What happened to the allure of the HDTV?  I was thinking about this the other day, as I tried to shoehorn some more crap in my storage space and realized that the little 15” analog CRT TV I have in there is probably never going to see service again and is just wasting a couple of cubic feet of precious space.   (Did I throw it out?  Of course not.  The second I do, our main TV will blow up and I’ll be forced to play Call of Duty by sound only.  Besides, I’d probably get sent to Guantanamo Bay as a terror suspect for chucking a TV into a dumpster here in the people’s republic.)  I mean, it took something like twenty years from the time the Japanese had (analog) HD in every home from the time they finally shut off the old systems here in the US.  And for all of that time, HD was in this virtual limbo.  It was like space travel - sure, you’ve got some Russians hanging out in a space station, drinking Tang and dissecting mouse livers in zero-G, but the time from the first space shuttle launch to the expected time when anyone can go to a United Airlines terminal, drop a credit card, and take a flight to the moon is somewhere between forever and never.

(Side note: if Virgin or United or whoever starts offering those low earth orbit flights, do you think they would give you mileage?  Because if so, you’re going to rack up something like 400,000-some miles per day.  Fly for a week, and you can turn that shit in for roughly 2500 years’ worth of Sports Illustrated subscriptions.)

I remember the first time I ever saw an HDTV set.  It was at a Magnolia hi-fi shop in Lynnwood, in like 97 or 98 - they had this big-screen, I think a rear projector, since that was about all they had back then.  And one of the local stations - I think KOMO - was broadcasting 24 hours in HD, but they only had like two hours a week of actual programming, so they ran this loop of some crap they filmed, like a news helicopter flying over the mountains, shooting the evergreen trees scrolling by, some clouds or mist in the distance, snow-covered peaks, that sort of thing.  And I was absolutely floored by the quality of the broadcast, the way it looked like much more than just doubling the number of lines or whatever.  The color depth, the richness, was simply amazing.  And then I talked to the sales guy, and of course the set cost as much as my car, and you had to buy a laserdisc player, and none of the cable systems did anything, so you had to get some rabbit ears, and they hoped that in a few years, about ten percent of shows might be in HD, and the whole thing seemed as probable as getting a working jet pack with a completely legal death ray add-on system.

I never thought about making the jump to HDTV for a while - I never had enough room or cash to buy a rear-projector system.  When I moved to Astoria in 1999, I bought the most TV $500 would buy, which was a 27” Panasonic CRT set that lasted me ten years.  I thought about HDTV only because in New York, all of the networks started broadcasting in the early 2000s, and I couldn’t get shit with my rabbit ears hooked up to my analog set.  The rumor was a good HDTV tuner with an analog output would potentially give me clear pictures, or at least I’d trade the snow in the picture for pixelation compression errors.  But I didn’t want to drop hundreds on a box just to eat up more of my writing time on crappy network shows, so I forgot about it.  (There was also an issue that the highest point in New York City, which was the central point for all HDTV service since 1998, suddenly vanished in September of 2001.)

I did buy a HDTV in 2009, when we moved into this new place, for a few reasons.  First, I could junk that old 27”, and not have to move it or buy a bulky piece of furniture for it to sit on.  The thin-screen LCD revolution happened after the turn of the century, and after a few years of enjoying the fruits of a 20” LCD monitor on my desktop, I got a nice Samsung TV for the house.  And then less than a year later, Samsung gave all of their employees a bigger LCD TV as a year-end gift (probably to clear out stock for their new LED TVs, which look great but are awesomely expensive right now).

I remember all of the madness about the big switch, when the evil socialist Obama government would pull the plug on the analog TV standard and leave us all without our daily doses of Judge Judy and Matlock reruns.  The whole thing seemed like a joke to me, since I first heard about the changeover something like twenty years before, and if you’ve got cable, it doesn’t even matter anyway.  But people freaked the fuck out, and the government changed the transition date and spent billions (literally!) of money on education, and coupons for converter boxes.  It’s an amazing testament to this country’s priorities that people die in the streets without healthcare, but threaten to shut off people’s TV, and we’ll organize and blow federal money like there’s an asteroid headed straight to the earth and we need to get Bruce Willis on that thing with a nuke and a drilling platform, pronto.

