clue free

David Campbell, the founder of Saks Fifth Avenue, said, “Discipline is remembering what you want.”

I’ve been laid off as of December 31st. Hardly unexpected, but not appreciated after more than five years of very above-and-beyond sacrifice (which, as a classy professional, I can’t talk about.)

I wore many, many hats over the years — IT guy, web developer, PowerPoint lackey, project manager, copywriter, proofreader, retoucher, strategist, audio/video engineer, roadie, Flash coder, Devil’s advocate, comic relief. On a personal level, it was extremely rewarding to be able to learn and work within so many disciplines. Constant challenge and stimulation and all those good things that make it nice to work somewhere. On a professional level, post-job-doing-everything, it makes it really hard to “sell” myself to new employers. When someone is looking for a good hammer, don’t hand him the whole toolbox. Forward movement is going to require more thought than usual.

For now, it’s important to catch up on the things ignored during that era; video games, movies, exercise, photography, reading for pleasure… Put that way, it’s a good thing this happened before I forgot why I’m supposed to bother.

So, after a few weeks’ rest, I’ll remember what I want, professionally. Geographically, it’s safe to say I want to live somewhere where astronomy can be properly appreciated on a daily basis.

I knew there was a good reason I resisted Facebook for so long. The insults started before I was even finished signing up!

Maybe I’m reading too much into this… “coincidence.”  But think of how Cosmopolitan magazine could run with this: WHAT DOES YOUR CAPTCHA SAY ABOUT YOU?, HOW TO TELL IF HE’S A SPAMMER (OR JUST HAS AN OPINION), and the classic 38 AURAL CAPTCHAs THAT WILL DRIVE HIM WILD!!

Saw my first Google G1 early adopter this morning on the subway. Unfortunately, he was doing nothing to dissipate its for-geeks-only image.

• CRT tan
• Skullet
• Giant backpack
• Apple-shaped physique (oh the irony)
• Grease spots on various parts of clothing
• Untied shoes

Long story short, the G1 was obviously the cleanest thing this guy owned. In the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads, he could play the Linux box. So now, with character development out of the way, I can proceed to the point–or rather, observation–which is not that only iPhone users can be cool.

Keeping a safe distance from Our Hero, I watched as he panned up and down web pages and played around with a few of the built-in apps and the Android Market.  He was having a groovy time being a groovy person.  As we started to descend into the tunnel that leads to Manhattan, I noticed that his expression was cooling.  He started to fidget.  His face looked like he was wondering if he left hair in the shower drain, without actually caring one way or the other.  He put the phone away, briefly… then took it back out, used it for 5 seconds, and then just cradled it, stealing glances at the other passengers, not quite half embarrassed.

He seemed to have run out of things to do, and didn’t know how to reconcile this with the fact that he now had this shiny new toy.

I think this was his first smartphone.

Anecdotally, I’ve known plenty of geeks and gearheads who resisted smartphones for one reason or another.  Some sniffed at the quality of each converged component, preferring instead to lug around dedicated devices (including a full-size SLR, in one case. Giant Backpack Dorks of the world, unite!)  Others simply wished for the more straightforward interface and reliable performance of “a phone that is just a phone.”

When someone like this purchases one device that rolls telephony, web, email, calendar/to-do, media playback, video and still photography, GPS, and metric dozens of other yet-to-be-discovered functions into one box that fits in your pocket, there’s a natural expectation that you will never, ever, be bored, ever again.  A steal at only $179.99 with two-year commitment!

Well, yes, except that we always find a way to get bored.  People go broke filling their house with blinking distraction gear and still complain that there’s nothing to do.  Everyone gets to that quasi-zen moment when, surrounded by all your ass-kicking LED-sporting gear, you just can’t bring yourself to use any of it. Ironically, depending on how determined you are to vanquish boredom forever, you will experience the Moment more often than others.

The difference here is–rather than the rainy Sunday afternoon when this usually happens–smartphones have the potential to put this moment out in public.  This morning, one guy got there, on his way to work.

There’s a story on Gizmodo today about a blind, diabetic guy who is trying to sell his record collection.  He values it at $50 million, but even priced at $3 million, he can’t find a buyer. Somehow, this is surprising and upsetting to a lot of people.

The vast difference in appraised and asking price (and failure to sell even at 6% of the appraisal) tells me that the basis of my rant is well-founded, or at least, not entirely wrong. He owns millions of vinyl platters, relatively few of which are available on CD. This is much less a tragedy when one asks, “was there merit to their re-release?” Plenty of awful music came out back then, same as today — we’ve just had longer to forget it. People are constantly dismissing the whole of the new as inferior to the whole of the old, conveniently forgetting things like child labor, crucifixion, and The Doors.

Beyond all that, though, is the whole notion of hanging on to old formats and the “thingness” of things. To sidetrack for a moment: A few of my friends belong to an artist’s collective that specializes in fancy books and unusual/antiquated printing and binding methods. Hanging around in their studios, whippersnappers can learn why we refer to the upper- and lower-case, for example. One day, I was chatting with their president, Mark, and mentioned that I had read Moby Dick on my Palm Pilot 1000 in 1997.  And I liked it!  I thought it was a really good book, despite its complete lack of paper. This blew Mark’s mind, and some time later, he gave a talk at a fundraiser explaining specifically that they were making books “not for people like” me. Which was fine, because people like me bought electronic organizers and spent weeks seeking out add-on programs (written and distributed by programmers who were bored on weekends), and then took free ebooks and downloaded them to memory cards. Not to save money, but for convenience. Convenience in a perverse, head-scratching, weeks-taking way.

