Technofetish: Taking it down a notch

This week's technofetish award goes to all those who are drooling about the new Apple iPhone. My reaction at the announcement was: *sigh* a phone. Apart from being a little turned off by the hype (can't anyone see how the slavish followers reflect the 90s Microsoft fan club or is that just an ex-Seattlite privilege), I have to admit that I am not excited by the fact that it is an all in one package - phone, camera, internet device, media player. I actually like my appliances being separate so that when one gets outdated it is less expensive (in theory) to upgrade. Furthermore, the whole phone thing (what Jobs calls the killer app) didn't interest me simply because, surprise, I rarely use a phone (cell or otherwise).

Kottke has a wonderful distillation of all the recent writing about the iPhone.

While I thought the design of the phone and interface was very beautiful both, at closer inspection, leave a little to be desired. I don't want to go into detail (see some of the mentions in the Kottke piece) but I will say that the iPhone does begin to spark my interest when you think of small computers such as the oqo. I am more than eager to see a full-fledged OS X machine in a package slightly larger than the oqo or the iPhone with features like voice recognition and touchscreen/stylus input.

Heck, you could make calls through something like skype if you really needed, as I have ascertained from exhaustive informal research and eavesdropping, to tell your friends about the incredibly mundane things about your life that you wouldn't normally tell anyone (except perhaps your gastroenterologist).

I think if Apple did a small form factor sub-notebook with touch/voice/stylus and it could perform some of the same tasks as both the iPhone and appleTV devices, then I think they'd be looking a more than the 1% market share they are hoping to attract (which I am sure they will get) and would have a product that is perhaps more attractive to the Japanese and European market where space is premium.

But Apple Inc. is more about cleaning up: Taking the jumble that is out there and making it better. My bet, though, is that the iPhone is just a test technology that is a stepping stone to a larger more powerful device (sub-notebook? tablet? both?).

Note: Blake, a grad student, asked why voice recognition and speech-to-text technology that has been around for a while wasn't incorporated to make facilitate speedier texting.

The Gimli Glider

Found this on Digg and thought the experience for both pilots and passengers sounds horrifying. It is a quick and captivating read.
More on the incident: 1, 2

Note: Apparently the incident is a result of bad metric conversion. This happens to me all the time when I convert to the decabet!

Media Diet

The last post got me to thinking about mythologies. One that I see students buying into all the time is that media are inert. When I taught Introduction to Visual Communications, I was surprised by how students were unaware of the "mediatedness" of their daily lives. After all, sometimes I go home with "plastic poisoning" from spending too much time in front of the computer only to go online minutes after the kids go to bed. But I also spend a lot of time in social situations. Could I be the one believing in something that is fundamentally incorrect?

So, as a sort of New Year's experiment, I am going to follow New York Magazine's lead and write about my Media Diet. Here it is:

Wednesday: 7:15 - 7:30 - Check email and quickly review nytimes.com, cnn.com, commondreams.org, huffingtonpost.com, digg.com, gizmodo.com, and surf for CFPs (calls for papers)

7:35 - 8:00 - Watch Arthur while feeding the kids.

8:40 - 9:00 - Listened to iPod on my commute (car stereo doesn't work): Oldies - Police (Roxanne), Pink Floyd (Wish you were here), Beatles (Strawberry fields)

9:00 - 9:10 - Walked to work from far reaches of parking lot listening to iPod (too cold to read): Jazz - John Coltrane (Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye), Ahmad Jamal (The Awakening)

9:30 - 9:50 - Review CFPs (calls for papers)

10:00 - 10:10 - Review digg.com, drawn.ca, boingboing.com

11:05 - 11:25 - email

11:25 - 11:30 - prepare last post

1:00 - 1:20 - prepare this post

(more later)

Happy New Year (Now, Don't Mess it Up!)

Open Democracy is an interesting website that:

is the leading independent website on global current affairs - free to read, free to participate, free to the world...offering stimulating, critical analysis, promoting dialogue and debate on issues of global importance and linking citizens from around the world.

This article captured my attention recently. How many mythologies have you bought into recently?

What we know now

Here's a list of 50 interesting things that we now know that we didn't know at this time last year.

How to handle telemarketers

Why is it that I joined the no-calling list yet I still get telemarketers calling at dinner time? Here is sweet revenge. This has to be the best trick played on a telemarketer. It's very funny.

From Neatorama

Tuesday Lovin': 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials

Very funny list of failed holiday specials. There are such goodies as: Muppet Christmas with Zbigniew Brzezinski, A Canadian Christmas with David Cronenberg, and Ayn Rand's A Selfish Christmas.

Feeling Lucky, Punk?

Sunday Schadenfruende: Tom Delay's Blog

If I've got the story correctly, Tom Delay started a blog and was so overwhelmed by negative comments that he took it down. But not before some wily person copied and re-posted it. Read the nice, warm and fuzzy comments.

Warning: After the first few posts it deteriorates into puerile name calling and is rather distasteful.

Looking Back: New Old Photographs

By chance I came across these two collections of photos from the 30s and 40s. They both candidly reveal a very different America. It gave me pause to think about an 8mm film I'd seen years ago when I had gone with a friend to visit his grandparents. The color film was of New York in the late 1940s or early 50s and was fascinating. It's one thing to see a city represented in a Hollywood film but quite another in a home movie. It is in some ways more magical because it is evidence made by someone you know and trust. Of course, the stories that accompany a viewing help make it vividly real.

The comments on both these collections work similarly.

Happy X-Mas

from Crooks and Liars

RIP: Big Bird

A sad day for muppets everywhere.