Where's the Wowser?

Americans used to love American technology. In the '50 and '60s, the rollout of the new Detroit car models topped the news programs. We were excited to have a new car, or even to see one for the first time. They touched our fantasy life, as well as our family life, and we could hardly wait for what comes next. Americans mostly hate their cars now, settling for anything with a wheel on each corner that will get them down the road with regularity and reliability.

The last vestige of that old familiar feeling probably goes to boutique electric carmaker Tesla, whose slam-you-back-in-your-seat roadster arouses a tech-lust that few have the depth of pocket to indulge.

We build little of what we once did--cars, appliances, gadgets, ships, consumer electronics. We travel to the International Space Station in a 1970s model space shuttle--having gone from "live TV from the surface of the moon" to "your father's Oldsmobile" in a single generation. What little we do design and/or build doesn't stand out from our world competitors in any way that elicits the "Wowsers!" response.

The only US company that seems to consistently have the old magic is Apple Computer. The unveiling yesterday of their new tablet computer, the iPad, had all the sizzle you could want. Ever since the introduction of the first Macintosh during the Super Bowl in 1984, new Apple products have lit up the "Hot Donuts Now!" light in American brains. The Mac, the iPod and the iPhone were transformative technologies--not because they were the first of their kind, but because they were the first to get it right-- to combine function with usability, sleek design with smart, even hip, marketing. They make you want it--and heaven help me--I do.

Some assembly required

It's one of those paradoxes. The virtual world gets more and more tidy and compact--my whole music library would fit on an iPod; everything I've ever written would fit into a corner of a thumb drive; a Kindle can hold every book I've ever read. But my real world becomes more and more a mess. No really--think post-apocalypse Bartertown/Thunderdome mess, think Neanderthal midden heap mess. Think boys' dorm room closet mess. I walk in shame.

My dark wood, plate glass and brushed aluminum desk, which once looked like something trendy out of  CSI Miami, is now completely invisible under undifferentiated drifts of mail, memos, printouts, poetry chapbooks, CDs, litter from munchies, and something unrecognizable, but with a familiar smell. In addition, it holds two monitors, two speakers, one phone, an LP digital turntable, a scanner, a microphone, a headphone set, a digital camera, a semi-functioning mini-disk player, a flash recorder, a stereo remote, at least one cassette tape, one floppy disk, two mini-disks, and a zip disk in a pear tree. Also, a hand-thown lidded jar containing a hand-tooled leather change purse containing three Mercury dimes (for casting the I Ching), a hammered Chinese brass box with Imperial dragons, topped by a small cast image of the Bodhisatva of Compassion, a tube containing an unknown but popular Japanese condiment, a machine-tooled pen and holder in the shape of a '50s sci-fi rocket ship, a set of itty-bitty screwdrivers, a stapler and a Sharpie.

And that's just the desk. Just to hit the high points, seven of the dozen computers in the room work. There is a full shelf of outdated manuals for outdated software, a nice selection of early 20th century illustrated books, a 1929 Atwater Kent radio transmitter, an Edison wax cylinder redording, a horn-style speaker and a condensor mike that weighs 20 pounds. Along with several rat's nests of cables for connecting devices I no longer own to devices that no longer work. I'm hoping to jerry-rig a shambolic automaton out of the spare parts that can write the Listening Post for me, leaving me some spare time to tidy up, but I can't find the assembly manual anywhere.

Road notes

There is lot of road between the North Country and Maryland underserved by public radio, providing the traveler prolonged opportunities for contemplation. As I zipped along the endless pavement in concert with thousands of other drivers, it occurred to me what a backward solution we have arrived at for the problem of getting from place to place in a hurry. The problem, as I see it, is that we are slow, and we get tired. Neolithic man took the first whack at this problem. Some early genius noticed that other animals ran faster, climbed on top of one, and bullied it into going his way. There must have been a learning curve--saber-tooth? No. Horse? Not too bad!

