Back when I was in school teachers would always scare me with stories of how my exploits would end up in my permanent record. I believe this is it! – Geoff Fox
Stef had a little problem with her car today. The oil was changed before she left for the West Coast, but today the routine maintenance light came on. Undoubtedly no one bothered to reset it. I went on Google, found the fix, emailed it, then followed up with a call. Any excuse to speak to her is good.
I don’t know if Stef realizes what I have come to realize… and I assume every parent at some point realizes. Frequent contact is good. Yes, absence does make the heart grow fonder.
We talked for a while and then she told me she called my folks and spent ten minutes on the phone with my newly sighted and very, very, very happy father.
If my speaking to Stef is a plus, calling her grandparents is a double plus with gold star and cheese on top delivered by a unicorn!
Tomorrow at 6:50 AM Helaine hops a flight (or really flights) to make the first parental visit to the Coast. She’s bringing a camera. Stef thinks it’s for her, but I really want to see if the place is as clean as she claims!
You can move away and grow up but that doesn’t stop you from still being our child.
But it’s my choice and I don’t use the subterfuge of friending someone to accomplish my commercial goals.
When I first plopped myself onto the Internet in 1992 it was a very different place. This was the pre-browser, pre-WWW era. If there was anything commercial on the web I didn’t see it. Besides, the web (for me) was totally text based and running to my computer at either 300 or 1,200 baud (I can’t remember at the moment).
Things have changed! The Internet is full of ads and commercialism. Some companies, Google for instance, managed to find a way to make ads more valuable by making them contextual. Few find Google’s ads objectionable (though they’re often weirdly out-of-context)
Lets talk about Facebook. It’s relationship with ads is very different.
Modeled on Harvard’s actual physical “you can hold it in your hands” Facebook, it has become the leading social networking site on the web. They claim 350 million active users over the last 30 days! I can believe it.
Either I’ve clicked enough buttons to silence most of them or their number is diminishing. Maybe their days are numbered?
Still, Facebook is too ripe with customers for businesses to stay away. Three of my last four friend requests were from businesses! That’s against Facebook’s TOS, but just wrong as a matter of common decency.
One woman (recently friended and now unfriended) sent an unsolicited invitation to her company’s wine tasting. I hit ignore (I’m a non-drinker) but was still spammed this morning by her ALL CAPS Facebook email with the details.
Founded in February 2004, Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people’s real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment.
“[T]rusted environment.” That’s the operative phrase. That’s why I find this whole rush toward businesses wanting to be my friend smarmy. They want to take advantage of that trusted environment, which they’ve done… to the detriment of trust!
There is a place for business on Facebook. There are fan sites and other ways to communicate with customers. I am part of one. I am a member of others. But it’s my choice and I don’t use the subterfuge of friending someone to accomplish my commercial goals.
Facebook has in many ways become a pain-in-the-ass. There are many good parts. I like that I can see photos and hear stories from my friends (whether close friends or just Facebook friends). I don’t want to be hustled. We are approaching the tipping point.
If not careful Facebook will find, as MySpace has found, friendship is fleeting.
Unfortunately, the downside is we’ve got a lot of orphaned data. If you saved a photo on a floppy years ago good luck seeing it!
A friend asked me to help him with his website. I spent a few hours transcoding video to “flv” files last night. He gave me the video on DVDs¹. Boy, there’s media that came and is now going in a hurry! I carry 8 Gb of memory with my keys–a lot more than a DVD can hold.
Since I started playing with computers we’ve gone from cards, tape and switches to three separate types of floppy disk, CDs and DVDs. Nowadays you’re just as likely to get movies streamed over the Internet without any physical media.
The floppies are so outmoded they probably can’t hold the documentation for today’s software much less the software itself! CDs aren’t much better.
As technology moved forward our demand for storage has increased. It’s like closet space at home. You never have enough.
Unfortunately, the downside is we’ve got a lot of orphaned data. If you saved a photo on a floppy years ago good luck seeing it! Who knows how long will be before computer manufacturers stop including DVD drives too! They’re bulky, power hungry and expensive.
