The ‘DRAMA’-tic Decline of Sitcoms

Turning Full House into Friends

We never thought it’d happen, but ‘Situation Comedies’ which were once the staple of Television had to bow down to their funnier cousins, the Dramas!  Now SitComs are nothing but a fleeting memory, a smear on the sidewalk.  Archaic remains of a bygone albeit glorious era!  I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of Sitcom junkie.  Now I know what you’re gonna say, “Dude, its 2010”, slurp it up and move on!

The 80’s

As a kid I was watching classics like Charles in Charge [man was that supremely funny, remember his buddy… erm ‘Buddy!’], Alf [once again solid gold], Growing Pains, Coach, Major Dad, Saved by the Bell, Blossom, the 80’s sitcom list is practically endless. The focus was mainly on family humor.  There were always parents or kids of some sort.  This format slowly fizzled out with the newest of the lot: Home Improvement and the Fresh prince of Bel air.  And then who can forget the Landmark ‘Full House’.  It might seem tame now, but we all laughed at it back in the day!

We empathized with the highs and lows of Donna-Joe, more emphatically known as ‘D.J.’… (No not Dorian John!!).  We all lapped up spin off’s Bob Saget’s America’s Funniest Videos and Dave Coulier’s (identical) America’s Funniest People.  But the Full house wheels, had to grind to a halt.  It suffered from the FULL CIRCLE SYNDROME, that plagued all family / child centric SitComs.  In that, the franchise can no longer continue, when you have different kids at different ages growing up.

Think about it, the episodes had to end, because the show soon turned 360 right back to when it started.  A veritable ‘quantum leap’, remember that? DJ, was no longer a child.  Stephanie had grown up to the point where she became the new DJ.  And little Michelle grew up to the same age Stephanie was when the franchise started!  So any new situations we were presented with would have just been a repeat of what we saw earlier.  And while I’m on the topic, am I the only one who doesn’t find the Olsen Twins Hot?!?!  Come on pedo’s they still look pretty much like Michelle!!

The 90’s

A writer somewhere in the guild must’ve jumped outta bed in the middle of the night yelling “Wait a minute, kids’ really aren’t all that funny anyway, why not just take them out of the equation altogether!  So the 90’s saw the advent of Single Adults and the Ensemble Cast Phenomenon.  No doubt, Seinfeld was the first of all this in that decade.  You have to take into account, that it was pretty darn edgy when it first came out!  And upset a lot of people, even if we take it for granted now!

Here, were a group of adults, none of them married and hopelessly dysfunctional!  This successful model carried over to Frasier, 3^rd Rock from the Sun, Carolyn in the City, and FRIENDS, still undisputedly one of the funniest coms of all time, with the largest bandwagon.  Oh and absolutely zilch kids [with any relevant roles].

The 2000’s

The 2000’s brought with it nothing new but there were a few noteworthy hits like the colossal Will and Grace.  There was even room for a few family numbers like Everyone loves Raymond, According to Jim, and the short lived My Wife and Kids, which was basically trying to reinvent the wheel.  It was nothing but a modern day avatar of the Bill Cosby Shows.  Hope and Faith kind of blew itself up with Hopes’ Histrionics and seriously, who could stand the ‘Gooch’?

How I Met Your Mother and a couple of others, whilst trying to put a new spin on things, are still only small blips on the radar.  Less than Perfect, Just Shoot Me were also note worthy.

Eight Simple Rules (for dating my teenage daughter) was actually quite good.  But John Ritter’s untimely death brought about the shows demise.  But we have to give it a standing ove, for them still gloriously going on for a couple of seasons, bringing in the great talents of David Spade and James Garner. the Joey (Show) and Old Christine, both with ex sitcom stars, tried to keep the fire burning, but soon turned out to be just smoldering embers.  Joey was actually not all that bad.  Don’t get me wrong, the characters were all actually quite tight and talented.

Its just that the show had ZERO premise.  And further more the writing just got warped towards the end.  More like Insane! What with Joey the Magician’s amazing vanishing assistant and the sudden appearance of his side kick Miguel A. Núñez out of thin air, who absolutely had no real role in the show except for comedy relief

Melo – Drama-tic

Dramas were always quietly lurking in the background.  Garnering only as much respect as Soap Opera’s they largely went under the radar.  I did like JAG though!  But who would have thought, post 2004, there would be a ‘DRAMATIC’ usurping of the Sitcom Kings by Drama Peasants!  Why 2004?  Remember Pop culture, doesn’t go through a paradigm shift at the turn of the decade, but rather towards the middle of it.  Which is why you see a consistent style in 1974 – 84, 84-94, 94-2004 [Remember the reign of FRIENDS?].  What we’re having now, should have a run till 2014.  Just wait and see!

