Category Archives: w/r/t technology

Feb 22 2012

nomophobia: why I’m tired of hearing about it

Yesterday I came across an article on Mashable about nomophobia and I rolled my eyes. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard of it nor was it the first time I rolled my eyes. For those of you who aren’t well-versed in made-up words, nomophobia(1) is the fear of other losing your mobile phone or being out of mobile-phone contact.

Let’s forget for a minute how ridiculous this is, that some people genuinely feel their lives have come to a halt because they have forgotten their phones. Of all the more ridiculous aspects of modern culture, such as that both Renee Zellweger and Reese Witherspoon have won Oscars, this one takes the proverbial cake. It’s on par having nothing to do because your television is broken or not being able to walk because you can’t find your shoes. It’s that ridiculous. Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPhone just as much as anyone, but the few times I’ve been without it it wasn’t like the orchestra started playing over my acceptance speech.

But I don’t want to talk about the phenomenon.(2) I want to talk about the word itself.

According to Wikipedia and about half-a-dozen other equally unreliable sources from the internet,(3) nomophobia combines the word phobia (meaning ‘fear of’) with nomo, which is a portmanteau of no mobile. I don’t have a problem with portmanteaus in general. There are some really great words created by combining two other words, such as squish, squawk, motel, escalator, gerrymander, pixel, emoticon, and best of all, brunch.(4)

The problem is that, unlike all of those examples, nomo is already a root-word. The Greeks gave us the word nomos, which means the principles that govern human conduct, esp. as defined by culture or custom.(5) The root-word nomo is used to form words relating to laws or legislation. Hence we have nomocracy, a system of government based on a legal code. We have nomogenesis, a theory which regards evolutionary change as resulting from laws inherent in the nature of living organisms, rather than from external factors. There are nomism and nomotheism, which are both Christian approaches that bind everything – even God – to the strict adherence of universal laws.

So if anything, nomophobia would be a fear of law, a fear of strict code, or perhaps a fear of strict enforcement of the law. It would not be a fear of losing one’s mobile phone.

I’m not against making up words. I’m against making up words that make zero sense given the history of our language. Perhaps a better word would be perdiphonophobia, which is not only somewhat more etymologically accurate but also nicely hints at the purported perdition these without-their-phones people seem to be caught in. And it also has the advantage of not tromping over root-words that already exist.

I know this is a losing battle. I know that the seven people who read this blog(6) won’t be enough to actually change this nonsense word nomophobia. And frankly it’d probably be better that we rail against the phenomenon itself. But for right now I’m sticking with perdiphonophobia. If the two worst actresses of our time can win Academy Awards, there’s a least a chance that one man with one blog can eradicate a stupid word.

  1. Which autocorrect keeps changing to homophobia.
  2. Other than to talk about how ridiculous it is, obviously.
  3. My thinking here is that the unlikely probability of six sources having the same wrong information increases the probability that the information is correct. This thinking, by the way, is probably why I don’t work at the reference desk.
  4. Kinda wish staycation would just go, though.
  5. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, my friend and companion for many years now.
  6. Readership’s up a bit!
Jan 25 2012

busy busy busy

Sorry I haven’t the time to write much of a blog post today. After writing about Google+ and social search the other day, I started systemically removing everything I’ve ever posted to anything owned by Google. And it’s a good thing. Yesterday The Washington Post wrote about Google’s new terms of service, that Google plans to follow a user’s activities across all of the platforms it operates, such as Gmail and YouTube.

Apparently Google is facing some backlash over this. And while it’s tempting to throw my opinion into the mix…well, I just did that. What I had to say about Google+ and social search applies in much of the same way as Google combining my data from Docs and Picasa.

So the reason I don’t have time for much of a blog post is simply that I’m busy deleting anything I can find that I ever posted to any Google-owned site. Over the last six years we’ve developed an extensive partnership. But that ends today.

Goodbye Google. Good luck with that whole don’t be evil thing.

Jan 3 2012

paranoia and the netflix curiosity

Over the past six months or so, Netflix has demonstrated beyond a shred of doubt that they can screw up on a macro scale. Need proof? Check out the stock-price nose-dive since July, 1:

Only the average length of celebrity weddings falls more steeply than that.

Of course, what else should they expect when they raise prices by 60%? That’s what they announced towards the beginning of July or, as it’s known around the Netflix offices these days, The Halcyon Days of Yore. That, coupled with a horrendous decision called Quikster, caused subscribers to jump ship faster than all the rich people on the Titanic.

