Computers – Page 17 – Auxiliary Memory

Science Fiction Overload

I’ve always loved science fiction but keeping up with the genre is a big damn job. I constantly worry I’m going to miss a breakthrough novel with the impact of Neuormancer or The Life of Pi or Replay just because I was wasn’t keeping up with the times.

As a young bookworm I read several books a week at a time when the science fiction section at the bookstore was a wire rack at the drugstore where I bought my Popular Science and Mad Magazines. There just wasn’t that many new books being published every month and the real focus was on feeding an indiscriminate reading appetite. Reading the book review sections in Amazing, Fantastic, Analog, Galaxy, If, and F&SF kept me perfectly up-to-date on the world of science fiction publishing in 1968, but it’s not enough for 2008.

Every year now Locus Magazine reports there are over 2,000 SF&F books being published as well as a large variety of magazines, graphic novels, online zines, ebooks and other outlets of SF&F storytelling. The field is long past the size that I can comprehend. I’m a small town bookworm living in a giant metropolis of fantastic fiction. Last night I was watching a documentary on Discovery HD about Miami, the town I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. My father’s family moved there in the 1920s. The show made me realize just how much of the city and its glamorous history I had never noticed even though I had lived in many places in Dade County. If I went back home I’d be just another tourist. That’s how I feel about SF&F today. I can’t believe I miss so much.

What I need is a Lonely Planet Guide to the vast hyperactive country of science fiction. For years that was Locus Magazine’s job but even it overwhelms me today. Thank God for the Internet, and a special prayer of thanks to the guys who invented RSS. This year I’ve been on a voyage of discovery to find just the right RSS feeds that are easy to read and reduce the fire-hose of SF information overload down to a water fountain burble.

Of course I added the RSS feed to my old favorite Locus Magazine but strangely enough I was disappointed with its cryptic posts in my Outlook inbox. Some RSS feeds send the entire article and others just send snack-size snippets to entice you to click on a hyperlink and jump over to their site to eat the whole whole meal. The bite-size phrases from Locus seldom get me to byte. I do click now and then and sometimes discover perfect little gems like 2007 SF/F/H Books on Year’s Best Lists, which cross-tabs several review sites to list the books that have gotten the most recommendations for best books of 2007 (first posted on 2/13/8).

This same article was written up by SF Signal on 2/20/8. SF Signal is a fantastic web site that very successfully reports on the most tasty data bits about SF&F. It serves the same function for our genre as Slashdot does for computer news. I’m now trying to decide if I can abandon my RSS feed for Locus Magazine and depend on SF Signal to keep me up-to-date about anything worthy that Locus does publish. In other words a plain RSS feed is not always perfect, so maybe a meta-feed is even better.

Of course the best solution would a single RSS feed that notified me from many sites just the stories I would likely love to read. So if I could train my feed from SF Signal for just the kinds of stories I want to read then that would really save me some major time, but that might be too science fictional of an idea. What I’m wishing for is a reading robot companion that gets to know me perfectly and then spoon feeds me just the right stories.

The trouble is I can only read maybe 7-10 science fiction and fantasy novels a year and maybe another 20-25 short stories. (OK, yes SF&F is great, but there’s actually more healthy stuff to consume too, like science and history books, so I have to limit my SF&F candy.) Logically I should ignore all books but the very best sellers and also read one SF best of the year anthology to sample the best of each year. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well doing that. I can dip into several best of anthologies and only find a few real nuggets among the fool’s gold. Not that a diamond to me won’t be cut glass to someone else, or vice versa. And many best sellers are less than filling to me.

What I’m learning to do is search out blogs by various SF&F bookworms with the hope I’ll find a few taste-clones of myself. I’m currently reading:

These readers don’t have my exact reading habits but they read much slower than review sites and they comment about books in a low key personal manner that I identify with. This slows the pace down for finding books. I hope to add other blogs in the future. I find it very easy to keep up with their blog feeds and figure I can eventually handle maybe ten or twelve blogging friends this way. It’s a virtual book club and we chat with each other without even knowing the other is in the room, so to say.

I also find speciality sites like The Internet Review of Science Fiction and SF Audio to be very helpful too. They cover more stuff than I ever want to handle, but I can easily pick and choose. SF Audio has a good RSS feed with enough content in each post so I quickly click yay or nay with my mouse. IRoSF is formatted like a magazine so it’s easy to pick and choose in the TOC, however I think I would like it better if they sent out RSS feeds of their full stories. Although that might not be what they want after creating such a nice magazine format, but my desire does fit with the new reading paradigm of the RSS.

When it comes down to it we spend a lot of time reading emails, so RSS feeds simply spoon feed us reading material in email size bites. I wish my Kindle was more of a true RSS reader. I haven’t experimented with it using RSS feeds, but I will. The Kindle is even easier to read than my Outlook client. And that’s what my needs comes down to, an easy method to shovel just the right words into my head. I’m getting old, so I can’t process as many words as I want, but these futuristic times really do have the technologies to do less with more. Imagine if I could get all my reading through email sized chunks of words?

