jameswharris

Being An Old Dog Learning New Tricks

I’ve been in my present programming job since 1987. I’m a database programmer, but I’m not part of IT, but was hired by a college within the university where I work. I was employed way back then to set up a Novell network and develop a multi-user dBase III system to shadow the university’s canned student information system. In the mid-nineties, I rewrote everything in HTML and classic ASP for IIS and Microsoft SQL Server, and switched our network to Windows and TCP/IP. I have cranked out hundreds of thousands of lines of custom code since. Now our university IT department wants all us non-IT programmers to rewrite our code to meet IT standards that runs on their servers. I’m totally behind that, because I know when I retire someone will have to maintain my code.

The trouble is, I’m 58 and this means I’ll have to learn a whole slew of new languages – XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS 2.0, PHP, and JavaScript, new frameworks JQuery and CodeIgniter, switch from Textpad, a programming editor to Eclipse, an IDE, and they want me to learn generic SQL that works with an abstraction layer in case we switch backend databases. Plus I’m switching web servers from ISS to Apache. This is a lot of new stuff for an old dog to take in. My very comfortable environment that I’ve lived and worked in for 15 years is now totally Alice in Wonderland. It’s like moving to Paris and having to learn French.

I do believe this is good for me, especially for exercising my aging mental stamina, but I can feel that it’s pushing the limits of what my mind can handle. I’m sure in several months I’ll be comfortable in the new paradigm, but for now I feel like I’m a couch potato going on the Biggest Loser. I wonder if all this mental weight lifting and running, all this programming huffing and puffing, is going to kill me.

Now that I’m getting old, I know why old dogs don’t want to learn new tricks. It’s so much easier to stay in the comfort zone of doing my old tricks. What’s weird is I’m learning all this new technical stuff at the same time I’m becoming so forgetful in everyday life. More than anything, I’m in a USE IT OR LOSE IT phase of life. It feels like I’m surfing and the only thing I can remember is the wave I’m riding right now.

The famous urban legend is we only use 10% of our brains. I’ve read about scientific experiments that disprove that. One set of experiments had test subjects learn something new and test their retention ability, then after awhile, switched them to studying something different. As they learned new stuff they forgot old stuff. Other experiments mapped the brain with various scans. There aren’t any unused portions. What they learned is we all use our brains fully, but fully varies from person to person, and I’m guessing also varies at different times in our lives. It’s like that circus act where a guy keeps 30 spinning plates all twirling at once. When we’re young we can keep 25 things going at once, but as we get older, that number decreases.

Learning my new programming paradigm is like trying to be young again. It’s fun and exciting, but this time around I realize I’m pushing my limits. I can feel my limits in a way that I never imagined when I was young. I wonder how far and how hard I can push those limitations, and for how long.

JWH – 1/20/10

There’s No Such Thing As Free TV

In the early days of television it appeared the shows were free, just put up an antenna and watch your favorite programs for nothing. But as we all know, we paid for our viewing by watching commercials. Then came cable TV. We paid a small fee to avoid the hassle of messing with antennas, but we still watched a lot of commercials. However, this started the upward cost of watching television. Cable providers slowly added more channels and raised their fees. They even offered commercial free networks like HBO and Showtime, but at an even greater cost. It’s not uncommon today to pay over $100 a month for cable or satellite access. Then they charged even more for DVR boxes and services so we could skip over the commercials.

Now people are abandoning their cable/satellite services to save money and going retro by using antennas again, and getting over-the-air (OTA) HD television. They supplement their viewing variety with Netflix, HTPCs and now DLNA compliant devices. Getting TV from the Internet gives the illusion that we’ve finally found a way to get free TV. Don’t count on it. We still pay $25-50 a month for broadband Internet access, and we still watch a lot of commercials. And if the movie and television industry has their way, they’ll find new ways to charge us for watching our favorite shows over the Internet.

