#215 - Another Day Older

"St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go / I owe my soul to the company store." - Tennessee Ernie Ford - "Sixteen Tons"

Today is my birthday. Today, I enter another decade of this chronological journey we call life. A great deal of change has occurred in that time.

When I was born, a lifelong military man was President and just over four years away from warning about the dangers of acquiring unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex and the potential for what he called "the potential rise of misplaced power." Today, it could be argued that those dangers have become reality, although not perhaps in the ways he envisioned.

When I was born, life was for many of us black and white and not simply the way in which we watched television. A large part of the nation was literally divided by the color line, and the differences between good and evil were, we thought, more clearly defined.

Today, many of us no longer watch television, instead getting our entertainment from our phones. That technological change has been accompanied by an apparent attempt to in some ways reclaim the "simplicity" of the decade in which I was born, complete with the calls by some to restore some modern-day equivalent of that "separate but equal" time.

Then, as now, we developed and shared technological advances not always aware of or even thinking about the potential ramifications or dangers for future generations. Then, as now, whole groups of people are fighting for the rights they argue were granted them in the Constitution.

The divisions present when I was born were less visible than they are today. In that sense, that decade was a simpler time. There were not dozens, if not hundreds (even thousands) of places from which to gather information available to the average person.

Today, we have the 24-hour news cycle, bloggers whom some people quote as if they were experts or trained journalists, a massive distrust of the so-called "liberal media" (so called because mainstream media is controlled by a handful of large corporations), and various Internet outlets for "fake news," many of which seem to have no other goal than to create and facilitate dissension and disagreement. (The fact that The Drudge Report is only one letter removed from dredge and rhymes with sludge is not lost on me.)

Some of our most important institutions are amongst the least admired or respected while we seemingly revere sports figures (basically entertainers) who make as much (if not more) money in a single year as many people make in a lifetime. At the same time, the gap between the richest and the poorest of us seems to grow exponentially while the middle gets squeezed even more tightly.

Us baby boomers (those of us born between 1946 and 1964) were dubbed the "Me Generation" in the 1970s. For many, the focus on self-realization and self-fulfillment during our youth has given way to a different kind of focus on difference and a desire to keep those who are not like us out or separate.

Then again, perhaps it has always been like this. When Europeans came to America, they moved to control, eradicate, and segregate Native Americans who wished to hold on to their lands and their traditions. In the decades since I was born, America has attempted to bring (or perhaps impose) our way of life and our values to others who did not ask for it, helping to fuel conflicts in Vietnam and the Middle East in a sort of unholy crusade to impose the modern-day religion of capitalism on unbelievers.

I've lived long enough now to know that one answer does not fit all and to conclude that kneeling at the altar of the almighty dollar has the potential to do more damage than not (forests, waterways, skies have all paid the price).

Socrates once said "All things in moderation, including moderation." We seem to live in a world and a time of extremes (extreme wealth, extreme poverty, extreme politics, extreme religion). Perhaps a little moderation is in order - moderation of political views, of prejudices, of religious views, of greed, of damage to the environment.

While we plan and race to send expeditions to Mars and to the Universe beyond, perhaps we should take a bit more care of the world we currently inhabit. Otherwise, the problems we have failed to deal with and resolve here will be sure to follow us wherever we end up.

#182 - Taking Chances, New Toys, and Other Random Thoughts

Several days ago, I wrote a little something about technology, touching on a few good and bad points from my vantage point as a Baby Boomer miles away from friends and family. As I recall, that was the first post I had ever written and published from my Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 tablet. This will be the second.

One thing has changed for me technologically since that prior entry. I have now paired my tablet with a Bluetooth-enabled keyboard. The keyboard, while a bit smaller in overall size than a traditional computer keyboard, has close to normal sized keys, meaning that even someone as fat-fingered as I can be is able to type without too much frustration.

The keyboard was fairly easy to pair with my tablet. Within about 30 seconds, I was up and typing. In fact, the hardest part of getting the keyboard up and running for me was finding the two AAA batteries needed to power the keyboard.

The keyboard itself is about eleven inches wide, so it is a little wider than my table in widescreen mode. However, both are small enough and easy enough to balance that I can write a blog entry from an easy chair, as I am doing here.

Obviously, Android and Bluetooth have been around long enough that choosing to use either technology or both is not a great leap of faith. Enough people have come before that new users are unlikely to face any insurmountable hurdles when adopting these technologies for the first time.

Technology is certainly one area where early adopters at least are asked to take a chance on new devices, new programs, or new ways of doing things. As with anything new, there is always the risk of failure or at least the chance that things will not go as expected, as hoped, or as planned.

Of course, this is the case with any new venture, activity, or risk taken. I experienced those fears, as well as the relief when the worst did not come to pass, when I ventured onto the stage of the monthly Idaho Songwriters Association Forum the last Tuesday of February. The forum is an opportunity for Idaho songwriters, young and old, experienced or just beginning, to try out material before an actual audience.

My wife and I attended our first forum in November, and I came away thinking I could be up there and thinking I'd like to try it at least once. For me, the biggest problem was not a lack of material; I've been writing for 40 years. The biggest obstacle is the fact that I don't really write music. Thanks to my wife's help, I was able to get something I'd written into presentable form and was able to offer it up for public consumption. Thankfully, it was well received, although you never know how people will respond until you put something out there. The reception was positive enough that I am now working up a few other songs for future forums.

