Free WiFi

A few weeks ago my wife and I drove up to northern California to visit my daughter at Berkeley. Since # 2 daughter likes to think she is descended from royalty (must be several generations back), she insisted that the next morning we go to a little French restaurant called Le Bateau Ivre for breakfast. Although the service was pretty slow, the food was excellent and reasonable so they got two out of three right. But what impressed me most (note: this will reveal a lot about my priorities) was the fact that they had a sign up that announced free WiFi access.

When we were finished eating and I knew we probably had about 10 minutes to kill before our waiter returned with the credit card, I decided to walk over and talk to the owner about the WiFi. What I learned is that the free access had not been up for too long, but they were already quite pleased with the business it brought in. They have two transmitters which serve about 50 tables inside and outside and the owner claims that they don’t get many people who abuse the free service.

No doubt the reason this caught my attention was the fact that I had just, a few weeks before, mentally added up all the money I pay each month for stuff like internet, satellite, cellphones, land lines, etc. Yes, I know that there are a growing number of large hotel chains who cater to businessmen that now offer free internet hookup in the rooms, but here was a small restaurant that was offering the same thing. It was a ray of hope - a sign of good things to come. I’m sure we will always pay for high speed access at home because it will carry an increasingly larger and larger amount of data, but public access for undemanding tasks? - that should be free.

Patience....

Master of you own Domain

Our family has had Earthlink DSL service for several years now and for the most part it works fine. However, occasionally it seems to get really flaky and goes down for several hours, or even the better part of a day. Furthermore, I’m still paying the same $50/month that I paid a couple years ago which I think is too much. So the other day I asked myself, “what would happen if I finally got fed up with Earthlink and decided to go with another online service instead?”

The answer to my question is something I'd rather avoid, which my internet service is counting on. My whole family and I would have to get new e-mail addresses and notify hundreds and hundreds of people and accounts of the change. Big problem, and getting worse as each day goes by!! Naturally I started to wonder if there is any way to fix this problem now before it gets even more painful?

Here is what I came up with, and recommend to others:

I hunted around and found a good hosting service, picked an inexpensive hosting package and registered my own domain name. Sounds complicated but it took me all of about 30 minutes to make the decision and get set up. I tried several different domain names until I found one that I liked and thought I would be able to live with for a long time. The package I chose (through www.1and1.com) includes three domain names, but they have a slightly cheaper package that includes one name for only $7/month. It also includes 200 e-mail addresses, lots of free software to help you design and publish a simple web site, and a whole bunch of other things like free virus checking, Webmail, etc. My feeling here is that before you know it, everyone will have their own personal website, so why not reserve a good name now?

If you are not interested or ready to set up your own website, then go with just the domain name registration and your own personal e-mail account. At my same hosting service the domain registration only costs $6/year and you can get your own personal e-mail account for $1/month. At this point you may be asking why would I want to do all this if I already get a free account from Yahoo?

Here is why: For the cost of one cup of regular Starbucks coffee per month ($1.50), you can have your own domain name, like decembersunshine.com and 5 e-mail addresses with more space then you will ever need. With that comes free virus and spam filtering and free Webmail when you’re traveling. You can use Outlook at home or their Webmail connection at home or while traveling.

Now you can switch internet services whenever you choose without having to change your e-mail address. Cool! What’s more, you have total control over the prefix part of the e-mail address (the part that comes before the @), since you now own the domain name (the part following the @). Call yourself bubba@decembersunshine.com or whatever you want and change it if you need to. You can even set it up so that mail addressed to any prefix before the @ goes to a special mailbox.

The point here is that your e-mail address is going to take on an increasingly important role in your life as each year passes, so why not take control over it now before all the interesting domain names are gone?

I have to admit that I have an ulterior motive in trying to get people to separate themselves from their ISP e-mail service. Who knows, maybe if this happens to a significant degree, then people may be more inclined to shop around for a cheaper internet service (as I am getting ready to do) and put the pressure on them all to lower their prices.

Craft your own personalized e-mail address and become the master of your own domain for just a few bucks a month !!!

Virtual Hunting

This one comes under the heading, “Ain’t technology great!” Since video and computer games have for a long time now, offered people the opportunity to engage in the fantasy of playing Rambo or James Bond with a full arsenal of weapons at their disposal, it comes as no surprise that someone is taking the whole shooting experience to a new level.

I just discovered that you can subscribe to a website that has a real rifle set up on a Texas shooting range that you control while sitting at the computer in your family room. In an attempt to make this experience a little more realistic, there are four cameras along with the aiming of the gun and the trigger release. One camera is on the target, one mounted on the rifle scope, and two others that pan the area. Oh, and there is an attendant sitting behind the gun (hopefully the aiming mechanism has limit stops), who is probably secretly laughing at you for paying $15/month plus $6 for every ten shots.

Ok, so this all sounds like the kind of thing that would appeal to 11 year-old boys who live in the big city and have never had the opportunity to shoot a gun, right? And it also sounds like something that would get old after you do it twice, right?
But we’re both not thinking far enough ahead.

According to the L.A. Times , these folks are planning to up the ante and introduce real live moving targets for the virtual hunter to shoot. I’m not kidding. They are considering giving the armchair hunter the option of shooting several different kinds of live animals, such as antelope, sheep and wild hogs. Now, even though I’m fine with people hunting for food when that is part of their normal lifestyle, I've never had much regard for the killing of animals for sport. This situation is made worse because the animals in question normally hang out on one side of an open field, and then when they get hungry, head over for dinner which they know will be on the opposite side of the field. The open field is of course where you are sitting, at least virtually, with your rifle. It’s more like a shooting gallery than a hunting experience.

What’s next you ask? I hesitate to speculate, but I can’t help it. Lets say that the whole idea of real-life virtual experiences (is that an oxymoron?) catches on. How much would people pay to be looking through a helmet-mounted video camera on a fireman entering a burning building? or how about an Iraqi soldier on patrol? or maybe a real African Safari?

For me this whole thing is a little too much like a bad science fiction movie. It’s all just a little too detached and surreal. But unfortunately even if the hunting thing never takes off, I sadly predict that other virtual adventure ideas will quickly become big business. We can only hope that someone is working on a real working Holo Deck (re: Star Trek) before too many animals or people get killed trying to satisfy armchair adventurers.

Early Adopters Beware

Although this blog is not about previewing the latest new gadgets - there are plenty of other blogs that do this quite well - I couldn’t resist commenting on several items that caught my eye in the December issue of Wired Magazine.

• Trimtac Security Tag: Amazingly, this is almost exactly the device we were just talking about in relation to the proposal to track your car for road tax purposes. It records your GPS position every few minutes and sends the data to an internet database using GSM technology, like a cellphone. It is positioned as a portable LoJack-type device which you can place in any vehicle or even your luggage or golf bag (it runs for 3 months on 4 AA batteries) and then subscribe to the service. The technology is clearly available, but the big hurdle will be the logistics of getting them in vehicles and the political task of mandating it. Given some of the more insane propositions that the electorate has been passing in California, maybe that part will happen sooner than I predicted.
  
  
• MIB USB Drive: Clever little device that you upload MP3 songs into and plug into your cigarette lighter jack. You then can transmit your songs into your stereo via an unused FM frequency. Seems like $115 is a lot to spend for this feature. How hard would it be for cars to have a little jack in the dash so we can upload a bunch of songs or pictures or movies into the car’s entertainment system? Some new cars havea Bluetooth wireless feature, but not many devices support this yet.
  
  
• Arkon Laptop Holder: This clever device clips onto your steering wheel and gives you a platform to support your laptop. Now you can talk on the phone, write e-mails, and finish applying your makeup simultaneously while sitting in stop and go traffic enroute to work. What a time saver! Maybe it's just me but I think that piloting a potentially lethal object, like a car or truck, should demand your complete attention.
  
  
• Nokia Image Album: When you start using your new megapixel camera phone, you will soon realize that you need a place to store all the great candid shots you now take while standing in line at Starbucks. Nokia offers a small portable unit with a 20GB hard disk that you can download everything into and then show the pictures to your friends on your TV. Cost: $400.
  
  Sounds good but here is the problem: I just checked online with Dell and you can buy an entire PC with a 40GB hard disk, 256Mb memory, 17” monitor, and a free printer for $348! Jeez! I doubt if many people comprehend the far-reaching influence Dell has on the pricing of new technology. If I can buy a whole PC for $350, then why should I have to shell out $500 on a PDA, or $600 on a photo iPod? One has to admire Dell for proving that you can succeed in the computer business if you optimize your supply-chain and provide a quality product with a lot of value for the buck.
  
