James L Adams—People and Products

Wired Magazine—in my Opinion, a Good Product Gone Bad

As you may know, I am very interested in the quality of industrially made products. Certainly magazines qualify. I do not set myself up as an arbiter of taste, and do not usually question other people’s likes and dislikes, but sometimes I am amazed at the direction some products take,I guess in order to make more money. Wired, which used to be both fun to read and informative, had the good judgment to jump early into things digital. It featured articles on new and exciting technological developments, explained the way things worked and had interesting statistics about applications. But then Conde Naste bought it, and the result might be an improvement if you are looking for luxury goods such as ten thousand dollar watches and three thousand dollar bicycles, graphics that make the text much more difficult to read, and yet more news and interviews about and with movie actors and other wealthy glitterati.

I let my prescription lapse at that time, but I seem to continue to receive it with various inducements to re-join the subscriber list. This seems to be an ear mark of many magazines, especially those who carry a large amount of advertising. They seem to want to continue to be able to add you to their subscriber list, probably to boost “readership” and demographics to maintain and increase advertising income. Conde Naste seems to excel at this. Perhaps I will turn them in for putting trash in my mail box. But just to make sure I am not making a mistake I opened the last edition (rather than just throwing it into the trash) and did not change my mind. It has little left for me.

The cover article has to do with General Motor’s re-entry into the electric car business. Not exactly new news, and I wish them luck, but I plan to wait and see (yes, one of my sons was an early Tesla employee). Ads for Kit and Ace (luxury athletic clothing ), and TAGHeuer (luxury watches) follow, On the back cover is the Lincoln Black Label MKX (a Detroit Luxury car) and inside is an ad for Morgan Stanley. None of these are widely sought after by the people I know involved in digital devices or applications.  In between are lots of full page ads (including the kind that fold out), articles such as one about the 20 most politically influential “Tech Insiders”, an article on the GM electric car (the Chevrolet Bolt) and one on trends in transportation (bold face statements taken from text turned sideways and put in the middle of the page on both). And of course, suggestions for the well-appointed techie, including a $2000 table and a $870 office chair. The articles end with one treating a bizarre brain operation that I guess was intended to make the person owning the brain (who paid for the operation) more susceptible to being hooked up to a computer?????

I perhaps am not being fair to Wired, but I miss the old emphases, and don't seem to get much from the new. I admit I have a bias against Conde Naste magazines, except for the New Yorker, which has done a good job of holding onto tradition , and one expects luxury ads in it. It is difficult to escape these magazines, as they tend to end up in doctors offices, dentist offices, and other places where one encounters waiting rooms—they are especially worrisome in doctor’s offices because they feature models who clearly have eating disorders. And they even appear in my house. As an example, my wife subscribes to Architectural Digest (she refers to it as a “guilty pleasure”), and I hate it. First of all, there is little in it about architecture. It occasionally contains impressive houses (usually owned by celebrities) , but the emphasis is on the furnishings and decorations in the rooms.  The items are all identified by source, and can be bought from dealers often listed in the magazine if one has a large amount of money to spend on such things. But the three reasons it annoys me the most is the staggering amount of advertising in the magazine (they should pay me to read it), the fact that very few of the spaces in the magazine show any signs of human habitation (no toys on the floor, magazines on the table, glasses on the drainboard, bicycles on the porch, or butt-dents on the couches), and third, the letters seldom of ever fall short of raving about the magazine and its contents. I admit that I have never written a letter to the magazine, and maybe I will to see what happens. I will have no trouble at all in finding something that I consider awful, and I suspect they will not print my letter. If they do, I will write an apology to them and a retraction to this post (maybe).

Repurposing Products of Technology (Trash)

I have a fairly complete home shop and like to make things. I also have access to a huge amount of old scrap material at a friend’s farm, and discarded objects put out on the street for the twice a year free trash pickup in the area of my house. I frequently attend shows of antique machinery, which typically have a so-called swap meet, where no-longer-used pieces of equipment and components are available for very friendly prices. I have discovered that I can please not only myself, but friends and neighbors by turning old stuff back into useful objects. Eventually this scrap will be recycled either into raw materials (iron, aluminum, etc) or ground fill. Why not get some use out of it in the interim?

This post is about turning scrap metal into so-called yard art. I recently was not only annoyed, but flattered when a bird I had made out of various discarded objects was actually stolen. I just thought I was having fun, not creating objects of value. It is shown in the photo before it flew away.  Since I spent a year as an art student at UCLA, and was brainwashed as to what real art is, I do not consider this real art, but it is fun.  Maybe it is yard decoration.

In fact I have done a lot of this sort of stuff, now that I have outlived my art teachers. The photos below  show two more birds, an ant ,and a flower that also reside in our yard.