Sure, there are downsides to the emailization of reading. It’s all fast food consumption and nothing is saved for studying. What some clever programmer needs to do is marry Outlook with MediaWiki. That way we could read and digest our words into something for long term memory.

I wish I had more time to read more books. Reading reviews at least show me the myriad of ideas being explored in the world of SF&F. To get an idea of what I mean just read January 2008: Short Fiction at IRoSF – there’s a reason why the old magazines were called Amazing Stories or Astounding Stories of Super Science and Fantastic Tales. There’s a lot more to SF than spaceships and more to fantasy than hobbits.

SF&F are the genres that require their writers to think up wild ideas, and boy to they ever. And me, I’d love to explore than all, but I can’t. I just can’t. So what I want to do is find the most sense of wonder I can for my limited reading time.

Jim

In Defense of Microsoft

Those cute, I’m a Mac and I’m a PC, commercials really irritate me. Now I don’t want to get into the whole PC versus the Mac thing although at times it might seem like I am. What I want to explore is our love-hate relationships with our computers. No matter how much you love your computer and OS, they can be throw-out-the-window annoying at times. For instance, Word 2007 crashed just after I started this blog entry. Office 2007 sometimes crashes on me on this machine, which happens to run Vista. I use Vista at work and Office never crashes, and I help support hundreds of machines and I’ve never got one support ticket for Office 2007 crashing like this. Service pack 1 didn’t help either. If I told this to my Mac loving tech friends at work it would excite them no end because it would be fuel for their anti-Microsoft philosophy.

John Dvorak, a famous computer pundit, regularly writes columns about the doom of Vista. He’s not the only one, there seems to be a tidal wave of attacks on Vista and Microsoft. I think Vista is superior to XP, and I love Office, especially 2007, even though it conks out on me at times on my home computer. My Mac friends will gleeful attack the faults of Microsoft for hours and I’ll mention I have a user with Leopard that keeps crashing and they’ll just quickly admit Leopard has some problems and go back to attacking Vista or Exchange. How weird is that? It’s like having a wife that tries to kill you from time to time, but since you love her you don’t want to divorce her. I think with Mac fanatics, they say she’s so beautiful, how can I give her up. PC fanatics say she does everything, takes care of the kids, cooks great meals, keeps a beautiful house, I couldn’t live without her. Linux fans brag how their computer wives never try to kill them while ignoring the fact that none of their friends find their wives attractive.

One reason I hate those I’m a Mac commercials is because they are as honest as a political campaign commercial. And I can’t understand why Microsoft doesn’t slam Apple with counter commercials. I’ve always been a loner, and should have been a Mac person. I even used a Mac for years. But I know who pays for my livelihood, and in the world of work, PC computers are the team player. And since I have to support hundreds of computers and users, the concept of team playing is quite obvious to me, even though I’m a loner type. Macs are like opinionated movie stars. Arty types are just not known to be team players, so I can’t understand why Macs even want to be part of the corporate world of team playing.

When I listen to my Mac friends they want to overthrow the government and establish a radical new political system. If makes me feel old and conservative. When I hear PC pundits scream for the return of XP, it makes me think I’m living with creationists. I ask my Mac friends what should we do and they say get rid of all the PCs. And I say wouldn’t Apple become the new Microsoft? At least Windows runs on any personal computer including Macs. Why would corporate America want to switch to a system where computers only come from one company? I tell my Mac friends if I was to dump Microsoft it would be for Linux. It’s more universal than Microsoft running on anything from the smallest to largest computers.

I’ve installed Linux once or twice a year since 1993. Every time I discover I can’t do what I want with Linux and go back to Windows, but each time it gets closer. Currently, if I was to switch away from Windows I could do the most of what I do now with a Mac, but I refuse to buy into a system with only a single source of hardware, and very expensive hardware at that. And even though Mac fanatics promise Nirvana, I support Macs at my job and I well know how unhappy some Mac users are at times.

The truth is we’re all unhappy with our computer systems. Sure PCs are plain-Jane machines that are as glamorous as shovels but we’re all able to work with them. Now that the PC pundits hate Microsoft, as well as the Mac and Linux users, I have to wonder should I give up on Microsoft. Is it time for a new computer world order? Now that the major music companies are all agreeing to sell music as MP3 files without DRM, it means any computer system can play them. Now that Amazon bought Audible.com, maybe I could get my audio books in a file format that isn’t dependent on my OS. If everyone used the same file format for word processing documents, spreadsheets, databases, sound files, etc., then it wouldn’t matter which computer system I used.

