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A late Christmas present arrived last week from my wife. It was my fault it was late – I set a budget for Christmas and a limit for how much we would spend on each other, and her preplanned gift was over the limit. So she took the money, set it aside, told me what I was getting on Christmas, and after two months we had added to it enough that we could afford a record player.

My father laughs every time I mention the record player; first when I said I wanted one, then I told him it was Freya’s present to me, and then just this past week when I told him it had arrived. Why, he wonders, would his perfectly rational son go out and pay money for a technology that has seen its time and, in his mind, thankfully been replaced? But I’m not the only one; there are no less than 4 record stores here in Nashville that have a great deal of records and do what I suppose is a thriving business buying and selling them. Vinyl – the long dead format, is not dead at all.

There are similar type resurrections all over the place if you peer past the wares at your local big box retailer. Despite advancements in digital printing technologies, many “ancient” printing techniques are still used. And even though our food supply is now mostly hidden from our eyes and able to deliver any food – natural or synthetic or something in between – at any time of the year to anywhere in the civilized world, lately there is a movement to plant gardens and raise chickens in our own backyards. From the ongoing popularity of thrift stores to the success that etsy.com has had in bringing craftspeople’s handmade goods to a worldwide audience, it doesn’t take much work to see that in our age of unprecedented technological advancement, the “old ways” of doing things aren’t completely dead.

“Technology has not resulted in convergence” Jesse Schell, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University said in his recent presentation about the future of gaming. Rather, he observed it results in divergence. It creates complications for us. The technological landscape is filled with dozens of revolutionary devices that don’t interact well if at all, for every “life simplifying” device there are multiple hacks available that actually utilizes the technology in some form that simplifies our life. And we accept this way of technology because we trust the long arm of progress; we believe that each New Thing really is better than the previous thing, and thus necessary for us to own.

Convergence. Technology that works together and in doing so, makes life simpler. I think we assume this is coming. Technology just keeps improving, and this is just how progress works. I’m afraid if we keep thinking that way we will waste a great deal of time waiting. There is no incentive for technology designers to create convergence and simplification – proprietary systems are what make money. They lock you in and force you to buy from one corporation or technology creator. Progress, as it stands now, is at the mercy of a capitalistic market prone to the incentives and desires of corporations. This does not make it evil, but it does make me question our inherent trust in the system.

The problem with the system, to me, is that it keeps producing really cool gadgets. I’m a geek, I understand the common feeling of geek gadget lust. All geeks seem to function on the same wavelength. We seek to find the perfect device, but we don’t know what that device is. We keep waiting, and if a device isn’t quite there, then we hack it and modify it. Geeks accept divergence as a way of life. Sure, it’s frustrating occasionally, but usually it is just an obstacle to overcome on the path to, well, who knows what. Progress? We like the challenge and we accept the frustrations. We take the time to learn what needs to happen to change the technology we are given into something that’s closer to perfection.

Maybe this comes because we implicitly trust in the idea of progress. We are moving forward in time, so naturally we must be progressing. Necessity is the mother of invention the proverb tells us, and the inventions come at a staggering pace these days, which must mean that we have a lot of unrecognized necessity in our life. That is what happens when an exciting new technology is announced; we immediately recognize the previously hidden necessity in our life, a need that we just didn’t know we had until now.

The iPod did that for me, nearly a decade ago now. It was announced in early 2001, but I didn’t obtain one until 2004. I had always enjoyed listening to music but I didn’t realize that I needed to listen to it everywhere. Once the ability existed, well, portable music (in mass quantities) instantly seemed to be a necessity.

But last year, after having an iPod for about 5 years, I realized that I don’t listen to music the way I used to. There was a time when the acquisition of new music was exciting; when I would open the CD and take it out and play it and listen through while reading the lyrics, admiring the album art, appreciate the album as the art it was (admittedly, a very low and pop art considering my tastes at the time). Lately though, I rarely stop listening to music, which means obtaining new music is simple an event which allows me to set aside the last album I wore out and listen to this one until I find yet another album to wear out in an endless cycle.