  
• Oakley MP3 Sunglasses: Oakley is known for expensive sunglasses and this one is no exception at $495. It looks like Borg hardware with an MP3 player, 256Mb of memory and ear buds so you can have all your tunes with you and look totally cool while you’re out and about. If you’re worried about running out of battery power, you can probably rig it up to your $425 Scott Solar Recharging Jacket and never have to be without tunes again. You'll be ok if you're walking in New York city or Hollywood in this getup, but I suggest you carry several forms of ID if you plan to be in one of the more rural areas of the country, just in case you need proof that you were born on the third planet from the Sun.
  
  
• Flybar Pogo Stick: If you have $300 to spend on a new high-performance pogo stick, here’s the ticket. This baby claims to be able to get you up to 5 feet of air! I predict a whole new sport emerging from this - I can see it now: 10,000 armored, helmeted athletes bouncing through Boston city streets as they crush and trample each other for the Pogo Marathon Championship!
  

Truth is, I love this time of year with all the cool geek shopping lists coming out; but it’s also time to renew my pledge to think twice before I rush out and feed my habit. Restraint is a virtue here unless one has unlimited funds. Heck, even if you do have unlimited funds, save most of it for something more worthwhile, like maybe a trip to some exotic place like Istanbul or Marrakech. Of course you would want to take along your digital camera and laptop so you can e-mail pictures to your friends at each stop along the way.

GPS and Cuff Links

Unbeknownst to the general population, GPS technology is steadily and quietly growing all around us. Once strictly limited to military and marine use, it is rapidly finding its way onto every small plane and boat, luxury car, even handheld units for hikers and bikers. Large trucking companies have them on their entire fleet, tracking them wherever they are on the continent, and farmers use them to pinpoint exactly where to navigate their heavy equipment. Soon, virtually every vehicle of any size and significance will have a GPS unit built into the instruments.

The biggest potential use is of course automobiles. The current discussions in California about mandating GPS in private automobiles (see “Taxing by the Mile”) has naturally refueled the privacy issue again. In many ways it seems silly and naive for people to complain about a GPS device recording where they travel in their car. After all, they’re out in public, traveling on city streets or public highways, and they’re not exactly invisible. Anyone could legally follow them and keep notes on their whereabouts. They are already being tracked to some extent if they use a credit card to buy gas, or a radio transponder to auto-pay at toll gates.

In spite of these recurring protests by privacy advocates, the fact is that we as a nation are slowly getting used to the idea that information about us is being stored somewhere, whether it’s the phone company, the IRS, Social Security, Dept. of Motor Vehicles, U.S. Customs, the FBI, Credit Agencies, wherever. Pretty much everything we do is already recorded somewhere, including where we buy gas, what restaurants we frequent, and what we buy at Radio Shack and Macy’s and the grocery store. As the use of debit cards grows in leaps and bounds, so does the mass of data on what is bought with them and by whom.

Many of you have no doubt seen the commercial for Onstar that demonstrates how their system knows exactly where your car is and can send a tow truck or even unlock your doors because it can connect to your car’s computer via satellite. The idea of your car being tracked is already here folks. It is not a hypothetical futuristic new thing. It’s here today and I for one, am convinced that it will continue to spread and grow and eventually become a must-have feature on every car. It may take a couple of car generations for the majority of cars to have them built-in, but it will happen.

The benefits of never getting lost again, or being able to get directions to a new store or someone's house will drive acceptance of the technology. As long as it's not abused, people will get used to the technology and will learn to rely on it if their car ever breaks down or gets stolen. Whether we like it or not, as technology permeates every aspect of our lives, there will be few things that go unnoticed by one electronic system or another.

Twenty years ago, Nicholas Negroponte, then director of the MIT Media Lab, liked to comment in his speeches that before long, “You’ll find that your left cuff link will be communicating with your right cuff link via satellite.”

We are closer than you might think to that reality.
I say, bring it on.

“PDA calling Cellphone, Hello!”

Today I was waiting in line to buy gas when my daughter pointed out a guy in the car to the right in an odd pose. With his hands out in front of him like he was holding two revolvers, this guy was obviously looking up a number from the PDA in his right hand, and then thumbing in the number in the cellphone held in his left. Although it wasn’t all that remarkable a feat, it was amusing to watch. As his head swung left and right, you could imagine the numbers from the PDA shooting through the air to his eyes, then to his brain and down his arm to his left thumb where it entered the phone mechanically. Amazing piece of human networking !!

Seems like “in this day and age” there should be a better way. So, here is my challenge to Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, et al: Start offering a FREE service where Average Joe can store all his names and numbers and appointments (if he is one of the few to use the calendar in his phone) in a secure account online. All he has to do is dial a toll-free number when he wants to update his online list. Now Joe also has the option of synchronizing his PC phone book and / or his PDA with his cellphone. It's also easier to enter names and numbers on your home PC than on your phone.

If Blogger will host your blog for free and Yahoo will give you an e-mail account for free, why wouldn’t Verizon do the same for the tiny amount of space needed to store your contact information? Seems like the smart thing to do for customers and build customer loyalty when it comes time to upgrade or replace a phone. Hey the next time Joe loses his phone down at Sharkeys, he could set up a new one in minutes and the wife would never know!

Just kidding guys, wives always find out about stuff,
it's one of life's mysteries.

Must-Have Gifts

Today I’m half-heartedly paging through some of the pile of catalogs that appear in our mail around this time of year. One that always catches my eye is the one from Sharper Image. This is an interesting company, and I must admit that I’m attracted to their beautiful catalogs and their overall sense of good design aesthetics.

However, several years ago I started a practice of trying to come up with a one-sentence description of what a company is all about, like Disney’s “for the best in family entertainment.” On this day I had just gone through the Sharper Image catalog and came to the conclusion that their catalog cover should have the Sharper Image name in bold text at the top followed by the phrase: “The Quintessential Source for Over-priced Stuff You Don’t Need.”

Now maybe this is a little harsh, since they do have stuff in their catalog that is not over-priced that some people might need (I’m trying to be fair here). But, being an engineer with some experience in what a product should cost to produce in Asia, and admittedly, a personal bias against spending $100 for a motorized version of something that you can get without the motor for $5, well, some of the gadgets in their catalog just leap off the page. Here are a few examples:

• Panasonic electric shaver for men - $300. Looks nice, probably works well. Has a pop-up head for sideburns. But when you get to the women’s personal products section of the catalog, you find the women’s version which looks basically identical with the same pop-up feature, different colored housing, same wet/dry, sold for $60 (that's 80% less!). One can’t be sure if this is Panasonic inflating the price of the men’s version, or SI – probably a combination of the two.
  
  
• Turbo Clipper - $50. This is basically a plain old manual toe-nail clipper that is built-around a 5” long plastic housing, and includes a small battery powered grinder at the other end. If you end up using a regular nail file, which I probably would do to get rid of the sharp edges rather than grind my skin off, you are paying $49 over the cost of a normal nail clipper for the convenience of collecting the clippings in a special compartment. This item is proudly noted as “invented here.” by the SI design team.
  
  
• Turbo-Groomer 5.0 - $60. This item, also “invented here,” is the dreaded nose-hair trimmer that seems to re-appear in all the Christmas ads. But differentiated from the garden variety trimmer, this one has “titanium nitride cutting edges that whirl at high-torque 6,000 rpm...” Everyone knows that you need a really high speed device with lots of torque to hack through all that nose hair, right? Here’s my suggestion if you are one of the few that actually need a nose-hair trimmer: Take the same simple cutter head and mount it on a stainless steel sleeve with a knob at the end to manually turn the inside cutter. It would work just as well, would be safer, and could be sold for about $8. Maybe these already exist, I really don't know.
  
  
• Ionic Breeze Quadra Air Purifier - $400. I hesitate to even mention this item since it is probably Sharper Image’s biggest source of revenue in the entire catalog, but there are a couple things that bother me. First the price seems to be extremely high given that there are no moving parts and the electronics are relatively simple. You can compare this unit with their Spire Fan: 3 speed motor, 15” taller, sleep timer, same Negative Ion feature plus a remote control for only $80. The other clue that you are probably paying way too much is that they offer to sell you a second Quadra for only $200. My guess is that the cost to produce the Quadra is around $35. Of course, when you factor in all the advertising that SI does on this unit, maybe they have to charge as much as they do.
  
  
• And lastly, my favorite: “You Can See Clearly Now!” eyeglass cleaner - $60. This “invented here” device is about the size of a large ultrasonic jewelry cleaner. You clip your glasses to the hinged lid then close it, which dunks the glasses into a solution of water and soap. After 40 seconds, the lid pops up and “shakes off any excess liquid for 20 seconds.” That’s it! No ultrasonics, no heat, just dipping your glasses in soapy water. I had to read this one several times thinking that there must be more to it. Truly amazing!

