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April 01, 2009
 
5:44 PM
So this past year for Christmas my wife and I decided to get our immediate family books. Like, our "theme" was to get everyone a book.

We came up with this idea, of course, on the Saturday before Christmas on Thursday.

I figured we would just go to Barnes & Noble, pick up like 6-7 books and be done with it. My wife though decided to get online and make a wish list of the books we thought would be perfect for everyone.

Of course, for various reasons the books will not be delivered in time if we had ordered them online. Like, some would but some wouldn't. And the ones that wouldn't are not in the local Barnes & Noble here in Frisco, they're in stores scattered all over the Metroplex. And some can only be found in Borders stores.

But, being the awesome guy I am, I tell my wife to heck with it, I'll go pick these things up on the way home from work. Yes it will be a bit of driving but hey, why not? She tells me I'm awesome and I go "reserve" the books using the online "hold in store" bit that both Borders and B&N have on their sites.

Over the course of the next day I wind up whittling it down to four bookstores in the Metroplex. So about 6 PM when I'm done with work (yeah, kinda started out late) it's freezing outside, pitch black dark but hey no worries - I have the iPhone now with Google Maps!

This is all in the DFW Metroplex, so locals can laugh at how dumb I am...

So I head to the first one, a B&N on Preston, a few miles from my workplace. I go to the register, they have the book I reserved, and the stoner kid says "woah, cool - a lot of times when people reserve stuff online we don't have it!" - given that I have like six more books to go across three stores this isn't a good sign.

I head to the second one, a Borders on Preston. I pull into the wrong shopping center with the wrong Borders because I saw "BORDERS" and freaked out. Got back on the road, passed the real "Borders" because the sign is covered by trees somehow, turnaround and get Book #2.

I then plot out the third store, a B&N on Beltline in Dallas. The trip is 29 miles and 40 minutes away but who cares, I need to get these books, right?

So I'm driving and driving and driving and it's still freezing outside, raining a little, dark as heck, and I have no idea where I'm at or where I'm going but Beltline is a longass road so I don't think anything of it.

Towards the end of the trip one of the "roads" Google has me turn on is actually a turn-in to a parking lot. Like, I thought I had screwed it up but as I look down I see my little blue dot on mu iPhone going across the "road" in the parking lot so I figured "whatever" and kept going.

I turn onto Beltline and I'm really close now, so I keep looking for the B&N. At some point though the road stops. Like, dead-end. Not sure I'm technically on Beltline anymore since I thought the idea was Beltline was a loop or went on forever or something. Suddenly I'm at someone's farmhouse with like cattle and shit. OK, so I overshot it right?

I redo the calculations on the Google Maps app and sure enough I drove right past it.

So this time I turn around and look real close and at some point I realize that there's nothing but residential houses where Google has told me to go.

No big deal, I'm sure it was an approximate location and it was in some strip mall I passed, right?

Only then do I see that Google has not sent me to Dallas but rather to Grand Prarie, TX.

See, when I told Google "5301 Beltline Road, Dallas, TX" it said "hmm, I don't see a 5301 Beltline Road, in Dallas, TX, but I do see one in Grand Prairie, TX, which is near Dallas, TX, I assume he meant that" and sent me there.

And me, seeing "Dallas, TX" on the B&N website and realizing that it would be a ways from Allen where I work just sort of assumed that this long-assed distance was normal. I didn't think to check the endpoint close enough.

It should be clear by this point that I have no sense of direction, a condition exacerbated by the darkness and just enough rain to be annoying and not enough to actually merit windshield wipers.

So I fire up Safari on my iPhone and go find the location on the Barnes & Noble website. I find the phone number. Only I either have to briefly memorize it or write it down because the iPhone does not have cut and paste nor is it smart enough to figure that if there's a phone number on this website for some reason that you might want to click it to call it (usually it can). So I have to hunt down a pen in my car. And I can't find one. I'm in the parking lot of some kinder care center in motherfucking Grand Prairie, TX, and I can't find a pen. I have to dig one out of my briefcase.

So I write down the phone number on paper using a pen so that the Jesus Phone can dial it (note, I love my iPhone but damn). The phone number tells me where the B&N is.

It's in Addison. Like, right near where I was earlier in the night.

Addison.

For the sake of reference, here's a map of how far I was from where I needed to be.

