Argument over our creation will lead to our destruction.

What I love most about humans is their ability to focus so much time and energy on things that amount to nothing and over which they can never exert control. Take religion. God has proven himself to have zero impact on our daily lives and yet this is all we want to fight about, and all we have fought about since time immemorial. Do the math, over the centuries we're talking about billions of deaths. Why? When we have something so worthy to fight about - something that actually affects our daily lives. That's right folks, I'm talking about computer operating systems. Your OS affects your life in all kinds of ways every day. People should be up in arms, and taking up arms at having to put up with Windows when the Mac OS is so obviously superior in every way. If there was ever a cause that deserved armed combat and suicide missions, it would be operating systems. And yet, so much apathy. Sad little world really.

Pirates never die.

What I love most about Steve Jobs is that he changed my world. The amount of time I spend during the day that isn't on an Apple device can be measured in minutes. He was a pirate captain who challenged accepted norms in every industry from music to telecommunications – and was victorious in every single engagement.
RIP, Steve, you've earned it.

And then she said...

I am grateful for the small mercy that more people didn't have to listen to the Bigot Lady in the Vancouver Airport lounge last night. As it was, with her booming voice and tiny little Blackberry headset only a couple of hundred of us were in her blast radius.
First of all, it's all about the Chinese. I guess she had just been there. How awful the food was. And the customs. And the people. I had my audiobook blaring full blast, and she was still all I could hear. I felt so bad for the little Chinese guy sitting a couple of seats away from her.
But then she really went and did it. She started laying into Apple. How she had, and loved, a Mac, but how awful Apple was as a company, and how iPhone users were such losers. Well, as you can probably imagine, I lost it. I wasn't about to let her drag my people into her racist rant.
I whirled around in my chair and shouted a question across the room to her. Did she know that the whole lounge could hear her? "Yes" she said sheepishly. So I went on to suggest that perhaps she keep her hurtful ignorant comments about minorities to herself.
(Hey, in terms of computers, Apple's still a minority.)

You want a tip? I'll give you a tip...

I am grateful for spending most of my adult life to date not having to figure out how to skip the tip screen on Interac machines. But the last couple of years that has not been a luxury I have been afforded. Don't get me wrong, I am happy to tip people when they provide a service to me. Well, newsflash - taking my money and plunking down a styrofoam container of coffee on the counter is not providing a service. And being grumpy while "forgetting" to thank me for my business, when I finally figure out how to leave a zero tip, probably means that I just won't come back to your establishment, period.
If you aren't bringing something to my table, or clearing it, or washing up my utensils, I am not going to tip you. Not now, not ever. If your employer isn't paying you enough to do your job without tips, then I am sorry - sorry you haven't figured out it's time to find a new job.
Of course the coffee shops almost had the last laugh today. I thought I was at one that didn't go in for the tipping nonsense (probably because it was just a counter, literally) so I charged through the tip screen, thinking it was finally time for my PIN number (see my earlier blog for my rant on that nonsense). Luckily, I looked down before the final OK button to see that I was about to pay over six thousand dollars for my coffee! Yup, I had entered my pin number as the tip.

There oughta be a law.

What I love most about our new digital nation is the ease with which we can find other people and organizations. The Yellow Pages app is a great example of that. So why, oh why, did TELUS just cut down half a rainforest and deliver them to every home and business in Calgary? A city with one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the country. Not only are they are wasteful of paper, but how much energy will be expended in their delivery and their subsequent transfer to landfills (45%) and recycling facilities (55%). Yes, I get it, some of our citizens over the age of 60 do not have access to the Internet - but at that age their eyes don't give them great access to the tiny type in the big yellow books either. There has to be a better way. This is yet another of the many things TELUS should be ashamed of. Too late this year, but there should be some kind of legislation enacted before next year's forest killing occurs.

Frac the Interac.

