Chain Smoking Blue Monkey

White boys may not can jump, but that didn’t prevent Steven from getting Air today. MacBook Air is an ok name. I guess. What about AirMac? Airbook? Yes, I know, it is part of the MacBook line up, and I’m just being silly.

CSBMonkey is not that desirous of power in a laptop as much as he is portability and functionality, and this meets those standards pretty well. The lack of Firewire indicates that despite YouTube, home video simply isn’t more than a niche market for most computer users. USB will let most people connect their still cameras or card readers. This is a laptop for leisure travelers, business travelers, writers and students, even if it does carry a premium price. It can also serve as a backup device for a lot of executives. Weight is a genuine issue when people consider laptops, especially people who travel frequently for their jobs. The DVI out is the main indicator that it was designed for people who want to use it for presentations in business meetings, and the USB port means not only cameras can be attached, but flash drives, which are a mainstay among business folks these days. The mini-DVI still forces folks into using a external dongle, which believe it or not, is a consideration for a lot of people who do not want to be in a scenario involving their presentation that is in Keynote and all of the sudden they realize they can’t connect their computer to the projector.

Air is an interesting product and one that I personally would buy if I were in the market for a Mac laptop. I can see it being an amazing tool for productivity driven workers. Light, easy on the back (but not on the bank account), fastest wireless available, USB port, etc. make it the type of laptop that people keep on their desk next to their regular workstation and then grab on the way out the door. I expect Apple will sell more power supplies for these than they will external SuperDrives. The Air is not a replacement device at all, but an supplemental device for people with high connectivity needs but application needs that exceed the iPhone and Blackberry. It is built for and aimed at (via the price) a high end market that sees $1800 as just breaking the impulse purchase price.

The new AppleTV is still sort of “eh” in my opinion. Definitely a step in the right direction, but squarely focused on you giving money to Apple for any videos it plays, and that still rubs me the wrong way, no matter what 20th Century Fox’s says about their included digital movie files on DVDs. (I saw those on the Die Hard 4 DVD when I was in Virgin Megastore a couple of weeks ago. Interesting that it was a pre-cursor to this announcement. It is good, though, that the media companies are realizing that their encryption on DVDs is laughable at best and downright stupid at worst.)

The inclusion of connectivity to Flickr on the AppleTV was practically under the radar, but I read that as a huge admission that .mac is still floundering as a place for people to put their photos. .mac’s galleries are nice but they are bulky and slow, and there is no getting around that fact. People use Flickr for a reason. As someone who was steadfastly in the anti-Flickr group until just recently, I can say that there are very good reasons to use Flickr over .mac. It’s much more affordable than .mac, and I suspect that the majority of people who are interested in using .mac are interested in using it to easily put photos online for their families and friends. .mac makes it easy, but $99 a year just for a 10B photo gallery and limited bandwidth (Apple does have a well buried but existing bandwidth quota) is a lot when you can up that to unlimited on storage and bandwidth with Flickr Pro for $25 a year: http://flickr.com/upgrade/ Not to mention that Flickr ties into damn near any blogging system you can throw at it. $99 a year for 10GB of space is even starting to bug me, and by the time my renewal rolls around this year it’s likely that I will have all of my email services over to gmail and stop using .mac altogether. Sorry Apple, but .mac is failing given the available resources for the same costs. $100 a year can get you a lot that works just as easy as .mac and which you can use from just about any platform.

Multi-person SMS! WOW! THAT’S REALLY… zzzzzZZZZZZZZZ! Hunh? $20 for what on my iPod Touch? Can’t I just Jailbreak my iPod touch and get those same things for nothing? Fail.

The Google Map thing I have to really look at more closely to get the full grasp of it.

