|
Daily Blah for... Monday, October 30, 2006
He Uses the Google? No, We Got the Google
So the blogosphere is in a predictable fit of hysterics over yet another Bushism. Last week the President told an interviewer (the lovely Maria Bartoromo, no less, who's had quite a busy year, getting the Fed Chair to make embarrassing comments and also interviewing me, which is about the only thing I have in common with those other two gentlemen) about "the things I've used on the Google." Naturally, it has become an instant hit, a meme to slot right alongside "the Internets." The cognoscenti are starting to insert the definite article before the decade's favorite noun/verb, as in: "can you look that up on the Google?" It began ironically, it will soon become part of the language, and it will forever be associated with Bush's amusing idiocy.
But I'm not laughing. I'm seething. Because I, Mr. President, came up with "the Google" a full eighteen months before you did. Working from home, I would often have a friend or two or five come over with their laptops and hang out in the spacious wifi-enabled kitchen of my old house. Invariably, I would be off the laptop, on the phone, fixing food, and need an answer to a random question. Up would go the cry: "who's got the Google?" It was shorthand for "who's got an open laptop with an open browser window with a Google search bar on it into which they have a spare moment to enter the following search term?"
"I've got the Google," someone would reply. It fast became our favorite call-and-response, so much so that it begged a parody of "I Got the Power," that early 1990s dancefloor hit by Snap!: "I Got the Google." It had all the momentum of a beautiful meme -- and then Bush goes and spoils it all by saying somethin' stupid. Thanks, Dubya.
Well, this may be tilting at windmills, given our relative influence on the culture, but I urge you dear faithful Blah readers to boycott the Bush meme and use mine instead. The guy's already got "Internets" and "is our children learning" and "putting food on our families." He's doing just fine on the memorably-mangled language front. Let's not "use" the Google. Let's say we "got" the Google. Thanks, dear readers, and may the Google be with you.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Wascally Wifi Wabbit
So a couple of days ago I took delivery of my first Nabaztag. No, I'm not talking about the scary flying creatures in Lord of the Rings (although when I first saw a Nabaztag, I kept calling it a Nazgul). A Nabaztag is a rabbit. A plastic rabbit, with two dots for eyes, a "T" for a nose and mouth, and two magnetically-attached ears that look like something Good Vibrations would sell. The Nabaztag is so minimalist, in fact, that it looks like what Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive would design if they got into the toy business. The overall effect, though, is so surprisingly rabbit-like that it's a prime example of the smiley-face effect: the human brain need very little information to create the image of a face. We're hard-wired for it. Evidently, we're hard-wired to see rabbits, too.
Anyway, I'm rambling, which is appropriate, because it's what the Nabaztag does. This, you see, is a wifi rabbit. Unpack him, plug him in, name and register him on the Nabaztag website, and he will automatically detect and log onto open wireless networks around him. Thus hooked up, he can be customized for a variety of services: telling you the time, the weather, the air quality, local traffic information, much of it via glowing symbols on his face and chest. He'll read you his favorite bits of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. He will read out emails sent to him via the Nabaztag site if you press the button on his head (the only button on the whole rabbit -- told you it was Jobs-style minimalism). He'll make snippy, Marvin-the-Paranoid-Android-style comments. His ears will do tai chi. And if you link him up with another wifi rabbit anywhere in the world, the ears will settle into the exact same position as that other Nabaztag's. It's terribly cute -- but not a little problematic in the implementation.
To look at Nabaztag, you might presume he was Japanese or Korean. In fact, he's French. And that appears to be part of his problem. Now, I'm no Francophobe -- well, I'm English, so take that with a grain of salt. But the English version of the website has a few teething and translation troubles, and it's hard not to get the sense that the French version is easier to navigate. Perhaps it's a plot: get a device in every English-speaking household, then use it to force us all to start learning French.
A small example: Nabaztag's default is to operate on French time, even after you tell it your zip code and country. I assumed that the zip code information would mean it would set its own time zone -- this is, after all, very much touted as a set-it-and-forget-it device -- and that my Nabaztag, named YawannaBuya (after the Spike Jones comedy song from the 1950's: You Wanna Buy A Bunny?) would thus heed my instructions to sleep between midnight and 8am. No such luck: YawannaBuya woke me up at 1am to say that he would like me to move him so he could have a change of view, and again at 3am to complain that he was hot, and would like me to fan him down. The next day, grouchy and irritable, I finally tracked down the part of the Nabaztag site where you set his time zone. On further reflection, I thought, I should have named him Bugs. LotsaBugs.
