Texting while driving

---

I adore my mobile devices, but I like to think I’m reasonable about using them. I do not walk blindly down the sidewalk like a zombie while texting, my eyes fixed on my screen. (An acquaintance recently had her phone stolen from her in the open street; she was walking down the street in a quiet neighborhood, texting all the while, and a kid ran up and snatched it out of her hand. She was very indignant about this, because she didn’t think she’d done anything out of the ordinary.)

But it still amazes me (as an older person) how people drop into trances while using their phones and their tablets. Three-quarters of the people I see on the bus are texting or using their phones. At least half of the people I pass on the sidewalk are deep in contemplation of their devices, completely unaware of their surroundings.

Not to mention people driving cars.

I hate to think about it. I’m a pedestrian – I don’t drive a car – so I’m largely at the mercy of people driving big ugly dangerous vehicles, and I continually hope and pray that they look up often enough to stop at intersections and yield at crosswalks. Because, you know, sometimes they don’t. (Once, a couple of years ago in downtown Providence, I was in a crosswalk with a couple of other people when a driver actually speeded up toward us. I ran like hell toward the sidewalk; another guy, braver than me, stood his ground and yelled obscenities at the driver.)

But it’s the entranced drivers – the ones who are talking and texting – who worry me.

Follow this link to find an interactive test posted by the New York Times a few years ago. It’s very simple: you have to drive and text at the same time.

I failed it within seconds.

Try it, and see how you do.

You’ll be horrified.

---

The fragility of hardware

---

We love our devices, don’t we? Our laptops, and smartphones, and tablets. I have all three, and I marvel at how well they work.

Also I marvel at how pretty they are. Every evening I plug my iPhone in to charge, and it lies there pulsing with green light like a fragment of kryptonite, and I think: how lovely!

But how fragile also.

A few weeks ago, I was taking pictures in a field of weeds with my iPhone. I leaned down for a closeup of some Japanese knotweed, and –

Oops! Flip! Crash!

I’ve dropped my phone at least a dozen times before, and I’ve always been lucky: it always landed on a soft surface. This time, it landed on a jagged-edged paving stone.

The phone itself was unfazed. The glass covering, however, was shattered into a million pieces.

They can be fixed. Mine was an iPhone5, so the repair was not cheap. Luckily it was a business phone, so the company paid for the repair. But – still!

Since then, I’ve ordered a nice smothery cover for my phone, which will enfold it like a mother’s love.

Why do companies make beautiful slim little phones that slip right out of your hand like baby eels? Everyone buys a rubber/plastic guard for his/her phone. I hate that – why have a beautiful thing and disguise it? – and kept mine in a kind of holster. The holster didn’t protect it from that damned paving stone.

Apple / Samsung / everyone else: stop making things ultra-thin, if it means we have to buy ultra-thick covers to protect them.

It’s just ridiculous.

---

Speaking machines

---

Our city buses learned to speak a few weeks ago, and you could have knocked me over with a feather.

Partner and I often ride together in the morning, and we’re used to the same things happening every day: the same driver, the same people getting on at the same stops.

Then I heard this odd mumbling voice coming from outside the bus. At first I thought I was imagining things. Then I realized that the voice made sense. “Wickenden and Ives!” it said. “Next stop, Wickenden and Ives!”

Naturally it didn’t pronounce the words very well. WICK-en-den came out WEEKEND-un. It’s a machine. It has no subtlety.

Then it began to announce stops, as follows: “STOP REQUEASTED!”

Requeasted?

Well, as I said, it’s a machine.

Do we like things talking to us? Many of us do not. Several studies have shown that people dislike talking machines. If things are almost, but not quite, human – if they exist in the “uncanny valley” between non-human and human – they’re creepy. We want them to be one or the other.

Studies have shown that we react better to women’s robotic voices than to men’s robotic voices, because we find them gentler, less threatening, less bossy. I wonder why the Rhode Island Public Transportation Authority chose men’s voices for their buses? They sound gruff and uninterested. They remind me of the nasal recorded voices I used to hear in Morocco in the 1980s when I rode the trains: “Mesdames et messieurs, nous sommes en train d’arriver a Casablanca . . .”

Which brings us to Siri.

Have you ever spoken to Siri? I have. I find her rather lamebrained. She doesn’t like being sworn at; she has lots of canned responses, like: “Such language!” and “You shouldn’t speak to me like that!” Okay. She often misunderstands me, even when I’m trying very hard to be understood. I ask her for information on Puerto Rico, for example, and she’ll say something like: “Do you want me to search the Internet for ‘What resorts are on Puerto Rico?’”

Now and then she gets it right. Ask her about the weather, or a stock price, and she’s nearly infallible. And she’s very demure about it.

But she sounds – I don’t know – defensive when you ask her anything off the beaten path.

Stupid robot.