Don’t get the wrong idea. I love technology and gadgets and going through catalogs of stuff looking for cool new inventions. I’m all about tools in the general sense - things that empower and enable me to do things I couldn’t do before. But here's the thing: I’m really sensitive to hype, which is why I’m singling out Sharper Image here. As I page through their catalog, I get a very strong impression that I’m being condescended to - that SI knows full well that most people will be too embarassed to return the silly eyeglass cleaner when they discover that they paid way too much for it.

I prefer dealing with companies that are all about value - companies that are secure in the knowledge that when I bring their product home, it will work as advertised, won’t break prematurely, and most importantly, I will be satisfied that I got my money’s worth. Simple, direct, no hype. Am I being naive again?

Taxing by the Mile

I read an interesting article in the LA Times yesterday about a subject that I wrote about in July; namely, installing a tracking device on every car that feeds information to the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) regarding where you’re driving, or how many miles you’re driving. Believe it or not, the new DMV director that Arnold just appointed is claiming that California is not getting enough money from gasoline taxes in proportion to the miles driven because cars are getting more fuel efficient, and something should be done about it.

Here is what they are discussing:

1) install a device on each vehicle that transmits the odometer reading into the gasoline pump when you buy gas, which then calculates your tax based on how many miles you have driven since your last fillup. You would probably pay a tax that is proportional to the weight of your car, since heavier cars tend to use more gas and do more damage to the roads than light cars.

2) install a device on each vehicle that communicates with a GPS satellite and records, in addition to how many miles you drive, exactly which roads you travel and at which time of day. Here, you might pay a tax that varies with the particular road, with maybe a “rush-hour” penalty, or maybe a “freeway tax” or who knows. When you put all this data in the hands of politicians, virtually anything can happen whether it makes sense or not.

Here are a few possible scenarios that come to mind after the DMV starts distributing (selling?)your data to other agencies and select companies:

• You get a notice in the mail from the DMV that the miles per gallon for your 1995 Suburban have fallen below new minimum levels. Even though you get the same mileage you did when it was new, you are hereby required to upgrade the engine or pay a substantial fine.
  
• You receive a speeding ticket in the mail based on how long it took you to travel from Bakersfield to Las Vegas, accounting for the 35 minute stop at Denney’s in Baker. (Side note: you take pleasure in the fact that they still don’t know what you had for lunch).
  
• Your aunt Lillian calls and yells at you for not stopping to see her when you drove through Palm Springs last month (she subscribes to a new Google service that sends her alerts when her relatives pass through town).

Technology is our friend.

Coping with Change

I decided to change the title of my modest outreach experiment here to something more descriptive. The new title feels like it fits better with my interest in how technology affects our daily lives and I think is easier to remember. My apologies to any who may have to change the link description on their sites. Just remember, Change is Good.....

Tactile Feedback

I was just checking out the new Tissot watches that have a touch screen and vibration feedback feature for reading and setting the watch. Pretty amazing and very innovative; perfect thing if you’re visually impaired, or maybe if you’re a deep-cover operative meeting your contact in the dark and don’t want to give away your position prematurely.

Of course, I immediately started wondering whether this type of sensory feedback could be useful. Here is the idea I came up with:

Put a small vibration transducer under the left mouse button and add functionality to your browser so that when you mouse over a link that fits a certain set of criteria (you set this up), the mouse gives a tiny vibration to your finger to encourage you to go there. This would obviously require some sort of tie-in with a very powerful indexing service, like Google, but it seems plausible. I suppose you could do the same thing visually, or audibly and save the bother of getting a special mouse, but tactile feedback would be the most intuitive way since your brain has already got a high priority connection to your index finger. It would almost become a Pavlovian-like response.

Three questions: 1) would this become annoying? 2) how often would it lead you astray? and 3) would the lack of a feedback vibration discourage you from going to places you would otherwise have discovered by accident? I suppose it leads to another whole issue too. How hard would it be for unscrupulous folks to globally hack into people’s settings to artificially bring more people to their site?

Does anyone know if publishing an idea on a Blog prevents me from patenting it later? Something tells me I just gave away the germ of a zillion dollar idea......

iPod and the Bell Curve

Today I noticed that Apple is expanding their iPod functionality to allow you to store pictures. Maybe they are actually realizing that $400 is a lot to pay for just being able to listen to music on the train home, or that most people don’t even have 2,000 songs they like, much less 10,000. So why have they upped the price for the picture version to $500 (40Gb) and $600 (60Gb)?

Obviously I’m wrong; not only are people happy to spend $400 to listen to music, but they are also willing to spend $100 - $200 more to be able to carry around several lifetimes worth of snapshots as well. The 60Gb model will purportedly hold 15,000 songs or 25,000 pictures, or some combination.

So who’s buying these beautifully designed music players? Is it primarily a status symbol? The law of diminishing return has got to kick in here at some point, don’t you think? I mean, lets be honest, how many songs are there that you like enough to go to the effort of individually storing them on your PC, possibly ripping them from a CD, then transfer to your iPod? Maybe a couple thousand if you have a lot of free time on your hands. I know that there are people out there who will disagree with me, but come on, you guys are at the tip of the bell curve and you know it.

What about pictures? Lets say you’re an avid photographer and you take 100 digital pictures every weekend, and if you’re pretty good you select half of them to keep. At that rate it would take you ten years to fill up your iPod. But that’s assuming that you were willing to spend several hours every weekend going through your pictures, maybe fixing red eye, cropping, doing color corrections and carefully annotating every picture with who’s in it, location, date, category, good, medium, fair, etc. and organizing them into albums. With 25,000 pictures you would need a really well thought-out system for categorizing all your pictures otherwise you’ll be lucky to find them again.

You can tell that I don’t own an iPod, in which case I would probably be talking about how amazingly well thought-out the controls are (which they are), and how this makes me feel so much cooler than all those losers with CD players (which it would). Maybe an Apple evangelist will read this and send me one just to convert me. (hint, hint)

I just had a thought, what if the music/picture iPod and the cellphone could somehow merge into one product, now you’ve got something worth the money! That’s worth a whole separate post....

Pseudo Science

Although this blog is ostensibly about technology, I sometimes run across a scientific article that I just have to comment about. This one is from USA today dated 11/8/04 entitled “Global warming blamed for huge western USA wildfires.” These academic yahoos are actually spending grant money to arrive at the conclusion that multi-year drought conditions and forests that have been artificially allowed to get overgrown have less to do with the recent fires than an estimated 2 degree rise in global temperature!! Scientists can’t even predict the weather more than two days out; why should we accept their hypotheses based on tree ring data?

I admit that this whole global warming scare is a hot button for me - it triggers some sort of B.S. alarm way back in the dark recesses of my brain. After reading several books and articles over the past ten years or so that outline all the cataclysmic changes that have occurred over the geologic and biological history of the earth, especially all the various ice ages (that last of which covered half of north America with glaciers) you can’t help but wonder how objective these scientists are and how many assumptions are hidden in their “conclusions.”

For one thing, we only have reasonably accurate global temperature readings for no more than 100 years which is less than the blink of an eye in the history of life on earth, much less geologic history. Given that the temperature of the earth results from a very complicated interaction between chemical reactions and magnetic currents in the earth’s core with massively complex interactions between the atmosphere and all life forms on the earth’s surface and under the oceans and also taking into account continuous changes in the magnetic poles and solar events that also cyclically alter the earth’s magnetosphere ---- with all that how does one form a conclusion about what really controls the surface temperature of the earth over extended periods of time? Especially when you only have temperature data for 100 years?

My inherently skeptical nature leads me to conclude that this whole global warming business is a Trojan horse perpetuated by environmentalists and scientists alike. First the scientists hypothesize a theory so they can get published and continue to get grants to support their research. Then come the ever so pragmatic environmentalists who eagerly pounce on these reports claiming that “scientific evidence suggests” that man is the culprit and we should eliminate all factories, refrigerants, campfires and all internal combustion engines on the planet.

This is sounding like a rant isn’t it? Maybe I can blame it all on Michael Moore.

Does Size Really Matter?

I signed up for a fairly simple webhosting contract about 6 months ago with 1and1.com and happily they have steadily increased the webspace and bandwidth of my package since then. As I’m still in the stumble and recover stage when it comes to actually setting up and maintaining a website, maybe I’m easily impressed.

For $10/month I get 3 domain names, 2GB of webspace, 50GB of traffic, 200 e-mail accounts with 1GB storage each, a free copy of NetObjects Fusion to design my sites, and lots of other stuff I don’t understand yet. Seems like a killer deal to me.

