It’s back to school for me on 3 September, but at the moment I’m fully engaged in buying books and such. Textbooks are, after all, important. Where else would one find either annoying but colorful blurbs on vaguely related topics surrounded by some content (at the less advanced levels) or remarkably dense, black-and-white books? These pieces of bound paper are worth something, though, because my books for this year cost over $600! The college students among you will probably ask if I left out a zero or two, but this is for 9th grade. $600 for 9th grade textbooks!

On top of that, the books weight about 25 to 30 pounds in total. They take up a bunch of space and are inconvenient to move and carry around. So what is the solution?

E-books! I can completely reduce the clutter, the tonnage, and the inconvenience. I can put all of my books onto one device. As far as e-book readers go, the Amazon Kindle is the clear winner for a number of reasons, including its ability to download books over the air and its independence from a computer. The obstacles to that oh-so-elegant solution, however, are not few.

First, my school does not support e-books at this point. With good reason as well! E-book technology has not developed to the point where it’s suitable for classroom use. You can’t take notes on the ink, for example. It lacks a built-in dictionary. The ability to configure many Kindles at once would be helpful for school as well.

Second, the availability of textbooks is a problem. McGraw-Hill publishes nearly all of their textbooks electronically as well as on paper, as do many publishers, but I’d have much more trouble finding my obscure French textbook on the Kindle.

Third, the design of the Kindle (the only viable option) would be problematic. It has some design quirks (the placement of the “next page” buttons, for example) and the screen is a bit small.

Like most things, all of this will be solved in time. My school (as well as many others) will start support e-books when the technology progresses to where it needs to be. The availability of textbooks is a work in progress. As time passes, more books will be published electronically and as schools and consumers switch to e-books, that will surely fuel more electronic releases. My design prayers will be reportedly answered as early as October with my small screen fears allayed next year.

With those changes made, Amazon will have created an electronic device that mimics most of the features of a regular book and enhances many others (please give us a dictionary that would allow us to tap a word and see the definition or something similar). The only “big” missing feature is the ability to write on the “paper.” That will help the Kindle infiltrate the education market because taking notes in the book is crucial for students. But in the case of a touch screen, write-able Kindle, it is not Amazon that is slowing the process. The underlying electronic paper technology cannot produce those results yet.

So it seems that my dreams of walking out the door to school with nothing but my Kindle and my laptop in hand are a bit far off. I’d probably still have to pay about $600 anyway because the high price of textbooks is due to the content on the pages, not the cost of the pages themselves. I can hope, though, as I’m lugging my books out my front door.

I would describe the mood in the Internet community as puzzled yesterday afternoon when Amazon.com went down for two hours. When I found out that Amazon was down, I was amazed. Amazon is never down just like Google is never down! Then I started chuckling to myself because it’s almost laughable that only two hours of downtime could cause such a stir on the Internet. Pingdom reports that this is Amazon’s longest downtime since 2006, when Pingdom started monitoring Amazon. Other than a one hour, 44 minute outage in 2006 and today, the longest downtime, according to Pingdom, was 26 minutes in September 2006. Internet users expect a lot more than they used to.

There was a time when 56K modems were considered fast. Online shopping didn’t exist yet. AOL was the industry leader. Google was being run out of a garage. Those were the “good old days.” We didn’t expect webpages to load in a split second. Downloading a one gigabyte file (something like a movie) would take about 41 hours.

Today, we expect instant load time, so when a website doesn’t load at all and instead displays an error message, people tend to freak out. So if the 1990s and early 2000s are the “good old days” now, what will we think of 2008 in ten or twenty years? We imagine ourselves to be so advanced, and perhaps we are, but if there is no limit to just how advanced we can become, then we are just barely scratching the surface of technological development. I’m sure that one hundred years ago Americans considered themselves advanced with such modern marvels as the Eiffel tower (the tallest structure in the world at the time). The French, nor anyone else, could conceive of a time when people were building structures over two thousand feet tall. There is technology that we don’t know about yet and we can’t imagine that will be ubiquitous in another one hundred years.

