Well Known Fact

Feds to World: Tech is Here to Stay—Deal with It.

On Monday, July 26, 2010, two very different pronouncements by two very different government agencies offer a common theme around emerging technologies. The message is clear—new technology that provides real benefits must be allowed, unless there is an overwhelming public interest that it should be restricted.

The more widely read case was the Library of Congress’ finding that the practice of jailbreaking iPhones, or any mobile computing device of its ilk, is not a practice protected by copyright, which is to say broadly—it’s legal.  Of course, Apple retorts that doing so might violate terms of service and therefore void warranty, but that’s a different matter. The bottom line is that no one’s going to the pokey for downloading Cydia.

In the less publicized announcement (at least among the technoratti), updates to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provide new guidance for the growing population of disabled persons using Segway devices in lieu of traditional wheelchairs. Basically, under the re-tooled ADA, Segways are legitimate devices for disabled people to get around—and unless a business can legitimately claim that the unique attributes of the device pose a particular threat to safety, they must be allowed.

In both of these situations, the audience that is directly affected by the ruling is relatively small compared to the broader universe of people who use the devices. But everyone who uses these devices has a lot to gain.

In the case of jailbroken iPhones, a bounty of new underlying capabilities available to the handset itself, but heretofore forbidden by Apple, can now be legally exploited. If you want to. Or by all means, stay inside the walled garden—it’s nice there.

In the case of Segway devices, if you go to most theme parks or places of public accommodation that previously gave Segway users major hassle, or forbade their use—the Big Heat will probably back off entirely. Even if you’re not disabled. Why? Because who wants to get slapped with a lawsuit for discrimination for asking a patron if that Segway is really being used to accommodate a disability? Would you expect to get the same treatment for rolling into the CVS with a wheelchair? I suspect not.

These two findings are good news for all of us. They demonstrate a realistic, if long overdue acceptance of emerging technologies as being legitimate replacements for existing tools. And what’s progress if not to allow better designs to prevail?

And if you don’t like it, by all means, stay inside with your 1995-era analog TV. You can turn it on. No one will stop you. Oh, and that funny pattern you see is what we in the biz call “static.” Enjoy.

Deprivation: Day 10

In deference to those with bona fide medical disorders, I’m not going to title this post “Obsessive Compulsive.” But it is fair to say that for the nine days I was without my usually plugged-in state, I went through some classic symptoms of withdrawal, suggesting that my recent relationship with technology is a skosh imbalanced. 

Fine. You, the consumer of this digital content are the beneficiary.

And I became aware of entirely new technology solutions I hadn’t discovered, or uncovered previously to help fill some gaps.

One of my favorites: packagemapping.com, which takes the dowdy line-by-line, city-by-city tracking information provided from UPS and FedEx and plots that information onto a Google Map. PackageMapping works with about 12 other lesser-known services, too (Purolater?!).

There are a bunch of services that do something similar, but this is the one I latched on to.

This way, you can obsess over why whatever-it-is isn’t here, or there, yet.

We’ll talk about some other alternates in upcoming posts… Teaming dozens among the  WKF fanbase—any favorites? Feedback!

Deprivation: Day Nine (and how Prowl works with Google Voice)

Configuration day.

My new iPhone came in the morning. Thanks, Mr. FedEx guy.

Then came all the usual unboxing, powering up, activation and initial syncing. All this went relatively smoothly, but it was clear that this sync was going to take a long, long while. I canceled the sync midway and just took the phone to work half-baked.

Many things worked really well. Other things, surprisingly, didn’t. I had to reassociate some of my email accounts, but not all of them. My Exchange configuration for work email simply wasn’t there at all, so I had to redo that from scratch.

We’ve previously discussed in this space my having been a Grand Central, and now Google Voice user, for about eighteen months now. Google Voice finally opened to the general public last week.

Like everyone else using this innovative platform, the lack of a fully-fledged Google Voice iPhone App has really cramped my style and adds complication to an already complicated mechanism, ultimately designed to make things easier. (Note to the peanut gallery, yes, I know all this and more can be mine with a jailbroken iPhone with these Apps purchased through Cydia. I know. I know.)

A key drawback of Google Voice without a dedicated iPhone App is notification. Specifically, if a Google Voice app existed, when you received a Google Voice-directed voicemail message or text (SMS), your iPhone would alert you through notifications that it came in. Absent this capability, the Google Voice service can be configured to send a traditional SMS to the phone. This is a good proxy, but tends to burn up SMS messages like wildfire.

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Note to readers: it’s about to get super-geeky here… You may want to pick up after the next break if you want to save yourself a minor headache. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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I’ve been impressed with the promise of Prowl, which bills itself as an iPhone Growl notification service. For those unfamiliar, Growl is the open source common system-wide notification service for Macs. On Windows machines, practically every application has its own distinct mechanism to alert users to things going on. On the Mac, developers don’t deal with this—they tell their programs to hand off an alert to Growl, which runs in the background as a common service, and Growl does the alerting in the form of an alert bubble on screen, audible chime or other scriptable behavior to tell you that, for example, your latest DropBox document completed syncing.