The music just passes by, and I know the melodies of the songs really well and I might even subconsciously know the choruses, but I hardly ever take stock of the album as a whole. I hardly ever focus in on the music. Actually, truth be told, I have trouble doing it because music has become merely a soundtrack – something that plays while I live life. It is the background, and I just like the background to change occasionally. Last year I realized this about myself, and I decided I didn’t like it.

Have you ever objectively examined a technological device in your life? Marshall McCluhan made famous the maxim “the medium is the message,” but do we ever try to examine the mediums in our lives and what that makes the messages in our lives? Is it possible that the message of cell phones is that people are convenient, portable, and subject to our schedules? Could it be that the message of iPods is that all music is cheap, portable, and demands nothing of us as listeners? Is it true what Neil Postman says, that books relate a worldview that is rational and linear, and moving images destroy this worldview, disconnecting us from the world?

Recently I saw six arguments against ebook readers meant to establish the thesis that ebooks and the devices that display them are actually regressive technologies when compared to books. The arguments focused on technological aspects – books can be skimmed, ebooks can’t, books can be searched non-linearly, ebooks can’t, etc. Another argument put forth against ebooks, at least as sold by the major distributors, is that they are proprietary and locked in. Imagine if the book you bought at your local bookstore was physically incapable of being loaned to another person. You can’t imagine it because it doesn’t make sense. But that is the nature of technology. It diverges. If you stumble across a good ebook, you either loan your ebook reader to your friend or you recommend they buy it, neither option being as convenient as loaning them a physical book. Why do we put up with these problems of technology?

Ostensibly, we put up with hindrances like this for the sake of “convenience.” An ebook reader doesn’t let us lend books to friends indefinitely, but it does let us carry our books anywhere we want go to – a whole library with us all of the time! If, granted, we have bought an entire library to carry with us, at prices similar to those of physical copies. Maybe this is convenient for things like textbooks, but most of the bestselling books on ebook seller’s lists are the types that actually are just as convenient to carry around. And they don’t ever run out of battery life.

“Convenience,” at least sometimes, is a lie we tell ourselves to convince our minds that we are living in the future, that this is progress. It’s not that all technology is inconvenient, but maybe more of it is than we’d like to admit. This is what I mean by objectively examining the technology in your life. Do we ever stop to ask ourselves if this technology is making our life more convenient? Is it easier than the way things were before? Do we even know how things were before this technology exists, what sacrifices or simplifications were made in accepting it?

I often think “I can’t even remember what life was like before X existed.” Maybe it was cellphones. I know for a fact I can’t remember what life was like before computers – there has been one in my house for as long as I can remember. But even newer technology like iPods, HD video, laptop computers, these are the things that radically change the way we live, and yet we don’t step back and question them. Our answers aren’t at all guaranteed to be negative, but they should always be revealing.

I realized that music played all the time in my life and yet I hardly ever listened closely to it. And, as mentioned, I didn’t like that. And I further realized that it was due to the technology in my life. I could play my iPod anytime I felt like it, any song, on demand. And if I didn’t like a song, or it was catchy, or I wasn’t in the mood for it, I just hit skip and was on to the next song. Meanwhile, I claimed to appreciate artists and art. I wanted to understand art more, and I was very aware that you understood art only through intentionality, through focusing on the art and asking questions and attempting to understand it. And I claimed to consider music an art.

Cognitive dissonance. I guess I had a shortage of it. I finally received a dose and I realized that in order to combat this constant flow of music, I needed to make music listening an intentional action. There needed to be some sense of purpose to it, at the very least to regain my respect for the artist and their art.

So I decided to buy a record player. This wasn’t, perhaps, the inevitable result of wanting to pay more attention to music, but it’s what I chose to do. There was a bit of nostalgia – of harkening back to the days when you couldn’t just call up any song you wanted at any time, but you had to go pull out that specific album and carefully seek to the track you wanted, or, more often, just play the record all the way through as the artist intended.

Does a record player create convergence, does it simplify my life? Not at all. It’s just as disconnected a device as any. Vinyl is a specific format unplayable by a cassette player, a CD player or a computer. To listen to music on vinyl I have to buy it all over again, even if it’s an album I have in some other form. But I had a desire to put an obstacle between me and my music, a barrier, as slight as it may be, for me to overcome. This means that hopefully I don’t just casually throw on a record, but instead I find a fitting album for the setting and mood, and put it on, and respect the creation of the artist.

