Stumbling into BodyHackingCon on the last day

You walk into the BodyHackingCon on an early Sunday afternoon, and you are not sure if it's really still going on. You expect it to have a bigger, or at least flashier presence: shouldn't there be people with highly visible body modifications milling about? Instead, you see people in business casual whose name tags say "superintendent", and the hallways are plastered with signs for Texas School Boards convention. But you persist and walk around a corner, and then down a city-block-long corridor around another corner (that's Austin Convention Center for you), and you are finally rewarded by a hand-scrawled sign pointing towards an open door of a huge, warehouse-style expo room. But this is the last day of a 3-day convention, so naturally most of the vendors are gone.

Neosensory vest that is supposed to let you perceive words as vibrations on your skin

There is still a thing or two happening; at one of the booths a visitor is trying to pull together the edges of a peculiar-looking vest around his torso; it clearly is not going to happen, since the vest is 3-4 sizes too small. "I'm sorry. We are planning to have larger sizes in the future," says a vendor at the booth, even though the guy is merely average size. But apparently the vest does not need to close to work. It is studded with small metal circles that make up some kind of haptic language interface. That's only my guess based on what I could glean from the snippets of conversation. Because who needs to ask how it works when you can speculate?

"Whip. Angle," says the booth guy. "Whip. Angle." Then he turns a phone screen to the guy who's trying out the vest. There are two circles on it, and he asks the guy to pick one to tap on. Apparently the booth guy made the dots convey some kind of haptic stimulation (e.g. buzzing?) -- and asked the wearer to recognize the word encoded in it. He praises the wearer for answering correctly. "So you see, it's not just the length of the word," he says. I guess he was saying that the vest made it possible, with some minimal training, to distinguish the actual word pattern, not just a longer word from a shorter word?

A jacket with a ribcage headpiece? This would make a splash at a science fiction convention.

Then you look around some more, and even with most vendors gone and large patches of the expo hall square footage reverting to its post-convention beige bleakness, you still see something unusual. At another exhibitor's booth, flanking it on both sides, two women are lying on the tables, looking for all the world like wax statues. Their eyes are covered with something that could be a sleep mask or a VR headset. You glance at the vendor's name -- bio- or healing-something -- and think it's more likely to be a mask. By the way, the name matches a definite pattern: half of the exhibitors' names here have "bio", or "quantum", or something vaguely medical in a New Agey way. Which is fitting, given that half of them sell nothing more than nutrition drinks and supplements.

You stumble upon exhibits of clothes that wouldn't be out of place a goth or punk store, except they have patches with wires sticking out, like something that's placed on you right before a surgery. Some also light up. Many would make a stunning costume at a science fiction convention, if you could spawn off a third or fourth alter ego to explore your mild interest in costuming. Overall, this is the bodyhacking you could get behind -- the kind that stays entirely outside the body.

Most of those clothes are art projects. One dress claims to simulate dark matter: "Dark Matter inflates and deflates against your body to simulate the universe expanding against you, and the buzzing sculptural universal necklace, "Dark Energy", buzzes against your skin to simulate movement through the universe in time in accordance with events happening in VR". But you have read enough science fiction and imagined the vast cosmic space enough times that you know if you put on that dress (not that it's an option) the experience would fall very short of feeling at the center of the expanding universe.

A cape that goes over some sensor with wires that's placed on your chest, resembling uncannily of surgical preparations.

Some of the clothes have VR content associated with it accessible through your phone; and perhaps you could spend some interesting minutes with it, but just downloading the app would take some time, and the WiFi connection in this building is iffy, and the event is winding down and you are sure vendors are anxious to pack up and leave.

Finally on the way out you get a glimpse of a more radical kind of bodyhacking: a guy you pass in the hallway has small, but prominent devil's horns under the skin of his bald forehead.

Tangled up in cords (not umbilical)

Labor and delivery in a modern hospital exposes you to some amusing tech gadgets. There is a computer on wheels by your bed that displays a graph of your baby's (OK, fetus's) heart rate, and a graph of your contractions. Sometimes a nurse comes in to check on you, and pulls up another patient's graphs besides yours -- multitasking, I guess. So you can see how strong or frequent are this other, anonymous patient's contractions, and play an imaginary race against her. Faster! Stronger! Who's going to deliver a baby first?