And despite having set specific times for him to do so, I've not yet heard YawannaBuya read the papers to me. Perhaps, in true French style, he will only do so when he's ready. Perhaps he'll read me Le Monde instead. I dunno. The weather, air info and messages seem to work, at least. (You can send him an email, or get him to play me an MP3, by sending it to yawannabuya@nabaztag.com.)
Despite such troubles, Nabaztags appear to be taking over the tech world at a rapid clip. The online contact company Plaxo, for example, recently invited its 15 million users to send in praise and complaints via the Plaxo rabbit. A hundred Nabaztags played a symphony at the Wired NextFest. You can download a Google Earth layer that will show you nearby Nabaztags. And at the recent DEMOfall conference in San Diego, the updated Nabaztag 2.0 (now with microphone, voice recognition and the ability to "smell" carrots) was the most blogged-about item at the show. I get the sense this guy is here to stay. I'd better buy a fan so I can keep him cool at 3am.
Daily Blah for... Monday, October 23, 2006
From the "Scary as Hell" Department
In other news, we're using Earth's natural resources 25 percent faster than the planet can renew them, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
Gaah.
Not much else to be said, just ... Gaaaah.
It's okay, right? I'm still going to have descendants four generations' hence who'll be blogging about this kind of sourpuss, overemotional environmental warning?
The truly scary thing is, the next generation may be starting to take it as read that they are probably the last people to walk to the face of the Earth -- creating, if we're not lucky, the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that tends to plague human minds. From an excellent, future-focused column I read today on the Clock of the Long Now by "Kevalier and Clay" author Michael Chabon:
If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book. If you had told me, when I was eight, that a little kid of the future would feel that way—and that what’s more, he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings in it—that would have been even worse than hearing that in 2006 there are no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jetpacks for everyone. That would truly have broken my heart.
Sigh.
I love our species, dumb as it is, and I refuse to countenance self-eradication, though there seems to be some gaia-esque logic to it. You get to that logic if you stare hard enough at this graphic:
This graphic comes from the London Times, and it's a quick-read version of this story in the New Scientist, which asks the all-important question: if the human race disappeared tomorrow, how long would it take planet Earth to heal?
This, you see, is the real reason I an such an ardent booster of, oh, any space project going. Why I think we couldn't have a more important topic to discuss, on this blog or any other. It's about spreading ourselves around a bit in space, and not bunching up so much on one planet. It's about not taking from an ecosystem more than we can give back, which is practically the definition of self-genocide.
(Is there such a term, I wonder? Well, the word "genocide" itself only popped into existence in the 1940s, to fill the need to describe a crime so heinous it beggared the imagination. If that is the pattern, I wouldn't want to be the lexicographer that has to slip "self genocide" into his dictionary. He'll be writing it by hand, with the last piece of notepaper.)
And yes. It's also about giving eight-year-olds dreams again. Ones that don't involve morally-correct mass-destruction.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, October 22, 2006
Newsflash: Electronic Voting Machines Could Skew Elections
You gotta love it when the mainstream press fakes amnesia and happens upon a "new" paradigm. The current kerfuffle about Diebold disks is just that, and the ABC News headline in the story I just linked to -- "Electronic Voting Machines Could Skew Elections" -- just begs the response "well, duh.."
Let's see. Here's what we've known for at least the last two years:
• Electronic voting machines don't leave paper trails and work on proprietary software, which only the operating company has access to.
• Partisan election workers have been flouting the rules and taking them home at night.
• Computer experts have demonstrated that it would be child's play to hack them, in one notable case by installing a virus that flipped an election.
• There are allegations that vote-fixing software patches were installed in such machines in Florida and Georgia.
And thus, unsurprisingly, inevitably, but perhaps most importantly, we have a further breakdown in America's confidence in its voting system. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this latest story -- the part that is, genuinely, news to me -- is that the Republican governor of Maryland is advising voting by absentee ballot, a reverse of his previous position on the machines he helped install in the state.
If Diebold doesn't make some serious fixes soon -- like making their software open-source and stopping the ridiculous claim that such a move would "stifle innovation" -- they're going to be faced with the largest single machine recall in computer history.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, October 21, 2006
Forget Snakes on a Plane ...
... here's Shrimp On A Treadmill.
