A few hours with an Apple Watch

The pocket-sized super computer that I use as an alarm clock woke me at 2:45. It was the first morning the Apple Watch went on sale and I placed my order within that crucial first three minutes window of maximum availability.

My Silver Aluminum Case with White Sport Band was delivered on Day One (24-April-2015). 

Here are my first few observations after using it for the past few days: 

• I wasn't expecting it to arrive in a long rectangular box. It was like someone had mailed me a baton.
• My daughter figured out how to turn it on before I did.
• Pairing the Apple Watch to an iPhone is very straightforward. You point the two at each other. The Apple Watch begins to shine with the sort of semi-coherent, structured static that I'm pretty sure fills the dreams of androids. The iPhone grows entranced. A moment passes and then they're paired together.
• Lots of my iPhone apps had already been updated with an Apple Watch component in the days leading up to the launch. The initial setup screens after the pairing offer to install and activate all of these new apps automatically. I declined, opting instead to set them up individually on a case by case basis.
• The question of Watch configuration quickly becomes "what information in your life is really important enough to direct to your wrist?" For example, I interrupted dinner last night to excitedly show my family how the results of a new eBay search for "Tron keyboard" had just arrived on my wrist. Sometimes I make bad choices.
• Configuring the Apple Watch and your interactions with it is a bit fiddly and surprisingly deep for a 1.0 product. It makes me think that this has been quietly incubating behind closed doors for a long, long time now.
• For example: you can customize which new apps make their way onto your watch, how notifications are handled (by default, it mirrors your iPhone settings), and which apps have Glances available (note: glances are little application views that can accessed by swiping up from the bottom of the screen)
• The Taptic Engine is really... interesting. It's not a buzz, like you feel from a PS3 controller, but an actual tap. The exact sensation is that of invisible (ghostly?) fingers tapping lightly upon your arm. It's surprisingly intimate.
• Some of the apps are a bit pokey. And by "pokey" here, I mean having sometimes having to wait 3-4 insufferably long seconds for data to refresh as it's pulled from your phone.
• Having an Apple Watch really has kept my iPhone in my pocket for most of the weekend.
• Modular is my favorite watch face. Mickey (pictured above) is a really close second - except all the wiggling makes me forget to look at where his arms are pointing most of the time.
• My daughter has been wearing the Apple Watch around the house now and then. Every so often my iPhone starts playing a song or one of my apps comes alive in the background or asks for something. This makes me think we'll all be making fun of the grown-ups who published Apple Watch 1.0 reviews citing the perilous complexities of the new interface.
• The idea that a piece of jewelry is also a machine that's slurping and squirting bits of data from a global internetwork is totally normal to my daughter.

Dead watch

Originally published 16-June-2012.

I killed my wristwatch, first in slow degrees and then abruptly.

I bought the watch as a gift to myself after finishing undergrad. A Casio GW9000A-1 Atomic Solar Mudman. Sitting upon my wrist like a matte black can of tunafish. Water resistant down to 200 meters. Using sunlight as its only energy source. Listening to a radio signals from an atomic clock hidden away inside Fort Collins, Colorado to set its own time. I dreamed that I would give the ugly black wart to my daughter at her own college graduation one day.

But then, just a few years later, the screen started to fog up on the inside. Moisture had somehow found its way inside the casing.

I opened the backing (of course) and cleaned the insides thoroughly, leaving it all to air-dry for a few days. I put it all back together and watched as a black blob of ink swallowed up the LCD (of course). And this was the exact moment that I thought to dig out the owner's manual and discovered the myriad number of ways in which I had just voided the 20-year warranty.

And that's how I abruptly killed my watch.

But there was also the slow death.

I don't know the course of quality assurance testing on a Casio Mudman. Chronic, rapid temperature changes amd chemical baths, however, would appear to be the outlying test-cases. I wore mine into hundreds of hot showers. I took it in and out of a hot tub, submerging it in very, very hot chlorinated water, putting it into cool night air, submerging it again (and repeat, repeat, repeat). I wore it into many, many different chlorinated and saltwater swimming pools. I wore it in the ocean. I even wore it into the Jefferson Pools. I loved it so much that I never took it off if possible. And why should I? It was tough enough to withstand more rigorous hardships than my own relatively measured life would dish out.

After it died, I realized I was fundamentally wrong in my thinking about the watch and its purpose.

Despite it's toughness, I still needed to be careful with it. Just as careful as with any other watch really. It shouldn't have gone into swimming pools or hot tubs if I could have avoided it. And if something terrible and unpredictable were to happen, then it would hold up longer and under far worse conditions than most other watches.

Before the onset of a true disaster, it faced the slow death of a thousand first-world paper cuts.

(Insert future neologism here)

I'm watching a cartoon with my daughter and the heroine suddenly receives an important call on her wrist communicator. She holds her wrist up to her mouth and talks urgently with her friends back at their secret base. The plot continues.

My daughter's still young enough that smart-watches will always be a native citizen of her world. For her, any timepiece that doesn't actively talk to the internet will automatically fall into the same category as a wind-up mantel clock or pocket watch. An interesting curiosity from a simpler time.

This is just another thing that will soon be her reality, like the self-driving cars, desktop supercomputers, and ubiquitous high-definition video conferencing in that cartoon that have already arrived. They're part of the background of her stories now and no longer magical accessories.

Me? I can't wait to get an Apple Watch onto my wrist.

I still get a giddy little rush every time I use FaceTime and fully expect using an Apple Watch will feel the same. Its every use will remind me that I'm lucky enough to be living in the brightly colored Hanna-Barbera future of my childhood.

Of this, however, I am quite certain:

"Everyone talks using their watch, Dad," my daughter will one day tell me. "But me and my friends? We really like to (insert future neologism here) with them much, much more."

At the beach

Our family has been visiting Virginia Beach on vacation for the past few years and I love it.  

I love the tacky gift shops, arcades, oversized beach towels, haunted houses, ferris wheels, fried fish, henna tattoo parlours, pizza by the slice, and ice cream on every block. It's all great fun really.

And there's the ocean itself - big and beautiful, stretching across the length of the whole wide sky. Humans have laughed and played together at the edge of land and water for hundreds of years. 

Playing in the ebb and flow of the surf stirs old echoes. Like so many things in my life, I can't go to the beach without thinking about my father. In my memories, he's lean and tanned, eternally young. We're on the trip to the beach we took with several other families back when I was just a boy. While the other adults sat on their towels underneath umbrellas he played out in the salty water with the children all day long.

It makes me wonder what my own daughter will remember about our trips. What memories of me will she carry forwards, out onto the undiscovered beaches waiting there in her future?

"It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."

We ventured out to explore Grand Caverns, the oldest show cave in the United States. 

It was discovered back in 1804 by a teenager named Bernard Weyer. One of his animal traps went missing and, reluctant to let it go, he followed it down a hole. There underneath the ground he found the pre-Cambrian limestone melting like hot candle wax across the thousands of years.

An 1856 sketch by Ed Beyer (hanging in the lobby of the Homestead Resort, Hot Springs, VA)

It's the sort of landscape through which a larval geek may easily imagine carrying a brass lantern and elvish sword of great antiquity in search of lost treasures.

Even after tourists had visited the caverns for nearly 200 years. a new set of caves was uncovered by a search and rescue dog named Rosie in 2004. They stretch out more than 3 miles further than anyone had ever expected.  

This fact makes me smile every time I think about it. It's good to know that there are still things left to be found out there in the world.

Undiscovered caves, full of treasures, sasquatch and lake monsters.