Toxic

My friend Erin is very interested in environmental safety. She may actually go to graduate school soon to study it and get more active in bringing information to people about environmental dangers.

She gave me this link to Skin Deep, a study by the Environmental Working Group who rated a large number of personal care products that may contain harmful ingredients. You can look up the products you use to check what types of toxins they contain. It is a bit gloomy to read some of the possible health effects, but it could help you make your next toothpaste or deodorant purchase at the supermarket.

Wow

This morning I was watching the KRON4 morning news while ironing my shirt for work. While spritzing my collar a grandma neuron fired off and I realized something fantastic. Terisa Estacio, one of the bay area morning anchor women, is actually the lead singer of Von Iva, the rock band I saw this weekend. What a woman!

Judge for yourself.

• Newswoman by day
• Rockstar by night

Shows

It was another week of great music in the city.

Once again I saw Alana Davis on Thursday night at the Red Devil Lounge. I thought I might be bored since I saw the same show just a few weeks ago. Once again I was totally moved by her charismatic and technically flawless solo show. Beautiful. This time Monica got to go as well.

We also went to the Von Iva show at the good ole' Independent. I had never seen or heard them, but Shannon saw them once and told me I simply must go check them out. Von Iva is an all girl, high energy, hard rock and roll band... the type you'd expect to see at a West Hollywood rock club during the Guns N' Roses era. The lead singer is an energy explosion the likes of Tina Turner and Mick Jagger. Great, strong voice and loves to interact with the audience. If you like rock, go see Von Iva.

But the act that opened for Von Iva was a surprise, the likes of which we never expected for a hard rock show. We walked in to the venue to see a small effeminate man dressed in tight white clothes and another young guy in front of a laptop on stage, performing what can only be described as boy band music. Except there was only one boy singing - one boy with a lot of guts. Some of the crowd booed him after his first song. But little by little he won the crowd over. His mastery of boybandisms, his well crafted songs, and especially the backup dancers he eventually brought up, ended up being a real hit. The band, called Hey Willpower, was an extremely intriguing mix of trite radio trash and uber hipster style. Very entertaining. And not just to laugh at. The music and his singing voice was probably up to the level of a Justin Timberlake, just without a gram of pretense. I hope they keep it going.

Blaster

I've just about completed work on my PortoBlaster, a portable disco sound and light system to be towed by my bicycle out into the deep desert at Burning Man. I conceived of it several months ago and somehow managed to make it happen over the past few months. It looks like a fairly puny project from the looks of it.. but it took plenty of pondering, rule checking, and dumpster diving.

Here are some pictures

Normally at the event, the only vehicles allowed to drive on the playa are art cars which have been licensed and approved by the event's DMV. This normally requires an especially extravagant setup which I don't really have the means to pull off myself. However, bikes are permitted free access to everywhere in just about every configuration one could imagine. I knew the only way to get sound and light equipment far out into the darkness was pulling with my bike. After months of agonizing over how I might accomplish this, here are the parts I assembled:

A twin baby bike trailer - holds 100 lbs. $69
A Stereo Amp - Sony home stereo amp from Craigslist - $20
Two decent bookshelf sized speakers - Salvation Army - $7.50
An old mini-portable CD player that's been collecting dust for years
Some Xmas lights from last year's tree
A red tube-light I've had laying around that I've never used
A blue twirling police beacon light - Target - $12
Purple spray paint
Some velcro and wire hooks to keep things in place
1 yard of plush white faux fur.

The last and largest hurdle to bring powered equipment into the desert is where to get electricity. Generators are expensive, heavy, and loud. This was the toughest piece of the puzzle. I could have gone the car stereo route and used a marine battery for power, but I wasn't sure about the lights and I'm not super handy with car audio. I became enamored with the Honda 1000 generator, which weighs 29 lbs, and is apparently about as quiet as a sewing machine. Unfortunately, they are expensive and not easy to find second hand. After doing the math on renting vs. buying and sizing up market on eBay and Craigslist, I decided that if I could find one for $400, I could easily re-sell it after the event for the same amount - making it essentially free for my use. I found one on eBay after weeks of searching and it's waiting for me to pick it up at Fedex right now. I really hope it works.

