Tuesday, August 30, 2016

GADGETS FOR THE TRAVELING TECHIE


tools from Ötzi the Iceman over 5,000 years ago
from age-of-the-sage.org
(http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/archaeology/otzi_the_iceman.html)
    "This Stone Age man [Ötzi] has four pieces of stone on him (and one very exciting piece of futuristic copper metal), but almost all of his kit is totally biodegradable. If he'd been buried properly and dug up nowadays, we'd have known nothing at all about his tailored pants, his raincoat, his belt, his backpack, and especially a couple of dozen different thongs. ... The guy never made a move without a handy reservoir of string."

      — "Tomorrow Now" (2003) by Bruce Sterling

In his non-fiction futurist manifesto "Tomorrow Now," science fiction author Bruce Sterling spends some time going through the pockets of Ötzi the Iceman, concluding that five millennia ago humans liked their gadgets just as much as we do now.

Here's what I said about gadgets in my book, A Survival Guide for the Traveling Techie, in section 2.17, SHOPPING FOR TECHNOLOGY:

    An early reviewer of a draft of this book complained she'd expected more in the way of reviews of the latest handheld and mobile gadgets. Now, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool techie and I love gadgets, but I'm also a technical pragmatist and so I tend to ask 'what will help me do my job?'

    If it's up-to-date gadget reviews you want, check my blog...

I was referring of course to this blog, and though I've been writing it since 2014 I have yet to talk about any gadgets. Oops. So here we go, with the whole truth on my favorites and why.

Pioneers


image from
www.appledorebookshop.com/
pages/books/8187/william-o-steele/
flaming-arrows

I sometimes hear techies say "Pioneers end up with arrows in their backs." I hear this more frequently from sales people and managers in tech industries. I've also heard, "It's hard to be on the bleeding edge and not get cut." These homilies are arguments against being an early adopter of technology. And yet as a techie aren't we supposed be out there embracing the new?

Here's the big picture: I've found you have to divide your gadgets into two categories: early tech and late tech. An early tech gadget is one from a technology that isn't ready for prime time, and you're using it because:

  • you think it represents the future, so you want to get in on the ground floor

  • you want to learn all about it

  • let's face it, you love it

You can only afford a few of these. The pros of being an early adopter of a new technology are:

  • You get to learn all about it first.
  • You get to impress your geek friends with your new, bleeding-edge gadget.
  • You hopefully gain a new capability before most other people.
On the other hand, the cons of being an early adopter are:
  • It can be very aggravating.
  • There is no guarantee that the technology will ever deliver as advertised.
  • Even if you pick the right tech you may end up with the wrong vendor, becoming proficient in a proprietary solution that goes away.
  • You can end up being very annoying if you don't learn to curb your enthusiasm.
  • You may end up learning the wrong lessons, including some "learned helplessness" if you conclude that X is hard, and later it becomes easy. (This happened to me with voice recognition, optical character recognition, and some other low-level Artificial Intelligence applications.)
So carefully choose which early tech you devote mindshare to.

With me my early tech gadgets and fads have been Personal Computers (PCs), 3-dimensional computer graphics (3D CG), Visualization, Digital Video (DV), Global Positioning System (GPS), Smart Phones and Big Data. I'm sure you have your own list.

The rest of the gadgets in your life are late tech, you have them because you need them and you want the minimum amount of nonsense from them, so you get mature technologies. I have been this way about (non-smart) cell phones, laptops, databases, cars and pocket knives. Again you have your own list.

My List of Most Useful Items


image from the cover of my book
"A Survival Guide for the Traveling Techie"

Some of the items listed you can't take on a plane, so don't.

In my family we used to say all you needed was duct tape and WD-40. If it moved and it shouldn't, duct tape it. If it didn't move and it should, use WD-40.

Later when the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, wrote a magazine article attempting to summarize his massive catalog on surviving and thriving in Western Civilization, he listed duct tape and WD-40 and a Swiss Army knife.

If you scrutinize the photo above, most of the items I used to carry around as late as 2005 (GPS, camera, music player, flashlight, flip phone, maps, reference books) are now incorporated into a smart phone. Less romantic I guess, but more efficient.

