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Revenge of the Febs

The natives are restless. I think we're deep into The Febs.

About a hundred years ago, around the time when I worked for the Beckley Register-Herald, Neale Clark coined a phrase — "The Febs" — describing the doldrums of February. It's the time of year when you're reaching your wit's end with winter, and in Neale's own words,

Your kids walk around bumping into the walls and can't seem to focus their minds on anything for longer than thirty seconds. The cat also has sunk into a dismal sort of stupor.

Symptoms are general unrest in the household, bickering among smaller children, fistfights among adults. There is little relief, other than Valentines Day. Presidents Day only tends to aggravate the symptoms, given the fact that certain agencies get a day off and you don't. Added to this are the inevitable snowstorms....

That phrase has stayed with me over the years because it fits like a wet toboggan. And we're there now. There's a grumpy unrest in the air, people are being snippy, and it feels like it's going to last much longer than the singular month for which it's named. And ah, yes, the snowstorms.

So the one we were told was coming this weekend was a dud (at least it was in Charleston), and I heard the phrase "Rockefeller Blizzard" tossed around a few times. Another is supposed to blow through starting tomorrow. That is, if you could call it a snowstorm. What do you call it when it's not snow that's falling, but instead a mixture of snow, ice, sleet, rain, and slush? The word "mess" comes to mind, and it looks like we're going to get several inches of "mess" between now and Wednesday.

I feel for the people who got hit bad with the weekend storm. Keyser, WV got 32 inches, as did Dulles Airport. DC in general got absolutely hammered. I think it's weird that Charleston got maybe an inch of snow and that's it. I don't think we're going to dodge the bullet again tomorrow, though.

Twenty more days and The Febs come to an end. It can't come soon enough.

Definitely not a learning environment

Here's one last picture from Chuck E. Cheese last night.

This is one of the low-end video games offered by Chuck E. Cheese. Oops, looks like they misspelled a word in huge letters all over the screen. Is bad spelling bad English? I don't know, but it's kind of funny.

And Google returns a surprisingly high number of results for the "word" continute. Ok, maybe it's more scary than it is funny.

The E in Chuck E. Cheese means economics

I'm back from an evening celebrating Andrew's fifth birthday at Chuck E. Cheese, or as Tim Wilson would say, Chuck E. Cheese Hell.

Actually it wasn't too bad. I don't remember the last time I was at Chuck's, but I do remember the pizza tasting roughly like cardboard that time. This evening it tasted a little more like pizza. Which, of course, means they used slightly more pizza-flavored spray on it this time than they probably should have. And, that probably means there will be some firings after the weekend's birthday parties and such are finished. It'll probably be light this weekend anyway because of Super Bowl XLIV.

Now, on to the casual observations and what-not, since that's what I do.

What a racket. I'm talking about the games. They operate on a token system, which means you part with your US dollars at the border and get them converted to tokens which are worthless anywhere else. Kind of like visiting Great Britain. The exchange rate is 1 dollar to 5 tokens, so from that perspective, it's kind of like visiting Denmark.

For each token, you get to play a game. Those of you who remember Aladdin's Castle will be familiar with the concept. The big difference there, though, is the games in Aladdin's Castle were actually decent. All the games at Chuck E. Cheese are third- or fourth-rate video games you would never ever see anywhere else. It wouldn't surprise me if they were made exclusively for the franchise. I mean, seriously... The Maze of the Kings? What the fuck? I played this one, and the gameplay is about as exciting as cutting the grass, if cutting the grass only took you three minutes and left you wondering why you even bothered.

Some of the games are more in line with "games of chance" at a carnival or at the state fair, and in exchange for your token, you get some tickets in return. The better you do at the game, the more tickets you receive. The tickets are even more worthless than the tokens. The tokens at least look, feel, and sound like money — and might even fool a vending machine here and there (or maybe a Dane). The tickets are paper, look almost identical to raffle tickets at a bingo parlor, are easily torn or lost, and certainly wouldn't be redeemable on future visits. I don't know what the exchange rate is at this point, but I can assure you we're deep into Bernie Madoff territory.

So once you have your tickets, you take them to a counting machine which basically eats up the tickets one by one and spits out a receipt when it's finished indicating how many tickets you turned in. I'm going to assume the machine is accurate, which may or may not be a fair assumption, but I'm also going to assume the Chuck E. Cheese staff doesn't care if it is or not, and I think that's an even fairer assumption. Anyway, you get to turn in all your tickets for a single slip of paper. I'll admit, that's pretty damned handy — one slip of paper is a lot easier to lug around than five hundred little tickets.

After all the tokens are spent and you've got your receipts in hand, you march up to the exchange counter where you can trade them for prizes. And the more tickets you have tallied up on your receipts, the better the prizes you can pick from. How cool is that? The top prize was something called a 4D Space Shuttle model, which retails for $135 at Amazon.com and can be yours if you somehow collect 10,000 Chuck E. Cheese tickets. You've got to be really hardcore if you're going for that prize. Andrew turned in 317 tickets, which they rounded off to 310 (more fuzzy math). For that, he got a felt picture and a few markers to color it, and one grape lollipop.

All in all, though, not too bad. Despite most of the games being shit, Andrew seemed to enjoy himself. He specifically asked if he could play one of the worst games — even worse than The Maze of the Kings — four times, so I gave him the four tokens and let him go at it. How many times do you turn five, after all?

