Tag Archives: technology

Enjoying the new Caller ID app

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How many of you have downloaded the new Caller ID app?

When I was a kid, the phone rang and we answered it.

Eventually, we got an answering machine that used small audiocassette tapes, one for the message a caller would hear and one to take messages from callers.  With time, we learned to let the answering machine accept the call so we could decide whether to pick up the phone or let the caller decide to leave a message.

Years later, Caller ID became widely available, meaning we could then look at a digital display of the incoming phone number and associated name, decide on that information whether to pick up the phone or let the answering machine, now also digital, take the call.

With the latest Caller ID app, oddly enough named TMI4U2Day2, uses a database that holds all possible phone combinations and searches the Internet constantly for relevant information associated with a phone number, including name, address, public profiles on popular social media, reviews (mainly for business phone numbers), legal info and other knowledge you might want to know about an incoming call, displaying a summary on the app front page when a call comes in on your smartphone, app-enabled deskphone, digital satellite television or Internet TV appliance.

My favourite part is the add-on, which allows you to use a voice recognition system to track down the anonymous identity of telemarketers.

The last couple of days have been fun, what with political-funded pollsters calling to get my opinion about news headlines where, within seconds, I can respond to the caller with his/her name, prompting many to hang up while I spout off their personal information such as recent marriage problems nuanced in family facebook support posts and rambling blog entries.

I want a business to call where I can surprise the person talking to me that s/he is part of a class action lawsuit that will ruin the reputation of anyone that has worked for the company and/or its affiliates.

I can’t wait until the next nonprofit organisation calls to get my undesired donation to help the International Ingrown Toenail Research Centre or Television Cooking Show Addicts.

“Hello?”

“Hi, there!  This is the International Ingrow…”

“Juhgitframnithwqa, is that you?”

“Huh?  How do you know my name?”

“Did you really just tell your boyfriend that his getting your sister preggers is going to put your marriage plans on hold?”

“Where did you get that information?”

“Wait.  Don’t you want to tell me the sad story about a lonely boy who’s afraid to go out into public because of his embarrassing ingrown toenails and…”

“Stop right there!  I want to know how you know me.”

“Oh, come on.  EVERYBODY knows what happened.  In fact, the United Nations is holding a referendum on your boyfriend problem this afternoon…”

CLICK!

Check your app store today.  And hurry!  Only the first 10 million downloads will include a free nonshareable version of TMI4U2Day2.  The rest of you will have to donate one of your kidneys to get this add-on that all your friends, real and virtual, will be blabbering on about in social media outlets in this solar system, making you look so, like, yesterday.

Re-versed Psychology

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A black fly taunts me, buzzing in close, just long enough for me to take a mis-aimed swipe, and then flaps its little numb-brained membraned wings up into the hard-to-reach edge of the intersection of the two trapezoidal picture frame windows of our cathedral-ceilinged living room.

Translate that sentence into the language of the colonists in the depths of the ice lakes of Space Base 45Zed9Alpha.

They haven’t seen flies there in over 20,000,000 generations, or about two years to the rest of you reading this on Earth.

My parents and their clones singing for supper -- whoohoo!

You see, we populated this solar system so far back in time with energised molecules that you’ve come to believe either you evolved from dust clouds in the formation of the solar system or some Being-related faith-based system created you.

You just don’t get it, and through consultation with the “professional” couch-talk, tablet PC scribbling, overeducated psychological psychiatrists — supposedly fellow members of your species — I’ve come to the conclusion that you never will.

Look at it this way — you’re a beehive, God is dead, the European Space Agency is just as clueless about the EU as the rest of us, Wolfgang is a name (not a gang sign (or is it?)), and if I could just see one tree leaf blow across the Martian plains, I’d go for a walk looking for another, instead of sitting in this space habitat waiting for my parents to assign me a job to do in this kid-free exploratory zone.

Send a male and female to Mars without birth control technology and I am the result!

