How to justify an Apple Watch purchase

I'm a watch wearer. I have a nice electromechanical watch which my wife gave me. It keeps time well, it shows me the time, the day of the week and the day of the month. It harvests energy from movements of my wrist and in the time I've owned the watch it's never run down. It has a nice enough dial, it is a little thicker than I'd like - it doesn't slip under shirt-sleeve cuffs as easily as it might, but all in all I'm very happy with it. I wear it from when I put it on in the morning until when I take it off at night - and it comes off when I'm bathing, exercising in the gym, or swimming. At night it sits on my bedside table.

I have an iPhone (5S). I have it on or about me most of the time. At night it sits next to my bed charging. I use the phone for the usual things, checking the news, sending and receiving messages, tracking my travel and my fitness, listening to podcasts and music. It would be better if the screen were larger, the size were smaller and the battery lasted better (yes, I see the conflict). Overall I'm pretty pleased with the phone.

I don't have a (working) heart monitor, nor a "fitness device" like a FitBit. I used to use a heart rate monitor when I started out doing exercise (mountain biking and going to the gym). I found it useful - it helped me learn to pace myself when biking. At one time I was using a gps to track my biking route; when I got home I'd correlate the route with the record from the heart-rate monitor, a laborious process at the time. I'd like to get a heart rate monitor which interfaced to my phone properly.

The phone tracks movement quite well. The problem is that I don't have the phone on my person when I exercise in the gym. It's with me so I can listen to whatever (worthy podcasts) while I exercise, but I don't wear it. As a result, the phone thinks I'm immobile while I'm pounding the treadmill, rowing, cycling, or whatever. I keep track of the time and "calories" that the gym machine report and dutifully record them in MapMyRide. However, this experience could be improved. It would be great not to have to take the phone with me into the gym, it would be great to have all the recording done for me, and it would be good to have my heart rate recorded.

Clearly an £8,000 Rose Gold Apple Watch Edition (with sports band - off course) is just what I need.... or perhaps not. But a £300 aluminium Sports Watch (38mm) just might be. Or maybe it should be the 42mm. And which strap? So off to the Apple store to find out. There seems to be a lot of interest in making try-on appointments, the Apple Concierge website crawled up and down (not as badly as did the Kate Bush pre-order website), and I eventually ended up with an appointment at 9:15am. 

I rolled up just after nine, was greeted on my way in, introduced to the guy who would show me the watch. The Apple store had a couple of tables devoted to the watch. One was a show case partly populated with an assortment of watches including a few Editions. The other was used used for the try-ons; it has a number of drawers under the table top, unlocked by the demonstrators' check-out device. I told my Apple guy that I was interested in the Sport model, I wasn't sure which size watch I wanted, and I'd like to see both the black and white straps. "No problem!" except there was; he couldn't open the drawer and had to seek a colleague's help. I tried on a 38mm white and a 42mm black. The rubber straps felt great and comfortable, nice and warm. Even though I'm sure that white (Ive-ory?) is the preferred colour, I think white always looks discoloured (an effect of ageing?) and so avoid it if possible. I must say that the white looks pretty good but it isn't discrete, so black it is for me; if I wanted my watch to stand out I'd go for pink or green. Then to size. The 42mm is about the same size, maybe slightly larger than my current watch, the 38mm seemed better. So, decision made, if I get a watch it will be the 38mm space grey aluminium with black rubber strap. "Can I take a look at the stainless steel ones as well?"; "Sure". The straps are great, really nicely engineered. The Milanese Loop is gorgeous, the Link Bracelet very butch and the Modern Buckle wonderful.

Function? Good question. The try-ons were running a demo loop; I can understand why display models should run the loop, but the try-ons would be better if they were running the actual watch software. With the loop I couldn't tell how well the display auto-on worked, nor could I really tell how good the watch faces looked on my wrist, nor could I really tell how easy the device was to operate on the wrist. There were some mounted watches running the standard software which I used. The force-touch seems easy to use, the digital crown might be a bit fiddly but I expect that with practice it gets to be easy. The display is very bright, there is some control available, I suspect I'll want the brightness down and the colours muted a little. The watch faces looked good; the home screen flowed really well, but one or two other things seemed a bit slow. I don't think it's possible to get a feel for how well a complex device like this works until you've lived with it - it wasn't obviously broken.

After my try-on I took a look at the display case. The Rose Gold looks good! So do the bright sports straps - perhaps I should get one as an accessory if I buy a watch?

And the if? I decided to order but shipping wasn't until June. So I didn't; I wanted instant gratification. But I placed an order that afternoon.

Finally - the new MacBook. There weren't any in the store. 

13th Floor Elevators - Youre Gonna Miss Me (best quality)

Avvays

I love this song

Tis true

http://skiingjim.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/getting-ready.html?m=1Skiing Jim: Getting Ready

Book Hive

2014 saw "Book Hive" in the City Library here in Bristol. I don't know why I didn't get round to blogging about this at the time but better, late than never. This is a short video I put together from sequences taken at the library and a Dorkbot event where the artists talked about how the installation was put together.

Pomplamoose

Pomplamoose are an interesting indie band. Some of their covers are great, some of their original songs are great, and some not so much to my taste. But they are nearly always entertaining and I really like the way their videos often expose the way way in which they are put together. The Pharrall Mashup (Happy Get Lucky) is a case in point.

I also find Pomplamoose interesting because they are an example of an indie band as a small business. Jack Conte (the half of the band that isn't Nataly Dawn) recently exposed the economics of their latest tour with this article on Medium.

A Rainbow in Curved Air

Last night saw me in Bristol's Old Vic theatre for the third night in a row, this time to see and listen to a performance of Terry Riley's "A Rainbow in Curved Air" by Charles Hazlewood's All Star Collective and Danceroom Spectroscopy. I'd seen the All Stars perform the piece last year - in fact, embarrassingly, their performance was my introduction to this seminal work - and was keen to hear it again, and whatever else they'd play in the concert.

Charles Hazlewood educates the audience prior to the performance

I wasn't disappointed; not at all. Charles Hazlewood introduced the piece with a short lecture about the nature of minimalist music and explained that the night's performance would follow the form of Rilley's piece but would be improvised and that the musicians would be interacting with Danceroom Spectroscopy's visuals.

Charles Hazelwood, Will Gregory, Ross Hughes 

And what a performance it was. Danceroom Spectroscopy' visuals were spot on, a great blend of abstract, photographic and algorithmic, and I enjoyed seeing the band members interacting with the visuals. Sonically the performance was grounded in the late 1960s with parts coming straight from Rilley's original and parts sounding like they'd been sampled from the more experimental parts of Pink Floyd's The Piper at The Gates of Dawn or from the first two Soft Machine albums. The piece became very free-form at times, and just as it seemed on the edge of falling to apart Tony Orrell's drumming would bring structure back into the piece and bring the audience to edge of their seats. 

Overall a great evening. I hope someone has recorded it and a copy finds its way in to my hands. The Pit at The Old Vic was a great place to see the performance from - although the next time I'll opt for standing rather than sitting. The only other thing I'd change would be to project the visuals over the whole performance area rather than on a screen - then we'd really be back in the 60s. 

iBeacons

Catching up after my summer break, I'm delighted to have discovered some iBeacon activity going on here in Bristol. The CPAgroup are "making sense of iBeacons and their application in the real world" and they have an interesting project "Shufdy" with its own iPhone app which is experimenting with the technology around Bristol. 

Me, I'm going out to see whether I can find any iBeacons.