There’s always something to howl about.

Month: January 2012 (page 2 of 2)

Product (category) idea: Antoinette the anticipator.

I first thought of the idea of an anticipator as hardware, I kid you not. The early 1980s? Software was dear in those days, but early computer-on-a-chip chips were cheap and abundant. There still would have been a software component to an anticipator, of course, but not much.

Here’s what I thought about then: Anything that could be monitored by signal processing — as, for example, the communication between a micro-computer and its peripheral devices — could have an anticipator in-line, monitoring all the signal traffic back and fourth. By maintaining a probabilistic database of past events, the anticipator could, over time, evolve strategies for anticipating resources likely to be called for in the near future, and, using otherwise dead time on the computer’s data bus, cache that data in advance, eliminating time lost on fetch requests made in real time.

Wow! How kludgey our world used to be! In the bad old days, there were pre-fetch routines built into operating systems, but they were a brute-force solution to a vast array of very small, fussy problems. An anticipator would strive to be optimally efficient and mission critical by dealing only with the specific data most likely to be requested.

An example? If a font required for a document is not stored on your printer, the printer must fetch the outline data from your hard disk. It’s a small job, on its own, but you could maximize your productivity from the printer if those fetch calls in real-time were ameliorated by intelligent pre-fetching. The anticipator could both maintain the most-often used outlines in the printer’s memory as well as anticipating exceptions to the everyday rules — for example, by keeping the boss’s favorite Christmas font on the printer from Thanksgiving through Christmas. That implies real secretarial smarts, but it’s simply probabilistic database mining being perfected over time.

So what about now?

Antoinette the anticipator harkens back to Heidi and Sarah, and to Constance, which I haven’t gotten to yet.

Imagine an anticipator function in Sarah that, when Sarah figures out that you are going to be late for a meeting, sends out all the appropriate notices, all Read more

Product idea: Sarah, Heidi’s helper in the real world.

The big buzz in the mobile computing biz is augmented reality, your phone or tablet takes in a scene and then echoes back to you what it can infer from an image and its GPS coordinates, compass direction, etc. This may be cool, or it may be cool like a QR-code, an idea whose time will never come.

Augmented reality will be that much cooler when it’s like Arnold-the-Terminator’s eyes, but that illustrates the key defects of the idea, as it is currently implemented:

Augmented reality is not done continuously but only on demand, and only in static and affected ways.

And, in consequence, it’s not doing anything terribly useful, except possibly in vertical market applications.

But reflect that an iPad can run continuously for 10 hours without recharging. Next year’s models may double that number. Soon you will get reminders to plug in, or your devices will find ways to provide for themselves while you’re asleep.

So instead of a truly amazing augmented reality presentation on the Black Hills of Dakota, how about a piece of software that watches you and your life all the time, and augments your activities however it can.

This harkens back to an idea I’ve brought up before, a hypothetical self-maintaining CRM called Heidi:

An email comes in over the transom. The spambot says it’s not spam and the sender is not already in your CRM database, so let’s extract as much information as we can from the email. With a name and an email address we can probably get the sender’s full contact information, and possibly a whole lot more.

Make that first contact a phone call instead. Caller ID is lame, but Google is not. From the phone number, can you get back to a name? A location? From those, can we effect the same kind of searches discussed above?

There’s more: Once your CRM knows a name, it should be watching for any changes in publicly-available databases that should be reflected in your private CRM database. That is to say, your CRM should be maintaining itself.

Sarah’s going to monitor every phone call, of course. She or Heidi should be doing all Read more

The Reformed Broker: “Five Reasons Facebook is Over”

It’s probably wrong for me to talk about Facebook at all, since I simply do not get it. I have been trading ideas on the nets since there was only one net, but I have never understood small talk in real life, much less in HTML with loosely-connected strangers.

Even so, I have been convinced all along that Facebook (and all purely-social media, for that matter) is a fad, the Pet Rock of the microsecond. Doesn’t matter to me, either way, since I will never get small talk. But I found this article on Facebook’s forthcoming IPO interesting:

Users lose interest in the faddish social games – The dirty secret of the early days of Web 1.0 is that pornography was the only revenue source that allowed companies to survive until real business models evolved. Social gaming has thus far provided the same service to Web 2.0. We are currently in an Air Pocket of Retardedness where kids and housewives have figured out how to submit their credit card information for utter stupidity like Farmville and Mafia Wars but haven’t yet realized how dumb they are for having done so. It is only a matter of time before the spell wears off and people realize how utterly ridiculous it is to be buying virtual crops and power-ups with money that can otherwise be used in the physical world. Remember ringtones? How about The Sims? Or Garbage Pail Kids or Pogs or Pokemon or Texas Hold’em or Beanie Babies or any of the other “flush your money down the toilet” fads of the past 20 years? These things pass and we eventually laugh at ourselves. That moment is coming soon for social games that require continual charges on our credit cards.