But is that really valid? Some of the countries getting the OLPC computers are complaining that it doesn’t run Windows like the people use in the rich countries. When I ask kids from India and China coming over here to go to school about Linux they go huh? They want to study Microsoft and Oracle. Where Linux succeeds best is in the corporate world where it does unflashy server work. Logically, having an OS like Linux, with its free and open source philosophy, should become the world standard and be the replacement OS for PCs and Macs – and that might happen. But success might not be about logic. For my day-to-day use Vista is the champ because it offers me more variety of services and works with more online services and is more secure than XP. Are there things about Vista I don’t like? Sure. But to switch to any other system means a lot more aggravation. Even Microsoft and Windows must evolve.

Microsoft should make a series of ads where the hippie Mac kid walks into situations where teams of people are working and propose radical solutions. Imagine today at the Super Bowl the Mac kid walking out on the field and telling the quarterbacks “Hey, football sucks – soccer is the game for America.” Or have him walk into some corporate skyscraper and go up sixty floors to the CIO office and tell the top guy he should replace his 80,000 computers with Macs, retrain all his workers and rewrite billions of lines of code so his customers use Apple friendly programs.

I like my Mac and Linux friends, but I get tired of all the Microsoft bashing. And now that all the PC computer magazines and websites are starting to bash Microsoft too, it’s getting depressing. Computers are very important to me. It’s like my last blog entry about living without electricity; I wouldn’t want to live in a world without computers either. I want my computer to work faithfully and not annoy me, but I don’t want my OS to become my religion or political party or philosophy.

Jim

I’ve Got an Electronic Monkey on My Back

Every Sunday I page through the Best Buy, Circuit City, Office Depot and Office Max ads for new electronic toys to help make my life better. I’m currently thinking about buying a Palm TX, Asus Eee PC, iPAQ 200, iPod touch, Nokia N800, Nikon D40x, an external SATA drive for my Scientific American 8300HD DVD cable box, a GPS for my wife, better speakers for my PC at work and home, a 24″ LCD for my home computer, a Roomba vacuum cleaner, a Canon SD750 pocket camera, an Olympus voice recorder, a Mac Mini to put the Internet on my HDTV, a Sonos ZP80, a SanDisk E280R, a miniDV video camera, a Blue Ray/HD-DVD player/recorder, a Blackberry, and so on. That’s the current stuff I’m thinking about.

When my wife brings her work laptop home, we have five computers, two printers and two scanners to do our work. We have two digital cameras and seven remotes on the table between our La-Z-Boys in the den, and that doesn’t count the expensive universal remote bought to replace the others that we do not use, or several other orphaned remotes scattered around the house. We have three television sets, two DVRs, four DVD players, two of which are DVD recorders, two component stereo systems and two cable boxes. We have four telephones hooked up, who knows how many not hooked up, as wells as our two separate cell phones. We both have iPod Nanos we always carry, plus we have several other less famous MP3 players sitting around cluttering up shelves and chest-of-drawer tops.

Growing up, from 1962-1967 I survived off of one white GE AM clock radio. My family had one TV and one telephone the four of us shared. I rarely used the telephone, but spent hours with the TV and books. And I consider those years the golden years of life. In 1968 I bought a stereo and Yashica twin lens 120mm camera which began my gadget addiction. By the late 1970s I started buying home computers and all the junk that goes with them, plus I began the new addition of reading magazines about gadgets. The crap has been piling up ever since and I’ve got an electronic monkey on my back.

Do I really need all this crap? Does it make my life better? Is there a way to manage this addiction? I say manage because I don’t plan to give up using a computer, watching TV, playing music, using a phone, or listening to audio books on my iPod. I’m so tempted right now to buy a smart phone because of how cool my friend’s Treo 700w is. Laurie has one gadget that I need two to cover – a definite case of gadget envy. Three if you count the camera that I sometimes carry. Four, because roaming access to the Internet that I don’t have now at all, but would like.

There is a struggle between what I really need and outright gadget addiction. The spirits of Buddha and Henry David Thoreau urge me to simplify my life, to seek inner harmony and withdraw from this crazy over-connected world. But my modern soul thrives on input and I constantly crave more data. Is there a middle way? One where I can maximize my philosophical growth and yet drink from the fire-hose of the Internet? On one hand I seek a monkish contemplative life with my books and on the other I want to use the Internet as a sixth sense and watch every sparrow that falls from the tree.

What are my pure needs and how can I use technology wisely? How can I achieve simplicity of living but live in a world of fiber optic interconnection? We have seven technologies to master: telephones, computers, stereos, televisions, photography, video and games, although it really comes down to one, the digital computer. Theoretically, it might be possible to have a device that does everything, but I’m inclined to think I’ll need three: the personal handheld that goes everywhere, the general computer for each family member, and the entertainment center in the den for family and friends.