Sitcoms have been upstaged by Dramatized Comedies or DRAMCOMS as I like to call them.  If this word becomes Popular culture, please credit me for it!  Remember you heard it first, here on Julius Davies! An attempt to combine the best, or worst elements of Sitcoms and Dramas.  The same candy, in an ‘all new wrapper’.  What are DramComs I hear you ask?  Its basically comedies minus bright lights, live stage sets and studio audiences and laugh tracks.  In fact Sitcoms minus the humor!  Shot vastly in real buildings, with less obvious jokes and more implied lines.  Alley McBeal, 30 Rock, Boston Legal [who can seriously get that?], Scrubs, Curb Your Enthusiasm, My Name is Earl, Arrested Development and Ugly Betty are all acclaimed products of this genre.

Slap on some Shtick

What bothers me and a lot of other people is the advent of slap stick in modern day DRAMCOMS (patent pending).  DramComs took out the lights, live stage sets and studio audiences and laugh tracks to replace it with people slipping and falling, over dramatic, over the top stuff that can’t even happen in fantasy, let alone reality…  This is more like live theater now than television, or a circus side show.  How the characters careen of into some fantasy world where characters heads expand, or tongues stretch out, pioneered by Alley McBeal and perfected by the infamous JD of Scrubs.

Take away the delusional instances, and you’re left with very little actual humor.

Doesn’t all this seem vaguely familiar?   Anyone remember back like a 1000 years ago when Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, the Three Stooges and Abbot & Costello ruled the roost?

Granted, sitcoms were getting a tad corny.  But to take out jokes to bring in adolescent tripping and falling humor?  Seriously?  SCRUBS even went on to poke fun at that exact same thing by having an exclusive episode spoofing Sitcoms!  Complete with the bright lights, studio audience laughter, Comedic Relief character enter applause and everything.  The whole nine yards!  They even had Elliot and Carla with low cut blouses like you see in all sitcoms! LOL!

Come to think of it, isn’t it strange that for some reason all sitcom actresses wear uber form fitting tight sweaters?  What! does Bloomingdales have a custom tailored division?  Even if they’re soccer moms like Courtney Thorne-Smith from According To Jim!

Still, baring a couple of ‘pseudo realistic’ deaths and events that happened in SCRUBS, it is still as fluffy as sitcoms, despite their attempt to prove themselves not so!  I still love it though, and it is the only relief DramComs can provide from other Drab Coms.

Sitcoms Have Got A Day Job!

But look very carefully!  Sitcoms haven’t died altogether.  They’ve just moved down to a different demographic!  Kids and Teens!  All the new shows on Kids channels like Disney and Nickelodeon are sitcoms in effect!  My Cousin Skeeter, Zac and Codey, Wizards of Waverly Place, That’s So Raven and the ground breaking Hannah Montana!

Sabrina [the teenage Witch] which was actually quite well thought out, would’ve probably had a better run if it was showcased on kids channels like the aforementioned.  Also take note, that Sabrina is in effect Melissa Joan Hart who played Clarissa as a kid in the early 90’s on Nick!

Take it or leave it

Well, I guess we’ll have to make do with what we have!  Dramcoms, or whatever.  Imagine what the world would be like, if there were no sitcoms at all!  Think of that ‘Situation’ (pun intended).  We’d have nothing to laugh about at work or home!  Right now, I’ll take whatever I can get.  Because despite DramComs and all the slap shtick humor, there is the REVELATION that is SCRUBS!

Another good thing about SCRUBS, is it is a cast of virtual unknowns!  Which is a good thing, because it brought an element of freshness into the show.  Dr.Cox is an ocean, and J.D. (my namesake) is a 24c diamond in the rough!  All other DramComs, mainly featured washed out OLD, botox injected actors and has-beens from the Byzantine era that was the previous decade.  How long can anyone even watch Kath and Kim?  Also older actors like Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock, just act too ridiculous to the point that they try to become larger than the actual comedy series itself.

It’s not their fault, but after 10 years of being funny, you’ve pretty much exhausted your resources, and you might not wanna move on to the next Franchise guys!  The exception maybe being William Shatner.  Who made a successful transition from the super famous Capt.Kirk in Star Trek, to the acclaimed Boston Legal.  That to after a long break.

Maybe Sitcoms will come out their similar Sabatical this decade in 2014!  Let’s keep our fingers double crossed!  In the mean time, we seriously have to stop being so jaded and demanding, constantly trying to innovate upon the wheel.

No matter, how much of a ‘SPIN’ you put on it, a wheel is ultimately still a Rotating Disc.

If we stop laughing at Sitcoms and enjoying Game Shows, we’ll be putting writers in a tough spot, and fewer people are gonna want to be writers in the first place.  They’d much rather be internet journalists like us.

Remember if you raise the bar too much,

People will ultimately choke on it.

8 Kinds Of Twitter Users

Twitter is lots of different things to different people.  Love it or hate it, its here to stay!  You can read a million articles on different ways you can use Twitter.  Believe you and me, when you Tweet Up, you’ll make Twitter work for you, in your own unique way.  This is what makes Twitter so special!  So Drumroll please… here is another take on 8 kinds of people who use twitter

1. Work it Baby!

They’re on twitter, but it’s still basically just Work!!  An extension of their LinkedIn Page!!  Their profile and their tweets are all about Cipher Decryption, and how they resolved that new bug in the latest beta build!  And twitter has become in many companies, just a substitute for their internal IM’s and bulletin board services.