See, the DFW area does this weird thing with some cities where they're occasionally considered the city of their name and occasionally considered "Dallas". So in this case the store is in Addison but it was listed as being in Dallas. I have a relative who for years lived in "Dallas" but he really lived in Carrollton. It was like this weird pimple of Dallas in the middle of Carrollton and if he had people send him mail as Carrollton it wouldn't get delivered to him but if it was addressed to "Dallas" it would.

On my way out of Grand Prairie, I stop at a McDonald's to get some fries because at this point I'm starving. The woman who handed me the fries was the most terrifying person I've seen in a while and the fries were stale. Pretty on par for the evening.

So I drive all the way back to Addison and find the store. At which point I had the one smart thought I had all night - the fourth B&N was the local-to-me one and the only reason they had the remaining books is because those books are easy to find anywhere, so I picked up the rest of the remaining books and headed home to Frisco.

All told it took me like 4.5 hours but hey, at least we got all the books.

So yeah the moral here is - I rely way too blindly on technology and still can't maneuver for shit in the Metroplex. But I got nearly caught up on my podcasts so it's all good.

March 14, 2009
 
12:00 PM

Right now I have three posts which are epically long and that I've never completed. And it's been over seven months since I posted and some amount of the information in those posts is now out of date so I'm taking that as a sign and starting fresh.

I am now one of the many people who own an iPhone. My wife and I both got one back in November.

The phone blows me away, though part of that may be due to the fact that this is my first smartphone (and yes I know some people don't consider it a smartphone because it doesn't have copy and paste - whatever). Previously, I had an attitude of "I want my phone to just be a phone, I don't want it to do everything for me." But after dealing with this phone for a few months now, I start to understand why it's such a big deal and how useful having a portable computing device in my pocket is.

One of the things that still boggles my mind is how many apps there are for the thing. As of the time I'm writing this, the only way to write an app for it is to use the official SDK. The official SDK only runs on Mac OS X 10.5, which in turn requires a Macintosh. I figured the mere fact that there are not that many Macintoshes in the world, much less Macintosh developers, would limit the number of apps on this thing. I guess I'm wrong. When I look at the fact that the guy who wrote the iFart application was clearing $10K a day near Christmastime, I start to curse the idea that I didn't drop the $599 on an Mac Mini.

Of course something I've learned in the meantime is that a lot of the "best" games on the device started their life somewhere else. Sally's Salon - which is a really fun game, even if you're a macho man - started out as a Flash game, so the gameplay elements and all the graphics and so forth were already done. A fairly good GTA clone, Payback, started out its life on the homebrew handheld platform GP32. And SimCity on the iPhone is more a less a port of SimCity 3000 for the PC (with iPhone-specific controls).

Probably the best game on the device, Rolando, is indeed an original game but clearly inspired by the PSP's Loco Roco, though it does have the advantage of actually being able to use the tilt controls of the iPhone itself, something Loco Roco had to emulate using the PSP's shoulder buttons.

There's another offering from Apple, the iPod Touch. Essentially it's the iPhone without the phone part. I know I'm in the minority here but I think the iPod Touch is the most pointless device ever. It's an iPhone without the phone. It's an iPod without much space. It doesn't have 3G or a camera or GPS, and it can only get online when you're near a Wi-Fi hotspot. And maybe this is just familiarity talking but I think the iPod functionality of the iPhone and the iPod Touch is very weak - sure it's prettier but it's harder to use and is missing functionality. But at least the iPod Touch is really expensive - space-wise, the iPod Touch is as expensive or more expensive than the iPhone subsidized by AT&T. Sure, you don't have the two years of monthly bills from AT&T but I just don't see why anyone would want one of these things instead of an iPod Nano or a real iPod.

Of course, it does play games. And I like it as a gaming device. But it's got nothing on real portable gaming devices like the Nintendo DS. Forbes thinks the iPhone could kill the DS. Forbes is good in their area but they're clueless when it comes to gaming.