A tattered copy of an old newspaper is still readable. My 1968 Fortran programming masterpiece (adding 50+5) or a photo from a turn of the (21st) century Sony Mavica camera not so much. Even the archives of the Internet aren’t so permanent.
I just looked for my earliest net posting, November 11, 1992, but couldn’t find it! It had been safely held when Google acquired the entire Usenet archives a few years ago. Where is it now?
I like the expanding abilities of our modern society. I just don’t want to lose everything we’ve done up until now. It seems like that might be happening.
¹ – The video I was given had been saved by a video editor program, then burned in standard DVD format. Bad idea. Even when first used engineers knew DVDs had limited capacity. The format used for DVD movies and the like is lossy and compressed. Video should never be transocded to a DVD unless it will never be used for anything but watching. He should have saved the files then burned them as is–unplayable on a DVD player, but higher quality for my need.
People are computing with devices like BlackBerrys and iPhones. They’re versatile bits of hardware without being all that powerful. Slowly but surely these smartphones have been pawning off the heavy lifting to ‘the cloud.’
Recently I’ve come to an Internet epiphany. Don’t worry about the word. I looked it up to make sure I was using it correctly.
An epiphany is a moment of sudden insight or understanding.
I’d always thought as our use of the Internet progressed we’d need beefier hardware (aka more powerful computers) to get the job done. And certainly, that’s what the last few decades have shown us. Better computing experiences followed better hardware.
Recently there have been all sorts of changes to that conventional model. People are computing with devices like BlackBerrys and iPhones. They’re versatile bits of hardware without being all that powerful. Slowly but surely these smartphones have been pawning off the heavy lifting to ‘the cloud.’
Cloud computing means data travels the Internet and gets processed remotely. A Google search takes place in the cloud. My Gmail account lives there. So does the real work that enables the Dragon Dictation app for my iPhone. I downloaded the Siri app this weekend. That doesn’t fly without the cloud either.
This new era of cloud computing is only available because data pipes are fat. In a few years I may look back at the last sentence as a naive observation, but today we’ve got many multiples of what we had a few years ago. Most of us have all the bandwidth we think we need¹.
When bandwidth and cloud computing are heavily involved the power of user hardware becomes less critical. Tablet computing like the iPad or tiny netbooks with weak processors survive because there’s less for them to do to get the job done. Most of the job is accomplished in the cloud.
We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 and gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections
That much bandwidth and speed means cloud computing can lift even more weight while the user hardware becomes less critical.
Telcos and cable companies must be quaking in their boots. Certainly this kind of bandwidth can open up new communication devices and methods for delivering video and audio. Even Google who’s come up with the idea expects “uses we can’t yet imagine.”
Mass media has been turned upside down within the last decade by advances in computing. Which sector will pay the price now?
¹ – In reality bandwidth is like closet space. There’s never enough.
How much of your life is revealed by connecting the dots concerning where you go on your computer?
If this is Google’s rumored Super Bowl ad (and so says the rumor) try and look past the sweetness and poignancy. Think for a moment what the aggregation of your Google searches or website crawls says about you.
How much of your life is revealed by connecting the dots concerning where you go on your computer?
Logs and records are kept. Your life is well documented, but the documentation is outside your grasp.
How much of your life do you want revealed by where you go on your computer?
We need to weigh the cost for everything the Internet brings. Sometimes the costs aren’t immediately obvious.
Because of Google’s methods popularity and/or importance are finally accurately quantified. It seems so wrong to take emotional concepts like important and popular and make them the output of a series of mathematical equations, but that’s exactly what happens!
In 1999’s Bowfinger Steve Martin knew how importance was defined.
“See that FedEx truck? Every day it delivers important papers to people all over the world. And one day, it is going to stop here, and a man is going to walk up and casually toss a couple of FedExes on my desk. And at that moment, we – and by we, I mean me – will be important. “
The paradigm has shifted. Our new arbiter is Google¹.
Because of Google’s methods popularity and/or importance are finally accurately quantified. It seems so wrong to take emotional concepts like important and popular and make them the output of a series of mathematical equations, but that’s exactly what happens!
