Rich Mintz  

I’ve written before about my Amazon addiction, and now I have two more: a moderate Woot addiction and a much more serious Fab addiction.

Woot is a closeout service that brings you five specific deals each day, some of which are really good. The ad copy suggests that the target audience is people about 20 years younger than me, but that hasn’t prevented me from buying things, like a NeatDesk scanner, which I’m using (along with Evernote) to finally start moving myself toward paperlessness.

Fab brings you selections of products from a dozen or so small independent retailers every day. It’s typically design-oriented, artsy, hipster stuff, sometimes closeouts, sometimes one-of-a-kind or few-of-a-kind objects. They do a pretty good job of making it a social experience, by encouraging you to recruit your friends and giving you significant cash-money discounts when you succeed.

I’ve bought the following from Fab in six months, for a grand total of almost $1200: travel mugs, coffee cups, iPhone handsets, Fancy Hands, luggage, T-shirts, a mozzarella cheese making kit (!), 2 wallets, kitchenware, a bicycle, 2 messenger bags, notebooks.

Add these to my Amazon spending (short description: thanks to Amazon Prime, I check Amazon first whenever I decide to buy anything, from toothpaste to kitchenware to aluminum foil to electronics), and I’m now buying almost everything online except for groceries. I’m spending a bit more, because I’m buying a bit more than I otherwise might be. But I’m happy, finding things I enjoy and can afford and having them brought to my door by a cheery man in a brown uniform.

You know that list of tedious, time-consuming tasks that you keep queued up forever and never seem to make any progress on? I’m talking about things like “call the insurance company to get that claim straightened out” and “figure out what kind of connector this old game machine uses so that you can order a replacement adapter” and “find out which airline has the best bicycle baggage policy.” Some of them are actually urgent, some are just nice-to-dos, but all of them are things that are hard to find time for.

I got an offer via Fab (on which more later) for a discounted first month of service with Fancy Hands, an on-call personal-assistant service. You pay a monthly fee (starting around $25), and for that you can make a specified number of “requests” in email during the course of the month. At the level I’m signed up at, I’ll be paying about $3 per request after my discount expires, and I’m likely to upgrade to a higher tier which makes them cheaper.

Fancy Hands’ helpers are on duty 24 hours a day, and I’ve found them professional, reliable, and competent. They can’t go anywhere for you and can’t spend any money on your behalf, but they can do pretty much anything else for you that a person can do with a phone and/or a computer. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve used them to do things like this:

• make a doctor’s appointment
• straighten out an insurance claim
• track down a missing hotel invoice
• change a train reservation while I’m traveling
• find a suitable hotel in a city I don’t know
• figure out how to connect my scanner to Evernote
• find out what kind of charger I need to power an old device

These are all things I can do myself, but they’re all pains in the ass, and it turns out I’m perfectly willing to pay 3 bucks each to have someone else take care of them reliably, report on the results, and clearly document what they did. So I’m renewing.

The Google Glasses project that everyone’s talking about is, well, I guess my main point is, sure, it’s going to be awesome, but why is everyone so amazed? There’s really no debate about the fact that this is coming.

It’s obvious that, within my lifetime, not only are we going to have the Internet always with us in cybernetic devices (that cow is more or less out of the barn), we’re going to have it implanted into our bodies in an always-on manner.

I predict (and you can hold me to this): Google Glasses with consumer pricing, i.e., “Internet on our heads,” in 10 years; hearing-aid-type network device accepting subvocalized commands, i.e., “Internet next to our heads,” in 15 years; true implant accepting thought-impulse commands, i.e., “Internet inside our heads,” in 25 years. I plan on staying alive long enough to get the last one.

This stuff has been all over science fiction (of both the utopian and dystopian varieties) for a couple of decades. In fact, at the moment I’m reading M.T. Anderson’s Feed, in which implanted always-on connectedness is a major plot point.

In Feed, told from the perspective of a teenager about 20 years in the future (I’m guessing this because one of the dads in the book says “dude” a lot), kids go to the Moon for spring break, and everyone has a flying car, and (for the 73% of Americans who have always-on feed implants) basically every interaction with the world is shopping-focused and mediated by a corporate information aggregator. It’s awesome that you can chat your friends in your head; some of the rest of it (like the fact that the President of the United States can’t put together four coherent sentences), not so much.

So I got a quasi-spam this week from a potential vendor. (I say “quasi-spam” because it’s a service that, based on my publicly available professional affiliations and so forth, someone might plausibly claim to believe I might want to buy.) The vendor, apparently with a straight face, sells something called Transparent Billing, which claims to help you manage your remote workforce more cost-effectively — and it’s horrifying.

Read their page and at first it just seems like the typical boring web-service copy, until you come to the words “screenshots of work performed.” This is where you swallow hard, and click for more information. You learn that for “only a dollar a day per employee,” you can have comprehensive automated reports on what your employees are doing, including automated screenshots from their computers and reports of their keystroke activity.

If this is what we’ve come to — already, in 2012, not in The Dystopian Future, but now — well, f*ck me, I’m moving to the moon colony. What sort of company would say to itself, “hey, we’ve got to figure out a way to build a loyal and productive workforce,” and would then pick this way?