2. Kool Kats

These dawgs are down with it.  They’re young, cool and casual.  They couldn’t care less about letting the world know what they do for a living.  They just wanna party hearty till its 4am holmes!!

3. Celebrities

Nuff said! I wonder how real celebs seem to find the ‘real’ each other so well!!

4. One hit Wonders, The Flash in the Pans,

All these guys do is join 1 day. Say “What’s the deal with Twitter”” “Followers anyone” “I don’t get it”.  And that’s it, you never hear from them again.  In the year 2048 you’ll find them still sitting in their rocking chairs, while the entire world is tweeting.  Saying “You whipper snapper, I remember back in the 2000’s when I tried to get on twitter”… No amount of Twitter Evangelism is gonna get through to people who were once bit and twice shy!

5. BFFF

Best For Friends n Family!

“Hey, I just wanna keep dibs on my family”.  And I wanna let them know if I’m eating a Cream cheese sandwich, or a Cheddar cheese sandwich.  Believe me, it matters.

6. Plain Janes

Their twitter page is uber plain.  The default cyan theme.  No mods.  None of their friends (all six of them) have any profile pics!  They’re all the generic Twitter o_o !  Maybe twitter made it that way, with a default picture so vile, that no self respecting human being will wanna keep it!!

7. Marky Marketson

Many tweeps are not even people.  They’re institutions trying out a new way of marketing. You’ll get like a gajillion tweets from them in a day.  And if ever twitter is down, its gonna be from their Flutters!

8. Drift wood

The most common kind of group who have taken the twitter catchphrase ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING NOW’ literally.  The famous “Eating a sandwich on the crapper” bunch.  They seem to think that the mundane trivia of their lives are interesting to people other than their mom or grandma!

“Waiting for Lizzy”

“Still waiting for Lizzy”

“What was that song… Waiting… Anticipating”

“Yeaup, you got it, still waiting”

“Oh look! A terrorist bombing!…”

“No no, my bad, a car just backfired…”

And they end up with like 250 tweets a day, with hardly 2.5 people who care!!

9. Das Living Dead

People who have like thousands of people / celebs on their following.  But they have not more than 4 tweet updates themselves!!!  Kinda like drift wood, they must have serious self esteem issues, if they think everyone else’s life is better than their own!  I mean seriously if you’re a girl, if all you did, was buy a new pair of shoes, tweet it up!  There are people out there who actually do care!

Now I’m not trying to say any kind of user is better than the other.  Hey! There’s a little bit in all of us.  And I for one, fall into a lot of these types!  I just thank God for TweetDeck, that actually helps me categorize these people into groups, to spare me the pain of reading all this!

Being Happy is not an Option

I want my Life Back!

Who let the life out!  Remember back to when we were kids?  Life was so easy.  We could pretty much laugh about anything, it was so easy to!  What happened along the way!  At what point in my life did I sweep happiness under a rug?  Since when was being happy an option.  Being joyous came naturally in those days, we didn’t have to strive for it.  This really bites!  We used to crack all kinds of jokes when were little.  And it didn’t have to be REALLY FUNNY, MATURE, or IN THE CONTEXT.  IT was just something to laugh about!

Somewhere along the road, life taught us life is for fulfilling responsibilities not so much savoring the moment.  We were funny.  AARGH!!

Our Jaded Education System

Man, when I think back to when I was kid [aka a million years ago].  I realized how much I sucked in school.  If I could only travel back in time to the eighties armed with wikipedia, and every other wiki on the net, I’d have aced science in no time.  Makes you really wanna envy the kids of today.  I was only set free fairly recently.  I mean, I always thought I was an idiot, which is why I did poorly in school.  Especially in math, despite being pretty scientifically inclined!

I was actually a brilliant student in a dunces shell.  The thing is I excelled in too many things and there wasn’t enough time to concentrate on anything.  On the whole, I was pretty clammy with the whole cramming sha-gig.  I seriously couldn’t stuff anything down my throat without first understanding what it is. This was my Achilles heel.

Which is fine, when you have all the time in the universe and you can ‘learn stuff at your own pace’.  It’s surprising how many schools put hundreds of students on the same page, and expect them to progress together and then penalize them with grades for not doing well.  It isn’t fair really.  All I can say is those kids who are at the top of the grading curve, are pretty darn lucky!  They just happened to be able to fit into the SYSTEM, that’s all.  It does not mean they are smarter per se than everyone else.  Most kids in asia, seem to handle this pretty well.

Who said grades were an accurate barometer of a child’s potential anyway?  Its not something universal like a thermometer, which you can pretty much stick in anyone’s throat.  People are not absolute and not relative.  But what are you gonna do?

