If you, like I, have ever wished that the writing at Stateside could be as well-informed as the writing over at Public Address, then wish no more! PA founder and Hard News-man, Russell Brown, stopped over last week in San Francisco on his way back to New Zealand from the Friends of O’Reilly camp in the North Bay. (O’Reilly is a technical publishing company.)
Earlier in the visit, Russell had been down in Silicon Valley and over to the East Bay, so he got to see a good range of the Bay Area and met a lot of the movers and shakers behind the developments now shaping the Web experience for all of us. For details about his visit you should of course read his posts from August 25 through September 1.
As he prepared to fly back to NZ, Mr Brown responded to my emailed questions on weighty matters of one sort or another!
There seems to be two conflicting internet developments: competitive popularity (where sites such as YouTube push content to the top according to how many people view it) and collaborative earnestness (where information is shared and developed using the wiki model). From the people you've met while you've been here, did you get the feeling that either of those models will fundamentally change the way most people get the news and information they find useful in their everyday lives in the same way that people's shopping habits have been changed by e-commerce?
I don't think the two are quite as polar as you suggest. Both YouTube and Wikipedia farm out authority to their communities in different ways. Traditional news journalism isn't going to go away (it would be a disaster if it did) but these other ways of handling news and information all have a role. E-commerce hasn't shut down the shops and malls and I doubt it ever will.
The rule is generally that media innovation is complimentary - TV didn't wipe out radio when it arrived, although a lot of people thought it would. Newspaper readership is falling though, and there are risks in that. digg.com really works pretty well, but it's never going to promote boring-but-important stories like local authority reporting.
There are also risks in people being able to personalise their news to the point that they get only the news they want to hear - and only the news that fits their prejudices. I've always thought that personalised news services should sometimes deliver people news they *don't* want ...
My local public transport authority, AC Transit, is talking about introducing WiFi for commuters on its TransBay service, yet it can't even provide enough buses to pick up all the kids and commuters trying to get to school and work in the mornings over here in the East Bay. Were your fellow campers working on stuff that is all very clever but not actually very useful?
There was actually quite a bit of discussion of social goals and political activism at sessions devoted to those issues. O'Reilly's mission statement is "changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators" and I think the focus on social good is genuine. At the Sunday debrief, two of the requests from campers were (a) that next year's event include some aid or community development people, and (b) that it should have as little environmental impact as possible - this year, the plates were paper but the forks were still plastic.
Both Steve Tomlin and Bunnie Huang of Chumby Industries seemed to want to do the right thing. Bunnie has done everything from work on supercomputers (his PhD) to hacking game consoles, and he told me he liked the idea of working on something that could be put to useful social purpose. They cited the idea of Chumbys for geriatrics - which could display pics of family, remind them to take their medications, etc.
I noted in the blog what I thought was a yearning for classic values. I think many of the people there despair of the direction America has taken -I had several conversations with people about the diminishing status of science and the loss of "yankee ingenuity", for example.
But the example you've cited is a nice demonstration of how people can get it wrong too. It's good if WiFi encourages public transport use, but it doesn't make much sense if the public transport capacity isn't there.
Did you eat any apple pie? After all, you were in Gravenstein country just a couple of weeks after the harvest festival!
No, but I had some applesauce. And I was really impressed by the Wholefoods store in Sebastopol. They don't seem so hung up on the organic thing as similar stores in NZ; it's just good food. One thing that really frustrates me in NZ is all the expensive US-sourced organic food products at those shops - sure, it's organic, but can you *really* justify the carbon miles on that tin of baked beans?
Is there any impression that's top of your mind when you think of this trip?
(a) Clever, thoughtful people that I could relate to. Tech people who get to NZ are usually on corporate message, and it's nice to meet people in the sector who aren't.
(b) The sheer range of atmospheres and environments I visited in a relatively small area. I loved IBM and Google but I didn't really like the valley, it seemed scorched and ugly. Berkeley and Sebastopol were nice and downtown SF is a fun, crazy, dirty mix. I won't be too sorry to get away from beggars, crazy people and crack dealers though ...
Did everyone seem big?
There certainly are some fatties, but I'm not all that svelte myself at the moment. I was amazed at portion sizes and how much people eat - I was consciously looking not to overeat after the first couple of days. And I'm amazed at how many people suck down those giant fat-and-sugar concoctions at Starbucks. Yuck.
I found both great food and really bad food.
Righto, better pack.
PS from Rosalea: Assuming gravensteins are in-store now Down Under, here’s a link to the Sebastopol apple fair website, where you’ll find an interesting history and some delicious recipes about that tart little number the Russians brought to California!