Whew

A guy who sits next to me got a call this morning from a ham radio operator friend of his. The friend said he had just overheard a call from a police officer in downtown San Francisco that a bomb had just gone off on the street and it appeared to be a terrorist attack. For several minutes I raced around the web, searching for some news that might have been published. I remember feeling like "here we go".. as if San Francisco was overdue for an attack and this was just the beginning.

It turned out to be an underground explosion of some power equipment that blew off a manhole cover and actually did injure a few people. The policeman had just jumped to a conclusion. Shocking.

In any case. I suppose we've bought one more terror-free day.

Chair

I bid farewell to my trusty old office chair today. I'm putting it up for sale on craigslist. It was the chair I bought when I first decided to quit my job and work for myself back in Arizona. It was only marginally comfortable and I can't say I got nearly enough work done while I was sitting in it.

What is it with men and their chairs? Maybe it's the throne in our castle. Frasier's dad, Archie Bunker, and now me. Dumb I suppose. But I'll miss it nonetheless.

Bye Chair

Mayor

One thing that no one that works with government wants is media attention. Media has the ability to turn regular everyday life into outrage at its own whim.

One outrage that has existed just fine without media help is the San Francisco Department of Parking & Traffic. It's no secret that the project I work on is funded mainly through convenience fees collected from people paying parking tickets online. Our online citation payment feature is one of the few bastions of convenience surrounding DPT these days. They have been terribly understaffed and overworked lately, and it appears the long lines and teller window freakouts have finally caught the attention of the mayor.

This article underscores some of the understandable frustration people have been experiencing while trying to do business with the department. Somehow, the mayor has now associated our convenience fees with the public's frustrations and has indicated that he wants to see them eliminated. Great. In reality, we don't receive many complaints about our fees from the public. When there are complaints, they tend to be aimed at the misconception that our services are a cost savings to the City.

There is nothing the public likes to see more than swift and drastic cuts in taxes and fees. Yee haw! Unfortunately, the costs of our services don't become free. Those fees will now have to be paid from some general fund that is currently used for other, less visible services.

I am a fan of the idea that people should pay mainly for services that they use (e.g. bus fares, bridge tolls, and dog licenses). If he funds our project through unrelated sources, that means that people who aren't Internet users will be paying for part of our project either through reduced services or higher taxes - in theory.

I am glad, however, that my project is anywhere on the mayor's radar and that there doesn't appear to be any danger of us getting cut entirely. Personally, I think our services are a ray of light, as city projects tend to go.

I just wish our project were allowed to thrive along the same business model that has been so successful thus far. Ah politics.

Pea pods

Monica and I were fortunate enough to get tickets to a last minute show put on by the Black Eyed Peas at The Independent on Friday night. I'm on the venue's email list and they sent out an email about two hours before the tickets went on sale. Within ten minutes, they were sold out, so right away I felt a sense of privilege even gaining entrance to the place.

Their two opening acts were top notch. Jennifer Johns is a great soul singer who was on stage with only a percussionist and turntablist. She really had a great energy about her. After her, Crown City Rockers came on and really brought down the house. I've never heard of them before, but they have a new fan in me. Each member of the band is a tremendous musician and the performance was impressively tight. I believe they are from Oakland and so I was looking forward to seeing them again some time soon. Unfortunately (for me), they appear to be blowing up a bit, and are now on a long road tour. Ugh. I hope they don't get too big before I see them a few more times in small venues. But if they do.. good for them.

The Black Eyed Peas didn't come on until about 12:45am and by that time we were pretty exhausted from dancing so much. They had just come from SBC Park where they had opened for Dave Matthews and seemed a little tired. But they still put tons of energy into their show, most of which was completely freestyle. They only played one mainstream BEP song that I recognized. In the end, they had both opening bands on stage with them and also brought up Eric Krasno from Soulive on guitar. Quite a finale.

A curious thing about the show was that they kept insisting that the show was supposed to be free and that we should all go ask for refunds. They kept incorporating that mantra into their freestyle raps. I emailed The Independent to see what that was all about. They said I should hear something about it soon via email. Interesting. We'll see what happens.

