Barriers to Communication

I met my late wife online back in the Dark Ages, using a Commodore 64 and a 300 bps modem. By the time I married her, I had graduated to 1200 bps. (That’s “Bits Per Second. For contrast, a 56k modem moves at up to 56,000 bps and a cable modem might go a million bits per second or faster.) While a lot of things have changed since then, some things remain the same. I’d like to talk about a couple of them.

It’s easy to misunderstand people in the online world. There is no tone of voice, no inflection, no raised eyebrow, no gestures. This means that to a certain extent the people we meet online exist in our minds. We supply any missing elements, and that means that anything that you say online is going to be seen through the filter of what the other person brings to the table. All of the hints about what you really mean that we take for granted out in the Big Blue Room are missing.

On the surface, this lowers the first barriers to talking. But it can often be a barrier to communication. You have to say more, create more context, and be more ready to explain what you really meant. But it also means that the other person has to be willing to listen. Every listener in the online world needs to understand the limitations, and be open to listening as the person they are conversing with expands, clarifies, and even corrects what he was saying. Both sides have to make a genuine effort or there is no communication.

All of this brings me back to where I started. I met my wife online. The details are a story for another day, but we misunderstood each other fairly often. In fact until we established a common framework of shared references and knowledge about each other it often seemed that the more we talked the more we misunderstood each other. The misunderstandings didn’t stop when we met in person, they just changed their nature. We misunderstood each other through 19.5 years of marriage, and still managed to make a go of it because we cared.

One other thing I’ve learned, both from my own marriage and from watching others try online relationships, then try to turn them into 3D relationships is that if you think maybe there’s a romantic feeling there it is VITAL to meet each other in person ASAP. Remember, you’re talking online to someone you’ve built in your mind. In your mind you might not see the faults. He won’t leave the toilet seat up. She won’t try to strangle me by hanging pantyhose in the shower. Eventually you make up an ideal person that no mere flesh and blood person can live up to, and meeting in person is a disappointment. Meeting in person early in the relationship can prevent this.

People drop bits and pieces of who they really are in the online world all the time. It might be a reference to an expiring car lease and what the replacement will be, or it might be a reference to going over to a daughter’s apartment to have dinner or the desire for a Sonic Cherry Limeade slushy.

These little hints add up over time to a more complete mental picture of the real living, breathing person on the other end. But to gather these pieces you have to pay attention. That means you have to give a damn about the person you are listening to. If you don’t make the effort, you miss the best part of being online.

The Internet Ruined Their Marriage

Ever met someone who swears that the Internet ruined his or her marriage?  

Yup, that's right. That Eeeeevil Internet snatched away what had been a perfectly happy spouse, broke up a happy home, and caused no end of grief. Chat with enough people long enough, and you'll find one. If you're lucky you'll only find one. If you're smart you'll learn to recognize the symptoms after that and run like hell. Not being so smart, and being curious about how they thought a computer had ruined a marriage I've spoken with a few over the years.

I've also seen the supposedly happy spouse who left. They came online for a variety of reasons, but once they arrived they found they could play, or they could "talk" with  people who actually listened to what they said. They found people who would laugh at their jokes, and snark back at them in the same vein. They found interesting people who knew interesting things and were interested in them. So what was it that they found online? They found people who didn't take them for granted. 

Whether they were a news junkie, or a gamer, or someone researching genealogy or any of a thousand other hobbies that might have been the original reason for getting online, they found something they lacked. It might be that they had adjusted to that lack, and so outwardly looked contented with their lot, but they were missing something. 

(You get a pass if that husband or wife is one of the people you regularly talk with online because you're both hopeless geeks. I have to give you a pass, I used to send an IM to ask my late wife for a can of soda, and she'd send me an IM to remind me to take out the trash.)

Here's where the blame part comes in. Their husband or wife (though usually it seems to be a husband) didn't have a clue that their spouse was missing something, that there was discontent on one side of the equation. He (or sometimes she) thought everything was fine, and on the surface it might have been. Then that Internet thing came along and screwed up everything.

News Flash: YOUR life may have been perfect. The life of your husband or wife wasn't.

In almost 25 years of online life I have never seen a healthy marriage ruined by the Internet or online services. I have seen it, both online and in person, become the breaking point for a marriage that was already strained. But the problem was not the Internet. It wasn't the online service. It wasn't some heart breaker or home wrecker online. It was the marriage itself.

A relationship, online or off, is something you have to work at. If you're talking more to people online than to your husband or wife, take a look at your relationship. Fix it now. Because if it isn't the Internet, something else will surely come along.

No Substitute for Talent

You'll have noticed by now that this is a rather basic blog layout, picked from what Blogger supplies. There is a reason for that. When it comes to things like drawing, design, and layout I have absolutely no talent.

Geek stuff I can do, or I can learn. In the case of HTML it's partly relearn and partly learn the things that have changed since I last did a web site more than a decade ago. It was an incredibly ugly internal corporate site for a group I worked in, mostly a convenient place to hold documentation for various networks we supported.

Hardly a day goes by that someone doesn't invite the Twitterverse to look at a new web page they did and comment. Even when it isn't quite right I despair because I know that it's better than anything I could do.

At one time I thought that computers were the answer to my problem. I spent hundreds of dollars on various painting, drawing, and animation programs, first for my Amiga 500 and later for a PC. Each time I thought "THIS will be the tool that will reveal the hidden genius!" Each time I finally had to admit that this was not the tool to reveal my hidden genius.

