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Buying an iPhone as Social Event

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iphoneI spent a really interesting and entertaining four hours in line at the Apple Store in Palo Alto (California, USA) last Friday morning, waiting to purchase an Apple iPhone “3G.” I had a great four-hour conversation with the guy in line behind me [see footnote Social Behaviors, below. And then I bought my iPhone.

And like most of the fanboys and fangirrls who have their phone already (it’s my first 48 hours) I am just really pleased with this communication device. And it has given me its own set of challenges as well. [Read more…]

Does */* balance exist?

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danah boyd explores the question does work/life balance exist? in a recent Apophenia blog post. (I’ve entitled this article “*/* balance” because “*” [pronounced “star”] in programming terms means “fill-in-whatever-you-want,” so “star/star” balance might stand for work:life balance, or work:fun balance or work:family or whatever your particular thing is. Her blog post was triggered by this New York Times article In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop. You might also call the article, as they suggest, Death by Blogging.

I have always contended that my method in life was to avoid “work” in favor of something that I enjoy doing. And for me, enjoying means not only that I’m happy, but that I make some sizeable contribution to the welfare of humanity at the same time. So when I label something work, I am referring to something that I really don’t want to do, but have to do for some reason.

And people have always said to me “you’re always working.” But, I actually don’t do very much that I’d classify as work by my definition. I’m fanatically dedicated to what I do, but it’s more often not really work.

So let me say more about balance… [Read more…]

On again, off again, the future of connectivity

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Twitterrific on iPhoneIf you live in the US and a few other parts of the world, you might think that “being connected 24/7” is the future of the entire world. That we will have mobile communication and memory and computing devices with us everywhere we go and that they’ll be connected to the network and consequently the rest of the world, at all times. That the world will be Twitter-like. Especially tweens may think this way. I suppose that US tweens don’t even think about there being any alternative. They’re just connected and that’s the way it is.

Well, there are more than a few barriers to “being connected 24/7” which lead me to believe that our real connectivity model will be “on again, off again.” And that what developers need to focus on is memory/computerpower that is self-sufficient and can operate standalone most of the time, but can instantly “sync” itself to the rest of the world when a connection is available. If you have a PDA or iPod or practically any device that utilizes large files, you’re already acquainted with the term sync.

I know I’m not the only one thinking about this. Vis the (last month) announcement of the Kindle, an e-book reader on steroids, that syncs itself whenever it has a network connection and otherwise doesn’t seem to care. (I’ve used e-books for years, but in the form of downloaded files and “reader” software on my computer.)  Groove, which I haven’t used for a couple of years, also had this kind of model – opportunistic syncing. Google Docs (documents) currently works only when you’re actually online, but there’s lots of talk about how to enable it for offline work, including perhaps a big Ajax (Ajax==”lots of javascript on the browser side manipulating DOM objects”) effort that would allow offline work that would later on upload to the big server in the sky. And I’ve blogged already about Ecto and other tools that let you create blog entries while offline and then upload them when you’re connected.

What’s the real future? Well, it’s obvious to me. Ultimately we’ll all carry devices that are capable of functioning “quite well” in standalone mode, but which sync up whenever there’s connectivity, refreshing information from the network while at the same time updating our own information on the net. Remember in 2013 to remind me of this and see if I was right.

How much does proximity count?

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One of the blogs I track that makes me think a bit is Web Worker Daily. In a post How to succeed for tech entrepreneurs – stroll down University Avenue? the question is raised of whether it’s useful for an entrepreneur to have a presence in a high-tech hub, like University Avenue in Palo Alto (or I suppose any other University Avenue). My answer is “yes, but only once a week.”

[Read more…]

I’m a Turtle – Online vs. Offline

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[More in my series about cyber-nomads, entitled “I’m a Turtle”]

Wayne Hodgins runs a great blog Off Course-On Target – he is the e-learning guru at Autodesk, just north of here. And is involved in many important initiatives related to online learning. And Wayne travels. A lot.

In a recent post (11 May 2007), Online vs. Offline, he discusses the current trend toward web-based “applications” (such as Google Docs), but at the same time raises the question of whether these applications can thrive when individuals do not have “always-on” or even very good Internet connectivity.

Here’s what I wrote in response to Wayne’s article (with slight paraphrasing because you already have more background because you read my blog)…

2007-03-26-computer-room-tm.jpg
The Internet/computer room
– Chonor House – Dharamsala, India

If you travel to even-farther-removed places [than the US and EU], the connectivity issue becomes really critical. When I’m in Northern India – Dharamsala H.P. – we used to always use Internet cafes. Up to about 12 months ago you had to use their computers – you couldn’t plug your computer into their router unless you could convince the proprietor that it was safe – or that it could even be done. Then they got wise and now we plug in directly – paying the same fee as if we were using their computers, but we’re wired right up. Back then they had 10 to 15 computers sharing one DSL line (128k bi-directional is pretty typical for 10 people to be sharing). Now bandwidth is a bit better, but still limited. I work alongside another org that has community mesh wi-fi available in the same town, with broadband uplinks to the Internet, and I can use that if I arrange it in advance and pay for the bytes I transfer, but I have to really do it at night when traffic is low, which entails a walk down a steep hill in the dark to another hotel where they have a wi-fi access point to the mesh, in the lobby, and then I sit in the lobby and get decent connectivity – generally about 512k bidirectional all to myself. [Read more…]