Once again this year, I tried and failed to get a usable photo of the Perseid meteor shower. I’m not sure if I need to learn my camera settings better or if night sky shots are just not feasible on a compact digital camera without a bulb-mode for shutter control.

It wasn’t all a wash on the photographic side, though. I managed to get a fairly good panoramic shot of the lights of Platteville off in the distance.

I really like the subtle curve of the horizon present in a long shot like this. It really reminds me that we are on a planet.

OK, so maybe I don’t need to be reminded of that, but it does let me see the Earth as an orb, which reminds me that the planet is not some infinite plane, but rather a discrete object. If I think of the Earth as an object, I think about the context of that object: it’s position, surroundings, and scale. This naturally leads to thoughts of space and distant stars, and of big rocks hurtling through the darkness.

So, even though I didn’t capture the meteor shower directly, I feel like I was able to capture some small part of what it feels like to watch the shower, maybe better than a picture of a streaking meteorite would have.

There’s a certain depth and complexity of emotion that comes with watching a meteor shower. Part of it comes from conflicting concepts of distance. The shower itself is a beautiful thing. Appreciation of beauty is an intimate interaction between an object and a viewer. It instills a sense of closeness to the part of ourselves that admires beauty.

But, there is another part of us that sees point of light in the darkness and thinks about remoteness and isolation. A part of our mind tells us that our place in the Universe is one of inconceivable distance from everything else we can see in the sky. It instills a sense of separation and loneliness, the sort of loneliness that feels less of melancholy and more like a purity and oneness of self.

The other exciting thing that comes with astronomical events is the sense of impermanence it gives to the basic foundations of the world we interact with. Though they spin about us every night, there is usually a unchanging totality about the stars in the sky. It’s true that the meteorites are not really falling stars, but it’s hard to watch one and not imagine it as some star that has finally left its appointed place, flying off to who knows where.

If I seem more chatty than usual over a photograph, it’s because lately I’ve rekindled a desire to probe the question of photography as art. I wonder if it matters to you as a viewer whether my feelings on the night I took that picture influenced me to shoot it in the way I did or whether they originated after I viewed the shot for the twentieth time. To be honest, I’m not sure whether it matters to me, either. I’ll save those thoughts for the next meteor shower.

It’s not that often that a piece of technology significantly exceeds my expectations, but I must say that the quality of the voice recognition software that ships with Android continues to amaze, outperforming every voice recognition software I’ve tried in the past, including those that require you to train the software (Google doesn’t).

Terms correctly identified by Google Voice Search

• Onomatopoeia
• Christiano Renaldo
• Frankincense
• Pashtun
• Andrea Doria
• Apropos
• In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree
• The Secret of Crystania
• Tony Gregerson

Terms incorrectly identified by Google Voice Search

• Convex MacroLabs (”Convex Mac Relapse”)
• Koenshaku (”Colin Shocker”)
• Onigiri (”Tony Geary”)
• Amaterasu (”Amateur Ass 2″) :p

This morning Apple held a rather unique press conference to address the growing controversy over the reception problems caused by the iPhone 4’s external antenna. I’ve been following the antenna issue for a while, but I hadn’t really planned on posting anything about it until I saw Michael remark that the press conference was ‘PR perfection’ and that it ought to spark ‘goodwill’ toward Apple. On the contrary, while I had previously held the opinion that the antenna issue was being overblown by the press, the conference left a bad taste in my mouth.

I suppose I should start by mentioning that three of my co-workers have iPhone 4s, so I’ve had plenty of time to play with the phone. When I first heard of the antenna issue I decided to test it out. Sure enough, all I had to do was place a single dry finger on the antenna gap without applying any pressure, and I was able to reduce the signal from a reported 5 bars to ‘no service’. This was repeatable with the same results on all three iPhones. If done during a phone call, the call would drop. Now, my office is inside a large building, and the reception there is not fantastic. My phone typically gets about 2-3 bars, though I have not noticed that holding it makes much difference, and I always hold my phone in the dreaded left-hand fashion since I think that makes more sense. What I’m getting at is that it was undeniably clear to me that there existed an unusual reception problem when holding the iPhone 4 in a certain way. Based on YouTube videos and posts on message boards, I was one of many people who held this conviction from personal experience with the phone.

The first part of Apple’s conference was dedicated to telling those of us who had experienced the problem personally that we were imagining things. “This is nothing new,” Apple said. “Every phone does this. If you think that this is a special problem with the iPhone 4, you are wrong. Every other phone you have owned has the same problem, you just didn’t realize it for some reason. Look, we have anechoic chambers that cost millions of dollars. Therefore, your personal experiences are simply not real and the results published by websites that have measured signal drops without using specially designed test rooms are not to be trusted.”

Perhaps for people who had only heard about the issues second-hand, this was a persuasive argument. However, for me, it was an exceptionally arrogant and dismissive response. It was the climax of a crescendo of arrogant handling of this issue that had originally started with Steve Jobs chiding a user for holding his phone in the wrong way. There was no admission of a problem. Instead of the problem being with Apple’s product, the problem was with the customers and media, who were simply imagining things or sensationalizing the story for their own gain. If that wasn’t enough, they smugly reported that Apple had sold millions of iPhone 4s with fewer returns than previous products. So once again, this proves that the problem doesn’t really exist.

Now, where things become truly bizarre is in part two of the conference, in which Apple unveils a plan to give away free bumpers and cases to iPhone owners. Now, in my opinion, this is the proper response. I privately predicted this result to my iPhone-owning friends weeks ago, and never really expected them to issue a product recall. The move is reminiscent of Nintendo’s decision to offer free Wiimote jackets, though Nintendo’s choice certainly seemed more magnanimous since they really didn’t need to do it, whereas Apple tried to avoid acknowledging a problem until “Fix Your iPhone with Duct Tape” was a headline story on CNN.com. But even though I think that offering cases is the right response, what really gets me is the cognitive dissonance of it all. Apple goes to great lengths to argue that the iPhone 4 doesn’t have a unique problem, but then turns around and says “but we’re going to give you cases anyway, since people say that fixes the problem.” I have to wonder if there was a discussion inside Apple in which someone said “We need to fix this problem, but we can’t admit to our customers that there ever was a problem. Let’s just say there is no problem, then give them something free to fix it and hope that the offer of a free trinket will make them temporarily stupid enough not to put two and two together.” Certainly, some people seem to be swallowing it. I haven’t yet seen a mainstream realization that if Apple argues that all smartphones suffer from this problem and it is not uniquely pronounced on the iPhone 4, then they should be offering free cases to all owners of previous-generation iPhones as well. Nor have I seen too many people worry about Jobs’ statement that they would re-assess things in September, which likely means “we are working on a new version without the defect, because it’s a lot cheaper to fix than to give free cases in perpetuity”.

Maybe it really is PR perfection though. What really matters is that it works on most customers, and for many people it’s enough to just get something free. Sure, I was looking for Apple to admit that there was a problem, but a lot of there fans probably don’t want there to be a problem. They would rather put on their new case and tell themselves that they were imagining the reception problem because their is something comforting about the belief that when you buy an Apple product it’s going to be perfect. On the other hand, this move is not going to endear the to their critics, but maybe a return to the status quo is all Apple really hoped for.