Band-aid on a broken knee?

Dennis scooped a CNN article on a Roman gladiator cemetery found in the unlikely place of York, England. (Not, in fact, as unlikely as it initally seems, but that's another story...) So I followed the link on the Facebook recommendation, read the article, then jumped back a bit at the "Dennis ----- recommends this" note at the bottom. I was still logged into Facebook at the time, so the two websites were clearly sharing a cookie (or three) with the earnestness of kindergarten BFFs at milk-break.

Such borrowing of credibility struck me as truly pointless, for a few different reasons:

• It only works when the reader is also logged into Facebook (and perhaps other Web 2.0 hangouts besides). Maybe some folks never log out, but to me that's tantamount to spending all day by the office coffee maker, waiting for your peers to stroll by and validate whatever newspaper/magazine article you're reading.
• Making the media more "social" doesn't address what I consider the fundamental problem with mainstream "news" reporting, namely the too-cozy relationship between reporters--their upper echelons, at any rate--and the reported-upon. Politics is no place for paparazzi, whether you're barbequeing with the Bidens or trading on your Watergate laurels to legitimize Vietnam 2.0 and 2.1.
• The prurient appeal of a Arianna Huffington vs. Ann Coulter locker-room cat-fight notwithstanding, we--speaking broadly, of course--tend to pay most attention to the "reporters" we agree with. Finding our friends in the crowd may provide additional validation of our world-views, but validation is an after-the-fact side-effect. It does nothing to bring in (desperately needed) new readers.

And, most importantly, news is not a popularity contest. Mixing the dynamics of new and old media is a B-movie species mis-matchup that just might be more ridiculous than "Bambi vs. Godzilla." Except not nearly as funny. Not even close.

Another new "race" in technology

Another riff brought to you by last night's trip into Barnes & Noble. Not so much about books, though, because--for once--the in-your-face front display did not contain books. No, the pride of place normally given to J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer was instead devoted to the Nook eReader. No great shocker there, just elementary retailing in action. In fact, I think it was just last week I'd read that both Amazon and B&N are more aggressively marketing their gadgets.

But the poster-blurb about wi-fi & 3G did catch my attention, along with some mention--I thought--about web browsing. It turns out that the web browsing thing wasn't just the mudslide pie sugar-rush talking after all. Amazon's next-gen Kindle will (allegedly) also have built-in wi-fi--presumably in conjunction with, or in place of WhisperNet.

Together, they only make me (again) wonder how long it will be before accessing an unfettered internet will be a "given" in the same sense as electricity and hot & cold running water. Which is interesting timing, considering how AT&T and Verizon and Comcast and a number of their ilk are dusting off the notion of data-capping and/or actively fighting net neutrality.

In a sense, it's a race to see whether always-on and unmetered access will become either a quasi-right or a privilege in the American mindset. Granted, utilities are typically metered, but phone/data companies try to have it both ways by combining use-it-or-lose-it with overage charges. I mean, seriously, who talks exactly 500/1000/whatever minutes a month? Yeah, didn't think so--which makes it a lose-lose proposition all the way.

Personally, I'm betting on quasi-right. And the driving reason is the explosion in the number of gadgets that come with web browser as a standard feature. Gadgets that are live in a handful of seconds, rather than the time it takes a PC or laptop to go through the operating system equivalent of waking, showering, brushing teeth and reading the paper over coffee. In a phrase, instant gratification. Standing between the American consumer and instant gratification generally isn't smart business. And, having recently rolled my eyes half-dizzy shopping the talk/text/data Happy Meals the brand-name mobile giants offer, I can't say as I'll feel sorry for them when they lose the race.

The price of instruction, or "Is our professionals learning?"

In my considerably less-than-humble opinion on the matter, instructional books--digital vs. dead-tree doesn't matter here--should come in one of two prices:

A.) Free (and by "free" I mean "Free as in Richard Stallman buying the beer")
B.) Something between $20 and $25 (2010) US dollars per printed pound.

In my case, I mean computer programming books, (What else would you expect here?) But in all cases, the value-add of instructional books is multi-level. At the base, someone had to master the subject well enough to explain it to someone else. Built over that, that same someone had to have the additional (and much rarer) talent to break the subject down into chewable, digestible bites for folks starting from zero. (And, of course, that someone had to scrape together the wherewithal to write and publish the material.)

But back to the price-points.

"Free," whether we like it or not, comes with a "pay it forward" kind of obligation--at least after we've invested enough of our disposable time and attention-span to extract significant value from "free." At a minimum, we can recommend the material to others seeking the same skills, and thus give the author the recognition that s/he was presumably seeking by giving away her/his work.

A heftier price-tag, on the other hand is a healthy thing for the would-be purchaser (assuming that the work doesn't suck of course). With the odometer of software versions flipping so quickly, with new languages/infrastructures continually sprouting (and, sometimes, dying off just as quickly), the book purchase is almost a commitment. (Tightwad that I am, I think I may well have proposed to Android at Barnes & Noble tonight. Gack.)

But, as much reverence as I have for the printed word, there shouldn't be a middle ground between the two price-points. Discounting is a by-product of the industrial mentality--the extraction and manufacture of X is commoditized by mechanization and economies of scale (plus, not infrequently, cut-throat tactics and ruthless, brutal exploitation). Absolutely none of that applies to mastery of a topic or skill at helping others master it.

Oddly enough, I'm optimistic that the "ninety-five percent of everything is crap" principle will actually benefit the quality of instructional knowledge as a whole--particularly in my field. The creators of the bottom ninety-five percent--with no offense intended to their efforts or know-how--will not optimize to deliver value for the longer-term. The remaining five percent will. (As an example, consider what Jancis Robinson does for the constantly shifting geography of the wine world with what's basically a freemium business model.) In that scenario, the middle-grounders are caught between an overgrown jungle of free information and the carefully cultivated walled gardens of the brand-name authors on the topic.