Like

There are a couple of words in the modern west coast vernacular that have been sitting snugly on my nerves for a while now. You know them. You probably say them. I do. Sometimes I hear myself and think, "how did this happen?"

The first has been with us since the early 80's and was introduced during the Valley Girl period of modern slang. I'm not sure how the word "like" became such a versatile term, but somehow it manages to creep into about 90% of some people's sentences at least once, sometimes multiple times - in one sentence.

Apparently the Brits have taken notice and have begun educating the public to this word's origins and effects. It is seen as an American plague spreading to their continent.

The author of this BBC article and I both agree that the word's use amounts to laziness in speech and an unwillingness to bring concrete commitment to one's thoughts. Sometimes it's difficult for me listen carefully to someone's message because I am so distracted by the word peppering their speech so much.

The other word that has crept in a bit more recently is "er", as in, "are you going use that chair?, er...". It's really "or".. but tends to come out "er", and implies that the speaker is about to provide an alternative to the preceding statement, but generally just trails off in awkward vagueness.

When I first moved to San Francisco, I had a boss who would say "er" after almost every question. I had never heard this before and was certain it was just her own weird habit. Maybe she was patient zero in this epidemic, because it seems to be sweeping the nation. It's now so common, I hardly notice it anymore.

Do you think that, like, er is the new like?, er.....

I have fallen prey often to both of these verbal ailments and invite anyone who detects it on me to alert me immediately so I can use my special spray to eradicate it (I wish they really had that). Really though, these words and phrases are just part of our everyday speech and are perfectly acceptable in small amounts. Also, we all know that word nazis can be super annoying - those folks that like to point out incorrect uses of words, grammar, etc. I know - I used to be one. People hated it, so I stopped.

I wonder if someday, young people will rebel against their Valley-talking parents, and start to use painstakingly proper speech, just to get on their parents' nerves. It could like totally happen.

Hitman

I wrote a few weeks back about my lack of understanding of the furor surrounding globalization. I didn't (and still don't) understand exactly what all of the protests have been about.

The new book I started today will likely shed some light on that. Confessions of an Economic Hitman is the biography of a man who claims to have been a central player in large-scale economic deals that have had far reaching effects on developing countries.

I'm really not a huge reader, but this is my third book in three months. This is really unprecedented for me. We'll see how long I can keep it up.

Unions

I like the idea of collective bargaining. I don't generally like unions so much.

I think it's important for people to protect themselves from abuse by anyone. This can include employers, neighbors, government, or anyone else. Unions have historically been a good method for unskilled people to protect their own welfare from tyrannical employers.

My own personal feelings about modern day unions, however, is that they tend to have drifted from the notion of reasonable treatment more toward the notion of fanatical protection. They seem to be institutions that are interested primarily in their own survival regardless of their actual usefulness to their subscribers. That's a fairly unsubstantiated feeling though.

During my time working at the City, which is a union employer, I have heard some pretty appalling acts by employees, from drunken bus drivers to six-months-absent computer operators that have gone unpunished (and un-fired) by management due to aggressive union leadership. That sort of thing tends to leave a bad taste in one's mouth.

This is my common sense take on why unions exist. It's not based on any particular education on the subject:

In the free market, supply and demand for jobs are fairly stable. Workers and businesses are able to equitably agree on fair compensation in return for good job skills and reliability. Most of the time this seems to work pretty well. If I as a worker feel I am not being compensated fairly, I can choose another more generous employer. My current employer loses out on a skilled, reliable employee - a scarce asset. This is the market in which I have operated throughout my career.

The folks who don't do so well in this arrangement are unskilled workers. Since it's easy to find people with no skills, employers aren't as incented to treat their employees well - because they can find plenty of people willing to do the job. This is where unions came from. By drying up the supply of unskilled labor through organizing potential workforce (often heavy handedly), unskilled people got negotiating leverage they wouldn't otherwise have had. This has worked well for jobs like bottling soda pop, bagging groceries, and collecting garbage.

It's less clear to me why there are unions for skilled, experienced people like airline pilots and nurses. It seems like those positions might be more difficult to fill if disgruntled employees left their jobs. But I suppose a large enough organization could weather the vacancy.

