Kindle-Free

Because three children under 12 tried to drag me into an argument over who got to lay in the hammock in the cabin up at Island Park Scout Camp, I inadvertently left my Kindle Fire there, in care of said children and my wife, who have spent the balance of the summer working at the camp leaving me to fend for myself in the wilds of Ammon, Idaho. (The Kindle was in the cabin and they were arguing at me when I was trying to pack after spending the weekend there. I packed hurriedly and fled.)

That in of itself is tragic. But now I must spend the entire week without my beloved precious. We'll see how that goes.

I know that sounds funny, coming from a guy whose house is bulging with electronics, including a formerly much-beloved iPod Touch that was relegated to alarm clock status until the Fire Debacle occurred this weekend.

I will try to remain strong.

First impressions:

1. The iPod Touch is incredibly small. It is the noisy cricket of tablets. Every time I pick it up, it feels like I'm holding one of the more fragile Faberge eggs.
2. I'm still a nervous nelly about missing my alarm, no matter what device I'm using to get myself out of bed. I finally gave up checking the time when I woke up ten minutes before my alarm was supposed to go off.
3. I wish I knew what happened to my iPod Touch case, packed away when we moved and now the only significant item of mine that remains AWOL. Maybe I should check the boxes that hold my ugly tie and Mexican wrestling mask collections.
4. My wife will probably want a report on my Kindle-free week, as she mocks me mercilessly for how often I'm seen, Kindle in hand. Although she is the one who insists on taking her iPad to the grocery store on the flimsy notion that it contains her shopping list.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Heads Up: Our Internet is Out

Just a heads up that our internet service is out and won't be back until Friday or so. We should have intermittent contact over the next few days, but if you need to contact us for urgent matters, use the telephone.

How quaint.

BRRRRGGGZZZSSSSAAAAPPPPFFTTTT!

So, you know that nifty electrical zapping noise you get in your better-quality old-timey Superman cartoons, like this one:

Well, I was standing at the sink this evening washing the dinner dishes while an apple crisp cooked in the oven right next to me. All of a sudden the oven started making that Superman noise, accompanied by a big puff of smoke and a fake electronic light show. But I knew it wasn't fake, so I quickly turned the oven off and peeked inside. Part of the element was glowing a very nice cherry red with some melted globs stuck to it.

After it all cooled, I took the standard approach to appliance repair. I opened the oven and poked at the element with a barbecue fork, shielding my face with a furnace glove, to be extra-extra-extra safe. I could see that the element had snapped and the nifty noise I heard was 220 volts of electricity arcing between the broken bits, melting things as it went. Sooo glad I was standing there when the fireworks went off or, well, I could be typing this from a smoking ruin right now, or at least still be outside with the guys in the funny hats and rubber boots.

So we can replace the element, in theory.

It's still par for the course this year, though. So far this year, we've had to replace the toaster, the microwave, and the freezer. The master cylinder in the truck has failed twice, and we had to get new tires for the Pilot after Michelle had a flat. Just holding our breath now to see what the next broken-down bit of machinery will be in the house. Probably me.

Two things to day: When I see the baddie's hideout in this episode, all I can think to say is "Art Deco. Very nice." Also, if you can identify the pop culture references I use in this post, well, you're just as much of a nerd as I am.

No Smartphone Folk Us

My wife and I are technological anachronisms.

We have one cell phone between the two of us. One. As in only one phone, for two people. And all this phone does is make phone calls. Oh, we can send text messages too, but since we only have one phone, who are we sending them to?

We have other little hand-held gadgets: Between the two of us, we have two iPod Touches and two regular iPods. For the Touches, we use our home network or, when we can, a free wi-fi network. My wife has a Kindle that cadges onto a free cell network wherever she goes.

We don’t have smartphones. We don’t have a cell phone plan – ours is pay-per-use. We’re not dropping the $70 to $100 a month that others do for their fancy gadgets. Oh, we could probably find many reasons to sign up, but to tell the truth, we’re not missing right now what we’ve never had.

