Recently in tech life Category

I'm in love and, ironically, the fact that this love letter is not directed to my husband will nevertheless delight him.

I'm in love with my phone. 

In the last few weeks, as we've vacationed around, my iPhone has served as, variously:

• a camera to record charming children (fleeting moments that have to be captured lest we think we've imagined those brief periods when they arent actively trying to kill one another);
• a GPS to help me find the public library in a small Indiana town and then several weeks later a hotel in Cleveland;
• a DJ to identify who sang "Spirit in the Sky," which was playing as I sat outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Do you know without looking it up?)  
• and a keyboard on which I wrote a blog post whille sitting in the rooftop pavilion of the Cleveland Clinic.

When I look at how I hold my little plastic lozenge-shaped miracle tool, I realized what it is: a latter-day divining rod. Divining rods--diviners--were people who could find water using a dowsing rod, usually a fork-shaped stick; it's from this old legend that we get the expression a "rainmaker." A diviner, or a water-witch, helped people figure out where to dig a well, forecast the end of droughts, and generally found something where, previously, there had been nothing.

Isn't that what an iPhone does? Look at the map and there you are, a blinking blue dot on a purple line, moving (you hope) closer to your destination. Download musicid and you're able to hold up your phone to the radio and be told not only who is singing, but also find you youtube links and song lyrics. Click on the internet icon and mirabile dictu, you're surfing the net. Like magic, my plastic lozenge pulls signals out of the air and translates them to pictures.

Frankly, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this puppy could help farmers in drought-stricken areas find water; "water-witching" might be the next killer app. 

There ain't nothing this baby can't do.

Mannahatta Mamma had technical difficulties earlier this week - apologies to anyone who wondered what had happened (yes, mom, I'm talking to you).  But with some help from the folks at Living Dot and to Husband (aka Domestic Tech Support, or DTS), we're back up and running. I'll be posting soon from the other side of the country, where I am on this weird and wonderful thing known as a vacation...

The bluetooth doodad thingy that I use in the car has been malfunctioning: it works, but then when I turn it off, I have to re-set the doodad so that it can "find" my phone, which, of course, can't be done when I'm driving. It's aggravating but I've been kind of living with it (who has time or inclination to go find another ear doodad, really?)

Husband searched the web and found a deal on an earpiece, which arrived in this morning's mail. I thanked him (so lovely to have a tech assistant, isn't it?), put the package on the floor next to my desk, and went about my day. That night, when Husband came home, he said "did you try it?"

"What?" I asked, mind on dinner and dishes and homework.

"The earpiece, did you try it? Does it work?"

"Uh, no. I don't need it until Thursday, when I drive to work, so..." Husband sighed and returned to his email.

And there it was: the gender-tech chasm, running right across the apartment floor. He didn't understand why I wouldn't immediately want to fiddle with this new doodad, see what it can do, tweak it and tinker with it, set it up with my phone. I can't understand why I should futz with it until I have to. And then when I do futz with it, I just want it to work.

Luckily, Dell, the computer giant, has decided to create a bridge across that chasm: this week, they've launched della.com, a site designed to help women with their technology choices.

The home page features attractive women holding even more attractive laptops, all with stylish cases; there are directions for how to recycle your tech (isn't this something men want to do, too?), a spotlight on a woman designer who works for Dell; and a list of "seven unexpected ways a mini can change your life." Did you know that a mini be a recipe finder, diet guide, and provide maps to restaurants? (Women, apparently, are very interested in both eating and not eating.)

Your mini-laptop can even provide free guided meditations, for those times when you can't make it to yoga but can find the time/place to have your laptop tell you to listen to your breath (rather than to your laptop's "free tweakable online task manager").

Now first of all, there are lots of women who have crossed the gender-tech chasm, and whose tech savvy puts everyone around them to shame. (For an academic's take on tech, digital media, and gadgetry, try Kathleen Fitzpatrick's Planned Obsolesence, just for starters.) 

And second of all, della.com doesn't seem to want to help women be more tech savvy; it just wants us to buy the super cute polkadot laptop sleeve, and maybe the matching tote.

Finally, if this site is Dell's way of trying to sell more laptops to women, does that mean that the "regular" Dell site is the "male" site? Or will Dell start to proliferate like the Gap did - babydell, dell women, dell men, dell kids?

The mind boggles. In the meantime, my ear doodad is still in its box. I'm hoping Husband will set it up soon.

I love metaphors and I hate driving at night.

These two completely unrelated facts collided the other night when I was blinded by the blue-white glare of SUV headlights in my rear-view mirror.

You know the headlights I'm talking about: they're xenon headlights (known in the car biz as high-intensity discharge lights, or HIDs) and when they come barreling up behind you on the highway, it's hard not to feel like Karen Silkwood about to be run into a ditch. And if a set of these gleaming lights streaks towards you from the opposite lane, you'd better hope you're alone on your side of the road, because you're going to be momentarily blinded by the bluish glare.