Despite having been a longtime subscriber, I would have been one of the first to leave. Any price increase of more than 15% is more about profit than inflation, and an increase of 60% simply shows how greedy Netflix has become. But Mom had given me and Ashley the gift of Netflix last Christmas – a yearlong streaming-and-one-DVD plan. So I didn’t have to pay that drastic difference.(1) If I had I’d have dropped them quicker than a Kardashian.(2)

Today I learned that Netflix can screw up on a micro scale as well. Or at least a seemingly micro scale. And now I want to drop them even though Mom gave us another gift subscription. Or, more accurately, because of how they handled Mom’s gift subscription.

Back in December, the day after we had our family Christmas gathering, I hopped on Netflix with the little certificate Mom had given me. In the box marked ‘Redeem’ I entered the little code and…nothing. Some text showed up in red asking me to enter a gift code if I had one. So I tried again. And again. And again. With the dashes. Without the dashes. Caps-lock on. Caps-lock off.

Nothing worked. Netflix behaved as though I’d entered a bad code. So I let it go for the day. The next day I got the same results. I was like that I time I thought that there’s just no way that show New Girl sucks as much as I thought it did…but then learned that it did – no passage of time changed the fact that Netflix was sucking at redeeming Mom’s gift.

Last week I called someone at Netflix to help me work this out. She verified that the code was valid, but neither her nor her supervisor could figure out why it couldn’t be redeemed. Nor could they just redeem it for me, which I’d have thought a logical solution, but they behaved as though I suggested they coat their heads in honey and walk under a bee’s nest. The best they could do was suggest that I wait until my current gift ended and try on that day.

That was yesterday. It still didn’t work.

This morning, already in something of a grumpy mood, I figured what the hell and tried again. This time it worked just fine, like there had never been a problem. Like the big-bad wolf who hadn’t just eaten my grandmother.

But there was a catch. Since my gift subscription ended yesterday, they are now charging me for the month of January and my gift subscription will start in February. In other words, Netflix just made money by refusing to accept my valid gift-code and then telling me to wait until my current gift ended. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but you have to wonder how many subscribers they pull these kinds of shenanigans with and how often.

Look at it like this: Netflix has around 23 million U.S. subscribers. Even if they pull this trick with 1% of that subscriber-base, they’d make more than $1.8 million. And that assumes that each of that 1% avail themselves of the streaming-only plan. In reality the amount could be much, much more.

I realize this is a bit paranoid, but it’s not hard to imagine a company in relatively dire financial straits – especially one whose aforementioned straits are the direct result of them screwing over customers – pulling this kind of trick. I really hope they’re not, but the whole thing was suspicious, how the code wouldn’t work, how they told me just to wait, how they couldn’t just redeem the code, and then how it magically worked…for the following month.

I’d like to think they wouldn’t treat their customers this way, but their record of late suggests they care more about money than about subscribers.

  1. And they continued to honor Mom’s gift even though by their new price she paid far less than what it would have cost. They weren’t going to at first, but right around the time Apple settled an iTunes-gift-card lawsuit, Netflix had a change of heart.
  2. An officially recognized unit of time equaling 72 days.
Dec 26 2011

my transition is now complete…

No, not to the Dark Side…though that would be fun.

You’ve met Cooper:

You’ve met Amie:

Now meet Dave:

I have wanted a Mac for so long that this really is something of a momentous occasion. The recent Samsung ad pokes fun at creative people being somewhat snooty about needing Apple devices,(1) but here’s what I know: if you go to almost any store or website and enquire about recording music on a computer, almost everyone will tell you that you need to start by purchasing a Mac. I know this from personal experience.

And it’s not just a software thing. Everyone I know who’s tried to use a Windows machine to record – no matter which software they’ve used – has either devised wildly complex workarounds for basic audio-interface problems(2) or has simply given up.

I can’t speak for all creative people, but personally I haven’t wanted a Mac because I’m creative; I’ve wanted a Mac because they actually work, which frees my time to focus on creating.

I am no longer a PC. I am part of a happy Mac family.

Now I’m going to go make stuff. Or apply at a Starbucks.

  1. Let me just jump in here and say that Ashley and I both have owned a couple of different Samsung smartphones and they are turds. Big honking turds. This ad, in my opinion, is an acquiescence to Apple. Samsung is effectively admitting that they cannot produce a better phone and because of that have decided that their best angle is to attack Apple’s fans.
  2. Read: lag.
Dec 21 2011

gamer for the holidays

I’ve always enjoyed video games. Mostly I think I like both how they tell stories in such an immersive way, immersive in the sense that in no other medium am I literally in control of what does or doesn’t happen. I also enjoy that playing a video game is different from letting your brain die from television. Games – most games anyway, or at least the kind I tend to play – engage the brain in various ways and it feels less like I’m shutting down than I feel after about two episodes of New Girl(1) or just about any show.

