Toshiba NB205 Netbook

I finally made the plunge and bought a netbook, a Toshiba NB205.  I had been wanting one since the Asus Eee PC 2G Surf was announced.  I kept waiting for better battery life, better keyboard, better screens, and finally decided I’d buy either the Asus Eee PC 1005HA or the Toshiba NB205 because of reviews in Laptop Magazine. 

The extensive review in Laptop Magazine practically gushed about the Toshiba, giving the Toshiba 4.5 stars, .5 more than any review that I had seen for a netbook, but the magazine was also was quite fond of the 1005HA, which it gave 4 stars, a rating many netbooks had achieved there.  And the Asus 1005HA had some features I really wanted more, like wireless-N, a better webcam, slightly better battery life, and not having a weird battery butt hanging out.  However, the Toshiba got rave comments from an Amazon customer reviewer who owned a Macbook Pro and claimed the Toshiba was the first netbook that had Apple-like build quality – that swayed me a good bit.  Plus everyone said the touch typing on the Toshiba was fantastic, and I had always found typing on any the netbooks I had used so far as being yucky at best.  Typing on the Toshiba is surprisingly great, at least for me.

I highly recommend using the netbook you are thinking about buying at a store before you purchase one.  Don’t just order one from Amazon, sight unseen.  Sales are staggering for netbooks, and I think a lot of people aren’t ready for this new computer size. 

The whole concept of a netbook is a compromise.  I paid $399 for my netbook.  When people hear they can get a laptop for $399 they think its a bargain they can’t pass up.  Buyer beware, netbooks use an Intel Atom processor that is far slower than your standard Centrino.  They use smaller and cheaper components.  10” screens are tiny, and the keyboards are very different.

Too many people I’ve met wanted a netbook because they are cheaper than a laptop.  Netbooks represent a functional design to meet specialized tasks.  Don’t go by price.  Buy one because you want to carry a computer to more places than you do now.  Or because you want a small form factor for a specialized reason.  I bought mine because I want to make it into a multimedia ebook to use in my La-Z-Boy.  A guy on Amazon said he bought one because he was afraid to take his expensive MacBook Pro on trips, but wasn’t afraid to risk a $400 machine.

Think of a netbook as a device that fits between an iPhone and laptop in finding a purpose for existence.  Smart phones allow users to take the Internet everywhere, but at a cost $70-$100 per month, and limiting their users to seeing the web on a 3.5” screen and typing with one finger.  A netbook requires no monthly fee, but getting the Internet means mooching Wi-Fi connections or buying a broadband subscription, but you get to see the web through a 10” window and type with all your fingers.  Netbooks originally came with 7” screens and tiny keyboards, but it was soon realized those dimensions were not practical unless you were a child with tiny fingers.

Unpacking and Setting Up

I bought my Toshiba at Office Depot, and they tried to pass off an opened machine as unopened, so I had to take it back and get an unopened box.  That annoyed me, but the actual experience of opening a new NB205 was very nice.  I was up and running very quickly.  Boot-up was fast.  There wasn’t much crapware on the machine, just a 30-day trial of Norton Internet Security 2009 and Microsoft Works with a bunch of custom Toshiba utilities for improving netbook living.  There were a handful of promotional short cuts on the desktop that I immediately deleted.

Netbooks don’t have CD/DVD drives for installing software, so anything you want needs to come from USB or over the net.  A very useful utility for owners of netbooks is a ISO image mounter, that allows you to treat an .iso image file like it was a CD/DVD drive.  I got a free program called Virtual CloneDrive from Slysoft.  This allowed me to install programs from work on my machine.  I downloaded the .iso file, clicked on it, and I had a virtual H: drive to install the program.  Very cool.

Like most computers I set up at work, wired connections are a snap, but wireless ones are annoying.  The Toshiba comes with the wireless and Bluetooth turned off.  I quickly spotted the FN + F8 key combination that would turn it on, but many people will miss that.  The Toshiba comes with damn little documentation.  Mostly a warranty and little pamphlet about Safety and Comfort.  Plus the standard Quick Start Guide.  It does not come with an install CD/DVD, but it does have a hidden partition to reinstall itself and provisions to make your own install DVD.  But you’ll need a USB DVD burner. 

On the Quick Start Guide they tell you to launch the User’s Guide on the computer.  It’s an Acrobat file.  Although the little NB205 screen is very nice and bright, I sent the User’s Guide to my desktop so I could read it on a 22” monitor.  The manual is okay, but like most, they have to have all kinds of wordy warnings, and exceptions depending on which country you are living in.  It’s hard to zero in on just the stuff you need to know immediately. 

Computer makers should put out two manuals – one that their lawyers would approve, and a second, that readers will like.  Better yet, put out a training video, or put a link to the web, and offer a better multimedia experience.

I’ve been spending hours trying to find a way to make the wireless work correctly.  This is a bad first experience bump in the road.  I don’t know if it’s Toshiba’s fault, or something with my Linksys Router.  But my other wireless devices work fine.  I hope it’s just a miscommunication setting.

Wireless Speed

Laptop Magazine reported that the Toshiba NB205 got faster than average transfer speeds with the built-in wireless connection, getting 21.30 Mbps download speeds at 10 feet from the router.  At ten feet from my router I’m getting .4 – .7 Mbps downloading speeds, which is significantly wrong.  I average around 2.2 Mbps upload speeds, which is great, but bizarre since upload speed are usually a fraction of downloading speeds.

Like most laptops today, the Toshiba came with wireless software that tries to wrestle control from Windows to manage the wireless connection.  The NB205 ships with Atheros, which does have a nice little utility to give back control to Windows.  Under Windows my download speed sucks, under Atheros, I can’t even make a connection, even though both systems tell me I have an excellent wireless connection.

Using a wired connection I can go to http://www.speedtest.net and achieve 22 Mbps download speeds.  Switching to wireless and I get .5 usually.  Where’s the problem?  So far I haven’t figured this out myself, and I may have to wait till after the holidays to contact Toshiba.  Carrying around my netbook in the house I can use the net, but it’s very slow, and unsuitable for streaming video, a feature many netbook users like.  I did check Hulu and YouTube under the wired connection, and the videos look great on the Toshiba’s little screen.

Battery Life

Laptop Magazine reported the NB205 got 8 hours and 33 minutes of battery life on their tests.  I used my machine over over 4 hours today and had 55% left on the battery meter, so that seems to pan out.  Not only that, the screen shows nice brightness with the power connector pulled.  I hate laptops that go all dim just to save battery life.

The reason why I wanted either the 1005HA or NB205 is because they got between 8-9 hours of useful battery life.  You can carry your machine around all day and not need to bring the power brick and cord.

LED LCD Screen

The LED backlit screen is lovely.  Bright and sharp.  I got TweakUI and removed the Recycle Bin from my desktop and set my taskbar to auto hide, so my desktop is completely clear of all icons and menus.  I always install Webshots, a desktop photo gallery program.  I want my desktop to be my art gallery, not an ugly collection of icons. 

If you pay Webshots a $19.99 annual fee, you can download unlimited photos from their archives and get wide screen crops.  I don’t know what Webshots does to the battery life, but I like seeing a slideshow of great nature photos for ten minutes now and then.  Having the outdoors as part of my indoor life is restful and contemplative.  People who come to my office at work often get mesmerized by my Webshot slideshows.  I’m used to visitors not looking at me when they are talking to me, but looking over my shoulder to my image gallery.  Some photos are dazzling.

I’ve set up Dell Mini netbooks that had higher resolution than the Toshiba, but the fonts are just too tiny.  1024 by 600 is a decent size, and the Toshiba’s desktop doesn’t looked squashed or stretched like I’ve seen on some netbook screen settings.  It’s a perfect little XP window.  I’ve very happy with the screen.

Keyboard and Track Pad

The keyboard is excellent for touch typing.  I like the island style keys, because the design does feel right.  Often on other keyboards I hit two keys at once, but not on this one.

The track pad also feels good, and has multi-touch features.  I keep doing something wrong though, with my fingering, because I keep causing the browser window go back a page.  That’s annoying, but probably my fault for unintentionally giving it the wrong command.

Plans for the Toshiba NB205 Netbook

I don’t want my little netbook to be a pint-size version of my desktop computer.  I want to find apps that take advantage of it’s size and on-the-go potential.  Take for instance Safari on the iPhone and iPod touch.  It’s very cool to have a browser that works so well on a 3.5” screen, but in reality I never use Safari to browse the web on my iPod touch.  But I don’t consider that a failure.  What Apple developers have done is bypass the browser with custom apps.

There are web pages that sense Safari on the iPhone and show a cut-down web page for better viewing.  And that’s great.  Instead I prefer a custom app for each task I routinely need.

For example, instead of using Safari to browse the web for movies and show times, I use an app called Now Playing.  It looks great on the 3.5” screen.  When I launch it, I’m shown a list of nearby theaters.  I pick one and I’m shown a list of movies playing at the theater with show times and Rotten Tomato ratings.  If I select a movie I’m given a paragraph about the movie and buttons to a video of the trailer, reviews and links to several web sites that offer more reviews.  I can even add the movie to my Netflix queue or send the movie times as an email.

In other words, several sites I’d normally browse to research going out to a movie, are combined into one app and formatted perfectly for the 3.5” screen.  What I want to find for the netbook is an app that does the same thing formatted for the 10” screen.  See the distinction.  Understand why I don’t want my netbook to be a tiny desktop?

Now I might have to get away from Windows to achieve this goal.  Jolicloud and Moblin are two alternative operating systems that make a  button menu system like on the iPhone for netbook computers.  But that’s just the start.  They also need to reformat the web applications so they are designed to be perfect on a 10” screen.  Right now they just call up desktop applications and browser applications for regular computers.

For example, most people who create magazines and newsletters to be distributed in acrobat reader, format them for 8.5 x 11 inch paper.  On rare occasions, I seen magazines formatted for acrobat to fit a full size computer screen.  This makes a stunning difference.  I wished I had a link to illustrate this.  iPhone apps are great because developers format for their screen.  Web apps on desktop computers often look odd because they were designed for the developer’s monitor and not yours.  How often have you gone to a web page with teeny tiny fonts and an extremely busy layout.  I bet it looks wonderful on the developer’s 24” Macintosh display.

I don’t know if developers will develop applications specific to 10” netbook displays, but I’m hoping.  Although I have Office 2007 running on my little machine, and it’s usable, it’s not pleasurable to use.  Now I might be able to put Word in full screen mode and be happy, but I’d rather have a word processor designed for a 10” screen.