Mobile devices (our cyber-appendages) are here to stay, but pay-by-the-minute mobile calling is on the way out. We all know this, but it’s still surprising each time I find myself doing something baldly irrational in order to avoid making a mobile phone call with minutes I’ve already paid for.

Here’s the latest: I’m sitting at my desk at work, on my computer, with an all-you-can-eat VoIP phone (which someone else paid for) sitting in front of me, and an iPhone at hand with a gazillion minutes. I have to make a quick call. What do I do?

If you chose “(c) I open Skype, because it’s just less of a pain in the ass, and pay 5 cents a minute out of my own pocket,” you win!

Well, Carmageddon is here, and in honor of the gigantic metrowide disruption caused by this project to add one (!) carpool lane to the 405, here’s “Magic Highway USA,” Disney’s apparently serious look at a future where tubular highways, solar cars, RVs that drive themselves while you play checkers in the back, and parking in the sky are all part of our everyday experience. More than 50 years later, most of this hasn’t happened, although you have to admit they were right about GPS. Enjoy.

Suppose you were at home in New York, but about to leave for DC.  Now suppose you needed 50 copies of your presentation printed. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to upload a file, then get in the car and drive to DC, and then pick up your printouts 6 hours later in a tidy little box with a cute little ribbon on it when you got there?

Well, guess what? You can, and I just did! (Minus the cute little ribbon, but I bet if you typed “PLEASE TIE BOX WITH CUTE LITTLE RIBBON” in the Special Instructions box, they would.)

I’ve written before about the transformational value of Amazon Prime — Amazon’s pay-once-per-year, get-free-shipping-on-almost-everything upgrade program.  It turns out (not surprisingly if you think about it, but most of us don’t) that the emotional pain associated with paying extra for shipping is so high for many of us, that it impedes us from buying things that (on a strict dollars-per-unit-of-utility basis) it would be rational for us to buy. (Extreme case, drawn from my own recent life: I obsessed over paying $3.99 for shipping on an item that I then had to pay $23 to schlep home from the office in a taxi once it got delivered.  The taxi fare didn’t bother me, as I experienced it as background noise; but the much smaller shipping add-on rankled.)

Amazon Prime is one of those brilliant ideas that you aren’t sure will work until you try it — and four days after you sign up, you’ve already forgotten what your life was like before it. (Netflix is another.) In fact, Amazon Prime (combined with Kindle e-books, and Amazon and Half.com used book inventory) has been such an emotional plus for me that I decided a few months ago that I’d adopt two new policies for a while and see how they worked out:

1. Anytime I have an impulse to purchase something of relatively nominal value that Amazon carries (e.g., I see a review for a book I’d like to read), I order it immediately, either for Kindle, new via Amazon Prime, or used, depending on price and how I feel.
2. Anytime I need anything (dishes, toothpaste cat food, barbecue sauce) that is small enough to carry home from work on the bus, if I can wait until the day after tomorrow to hold it in my hands, I check Amazon for it before making a store trip.

I haven’t been scrupulous about number two, but I’ve been quite scrupulous about number one.  And guess what? I’ve spent a little bit more money on books (enough to notice, not enough to be concerned about). But in return, I find I’m vastly happier.  The increase in happiness associated with not having to agonize over whether I care about such-and-such book “enough” to spend the money, not having to schlep to the store, not having to keep track of pending purchases, turns out to be worth much more to me than the (modest) incremental money I’m spending. And, on the whole, I’m getting the things I want into my hands sooner.

Quantum computing, like quarks, black holes, and pretty much everything Steven Hawking has an opinion on, is one of those half-physical, half-philosophical subjects that are always hard for me to stomach.  Half of what’s written on it is impenetrable, and half (including most of the popular stuff) has a smug and sophomoric tone that I cannot endure.

So hats off to Rivka Galchen, whose story on quantum computing in the May 2 issue of The New Yorker is the first article on the topic that I haven’t put down after paragraph six and never picked up again. Far from it — this story is lively, it’s full of illustrative anecdotes I want to quote (somehow I never realized that Dr. House and Wilson are based on Sherlock Homes and Watson, but of course they are), and it’s got me excited enough to seek out more reading on the topic.

To give credit where credit is due, I got softened up by James Gleick’s The Information, which I should write about more. It’s a very readable and yet appealingly dense history of the origins and growth of information theory, the kind of book that has me mining the bibliography when I get to the end.

I’m sure these Brooklyn hipsters are perfectly nice in person, but when I read about them in the paper, it kind of makes me wish I had a sack of bedbugs to let loose in their coworking sanctuary in the middle of the night.

Don’t kids just, you know, “do things” anymore, without it being a Statement about What They Stand For?

I know the answer: “of course they don’t, and they never did.”  Every generation is intolerably self-important in its own special unique curated-and-encoded way.  (Remember, mine invented the Web the first time around.  And my parents’ generation? Don’t get me started.)  Not to mention that the company I work for isn’t exactly Dunder Mifflin (for my British friends: that’s “Wernham Hogg” in American).

But still… there’s artisanal coworking, and then there’s artisanal coworking. Just saying.