This was on my screen when I returned to the office from my start-of-year vacation.

Just sitting there.

Item via Daring Fireball: Comcast Rebranding as ‘Xfinity’

• Philadelphia Inquirer: Comcast unveils new brand name and logo

Comcast Corp. said yesterday that it would re-brand its TV, Internet, and telephone services as Xfinity on Feb. 12 to signal to customers that this isn’t the same old company. [...]

This re-branding comes as Comcast has struggled to rebuild its reputation because of poor service and problems with its network that resulted in telephone and Internet outages. Its customer-satisfaction rating is among the lowest in the industry, but it has improved slightly in the last year. Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said the re-branding was not an attempt to distance the service from the Comcast name. “This is about our product. It is about providing our customers with products that just keep getting better.”

If it’s about improving the product, then improve the product. This is a name change. To claim otherwise is lying.

As a longtime Comcast customer who is tensed and ready to jump ship the moment Verizon FiOS comes to my neighborhood, I can only say I’m not surprised. As John Gruber said: “Many companies walk away from household name brands just for kicks. Sure.”

(Daring Fireball is my number one source for informative links and Mac/tech commentary. I read it every day. John Gruber, the author, is very much a man after my own heart.)

From what I’ve seen and read, the iPad is beautiful and quite capable. I would give up my iPod touch in a heartbeat to get an iPad. I’d be content to carry the iPad in a small bag or pack. (Already, I always carry a Tamrac Digital 6 camera bag with my Canon PowerShot S5 IS, spare charged batteries and SD cards, iPod touch, LG enV2 phone, and wallet stuff. I wonder if we’ll see a new class of bags now.)

But I’ve been thinking about what the iPad is not.

It’s not a videophone. It so easily could be, and this feels like a criminal waste of potential. If Apple had included an iSight camera, like on the MacBooks, then the iPad truly would be “magical.”

It would be the Internet device for, say, grandparents. It’s already a market-killing (or, at least, marketwide-price-reducing) digital picture frame. With the camera/SD card adapter (why no SD slot?), you can load photos directly from your camera. Add the keyboard dock and it’s a perfect email station. Add video chat and it would be everything you need to stay connected to your family online.

So why no camera? Did AT&T refuse to offer an unlimited data plan (or any data plan at all) if the iPad included a video chat function? There are already mobile broadband adapters for laptops, of course, but I’m guessing that using those for video chat is still a niche application, whereas integrating video chat into the iPad—with an icon right on the home screen, and Apple’s characteristic ease-of-use—would have the same effect as building Safari into the iPhone: an immense increase in data usage. People would use it all the time.

Still, I cannot see a future in which Apple doesn’t add iSight to the iPad. It’s the single most glaring omission. There must be a business reason for its absence—but Apple has a fine history of breaking down “business reasons” over time. It’ll come. I mean, videophone. It is the future. And, dear heavens, I will buy it.

It’s not just a bigger iPod touch. Some critics say it is; I must assume that they were not paying attention to the keynote. The extra screen real-estate enables greater functionality by an order of magnitude. Watch the demo of email, photos, and especially iWork. That’s not an iPod touch—it is a new category of device. It’s the device I wish I had instead of an iPod touch.

It’s not a graphics tablet. Yeah, I had this pipe dream of the iPad having built-in Cintiq-style pen support, but the iPad isn’t meant to be a primary tool for artists and designers. Serious graphic work requires the power of a desktop machine, for now. And the added hardware support would greatly increase the price. Still…sigh. It was a pretty dream.

It’s not a GPS. Shucks. Well, give it time. Update: Actually, the 3G model does have GPS.

It’s not a keyboard-less laptop. You want multitasking? You want a desktop OS? You want an open application ecosystem? You want Flash? Get a laptop. You’re not the intended market for the iPad. You should know better.

My pre-show thoughts on what the Apple tablet ought to have:

• An optional Wacom-style pen for fine artwork
• Support for a Bluetooth keyboard
• An SD card slot (like current Macs) for uploading photos and video during trips
• Enough storage for at least a week of such photos and videos (perhaps this suggests more than one price point, based on storage)
• A forward-facing camera for video chat

The rest feels obvious to me:

• At least a nine-inch multitouch screen
• WiFi (and maybe cell data service, but I’m shaky about whether that’s standard)
• Interface more iPhone-style than Mac-style

Anyway, I eagerly await the reveal. I’ll be glued to my favorite source for Apple keynotes:

• Engadget: Live from the Apple ‘latest creation’ event (with auto-refresh)

I’m also occasionally peering at Andy Ihnatko’s liveblog.

Interesting related links from before the show:

• Engadget is skeptical but impressed with allegedly leaked photos: “Is this the Apple tablet?” Update: Yes, it is.
• Derek Powazek states his wish—and it’s about content, not so much about hardware—and I totally agree: “What I Hope Apple Unleashes Tomorrow” This excites me more than the device itself. Update: I dunno. Other than noting that they use the ePub format, no word on the publishing process.

Update as I’m following the keynote:

It’s the iPad. Looks like an iPod touch scaled up to about letter size, with interface enhancements to make better use of the space.

Steve’s just sitting in a comfortable living-room chair, surfing around on it. Nice.

Photos from Engadget. Definitely go there and see all the pictures.