The problem is that I’m a completist. When I find an author I love, I read all of his or her books. In order. I never watch just one Star Wars flick; I have to watch all six. I have never warped any level ever in any Mario game. If there’s a footnote, I read it.  I don’t just fart. I fart, pick my nose and scratch my balls all at once. Just as a few examples.

Video games offer a lot to be completed, especially the types of games that catch my attention. My sister’s fiancée(2) seems personally offended that I won’t play Skyrim, no matter how much I explain to him that I can’t play that kind of game. It is literally meant never to end – infinite side-quests! - and I just can’t roll like that. If I can’t ever actually finish the entire game, I’d rather not start. No offense to family members.(3)

All this means is that I generally don’t have a lot of time to play video games. But, perversely, that doesn’t stop me from buying games.

My favorite games are The Legend of Zelda franchise. Each game has a huge world to explore, treasures and heart-pieces to find, and side-quests galore – not to mention that Link is the best lawn-mower this side of International Harvester and I simply cannot resist using the awesome weapon that is the Master Sword to cut down weeds and trees in the hopes of finding a few more rupees. Even elvish folklore heroes gots to get paid.

But it takes me a really, really long time to play a Zelda game. I feel like an Ent: It takes a long time to play a video game, and I never play a video game unless it takes a long time to play.(4)  Any Zelda game takes me a few months to play, at least. I’ve been playing Majora’s Mask off-and-on for almost a year now.

Starting Saturday, I will be off work for ten days. I’ve decided to take  little break from reading – which is a weird thing for me to do – and instead finally get to this pile of awesomeness.

Zelda games

I already know there’s no way I’m going to get through all of these games in 10 days. But the thought of doing little else during that time is too tempting not to try. Like I said, I’m a completist. I might as well try being completely lazy, right?(5)

  1. Why the hell does everyone like this show? I see celebs tweet to Zooey Deschanel that she’s so amazing in this show. If I were a celebrity and I knew Zooey I’d tweet that I’m sorry prostitution didn’t work out and she had to take this gig.
  2. Unsure whether or not calling him my brother-in-law is a bit cart-before-the-horse here or not. Plus using the word fiancée gives me the chance to use that grave accent on the first e there. That’s always fun.
  3. He hasn’t married into it yet, but I consider him family, grave accents be damned.
  4. I figure it’s totally fine to mention both Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings in the same post if that post is about video games. I’ll see if I can work in a Dr. Who reference just to round things out.
  5. Couldn’t quite make that Dr. Who reference work in an honest and non-ham-handed way. I feel like I’m letting you down, but I’d feel like I were letting you down more if I’d have gone for the half-assed reference.
Dec 12 2011

how – of all people – Steve Jobs has helped me feel a little less lonely

I wasn’t quite as familiar with Steve Jobs, the public figure, as some other people I know. I remember when we got our first computer, an Apple IIc+, in what must have been 1988, I sat down and dutifully read the instruction manual because I was an awesomely adventurous child. The manual mentioned that Apple had been founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in one a garage and that they named the company Apple because they couldn’t think of what else to call it. For a long time, that’s about all knew of the guy.

I learned much more about Steve Jobs after he passed away. Like many, many other people, I read Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography and, from it, have no problem describing Jobs as a man with a soul but no heart.

To have a soul is required, I think, to believe in things like poetry and music and change and the sheer force of one person’s will. Jobs did all of these things, and I can see his soul shine through my iPhone and iPad.

To have a heart is required, I think, to be kind, considerate, compassionate and honest. Having a soul is self-directed; having a heart is other-directed. At this, Jobs failed. He was a brilliant man with a brilliant vision and a brilliant passion, but let’s face it: more often than not he seemed to care very little for and about how other people felt.

Which is why it’s so weird that I owe him a big thank you for helping me feel less lonely right now while Ashley is in Disney World.

Because she recently acquired an iPhone,(1) and because we share an iCloud account, I can hop on the Find my iPhone app at any point and see what she and her family are up to.

