Steve and the Holy of Holies

I never owned a Volkswagen Bug, but nearly 30 years ago I proudly bought (and still have a copy) of the "Compleat Idiot How to Keep Your Volkwagen Alive" guide, first published in 1969 by an aerospace industry 'dropout'. With its 'groovy-looking' and clear diagrams of repair tasks, the guide seemed to promise a better and simpler life amid the technology -- like the motor vehicle -- that we depend on for all the best of what we can do, but that also threatens (think, global warming) to destroy us. It said, 'there's another way.' We can have material things that serve us, instead of us having to live a 'rat race' existence where we feel enslaved to those things and an obsessive need to consume and constantly acquire more and more. It said, "small is better."

Until recently, I had never owned an Apple computer. But I always admired them. They also carried with them this promise -- one Steve Jobs credited in part to the influence on him of the Whole Earth Catalog -- of a better way to live. A way that did not mean we always had to pursue having lots of complex gadgets. One that said that it was possible to own things that were beautiful -- beautiful with an almost Japanese aesthetic that found beauty in the small and simple.

This is part of why so many of us seem to mourn so much at hearing of the death of this man who was, in fact, not someone most of us knew at all. He stood for something much beyond his actual deeds. He stood for that 'small is better' belief and aesthetic. His very life was a beacon of hope for America and its future. He embodied the possibility that the great and terrible rent that came upon this country in the 1960s amid the Vietnam war -- the split between Counterculture and Nixon's Silent Majority, a split that has grown into the current great gap between Red and Blue states -- could be healed. Rather than being in conflict, the goals of the Counterculture and of commerce could come together. This greatest success of American companies in our time -- this Apple -- showed that one could made piles of money by bringing Counterculture values to life. In a sense, Jobs was a modern-day priest, someone who appeared almost magically to be able to enter the Holy of Holies of our time, a place that would have destroyed an ordinary human with its beautiful and terrible power. Jobs could see clearly things that were obscured for the rest of us. The music world despaired of finding a way to distribute music on the Internet that could also allow money to be made. Jobs, on the other hand, saw a way to make it simple -- just sell the songs individually for $1 (minus a penny) each. It seems almost obvious in retropect, but only this 'priest' could both see it and pull together the resources to make it happen.

Jobs' greatest inheritor is Google, another company that has found fantastic financial success while pursuing a sense of higher values -- especially its famous "don't be evil" maxim -- as well as pursuing simplicity in the user experience. It remains to be seen what the future of these two great American companies is and whether they will continue to uphold their values. But as we approach this Yom Kippur, we can bring a hope -- a prayer -- not just for individual existences to prosper in the year (and years) ahead, but also a hope for the nation and the world: a hope that we will find a way towards a small-is-better prosperity in the model that this 'priest' (or prophet) modeled for us. A prosperity that does not mean destroying our planet. A prosperity where we can be truly satisfied with what we have. A prosperity where every person has the opportunity to live out his or her dreams. A prosperity that frees us from violence, homelessness and pain. A prosperity that does not forget the widow, the orphan and the stranger.

Tzom Kal.

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Of course, there are other reasons we have so much emotion at Jobs' passing. First is how young Jobs was -- only 56. It shows that no matter how blessed a person might be in many parts or their life -- including the wealth needed to afford the very best of medical care -- many years are not guaranteed to any one of us (certainly, a theme with resonance on Yom Kippur).

I also feel like I _owe_ Jobs (or at least Apple computer). Apple has _taught_us so many things that we often paid them nothing for. For example, Apple taught me that a notebook computer was something I both _needed_ and could afford. I will never forget that group project session in 1993 when I was finishing up my first masters degree. Another student pulled his Powerbook 100 (see pic above) out of his bag and pulled up the group project we were all working on -- we finished it together right there and then in that student lounge instead of each having to go home (or to a computer lab) to work on our individual sections independently. It blew my mind and I knew I had to have one. I ended up buying an early IBM Thinkpad instead, a device that helped transform how I worked and thought. IBM got my money for that purchase -- not Apple -- but I never would have spent the money if the Powerbook 100 hadn't 'taught' me what its value could be. Similarly, the iPod and the iPhone taught us -- and other music device and smartphone manufacturers -- what was possible. We have all benefited tremendously. It is certainly true, however, that Apple rarely has invented anything new. I had an mp3 player by RIO before the iPod was ever released. But it never really worked right. Apple under Jobs has known how to take complicated technology and put it all together with data and media in ways that _seem_ simple -- or at least are experienced as simple by the user. They just work. They teach us how it is done.

