Frivolous Friday, 05.21.2010: "What if?" history...or maybe not so much...

I successfully beat back the temptation to upgrade my pay-as-you go El Cheapo cellphone to a Blackberry, despite the siren-song of GPS and other amenities--namely web/email connectivity that isn't absolutely cheesy.

In a word, convergence. Which only highlights how quickly having both capabilities available in tandem, virtually anywhere in the industrialized world, has become the norm. Yet, convergence sort of implies parallel development...and a certain inevitability besides. But computers, in one form or another, have existed for far, far longer than telephones. Which prompts the thought experiment of "What would have happened if it had been the other way around?"

The short-and-silly answer is that tech. support calls wouldn't have changed much at all. For instance, let's roll back to...

Stonehenge (circa 2500 BCE)

Tech: Acme Megalith Customer Service. How may I rock your world?
Customer: Cute. Look, we've got a problem here. Tomorrow's the Solstice, and I don't think that the heelstone's working right.
Tech: Which model do you have?
Customer: Okay, so we upgraded from Bluestone to the Sarsen edition, and let me tell you, it's been nothing but trouble--
Tech: Have you rebooted since the upgrade?
Customer: What's a "reboot"?
Tech: Well, you need to let the calendar year cycle and use the bluestone to validate the solar and lunar cycles before cutting over to the sarcens. That's on Page 1 of the manual.
Customer: Look. Dude. I don't have time for that. Like I said, the Solstice Festival is tomorrow. This thing cost us a chieftain's ransom: It should just work, okay? Screw your reboot.
Tech: Did you do the upgrade yourself, or did someone else do it?
Customer: Umm, contractors. War captives, mostly.
Tech: [curses under breath] Sir, I'm sorry to inform you that you have more than likely voided your warranty by not using an authorized service contractor for installation.
Customer: Are you kidding me? Do you realize this is the freakin' Solstice Festival, for cryin' in your mead? Great Mother, I've got three Arch-Druidesses breathing down my neck!
Tech: I'm sorry, sir. If you'd like, I can recommend several local authorized technicians who could inspect your Acme Megalith(TM) installation and recommend various recalibration options...
Customer: [hangs up]

And, lest my gentle reader think the Stone Age too primitive, let us fast-forward to...

Rome, (after 100 BCE)

Gaius: Ave. Gaius dicit.
Demitrios: Hey.
Gaius: Demetrios! 'sup, amice mee?
Demitrios: Yeah, so I think I scored the 3G Antikythera device for the boss, but I'm only like 90% positive it's legit. Can you help me out here? There's some serious denari riding on this.
Gaius: Dude! That's not supposed to be out until next calends! Can I scoot over and take a look at it?
Demitrios: Ummm...that might be...problematic. I'm a little ex urbe right now, y'know? This was kind of a big deal.
Gaius: [sighs]
Demitrios: What?
Gaius: Nothing...nothing. We'll do this remotely, then.
Demitrios: So, like, it's metal and has all these chariot-wheel-looking things. With teeth and stuff.
Gaius: [stifling sigh] Right. So far, so good. Where are the date hand, the Sun hand and the Moon hand set right now?
Demitrios: [pause] Which ones are those?
Gaius: Should be right in the front.
Demitrios: Right. Yeah. They're there. [another pause]
Gaius: So...where are they set?
Demitrios: [yet another pause] I'm not sure. Okay, there are these zodiac things on it. Oh, hey, there's Mars. And Venus, too! Speaking of Venus, if you're ever in Aigila, I know this place--
Gaius: Yeah, sounds great. Just...how many gears--I mean things with teeth--does it have?
Demitrios: A lot. Hang on--lemme count. [still another pause] A lot.
Gaius: You know what? I think you've got the real deal there. I say bring it on home.
Demitrios: Kewl. Thanks a lot, man. Tell you what--I'll swing by when I'm back in town & show you, 'k?
Gaius: Sounds like a plan. See ya in a few weeks.

Or, even the much-neglected "Industrial Revolution" of Europe's Middle Ages...