So I love stuff like quarks and leptons right?  But they didn’t give me time to ponder on them and think about what they are.  Let me visualize them in the dark atom.  Words lost in an educational system, which is just a constant barrage of info.  No sooner are you introduced to two new concepts, are you introduced to two dozen more concepts.  The only resort I had to escape all this was day dreaming about stuff I liked.  Which is what made me crap out in school.

Commerce is easier than Science

For the simple reason that there are FAR FEWER CONCEPTS to learn.

In science, to even get started, you have to know, a gajillion things.  For eg:- QED, muons, neutrinos, leptons, antiparticles, baryons, hadrons, photons, gauge bosons, vector bosons, quantum theory, Pauli Exclusion principle, general relativity, special relativity, equivalence, gluons, quarks, gravitons, mesotrons, hadrons… The list is freakin endless.  And no!  This is not some fictional whoo-ha right out of Star Trek.. This glop actually exists!! Go figure!

And then factor in the mathematics required, to integrate all this, by AAAAAHHH EQUATIONS!!  It boggles the mind!  No wonder, many people take commerce in school and college.  Compared to the math in science, the math in commerce is a walk in the park.  Oh and what do you do if you’re a nimrod du jour and can’t do any math at all?  Relax, there’s the always the –drum roll- ARTS!!

So I thought, why not end up doing an MBA.  There’s fat little else I can do.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved doing my MBA.  But I should have just as easily done something uber technical.  Nope, I was no dufus in school.  Just the product of some poor labeling.  When is someone gonna invent time travel already?!?!?!  I gotta laptop, and some wiki’s and I’ve got the world to prove!!

Its All In The Outlook

Its HOW I do it that’s important, Not WHAT I do.

The Gym X Files

Believe it or not [cliché I know], its not WHAT I DO, BUT HOW I SEE IT that matters.  Take for example going to the gym.  I see all these women hitting the gym, and they’re doing exactly the same stuff I’m doing as a man.  Things like deadlifts, pullups, chestpresses etc, are no longer mutually exclusive to just guys.  Women do all these exact things!

Which set me thinking, we all talk about the new wave in the 21^st century, where the stigma attached to going to the gym has been removed.  Not too long ago, working out was something you think only muscle bound thugs and lugs did.  But now that I actually go there, I realized, this is something we all must do!

To Buff or Not To Buff

Whether I wanna bulk up or not, is not the issue.  In this sedentary day and age, we all OUGHT to and SHOULD go to the gym!  There really isn’t any choice any other way!  There’s no, “Should I really go to the Gym” or “I don’t’ have time to work out”.  Isn’t walking enough?  Aah, an emphatic no!  It isn’t

Instead, it should be more like, “OK, I know I have to go to the gym, now what do I do there”.  Its like driving a car, or getting a job.  Nobody says I don’t wanna drive, or I don’t wanna work.  It’s the sane thing to do and it’s a given.

Instead the choice is more like, “OK, what car do I get, I know I can’t get out of driving” OR “Everybody has to work to eat, so lemme see how I can bring home the bacon”.  When I see it with outlook tinted lenses I’ll see things differently and clearly.

Change the Choice

I got all muddled up with whether or not I should go to they gym, when I should have realized

Why didn’t we go the gym all these years then?  Well just cuz the world runs a certain way, you can’t say that’s the optimum, way it should be.  There are catalysts of change and all these movie stars and svelte starlets have changed the concept of what going to the gym should be.  With chicks, its being slim and trim, with guys, its being toned.

We all have different goals that’s all, but we all really ought to go to the gym, that is of course unless we’re into other things like squash, tennis, swimming etc, which few people are really for two reasons

1. Time: and the lack thereof
2. Groups: The problem with all sports is that you need more than 1 person.  And when you’re schedules tight as it is, and you have to tie it with someone else’s, you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

Then why weren’t people do it all these years?  The same reason people were loadin up on carbs and oils and getting heart attacks: IGNORANCE IS BLISS.  The need to hit the gym, actually started the instant the Industrial Revolution began in the 19^th century.  Oh and for you non history whiz’s, that’s the 1800’s onwards!  But people set up defense mechanisms, to be lazy and found reasons to not going to the gym.  Stuff like, Ooh, “Its just for nimrods, and Schwartzneggers”

Its not about GOING to the gym, its what I do with my gym membership.  None of the cast members of Friends, would look the way they did, if it weren’t for the gym.

A lotta geezers [and I mean people in their 30’s] still say, “Man it’s just a bunch of hype”  You guys are just hitting the gym, cuz it’s the glitzy and glamorous thing to do and cuz Beyonce and Brad Pitt are doing it.

But answer me this, since when did not having potentially life threatening belly fat, or being healthy, looking good and eating right, become a WRONG THING?  If a doctor asked us to go to the gym, wouldn’t we see things differently? Actually we’ve got it all wrong.

DAS MEDIA

The media [movies] always have a negative stigma attached to them, saying they corrupt our youth and teach them all kinds of crap.  So you associate all kinds of STIGMAS with movies.  But I for one, having grown up in a pretty detached household, owe a lot of what I am to television!  It kind of raised me in the absence of an active father or mother figure.  It taught me right from wrong.

