I will accept debate about the proper spelling in the comments.

That out of the way, here is now to cook the perfect omelette:

Before anything else, you have to realize that proper heat is key.

If you’re one of those guys compelled to cook at temperatures more appropriate for forging steel, stop reading now.  Close this web site.  Go to Village Inn.  You’ll be happier with your omelette.

Stove tops vary, so you’ll have to experiment.  A few notches below medium seems to work best on mine.  Slow is what you want.  If your eggs sizzle when you add them to your pan, it’s too hot.

Get a good 10″ non-stick pan.  A good omelette pan is like a good cast iron skillet.  You’ll develop a relationship with it.  Treat it well.  If you buy it flowers, I won’t judge you.

Now, about the eggs.  A wise man, LL Cool J, once said that the perfect omelette is two eggs, not three.  That’s just about right.  Your mileage may vary, of course, but I think two eggs cooks more evenly.  With three, I found a tendency for the bottom to start to burn before the top was ready for the fold.

I sauté veggies and anything else I want to go in (like Canadian Bacon) ahead of time so I’m not trying to do too many things at once.  Besides, there isn’t enough time once the eggs go on.

Turn your stove on and get the pan warming up.  Put in enough butter or spread to coat the bottom and up a tiny amount on the sides.

For the eggs, I add some salt and pepper, and either a SMALL dash of soy sauce or worschestshire.  Often I’ll put in a little bit of hot sauce, too.  A little splash of milk.  Whisk it up.

Your pan should be at temperature. Add your eggs. To reiterate, if it sizzles, you’ve already screwed up.  Abandon ship!  Make out your will!  It’s all OVER!

Well, OK.  Maybe not.  But still.  You don’t want the sizzle. It’s not the end of the world, but turn the heat down a bit and you’ll need to be extra careful now that your eggs don’t cook too fast on the bottom before the top is ready.

This next part will take some practice to both get the timing and the technique right…

Give your eggs a few seconds to start to set.  Pick up the pan and give it a gentle swirl. You’re not creating a tsunami here.  I said gentle.  What you want is to create a very thin coat of egg about a quarter to half inch up the sides of the pan.  This will create your “timer.”  I’ll explain in a sec.

Now, leave those eggs alone on the burner.  They’ll be fine.

Go mix up your second batch of eggs.  Unless you live alone.  In which case, get out your phone and check your e-mail or post pictures of your cooking omelette to Facebook to make your friends jealous.

In your pan, your omelette might start to bubble a bit.  Swirl it around again.  GENTLY!  This is especially important if you have a stove like mine, which thinks it belongs in the Leaning Tower of Pisa, causing all contents to lean to one side of the pan.

You should still have a little bit of uncooked egg on top.  More importantly, that little bit your sloshed up on the edges?  It should be crisping up and pulling away from the pan.  You know what this does?  It gives your spatula easier access than a football jock has to the cheerleaders.  It also serves as a nice little timer that tells you the omelette is just about ready to fold.

Slide your spatula gently under the eggs a little bit to loosen it up.  If you’ve done a good job managing your heat and had enough butter or spread on the pan, the entire omelette should easily start to slide around.  PERFECT!

Now add your fillings.  And cheese.  Lots of cheese.

Finally, we come to the ever important fold.

Take a deep breath.  Steady your nerves.  This is more vital than making sure to cut the red wire instead of the blue one.

I use a spatula and a fork.  I slide the spatula under the eggs and gently use the fork to hold the edge to the spatula.  Again, this may take practice, but your aim here is a steady, quick fold over the top of your fillings. Do NOT pull as you fold or you will tear the eggs.

Add more cheese on top.  If you don’t like or can’t eat cheese, I can’t help you.

Let it cook just a little longer to melt all of the cheese.  This is another reason to make sure you’re cooking without a lot of heat.  You shouldn’t have to worry about burning your eggs at this point.

When the cheese is melted, your omelette should just slide off the pan and onto a plate.

Now, here is the important part:  Before you cook the next omelette, let your pan cool slighty and WIPE IT OUT!  Get rid of any excess melted cheese and, more importantly, your used butter / spread.  You don’t want that already cooked gunk under your eggs.  It will create uneven heating.  However, be sure to add new butter / spread for the next batch.

Last step:  EAT!

Here, at last, was the future.  Maybe it’s not the 24th century.  Maybe we aren’t all wearing awkward polyester uniforms with weird shoulder padding.  Maybe we aren’t all members of Starfleet.

But by god, we can have those damn handheld tablet computers!

There was certainly a part of me that wanted an iPad on day one.  However, I remember getting burned – hard – with the original iPhone.

Sure, the iPhone was cool when you first heard about it.  Once you got one, though, you were like, “now what?”  It wasn’t quite just a phone.  But it wasn’t exactly more than that, either.

It seemed innovative and, as Steve Jobs would say, “magical,” but at the same time, it also seemed very quickly behind the times.  Anyone remember the Edge network?  Try loading an e-mail and you could probably drive to the location of the sender and have them just tell you in person before the phone finished.  And all other carriers were rapidly switching to 3G.

