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Question 268 of 365: Can we take everything with us?

Published on September 25, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.
Micro SD
Image by bigcityal via Flickr

We have preferences and we have workflows. We know where things are in our offices and on our devices. We don’t have to relearn every keystroke on a daily basis. We establish comfort zones all around us so that we can rise above the minutiae and pursue the big productive work at hand. We even lug around large laptops or set up elaborate work environments just so that we don’t have to change too much from day to day.

Even as I argue for a device independence and syncing every service to one another, I notice that I am leaving a lot of the customization that I treasure behind. I am starting to begrudge putting in my wifi credentials on each new device I decide to use. Even though I have access to all of my files in Google Docs and Dropbox, access still differs a bit depending on the browsers and versions I have to work with. I have decided that I hate upgrading software almost as much as I hate having to bring a certain laptop with me in order to access all of my individual preferences. It just seems so antiquated and uncivilized to feel like a foreigner even as I access the same gmail account on different computers.

There may be hope, however. Yesterday, I decided to give load up Ubuntu Linux on a micro-SD card. This tiny little card holds an entire operating system, all of the programs I will need to run on it, and every preference I could possibly have. Currently, I am running it on a Netbook that I was given for a test drive. But, I popped the card into a USB stick and loaded it up on my Mac, my wife’s Dell and any other machine (save my iPad, I suppose) that I could throw it’s way.

It is nothing short of a revelation.

I am looking at the same desktop on this machine that I look at on any machine that I turn to. The desktop is the same. The programs are the same. Even the saved credentials are the same. I am literally packing my entire computer into a square centimeter of silicon. How did I not recognize this as the logical extension of syncing everything together? How was it that I missed the idea of bringing my consistency of experience to everything I use?

The word that Ubuntu uses for a USB stick based install that can save preferences is persistence. I think that describes what I am doing pretty well. I am using a persistent system. It persists as a part of me, even as I add to it and change my workflows to meet the operating system that is so tight and compact that it can fit into a single Gigabyte. I can now take everything with me that I need to get down to business. Everything.

(For those who would like to know more about this setup. Here is what I have done:

  1. I made the Ubuntu instance out of the Universal USB Installer. (I used the Netbook Remix of Ubuntu because I knew it would work on pretty much any machine)
  2. I installed Google Chrome with the Browser sync (for any computer I use that isn’t running this Ubuntu instance).
  3. I’m using Google Documents to edit all documents.
  4. I installed Dropbox to sync all files to every computer (I do not sync directly to the USB stick, but rather to the hard drive of whatever computer I am running).

While this really isn’t a long list of things that I had to do, I think that each one adds a bit to being able to take everything with me.)

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Question 238 of 365: Why is everything a phone?

Published on August 26, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.

I just got the message today that I am now able to call domestic phone numbers from gmail. In one fell swoop, Google has become my default phone service. I can use my computer to call any cell phone or land line for free over the web. It essentially has taken all long distance service out the equation and has made me question the needs for skype, home phones, and even cell phone providers that don’t use VOIP. Telephone service has become data service. Minutes don’t matter and neither do phone numbers. All I need is a contact to make a connection.

And, I realize that this isn’t the first time that the ground underneath telephony has shifted. I get that Voice Over IP has been around a long time. And yet, it makes me realize that everything is a phone now. My computer, iPad, and iPod. Anything that connects to the web is a phone. Soon (with the release of the iTV in a few weeks), my TV will be a phone too.

I didn’t have a cell phone until 2003. I put it off because I thought that the expense wasn’t justified. I didn’t want to just make phone calls from more places. That wasn’t interesting to me when I could pick up any phone and have the same things as I would on a cell phone (minus the contact list). Why would I want a monthly fee to have instant access to others. And, maybe I was right to question the expense. Certainly, Google has.

They do not see the value in the phone calls themselves, but rather everything else around it. They see value in the ads in gmail. They see value in keeping us on any device connected to their networks rather than going anywhere else for our connections. We are moving to a place where phone calls essentially cost nothing. We are going to pay for data. We are going to pay by clicking on ads. And everything will continue to become more and more like what a phone was and not what a phone is today. The actual call will become such an easy portion of our communication that it will be built into every gadget and device we purchase. Phone service will cease. It will just be service.