First you can make the argument that the iPod Touch/iPhone cannot hope to compete with the DS (and I'm going to keep saying "DS" but really I'm lumping the PSP in there as well, so please just assume I'm saying both) at the price it is. The Nintendo DS is $130 (the PSP is $170) and the cheapest iPod Touch on the market is $230 (the cheapest iPhone is $200 layout but costs $70/month for two years). It is indeed impressive that Apple has sold over 13 million iPhones (and some number of the iPod Touch) but Nintendo has sold 100 million DS units. Literally. Like, last week they sold the 100 millionth unit. And while the PSP is no DS, they're no slouch either at 50 million units. Sure, some of that is momentum - the DS has been out since 2005 and saw one major must have hardware revision and the iPhone/iPod Touch have only had affordable apps for about a year now, but the fact is that more people are going to buy a $130 gaming device instead of an overpriced iPod or an expensive phone. Even Sony didn't quite get this - they figured an initially $250 portable PS2 would sell like hotcakes and it didn't make any real traction until they lowered the price to Gillette Razor levels of uptake.

Second, you can make the controls argument. Rolando works on the iPhone (and since I'm no longer talking price, just assume when I say iPhone that I'm also talking about the iPod Touch) because all it needs is tilting and the occasional light touch on the screen to play. A number of people thought Nintendo was crazy for making the DS have a touchscreen. They proved that there was indeed an entire genre of games which would benefit from a touch screen (though to be fair, it was similar or identical to the kinds of things which could be accomplished on a PC game with a mouse in most cases). So the touchscreen of the iPhone is not the problem. In the right sorts of games, the iPhone's touch screen makes for some very interesting gameplay.

No, the problem is that that's all the iPhone has. It has no buttons or control pad (the one button the iPhone does have closes the app). This severely limits what kinds of games it can play. Tilt controls are frustrating - the We Love Katamari game on the device requires the iPhone be level and then tilted from that position in order to control the on-screen character. Fine, unless you wanted to play a game while laying on the couch. Every single Nintendo DS game works fine on the couch. You can put buttons or a control pad on the screen, and some games do, but that kills screen real estate, and in my opinion kills the point. Plus you miss all tactile sensation, which is one of the reasons I don't like the iPhone as an iPod - with my 5.5 Generation iPod, I can move to the next track by just feeling for the device and clicking. Can't do that with the iPhone. Heck, some of my favorite games for the DS use the control pad and buttons exclusively. Some even ignore the second screen. This is why FPS games like Brothers in Arms and the forthcoming Prey just don't work well on the iPhone - they're cramming a square peg into a round hole.

But the real deal breaker for the iPhone is battery life.

Nintendo came out with the Game Boy in 1989 it had no light on the screen. And neither did any Game Boy unit until the Game Boy Advance SP came out in 2003, some 14 years later. And it's not like Nintendo didn't know people wanted a light - people had been begging and pissing and moaning about it for years and years.

Why did Nintendo hold off on the lighted screen? Battery life. People kept telling Nintendo that they didn't care about battery life but Nintendo knew better - ask anyone who owned a Sega Game Gear, which came in 1991, what they remember about the system and to a one everyone will say first and foremost how they had to buy six AA batteries to use the thing and even then they got at most 2-3 hours of life out of the thing, tops. Sure, it had better graphics than the Game Boy and the lighted screen everyone said they wanted, but who cares when the thing couldn't play games for very long and was enormous as a result of the batteries to boot?

When Nintendo finally did put a light in the Game Boy it only did so when they could put a rechargable non-standard battery in there. Ironically this put the Game Boy and Nintendo DS in the same category as cell phones in that now they were these devices where instead of buying standard batteries you plugged them into the wall overnight.

I've noticed that my favorite games on the iPhone, like Rolando and Fieldrunners, drain the battery like popcorn. And with the iPhone in particular, this is a big problem. The 3G already drains it fast (much moreso than edge or wifi). Besides just the battery argument, the other big problem with the iPhone losing battery power is that it leaves you without a phone. When your DS dies, you curse a bit and move on. When your phone dies and you're not near a charger you could be in trouble.

The iPhone does have some advantages as a gaming platform - unlike your DS, you will carry your iPhone with you everywhere you go. My wife and I have actually cut off our land line and just use our iPhones exclusively now (the only people, we noticed, who called us on our land line were our parents and telemarketers, and we can just have our parents call our new number). Playing with your DS in public as an adult could make you look silly - using your iPhone looks completely normal. Plus, the Nintendo DS is a platform whose development is expensive and exlcusive - you have to invest in pricey development kids, and your game has to be manufactured on physical cartidges. Anyone who can afford a Mac, a $99 fee, and can set their own price can develop for the iPhone. iPhone games tend to cost $10 at the most, DS games tend to cost $20 at the least (usually at least $30 new).

