Category: Computers

The Net Results

The phone voice has always fascinated me. It’s like we have a different personality when we’re answering the phone. The ability to switch was impressive.

Are you familiar with this? I first noticed it when I was a child. We shrieking, arguing, playing, fighting children would be running amok around the house, and Mom would lose it. A stream of orders, admonitions and angers would be launched, stopping us dead. In the midst of her tirade, the phone would ring, and she would answer it with such a sweet, polite voice, it was amazing.

That’s back when we didn’t know who was calling. She was also answering a phone hard-wired into a system and affixed to a wall. Cherry red, this wall phone featured a thirty-foot coiled cord. At first, that phone had a rotary dial. Push buttons — they were always gray — eventually replaced the dial, and then the Princess replaced that big, clunky phone, and the Princess succumbed to the smaller, neater Trimline.

But the coiled cords stayed long for many years. That long cord enabled wandering around while on the phone. If you could also master the neck hold, you could practice hands-free calling. The neck hold meant the phone was wedged between a shoulder and ear with the mouthpiece angled toward the mouth. Mom was able to do this so frequently and consistently, I was amazed that her shoulder returned to its normal position after she hung up.

These things have changed. Hands-free means you’re not using your shoulder. Speakers and headsets are available. The phone voice isn’t gone, but tailored specifically to who is calling. Caller identification and ring tones dictates the phone voice tone. One young friend says that when her Mom calls, she always answers with a flat, weary, “What is it, Mom?” This is because Mom is calling with worries, complaints and concerns, and never just to chat. On the flipside, a Mom I know answers the same way with her son, because he’s always calling to ask for money or help.

We did have a caller ID system, and did tailor the phone voice to the situation. When I was younger, we children were excited and honored to enjoy the privilege of answering the phone. Of course, it also meant we didn’t want to give it up, telling our parents, “No, I’m talking,” when we were toddlers just getting the hang of it. As we aged, we became the caller ID system. “Dad,” (or Mom), “it’s work.” Or Aunt Sally or Uncle Doug, or Grandma Barb. “The person taking the call would usually mutter something about, “What do they want?” Accepting the phone, they would turn on the phone voice for that specific caller.

That sweet, ultra polite and professional phone voice still exists at work where customers and clients are calling. In the military, we were required to answer according to which lines were ringing. I was in the Command Post, where phones abounded. Crash lines and hotlines to headquarters were not answered; you just picked them up and listened while scrambling to copy information. For outside calls, we identified the location and function, along with our rank. If it was a non-secure line, that was mentioned, and then we asked them, “May I help you?” For the direct lines to the various directors and commanders and their homes and offices, we only answered with our name and rank.

My, how we’ve trained ourselves. Of course, I use this growth and phone specialization in my writing and try to extrapolate how and what might come about. In the novel of the distant future now in editing, people don’t use phones. They’re on nets, basically a voiceover wireless protocol. Most people have a team net, ship net, corporate net, social net, private net, personal net, system net, family net, and friend net. Many have additional nets. While some of those seem redundant, they’re sliced and diced according to individuals’ preferences.

Various systems of bioware direct the calls, with your personal assistant – who is on their own net – informing you of who’s calling on what net. Virtual presence, virtual intelligence, and virtual personalities provide greater options. Calls can be answered, ignored, or shunted into various automated systems. Virtual personal assistance then often digest the calls’ contents, feeding into memory what needs to be known, remembered, or accomplished.

This is done effortlessly. It’s not unusual for a person to be on multiple nets simultaneously.

All of this thinking about phone voices was triggered by Twitter. The current White House occupant loves his tweets and Twitter. This has inculcated a shadow Twitter nation that responds to his tweets with their tweets. Then the media analyzes the tweets and responses even while reporting their takes and tangles. Even though it’s all in so many characters, there’s a distinct voice to everything written.

Often, though, it really seems like a toddler has gotten hold of the phone, and is yelling at the others, “No, I’m tweeting!” Yet, oddly, my future folks don’t text, or Twitter, because that requires using hands. It makes me wonder, though, what’ll it be like in another twenty-five to fifty years?