My ‘aha’ moment came earlier this evening. I was trying to learn how to scoop data from an online database and massage it to produce a webpage. Actually what I wanted to do was unimportant because I only got as far as typing in “how to.”
Google was now working ahead of me, anticipating what I might type next. It unfurled a list of the most popular “how to” questions.
how to tie a tie.
how to kiss
how to get pregnant
how to lose weight fast
how to cook a turkey
how to solve a rubix cube
how to make a website
how to download youtube videos
how to write a resume
how to lose weight
I am surprised tying a tie has reached this level. Look a the competition it’s knocked off. Maybe I’m jaded because I tie one every day (Double Windsor knot), but I didn’t think there was this level of demand.
Considering “how to lose weight” appears in two different forms (normal and panicky) it probably belongs higher on the list.
Cooking a turkey and solving a rubix are both surprising entries, but just barely.
I’m not sure what’s more surprising–that there’s nothing truly weird or that the list is really so pedestrian.
Is this all we really want to know “how to” do? Can’t we get a little more creative?
¹ – I know Google is the authority because if you enter “Geoff,” I’m the sixth result. On Bing I didn’t show up in the first six pages of results. Yahoo! doesn’t list me through ten pages.
If anything keeps the iPad from being a success it will be because Apple forgot we are their customers, not apple itself.
Friends and colleagues know I’m a technogeek, so it didn’t take long after Steve Jobs’ iPad announcement for the queries to begin. To summarize the two top questions are:
“Are you getting one?”
“Why would anyone want one?”
I probably wont be getting an iPad. It has less to do with what it can do or what it costs than the restrictions placed on it.
Imagine a world where your Chevy could only use gas approved by Chevy (and where Chevy siphoned off a cut of the profits)! In essence that’s what the iPad is all about. You may be buying the iPad, but you don’t fully own it because you are limited by license (and I suppose law) from using it freely as you wish.
Apple has already used this business model in the iPhone. I have one. I am often frustrated by improvements which should, but don’t, exist.
Believe me, there are lots of things the iPhone can and should do, things which developers would certainly write software but that Apple restricts. Google’s “Google Voice” app is a perfect example. It exists. People would like it. Apple hasn’t approved it and isn’t all that forthcoming in explaining why not.
IPhones¹ can be ‘jailbroken’ to allow some of these improvements, but it’s tough to embrace a technology where you have to violate a license or law (or both) to use the equipment. Beyond that Apple has shown a propensity to patching jailbroken phones, sometimes ‘bricking’ them–leaving them with the capability of a brick!
Beyond that the iPad seems crippled by design failures. There’s no camera–and this would be the perfect product for video calling. There’s no ability to multitask–run two apps at once. Though it has a 3G modem there’s no cellphone functionality, even through a Bluetooth device.
To me the iPad seems more proof-of-concept than mature platform.
That brings me to the second question. Why would anyone want one?
A relatively small and light computer seems the logical step beyond a laptop, especially if it’s a laptop, telephone, TV, movie and music, book newspaper and magazine playing device. The screen is small for sharing, but for arm’s length viewing it can and will provide a big screen experience.
A device with the form factor of an iPad can be a unifying device that brings all media to a single place, especially with the ability to connect through both cellular and WiFi data networks. It’s exciting in the abstract.
A few years ago Qwest ran an ad (attached at the bottom of this entry) which left most people scratching their heads. Devices like (but not) the iPad are what is needed to make the commercial finally make sense.
Alas, Apple isn’t as interested in providing this total experience as they are in maintaining a toll road. Make no mistake about it, they want every penny you spend to pass through their outstretched sticky fingers.
If anything keeps the iPad from being a success it will be because Apple forgot we are their customers, not Apple itself.
¹ – when a proper noun begins with a lower case letter, like iPhone, does it get capitalized if it’s the first word of a sentence? By naming something with a lower case letter you’ve already violated the rules of English so the next step gets iffy at best.
The problem is the first versions of Chrome were noticeably sparse and unable to support add-ons like Firefox can (called extensions in Chrome). That’s now changed
I am fascinated by technology with a pretty good understanding of how lots of electronic devices work. Advancing the state-of-the-art is my fun. That’s why I think it’s time to switch from Firefox to Google Chrome.