Paris, France (mid-14th century)

Automated Answering: Thank you for calling Acme Astrolabe. Your call is important to us. Please listen carefully to the following options, as they may have changed. For Sales, press I. To speak to a Customer Service Representative, press II. To report a lost or stolen astrolabe, please press III. For all other calls, we'd invite you to press zero, but that hasn't been invented yet. Unless, of course, you're a filthy Saracen, in which case, bugger off.
Customer: [Presses II]
[On-hold madrigals]
Automated Answering: Your call is important to us. All available representatives are currently assisting other customers. Please continue to hold.
[On-hold Gregorian chants]
Tech: Thank you for calling Acme Astrolabe. How may I move Heaven and Earth to assist you?
Customer: Hi. This isn't a big deal, really: I think I just need the Latin manual for this astrolabe I have.
Tech: Milady? I'm not sure I understand.
Customer: I think I have a Greek astrolabe. I just need the Latin instructions--that's all.
Tech: If Her Ladyship doesn't mind me asking, what makes her think that it's a Greek astrolabe? I mean, yeah, we do make those. But they haven't been in use for...well...a while.
Customer: Oh, I'm pretty sure it's Greek. Because the numbers on it are all funny. Not I, II, III, IV, V: You know, all normal and stuff.
Tech: Would Her Ladyship mind telling me how she came by this astrolabe?
Customer: Oh, yes: It was part of my late second husband's estate.
Tech: Does Milady have any idea when her husband--rest his soul--might have purchased it?
Customer: Oh, he didn't. It was part of his legacy from his father.
Tech: [reaches for manuals, stifling sigh] Then might she have an idea of how her late husband's father--rest both their souls--would have purchased it?
Customer: Not exactly. We think that his great-great-great grandfather brought it back from The Crusades. Meaning, of course, the great-great-great-grandfather of my late husband's father. That means that it was Greek.
Tech: Milady's knowledge of history is impressive, certainly. Would she be able to describe some of the inscriptions for me?
Customer: Well, it starts out mostly okay. The "I" has this funny little spur that comes off the top, but, then, it's Greek, right? But where the "II" is, that looks like a sideways pot-hook resting on a horizontal bar. And the "III," well, that's...well, totally foreign. And it just gets worse from there.
Tech: [pause]
Customer: Hello?
Tech: I do apologize, Milady...I'm looking through my manuscripts, but I'm not seeing what you're describing...would Her Ladyship very much mind holding again while I talk to one of my colleagues?
Customer: I can hold.
[On-hold medley of schwamm and sackbutt "Greatest Hits"]
Tech: Still there?
Customer: Yes.
Tech: Milady, again, please let me apologize. But from what Your Ladyship has described, it is an Arabic--meaning Saracen--astrolabe, which we didn't manufacture.
Customer: That's impossible! My second husband's father's great-great-great grandfather was the standard-bearer for Guy de Lusignan himself! That's as Greek as it gets!
Tech: If Milady would care to send the astrolabe to us, our technicians would be more than able to authenticate--
Customer: [hangs up]

Now, don't get me wrong: It's not like I think that civilization hasn't actually progressed, y'understand. That being said, certain...errrmm...constants...aren't difficult to project. Even centuries & millenia back in time.

Trust can be stolen as well as betrayed

First off, I wasn't planning to harp on this theme again. (Second off, apologies to @OrangeComputer for re-hashing something we chatted about before tonight's Linux User's Group meeting.) But this popped into the Twitter feed even before I logged in: Facebook caught sharing private data with advertisers.

Obviously, there's a lot of hardware and software magic that makes the internet work in 2010. On the human level, however, it only boils down to two factors:

1.) Filtering out the noise to focus on the signal(s) most important to us. That's what made Google's Page & Brin the bazillionaires they are today. Not trying to monetize an increasingly cluttered (and often obviously bought-and-paid-for) search "portal" like everyone else tried.

2.) Trust. The reason you don't buy anything from a URL that doesn't start with "https://." The reason you'll think about paying more to a brand-name retailer than an EBay/Craigslist scalper. And, quite possibly, the reason you signed on to various social media venues such as Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace...and even Facebook.