What’s interesting is that they just upped the storage space for e-mail boxes to 1Gb each – previously it was 50Mb. Personally, it doesn’t really matter to me since I use Outlook and empty it out pretty much every day anyway. The only time it might become an issue is when I’m traveling and use their WebMail service to check my messages, leaving everything on their server till I get home. Even then, I probably wouldn’t have gone over the 50Mb limit. But maybe now that people are using their digital cameras more, and people are e-mailing huge Powerpoint presentations and such, maybe the 1Gb mailbox will be the new standard, at least for a while.

But just having all that storage space going unused makes me nervous. What could I do with it? Is there some way I can utilize that “free” space? I suppose I could set up semi-permanent storage e-mail boxes for backup purposes, or set up what would amount to a drop box for friends and family to go check when they wanted. Hey, I could charge people big bucks to rent my drop boxes for espionage purposes!!

I hope Mr. Ridge isn’t reading this blog. Erase. Erase.

Disruptive Technology

Today I was thinking about how vulnerable we are becoming to technology that is intentionally disruptive, and I’m not talking about identity theft and credit card scams.

For example, there was an article in the LA Times a week or so ago that described how an inventor came up with a universal keychain remote who’s only purpose is to turn off TVs, any TV. People are buying these zappers who don’t like having to listen to TV’s in public places. They like to be able to zap the TV off with their little stealth remote so they don’t have to suffer through some horrid soap opera while they wait for their prescription to be filled, or their oil to be changed. Now this may seem like a fairly innocuous issue, but it suggests that there are loads of other things that people may choose to mess with that are not so harmless.

Suppose you had a stealth transmitter that would trigger the traffic lights to green every where you go (as emergency vehicles do in many places). Awesome! I would love to have one and you would too. But what if even 25% of the people driving had one? It would create total chaos because you would get used to not having to slow down for lights and you would find yourself running red lights and hurting people because the guy going perpendicular got there a little ahead of you and cancelled out your signal.

Or what if the guy behind you decides you’re going too slow for him, and has a phaser-like gun behind his grille that sends out a high energy pulse that scrambles the electronics in your car. Your car promptly dies as he cuts around you and flips you off. (This one is already in test, with police agencies in several places evaluating these to stop bad guys).

Or suppose some screwed up teenager builds for her science fair project a long distance “reader” that fits in her backpack and can demagnatize or scramble all the cards in your wallet from, say, 10 feet away.

Or imagine that someone has figured out how to screw up the transponder reader on toll roads and bridges that charges people’s accounts as they commute to work, causing everyone to get charged double for a whole day.

I could go on. The point is that as we get more and more wired, we also get more and more vulnerable. The sad truth is there are a lot of very very smart people who are also totally dishonest and out to prove how clever they are.

Question: Are our bureaucrats smart enough to insist on adequate protections for all these systems, and frequent upgrades to keep up with the hackers? I’m not optimistic.

Early Adopters

Do you consider yourself to be an early adopter? Do you salivate when you dream about adding a media PC to your A/V system in the family room that the rest of you family already can’t operate? Did you spend last summer crawling in the attic and under the house to run high-speed ethernet wiring all over your house so you can automate everything under the sun? If so, then my hat’s off to you. You’re a pioneer, a visionary, a true geek. (fyi, a geek is different from a nerd in that he/she doesn’t wear a pocket protector).

However, if like me, you resist the urge to replace your PC every year or pay through the nose to have the latest new gadget, you are among the majority of people who marketeers call late adopters. These are people who tend to be more conservative in their buying habits and prefer to wait and see if this new fangled Tivo thingy is really something they need, and if it turns out they want it, they derive satisfaction out of having waited until it drops in price by 50%. These people comprise the vast majority of consumers, like 80%.

If you fall into the 20% group, you are indeed a strange breed. You love technology so much that you are willing to put up with poorly written instructions, flawed ergonomics, pre-release software, and little or no technical support just for the satisfaction of being on the cutting edge. You are so into high tech that you don’t seem to mind spending hours upon hours trying to program your new remote control or fancy security system, as long as it does something cool that you couldn’t do before. You are all about empowerment and owning tools that expand your leverage over your life.

Having said that, I must admit that I occasionallywake up and find myself in bed with the above group of geeks (figuratively speaking!!). I have always been a collector of tools; and I’m not just talking hammers and electric screwdrivers. I broaden the definition to anything that makes me feel more powerful, more in control. I know what you’re thinking, that I’m suffering from some sort of insecurity complex or it’s a macho thing; but we’re talking about a basic human need here: the need to feel in control of your environment. I freely admit that I am fascinated with technology and sometimes get need and desire mixed up.

Of course, I don’t regularly succumb to the desire to have the newest and coolest thing because as I get older my frustration threshold seems to have dropped a bit. I find myself more willing to wait for the vastly improved version 2 and I also don’t particularly like paying through the nose to help a company complete their product development.

Consequently, as I read these tech articles I find myself chuckling at the things that the innovators (very early adopters) seem to believe. Example: I just read one in Electronic House about archiving your video collection that starts out: “while most of us have computers with DVD burners in them...” This the first clue about which part of the continuum this guy is in. He goes on to explain how cool it is to have a DVD burner that needs no computer; a burner that you can set up in the kitchen and hook to your VCR to copy a movie while you’re making toast. What is this guy smoking? Probably his toast as he tries to monitor his file transfer while making breakfast. You probably ask (along with me) why is this capability worth an extra $400 to have in the kitchen? Why do people talk themselves into thinking that they “need” this kind of thing?

While I accept that articles in these kinds of publications are clearly aimed at a narrow audience of early adopters, it still makes me laugh that they are so serious about the benefits of being able to control every part of their electronic environment from every room in the house. I envision this guy with a wireless PDA strapped to his belt just itching for a member of his family to present him with a new challenge: “Dad, please tell the lawnmower robot to stay in his little charging garage this afternoon, I’m having some friends over” or “Dear, can you please show me how to play a movie on all 8 LCD screens in the house at the same time. I don’t want to have to sit in one place to watch my movie.”

Granted this is an extreme case that only applies to people with too much money on their hands, but the true early adopters that make up no more than 20% of consumers really do us a service. Even though they are clearly not as hard to please as the rest of us, they do drive the technology and they help to get the refinement process going so the rest of the population doesn’t have to suffer with so much bad design. For people like me who appreciate well thought out controls and eschew silly gadgets that nobody really needs, it is a good thing that we have these folks to run interference for us, and provide a proving ground for all the innovative designers in the world.

Gladys and Otis

This morning I noticed a curious episode in the ongoing saga of “Man against Machine” or in this case woman against machine. It demonstrates how much people distrust even the most mundane everyday mechanical and electrical systems that we encounter.

This happened after I dropped my daughter off at work, and drove through the parking lot to get back on the main drag where naturally I just missed the light. So I’m sitting there and I notice a lady (I’ll call her Gladys) who was crossing the street directly towards me and only made it half way across before the light changed. So Gladys was stranded at the center divider standing next to one of those buttons that trigger the walk/don’t walk cycles. So I notice that Gladys starts pushing the button over and over as she keeps glancing up at the traffic light.

I can see her shoulder moving just a little so I start counting how many times she is pushing the button; I estimate that it must have been 25 times at least, and all this time she keeps glancing up at the Walk/Don’t Walk sign to see if it is changing. Then Gladys stopped for about ten seconds, and then decided that the stupid control may not have “heard” her and started pushing it again another ten or twelve times. Since this is normally a busy street, all this was happening long before one would expect the light to cycle to Walk again, so I found this all pretty amusing and tried to imagine what was going through her head.

Now everyone probably pushes the button more than once just to make sure that the light control picked up their button press, maybe two or three times just for good measure. This was different though. I was wondering if Gladys actually thought that if she pushed it a whole lot more times, then the control would get the idea that she was in a hurry, switch to a faster cycle and stop the cross traffic sooner. Or maybe she just didn’t trust the system to remember that she had pushed the button, that if there was a lot of traffic, then it would decide that the cars were more important than Gladys and make a conscious decision to make her wait longer.

Something interesting happened then. A man walked up to the crosswalk on my side of the street and noticing that there was a lull in the traffic, just started walking across against the red light. When she saw this guy boldly flaunting the rules, Gladys hesitated and then decided that she wasn’t going to let this guy make her look stupid and decided to take off, anxiously looking both ways to make sure she wasn’t going to get caught breaking the law. Of course, when she was most of the way across the remaining lanes, the light changed anyway at which point she relaxed, probably telling herself that the 35 button pushes did the trick.

