The quandary of technology (and a few other things)

first off, is the man for securing me a ticket to see tom waits at the NO benefit show at radio city. I don’t care if he only plays one song with a bunch of other asshats, seeing him on stage is something i have been waiting years for. it will be worth it. the other bands look like a mix of traditional NO funk/blues (which i will be into) and crap big names to draw people (which i will not be in to).

i need to buy a flask before the show.

unfortunately, due to a meeting i was at, i was unable to secure any tickets of my own. as a result L. will not be coming along, which is kinda a bummer. still, i am uber-psyched about seeing the show.

this meeting i got stuck in really got me thinking about technology. how people are afraid of it. how some people use it effectively, and others use it so ineffectively, it ends up causing more work for people then if they didn’t use it at all. how some age-old axioms for living life apply to tech, and others do not.

mostly, i get to wondering about ROI when i look at big technical problems. is the money spent managing legacy systems spent effectively? is money spent on new toys and gadgets better than a few extra staff who can support an existing system? where do you draw the line between old and obsolete. my line between those two has always been interoperability. however, supporting diverse systems creates a challenge. at the same time, running a unified system makes it very vulnerable to single lines of attack. is that a viable solution not to move forward? if not, how long can you justify “we can’t do this because we are going with a unifies system, and only third party vendors can do that”? at the same time, what do you do when you have a business need handled by a third party that suddenly evaporates?

i miss the pioneer days. i feel like all the risks in tech have been shuffled off to the reservations. the fat buffalo herds of technology profits have been dwindled down to a few roaming clusters here and there. wild bill’s ipod rodeo has turned technology into an apparel item. people are more concerned with brand and appearance than how their gadgets work. the little railroad towns have all moved to india.

geeks have street cred now, if only in their ability to make magic happen.

there are no answers to any of this. i don’t know if tech makes things better or worse. it certainly opens many doors that would otherwise remain closed. at the same time, it creates problems that never existed before.