Alas, (with apologies to Shakespeare).

Alas, poor XP! I knew him, Horatio; an operating system of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; it hath borne me on its back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rims at it. Here hung those icons that I have clicked I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?

Technological Habituation

I forgot to bring my cell phone with me to work today.

That should be no big deal.  There's a phone here at my desk, although I do have a few clients who are routinely used to using my cell phone. But to my surprise, I fee odd without it.

The reason I feel a bit odd is several fold, but it shows how acclimated we become to technological changes, for good or ill.

When I started practicing law in 1990 I did not have a cell phone. Cell phones weren't even available, I think.  I know that we didn't have them as college students.  The first cell phone we had at all, in my family, was one that my father bought for some reason. It is what they called a "bag phone", which is a relatively large cell phone which you plugged into a vehicle's cigarette lighter (which is what we called a "power point" at that time) for power.  It had no power of its own.  And it was designed for use in a car.

Exactly why my father thought we needed one I don't know.  Maybe it was so that we would have it when we were out in the sticks. We didn't use it much, but we did have it for a period of years.  I know that I still had it when I started dating my wife, which was after my father had died, but only barely.  It seems to me that I also had it when first married.

I'm not really keen on cell phones, even now, and didn't have one for a long time after they became available.  My first one was a cast off from my wife.  Now, however, I have an Iphone and the reason is that it essentially became impossible for a lawyer not to have one.  You need it to check your email while traveling. That sounds like an excuse, but it is not.  I skipped the whole Blackberry thing but there came a day when I was working on a case, while I was on the road, and settlement negotiations broke out while I was traveling.  Having not adopted the smart phone at the time, I found that I was reduced to making piles of calls, where I had cell phone coverage, to see what the heck was going on.  That week I had an Iphone.

I never thought I'd be a person who texts, but I do, and that is what makes not having the Iphone here today odd.  Throughout an average day I'll send a few text.  My wife texts me, and some times my son does, even from school.  I like the fact that this means they're sort of connected to me all the time.

That's something that was totally different before the cell phone.  I was, and remain, used to the idea of being out in the sticks in contact with nobody.  And prior to the cell phone when I was at work, I was out of contact except via the office phone, which I limited pretty much to work calls. At that time I can recall it being a real irritant that some office staff took huge numbers of personal calls in a day. People still do, I'm sure, but  they aren't tying up an office line now by doing it. 

More significantly, when I was away at school, I was really away.  That wasn't so pleasant, but that's something that the current generation will really not experience, again for good or ill.

This is, of course, a species of habituation.  I'm habituated now to having a smart phone.  And a computer.  But it wasn't always so.  And perhaps it isn't a good thing.  Indeed, I have some changes coming up regarding that.

One thing I've been doing for a couple of years, and which I'm electronically habituated to, is updating a couple of historical daily calendars.  One is my Today In Wyoming's History blog and the other is the daily  history thread on the Society of the Military Horse website.  I've done those, for some time, every day before I head to work.  I'm stopping that, however.

Indeed, I've already stopped updating the Wyoming History blog entries, as of about December 1.  I have the old posts set to keep posting daily until December 31, but after that I'm changing the format of the blog to stop daily entries.  I have been updating it for over a year, and I have most of the daily events I can readily catalog entered, so there's no need for it to be repetitious.  I'll keep the blog, and hopefully find a way to make a calendar for it so people researching any one day can do so easily, but after December 31, 2013, the blog will only be occasionally updated with new entries pertaining to Wyoming's history. 

I'm also gong to stop updating the SMH calendar as well.  Maybe somebody else will take over it, but it's run for several years and is very complete.  Most days, I don't add anything new to it, so there's no reason to update it.  Or at least somebody else would add more flavor to it.

This means that my morning routine is starting to change, and I like it.  I may not turn the computer on as much in the  mornings, or at all, as I've grown used to.  My blogging will continue on as for some reason I have a compulsion to write, but the daily entry type of stuff will cease and I may go back to reading in the mornings, like I used to do.  Indeed, I did that this morning and didn't miss the computer really.

Boo Hiss Apple

Apple makes a fine product in the Iphone, no doubt about it.

But why can't they wait to release updates to Itunes and the Iphone until they actually have the bugs worked out of the programs?  I live in fear of their updates.

I probably ought to elect simply not to update either, but I'm afraid that if I don't, my systems will no longer be supported by the existing greater programs, so I do. But about half the time, the updates are really buggy.  Usually what they mess up, like the most recent updates, is the systems ability to support Podcasts.  Right now, for example, it's not transferring them to the phone, and it's not allowing the transferred ones that have been transferred since the most recent updates to play.  A while back, however, some bug in their update caused my phone to act as if it was plowing through data, when in fact it wasn't. 

Why do they do that?  Have they been infiltrated by North Korean operatives?  Have the last ancient Nazi war criminals found refuge in Apple, where they work to reverse the results of World War Two through disruption of our communications systems?  Are Apple employees secret Trotskyites?  Do the deeply buried operatives listed in the Verona files now find work in their dotage at Apple?

