On Saturday my office-mate and I went to the Marin Tech@Home show. Everything from Macy's and IBM showing the latest in ways to integrate the design of your computer equipment with the look of the furniture in your office, to a couple of small startups.
And, this being Marin, they had the usual line-up of speakers, the two I remember off the top of my head are Ed Catmull, CTO of Pixar and Gary Rydstrom, academy award winning sound designer.
I went looking for ways to make technology useful. I found one that stands out; I rode the Zap Bikes electric scooter that'd be great for commuting except that I'd still be at the mercy of the bus across the bridge and the traffic flow to the bus terminal is still as bad as it would be on a bicycle.
But the tenor of the whole event was pretty much set when I started talking to a guy on the Novato school board while we were waiting for the doors to open. Now I had to play a little dumb as Catherine resigned from coordinating the school libraries there, but as he was going on about how cool it was that they were wiring up the schools I asked him the fatal question:
"So are you implementing based on curriculum needs?"
"Oh yes. We're putting computers and Cat 5 in every classroom, before the libraries even, and we're requiring that some portion of every teacher's presentation involve these computers."
Uhhhh... Yeah. Right.
What do they put in the water up there?
Back in the early '80s my high school had televisions in every classroom. Hooked up via coax. They sat unused and dust-covered, at least in the classrooms of the effective teachers. When AV aids were actually necessary they were wheeled around on crash carts. I don't know what a new 20 incher plus the coax to feed it cost back in the mid-to-late '70s, but I bet that even in Fairfield county Connecticut that money could have been better spent.
And computer technology goes obsolete way faster than TV technology.
But this brought up a whole new set of questions: What is it about computing that makes people so willing to put the cart before the horse? Are we as a race really that misled by the blinking lights that we'll waste money on applications that all the studys have shown us are counterproductive?
I don't get it.
So I went around the show looking for other applications.
Here's a box that sits on top of your Sony 200 disc CD changer and tells you title and artist and a little more info. Cool, but worth a couple grand and a few hundred watts?
A mixing app that lets your kids take a couple of sampled tracks and merge them together, with effects, much like the Boom Box activity from Toy Story Activity Center. Whatever happened to tambourines and recorders, or even just an overturned soup and a wooden spoon?
A $600 iron with the heating and steam element in the ironing board. How much of our consumption is based on the ridiculous rituals surrounding fashion anyway, and now we're taking that extra step?
Remember back in the '70s, and even earlier, when Popular Science used to talk about how technology was going to make our lives easier? Not only hasn't it happened, we're going hard the other way.
Does anyone have a company based on actually improving the quality of people's lives, and would they like to hire a kick-ass coder who wants to live in the mountains somewhere?
Monday, March 15th, 1999 danlyke@flutterby.com