Brenda Cooper's Blog, page 11

Google Glass: Glass goes to work

So just a short update on my Glass experience so far…..

After taking Glass out to a party (see previous post) I felt up to taking Glass in to work for the pre-holiday work days.  I also took it down to a coffee shop for lunch and out to take some pictures.  So here’s some impressions:

I’m learning where it feels weird to wear Glass and where it feels more natural (and more places will probably feel more natural as time goes on).  Just walking around town outside, I really liked it and felt cool.  This photo is Marina Park with a single sun-brightened bench.

Wearing it in restaurants was a little weird.  Kind of like a “look at me” statement. Mind you, I’m a Leo and a public speaker who loves to be on stage, so don’t get wrong – I like being kind of “look at me” but the reaction Glass gets varies from “Cool!” to “Don’t look at me your moronic alien.”  Of course, many people don’t notice at all or just don’t know what Glass is. Some people clearly believe it’s autonomous. I’ve had to explain to two people now that it’s just a computer and it does what I tell it to, just like my phone.  It’s not recording everything I see all the time.  Really.

In restaurants Glass felt OK in big noisy ones, and not as good in quieter places.  Bathrooms – no.  Even if it’s off – it makes people nervous.  It’s no more dangerous than a phone clutched in my hand, but still….

Things I’ve learned —-

How to accept and place calls – really easy.   The earpiece vibrates strangely when people talk to me and feels a little distracting. Katie (the household seventeen year old)  said my voice is clearer through Glass than on the iPhone Speaker.

I did learn how to tether it to the iPhone.  Still thinking maybe I should have gone to Android and a second phone.  My iPhone is now data central for Glass, for the Pebble, and for the Fitbit (my three wearables) and I can’t sync more devices well –  like my blue tooth speakers or wireless headset.  Maybe I still need to learn to do it.  It feels like having only one remote-control when you need two.

The setup for Wink was annoying me since I can’t manage to wink (I keep walking around practicing winking with my right eye, but I’m not doing it well enough to calibrate Glass yet and I look rather funny trying).  Solution?  Katie can wink.  She put Glass on and calibrated Wink to her, so I still can’t use Wink, but Glass has stopped insisting that I try to set Wink up.  This is a large relief.

After five days, I’m much more facile with moving around Glass, although I still do unexpected things once in a while like accidentally delete a picture or take one, or send something to the wrong person, although that doesn’t matter yet. I can’t get Glass to actually send anything.  I have contacts set up, and Glass thinks it’s sending things but it’s not.  Or at least no one I know is receiving anything.  Almost surely a mis-configuration on my side.

The battery is getting better.

Things I want?  For Glass to sync with my fitbit and tell me how many steps I’ve takes so far today.  To be able to tell it to “stop” when it wants something you don’t want/can’t do like the Wink setup.

Well, off to spike the  ham with cloves.  Merry holidays to all!

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Google Glass: Glass goes to a party

Took Google Glass out to Patrick Swenson’s birthday/holiday party.  Here is a brief summary:

It didn’t feel as weird to be wearing Glass as I thought it would.  A number of people were interested in seeing Glass, which makes sense since it was a room full of science fiction writers and tech geeks.  I did not leave it on all of the time. It is comfortable to wear for an hour at a time (I didn’t try longer).

I was the only one with Glass there – not surprising since I haven’t seen it in the wild in Seattle much.

Almost everyone wanted/expected Glass to do more than I could make it do without better connectivity. I MUST tether – buy an Android or give up my unlimited data plan.  It might actually be cheaper to add an Android phone (to tether I apparently need to buy the most expensive data plan AND add tethering, which adds $35 a month to the phone bill).  Two phones would solve another problem — I like to walk with my wireless headphones and listen to podcasts or books or music.  I also want to walk with Glass.  But I can’t synch two handsfree devices to one phone (duh!).  It turns out this is why I couldn’t pair Glass to the iPhone for two days – my wireless headphone set is always paired.  No way I can switch from the wireless headphones  to Glass with Glass’s battery life.  Glass made it through three hours of party.  I am already “girl with two pairs of glasses” and I’m not certain I want to be “girl with two phones.”  But if I take my headphones and Glass for a walk, Glass will be a brick unless I have ubiquitous wireless. Or unless when I tether it I don’t also need bluetooth.  Need to explore that.   I suspect ubiquitous wireless is a pre-requisite for wide-spread and easy wearable computing.  I knew that, but this Explorer experience is an underline.