Netflix, at $8.99 for 1 disc service and streaming video via a Roku box is probably the cheapest way to get the most TV watching bang for the buck. Now Netflix is under attack by the Hollywood Studios. As the Business Week article points out, studios don’t like the all-you-can-eat streaming pricing. They want a cut of the action for each movie you watch, because they consider streaming equal to cable/satellite pay-per-view movies, that cost viewers $4 a pop. And the studios, like Warner Brothers, want to slow the access to movies that Netflix rents because Netflix is cutting into sales of DVD/BD discs. I know I don’t buy discs anymore, so I can understand this. And if you haven’t noticed lately, a lot of streaming content on Netflix started showing expiration dates. Bummer.

Generations of television viewers who grew up after the Baby Boomers don’t remember “free” TV. Every house had an antenna sprouting from the roof and you didn’t have to pay a monthly bill to watch your shows. Of course, we didn’t have the power to skip commercials, and we only had 3-4 channels in our nightly lineup. We had NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies showing new to broadcast films, and each station had a library of old films they could show at odd hours of the day, usually in the middle of the night. Life was simple then. Of course, so were the shows.

Decades later, television shows and movies cost untold millions to make, far more than what broadcast commercials and movie tickets can finance. Movie makers want to maximize their profits by selling their films several times, in a standard tiered released system where they get the maximum revenue at each stage:

Theatrical releases
DVD/BD sales
Pay-per-view
Premium cable (HBO, Showtime, etc)
Basic cable
Broadcast networks
[Netflix streaming?]

So where in the hierarchy do they release titles to Internet streaming? And if DVD/BD sales are hurt by rentals, when do you release titles to Netflix? Right now, I pay the most for movies because I watch a lot of flicks on the big screen. I could probably save $500 a year by waiting for movies to come to Netflix. This is one reason why I don’t care about getting cable TV anymore, or when movies get to Netflix. But if you aren’t big on going to the movies, this does matter.

The trouble for movie makers is Netflix is so damn efficient and cheap. Even without streaming, for $8.99 a month you can watch about a 100 movies a year, and with streaming, your selection is overwhelming. Who needs to watch more? And if you count that Netflix rents/streams TV shows and documentaries, that makes $8.99 a month the cheapest form of TV watching other than OTA viewing. Sports is the main thing missing, and probably why more people don’t give up cable/satellite.

Now Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is catching on, allowing you to stream video content off the Internet directly to your TV, without using a computer. Geeks have been hooking up their computers to their TV for years, but it’s not an elegant consumer oriented solution. All the major TV manufacturers are starting to build DLNA technology directly into their TVs, meaning you won’t need a Roku box to stream Netflix and Amazon videos. Each manufacturer can choose which streaming system to support, or in some cases, they can support PC servers like PlayOnTv that will talk to your TV directly, or via your Wii, PS3 or Xbox 360, so you can watch Hulu and other emerging Internet TV networks.

Essentially, online TV networks like Hulu.com, CastTV and TV.com are ways to get broadcast and cable network shows free off the Internet, or free if you ignore your ISP bill. But when content providers realize that these services will undercut services higher up the economic viewing ladder, will they continue to offer their content for free? Will there be more commercials, or even subscriptions required?

I installed PlayOnTV on our Wii and played around with Hulu. The Wii remote made a decent TV remote and worked well with the Hulu menu system. This bit of testing provided an epiphany for me. Internet TV is like cable TV – too many channels and too much to see! Since I’ve given up cable TV and lived for a few months with just ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and Netflix, I’ve learned to love simplicity. I thought I wanted more documentaries which Internet TV might offer me, but it’s not worth the hassle of finding them.

I like the higher quality of watching Blu-ray discs, or even DVD quality, over watching Internet TV quality. Broadcast HD seems better than cable HD, and Blu-ray 1080p is even better yet. I’ve gotten used to pristine picture quality, and for me at least, visual quality is better than viewing quantity. I don’t mind waiting for BD discs to come in the mail. I know my viewing habits aren’t typical. My wife is a channel surfer and loves to see what’s on by flipping through hundreds of channels. If you’re like her, then you’ll need to pay for cable/satellite, or spend the money for Internet TV options.