We do have wireless Internet at home. When we didn’t have broadband, I missed it. We were on DSL for a while, then, to save money, we were on dial-up. Then we went back to broadband, and we’ll never go back to anything else. But we knew what we were missing. With cell phones, not so much.

Now AT&T, home of the iPhone, is implementing a 2GB cap for smartphone data use, with $10 per additional gigabyte charges after that, on top of the $25 paid for the first two. Do not want. Do not need. We’ve got no data limits on our home network, which is a good thing, since we’d likely be paying extra every month if we did.

The irony here is that Apple today announced its iPhone 4, which features, among “100 new features that aren’t available on the current iPhone 3GS,” per CNN.com, the ability to video chat. Steve Jobs says this of this new technological feat:

I grew up with the Jetsons dreaming about video phones. It's real now.

So how long of a video chat can you do for under 2GB, and still be able to use your smartphone before getting smacked with extra fees? Well, probably not much. This, per AT&T:

2 GB is the equivalent of 10,000 emails without attachments, 1,500 emails with attachments, 4,000 Web pages, posting 500 photos to social media sites, and 200 minutes of streaming video combined.

How quickly one will go over that limit – and incur more charges – is anyone’s guess. But since Americans in general have lost common sense when it comes to cell phones, they won’t blink at the additional gigabyte charges (I know.; I used to work for Qwest and got innumerable calls from folks with horrendous cell phone bills that they just up and paid because, “Ya gotta have a cell phone.”). Yeah. With all the doodads.

I think I can hear George Jetson’s reaction right about now:

But do I need Internet everywhere? Sure, it would have been fun to send a tweet from the top of the Teton Dam this past weekend, but would it really have been worth the $80 a month just to do that, or even to just do that a few hundred times in a given month? Not really. I don’t need real-time broadcasting of my inane activities when I can do virtual real time when I get back home.

Random Babblings About Twitter and Facebook

Thanks to Twitter, I've been eavesdropping on a rather interesting exchange tonight involving the possible futures of Facebook and Twitter.

It has been posited that Twitter's users, or Twitter itself, could be absorbed, Borg-like, into Facebook as -- granted I'm only speculating here -- Facebook brings in more flexibility than does the 140-character micro blogging site.

I do, however, wonder if the difference in audience and purpose might keep Twitter and Facebook decidedly seperate, at least for the bulk of each service's users. I'll explain what I mean by that, and offer the caveat that it may simply apply to how I use each service and may not necessarily apply to everyone else. Or anyone else, for that matter.

So, who is my audience on Facebook? I can more sincerely say that on Facebook, it's friends, and I include family in that category. Now, it may simply be because I have many more physical, I've-met-them-before friends who use Facebook than use Twitter, so, It Stands to Reason, if I may invoke that storied and most respected college of common sense and knowledge, that Facebook is going to naturally be the place I go to share stuff with friends and family.

So who, then is my audience on Twitter? I do have a few friends. There. A few I actually will see on a week-by-week, or month-by-month basis. But most of my "followers" there are people I have never met and likely will never meet. Many of them seem to be practitioners of that sacred rite of multi-level-marketing, but that's probably my fault because I will typically follow back anyone who follows me, unless they are a Twitter Bimbo or introduce swearing or other questionable material to my Twitter feed. But I have many more contacts on Twitter than I do on Facebook, but it's less likely that I'll ever meet or interact with the Twitter folks than the Facebook folks.

So what purpose do each of these sites serve? Well, aside from begging my bishop's blood pressure up because I use them -- and I'm not sure he knows about the five blogs for which I"m a contributor or the sole author -- there are distinct uses.

Some uses intersect. I use both Facebook and Twitter to promote my blog posts and Uncharted, a travel and adventure website I'm involved in. I use both services for the occasional bout of nonsense. But that seems to be where the common uses cease.

