ocracokewaves

The anonymity of technology

Traffic in Cary, NC When I used to drive between college in Boston and my home in Mount Airy, NC in the late sixties and early seventies, I could tell where I was by the radio station.

You could pick up some local news and weather. Today real local radio stations are hard to find. We get our weather from looking at one of the gadgets in the car.

Radio in our case is XM, though it might not be much longer given how poorly the new antenna is performing.

Still technology, google maps, Accuweather long range forecasts, and satellite radio have created a cocoon for us as we travel.

When you throw in chain restaurants and pay at the pump, it is little wonder that it is hard to tell one place from another.

I can still remember one fateful evening on the way back to Boston in the old days. The belt driving the fan on my Jaguar XK-E broke on the Interstate highway. This was well before cell phones. I waited for the engine to cool and drove a mile or so a couple of times.

That got me to a local filling station which was still open on a Friday night. Unfortunately he didn’t have a fan belt to fit my car. He gave me a ride to the local hotel in Hagerstown and said he would pick me up in the morning.

Good to his word, he showed up the next morning, and we found out that the closest thing in town was a belt for a washing machine. I bought three, and he quickly installed one, and I was back on the road.

No Onstar, no cell phone, no triple AAA, and no advance computer registration at the hotel. Laptops had not been invented. Being wireless meant someone ripped your wires out. How did I manage to survive?

I wonder if the lack of interaction with the local world as we fly by in our technology aided cocoons has made for more or less understanding of our neighbors?

River and mind fog

River Fog Today, December 29, the air temperatures on North Carolina’s Crystal Coast are so warm that fog is forming over some of the rivers.

Sometimes I think we live in a fog of technology. While the river fog will go away when the weather changes, I think we have to work at losing the technology fog.

Almost every home has a computer, and lots of people depend on email to do their jobs and to stay in touch with friends.

Most people, not including my wife, use a cell phone with a camera phone.

Wireless networks are everywhere, and few homes are without an all in one printer/scanner/copier.

Then there are the digital cameras and movie cameras. We have HD televisions with HDMI inputs so I suppose the next thing is a Blue Ray or HD DVD.

We were in Best Buy the other day and actually stopped for a couple of minutes to look at a comparison between Blue Ray and regular DVD. I will admit to the Blue Ray images being stunning.

What I can do with the technology that we already have in the home and that which is accessible on the web like geotagging and Google Earth is astonishing.

While I cannot yet send an image that rivals Blue Ray, I can send some very stunning images.

Someone sent me some fantastic images that are going around the web. While my images might not be quite in the same class, they aren’t bad. I think a lot of people can say that these days.

We have such good tools today, that anyone can be an expert, by capturing an image, balancing the color a little, and easily sending it by email or MMS.

Not only can you send it to someone, but likely they will be able to get it even if they are traveling. There is so much content, some of it very high quality, and delivered very quickly that we are in an information fog.

There are people who have trouble processing it all. And above all it is harder and harder to get information to stand out.
It is easy to lose track of what you want to focus on because there is so much information. Sometimes it is more than you want or need to know.

There are times you have to back away from the technology and what it delivers until you can see through the fog.

Too much information can take away your decision making ability. Maybe I am old school, but once in a while you have to go with a gut feeling and not let yourself get overwhelmed with instantaneous high tech data. Once in a while, all this high tech stuff lets you turn something not so appealing into something not exactly as good as it looks.

Maybe it helps to go back to a basic computer that does not overwhelm you with its possibilities. I am trying that with a new Zonbu computer.

Invisible digital ink

Crab Pot Tree Valley Email is what I live by in my real estate business. Most of my clients contact me by email before I actually meet them.

It works fine for the real estate world, but a package of letters returned to me by a friend got me to thinking if we are someday going to regret all the email.

The letter were written in the early seventies to a college friend when I first moved to Canada. It is interesting to look at them and glance through my thoughts. They tell a lot about me and what was important to me then.

I only have one friend to whom I still write letters. Even those letters are typed on a computer. Most of my communications with friends are instant messages or emails. We often do instant messages instead of phone calls. While they are quick and easy, they have little permanence. Without a lot of work, when the computer is gone the messages are gone.