I like this:

The initial appeal of creating a Facebook profile for the average person was that the ability to code or “understand” the web or HTML was completely unnecessary. Which was brilliant, it allowed users to generate a page with next to zero knowledge about the ways of the web. The problem is, as Read more

SplendorQuest: Someone to thrive with.

I wrote this nine years ago today, but it describes events that happened fourteen years ago. You’ll figure it out…

This is my best-beloved and me yesterday:

If you wonder what a gorgeous woman like that is doing with a schlub like me, I commend you to the power of poetry.

 

Someone to thrive with.

So… She says it’s time she goes
But wanted to be sure I know
She hopes we can be friends

I think… “Yeah, I guess we can,” say I
But didn’t think to ask her why
She blocked her eyes and drew the curtains
With knots I’ve got yet to untie…

What if I were Romeo in black jeans?
What if I was Heathcliff, it’s no myth?
Maybe she’s just looking for
Someone to dance with…

The song is ‘No Myth’ by Michael Penn, a very folky kind of Rock ‘n’ Roll. There’s this one and ‘Thunder Road’ by Bruce Springsteen: “You can hide ‘neath your covers and study your pain, make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain.” We never had an ‘our song’ because we always had two.

I found her on the internet, like every good thing. It was just after Christmas in 1997. She was a widow awash in sadness, and her sister pestered her into posting this completely impersonal personal ad:

Women Seeking Men, Phoenix, Arizona

Intellect, Hubris Appreciated

Relationship: Talk/E-mail
Religion: Gnostic, Hermetic
Other: Doesn’t Smoke, Drinks, Doesn’t Have/Want Children

Description: I haven’t started dating since my husband
    died… and I’m not ready to start yet. I do, however,
    enjoy stimulating discussions, and am interested in
    expanding my network of gentlemen friends without
    having to go out and meet anyone. You may fantasize…
    I am lovely… but do not be crude or too graphic. It
    seems that the chatrooms I’ve scanned are populated
    with people looking for anonymous opportunity to be ill
    mannered. Please do be eclectic, though. There is so
    much fascinating knowledge to be shared and adventures
    to be enjoyed, that the mind should not be limited by
    crassness or trite vocabularies. If you don’t
    understand, please go to the next on the list.

I was in the same sort of spot. I had been through a completely vicious divorce, very costly financially and emotionally, and I had no need or Read more

Me in 2012: Writing Splendor’s sound-track, among other things.

I’ve been living for years now with my daily calendar system of staying focused on my goals. Some months I do better, some I do worse, but having a regular agenda has proved fruitful for me.

These are my daily goals:

  • Work-out with free weights
  • Walk with Cathleen and the dogs
  • Write or update software
  • Blog or write essays or Willie stories
  • Practice the guitar

Software and writing came and went, strong and weak, in 2011, but the guitar got the benefit of end-of-day exhaustion almost every day: Mindless sitcoms on the TV, internet radio playing in my office, eye-candy on the iPad and “a Telecaster through a Vibralux turned up to ten.”

I love it, to say the truth, especially the sound of a solid-body electric amped up very loud but played very quietly. This is what made those Chicago blues gods such great underpants gnomes, and it’s the trick the British blues-rock gods missed when they doubled the tempo on all those old riffs and called it rock ‘n’ roll. I feel sorry for poor Cathleen, who by now has heard the I,IV,V blues played crudely in at least half of its infinite variations. But it works for me so well that sometimes I take pity on her and play through a headphone amp. This also promotes dancing — by me, that is, since I’m self-contained and free to move where I will.

But I’m wary of it, too, because the guitar gives me two benefits I must always find in my work: A creative outlet and something to do with my hands. I don’t want to give it up. To the contrary, I think I might take up the piano, as well, this year, as a looping and recording platform. My solution is to learn to write songs. I know I can do this, but by now it is possible to carry the song-writing process all the way through to a marketable demo — or even a release-ready recording. I have no desire to perform, but I would love to find an ambitious act to feed tunes to.

My other big blue-sky project for the year is to Read more