God himself could not sink this phone

So my Nexus 4 arrived and it’s beautiful. The screen is amazingly clear, and Android 4.3 is superfast. In terms of performance, updating from my Blackberry to this is like going from a shopping trolley to a fighter jet.

Speaking of Blackberry, take a look at this graph from the Wall Street Journal:

Sourced from http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/09/20/blackberrys-slump-in-4-charts/?mod=e2tw

So while all the Cal Hockleys of the smartphone world were paying people lots of money to take them to safety on an iPhone, I clung to my Blackberry and listened to the band as we slowly went down. Thankfully I was resourceful enough to find a boiler door (i.e. my Nexus) and everything worked out okay (except for that person who I was clinging to it with, who may or may not have been my true love and is now decomposing at the bottom of the ocean ... ).

Is it weird that I find Blackberry’s demise sad? I guess I had a vested interest in the company because I had my Curve for so long. I still think it was a good phone too, but age (and my parent’s toilet) got the better of it. Now Blackberry are kind of like that best friend you used to hang around with in Grade Four but haven’t spoken to for a while, and for me it’s as if I’ve just found out they have a terminal disease. What do I do? Wish them luck I suppose, and hope they don’t me ask for money.

So now I’m doing that thing where I’m finding any excuse to use my phone. Someone casually asks what time it is in London? LMGTFY. I’ve also sent a fair few messages that have low or zero relevance except that they’ve been an excuse for me to play around with the (very fun) Android swipe typing feature. If you know me, you probably suspect that you’ve gotten one of these messages in the last couple of days, but then again it’s probably hard to distinguish them from all the other unneccessary shit I send.

I admit the novelty of the new phone is slowly wearing off. Which is a good thing, because I’m still not quite sure how I feel about being so attached to it. But since I can actually talk to my phone and have it understand me I’m leaning towards classifying it as a sentient being and therefore a friend rather than an object. I’d be tempted to go so far as to claim it as a co-dependant relationship but it’s quite clear I need my Nexus much more than it needs me.

Yes I’m scared of becoming a Google fanboy; no I don’t want to talk about it

Two days ago I took the plunge and ordered a Google Nexus 4. If you know about the history of me and my Blackberry, or my penchant for keeping things until they are absolutely, embarrassingly unusable, then you’ll understand this is kind of a big deal.

Basically, my Blackberry is still ‘usable’ in the most literal sense of the word, but ever since I dropped it in my parent’s toilet (unsoiled, thankfully) using it has been even more of a labour of love than usual. Added to my general Blackberry woes of low (i.e. non-existent) compatibility and infinite loading screens was a trackball which steadfastly refused to do what I wanted it to. This is fine if you don’t use the trackball often, but back here in tactile user interface land you must understand that the trackball is the essence of the Blackberry Curve.

My trackball kind of works okay for the most part, but it has become incredibly sensitive; especially in the scroll up/down department (I don’t want to think about what’s causing it to malfunction since its Cousteau-esque adventure). This stops me from scrolling up and down message histories, meaning that I have to commit entire conversations to memory and then hope that my replies cover everything. Too bad if someone refers to a message they sent a couple of days ago, that baby is gone. In a Zen kind of way it’s somewhat refreshing to be constrained to the present, but in an actual day-to-day want to live successfully kind of way it’s shit.

As attached as I have been to my Blackberry, I’m excited about my new phone. I've been checking the order status hourly and telling anybody who'll listen about my purchase. My childish glee may say something about the attractiveness of Google products, because generally I try not to let material objects determine my emotions. This is clearly a lie if you read my Blackberry post, but in any case as someone who tries not to buy into new product bullshit I’m somewhat embarrassed about the daydreams my imminent new phone has induced. 

I’ve been imagining the endless range of apps and games I’ll be able to download, and how I’ll suddenly become infinitely more valuable to my friends, because while they’re all struggling to load an Apple maps page on their iPhone I’ll be whizzing around with the greatest of ease on Google maps (or, you know, something else that people do with smartphones. I wouldn't know). Even stupid stuff that I know I don’t care about—such as the Nexus always being the first phone to receive Android updates when they come out—has me pinching myself as if I’m in some sort of wonderful dream.

And this is all before the phone has even arrived. At the time of writing, the order status is still ‘Pending’*, so I technically haven’t even paid for it yet. Which leads to the real reason I’m worried. I’m not even a Nexus owner and already I feel like I’ve become a massive Google tool. I’m going to be that person at parties who starts talking about all the reasons their semi-obscure phone is vastly superior to everybody else’s and have all sorts of little stupid apps to prove it. I’m going to be that person in the supermarket using Google Goggles to take photos of all the products and then read other Google tools’ reviews of them. I’m going to inadvertently check the wrong box while browsing my Gmail account and sign away my power of attorney to Sergey Brin.

This is troubling because I’ve often been asked why I don’t own/want an iPhone. I usually mumble something about not wanting to be a mindless drone to a giant corporation. And then I go and buy a Nexus. I suck.