So much for your modern science.

Now where is that nuclear fusion experiment I invented last night and was playing with this morning…?

Time to obviously send messages in open secrets under broad daylight to members of my gang to cause another prominent person getting in the way of our agenda to die of a “natural” heart attack.

If only you fools knew who we were.  Hahahahahaha….

If only I knew how to tell you…sigh…

What I wouldn’t give to hear a single severe thunderstorm warning on this planet!

Fashion Forward

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Our friends in the Mob like to fund motorsports events, equating the smoke-belching monster races to gladiator events of old.

They passed on the word this afternoon that they approve the following fashion statement and will hire the designers to handsew space uniforms with child labour to show the real company mergers the Mob has planned to keep the general population buying goods at rock-bottom, low-quality prices.

Fortunate Drawers

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Sitting here in a café in a small Turkmenistan town, watching caravan after caravan go by (what you Americans might call tractor-trailer rigs), smelling jet fuel and gunpowder, I figure this is part of the forward base action I was expected to report to my superiours in a conference call later this afternoon.

At first, I complained about this satellite phone, looking like a geek at a debutante party, or rather the rich geek father depositing his little princess at her coming-out party (and yes, you can take that for all it’s worth, these days).

But looking at those guys across the street cradling their smartphones covered with acronyms trying to get a good signal, I say being the sore thumb at an M.C. Hammer hardware store is a good thing, for once.

Besides, I’ve got a friend who carries her lucky knickers just for me.

And I’ve got another friend, El Presidente, who thinks about nothing but al Qaeda and schooling in Sunday afternoon football smackdowns to keep my thoughts warm at night, too.

I wasn’t always like this, sipping stale coffee, spreading badly-worded rumours from underpaid government copywriters, but then maybe I was…we just called it primary school back then.

That’s okay.  It beats sitting at home, not making any money there, either, watching the television news or surfing the Internet for useless tidbits like every other secret organisation in the “business.”

Where was I?  Oh yeah, spiking my coffee with homemade hooch.

You see, in the hinterlands of the former Soviet Union, radioactive material is as easy to get as rabies from the raccoons I used to…well, let’s not go into boring details at this juncture in the punctuated story.

But hey, when a guy gets lonely…never mind.

Anyway, I was sitting on a crate of rotten eggs, unable to distinguish the smell of my ripe, unwashed body from that of chickens that’ll never live to see the light of day reflecting off a machete swinging toward their heads, when it hit me.

The kid down the street, always pestering me to call a tobacco shoppe down the street from his cousin in London and asking if they have Princess Edward in a can, looked at this blog I was texting with my calloused thumbs (calloused, mind you, from texting — what else did you think caused the callousness?  I mean, calloused hands.).

He asked if I had a more interesting writing style, after he’d thrown the uranium/plutonium ball at my noggin.

Hey, that reminds me.  Maybe I’ve got a gold mine at my feet.  Either that, or the pyrite the panhandler pretended to think was gold and sold it only to me, his best friend in the whole wide world, if not the block in which we both live, at a bargain basement we were using to brew the hooch I give out to unsuspecting tourists before I remove their overweight wallets.

Seriously, what have I got that you don’t?

All this nuclear fissable material.  No, that’s the Coke gurgling in my stomach that’s fissable.

It’s the fissionable stuff I’m dreaming about right now.

You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Yeah, you know it.  Re-activating Project Orion.

We’ll just declare Turkmenistan off-limits and use it to launch the Mars mission my fellow members of the Committee are dreaming with me.

We’ll rename the country ChernobylTwo or something like that.

We can put this whole “war” to contain nuclear proliferation to a rest and just keep starving the Iranian people to death while their leaders bask in the personal glory of the sacrifice of their people to show them old episodes of “Who’s The Boss?”

Can you think of worse torture than that?

Rumour has it the last thing that Andrew World’s-worst-job-as-overpaid-angry-man Breitbart saw before his heart acted up was Alyssa Milano pretending to act.

