In Defense Of Low Tech

The life of a digital gypsy. Sounds kind of fun, huh? Technically speaking, you could spend your whole life working, communicating, and wasting time without being plugged in somewhere. I mean eventually you would need to recharge the batteries on all your devices but think of it, using a cell phone to conduct business over the phone and a laptop to work on with a Wi-Fi signal at say, Panera. You could remotely work from home or at your favorite coffee bar.

Hell, if you were savvy enough you could make a good living without ever stepping foot inside an office or perhaps even own a residence. Companies would pay you to work for them, traveling the world, squatting in an empty cubicle in their office and housing you at a hotel or some sort of alternate housing. You could be a Wi-Fi nomad. But what happens when the signal stops?

NPR recently ran a story about a digital gypsy who does everything without being connected by wires. If you can get past the interfaces of working on a smart phone or laptop then maybe that’s the life for you. Personally, I want a hardwired connection somewhere in my life. I have digital voice for phone and while it may be nice to have something shiny and high tech I recently wanted to go back to the old rotary phones of the 70s and early 80s. Why? We had a little thing lovingly called Snowmageddon this past Winter. We suffered through severe snowfall that darkened the homes of numerous customers up and down the Mid Atlantic. I was without power for two days.

Ok, that doesn’t sound that awful. Sounds like camp. Well, it’s not. I’m not saying that I was close to jumping the cliff because I didn’t have cable or couldn’t harvest my crops or play Bejeweled Blitz. But three things took place that forced me to vacate my home until the power came back on there.

1. First and foremost, the heat. We had no heat in the house and the temperatures dropped into the 40s by the end of the first day.
2. No power means no good sleep. I am a CPAP user and without power, sleeping is rough for someone who quits breathing while they are asleep.
3. No power means no phone. Again, I have digital voice that runs through a modem fed by my cable company. I can’t just pick up a corded phone and call someone. Granted we have cell phones, but see how low tech would have triumphed here?
4. No power means no Internet. Oh the horror. Since I run an online business as a side gig, I could not update this blog, my websites, or my websites’ blog. This is, of course, the least problematic thing I experienced.

Now, I know there were people in more dire situations than mine. A man died waiting for paramedics to get to his house through poorly plowed streets. But think of how many people rely on power and wireless signal to do anything.

I may be Chicken Little but haven’t we seen, firsthand, how putting all our eggs in one basket is a bad thing. We let the banks run amok and we ended up in serious trouble. The automotive industry collapsed and people lost their jobs. People lost their homes. America lost its financial footing and we are still coming back from the brink. Take that lesson and apply it to the Internet and wireless technology. What if we find ourselves without a signal?

IT experts will tell you the Internet’s infrastructure is built for redundancy, that it withstands numerous attacks from hackers, viruses, or anything as simple as a undersea cable being severed. But how long can we continue to rely on something so vastly complex and touchy. How long before we have some sort of EMP disaster that slows us down to a 14.4k speed. Remember Wargames? Same idea. Somewhere in all of this wireless world we need to have a cord plugged in somewhere. In our financial industry, our defense and security infrastructure, and our basic city infrastructure.

Here’s another example. NYT is removing a number of routes from its service to save money wherein they will have to spend an ungodly amount to redo all the signage for subways, bus lines, and maps and ticketing. While it might be less expensive to maintain digital signage and the use of apps for smart phones to be able to freely change information on the fly and reduce the need for costly revisions, what happens if we have a power outage like we did in 2006. Granted the transportation system might be affected but taxis and busses can still run. What if that outage extends into weeks? People, unfamiliar with the layout of Manhattan will not have any way to navigate around. Eventually, old printed signage will have to be brought out costing more money to install and maintain until Con Edison comes back up and running.

Everyone talks about business continuance and disaster recovery of online systems but are we truly prepared to address a situation that involves no t having any systems? How many times have you walked into a room and tried the light switch when you know the power is off? It’s habit. It’s not that you are checking for power. You are assuming it’s there. Can we afford to assume that the power will always be there? And it’s not like I’m spelling Die Hard 4 type of cynicism about our country's ability to handle a crisis. I’m talking in terms of the everyday digital gypsy. If we have a collapse of our networking infrastructure, how does someone who relies on it to do business expect to stay connected? Instead of the factory worker who gets laid off you have the white collar consultant. That person that squatted in a cubicle and lived at the Hyatt using his laptop and crackberry to make sure he could afford that latte habit would be isolated. There are more out there than you think and they are probably responsible for a lot of commerce that helps keep the economy chugging. They may be the second line of impact after the bigger systems like banking, agriculture, and automotive, but those industries might rely on the digital gypsy to keep them working.

