"Let X = X"

The Zune Home Kit is excellent... charge while listening or viewing your content on the TV!  Comes with another remote control--like I need one of those--but it looks and works like a little mini-Zune.  I like it because I don't have a music system in my bedroom, but of course there's a TV, and it has decent stereo sound.  Finally, acceptable tunage in the boudoir!  (DirectTV's music channels up in the 800's are as insipid and underwhelming as commercial radio).  Now to make a loooove mix or two.  Dad, eeew!

The Zune Car Kit is awful... shun it!  There are plenty of blog sites that rant about the FCC severely limiting the power of in-car FM transmitters, and the Zune Car Kit is no exception.  Number one, it's been impossible for me to find a station that receives the signal without bleed-over from a real radio station.  There's always static or even overlapping talk/music breaking through the Zune's transmissions.  Sometimes I can find a relatively clear spot, but only by holding the Zune or the transmitter a certain way.  But the static always comes back, in city or country.  It's intolerable.  Since I'm past my 30-day return period, I might look at modding the transmitter to put a little antenna on it.  But then there's the second drawback: even at its best performance with no static or cross-talk, the frequency range is limited by FM modulation.  The clearest sound I've heard via the Car Kit is still far worse than listening to the Zune using direct wired speakers.  Don't go down this path!

Bill Gates published an article about a week after I joined Microsoft, back at the close of the last century: Everyone, Anytime, Anywhere The next step for technology is universal access.  He mentions convergence in the opening sentence.  But that's not why I searched for this article... I searched for "Anywhere, Anytime" because I wanted to follow-up on the Zen comment in my convergence post.  Hmm, getting a little dizzy here.

Proposition: I think "Anytime, Anywhere" is a flawed idea.  I think that part of what feeds our souls is a variety of daily place and circumstance, allowing us to more easily process the world's stimuli by its differences. 

Ok, that's a bit highbrow, let's take the other extreme.  More concretely: I think my stress level has increased significantly since I got the ability to deal with email anywhere, anytime.  I'm no longer able to go an entire vacation, or weekend, or even evening, without checking my phone, or at least listening for its distinctive email sound.  If the phone is misplaced, I'm not at ease.  I put it in my pocket when I go into the back yard!  I know this is stupid, and is subtly maintaining a barrier to the natural world.  And sometimes I don't do it.  But it's a habit and I'll do it unless I consciously try not to.

Most professionals I know in the software/IT business have the ability to do literally all of their work from their laptop and phone.  So, if we're in a car, an airport, a hotel or our own bedroom... the possibility exists that we can be checking on a server job, finishing tomorrow's handouts, or just trying to keep ahead of our constant email flood.  Now we have blogs to read and podcasts to learn from! 

So the onus is completely on us: to understand the necessity of rest to maintain productive work habits, to account for this when planning and promising, and to be firm when asked to go further. It's not easy, and it's not usually a significant part of many professional's training.  I work with dozens of companies as a software consultant, and across the board the story's the same: everyone pays lip service to the honored "work/life balance" but few achieve it.

Devices that do it all

And what about making devices general purpose so they can do so much more?  The underlying promise is this: we can have whatever we want.  In marketing-speak, anything, anytime, anywhere.  And of course a software platform company will pursue this as a strategy, because it's the platform that enables it... new functions are only a download away. 

A technical problem

Theoretically, this ideas has a lot going for it.  But as we software developers know from long experience, practicality always has a way of constraining theory.  Much has been said about Moore's law, the salvation of CPU-hungry programs, continually layered one on the other.  But that salvation is always just out of reach... the same argument is argued repeatedly, and the software always wants for more.  True, there are many good systems built that deliver the promise.  But as time goes by, the software moves ahead and the hardware does not.  Worse, this is especially true for home users.  New software is adopted at an accelerated rate, with little of the governance so important to enterprise stability. 

What does that mean for us?  That a good part of the time, we live and work with poor performance, instability, and more or less constant frustration.  I used to reboot my phone at least once a day, typically just at the time when I want to make a call.  I eventually fixed it by deleting about 1/4 of my synchronized contacts (about a thousand accumulated over the years).  But I lived with it for too long before figuring it out, and now I don't have those contacts available.

And another thing.  When the device fails, then all of the functions are gone.  I learned this years ago with my combination TV-VCR and VCR-DVD and cassette-LP.  More recently, I tried using my phone as an MP3 player, but pausing to answer the phone is often unsuccessful... can't get the functions to respond fast enough.  Plus, it just uses up power I want in reserve for unexpectedly long phone calls.