Prowl takes the Growl implementation one final mile by forwarding the Mac-based Growl notification and sending it via Apple’s iPhone push notification service to your iPhone. For most notifications, this requires you to keep a Mac always on to be a server of sorts, a sentinel to forward notifications. A special API is configurable in the form of an add-on service called VoiceGrowl (I know, these names are usefully ridiculous). VoiceGrowl integrates into Prowl such that a Mac need not be in the loop in order to get Google Voice notifications sent to an iPhone through the iPhone push notification service. A bit of digital trickery ties all this together courtesy of Google Voice forwarding a notification to GMail, which is looking for a filtered string identifying the SMS as from Google Voice and in turn forwarding that to the VoiceGrowl servers.

(Surely this space would be even more useful with a diagram explaining this Rube Goldberg concoction, but someone is going to pay me before I spend two hours with Visio or OmniGraffle working it up. It’s painful enough that actually got all this working in the first place, and am now writing about it. I’m just sayin’.)

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Note to readers: Stand down Geek Alert. Stand Down.

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When set up properly, it works like this: your Aunt Sally sends you an SMS to your Google Voice number. On your iPhone, you get a notification alert, and if you click the “View” button on the alert, the Google Voice web app spawns so you can see the message and reply as you normally would. The behavior is essentially identical to getting and replying to a regular text message, except you use the Google Voice webapp and service to send and receive instead of the iPhone’s native Messaging app and AT&T.

All this work to avoid giving AT&T an extra, audacious $5 or $10 a month for a higher text messaging limit. It should be stated for the record that given AT&T’s current text messaging rates (really I should only pick on AT&T here, it’s all the carriers, basically), platinum on the spot market is cheaper. Text messaging is like buying sugar. Twenty-five cents for a packet of sugar; Twenty-five cents for a pound of sugar; Twenty-five cents for a ton of sugar drop shipped to any location on planet Earth. The economics of marketing defy ordinary economies of distribution. But I digress.

The point.

The point is that after two years with my old iPhone 3G, I hadn’t appreciated just now much I customized its behavior. It was a bespoke implementation to be the best made-for-me Swiss Army tool possible.

Nine days without it made my life very different very quickly.

And configuring the 3G’s replacement may take a little fiddling… or maybe a lot.

Deprivation: Day Eight

Trust but verify.

Ronald Reagan used this term, an approximate translation of the Russian, doveryai, no proveryai, when discussing arms control with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

It wasn’t until tonight that I realized how frequently I reply on my own portable electronic reference to verify facts, validate truths and memorialize important moments. Perhaps centuries from now, historians will note ours as an age when even the rich stopped using professional biographers and instead captured their own touchstone events firsthand.

Tonight’s story begins with am exchange with a woman with whom I do occasional business. She asks, “hey, why didn’t you send me that person’s contact information like you said you would?” She’s referring to a conversation from a couple of months back. I’m absolutely certain I did send the informaiton, exactly as requested. I distinctly remember drafting the message.

But I have no proof. Ordinarily, it’s a few flicks and swipes, and voila, here’s pocket-sized, irrefutable evidence of the prior communicae. Or at worst, an immediate opportunity to correct this oversight, and provide that information digitally on the spot.

I can do neither.

The conversation quickly devolves on this unusually cool Washington, DC evening into my recent experiences without a phone—the talisman of our time. I note that on one hand it’s incredibly empowering—for the moment, I am exactly where I want to be, and I’m forgoing all other opportunities without qualification.

On the other hand, it’s incredibly limiting, not knowing if somehow I’m needed by someone I love.

For now I’ll have to trust, and (later) verify, that everything’s ok.

Deprivation: Day Seven

Consider it delayed gratification.

One of the most profound differences between being constantly connected and not is the ability to make connections, coordinate, and make near-spontaneous plans on the fly. Absent a phone, text messaging and email, my life has become decidedly 1970s in approach.

Today’s example: work related, after hours happy hour. Typical. Went to local watering hole. Met up with the usual cast of characters. But as things were winding down, I realized the usual habit of checking in with the extended social circle of others who may also be out-and-about simply wasn’t an option.

I would have needed to make those plans in advance. And thinking about it, I can’t recall a situation in recent memory where I thought, ok—I’ll stay at this social gathering exactly 80 minutes, so I can meet up with that other group I want to connect with at exactly whatever-o-clock. We don’t make plans that way in the 21st Century. In fact, one never really knows who might be out-and-about. Or where they are. We don’t have to ask until the spirit moves us. And when it does, nearly immediate gratification for that spirit is not far behind.

So my evening had an abrupt end and I went home. I likely would have done that anyway, but it wasn’t until the next morning that I knew I missed an important opportunity to connect with others.

Deprivation: Day Six

Disrupted. That’s the prevailing theme of the day.

