Port Authority and the Bus to Pittsburgh,
published at 1:10am on 10/06/06, with 8 Comments
New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal at 11pm on a Thursday night is a dead, depressing place. The only people there are passing through or never leaving, all the restaurants are closed, and the information booths are empty shells of anything even remotely useful. My friend was one of the ones passing through on her way from Boston to Pittsburgh and by the time she is done, she will have traveled for something close to 15 hours on two buses with an hour layover in the Big Apple.
She never actually leaves the bus terminal, but at least she got her taste of the eccentricities of New York City.
Port Authority is home to one of a handful of bowling alleys on the island of Manhattan. The only other one I know of us down in the Village where the NYU students pay a cover to listen to loud music and drink while they throw their balls down the lanes. The Port Authority bowling alley, though updated, is an almost serene place with a bar to the side and empty lane after empty lane, punctuated at times by the local bowling league.
There really is nothing happy about the entire building.
The bowling alley is also closed by 11pm on a Thursday night. The arcade adjacent was open, but our attempts to get a beer at the bowling alley bar were thwarted by the city that, apparently, finds time to sleep. The other bar on the second level of the building, MiLady’s (”meet me at MiLady’s,” the sign out front proclaims) was open, but was filled with bad karaoke, set up inconveniently directly in front of the front door to the establishment, leaving us only to watch momentarily and actually consider going in, until we realized that it was occupied by those who never leave.
We ended up at a pizza/pasta/other food establishment on the ground floor of the terminal eating $2.50 slices of pizza and watching European tourists in matching white hooded sweaters. By the time we left a little past 11:30, the chairs were going up on the tables.
I pity the person who gets stuck in Port Authority over night.
For anyone who’s never actually been in Port Authority at all, I can only describe it as an example of how not to arrange a building for optimal navigation. Where one might describe the flow of people through Grand Central Terminal as a dance, Port Authority is something more akin to a tumble down a flight of stairs. We we reached the bottom of the stairs to where my friend had arrived, a man called out to us.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
He was older, unbathed, carrying a small black nylon workout bag that was tearing at the seams. His black winter coat was tattered, and he was definitely one of the people who called the building home.
“Bus to Pittsburgh,” we responded.
“This way, follow me,” he called back, “this is arrivals, you need departures.”
And we followed him through the terminal, under 41st Street, to the departure terminals. “Don’t be scared. You’re scared. Don’t be.”
“Gate 69,” he said, which was definitely not right as we looked over towards it and found it completely empty. I went to the information booth and asked where the bus to Pittsburgh was departing from.
“Gate 69 or 70,” said the only information booth worker in the entire building.
We walked over to gate 70. On our way, our new friend was standing by the escalator.
“Hey, can you help a guy out?”
My friend gave him a dollar, justified with the notion that “this was a legitimately useful service.”
We wandered over to the gate where my friend was told that the bus was about to leave. Did she have her ticket? (Yes.) Then come this way. (We hugged, and she was led through a closed door to the waiting bus.)
I looked up at the sign above the door.
Gate 69.
The maze of Port Authority is a curse to any traveller, but in the confusion has developed an ad hoc service economy, both out of necessity and opportunity. Like good businessmen, they stand near the entrance to the building, beside the empty information booth, and inquire, ever so gently, “looking for a bus?”
And in that moment those who are just passing through can get a little taste of what New York is all about.
Filed under: Observations, with 8 Comments
BarCampNYC2: Reflections, etc.,
published at 9:10am on 10/04/06, with 3 Comments
This past weekend I had the wonderful experience of watching the BarCampNYC2 event that I had helped organize finally come to fruition. When I attended the first New York City BarCamp in January (almost a lifetime ago with the way 2006 has been progressing thus far), I ended up having such a fantastic time at the event that I decided that I would help make the next BarCampNYC happen.
The interesting thing about the organizational aspects of a BarCamp (or any conference that utilizes some or all of the Open Space Technology techniques) is that the seemingly ad hoc, un-conference is actually planned out to nearly every last detail up until and during the event. Though the structure ends up being fairly loose for the conference attendees, and though the dynamic and the structure of the day may change at any given moment, there is always a team of people at the helm, steering the anarchy, ensuring that it ends up at (or even near) intended goal.
