Testing

Today at work, we had a test of the “Giant Voice” base-wide alert system. My office is in an odd little out-of-the-way spot, on the third floor with an open walkway outside. We call it the Crow’s Nest. It used to be that we couldn’t hear the Giant Voice up there in the Crow’s Nest. We could hear the alarm, but not the actual announcement, unless we went out onto the walkway and strained our ears. Well let me tell you that the Giant Voice works just fine now.. I’ll hear that Giant Voice in my sleep. Holy cannoli

*****

Oh and speaking of holy. The President, such as he is, is doing the most to force people to choose: Christianity or MAGA. Jesus or Trump. It’s getting interesting. Meanwhile, he appears to have confused Pope Leo with the Mayor of New York, because Popes don’t have much influence on law enforcement and crime policy. The Pope might be “weak on crime,” but he’s probably not weak on blasphemy. Side note: I work in a medical school, surrounded by doctors, and not one of them has ever appeared at work in a long white robe with a scarlet stole. 

*****

There’s always a bright side though, and that is that the memes coming out of the Dr. Donald Jesus debacle are top-tier. Hilarious people all over the internet are finding ever more creative ways to roast the “I thought it was me as a doctor” claim and each roast is better than the last. 

And the Pope Leo crashout continues. Yesterday, the brilliant JD Vance extended his winning streak by telling a nearly-empty arena that the Pope needs to watch his step when he’s commenting on theology. Nice work, Thomas Aquinas. Good way to sell your new Catholic conversion memoir. You’re a genius. 

My favorite thing is how news media thinks they're covering a Leo-Trump "feud." Pope Leo is not feuding with anyone, especially not the likes of Donald J. Trump. His Holiness is out here saying stuff like “war is bad, love one another, pray for peace” like pretty much every Pope since the last Pope Leo. Trump then comes back with a clever rejoinder something like “Shut up, bro, you suck and you wouldn’t last a second in the UFC octagon.” This morning, as a little social media joke, I posted an offer of $50 to the first reporter to ask Karoline Leavitt if the President is suffering from PDS (Pope Derangement Syndrome). By the end of the day, eight commenters had offered to match the $50. And that offer remains valid. We will pay up. 

***** 

It’s Thursday morning now and I'm sitting in the doctor's office waiting for the scheduler to come in. I have been putting off my colonoscopy appointment. Considering my very long history of medical avoidance, it’s hilarious that I work at a medical school. Do as I say, not as I do. 

Anyway, I’m going through with it now. I actually had a colonoscopy in 2019 so I know it's not a big deal. The day before is dreadful but the procedure itself occurs during a deep sleep brought on by really good drugs. And then you wake up and go home and eat your first solid food in 24 hours. It’s fine. It’ll be fine. Everything is fine. 

*****

Actually, things might be temporarily fine. Israel and Lebanon reached a cease fire agreement and the Strait of Hormuz is open again. We went to war to accomplish the same conditions that existed before this war started, at the cost of many lives and many millions of dollars, but if this cease fire gives innocent people a reprieve, then it's all to the good. 

*****

It's Friday now. I feel like it wasn't a particularly productive week, but I accomplished quite a bit. I'm just always distracted. I've always been scatterbrained and easily distracted but I'm hanging on by a thread now. 2026, man, you know? Thank God for Pomodoro timers and lists and sublists and Google reminders. Maybe I need my own Giant Voice just to keep me in line. Good luck, Giant Voice. If a Giant Voice can prevent me from going off on tangents every five gosh darn minutes then it would be money well spent. 

*****

Very secure...

I had to change a password yesterday. It’s a password for a system that I use daily so I’ll remember the new password after a few days of daily log-ins, but I just hate to change a familiar password. It's a disruption. It throws me off my game. 

The system rejected my first attempt to create a new password because it recognized it as an old password. “We’ve seen that password too many times before” the pop-up message read. Who’s “we,” I thought? Who’s seen it too many times? Not me, I tell you what. I’m very happy with that password. I like it just fine. In fact, it’s one of my very favorite passwords, which is why I keep trying to recycle it. Here’s an idea, Mr. Enterprise Solution: Suppose you let me decide when I’m tired of my password? 