Time Capsule I like. Sure, you can set this up yourself or buy other versions with embedded linux etc. but this thing works the way a Backing Up For Dummies should work. Thoughtlessly. That is how backup HAS to work for most people using computers and I am glad to see Apple making a big enough deal of it to actually design a product to do it. Time Capsule has a much larger impact on me than any of the iPod/iPhone related stuff he announced today. The real test of it for me will be if non-Mac platforms can easily back up to it. It is still a stellar looking product and it is likely to make an appearance in my own home during my next Mac purchase.

Overall I found the MacBook Air and the Time Capsule were the only remotely interesting things really going on today.

Here is a dirty little secret. The place that pays me to act as a chain smoking blue monkey doesn’t have a knowledge base. None at all. They think they do. They think the have provided the monkey a bucket to put his knowledge in. The monkey has inspected the bucket for quite some time now, and it turns out that it is a shit bucket and not a knowledge bucket. Now I know that sometimes those two are one in the same, but most of the time that’s not the case. The monkey isn’t stupid. He knows the differences between his buckets and he would appreciate his keepers not testing him about his bucket knowledge.

The monkey is curious, though, and he does wonder if you have what you know on hand. Do you have a bucket you put all your disparate knowledge into? Do you have a bucket that you put specific information into? And if so, what exactly ARE you using as a knowledge base bucket?

I have taken to using the free, small, fast, and flexible TiddlyWiki for collecting my own small knowledge bases. I have other buckets as well. Often just folders that I can drag things into based on my own little life categories.

The monkeys keepers don’t like wikis, though. I think there must be spirits in the wiki that scare them, although the spirits are not bad just free. Free spirits scare a lot of keepers. The monkey is using one at his pay day job anyway, though, and dumping all of his collected knowledge about day-to-day operations, cases that can impact large numbers of people, and just as a general point of collected information about the how, what and where of what the monkey does.

The monkey recently decided to make sure that the bucket gets smuggled out with him when he makes a break from the confines of the keeper built walls.

There are some simple rule in most professions and trades.  One of the most simple rules is this:

 Know the tools of your trade.

If your trade is being a doctor, you should know how to use the medical technology you use to treat patients.  If your trade is farrier then you should know how to mallets to create horse shoes.

If your trade is scientist, you should know how to use a computer.  As a scientist, as this point in time and history, your tools are no longer just your graduate student slaves, your charming personality and wit, and those piles of aging tools in your lab.  All of that is now secondary if you are a scientist.  Your tool of the trade is your computer.  Because what your profession is all about is information that you collect and then how you think about it.  If you don’t think about it differently than someone else, then you are not really a scientist then, are you?

Let me repeat this.  If you are a scientist, your tool of your trade is now your computer.  Because of that, you should know how to use the computer as well as you know how to use a telephone or a television or a door knob.  You should never have to call a desktop computer support person to ask how to map a network drive.  You should understand how your computer connects to networks.   I am not saying if you own a car you should know how to fix it.  I am saying that if you own a car you should know how to drive it.   You don’t hire a mechanic to drive your car, so you shouldn’t hire computer support technicians to do your most basic computing.  You don’t hire a mechanic to teach you to drive.  You shouldn’t hire a computer technician to teach you how to use your computer.  If you want to learn, then you take a few lessons and then you get in the car and you practice.  A lot.  You do not have to be a race car driver to get back and forth to work.  Similarly, you do not have to be a computer support technician to know how perform the essential functions of your computer.

If you don’t know when to double-click and click, then you may not know how to use the brake or gas.  If you push down on the brake when you meant to push down on the gas, then unexpected and jarring things begin to happen.  In some cases, very bad things may happen.

