It is said that if sit down at your computer late in the evening and browse the web long enough, eventually you’ll wind up on YouTube looking at cat videos. Personally, I’ve found that to be less than completely true, though I’d agree completely with the assessment that you’ll waste enormous amounts of time following long chains of links to sites you would never have gone to directly.

So I’m not sure exactly how I wound up there, but late a few nights ago I wound up reading the IMDB citation for the 1970 classic Airport. I had a vague recollection that, like most tales, the book was better than the movie, and as I believe there’s always an opportunity to learn from a master I hunted down a copy and began reading. I’d read it once before, but that was <mumble> years ago, and though the book hadn’t change, almost certainly I had.

And I’ll admit that part of the reason I enjoy reading umm… ‘mature’ books is that they’re a telescope into what life was like when they were written: the mores, values, what was controversial, what was accepted as fact, and what people worried about. That’s probably why I really can’t warm up to any of the contemporary reboots of Sherlock Holmes-what I enjoyed most about the original is that it was a visit to the Victorian era and all it’s trappings.

So hunted down a copy of Airport, the book, and polished it off over the course of a few days, partly to study it’s construction and partly to see what life was like forty-five years ago. Many things have changed, but many haven’t. The book today is an unintentional tour through areas as diverse as male/female relationships, career, aviation technology, bureaucracy, government, lawyers, abortion, race, and much much more. Its also a multi-threaded series of plots, all culminating in a climax that occurs only about eighty percent of the way through. Yet author Arthur Haley manages to maintain suspense and keep the reader’s interest all the way to the end.

So in addition to being an enjoyable page-turner (screen-swiper?) and an interesting view into the past, the book is also a place to learn about the craft of writing. Perhaps even more so than the various ‘How to Write’ books written by various other best-selling authors, sadly not including Mr. Hailey. And I’ll bet that his other works would be equally didactic, viewed from the right angle.

So there’s an opportunity to both learn and have fun simultaneously. Time to get started!

This week marks my first appearance on Amazon, as a presumably bona-fide author. Having reached this point, I’m surprised about how much effort was involved that actually had nothing to do with writing. Or at least with that portion of writing that involves locking yourself into a secluded room and letting the creative juices pour out. Cover art, copy editing, tweaks, revisions, trying to comprehend megabyte-long end-user license agreements, website enhancements…. Until now, it’s all been about sharing with friends and family. But now, it’s like letting a bunch of strangers into my home. I feel a need to neaten up the place, and no longer think its reasonable to make excuses. The old “I’ll fix it in the next revision” doesn’t work anymore.

One thing about self-publishing that really feels nice is that it permits me to completely ignore ‘industry sensibilities’. If I get a writer’s forum critique saying that a particular piece isn’t the length that most markets are looking for, I can file it under ‘true, but not relevant.’

In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson talks about how The Net makes it possible for merchants with a narrow appeal to connect with customers who want to buy what they want to sell. In a world of more than seven billion, there are bound to be some folks who are interested in what I have to offer. After all, even dinosaur erotica seems to a hit these days.

But however broad or narrow the appeal of my art may be, I now feel a pressure to create more. As in “That’s nice, but what have you done for me lately?”

So back to the secluded room. I’m got a self-commitment to get Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor out of the editing room and onto Amazon by the end of this month, so I’d better get to it!

Well, not quite free. But 59 bucks is close enough that I’m going to call it free. Here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 59 dollars is less than one day’s wages… even if you’re working at minimum wage. And for that sum, you get a 1.2 ghz processor, 4 gig of memory, 800×480 color display, WiFi, two cameras (admittedly neither with great resolution), a microSD slot, and a “4-dimensional gravity sensor” (great for time travel?).

But it it a good idea? Well, maybe not. The Amazon reviews were pretty negative. But still, if you’re of limited means, want to get online, don’t want to do it at the library, and for some reason don’t want to find a nice used tablet on ebay, this would certainly do the trick. Free WiFi might not be quite ubiquitous, but its surely common enough that a gadget like this means that anyone who wants to own and use a tablet can get one.

There are also some other implications. For one thing, it kind of makes you wonder a bit about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, which provides toy-like monochrome-screened laptops for third world children, with the units costing more than $200. If Kocaso can quietly produce their $59 laptop, why all the fanfare about OLPC, and all its political intrigue?

There’s also the perspective of this crotchety old geezer thinking back to his first computer. I won’t say exactly when that was, but I’ll drop the hint that the president in office was a former peanut farmer. That computer took up most of a desk, and was equipped with a 0.002 GHz processor and 0.000064 GB of RAM. And the screen resolution was, I think, 480×200. In monochrome. Green.

