Telemetry Before It Happens

I'd like to borrow another runner's memory.

I've been traveling a lot, and it's easy to scope out a route near each hotel using Google Maps' measurement tool and some Street View sleuthing.  But knowing when a turn is coming up, or the sidewalk becomes choppy dirt, or the hill evens out just past the firehouse .. you don't know those on the first run.

My Nike GPS watch gives me telemetry after each run.  What I need is telemetry before.  Start out the route on my second run, and I'm a little better prepared for the details.

But is the novelty of the first-time around "worth" something?

Nope.  What if the borrowed runner is used to marathons .. I'll bet she'll have a different stride and pace than me.  Or what if this is a noontime stroll I'm borrowing .. maybe he's never seen it in the evening with the city lights glimmering.  "Interesting, I've never done it this slow/late/sober/male/lean ..."

So, GPS running-accoutrement makers, how about it?  Telemetry after my run is so 5k ago.  I'll pay extra to have it up-front.

Minting an "I Owe You a Beer" Currency

"I owe you a beer."

A lot of people at work have saved my butt when things got too busy for one person.  I tend to say "I owe you a beer," when this happens.  How do you keep track of all those beers?  To solve that problem, I've decided to mint my own currency, pictured here.

I give 'em to people who I owe a favor to, and they can hand them back at any time and I'll redeem it for a real beer. I'm a central bank, with a private currency tied to "the beer standard."

There are still some details to sort out.  For instance, what's the exchange rate?  Certainly, a beer is about equal to a well drink ... but what about call drinks, or a roy rogers, or fancy wine?  (Is boxed wine the penny?)

It's pretty easy to get custom-made poker chips.  I used American Prom, who have an online design tool.  They shipped quickly and looked just like the on-screen mock-up.  There are jillions of other places tho.

Film Rescue International

Film Rescue International just finished resurrecting an antique roll of 127 film for me!  It required a developing process that the dinosaurs used before they went extinct.  And I'd totally exposed half of it to indoor sunlight.  They still managed to coax a few shots off the thing.  These people are awesome!

You know, this is one of those awesome things about the modern individual's ability to communicate globally.  Big service bureaus need to do the one-size-fits-most thing, to be financially stable at scale.  But a handful of specialists, when they're the *only* people who can do the job, are able to make a living collecting bunches of small orders from the entire world.

This is very kewl stuff.  I'm curious to see where else the model can be applied to keep "dead" technologies alive.  Throw in some desktop 3D printers, scanned service manuals, a wiki, and now you've got all sorts of possibilities!

Should Corporate IT embrace its inner Ma Bell?

Okay, bear with me here.  I was thinking about this on the ride home, and I could be on to something, or I could have just inhaled too much exhaust.  Is "Corporate IT" (with capital letters) reaching a point where it looks more like Ma Bell than a helpful and innovative organization?  That's not a bad thing.  Look what happened when Ma Bell got shaken up.

Remember the old days, when you got your phone service in one-size-fits-all "service offering?" (Put down the ITIL book, I'm using it derogatorily.)  The phone company actually owned the wiring in your house, and you rented the handset from them.  (Kids, skip down a paragraph or two.)  And that made perfect sense!  Their product was intended to connect people, not just run a stupid network.  And who the hell wanted to manage their own infrastructure in the house, anyways?  Seriously, what do I care about my stupid phone service?

And then along comes the Sports Illustrated Football Phone.  (Kids, skip another paragraph.)  It just looks so awesome on TV and it's free fer chrissakes and it's a nice way to show your friends just how enthusiastic you are about ritualized, non-lethal battle games.  That guy in the ad looks so chummy and smart!  You must have one.  But it's a piece of junk and it breaks. So you call the phone company and they natter on at you about how it's an unsupported device and who do you think you are, a phone technician, this is very serious stuff.

You could write a book about this, so I'm sure someone has.  If not, get me a ghost writer and I'll supply the technical angle.  (Sadly, Tim O'Reilly does not read my blog.)