1/2 inch thick, 1.5 pounds, 9.7 inch LCD display, and powered by Apple’s own processor. Interesting.

16, 32, or 64GB flash storage. Bluetooth and WiFi. Accelerometer. Compass. Speaker and microphone. 10 hours of battery life (and a month standby).

Can run iPhone apps, either at original size or pixel-doubled to fill the screen. Apps can be rewritten to use the full screen resolution.

There’s a bookstore, iBooks. The interface looks an awful lot like Classics for the iPhone.

And iWork for the iPad.

Available with just WiFi or also with 3G cellular data. Special deal with AT&T: $15/mo for 250GB of data, $30/mo unlimited—prepaid, no contract. And the iPad 3G models are unlocked, so they could be used on other networks. (International deals are in the works.)

And the pricing…WOW.

Available: a keyboard dock. Wait…a keyboard dock? Not Bluetooth? Wha? Wow, it looks like every one of my “ought”s (except for storage) got left out. Update: MacInTouch reports that the iPad does support Bluetooth keyboards. Very good.

A few more specs:

• 1024 x 768 resolution
• “Assisted GPS” included with 3G models
• SD card reader available as an accessory. Okay, that’s good.

All right, back to work for now.

A couple of years ago, I caught a flu. I was out sick from work, and pretty much out of commission altogether, for almost a week.

Because I was officially offline from any normal responsibilities, a strange thing happened: I went to sleep far earlier than usual, at 9:00 to 9:30 every night—tired. I didn’t have a stressful day of work to look forward to, so, paradoxically (but, on the other hand, obviously), I woke up easily in the morning.

When I went back to work after nearly a week of unfettered sleep, I was sharper than I’d been in years, sleep-enriched and optimized. Wide awake, mentally focused, amazingly capable. “I ought to get the flu more often,” I thought. I felt fantastic for at least a week.

But my sleep habits, in both timing and mental state, slowly returned to “normal”: Hit the snooze button a few times, get up groggy and almost literally weighted by the backlog waiting for me at the office, drag myself through the morning preparations and commute, slog through most of the workday, stay into the evening because focus only really arrives in the late afternoon and I want to keep getting things done while I’m in the zone, get home later than I’d like, force myself to stay awake through my prime tired period (during which I could put my head down and effortlessly pass out) so I can attend to the evening dishes/garbage/recycling/ablutions/whatever, get hit by my second wind and take hours to unwind, and go to bed late.

I am guessing I’m not the only one stuck in this cycle. I wonder if it isn’t “normal” for a majority of people, but who bothers to talk about it?

The crucial habit I need to acquire, now that I’ve thought this out, is to push myself hard to wrap up all the evening responsibilities before the natural tiredness hits, and see if the rest of the schedule realigns itself accordingly. My body seems to want to sleep at a particular time—and structuring my schedule around that time may sound stupidly obvious, but old habits are hard to break, and I wonder if this bad habit isn’t ingrained in our society itself.

It’s September 9 again.

Live coverage of Apple’s “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it” event this afternoon:

• Engadget
• Macworld

Steve Jobs is back, to a standing ovation, and encouraging everyone to register as organ donors.

New stuff in iTunes 9: Home Sharing—automatic sharing of content between local computers! Hallelujah! Genius Mixes, which throw similar songs into a playlist and sequence them intelligently (I think). Wow. The iTunes Store now has iTunes LP, which bundles artwork and liner notes and videos with albums. iTunes Extras includes special features with movies, too.

And, as everyone expected: updated iPods.

Video camera in the iPod nano. The nano? Yeah, the nano. Which also gets a speaker. And a microphone. And a pedometer. (Not surprising, since they’d already put an accelerometer in there.) And, yes, an FM radio. 8 gig for $149, 16 gig for $179. Gosh. This is gonna be huge.

But…no camera in the iPod touch? Awww. Well, at least it gets a bit faster, and the 16 gig is down to $199, and we now have 64 gigs for $399. The iPhone/touch 3.1 software update is free and includes Genius Mixes and a Genius for apps, which sounds interesting and dangerous. iTunes 9 lets you manage your apps in a much more comfortable interface. That’s cool.

Still, they really should have added a camera to the iPod touch. Embarrassing to have cameras in the iPhone and nano, but not in the touch.

Idiozeitgeist is back. Never really went anywhere—well, that’s another issue—but anyway.

Last September, I upgraded my blog software. Problem is, I had hacked the previous version’s code (and customized the configuration data in the database) in wholly unapproved ways, and the new software refused to let me access the admin interface anymore. Upshot: I couldn’t post anything for eleven months. Well, that problem is out of the way now.

Sure, I might have figured out how to fix the blog sooner—but in late November, I discovered Facebook. Ho boy. Potent stuff. I’ve been a happy addict since. If you know me, you can find me there.

But! This here thing is still running. I’ll rig up Facebook to mirror these posts there.

Actor and philanthropist, dead at 83. A rightful Hollywood legend.

Live coverage of Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event this afternoon:

• Engadget
• Macworld

I’ll be refreshing those pages to get my live-update fix. Steve Jobs will undoubtedly be unveiling new or updated iPods, and maybe new music or video services, at 1:00 Eastern time.

Allen’s 39 today! And he loves birthday greetings!

Allen at Epcot Center, 1 October 2007. Photo by Disney PhotoPass photographer Bill.