When things are so awful in Japan. There’s not much I have to say on the subject, since I’ve had Mac Freedom on most of the day and have missed much of the news. Still, if you want to do something to help, check this out.

—-

Is anyone even remotely surprised that James O’Keefe’s gotcha video that caused the firing of an NPR fundraiser and the forced resignation of their CEO was in fact dishonestly edited to be a hit piece? No? Of course not. That’s what this guy does.

Credit where it’s due: it was Glenn Beck’s people who did the investigating. Good work, folks.

—-

Finally, personal stuff. Guess who just failed her saving throw against The Shiny? My wife. We bought an iPad for her yesterday.

Most of the people reading this won’t know her and won’t know how honestly astounding this is. She has no patience or interest in online digital culture (beyond a few basic things like TED Talks and emails from friends). She doesn’t like the way computers operate–she’s always asking where is this and where is that, how do you…Nothing is ever straightforward enough for her.

Also, she’s severely dyslexic and dysgraphic–reading is a slow process and writing legibly can be very stressful. This means that, except for a couple areas of personal expertise, she has a way of talking around the things she wants done and can be vague at times, relying on the listener to interpret what she wants. Computers don’t do that, of course. You can’t tell it to put the thing away and you can’t mix up one word for another. You have to accommodate it, not the other way around. And her eyesight, never very good (like you’re surprised?), is getting worse.

But she liked the iPad. It’s portable for in the home, the fonts can be set quite large and the screen can be made white text on black. Also, it turns out the ereader features were less interesting to her than the idea that she could take all of her addresses and phone numbers off the random scraps of paper they’re on and save them for herself.

What’s more, some of the apps are tempting as hell. I’m buying Sketchbook Pro for her soon and Animation Creator HD, too. The hard thing will be to keep the boy from loading it up with games he wants to play. He’s already pressing me to buy Fruit Ninjas or whatever that is (and I confess that I spent much of the time in the store playing Angry Birds and Cut The Rope).

Anyway, this will give me a reason to use iTunes now, which I’ve been avoiding like crazy, since the iPad has no file structure. We’ll see how it goes.