All I know how to do so far to take a picture is to go through the verbal commands, which in a crowded room means loudly saying “OK Glass.  Take a Picture.”  Kind of distracting, and not very social.  I will have to learn the other ways to do it.  Currently practicing my right-eye wink and still failing.  I also can’t get Glass to stop insisting I try to make wink work, which is a distraction.

I did manage to get a couple of pictures (poor ones) and a decent video of Ken Scholes and Nancy Kress doing music, but the video turns out to be an animated GIF and appears not to play in WordPress or on FB.  So I haven’t posted it anywhere.  Note to self:  taking a really good video of a subject that’s sitting down requires not moving one’s head!  This is an inside bad-light Glass photo of Ken and Nancy (and Christy – which I might have spelled wrong).  The video-as-x-seconds of animated Gif is too distracting to post.

Funniest comment?  Nancy Kress thought I should name it something different than “OK Glass.”  Not a bad idea to have a configurable trigger phrase that would allow us to personalize Glass.

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Google Glass: A few days notes

Yesterday was more full of snow and dead batteries and work and a family movie than it was of Glass.  It’s interesting just to see the family reactions to Glass, though (which is still only at home).  Yesterday morning I had an immediate success when I put on Glass and asked for the weather and had it in seconds.  When Toni came down for her coffee, I tried to show her, and asked Glass for the temperature.  Glass decided “temperature” meant “picture” and took a picture of Toni in her bathrobe and then when I tried to ask it about the temperature again it tried to email the picture to a couple of guys I did a podcast interview with a few months ago.  Not good.  As far as I know, I managed to intercept the bathrobe picture before it got mailed. Later, when I wanted to take a picture of the snow outside our house while I was waiting for AAA, it worked great. But now Toni thinks Glass is no better than Siri, and I hope that she’s not right.  The household seventeen-year-old does well with Siri, but Toni and I both  struggle to get anything useful.  Toni seems – at best – to be mildly amused that I brought Glass home.

Katie is mostly interested in the fashion implications – does Glass confer a unibrow and does it block your eye?  (no and no, IMHO)

Today I am back at it trying to learn a little since I plan to take Glass out to a party tonight  I have successfully snugged it to my iPhone with bluetooth and updated some Google contacts and dropped those into Glass. I am finding that I need to go update my Google electronic self which is way more out of date than my IOS self or my FaceBook self.  That, I suppose, was predictable.  I failed at getting “Wink” to calibrate, so I will not be winking any pictures into existence.  I can wink with my left eye, but I can’t wink one-eyed right and Glass appears to know the difference between a wink and a blink.  

I basically feel like I still don’t know very much.  I did manage to find my pictures.  The picture  up above is the photo of the snow outside our house that I took with Glass.

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Google Glass: Day one

So I haven’t answered many questions from my last blog post yet, but the household teenager is done with her finals and I’m free to play with Glass.  Here’s how its gone so far….

The boxing and presentation of Glass is cool.  Glass is light and easy to wear.

Set up is pretty easy.  It took me a few tries to get it connected to my home wifi and I haven’t yet gotten it connected to the iPhone via bluetooth.  I can’t tell if it needs to be connected to a hotspot (but it  looks like no hotspot is needed unless I want turn by turn directions, which I kinda do).  In that case, can I use a wifi hotspot and tether to that or do I have to tether to my phone?  Something I may be able to ask Glass.