I know this all sounds like the musings of someone (me) who should have better things to think about, but I was alone in the car and this is just the kind of thing that people think about when they have nothing better to do whether they admit it or not. So as I headed home, I started thinking what if there was a light on the button thingy that lights up to acknowledge that the unit picked up your command. Would that make Gladys stop after just a couple presses? Maybe not, since we have virtually all seen people press elevator buttons again and again that were already lit up, with the same thought that all this extra pushing would make an impression on the “brain” that runs the elevator.

Unfortunately the elevator brain is probably not that smart, or then again, maybe it is. If we actually programmed elevator and other controls to react to how many times you pushed the button, you would soon find people wearing out the buttons trying to impress Otis the elevator that they were in fact more important than all the other people who might be trying to use the elevator at the same time. Parents would train their kids to stand there and push the button continuously until the elevator got there. And they would do the same thing inside, trying to get the elevator to cruise past floors where people were waiting just because they were “in a hurry.” So maybe Otis knows that people are often self centered and could care less about being fair to the other patrons, and he consciously ignores those extra button presses in an effort to be impartial.

Of course, we all know in our hearts that Otis gets annoyed and actually takes his time when someone does that just to teach them a lesson. Obviously Gladys didn’t understand this fact.

Collective Intelligence

Ok, so I was reading the November issue of Fast Company magazine (the paper version -- that’s another subject in itself), and I was reading through their list of the 101 most provocative things that will change our lives in 2005. I come across number 64 which references James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, where he espouses the idea that groups of people can be smarter than the smartest individuals within them.

Certainly not a new idea, but think about his four criteria for crowd wisdom: 1) diversity of opinion to bring in a variety of info, 2) independence of members from one another to prevent the rise of a dominant leader, 3) decentralization to balance out mistakes, and 4) a good method of aggregating opinions.Assuming you accept his theory and the criteria above, which on the surface seems reasonable to me, why aren’t the most pressing problems of the world being solved by collaborations over the internet between large groups of smart, engaged people? What element of human nature would get in the way of the internet becoming an immensely powerful force that could generate solutions to our most pressing problems?

Maybe number 4, a good method of aggregating opinions, is the hard part. How do you get your ideas accepted, even heard in the cacophony of voices that the internet has now enabled, and how do these aggregate problem solvers achieve credibility? The obvious answer is through success. Like any business, you start small, tackling the moderate problems first, then work up to the big ones.

I have to believe that this is already happening, unless, and this is the big question, there is a basic flaw in Surowiecki’s concept. Does the old adage “two heads are better than one” break down when you get too many people involved? Does ego screw up the whole idea and cause the solutions to degrade into “designed by committee” type solutions? Do the smart ones in the crowd fade back when they don’t get recognition for their brilliance? Do the solutions dumb down to that which is easily achievable?

Interesting....

AARP convention observations

What an discouraging weekend! Just got back from the AARP convention in Las Vegas where I was handed free samples of Glucosamine tablets and Metamucil and offered numerous pamphlets describing how to deal with my declining mental capacity. Notwithstanding all the upbeat handouts, I went there to see if any high tech stuff was being designed specifically for seniors, which is something I’ve been interested in for some time now.

Well, either this is not a priority with designers, or this venue wasn’t the right place to show it off, because there were only a couple booths that had anything that fit my criteria for innovative design aimed at seniors, which was a little surprising given that there were over 300 exhibitors.

I even saw quite a few gadgets that were poorly designed for virtually anyone, not just the 50 to 70 year-olds that made up the majority of the crowd. I’m talking about devices that either had really tiny buttons with microscopic labels, or the buttons were placed so close together that you could easily push two at once, or the shape of the thing was such that it was hard to hold on to, or there was no tactile feedback; you get the picture.

Apparently it is going to take time for product designers to wake up to the fact that the median population of the US is getting older and that the 45 and older segment has more than half of the buying power of the economy. We also represent over 50% of discretionary spending and control 70% of net worth in the U.S. Wake up people!!!

Smart Homes or Useless Gadgets?

What with all this talk about home technology taking over our lives, maybe it’s time for a reality check. I just read an article written by John Dvorak, columnist for PC magazine who’s stock-in-trade is the presentation of contrarian viewpoints. His opinion in this 9/29/04 article is that the appeal of all this cool new technology is far overstated and that we really don’t need all these silly gadgets. I guess I would have to say that I don’t disagree when he questions why someone needs to stream mp3 files from their computer over their wireless net to their kitchen or bathroom (“What kind of nutjob needs that?”), but it won’t be long before people will pay real money to play their large mp3 collection on their family room AV system.

He also claims that only the very wealthy or bored compulsive engineers (like me who wire stuff constantly) really care about smart homes. On this point however, I strongly disagree knowing full well that John is baiting me with his typically hyperbolic writing style. Clearly the infiltration of technology in the home is an irreversible trend, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, and whether you really “need” the nice things that will become commonplace in middle-class homes before we know it.

Just look at the numbers for U.S. households with computers today versus 5 years ago. Then look at the same data on broadband. The number of houses that have their thermostats connected to their home network and programmable on dad’s PC is probably infinitesimal, sure, but it won’t be more than a few years before your next PC will have the capability to manage your sprinklers and your Christmas lights, and yes, your thermostat. You probably won’t use many of those features right away, but having them there will propel the technology just as sure as having cable available in a neighborhood makes people bypass their TV antennas.

The adoption of “smart home” technology is going to happen. Accept it. But know that only things that provide real benefit will ultimately succeed in the marketplace. Home builders keep very accurate records of what people ask for in their new homes, as well as what systems they pay to have installed later. Builders are just as important a factor in the marketplace as consumers. They will only install things that are cost effective for them, which means technology that helps them sell homes, which means technology that people like over the long run and doesn’t generate negative word-of-mouth.

Yes, we certainly don’t need a TV screen on our refrigerator door, but maybe it will morph into a touch screen that keeps track of food expiration dates, or programs the pork chops to be defrosted by 4 pm tomorrow afternoon, or notifies us of specials at our local market, or who knows? What we do know is that these things evolve according to what people want, and the “nutjob” ideas quietly fade away.

Digital Memory Update

Just bought a 512mb Compact Flash memory card at Costco for $35. Now, together with the 256mb card I had before (which cost about $55 by the way) and the 64mb one that came with the camera, I can take about 700 medium resolution pictures on a vacation. The only way I could take that many pictures is if I had the camera around my neck 15 hours / day for 3 weeks. Plus, only half of them would be worth keeping.

My prediction of $5 memory cards that are kept as backup memory is creeping closer...

Digital Photography Still in Infancy

Clearly the rapid rise of digital cameras has been restrained by the cost of memory. Once the cost of memory reached some magical level, sales of consumer grade digital cameras started to take off in the marketplace. It is now at a point where digital cameras are threatening to totally displace film. I think I read that sales of new cameras has now tipped the scales toward digital; it would be interesting to know how many digital pictures are now being taken versus film.

The problem is that this technology is still far from maturity mainly because the cost of memory is still a huge limiting factor. The other restraint is internet bandwidth. Not until we are all blessed with infinite bandwidth and dirt cheap digital memory, will digital photography approach the level that film photography has achieved.

Think about it. When you are taking your digital pictures, what resolution do you have your camera set to? Probably much less than the maximum your camera allows. If you have a 4 megapixel camera, you probably take most of your shots at around 1-2 megapixels. Why? because you can fit more shots on your expensive memory card and because it takes a long time to send a bunch of hi-res pictures over the internet to your friends, and because hi-res pictures take a long time to print on your inkjet printer. All these things effectively force the quality of your digital prints below the quality of film.

When we finally surmount this problem, you will no longer be kicking yourself that you didn’t take that perfect shot at the highest resolution because now all your shots will be good enough for an 11x14 or larger print. Plus, your PC software will pay attention to how you edit your pictures and automatically make corrections based on these accumulated preferences, thus improving on the current “average” quick editing that most software does. Also, you’ll be able to quickly send hi-res pictures over the internet and you’ll be able to store an entire vacation’s worth of pictures on one or two memory chips that cost $5 each.

The trick is going to be how we store all these pictures. I like Picasa, but it doesn't have a way to annotate each photo, only folders or albums. We are going to need a good system to annotate pictures or we will never be able to find them before long; many people already have this problem. We also need to get more conscientious about throwing away the bad ones. I should go through my photos before it becomes too big a chore.....

