In the Waiting Game, Technology Always Wins

As Ben Franklin famously opined, "Only three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and a new Apple model announced in the spring." Okay, he obviously didn't contribute the last bit (he was more of a Linux guy), but it might as well be added to that short list of life's inevitabilities. Industry watchers and consumers fearing a seasonal bout of buyer's remorse dread the early part of every new year, because the rumors start flying about what you would have gotten if you had only waited. Sure, there will always be something new on the horizon, but it doesn't mean you can't demonstrate bad timing in your purchasing.

For example, in the second week of April 2010, my family wanted to do something nice for me: surprise me with a new Apple laptop. I hadn't had a new Mac in years, preferring to staple on upgrades to my ancient G5 until it was a computational Frankenstein, wheezing and belching just to keep up with simple tasks. A new MacBook Pro was certainly in order. And my birthday was in mid-April.

But my tone-deaf reaction to my new, surprise gift was that my loving family had exhibited spectacularly bad timing in buying this "new old stock" laptop. As gently as I could, I pointed out that if they had waited three days, they could have chosen from the new crop of laptops that featured the faster i5 and i7 processors and the extended-capacity battery technology. Off we went to the Apple Store for a full refund. I returned four days later and was one of the first in line. And, in time, they forgave my ingratitude.

But really, how could a normal (i.e., not technology-obsessed) person possibly know about "expected releases" if he didn't spend way too much time lurking on blogs and message boards to glean—with no firm evidence—that Apple always releases a new computer in the spring and a new iPhone in the summer? One can't; one just "has to know." But even if you don't need the latest and greatest, it still makes sense to wait for the new releases, as the price for last year's model will drop significantly. If you're OK with a used or eBay-purchase, your buying leverage goes up significantly.

So here we are in Q1 of 2011, and the frenzy of new tech is upon us. If you're looking to buy a new tablet and consider one running Honeycomb (Android's tablet-specific operating system) as a worthy competitor to the Apple iPad, boy, do you have your work cut out for you! You will be spending a lot of time reading through reviews and sorting hype from reality. Be consoled knowing that much the same fate awaits phone and computer buyers of course.

In fact, so chaotic is this spring season of new tech that we actually have two announced technologies with the same name: Thunderbolt. To smartphone shoppers, the name refers to HTC's latest flagship Android-based model, due out in mid-March. To computer users, Thunderbolt is the new communications protocol invented by Intel and that will appear on new Apple MacBook Pro laptops.

If you haven't heard of Thunderbolt (the computer-related one, that is) until this editorial, you need to read up on it at Apple's website, as well as your favorite message boards, including this informative thread in the Harmony Central forums. It will significantly change how you move data and signals to your peripherals, and has profound potential for high-bandwidth pursuits like high-def video, high-resolution and surround audio, and large-project and system backups. Thunderbolt has some compelling specs besides superior I/O throughput speed (20 times faster than USB 2.0, 12 times faster than FireWire 800, and twice as fast as USB 3.0) too. Of course, it will backwardly accommodate USB and FireWire for now, but T-Bolt champions hope to ultimately replace those two aging technologies. That's by no means inevitable, however. Remember, we still have USB 3.0, which is less than a year old and is an upgrade to a proven platform. Plus, you already own the cables for it. We will just have to live through it to see how it all shakes out.

One thing is for sure though: A year from now, you won't even consider a device that doesn't supersede Thunderbolt (if it's a smartphone), or—if it's a computer—includes it or offers an alternative, whether that's USB 3.0 or something else. Either way, your vocabulary must now include this stormy compound word. And like some technological Thor, you will need to wield it with authority in order to prevail.

"United Breaks Guitars" but Launches Careers

Unless you've been living in a new-media deadzone lately, you've certainly seen the viral YouTube hit song "United Breaks Guitars." I think it's a catchy song, but for the life of me, I don't know why, as my local NPR station reported, United Airlines would be thinking of buying it to use as a "training video." It's a send-up, a spoof! Could they be buying it to kill it? A little late for that, don'tcha think? The horse is already out of the barn on that one. Perhaps they just want to use it as an "ice-breaker," before settling down to the task at hand: not trashing the instruments of their customers.