I did downloaded Microsoft Reader and eReader to see how they looked on the Toshiba.  They are okay for reading ebooks on the 10” screen, especially eReader, because that program can be configured for a two page layout that makes the screen look like I’m reading from an open book.  I’ll have to explore more later, especially my old account at Fictionwise.com.  I’ve been trying to find a comfortable and practical ebook reader for years and years.  I have to admit the Kindle was very close.

I’ll return to the subject of the NB205 in the future, as I find more applications and tasks suited for what I want.  It’s a very nice little mini laptop.  I’ll need to buy a purse or some kind of messenger bag to carry my netbook.  It can’t be an on-the-go computer if I don’t take it everywhere I go.

JWH – 7/4/9

Kindle DX versus Netbook as Textbook

The holy grail of ebook visionaries is the electronic textbook.  Textbooks are huge, heavy and expensive and some poor school kids carry more weight on their backs than soldiers on a march.  It’s as common to see backpack humps on college kids backs as seeing cell phones in their hands.  Ebook promoters see dollar signs whenever they spot one of those humpback students lugging around all that printed matter.

And those ebook promoters are right.  Why carry forty pounds of paper when you can carry 1 pound of electronics?  But is the Kindle DX the answer?  I don’t think so.  First, let me give you a little story.  Years ago, before audio books were even common on cassette tape, I took a two semester Shakespeare course.  We covered almost 20 plays, each tested with a very detailed 10 question quiz.  I remember how I faithfully read and studied the first play and was shocked when I only got six of the ten questions.  The professor had a pattern.  Half of the questions could be easily answered with a fair reading of the play.  One question was always about a very obscure detail that kept most people from getting a perfect 10, and the other four questions divided the class between those who really got into the play and those who didn’t.

I realized a quick reading the night before class wasn’t going to cut it, so I went to the library and got each play on LP.  They came in boxed sets of 3-4 discs.  The records were old and scratchy, but usable.  This was in the early 1980s.  I’d play the records while reading the play – it took hours.  After that I always got perfect 10s on those quizzes.  Now my magic retention rate only worked if I faithfully followed the words on the page while listening to the same words spoken.  Reading or listening by itself didn’t work.  Other than these two Shakespeare courses I never used this learning technique again in school.

However, when I started using my ears as my main sensory input for reading back in 2002, I started playing around, experimenting with each form of input.  I paid attention to what I noticed when just reading with my eyes.  Then I paid attention to what I noticed, just from listening with my ears.   I would then read something I had just listened to, or vice versa.  Each time I’d found details I had missed with the opposite method.  I discovered what the eyes learned was different from what the ears remembered.

One book I did this experiment on was Emma by Jane Austen, a book I was reading for a book club.  I listened for an hour.  Then I reread that hour with my eyes.  Listening was great for getting a sense of character and dramatic action, but it was poor on retaining words.  Austen immediately introduced too many characters – that made the story confusing.   Each character live in a house with a name, often set in a different village, with another name to remember, so I was overwhelmed by people and place names.  Seeing all those names in print helped clear up many issues. 

Again, I concluded that to study a piece of writing for academic purposes, I needed to see it with my eyes if I wanted to memorize words and spellings.  However, by listening, I experienced the nuances of conflict, characterization and plot better.  Hearing stories helped me to to imagine 3D action and settings.  I saw color and details better when I heard the words rather than read them. 

Listening, which is far slower than reading, forced me to concentrate on the subject, and that was especially reinforced when I watched the words while also listening to them.  Seeing a word and hearing it made me think about it’s pronunciation and spelling more than when I just read it with my eyes.  But listening alone is terrible for learning spelling.  There are many books I’ve only heard that I have no idea how to spell the character’s names. 

I think these observations are key to the success of future etextbooks.  Strangely enough, the Kindle now offers to read books to their owners, but they also allow Kindle users to play MP3 or Audible.com audio books while reading, although I think few people take advantage of this feature.  I sold my Kindle 1.0 to my friend who prefers to read with her eyes and loves to travel, but I do have the Kindle reader software on my iPod touch and do some reading with it.  However, iPods can’t multitask, so I have to play the audio book on my Zune and read it on the iPod touch.

From this one anecdote you might surmise that the Kindle DX will make a great etextbook, but I’m not so sure.  I found the e-ink technology clumsy for random reading, which is often what people do when they study.  Also, kids studying will be taking notes for writing papers or passing tests, so I think the future of etextbooks will be on netbooks, and those little devices are great at multitasking, allow reading and note taking and even cutting and pasting of quotes.

To really memorize details for a studied subject, I think you need to see it, hear it, and then write about it.  iPhones and Kindles don’t help here.  When I write this blog I keep a browser window open, with tabs to Google, Wikipedia and OneLook (a dictionary gateway site).

The computer literacy movement of the 1980s promised so much but delivered so damn little.  I’ve always wondered why programmers couldn’t write programs that taught math.  Kids will play video games for hours, games that mesmerize them into deep rapt attention, tricking them into learning a myriad of details from game play.  Teaching mathematics via interactive computer animation should be a no brainer, but most software that attempted the job came up with dull drills and tedious flash cards.  That doesn’t mean the concept of computer aided learning is a bust.  Anyone who has played with Mathematica should shout they’ve seen the light.

What’s needed is a synthesis of many learning techniques and technologies.  First, I think etextbooks won’t be ebooks.  That’s way too lame.  Etextbooks should combine video lectures, film clips, audio, computer CGI, and photos to go with old fashion black on white text, plus add tests, quizzes, puzzles, word problems, virtual worlds, games and any other interactive method to get kids to practice math.

If I had the money and resources to create etextbook on mathematics I would build my course around the history of math.  I’d take it from anthropological ancient history to theoretical here and now.  But I’d build it as a suite of components, usable on different platforms in different study environments.  So if the user only wanted voice, in iPod mode, they could spin through the centuries to find MP3 podcasts about the history of math.  If they were in a mood to play with their Nintendo DS, they could load up a mathematical game, or install a challenging game app on their iPhone.  If they were in the mood for a documentary, I’d let them stream video to their television sets.  Hell, I’d even offer to print puzzles for when they have to sit on the pot.

I’d also find some way to create a scoring system, especially one that could be tied to a Elo type rating system, like they use in chess, so students would feel challenged to compete.  It would be great if the American Mathematical Society had a way to rank people’s knowledge of the various Mathematics Subject Classifications.   Kids love video games because they enjoy beating friends with a specialized skill, and they also love competing against a computer too.  Traditional schooling is so boring and passive. Etextbooks need the challenge of competition, but it would be so tired if all they did was offer time competitions on who could finish solving ten equations first.

What if a Civilization type game required various mathematical skills to play, so if a student wanted to build a pyramid in the game he’d need to know geometry, or if she wanted her little Sims to sail across an ocean, she’d have to use celestial navigation to advance the game.

In other words, if publishers are only going to take the text from their printed books and put it in an ebook, that’s not going to work.  Even if the Kindle had full color and resolution to match the printed page, so a Kindle book could contain all the photos and illustrations of the real textbook, I still don’t think it will be equal to using paper volumes.  Modern textbooks are gorgeous compared to what I remember I had to use as a kid.  If I had the choice between 5 books, weighing 40 pounds, and 1 Kindle weighing less than a single pound, I’m afraid I’d shoulder the burden, because real textbooks are far easier to use, and much more spectacular to look at.  I kid you not.  If you haven’t seen a text in forty years, go find a kid and look at theirs.

When I owned my Kindle and subscribed to Time magazine, I found it easiest to read from page one to page last, and endure the time it took to page past articles I didn’t want to read.  There were navigation links, but between flipping back to the table of contents and to an article to see if I wanted to read it, it was just easier to stay in linear mode of page, page, page, page….

Etextbooks will only be better if they offer a variety of ways to study.  Ultimately, I don’t think individual etextbooks will be the answer.  I think students will subscribe to an online textbook service, and pay $4.99-$19.99 a month per course, and access a myriad of multimedia features, paying about the same as buying a textbook for a one semester course.

The old way to going to college involved scheduling a class with a professor and studying a book together in a room with other students for a few months.  Online instruction means studying on your own with a professor you might never meet who shepherds unseen students through a system of requirements.  Wouldn’t you prefer a textbook service that gave you podcasts to listen to at the gym or grocery store or while doing the dishes, and video lectures to watch before bedtime, and online games to play against your classmates, and ebooks to read on your iPhone at break at work.  Local college professors may stop lecturing, and end up becoming educational gurus who help their students find their way to enlightenment in the subjects they paid to master.

The textbook of the future will have to be very flexible.  I don’t even go to school, but I study all the time.  I just finished the audio book The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg about cosmology of the early universe just after the big bang.  I’m about to read the hardback and listen to the audio book of The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, which will go deeper into many documentaries I’ve been watching lately on The Science Channel and PBS, but I also want something more systematic, so I’m going to get a DVD set or two from The Teaching Company.  Their great DVD courses would be fantastic to keep on a netbook.

The more I study cosmology and physics, the more I feel the need to study mathematics.  I wish I could find something like the RosettaStone language courses to help me.  I also wish I had something that tested and rated my knowledge.  I don’t feel the need to go back to college and major in physics, but if an astronomical association offered online testing, with amateur rankings, I might be tempted by their challenge.  Our K-12 upbringing made most of us to hate learning, mainly because they made gaining knowledge all about passing crappy tests.  Video games are a form of test taking, a fun kind, that addict kids.

It’s a shame that most adults study new subjects like snacking on potato chips.  We constantly nibble on information but are never challenged to do anything with our empty data calories.  People will spend 60 hours a week playing online video games that require an amazing amount of study just to slay imaginary dragons or build pretend lives in Second Life.  Why not set up servers and let players build an historically accurate virtual Tudor England, so they could apply their hobby history scholarship to a challenge.  What if teachers told their students, “Your homework for this week is to create a virtual Mayflower, and show why the Puritans came to America.  Each of you must flesh out one historical character and show that person in twenty scenes from their life interacting with the characters your classmates create.  Please tell you’re parents they aren’t allowed to play this week.”

See why I think existing invention of the textbook shouldn’t be converted into a gadget that only displays electronic words and images on an electronic page because it’s lighter than a bulky book?  Modern textbooks are already bursting their bindings trying to become multimedia experiences.  E-ink would be a huge step backwards.  Go find a 2009 textbook, and flip through it.  What I’m saying will be obvious.  It will also be obvious that the weight of all the knowledge within that tome won’t be easily consumed by your darling rug rat.  Today’s kids chow down on HD video and 1080p Xbox games.  The Sirens of virtual worlds call to kids and the printed black letter on white paper, or gray e-ink, just won’t charm them.