The poor guy looks like he's getting tired, and that would be because he's a sick shrimp. The whole story behind this strange, groundbreaking sick shrimp workout experiment is here.
Daily Blah for... Friday, October 20, 2006
The Screen and the Mirror
A couple of very cool futuristic demo videos for you to check out today, folks. First of all, take a look at the amazing Multi-Touch Interaction screen (ignore all the academia-speak on the page, just hit play). Basically, we're talking Minority Report technology without the dumb Tom Cruise gloves. The demos on the video are jaw-dropping, and you can really believe we'll be using such screens (sans keyboard, or rather, just pulling a keyboard up whenever we happen to need one) in the very near future. Combine it with FOLED (Flexible Organic Light-Emitting Displays), and you'll be carrying a portable touch-screen with these kinds of programs everywhere you go. Unroll it and hey presto -- instant Minority Report.
The second demo is a little more artsy, but no less futuristic: Media Mirror, a video installation that turns your boring old mirror image into a mosaic of about 200 live cable feeds. On further reflection, perhaps this too is a future product. After all, we seem to always be looking for more and more multitasking opportunities. Who wouldn't want to combine checking themselves out in the morning with catching up on cable news? I know I'm installing one in my bathroom first chance I get.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, October 12, 2006
Future Boy Spins DVDs
The latest Future Boy column takes what is a very contrarian position in the tech world today: that DVDs will not only survive the streaming media/movie download revolutions, they will blossom. The takeaway message, and the key news:
Their quality is far superior than streaming movies wirelessly - which, by the way, are going to look horrible on a regular Wi-Fi connection. You can lend DVDs to friends and family. They're easy to mail. And you get instant access to all of their features and every scene in a movie, instead of having to wait for the download to end. What's more, DVDs cost pennies to manufacture. Movie buffs take great pride in their DVD collections. And there are, by last count, 1.1 billion DVD players in homes around the world ... Some 120 million devices in the United States are capable of burning DVDs - more than enough for every household.
That's why a little-noticed deal this week between software developers Sonic Solutions and Macrovision Corporation makes a lot of sense. Sonic (Charts) makes software that helps consumers burn discs, while Macrovision (Charts) sells copyright protection services to the entertainment industry. So for the first time, consumers will be able to download and burn movies onto DVDs legally - that is, with the copyright protection technology that the movie studios demand.
Jim Taylor, a former DVD evangelist at Microsoft and now the general manager of Sonic, says most consumers don't yet understand how restrictive movie download services are. "For most people, it hasn't quite sunk in yet that download-to-own is not download-to-burn," explains Taylor (no relation to this author). "Yet the number one demand from consumers [who download movies] is the ability to burn to DVD."
Taylor is confident that the Sonic-Macrovision technology will hike studio revenue by hundreds of millions of dollars a year between now and 2008 - and by billions of dollars a year thereafter.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Attack of the Non-Killer Kitties
It's one of the great ironies of my life: I'm allergic to cats, and yet I adore the little self-important critters. (Of course, as I never fail to point out when this discussion comes around, it's not that I'm allergic to cats per se. In point of scienfitic fact, my body is having an allergic reaction to the feces of the mites that live in cat fur, which seems quite a sensible thing for a body to have an allergic reaction to; it's all you people breathing in cat mite crap with no ill effects who are the freaks.) And it would seem I'm not alone in this dilemma: fully one-third of cat-allergic Americans are so enthralled, they keep kitties in their homes anyway.
So I've been watching the development of hypoallergenic cats -- genetically tinkered to resist mites and their detrius -- with great interest. According to http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifthis New York Times article, San Diego-based Allerca is about to start shipping the modified mogs in January. The price tag is too rich for my blood -- $4,000 -- and the screening procedure appears to be more stringent than that for adopting orphans. (Well, to be fair, orphans didn't require a multimillion dollar investment or a genetics lab.) But this is just a start, a slippery slope I look forward to society sliding down. Waiting for cheap allergy-free kitties is like waiting for a one-terabyte iPod -- wait a few years, keep yourself busy doing other things, and it'll happen before you know it.
Daily Blah for... Monday, October 09, 2006
YouTube, RIP
Well, it was good fun while it lasted -- all those free music videos, the snippets of badly-taped kids' cartoons from the 70's, the everything-you-need-to-know-about-last-night's-television-in five-minutes montages. Now that Google has acquired YouTube for a staggering (and extremely swaggering) $1.6 billion, you'd better bet the videos with any potential for copyright protection -- anything from TV, Hollywood, record labels, anywhere in the world -- are going to get pulled down sharpish, as hungry copyright lawyers salivate over the size of Google's deep pockets.