Motivation: javascript.
Javascript (lower case ‘j’) is used on websites a lot. Web servers can offer more because javascript is executed on your computer and not the webserver itself as some other languages are. Chrome came out of the box with a javascript engine much faster than anything else–noticeably faster while web surfing. It’s a significant pick-up.
The problem is the first versions of Chrome were noticeably sparse and unable to support add-ons like Firefox can (called extensions in Chrome). That’s now changed.
Today I fired up Chrome, ‘updated’ to a stable beta version, and began to download new tools. It now syncs bookmarks with my other browsers using Xmarks. Also installed are an ad-blocker and Gmail checker. I suspect new extensions will be forthcoming. These few
Browsers first appeared at a time when the web was served by ‘thinner pipes’. Multimedia playback was very limited.
New browsers will better support all sorts of media natively, without the need for players (think Flash and Quicktime for example). The separation between TVs and computers will shrink and shift. Are TV stations worried? You betcha.
A faster browser is another step toward making that all possible.
Over the years my traffic has gone up and down. It was highest just before I was struck by a hacker and lost my Google mojo.
Earlier today I got an email from someone who just discovered this blog. He couldn’t sleep and aimlessly went from page-to-page. He joins the 73,807 visitors in 2009 who came here 165,558 times and viewed 297,223 pages! My page counter currently reads 2,120,588 pages served since I began.
Over the years traffic has gone up and down. It was highest just before I was struck by a hacker and lost my Google mojo. Google has reinstated me to their index, but the traffic has never quite recovered though it’s getting close, again.
All of these statistics are possible because of Google. There’s a little piece of code on every page which connects to Google Analytics. GA quantifies everything that’s going on.
There was a time I was making a few bucks a day¹ from the blog. Now it’s a few pennies. That’s Google related too-Google AdSense.
Posting my blog entries to Twitter and Facebook has made a difference. I know most readers don’t read every entry I write, but from time-to-time there’s something that catches social networking eyes and traffic spikes.
The blog is read around-the-world though over 2/3 come from the United States. Foreign viewers tend to come for something specific, stop by and never return. Connecticut provides the most readers. As far as I remember I have never mentioned this blog on-the-air.
I was REALLY sick… doctor to your hotel room sick… and didn’t post October 22, 2006. That’s probably the last day I missed. An unwritten rule demands a post every day. Often there’s more than one.
Each entry is written and rewritten. Seriously, everything is rewritten. Mistakes still get in. Helaine is my best editor, though she continues to refuse my offer to let her make the corrections on her own.
Writing this blog is the most disciplined part of my life. Until I began I had no idea how much one could enjoy writing.
¹ – Before you poo poo a few bucks a day, over the year it added up to hundreds of dollars, which paid for the web hosting with a little left over for coffee.
The iPhone is transformational technology. It will change your life.
“It’s the best toy ever,” was what my secretive friend in the San Fernando Valley said right after he got his iPhone. He kept saying it and saying it and saying it until I too broke down. You know what? He was right.
I complained originally about the keyboard and inconsistencies regarding when or which apps allow you to turn the screen to the landscape position. Still true. Horrendous battery life. Also true. I have chargers or cables at home, work and in the car.
The iPhone is transformational technology. It will change your life.
More than likely what I’m saying also applies to the new phones running the Android operating system, like the Droid and the soon to be unveiled (but already widely seen) phone from Google itself!
If you just count hours I used the iPhone more when I first got it . Now I go for value and utility. I answer email and check Facebook and Twitter. I don’t update my blog with it… well I did once and it wasn’t fun!
I have added apps. I’ve added enough that every once in a while I clean things out and reclaim a little space.
I have been blown away by some of these little programs like the amazing ReelDirector video editor. That was $4.99 well spent! Everyone is astounded I can shoot and edit video in the phone and the quality is very good.
Tonight my friend Bob showed me Glympse, which will allow a friend to track you for a set period of time. If I was driving to your house I’d send a private url which would allow you to track me and know when I’d be there.