So I’ve had the HDTV hookup for a year and a half now, and I guess sometimes I notice the difference.  But it’s one of those news memes that seemed like the end of the universe in early 2009, but in ten years, nobody’s even going to remember a time when we didn’t have HDTV.  And the real question is, when will the next big switch happen?  NTSC in the US went from 1941 to 2009 with color TV starting in 1951 (and then stopping, and restarting in 1953).  I’m guessing the next big move to make all TVs obsolete won’t take 56 years.  The next big format war is going to be over 3D TV, and of course, every major manufacturer has their own format, and has their own hallucination that their format will prevail and that by next year, all of us will be replacing our TVs with their new crap.  If they had their way, we’d replace our TVs every year, and also buy a new cell phone every year, and a new computer.  I expect Samsung’s home appliance division to get in the game too, and come out with some new planned obsolescence strategy for their clothes washers and refrigerators too.

Now I just need Comcast to get with the digital revolution and give me a new DVR that has an actual HDMI out, so I don’t need to keep hitting the screen format button and try to figure out if a person’s face is really bloated or if I’m supposed to be watching something in 4

instead of 16.

Last week, I drove 40 miles each way to work, which is 400 miles a week, which is about 20,000 miles a year, or maybe a hair less when you count in the various holidays and days I break an arm or wreck a car or get sent to a trade show where, instead of questions about my work, idiots ask me questions about the parent company’s TV sets.  Today, I drove zero miles.  I sat at my kitchen table, with sunlight streaming in from my giant 17 foot tall wall of windows, with a cat sitting on the table next to me, and plugged away at my laptop.  It wasn’t bad.  I mean, I don’t have a work laptop yet, which meant running Windows in a VM on my Mac, and then running a VPN in that to connect back to Palo Alto, then a morning of trying to figure out how to get at servers in New York, but it worked.

I’ve done this drive for two years.  With my tiny car’s awesome mileage, that still comes out to about a thousand gallons of gas.  Add in the lunches and the dry cleaning of shirts and the cost of said shirts and pants, now that I get to sit around in jeans and a t-shirt, and I wonder how much it cost me to work.  Granted, I probably made much more than that, and it would be much worse if I cared about my appearance and spent more time in a Nordstrom’s or at a salon or going to a gym every day to obsess over my muscle tone, but it’s still freaky math the amount of money you pay to make money.  And that’s on top of essentially paying half of what you make to various forms of The Man.  So yeah, it would be cheaper for me to sit around in dirty clothes in some tea party wet dream of a borderline-anarchist land with no laws and no taxes, but it also costs money to stockpile ammunition.

I spent all day reading tech writing stuff that was my bread and butter from 2001 to 2007, and a lot of it’s still me.  Editing old work I haven’t thought about in years is a really strong and effective time machine.  I mean, the product has moved on since I left, and someone else worked on the docs, but it’s the same basic templates I created, and the bulk of the writing’s still mine, or at least a slight variation of mine.  It really pulls me back to 2003 or whatever, when I was hashing this stuff out for the first time.  And it’s somewhat stupid to get nostalgic about an era that’s largely documented on this very site, and that’s got some pretty solid coverage in my paper journals and in saved emails and all of the other crap sitting on my hard drive.

But red-penning my way through hundreds of pages of this stuff brings me back to the times I sat in the back corner of that office, hunched over a Dell, a giant second-generation iPod playing from its whopping twenty-gig hard drive, wondering what kind of fortified compound I’d build out of leftover shipping containers on my land in Colorado, what I’d do on my next big trip to Vegas, how I’d endure another weekend in Astoria, what I’d add to my Amazon shopping cart for my near-daily purchases I’d rapidly consume on the N train every day.  It makes me think of bad first dates and forgotten coworkers and random movies I saw for no reason other than the two hours of free air conditioning, even if it did cost ten bucks a pop plus a long train ride into “the city”.

And I guess I do lament the New York I resisted in that period, the people who were the status quo and how I knew I could never be them, and how I tried hard not to be.  New York is a land of old money, and a place of millions of people who come to this overpopulated ghetto of an island to somehow prove that they are old money, even if they’re tending a bar and running a receptionist desk.  It’s not like LA, where everyone is trying to get rich quick, where being a nobody from a dirt farm in Nebraska is actually a good thing, because you want to prove that you came from nothing and created everything.  I never came to New York because I wanted to be a New Yorker or because I wanted to follow some near-Parisian dream of being a bohemian but with a rich lineage. And there are millions of people who drive cabs or dig ditches or bust suds in a dish sink who have much different dreams.  But when you’re a white, single, early thirtysomething with a college degree and a desk job, it’s pretty hard to look beyond your demographic.

