January 28, 2008 — 6:04 PM
On Multitasking
Author's Note: This entry began as an email, like many of my very best entries. Because I think it's important, or because I'm just excited about being erudite twice in one day. This was a response to an article that ran in the Atlantic, by Walter Kirn that claims to conclusively prove that multi-tasking is evil and wrong and leading us down the path toward stupidity. I think that's a load of crap, and here's my response to Mr. Kirn:
Multi-tasking is how I survive. Multi-tasking allows me to be on the phone with a client and both talking them through the problem AND searching for its solution in simultaneity.
It's what allows me to be listening to a lecture in class, taking notes in SubEthaEdit, and reading digressionally-related media at the same time, all while maintaining a conversation about geopolitics in IRC and in conversing with at least five people in Instant Messenger.
Here's the joy of technology for me: Digital interaction is not 1-to-1 in real time, it's 1-to-many in low bandwidth operations. I have several modes of interaction now: Email, Instant Messenger/IRC and Telephone. Each of these have differing mental bandwidth requirements that either make multi-tasking simple, or they make multi-tasking difficult. I can generally handle 5-10 simultaneous conversations over IM or IRC, though I frequently handle less than that. It was very interesting to watch my own chat habits during the recent Macworld Keynote, as my Instant Messenger window had more tabs than even I could see, and my little Adium bird looked like it was having an epileptic fit. There were a few professional contacts that were ooing and aahing over the new iPhone software, a few friends who were deep in lust with the new MacBook Air, and a few clients who were wondering what all this meant for their networks and systems, and could such and such a partner get an Air quickly?
They were in synchronicity. But, like many good communications over the internet, they were done in low-bandwidth. Instant Messenger is not designed to be a 1-to-1 realtime conversation. That's the beauty of it. Email is much the same way, but given a socially-accepted longer latency period. But nothing replaces the telephone in terms of good 1-to-1 conversation. But even still, things like my headset for my iPhone allows me to have both hands on the keyboard and manipulate information while trying to troubleshoot an issue.
I think you CAN do multiple things well, provided that you have the mental bandwidth to track all the streams.
It's very funny that this comes up now. My wife and I play World of Warcraft online with a disparate group of people spread out across five or six time zones (we have people in Alaska, and Melbourne Australia, as well as scattered like pushpins on a map) and have been working with this group of 25 peers to accomplish a specific feat in the game for some time. It requires immense coordination to deal with five different simultaneous objectives in what could pass for the digital equivalent of dancing with the stars on speed. It's multi-tasking. Healers have to watch more than just their own group of two or three, but also an orbiting player on a specific task, as well as perform multiple game mechanics at once. It's a multi-tasking training course. You have to be able to fire off email salvos while answering instant messages and then handling phonecalls between.
We're interacting with more and more people each day, and our networks are growing more and more diverse because of that. Diverse groups have difficult needs in terms of mental bandwidth. Some people accept 10 minute delays in IM, some don't even accept 5 minutes in email. It becomes a focus trial. Accomplish what you need to accomplish in the time you need to accomplish it in. It sounds easy, but it is hard to do, and do well.
While it's easy to long for the time to do things in single tracks, I think the end result for me was dissatisfying. I found the wait at NCEE to accomplish tasks to be utterly untenable. Being agile, being multi-threaded, is difficult, but I find it incredibly rewarding when it works right. When I can troubleshoot a mail server's failure to accept properly formatted mail envelopes, while talking the accountant through the process to add new charts of accounts to Quickbooks, while handling an IM conversation about taxes with my business partner, I feel alive and well.
Sometimes multi-tasking is the right decision.
But it requires the right context. TV/Fridges aren't the right context. Nor are cellphone/shavers. Or Models/Actresses (viz, Connie Willis' short story). But within the right context, I think we grow closer to a higher level of productivity.
I love that the article talks about Microsoft's horrifically hysterical "Where do you want to go today?" campaign, but somehow ignores the incredible combinatoric power of the Apple iPhone. All his lambasting of the industry (well deserved, for the most part) is perhaps not so valid when taken in contexts in which technology is designed to get out of the way of the human operator. Take, for example, the maps feature. This morning, as my friend Jeff and I trundled through the cold into the District for a failed attempt at a political rally, we needed to directions to the site. I'd seen the map at the house, but a refresher is good when you're going somewhere unfamiliar, and I was able to quickly tap in the address and then get directions. Yes, I had to look at the screen, but that's what stoplights are for. I mean, we do it with dash-mounted GPS, why not my iPhone instead? Why is the one better than the other?
I think the author's trope about someone too disinterested to notice is complete and utter crap and about as adequately shows a complete misunderstanding of the situation as anything else.
Multitasking isn't the problem.
It's never been the problem.