Let that be a lesson to you, kids.  Don’t get your hopes up.  And further more, don’t listen to a word your clueless parents have to say.  They were terrible students in school and the only reason they’re doing well is that their bosses were even worse so the whole adult scheme is to pretend that everyone is smarter than they really are.

Of course, you kids have no clue what I’m talking about because, as we’re supposed to know, genetic research proves that our species has actually gotten worse, our purity as animals watered down with talks about backyard BBQ parties, easy-to-hack security alarm systems and other ways we deny we’re overdressed members of the fight-or-flight club.

Almost time for the conference call.

Go back to looking at your cute kitten videos and sports scores.

I’ve got a nuclear bomb powered rocketship to promote!

The saga of global management continues…

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The Committee revealed today that it had convinced U.S. military leaders to show a soft side, a sympathetic position in its support of our species.

The military will soon divert resources to stop global warming by strategically triggering bombs and other military-grade devices underground, causing magma pockets to combine into giant high-pressure chambers under volcanoes around the globe.

Then, in a series of timed explosions, the military will set off volcanic eruptions that will spew ash plumes tens of kilometres into the atmosphere, blocking the Sun’s overheating power, thus reducing the greenhouse effect for several decades, allowing our species to maintain the status quo in current crop allocation ratios.

Negotiations with the airline industries over disrupted flight paths are ongoing at this time.

Meanwhile, the Committee is trying to address population growth issues, and may resort to taking “excess” babies from overproductive families and training the children to become future workers on offworld farms, easily expendable in the big picture, in other words.

The sooner the babies can be launched, the less fuel used and the better they will acclimate to the gravitational forces and emotional stresses of life on our Moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies.

The Committee is soliciting ideas for the perfect surrogate mothers to tend to these babies as they reach prime working age, around six or seven, and then will not need “formation years” nurturing any longer, converting the surrogate mothers to worker bots on the farms.

Usted es un colombiano experto en SEO, ¿no? Por lo tanto, hermanos, os encomiendo.

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Here lies an outlier

As we get to know more and more about each other, we will grow more comfortable accepting each other’s subcultural differences, appreciating how the definition of success can vary so widely that it almost seems impossible seven billion varieties point to the same thing: our species’ survival and growth.

Yes, it includes fear, crime, ecosystem disasters, economic failures and myriad ways in which the universe we live does not always point toward our survival and growth.

Dust particles — small fibers, short hair, unidentifiable tiny, twisted objects — seemingly oblivious to gravity, float through a beam of sunshine propped up between the writing desk and the dirty window.

A few days ago, I visited with some friends whose father recently died.  My friends and I had spent a few years together in primary and secondary school over 30 years ago.  One friend I hadn’t seen in at least 35 years.

Needless to say, we knew little about one another except what we have seen in the past couple of years while sharing space on a computer server farm spread across data centers around the world dedicated to an online social media website called facebook.

In other words, we had little to say to each other in person that we didn’t already know, or should have remembered seeing in our online personality profile.

The moment was there for comfort at the time of loss of the family patriarch.

Soothing words.

Fond memories of our youth spent under the guidance of a chemical research/sales engineer and literal/figurative father figure.

I cough, sending dust particles on a swirling dance out of and back into the sunlight, which then disappears with clouds passing overhead, reappearing a few minutes later at a new angle, attached to the bright, yellow glob amidst the blue-painted dome high above.

An airplane swoops and circles the patch of sky nearby, making the sounds of the television playing a movie called “The Longest Day” seem live and in real 3D viewing/listening closeness.

After visiting with the friends, my wife and I returned to her mother’s house, continued our sorting through physical reminders of my wife’s mother, father and brother, all deceased.

My wife’s nuclear family is no more, except in her memories.

Her brother’s widow and children still live.  She has cousins spread around the globe.  And her family by marriage — my blood relatives, including nuclear family (father, mother, sister), as well as extended family (nieces, nephew, cousins, aunt, uncle, etc.).

