Techmouse

The latest gadget suddenly doesn't seem so important, compared to the devestation and dislocation in New Orleans and other areas of the Gulf Coast. While I would love to write about, for instance, the new iPod Nano, I offer instead the following links to lists of charitable organizations offering relief to Hurricane Katrina victims:

The Network for Good
USA Freedom Corps

In a well-publicized agreement a few years ago, the Henrico County Virginia (Richmond area) public schools made a deal with Apple to supply iBooks to its public school students. Apparently, Apple was outbid by Dell this year, and the school system decided to transition to Dells. In another well-publicized move, the county announced an iBook fire sale--$1,000 iBooks would be sold to the public at $50 each. It is a G3 iBook with 320 megs of RAM, Airport card, 10 gb hard drive, CD-ROM drive, with OS 10.2.8 installed

Frankly, this sale is an obvious waste of money. With minimal effort, an iBook of this configuration can fetch around $300 and change on eBay. Henrico County schools are thus losing about $250,000 by this fire sale. Perhaps, unlike most other school systems, Henrico County schools are so flush they can afford to forgo a quarter of a million bucks.

In any case, recently the school system's web site announced that "The Henrico County Board of Supervisors has amended the County Code relating to the sale of certain surplus property. Accordingly, all of the iBooks for sale on August 16 can only be purchased by Henrico residents or taxpayers."

Somebody must have gotten pissed about the idea of a bunch of out-of-county carpetbaggers (like me, for example) swooping in to buy their $50 iBooks! If they're going to waste money, at least the Henrico County officials want to make sure that local residents are the beneficiaries.

Is it any wonder that this ARG (Alternate Reality Game) is so popular? In our real cities, terrorists blow up civilians on transit systems, our government prosecutes a war with no clear goals, and, increasingly, violence rather than negotiation becomes the way to solve differences.

In Perplex City, intellectual achievement and puzzle solving ranks supreme. It is both a game and an escape fantasy, an immersive world that lives at right angles to the imperfect world we are really immersed in. But perhaps it is in our world the response to violence and terror--not the negative response of war, but the positive response of hope and resiliency--that provides for a positive outcome.

A good introduction to the game, by the way, is provided in this absolutely understated and hilarious interview with Michiko, the editor of the Perplex City Sentinel, found here:

http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=170118#170118.

Earlier this month, I took a tour by Segway of my home town, Washington, DC. I did get to see the WWII memorial, which I hadn't before, but mainly the Segways left a greater impression.

They're the closest thing to a magic carpet yet invented. It only takes a very subtle movement to make them go--basically, a little pressure on the balls of your feet, as though you are about to take a step, and the machine glides forward. Lean back a little on your heels and it glides back. Twist the handle and it turns. It's almost effortless.

Of course, one cannot pretend that one is getting any exercise, and the Segway does not reach anything close to the speed of a bicycle, so I'm not entirely clear whether it's a fancy teched-out scooter or a real transportation tool. It's all kinds of fun, though, and allows you to both be a pedestrian and be motorized, in a sense the best of both worlds.

In her book, Life on the Screen, author Sherry Turkle argued that interacting with and through computers has created new basic metaphors for how people think about a wide variety of issues, indeed, about life itself. Whether by a stroke of genius or marketing necessity, Apple Computers has sought to introduce a new metaphor to support the new iPod Shuffle: Life on no screen. Randomness. An interface that is no interface, lacking the ability to either see what's coming or (except in a very limited way) direct the next result.

Apple's advertising is pushing the idea that"life is random" and "randomness is the new order." I don't know whether or not that's true, but certainly the marketing of the Shuffle has been successful. I suspect that there are are certain number of users who literally use the Shuffle in the way that the advertising suggests. I suspect there are many others, like me, who put our audio books and new music toward the top of the "playlist" (there's only one on the Shuffle) so that they can be easily found, and then use the "autofill" function to randomly put music from our libraries on the remaining space. I suspect that there are others who manually load specific music to which they want to listen at that particular time. In these ways, a certain order is found, but it is not the searchable order of a visual user interface--it is, rather, the order of a mental image of a portion of our music libraries that we choose to carry with us that particular day, which the outside of the shuffle in no way reveals, and which therefore forces us to listen to discover and re-discover.

The inscrutable exterior blankness of the Shuffle, much like the monolith in the film 2001: A Space Odyseey, along with the fact that unlike other similar products, it is so very un-technological looking--not only no screen, but no fancy dials or buttons, just the simplest of controls; even the status LEDs are invisible if not on or blinking--calls forth a sense of magic. Can this almost-smooth piece of plastic really play music? Yes, and very well. It is a pretty piece of plastic candy with a surprisingly loud and robust sound. It is so light as to be almost unnoticeable, yet when it is noticed, it is pleasingly simple in design. I prefer to wear it without the lanyard in order to avoid a profusion of cords and strings, and to plug it directly into a USB port without a dock or extension for the same reason.

I'm sure most people who buy the Shuffle just want something relatively inexpensive and nice that plays music, and don't care too much about whether "randomness" is a lifestyle or not. I suspect that, in fact, the real revolution here is the utter simplicity of the device, a simplicity not only evident in its operation but expressed the Shaker-like plainness and functionality of its design. If it is through computer interfaces that we now find our metaphors for existence, the shuffle is the metaphor that is no metaphor--a device that just holds our music and then gets out of the way while we listen. You don't fuss with scrolling through libraries (well, not too much), or even looking at the device. You just turn it on and listen and can practically forget that it's there.

With the Shuffle, in the end, it's less about the player and menus and more about the music--and that, I think, is how it should be.