Eventually I had to admit the truth: I have no hidden artistic genius. I have not even a smidgen of talent in that direction. Artistic power tools on a computer just help me make a mess much faster. There is no substitute for talent.

Manual Dial Modem

This is a tale from ancient times, when I had to push data uphill both ways in the snow.

When I first got online I was using a Commodore SX-64 with a 300 baud HES II modem.  By today's standards that's REALLY slow but it seemed a miracle at the time. An ordinary guy like me could not only have his own computer, but could connect it to others and communicate with people.

Another time I'll talk about how slow 300 baud is compared to the speeds of DSL and cable modems. The HES II was a manual dial modem, so today I want to describe the process of getting connected.

1. Set your telephone and modem side by side. This will be important later when speed is essential.

2. Boot the computer and load your terminal program.

3a. If your terminal program recognizes that manual dial modems exist, set it for manual dial, then select the system you are connecting to from the menu. The number to dial will display on your screen.

3b. If your terminal program removed the manual dial feature because you only have 64k of memory and the space was needed for other features then pick the system you want from the dialing directory. If you're using a program like this have the phone already in your hand as the program will expect you to dial as fast as it does.

4. Dial the access number. Yes, I mean "dial." With a rotary phone.

4a. Get a busy signal. If your terminal program supports manual dial, hang up and dial again. Repeat as needed till you get a modem tone, or till you're foaming at the mouth.

4b. Get a busy signal. If your terminal program doesn't support manual dial, watch the time out message appear on your screen. Hang up, go back to the dialing directory, reselect the system to connect to. Dial the phone number again. Repeat as needed till you get a modem tone, or till you're foaming at the mouth.

4c. Give up on calling that system for now and try another. Go back to step 3.

5. If you don't get a busy signal (or the voice of someone you woke at 3 am because you misdialed) then after the phone rings a few times you hear a modem tone. 

6. REALLY fast reach behind the phone and unplug the cord. Plug the phone cord into the back of the modem. 

7. Go to the front of the modem and flip the switch to the "Off Hook" position. (This switch tells the modem whether to be connected or not. It's a subject for another time when we discuss the joys of trying to get a friend to dial into your computer.)

8. Press the RETURN key.

If you've done everything fast enough you are now connected to the system you were trying to reach. (You can put down the phone, it's not connected to anything.) 

If not:

9. Hang up the phone.

10. Flip the switch on the front of the modem to "On Hook."

11. Unplug the phone line from the modem and plug it back into the phone.

12. Go back to step 3.

The process got a bit easier when I found a "Y" connector for a phone line at my local Radio Shack. This meant I could drop steps 6 and 11.

iPhone 3.0 OS Guide

Unlike a lot of geeks, I don’t own an iPhone, nor even a Blackberry. I’m still holding on to my Palm Centro and waiting anxiously for the new Palm Pre. But the big news in the smart phone world today is the new release of the iPhone 3.0 OS.

Gizmodo brings us iPhone 3.0 OS Guide: Everything You Need to Know.

Death of the Internet

Every couple of years we hear about The Impending Death Of The Internet. The latest death of the Internet meme is that we’re running out of IP address space, the numeric addresses that lie behind the “friendly” addresses made of words. We remember words more easily, but computers work better with numbers. We’re running out of those numbers.

One of the more interesting articles about the problem is this one, because it suggests a solution to the problem. Let the people who have excess IP addresses sell them. Renumbering a network takes time and money and can disrupt the operations of an organization, so this makes sense to me.

The first time I heard of The Impending Death Of The Internet was in the early 1990s. The number of routes that the routers that direct traffic in the core of the Internet was growing rapidly and the existing routers soon wouldn’t have enough memory to handle the load. Obviously we survived it, as routers with more memory and more powerful processors came on the market. We also survived various shortcomings of various routing protocols as they were adapted, updated, or abandoned over time. This isn’t even the first time we’ve been on the verge of running out of IP addresses.

We’ll survive this particular threat too, whether it’s by selling IP addresses, using some form of coercion to make organizations give back addresses without compensation, or by getting the really big service providers to convert to IPv6 on their backbones and give up the IPv4 addresses they currently use for the backbone. (The problem is already critical in Asia, who came late to the table when IP address space was handed out. I have worked with companies in India that exist behind four layers of NAT (Network Address Translation.)

This doesn’t mean that there is no problem. There is a problem, and the technical community has to solve it, and convince those who pay the bills for tech to pay for the next solution. But the ordinary user doesn’t need to get in a lather. The sky is not falling.

First Post

Welcome to Beregond’s Bar. This is where I plan to ruminate on things about life, mainly online life. I’ve been living in the online world since 1985. At one point in my life I had an offline job in telecommunications, an online job, and various online activities I pursued as a hobby. I didn’t think of it as a job, another job, and a hobby. It was more like an obsession that expressed itself in different ways at different times.

I’ve always been fascinated by what people do online and why, and by the stuff behind the scenes that makes it possible. I’ve been taken to task more than once for thinking about stuff way above my pay grade. I keep doing it though, hence this blog.

I expect to avoid politics on this blog, except as it directly affects the online world. I’m planning on a blog to talk about politics but it doesn’t exist yet. I’ll put up a link once it does.