Here is what I see as the future of our telephony:

We will be completely device independent. No matter where we are, if someone is trying to reach us via voice the things around us will ring. Refrigerators and tables will have confirm or deny buttons. And then we will have phone calls with the air around us because everything will be a microphone. It will just be too easy to accomplish. We are living in an internet of real objects, and each one will be able to connect to our Google Voice account (or whatever it becomes) because the alternative is to give up connection to some other service that is willing to do this for free. The value of communication will continue to be around the amount of data it requires to make these calls and not on how long we are on the phone. Because with our voice will will be sending files and video to one another to any screen that just happens to be around. And those bytes that we send will be where people make their money. We will pay for the privilege because we are already on the phone. We are already communicating and the cost of sharing has been completely obscured. And, sharing is what the future is all about.

And the future started today.

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Question 213 of 365: Where is the asterisk?

Published on August 1, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
Asterisk
Image via Wikipedia

I have never understood infomercials. While they may be fun to watch or poke fun at every once in a while, I have never for a moment wanted one of those products bad enough to want to “call and order right away.” I know that there probably is a market for the products that they are selling, otherwise they wouldn’t be so ever-present. I just never could see myself as their target audience. I always just assumed that their target audience weren’t the type of people who looked for an asterisk. They weren’t the folks who really paid attention to the fine print or the incredibly fast talking at the end of every infomercial that explained just how different actual results and the results on the television could be. I have always looked for and listened to such things, even if I did not head their advice.

I first started looking for asterisks when I bought a super long range frisbee called the Arobe (or something like that). It claimed to be the farthest reaching frisbee in the world. I learned very quickly that this claim was pretty false whenever I threw it. Sure, it went farther than most of the frisbees I had thrown, but it was all in who was throwing it that made it a world record holder. I couldn’t propel the thing much further than the length of my parent’s lawn.

That first asterisk led me to be skeptical of nearly every claim that came after, including those infomercials. But, I have been noticing a severe lack of asterisks in the claims that people are making every day now about their value and their contributions. For example, there are almost no asterisks in either the Android or Apple app stores. The apps do what they claim to do, except when proven otherwise. There are no claims of “your results may differ” when it comes to describing or creating the new “killer app.” And frankly, without the healthy dose of skepticism that I have learned from buying frisbees and watching over the top infomercials, I would be buying a whole lot of crappy ideas and applications.

I would like to start seeing asterisks at the bottom of blog posts and news articles with the biases of the author. I would like to start seeing them crop up as links to opposing viewpoints. To me, the web is one big claim that each idea holds the same amount of truth as the next. Every site is proclaiming to have the right information or the right tool or the right context to fit your needs at the moment. But, without an asterisk on each on of those proclamations, there isn’t anything that can be said to be fully true.

It is the asterisks that make our claims believable. While they may not be entirely convincing with them in there, it is what makes it okay to go out on a limb and state fantastic successes without being delusional. The asterisk is what gives us the freedom to go from ingredients to finished product without having to show all of the steps in between. And yet, the asterisks are so implied online that we forget that they are there at all.

Twitter is not a life stream. (at least not without an asterisk that leaves room for all of the times that are not spent tweeting).

Wikis are not completely democratic (at least not without an asterisk that leaves room for all of the edit wars and bias of any given article.)

News websites do not have the definitive version of the news (at least not without an asterisk that leaves room for citizen journalism).

Comments and Web Traffic are not the measures of success or importance (at least not without an asterisk that leaves room for quiet authorship and appreciation that goes beyond simple popularity).

You get my point. The missing asterisks online are too numerous to count. And I would like to start seeing them pop up so that we can proclaim loudly that “results may vary”, even online*.

*I would like to state my bias for this post. I do not believe everything I read online, but I know a lot of people who do. I look down on those people, and in that sense, I am an elitist.

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25 Killer (iPad) Apps

Published on July 8, 2010, by in Uncategorized.
The brushed aluminum back of the iPad Wi-Fi
Image via Wikipedia

I have been putting this post off for a while now, but I am finally compelled to write about all of the apps that I am using  on a regular basis on my iPad. I am compelled by just how many conversations I have had about doing more than just consumption with the device. The following list of Apps are what make the iPad essential to me. They are what make it more than just a toy:

Before I go too deep, here are the apps that I have on my iPad right now (While there are a great many Jailbroken apps that I would recommend, I think that it would be somewhat counterproductive to highlight those in this blog post because the vast majority of users are never going to open up their device as I have.):

  1. Accuradio – This is the one and only radio service (other than the amazing NPR of course, which has been downloaded so many times for iPhone and iPad that it hardly needs mentioning in this list) that I have found which I do not find myself skipping through songs I have already heard or artists that I could care less about. I think it is because it is being curated by real people rather than by an algorithm. The stations vary widely, but my favorite is Future Perfect Radio.
  2. IM+ Lite – This is the best way to chat on the iPad (Multiple sessions at any given time, push notification, etc) I use Google Talk all of the time on my laptop, but this was the only reliable way to continue to do so on my iPad. And with backgrounding (either on a jailbroken iPad or in the iOS 4 which is forthcoming), you will never again miss out on a  conversation that you could have taken part in.
  3. Atomic Browser – This is one of the only apps I actually paid for (99 cents). I love the ability to choose tabs over Safari’s odd pagination system. I also love that I can change what the user agent is (this means that I make a website believe I’m running Internet Explorer or another desktop browser). This gives me the opportunity to see the desktop version of every website if I wish to do so, rather than the more limited versions of mobile sites.
  4. Air Sketch Free – Killer. This app allows me to draw on the iPad and have it display on any computer (or projector) that is on the same wifi network. This means that I can present without cords as well as I can allow everyone in a room to see the same thing that I see. Just awesome.
  5. DejaPlay – I have written about this app previously because I think that it is wonderful. It is the best way for me to view videos that my friends and colleagues are sharing on twitter and facebook. It compiles every link that is shared and puts them into an elegant video display. Rather than wasting time down the rabit hole that is YouTube, I can watch my network curate my video library in real time.
  6. GoodReader – Another pay app (also 99 cents) makes the iPad into an uploading and downloading machine. While the app was created for the purposes of viewing big documents, I pretty much exclusively use it for downloading files uploading them to other sites. Here is my favorite use case: I open up GoodReader and pull a file from my e-mail and put it up on Dropbox and then share it out with everyone I wish to. Another thing I do a lot is upload things to FTP sites and web servers that I maintain. This means that I don’t have to wait to get to my laptop to update a file. I also can get access to all of the files on my iPad from my computers without having to use a USB cord. (In fact, I haven’t synced my iPad, ever. I activated it once and that was it. I haven’t seen the need.)
  7. CloudBrowse – Although this is becoming less valuable to me as I find other interesting workarounds, this is still the only way to really get flash or Google Docs to play nicely on the iPad. Useful, if a bit crippled without a paid account.
  8. Dropbox – I have become more and more dependent upon this product to sync everything I need. Whenever I need to look at a file or send a link to someone, I just jump into the app and grab it. What else can I say… it just works.
  9. Sundry Notes – Best App. Seriously. It’s uses are incredibly far reaching. The only thing I can compare it to is Keynote, Smart Notebook, Word, and Skitch all rolled into one. From this app, I can take handwritten notes, typed notes, screenshots from any webpage, insert equations, and do voice recordings of what is going on. This app is ridiculously useful for meetings, brainstorming, presenting, and everything in-between. The export to PDF works great and you can even view your notes online if you want to sync with their service. Oh, and you can annotate PDF’s from your computer if you wanted to do that by syncing them in iTunes. Crazy awesome.
  10. Idea Sketch – A free and well laid out mind mapping software. Brainstorming in here is a pleasure. Export works great and you can even let other people edit your brainstorms if you e-mail them along.
  11. Adobe Ideas – The drawings and writing that you can do in this app are incredible compared to pretty much everything else out there. This is mostly because the app translates your jagged strokes into smooth vector graphics. My favorite part, though, is the enormous drawing area that you can zoom in and out of to draw and write in detail. I guess I would most compare it to an iPad version of the Prezi interface. Slick.
  12. Google Earth – I thought about not including this in the list because of how used it already is, but I think that if you have only used Google Earth on a laptop you are missing out on some of the best interactive learning that is available anywhere. I have spent hours just observing the differences between cities by zooming in and out on Denver and Kansas City. Feeling as though you can control the entire world is just cool.
  13. Web Projector – One more 99 cent app, here. Although I use my jailbroken capability to project anything on the iPad from the VGA cord, this is the cheapest way I have found to project anything that you can access from a webpage. It works very well and gets updated frequently.
  14. FeedlerRSS – Other than the web interface for Google Reader, this is my favorite (free) way to read the blogs I follow. It works well and lets you get through quite a number of posts in short order. My favorite thing about it is that I can actually see the blog posts in their original context, which is missing a lot of times when I just read it on Google’s site.
  15. Caster Free – I can’t tell you how cool this app is. You may just have to see it for yourself. It is a single stop for creating podcasts from multiple recordings, mixing them, processing them and then posting them to either an FTP site, a blog, or even Dropbox. I can’t believe that this one is free, actually. This is content creation at its finest on the iPad. (I know that AudioBoo and other services do this well, but you don’t own the files like you can here.)
  16. Story Kit – While this isn’t the most polished app in the list, it is one of the most interesting ways to create a book. It would work well with younger folks as well as with very simple content.
  17. Gooey – I use Google Docs to take notes quite often, or to leave myself reminders. This is a great way to add a Google Doc that is a quick note. There really aren’t a lot of features other than a pretty interface with this one, but I really like being able to save a quick note that syncs directly to Google Docs. I also like that it is free. Watch out, though, some versions of this app do crash. Good thing I only need it for a few minutes at a time.
  18. Granimator – Possibly the easiest, most creative art app. Basically, you paint with great drawings. It is meant to create backgrounds, but I think that it makes for a great backdrop for note taking or brainstorming. It also definitely gets my creative juices flowing to see someone else’s creation. Just cool.
  19. PaperDesk LT – If you just happen to have a VGA cord lying around for your iPad and are interested in projecting some drawing, text creation, or other brainstorming activities this is the perfect free app. I really like the way that you can save sessions for later to keep on projecting what you were working on even after you leave the app.
  20. Photopad – The best free image editor. All of the editing features that you would expect from a desktop editor with the ability to save right back to your Camera Roll. I can’t tell you how many screenshots I have rotated and cropped in here.
  21. uStream Viewer – Although we can’t record or stream from the iPad with the current version (although I swear you can see where the camera is supposed to go), I absolutely love being able to attend events in real time with chat. This is the only non-native iPad app in the list, but I think that it really works well in pixel doubled mode.
  22. iDraft – Adobe Ideas does pretty much everything I need from a drawing program and Sundry Notes does pretty much everything I need from a note taking application. So, what do I use iDraft for? Well, to make pretty diagrams and pdf notes with multiple pages. The simple pencil in this app makes it look like I am using a calligraphy pen, with the ability to make thin and thick marks by changing the speed of my gesture. The words I make in this app are nothing short of beautiful.
  23. JabberPad – Possibly the coolest concept for any app on the list. This app uses open protocols (including a jabber server) to create a collaborative whiteboard with any iPad on the same wifi network. Not only that, but you can chat with the other people in the same whiteboard. I can’t wait until you can contribute using your computer on the same network as well. Brilliant.
  24. Analytics (It looks like this is no longer free. I wouldn’t pay 6.99 for it, but it is pretty cool.) – While this isn’t really creating or consuming, it is really nice. This allows me to see my Google Analytics account (or at least the most important info to me) on the iPad. I love just taking a quick glance at how the different websites and blogs I maintain are doing and what I might need to change or highlight.
  25. Desktop Connect (pricey at 11.99, but worth it) – There are many free versions of VNC viewers (log into your desktop or laptop from the iPad) for the iPad, but this is the only one I have found that lets me login to a Mac from anywhere (at least for this cheap). This is because they have a desktop software called Easy Connect that actually authenticates using your Google Account. This means that not only can you see your desktop computer from your iPad no matter where you are in the world, but you can also see any of your friend’s (according to your Google Talk account) computers if they are online. They will have to give you access, but I think that the idea of actually seeing the network of your friend’s computers is stunning.

Well, that is it. That is my list of why the iPad matters right now. Again, there are some missing things that I need to Jailbreak my iPad for, but the ones I mentioned above are reason enough to buy and use an iPad and never look back. The iPad is not a device for mass consumption. It is a device like any other, completely dependent upon what you actually want to do with it. I want to create with it, so that is what I do. While not all of the apps above speak specifically to this need to create, they all inspire me to create more and better. Call me a fan boy if you must, but I believe in creating with whatever is available and it just so happens that I have an iPad.

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Question 151 of 365: How do we predict the future?

Published on June 1, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
Souris Microsoft | Tapis Google !
Image by louisvolant via Flickr

Everyone is trying to devine the next big thing. Reading the tea leaves on Twitter or letting the alerts drift in to the inbox of your choice. We are all looking to get in on the ground floor of the next version of the web (3.0, 3d, etc.). We are looking for what could be, in every cute logo or interesting color scheme.

I keep thinking that I will know it when I see it, too. I look back on what was the next big thing, and I knew it then, right? I saw Google way before they were Google. I was searching with them back in high school. I should have just invested in them when they went public. I didn’t, though, and so many other people are in the same boat. And that is why we keep looking for the next Google.

That’s not the only reason, though. We keep looking because we want to know the future. We are looking for reasons enough to invest our time or effort, if not our money. But we keep looking in the same places. We are looking toward app stores and startups with vowels missing.

Predicting the future requires a little bit of crazy. It isn’t going to be the same companies, although they will be major players. It will be someone that sees something completely different from the same set of rules and situations.

While I know this isn’t going to be it exactly, here is something that the future might be:

There are a special glasses for making things appear to be in 3d, but I believe that there are new glasses coming. I believe that there are glasses that block out every other frame of a movie. The reason they do this is because there are two movies playing, interlaced so that the glasses will display only one and block out the other. The sound will match for the one you are watching. You will be able to sit in the same theatre or in front of the same screen and watch two separate films.

This is crazy talk. It doesn’t exist, nor will it. There are two many unanswered questions. There are too many things that don’t make sense about something like this, but this is the future. The future of ridiculous technology that seemingly is more intrusive and convenient at the same time. These glasses are impractical. They are the unfortunate offspring of wanting to be completely immersed by the media you are consuming and wanting to be with others who are interested in being with you but not in consuming the same media that you are.

The future is in sharing the same space but not the same experience. The future is in finding connections without having to know all of the same people or the same facts. Differentiation is the future, whether that is with glasses or with a single online profile that knows more than it lets on.

The next Google is going to be the first company to let people be who they are with one another. They will present technologies to get people together. People have been trying this for years, but it is the one thing that is still severely lacking. The physical devices have presented screens to separate our learning and understanding. The ones that are coming are ones that bring it all together.

The ones that have already had their shot at this rather elusive prize probably won’t get it quite right. Google, Apple and Microsoft pay lip service to the future, but they really are trying to shore up the markets that have made them profitable. They won’t see someone coming up on the outside with a crazy gadget such as those glasses. They will see it as something that can’t possibly catch on, and then once it does, they will try and copy it or buy them out. But it won’t work this time. This time, the future will be too interested in creating itself anew. And it will.

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Question 148 of 365: Who gets notified?

Published on May 29, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
SAN FRANCISCO - JANUARY 26: Workers apply th...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The shipment of iPads came in. The ones that my father was looking forward to. The one that meant a message from Apple was was sent out to his email address. I was notified because he was notified. And I went and picked it up. I will mail it off tomorrow, but for today I will spend some time thinking through the idea of being notified when good things are coming your way.

I wish I could be notified for the following things:

  • When my children say they love me when I am out of earshot.
  • When I could get away with eating a bunch of junk food because of my low calorie count for the rest of the day
  • When my wife works on our budget or bills and I don’t know it. (This is to make sure I never take it for granted).
  • When someone adds something substantial to an idea I enjoy thinking about
  • When remember something worth writing down. (Ideally, this wiuld alert me to the idea I’ve just had and not the fact that I have just had an idea.)
  • Whenever something new is going to completely change my direction and interest drastically. (This may require being able to know the future, though.)

    • So, while I don’t get alerts for those things yet, I can be fairly confident that at least I get alerts for the new gadget du jour. That is nice and convenient, but not nearly as transformative,

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    Question 126 of 365: Is multi-tasking noise?

    Published on May 6, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.
    multi-tasking desktop
    Image by natala007 via Flickr

    People have been up in arms since the iPhone came out that it doesn’t allow multi-tasking. In fact, I was one of those people with arms outstretched. I couldn’t understand why any company as visionary as Apple would want to limit their devices to only doing one thing at a time. At any given moment, I have at least 20 programs running and another 20 tabs open in Chrome. This is the way that I work. It is how I communicate with other easily and how I push the flow of data along. Now though, I am beginning to question whether or not this multi-tasking mania is really good for my creative prospects.

    I think I get why Apple has resisted multi-tasking so much on their devices. They wanted each one to provide an experience for their users that was unlike anything else they have seen. They wanted to make sure that each app downloaded would feel as though it were made just for them, and not as some distraction for other distractions from real work. As I have gotten used to working on the iPad, I have realized just how powerful it is that I don’t have twitter up while I am writing. I realize just how intriguing answering an e-mail becomes when I’m not distracted by downloads or multiple tabs that keep on redirecting my attention.

    On the desktop, I set up tasks in separate programs. I start one and then jump to another while that one loads. I sometimes forget about the first one until I am closing out of things a few hours later. On the iPad, I don’t feel that rush. Everything is fast and the apps don’t work together at all. Ordinarily, I would be frustrated, but at the moment, I like the fact that I am drawing a vector illustration in one app, taking a screenshot, rotating it a second app, then sending it to my blog with a third. Each task becomes sacred. It becomes more time with the process of making something great. On a desktop, it is all done for you. You don’t feel as though you have accomplished something.

    And, I want to accomplish something. I want to take my time editing and producing and completely forget that there are other tasks that need to be done. For the moment, there is just one. I will follow it to its logical conclusion and then move on to the next.

    It lets my mind be something it doesn’t ussually get the chance to be: organized.

    It is like the one time that I cleaned my room for real.

    I don’t think that I am alone in complaining about having to clean up my room. Also don’t think I am alone in doing a half-hearted job most of the time because I knew that it was going to get messy again quite soon. I am also willing to wager that I am not alone in having spent one full afternoon really cleaning my room so that I was proud of the result.

    I set up action figures in fight scenes on the bookshelves. I put each of my baseball cards into their protective sleeves. I made my bed with special folds at the top that were far to intricate to be accidental. I sorted my books by genre and put the series books into their correct order.

    In short, I cleaned that room like it was my job. And, I enjoyed it. I took time with those action figures to make sure that the scenes were believable. I found out new statistics about my favorite ball players. I thought about how many times I had slept in that bed while I folded the top sheet underneath the blanket. And I made mental notes of when I should read those same books again. Each event had its place and I wasn’t worried about getting all of it done because I knew that I would eventually create the finished product.

    I feel like that is the power of not multi-tasking. That is the power of quiet.

    While I need the noise sometimes to do a lot of things quickly, I know that I will never enjoy them as much as if I only were doing one task at a time. So, the iPad may get multi-tasking this fall, but I can tell you that I will never use it to create noise. I will never enable it just so I can devalue each step in the creative process. I will only use it to know more about the one task I am concentrating on right now. On this device, I will set up workflows only to create better work, never more output.

    Because for me, output and work are two totally different things. The latter I love because it gives me more purpose. The former I despise because it gives me generic accomplishments and false understanding.

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    Question 107 of 365: Are we occupying or transforming our idle time?

    Published on April 18, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

    My brothers played hockey. Smelly, cold, and rough and tumble. They had early ice times and late night games. They played from mighty mites on up through peewees and then in high school too. Hockey made sense to them in a way that it never did for me.