What does that leave us with? Diet Coke and Mentos experiments, and shaky videos of your neighbor's cat skateboarding. Hardly the kind of quality entertainment you'd expect from a company streaming 100 million videos, and indeed it's hard to imagine Google could sustain that impressive (and oft-misunderstood) viewership figure with user-generated, non-copyright-busting video. (We're talking the quality of the lightsaber kid rather than the quality of the Star Wars mashups.)
As Mark Cuban has been saying repeatedly, anyone who buys YouTube is "an idiot." YouTube is so successful because of the complete freedom of its content, and its lack of significant cash reserves is the only thing keeping the lawyers at bay. “The minute that acquisition takes place," Cuban said of the Google rumor on Friday, "YouTube couldn’t be YouTube.”
Which makes me worry about Google. This kind of big-walleted bravado, this flavor-of-the-month acquisition, is more in the character of a stodgy old company like HP or Microsoft. It's the kind of thing a technology company does when it wants to appeal to Wall Street Journal readers rather than common sense. Sergey, Larry and Mr. Schmidt The Grown-Up had distinguished themselves until now by not playing that game, and like a medieval courtier I find myself blaming Evil Advisers -- some unseen room of besuited marketing types with the combined depth of a kids' paddling pool, each trying to outswagger the other by coming up with ever more noticeable ways for Google to blow its multibillion-dollar wad.
Daily Blah for... Friday, October 06, 2006
Hair Today
It's a topsy-turvy world, dear Blah readers. The only constant is change. Small famine-filled countries are preparing to explode nuclear weapons, Republicans are chasing after Congressional pages, and Mayor Gavin Newsom has stopped wearing hair gel and has started looking like Hugh Grant. Forget about the Big One -- this truly is a San Francisco earthquake of seismic proportions. One that begat intense speculation about the impact of the new girlfriend, and whether Kimberly had instituted some sort of marketing deal with Brylcreem that just expired.
But the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Newsom was co-opting the look of the old-school politician, the one that hasn't changed since the 1950s -- starched shirt, blazer, slick hair. In the age of Mark Foley, this look starts to seem more than a little creepy. And what the electorate wants in a politician -- what image suggests authority and leadership -- is bound to change eventually. We don't ask our elected representatives to wear powdered wigs and breeches any more, as much as we may like that look on the back of our banknotes.
 No, what we crave in politics and politicians, now more than ever, is authenticity. (This, by the way, is why Democrats almost always seem to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory -- they may be by far the saner party, but they're also the ones that come across as the more stiff.) What Newsom is saying is: hey, I have authentic hair. I'm an authentic guy. Believe my bangs, believe me. Or maybe he's just taking a cue from Hugh Grant's popular British PM in "Love Actually."
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Telstar Takes Off
A quick plug for Telstar Logistics Employee News, the blog of my friend and co-worker -- sadly, soon to be no longer my co-worker -- Mr. Todd Lappin, friend to all things cheesy and Cold War era-ish. Telstar Logistics is the name of the fake company he created more than a decade ago, largely to get free parking in loading zones for his van, which bears the Telstar Logistics logo (stolen from a defunct, but formerly real 1950's company, it shows a cityscape of skyscrapers in front of an atom, and you can't get more frickin' 1950's America than that).
The Telstar brand has grown in popularity over the years, with every fake logo pen and clipboard he hands out. Recently he was even sent, completely unsolicited, an application to open a Telstar Logistics franchise -- he hadn't even created such an application form, but the sender was clearly in on the joke, and savvy enough with desktop publishing, to make one himself. Now Telstar is taking his leave of us, and doing some contract work for CNet on the way to becoming a stellar product designer -- and he will be doing that contract work not as a freelancer, but as a representative of Telstar Logistics. And the moral of the story, kids, is that even a fake company can take over your life, especially if you work hard at it.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, October 03, 2006
A Very Dan Debut
Daily Blah alumni Dan continues to make waves over at CNET. His latest groundbreaking venture: launching a virtual version of the CNET building in Second Life. This marks the first time a journalistic entity has crossed over to the 3-D online environment, and I can think of nobody better to take it there than Dan, whose coverage of virtual culture -- Second Life in particular -- has set the gold standard this last year. Here's hoping he's blazing a trail other journos will soon follow.
|