The killer research (plus?) app -- Zotero

I don't like to gush about new hardware/software when I've only hardly used it . . . . . but I'm so wowed by the half-hour I just spent with Zotero -- a free and open-source on-line service for keeping track of your files and research -- that . . . well, here goes! :)

Zotero does the one thing I've been desperately wishing for ever since I started writing research papers back in September -- it not only lets you store pdf's online of the articles you're reading (which Google Docs does a great job of), but it also allows you to keep notes on all those files and organize them fifty-million some-odd ways. There is a program they like at NYU called refworks that lets you do _almost_ all of that -- everything but have easy access to the articles themselves! . . . . Which makes me feel like a well-groomed elephant who can't find his trunk. . . Or some such animal-based metaphor. :)

Zotero, on the other hand, gives you the full package. And I suspect that Zotero's utility is far beyond the graduate research area. I'm looking forward to using it more!

Late adopter

My father, of blessed memory, loved high-tech and made his living working in that field. But, yet, he was no gadget freak -- he needed real convincing that a new technology, whether it be personal computers or email, really was worth adopting.

He's passed the late adopter thing (as well as the love of technology) on to me, so it was only yesterday that I finally took the smart phone plunge -- and at that it was, Minna, not me, who actually made the purchase. We have iPhones!

Late adopting, actually, despite what this guy says, is a pretty rational strategy -- the newest of the new is usually too expensive and too untested, and I've usually regretted the times I was an _early_ adopter (like with mp3 players; I brought one with me on my Israel year and 2000, and it was a real disappointment).

Anyway, I'm feeling pretty good about this iPhone so far. . . . I think I waited just the _right_ amount of time.

Thanks, Minna!

[X-posted to smamitayim]

Google Docs offline is here!!!

I'm so excited. Now the very best way to edit and organize your documents no longer requires you to be connected to the Internet in order to use it.

The greatest advantage of Google Docs -- Google's free on-line word processor, spread sheet and presentation program -- is, indeed, its interaction with the Internet. You can just edit your documents from any computer (connected to the Internet) at any time. No more fumbling with discs or flash drives or time wasted wondering what directory or on what computer I stored a file (or, worse, wondering if you have the latest version or not).

But, unfortunately, there are still times when I'm not connected to the Internet (like when I'm traveling). It will be so great to know that, at those times, I will still have instant access on my laptop to every file I would need.

[I first wrote about the possibility of this feature in May of last year.]

The death of the milk crate

I thought the New York Times' story on a new style of gallon milk jugs really missed the headline: It's not that people will have to learn to pour their milk a bit differently; it's that the change will lead to the disappearance of the milk crate -- that nearly indestructible construction of plastic that generations of college students and others have used (often after a creative acquisition) to create low-cost furniture and other useful things (note the pic on the right for one interesting example).

Of course, I'm sure we will still be able to buy milk crate-like storage crates at Office Depot and alike, but I will still be sad a bit for the loss of the real thing.

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Here's the Times's graphic explaining the change:

Starbucks going almost free

For Internet wireless access, that is. It has long been a frustration to me -- and I am sure not really a benefit to Starbucks' bottom line -- that they used the overpriced (and highly unreliable) T-Mobile service for this. AP reports:

Starbucks said Monday it will give customers that use its Starbucks purchase card two hours of free wireless access per day. After that, it will cost $3.99 for a two-hour session. Monthly memberships will cost $19.99 and include access to any of AT&T's 70,000 hot spots worldwide.

Nearly all of AT&T's broadband Internet customers will automatically have unlimited free Wi-Fi access at Starbucks.

Current T-Mobile HotSpot customers, who pay anywhere from $6 per hour-long session to $9.99 for a day pass to $39.99 a month for unlimited access, will get Wi-Fi access at no extra charge through an agreement between AT&T and T-Mobile.

