When Z-day Comes…

…how long will stuff keep working?

Take, for example, electricity. How long will our current power generators and distribution systems last if no one shows up to maintain them one day? How much human intervention is required to keep them going? Will I just keep getting bills auto-generated and stacked in ComEd’s outgoing mail pile?

How ’bout cell phone service? Will all the satelites and fiber optics just keep going until my service is cut off ’cause there’s no one to process my payments? Or the Internet? What if everyone at Google and AT&T just didn’t come to work? How long would their systems keep working?

What about GPS? Will TomTom guide the few remaining people through the  post-apocalyptic wasteland?

I just saw Terminator: Salvation (thumbs, up, mostly) and they seemed to have a fair amount of functioning infrastructure considering the situation. It didn’t seem luxurious by any means, actually quite the opposite, but they seemed to have some sort of digital network, electricity, etc.

I’m just curious. Seems pretty important to have that stuff working, especially since I can barely make a lasagna without internet access.

By the way, that show on History channel, Life After People, sucks. Seriously. Don’t waste one minute watching it. Great idea, poor execution.

Looking WAY Forward

There are a lot of people out there who are pretty clever. Not the majority, but quite a few. People who can look at a situation and easily identify how things could be better. These people see how things should be in five months.

Then there are people, far fewer, who can look at the big picture and identify how things could be better and how to fix them – people who see how things should look in five years. They’re on the cover of magazines like Wired, Forbes, Fast Company, etc.

Then there are people, maybe a few on the planet, who can see how things should and sometimes will be in 50 years. They are much easier to recognize 50 years afterwards, but they are always around. They’re not usually on too many covers, because they’re too far ahead of their time. Even if people don’t dismiss them as crazy, very few people are willing to work on such long-term goals.

R. Buckminster Fuller was definitely in the last. So I’m pretty excited that there’s an exhibition of his work coming up at the MCA. Nikola Tesla is another good example.

But the point of this post is to share with all of you TED. This is a great site where you can watch videos presenting some of the great ideas that we’ll see in the next five to 50 years. Some of them are really interesting and some of them are totally mind-blowing.

I highly suggest watching as many as you can. They’re definitely worth your time.

Disposable Culture

My headphones suck. I have some of those 2.4GHz wireless ones that were popular before BlueTooth came along.

They sound terrible, they’re uncomfortable, they distort heavily (and seemingly without cause), they make that terrible noise whenever my cell phone does anything, etc. Basically, I subject myself to everything you can hate about a pair of headphones every single day

Why do I do this?

1. I don’t have better ones (yet).
2. I spent good money on these.
3. They’re better than listening to my co-workers noise.
4. I can’t bring myself to throw them away, but I wouldn’t impose them on anyone else either.

This is dumb. I know it’s dumb. I’m searching for new ones right now.

In searching for new ones, I’m reading a lot of user reviews of these and I found a bunch that said things like:

“They were good but only lasted 5 mos., so I bought another pair”

“They broke after only using them a few times, but they were only $XX, so what can you expect?”

etc.

“What can you expect?” You SHOULD expect that all the time and materials and energy that were put into making that inexpensive electronic device result in something durable.

Think about all of the work that went into harvesting the oil to make the plastic; processing the ore to make the copper; the hours spent designing and manufacturing each piece; the laborers that spend years snapping, screwing, and gluing individual pieces together, designing packaging, marketing, copywriting, screenprinting meaningless logos on the side; and all the fuel spent shipping raw materials around the world so that finished products could be shipped back around the world to land in your lap.

Now think about the workers who come to your street to pick up the broken pieces of all that energy to haul it away and bury it underground. Until, that is, we discover that we have no natural resources left because we spent millions and billions of hours using them up only to bury their product underground. Then we’ll spend millions of dollars and even more labor trying to dig up, clean up, and re-use all of it.

We talk about the high cost of energy – the price of gas, the impact of burning coal, etc.; but what we don’t pay attention to is the fact that we’re using that energy to create more problems for ourselves.

I remember reading a really good article (subscription required) about how our “economic health” is based on the total quantity of our spending (GDP) rather than the quality of our spending. The argument was basically that by dumbing down our understanding of the economy to a single number we are ignoring the most important factors of the economy. In his example, a two-pack a day smoker with cancer, astronomical credit-card debt, an unsustainable mortgage, a gas guzzling SUV, and diabetic, overweight, fast-food eating children is the best thing for the economy.

And I can’t help but think that if we truly measured the quality of our spending we’d find that almost none of the spending we do is helping us.

Ugh. Overwhelming. No wonder I don’t sleep well.

My brain is trying to kill my body

I have been up since 3:30am today.

Three…Thirty…A…M.

I have a theory as to why this is, and it goes something like this:

When I decide that I’m going to be drinking, my brain says, “OK! Have fun! See you when you wake up!” and goes somewhere else to be productive. I’m clearly not going to be using it for a while.

I am not one to get up in the middle of the night, so when I do go drinking, and then need to get up in the middle of the night because my body needs to deal with a lack or abundance of water, my brain says “Hey! Welcome Back! Here are all your messages: …” and proceeds to make sure that I am both obnoxiously awake and thinking about stuff that couldn’t matter less at 3:30 in the morning.

So, after laying in bed for an hour trying to get back to sleep but still thinking about everything that’s going on, I decided to get up. And do some server maintenance. That’s reasonable. Right?

I’m not even hungover. Just annoyed. And tired.

…but we did take first in our league.

UPDATE: Giving Notice

A couple of weeks ago, I told you all about my giving notice and the unexpected response.

Well, we worked it all out. I basically got what I asked for, with a little more.

In addition to another 4-6 weeks of work, if necessary, I will be “consulting” for them to make sure that this project gets completed.

I have mixed feelings about this result. While I want to make sure that this project goes according to plan, completes on time and meets expectations, I am also looking forward to moving on to my next project (whatever that is), and I don’t want to get stuck working part-time remotely for a year.

Don’t get me wrong – I love my current job. But what makes it great is the people I work with. Supporting them remotely won’t be the same.

Maybe we’ll come back to Portland in a couple of years. Maybe I’ll want to come back to this place. Who knows? I just don’t want an awkward, drawn-out, long-distance relationship where we grow apart only to try to re-kindle things and find out we’re in totally different places and should’ve just broken it off cleanly a while ago.

The Common Tragedy

The tragedy of the commons is alive and well.

You know it as well as I do, but you might not think of all the ways in which it is affecting your daily life. I don’t either, I guess, just when it stands in my way.

This time it’s bandwidth at work. There are 40 of us. Using two load-balanced T1s. And it’s not enough. Not by a lot. Nearly every day I get this email:

Any reason our internet is so slow???

Yes. There is a reason. It’s ignorance of the tragedy of the commons. Or, more likely, ignorance (and a little apathy) about everyone’s role in it. So go, read about it. I promise it’ll be rewarding.

Obviously, it’s about far more than your limited bandwidth, cold showers, and expensive gasoline.

So, next time you’re thinking “We need more…“, spend a moment thinking about how you affect it before you complain about how it affects you.