The system didn’t like my second attempt either. “Choose something harder to guess.” Harder for whom, genius? If it’s hard for some hacker in the Caucasus to guess then it’s going to be dang-near impossible for me unless I write it down, and if I have learned anything in decades of yearly cybersecurity training, it’s that writing a password down is not a good idea. 

I finally came up with a new password that was acceptable to the very discerning password approving software or whatever it is, and bonus: The new password is hilarious. I cracked myself up with that password. I’m still laughing. I'm going to laugh my silly head off every time I log in now. 

Then I remembered that I had done the very same thing a few years ago in another enterprise system, and I laughed and laughed until the next day when I couldn’t remember the number and special character combination that accompanied my hilariously funny password, and I had to start all over. Determined not to let this happen again, I wrote down a hint for the new password (which is pure comedy gold I assure you). This is what it’s come to. I need a password for my password. It's a great system. Very secure. Very mindful. 

Burn Book

Could I have chosen a more different book from Middlemarch than Kara Swisher’s Burn Book? Possibly. But Kara Swisher is a very big departure from George Eliot, and 21st century Silicon Valley is a long way from 19th century England. It’s a very different reading experience. I’m a little whipsawed right now. A little confused. 

If you spend any time reading online book discussions, then you’ll know that Burn Book is mildly controversial. I haven’t gotten to this part yet, but apparently Kara Swisher is pretty hard on Elon Musk and the social media book commenters complain that she was once as taken in by Elon as she is now critical. 

I’m not wading into that discussion; first of all because no good ever comes out of an online argument about books or anything else, and because I haven’t been following Kara Swisher for years as many of these Threads commenters appear to have been, so I can’t comment on her early coverage of Elon Musk. 

*****

I’ve read some of Kara Swisher’s work here and there over the years, but not much because until recently, I didn’t have much interest in her journalistic beat, which is the internet and social media and all of the technology that powers pretty much everything. I’ve also seen her on TV, mostly in short commentary sound bites. She is not just a writer and thinker, she’s also a mover and shaker and a bit of a personality - brash, confident, even pugnacious. And so predictably, lots of people, especially lots of men, don’t like her for the usual reasons that people don’t like opinionated women who say what they want to say without worrying if men will think that they’re shrill or aggressive or unfeminine or God forbid angry. Kara Swisher doesn't care. 

And really, it’s not just opinionated and outspoken women - lots of people don’t like women at all, full stop. And that’s something that I’ve been thinking about lately, I have some things to say about it but maybe another time. 

Or maybe now. Misogyny in tech is pretty much a byword - even people who “don’t believe in glass ceilings” (lol Nikki Haley) acknowledge that the technology sector is notoriously hostile toward anyone who is missing a Y chromosome. And Kara Swisher is not afraid to call them on their misogynist bullshit. She could stay quiet about it, and remain as the only girl in the room, the only girl who plays on the boys’ team while all the other girls are relegated to the sidelines, jumping up and down and waving pom poms. She could be the cool girl. But she calls out the misogyny because she doesn't care if the boys like her or not. 

*****

Kara Swisher started reporting on the Internet and everything arising from it, from e-commerce to chat rooms and email and social media, in the 90s, when lots of people - even smart people - thought that it was all just a fad that was going to go away. She saw things that other people didn’t see, although I’m sure that there’s some truth in some of the online criticisms of the book. In some places, she comes across as a boastful know-it-all. I think that most of the time, she really did and does know it all when it comes to tech, but I get just a slight sense of 20/20 hindsight in a few stories. She claims that she knew certain things or predicted certain outcomes before they materialized. For example, she tells us that she once told a then-unknown Jeff Bezos that the early Amazon was not so much a tech company as a retailer with a very good logistics operation. If she really said that at that time, then that was a brilliant observation. Ultimately, as Kara Swisher explains it, Jeff Bezos used technology as a tool to transform the essentially non-technical business of selling merchandise and Steve Jobs, whom Swisher admires very much, transformed technology itself. The question I have is, is there really a moral difference between those two accomplishments? I’m not so sure. 

*****

I like the very casual, immediate style of the writing in Burn Book. Swisher is very much at ease with internet slang (she probably invented most of it). In one of the few passages that is truly a memoir-like observation about herself, she writes that she has always been brash and confident and impervious to others’ criticism - “it’s hard to neg me,” as she puts it. This is, by the way, a trait that I would love to claim for myself, but I cannot because I am exactly the opposite. She also uses the word “grok” quite frequently - once would have been enough, but I guess it’s just one of her everyday words. I had never seen or heard either “neg” or “grok” in writing or conversation, but it was easy enough to infer from context. There's also lots of tech-savvy bravado - "Who emails?" she writes. Everyone, Kara. Everyone still emails. 

