Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater

Wed, 16 Nov 2011

Don't Be Evil

My history with gadgets is long and varied. I've owned pocket-size computers for as long as I reasonably could, starting with the venerable HP 200 LX, which I purchased in early 1995. This tiny (for its time) wonder (for its time) ran DOS and sported a CGA screen, running for 20 hours on a set of AA batteries. It had a set of built-in apps which, if not perfect, were at least pretty good. And it had a full (including numeric pad) keyboard, which was quite typeable. I actually still have that wee beastie sitting in a box in the basement, but the lack of a backlight keeps me from seriously considering it anymore.

I graduated to a Compaq iPaq running Linux (deep, deep nerd), then to a Palm Tungsten T5, and finally, after many years of holding out, to an iPhone 3GS. Now, I find myself in possession of a Motorola Droid X, which was the white-hot coolest smartphone in the world for about three weeks in late 2010.

Up until the iPhone, none of my pocket computers (which I have variously called "Palmtops," "PDAs," and "smart phones") were particularly connected. The iPaq came closest, with a backpack that doubled its sleek, curved volume and would take a full-size PCMCIA card, including a wifi card. But really, I never had a connection until the iPhone. And, as things have progressed, the first really "cloud-enabled" device I've had has been the Droid.

The problem, for me, is that "the cloud" is a term which is roughly synonymous with "blind trust in people who have no vested interest in your privacy." Granted, the data connection to the Internet is paid for, but the services of Google's cloud are, only in the most tenuous way possible, tied to any sort of financial transaction. Thus, Google's interest in my privacy is largely academic, or at least reputational.

So, I have been unhappy about the idea of putting my data into "the cloud." Some of it, sure. Facebook, whatever. I don't put anything I actually care about there -- what goes up here (which is imported into the cloud) and there (which is the cloud, and with a decidedly antagonistic view toward your and my privacy) is, more or less, fluff.

I do have data I care about, though. Obviously financial data, social security numbers and the like, sure. But I care about my schedule. It does a couple of things: first, it tells me where I need/want to be, so reliability is high on my list. Second, it tells anyone who cares to look at it exactly where I am to be found, and when. Without engaging full-on paranoia mode, there's a lot of value to certain other people in such data. For instance, people who are interested in liberating you from whatever material possessions you might not be actively guarding at a given moment. I'm sure there are many other more-or-less-frightening uses for someone's schedule.

So it was with a great deal of trepidation (as I wrote about before) that I started using the Droid X, with its inherently cloud-based everything. I refused, in fact, to use the calendar, instead buying a classy paper calendar book to carry around for my personal use. But I wasn't happy with that. I don't want to carry around extra crap.

So I was very pleased when the calendar silently upgraded itself to suddenly include a "phone" storage option for the calendar. This was several months ago. I gleefully ditched the paper calendar, and shoved all my temporal data into the phone's little memory banks.

For a few months, all was good with this little world. My schedule was safely under my control, and unlike a paper calendar, the phone would actually make little beeping noises at me to remind me of things I'd scheduled for myself. But you can see where this is going.

A few weeks ago, for no apparent reason, the alarms stopped feepling and jingling. Then they'd go off 23 minutes after the event had started (and not the 15 or 30 minutes before that I'd requested). Sometimes they didn't go off at all. It got to be very discouraging.

Then, tonight, I went to look up plans around Christmas, and discovered that, to my horror, events I'd placed in September were showing up (sometimes having moved, sometimes having been duplicated) in December.

You may recall that I said earlier that reliability is one of my watchwords. If I put an event in the calendar, it damn well better stay there. And you know, until this Android wheeze, it did. The iPhone, the Palm, the iPaq running Linux, the 80186-based HP 200LX, they all kept my schedule exactly as I'd entered it. Without fail. It wasn't always pretty, I didn't always love the interface, but the data was always there.

Well, without belaboring the point any further, Google has failed me. They may be striving to do no evil, but neglect is about as bad, as far as I'm concerned. The paper calendar came out tonight, and I'll be transferring everything that may or may not be correctly recorded in the phone's little scattered memory banks, and acquiring a fresh 2012 calendar on the morrow. I'm no longer interested in being subject to Google's whims, evil or not.

Posted at 21:34 permanent link category: /gadgets


Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater