I have a couple gadgets inside of me. One was forced on me; the other I chose. I made the choice in much the same way you’d choose a computer. I tried to future-proof myself. I chose an option that I could upgrade later. In the end, I made a decision that was not entirely rational, but rather based on passion and branding and aesthetics over performance. Like I said, just like a computer.

I’ll start with my leg, because it’s easier for me to talk about. I broke my ankle a few years ago. I was walking the dog on a very, very cold night in Newton, Mass, and the sidewalk all around the block was a track of ice fit for a speed skater. I took a bad step and slipped off the curb, and my tibia rotated wrong and crashed into my fibula, snapping it in multiple spots. I fell to the ground immediately, and that’s when I learned a couple things about myself.

First, I learned that I do indeed have a high tolerance for pain, something I’d always suspected but never bothered to prove. When the paramedics arrived to put me on a stretcher, they asked me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. I gave it a six. The worst pain I’ve ever felt, by the way, is a cracked tooth, which is about an 8, and it’s a great story, but for another time.

The second thing I learned about myself is that my body is capable of destroying itself with hardly any intervention from my mind. When they lifted me into the ambulance, with my foot askance and twisted, I asked if there was any possibility I could have dislocated it, instead of a break.

The paramedic told me: “well, anything you can locate you can dislocate.” But it was obviously broken.

I had titanium installed. The x-ray is awesome. I have an erector set in my leg, with screws holding me together. There’s no chance it can break again, I’m part fighter jet down there. I couldn’t walk for four months, and I was in pain and using a cane for another 2 months. I had an awesome rolling aid instead of crutches called a Roll-A-Bout. I highly recommend it if you break your ankle. I was faster on that rollabout than I ever was on both feet. When I needed a cane, I bought a high-tech, carbon fiber walking stick with spring loaded shocks and other features only useful for orienteering and nature photography. It made the suffering more palatable.

Now my only limitation is that I can’t stand on my tiptoe on that leg. When I tell people this they look at me like I’m telling them the old joke about the guy who breaks his hands and says to the doctor: “Doc, will I be able to play the piano when I’m healed?” The doctor says “Sure,” to which the patient replies “That’s great, because I could never play before.”

See, I’m a big guy. When people are meeting me for the first time, I’ll sometimes tell them to look for the biggest guy in the room, and that’s probably me. For the six months I was recovering from my broken ankle, nobody explicitly said it, but I know that my size must have been the reason such a shallow fall caused such a horrible injury. I’m not a 6’2″ basketball player jumping eight feet in the air to block a shot. I’m a six foot schlub who slipped off a sidewalk walking a 40 pound dog.

This brings me to the other gadget inside me. I have a device implanted in me called a lap-band. It’s like an inflatable donut . . . mmm, donuts . . . wrapped around my stomach. It makes my stomach smaller, and divides it into a small portion up top and the rest down below. This is supposed to be a weight loss surgery. You fill the donut with saline and it expands, contracting your stomach. Then, you eat less.

If you don’t eat less, you throw up. That’s actually a feature of the lap-band. It’s supposed to make you throw up. Also, because of where it’s located, higher up than your normal stomach, a full stomach actually feels more like choking on something at the bottom of your throat.

Is it any wonder this device doesn’t work? It sounds like high-tech torture. In fact, the lap-band has a shockingly low success rate. 70% of people who get a lap-band fail to lose weight. Your body adjusts to it. Your body naturally learns how to make you more comfortable, and you resume your old, horrible habits again. When I got the band installed, I lost a bunch of weight, then it came back.

I had other options for surgery, but they all involved heavy cutting and removing massive parts of me that would never grow back. The lap-band is reversible. In fact, I’m having it removed soon. I’ve already had it replaced once with a newer, better model. Now I’m having it taken out altogether. Time to try something different.

When you make the decision to have this band removed, the doctors will exclaim that the lap-band has failed. The euphemism of this choice is not lost on me. Let’s be honest, the band didn’t fail. My body didn’t fail. They did exactly what they were supposed to. They succeeded. I failed the band. The psychology of my thinking and habits overcame my physiology. I am weak. I take the blame. I have failed myself.

Perhaps this is why I’m sensitive to the power that psychology has over our choices, especially when it comes to technology. Technology buying should be a completely rational decision. I need this, therefore I buy it. I do not need to do that, so I will not buy something that does that.

We look down on people who make decisions they cannot rationally explain. We justify our purchases after the fact with rational arguments. I bought this phone because I have large hands. I needed a 60-inch television because I could not read the text on screen. I bought this watch because it is high quality and it will last longer.

We look down on the passionate, the irrational. We look down on people like me whose psychology has failed them. You bought a device you cannot understand, and you are a failure for not learning how to use it. You bought something because your friends all had one, and it made you feel good when you bought it, but you are missing out on all the capabilities of this other thing, the thing I carry with me every day.

I failed my band. The problems I have, which I pretend to understand, and for which I am regularly judged by people who also believe they understand, defeated me. I let them win. I am weak. I am passionate and I give in to irrational urges and desire. I have failed.

One day we’re going to see the utter stupidity in this form of judgment. One day we will understand the true power our subconscious minds hold over us. We will stop blaming people, and hating people, for making decisions based on emotion and passion. We won’t blame them when they fail the gadget, when we realize they may never have had the power to succeed.

It really wouldn’t have to be much. A programmable RFID-type key that I could then use for a variety of purposes. I could tap my finger on the electronic gates to get into work. I could get into my car and start the engine simply by touching the door handle, then the steering wheel. It could be fun to pay with a finger. Just magically tap upon the NFC reader at the register and I’m good to go. Wave my bare hand at the gas pump. The possibilities are endless.

Also, a little dull. I love NFC in my phones and I guarantee I use it more than almost anyone else you know (spoiler alert: my day job is with Samsung). I’m talking about implanting something in my finger. It needs to be a step beyond the latest and greatest.

An LED would be fun. Something multicolor that I could control. I wouldn’t need mind control to change the hue or brightness. Bluetooth would be fine. I program my finger on my phone and when I tap against something it lights up. The E.T. effect alone would be worth the price of admission. I wonder if my son would laugh when I touch his bumped head with my finger and as it glows softly I whisper “Oooooouuuuchhh.” Probably he’d run screaming from the room, because Daddy’s fingers aren’t supposed to light up, and he hasn’t seen E.T. yet. So, maybe light-up finger is not the way to go. I need something more personal, less showy.

Therefore, laser pointer finger is also out. This is unfortunate, because the minute I thought of it I knew it had vastly more potential than LED finger. If it’s going to be my finger, I’d spring for the 1W blue-laser type, the one that can pop a balloon from less than 1 foot. I’d need a way to dial it back on command. Bluetooth again, perhaps, or a touch sensitive control. After all, you don’t want to fire off an astonishingly potent laser from your fingertip at the wrong time. You could be wiping an eyelash out of somebody’s face, or picking your nose, or dancing in some sprinkler-like fashion and end up causing serious harm. Sorry, closest-I’ll-come-to-having-a-real-lightsaber finger, it just isn’t meant to be.

I need to think more creatively. How about a camera? There is great potential in a camera that is a continual part of my body. I’ve occasionally imagined replacing one of my eyes with a camera – haven’t we all? I’ve never considered replacing one of my fingers. It would be easier to control the shot with a finger cam. The eyes are somewhat involuntary. If something crazy catches your eye, it will rush to the scene immediately. A finger, on the other hand, can take some direction. There is control and flexibility. I could control the perspective, the angle, the aperture.

Unfortunately, there are also many places a finger goes that should not be filmed. I’m going to let that last statement float in the air until you get my meaning. Actually, I didn’t have any specific meaning in mind. There are a ton of disgusting places you would stick your finger that should not be filmed, but you just thought of the worst of them. You are a sick weirdo. I was thinking of when I’m cleaning out a whole raw chicken. You, on the other hand, are a disgusting person. That is exactly why fingertip cameras will never work.

If not a camera, a speaker, perhaps? A small wireless speaker? There’s a lot of useful potential in a speaker. I could play music, then stick my finger in my ear to hear it. I could make a phone call, then stick my finger in my ear. If I wanted to whisper something to you without being obvious, I could record a quiet message, then stick my finger in your ear. Basically, what I’m saying is that my finger is going in an ear, like it or not.

What you’d really want with a fingertip speaker, though, is volume. Like enough power to get your groove on. I would love to point my finger at a crowd of people standing around at a bus stop and have my tiny speaker blast the opening from C+C Music Factory’s song “Everybody Dance Now!” If you’re too young to remember that one, it was like the 80′s version of “Harlem Shake.”

I also thought it would be cool to use my finger as a megaphone. I could talk into my phone and my voice would come booming from my hand. Unfortunately, when I think of practical applications, I only imagine myself shouting “Muad’dib!” over and over again.

In the end, if I could implant something, I would implant a whistle. That’s it. Nothing electric, just a simple whistle. Perhaps a slide whistle. Because the best part of having something implanted in my fingertip would be showing it off to kids. It would be friendly and unintimidating. Fun at parties. Great for impromptu sound effects. I imagine my son telling his friends about the cool trick Daddy can do, and then I use my finger to make a brilliant whistle, and watch while a bunch of 4-year olds stick their fingers in their mouths and blow heartily, trying to make a sound.

Why can’t I just wear a purse? I certainly can, there’s nothing illegal or wrong about it. In technology and gadgetry, there’s an assumed scale of masculinity to femininity. I don’t agree with the scale, and I generally try to ignore or actively buck these trends. Still, they exist, and here they are, laid bare.

First, there is the outright masculine end of the scale. Don’t think about male body parts, think Jeeps. Jeeps are very ugly and highly functional. They have little aesthetic decoration, but every detail serves a purpose. There is a teeter-totter of utility on one end and aesthetic on the other. As we give up utility in favor of beauty, our gadgets are widely perceived as more feminine. Add colors design finishes, start removing features and wanton capabilities of questionable benefit and you end up with a feminized device.

There is also a question of color, which makes far less sense to me. I’ll never understand how colors became gendered, in the same way I wouldn’t understand gendered flavors or gendered musical notes. Some colors carry an undeniable association with gender, though, even when the color seems completely neutral. Pink is the most obvious gendered color. Purple comes a close second. Mix colors with red, it seems, and you remove their male potency.

Some gendered colors surprise me. I remember the first product I purchased that carried a gender stigma of which I was unaware: the white iPhone 3G. I loved that device in that color. Black seemed too industrial. Black was too normal, like so many other smartphones on the market. It was uninviting and, frankly, for my tastes, too masculine. So, I shouldn’t have been surprised or embarrassed when I showed off my brand new iToy and was greeted with some harmless ribbing by my male colleagues. Even some women I showed it to, including my now-ex-wife, thought it was a bit too feminine, even for their own tastes. Personally, I just liked it better. When it comes to deciding which color gadget to buy, I make an entirely emotional decision. Whichever color appeals to me most at the moment I make the purchase is the one I take home.

I believe in the legitimacy of this emotional response to our gadgets, and that’s certainly what I was feeling when I decided to buy my new tablet a purse … I mean, a carrying case. I scoped out my favorite bag makers and decided on either a Tom Bihn Ristretto or a Waterfield Ultimate SleeveCase. Both seemed a little effeminate for my needs, but both were exactly what I wanted.

Here’s my full disclosure. Usually here’s where I mention day job is with Samsung blah blah blah. Today, though, I’m disclosing that my father used to carry a purse. A satchel. A man’s carry-all bag, in the European style. He had many of these, leather and canvas. His use of the purse predated tablets or even smartphones, so there was no form-fitted purpose to his carrying a purse. It simply made sense as a way to store his wallet, keys, StarTAC, and a few papers or receipts or whatnot. He gave it up a few years ago, and I have little doubt he was simply tired of the comments. He was tired of being labeled the guy with the purse. He still has the bags, stuffed away somewhere, holding onto receipts that predate Check Cards and email.

Why can’t I just carry a purse? Actually, I can. There’s nothing really stopping me except the ideas in my own head. I can ignore looks and comments from people around me and simply do what I like. It’s just that easy. Right? Unfortunately, no. We’re humans, and humans are coded to work better in groups. We hardwired to be acutely aware of those around us and how they are responding to us. We’re supposed to change and conform. We feel awkward. We stick out. In prehistoric cave times, this instinct keeps you from being culled from the herd by a hungry tiger. Today, it makes me feel awkward about carrying a purse.

It’s especially weird that I should feel awkward about this because I already own plenty of pink. I have pink iPods. I have pink phone cases (that I use with my big white smartphone). I have shirts and gadgets and decorations at home that veer into the feminine end of the color spectrum, though I wouldn’t say they are especially feminine in design, if there is such a thing.

There is also a strange divide between fashion and utility when it comes to bags. I may feel like my Ultimate Sleeve Case looks too feminine wearing it about, but it’s nothing compared to a Coach bag or a fancy Italian designer case. When a bag literally borrows materials and design accents from a famous women’s clothing house, it falls deeper into feminine territory.

At once, my free-thinking and liberal mind is watching all of the sinkholes open in my argument. The secularization of men’s and women’s clothing is problematic. My definitions of masculine and feminine in design, with utility on the masculine end and aesthetic on the feminine, is reductive and perhaps dangerous. It results in pink versions of under-specced phones with dangly accessories tacked onto them. There are problems with my color assignments, especially as color and design preferences vary greatly by culture.

I know it. I see the pitfalls. I understand this is an argument about which I’m hardly qualified to rave from a distressed male perspective. But the bottom line is that I just want to carry a nice purse. I love my tablet, I want to pare down so I can just carry my tablet and some essentials, and I want to sling that all over my shoulder. To meet my needs, I’ll buy whatever I need. I’ll just buy it in black, with some distressed hide leather. And I’ll get a really ugly, utilitarian strap.

Of course. First, let me tackle that last and most ridiculous point. It’s not a PlayStation launch if they didn’t show the hardware, right? No, that’s completely wrong. What is the hardware? It’s a box with a gaming computer inside and a bunch of ports on the outside. It should look reasonably attractive sitting underneath my television, but if it doesn’t I’ll just hide it behind something else, like my Xbox. It should be slim enough to fit in my cabinet, but my receiver is pretty big, so I don’t mind a little heft. Since the Xbox 360, design has become more important, as gamers realized they could have a console that wouldn’t offend the sensibilities of non-gaming spouses; but if this is a priority for you, you’ve gotten your priorities screwed up.

You know what I really want from my PlayStation box? I want it to play really freaking awesome games for the next 6 years. Every time I turn it on, I will spend exactly 5 seconds looking at the box and 30 minutes to 8 hours looking at the content it blasts onto my TV screen. If the box protrudes hairy tentacles and screams obscenities at me every time I turn it on, I can live with that if the games are good. If the ports are covered with Man-O-War tentacles that sting me every time I plug in a controller, I’ll buy some ointment and keep playing. If reaching into the box is worse than pushing my arm into the foul and stinking moist womb of Beelzebub’s mother, who the heck cares if it plays games that make me forget the horrors of my life and the cruelty of my own impending mortality for more than 15 minutes!?

If you care so much about the box, you are the problem with the games industry: style over substance.

For disclosure sake, my day job is with Samsung Mobile, so I know a thing or two about launches. As a former tech journalist, I covered Apple events and Nokia events, so I’ve seen the best and worst a launch event can be. But launching a phone is very different. The problem is that the tech press has grown accustomed to fast-paced phone launches. Every 4 weeks the coolest phone you’ve ever seen hits the market. The tech press is spoiled. They want cool hardware design, which is much more important with a phone. They want a full explanation of the device in 30 minutes or less. They want to leave the press room and walk into a store to buy it (or at least walk into their Brooklyn apartment to review a sample unit).

That doesn’t just mean that our press is jaded. That means you don’t have to say as much with each phone launch. You don’t have to detail every feature. You can build on what the audience already knows. You can highlight the new and confirm the old.

A phone is a very personal device. You will touch and caress it for the next two years. You will tell it your secrets, share your relationship photos, and stick it in your pants. When you buy it, you expect to know much of what it can already do.

Sony is not selling you the hardware. You need the hardware to play the games, but for the first year or so, Sony will lose money on the hardware. A lot of money; maybe a couple hundred dollars per console. Where do they make their money? Games. The money comes from the games they make internally and the licenses they sell to EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard and others.

So, when Sony hosts a launch event, they aren’t selling you on the box hardware. The box is a necessary evil to get you to buy and play the game. If you only bought the box and watched Netflix and never played any games, Sony’s PlayStation division would be out of business in this generation.

Games are a hard sell, especially when they cost $60 a piece, brand new. They cost as much to make as a Hollywood blockbuster, and like a hot movie they make most of their money in the first week they are available. What’s worse, the movie producers make a ton of money months later when the movie goes to DVD, but game producers don’t see that kind of profit. Why should Sony ever support used games with the economics of the gaming market already tilted so heavily against them?

At a PlayStation launch event, Sony needs to prove that a 20-60 hour game on unproven hardware is worth 4 to 6 times the price of a movie ticket. How can you possibly fault them for showing 2 hours of game previews? Sure, the jaded press in the audience will get bored, but diehard fans will pore over those previews for 7 months until the console is in stores.

Go ahead, Sony, be proud of your launch event and ignore the critics. Every one of them is a fan. They all lusted over at least one of those games, and lamented the beloved titles you didn’t show, but probably will at another 2-hour event at E3. The same press will complain again there, because it’s their job to by cynical; but they’ll be first in line to buy one. In the end, it’s not about the event, or the box. It’s all about the games.

But seriously, Sony, enough with the updates. Just let me play the game and forget that the rest of it – the box, the controller, the world – exists, even if it’s only for 30 minutes.

I’ve seen a lot of strange reaction to this development. The basic reaction seems to be along the lines of “So what, they can use my blurry sunset/beer/self portrait/random building photo for all I care. It sucks anyway.” That’s great for all the narcissists out there who can only think of the photos they publish themselves, but there is real work going on with Instagram. There are professional photographers using the service. War photographers. People taking photos of their kids, their homes, their lives. People who actually care. Just because you take horrible photos and don’t think they are worth a penny doesn’t mean everyone feels the same. Nor does it mean everyone else should be obligated by your pathetic lack of empathy.

Of course, I’d have to be a moron to sign my name on the dotted line without reading the contract, right? Instagram did not force me to upload my photos, I chose to use their service. In the process of creating a username, password, and profile, I undoubtedly had to at least address the issue of the terms of service. Most likely, I checked a small box, because failure to check this small box resulted in a button that was grey and unclickable, and only checking the box would allow me to proceed.

In all the Web sites I’ve signed up for, the most stringent enforcement I’ve ever seen for reading the ToS is forcing the user to scroll all the way down to the bottom in order to find the magical check box. In these cases, I certainly did not read the terms of service, but I at least have some familiarity with their length. Longer equals more serious, so I assume these must be serious terms, written in serious language, and I will be in serious trouble if I ignore them. Whatever. Scroll, click, post.

If Terms of Service are so dire, why not a pop quiz at the end? When I was an English teacher, I knew that pop quizzes were a viable way to test whether the students had actually completed the reading assignment. They aren’t good for testing understanding, or learning, or interpretation. But if I wanted to make sure that my students read from page 35 to page 40, I gave a pop quiz.

Reading is important, and the difference between a student spending 20 minutes reading every night and a student who only reads for 5 minutes is quite a bit, in aggregate. A student who reads for 20 minutes every school night through middle school and High School will have read for an equivalent of 17.5 days by the time she graduates. A student who reads only 5 minutes a day will have read for just under 4 days.

Now let’s translate the same to Terms of Service agreements. According to a study published in “I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society” (download the .pdf here), if a user were to read all of the Privacy Policies he encounters in a year, it would consume about 250 hours of reading time.

Privacy Policies tend to be much longer than the Instagram Terms of Use, which weighs in at just over 1,000 words. But I know from writing numerous columns of 1,000 word length that most Internet users are not patient enough to read them in detail; and my columns are written in plain, if pretentious, English, without any legalese.

It is silly to expect users to read the entire Terms of Service. I ran the Instagram Terms of Use through a reading sample analyzer, and it registered a grade level of 8.5 on the Flesch-Kincaid scale. Now, most of you have probably reached higher than a ninth grade reading level, but should a High School education really be a requirement to post pictures of your cheeseburger? That assumes you went to a good High School, your teachers taught you properly, and you have maintained your reading ability since you graduated. Most states require a reading level for Insurance documents that is only a few points lower on the Flesch Reading Ease scale.

People sign up for a Web site with a few set expectations. The Terms of Service should take these expectations for granted, and should only make special note of terms that specifically contradict these expectations.

1. My stuff is mine, and nobody else can use it unless I say so. This goes for everything I post. My words on Twitter. My photos on Instagram. My relationships on Facebook. It’s all mine. I own it, and only I can use it, unless I have granted specific permission. You can look at it. You can analyze it, then pitch me advertisements based on what I say, what I see, and who I know. But you cannot use it for advertisements, or promotions, or even for an internal slideshow demonstrating the adulterated beauty of sunsets in the North Texas area.

2. My stuff will stay where I put it, until I decide to delete it. Then, it goes away forever. It should be easy to delete my stuff. It should be easy to find my stuff, until I erase it, after which it should be impossible to find. Also, you can kick me off and delete all my stuff at any time, for any reason. It’s your service, I’m just visiting.

3. I take full responsibility for everything I post. If I rob a bank and then post incriminating photos, that’s my fault, and I’m going to jail. If I take a self portrait and I didn’t see the flasher exposing himself in the background, that’s totally my bad. If I post a photo of my Mom and she hates it so much that she disowns me and sues me for defamation of character, I’m the one who has to deal with her, not the service.

That’s it. That’s all I expect. If there’s anything more, spell it out in the most plain English you can manage, preferably at a fifth grade reading level.

It’s a debate I’ve had with myself, my friends, my co-workers, for years. I’ve had the discussion in person, and I’ve looked for advice on the Web, on my social networks and on etiquette sites. I don’t celebrate Christmas, so what do I tell my son about Santa Claus? What do I do when he asks why Santa does not come to our house?

For the Christmas tree, the holiday lights, the answer is clear. We don’t have a tree because that isn’t how we celebrate our culture. We have other traditions. We have huge family dinners in the spring and the fall. We go to temple and sing in strange languages. We light candles, fry tasty foods, and give small presents, but not at the exact same time as everybody else. We have our culture, and we can also experience and enjoy the culture of our neighbors.

Seriously, do you smell that? How do I score an invite to a Diwali party, can anyone help me with that? How do I insinuate myself in an Eid al Fitr celebration? I see the catering trucks out front. I can smell the food while I’m walking my dog. You can’t hide it from me any more! I’m tired of the Christmas cookies and the hams and pies and fruit cakes. I’ve never been a fan of latkes and the cheap chocolate in Hanukkah gelt. I need spices and chutneys and pistachios and honey and… But I digress.

What do I tell my three year old son about Santa? I’m sure the parents of his classmates would be happiest if I simply lie. I perpetuate the myth of Santa Claus, while explaining that this magical elf, who flies around with adorable, mythical creatures, one of whom may or may not have a light-up schnozz, will not be bringing us any presents this year. There are two classes of people left off this list: the naughty, and us.

Then, suddenly, it occurred to me that I may not be the biggest problem these parents face in keeping the story straight. I was talking with a friend who is also a single parent. I was talking about my experience with the Terrible Threes, and she said:

“Yeah? Wait until he can Google you.”

Well, I hold up pretty well to Google scrutiny, thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster; and my son isn’t yet four. He can’t read, let alone type, and he certainly can’t Google. I suppose he could use a voice assistant and simply ask the question, but I’m sure asking Siri “Does Daddy have any dark secrets in his past?” hasn’t yet occurred to him. Also, he’s not 100% clear on my first name, yet, and there are a lot of dudes out there named “Daddy.”

What if children ask Google whether Santa Claus is real? Well, I have some good news. For the most part, the first page of Google News will not spoil this mystery. There are some outliers, but you’d have to dig pretty deep into Yahoo! Answers to read a response in the negative. Those are met with serious disapproval, as you might expect.