The Telephone

The telephone is a marvelous invention that we can carry in our pocket and connect with anyone else in the world. It’s more basic and universal than the computer, and it’s no wonder that it has worldwide acceptance. I would never give it up. What would be the perfect phone be in concept? The obvious is it should have crystal clear voice communication and work anywhere from the depths of the ocean to the highest flying plane. After that, what should a phone be? You can already get phones that combine limited functions of the other six technologies, so does that make the iPhone the ideal phone?

The concept of combining my cell phone and iPod Nano into one unit is very appealing since I carry both everywhere, but I’m not ready to buy an iPhone. I have a Motorola cell phone with a pay-as-you-go plan with no monthly bills. I upload $50 about twice a year to T-Mobile and that covers my cell phone usage. Switching to an iPhone might save pocket space but will decrease my wallet space by 8x. However, is spending more money on a gadget that brings six of the seven technologies together worth the monthly expense?

How many of the seven essential techs are really needed in a palm size device? If I was stranded on a desert island I’d want them all.

I’m meeting more and more people who have cancelled their home phones and switched completely to cell phones. My house alarm depends on my wired phone system, but I’ve heard they now have cell phones that can do the job too. Or I could kill off all the features from my AT&T service except a rotary dial line and devote it to the alarm. This would have the added bonus of stopping unsolicited phone calls. We’re already on the do-not-call registry, but there are an amazing number of charities and other organizations that are exempt.

My wife objects to cancelling the home phone because cell phone reception isn’t that good at our house. That could improve, especially if Google gets to buy the current TV spectrum and use it for some super wireless network. Convergence is on its relentless way.

The Stereo

Music has been vital nourishment for my soul since the late 1950s. Over the decades I’ve had many stereo systems. I’m not an audiophile, but I like a certain level of sound quality. I was moving toward Super Audio CD (SACD) technology when MP3 took over the music world. Coincidently, about the same time I was getting a 56″ HDTV, Apple was promoting the 2.5″ video iPod. The modern generation seems to be into small – and that’s cool. I’ve tested MP3 music enough to know that it is better quality than the stereo systems I had in the 1960s, or even the 1970s. MP3 is good enough technology.

The burden of the past is maintaining legacy systems, and in this case, maintaining technology to play LPs and CDs. I have 1500-2000 CDs and LPs. Many of my LPs have never made it to CD, much less to iTunes and Rhapsody America. For example, I have a soundtrack, “On the Flip Side” to a 1966 TV show featuring Ricky Nelson, a teen idol from the 1950s who is probably totally unknown to the Brittany Spears generation. To maintain that music I must keep a turntable and stereo system, or convert it to MP3, and find some way to preserve those song files from being lost or corrupted for the rest of my life.

What I really hate about giving up LPs is losing the 12″ square cover art. Boy, wouldn’t I love to find a website that has hi-rez images of all the great LPs to use for my desktop background. Scanning my LP covers would require getting a very large flatbed scanner – well beyond the practical, or set up a macro-photo stand and light for photographing the covers.

I’ve hung onto many LPs for years but only play a couple every few years. I think I should just let go and give them away to some collector who still lives and breathes LPs. My inner Buddha tells me not to hang onto the past. And the present is Rhapsody America with tiny cover art and no liner notes. On the other hand, the present is Rhapsody America with instant access to millions of songs for $10 a month – unfortunately, Ricky Nelson, like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, are not available through Rhapsody, which shoots black holes in my life of subscription music simplicity.

I can understand copyrights and not stealing, but I find it hard to understand why creative work that isn’t for sale, or hasn’t been for sale for decades, is protected. Is there a movement somewhere online to preserve all those forgotten LPs, including the covers and liner notes for the future? It’s a shame the system doesn’t allow the fans to digitize those old albums and upload them to Rhapsody music, and then allow the legal copyright watchdogs to set up accounting for Rhapsody to pay the original artists when the music is played.

And it annoys me that Ricky Nelson “In Concert” is for sale on iTunes but not AmazonMP3, or as a CD on Amazon.com, or playable from Rhapsody America. Life and music should be simpler, and so should preserving the past.

The Television

I love my 56″ Samsung DLP HD TV. Imagine combining all seven technologies through it? It would be great to have video conferencing with my old friends living in distant Miami or Australia. My TV can already be a giant screen to surf the net, play games, show photos and videos. But right now there is a good deal of complexity in doing all that. It’s complex enough that I have to set up things for my wife and all the remotes and wiring is annoying to me as well.

The straw that broke my camel’s back was this morning when I was pricing external SATA drives to add to my cable box to get more disk space to save more TV shows on my DVR. I had to ask, what would Henry David Thoreau do? After his ghost told me to give away everything and build an 8×10 cabin in the woods, I decided to ask: what would I do? The first thing I told myself was to either watch the damn TV shows or stop recording them, but don’t buy any more crap to add to the entertainment center.