I spent 45 minutes of my morning troubleshooting an issue over the phone with someone.  They have a work laptop that they take home and they can’t get to work for them.  At work, the computer is fine, and I suspect that if I took the computer to my own home and connected to my wireless network that it would work fine.  However, for this person, no, it doesn’t work fine.  It works sporadically.  And so it falls to me to do “my job” and to assist the person over the phone in making an effort to determine the problem through a series of troubleshooting steps.  One of those steps is the obvious one of eliminating possible causes of the problem or eliminating those things which are NOT the problem.  Of course, it seems obvious to me to do the process of elimination.  With computer tech you are left with one of the few areas of life that you actually can treat like a dime store mystery novel in the process of eliminating suspects.  It’s entirely procedural and a step by step process.  What it isn’t is randomly guessing what the problem might be based on partial knowledge you have seeped up along the way in conversations and newspaper articles about technology.  Dumbing down happens, and when you overhear a conversation and pick up only the bits you understand a little of and take those as entirely accurate descriptions of reality, you should know that you only have part of the story.  None of us will ever have the whole story, of course.  But some of us WILL have more of the story.  And that “more” of the story is what differentiates supposed experts from novices.  “Experts” just spend more time doing something over and over again, and in some cases that means reading and learning the same things over and over again.  When you pick up just enough to be dangerous then you are not actually helping yourself.  And if you ask an “expert” for help to solve a problem but refuse to follow even the most simple steps or answer even the most simple questions, then you are never going to actually solve the problem.  You are going to make it worse.

I help people with computers.  My job is not to pull teeth.  If we are talking to each other and I am asking questions or giving instructions it is in the service of reaching the end goal that you desire.  You are not necessarily expected to learn anything at all from a troubleshooting interaction.  If you ARE expected to learn something from the interaction, the good tech will summarize that at the end (and hopefully in a follow up email).  But I should not have to coerce you or lay out bait for you to tell me what I need to know to HELP you.  If you are coming for help you must also provide help to the person attemtping to provide help for you.  You must help in the form of providing information and following steps.  And if you don’t understand the steps you should always feel free to simply say “I don’t understand.  Can you simplify that anymore than you already have?”

What it comes down to, though, is sad and simple and not about technology at all but about customer service:  Customer service jobs are fucking nightmares.   They are nightmares for both the customer and the service.  If you receive good customer service that means you are lucky to get a patient person on the phone.  If you receive good customers as a service person then it means exactly the same thing: you are lucky to get a patient person on the phone.

Nightmare customer service can stem from many things, such as lack of knowledge or communication skills.  But most poor customer service is simply because one or the other or both people on the phone lack patience and are not bothering postponing their impatience.  Customers want problems solved NOW NOW NOW.  Customer service wants to solve the problem as quickly as possible as well.  Maybe not “NOW NOW NOW” but the sooner the better.   Now we are basically just an entire country of impatient people attempting more often than not to be a service oriented society.  We are increasingly impatient on both sides of the equation, and worse is that we are propogating the idea that “The customer is always right.” when quite often the customer isn’t right at all.  The customer can’t be right all the time and it’s a silly concept to start with.  You can’t be right about something you don’t know about.  That’s why you have to CALL customer service.  If you want to be right, then you call consumer relations.  They are PR people and their job is to tell you how great your company is, and one function of that is to please the customer to the point of making the customer feel that, yes, indeed, they ARE always right.

The csbmonkey is over 40, the magical age when you can abandon all pretenses of being cool ever again and settle down to dressing just enough to cover yourself when you go out to the store to pick up good beer and laundry detergent. However, the csbmonkey does make some efforts not to be to obvious about his realization that he’s totally abandon ‘cool’ or even ‘decent’ behavior. As the csbmonkey was heading out of the Official Corporate Coffee Shop Of The United States Of America, he saw another over 40 fellow wearing a shirt that simply said “Spiritual Gangster” and nothing else. And thus there was confusion. The shirt, while probably innocuous, is also essentially stupid and meaningless. Fine to abandon cool and all of its trappings, but to adopt what is just making enough sense to not be a non-sequitor as your fashion choice for the day smacks of a lost soul that believes it has found the map.

And then he turned his head an exposed a piece of technology that the csbmonkey truly, truly despises: the bluetooth over-the-ear attached to nothing headset. The Spiritual Gangster (note: he was not a Spiritual GangsTA) was sporting what is possible the lamest and least of cool accessories he could possible have attached to his skull. The Spirtual Gangster was just another part of the collective of Bluetooth Borg Headsetters.