Even the Wikipedia page clouds the issue, at least for the nascent intellect of a true believer. I doubt anyone who questions the reality of Santa Claus would be able to negotiate the dense text at the top of the Wikipedia entry, and the phrasing is ambiguous enough that a young mind might still leave the page satisfied, though perplexed.

The real question is not whether a child could or could not find the answer his parents wish to keep a secret. The question is whether this is still a relevant expectation in a digital age.

I’m not trying to be a killjoy. I do not believe there is some moral imperative to keep children grounded only in the world of real facts and possibilities. Would I want my child to never believe in magic? Do I spoil the illusion that those are not actors on a sound stage, but rather space pirates flying in a ship throughout a galaxy far, far away? Do I embark on long discussions of how Phineas and Ferb simply could not conjure the level of building materials and expertise to construct an expansive stadium in their backyard? No. No I don’t.

I will not spoil the story for your children; however, I want something in return. I want acknowledgment that I could spoil it at any time, and appreciation that I don’t. I work and live on the Internet. It’s a dangerous place, and dangerously honest. It’s also very easy to change and reroute perceptions. If the Internet could change the very definition of the word Santorum as revenge for perceived political slights, imagine what could happen if we rerouted Google search for the word Bieber to direct to pages with the ultimate truth about Santa.

I’m going to be vague with my child. I’m going to avoid lying as much as possible, and try to help him enjoy living as a minority in a culture that at once tries to paint its beliefs and traditions as secular and insufficiently pious. If the time comes that he finds the truth for himself on the Web, or through some other resource, I’m not going to deny the truth. As we all know, it’s impossible to erase the truth about yourself completely from the Internet, even if you never truly existed in the first place.

Everything about Twitter is small. Tweets are small, even fewer characters than a text message. The feature set is small. There isn’t much to do on Twitter. There are no apps. There are photo services and video services, but they are not nearly as robust as competing offerings on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and, well, just about every other social site you can name. Heck, Flickr hasn’t been updated in about 10 years, and it’s still a far better photo site than Twitter.

Twitter followings are small. Personally, I recently hit more than 2,000 followers on Twitter after a few solid years of use. It’s nothing to crow about, not publicly at least. Most of my favorite Twitter friends have exponentially more followers than I do, and those are just the people who will meet me for a drink. Compared to celebrities, I’m followed by almost nobody. Of course it’s about quality, not quantity, and I cherish the conversations I have with any and all of my Twitter followers, but I don’t fool myself into thinking I’m influential or famous because of a measly 2,000 people.

A good Web writer, for instance, even in a niche like technology journalism, can see a hundred thousand page views on a popular story. A million views is not unheard of. However, I’m friends with a writer who left his Web site, and his loyal fanbase, behind, and he was able to stay relevant in the eyes of the massive corporations and their Public Relations team because of his Twitter following. He probably had 25,000 followers or so. He wasn’t publishing a word on any Web site, but he could still keep up with news and request advance review samples of new products. I know this because my day job is working on the PR team of one of the massive companies that was still happy to work with him.

Twitter may have millions of users, but in terms of its effect on the zeitgeist, I’d stay it’s still minimal. Until my parents ask about it, it isn’t popular enough to matter. Sure, we can fool ourselves into believing the Twitter echo chamber is sparking revolutions and acting as a force for good, but mostly it’s a way to report on earthquakes in California and kvell about bad airline service.

After hurricane Sandy hit, I found myself called to northeastern New Jersey for a business meeting. All of the hotels were completely booked, filled mostly with refugees who still lacked power and the utility workers called in from around the country to try to restore it. I travelled with a team of three people, and all of us had to stay at different hotels because no single spot could accommodate us all.

When I checked into the Hampton Inn in Parsippany, I was told my room had been smoked. Of course, the hotel is non-smoking, but the previous tenants had decided the fee for smoking was worth paying to avoid battling what must have been an all-consuming religion of cigarette addiction. The room smelled of people who smoked like they were on a plane barreling towards the Atlantic with multiple engine fires.

The front desk apologized, but they could not offer a different room until the next night. I’d have to suffer. Hampton Inn has a very generous 100% guarantee, but the front desk only offered a “discount,” and then only “if I asked.”

I did not ask. I went to my room to sniff it out. It was awful, but I would survive, save the throbbing in my skull. Still, I did not ask for the refund. Not yet, at least.

Instead, I did what most of my friends would do. I went to Twitter. I did my best to brutalize Hampton Inn in the most civil way I could muster (ie. no cursing).

I heard from the corporate social networking response team within minutes. Minutes. If I had set a fire in my room and waited for the emergency squad to arrive, they would have taken longer to reach me than the Hilton International social networking team took to respond. They resolved my issue quickly, even beyond my expectations. At one point, I’ll admit I stooped so low as to provide my online bona fides and bylines, as a way of forewarning them this column would be coming. But it didn’t matter, because their response was already formidable.

For the same reason, Twitter is unusually popular with celebrities. You might think it’s a great place to drum up publicity and support, but is it really? I don’t think a Twitter following is so large that sheer numbers alone can make the difference. I don’t think the audience is paying close enough attention to catch the message, even in short bursts.

I think it is the highly personal nature of the interaction. It is direct, unmediated feedback. When I went to speak to the front desk, I liked to think I was speaking directly to Hilton International, but I was not. I was speaking to a poor young woman who was doing her best to manage a perturbed customer in a time of real crisis. It wasn’t even my crisis, I just stepped in it.

Somehow, Twitter messages are taken more seriously. I am now tweeting directly to the corporation as a whole. Corporations, wisely I think, have granted supreme power to their social networking teams to respond to these issues. The front desk could offer me a discount, but the social networking team could do much more. They have resources, connections, and the ear of the power brokers.

I also think there is a fascinating dynamic in the follower / following relationship. If I am following you, you can send me a private message. I cannot respond, not privately, unless you are following me. For celebrities, this means that any celebrity can lean over and whisper in your ear, using a Direct Message. It is fleeting, and titillating. So much more personal than catching an eye in a crowd or reaching out a hand to shake.

Corporations have the opposite relationship. If they want to talk to you personally, they need to ask you to follow them. Now, you are the power broker. You can keep screaming into the wind, or you can make the connection and hear what they have to say; but first they have to reach out personally, directly, and ask to be heard.

[Image credit: Andrew Becraft]

Joe Brown, chief at Gizmodo, penned a brief editorial about how guns are a gadget too dangerous for normal civilian use. He makes an excellent point for geeks, mostly concerning time machines. But his column is too brief for the topic at hand. Joe, let me show you what a thousand words looks like, because it would be impossible to flesh this out in the space you’ve allowed yourself.

So, Joe’s basic premise is that every sci-fi movie that involves time machines basically concludes that time travel is too dangerous for us normal humans. Except he forgot the canonical time traveling opus, Doctor Who. If anything, Doctor Who proves quite the opposite. The good Doctor emphatically solves his problems with little to no violence, and usually folks he encounters leave all the wiser for being in his presence. Sure, he’s not human, but the show’s writers sure are, and that’s what we’re really talking about. Joe thinks it’s impossible to even imagine a scenario where such a dangerous technology should be left in the hands of humanity. Our greatest thinkers, Joe implies, cannot conceive of a world order preserved with time travel as a natural part. But that’s just not true. Doctor Who. Marty McFly. That one Harry Potter book, the really good one (the best one, in my opinion). All involved time travel, and everything worked out for the best.

So, let’s leave the fiction world behind. It is impossible to argue that guns are not dangerous. They are tremendously dangerous. They offer the maximum amount of damage for the minimum amount of intelligence. I could put my 3 year old behind the wheel of a car, and he would have trouble figuring it out. But if I hand him a semi-automatic pistol, I’m sure he could kill something with ease.

I should also assert my liberal bona fides. If all guns disappeared tomorrow, I would not shed a tear. If the government somehow came to its senses and banned all firearms, from automatic assault rifles down to black powder muskets, I would applaud the decision and vote for any representatives supporting it. However, as long as guns are currently legal, I think there are solutions to maintain the status quo that do not involve a full-fledged ban.

That ship has already sailed, after all. The guns are out there. They are easy enough to get. A gun ban would certainly stop some criminals from acquiring firearms, but not all, and probably not even most. Other countries still make guns. Heck, anyone with a 3D printer at home can now print working guns for themselves, without a license or waiting period. I can’t think of any technological development more frightening than that. So the genie is already out of the bottle. Guns are here, and guns are easy, and we have to deal with that fact.

Exactly one week before the shooting at the movie theater in Colorado, I fired an assault rifle for the first time. It was an AR-16, the same weapon the shooter used (one of many, in fact). The rifle belongs to a friend of mine here in Texas, a very sweet and gentle family man who grew up in rural Idaho. We had planned the outing to the shooting range for a while. When the day came, I asked if he needed to stop home after work to pick up his weapon.

“Nope, I have it already. It’s in my trunk.”

“Do we need to buy ammo?”

“No, I’ve got about a thousand rounds already.” Hollow point rounds. You need to use hollow points at a shooting range so you don’t obliterate the targets. When we got to the range, I had to buy a membership and watch a 10-minute safety video. The range took safety very, very seriously. When I heard the tremendous report of the guns being fired, I asked my friend if he had earplugs he could lend me.

“No, but you can just use a couple bullets.”

“Bullets?!”

“Yeah, just stick them in your ears. I used to do that all the time when I was a kid.”

Instead of sticking live ammunition in my ears with the bullet facing my brain, I convinced him to give me a couple bucks to rent a pair of ear covers.

I have to admit, it was an awesome experience. For a first-timer, I did fairly well from a scant 50 yards. I chalk that up to extensive video game experience. Firing an assault rifle is exhilarating. It’s tremendously powerful, but smooth at the same time, thanks to the large spring that runs through the stock and catches much of the recoil. It took concentration and precision. It involved a loud bang, smoke, and heat. There’s a slight element of danger, but also the reassurance of knowing that if you follow the proper rules and procedures, nobody will get hurt.

Should we ban everything that could possibly hurt us? Should be ban only the things that could hurt us the most, with the least effort? Our laws currently establish a right to own guns, and I, as a responsible and intelligent citizen, have no problem exercising and enjoying that right. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want to see anybody get hurt.

I think gun opponents are going about this the wrong way. We do not need gun control. Such a thing makes little sense. We need human control. We need to control the humans who have access to guns, the way guns are used and stored, and places in which guns are accepted. But mostly, we need to change the way we talk about the issue. When you tell a gun enthusiast you favor gun control, they think you are taking away not only a favorite pastime. You are also taking away a form of protection and safety.

My friend with the assault rifle owns 10 30-round magazines. He could carry 300 rounds on him without having to reload a clip. When I asked him why, he said

“Well, I was buying only a few clips, and the guy selling them to me explained that a clip is inexpensive compared to the price of the rifle itself. So, you might as well buy a bunch. Because when the s*** goes down, you’re going to want those extra clips.”

When it goes down, indeed. I have no statistics to back up whether gun ownership results in safety or tragedy. But I do know that gun owners legitimately feel their safety is being compromised when you suggest taking away their guns. And if they have never used their guns improperly, or in a harmful manner, why should they have to sacrifice their right to ownership?

Instead, let’s put technology on the case. Let’s stop calling it gun control, and start calling it criminal control. Nobody will defend making it easier for dangerous criminals to own guns. Let’s extend waiting periods dramatically. Take the passion out of gun purchases. Leave time for a proper background check, using all the tools of the Internet to get a clear picture of the person purchasing the weapon.

Let’s accelerate the development of biometric gun locks. Only a registered owner can use a gun. Let’s develop new ways to keep guns locked, secured, and only usable by trustworthy owners. Targeting systems that recognize a clear threat. Chemical tests to make sure users aren’t drunk or high or otherwise chemically imbalanced.

The NRA and its associate organizations like to say that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. It’s an inspired slogan, so let’s see them put their money where their mouths are. If we can’t take away the guns, let’s do more to stop the people. Let’s do everything possible. If guns are the most dangerous gadget, it is time to treat them like a gadget and spend more time developing features and improving security.

We may never be able to completely end the gun violence insanity that has plagued the U.S. in the past few weeks, but at least we can inject some technological intelligence into the gun ownership body, and bring this fever down to a manageable level.

That’s right, I said it. Subscribe to HBO. Buy a TV to go with your fancy MacBook (disclosure: by day I work for Samsung, but I’m typing this on a fancy MacBook Pro). Subscribe to a preposterously expensive cable service. Add HBO for an extra $15 per month. Then, start watching. See? That was easy.

Whenever people get all huffy about the problems with content distribution, Game of Thrones is usually the prime culprit. This was made famous in a Web comic by The Oatmeal. The dude tries to watch the show on Netflix. Then he tries to buy it on iTunes. Then Amazon. And so on, until he ends up pirating the show.

First of all, good luck with that. I stopped downloading any pirated content about 5 years ago, when I was caught and sent a nastygram by my cable company. But it wasn’t really the cable company who caught me. It was HBO. I was trying to download The Wire. The warning I received said they were not pressing charges immediately, but they wanted me to stop and destroy my copies. They also reserved the right to sue me at any point in the future. I’m probably in the clear, but hopefully this screed will go some way to convincing HBO that I’m completely on their side. I have seen the error in my ways.

See, when you buy a CD, for instance, you probably thought you were buying the music. But actually, you were buying the plastic, and a license to play the music at certain times, and for certain audiences. Want to play the CD in your car? No problem. Want to play the CD in your bar? Now you have to pay up. There are certain allowances that the courts have approved to bend the rules. You can make one backup copy of your purchased media. You can make mix tapes with songs. You can rip music you purchased to your computer.

Unfortunately, by the time digital video went mainstream, the entertainment industry had learned its lesson. There’s gold in them thar hills. The more you restrict the license for content, the more money you can make as people are forced to sign up for more services, or buy more copies of a video.

It sucks. I won’t dispute that. I’d like to see much more free and open licensing, if not complete freedom to do with my digital purchases as I wish. If I bought Star Wars on VHS tape, I should be able to pay a small fee, for manufacturing and distribution and such, to get that movie again on DVD. Then pay a little more for Blu Ray. I paid for it once, now I should only have to pay for the plastic. And if I want a digital copy, I should pay only for the bandwidth. That would be awesome.

But that’s not the way it works, and the arguments I have heard are stupid. Waaaaaahhhh, I can’t get the show I want, so I have to break the law. Waaaahhhh, the awesome show isn’t available on one of the four services I use, so I have to steal it. Waaaaahhhh, HBO is evil for not giving me exactly what I want, how I want it, when I want to see it.

Shut up. Grow up. Stop acting so entitled.

I would love to see Roger Waters perform “The Wall,” but the tour doesn’t come within 5 hours of my house. So, should I have someone bootleg it for me? An actor friend is in a movie that’s only showing now in New York and Los Angeles. Do I pay for a copy off the street? Do I cry because the only place to see the Mona Lisa is The Louvre?

This is how art works. Art is not just a finished product. It’s also a moment in time, and a reflection of that moment. Sometimes, you have to be there. Art also has to make money. We don’t have huge patron families like the De Medici’s funding massive cathedrals anymore. Government arts funding is not enough, especially not in the U.S. So, sometimes the best shows need to be exclusive, if they are going to be created at all. When you steal those shows, you’re slimming the chances of ever seeing content so fantastic ever again.

The best way to see Game of Thrones? Subscribe to HBO, like the rest of us. Maybe you don’t think the price of the show is worth the subscription. But there’s also a ton of other great content on that channel, and on other cable channels. I really wanted to watch the show Homeland when everyone was talking about it, but I didn’t subscribe to Showtime. So, one long weekend while I was home visiting my parents, I hunkered down in their basement and watched every show on demand. It was pretty good, though not as great as everyone says. Then I started catching up with Dexter on Netflix, and hit a wall when Netflix didn’t have the newest episodes. So, the next time I moved and started service with a new cable provider, I subscribed to HBO and Showtime. If they stop showing content I like, or if it’s too few and far between to be worthwhile, I’ll stop.

But let’s not pretend we don’t understand the game. My response is exactly what HBO wants, nothing more and nothing less. They have crunched the numbers, I’m sure. Game of Thrones is driving subscriptions. A lineup of great original content makes people want to subscribe. I have yet to hear a convincing economic argument that says they should break away from this model. If they could make more money offering the show on one of YOUR favorite services, they would do that.

Pay for the art you want to see. Don’t expect sympathy when you whine and complain that you can’t get what you want. Art is special. Art is worthwhile. But as long as artists have to make a living off of their work, art cannot be free.

I’m not talking about the commenters. I’m not talking about laypeople. I’m talking about professionals who are paid to write for a living. Especially technology journalists. There are many, many excellent writers out there who work in technology. I hope they do very well, and I hope you read them thoroughly. But there are also many, perhaps a slim majority of writers, who write with prose that is simply messy, imprecise, and overwrought. I think it is a problem endemic to more than just their technology stories. The problem, at its core, is a way of thinking about how to publish on the Internet.

On the Web, you need to publish quickly if you want to succeed. This isn’t because readers remember who broke a story. Ask the average reader who got the scoop on the latest piece of iPhone jetsam to emerge from the Chinese black markets, and you’re likely to be met with a blank stare.

Even Techmeme gets it wrong, often. Techmeme republishes the most popular technology stories on the Web. Ideally, the writer who reported the story first will show up as the top link. All the Web sites who sourced that story get pushed beneath. That’s how it should be. But Techmeme often puts third-hand stories above first- and second-hand reporting. Techmeme offers a ton of traffic, especially for the top links in each topic. But publishing first does not guarantee those clicks.

So why publish so quickly? Why rush the story out the door without a proper copy edit? One word: Google. Even when Techmeme doesn’t know where a story came from, Google knows. Google search results tend to prioritize stories that came out first. Even better, Google takes into account how many other stories are linking back to the original. So, if you report on something first, even a minute earlier than the competition, you might get better Google placement.

If you want to make a living running a technology blog, you need to appear on the first page of Google search results. Return readership and feed subscribers certainly matter. But to many sites, especially smaller, up-and-coming sites, the search results will pay the bills for years while the site builds a following.

Speed is therefore of the essence. This comes at the cost of copy editing. Copy editors make everything better. They polish the prose to make it shine, without losing the author’s voice. They write headlines that are engaging and accurate. If you read a story about a gadget that is based entirely on a leak or rumor, and the headline says “Confirmed,” you can guarantee no copy editor wrote that. That was written by an editor focused more on clicks and dollars, not words and meaning.

For a very, very brief time I was a copy editor for a Web site run by the editors of PC Magazine. This was at the height of the dotcom crash. I was told that our unique project was funded for at least a year. Then I saw copy editors in other departments getting laid off. Some were rehired part time, on an hourly scale and without benefits. Finally, on a Friday afternoon, a payday in fact, I was called into a meeting with the boss. Friday afternoon meetings are always bad news. When they happen on a payday, you should probably pack up your desk before the meeting starts, just to save time. Trust me, I know from repeat experience.

The real problem is that many sites care much more about clicks than content. There are some sites I read that are simply wrong. They get everything wrong. They report rumors, then “confirm” those rumors, and by the time those rumors have been revealed as false, they have already moved on to the next big thing. I see these sites quoted and sourced over and over again, even though their accuracy percentage hovers in the low single digits.

Why are they still thriving? Speed. Clicks. Why bother asking a company for a response to a query? You usually know what they will say, especially when it has to do with unannounced devices. (Disclosure: In my day job I work in PR for Samsung Mobile). Wait for a response and you’ll be passed by all of the sites that didn’t bother. Take the time for accuracy and you’ll be out of business, while smaller sites report whatever they like with impunity.

If accuracy is a casualty of the need for fast posting, then grammar, usage, and spelling concerns are barely an afterthought. I know quite a few writers who complain frequently that their warnings about proper English and good writing go completely unheeded. Heck, I was one of those writers. I wrote for a site run by a very intelligent Norwegian who spoke a confused and somewhat garbled English as his second language. We never edited copy, I just did my best to get it right the first time. But management explicitly placed no value at all in proper English. Now the site is gone, vanished into the ether. Old stories don’t even show up in Google search results. There’s irony for you.

How do we fix the problem? Easy. Avoid the worst offenders. Hopefully your instincts have already pushed you away from them. Even if you aren’t a grammar professional, poor writing will fall heavy on your ears if you enjoy and cherish the language.

Point out mistakes. Always. As a writer, I hate it when readers point out grammar errors in comments. But I’m mostly angry with myself for letting a mistake slip through. Harp on poor grammar on your favorite sites long enough, and they will start to take the problem seriously on an institutional level.

Most of all, though, reward good writing. Read the longer stories. You probably read 3-4 stories about the same topic, anyway. Instead, find the Web site that writes the longer version, and stick to that one. Tell them you appreciate their command of the language. Everybody reads comments. Writers, editors, bosses.

Finally, if you’re a writer, reread your own work. You would be amazed how many writers ignore this. When seconds matter, and delays cost money, it seems a waste of time to proofread. Here’s how I motivate myself to reread. I tell myself that if I can’t bear to read this story again, a story I wrote, how could I expect a stranger to read it even once? I cannot.

We all make mistakes. I’ve made plenty. English is a malleable and forgiving language. I’m not asking for perfection, I just think our profession would be a better place, with more accuracy and less nonsense, if we took the language as seriously as we take the topic.

[Image credit: RJ Aquino]

I have been searching for accompanying images for this story for a while, and I finally found one. A Twitter friend posted this lovely image of Chicken Fried Bacon. You may have never heard of chicken fried bacon, but I live in Texas, and we invented frying things unnecessarily. We invented the corny dog, a hot dog dipped in cornmeal batter and deep fried. Chicken fried steak is our state bird. At the Texas State Fair, you can eat fried everything from ho-hoes to Frito pie to beer to butter. Yes, someone dips frozen butter in batter and fries it in oil. It’s not just a heart attack waiting to happen. It’s an offense to God and cows alike.

[Image credit: Chris Sorensen]

So, anyone surprised by chicken fried bacon? No. In fact, it could actually be pretty good. I’m not endorsing its consumption, but bacon plus fried must equal delicious, right? Except, look at that photo. It looks like dried dog poop in a serving tray. That’s not an exaggeration. It is the most disgusting looking food photo I have ever seen. And the accompanying hashtag to go with this picture? #sowrongitsright. No. No. Just . . . No.

Food photography is hard. It takes hours and hours to get the perfect shot used in commercials and promotional materials. The ice cream melts. The burger gets dry. The cheese goes from melty-gooey to stiff and still. Food does not behave. Which is why food photographers often have to augment their photos with unnatural, inedible substances. Concrete is used to stiffen milkshakes. Soap is used to create frothy bubbles. Plastic is used with wild abandon.

If professional food photographers have trouble making food look good with all of these tools at their disposal, how could you possibly imagine you can make your food look good when you snap a shot with your cameraphone? You cannot. Your food looks awful. Instead of making me drool, or envy your experience, or marvel at the spectacle, it simply makes me nauseous. If that’s what you’re going for, congratulations, you have succeeded.

The first problem is lighting. Phone cameras require a great deal of light to take an excellent, appealing photo. That’s why most of your indoor shots look lousy, while brightly lit outdoor photos look much better. The color of the light also makes an enormous difference. Tiny cameraphone sensors tend to have more of a problem discriminating and balancing colors. Reds and greens are especially problematic. This leaves many food photos looking yellow indoors, and bluish outdoors.

The second problem is context. Sure, I can spot a burger from across a room. But how about a lobe of foie gras on a plate of lentils? How about slabs of gnarled, curly bacon fried dark brown in batter? How about a ghoulash of some sort with ingredients I could hardly name if it were right in front of me, let alone the subject of a poorly lit, off balance cameraphone photo?

But my biggest problem of all with food photography is that it’s time to stop glorifying food. I hate the term “foodie,” but I do consider myself knowledgeable about food, food culture, and cooking. But I think we’ve taken a dangerous turn when it comes to an obsession with food on the Internet.

When people are extraordinarily happy with their food, they take a picture and share it. Why? Because they know their friends will relate. Because it makes them feel special and important to be eating something so tasty or unique. Because it’s a way of marking where you are and telling people what you are doing. Whenever we travel abroad, we always make special note of the food. When you think about it, that seems odd.

