Internet – Page 18 – Auxiliary Memory

Blogging by Candlelight and Paper

I started this blog last night while the power was out, writing with pen on paper by candlelight. My power was out just 45 hours, but some people on my block still don’t have power. I think after the storm Monday as many as 60,000 homes were affected. We’ve had our power out as long as 13 days here in Memphis. Memphis is a sea of trees if seen from the air, and when we get high speed windstorms lots of them blow over. Down the street I saw where one tree fell and knocked another over. My power was out because on the next block over a tree fell on the power line and pulled the pole over and the wires down. Two houses over they had their power line pulled off their house.

The first night without power my nephew was visiting and we sat up playing rummy by candlelight, but he left first thing in the morning, to continue on his trip from Portland, Oregon to Lake Worth, Florida. I thought my power was going to be out until Friday, so I was bucking up for two more nights of darkness and cold but MLGW fixed me. Having these incidents are very educationally, and even though I hate when things like this happens I try to make the best of them.

I spent a lot of time last night thinking about being addicted to the grid. I found plenty to do in the dark. I have an iPod touch with 22 unabridged audio books on it. I also found an old Walkman and a box of old time radio shows on cassette, so I listened to a 1950 episode of Philip Marlowe Detective. But I spent most of the evening thinking about how we live on the power-water-gas-information grid and how ill-prepared we are for when things go wrong.

When I came home yesterday I had plan to take my frozen food to my friends house, but by then it had gone mushy. I had to toss out most of what was in the refrigerator and all the stuff from the freezer compartment. So I started thinking about how I would eat for three days. I figured I could eat out, or buy food that doesn’t require refrigeration. I didn’t want to mess with an ice chest because we had just thrown away two that had gone mildewy. A neighbor a few doors down was running a very loud gas powered generator, and I thought about buying one of those for the future but I decided against it too. I hate the noise. It does protect the food but they take a lot of gas, so I figure it would be a breakeven deal.

What I wanted was more light. I had three flashlights, two candles in glass lanterns and a giant block candle with seven wicks, but even with nine flames I didn’t have enough light to read comfortably. I once read a wonderful book about America in the 1800s and it chronicled how people’s lives were changed by the technology evolving past candle light. Whale oil made a huge difference. I did some research on Amazon and found there are LED lanterns now, so I’m going to order one of them to be prepared for future blackouts.

I also wanted a radio or TV to listen to the news. I have two Walkman cassette players with AM/FM/TV tuners, but the TV part doesn’t work anymore since they phased out analog signals. And I couldn’t find any news on the AM/FM bands. I didn’t have much patience though. I plan to buy one of those emergency radios that have a crank to recharge the batteries and l want learn which radio stations are worth tuning before the next power outage.

Some of these emergency radios have hand cranks that will charge a phone or USB gadgets. My cell phone ran out of power just after the storm. This event taught me to keep my phone and gadgets well charged, keep the dishes washed up, and don’t let the dirty clothes pile up either.

Luckily the house only got down to 60 degrees – just a touch cold. I put on a hoody jacket and slept in my clothes under one patchwork quilt and was fine. I have been in the house without power in the dead of winter and in August, so it could have been much worse. But being addicted to a favorite temperature is a bad habit to have.

Most of all I was annoyed by having my routine disrupted. That’s really being a pussy I know, but I’m a man who loves his rut. If I owned an iPhone 4 instead of an iPod touch I think I would have felt connected to the net and felt less of a sense of net withdrawal. The funny thing is I saw this PBS show last Friday about a family in England being forced to live with 1970s technology. I never would have thought the 70s as the old days, but when I saw how different they had to live I realized how much life has changed just in my lifetime.

I tried to imagine what life was like for Jane Austen at the beginning of the 19th century, two hundred years ago. No toilets, electricity, running water, central heat and air, safe foods, etc. Dark was dark back then. If I only had candles last night and none of my gadgets I would have been closer to Jane Austen times. What the hell did they do in the evenings?

Just listening to the old time radio tapes reminded me of stories my mother and father told me about how they grew up. Radio shows aren’t very sophisticated entertainment – and neither is television once you get used to the internet. I think our modern minds have become addicted to complex stimulation. Listening to the Philip Marlowe mystery was quaint but I’d hate to return to those simple story days.

Since I gave up cable last year my wife constantly searches the local channels for something to watch when she’s in town. She likes to watch Antenna TV, a channel with old TV shows from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. I loved The Monkees as a kid, but seeing it now makes me wonder if I was mentally handicapped as a teen. I grew up back then but I wouldn’t want to return to such primitive entertainment. I can’t imagine what young people today think of us when they see such shows. But then I was talking to a young woman (in her thirties) and she told me how much she loved The Adams Family because it was something fun to watch with her 4 year old daughter.