These are the times in which you and the csbmonkey live. When it’s ok for a mid-40 something man at Official Corporate Coffee Shop Of The United States to wear a long sleeve t-shirt that indicating that he is a Spiritual Gangster of the tribe Bluetooth Borg Headsetters. It does make me wonder what such a Spiritual Gangster’s god looks like.

I have been trying it all lately. And by “all” I mean just about any kind of application or service that comes to light online that looks like it might do something I want it to do for me. Some work and some don’t. Some work sometimes and other times not. Some don’t work at all, and those, of course, are the ones I know least about since if they don’t work it becomes immediately apparent and I simply stop using them.

There are dozens if not hundreds of great things out there, too. Sites like Lifehacker chronicle this stuff every day and link to so many things that it is ultimately impossible to actually try them all in any effective or efficient manner. Still, every now and then I will try one that looks like it might work for me. Since Lifehacker focuses so squarely on productivity and time saving apps, there is an interesting irony that permeates a site like that. You can only try so many things, after all, before you have diluted your own data pool to the point of it being unusable.

I love reading about those applications, though. The csbmonkey likes the idea of total control over all of his life’s data. I love to believe in knowing and responding in the most effective ways possible. I love believing that the computer is the technology tool that can work in beautiful concert with all other sticks and baubles that store data. It’s fun to pretend. It’s fun to implement if you can. Ultimately you want the pretending to be reality and for the fantasy of smoothly flowing data between servers, computers, PDAs and phones to all work like a sober, tight rock band on stage or a well rehearsed symphony performance. We rarely get that, though.

What DO we get? Chaos. Misery. Anger. Confusion. We get a bunch of 15 year old kids in the basement with their guitars they’ve practiced for a month and decided to form a heavy metal band. We get a volunteer philharmonic orchestra that only practices their pieces twice before performance. We don’t get harmony and joy and beauty. We DO get noise and out of tune loud and unbearable things that we want to run away from.

Yet, somehow people DO find ways to get things well practiced enough to get music instead of noise. How do they do it? The same way that bands and orchestras get great: they practice.

Just downloading that app and installing it won’t make it work for you. DOING things with the app, regularly, finding its flaws and working around them, finding its strengths and exploiting them. THAT is how people make things work for them. There is no magic in the machine that will make how you deal with your personal data mystically all start working as per your fantasy of your brain simply organizing itself without any effort from you.

The things I do for work keep on going. I show up, do those things, and they keep paying me. It continues like that. Repeat.

Overall I can’t say I’m happy. Although I can’t say I am miserable or depressed.

There is ennui. There is malaise.

Why are there these things?

Complicated to define. Boredeom. Learned helplessness. Learned stagnancy. There are a lot of things I read (and have read) that talk about why this happens to us monkey in our efforts to keep on keepin’ on. Three Signs Of Miserable Job has many interesting probabilities. The Slacker Manager 13 of the 30 Reasons Employees Hate Managers (including part 2) also had the csbmonkey’s brain lighting up in the some of the pattern recognition centers.

Csbmonkey took some time during these dog days of summer long lunches to jot down just what it is about monkey’s particular form of daily repetitive tasks are starting to make csbmonkey feel more like a cagedforscientificpurposesmonkey instead. The clue is actually right there with the word repetitive. Csbmonkey hears the same questions every day, yes. Like most of the csbmonkeys out there. It’s part of the job, of course.

Nevertheless, the csbmonkey needs more to his life than the four concrete walls. Civilization shouldn’t collapse and the apocalypse shouldn’t have if csbmonkey is allowed to be outside of the walls some. It’s too bad the zoo keepers believe it’s nothing but pestilence and anarchy beyond the concrete walls they built. Csbmonkey could do some cool stuff.