Ends are where I see the most difference. On Twitter, promotion is an end, but it's rather one-sided and shallow, because I have no real measure on who is reading and, more importantly, who is clicking on the links I send out to be read. A lot of Twitter metrics sites point to retweets as a good measure to gauge how effective your tweets are. If that is the case, then the nonsense I tweet is received with much more enthusiasm than is the stuff I hope to promote.

The opposite is true on Facebook. While the nonsense does receive some attention, I can tell by Google Analytics that I have many more visits coming to my blogs from Facebook than I do Twitter -- so the promotions I'm doing on Facebook are more effective? Why? Because most of these people know me, see me occasionally, or at least remember me as one of the fat geeks who roamed the halls of Bonneville High School, looking pitiful. So there's a lot more human contact on Facebook than on Twitter.

And that just may be how I'm using the sites, once again biased because I have fewer actual physical friends on Twitter than I do on Facebook. I can see the dynamic being much different if my circle of friends on both sites were similar. As it is, my Twitter followers are probably a more diverse group of people from more areas in the nation and world, but it's my Facebook friends with whom I have more meaningful interactions. (Sad reality is that I'm so durn shy that I interact better with people I know on Facebook than I do face-to-face, but it's interesting that because of the stuff I put on Facebook those face-to-face interactions are becoming easier because we can chuckle about the things we "say" on Facebook.)

Note I don't speak much about my blogs here. While I'm pleased with the traffic coming to my blogs from Twitter or Facebook, I'm loath to shut down the blogs and just use Facebook for the postings and both Facebook and Twitter for the promotions. I like that I can control the look and feel of my blogs, which adds to the overall 'oss 'oldin' hexperience.

So overall, I see room for both Twiter and Facebook in my Internet experience at the moment. And my blogs. Sorry, bishop. At least I don't do Farmville . . .

An Open Office Quirk

I love Open Office's word processor because, well, I'm obliged to.

It fits the budget. It works somewhat better than the version of Microsoft Works that came with this computer (why they can't sell computers, well, cheapies, with Microsoft Office or a better processor than Works as standard is beyond me).

I miss WordPerfect. The last desktop I had came with WordPerfect, and I loved it. Never gave me a lick of trouble. I was very sad when that computer died.

But now I'm stuck with works, too cheap to buy WordPerfect, and too set on using a word processor to use InDesign, which my wife uses as a word processor. So I used Open Office.

But it has a quirk I can't figure out (you anal retentives out there can relax; I finally got to the point of this post).

When I copy a block of text out of Open Office and paste it into the little text editor Blogger uses, all of the metadata from Open Office is displayed as text, ranging from OO telling itself what font to use to HTML tags on divisions, spans, et cetera. Same things happens with the Uncharted text editor. Why? Why? Why? When I paste into Microsoft Works, nothing happens. Nor does it happen in e-mail. But in these WYSIWYG editors, there it is all over the place. I could go non-cheap and buy WordPerfect, I suppose, or learn to put up with the inefficiencies of Microsoft Works. But I'd like to continue using OO, if someone can tell me how to get around this error.

From Luddites to Tapeworms

I'm the last one you'll find complaining about social networking. I blog,obviously. I'm on Facebook and Twitter. Heck, with a few friends, we've started asocial network of our own, revolvikng around professional writers and photographers workin with amaterus who want to shre their vacation adventures. But the whole idea of using social networking platforms to tell people where I am when I'm tweeting or blogging or whatever, I'm not sold on that.

Foursquare, obviously, is making news these days, with people all excited to tell others what restaurant they're eating at, where they're waiting on the curb for a cab and such. I just don't see the utility. My Foursquare entries would probably look something like this:

On the bus, US Highway 20, heading for work.

At work. Radioactivity down to nominal levels.

17-Mile Cave, staring at the graffiti.

In the bathroom.

Still in the bathroom.

Wandering amongst the cows.

I'm a boring guy, see? And then there's the criminal element. I don't need to broadcast that, hey, while I'm having fun somewhere else, there's NOBODY at the house. Come on in and burgle!

