A La Mode

When did the phrase "a la mode" get associated with ice cream? Literally translated from the French, it means "in the style" (or "at the style"). Thus, at one point, adding a scoop of ice cream with whatever you're eating was considered fashionable. Somehow, perhaps due to the fondness Americans once had for the French, it was used to stand for ice cream.

My purpose is not to talk about ice cream, but to talk about style. My parents have left most of the configuration of our house about the same as before. They have the same microwave, the same couch, the same beds. They've never particularly thought, for example, that we need to replace our kitchen shelves or change the colors of the carpet (the carpet was replaced). The furniture has more or less stayed the same.

My parents have watched satellite TV getting Chinese programming for years. They still have a VCR. We do have a DVD player. They have computers, but pretty much run on a slow modem connection. They have no desire to upgrade to a fast Internet connection. They have no desire to obtain cell phones. It's just the way the industry makes us pay for more and more services that we feel like an idiot for not having, and yet, they choose to live life the way they've lived it.

I'm in the software industry. There's a sense I need to keep up. I can't use a photo service, I have to use Flickr, don't you know? Not Photobucket, not Apple's photo hosting, not one of several other photo hosting sites. Is Flickr even that good? It's main advantage is something that sits outside their photo hosting, and that's tagging. To be fair, I do have Flickr because I'm not, at this point, interested in finding another photo hosting service. And because my housemate gave me an account on it. Nothing beats getting stuff for free.

How about email? My brother has Yahoo Mail. I find it a bit annoying. I have it too, and I much prefer Gmail. But then Gmail is supposed to be the "it" email. It applies the Flickr idea of tagging to mail. It's not a perfect replacement for folders, but does give you something regular folders don't (and even mail folders from mail sites don't give you nesting).

I search on Google, but who doesn't? But there are other search engines, that either give you clustering or weirder clustering (I have to thank Lance for pointing these search sites) or webpage previewing which presents a tab for each webpage it searches.

I went to Digg, but I don't dig it. I find it's interface confusing and with only a handful of results per page, I tend to ignore it a lot. I like reddit since it puts about 25 results on a page on topics that have some interest to me. I hardly use Slashdot, because it has one missing feature that aggravates me to no end: it doesn't put the year in the date of the posts. I can never tell if the post I'm reading is this year, or three years ago. I generally have to scan the URL. It's awful, awful, awful. I could also never get into the tech topics they cover.

I now browse through techmeme.com (hi Gabe! Oh wait, my blog doesn't get enough readership for you to care. You're still reading it, aren't you?) mostly scanning at titles, though I check it out far less than I check out reddit.

I head over to my favorite online comic, Dinosaur Comics which I found from someone's away message, on a nearly daily basis.

I read Joel on Software when it comes out with stuff. Occasionally, I'll read the Creating Passionate Users blog, which usually grates, but has some interesting stuff.

I read sports on three sites: washingtonpost.com, nytimes.com, and yahoo.com. I find ESPN's website far too busy, and lacking in content. This is where Mark Cuban is right. If you're a sports webpage like ESPN, get good analysis (maybe they do). You should almost not rely on AP for anything. Everyone has AP. Make your site worth getting to. I like Yahoo's sports page because it's less cluttered, but even they don't have enough original articles that I care about. Right now, Sports Illustrated, the magazine, is the place I'd read sports news if I wanted something beyond the basics. I pick up much of my sports information by listening to the morning sports show. Ever since Tony K. went on hiatus, it's been Mike and Mike, who are a distant second for me.

I head over to music websites, mostly All Songs Considered at NPR. I briefly visited audiovant.org. I just discovered pitchforkmedia.com recently for music. There's metacritic, which I visit only once in a blue moon.

Informed websurfing is a habit that I've picked up, especially recently, that my parents are unlikely to ever pick up. They simply don't use the web that much. Even my brother, who uses the web reasonably often, doesn't try out many of the web's newest features. I suspect that's far more typical of users of the web. Right now, Web 2.0 is flying right by them. Maybe if their favorite sites went to Web 2.0, they'd notice. But right now, it seems not every website is ready to embrace Ajax goodness, and frankly, no one seems to mind that hasn't happened yet.

I read enough websites that I should be relying on some RSS feed to help me out. I should use Michael Arrington's recommended webtools on his Tech Crunch website. Right now, I haven't made that jump. My last time with RSS lead to clutter and I eventually gave up. But it seems to make sense that I use an RSS tool.

But before I get to that, why must I keep up? I've fallen into the same kind of crowd that follows sports or soap operas or episodes of Lost religiously. The web has even helped all those addicts. Would I not be better off learning about real deep knowledge.

Is Einstein happy that all his lonely hours were devoted to thinking about deep problems, not checking out the latest news in websites, that leads to a certain kind of knowledge akin to what celebrity is seeing what celebrity? We're using valuable brain space on knowledge that takes time to accumulate and gets stale very quickly.

For example, Barbaro was trying to win the second leg of the Triple Crown. Experts had dubbed the horse as the best prospect to win since Secreteriat. Only a freak accident would cause Barbaro from making his name in history. OK, I'm exaggerating a bit. The horse that did win, Bernardini, had a rather amazing run. It was completely overshadowed by Barbaro breaking his ankle, an injury so serious that in the past, they would have killed the horse ("put it down"). I've read a few stories about it, seen pictures of post-surgery Barbaro. Now I really don't follow horse racing much, except Triple Crown time, but because I follow sports in general, I keep up.

My brother may have heard of this result, but he couldn't care less.

My question is this. Will it get worse? Some people have decided even the old killer app of the recent past, email, is too much. Donald Knuth doesn't even bother reading email. He wants to spend time writing books and using his brain for something he thinks is not as trendy, something that will last the test of time.

However, it's so much easier keeping up with all this tech, because frankly, I'm not the one who has to do it. Someone else tags important stories (by some metric) and I read what they find if it interests me.

But sometimes I wonder why I do it? At some point, so many people will be creating so much content, that no one can really keep up. In fact, that's already happened. Go to a tech conference, and you'll someone say "have you heard of X?" and the speaker, often well-versed in technical aspects, will say no. There's just a ton of stuff out there. And if the speaker at a hip conference doesn't know, what about the Joe Blow getting on with life as a software engineer? And what about the Joe Blow that isn't even in software?

They're all happy with Windows 95 or Windows 98. XP, bah. Maybe they'll pick up a new OS sometime in a few years time. Who needs installation and all that modern stuff?

Ah, my shiny new Macbook should be coming next week.

No, I didn't get black.

Do you think I'm stupid?