The csbmonkey’s jobs are many.  Fix.  Prevent.  Crush. Kill. Destroy.  Save. Console.

And noticing.

Noticing things that the regular monkeys are noticing but don’t have the language or facilities to express except with a grunt here or a screech there.  And noticing things that the other chain smoking monkeys don’t notice either.  Things that that other chain smoking monkeys think the regular monkeys are grunting and screeching abou.t

This is one of the days when the csbmonkey  realizes that he is indeed a caged monkey.  One of those days when looking over at that other shiny cage is a realization that a shiny new cage is still a cage.  A day of caged recognition.  That to keep doing the non-monkey things in life one has to subject to being the monkey for a large portion of life.   It is not a good day for csbmonkeydom at all.

Soon you don’t even really bother picking at the lock of the cage anymore, since you realize that the small cage just happens to be sitting in a larger cage.  You can’t escape your monkeydom that easily.  Swinging from cage to cage is not swinging from tree to tree.

The csbmonkey is linked in spirit to his automaton cousins.  He does this thing because other people are doing a thing because someone wants a thing.   Whirrrrrr…

When do I stop doing this?

Starting is easy. Stopping is not. Starting an addiction is as easy as having a bad day and needing something to help forget it. The new thing. The thing to make life easier. After all, there’s a need for that new thing. Something to forget that lousy day? Something to make life easier? There are times, in fact, that something new and novel is necessary.

The old stuff isn’t working anymore. The rolodex is stained beyond legibility. The day calendar is covered in beer, coffee, whiskey and cigarette stains. Some of the months are analogous to your memory in that they are missing. Torn out. Tossed aside in a fit of frustrated inability to write down what should have happened instead of what did happen. Or worse… writing down appointments you actually did keep as opposed to the ones that you planned to keep, and they all had to do with putting out that fire your friend started and then cleaning up the aftermath instead of building that dream cottage on the beach with a place for a fridge full of beer and margaritas.

The journal is a wire bound high school ruled notebook written in with number 2 pencil, a pen found on the sidewalk, and sometimes something that may or may not be blood (but for certain isn’t graphite or ink). This is where the best thoughts of the day end up? In the same place some kid is dashing out heartfelt poems and doodling bleeding hearts?

This stuff is a MESS! Piles of stained paper. Paper. Good technology. Tried and true. Textural in nature. Smells. Feels. Cam be held. Exist. Good stuff. Messy stuff. It’s a MESS! Needs a place to BE. Needs a place to stay. Needs physical space. Collects dust. Oh paper, how much love there is for you, yet how much hate.

Paper isn’t going to end here, though. Paper is just going to start being a part of something new. Something more. Something with more demanding needs, but something with a mighty high payoff. Paper and the computer are going to be pals. Like the good old days. Like the 80s when paper held computer’s hand and led computer into a strange, scary forest of new creatures and new people. New people that liked computer A LOT. A little too much. People that liked to hang out with computer so much that paper wondered how those years passed so quick and so many drunken nights happened until one morning paper woke up alone ten years behind computer with no retirement plan. Paper got dumped.

This story isn’t about paper, though. This story is about how, exactly, to make a decision. How to decide on when it’s finally time to start looking for that technology to solve that problem. This Palm Pilot was good enough then. Why isn’t it good enough now? This Blue iMac was good enough then. Why isn’t it good enough now? All manner of things once were good enough and mysteriously, now, they aren’t. The Palm Pilot evokes wide eyes and provokes the same reaction as a slide rule or abacus. The Blue iMac is remembered in a “I had one of those!” moments. But… but… but… it all still works! What’s happening? Why can’t it still work?

Because it all moves as fast as what it moves. And it moves data. Data moves fast now. Very, very fast. Accelerating along with the unstoppable tide of time and human desire. SCORCHING ahead. Burning. Causing the hand to pull back in pain. The head spins dizzily and this thing start to feel heavy and slow. And worse. It feels worse. It won’t stay on long. It’s big. It’s got that… color. It’s beige. Or gray. Or blue. But is that a reason to just toss it aside? Oh yes, yes, yes it is. It isn’t the only reason. It isn’t keeping up. With thinking. With viewing. With adapting. Those other things that aren’t so set in stone, they are.