Not that I think that's likely to happen; it's just a typical scare tactic brought up by people like me who want social network location tagging to get off our lawns. That's why I'm not turning on the "Where Am I" feature in Twitter, and that's why I'm careful when we're on vacation not to be too braggy. But also, that's why when we leave the house, we tell our neighbors (whose son is a cop) to watch the house and thump on or wing unfamiliar passersby.

All of this need to tell people where we are, though, reminds me of a passage from Arthur C. Clarke's novel Imperial Earth. I'm too lazy to get off my duff (I'm in front of the computer @home) to get to the bookshelf (about six feet away) to get the book (between Susannah Clarke's Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norell and Beverly Cleary's The Mouse and the Motorcycle) to quote directly, but, oh, hell, let me get it:

"I must ask you, [Boss] said, "to hand over all watches, radios, and communication devices. You won't need them until you get home."

He held up an admonitory hand at the chorus of protests.

"There's a good reason for this -- and for any other peculiar requests I may make. Remember, this whole program has been worked out for your benefit. If you won't cooperate, you're only cheating yourselves. Cameras and recorders -- yes, of course, Use them as much as you like."

There was a general sigh of relief at this. Duncan had noticed that most of his companions were festooned with equipment designed to capture every aspect of their experience. A couple were obviously "tapeworms," those peculiar addicts who went through life accompanied by voice-actuated recorders, so that nothing they said -- or heard -- was ever lost. Unless they could do this, Duncan had been told, they did not believe that they had really and truly lived . . .

So that's why I've got a picture of a chatty tapeworm for this post. (The quote here is from Chapter 25, "Mystery Tour," of Clarke's book.)

About the only thing he got wrong, I think, is the plural "devices." These days, of course, most everyone has one device, a smart phone, with which he or she can do all of these things. I'm still enough of a technology pseudoluddite that I have a still camera (a very nice digital) a video camera (HD, of course), an iPod Touch and, shockingly enough, a cell phone that ONLY MAKES AND RECEIVES phone calls. So I am festooned, as Clarke says. But I don't have them going every second of the day, either. No matter what my wife says.

Miracle Meets Sandwich Maker

Part of me knows I'm witnessing a miracle. I'm sitting at my desk, laptop a-working, uploading photos to Uncharted with only a "wireless" connection between my laptop and the outside world. Little microwaves, or radio waves, or photons, or Klingons, or what have you -- I don't precisely know how all of this works -- are zinging from my computer to the router, which is then shooting the information up a wire to the antenna on the roof, which is shooting the information with invisible waves to some other tower, which is in turn shooting it to some other kind of object -- most of the time my computer says it's communicating either with another computer in Orem, Utah, or in Cheyenne, Wyoming (I prefer Orem; they're all business down there. Cheyenne tends to take the cowboy way with my data and make it take longer to upload, for some reason). And at the same time it's allowing me to construct ridiculously complex sentences like the preceding one.

Part of me knows how Arthur Dent felt. He made sandwiches. He was the best sandwich maker on the planet, sharing his lore with the knife-maker and the bread-baker so as to find perfection with the other tools of his trade. Sandwiches were his trade because even though he came from a planet with wireless technology, computers, 767s and such, he only knew how to make sandwiches.

I'm getting a little better with technology. I dare dabble in a primitive way with basic HTML. I know how to open a computer to stare at all the wires inside, perhaps install some more memory, take out the working parts and chuck the rest. I can build things and hook them up, but if you handed me a pound of raw silicon, some soldier, and bits of plastic, the best I could do with it would be a lousy free-form sculpture I'd call "Raw Materials For Something I Cannot Make, Version 2.0," which isn't bad, until you realize it's going to be slow enough you won't even be able to play Minesweeper on it.