Here is my high-priority list of what's on my "Bat Belt":

  • Swiss Army knife
    I prefer a model with scissors, awl, corkscrew (useful for untying knots), can opener, toothpick, tweezers, bottle opener, flat blade and Phillips screwdrivers, and two knife blades, and without a saw (too many knuckle cuts)
  • WD-40
  • duct tape
  • iPhone
    apps:
    • GPS/navigation/maps
    • NOAA Weather
    • Wolfram Alpha
    • TouchTerm
      can actually ssl into a shell
    • Yelp
    • Runkeeper
    • Starbucks
    • Facebook & Twitter
      to stay in touch with family and friends; also remarkably good at alerting you to breaking news events
    • Netflix & Hulu
    • SoundHound
    • Tango
    • Find iPhone
  • iPod classic
    content:
    • music mixes
    • videos
  • iPhone/iPod accessories:
  • backup maps

    for when your phone dies or all the phones die; I like to carry Thomas Guides when I can, otherwise I print out local maps from Google and get regional maps from AAA

  • backup phone list (hard copy)
  • surge protector
  • 3-wire extension cord
  • 3-wire to 2-wire adapter
  • battery powered analog alarm clock
  • good luck charm
    I have a Mushu dragon plushie my daughter gave me which is remarkably effective at preventing hardware failures
  • backpack
    or laptop bag, for carrying laptop and etc.
  • books to read
    or you may prefer a tablet or e-reader
    currently reading: Death March (2nd Edition) (2003) by Edward Yourdon


    and Neutra (2004) by Barbara Lamprecht

  • pointer (telescoping or laser)
    I once worked for an old-school CEO yachtsman from Pittsburgh kept saying you should never point with your finger
  • office supplies:
    • portfolio
      pick a color scheme: silver and black, or gold and brown (ranging from burgundy to tobacco)
    • pad of paper in the portfolio
    • nice pen in the portfolio
    • fine point permanent pens
    • colored pencils
    • "magic" tape
    • scissors
    • hole punch
    • stapler
    • golf pencils to carry in your pocket — never put an ink pen in your pocket
  • gum
    to chew if you start to fall asleep in a meeting or driving

My List of Nice To Have Items


image from dailymail.co.uk
( i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/02/24 )

These are things I usually leave home but sometimes bring on the road as needed.

  • MacBook Pro 13 inch with external disk drive (Touro brand) used by Time Machine backup software, HiDef monitor, cables, external mouse
  • printer/scanner
  • Compac PC laptop with cables and mouse
  • Linux system with cables and mouse
  • mouse pad
  • Apple TV with cables
  • HiDef video projector with cables
  • Xbox or other game system, with cables
  • disaster/survival preparedness kit:
    • water
    • compass
    • 12 v water boiler
    • cups, bowls and utensils
    • ramen
    • snacks
    • cans of Spaghettios
      for hungry kids especially
    • mirror
      if lost in the wilderness you can signal planes with a hand mirror
    • bedding
    • space blanket
    • waterproof matches
    • crowbar
      rescuers in earthquakes report needing these

A Final Note: Narcissus Narcosis


Narcissus taking a selfie, from
stephendpalmer.com/selfies/

If you don't know who Marshall McLuhan was you probably should. He was a self-styled media critic, and gave us such aphorisms as: The medium is the message. He began his career as a literary critic in Toronto, specializing in Edgar Allan Poe, but ended up a world-acclaimed expert on the effects of new media on people's behavior and perceptions. He died in 1980, but when WIRED magazine began publishing in 1993 it adopted him as a sort of patron saint of the internet and interactive technologies, spreading his fame and influence further.

In his speeches and writings he was amazingly prescient, and he manages to shed some light on our 21st Century gadgets. He predicted what sounds amazingly like an internet-connected smart phone in the 1960s and '70s, as described by his biographer Phillip Marchand in 1989:

    "He told an audience in New York City shortly after the publication of Understanding Media that there might come a day when we would all have portable computers, about the size of a hearing aid, to help mesh our personal experiences with the experience of the great wired brain of the outer world."

McLuhan used the term "Narcissus as Narcosis" to describe our obsession with images of ourselves reflected in our gadgets. (In Greek mythology Narcissus of course was the ultra-attractive man who fell in love with his reflection in a pool. His name comes from the same root as narcotic.) Recent bloggers have noticed the similarity to the phenomenon of "selfies."

McLuhan wrote in chapter 4, The Gadget Lover, Narcissus as Narcosis, in "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" (1964):

    The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system. Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves...

He elaborated in 1961 in an interview in Playboy Magazine:

    ...all media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment. Such an extension is an intensification, an amplification of an organ, sense or function, and whenever it takes place, the central nervous system appears to institute a self-protective numbing of the affected area, insulating and anesthetizing it from conscious awareness of what's happening to it. It's a process rather like that which occurs to the body under shock or stress conditions, or to the mind in line with the Freudian concept of repression. I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.

    This problem is doubly acute today because man must, as a simple survival strategy, become aware of what is happening to him, despite the attendant pain of such comprehension. The fact that he has not done so in this age of electronics is what has made this also the age of anxiety...

Something to ponder as you find yourself sucked into the invisible web of your connected gadgets...

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