There is plenty to be said about what went right at the event, what went wrong, what could have been done better, and much of that is already broken down on the post mortem page, but I wanted to explore a bit the main thing that I noticed which was this very different “buzz” in the air compared to the first New York City BarCamp, which I will attribute to three things: Space, Communication and Context.
This BarCamp event was held at the Microsoft offices in Midtown Manhattan and the office was absolutely lovely to us, and they definitely just helped to ensure that the event could happen at all (namely, it was one of the only spaces, if not the only one, that allowed overnight stay for the campers). As the company’s sales offices, the space was a collection of conference rooms, surrounding a couple of center common areas, which ends up being perfect for an event like this where you want to be able to mingle with people in-between sessions. I think the only downside to the physical space itself was that there was actually just too much of it. Everyone was able, if they wanted, to find their own corner in which to hide, and I noticed many people grouping off, many times with the people with whom they arrived, and tucking away into a side room or down a hallway, never interacting with other participants.
Now if we were to fully embrace the spirit of BarCamp, we would argue that people are allowed to make of the conference what they will and should be allowed to tuck off into a corner if that’s how they feel they will best experience the event, but at the same time, I would argue that we are going to have to filter out people who are just not interested in fully participating, and participation is a large component of why one would attend, and why the sponsors are paying for, a BarCamp.
Which actually brings me to the next point about the space itself: the draw. The draw that the name “Microsoft” has versus a secret meeting place in downtown Manhattan (which is how the first event was billed) is markedly different. I will simply offer the shoe closet as an example of this difference: I decided not to wear my black, Chuck Taylor Converse All Star sneakers to this event for fear that they would get lost in the pile of other hipster shoes, but what I found instead was a collection of sensible sneakers and loafers, indicating a very different crowd than the one I was expecting. I will not want to blame the space entirely for this, but I do think that an event in Midtown Manhattan will bring in a very different demographic than a downtown one.
In addition, the space brings with it its own group of attendees. When I arrived to set up on Saturday morning I encountered a cluster of MS employees sitting together in the main lounge area. This was a group of engineers who, from all outside appearances, had no idea what they were doing at this event, and were not actually interested in embracing the (arguably froofy) underlying motivations behind BarCamp. One individual had gone as far as to, with a smirk, fill out his nametag “I am a MAN, I am interested in SEX” (the “I am a…” and “I am interested in…” were pre-printed on the name tags). To me, that small gesture, along with the aforementioned exclusivity, and the behavior I witnessed in the actual presentation sessions, was indicative not of any personal shortcoming, but simple a failure to truly internalize, before the event, the type of event a BarCamp really is.
Which of course brings us to my second point, which is one of communication, which I do believe was lacking on the part of the organizers. Again, while an event like this is supposed to be organic, there is some point at which the people making it all happen have to take a step back to see what the attendees are actually seeing and to help get them as engaged as possible leading up to the actual event. In our attempt to keep things loose and free, I think that we missed an opportunity to actually get our hooks into people and make them really excited for BarCamp.
I think the primary shortcoming was simply in making sure that people knew what BarCamp is all about, at least in the broadest sense. While we were immersed in the day-to-day planning of the event, the participants simply had the event website to get all of their information, and up until the event (and even now) the site does not really convey what BarCamp is all about or why you might want to attend. It did not emphasize the attitude that you need to bring to the table in order to really have fun, and I think that it put too much emphasis on one particular part of the participation mantra, namely that everyone needs to present. It did not actively encourage people to help with another presentation or help lead a panel discussion (instead of just leading the typical slides-and-lecture style talk), which resulted in, anecdotally at least, in a number of people not attending simply because they didn’t have a full understanding of what was expected from them.
Finally, there is the matter of context, in a more societal sense, and I don’t think that anyone actually had control over this part of the day. We are eight months down the road from the last BarCamp event, and a lot in the world has changed. A lot of the people who were looking for work, who were exploring projects on their own or who were just starting their own companies are now solidly entrenched in the daily day-to-day of the work, and when that happens, a lot of the gleam can come off of one’s vision of the world. And instead of being stuck in the middle of winter, with the prospect of spring on the horizon, we are now at the end of the summer, with only the prospect of a cold and rainy autumn on the horizon, which too affects the overall mood of the participants. Again, this context was mostly unavoidable, and I’d be curious to know if there could have been any way of harnessing it, but I think that it’s important to at least acknowledge its existence as an outside influence.