Knowing when to single track is the problem, and this author doesn't understand that, to their significant disadvantage.
There will always be, for lack of a better term, assholes who think they're more important than you. Before technology, they'd have smiled and nodded, drank whiskey from crystal tumblers in their corner office and puffed on a cigar while ignoring you studiously, now they just text away on their blackberries doing what they'd rather be doing instead, be that porn, be that stocks, be that answering emails they think are more important than you.
There's no cure for assholes, I'm afraid, but that doesn't mean all of us who multi-task are assholes.
January 27, 2008 — 12:27 PM
Now that's a show!
Last night, we hit the 9:30 club to see John's band Honor By August play. We got there as Dreamscapes Project was taking the stage, and that gave us time to settle into the Crow's Nest right below the DJ booth. The Dreamscapes Project left something to be desire, even if their rock cellist is definitely a solid asset.
dj lil'e was spinning between sets, and kicking ass as usual. She lead the set with Domo Arigato, Mr. Brightside, one of her killer mashups. I love watching e spin because it's clear that she's having an awesome time of it. Last night was certainly no exception to that.
Honor By August's set was the best I've seen from them, they were just plain on. Michael's vocals didn't slide into the nasal place they sometimes go, and the band was in sync and sounding great. Especially good were "Pass Me Another One" and "California."
Nice job guys, here's hoping there will be many sets like this.
January 15, 2008 — 5:49 PM
It's a Cloud Machine.
The new MacBook Air is a unique piece of hardware. It's going to be the subject of a lot of discussion in the next few days, as people pick apart the innards like so many vultures. Battery life and storage aside, I think the MacBook Air represents a drastic departure in the world of computing, and a welcome one. It's a cloud machine. It's not meant to be a primary environment, but rather, an attactive ephemeral one.
Increasingly, as a society, we're storing our data online. I know that for my business, one of our mail servers supports Address Book and iCal sync, so that I can get my calendar anywhere, and my addresses anywhere. I can login via Safari or Firefox, or download a conduit from my server to sync with the iCal and Address Book applications. My email works the same way. Check my webmail, or set up Mail.app with IMAP to view any of my accounts.
Flickr? Well, it's iPhoto for the cloud. All my images are stored there, and if I provide my authentication key, I can grab full res originals. The iDisk is an equivalent for documents, though only for .Mac members. Google Apps for your domain is yet another service-based equivalent. But, as you can see, there's a bunch of your information stored out there, so who cares if you've only got an 80GB internal drive in the MacBook Air, there's a whole internet out there full of your data that you can quickly pull down via 802.11n or one of the USB-enabled Wireless-provider appliances.
So, the Air is an interesting step forward. It's not meant to be your primary machine, but rather the easy-to-tote one that you take onto airplanes and out to off-site meetings. Me, I'll keep carrying my MacBook Pro, as it's eminently luggable in its current state and better equipped. But should my shoulder go out again, or should I lose my WoW addiction, the MacBook Air becomes an incredibly attractive option. It's capable, for sure, of running Leopard well, and with most of my data stored out in the Cloud, I can easily retrieve and store useful information in native formats without having to worry about where things are and how they're kept.
January 15, 2008 — 10:08 AM
And Lo, We Wait
This post is specifically for my brother-in-law.
This is a post about waiting. I don't wait very well. I don't like sitting in anticipation of something I know little about. But that's what today is all about. For the past three or four days, my Twitterstream has been filled with friends talking about Macworld Expo and their trips to San Francisco, and all manner of things along those lines. It's made me insanely jealous of being there, not to mention all aflutter with the rumors of what is to come.
See, today is a special day. A Tuesday unlike every other Tuesday. When His Steveness descends from his office in Cupertino, assembles the masses at the Holy Moscone Temple and brings forth the tablets inscribed with the Holy Word of Apple. Okay, enough with the religious imagery. Too many people think Apple is a cult. But as it is, thousands have gathered in San Francisco, and judging by the timestamps on some tweets, many have been up since well before dawn to get in a line to get seats for the Keynote address. I can understand why people ascribe religious fervor to the Apple community.
But, then again, think for a moment about why people who are fervent in belief do anything: it brings them great joy and purpose. Specifically, "I bring good news of great joy." Their hearts are filled with joy, with camaraderie and excitement. How the hell is this a bad thing? How the hell is this anything but a celebration of people coming together under a common banner of platform unity?
I know that folks get tied up in the religious imagery of Steve Jobs as Prophet, it's a fun thing to imagine, honestly. It lets people who believe in Apple, Believe. It lets people who denigrate Apple for its followers to be snooty and high road riders. It lets people who want to explain away Apple's fans as nothing but mindless zealots, and granted, a few of them are, and believe that their machines are better in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary (viz. Vista) be superior. But frankly, have you ever met a person of faith who cared what you thought about their belief when you didn't share it?
