A Pile Of Blog

What Will People Say When I’m Gone?

The recent surprising and untimely death (is death ever timely?) of a local 21-year-old was sad, to be sure.  Head-on collision, passenger in surgery, the other driver in ICU.  But what caught my attention, and what made it even more sad to me, was the initial reaction of his Facebook friends.  OK, sure, most of them probably knew him from school or from the wine bar where he worked, but many were friends who had known him longer.  And yes, he’s only 21 so it’s not like he had time to win a Nobel Prize or two.  But still, it made me think.

Almost all of the reactions were brief.  Most repeated the same two or three phrases one is expected to say.  The reactions that contained the most original content were generally in the form of jokes (because he would have appreciated that) or funny stories about a shared memory.  However, those were few and far between.

And that got me to thinking - what would *my* friends say on my Facebook wall if I were to die today in an accident?  It’s a sobering thought, and who wants to be sober?

Musings on the future of print media

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how I might be able to somehow cash in on the whole iPhone/iPod/iPad phenomenon.  Hell, I’d be happy to make $50 a month off of it.  It’s a huge ecosystem.  80 MILLION devices so far, 3 BILLION apps downloaded.  People who have never used the Objective C programming language before spend six weeks creating a game and get 4 MILLION downloads - at $2.99 each.  Do the math.  Time to quit the day job.

Unfortunately, suffering as I do from a touch of the ADHD, my mind tends to wander.  It makes it difficult to focus on a plan or a strategy.  It helps me do big-picture thinking though.  And I’ve come up with some observations.

I have long envisioned a way for books, magazines and newspapers to go digital.  The first time I saw e-ink technology in a flexible format I knew what I wanted.  One sheet of plastic with e-ink tech in it.  On the left-hand side would be a rigid plastic spine.  In this spine would be a memory card, a few buttons and a USB port.  You plug this device in to a PC and synchronize it.  Voila.  Read all you want on the subway or the back porch.  No wifi or 3g needed.  Subscribe online.  This sort of setup fits perfectly with an iTunes-like subscribe-and-download model.  I’m sure I’m not the only one to envision things in this way, but you wouldn’t know it to look at how long it has taken for such a product to hit the market.

Most of the work in this realm seems to have targeted books.  The devices have been small, heavy and expensive.  DAMNED expensive.  The Kindle was the first one to get to a lower price-point.  The Kindle reader app for the iPhone is free.  The phone and it’s data plan is not.  And yet none of these matched my vision for what I thought was the future of print media, and almost completely ignored newspapers and magazines.

And now, finally, after all these years the device I imagined so many years ago has come to the marketplace!  Well, ok, it’s not for sale yet, but it debuted at this year’s CES show in Las Vegas and they have a web site.  It’s 9x11, a quarter of an inch thick and weighs a pound.  It has 3G and WiFi plus a USB slot.  Very high-res, SD memory card slot, 4GB internal memory, speaker, earplug jack.  Full touchscreen!

It’s called the Skiff.

Sounds awesome!  But there is no price or release date yet.  And I can’t help but wonder what the Skiff executives thought as they watched Steve Jobs’ iPad presentation.  I’m pretty sure there was a sinking feeling when they heard the $499 price.  I really like the way this device looks, and yet it may be a case of too little, too late.

The iPad has a few advantages here.  It is about the same size, 1/4 inch thicker, a half pound heavier.  But I don’t think that’s enough of a difference to give the Skiff much help.  The iPad has color.  And a web browser.  And an app store with over 140,000 apps.  And a book store.  Oh, and one more thing…

Interactivity

One thing that happened while people were trying to figure out how to digitize print media is that the average reader is no longer satisfied with static content.  The web browser has trained us all to expect hyperlinks that allow us to immediately *see* and read details about footnotes and references.  To make matters worse, they also expect animation and color and video and audio.  And that is exactly what print media has provided the average reader on their web pages and apps.  I can see photo galleries and watch video clips from the NY Times web site.  So why should anyone think that I would want to go back to reading static non-interactive content in 32 shades of grey?

So for print media to take their writers and reporters and survive this transition to mobile digital consumption they are going to need to provide the reader with an experience that is at least as interactive as their own web sites.  And that requires more than e-ink.  The iPad might be the answer.  The App Store allows publishers to create an app that will deliver their content and also allow readers to push a button to subscribe and make purchases.  They don’t want to be an ebook on an iBooks shelf.  They need to be separate apps.  The larger publishing houses should seriously consider one big app which readers can use to subscribe to all of their magazines and newspapers.  The Fox app anyone?  Times app?  This will require some thinking because there will be a transition period.  And certainly the iPad will never take over the entire mobile space for digital reading, but the trend is definitely moving toward slim, lightweight interactive devices for consumption.  Publishers need to figure out how to monetize that, pronto!