But the real irony is how the DS is starting to head the other way in applications. A game was released over Christmas Personal Trainer: Cooking. It's literally a "game" where you play along and cook. My wife has told me she's going to get me that game so I'll cook something other than Hamburger Helper, the IKEA furniture of cooking. There's games that teach you how to speak foreign languages like Spanish. There's a game that's designed to help you quit smoking.

All of these "games" fall under the category of applications where you're doing something which can be aided by a computing platform, and in some cases a portable one. Strictly speaking, you don't need to have your Spanish coach be portable, but since normal people don't want to be in front of a PC after their work day is done, it makes sense to place these programs on a different device.

But if you have an app which would be best on a portable device then where do you put it? The iPhone is attractive for a lot of people but it doesn't cover all of the people without an iPhone. The PDA market is dead. The rest of the smartphone market is fragmented amongst Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Android, etc.

To say nothing of the fact that most people don't have smartphones and putting out a game for normal phones, even with Java, is a nightmare. John Carmack, in a QuakeCon keynote, relayed his experiences getting DOOM RPG onto phones. He had to write it in two languages, Java and BREW. He had to make a "High" and "Low" version of each (for the different capabilities in cell phones). And then he had to hand it to EA's mobile division where they made 40+ different iterations for all the different cell phones out there. Write once run anywhere my ass.

But 100 million people own a DS. If you could convince 15% of them to buy your app then you'll sell more copies than if you convinced every iPhone owner in the world to buy your app. Of course, that's just number of copies - if you account for manufacturing and distribution costs you might come ahead charing $5 for your app and keeping 70% of that (which is your cut, Apple takes the other 30% which given that they're facilitating the whole process, is pretty fair) and not losing any money on "copies" you don't sell.

The iPhone is a great device, and a great gaming platform. It's just not the be-all, end-all that analysts say it is. Still, it's great.

Except for that time that the Google Maps application sent me to Grand Prarie by mistake. But that's another story...

July 27, 2008
 
1:38 PM

The greatest blogger on earth is Joel Spolsky. He has an article he wrote recently called Martian Headsets. In a very roundabout analogy way, he explains why the fact that Internet Explorer 8 is going to be standards compliant is both a good and terrible thing and why Microsoft is screwed no matter what they do. Now, it's not like Microsoft deserves sympathy for the mess they're in because they created it.

To recap: versions of IE up to and including IE6 are not only non-standards compliant but they were downright hostile to standards and now if IE8 actually does wind up being standards compliant it will break every page out there that's been coded to account for IE6's quirks. Developers actually call it "quirks mode" and IE7 went a little ways to fix this but IE8 is actually going to try and implement the standards fully. Depending on who you listen to, IE6 (often called out because it went the longest time without an update) either did not meet standards because standards were too loosely defined or too difficult to follow (it's all in the article above).

There's one bit in the article though that I think really needs to be pointed out

Jon Postel should be honored for his enormous contributions to the invention of the Internet, and there is really no reason to fault him for the infamous robustness principle. 1981 is prehistoric. If you had told Postel that there would be 90 million untrained people, not engineers, creating web sites, and they would be doing all kinds of awful things, and some kind of misguided charity would have caused the early browser makers to accept these errors and display the page anyway, he would have understood that this is the wrong principle, and that, actually, the web standards idealists are right, and the way the web “should have” been built would be to have very, very strict standards and every web browser should be positively obnoxious about pointing them all out to you and web developers that couldn’t figure out how to be “conservative in what they emit” should not be allowed to author pages that appear anywhere until they get their act together.

But, of course, if that had happened, maybe the web would never have taken off like it did, and maybe instead, we’d all be using a gigantic Lotus Notes network operated by AT&T. Shudder.


Basically there are all kinds of stuff that you shouldn't be allowed to do in a standards-compliant webpage in a standards-compliant web browser. You cannot follow certain kinds of tags with certain other kinds of tags, it's illegal. It doesn't really make sense that it's illegal, since the basic effect is the same, but it's still illegal.

But if web browsers enforced everything, would the web really have become as popular as it is?