It is now several days later. The earlier material has just been left dormant, in some sort of electronic limbo, waiting for me to decide how or whether to finish the entry. I guess I've decided to finish it.

This morning, I went to start up my laptop only to find that, while the hard drive would spin up and the laptop would make all of the normal noises of booting, it was for all practical purposes a paperweight, simply because I could see nothing but a dark screen. Preliminary research indicates the CPU may have gone bad. Oh, joy!

My laptop is by no means new; I bought it about four years ago, but I had hoped it might last another year or so. The challenge for me in finding a new laptop, aside from not really wanting to spend any money, is the fact that I do not run Windows; I run Linux and have done so for more than a decade.

Unfortunately, it is hard sometimes to find a machine that is fully Linux compatible, a task made slightly more difficult with the advent of Secure Boot and UEFI-compliant BIOS. Don't ask me what either means or adds to a machine. All I know is that it make the challenge of a Linux user when selecting a new machine that much more difficult.

Sitting here thinking about the challenge ahead in terms of finding a new computer, I am reminded slightly of the ongoing Net Neutrality debate and of the old adage "Knowledge is Power." There are those who think knowledge and technology should be accessible to all people equally and those who believe those willing to pay more should get more Perhaps an oversimplification, but you get the point. As a Linux user, I guess I would fall into the equal accessibility camp, which is why I am not a big fan of Secure Boot or UEFI.

Perhaps there is a bit of Don Quixote in me wen it comes to such things, especially as I have neither political clout or big bucks to pump into any PR campaign. However, I have hope that a majority of people will reach the conclusion that equal access to information and technology is in everyone's best interests just as I have hope that I will not have too much trouble finding a new computer on which to run Linux. To quote the old reporting cliche, something we were advised as reporters never to say, time will tell.

#181 - Technology - For Better or Worse

After breakfast this morning, our son starting talking (yet again) about some particular figure he wanted to get for his Wii U console. I then tried to have a conversation with him about spending so much money on these things and the fact that Nintendo would probably not make these figures (known as Amibos) or the games forever, especially given that the Wii U is a distant third in the video game arena behind XBOX 360 and Play Station 4.

That got me to thinking about technology, both the good and bad. Developers are always coming up with some new way to do things. Often, the new way is an improvement. However, there are times when perhaps the better technology loses out to a lesser technology simpler because the marketing and PR effort was not as strong.

Anyone remember the Beta vs. VHS wars back in the 1980s? I came down on the Beta side since, working in television as I did at the time, I was convinced Beta was a better recording technology. Many experts and reviewers agreed. However, VHS had a bigger and better marketing push behind it, and Beta recording technology became but a footnote.

I suspect my son must somewhere possess a fondness for underdog technology, something he must get from me. Stored in a closet in one of our bedrooms now used as office space we have an old Iomega Zip drive (remember those?) and about a dozen Zip disks. They were going to replace floppy disks (yes, we also have working external floppy drive) for users who needed more storage space than a floppy could offer. That lasted a few months until writable CDs hit the market. Another technological footnote.

However, not all of our technology is stuck in the past. I am typing this blog entry on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 using a stylus and the on-screen keyboard. If I get the hang of this, I may get a Bluetooth keyboard to make this progress even easier. At that point, my tablet may relate my four-year old laptop for many of my everyday technology needs. It also looks like Android is big enough and ubiquitous enough that it is not destined to become a technological footnote anytime soon. Thank goodness.

#159 - Technology - It's a Beautiful Thing . . . Sometimes

Technology is a beautiful thing – when it works. When it doesn’t, people are inconvenienced, businesses lose money, lives are disrupted.

A recent and minor change in the office where I work brought that notion home to me. The change – a simple battery – caused us to be without access to our internal computer network as well as the external computing world for about 30 minutes. No opening files from remote locations, no sending or receiving e-mails, no surfing on the internet and, because we have internet phones (voIP or voice over Internet Protocol), no incoming or outgoing phone calls.

Once the battery was replaced, regaining access was simply a matter of restarting our computers, reopening our e-mail programs and web browsers, and picking up where we left off. Except for phone calls, that is. This seems to be a problem every time there is some sort of change to our computer network, only no one seems to know where the reset button is for the phones (if there even is one).

Technology is a double-edged sword. It frees us and ensnares us. Thanks to technology, medical and scientific procedures and advances once unthinkable become commonplace. We can map the human genetic sequence and turn once major surgical procedures into outpatient surgeries with small or no scars. At the same time, a computer failure can cause large parts of a major city to lose power or potentially cause a nuclear missile to begin a pre-launch sequence. Because so many of us use e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter to communicate with friends, family, and associates, a technological failure can also cause us to lose touch with the world around us, albeit temporarily.

As I sit and wait for the telephones at work to resume functionality, I am struck by the thought that most if not all of us would be lost and completely unable to function in a world without the technology we take for granted. While our 18th and 19th-century ancestors were largely independent and self-sufficient, we are largely dependent (the objections of some notwithstanding) on one another and upon our economies of scale. Such changes are more efficient and perhaps make life easier, but disruptions are more noticeable and create more inconvenience on a larger scale.

Although they are never mentioned as part of the argument, I suspect such potential pitfalls lend credence to the suggestion (even argument) that each of us needs to occasionally unplug and disconnect from our electronic lives and plug into and connect with the physical world around us. Our e-lives allow us to reconnect with people and places we might otherwise lose touch with, but they are no substitute for the world that exists all around us. As The Police sang in their 1981 song, “we are spirits in the material world.”