I also enjoy making functional looking things that do nothing. The next photo looks like water runs through it, or at least in and out of it, but that is not the case. As you know, I also restore abandoned machines, so that they operate and retain some of their early glory. A few are shown in the following picture, and I will talk about that use of time  in a future post. The final two are of  a restored pump-jack  holding our mail box ((corny, but Marian (yellow vest with bird and ant, likes it)) and a restored  oil pump doing nothing but sticking in the ground. (Incidentally, I realize that the layout of this post is awful, but I use the Typepad service, and no matter what I do, the service screws it up.)

 

 

 

 

 

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Are Computers Turning Us Into Slaves?

Are Computers Turning Us Into Slaves?

In 1996, Clifford Stoll, already a long-time computer user, wrote a book entitled Silicon Snake Oil, which was critical of the internet. I loved it and recommended it to all of my friends. It was a breath of fresh air in an atmosphere which was polluted with the breathing of people sure that computers and the internet would solve all problems and generally lead to nirvana. Many of the latter are still around.

One observation I remember from the book, was that in the early days of the computer, he claimed he spent half of his computer time simply trying to get his equipment to do what he wanted it to do, which was reasonable, but in 1996 it seemed like he was still doing this, and it hardly seemed reasonable at all.

Now it is ten years later. It has been raining for the last two days in California, and although I probably should have gone outside and played in the rain, it being miraculous in our drought ridden state, I decided to stay inside and work on my computer, happily typing on books, getting my photographs out of Apple’s new and disastrous Photos software, doing small things such as this post, and so on. I did none of that. Instead I worked on our relatively simple home computer system, which consists merely of two computers, two printers, and related equipment.

At the beginning, my wife was having problems with scanning material to Word, and downloading Christmas photos from her camera, and my printer was doing an awful job printing pictures – streaky and too dark. The streaky was clearly from a printer needing cleaning. But the too-dark seemed like maybe something more profound. The result was a struggle with color balance, where was it being controlled, etc, and the usual downloading of new software. Still too dark. So I ran it through the cleaning sequence three times. No difference. At that point I had already spent far more time than the printer was worth, so I went and bought a new printer, and you know how much time that takes, especially since it is sales season, people are still returning Christmas gifts, and the traffic is a nightmare in this area anyway. And of course, there was then the time spent learning to use all of its features, most of which I didn't need.

After selfishly solving my own problems first, I attacked those of my wife, and made a slight bit of progress. Like most people we work with lots of peripherals and are hampered by finite desk space and large screened maschines with not enough USB ports (which are in the back of the machine, and therefore sweep everything on the desk to the floor when the computer is rotated to reach the damn things). She was powering one USB hub off of another one, and since the light on her card reader was not going on, maybe not enough power to download the photos? So I did the usual shuffling of USB cords, including trying to trace them through the snarl that accompanies most computers, hoping that some combination would let everything work, but no luck. I then re-entered the post holiday traffic and got a new and better brand of hub, but still no luck. I finally tried her card on my computer and it also didn’t load – woops, something wrong with the card. It turns out she bought it overseas, so I set that one aside for later.

On to the scanning. Somewhere in the recent “upgrading” we have been doing due to changes in operating systems (required on mine by the encryption now demanded by Stanford servers and hers demanded by peripherals and consistency with mine), and resulting obsolescence of applications, she couldn’t find her favorite method of simply scanning to RTF and then saving the document as a Word document. We worked on that for a while before succeeding, also trying to translate the marketing language concerning available new optical character recognition software that maybe we should download (impossible to learn such things over the phone, all advertised as the best on the internet, and I wasn’t about to go driving again). But by then, my two days were over.

So, Mr. Stoll, in those two days days, I  far exceeded spending half of my time trying to get my “system” to do what I want it to. I  spent ALL OF IT. And was not done! And to make matters worse, quite a bit of my time was spent accommodating to having to “upgrade” software which, I didn’t want to do, because it will require me to modify useful habits I have acquired over time, and the changes will not improve my life—so far, quite the contrary. In my present mood, typewriters were pretty cool.

Following day note: My wife’s computer had lost its connection to the internet the day before in all the excitement. We initially thought it was because we had pulled something loose in the afore mentioned swarm of wiring which not only interconnects our computers, printers, and so on, but also allows us to participate in a beta test of Google Fiber and TV, all controllable from a pad and working through many black boxes. My credentials would seem to indicate that I should be better than average at screwing around with this kind of stuff, since I have been an engineer for 60 years, have used computers since they became available, and I guess was once a “rocket scientist”, since I worked on spacecraft at J.P.L.  If true, I have great sympathy for those who are only average and are in the same boat as I seem to be in.

Turned out it was a faulty power strip, now replaced and all systems are go, except that one of the external back-up drives seems to be balking.  I will now post this thing, call for help from a friend, Tim Keely, the world’s best IT person, who will know what is up with the external drive (no clue from its manual on the web), get back to the imported photo card, and then begin my periodic unsnarling of wires that seem to love to intertwine beneath desks and tables and behind sofas, bookcases, heavy chests of drawers, and other heavy objects. My world is not yet wireless.

And aren't computers supposed to serve us, rather than the opposite?