Why print is dead

I've spent way too much time today reading the website / blog of Dave Winer, the inventor of modern RSS and podcasting, and one of the earliest bloggers. His site has been operational as a blog since 1997, and his archives date back to 1994 — probably something you could classify as a blog despite the lack of the term in those early days of the web. And he's got many key moments in the web's evolution recorded. Watching the web evolve over the last fifteen years has been roughly equivalent to watching civilization progress from the Bronze Age to the early days of spaceflight.

Winer's site is one of those I stumble across now and again, but not one I regularly follow. That's not because it's not interesting. It is interesting... plenty of good stuff to be found there, a good bit of it related to blogging, media creation, and technology — but certainly not all of it.

One of the area bloggers recently referred to me as "new" to the scene. I chuckled at that characterization and was not offended by it in the slightest. Because in some sense, aren't we all somewhat "new" to the scene? Sure, there's a history to blogging, but it's not a very long one in terms of what it really is — another means of communication. Though it is a revolutionary one, as revolutionary as the printing press, maybe more since literally anyone can do it. The printing press emerged in 1454, about 550 years before blogs became popular enough that mainstream media sat up and paid attention.

Which brings me to the topic of social media experts. I have a bad habit of pointing out when the emperor is wearing no clothes, and even though that usually pisses off the emperor, I do it anyway. Whether or not this is one of those instances remains to be seen, I guess, but I have a funny feeling it might be.

Can somebody please define the phrase "social media expert" for me? Is it even possible to be an expert in a field which is less than a decade old? If so, what are some examples of credentials which could make it possible?

I submit that content is king — always has been, always will be. But people don't want stale content, which is why traditional print newspapers and magazines are struggling. Anything involving fusing carbon particles onto wood pulp will be instantly dated, even more so if it takes 24 hours, a week, a month to get it delivered to the information consuming public. It's not a matter of getting more advertising to make up for the revenue from lost subscribers. It's more a matter of changing the way your brain works.

Revenue is no longer the driving force here. Information is. People are going to naturally flock to where they can get it, and the delivery mechanisms are merely tools of the trade. Kids in high school know how to use them effectively, and so do moms, grandparents, and soccer coaches. But the reality is we're all "new" to the scene... so the best way to learn is to just jump in and play.

If you're paying an expert to show you how it all works, you seriously don't get it and are going to get slaughtered anyhow.

Doing the math

"I happen to know that in the future I will not have the slightest use for algebra, and I speak from experience."

Peggy Sue Got Married

Here, in order, are the events of the last few days which have revolved around this quote:

• Helping Katie with some Algebra homework, and watching her try to figure out the proper steps to take when the problem looked slightly different than the ones before.
• Remembering figuring such things out myself when I was her age.
• Realizing I'd not needed to use algebra in a very long time.
• Wondering if she would reach a point in her math classes where I would no longer be able to help her, something which happened to me when I was in school.
• The next day at work, discussing this event with a coworker, who quipped that it sounded a lot like the line from Peggy Sue Got Married.
• Today, being asked by another coworker if I knew how to find the lengths of sides on a triangle if the angles were known.
• Realizing that, once upon a time, I did indeed have this knowledge... but apparently no longer do without aid from the Great Google.
• Deciding it wouldn't be long at all until Katie's math classes surpass my fading memory.

That new Apple thingy

The days of mystery and speculation are over, and the iPad is out. It's kind of neat, I guess... basically it's an iPod Touch with a big screen, or looking from the opposite direction, a dumbed-down MacBook with a touch screen. If anything, it's an attractive device — not surprising for Apple.

It's going to be interesting to see how this develops over the next year or two. I think we're reaching a point where it doesn't matter much what kind of physical device you use to access your data and move it around. It's now completely possible to save things "out there" and retrieve them wherever you are. I know at least one person who's confessed to me his phone is becoming his primary computer. And I find myself able to do a lot more on my phone than I ever expected possible, even without a data plan. (Really, who needs a data plan when WiFi is everywhere, even in Charleston, WV?)

I don't think the iPad is aimed at the computing elite. I think the target market is Joe and Jane Consumer, the ones who basically want to look at pictures, check email, and poke around on the Internet. For a lot of people, that honestly is enough. The iPad might work for that, assuming there's really a market for it. Generally speaking, I'm not overly impressed, but I can see it having a place. I do believe the Kindle is a dead-end street, for example.

Here's where I see things going. The iPad will start selling in the spring, and die-hard Apple fans and early adopters will snap it up as usual. Apple will funnel the early profits into working out the bugs, adding features, maybe a little more research and development — and a new model will come out toward the end of the year, I'd say mid-November at the latest. Just in time to make it the "must have" Christmas gift of 2010.

The installed base is going to be fairly significant this time next year, and it may be significant enough that 2011 is finally going to be the year when sitting down at your desk to use your computer starts to seem a bit ridiculous.

I think what's going to be more interesting, though, is seeing what happens with AT&T Wireless. The iPad is going to work on AT&T's 3G network in addition to having regular old WiFi. Now, AT&T's data network has already been overloaded by the iPhone. The iPad is going to make that worse. I wonder how much more data Apple needs to push through AT&T's network before it basically becomes the Apple network, and it makes more sense for Apple to just buy the company outright.

As for me, I'm going to sit back and watch the fun this year. I think the new features added to the iPad this year will make up for the nonevent today's announcement became, and I think they'll turn it into the device everyone hoped it would be. For now, it's not quite ready for prime time.