I used to try to keep CD and then DVD backups of my email. Unfortunately the volume of mail has grown faster than the storage medium. Of course I use IMAP for much of my email so it hangs around for a few years, but still eventually it will go.

I have a lot of information on the web in my blogs. I guess they have some degree of permanence as long as I pay the bills. I have actually done backups of the information and even backed up a couple of my important websites.

Yet in spite of that I feel that we are on the edge of losing a lot of information. Maybe there is so much of it that there isn’t enough storage space to store it all.

Even if you could store who would take the time to read through an average person’s email? Maybe a relative, but they would have to have more time than brains.

Maybe this new age of email and instant messaging means that whatever doesn’t make it into a book will have to be learned over.

Then again maybe technology will rescue us with a way to digest all our emails and dig out some great thoughts that might have been lost to the world without some machine help.

Our own paper handcuffs

Fall Sunset I have seen some true innovation over the years.

I can still remember when the only way you interacted with a bank was through a teller.

Gas was pumped by someone who came to your car and cleaned your windshield while your tank was filling.

You talked to an operator to make some long distance calls. The only way to make a call while traveling way to find a pay telephone booth.

When I started farming, I jumped within a year or two to putting up our hay with a round baler. It was a true innovation and allowed me to take care of two head of cattle with very little human help besides myself. The provincial department of agriculture told me the haying method that I was using was doomed to failure.

Personal computers when they first came out made huge changes in the way we did things. Typewriters almost died off, and everyone and his brother could do desktop publishing, but as we all know the paperless office never happened. In fact the reverse happened.

Somewhere along the way, computers made it so easy to generate paper that we are now close to drowning in it.

As a Realtor®, I am amazed by how much paper it takes to buy and sell houses. We continue to add sheets of paper to everything we do. In fact our main offer to purchase contract went from five to seven pages just this summer.

While more and more paper is being required, our communications between people have become less and less paper dependent. Very few people write letters anymore. You cannot go back and refer to what someone said in a letter. You are lucky if they sent you an email.

While some people seem to like communicating by email, others have come over to the world of instant messaging, and then there are those who always have a cell phone glued to their ears and cannot seem to communicate any other way.

Somewhere along the way when the world should have moved to digital signatures and secure encrypted PDFs, we got stuck on faxes which are easy to hate. In spite of all our advances, faxes are dependent on mechanical paper feeds which have made little progress when it comes to handling sheets of paper. Scanning and/or faxing are not exactly my favorite way of doing things.

While an ATM almost never fails, if you try to do a twelve page fax, you are almost guaranteed to have to resend a page or two. Often when we switch to scans by email, we end up stressing the human at the other end of the email chain. It is not unusal they are challenged at downloading or printing even simple PDFs.

This leaves the real estate business with not only some of the latest technology but also some of the oldest. We still get forms by mail.

While real estate is one of the few business where blogging has become effective, digital pictures omnipresent, and centralized online databases a part of everyday business, it is also one of the last places where bricks and mortar places of business still are important along with those faxes and printed documents.

I have watched a number of real estate people try to move to the world of smart phones which guarantee instant communication and the ability to keep everything synchronized and in one place. Based on the people I have watched, they do not work very well. I see people whose phones are beeping all the time from the overload of mail and phone calls.

While Apple’s iPhone promises that everything you need will be in one spot, that is a tall order in a business where multiple government agencies along with county, state, and national professional organizations want a record of what you are doing from the time you first meet a client until they sign their HUD statement.

My experience has shown that a paper file folder seems to be the only effective place for keeping everything from faxes to my notes. In fact the paper file folders seems to be the cornerstone of the real estate business.

Learning how to create a listing folder with the various pieces of information that we pull from different computers along with the signed documents we get from clients is key to being successful in our business. Eventually that folder becomes a pending folder and a closed folder. It is often mirrored by folders that we real estate agents carry so we do not lose our minds.

The paper folder might hold a fax from the county environment services group on a septic permit, a computer print out of the tax value of the property, computer generated forms, a digital flood map, and notes that are scribbled while talking on a cell phone in a parking lot.

