As futurist Paul Saffo says, for a company like Mercedes nowadays, “the value add is the software and the computers. The wheels are primarily there to keep the computers from dragging on the ground.”

I for one welcome our new robot-car overlords. Hell, they have to be better drivers than 90% of this town.

But it’s not like there isn’t a damn good source that suggests Apple’s plans for K-12 textbooks are anything short of ambitious and transforming. I’m guessing Apple’s pitch to the textbook companies is something like this: “Digital transformation of your industry is inevitable. Here’s our plan; we’d like you to come along for the ride. But if you choose not to, we won’t hesitate to leave you behind.”

One potential byproduct of an Apple foray into textbooks? The much needed diminishment of Texas’ influence in the content of curricula across the country.

Additionally, i imagine as we roll out ciruccula for say, a teen dating violence program nationwide, we’d neeed to be on the cutting edge of these tools to remain relevant, especially if we have any hope of engaging a youth audience.

…About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds.

Q:  If a taco and a burrito are traveling near the speed of light and collide, will the result be delicious? 

A: The result would be an explosion large enough to destroy a small village.  high speed collisions do that, whether or not they are made of Mexican food.

Neil deGrasee Tyson AMAs on redditt

But the Texas Job Miracle, the education reform, the balanced budget, that stand-up to Washington attitude? Here, Republican friends, who i respect and admire for your misguided fiscal conservitude, your ironic efforts to shrink government while piling money on the single largest consumer of tax dollars (defense) and your repeated beseeching of the country folk (who in all honesty are probably more liberal than you think) – here I give you…information.

• The Jobs Miracle - Yes we have more job, but the good ones are based around a spike energy prices, with the most common occupation sectors in Texas were office and administrative service, sales, and food service.
• Education – $2 Billion (with a B) cut from education while $6.5billion sat in a rainy day fund.
• Higher Education Reform - When your alma mater, whose board you’ve stacked with you’re hunting buddies, shows your consultants the door, somethign is amiss.
• A Balanced Budgets and Getting DC out of our State’s Business - Also known as covering tax shortfalls using stimulus dollars.

The worst part of the probably-kaput-campaign: Not just the inevitable number of Aggie jokes that will come out of this, but once again Texas is represented by jingoistic, reactionary politician that represent a very small percentage to the Texans I know.

This conversation began as a debate one whether Pinero had been beat boxing/humming (or whatever the hell it is that he does) to the Airwolf Theme, or the some mangled mashup of Magnum and Sanford and Son. (It was Airwolf, spot on).

This entire scene can be supplementally overlaid on our tiny call center, where in 36 hours we’ll be launching a 24-hour service line for young adults in abusive dating relationships. This timeline has been somewhat accelerated, so we are of course scrambling. The focus of our efforts is on mine and Brian’s pet project of adding a SMS/text component to the hotline, a channel we hope will not only be more comfortable for clients in crisis, but also cross some digital divide issues, giving lower-soci0-economic demographics, who may not have access to a computer (but may have pay-as-you-go phones with texting) a way to connect. It would allow them to ask basic questions about the health of their relationships without the scary crisis levels of calling the hotline (thus also saving us valuable resources by allowing us to triage incoming calls). It would be the first-of-its kind human services texting helpline in the country and would be announced on national television the next day.

And as of the Airwolf conversation, it did not work. The timeline had left us flat-footed. Our IT support was on vacation, and Brian and I were left staring at stalled status bars for the install of our new miracle chat, as it fought for space on our inadequate internet connection. This wouldn’t be a crisis in itself, except the helplines computers are old (like first-term-W old), and the chat client was disappearing from the system every time the machine was shut down (which needs to happen, else they start melting). This forced the advocates to reinstall every single time, doing god knows what to the systems, and slowing down the internet to a damn near inoperable degree.

“So what if we just leave them on and logged in till we can figure this out?” Brian suggests.

“I really think that might melt them. Or at the very least cause some serious issues…”

“What if we buy a fan, crank the AC and if they crap out, maybe we get a new computer or two?”

I shrug. “Tell your folks to bring blankets and jackets”

As much as this sounds like Doc Brown holding the cables to together while the Delorian blasts down main street as lightning simultaneously strikes the clock tower and sends Marty back to 1985, it was the best solution we had. On to the next crisis.

As a side note, the fact that Brian and I are heading up this project is two steps shy of mildly psychotic. Neither of us have degrees in IT-related fields, and in college Franzia on the couch before class in the morning, happened more than once. Yet here we were heading up project that actually meant a damn and could make a difference in peoples lives.

I’ve made a point to never write about work on this site (which explains the decrease in posting of late, as so much of my life is about work), but we’re making an exception here. One this was important and had the potential to change the direction of how these types of services are offered. Two: not everything went exactly to plan (in fact nothing went to plan) but we pulled it off – Brian, and my absurdly small communications team hit the mark and in doing so crossed some invisible threshold into being more than just a job, but something we could be proud of.

At that moment back on my side of the building, the official panic level on the whiteboard was climbing from “take cover” to a midpoint between “…Imperial troops have entered the base…” and “Fast Zombies”

In addition to taking on a new service provision we war also launching a new website with our partner project in California. As with these things, I’d assumed the website would be the impossible task and the chat the easy one. It turned out to be quite the opposite in fact, with the website kicking along quite smoothly and the cant being an epic clusterfuck.  Still, any website is an effort similar to counting grains of sand on a beach – reading back through content, checking links, tweaking styles, uploading file after file after file…how many times our stylesheets have made the virtual trip from our desktops to the data center in Kansas in the past 48 hours – the distance numbers would get us to the moon at least.

The really stunning thing is, in hindsight it all works out somehow. It’s not perfect, but we did something new, something a bit epic on a ridiculous time frame that no one thought possible. Our announcement had a few hitches, but at the end of the day we have something unique. Something we can be proud of.