I’ve figured out how to take a picture, query Google, navigate around, and charge Glass.  There is a lot of help available to Glass Explorers and I will be looking at that more.  But there is one problem (I think).  The iOS advice almost all seems (reasonably enough) to be for Glass pre IOS My Glass app.  I get it – no problem.  No frustration.  But it does make it confusing – I often can’t tell what instructions apply now and what instructions apply to Glass and IOS pre-My Glass for IOS. Time will fix that up.

The screen is easy to read and I can wear Glass and reading glasses both at once.  It DOES look dorky, but I will hunt for reading glasses where that isn’t true.  I probably just need thinner frames or frameless ones.

There is a learning curve. Some things are easy (like querying Google) and others are harder (I haven’t done it yet, but the instructions for posting a picture to FB look way worse than just taking the picture on the phone and posting it – more steps).  After a few hours I’ve scratched the surface and I’m packing it in for the night.  Not ready to go out in public yet, but maybe to a party this Saturday.  Hopefully I can figure out the tethering thing by then.

For your entertainment, here is an iPhone selfie of me with two pairs:

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Google Glass and me: The arrival

Glass arrived today.  It’s still in the box.

I’ve been thinking about this technology purchase a lot.

I’m an early adopter.  I’ve worn a fitbit for years now – I’m on my sixth one now.  I wear a Pebble.  Attached to this computer – right now – there is a multiple USB hub with the fitbit charging in one dock, my iPhone 5 charging in another (including its mophie case) and my watch charging in a third.  I already have my iPad Air.  So it’s not like new tech phases me.  But I’m having very mixed reactions to Glass.

Glass is expensive.  Not only do you need to get an invitation in the first place, but it’s $1500 just get over the initial bar.  Plus tax.  At least the shipping was free and fast.  But I’d like to upgrade my MacBook Air, and Glass is expensive enough I had to decide what was going to wait if I bought it.  The MacBook Air now has another year of useful life and I have a cleanup job to do on the hard drive so I can get that year out of it.  You know I want something pretty badly when I’m willing to spend time to clean up electronic messes.

Glass is beta.  As far as I can tell, I’m now what is knows as a “Glass Explorer” which means I’m beta testing this product, and I paid dearly to be able to do that.  I’m not going to make money from Glass – I’m not a software developer itching for the SDK or a famous entertainer who can feed off the cred of wearing Glass.  I’m kind of a normal person.

Although, check that.  A little, anyway.  I am a CIO and a futurist and a science fiction writer.  Most normal people aren”t three things.  One of the reasons I wanted Glass is to see what it would be like to have real useful wearable tech.  I write about it in fiction all the time.  Living it is attractive.  Living it in beta maybe won’t be, but I guess I’ll see.

Glass makes me nervous.  I wear a red Pebble, but most people don’t notice it.  My geekier friends do, but mundanes see it as a slightly bulky fashion watch and don’t know it answers my phone and forwards me my texts and integrates with apps (a few apps, anyway). But Glass goes on your face.  It’s iconic.  Everyone will notice it. In addition, everyone will recognize it. Will people see me as “Fond of Geeky Headwear” or will they see me as an “early adopter futurist?”  or as a “Glasshole?” Will they be afraid I’m winking and taking their picture every moment?  Glass will be banned in the gym locker room (cellphones are), but will it be banned in the gym?  Will people see me through Glass?  Will it bring me closer to people or push me away?

I saw Vint Cerf wearing Glass at a FiRe 2013 conference and I thought he looked cool in.  So why don’t I think I’ll look cool in Glass?

I’ll find out soon enough.

I’m waiting for the IOS My Glass app  (Glass is rumored to be no better than an app-enriched bluetooth slave like the Pebble without My Glass).  I had actually started pricing android phones and mourning the loss of IOS, which I love.  I’ve never used Android, but I went from all-windows at home to all IOS a few years ago, and I’ve been happy).  I was planning to get an Android today, maybe even as a second line just for Glass, so I’d have it when Glass showed up.  But then My Glass for IOS showed up yesterday, and hit the news about the time I got my tracking number for Glass.  The app has since been pulled with assurances from Google that it will return by the end of the week.  So I’ve been teased, but I trust that the app will return for a second date.

