Suburban (in)Sanity

We have the most disruptive technology in our pockets and nobody seems to notice

"We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters." This quote was made famous by Founder's Fund VC Peter Theil. 

We sci-fi folks are dreamers. Prognosticators. Fortune tellers. There are some in the SF community who feel like our era is over. Our dreamery future-fantasy stuff is just out of touch with the fast pace of technology today. Or our dreams are too inattainable to be real.

But here's the thing. Peter Theil is right, in a way. We don't have flying cars or bases on the moon or regular rocket rides to asteroids (though we did land a big 'ol rover on Mars. With Lasers!) A lot of the things we dream about in SF stories seem impossibly far off. Teleportation. Telekenisis. Teleanything that doesn't include 150 stations of Reality TV. Distant space travel. Contact with alien cultures.

But, really what's happened is that the future has caught up with us so fast that I think people just haven't noticed.

The cell phone camera is a disruptive technology, and most folks have one on them or are in the presence of someone who has one for the majority of their day.

My camera is a powerful force. I take pictures and digitally journal many of my days (I tried the 365 project  - a picture each day. I fell off the wagon early, but I still find I take a photo more days than not.) 

In addition to photo journaling and just recording life, we have the opportunity to catch moments and record them (my cell phone camera is also a powerful video camera) in high def video. From a baby's first steps to a blissful afternoon walk in a pretty park. This creates a bit of mania in us, I think, as we sometimes forget to just *enjoy* the moment, we're so busy photographing it.

But then it also gives us the opportunity to enjoy the pleasure of the "not so special" moments captured. For me, it helps me to slow down, to fully experience things that I might not have taken the time to notice before. Instead of creating hyperphotographyitis, it's almost like I've amped up my personal awareness of things I see.

What surprises me, though, is how little people pay attention to this. They just blithely go about their daily life taking snapshots of recipes and zinging them across the internets, videotaping democracy rallies in other countries, photographing new species of wildlife and otherwise slowly, (or is it so rapidly we can't even see the movement such that we think it's standing still?) changing the world.

In my own life I've found myself using my camera on my phone for all sorts of things beyond the general activities of a mom trying desperately to capture moments of her kids childhood before they slip through her fingers.

I videotaped my son's hands shaking so we could discuss it with our doctor. I've taken pictures every year or so of the birthmark on my daughter's back so we can see that it is gradually fading. I've photographed receipts to store a copy of them when dining out. I've videotaped a musical group in Ireland including an elbow pipe player. I've sent photos to family members so they can stay current with the kids' development. I've photographed food, flowers, the sandhill cranes that reside nearby part of the year, plants in my yard that I'm not 100% sure aren't weeds.

I've used photos to document the kids' orthodontia progress. I've sent photos to my husband at work to alert him of something going on at home (often hilarious, like the dogs passed out in yin/yang position with their noses in each others...nether quarters, but also to show a repair project we'll need his help with when he comes home.) And he's used photos to share parts of his travels with the kids, or to show us something funny he has seen. We use this powerful technology to stay close, and get closer.

How about you? Do you use that disruptive technology that's in your pocket? What's the most unusual (SAFE for kids/work/families please!) thing you've photographed or the most unusual thing that's happened as a result of interacting with other people's photographs?

Image gallery - click on a thumbnail to see the image. First is my first attempt at home canning. A good girlfriend texted me a page from her canning cookbook when I panicked midway through. The second is Liam's painting from summer art camp midway through. The third is the site that inspired the painting.

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On being a girl geek

Amanda Hocking has this remarkably insightful way of looking at things.

If you don't know who Amanda Hocking is, you should. She's sold more books in the last minute and a half than most bestsellers hope to sell in a month. Or a year. Or their entire careers. Or something crazy like that. She puts out eBooks and Print On Demand (POD) books - she is her own publisher. It's a fascinating case study in "going viral" because first her books went viral, then she went viral as the media rushed to report on her as a story.

But who cares about that part of it (other than me, who aspires to her level of success) - she's a writer and writes some nifty blog posts. This one about dude geeks vs. lady geeks resonated particularly well with me.

I'm a lady geek who knows that about myself, but I think there are a lot of women who wouldn't classify their interests as geeky, but are just as funny/quirky/odd as the guys who paint miniature figurines or collect baseball cards or attend movies in full storm trooper gear.

Amanda says that the traditional "dude" geeky things are acceptable and the "lady" geeky things aren't. I have a feeling this is an observation bias, and that she could benefit from a few showings of Twilight with my sister and her Twi-moms friends, where they can literally repeat every line of dialogue. Probably hum all the tunes, too. If pressed, I imagine interpretive dances would be possible. "You think you can out-dance me?"

But then, I don't think she's wrong when she says:

I think if were to get a room of geeks together and have them make a food chain of what geeks would be on top and what would be on the bottom, there would be much arguing, but there would be almost a unanimous vote to put Twihards and Sex and the City fans on the bottom.

Why is that? She keys in on romance as the key difference. Do you think that's it?

I think from my point of view, geeky interests are in general frowned upon, regardless of gender categorization. I have spent loads of my life trying to avoid sharing too much about my various geeky interests.

I remember vividly an intense conversation I had with a 7th grade boy from my class about the Ultima IV videogame (sidenote: Anyone know if the games are still out there in the public domain somewhere? I check the app store for the iPad port every once in a while...loved that series...) that we both played. Until that moment, that conversation, I hadn't realized that *anyone* I knew played the same videogame and knew anything about it. It was certainly not possible that any other girl I knew would have played the game (even though I got into the series because my older sister played the first one or two.) Girls other than me didn't play video games (this is 7th grade, remember. I had no idea.)

So I geeked out with the guy for a bit, until it dawned on me that I was talking with intensity about a videogame with another person. A boy, no less. I remember the strong urge to change the subject/move elsewhere/do something else because I was exposing my extreme geekiness just by talking to him. (For the record, it was clear from our conversation that I was the far superior player, natch. This further added to my sudden bout of self-consciousness.)

Somewhere in adulthood, this all changed. Is it parenthood, which so clearly obliterates ones feelings of self-consciousness about so many things as we become aggressive information seekers, sharers, and worriers? Or just that whole "maturity" thing, which I'm not sure I've achieved yet but I've read about it in books. Oh gosh I am such a book geek! I can't help myself - when I see people reading a book I like, I have to ask them about it. My only complaint about ebook readers is that I can't tell at a glance what someone is reading. Unless I peer over their shoulder. That seems a touch weird, right?

There are still aspects of my geekiness that I do try to obscure, or at least not inundate others with. And I do apologize profusely when I've drenched someone with one of my geeky interest areas, like I did the other day with breastfeeding and a young woman who isn't a mom but would like to be one day. But more and more I'm accepting and embracing my geekiness and figuring that people who find it less acceptable, well, they probably just have a "oh she's such a geek" column in their head that they file more examples under. Who am I kidding? Nobody else has the mental filing system metaphor. I'm such a geek!

So I shared some of mine. How are you geeky, and how do you accept the geeky parts of yourself?

On email accounts and backing up and general digital hygeine

Found myself writing a long post on a yahoo group about why and what I do to secure my email inbox against catastrophic loss, and thought it was worth boring to tears sharing with my blog readers. So what do you do? What's your solution or insurance policy for your email?

Note: This is going into my Tales from my Science Fiction Life file because honestly, email is something that came into being during my adulthood. When I was in college, no email. Grad school, we used IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and sometimes we found information on newsgroups. Post-grad my first work email was a ccmail [1] account. One of my email addresses has the number 99 in it because that's the year I created the account. So, it's been only a bit more than 10 years, really, since this stuff has mattered, and today it matters a great deal. But enough about history, back to our regularly scheduled lecture information session about email and backups.

For email, I've switched over to gmail for my primary email storage, although that is putting my eggs in *their* basket, it's a pretty reliable one (they have multiple redundancies and things like bomb-proof bunkers, I trust them, your mileage may vary.)

I use email accounts that run the IMAP protocol, which who the heck knows what it stands for, but means that the server and the email clients sync with one another. Contrasted with POP and/or POP3 (which tries to do something similar but does not.) Main point - there are copies of all messages on the server, until you manually delete them from one of your readers (sometimes there's another copy, if it was synced down from the server before you deleted it and you haven't synced back up to the server again yet, but this is temporary and somewhat rare unless you're a freak like me...)

I use Thunderbird as my email client (mozilla free download - same people that bring you Firefox browser.) I have it running on my iMac and my macbook. I also then have my iPhone hooked up to my email accounts (yes, there are multiple email accounts, and yes, there are a lot of computers/tech in my house. Geek, remember? I prioritize tech over almost every other household purchase! Some days the cats don't eat because mamma needs some new tech. Just kidding. Meow.)

When I check mail on my phone while out and about, it fetches me the latest from the server, which may mean 5 new messages, as well as 8 or 10 deletions from when I was at my desktop earlier in the day. Very convenient for checking mail from many places. I can check on a computer at the library using gmail.com via a web browser, and again those changes will be fetched down to my other computers next time I log in on them.

Can't beat the convenience, and because it's all server-side it means I can't really lose that email inbox. A local copy is stored on each of the other machines (the phone carries only the last 50, though you can dig back into your inbox deeper by fetching more messages manually) so there's a quasi-backup there, plus the server copy.

Again, all my eggs are in gmail's basket, but it's giving me the convenience of what I need. I even run one of my other email accounts through a shell gmail account because I prefer gmail's way of handling messages and I was having a spoof problem with that account. The only hitch is that the first time you download the mailbox to a new machine, at least in my case because I'm a digital packrat, it takes a while (I have 5k messages in my inbox. I delete a lot, but get a LOT!)

I predict this kind of mobile connectivity will be standard in the future, in fact I'm waiting for my invitation to download a copy of RockMelt, a new browser that's more tuned into the social web because I think they're starting to head that way - basically more awareness of the constantly moving user, one who uses multiple types of devices all day and needs access to their core "stuff" be it email, files, images, movies, music library, digital books, friends, contacts, etc. Stay tuned for ... more tales from my science fiction life!

 

[1] If you actually follow all the links from this note to the wikipedia articles, you can get a nifty little primer in Ancient Internet Tech, aka "You kids get off my lawn!" stuff. Lovely. When, exactly, did I get so old??

 

Science Fiction geeks as technology prognosticators

Search engines, virtual worlds, the Internet — ever get the feeling you're living in a science fiction fantasy? Well indeed you are. For more than a century, inventors have been driven to create what sci-fi writers have boldly imagined before.

via www.npr.org

This is one of many reasons why I write science fiction. The only difference is that in my case, nobody was writing what I wanted to read back when I was discovering science fiction (stories about what it was like to LIVE there, BE there, amidst all this technology that changed things, but didn't change things.) So *that's* what I write. Science fiction about being there, living there, wherever, whenever, or however technology-assisted "there" is.

Embracing your inner nerddom

I've been a nerd, or geek or whatever you like to call us, all of my life. It wasn't until I reached...er, adulthood? Before I became comfortable with the whole nerd thing as a way of life. And I have to tell you, one of my many lessons in life has been that when you are able to be comfortable in your own skin, able to just say "yep, this is how it is with me, this is who I am" - most stresses fall away. Or at least are minimized. It's a lot easier to be satisfied with who you are than to be wanting to be something or someone else.

Lucky for me one of the ways/means by which I became comfortable with being a nerd is through my family. It turns out it takes one to know one, I am from a family of nerds! Isn't that great? It's a little freaky now to look back with that perfect-clarity that only adulthood (and a late night at the computer screen) will give you and realize that this was true all of my life, and had I only understood and appreciated this about my family I might have been more comfortable sooner.

How do I know this? Well, it's because in part my little sister got us all hooked on a silly iphone/mobile game (words with friends, in case you were curious. Want to play? I'm kayti99...) And while we're all hanging out with her while she's in town for her 15 yr high school reunion (honestly, who gave any of us permission to get this old? I keep finding gray hairs. I'm a wreck over it. Um, not really, lol. See aforementioned comfortable-in-own-skin points.) we're sitting around playing words in this silly game and egging each other on. Only nerds would sit around in a room with everyone's nose buried in some sort of mobile computing device of some sort. Even the kids were getting in on it! (Note to kids: Embrace your inner nerddom now while you're young, it'll just be so much easier for you.)