That’s simple enough. The little red collector devil on my left shoulder whispered, “Psst, just record them to DVD+R disks.” Red has been pestering me to buy two DVD sets this week, The Complete Monterey Pop festival and Freaks and Geeks complete series. He wants to collect everything I ever loved. The fat Buddha on my right shoulder keeps pointing out the efficiency of Netflix and the virtue of non-ownership. Buddha-boy also keeps nagging me to give up my closet of old LPs and my turntable. He also wisely points out that my entertainment system doesn’t need two DVD players, and I could jettison the one that plays SACDs because Super Audio CDs never caught on and I only bought five of them. It’s too bad that my receiver/amp doesn’t come with a wireless media server built in so I could also junk the SoundBridge M1001.

Once I start thinking that way, I begin to wonder just how many components I need in my entertainment center. The 56″ HDTV is a must. Ditto for the cable box/DVR. But what if Scientific Atlanta made a cable box with a Blue Ray/HD-DVD player/recorder built in that was compatible with all formats including SACD? What if it also had a built in amp for 5.1 surround sound? I’d go from TV + Receiver + 2 DVD players + turntable + Soundbridge + cable box/DVR to television plus superbox. I also be down to one remote, which would be fantastic. Comcast, are you listening?

The Computer

I actually spend more time with the computer than any other technology or with any other human being for that matter. The brain is where our five senses come together to be processed by our conscious mind. The computer is where our technologies meet and our conscious mind uses it like a sixth sense to examine all of reality. It probably does deserve the time I devote to it, and although it keeps me from physically being with people, I know a lot more people through the computer than I know in real life. There is a philosophical balance there.

Now, the question is how to build the ideal computer. Many people have come to love the laptop, but I find a large high resolution screen essential for my extended viewing of reality. I love photography, art and other recordings meant for the eyeballs and there’s nothing like a large screen for my personal art gallery or showing HD video. I currently have a 19″ widescreen LCD, but I’m planning to buy a 24″ replacement. 1920×1200 pixels allow the computer world and the HDTV world to intersect and overlap.

The ideal CPU will have all the processing I need for as few watts of power as possible to help promote Green Living. It should be silent and cool and ultra-dependable.

Next it needs great sound. I’m working on that. My desk is still cluttered with Bose bookshelf speakers and Sony AV receiver I use to play music from my computer. I’m just ordered Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 speakers to simplify that problem so I should get back a couple square feet of my desk’s top (I hate to say desktop since that might be confusing since the old word, desktop, has been hijacked by computer phraseology). The goal though is to process all the music digitally inside the CPU and play it with the highest fidelity speakers I can afford, yet be the smallest.

My Canon MP600 copier/scanner/printer has already simplified things nicely in the paper related department, but I’d love to live in a world without paper and printing. The ideal future will be when I don’t have to scan anything in, print anything out, or copy anything at all. I wonder if that’s possible. My wife and I have inherited the family photos from our dead parents, so we have a heritage to preserve. Once those photos are digitized I don’t think I’ll need a scanner any more. I think I’ll package up the physical photos and give them to my sister who hates computers. That will free me of a lot of physical possessions and make my inner Buddha smile.

I’m still burdened by those 1500-2000 LP and CDs. The thought of digitizing that much music is daunting. Rhapsody Music has become so easy to use that I rarely play CDs. If Rhapsody were to go bankrupt though, I’d want those CDs & LPs. Getting rid of 15 heavy boxes of physical music sure would make Henry David T happy.

The Camera

I doubt they will ever make an iPhone type device with a camera I will like. I’ve played around with photography off and on throughout my life. When I was younger I had a darkroom and did black and white work. Later on I built a dark room for my wife and she did color printing. Digital cameras and Photoshop are absolute magic compared to those messy chemical days. I want a digital SLR like the Nikon I use at work, but if a cell phone had a 7 megapixel camera with 4x optical zoom and a quality lens, it would be very valuable to carry around all the time. I don’t know if technology can make a phone small and light enough and still be a worthwhile camera. The iPhone is nicely sized for showing off photographs, although I’m thinking a 4″ screen like on a iPAQ 200 would be better. A 4″ screen is also superior for GPS, data and e-Book reading.

I currently want to get back into photography and that means carrying a camera around at all times. By today’s tech I would have a cell phone, iPod and camera. I’m quickly moving towards needing a purse. If I got a SLR with flash I’d need a backpack. The elegance of a handheld device that does everything is overwhelmingly attractive.

The Video Camera

I don’t know if I need a video camera because I don’t take video now. However, I damn sure wished I had own one my whole life because my old brain just can’t remember things like it used to and it would be nice to see all the places and people I knew growing up. If a video camera could be added to my list of functions on my handheld device there might be times I would use it and save the results. That’s a whole new area to explore philosophically and intellectually. What does it mean to have such a well documented life?

