Tag: the past

Cooties: they’re back

Ages ago, we thought we had a cure for cooties in the youth population: the cootie shot.

The disease itself could usually go untreated without ill effect; the real problem was the secondary social stigma that came with being a carrier. Once the other kids found out that you had cooties, your social life would be roasted, toasted… burnt to a crisp. Play dates? Canceled. Sleepovers? In your dreams. And, honestly, who would want to go to your birthday party?

Yes, it was that bad.

From this culture the cootie shot was born, and fear of cooties could make even the biggest wimp forget he was afraid of shots — this was a serious problem for which there was no other treatment. Even the children whose parents’ questionable scientific beliefs kept them far away from vaccinations could be found seeking treatment in the dark alleys of the schoolyard, because cooties — not chicken pox or whatever — was the one illness that could keep you up at night, worrying well past your bedtime.

The cootie shot was supposed to be a bulletproof defense against every known strain. It was supposed to offer a second chance at childhood.

Getting vaccinated worked like this: a typically unlicensed practitioner with questionable medical training would administer the shot by speaking the following incantation in a singsong voice, while using their finger to trace the noted shapes on your body.

Circle circle, dot dot
Now you’ve got the cootie shot

But that’s just the first stage of the vaccine cocktail. Perhaps your forearm would be protected, but what about every other part? If you didn’t continue the full course of treatment, cooties would likely gain a foothold and basically ruin your entire life.

Circle circle, square square
Now you’ve got it everywhere

At this point, you’d be safe until the shot wore off… which by the way, it would do almost instantly. Kids were still getting infected left and right, so the greatest medical minds on the playground came up with what seemed like a silver bullet for this public health crisis.

Circle circle, knife knife
Now you’ve got it for your life

Only now could you breathe easy — you were finally immune. Not even the yuckiest girl1  could cause you harm.

At least that’s how it used to work. Once a panacea, a hope for a better tomorrow, cootie shots have become scarce. This easily-preventable ailment joins measles, polio and whooping cough as again something we must once again worry about.

What happened? Make-believe medical professionals today — with their hands tied by a well-known enemy of healthy and happy population — can be heard all too often singing a very different song:

Circle circle, shame shame
Your HMO denied your claim

  1. Everyone knows that females are the main carriers of cooties, and those bitches are everywhere.[↩]

On wishing for boredom

This is not a post about Steve Jobs. I read enough of them in the days and weeks after his death. I read in these a lot of what I already knew and learned some new stuff for sure, but one Steve quote stood out to me in Wired’s obituary:

I’m a big believer in boredom,” he told me. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, he explained, and “out of curiosity comes everything.”

I’m not sure if I’d head this quote from him before, but it put into words something that has been troubling me for some time: I haven’t been bored in years.

The first time I noticed this was in the mid-2000s, and  I only realized part of it, and I saw it through the lens of my Internet usage, particularly RSS. Even today, as the cool kids have moved on to following Twitter feeds (really, talk about a step backwards) of websites and blogs they find interesting, I’m still a huge fan of the no-bullshit, user-in-control, decentralized power of RSS.1

What occurred to me back then was that having posts pushed to me daily gave me more reading material than I needed. And since I could never get all the way through the unread glut of posts from blogs I’d subscribed to, my need to ever go foraging for interesting things to read basically disappeared. RSS gave me tons of serendipity (thank you, linkblogs!)… and at the same time, practically none at all. I miss the old days — some would say the bad old days — when I’d get my online entertainment and random bits of enlightenment by browsing aimlessly from link to link, being personally pointed to interesting things by friends on AIM, following latest links posted to proto-blogs like Pixelsurgeon, and… I don’t know, however else we found cool shit back then.

The second time I felt this effect of this was at some point over the last few years, but this time in a more general sense. This time it was bigger than RSS; this time it was about everything in my life.

I realized I have far too many options for entertainment. There are two reasons for this: massive digital storage devices and the fact that, being employed gives me an actual entertainment budget for purchasing paid media and fancy devices on which to experience it. Between a pile of unread books and bunch of e-books; more unwatched movies, seasons of old TV shows and anime series than I can name; and games galore that I’ll never finish (thank you Nintendo Wii and DS, Android phone and a still-kickin’ Atari 2600), I’m pretty much set for… forever.2 Even if I don’t seek out anything new, it’ll be years and years before I get through all of this. And it’s not like I can just ignore new releases and stuff I become aware of in the meantime!

I might be able to enjoy this world o’ plenty, if I could forget about what life was like when I was growing up, before we had the computing power, storage and network capacity to experience all the digital riches of more entertainment than we’ll ever need. I spent so much time being bored growing up, aimlessly thinking and daydreaming and such. This was before my first computer; I had tons of books and had probably read almost all of them, made good use of the public library, played with toys, action figures and stuff a whole lot and still found time to be bored and daydream because it seemed like I had run out of things to do.