I pay $16.99/month to Netflix for 2 discs out at a time with Blu-ray. That’s as cheap as I can get while getting the most TV watching for my dough. If the movie studios force Netflix to charge more for streaming, I’ll live without streaming. I’m a little annoyed that Blu-ray discs cost more to buy and rent than DVDs when they look physically identical, but the extra visual quality is worth it to me. I don’t mind watching Big Love or Weeds months after their HBO and Showtime broadcasts.

TV isn’t free, but it doesn’t have to be expensive either. How much you pay for TV depends on how impatient you are to see new shows and films. As I get older I’ll probably stop going to the theater as much, because paying $10 to see a movie the first week it’s out won’t be as important. I know a lot of old guys who stopped going to the movies altogether. If you’re young, restless, twitchy and impatient, then you’ll probably love flipping through 300 cable channels and won’t mind paying $100 a month for that pleasure.

When I heard Warner Brothers wanted Netflix to wait a whole month before renting movies that had just gone on sale, I laughed. At 58, a month is nothing. To a teenager or twenty-something, waiting a month is probably unbearable. I’m still finding new movies from the 1930s to watch, and I’ve seen thousands of them already. I’d much prefer Netflix maintaining it’s low rates than getting movies sooner. Let the young finance the movie and television industry – if you’re patient you can save your money for retirement.

JWH – 1/17/10

Songs Rated 10

I am home today because of a snow day, and I felt deliciously sleepy, so I put on my Songs Rated 10 at Lala.com, turned up the volume, kicked back in the La-Z-Boy, covered up with a warm fuzzy blanket and let my mind float away with the music. I absolutely LOVE listening to my favorite tunes when I’m half asleep, drifting in and out of slumber land. I play the music loud so it constantly jerks me back to near wakefulness, usually as each song begins, and then I slowly fall back into unconsciousness. This is as close as I can get to listening to music high anymore – it’s been decades since I mixed music and smoke.

My Songs Rate 10 playlist are cuts that I can listen to anytime, in any order, and repeated endlessly. My lullabies currently represent 47 songs from various genres dated from 1965-2009. Click on the link and you can see and even play the list. This is the magic of Lala. They let anyone play a song once for free, so it’s a great site for sharing music. I wonder if anyone else in the world has this particular list of 47 songs?

These songs resonate in my mind in a way I can’t comprehend. Somehow these songs are on the same frequency as my emotions because when I play them they make my feelings well up and become highly sensitive to the music’s words and notes. Their rhythms stimulates my thoughts, their melodies flow around my synapses freeing old memories. My mind releases random images stored away in neural chemistry that float to the surface of my dreamy consciousness. I’ve often thought this is the state of mind I want to be in when I die, so I’d just drift away, returning to the blackness of nothingness while my awareness floats between two notes.

JWH – 1/8/10

Predicting the Apple Tablet

The computer press is buzzing with rumors of an Apple tablet computer. I don’t think anyone knows anything for sure, and I expect Steve Jobs to wow people when he finally announces whatever he plans to show off as his next big product. It may be a tablet computer, or it might be something surprisingly different. Most people speculate it will be something to compete against netbooks and ebook readers, both of which are hot products that Apple currently doesn’t compete against. A lot of rumor sites show an artist conception of a giant iPod touch like device. Some sites are even predicting it will cost $800-900 dollars.

Well, if the Apple tablet is to compete against netbooks and ebooks the price needs to be a whole lot closer to $400. I do think a touch screen tablet is the perfect competition to a netbook, but I’m not sure about such a device replacing ebooks. Maybe for reading magazines, newspapers and web content, but not for reading fiction. Think about it, reading fiction is something people do for hours on end, and imagine holding a heavy device that long? I think the Kindle and Nook are too big. My ideal ebook would be mostly screen, about the size between a mass market paperback page and a trade paperback page, weigh next to nothing, be extremely durable, and cheap enough so I wouldn’t be afraid to carry it everywhere I go. That doesn’t describe any of the Apple tablet rumors.