* * *

I myself have had one serious mishap with an instrument on an airline: the neck of my banjo was broken on a trip from JFK to London Heathrow. The airline ended up settling, but it took awhile. The first agent I dealt with was unsympathetic, disbelieving of my claim, and rude. Then I went further up the line, and got satisfaction. But it was a couple of weeks of back and forth before they cut the check. One hoop I had to jump through was getting the instrument appraised and the damage assessed. They chose a repairman in my home city (at the time I was living in Pittsburgh). The funny part of it was, I already knew the guy! He had worked on my instruments before. He was a total pro about the situation, though, and jumped through the hoops with me, filling out the necessary paperwork, etc. In a couple of weeks the check arrived. Case closed.

I once witnessed (from my window on the tarmac) a luggage wagon piled high with bags, with an acoustic hardshell case on the very top (not mine, but belonging to someone on my flight). As soon as the wagon lurched forward the precariously placed guitar came crashing down onto the concrete, probably a distance of 7 or 8 feet. The guy picked up the guitar and tried to swing it back up to the original position! It didn't take, and he only half-heartedly tried to catch it on the way back down, breaking its fall (again) to the pavement only slightly. A horror show. The person whose guitar it was must have been on the other side of the aisle, or surely screams of agony would have been audible.

The Best and Brightest (?)

I’ve always had a fascination with the Vietnam War, and particularly from the angle of the American government’s (mis)handling of it. Recently, two articles appears in the NY Times that both referenced David Halberstam’s book “The Best and the Brightest.” Below are the links. (BTW, if you can read only two books on the Vietnam War, that’s one of them. The other is Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie.”)

Richard Holbrooke (former U.N. ambassador) reviews of “Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam” by Gordon M. Goldstein:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/review/Holbrooke-t.html?scp=2&sq=holbrooke&st=cse

My favorite passage in this piece has nothing to do with the book; it’s a personal anecdote offered by the reviewer toward the end of the piece:

As it happens, I was part of a small group that dined with Bundy the night before Pleiku at the home of Deputy Ambassador William J. Porter, for whom I then worked. Bundy quizzed us in his quick, detached style for several hours, not once betraying emotion. I do not remember the details of that evening — how I wish I had kept a diary! — but by then I no longer regarded Bundy as a role model for public service. There was no question he was brilliant, but his detachment from the realities of Vietnam disturbed me. In Ambassador Porter’s dining room that night were people far less intelligent than Bundy, but they lived in Vietnam, and they knew things he did not. Yet if they could not present their views in quick and clever ways, Bundy either cut them off or ignored them. A decade later, after I had left the government, I wrote a short essay for Harper’s Magazine titled “The Smartest Man in the Room Is Not Always Right.” I had Bundy — and that evening — in mind.

__

Frank Rich parallels the “Best and Brightest” of the Vietnam War with Obama’s new “Best and Brightest” economic team here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/opinion/07rich.html?ex=1244523600&en=60c233e406f0fdd9&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1210-L4

Choice excerpt:

In his 20th-anniversary reflections, Halberstam wrote that his favorite passage in his book was the one where Johnson, after his first Kennedy cabinet meeting, raved to his mentor, the speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, about all the president’s brilliant men. “You may be right, and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say,” Rayburn responded, “but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”

Harder to drink the Mac Kool-Aid

It's just after Christmas 2007 in my household, and the graphics card that I bought my daughter (an NVidia GeForce Ge7300) won't run in her pre-Intel Mac (which is not that old). This is yet another disappointment of the Mac platform that I keep encountering. Usually, I have to keep a watchful eye on the operating system, sorting out in my head the non-intuitive three-decimal system with the counter-intuitive feline imagery, to make sure that I can run a compatible program.