Of course I did a lot of thinking about the poor people in Japan who are having their routine lives diverted for probably months if not years. I was having no trouble adapting to life without power – it’s not life threatening, but I wouldn’t want to go all Thoreau and choose such a lifestyle. I’m reading Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire and he makes living out in nature sound exciting and romantic, but reading between the lines I don’t think the desert heat comes through well in just words.

I also thought about what it would take to live with less, and wondered how much less is acceptable. Could I live without the Internet? Sure, but I really wouldn’t like it, but that’s weird to think about. Why is the Internet so important? I spend Sunday afternoon to Friday evening living alone, so I use the Internet to socialize at night. The computer, phone and TV make me feel in touch with the world and people. If we fell back to Jane Austen times, work would be my only social contact and I’d probably read in the evenings. I’m too tired after work to be socially active. But if we didn’t have this modern world I don’t suppose my wife would be working out of town.

I wonder what our married lives should be like without our electronic addictions? And yes, my wife has her addictions too, like Farmville and Angry Birds. When Nicky was visiting we talked, and then we played cards. I can see how simple games like chess, checkers and cards could be so valuable to people in the old days.

My first night back with electricity I’m typing my blog, listening to Miles Davis’ “So What” from Kind of Blue and enjoying unnatural light and heating. I just got in the 5th season of Friday Night Lights, one of my all time favorite TV shows to watch later, and I’m back in my routine. However, I’m not as inspired to write like I was last night. See, being forced to do something different has it’s educational value. Thinking about being out of my rut was stimulating in itself. I should try to do it more often. Yeah, right.

JWH – 4/6/11

Apple’s Dangerous Storefront Paradigm

What if you bought a Sony TV and then discovered you could only watch shows that Sony okayed ahead of time? Furthermore, what if Sony decided that anyone wanting to create a show to broadcast to your TV had to pay Sony a fee? What if some TVs worked with some networks but not others? How would you feel if you wanted to watch a certain show but discovered that Sony censored that TV production?

Radios, televisions, record/tape/CD/DVD players have always been sold as machines that were universal devices. They would work with the same content everyone was providing. You bought a RCA television and it played the same shows as a Sears set. A GE clock radio would pick up the same stations as any other AM/FM set.

When computers came out there were many types, with different chips and operating systems, and there was no universal system. Then came the IBM PC in 1981, followed by PC clones, and things settled down, but not quite, because in 1984 the Apple Macintosh came out with all intentions of being different. The Mac’s market share has always hovered around 1/20th of the PCs. It wasn’t quite disruptive, but offered an alternative. But if you bought a Macintosh computer you could buy any Mac compatible software you wanted.

Now, with the iPhone and iPad, and the Apple App Store, Apple is creating a paradigm shift that will shake up things and change the way we do things completely on computers. And don’t be fooled, smartphones and tablet are computers.

Apple is changing the computer from being a general purpose device that the buyer has control over into one that’s essentially a tiny Apple storefront. Apple wants to get a cut of the action on any program, service or content that runs on their machines. Not only that, they want to control what services, programs and content that can be used on their machines.

This is like Samsung saying “If you want to watch The Social Network on our TVs, we get a percentage of its selling price.” Because computers never completely became universal devices like radios, TVs and DVD players, computer makers can get away with trying something different.

What Apple is saying, we don’t want to be a computer maker anymore, we want to be a retailer that sells products for computers. They couldn’t do this before because they didn’t have the App Store. The App Store is a choke point that Apple can control.

Under the old paradigm if you wanted a tax program for your computer you picked out a program you liked and bought it direct from its maker, or from a mail order store like Amazon or New Egg, or a retailer like Office Depot. Now Apple can say the only way you will get a program for your iPhone, iPad, and soon maybe your iMac is through an App Store they control, and which they charge a 30% cut. Now some people like this paradigm shift, it does have merits, but I for one find it scary too.

For instance I was going to buy the iPad 2 as soon as it came out. I changed my mind weeks ago when Apple announced their 30% fee. I was wanting an iPad to read magazines on, and my first magazine subscription was going to be The New Yorker. Right now The New Yorker is $4.99 an issue on the iPad. It’s $2.99 a month (4 issues) on the Kindle, and $39.95 for the PC version, that includes access to the complete back run of the magazine. I don’t know what the subscription fee will be on the iPad because Apple is just now working out the deals and technology to sell subscriptions.