If a new Apple device is going to be rolled out it must not compete with the iPhone or the MacBook, and that puts it squarely into the netbook space. Netbooks have keyboards and work just like bigger computers. A tablet doesn’t. So how many of your everyday routines can be enhanced by a 10 inch touch screen? For me, that would be something to replace magazines and newspapers. If bookworms balk at paying $260 for an ebook reader to make novel reading easier, will newshounds accept spending $800 to make reading the news easier? Not me.

You can get a 22” LCD monitor for around $200, and sometimes a lot less. For reading the New York Times, magazines and blogs, I’d love to have a monitor I could hold in my lap and read while sitting in my La-Z-Boy. A 10-12” screen would probably be ideal, but it must be thin and very light. It doesn’t need to be a computer, but just a reader, maybe just a portable Acrobat reader. And I don’t want to pay more than the cost of a monitor to have a monitor I can hold in my lap to read.

I’m not sure I’d even want video and music from such a device, especially if it will raise the price significantly. I just want to read what I normally sit at the computer and read, but in a comfortable chair. My Zune, iPod Nano and Sansa Clip are perfect for audiobooks and music. My iPod touch mostly goes untouched. My netbook mostly goes untouched. I just don’t do that much on the go computing.

The iPhone was brilliant. The iPod was brilliant. Do we really need the iTablet? How many more useful devices can we use? Steve Jobs does have an amazing track record of creating devices we didn’t have before but can’t live without now: Apple II, Mac, iPod and iPhone. But I prefer a PC to a Mac. The Sansa Clip is easier to carry than my iPod Nano or touch, and even though I’d love an iPhone I won’t spend the money. The $64,000 question is whether or not Steve Jobs will announce something I will run out and buy. I’d own a Mac if they were cheaper, so I’m guessing I’ll be waiting on the HP tablet computer.

JWH – 1/7/10

Sherlock Holmes and Other Modern Myths

There are some fictional characters that have achieved a kind of immortality outside of the stories from where they were conceived, and they get interpreted over and over again in new books, television shows, plays and movies. These include Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Tarzan, Ebenezer Scrooge, Frankenstein, Superman, James Bond, and to a lesser extent, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, the March sisters (aka Little Women), and so on. The list is surprisingly short compared to the millions of books that have been published. And it’s fascinating to note the fading of some of these characters, like Nick and Nora Charles, Dick Tracy, Perry Mason, etc.

One way to understand fictional immortality is to study how various Shakespeare’s plays have been in and out of fashion over the last four hundred years. We like to assume we’re getting the true Shakespeare when we read the plays, but are we? Read a play and then watch it performed. It comes to life with actor’s performances and the director’s interpretation. I have read that Shakespeare changes with the generations and centuries.

Another specific way to see mythmaking in action is to study Wyatt Earp. Sometimes a famous fictional character is based on a real human. Read a handful of Earp biographies and then watch several of the dozens of movies based on the Earp myth, especially the films with Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell. You’ll begin to see how myths are created. Absolute facts don’t count, but the defining of a Platonic Form that makes the character recognizable no matter when and where he or she appears and in what guise. Wyatt Earp is still Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine, even only a damn few facts remain. That’s the power of myth.

Many people hate when their favorite book is made into a movie because the filmmaker’s interpretation of their beloved character is different from how they brought the character to life in their mind. But everyone’s mental interpretation is different, so I don’t criticize movies for seeing characters different. In fact, I love seeing multiple interpretations, especially when moviemakers are trying to be faithful to the original story, or trying to tell the original story in a modern setting. I love when actors inhabit a character and make them come to life. I’m critical when a writer uses an iconic character for a stock performance, especially when they obviously don’t strive to add life to the character.