MySpace is a site to go to if you want your eyes to bleed. The guys there have constructed their code in such a way that it's fantastically easy to make a web page, and damn near impossible to make a web page that looks good. Years ago (think 1996) there was a site called GeoCities which did something similar, without the social networking capabilities. Web site hosting was expensive and out of most people's grasp, and they sure didn't know how to use HTML. GeoCities would let you create a webpage, get it online, and also had a tool to edit the HTML for you. Sure, you had about 2MB to work with and sure, the URL was half a mile long, but you could do it. And the web became littered with tens of thousands of sites that essentially consisted of pictures of their cats, a couple of animated "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" gifs, and every tag trick in the HTML 2.0 book, with at least one blinking text tag which became useless when IE decided not to implement it.

Most of the people who made GeoCities sites either abandoned the concept of making their own pages (and maybe moved on to making YouTube videos or something) or they went forward and maybe pursued a career in technology. The new generation of people who want to make a spiffy web page and don't know how have moved on to MySpace. Namely, High School teenagers.

Now I may come across as a snob here but really I'm giving MySpace some faint praise. It's not like MySpace is the first site to try this - it wasn't even the first site trying at the same time that it got started and running. It was just the first one to nail what people need - an easy way to create content, and an audience.

Same thing goes for YouTube - people don't remember (even though it was maybe 2006 when this all happened) but YouTube was one of a number of video site competitors. And if you're like me and you mainly just watch the videos, they were all the same. So why did YouTube succeed? Easy, they made it dead simple to upload a video and share it. No one else quite got this. Not even Google, who had their own competing video hosting site and wound up buying YouTube.

And it's not like video sites were a new concept or anything - there had been sites for years that hosted online videos, but they all suffered from the same problems, namely the technology involved. You had to embed the videos on your site, or make them streamable. Most video players, like RealPlayer or Windows Media Player or QuickTime could be embedded but which one did you go with? If you went with any of the three you wound up locking out people who didn't have the one you picked. If you went with Windows Media Player, which has the greatest install base, then you locked out the Macintosh and Linux users. If you went with QuickTime you locked out people who were purposely keeping Apple off of their systems. If you went with RealPlayer you locked out everyone who didn't purposely go out and download that player. And since Real Media did so many shitty things for so many years with their player and how it would operate many people, myself included, just boycott the thing out of sheer spite.

And then every once in a while the program you wrote the embedded video player support for in your website would change and decide to not work with your page unless you updated the tags in your document - but doing so would then break the support for anyone who didn't upgrade. You could just tell everyone going to your site to just upgrade to the latest player but a large percentage of your audience would just say to hell with it and move on.

This all changed when Macromedia (now part of Adobe) added the ability for Flash to play video content. Initially I thought it was a dumb idea - why would anyone want to play a video in a Flash document? I also figured for sure it would be abused - great, now all those sites out there who annoy you with Flash-only content will throw videos in your face. But it turned out to be brilliant - now instead of worrying about the ten different kinds of video codecs and who has what player, now you just had to worry about who had Flash. And 93% of web users have Flash (out of desktop users, not phones or anything). So while Google Video was trying to implement and enforce an open source standard based on VLC on their users, YouTube would literally take just about any sort of video file on Earth and just play it. They solved the technical issues involved with video on the Internet, and because they solved the problem YouTube became easy, and that made them popular. YouTube didn't win by having the best ad campaign or spending a lot of money convincing people, they won because they were the best in a field suddenly ripe with competitors.

Of course the other problem with video sites on the Internet was bandwidth. YouTube ran advertisements from day one but no one believed for a second that they were making enough money with them to cover their bandwidth costs - especially since they were literally doubling their bandwidth usage every month. Everyone wanted to know what their business plan was. As it turns out their business plan was "get purchased by someone bigger" and that's exactly what happened. But that's another story.

There's a reason the web took off - because it became easy to make a web page. If making a web page was difficult - and if the initial web browsers of the day had enforced this - then the web might not have taken off. It's not like this was the first thing to appear on the Internet - email and newsgroups go back further than the web, along with IRC, FTP, etc. For that matter, if Microsoft hadn't made Internet Explorer a built-in feature of Windows, would the web have taken off as quickly as it did? Suddenly you had no excuse not to be online - there was a web browser built into your system. Netscape sued Microsoft for bundling IE with Windows 98, and it's not like Microsoft really did them any favors there, but even as recently as 1997 Wired Magazine was prognosticating that the Web Browser would go the way of the Dodo in favor of "push" technology. "Push", as it was configured back then, never really took off (the idea that instead of you seeking out content it would come to you) but in a modified form it exists today - RSS feeds, instant messages, podcasts, etc.