A spiritual problem, with your help

Recently, I've begun to think there's something deeper than all of this.  I think it has to do with the "personality" of individual tools and our relationship to them.  I have a really strong feeling about this but I don't know if I can do the topic justice.  Maybe if there's anyone out there actually reading this fragmented diatribe, they'll help express this somewhat coherently.

I know Zen Buddhism explores this topic, or a similar one, in detail.  Pursuing mindfulness of ourselves in the world, we are encouraged to recognize and respect our relationship to the current moment, including all of the people, objects and sensations it entails.  For tools having one or few primary purposes, this relationship is direct, and intimate.  Stirring soup with a spoon, or hammering a nail, or sewing with needle and thread, or any of ten thousand other mundane acts, can each serve as a moment of meditation and presence.

What happens when the multiplicity of a tool's purpose grows so vast that each use requires we remember a series of steps... even when the steps become rote?  I don't know how easy it would be to examine this analytically.  But it's experiences and feelings that prompted me to consider this in the first place.  I like having different devices specialized to different purposes.  I think the example of how frustrating "universal remotes" may be a ready example.  (I've just heard that Logitech is supposed to have the holy grail of universals in its Harmony line).  But honestly, when I get a device with too many features, then too many features go unused.

So what?

So what's the point?  From a semi-related gathering of observations, I guess the common thread is to ask where is the humanity in the design of products that we bring into our lives?  Because in some subtle way at least, these products will affect our spirits.

This word was huge in the mid to late 90's... nearly every article on the rapidly expanding Internet seemed to mention it.  In this word lay many promises of technology realized: when websites can talk to your bank and your phone can talk to your thermostat and your refrigerator calls the grocery store with a list of things you're running low on.  I was pretty excited about this in the beginning, until they got to the refrigerator part. 

Reminded me of all those glorious predictions of the future so popular in the 50's (before my time) and 60's (um, not before my time).  But you've seen these old ads, right?  The housewife in dress and pearls, smiling over her stove or dishwasher or fridge or whatever appliance is making her life so much easier.  But what really happened?  Modern conveniences, in the long run, had the effect of speeding up our lives.  And with them came the headache of buying, owning and maintaining them.  They made immediate tasks simpler, but it came at the cost of hidden complexities and obligations.

Well, this is really getting far into Zen territory, where I love to go, but that's not the point of this posting.  Remind me to come back.

The point is, I see more real, useful convergence right now than at any time promised in the past. 

• Websites talk to each other and work with each other like crazy.  No one predicted how successfully people would use MySpace, YouTube, Flicker, Photobucket, TypePad, Technorati, Google Maps, and on and on.  Oh, yes, and Windows Live Spaces!
• Technologies like RSS and mashups are truly useful ways of combining information on the web to create something that wasn't specifically designed into any of the components.
• I've been getting my email, calendar and contacts synchronized to my phone for years, and that has been a lifeline of efficiency, far past the similar yet cumbersome PDAs of the early 2000's, which to me were always much more trouble than they were worth.
• I can take a picture with my phone and email it to this website, where it will appear on the home page straightaway (check out Phonepix in the upper right corner).  I love that!  And, no, it doesn't improve my productivity, but I can imagine it would for some professions: realtors, inspectors, buyers, etc.

Another surprisingly cool thing is that this page shows a recent history of what I've been listening to on my Zune.  I don't know why that fascinates me so much, but I remember years ago in college when we played all that vinyl, we rigged a little shelf on the wall above the turntable where we'd put the currently playing album jacket to share our musical tastes with friends.  This is the same thing... but it just does it for me automatically and there are (potentially) more friends out here than there were in my dorm room.  (Although some of my roommates did like to party... ahem!)

And speaking of vinyl, Wendy bought me a great Christmas present this year: a turntable with digitizing software.  I spent the whole vacation ripping the albums I love but haven't heard in so many years; got 70 done out of about 200.  Then I got a Zune, and I immediately synched every one of these (and all our CDs which we had ripped some time ago).  With playlists, I enjoy this music even more than I ever did, to hear those long forgotten favorites.  I know, I rail against playlists in a posting below.  But these are mine and I can edit them whenever they get stale.

And this kinda blows my mind a little: the albums that I bought 25 years ago and spun in my dorms and apartments... after ripping to my home server and synching to my Zune, appear like magic in the little display above as artistically as when I'd flip through the stacks in the record stores on South Street... even more so, since I can scroll them back and forth, with a little glow appearing and the artist's name.  More information is just a click away, and the chance to share with new friends.  I guess I'm just easily amused.  Or old.  My daughter says: duh, dad.

So anyway, I'm going to enjoy this now, and keep my eye open for when the tide might start to turn, when that undertow of ownership, dependency and obligation might become a stronger force and starts to pull us out past the shallows where we love to splash.