We spend 3-4 hours a day eating, at most. So, 1/8 – 1/6 of the day is spent at meals. What about the rest of the day? Sure, you can have a great night’s sleep, but you don’t take a picture of your bed afterword. When you have an easy commute, do you take a picture of the open road? When your boss is happy with a project you’ve completed, you don’t snap a picture and share it (confidentiality aside). I would fully expect to see photos of a movie poster if someone liked the film, but I’ve never seen that shot on social networks.

My problem with the current obsession with documenting our meals like photojournalists is that it only promotes more eating. And because we usually snap the most unique and unhealthy dishes, it promotes the worst type of eating. If I see a picture of a juicy, well-adorned burger before lunch time, I want a burger. If I see photos of the awesome dumpling shop you found, I want dumplings.

I don’t deny there’s a level of personal responsibility involved. Sure, it’s my job to make the right decisions for myself. I don’t have to open your photos. I don’t have to eat what you’ve photographed. But if our decision making process were so easy, weight problems would not be such an issue hanging around the waist of the public’s health. We’re already bombarded enough with photographs from professionals working for hours to make food look unnaturally appetizing.

Before you post photos of food, ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve? Is there really any positive benefit? At worst, you’re posting an ugly picture. At best, you’re showing off and glorifying your meal. If you don’t agree that it promotes an unhealthy obsession in our society, at least understand that it’s boring, unless you have the skill to do it right. Which you don’t. So stop shooting your food. You’re a horrible photographer, and I’m having enough trouble sticking to my diet without your help.

[Image credit: Lindsey Turner]

It’s time to stop creating these post-credit scenes. The joke is not only played out, it’s actually starting to hurt the movies. I recently wrote a column on spoilers here at SlashGear, and I focused on the horrible ending to the movie “The Grey.” A commenter pointed out something I hadn’t realized before. The movie ends abruptly, just before a fight that I would have expected to be the climactic moment. Imagine if Rocky had ended before the first punch was thrown against Apollo Creed. That’s how it felt.

So, one thrust of my column was that some endings are so bad, it’s almost better knowing about them in advance before you see the movie. But then a commenter on that column pointed out that there is a stinger scene after the credits that completely reverses my interpretation of how the film ended. Or at least it adds significant details.

This is just wrong. It’s time to stop the stinger scene. From now on, the movie needs to end when the credits start to roll.

It’s easy to see why movie makers would add this sort of scene. There are really two reasons. The first is that the credits are important… to the people credited. It’s actually a perk of the job. Whether you are listed, and how high you appear in the list, is a badge of honor for folks working in the movie business. This is why credits are getting longer and longer. This is also why there are four or five producer credits before the movie even opens. These listings are negotiated in advance, and they are part of the job.

Hollywood needs to get over itself. I know, that’s probably the most redundant line I’ve ever typed. But I think, for the credits, it’s a real necessity, now that it’s causing problems.

Can you imagine if everything had credits? In my day job, I work for Samsung Mobile. Can you imagine if you turned off your phone and then had to sit through a list of all the names of everyone who worked on a phone? There are hundreds, if not thousands of people involved.

Can you imagine if you finished a Big Mac, then had to sit through the credits of everyone who helped make the burger? Even in the art world, there are almost no parallels. Video games are the only exception I can think of. When you see a painting, you don’t see a list of everyone involved. The person who stretched the canvas. The artist’s assistant. Sometimes you don’t even see the name of the subject. You just see the artist’s name. Are movies really claiming that every boom operator, every second assistant, is an artist? Feh.

The second reason is more legitimate for the viewing audience, but no less annoying. Those extra scenes make us feel like we are “in the know.” We’re the cognoscenti because we were tipped to sit through a movie to the very last flicker of light.

Now, however, that is not enough. How many of you saw the secret ending for The Avengers? No, not THAT secret ending, the secret ending AFTER the secret ending.

For all of the movies that led up to The Avengers, there was a stinger scene hinting at the upcoming ensemble film. At the end of The Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor, there was an appearance by Samuel Jackson’s Nick Fury, or Clark Gregg’s Agent Coulson. There were whispers of an “Avenger’s Initiative,” so that comic fans would get hints of what was coming. Okay, I can accept that. The writers didn’t want to interrupt the main story line with hints about the big blockbuster to come, so fans get the secret ending. After the first one showed up at the end of The Hulk, fans knew to stay in their seats to the end.

Then, The Avengers screwed with the fans. Sit through the credits and you get a scene with Thanos, a villain who appears to be the arch-enemy in possible sequel films. Then, the credits keep rolling. If you stayed even longer, you get a quiet little scene featuring the heroes eating shawarma. Seriously. They’re eating sandwiches. It’s a reference to a toss-off joke from the movie. It’s kind of funny, but I completely missed it when I saw the movie in the theater, and I was peeved.

I consider that Avenger’s scene to be the final flip-off for stinger scenes. It created striations of fandom. I was enough of a fan to know that something else would be coming, but not fan enough to stay even longer. Fine. Leave me out of the joke.

It has gotten to the point where I expect a stinger whenever I see a somewhat unsatisfying movie. I wonder if there will be a better resolution at the end of the credits. I wonder if the characters will be revived for a sequel that might deliver on the promise that the current film could not fulfill. Stinger scenes now act in the opposite way that they were supposed to act.

It used to be so much fun. It was Ferris telling us the movie was over. It was Animal from the Muppets telling us to go home. It was Darth Vader’s heavy breathing at the end of The Phantom Menace, reminding us that we have better Star Wars movies at home on DVD.

Now, it’s about exclusion. It’s about poor writing and directing. It’s about forcing us to pay attention to the people behind the scenes. I’m done. I just finished 44 ounces of Coke and I’ve been sitting for 2 hours. I’m tired of supporting this trend. When the credits start rolling, the movie is finished, and that’s the only chance you get to tell me the story.

Bad Food Photos

This is my number one pet peeve for online photography. Don’t post food photos, unless it’s something absolutely amazing to look at, AND you can take an excellent photo of it without disrupting the diners around you.

Sunrise, Sunset, and Bad Weather

Stop shooting sunrise and sunset. It’s a cheap thrill. Just enjoy the beauty of the moment. Sunrise shots wreak havoc with a camera’s white balance, and that makes them unnaturally dramatic. While it produces a cool image, it isn’t a fair representation of what you see. And sunrise/sunset pictures are just as boring to folks who aren’t there as baby pictures when it’s not your kid. Also, photos of giant thunderclouds or blustery wind never turn out well. It’s impossible to see the weather in a photo like you experience it in person.

Excessive Baby Photos

I’ve been very cautious of this in the last few years, since my son was born. I like seeing baby pictures, especially from my friends’ newborns. But don’t duplicate photos of the same scene, the same action, or the same expression. Shoot thousands of photos, then pick less than 1% to actually show off. The rest are just to embarrass your child later.

Ugly Photos of People

Don’t make your friends look ugly in photos. Don’t take photos from bad angles. No pictures from below. Nobody looks good from that angle. Shoot people from above, looking down on them. Don’t shoot people from the back. Nobody likes how they look from the back. Don’t shoot people at their ugliest moments. I don’t just mean your friends. I mean people you see in public. People who are poorly dressed at WalMart. People who fell asleep on the subway. Definitely not people in a fight. That’s what video is for.

Giving the Finger

This one irks me so much I gave it its own spot. I joined a Facebook group for a summer camp I attended in Middle School. I didn’t have a great time there, but I thought I’d check in to see the people I actually did like. Almost every photo from the old days had people giving the camera the finger. It reminded me of everything I hate about them. It’s not funny. It’s not fun. You look like a jerk, not like a punk rocker.

Action Figures Doing Stuff

How many photos of G.I. Joe figures, or Star Wars figures, or Lego minifigs have I waded through? Thousands. All with captions. In my life, I think I’ve seen 1 funny action figure shot. If you don’t work for Robot Chicken, you’re not funny enough to post these pictures. Move on, try something else. Tie them to a sparkler and light them on fire, like a normal kid.

Photos of the Stage (if you have bad seats)

If I can’t see the band clearly in your photo, don’t post it. The band Phish has an amazing light show. It can produce photos that are occasionally cool. But they all look the same. Plus, it just depresses me that you couldn’t get better tickets. I hate having horrible seats at a concert. Your photo just reminds me of the worst concerts I’ve been to.

Screenshots of Twitter or Text Message Conversations

Once I learned that it was easy to fake a text message chat, DamnYouAutocorrect.com lost much of its charm. But that only proves that the only text message conversations worth reading are usually fakes curated by a good editor. Also, you don’t need to show me your thrilling, ironic conversation on Twitter. I don’t need that kind of proof. Just tell me about it, that will do.

Photos of a TV Screen or Monitor

Don’t take photos of a misspelled caption on the TV. Don’t use your phone to take a photo of the error message on your computer. I get it. The Blue Screen Of Death can strike anywhere. I believe you. You don’t need to prove it by posting a photo of the Jumbotron.

Expensive Stuff You Just Bought

Be humble with your purchases. There is a fine line between collecting and bragging. There’s no reason to be embarrassed by success and wealth, but taking photos of your new diamond ring or your expensive watch can be off-putting. Unless you’ve found a rare collector’s item that nobody with a huge wad of cash could walk into a store and buy, you’re essentially just duplicating a page from a catalogue, and I hate getting catalogues in the mail. Except Victoria’s Secret. Please, never stop sending those.

Anything From Your Office

Home office. Company headquarters. Unless you work at Google, your office is very dull. By day, I work for a major technology manufacturer. We have cool gadgets floating around all the time. But I can’t post pictures of anything cool. You’ll just see cubicles. And conference rooms. And people you don’t know doing silly things that are only funny after 8 hours of plastering my butt to a seat. Definitely do not post signs hanging in your break room. I have my own break room, and it has its own signs. If you show me one of those signs in a photo, I promise I will steal your lunch, especially if you make a tasty sandwich.

The Average Old Thing You Found in a Cardboard Box

Hey, I found my old Palm Treo! Here’s a picture of it. Look! It’s a miniUSB cord! Remember when we all used those instead of microUSB? Wow! A ribbon from an old typewriter! We were so silly back then. Blech. If it wasn’t important enough to photograph then, and you weren’t alive before NASA faked the moon landing, then I don’t care to see it in pictures.

Nothing

Seriously. No photos of nothing. Look at your photo. Is there something there? Can I see it? Is it interesting? If you could not answer yes to these questions, please do not post your photo.

Bonus: Things I Will Begin to Hate Very Soon

Feet

I have to admit, I don’t mind feet. I’m not a fetishist. I just have nothing against feet. Feet in a photo can add a little drama and perspective. Feet on a beach, not at all interesting. But a work friend just posted a photo looking down at her feet, and she was clearly sitting in the middle of the street at the top of a hill in San Francisco. That’s a cool shot. So, I’ll give feet a pass for now, but consider this a first warning.

Writing

It seems stupid to post a photo of a handwritten note as a way to deliver your message, but somehow I don’t yet mind the style. This is only cool for one more month. As of September, 2012, you are no longer allowed to do this.

Tickets

I like tickets because of what they reveal about you. You may think your airline ticket is only showing me where you’re going. But I also see whether you get to sit in first class. Whether you’re a window or an aisle person, or the loser stuck in the middle. If you have good seats to the concert (and if not, NO PHOTOS). In excess, these will surely drive me crazy, but for now I’m not against ticket photos.

[Image credits: Simon Carr; Sergey Alifanov; Michael Lockner]

CNN recently posted a story begging readers not to post spoilers online. The writer wants you to give fair warning, and asks you not to post even hints that there is something to spoil.

I understand this, especially the hints. It is a very stupid person who says “this movie has a twist at the end” and thinks other people won’t be able to guess. I remember when I went to see The Sixth Sense, the schmuck tearing tickets said to every single customer “It has a surprise ending, you’ll want to see it again.” Rip. “It has a surprise ending . . .” Rip. He clearly felt it was his job to ruin the movie for everyone. And you know what? I knew exactly what that surprise was going to be less than halfway through the movie. I tried to deny it to myself, and to forget what I had heard, but of course the movie keeps reinforcing the idea and playing with it in creative ways. The same reason the movie is worth seeing twice is also the reason the surprise was completely ruined on the first go round.

I used to review movies, and I tried to be sensitive to this. But here’s the problem. You cannot properly evaluate a movie without judging its ending. You can’t discuss any story properly without also discussing the climax and the resolution. After all, everything is leading up to this climax.

How can you properly evaluate a story without considering the ending? Sure, you could write an entire movie review without spoilers, and there are plenty of outlets that offer such a review. But I often read reviews of movies after I have seen them, to see if I agree with what the critics have to say. Any proper criticism of a film, or any story at all, needs to explicitly take into account the ending. Even though most critiques try to spare readers from an early reveal of the ending, this very idea might become outdated.

A friend recently told me she heard her daughter utter the words “Samantha, I am your father,” in the ghostly drone that passes for a child’s impersonation of Darth Vader. The little girl had never seen Star Wars. So how did this, perhaps the ultimate movie spoiler, creep into her vocabulary? Best guess is that she saw it in parodies. In cartoons, on sitcoms, and popping up over and over again, until it took on its own meaning for her.

I haven’t shown my 3 year old son Star Wars yet. I’m waiting until he’ll be able to sit through the entire first movie without much squirming. But I’m not shielding him from learning these important plot twists in advance. I don’t think it’s so important.

I remember when I saw that fateful scene at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. I wasn’t really shocked. In fact, I was more incredulous. Really? Why would the writer come up with this twist? After all, Darth Vader hardly seemed to notice or care about Luke Skywalker through the first and much of the second movie. Why isn’t he more interested in reconnecting with his long lost child? We never see anybody tell Darth Vader that Luke is his son, so we must infer that he either knows through some power of The Force, or he sees a family resemblance. But if The Force tells him it’s true, why didn’t he find the kid earlier? And why wait until after you’ve cut off his hand to tell him the truth, if he believed the truth would be such a convincing argument to turn the newfound Jedi?

The plot twist exists on its own not as a shocking surprise moment, but as an interesting turn of events. You don’t need to be surprised by the twist to appreciate its power. The spoiled events in a movie rewrite the story from the beginning. In the movie The Grey, when you know that everyone dies, the story changes from a tale of survival to a tale of desperation. You might like the movie more knowing that nobody survives. When I saw the film, without knowing its ending, I was seriously disappointed.

Certainly knowing the plot twists in Star Wars don’t hurt repeat viewings. The only real problem is that Darth Vader seems so aloof and unimpressed by his son running around the Death Star killing Stormtroopers that we have to wonder if the writers had imagined the twist before the first movie was finished.

Even in movies where you walk in with a historical knowledge of the ending, the lack of surprise does nothing to hurt the film. In fact, it may add to the tension. In the movie “127 Hours,” for instance (one of the better movies that you certainly did NOT see in 2010), I walked in knowing the main character was going to cut his arm off at the end in order to survive. The guy lives. The arm dies. Still a good movie.

In “Titanic,” of course we all know the ending. That the ending is so well known was the punchline to thousands of lousy late night comedian jokes. But waiting for the ship to hit the iceberg, and watching its inevitable demise, added to the enjoyment. It certainly got me through the sappy scenes in the middle.

I recently started watching the second season of Game of Thrones. I had originally planned to wait until I had finished the second book, but I haven’t been able to quickly finish the first book in the series, let alone the second. Recently, bits and pieces started popping up online. Plot details were revealed. Deaths documented. I knew that if I didn’t start watching soon, I’d know the whole story before I started watching the first episode.

So, I started watching, because I wanted the plot to unfold for the first time before my eyes. I didn’t whine about it, I understood. People have a right to talk about the key plot elements, as a way of criticizing and evaluating the show. It’s part and parcel of what makes the Internet such a great tool, the constant stream of information and feedback. Spoilers are a necessary evil. There’s no reason to be like Ned Stark and lose your head over it.

Oh, I forgot to add: SPOILER ALERT.

There is a moment playing Diablo games when it hits you. Why am I still playing? It’s a tough question to wrestle with, since this is the same question that could ruin all video games for you. What’s the point? So, I started to think about my favorite games. Some games have a great story line. You can make different choices each time, and affect the outcome, subtly or drastically. Some games are interspersed with amazing set pieces so massive in scale that you cannot wait to reach them. Some games offer challenging puzzles, with multiple ways to solve them, so you can constantly replay to try each permutation.

Most of all, though, the best games are simply fun to play. Video games run with the idea that “half the fun is getting there.” In the best games, that’s almost all of the fun. There are very few games that I replay continually just to see the ending. The actual gameplay has to be very fun. In fact, the gameplay has to be just as fun when you lose as when you win. I have a maxim of gaming that you should never expect to complete a gaming task once. Even the most difficult feat in gaming will often be repeated. So, it must be fun. Losing has to be almost as enjoyable as winning.

Diablo is simply no fun. The gameplay is beyond repetitive. It’s inane. It’s completely lifeless. It is mouse clicking with a few keyboard shortcuts thrown in. The entire game boils down to: look at that monster, I’m going to click on it until it’s dead. There is very little skill, or even thought involved in playing the game. There are no puzzles to solve, no riddles, no mysteries. There is a plot, but it is almost entirely revealed in high-quality cut scene movies between the action. Almost nothing you do in the game feels like it is contributing to the storyline.

It used to be that Diablo was about collecting cool weapons and leveling-up your character. You play more and you gain more awesome toys and cool abilities. To a small extent that is still true. But Blizzard has made serious mistakes in the game design and, at the risk of sounding cynical, it seems that much of the problem comes from the new auction house. Users can now buy and sell items in the game with real money. Blizzard takes a huge cut, of course, but you’re still making money from playing the game.

However, look where this has left the game experience. Items are now worth money, which means that Blizzard needs to create an entire level of items that is at once nearly-unobtainable and also very valuable. This pushes down the value of almost all other items in the game. Any item that is not ‘magical,’ which is to say the overwhelming bulk of the items you find, is completely worthless to the player. These items do not add to the gameplay at all, and you can’t sell them. Blizzard has strewn its virtual world with tons of virtual garbage.

Characters gain new abilities as they gain experience, but often these seem like a step backwards. I get new powers that add or augment my existing abilities, but these are often less interesting, or less powerful, than the powers I already had. The special effects look cool, but the action on screen can be jumbled and confusing at times. So, no matter how cool it looks, you are essentially just clicking on a massive pile of bad guys, and repeating this simple act until they all stop moving.

So, Diablo III has some very fundamental flaws, but it is the little things that bother me even more. Some of these are endemic to the hack-and-slash dungeon crawler genre, but the genre, and gaming in general, has grown up significantly in the 11 years since Diablo II was released. While competitors are creating deep virtual worlds and immersive environments, Blizzard has taken the laziest route possible with Diablo III.

Here are some of my favorite examples. In the game, you might have to kill a swarm of bugs. That swarm acts like one single enemy, but looks like a swarm. So, you just click your mouse on it, and your character starts shooting at flies with a crossbow. Some of these flies are so scary your character will run away from them, even though they look like all the other flies, and you wouldn’t know they strike such fear in the hearts of men unless you read the description, which says simply “nightmarish.” Okay, fine, your character kills these nightmarish flies and is rewarded with . . . a suit of armor? What?! Seriously, I’m supposed to believe that this swarm of flies was carrying a suit of armor? What the heck were flies doing with armor? And 80 gold coins? Where did they keep them? I suppose flies in Diablo III have pockets.

There are a few non-player characters, and you are forced to listen to the same repetitive dialogue from them over and over again. It has nothing to do with the plot or the action on screen. You could be fighting a nest of giant spiders, and the Enchantress character will ask if you think one of the boy characters likes her. You could be literally descending into the depths of Hell, and the Scoundrel character might talk about the women he’s taken advantage of. It’s boring and nonsensical, and worst of all, it’s repetitive. Each character has maybe a dozen lines or so that they spew at the weirdest moments, but over the course of a 20 – 30 hour game, you’ll hear these lines over and over again. And you can’t kill these characters. Trust me, I’ve tried.

Diablo III is simply an example of the laziest form of game design. It is as though Blizzard tried to imagine the least effort they could put into improving Diablo II while still calling this a new game, and then cut out half of those ideas. Blizzard has created a world that will make you feel worthless for revisiting. Why am I still playing? I’m not. I’m done.

Before I tell you exactly which one (have you guessed yet?), let me define what I want in a music service. I want good music. I want the music I am in the mood to hear. Sometimes that’s a song I already own. Sometimes that’s a song I’m familiar with, but haven’t gotten around to downloading. Sometimes it’s a song I didn’t know I would like until I heard it. Never do I want to hear another cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” as long as I live. I’m looking at you, Pandora. Enough with the “Hallelujah.”

My favorite music service, by a long shot, is SiriusXM. That’s right, satellite radio. I love it. I knew I would love it from the start. I love it so much that when I bought a car that had Sirius radio installed, I called up and bought a full year’s subscription with all the bells and whistles, before the 3-month trial period had ended. That’s support for 1 car stereo, plus access to the Web site and the mobile app for streaming.

I don’t know exactly how much it costs, and I’m not going to Google it for you. That’s not the point. It wasn’t so expensive that I balked at paying for a year. The music was much more important to me than the total cost over a year. If you’re looking for a bargain, look elsewhere. But if you want to know why I think this is the best service available, keep reading.

First, an unnecessary disclosure. My day job is with Samsung. As far as I know, we’re not connected to SiriusXM in any way, and I’m not being paid to promote the service. In fact, I’ll bet there are a variety of ways we’re connected to other music services. For some people, those others may be the right choice. There are lots of ways they can serve up music that Sirius can’t match. But those are not my favorites.

One exception is Google Music. I use Google Music in addition to Sirius. When I need to satisfy the itch for just that one song from my library at the precise moment, Google Music comes to the rescue. But I’m not married to Google Music. If another cloud-based storage option came along offering even slightly better service, I would jump ship without regret.

I joined SiriusXM first for Howard Stern. I’m a long time fan. Don’t judge until you’ve tried him for a month. Howard Stern operates two channels on SiriusXM. One plays his main radio show, which is broadcast new three days a week, and then reruns of the show for the rest of the week. The other station plays shuffled clips from his 30+ year history on the radio, as well as shows from other broadcasters Stern has culled.

There is every indication that when Stern’s current contract is up, he will retire from radio. His success on “America’s Got Talent” is probably not helping my chances of hearing him live on my morning drive. When Stern leaves Sirius, I will miss his show more than I have missed any other show that disappeared from the airwaves. But I will remain a loyal SiriusXM subscriber.

Sirius has an excellent collection of curated radio channels. The first 10 channels correspond to decades. Channel 6 is all Sixties music; channel 9 is all nineties music, and so on. There are channels themed towards certain bands or personalities. Jimmy Buffett has his own channel, and so does Eminem. There is a Bruce Springsteen channel, and Sirius recently added a Pink Floyd channel. The best thing about these personality-inspired channels is the bonuses they offer. There are clips of interviews, outtakes, B-sides, and live recordings that even true fans may have missed.

In fact, this is the best thing about all of Sirius. The channels are well-curated. Sirius has employed plenty of old school DJs from the bygone days of radio. Almost all of the original MTV VJs are employed at Sirius. Video killed the radio star, but satellite radio resuscitated the video star’s career.

Tune to a station you like. I love “Lithium,” which is likely named for the eponymous Nirvana song, and which plays mostly alternative music from the early nineties. If you’re a true fan of this genre, on any given day you’ll likely hear songs you already own, songs you never got around to downloading from Napster in its heyday, and some songs you’ll swear you’ve never heard before.

The genre selection could use a little more variety. You won’t find the most obscure genres to quench your thirst. If you’re into underground hip-hop, or pop a cappella, or other less popular genres (as I am), you won’t find stations to support your habit. But there is still plenty to like. I have 6 channels programmed into my dashboard shortcuts, and each of those is a starting point. Sirius channels are nicely grouped. So, if you start with a singer/songwriter channel and work your way up the board, you’ll branch out in ways that make sense: through coffeehouse music; to early alternative rock, with its smooth vocals and padded synths; to the nostalgic Lithium station I mentioned; through college rock and new alternative.