My friends’ father lived for 84 365-day, 24-hour cycles around our local star.

As the planet spun, my friends’ family influenced those they met, all of them tied to Earth by gravity, the curvature of spacetime, we surmise.

We can see the familial influence through the eyes of the intersection of sets of states of energy, adding meme upon meme, including the word “meme,” to build physical representations of ideas like “idea,” to arrive at the point where schoolmates meet 30+ years later to reminisce about a few years spent in growing up together toward adulthood.

Did any of the dust particles floating in the air at the church where, due to one death, we met to talk about good times in childhood attach themselves to me and then re-enter the airspace in the sunbeam not far from this computer?

What about the particles I can’t readily see, such as water molecules, bacteria, dead skin cells or other microscopically miniscule minutiae?

We are connected in ways we rarely take time to notice, if we can see the connections at all.

How do I explain a blog post composed only of pictures to a blind person who uses a Braille keyboard and automatic audible reader?

How do I explain wireless radio pathways between a notebook computer and wireless router to people who can’t feel or don’t communicate signals at a wavelength of 0.125 m or about 5 inches?

Although… you know, some people say they can feel 2.4 GHz radio waves and other phenomena they claim causes them radiowave/EMF sickness.

But let’s get back to the global story of our lives, where financial gurus want to prop up a system that is no longer a viable connection between the macro and microeconomic levels…

Gusset up the place

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To be a part of the moment in which we are all a part of the moment…

To read reports written in opinionated manners that one has no interest in perpetuating, personally, but understanding that the flow of the river of life — especially the main channel — does not take into account individual water molecules electrically and/or chemically attracted to a deep pool off to the side…

Gravity a mystery and yet as obvious as a changing social form of the silent treatment, such as someone refusing to respond to emails or texts…

Accepting the fact that belief in one method of thought processing is primarily what we tend to do, who we tend to be…

A one-atom “transistor” — when we do create a subatomic version?  And what comes after that?

A poem, a short story, a nail, a truss — if all is humour to this author, except when everything is not, what is anything?

The word “supercomputer” will fade into another word after supercomputer becomes ubiquitous, commoditised, superfluous…

How many people are office workers, and of them, how many long for a viewbicle?

Are you rewriting language in your image, mashing up ideas into combined letters, words and phrases that only you can understand?

Or are you thinking more universally, writing for moments past, present and future?

While others, call them A-prime, perpetuate social constructs with which they feel most comfortable identifying themselves, I contemplate the social construct of me tied to A-prime with whom we live in our time here together and what it makes me, B-notB, if I am walking the path of the wanderer who lives inside and outside of time-based social constructs.

I am humbled that people who call themselves nonconforming individualists would want to link to me in modern online social circles but I have to be careful not to allow the part of me that is the chameleon personality to blend in with nonconforming social constructs (yes, the irony is obvious — “nonconforming” and “social” seem to contradict each other) that aren’t my own.

To compute trends that will not occur in my lifetime evokes, if not provokes, odd feelings.

To know the flow of social change is often slower than we perceive…sigh…

What of the person who thought thousands of years ago of another person walking the surface of our Moon?  And of the next person who wished to walk on the surface?  And the next one who dreamt of the method getting there?  And the one who wrote a plausible story about getting there?  The one who filmed a fantasy sequence of encounters on the surface? And finally the person who first stepped on our Moon’s surface?

Is computing the trends enough?  Do I have to experience them in the moment with everyone else to experience them in my thoughts?

And do I have to share them with you/us to make the trends happen or remain silent and let them happen without an iota of influence these words will have, spreading first into a network of nonconformers and out into the rest of our shared subcultures?

What if I hold the pebble in my hand and put it in my pocket instead of skipping it across the pond?

