The latest casualty of the internet revolution is the business card.   The little 2 by 3.5 inch pieces of cardboard are seen as quaint relics of a bygone age.  Once a staple in briefcases and wallets around the world, they are viewed with derision by the young uber techies in society. People who use them are viewed as dinosaurs and out of touch with the latest technology.

U.S. sales of business cards have fallen consistently since the late 1990s with the slide accelerating significantly since the advent of smart phone technology. Some 77 million smartphone users have downloaded the “Bump App”, which allows them to bump their phones together and instantly exchange contact information.

You can read the story online at the LA Times: “Passing out business cards is quickly becoming passé“.

A little while back my boy Matthew turned five.  For his birthday I told him he could have a birthday party or a family day trip to Lego Land in San Diego.

“I want both!”, he replied.

“No”, I said. “You have to pick one or the other.”

“Can Reagan come to Lego Land?”

“No.”

“But I wanted Reagan to come to my birthday party”, he said sadly. I knew he was going to pick Lego Land.

Reagan is the little girl who lives across the street. He really cares about her and Matthew lights up every time she walks in the room.  He’s known her since he was born. They go to the same pre-school. They even have a pinky promise that someday they will get married and move to Hawaii.

When I saw how sad he was at the prospect of not celebrating his birthday with her I got an idea.

“You can go to Lego Land and you can pick a day to ask Reagan to go with you to get some ice cream.”

“Huh?”, he replied.

” I’ll take you and Reagan out to get ice cream.”

His face lit up. “Just me and Reagan?!”

“Yup.”

“Coooooooooooooooool!” He ran out of the kitchen and went off to tell everyone else in the house.

The next day at pre-school,  Matthew entered the classroom and walked straight up to Reagan.

“Reagan”, he said excitedly. “Will you go with me to get some ice cream?”

She looked at Matthew and then up at me with a confused expression.  I explained to her that he couldn’t have a birthday party and told her how sad he was that she wouldn’t be part of it.

She smiled from ear to ear, “REALLY!?”, she asked looking back at Matthew.

Matthew was beaming and his head bobbed up and down yes about a thousand times in a few seconds.

“OH YES!”, she cried out while giving him a big bear hug, “I WILL GO FOR ICE CREAM WITH YOU! I WILL, I WILL, I WILL!”

That night I bumped into Reagan’s dad, Brad, outside his house.  He came over and we talked.

“What’s this I hear about Reagan going out for ice cream? That’s all she’s talked about since I picked her up from pre-school today.”

I explained everything and he just smiled and shook his head. His wife had the same reaction. When the day for the ice cream date finally arrived, I picked up Matthew at 12:30 and took him home. Reagan stays at school till 4. That’s when her dad gets off of work.

When Matthew got home he ran straight upstairs. He came down about 15 minutes later dressed in his Sunday clothes and his hair was wet and slicked down.  He never got dressed that fast in his life! Matthew looked like a handsome little gentleman.

“Whoa! Slow down sport,” I said. “Reagan is still at school for a while.”

He was upset and very frustrated.  The hours passed slowly as he repeatedly went to the window and peered out to see if Reagan’s car had pulled into their driveway. When it finally did he exploded with energy and dogged me until I finally had my shoes and jacket on and was ready to go.

We walked across the street . I let him go to the door. Her mom answered with Reagan at her side. Reagan was wearing a bow in her hair. I talked to her mom for a minute and then we were off.

We were the only ones in the ice cream shop. When I explained to the two female employees behind the counter what was up they both looked at each other and said, “aaaaaaaaawwwwwwwww!”

The two picked out what they wanted, I seated them at a small table, then I picked a corner of the parlor and just watched, along with the ice cream parlor ladies.  Matthew and Reagan ate their ice cream and stared into each other’s faces, talking about who knows what, just like any other couple, about whatever couples talk about over an ice cream. They were in their own world.  I kept trying to imagine these kids at 16. What would they be like? Then I gave up and just watched them as they were. It was too cute.

It lasted only 20 minutes. They ate all that they could. I had the leftovers boxed up to take home and we left.

When we got to Reagan’s front door Matthew said to her, “I had a wonderful time.”

“Thank-you for the ice cream Matthew”, she replied  and hugged him good-bye.

Matthew was quiet for the rest of the evening, in his own universe, probably reliving his date. Shannon, my wife, was eager for the details.

After I told her everything her expression turned to shock.

She  yelled at me, “YOU DIDN’T GET PICTURES?!”