--PEACE OF PIE--
For a couple of months now, I've had a trial home delivery of the San Francisco Chronicle. During the week, while waiting at the bus stop, I split out the sports, cars, classifieds, and San Francisco news and leave those sections in the recycling part of our famously theft-worthy street trash cans, and read most of the rest on my way to and from work.
In addition to all the usual sections, the heavyweight Sunday edition is packed with advertising sheets and coupons, so I split those out too and give them to my neighbor, who passes them on to a woman who puts them to good use saving on food and treats for her grandchildren. Even without all those sections I pass on to him, I'm left with a mighty stack of reading for a Sunday.
Here's a couple of thoughts about what's there this Sunday.
::Holy industrial sabotage, Batteryman!::
The back page of the business section has a column entitled Product Recalls. Reading it is not for the faint-hearted. From scooters whose "handlebars, wheels and brakes can break and detach" to climbing harnesses whose faulty webbing "could cause climbers to slip out of the harness and fall" to motormower blades that can crack and break into pieces "posing a serious hazard" (are you kidding!), there is not one recall that doesn't make you wonder how the hell these products got on the market in the first place.
And then there's the 4.5 million lithium-ion batteries for laptop computers being recalled by Dell and Apple because they allegedly catch fire. Not that I'm a paranoid conspiracy theorist or anything, but I find the timing of this awfully suspicious. Sony made those batteries and presumably Sony will have to suck up the cost of replacing them. Just when it's about to launch an exciting new WiFi product (the Mylo) that will suck the wind out of the sails of companies manufacturing MP3 players and handhelds reliant on the big telecommunications companies to deliver downloads anywhere any time via cellphone access to the internet.
I mean to say, fancy Apple's Steve Jobs being in bed with this guy.
::Pluto has left the house::
In the Insight section of "ideas, opinion, commentary", one of the Chron's regular columnists has a funny memo To: Pluto, From: The Solar System about the erstwhile ninth planet's recategorisation as a dwarf planet. With total insensitivity to the smaller folks among us, CW Nevius calls it a "demotion"--no doubt he'll be hearing from somebody's lawyer some time soon.
But in fact, a letter to the editor got the jump on this subject earlier in the week. Its writer wondered what was going to happen to all the Scorpios of the world now that their planetary sponsor is no longer a planet. Indeed! How will the entire foundation of astrology cope now that Pluto can no longer be the planet in your house of whatever house it's in at the time?
If we could have voted on who got tossed off the solar system, I'd have gotten rid of Mercury. It's forever going retrograde and making me lose my house keys or gum up the computer.
::Is that a hare brain under those rabbit ears?::
Among the magazine-style sections in the Sunday Chron is SelectTV, a TV Entertainment Magazine. It contains the TV listings for the coming week in a grid format, along with celebrity news and a crossword. Truth is, I already get my TV grid from a website called TitanTV.com because I can limit the grid to the few analog stations my rabbit ears can get.
Thankfully, summer is nearly over—school’s back next week—so the season for “TV” being the acronym for Totally Vile might conceivably be at an end. This summer, television seemed to have turned to the vaudeville acts of centuries gone by as its inspiration, with shows like America’s Got Talent and harebrained stunt shows supplementing the usual ghastly Survivor, Big Brother, and Idol spin-offs.
Not that I watch much television on my television. TitanTV has cut a deal with Fox to stream the first three episodes of four of its Fall series on-line for free. On Saturday night, I watched the first episode of Vanished, which is about a US Senator’s wife who goes missing, and was aired first on television mid-week.
The way it was presented on my DSL-fed Apple cinema monitor was with two small screens, one showing the uninterrupted program and the other having a combination of Google ads and a Flash ad for an insurance company constantly cycling. You soon tuned out the ad panel. And got used to the small size of the image, which streamed without a hitch. The sound quality was excellent.
Assuming that’s the size image I’d see on a handheld device, it’s certainly a preferable way to watch primetime television for someone like me who doesn’t want to have to sit through a bunch of crap in the early evening just to get to what might conceivably be an even worse bunch of crap after 9pm.
“Blue smoke goes drifting by into the deep blue skies,
My memories of home will never die.”
In 2006, the San Jose Jazz Festival could no longer bill itself as the world's largest free jazz festival. You paid $5 each day and got a wrist band that admitted you to the venues, such as the Main Stage in Cesar Chavez Plaza. Friday was red. The main band was Dr. John.
Besides the Main Stage, Blues, Salsa, Latin, and Big Band jazz were featured.