So why doesn't the Macintosh take over the world? Especially since, as so many of its fans decree, it's so much better? Simple really - it's not easy to run one. There's one place you can get one - Apple - and if you don't like their offerings or their prices, then tough. Want to run a PC with Windows? You have hundreds of manufacturers in an ecosystem of computer hardware makers to choose from. Back when Apple started making computers, every manufacturer did their own thing, no one ran programs from anyone else, and the market was very fragmented. Apple still runs their operation the same way today. So while Steve Jobs can make rooms full of people in turtleneck sweaters cluck like chickens at the sight of a new iPhone, Apple can't get past a single-digit market share.

Their #1 success story, the iPod, only sells and works as well as it does because it runs what people want it to run, namely the scores of MP3 files they've amassed over the years. The Macintosh, by comparison, doesn't run what people want it to run, namely all of the Windows programs they own, and all of the games they'd like to play. If the iPod had, from day one, only run AAC files then no one would have purchased it. They would have just gone on to the next iPod-like player that would. In fact, the iPod never really picked up steam, sales-wise, until the third generation which officially supported Windows. Sure, you could do it before if your PC had FireWire (few did in 2001) and if you were willing to try and run one of the reverse-engineered programs people were releasing, but until Apple officially made the thing support Windows, it didn't go anywhere. And today probably 70% or more of iPod owners run Windows, which Apple treats as a second-class citizen with regard to iTunes. The Macintosh is selling better nowadays, but it's likely to have nothing to do with the witty "Mac vs. PC" ad campaigns - it's likely due to the fact that now the Macintosh runs on an Intel processor, which means you now run Windows on your Macintosh, either through dual booting (which Apple officially supports, via Boot Camp) or through a program called Parallells which allows you to boot Windows at the same time as Mac OS X. So in other words, the Macintosh is becoming more popular now because it gives people what they want - the ability to run their existing Windows programs and games.

Anyway the point of this whole long diatribe which took way too long to write is that there's usually really good reasons that things take off and it's not just because someone can advertise better than someone else. The Internet took off because it made it easy to get information out to the massess, especially when you could guarantee that they'd be running a web browser. MySpace made it even easier to have a website when you don't know how to make one. Video sites were always a lost cause until Flash took away the technical barriers to entry, YouTube took away the content posting barriers, and Google took away the bandwidth concerns. The Macintosh has always been a bit player until Apple took away the barriers to running Windows and the programs everyone already owns.

We want to believe in conspiracy theories. It's fun. But IE wasn't standards noncompliant because Microsoft wanted to fuck the web, it was noncompliant because standards are really hard to nail down and Microsoft just screwed them up. YouTube isn't the #1 video site online because they advertised, they're #1 because they made it easy for people to put videos online - they figured that out before anyone else. The reason someone wins in a technical field is just because they figure out the barrier to entry and the elminate it.

March 12, 2008
 
9:15 AM

Since my short and stupid posts tend to garner a lot of people liking them, here's another. Moe blogs about her kid. I don't have kids, so you get to hear about my cats.

We have two Tonkinese sister cats, Liza and Sandy. We've had them since about 2001 or so. They're pretty different, personality-wise, so it makes for an interesting contrast. Liza ("my" cat) is fat and skittish, doesn't run around a whole lot, and whines a lot more than her sister. Sandy (my "Wife's" cat) runs around a lot, is a lot more adventurous, and (ironically) tends to like food a lot more.

Our house is two stories tall and when you get to the top of the staircase there's this taller than waist-height "wall" (I'm sure there's a better term for this) that runs parallel to it on the second floor, forming a bit of a "hallway" leading to our bedroom. Sandy likes to jump up and perch on the wall for various reasons: she's a dorky creature of habit, it makes it easier for her to get close to eye level with us, and her sister won't go up there so it's a great way to get away from her when she's being chased.

For some reason a few weeks ago she screwed up and went straight over the wall. She landed on her butt and went tumbling down the stairs. She seemed fine, but a day or so later we noticed she was chasing her tail. A lot. At first we just figured she was just being a dork again but then we noticed her tail was twitching a lot. We sprayed Bitter Apple on her tail but it wasn't effective, seeing as how a couple of days later she had literally knawed off all the fur on the tip of her tail. We took her to the vet who believes it's a pinched nerve in her butt from the fall and gave us some medicine to rub in her ear (way easier than making her take a pill).

