Which Reality Is, Technically, Real?

Not long ago, in the lobby of a local TV station, I checked out the two TV sets tuned in to that station.  One set was big and boxy showing the station in traditional broadcast mode, the other a slender  HDTV proudly showing the station signal in high definition.   During a commercial, I concentrated on studying picture quality and saw that the colors on a bottle of detergent looked markedly different.  Which  were the real colors?

Websites give us more than just two realities.  At NetOutcomes, we routinely program Websites to work in at least four realities: two versions of Internet Explorer and two versions of Firefox.  If our clients can afford to, or can’t afford not to, we add a fifth reality, Safari, Apple’s browser.

As professionals, we know about these multiple realities (actually, there are still more), but even so, occasionally, we argue amongst ourselves.  A programmer announces, “I’ve got that site working in Internet Explorer now,”  and someone promptly answers, “No you don’t.”  Typically, that turns out to be because the person who says, “It still looks bad to me,” hasn’t refreshed the page – he or she is looking at the old reality.

At times, even our nicest clients call up to contradict us, impatiently saying, “You said you updated that page on our site, but it’s still the old page.”  It may turn out that, in the case of clients with AOL or with some large companies, our clients still can’t see changes we make immediately.  Some people are always viewing a saved version of a site on a proxy server, and so they can’t see changes until the proxy server updates itself.

In these situations,  we tell people to try an independent source of reality, Megaproxy. Megaproxy.com updates its domain name registration information constantly and serves up only the freshest live sites.

These multiple, conflicting realities were on my mind lately as I pondered another oddity, one about my technology column.  Lately I’ve had an increase in the number of  people who have said to me something like, “I really enjoy reading [or getting] your column.”

These compliments are odd because I quit writing the column a few months ago.   People haven’t been getting the column, but the compliments continue.

A century ago, this happened to me in Ames, Iowa, where I wrote a column for the Ames Tribune for a time.  More than  a year after my last column appeared, a woman said to me,  “Oh, you write that column for the newspaper.  I liked the one about the Siamese cat looking out the window at the sheep in the field.”

This century, for about a year and a half, people have read my column in one of two formats – either in Tucson Business Edge, or via an email NetOutcomes sends out.  As it happens, a separate venture of mine, MyTucsonEvents.com, an online event calendar, competes directly with the Tucson Citizen, owners of Tucson Business Edge, so I resigned as a columnist for Tucson Business Edge.

So which TV set or Website is the real one?  And, can people really enjoy getting a column they aren’t getting?  Which reality is real?   I think they all arel.  Every tv, ever browser, every pc and every monitor presents a reality to the person using them, and each is real to that person.

As of today, the new reality about my column is that I’m writing it again, and you’re really reading the latest one right now.  The reality is also that now you’ll have to get it by email, or by visiting the NetOutcomes.com Website, where you’ll find it waiting for you, along with 53 past editions.  All real.  I’m happy enough with this particular reality, and hope you are, too.