Radical New Printer Technology

I’m tired of having to pay exorbitant fees for ink and toner. I now have five different devices in my home office that print on paper: inkjet printer, laser printer, copy machine, label printer, and a fax. The last two are thermal, so I just have to buy special paper (haven’t been suckered into buying one of the plain-paper fax machines yet – the old thermal ones still cost a fraction of the cost to run and we rarely need to do anything with the pages that come in except read them). The first three items, however, require buying expensive inkjet or toner cartridges. As we should all know by now, printer companies make more profit on ink and toner than on machines. Like razor blades.

What we need is a new technology! What follows is my latest prediction inspired by mass quantities of caffeine and poppy-seed muffins:

Laser printer with no toner.
Media = coated paper that responds to specific wavelengths of light to produce color.
Printer = the same basic form factor as the inkjet, but the print head would be an almost weightless laser (maybe three lasers). A one ounce print head could travel lightning fast, would require a much lighter drive mechanism and would be super quiet, totally clean and maintenance free and the pages would come out dry. No heat required, no cleaning cycle, simpler mechanism, smaller footprint, lighter weight, lower power requirements (portable?). What’s not to like?

The hard part is the paper of course. Once that technology is perfected though, it would infiltrate every aspect of the business world. And since this new coated paper would be manufactured in mass quantities, the economies of scale and the simplicity of manufacturing it would drive the cost down much below the current cost per sheet (much smaller investment in hardware and no toner/ink and little maintenance). Assume that the printer makers would be forced to standardize on the same paper technology (like thermal fax paper did). Soon, all copiers and printers would print in color. Color would eventually become cheaper than black and white because of volume pricing. Also, printers could be miniaturized for all sorts of special applications.

When you think along the lines of this latest technology pipedream, the current “ink spraying on paper” or the “heat fusing of carbon dust on paper” technologies seem really crude and destined for oblivion. How much time would the world save not pfutzing around with the copy machine getting toner all over or trying to clear paper jams because of the tortuous paper path?
For those who are thinking that I have just traded one consumable (ink) for another (paper), you’re right, but I maintain that it is a good tradeoff. Maybe it would take time to become the new standard, but it would inexorably win out because of the huge savings in cost and reliability of the printers.

Maybe I should apply for a $5 million government grant to study the impact just from an environmental perspective......

Ubiquitous Cellphones

I just upgraded my Cellphone for the first time in five years. I suppose this puts me really behind in keeping up with technology, but I guess you could call me a selective early adopter. Everyone has different needs and my old phone did virtually everything I needed it for. Yes, today’s models do much more, but my old Qualcomm Thin Phone suited me just fine and I have mixed feelings about retiring it. As the name implies, it was thin, only half and inch and slips into your pocket and feels good in your hand. Truth be told, I haven’t seen a phone even today that is so thin. Besides that, it worked fine and the menus were simple and easy to navigate and it held 200 names and numbers.

So, why did I upgrade? I was basically forced to since the old phone was no longer compatible with all the system upgrades Verizon has been making and they wouldn’t let me upgrade to one of the newer plans unless I got one of the new phones.

So now I have one of the dreaded flip phones. At least that is what I considered them to be while I had my trusty Thin Phone. I’ve gotten used to it and even like some of the features, like the fact that the phone picks up when you open it and hangs up when you close it. Much more intuitive. But of course it has all these annoying ringtones and options for assigning the Star Spangled Banner to a specific caller and the Minute Waltz to anyone who blocks their Caller ID, and another to... You get the picture. You can also tag cute little pictures to each name in your contact list if you are, you know, like 9 years old.

The other thing it does is text messaging, although I haven’t tried that yet. I read that this is all the rage in Japan with the rest of the world quickly catching up. In Japan it is apparently a cultural thing; having you phone ring in a quiet place is considered rude so it is common for people to just check their messages frequently and leave the ringer on the lowest setting or off. Consequently, if you are standing in a subway station in Tokyo, you can expect that literally half of the people standing there will be staring into their phones either playing games or punching in text messages furiously.

It makes me wonder where we are heading, cellphone-wise. I also read about how in Japan and other countries they are incorporating RFID technology into some phones so they can be used as smart cards to pay for subway rides, vending machines, even as proximity ID badges for access to your apartment or company. Your phone is going to be your lifeline in more ways than one. Losing your phone will not only be extremely inconvenient, it will be embarrassing when you can’t pay for your train ticket or get into your apartment. The question that comes to mind is how will people protect themselves from this happening? Will all your personalized data be implanted in a chip under your skin so you only have to replace the dumb handset? Maybe the handsets will become cheaper, even disposable when they reach the commodity stage.

Of course, we are a very long way away from that here in the US, given that we have so many competing standards for cellphone communication. Europe is far ahead of us in that regard, using GSM everywhere and even only charging for outgoing calls – how logical!

Slight change in direction

This blog used to be called "Technology for Seniors." Although I remain interested in the development of products for seniors, I have decided to change the format for this blog and shift it in a slightly broader direction.

Whereas products for seniors need to encompass those who are not as technically oriented as the younger generation, my attitude now is that all high-tech products need to be simplified more. Consequently, I am exploring how technology evolves from leading edge new products that have yet to be proven in the marketplace, to the other end of the spectrum where a product has been refined many times in response to customer feedback and achieves a state of design excellence in regard to ergonomics and ease of use.

My observation is that we are beset with products that are both difficult to understand and poorly designed for our evolving lifestyle. Of course there are exceptions, but for the most part new technology immediately goes through a transformation powered by consumer feedback, both positive and negative. Some is marketplace driven, some is from data collected by technical service people. Companies that understand this try hard to stay connected with their customers through a good customer service system.

Therefore, I am moving toward a discussion of how products travel this road toward perfection with an effort to define what that state of design excellence is. Also, I am interested in ways to shortcut the process. In some ways the design community is already addressing this through better education and a thoughtful evaluation of what makes a successful product. If you read previous posts, you will see many that highlight products that have serious design flaws and are desperately in need of a push toward better ergonomics or simplification.

The name for the blog is still relevant. Mature Technology is that which has undergone the transformation to design excellence. General use products that have achieved that goal don’t necessarily have to be ubiquitous, but their features and controls must be intuitive and easy for non-technical folks to use and enjoy. The things is, when you have designed your product to those standards, it is appropriate for anyone and everyone, including seniors. From there it is a short path to making modifications for those people who have hearing or eyesight or motor skill limitations. Example: I just upgraded my cellphone and although it is smaller and the buttons are closer together, it has a feature where you can have the phone speak the numbers as you press them so you can confirm that you hit the right numbers. A very simple improvement that addresses these types of problems elegantly.

I encourage interested people to e-mail me with suggestions for topics or just to discuss these issues.

Networking Headaches

Just spent several days and an obscene number of hours trying to get my home network back working normally. Everything deteriorated when I installed Windows XP service pack II upgrade on all three computers in my home. This is supposed to be more secure by virtue of a built-in firewall as well as several improvements to the IE browser, among other things. It also cleans up and integrates dozens of earlier hotfixes.

Of course, after I spend several hours per machine backing up files and installing and configuring the upgrade, no one in my family could log onto the internet for more than ten minutes before they were booted off. They either had to log off and log on again or restart their machine, or recycle the router. You can imagine the bitching I was getting. I almost started to feel empathy for the IT people in my last company. Almost.

Anyway, after three intense days of trying everything I could think of including spending many hours online with the tech support people in India, I finally tried disconnecting an older Belkin switch that worked fine before the upgrade. Viola' problem solved. After everything started working again and the pressure was finally off, I quietly took the old Belkin switch outside and unceremoniously flattened it with a 25lb sledge. For some reason I didn't recoup all the wasted hours by doing that, but it felt good.

Now that I am in a more reflective mood, I am thinking about how vulnerable we all are when we lose internet connectivity. My wife and I both run our businesses from home and my daughter is enrolled in online college classes. We also each keep in touch with friends and relatives via e-mail. It was only a couple years ago that we had a dialup connection and only one person could be online at a time and it was so tedious that no one spent very much time there.

Now it has become an integral part of our lives and when it crashes, the impact is felt immediately. Setting up a home network can be relatively easy if you have fairly new machines and they all have the same operating system, which is likely. Fixing it when it crashes is not easy. The software built into Windows is almost no help.

I consider myself to be fairly literate when it comes to computers, less so with networking. I wonder how many people in LA are on the phone with their ISP or their network hardware Technical Service people right this minute tearing their hair out. I'll bet the number of people increases significantly every day.....

Brilliant appliances

The microwave oven is easily the most important recent household invention to extend the independence of older people.

Why?