Writers, what do you see in the future?

2

Today’s Theme Music

I’m doing more streaming out of the Wayback Machine. This morning, we jump back to the year of my high school graduation, 1974.

Ah, exciting times. Vietnam. Nixon. Whip Inflation Now. Watergate. Cold War. ‘The Godfather’. ‘The Exorcist’. Eight track and cassette tapes. Princess phones, wall phones and extra-long telephone cords were in vogue.

Cable television viewership was rising. Microwaves were riding in on the first wave of availability. Companies were messing around with smaller computers but they were still focused on business. VCRs, DVDs, and Compact Discs were all in the future, as were Microsoft and Apple. There were still two Germanys. No European Union. Cell phones were just being used for the first calls but they were huge, expensive, heavy clunkers.

We were still recovering from the oil crisis of 1973. The national fifty-five miles per hour speed limit was upon us. The Phantom F-4 was our front line fighter, along with the F-111. The F-16 was still a prototype, and the F-14 was just entering service, with the F-15 coming along behind it. The Expos still played in Montreal, the Nationals didn’t play in Washington, and the Rockies and Marlins were still dreams.

From that stew, we have the Troggs with ‘Wild Thing’. I loved the song’s use in the film, ‘Major League’, in 1989. Charlie Sheen played Ricky ‘Wild Thing’ Vaughn, a Cleveland Indians pitcher. Of course, the Troggs hit was a cover of a song written, recorded and released in 1965 and the song in the movie was a cover by X.

So, here we go, a 1965 song, 1974 hit, from a 1989 movie, in which it was covered by a punk band, enjoyed in 2017.

Isn’t technology grand?

 

0

Time Suck

What does space travel, laundry, and cats have in common?

Why, they’re all time sucks, of course.

My wife shared information from an article about time savings and modern American life. Most households, particularly women, have seen a dramatic decrease in how long it takes to prepare meals. It used to require about two hours per meal. Of course, breakfast was rarer in those days.

On the other hand, laundry is an area where people don’t save time. The reasons derive from our attitudes toward hygiene, washing clothes, the increasing specialization in clothing, and fashion. We have and wear more clothes, and change them for more uses, whereas we used to accept being a little dirtier. The increased quantity and specialization equals more time doing laundry.

My time sucks today were more prosaic and had less to do with modern living. One involved a clogged toilet in one bathroom, a clogged sink in another bathroom, and a vomiting cat.

I’d just finished bathing and dealing with the clogged sink when Quinn puked. I was whining to myself about the sink and my hairiness. I’m sure that’s what caused it. The master bath has two sinks, and it was my sink that was clogged. He bugged me for food. He’s a small critter with a high anxiety level that causes him to leap up and race out of a room, so I’m always trying to fatten him up and encourage him to eat more. I fed him, per his request.

Then it was time for some morning business. All was successful, until the flush. Water rose and nothing went down. As I swore about that, I heard puking in the other room. I raced out in time to witness Quinn heaved a hair ball and his meal.

His deed was done on the hardwood floor. That means clean it up ASAP. I grabbed toilet paper and did the task. It was still warm, of course. Some dribbled onto my hand. I gagged reflexively, not a lot, and not as much as I would have in the past. Still, I wonder what it is about warm puke that causes me to gag.

Then it was back to the toilet. I’m not usually religious but facing a clogged toilet usually coaxes a prayer out of me. “Come on, flush,” I said, flushing. Then I corrected myself, “Come on, go down.” My prayers were answered, restoring my uncertainty about God’s existence.

Back in the office, I encountered another time suck. The story in my novel in progress requires Handley to take a shuttle. She enters the airlock but then what does she do? What’s the Avalon‘s layout? To address that, I needed to make a cup of coffee. Coffee helps me think.

Then I sketched the shuttle’s layout with pencil and paper. I should have been satisfied, but my secret geek required me to go to the computer and Illustrator and do it properly. That led to demanding details about the shuttle’s space capabilities, intended purposes, crew requirements, cargo capability, blah, blah, blah….