In any event, the entire point of telling you that story was so that I could show you this - I was explaining to a coworker what happened and they weren't getting what I was saying, so I illustrated it for them on the whiteboard.



She didn't really go tumbleweeding down the stairs, that was just funnier to draw. She's getting better and other than the now-subsiding biting habit she's fine like before.

But in the meantime I've taken to calling her "bonetail"

February 22, 2008
 
1:49 PM

Earlier this week Slashdot ran a story on obsolete technical skills, and it inspired me to share my personal level of insanity with the group. So, if you like weird posts this one is for you. If not, tune in... whenever the hell I finish the other posts I have unfinished right now.

Back when I was a kid, I grew up in a modest town of about 50,000 people. Too big to be a small town, not big enough to get on most maps. Our phone book was about one inch thick. Small towns had phone books that were essentially glorified pamphlets, about 1/4" thick, and even then they shared it with all the neighboring towns. I knew people from small towns who thought phone numbers were four digits long, since the first three digits were always the same (and the then-optional area code was the same for probably a hundred miles).

When my family would go on trips we would visit "big cities" like Dallas, Houston, Orlando, Memphis, etc. and in the hotel rooms I would notice that the phone books were always really thick. Like 4-5" thick. And sometimes, that was just the yellow pages, the white pages were an entirely different book, itself 3" at least. And they always had these awesome pictures on the front of the local skyline instead of the giant public domain "fingers do the walking" logo that would grace the phone book back home.

So consequently I made the connection early on in my mind that living in a huge city meant you were a success. And living in a huge city meant a huge phone book. Therefore, having a huge phone book in your home meant you were a success. A tenuous connection, but even then I had big dreams of moving to a "big city" later in life and one of these days I would have a big phone book in my house because hey, that's what big successful people living in big successful cities do.

Years and years pass. I grow up, go through High School, go to College, graduate, get married, and eventually my Wife and I move to the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. We get good paying jobs and rent then eventually buy a house. Initially the phone books that would appear on our porch would be the same standard one-inch affairs I grew up with because we live in the suburbs and they only cover the suburbs, but then one day a bag with two phone books, a 3-inch white pages and a 5-inch yellow pages, shows up on our front porch. These phone books cover the entire Metroplex. They have amazing photos of the Dallas skyline, with Reunion Tower on them (under a stuck-on ad for some ambulance chaser, but that peels off easily enough).

I'm elated. After all these years, I've finally made it! I'm finally in a good job making good money and living in a big city and hey, like all big successful people living in big cities, I have a pair of bigass phone books. I've arrived! Every time I look at these phone books I'll remember how I'm in a big city.

So I put these phone books next to the phone and the first thing my Wife says was "Just throw those things away. We have the Internet now."

I ignore the order and I keep the phone books under the phone cradle for a few years, exchanging them out when a new one comes in. I never tell my Wife the insanely silly "but I've always wanted a big phone book" bit because I'm not in the mood to get laughed at (though, apparently, I don't mind that people reading my blog will laugh at me). I get to keep them in place with the razor thin "well what if we want to look up a phone number when the power's off or our Internet is down?" excuse.

But then one day I'm cleaning the house and I'm trying to reduce some clutter and it occurs to me that in two years I've never opened these things, ever, and they're just collecting dust and the odds of the power going out or the Internet going down at the same time as my cell phone battery dying and me having to have some obscure phone number are vanishingly small. Oh, and in the years since we moved out here we've switched to Vonage so we couldn't even use the phone in a power outage anyway. And I now have Internet access on my phone (hell my wife has a Treo) so if we needed to look up a number there's better ways. And the inconvenience of a computer in another room is moot since I put Ubuntu on an old laptop and keep it in the kitchen, hooked up wirelessly to our router.

So I tossed the phone books into the recycle bin (literally) and do so for every other phone book that comes in. At some point I figure they'll stop putting them on my doorstep, and people will stop advertising in them. They'll go the way of the pay phone and TV Guide's printed listings.

Now I'll just have to contend with dialing ten digits to call someone or remembering ten different area codes to be my reminder of how I'm in a big city. That'll work.



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