• It saves time in the kitchen, thus making meal preparation less of a chore for people who don’t like to cook, which in turn saves them money.
• It enables food to be cooked and served in the same container making cleanup easier.
• It reduces wasted food; especially true with restaurant “doggie bags.”
• It can result in safer food, i.e. food that is cooked throughout and therefore has reduced chance of harmful bacteria than food that is just heated (or reheated) on the outside.
• It has created demand for a broad variety of easily prepared meals that just need to be “zapped”
• It makes it practical to make a totally workable kitchen from just a small refrigerator, a sink and a microwave oven.
• It is arguably the most cost-efficient appliance in your home if you compare the amount of use it gets versus the price.

What other recent invention has had the same impact?

Scary thoughts .01

How long will it be before every car has a built-in transponder that transmits the car’s identity to nearby receivers like the ones on toll roads?

Then each city will put in readers at intersections and totally put a stop to all those jerks who run red lights to save a few seconds. You can imagine the hew and cry though when people realize that their cars can now be tracked almost everywhere? Someone would of course want to analyze all that data that shows how fast you drive and how often you change lanes, what freeways you take, etc.

The next thing will be having to insert your driver’s license into a card reader in the dash before you can start the car. Naturally that information would also be included in the transponder signal so not only would the DMV know where your car is, they would know where you are too. So now, someone will know what your movements were when you were supposed to be at work, how many times a year you go to Mexico, Vegas, Ben & Jerrys.

Come to think of it, that’s really scary to think that the DMV would eventually become part of the DHS (Dept. of Homeland Security) and one of the most powerful data gatherers in the world.
Didn’t I see something like that in the movie AI? You know it’s going to happen eventually...

Home Health Monitoring Center

What if your treadmill could connect through your home network to your PC and the internet? And what if there were attachments you could buy to check in addition to your heart rate, your blood sugar, blood pressure, weight, etc.? And what if the interactive software prompted you to enter in some body measurements and answer some questions about how you feel and other health risks?

As an integrated health monitoring system, this machine could:

1. Keep records on your PC of your blood sugar, blood pressure, exercise routine, weight gain/loss and other factors

2. Allow you to do some sort of stress test to gauge your cardiovascular fitness level

3. Give you real progress updates on your workout and suggestions for modifying it.

4. Alert you to contact your doctor if certain factors look out of the ordinary

5. Provide you with records of all the above to take to your doctor (save time and the cost of having them run the same tests!!!)

The concept here is to use the power of your home PC and an internet connection to keep accurate records of your health and exercise routine and through the internet, provide you with real-time relevant advice and guidance based on your personalized stats. It is a known fact that when these results are made more visible, maybe even monitored weekly by your doctor, you will tend to be much more conscientious about taking your health seriously and keep to the program.

The point is that this kind of home-based diagnostic device, or at least record keeping device, would be a great thing for everyone, especially for seniors and people who are on some sort of therapeutic program. It would also, incidentally, be useful for a caregiver (child or a friend) to have access to this information (with permission) through an internet connection so they can see that their mother or aunt is keeping up with her routine.

I know that various types of monitoring devices already exist as very high-priced medical devices prescribed by doctors and either rented or purchased through health insurance, Medicare, etc.

What should be happening is that consumer products companies should be working on less expensive alternatives that people could buy just because they want to keep better track of their health, or the health of their parents. They could even have internet diagnostic tests to make sure that the machines are working correctly and calibrated.

Household Robots

A lot has been said and forecast about how we will all have personal robots helping us around the house and in other places, maybe restaurants, stores, etc. This all sounds cool and plausible and almost everyone knows that sooner or later it will happen. However, when most people use the phrase “sooner or later” they mean later. In the case of robots this may be true, although we are already seeing a few rudimentary units marketed for things like mowing your lawn or vacuuming your house. I haven’t done any research on these but my guess is that they only work well in a very controlled environment where a human being has already done a pre-flight check for any hazards or corrected any situations that are outside the capabilities of the machine (e.g. tee shirt on the floor, sprinklers accidentally timed to go off during the mowing, etc.). The brain power in these first machines is going to be pretty limited.

Hence, the road to success for robots will undoubtedly be a slow and rocky one, with a lot of pain for the first companies out there. In my opinion, robots will need to be programmed with a tremendous number of contingency algorithms to deal with all the weird problems that can present themselves in the atypical home. Even a 2 year old child is more inventive and resourceful than the best robot will be for quite some time to come.

Maybe I’m being unduly pessimistic but I think that household robots will not be particularly affordable or idiot-proof (translate: successful in the marketplace) until a very large amount of programming is done and tested and debugged and highly integrated down to just a few relatively inexpensive ICs.

Maybe someone can devise a way to reduce the A.I. needed for these machines into a few basic modules that can be mixed and matched for the particular job. Then when the customer gets her mechanical friend home, she plugs it into her PC and over the internet answers a host of questions about her lifestyle and the layout of her apartment and what she wants this guy to do. At that point the mother ship executes a mind-meld with little Robbie so that he has a jump start on dealing with his new home.  Maybe his new owner can even pick a personality, like kids do with ring-tones. I have a remote control that you program over the internet like this (Harmony); a brilliant concept in my opinion. This is the only practical way I can see that the necessary customization can be done relatively easily.

The trick will be to develop enough brain power cheaply and design the myriad of sensors intelligently enough to handle most of the everyday problems so that people aren’t always bitching at the poor little guy. On the other hand, maybe we need someone to yell at when we get home. Someone who won’t talk back or throw things; someone who will just apologize for anything that he might have done and go on about his business. It could happen....

Home Business

In the August issue of Fast Company, Shoshana Zuboff notes “In 1900 there were 13 million people over the age of 45. Now there are nearly 100 million.” She also points out that the average life span is 77 years. The average life span! So if you balance out all those young people whose lives are cut short by accident or illness, that means that a whole heck of a lot of people are living into their 80’s and 90’s these days.

This begs the question: what are you going to be doing at age 70? Are you going to be working, or are you going to be retired? My gut feel is that a rapidly growing number of baby boomers are going to want to transition to some sort of home-based business - a business that offers an escape from the corporate rat race but gives them a supplemental income to extend their retirement savings those extra years. People these days are living longer and they are also spending more time “retired.”

In a time when corporate downsizing and “restructuring” tends to focus heavily on those with higher salaries (i.e. more senior people), there are a lot of people scratching their heads and thinking about starting a new career in their fifties. Many of you will be looking for a low-stress home business where you can control your own destiny.

This all points toward yet another incentive for people to extend their independence further into their senior years. It won’t be just for the enjoyment of living in your own home rather than a nursing home, but also for financial survival because it is pretty hard to save up enough money to live comfortably for 20 years. There is already some movement toward developing technology that makes it easier for people to live alone and continue working at home when in the past they would have to move to some sort of managed care facility. Unfortunately most of this activity is in the realm of developing medical devices, not everyday technology that makes your life easier or makes it easier for friends or relatives to keep tabs on you or vice versa.

Lots of interesting trends to keep track of.....

Creative Outsourcing

Just read a short article in Wired that mentioned a programmer who outsourced his own job. Given my strong feelings in favor of laissez faire capitalism and strong feelings against short-sighted laws that attempt to hold back the unstoppable globalization of all business, this article instantly caught my attention and made me laugh.

Here is a guy who gets paid $67k to write code. In an effort to gain more free time and increase his hourly rate, he independently subcontracts his work to a guy in India for $12k/year. His employer thinks he is telecommuting but he now only spends about 90 minutes per day actually working. He says that he is thinking about taking a second job which, if it pays the same, will mean he now would have to work a total of 15 hours per week for $110k per year. Not bad if he can pull it off.

Of course if both his subcontractors decide to flake on him, he will have to work an 80 hour week until he finds decent replacements – probably not a big risk. The downside occurs when his subcontractors get better at coding than he is and he then can’t take up the slack if someone bails. He is now effectively an employer with some of the problems that come with that arrangement.

The really interesting thing about all this is that even though the job has been officially outsourced, the job still exists here in the U.S.; it is just that the ultimate employer is not getting the difference. Eventually, this guy is going to come up against the problem of his original employer deciding to outsource directly and he will have to hit the bricks looking for a new job, or he will have to leverage his experience and start a new business that is based on managing offshore programmers. The gist of this article is that even though outsourcing is going on at an increasing rate, there is also a steady increase in new jobs being created here in the US to adapt to the changing job landscape. The article doesn’t say what kind of jobs, but one can assume that all these outsourced workers need to be managed by someone and that the increased efficiency ultimately creates jobs in other areas.

I guess the thing that I love the most about this guy is that he is being creative and entrepreneurial and that technology now makes it possible for him to operate independently from his house. It is one more small indicator of how “work” is changing.