JWH – 7/3/9   

Predicting Technological Change

In the last few days I’ve helped many people set up their new iPhones with the campus Exchange server and wireless registration.  I can’t even count how many people I know now that have an iPhone, but they tend to be young, but not always.  I don’t own an iPhone myself, but I do have an iPod touch.  I’m too cheap to own a smart phone, even though I would love to own an iPhone, I won’t allow myself to pay another big monthly communication’s bill. 

I’ve been working with computers since 1971, and have always been gadget crazy, but I’ve yet to join the craze over expensive cell phones.  That will change when I see the right netbook.

When people come to me for help with their iPhone, they like to show off all their favorite iPhone apps, and there are an amazing variety of these little programs.  Some apps, like games, are built on concepts that developed on the desktop computer.  Other apps, like those that help find restaurants or tell you what song is playing have evolved from needs of people on-the-go.

I used to tell people that the way to predict technological innovation was to forecast tech growth in gadgets that were jettison components with moving parts.  For example, the floppy disk.  It’s been replaced by the flash drive.  Soon the CD/DVD optical drive will disappear because of high speed networking.  And finally the hard drive will disappear because of solid state devices.  Looking at the phenomenon of netbooks shows off this trend.  They don’t have optical drives.  And many users try to ditch their spinning hard drives for SSD drives.

I should have taken my own advice, and not bought a Blu-Ray player because I have only played one Blu-Ray disc so far, and instead watched 14-15 downloads from Netflix.  The no moving parts of the Netflix feature on the LD BD390 is far more appealing than the Blu-Ray player with moving parts.

Now, besides telling people to watch for gadgets that have no moving parts, I tell friends, to keep an eye out for tech with programming geared for on-the-go tech users.  That’s part of what I was getting at with my last post “My Life on a Hard Drive.”  It appears that netbooks should kindle the same excitement as iPhones.

I was watching Brink, a show on the Science Channel the other night, and they were showing off a wearable video projector that allowed people to use their hands to interact and play with computer screens  projected onto almost any kind of surface.  This gadget has no moving parts, and it’s designed for on-the-go computing.  I can easily imagine future netbooks or iPhones with a built in video projector.

One class of apps that my young iPhone acquaintances are showing me are those that help find places to eat.  None of the people I hang out with have an iPhone, we’re all too old and cheap, but one of us needs to get one, because we always argue so much about where to eat that’s new and not boring.  The idea of every nearby eatery and their menu popping up on a screen based on location is just too cool, even for us old farts.

Now think about where tech wizards could take this concept.  Last weekend I wanted a copy of The Kings of Leon’s latest album, and the only nearby place I could think to shop was Target.  I drove over only to be disappointed.  What if I had an app that told me ahead of time all the places that were selling the CD and its price.  Won’t this trump Amazon.com?   Or what if I was in my local Borders and wanted to know where a book was shelved, so instead of asking a clerk, my phone could just tell me.  I’m sure you can think of several good apps now, related to being somewhere and wanting instant information.

Of course, this leads to another prediction.  Future tech seems to put people out of work.  I’m getting very close to not wanting to buy music CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, magazines or books because of technological alternatives.  If I can listen to music, watch movies, read books and magazine articles all on a netbook or iPhone, why would I want to acquire all the physical crap required to store media I can get easier via the net?

Notice something?  My habits are changing and they just invalidated the suggested ideas I had for new on-the-go apps.  Any shopping app I predict shouldn’t involve buying things like CDs, DVDs, and other physical storage tech that’s being outdated by digital tech.  We’ll want apps not to buy stuff, but to get services like food, movies, plays, tourist sites, concerts, etc.  Again, on-the-go over the impulse to acquire.

Some stuff, like clothes, I don’t think will be replaced by tech.  Who really wants to wear a computer?  Unless the fabric design is computerized.  But I predict we’ll want smaller wardrobes because of our rolling stone natures. 

But the same predictions about computer tech can be applied to automobile tech.  Electric cars have fewer parts.  They promote on-the-go lifestyles.  The goal is to get to a point where you don’t buy physical fuel.  By the same token, mass transit does away with owning something with moving parts. 

Look at computer games.  The trend is away from buying discs to getting games off the net, and to carry around devices where you can play games anywhere.  Also, the trend is to combine devices.  Why have a phone and a portable game unit when you can have an iPhone?  Why have a GPS and travel books, when an iPhone can replace them?  Why have a camera and voice recorder when you can have an iPhone?

The question becomes:  Will the iPhone become the super gadget, or will it be the netbook?  The flip phone was too small, and the laptop too big.  What will meet in the middle?

As a society become more mobile, all of us get tired of carry around so much junk.  Every time I moved in my life, I always had more junk than the previous move, more boxes of books, LPs, CDs and other stuff.  The next time I move, I’m going to have less.  I’ve already gotten rid of my LPs.  I’m thinning out CDs.  I’m switching from buying DVDs to Netflix.  I’ve stopped buying CDs because of Rhapsody, Zune, Lala and Pandora.  I keep my photos on my computer.  And my dream retirement would be to travel light and live in a different city every six months.  See the trends?  You don’t need a crystal ball and a turban on your head to play tech swami.

But here’s a prediction that might not be so obvious.  I think programming should be nearing a breakthrough where educational computing makes a comeback.  Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, personal computing and educational software were all the rage.  People felt obligated to buy their kids computers.  Everyone talked about computer literacy.  But programs that taught never panned out.  

Online courses and degrees are a huge growth industry in the education business.  Notice the connection to on-the-go people.  Eventually the market for apps that help us get more services will saturate.  Sooner or later, I think we’ll see iPhone and netbook apps that help us learn and study.  We have portable music, portable TV shows, and portable audio books, why not portable lectures?  It’s like having a school without teachers.   The Teaching Company’s Great Courses would be fantastic on the netbook screen.  And see, this educational angle may turn the tide against the iPhone to the netbook as the on-the-go device of just the right size.

JWH – 7/1/9  

My Life on a Hard Drive

I wanted to call this essay, “My Life on a Terabyte Drive” because it sounded cooler and more specific, but then I’m thinking about buying a netbook and they only come with 160 gigabytes of hard drive space, something less glamorous to say in a title.  I can’t even fit my music collection on that, so it wouldn’t be true either.  If you read to the end of this essay, you’ll see I could have called it, “My Memory Book,” but that title wouldn’t mean anything to you until I explained it all. 

Either at work, or with friends, I’ve had to help many people move their personal data from one computer to another.  When I started this kind of support years ago, all I needed was one floppy.  The last time I moved my stuff to a new machine, I bought a 750gb USB drive.  No, I didn’t need to fill it up, at least not then.  My Mozy.com account says I have 193.3gb backed up with them, but that’s only my life from one of three home computers, and I’ve yet to complete the epic task of scanning all my family photos.

When I contemplate putting my life on a hard disk many fanciful ideas come to mind.  I like to compare this goal to mind uploading, a science fictional concept that deals with transferring a person’s personality to a computer.  I first wrote about this idea in “My Life in 75 Megabytes,” which lets you know how long I’ve been thinking about this concept.  Back then my own expanding universe was much smaller, and could fit on a zip disk.

I find I have seven discrete concepts I’d like to explore in this essay:

1. What goes into a digitized life?
2. How is a digital life organized?
3. How do we synced ourselves across many machines?
4. What role does the media player play?
5. How to we span living across local and network drives?
6. What do we need to protect our digital memory?
7. And do our files define our personality?

Thinking about buying a netbook that will be my carry-around auxiliary mind, a Mini-Me, so to say, I’d like to think about it’s full theoretical potential.  Let’s just play with the idea of what we’d like to have on a computer if one day we found ourselves orphaned from home with only the clothes on our back and a computer in our hand.

What Goes Into a Digitized Life?

Photographs have been the primary artifact that people want to protect and preserve.  Photographs are what people cry over the most when their CPU bytes the big one.  Next up is music files, either ripped, stolen or DRMed.  Few people stuff their machines with essays and fiction like me, but many folks like to maintain a wordy autobiography in the form of an email archive.  A few $-minded souls, horde tax records like misers.  And I’m starting to see hard drives become the new shoebox for home videos.  I myself, have hundreds of audio books that I’ve tediously ripped from cassette tapes and CDs that I’d hate to lose.  My wife wants to preserve video games, and their activation codes.  I’ve met a few people who maintain databases of things they love to collect.  When it comes down to it, there’s an almost endless variety of things people junk up their hard drives with and want to save forever.

All this digital junk can be broken down into two extremely distinct types:  Unique, owner created data, that can’t be found anywhere else, and copies of stuff other people created, either received free, stolen or bought.  It’s far more painful to have a laptop stolen with five years of digital snapshots than one with hundreds of dollars worth of songs bought from iTunes.

For the purpose of this essay, let’s not worry about the actual size of the hard drive on your buddy computer, but instead imagine this device will contain everything you want to save that can be digitized and if found in 30 years by your grandchildren, or 300 years by a scholar of the 21st century history, would make a statement about who you are.  Think about this super-netbook as your library of personally created data, plus copies of your favorite songs, books, audiobooks, movies, TV shows, paintings, poems, short stories, novels, etc.  Just think of it as the memory you wished your neurons could records.

The File Structure of Our Lives

I don’t know if you’ve ever gone into someone else’s computer and tried to extract what they desperately want to save, but it’s a fascinating task.  Microsoft, Apple and Linus all make provisions for storing user documents in a specified place, but users do their damnedest to squirrel important files all over their drives.  And even when they stick to the Home directory concept, everyone creates their own folder structure and naming system.  In recent years the idea of standard music and photo folders have emerged, which is great, but I think we need to convene a panel of Nobel prize winning eggheads to develop a worldwide standard, to be used across all OS systems, so future archeologists poking through our private digital junkyards can easily find our treasured entombed memories, and make sense of them.

We need to organize our auxiliary brains and keep them tidy for ourselves too, because as we toss more stuff into our net noggins, finding what we want becomes harder and annoying.  I love the fact that most applications in Windows now open My Documents as default when you mouse click Open File.  It drives me nuts that people want to override this and put their crap all over the desktop or in folders they created off of the root drive. 

I’m also glad Microsoft simplified “My Documents,” “My Music,” and “My Pictures” into Documents, Music and Pictures.  But now we need to expand on that to include Videos, Movies, Books and other categories.  This is where things get tricky, where arguments start, and OS turf wars begin.  Under “Jim” on my Vista machine I have:

• Desktop
• Downloads
• Links
• Pictures
• Searches
• Documents – Shortcut
• Contacts
• Documents
• Favorites
• Music
• Saved Games
• Videos

This is how Microsoft divides my life, and they’ve made some mysterious choices to me.  I wish I had a Mac so I could see how Steve Jobs wants the same job accomplished.  Ubuntu just gives me a home folder, leaving me free to make my own decisions from there   Since our computer will define our personality and I said we could save anything digital document that defines us, this means the home folder will become a library of digital files.  I’m not sure if the structure set out by Microsoft is a workable Dewey Decimal system for this task though.

