My Job, Apparently

Ironically, in spite of my handle TechBoy that I use here, I seem to rarely talk about tech. I suppose that is because I talk tech just about everywhere else. I started this blog to sort of balance that out and give the other half of my brain some exercise. According to this blog posting, however, that isn't good enough, so I feel inclined to inject a little tech related musings today. Maybe I'll throw in a little more tech once in while, just to keep some people from nagging me.

I would imagine that the biggest and most prevalent tech news is the release of the iPad last Saturday. However, rather than talk about how awesome it is and go on about all the apps, I thought I'd set the Wayback Machine and take the iPad back to some of my early techie days and speculate what reactions I'd have.

"But Mr. Peabody, this isn't the Wayback Machine!"

"Shut up Sherman or I'll make you pick up my poo again."

The year is about 1995. I've had a Macintosh IIci for about 3 years and traded it in for a refurbished PowerBook 180c color laptop which had a screen an inch or two smaller in each dimension than the iPad. The World Wide Web was pretty new and you could only make your own website by learning how to hand-code HTML. The first WYSIWYG editor for HTML was coming out, called Adobe PageMill. It seemed nice, but really mangled the code so that going back in and customizing by hand usually took longer than if you had just built it that way in the first place.

The laptops of the time really give you a good comparison...

PowerBook 180c: 7.1 lbs

iPad: 1.5 lbs

PowerBook 180c: 2.25" thick

iPad: 13.4 mm thick

PowerBook 180c: 8.4" diagonal screen

iPad: 9.7 inch diagonal screen

PowerBook 180c: $4,110 (new)

iPad: $499 (new)

So there are a few figures to give you an idea of how far we've come. No wireless or broadband internet yet either. 300 baud (yeah, I know you have no idea what that means) telephone modem.

My friends and I were geeky enough, but if you had arrived from the future and handed us the iPad, with a transdimensional link to the current day internet....I don't think we would have bothered leaving for college. I think the only reason we spent any time away from our Commodore 64s and TRS-80s was because you couldn't do a lot with them, and the games sucked. However, we managed to loose a lot of time to them anyway. Does anyone remember "light pens"?! Now we just have fingers, but we thought it was way cool to be able to draw on a television screen. Yes, television screen. You would hook up your computer to your television. Ok, I reset the Wayback for high school...that wasn't 1995.

To be honest, I'm not sure how things would have been different with the iPad. My friends and I generally just were excited to play with new technology. I'm not sure we would have seen it as life changing, although seeing what technology could do, we might have been more inspired to invent things that would use it. That, and we would have bought a shit-load of Apple stock and be billionaires!

The iPad is really a device for today, with it's social networks and need for immediacy. We gobble content as fast as we can download or browse to it, although there is a lot more garbage content now with an emphasis on entertainment and time-killing rather than education.

"The new Apple Store is great isn't it?!"

"Yeah, but it sucks that they make you buy the spacesuit just to see the new iMonolith."

PS: Here's some crappy Atari games from the time too.

A Magic Trick Gone Wrong

This is not the first time I have written about the difficulties and process of writing a blog post, and I suspect not the last. As was illustrated by a previous post, the process between initialization and conclusion of a point, thought, or concept can be a rocky one. This is definitely something I've been working hard at to improve. I'm sure there are some kind of mental devices for planning out what you want to say so that it either fits in a given space, or takes a particular time to write, but I've always been a free-flowing kind of writer. I start with an idea, roll it around in some flour, bake it for a while, and then sit down and just start writing what comes to mind. Yeah, I know, I completely mangled that metaphor, but you get the idea.

The trouble is that free-flowing mode I'm so fond of tends to not have any boundaries. I write until I can reach a concluding point, or can't think of anything more to say about the subject; assuming I haven't changed the subject several times. Welcome to Tangentville! What tends to be the worst case scenario is when I'm interrupted (like I just was with a phone call) and it becomes difficult to rediscover the stream of consciousness I had been traveling along.

I have likened this writing process with the age old magic trick of pulling a streamer from your mouth. The "device" that allows you to do this is called a "mouth coil", but that as far as I'll get into the mechanics of the trick. The magician seems to pull an endless, colorful streamer from his mouth.

"I don't remember eating anything that color."

Now imagine that you are the magician, ready to wrap up this little trick and anticipating the end of the streamer, but it just keep coming out. In fact, you realize that it is no longer a trick and you seem to have no control over it anymore. Yes, I do have a lot of nightmares, why?

Anyway, it gets out of control, and so you snip off the streamer, swallow, and move onto the next trick. The only difference is, with my writing, you don't see that first part of the trick where it all went wrong. It's more like if the trick went haywire during practice and it was just eliminated from the show. So what is the point in writing about it? Well, I sometimes think better when I write it out, and maybe someone will read this and offer some suggestions for working out my writing obstacles. In the meantime, I'll keep drafting up things to say, and maybe one day someone will put all those unfinished thoughts into a book and it'll make millions! Hey, it worked for the son of J. R. R. Tolkien.

I think I'd much rather do this trick, but maybe with Jessica Alba.

Why Can't Women Be More Like Sandwiches?

Updated…for your reading pleasure. Two reads for one post…whatta deal!

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You know, I can't for the life of me remember what prompted this title, but I felt it was too good to not use, if only for its controversial overtones.

Sexual references aside, let's examine why one might want a woman to be like a sandwich. It might trigger something. It should be said that it is perfectly resonable, as a woman, to wish men were more like sandwiches, but you'll have to write about it on your own blog because I'm not going to go there.
Ok, so a good sandwich has lots of toppings, but that doesn't translate well since I'm not a fan of a lot of makeup, but an attractively dressed woman is always nice, as is an attractively dressed sandwich.

I guess I could be snarky and say things like, sandwiches don't argue with you, you can just make a sandwich and go because sandwiches don't keep trying on different meats and veggies...you know, the usual stereotypes. I think the original idea was simpler than that. The sandwich represents something simpler, and relationships can be difficult.

The effort you put into making a sandwich is almost always rewarded with the eating of the sandwich. It's usually a 1:1 relationship. Hopefully the energy you put into a relationship is returned in an equally rewarding result, but sometimes that may not be the case. People are generally more complicated than sandwiches, let's face it. I think it goes without saying that the company of a woman (for myself anyway) is probably preferred over that of a sandwich, but some days….you just need a sandwich.


Trust me, you do not want to do a Google image search for "sandwich girl" without SafeSearch on!