I'm a writer in Santa Monica, CA. I blog at True/Slant and Huffington Post.
As of early 2010 I'm working on a Web video pilot, Big Questions.
More info? Why, certainly.
It's like jolly old St. Nick never left!
Thanks to my super-thoughtful across-the-alley neighbors, I can be reminded well into February of the joy that Christmas brings. The dead, brown joy. Salud!
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Future Shock
The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.
The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party.
Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.
If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people's perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn't a price worth paying to have a computer that isn't frightening anymore.
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One of my favorite things anybody ever wrote. Howard Zinn wrote it.
"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
(The Optimism of Uncertainty: The Nation, 9/20/2004)
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So, yeah. I got my Chumby a pet.
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NYT on how the iTablet will bring sexy back to e-readers.
Many people like their e-readers (not least because they save them from having to haul around books, newspapers and magazines) but I’ve yet to meet anyone who loves them. That’s the key. If a really great e-reader appeared, the market would explode. The e-reader is waiting for a killer product, just as the MP3 player was before Apple’s iPod. Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, it made such a sexy one that many more people wanted to buy it. That’s what it is promising to do again.
via nytimes.com
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I don't just make this stuff up, you know.
Friend of Big Questions David Lidsky is outraged that I've answered "pie" to the Small Question "Cake or Pie" in today's Big Questions video update. He points me to the work of Paul F. Tompkins, among others, in this area. I offer the graphic below as proof that I do put actual thought and planning into my conclusions. Look, for crying out loud: I use arrows. ARROWS.
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