Creating technology that makes us more human

I think I've posted a link to this video before, but my mention of text messaging last night made me think of it again. I do think it's very important that everyone see this, so here it is. This time I was all fancy and embedded it.

The e-mail chronicles

I've always been interested in the ways technology destroys us as social creatures. I think I was in middle school when I pondered whether my generation would be adversely affected in their ability to choose career paths because of our exposure to video games that allowed us to save, load, restart, and create multiple profiles. I am angry when I see people texting one person while hanging out with another, and I feel intense shame when I even read, let alone respond to a text message in someone else's presence. And now I wonder, in this age of text messaging and Facebook, if e-mail has become another victim of changing technology. I read in the New York Times recently that "nobody e-mails anymore."

I think I was in the fifth grade when I sent my first e-mail. I sat down at our Packard Bell 386, used the 36.6k modem to dial the Internet, and opened my parents' @npcc.net (which no longer even exists) e-mail account, and typed a letter to my best friend Jacob. At his parents' e-mail address. The subject was "friendly."

It took me a couple of years to break free of my parents' e-mail account, where my only shot at privacy came from the hope that my dad didn't know how to use the "mark as unread" feature. Still an infant on the world wide web, I was overjoyed to discover that I could have my very own web-based e-mail account: for free! And so I became nmk16@startrekmail.com.

It wasn't long before I realized that free webmail was not reserved for geeks, so I migrated to jedi776@homail.com (clearly I was loathe to part completely with my geekiness). The 776 was because my friend Tyler used the number 67, and I reversed it as an act of challenge.

I used to e-mail with people all the time. Friends, love interests, e-mail e-mail e-mail. But at some point it all stopped. Maybe it was the advent of the Facebook message, which took the whole idea of an e-mail address out of the equation. Or maybe it was just that I got a life and became entranced with this novel idea of spending time with people instead of a computer, to the point that I lost my ability to stay in touch over distances. But I actually don't think it's the latter, because not only do I not write e-mails: I don't get them, either.

Of course, we could be looking at a cause-effect relationship here.

Anyway, I think you should e-mail me.

I'm glad I was never 18

I wrote earlier this year about an infestation of sketchy people at Pirate House. One may argue that Pirate House has a continuous infestation of sketchy people (for example: Micah, Steve and myself), but I maintain that the fact that we didn't know any of them--nor did anyone else--qualified them as sketchy even by our standards.

Well, I'm now facing similar difficulties at Tucker's house.

Along with Ketan, Brandi and me--all Metta interns--a high school graduate named Isabelle has been living in Tucker's large, beautiful house. Isabelle is generally quiet, polite, and out of sight--all things I would consider to be good qualities in a housemate. This is mitigated by her tendancy to leave dishes lying around and occasional streaks of the kind of elitism that could only come from going to some fancy prep school.

With Tucker on vacation for a few weeks, we have the house to ourselves. Or we did, until Isabelle, freshly done with her internship but still staying in Berkeley, began bringing a string of friends to hang around the house. They enhance the dish issue, and in their most famous exploit left a huge mess of pineapple in the kitchen, which Brandi had to sweep off the floor. I mentioned this to them, and they responded by spelling "we're sorry" in pineapple chunks outside my cottage. They even cleaned it up later, sealing it as a truly cute gesture (though Brandi is the one that needed the apology). Then they left some more dishes lying around, which Brandi cleaned up.

Now, if you've ever lived with me, you might be saying, "Whoa, Nick. Are you complaining about dishes?" Fair enough. But I've been very good this summer, and it has been getting on my nerves. But that's just the grating inconvenience.

My personal issues are with the friends' attitude and demeanor. They are loud, crude, pretentious, and I'm pretty sure they drank some of Mark's beer. I heard them talking about Princeton, of which I'm glad, because I came to a realization.

I had just been eyeing a PhD in Liberal Studies at Georgetown University. Now, Georgetown isn't Ivy League, but it's still a very good school, with what I imagine is a similar atmosphere (after all, Bill Clinton went there). But you know what? If these are the kind of kids being funneled into these schools, I want none of it.

Don't listen to them!