Done at last, ninety minutes later. By now, I was staring at the rear end of ten thirty. Gadzooks, time had been sucked up.

Of course, I need to point out that space travel wasn’t really the time suck; it was the creative process of writing about it. Does that count as a time suck? Maybe not. I suppose that I didn’t need to go into such detail to create the shuttle, but that’s my nature.

I reckon that’s a confession. It’s really my nature that’s the time suck.

 

0

Bitter Modern Blues

My dependencies sicken me.

Here I am, deploring the deplorable state of the net as it drifts in and out of connectivity.

The first thing that jumps to mind is, WTF? Then, of course, I ask myself, is it me? Is it my system? Everything is checked and reset.

But problems continue. It started last Friday and has gone on and on. Finally, Monday, I checked downdetector.com and other sites. They verified, yep, we got problems. You can see the spikes.

gmail outages

Yesterday, the same.

More of it today.

Naturally, the Internet corollary to Murphy’s law specifies 1), your net connection will drop at the ideal time to curtail your momentum, and 2), just when you think it’s all fixed, it will leap up and bite you in the ass one more time.

Because of the commerce implications of outages, you probably won’t know what’s going on for a while. Connectivity, latency and response times equal sales and advertising revenue. Amazon owned up to its error last week because it was human error, something that is less likely to scare off customers than hardware and systems failures where they’re scrambling to figure out what the hell has gone wrong.

 

 

0

Downstreams

Some mental activity racing along my axons today.

  • Love that first slurp of my quad shot mocha at the Boulevard. The baristas know my preferences and do a great job of blending everything and then topping my coffee drink with with a skim of dark chocolate powder. I love the contrasts of flavors in that first tasting. Sensational.
  • It’s National White Shirt Day! This day recognizes the end of a 1937 UAW strike at GM for better working conditions. I have my white tee shirt on, under my natural wool sweater.
  • I don’t recall any dreams from last night. That’s unusual. Wonder why. Sleeping period, six and a half hours, seems about normal.
  • I’ve been reading a series of articles on sleep and whether we’re evolving from being biphasic. The latest article was on Van Winkle and provided a brief summary of the last eight thousand years of sleep.
  • I realized Part I of my  science-fiction novel in progress requires some serious editing and revising. I first realized that about a week ago and tried rejecting it. My writer within was willing to overlook changing it; the resident interior editor was reluctantly accepting of it. However, the reader in residence said, “Oh, no. That needs work.” Trust the reader. After we argued a few days, the writer and editor agreed with the reader’s points. However, the writer came up with some interesting ideas to explore in parallel.
  • The editor, though, urged us all not to make any changes until it’s all done. He pointed out that Part I is the way it is because the stories and concepts were still being explored. True; I write to understand myself, to order and structure and expand my thoughts. He pointed out that since I’m still writing the other parts, I can save myself some potential work by fully completing an entire draft before making major revisions. I accept his contention and put it on hold until the first draft is completed.
  • The novel in progress is ‘Long Summer’. Science-fiction, it’s not quite a sequel but is collateral to ‘Returnee’, as it stars Brett and Castle Corporation, and continues with many of the same themes of technological alienation and isolation, and socializing with yourself via virtual beings you develop to help people cope with life as they live far longer.
  • Talking with the barista today. “Fun plans?” she asked. Because, it’s Saturday; in her working and school world has meaning that has left my writing world. I don’t segregate the days into weeks and weekends any longer. I barely notice the date. “Movies,” I answered her. “We’re going to see ‘Lion’.” She wasn’t familiar with it. I mentioned Dev Patel and a few of his movies. Yes, she remembered ‘Slumdog Millionaires’. It didn’t occur to me until later that she was eight years old when Slumdog was released.
  • That conversation pointed me onto new vectors of changes and the differences in my values, perceptions and experiences as a sexagenarian and the same in her as a young adult. It’s the same conversation I had as a young adult with those forty to fifty years older than me. I was twenty in 1976. Those who were sixty in 1976 had been born just after World War I ended. They fought in World War II and remembered the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Grandparents had been part of the American Civil War. The Soviet Union was founded during their lifetime and the Cold War dominated world politics.
  • It’s interesting to put into perspective. What I think of as ‘normal’ isn’t the same as the previous generation or the next generation. Besides when we were born forming us, so do our education levels. More strongly and interesting, we saw how where we live and our education and economic situations affect national politics during the 2016 presidential election. Now, this article on FiveThirtyEight tells about how where we live affects our deaths. It’s a telling insight to me.