So TV and the movies teach you positive things too.  Like innovative ways to love your partner and how to enjoy life.  It’s not like we’re going to learn these things on our own, with society being isolated the way it is.  And I’ll be darned if my folks teach me any of this.  Movie stars are actually teaching us a good thing with their going to the gym.

Don’t put a bad spin on it saying “Oh they’re just celebrities, this is real life”.  Not true.  They may be playing fictitious characters.  But they are real people.  With real lives.  And it’s their real bodies we are seeing on screen.  Even botox and makeup has its limits!!

So the reason people like aunties go to the gym, is thanks to popular culture and media, the stigma of going to the gym, has finally been lifted!!

And at the end of the day, no matter what you do, it takes commitment.  You  can’t really say that playing squash is easy and hitting the gym is hard.  It’s all in how you perceive it.  Either way, I’m happy God that you gave me this good take in going to the gym!!

It is not the new, cool IN thing to do.  It was the SENSIBLE thing to do all along!  It’s just that we never realized it!!!

THE INTERNET: MATRIX OVERLOADED

Why Email, Among Other Things, Is Dead.

Web 0.0

As the internet has grown there’s just a whole lot more to do on it than there used to be. When the net

started out, it was just an interesting albeit boring, what I like to call WEIRD WHITE WASTELAND the original (WWW). Every page was static and white, chock a block with blue hyperlinks. Arial and Times were the fonts of the day. Lines and tables and the ubiquitous gif banner was the only distraction. It’s almost as if all sites looked like Google! In fact, Google is the only site that still looks the way it did when it started out, aside from a few promote and demote icon scripts.

Retrospect

The look for what I like to call Web 0.0. Man now that I look back in retrospect, I should have saved some of those old sites the way they looked just for posterity! Yo! Why didn’t I think of that back in the day! I’d have been a millionaire by now, instead o’ working a desk job!!

Yeaup, back then, getting on the net meant just to ‘CHECK your MAIL’ and mebbe go to the website of some companies. Not tech companies, but actual BRAND COMPANIES Companies. I remember going to planetreebok.com and adidas.com as a kid, cuz there really wasn’t that much more out there to do.

Clear the Mess with CSS

Who knew that with php, scripts and a little thoughtful work around in HTML and CSS techniques you’d have the myriad of sites out there. Don’t even get me started on how much I could do in those archaic internet cafés which were uber pricy back in ’94 at like 4 dollars an hour surfing charges!! Not to mention the snail crawling 28.8 kbps speed we got! Anyone remember dial up?

EEK- MAIL!

E mail is archaic in its build. We’ve just about had enough, haven’t we all wished at some point of time that email would be a lot more intuitive and user friendly. For starters, the FORWARD and REPLY icons are confusing, static and non intuitive. And no adding f and r as shortcuts on the keyboard in yahoo hasn’t helped things a bit. See the death of email. Adding addresses is still notoriously difficult. And adding images of any sort is still a veritable nightmare!

With the huge influx of official mail, email does have a lot of its strong points. Maybe you’ll relate, the reply / forward / trail mechanism is still highly efficient and probably the only way to document a long trail of mails. You try to console yourself, after you get through with all your mails at work and get on to your personal email you’re already too wiped out as it is.

The average person will easily have at least 10 email id’s by now!! All with different user names and passwords. I think what really spelled the doom of email, was it just isn’t fun anymore. When that’s all you do at work, who wants to come home to rat out even more emails!!

MOVE OVER, I HAVE A BANDWAGON TO CATCH!!

Unfortunately or otherwise, there’s also a lot more to do on the net now, than there used to be. There’s orkut, facebook, blogs, feeds, customized pages like igoogle myahoo, tech forums, threads, online magazines, newspapers, linkedin, scour points to scour, webshots, corbis, flickr, twitter, wikipedia, imdb, rottentomatoes … the list is endless and this is just for a naive below average user!!  Internet 2.0 aspects like this, all take monster time to load.

Who could even visit all these sites in even a week, let alone, in a day!! And that if you had absolutely NO life, job or education and spent all day joined at the hip to your computer. All this was meant to initially cater to ‘THE HOST OF DIFFERENT INTEREST GROUPS’ out there. Remember the average John Q Public and Joe Six Pack. Essentially, so that there can be a LITTLE OF SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE on the net.

But instead what we have now, is whole bunch of storybook JACK OF ALL TRADES AND MASTER OF NONE types. Unfortunately, what was initially meant to cater to a broad interest group, now has everyone jumping on the bandwagon. Just take the couple of sites I listed, aren’t most people on all of them, and the list is only increasing daily. How much can you be part off?