For the moment, my Glass is unopened and I’m checking the Apple App Store from time to time.

Follow me here or on FaceBook or on LinkedIn if you want learn how this works out.  I’m looking forward to the journey in spite of my nerves.  And in the meantime, there are holiday cards to print,  a household teenager to get though finals, and gifts to wrap.

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New duology to come out from Pyr!

I’m very pleased to announce that Lou Anders at Pyr has chosen to buy two more books.  This will  be another duology, and will tell an entirely different story than Ruby’s, although it is in the same universe.  I’m picking up about fifty years after the end of The Diamond Deep, and telling a story about the fight to save a planet and a whole vast ecosystem of orbiting space stations.  It lets me play with human and trans-humans, and to explore a universe I got to build up in the last book but didn’t really have the time to showcase much there.  I’m almost exactly halfway through the first draft of Edge of Dark – which is book one.  I think it’s something readers will like.  I’m pitching this one slightly more adult with no young-adult main characters.

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Reading Recommendation: The Expanse, by James S.A. Corey

Really, this is a recommendation for the first three books in The Expanse series, as I’ve heard there will be three more.  I already did a recommendation for the first book, which was so good that I had to read the next two.

The books are Leviathan Wakes, Caliban’s War, and Abaddon’s Gate. I found this to a be a rich, tense, and very fresh series.  The authors (and yes, this is actually a collaboration between Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) have a very good sense of the plausible future.  They also write space opera in a way that convinced me that they actually WERE in space.  A lot of science fiction portrays space ships as if they were ocean liners, and this series didn’t make that mistake.

I particularly love the way the main character is the same throughout the books, but the supporting cast varies – it’s another way that the books seem to be more real – to live in a real world. The politics are also (unfortunately) very believable.   The authors seem to “get” humanity as well as they get space.

I’m looking forward to the next three books.  These three gave me many hours of pleasure.

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Diamond Deep Review Roundup

Very pleased with the review roundup for The Diamond Deep.  Here’s a brief spin through the highlights:

From Paul Weimer’s 4 Star review in SF Signal:

“There is a real first contact feel to Ruby and the denizens of The Creative Fire coming to terms with alien cultures, alien technology and even an alien environment. Given that, Ruby’s impact on the The Diamond Deep, while as striking as her impact on The Creative Fire, takes different forms and has different consequences.”

From M. Mogsby’s 4-Star Review at The BiblioSanctum:

“I almost relegated it to the “save-for-later” pile. Boy, am I so very glad I didn’t.”

From the Romantic Times’s 4 Star review:  

“A sequel to 2012’s The Creative Fire, this is a worthy conclusion to Ruby’s story.”

And best of all, one of my old friends from Longview came up to me at Orycon and told me she’d been up all night reading it.  That’s maybe the best thing a writer can hear…..

Bothe The Creative Fire and The Diamond Deep can be found in all of the usual places, and signed copies are available at The University Bookstore in Seattle or at Powell’s City of Books, Beaverton Store, in Portland.

Now back to writing the next book and seeing if I can drive those four stars right through the roof to five stars.  :)

 

 

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Buy a book, get a chance to win a John Picacio calendar

The Diamond Deep came out early this month.  Since I was out of the country, I couldn’t have a proper party.  So I’ll be throwing one at Orycon, hanging out at a signing, and visiting a book festival over the next ten days.  I will have a few copies of both The Creative Fire and The Diamond Deep available.  But buying from me isn’t the best choice.  It doesn’t support bookstores.  Not only that, but I can’t sell you an electronic copy.  So here’s the great deal for you….

