I’m in on the Apple Watch. All in.

Well, in for a $400 Nerd Edition Space Gray Sport with the black band. That’s pretty all-in though.

I wanted to hold off for a year, convinced my I needed to upgrade my iPad first, and that would cost the same. Then, on a whim, I decided to see if I could improve my iPad’s performance with a nuke and repave. It worked. My iPad 3 isn’t a speed demon, by any stretch, but it’s far more usable than it was before. Suddenly, I have a $500 surplus, and I know exactly what I want to waste it on.

So, why an Apple Watch? It comes down to three things:

Fitness Tracking

I wear a Jawbone UP Move and like it a lot. What I don’t like is the lack of integration with the iOS ecosystem in many ways. It’s HealthKit sync is limited to step counts and sleep tracking—the latter of which is flaky. It’s clear that if I want to use iOS and get the best fitness tracking experience, It’s going to have to be either an Apple Watch or nothing. (Or just keeping my phone on my person, which is a pain.)

I’m also planning to get back into running for fitness. The ability to use the Watch as a tracker for running alone appeals to me. It’ll be a while before I can use it on its own with, say, a Couch to 5K app, though, so it’s a good thing I still have my iPhone arm band, which will be a good stopgap until real native apps are available.

The only issue I can see with an Apple Watch over my Jawbone is that I can’t do sleep tracking with it. I can use my iPhone to track sleep, but I’ve found having an alarm right next to my head in the mornings is ineffective. I don’t hit snooze—I turn it off and go right back to sleep. With Apple Watch, I can just plop it on its charger and have that wake me up instead, and be free to do sleep tracking on the phone.

Contextual Computing

Smartwatches are the best expression of context-aware computing we have at the moment. I’ve seen a few Apple Watch owners on Twitter showing off the customized faces they use at various times of their life, and I love the idea. At the office, I can have a face that shows my work calendar, my activity goals, and current weather. At home, I can switch to one that just shows the current time with nothing else to distract me. If I’m out for a walk, I can switch to something that’s optimized for info I’ll need while out of the house.

And then there’s glances: all the info I’d want to see, and quick little actions that I can get to and deal with in seconds, with (hopefully) less distraction and Social Media K-Holes than before. Running errands? Check the OmniFocus glance. Buying groceries? There’s my list, right when I glance at my wrist (I presume). [1] Need to see if the trains are screwed up? Glance.

If there’s one thing I loved about my Pebble, it’s just the power of looking down at my wrist and seeing little bits of contextually relevant information. To have that again, only in a fully-integrated manner, would be an incredible boon. Which leads to number three…

I Miss My Pebble

Not going to lie. I really miss having my Pebble on my wrist. Not enough to go back to it, mind, but I miss the ability to just shove my phone in a pocket and not have to dig it out for stuff like switching music or even just to see what notification I just got. I’ve got my notifications pared down pretty severely, but that only means that when my phone buzzes, it’s probably something important. If I can deal with some of them from my wrist, instead—I’m thinking Due timers especially—that’s one less excuse to pull out my phone and fiddle with it.

Apple Watch looks to excel at all the things where the Pebble failed for me. It’ll let me interact with notifications from my wrist, be a fully-integrated fitness tracker, and let me get relevant, glanceable information without having to pull my phone out of my pocket. I don’t want to have to switch modes just to switch my music, see how far I’ve walked, or just find out what someone messaged me.

I don’t need a smartwatch, let alone a $400 Apple Watch. I just want one. I have a use case for it, and it looks like it will fit my life and my needs well. I’m already comfortable wearing watches—even before I got a Pebble, I would switch between an analog Swiss Army watch and a Casio F–91W. A watch has a natural place in how I live my life, and I want to expand on that. It looks like Apple Watch is the best solution for that right now, so it seems right to dive in.

My neck is killing me. Too much time staring down at the glowing rectangle in my head, or the glowing rectangles on my desk at the office. It makes it hard to get any work done in my off-hours, like writing. “Tech Neck” is a legitimate issue, though be careful when searching for it, as the term is also conflated with neck skin wrinkles caused from looking down into phones.

On top of the neck pain, my optometrist recently prescribed me special short-focus, blue-light blocking lenses for when I’m using a computer screen—in other words, all of the time. The lenses block the high-frequency blue light that causes eye strain, and the focal length helps prevent that issue as well. They have helped, and I think they’re even helping me sleep better, that is when I remember to use them at home.

I do my best to make sure my ergonomic situation isn’t too dire. Though I’m still a seated desk hold out, everything is placed in a fairly ergonomically sound position, and my chair is at the right height. That’s, of course, at home. The less said about my work setup, the better. Still, it could always be worse. I think about Phoenix Perry, a game designer and activist, who spoke of a four-year struggle with severe carpal tunnel syndrome at the recent Facets conference. The pull-quote I took away from her discussion was this:

The user should never be forced to conform their body to an interface.

So many of the tools we use on a daily basis are designed with functionality as the primary focus, not ergonomics. The exception to this is, of course, Apple—who designs many of their peripherals to look better than they work, as Phoenix related in an anecdote about meeting the designer of the Magic Mouse. [1] These tools should adjust to us, and how we use them—not the other way around. Okay, perhaps we also shouldn’t be walking along city streets, head down into the screen in our hands, but it’s a problem that extends far beyond handheld devices.