This is, of course, not nearly as big news as Microsoft's ongoing attempts to buy Yahoo! But both events are part of a larger trend -- the movement towards free and open networks and software. I predict that in another few years, Starbucks will follow the example of many a local coffee house and provide wireless access completely free. The customers will just expect it.

The revolution will be googleized – living and working in a “cloud”

There were couple of interesting articles in the New York Times recently about how Google is challenging Microsoft. One was a personal account of how the writer declined to buy a copy of Microsoft Word when she bought her last computer and instead has used Google's free on-line word processor ever since. The other article was a long analysis of how Google's “cloud computing” vision may be changing where our computing lives are going. The “cloud” is a place where I've been living and working for a good year now and it's made me so much more efficient and has eliminated so much of the frustration I felt before from computing. I invite you to try the cloud, too!

Do you, like most of us, have to work on your documents both at home and at work or even more locations? Can you imagine having all of your documents right in front of you whatever computer you're sitting in front of? Can you imagine not having to carry around disks or thumb drives, not having to email files to yourself, not having to constantly wonder what folder or hard drive you saved that file on? That's what cloud computing does for you.

The reason it's called cloud computing is that the bulk of the work of the computer, including file storage, no longer happens on the computer in front of you – it happens out in the cloud. That is, out in some data center somewhere that you're connected to via the Internet. You don't need to know where this data center is. And it might very likely not even be in one place. Software like Google's distributes the computing work seamlessly wherever its data servers happen to have capacity at the moment. And there's no center or hub to the system, another reason it's like a cloud. What that decentralization means is that – as it is with the Internet itself – it's almost impossible for the whole network to fail. Or, at the very least, the chance of it failing is infinitely smaller than the risk of your computer's hard drive crashing (along with all the files you have on it) at any time.

The best part of the cloud that Google has made available so far is Google Docs, its free word processing program that works right through your Web browser (even Microsoft's Internet Explorer). I use it for almost everything that I do. When I want to write a new document, I just open up a new one and start writing right away. I don't have to worry – as I always had to do with MS Word – about where I'm going to save it so I can find it again. When I look in my Google Docs directory next time, I know it will be sitting there right on top of the list (the list is organized in the order of the files you last worked on). And if I want to find it again months later, Google Docs has a great search feature that blows away anything MS Word can do – it searches the text in your files in the same efficient and intelligent way that Google's Web search looks through the Internet. And I don't even ever think of saving a file. Google Docs just does it for me all the time (saving all of my old versions in case I want to look back at something I did before).

In addition to Google Docs, Google's free online applications include a spreadsheet (think MS Excel ) and a presentation program (think MS PowerPoint ). They all work great and have simple and intuitive interfaces (you don't need to be looking through a manual – nor will you have to take hours-long classes – to learn to use these programs).

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One thing that's fascinating to me about this move to cloud computing is its “back to the future” quality. When I was working in the newspaper business, we had an incredibly excellent mainframe-based computer system that had many of the features just now becoming widely available in Google's products. Those mainframe programs, however, were long ago displaced by PCs. There are many reasons for the PC displacing those older systems, but one was that the programs that Microsoft wrote for those PCs could do a lot of things – especially in terms of manipulating exactly how things you created appeared physically on paper or on other computer screens – that the mainframe systems just couldn't do.

Google's products have this same downside – Google Docs, for example, has none of the sophisticated desktop publishing features of MS Word. But the difference between the old mainframe systems and what Google offers today is that Google's applications actually run on your PC (or Mac). That means if you need desktop publishing you can “bail out” of Google Docs and use your PC for just that one more demanding project.

Google understands this as part of a 90-10 kind of approach – one where 90% of your work gets done with “cloud” software and the other (highly specialized, computer-hungery work requiring having direct access to a hard drive, etc) gets done on your PC itself with “old-fashioned” programs like MS Word.

Another downside of Google Docs, at least for now, is that it you have to be connected to the Internet to use it. In fact, as I started to write this particular post you're reading, I was not connected to the Internet. But, even so, I had not “bailed out” to MS Word to write this. Instead, I was using Sun Microsystems' excellent StarOffice package (an alternative to MS Office ), which is currently available for a free download from Google as part of Google Pack.