Assuming you're not just collecting followers, of course. But if the leverage for you creating the account was the fact that peeps you know are there, then the site is guilty of trust-skimming. In other words, the social media site was, however passively, your trust in your friends to make you feel comfortable with giving it the ability to eavesdrop on your chatter, to catalog your interests, to monitor your activities. Heck, I remember my first invitation to LinkedIn starting with a sentence like, "Because I trust you, I'm inviting you to join..."

No matter how zealously the social site guards your privacy, the technique's at least a wee bit slimy. In the long run, though, Facebook may be doing the online world a favor by showing us the truly nasty end of the sliminess spectrum. I just hope that a healthy percentage of its users take that to heart before Web 3.0 plugs us all into Zuckerberg's Matrix.

Welcome to our world, Windows.

If you want to develop software for the Android (think Nexus, Droid Incredible, and a slew of tablets hitting--or aiming for--the market), the default development environment is the open-source Eclipse product. I've used it; there's nothing wrong with it. I just have an ever-so-slight preference for the underdog NetBeans product (also open-source).

Officially, Google--Android's creator/patron--only supports Eclipse, but the NetBeans "hack" isn't terribly complicated...at least if you don't make my mistake and assume that NetBeans' Android plugin doesn't auto-magically install the Android SDK when it installs itself. And you make sure NetBeans isn't running when you do figure that out. I flunked both. When I figured out the first, I couldn't set up Android as a "Platform" in NetBeans, which led me to question whether I'd actually installed anything in the first place.

So I bee-bopped on over to the "official" Android page. And even after clicking the one and only "Installing Android"-flavored link in the side bar, had to re-trace my steps to be certain that I wasn't seeing things. Sure, the first platform download in the list of links was Windows. But the installation instruction screenshots were all from a Mac. Rather less significantly, the NetBeans plugin installation instruction screenshots were all from Ubuntu Linux. No having to make mental substitutions for folder paths--particularly swapping n "/" for "\". Which most definitely is something you wouldn't have seen even five years ago.

Now, obviously, two websites--even one owned by Google--do not make for a statistically valid example. For that reason alone, I wouldn't dream of calling Windows the Third World of operating systems. (There are any number of other reasons, including the fact that I dislike using the term "Third World" for most purposes.) But between the web and smartphones, the days of near-unilateral operating system hegemony are clearly over, quite probably for good.

The code pusher

I never like telling "my" favorite client that an extra bell or whistle will involve extra fee. But they're asking for a brand new report, which isn't something I can sneak into normal maintenance.

To determine whether I have a handle on what info. they're looking to track (should the new report be authorized), I wrote a simple SQL query to dump the data from the database into an Excel file. As I emailed the test spreadsheet to my contact, I couldn't help but think, "They say the first hit's always free..."

Blech.

We interrupt your regulary-scheduled blog post for the following rant...

Let's get this out of the way up right up front: I am not, not NOT defending (much less condoning) the two-bit carnival shell game that Mark Zuckerberg & his Facebook goons have been running with their terms and conditions. It's sleazy--period.

But, then, Facebook has always has had a slightly skanky ambience. When I joined in late 2008, the sidebar was carpet-bombed with ads for akai berry and "Sorority Life" and what-not. Only the ads have changed, but FB's explosive growth (presumably matched by revenue) has certainly not brought any "gentrification" in tone.

In a nutshell, it's like that bar. The one where you actually prefer to step on the peanut shells because it allows you to ignore the tackiness of the floor. The one where you developed your reputation as Captain Iron Bladder--because your own bathroom, even on a bad week, is operating-room clean in comparison. But you and your friends from Back In The Day were too poor for tonier venues, so there's a sort of coming-home feel to it that absolves you of having to be higher-rent during the week. Plus, you can bring your newer friends there because the cheese curds are still as legendary as days of yore. Your only concession to adulthood is to shower off the skeeviness, no matter how late it is when you get home.

That kind of place. Yes, maybe it's like Cheers in that "everybody knows your name," but expecting anyone--particularly the proprietors--to watch your back or make sure you don't go home with the wrong person is, quite brutally, a double shot of infantilism with a self-absorption chaser.