The fact is, 65% of US workers, both skilled and unskilled don't operate under any sort of union - and that number is apparently growing.

The Guardian has an article this week about the recent unraveling of the AFL-CIO, which as far as I can gather, is a union of unions. By uniting local unions into a larger national union, they can all enjoy greater political and economic power. That is if they can all get along.

It appears that major factions of those local unions are starting to disagree about the future direction of of the AFL-CIO. The major disagreement seems to be over whether they should pour more money and resources into political contributions or into growing union membership through recruitment. A perfectly valid controversy.

It has been becoming clear lately to the local unions that they don't have nearly as much power as they had hoped when negotiating with international corporations. You see, even if, for example, the Safeway workers in the entire state of California were to strike, Safeway still has thousands of other stores to keep themselves economically healthy. In other words, they can weather local or even regional strikes pretty easily nowadays. The only way for unions to be effective is by organizing nationally. Which means a whole lot more consensus among previously sovereign local chapters. Yikes.

With the growing importance of national solidarity and the deteriorating consensus on agenda, it seems like the very fabric of unions are at a crossroads. Would two or three splintered national unions collectively hold the same clout as one united AFL-CIO?

Interestingly, the book I just finished, Freakonomics, has a compelling argument about the effect of increased campaign spending on election outcomes. There is apparently good evidence that pouring even large amounts of cash into a campaign budget will not have more than a 1% effect on the outcome. I wonder if anyone in these unions has read that book. That might help them choose a direction.

I haven't given up on unions altogether, but I would like to see them focus more on employee development and protection and less on power and politics. We'll see what happens.

Wish

I wish everything worked the way I wanted it to.

My project here at the City has been an interesting experience. Coming from 15 years working in the private sector, the city government environment has been a major adjustment.

I realized early on that the normal motivating factors that drive decision making are very different in business and government. Concepts like competition, efficiency, profitability, and customer service, although not always accomplished in the private sector, are at least normally at the heart of most important decisions.

Since I tend to lean Libertarian in my civic thinking, I came in to the project already possessing a healthy skepticism about how governments operate. That skepticism has been nourished during my 3 years here and is as healthy as ever. I now know that many day to day decisions are made using the notions of survival and power as their basese rather than what we would all hope they would use, optimal service to the public.

My experience is that most city workers want to serve the public, and hold that as their best intention. But over time, those intentions seem to get pushed aside to make way for more basic realities. In this environment, virtually no organization, whether an entire department or a small specialized group, is safe from being reduced in size, taken over by other groups, reorganized, or cut altogether. For this reason, a substantial force in any decision involves looking at how mere survival might be affected.

My project here is a good example. We are here to provide the facilities to take payments for any city services over the Internet. Right now we offer about 14 services. The City contracts with my employer to provide our time, expertise, equipment, and support. It makes sense for the City to use contractors rather employees for this because of the flexibility we provide during the pilot period of a new project and the specialized nature of our work. The city pays for our services both by charging convenience fees for many types of payments (similar to Ticketmaster) and also out of the budgets of those departments we serve.

For the first three years of our project, convenience fees have not been able to cover our costs by themselves. It takes time for the general public to get used to the idea of using the Internet to do their business and many are only becoming aware of our existence online little by little. That said, our daily payment volume has grown at a healthy rate month by month, year by year.

We often have to fight the perception that taking payments over the Internet is a cost savings to the City. In theory, if a substantial enough portion of business was done this way, fewer human resources might be required. However, we are not there today, and it is unlikely any workers will be laid off due to our success any time soon. So what it does mean is more man hours and more equipment which is not how costs savings happen. As it is, the City has to come up with money from its budget to provide this convenience to its citizens.

Since much of our equipment will be paid for soon and our fee collections have been on the increase, I decided to forecast when the day might come that our project pays for itself with its own fee collections and no longer requires city funding.