I once met a homeless person who said he regularly talked with God and that God had recently told him all people who declawed their animals, a desecration of God’s creatures, were doomed to hell.  I told a friend I consider a devout Christian this story and he told me that God gave us dominion over all of God’s creatures so he didn’t believe that the homeless person really had talked with God.

From the scenario, I discovered that we elevate ideas to the forefront of our thoughts to strengthen our social constructs.

The homeless person and my friend have valid points, depending on whether I believe God regularly talks to people or that God gave our species dominion over every species.

Or both.

Our subcultures are contradictory, by default.

And I, this set of states of energy, consider myself alive, which separates me from that which is not alive, whatever that means, because alive/unalive is a barrier not easily perceived in an ecosystem in which atoms mix and molecules reform constantly.

I am the Wondering Wanderer, the Wandering Wonderer, not here to convince others to align their thought patterns with mine or the trends I’ve computed.

I observe.  That’s who I am.

I see us, no matter where we are in cultural subsets, squarely in the middle of one subset or spread across many, and how we interact, which intuitively and computationally imply future moments of interaction we call trends.

Some trends I would like to see happen in my lifetime, some trends I know will happen but I wish they won’t, and some trends I hope happen regardless of the status of my set of states of energy as living or nonliving.

For instance, will a person sewing images in a gusset establish a trend of decorated gussets that spawns whole industries of underwear fashion and function?  And how will that affect international business relationships of the 2020s?

Will I return to stop referring to the words “politics” and “government,” letting them meld with the word “business,” as they should?

After all, government is just a business run on coercing, cajoling, encouraging a large group of people to jointly pay for services they want on large- and small-scale levels but wouldn’t normally pay for individually.  Kind of like business in general, n’est pas?

You Can’t Say That on Television

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How many social media networks do you belong to?

I don’t keep up with the trend in online social networks so, a few years ago, I was surprised when a former secondary school girlfriend of mine invited me to a couple of social networks I’d never heard of.

The networks were geared toward schoolaged children, with a lot of the online checkboxes, smiley faces, etc., that we used to exchange in notes passed in classrooms.

I suppose the networks still exist, that the demand is still there, but since I neither have children nor am of schoolage (6-18 years) anymore, those parts of society aren’t of interest to me.

Unless…

Unless, that is, there’s data there worth mining to see where the leaders of tomorrow are going to take society and what the followers expect of their leaders.

Should mainstream media and/or the major blogging/tweeting community members pay attention to these feeder streams of age-specific social networks?

Or are they already buzzing about them and I’ve missed the symbol sets, the codewords, that go with those subcultures?

I never read the teen celebrity-following magazines when I was a kid.  I was more likely to read a technology-based magazine, instead.

I passed notes in class, though, starting around age 8.  No, I actually passed notes in my first year of school, when I was 5 to 6 years of age, but they were mainly drawings of cars, boats and submarines that I shared with other guys.  It wasn’t until age 8 that I started passing love notes to girls.

In the U.S., I see a trend where the candidates for U.S. President are attempting to send love notes to women in an adult sort of way, one type for married/attached heterosexual women, one type for single heterosexual women and another type for nonheterosexual women, attached and/or single.

What kind of social networks did the candidates and the women to whom they’re sending signals use when they were kids?

Answer that question and you’ll know the political trends of the next decade.

Meanwhile, I return to the technological trends of this decade predicted by the view 1000 years from now, before seeing what the Committee wants to discuss at the next meeting…

A nod to Andrea, who attended Lee University.  I hope you meet the person with whom you want to spend your remaining days on this planet, reinforcing the great life you’ve had already.

How to be a book author in 25 years or less

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[Personal notes – feel free to skip]

Having written and published several books, a few that actually made me money, I enjoy reading about the lives of  authors/novelists, what motivates them and got them started.

Take this fellow, “Americana,” for instance.

Like so many others before him, he is discovering the joy of dropping out of the rat race.

Leisure time.