Read the article: ‘Searching For Sugar Man’: The Unbelievable True Story Of Rodriguez

Listen to his music:

It’s almost that time.  My last child is getting too old for naps and that special time I had with him, snuggling up in the afternoon is finally going to be gone.  My favorite part of parenting has always been that feeling of a child curling up on my chest or snuggling next to me and then going to sleep.  I don’t know how else to explain it except that it feels  like a perpetual hug.  At the risk of losing my “Man” card, I wish they could stay little for a lot longer.

My kids are growing so fast. The triplets will be seven in January.

Rose is already wearing some of my wife’s old clothes. She wears Shannon’s t-shirts as jammies and some of her old blouses with a belt or something around the waist. She’s starting to look long and beautiful, a real little lady.

Joseph is no longer the Thomas the Tank Engine loving kid he used to be. Now  he’s all about jet airplanes and robotics. I build electronic circuit projects with him and he actually understands what’s going on.

Michael is our little book worm. He reads very well and takes after his mother as far as smarts go. He will be the brainiac of the three.

All of this is cool. It’s amazing to watch them grow and mature. When I first saw it happening in them I comforted myself with, “Well, I still have Matthew for a while longer.”

Now that’s going away too.

He wants to be like his older siblings so badly that he tries to do everything they do. Sometimes he succeeds but mostly it just ends in frustration.  It’s very cute to watch, we comfort him and it all works out. He throws the most tantrums but I understand where it comes from.  And I see in his eyes the understanding he is acquiring about everything around him and he doesn’t want to be little anymore. At four and a half he’s done with baby toys, tricycles, training wheels and will start t-ball sooner than I can imagine.

Regularly, someone I’m talking to will say, “Hey, pretty soon your  littlest one will be going off to Kindergarten and you’ll have all of them in school full time. Wow, you’ll enjoy that!”

I just wish they’d shut up.

Christmas is coming and  I must admit that I’m starting to feel the Christmas spirit. I know that it isn’t even Thanksgiving yet but I’m a sucker for everything that has to do with the holiday. The mail is full of catalogs, the radio is already playing carols, Christmas tree lots are starting to open and my kids are bombarding me with present suggestions. The dog even came back from the groomer today with a Christmas bow tied around his neck.

We don’t get snow here but I am fortunate in that off in the distance I can see the mountains. They are already dusted with snow and soon they’ll have a lot more.  If I really need a snow fix I can load the family in the van and drive there for a day of sledding .  My wife and I grew up in the Midwest so we know how to act in the snow. We do the right thing and put chains on the tires, dress the kids warm and anything else that’s required so that we don’t have problems. But this being California it’s not always your behavior that gets you messed up, especially when it has to do with snow. There are a lot of steeyuuupid people out here who have absolutely no idea how to deal with snow, or any kind of weather for that matter. But snow is the worst.

I don’t know how many times we’ve gone up into the mountains and have seen a Mercedes, or some other expensive car,  stuck in a drift. The car has no chains, the guy driving is wearing clothes better suited for the beach and his date is in a short, short skirt and wearing stiletto heels.

You just know that earlier they were at the bottom of the mountain, bored, and one of them suddenly said, “Hey, it snowed in the mountains last night! Let’s go take a look!”

Then the two are stuck and he’s trying to get cell service on his phone for a tow and his girlfriend is freezing her over exposed ass off.

Then there are the drivers that you know are native Californians because every time there’s a little ice on the road they totally freak out. And when there’s a lot of ice they are hopeless.

My personal favorite Socal snow newbie is the guy with the big ass pickup truck that drives all the way up to the snow,  then shovels his truck bed full of the white stuff and then drives back down the mountain with it. We had some neighbors who did that so they could have snowball fights. It’s a lot of work but it just proves the magic of the white stuff. No matter how much you might hate it over a long period of time, there is still a magic grace period when it will bring out the kid in everyone. And if it’s Christmas, then that’s just an unbeatable combination.

My friend Dee Murphy posted this on her facebook page for her food blog, The Food Friends. I think you’ll like it.

Today feels like Autumn. Last week felt like the middle of Summer. It was ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit  on Wednesday last week. Today it’s fifty-eight and drizzling.  It won’t last though. They don’t call it “Endless Summer” out here for nothing. California is a place where time stops.

It’s really amazing when you think about it because it’s the most hectic, high strung place I know.  That “laid back California” mystique is a load of crap. Everyone and everything moves at high speed out here.  The only thing that hardly ever changes is the weather. So, you move around at breakneck speed in your daily life, but it’s always sunny and warm.

Then one day you look in the mirror and notice you’ve aged and say to yourself, “When did that happen?”