YOU’RE GIVING ME A NET ACHE

Blogging is now being phased out by microblogging sites like Twitter. Its just like I said earlier, every new technology and thing out there on the net, only IRRADICATES something before it. I mean, it took me forever to get on blogs, and now, I have to totally reconfigure my brain to get on twitter. Man, when I think about the net’s real but brief existence for the past 15 years, I might have to totally re-hardwire my self at least a gajillion times!

There’s only so much change I can stand. I mean, in the old days, it took like 20 years, to develop a generation gap. Now its like 20 days, and some new technology is out there on the web that if you’re not down with you’re like a weed. I don’t know what kids 5 years younger than me are talking about. That can be a little intimidating and, there’s only so much I can take.

STEP ASIDE VIDEO GAMES

One thing we remember about video games is how they were blamed for warping kid’s minds. Now those same kids have grown up into the next great brain drain, the INTERNET as adults! I don’t know about you, there’s just too much to do on the internet for any normal human being to indulge in. If only we had 96 hours in a day! And 9 days a week, with only 5 days work!

INFORMATION IMPLOSION: the 2TB Hard disk

Apparently TB, doesn’t just stand for tuberculosis anymore!! There’s a new kid on the block. The 2TB Hard disk!! Information management is starting to just take up too much of a chunk of our already valuable time. Think about it, information is increasing. But time isn’t! Seriously what the blazes are you gonna do with a 10 TB hard disk. Is there one?

No, but there easily will be. Believe me, platters are only gonna get thinner and denser. Back in 93, (I know, the pre-historic days, before even Miley Cirus was born!!) We gawked at a 1GB hard disk and marveled at how we could stuff and cram something into what we thought was the already overloaded Winchester hard disk platter technology.

The 80′s is more than Punk Hairdo’s

Before that in the 80’s we marveled when someone came out with a gasp!! 1 MB HARD DISK!! Cuz back then, we didn’t know what to do with our actually FLOPPY floppy disks, and here you had 1024 Kilo bytes! Ya gotta be kidding me!!!

OK, 2TB hard disks exist now. And WDD have just released theirs last month. But hommie, what are you gonna do with 2000 GB of data? Don’t get me wrong, I know you’re gonna need even more, cuz you’re gonna stuff it with blue ray movies and what not! But its gonna be a nightmare to manage all this information!!

Software Grows.  Files Don’t.

While video files are really huge, your bare bones excels, words and power points aren’t really going to increase that much in size. Think about it, its SOFTWARE that grows in SIZE, not small files like documents and music. Yes I said it, MUSIC. At 320 kbps mp3s are already at what is called TRANSPARENT FIDELITY QUALITY which is virtually identical to that of a CD, and increasing things to 512 kbps is not gonna help.

How on earth are you gonna micro manage all these micro files? Think of all the 100s of folders and sub folders you will have to create to manage all this. The mind jitters! Then there’s the veritable impossibility of being able to actually being able to RETRIEVE any of this information in a TIMELY MANNER.

I JUST KNOW JACK: THE PHOTOGRAPHY ILLUSTRATOR CASE

Think about it, the average person has to worry about His job, family, his personal life, hobbies, voluntary organizations / clubs, where really is the time to spend all his time on the internet. Yeah, notice how I mentioned hobbies, the internet should be a boon for HOBBYISTS. A guy really into photography will already spend tons of time on flickr, dpreview, corbis, webshots, interface lift and a host of other sites. Not to mention all the Photoshop tutorials and tips out there that every PHOTOGRAPHER must Know. CHECK OUT MY POST ON PHOTOGRAPHY OR PHOTOGRAPHICS?

But photographers have enough to worry about. There’s lenses, equipment, tripods, diffusers and lighting among a million other things. Now they have to be masters in 500$ software too? Go figure! I long for the day, when an average guy had like 4 hobbies tops. Small wonder the prophets said there’d be an information explosion in the last days!

LOOK MA! I’M MOBILE

And to make matters worse, all this junk is now on our mobiles, the one last space of sanctity we had in life. The one last device that helped us keep in touch with our NEAR and dear, not just the NEAR and FAR!! Now phones are all about 3G and the internet. Smart phones, read my SMARTPHONES BLOG are so uber stupid, that you need a degree in rocket science to operate them. The whole idea of using a phone, is to simplify life, not to make you even more jaded than you already are!

CLOUD COMPUTING: DAS MURKY

Great! now the only information I had at the sanctity of my home is now also going to be on the net. My bank accounts, sensitive info everything. Let’s not even think about the pain of logging on and authentication and time wasted to get to this information.

SIBLING RIVALRY, AND CANNIBALISM

Yes net 2.0 and all those buzzwords in your face, there’s a lot the net has to offer, and therein lies the problem. ‘FACE’ it, the nets own maturity is spiraling it to its own destruction. Kinda like a family that has too many offspring and that causes them to go under! Remember back when the internet was a delight, its now a pain, you have too much to do. And you find out that, this is exceptionally painful for IT professionals who are already stoked with too much IT infrastructure, where is the time to dilly dally with the big WWW (Wasted Wired Winterland).

