Everything life widget...from irritant to obsession

I seem to be steadily accumulating an array of rechargeable battery-powered gadgets.  An ipod, a smartphone, a kindle, a laptop, and on and on.  And on.

This has created a whole new problem, since I suffer from depression and a borderline personality type, and its this:  batteries run down.

Sounds trivial, doesn't it?  But its gradually taking over my life.  As soon as any device comes off mains power, a little "charge-remaining" meter in my head starts cycling downward.  It's making me really quite unhappy.  Some of the other depressed people I know obsessively stockpile food, but I stockpile charge.  I can't stand to watch my family using the laptop on battery power.  I have to plug it in when they're not looking, its like a tic.  Don't they know that the bloody thing will run out of juice, maybe not right away, but eventually.  It's out there, like death, and I think that's the point.

Hoarding tins of beans or constantly charging or even collecting stamps, its just our attempt to hedge against mortality, to rage against the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas put it, in my case quite literally.

Take me out the ball game: Baseball and the old fat Brit

One of the first things you notice when you look out the window of a plane flying over the USA is that the landscape often seems to be carpeted with baseball diamonds. Everywhere that has people has baseball. But what does a sports-phobic Brit know about this most popular and enduring of American pastimes?

Well, for one thing, like many of us I've seen it crop up in at least a dozen films and T.V. shows, and for another the modern English vernacular is peppered with baseball references: stepping up, hitting a home run, taking a rain check, getting to first base, throwing a curve ball, covering the bases, in the ballpark, I could go on and on.

It is amazingly accessible and deeply appealing to a nerd like your humble blogger. Its history and layers of complexity make for a fascinating and involving life-long hobby without ever needing to watch or play the game if you don't want to. I do like to watch the odd game but it's hard to get to see over here without a costly subscription to MLB.tv and in any case, I already have a favourite game (or games), the 2004 AL East Divisional Pennant clash between the Boston Redsox (go Sox!) and their arch-nemesis, the consistently talented New York Yankees (booooo!).

The way everyman underdogs the Redsox came back from 3 games to nothing down in the fourth of seven games to snatch the pennant at the death in the seventh game must surely have made for the most watchable baseball in recent years. I could no more root for the Yankees than I could support Manchester United, their nearest UK equivalents. No way. Winning all the time is just boring and feels like bad sportsmanship somehow. It somehow feels ingrained that following a team should not be EASY.

There are some parallels with British games like football (NOT SOCCER), for example when Sol Campbell moved from Tottenham Hotspur to their arch-rivals Arsenal he was villified. In a similar vein, when Redsox mainstay Johnny Damon followed in Babe Ruth's footsteps and moved to the Yankees as a free agent, Sox Nation were NOT happy. It will be interesting to see what happens when another 2004 pennant big player David Ortiz is lost to free agency this year, as rumours involving a similar move to the Yanks are already circulating.

Baseball is serious stuff, and indeed the US version of Nick Hornby's anthem to fanatical sports devotion, Fever Pitch, swapped baseball for football. However, at the remove of largely taking place on another continent, baseball appeals even to this fat old sport-hating Brit.

I've been trying very hard to wean myself off printing documents on paper of late, partly to be more environmentally friendly and partly because I've go a bad back. Instead I've been using technology solutions to manage all the documents I have to read, and as a research scientist that means pdf files, above all else.

First, I had to catalogue them. Fir this I tried a paid (though inexpensive) app called PDF Stacks (http://pdfstacks.com/) but I found it quite clunky in it's approach to indexing files using the metadata. In the end I settled on Mendeley, which does much the same job but is free fro entry level users (http://www.mendeley.com/). It also allows connecting with other users in a LindedIn kind of way and also online storage of files and sharing, much as in Cite-U-Like, although the latter is much more labour-intensive. Mendeley is by no means perfect. It's implementaion of bibliography generation is poor as yet and about one in three files catalogued needs some degree of amnual indexing, but this is as likely to be a result of bad metadata as anything else.

How about reading the documents though? Even the best PC display, being backlit, is awful for reading for any length of time because it causes eye strain and also, it's generally in the wrong format (i.e. landscape), unless it supports rotation.

I was eagerly awaiting the launch of the Hearst group's Skiff reader with a metal foil e-ink enhanced display, measuring a whopping 11.5 inches diagonally. Sadly, the developing company got bought out but the tech rights didn't, effectively killing the product at the prototype stage. A good (and at the moment only) alternatives are tablet such as the iPad, Galaxy Tab or Adam, all expensive, heavy and suffering from the backlight problem, or the Amazon Kindle DX. Ok, the latter doesn't do colour and the annotation support in pdf's is non-existent at the moment but the e-ink display is crisp and large enough to view entire pages of A4 pdf's without squinting. the capacity could be larger (it's currently an un-expandable 3.3GB) but apart from that, I love it.

One problem remains however: rationally naming thousands of pdf files without hiring help to do it before you die of old age, so that you can find the paper you want easily. I've tried several products but the one that gives the most consistently predictable and satisfactory results is a-pdf-rename, one of dozens of neat, low cost packages from the eponymous a-pdf company for doing pretty much anything legal you can think of to your pdf's. You can download a trial at http://www.a-pdf.com/rename/, but I guarantee you'll end up more than happy to pay for it at only $27.

I only wish they did mix and match bundles of software because the range of functionality in their products is vast, from scanning documents into PDF format to stripping out images and merging files. If you use PDF's a lot, eventually you WILL end up using one of their products. And quite right too.

Anyhow, back to the paperless office...