The Electric

In the Oct 24, 2005 issue of Time magazine, there is an article featuring a round table of some of the leading trendspoters in technologies.

Here’s the group: Tim O’Reilly: publisher and technology advocate Esther Dyson: editor of technology newsletter Release 1.0 for CNET Networks David Brooks: author and New York Times columnist Clay Shirky: writer and technology consultant Mark Dery, author and cultural critic Moby: pioneering electronic musician Maclom Gladwell: author and New Yorker writer

Notice anything other than Gladwell’s egg head fro?

Where are Africans? Folks like Omar Wasow Only one woman? Was Xeni busy? Most of these folks are based on the east or west coast. Anyone from the Asian tech powers of Japan, China and Singapore? Is India in da house?

Just as Dare pointed out when he returned from the Web 2.0 conference, the ‘leaders’ in the field that appear at conferences and in articles are white, middle class, college educated and mostly male.

This presents a clear case where bias comes into play yet we don’t acknowledge that it is a bias. Not saying we need to have a limit or a minimum on the ethnicity of presenters but rather we need to make sure we don’t forget anybody.

My question for the week is how does the bias of ethnicity along with those of geography (most of these folks live on the coasts in major urban centers) impact the views these people give?

I love this bit of banter between Mike Doughty and his band:

Mike: What flavor of gatoraid are you drinking? Dan: Blue Mike: Ever notice that blue is the color of gatoraid that is also the flavor? Red is punch Oragne is Organe Green is lemon What flavor is blue? Blue is blue

Update on yesterday post involving my DOA XPS 600.

Rather than wait for a call from Dell, I call them at lunch.

My options are to either return for credit or exchange. Problem with the exchange is twofold. First the clock is still running on my 21 day return policy in case something happens like this again (the rep told me that it would be fixed after 21 days rather than replaced) and I won\\’t be able to upgrade the system (I saw the new Creative Xi sound card is now available and I wanted to switch out the Audigy for it since it\\’s only $50 more).

So I opt for a credit but that means I have to wait for UPS to ship it back (they pick it up on fried), 10 to 15 days from the time its checked back into the system for credit to appear on my Dell account before I can start the order process just in time for the christen rush!

Yet I was able to get the monitor (which I\\’m paying $360 for while it lists by itself for $590 on sale this week) to work with my XPS B733r. So at least I now have a wonderful image while I wait for it to process.

Keeping this all in propective. Folks all over the gulf coast would love this problem rather than the ones their facing. So I gotta remember to be thankful for what I got and not care about what I don\\’t got…Got it?

I am a unhappy geek.

I feel sick.

Tom Petty may have said it best when he sang the waiting is the hardest part. Right now, somewhere in the bowels of the UPS network are two boxes containing my new rig. Like a monkey in a crack experiment, every half hour I’m hitting the UPS site. Where the monkey hits the button for a fix, I hit the button to see just where those boxes are at.

So far those boxes are at an undisclosed UPS location near the Dell warehouse in Texas but maybe that information will be updated the next time I hit the button. There is always Bloglines but until the boxes move, the RSS feed wont pick it up.

1. Apple IIc So many conflicting memories about this one. I don’t think I would have graduated high school without it. Yet the guilt I felt from having it made me wish I had never saw it. Plus it turned me from an Apple kid who worshiped tales from Fire in the Valley to the Apple Hater that I am today.

Let me set the stage. It’s fall 1984. We just moved into an apartment after my Grandpa had died that spring. I had been begging my folks for an Apple after we sold our TI. I mean the Apple II+ was the machine for kids in those days and I loved every time we would play Oregon Trail as part of social studies class. I also loved the idea of owning an Apple because the snobby kids would flaunt the fact they had one even if they couldn’t figure out how to put the disk in it.

When we went shopping for it, my Grandma was in the hospital. She had gone in with pneumonia and on the day she was to come home had a grand maul seizure. Three months had passed and things were not good. My Dad was busted up a the idea of having to put her in a nursing home. My grades were dropping from C’s to F’s. I was bugging my parents for an Apple and when the IIc came out, they said yes. Yet the week we got the IIc was the week my Grandma died. I had the boxes in my room but was told I couldn’t open them since we might have to take them back. I puked the night before we left for Tennessee for the funeral. Once home I whined to open the boxes. My parents said yes in spite of the fact we couldn’t afford it.