But it's not our lot to be satisfied with incremental improvements. Smooth roads would help--so we have paved 1% of the surface of the continental US. Wheeled vehicles?--pretty efficient--so 2% of all our labor and a bigger chunk of our income goes into building, buying and feeding cars and trucks. Cheap high-power fuel?--drill out 100 million years of fossil carbon and torch it all off in the blink of a geological eye. And we need garages and bridges and car stereos and diners and drive-thru wedding chapels and malls. We spend hours commuting and zip around like mosquitoes all day.

Seems pretty Rube Goldberg. Think if all that effort, treasure and resources spent over the centuries had gone into learning how to run faster and longer. We could probably run 45 miles per hour for ten hours at a crack. We might have learned how to fly like Superman does. Instead we're stuck with all this scrap metal. Are we there yet?

Behind the mule

Farmers have always been used to the notion that year by year their work disappears. The crop goes into bellies; the stubble is plowed back in to fertilize the soil; the weeds that are pulled always return. Only the land itself, ready for the next crop, endures from year to year. The work of carmakers lasts a little longer--ten years, twenty years for some, fifty for a tiny few. The rest is crushed for scrap. Artists and writers, on the other hand, have always had their eye on eternity, expecting their work to endure on paper or canvas, stone or bronze, moving on into the future after their creator has been plowed back in.

But modern media has a shelf life shorter than a Twinkie. I've spent a lot of time over the last months trying to resurrect for reprint a book I designed back in 1992. I found it finally among a stack of dusty floppy diskettes--old Mac-format floppies with the files compressed via a no-longer-available utility. If I could extract them, they would be in a design format for software I no longer possess. If I could reinstall the software on a machine old enough to run it, it would be too old to connect with the Internet or network to a newer machine needed to convert it for contemporary use. It might as well be the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I tried--cajoling antique hardware back to life, searching out old applications and relearning how to use them--but, in the end, no luck. So I have taken the dusty book itself from the shelf, to laboriously scan it page by page, to re-edit and design from scratch. And that should do it for a few more years--the lifetime of a Twinkie, perhaps. Progress has put us all back behind the mule.

Rain of soup: the NPR API

For a longtime advocate of emphasizing the "public" in public broadcasting, this is an exciting moment. My online colleagues at National Public Radio have made it the first major media company to hand what amounts to the "keys to the kingdom" over to the public. They have done this via the introduction of an open API, or application programming interface--a mouthful of buzzwords describing a feature that allows the public to access the entire archive of 250,000 NPR stories, and to use them as they see fit within their own sites, pages, and blogs. Included are tools to organize collections of stories by topic, program, series, reporter, and/or search term, and to receive those stories in a wide variety of formats and at varying levels of detail.

Within a few months, NPR stations such as North Country Public Radio will also be able to make their own stories available to the public using NPR's API. So, for example, if you had a blog dealing with environmental issues in the Northeast, you would be able to create a collection of stories on the environment from NPR mixed with local stories from NPR stations in the Northeast. Or a bluegrass fan might collect all the performances by and interviews with bluegrass artists at NPR and mix in performers from the UpNorth Music project. Or you could just grab every story since 1995 about James Brown, the hardest working man in show business. Sweet.



Even better, outside developers are already building new tools to use the API in novel ways. John Tynan at KJZZ has worked out a widget that takes NPR stories by topic and drops them onto a timeline, so you can see how coverage of a given issue develops. Here is a sample of the work in progress. Geoff Gaudreault of Reverbiage has built a widget that combines a 3D globe mapping out the latest NPR stories with an embedded player to listen to the stories. See it work and get the code. At NCPR, we are in the process of switching to the API for all the NPR features syndicated within the site. You can play with the API yourself, and should. Use the "Query Generator" to select and view different slices of the NPR pie. Register to use the NPR API.

Perfect swish

One of the ways you can tell I am a geek is that I watch science programs on TV. This week I was glued to the screen watching to see if NASA's Phoenix lander would beat the odds and reach the polar Martian surface in one piece, then phone home. Nice trick--sort of like throwing a perfect swish from mid-court in Montana through a basket located in the Canton High School gym. It takes a certain cast of mind. A few years ago I took the Boeing factory tour and was impressed by the fanatic level of organization. The tool cart area was marked out on the assembly floor with precise grid lines, and each rectangular cart was aligned in the center of its grid area, square to the lines. The tools on each cart were likewise perfectly aligned with the sides of the cart. All down the third of a mile long production line, there was not one thing out of place.