Keepin Tabs

And don’t even get me started about the difficulty of keeping track of all these sites. There’s all the meta tagging and bookmarking you have to do, to actually remember these sites. Is your delicious and foxmarks, starting to look like a website of its own!! I want out! Somebody save me! I’m sinking! Dude, just unplug me, I wanna get out of the INTERNET MATRIX and back to Zion reality. Cuz, right now, I’m like some kind of flaming walking zombie with a laptop strapped to my chest and a smartphone surgically attached to my scalp!

MOBILE OR MORE BILE??

Man I miss the days back in the 90’s when mobiles were simple.  And they were so freakishly expensive, sophisticated and heavy that you just had a whole lot of respect for them!  I remember how I used to dally with my dad’s mobile.  IT was the good old Nokia 2110 GSM Phone 1994.  And I just love it!  And it cost 100′s of dollars!  It was as big as my arm, but it was real fun!

360 Degrees + 5

Yes the mobile sadly has turned full circle. It started off as a super sophisticated device back in the 80’s and evolved into something fun in the late 90’s and early 2000′s. But now with the era of smartphones and windows, mobiles have reverted to what they always were: bland, boring and benign. Infact they’ve become worse. The good old phones like my dad’s Nokia 2110 were at least easy to use, which is more than I can say for modern SQUATphones.

The Undisputed Classic

I also still think the Nokia 3310 is going down in history as the most simple and fun phone ever!!  I loved listening to the myriad of ringtones it had and trying to compose them!!  Yes tone, not TUNES… Cuz nobody can compose tunes.  Only professionals can do that. Move over ‘FOOLABOUT’ and ‘BEE’, its BLACK EYED PEAS, edited ringer 128 kbps.mp3

Who let the Fun Out!

Remember back when to when phones use to be fun! You could customize them, put on skins and what not. Then some genius down the line felt that phones are more for synchronizing with an exchange server, and not for fun. And doing so, sapped all the life out it!

G Pee RS
And to make matters worse, all this internet junk is now on our mobiles, the one last suite of sanctity we had in life.  The one last device that helped us keep in touch with our NEAR and dear, not just the NEAR and FAR!!  Now phones are all about 3G and the internet.  Smart phones, read my WHY THE INTERNET IS DYING are so uber stupid, that YOU NEED a degree in rocket science to operate them. The whole idea of using a phone, is to simplify life, not to make you even more jaded than you already are!  I can’t even imagine giving my dad a smartphone as a present now!  He’ll probably use it as a glorified paper weight!

Missing the mark… What mark, there was a mark?

For a while phones seemed like they were going in the right direction with players like Sony Ericsson.  I really liked, that’s right LIKED their phones, and I’ve even owned one.  Making it color and adding a picture browser and gallery and all that were kind of neat.  Iphone coming in about 7 years later after color phones also seemed to be a step in the right direction, bringing the human aspect back to phones, and was definitely a step up.  Yeah the Iphone did created 3 new problems for every 1 problem it solved.  But it still is pretty fun though! What ruined the fray are smartphones.

iPhone = iPhuel

Just when pocket pc’s and the whole smartphone concept was dying, the iphone stepped in actually adding fuel to smartphones even if being the exact opposite! Pocket PC developers thought, wait! Aren’t our products also touchscreen! Let’s ape the iphone with its black interface and still run it on our stupid windows platform!! And believe you and me, people are buying into the crap by the truckload!

THE MIDAS TOUCH

All this happened when we thought that phones have reached a plateau.  I wonder if all this was some carefully orchestrated elaborate deception!  Think about it, phones had kinda reached a ceiling. You added a 5 megapixel camera, mp3 player, expenses manager, email checker, word document functionality.  Now what?  Even increasing the mega pixel rating wasn’t roping in the consumers.  And the recession didn’t help matters.  Then Touchscreen turned out to be that midas touch!  Iphone helped kill that stigma attached to totting a touchscreen pda with a stylus geek image.

Maybe ‘I’ shouldn’t have

They totally revolutionized its interface, introduced the fat finger concept, broke the mold and built a whole new one!  I wonder if there was some secret meeting somewhere, the kind Microsoft usually has!  Whatever it is, it worked, because all our Sony Cybershots and Walkman phones seems obsolete and everyone is rushing out to buy HTC Touch Cruise, LG Cookie, Sony Experia and Google Android products!  It worked!  The mobile consortium HAD come out a way with a way to already tap the 100s  of millions of mobile users out there to change over to touchscreen phones! Now we have to put out with the unleash of oceanic crap iphone clones from people like the HTC windows consortium

Now I have an HTC S710, which is without a doubt the worst phone on the planet to ever embrace humanity.  The less said about it the better, why waste valuable server space.

Win – Dho’s…

Windows Sucks

Its not so much HTC than windows mobile.  The developers must’ve thought, OK we’ve already failed with Windows Vista, so why not take our flawed and crippled OS and port it to a phone and shove it down unsuspecting consumers throats.  Most people didn’t know what smartphones were but they did know windows… so why not marry the two and throw everybody off track.  My eyes already burning from the mud slung from my windows PC have now been gouged out by Windows mobile.