Cheers

1

Strap It On

Well, it’s been a week since we strapped them on. I had mentioned buying them in passing about a year ago. Like a volunteer seed, it took root in my wife’s thinking. After a year, we finally  took action. Now I can provide some feedback on what a Fitbit has meant to me and my life, at least one week of it.

My Fitbit is a Charge 2, worn on my right wrist. The Fitbit informs me that I walk an average of twelve thousand steps and five miles a day. My highest miles walked were five point six, measured out in fourteen thousand steps. My resting BPM is fifty-nine, with a low of fifty-five and a high of one hundred thirty-nine, reached when I walked up the equivalent of thirteen floors of steps while doing an urban hike. I averaged seven hours and fifty-seven minutes of sleep per night, awakening three times. I’m usually restless twelve times per night, with a high of seventeen.

All interesting stuff. I’m dubious about its accuracy. It seems to think you’re sleeping if you’re reclined and not moving. But my wife and I both note, yeah, we’re in bed, but we’re not always sleeping just because we’re not moving.

I’m pretty pleased with my walking activity. We’ve endured many days in the low mid to low twenties and high teens where built up ice encumbered walking. I’m also recovering from wrenching my right knee while on the ladder, cleaning smoothie off the kitchen ceiling.

The Fitbit seems very dependent on arm movement. Don’t move your arms, you don’t get credit, it seems. It also sometimes seems to work in blocks. Yesterday, crossing the house to attend the cats, I checked my steps: twelve thousand, six hundred forty. I found the cats, petted them, provided them with catnip fixes, went around checking on doors, poured and drank some water, refilled the water pitcher, and took out the recycling. Then I checked my Fitbit.

It still registered twelve thousand, six hundred forty.

I knew I’d been moving around, and I swung my arms when I was walking, if I didn’t carry anything, so I knew – what? That the steps hadn’t registered. But was it a question of yet? 

Indeed it was. After sitting down at the computer and turning on Sneaky Pet’ on Amazon, I checked my Fitbit, and my steps had jumped. It had a full charge, done earlier that day, so I put this down to a system flaw.

Despite these things, I like the Fitbit. I installed the app on my iTablet or whatever it’s called and the two synchronize whenever they’re near one another. What I like is that it tracks and counts a great deal of information. Even if it’s rudimentary or flawed, it provides a sufficient structure to encourage me to do more and be more mindful about what I’m doing. The Fitbit buzzes every hour to remind me to move around, something I appreciate. My wife and I often make a game of that, first marching around to ‘Colonel Bogey’s March’, and then chasing each other around the furniture until one of us needs to go pee.

Once I have three weeks of averages, I can establish goals to move around more. The biggest thing is that I want this as a companion, and not a master. I don’t want to become obsessed with counting steps or miles and reaching higher and higher levels, but to use it to enhance my healthy practices.

Of course, part of me thinks into the future, when the Fitbit’s technology is improved and replaced. Then I expect to find it in a drawer, forgotten, and take the opportunity to write, “Do you remember Fitbits? We used to wear them to count our steps.”

Who knows what we’ll be using by then?

 

7

Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday, ARPANET. Without you, we would be lacking the Internet.

Some will whisper, this is an anniversary, not a birthday. Maybe they’ll make such a remark on the Internet.

Few realize how long people worked on ARPANET and its principles and processes and what its success actually represents. Like Philo Farnsworth and other inventors, their work is used but rarely remembered and celebrated. Most ARPANET and early Internet pioneers worked in teams. They’re remembered but no celebrated but they had some nifty ideas. Their accomplishments helped drive Internet development. Without them, we’d not have bloggers sharing opinions, dreams, hopes, frustrations and cat photos and videos, and complaining about government, politics, manners and movies. WordPress would probably be a lot smaller and less successful.