Amoeba greets Phoenix lander.

I shared this techno-utopian vision with my biologist friend David in a little New York taqueria. He said, "That's the difference between technology and life. Living things are always right on the edge of falling apart. Biology is like a Marx Brothers movie." I asked him why we couldn't build a simple single-celled creature from scratch, once we had the entire genome decoded. "Information is not the same as knowledge;" he said, "only a cell knows how to make another cell." I guess it's like the difference between having the script to A Night at the Opera and living inside Groucho's head. It comforts me to think that out there in some underground "clean room," greater geeks than I are grinding their teeth in frustration at the genius of the amoeba.

Audio archaeology

Kevin Irwin has been camped in the back of the web office for the last few weeks with a resurrected reel-to-reel tape deck hooked into a computer. Tape is like a Twinkie--leave it in a dusty box for a couple of decades and it will eventually go bad. So beside Kevin is a piece of ad-hoc tech cobbled by Radio Bob out of plywood, tin foil, light bulbs, and a thermostat pried out of an old CPU. Inspired equally by a toy Easy Bake oven and a Clarkson engineering degree, it is used to cook the tapes, stabilizing them just long enough for one last good playback.

String band sketch by Matt Gordon from their 1980 LP Backroad Breakdown.

Some at the station view this exercise in audio archaeology with trepidation. Radio is meant to play, then go away. And given the quality of much that has come to light from the somewhat random library that survived the move to the new station offices more than a decade ago, one could agree. But now and then, the midden heap disgorges a gem--intermittent reinforcement to keep the digger keen to his task. One such for me is a recording from around 1975 of the St. Regis River Valley String Band.

Back in the day, band founders David and Linda Danks lived around the corner from me in Sanfordville, in a farmhouse on Pickle Street. This was a golden time for live music in the area; another band lived downstairs from me, and yet another down the road in the opposite direction. I recall the largest member of the Danks family was a massive and ugly specimen of swine named Captain Gonad. The band limped from gig to gig in a crapulous and ancient GMC school bus, renamed The Fool Bus. The prime venues of the day were bars, beer blasts and Legion halls. Hearing the band today, the sweet old-time tunes are inextricably bound up in my mind with the din of table talk, the clamor of pinball machines, and the pungent funk of half-dried beer, tobacco, and woodstove-scented flannel shirts.

"Friend me" not

While I have been fascinated to follow the development of social networks on the web, I have never warmed up to them in practice. The very name sounds oxymoronic--social sounds, well--sociable--and network sounds like work. So I might visit a FaceBook page for information, but I have not built one of my own, and rarely interact with the pages of others. My cell phone is not web connected and sits mostly idle--a text message has never passed its tiny little keypad. For a while I tracked old running buddies via Classmates, but with both ends needing to be paying customers to actually communicate, my skinflint genes kicked in and I let it lapse. The alternate reality site Second Life now moves on without me. I tried to create an avatar there that looked like me, but everything came out way more young and buff than sad reality, and I had no desire to present myself as a blue punk vampire with a face full of steel, or to build a zero-gravity domicile constructed entirely of virtual cornflakes.

So my social life operates in a way a cave man would recognize. I go to where people live and sit within earshot of quiet conversation. I share food, news, blarney and opinion in kitchens and coffeeshops. I like my music live and will pay for the privilege. I embrace my inner throwback. There is no end to the axes I enjoy the grinding of, and I guess social networking is one. Don't friend me, I'll friend you.

Where did the future go?

Chip Forelli photo of the Unisphere

Beside my desk is a photo of a relic of the lost future, an eerie view of the Unisphere from the 1964 New York World's Fair. Beyond bare trees the floodlit globe, circled by silver rings, floats on glowing fog. No one occupies the row of benches to contemplate the vision. As an eleven-year-old, visiting the fair, I was assured that the future would be full of marvels, turbine-powered cars that drove themselves, space colonies, undersea cities, a benevolent world government, and an end to disease and hunger. Perhaps a secular view of heaven, but heaven.