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Why do I care so much about this to write about it? Well, one reason is that I have always seen the computer as a potentially revolutionary phenomenon – something that has the potential to be a force for human freedom and the expression of the human spirit. Back in the 1980s the personal computer was still a very new device as was the desktop publishing it was starting to make possible. Here in the States, desktop publishing was a godsend for many small businesses. But it had even more profound implications in the Communist world where it threatened to put an end to one of the most powerful tools that totalitarian system had for maintaining its tyranny – the monopoly the Communist party had over the printing press. What the intelligentsia of the Soviet Union saw happening with computing in the West helped make clear that Communism's days were numbered and helped put the forces together that made possible what had once seemed impossible – the Soviet Union deciding on its own to dismantle its Communist system and to tear down the Berlin Wall.

It was a revolution. The changes in information technology made it possible. That was the day of the personal computer. Now is the day – and revolution – of the cloud.

I won!!!

Well, not really. But -- when I read today about the last of the bastions of pay-for-content news on the Web, the Wall Street Journal, finally giving up and going free -- I couldn't help but feel a sense of vindication: it was in a 'past life' now (ie, well before I became a rabbi), but I still remember clearly how passionately I argued with my colleagues at my old newspaper against the idea that we had to charge for our Web content ("how can we just give it away!?!!). With the cost of distributing content on the Web being effectively free (especially when compared with the cost of delivering piles of black ink printed on dried sheets of wood pulp to the end user) I just thought it was inevitable that the only sustainable source of revenue would end up being advertising. . . . And so it has come to pass.

The day Redmond died?

Google today introduced the product that may finally bring an end to the now-decades-long stranglehold the folks in Redmond, Washington, have had on most of our computer desktops.

In case you've missed it, over the last year or so, Google has started a revolution by introducing free software applications -- especially Google Docs -- that do the same work as Microsoft applications like the word processors (MS Word) and spreadsheets (Excel) that can cost hundreds of dollars. But these new applications have had one major limitation -- you have to be connected to the Internet constantly for them to work. The new product -- called Google Gears -- puts an end to all that. It allows you to run the same applications (all of which run inside your Web browser) even when you're not connected to the Internet.

The whole thing, admittedly, is in its infant stages (Gears, for now, only works for one product, Google Reader). But the potential is clear and exciting: a future where you will only have to install one application on your computer -- the Web browser. Everything else will just run -- without the hassles of having to install (and pay for) countless updates and security changes -- inside that browser. And it will all be free.

So, why should a rabbi care about this? Well, I'll just conclude by quoting from a previous post I wrote on an interesting Google product:

The answer is because it's religious and non-profit organizations -- which tend to be small and cash-strapped -- that stand to benefit most from these developments. Google Docs, for example, allows people to seamlessly collaborate in writing things like grant proposals in a way that used to only be possible inside organizations that could afford to spend millions on networks. It's power to the people! And that's always been exciting for an ol' justice lover like me.

The corporate iPod?

I have become a huge fan of Google products over the last year or so (especially Google Docs, their free word processing and spreadsheet package). Unlike the hugely expensive products out of Redmond, Washington that have come to dominate so much of our computer lives, Google's software products have simple, elegant, intuitive user interfaces. And they are reliable and powerful.

But I just heard that Google is moving beyond software into selling hardware. The product is called Google Mini and like Apple's hugely successful iPod it endeavors to be a product where the hardware and the software are intimately integrated with one another (that is, you buy an iPod neither because it is the best hardware value or because it has the best software; you buy it because its combination of those two things is the best _and_ because the combined package works right out of the box without your having to read complicated manuals or pay somebody to help you).

The Google Mini, however, is not about music. It's about search. That is, giving a company of any size a robust way of offering its employees or customers ways of searching through its data without having to hire a small army of network technicians to set it up and maintain it. I think it's very exciting.

So, you ask, why would a rabbi or chaplain care about such things? Is this just my old "geek freak" coming out?

The answer is because it's religious and non-profit organizations -- which tend to be small and cash-strapped -- that stand to benefit most from these developments. Google Docs, for example, allows people to seamlessly collaborate in writing things like grant proposals in a way that used to only be possible inside organizations that could afford to spend millions on networks. It's power to the people! And that's always been exciting for an ol' justice lover like me.