In the end, it’s not that divergence is a bad thing, more that it is an inevitable thing. Technology will continue to diverge, and we’ll keep hoping it simplifies our lives. Sometimes it will, but many times it won’t. The question is, are we willing to admit that?

(Reposted from my Tumblr to allow comments)

So yesterday I tested my self control by waiting to find out about the Apple iPad. I did this by closing down Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader until Apple released the Keynote video online. It worked, except for in a moment of weakness I signed onto Facebook and saw that it was named the iPad.

That is the worst name ever.

But I remember a few years ago when Apple released the iPhone and everyone laughed at how dumb the name was. Fast forward to now, when millions of people have used the word iPhone multiple times a day, and we all think it’s the most obvious name because the Apple Reality Distortion Field has settled in. I imagine in a year or two this will be the case with the iPad – we’ll move away from feminine hygiene jokes and everyone will just want the device.

So I watched the SteveNote last night and took in all the demos of the software and then read a few blog posts, some positive, some negative. And I think most people writing about it are missing it. This is partially because, as with all new Apple products, the Tablet had been rumored to save mankind from itself and what Jobs announced yesterday unfortunately is simply Apple’s version of the next generation of computing. And there were a lot of rumors that were, as always, false which was disappointing to many people.

Here, for my future self and anyone else who may be interested, are my thoughts on some of the main features of the iPad.

Why Does this Exist? Apple has always been brave enough to tell people what they want, rather than responding to the masses’ requests and delivering some futile attempt to give everyone what they want. With the iPhone, Apple blew everyone out of the water because it wasn’t much like anything we expected. The iPhone, simply, was revolutionary. But the iPad is, on a hardware level, just a large iPod Touch. Not very revolutionary. The iPad exists therefore, to allow users to gain the potential that touch computing offers without the size limitations of an iPhone or iPod Touch. It won’t fit in your pocket, but it’s a lot easier to use while on the go than an iPhone is.

Software & OS I think a lot of people are let down by the software, whereas it is the thing that most excites me. When Apple released the iPhone no third-party software was allowed on it, and furthermore there was no “roadmap” of when it would be available. The iPad on the other hand, comes with 140,000-ish non-optimized apps and a roadmap for the development of iPad optimized apps. With the immediately available SDK and the iTunes store (whether you love it or hate it), the iPad on a software level is nothing but Potential. The demo of iWork didn’t seem that interesting yesterday because who thinks making documents is interesting; but I think the iPad will give us a sense of tactile creation again. By dragging and drawing and resizing with our fingers, designers can work in a more innate method. Hopefully Adobe (or some more nimble competitor) will come out with an Illustrator and Photoshop for the iPad that will remind us how poor mouse-based designing actually is.

In fact, the options seem incredible when you consider the size of the device. An iPhone is limited by its extremely small screen, but the nearly 10″ tablet gives you some good working room. Imagine Architects being able to sketch plans or modify blueprints on the fly; contractors being able to pull up blueprints and double check everything on site. Imagine hospitals finally being able to access centralized medical records. Imagine using the iPad as a control device for the programs you use on your computer, or as a better remote for your home theater or Apple TV. Imagine a cable that plugs it into your DSLR letting you measure levels and exposure on a touchscreen, or previewing video that you are shooting. Imagine all the different uses that a large touch screen offers, and eventually they will probably be created for the iPad.

MultiTasking. This seems to be the most shocking of all revelations about the iPad – it doesn’t multi-task! But let us remember, it does multi-task, it just doesn’t let you run everything. When you are using an iPhone, and based on what I’m reading from people who played with it, the iPad works the same, there are multiple tasks happening in the background. Mail is running, Safari is always in the state you last used it (all browser windows remain open and in the order you opened them), and the iPod is ready to play music. So the iPad and iPhone DO multi-task, but only with the tasks that Apple thinks should always be running. This can be frustrating, but consider the alternative.

Since the release of the Nexus One, the Google designed Android phone, one of the comments many people have made is that multi-tasking is great, but you never know what programs are running. There is an app-switcher, but it only shows six recently used apps. For many users, even advanced, geeky users, the only way to quit out of all programs is to restart the phone. That’s a horrible user experience, because most people won’t correlate a slow phone with too many apps being open because there is nothing in the OS that lets them know too many apps are open. So a slow phone will be a fault with Android, and Google will take the fall. Apple does not want this to happen, so they are taking the totalitarian approach of only Apple approved tasks are able to run always.

