Up: The Tour

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Parka

My friend wore a green parka. She is, like I now am, self-employed, and called me this afternoon using Skype, which I can already see, a few weeks into my new career, is going to be a problem. Behind her a cat moved, rendered as a set of small animated blocks, like something made of Scrabble tiles. "That green parka," I said. "Let me ask you a question about it."

She waved her arm to point to herself, and to the parka. That caused a problem, a stutter in the system, and then we were both trying to speak at once:

"The parka?"	"—Kay—"
"—Ahead—"	"—Go—"
"—So—"	"—Yeah—"
"—That—"	"—Parka—"

We were silent for a while, waiting.

"Go ahead," she said. "Ask your question."

This is the era for brief, frequent pauses. Pinwheels, little watches. FOUC. Vi.Me.O. The future arrives in five-second bundles, but then for the next ten seconds you're back in the past.

The 80s was the last truly futuristic decade. Skinny ties. Power, Corruption & Lies. Tass Times in Tonetown. Something about constant nuclear threat and Neuromancer. After that we kind of caught up with the future. Before, well, the future in the 70s was much goofier. Filtered cigarettes. R2D2. Kitchen appliances. People kept coming up with new kinds of magnetic tape, and new ways to change vinyl records.

I wonder if when we look back at this month of iPad if we'll think what an amazing moment to have lived through, or if it will be like some guy with sideburns telling your dad about the reel-to-reel player in his carpeted van.

This man I know once took me out on his sailboat and, long story, but I had to bring the boat around alongside another boat using a rope. He said to me, as I did this: "Listen. You can't go too slow. There is no such thing as too slow. You can only go too fast." And I thought about that for a long time. It's a nice thing to think about, on the weekends, if you have a sailboat.

In my novel nervous teenagers go to startup school in abandoned skyscrapers. (I like to say "In my novel..." a lot, instead of writing. I also like to organize my text-conversion pipeline. My latest idea is to port the novel to org-mode.)

I want to live in a historically awesome moment. What if in the map of time this is one of the small towns? What if this is someplace we drive through to get somewhere interesting? If right now turns out to be nowhere? Then again have you messed with spatial search in Solr? Right now is turning out to be everywhere.

I met an Amish inventor once. Everything he worked on turned out buggy.

"My question is," I said, when the pauses settled, "is how many days in a row have you worn that parka?"

My freelancer friend thought for a moment.

"Actually," she said, "that's a very good question."

Internet connections mostly fail on users 50-64-years-old, March 12, 2009, IT Facts:

All demographic groups are about equally likely to have certain devices fail them, though seniors who own cell phones are significantly less likely than younger cell phone owners to have problems with their cell phones. Just 18% of cell phone owners 65 years old and older reported that their cell phones had failed in the past year, while 26% of 50-64 year olds, 33% of 30-49 year olds and 30% of 18-29 year olds reported cell phone problems. Seniors are not as exclusively reliant on their cell phones as younger owners, and so they may have less wear and tear on their phones than do younger users who are more likely to experience cell phone failure.

We got the landline back in the new apartment. I can't tell you how happy that made me. I call people on it all the time. It's like we're in the same room. Getting older.