It turns out that day is likely about a year from now, sooner than I thought. To me, this validates my project as a healthy exercise in providing services to citizens. At that break-even point, only the citizens that use the service are required to pay for it. I personally like government services that work this way, like riding the bus, paying a bridge toll, or licensing my dog to provide city animal care. Revenue structures like these allow services to naturally expand or contract based on citizen demand rather than being based on politics or skillful fund raising by city officials.

I went to report my great news to my city client. Unfortunately, rather than celebrating this news, he proceeded to explain to me that our fee source is still, like every other city source of income, subject to being cut or reduced due to political demands or the whims of certain departments. And further, that giving services to departments for free is inadvisable because of the feeling of entitlement it imparts to them. Departments must pay for services they receive otherwise they begin to abuse them. This conversation went on for a while and I became further and further disappointed in the fact that something wonderful like breaking even couldn't even be considered worthwhile in this environment of doom and gloom.

For now, I'll sleep better knowing that money is available for my job to continue, at least for the time being - money that will likely build up in city surpluses, whether they appreciate it or not.

Tolerance

Every now and then I see a story on television or hear something on the radio touting a new "zero tolerance" policy about one thing or another. Sometimes it's drunk driving, racial discrimination, schoolyard bullies. This week it's speeding on the freeways in the Bay Area.

A morning news traffic reporter was gracious enough today to let us all know that the CHP is instituting a "zero tolerance" speed policy on the freeways this week. It didn't appear that he was leaking secret information. It seemed to have likely come from a Highway Patrol press release.

The implication to me seems to be that during any other period in the past or future, this behavior is tolerated to some degree. Why are they telling us this? First, it has the effect of warning would-be speeders not to speed this week, but lets them know that next week they're less likely to be punished. Second, they are advertising their own lax enforcement for the other 51 weeks of the year. Is that the message they're trying to send?

Next time you hear the words "zero tolerance". Consider the implication.

Jump

I jumped out of an airplane on Saturday.

I've always wanted to do it. I'm not really a daredevil. But I wanted to know what it felt like. And now I know.

Toby's 30th birthday provided the excuse. He invited me and a few others. I couldn't say no. I was doing it. No matter what.

Almost everyone else he invited somehow befell some sort of problem that prevented them from making it. Go figure. So he and I drove up to to Byron on our own and met two of his old friends there.

During the drive up there, we were getting a little anxious for what we were about to do, Toby especially. I really had no idea what my reaction would be once it was time for me to face the open door in the plane. I actually packed an extra pair of underwear in my backpack - just in case.

Byron, which is near Tracy just passed Livermore, is a desert. It doesn't resemble the rest of the bay area to me at all. When we arrived at the small private airport and opened the door, the 100 degree air was a shock to us both. Luckily I had also packed some shorts and flipflops.

The skydiving company is essentially a hangar with carpeting and gear and is full of people packing parachutes and nervous-looking people waiting around on couches. Occasionally some jump-suited, wide-eyed, jittery folks would stagger in with big smiles to change their clothes, sign the log book, and thank the employees before leaving.

We chose to do a tandem jump. It requires next to no training (about 25 seconds) and you have the peace of mind knowing your life is in the hands of an experienced professional. All you have to do is fall - which is easy.

After a couple of hours of waiting around watching folks continuously drop out of the sky right in front of the hanger, it was finally our turn. We were the last group of the day. By that time, our nervousness had waned and we just wanted to get up in the air.

We made our way out to the 12 person airplane, which only seats 12 if you stack yourselves in there like Pringles. After take off, all of the experienced people cheered. Apparently the take off is the most dangerous part of the trip. In a few minutes, we had climbed to 14,000 feet, high enough to see San Francisco in the distance and to peek over the Sierras as well - in other words, very very high.

One by one, people would get up and stand in the doorway with their butts out the door, holding on to the top of the door frame. Then, whoosh! they were gone! This was the point I had most worried about my own reaction. Funny thing was - I wasn't afraid at all. Knowing I had Vic, my jumping partner, taking care of me was very soothing.

We were the last ones out of the plane. He walked me up to the door where I stood hanging out the opening, strapped to his belly. I held on to my harness straps and he rocked me forward and backward three times... One, two, Go! For about the first two seconds, my body struggled to figure out this unprecedented situation, and quickly the feeling of panicked falling turned into a feeling of flying or riding. The 120 mph freefall lasted about one minute, enough to drop about 10,000 feet or about 2 miles. It was a fun ride.

