Odd Man Out

I'm going to take the risk of opposing Donald's views about lifecasting.

I'm a big fan of technology, generally, and I'd love to be able to plug my brain into infinite storage, which would be like having an inexhaustible eidetic memory. I'd like to be able to commit some events to that sort of memory, and I'd probably acquire wearable computing clusters and storage if such things were available. So on that side of things, hey great, so long as you manage to avoid solipsism (most of what I do in a week isn't even interesting to me, and I see little value in recording it willy-nilly).

It's the public-facing side that I find singularly unappealing. My casual consumption of these various lifecasting projects has always led me to say "So what?" It's one thing to lifecast an actual public or historic event, such as a political rally. It's quite another to broadcast the banal minutiae of one's life. Regarding Frank's site, referenced by Donald, I find nothing of historic, artistic, political or humorous value in the little collage of pictures. It is merely narcissism, and it even lacks originality. It's been done. All of this stuff is just noise, and I have plenty of ways to waste time already.

I have no problem with photo galleries, event-centered and intended for consumption by friends and family. Blogs likewise often involve (not often enough maybe) skill and taste, and at their best have real, valuable content. It's the self-marketing and hubris of lifecasting that drive me crazy. I'm perplexed by imageering marketers who feel their lives are worthy of attention, bored with the ironic detachment of hipster douchebags and frustrated by tasteless artists whose medium is merely tedious images and who lack any semblance of craft or skill.

Why is it so often the case the technical decisions get made by people who clearly lack any real expertise?

Well I suppose I know why, but I'm taking a minute to whine about it anyway.

In our office I've elected to solve a data transfer issue by setting up a VPN (please refer to Wikipedia) with the vendor in question. It'll cost us nothing and we'll have live, on-demand access to the vendor's database.

Meanwhile, company HQ has a secure server system that allows vendors to upload files. It works well but requires the vendors to set up accounts, install client software and learn to use it.

For our office, the VPN is certainly the more elegant and useful solution. We don't need to transfer static files because we can get live data instantly through the VPN. The process can also be cleanly automated. But today we got a very terse email from the HQ VP who's demanded to know why we aren't using the secure server.

So my reaction was something like, Good god man, edit for tone! Then I started getting annoyed. This guy is a medical doctor and statistician. Why does he presume to tell me how to transfer data? Do I tell him how to write a clinical trial protocol?

No. No, I don't, and I don't care to be second-guessed by a man who hasn't a tenth of my expertise.

At every office where I've been employed there's always been some Clueless Baby Boomer ("CuBBies" -> new pop buzzword), clearly out of his depth, demanding that we do things his way. It is so tiring. I have ennui.

This post is going nowhere though, so I'll have to hang it up for now.

Some scientists are saying it's highly likely there are unknown, large creatures in the ocean, yet to be discovered.

Well sure, I guess it's not surprising, given the sheer vastness of the ocean and the fact that we've explored only a fraction of the surface waters, a smaller fraction of the ocean floor and virtually none of the intermediate depths. Of course there could be critters we've never seen.

In a less clinical vein, though, doesn't this kind of story thrill you? Who wouldn't love to see a modern journey to the center of the earth?

Here's a fun Cringely essay on how we can save the world by changing exactly nothing about how we live our lives. Fascinating stuff.

Dig through Mr. Cringely's archives if you have a spare moment. He's got a lot more fascinating stuff in there.

CUPS is the Common UNIX Print System, the predominant printing subsystem on recent UNIX platforms. (Yes, FreeBSD and Solaris still use lpr by default, but they readily support CUPS, and most people I know immediately replace lpr.)

CUPS has been open-source for years and has always been distributed under the GNU GPL license. Yet Apple went out of its way to purchase the source code and employ its author.

Since I'm a fan of Apple products, and also of open source software, I find this quite intriguing, and not a little confusing. What's in it for Apple?

I knew I haven't the fortitude to stick it out in line, so instead of queuing up for my iPhone, I sat at home at 5:55 PM on June 29th and hit 'Refresh' until the Apple Store web page came up with it. I must have been one of the first to order it online, because it came well ahead of schedule, on July 5.

Of course, I actually bought it for Melinda. I had purchased a new phone relatively recently, and she was still using a slow-dying Motorola flip phone. It was her turn. Nevertheless, I played with it first, and for quite some time.

I just love the thing. Perhaps it doesn't live up to the hype, but how could it? Even if it isn't exactly revolutionary, it is clearly the best "smartphone" on the market at the moment. Its web-browsing is so far superior to any other mobile device I've seen that I can't believe the iPhone won't dent the Blackberry's market share. We have lots of the very newest Crackberries floating around the office and they can't hold a candle to the iPhone and Safari. Scaling and zooming on web pages--and these are real web pages mind you, not the "mobile" pages one gets on most phones--work flawlessly, exactly as they do in the commercials. Colors are rich, links work and the flash player handles everything I've run across so far.

Integration among its applications is exceptional. If you pop open a contact from your address list and tap his or her address, Google maps will open immediately, and display a road map of the area. And it's really Google maps, not a "mobile" equivalent. You can look at the satellite image and drag and resize the map, just as you would at a workstation. From a contact page you can easily send images, maps, sound files, text messages, emails and urls. It can handle RSS feeds!

It's so good, in fact, that if its hardware were slightly upgraded (operating RAM), it could replace an ultralight laptop. It does everything most people need to do on the run, and it does it better than blackberry. It also does it with the style and sound design that makes most Apple products so good.

Considering that it's only marginally more expensive than smartphones from other vendors, I see the iPhone sliding toward dominance of its niche.

Oh, and I'd read some horror stories about activation. For the record, I had no problem at all. Melinda and I are already ATT (nee Cingular) customers, so it took me less than 15 minutes to go from plugging the phone in for the first time to having a working iPhone. That includes the time I spent recovering Melinda's forgotten iTunes account password.