So, here we are, two hours from the Stevenote, and I'm stuck 3,000 miles away on a cold winter day in Washington. If you need me, I'll be at Murky, watching Twitter and the MacRumors sites for updates, and fixing computers for my friend Jason. Back on the other side of things.
January 11, 2008 — 12:06 AM
After The Apple Repair: Fixing Time Machine
I recently had a whole trial at the Apple Store, that ended in the replacement of my MacBook Pro's Main Logic Board. Time Machine, while it's fucking amazing in terms of actually backing up your machine to disk, is set in its ways about some things. Specifically, it tags the backup folder on the external drive with your Ethernet MAC address. Which, when you swap out the logic board, will change.
So, here's how you FIX that problem:
First, you have to do some permissions voodoo. Open up Terminal, and navigate to your Time Machine drive's slash (root, base-level)
chmod -N Backups.backupdb
cd Backups.backupd
chmod -N yourbackupname
The Backups DB is ACL'd. We'll talk more about this here in a second, because this is a pretty...non-gentle way to fix it. chmod -N, new in Leopard (and Tiger Server...) removes the ACL control from these folders. This is a Kludge. However, it's what I had to do.
Once you have stricken the ACL's from the directories, it's time to change the attribute associated with the MAC address. xattr is the eXtended ATTRibutes library that allows you to do some pretty fancy dancing behind the scenes without having to do a whole lot of extra programming. It's a way of tying things together with a nice bow. Want to dink around with it more? xattr -h at the command line is the short guide. There's no man page for it.
So, here's how that works. You need to tell the Backup Director what your NEW MAC address is. Find it under Apple System Profiler. Then, tell the backup who you are:
sudo xattr -w com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress 00:17:f2:xx:xx:xx backupname
Fill in the MAC address. Fill in the backup name. Then fire up Time Machine and it will recognize your drive again...
Or, at least, it's no longer failing here. I have a feeling Time Machine needs to reindex what's already on the drive and then do a big compare and then do a massive write. As I type this, though, it's at least added an InProgress entry for today's date into the same folder where all the others live... Happy thoughts.
About the ACL....no idea what happens now. Is Time Machine smart enough to restore that ACL after I've ripped it out? Good question. No freakin' clue. I'll update this section
Hat Tips: David Leber, Dave Schroeder, Jon Thompson, Barry John Williams
January 9, 2008 — 12:58 PM
Back in Action.
Live, from Murky in Arlington, I am back in action. After 9 days without my laptop, I once again have it. It's funny how much one little hunk of metal and silicon means. Sure, a lot of my data is out there in The Cloud, and it's accessible, but it's a bit different when you depend on the ability to access that data remotely.
Sure, my iPhone gets my mail and I can respond to and from it. But it's not meant for the sheer volume that I deal in. The iPhone's fantastic for reading email, but for responding it's suboptimal. I like a full-size keyboard. I'm verbose, though you wouldn't know it from the way I blog. I like to link to things, and that's difficult if not impossible on the iPhone in its current state. So, to do Real Email, I need a real machine.
But, what does it say about me that I'm so thoroughly dependent on my laptop? More so, what does it say about the world we live in, the rules and regs of working, that I need to have a real computer workstation. I was thinking about this a bit during the past week, and my friend Joseph nudged me a bit with more on the Zombie Apocalypse Workout, which really started kicking my ass.
How over-dependent are we on technology like Email, like IM, like telephony? Is it to the point that we're eschewing more rustic, yet venerable technology like POTS lines for the high-end digital signaling stuff, to our folly? Everyone seems to have a major hard-on for VOIP, but from what I see of implementation, we're still 5-10 years from that replacing actual copper. Are we trading on-site meetings that are productive for remote meetings that feel like wastes of time?
I mean, sure, some problems are best solved by remote, through the use of technology. But are we using technology to fix our problems just because we can, or are we acting when there is a compelling need? Sure, there's a lot to the geek persona that demands we live on the bleeding edge between advancement and acceptance, sometimes on the far side of that line. So, measuring technology by its value of usefulness is something that perhaps I need to do more often.
What I've settled on, Scarlett O'Hara style, is that I'll never go without a laptop again. Business Priority indicates that we not spend that money on that right now, but should the opportunity arrive again that I need to surrender this machine, I will be managing to grab a second machine in some form. Fortunately, Time Machine as part of Leopard makes it easy and practical to maintain a good and transformable backup, making which Intel-based machine I use largely irrelevant. So, thanks to Apple for that.
Regardless of the assessment that Technology (specifically, Computers and Networked Computers) has become integral to the society that we live in, inextricably so, we have as an option that you can do pretty much two things: Engage and Adapt or Disconnect and Eschew. I prefer to do the latter, even if it means that it comes with a hefty pricetag, because, dammit, I'm just happier when I google something instantly, and carry on a dozen conversations at once.
