Neal Tucker

10 Awesome Android Apps – Part I

I got a Droid for my birthday, and it has changed everything. I previously owned a Blackberry, and this thing makes it look like Zack Morris’s oversized-grey-box-that-sometimes-made-phone-calls. I couldn’t be happier with it. And I imagine it will only improve with Froyo and beyond. Having now used it for a few weeks, I have compiled a list of twenty apps that I consider to be my favorites, of which this is part uno. Behold at my behest.

The Google Suite (x3)

Gmail, Google Voice, and Gtalk are all musts for anyone who uses Google apps, and it stands to reason that many (most?) people using an Android device probably use Google apps on a regular basis. It also stands to reason that if you do use an Android yet you aren’t using Google apps for everything, then…do. That’s all I have to say. Nothing else compares, in my opinion. I’ve used Yahoo!, Mobile Me, and a few other lesser-known sites’ suites, and Google is head-and-shoulders above them all. In my correct opinion.

Twidroid

If you use Twitter in any capacity, there is no Android substitute for Twidroid. It has all the gadgets and gizmos you need, and it comes in two sizes, FREE and 5 bucks. I personally use the free version, because I haven’t yet found the premium features worth the price; honestly, that’s a testament to how incredible the free version really is. Unless you need native bit.ly support or you use lists a lot, I don’t think you’ll need the premium version.

Evernote

If you want to talk about apps that truly can change your life, then Evernote needs to be

in the conversation. This app is intended to help you remember anything and everything that you want or need to remember. You can write a note, snap a picture, record an audio note, or upload a file to a note, and it syncs it with your online account, your phone, you computer, your iPod, iPad…. So, whenever you need to remember anything, you just type in some keywords, a tag or two, search in images of documents, or even just look at the geo-tags to see what notes you created near where you are, and it does the rest. This one also comes in two sizes, FREE and subscription (monthly/yearly). I cannot recommend this app enough. If you ever take notes for any purpose, be it in class or for the grocery store or to remember appointments, then you need this app.

Grooveshark

Because Spotify won’t get its crap together and come to the US, we have Grooveshark. For $3/month, you can listen to just about any song you want on

yourAndroid device. The online site is always FREE, but you do have to “Go VIP” in order to use the app on your phone. And, in case you’re wondering (which I was), about whether this is legal, let me calm your qualms: it is. Read all about it here.

eBuddy

Unfortunately, there is no chat client app for Android made by Google, nor can you use the GTalk app for other services, which would be fantastic, because that app is wonderful. Due to the preceding, there is eBuddy, a very simple app that allows you to chat on pretty much any chat service, from AIM to GTalk to Facebook and others. I’ve tried several others, and this one is much better in my opinion. The design is simpler and less clunky than its counterparts in the chat app realm.

Foursquare

For a while now, people have been touting Foursquare as the “next Twitter.” I was skeptical. I gave it a shot. I’m not as skeptical. I decided to give a week, and, before the week was up, I was hooked. There’s something inherently appealing about keeping track of your own whereabouts. And, to keep your worries at bay, you can easily hide your posts from people, even your Foursquare Friends. Plain and simple. I should also mention that my fascination with this service is in no small part due to the very well designed app, clean, efficient, and very attractive. I also tried Gowalla, but it never worked, so that was an easy No. For some time I’ve been “checking-in” to cities with Brightkite, but I think I’ve quickly grown quite attached to Foursquare. If you’re skeptical as I was, I recommend that you give it a solid week. If you hate it, delete your account. But, I don’t think you’ll want to.

USA Today

This one is pretty straightforward. It takes all the great aspects of the newspaper and puts them on your Android. It has news, sports scores, the weather, pictures, and the now famous USA Today polls – quick, fun, and informative. It also boasts a convenient in-app browser for opening any native links, a very helpful addition to any news app.

NPR News

Like the aforementioned USA Today, this one is pretty straightforward. However, that being said, all the NPR podcasts are available here, in addition to every single radio station available nationwide. I listen to this app all the time, as it puts NPR, one of the best news and commentary sources of the day, right in your pocket, at all times. Highly recommended for any cultured Android user. Kidding. But seriously.