The iPhone has Push notifications from a web server that are able to keep you up to date on the phone even if an app is closed, but it remains to be seen how an iPad will solve this issue. Personally in my use of an iPhone, the lack of multi-tasking has never been much of an issue, except in a few specific cases. Apps launch so quickly most of the time that it does not matter whether it had been opened or closed before I wanted to switch to it. But the one exception is music – it is annoying if I am playing music in an App that isn’t the iPod, and need to do something else on the phone. Say I’m listening to Pandora while on the road. If I need to check Google Maps I have to close Pandora and stop the music to do so. This doesn’t kill the usefulness of the device, but it does make me use Pandora less because it just isn’t as convenient.

The lack of multi-tasking does make sense right now for the iPad since it seems to be working on a slightly modified version of the iPhone OS. I have no clue how fundamental the lack of multi-tasking is to the OS, and I have no clue if Apple plans to modify the devices abilities. What I would love to see is a simple system of multi-tasking. Allow me to select the apps I want to be able to remain open in the Background. An easy way that I see to do this is if the “dock” on the iPad had permission to keep apps open. In other words, the four apps that are at the bottom of the dock are the ones that can remain open. I’ll always know which apps are running, and at any time I can rearrange to end the tasks and shift my preferences.

Lack of a Camera This surprised me. I can only hope it’s coming in future versions of the iPad. One on the front would be cool, but one on the back would be just as cool, if apps could be written that allowed for me to draw over live images or manipulate pictures taken on the device (as already exist for the iPhone). I’m sure Apple has a reason to not include a camera on the device – possibly for the same reasons they didn’t add a camera to the iPod touch? But hopefully future generations of the device will add one. If one is added, we won’t find out until they announce it.

The iPad is a really cool device. It looks closer to the “future” than anything else since the iPhone. The best part about it is that it exists – it’s not a prototype, it’s not a beta, it is a real, working, touchscreen computer with thousands of apps and the potential for thousands more. I don’t think I’ll buy one until the next generation at the least, but the $499 price point makes it tempting to buy now. The iPad, despite it’s crappy name, is to me, a device with a ton of potential.

In high school I competed in Policy Debate, which means that the words “Resolved” and “Resolution” have very little to do with New Years for me, and very much to do with 1ACs, evidence, and the intricacies of US Policies. That said, the new year does provide a good window to examine that which is driving me, the things that I’ll be spending my free time and paid time working towards, thus I give you this examination of that which I have resolved, and still resolve to do.

Fourteen months ago and some change I made a covenant with the most amazing woman that has ever existed to love and cherish her, and to stay by her side until she dies. Those fourteenth months have been the best months ever in my life, and whether or not the trend continues, I’m her adoring lover and eternal best friend until my soul departs this gigantic world. Daily I will ask the questions that fill my head constantly: “how can I make her happier?” “What does she need that I can give her?” “What does she want that I can give her?” and quite often, “What am I doing wrong right now?” But my overarching, all-encompassing question is always “How can I best show her love at this moment?” I look forward to a year of understanding how to better answer that question each day.

Fourteen months from now the two of us hope to embark on a wild and crazy adventure – an 8 month road trip covering a great deal of the outer edges of the US. From Nashville to San Diego to Alaska to Maine to the Florida Keys and home to Nashville (with a great deal of stops in between). There is no overarching “why,” rather it is a natural way for us to achieve a great deal of our desires and fuel our passions in one big crazy act. Here’s a couple of our reasons:

Obviously, an eight month road trip covering 15-16,000 miles means that the people undertaking it enjoy traveling, and that is our most shallow reason for the trip. We want to travel, and see the US, and meet wonderful people, and understand a little more about life than we might learn by just staying in Nashville. But most jobs today grant us 2-3 weeks of vacation a year, and you always want to conserve that and use it sparingly; one big vacation and then a few days here and there for other traveling. Traveling within these confines inevitably forces you into tourist mode – see and do everything in a compact time so that you’ve “seen” wherever you may have traveled to. We don’t like that.