There are blocks of comedy channels, from family friendly through the ultra-raunchy Raw Dog and Howard Stern channels. There are news and political channels that cover a wide spectrum. I still donate to my local public radio station, but I can’t stand listening to it because of the ubiquitous membership drives. On SiriusXM’s NPR station, I get most of my favorite shows with none of that nonsense.

There are occasionally cool special events, but SiriusXM would do better to have more of these. Sirius broadcast live Bruce Springsteen’s first ever show at the Apollo theater in New York City. A special tribute channel will pop up frequently to correspond with an anniversary or a death. The Pink Floyd station seemed to start as a special feature, but now seems like an awesome permanent fixture. Still, when Stern vacates his channels, Sirius will need more original programming to fill in the gap.

There are other small problems, too. The service doesn’t work in tunnels. It cuts out briefly when you drive under a large overpass. Sometimes, it just stops working for a moment or two. Sirius depends on a direct line of transmission from a satellite in space. It doesn’t quite penetrate yet. It would be nice if the service could buffer better, or perhaps pair the satellite component with an online, connected component in the car for a hybrid service that was much more reliable. It doesn’t hamper my enjoyment, but it is annoying when I miss the punch line of a joke because I drove under an exit ramp.

Sirius has been growing steadily, but not quickly enough. It is competing with free terrestrial radio, after all. Free radio gets worse and worse by the day, but hey, it’s free. Plus, most cars have an audio input for your phone or MP3 player, as well as CD players, DVD players, and even Blu Ray built-in. And that’s just in the car. On the desktop and on mobile devices, competition is even more fierce.

I would still recommend SiriusXM above all. If you miss the old days of radio, when a DJ you could trust and enjoy would pick out an interesting selection of music, then SiriusXM will bring you back.

[Images credit: Kristina Alexanderson]

Second, I had almost forgotten that high school reunions exist. For whatever reason, so did my friends who should have been in attendance. Now, reunions are highly charged affairs. I attended my 10-year reunion and I had a wonderful time. I hated high school but, perhaps miraculously, my reunion reminded me of all the good I liked, and also taught me how much people can grow up and mature in the best ways after high school. It taught me how ridiculous you look if you stick to the same attitude that made you feel so powerful back then.

Some people still hold old grudges. Some people have simply disconnected themselves and do not want to go back. Some don’t see the point at all. I’m an admitted nostalgia junky, so reunions have a special appeal to me. But I understand many people don’t feel the same way.

Most of all, I wonder how many of those people skipped the reunion because of Facebook. While I might have argued from this perspective a few years ago, I wouldn’t take this stand now. But it’s obvious the reunion concept is in danger because of social networking.

Why bother going to a reunion? If I was close friends with you in High School, I kept in touch with you. If I liked you just a little, I’ve already connected with you on Facebook. If I didn’t like you, I probably connected with you, then dropped you after I realized I didn’t want to hear about your stupid life. And if I hated you, I’m definitely stalking you from afar and hoping your life goes to trash before my eyes. Thank God for Facebook’s horrible privacy settings. The morons who bullied me back then will never figure them out.

It was for this reason that I skipped my 15-year college reunion. First of all, 15 year reunions are just stupid. Reunions come in 10-year increments. That’s the rule. I know 25-year sounds enticing, but trust me on this one. Skip it and wait until your 30-year.

I skipped my college reunion because I keep in touch regularly with everyone from my class with whom I was friends. And college is much more mixed in terms of class years. I had far more friends from other classes, and none of them would be attending. So why bother? But high school is more regimented. You tend to go to class with students from your graduating year. Most of my high school friends graduated with me.

I hope the high school reunion does not die in the face of Facebook. The argument that you will keep in touch with the people most important to you, regardless of social networks or contrived picnics in your old home town, is simply untrue.

Humans live in very limited spheres, but feel like we exist as part of the whole world. When I’m in New York City and I happen to run into my friend who is a lawyer in Turkey, or my actor friend who works mostly in southeast Asia (true story, and on the same day, no less), I feel like the world is a small place and it’s easy to connect. But in fact, it is too easy to lose touch even with people who are very important to us. The idea that we’ll keep in touch with those we love best is self-defeating. What’s the value in giving up on trying to keep the channels of a relationship open?

Facebook is not an artificial class reunion, it is simply a tool. You still have to do the legwork yourself. Facebook is no more forcing us to be friends with old acquaintances than the telephone is forcing us to call our parents. There is no reason to disdain Facebook simply because of the strange friendships we have dug out from the backyard of our childhood homes, hosed off, and trotted around on our handlebars.

There is value in seeing people in person. Going to my 10-year reunion was cathartic, even though I hadn’t accomplished so much. I had a wife (now ex-), but no kid yet. I was a teacher, and I’ve since changed careers. But it did help me bridge a divide in unexpected ways. Being friends with people on Facebook gives me an idea of what they look like, what they are into now, who they ended up with. But it doesn’t have the same impact as talking to them personally and seeing them in motion.

I had forgotten that we are all real people. In the crowded space between high school and now, my adolescent emotions had clouded my impression of these people to such an extent that I had imbued them with a power and an importance that was unsustainable. I’ll admit I was still holding some old grudges, but those grudges were disfigured by the emotional maelstrom that is our youth.

The best part of the reunion was seeing people who were not so important to me that I wanted to rekindle a real-world friendship. On Facebook, those casual acquaintances are answers to trivia questions. But in real life, they help fill out and make whole the piecemeal memories we’re stuck replaying in our minds over and over 10, 20, or 30 years later.

Facebook does not have to supplant reunions, but it will if people do not make the effort to attend in real life. Ironically, it’s a leap of faith, like Facebook itself. On Facebook, you must contribute. You MUST. If you don’t contribute, I don’t contribute, and nobody contributes except for the people I want to hear from the least. You must have faith that I won’t see your contribution as narcissistic. I want to hear from you, that’s why we’re friends.

The same is true for reunions. Don’t go to your high school reunion for you. Go for me. Even if you won’t get much out of it, you may be surprised by who is happy to see you, and how much your presence means. En masse, the effect increases geometrically as more and more people attend.

For a little while, as Facebook grew in popularity, it might have made sense for Facebook to replace the reunion. But now the tables have turned. We turned to Facebook to remind ourselves of the people we had lost. We should turn again to reunions to remind ourselves that they are real people after all.

It was a simple statement. Something to the effect of ‘Don’t you hate it when you see something cute that your kids are doing and you say to yourself: I wish I had a camera.’ Sounds innocuous enough, but that one phrase changed everything, and it may shape more than the future of computing. It may shape memory as we know it.

Until now, I had imagined Project Glass as a sort of wearable cell phone. Where phones have fallen short of delivering a great augmented reality experience, a head-mounted display with a translucent screen might fare much better. Augmented reality improves navigation, local search, and even social functions almost exponentially. Project Glass seems like the first product in a broad future of wearable computing products.

But even as I have drooled over Glass in the past, it never truly occurred to me that Google might mean for Project Glass to record everything. EVERYTHING. Your entire life. Before we think about the implications, let’s discuss why this is completely possible.

How much data would it take to record a life? That depends on a lot of variables. Are you recording in 1080p? 4K? What audio bitrate? Audio and video, or location data, too? Do you record the moments when you are watching your own recordings? When you’re driving on your commute? Watching a movie or TV?

Let me offer a ballpark figure. 4.5 Petabytes. That’s my educated guess for the storage it would take to record every waking moment of my life. Forty-five Terabytes a year for 80 years. That’s based on a ‘high-profile’ video recording rate of 15 Mbps, and 6 hours of sleep every night.

Is that an insane amount of storage for anyone to possess? Not for long. I have on the tip of my finger right now a tiny microSD card with a 64GB capacity. Yesterday, this card did not exist, and a 32GB card would have cost a couple hundred dollars. Today, a 32GB card can be had for about $1 per Gigabyte. Tomorrow, we’ll have 128GB cards, and I believe the microSDXC standard tops out at 2TB or more. Within 10 years, I would bet that a Petabyte of storage, which is a million Gigabytes, will be completely affordable, either in a compact form or via a remote (cloud) storage host.

So, by the time my 3 year old is in High School, he’ll have access to the technology to record his entire life. I cannot begin to fathom the perspective he would have. It would change everything.

Of course there are privacy concerns, and legal issues. But what has me curious at the moment are the ways such technology will shape nostalgia. I love nostalgia. I’m a big fan. Nostalgia is one of the most fun games we can play with our own lives. When we can reference a first-person video of every memory we have, will that destroy the value of nostalgia? Will the term become meaningless?

Think of your earliest memory. In your mind, how do you see yourself? Do you see your arms and hands reaching out in front of you? Or do you imagine yourself fully formed, in the third person? It’s a strange phenomenon that we remember ourselves from outside our own bodies. But technology like Project Glass may change the way we approach even our own memory storage. Is there a biological imperative, a psychological reason why we imagine ourselves this way? Is the disconnect necessary? I don’t know. But if I’m forced to imagine myself only in the first person, I know it will change the way I remember my entire life.

I’ve also heard the question raised of whether we will continue to remember at all. Certainly memory is an evolutionary trait. We are not likely to cease all memory function in a few decades simply because a technology helps us record everything we see and hear. But memory is also a learned skill. We learn to categorize and associate our memories. We learn what is useful for long-term storage, and what is best forgotten. Our mind has defense mechanisms in place to protect us from painful memories, and emotional triggers to spotlight and gild our best moments. What happens when we reduce all of these moments to a high-definition video played back on a computer screen?

One of my favorite moments from my youth is the night I met my first long-term girlfriend. We were at a party, but outside on the street, sitting on the spoiler of my car. It had just started to rain, and we were covering ourselves with a small foam floor mat that my father used in the aerobics classes he took. We talked for a few hours and really hit it off. I don’t remember anything we said, but I remember that my friends inside were impressed that I had done so well.

I hope that I will always have in my mind the feelings associated with that night. But if I played back the conversation, I’m sure it would destroy the memory. It was drivel, and melodramatic high school prattling, and the most obvious flirting nonsense. Outside of my own head, it would be embarrassing and cringe-inducing. It would be evidence against me.

Isn’t that adolescence in a nutshell? And early adulthood? And, well, all of life? Life is embarrassing. That’s why embarrassment makes us laugh so hard, because we can relate. We’re all horrible actors on our own stage. While I love the idea of Project Glass, and I can certainly see the advantage of having a camera recording all of those lost moments, there are too many moments that should stay lost. I would rather have them rattling around in my head than on my TV screen. I’d rather see myself from the outside, or remember the event from deep within, than have an accurate depiction of what my arms were doing, and how I sounded as the words spilled out of my gullet. I hope we don’t lose the ability to get it wrong, somehow, because memory is so much more interesting when it’s imperfect.

You see this sort of stunt all the time. Often, it happens on college campuses, but columnists and reporters will try the same concept. Someone gives up something for a length of time. For a while it was cell phones. Then, smartphones. Computers. Etc. I imagine that every major innovation has been accompanied by a stunt writer giving it up. The pocket calculator. The microwave. The color TV. I’m sure if you go back far enough, you’ll find papyrus scrolls filled with stories about giving up this new-fangled invention: the horse. Writers forcing themselves to walk everywhere in sandals, instead of riding on the backs of those darn contraptions, with their tails and their stinky droppings.

The appeal is obvious, especially for those of us who have lived through dramatic changes. Certainly the Internet represents a paradigmatic shift in global communication, the likes of which we have never seen before. Well, not since the telephone. Or the telegraph. Or the post office. Or, well . . . okay, at some point we weren’t able to talk to people across the globe, and now we can. And I’m sure when that happened, writers found themselves pitching their editors on stories about giving up stamps. Or messengers. Or those fires that they burn at the top of mountain peaks. Can you imagine living in medieval times and giving up mountain-peak-signal-fires? I certainly cannot.

It’s hard to live through change. You start to get whimsical. You start to feel claustrophobic, locked into the new way of communicating, the new way of living your life, and you long for the simpler times. In literary terms, this longing is known as a pastoral. The term pastoral comes from the word “pastor,” which is a shepherd herding a flock of sheep. Pasture comes from the same root. But in literature, the idea of a pastoral is the feeling that what we all really want to do with our lives is run away from civilization and just herd sheep. Doesn’t that sound nice? Just you and the sheep. And the grass. Rolling hillsides. Of course I’m imagining all of this taking place in New Zealand, so there are also hobbits there. But I don’t talk to the hobbits. I just tend my sheep.

Pastorals are not limited to sheep herding. Any situation in which you find yourself longing to leave the complexity of your life behind in favor of the simplicity of a zen existence is a pastoral. My favorite modern pastoral is the guy who works the night shift in the morgue. That would be a great job. So peaceful and quiet. Nobody to bother you. You could simply read books all day, or finish that novel you’re working on. All of your stress would disappear. Just think of it. Working in a morgue. Let that story play out in your head.

If you’re like me, that story always, without fail, ends in zombies. I can’t imagine myself really working in a morgue without imagining an outbreak of the living dead. That’s the problem with pastorals. In fact, that’s actually built into the idea of the pastoral, in literary terms. The pastoral always sounds nice, but in reality, we know that it can never truly make us happy. It sounds nice to live your life amongst the rolling hills of New Zealand. So quiet. Just you and the sheep. But the sheep need to be sheared. The sheep need to be tended, and moved about a bit to find good pasture land. It rains a lot. And you still have to make money off the sheep so you can eat. Or you have to kill one of your sheepy friends to eat them. Also, the hobbits, with their stupid “my precious” this, and “shire” that. It sounds nice, but it’s just a story we tell ourselves. It’s a form of nostalgia for a life we could have had. It’s remembering the moment we came to the crossroads, and took the path more traveled, and that has made all the difference.

Giving up the Internet is a pastoral. I respect the decision, and I’m curious about the story. But I think the exercise is ultimately pointless.

I once envisioned a similar story, but from the opposite angle. I read about a college professor who challenged his students to go smartphone-free for a month. I decided that I would try to live an entire month with a smartphone. I wouldn’t give it up, quite the opposite. I would make sure a smartphone would be ever-present in my life. I would sleep with a smartphone in my hand. I would use a waterproof smartphone in the shower. I would always have a smartphone on me, always charged and connected. I wouldn’t go anywhere without smartphone reception.

I didn’t write the story, in the end. Motorola made me send back the Defy review unit I had, their waterproof phone. Then I got a job at Samsung. We make a waterproof phone, too, but I was no longer a writer full time. I had joined the corporate world.

But I think my experiment would be more sound. What is there to learn from giving up the Internet for a year? Will Miller tell us how things were back in 1992? I was there. The music was good. But it was harder to keep in touch with friends. I had a cell phone then. It was the size of a small suitcase. It cost $1 per minute to use, after the monthly fee.

Will Miller tell us what it’s like to live in 2012 without the Internet? Why bother? We have the Internet. We will always have the Internet. We’re never going back. We’re never giving it up. When the Internet goes down, for us locally or even on a global scale, we will not revert to some pre-Netscape existence where we start calling 411 again and send letters by licking a stamp. We’ll instead lament the fact that the Internet is down, and we’ll work very hard to fix it.

I just find the prospect of examining a modern life without the Internet to be very dull. I want to know what the future is going to be like. What will life be like when our cell phones are contact lenses that we wear on our eyes? What will it be like when we pay with implants in our fingertips, or talk through wireless communicators in our brains? How will we think about transportation when our cars can do all the driving for us? How will we eat when we start drinking our own recycled bodily fluids, stillsuit-style? That’s what I’m curious about. Thinking about a world without an Internet is like visiting one of those villages full of actors who pretend to live in the past. Oh, that’s how they made butter. Oh, that’s how they fixed a shirt. What, they didn’t have lightbulbs? No way. Can we go now? I saw an In-N-Out on the way over, and I want to stop for a double double.

Please, if you read this, don’t send it to Paul Miller. He has enough to deal with. He’s had to resort to turning in his work on flash drives. Flash Drives! Can you imagine it? How very 2004 of him. I’m not sure how he’ll manage, playing X-Box without 13 years olds spewing racist, homophobic slurs at him. Is he single? How do people date without the Internet? Do bars still exist? If he orders a pizza from Dominoes, how will he know if it’s on its way!?! Will he have to guess? Wait by the door for 30 minutes? I couldn’t live like that. I’d rather just quit my job and work in the morgue. You’ll find me in the basement, with my pad and paper, and my shotgun.

I can definitely see his point. People are starting to search for his name. He’s at a weird point of fame. I’m sure if I were in a college singing group with Robert DeNiro or Alyssa Milano, there would be no problem posting goofy pictures of us in hockey jerseys singing Oom Poppa Mow Mow. Bobby D (as we called DeNiro when he was a high tenor) might not prefer I post our intimate moments of camaraderie, but they certainly won’t spoil his image or hurt his career any. Guessing celebrities from High School Yearbook photos is practically an internet sport.

Similarly, if my friend were not at all famous, he would not have cared. I’m not famous, so I don’t really care which pictures of me are posted. But my friend is at a turning point. People are just starting to form impressions about him. Casting directors are starting to Google him and search for him on social networks. I would hate to stand in his way, simply because we sang the national anthem at the All-Star Fan Fest one year.

The second photo was also from my a cappella group. This was a shot of a few of us at our absolutely most unphotogenic. We were recording a CD on a shoestring budget. We were sleeping in the music building on campus. We were in pajamas with sagging faces and dark circles under our eyes. We looked awful.

Actually, I shouldn’t say “we,” because I was taking the photo. I wasn’t actually in this horrid shot.

I posted this picture on Facebook because I’m friends with most of my old group-mates. But of course they are not my only friends. So I was also sharing with all of my friends, and all of their friends. Let’s do some quick math.

The average Facebook user has 130 friends. Let’s assume a 20% overlap between friends, which is probably quite generous. So, I shared my photo with 130 people, and all of their friends. They are all friends with 104 people who are not in my circle. I have now shared that horrible photo with 13,520 people. My friends are actually quite active on Facebook, so the real number is probably much higher. I have almost 300 friends. Doing some quick math in my head . . . I could have spread that photo to 10 million people.

Nobody wants that. How many of us love the way we look so much that we want to put our picture in a magazine? Because a strong circulation on Facebook probably gets more eyes looking than a low-end glossy.

So, here are some rules I might suggest for posting photos on Facebook. An etiquette guide to photo-documenting the lives of others:

1. Think about when XXXX sees it

I keep a cultivated and groomed list of Facebook friends. I have strict controls over who gets to see what. But most people aren’t like me. I’m not friends with my boss or my ex-wife. I have strict control over the photos that my father can see, or my cousin, the DEA officer. I don’t post anything stupid or illegal on Facebook, but I’m well aware of who gets the joke, and who will jump to the wrong conclusions.

So, before you post a photo, remember that everybody who is friends with the person you tag may see it. If I post a picture of Dave, Dave’s wife will see it. So will his parents. His boss. The kids he babysits. Teenagers who work for him over the summer. His distant cousins in Austria. Does Dave want that picture shared with everyone? It’s probably okay, but when in doubt, just don’t post.

2. Check the background, and don’t tag

Don’t tag me if I just happen to be in the distant background of a picture. Share the picture with me, so I can see what was happening while I was off talking to Fred in the corner. But there’s no need to tag me and Fred, if we’re not the subject. You don’t need to tag everyone in a photo. Just tag the most important people.

3. Only people with faces

I know what I look like, kind of. That is, I look in the mirror every day, and I’m familiar with my own face. I’m not happy about it, but I can work with it. The back of my head? Not so much. I have no idea what the back of my head looks like, but I’m sure it’s not my most flattering angle. There’s something unpleasant and uncanny about looking at a picture of yourself from the back. It’s so unfamiliar to us, it’s almost never pleasant. It’s like hearing a recording of your voice. You think: “do I really sound so nasal and pinched?” No, of course not. But it’s not an angle I like, and it doesn’t add to the picture to let me know that I’m there, even if you can’t see me.

4. The 10% rule

Don’t post every photo you take. I subscribe to a 10% rule. When I bought my digital camera, and started snapping photos like crazy, I found that only about 10% of the photos I took were worth looking at. And only 10% of those were actually good. So, 1% of all my photos are truly keepers, and the rest are taking up space. And I’m not a bad photographer, having wielded a camera professionally for a few years.

That said, I take hundreds of photographs at a time. When I take a trip to the zoo with my son, I snap 300 – 400 photos. I save about 30 of those. When I really want to show off, I pick the top 3. I’m satisfied with that. If I did that every weekend for a year, I’d have 150 or so great pictures. I don’t think there are 150 photos of me when I was a child, in total, let alone the good ones.

So, snap lots of photos, but only save the best. Don’t try to set up the best 20 photos you can imagine at a party, or a baby shower, or on a field trip. Just keep shooting, taking dozens, even hundreds of shots. Why not? Memory is cheap. Shoot more, and be more picky.

5. Accept the inevitable

Finally, I have a suggestion for photo subjects. Grin and bear it. Remember, Facebook is not for you. On its surface, sharing so much of yourself, your thoughts, actions, and images, may seem like a selfish act. But actually, it’s selfless. You are sharing with people who want to see you. People want to know what you are up to, and what you are thinking, and especially how you look. Don’t untag yourself from all your photos. That defeats the purpose of Facebook. Embrace it. Or ignore it. But most of all, accept it. Trust me, you’re not nearly as ugly as you think.

It’s easy to see the appeal of a kid’s tablet. I take my son to pick out a toy and, at 3 years old, he’s horrible at making decisions he’ll be happy with long term. It’s much better if I pick something out. Otherwise, he’ll pick out another toy car, or another LEGO set. Neither of those are bad, but he’s more likely to pick toys similar to what he already has at home. He’s in the mood to play, and his imagination ventures to the familiar. So we end up with another dump truck, or a train of a different color.

Enter the tablet. I see a size that’s small enough to fit his hands. I see educational apps and reading, in addition to games and coloring programs. It’s colorful and not too expensive. But every time I tried to pick one up in his presence, he refused it, opting instead for something more plain and repetitive.

Here’s my whopper of disclaimers. In my day job, I work for Samsung. We make Android tablets. I have a stack of them at my desk, and another stack on my shelves at home. Android is a great OS, but it’s a bit complicated for a toddler. So, I use the Galaxy Tab, and my son uses my hand-me-down iPad, a leftover from the days before I joined my current company. Yup, my 3 year old already has a 1st generation iPad that is loaded with only apps and videos that are appropriate for his age. He doesn’t use the iPad often. In fact, I usually leave it locked in the glove box of my car. A tablet is the perfect road companion for a kid.

So, between his lack of interest in the kid’s tablet, and his current iPad, I wasn’t going to spring for the Leapster, but then my parents show up for the holidays with a new Innotab. They wanted the Leapster, but it was sold out.

The Innotab is a remarkably complicated product, and not really appropriate for my son’s age. The first thing you have to do when you turn it on is pick your name from a list. Mind you, he’s the only person who uses the tablet, so the list is his name and “Guest.” Why is this account logon process so important on a toddler’s tablet? I have no idea.

He’s lost the stylus already, even though it slots in the back. I can’t find it anywhere. He might have stuck it in a pocket and dropped it at the zoo, for all I know. But he can still draw with his fingers. He understands how to pick his favorite color and change brushes. He can even erase everything and start with a fresh, clean page. But when he tries to start over, he gets a message asking if he’s sure he wants to delete his work without saving. He’s 3. What is he possibly going to create that will be so worthwhile he needs to save it every time? I’m sure the feature is nice to have for some people, but I have to clear this message every time it pops up, since he can’t yet read.

I could go on and on. When they originally bought the tablet, my parents were frantic about having me download new apps for it. They didn’t understand that it came with a fine variety. They didn’t understand how to plug in a mini-USB cord, or where the SD card goes. No memory included, of course, which they also didn’t realize. Once we figured out how to sync with their computer (requiring a system update to run the tablet software), we had trouble navigating the app store online.

In other words, it was all a terribly complicated process. But this isn’t what my parents expected. After all, this is a simple, $100 tablet. An iPad costs $400 or more for a current model. Even a Kindle Fire is twice as expensive.