It’s also oddly contradictory, now that I think about it, how so much of being a status quo New Yorker is all about getting out of New York.  You spend every free second slinging shit at the “flyover states”, but almost every big status symbol requirement has to do with where you summer, how you get a share on Fire Island, how you go upstate to see the leaves turn, how you go to Europe or “do” LA or go to Rio or whatever non-New York place is supposed to make you a New Yorker.  I never built in these escapes, and being confined to a little island with no car drove me nuts.  It’s why I would get a last-second flight deal and go to Pittsburgh and absolutely love it.

I still haven’t been back to New York since I left.  I’ll probably end up going back soon, and I’m sure 100% of it has changed.  And I know I could never live there again, but I am curious if I show up at the corner of Broadway and Houston, if the whole thing will feel like I never left, or if I will be overwhelmed, or if it will all seem like a strange dream.

I think I’m buying a new computer desk tomorrow.  The kitchen table is no AnthroCart.  And once the new laptop shows up, there won’t be room for two computers and a cat.

When I was maybe ten, I became obsessed with the Elephant Man.  I think the movie came out around then, or maybe it was the play, and Mark Hamill was playing the role of Merrick in the Broadway version, and because I was so infatuated with Star Wars at the time, I absolutely had to read everything about it, which was pretty much nothing, given that we had exactly five TV channels, and the closest thing to Google around was a Sears version of the Pong game we got that Christmas, which was so cheap it had the paddle wheels actually mounted on the top panel of the game unit, and didn’t even have wired controllers, so two people had to sit right next to each other to play.  (And I also thought that maybe there was some hidden easter egg in the game - which is odd, considering the very first easter egg in a commercial video game was probably the hidden room in Adventure for the 2600, and I never played that - so I would spend hours trying to drive up the score in the practice mode, thinking maybe if I got the score up to 99 or something a magical message would appear, like a “good job!” or a phone number you called for a free t-shirt, or something.  No luck.)

I never got to see the movie back then, the David Lynch thing, because HBO only played it once that I could remember (although they played that horrible Flash Gordon remake pretty much every other hour) and this was twenty years before the DVR and at least ten years before we got a VCR that could record, and it was at the same exact time I had to go to my stupid CCD class on a Sunday for church, and I was so pissed off and tried to talk my way out of it, but couldn’t.  I did manage to borrow the book version from someone, and it had maybe six photos in it, but that wasn’t enough.  Sometimes I wonder if these frantic obsession cycles I have got burned into my head result from a lack of media back then.  I mean, if I would’ve heard about the Elephant Man, and then jumped in a web browser and spent four hours poring over wikipedia articles, instead of just getting a tiny taste of it and then not seeing a single thing for years, maybe I would be placated and not spend inordinate amounts of time researching these memes from childhood, reading old Apple II history or 1970s fighter jets or non-Apollo 11 moon landings, because my school library had only a single book on the subject, and I probably checked that single book out 20 times and memorized every damn page.

This still happens.  Like last night, I saw that movie Benjaman Button (or whatever it’s called - Curious Case of…?) and it had a brief appearance by a fictionalized Ota Benga, who was this pygmy from Congo, who was brought over to the US and became an exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, running around a cage in a loincloth throwing spears and playing with monkeys.  (Obviously the political climate was slightly different in 1906, given that now those primates he shared a cage with can now legally drive cars and vote in 22 countries, and would probably be allowed to apply for home mortgages, had Countrywide not gone under.)  So I throw that in google, and Ota Benga links to the movie Freaks, which links to the Lobster Boy, which links to Grady Stiles, the lobster boy who was a horrible alcoholic and was killed by a (poorly) planned hit by his abused family, which brought me to some other article, which brought me to Chang and Eng Bunker, and now I’m spending my valuable day off combing the web for articles about conjoined twins, half wondering if there is either a medication I can take for this, or a way I can make enough money off of it that I can just harness this compulsion into a six-digit career.  (And no, I’m not going to start an ad-sponsored site about freaks or about Soviet attempts at Venus landings or whatever else.  I know in an hour, I will be busy googling for a new desk again.)