January 4, 2008 — 3:25 PM
My (Unsurprising, Yet Consistently Bad) Apple Treatment
Let me start by saying I love Apple's gear. My iPhone and MacBook Pro, when they work, are phenomenal pieces of hardware. I think this is what makes the rest of what follows so incredibly frustrating. This is a company I love, but that treats me badly.
Last Sunday, without warning or symptom, my MacBook Pro died. It was on one minute and off the next. I'm to the point in my career where there are very few Mac problems when the machine is on that I can't fix. With Time Machine, I have a constant good backup, so it's not that awful to have to restore the system anymore. That is, when I have the box.
Sunday, when it died, I shopped around for a Genius Bar appointment. My preferred store, Clarendon, offered me an afternoon appointment on Tuesday the First, the same as Pentagon City. Fortunately, Tysons Corner could fit me in at 3pm on Monday the Thirty-First instead. So I went to Tysons. I talked with a Genius named Jay. They got to me 45 minutes after my appointment was due, but at least they got to me. I showed him the problem (it wouldn't turn on for love or money) and he concurred it needed repair.
Here's where I made the mistake. I let him do the repair in-house at Tysons. He told me there were logic boards on-hand. I know it takes only about an hour to actually do the repair (despite there being 45 screws) once you have the part, so if they had them to work with (and this was after he had my SN and Model number, so he knew they had the *right* one) they could fit me in during the odd times. He said 3-5 days. When I asked if I should do a depot repair, he said, "well, we have the parts in stock." So I let him take it.
So, days pass. No response. Yesterday I had lunch with a friend in Tysons, so I stopped in to check on the repair. The Genius Bar area was a mad house, as no one seems to know how they're supposed to use their iPods/iPhones, so I gave my repair paperwork to one of the turquoise-shirted staff for examination. He went back in the back for 5 minutes, and told me it wasn't ready.
He didn't have any useful information, so I let him go. Today, when I hadn't heard by 2:30, I called up Apple (as it was the fifth day) and was told they'd only just gotten the part today. Oh really. So, who was wrong? The genius, in terms of what part was necessary? Or Apple, in terms of what they had on hand? Either way, I've been without my primary business machine all week because I made the mistake of listening to their Genius. Worse, I was told that this was only the fourth day since they were closed on New Years. Oh really? Then why was I offered an appointment at Clarendon and Pentagon City that day? If they'd been closed, but I'd had an appointment, I'd have been really quite pissed.
I don't think I'd be so upset, except that this is the sixth major repair in two years.
Yeah, you read that right. Sixth. Within the first few weeks, I needed a new hard drive. Then it was the battery and battery bay that needed replacing. Then there were two logic board repairs. Then finally when it went out again in February of last year, I called up Apple and plead my case to Customer Care for a replacement. They decided to replace my machine, which I appreciated, but now I'm stuck with yet another dud of a laptop from Apple.
Apple, I love you guys, but please, quality control might be something you should look into.
January 4, 2008 — 3:22 PM
links for 2008-01-04
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God I love this series. Here's hoping that the new one is as strong as the previous three...
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Key quote:
So, once you subtract the breathless rhetoric about "surge" and "momentum" and (oh, Lord) "electability," it's finally admitted that the rest of the United States is a passive spectator while about half of 45 percent of 85,000 or so Republic
January 2, 2008 — 10:11 PM
Hondas Save Lives.
That's my parents' Honda Element.
On Saturday night, they were driving through Barstow when an overcorrection at highway speeds turned into a disaster. After hitting the guard rail, their car was flung up into the air like a kite, for two and a half revolutions, and came slamming down on the passenger side.
Fortunately, because of some very outspoken safety-conscious people in the community, auto manufacturers take these sort of incidents very, very seriously. And, thankfully for me especially, the guys at Honda know their shit. The car was obliterated. But my parents were able to walk away. My father broke his shoulder, and my mom cut her head to the tune of 15 staples. But neither were crippled. Neither were killed. Because the safety systems, including their seat-belts, and the airbags and all manner of crumple zones and protective beams, worked as they were engineered to do.
Thank you, Honda, for protecting my parents.
January 2, 2008 — 6:32 PM
Infoporn: Twitter Stats
Twitter Stats
Originally uploaded by tbridge.
Ah, Twitter. Where I craft my tiny 140 character masterpieces of wit, wisdom, outrage and rantery. Now, thanks to this sweet stats package from Damon Cortesi, we can see it all in live technicolor.
Should I be following you, but I'm not? Send me a direct msg at tbridge and we'll figure it all out. In the meantime, check out the pretty Numbers graphs in the big version of this photo.