BarCamp is a free event, and while it is open to all, it is really only open to people who are open to it. Attendees who are not ready to experience it, and who are not willing to let go of their preconceived notions of what a technology conference should look like will not only have a bad time, but will also bring down the buzz of everyone around them. While I do not think that this happened at this event, but I do feel like the energy level was not as high as it potentially could have been. I firmly believe that the un-conference aspect of the event applies to the planning of it as well, and I am excited to take the lessons that we learned this time and apply them to future BarCamps, either in NYC or beyond.
Filed under: Observations, with 3 Comments
lonelygirl15,
published at 12:09am on 09/20/06, with No Comments
Hoax
noun
something intended to deceive or defraud
(Dictionary.com Unabridged v1.0.1)
That seems right, but when I think of the word “hoax” I tend to think of something more malicious, less simply fooling someone, or playing a trick on them, but deceiving with intent to do harm.
noun
something intended to deceive; deliberate trickery intended to gain an advantage
(WordNet 2.0)
That seems closer.
I’ve been thinking about hoaxes lately, ever since the collective Internet started wetting itself over the outing of the video diaries of lonelygirl15 as the project of three (male – has anyone else even started ranting about the fact that the filmmakers were all male?) filmmakers and not a teenaged home-schooled girl named Bree who was making and posting videos on the web under her parents’ noses.
People on YouTube seem particularly distressed about this realization, even though most of those who have posted response videos expressing their shock, outrage and disappointment all seem to have an inkling that the videos weren’t real in the first place. Or rather, let’s be clear on the terminology here. “Real,” in this case, means “actually made by a teenager with the help of her more tech savvy, but still teenaged, friend.” The thing that is so striking about a number of the videos that I’ve watched is that their biggest complaint is not that the videos were scripted, or that they were just a film production (though that complaint is certainly present), but that there was no longer any mystery to them. The outing of the project as simply a project, as opposed to someone’s actual life, meant that there was no more room for speculation – no more opportunity for people to convince themselves that what they were watching was actually a real life unfolding before their eyes, as opposed to the created story of a real life unfolding before their eyes.
As the great equalizer, the Internet/web has finally done its job, allowing everyone to produce the content that they all want to consume, and along with that comes the implicit (though mistaken) understanding (or perhaps merely hope) that living in isolation, physically, people are still able to reach out across the wire and actually connect with someone. That’s the crux of the matter – people that connected with lonelygirl15 felt like they made an actual connection to an actual person, not some kind of virtual connection, and that given the nature of the internet, that connection had the potential to be reciprocated.
Recently, I was talking to Kara about wanting to start experimenting with video. I noted that when using different media to document a particular moment in time, writing and photography can only ever be representations of the artist’s perception of the world, completely open to interpretation by the viewer. A page of written text can be visualized a million ways when read, and a photograph represents only a split second of the world, completely ignoring the moments immediately prior and following the image captured on film.
But video. Video, I said, was somewhere else, somewhere closer to the Truth. Video seems to capture so much more – more emotion, more feeling, more depth – in the form of movement, that watching a video is as close to Reality as you can have without actually participating in the artist’s world with him. Because our lives operate on a continuum, watching a video over time feels more real that looking at a photograph, and it is that much easier to be drawn into the assumption that we are already closely connected to the artists.
So are people upset because they were tricked? Or was it because they really believe that the advice they were giving was actually making an impact on someone’s life, and learning the truth rendered all of their connections moot? There was a perceived one-to-one connection between each audience member and lonelygirl15, aired in public, to be sure, but still intended to be a direct line between two human beings, and now all of that advice is all a lie, directed at filmmakers rather than a teenager. The fact that there is no girl on the other side of that computer, looking back out, looking for validation, is enough to make people feel that the energy that they invested in their time with Bree was wasted.
But let’s get back to the question of whether this was a hoax. Every time I heard this project described as a hoax, I cringed. I knew that the videos couldn’t be Real – they just felt too wrong to be what they claimed to be. But to describe the videos as a hoax, to attribute any amount of malicious behavior to the project, just seems to be dismissing it too easily.