Where would Amazon and eBay be without the Internet? What would Facebook be without an Internet?

Seriously, take a moment to imagine a Facebook without an Internet and the web.

I need not add the rhetorical amendment asking where the rest of us would be and what we would be doing, but I kinda did.

Going back to my early Internet and computer learning reminds me minicomputers once roamed the electronic frontier. Remember the Burroughs Corporation?

Sure, some remember. Some also remember the Nash Rambler.

Such is the case with inventors, engineers and their work. Their ingenuity shapes our lives but we remember few of them. As always, the winners shape the marketing we refer to as history.

Ah, it’s all ancient history, way back, like a long time ago. Here we are, on the Internet, clicking, scrolling, and googling away the morning.

Happy New Year.

1

Today’s Theme Music

Back into the wayback machine for this choice – which puts in mind the fantasy, wouldn’t it be cool to have a wayback machine? “Yes, but the paradoxes, what you would do to time,” naysayers moan. Yeah, let’s suspend logic; suspend physics, quantum mechanics, all the thinking and all the relative theories. Just pretend you’re a child and play with ideas of all the time travel variations possible.

Here’s one.

Just about every house is getting one. It’s the hot holiday gift, and it’s on sale in dozens of places. You, disliking crowds and cold weather, and feeling bored, restless and wanting a change, surf the net and turn to Amazon to check out the offerings and read the reviews. They come up immediately: Wayback Machines. They’re priced at just under six hundred dollars. If you order today, sites claim, “Receive this by Christmas with Free Shipping!”

Okay, but six hundred eggs. Cards are already heavy with spending for the season for toys and clothes, dinners out. But you’re intrigued. You read.

“What’s included: computer interlink, two bracelets, headgear and software.” You skip into the specs and the system requirements, bringing up your system’s information and running a mental checklist.

You have the computer speed, the computer power, an approved OS, the USB ports, everything needed. Well, hell, you should, you blew a wad on this laptop just a year ago for your own special Christmas present because, WTF, you deserve it.

“This is not virtual reality,” a review says. “This the real thing. You are there.”

Yeah, you’ve read the ads, seen them on television during football and baseball games for half the year, talked about them at work while waiting for meetings to begin, swapped information with friends over wine and beer. You know what it’s supposed to be, what it can do.

So you order your Wayback Machine.

Three days later, it arrives. Boxes are in boxes. You’re usually so organized about opening and unpacking boxes, especially things like this, but you’ve become really excited about what it can do.

“Where the fuck is the quick start?” you ask, and it’s right there, the very first thing you pulled out after opening a box, a DVD. There are cables and the headgear, which looks like one of those half-helmets, the small console, the size of your first Roku, resembling a blue and black cigarette back, and the silver and black bracelets.

It’s a clean set-up and install. Breathlessly you power everything up, starting as the program booms, “Welcome,” even thought it’s a soft female voice. Lights are green. The program shows up on your laptop’s screen. You’re sweating and trembling. Well, the heat is running. It’s snowing outside. The wife, children and grandchildren are all out shopping. Then they’re eating somewhere and going ice-skating. You tell your phone to turn down the heat.

Snow falls more heavily outside past the windows. Inside, it’s just you. Your anticipation amazes you. You hope you won’t be disappointed. You put on the bracelets and headgear. The system checks you out. The Wayback program asks, “Do you want to sync with your Fitbit and smart phone?” Hell, yes.

Thirty seconds later, that is done. “Select a year from your life,” the program says.Feeding off a memory, a hope, a dream, you select 1964.

Then shoves now aside. It feels a little violent, more violent than the reviews said it would be like. Your pulse breaks out into something appropriate for finishing a hundred yard dash. Your body –

Oh, my god, you’re back in it, you’re ten years old ago. You’re so skinny. Jesus. It’s amazing how much you look like your grandson, Yuri.