I was perusing reviews of web hosts today trying to find a possible future home for Nidgin Idberry. Two of the first names I stumbled across, in addition to my old 1&1, were FastCow and JustHost (and I'm not linking either because they suck). I searched around for some reviews of them, and came across this website: www.hostingsthatsuck.com

HostingsThatSuck had a review of FatCow that said "Hold up. We researched this, and there are more positive reviews than negative. We recommend them!" Okay, cool.

Then I was checking out other hosts on the same website and I came to a startling realization.

The text was identical.

Compare:

You have seen the number analysis above. Numbers don’t lie. You should look no further. EasyASPHosting comes with 30-day money back guarantee so there is little risk to you to try host your blog, build company website or sell your products with them. Follow the EasyASPHosting discount link below and get their special limited time 15% discount via the coupon code (the coupon code may have expired so hurry).

You have seen the number analysis above. Numbers don’t lie. You should look no further. HostExpress comes with 30-day money back guarantee so there is little risk to you to try host your blog, build company website or sell your products with them. Follow the HostExpress discount link below and get their special limited time 15% discount via the coupon code (the coupon code may have expired so hurry).

You have seen the numbers. You should look no further. Follow the Dot5 discount link below and get Unlimited Everything (diskspace, bandwidth, email accounts) at only $4.95 $3.95 per month. Hesitate no more. They come with 30-day money back guarantee so you have no risk to try them. Dot5 Hosting can get you started today.

I found the Dot5 review, by the way, by researching the worst internet companies out there and plugging them in to HostingThatSucks to see if they got a good review. They did. There are a couple of variations, depending on whether the host is big enough to have negative experiences floating around on the easy-to-find portions of the net. So it's either "You've heard this bad stuff, but here's OUR verdict" or "we couldn't find any bad stuff about them, so here's OUR verdict."

Why?

Many bloggers make money by writing paid reviews on their blogs. Some seed them in, nonsensically, as nonsequiters to their normal writings. Some slip them in between legitimate reviews. And some blogs (okay, many blogs), like HostingThatSucks, set up an entire fraudulent website devoting to writing rave reviews for terrible services, making their bucks at the expense of those poor suckers who are trying to research products.

Oh, that site I linked to there? Paid Opportunities. It's a blog about making money online, much like one I tried to start and abandoned within a week. The irony is Paid Opportunties is basically devoted to taking money from companies to sell you on using their services to make money online. So it's half sincere, since the author is making money on it, but there is no reasonable expectation that you will too. It's essentially a pyramid scheme.

In the quest to make money online--or just to make money--we are finding that it is not the decentralized responsibility and groupthink of the corporation that is responsible for unethical practices in the market. It is the simple fact that greed--individual greed of individual people--trumps integrity.

nickkauffman.blogspot.com does NOT recommend HostingThatSucks OR Paid Opportunities.

Nico

Cherry? Plum? Cherry plum!!!!

Chris dropped a bike off today and asked if we would like to go pick cherries.  He had discovered a cherry tree with ripe fruit on the street.

We went and only managed to get a few cherries off the young tree.  It was too weak to climb well, and the cherries were too high to reach.  Between jumping, minor climbing, and Chris sitting on my shoulders, we managed to get a few, but our dreams of great spoils were unmet.

Then, on our way back, we found a much bigger tree.  Chris climbed up, with a boost from me, and threw down some very large cherries.  Looking around, I found another one just a bit down the street, which proved highly fruitious.  Now we had lots of cherries, enough for a pie or a cobbler.

These are things you never think about until someone mentions it.  Obviously, there aren't a lot of fruit-bearing trees on public land in, say, Indiana, but in California (and Mexico) you see a lot of trees--lemon, cherry, lowquat--just hanging out on the side of the road, with nobody to pick them.  All the fruit goes ripe, falls to the sidewalk, and gets smushed.  Nobody would think to harvest it!  In fact, we got a lot of strange looks from people passing by on the sidewalk, all of whom declined our invitation to take some of our bounty.

This is because of our attitude of scarcity.  We think value comes from the supply chain--something we pay for, that comes from an official source.  We need to move into a paradigm of abundance: urban gardens, food cooperatives, harvesting those feral fruits.  I had a great idea to create a website that used Google Maps to mark every fruit tree on public land, but this already exists.  However, it is scarcely used, so try and spread the word about neighborhoodfruit.com.

Oh, and it turns out they weren't cherries at all; they were cherry plums.  But whatever, we're still making pie.