Carpe Momento!

No, this isn’t some new spell uttered by Hermoine or Harry. The brother of this phrase is the more well known “Carpe Diem” which translates to “Seize the Day”. “Carpe Momento” translates to “Seize the Moment”. I can think of few other phrases that fully describe our eLives than Carpe Momento.

The whole premise of the advances of technology isn’t so much about how it gets easier to use, or to a lesser extent, if it becomes more powerful, but one of the biggest drivers of technological advances is in terms of speed. How much quicker can we run a report, close the general ledger for the month, create a Powerpoint presentation. It all seems to be about how much we can pack into a typical 7.5 hour day.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having technology providing us with the tools to give us information quicker. There are many scenarios where having real-time updates are not only a convenience but in some cases, they can even provide direct benefits to our health and wellbeing.

I believe that the virtually instantaneous access to information has a distinct advantage when it comes to our medical care. Although our medical records are not yet fully computerized, you can bet that at some point in time they will be. Our pharmacist, our family doctor, our specialists and our surgeons will have immediate access to our complete medical history that is relevant to their care of us. In the future when we go to the hospital, our beds will have terminals directly linked into our medical records for doctors and nurses to access our medical history.

So where is this article going? What’s the “bad” part of this as it relates to technology? Well, I think that I’ve said as much in some of my previous posts, but this whole technological culture that has developed gives us a sense that we always need to be connected and that we always need to respond immediately. One of the biggest blessings and curses to our society is that of email.

Email liberates us; it allows us to communicate quickly and sometimes even effectively. The problem is that the nature of the communication method lends itself to communications diarrhea. In the era of the printed memo, one had to articulate and had to plan. It was known that a response might not be received in hours or days, so as much information has to be communicated to the recipient as possible in order to make the exchange of communications meaningful, concise and effective. Now, we read an email, think of it for as long as we think we might need to, and just respond – often to realize that there was something incorrect or missed out.

As always, I’ll add my disclaimer that I am just as guilty as others – if not more-so. I’m well known for my ten dollar answers where a ten cent answer would have sufficed. In addition, I have this horrible habit of thinking that if I’m emailed a question on something that I need to respond with my answer immediately. A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine joked that sometimes he’s amazed at how quickly I respond to some of his emails, his comment being “I’ve barely sent the email and in a matter of seconds (literally) you’ve responded.” I jokingly responded to him that it was my goal to respond to his question before he was able to ask it! I guess to be the Carnac the Magnificent of the email world.

As I said at the outset, Carpe Momento really should be our motto. I can’t really speak for others, but I suspect that there are many who could relate to my comment that I get so overwhelmed and immersed in technology that I forgot to live in the moment and to experience life.

This relates directly to a conversation that I had with another colleague at work. We discussed this very thing and how there seems to a distinct difference between the North American and European lifestyles (to generalize, of course). I’ve often heard it said that someone in the Western world lives to work, whereas someone from Europe works to live. These are two totally separate lifestyle choices and to be honest some days, the European lifestyle does seem intriguing.

InstaNews - I'm Torn

I watch these tragic events unfold in Japan, I can't help wondering if this nanosecond news reporting is a good thing - or a bad thing.  Probably as with the case with so much technology, it's a little bit of both.  As I said in my post refuting Jon Bon Jovi's comments, there is no black and white. Technology like anything else has it's good and it's bad, and that mix will be like pendulum depending on so many factors.

On the good side, we have virtually instantaneous access to information.  Especially for those in the danger zones, it can help them assess what their next course of action should be.  It also helps then stay in touch with their loved ones and I have to believe that this into itself is something that can be very beneficial.

On the bad, we have the same problem - instaneous access to information.  What we find is that the media can over-report - can report inaccurately and sensationalize and this can sometimes make the situation even worse. 

Like I said, there's good and the bad, every coin has it's two sides and it's impossible to know for certain which way the flip will go at any given point in time.

