June 24th is Techie No Work Day

June 11th, 2010

If you haven’t heard, Apple’s new iPhone 4 goes on sale Thursday, June 24th. If this is anything like the last few iPhone releases, and there’s no reason why it won’t be, there will be throngs of tech-minded people lined up outside of Apple and AT&T stores across the country just waiting to get a hold of the latest, coolest gadget from Apple. Some of them will even be putting aside their social awkwardness to talk to those around them about this new iPhone. Its lure is just that powerful.

Now for those who are not interested in this most excellent device, there’s something you should know. On June 24th, there will be very little actual work done by those of us in the tech industry.

You see, when you’re into devices like the iPhone, and a new model with new features is released, it’s like you’re 7 years old at Christmas all over again. All you want to do all day when you get the iPhone is play with it. First you’ll spend a good 10 minutes just looking at it. If you’re a designer like me, you’ll be admiring the new buttons, steel band and glass front and back. Then you’ll want to test out its cool new features like the higher resolution screen, multitasking, HD video recording, folders, and the new 5-megapixel camera with LED flash. I alone expect to waste at least half an hour on FaceTime, the app that lets you video chat with other iPhone 4 users over WiFi. Of course this means I’ll be wasting others’ time too, but they won’t mind. They’ll be doing the same thing.

Now I’m not necessarily proud of this Apple gadget obsession I’ve been roped in to. I’ve been on Macs for over 20 years, but I’ve had my iPhone 3G for just 2 years and I can honestly say I can’t imagine going back. Among other things, it’s my phone (obviously), email client, GPS, restaurant finder, weather report, and Scrabble opponent. I actually didn’t think I was overt about it until a recent email exchange with my father where he said, and I quote, “You are a captive of Apple. As a parent I feel it is time for an intervention. If 11 people show up at your house please cooperate!” (What am I, Jason Chen?)

So for the rest of you out there who don’t understand this particular electronics disease, please understand this one thing. If you email your web developer on June 24th, don’t expect to hear back from them right away. If you call technical support and they are treating you like your children sometimes do when they don’t really want to talk to you, don’t take it personally. If your IT-badge-wearing significant other disappears at 6 a.m. to be one of the first in line at the Apple store, just roll with it. If you can, and we hope you can, accept the fact that for that day, there is a small, inanimate object that will have 95% of their focus.

Correction; a small, very cool inanimate object.

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The (D)evolution of Fantasy Sports

June 2nd, 2010

This one can go in the category of “I used to walk uphill (both ways) 3 miles in the driving snow every day to school” category of rants. My son hasn’t started playing fantasy sports yet. And he probably won’t for several years. But when he does, I have a filing cabinet full of old USA Today sports sections with pages and pages of YTD stats for every NBA player. I have notebook after notebook of hand-compiled tallies of 8 statistical categories for every active player in our fantasy basketball league… for every week for an 82-game season…. for several seasons in a row. How could one possibly consider these to be the glory days of fantasy sports when there are now thousands of web sites devoted to crunching these numbers for you? Primarily, I miss the in-person draft nights. There were no online drafts when you could haul your laptop around the house trying to draft a good player while simultaneously doing the dishes, putting your kid to bed, and arguing with your spouse. (Not that I ever argue with my spouse or have ever argued with her while doing the dishes, putting our son to bed, and hauling my macbook around waiting for the loud bell sound that signified my turn in the draft – that was purely hypothetical for storytelling purposes). No, you had to show up at someone’s house, sans kid and dishes and wife, with beer and fantasy draft magazines in hand, and be ready to focus 100% of your attention over the next 3 hours on nothing but players and insults. Then there were the countless hours sifting through pages and pages and pages of the USA Today Sports Section, compiling stats, and writing them all down on pieces of paper with a pencil. (I don’t think my forearm has ever been as strong since). Finally, there were the awesomely archaic methods of distributing the results. (You’ll notice that Yours Truly placed first in 1994’s competition). There were the sophisticated vehicles for up-to-the-minute news updates (and pictures of awesome NBA hairpieces), awkwardly-formatted online insults, and pre-digital camera photos of your future wife and Charles Barkley in the same frame. Honest, they are both in that picture.
In short, I have always loved participating in fantasy sports leagues. The modern-day tools available to see up-to-the-second statistics and league standings play into the ever-increasing need for instant gratification. But they also make me wax reminiscent for the days when fantasy sports leagues were really little more than a good excuse to get together with friends.

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The Day I Fell In Love With The Internet

May 26th, 2010

I remember the day I fell in love with the Internet. It was sometime around 1990 or 1991 (okay, so maybe I remember the circumstances of the day but not the exact date), and I was in San Jose, California, hanging out with one of my cousins at the home of one of his friends. We were watching the Cincinnati Reds play the San Francisco Giants on TV, and about 20 minutes after the game my cousin’s friend emerged from his room with the box score from the game that had just ended in his hand. I was amazed – life would never be the same.

As a lifelong sports geek, I have a love for box scores, statistics,  and records. One of the cherished daily rituals of my youth was picking up the morning paper and looking at the box scores from the previous day’s action and using their acronyms and numbers to try and reconstruct what happened in those games. Box scores were magical to the younger me, but they could also be a source of frustration, mostly because I had to wait until the next day to see them and I often missed out on some of them because West Coast games would end after the local papers were printed. This info that I cherished was only available to me via an imperfect system.

So on that fateful day when the friend of my cousin handed me a copy of a box score from a game that had ended just minutes ago, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. How did this happen? He told me that he had printed it via his Prodigy account, and once I understood what that meant, I knew that I needed access to this new (to me) online world. I eventually got online, and was able to take part in the information revolution that ensued, particularly in the world of sports information. I and others of my sports-inclined ilk now have immediate access to every piece of information we could ever want – instant box scores, in-game box scores and gamecasts, archives, real-time fantasy sports – and that’s not even taking into account live online broadcasts of games.

So here I am with access to more info than I ever could have imagined – but something’s missing. I don’t know if it’s just a function of getting older, or if it’s just information overload, but I don’t read box scores anymore, either online or in the newspaper (which I still get on weekends).  The charm is missing – they used to look like this, now they look like this, they used to seem special, now they just blend in with the rest of the information noise.  I wouldn’t want to go back to the pre-Internet days, mind you, but I do sometimes long for those days when the little bit of info that was given to me somehow meant so much more.

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