The Game Machine

I feel left out and old because I don’t play video games. My wife loves playing games on her laptop but doesn’t want an Xbox or Wii. I do wish I could play chess or Civilization, and sometimes think I should get into games as a way to exercise my aging synapses. Like video, games are another thing for me to think about in the future.

Conclusion

Besides my addiction to gadgets, I have the weight of thousands, if not tens of thousands of albums, books, magazines, photos, DVDs, important papers and mementos to carry on my back as I march forward into old age. If I chose one object a day from my lifelong clutter to give up, I’d be dead before I could achieve Thoreau like living. Getting rid of 10 objects a day would probably allow me Zenplicity before I’m sixty. I’m fifty-five now, and choosing ten items a day to jettison from my collection would require real work. Having everything digitized is a wonderful dream, but I don’t think it will happen. To achieve at home Nirvana, I must reduce the number of gadgets I use, but also let go of the past, and just get rid of my junk. The real importance of having the right-minded technology is to improve your life and help others to improve life on Earth. Ultimately, it’s more important to study reality than play with gadgets, but realistically computers are far more powerful tools to do this exploring than any telescope or microscope.

jwh

Magazines v. Web v. Newspapers v. Television

Yesterday I sat down and read through the latest issue of Time Magazine. I am an information junky, but I don’t read magazines as much as I used too, not since the web. Reading the web is an exciting way to take in data – I can start with Slashdot and follow a link to MSN to an article entitled “Sci-Fi from Page to Screen,” read it, and from there start googling the concept for more information. It could lead to an hour of diversion and maybe even a couple hours of blog writing. The casual way to read a magazine is to start with the cover, flip and read until you reach the back cover. With magazines and newspapers you read by picking and choosing what you like, but they are self contained because they don’t have hyperlinks. Television is a horse of a different color altogether. If you discount channel surfing, picking a show and watching it from start to finish, means being a captive audience. If you count channel surfing, then television is more like web surfing, but not quite the same because a couple hundred channels is nothing to the billions of web pages.

What surprised me yesterday while reading Time was the quality of the experience. I seldom sit and read a whole magazine anymore. I read the letters to the editor, the small and large pieces. Towards the end I started skimming more, but I tried to take in the magazine as a whole. It felt like I got a small snapshot of what was going on in the world this week. If the web didn’t exist magazines would be my web. The world through a magazine eye felt distinctly different than the world I see from surfing the web or watching the television news or reading The New York Times.

The cover story intrigued me, “Why We Should Teach the Bible in Public School” by David Van Biema. So did another story that was the cover story in the Europe, Asia and South Pacific editions, “The Truth About Talibanistan” by Aryn Baker. I’m an atheist but I find the study of the Bible fascinating. I’ve often wondered why it isn’t taught in school. Of course the way I would teach it by linking it to anthropology, history, language, psychology, sociology, grammar, etc., is very different from the way it is being taught. While reading the article I was itchy to click and research. Then reading the article about the Taliban I was reminded of seeing a documentary on Frontline about the same topic, “The Return of the Taliban.” They didn’t tell the same story, but that’s not the issue I want to get into.

Seeing the Frontline story on HDTV had far greater impact than reading the article in Time, but the magazine article had more to think about. This brings back the old issue of television journalism versus print journalism. Right after reading that issue of Time, I went and watched “Arctic Passage” on NOVA on HDTV about the mysterious and tragic Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845. While watching that show I was struct by how much richer the experience of learning was through the 56-inch HDTV than reading and seeing photos in a magazine or book.

The magazine was about ideas in my head. I read many exciting bits of information that made me think and want to write and research. The show about Franklin was rich and educational in the best way and I was satisfied with the subject when it finished. I have read about the Franklin expedition before, and the NOVA site has more reading material, but the show left a sense of completeness. Given its fifty plus minutes, the documentary makers summed up the issue in a very satisfying way. I then selected from my PVR, “Monster of the Milky Way,” another NOVA documentary.

The impact was fantastic. I read a lot of astronomy magazines and websites, but the 56″ astronomical photos and videos they showed were stunning. The animations were gorgeous and awe inspiring and totally filled me with a sense of wonder. The trouble is NOVA only comes on once a week with maybe 20-25 new shows a year. What if every topic I wanted to study had a 55 minute NOVA quality documentary to present the information – would that be the best way I should take in information? I don’t know. Maybe? It certainly feels more real than reading.

Newspapers, magazines and the web are great for taking in mass quantities of informational tidbits. The web excels at ready access to information, but I’ve got to wonder if NOVA made a documentary about “Sci-Fi from Page to Screen” it would blow away the reading experience of the MSN.com piece. What if the web was surfing a vast library of high definition videos and our computers had 24-inch 1980×1200 high definition screens? What value does the written word have over the spoken word with visuals?