Welcome - China-Bot

Oddly today, I got 15 hits from China.  15 hits in one day is a large number, but 15 from a country that rarely visits my blog, is unheard of (there had only been 6 hits from China in the last year and a half).

I have a suspicion that this is closely related to my little experiment and it was some individual in China would had scraped my test email address and is now foraging through TecHumanity looking for more email addresses - sadly, none to be found.

Welcome aboard ChinaSpyder or ChinaBot - enjoy your crawling at TecHumanity.

The Fat Lady Has Sung...

...and Microsoft has officially pronounced the Zune to be dead.  Farewell Zune, you really never had a chance.  To the heap of discarded technology goes thou - to your brethren of useless electronic artifacts.

The Day that the Music Died?

Bon Jovi has stated his opinion that Steve Jobs aka Apple aka iTunes has killed the music industry.  To give him his fair due, I've copied what I'd assume to be a direct quote that states his position.

"Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it. God, it was a magical, magical time."

There is an awful lot of truth in what Bon Jovi claims.  It's not unlike a conversation that I had with a friend at lunch the other day where the assertion is that book-reading has likewise been affected.  For a true book-reader - or for some of them, there is nothing like the hard-cover book in hand, the sounds of the pages being flipped instead of the buttons being clicked to go from page to page.

That having been said, I would contend that in a lot of ways, the ability to publish and purchase music in a lot of ways has revolutionized the art.  My argument being that it is given independant artists a whole new avenue to get their work out there - that the artists that can't afford the big studio time...well, let's just say that it has evened the playing field a bit.

I don't really mean to contradict Bon Jovi - after all, he is much more qualified than I to speak on the impact of technology on music, but I can't help thinking that his opinion is totall one-sided.  Sure, there are probably areas where music has been hurt, but like so much else, there is good and bad - it's usually a matter of finding that balance - or if seeing which is greater.

I know that personally, I am nuts for discovering new artists on iTunes, without having this immediacy of being able to listen, ponder and purchase, I would have not bought half of my library and I have a big library of music (9,000+ songs at present).

On a side-note, I'm going to cajole my nephew to see if he can offer his professional opinion on this matter.  As he is a lawyer in the music industry, and a musician, I'd love to hear his comments.  However, given that his wife will be having their first child anyday now...this can - and will wait.

Apple iPhone - Daylight Savings Time Bass Ackwards

Oh come on, Apple.  You didn't have enough problems in the past with the clocks on the iPhone? 

November, 2010 was the first bug reported when clocks were supposed to go back.

Then - in the New Year, there were reports of timers not going off, so the few unfortunate souls who depended on their iPod/iPhone to go off so they wouldn't miss the New Year's celebration - and the alarm didn't go off?

Despite these two problems in the last 4 months, now when we run into DST and some models are setting the clocks back an hour instead of forward? That's just nuts.  I'm sorry, maybe there's an explanation, a reason, yada yada yada.  The long and the short of it - that's inexcusable.

Me thinks this doesn't reflect well on Apple at all.

"The Experiment" - The Only Downfall

Already received my first SPAM, I was interested to see which disposable address it was sent to, but the problem is (and I didn't consider this) is that if the sender uses BCC instead of CC or TO then I don't think that I can see the email address they used for me.

Still - I'm pretty sure I know how they got it.  First of all, I've created a brand new Hotmail account and I've made sure that I don't post the email address anywhere, so I know it's not that email.  That having been said, I've only created two disposable email addresses and used them as a test.  The first was signing up with Apple Support, so I doubt that it came via that route.  The second test was the disposable email address that I posted here, knowing that bots can visit sites and harvest email addresses.  By the process of elimination, this must have been the source.

On a somewhat interesting side-note, today, I've found that all of a sudden, I have 23 hits, all from the same O/S, country and browser, which leads me to believe that it's somewhat likely the same source.  Perhaps this bot is checking other pages on the site for other email addressed, but I don't think so.  Just from the posts that were viewed and the fact that they are older, I suspect that this is an individual how has stumbled upon TecHumanity.  I can't be sure, but that's what I think.