---

Technology and its discontents

---

Some time back, Partner’s nephew appeared on Mecum Car Auctions (you should watch it sometime, it’s fascinating), driving a couple of the cars being auctioned. We wanted to share the video experience with Partner’s sister, because there were a few good shots of her son in the car.

 

Probably, with the right connections, we could have plugged into the TV or the DVR and extracted the images.  But neither of us is very good at that, and I have struggled for a long time to figure out how to do it.  We have a conventional DVD player / VCR wired into the system, but I think I connected the units in the wrong sequence; according to the DVR manual, I should be able to record programming onto a videotape, but I can’t. And I’m sure somewhere in the wide world there’s a cord that I could plug into the TV or the DVR to connect it with the laptop, but after buying at least three different cords (and facing blank stares from Best Buy staff members when I labor to explain what I want), I have given up.

So this is what we did:

 

 

•   We recorded the show on the DVR.

•   I took my little Polaroid digital camera (which takes videos too) and made a mini-movie of the relevant clip (Partner was behind the remote control on the DVR; it was a two-man operation).

•   I uploaded the clip to Facebook.  It wasn’t perfect, but it was definitely Partner’s nephew, and if I do say so myself, it wasn’t bad.

•   I called Partner’s sister on my cellphone and told her to log into Facebook.  She assured me that she was no longer on Facebook, because she hadn’t logged in for so long.  I assured her that she was wrong.  I talked her through it, step by step.

•   And finally I heard her shriek: “OH MY GOD!  MY BABY!  MY BABY BOY!”

 

It was worth it.

But I desperately need to figure out a better way to do this.

 

I am told that the DVR has something like a computer’s hard drive at its heart.  If so: why can’t I dive in there and copy out a file?  It would be so much easier.

 

And can someone please go beat the bejeezus out of those stupid boys at Best Buy for me?

---

 

 

New improved websites!

---

I do not read the New York Times online much anymore, as I have said elsewhere.  I do, however, read David Pogue.  I hate his smarminess, but I love his advice, and he’s right about technology most of the times, and he has taught me a lot.

 

One of his recent articles (which you may or may not be able to read, depending on your subscription status) talks about kids and their familiarity with technology.  In short, David says to stop telling stories about how your eight-year-old helped you fix your iPad, or reset your LCD projector for you.  Your children were born into a technology-rich world; of course they know how to do these things.  (I think back to when I was a kid, growing up with TV.  I was completely comfortable with it, but my parents treated it as if it were breakable.  I wasn’t allowed to touch the channel knob (yes, channel knob, no remote controls in those days) until I was maybe ten or eleven.)

 

 

So: at the age of fifty-four years, I am a knackered old horse in a field full of Kentucky Derby winners.  The young people are laughing at me and running circles around me, as I complain and try to figure out how to format something in Microsoft Word or Excel.

 

 

But, kids, can I make a couple of suggestions?

 

 

-        One: logout buttons.  I pay a lot of my online bills at the end of the month, in one long session; I log out of one site and into another.  The login is easy; how many ways, after all, are there to format a “username” / “password” page?  But the logout – sheesh!  Sometimes it’s a tiny six-point “logout” at the top of the page; other times it’s a big red button at the very bottom of the page, down below where I haven’t scrolled.  Suggestion: make it a nice visible red button at the (let’s say) top right of the screen, with the words LOG OFF written on it.  Make this an industry / Internet standard.  This would be very nice.

 

-        Two: checkout pages.  They’re all different. Some want my life story; others want my name and credit card, and that’s it.  Let’s standardize them. What’s the harm?  I would think that this kind of standardization would appeal to the banks and credit-card companies, and everyone else besides.  It would be kind of like shopping in a real flesh-and-blood store: the checkout process in Home Goods resembles the checkout process in TJ Maxx, and Walmart, and Stop & Shop, and CVS.  Is there any reason it shouldn’t?

 

 

-        Three: passwords.  I know my own system.  I use a simple password for things I don’t care about, like logging onto a news website; I use a more complex password for anything financial.  As a result, I get all mixed up.  I try systems and mnemonics and all kinds of things.  I end up writing my passwords down, which we are told is exactly the wrong thing to do.  Can someone please figure out a better way to do this?  Thumbprints?  Scanning my driver’s license?  Retinal imaging?

 

 

 

These are my brilliant ideas.

 

 

 

Now I, the old knackered horse, will go lie down in the field and die.

---

 

 

"We don't have a TV"

---

I was talking to a new guy in the office the other day. I said: “Do you watch ‘The Simpsons’?”  And he said: “Oh, we don’t have a TV.”

 

 

I swear, it’s like saying “We don’t have electricity,” or “We haven’t put in one of those newfangled flush toilets yet.”