Convergence on the horizon for AV

Finally a ray of hope for simplifying the AV mess we suffer with. The DLNA (digital living network alliance which consists of the big guys like microsoft, nokia, sony, HP, Phillips, etc.) just announced the release of their first set of guidelines for networked device interoperability. Hopefully this will help drive the convergence of phones, AV systems, home computer networks, and other appliances. As this process evolves, new products will appear that can communicate with each other and self-configure. I look forward to the day when I don't need to set up macros on my remote control to watch a DVD. Maybe we can expect some measureable improvement in the next five years or so....

Case Study

I was talking with a friend and his wife this past weekend and the subject got around to his elderly mother. Alice’s (not her real name) husband died a couple years ago and she is not doing too well living on her own; doesn’t go out much, has very few friends, doesn’t eat well because she doesn’t want to cook, lets things go around the house. She seems to be suffering from loneliness and a mild form of depression and has sort of withdrawn from the world. Her two kids live fairly close by and visit regularly and call her several times per week, but they are both worried about their mom living such a solitary life. The thing is, Alice is very healthy and able to do most things by herself and is adamant about remaining in her own home where she feels comfortable.

Old age can be a pretty depressing time if you don’t have any engaging activities to take your mind off the daily problems. What this woman needs is someone around to interact with and look out for her and basically motivate her to enjoy her life. She was left with a comfortable retirement income so she could afford to move into a senior facility for people who only need companionship and someone to cook their meals, help with the shopping, etc. My friend thinks that Alice would learn to enjoy it but is not prepared to force her into making the move. An alternative to moving her into one of these places might be for someone to visit daily, maybe just for 30 minutes or an hour – sort of like a friend who lives across the street. It would be nice if she lived in one of these enclosed condominiums where she would see people every day and make friends – more of a community atmosphere than what she has now living in a separate house on an urban street where neighbors don’t talk much.

Regarding the main subject of this Blog, there may be a couple of technology approaches that could improve the situation if Alice is willing to give them a try. One is a simple videophone. The children and even the grandchildren could schedule calls at different times in the week outside of their normal visits and give her a boost in this way. You can also tell a lot more about how a person is by seeing their facial expressions rather than just hearing their voice. Another might be to put in a computer that Alice could use to explore the world from her own home and even get involved in some forums, etc. She might be reminded of how much is really going on in the world versus just watching TV and worrying about imaginary problems. Of course, if she doesn’t want to bother with these pesky devices, that would obviously not be the solution.

I’m thinking that the best solution in this case is probably not technology but real time face-to-face human interaction. That is probably the only thing that is going to pull Alice out of her withdrawal and give her something to look forward to in her day. She will also feel a sort of accountability to these friends that will motivate her to attend to her appearance and her diet and get involved with things with her friends even if she is initially ambivalent towards them. This could improve Alice’s life dramatically. My recommendation in this case would be to find a senior residence facility where Alice can have her own comfortable apartment with a patio that opens up onto a communal area where she can make friends. A place where she can choose to make her own meals or go to the dining room if she wants. A place where there is a nurse on staff and dieticians and activity planners, etc. A place where Alice can embrace a new life.

Timeline

I’ve always been interested in astronomy, so occasionally something happens to make me think about how vast the universe is, and wonder what some other highly advanced civilization would think of our simple technology. When you sit in your backyard in the evening and look up at the stars realizing that the light from that star over there to the left has been traveling toward earth for several million years, it provides you with a frame of reference.

Then the phone rings and you go inside and discover that your daughter has left the cordless phone upstairs again and you have to run to another room to answer it. It makes me smile to think what a short time these "gadgets" have been in existence here on earth and how much we have to look forward to.

The integration of AV components

Why is it taking so long for AV components to be integrated more? Although we see examples in many places of convergence and standards adoption and simplification and integration, it sure does not seem to be happening in home audio/video. Isn't anyone taking a leadership postion on this subject? Maybe there is stuff going on behind the scenes but it sure doesn't seem to be evident in the marketplace. With the proliferation of satellite and cable set-top boxes and the introduction of DVRs (or PVRs) it only seems to be getting worse.

There no reason you shouldn't be able to buy the following system today: one AV "controller" that includes all the features of your current receiver, DVD player, CD player, TIVO, and broadband receiver (cable or satellite). Your cable company or satellite company would provide you with a smart card that configured your "controller" to work with their service. You would then plug in your TV "monitor" and speakers. Since everything would be in one box, you would finally be rid of all the configuration problems you have now (TV set to channel 3? mode set to video?) and you would finally be rid of the rats nest of wires. Pull up a menu on the screen and the controller would take care of everything.

Finally a "smart" system that would suit people who have no tolerance for the mess that the industry has put upon us. And finally a product that people with cognitive impairments could use with ease and without having to hire a specialist to set up and troubleshoot.

And finally a system that would be safe to connect to your home network to play your downloaded music library, edit and play your home movies, present a slide show of your digital photographs, etc. Finally a system that delivers on the promise. Whether it happens in my lifetime is anyone's guess.

Un-structured wiring

I read several newsletters about the latest in home automation. The articles that interest me are not so much those that go into great depth about some new wireless protocol or a new digital format that DVD players can now support, but rather I look for articles that discuss trends and how new technologies will affect consumers. The latest issue from Home Toys > http://www.hometoys.com/htinews.htm < has yet another article about structured wiring. I guess my house has structured wiring, although much more eclectic than the fancy cabinets and expensive cabling that you see in new homes today. I've got distributed audio/video/phone/ethernet/and sprinkler wires going to a closet downstairs where I have my DSL modem and routers. Not pretty but fine for me.

The problem I have with spending $30k -$40k on all this stuff in a new home today is that the stuff that plugs into it in the family room and the office and the kitchen is all going to change before you know it. Who knows what kind of wiring you will need in ten years? Ten years is not that long if you are burying all this stuff in your walls. With the rate of change in the electronics industry, your ethernet cables may be totally inadequate to carry the bandwidth needed in the near future, and the way they typically install this wiring is just to route it through the walls either loose or in pre-packaged cables(e.g. 2 ethernet, 2 control, 1 coax, 2 speaker). The problem is that the guys who put these in, do it in such a way that you would have to rip off the drywall to replace it. If it was my home and I was standing there looking at the framing before any drywall was put in, I would insist on them installing conduit so I could pull it all out and replace it, maybe room by room, but at least with that capability.

There is so much hype about structured wiring but no one seems to know what is coming in 5-10 years. It's entirely possible that you might want to replace all of this wiring with just one fiberoptic cable going to each location. It would have enough bandwidth to carry virtually everything at the same time including HDTV, internet, lighting controls, phone, everything. And it would be easy to replace the module at the end to add features without changing any "wiring." I wonder what the incremental cost would be to add one fiberoptic cable to each run in that new house today even if you have nothing to hook it to yet?

Bullet-Proof PC

Don't know if someone is already working on this but I haven't seen or heard of it. The other day I was thinking about my older sister and her home computer that wasn't connected to the internet, ostensibly because she is afraid of getting viruses. Now, she certainly isn't unfamiliar with computers since she has been using one for quite a few years at work, but still, she worries about the wild wild west reputation that he internet has, and has decided that she doesn't need that headache.

In many ways I think she is to be admired for trying to simplify her life and not get caught up in all the high tech that so many of us labor with on a daily basis. I don't necessarily agree with her rationale for not hooking up to the internet, but it made me think about how many other people there are in the world who have deferred using the internet for the same reasons.

So, given my interest in technology for seniors, my thoughts naturally evolved to wondering if there could be a machine that solves this problem and simplifies the entire experience of using a computer.

Here is my idea:
Suppose you had a reasonably fast broadband connection and you subscribed to an online service that managed all your software maintenance - automatically.
That means that, lets say every night, your PC would log onto your service and the entire operating system and whatever programs you subscribed to would be checked out and refreshed daily. You would have a pretty simple setup with something like Microsoft works and all your files would be stored and backed up online, not on your machine, and you would have no ability to load new programs locally and screw it up.

The intent here is to appeal to those people who have a need to browse the internet, write e-mails, maybe even converse via a built-in video camera and microphone. We're talking a simple communication device with wireless keyboard and mouse, and a single USB port set up to upload digital photos. The objective would be to create a PC that was almost totally impervious to virus attack, with firmware that could go online and refresh (or upgrade) all the local software if needed.

This would require a big investment to integrate the online component and the hardware component, but it could be done. I'm even thinking that the PC may not even need a hard disk with the price of ram and flash ram getting so cheap. That would significantly add to the reliability.

Given all the hair pulling that computer users go through to keep their machines working, this would solve a lot of problems for people who use a home computer as a communicator - reading and writing messages, learning about things online, shopping, etc.

Who is working on this?????