I wonder whether it would have been considered a hoax if these were video diaries of an actual girl, but re-created by filmmakers, more like a staged reading of The Diary of a Young Girl Who Can’t Leave Her Room Because She’s Grounded. If the story was real, but the videos weren’t Real, would there still be this animosity? Or if the videos were Real, that is, produced by an actual teenager, but not actually real, instead scripted out of her own imagination? Would that have been any more palatable?
I wonder what bothered people more: the fact that the stories were made up, or the fact that they weren’t actually making the connection that they thought they were?
Filed under: Observations, with No Comments
What’s in a sound?,
published at 9:09am on 09/11/06, with 1 Comment
Abrasive noises are contextual. For me, on the inside of my apartment, the dissonant sounds coming from the multiple grinders and jackhammers on the outside of my building produce a cacophony that is not unlike having my teeth drilled for 8 hours every day. But for the workers on the outside of the building who must shuffle up and down the facade on their moving platforms, using those grinders and jackhammers just represent a day’s work, a noise that is controlled by them and them alone and that probably has associated with it some sense of accomplishment at the end of the day.
At least that’s how I always feel after I make or destroy something with my hands.
Today, there are sirens tearing up and down the streets of the city. From my apartment, they are part of the landscape of New York, for the officer in the car, for the firefighter in the truck, and to the person in the burning building, these noises all mean something different.
Filed under: Observations, with 1 Comment
Open Source: Not actually that ugly,
published at 6:09pm on 09/03/06, with 1 Comment
I’m no open source zealot, but when someone decides to talk shit about the methodologies that make up the core of open source software development to further an argument that really has nothing to do with open source at all, it kind of makes my blood boil. That was the reaction I had when I read “Open Source Gets Ugly” in Red Herring last month with this lead-in:
Proponents may believe that the movement can do no wrong, but could open-source tools and techniques be doing more harm than good?
A slightly inflammatory introduction, but one that I could probably have lived with, if it didn’t continue with this gem later in the piece:
Malware writers are using open-source development models and software to share malicious code and collaborate on projects, increasing the efficiency of the malware creation process… For example, cyber criminals are making available source code with documentation so that viruses can be easily modified to create more variants. They are also using open-source project management software, such as a Content Versioning system, to keep track of their nefarious projects, says the report.
Filed under: Observations, with 1 Comment
On Being American,
published at 4:08am on 08/23/06, with 4 Comments
The term “lazy” comes up far too often in conversations when talking about Americans for it to just be a fluke. Where exactly does this notion come from? After all, if you look at the amount of innovation that has originated in the States over the course of its history there’s no denying that there’s something happening here that’s going well. But there’s this underlying belief that we’re just a bunch of lazy slobs, and that the world is going to eat us for dinner. So what is it?
Let’s think about what Red Herring (08.28.06) had to say about the growth of Asia’s economy in the early 1980s:
The model also assumed certain putative elements of Confucian culture such as an emphasis on education, discipline, and harmony in the workplace…
Fascinating. That certainly doesn’t sound like the US at all. Maybe we’re onto something here. After all, half of my friends are going to law school these days, and the other half of them are already lawyers (leaving a remaining half of my friends who are just shocked that I am a software developer who can’t do math), and a country that churns out this many lawyers must have some pretty hard working individuals. Well, except that upon further examination, it seems like law school is the fall back position for people who have no idea what they’re doing. A friend of mine was telling me about her friend the law student who, despite being particularly bright, did not seem to have any ambition (and was subsequently moved from the “fun to date” pool to the “how do I get out of this” pool). “But he’s an engineer,” she said, “So it’s not like he’s not motivated at all.”
Oh really? Consider for a moment the work that one needs to go through to be a successful engineer over the course of one’s life. And consider that engineers in our society are really not pushed to the top of the earning bracket within a particular organization. And then consider that the average first year associate at a law firm can make, with bonus, far more than an engineer well into his career, with guaranteed advancement as long as you maintain your billable hours (and don’t royally screw something up) and it seems more to me that the primary motivator for going to law school is that it’s probably one of the easiest (and by easy, we mean least ambiguous) career path one can choose in this country.