*****

Yesterday, I spent a good part of the afternoon working on a presentation about AI in medical education. I know pretty much nothing about AI but that's not going to stop me from making a slide deck about it. I’ll make a slide deck about absolutely anything. I’ll write about absolutely anything. Give me a topic. One time when I was writing a speech, my smart-aleck son asked me why I didn’t just use ChatGPT. I don't need ChatGPT, I told him. I am ChatGPT. 

Or maybe ChatGPT is me. Maybe I didn’t write this at all. Maybe all I wrote is an AI prompt: “Crank out a half-baked, scattershot review of Kara Swisher’s Burn Book, and throw in some random non-sequiturs.” 

I might try that, actually. Let’s see what happens. Let’s see how this shakes out. 

*****

In all seriousness, I learned a tiny bit about AI as I worked on this slide deck, and I’m going to learn more. This is one of Kara Swisher’s key messages. AI is here to stay, and we should, collectively, figure out a way to control it before it controls us. We can’t make the same mistakes that we made with the World Wide Web and social media. When the young geniuses who are inventing new technologies by the minute promise us that we don’t need to bother our pretty little heads with annoyances like regulation and oversight because everything is under control and they have our best interests at heart, we have to not believe them because nothing is under control and they absolutely do not have our best interests at heart. Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook and Satya Nadella do not have our best interests at heart. Elon Musk REALLY doesn’t have our best interests at heart. 

Powerwash

I had to attend a Zoom meeting a few nights ago, God help me, and my camera didn’t work. I tried one thing and then another, and it wasn’t user error. The camera just didn’t work. 

My Chromebook is new. I just bought it in January and this is February so I think that still qualifies as “brand-new,” in fact. It occurred to me, as I tried one possible fix and then another, that I shouldn’t have to troubleshoot hardware issues so soon after I unpacked the box that the device was shipped in. But I deal with repair and maintenance issues the same way that I deal with health matters: I Google hotfix ideas; and if they don’t work, then I either ignore the problem until it goes away, or I learn to live with it. 

Yeah, I know. I never said that I was a genius. 

Apparently, you can wipe a Chromebook, restoring it to its factory settings, in about five minutes; and then you can set it up and configure it to your personal specifications in another five minutes. The wiping part is called a “powerwash,” and the online Chromebook community assures me that the whole thing is a snap. And I have no reason to believe that it’s not, because I set this thing up starting from factory settings just a few weeks ago, and that took all of five minutes. I do pretty much all of my writing on Google Docs, and I store all of my stuff on Google Drive, so I wouldn’t lose any data. It's a pretty low-risk operation, in my estimation. 

I was this close to pushing the proverbial button and power washing this thing right back to ground zero, and then it occurred to me that I had never actually powered the Chromebook completely down, and that maybe I should try that first. I have it set to sleep when I close it, but I never really turn it off. So I turned it off. And then I turned it back on. And voila--the camera worked, and the fire hose was not necessary. I was still tempted to power wash the Chromebook anyway, just to see what would happen; but then I thought, why tempt fate? Why mess with it? Why fix that which is not broken? 

*****

So I had another meeting earlier today, and the camera didn’t work. It wasn’t on Zoom, it was on another damn thing. I don’t know. I can’t, with the virtual meetings. Anyway, if the meeting had been a Zoom meeting, then I might just have assumed that the problem was on the Zoom end and not the Chromebook end, but this was a different meeting platform. It’s not meeting-related either, because I just tried the camera again with no meeting in sight, and you know what? It doesn’t work. 

I have yet another Zoom meeting tonight. Did I mention how many volunteer jobs I have right now? I have three, in addition to my actual paid job. And they all require meetings, and all of the meetings are on virtual platforms, so I need the stupid camera. 

I’m going to try Plan A again. I’m going to shut down the Chromebook until it’s time for my meeting. If the camera doesn’t fix itself, then I’m going to scrub this device like a car after a snowstorm, so that it’s squeaky clean and shiny. I’ll let you know what happens. Or maybe you’ll never hear from me again. Oh, technology.