There was a time when you paid $100 for something, like a stereo or a television set, what you got was a simple device with fewer features. That’s probably still the case for home theater. You get fewer ports, fewer buttons and nobs, fewer information flashing on the tiny LED screen. Pay less for a Walkman, and you lack recording capabilities, Dolby Noise Reduction, and a waterproof shell. Pay less for an action figure and you get fewer points of articulation, fewer lights and sounds. Literally, fewer bells and whistles.

But with more complicated technology like a tablet computer, you need to pay more to get less. Rather, you need to pay more to get something much simpler. My parents knew that I had given my son a tablet already. I’m sure they thought to themselves: he can’t use that iPad, it’s too complicated. We’ll get him something from a toy store; something for his age group.

The last time she came to visit, I gave my mother another one of my hand-me-down tablets. It was for her to use. She was intimidated at first, but then she sat down with my toddler and he showed her the ropes. He taught her how to unlock the screen and open her favorite app. He taught her the pinch-to-zoom gesture in the photo gallery, and how to swipe from one homescreen to the next. He still uses the big LEGO bricks, and he’s a few years from coloring within the lines. But put a 7.7-inch tablet in his hands, and he’s already generations ahead.

[Image credit: Tai Chem]

If you believe the rumors, and I do not believe the rumors, the next generation of at least one of the major gaming platforms will appear in 2013. Smart money would have an introduction at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, with sales starting in the holiday season. This is the normal pattern for consoles.

Of course these systems will be more powerful. Doubtless they will also have expanded media center features, as the race is on to create the next generation set-top-box-to-rule-them-all. Both Microsoft and Sony are shoring up their offerings in the mobile world (disclosure: in my day job I work for Samsung; we make Microsoft Windows Phones and compete directly with Sony Mobile). I would expect that the next Xbox and PlayStation consoles will have even more connectivity and interactivity with their respective mobile cousins. That’s the PS Vita for Sony, and Windows Phone / Windows 8 for Microsoft.

All of this sounds good so far. In fact, all of this sounds great. I’ve been using the PS Vita for a while, and it’s an awesome device for hardcore gamers. I love my Tegra-based tablet for casual gaming, but for games that require precise controls (read: tons of joysticks and buttons), the Vita does an excellent job.

I also like Windows 8 very much. Microsoft has proven its savvy as a convergence leader, and the company has finally shaken it’s image of being stodgy and non-creative. I suspect that was simply a holdover from too many folks being stuck on Windows XP for years longer than they should have been. But my favorite thing about Microsoft is that they don’t quit when they know they have something good.

The rumors lose me when they claim that next generation consoles will lack physical media. This would be a huge mistake. While I’m sure that most technology journalists covering the gaming beat have downloaded plenty of games and movies to their consoles,

The worst thing that could happen to the next generation of Sony PlayStation, Microsoft Xbox, and Nintendo Wii consoles would be launching in 2013 with no physical media support. I know that, at first, going media-free seems like the future for consoles. More and more laptops are appearing with no support for spinning plastic discs. Most people have probably stopped using a disc at home to watch their favorite movies and shows, as on demand and streaming services find a better foothold in the living room. But gaming presents its own special challenges. Even more, gaming presents some very good reasons why physical media is a necessary evil.

First, a reality check. Late last year, only an estimated 68% of U.S. households had a broadband connection. That means about 100,000,000 people in the U.S. have no broadband. And of those who do, I wonder how many spring for a connection that is actually useful for next generation broadband apps, like video chat, HD video on demand, and downloading massive gaming files.

Video games make for relatively economical entertainment. There’s an initial cost for the console, but console makers heavily subsidize this price, even at launch when the price is highest. So it’s a good deal. Then, games are often $60 each, but only when they are new. I know plenty of people who are still buying PS2 games, because they can be had for $10. Really, has a PS2 game lost so much of its fun in the years since its release? Then it probably wasn’t worth buying then, either.

So, a game console without a DVD or Blu-Ray drive would instantly limit its addressable market. But I have a fast Internet connection, and just enough disposable income that I’ll splurge on a new release, if it’s a title I’m hotly anticipating. A console without a drive would give me great pause.

There’s a question of storage. Sure, storage is cheap today. I bought an external drive recently with 1 TeraByte of storage, and it was close to $100. I’m sure the same can be found cheaper. But console makers are already losing money, and tend to pinch pennies when it comes to storage. The jump from a paltry 4GB of storage to an acceptable 250GB on the Xbox 360 costs almost $100. Sure, a high end Xbox with 1 TB of storage might suit my needs, but would the entry level be equally unacceptable? And when a user runs out of space, then what? Delete the games? Lose them forever? Or do you expect Microsoft will shell out the money to pay for enough bandwidth that you can keep downloading and streaming those games forever? If Netflix is putting such strain on our networks already, can you imagine what would happen when the consoles jump on board?

Worst of all, though, is that downloadable games are bad for consumers. You can’t trade a downloadable game. You can’t sell it. You can’t lend it to a friend to try out for a while. You can’t even bring it to a friend’s house to play with a group, unless you cart your entire Xbox with you.

Even with physical media, what’s the first thing that happens when you pop a disc into the tray? Right. Updates. Lots of updates. Crippling, infuriating, time-consuming updates. This is on day 1, on a game that was printed to plastic. Imagine how much worse the situation would be if developers didn’t even have to think of publishing dates? It might give them a bit of extra time to fix bugs, but it would also make games seem more fluid, less concrete.

I’m happy with my game consoles now. I like my Xbox 360, and I love my PlayStation 3. I use the Playstation more often, too. Not because of the games, but because I’ve started building my own Blu-Ray movie collection. No matter what you expect, HD movies on Blu-Ray are much higher quality all around than what you’ve seen streaming over a network. The picture is better. The sound is better, and usually supports a more robust home theater. The presentation is better, with better menus and extras. I’m not ready to give any of that up, just yet. I don’t doubt that a disc-free future is in store for console gaming. But I hope that future waits just a bit longer.

“I see you went to Brandeis University. I had a friend who went there. Did you know Shana Liebowitz?”

[Image credit: Terry Chay]

I politely explained that my circle of friends at Brandeis was small, and there were probably a half dozen Shana Liebowitzes who had graduated since I went there. Her expression never changed as she continued her line of questions.

“Maybe you know her friend, Bob Youn? She was also friends with Steve Warren? Mike Dunhill? Sara Lipschitz? Noah . . . “

I wanted to stop her. I wondered how long the list of names would continue. I knew none of those people. They might have been friends of friends of mine, but I was unfamiliar. I’m also not very good with names; by the time you’ve told me what you do for a living, I’ve already forgotten who you are.

She rattled off at least 75 names. It took four minutes. I sat in my chair and tried to smile through it. I really wanted this job.

“ . . . Masterson? No? Oh well. Maybe they’ll come to mind later. Let’s start the interview.”

We hadn’t started yet?

“I see you currently work for Samsung Mobile. Do you know Melissa McNulty? James Heller? Kendrick . . .”

Another four minutes passed. I actually did know a few of the people she mentioned, but they weren’t in my department, and they certainly couldn’t say anything to my performance or recommend me in any meaningful way. Finally, she got to a name I thought would be relevant.

“Tim Bentley?”

“Yes! Yes, I know Tim. Tim was my supervisor for a time while I worked on a project in Strategic Planning. I’m happy to tell you all about it, it was a very interesting study.”

“Oh, you know Tim? I don’t actually know him. But I’m friends with Rob Edwards, who has a cousin Samantha Edwards who worked at Hollyville Advertising with Katherine Bentley, and she’s married to Tim.”

Again, shocked. I didn’t even know Tim’s wife’s name.

“So, I have a few questions I’d like to ask, if you don’t mind.”

Finally.

“What did you think of The Hunger Games?”

“The Hunger Games?”

“Yes, the Hunger Games.”

“Well, I read the first novel on a flight on my way to Korea. I read the second novel on the way back. They were both a quick read. I was invited to Samsung HQ in Korea to speak about . . . “

“No, not the books, the movie. I see that you went to the Cinemark Theaters in Allen this past Saturday, and you mentioned that you were off to see the Hunger Games? Did you like it? The movie, I mean. Was it worth seeing? Should I go? Should I take my niece?”

She peppered me with questions. Very strange, I thought, but at least she wasn’t rattling off a list of names again. I answered briefly, hoping to turn the conversation back to my work performance.

“Great, I’ll be sure to check it out. Now, I have a question about your timeline here. Do you mind if I ask?”

“Of course, please do.”

“Are we friends?”

“Friends?”

“Sure. Are we friends? I’m asking this as a friend. I see on August 31, 2007, you asked people to lick you. Can you explain that?”

“I . . . I what?!? I said what?”

“August 31. 2007. I quote: Lick Me.”

“Wha . . . I, when did I . . . how did you hear that?”

“Oh, it’s right here. It’s on your timeline. It’s one of the first things you ever said, ever. Lick me. I don’t think you said anything else for two more months, until you saw Samrat on a movie poster on your way to work.”

“You know Samrat?”

“No, but you posted a picture of his poster. Was it a good movie? Wait, don’t tell me, don’t ruin it.”

By this point, I was getting a bit irritated, and I wondered if I should leave. If we weren’t going to talk about my work, why was I here?

“You went to Pocono Highlands Camp?”

“Yes, as a camper. But I really learned more from my time as Waterfront Director at Capital Camps. That was later.”

It was a stretch, but at least it was work.

“I also see you’re a fan of Alien and Aliens, but not Alien3 or Alien Resurrection.”

“Yeah, they were, um . . . is that a question?”

“No, not really. Do you still keep in touch with Yu-Ting?”

“Who?”

“I think she goes by Elizabeth now. But she was called Yu-Ting back in Mrs. Brackworth’s class.”

“My Kindergarten teacher? How do you . . . “ I was starting to get the picture. Apparently, she had already downloaded the picture. The one with 20 five year olds sitting and standing in rows. I was in the back, in between Bobby Scottsman and Steve Bachmann. Elizabeth Sung, formerly Yu-Ting, was sitting in front, holding a small placard with removable letters that now read: “Thunder Hill School. Mrs. Brackworth. PM Kindergarten. ’80 – ’81.”

“Congratulations on your baby, by the way.”

“Thanks, but he’s three years old, now. He’s not really a baby anymore.”

“I know. He’s grown up so fast! He was such a cute baby. And what an adorable infant he became. As a toddler, he looks like quite a handful. He’s really a fan of that tie-dye shirt, huh?”

I started to pack my things, ready to leave.

“Where are you headed? Are you going back to Barcelona this year?”

I slid my extra copies of my resume into my folder, and my folder into my briefcase. I reached across and picked up my business card, then slipped it back into my shirt pocket.

“Where did you get that dessert? The one with the chocolate and the crisps and the olive oil? That looks soooooo good? Was that sea salt on top, or sugar?”

I stood up and pushed in my chair. I opened my mouth to thank her for her time, then thought better of it. Instead, I settled for a slight wave.

“Oh well. Sorry to hear about your divorce! Thanks for your time! We’ll be in touch, Philip!”

She was calling after me now as I left the room and walked toward the elevator.

“Or should I say, Mr. Mayor!”

He voice faded as the door closed behind me and I descended back to the street.

I check into places I have not been. Sometimes, those places are far away from where I’m sitting. Before I ever visited Good 2 Go Taco, I checked in there on Foursquare. I was more than 10 miles away at the time. I did it to needle my boss, who was mayor of the joint at the time. I was threatening to steal all of his mayorships from him, and I knew that Good 2 Go was his most prized mayoral possession.

[Image credit: Nan Palmero]

A few days earlier, I had created a Foursquare location specifically for his office. Then I checked in. He checked in second. The way Foursquare works, if I checked in every day at that point, before he had the chance, I would quickly become mayor and hold that position indefinitely. I usually arrive at work before he does. I was mayor on day two, and held the title for a week or so, until a business trip took me away from my realm.

Sometimes I check into places long after I’ve left. Sometimes I check in before I arrive. Sometimes I check into a place that’s nearby, usually within sight, even though I won’t be going there. When I was in Amsterdam, I checked into a cookie shop across the street from the place I had stopped to get coffee. People can take a check-in to a coffee spot in Amsterdam the wrong way, so I thought it safer to mark my position using the cookie shop. I was mayor of that cookie shop for three months, even though I was only in Amsterdam a week. Apparently, Foursquare is not very popular in the Netherlands. Or maybe the cookies weren’t as good as they looked.

Why do I cheat? A couple reasons. First of all, Foursquare deserves a little cheating. The company, and the service, needs to get its act together. Some of my cheating is my own passive aggressive way of pointing out the obvious flaws in the system.

The distance checks are completely unreliable. Early on, the Foursquare phone app started using GPS or other location information to verify that you were near your check-in spot. But I’ve been denied plenty of legitimate check-ins because the app was gathering the wrong data. It wasn’t the phone’s fault. Google Maps found me with no trouble. But Foursquare thought I was too far away from Whole Foods to earn a check in.

So, I exploit that. Sometimes the app seems to forget to check your distance. This is how I managed a check in at a taco shop more than 10 miles away. I just searched for the location and tried to check in. A few times, it worked. A few other times, it did not.

Foursquare is also in serious need of some curation. I decided I wanted to become the mayor of my apartment complex. But when I started checking in, I found four or five listings for the same address. All of them had different mayors, even though they all pointed to the same address.

Pro Tip: Don’t really check into your home or building on Foursquare. There are obvious safety implications in telling people when and where you will and won’t be at a given time. I check into the apartment complex next door, and count that as a check in for my pad. When I lived in a house, I created a location with a nearby address. Close enough that Foursquare would find it, but not close enough that psychopaths would find me.

Foursquare also needs better recognition of the categories of the places you check in. I checked into a maritime museum and earned the coveted “I’m On A Boat!” badge. Then, when I actually checked in from a boat for the first time, there was no reward. It was a completely anti-climactic Foursquare experience.

I’d also like to know how many check-ins it really takes to become mayor, and how that works. I checked into a lunch spot in San Francisco two days in a row and became mayor. How could that be? It’s a very popular place (Gott’s Roadside). I can’t imagine my two consecutive visits earned me the mayor spot. Less than a week after I left San Francisco, I was replaced, but that’s only surprising that I held the title so long.

Nitpicking? Sure, but the confusion that Foursquare creates about the rules, and the inconsistency in their application, makes the game much less fun. And it is certainly a game.

So, I started to think about what I really wanted out of this game. Which brings me to the second reason I cheat. I don’t really care about winning at Foursquare. I just want to make myself seem more tech savvy than my luddite friends, who dabble in the game but can’t quite keep up. I want to use Foursquare as a power play in my own pathetic social life. I want to use it to rib and needle, to tease and brag. I like to mark my spots in a strange city so local friends can find me and distant friends can make recommendations. But most of all, I play the game my own way.

I certainly don’t feel bad about cheating. This isn’t Words With Friends, after all. I can’t tolerate cheating in Words With Friends. My friends think I’m a formidable player at Words With Friends because I used to be an English teacher, but my Scrabble skills are surprisingly mediocre. But what skill I do have is knowing exactly what vocabulary words someone does or does not know. After years of reading essays from 14 year olds cribbed directly from Wikipedia, I have a great idea of whether you really know what a Qat is, or whether you’re just randomly placing tiles.

The same folks who cheat at Words With Friends are the ones now beating me at Foursquare. Not because they’ve been taking trips to fascinating locations or racking up mayorships left and right. No, these are the folks who check in at the gas station, and the ATM machine, and McDonald’s, and their bathroom, and everywhere else they pause for even the slightest moment. The folks who earn astronomical Foursquare scores by marking their place at the most mundane spots in their lives. To me, those are the folks who are ruining my game. But I’m a cheater, so what do I know?

Sqoot, a company promoting a coding marathon in Beantown called the Boston API Jam, came up with a doozy. In the invitation to the event, Sqoot lists some of the perks for attendees. Among these: Massages; a Live DJ; Gym Access; Top Shelf liquor; Women; free dark chocol . . . wait a minute, did they say women? Women are a perk? Yes, indeed.

In fact: “Need another beer? Let one of our friendly (female) event staff get that for you.”

Do I have to explain why this is a boneheaded move? Probably not. It touches on so many terrible prejudices that it really shouldn’t be excused. Women are a “perk.” Women will be present, if only to get you a beer. Attendees prefer women, especially subservient women. Women, especially those women who want a man to get them a beer, will not be in attendance as coders.

Some of those inferences are exaggerations, but the hints of their implications are certainly present in the text. So, how can one excuse Sqoot? Well, I can’t, but I can at least explain why they aren’t as contemptible as you might think, and certainly not as bad as other egregious and similar incidents that have popped up recently.

First, there’s a case to be made that this is offensive to the men as well as to the women. What sort of doofus wants to admit that women in attendance at a coding event would be a perk? This is similar to the booth babe controversy. On its surface, it would seem booth babes are a problem for women, but they are equally problematic for men. Assuming a constant sexualization in men’s psyche is offensive, just as is identifying women as objects. In other words, it is similarly offensive to say to a group of men: “all you think about is sex” as it is to say to a group of women: “your existence is to serve men.” I won’t argue over who gets the worst end of that stick (the women), but I will say it does nobody any favors.

Second, Sqoot’s timing couldn’t have been worse. Without taking sides, I can still say that issues that disproportionately affect women have become hot-button political topics. Attacks against women make the news on a nightly basis. Now is perhaps not the time to tread the boundary between bawdy humor and blatant sexism.

On the other hand, is it possible to accept the honesty in the premise, no matter how unsavory? I’m not sure about coding events, but the technology events I go to are attended by men in the majority. I’d like to see this change, not just to give women better opportunities in a thriving field, but also because the entire industry would benefit from a variety of perspectives, whether those are perspectives of a different sex, race or culture. I won’t define those alternative perspectives in stereotypical terms. I’ll just say that I assume that people think differently from each other, so the more difference we can encourage in our industry, the wider the variety of opinion.

But, back to my original point, I think the real offense committed by Sqoot is that the joke just wasn’t funny. I’m a fan of some very offensive and controversial comedians. Howard Stern. Bill Maher. Louis C.K. As much as they might protest, they certainly reach levels of offensiveness far greater than what Sqoot achieved. They also surpass the infamous Rush Limbaugh comments with no trouble.

Stern is a perfect example. As he often says, it’s hard to fill a 4 hour block of entertainment every day. He’s now down to 3 days a week, but he once regularly produced 25 hours of radio every week. He loses track of the things he says. He says whatever comes to his mind. One day he might prattle on about how bombing Iraq would be fun, and the next he’d tear into a caller who suggests we should be sending troops to war. He’s contradictory and inflammatory.

He’s also very funny. If you listen long enough, you see he means well. He’s not an example of how to behave, and he doesn’t pretend to be. He’s an entertainer.

I think that Rush could have easily gotten away with his sexist tirade if it were actually funny. But the guy’s a boor. The problem with Rush wasn’t that he was making fun of a young person, or a woman, or someone in a position of less power than he. Howard Stern regularly pokes fun at the physically and mentally challenged, and not only do those folks not protest, they often become regular callers, even after he’s tagged them with offensive nicknames. He’s funny. It’s easy to see that he actually sympathizes with the people he attacks. And, perhaps most importantly, he never suggests that he’s better than they are.

Neither did Sqoot, and this is why the backlash against the company rubbed me wrong. The joke was not: “Hey, let’s make subservient women serve us alcohol.” It was: “Hey, you’re all too lame to attract women, so we’ll hire some to be nice to you.” There is humor in there, but Sqoot simply failed to find it.

[Image credit: Anton Novoselov]

I settled in to play Tiny Wings on my iPad tonight and couldn’t keep the associated memories at bay. If you haven’t played Tiny Wings, it’s an easy favorite in a sea of mobile games. You play a small bird in a land made up of rolling hills. There are no real controls. You tap the screen anywhere and the bird tucks his wings and dives. When you let go, he soars. Your goal is to see how far you can get on the continuous islands of hilly landscape. You collect gold coins and score points. There are objectives. But you can ignore all of that. You can play the game forever and be completely satisfied with the diving and soaring. Hold your breath as you dive. Exhale as you soar. It’s what gaming is supposed to be about.

I played Tiny Wings for hours on end while I was negotiating my divorce. I was living in the guest bedroom, upstairs from the Master, and I would dive and soar for hours. It was zen. I can’t say it was escapist, because that sort of simple gameplay doesn’t require your undivided attention, though it does reward a clear mind. Dive and soar. Hold your finger on the screen while the bird dips. Let go at the right moment and he lets out a cute little yip. Peaceful music. Rolling hills. For hours and hours.

This brought me back to the first time I found myself in the same state of zen. I was in college, and my recently-ex-girlfriend was a senior in High School. It didn’t work out. Distance. What can you do? I’ll tell you. You can play Tetris. You can play and never stop.

I honestly believe I hit a point of self-actualization in Tetris. At that moment, I could have gone on to be the best Tetris player in the world. I played for hours on end, without stopping. On my last game, I broke 700 lines, then simply walked away. The game was not getting any faster. The board was clear of debris. I was racking up full, 4-line Tetrises right and left.

I believe I learned the language of Tetris. Subconsciously, I broke the code. I knew which pieces were coming. Not the next piece, which is usually shown to you while you play. I could see many pieces in advance. I was setting up structures that could only be completed by specific pieces, and those pieces arrived on schedule. When I realized that I had essentially beaten the game, I simply walked away.

I hadn’t gotten much sleep, so it’s possible none of this is true, but I’m sure I could pass a lie detector test saying that in 1995 I learned to speak Tetris.

I’m not a casual gamer. My favorite games are first-person shooters, usually on XBox. I’m working my way through Halo Redux right now, and I just finished the Goldeneye reboot. These were originally my favorite games of all time. I’ll have a column about game remakes when I’m done testing.

When I’m in a good mood, I can’t play a game for more than a half hour. On a good week, I usually can’t sit in front of a console more than 2 or three times. I wish that game reviews and game journalism reflected my tastes, but they don’t. Game reviews are written for people in college dorms who always have 8 other people willing and able to play along. For people who didn’t read the book in English class and don’t know how dire and repulsive the dialogue in even the best games can be. Game reviews are for people who accept raising chickens as an acceptable part of video gaming. I do not.

When my son was born, I did not play games for a full year. It was not a conscious decision. I knew I wasn’t playing, obviously, but it never occurred to me how long. I turned on my XBox one day and found Gears of War 2 still in the drive. The game was well over a year old, and I hadn’t finished the first level. In a way, I’m happy that I didn’t play any games while I was learning how to be a parent. I don’t want parenting associated with the sense memories of gaming. I don’t want to look at an old photo of my son as a toddler and remember the time I beat back the Locust Horde.

The phenomena doesn’t just apply to gaming. When I’m working out, I have to switch up my exercise music regularly. It’s a hassle. I get into a rhythm, anticipating what comes next, and the time starts to fly by. But then, I hear a song on the radio that I associate with the treadmill, and I feal a bit queasy. I feel out of place, and exhausted. I don’t want to listen anymore. I can’t hear certain Common or Phish albums because of this. Soon, I won’t be able to listen to Girl Talk.

I racked my brain trying to think of examples of happy times that I associated with gaming. I cannot. But that makes sense. Games are for escape. Games can transport you to another world, or let you empty your mind in a state of zen peace. At my happiest moments, I wouldn’t need such a remedy. So gaming will always be melancholy for me. As long as games help me escape, I’ll always associate them with the world I’m escaping.

In an interview with the BBC, Gary Shapiro, the head of the CEA, which is the association that runs the Consumer Electronics Show, made some comments about the unfortunate necessity of booth babes. Surprisingly, Gizmodo published an editorial taking Shapiro to task. Let that sink in for a moment. Gizmodo. Arguing against booth babes. The same Gizmodo that published a story a week earlier in which one of their writers dances awkwardly with a couple of models who clearly would rather be elsewhere. Now, I’m not criticizing Gizmodo. I like that site and their coverage. I like that they have a variety of editorial voices, on both sides of an issue. I think that highlights the complicated nature of the problem.

Gary Shapiro tried to respond by apologizing. He did a fair job, but it’s hard to say the right thing on the Internet, and in the interest of brevity, I think some of his nuance was off. He’s taken to task in the comments forum on AutoStraddle, and I think it’s fair to say we’ve beaten up Gary enough for one day. There’s always tomorrow. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so let’s see if CEA adopts any formal policies toward booth babes before the next CES rolls around next year.