With zero exaggeration, it flat-out Blows My Mind that anyone, after fifteen-plus years of mainstream internet usage, expects privacy when they link their real-world and online selves. But, as the relative intangibility of online interaction vs. face-to-face human contact (still!) seems to be a stumbling block, I'll share my secret formula for not sabotaging your career and/or real-world friendships via Facebook:

Step 1: Be born to the sixth of seven children from a tight-knit family started right before the Great Depression and capped a couple years after WWII.

Step 2: Friend up one of your first cousins. Specifically, one who used to babysit you while the 'rents spent their Date Night playing Bingo at the Eagles Club. Bonus points if you were the flower-girl in said cousin's wedding.

Step 3: Wait a couple weeks (or less) until your other cousins (who also baby-sat you at some point and thus had to Set An Example for you) and your second cousins (for whom you baby-sat and likewise provided an example) figure out that you're on Facebook and friend you up, too.

Step 4: Do not run afoul of Dunbar's Law. I don't care how wild-looking their avatars are, they are people, not badges. There is no prize for "friending up" more people than anyone else...not unless you're going for the gold in the Wanker Olympics. By all of which I mean: Do not divide your shouting into the void by the number of people privy to it. The internet can easily amplify as much as it dilutes.

As a formula, it's served me well so far. Yes, I've experienced a bit of of "Wow, you really haven't grown up much since 19--, now have you?" Or, "You keep using that word. I do not think you know what it means." But that's to be expected. And the simple act of blocking those folks' post from your feed basically amounts to embalming fluid for nostalgia: I can't recommend it highly enough. And, in fairness, I also had the highly instructive benefit of a certain lack of...err...discretion by friends who realized too late how public their preferences and pursuits actually were.

But. I cannot, for the life of me, grok why anyone over the age of five cannot get this through their skull: Online life gives you the same hard choice as the real deal. You can fit in and get along and get the gold sticker by your name for playing well with others. Or you can be yourself. There is a cost either way. Which of those two prices turns out to be the most exorbitant...well, that's up to you and your value system. I wouldn't presume to pass judgement on either choice.

Yet what I cannot and will not sympathize with is people who expect to turn their private information over to a purely online company and expect that company to guard it like the Crown Jewels. Nuh-uh. Not in 2000, And certainly not in 2010.

Again, I'm (emphatically) not "blaming the victim." But I am thoroughly sick of the blogosphere's hyperventilating and the naifish expectation of privacy from any company that can make bank pimping your info. to someone else.

Only unskilled management hires unskilled labor

Prepping a bottle for use in home-winemaking isn't exactly cutting-edge in terms of technology or process. There's warm running water for the initial rinse, which removes dust that you don't want in the cool-water iodaphor bath that sterilizes the glass immediately before bottling/corking.

About the only thing these two basic steps have in common is emptying the bottle of risewater/solution. For me, the routine makes for thinking-time, but Dennis bores more readily than I. That, and he once upon a time earned his crust as a manufacturing engineer for a bottling/packaging equipment firm. Which is probably why it was he who discovered that swirling the contents during draining creates a gravity-enhanced vortex that empties the bottle much more quickly than simply up-ending it over the sink.

To me, finding process improvement in such a "lowly" job as washing bottles merely reinforces the notion that there truly is no such thing as "unskilled" labor. And that excellence in execution can and should exist at all organizational levels. Yes, at some growth milestone, it makes great gobs of sense to hire someone else to do the things that take your time away from the sweet-spot of your own productivity. But choosing a person who's as uninterested in--or mediocre at--those things as you might be cheats all parties involved. That's something I've never understood, despite having seen it all too often in years past.

Product documentation #fail

Not quite eligible for the Rogues' Gallery, this, but a fully-qualified #fail all the same.

The backstory is that Dennis bought a live-trap for the loitering bunny that mowed down the coral bells he planted out front (where the cats are not allowed). The manufacturer (Havaheart), provides five and a half pages of tri-lingual documentation. Packed inside the trap. Which ships in the "closed" position.

Maybe they just want to make sure you're smarter than whatever you've set out to catch? Which might not be a bad thing from a product liability standpoint, but... [scratches head]