    I used to stay home during their practices, that is once I had done enough time in the ice rink arcade. For years I faked playing video games in there, living vicariously through people who seemingly had quarters coming out of their ears. But when I was old enough to stay home, I did. I knew that there was only so much locker room stench I really needed in my life, and once I had reached my limit, I said no more.

    So, I stayed home and had marathon sessions of Saved by the Bell. I should have been doing homework, so I would try to turn off the TV from time to time, but I never was able to resist one more episode. Because of this I can go head to head with anyone who believes they know more about Zac Morris than I do, unfortunately it isn’t something that comes up all that often. I wanted to escape from my responsibilities into a world that was made for the protagonist, where the affects of doing whatever you wanted were never felt for very long (see the episode where Zac scores extremely high on SATs without doing any work in school). I just couldn’t turn away, at least not when the alternative was math worksheets or projects that had been dreamed up decades before.

    It was when I was left alone like this that I understood just how idle my life was. Without the presence of interesting goals or progress toward something of value, I was just looking for something to distract me until my parents came home. That was when I first noticed how much time I really had to do “nothing,” but it certainly wasn’t the last. Before I could reflect upon it, I had lived some of the most insignificant moments of my life in front of the television and computer. Before I knew that Collaboration would engage my mind, I saw that entertainment could distract it. Before I understood that creation would bolster my confidence, I saw that consumption would provide escape.

    And yet, I did figure out what would truly bring about my happiness and let me transform my idle time by controlling the ratio of input to output. I realized this as a function of being bored. I starting to write on a daily basis. It was becoming engaged in poetry and the conversations that it held that allowed me to finally turn off Saved by the Bell and find something more worthy of my time than Zac Attack (the fictional band that Zac Morris created in a dream episode). Unfortunately, I don’t think it can be writing that does it for everyone. I also think that we are distracting ourselves more easily than we ever have before.

    Netflix on Demand, DVRs and similar services are creating a culture of entertainment that feels more like creation. Because we can play, pause and fast forward all of our content (even print, audio and images), it seems as though we are doing something. There is no longer the sense that other people are going to create a marathon of episodes for us. We are creating that marathon for ourselves. We are now active participants in our own idleness. Before it was being pumped at us, but now we are choosing to turn on the fire hose and leaving it on because it feels like we are moving from the pressure.

    We can no longer accept that boredom and idleness are the same, mostly because we are no longer bored when we are idle. We don’t give ourselves the chance to be bored. We must always be engaged by the content at our fingertips. We must always be searching YouTube for the next viral video or be reading up on the next Apple rumor. In that way, we are occupying our idle time in self-made distraction. We are crafting the environment that occupied my time for years while my brothers were off playing hockey. And yet we are feeling transformed in this environment, and that is what I am most worried about.

    It is the fact that our idleness has become so interactive that is disguising our preoccupation with it. We are no longer able to simply be bored and to let that run its course. Because inevitably, boredom leads to invention, at least it did for me. I wrote in the quietest of times and spaces. I wrote when there was nothing to occupy me. But there aren’t those times now, and that is a turn for the worse. While I am not going to make an argument that certain devices, like the iPad, are turning our culture in one of consumers rather than social creators, rather I would like to state that it is the way in which we are consuming our content that allows us to confuse idleness with participation.

    In one last analogy, I believe that our instinct to create playlists of music has been compared to the mix tape or cd of just a few years ago. Unfortunately, I do not buy it. Now, our playlists are made up by Pandora or iTunes Genius technology rather than by people. We share them far and wide through project playlist and other such sites. There are no hand crafted covers or agonizing over tracks. While I do not wish to bemoan the past, I think that believing that the playlist and the carefully crafted mix are the same is one more way in which we are confusing a mere occupation of our idle time with a transformation of it.

    If I can be so bold as to suggest:

    We need more boredom. We need more mix tapes. We need more writing.

    We need less false interaction. We need less occupied minds. We need less playlists.

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    Question 96 of 365: What’s touch got to do with it?

    Published on April 6, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

    My son wouldn’t stop screaming in the Apple store today. I tried to give him crackers and even Vanilla Wafers to try and get him to entertain himself. But still he wailed. He threw his food on the ground and then screamed until I picked it up for him to throw again.

    This was at the second Apple store we went to today.