So what’s the point? The point isn’t that Americans are lazy. The point is that Americans would rather not do work that they don’t have to do. We are all taught that we have options in this country. We have opportunities. And for the most part, we can, and are encouraged, to maximize in any way possible our own lives in order to advance, not the common good, but our own. After all, a society where everyone is picking himself up by the proverbial bootstrap can only pull up the entirety of society in the process.
Right?
Well, probably not. Along with selfishness in one’s own role in the world comes a general feeling of entitlement and selfishness that doesn’t go away simply because we’re talking not about a career path but rather, say, running to the subway.
The subway? Sure. The other day, I was sitting on the train, along with a hundred other people, and the doors were closing, and a man came tearing through the turnstiles and stuck his hand between the doors. As his friend was busy swiping his card through the machine, the man stood in the doors, preventing the train from leaving. After what was probably no more than a minute, but seemed much longer, both of them ended up inside the train car and the doors finally closed. For the sake of two people’s convenience, an entire train full of passengers was delayed. The train behind ours was probably thrown off schedule a little bit. The passengers waiting for our train were affected a bit. And while one could argue that the difference of a minute in the scheme of things does not really matter, the truth of the situation is that this is something that happens every day, on every train in New York City, and it happens simply because there is no regard for what one individual’s actions mean to the larger system.
Or take my fellow cyclists, for example. From my apartment I can look down at a particular intersection and see, on any given day, at any given stop light, cyclists riding through the red light, circling around cars that have the right of way, cursing at the cars, and then continuing through the intersection, leaving a mess of traffic in their wake. The consequences to the cyclist are nothing but positive (other than in the increasingly not-so-rare situation where a car and a cyclist actually succeed in sharing the same patch of road at the same time – in those instances the automobile generally wins the fight). The consequences to the drivers are two-fold: first, they are inconvenienced and aggravated, and second, they have their belief reinforced that bicycle riders are nothing but a public nuisance who should all be run off the roads. Subsequently, the consequence to me, as a cyclist, is that I am routinely told to “get off the fucking road” by irate drivers who know that I will probably do everything in my power to piss them off, which I probably will now that they are giving me shit, and so on and so forth.
So, no, Americans aren’t lazy. They just don’t give a shit about anyone else.
Filed under: Observations, with 4 Comments
Irony, defined,
published at 2:08am on 08/16/06, with No Comments
Let it never be said that the US government doesn’t have a sense of humor:
Such were the personal items seized from the remote Montana shack of Theodore J. Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, that will be sold soon under order of a federal judge in an effort to pay off a $15 million restitution order.
[...]
Last month, the government proposed an online auction of the personal items, with the proceeds going toward the restitution. Judge Burrell approved that plan on Thursday, despite some objections from Mr. Kaczynski.
Filed under: Observations, with No Comments
From Point A to Point B,
published at 9:08am on 08/14/06, with 5 Comments
I love traveling by train.
I love travel in general, and I love airports (the latest brouhaha in the airports notwithstanding) and I love the feeling of knowing that you are in the process of getting to where you’re going almost more than actually having gotten there, but in any event, I really do love to travel. There is something about traveling by train, however, that I find so much more relaxing and fundamentally more intimate than flying, that I will wax on and on about it to anyone who will give me the time to open my mouth.
So it is with great bewilderment right now that I see that Amtrak has done nothing in the past several years, as fuel prices have gone up and as air travel has gotten more and more frustrating, to try to lure more people away from the skies. There is the argument that their Acela service was trying to do just that – by catering to business people who want to bop easily between Boston, New York and DC – but I am talking about trying to make it significantly cheaper than flying between any of those cities and actually trying to make some kind of end-run around the commuter airlines, rather than just sitting back on a sagging infrastructure with an on-time rate so abysmal that even I, the biggest proponent of rail travel around, am tempted to suggest that people fly because really, it’s a crapshoot when your train is actually going to show up.