But it was really making me think.  Do we need to just relax, put a few sandbags in the right places, and begin to define our basic offering as merely running a line to the MPOE?  Do we charge extra for inside wiring work, but offer an "inside wiring plan," for folks who never want to bother with it?  If you get tired of your answering machine breaking tapes all the time (Kids, skip another sentence.) you'll see the value in paying extra for voicemail.  If you want to run a call center, we'll happily give you a T1 ... but arranging to de-mux it and install a PBX is up to you.

It sure beats the current state .. where we continue to offer services that are somewhat appealing to end-users, and mostly manageable at scale for IT, but kinda leave both of us a little unsatisfied.  They said I can keep the awesome football phone even if I choose not to subscribe!  Why are you making me use this hideous, heavy, putty-colored thing!?

Maybe it's time for Corporate IT to learn to stop worrying and love the football phone.

Kevin Kelly at TEDxAmsterdam

Continuing the lunch-time video habit, I ended up watching a speech by Kevin Kelly about "technology's story."  As a one-time Whole Earth Catalog editor, you might expect him to think outside the proverbial box -- he doesn't disappoint, dismissing how engineers see these tools, and talking about how we might consider our technology (without which we'd be toast) a seventh kingdom of life, with an evolution and urges of its own.

The talk is a very nice redux of his book, What Technology Wants, which I read a couple of months ago.  I found most of his written arguments compelling, peppered with a couple pies in the sky.  If Amazon auto-generated per-book hash-tags, I'd aim you at the comments my Kindle tweeted about the book.

In another intersection, I've been following the Quantified Self movement, another of his brain children.  I find the most interesting thing about "self quantifiers" is how easily we humans graft technology right onto our bodies.  (Nike+, GPS, bluetools, eyeglasses)  I guess we'll know what technology wants, once we're all cyborgs.

Ambient Findability

Alright, so I clearly read more slowly when I'm not on vacation ... today I finally finished Ambient Findability, by Peter Morville.  It's funny, I was actually expecting this to be something technical about the ubiquity of GPS devices, or fun tricks with RFIDs, or geo-IP databases.  Instead, it's a really interesting philosophical wander through the ways that humans and information come together ... "find" each other.  Bring a highlighter (or, more likely, the function on your e-reader) because you're going to keep finding quotes, study results, anecdotes and references to other sources that you'll want to be able to find later.

When your Purchases have Memory

So I was reading an article on flexible graphine memristors, which are a non-volatile data storage device.  And I was thinking about how most modern electronics actually are washable -- as long as they don't have power attached.  And so I thought, what if you put flexible memory devices in clothing, they'd be just like any other tag on it.  And then I thought okay, what if I add a radio antenna and attach it to a microprocessor that's small enough the radio waves alone are enough to power it.

Now you've got a bit of data-storage that you can attach to every item in a store, that can be read and writen at a distance over RF.  And it's flexible, so it can stay attached for the life of the product without bothering your customer.

Kewl huh?  Imagine walking into a clothing store and they know exactly how much you paid for each item you're wearing.  Did you pay full price?  Did you buy each item by itself, or as an outfit?  How long after the new products came out, before you purchased them?

What if other retailers "bomb" the tags of their competitors, so that after you've visited a Levi's store, your Lucky Jeans start lying, saying you bought them at a total loss to the retailer .. and months after they came out?  What if you rewrite your own tags, to get better service, by setting off the "pays full price, buys multiple  items at once, adopts early" flags in a target retailer's scanners?  And that's just clothing.  I can't wait to mess with more ubiquitous computing.

Old-Skool Ambient Notification

It's fun to think I'm travelling into the future, implementing ambient notification and using ubiquitous/wearable computers.  But the fact of the matter is that ambient notification is very old.  The most obvious example is the cathedral bell tower that chimes every fifteen minutes and tolls on the hour.  I also like to think that skylights ambiently inform you of the time of day and outdoor weather without having to look at them.  What else?

"Junk" CDROM Blanks

I was emptying out junk from a cabinet, last weekend, and realized that CDROM blanks are now "junk." Little USB drives are not only easier, they're re-usable. But even those don't get much use -- you can email a couple hundred megs without batting an eyelash. I paused long enough to take a photo on my phone, since this seems like a momentous point in personal digital distribution or something. Or maybe not.  I wonder what we'll be doing in ten more years...