The most user unfriendly piece of code on the planet.  I totally agree with the guys a 100% CRUNCH GEAR – 10 things I hate about smart phones. Pick up a windows smartphone and you won’t even know how to get to the photos, videos and gallery!!  And trying to clone a iphone middle layer on windows crapola parabola white candy ass interface isnt’ gonna help matters.  Whatever happened to the good old sony ercisson themes which were really slick!! All said and done, I miss the good old Nokia 3310 and the times you lay on your bed playing archaic snake and trying to compose ringtones.

THE GOOD
Phones like the LG Cookie, heading a step back in the right direction of making phones fun. I got my hands on one recently.  I quite liked it actually and its cheap but has all the neat functionality of the iphone!!

THE BAD, THE UGLY
Like the guys at CRUNCH GEAR. said, windows mobile should be put to rest and all touch screen phones that have windows written on them should be nailed in a six feet under coffin where they rightfully belong. After using these phones, you’ll feel the smarts… and not the good kind.

PHOTOGRAPHY or PHOTOGRAPHICS

A guy really into photography will already spend tons of time on flickr, dpreview, corbis, webshots, interface lift and a host of other sites. Not to mention all the photoshop tutorials and tips out there that every PHOTOGRAPHER must know. Think about it, when was the last time you saw an untweaked photo out there on the net? Every photo is super leveled to the max, with the contrast jacked to god knows what levels. Exposure, aperture priority, shutter speed, depth of field, are all thrown out the window, they’re not longer a PRIORITY!

No PHOTO seems to be acceptable, unless its NAT GEO worthy. I mean come on, when was the last time the parakeet’s plumes looked so colorful? And I don’t recall the Yucatan rainforest being quite so super green!! Hey I’m all for tightening a photo so it can confirm to the confines of what we can actually see within the VISIBLE SPECTRUM with our Naked eyes. Removing Over casts, color casts, flushed images, shakes, cropping are all great. But I have to draw the line at sprucing up the contrast so much that the hudson river looks like a can of blue paint!!!

When is someone going to start a website for good old fashioned photos that aren’t tampered with. I long for the day when I can look at a photo’s meta tag and not see ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CS4 OR ELEMENTS on it!!!! Come on guys, purists unite! Someone should start a website!

Photographers have enough to worry about as it is. There’s lenses, equipment, tripods, diffusers and lighting among a million other things. So now they have to be masters in 500$ software too? Go figure…. I long for the day, when an average guy had like 4 hobbies tops.  Instead of being a jack o lantern of all trades!

Why you can’t travel back in time

Time TRAVEL. IF someone could travel from the future into the past, they already would have. It doesn’t matter how far down the future it is invented, it just hasn’t happened. Otherwise, someone from say 3010, could have easily come back to 2010. So it hasn’t happened.

But that aside, there are actually 2 distinct pasts.

1. The NOW PAST
This is the now. The current present. Nobody can come back from the post millennia because IT HASN”T HAPPENED YET. Once it does, I will be in that future, to come back to the past of this today where I am actually typing this.

2. The B Past
The B past comes into effect only in the events after when this is possible. Either during the millennium or otherwise. Right now I am in lets call it the A past. But when I go to heaven / millennium, a new past will be created, the B past, which is exactly the same as my A past, with the exception that I can travel back to this new past now and relive my pleasant memories.

Why Aliens can’t have landed

For one thing, distance. The nearest star to earth is Alpha Centauri. An analogy of its distance, would be if the sun were a marble on a street in NY, then Alpha Centauri, would be a marble in Washington DC. The next closest star to that, would only be rio de Janeiro! Unfortunately, I forgot the time scale, but it takes way way longer.

The value of information obtained, should exceed the cost of obtaining said information!

Even if aliens could somehow survive the gargantuan expanse of space even between stars and come to earth, what would they gain from it? It doesn’t make sense to invest so much time and technology to visit some Neanderthal species that can’t even reciprocate the favor. Assuming that aliens couldn’t exist even within a radius of the closest 1000 stars. If they had that much choice and can detect maybe ultra gamma waves or something that emanate from space faring capable civilizations, they’d head in that direction. Instead of charting out to pre historic earth with its rockets.

SOL and close to speed of light travel are impossible anyway and even then it would take too long. And warping space, while good in theory couldn’t possibly exist in real life.

And since other civilizations have already started way before us and we’ve been around for thousands of years… Aliens could have made contact with us a long time ago, and they haven’t.

Think about it, everybody needn’t be as open minded as we are. If we could spend trillions of astro dollars to travel to the next 5^th closest star say, wouldn’t we like to gain something from it from a commerce standpoint? Which country is going to fund a space endeavor so we can visit some prehistoric nimrods in a star system far far away [not galaxy, that’s ridiculous]. This is why aliens aren’t going to spent centuries in space to visit us. Because what could they possibly gain from visiting a species so much more backward than them!!