There’s really no civil way to argue in favor of booth babes, though I may try, if you’ll indulge. I’d like to offer a slightly different perspective on booth babes, one of power and weakness.

Is there something wrong with hiring an attractive person to lure people toward your products? Maybe, but not in this way. I have a much bigger problem with the retouching, airbrushing and special effects that go into television commercials and print magazine ads than I do with models in person. In person, the women who work as booth models are undeniably attractive, and perhaps dressed in ways that would be inappropriate for the average attendee. But they aren’t impossible. They aren’t a false version of what a woman or man can look like.

Okay, I threw that one in to be PC. I did not see any male booth models at CES, so I’m just going to drop that pretense.

In any case, saying that a company should not hire attractive models for their booth is also saying that an attractive person should not find gainful employment as a booth model. That seems wrong, too. I’m sure there are physiological studies that measure the response in humans when they see a person they deem attractive. The Consumer Electronics Show is a giant advertisement. The booths exist explicitly to attract your attention. I have no moral objection to a woman working as a model, so why would I have a problem with a company hiring a woman to help showcase a product line?

Well, I’ll tell you why I have a problem with it. Booth babes make me uncomfortable. I know there are guys at the show who enjoy the booth babes, perhaps too much. I’m not a sleazeball. I don’t pinch or squeeze strangers. I don’t hand out my room key to just anyone I meet. I don’t flirt at trade shows. When I’m at a trade show, I’m working. I’m focused on my topic. Booth babes have an inherent sexuality to them, and this isn’t the venue for it.

When I get home from CES, I inevitably have three groups of photos. I have my product shots from the show floor. I have my candid shots hanging out with friends and touring the Vegas strip. And I have the booth babe shots, which are something like the photographs in National Geographic. They serve to document, not titillate. I show them to friends as an illustration of what I did and what I saw. But of those three groups of photos, guess which pile is the largest?

The product shots. Remember, I’m working. Then, the scenery. I could snap the fountains at the Bellagio for hours on end. Finally, the smallest group is the booth babes. This year, I didn’t take a single booth babe shot.

As a man, I’m embarrassed to take photos of the booth babes, or with the booth babes. I’m embarrassed to stop and stare at them. When I do talk to them, I’m often annoyed because they don’t have the information I need. They aren’t paid very well, so they aren’t trained in the nuances of the products. They don’t know which processor is in that phone, or how large the battery is in mAh. This is in no way their fault, or a reflection on them as individuals. It’s not their job to know.

I want to talk to the other people. The people who do make it their job to know.

It’s time to give up on the booth babes. Make an attractive product and people will come to it. Make an interesting pitch and people will listen. If you have to rely on booth babes to sell, you might want to question what you’re selling, and to whom. And if you’re an attendee and you feel the booth babes are a necessity of the show, I might suggest another place where you can find all the pictures of attractive people you desire. It’s called the Internet. You’re looking at it right now.

[Image credit: Maryland State Archives]

Every single witch was naked. And Polanski didn’t stop at the three witches in the script. There were dozens of them. Naked, cackling, ancient, overweight witches caked in dirt and grime, stirring cauldrons. I was obviously worried about showing this movie, unedited, to my tenth graders. But I asked my principal for permission first. I pulled up the scene and she and I watched it together.

“Do you see anything sexual here? Because I wouldn’t want to show them anything sexual,” she said. What I saw on the screen was probably the least sexual scene I had ever witnessed in a movie. It’s the kind of scene I’d call to mind if I wanted to hold out a little longer, if you know what I mean. So I showed it.

I didn’t just show it. I presented it. I played it on my class projector. I didn’t need a screen because my walls were painted white, so I threw the movie large from floor to ceiling. I pumped the sound through my nice 2.1 speaker system. Because I had ripped the movie to my hard drive (I’m claiming fair use as a teacher), I could stop and start easily so we could discuss scenes.

At one point I stop and stood in front of the room, asking basic recall questions to make sure my students were paying attention. They were staring straight at me, but they weren’t answering my questions. They were holding back laughter. Of course, I had stopped on one of the witches scenes without thinking. I hadn’t turned the projector off, and it was aimed directly at me. Where my pasty white face should have been hovering before them, instead I was plastered with a gigantic, ancient nipple the size of a serving platter. I was a boob in front of the room, trying to get 20 or so fifteen year olds to take me seriously. When I realized, even I cracked up.

Now let me back up and explain what’s really happening here. In my classroom, I had two computers. I had an old bondi blue iMac, the very first on the market, on my desk. I used it only for attendance and internal email correspondence with other staff members. It could hardly manage much else. The movie file was stored on my personal 17-inch Powerbook, a holdover from my days working in production at dotcoms. The speakers were my personal set. The projector I used was the only one in the school. Most of the computers did not have the proper VGA connection to hook up to the projector, and even if they did, most of the teachers, who were young and fresh and extremely bright, could not troubleshoot the connection, anyway. There was little competition for the projector, and it stayed in my classroom for most of the year.

My school had one computer lab, with just enough computers so that everyone in a class got a seat. They were Internet connected, but there was no internal server, so students couldn’t store their work in a central location. If they forgot on which computer they started a report, they might lose it forever. If a malicious student came along next and deleted the files, there was nothing we could do. The students couldn’t afford flash drives, and the school couldn’t afford to provide thumb drives for them. Some students had floppy disks, but there were only two USB floppy drives that would work with our computers, and one of those was usually broken. Try telling a room full of students that it’s time to pack up and head to their next class, then watch them pass the floppy drive around while they frantically save their work.

I taught at one of the better schools in the city. It was a successful charter school, so in addition to the public funding, we raised extra money ourselves. This was still the best technology we could manage. I can’t imagine what the average school had to use, let alone the schools in the neighborhoods where property values provided the lowest level of taxes to support education. Did you know most school funds come from property taxes? If you live in a neighborhood with expensive houses, your school has more money. So it goes.

When our school got a little bit of extra money, we fixed things. We added new whiteboards, or bought new chairs. When we got more money, we hired people. We hired teachers, or tutors, or special educators. Students took five courses, all the same. Every student took English, Math, Science, History, and Spanish. We offered no other languages, no art, no physical education. No music. When the school raised a ton of money after years of successful fundraising, we bought a new building and moved out of the basement of the YMCA, where we shared space with homeless veterans and a women’s shelter.

Technology, like new computers, was low on the list. Very low. It’s not that the school didn’t care about technology, it just couldn’t be a priority. The teachers were not trained in new gadgets, and we didn’t have the time to train ourselves. The students did not live in a world of mp3 players and tablet computers. They had computers at home, but many of them lacked an Internet connection, or a printer. Some had to rely on the local public library to use a connected machine.

There are red herrings in the arguments over teaching. There are easy targets that most people agree need to be changed dramatically. Textbooks are one of these. It’s easy to look at the sorry state of textbooks and decide that they could use an upgrade. When you see a kid carrying 30 pounds of paper and cardboard on her back, this seems like an obvious fix. But in my five years teaching in urban schools, in schools where 90% or more of the students qualified for a free lunch, I never once pointed to textbooks as a priority that I would like to change. I never felt that my lack of technology in the classroom was the main issue holding us back.

The problem with education is, and always will be, a human issue. When I start arguing the topic, and it’s hard for me to refrain from jumping into an argument about education, I’m often asked what needs to change to fix our education problems. Is it the students? The parents? The administration and the budgets? The school district and the federal regulations? The teachers? What is it?

It’s everything. It is every last one of those things. But I promise you that everything you think you know about the problems in education is wrong. Maybe you’ve heard that the students are lazy and don’t have any ambition. Maybe you’ve heard that the parents don’t care, or they care too much and stifle the teachers. Maybe you’ve seen administrative bloat and budgets that need to be trimmed back before they are increased. Perhaps you’ve heard the term “teaching to the test.” Most of all, you’ve definitely heard about the teacher’s unions protecting bad teachers while the good ones leave the profession early because they are so underpaid.

I could write a column on any one of those issues. The idea that students are lazy hurts me the most. Lazy is a code word. When someone calls a student lazy, they are dismissing that student. I never met a lazy student. There was always something else going on. There was something missing from their lives, or something missing from my teaching, that made them behave in ways ignorant critics would deem lazy.

I never met a parent who didn’t care, though I met many who never showed up to school meetings, mostly because they were working night shifts and 16 hour days to make ends meet. As far as teachers leaving, teachers should definitely be paid more, but that’s not why I left the profession, and I suspect it’s not why most teachers quit within 5 years of starting out. I left teaching to take a job that paid half as much. So I’ll tell you why I left.

I could never do enough for my students. I worked 12 hour days, and always on weekends. I graded dozens, even hundreds of papers in a week. I could never plan enough. I could never provide enough feedback. And I wasn’t remotely the best teacher at my school. I can’t imagine how the best teachers tortured themselves, and many of them are still teaching.

If you want to reinvent the textbook, by all means, go ahead. I’m sure that college students will love the fancier books, and professors will make even more money publishing endless revisions and selling the fresh copies without losing money to an intermediary publisher. I have no quarrel with that.

But don’t think that will fix our public education problems in any way. If you want to fix education, you won’t be able to do it with software and technology. You need to start with the people. Help them. Respect them and support them. But most importantly, hire as many of them as you possibly can. There is unimaginable work to be done.

[Image credit: Lassi Kurkijärvi]

We were heading into Target the other day and he asked for a toy. I don’t oblige him every time, I like to keep it random and special. This time, I said yes. He wanted a dump truck. A big dump truck. A big pink dump truck.

That’s kind of awesome. I would have loved to buy him a big, pink dump truck, but guess what? Target doesn’t sell any. They have blue. They have green. They have a bunch of different colors and sizes. But no pink.

Let’s get the stereotypes out of the way now. It would be ignorant to say there is not a stigma associated with pink and masculinity, especially in our country, and even more down here in Texas, where we live. Pink is for girls. Boys don’t wear or own pink. There’s no question of what a boy with pink toys ‘means,’ because it just isn’t done. You can’t buy toys that interest my boy in the color pink.

It seems to me this is among the more stupid of all our gender-based stereotypes. Pink is a color. It’s an unsaturated shade of red. It’s pretty. It’s one of my favorite colors, too. Would you rather see the sky when it’s royal blue, or at sunrise, when it’s streaked with orange and luscious pink? Do you want your steak brown and grey, or moist and pink? When Apple released the iPod mini in a variety of hues, I went straight for the pink one. I still have it, even though it doesn’t work. For that device, it was an awesome color.

I don’t care how pink was saddled with this stigma. It’s stupid. It’s just a color. It would be equally ridiculous if we associated specific musical notes with gender. Sorry, your daughter can’t play an E above Middle C on the piano. That note is only for boys. Sorry, your son isn’t allowed to have hot fudge. Hot fudge is for girls. Boys eat caramel sauce. For my son, at least, that caramel sauce will have to be served on strawberry ice cream, because when we go to our favorite scoop shop, that’s the only flavor he’ll tolerate.

Gadget makers often release gadgets in lovely shades of pink, almost invariably targeted at women. I’ve long wrestled with how I feel about that. On the one hand, it is odd to market a device to one gender or the other based on color. On the other, if people want to buy a pink television, then somebody should make a pink television. If market research shows that women are not buying television sets, but women love buying things in the color pink, then it would be good strategy to make a pink television. I’m not sure if this is what the market research actually says, but based on the preponderance of pink aimed at female buyers, there must be some statistics to back up this idea.

Here’s where I disclose that in my day job I work for Samsung. But I also see phones from other companies. I remember one company released a phone in a gorgeous shade of purple. It wasn’t explicitly called a woman’s phone, but most of the marketing seemed headed in that direction. But I loved that color. I wanted a phone in that color. So why didn’t I buy that phone? Well, it’s not just because I work for a major competitor. It’s because the phone didn’t have all the features and specs I desire.

I think the answer to this problem is not to stop making and marketing pink devices aimed at women. The answer is to start making and marketing more pink devices aimed at men. Or, more generally, make pink devices that everyone will like. Treat pink like the appealing color that it is, and not some super-inflated symbol of gender and sexuality.

I know it won’t work. If all the laptops in the world were painted pink, there are too many people who simply would not own a laptop, no matter the inconvenience that causes them. The pink devices will not sell as well. Not for a while.

It is also difficult to make gadgets in a variety of colors. It causes problems at every step of the retail chain. The unpopular colors die out very quickly, or are left to rot on shelves. It would be hard to imagine a gadget maker, with profits and a board of directors at the top of its hive mind, investing in a style choice for the benefit of changing the perception of society. That’s not the job of the manufacturer. The manufacturer should provide what the customer wants in the best way possible. It is rare that a manufacturer can dictate taste in such an extreme way.

But if your goal is to change perceptions — and that is my goal here — the way to do that is not to stop selling pink gadgets to women. You need to remove the gender from the equation altogether and start selling pink gadgets to men. I would buy, and in 10 years when my son is ready for his first cell phone, I can make a guess as to which color he’d choose. I just hope that the masculine army of blues and reds and brown and drab does not pummel the beauty out of him before we get there.

On Sunday, I’m going to fly from Dallas to Las Vegas. I’m not going to have time to check into my hotel, because I have to go directly to my first meeting. I’ll be sitting in meetings for at least 8 hours. The next four days, I’ll wake up at 8AM and start working. I won’t stop until late into the evening. On many nights, I won’t get back to my hotel room until after midnight.

I’ll be at the Consumer Electronics Show, of course. The Super Bowl of gadgets. Except it lasts for days and days, and there is no football, just commercials. It’s so huge that it takes place not only at the Las Vegas Convention Center, but also the Hilton next door, and the Sands convention center connected to the Venetian hotel. A friend wore a pedometer at the show one year and discovered that she walked 4-6 miles a day, every day.

Sounds grueling, right? Hardly. Let me fill in the blanks.

My first meeting is with a good friend and drinking buddy. Every subsequent meeting I have will be with technology journalists, analysts, and other industry professionals. These are people who are interested in the exact same thing I’m interested in. We’ll have plenty to talk about, on professional and personal levels. It’s not like going to the office, it’s more like hanging out in a college dorm, arguing politics over pizza until late in the night. But instead of pizza, it’s all about gadgets.

My day job, and the sponsor of my trip, is with Samsung. My meetings will involve talking about Samsung products and showing off the coolest stuff we have. I’ll be carrying around a bag full of awesome gadgets throughout the show. During the meetings, we’ll play. There will be questions, photographs, hands-on videos. But mostly, we’ll play.

At night, we’ll head to corporate and PR sponsored events. These are usually nice meals, parties at night clubs, or mini trade shows with free alcohol and plenty of fried food. Since CES always happens after New Year’s, usually we’ll hear anecdotes from the club workers about how Britney Spears or Paris Hilton passed out in this VIP room, or threw up in that elevated bathtub. I’ll go to the most exclusive clubs in Vegas, the places that wouldn’t let me in wearing the same outfit a week later. There will be music, dancing, free pens and baseball caps, and more time hanging out with some of my favorite people in the world.

I love my job. I loved my job when I was a journalist. I love it now that I’m on the corporate side. If you’re working at your cubicle, or from the cab of your truck, or from anywhere that does not send you on an all-expense paid trip to Las Vegas once a year, I hope you see I’m not trying to brag. I appreciate my job and the opportunities it gives me. I work hard at it, and I worked hard to get here. I put in the hours. I will never complain about it. I know exactly how lucky I am.

I wish everyone in my business were so self aware. I’ve seen column after column on other technology Web sites complaining about having to make the trek to CES. Some folks even revel in the fact that they have never attended the show, all the while dismissing what’s there, as if they have any idea.

Is CES a dying animal? No way. Microsoft is scaling back. Other companies have stopped exhibiting at trade shows, preferring their own, invariably more exclusive corporate events. There is certainly a time and a place for that strategy, but CES serves a definite purpose.

First, it’s a mile marker for our industry. It’s a way to stop after the holidays, look around, and try to figure out where this giant ship is sailing. It’s a way to spot icebergs and jet streams.

The Consumer Electronics Association, the group that runs CES, exists to promote consumer electronics. No trade show in existence does a better job promoting its category than CES. Sure, you may have read about the adult entertainment show that used to run concurrently with CES. But have you heard of the pizza maker’s trade show in Las Vegas? Have you seen coverage of the Construction Expo that happens once every 3 years? In fact, can you name any other major trade show convention that is covered by all major TV networks, all forms of print and online publications, and supports an entire category of bloggers and Web sites? Of course not. This isn’t just a testimony to the popularity of technology. It’s a testament to the hard work and sheer spectacle of CEA at CES.

Second, CES lets in the little guy. At some point during the show, all journalists run out of steam and decide to walk the floor. Everybody wants to find the little guy, the cool products hidden in the back of the convention center. I’ve played video games with my mind. I’ve watched movies that smell. I’ve watched body painting and drag racing and all sorts of fascinating pageantry.

The weirdest thing about technology journalists is that many of them think they have hard jobs. They think that CES is difficult. They complain about the walking, the long nights, the bad food (okay, too much fried, not enough fresh). If you follow tech journalists on Twitter, be prepared for a full week of complaining about flight delays, poorly designed airports, hotel errors, shuttle delays, blistered feet, missed meetings, and more.

Feel free to tell any and all of them where they can stick it.

I’ve never had a true manual labor job, but I have had jobs that were actually difficult. Tedious jobs that were repetitive and dull. Retail jobs over the holiday time. I worked 12 hour days as a teacher in inner-city schools. My students were awesome, and they were the reason I woke up every day. But there was endless paperwork, long hours, a complete lack of appreciation on every level, and heartbreak. Try grading 200 papers in a weekend and tell me how difficult CES can be. Try calling a single working parent to tell them their child would be expelled for a stupid rule infraction, then tell me how much you hate going to parties every single night.

Or don’t. Enjoy it. Love it. Have a great time. If you’re so jaded that you really hate the Consumer Electronics Show, you probably need a new career. But I warn you, you’re going to be very disappointed with what you find. There are very few openings for people with expertise in playing with gadgets, drinking heavily, and hanging with friends.

It’s important to support the person up front because in times of stress and adversity, the little authority you’ve invested in that person will pay off. When that person tells you to leave the building immediately, you’ll do it. You won’t ask questions until you smell the gas leak. In a way, this is like a military command, but without all the imminent peril and killing and stuff. It’s about trust. I put my trust in the person who is leading the group from the front. At best, things go very well. At worst, nobody gets hurt, and it’s all over soon.

When a flight attendant tells you to turn off your cell phone, just do it and don’t complain about it. Airports and air travel are a sore point for me on Twitter and other social networks. It used to be people complained about flight delays. Then they complained about the airport gates. Once, a friend complained that his windshield was cracked by an errant pebble kicked up by a truck in traffic on the way to the airport. From where was he tweeting? Now, the complaints are all about turning off your phone, your laptop, your iTouch, your tablet, and all the other junk you carry with you.

I’m sick of it. I couldn’t care less.

I know, you’re right. Phones probably don’t crash airplanes. Okay, it’s debatable what is the effect of a couple hundred cell phones scrounging for service as the plane tries to catch air. It may cause interference, but a cell phone has never been pegged as the lone culprit in an airline disaster. And if the wireless radio in your cell phone probably won’t bring down the plane, certainly the slight trickle of juice through your Kindle won’t hurt anything.

I don’t care. Turn it off. Turn it all off. And don’t complain about it.

Want to know why you should turn it off? Because the flight attendant told you to, and he or she asked nicely. Try to argue with that. You can’t. If you do, you’re just a jerk. You’re not in charge of the airline. You’re not a pilot or a flight attendant (and if you are, I’m betting you’re agreeing with me anyway). I don’t care if you’re an electrical engineer specializing in RF interference. If someone asks you nicely to turn off your gadgets, and makes it clear that your refusal will seriously inconvenience the people around you, just do it. Stop wasting time.

If you want to argue this policy, do it. Go to your congressperson and voice your concerns. You’d be amazed how few people have to call a congressional office before they start taking the complaints very seriously. If that doesn’t work, complain to the FAA. Complain to the airlines. Then, start taking the train. Take a greyhound bus. Chances are, they have better Wi-Fi and more power outlets anyway.

By the time you get on the plane, you’ve already lost the argument. It would be like walking into an Outback Steakhouse and yelling at the waiter because the beef is not locally grass fed. It’s too late. You knew it was Outback Steakhouse. Enjoy your Bloomin’ Onion and shut your trap.

Partially, this argument is about respecting the limited authority of the flight attendant. I’ve never honestly seen a flight attendant abuse his or her authority. If anything, I wish they would flex a little more authority. Time to start harassing the idiots who can’t figure out how to stow a piece of luggage WHEELS FIRST on the LEFT SIDE OF THE PLANE! Is it so hard? Instead, I have to check my bags or pay extra to make sure I can get on the airplane before those spatially inept morons.

I’d like to see flight attendants chastise people who listen to music through their laptop speakers, instead of using headphones. I’d like to see a flight attendant tell the inconsiderate nincompoop in front of me that slamming his seat into a reclining position while I’m eating my expensive cheese and crackers and raisins is inconsiderate.

I’d like to see a flight attendant explain to some mid-twenties hipster that babies can’t control their crying, but unwashed hipsters can certainly control their eye-rolling and obnoxious deep sighs. Suck it up, hipster, or I’ll take away my toddler’s iPad just before take off and let you enjoy his reaction for the next 3 hours. I’ve heard it for 3 years, so I can just fade it out. Good night.

The best reason I can think of for turning off your gadgets is because it helps you pay attention. The most dangerous time to be on an airplane is during takeoff and landing. That’s when the bad stuff happens. Maybe your cell phone won’t cause it to happen, but it might make things work. If you have to tweet that your plane is going down while I’m trying to reach over you for my oxygen mask, you’re going to be the first person I eat when we crash land on the island.

I’ve never heard a flight attendant claim that the electronics interfere with the airplane’s controls. They only ask you to turn off your gadgets, they don’t explain why. I’ve always assumed it was so you could offer your undivided attention at the only time during the flight when they want you to be conscious and alert.

I’m cool with that. I turn off my gadgets. I power them down, I don’t just put them into airplane mode. Before I board the plane, I store all my extra gadgets in my carry-on, powered down.

Just remember, air travel is amazing. Air travel is cheaper now than it has been at any other point in history. You can fly across the country in less time than it takes to drive between Dallas and Houston. You can leave Korea at 10AM and arrive in New York at 8AM ON THE SAME DAY! We’ve invented time travel, and you’re missing it because you have to check in on Foursquare. If the airlines insisted that you cannot even bring anything electronic on planes, it would still be worth flying. If they told you every flight would be a “Grease” singalong, it would still be worthwhile. Actually, that would be cool at first, but as a Platinum flier I could see that getting old.

Stop whining and turn off your phone, you self-absorbed, super-entitled, do-nothing. Instead, spend the time pleasantly reminiscing about your trip. The sights. The culture. The business at hand. The cab driver who wouldn’t stop talking on his Bluetooth, even though the sign clearly says the driver will not talk on the phone. See? It’s contagious.

Buy a new TV

Last year, I vowed to “Use my gadgets to do things more than I do things on my gadgets.” I don’t know what that means, but I think it was my way of telling myself not to buy a new TV. All year long, I held onto that mantra, and used my resolution as a way to keep myself from the purchase. It has been a very difficult year to avoid buying a TV.

First, I started working for Samsung in my day job. Now, TVs are cheaper and more readily available to me than ever before. Plus, we have a room dedicated to awesome TVs where I can test our convergence products. I get that room for short stints at a time, then I have to leave. I am not allowed to hook up my PlayStation 3. Man, I want one of those TVs.

Second, I got a divorce. That means I don’t have anyone around telling me I can’t go larger than 38-inches because of the size of the entertainment cabinet. In fact, I got rid of that cabinet, too. So, the wall’s the limit. We sold the house, so I had some cash money on hand. Also, I needed something huge to fill the void of endless loneliness created by the dissolution of my 15-year commitment. A TV would be perfect for that.

Third, all my favorite video games can now be played in 3D. There are movies in 3D worth buying. I never minded the 3D glasses, not much. TVs are cheaper than ever, thinner than ever, and they look great.