Okay yes. It’s a little creepy. Or at least it would be if she didn’t know I was checking her location. Granted, this isn’t precisely what Find my iPhone was meant for,(2) but yesterday when I had a quick look and saw that they were watching the Lion King show at Animal Kingdom…well, for a moment it was like I was there with her. There’s a part in the show that I find to be one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. I won’t spoil it for you, plus there’s simply no way I could describe it with any real effect, but both times I’ve seen it, tears came to my eyes. And both times I’ve seen it, Ashley was with me. And right then, last night, just for a second, I felt what that felt like, instead of just feeling bored and vaguely sad. I felt Ashley right next to me, looking up in wonder. I could even picture her face smiling under the light. And for a little bit I felt somewhat less alone.

Then there’s Photo Stream. For those who don’t know, Photo Stream stores a copy in the cloud of any picture taken on an iDevice for 30 days. So, again, since Ashley and I share an iCloud account, I can see the pictures she takes without her having to send them to me. Photo Stream only syncs photos to the cloud over WiFi, so I can’t see her pictures until after she’s returned to their resort. The other day she took a picture of a gallon of chocolate milk. I have no idea why. Can’t even guess. But it’s exactly what I was looking for, exactly the kind of randomness that is Ashley.(3)

And of course, there’s FaceTime. I love Ashley’s voice a lot, but everyone sounds different over the phone. She says I always sound like I’m waiting to get off the phone, while I think she always sounds a touch put-off. But with FaceTime, Apple’s video-chat, I can hear her lovely voice, see her pretty smile and watch her laugh. That was the highlight of my day yesterday. There’s something about seeing someone, seeing the person you’re talking to, watching her react to what you say, seeing smallish movements of eyebrow and chin, that makes me feel a little less here and a little more there.

And it’s odd that this closeness has been brought about by one of the most emotionally distant people I’ve ever read about. It’s as though he wanted to connect everyone in the world with what they love – music, art, pictures – and the people they care about even though he himself had a hard time connecting with anyone. I’m sure he didn’t create FaceTime or Find my iPhone (though the books mentions that iCloud was something he wanted to make work), but you can believe not a thing shows up on any Apple device out-of-the-box that he didn’t know about and approve of.

He’s caught a lot of flack over the years for a statement he made at a company retreat way back in 1982: “Customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” But he was right. At least in my case. I didn’t know I wanted ways to miss Ashley just a little bit less until I figured out how to use Apple’s devices to do exactly that. And that’s what technology should do: bring us closer to whom and to what we love.

  1. 2011 will forever be the Year of Apple for us. Make of that what you will.
  2. Which seems to be helping porn stars find their stolen phones.
  3. I should point out that it’s only seeming randomness. She always has a reason.
Nov 18 2011

trans-siberian awesomeness

A few days ago, Ashley and I went to see Trans-Siberian Orchestra. We saw them two years ago for the first time and it was such a great show. And this time it turned out to be exactly the sort of mid-week high-entertainment date-night we both very much needed.

The other plus to the event was that it gave me a chance to really put my new Amie’s camera through its paces. I’ve heard much about the iPhone’s camera over the years, so with the 4S’s 8mpx camera, I figured I’d get some sweet shots.

As you can see below, I was not let down. I’ll point out that while we weren’t exactly far from the stage, I did have to zoom for most of these shots. And the still look great, even despite the vastly different types of lighting, color and motion.

amazing

lasers!

This is the loveliest picture I've ever taken...

...then the singer hit critical mass.

Note how the background lighting looks like a city.

Not even Smurfette's buttcheeks are this blue.

 

So that’s two things that totally rule: TSO and iPhone 4S.

Nov 11 2011

iBo; or, do iPhones dream of actual sheep?

Yesterday was my last day as an Android user. I have given unabashedly in to what I can only term to be iLove, which I can only imagine will in time be followed by iEngagement and iWedding and iMarriage.

Though I’ll bet the stats for iDivorce aren’t nearly as high as the U.S. standard +/- 50%.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Or, iDigress.

Back in June of 2007 I rocked a Motorola CRZR knock-off. It was…considerably less than sweet. All I used it for, though, was calling and this new thing I’d recently found called text messaging. I knew a few people who kept music on their phones, but these people were insane in my humble opinion. Forget that they could only keep around 100 songs and that the music players were about as cumbersome as a petrified club and that they sounded like a miniature diarrhetic sperm whale. Few things in my life had cemented my embrasure of technological advancement more than my 30GB Video iPod, purchased in 2005. It was slim. It was efficient. It was lovely. And it held all of my music. All of it. It’s hard to explain precisely how that affected me. It had something to do with liberation, that if I was walking home and I saw something that called a song to mind, I could listen to it. Right then. If a mood struck me at work, I didn’t have to limit its expression by which CDs I’d brought to work that day. It was incredibly freeing.