Data Exhaust

I was thinking about data exhaust on the ride in, and I was still thinking about it at my afternoon tea break. So now I will share. I guess the idea of spending my time collecting, redirecting and analyzing the torrential flow of data that modern life creates -- well it sounds like a dream job! It's a cyberpunk thing, the "digital seer." Or maybe they'd have said "shaman."  Hrm.  A little to froofroo mystical, maybe.

Basically it's what a sysadmin does already for part of their day. It's the especially fun part -- look at all the metrics and figure out what the *actual problem* is. Folks tell us "this server is slow" and we run a couple commands and tell you that you're probably missing some indexes on your database, even though we didn't look at the inside of your database. It's like magic, but not at all.

Wouldn't it be interesting to try to formalize or mechanize that? Watch and see what handful of tools you use to take the pulse, then make that an automatic script? Isn't that basically what the data visualization nuts are doing -- translating metrics into something that doesn't require "work" to explore? Are there tell-tale metrics (or ratios of metrics, or red flags) that let you see the proteome of a running system, so to speak? If you show others how it's done, is it still magic?

Maybe that's exactly what I like about my imagined profession.

What if our diagnostic craft stopped looking like magic and started looking like art?

Distributed Science on the Cheap

Buried in this post on O'Reilly Radar is the idea of doing large-scale, distributed scientific studies using consumers' hand-held devices. I can imagine health and human services releasing a mobile phone app that lets you measure, for instance, radon gas levels ... and then all the individual data sets getting uploaded to a central server that can look for larger trends.

Printable electronics are getting so easy ... they could print the sensor on postcards that you cut-out and wedge in your phone's USB port. How about a lead sensor on a postcard? How about water quality? Grassroots campaigns could print sensors and hand them out in neighborhoods they want to mobilize.

Semantic MediaWiki

Like so many places, our company wiki has pages describing the owner/admin of various systems and databases and filer mounts and whatnot.  But try to get a list of all the systems that someone admins, and you have to wade through all the (often unrelated and unmaintained) pages that a MediaWiki search returns.  And that's just one f'r'instance.

So I'm more than a little interested in Semantic MediaWiki extensions.  Skeptical, but interested.  And skeptical.  But interested.

The dream I'm shooting for is a wiki markup language that lets me do simple key-value lookups (and write updates, in version 2) on a federated data source.  For instance, why do I have to keep updating the "volume sizes" column on a page about storage, when an SNMP oid can tell me what the size is right this second?

If the computer is so darned smart, why can't it tell me who currently admins a particular system?  It's right there in puppet!  You go look it up -- I'll show you how.

Eyeballs R Noms

Google bought reCaptcha.  For the technology or for the click-trails?  After all, they already know all the "monetized" blogs you visit and how long you spend there, because the "Ads by Google" hits tell them.  But what about those pesky free-lovin', non-advertising, un-google-hosted blogs that don't generate hits on google servers?  Thanks to the ubiquity of comment-spam, now those hits will phone home to the googlemind, too!

This could be fun ... I'm imagining smart-ads following my pheromone trail, trying to cross it with similar ones, hoping to steer me gently toward familiar-smelling products and services.  And I've got a python script pretending to be me that's randomly generating hits to some totally nutty interests ... as if it's firing flares and chaff out of my fleeing browser.  And now two bots are having a completely meaningless conversation because they don't understand real human behavior.  Wait, now I've gone full-circle. :)

Wearable Computers and Permit Requirements

It struck me the other day that here I am taking the MSF course and the only skills they can really test you on are things that someone standing still with a clipboard in-hand can see. They can't really see how you do at speed.

So I thought of this ... will wearable computing, or other persistent computing resources, allow the DMV to do permits differently in the future? The DMV waives the riding part of the M1 license, because in the class I've now had some practice with turns and stops and things. But imagine if they issued a key-fob that tracked me for a while and watched me practice on my own. Perhaps a web site would show me how to do quick stops, then the key-fob would track me as I practice in an approved off-street area. And perhaps it'd track the number of "smooth turns" I've completed and count down until I've done enough of them that they consider me to've passed my permit "test."

Just a thought.