Travel for us, is to take our time and to soak in the culture of wherever the road has taken us. Time moves differently in each city, people have different habits and norms. Oh sure, you can travel to a hundred cities in the US, staying at the same hotel, eating at the restaurants, shopping at the same stores, and always feeling “at home.” That is exactly what we hate about travel – the chain-ification of America. But to scratch beyond that surface requires curiosity, patience, and a healthy does of adventurousness. So we’ll spend anywhere from a week to a month in cities that we want to visit, camping out somewhere close to the city or crashing at friends’ houses for a few nights, and then taking the time to wander streets, explore the unknown, talk to locals and get recommendations. In this way, hopefully, we will experience the real culture of the cities we visit, rather than just experience the amalgamation of Chain America.

To take this road trip will not only require giving up our jobs, but also our home. We’ll pack up important stuff into a storage unit and give away the rest. What little we decide is worth taking, we’ll pack into a camper that we are planning on buying this year. One of those small 13-foot models that tows behind small SUVs. Just some sort of permanent structure to sleep in if its raining and to do a little cooking in. Otherwise, we’ll sleep in a tent and enjoy the freedoms of being rent-free. But this forsaking of our home is fitting too because a purpose for Freya in this trip is to explore how cities around the US deal with the issue of homelessness. Her dream is to help those who do not have a home, specifically families and kids (this is a larger problem than you imagine, it is just typically much more invisible), but in what form and how she doesn’t know yet. So this trip will give us a chance to volunteer and serve at shelters and ministries around the country to understand what works, what doesn’t, and who has some really good ideas.

My passion has always been film though, and this trip is an exciting chance for me to develop more of my understanding regarding the medium. I hope to buy a Canon 7D in the coming months and start the process of familiarizing myself with the gear, so that while on the road I can document. Home movie style documentation will no doubt occur on our trip, but I also want to make short documentaries that are film festival quality. So it is my goal to seek out people carrying on antique craft-making skills, or unique museums, or anything of interest really, and to make short 10 minute-ish documentaries about these people or things. First of all, to actually document and remember, but second to refine my skills at editing and creating and mostly just because I love to make films and I don’t get a chance to do what I want most of the time these days.

One of the things I do get to do a great deal these days, and Freya too, is to learn. We may have both dropped out of college, but there’s not a week gone by that we don’t learn something new. I’ve been on a history kick lately and Freya has been reading about Art History and also Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Syndrome), meanwhile we both love to read fiction and poetry. But book learning can only get you so far. So while we’re traveling we’ll be stopping in whatever museums catch our fancy; wandering through, reading all the signs (because both of us are Those People) and soaking it all in.

Those are four of many reasons, but they are why we are resolved to take this trip, and this year we are resolved to save every dollar we can towards this trip. Of course, when we take it we will take many pictures and make many funny videos and video blogs to keep everyone up to date on the things we do, posting the documentaries, and overall trying to remind everyone that yes, we are crazy, but we’re the type of crazy that you’re envious of.

There are many other things I have been and continue to be resolved to do; building better friendships, learning new skills, reading all of Dostoevsky’s major works, and writing a screenplay. These things will happen in due time. As it stands now, I have ginormous goals to carry me through the next two years (well, marriage carries me through forever), and I find it much better to stand resolved to do bigger things than it is to stand resolved to go to the YMCA regularly. Which is, now that I think of it, something I very much need to do.

It occurs to me just now, while reading something completely unrelated to the thought, that we lose wonder because we feel we have a grasp on things.

In the idyllic days of yore, when science was a black art and the world worked by magic, there was power and fear and wonder in the things we didn’t understand. From our modern standpoint, we can see how priests and witches controlled people because they seemed to have the keys to the world – they controlled the magic forces and thus they controlled people

Now magic is the fodder of kids books and illusionists, and the world is safely in the hand of the laws of physics, of forces like gravity and genetics and molecular biology. And the world can be a pretty damn boring place to live, if we just delude ourselves into thinking we’ve got it figured out – or at least more figured out than those foolish people in the dark ages who believed in magic.

But, even if we do have it figured out, that doesn’t necessitate a lack of wonder and marvelling at the forces that guide the world. We do understand gravity, but that means that stuff that is up, falls down! That’s kind of cool!