Anytime between now and the end of the last event of the weekend (a great grand signing at the Powell’s in Beaverton, Oregon!), if you can find me and show me a receipt for en electronic version or bring me a print version and a receipt from a store, from Amazon, or from a bookseller at Orycon, I’ll give you a card to fill out that will enter you into a drawing for one of John Picacio’s 2014 calendar’s plus one of his Lotteria cards.  The calendar will ship when John ships them all, late in this year.

Not only is this a great prize, but there is a link between the prize and the books.  John is the cover artist for both novels, and his fabulous art for The Creative Fire won a Chesley, which is a prestigious art award.

So here’s where I’ll be in case you want to find me and enter:

This weekend (November 2nd and third) I’ll be at the Northwest Bookfest in Kirkland at a booth with other local authors.  I’ll be there about half the time.  Others include Louise Marley, Cat Rambo, Jennifer Brozek, and more….I think you can get to us for free, but I’ll tweet out for sure Saturday morning (follow @brendacooper).  Next weekend, November 9th and 10th, I’ll be at Orycon in Portland, Oregon.  On Saturday night, I’ll be hosting a party with another author and two editors (John Pitts is releasing his new collection, and his editor, Patrick Swenson will be there.   Bryan Thomas Schmidt will be there for the release of an exciting new anthology edited, Ray Gun Chronicles. I have a story in there).  We’ll be in the Presidential Suite and we will be having fun!

Sunday night, November 10th — starting at 4:30 PM, I’ll be joining  other authors at the best Portland mass signing of the year, the Sci-Fi Authorfest at Powell’s in Beaverton.   This is really fun — lots of us are there, storm troopers occasionally wander through, it’s family friendly, it’s near restaurants, and….if you buy a book there and have me sign it, this will be the last opportunity to enter this particular drawing.

Don’t miss this chance to have  a wall full of John Picacio’s work for all of 2014!  The picture below is linked to his Kickstarter, just in case you want to be sure to get a calendar!

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Backing into Eden Chapter 16: Transgenic Animals and the Future

This is part three of three.  Now that I’ve listed some of the ways humans use animals (traditional and GM) and talked  about ethics, I want to cover some reasons we may need GMO animals in the future.  I want to remind readers that the highest ground is almost certainly to use conservation and respect to maintain a healthy ecosystem, to rely on care instead of test tubes.  Of course, we haven’t done very well at that.  Instead, we seem to be backing ourselves into a corner, which we will then have to fight out way out of.  This is a very human way of being, even if it’s not particularly mature.  I’m an optimist. We can get to a future we largely like, even though the corner is getting tight.  The tighter we let that corner get, the more likely we are to need more dangerous and more radical innovation to escape.

Before I talk specifics, here’s a quick reminder of the ethics points I brought up in my post about GM ethics:

The animal must be no worse off.  At the very least, GM animals should live as well and be as healthy as non-GM animals.
No animal slaves.  GM tools should not restrict free will or provide mechanical control over animals.
Operate inside the ecosystem.  The balance of ecosystems is critical, and GM animals should not cause major imbalances.
Mind the boundaries – GM work is scary as well as exciting. It should be.  Keep boundaries between GM / non-GM animals until extensive testing has been done, and then do more testing.
No greed – no long-term ownership of DNA or other design elements of created or changed beings.

We don’t know how much the growing population and increasingly unstable climate will affect us, but I am certain life will not be business-as-usiual.  Here are a few of the ways that we may use GM animals in the future.