 

 

It happens at least a couple of times a year: someone telling me that he/she doesn’t have a TV, or that he/she doesn’t watch TV at all.  (At least this guy hedged and admitted that his family had Internet access, which means that Hulu and all kinds of other things are probably already polluting his kids’ minds.)

 

 

But I still feel that I’m been judged and found wanting.

 

 

I feel like someone in ancient Rome asking my neighbor if he’s going to the big Bacchus thing next week, and he says gravely: “Oh no.  We believe in Jesus now.” 

 

 

Don’t you just want to take that Christian neighbor to that Bacchus thing and offer him up as a sacrifice?

 

 

Well, hm, no one is pure these days, there’s that consolation.  This guy admitted that his kids probably watch TV on their computers.  A few years ago, a TV-hating friend of mine finally bought a TV, but only watched VCR movies (which she got from the local public library) on it.  I can tell you that, by now, she has certainly moved on, and I’m sure she’s watching “The Good Wife” as I’m writing this.

 

 

“Television,” after all, is no longer a discrete medium.  It’s just a delivery system, like a syringe.  You can absorb the sweet poison of your choice – “The Good Wife,” “NCIS,” “Jersey Shore,” “Bad Girls” – in so many other ways: mobile, laptop, tablet.

 

 

Televison sets seem so inert now.  You have to hook things up to them to make them interesting: a cable box at least, a Roku unit, a Wii, an Xbox, a DVR.  Otherwise, you (with your rabbit ears and digital converter box) will be stuck with four fuzzy local broadcast channels, just like when I was a kid.  (Well, we had five – the three networks, a Portland independent station, and PBS – but the PBS station had lots of static, and my mother was convinced that static ruined the TV set, so I could only watch it when she wasn’t paying attention.)

 

 

TV haters: come out of the closet!

 

 

We know you’re watching something!

 

 

Just admit it!

---

 

 

SOPA and PIPA

---

As a citizen of the Internet, I assume you’re aware of SOPA/PIPA.  It looks as if both houses of Congress have tabled the original versions of the legislation (largely because of the huge anti-SOPA/PIPA movement here on the Net), and are rewriting them to be more specific.

 

 

I am uninformed, and can only tell you my feelings on these pieces of legislation.

 

 

Very simply: I was alarmed by them. 

 

 

Supposedly they were all about stopping piracy, and that’s fine.  But the corporations pushing the legislation were playing a double game: they were pretending that it was all about cracking down on websites (mostly outside the USA) that illegally distribute movies and music and such, while they were really thinking of the law’s very real application within the USA as well.

 

 

Did you notice the word “corporations” in the above paragraph?

 

 

Exactly.

 

 

“Piracy” can be very broadly defined.  “Piracy” could be something as innocent as a Tumblr blogger posting Disney images.  “Piracy” could be posting a link to a song you like, or a video clip. 

 

 

Which means that almost all of us out here posting our favorite quotes and links and clips on our blogs and on Facebook are pirates!

 

 

Not so, not so, croon the pro-legislation people.  We’re only after the real pirates.  David Pogue, who alternates between intelligence and toadydom, decided that the Google / Wikipedia approach – to black out their websites in protest – was an overreaction, and that they were siding with the pirates.

 

 

Well, yes, David, they were.  This is because we are all part of a big incestuous system called the Internet, and it’s all about trading information.  And Google, and Wikipedia, and all the rest, were perfectly aware that, once the legislation was in place, it would not be used merely to go after Swedish and Korean and Russian sites, but to go after sites here in the USA too.  Sites like mine and yours and everyone's.

 

 

How much of a pirate am I?  Not very much.  Last summer I watched the “Thor” preview on a probably-pirate Russian website, but – hey – a two-minute trailer?  If I go to Hell, or prison, it will not be for that particular transgression.  And sometimes I scoop up images to use in my blogs or on Facebook, and I do not always inquire about their copyrights.  And sometimes I quote books and poems and all kinds of things, and I do not add complete copyright information (though I try hard to credit the authors).

 

 

But I suspect that I too would be in violation at some point down the road if SOPA/PIPA in their original forms were enacted.

 

 

Because that’s what corporations do.  They restrict access. 

 

 

The Internet is a zoo. I love the depictions of it on shows like “Futurama” and “The Simpsons,” with people actually entering it as if it were a place, flying around among buildings marked GOOGLE and FACEBOOK and ONLINE GAMBLING and NAPSTER.  And that’s exactly what it's like. 

 

 

Frankly, it has always seemed to me that I have the right to share media with my friends.  It’s like handing a newspaper or magazine to another person so that they can read something.  I paid for it; am I the only person who can read it?  Really?  And how exactly are you going to enforce that?

 

 

I didn’t call my congressmen this time.  But if this legislation comes up again, in anything like its current form, I will.

 

 

So there, David Pogue.

 

---

 

 

The iPhone 5: dream big!