What folder do I file my digital audio books?  Where do I put my ebooks or .pdf files for magazines and articles?  And should I save Gattaca, my favorite science fiction movie under Videos, the same place where I would store my home made clips?  And if I collected favorite YouTube videos, should they also be filed with my personal videos?

I think we need to rethink the \Home\ folder concept.  \Jim\ should be just for documents I created, and another folder called \Library\ should be used for all files I collect that were created by other people.  And the two might even have sub-folders with the same titles, like \Videos\,  \Photos\ and \Music\.  (That’s assuming I become more creative than I am now.)  Thus the new \Jim\ might contain these sub-folders:

• Audioclips
• Banking
• Blogs
• Bookmarks
• Data
• Diary
• Emails
• Essays
• Fiction
• HTML
• Lists
• Medical
• Numbers
• Photos
• Timeline
• Video

This isn’t perfect yet, but I hope you see where I’m going.  Under \Library\ I might have these sub-folders:

• Art
• Audiobooks
• Books
• Lectures
• Magazines
• Movies
• Music
• Photographs
• Podcasts
• Television
• Video

In my personal folder, I have Photos, for those I take, but Photographs under Library, for pictures I buy.  Art would be for digitized artwork I like.  My desktop gallery program could be set to pull from Art, Photos and Photographs.

How to Keep our Digital Life Synced?

I have two desktop machines and laptop at home, and various iPod and MP3 players, including a iPod touch, and I’m planning to buy a netbook.  Plus I have several computers at work with years of programming code I created that I never want to loose.  At work I have USB drive I brought from home that has a backup of all my home files, but in particularly, my music library so I can play songs at work.  At times I also bring USB drives home, so my work is backed up.

The absolute ideal file storage solution would a 100% reliable gigabit network to a federally protected online databank with all my computers accessing one file system library that was perfectly safe until the Sun goes nova.  Plus, my data would be preserved for ever and ever, even after I died, for historical researchers.  I’m watching The Tudors – don’t you wish the producers of the show had access to Henry’s and Anne’s home directories?

Unfortunately, we don’t have such an ideal solution.  The trend is toward owning multiple computers, and by computer I also mean cell phone, iPod, and even video game units, anything that processes and stores digital data you create.   And we’re already seeing syncing solutions.  You can backup cell phone directories to your home computer, or if you have an iPhone, you can get your email, contacts and calendar from an Exchange server at work, thus syncing your phone numbers in one database.

In fact, the iPhone is a marvelous device, in that it can sync songs, photos, audiobooks, television shows, movies and other files from your mothership desktop to your lifeboat phone.  Apple doesn’t seem to like the concepts of netbooks, hoping you will use an iPhone/touch instead.  However, I find their amazing little screen too small to be my carry-around computer companion.

The Role of the Media Player

iTunes is also a fascinating program and concept.  It’s a program that attempts to manage the \Library\ portion of your file system, and a media player for playing songs, television shows, movies and audiobooks from your library.  With a bit of tweaking from Apple, it theoretically could handle my Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher and PDF documents too, if we wanted one file librarian to manage all my computer files, including the personally created \Jim\ files too.  Wouldn’t that be cool?

Right now we generally have one program that creates each kind of content, such as a word processer for writing, a spreadsheet for playing with numbers, a database for handling data in tables, a publishing program for making magazine content, web editors for creating web pages, audio programs for recording voice, and so on.  But on the other hand, there are two classes of programs emerging that show us the results of what these other programs produce.  The first general class of file viewers is the web browser for looking at data files on the net, and the second program is the media librarian for looking at files on your computer.

I’m not sure if media librarians are a good idea or not.  They are designed to make life easier for the user and isolate the user from knowing about the file system.  The entire Macintosh philosophy seems to follow this belief too, that things are easier if you keep the user from needing to know too much about the file system.  I’m not sure that’s a good educational goal.  Both the web browser and media librarian work to replace the operating system.  An emerging class of Linux netbooks work to create an easy-to-use visual menu that sits on top of the OS and hides things from the user too.

The trouble is, if users work directly with the file system and double clicks on one, whether word processor document, or mp3 music file, those files will be launched into an editor program, rather than a player program, assuming the user created the files.  Media librarians like iTunes, Windows Media Player, Rhapsody, Audible Manager are great for organizing and playing certain kinds of files, producing playlists, sharing media with other users, etc.  The trouble is to select one universal media library program that does everything perfectly.

When I download an audiobook from Audible.com, it goes into my iTunes and Audible Manager, and I can have it also go into my Windows Media Player.  Sometimes the download gets messed up and the audiobook doesn’t get filed in one of the players.  So I have to find the file and manually add it to the library.  iTunes files all MP3 files under Music, so songs and ripped audio books get mixed together.  That annoys me.

Plus iTunes only wants to work with iPods, so it doesn’t help me when I use my Zune.  But then my Zune Media player won’t have anything to do with my iPods.  And all my media librarians fight to own my MP3 collection of 18,000+ songs.  It’s a huge pain.  I also have multiple programs willing to play my videos too, but none are universal, thus I have to have specialty programs like Amazon Unbox to view videos bought from Amazon.

Right now you can set Windows to launch any program you choose for a particular file extension.  Thus if I have Rhapsody set for .mp3, it will launch when I click on a song or an audiobook or a podcast, all of which share the .mp3 extension.  I wish Windows would allow a folder override to this system, so for \Audiobooks\ I could set Audible Manager as a my player, and for \Music\ I could set Windows Media Player, and for \Podcasts\ I could set iTunes.

Now that we’re slowly moving away from DRM enslaved files, we will be less reliant on media librarian programs like iTunes.  Also, why does your favorite program to play songs also have to be your program to load songs onto a MP3 player?  And why can’t I have one librarian for all my devices, including iPods, Creative MP3 players, Zune, phone and netbooks?  Every portable device has a limited amount of storage space, so wouldn’t it be great to have a librarian on my largest computer that could talk to all my lesser computers and help me manage a subset of files I want to maintain on each?

I would love a librarian where I could rate my content 1-10, whether songs, movies or word documents, and then when I plug in a portable device, the librarian would show me how much that device can handle by telling me, “This device can hold all content rated 8 and above, would you like me to load it?”  Or I could set it to always load personally created data first, then songs as a second priority, and only sync television marked unseen, and to manually sync movies.

Even still, I’m not sure I like one program to do everything for me.  I like choice.  I like the Unix philosophy of having a tool for each job.  I think I’d prefer to pick each app that played each kind of file.  That way I could have the perfect ebook reader for me that might be different from my perfect music player.   Hell, I might like one kind of MP3 player for playing albums, another for playing playlists, another for random playing of songs, and even another program where I play and manage my all-time favorite 1,001 tunes.  And all of these would work from the same \Music\ folder structure.  I’d also like a program that would generate reports on the \Music\ folder by listing all albums, artists and tracks, and keep statistics on each.  I have no idea how many albums I own, even though they are all on a computer.

Hard Disk Driving versus Network Driving

As the Internet get better, meaning faster and with more features, space on our local hard drives will be needed less, until we only need to store personally created data.  If Rhapsody’s library had every song my personal music library did, I’d never mess with a \Music\ folder again.  If the network was fast and always dependable, I wouldn’t even worry about putting songs, television and movies on my devices because I’d just stream them from Lala, Rhapsody, Pandora, Zune, Netflix and Amazon.  A netbook with a 160gb hard drive would be fine and dandy as my auxiliary brain until I took too many photos or videos.  And if I could store unlimited photos and videos reliably online, I’d again be free of hard drive space limitations.

If the the broadband and the network were that great I wouldn’t even need a \Library\ file system at all.  However, any experience with flaky network connections will make you horde your favorite content locally.

There’s a reason why they call these cute little computers netbooks.  They are gadgets designed to depend on the Internet for their content.  I’ve never wanted a smartphone because I’ve never wanted to pay a broadband cell phone bill, but I’d be much more likely to want broadband service with a netbook.  And all the cell phone providers are quickly ramping up to sell netbooks with two-year broadband contracts. 

Laptops were supposed to be on-the-go computing, but they have been too big, too expensive and don’t last long enough on a charge, to be the always on-the-go computers.  I just don’t want to carry an expensive laptop everywhere, afraid I might break it, lose it, or have it stolen, but I might carry a $350 machine everywhere I went, especially if it’s charge would last all day like a cell phone, and I could get access to the net.

I’ve set up a half-dozen netbooks so far, all for women who want these purse size computers.  I’ve had several grown women in my office all squealing like girls over purple and pinkness.  They don’t even understand the potential of netbooks, all they see is pretty and purse-able.  They even buy netbooks with their own money for work use.  I’ve talked to other women that bought them for home use at Walmart or from the Home Shopping Channel, and they tell me their kids are buying them too.  Netbooks are hot.  $250-$400 seems to be the right price for portable computing.

I’m waiting for 8 hours of battery life, which many models have now, and better video processing, which is coming this fall.  I’d also like faster processing and I’m torn on deciding between a 10” or 12” screen, and what resolution it should have.  I’ve set up a Dell Mini 10 with 1366×768 resolution that’s super sharp but teeny tiny  But the Dell’s was properly proportioned at the resolution, something not true of all netbook screens I’ve seen.  I hate squashed or stretched fonts!  

Netbooks are getting very close to showing 1080p video, so they will make great on-the-road theaters that can replace portable DVD players and iPods, plus they make great Skype video phones.  Combined with broadband and Bluetooth headsets, they can be cell phones too.  The implications for this auxiliary brain as a communications tool is immense.

Backing Up is Hard To Do

As we put more of our life on our netbooks, or should we steal a trademark, our Lifebooks, it will be vital to back them up.  If netbooks are synced with desktop computers, that’s one level of backup.  Asus even sells their netbooks with 10gb of online storage.  And there is always services like Mozy.com that backup files to Internet servers.  But the main thing to remember, these devices will become our heads we can lose, and we’ll hate the day we experience a digital lobotomy.  I’ve always said the Internet is our real sixth sense, and netbooks will only reinforce this belief.  Once we all got addicted to electrical devices like computers and televisions, we’d get pissed when electricity went off.  After I became dependent on the net, I actually get jumpy and depressed when the net goes down.  If we become addicted to our little buddy computers we carry everywhere, losing one will be painful indeed.  Like losing part of ourselves.  Being able to quickly replicate our digital life onto a replacement netbook will be extremely important.