Pollinators:  Bees are dying from colony collapse disease.   Scientists have pointed to multiple possible factors, the latest of which is simply the stress of modern living.  Seriously – it appears that any combination of diesel fumes, neonicotinoids (from pesticides), habitat loss, or parasites may cause entire bee colonies to disappear.  I empathize with the poor bees – some days the stress of the modern world does seem tough to just keep going through!  But seriously, we need pollinators for most crops and we may have trouble keeping enough healthy bees to manage all of the work.  Perhaps bees can be helped so that they are more resistant to stress, parasites, and poisons.  We need bees.  Without them, we won’t be able to produce enough food to feed the world.  Other key pollinators such as bats are also endangered.  We may be able to make robo-pollinators, but bees are natural carbon-based beings that melt back into the earth for easy re-use, and I shudder to imagine stepping on the dead carcasses of pollinator nanobots on a hike through the woods.  There is work being done (linked below) that may help create stronger bees without GM tools.  That would be safer.  Any useful deployment of GM bees will stretch the ethical constraint about minding the boundaries.   Nevertheless, pollinators are so critical we should be working on every technique we might need.

Ecological Niche-Keeping:  As mentioned early-on in this series, we appear to be heading right over the biodiversity cliff into a mass-extinction.  In many ways, it has already started.  Pollinators are only one of the  wriggling and breathing parts of the ecosystem under severe threat.  There are others.   GM tools may help us bring back extinct species (including recently or not-yet-but-soon-to-be-extinct species).  Think critical and sensitive layers of the food change, like krill.  Think predators or prey necessary to keep a balance.  We might prop up existing species (for example, by adding a unique biological marker that helps us track bears so we can be sure we know when they are outside of our door, or something that makes ivory trackable back to the originating elephant).  We might have to bring back species after we drive them to extinction.

Adaptation Assistance:  Some species may have a thin line between them and extinction as their habitats change in response to climate change.  Making a bird a bit more resistant to cold might help it survive, for example.

To improve the health of the animal:  Even when there’s no need to change an animal because its habitat changes, we may be able to simply improve some animal’s health.  For example, we might find a way to eradicate collie-eye in dogs.  In a current case, the Roslin Institute just published a paper on using DNA editing to create pigs that are more resistant to illness, and hoping that their work will migrate to wild populations (see the Pig 26 article linked below).

Improving food animals:  Part of how we manage our wild animals is to manage the parts of land and the sea that are spent feeding us.  That means getting more efficient and doing less damage with our farming.  Many of the examples so far are either under heavy attack from the far left (think Monsanto corn) or stuck in a waiting game for approval (think AquAdvantage Salmon).  Orange crops in Florida are threatened by citrus greening, and standard eradication methods are persistently failing.  There is work underway on a GM solution.  Yes, I know an orange is not an animal. Most GM food improvements are not animals, yet.  I suspect there are a lot more corporate lab experiments waiting to see what happens with the salmon currently under consideration (they grow faster).  I personally prefer we switch to others sources of proteins, but I’m a minority, at least at the moment.

Thanks for reading this, which is the third entry in a three-post series on GM animals.  If you missed the others, they are Human use of Animals: Lists and GMO Ethics.   I didn’t spend so much time on this topic because I think it will be a major part of what we need to do the preserve and enhance our ecosystems in the future.  I hope it isn’t.  I hope it’s a small part of a program driven far more by protection of our existing ecosystems.  I chose to spend this many words on this topic because it’s interesting, it’s emerging faster than many people seem to be aware of, and there are a multitude of questions we should be asking.  I am also hopeful that we can avoid labeling all things related to GM animals as bad.  Some will be bad, and should be fought in the legal system and online.  But others may be critical to the future success of humans and animals alike.

As usual, here are a variety of related links:

Stress alone can lead to bee colony collapse, Discovery Channel News, October 7th, 2013,  Gayathri Vaidyanathan

5 things that probably aren’t killing honeybees – and 1 thing that definitely is, Mother Nature Network, May 8, 2013, by Stacie Boschma

Building a better bee, Maclean’s, Thursday, October 7th, 2010, Tom Henheffer  Note that I couldn’t find a 2013 follow-up to this topic

A race to save the orange by altering its DNA, New York Times, July 27th, 2013, by Amy Harmon

‘Pig 26′: Can this little piggy win over the enemies of GM? The Independent, April 15 2013, Steve Connor

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