---

Tatiana, one of my student employees, sent me a link to a YouTube video a few weeks ago.  “You have to see this,” she messaged.

 

 

I was as blown away as she was.

 

 

It it (if you’re too lazy to follow the link) a conceptual video of the features the iPhone 5 might have. In brief: as thin as a playing card. Able to display a virtual keyboard (which can be manipulated and enlarged) on the desktop below the phone. Able to display 3-D graphics.

 

 

This is delicious.

 

 

Now, I realize this is all pie-in-the-sky.  It’s a wish list.  Of course it is!  The technology isn’t there yet.

 

 

But you know what?  It will be. And sooner than you think.

 

 

As I’ve said before, I am no friend of Apple.  I was one of their biggest fans, back in the 1980s and 1990s.  Then they became provincial and unfriendly, and I realized that the PC world – broad and dull as it was – was the world of the future.

 

 

Well, here we are in 2012, and what do you know? The iPhone and the iPad are way ahead of the pack.

 

 

Believe me, I know.  I bought a Kobo Literati reader about a year ago. It was slow, unhappy, pathetic.  Then a B&N Nook (reconditioned): nicer, but unable to do a lot of stuff.

 

 

Then the office gifted me an iPad, and it was as if someone turned on the light in a very dark room.

 

 

The iPhone 5 video is laden with comments about how ridiculous it is: “maybe in 2050,” one of them snarks.

 

 

Listen, junior: a lifetime ago – in 1995 – we were just getting the Internet in our offices.  We didn’t know quite what it would do, but we were very excited.  I remember one of my officemates telling me that she’d actually logged into the Aer Lingus website! I ran over to see.  And it was –

 

 

A picture of an airplane.  And nothing more.

 

 

This is it? we said. This is what the Internet is all about?

 

 

Well, of course it wasn’t.   Seventeen years later, we’re streaming movies and TV directly to our mobile devices and our televisions. We’re shopping online.  We’re doing everything online.

 

 

And these stupid commentators think that it will take another forty years to achieve a few more advances? 

 

 

I don’t think so.

 

 

We must be good at this evolution stuff.  We do it so fast.

---

 

All my (useless) gadgets

---

I have a box – no, two boxes – of cords and connections belonging to various computing devices. 

 

 

The devices themselves are long gone.

 

 

How does this happen?

 

 

Last year I bought a cheap ($40) Kobo Literati e-reader at Bed Bath & Beyond.  I liked it, but it was slow and balky.  Barnes & Noble had an online sale for reconditioned Nooks, so I bought one ($80), and loved it, until it started acting wonky.  Then, a few months ago, my office granted me an iPad, and the Nook joined the Literati on the unused-gadget shelf.

 

 

Goodbye and good luck, my one hundred and twenty dollars.

 

 

I’ve always been very conscientious about backing up my computer. Some years ago I heard of this great new backup system: the Jazz drive.  I bought one on eBay, for maybe $40, and a bunch of Jazz disks (which are like cassettes on steroids) for maybe $25.  I used it probably four times.  It was clunky and noisy and difficult to set up.  I now own a smooth little candy-bar sized storage device that plugs into my laptop with a USB connection, and which slurps up all my data effortlessly.

 

 

Another sixty-five bucks down the tube.

 

 

I could go on forever.  I am too cheap to buy a proper iPod, so I have purchased at least three cheap imitations, none of which works right, total cost (estimated) sixty bucks.  Then there was the reconditioned laptop, which was wonderful and lasted for about a year, until it actually had a nervous breakdown, complete with beeping and booping sound effects.  Two hundred dollars down the drain.  (Moral, if you haven’t been keeping track: don’t buy reconditioned items.)  The next laptop lasted quite a while – four years, maybe – but it became painfully slow and difficult to use during its last year of active service.  It was around four hundred bucks, I think.

 

 

(My current Dell Inspiron laptop also cost around four hundred bucks; I think I bought it in early 2009, and it is going strong almost three years later.  It has some quirks – it often refuses to recharge its battery – but it is light and easy to use, and I am partial to it.  I had a whirlwind love affair with the iPad when I first got it a few months ago, but – as someone online wisely stated not long ago – the iPad is not a laptop.  Laptops are far more powerful and speedier, and much easier to use for word processing (it is not pleasant to type on a smooth glass surface).  I just bought one of those fancy iPad cases with a built-in Bluetooth keyboard, which makes it a bit nicer to use, but iPads are mostly for travel, I think: it was a godsend on our last two trips, to Orlando and to Cape Cod.  At home, my laptop is (as Eloise said of Nanny) my mostly companion.

 

 

But I still visualize all that money flown out the window, for all those lovely glittering gadgets I bought, thinking they would change my life. 

 

 

A few of them did. 

 

 

But I should have chosen more carefully. 

 

 

Let’s face it.  I’m an idiot.

