time

Smart Watch? Nope.

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

I don’t do tech reviews, normally, because I don’t think anyone can review any technological device as soon as it comes out. Sure, you can see how fast it is with benchmarks, you can oooh and ahhh over screen resolutions and all the pretty colors, but really, you don’t know how good a device is until you’ve had it a while.

My new technology fetish went away a few decades ago. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, I don’t want technology, I want stuff that works.

A few years ago, I got one of these ‘smart watches’. I didn’t really buy it, but I did, because it came as a special with the phone I purchased at the time. In fact, I wouldn’t have gotten one otherwise, because – well, what’s the point of having something you don’t need? For some people there is a point to that, a point I do not understand or need to, but I’m probably lazier than them. The things I need demand enough time of me, and I need time to not be doing things for the things that I need.

Henry David Thoreau was on to something.

This watch was shiny and new. It was packaged prettily. It even came charged, and so I dutifully became familiar with it and got it to do some stuff – like tell the time, monitor my heart rate and sleeping, and connect to my calendar. It did these things dutifully, but it would require charging just about every day.

That’s annoying. My first watch was a Mickey Mouse watch, given to me at age 9 6 by my parents so that (1) I could learn to tell time by the hands, (2) I would know what time it was and stop asking them. It was incredible for about a week. I would have to wind it up daily, and Mickey dutifully pointed at the hour with his small hand and the minutes with his longer hand. It was then I realized that Mickey Mouse had arms that were not uniform. This bothered me, so I took off the watch and simply looked at the clock on the wall.

They’re selling smart watches now that show the time digitally or traditionally, and they’re all very sleek, but… I don’t think they’re worth the effort. I have lots of devices that tell me what time it is. The heart rate and health stuff was interesting to monitor for a while, but that’s gotten monotonous. And when I look at the watch, greedily sucking at the nipple of it’s wireless charger, I wonder what the point of it is.

It has not improved my life. The feature for talking to people on it like it’s a phone – the whole Dick Tracy thing – is annoying, and having tried it, anyone who does it in public looks like an idiot. I’m sorry if that’s you, but yes, shouting at your wrist and sticking your ear next to it to hear what’s being said makes you look like an idiot. Notice, I didn’t call you an idiot. It just makes you look like one.

Anywhere my watch went, my phone went. Much more usable. Much longer battery life. Much more useful. The whole ‘smart watch’ thing seems like a novelty to me.

I sort of knew it when I got it because I didn’t really want it. Now it will go into a drawer of junk, leaving my wrist free and unencumbered when I write on a laptop, without it scratching the laptop case. Yes, my laptop has a scar.

Wearable technology is a cool idea until you wear it a while. Now they’re gonna put ‘AI’ on them to make them ‘smarter’ and again, not that big of a deal.

Of course, if you really want one, go out and get one, but really – what do you need it to do?

To What End?

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

Sometimes it’s worth wondering about whether something is worth the hassle. An example this week was over a parking incident. I am, at present, stuck parking between 2 larger vehicles who are hemmed in by posts on either side.

For a while, one of the owners of the spot wasn’t using theirs, so I gave the other guy much more space so that he and his wife could get in and out of the vehicle. The owner of the other spot had a stroke and wasn’t able to drive, and recently someone started using his spot – I believe his son – and with their large vehicle, with poorly painted lines, it can be a challenge to park. I completely get that.

As it happens, the newer person parked closer to my spot, and so to make space for him to get in and out of his vehicle, I ate the line a bit on the other side. We’ve all dealt with this at some point, parking isn’t something that is necessarily as exact as we would like it to be and sometimes things happen.

I didn’t think much of it.

I got a message the next day from the other guy’s wife about her having to get out of the vehicle before her husband parked, which for one incident seemed… petty. So I explained to her on WhatsApp why these things happen, which I should not have to do for anyone who has been alive for more than 2 decades these days. Her husband has been alive 6, her, maybe 4 or 5. This should not have been a thing given I’ve been parking next to them without incident for about 4 years.

