Happy New Year

Well, I’m glad to see 2009 gone. Not that it was a bad year; I wouldn’t trade a minute of it for anything. But there was that whole uncertainty about my career and work, etc. Money was a big issue, considering I hardly had any. But that’s over now, and I’m heading into 2010 with a new job, a new plan and plenty of positivity.

Happy New Year to you.

Manly Tips 9: Your Pocket Knife

Check your pockets. Do you have a pocket knife? No? Then you’re no man. Wait, check your man-purse. Is it there? It is? Go bake me a muffin, cupcake.

A pocket knife is an essential tool for any man. I’m on my third, which is saying something. My first was a nickel-plated two-blader with a can opener that I found at the beach when I was about seven, and carried well into my twenties. My second was a black Swiss Army Knife, a simple jobber with a corkscrew and a toothpick. That one was stolen out of my coat at a tavern in Chelmsford in 1997. My third, which I carry today, is a classic red Swiss Army Knife; that’s a photo of it up top. It comes in handy every day, and let me tell you why:

1. Fixing the car.
2. Cutting the filter off your smoke.
3. Jimmying the lock when you forget your keys at the pub.
4. Opening letters from fans.
5. Unwrapping new tools.
6. Fighting ninjas.
7. Cutting the plastic off the new AC/DC CD.
8. Carving emergency snorkels out of bamboo while hiding from ninjas in a swamp.
9. Getting the Harley up and running, with the help of some duct tape.
10. Piercings for a fiver a pop outside the pub just before last call.

If you can’t find a reason on that list to carry a pocket knife, well, you should probably become a librarian.

I’m On A Mac

It looks like I’ve found a deal on a MacBook, so I may be portable again in the next few days. My new job makes that kind of portability essential, especially when it comes to the MacBook’s audio/video capabilities.

My plan was to buy a Windows netbook. My mothers have a Dell Mini 10, and I like it, so I went shopping and discovered an HP netbook that I really liked. But I know myself, and I worry that the netbook would not do enough, and I’d be back shopping for a proper laptop in a few months. So I’m now leaning toward the MacBook. But then I see netbooks for $200, and I have to think “Kind of handy.”

I should come to a decision in the next few days. In the meantime, there’s this:

More from the Pantsless Knights here.

• Note: My legendary indestructible Compaq Evo is still going strong, but it’s having trouble with our new wireless network and no longer likes connecting to the Internet. I love that machine — it was my only computer for years — and without its drive dock it’s the size of a netbook, but it’s closing in on a decade old. I think I’ll give it to my son to use with his new digital camera.

Failed Futurists: Predictions Gone Wrong

Here’s a list of famous technological predictions that got things horribly, horribly wrong. One of these predictions is fake. I know because I made it up.

• “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys,” Sir William Preece, chief engineer at the British Post Office, 1878.
• “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” H.M. Warner, Warner Bros., 1927.
• “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
• “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night,” Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946.
• “The world potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at most,” IBM executives to the eventual founders of Xerox, 1959.
• “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” Ken Olsen, founder of mainframe-producer Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
• “People won’t want to play these electronic games for more than a week, not once we start selling pinball machines for the home,” Gus Bally, Arcade Inc., 1979.
• “No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer—640K ought to be enough for anybody,” Bill Gates, Microsoft, 1981.
• “Next Christmas the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput,” Sir Alan Sugar, British entrepreneur, 2005.
• “I’d say three pounds of bacon will be enough for breakfast.” Weathereye, 2009

I can remember the first time I used a personal computer. It was a Commodore Pet that was brought to my school when I was about 10 or 11. At that point, I had played Pong and Night Driver in a video arcade, and was fascinated. A year later, a friend got the Atari 2600, and before long the Tron movie opened the world of computers up to our young imaginations.

My kids are baffled by the concept that we didn’t have video games when we were young. “That’s not all,” I tell them. “If you wanted to watch a movie, you had to go to the theatre or wait til it came on TV. And we only had two channels.”