For me, I want to stay plugged in somewhere. I want to know that when one thing fails, I have a backup plan. It may not be perfect, but it’s a start.

Doomsday Seed Vault Reaches 500k Samples Adds Burpee Section

I have yet to grow a successful garden in my yard. It could be the fact that I have four huge trees standing guard at the corners of my yard shielding it from most of the sunlight available. It could also be the fact that I just plain suck at growing things. That sound you just heard was my Father doing a facepalm over his son’s horticultural ineptitude.

But when I heard that the Svalbard Global Seed vault in the arctic region of Norway hit over half a million samples my mind started short circuiting. Could you imagine standing in the presence of all those seeds, carefully tucked away in four ply protective enclosures at a regulated temperature? I get a little sick standing at the Walmart Burpee seed section thinking about what species I could potentially wipe out of existence with my black thumb. I’ve done some experimenting over the years to try and correct my faults. Recently, I took the approach of putting a tomato plant in the bottom of a hanging basket and putting a couple basil plants on top. I figured the tomato plant would be able to grow down without the need of a stake and the basil would be a nice addition to the mix. I never grew one fruit but the basil did pretty well. I can also grow nice zucchini vines and flowers but never a damn zuc.

Anyway, the point of my story is not my gardening issues but this damn seed vault. How cool is that? Of course, it functions the way a backup server functions in a computer network. There are seed banks all over the place and this one is used for duplicates in the event of global or regional disasters affecting the primary ones, which have happened in the case of the Philippines one flooded from a typhoon in 2006. The one in Norway is supposedly able to withstand global warming, earthquakes, and nuclear strikes. We’re pretty two for three around the world these days on those types of disasters.

This got me to thinking, though. Usually in cases like this the fire department gets a preemptive alarm on my brain. Just follow the smoke. Actually, I’m sure there are safeguards in place for more than just seeds. But what if there aren’t. Think about it? In the bible, whether you choose to believe everything you read, Noah built an ark and herded two of all the animals of the world, and Kathy Lee Gifford onto his Noahwegian Cruise Ship and set sail for higher ground. Unfortunately, dragons, unicorns, fairies, and other “mythical” creatures were told the wrong time and were made extinct. Thank you, Robot Chicken. So, is there any kind of repository for animal species to be preserved in the event of a global disaster? Yeah, kind of… There are things called Frozen Zoos which hold DNA and genetic material thanks to groups like the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species. Think proactive Jurassic Park. They could theoretically revive species that become extinct.

Remember in high school when you learned about the Wonders of the Ancient World? Me neither. But there was a library in Alexandria that held some of the greatest works of ancient writings and it burnt down because Julius Caesar got a little carried away with matches. Kidding again. That’s a theory. Still, the destruction of the library caused a huge gap in written history. That was until Nicholas Cage found scrolls from it along with the Mason’s treasure vault underneath a church in New York City. Once again, kidding.

So, what about an indestructible vault for architectural drawings and concepts, medical procedures, music, writings, and other items of historical worth?  Sure, you have the library of congress and my iPod but what if the attacks on 9/11 would have destroyed more than just a section of the Pentagon. What if the National Archives building were hit? Now, there may be some electronic repository for works of art or architecture that Bill Gates might have come up with but are you willing to expect future generations to recover the history of civilization while waiting for automatic updates to occur on Windows X? Or better yet, an update to the iTunes store. If we’re lucky a monolith will appear somewhere with a service patch that automatically upgrades us to the next version.

Let's put Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich in charge of the scenarios and in the event that some disaster does occur, and Al Gore will stand there saying I told you so, it would be nice to offer future generations a blueprint and set of tools to get civilization back up and running quicker than a millennium of incremental baby steps. My brother said, “We should start sticking stuff up on Mars…you know…before we move.” I told him we should think about the future and buy a franchise operation of an EZ Storage business and place it right between the Walmart and Starbucks. That’s a couple years away, at least. Maybe by then we’ll have a fix for social security, healthcare, and a better way for me to grow tomatoes in my yard. If I’m lucky I can swing by the Mars Walmart for some Burpee seeds, a Caramel Macchiato from Marsbucks and a copy of the National Audubon Society’s Guide To Better Growing. One can only hope.


Funny Footnotes

Mars-Evans City Storage
Mars does have a storage business.  But the Starbucks and Walmart are miles away.