I buy courses from The Teaching Company and I always agonize over whether to get the DVD option, the audio edition and whether or not I need the print supplement. Their DVDs aren’t hi-def, and just contain photos to supplement the lectures, but often those photos have great impact.

Do I prefer the NOVA shows because hi-definition television is as close to reality as any media can get? When I attend lectures I hate PowerPoint presentations and videos. I want the speaker to say something interesting and be engaging. I just finished a very rewarding book, Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers. I have to admit that if that book were presented as a long mini-series on PBS it would probably be my favorite way to study Twain. Photos and videos just have too much impact to ignore. Maybe that’s why YouTube is so successful on the web. But would I learn as much about Mark Twain, or remember as much?

Where does that leave me as a writer? Should I add photos to my blog? Should I go into video blogging? Should we all become documentary makers? Blogs tend to be of lower quality writing than professional magazine writing, and video blogging is a far cry from PBS documentaries. However, what if communication between people becomes more visual in nature? Cell phones with cameras are getting popular. People email me digital photos all the time. How soon will it be before I start getting personal videos? I already get joke videos. What if the video we got were high definition?

The question I started to write about today is: What’s the best media or method for getting a feel for what’s going on in the world each day? Television is like having extra eyes that rove the planet. Blogs are like getting to read people’s diaries. Newspapers and magazines are like getting letters from well traveled friends who are great writers. Communication speeds are so fast now that news delays range from hours to weeks. In the nineteenth century it took weeks or months and sometimes years to hear about things going on around the world. Of course reading non-fiction books is like getting the news centuries late, and with cosmology the news is a billion years old.

Slowly high definition televsion is coming to news programs. Watching The Today Show or The Tonight Show in high-def on a large screen has a very real immediate feel. The disadvantage of television over magazines is details. For me, seeing details in print are more memorable than hearing them. I can study them and reread easily. It’s much easier to quote a magazine than to quote a television show. And I tend to think print is more philosophical than the visual media. But most of my book reading is through audio books, mainly because I have more time for them that way, and the fact that I think I experience novels better though audio than though my eyes. That’s because I listen to books at a conversational speed, but speed read them with my eyes, often skimming words. But to study them for a test I’d need to see the printed page.

What I’d really like is to combine high-definition television with computers and the Internet. The PBS sites are doing something like what I’m thinking about. You can get a transcript of their shows for study and quoting, you can link to videos to show friends, it stays on the web for reference and it has hyperlinks for more surfing, but I need to see the videos in high definition on my computer screen. When will that happen?

Imagine a Wikipedia entry for every topic no matter how tiny, and each entry had links to all the media related to that topic. So for the Franklin expedition there would be links to all the documentaries, the primary research, secondary research, articles, essays, photos, diaries, etc. Also imagine this Wikipedia’s front page with news streaming in about what’s going on in the world in current time. I picture a map of the world with a visual interface that helps spot new and interesting events. Other tools could track with keywords and photos. Let’s say the idea of teaching the Bible in school becomes newsworthy in this interface and catches my eye. Wouldn’t it be fun to follow a link that takes you to cameras in the classroom? What if one teacher calls up a documentary about translating the Bible in different times and places, and I could fall out of real time to watch it?

A lot could happen in our future when it comes to information.

Making PC Users PC – The Green Computer

Ever since I saw An Inconvenient Truth I’ve been pondering ways to do my part to use less carbon. Since I work with computers the first idea I had was to stop leaving my computers on 24-hours a day. That isn’t easy since at work I manage four servers and have two computers for programming. The best I could do was turn off my test computer when I wasn’t using it. However, at home I discovered I could save about 20 hours of power a day. Between those two computers I’m saving maybe 280 hours a week.

It’s a shame that Microsoft promotes automatic upgrades at night. Microsoft should tell people to turn their computers off when they aren’t using them and then develop programs that analyze usage patterns and run updates during the day. Most business just let workers leave their computers on 24×7. What a waste. I work at a university and they leave all the lab machines and classroom machines on 24×7 so they can run patches, updates and changes at night. But that’s wasting 16+ hours of energy a day per machine. Even with power saving features these machines waste a lot of energy (as do TVs and other electronics that never shut off but go into a mode designed for a quick start).

Simple solution – don’t run computers if you aren’t using them. What about reducing the amount of power they consume while running. I started googling around and found this ultra low-powered PC at Tranquil PC. Tranquil claims it uses just 15-21 watts running Windows XP Home – about the power of a compact fluorescent bulb. However, it uses a strange chip, the VIA C7-M that might be computationally low powered too. Googling VIA C7-M I discovered a whole wealth of knowledge about Carbon Free Computing, a phrase that seemed new to me, which means the idea isn’t that popular since I read a lot of computer mags and websites. Evidently seekers of the green PC are also aligned with the seekers of a quiet PC and solar power advocates.