There’s an ad on TV that has puzzled me ever since I moved to the Bay Area. It’s for an electronics store that sells not just consumer products but the kind of stuff techies go nuts for--memory upgrades, gold-plated audio jacks, all that jazz. The curious thing about the ad is that it features an owl and the night sky. So, being down in the South Bay this weekend, I decided to find out why.
But first, a diversion, because I completely overshot the light rail station I was supposed to get off at and ended up in the historic city of Campbell. I know it’s historic because there’s a sign that says so:
Having dutifully trotted into the HD, I discovered the most bizarre thing: this replica of a 1950s jigsaw puzzle box.
Actually, it is called Ainsley House. Campbell is at the center of what was once a fruit-growing area, and the J.C. Ainsley Packing Company was one of three major canneries in the town. Most of the high quality fruit canned by Ainsley was shipped to England.
A moving walkway has you gliding like Cleopatra on a Nile barge up to the front door, and inside, the Egyptian theme is used everywhere. Even in the Presentation Room, where a mummy stands sentinel to the right of the home theatre screen, holding what could very well be the very receptacle from which Snakes on a Plane escaped. Look out! There’s one on the sconce!
Once you have finally had your fill of walking around an acre or two of electronics, the marvellous checkout area awaits you. This view of the 58 checkout stations is taken from just inside the grand entrance, which means you’re looking at merely half the width of the building.
Talk about supersized Fry’s!
It's been almost a year now since I started commuting 77 minutes each way to work. That precise figure is taken from the length of the CD I often listen to, a CD I burned myself from the iTunes I'd downloaded to my Mac. So, why don't I have an iPod instead of a portable CD player?
In the process of answering that question, I’ve formulated the theory that there are two types of people in this world: Rectos and Roundies. Rectos are impressed by quantity, numbers, and surface appearances. Hence, iPods are favoured by people who want to indiscriminately load a gazillion songs onto a device that will make them look cool.
Roundies are more comfortable with quality, abstract concepts, and content. They would rather have 77 minutes of songs they actually like even if it makes them look sooooo last century. That makes me a shape snob, I suppose, but it also puts me in with the locals. During the school year, the bus I take to work is packed with that demographic the marketeers love--high school kids--and very, very few of them have an iPod.
Is that an economic thing, given as the bus travels from some of the poorest parts of Oakland? Well, those kids dress in clothes that must cost as much as an iPod and they're rarely seen in the same outfit twice, so they've made a spending choice that doesn't include the iPod.
Perhaps it's cultural then? I think that's getting a lot closer to it. There are other, much cheaper, MP3 players out there but even they are rejected in favor of CD players by my young fellow commuters.
Perhaps it's the ability to burn multiple CDs and give them to friends that make the CD player popular, especially here in Oakland, which is a creative hotbed for new music distributed on small local labels. A couple of local music promoters commute by bus, and I've seen kids go up to them and hand over their homemade CDs, hoping to pick up a recording deal some time.
But beyond all of that, I really think that there is a deeper force at work in the preferences people have for one shape over another. Industrial designers know this and use it to good effect. Ideas about shape are so deeply ingrained in us, that--for example--it's inconceivable that military vehicles would have curves even if it made them more aerodynamically efficient. Would a Hummer be a Hummer if it had the Beetle's lines?
Roundies of the world unite! So long as Rectos rule the roost, we'll never have a decent quality of life for all on this planet.
One of the things I loved most about Star Trek were those little communicators the crew could tap on and speak into to communicate with folks back on the Enterprise when they were on-planet. Well, next month us regular folks will be one step closer to having that ability to get the kids in from the back yard for dinner without having to go out there and yell at them.
Not since a globe-trotting Kiwi friend turned up on my doorstep in 1979 with the Sony Walkman he'd bought overseas have I been this excited about a piece of consumer technology, and again it's from Sony. The Mylo (short for My Life Online) is not a phone; it's a communicator, which is just perfect for someone like me who can't justify paying a monthly charge to connect to a mobile phone network. It will likely be an adjunct for kids already hooked on cellphones but frustrated by their limitations.
Because the Mylo uses any accessible wireless network, it is a broadband device delivering content at much higher speeds than a cellular network can. You can use it for instant messaging, Skype internet voice calls, emails, and web browsing. It stores music, video and photos, which you can exchange as part of your real-life conversation with someone else in the vicinity who also has a Mylo. Like when you're with your friend in a coffee shop that has wi-fi.
The Mylo will be available here in the States in September, just in time for it to be this year's must-have item for students, since most university campuses have wireless networks. For the real significance of this product with respect to the telecommunications industry, read this commentary.
