Project Dresden

I know we're not supposed to laugh at our own jokes, but once in a while I find something I forgot I had written, and if it makes me laugh to see it again, I feel like I must have done something right.

Project Dresden

Heroes

(Originally written July 27, 2000)

My son, almost 4 years old, has developed an interest in Batman and Spiderman. He's starting to have heroes. I think that's neat. I started thinking about my childhood heroes - Batman and Spiderman being two of them - and then I started to wonder about people who for some reason maybe didn't have heroes as children. My first thought from there was those teenagers who shot up their schools. Did those kids have heroes?

See, I was exposed to violent media as a child. Lots of violent media, probably way too much violent media. That's why I don't buy the argument that video violence drives these kids. If that were true, I'd be hiding in Canada right now with a 12 body count on my record. So what made me different? Why didn't I snap?

Let's see. I was exposed to video violence, I hated high school, I thought there were plenty of people there who deserved to "be taken down a notch." But I never did it. Never even considered it. I think the difference was, I also had heroes from an early age. Even though my heroes were "action heroes" and sometimes did their own violent acts, there was always a code of conduct driving the heroes, determining when it was time for them to use violent force.

I don't consider myself a hero, but I have always considered myself one of the good guys because I admired my heroes and wanted to emulate them. My heroes gave me a belief that even in dark times, the good guys win in the end. My heroes gave me hope.

The good guys don't inflict themselves on the innocent. Even the not-so-innocent ones that torment the hero. There was a scene that ended up being cut from Star Wars, where Luke's "friends" at Toshi Station were mean as shit to him. He did not blow them away. The good guys only use deadly force when the bad guys use it first. Even the heroes with a "black streak" in them, like Han Solo or Batman, still answer to a code of morality. Han Solo is a particularly good example because his moral code became stronger as the story went on, until at the end he's volunteering to sacrifice himself for something other than a profit motive.

(As an aside, I was really irritated when Star Wars Special Edition changed the film so that Greedo shot first. Even as a kid, I knew Han Solo's life was on the line and he had reason to shoot first.)

So, did those Columbine kids have heroes? I'd like to know, but I would guess they didn't. They obviously felt unhappy and tormented, and without heroes to anchor them to the good guys and give them hope, they did whatever they felt they wanted, or needed. They didn't have the tools to withstand and control the darkness inside us - yeah, all of us - and ultimately it got them.

Make sure your kids have heroes. Make sure you have heroes. Be one of the good guys.

Tonight's homework: choose the future of computing

Compare and contrast:

The Web's The Place by Tim Bray

iPhone's AJAX SDK: No, thank you by Wil Shipley

Be Seeing You!

When I was in 2nd grade we got our first computer at home, an Apple ][+. One of the first softwares my dad bought to go with it was a game called "The Prisoner", loosely based on the Patrick McGoohan TV show of the same name. This was a very early game, a strange mish-mash of hi-res, lo-res, and text graphics.

One of the more distinctive traits of the game was that whenever someone "talked" to you - talking consisted of capital letters crawling across a window of lo-res block graphics - each letter was accompanied by ringing the computer's "bell" at varying pitches. I think they were going for some effect like the school teacher in Peanuts but the Apple's bell was better at making higher pitched sounds so that's what they used. The effect was like - well, like nothing else I can think of. If you ever had an Apple ][ you probably know what I mean.

Anyway, just like in the TV show, everyone on the Island ended their conversations with a cheery "Be seeing you!" (It was irony, see, because they were all prisoners on the Island - you're not going anywhere far.) Every conversation ended with "Be seeing you" and the pattern of the bells was always the same.

Every once in a while when I'm talking to someone in IM one of us will say "Be seeing you" and oddly enough the pacing of your average touch typist exactly matches the printing speed of that old Prisoner game. As soon as I start to see those letters I always always hear the bells in my head. I'm sure I'll hear them until the day I die.

Weird.

Macbook Thin == iTablet beta

Well, we didn't get an iTablet, we got Macbook Mini. Except it's more like a "Macbook Thin." Which is interesting because making it Thin instead of Mini addresses Bill Manning's complaints about UMPCs, which I thought were spot-on.

I wasn't predicting a tablet, just hoping for one. The Macbook Thin is a great product for the "not me" demographic. There's a lot of neat tech packed into the thing but I don't have a need or a desire for one. I will stand by one thing I said, which is that there's a lot of overlap in the components that go into the Thin and the components that would go into an iTablet. Imagine breaking off the screen half of the Thin, replacing the keyboard with a 13 inch touchscreen, and you'd have a pretty kickass tablet. The internals of the two products would be pretty similar.

Right before Macworld there was a rumor that a tablet is in development, but wasn't going to be ready by January. (This rumor persists, and is gathering strength.) What if the Macbook Thin was actually a "Plan B" product, when it became clear that the tablet wasn't ready, conceived both to make some money, and also get some of this superthin tech out into the field and shake out the bugs?

One thing that is scary about the Thin, relative to my tablet obsession, is the price. If the high-end Thin is $3000, how much might the tablet cost? $4000? $5000? That's too much to pay for a device which is by design an ancillary device to another computer you already own. Maybe that in itself was the reason for delaying the tablet - getting the Thin into production will also allow them to ramp up production of components, streamline the production lines, and bring down costs, so that the eventual tablet will hit a reasonable price point.