Knowing the sort of people they were I stopped by the property manager’s office and started off with, “You know, in case this guy comes and talks to you…”

My instincts were right. He had been there already. No surprise, I explained it to the property manager and I explained that I will always make sure that other drivers will be able to get in and out of their vehicle – but passengers, with the size of the vehicles we’re dealing with as well as the size of the spots, may not be able to.

I got a new message from the wife, saying that they were working out ways for me to get in and out of my vehicle – which was never an issue. If I have a problem, I work it out. I haven’t run into the person using the other spot yet, but I do believe he’s trying to get used to parking in that spot and he and I have only had once issue which the married couple just won’t let go. Because she had to get out of the car before her husband parked.

Once.

At this point, I had spent an hour on the issue with messages. It seemed ridiculous to me, but the world seems ridiculous to me so when I saw my psychologist I brought it up. So we used 10 minutes of her time, and mine, talking about it, and she assured me I wasn’t being crazy about it. Now we’re looking at my time, which is now at 1 hour and 10 minutes, and her time, 10 minutes, the property manager and the administrator who I spent 5 minutes with and who the husband probably spent 10-15 minutes with… and we’re looking at an hour and 40 minutes of ‘people time’.

Over one incident. Over a mild inconvenience.

And at the end of it – I hope this is the end of it – the husband sends a message that he’ll try to park closer to the post in the future, ‘alcohol permitting’.

I wonder sometimes whether people really consider how much time they waste on stupid stuff… and how much time they make others waste on stupid stuff.

10 years ago, I would have just told them what I thought about the whole thing from the start and let it go, leaving them to sort things out on their own.

I think it’s time to go back to doing that.

This is how productive time is lost. And productive time, either for business or for personal reasons, should trump stupid every time – and we need to make it so that it is.

Take back your time.

Internet Detritus.

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

Back in 1996 I was driving to work in the Clearwater, Florida area and saw a billboard to Brainbuzz.com, now viewable only through the Wayback Machine. I joined, and I ended up writing for them. Not around anymore.

They became CramSession.com, where I continued writing for them. I had roughly 100 articles I wrote for them about software engineering and C++ which are just… gone. Granted, that was over 2 decades ago, but it’s peculiar to live longer than all these companies that thrived during the Dot Com Bubble, which should be taught in high school now as a part of world history. It isn’t, of course, but it should.

Consciously, we distill good things and keep moving them forward, but sometimes because of copyright laws, things get orphaned in companies that closed their digital doors. Generations afterward, it’s hard to convey this lack of permanence to future generations because the capacity for things to last ‘forevah’ seems to be built into some social media, but it’s hidden away by algorithms which is effectively the same thing.

Sometimes bubbles of information get trapped in the walls of an imploded company. It could happen even to the present 800 lb gorillas on the Internet now. The future is one thing that nobody will tell you in their end of the year posts: It’s unpredictable. The world changes more and more rapidly and we forget how much gets left behind at times.

“When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver’s watch, that “wonderful kind of engine…a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal,” they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, “he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life.” To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We’re all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?”

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, James Gleick, 2000.

What’s really funny about that quote is that Yahoo.com was more of a player in the search engine space back then. In fact, in 1998, Yahoo was the most popular search engine, and that it’s still around is actually a little impressive given all that happened after the DotCom Bubble popped. So the quote itself hasn’t aged that well which demonstrates the point I am making.

Nothing really lasts on the Internet, and even with the WayBack machine (thank you, Internet Archive!), much of what was is simply no longer, subject to what companies owned copyrights of the information, or a simple matter of what things have been kept around through what boils down to popularity.

And what’s popular isn’t always good. I submit to you any elected official you dislike to demonstrate that popularity is subjective – and on the Internet, popularity is largely about marketing and money spent toward that end. The Internet, as it stands, is the house that we built based on what made money.

That’s not particularly attractive.

In the end, it all sort of falls away. And coming generations will see it as well, some may have already begun seeing it.

Who decides what stays on the Internet? Why, we do of course, one click at a time.

Now imagine this fed into an artificial intelligence’s deep learning model. The machine learning would be taught only what has survived, not what has failed -and this could be seen as progress. I think largely it is, despite myself – but what important stuff do we leave behind?

We don’t know, because it ain’t there.