Some strange facts about Chang and Eng Bunker:

• They owned slaves.
• They lost part of their plantation in the Civil War and were extremely anti-government after that; they also had a son who fought for the Confederate Army.
• They met a pair of sisters and fought over which of the two they wanted - they both wanted the same one, but Eng won and Chang got second pick.
• They had 22 children between the two of them, which raises a bunch of obvious questions about how one performs the required acts to conceive a child when your brother-in-law is sitting right next to your husband as you complete said act, repeat 22 times.
• The kids were all double first cousins with each other.  Double first cousins are technically half-siblings from a genetics standpoint, but since identical twins have the same DNA, they were more than half-siblings, but not full siblings.
• The sisters ended up on bad terms, so they had to set up two households, and the twins would rotate between the two of them, spending three days at each house.
• Chang had a stroke four years before they died, and he was the one that controlled their legs, so they were pretty much screwed after that.
• Chang died in his sleep; Eng woke up one morning, connected to his dead brother.
• A doctor offered to perform an emergency separation of them after Chang died, but Eng refused to be separated from his brother.
• Their grandson was General Caleb Haynes, who was a prominent pilot in the Army Air Corps in WWI and WWII.  He was later a freemason, for those of you who are keeping score on how the freemasons are connected to everything.

Great, now I’m going to spend the afternoon googling how many of the people who walked on the moon were freemasons.

iOS 4.1 came out yesterday, and I updated my iPhone 3G, which has been plagued with slowdowns and randomness since I updated it to 4.0.  It was almost so bad that I thought I was running a high-end Windows Mobile phone.  (Okay, not that bad.)  But it appears that the fixes in 4.1 alleviate any of the problems I was having, and everything is back to normal.  I can’t use the new game service, and it doesn’t multitask, both of which are not deal-breakers for me, since I need fewer things to waste time with, and I don’t care much about multitasking as long as I can switch between apps smoothly.  (Like for example, my Windows Mobile phone multitasked, but switching between applications was clunky and involved the virtual equivalent of the phone saying “oh yeah, hang on a second dude…” Switching between email and the web browser is faster on the iPhone, even if both of the applications are running and in memory in WM, the only difference being that in WM, you’re burning through the battery twice as fast.  And I used to constantly do stuff like switch out of Google Maps but not exit it, so it would still be running but not be visible, and by lunch my battery was dead.)

One of the things that enticed me though, and I can’t find any good information on it, is that you can supposedly use a bluetooth keyboard now with the iPhone.  I don’t know if you can on the 3G, or if the performance is decent, but if so, that gets me a step closer to the ideal travel computer setup.  I’ve always wanted some kind of thing where you had an iPhone-sized palm-based computer that you could pull out of your pocket to take a picture or play a song or jot down a note, but then when you sat down at a desk, you could pop it in a cradle or stand and hook up a keyboard and maybe a monitor, and you’d be able to work.

I think my obsession with this model was fueled by a week I spent in San Diego for a conference in 2000, when I only had my Palm Pilot IIIx with me.  It was before I owned a laptop, and probably the main reason I shelled out $5000 for a Dell Latitude in the beginning of 2001.  But this was when the Palm was a big deal, and every suit you see tooling around the airport with an iPad today was tooling around the airport with a Palm Pilot back in 2000.  You could actually go to a CompUSA and buy software for the Palm Pilot - actual shrinkwrapped, boxed, on-disk software.  I think back then, they had entire aisles of software, plus all of the cases, screen protectors, cables, docks, and other add-ons you could buy.  I did a lot of reading on the Palm, a lot of eBooks (which was ten years before the eBook was invented, according to current news reports).  I also played many, many rounds of Dope Wars, and found many hits of acid on a dead dude in the subway, when I happened to actually be on the subway.  But I never really wrote much on the Palm, because the stylus and the graffiti inking language never completely jived with me.  I can barely read my own handwriting, so learning a new handwriting system was out of the question.

I did no writing on the trip - I found a Borders instead and bought an armful of Philip K. Dick books to keep me busy.  But when I got home, I saw this little keyboard at CompUSA and immediately bought it.  The thing unfolded and you plugged your Palm Pilot into the lid, sort of like a makeshift cradle, and then typed away.  This thing was an awesome novelty for me for about three days, until I got bored of trying to write on the Palm Pilot and decided to start gardening in my kitchen or trying to collect crossbow parts off of eBay or whatever the hell else I did at that point in 2000.  This keyboard looked neat, and the folding lid was nifty, but the keys were like 95% sized, and my fat fingers kept hitting the wrong things.  Plus there was some weird delay of a tenth of a microsecond that made the user experience a bit sloppy.  And there were various ergonomic issues with having the keyboard immediately under a three inch screen, and the joined assembly bouncing around as you typed, unless you had a perfectly flat and stable surface to rest the whole thing on.