The Magical and Revolutionary iPad

A lot of people just don’t get it yet.  And I think there is a reason that almost every person on stage at the Apple event on Wednesday kept talking about holding it (the iPad) in your hands.  They’ve been working on this for years, and they have come to understand that just *telling* or even showing someone an iPad doesn’t do it justice.  They understand that only when you hold one and start using it will you ‘get it.’  And that’s where the magic comes in.

Think about it for a minute.  How did you use cell phones before the iPhone?  You punched physical buttons and talked, period.  Or, if you were on the cutting edge maybe you had one of those spiffy Windows Mobile ‘smart’ phones where you poked at the screen with an itty-bitty pen, if you hadn’t managed to lose it yet.  I had a few of those phones, and I remember how I was always attempting to use my finger on the screen to avoid having to pull the stylus out.  It didn’t work very well.  I also remember giving up on ever trying to see the screen in sunlight.  I also remember how damned difficult it was to ever find any sort of application anyone was willing to make for it.  And if you did find one, and were willing to spend a LOT of money for it, good luck getting it loaded on to the phone.  It was just one big hassle-filled experience, yet I was willing to jump through all the hoops because I’m a geek and I love gadgets.  But never in a million years would I be able to get my wife to use one.  She would have laughed at the idea.

And yet now my wife is a huge fan of one of the most advanced smart phones in the world, because the iPhone changed the whole game of how users interact with it.  It’s not so hard.  Apps are a few pokes away.  Easy.  It’s all about easy.  And yet the iPad has more detractors than the initial iPhone did, possibly exceeding the detractors of the original iPod!  They are adamant that it will either completely fail or will stagnate in mediocrity.  Here’s why I think they have it all wrong.

First, it seems that they expected some sort of miraculous swiss army knife type of hardware device that is laptop, tablet, phone and Kindle all in one package.  They wanted it to run on Verizon too.  No device could ever meet all these expectations.

Second, they misunderstand the iPad’s target uses.  Steve Jobs spelled them out in detail:  Browsing, Email, Photos, Video, Music, Games, Ebooks.  And yet they still insist on saying things like “It’s literally a bigger iPod Touch - for what?”

Third, they miss some things that weren’t specifically said out loud at the recent event.  For example, web pages with multitouch.  Forget the iPhone - the only multitouch needed was zoom.  Too small.  But imagine a web page on a laptop screen, no keyboard, no mouse.  All interaction is by touch.  I can even see a complete redesign of all web pages to be optimized for a touch screen experience.  Take a web site and put it all in an app.  Informational ebooks, make them an app, or make them a paid ‘extra’ tab in your app.  There are a lot of possibilities here.

So I guess I can’t stop the whiners, and I’m definitely tired of attempting to explain my thoughts on the subject to raging nerds, but those are my thoughts.  I look forward to revisiting this topic in June or July.  Hopefully by then I’ll have my own iPad and can expand on the topic.

How T.O. Saved My Life

OK folks, I mentioned a rant, and here it is.  And like any true rant, it isn’t necessarily well thought out, and it might end up not having much of a point, but after writing it, I feel better, and that’s what ranting is all about, right?

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I have always considered myself a true sports fan.  Well, to be more accurate, a true football fan.  And although I’ve dabbled with a few other sports, I’ve always gravitated to football.  I root for schools where I live, or where I grew up.  My own alma mater, of course.  I even root for Texas A&M because my wife graduated from there.  I also tend to root for colleges from my home state (Texas) when they play schools from other states.  But I have developed no hard and fast allegiances to any of them except for one, and that team is the Dallas Cowboys.  But more about them later.

One other thing that I can observe about myself is that I my emotions are closely tied to my team’s fate.    I soar when they win, but I hate it when they lose, and it effects my mood much more than it should.  After every loss, I immediately regret having wasted three hours of my life.  But I enjoy on-field displays of emotion, pride, determination, and I have always enjoyed end-zone celebrations.  I have often wondered why the NFL penalizes such displays.  It makes no sense to me.  Which brings me to T.O.

I really did not know a lot about Terrell Owens before he joined the Cowboys in 2006.  I did know he had celebrated on the Star in the middle of Texas Stadium, and I had seen his infamous celebration where he signed a football in the end zone.  And since I enjoy celebrations and creativity, I was excited to have him on my team.  But from the very first day Jerry Jones brought him on board he was heavily criticized by the local sports media.  I guess it comes with being hung with the ‘America’s Team’ moniker but the media here are always critical of the team and its ownership, even in the middle of winning streaks.  Nothing less than a Super Bowl every year is sufficient to calm them down.  And T.O. was fresh meat.

Flash forward to the end of last season.  It ended badly, the promise of 2007 collided with the ugly reality of 2008.  Jerry Jones made some changes.  He encouraged Wade Phillips to fire the defensive coordinator and take on that duty himself.  In player changes they brought in Keith Brookings and cut people with high salary caps and injuries later in their careers.  But you would never know it because the only player the press talked about was the release of Terrell Owens.  He was still under contract and his salary still counted against the Cowboy’s cap.  To the press, this meant he was untradeable and they once again trotted out their favorite argument against him:  locker-room poison.