Do Our Files Reflect Our Personality?

If a team of psychologists with AI tools, found my future netbook with all my writing and all my favorite photos, art, books, movies, television shows, songs, on it, could they analyze the content and produce a description of my personality?  If netbooks had been around for hundreds of years, and we could study the content of our ancestors, how much would we know about them?  My father died when I was 19, and there has always been so much I’ve wondered about him.  I would love to have a copy of his auxiliary brain.

Also, imagine kids starting school with netbooks and keeping all their schoolwork, photos and videos they make throughout their K-12 careers.  Boy, I wished I had such a childhood treasure.  I wished I had taken photos of all my classmates, all my classrooms, hallways, schools and teachers.  I wish I had taken photos of all the homes I lived in, with photos of all the rooms, furniture and the streets I walked.  We always focused our cameras on families and friends, but I wished I had also taken photos of objects, like houses, rooms, streets, cars of my life, to aid my memory.  I’ve forgotten so much that I’d love to recall.  Maybe it has little true value, because I did forget all that stuff, but now I wish I had more evidence of my earlier life.  I wish I had photos of every dog and cat I owned.  I can barely picture my furry friends now, mostly just recall their names, like Blacky, Chief or Mike, and some I can’t even remember, which is sad.

I seriously doubt there is much real detail to download from our brains, if such a science fictional reality is ever possible.  I don’t know if personality profiles can be resurrected from netbooks, but I think my sense of personal history would be much stronger, and my self awareness, far more vivid, if my poor old brain had more solid evidence.

The Future of Netbooks

Thinking about these seven concepts of how we could store our life digitally and have it readily at hand, to help us with day-to-day activities, makes me picture all kinds of possibilities for netbooks.  I doubt our futures will include jacks in the back of our skulls like the people in the movie, The Matrix, but the netbook could become the mind-computer interface between ourselves and the net. 

With Bluetooth, we could have cell phone like headsets, so we could make calls, but also use our netbooks for dictating voice recordings, to aid our memory with verbal annotations.  Photo and video cameras could be combined with Bluetooth so anything we snap or video is immediately recorded to our external brains.  Medical monitoring devices could be combined with Bluetooth, netbooks and broadband for new kinds of health tracking and assessment.  Netbooks will only expand social networking, and if our youthful population is so close now because of cell phones, think what constant video phoning will do to their generation.

Netbooks might finally bring us into the age of videophone that’s been predicted by science fiction since Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon entertained tykes in the 1930s in the Sunday funnies.  Computer pundits thought we’d all be wearing computers by now, but maybe a good device that’s easy to carry will do instead.  This makes me predict purses will become common for men, at least leather over-the-shoulder pouches, or we’ll see more men with messenger bags.  But netbooks are so easy to carry, they may never get to far from our hands.

If netbooks had reversible LCD touch screens as a standard feature, so they could function like Tablet PCs, netbooks could replace the emerging ebooks devices like the Kindle and Sony Reader.  Right now I find it easiest to carry a cell phone in my pants pocket and a Zune in my shirt pocket, one for phone service the other for audiobooks.  But if I have a netbook with me wherever I go, or nearby, then all I would need to carry on my person is a Bluetooth headset.  Should I predict the demise of the iPhone and iPod?

The deciding factors on buying a netbook is how big the screen and keyboard, and whether or not they are useable for long periods of typing and reading.  I bought an iPod touch to be my carry around computer, but I didn’t like typing with a single finger, and the screen was too small for browsing the web.  It’s pretty nice for reading text email, terrible for HTML email, very nice for checking movie times and looking at previews, pleasant for reading ebooks, although I might like a slightly larger screen, and very nice for Pandora and Wolfgang’s Vault. 

When netbooks first burst on the scene in 2007, their appeal included solid state storage over spinning hard drives, so, “My Life on a Hard Drive” might be a poor title soon, but if spinning drives disappear, I predict we’ll still call solid state devices hard drives too.  Technology is evolving away from moving parts, so we might eventually call netbooks, memory books, the name I want to use for them.  If the right technology pans out, and the right pricing for broadband emerges, memory books might be very common indeed. 

What will you put on your memory book?  How will you organize it.  How can a memory book improve your life?  A good portion of our population has been able to avoid the computer revolution, but if a memory book becomes so personally useful, will anyone choose to be a Luddite in this revolution?  As I age, and my memory falters and skips, being able to query a memory book becomes a very useful mental crutch.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad.  Will it make me weaker or stronger?

I do know organizing my thoughts for this blog helps me retain words, and even learn to use new words.  Writing these blogs help me refine and distinguish discrete ideas and concepts.  In the past year I’ve met a number of people, usually young, who have asked me what my favorite movies, books and songs are, and I had a hard time making a quick list.  That disturbs me.  Maybe if I constantly worked to maintain a library of favorites on my memory book, or even just keep my memory book handy and constantly annotated a list of favorites, I would feel better.  Who knows, I might not even need to open my memory book, but my real memory of such lists would be fresh enough to have something to say in casual conversations.

I don’t know if my memory weakness is normal for someone my age, or if it portends Alzheimer’s in future years.  My wife already gets impatient with my slowness to respond, and hates when I tell her she better start acquiring more patience in case I get worse.  “You better not,” she warns me.  Having a memory book might become the glasses of my memories someday.  Or my memory book might become a very large hand to write notes on.  Or it my memory book might become a gym to exercise my neurons.   This is all fascinating to consider, and I can’t wait to test out these ideas.  I’m just not ready to buy a netbook yet.

JWH – 6/28/9

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The Time Machine is the big bang origin of the science fiction universe.  I’ve read The Time Machine a couple times before in my life, but I never noticed that it was the origin of all science fiction, but then I haven’t spent the last decade rereading the classics of science fiction before either.  On this third reading, this time via audio book, it seemed quite obvious that The Time Machine is the first science fiction novel.

Now a lot of people are going to argue with my revelation, by bringing up Jules Verne, or Mary Shelley, or many other stories that have fantastic elements in them.  And I completely understand because those stories are a kind of science fiction too.  No, I’ve come to the conclusion there are two types of stories labeled science fiction.  There’s the all-purpose label that imprecisely gets slapped onto almost any kind of far-out tale, and a second type, that’s very rare, that’s illustrated by what H. G. Wells wrote with The Time Machine.

This truer version of science fiction was created by Wells as a method to use science to speculate about the future.  Many writers have written stories that extrapolated the future from present trends, but Wells uses what he learned from the sciences, evolution and cosmology, to write what is essentially the matching bookend to the biblical book of Genesis.

The Time Machine comes after Charles Darwin, but before Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble, but it’s message is just as thrilling and full of sense of wonder being read in 2009 as it was in 1895.  If you read this story as an adventure using a time machine, then you are seeing the book as generic science fiction.  If you read this book and realize that H. G. Wells is using his current day science to speculate about the evolution of man as a species, and the death of the Earth, then the term science fiction means something different.

H. G. Wells actually present three major speculative ideas for the readers of The Time Machine:

• Time travel is the obvious idea that everyone talks about, but few people analyzes Wells theory for time travel.
• Just a few decades after Darwin’s famous book, Wells suggests that mankind could branch into new species, and even species that aren’t as intelligent as home sapiens.
• Finally, Wells paints a picture of the end of Earth after mankind is long gone.

H. G. Wells produces the essential elements of the science fiction novel out of these efforts.  Most people think inventing the concept of a time machine is the main science fiction element, but it’s not.  If the unnamed hero of this novel had traveled backwards in time, the time machine would only be a gimmick for writing historical fiction with a modern protagonist.  An absolute essential element of science fiction is its speculation about the future.

Many writers have suggested that Frankenstein is the first science fiction novel, but I don’t think that’s true, because the story wasn’t about the future.  It’s a horror novel.  A novel about a monster.  After reading The War of the Worlds immediately after The Time Machine and I’m struck by the immense difference between the two.  The War of the Worlds is an exciting novel, with far out aspects, and even sense of wonder, but it doesn’t feel like The Time Machine, it doesn’t feel like a science fiction novel that The Time Machine was.  It’s not about the future.  It’s about monsters from space.  It’s another horror novel.

Now I understand why I never felt H. P. Lovecraft was a science fiction writer even when he wrote about invaders from space.  I don’t know why movies like The Thing, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Them and all those other monster stories from the 1950s were considered classic science fiction films, putting them into same the genre as Forbidden Planet and 2001, A Space Odyssey.

When I start to think about this I see the term science fiction as a box for throwing all kinds of odds and ends into that are hard to classify.  Most people throw UFO or X-Files type stories into the science fiction box and I think that’s totally unfair.  Space travel doesn’t equal science fiction.  Aliens arriving in flying saucers is not science fiction, but just monsters from outer space.  ESP and all of that are just more monster stories.  The human race has a long list of monster stories, in fact most of the oldest stories, Gilgamesh, Ulysses, Beowulf, are about monsters.

The Time Machine gives us many clues to what real science fiction is about.  Another essential element is it’s speculation about seeing reality through scientific ideas.  When the Time Traveler visits the year 802,701 and our pinnacle of culture is forgotten, we are like Dorothy realizing we’re no longer in Kansas.  The difference between L. Frank Baum and H. G. Wells, is Wells uses scientific ideas in a different way than they were ever used before.  Instead of using science to understand the present and the past, he uses it to understand the future.

We will never know the future.  Science fiction isn’t about predicting the future.    Wells invented a kind of literature that tries to grok the future through scientific speculation.  By this measure Star Wars is not science fiction, but Star Trek sometimes is.  The War of the Worlds is science fiction, but not as much as The Time Machine.  Both novels are mostly fiction, but Wells weaves in concepts and speculation from the knowledge of 1895 science that he knew.  For instance, I’m trying to track down when astronomers first suggested the idea of the sun turning into a red giant.  It must be before 1895.

The odd thing about science fiction is you can’t learn science from science fiction.  You have to already know science to spot the science in science fiction.  It’s like jazz.  You can love jazz without understanding the concepts of music, but if you want to know what a jazz musician is doing, you have to understand music theory, even at a simple level.  Reading The Time Machine for me, was watching H. G. Wells take the science of 1895 and improvise speculative pictures of the future.

Most modern science fiction never even tries to do this.  Most science fiction is escapist adventure fiction.  Wells is working as a philosopher, using fiction with the lens of science, making science fiction a scientific instrument like the telescope, to show his readers something about the nature of reality and possible futures.  He’s pointing his finger at something, whereas most adventure science fiction doesn’t.  Real science fiction, as Wells invented it, points to a speculative concept.  It has something to say about reality, usually about the future.