Why anyone would use anything less to listen to music was beyond me.

So when the iPhone debuted that month, I didn’t care that much. It wasn’t just that, to my mind, a phone and a music player different devices. What I felt for my iPod really was something like love. It had gotten me through a pretty rough patch in the very recent past and the thought of tossing it aside saddened me in exactly the same way that losing friends has saddened me.

But okay. So this is crazy talk, right? It’s a device. It’s just some wires and parts and a screen. This talk of fidelity doesn’t belong in this context.

Does it?

You can – and should – answer that for yourself. For my part, I’ll say that the Buddhist precepts that are the closest thing to religion I follow allow for the minuscule distinction I see between me and my iPod. In fact, we are made of the same substance, both of us being just light slowed way down. This is as true of the tree and the friend as it is of my iPod.

But again. That’s a question for you to answer. The above applies to me and isn’t meant in any way to be prescriptive.

A few years later, having gotten hip to the smartphone thing and poised with an available upgrade, I didn’t even think about getting an iPhone. The Black Bard was still doing what I asked him to do, was still the device I made sure I always had on me. And Android is a Google product. At that point, Google impacted my life on a daily basis in a much broader fashion than Apple. Yes, I listened to and iLoved my iPod, but I used Google for email, blogging, documents, chat…enough things that it made complete sense to try out an Android phone.

So I did. And I liked it. A lot. For a while.

Then, just like every Windows computer I’ve ever had, it started doing just random things from time to time. It stopped telling me when I had new text messages for a while. It started randomly logging me out of my Google accounts. There were other things, but what it all amounted to is a constant sense of me v. my device.

That line, that distinction between my and my Droid, widened.

And then I noticed that the Bard was slowly dying. It just wouldn’t hold a charge anymore for more than about a day, whether I listened to it or not. I was very sad, and out of lack of options more than anything else, I started using my Motorola Droid to listen to music. And I’ll admit it wasn’t long before I thought you know what? having one device for pretty much everything is really convenient. I began to forgive it for its transgressions, like the morning I woke to discover it had deleted all of my alarms. I began to think well…I am asking a lot of it….

That sense of me v. my device was still there, though, like a Facebook friend you can’t quite dump.

Now, though, I sometimes thought about getting an iPhone. For the first time I connected the years of more-or-less trouble-free interactions I’d had with my iPod with the troubles my Droid was giving me on a near-daily basis. For so long these two devices had such different purposes in my mind that I never compared them. Now I was…and it wasn’t favorable for Android.

But what killed my loyalty to Android was that Ashley wanted to go wedding-dress shopping. And that she’d bought an iPad just an hour earlier. I won’t go into why we bought one since it doesn’t matter here. What matters is that since I couldn’t be involved in shopping for her wedding dress – superstitions are as superstitions do – I asked her if I could use her new iPad to do some of my own homework. I went to Starbucks to steal some Wi-Fi and in three hours I managed to finish the articles I needed to read for class. And annotate them. And take notes. Three hours that would have been more-or-less wasted by wandering around shops while she tried on dresses at the bridal store were, instead, made into one of the most productive three hours I’ve ever experienced.

Thanks to the iPad.

From that moment forth I began to really pay attention to how well the iPad functions and how much I could do with it. I’d previously thought iPads to be completely extraneous – and they are. But that’s not the point here. The more I used the iPad the more I noticed the distinction between interfacing with a device and interacting with one. You and I can interface: we can have some type of exchange mediated by some type of distance or barrier. Or we can interact: remove the barrier.

It was then I realized that my love of the Black Bard was about more than just music.

My Android phone was nothing but a phone. Something I used. It never seemed as though it were sleeping; rather, if just seemed switched off. Disconnected. It was never a friend to me; I never named it.  Whereas the iPad with is something I work with. That line between me and the device is as nil as can be. We can explore reasons for that another time, but I can sum it up this way:

The same gesture on an iDevice and an Android device – swiping the screen with a finger, one of the most basic and frequent things you’ll do with a touchscreen phone – yields small but distinctly different results. On an Android phone, as much as three seconds may pass before anything happens. On an iPhone, the screen moves. Right away. As though it were just napping while it waited for you.

Yesterday was my last day as an Android user.

Friends, I’d like you to meet my iPhone, Amie.

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