I've tried all the things I was taught in my driver's ed class (back in the stone age, granted). I blink my headlights at the blindingly white oncoming lights, only to get more glare flicked back at me. If I flip my rear-view mirror so that I can't see the lights behind me, I can't see much else behind me either, which makes lane-switching pretty much a crapshoot - especially winding through the nonsensically skinny roads of lower Westchester.

The headlights illuminate (sorry, couldn't resist), a social contract dilemma: the headlights make driving safer for the person behind the headlights and less safe for the person in front of the headlights.  And here's where I veer off into the realm of the metaphoric: what are we to make of the fact that thousands and thousands of people think that their ability to see further and thus drive faster is more important than the general safety of everyone else on the road?

Of course, this metaphor, in my mind, gains further traction in the fact that these headlights aren't cheap: they can cost up to $1000 to install (or a bargain-rate $850 on a new Mercedes). So what we've got (cue vox populi) is a lot of rich people zooming around blinding those of us putt-putting along in old Subarus.

But wait, you say, if these bright headlights are really unsafe, wouldn't the government do something about that? Create headlight standards or installation regulations, or something?

Barring the fact that the government of the previous eight years didn't do much else other than zoom around insisting that their need to get where they wanted to go trumped everything else, let's examine how the National Highway Traffic Safety Authority (NHTSA) has handled this issue.
 
Back in 2001, NHTSA opened the subject of headlight glare for public comment; it then commissioned a report, which was published in 2003. In its summary, the report found that about 30% of respondents were "disturbed" by headlight glare. The authors of the study found that people were less bothered about headlight glare in months with increased daylight hours, and more bothered by headlight glare in darker months. An astonishing insight: when it's dark, headlights are more bothersome than when it's light.  Really a heckuva job, don't you think?

Reading this report did, at least, offer me a diagnostic term for my headlight frustration, which, according to the report's statistics, is shared by a large percentage of women 35-44. We are "glare-disturbed."

Glare-disturbed. It sounds somehow ... peri-menopausal, doesn't it?  You know, she's got hot flashes, dryness, and glare-disturb. 

Or perhaps flirtatious: She was at a bar and got all glare-disturbed by the cute man at the next table.

But in the automotive context, glare-disturbances seem not to warrant any action on the part of the NHTSA, which insists that, as yet, no accidents have been caused by these new-and-improved headlights. Another instance of a government agency deciding that the best strategy is to wait until there's a crisis to try and fix the problem. Right? Let's not do anything, you know, preventative, like simply mandate that headlights on SUVs be mounted lower than the rear-view mirrors of other cars, to name just one way to improve this problem?

Sorry for the rant - I guess I'm just glare-disturbed. In my xenon-induced fog, I forgot how violently Detroit reacts against any impositions of standards (seatbelts, airbags, fuel emissions, you name it).  Which may have something to do with why the auto industry execs are all walking around looking so glare-disturbed themselves, these days: the bright lights of their own extinction are bearing down on them.

Clearly I can't rely on Detroit or the NHSTA to fix my glare-disturbances, alas, so I've been forced to come up with my own solution: I'm going to use my stimulus money to buy a monster truck.

I have an iPhone. It's a calendar, note pad, map, camera; I can use it to get my email, listen to music, or play games (or I could, except that I refuse to download them, much to my children's chagrin). It's actually not that great a phone but I love it anyway, my little palm-sized PDA.

And now, thanks to the folks at babycenter.com, these new-fangled PDAs can tell you when to get yourself some old-fashioned PDA: you can now sign up for a service that will send you text messages telling you when you're ovulating. Yep, that's right. Now your phone can be a bonk-alarm - or, as babycenter.com calls it, a "booty caller."

Once you sign up for this service and plug in the salient information, you can expect a series of three messages per month offering you such brilliant tips as "stress gets in the way of conception so relax and get a massage, meditate, or take a yoga class." Well that's just great. So now in addition to everything else I might be worried about (like getting or not getting pregnant), I have to listen to my freakin' phone nagging me to relax?

Why such faux-friendly advice? Why not cut straight to the chase: "Your eggs are hot, lady, so get busy!" Given this level of mechanical intimacy, one wonders what other services one's phone could provide? Are there downloadable apps for those services? 

When I wanted to get pregnant with Caleb, after one preemie birth and one miscarriage, I borrowed a friend's copy of Take Charge of Your Fertility, although initially I wasn't interested in following the book's method, which primarily involves daily temperature taking.  I balked: who wants to be sticking a thermometer "down there" every morning? After my friend recovered from her fit of hysterical laughter, she gently pointed out that I wasn't cooking a turkey. All I had to do was take my temperature orally and plot the measurement on a graph.

Even so, however, the process was more work than I wanted it to be. All those charts and graphs and timed intervals - reminded me of story problems from math class: if an ovulation cycle lasts three days but the partners in question are too busy to have sex more than twice in that three-day window, how many times do they have to have sex and at what time, in order to conceive? Or, for those of you in an advanced class: if a woman is trying to have a baby without a partner, how many times does she have to visit the clinic in order to conceive and how much will it cost?

Maybe this sex-text service would have been just right for me, were I still in the baby-conceiving business (which I'm not). But somehow, I find this family planning via text-message both hysterically funny and a little bit ... invasive. Do I want information about my fertility floating around in the ether alongside sports scores, CNN headlines, and Perez Hilton?