But doesn’t all great literature point to something about reality?  The difference between fiction and science fiction is the science.  Most people study literary reality through lenses provided by culture, customs, upbringing, religion, and philosophy.  You have to study science to appreciate real science fiction, and few SF fans study scientific subjects.  Wells invented a kind of literature that many writers tried to copy, but few got it right.

And again, it’s not about predicting the future.  Time machines are extremely doubtful, and so are the Eloi and Morlocks.  Charles Darwin looks at nature and fossils and says, “Hey, there were probably other species of humans before us.”  Wells, takes that idea, and says, “Hey, maybe there will be others species of humans after us.”  That sounds very simple now, but try to do it yourself.  If you can, then you can write the kind of fiction I want to label science fiction.  If you take someone else’s speculative idea and turn it into fiction, for instance Star Wars, something I don’t want to call science fiction, then you aren’t doing what H. G. Wells did.

Yes, yes, I know I’m being very picky and splitting hairs, and probably sounding pretentious like those wine tasters who claim they detect all kinds of rare flavors when you can only taste alcohol.  Let me give you another analogy.  Watch the History Channel.  Can you tell when they are showing real history from made-up crap?  Many scholars would say The History Channel should be called the Science Fiction Channel.   I’m making two points here.  First, anything labeled History should be considered truly educational, and second, they are slamming The History Channel’s crap shows by using the label science fiction.

Can you see why I want to make a precise definition of science fiction?  One that will represent the best creative intentions of H. G. Wells, and not the one-size-fits-all box for weirdo ideas?

JWH – 6/24/9

Manned Space Flight – Is it even on your radar?

During the glory days of NASA, between President Kennedy’s great 1961 proclamation committing the United States to going to the Moon within a decade, and Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in July 1969, there were three great space programs:  Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.  Each manned rocket launch during those years was covered by all three television networks.  ABC, CBS and NBC would stop broadcasting game shows and soap operas and the missions would become  national events.  The 1960s represented a tremendous time for the public’s interest in the space program. 

Next month marks the 40th anniversary of mankind’s first landing on the Moon.  Popular interest in space exploration appears to have dwindled significantly ever since Apollo 11, with even Apollo 18, 19, and 20 being cancelled.  Our lunar exploration years only lasted from July 1969, through December 1972.  And when was the last time you took off from school or work to spend the day watching television of a space mission?  I would have taken vacation days to watch the recent Hubble repair mission if any of my damn 200 cable stations had covered it live.

Since 1982, the Space Shuttle has been our vehicle for traveling into space, but it’s scheduled to be retired next year.  The Space Shuttle never left low-earth orbit (LEO).  I wonder how many people know about our next manned space system that’s currently on the drawing boards?  It’s called the Constellation Program, that will use the Ares 1 rocket combined with the Orion space capsule, both in early design development.  It is a dramatic change from the 30 years of Shuttle flights, in that Orion will eventually leave LEO. 

The Constellation program was conceived officially in 2005, and scheduled to blast-off in 2015, with the exciting goal of returning humans to the Moon by 2020.  How many Americans know about this, and do they care?

NASA plods on, year after year, with a decent budget that’s prone to suffer booms and busts depending on the political weather.  NASA goals are constantly up for debate.  NASA is a prestige agency for the United States.  Space flight has always been political, and the only real reason we rushed to the Moon was not for science, but as competition in the cold war.  The current Constellation plans probably came into being because of China’s new space program that’s aiming at the Moon, with India and Japan echoing Chinese ambitions. 

Like atomic bombs, manned space missions are the symbol of national pride.  Only the most elite of nations belong to the club.  Even though NASA doesn’t get a lot of public support, it’s budget will never be zeroed out because the President and Congress fear the United States would be seen as a declining world power if it did.  Within Congress and NASA the debate has always been how to get the biggest political and scientific bang for our buck.  There are two factions fighting for dollars:  those campaigning for exciting manned missions and those who advocate scientific robotic missions.  Robots have been our real space explorers, going where no man has gone before, or likely ever.

Many scientists, and maybe most of the public would be fine with letting robots have all the glory when it comes to space exploration.  Let’s be honest here.  The only real value of exploring space beyond thumping our nationalistic chests, is science, and it appears that the public has little interest in real scientific research.  NASA’s web site for the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have had millions of unique visitors, showing the biggest peak of interest in space exploration since the 1960s, but how many people does that represent?  

Let’s say seven million.  There are nearly seven billion people on Earth.  Do the math.  1 million people is 1/1000 of a billion.  Let’s even say NASA has seven million hard core fans world-wide.  That would give them one tenth of one percent of popular support.  Probably more people spend time thinking about drinking beer than exploring space. (If NASA only had the money people spent on getting high.)  Seven million people seems like a big political block, but really it’s just a tiny sub-culture.

And are there really 7,000,000 people on Earth who actively spend a lot of their time thinking about space exploration?  That’s saying 1 person in a 1,000 has a serious interest in the final frontier.  These people would keep up with news on Space.com, read books about space exploration and technology, sign up for Twitter news feeds covering space vehicle development, and are members of one of the many space societies, like The Planetary Society, The Moon Society or the National Space Society.  But membership in The Planetary Society is only around 100,000.  What if the real figure is only 700,000, or .01%?

My guess that real world-wide space advocates number far less than seven million.  “Revision for Space Vision?” from MSNBC’s Cosmic Log, a blog by Alan Boyle, gives a listing of recent news articles about the Ares rocket that’s being built for the Constellation project, and other related news stories that would interest space advocates.  When I ask my friends if they knew there was space program in development to return men to the Moon, they say no.  For all I know, we could return to the Moon in 2020 and most of the people of the world won’t even notice this time.

Why is something as exciting as the universe get so little attention?  Why does the latest iPhone get more press than NASA’s latest lunar mission?  Did you even know about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that’s scheduled to reach the Moon on Tuesday?  Or about Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite that will crash into the Moon in October hoping to discover water ice?  The orbiter will take photos so detailed they will be able to see the tracks left by the Apollo astronaut’s rovers.  A lot is happening on the Moon right now, with spacecraft from many nations exploring it remotely, or will be in the near future.  But how many people care?

Within the very small community of humans that are interested in space exploration, the Moon is becoming a hot destination.  There is even a web site, Moon Daily, for keeping up with all the activity.  Over at Asimov’s Science Fiction, James Patrick Kelly has an story in the current issue set on the Moon, “Going Deep,” which he reads for an MP3 audio edition, so the Moon is still of interest to science fiction writers and fans.  And NASA recently held an art contest called “The Moon: Back to the Future,” with a very nice gallery of winners.

Hopefully, between now and 2020, the public will take a fresh interest in lunar exploration, but is that being too hopeful on my part.  Most people consider learning about the Moon as exciting as studying rocks, and geology has never been one of the glamour sciences like astronomy and biology.   (And when was the last time you met someone at a party talking about those topics???)  The public is probably more than willing to let scientists play with the Moon as much as their little hearts want, as long as they aren’t asked to listen to any of the boring facts.

I’ve always cherished the assumption that space was the final frontier, and the manifest destiny of humanity was to explore the cosmos, but I’m starting to believe that is a false assumption on my part.  I’ve started writing a novel about colonists on the Moon, but I’m wondering about its potential audience.  If I want to make any money, I’d need to call it “Vampires on the Moon.”  Science fiction is very popular in pop culture, but interest in science fiction doesn’t translate into interest in space exploration.  I wonder if space exploration was as popular as rock music or professional sports, if humans would have already visited all the places our surrogate explorers, the robots, have reached?

JWH – 6/21/9

LG BD390 Blu-Ray Player Part 2

I’ve had my LG Blu-Ray player for ten days now, and I’m learning a lot about this specific player, and Blu-Ray players in general.  I had been waiting for the price of a Blu-Ray machine to fall below $200 before buying, which it had, but I ended up spending $150 more for my player because I wanted Draft-N wireless built in, which only LG was offering.  I wanted a Samsung player, like my TV, but Samsung only offered wireless-G that plugged in as a dongle, which I gave a Bronx cheer to as a buying option.

Networking speed is everything.  For the first six days of owning my LG machine I was totally delighted with the built-in Netflix feature.  I was getting the HD bar on their little connection meter, and content looked fabulous.  Then Memphis was hit by a storm that knocked out the power to 129,000 homes (luckily, not mine this time), and networking hasn’t been the same since.  This isn’t LG’s fault, and I hope Comcast will eventually recover, but this lesson from nature has taught me something significant.  Without a very fast broadband connection, don’t count on those extra features of Blu-Ray players that make them cost more.

There are many factors to networking speed.  First, is the wireless speed between the device and your wireless router.  Draft-N is the fastest, and I think this speed is needed for streaming video well.  Then there’s the speed between your house and the Internet.  With Cable Internet, this varies greatly.  Finally, there is the speed of the video servers.  If those machines are hammered, things will be slow no matter how fast the other two connections.

Each evening since the storm, I’ve selected something from my Netflix menu only to be told that my connection was too slow and the machine asked me if I wanted to try anyway.  After hopefully answering yes on several nights, I’ve learned to just say no.  Movies and TV shows that were once quick to load and beautiful to look at were now almost impossible to load and horrible to watch.  Bummer.

I’m not an early adopter, and after several years of Blu-Ray refinements, I had hoped things would be smooth sailing by now.  Not so.  My wife keeps asking me why I don’t take the LG back.  She complained that her DVDs looked better on the old DVD player.  The Gilmore Girls jittered.  I could see it too.  And I had read on the Amazon reviews many complaints about playing DVDs on the LG player, whereas many reviewers said old DVDs looked great.  I got into the setup and changed the screen resolution to automatic, and Susan’s problems disappeared.  That’s one of the many hassles of digital TV, matching the resolution of the content to the resolution set on the TV.  I had set the LG to 1080p, wanting to get the max out of my Blu-Ray discs.  The TV was set to 4:3 for playing DVD TV shows.

So my advice to people getting into this Blu-Ray game is to expect a learning curve.  They aren’t as easy to use as DVD players with old-style analog TVs.  And I also say “buyer beware” to people wanting those new gee-whiz features.

I really wanted Pandora streaming music, a feature offered on Samsung players.  I even wrote LG to see if they were working on it.  Here’s my plea:  “Will the BD 390 be upgraded to handle Pandora streaming music, and Amazon Unbox video?”  Here is LG’s short answer after editing out the flowery marketing speak:  “Unfortunately this unit does not handle Pandora that is a feature of one of our new home theater systems.”  I would have thought their fancy Blu-Ray player was part of their home theater system.  At least I got my reply within 24 hours.