Now Amazon has a choke point for Kindle users too, and I’m sure Amazon is making something for selling magazines, but I doubt it’s 30%. But see the difference? Under the old PC model of buying content we can deal directly with the seller. $39.95 a year is a great deal. It’s $3 more a year than the Kindle price, but I would get all the back issues to read while I’m a subscriber, plus I’d see the full magazine page with all it’s ads and illustrations, and not just the content and cartoons as I do on the Kindle.

I was hoping The New Yorker would provide the same deal on the iPad for $39.95, but will it when Apple wants $12 for its share? Does Apple deserve a share? Are they really a retail store? Google has since claimed that sellers on the Android platform will only have to kick back 10% to them. But is being cheaper any fairer?

See the paradigm shift coming? Computers are becoming storefronts. Apple tells its users that programs bought from their App Store are safer than those purchased elsewhere, but isn’t that some kind of protection racket? And isn’t this also a kind of Monopoly too? To be legal shouldn’t iPad users have the right to visit any application store they choose? Imagine if Ford sold you a car but enforced where you bought your gas and oil because they claimed it was safer?

Before Apple announced their shakedown plans I had imagined having an iPad with Rhapsody Music on it. I pictured in my head what a beautiful app Rhapsody could design for listening to music while looking at appealing visuals, like large size photos of album covers. But will Rhapsody still develop such an app? Many content producers are saying they might have to pull their wares from the App Store, but I don’t picture that happening. I just see them jacking up their prices.

The New York Times plans to sell the online version of their paper for PC users for $15 a month, and charge $20 a month for iPad users. But to be fair it’s $19.99 for Kindle users now. If they didn’t have to go through Apple or Amazon, and Kindles and iPads were just generic devices, would The New York Times just charge $15 a month to their users?

Is having the device maker controlling a choke point on sales of content for their devices really needed? If you buy stuff from Target at their stores or online you really need Target to manage all the stuff they sale, so they deserve making money. But do Google and Apple really do that much to run their stores? It’s nice to have one payment system, and it’s nice to have one installation system, but is it really worth 30%. Their fees should be more in line with what credit card companies charge retailers. I’d say 3% tops. And how many retail stores can get away with a 30% mark-up – most live and profit by razor thin margins.

Whether we like it or not, tablet computers are our future, and this is a good thing. But giving Apple, Google, and Microsoft the right to control all sales on their devices is not. Microsoft is a dark horse in the tablet race. What if they came out with a hands off approach, and just sold their OS to tablet makers, would that change the game? There’s a reason why PCs dominate the market share. They may be open to attack from hackers, but they are open.

JWH – 3/20/11

Comcast–Customer Service

Comcast does try to fix things, but they aren’t persistent until the problem is solved. I have internet and telephone service with Comcast. Months ago my phone started acting up after many months of perfect use upon switching from AT&T. I was also experiencing outages with my internet too. The phone service is voice over IP, so it’s dependent on the internet. The trouble was the outages were intermittent, the worse kind of technical failures for customer service.

When I’d call Comcast they’d run tests and tell me everything was fine. I complained enough they sent a tech guy out and he tested stuff. He checked my lines out to the pole and declared that everything was fine and I should call when the outage was happening so they could run a test. The trouble is my phone doesn’t work when the outages happen, and my damn cell phone doesn’t work in my house.

Just when I was researching returning to AT&T my phone started working again. It then worked without any problems for several months. I assumed Comcast fixed something in their system and nothing had been wrong at my house.

Well, the problem is back and my friends are again tired of trying to chat with me on the phone.

The outages are fleeting. I’ll be talking on the phone and I’ll have random moments, seconds or even minutes, when the people I’m talking to can’t hear me. I can hear them fine, they just can’t hear me. My wife works out of town, so I like to talk to her, or other friends in town. But my phone service is so annoying people don’t want to talk to me.

And I just don’t want to go through the same customer service rigmarole as before to get it fixed, when customer service didn’t fix it the last time.

Concurrent with the phone outages my Netflix is giving me trouble – and I’ve become quite addicted on streaming Netflix. My daily life has become dependent on Comcast technology – for socializing on the Internet, talking on the phone, and watching old TV shows late at night. I wish I could just pack it in and be content with reading books in the evening and live without the aggravation of fighting with Comcast customer service. And it’s not that Comcast isn’t pleasant to deal with on the phone, they are very nice, but like I said, they are quick to get rid of me when they don’t have something to work on directly.