That’s the bad side of  ”Endless Summer”. When you live somewhere that really has seasons, you gage the passing of time much better.  Don’t get me wrong, California does have four seasons. We have fire season, smog season, earthquake season and rainy season (which is very short).  When people talk about weather out here it’s not uncommon to hear someone say, ” It feels like earthquake weather.” Some think that when it’s wet, then that’s earthquake weather. Others say that when it’s really dry it’s earthquake weather.

I personally think that ants are the best earthquake indicator. Sometimes out of nowhere we have a lot of ants in the house. Not because of spilled food or anything, it just happens. Then, sure enough, there will be an earthquake. It could happen in Japan but there still is an earthquake. So my theory is sound, at least to me.

We’ve heard it before. We’ve seen it in dozens of science fiction movies. Robots, replacing people, doing the job better and making humans irrelevant in the future. In Farhad Manjoo’s recent series of articles for “SLATE“, the future is now.

Robots are taking more and more jobs away from humans, but the paradigm shift isn’t happening in the way that Hollywood and many futurists and so called “experts” said it would.

In the past, robots were thought to replace the dirty work jobs and servitude positions occupied by the lower branches of the human family tree. Look at some examples in Hollywood movies. Wall-E, the little robot in the recent Pixar film of the same name, is a garbage collecting robot. Dozens of other Hollywood films traditionally show robots as servants and mechanical slaves. The higher intelligence humans ran things.

It’s 180 degrees different.

It’s much harder to create a robot to mechanically do those menial jobs, and besides, we don’t need the robots for them. We’ve got billions of humans for the cheapest paying work on the planet.

What computers are really good at is thinking. The thinking jobs are what the robots are going to replace by the millions. The first examples of this trend are taking place in what are called “middle skilled” jobs. These are the jobs that need some training, but not much.

Middle-skilled jobs consisted of secretaries, administrative workers, repairmen and manufacturing workers. The stats show that since the 1980s, across the board and across borders, these jobs have rapidly declined and won’t come back. Most job growth has been at two other extremes, either very highly skilled professions with very high pay or in the service sector requiring almost no skills and pay very little. Middle-skilled jobs traditionally made up a huge section of the middle class and as we’ve seen in recent years, that’s disappearing too.

The majority of economists disagree with this line of thinking and state that, in the past, technological advances always created new opportunities and jobs that grew economies. As an example they always point to the “Industrial Revolution”.  They state that when agriculture declined, industry took up the slack.

The difference today is the fact that the businesses being created are not labor intensive and the tech boom has streamlined business so much they don’t hire as many people. If very physical labor is required there is an unlimited pool to pull from and this also helps to suppress income.

Since robots don’t need to replace the low end and have successfully decimated the middle, the only thing left is the top and they are already making massive inroads in that area as well. In the very near future they will be using high powered algorithms to diagnose diseases and fill prescriptions. They have programs now that can write articles and legal briefs. Online tutorials now teach our children and are getting more sophisticated every minute of every day.

The most recent example I can think of to demonstrate this new reality is “LegalZoom.com”.  This website is decimating the legal profession by offering services at a fraction of the cost lawyers traditionally charged. High powered programs do legal research and business software has streamlined the work traditionally done by entry level lawyers, clerks and legal assistants.

If you are a recent law school graduate, good luck finding a law job.

The PC recently celebrated its 30 year anniversary this year. It’s easy to look back on the last 30 years and see where we came from. It’s not so easy to look ahead at the next 30 years and see where we’re going.

Over the last few weeks I’ve read numerous articles by supposed techno big-wigs and futurists as they waxed poetic on what the world of technology holds for mankind. The one thing that they never print in these articles is a disclaimer stating that the opinions are just that – “opinions,” and that they usually push a philosophy or agenda.

As evidence of just how wrong  ”big thinkers” can be, I’ve collected a list of some of the biggest blunders of techno think.

Enjoy.

Everything that could be invented has already been invented

- Charles Duell, commissioner for the U.S. Patent Office, 1899

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.

- Popular Mechanics, 1949

I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.

- Editor of Prentice Hall business books, 1957

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.

- Ken Olsen, 1977 (founder and CEO of DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation, {Out of Business})

No one would need more than 637kb of memory for a personal computer and 640 ought to be enough.

- Bill Gates , 1981

We will never make a 32-bit operating system.

- Bill Gates, 1989

Spam will be a thing of the past in two years’ time.

- Bill Gates, 2004

Next Christmas the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput.

- Sir Alan Sugar, 2005 (founder of the electronics company, Amstrad)