That future would, of course, be now. And the future did bring marvels, if not the same marvels touted by the fair and my endless collection of science-fiction novels. Who could have foreseen that by the time we built the infrastructure to support world-wide videophone service, that the hottest method of interpersonal communication would be typing arcane abbreviations onto itty-bitty keyboards? It would haven taken a huge cynic to predict that once the entire corpus of human knowledge was available to anyone in the world, the one thing people would be clamoring for would be a thirty-second amateur video of a farting panda. Heavenly. The future's wasted on the present.

Speak of the devil

I was starting to feel a little nostalgic about disaster, listening to the retrospective coverage of Ice Storm '98--right up until everything started to fall apart again. The massive thaw of the last week presented its bill with hurricane force winds. The campus went dark, the network and phones went dead. The website was kerflooey (a technical term). The transmitter was running on generator. Power surges melted my computer. It was a classic case of "speak of the devil."

Fortunately Lucifer didn't hang around quite as long this time. And there were some lessons learned. When the land lines went down, the cell phones came out. When the campus lost power, parts of the network stayed up on generators, as did our transmitter shack. There were workarounds for almost everything, from getting audio to the station to getting cancellations and closings out to the community--laborious maybe, suboptimal, but workable. Without the example of 10 years ago we would have been down to tin cans and a string.

So thanks for sending in your recollections of Ice Storm '98. But maybe in the future, we should just remember in our hearts. Not that I'm superstitious.

Rate of Change

Things happen by fits and starts. There are rumors of change, meetings to plan this and that, and lots of waiting in between. Then--and I'm not sure if it's a fit or a start--everything happens at once, creating a level of chaos that requires, as Hunter Thompson says in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "a real connoisseur of edge work." Such a fearful convergence rules the station today. The long anticipated building renovation is heralded by jackhammers and sawzalls, and the operation of a large orange crawler-thingie that causes the whole structure to shudder and groan as if was being chewed and shaken by a tyranosaurus. The production studio is gutted out to accommodate new gear to serve the next round of the UpNorth Music project. Joel contemplates a stupendous new computer screen that gives one cause to wonder, "How big is God's monitor?" And Radio Bob is teleporting himself back and forth between Waterman Hill, where our new transmitter tower is dragging itself up toward the stratosphere.

Amid this high craziness, more meetings are going on behind the plastic sheets that serve in place of windows in the station kitchen. Whatever comes of this round, it is likely to happen at the same time as everything else.

Be everywhere now

I don't very often get out to big outdoor concerts, but when we heard that Van Morrison would be opening Bluesfest in Ottawa, his first return to the area in 40-odd years, we bought our tickets the first hour they were offered. Certain music heard at certain times in life just burns itself into the bottom of the brain. Van has a little chunk of grey matter all to himself somewhere to the south of my prefrontal cortex. I've changed in the interim, and no doubt Van has too, but the songs remain fresh as a daisy.

But while my attention was otherwise occupied, the outdoor concert seems to have changed, too. While the audience was always wired up--by the proximity of tens of thousands of co-religionists--now they are also wired up in a more technological sense. We bought our tickets online, where once we would have queued up for hours outside some box office, gabbing with fellow fans. Inside the venue, the pre-concert rain remained unchanged, but many were plugged into iPods under their umbrellas, grooving to unknowable music, and many more were texting their beer orders to friends who drew the short straw for standing in line. Others were calling directions into their cell phones, trying to hook up friends with patches of grass held open for their arrival.

Once fan banners were used to conceal microphones to capture bootleg recordings of favorite artists--now people wave aloft their phones, broadcasting the concert direct to friends at home in streaming video. We were 50 yards from stage with a good view, but people around us were often turned away from the stage to watch the video feed on the big screen. Some were even videoing the video screen--the giant cyberhead of Van eclipsing the little Van laboring onstage. Be Here Now used to be the dictum when Van was last in town. The 21st century version is, apparently, Be Everywhere Now.