---

 

My new BlackBerry; or, I have become one of the people I hate

---

I was recently determined to be an Essential Staff Member at the office. To make this official, they gave me a magic kiss on the forehead and a BlackBerry Torch.

 

 

Oh my dear little lord Jesus!

 

 

This thing sucks up all my email – not just my work email, but my home email too – and presents it as a neat little list. It somehow mysteriously hooked itself into my Facebook account (not sure how it learned my password; maybe it got me drunk, or hypnotized me), and now it makes a cheerful little “ka-thunk!” noise whenever I get a Facebook update. It hooks into the Weather Channel, and MSNBC, and Bloomberg, and the radio, and the television. It has GPS and a camera. And I am beginning to get the hang of thumb-typing on a hamster-sized keyboard.

 

 

In short, it does everything but count the change in my pocket by radar.

 

 

It is my Precious.

 

 

However:

 

 

A few days ago, I was walking back downtown at lunchtime, and absentmindedly I pulled the BlackBerry from my pocket to check it, and saw an email which needed an answer, and began to answer it, still walking down the sidewalk, not watching where I was going or paying attention to my surroundings.

 

 

And I realized with a sudden shock that I had become exactly the kind of person that I have always hated.

 

 

But you know what? Haters gonna hate.

 

 

My precioussss.

 

---

 

 

E-readers

 

---

I bought an e-reader a few weeks ago, It's a Literati, made by Sharper Image.  I bought it at Bed Bath & Beyond, on seventy-five percent markdown.  (Is Sharper Image going out of business?  Is Bed Bath & Beyond?)

 

 

It came preloaded with TWENTY-FIVE CLASSICS! “Huckleberry Finn.”  “Moby-Dick.”  “Pride and Prejudice.”  (Not really things I hunger to reread.)  And an offer for as many more public-domain classics as I want: “On the Origin of Species.”  “Tom Sawyer.”  (Big on Mark Twain, aren't they?)  Also “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” and “Grimm's Fairy Tales,” which are more down my alley.

 

 

I can see why it was discounted.  It's slow.  It takes a long time to jump from chapter to chapter.  The battery runs down quickly.  It can't jump to familiar passages, or even to a particular page.

 

 

But I like it. 

 

 

I’ve been reluctant to buy one before.  I was afraid that it’d be just one more technotoy to play with and discard.  Now, however, I’m sold on the concept.

 

 

I've been loading it up with free stuff from Project Gutenberg.  If you don't know the site, go check it out.  (Also, send them some money.)  They have tons of stuff.  James Joyce (Gutenberg has everything but “Finnegans Wake,” damn it).  “Palgrave's Golden Treasury.”  “Fathers and Sons.”  “Anna Karenina.”  “A Hero of Our Time.”  (Russian classics rule, right?)   Dryden.  Dickens.  L. Frank Baum.  Woolf.   Verlaine.   Dante.  Andrew Lang.  Confucius, and Mencius, and the Koran, and the Apocrypha, and the Rig Veda.  I’ve got almost four hundred books in it so far, and it’s barely half-full. 

 

 

I still like real paper-and-ink books.  I have a whole roomful of them, so evidently I must think they’re okay.  But I like to travel with reading material, which (as any reader will tell you) can be pretty tedious, especially for long trips, and especially if (like me) you like to read a little of this and a little of that.  The e-reader solves this problem very elegantly.  I can skip from President Grant’s autobiography to the Prajna-Paramita-Hridaya Sutra to “The Phoenix and the Turtle” at my whim.  It’s also ideal for bedtime, as it doesn’t weigh a ton and won’t conk me in the head if I fall asleep while reading it (as has happened more than once with Thomas Pynchon novels and forty-pound histories of the Thirty Years War).

 

 

It’s just big enough to whap someone in the back of the head with, too, just like a real book.

 

 

I am now prepared for any reading emergency.

 

 

Boswell’s life of Samuel Johnson, anyone?

 

 

 

---

 

 

Better jerkitude through technology

 

Have you seen these television commercials?:

 

 

• An obnoxious neighbor taunts his neighbor's holiday decorations, using text, email, and phone.

• A guy in a car pool receives an emailed joke seconds before his coworkers receive it. He reads it, laughs shrilly, and puts his phone away. When his coworkers catch up with him a few seconds later and try to share the joke with him, he feigns boredom.

• An obnoxious girlfriend (see example #1 above) breaks up with her boyfriend via text, email, and phone, while sitting at a restaurant table with him.

   

 

What is the subtext here?

 

 

Evidently that technology is a great way for jerks to enhance and improve the quality of their jerkiness.