But now, the pre-Intel G5s seem like persona non grata of the computer world, and I'm fast losing patience with the way Apple keeps revamping its platform at my expense. Speaking of expense, it's getting harder and harder to justify the cost increase of Mac computers over their Windows counterparts, especially as more and more core programs (MS Office, Adobe CS, browsers, Digidesign Pro Tools, Steinberg Cubase, etc.) become cross-platform. Sure, I'd love to learn Final Cut, but not enough for me to buy a Mac. I use Sony Vegas, and it's just fine.

I was an early-adopter Mac user. I still think the Mac is elegant and technically dazzling. But over time, you will eventually become victimized by Apple (witness the current price-drop fiasco of the iPhone). Windows can be infuriatingly slow to adopt commonsense upgrades (the Start menu in XP is just one example of woefully out-of-date interface design), but you can use machines that are several years old without incompatibilities. And more and more, I'm coming to respect that. And my bank account is too.

NAMM SHOW 2007

Just got back from the "Las Vegas" of gear shows: the Winter 2007 NAMM show, in Anaheim, CA.

I hadn't been there in three years, so it was quite a shock to see just how much the show has evolved and honed its technique. The exhibitors are largely manufacturers, and they display all their new gear (sometimes the ship date is months way), as well as highlights of their product line.

All the big guys are here: Roland, Yamaha, PRS, Gibson, Fender, Korg/Marshall/Vox, Taylor, Martin, Peavey, Crate, Mackie, Washburn, Apple Inc., Digidesign/Avid, MOTU, Steinberg, Cakewalk, Sony, DigiTech, Tascam, AKG, Audio-Technica, Shure, Blue, etc.

It's probably easier to name the companies who were not there.

One of the highlights of the show were the performances. Sure, there's a lot of "in-booth wanking," but there are world-class performances and concert experiences at night, in the ballrooms and makeshift venues. I saw Johnny Hiland twice, and was just blown away. A few years ago he was a delightful Tele-picker. But as amazing as that was, it wasn't that uncommon.

How far he has come. He now plays and endorses Paul Reed Smith guitars, and he's playing rock and roll with the best of them. His sound is steeped in the humbucker sound, and he's gone way past the lickety-split chicken-pickin' stuff. Rich, emotional, and lyric lines pour forth from his fingers. He's staying close to his southern roots, for sure, but his rock vocabulary has expanded, and he's now emerging as one of the pre-eminent voices in that genre -- right up there with Warren Haynes.

Blues Guitar for Dummies on sale December 18, 2006

My latest entry into the Dummies juggernaut is Blues Guitar for Dummies. This 384-page book includes a CD-ROM of all the musical examples that appear in the book (over 140 of them). The book provides tips on buying guitars, lists must-have recordings, gives a history of the blues and its key guitarists, and includes lots and lots of instruction and music examples. Everything from fingerstyle (Delta, Piedmont, ragtime, country) to electric (Chicago, blues-rock) to slide (standard and open tunings) is explored in depth. Blues Guitar for Dummies is perhaps a little easier than Rock Guitar for Dummies, and a good next step after Guitar for Dummies.

One of the most interesting things I discovered in researching the book was just how much the blues has been ignored by instrument manufacturers, record lablels, and even listening audiences over its history. Most of the blues knowledge we have is due to the resurrection of the genre beginning in the mid- to late-1960's (during the Great Folk Scare). Many of the primary, first-generation blues artists (Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf) were middle-aged or elderly by the time they were rediscovered, having spent the prime of their careers (and lives) in obscurity. So the information before this period is scant, and scholars vigorously disagree on even the most basic issues, like the spelling of artist's names (Charlie vs. Charley Patton, etc.) and birth data (year and location). Even the living artists themselves gave conflicting accounts of events.

Then there's the collective ignorance of the public. Most people don't even know where the Mississippi Delta is (it's not at the mouth of the River; it's 200 miles north), and are hazy about what is history and what is lore.

When I was researching early electric instruments, there was plenty of available material on popular and jazz players of the day, but relatively little on blues players, despite blues preceding jazz (and in many cases influencing it). You can find celebrity endorsements by Nick Lucas, Jonny Smith, and even Trini Lopez (!), but not T-Bone Walker.