*It's probably frozen because they've discovered I use Hotmail.

Zen and the Art of HTML Coding

Part of the course I’m currently doing involves editing content for digital media, and a component of this has been to examine/experiment with some HTML and CSS coding.

I remember learning a bit about this as a kid. Dad showed me how to make a really basic web page and to jazz it up with some colour. It was fun because it was a bit like playing with Lego – you’ve got certain finite elements to use but you can combine them in pretty much infinite ways.

Don’t believe me? Check out the CSS Zen Garden. It shows how different designers can create hugely unique webpages with the same building blocks. It’s awe-inspiring to see how many different ways the elements can be combined. 

The idea that so many different designs can come out of one set of building blocks is appealing, for it mirrors nature. Think of snowflakes, or even human beings: all made up of the same basic elements but no two are exactly alike.

It’s not a coincidence that only recently I have come to find the ‘art’ of HTML quite profound. I’m currently reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which (among many other things) talks a lot about the inherent beauty of the structure of things, even seemingly ‘scientific’ things, and how art and science really aren’t as far removed from each other as some people like to pretend.* Good web design is an art form – a highly technical, specialised one, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any less artistic.

I like the idea that creativity is an expression of each individual person, and this can be found through a Renaissance painting or a website. In every web page a small part of the web designer’s worldview is expressed.

With a basic understanding of HTML you can view the source code of sites and begin not to see just web pages constructed by strings of code but choices. Every page element has been deliberately placed and coded by somebody. There is a reason that a search box is placed where it is, and why it has a grey border instead of a pink one.

I’ve made an effort to be more mindful about encounters with art that I’m having every day. The Google homepage, from a design point of view, is a thing of beauty. Twitter’s ability to present so much information in such a clean format is elegant. The fact these sites just ‘work’ without us ever really thinking about it, is a credit to the designers and their ability to harness the craft of quality HTML coding.

*Apologies to Robert M Pirsig for distilling one idea from a quite complex book for my own purposes. And for stealing his title.

Me Fans Are Stupid Pigs

Of course you aren’t. I would never really say anything like that about my reader(s). But the fact I can offend you in the post title shows how solid our relationship is. We joke, we have fun, we’re striving for a better future. It’s as if we’re characters in a New Radicals song.

What I’m trying to say is that August marks three years of this blog. That equals 40 posts of me trying to put into words how I feel about the internet and digital culture in general. How was it for you? I thought it was okay, and am rather surprised I’m still at it. Granted, during the three years there have not necessarily been three years’ worth of posts (2012 is devoid except for an excited mid-winter three post flurry) but there’s hopefully been something that you enjoyed, or at least read past the first sentence before spending six hours on Buzzfeed instead.

So, three years, and what do I have to show for it? Well, according to the ever-reliable Blogger stats, during that time the blog has had 4,147 pageviews. I was going to look up the Alexa ranking for this but apparently they don’t have enough data to rank the site, which is fairly telling in itself. Also keep in mind that the reality is probably bleaker than that: for some reason there are page hits from May 2007 (i.e. three years before I started the blog) and there would be many times when, despite me checking the ‘don’t record your own pageviews’ box, I have definitely inadvertently inflated my own numbers (logging in from other computers etc.) Don’t feel bad for me though, this is the life I chose.

It was a little cringeworthy reading through the old stuff. Partly because most of my writing back then makes me sound like a pretentious wanker, but mostly because it reminds me that in three years I’ll be looking back on this post and concluding that I’m a pretentious wanker. In any case, the archives are open. Go for a browse if you need more proof.

Before I let you go, let me just have an attempt at explaining the name. ‘The Digital Printing Press’ is meant to refer to the internet itself, rather than my blog. I don’t see my blog as the defining disseminator of information in the digital age (4,147 pageviews), but obviously the internet is going to have incredibly long-term social, cultural and even political implications. That’s what I’m trying to get at. I’m not much of a fan of the name anymore, but since I can’t think of anything else to change it to, for now it stays. I at least hope you enjoy the new banner photo. Maybe one day I’ll go all Kentucky Fried Chicken and change it to ‘DPP’ and hide my shameful beginnings under the soothing power of the acronym.

Fun Facts

Most popular post: Macquarie and Me – I would never have thought a shoddily composed ‘scientific’ dictionary test would be so engaging.

Least popular post: Let’s just say it only had five views. Try and guess. That’s a fun game for you.

Most popular tags: ‘internet’, ‘social’, ‘Facebook’

General highlights

-I used the word ‘conformance’ exactly once, with devastating effect.

-I implied the headquarters of ‘Powerband’ were in a dilapidated Quonset hut.

-I wrote a love letter to my Blackberry and have since dropped it in the toilet (it still works)

-I pretended I was William Randolph Hearst and didn’t get sued by him or Orson Welles

-I edited/vandalised television actor John Howard’s Wikipedia page to make a point.

-I didn’t make a single typo.

Three more years! Three more years!