And the initial app selection was more anemic than a vampire fang-banger.

It sort of made the iPhone seem like an idiot savant.

With a better form factor, an improved screen, zippier internal specs, and 3G capability, the second and third generation iPhones (3G ad 3Gs) better lived up to the promise of the concept.

So when iPad was announced,  the part of my brain that is obsessed with shiny new gadgets was quickly bitch-slapped by the part of my brain that remembers my frustrations with the original iPhone.

Despite the appeal of the iPad, it still clearly lacked some things.  Notably, a camera.

That might not sound like a big deal, but people noticed a clear spot for a camera in the internal construction of the device.  Not only that, but just a couple of short months later, Apple brought out the iPhone 4 with FaceTime.  Suddenly the lack of camera seemed like a glaring omission.  Not a deal breaker, but it did make people wonder what else Apple wanted in the iPad but either didn’t have time for, or chose to leave out.

Adding insult to injury, Apple updated iOS to allow multi-tasking (really just glorified fast app switching) for iPhones, but iPad users had to wait.

The longer I waited, the more sense it seemed to make to avoid iPad 1.

Well, a week ago Steve Jobs unveiled iPad 2 and all of my opinions have changed.

I now own an original iPad.  And I will refuse to buy the iPad 2.

In my mind, there are three clear problems with the iPad 2.  Added together, they diminish appeal of this so-called upgrade.

In no particular order, here they are:

1. iTunes

iTunes is like that room in your house where you throw all of your shit and then have to make excuses for when guests stumble upon it.

No matter how great the iPad, the iPhone, or even the iPods are, the craptastically clunky, slow, and inefficient iTunes will be a dark cloud hanging over them.

Steve Jobs is notorious for his slavish obsession for simplicity of design. I can’t imagine how iTunes doesn’t cause him to wake in the middle of the night with cold sweats. Even Microsoft Windows has moved into this century in terms of design aesthetics and function, and that fact alone should give Jobs seizures whenever he plugs in his iPhone to sync it.

At best, it’s an eye-sore.  At worst, it’s a frustrating experience that makes you want to throw a brick (likely that brick being your iPhone) through the nearest Apple store window.

Apple’s loves saying “it just works” when it comes to iDevices. That notion completely falls apart the instant you connect to iTunes.

Unfortunately, like the boulder chasing Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, iTunes has a lot of momentum to overcome in order to improve.  An example of classic bloatware, it would likely take nothing short of completely scrapping it at this point and rewriting it from the ground up.

I’m Ok with that.  In fact, I encourage it.

Apple clearly wants to make all of their “post-PC” devices talk to and share with each other.  Using an iPhone to share a hotspot to the iPad, or streaming iPad content to the Apple TV are all positive directions toward making this family of devices all seem connected.

iTunes is the spoiled child who pouts and ruins everyone’s day by refusing to play along.

It has trouble recognizing multiple devices on the same computer. Search for iPhone problems and you’ll find countless people who face a message telling them that iTunes thinks their phone is a “new device” every single time they connect.  The problem is, as the name suggests, iTunes was designed for music.  It was never intended to be a comprehensive content management system, dealing with music, applications, books, video, etc.  While it may have worked adequately for the iPod, by the time the iPhone rolled around, there was just too much expected of the software and it’s clearly not up to the task.

Apple’s draconian DRM is also to blame.  It may be somewhat easy to get content onto the devices, it’s notoriously difficult to get it back off.  Much of this had to do with the deals Apple had to make with record labels in order to secure such cheap music content for their stores.  But those days are over.  Many of the licensing restrictions are eased, and many of them just don’t apply to apps, for which even Apple provides roundabout instructions for putting them on multiple devices.

And Apple’s DRM never worked in the first place.  All of the content found in the iTunes store can be readily located on torrent sites and easily loaded (and unloaded, I might add) to jailbroken devices for those choosing to go that route.  It’s only the loyal Apple customers, those that obey Apple’s DRM rules, that are continually punished by the abysmally miserable experience of iTunes.

iTunes is very nearly a deal-breaker for ANY Apple product, no matter how great it is.

It is time for iTunes to die and to be replaced with something that gives users more control over the content on their devices.

2. Storage

When the iPad debuted, 16, 32, and 64 gigabytes of storage felt about right.

As a new class of product, it was really impossible to tell what would be necessary and a 64gb cap was a perfect balance of cost-effectiveness while still providing a decently large amount of storage.

It also followed Apple’s practice of not giving *too* much to consumers in the first go.

Most of their iDevices wind up getting a boost of storage space with each new iteration.  Often, it’s a doubling up of the top level (the notable exception, along with the iPad, is the iPhone 4, but once could argue that Apple doesn’t want to give *too* much storage to the iPhone and thus kill the necessity for their iPods).

Curiously, iPad 2 remains at the same levels as iPad 1.