I wrote with Bank Street Writer then moved to AppleWorks with the Beagle Brothers Spell Checker.

I printed all my homework assignments on it with the Scribe printer. I could remember going to Persacom and getting raked for Scribe ribbons (good for only 50 pages) and feeling grateful since they were always out of stock.

I played Microleague Baseball, Hardball and yes, John Madden Football (which I still have in my basement)

I tried programming or rather tried to read a game program written in BASIC from a book that had about 25 programs in it (could you even thing about doing that now?) to my Dad while he typed it in. I could never say the characters list { [ ; or > correctly so he gave up in a huff.

I still get flashbacks to the Apple wall vs the IBM section when I would go to Perscom. Even with the Mac’s coolness, I will never forgot how Apple just dumped the Scribe and then the IIc. I know better now that I’ve been in the IT business but it still pisses me off the free ride Apple gets for shafting its bottom tier owners.

Whereabouts: Was still running as of 1994 when it was sold along with my Dad’s golf shop

1. Texas Instruments TI-99 A So many firsts with this guy.
2. First time disk drive
3. First voice synth
4. First time making a voice synth cuss
5. First time I bought a game and loaded it via a cassette tape
6. First code I ever wrote And while I wasn’t to play games on it, I do remember my Dad in my room while I was asleep playing Munch Man at 3 in the morning. To this day I can remember one of the football coaches in my youth league working as a TI salesman at K-mart when they had a booth for the 99-A in their store. He’d let me mess around with it to show how kids take to computers like ducks to water. Later when TI pulled the salesmen, I would throw down a three line print screen command with a loop to see how long it would run before someone would notice and reset it.

To honor all those systems that have gone before the new XPS 600 that is on it’s way, I give a listing of those riggs that have brought me to this point in my geekdom.

1. Tandy TSR-80 Model III 5th grade. Mrs. Novak’s class. Sure we knew nothing about it which was more than Mrs. Novak but did we have fun trying to make it do something…anything Whereabouts: Unknown

After three years of waiting, I finally order a new computer from Dell. Jean is still trying to recover from the shock that I pulled the trigger on the deal. I have an interest free PC loan from work so it makes the higher end rigs more affordable. Yet I’m still mulling over the trade offs in an attempt to make sure I’m cool with them.

See I was down between a Velocity Micro and a Dell.

The Velocity had the AMD X2 64 bit chip in its favor. The Dell offered 4 years on the warranty, the Intel Pentium D Dual Core and a 20 in LCD wide-screen digital monitor for just $230 added to their new XPS 600.

The Velocity Micro didn’t come with a monitor and they couldn’t work with me on the price. Dell had me on one discount plan since we switched our printers over to theirs at work (their quite nice) and still worked with me to lower the price. I was able to grab a 13 in 1 plus floppy reader along with a WinPVR 150 for just $50 over my quote.

So now the hard part, waiting for the thing to come.

OK, three weeks of waiting to see what kind of tumor you might have is never fun. I stress eat just about anything I could find. I was irritable.

I told a coworker who’s husband is dealing with cancer and she gave me a lay blessing on my forehead with the sign of the cross. I went to a healing service at church and had a blessing with oil given by my pastor.

I played with John and even picked out and ordered a new computer while keeping one eye on the calendar. I started my class at Franklin but couldn’t get into it the first week since I didn’t know if I would have to drop it due to the knee.

So when it came time to roll into the Doctor’s office, I almost wanted it to be bad news with the logic that the waiting had put me in that ‘pissed at the world place’ and just needed to have my reason vetted. Plus that hypocondraic in me didn’t want all this to be for nothing.

Twisted isn’t it.

Yet nothing is what it was. I have a cyst. Thanks to the MRI, it showed that there isn’t anything to do aside from a little PT, a bunch of weight loss and some anti-inflammatories from time to time.

The black cloud of doom broke to the sunshine. Jean and I thanked God. Then the crash of three weeks worth of worry came. It left me irritable. My guess it’s due to the sugar withdraw as I go back on my eating plan.