I give up. I’m buying a TV. I’ll wait until after CES, when the new models are introduced, and pick up last year’s model for a good price. I might even wait until the Super Bowl sales start. But I will have my TV. So the lesson here, I suppose, is to make resolutions that you were probably going to stick to anyway. That way, when I buy a new set, I’ll feel good knowing that I have stuck to my resolutions, as well.

Take more pictures

So, I’m not going to be an anti-consumerist this year, but I’m still not going to buy useless junk, unless you find a 51-inch 3D plasma TV useless, in which I don’t need to hear your stupid opinion. One way to make a commitment I’ll stick to is to resolve to use the things I already have in better ways.

For instance, my cameras. I have a ton of cameras. I’m not a professional-level photographer, but I can handle Manual mode on a DSLR with little trouble. I have a DSLR with a bunch of lenses, a point-and-shoot, an HD camcorder that I would never have bought if I knew how good video recording on DSLRs would become, and every phone I have uses a 5-12 megapixel camera, with HD video. I pre-ordered a Lytro camera, too.

Now it’s time to take more pictures. More pictures of my son and my family, of course. But maybe a photo safari is in order. Head down to the wild landscape of southwest Texas or Louisiana and fill up some memory cards.

Read more books

The first thing my mother asked when she picked me up at the airport was whether I was reading anything good. Actually, I don’t think I’m reading anything at all. I finished The Hunger Games, and I’m meandering through Game of Thrones and the subsequent books. But I’m not the avid reader I once was.

I blame television. Early in the TV season, I record a bunch of new shows, then eliminate some from my round-up as they get cancelled or I lose interest. This year, I’m going to subtract more shows than I add. Some shows with a good premise but very mediocre execution will have to go. Sorry “Terra Nova” and “Person of Interest.” You both had promise, but you’re dead to me now. I’m going to give the new Hurley show “Alcatraz” 2 episodes to win me over after the mid-season break, then I’m gone.

In my spare time, I’ll read. I used to read every single night. It’s time for that to start happening again. My problem is that I make a good resolution (Read more books) and implement a bad plan (Read the entire new translation of “À la recherche du temps perdu”).

Now that books are no longer printed on dead trees, I might be more cavalier about stopping a bad novel. I might be less interested in filling in the gaps of lost classics that I want to own and have around, but not necessarily read. Instead, I’m going to actually read more books.

Document the important stuff

Reading through my social networking history, I can tell you all sorts of interesting facts about my life. I can tell you what song was stuck in my head on a Monday in November of 2009. I can tell you which airports I’ve been to, and if there were any major, annoying flight delays. I can tell you how many times I remembered to check in at the movies, but not which films I saw. Yawn.

I’m going to make an effort this year to use my technology to keep track of the important stuff. Not my family, I don’t need a reminder to take pictures of my toddler. He’s the subject of all my pictures anyway. No, I mean the personal stuff I’m avoiding.

It’s time to track the vitals. I have at least 3 different types of devices with a pedometer built in. I have 2 devices that can track heart rate. I have a multitude of apps to track calories and diet. I have apps to track health progress, fitness goals, and one that takes a photo every day and makes a movie to show your progress.

In other words, it’s time to stop tracking nonsense and start tracking useful information. It’s time to stop sharing silly minutia, and start saving important personal information that I can use and keep to myself. Of course, all of this is in the service of my next resolution.

Lose some weight

I know this is probably the most popular New Year’s Resolution, but this is a meta-tech resolutions list, so here’s how my resolution is different. Weight problems run in my family. My cousin Rachel started a blog to help with her weight loss goals. She lost more than 120 pounds. She doesn’t just look better. She looks like a different person who then also lost a lot of weight and looks like an even more different person.

I think Rachel would agree she got a big boost from blogging her experience because of the accountability it created. When you make this sort of thing public, you create an audience, even if it’s only in your own head. Then, you feel obligated to deliver to that audience. The same thing happens with personal trainers. When you know you have scheduled appointments to see a personal trainer ever week, you feel more accountable for your actions. This should be an ingrained notion in our own heads, but I suspect my wiring is faulty.

Where I think most weight-loss resolutions go wrong is that they aren’t really new goals. We’re constantly trying to lose weight all the time, so setting this as a resolution is like saying you’ll drink coffee every morning or you’ll floss more. You’ve pretty much already decided what you’ll do, and a resolution won’t change anything. When you fail at the resolution, you’re simply failing at the new action, but there is little accountability. After all, who really cares about New Year’s Resolutions?

So, my resolution is accountability itself, not simply to lose weight. I’ll hold myself accountable, through recorded progress and other digital means and reminders. Maybe I’ll go public, maybe I’ll just keep a personal record. But it’s going to work, because If it doesn’t, I’ll know exactly when things went wrong.

I know more than anyone else you know

I know, I didn’t get a degree in Computer Science. You have no idea where I learned all of this stuff, and I could hardly explain it either. Mostly, it comes from making a lot of mistakes, and then begging smart, vicious people to help me. I know I can sound exasperated walking you through tech problems, but if I’ve never told you to RTFM and compared you to Hitler, trust me it could be much worse. That said, before you ask anyone else for advice about anything, ask me.

I know more about technology than any retail employee you will encounter anywhere. I know more than the folks at the Verizon store. I know more than the folks at Best Buy. I know more than half of the people at the cable company; anybody not issued a crimper is beneath my technical knowledge. Stop asking these people for help. They are only making it worse.

I know the guy at Verizon offered to help sync all your contacts from your old SIM card, but I might have a better way. And no more signing contract agreements without getting a nice phone subsidy coming your way. I know you bought your computer at Best Buy, but this isn’t a car dealership. Those folks probably know less about your gear than any other type of repair shop you’ll encounter.

When your cable company tells you there is no problem with your Internet service, then suggests you stop by to pick up a newer, more expensive router with wireless built in, call me first. I may know a trick or two.

Never delete anything

My father works in an office with a ton of files. Actual paper files with little color-coded letter stickers on them, all arranged neatly in a set of large filing cabinets. Every few years, they get to throw away the deactivated files, which is a huge process, but it reclaims space. Paper systems are more efficient with a good waste disposal system. But this doesn’t translate to computers.

At some point, early on, a computer geek told my father that his computer was running slowly because he was out of memory. I’m guessing his hard drive was 99% full at the time, which can actually cause problems. Today, he’s using a couple gigs of half-terabyte storage system. He also has a 500GB backup drive. He throws things away like his computer is Noah’s Ark and he’s got to save space or lose the dinosaurs forever.

I went looking for Skype on his machine this past week, and all I found was an alias, a shortcut. This shortcut opened a Skype installer. No app, just the installer. I asked about it. Turns out, at the end of every conversation, he deletes Skype. Tosses it in the trash. Then, when he wants to chat again, he goes to Skype.com and downloads the newest app. When he can remember his login information, he can then make calls.

The psychology behind all of this is fascinating. Is this a better practice, or worse? Is the waste of time balanced by having the latest version of the app? Why am I not getting through to him on how much storage he has?

I’ve told him he has enough storage to hold the entire works of Shakespeare, Encyclopedia Britannica, and every book he’s ever read, with room for a few hundred more copies of each. He has enough room to hold every DVD in his library, if he wanted to rip them all. His photo library is not taking up a tenth of his storage space, so there’s no need to delete any photo he might find in the least bit pleasing.

But he still deletes. He doesn’t just delete email, he deletes the email app. He doesn’t just clean up his bookmarks, he tosses the browser. Forget about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. He throws out the baby and the bathwater, then gets a vasectomy to make sure this sort of thing never happens again.

Never install anything

What really gets to me is that even though he deletes everything needlessly, he’s still chocked full of garbage. His Web browser, which is somehow completely up to date, miracle of miracles, is bogged down by multiple toolbars. He’s got weather apps and widgets clogging up his status bar. Every time I move a folder, Norton double checks to tell me everything’s copacetic.

Here’s how this happens: a pop-up appears asking my parents to install something, and they do. Pop-ups look a lot like system notifications to them. It’s all just messages from the computer, so they trust and click. That’s how the browser gets updated. That’s also how they are running on so much bloat. They try to open a file, but it uses a weird file extension, so the computer offers them new software to download. They do it. During the installation of one piece of software, they see confusing offers and end up saying yes to others.

Then the system slows down. Must be because the memory is full, my father thinks. And he starts deleting with relish.

It’s time to upgrade . . . everything

My parents bought my toddler a kids tablet toy. It comes with some software installed, but as soon as you turn on the toy, before it offers you any software, it asks if you want to download more from the download store. That requires a PC connection. No problem, except that my parents bought their PC in 2006. Their software is out of date, and it cannot be upgraded.

When I used to sell computers, I used to tell people “Be happy with what it does right now, and it will always do those things. It just might not be able to do the new stuff down the road.”

Well, we’ve gotten to the end of that road. The desktop had a good 5 year run, about what I expect from a desktop. It can’t run the newest systems. It can’t work properly with the newest mobile devices and peripherals. It can still work on the Web just fine, but it’s a bit underpowered for the high definition and fast streaming content my parents might enjoy watching.

While you’re at it, get a new cell phone. My father’s phone is a clamshell. It’s fairly new. Carriers still sell clamshells. But it’s time to upgrade. About once a month I get frantic messages from him. “Philip, we’ve been trying to reach you, but you haven’t been answering your phone. Please call us as soon as you get this message.”

I have 3 email accounts, including my corporate email. I have a Twitter account and a Facebook page, and I’m active on both. Even better, I am a huge Google Voice fan, and calling or texting that number makes at least 6 phones ring. So, why couldn’t he get a hold of me?

Old number. He was using a phone number I had back in 2004. I’m not sure how it ended up the only number he had for me in his phonebook. Neither is he. Nobody knows, but I blame the guy at the cell phone store who tried to “sync” his contacts through his SIM card.

My parents would not use any of the same features on a smartphone that I use. I use my phone for social networking and work tasks. They don’t use Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn (thank gawd). They probably don’t care about the star charts, the music stores, and the hundreds of games. But they would love some Fandango. And they would go crazy for the navigation and location-based features.

Dad: “Okay, I checked my tire pressure and it’s all good. So tonight you can take your mother’s car or you can take the Jag.”
PB: ” . . . ”
Dad: “Are you sure you want the Jag? It doesn’t have navigation. How will you know where you’re going?”
PB: “Shut up and give me the keys.”

Also, time to get a new digital camera. Nobody uses CF cards anymore, and a 2GB limit on storage is ridiculous. Plus, did you know even the cheapest cameras can now take video in high definition? And don’t get me started on geotagging. Heck, it might even be time to replace that old Kindle. E-ink screens have gotten even better since the first generation.

Don’t buy anything that requires my help

By now, it might be obvious that I’m a prissy, pretentious schmuck. I can live with that. I don’t mind if people don’t take my tech advice. In fact, sometimes I even prefer it. I’d rather not take your late night phone calls complaining about your phone’s address book, or commiserate the second time you dropped your precious glass phone and the screen shattered again. But I’m happy to give my advice, and I promise to always take tech advice giving seriously. I won’t steer you wrong.

But when you go out and buy something tech related without asking me first, you’re on your own. Having trouble setting up that router? Good luck with that. Can’t figure out that cheap tablet you bought? Should have asked me first. Surprised your new device didn’t come with memory cards and requires a boatload of AA batteries every week just to function properly? I could have warned you, but you didn’t ask.

I’m a know-it-all, and I’m obnoxious, but I also get offended easily when people don’t respect my expertise, as it were. When I show up at my parents’ home and see some new gadget or piece of tech lying around, I feel like a cat who’s come home to a new puppy. I sniff around it disdainfully. I turn away from it and aim my backside in its general direction. I give off a vibe that says “What is THIS doing here? And why was I not consulted?”

Recently, Marley threatened to join Facebook. I owed him some money for concert tickets he bought over the summer. For no good reason, my own sheer laziness, I was very late paying him back. He threatened to join Facebook just to shame me into paying him back. I told him that for $150, it would be worth it to me to get him on board. But I paid him anyway, because I knew there was no enticement that would get him on the site.

I’m not sure I can make a judgment about why he is or is not a member. I think we’re past that point. I don’t just mean that I am past making assumptions about my friend. I’m saying that now that Facebook claims 200 million members in the U.S. alone, or just under 2/3 of the population, it is no longer interesting to judge people who haven’t gotten involved yet. The ship has sailed. They obviously know about Facebook, and they can probably imagine its benefits. They know what they are missing.

What are they missing? Really? I could list all the more tedious benefits of Facebook that they won’t experience. The games. Connecting with people you haven’t talked to since elementary school. Your mother stalking you online. But there are some significant benefits to Facebook.

Birthdays. Graduations. Weddings and babies. Deaths. These are important milestones in life, and many people are reporting them first, or only reporting them at all, on Facebook. I don’t just mean your peripheral friends. I mean some of your closest compatriots.

In the last email Marley sent, he told me that a guy we both know is expecting a new baby. Of course, I’ve already seen ultrasound pictures. I saw them more than a month ago. Don’t scoff. I know ultrasounds are a cliche. But these are people I like and care about. I was happy to see the blurry image of their seedling.

So, clearly my friend is missing out. But here’s the funny thing: in my closest circle of friends, he’s the one I see most often. I have a small group I try to see a few times a year. A couple still live near our hometown, where my parents live, and I see them when I visit my old home. Some are near Philly, some in New York City. Marley is in San Francisco, in the opposite direction. But in terms of the number of visits per year to each of my friends, Marley wins, hands-down.

Part of that is because my day job at a technology company sends me to San Francisco frequently. But I also go to New York, and I rarely see my friends there. I can’t say there is a conscious effort to see Marley because he is not on Facebook, but there is definitely a conscious effort to stay in touch, and perhaps that need, unfulfilled because he abstains from social networking, drives me to visit more often.

Also, Marley is a lot of fun. He’s my friend who makes me get up and do things. He goes camping and hiking, takes road trips, likes good food and drink, and generally has a good attitude about life. He goes to lots of concerts, probably a few dozen a year, or more. He’s not a luddite. He owns the nicest TV of anyone I know, and he programmed his own Crestron remotes to control his vast and expanding audio visual system. He’s got a smartphone, though admittedly it’s a hand-me-down I threw his way.

I wish I had a definitive conclusion here. Something like: fun people ignore Facebook. Or: not being on Facebook drives people to visit more often. But I don’t. I just have a portrait of a non-Facebook user. Facebook doesn’t make sense with his personality, even though I honestly believe Facebook will some day be as indispensable as the phone book used to be, or 411 after that. It is the way we will find each other, and a way to be found.

When someone I know is not on Facebook, it makes me wonder. They must not want to find people. Not as a passive action, a willful ignorance. But as an act of defiance. They refuse to connect with their past. They refuse to reach out for casual, nearly meaningless relationships with people who would have otherwise slipped away.

These are probably the same people who skip their high school reunions, but without malice. There are some people who skip their reunions because they still harbor old hatreds, ancient resentments that they cannot grow past. But then there are others who simply don’t see the point. There is no interest for them in marking time by gathering together and wondering who got fat. Who had children and got a divorce. Who died.

The high school reunion is certainly an anachronism of a time before Facebook. I doubt I would attend any official high school reunion in my future, unless the location and timing were unavoidably convenient. I keep in touch with almost everyone I enjoyed in high school. I no longer need a reunion.

Maybe Marley isn’t behind the times. Maybe he’s ahead. I’m trapped in a world of nostalgia, while he’s evolved beyond those connections. I have a Facebook friend who is steadily trying to hook up with every single woman remaining from our old high school class. He’s been entirely unsuccessful so far, but he has made a spectacular effort. Marley, on the other hand, is living very much in the present, without regret, and enjoying almost every minute of it.

He posted no marriage photos on Facebook. When his wife gets pregnant, I’m sure I won’t see ultrasound images. But I will visit as soon as I can after his baby is born. And I’ll make every effort to remain his friend, even after all the reunions have passed me by.

I could fill pages with disclaimers about this case. I used to be a tech journalist full time, and I was friends with just about every editor with a byline on all of the sites involved. I still see them regularly on a professional basis, and we still drink and joke and tell embarrassing stories about the time we got too excited over a new phone with polyphonic ringtones. So, I’m not going to say who’s right and wrong.

I’m also not going to simply flesh out the merits of the case. You can find those details elsewhere. I’m not going to analyze this issue from an unbiased perspective. I’m not legally qualified to do so. I’m just giving my opinion on the case as I understand it.

I went directly to Kravitz, but I didn’t talk to anyone on the PhoneDog team. Noah is a friend, but I don’t know any of the people named on the PhoneDog side of the case.

It seems there are two issues here. The first is how to measure the value of a Twitter account when social networking is part of your business strategy. How and why the account was created makes a difference here. Eventually, that won’t be the case. When companies start assigning Twitter accounts like email addresses and phone numbers, they will certainly have more sway over the ownership of that account when the employee leaves. But for now, we’re all still feeling our way around Twitter. We’re cautious and unsure of its utility. We’re worried about making huge, career-ending mistakes.

I tweet a lot. My day job employer does not require it, but does not forbid it. It’s all at my own risk, and it’s a heavy risk. It is far more likely I’ll make a mistake on Twitter that will get me in some sort of trouble than it is I’ll generate some great success on Twitter that will prove it’s worth the risk.

I asked Kravitz why he opened his Twitter account in the first place.

“I saw enough of the people around me using it that I figured I should be paying attention. And seeing as I make a living posting content to the Web – and tech-related content at that – it seemed like a good, potentially great, way to spread the word about what I was doing.”

Kravitz opened his Twitter account as “@phonedog_noah.” I asked if he was the first PhoneDog employee to open an account. “I believe I was, yes.” Was the “PhoneDog” name in the Twitter handle a company mandate? “No, nobody told me what to name myself.”

See. The company did not yet understand the branding value of a Twitter feed. This brings me to the second issue here. Is Kravitz’s Twitter feed a part of his work life, or part of his identity? Is it part of his brand, or just something fun he does to pass the time?

I have worked for companies that lay claim to any creations while you are employed. So, if I work for Samsung (which I do), and I create a really amazing pickle slicer, that’s Samsung’s pickle-slicer now. If the Twitter account is a work product, there could be an argument that PhoneDog owns anything Kravitz creates.

However, what if it is part of his identity? Let’s say I work at a company and I change my hair style, lose some weight, and start dressing much better. I might have better luck with my clients, and the company reaps the benefits. If I then leave the company, can they claim to own my image? Should I become slovenly, hairy, and fat again?

I asked Kravitz about how he accumulated so many followers on Twitter.

“I tweet a lot about Phil Collins, trips to the dentist, and sports in addition to technology. Maybe people like me? … I tend to tweet quite a bit in general, and quite a bit about non-technology things – and I tend to carry on conversations with other tweeters, so Twitter is often more of a virtual town square for me than anything else. Some people like my style, some don’t, and so it goes.”

I use Twitter similarly. I do comment about mobile technology, which is my job. But I’m in this job because I love mobile tech, and I tweet about the things that interest me. I’ve always thought about Twitter as a virtual water cooler, similar to Kravitz’s idea of a virtual town square. Of course, Kravitz has more than 10X the followers I have, so I suppose he needs a town square (by the way, you can follow me @philipberne, hint-hint).

So, can work lay claim to the relationships you build around the water cooler? If you spend your spare time chatting with strangers in a nearby town square, can your job say you can’t take those strangers with you when you leave?

How would that happen, exactly? I suppose that Kravitz could have changed the PhoneDog_Noah Twitter handle to simply “PhoneDog.” Then he could have started at scratch with a new account. When you leave an office, you don’t get to keep using your desk, or your email account. The desk is physical. They clean it out and the next person takes it. The email account is virtual. They flush it to save space, or dig through your emails for pertinent information, but they can’t give it to the next person. It loses all of its value when it is no longer connected to you.

The Twitter account seems to fall somewhere in the middle. It could still have value even if Kravitz weren’t the one behind the tweets. It’s like reading a new Robert Ludlum novel. The poor “Bourne” author passed a decade ago, but a fan who wasn’t paying attention would still be thrilled by his latest paperback. It would be even easier for PhoneDog to continue tweeting from that account, even with Noah uninvolved.

The most damning evidence against PhoneDog might be Kravitz’s last post. He suggests readers find him on his blog, or check out his newly renamed Twitter feed, under the @noahkravitz name. That post is still up at PhoneDog as of writing, so it would seem that PhoneDog is endorsing Kravitz’s ownership of the new name, while at the same time suing him over it.

I asked Kravitz about whether he saw his Twitter account as part of his identity, part of his job, or part of his brand.

“I’d say it’s all more part of my identity than my brand. In order to view it as part of my brand I’d have to be a better businessperson than I clearly am, given that I’m somehow in the middle of this silly mess. I mean, seriously, would the pitchman for a brand be tweeting photos of himself at the dentist?”

Without getting into the details, a major company recently announced a major product and it didn’t live up to the hype. That’s not a knock on anyone, because no product can live up to the wild pre-launch hype. Which product is not important for this column (though now is the time where I disclose my day job is working for Samsung Mobile). Let’s call it a Thneed. What’s important is how we all get along, even though we’re on completely opposite sides of the fence.

For some products, this doesn’t matter. I think the silliest arguments are between Xbox fanboys and PlayStation fanboys. That’s like arguing over peanut and plain M&Ms. Why would you spend even a minute of your time arguing that the Xbox is better than the PlayStation, when you could be spending that time playing Halo (the greatest gaming series of all time). You could be spending time on your PlayStation, playing, um, I don’t know, that game with the little sack puppets that jump around a lot.

Actually, I’m just kidding. I own both. I love both. I use both regularly. There are benefits to each. There are exclusives on each. It’s an argument that cannot be won, because there is no winning. There is only gaming. I’m happy playing my games, you’re happy playing yours. So let’s just agree that both consoles make us happy, and go back to making fun of Nintendo.

But, I digress. Ina Fried, at All Things Digital, reported on the launch of the big new product from that big company. She noted that initial presale estimates were very high. She also notes that “Initial reaction to the was somewhat muted.”

This is true, to a point. Reaction from the tech press registered disappointment after inflated expectations. Some of that disappointment was also the deflating of a balloon filled with the hot air of lusting for something — anything — new. Of course, if the Thneed were so disappointing, then presale estimates wouldn’t be so high, right?

That’s exactly the point John Gruber makes on his site, Daring Fireball.To quote:

“Initial reaction by whom? What could be more initial than record-breaking preorders . . . ? What she really means is that a bunch of self-proclaimed technology experts and analysts had a muted reaction . . . , and that . . . they just don’t get it.”

See what I was saying? According to Gruber, Fried just doesn’t get it.

This got me thinking about the Transformers movies, and how terrible they were. Not the third one. I can’t bash that one now since I showered it with faint praise here on SlashGear. I’m thinking of the second movie. Transformers 2 was, quite possibly, one of the worst movies ever made. It wasn’t just poorly written, or poorly directed. It was actually offensive to thinking people. I did not read one good review of that movie. It earned a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Know what else it earned? $400 Million dollars. Domestic. Internationally, the movie brought in well over $800 Million dollars. If Transformers 2 were a country, it would be wealthier than Grenada.

So, the audience voted with their dollars. Who was wrong? Could the people filling the seats possibly be wrong? I was one of those people, with much regret. To earn those numbers, there must have been plenty of repeat viewings. It was a very popular film, #28 on the all-time top grossing movies list. Could Michael Bay have been wrong? He earned enough money to buy a small country.

But the critics weren’t wrong, either. It was an awful movie. That’s an opinion, not a demonstrable fact. Still, every movie critic I respect and agree with panned that movie. So how can the two sides coexist?

They each place different values on success. The critics are looking for artistic success. I’m not going to define that here, that’s a thesis-worthy topic. But clearly the critics didn’t find success in Transformers 2. On the other hand, pundits and investors are looking for financial success. Who cares if the movie is good or bad, as long as it made a lot of money. Look at the list of top grossing films. It’s littered with movies that I wouldn’t see again if you paid me (though you’re welcome to try).