(And here's a bit of trivia. Semi-reclining in bed is called semi-fowlers in nurse parlance. Sitting up straight in bed is called high fowlers. I know this because the nurse, whenever she came in to check on me, made notes of my position in the computer by the bed. I finally asked her what that meant.)

Baby heart rate and contraction monitors were by far the most annoying aspect of hospital birth. They made my first, pre-induction night the most uncomfortable -- more so than the two postpartum nights. I had to sleep in a hospital gown, on a bed that is designed for delivering babies, not sleep. The whole time I was tethered to the monitors that were placed on my belly and had cables going from them to the computer stand. Whenever I shifted, let alone rolled over on the other side, the monitors slipped off. Then the nurse would come in and mess with them for 10 minutes at a time to reposition them. This happened at least once an hour. I'm surprised I got even one hour of sleep. I finally drifted off early in the morning, and was woken up by the nurse at 6 a.m., who came in to start the induction. Oh, and the evening before I barely talked the nurses into unplugging my IV port from the IV line, to which they had me hooked up most of the evening. The reason? The baby's heart rate seemed too high, so they were giving me fluids. (I don't see a connection here, but I'm not a doctor.)

Going to the bathroom is an ordeal. You have to unplug the cords of the two monitors' and automatic blood pressure cuff, sling them over your shoulder and take them with you to the bathroom. The exercise is pointless -- the monitors will slip off of their fine-tuned positions on your belly, and will have to be readjusted. You might as well take them off, but instead you do as the nurse said, and drag them and the cords with you. You ask for cordless monitors, and the hospital staff brings them to you as soon as they can find some (they only have two cordless monitors on this floor, and they are in use all the time), but that still doesn't do you much good, because you also have to drag the damn IV stand with you to the bathroom! It makes the whole trip only marginally less cumbersome.

The next most annoying thing was a self-adjusting bed in the postpartum room. It makes tiny adjustments to its elevation and angle the whole time you are in it. As soon as you sit down, the bed slightly inflates or elevates the part you're sitting on; sometimes even when you are lying still, the bed will inflate or deflate under you. Those shifts are minuscule, and your position hardly changes at all; only the low whirr of a motor and vibration informs you that the bed is doing something. A nurse explained to me that this is to prevent bed sores -- not that postpartum patients are in much danger of those, but the hospital has just one type of bed, and this is it. And no, these self-adjustments can't be turned off. In two days I still didn't get used to them enough to ignore them. It's as if this inanimate thing is constantly annoyed by your presence and squirms to get out from under you. :-) It's hard not to take it personally. It makes you wonder if we really want "smart houses" in our future. Maybe I'll be just as happy with "dumb" furniture that's not aware of my presence.

Another gadget snafu

This morning was wasted by my hare-brained last minute initiative to get an audiobook to listen to during my trip to Fencon. Not long ago I bought an iVO Sound MP3 player. No, I haven't heard of this brand either. As it turned out, this proved to be the problem.

I bought an download of an audio recording of Robert Charles Wilson's "Axis" from Audible.com. When you buy a recording from them, it does not come in a clean, neat MP3 file. No, you have to install an Audible Manager software on your computer. Then you use the manager to transfer the recording, which is in a proprietary format, to your MP3 player. Before you begin that process, the Audible Manager asks what kind of MP3 player you have. Lo and behold -- in the list of 20-30 players, there was no iVO Sound! So I called their customer service. After putting me on hold, the guy determined this player was not compatible with Audible format, because it lacks some kind of universal plugin.

I asked him for a refund. (Those audiobooks are not that cheap.) The customer service guy tried to remind me that I have other ways to listen to audiobooks, such as on my computer. I told him I bought this recording specifically for listening on a trip, so playing it on a computer is not an option. After putting me on hold (probably to confer with a manager) he said they'll issue me a refund. It should show up in my account in 24 hours. We'll see if it does or not.

What a waste of time. It all could have been avoided if Audible.com listed the MP3 players they support on their website! How hard can that be?