Broken Time.

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

This space was going to be intentionally left blank as I spend some time on Memorial Day, but then this I was reminded by a vibrating watch that I had to write something here – a reminder.

Reminders allow us to remember to do things, which is also a fitting thing to write about given that it is Memorial Day.

The day itself sits comfortably on American calendars, itself a technology from the Roman Empire era. It allowed scheduling and organization. In time, it enforced scheduling and organization and to some today, it is a tyranny. Deadlines make wooshing sounds as they rush by.

The technology that I was reminded by is voluntary, I set it up and of course it doesn’t have settings to take public holidays off – and if it did, it might not work because where I am located, Memorial Day is not a public holiday. The world outside of the United States trudges on.

Much of the reminders I get these days are involuntary. Some software company wants to update something just about every time I touch a different device. The poor woman at the optical center who wants to remind me of needing to check my eyesight this year calls while I’m in the middle of talking to someone.

Reminders can be interruptions, as the reminder was today for me.

When I was younger, I recall seeing those older than myself sit quiet for periods of time, lost in thought or memory – or both. It was an inordinate amount of time, I thought, to be so long without motion and observation. As I grew older, I learned the time is never enough, there’s always something that shakes us from the moments of deep thought, of reflection, of revisiting events, of studying problems and possible solutions, or simply taking a moment to be human.

We don’t talk about the time it takes to be ‘simply human’ that much, and we have neatly shoved it into the realm of the introverts that the extroverts scream outside of. It’s necessary, and while technology pushes the frontiers of productivity employers push the frontier of the clock, tapping their watches insistently as they look at us.

The difference between a reminder and an interruption is the importance of the what you are doing versus what you needed to be reminded of. If you’re rushing to get online to check for an email about a deathly sick relative, that interruption from Microsoft is likely a very negative experience.

“You’ll upgrade my operating system to the next version of Windows for free? That news on Aunt Samantha can wait! Screw that lady!”, simply doesn’t seem to be something would think in such a situation.

It does seem that in my lifetime, we get interrupted more than reminded. That could also simply be my anecdotal experience as I grow older, but it does seem to me that Pavlov might have a lot to write about these days.

The Need For A Vacation.

~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

Sunrise, Batteaux Bay, TobagoI took some time off – got out of the new home, got away from the old problems and the old thoughts. There were times that I took some time for myself, and those who know me well will say that it’s actually rare for me to not be alone somewhere, but it’s not quite the same.

There’s a need to be elsewhere, physically, in a completely different environment. Over the decades, I count two vacations where I was able to do that, and this was the second one.

That should strike people as peculiar – I mean, software engineers used to make decent money, a few still do, but over the years it hasn’t always been a matter of having the money as much as the time. It’s also a matter in the United States that has people writing articles, such as , “Why America has Become The No Vacation Nation“.

There have been life changes for me recently with work and living that have allowed me some time to reflect on ways forward – something I worked hard and long for. I did, disappearing and unplugging for the most part away from almost everyone. For 10 days was ‘offline’. This gave me time to think about things, something that I’ll write more about on RealityFragments.com.

The point here is that I had no idea how necessary it was until I was away and elsewhere, apart more than usual, and able to process a lot of things that I had not been able to before.

Over the course of our lives, and the smaller subset of our lives that we call careers, we start on many different paths and sometimes stay on them even when they are no longer necessary. We might do things in certain ways because of old plans, or old circumstances – abandoned, or gone. And while we are doing those things, we completely miss the things that might be hitting us over the heads in our desperate clawing toward a future that a younger version of ourselves once wanted, once needed…

The pressures of life, through our circumstance or even those we create for ourselves, have the capacity to overwhelm us and work against us.

A few days won’t do. Long weekends are meaningless. Over-scheduled insanity is just work in a different guise, that’s not a vacation.

Nature reclaims things.

We all need time and space for a real reflection, and if someone asked me what I regret in my life, it would be that I have been poor about giving myself that time.

Time where I could take my time and plan the picture above. Time to tie a string to a waterproof camera and just throw it in the ocean off a dock for an entire morning. Time to walk around and be surprised by what drops in your lap.

Time.