Even more cool, more magical if you will, is that the act of procreation and the system of DNA and genetics means that I am very literally made up of the stuff that makes up my mother and father – in visible and definable ways. I find it even more fascinating that genes allow information to be carried but hidden for generations – a scientific but seemingly wondrous way in which we are linked to our forefathers.

If you don’t marvel at this stuff, you obviously don’t like mystery.

Today Disney posted on Facebook the scene from Up where Carl looks through Ellie’s adventure book. It may never be possible for me to watch that scene without crying, even now just remembering it I’ve got the sensation behind my eyes caused by the tear ducts gearing up for another run. That scene is Good, with a capital G, because it captures so much in so very little.

With every subsequent viewing though, I’m able to soak in more. The first time it is of course only the emotion, the story, the narrative that sweeps me up. The strength of the scene is how that will never fade away. But the other viewings allow me to peer further into the scene, into the details. The joy of a Pixar film is that all the layers are there, so carefully crafted.

Pete Docter was on NPR’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me a few weeks ago, and he spoke of how they had meetings to design all the badges on Russell’s uniform – every badge has a reason and a specific design (don’t believe it – check out the designs here). The host asked if anyone ever stops those meetings and says – “Hold up, THIS DOESN”T MATTER, no one is ever going to notice!” and Docter replied, that no, they never worry about that, because they make the movies for themselves, and they do care.

Watching this scene again, this becomes so clear. As Carl flips through Ellie’s adventure book, he sees pictures that she’s added. The scene is monumental first [SPOILER] because he always thought he failed her, that she had wanted a life filled with adventure but had never had any. But the pictures reveal that she was happy – that their time together was an adventure.

But the power of the scene is enhanced by the photos that he looks at. I fear to think how this scene would have looked from any other animation studio – pictures from “decades” ago would be the same colors and vibrancy of the world that the character currently inhabits. Pixar doesn’t do this. Each image looks like it was taken with a camera from the time period it is supposed to represent. The grain on the photos, the coloration, everything is carefully designed so that the album feels real, almost as if we are turning physical pages in our hands. Just look:

I imagine if you know anything about film cameras  you can just about identify what camera they were modeling in each image. I don’t know much, but I can see the difference.

What struck me though, and this is the real point of this long post, is how these small details make such a big difference in helping the scene rise above sentimentality. Pixar movies are often praised for their ability to deal with big emotions without delving into sentimentalism – the cheesiness we associate with Hollywood (think “Romantic Comedies”).

The root of Pixar’s ability to stay away from sentimentalism is it’s concern for Story as first, second, and third priorities when crafting a film. But I think a great deal of it is their desire to focus on the details and worry about the little things. Sentimentalism is the cheapening of emotion – love as a mushy feeling rather than love as something that is wonderful but hard, epiphanies as easy to gain insights that feel important rather than hard earned wisdom.

Sentimentalism is widespread in our culture because it is easy. Rising above sentimentalism, conversely, is hard, because it requires wisdom, hard work, avoiding easy the definitions of emotions, and most of all, taking emotions seriously.

Check out the last two pictures above. Notice the way the light plays on the characters. In the picture of Carl and Ellie on the hill, their heads glow from the sun and the balloons are barely visible in front of the bright sky. In the second photo, the edges of the windows curl in softly because of the bright sunlight, and Ellie’s shoes are slightly lit from the light. In the curtains we see the texture of the photograph, as if it were a physical object on the page.

These details aren’t obvious. If you notice them the first time you watch the film, you’re a very strange person (or perhaps you do computer Animation, in which case, ok). But the details are there, adding a sense of reality and history to this scene that draws us in with real emotion. Because Pixar takes seriously the pictures in Ellie’s adventure book, we are able to take the emotions Carl is “feeling” seriously.

I imagine every scene of every Pixar film has layers like this that we could point to as reasons they are masters at what they do. But this is an encouragement to me to pay attention, to care about what I do. Specifically as I keep working towards making films and crafting narratives, it’s a reminder to pay attention to the little things. No one may ever notice them, but the more fully I pay attention to these details, the more full my worlds will be.