How P do we want our PDAs to be, anyway?

 

Facebook. It's gone from noun to verb - as in "I facebooked him" -- in record time, even faster than "google" became an action, not just a search engine.  

I resisted facebook for a long time but finally gave in when a friend asked why, if I'm blogging about my life, would I be hesitant about revealing myself on facebook. Which is not an unreasonable question.

Now, a short month later, I'm hooked. It's a socially sanctioned peep-show: everyone becomes a voyeur, seeing only tiny slices of other lives - lives that we might not interact with in any other way, outside of the facebook fishbowl.

We all know the facebook lore about rediscovering friends from elementary school, re-connecting with ex-lovers, tracking down once-close friends who moved away... All these people can become "friends" on facebook and we see them in the photos they post at parties on the other side of the country with friends we don't know and will probably never meet; or we get cryptic status reports (so-and-so thinks the tattoo hurts, for example; or such-and-such thinks the mullet was a mistake).  Unless these people are friends in real life, rather than just virtual life, we may never know what the tattoo looks like (or if the pain is caused by someone else's hideous tat); we may never see the offensive mullet (which is probably okay, given that no one can wear a mullet well).

I can't even imagine what facebook does to someone who is 14, 15, 16, 17...reams of ink (both real and virtual) have been spilled trying to explore and explain the implications of growing up online - I know that my students are IMing (another lightning swift noun-to-verb shift) constantly, and updating their FB status equally often, with almost laughable results: Jane is walking to class, Jane is in class, Jane is bored by class, Jane is not taking notes, Jane IS taking notes, Jane is... well, let's just say that occasionally Jane is busted by a facebooking professor, but that's a story for another day. Sometimes, kids, those privacy settings DON'T WORK.

What will happen to the generation growing up with the belief that everyone is interested in their every breath, every thought, every action? Facebook sort of reinforces that childhood narcissim: on facebook, it seems as if you ARE, in fact, at the center of the universe. Will this generation ever be disabused of that fact? What's going to happen to us, their doddering parents? Will our facebook friends take care of us in our dotage, when our digital children can't be bothered, when we're drooling with alzheimer's and want to update our status - but can't remember what it is? I shudder to think.

But in the meantime, given that I've got at least a few years before I have to throw myself on the mercy of my digitally hyper-literate children, I amuse myself with The Lists.

If you're on facebook, you've probably gotten at least one of these lists, these compilations of twenty-five random things about someone's life, and if you're like me, you find them weirdly compelling reading.  When I was first "tagged" by one of these list-makers and told that I was supposed to now make my own list, I resisted. Too public. Too much information (Yeah, yeah, see above on "but don't you write a blog? so who the hell are you to talk about too public?" What can I say. It felt weird to make a list).

Then Jeanellen explained that I could make the list but screen who gets to see it. (There's your shout-out, Jeanellen!) So I made a list, tagged other readers, and kept reading lists.

Now the first question I have about these facebook lists - and other facebook fads - is where do they start? Is there some omphalos of faddism somewhere, buried in a bunker in Golden, Colorado near a missile silo? Some cackling mad scientist sitting in front of a mammoth computer screen, sending out "lil' green patches" and "shite gifts for academics" and "bumper-stickers" and other assorted facebook crap?

The second question I have, about these lists in particular, is why I find them so fascinating.  It's that peep-show analogy again: when you watch a peep-show, the fiction is that the person you're watching doesn't know you're watching - but of course, it's a performance, and the performer knows exactly what you're doing. So The Lists are intimate - private oddities and quirks - and yet not at all intimate, because they're shared with at least twenty-five people and probably more. 

What would a future world think of these lists, if they were saved and shoved into a time capsule? According to my non-scientific sampling, we are a society who loves porn, play-doh, pedicures, our partners if we've got 'em (or at least, we feel compelled by the public list to say that we love them), stupid television, pets and children (in about equal measure), food, sports, books, Barack, and that very few of us grew up to be what we wanted to be when we were children.

I don't know - does that seem representative of a certain swath of US culture? Will these lists of random things become the 21st century version of The Pillow Book, a wonderful collection of lists and observations written by a 10th century Japanese woman? Among her lists are "items that give a clean feeling: the inside of a copper bowl..." and "things that are beautiful: cherry blossoms, a new kimono..."

Who knows - maybe all this facebookin' (sung to the same tune as that old song, "barefootin'") does bring us closer together and that as a result we'll become a more tolerant and compassionate society. Or maybe it's going to make us all unable to communicate in any face-to-face fashion: after all, it's really easy to delete people from your "friends" list and you never have to say a word. Just click and poof! it's all over between you, with nary a word of confrontation or explanation needed. Are we really friends with all these "friends"? What if you had a party for your facebook friends and...no one showed up?

These are big questions for the digital age, my friends, and I'd love to ponder further. But I just got a pop-up that there's a new facebook message waiting for me - another List beckons.

And no. I will not include my own list here. Too public. But if you friend me, maybe I'll share.