When I come back from Dallas, I may actually return the iVO Sound to the store and buy a more common brand of MP3 player. The iVO is decent, but not the easiest player to operate. Its user interface is kind of screwy.

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Austin High Tech Career Fair

Austin High Tech Career Fair

Was great. Though I'm not actively looking for a job, it was interesting to see what's out there. I was glad to see that C++ seemed to be in demand, and C# / .NET even more so, as I happen to specialize in those technologies. I also took it as a good sign that some recruiters roamed the hall looking for anybody with a software developer's identifying green star on their badge. One of those ultra-enthusiastic recruiters touted the casual office culture as one of the main perks for working at that company; as a visual evidence whereof she spoke, one of the software guys in the company booth wore his jeans low enough to deliberately expose a sliver of his plaid underwear. :-) Hmm. I think even in the days of the first internet bubble you didn't get to see stuff like that in corporate-type events.

My interaction with recruiters and company representatives varied from brief exchange of resumes or business cards, to long conversations that resembled job interviews, in which they asked me about the details of my work. Later, during the networking part, I had a good conversation with an internet entrepreneur about my personal bootstrapping project. He was actually the first person I talked about this with. It's amazing how your pipe dreams suddenly start to take shape and not seem so unrealistic anymore when you discuss them with someone. Once you start talking, you are forced to put your nebulous concepts into words, and suddenly they crystalize.

Steve unexpectedly ran into his former roommate from his graduate school days, and we chatted with him a little. Then a door prize drawing was announced: door64 was giving away Chumbies. And what do you know -- Steve's ex-roommate won a Chumby! People swarmed all around him to take a peek. I was envious, but did not stay long enough for the second drawing. The crowd of people thinned out pretty quickly after that.

My new teh shiny!

A month ago I bought my first smartphone, an AT&T Tilt. I've been enjoying it so far, despite having a bit of a rough start with it.

The activation was a bit confusing. The box contains generic instructions for activating any AT&T phone, but not specifically the Tilt, and it does not contain separate instructions for activating an upgrade phone for those who already have AT&T wireless service and are keeping their old phone number. So I tried to activate it online, and got a message that it's already activated. But I couldn't make phone calls. So I had to call AT&T customer service, to have them activate it, which they promptly did.

Once activated, it worked like a charm

And it worked -- not just the ability to make phone calls, but also internet access and multimedia messaging. This is a big improvement over my earlier phone, a Nokia. The Nokia phone was theoretically able to send multimedia messages, but very few of them ever arrived. :-) With this one, no messages have got lost so far. Also internet access was very slow with my Nokia phone. Most pages never loaded. With this phone it's fast. It connects to 3G networks where they are available (and as far as I can tell, in Austin that's almost everywhere) and to AT&T's Edge network where 3G is not available.

The phone functionality works like a regular phone, so I won't talk much about it.

The interface is intuitive and user-friendly

The interface is intuitive and user-friendly. Any action I've wanted to do so far has been completely obvious. Partly it's because this phone uses Windows Mobile operating system; I should probably be ashamed of myself for using Windows, but I could not find any other phone that had all the functionality Tilt has, and didn't cost an arm and a leg. (Since I got a refurbished Tilt, it cost me less than $200.) As much as it is fashionable to hate Windows, this phone Just Works. :-)

The only learning curve that this phone has imposed on me is finding out is how to perform most operations with the keyboard instead of a stylus. I don't like using a stylus much: alternate between tapping the stylus and pressing keys is not very ergonomic and slows me down. (The same way it is inefficient to alternate between keyboard and mouse of a regular computer, which is why I'm big on keyboard shortcuts). Plus, styluses get lost so easily. You can't hold one in your hand when you type: you have to find a place to put it down. And that's how they get easily lost.

WiFi and camera

In addition to 3G connectivity, AT&T Tilt also has WiFi. So far I have only tried to connect to wireless access points that don't require encryption. If I were to connect to a password-protected access point, it shouldn't be a problem, since a new connection screen gives you an option to enter a password. However, my wireless router at home requires a MAC address of a device in order to allow it to connect. If I needed a MAC address of my Tilt, I would have to do some research to find it (perhaps only as far as the user manual -- I don't know. I haven't had much need to connect to an encrypted access point. At home, after all, I can use my regular laptop.)