So they finally got what they wanted, and the future looked rosy.  But I searched in vain for any quote from any Cowboys player who would go on record agreeing with this assessment of T.O. and to this day, a year later, I have yet to find one.  Instead player after player talked of how much T.O. meant to them, how hard he worked, how much he helped them.  So whence this idea that T.O. poisoned locker rooms?  Evidently the only place that this idea lives is in the minds of sports writers and talk-show hosts.  And for some reason, the sports press in Dallas really likes their players to be well-mannered.  In the hey-day of the triple-threat days of the early 90’s, when Troy, Emmitt and Michael were dominating the NFL they never hesitated to tear into the other players whose off-the-field exploits regularly landed them in the news, and in trouble with the law.  The sporting media would just as soon have run them all out of town, and would gladly have traded the three Super Bowl wins for them.  Around Dallas, they like their players full of talent and simultaneously full of meekness, humility and manners.

Terrell Owens never got busted with a van full of pot, was never caught in a room full of coke and hookers, never had to be interviewed regarding a teammate’s death, never drove drunk and wrecked his car.  There was one incident where he possibly attempted suicide, but that’s a far cry from injuring or endangering others.  And yet he set the press on edge like no other Cowboy ever did.  They picked at every misstep on the field, they used his willingness to speak to the press as an opportunity to bait him into saying something they could use to stir up controversy.  After two full seasons, they got their wish.  A series of rumors were floated that there was disharmony between T.O., the tight end Jason Witten and quarterback Tony Romo.  And at the end of the season T.O. was cut.  The press had a field day, denigrated him and publicly stated that Dallas didn’t trade him because they got no offers.  No one could possibly want T.O.

And it was at this point that T.O. opened my eyes to the true nature of the press, at least around here.  He didn’t fit their idea of the right type of player, so they hated him.  And they were wrong, and I saw it.  For starters, I told any one who would listen that I would be surprised if T.O. went a week without a new team.  As it turned out, he didn’t last the weekend.  Buffalo signed him for one year and $6.5 Million.  And in the middle of the season, some Cowboys players were still exchanging text messages with him, indicating that he was encouraging them.

So now I was faced with a problem.  To continue to root for the Cowboys without Terrell I would have to forgive the press for their treatment of him, forgive Jerry Jones for using him as a scapegoat and forgive Tony Romo and Jason Witten for whatever role they had in it all.  So I didn’t.  I gave up on my team.  I actually enjoyed the first half of the season because it was evidence that cutting T.O. did nothing to help this team.  I was convinced that the real problem was the coaching staff, and I still can’t stand Wade Phillips’ good ol’ boy persona.  And yet somehow the players managed to man up and get their act together and not only win the division, but win their first playoff game in thirteen years!

And yet I feel no pride.  Their success is bittersweet for me.  It’s all sunshine and rainbows for Jerry Jones, a great year for his brand-new expensive stadium.  Wade Phillips is unlikely to be fired now, especially if Dallas can defeat Minnesota on the road.  Tony has gained some status on the offense as a leader and T.O. is all but forgotten.  But the magic just isn’t there for me any more.  And I’m glad, because that strong connection between my own emotions and the fate of the Dallas Cowboys is broken, at least for now, and they can win or lose without any effect on me.   And for that, I have Terrell Owens to thank.

Kickin’ it old skool

You’d think I would learn to act my age.  Last night the wife and I attended a concert where I’m quite sure we were the oldest people in the whole joint.  It was loud, it was non-stop electro/dance/hip-hop.  We were dressed to party, and we did!  We took it easy on the alcohol which was good since it was an hour drive home after the concert was over.  No, we didn’t even try the after-party.  We also forgot our ear plugs, so my ears are still ringing twelve hours later.

So - learned our lesson, right?  You would think I woke up this morning full of regret, ready to spend the day listening to classical music (if any) and reading a book, right?

Well, no.  Actually I spent the morning drinking coffee and editing and uploading video clips that I took last night.  When I finally got around to making breakfast around 1:00pm I put on my favorite Pandora station based on a song from one of our favorite artists, LMFAO.  Specifically, the station is based on “I’m in Miami, bitch!”  And as I started working in the kitchen the new song from Kesha came on, “Tik Tok.”  I just love that song.  I turned it up.  I danced.

So evidently we have not learned any kind of lesson here regarding acting one’s age.  If anything it has encouraged us.  I like dancing to a hot groove.  So sue me.

Act your age if you want.  Wear short pants and tennis shoes with knee-high black dress socks if you want.  Long for the days of Elvis and Frankie Valli if you want.  I’ll stick with head-banging club tracks, wine, cigars and acting a fool.  Why?

Cuz thas’ how I roll!