What is next? There has to be something next. The next thing to try that works. That, for a little while, will serve a purpose. No! Serve THE purpose! The purpose to keep up with it all. The purpose to profit. The purpose to take those damn ideas and keep them. NO! Not keep them. Cultivate them. Make them grow. Make them into things that themselves have purpose.

What is here isn’t working. The deck needs shuffled. A new card has to be pulled from the deck.

Next time, I’m going to pull a new card from the deck.

In the day to day “Have you restarted it?” life of a CSBmonkey, there are a few constants, and one of those is the inevitable crashing of these application thingies.  They crash like drunken teenagers on prom night heading home at 5 am in mom’s mini van.  Often, the results are the same.  Split skulls from the impact, brains hanging out and spread across the pavement.  The anguish and the misery that follows a crash is inevitable.  That was important stuff involved in the crash… the graduating high school student and the yearly budget someone forgot to ctrl-s after working on it for 12 hours.  The prom night crash is obvious, though.  Booze.  A little toke after that.  Some grinding and slurping late into the night (what teenager isn’t going to stay awake for that after all?).  The avoidance of teenage high school shooters and slashers (bringing up the question of exactly why we haven’t seen any prom night shootings… I didn’t say it was gonna be a pleasant question).  I mean, it takes everything a 17 year old can muster to get through that night, but computers… well, they’re basically infants and yet we put such high expectations upon them.  “Don’t crash honey, this budget analysis is due tomorrow… oh, nah, we don’t need any protection!  It’s more fun without me sheathing myself with a ctrl-s.  I mean, doesn’t it feel good?”

There are reasons that those application thingies crash.  Good reasons.  Let’s look at one of the most frequently used applications by our friends in the Pacific Northwest, Word.  Here are the various reasons this CSBmonkey has experienced crashes in that most venerable of applications:

*Corrupted normal.dot file
*Corrupted MS Word prefs
*Damaged application
*Damaged word document
*Attempting to access a very large document across an unstable network and the connection being lost
*Sun spots
*Solar flares
*Magnetic fields too close to the computer in the permanent location
*Computer hates being used: a.k.a. the “I’ll show YOU!” syndrome
*Client has failed to meet the computer or the application’s emotional needs
*Screwed up auto-save feature not working properly (probably due to sun spots)
*Auto-Tracking of changes on in those apps (Did you REALLY want to track those changes?  Probably not.  Way to go.)
*Documents were read only and yet let you keep adding stuff to them.  That was funny, wasn’t it?
*Computer has the dumb.
*Infestation of gremlins
*Possession by one or more demonic elements
*Infestation of regular gremlins that don’t know what to do with data
*Karma: computer, client, company client works for, etc. up to no good or was up to no good in the past and now coming back to haunt everyone via the “freeze up Word” method (more common than you think)
*Internet Explorer 7 whacked the crap out of the Office install, and now it’s been uninstalled.  Praise be!  Everything will work fine after this.
*Small, microscopic black hole nexus point at the location where computer freezes up regularly and causing atoms in device to not react in a normal and predictable way
*Similar to microscopic black holes, there could be weird gravity at the location that causes atomic corruption on various levels.  IF ONLY WE COULD REVERSE THE POLARITY WE COULD DETERMINE IF GRAVITY ISSUES ARE AT WORK!

You can see that the reasons are varied, and many.  Your ethics and morals and status as a decent human being weigh heavily in wether or not your computer works properly.  Don’t think Word isn’t watching you.  Don’t think that Excel doesn’t lurk under your bed at night reading your thoughts about the babysitter (or the baby sitter’s brother).  Purity of thought.  Or essence, these are the things that keep a computer running properly.  That and a good tech.