If you live a similarly full, media-rich and employed first-world life, and can still ever find yourself so luxuriously bored, how do you manage? And can you teach me?

  1. Google Reader, please don’t die.[↩]
  2. I didn’t mention music here, because the way I consume music is a little different. I still clearly have more than I “need,” but I don’t feel the same sort of pressure to get through it all, thanks to shuffle mode.[↩]

Steve Jobs on unintended uses of tools

A choice quote from an all-around interesting interview:

The point is that tools are always going to be used for certain things we don’t find personally pleasing. And it’s ultimately the wisdom of people, not the tools themselves, that is going to determine whether or not these things are used in positive, productive ways.

–Steve Jobs, 1985

Why doesn’t my phone have a thermometer?

It’s getting pretty warm again (did it ever stop?) in South Florida, so today when I had the misfortune of being outdoors, I got to wondering why with all the sensors found in most modern smartphones, they don’t usually include a thermometer.

It’s common to find sensors for orientation, screen contact/pressure, video, sound and even location. However, for some reason, the task of telling me about the climate surrounding me gets outsourced to a third-party that is somewhere completely different.

Just think about that for a second.

What we’re missing is the ability to know the actual conditions we’re experiencing. If one happens to be indoors, in the shade, or somewhere else entirely, all they’ll get from their phone is the typical outdoor temperature for their general area. Even if they happen to be inside of, and get reception in, a walk-in freezer. (“It’s certainly not 90° F in here…”)

On the other hand, I can think of reasons why our phones tend not to handle their own temperature readings. Wireless carriers obviously prefer that customers pay for data plans to use as many phone features as possible. There’s also the matter of expectations: nobody (but me!) seems to demand the feature, so why include it, even if the hardware couldn’t be all that pricey?

But most importantly, the sensor would likely be unduly influenced by the temperature of our hand, the atmospheric conditions in our pocket, the heat generated by the phone itself, and so on. Heck, I distinctly remember how wildly inaccurate my circa-mid-90s Casio G-Shock thermometer watch (same model pictured at right) was.

But gosh, was it ever entertaining to watch that dial spin! I also used to watch that bar graph scroll through the last few hours of recorded temperatures and pretend I was in a boat watching waves go by. Ah, childhood…

I can’t quite place my finger on what I would do with the ability to keep a reading of my own surroundings’ temperature over time… but I know I want it.

Lo-fi cameras are awesome…

I loves me some crappy digital cameras.

Ten years on, my first is still my favorite, my Game Boy Camera. Thank you Diego, for perhaps the greatest birthday gift ever. Sure, I had crappy film cameras before, but that didn’t stop me from loving my GBC like anyone does their first. Using film meant that I couldn’t go wild and experiment, take tons of pictures of stupid stuff like any kid with a camera does, and any self-respecting adult with one continues to do.

That wouldn’t exactly work with my Game Boy Camera, which only held 30 snapshots and didn’t come with any way to, you know, transfer them to a computer.

Details. To make do, I would delete all but my absolute favorites, the true ‘keepers.’ That awkward red cartridge still has photos from walking home on the day in 2000 I got the camera, of good high school friends, of a duck from Kendale Lakes, and self-portraits taken every few months as I grew my hair to a respectable shoulder length in college.

Last year, realizing that I was far from done taking tiny, grainy, black-and-white photos, I bought a second Game Boy Camera, and a couple of Mad Catz PC link cables, so I could finally transfer the photos. They’re cheap and plentiful on Amazon and eBay these days (the cameras, at least; the link cables are hard to find).

There was a time when mobile phones could be counted on to take photos of this sort. Sure it might be frustrating when you actually wanted to take a good photo, but think of the washed-out colors! The poor lighting! The blurry faces! Alright, maybe it wasn’t so great if that was the only camera you had at a memorable event, but if that’s the sort of camera you go out of your way to use for artsy, leisurely photography, I respect that.

My first mobile phone with a camera was a Sidekick, and its photos are by far my favorite:

I could add these effects with software, but what fun is that?

Then came my Treo, which was, unfortunately, a little bit better at taking photos:

I won’t even mention my G1, which takes practically perfect photos. How sad.

I’m glad I’ve been able to shoot with so many crappy cameras, because I know one I won’t be using anytime soon. Sigh.

To be continued…

The case of the disappearing, reappearing dictionary

I was a voracious reader from a rather early age. I recall having had my reading level, in first or second grade, assessed at that of an eighth-grader.

My reading prowess could be attributed to a few things, like my parents reading to me from a young age, and often encouraging me to read to them. More importantly, if I came across a word I didn’t know and asked them what it meant, they almost always made me go look it up in the dictionary. I had a children’s dictionary that I adored, but for words that didn’t appear in there, I’d use their musty collegiate dictionary. This fostered an environment where literally no word was beyond my comprehension, an empowering feeling for a pre-geek with a single-digit age!