Disconnect

David just walked down the hall to announce, “the internet’s down—and it’s snowing.” Another practically perfect day in “the cruelest month.” There are still things I could do: whittle a banana, whittle a monkey to hold the banana, whittle a tree to hold the monkey. But as web manager, I’ve got nothing to manage—the Maytag repairman of cyberspace. I know that NCPR.org is still out there, but it’s like the train that runs by Folsom Prison, out of reach beyond the razor-wire of the University firewall. I can write these words, but it’s a message in a bottle—no one will ever see them until they have been mooted by the industrious geeks of IT. I could catch up with some old friends, but my contact list has nothing but email addresses. I could continue my research for tonight’s poetry show, but there’s nothing in my notes but website URLs. There’s a poem by a friend--on my website, there are things I could make reference to—in my blog. There are sound clips I could use—in the online archive. Twice now the connection has come back on, only to swoon again in less than a minute: “No! Wait!”—then nothing but my forlorn claw marks in the dust on the screen. How could something that didn’t even exist a little while ago become the center of the universe? Shall I burn incense? Try the Tinkerbell technique? I look out at the snow, but it gives me no information.

Dread air

It was 4:25 am when my phone rang and the voice of Radio Bob delivered the prerecorded message “Gee! It’s awfully quiet here at North Country Public Radio.”--the silence detector on the transmitter telling me that my hasty training as cub radio tech acolyte was about to be put to the test. My first reaction was “Good grief, don’t you realize you’ve reached an English major?” But I was soon engaged in remote viewing of the dimly-understood station automation system via my laptop at home. No joy. So I put on my coffee and drank some clothes and by 5 am was at the station, clueless, but proud to serve. First I woke Joel Hurd from his well-deserved rest to interrogate the transmitter, then I woke Radio Bob in mid-getaway at a downstate hotel room. Yelling “Help” real loud is within my skill set.

Soon Bob was talking to Joel in the studio on one cell phone, and to me—exiled to our Waterman Hill transmitter shack to read dials—on another cell phone. This made it hard for him to use his hand puppets. While Joel may be an engineer, he's a production engineer, and compared to a radio engineer, that’s about as relevant as being a choo-choo engineer. As for me, the web manager—that may sound techy, but web geeks think radio technology is made up of tyuubes and—things. Actually, with the online stream still working, I was thinking “Ha—so much for the legacy platform, it’s time for the true masters of cyberspace to rule. MWAA-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

Some hours later Bob had distilled enough information from the mash of our ignorance to make a diagnosis, and Ellen Rocco and Sandy Demarest dispatched themselves south on a high-tech treasure hunt. They brought back a brand new stochastic deverbillator (or something like that) and a mere eleven hours after the dreaded call, we were back on the air. For those who take an interest in the technical specs; it was a metal box, sort of rectangular in shape. I think it may have contained both tyuubes—and things.

Postcard of doom

Writing in haste again, taking a break between sessions at my annual geekfest, the Integrated Media Associates Conference, this year in Boston. Nice for me, because I get to bunk with friends in Medford and hang out a little with my daughter in her adopted town. Yesterday was the hard-core techie sessions, with a higher concentration of bluetooth ear phones and bitty foldout keyboards than anywhere outside freshman orientation at MIT. Once again, it's the end of the world as we know it, according to keynoter Michael Rosenblum, video journalism guru. The explosion of services like You Tube represent the tipping point from old media to new. That is, from centralized, cash-fat and exclusive media, to lean, inclusive, democratic media. "Adapt or Die!" is the cry. The difference this year is that CEOs and senior producers are joining the ranks of the believers and the terrified. The message is received, but what will be done with it is totally up for grabs.

Somewhere the mix of social networking, blogging, visitor submitted video, audio and text will intersect with professional curation, the necessary resources, and the deep storytelling expertise of old media to create a synthesis that doesn't have a name yet. At least that is the hope. The alternative looks like holding stock in buggy whips and Betamax. That expressionless psuedo-personality The Market, as always, shrugs and says "Tough noogies." Next up, a day of sessions at MIT, with the title (ominous to many in the room) of "Beyond Broadcasting."