There is no phone smart enough to what a paper folder and a note pad can do. Those old fashion tools essentially put all the pieces together that are required to make a complex business transaction happen. The best way of taking notes is with a pen or a pencil and a pad.

Yet we are a business that seems to find a way to use every piece of technology that can be throw at us.

Yesterday I scheduled my first closing using TimeBridge. While it will not get rid of any paper, it might save a few phone calls and emails.

There is no doubt in my mind that there are better ways to do what we have to do, but there are so many legal requirements that I do not see a way out of these paper handcuffs.

The operating system lock

Fall on the coast Sometimes our technology decisions keep us on a certain path that is hard to leave.

Most of the world uses Microsoft operating systems.

There are some significant minorities out there.

That would include those using Linux and Apple’s OS X along with those who don’t use technology at all.

So I wonder how does going down one operating system path impact the rest of your life.

I once penned a post, The liberal Mac and the conservative PC. In the post I guessed that people who bought PCs bought them for a specific task while Mac users purchased their computers for what they might do.

I think there are very few PC people who fall in love with their computers. There are a number of Mac users who find computing close to a religious experience.

I recently bought a PC for a specific use, to handle the real estate forms that I need in my career as a real estate agent.

I don’t feel any different from buying a PC except maybe I am very happy to have some a significant chunk of change.

Admittedly this isn’t my first PC, I have a Dell desktop that I bought three years ago, and on which I ran Linux off of one hard drive while running Windows XP on the main drive.

I don’t get too excited about computers since they are everywhere.

I do wonder if never having left your operating system is something akin to never having left your hometown or traveled overseas.

If you haven’t enjoyed the agony of viruses or the ecstasy of a Steve Jobs keynote is your life somehow incomplete?

Does that operating system lock prevent one from seeing the big picture. There are plenty of people who have used multiple operating systems, do we occupy a special space as the gurus who which path someone should follow?

Actually, I think a case could be made that operating systems are so similar today and so much happens in the world of Google, including their applications, that there is very little difference in the capabilities of computers or their users.

Character

beach I have heard it said that your real character shows late at night when you are alone, and no one can see what you’re up to.

While that is probably true, the problem for the rest of us is that no one is there to see you, so we cannot figure out your character.

Maybe your character shows on a nearly deserted beach like this one near Emerald Isle, NC. At least someone might catch a glimpse of what you are doing.

Actually I think technology has made it much easier to see inside that protective coating which keeps most people from knowing who we really are. It has nothing to do with cameras or surveillance.

So how does technology reveal our character?

Sometimes it is as simple as technology providing anonymity through a nickname with instant messaging.

Most often it just provides distance or a buffer from real personal interaction.

What better to really tell someone off than in a voicemail or perhaps a cell phone call where the connection is so bad that they can’t even fight back?

Then of course there is the flaming email which is well known to all corporate dwellers.

In a sense people really do hide behind the technology. Technology lets the real person sneak out without fear of consequences that might come from a face to face confrontation.

The other day, I had someone go off the deep end in a phone call. They said things which they should have never let slip out of their mouths. I seriously doubt if the conservation would have been anything near that had it taken place in person or face to face.

What it did let me see is the real person who masquerades behind a facade of civility. I now know that the person is someone whom I probably rather avoid, especially in business dealings.

I recently had another illuminating moment with a business partner. His real character wasn’t revealed by technology but the way he said something had almost the same effect.

He decided that he wanted to get out of a joint business deal with me. Instead telling me directly, he waited to dump it all on my wife while I was at work. My wife had not been involved in setting up the deal, and actually wanted no part of it. She had even recommended against it.

It is probably one of the more cowardly episodes that I have ever heard. It is perhaps something that only a very small minded person would do especially since it almost knocked my wife into depression.

His actions showed a complete lack of real character. It was pretty obvious that his only consideration was his self. I actually cannot think of someone who has so grossly violated the code by which most men of honor operate.

I guess it goes to show that while technology can reveal a lack of character, those completely without character don’t need technology’s help in showing their lack of worth.

I have an interesting post on the concept of “Sour Grapes” at my Blogger site. I wrote it after an Apple maniac decided my purchase of a Windows laptop was based on dissatisfaction with my former career at Apple.