    The first store we went to, I let him out of the stroller and let him run around. The store wasn’t really supposed to be open yet, so there wasn’t anyone there except for the “trainers.” I was all alone with the iPads, except my son wouldn’t let me get a good look. It was like he was trying to make sure that I didn’t become too attached to the “magical” device.

    He nearly knocked one off of the table and almost knocked over a couple of signs before we decided that the training time before the store was open was not an appropriate time for a screaming one and a half year old. And yet, all I wanted to do was to let him see it and touch it. And that is what he wanted too. It was a shame that there wasn’t a kid’s iPad section, with foam rubber on the ground and huge numbers of kids apps ready to play with.

    So, what was I able to do with an iPad while parenting my child who is not quite ready for the intricacies of new technology? I have written an e-mail, opened up a number of apps, checked out openspokes.com (everything but the flash video works great), and checked out Pages. While those 7 minutes (total) are not enough to write an in-depth review, they are enough to make a single pronouncement: my son will likely use a touch screen of some kind almost every day of his life.

    While I do not believe that the iPad itself (at least not in its current iteration) will be what my son uses in the future, the power of telling a device what you want it to do with your fingers is exactly what my son expects to do, all of the time.

    He didn’t want to watch me touch the giant screens. He wanted to do it. He wanted to run his hands over them and make them do stuff. Whenever I bring out my laptop to show him something, he immediately thinks that I am going to check e-mail or look at something that will distract me from time with him. When we pull out the iPod touch, he immediately thinks that it is something for him to touch and for us to interact with, together.

    That is the difference of touch. Touch is for working together and for sharing, a computer with inputs that must be learned (keyboards, mice, etc) is for being alone. Touch is for changing what is in front of you, traditional computers are for making incremental shifts (in text, in presentations, etc.).  Touch is for show and tell, the desktop is for sit and stare.

    While many people are arguing that the iPad is turning us back into consumers rather than producers or creators, I would like to argue that touch devices like the iPad are what will teach my children to never be satisfied with sitting back and only being entertained. Because they will literally be making changes to what they see with their touch, they will always question the content that is in front of them. They will want to manipulate every type of media. They will want to watch movies with on screen chat. They will want to read newspaper with commenting always turned on. They will want to draw on everything and manipulate where the buttons go and what they should do. I’m not sure they will even know how to simply be consumers.

    My children want to touch everything, so why should I usher it out of them by introducing computers that do not require this creative part of them. If I believe that touching other people and giving my kids toys that can be manipulated (blocks, legos, crayons and the like), why should I not extend that to the devices that I ask them to use.

    If we are really talking about making our schools, our businesses, and our personal life more intuitive and filled with authenticity, touch is what we need.

    Not the iPad, but touch.

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    I won’t buy anything that only does one thing

    Published on May 3, 2009, by in Uncategorized.

    I have been thinking a lot about this recently: I don’t want anything to do with a device that only does what it was advertised to do. It is something that I have slowly realized as over he last few years as I went through the experience of using a Smart Board, CPS clicker system, an iPod touch and an Apple TV. The two former products are meant to do one thing well. They are advertised specifically for educational purposes, and they work. But the two latter products are meant to do anything that the community makes them do, and they are not specifically marketed as educational components.
     
    The latter products I keep on coming back to because they can do more and more as the community supports future development, and I guess that this is the difference between products I want to use and ones I don’t. The ones I care to use for education, are the ones with built in communities. They are the ones that get pushed to their full potential.
     
    So I guess what I am saying is that if I am ever put in change of large purchasing decisions for a district or school, I will be choosing to purchase and support products that connect together and have a community surrouning them.
     
    For example: I am right now using my iPod touch with an open source program called boxee (remote on the touch and the full program on the Apple TV) that is a full fledged media center in order to watch powerful TED talks in high definition on my TV using WiFi to stream the content. It is all connected.
     
    Shouldn’t it always be this way?
     
    (As an aside, I realize that this example is filled with apple products. I don’t believe that apple has a monopoly on connectedness or hackability, it happens that this is the community that I associate with most easily. I would actually love to hear about other devices that you keep on coming back to because they increase in value over time.)
     
    Sent from my iPod

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