Big corporations (Amazon, Apple) looked at this, wised up, and put together systems (Kindle, iTunes) that took you straight to the good stuff without the slog. So now, the problem is that there are millions of people that see little worth in hanging on to old formats when the new ones are so much more convenient. The iPod’s original slogan should have been “1,000 songs in your pocket at no extra weight.” That was why I went through all that work to get Moby Dick converted; because then I could also carry The Hacker Crackdown and 1984, and still have room left over for Pocket Chess and HMaki, without looking like Giant Backpack Dork.

Getting back to the record collection: the discussion that doesn’t seem to be happening is that the old formats fundamentally limit our freedoms. Artificial limitations are a hallmark of DRM, which we all hate, but even LPs do this — geographically. [It might be more accurately referred to as a natural limitation, and then we get to throw the size and weight of this pile of PVC and cardboard into the complaint. And I'll point out that digital files can't grow mold nearly as well as record sleeves.]

With open digital formats, we can place-shift and format-shift to whatever degree we wish.  If I’ve had the foresight to put my digital jukebox online (whether in the cloud or on a NAS), I can be walking around in Guam and stream Boogie Woogie #5 directly to my phone if the mood strikes me.  If I am suddenly stricken with idiocy and buy a music player which requires some esoteric format, I can likely re-encode and re-tag my entire collection in a simple batch operation. There isn’t even a need for me to be in the same room as the hard drives in order to do this. It seems to me that given modern society’s disposition toward convenience, the good people fighting Big Media might push this point a little more.

Given all this, appealing to the collection’s size strikes me as akin to those signs you’ll see when driving across the middle of the United States: “Largest Ball of Twine in the US”; then, 300 miles later: “Largest Ball of Twine in the US Wound by One Man”. Yeah, impressive, but who cares?

So it’s a shame that he is unable to unload his life’s work for profit. Or is it? Isn’t that what we used to call a legacy? Where is the pity in his leaving this trove to society, free of charge, if it is a truly wonderful and precious thing? Why does it always have to be about the money? I get a really bad taste in my mouth over the thrust of this video, which seems to focus on the fact that this man has built something over the span of his life that he can’t sell at the end. I’m sure he isn’t the first.

The new Treo looks sweet!  What a relief.  While they were rarely on the bleeding edge of technology, Palm has been the only handheld maker I’m aware of that consistently delivered a great experience.  This was the case until Apple got into the game, although Apple itself has had a bunch of stink centered on its recent release.

Luckily for the rest of us, Apple has raised the game to the point where the old guard finally have to bring a real game to the game.  We’re finally getting past the point where you have to choose between 3G or WiFi or touchscreen or GPS or looking like an industrial air conditioner. Sure, these were not trivial technical problems to solve (that’s a whole bunch of radios in a tight little space), but hardly insurmountable to a determined group of engineers.  It’s shameful that Apple was able to take so much market share so quickly from the hegemony of Nokia, Motorola, Sony, RIM, and yeah, Palm, but it’s not without precedent that they enter and dominate a market years late. The fat cats at the top get lazy, dole out token upgrades every once in a while, knuckle under to the carriers… and maybe people start to suspect that their hardware can actually do more. So one day, someone shows the unwashed masses that yeah, they’re right. (And some of us ask how T-Mobile dares use “Get More” as a slogan, considering how often carriers nerf promising handsets.)

People one day (next week-ish) will point to the iPhone as the inflection point where the general populace realized that it could do so much more with its phone than just call people. People still think of a car in the same way they did 100 years ago; their cellphones, not so much. Now you can map, surf the web, read books, watch full-length movies, play quality games, etc., etc., etc..  But people still, by and large, seem to think this is the purview of the iPhone, even though my HTC TyTN II–a year ago–could do everything the iPhone 3G can today. And a Treo 5 years ago could, too, just a little slower.

So thanks, old guard, for holding us back all this time. You have no one to blame but yourselves for the pickle you find yourselves in, and maybe some of you will be wiser on the next round.

Very insistent. It’s almost like trying to order something at The Pump that doesn’t include a pita.

Nature is pretty cool sometimes.

Growing up in New York, you kind of become immune to a lot of the majesty of skyscrapers (and they are majestic, really, even if you don’t care for their particular style.) Visiting other cities, you can gloss over what has gone into the towers, transportation system, utilities, and the general state of the place.  For many years I was completely unaware of the poor air quality in various cities because I was so used to Manhattan’s smog.

It’s fully a cliche when NYers do impressions of tourists with their jaws dropped and their necks bent back, and their feet all a-waddle, as they try to get their brains around even one building being that tall, let alone most of them.  “Why are they snapping so many goddamn pictures?”  It’s impressive.  It’s a massive feat of design, human drive, and engineering.  And there are hundreds of them.  If you have the time to think about it (and we don’t), it can make you feel a lot of things… including, well, small.  Artificial infinity is staring down at you.

But then I recall JD’s assessment of Hawaii: “it’s really nice in the sense that it’s the kind of place where you’re assured on a daily basis that Nature loves you.”