The machines that own us

combine They say that machines are supposed to work for us.

For a long time I have been skeptical of that.

When I bought my first tractor back in 1971, a very intelligent Uncle of mine said that to really pay for it, I would have to run it day and night.

Well I haven’t yet figured out how to work without a little sleep so I still can’t do that. Perhaps it’s good that I no longer own tractors.

Now I just have to run computers day and night to make them pay for themselves. Still when you have a machine worth a few hundred thousand dollars, it just blows my mind to see that it is only one man and the machine. While this combine was grabbing corn and shelling it (the work of many people), there was another tractor with an auger wagon almost full of corn.

I’m sure the combine driver would finish a load and head home for lunch and come back with an empty wagon. It seems so weird that one person with machinery can do so much work.

I saw another example which I had been waiting to see.

We went over to Beaufort, NC to have a look at Blackbeard’s cannon which had just been raised to the surface after nearly three hundred years under water.

There were some reporters from local television stations setting up to do stories. At least one of them happen to be reporter and crew in one person. She got the camera running and started talking in front of it. She checked the film she had done and then interviewed someone with a camera crew.

I am not so sure, but the machines might be winning.

The information glut

Just right beach There is something interesting that can happen if you write a lot on the web on specific topics.

You can end up being your own expert. That’s fine in theory but has some problems if you want to expand your knowledge.

Sometimes the web can be a crude tool when you used for search. Most books aren’t on the web, and we end up being reciprocal experts.

I provide you with information for the area you’re interested in, and you provide what I am looking for today.

We can do little more than hope that each of us is doing a good job. Considering it is hard enough to get anyone to proof your free writing for spelling errors, I seriously doubt that we will have much luck finding folks with the time to start checking for accuracy.

I hope we can keep ourselves from one hundred percent reliance on the web.

The reality is that much of the web information is never validated. We have more information than we could ever hope to grasp, yet much of it means little. We should be careful what we believe.

Maybe one of these days all those old encyclopedias will be worth something, or we will get some web sources that we can count on for accuracy.

Communicating without connecting

Roanoke Valley We have more ways to communicate today than ever before.

There is instant messaging, smart phones, voice mail, email, presentations, and even the venerable memos.

Sometimes it seems that we are saying more and understanding less.

We have lots of ways to say things and plenty gets said.

Often in spite of all the communication, people don’t understand each other.

Part of the problem is people don’t say what they mean. Another challenge is that some folk hear what they want to hear.

The challenge is to not only get the audience’s attention but to set the stage so that a properly crafted message hits receptive ears.

Few people can do this consistently. There are lots of tips that can help get a message across, most of them don’t involve technology and certainly not Powerpoint slides.

If I could pick one thing as important in setting the stage and delivering a message, I would pick consistent eye contact.

If you cannot look a person in the eye and say what you have to say, then don’t bother saying it.

The fine art of ignoring a phone call

Raymond's Gut There are places that phone calls should be ignored. This quiet spot near the White Oak River is one of them.

There are lots of other places also where phones are out of place. No one likes a phone in a restaurant, or at meal in your home.

We all fear the cellphone-using driver of a car when we see one making a turn or talking on the phone in heavy traffic.

Considering there isn’t a big difference in immediately taking a call and calling back when you are in safes spot, you wonder why taking or making the call now is so important. Even responding to the voice mail as quickly as possible is pefectly acceptable to most folks.

Some people have to catch the call at all costs, some let it mellow as a voicemail before responding, and then there is the group that doesn’t want to do either.

As technology has given us more tools to be connected, it has also given us more tools to choose the person with whom we might want to have a conversation.

I’m not sure that is good, but it is probably no different than hiding behind your secretary in the old days.

I take pride in returning my phone calls. Some I don’t want to make, but years of experience have taught me that it is better to get involved early in problems and to take the hits up front than to let trouble build.

It is strange though to see some of the Blackberry toting executives of today be just as disconnected from the real world as their predecessors in the sixties who relied on dragon-tongued secretaries.

We’re almost taking communications intravenously, yet some folks seem to be allergic to it.