I wonder why they don’t build modems that automatically monitor uptime and just inform the central office when their service is out or deteriorating. There’s no reason why they can’t build self-healing networks. In fact, they should be able to build networks that notice the trouble, inform the central computer, email me an apologetic note saying there is a problem and they are working on it, and then send the technicians a diagnosis of the problem to be fixed. Now that would be great customer service.

So what are my options?

Install my own monitoring tools and try to decipher the problem myself? Even if I could provide event logs I doubt if Comcast customer service will want to study them. It’s out of their work routine.
Wait for the system to fix itself like before?
Call AT&T and ask them to install U-verse?
Split my services so I go back to a AT&T land line but keep Comcast for internet (assuming things get fixed) and not have all my communication needs provided by one supplier?
Get a dual WAN router and pay for two internet services hoping one will always back up the other. I could get a land line and keep the VoIP, so I had dual phone systems too.

Notice, none of my options expects Comcast customer service to solve the problem. I sent Comcast an email and got a nice email back with several suggestions. The same tips they give you to try when you talk over the phone. Because my system works great most of the time, it shouldn’t be my system at all, unless it’s a flaky modem, and they claim they have run tests on it. The email was much more apologetic than the phone person, but the results are the same. They are rid of me until I try again. But I’m tired of calling. And I’m frustrated I can’t talk on the phone. And I’m annoyed that Netflix has stopped working like it did. And I’m depressed that my Rhapsody music stops and starts.

Ah, the woes of internet life.

JWH 12/14/10

Are Smartphones Nanocomputers?

Young people will probably not know this, but back in the 1970s personal computers were called microcomputers. The dinosaur of computers, mainframes, were huge, some as big as houses, and cost millions. Then in the 1960s newer, smaller computers started coming out that were dubbed minicomputers. These were still too expensive to be personal, but they were cheap enough that they spread like gossip. So when even smaller computers came out in the 1970s they were dubbed microcomputers. These eventually became cheap enough for almost everyone to own one.

Now most people think of their smartphone as a phone, but it’s really a computer, just a very small one, so why not consider the smartphone the next paradigm of computing and call them nanocomputers? I doubt if smartphones have any actual nanotechnology in them, but they might, but nano is obviously the next label in the series, so why not call them that? Of course, what will picocomputers be like? Nanocomputers are a planned concept, and smartphones might eventually use real nanotechnology, so it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the current vernacular, a “PC” is a Windows based computer. PC used to stand for personal computer, and in the old days all microcomputers were PCs, even ones from Apple. Somewhere along the way it became the PC versus Mac. The smartphone is even more personal than the original PC because people actually carry them on their person. We could call the smartphone a pocket computer, but that would be another PC acronym.

We could also call the smartphone the hand computer, following the labels of desktop and laptop computers. The term handheld was in use for awhile, but it doesn’t quite work.

So why do I object to the phrase “smartphone” when it’s already so popular? Because it’s rather limiting to think of the device as a phone. Steve Jobs and Apple have done a wonderful job with the iPhone by creating a new category of pocket computer with hundreds of thousands of applications. The phone part is just one of those applications, so why should it get top billing?

Already iOS phones and tablets have garnered over 1% of net user market share, competing with both Windows and Mac operating systems.

iPhones and Androids are quickly evolving into what I dreamed of having, an auxiliary brain. Cellphones are about as close as we’ll ever get to telepathy. Their GPS features give us homing pigeon like directional sense. Adding the still and video camera broaden their versatility to create new concrete forms of memory. The device is obviously more than a phone.

In the 1980s it was all the rage for schools to offer computer literacy courses to help the public understand the impact of the microcomputer on society. Nanocomputers are bought and used without any training and no one talks about computer literacy anymore. But do we understand the true impact of the nanocomputer?

Take this one example. Public opinion pollsters are worried that telephone polls are now skewed because only certain types of people still have a landline phone, which is the only kind they can poll. Now I don’t ever want pollsters to be able to call cell phone numbers, but what if nanocomputer users could elect to have a polling app, so whenever they felt like it, they could respond to variously kinds of polls.

What if nanocomputers became uniquely customized to its owner that they could be used to verify the identity of the user? Nanocomputers could then be used as voting booths, and that would lead to their use for referendums. By this thinking we should see these devices as extensions of our body. We can already network the ear with a Bluetooth headset. What if we connected nanocomputers to sensors inside our body? As we integrate nanocomputers to our body, when do they become part of us?