24!

Today, I turn 24. Now, time for revelry. Fireworks. Planetariums. South Africa. And like such as. I’ve posted a picture up top of some wrapped presents from family, with more pics to follow.

I would like to take this sentence-paragraph and inform both of my readers that I am well aware that no one will care about this but me and my immediate family.

That being said, let my first ever birthday live blog commence! At this time, ideally, I would have Robin Williams do a bit with a large, mainly solitary, arboreal ape, with long reddish hair, long arms, and hooked hands and feet, native to Borneo and Sumatra. The mature male develops fleshy cheek pads and a throat pouch. At this point, however, the differences between the two may be negligible. Instead, I will just post pictures from the day at the top of this post.

P.S. I just listened to Jimmy Eat World’s song “23″, which seemed appropriate. Great song.

Early to Mid Twenties

My final day at 23, and my early twenties, is coming to a close. Tomorrow, I celebrate 24, enter my mid-twenties, and enjoy Star Wars Day! I was going to tweet this, but a short blog post seemed more apropos. And longer to boot. I plan to blog my birthday tomorrow, with events, eating, and presents. Not to mention the whole thing will be televised. Okay. That’s all for now. See you when I’m 24.

Social Locating

Short blog post today.

Ok. Before Foursquare and Gowalla, there was Brightkite. I’ve been using it for a long time to “check-in” when I go to a new city. But that’s it. Just letting people know what general part of the world I’m in. Nothing more. Not posting when I get to Chuckie Cheese or the Hannah Montana concert or what have you. But, this coming week, despite it’s obvious safety concerns (if not because of them – we’re moving soon), I’m gonna give it a shot. So, if you see me posting with relative frequency about my current locale, then you’ll know why. Ok. Tis all for now.

A Fortnight

Yes, a fortnight. Two weeks (almost) starting in Chicago, then on down to Birmingham, then Florence, then Birmingham again, then up to St. Louis, then back to Chicago. I flew, rode, took taxis, and hopped on a giant double-decker Megabus. And, when I was finally close enough to see my apartment, I bartered for a packmule and charged for the door, which I mistook for a windmill, and now there is no door.

The trip was fantastic, and, except for my possibly ruptured spinal disk causing excruciating pain in my leg and back, it would have been close to perfect. In the Ham, I got a new phone (a Droid, and, yes, I love it, and yes, it is the one I was looking for), got to hang out with almost everyone, saw Millie rehearsal at Samford, and just spent time with the fam, which was awesome. In Florence, I attended a farm meeting (for the first time) at a large property my mom’s side of the family has owned since the 1800′s. The meeting lasted all of a half hour, then we ate lunch and just hung out on the farm with extended family. Then, I was off to St. Louis, where I stayed with Megan Stodard, got to see a Braves-Cardinals game at Busch Stadium with Curt Tanner, and went to the zoo and Union Station, all of which was wonderful, except that the Braves lost (AGAIN).

Having now bored you near a state that would likely allow me to use a word like lachrymose, here are some pics from the trip (all taken with my Droid, just fyi).

Backupify

I’ve been tweeting about it recently, and I thought I might go ahead and blog about it, too. The other day, I was using Threadsy, an online social aggregator site. Without warning, it deleted every Direct Message I’ve ever received on Twitter. Needless to say, I was a touch frustrated. And I told Threadsy, too. They quickly responded, apologized, and said they’d add a warning message, so people know what might be about to happen to their content. Good move by them – but too little too late: I won’t be using Threadsy again. Which sucks mainly because I have a cool Threadsy t-shirt. I can paint in it or something, I guess.

So, having just had all my DM’s deleted, I promptly went over to Backupify, a web service that backs up your entire online life, which, for me, includes Twitter. I checked my Archives and there it was, in one neat little file: all of my DM’s. I was ecstatic. I quickly downloaded all of them, to back them up locally as well.