 

 

It reminds me of a incident in Graham Greene's “Travels With My Aunt.” Henry, the narrator, is treated very rudely over the intercom by his aunt's live-in lover Wordsworth. Later, in person, Wordsworth is surprised that Henry is miffed at him. “'Man, it's jus that little mike there,'” Wordsworth explains. “'Ar wan to make it say all kind of rude things. There ar am up there, and down there ma voice is, popping out into the street where no one sees it's only old Wordsworth. It's a sort of power, man. Like the burning bush when he spoke to old Moses.'”

 

 

Anonymity allows people to be stupidly mean. Go check out the messageboards on the New York Times or New York magazine sometime; they're trolled regularly by a few anonymous people who say things they know will be inflammatory, who enjoy getting people riled up.

 

 

It's a sort of power, man.

 

 

And apparently the vendors of smartphones and such are now encouraging you to get in touch with your inner jerk, using their new technology to be an even bigger and better jerk than you already are!

 

 

As commercials go, I much prefer those Allstate ads with Dean Winters as Mayhem. He's very cute in his suit, and he has the perfect smile/snarl for someone representing a chaotic force of nature, and he winks as he leaves the scene of the crime.

 

 

If you have to be a jerk, you should at least be a sexy jerk.

 

 

 

 

Nook vs. book

---

 

I'm doing my holiday shopping as I always do: watching for some little adorable thing for myself. What fun is gift-shopping if you don't buy yourself a little something along the way?

 

I had thought that this might be the year to give myself an e-reader. Imagine carrying a whole library around with you! I've researched them enough to know some of the differences (WiFi / 3G / 4G) and pitfalls (difficult to read in sunlight, mostly black-and-white screens, illustrations sometimes not so great). A nice lady at the mall let me play with the Nook a few months ago, and I liked the look and feel of it very much. And the price is almost right: the basic Kindle is $139, the Nook only slightly more than that, and you can get off-brand readers for under $100.

 

But I was mooching along downtown on Saturday, with a paperback copy of Tim Robinson's “Connemara” under my arm, and it suddenly hit me: what benefit would an e-reader bring me?  It'd weigh the same as my little book. It would serve the same purpose. I bought my copy of “Connemara” for $9.99 from Daedalus Books Online; I could have downloaded the Kindle edition for about the same, so price is a wash. I can write in my book, and tear the endpapers out to make notes, and use it as a coaster; I wouldn't do any of those things with an e-reader (I think some e-readers let you make notes, but surely not with the hectic casualness I scribble in a book). E-readers have batteries that need to be charged up; my little copy of “Connemara” will probably outlive me, sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere, and it will never need to be charged up at all.

 

It'd be great, of course, to have a hundred books to read in one package.  Maybe if I were on a long trip, I suppose.  But did I need a hundred books for my Saturday stroll? If I'd had an e-reader, would I have turned from "Connemara" to “Troilus and Cressida,” or “Gravity's Rainbow,” or the Apocrypha, or Emily Dickinson? Maybe. But I spent the day musing over Robinson. He's a little tedious on the surface – so much detail! so many names! – but he builds up his text by accretion, one stone on top of another. He benefits from quiet attentive reading.

 

So I think maybe I will not buy an e-reader this year. Once they've integrated the e-reader with one or two other things – maybe an MP3 player and a phone and a camera – and brought the price down to the same point, they'll convert me. But not until then.

 

Now what am I supposed to buy myself for a present?

 

---

 

 

GambleTron 2010

---

Partner and I spent some time recently at Foxwoods, the big Connecticut casino. I normally stick to the slots, but I also like to hang around the table games and watch people playing poker and blackjack.

Well, guess what they've just installed? Virtual-reality table games.

There were four huge TV screens on one big unit, facing the four cardinal directions. Two were displaying life-sized virtual blackjack dealers, one was a virtual craps table, and one was a virtual roulette table. I am normally intimidated by table games; I'm not very sure of my gambling skills, and I'm afraid I'm going to either slow the game down for everyone else, or (worse) make a fool of myself, or (worst of all) lose all my money in a single bad bet. Or all three.

But this was just a big video display dealing virtual cards.

Well, I says to myself, I can handle this.

I did quite well, actually. I played $20 into $120 over an hour or so. I also attracted quite a crowd. Casino managers kept coming over one or two at a time, wanting to know how I liked it. Players kept wandering idly by and kibitzing over my shoulder. I especially liked the old guy who kept whispering “Stand!” and “Hit!” under his breath as he watched my cards.

The virtual dealer was a woman. Actually, it was four different women. All of them were quite attractive, although evening gowns seem a little dressy for 11:00 am. Now and then they'd look up in an eerie Max Headroom way and wink in a random direction; since I was the only player, I only got about one wink out of five. The image also jumped and stuttered from time to time, which I think was on purpose, to remind you that this was not a real human being. Then, after dealing about ten hands, Virtual Valerie would suddenly morph into Virtual Veronica or Virtual Violet (my favorite was the one who appeared to be standing in the middle of a swimming pool). One, a blond in a low-cut dress, seemed to fascinate most of the men who were kibitzing, including one of the casino managers; he giggled whenever she looked in his direction, and whenever she said “Dealer busts!” - well, you can just imagine.