I have an antique towel in my linen cupboard. It dates from just 2000, yet it is already a collectible item because it is emblazoned with the words “PacBell Park”. That is what San Francisco's baseball stadium was called when the Pacific Bell telephone company had the naming rights. Back then, PacBell supplied my phone service, although I also had a brief and violently unhappy relationship with AT&T as my long-distance provider.
Then PacBell became SBC and the park was renamed. And just recently new signage had to go up because SBC bought out AT&T and decided to use that name instead. Which means I am back to dealing with AT&T for any issues I have with my phone bill. Crikey! Do they still have what I said to that Customer Service Rep back in 2001 on my file? Is there no getting away from these behemoths?
Not that I'm a paranoid megalomaniac or anything, but I do have an instant attraction for the far-fetched, so you can imagine the connections my scriptwriter-mind made when I woke up to TV news footage of folks throwing their bottled water away at airline terminals, the very morning after I'd emailed my last column to Scoop.
So to test the theory that the combination of the phrases "World Trade Center" and "bottled water" in the same email somehow triggered this latest terror arrest sweep, I will now attempt to get cellphones banned on public transport / mobiles banned on public transit. For which, I am sure, the vast majority of train and bus commuters will erect a pedestal in my honour/honor.
There are some things about Oliver Stone's World Trade Center that are great examples of the craft of movie making. One of them comes late in the film, in a hospital waiting room, when one woman comforts another and the point of view--the interior point of view--changes with such subtlety that you hardly notice it.
Another is the sound design. I saw World Trade Center in one of the grand old cinemas from the golden age of cinema, the Grand Lake in Oakland. But even a commercial for the Dolby sound system that played before the feature couldn't prepare me for the sensation of feeling that there were 60 storeys of building collapsing around and on top of me.
For that is what happens in this movie. It's about two officers of the Port Authority Police Department--a group of people who I thought at the time were thoroughly overlooked in all the brouhaha about the brave fire fighters--who were trapped in the rubble but were rescued and survived. Not much of a story in that, as many critics have commented.
How can you write a movie that stays true to the circumstances and the people it is honoring, when the audience already knows the outcome? In his promotion of the movie, Nicholas Cage has been playing up the mystical qualities of the movie, and I confess that after the second sighting of Jesus with some bottled water in hand I had to make a beeline to the restroom.
Which reminded me I hadn't eaten so I popped across the street, got some KFC, ate it at a sidewalk table, then went back to the movie, arriving just as the first PAPD officer was being rescued. To be honest, it was as much the GI-Joe caricature of a US Marine about to singlehandedly do something heroic that drove me from the theatre as the effects of the copious bottled water I'd been drinking on another stinking hot day.
All of which sounds mighty disrespectful of the people Stone is honoring with this film, yet at the end--when the credits roll and the film's dedication to "all those who fought, died or were wounded on that day" is followed by a listing of the fallen men of the PAPD--I felt compelled to salute them.
They knew nothing about what was going to happen, and to get the most from the film you need to get your head in a space where you don't know what's going to happen either, which calls for a kind of resumption of innocence.
At this early stage of the movie, the script is good at helping you think--along with the PAPD--that the biggest problem is the fire and the lack of plan to deal with evacuating fifty or sixty thousand people. Then the newsreel clips of people all around the world watching in stunned horror as the NY morning unfolds bring you back to the intensity of your own feelings at that time.
Principal among those feelings, the sensation that the world was standing with the United States in that moment. Stone acknowledges that by emphasising in Cage's recital of the Lord's Prayer as he lies trapped, the words "Forgive us our trespasses and those who trespass against us." But it's the Connecticut-based ex-marine GI Joe on his cellphone as he strides over the rubble saying, "No, I'm not coming in today. They're gonna need some good men out there to avenge this," who almost gets the last word.
Heaven knows, personal care products cost an armpit and a legwax, but now it seems they're so valuable that Walgreen's pharmacy has taken to putting stickers on them saying: "This item intended for sale at Walgreens. If found at other outlets call 1-800-666-5677."
Anarchists take note: This is, of course, a great opportunity to wreak havoc with Big Corporations: just peel the sticker off the ones in Walgreens and go and stick them on items in another store, like Wal*Mart, for example! And vice versa, until every corporate behemoth in the US is suing every other corporate behemoth in the US.
I didn't notice the sticker till I got the product home, and it looked kind of bulky so I peeled it off only to find a miniature electronic circuit on the other side. It's a radio frequency ID, which can be used to track items as well as store information about what the item is. Oakland Public Library uses them on books, but somehow I don't mind that as much as finding an RFID on a personal care item.
Puts a whole new spin on the term "Trojan horse."
