Glen Campbell

I remember when “call waiting” was introduced by our local phone company in the late 1970’s. It was considered a really useful technology, in that, if you were waiting for an important call, you could still take other calls in the mean time. However, as our society became ever more obsessed with newer, faster, more immediate gratification, it revealed its dark side: it made people rude.

At some point, we (our society) decided that it was much more important to talk to the new, exciting, and (as yet) unknown person who was calling us, than to continue talking with the living, breathing, and oh-so-real person that we were already conversing with.

It reflects an obsessive belief that “newer must be better” and that “I need to find out what’s happening” rather than “continuing the existing conversation.” Of course, when you state it bluntly like that, it’s rather obvious what’s happening.

Fast forward thirty years, and Steven Hodson is commenting on the real-time web:

At what point did the quality of opinion and thoughtful discourse become less important than knowing the minute something happened in the world in a 140 characters or less? Just how is all this real-time web making it any easier to find and/or share content of value when we have to spend so much time just watching stuff go by on Twitter and Friendfeed because we might miss something?

Today, it’s not just telephone calls that get relegated to the back burner when someone new appears; News itself is being overwhelmed by fast-breaking, often faulty real-time transmission of information. By forcing people to respond in 140-character chunks, Twitter and its ilk have compressed an already soundbite-oriented culture into something of an incoherent scream.

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As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’ve started using Skype a lot more frequently in the last few months. Thus, I’ve been wearing headphones a lot more. Headphones are no longer a necessity for using Skype, by the way; it works perfectly well with the Macbook’s built-in microphone. The feedback that used to plague Skype (and similar systems) in the past has been corrected by newer, more sophisticated software.

There’s still a reason to use headphones, however. First, they keep your conversation from being broadcast to everyone around you; specifically, to my co-workers. Second, they block out external noise sources so that you can focus on the caller.

In my humble opinion, the criteria for an audio/telephony headset is very different from headphones intended for music. Because the voice bandwidth transmitted is much narrower than the music that comes from a CD or an MP3, audio headsets do not need to have the frequency range of headphones for music. Because people’s voices do not go from extremely loud to extremely soft, the dynamic range of the headset does not have to be as large as that of a device intended for listening to music. Instead, what matters most for audio/voice use is clarity: can you distinguish every work in the normal, mid-range frequencies used by the human voice?

The second major criteria for judging a headset, after audio quality, is comfort. After all, you’re going to be wearing these things, sometimes for hours at a time, and they need to be comfortable.

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I’ve recently converted all of my blogs to run on the Wordpress-µ platform, hosted on my own server. Wordpress-µ (pronounced “moo” or “mew”) is the multi-user version of Wordpress. It is used to run Wordpress.com as well as a bunch of other sites.

Where Wordpress is for a single blog, Wordpress-µ lets users create any number of blogs. In my case, it’s perfect, since I only have to maintain one set of code for all of my various blogs. The top-level blog is actually running as My Pencil and all of my various other blogs are “child” blogs of that one.

Why have multiple blogs? In my case, it’s because I think that my reader(s) have different interests. Tech/Breakfast is basically my long-running, long-winded commentary on personal technology, consumer electronics, website scalability, web 2.0, and other technology issues. It’s the largest and oldest of my blogs.

the Daily Funnies, on the other hand, is my collection of silly, stupid, or offensive jokes.

While there is certainly overlap in the readership of the two blogs, it’s highly unlikely that everyone who wants to hear an occasional joke is interested in my opinion of the latest digital headset or web 2.0 phenom.

Glen Campbell, as its name suggests, is my personal blog. It’s an attempt to segregate my reflections, musings, and poetry from the noise of the other stuff and to give them a proper home. I don’t expect many people to actually visit that one too much.

I think I’m falling in love with Skype.

It’s taken a while; I’ve had a Skype account since 2000. Quite honestly, I haven’t used it much at all. I usually didn’t even keep the client running. As an instant messenger client, it failed on two points: 1. it’s not Yahoo! (I work for Yahoo!), and 2. I didn’t have any friends (friends on Skype, that is).

What brought me back to Skype, so to speak, was my cellphone. You see, the team of engineers I work with is permitted to work from home on Fridays. We started this practice last summer, when gas prices reached $4.50/gallon. It’s proven to be pretty popular, as you can imagine; it lets people arrange things like bank visits, auto repair, and regular doctor’s appointments in advance, without having a severe impact on anyone else on the team.

However, working from home on Fridays means that all of our regular meetings are done via teleconference. Many of the team members (and myself) used our cellphones, until we realized that 2-3 hours of calls every Friday tended to eat up our minutes. So a bunch of people on the team started using Skype, since it’s free for calling toll-free numbers (and our conference calls are all toll-free numbers). I use Vonage at home but, frankly, the quality is inconsistent and the router constantly gives me problems.

So I tried Skype one week, and was hooked. Again.

This past weekend, I used Skype for video conferences with both my mother and my wife’s mother. My wife is now hooked, too. It’s a wonderful experience to be able to see the person you’re talking with; in my parents’ case, they recently moved to a retirement home that I had never seen. My brother (who supplied the computer running Skype for the event), took me on a tour of the whole complex. Very, very cool.

Now I just need to get more friends in my list.

My Skype name is gecampbell.

Amazon announced the Kindle DX today; it’s a 9.7-inch (diagonal) version of their existing Kindle 2 (their second-generation eBook reader).

It’s basically a large format version of the original Kindle 2. As far as I can tell, there’s only a couple of new features:

• The display will automatically rotate from portrait to landscape if you turn it on its side, and
• It supports PDF files without the need for the ($0.10) conversion.

The PDF support intrigues me; I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t just upgrade the software of the Kindle 2 to support it. Their support costs alone (just for repeatedly telling customers that, no, the PDF file they read on their big DX won’t work on the little model) would seem to substantially outweigh any marginal income ($0.10 per PDF? please…) or marketing advantage it might give.

From a personal standpoint, I’ve been hoping for this for years. Now that the hardware is available, textbook publishers need to step up and start making eBook versions of their books available. Some children carry 50-75 pounds of books to and from school each day, and college students will spend thousands of dollars on textbooks. The bulk of those thousands of dollars do not go to the publisher or author; they end up in the pockets of printers and paper providers. In addition, a lot of those dollars go to subsidize textbook costs in other countries (for example, the same textbook that costs $100 in the US may only cost $15 in India; they’re identical except for the covers—the Indian version says “Not for sale in the United States”).

Here’s hoping we see the end of paper textbooks soon.