Casinos have two basic kinds of games: obsessive one-player games like slots, which require very little human interaction, and table games, which are all about human interaction – with the dealer, with the other players, and with spectators. And slot machines, if you haven't played them recently, have gotten very videoized; they morph and swirl all over the place. (They also don't seem to pay off the way they used to. I'm just saying.)

But now they have figured out a way to turn table games into video games.

When I was the only player at the table, I did quite well. As soon as other people joined the game, however, I played much more poorly. I was trying to pay attention to everything at once: the dealer's cards, the bets, my own cards, and the cards my fellow players were getting. And the comments, and the little interactions, and the actual near-approach to human contact. My poor head just doesn't work as fast as it used to, especially with so much stimulation.

The virtual roulette table right next door was very popular. It soon collected a rowdy little crowd of players, chatting and having a good time. Those of us playing blackjack were a morose group of loners, staring at our cards and making furtive eye contact with one another from time to time.

Roulette is just luck, you see. Blackjack actually has a skill component and requires concentration, and my concentration is very limited these days.

But I had a very nice time anyway. Technology wins again.

But as a card-carrying Luddite, I have to tell you also about one guy, wearing the vest and nametag of a casino dealer, who stood behind me for a few minutes and watched me play. Finally, before moving away, he muttered: “Great. They don't have to pay her a cent, and she can deal cards twenty-four hours a day.”

---

Waiting for the Grand Unification

---

When we were in Manhattan recently, Partner and I saw a demo of Google TV. It's very neat: it makes your TV screen do everything your computer screen does, in addition to showing broadcast TV. There are still two small problems, however:

• The remote is the size of a VW Beetle.
• Lots of content providers are staying aloof from it, so there's a lot of programming you still can't access with it.

It's a step in the right direction, though. Ultimately, everything – your phone, your netbook / laptop, your desktop computer, your MP3 player, your TV – will access the same content and have the same capabilities. You'll be able to make a phone call with your TV, and access the Net with your phone, and watch TV programming on your laptop. (Actually you can do most of this now; they're still filling in some of the gaps). The main difference will be the size of the screen and keyboard in each case.

Now that's a grand unification.

The borders are already blurring. “The Social Network” was a movie about a website, written by a TV mogul. “Prince of Persia” - urk – was a movie based on a video game and marketed virally. (I mention it because Partner and I saw it on Cape Cod in June, during a moment of weakness. It was stinkeroo. But I digress.)

I would love to live to see the Grand Unification happen, but I also have my doubts. Anything heavily tech-oriented is also fragile. One good catastrophe – war, natural disaster - could knock out so much: delivery, content, availability.  Even a really good solar flare can bring the Net to its knees.


Time will tell.  The world is supposed to end in 2012.  There's that damn asteroid out there with our name on it that's due in 2029.  Barring any of that, there are the actuarial odds.  I'm fifty-three now; depending on which side of my genome wins out, my father's or my mother's, I have anywhere from ten to forty years left on earth.

Unless I get hit on the head by a falling safe tomorrow.

(But listen.  Seriously.  If you haven't seen the movie version of “Prince of Persia,” save yourself the grief. No one needs that.)

---

The death of the bedroom TV

---

It's been a long time since I've actually watched a TV die.

It's like watching a family member get sick.  You notice odd little things - cough, weight loss, pallor - and all of a sudden they're thrashing in delirium.

Well, the bedroom TV has evidently decided that it is reaching the end of its days.  We were watching some stupid movie on Saturday morning, and all of a sudden Partner said, "Look at the corners of the screen!"

Green.  Bright green.  The picture was bleeding outward, and the four corners of the screen were bathed in an eerie Shrek-colored glow. 

It's not all the time.  I think it only happens after the TV's been on for a while.  It's an old TV anyway - probably between ten and fifteen years; Partner bought it from a coworker some years ago for twenty-five bucks, I think.  It's a real dinosaur anyway, big and fat and heavy, the way TVs used to be as a rule.  And it generates heat like a sumbitch.

It makes me remember the black-and-white TV I grew up with.  It was probably purchased not long after I was born - a big console model, a Zenith, I think.  Then, after ten years or so, for no apparent reason, its picture began to shrink, bit by bit, the longer the set was on.  Finally, after four or five hours, the picture would disappear completely - kapow! - into a demonically bright little pinprick of light in the middle of the screen.  (I held my eye up to that tiny spot of light more than once, and I swear to you that I was sure I could see the entire TV image in there.  In retrospect, of course, putting my eyeball directly in line with a pure beam of cathode-ray emissions probably wasn't the smartest thing I could have done.)  You had to turn the TV off and let it cool down when that happened, and sometimes, if the moon was in the right phase, you could resume your viewing after a while.

