Not without surprise I notice a trend among fellow inmates to get pets. Well, I come from a small town, and I find the idea of having pets (or children!) in Manhattan surprising.

Anyway, I went to Harlem yesterday, and when I got back I realized that the only picture I had taken was this one.

Like any other self-respecting publication in the Western hemisphere, we called our antenna specialist. We wanted to find out more about the iPhone 4 and eventually publish a super-well-informed piece. Turns out our specialist doesn’t care – she’s at the beaches of Montauk, with her new boyfriend. She called back from the Lighthouse, where the two read Hölderlin poems to each other. On top of that, she actually owns the iPhone 4, which kind of disqualifies her to blog about it. Disturbingly, when we received her call, the thing seemed to work.

Meanwhile, back in the city, I wonder what we’ll all do with our lives when Apple is no more. Yesterday’s press conference surely was disappointing. I found the company more refreshing when they told customers who didn’t like a product to give it back, go away, and f___ themselves. What’s up with the latest “We love our customers” nonsense?

It looked like the perfect afternoon for German Manhattanites: 104 degrees outside, air condition on full blast, watching the game on Spanish TV. Well, thank you Spain for moving a dreadful object of reverse culture shock out of our sights, at least for the remainder of the tournament: the light blue sweater of our German coach!

When I look at the weather forecast for Manhattan, I can only conclude that by the end of next week we’ll all plead insanity. So it’s a good time to work on some images from happier, cooler days up in the mountains. I just posted some of them, from this past March, here.

Where are today’s creative writers? A cursory glance reveals that some of them are all over the MacRumors discussion forums – close to 1.500 comments and counting on Steve Jobs and how to hold your new iPhone. If you don’t have time for that, you may enjoy a short and sweet take on why this is a non issue here.

Of all things, it is this week’s release of Apple’s iBooks application that makes me say something about the rocky transition of book publishing to digital. I’m in a bind here: the contributors to NFN have published, or are in the process of publishing, what by now amounts to about a dozen books. That includes the entire range, from work with small publishing houses, to highly specialized and prestigious academic publishing houses, to the largest and quite mainstream publishing house in the world, to self publishing. Some of these books are available as e-versions, some not.

Last night I spent some time reading both the Iliad and Winnie-the-Pooh on the iPhone. I am hopeful. I think that 99.9 percent of today’s dead-tree hardcovers and paperbacks will be better off existing in virtual space. I’m not sentimental about printed books. Horrid and densely printed typesets, cheesy cover designs, flimsy paper, the overall poor reading experience, and tons of boxes whenever one moves – I won’t miss any of that. Reading on the iPhone and in a paperback side by side, I actually prefer to read the Iliad on what arguably is, due to its small size, the worst e-book reader in existence (except that the best English translation is not yet available in the iBooks store). I didn’t even mind losing the line breaks, though the true poetry-lover might balk at this: verse ought to be verse!

The question for me is: are the old dogs getting it? I think not. As far as I can see, established publishing houses in the US like to present themselves as being ‘open’ to the whole e-book revolution. But that’s perhaps because over here, going through the motions of embracing the future is something you just do by instinct, all the while where I come from people often cherish the past for its own sake (this includes an unnamed publisher who, in the year 2010, considers the use of PDF files eccentric and insists that proofs must be snail mailed back and forth half way around the globe…). Either way, it seems that many are having a hard time to think outside of the old paradigm of the printed book. Right now, e-book versions and their distribution are merely an afterthought, and the idea of publishing ‘only’ an e-book is almost considered blasphemy. I can’t help but think that today’s book publishing giants will suffer badly from the same disruptive forces that the music industry by now is quite familiar with: iTunes and the likes.

And yet, there’s an irony to all this. Never has the high quality approach of people like Gerhard Steidl made more sense. The same is true for independent books that fit the creative vision of a specific project. And from a technical viewpoint, the EPUB file format is not yet suitable for publications that are image- rather than text based (it is interesting though to think what one can do even within the current limitations).

For everything else – there’s an app for it. To me, that’s a good thing.

This one from my new Schlosspark series. The current state of the project is here. All images except one are from the forests near Schloss Schleissheim, north of Munich. With my life largely spent looking at a computer screen, I cherish every hour in a park, be that Central Park, or Jardin du Luxembourg, or Schloss Schleissheim. To be continued…

Suppose you love what you do. You may lose the concept ‘vacation’ altogether. This apparently happened to Stanley Kubrick. Why would someone he worked with vacation at the beach? Or rather, what does it even mean to ‘vacation’? When, for example, I make photographs in the Dolomites, people sometimes say: “Oh, you’re on vacation!” Or, when I email someone about something ‘work’-related late Saturday night, it never ceases to amaze me when I get a reply sometime in the following week rather than right on Sunday morning – with the implication that we are all forced by some cosmic power to stand still when the calendar says ‘weekend.’ For those of you who can’t imagine things to be other than “just perfect,” Jon Ronsen’s documentary on a thousand storage boxes left behind by Stanley Kubrick will provide much comfort, here. If you have 30 minutes, make sure to watch all five parts. Via here.

How many ways are there to spend the rapidly approaching dog days in Manhattan without starting to feel like an air conditioned cockroach? Here’s one – a bicycle tour through Riverside/Fort Washington Park, to the lighthouse under George Washington Bridge. It’s particularly nice there in the evening, and it’s part of my futile efforts to keep up a fitness level remotely sufficient for mountaineering. Yesterday, I caved in and even made a photo of the place.

Oh Adobe. I talked to half a dozen of your customer service representatives over the past three weeks. The fourth call was mildly successful insofar as the person was smart and focussed. However, after 30 minutes of investigating the problem he admitted that he had no solution, and escalated the case (to no avail). The others all were friendly, but utterly incompetent. I wrote about the first call here, but then kept silent, on what would have been easy to turn into a hilarious series on NFN.

I don’t believe in the concept of being mean towards people who are not guilty of anything, and who cannot defend themselves. To slave away the days in some call center and read Adobe talking points to frustrated customers must be worse than anyone deserves.

But I have a question for the geniuses who *run* Adobe: For a reasonably intelligent person, it takes less than five minutes to crack any of your products and use them for free. How to do it can be found out by anyone with a web browser in two minutes – compare this, for a moment, to three weeks on the phone with your customer service. I raise this point because the problem I have stems from the activation code that now you even include in your volume license installation files. Activation bothers *only* your paying customers, but no one else. Criminals must be Adobe’s happiest users.

What really bugs me: If you take the time and read up on how to crack Adobe products, you’ll find that those posts are written by smart people, who provide focussed step by step directions, and display excellent problem solving skills along the way. The irony is, if Adobe’s customer service were trained on that same level, the company would turn into a shining city upon a hill practically overnight.

So, why is it that the applications that give me the least grief are all open source (WordPress, Firefox, Mamp, NeoOffice), or based on open source (Google Chrome), or coded by individuals who own their businesses (Soundslides, SuperDuper) – not to mention the cloud services that are often small startups run by rebels? Is it because many intelligent people have left corporate America a long time ago, and only the bureaucrats stayed behind?

Adobe Photoshop (which I barely use anymore) is somewhat bloated but still without competition, Adobe Lightroom is mean and lean and beats Apple Aperture handily, Adobe InDesign does important things that Apple Pages does not. But I can’t help the feeling that three years from now, when I’m due for my next Adobe update cycle, the alternatives will be good enough, perhaps even better, and I’ll happily go elsewhere – as will many others.