I said this in a Wave that a video editing site started yesterday, in response to others attempting to figure out how to make Wave into a replacement for forums:

At least in the short term, there’s no use in trying to make Wave a forum or online help desk. Creative Cow and others work well for that.

Wave is at its base a collaborative tool. Once you add in too many people or widen the point of a given wave, it loses most of its usefulness.

The better way to use wave is as tool to achieve an end. If we already have video that we need to edit, we load it up in FCP or AVID, but if we have nothing we start in AE or similar programs. Same with Wave. Just because it exists does not mean we have to find a way to use it like we’ve used other tools.

Rather, we should take its strengths (collaboration) and apply the tool when it is needed.

That’s video production specific, but the point is something that’s frustrating me and applies to everyone on Wave. Google Wave, as Google’s engineers created it, is a replacement for email specifically intended to help collaboration. To collaborate is to work together towards a goal or end.

Google Wave has some really cool potential for increasing online collaboration – but it’s a very specific tool. What is frustrating me is this idea that “we have the tool, therefore we must use it!” It’s a common human tendency. If you go buy a hammer, you really want to start knocking stuff around. And stuff may need knocking around. But it might not.

If you didn’t need to collaborate last week, then just because you have a tool to collaborate this week does not make collaboration a necessary thing this week. It is a waste of time to create a need so you can use a tool – a waste of time that could be used in other productive means.

Furthermore,  when we get a new tool that we don’t yet understand, we immediately try to understand it from a familiar viewpoint. We have to fit it into the paradigms we already have, so that we can “conquer” the new tool. We take the motor driven vehicle that has been given to us to revolutionize transportation, and try to hook it to the horses that have been pulling our carts. Then we complain how it’s too heavy and our horses already got us to new places well enough.

So please, stop it with the Google Wave. Sign up, learn how the tool works from a technical aspect, but don’t try to make collaborations happen because you have a tool for collaboration. If Wave has revolutionary potential, it will be discovered – you might even be the one to discover it! But it will be discovered by people who have the right need for the tool and then apply the tool properly.

Until then, you’re just replacing the perfectly adequate with the newfangled for the sake of being cutting edge, and you’re missing the whole point. So stop.

Over at Marginal Revolution (which has the excellent tag line: “small steps toward a much better world”), the author posts healthcare reforms that he would support more than the current bill making its way through Congress. Some of them are really good.

4. Make an all-out attempt to limit deaths by hospital infection and the simple failure of doctors to wash their hands and perform other medically obvious procedures.

5. Make an all-out attempt, working with state and local governments (recall, since the Feds are picking up the Medicaid tab they have temporary leverage here), to ease the spread of low-cost, walk-in health care clinics, run on a WalMart sort of basis.  Stepping into the realm of the less feasible, weaken medical licensing and greatly expand the roles of nurses, paramedics, and pharmacists.

6. Make an all-out attempt, comparable to the moon landing effort if need be, to introduce price transparency for medical services.  This can be done.

He does add the disclaimer at the beginning that these are merely reforms he would gladly trade the Obama bill for, and not the best ever, but I agree that some of these reforms are really desirable. Check out the full post here.

Also, and this is something I hadn’t yet learned, the current Obama plan does away with existing HSA’s, which is a bit sad. I have an employer-funded HSA and the money that is being added to it tax-free is part of my future planning. I hope that I don’t lose it, it really has helped us think carefully about medical procedures.

From the New Yorker, November 9, 2009 issue:

According to various international agencies, fourteen per cent of of the buildings in Gaza were partially or completely destroyed, including twenty-one thousand homes, seven hundred factories and businesses, sixteen hospitals, thirty-eight primary health-care centers, and two hundred and eighty schools. Two hundred and fifty wells were destroyed, three hundred thousand trees were uprooted, and large swaths of agricultural land were made no longer arable, in part because of contamination and unexploded ordinance.

Thirteen Israelis died, including nine soldiers – four of them from friendly fire – and four civilians, who were killed by rockets. (Israeli civilian casualties were kept to a minimum because many residents near the border fled the area, and those who remained hid inside fortified bunkers.) Hamas claims that only forty-eight fighters were lost during the entire operation. The toll on Gaza civilians was far higher. According to Amnesty International, fourteen hundred Gazans died, including three hundred children; five thousand were wounded. Israel claims that only eleven hundred and sixty-six Palestinians died, two hundred and ninety-five of them civilians. The Israeli human-rights organization B’tselem has documented seven hundred and seventy-three cases in which Israeli forces killed civilians not involved in hostilities. So far, the group says, Israel has convicted only one soldier of a crime during the operation – for stealing a credit card.