I suppose one of the advantages to the Thinner and Lighter Movement is that it makes arranging and rearranging the devices and accessories we use for maximum comfort easier. As for phones, will an Apple Watch or Moto 360 help reduce Tech Neck from constant looking down and checking a phone during the day? One can hope, though one can also hope that they won’t need a $350 accessory to protect their physical health from the $600 device in their pocket.

Tech companies need to start looking into harm mitigation. A good place to start might be the blue light issue. If they can put a coating on my glasses to keep the bad blue light from getting into my eyes, why can’t they coat the screens with it too? Okay, it’s pricey, but Apple’s margins are big enough to make it work without causing them to raise the price of a MacBook or an iPad. I’m sure Tim Cook can spin it on stage: “A lot of people love using their iPads in bed. This new screen coating helps prevent blue light keeping iPad users from a good night’s sleep.” Hopefully that’ll keep iPad numbers on an even keep through Q4.

Until then, it’s blue-blocking computer glasses, regular breaks, the occasional Tylenol, and grumbling about why we let our tools hurt us. Something’s gotta give before my neck does.

“Businesses today are obsessed with being social, but what they typically mean by this is that they are able to permeate peer-to-peer social networks as effectively as possible. Brands hope to play a role in cementing friendships, as a guarantee that they will not be abandoned for more narrowly calculated reasons.”

— How friendship became a tool of the powerful | William Davies | Media | The Guardian

And now you know why brands say “bae.”

There’s a lot of gold in this piece, including the idea of altruism being co-opted to simply reinforce market capitalism. It’s not enough to just sell our eyes and our data to advertisers. The idea of the “friend” itself is being neoliberalized into another market-based unit with its own economic value that’s far more important than the touchy-feely stuff it used to imply.

For the past few days, I’ve been trying to use a music streaming service—specifically Beats Music—as my primary way of listening to music. I have a number of thoughts that I’m still working through, but there is a design pattern I’ve noticed, common to all the major streaming services, that deserves some scrutiny. On Beats music, it looks like this:

Other services use the Siskel and Ebert “Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down” approach, but the idea is the same. It asks: “Do you like this song, or do you dislike it?” Your selection is tied to whatever algorithmic method the service uses to determine what else it should play for you, though it’s not terribly explicit how it works. I think it’s safe to assume that a Heart or Thumbs Up means “Give me more of this,” and the X’d Out Heart or Thumbs Down is “Give me less of this.” Opting not to choose, I imagine, is interpreted as apathy.

The problem is that I don’t relate to a music on the binary level (or trinary, if you want to count the “meh” option of not tapping either) that these services use. My feelings about music run along a fairly wide scale that, at the extremes, could be described as “I want to hear this song over and over again until I drive everyone around me insane” to “If I hear this song again, I will punch someone.” This is probably too wide, and personal, of a gamut of values to expect a streaming music to implement, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be more nuance involved.

It’s possible there already is. If the folks handling these algorithms are as smart as they think they are, they’ll probably assume that a Thumbs Down, followed by skipping to the next song would weigh heavier against a track than a simple Thumbs Down, or that a Heart followed by a skip would indicate “I like this song, but I don’t want to hear it now… maybe play this artist less often.” These algorithms are so opaque, however, that there’s no way of knowing for sure. That’s what really throws me. How many times do I need to tap the X’d Out Heart and then skip the song in Beats for it to know that I really do not want to ever have to hear INXS again, ever? [1] It would be better if I could be just a little more explicit in how I feel about a song or an artist, so that I don’t need to rely 100% on the algorithm’s learning process.

After all, if algorithms are going to play such a massive role in what media we’re exposed to, it benefits us to have some insight into how they decide, even if it’s to correct the inevitable mistakes it’ll make during the learning process—and, occasionally, after. I want to see what my streaming service thinks about me, something like Google’s Demographics page meets Last.fm. I’d like to see things broken down by genre, by artists, possibly even by song, if I’ve made any specific decisions on any. That’s one of the biggest issues I have with streaming music—i’m wary of giving up control of the music I listen to purely to some black box of an algorithm. Probably because so many of them are both opaque and inaccurate all at once.

In Chu’s view, nerds created much of what we love about Internet culture but also much of what we hate about it. Intended as a refuge from real-world hierarchies and prejudices, the Internet has often wound up simply reproducing, even exaggerating, the power dynamics of the “real world,” complete with bullying. Chu feels that if nerds were more willing to set some community standards… and behave with less indifference to the worst of their peers, they could make the world a lot more pleasant and protect the best of nerdiness—the joyful obsessions, the embrace of outsiders, the indifference to convention.

— Reform of the Nerds, Starring Arthur Chu | Pacific-Standard

Powerful. Important. Nerds who are fed up with the abuse, bullying, and harassment online need to step up. Male nerds, especially, need to call their fellow men on the carpet for their terrible behavior. Bravo to Arthur for using his platform for good.