The next “big thing” on the technological front will be robotics. Much as computers were just beginning to be developed in the 1950s and 1960s, robots are just beginning to be developed now. A lot of great robotic technology exists, but it is prohibitively expensive. The breakthrough will come when robots will be able to learn from behavior, not just programming, and make decisions for themselves. Artificial intelligence will develop alongside robotics and one day, a computer will pass the Turing test.

That’s only the beginning. Robotics and artificial intelligence are already “known.” With those two areas, it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. I’m interested in the technology that hasn’t even been dreamed of yet. As pointed out in an episode of the West Wing, we can’t limit scientific discovery based on what we think will be instantly useful. When Michael Faraday started conducting experiments into the nature of electricity, he could not possibly have know that his work would one day run our entire world. If we keep discovering new things, then we could have a world run on something entirely new. It’s crazy to think of the possibilities because the next revolutionary thing hasn’t been invented yet, but sometime soon, a new technology will do for the 21st century what electricity did for the 20th century.

On an average day, I hear about or encounter at least ten technology startups, but I usually don’t care most of the time. The Internet is saturated with good ideas and vast community of interested people make it easier than it otherwise would be to get people to use your product (see my previous post, The Trouble with Innovation). I usually don’t talk about the stuff that makes View from a Farley run, but Intense Debate is special, so it gets special attention.

Intense Debate, for those who don’t know, is a comment system for blogs. The major blogging engines like WordPress and Blogger come with comment systems but the comment systems are basic. Intense Debate completely replaces the standard comment system. I’ve never used Blogger, so I’m writing this from the WordPress perspective, but no matter what platform you’re using, after just one quick install, your blog has Intense Debate.

I can easily moderate and delete comments or block certain words and phrases. Users can even sign up for an Intense Debate account so their information is stored and they can access a whole world of features. For one, I can block a specific user if they are a nuissance, but on a more positive note, they can start to really interact with other users.

If you read any section of the post, you should read from this part down. Intense Debate is special because it takes several features that are available in other comment systems, improves them, and makes all of that available in one comment system. The first thing is reputation. As a user comments, (and they can comment on other blogs, using the same account) their reputation increases and other readers can rate their comments, which also gives them a reputation increase or decrease. People can reply to comments and start a thread. Intense Debate even has a feature that allows readers to follow the comments for one post or an entire blog through their favorite feed reader.

But even more important than just the features is the personal touch that they put on service and support. Earlier this week, there was a small glitch and comments weren’t working for a lot of people. I e-mailed support and got an e-mail back less than 20 minutes later from Michael Koenig, who works at Intense Debate. The issue was soon resolved and Michael was friendly and helpful.

So why do I use Intense Debate for View from a Farley? The answer gets at the heart of what I’m trying to do with View from a Farley. The views that I publish are certainly my own and are often opinionated, but I really want to get a lot of user interaction. Intense Debate is a comment system, but it says “debate” right in the name. I would very much like to start a debate in the comments or if you’d prefer to just e-mail me, that’s fine too. So don’t forget that you can always add your opinion or hit reply on someone else’s comment to respond.

And if you have your own blog, I couldn’t recommend Intense Debate more. Go to intensedebate.com to sign up. And I have it on good authority that there are exciting changes and new features coming, but shhhhhh!

It’s true.  I love my printer to death, it does everything it needs to do and has never failed me.  But as with all technology, I occasionally come across design flaws that are so blatant that there must have been a really good reason or the designers are so extraordinarily dumb that they probably shouldn’t be designers.  My Canon Pixma MP600 won’t print unless all of it’s ink cartridges are full.  So even if I want to print an essay I need to make sure that my cyan cartridge still has ink left.  Dumb!

Okay, that’s my venting for the day.