The camera is adequate, for a cell phone. It's slow; as a result, pictures are blurry. The shutter lag is huge; it also seems to take an eternity to focus on the subject. At least it is like that with default settings. I twiddled with settings a bit, but it did not improve. And I don't think I'll twiddle more, because I've just bought a new digital camera and won't be using my phone camera much. I noticed, though, that the Tilt camera has a burst mode, among other things; that's nice, but the pictures in the burst mode come out nearly postage stamp-sized (320x240) and even more blurry than in the "regular" mode. I was a bit more satisfied with the Sports mode. It lets you take pictures in quick succession, like the Burst mode, but the pictures are 640 x 480 and about the same quality as regular.

Miscellaneous quibbles

I haven't tried some of the features of this phone that may be very important for people who use it for work. It's supposed to be able to access your mail, calendar, contacts, etc. from your corporate Exchange server, but I only use it for personal use, so I'll never know.

Synchronization between Tilt and a Windows computer works well, although initial instructions on how to set it up are a bit confusing.

One little quibble I have with this phone is that when its screen goes black (to conserve power), it does not respond to any key presses. You have to press the power button to "wake up" the phone, any other key will be just ignored. This was a problem for me when I was setting up my voice mailbox. Setting up a voice mailbox is a tedious task as you listen to pre-recorded instructions and press various keys in response to voice prompts. This process takes long enough that the screen goes black between one step and the next one. At some point the instructions ask you to enter your password. You start entering it and the screen goes black. You think that maybe pressing another key will light it up -- this would be only intuitive, no? I'm too used to "press any key" behavior of regular computers. :-) But no, it does not light up, and the keys you pressed have no effect; the phone does not recognize key presses when the screen is black. But the phone is not "asleep" (whatever that would mean), because your call does not get disconnected. The instruction robot keeps jabbering at you to enter your password. So there is this cognitive disconnect: you are still on a call, but your phone keys have stopped working. It did not immediately become clear to me that they stop working when the screen goes black, much less that the only way to get them working again is to press the power key. I was so confused by this at first that I called AT&T customer service to help me with this. Then I realized what I was doing wrong and unconfused myself. :-)

Speaking of AT&T customer service, I've had only good experiences with them (not just regarding Tilt, but throughout the 4 years of me being AT&T customer). They answer the call quickly, are polite, and make sure they resolved your problem to your satisfaction.

Book review: Tales from the Secret City

I suppose I can't really call this post a book review, otherwise I would have to review each story in this anthology. And I'm not going to do that. So, call it what you will.

"Tales from the Secret City" is a collection of stories of various Austin science fiction and fantasy writers, many of who I've met personally. Many of them don't have a lot of publishing credentials; they are still trying to make their first sale (though some of them have already sold stories, even novels). So I had two good personal reasons for reading this book. I'm always curious to read the work of people I know, and I identify with aspiring writers.

The anthology turned out to be not bad, though I can't say any of the stories struck me as stunningly good. The overall quality i comparable to another anthology of stories by local SF writers -- "Cross Plains Universe" -- and the latter has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award!

It would be too tedious to comment on each story, so I'll mention just the one that was the most memorable to me. (Which is not to say it's the best -- this is just a reflection of my taste, nothing else.) It was "Nothing Personal" by Odessa Cole. Haven't most of us felt that our gadgets have conspired against us? Well, in this story they actually do. Normally, I'm not too fond of technological dystopias, but this tale of a guy trapped in a hell of "smart technology" appealed to me for unusual reasons. Suspecting that his "smart card" deliberately lies to him about his finances, he spends the rest of the story troubleshooting it. This story devotes an amount of loving detail to the troubleshooting process you can't expect from any real-life tech support person.

There is a term "gadget fetish", but I don't think I've ever heard a term "debugging fetish". But if you have the latter, you'll find this story really sexy.

Well, I can't say I always get my kicks out of debugging things. There are lots of technologies out there I wouldn't approach with a ten-foot pole, as their complexity simultaneously scares and bores me. And yet, once I get deeply into something, I do get a thrill out of troubleshooting it. And that's the part of me this story indulged.