Saying that one side or the other is wrong is a stupid argument. It’s meaningless. It is, itself, wrong. There is no right or wrong when there are variegated measures of success. It’s like saying that I’m richer than you because I have a million dollars, while you only have 747,000 Euros. Sure, in the U.S., where we value the dollar, that’s true. In Europe, you’re the rich one. Geography aside, it would be ridiculous to say that I’m right for having dollars instead of Euros. It’s a meaningless argument. We can both be right.

Gruber and Fried are both right. Fried is correct that there were pundits waiting for the launch of the Thneed who were eventually disappointed by what they saw. Gruber is right that record-breaking presales are impressive. But to say that Fried ‘doesn’t get it’ is disingenuous, and I suspect Gruber knows this. He can rail against “self-proclaimed technology experts” all he wants, but in redefining Fried’s terms to match his own criticism, he’s fabricating his own reality as much as the experts he criticizes.

This is how we get along. We realize that we each value different measures of success. Those measures may be completely incompatible, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t relevant. When we dismiss someone else’s accurate measure of success and say that they ‘don’t get it,’ we’re part of the problem. Instead, talk about what you value, what’s important to you, and go from there.

Also, go see “The Dark Knight” a hundred more times, because that movie deserves to be much higher on the list.

[Image credit: Scubaben]

I also used to be a smoker. I smoked the most pretentious smokes of all: clove cigarettes. I can tell you the exact day I stopped. I was hanging out with some friends in lower Manhattan, near Wall street. We were on a smoke break. Well, they were on a smoke break. I had already been laid off from that company, but it’s hard to find friends for a smoke break when you are unemployed, so I would still go and visit them from time to time for a 15 minute puff outside my old office.

All the office buildings in that part of town are clad in mirrored glass. One day I caught a reflection of myself smoking. It was awful. I looked like an idiot. I looked like a pathetic loser trying to kill himself once drag at a time. I’m a big guy, and the proportion of the giant, hulking frame bent around the tiny, thin cigarette seemed so obviously wrong. I finally saw myself the way I should have seen myself all along, and I stopped there and then. I tossed the rest of the pack on my way home. That was 11 years ago.

I don’t remember the moment I decided to start being nice to customer service reps, but I can tell you that it worked like a charm. Not every time. Often, the rep simply does not have the power to help you. Sometimes, the company is running a blatant scam, and the customer service reps don’t even realize they are caught in the middle, giving contradictory answers. But I can tell you that I have seen and heard reps do magical things when you are nice to them. I have seen store managers at expensive computer shops give a 50% discount to a kind, but downtrodden customer. I have seen 7 consecutive insufficient fund charges reversed at a bank. I have seen airlines . . . okay, airlines don’t budge. But everyone else is cool.

I’ve seen a few disturbing instances of snarky Web sites beating up on kids recently. A Gizmodo editor made a kid cry. Actually, that’s just the headline. There is no evidence in the story that the kid did actually cry. He said “I feel like crying,” but it would not be factually accurate to say he definitely cried. But it is ironic, and very snarky, to write a supposedly apologetic story about how an editor wished he did not make a kid cry, and then exaggerate in the headline to make it seem like the kid’s reaction was more inconsolable than it actually may have been.

TechCrunch, on the other hand, now uses social networks for comments. I like this system, because it removes much of the anonymity that can cause commenters to become toxic. Unfortunately, the link between social networks and public Web sites can be vague, which is probably why this kid’s mother used the TechCrunch comments board to ask him to call home. If poor Jeremy thought his mom was blowin’ up his spot, he had no idea what he was in for when it became headline news on the popular tech blog.

Now, let me say that I like both of these Web sites. Tech journalism is competitive at a business level, but on a personal level most tech editors get along very well. We like each other and help each other out all the time. I’ve seen competitors lend each other equipment to help them cover the exact same event. Heck, I lent Vincent Nguyen, who is a SlashGear partner, my laptop power cord at an event when I was working for a competitor. I could have refrained and hoped that his site lost its chance for coverage, but that’s not what we’re all about. It’s only gadgets, after all. If we’re not having a good time, we’re definitely missing the point.

I even like the snarky tone, from time to time. Tone is a way that Web sites covering the exact same information from the same sources can differentiate themselves. If you want snark, you know where to go (and it probably isn’t here).

But here’s the thing. Snark by itself isn’t funny. It’s just mean. Snark is a combination of the words “snide” and “remark.” Snide means derogatory or mocking, in an indirect way. So, like I said, it’s mean. If your writing is only snarky, you won’t be successful with your audience, in the same way that screaming on the phone at a customer service representative won’t get your flight changed (seriously, American Airlines, did you think I meant to book a 1 AM flight with a 2-year old?). But snark can be used to great comic effect.

I have a dark, sardonic sense of humor, but it works. It works because deep down, I’m really a nice, open-minded, peaceful guy. I love everybody. I don’t want to see anyone hurt. So, when I make a joke about killing my parents, it’s funny because it is so out of character. It’s me doing an impression of someone who is completely awful. It’s me voicing the darkest thoughts in my head, which is funny because even the nicest amongst us has the same dark thoughts. I’m sure the Dalai Lama thinks about killing my parents, too (he would if he knew them {zing!}). It’s funny because comedy, and irony, are about springing upon your audience the unexpected.

But, every once in a while, I have to take a step back and realize that humor isn’t always the best way to handle a situation, especially when my humor is snarky or sarcastic. Believe me, I learned the hard way. I’ve learned that when you are talking to friends about cancer, or attending a funeral, even though it is impossible to mute the twisted thoughts that pop into your head, it is easy to keep those thoughts from spilling out. The same is true when dealing with kids.

Kids are like microcosmic adults, amplified. A kid lives ten years for every year of adult life. A kid feels emotional joy and anguish over and over again, instead of recalibrating to the same old blase that we all, um, enjoy. Kids are still developing, inside and out. They are still learning the rules. They do this by testing boundaries, and then pulling back when they have gone too far.

The Gizmodo story about making a kid cry was interesting, maybe even a little funny, especially to those of us on one or the other side of the PR / Journalist game (and I’ve been on both). But you know what would have been a better story? A success. A story about teaching that kid how the game is played, and then a follow-up on how well his app is doing, or what he learned from its eventual flop.

The TechCrunch story started with a tweet, and that was probably enough. Put the incident in front of a few thousand people, instead of a few million. Some kids can laugh off the foibles of their parents, but for some, those problems fester in their minds and hurt not only their relationship, but also their psyche as they become adults. It’s funny to see a parent make a mistake with technology. Follow @oldmansearch on Twitter and thank me later. But embarassing the kid for it? That might be going too far.

I hope these sites continue with the snark that gives them their voice. But occasionally, I hope they also take a step back and see themselves reflected in the windows of the giant buildings all around them. It’s only technology, after all. If we’re not having a good time, we’re definitely missing the point.

[Image credit: Perfect Porridge]

So, you can imagine our Texas-sized surprise when our governor and now-presidential candidate Rick Perry went to the Iowa state fair and made this comment on Twitter:

Can’t beat a pork chop on a stick at the Iowa State Fair.

What?! In case you didn’t realize, that is the most un-Texan thing Rick Perry has ever said. Down here in Texas, we are morally obliged to declare ourselves better than any other state. Heck, we don’t even need the rest of you. We’re so great, we might just leave and go back to being our own country. On so many levels, Rick Perry’s statement is simply anti-Texan. If he’s saying the Iowa State Fair has better pork chops on a stick than the Texas State Fair, he’s wrong. Our pork chop on a stick is much better (I’m assuming, because I’m a Texan). Technically, he’s being even more general. He’s saying that ‘nothing’ can beat a pork chop on a stick in Iowa. Can’t beat it? Nothing can? Well, them there’s fightin’ words.

And a fight is just what Perry got . . . almost. Local food blogger Andrea Grimes (who also credits herself a feminist and comedian) decided to take on Perry’s pork chop claims. She is the key editor for the local branch of Eater, a notoriously snarky and fun food industry blog that has outposts throughout the country. Grimes doesn’t hide her liberal leanings, so Perry was probably already setting off warnings on her radar, but apparently disparaging Texas food-on-a-stick, if not the whole of Texan society, was a step too far.

So, Grimes decided to reply on Twitter, but first she went to add Perry to her Following list. When she clicked the “+Follow” button, she was denied and greeted instead with the message “Sorry, you can’t follow this user (because they’re blocking you).”

Before I dive in, I want to point out the passive aggressive tone of that message. First, it is incorrect to refer to a single user as “they.” The grammatical way to say this would be “(because he or she is blocking you).” “They” is always a plural. But this again touches on the problems with gender on social networks, as I’ve mentioned before.

Second, I love the parenthesis. Parentheses divide a topic in two. Here is the main part, outside the parentheis. But inside, here’s the secret that I’m going to whisper to you as an aside, so you get my drift. The official, business-like Twitter explanation is that you cannot follow this user. But, just between you and me, you must have done something to piss them off (because he or she is blocking you). It’s like Twitter is embarrassed to say it out loud. Don’t worry, Twitter, we know it’s not your fault.

So, what’s the problem? After all, as Perry representatives made clear to the Dallas Morning News, the Twitter account belongs to Perry, and “He manages it as he likes.” He’s allowed to follow or block whomever he chooses. Just because he’s governor doesn’t mean he loses his personal freedoms to the whim of his constituents, right? Of course not. But I’m not claiming that Perry is doing something legal or illegal. I just think he would be a better governor for lightening up on all the blocking.

Clearly I have partisan feelings about Rick Perry, but I would say the same about any candidate on either side of the aisle. If Barney Frank blocked Matt Drudge from following him on Twitter, I would chastise Representative Frank the same way.

It’s important to understand what a Twitter block really means. If I block you, it does not mean that you cannot read what I am tweeting. As long as my tweets are still public, as Rick Perry’s tweets are, you can still read my posts. You can scroll through my timeline and see everything I say, and vice versa, so I can see all of your posts.

It does block direct messages, which are Twitter’s most private communications. Okay, I can agree with that. But it also blocks @replies and @mentions. In case you’re ill-Twitterate, @replies and @mentions are tweets that include someone else’s Twitter handle. Twitter makes it very easy to see every time you have been mentioned in someone else’s tweet. So, if you were to tweet “@philipberne looks like a hairy, dirty hobo,” it would show up in a special list of tweets that include my @name.

A twitter block does not prevent you from writing those @replies. It does not prevent them from showing up in your public timeline. Anyone following you will still see what you have written about me. It does keep those @replies from showing up in my special @reply list. Basically, if I block you, I’m the only person who can’t hear what you’re saying about me.

A Twitter block is sticking your fingers in your ears and saying “LA LA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!! LA LA!”

As Grimes points out, the simple problem is that a governor has an obligation to listen to his or her constituents. Getting access to a politician is difficult, and often requires time and money that the common folk doesn’t have. Even though Grimes admits she did not vote for Perry, he still represents her, and it wouldn’t hurt his relationship with his opposition if they knew they could use Twitter as an easy outlet to petition for a redress of grievances.

But I think it’s much more basic than that. I don’t think you should need to be a constituent to be heard. Take the example of my favorite Twitter politician, Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker. Booker regularly retweets messages to his followers from people who are sharply, and at times even unfairly critical of his work. Sometimes he tries to address their issues. Other times he simply retweets without comment.

In a way, especially online, there is a badge of honor in this. It is honorable to publicly air the problems your opponents have with you. It shows that you are listening, and hearing. It shows you care about both sides of an issue. It shows you aren’t afraid to face your detractors. It’s also a sign of maturity.

I send emails to my Congresspeople all the time. I never voted for any of them. I don’t always get a reply, but I have gotten a reply from my representative and each senator at least once. I respect that. I may not agree with what they say or do, but I respect them as people for listening to me, and in return, I will listen to them. If we ever find ourselves in agreement, they will have my vote.

First, a delightful disclosure. Not just my usual disclosure about how in my day job I work for Samsung and we make tablets like the one Perlman mistakenly thinks are not necessary. No, this is about Mike. Mike and I worked at a past Web site together. In fact, I hired him there, and I was his boss. When I left, he took over for more than a year until he left to join his current site.

I’m not going to argue with Mike’s assessment of the current tablet herd. I do think that his premise is flawed, asking whether or not a tablet, or the entire tablet category, is necessary or not. But my answer here will not simply recommend that you buy a specific tablet and love it until you find it a very necessary part of your life. Instead, I wonder if we should question the relevance of the term “necessary.”

Before the tablet computer got huge, the most common criticism was about use-case scenario. Why did people need a tablet? Why was this better than a laptop/netbook? Netbooks were popular and cheap. They could browse the Web, handle some productivity and maybe basic gaming, watch movies and videos, and everything else a tablet could imaginably do.

Not me. I got it. I understood from the start how much fun the new form factor could be. But I did not imagine myself actually doing things on my tablet. I did not imagine actual Web surfing, or actual movie watching. I just imagined myself holding it. I imagined myself swiping fingers across a screen in grand gestures. I imagined walking around the room and showing it to people, one-handed.

In my mind, it felt cool. It felt great. Did it feel necessary? Why rain on my parade?

Let’s define necessary. Necessary means that you have a task to perform, and you want the best tool for the task. Perhaps the only tool that will help you accomplish your goal. Want to find a stud in your wall before you drill? A stud finder is necessary. Want to cook the perfect omelet without too much butter? A nonstick pan is necessary. Perhaps not the only possible tool for the jobs, but necessary enough.

Necessary means that you have limited resources and you need to spend them wisely. I was going to order the wine pairing with my prix fixe meal, but I was already spending so much, it hardly felt necessary. I was going to have my eyebrows threaded while I was getting my mani/pedi, but I was low already running late for my date, and I looked good enough, so it wasn’t necessary.

Necessary means that a question has been asked, and this is the best answer. Unnecessary means that there was never any question. Necessary means something acceptably fits into my world view and expectations. Unnecessary means I wasn’t considering it before, and I won’t start now. Necessary decisions are all made logically, with forethought and the best evidence gathered. Unnecessary decisions are made at the behest of the id. They represent our feelings and emotions, our desires more than our needs.

I take the greatest issue with this last. Mike says that “tablets . . . are expensive, shiny, adult toys that serve as status symbols in most cases.” Okay. What’s the problem?

Expensive? Apparently Mr. Perlman is channeling Herr Schindler. Every penny counts. Instead of this $730 tablet, I could have purchased a cheap netbook for $200 (on contract). I could have given the extra $730 to charity. I could have used it to take a class at my local community college, then gotten my degree, then gone on for a PhD in microbiology, and then . . . cure for cancer!

I’m not being snide. I have money problems like everybody else. I’ve been underwater on two consecutive house sales in the last 5 years. The last thing I want is for someone to sell their organs to buy a tablet computer. But you can’t dismiss the entire category as expensive. It’s expensive compared to a spiral notebook, but cheaper than hiring a personal assistant. In between, people will make their own decisions. Plus, tablet prices have been fairly competitive from the start, perhaps more than any previous high-technology category.

Shiny? Some of them. Some are glossy. Some are matte. Some are thick, some are very thin. Is Mike really saying we should do away with all products that are shiny? Is shiny suddenly a negative attribute? I understand that Mike is channeling a familiar stereotype about shiny, pretty things, and relating the tablets to commodities like jewelry. Even so I would take issue with this argument that a thing that is shiny for shiny’s sake is worthless. But I think we can agree that being shiny is not a negative attribute in well-designed electronics.

Adult toys? Apparently, Mike has found a use for his tablets that we hadn’t considered. Kidding aside, what’s the problem with adult toys? Why can’t adults have toys? A toy is a possession created for pure enjoyment. What is wrong with adults having toys?

At some point, we started to equate toys and fun with irresponsibility and childishness. I’m not sure why. As adults, we never gave up our toys. We just started calling them by new names, disguising their true purpose, which is to make us happy. Is it irresponsible for an adult to possess something purely because it makes him or her happy? We tend to disguise these happy attributes as aspects of design, in a car or in fashion or in our houses and furniture and appliances. But someone who personally owns a cappuccino machine that can feed a small African village and outclasses all but the most European of coffee bars in my area . . . well, that person owns a big toy. And they should enjoy it like an adult. Take care of it. Relish it. But don’t be prideful or boastful about it.

Mike backs up his argument with some startlingly poor anecdotal examples. He used to own Pogs. Pogs are no longer cool. Tablets will eventually no longer be cool. I used to own M.U.S.C.L.E. men. They are no longer cool. I also used to own an Atari 2600. It is still cool. My father had a Porsche 911. It would still be quite cool today.

He then pastes a conversation he had with a cell carrier representative, where he badgered her again and again about why he should buy a tablet. He wants to know why he needs a tablet in addition to his 13-inch MacBook Pro . . . that he paid $1,400 for. That’s right, a guy who paid more than twice as much for his laptop as any respectable Windows owner would dream of paying, for the most woefully underpowered MacBook in terms of price/performance (no dedicated graphics card on a Pro laptop?), is asking a poor sales rep why he should buy a tablet that can’t run Final Cut. Final Cut. Mike, my friend, you are officially THAT guy.

Mike knows he is wrong. That’s why, at the end, he checks in to say his boss is a tablet guy, himself. But Mike thinks that if you are buying a tablet to sit at Starbucks and check Facebook, you are drinking the Kool-Aid.

First, kudos to Mike for spelling Kool-Aid correctly. Second, that analogy is completely played out. No more Kool-Aid. I’m declaring that meme dead.

Third, Starbucks has better coffee than any other coffee shop around me. I could make better coffee at home, and I often do, but sometimes seeing people and getting out of the house are more important than great coffee. Sad, but true. Fourth, Starbucks has free Wi-Fi, comfortable chairs, and they don’t hassle you to leave after sitting for an hour straight.

Fifth, why do you need a pro laptop at Starbucks? For the keyboard? The big novel you’ve been working on for three years? Got a compelling protagonist? Got an obstacle for him to overcome? Tablets are more comfortable to hold, by far. They take up less space. They have better battery life. Plus . . . this is a silly argument.

Arguing about a category is silly. Arguing about whether a device is necessary, that’s missing the point entirely. Criticizing people for buying a device simply because it is fun and might make them happy, that’s practically Marxist. Shunning buyers because they bought into a product category that is skyrocketing in popularity?

Well, Mike, are you still riding around on steam-powered motorcycles or have you switched to the new-fangled internal combustion engine, yet? Personally, I find these definitions of “necessary” to be stifling. I’d rather grab a couple peanut-butter cookies, go visit Charlene in Reisterstown and get back in time to queue up for the new Kanye and Jay-Z album that goes on sale at midnight. Now, if I could only find a record store.

The scroll bars are still there, but Apple has, by default, hidden them in many apps. You can make them reappear by hunting through the settings menu and turning them back on, but when they do come back, they are much thinner than they used to be, without the arrows at the top and bottom. They are also a bit buggy at the moment. If I try to click and drag the scrolling indicator, the page often jumps around, as if I had missed and clicked on the empty space above or below the scroll bar instead of directly on it. This doesn’t always happen, but it happens often enough that I have trained myself to avoid using the scroll bars this way.

So, the scroll bars, for now, are simply a visual indicator of where my view is located on a long or wide page. Clearly Apple does not think this information is terribly important, or else scroll bars would be turned on by default. As with the scroll bars, you can also hunt through the settings menu to turn off the new, so-called “natural scrolling.” This will bring you back to the method preferred on older Apple OSes, and also on Windows machines.

Some disclosure: my day job is working for Samsung. We make Windows computers that compete with Macs. I work in the phones division, but my work machine is a Samsung laptop running Windows. My MacBook is a holdover from my days as a tech journalist. When you become a tech journalist, you are issued a MacBook by force and stripped of whatever you were using before.

I am not criticizing or endorsing Apple’s new natural scrolling in this column. In fact, in my own usage, there are times when I like it, and times when I don’t. Those emotions are usually found in direct proportion to the amount of NyQuil I took the night before and how hot it was outside when I walked my dog. I have found no other correlation.

The new natural scrolling method will probably seem familiar to those of you not frozen in an iceberg since World War II. It is the same direction you use for scrolling on most touchscreen phones, and most tablets. Not all, of course. Some phones and tablets still use styli, and these phone often let you scroll by dragging scroll bars with the pointer. But if you have an Android or an iPhone or a Windows Phone, you’re familiar with the new method.

My real interest here is to examine how the user is placed in the conversation between your fingers and the object on screen. I have heard the argument that the new method tries, and perhaps fails, to emulate the touchscreen experience by manipulating objects as if they were physical. On touchscreen phones, this is certainly the case. When we touch something on screen, like an icon or a list, we expect it to react in a physical way. When I drag my finger to the right, I want the object beneath to move with my finger, just as a piece of paper would move with my finger when I drag it.

This argument postulates a problem with Apple’s natural scrolling because of the literal distance between your fingers and the objects on screen. Also, the angle has changed. The plane of your hands and the surface on which they rest are at an oblique angle of more than 90 degrees from the screen and the object at hand.

Think of a magic wand. When you wave a magic wand with the tip facing out before you, do you imagine the spell shooting forth parallel to the ground, or do you imagine the spell shooting directly upward? In our imagination, we do want a direct correlation between the position of our hands and the reaction on screen, this is true. However, is this what we were getting before? Not really.

The difference between classic scrolling and ‘natural’ scrolling seems to be the difference between manipulating a concept and manipulating an object. Scroll bars are not real, or at least they do not correspond to any real thing that we would experience in the physical world. When you read a tabloid, you do not scroll down to see the rest of the story. You move your eyes. If the paper will not fit comfortably in your hands, you fold it. But scrolling is not like folding. It is smoother. It is continuous. Folding is a way of breaking the object into two conceptual halves. Ask a print newspaper reporter (and I will refrain from old media mockery here) about the part of the story that falls “beneath the fold.” That part better not be as important as the top half, because it may never get read.

Natural scrolling correlates more strongly to moving an actual object. It is like reading a newspaper on a table. Some of the newspaper may extend over the edge of the table and bend downward, making it unreadable. When you want to read it, you move the paper upward. In the same way, when you want to read more of the NYTimes.com site, you move your fingers upward.

The argument should not be over whether one is more natural than the other. Let us not forget that we are using an electronic machine. This is not a natural object. The content onscreen is only real insofar as pixels light up and are arranged into a recognizable pattern. Those words are not real, they are the absence of light, in varying degrees if you have anti-aliasing cranked up, around recognizable patterns that our eyes and brain interpret as letters and words.

The argument should be over which is the more successful design for a laptop or desktop operating system. Is it better to create objects on screen that appropriate the form of their physical world counterparts? Should a page in Microsoft Word look like a piece of paper? Should an icon for a hard disk drive look like a hard disk? What percentage of people using a computer have actually seen a hard disk drive? What if your new ultraportable laptop uses a set of interconnected solid state memory chips instead? Does the drive icon still look like a drive?

Or is it better to create objects on screen that do not hew to the physical world? Certainly their form should suggest their function in order to be intuitive and useful, but they do not have to be photorealistic interpretations. They can suggest function through a more abstract image, or simply by their placement and arrangement.

In the former system, the computer interface becomes a part of the users world. The interface tries to fit in with symbols that are already familiar. I know what a printer looks like, so when I want to set up my new printer, I find the picture of the printer and I click on it. My email icon is a stamp. My music player icon is a CD. Wait, where did my CD go? I can’t find my CD?! What happened to my music!?!? Oh, there it is. Now it’s just a circle with a musical note. I guess that makes sense, since I hardly use CDs any more.

In the latter system, the user becomes part of the interface. I have to learn the language of the interface design. This may sound like it is automatically more difficult than the former method of photorealism, but that may not be true. After all, when I want to change the brightness of my display, will my instinct really be to search for a picture of a cog and gears? And how should we represent a Web browser, a feature that has no counterpart in real life? Are we wasting processing power and time trying to create objects that look three dimensional on a two dimensional screen in a 2D space?

I think the photorealistic approach, and Apple’s new natural scrolling, may be the more personal way to design an interface. Apple is clearly thinking of the intimate relationship between the user and the objects that we touch. It is literally a sensual relationship, in that we use a variety of our senses. We touch. We listen. We see.

But perhaps I do not need, nor do I want, to have this relationship with my work computer. I carry my phone with me everywhere. I keep my tablet very close to me when I am using it. With my laptop, I keep some distance. I am productive. We have a lot to get done.