In my line of work, I spend quite a lot of time with clients talking about their technical issues. Sometimes, it’s just handy to have at your fingertips a good solution to show as an example. It’s usually not meant to be the answer. Just a plausible proof-of-concept to demonstrate that there’s at least one good way to address the situation.

And clients naturally expect that you have that good answer right on the tip of your tongue. All the time. And that’s not too unreasonable: my clients’ companies are paying my company real money for the courtesy of my presence on any given day. The least I can do to hold up my end of the bargain is to give everyone good value for their money.

Part of that razzmatazz involves knowing exactly where the tools of the trade can be found. Right now.

Doctors seem to have this Mary Poppins-esque bag with more space inside than volume outside. Magicians have their stuff, too. For consultants, it has a superhero utility belt feeling. Batman isn’t completely useless without the utility belt, but his options are far more limited. And when the batarang isn’t available, Batman needs to get creative speedy quick to stop the Penguin.

Today’s revelation came in the form of using the camera on my laptop—which I almost never use—in the place of my camera phone to take photos of a whiteboard diagram. Awkward, but effective.

Let’s just hope Batman doesn’t need much more than ingenuity, Swiss cheese and twine for his next surprise. Would hate to drop the laptop on someone’s head.

Deprivation: Day 5.5

Fell asleep on the couch last night.

Woke up at 2:40 in the dark to stumble to bed.

First let’s clear some email and spam… Oh wait, what’s this?

“We are pleased to inform you that your iPhone has shipped. Please check below for your confirmed delivery date.”

I don’t know where Shenzhen China is, but it’s my favorite place in the world at this moment. Ni Hao, Shenzhen.

Deprivation: Day Five

Back at work today. The theme of the day is integration. Or to be more specific, how mobile technology has become central to how I do my work. It’s had an unexpectedly isolated feeling—even within the crowd.

As a business consultant, my colleagues and I do a lot of work on white boards. After a meeting today, my usual end-of-meeting practice of taking a camera phone photo of the whiteboards and sharing with fellow participants was interrupted.

The stack of images that I have available to me in my own private cloud are an indispensable reference of what was discussed on a particular day, in a particular place. But what to do when the indispensable must be, well, dispensed with?

Walking back from lunch, I have a soda bottle cap with me. I collect these Coke Rewards points. No idea what I’ll ever do with my points, but I collect. And there’s an app for that, so I usually capture and post those points at the time of consumption. Today, I was holding on to that bottle cap, waiting for a later opportunity to find a computer.

I’m a Google Voice user, which is incredibly useful for a consultant like me who may be at any number of work and client sites in a given day. Being able to have calls follow me, rather than the other way around, is a useful gain for me and my clients.

But today, I’m just out for lunch. That call will go to voicemail. The voicemail system will transcribe that call and send it to an email box that I can’t monitor from my lunch-time restaurant space. I’ll check that voicemail…later, when I catch up to it.

Sure hope no one needs me just then. Or, if I’m unexpectedly on the side of the road with a disabled vehicle—hope I don’t need someone else, either.

Deprivation: Day Four

Today, deprivation took an ugly turn toward desperation.

It all started innocently enough. A completely normal trip to the Giant Toy Store for diapers. Before leaving the house: “Any last requests? Remember, I don’t have a phone…”

I arrive at the Giant Toy Store. Oh great, a price cut on the diaper mega box! But wait, here’s an extra special, limited-time only rotundo pack with freebie storage bin. Let’s see… the unit price on the rotundo pack is slightly worse, but you do get that nifty storage bin. But do I need one of those? 

On the other hand, a $10 gift card is mine for buying the mega box, which makes the unit cost per diaper a little cheaper… but by how much exactly—oh how I wish I had a calculator…. but drat, that’s in my nonexistent phone. Would be nice to call home to bounce this rotundo bin idea around, or even a text….

Fast forward to bedtime.

Reading books.

Kids are playing with a very old GSM cellphone that has since become a toy.

Brushing teeth.

Wait a minute! GSM cell phone? Maybe it could take my old iPhone SIM card… I still have that! Maybe, just maybe I could get by for just a few days with this old clunker. Reduce REUSE recycle, right?

Open the back cover. Nice—battery is still there. Glad my kids haven’t lost it. Or eaten it. Whew. 

Now where’s that charger?

Oh, the charger. Crap. Pretty sure I tossed it.

Hrmm. Maybe, just maybe, my super-duper-universal-multivoltage charger will work. Uh. No… Looks like Motorola made a special one-off plug for this phone. It’s a different shape than—than, well everything!

This is what’s become of me. So desperate for regaining my digital lifestyle, I’ll slum for a 10-year old, probably dead, very likely malfunctioning phone, just to get my fix. What would people think if I use this monster in public? It’s practically a museum piece. Worse, it isn’t a museum piece—if it was a brick phone at least I’d get some attention. Of course, the analog network is gone now so I can watch nonexistent local digital TV channels… and that old Motorola brick is best used as a brick. Literally.

Oh the humanity!

Calgon take me away!

I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!

Johnny Five needs input!

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue…. (with thanks to Lloyd Bridges).