Can-Do! iBook!

[Paul Bernhardt]

A Rah Rah post for how great our iBooks are:

My iBook was a wonderful tool for me over the past 15 months of 
ownership (700MHz, 12"). I purchased it as my "dissertation computer" 
while I completed my Ph.D. Of course, it has been a wonderful computer 
for everything else I do with computers, but that was its job, and it 
did well. I ran heavyweight statistical analysis programs (SPSS and 
JMP) on it, wrote using Word (ugh, only because my committee chair uses 
Word, otherwise I'd have used Appleworks), did graphs using Excel 
(stopgap, I'll be producing final graphs using a stand-alone package, 
probably). It was way portable, so that when I decided I needed to 
sequester myself to work over the summer out of town, packing up my 
dissertation meant taking the books and articles I was focused on and 
the iBook. So extremely easy to take with me *everywhere* I went. I 
could be at the bridge club writing a paragraph before playing that 
evening. Over at my girlfriends writing a page or three. It went with 
me easily. Connecting it to the internet wherever I went was a snap. 
I've found open airport (WiFi hubs) that were clearly available for 
patron use (such as a Ameritel hotel in Twin Falls, Idaho) and maybe 
not for public use (such as Fiddler's Elbow bar in Sugarhouse area of 
Salt Lake).

But, it really shone this past Monday in my defense. One of my 
committee members was out of town (300 miles distant) and we wanted to 
include him by webcam. He is a Mac fan also, and was going to use his 
G4Powerbook at his home to tune in through iChatAV with my iSight 
camera set up in the middle of the conference table. I used Keynote 
presentation software for my talk. Both were running simultaneously on 
my trusty iBook and both ran flawlessly. We connected a couple of 
external speakers because the iBook's are not powerful and he was able 
to participate fully.

The only problem I ran into was with Keynote's file. I wanted to send 
it to the remote person and it just didn't want to send, no matter what 
I tried. Web mail methods failed. Mail failed, blech! Turns out Keynote 
files are not single files, but actually some kind of Unix package of 
documents (quicktime movies, image files, text files, etc... all linked 
up somehow). I discovered this when I loaded it onto an FTP site and it 
appeared as a folder with all these documents inside it. Wow! If I 
hadn't been blearyeyed with lack of sleep, I would have thought to Zip 
it... anyway, that wasn't the fault of the iBook.

The iBook was a workhorse and champ: Streaming continuous video and 
audio while running presentation simultaneously... Wow!

When we lost our remote person for a second and he reconnected the 
iBook announced his return and I was able to quickly invite him back. 
His image and mine appeared for a moment on the projection screen (Oh 
yeah, the iBook was, of course, driving a projector for the 
presentation) and several observers were heard to say: "Cool!" They'd 
never seen such easy webcam software.

Oh, and I passed: By tradition, I'm now allowed to be called, "Doctor."

Paul