I found one source that said Sherlock Holmes has been played by 75 actors in 211 films, but it was dated 2005, so we know it’s at least 76 and 212 now, if not a good deal more. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring the detective adventures of Sherlock Holmes, so there’s a wealth of literary history from which to define the Holmes mythology. And I think that’s what’s happening, our popular culture is giving life to modern myths. I wonder if this is how the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans gave life to their gods? We only see faint shadows of those ancient individuals today, and have no idea what their fully empowered identities were like.

Sherlock Holmes has been around since 1887, and Wikipedia has a fascinating summary about Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation, which also backs up many of the details in the new Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey, Jr. interpretation of the cerebral sleuth. I am not a rabid aficionado of Sherlock Holmes – I’ve read some of the original short stories and seen many different Holmes movies over the years, so I can’t accurately judge how Guy Ritchie treats the canon, but read Tom Richmond for a true fan’s view.

People who haven’t read Sherlock Holmes stories, or even seen any of the older Sherlock Holmes films will have a virgin impression of Holmes, and that’s fascinating by itself. If they are now inspired to read the stories or watch older interpretations they might be shocked and dislike the non-Robert Downey versions. Often filmgoers and readers imprint with the first encounter with a characterization, like ducklings to their mother, and find reasons to dislike any other performance. I think this is especially true of Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy. For baby boomers and older folk, Basil Rathbone is the definitive screen Sherlock Holmes. Such bonding is unfortunate because it restricts the evolution of the mythic character. Often the character must be reinvented for each generation.

I hope I live long enough to see the Harry Potter books get made into a second set of films – to be epic mythic a character needs to have been in dozens of films. Not that I don’t like the first productions, but I’m anxious to see new interpretations. I suppose this is why there are nearly a half a million fan-fiction retellings of the Harry Potter stories. I was very excited to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie hoping it would instill new life into the fading Baker Street citizens, and acquire a new generation of believers for the Holmes mythology.

But here’s my problem, even though I can buy Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes, and especially Jude Law as Watson, and love Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler, I’m not sure I can buy the plot of the new movie as a standard Sherlock Holmes story. While watching the film I predicted how it would wrap up and I was satisfied with the direction the writers took, but think Ritchie went too overboard with the violence, explosions and especially the scene at the shipyard. I absolute adored the recreation of Victorian London. I would have been happy if the only action had been Holmes and Watson strolling for two hours around town and just chatted.

I bet the Sherlock Holmes virgins had a far more exciting time watching the new film than most of us older fans because they weren’t burden with worrying if the story disrupted the canon. Besides the first time is always the most memorable. Many Pride and Prejudice faithful can’t stand any of the film versions because they want to adhere to the purity of the novel, knowing any aspect of a film version can drown out content from the original story. Most people will always think of Tarzan as Johnny Weissmuller even though the original 26 Edgar Rice Burroughs books describes Tarzan very differently. I’m sure there are lots of kids that have never read the Harry Potter books but worship the films and they would be shocked to discover a very different Harry Potter described by his creator J. K. Rowling.

But I don’t think any of this matters. Everyone can tell a cat from all other animals even though they come in an endless variety of appearances. There seems to be an indescribable natural form that is the cat ideal. You can always spot a Tarzan in any TV show, movie, book, comic, video game, cartoon, or other fictional venue. Ditto for Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Ebenezer Scrooge and Frankenstein. In popular culture this is also becoming true for Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, but isn’t as widespread as those already mentioned. I think the March sisters from Little Women have potential to evolve into 21st century famous fictional pop culture identities. They were major in the 19th century, and they maintained their fame since at a steady low level, but I sense a new surge. Pop culture prefers flesh and blood people to make famous, but it’s fascinating to see word and sentence people gain worldwide fame.

It will be fascinating to know if Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan, or even Harry Potter continue to exist one hundred, two hundred or a thousand years from now. Isis and Osiris are still around, but how many average kids know who they are. How many kids even know Odysseus or Gilgamesh.

JWH – 1/6/10