Your young entity is reading a book. The pages swim into your understanding: ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’.

You tear your attention from the page. You’re back in your parents house, Jesus, a place they sold during their divorce in the mid-1970s, back in the wood-paneled game room, built from the finished basement downstairs. In the corner is your father’s bar, positioned back there where he can see the television or play pool. You’re on that leather sofa he and your mother bought for the room. You remember, “This is where the dog barfed,” a disgusting moment that will happen in another year. You won’t even have the dog for a few more months.

There’s the big console TV. Brand new, the huge Zenith can broadcast in color. Taking over your young self – he doesn’t seem to notice – you pick up the remote control, amused at the differences between the technology of your youth, when color TV was new, and the technology of your life, using a computer to come back here. How the fuck is that even possible? You want to explore but you begin carefully, by turning on the television.

There is a show on in black and white. OMG, it’s the Kinks. Jesus, are they still even alive?

Then, releasing everything but enjoyment of the moment, you’re ten and watching the Kinks in your basement in black and white. Everything old is young and new, and you are free to believe that you can change the world.

 

6

Things I Don’t Miss

Didn’t need to scrap ice off my car this morning because it’s garaged. I felt for the neighbor out there de-icing his vehicle. There, I thought, is something I don’t miss, which launched me into musings about what else I don’t miss.

I don’t miss lite beers in any shape or vintage. Thank the gods for micro-brews and craft beers!

I don’t miss saving and counting pennies to buy a bag of pretzels as a treat or to go the movies. My years of extremely tight budgeting taught me the value of budgeting and saving but I enjoy indulging myself now, and I don’t miss those days at all!

I don’t miss military recalls, deployments and twelve hour shifts. I don’t miss midnight shifts, either, or pressing uniforms and getting haircuts all the time. Mission success was satisfying and I met some excellent people and saw the world, but I don’t miss all those other military accouterments.

I don’t miss cable television. Cable was cool and fun for a while but as it developed into a commodity and charged more and more while offering me less and less, it became a huge weight of disappointment. The smart television, Roku and streaming services aren’t perfect but they’re better than cable.

I don’t miss all those company meetings. Six AM, 9 PM…on some days with IBM I was on telephone calls and sorting and answering emails for hours. Don’t miss them at all, nor the annual performance report rituals. I really don’t miss completing expense reports. Just like the military, I enjoyed the company of some great people while I was with IBM (and the companies IBM absorbed, NetworkICE and ISS). Them, I miss. I also get a little misty eyed about the absent paycheck and its company.

I don’t miss old technology.  Take my old floppies – please (badaboom – tish). You can take them to where the IBM Selectrics and my Brother portable typewriters are buried, along with my old KayPro 10 and Zenith 150, and my clunky SVG and EVG color monitors, and 4.87 and 10 megahertz operating speeds.

It’s a short list of what I don’t miss. I had a good time through it all and came out fortunate in the end.

What don’t you miss?

 

 

8

Twelve Percent

Here I am, storming away, out of coffee, typing as fast as I can, unable to keep up with my mind’s streaming words until my fingers call, “Time out.”

Sitting up and stretching, massaging my fingers, I see how the coffee shop has changed since my arrival. I see my mocha is gone, that I drank it all. I think about getting another. But my laptop’s battery power is down to fourteen percent and I didn’t bring my power supply today. It’s going to be warning me soon that I need to shut down.

Putting it all together, I realize I’ve been writing – thinking, typing, editing – for almost ninety minutes with but a few pauses. I remember checking the time once and seeing it was 12:15. Now it’s 1:01.

Spending time with my characters and exploring their lives and situations was mesmerizing. I’m sorry that it’s ending. I think, maybe I can go power up at home and continue. But I know that’s not how ‘it’ works for me. Time to stop writing like crazy, pack it up and head home. The rain has stopped and the sun is shining, and I have some yard work planned, anyway.

Also, I just realized, I didn’t eat breakfast or anything, and I’m becoming very hungry.

And there is the laptop’s warning: twelve percent. Time to go.

5

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