How many young people, not just including trust fund babies, have fostered a luxury of life without the noise and haste of mass media?

Can you think of a book you read that talked about getting away from it all?

Isn’t this idea an odd thought, that one has gotten out of the hustle and bustle of daily living only to return to the life by proxy through writing about it?

What about those who live the life but don’t write about it?

Look around you.  Do you live amongst those who aren’t spending their time constantly connected and checking their online community?

I look at me.  Most days, the majority of conversation I have with any beings takes place between my wife and me in the mornings and evenings, the rest of the day spent sitting here or feeding/petting the cats, if I’m not taking a walk in the woods or riding a bicycle along a local river trail.

Close this notebook computer and I’m virtually cut off from the rest of the world.

Just me and my books and cats warming my lap.

In other words, happiness.

I was like the writer, Steve Tuttle, not too long ago — in meetings, on the phone, checking emails, creating/modifying spreadsheets, traveling across the globe, on a constant lookout for the latest breaking news in state-of-the-art technological advances that would enhance or greatly disrupt the business models which increased my personal wealth.

Then one day it hit me.  I was no longer working for myself.  I was working for a system of beliefs which were not my own but were given to me to accept as my own through years of primary/secondary/postsecondary education.

I was not interested in buying ever more expensive cars, eating in more luxurious restaurants or negotiating bigger and bigger deals.

I was interested in nurturing me.

But at the same time, I was interested in eliminating the expanding personality of me.

By stepping out of the need to participate in the social network of our species, I have stepped into a zone where one can observe patterns and predict trends because most of us follow a script we wrote together as a society a long time ago, are rewriting every day, in fact.

Which reminds me, how do empty-nesters feel after their lives, which were so wrapped around raising their little chickadees, suddenly end when the chicks grow wings and fly away?  Is it freedom or torture or just sheer boredom?

Just 13959 days until an event occurs that is chronicled in this blog.

Reality is only seven letters.  Which seven letters do you want to be?

As a funhouse mirror, I reflect both the good and bad in us, trying to make us think about the seeds we’re planting today for the trends we’ll follow tomorrow.

For instance, is there a possible resurgence in ultraleftwingism, followers of a group similar to the Socialist Party of old, workers who no longer feel “loved” by the corporate owners/leaders that employ them and rake in a lot more money through legislative-friendly policies that border on the exploitative?

Or, will this, solving the good business generation gap, be the new trend?

Finally, are states starting to see the light and will remove more nonviolent criminals from the prison system?

I’m willing to look backward and forward to find the trends that make my life of participating in the online community worth perpetuating.

Otherwise, the repetition of repetition gets repetitive, creating/mashing up offensive and nonoffensive jokes/observations/storylines to fend off ennui, all in the simple hope that we’ll see through the repetition and make a concentrated effort where/when our species will be the one to establish a colony of sustainable Earth-based lifeforms out of this planetary system.

It doesn’t matter to me what the people look like who inhabit the offworld colony or even if they’re totally “human” in today’s sense of the world, including cyborgs who live amongst us.  The goal is the same: hedging our bets, taking one egg out of the basket and placing it in a surrogate nest as far away from Earth as possible.

Everything else is recycling Earth’s resources over and over, no matter how much fun or interesting it may be, including this blog, the books I’ve written and the retail establishments I visit (and have visited, for which I owe a debt of gratitude to pay with mentioning them here again soon).

And if we determine that a lifeform different than us, such as a simple one-celled organism, has a higher chance of survival, especially when we’ve searched a celestial body and found no lifeform that we may endanger with ours or any other we bring, then I’m willing to “plant” that organism in hopes that it will seed the solar system.

Call me a farmer whose field is this local area of the galaxy, hoping that in the current 200-million-year window of opportunity, we can hop, skip and jump our way, in one form or another, to the next safe agricultural zone.

In the meantime, there’s the matter of dark matter to resolve, a whole field, a vast tract of land, on which we haven’t broken ground yet.