We are, of course, talking about the short, inter-city trips such as are popular in the Northeast of the United States, or perhaps down the coast of California. Nobody is suggesting that we all hop a magic train from New York to London, because as cool as that would be, I suspect that it would be rather difficult to build (though maybe someone can do a hydrofoil, a la the QE2 on drugs). No, what I’m talking about is the fact that in order to get from one city to another in the 3-5 hour range, it is often more expensive to take the train than it is to fly. Take the one-hour flight from New York to Boston, for example. While the flight itself is only an hour, it will take about an hour of travel time to get to the airport, and an hour waiting around at the airport as someone sniffs your shoes and makes sure that you’re not carrying any shampoo. With another hour on the other end for travel from the airport, you’re talking about a four hour ordeal to get from point A to point B. Compare that, with train travel, which features approximately the same amount of travel time, where almost all of the travel is a serene voyage up the coast (serene other than the large man who spent most of the last trip sleeping on my shoulder, but I feel like that is a peril of any modern day travel, save the private jet or what have you), and it’s a wonder to me that anyone would voluntarily take a plane between these cities. Except of course, for the price, which is always, always, always a consideration, alas.
And then there is the bus. Oh the bus. I refuse to take buses any more, ever since my last experience on a Greyhound where, 20 minutes after getting on the road we pulled off into a Greyhound repair depot and had to wait to switch buses because “the brakes aren’t working too well.” Which is probably to Greyhound’s credit, since I’m sure that if we were on the Chinatown bus, we would probably have just barreled up the highway in hopes that we would lose enough momentum to run gently into the curb by the time we hit the city. The bus is, however, cheaper than dirt and is thus the de facto option for the budget-conscious among us.
Indeed the problem is that there really is no mid-range cost option for inter-city travel. There is the bus (cheap and horrible) and there is Amtrak or flying for six times the cost, and there is nothing else. Here is the perfect opportunity for Amtrak to fill a void in travel and probably pack every train that they run up and down the east coast. To be purely opportunistic, they can even take advantage of the recent air scares and pitch themselves as the safer, more relaxing alternative to all that bullshit you have to deal with at the airports – I’m thinking something like “Amtrak, bring all the shampoo you want.”
In fact, the one leg that I have found to be the perfect travel corridor in the Northeast is the trip from New York to Philadelphia. It has three differently priced ways to get you between the two cities, spaced somewhat appropriately (though as always, Amtrak tops out the high end of the range that I think they should be offering). At the low end, again, is the bus, always a ridiculous option, but cheap at $10 each way. At the high end is Amtrak, the comfortable option that knocks an hour and a half off the bus travel time, but includes a six-fold price increase. And in the middle, coming in at the lower-end, but still twice the cost of the bus, is the regional commuter rail service that takes exactly the same amount of time as the bus but features a city-to-city rail-only comfortable ride for not nearly the premium that Amtrak demands.
Amtrak may argue that they’ve catered their offerings to business riders in the past several years, and that is where they are going to make the bulk of their money, and we could probably argue that I’m comparing Amtrak’s business service to the airlines’ commuter service anyway, which is clearly a business-level service. And one could also argue that if I’m such a fan of rail travel then I should be willing to pay the premium for what I say is a more enjoyable experience anyway, and that I should stop my whinging. The thing is, without having looked too much into the economies of running a railroad, I feel like there must be a way to put rail travel somewhere in the category of high-end whim. That is, if it only cost me $40 or $50 to hop on a train to Boston tomorrow, I would be much more likely to do it and head out of town for the weekend. But with costs up at twice that amount each way, it is unlikely that I will be doing this kind of travel just for the fun of it. There must be some point at which the price comes down so much that more people like me will start to ride the train more and will thus make up for the loss ticket revenue in volume.
Now this isn’t to say that I want the railroad to lose money – though since the airlines are getting a bailout and the national highway system is subsidized, I don’t see why everyone gets their panties in a bunch about the railroads getting subsidies as well, and maybe that’s the larger question. I just want to not feel like I’m getting completely ripped off every time I head to Penn Station.
So come on Amtrak, bring me on home.
Filed under: Observations, with 5 Comments
The role of family,
published at 9:08am on 08/01/06, with 2 Comments
Recently, a discussion around the assistance offered by certain family members to one of their siblings (or the relative lack thereof) inspired this addition to an age old adage-
Friends help you move
Real friends help you move bodies
Your family bails you out
Remember that the next time you’re expecting your brother to come help you move that dining room set up a five story walkup.
