Are We Absurdly Wired as a People?
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Technology
Allow me to set the scene, I was sitting at my usual position in a pew at church this morning. The person speaking at the pulpit was talking about music in the Gospel (the Mormon one) and was at that time mentioning how into Posicore she was. While I was laughing to myself and then explaining to my father, who was sitting next to me, what Posicore is, my Blackberry started vibrating. I ignored it at first, figuring that it was just an email that I could check later.
Unfortunately, it started going again and again. It vibrated to the point when my leg started to feel numb and I just had to know what was going on. I got it out of my pocket to reveal that my friend Nick, whom you may, but probably didn’t, hear on DuoRadio a few times, had been messaging me on AIM. I don’t know why the AIM app was even on, I usually have it set to invisible because I don’t like to IM away from a computer keyboard. Here’s what Nick had to say:
Hey dude, I’m on my new iPod touch now, this is wild.
Wow, what a wonderful world we all live in. Nick was able to send a message on his iPod touch over Wi-Fi from his dorm room at UMaine that went over the Internets to AOL’s central servers and then back over the Internets to T-Mobile who sent it to me over their wireless network to my Blackberry while I was sitting in Church listening to my friend’s talk about her love for music and Posicore.
Are you freaking kidding me? Is this what we as a society have accomplished? Clearly, finding a cure for AIDS is too complicated and better treatments for Cancer is another 20 or 30 years away. But, sending each other annoying messages over vastly complicated and expensive network infrastructure, well, the future is here everybody! And that’s not all, now when we see someone in an Airport Terminal wearing a messy clown wig and begging passers by for spare change, we don’t have to call all of our friends and tell them about it with our voices. Nope, we can just send them all a picture at the click of a button, unless you have the same phone my Dad has, then good luck.
OK, rant over. By the way, the above links for the Blackberry (Curve 8320) and the iPod touch are to my Amazon Associates account. I wanted to try this out and see if I could make any money at this whole blogging thing without annoying banner ads all over the place that no one would click anyway. Is linking to Amazon in a blog post not acceptable on the Internet? Anyone have any thoughts? If not, then I won’t ever do it again, but you have my word, I only link to products that I have used or owned and can recommend.
How Reliable is the Internet?
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Technology
Look at it, the Fail Whale, the ultimate symbol of crisis on the Internet today. Every time this shows up online, a million Twitter addicted souls cry out in agony as their only means of communication is severed for the duration. Because clearly, when Twitter goes down, which happens a lot, MySpace, Facebook, Email, AIM, and the United States Postal Service go down as well.
I don’t understand why people freak the heck out when they see the Fail Whale, or the much more common “Twitter is over capacity” message. It’s not a big deal, calm down and have a warm drink (Hot Chocolate really calms my nerves, but I almost can’t stand the sugar) and read a good book (I recommend John Hodgman’s “Areas of my Expertise“). While you are doing that, consider all of the people through out different areas of the world, such as Africa, South America, parts of Asia, who don’t have access to Twitter or the Internet at all because it’s either too expensive or the infrastructure doesn’t exist yet.
But this does bring up a good question, is the Internet reliable? We do so much over the Internet, emails, chatting, blogging, podcasting, music downloading, video streaming, you can even solicit sex online (I know, crazy right?). Things that the Internet and the infrastructure it rides on weren’t actually built to do. Most internet traffic goes over phone lines via dial-up and DSL, a network that was designed to carry analog voice only. Now, the crazy thing is that with the advent of Voice over the Internet (or VoIP), we now send voice over the Internet which transmits over phone lines that were meant to carry voice. Of course, that sounds completely ridiculous.
But back to Twitter and their 98% uptime in 2007 (99.9% is considered the average uptime for any online system). Twitter is only text, and they are having issues scaling with their users. How are we supposed to do audio and video if a text service has trouble scaling? How does Ustream provide 1.5 million veiwer hours of live streaming video a month? That’s massive! And all it takes to bring down a system like that is to have just one more viewer than your servers and bandwidth can actually handle. And with a local television station, you don’t go down unless some drunk guy in a pick up truck runs into your transmitting tower. That, or some clumsy intern trips over a power cord in the studio while fetching coffee for the news anchor who acts like he makes as much as Matt Lauer and owns the station as a result.
Religion and Technology Don’t Mix
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Technology
I’ve got to say, John C. Dvorak’s Dvorak Uncensored is a great resource for what I would call “back door” news. You know, things that the Mainstream American News Organizations don’t report on because “real” Americans aren’t interested in it. But this story that I have found is another prime example of how people around the world are continuing to take Religion too seriously, by imposing old and outdated ideas and rules in the modern technologically advanced new world. Apparently, a group in northern India has issued a “fatwa” on mobile phone use in the Muslim world.
Never heard of a “fatwa”? Neither have I, which is why I did what any sensible person with a computer and an internet connection would do and looked it up on Wikipedia. According to the article, as of today (April 14th, 2009), a fatwa is “…a a religious opinion on Islamic law issued by an Islamic scholar.” It can be binding or non-binding depending on the sect of Islam you are in and the status of the scholar in that sect. Well these scholars have spent countless hours contemplating the ways of Islam and the laws in place and have decided that no one is allowed to have an aayat (a verse of the Qur’an) as their ring tone.
The rational behind this, is that if you use an aayat as your ring tone and someone calls you and you pick up before the cell phone is finished reciting the aayat, you are in violation of the laws of Islam. And of course, if you allow the phone to just finish the ring tone before picking it up, you risk two things. First, the ring tone could start playing again and you would have to keep waiting until it’s finished again and second, the aayat could be so long that by the time it finishes, the person calling has given up and hung up. By the way, the fatwa also includes a clause against setting your phone to vibrate when you are praying. Because it would “distract” you from what you are doing.
In my experience, if you are praying correctly, nothing could possibly distract you. Unless the cell phone’s vibrating causes your leg to jump up in some sort of weird reflex, that would be really distracting. Why do the larger world religions seem to be at odds with technology in their teachings while smaller organizations are trying to embrace the same?
Why am I on the phone with P. Diddy?
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Technology
This is a note to the select few of you out there who have decided that it is necessary to pay their cell phone provider $1.50 a month just so that all of your friends can hear the latest Panic at the Disco single when they try to call you: You are all idiots.
First of all, the audio quality over a cellular phone line is terrible. I can’t tell whether I’m listening to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” or “Smack That” by Akon. And no offense to you, but your taste in music is awful. If I have to listen to “500 Miles” by the Proclaimers every time I call you, eventually, I’m going to stop calling you.
And does the cell phone company really need another $1.50 every month? At what point after paying $40 for a voice plan, $25 for a data plan, and $15 for unlimited texting and picture/video messaging, did another $1.50 sound like a necessary expenditure? Can you even do math? That’s $18 a year! For nothing! It doesn’t even cost the cell phone company a penny to implement!
So, you all do me a huge favor. Call your cellular provider and cancel that thing, “CallerTunes” or whatever it’s called. Everyone else will thank you.