The view jumping out looked something like this

Then Vic pulled the rip cord. The jolt wasn't as hard as I expected, although the harness was pretty tight around my legs. After our chute opened, he loosened me up and it was more comfortable. I can't describe how serene the rest of the ride down was. The difference between television pictures and the true-life view coming down toward earth is indescribable. Looking down at my dangling feet while floating down toward the ground felt like being delivered by the stork.

Then, on our way down, Vic let me know very calmly that we were going to land "somewhere else". I thought maybe the wind was blowing us off course and he was having trouble getting back to the hangar. But he explained that one of my friends' main chute had not opened properly and had to be cut away. Their reserve chute had opened and they were fine. It turns out that it was Toby's old roommate, Ekart. Our task at hand was to retrieve the chute they had cut away. That was fine with me. I rather enjoyed landing out in the countryside in a cow pasture. The landing was perfectly gentle and we even missed a giant cow pie I had my eye on by about six inches.

I unhooked and he instructed me to walk up the hill to retrieve a small parachute and then down a little further to pick up the larger one. He had scoped out the surrounding roads so he knew which way to walk. We lugged all the gear about 200 yards to the nearest road, which was really a long driveway to a farmhouse. He said he didn't have a radio, but that the others had seen where we landed and a truck would be by to pick us up soon. They didn't. Apparently we were tougher to reach then he thought.

After a half hour or so of waiting in the heat, I was ready to just walk the mile or so back to the airport which we could see from where we were. He was concerned about leaving his expensive equipment by the road. I wasn't nearly so concerned about his equipment. After a while longer, he got very irritated that no one had shown up and decided to leave the equipment and cross a long expanse of dry brush, cow pasture, and barbed wire to get to the airport. I decided against that plan and told him I'd walk down the road and to send someone for me. Off he went at a full jog toward the airport.

I only got about 200 yards down the road, when the trucks showed up. We gathered up the gear and they took me back to my friends who were a few beers ahead of me by that time.

During the whole process, I kept being reminded of movies where military men dropped into foreign territory, not so different than Byron. To those men, the ride down wasn't the end of their adventure. They were in unfamiliar territory with unfriendly residents to look out for.

My lasting sentiment during the whole journey was how grateful I was to have such a nice ride without having to worry about anyone shooting at me when I got down. Even though most days I take that for granted, that day I didn't.

Serendipity

It's fun to live in San Francisco.

It's a both a big city and a small town. After living here for over five years now, I have met quite a few people. I can't nearly call all of them close friends. I don't even remember many of their names. But it's always fun to run into people around town because it makes me feel like a member of the community.

First Thursdays is the day in San Francisco and many other cities when art galleries around town invite the public to come into their spaces and see what's on display. It's a social event as much as anything else, but what better place to hang out than a building full of art you could never afford.

Monica and I ran into four people we knew during the 45 minutes we were there yesterday. Some who's names we remembered, others' we didn't.

But before we got there, and while I was waiting for Monica to arrive, I did some window shopping on the block surrounding the gallery. I came upon an open door on Maiden Lane alley with some good loungy music playing inside and interesting decor. There was no sign outside the door, but I was curious, so I went inside and asked the people if it was open to the public. The girl working there said that it was a new bar named Otis and that it was indeed open.

So after the galleries got tired of all the rif raf hanging around and kicked everyone out, we found ourselves in a sea of aimless schmoozers with nowhere to go. We, of course, had our secret hideaway staked out already and went over to Otis. It had that air of a place that someone had spent a lot of time and money dreaming about and setting up. They passed that dream onto their customers in the form of a cool vibe and high drink prices. But the best part of the bar by far was the real grass they had covering the floor in the upstairs open-windowed loft area. How fun to be both inside and outside at the same time sipping $10 cocktails in a place no one knows about. Neato.

Then it was off to Tokyo Go Go for some tasty sushi dinner.