This computer I’m typing on is over three years old and I’ve been thinking about getting a new more powerful model. The first decision I have to make is whether I should buy a new computer at all. One quote I can’t locate the source says 80% of the energy related to the lifetime of a PC comes from manufacturing. If that’s true then it has all kinds of major implications. To gain the most energy savings means using a computer for as long as possible. Second, if we want to further reduce that 80% factor, we have to convince manufacturers of PCs to work on lowering energy spent on making computers. Third, succeeding at this endeavor will adversely impact the computer makers economically and indirectly hurt the economy. Which is why you don’t see the President campaigning for the U.S. to become the international leader at reducing carbon production.

Every economic decision becomes an ethical decision. I have always noticed that the success of our economic system is based on a lot of inefficiency. If everyone was honest and law abiding untold thousands of policemen and related professions would be out of work. If everyone spent their money wisely how many people in the credit card industry would be out of work? And it’s all interrelated. The microcomputer has created millions of jobs since the 1970s. Computer use has vastly increased energy needs creating more jobs in the power business and that impacts mining and manufacturing. Becoming green and reducing carbon emissions means a new kind of economy. Environmentalists have always countered this problem by saying new jobs and industries will be created, and that overall the economy will succeed.

Will the world become green? I don’t know. I tend to think we will all continue on the same path because people don’t change until they are made to change. This means our society will continue until it collapses and a new system will form out of the chaos. To picture this just watch the news about Iraq – even there some kind of new order will eventually emerge. Students of history know that civilizations come and go. Personally, I’d rather make the hard choices now and remodel our current civilization so it survives. However, I’m probably fooling myself. I can’t even make myself lose weight when I know I’m approaching a health crisis. Statistics show only one person in twenty, or five percent can lose weight and keep it off. Does that mean only one person in twenty can make themselves into green people?

Dieting makes a good analogy to going green. To succeed we’d all need to watch our calories and carbon for the rest of our lives. This will require discipline, attention to detail and dedication. Which brings us back to the question: Which is better for the environment – keeping my current PC or buying a new Green PC? The same question applies to cars. Which helps the Earth more, keeping my 6-cylinder Toyota Tundra or buying a Toyota Prius? I don’t know. If 80% of the carbon cost of a PC comes from manufacturing and the figure is similar for a car, then whatever we buy needs to be used efficiently for a long time. The three year replacement cycle for cars and computers is carbon wasteful.

Recently PC Magazine ran an article about building a green PC. The whole focus was to reduce the amount of watts used. The end results were nowhere near the efficiency of the Tranquil PC mentioned above. And I have read elsewhere complaints about Microsoft causing increase energy use by pushing its new Vista operating system. Most reviewers say Vista needs a discrete video card, a feature that often consumes more watts than the motherboard or CPU. This brings up the idea of whether Linux, Windows or Macintosh operating systems are the best for the environment.

To be fair, we have to consider use. A gamer with a high powered rig using 650 watts will hate the Tranquil PC using 15 watts. We can’t just say gaming is bad for the environment, so give it up. Like the idea of carbon management and carbon credits, we have to give every individual the chance to save energy in their own way so they can spend it in whatever way they like. For example, gamers could walk or ride bicycles for transportation so they can spend their energy credits on high-powered games.

For such energy/carbon credit systems to work we’d have to know what our energy allowance is. I don’t know if anyone knows the answer yet. Dieting only works when you know your daily calorie target and so we need to know how much energy we use now and how much less we need to use to save the world. Each person on Earth causes X number of carbon molecules to be released in the atmosphere. We could count up the total, divide by six billion and have the answer. Then we decide what our diet should be and know how many carbon units we can use each day. The trouble is that won’t work because people in Africa create far less carbon than someone living in the U.S.

While the Chinese are speeding along towards using energy like Americans, Americans should be working to use energy like the Chinese used to. That’s not happening.

Cynical minded people will just say buy whatever kind of computer you want because nothing you do will matter. Henry David Thoreau sat in his cabin by Walden Pond and saw progress barrelling down the track and knew it was going to crash into Concord. Walden was the book he wrote warning the people of the time about the future. No one stepped out of the way of progress. Thoreau observed that we all have choices we can make in how we eat, where we live, how we dress, the work that we choose, and explained that these choices meant something. Our times require that we all become Thoreaus, but I tend to doubt this will happen.

I think I’ll hang onto my present computer for awhile and continue to run Windows XP. I’m going to study the Green PC and maybe build one in the future. When I do, I think I’ll design it so it will last as long as possible and allow me to swap out parts, or even recycle parts from my present computer. I’d also like to explore other energy saving ideas. Is it better to play MP3 music through the computer or CDs through my stereo system? Can I digitize all my paper using habits? Are printers really needed? Besides being green, these are interesting intellectual challenges.