The point is, even online content can be subject to drastic data loss. If you’re at all worried about it (and I think you probably should be, to some extent, anyway), then you should check out Backupify. I signed up on a whim one day a while ago, not thinking too much of it. But now, I don’t know what I would have done without it. I know one thing: I wouldn’t have my DM’s. Some people might not care if their DM’s were deleted, or their status updates, etc., but I do, and it was a life-saver to have Backupify holding onto all that data.

They offer 2GB for free, which is more than enough for even a handful of Twitter accounts. I went ahead and downloaded my entire Twitter data packet that was on Backupify’s servers (in the Amazon cloud), and it was less than 4MB. So, you see how much 2GB can take care of. So go check it out if you want. You have nothing to lose. Except maybe your data.

Talk soon,

Neal

Redesign

As happens occasionally, I feel the need to redesign my websites and blogs. So: I did that. Additionally, this past week, I started up three more review sites, Books, Music, and Theatre (which also includes dance – pretty much anything within the purview of Performing Arts, except for music). And, as you can see, my blog has experienced a complete redesign. I wanted something minimalistic: simple and clean. I think the new design fulfills that requirement, and I think it’s more appealing to read – for both of us. Welp, that’s pretty much it for right now.

If you have any suggestions for a review, please send them my way! In the meantime, I’ll be doing stuff.

Talk soon,

Neal

P.S. Yes, that is a picture of a vanilla ice cream scoop in a cone. I was thinking of putting an orange road cone, but ice cream is just so much better.

Hughie & Krapp’s Last Tape

I saw Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape tonight at The Goodman Theatre downtown, both starring Brian Dennehy, with a 15-minute intermission between them.  Having read Hughie, I knew what to expect (more or less).  Having not read Krapp’s Last Tape, I knew only to expect Beckett (more or less).

Hughie came first.  Dennehy walked onto the stage, a vivid hotel lobby in the 50′s, from backstage left, in a large pinstripe suit, smoking, already reminiscing about his lost friend, the eponymous character we never see, Hughie himself.  The night clerk, Charlie, vaguely listens to Dennehy’s garrulous character, Erie Smith, spin his yarn for upwards of an hour.  Erie tells him about Hughie, the prior night clerk, and he tells Charlie of the stories he used to tell old Hughie, before he got sick, “was took to the hospital,” and died, a week before the play begins.  He tells Charlie how he’s lost his luck since Hughie died.  How he can’t win anymore – he’s a gamblin’ man.

Charlie listens in a torpor.  He hangs on to the ends of Erie’s sentences like an old faithful dog, trying but failing to attend truly to Erie’s words.  Hughie tells Charlie story after story, stories within stories upon stories.  Erie says to himself as much as to Charlie, “What I fed to Hughie wasn’t all lies…They was stories….” Not lies.  Stories.  Erie tells the story of himself and Hughie, because he needs Hughie.  Hughie, now dead, can’t help him save for his presence in Erie’s long-winded stories.  Erie clung to Hughie, because Hughie gave him confidence, gave him, in essence, a raison d’être, a reason for being.  Without Hughie, Erie can’t find joy in anything, in the women or the gambling, in the old memory-haunted hotel, or, worst, in his stories.  Several times throughout the one-act play, Erie heads for the stairs, a few times climbing up a stair or two, before turning around, facing the lobby, telling another story.

Nearing the end of the play, Charlie opens up.  His stupor clouding his poor judgment and ability to converse for most of the play, he finally reveals that he wants something that Erie has, something Erie needs to give away in order to live again: his stories.  Erie needs to tell his stories to someone who will believe them, who will “lap them up” as Erie says, someone who will sit at Erie’s feet and beg for more.  That person, it turns out, is Charlie.  Hughie can’t play that role any longer.  But Charlie can.  Erie recognizes this immediately, and we see a hint of the old spark we imagine Hughie had earlier in life, a spark we hope returns.