As I grew up, I didn’t always manage to keep reading with such volume and tenacity, and today, while I read tons of bits and blogs from the Web, long-form content isn’t something I take in a lot of. When I do, it tends to be an e-book. (I read these, in epub format, on my Android phone using the excellent open-source FBReader. Yes, reading off of a small backlit screen sucks, but this is mitigated by a nice serif font and the knowledge that, as I’m often reading in the dark, I wouldn’t really be able to read any other way.)

As I read, still I come across the occasional word I don’t know. These days, my main dictionary (either Free Dictionary Org or Lexicon Lite) also lives inside of my phone. FBReader doesn’t have its own built-in, and to switch to another app is kind of a pain, so I’ve lately been finding myself shrugging off unknown terms. I have become the sort of person who stopped learning new words.

This bothered me, so I decided that, damn the inconvenience, I would start looking up words again. Once I tried, I learned that it actually wasn’t so hard, after all.

The secret (if you could call it that) was to long-hold my phone’s Home button. This is the equivalent to the Alt+Tab key combination in Linux and Windows, which allows you to flip through open apps (only, in Android, it’s a list of the six most recently used apps, open or otherwise). As long as the dictionary is among the last six, it’ll appear in that list… as does FBReader, when it’s time to switch back. This is much more enjoyable than going back to the home screen, flipping open the apps drawer, etc.

I guess that’s a passable not-so-new-anymore year’s resolution: to leave no word un-lexicized.

More introduction (this time, the geek side)

I understand that self-identifying as a geek in 2010 makes me neither cool nor special, now that geeks are considered… you know… cool and special. But having laid out my blogging cred, I’d still like to make the case for the geek side of the equation (equations being something I actually know very little about).

Yep, a distaste for mathematics curtailed dreams of studying computer science, or something along those lines, in college. Back in middle school, however, I was happily hacking BASIC in my school’s Apple //e lab. I had sort of a knack for it; in computer class, I raced through the packet of programs we were required to transcribe faster than anyone else, and began spending my time writing my own programs, which would do things like tell my friend that his favorite football team sucked, repeatedly, through the magic of 20 GOTO 10.

I didn’t really apply this knowledge very well at the time; it would still be a couple of years before I had a computer at home. And even when I finally did, a completely awesome Pentium 166 MHz IBM Aptiva1 running Windows 95, I didn’t quite know how to get started programming on it.2

Another device appeared in my life a few years after the computer; I received a TI-83 graphing calculator for use in Algebra II. I initially found that it made a great mobile Tetris machine, but it wasn’t until reading Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead, in which he recounted his early days programming primitive computers, that I found myself inspired to do more with it.3

The calculator seemed like a good place to start programming, especially because the user manual contained an entire chapter devoted to teaching the TI-BASIC language! I picked this up pretty quickly, since I still remembered a lot of concepts from Apple BASIC. In my junior year of high school, I was soon writing programs to help me take shortcuts to solving math and science problems. But most importantly, I wanted to make games.

So I made a game. How I did so could be its own entry, and very well may be in the future.

This inspired me to sign up for the Computer Programming I elective in my senior year. They taught us Visual Basic, and the class was neither interesting nor fun. This, paired with the realization that studying computer science in college meant taking lots of math (something I’d always heard, but college course catalogs assured), made it clear that I should focus on the other thing I liked doing: writing.

I majored in communications, and the rest is history. Except for a fruitless foray into Python a couple of years ago, I haven’t programmed much lately.

But I still embody, I think, the hacker ethos. For me, 2005 could also have been called the mythical Year of Linux on the Desktop, thanks to the then-nascent, but still quite amazing, Ubuntu distribution. While it was alien to me, and didn’t quite ‘just work’ on my laptop, I persevered (smug Windows-using friends would say I “suffered”) and use it to this day. I love Ubuntu, and it still… almost just works.

Along the same geek lines, doing more with the devices I own seems to be a recurring theme in my life. These days. I carry in my pocket a rooted Android phone (running CyanogenMod), and at home have a homebrew-enabled Nintendo Wii and DS, a Canon PowerShot sporting CHDK, and Linksys routers running the dd-wrt and Tomato firmwares. My (lack of) skill-set means that you won’t find me helping the cause of hacking open a new device, but I’m glad to file the occasional bug. In short, I like to get as much as possible out of my devices, including, quite literally, my data. Backup is a topic I’ll be coming back to, for sure.

I think that about sums up my geek side (and unintentionally makes a pretty good case for my navel-gazing side).

  1. Mine looked exactly like the tower pictured there![↩]
  2. Let’s remember this when we talk about the iPad.[↩]
  3. My 2010-self is a little embarrassed by having drawn geekspiration from Bill Gates, but you’re reading a truthful blog.[↩]