If I had seen LG’s support page before buying the player, I don’t think I would have bought my player.  It doesn’t offer system updates for downloading, or any information about updates.  The unit itself has a menu option for checking for updates, but that only works if you have  the box networked or if put the update on a USB drive and feed it to your machine directly.  But how do you get those updates if the support page doesn’t offer them?  I was also wanting a user forum on the support page.  A Blu-Ray player is essentially a computer.  It has tremendous potential for expansion.  Many great equipment sites have these kinds of features on their support site.

Forums are especially useful because volunteer tech-wizards will offer hard won discovery tips, and company techs will add inside knowledge.  I get the feeling LG wants people to accept what’s listed on the box as the only features their machine will ever have.  They are missing a marketing advantage by not promoting such goodwill.  The menu on the LD BD390 has 8 icons, with room for 4 more without reducing the size of the current icons.  They could squeeze 20 icons easily onto the screen if needed, offering 20 super features.

These machines are computers, and adding features is like loading software and updating the menu.  LG could offer Pandora, Amazon Unbox, Rhapsody Music, Lala.com, iTunes, Hulu.com, and many other multimedia networked services.  And maybe they will.  The BD 390 is new.  I’m going to be pissed off though if they sell the same box labeled the BD 490 with those features.  If I see that, I won’t be buying LG anymore.

For now, I’m not going to take my player back.  It does what was advertised on the box, although the box should have had in very big letters, a warning that these features need a very fast Internet connection and without such a fast connection these fancy features will suck.  Many people are going to be disappointed.  Probably only the top cable and DSL speeds will offer pleasing results.   Doesn’t Korea have the best broadband in the world?  Their marketing execs need broadband simulator for the other countries they sell to, so as to get an idea of how their products will perform in different markets.

I hope my very fast Comcast connection comes back.  [Comcast contacted me because of this blog and reset my modem, and I'm  getting 17-20 Mb/s download speeds and the Netflix feature is back to producing excellent results.  Thanks Melissa, I'm happy with my LG again, and impressed with Comcast's service, let's hope LG might be reading blogs too.]

But the future development of Blu-Ray players that have networked features is illustrated by my desire to have Rhapsody support.  I have a separate device, a Roku SoundBridge M1001 that supports getting music off my computer that is stored in Windows Media, iTunes and Rhapsody.  The LG BD390 sees the Windows Media, but supports another media server, Nero, and doesn’t see iTunes or Rhapsody.  Roku now makes a Netflix/Amazon Unbox decoder.  Apple makes a AppleTV device.  How many boxes will I need to buy for my den to work with my TV and stereo setup?  How many HDMI connections and combinations of HDMI connections will that take?  How many surround sound connections to my receiver will I need?

The solution is one box.  And the obvious place for that box, is the Blu-Ray player.  I waited out the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray fight for the winner to emerge, but now it seems many other contenders must duke it out.  There are already several online video distributors, and many music services.  Right now it’s like buying a different brand of TV for each TV network you want to watch, and a different radio for each music station you want to play.

If you’re sitting at your computer you can take advantage of all of these offerings.  That’s because a computer is a general purpose device.  We need to think of the box we hook up to our TV as a general purpose device, and a Blu-Ray player is a computer.  They should be upgradable by software, so each quarter, as manufacturers make marketing deals, they can upgrade their players to offer more choices.

Here’s a specific example of my problem.  I discovered a new musical group I like, The Kings of Leon on Lala.com.  I then went to Zune Marketplace and added their album to my Zune to play on my trip to Birmingham, Alabama.  When I got home I wanted to play them on my big stereo in my den.  I have Rhapsody set up to do this, but I had switched the optical fiber audio connector to my LG BD390 player, so my SoundBridge M1001 wasn’t hooked up.  I went to Target to buy the CD so I could rip it and put it on my computer so the BD 390 could see it.  Target was out of the CDs.  I already have rights to play this CD on two paid subscription services, but I was willing to buy it on CD so it would work with my new LG BD 390, but that didn’t work out.  So I shifted the optical fiber cable from the LG to the SoundBridge and played the CD.  When I want to watch a movie, I’ll have to shift the fiber audio cable back.

If the LG supported Rhapsody, Zune or Lala, I could have played it through the Blu-Ray box as it was set up.  By the way, even though my connection isn’t fast enough for streaming video from Netflix, it’s perfectly fine for streaming music.  The Kings of Leon sounded great.  I may still buy the CD to hear them in their best sound quality, but my SACD CD player won’t work if the LG BD 390 is connected because my receiver won’t take 5.1 RCA connection setup from my CD player and optical fiber input by the LG at the same time.  The LG will play a normal CD, but it doesn’t support SACD, an orphan technology that I need to keep the old SACD CD player around to play my handful of SACDs.  The LG could have offered SACD and DVD-Audio support.

Sometimes I want to just give up on technology for five years, and come back and see if the Geeks of Earth have worked everything out.  Man, the Amish must have it easy.

JWH – 6/18/9

Update 6/19/9:  Melissa at Comcast posted a reply to this blog offering help, and my network is working perfectly again.  The Netflix feature is back too, and this has a lot of implications.  I’m on Netflix’s unlimited 1 disc out at a time subscription, but with this new feature I can watch as many TV and movies I want from their Watch Now list.  I’ve converted all my queue to Blu-Ray discs.  I read customer reviews of the Roku Netflix box on Amazon, and many say how streaming Netflix movies and TV shows have changed the way they do things.  One thing they do is to cut their Netflix subscription down to 1 disc out at a time, and many talked about canceling their cable TV.  Streaming Netflix, when it works right is a game-changer.  I know, for the most part, I’ve stopped buying DVDs because of Netflix, and I won’t be buying Blu-Ray discs, because I can get them from Netflix too.  We know Comcast is reading this too.  I wonder if they will change the way they offer content.  Instead of me buying a zillion channels, I’ll pay a few and stream just the shows I want to watch.  Streaming content could mean the end of networks.

New to Me, Old to You?

I discovered popular music as a kiddo while riding around in my Daddy’s 1955 Pontiac, playing with the AM radio push-buttons.  This was around 1958, and I was seven.  For some reason my parents didn’t have a radio in the house, nor did they own a record player and records.  Music wasn’t important in their life, but they seemed to love the music on TV, on the variety shows, where my Dad dug Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and my mother would tell us kids to shut up so she could listen to Nat King Cole or Perry Como.  Those crooners were so damn old, even then.

My parents would get especially excited if music clips of Benny Goodman or Glenn Miller played in an old movie.  They’d tell my sister and I how that was their music.  Big bands, with trumpets and clarinets, it seemed as ancient as Egypt.  Music that felt new was the rock and roll music I found on the AM radio in the car.  That music made my Dad turn red and shout, “Turn off that goddamn noise.”

I’m listening to Quicksilver Messenger Service, a San Francisco rock band from the late 1960s.  Quicksilver still feels out of the womb new to me.  Even though it’s forty years later, a much greater span of time than from Benny Goodman of the late 1930s to the late 1950s, Quicksilver didn’t get old to me.  Why?  Would kids hearing my music today feel it had been dug up by archeologists?

Is my music new to me, but old to you?

Listening to current pop music makes me feel old.  It’s all made by teenagers, or over-the-hill burnouts in their twenties, but then the rock and roll of the 1950s was made by teenagers too.  Time is doing a number on my head.  Time is more than relative.  I can feel young and old, both at the same time, just by listening to music.

JWH – 6/16/9

Better Than Television

Will there ever be a better invention than television?

Of course I hear all the young Internet dudes instantly reply, sex.  Really, and how many hours have you spent humping compared to boob tube dazing?  And by the way, I count video games and porn as byproducts of the invention of television.  Television is powerful.  It’s one hell of an addiction.  After air, water and food, I think I’d have to list television as the next necessity for life.

I want to do a quick look back at the history of television, but then move onto using my science fiction vision to see if I can picture something better than TV.  For the purposes of this essay I define television as a visual 2D screen with audio, so it doesn’t matter if the actual gadget is a Sears Roebuck cabinet with CRT from 1955, or iPhone from 2009, it’s still television to me.  If you can watch a live or recorded TV show on it, then I call it television, so something like the Kindle ebook doesn’t count, but an Asus netbook does.

What did people do before television?  I was born in 1951 and grew up with the glass teat, as Harlan Ellison named it.  As a child all the adults told me stories about life before television.  My mother’s mother, Nanny, was born in 1881.  She told me about life before cars, airplanes, radio and television.  The only way I could relate to my Nanny’s tales of old America, was through the westerns I grew up watching on TV – those shows showed life with no radios, cars, airplanes or televisions, like Dodge City, in Gunsmoke.  It hurt my little head to try imagine life without TV.

Last night I watched, “The Naked Time,” the fourth episode from the first season of Star Trek, which I first viewed on September 29, 1966.  Because I grew up thinking television was a new invention, it’s hard to believe that was 43 years ago, and that the first shows I remember seeing at age four, were 54 years ago.  That generation that raised me, the ones who knew a time before television, are dead now, or sleeping in line waiting to get into heaven.  I imagine rugrats today believing that television existed in the time of Jesus.  Television has so perfectly integrated into our minds, culture and life, that it’s almost impossible to imagine life without the TV screen, or its daddy, the movie screen.

Now, I’ve got to ask:  Is there a better invention than television waiting to be invented?  Some people are going to point to the computer, but I’m going to claim that what we love about the computer is the CRT/LCD screen, so that the Internet is really just a different kind of television show.  Ditto for video games.  I used computers before they were connected to TV screens, and although I found them fun, most people would have considered them boring with a capital B.

Television is a gestalt experience.  Forget about all that damn ESP mumbo-jumbo, television screens are our real sixth sense.  Until we get a neural jack in the back of the head, like Neo in The Matrix, the television screen is our information pie hole.  Up until the advent of the Internet, the screen was one-way.   Now, the screen is a two-way street to the hive mind.  As I type this, I’ve got Lala.com open in another window playing “Boom” by P.o.d.  If I wanted, I could open Netflix, Amazon Unbox or Hulu, and watch old-style TV shows.  Also, I wanted, I could use my webcam and send video back into the system.

But my question still remains:  Will there ever be a better invention than television as a communication’s tool?  When my Nanny was little, the newspaper was the only form of mass communication.  News from around the world was slow and sparse.  And it had no immediacy. 