Yes, it's a species of snobbery I'm guilty of here. But if it stops--or at least slows--the waste of trees and/or bandwidth on cut-rate mediocrity, that's the kind of snobbery I can live with.

Frivolous Friday, 06.04.2010: Schadenfriday limericks, Part II

Honestly, I don't think you can stay in I/T without at least a few strands of optimism in your neural wiring. (Although--oddly enough--a healthy streak of paranoia is never a bad trait for anyone who has to keep systems up & running & un-hacked.) That being said, the dewy-eyed-gee-whiz-ain't-technology-grand attitude that the magazine & gadget blog industry trades on can become a little insufferable at times. Luckily (for anyone else who feels this way), the antidote comes your way in five-line doses, starting...now.

Your smartphone looks new and so sleek
Palm-cradled or upside your cheek.
Yet buyers' remorse
Will come in due course:
A cooler one launches next week.

Computers forever surprise
Inverting chips' power to size:
Crunching data to store--
With less being Moore.
(If only our brains worked likewise.)

Instructions you'd joyfully pen
To head off computer mayhem.
Then 't'would be All Good,
If peeps only could
Stop freaking and RTFM.

On keyboard you've labored all day;
Your masterpiece goes to QA.
Yet, though unit-tests
Gave hopes for the best,
Bug tickets are headed your way.

Our tech. will be thrilled to discuss
The error that's caused so much fuss.
Please continue to hold
Until you grow old:
Your call is important to us.

Ditching the digital diary

A co-worker's question today nudged me just a bit out of the paper-bound universe by asking about my experience with blogging software. Turns out that it wasn't the plug-ins he was interested in so much as a way to organize the content around what something was about, rather than it was published.

Such talk should be double-heresy to this erstwhile History-English major, the kind that should have me looking over my shoulder for the periwigged ghost of Sam Pepys. Yet, when I think about how I look for and absorb blogs, date has very little to do with...well..much of anything. Oh, it's useful for context, and definitely as a cue that the material I'm reading is new (if only to me). But that's it, really.

In the end, I mentioned Blogger's tagging feature to the aspiring blogger. Tumblr may have it too; I've just been too lazy to look for it...not to mention open the door to having to tag 400+ posts on two copies of the same content. It's a door that will have to be opened, though, and soon. If only because date-driven blogging sends the signal--however subtle--that the blog is more "about me" than it is for the perusal of my readers. That's an attitude I'd prefer to avoid projecting, much less have reflected back into my own mindset by the medium itself.

Rudder > Motor

Slightly heretical thought for a self-conscious world: Assuming that irreparable damage isn't done, of course, what you break doesn't matter even half so much as how effectively you can fix it.

Speaking purely for myself, it's easy for we programmer types to believe that we live in a separate universe--yea and verily even "hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar underneath Funk & Wagnall's porch since noon" for my pre-GenY compatriots--from that of investment (cough!) "bankers," sticky accelerators and the species of idiot that drills a hole a mile-plus undersea w/o much thought as to how to put the cork back into the bottle.

Nevertheless, it's true. For instance, I managed to thoroughly crash a database server--mercifully over the three-day weekend--with a query that slowly ate CPU cycles until the only way to kill it was to change my network password, thus severing my workstation's connection from the server...along with everything else. By the same token, when I tried to run the traditional Monday report (on Tuesday, after reclaiming my login), I discovered that an upgrade on the very same server had broken it.

In both cases, we dealt with things pretty phlegmatically. Understand that by "we," I ninety-plus-percent mean our preternaturally awesome--and unflappable--SysAdmin. The same person who, knowing that I'd been cut off from the corporate email system, tracked me down on Facebook to let me know what was up. Who also happens to sit kitty-corner from me in the pod. The other ten percent came from the former SysAdmin, since promoted to minor-Deityness of reporting. Who is a cubicle wall plus two cubicles away. Which is pretty much the point. Not that I mean to detract one whit from such legendary awesomeness, mind you. Nuh-uh. It's just that the closer (physically and hierarchically) you keep the folks who fry the bacon to the folks who can pull it from the fire when things go awry in the frying-pan, the better off you are as an organization.

And I'm probably being far too Utopian here, but maybe--only just maybe--such working cheek-by-jowl would lead to a world where you'd see less of taking billions of bailout dollars with one hand and million-dollar bonuses with the other. Less whining about getting one's figurative life back after nearly a dozen (human) lives have been quite literally lost. Less denialism when irrefutable data to the contrary sits twenty feet away from one's desk.

Yep, definitely Utopian. Unless we--with dollars and votes and career-choices--insist that private and public organizations optimize for rudder, rather than motor (and--to extend metaphor--even more than the cargo-capacity of the boat itself).

A twist on chickens and eggs

I still don't have that whole intrinsic motivation thing down pat. But when I've been able to afford it, I've made the purchase of a new toy the reward for longer-term achievements such as a semester 4.0 average, the force-march through a multi-month project, and so forth. So it seemed fit enough that my reward for slogging through enough SQLite & Android to write a non-trivial application should be an actual Android device to run it on.

Now, it's no secret that writing software user interfaces--i.e. the screens, buttons, forms, etc.--is most certainly not my strong point as a programmer. So I decided to take a page from Kathy Sierra's book and work everything forward from the "How will this make the user rock?" First stop: Mind-mapping. Tools of choice: 11 x 17 paper and a refillable pencil dating from college.

Which is when I thought, "Wouldn't this be a great application for a tablet PC?" Sigh. Chickens and eggs, 2010.