Sometimes I use the iPhone instead of my car radio to listen to shows on NPR. I flew cross country using it to watch movies. I keep France24, a 24-hour English language all-news TV network from France, as my live TV demo–though I seldom actually watch it otherwise.
Yes, it’s a phone. It’s also a computer which leverages special hardware, like a GPS receiver, compass, accelerometer and touch screen. That makes it a computer that knows exactly where it is and what’s nearby.
Every time a new app arrives the phone does a little more. That’s not going away any time soon.
Apple is a little controlling. I wish I could see a little more of the inner digital workings.
I’m sure my California friend is reading this and taking some satisfaction that he ‘made the sale.’
Your front and back yards can vary by a few inches! It’s the best that can be done while wearing pajamas.
Helaine’s preparing dinner and so the Eagles game is on pause. What to do? A little Photoshop, some Google Maps, a touch of NWS/DOT snowfall totals and voila a rough postmortem map from this storm.
As always, maps like this are approximations. Your front and back yards can vary by a few inches! It’s the best that can be done while wearing pajamas.
This was a great trip to Vegas–not just because of my luck at poker. I had a great time with Helaine and my cousins and especially with Stefanie.
I’m writing from Las Vegas McCarran Airport. Thanks Google for the free WiFi. Next stop on this vacation is Palm Springs. It’s no secret this is the leading candidate for our retirement… whenever that is.
Palm Springs and Las Vegas are perfectly separated to make the choice between flying and driving difficult. It was truly a toss-up… even with Helaine finding a $25 fare between here and Ontario (where Southwest flies). With our companion pass that’s $25 for two, plus whatever taxes and fees are added, And, of course, on Southwest bags fly free¹.
We had breakfast at the Grand Lux Cafe and then, on the way to the room, the cows called. We stopped at Invaders from Planet MOOlah.
I’ve written about this slot machine before. If a slot machine can be fun and entertaining MOOlah is! It’s been sort of like an ATM for Helaine and me.
“One day they’ll do an audit and find they made a mistake programming it,” I said to Helaine.
We threw a few bills in, started pressing buttons and… nothing. Oh, the pictures moved across the screen and our money supply lessened, but no payoff. Every once in a while we’d get a quarter back. Unfortunately, it was $1.25 per pull. A quarter back was a Pyrrhic victory to be sure.
I looked at Helaine. “Maybe they caught on?”
The next spin we hit nothing, but mysteriously MOOlah moved into the bonus round. It’s as if one of the cows said, “Oh, the Foxes. We like them.”
Within two minutes our original buy-in had tripled. We printed a coupon, took it to an ATM, cashed out and went upstairs to move out.
We were out of the room at 12:10 and at the airport 20 minutes later. Our flight leaves in 50 minutes.
This was a great trip to Vegas–not just because of my luck at poker. I had a great time with Helaine and my cousins and especially with Stefanie. She was a joy to be with. That will make it that much more difficult when she moves to California next month.
Palm Springs is a whole different vibe. Though also in the desert it is much more laid back than Vegas. It is heavily populated by “gray and gay” (and in some cases both at the same time).
It’s also warmer than Las Vegas year-round. As I type this it’s 72° in Palm Springs but just 59° here in Vegas. When it’s 105° in the Las Vegas summer sun it can easily be 10° warmer in the Springs.
For the next few days we expect to see snow as we drive–but safely on the mountains that surround the Coachella Valley.
¹ – I mention this because I want to make sure Southwest never changes this 20th Century policy.
Briefly–I’ve seen lots of posts suggesting Microsoft’s Bing might pay News Corp (Rupert Murdoch) to let them index News Corp sites with the proviso they don’t allow Google to do the same.
I’ve lived in the New Haven area 25 years but until looking at Google Maps never realized there was an obviously man made, perfectly straight, narrow body of water inside West River Memorial Park
This is a real puzzler. I’ve lived in the New Haven area 25 years but until looking at Google Maps never realized there was an obviously man made, perfectly straight, narrow body of water inside West River Memorial Park. It resembles an airport runway… if they were made of water!
If you know what this is and why it’s there will you please let me know? I’m stumped and don’t even have a clue who to ask.