By the time my mother was born in 1916, radio was beginning to replace the newspaper as the media of mass communication.  To obtain a glimmer of this mind-blowing this transformation was,  I can only recommend watching Empire of the Air, a Ken Burns documentary, which is easily found on Netflix.  But if you want a much deeper insight, find the out-of-print book by Tom Lewis that the show is based on.  The effort will be worth it.  Radio is really the audio portion of television, and network the world in the first half of the 20th century.

Television is older than most people think – the technology begun to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s, slowly gained success in the late 1940s, and then blasted-off into the Leave it to Beaver world of the 1950s.  Many people think of life before the 1960s as black and white, because of old movies and TV shows, and think it was the psychedelic sixties when reality took on Technicolor hues.  Now that we spy on reality in 1080p, I bet future writers will look on the second half of the 20th century as being the fuzzy years. 

Radio allowed millions of people to have a shared experience.  Now that’s leaving Kansas for Oz.  Television expanded on the power of radio, so routinely tens of millions, and on extreme occasions, hundreds of millions, have shared a single historical event.  What next invention can top that?

Cell phones are having their impact, now that they are becoming universal, and Apple and its iPhone are pushing the envelope by evolving its invention into a pocket television, because the iPhone is only another form of a TV screen.  And as humanity evolves towards those higher beings in WALL-E, sitting on their moving recliners with their faces glued to TV screens, seeing the world not with their eyes, but their television, I can imagine it as the ultimate addiction.

Writing, and its descendent, the book, was the asynchronous form of mass communication that took over the world.  Radio synchronized people’s lives.  Television brought that synchronized communication to our major sense organ, the eyes, and it has dominated the communication landscape ever since.  Can it be topped?  I suppose scientists could invent some kind of machine that could broadcast reality directly into our brains, bypassing the screen, but I tend to doubt it.  If they could, we could live like the billions in The Matrix, never knowing if we’d taken the red or blue pill.

Such inventions are a long way off, so what could geek science invent before then?  TV eye-glasses already exist.  The goal is to fool the eyes, but despite fantasy shows like Caprica, there are some major limitations to virtual reality.  As long as the viewer just watches we can create better and better ways to view distant reality.  But if the viewer wants to interact with virtual reality they quickly face limitations.  It’s like waking dreams, if you try to manipulate them, they fall apart.

We can create virtual worlds like Second Life, but no matter how sophisticated such worlds get, will they ever be better than televised views of our reality?  Think of the difference between ABC World News Tonight, the latest Star Trek film and Up, a current animated film.  One shows scenes from around the world, one shows real actors mixed into CGI scenery, and the last is total animation.  Cartoons have always been a staple of TV, but would you want to live inside one.  Well, hell yes, for short times.  So virtual reality is one candidate to supplant TV.

This means, in the decades to come, there will be kids growing up with virtual reality as part of their lives, and old farts like me will be telling them stories about life without virtual reality.  How significant will be their cultural paradigm shift?  What if every day you could walk through a different art museum from cities all over the world, but without taking any flights?  How close could virtual reality get at showing the details of each painting?  What if we had the technology to scan each canvas so it was equal to looking at it from 2 inches away with our eyes, with the choices of various wavelengths of light, and the choice of having the light source come from 8 different directions.  Would that beat standing in front of the actual masterpiece?

I’ve always wanted to see Paris, but a phobia against claustrophobic transatlantic flights keeps me from going.  What if I could wear a helmet, recline in my La-Z-Boy, and walk the streets of Paris every night for an hour.  That would be television too, unless I got beyond the sense of viewing reality through a 2D screen.

We have to think about the holistic nature of television.  Television means vision at a distance, with the implied implication we’ll also get sound.  Writing and books, were information at a distance too.  Photograph and movies were the precursor to television.  All are based on 2D transmission.  Something better than television will have to be 3D.  Thus if I use this new invention and feel like I’m sitting in a room at MIT hearing a lecture or walking on Mars, then that will be a major step forward over 2D television at a distance.

Science fiction has been exploring such ideas for decades, and it has  taken that speculation even further with the concept of downloading, which is recording our minds and putting them into computers.  How far will reality ever get to catching up with science fiction is open to debate, but I do think VR goggles or helmets will probably be common in the near future, maybe before I die, and I will play the role of Nanny when talking to children who spend most of their time with their heads in VR helmets.

But at a personal level, what do I want from television and its possible replacements?  This is where things get philosophically interesting.  We use television for entertainment, vicarious thrills and gathering information.  What that implies is our brains are bored with our existing location in time and space and we want to fool them into believing we are located in a different time and space.  For centuries books were the technology we applied to this simple quest.  Intellectuals will claim that reading Pride and Prejudice is superior to watching one of the many 2D screen versions, but the details of a televised version are so vastly richer to our senses.

I know lots of people who shun TV screens, either the broadcast kind or the computer kind.  They live among family, friends and pets, pursuing hobbies and enjoying nature.  They live in the now, like all good Zen monks teach, but I’m not one of those kinds of people.  I grew up on television that has conditioned my mind to want to constantly teleport via 2D screens to distant places, real and imaginary.  Is that good or bad?  A world without television is like being an ant and not knowing how big reality really is compared to the little environment in which I crawl.  Does knowing matter?  I think so.

Thus, I’m sure if a better invention than television came around, I’d jump on it, if it allowed me to teleport with more details.  But there are other things to consider.  I’ll put this into an analogy that horny young men will understand so clearly, and be just as obvious to people who aren’t horny young men.  Which is better, a real live naked woman, or a naked woman on HBO?

JWH – 6/13/9

Why I Blog

The NY Times recently ran a piece, “Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest” by Douglas Quenqua, which told how 95% of blogs are abandoned by their creators.  According to Technorati, the paper said, only 7.4 million blogs, out of the 133 million blogs that Technorati tracks, have been updated in the last 120 days.  Most people just don’t stick with blogging, especially when they find out there is no money in it.  I never thought I’d find riches in blogging, but I do find the hobby very rewarding.  It’s a shame Mr. Quenqua only focused on people who quit blogging.

Blogging for me is therapeutic.  Since I’ve grown into my 50s, I’ve been forgetting more and more words.  The more I write, the better I remember.  Recently when I had an eye problem and couldn’t write on my blog for weeks, my memory went into a decline.  Picking a topic and focusing on it for several hours is good exercise for my mind.  Writing about the past has psychoanalytical benefits too.  I’m constantly examining where I got an idea, and why I believe something.  I’ve spent a lot of blog time examining the science fiction I read in my teens, trying to figure out how those fantastic stories shaped the thoughts of my life.  It’s been amazingly revealing to me.  That’s just one of many blogging projects I pursue.

Blogging is like practicing the piano in public though, because writing fast often produces sentences with many sour notes.  I try hard to revise my essays before hitting the publish button, but all too often I find bumpy passages and mistakes the next day.  This is actually good for me, because it pushes me to try harder, although I think I’m currently on a plateau.  Seeing how I’m not improving as fast as I was a year ago, makes me want to try something new, like reading books on writing essays, or studying fine prose in magazines to improve my sentence structure.  Lately, I’ve even thought of studying poetry, something I hated in school.

WordPress provides statistics about my blog pages, that I use to examine which ideas I write about are popular  This is probably a false assumption, but I assume if a piece gets a lot of hits it means it’s interesting.  That doesn’t mean my writing is better in that piece, but at least I found something that people want to read about.  My most successful essay has been “The Greatest Science Fiction Novels of the 20th Century.”  My stats tell me that 8,505 people have loaded that essay into their browser for whatever reason.  My ego would like to believe people actually read the essay, but all it really means is 8,505 folks have stumbled upon that page, whether or not they have read it is another story.  The act of writing it is what’s important.

My least popular essay is, “Super Men and Mighty Mice,” with 3 hits, but I think it’s one of my better efforts.  Hits don’t mean a thing.  Actually, both essays are very informative to me, and help me remember things I noticed about the world.  That’s why my blog is called, “Auxiliary Memory – Things I Want to Remember.”  I think Douglas Quenqua missed a great story by not researching why 7.4 million people do keep blogging.

Not only am I getting to know myself better, but I’m also meeting so many fascinating people online.  If you read blogs, you get to know people in a way you seldom do by just talking with acquaintances at work or parties.  I wished all my friends wrote blogs.  If my wife published her thoughts in little essays I expect I’d discover a whole new woman that I never got to know during the 31 years we’ve been married.  I’m constantly discovering things about myself that I didn’t know.  Writing is revealing.

Every evening after work I have about three hours of freedom where I can do absolutely anything I want.  All too often, I pick watching television.  I love television, it’s quite stimulating, but it’s basically parking my brain – unless I respond in some way.  If I watch a show, whether fiction or non-fiction, and then write about it in a blog, I will see that show far differently.  It becomes a real experience.

In my hours of freedom I could choose to read, listen to music, work at a hobby, play on the Wii, cruise the net, clean house, listen to an audio book, call friends on the phone, cook a better than average dinner, study a Great Course on DVD – the list goes on and on.  Writing on a blog post pushes my mind more than anything else.  Struggling to find the right words to capture a fleeting concept that came to me as a mini-epiphany during the day takes a great deal of concentration.  More concentration than I put into anything else I do. 

I wished I could have blogged when I was seven and first learned to string words together into sentences like they taught us in grade school.  I think it would have transformed my life and greatly improved my K-12 experience.  If I had had to write an essay about every lesson I studied, from math to PE, I think I would have learned so much more during my educational years.

Pedagogy puts a tremendous focus on reading.  At the College of Education where I work, students can get a master’s degree or doctorate in Reading, but we don’t offer any educational degrees that focus on writing.  Inputting words is important, but I think outputting words is more important for a good education.  It’s a shame that blogging is not catching on.  It’s a shame that it’s seen as a scheme to get rich quick on the net.  It has so much more potential.

We should encourage children to blog, and we should also support the permanent archiving of blogs, so kids growing up can look back over their own development.  We should develop a curriculum that asks children to explain what they studied each day by writing essays that explain their subjects in words, drawings, diagrams, videos, photos and so on, and not in checking multiple variations of A) … B) …  C) …  D) … at the end of the week in a quiz.

So Douglas Quenqua, write another article for your Fashion & Style section, and explore the positive aspects of blogging that those hundred million plus are missing by giving up on blogging.  I think if you examine a 100 different good blogs you’d find a 100 different reasons why blogging is too valuable to just dismiss as a passing fad.  Here’s just one creative example, Golden Age Comic Book Stories, that I discovered the same day as your article.  I don’t even like comic books, but I could spend endless hours exploring Mr. Door Tree’s passion for illustrations.  There’s real history in his pages.

Everyone should scrapbook their life in a blog.

JWH – 6/8/9