Progress is nice. The downside, of course, is that we expect so much more of our devices. Sure, I can check my bank balance while riding the train, but why can’t I look at images of my checks? Sure I can place a free video call from my cellphone to someone in Madrid, but why does the image have to be so jumpy? Etc.

The usual platitudes apply. I’m sure glad to be living now, I can’t wait to see what’s new in five years, and so forth. But I’m also wondering about the next great opportunity. You know, the one that will be completely obvious in a few years, but that I’m hopelessly missing right now.
Any ideas?

I just finished rereading Silicon Snake Oil, by Clifford Stoll. The first time I read this was in 1995, shortly after it was published. Having just established himself in the public eye with The Cucoo’s Egg, Stoll took the position that the then newly-mainstreamed Internet suffered far too many flaws to ever fulfill the world’s expectations.

Eighteen years later, it’s interesting to see where Mr. Stoll got it right and where he got it wrong. We should probably keep in mind that Stoll was an astronomer by trade, not an engineer or computer scientist, but still. When I finished the book, I couldn’t help but remember the oft-quoted words of a Western Union executive, when his company was offered a license on the patent for the newly-invented telephone:

We do not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a distance of several miles. Hubbard and Bell want to install one of their telephone devices in every city. The idea is idiotic on the face of it… This device is inherently of no use to us. We do not recommend its purchase.”

Well, a lot has happened since 1995. One of Stoll’s biggest recurring themes was how the inconvenience and low speed of dial-up modems would prevent widespread penetration of internet access in the consumer world. In only eighteen years, we’re now in a situation where DSL, cable, and wireless providers are beating each other’s brains out to offer us megabit-rate services, at an inflation-adjusted cost far below what we paid for dial tone in 1995. It’s widespread enough that there are a few fringe players in Congress who are starting to talk about broadband access as a ‘right’. And once you’ve got that always-on fast pipe there, all sorts of things become possible… and a whole bunch of objections just go away.

Another of Stoll’s predictions was that e-books would never catch on, because of the discomfort and inconvenience of reading a book on the flickering screen of a large, heavy computer. Well, Amazon doesn’t publish numbers, but after looking at a bunch of  sources, I’ve estimated the number of Kindle readers out there as somewhere between 30 and 50 million. But whatever it is, it’s got the traditional publishers quaking in their boots. Like his prediction about modems, the specifics of Stoll’s arguments were correct – nobody would want to read books on a flickering screen of a large, heavy computer. But the objection was rendered irrelevant by technological improvements.

Another of Stoll’s observations was that spending larger amounts of time in front of the computer would limit social interaction. That sure would be news to today’s teens and twenty-somethings who pretty much spend all their waking hours texting, tweeting, and updating their Facebook entries.  Sure it changes social interaction. But one of the desirable side-effects, at least to me is that it’s made the computer geeks more socially acceptable, not less so. A win, at least I think so.

It’s not like Stoll batted zero. His comments about net privacy, especially considering recent news, would certainly resonate with today’s audience. And his deriding of the internet as a panacea for all problems educational certainly wasn’t far off the mark – putting connected computers in a classroom won’t instantly resolve all of education’s woes. But it does open whole new worlds, from distance learning (especially valuable if you happen to live in the third world) to open-source textbooks. So perhaps he scored half a point there.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that I could have guessed any better than Stoll. And there is something to be said for having the confidence to ‘walk the walk’, to publish your predictions for all the world to see, for all eternity. That takes guts.

But the quick version is that when predicting the future, assuming that the underlying technology won’t dramatically improve, and in an astonishingly short period of time, will almost certainly lead you off-course.

Which of course begs the question “What are we missing today?”

Recently, one of our fellow denizens here was fortuntate enough to be able to treat himself to a shiny new bright yellow Legend Cub. The Legend Cub, a somewhat modernized clone of the original Piper Cub from the 1930s, is pretty much the opposite of the things that attract me to aviation. Its made of welded metal tubing with fabric stretched across it to provide the surface of the wings and body. It doesn’t cruise much faster than the 70s (MPH, not knots), and its usually flow fairly close to the ground. Where other planes might be for going places, the Cub is more about enjoying the ride.

My wife and I were taking a walk last week and, as my neighbor taxied by in the cub, I stuck out my thumb. He pulled over, shut down, and I ran to the plane and jumped in. My very first cub ride – out over the coastline, low enough to enjoy the scenery and slow enough that I had time to do so. And with someone else driving that’s exactly what I did. Admittedly a Cub with state of the art avionics is kind of an anachronism, but what the heck! He let me get a little bit of stick time, and then we headed back for a few more landings, on the grass of course.

My wife was pretty pissed when I got back, but it was worth it.