As a young sci-fi geek with a big imagination, I had a lot of ideas when I was younger. A friend and I formed a small software startup in 1984, writing games for the VIC 20, and we had an idea to somehow create comic books that would be sold on cassette tape and “played” on the VIC. Our plan was to spin that off into books, magazines and maybe even television and radio shows. Sadly, the VIC 20 does not lend itself to large-scale technological development, and once I discovered the guitar that was pretty much it for our idea.

What might have been …

The changes in technology within my lifetime — since the 1960s — are immense. The changes over the course of the past 120 years are staggering. Our world has changed more since 1890 than it did in the millions of years of human presence before that. I don’t blame those people quoted above for being unable to see outside their narrow window. None of us did. I’m still marvelling at fax machines even as I read about the Apple tablet. Now, though, we are suitable acclimatized to rapid change that we can predict, or create, the future, and new developments are less of a surprise. If I’m writing on one of those Tom Cruise Minority Report floating holo-computer thingies in a couple of years, I will probably not be surprised.

Anyway, the tech predictions I listed above come from a very good Wall Street Journal article you can read here.

Under The Tree, As Seen On TV

I have never bought anything advertised on television. The closest I came was the Time-Life Soft Rock Classics DVD set, which I assembled through other means, because I had a lot of the music already but not the dollars for the whole deal.

Maybe it’s because of early disappointment. When I was a kid, I sent away for a full-sized Inflatable Batman, and it never arrived, and the $4 I included in that envelope was gone forever. As I got older, I tended to buy things I could fondle first.

This Christmas, we received three As Seen On TV items as gifts. And my initial scoffs were quickly proven wrong.

The first came a few days before Christmas, when the inlaws came down to give the kids (their step-grandchildren) their presents. And there was something for me: Tow Truck In A Box.

The timing was perfect. Someone had tried to back the minivan into its spot after a six-inch fall of slushy snow over a flash-freeze of ice, and had gotten a front tire bogged down in the sinkhole where that tree stump used to be. After a couple of hours of trying to rock it out, I decided to wait until Christmas Eve when my brother was due, so we could push it out. Hey, the guy fought a train and won, so a minivan is no big deal.

Tow Truck In A Box is a set of four aircraft-grade aluminum plates with bladed ridges. You’re supposed to put them under your tires — linked together or alone — and use them to get traction and drive out. So I tried them. And fuck me if they didn’t work right off the bat. I had to adjust them once or twice, but in five minutes I was free of the ice and slush and good to go. The plates? Not a scratch.

Next up was The Magic Bullet. This is a cup-sized blender that you sort of tap to make it work. I’ve only used it once, to make a smoothie on Christmas morning. It was lightning quick, and did the job nice and fast. We have a blender attachment for The Food Processor Of The Gods, but it takes forever to haul all the components out and set it up. This thing is quick and easy. I doubt I’ll use it often, but when I do, I’ll like it.

And finally: Slap Chop. I’ve been laughing at Slap Chop infomercials for a long time, and so have you, but now that I have one, I’m happy with it. It isn’t some piece of TV schlock, despite its cheap plastic construction. It’s a simple mechanism and it works, and I like using it, because I hate food prep, but I like to make food. I used it tonight to add veggies to my frozen pizzas, and it took all of 30 seconds.

Two minutes after I opened it, I dumped some mixed nuts on the dining room table, slapped, and said “You’re gonna love my nuts.” You may think I was riffing on Vince’s infomercial, but really, I’ve been saying that for years, which may explain why Inflatable Batman never showed up.

District 9 or Avatar?

In a world where humans and aliens are in an uneasy relationship, one man learns to see through the aliens’ eyes and discovers within himself the ability to care for what is not of his world. But as he turns against his money-driven masters, a dedicated career soldier-turned-corporate-mercenary hunts him relentlessly until there’s a combat scene involving a giant walking battle suit.

The Internet goes wild with talk of this new film, and fans marvel at the CGI creature effects. Before the ticket stubs hit the theatre floor on opening night, there’s talk of a sequel.

District 9 or Avatar? You decide.