I am grateful for my self restraint in North American stores and restaurants. I have yet to hurl one of their Interac machines across the room through a plate glass window.
In Europe, when you are handed the little machine, you are requested simply to enter your passcode and hit OK - and that's it, transaction completed, goodbye, have a nice day, please come again, next time bring a friend.
Not so much over here. Over here, the little machines treat you like a freaking moron. Are you sure you want to spend this amount? Then you have to spend an extra five seconds agreeing to agree with the transaction and then you get another screen suggesting you enter your passcode!
Why is this? If your card is in the machine and the machine is in your hand, good chance that you're good with the whole money spending thing, no? As soon as it's plonked in your fat little hand, the only thing your index sausage should have to worry about is entering your passcode - I mean, COME ON, am I wrong on this?
Think about how many times you use Interac in the course of a day - multiply by five seconds, multiply by 365 days, multiply by 30 or 40 years. Get the picture?
(Of course, this is just a tiny fraction of a much, much larger bank rant, but we'll save that for another post.)

Hey Dude, where's my 21st Century?

What I love most about the 60's is that the future back then was so much better than what reality has turned out to be.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, hate to be the one to break it you, but we’ve all been had.

The movies of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s promised us a certain level of cool in the 21st Century.

Well here we are, and here it isn’t.

Manned space flight to Jupiter, eradication of all ailments, universal jet packs, colonies on the moon, personal robots, a greed-free Utopian society and, of course, the ubiquitous flying car. No, nope, nah, not, not bloody likely, I wish and yeah, right. I don’t know about you, but I’m lucky if I can coerce my truck up a steep hill, let alone into the wild blue yonder. And in terms of the vehicles we do have, there really haven’t been great strides, have there? Each new model year seems to be about which automaker’s designers got the most sandpaper for Christmas and whose safety engineers got the most exploding balloons. Isn’t there a point at which it ceases to be a car, and starts to become a balloon-filled jello mould?

Perhaps most heinous of all, we don’t even have video phones yet! Okay the latest iPhone is edging us closer (providing you're in a wireless LAN environment.) But otherwise folks, it’s 2010 and the best we can do is beam anemic, low rez images between cell phones. Woo hoo! (Is that a zit on your forehead or do I have a dead pixel?) And then there’s the really important stuff. Take cancer. They’ve had over half a century to nail that one. And we’re still dropping like flies. Where are the nanobots that were supposed to be coursing through our veins like tiny latter day Dukes of Hazzard?

So seeing all the broken promises, we should probably cast around for the guilty, that at least seems very 21st Century. But does one blame the scientists for not providing this cool stuff? Or the novelists and movie makers for over-promising on it? I think the former, since these things really aren’t that outlandish and they’ve fallen so far short on so much. To the point where this “21st Century” future is really more of yesterday, repackaged with better graphic design.

Or am I just expecting too much too soon? I don’t think so. More than one movie of yesteryear was specifically about life in 2001. And then there are all the things which I had promised my future self. New products that I was sure would be on the shelves of Walmart in the early years of this bold new century. Like the microwave that makes things rapidly cold instead of hot and the flashlight that emits darkness instead of light. (Hell, I even have names for those two, the nitrowave and the flashdark. Cool huh?)

And yes, I know we have managed to come up with a bunch of new methods to communicate, like email and text messaging - however in the main they are used to sell us stuff we don’t want or need. Besides, the really cool one - you know, the one that lets you hear the other person’s voice and actually talk together like humans, was invented a century ago.

Worse still, our future – today’s future –  has suffered. The future we collectively envisaged mid-way through the last century was far more exciting than the one we imagine now. It’s like our writers and film-makers are so disheartened by the no show of yesterday’s tomorrow, they’re hesitant to imagine today’s tomorrow.

In fact, throughout our society, nostalgia has usurped today’s culture. Not only have we failed to create a credible dream for the future, in many ways (certainly culturally), we are still stuck in the past. Our top radio stations play music from the 70’s and the 80’s, top grossing films are continuations or remakes of old tried-and-true movie formulae. What does growing up look and sound like to a kid today?

In conclusion, and in the words of one such remade character, “Throw me a bone here people, it’s not like I’m asking for sharks with frikkin laser beams on their heads.”