JC - Technology and Stuff

4 people, 9.5 bottles of wine = happy thanksgiving

Turkeys at dawn…

…and I’m not a Mac either! All the TV advertising will have you coming down on one of two sides; no room for compromise. Then there’s the question of phones. Are you an iPhone, an Android G1, or a Blackberry? Surely there’s no room for compromise there either. The world in which we now live forces us daily to make choices; to favor one thing over another. To make one product a winner, and another a loser. And it’s mirrored in the whole of American society. Even in sports. No American sports game can be a draw; there’s always overtime or an extra innings needed to decide a winner. Back one thing or another, but don’t come down in the middle.

Why am I forced to make these kinds of choices daily? Why can’t we just all get on? It starts in school (actually it probably starts well before then, but I’m not even going to go there!), when we choose ‘our friends’. Discrimination is a huge part of society. Some call it ‘choices’, but really it’s discrimination packaged up in a different word. Surely I’m not guilty of that you say, but you are. We prefer to shop at one store over another. We only buy gas at one station. We choose our work colleagues carefully and we support one team over another at weekends. We discriminate.

Now, I’m not actually saying this is a bad thing! I’m just calling it what it really is. Obviously something that’s built into our psyche. Heck, even my cat prefers to sleep in a warm spot in the bedroom rather than next to the fridge!

When I first came to the USA I noticed a huge difference in the TV commercials that were aired here as opposed to in the UK. The UK preferred to use comedy wherever possible and always played up a product’s values as best it could. It never ‘bashed’ a competitor. America on the other hand, used comparative commercials and ‘bashed’ the competition with happy abandon. I’ve lived in the USA for over thirteen years now and so I’m used to the style used here. There are times when I don’t like it but there are also times when it’s definitely useful. In my heart though I would just simply like to be given the choice. Maybe that’s a conditioned thing too.

So, where am I going with all this? Choices and technology. For me it’s always about the technology. Thirty years ago TV commercials only pit the likes of cleaning fluids off against each other. Now it’s PCs and Macs, iPhones and Blackberries, Xboxes and Wiis. Consumer electronics are now the cleaning fluids of thirty years ago. Where will it end? Maybe before I die it’ll be cloning cats or space flights to Mars, or holographic vacations. What now seem like unimagined luxuries will end up being the staples of choice (or discrimination). Why is that important? Well, as soon as something becomes a staple of choice, the bottom line is that it doesn’t really matter any more. It’s no big deal. Seventy percent of people will choose one thing and thirty percent will choose the other (or whatever the ratios are). But bottom line, you’ll get what you want. It’ll be pre-packaged and do what it’s supposed to (mostly). And another choice will have been made.

But technology is really all about the time BEFORE something becomes a staple choice. So, when you go out on Black Friday and buy all those items at hugely discounted prices, just remember you’re not buying technology. You’re buying the results of technology. Technology lives on the bleeding edge. Technology doesn’t pervade people’s living rooms. Technology is something that the few invest in for the good of the many. In actuality very few of us understand real technology. All we understand is consumer electronics (or the current flavor of the day). In the end whether I’m a PC or a Mac doesn’t matter. Either way I’m just buying cleaning fluid.

PS. If you have 30 seconds to spare, watch the video below…

Quiz night @ the 3 Lions Pub 2nite - should be fun…

Sarah Connor Chronicles rocks…

Settling in to a Monday evening’s TV - Sarah Connor, Coronation St, 2.5 Men, Worst Day, CSI Miami… It’s a full evening

I updated the theme for my blog today. I also messed everything up as a result and I had to recreate a lot of things all over again. Still, I think the end result is worthwhile and I am happy with the new layout and theme. I’ve added two new sidebar sections - Most Read Posts, and Favorite Posts. The titles speak for themselves and I hope they both generate a few more reads from visitors.

The other thing I have done is add a few ad related parts to the blog. I am hoping that now my daily traffic is increasing, I will be able to benefit from a little ad supported revenue. If it works - good, if not - then it will just be an experiment that I have tried. Basically I am using Google Adsense and also a link to 1&1.com, my web hosting provider. I am also looking into adding textual based advertising links. We’ll just have to see how that works out.

Traffic is something that most bloggers obviously think about from time to time. I write my blog for fun, but I also have hopes for it to be read by thousands of people out there. My viewership is slowly increasing and I’m just waiting for that one post that will set me apart from the crowd. Who knows, maybe one day soon.

In the meantime I’ll just continue doing what I know, writing and making a few cosmetic changes from time to time…

I’ve been busy but not busy recently, if you know what I mean. The last couple of weeks have flown by but I don’t really seem to have anything specific to show for it and no real idea exactly where it all went. Next week it’s Thanksgiving here in the USA and then four weeks later it’s Christmas. Someone reminded me yesterday that this year sees the closest distance ever between Thanksgiving and Christmas. An interesting thought. I guess that means it’ll all be over quicker this year. It’s already less than five weeks ’til Christmas and there are just less than six weeks until 2009 hits us with a vengeance.

Many people will be glad to see the back of 2008, a year of recession and election. I have to say it’s been a pretty good year for me personally, so I’m not going to complain. I do hope that 2009 is even better though.

I’ve written a few articles this year about my personal thoughts and some off topic blog items and they have all been well received. It’s nice to know I can write my thoughts down and people actually bother to read them! I myself prefer to read blogs where the content is original and not just recycled from somewhere else. I’ve found that too many blogs nowadays are just pieces culled from another blog and then quoted verbatim. No original thought whatsoever.