While we were eating, I couldn't help wondering about people living in San Francisco during, say, the 1920's, having exactly the kind of time we had that night 80 years previous. Different music, different art, different fashion, but otherwise the same brand of fun. Just another regular San Francisco after-work happy hour, full of gleeful happenstance.

It's fun to live in San Francisco.

Wireless

For a while now, I have been interested in the possibilities of location based applications for mobile phones. These are applications you could use on your cell phone that would incorporate your exact current location on earth in providing some service to you. Obvious uses for things like this are tracking people's movements, finding your way around town, etc.

GPS technology is clearly mature enough to include into cell phones. Unfortunately, cell phone companies have been reluctant to incorporate this technology into mainstream phones, presumably because of privacy fears of the public. In short, people don't want others to know where they are all the time. If the technology is present in their phone somewhere, someone might secretly track their movements. Bah! Personally, I don't think anyone cares where I go. Not even the FBI, Cingular wireless... not even terrorists. Yes, some companies might find some use in the aggregate information, like say, Safeway tracking my purchase patterns with my club card. But personally, I'm not threatened by that.

But wouldn't it be cool to be around town and have your cell phone tell you that your friend Fred was in the bookstore you're walking by right now? You could go say hi. Or maybe tip you off that your blind date is standing right next to you. Eek! Now you can make a quick getaway!

In any case, for me, the benefits outweigh my fears.

The other night, Shannon had a dinner party at our house where I met Ryan, who writes for Wired News. He told me about an MIT project that is faking GPS functionality in an experiment where the data gleaned from tracking participating cell phones are used to predict users' everyday behavior. I'm not sure how useful that information is to anyone (So what if they know I'm probably going to the gym right now?), but it's interesting that they were able to do it without GPS.

Ryan also suggested, after talking with me for awhile, that I might enjoy reading Reason Magazine. After taking a quick look at their website, I think he's right. And he didn't even need a PHD from MIT to help him predict that. Although I'm sure it wouldn't have hurt.

Retrospect

We have all had that moment when we were first introduced to the Internet when the sheer vastness of the available information sinks into our understanding, and we realize there's no way we'll ever really get our minds around how much is really out there. I had that moment in my college computer lab at ASU around 1994. I was working on a business school paper and stumbled on an early version of Netscape and a very early Yahoo!

Since then, companies like Google have undertaken the mammoth effort of indexing every useful web page into their enormous databases in an attempt to put as much of that vastness at our fingertips as possible.

I've noticed that Google has been taking stabs into other dimensions of life, like indexing every word spoken on television and mapping the entire earth.

My mind got wondering the other day at what could be next. I thought, "What if I could Google everything that ever happened in my life?"

Then I realized that the technology for that isn't too far away. We now have video cameras in cell phones, and key chain storage devices. Presumably, someone has the technical know how to store at least audio, and maybe some crude video in a wearable device (hopefully not as goofy as those Star Wars cell phone ear pieces). Pair that with the latest in speech-to-text technology, and Poof! You have a set of documents which can already easily be indexed by Google Desktop or packaged into a nice slick friendly home application or maybe even an Outlook add in.

What would life be like for people who really did record everything in their lives? Would they spend time watching themselves in their own personal reality shows? Would spouses pressure each other to record everything to keep tabs on one another? Would people get to see themselves the way the rest of the world does and use this technology as a tool to improve their behavior? What kinds of legal battles might occur over the use and rebroadcast of one's own life experiences. Do we own those?

I think we'll see something like this in the not so distant future. I'm not sure I'll be an early adopter, but I'm always very curious to see what's next on the horizon.

Simple

Hurray. I have a new book to read entitled Freakonomics. Once again I'll be slurping up new knowledge on what is normally mindless bus stop down time.

The book is written by some young, hot shot economist named Steven Levitt. I'm not sure what kind of story will evolve here or if it is just a collection of things that make you go, "Hmm." But I already like the way he thinks.

In his first observation, he explained a previously mysterious reason for a giant drop in this country's crime rate in the late 1990's. He very simply took one of the largest correlates for people turning to a life of crime, being an unwanted child, and matched it with a historical event that drastically and immediately changed the number of new unwanted children, Roe vs. Wade. So simple, but no one ever explained it before.

I like it. Good start.