Oh How Spoiled We Are

So Digital Bridge Communications, my internet service provider, gets a B from pingtest.net. Or a C. Or a D. Depending, as General Turgidson would say, on the breaks. One particular server in Orem, Utah, I get the B. Another, the C. Cheyenne, Wyoming, however, D territory.

Download and upload speed, half and half. Slightly better than average download speed, according to speedtest.net. Upload speed, however, I won't be changing fuses faster than a jackrabbit on a date.

Everything these days is measurable and measured. And doesn't really tell me much of anything, with results vascillating so much. With speed and reliability basically relying on a Las Vegas-style slot machine pile-o-randomness on which server I get, quality will vary from excellent to really, really poor. Wish it didn't hafta, but that appears to be the case.

So should I worry that my Internet isn't as powerful as others? Probably not. Because I'm spoiled. Heck, a few years ago we were still on dial-up. Dial-up, for heaven's sake, forcing ourselves to listen to that patented modem squeal every time we wanted to check our e-mail. So, definitely, my Internet is fast enough for what purposes suit me. I could use a bit better speed and quality to make iVisit work a bit better, but I don't think I'll get it, not at the prices I'm willing to pay.

Ludditism and Wall-E

We watched Wall-E again tonight, perhaps the first time we've watched it together as a family in at least a year. The message of the movie really struck me harder this time around, as I've had a little context added in my head on our society's tendency to over-rely on technology, in reading books by Max Hastings and William Langeweische.

It's not consumerism that led to the desecration of Earth in the society Wall-E describes -- it's a mere overreliance on technology. People became too accustomed to having some new gadget be just the thing to fix whatever ailed them. Many of the gadgets they bought did just fine in fixing problems. So effect became cause: Is there a problem? Make up some kind of fancy gew-gaw and voila, problem solved. Yeah, sure, they wear out. But it's just as easy to buy a new gadget to keep fixing that problem. Multiply that my billions, aided and abetted by the BuyNLarge government willing to keep shoveling gadgets people's way, and ka-boom, you've got a trashed Earth. But notice how they try to fix things. They had their windmills, creating power. They had their Waste Allocation Load Lifters, Earth Class, trying to clean things up, while they had their spaceliners and their virtual golf and their meals in a cup. To fix the problem, they depended on technology, while using technology to escape from their problems. That's the problem.

The captain realizes that when, as he's commanding one of his robots to do something, he pauses and then says, "No, I should do it." And he does. Without gadgets.

But note this: I"m not suddenly turning Luddite, nor suggesting that anti-technology is the way to go. Notice how the "Earthlings" go about fixing things: They use technology to help them, but they're not completely reliant on their gadgets any more.

We're not at the Wall-E stage yet. But we're moving further from the technology-as-assistant age into the technology-as-cure-all age. And it's not just technology that's the danger. Overreliance on any one thing -- government, money, technology, religion, reason, science -- whatever you want to call your overindulgence, that's the problem.

But there's nothing that can't be solved by listening to this:

Poor Twitter

So, Twitter saw its first major denial of service attack. Don't most websites regard that as a rite of passage, perhaps a signal that they've "made it," as Dorothy Gish might say.

Lillian and Dorothy Gish. "And, uh! True story. . ."

I read somewhere -- CNN, I think -- that some Twitter users felt "naked" without being able to Tweet. Pardon me, but that seems a bit pathetic.

I was once like that, though. About a month ago, I was a heavy Tweeter. But then my iPod Touch went through a full cycle in the clothes washer and stopped working. For a week, I felt pretty odd, not having that little instant gratification device in my hands whenever I wanted it. But as the week went on, and I visited Twitter less, and used computers less because I couldn't pull it out when I was on the bus or in the bathroom, I realized that I missed the thing less. I still feel badly that the iPod went through the wash, but I realize now that I don't really need one. I've got a desktop and a laptop, and that suffices.

And it does mean I spend less time on Twitter. And that's a good thing. I've read more books since the iPod went under than I did in the months I had it. And it's been at least 24 hours since I Tweeted. Don't miss it.