What happened to original thought? I personally think its demise is part of the problem in modern day society. People seem to have smaller attention spans nowadays. They just want to know things and know them NOW! No one sits down and reads the printed newspaper every day anymore. No one wants to read a manual or a good book. Even TV programs are made into bite sized chunks and available online to view when you have 22 minutes to spare. Individual music tracks are available to download at $0.99 a time, and movies are a buck a viewing. We’ve become a disposable society with disposable values, living disposable lives in disposable homes, wearing disposable clothes, sending all our waste to any country that has less money than ours that can recycle the waste to make a little money for itself in the hope of becoming the wasteful country itself. Original thought has been sidelined to the few; and even fewer want to read it.

My personal view is that the economy is correcting itself after a few too many years of complacence by those that matter. There are laws to economics, in the same way as there are laws to gravity and motion. Ignore these laws at your peril. Society forgets from time to time that these laws exist and tries to circumvent them in the hope that new laws will be created. Well, guess what, it doesn’t work that way. Abuse the laws of economics and society will have to be corrected. We are in one of those periods now.

When the economy does finally recover it’s going to be like a steam train leaving the station pulling a whole load of wagons. it’s going to take a while to get back up to full speed again. I only hope that this time around the driver is not going to go too fast and come off the rails again.

But like it or not, some things are here to stay. Movie and music downloads aren’t going to go away. Shortened attention spans seem burned into our psyches and reading is only going to become more online-based and less paper-based in the future.

I don’t want to imagine us degenerating into a totally thoughtless disposable society though and so we all need to take stock of ourselves and ask if that’s what we really want. We all have a responsibilty both to ourselves and to our country’s economy. Next time we throw out our disposable pizza box after watching the podcast on ‘Twilight’, while texting to our buddies, we should spare a thought for those citizens of poorer countries that aspire to follow in our footsteps. Is this really the legacy we want to leave them? Is this the example we should be giving?

Lazyness has become a first world disease and it needs stamping out. Original thought and deliberate action needs to be encouraged again. We all hold our future in our own heads. That wonderful amazing thing called a brain is still more advanced than anything mankind has so far built. Now is not the time to get complacent. We are only just beginning that journey to cross unimaginable technological barriers. Let’s show the rest of the world we care about the future we are creating.

At the beginning of this article I wrote that the last two weeks had gone by without much happening, and that it wouldn’t be long before 2009 would be here. Well, guess what, I am fulfilling my own prophecy here! What am I doing about not being lazy, using original thought and deliberate action? Not a lot really. Recession really gets you down doesn’t it? Recession can lead to more and longer recession if we all think this way. Instead, if we can turn ourselves around we can make a bigger, quicker impression. Like I said in an earlier article, now’s the time to start that project you have been talking about. Now’s the time to plan on your future. You’ll never have a better springboard for the future than now, in the depths of a recession. Get ahead before the market catches up. Me? I’ve got a few things on the go that I’ll talk to over the next few weeks. But in the meantime, I’m going to continue writing what I want to write, in the way I want to write it, all in the hope that it encourages at least one person out there to original thought…

I thought I’d end my small series on Google reader with a list of the feeds I subscribe to. Hopefully you will find one or two new ones that you like…

Geeky:
Cool Tools - http://feeds.feedburner.com/CoolTools
Lifehacker - http://lifehacker.com/index.xml

Google Related:
Gmail Blog - http://feeds.feedburner.com/OfficialGmailBlog
Google Blogoscoped - http://blog.outer-court.com/rss.xml
Google Sightseeing - http://googlesightseeing.com/feed/
Official Google Blog - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Official Google Reader Blog - http://googlereader.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Technology:
Android Phone Fans - http://phandroid.com/feed/
Android Community - http://feeds.feedburner.com/AndroidCommunity
ReadWriteWeb - http://feeds.feedburner.com/readwriteweb
CNN.com - Technology - http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_tech.rss
Techmeme - http://www.techmeme.com/index.xml
Wired: Top Stories - http://feeds.wired.com/wired/topheadlines
TinyApps - http://tinyapps.org/weblog/index.rss20
TmoNews - http://feeds.feedburner.com/Tmonews
Newegg.com RSS Feed - Daily Deals - http://www.newegg.com/Product/RSS.aspx?Submit=RSSDailyDeals
Official TigerDirect.com RSS Feed - http://feeds.feedburner.com/Tigerdirectcom
Engadget - http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml
TechCrunch - http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch
Zoho Blogs - http://blogs.zoho.com/feed/

WorkLifeStyle:
fivecentnickel.com - http://feeds.feedburner.com/fivecentnickel
Lazy Man and Money - http://feedproxy.google.com/LazyManAndMoney
The Simple Dollar - http://feedproxy.google.com/thesimpledollar
43 Folders - http://www.43folders.com/rss.xml
Unclutterer - http://unclutterer.com/feed/
The Big Picture - http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/index.xml

Social Network:
Windows Live news and interviews - http://feeds.feedburner.com/liveside
Retaggr - http://blog.retaggr.com/?feed=rss2
Web Worker Daily - http://webworkerdaily.com/feed/
All Facebook - http://feeds.feedburner.com/allfacebook

Shopping:
Amazon.com Gold Box Deals - http://rssfeeds.s3.amazonaws.com/goldbox

Comics:
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - http://www.smbc-comics.com/rss.php
xkcd.com - http://xkcd.com/rss.xml
QC RSS - http://www.questionablecontent.net/QCRSS.xml

Previous articles on Google Reader appear here and here.

Another week… Another monkey…