The progress we have made thanks to technology is an illusion, and I will vehemently debate anyone who disagrees and says the world is a better place than it used to be. These facts are regarding Israel’s war against Gaza last December and January, and they are really really heartbreaking.

Well it’s a good thing I have all of 10 visitors to my blog daily. First it keeps me humble – I really have to write for myself if I’m going to post because I’m not letting any fans down, and second it means that the external pressure to produce is not that strong.

So here it is, Tuesday, and I’ve not been able to complete my thoughts on what makes sense to me in healthcare. The truth is, there hasn’t been enough good analysis of systems already in place worldwide (Atul Gawande did one for the New Yorker, but that was just one piece), nor have I seen some trustworthy, fact based examinations of the different solutions being offered from what I consider non-partisan sources. We can throw around claims of bias and partisanship for all media outlets, but the best journalists attempt to overcome their personal bias in their writing. Rather than starting from one side and working to a conclusion that stays on that side, they recognize where their leanings are, and attempt to subvert that in their examination of the facts.

It’s a reason that I enjoy reading long-form journalism such as is in The New Yorker and The Atlantic and similar periodicals. The writers are able to spend time with the subject, which allows bias to be more clearly seen.

But that’s not what I’m attending to say with this post. Truth is, I just don’t know what steps make sense to solve healthcare. And that’s ok in that it’s not up to me to save healthcare, but it is frustrating as someone who is trying to educate themselves and have an informed opinion about the subject. The problems are systemic, complicated, and to truly repair they require sacrifice, something Congress avoids when passing bills. Rather than delay gratification to solve problems, we always end up spending our way out of them. And then have to revisit the issue a decade later.

In all my reading and all my admittedly amateur and haphazard researching, there have been two, maybe three solutions that begin to repair the healthcare issue but do not represent a system-wide fix. Here they are in brief:

1. Enact a system nationwide similar to what Maryland has in place

Every year a state commission sets the prices in Maryland for all medical procedures. This is the price that everyone has to pay – large Insurers, small Insurers, uninsured citizens. This reduces variance of medical costs, and (according to those who support the system) forces healthcare providers AND insurers to compete not on price but on quality and other benefits. But the other benefit is that we can get a handle on medical costs – medical providers are forced to operate under the prices they can charge and this can theoretically curb the ridiculous yearly increase of healthcare costs.

2. Standardize billing and record keeping for all healthcare providers

Right now a great deal of your insurance dollar (estimates are that it is over 30%) are spent on administrative costs – billings and records keeping. If you go to a different doctor or move to another state, there is no standard way for your records to be transferred nor are healthcare providers required to keep them in a standardized form. Surely in America someone or some group is smart enough to figure out this problem and to solve it. Normally I would be inclined to wait on a free market solution, but what motivation does the market provide to this? It seems that it needs to be motivated by someone else.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve found. Really, just two simple solutions that don’t at all get to the heart of the issue. So I guess what this means is, for now, I have to keep reading and keep digging to find out more about the proposed solutions, to see if they do make sense and will be able to help. And anyone who tries to convince me using political party propaganda will be summarily dismissed and blacklisted.

Well, today is the day I should have culminated my personal overview of the healthcare system from my point of view; but alas I haven’t had much time to write this week, and reviewing solutions I’ve heard and seen is the hardest part. So, that part is delayed, hopefully just until Monday. In the mean time, check out this post on Snarkmarket, that criticizes some of the more prominent articles of late about healthcare:

These arti cles per pet u ate the belief ram pant in jour nal ism that sys temic change hap pens in sweep ing ges tures. And very, very occa sion ally, it does. But over the past 90 years, almost every sweep ing change pro posed to over haul the health care sys tem has gone down to crush ing defeat. The real changes have been step by step, bit by bit. Even Medicare when enacted was a mere con do­lence for the death of the com pre hen sive insur ance sys tem Tru man had envi­sioned 20 years before.