So would a bluetooth keyboard and an iPhone solve any of these problems?  I’m guessing you would have the same ergo issues unless you pumped the iPhone video into a big monitor.  And it’s not like I can run emacs on my phone, so I’m not going to be writing a 300,000 word book in the notes application.  Also, there’s the issue that the 3G is not a powerhorse cpu-wise, so even my lowly netbook is going to outpace it for desktop application performance.  And then I have the various sync issues; I can’t keep all of my writing on my home computer in a phone’s tiny flash memory.  I suppose I could concoct some scheme where all of my data lived in the cloud somewhere, but that doesn’t help me much at 40,000 feet with no cell tower in sight.  (Side note: man, I hate the term “in the cloud”.  It reeks of MBAism, something that was invented by a suit to describe a long-existing service and wrap it up in some hip and smarmy term that could be resold for more money. I mean, was my VAXNotes conference back in 1989 “in the cloud”? )

Maybe the iPad is part of that solution - you have a big screen, you can haul it around easy, you can plug in that keyboard cradle thing or pair up a bluetooth keyboard and write.  And everything I write here, even though it isn’t my primary writing repository, lives in a remote server and can be accessed by any machine with a reasonable web browser and a functional connection to the internet.  Wordpress has a halfway decent app on the iPhone, and if the iPhone glass keyboard wasn’t so slow for me, I could write on there.  (It works perfectly fine for web surfing, googling things, and the occasional two-sentence email message, but I can’t hack out a thousand words on it unless you gave me like eight hours and four Ativan tablets.)  All of this is much less important starting next week when my office is my home and my Mac is always within arm’s reach.  But it might be more important the first time I have to make a trip back east for work.

Speaking of, last day of the old job is today.  I thought about writing something giant and grand to sum up my feelings about that whole situation, but it’s complicated, so maybe later.  Probably not tomorrow though, given what happened nine years ago and all.

Okay, as I mentioned, a lot is up right now.  One of the big things is that my work geography is about to get very complex and very simple.  Let me try to explain.

I was essentially offered my old job in New York, with a couple of differences.  One is that I won’t work in New York - I will be working from home.  The other is that this company got bought by a much larger company last year, which means the whole playing field has changed.  But things will be simple in the sense that instead of spending roughly three hours a day commuting, I will spend roughly fifteen seconds walking down the stairs.  The complicated part is that I will be working for a company in Palo Alto as a California employee, but I will be working with a team that’s in my old digs in New York, but who also has a chunk of employees in Boston.  So the “where do you work” question technically has at least four answers.

And although I am in the Pacific time zone, I will be working Eastern time.  This isn’t a big deal for me; at the time I usually get ready to hop in my car and battle the 880, I will sit down at the computer and start working.  The real win is that I can wrap things up early in the afternoon and have a couple of hours to write and deal with various domestic duties which may or may not include Call of Duty.

As always, I’m sort of weird about discussing my work here, so no more details, although it’s not terribly hard to figure out.

The weird part of all of this is leaving Silicon Valley.  I mean, I technically won’t - I still have an office in Palo Alto, and I can still drive an hour or two and hang out there.  But I won’t be day-to-day down there.  It’s odd to think I’ve been doing this daily drive for two years now, and I’m still not that familiar with the area.  But I do love to see the big futuristic buildings, the chrome and glass towers and campuses that belong to companies that everyone has heard of, or to companies nobody even knows yet.  And then there’s the strip malls and rows of buildings that looked futuristic back in 1982, and now look like a beaten, middle-aged hooker, but are still rented out at a premium.  I wish I could quantify this architecture more, start a site about it, take lots of pictures of rustic earthtone trim and solid wood faceplates and old buildings labelscarred with removed SGI or DataGeneral logos.  But now that I’m not down there every day, that’s another project pushed to a deep back burner for now.

I now have a million other projects, including crap like where I will fit another computer, how I will run a new KVM, what ethernet hub or switch or other crap I will need to add to the home network, and how I will keep the cats away from me while I work.  And I’m fighting a low-grade cold, which will hopefully pass in another day or two.

But first, I get to go sit in the parking lot officially known as the Nimitz freeway for the next hour or two.  I better enjoy it while it lasts.