Filed under: Observations, with 2 Comments
The complexities of modern life,
published at 1:07am on 07/29/06, with 1 Comment
As somebody who is ostensibly good with technology (having spent the majority of my professional career involved in one technology field or another), I find it nearly impossible to have a good experience with my parents’ technology needs.
The current source of frustration in my life as it relates to the computer at the old homestead is the 200GB Seagate Push Button external hard drive that I bought to backup the new iMac that is sitting where the old PC (and before that, the even older Apple //gs) once sat. The problem I am having with this particular hard drive that is that, for some strange reason, it refuses to spin itself down. Ever. In order to see why this ends up being such a source of agita for me, we need to first understand the reasons for buying this drive in the first place. It is important to point out that my parents are reasonably technically savvy – I talk to them more via email and IM than by phone and my mother has recently shifted her attentions away from her twenty year old 35mm camera to a fancy new Canon Digital Elph. But at the same time, I can not seem to get them to understand where files live on their computer and not a day goes by without an email dragging mishap that leaves my cousin’s mail folder somewhere buried amongst the emails from their car dealership.
My parents are, in fact, the very definition of the average personal computer user.
Computers are supposed to help these kinds of people – they are supposed to make mundane tasks easier and give them access to online recipes and weather reports. So what is the problem? The problem is that I have now stuck them with a hard drive that never shuts down. (What’s your point?) A drive that is constantly whirring when it is on, and that never stops spinning at night, which almost guarantees (in a house in the Northeast in the summer without air conditioning) a life span of about a month and a half. (Hrm, yes? And?) A drive that we can not leave powered on and thus a system that can not be scheduled to turn on in the middle of the night, back up their computer and go back to sleep again. (Ah!)
I have, in fact, taken what should be an invisible, automatic system, and turned it into one that requires constant, proactive user intervention.
My parents are, of course, very casual computer users and are much more relaxed about the situation than I am. On a little pink piece of notepaper, my mother very diligently copied down instructions for how to turn on and off the drive and how to run the backups. My father insists that the backups will be run “whenever we put something important on the computer” and I can feel the technologist in me die a little bit when I hear the sheer inelegance of this solution. “This can’t possibly work!” I cry, because it is in my nature to want to apply the supposed right solution to every situation.
Here I am cursing Seagate for building this stupid drive that never spins down, cursing society in general (why not?) for accepting such shoddy engineering in its consumer electronics products, and cursing myself for buying yet another faulty component for their computer (it should be pointed out that the iMac has already been back to the shop once and the USB card reader I told them to buy had to be returned because it too was broken). I am cursing everything under the sun for giving me this component that only barely works, and yet in my parents’ opinion, it is just another set of instructions on a sheet of paper to help them work the computer.
You see, my parents treat the computer as an addition to their lives – they check their email, they chat with their kids, they read newspapers, they watch funny videos – but if they happen to lose their emails, it’s not a big deal and if the web is down for a couple of days, they have better things to do. The computer itself exists in a separate part of their lives, along with other specifically computer-related items and activities. Adding more steps and more activities makes sense because there is already an entire world of actions that need to happen when using a computer – adding a few more can’t hurt.
On the other hand, I see my computer as an integral part of my life. I spend most of my waking hours in front of the glowing screen – it is my town hall, my library, my evening news, my radio; it is my brain. Any additional actions that exist solely to support the operations of this electric extension of my life need to be relegated so far into the background so as to maintain this illusion of this complete man/machine synergy. In the (currently top of mind) case of computer backups, a constant reminder that my entire life lives on a couple of fragile platters would be enough to send me into an eternal state of sorrow and despair. By relegating them simply to automated nocturnal magic actions, I can continue to live in my dream world while still remaining confident that my entire life can’t actually melt away in a freak Diet Coke accident.
While I can’t understand how they can be satisfied with a non-automated, non-daily backup of their files, they don’t see why it’s upsetting me so much that they don’t have one. Somewhere in their house, right now, there is a backup drive that is turned off, waiting to be activated. And this is apparently just dandy.
Lesson learned: sometimes, the most complex solution turns out to be the simplest.
Filed under: Observations, with 1 Comment