However…

During the iPad 2 keynote, Steve Jobs specifically pointed out the intended marriage of the iPad with the creative community.  Photographers, for example, have embraced the iPad as a digital photo album. Some wedding photographers even dump photos directly onto the device in order to create same-day slide show presentations for their clients.  For situations like that, and with today’s top-of-the-line cameras reaching beyond 21 megapixels, even 64 gigabytes of can disappear very quickly.

Given how many professionals have embraced the iPad, it really needed a storage boost for version 2.  I know that Steve Jobs loves to make his devices smaller and sleeker with new versions, but I’m betting that the professional community would have preferred a 128gb storage option over a thinner form factor.

3. Memory

Sure, the iPad 2 sports Apples latest generation mobile dual-core processor, as well as boosted graphics.  Jobs claims that iPad 2 is up to 9 times faster than iPad 1.

Initial benchmark testing is starting to question that.  Of course the key words here are “up to,” which can mean absolute peak performance and not average use.

Also, by all indications, they retained the 256mb of RAM.

This is 2011. Other tablets are being released with a gigabyte of RAM.

Yes, the boosted processor and graphics capabilities all make the iPad 2 speedier in basic performance.  Swiping is smoother.  App transitions are quicker.  Scrolling is no longer jerky. (Although to be honest, I haven’t yet noticed any problems in these three areas so far with iPad 1.)

Typically, Jobs made a jab at technical specifications in a clear attempt to try to divert attention away from areas where iPad lags behind the competition.  For example, competing tablets base their dual core processors on newer chipsets and offer a gigabyte of RAM.

The thing is, RAM is an important consideration, even in a tablet device.  As apps get more and more sophisticated, they will push the limits of the hardware more and more.  Perhaps Apple has justified the lack of RAM upgrade by allowing the machine to run virtual memory from the hard drive.  Except go back to point 2 about the lack of increased storage.

A bottleneck is a bottleneck.

[EDIT: I've since read conflicting reports that the iPad 2 does, in fact, have 512 mb of RAM.  Some are still reporting 256.  Apple won't say a word about it.  512 would be a significant improvement, but still put iPad 2 behind a lot of other competitors, which are stepping up to a gigabyte.]

So there you have it. Three problems with iPad 2.

Ever since the debut of the iPod, Apple has managed to be first to market with, as they call it, “post-PC” devices.  It generally has taken their competitors at least a year to release something comparable, by which time Apple is able to release a second generation that is still clearly superior.  The phone market is still trying to catch up to how slick the iPhone works, and there has never been a personal music device that can match the iPod in terms of simplicity of use.

By the tone of the keynote (“the year of the copycats,” as Jobs put it), it appears that Apple feels they hold the same advantage in the tablet market.

They don’t.

The iPad 2 doesn’t show any evidence of clearly out-distancing the competitors in the way their other iDevices have.  Instead, it bursts onto the scene somewhere in the middle of the pack.  It offers some clear advantages, but also has some clear deficiencies.

Where iPad is unequivocally superior is in what you can DO with it.  The apps.

Here, Steve Jobs is totally justified in his gloating.  The sheer volume of what’s available is overwhelming.

But here’s the thing.  And it’s one final blow to the iPad 2.

Every single iPad app out there right now was written and built for the iPad 1.

That is to say, they’ve all been optimized for the hardware specs of the original iPad.  That won’t change.  Much.  Some may be updated to take advantage of the dual core.  Many won’t.  If your app works fine now on iPad 1, it may run slightly speedier on iPad 2, but it probably won’t be enough of a difference to blow you away.

Sure, developers will come out with new apps to take advantage of iPad 2.  Those apps will likely suffer some on the original.

But a deal breaker?  I don’t think so.

There is just nothing at all about the iPad 2 that makes the iPad 1 feel in any way deficient or obsolete – unless you absolutely have to have FaceTime, that is.  So where does that leave iPad 2?

It feels more to me like a sideways move.

I feel like the iPad family is still clearly superior in the tablet market.  Despite other devices out-distancing Apple in terms of hardware power, Apple will likely always dominate in terms of apps.  And really, what’s the point of a monster machine if the limiting factor is what you can do with it?  Believe me, before the app store really got rolling, this was the pain point for many iPhone users.

So, I’d still recommend an iPad over any other similar tablet device.  Where my recommendation gets trickier is between the original iPad and iPad 2.  If cameras are your tipping point, go with version 2.

If not, do what I did.  Save a boat load of cash and pick up the original.  Plenty of people will be unloading original iPad’s because they feel compelled to worship at the altar of the Apple cash register.

But consider this your official warning.

If “safe” is your thing, this won’t be the place for you. If “predictable” is your thing, this isn’t the place for you.

If you visit blogs looking for the warm fuzzy familiarity of a weekend vacation at grandma’s house, then this place will disappoint you.

Random thoughts. Amusing stories (at least to me). Rants. Praise. Nonsense.

These are some of the things you’ll find here.

Here is a picture of how my brain works at any given moment, on any given topic:

1. Take a box.
2. Fill it with ping pong balls.
3. Take said box to the top of a concrete stairwell.
4. Dump box out.

The resulting chaos is my thoughts.

I hope you stick around and enjoy the ride!