Well, whatever it is, I wish they'd knock it off.

Connectivity

In the past couple of days, I have had instances in which I have been sitting in my office, with my computer connected to the net, and I have found it necessary to text message somebody using my cell phone.

Indeed, over the past year, not only have I found that it continues to be necessary (no surprise) to own a cell phone, but I am now text messaging on my cell phone as a work necessity. Text messaging tends to be associated with teenagers at the mall, but at least in my recent experience it's gone on to be a feature of at least the legal work place. Not all that long ago I found myself walking through Denver getting and receiving text messages pertaining to a deposition that was going on in Texas.

Here at my office, where I am right now (taking a break for lunch) I have, right where I am, a laptop computer, a telephone, a second miniature laptop, a cell phone, and an Ipod that's jacked into the computer, which allows me not only to send and receive email (including work email, and I've done that) but to keep my calendar and contacts electronically.

When I started this profession a little over twenty years ago, my office was equipped, as all our offices were, with a phone and a computer. The computer did not have net access. I don't really recall what I used that computer for, but chances are that I didn't use it all that much on a daily basis. I did write legal memos on it, and it had some programs that were used to substitute for casebooks we had in our library. It was probably three or four years after that when we purchased a computer that had net access, and we obtained West Law in our office for the first time. Before that, most local lawyers had a West Law account at the County Law Library, which was in the old County Courthouse. Having a good fax machine in that era seemed pretty neat. Now all this seems quite quaint.

It does make me wonder about the earlier era, however. Twenty years ago we were already on the cusp of a technological revolution. Even ten years before that we sort of were. But what about before that?

From probably the mid 1920s through to about 1980 the telephone was the only piece of connected technology any law office had. Fax machines hadn't arrived. If you wanted to send something, you did it by mail. Or if you wanted quick contact, you called. What was office work like then? It no doubt involved a lot of dictation of correspondence, and indeed we dictated when I first started out. Some people still do that. But we all did. And dictation in that era did place a bit of a premium on avoiding revisions, although we all revised. Revisions in that era were truly manual, and the result was, the further you go back, that the product had to be regenerated.

What about before 1920? At some time prior to that, most offices didn't have phones. How different office work must have been then. Quick contact just wasn't going to happen. Contact would have mostly been through the mail. Dictation would have been all direct. Everything was much more hands on and manual.

It'd be interesting, if we could, to go back to one of those offices, say an office of 1912, and see how they really worked, what somebody in our profession (assuming that there is a 1912 equivalent) actually did, on a daily basis, and how they did it, before communications became so instant over vast distances.

Electronic Communications

On Saturday I was staying in a hotel room with my family, in Rapid City. It was a quick trip, and I forgot to take a book, which is my traveling habit.

I did, however, take my Ipod, which has become my traveling habit, substituting, for the most part, for the radio.

While there, there was a moment when I found that both my son and I were on our Ipods, I actually took a photograph of him on his with mine, and it struck me how dependent we've become on modern electronics. During the time I was there, I checked email to check on a relative in the hospital, I found that an old friend had "friended" me on Facebook, and I accepted, I actually took a photograph from the hotel and posted it on Facebook, with my Ipod, and I checked for the local Mass times for Saturday and Sunday masses in Rapid City. I also checked Google Maps for various things while there.

Recently, while in Tulsa for business, I used Facetime on my Ipod to connect with my daughter's Ipod and visit with my family. It's free, as long as you have a WiFi connection, and while the video quality isn't good, the audio is, and you can see your family.

I started to think about this, and the dependency we have developed on this in short order. It's temping to bemoan it, and indeed there is a lot to bemoan about how technological and electronic we have become. On the other hand, however, I'm not so sure that in some ways all of this doesn't take us back a bit to one of the more warmly remembered aspects of our past, which is who people were in close association all the time. To a degree, this lets us do that, although the element of distance and separation is still there. Still, at any rate, for the traveler, things aren't as lonely as they used to be.

What you reall need is a Holley Carb. . .

I've come to the conclusion that those who work as computer geeks today are drawn from the same section of the population that once went into small shop mechanics.

Back in the 70s and early 80s, before computers invaded the automobile world and changed auto repair from a trade into a computer lab project, there were many small auto mechanic shops staffed by men in their 20s who wanted to mess with your car.  No matter what your problem was, when you contacted them about the repairs to your car, you were soon confronted with the "performance" changes that they wanted to make to it, or worse, already had.  "Man. . . this baby needed a Holley Carb!  I just ripped that old stock carburetor off and . . ."

At that point, you were doomed.  No aftermarket performance part so installed ever worked, and at best, with enough tinkering, your car might get back to the original state of performance, more or less.

Computerization of automobiles ended that.  So now, the same people go into computer programming.

If you work in an office, you know this is true. The moment your system is really working well, you are going to face an "upgrade", or worse, and entire new system.  If you are lucky, after days of messing with it, and hours and hours of lost work, you'll get a system back that is close to what you had.