But we all knew the TV was doomed.  That's when we bit the bullet and got our color TV.  The sick black-and-white model moved into my dad's den in the basement, where it lived in fitful retirement for many years; Dad mostly watched “Bonanza” and “Gunsmoke” anyway, so the picture quality didn't make too much difference.

TVs don't seem to break down the way they used to.  I somehow don't believe they're better made than they used to be, so there must be something else going on.  But then, we don't use them up the way we used to; we replace them.  In the old days, a TV was a serious investment, and you used it until it broke or exploded.  Nowadays you're always shopping for a good deal, or a better model, or something a little sleeker.  You're not replacing a broken device; you're just buying a slightly better/newer one.

Partner and I are of two minds on this subject.  Partner likes to replace things.  I, on the other hand, am a grim Calvinist, and believe in riding the horse until it whimpers in exhaustion and dies.  (Well, not always.  The lure of shiny new things speaks to me too.)

But the TV in the bedroom is spitting up rancid electrons as we speak, so there's not too much debate over what happens next. 

See you at Best Buy.

---

The persistence of memory, or . . . what was I talking about?

 

I came home from the health club the other night and said brightly to Partner, “I wrote a whole blog entry in my head when I was on the treadmill just now.”

 

He came back, just as brightly, with: “How are you going to print it out?”

 

Isn’t that cute?

 

His sarcasm aside, I do have a pretty good memory, and I keep a lot of stuff in my head.  Over the past few years, however, I have been losing it, in every sense of the word.  My memory for proper names has especially suffered.  Partly I’m sure it’s because of advancing age.  Partly, however, I think I’m losing my power of concentration.

 

It happens all the time, in lots of different situation: while watching TV, while reading, while at the movies, while in meetings.  I’m able to concentrate for a few minutes, but then I begin to lose the thread of the conversation, and then I begin to wonder what else is going on.  I have a perpetual sense that there might be something better, or more interesting, or at least less dull, somewhere else. 

 

I am thinking about this because of an article in today’s Times about kids using e-readers and digital media to read books and access information online.  A large number of kids say they’ve used e-media to read books; a majority, however, still like to read regular old hard-copy books.

 

Some parents are skeptical of this finding.  They believe that e-media are, in a word, too easy.  They are afraid that these media will reduce their children’s appetite for traditional reading and erode their ability to concentrate.

 

Remember what I was talking about before?

 

Every innovation in the world of media has come with the same warning label: THIS NEW THING WILL DESTROY YOUR MIND.  Written books made memorization – learning by heart – less necessary.  Calculators kept us from learning our multiplication tables.  Computers make it unnecessary to think about anything, ever, at any time.  (It’s been posited that the invention of writing was not necessarily looked upon as a good thing.  Certainly it was kept away from the masses for a long time; reading and writing were specialized skills.)

 

I did a little unscientific survey today.  First I asked a co-worker in her early twenties if she remembered learning things in school like multiplication tables, spelling-word lists, etc.  Yes, she said, although she was a little fuzzy on the multiplication tables; she absolutely remembered memorizing lists of spelling words, though.

 

I then put the question to the Brain Trust, which is a group of co-workers around my own age, all of whom are mighty opinionated.  Without exception, they all had vivid memories of learning math and spelling by rote, often accompanied by images of nuns with sticks in their hands.

 

The whole Brain Trust agreed that math skills are on the decline.  We shared stories about cashiers who don’t quite understand why you’re giving them $2.02 when the total is actually $1.52, and other stories about kids who thought there were twenty-five minutes in a quarter of an hour.

 

Question: is this real?  And, if so, did calculators and computers do it?

 

I’m not sure.  I do know, however, that my laptop is not only a very useful gadget for writing this blog and keeping track of my finances; it’s also a message portal, an email conduit, a virtual telephone using Skype, and a handheld gaming device.  How long can I really maintain my concentration on any one task, given that so many other wonderful time-wasting options are available?

 

I have lovely memories from years ago of settling back for hours at a time with a book and reading without interruption.  I haven’t done that in a very long time.

 

Maybe concentration and memorization are overrated.  When I took biology classes in college, the professor made all of the exams open-book, because, she said, “Life is open book.”  I can tell you that it didn’t make the exams much easier.  (I also have nightmarish visions of a doctor performing open-heart surgery with a textbook open in front of him, trying to figure out which artery is which.)

 

But, for whatever reason, I am definitely losing my memory, and my concentration. 

 

And I used to be so proud of them both.

 

(Do go back and look at the Times article, though.  There’s some interesting stuff in it.  For one thing, 39% of the kids in the survey said that information they found on the Internet was “always correct.”

 

What’s the big deal about that?  I know I always believe everything I see on the Internet.

 

Doesn’t everyone?)

 

 

---