And more importantly, how do we become part of them? I now spend more time in front of a computer than I do sleeping. Computers dominate my life, and so too for most people. When do we start thinking of them as a prosthesis? Aren’t they becoming enhancements for our brains, aren’t they becoming prosthetic minds? We should think of nanocomputers as body enhancements that are leading us towards group minds.

The idea of wearable computers has been around for decades. Most people thought such a concept was dorky, but now most people carry around one or more computers with them all the time. Even a normal dumb cell phone is a computer, and so are MP3 players, game units, tablets, calculators, GPSes, digital cameras, ebooks, etc. How long before it becomes obvious that the most convenient way to carry a nanocomputer is by wearing it? Many people wear their Bluetooth headsets all the time now. When will glasses and hearing aids be networked with the nanocomputer?

We need to get away from thinking of nanocomputers as phones but cybernetic enhancements to our bodies and minds. So when did the Borg assimilate us? When you think about it, Bluetooth headsets look like the first sprouting of Borgware.

JWH – 10/28/10

The Social Network – aka The Facebook Movie

Above all, The Social Network (2010) is a magnificent work of storytelling. Especially considering that it’s a story based on boring litigation over the tedious topic of computer programming. On the other hand, it’s a rare example of cinematic creative nonfiction. How do you dramatize the truth, especially when all the action is cerebral? I hate to say this because it might jinx some people from going to the movie, but The Social Network is an incredibly educational movie, especially about the nature of what it means to be an asshole.

The litigation over the creation of Facebook reminds me of the fight over who invented television, but few people will know about that. Ditto for the radio, and many other major tech inventions of the past we take for granted. It’s very hard to give exact credit when everyone stands on the shoulders of giants. Few characters in this film come across as nice, many are assholes, most are viciously aggressive, and we see the very worse sides of greed and sex.

At a naturalistic level The Social Network is about alpha males fighting over intellectual territory while alpha females throw themselves at the perceived winners. At the class level the story is about old money, old social networks, descendents of WASP wealth fighting Jewish upstarts who out maneuver the class incumbents to climb even higher on the social ladder. At the economic level The Social Network is about the marketing of an idea as an invention and who really deserves the spoils of business.

The film is bookend by two women who try to enlighten the Mark Zuckerberg character about the specific traits of his asshole personality. These are two of the three nice people in this film, the third being Eduardo Saverin, the nice guy who is fighting out of his league. People who get into Harvard are by nature driven by ambition, if not naked aggression, so we need to factor such drives out of the equation to make all things equal. But a bitch fight over billions is not pretty, so it’s hard to see the positive qualities of the combatants. I’ve got to say the movie reflects the efficiency of our modern legal system because it took decades to solve the legal battles over television and radio. And The Social Network does an apparently fantastic job of explaining to the public the complicated legal issues dealing with the foundation of Facebook.

To me, the saddest part of this movie is how poorly young women come across in this film. For the most part, the females in this story are the prized toys that males win in battles of aggression. They throw their beautiful bodies at any guy who succeeds, even the social challenged Zuckerberg, they frolic around lesser males who do the sweatshop programming, taking bong hits and acting sexy to spur on their coding success, and they lay on their backs to provide flat bellies for the rich to snort cocaine from. The strong independent women in this film are savvy lawyers, but the endless hordes of legal teams, male and female, come across as brainy vultures.

Of course, the sex-toy women also reflects badly on the males, because they don’t see women as other than prizes for success. Zuckerberg is portrayed as driven by envy, jealousy and desire, and the film makes a good case that Facebook exists because Zuckerberg was rejected by Erica Albright, and that he wanted the success of Facebook to give him another chance with her. It wasn’t about the money, but female approval.

More complex to understand is the exact quality of Zuckerberg’s asshole-ness. He’s brilliant and aloof, but he’s so lacking in social graces that you have to wonder if he has an autistic background. Mark tries so hard to be liked while looking down on all others and squashing any attempts of communication with a towering superiority. But isn’t that how most average folks see super-geeks?

I attended The Social Network on its opening weekend, a Saturday afternoon, and I expected the theater to be packed because of the overwhelming wonderful reviews and great word of mouth, but we sat in a mostly empty room. Moviegoers might not find the topic of this flick appealing, but director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin have created a powerful, riveting and engaging story of our times. It really shouldn’t be missed.

Finally, because the movie uses real names I must ask how much are the characters in the movie like their real life counterparts? I’d love to find interviews with all of them where they talk about their portrayals in the film. Actually, someone should make a documentary of that. Essentially the movie is metafiction, and that’s a fascinating topic by itself.

JWH – 10/3/10