As humans, we need food, shelter, clothes, of course.  But we truly need something that’s much harder to come by.  Those are the needs we cling to, what we hold on to even after it’s gone, what we grope for in the dark, what we frantically try to replace when all is lost.  Erie needed someone to listen, someone to hear his stories, someone to believe him, someone that would give him reason to live, reason to be.  Hughie was his reason to be.  Having lost Hughie, he mourned.  He spent a hundred dollars he didn’t have to purchase a flower arrangement for Hughie’s funeral.  He returned to the hotel where Hughie had worked and listened to him for nineteen years.  In the end, he found Charlie.

Next came Krapp’s Last Tape.  Beckett is known for his absurdist, existential plays, stories without stories.  In Hughie, stories were the essence of Erie’s life.  In Krapp’s Last Tape, Krapp replays his own stories in order to remember, but also in order to forget.  He listens to tapes he has made on his birthdays, sitting in a black, dark room, with a single light handing from the ceiling.  He exits to a closet upstage a few times, but he always returns to his dark room.

Beginning as a return to vaudeville, the play draws us into the idiosyncratic life of Krapp, the play’s only visible character.  As the play moves on, we are invited to listen with Krapp as he plays a tape from thirty years prior, his 39th birthday.  We hear him recount events that he can now only imagine.  His 39-year-old self (the other character) is a different man in many ways, ways the 69-year-old Krapp would like, so he seems to intimate at times, to forget.  In order to forget, he must first remember.  Krapp listens and remembers, imagining the moments in his life, thirty years ago, living a different life, a life altogether unlike the one he is living now, the one in the dark room, alone.  We hear that 39-year-old Krapp also lived a solitary life.  What was once a refuge for a young, introverted man, has evolved into a hovel for a old hermit.

He eats his bananas and listens to his tapes.  He seems to have no life but the tapes.  Having listened to the tape he recorded thirty years prior, Krapp records one final tape.  He denigrates his young (depraved?) self.  He takes refuge in the simple fact that it is all behind him, or so he says.  He references old stories that his younger self engaged in, all those many years ago.  He talks of going to church, falling asleep in the pews, gathering holly at Christmas, being young.  He talks to himself and to the tape, though that distinction is dissolving, saying how he might be somewhere again, another time, another place.

He says, finally, “Be again, be again.”

The two plays are very different, but they have obvious similarities as well.  Erie and Krapp are similar men, longing for something they cannot have, Erie for his Hughie, Krapp for his younger self, though each claims he doesn’t want or need it, in so many words.  Erie finds Charlie.  Krapp finds his tapes.  Each has lost something, but each creates something else in its place, in their own, very different way.  Each clings to a life no longer lived, replacing it with stories and tapes.  Dennehy is brilliant, finding the (often comic) tragedy of both Erie and Krapp: living, telling, recording, but most of all, and most difficutly, being.

Project 365

If you’ve been clicking my links on Facebook or Twitter, you’ve probably seen several consecutive posts with a prominent picture and a tagline beneath it.  This is part of one of my 2010 Resolutions, Project 365 as some have called it elsewhere.  Basically, the premise is simple: take a picture every day and post it online.  I’m posting all my pictures to Flickr, which automatically posts to Facebook, then I’m blogging it here, which automatically posts to Twitter.

For this first week, I’ve posted my photo of the day every day.  Subsequently, I plan to change up my routine a bit.  Having gotten into a kind of rhythm, I now think that it is a resolution I would like to stick with for the long haul.  We’ll see how that pans out, but I feel pretty good about it, and hopefully that’s somewhat realistic, something else that only Time Will Tell.

My new plan is to post my pictures once a week, each Friday or Saturday posting the previous week’s photos.  I’ll figure out some way to post them all to one blog post without appearing too cluttered.  If you have a suggestion, I’d love to hear it.  I don’t really have anything in mind right now.  I will always post them to Flickr as well, so if you want to see my whole growing 2010 gallery, check it out by clicking on any of the pictures I’ve posted (or by clicking here on this red text).

That’s all for now.

Talk soon,

Neal

Day: 7/365 – Date: 1/7/2010

Chicago is covered in snow; this is a brick wall down the street, laced in ivy, topped and buried in snow.