Work(ing Title)

Once again the lightning rod around which my inspiration chooses to strike is the same. This time Marco Arment’s thoughts on digital media are dovetailing nicely with my own:

I hate watching video on my computer, and don’t have cable TV. Instead, I have an Apple TV and an Xbox 360 with Netflix’s on-demand streaming app.

I wanted to watch this. iTunes doesn’t have it for rental and it’s not available for Netflix streaming, so I put it in my Netflix DVD queue.

But since I hate DVD menus and the Xbox 360 isn’t a great DVD player (too much fan and disc noise, no deinterlacing even over HDMI outputs, and awful remote-control angle), I usually rip movies with Handbrake, deinterlacing if necessary, and play them with the Apple TV.

Except this time, the plastic disc holding the 8.5 GB of MPEG-2 was scratched too much and couldn’t be reliably read by either my DVD-ROM drive or the Xbox 360 for playback. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and it can’t really be avoided, although Netflix is very good at minimizing it. I went to their site and told them it was scratched, and now I need to wait two days for a different plastic disc with the same MPEG-2 data that hopefully isn’t scratched so my computer can read it and bypass the trivial encryption and remove the prohibited user operations and strip the menus and convert it to the format that works best on my TV because it’s not the same format as older TVs and I don’t want to buy another box with another remote and another video signal to collect even more dust in my “entertainment center” that needs to exist to hold all of these boxes that all do the same things but with different publisher deals and content availability and in slightly different and incompatible ways.

This all seems so archaic.

One reason HD-DVD died and Blu-Ray has had a slow pickup is that the geeks like me, who buy the cutting-edge technology before it’s mainstream, are completely disinterested in dealing with discs. Every time I put a disc into a drive, I feel like I’m waiting for a VHS tape to rewind before I eject it and drive it back to Blockbuster: that feeling that this seems completely unnecessary with modern technology and it’s probably not long for this world.

Our grandchildren (and, for the younger generation, even our children) will probably never hear a dial tone or busy signal, use a tape rewinder because we told them the expensive VCR would wear out its motors if it rewound too many tapes itself, bring the empty case up to the Blockbuster clerk to get the real movie, or be disappointed to open their new CD’s case and find that the spokes have cracked and are rattling around inside. Do you think they’ll be shuffling movies around on plastic discs transported by mail or automobile and exchanging them for different ones because they’re too scratched to play?

The frustration outlined here by Marco is something I’ve shared for a while, and it has continued to drive me to digitize and collect the media I want to enjoy. The desire for an appealing and modern user experience is so strong, I’ve begun to investigate the feasability of digitizing the books I own, so that I can study my photography books on a massive desktop display, and read my narratives on a Kindle or a phone.

One of the fundamental problems at this point in the digital revolution we are all living through is how to balance personal preference with legal standing: If I scan my copy of The Rum Diary, should I feel obligated to retain the tangible original? Present copyright law is clear on this, but the rational conclusion is that keeping boxes of unused physical material is simply unreasonable.

Further, I believe that securing and maintaining digital versions of the media I patronize is far more easily accomplished than with their physical counterparts. One of my closest friends Megan now has a distorted, water-damaged copy of Rubber Soul; the unfortunate result of a fire in her apartment last year. While the nostalgic part of me may believe that vinyl represents a subjectively ’superior’ sound, another good friend and unapologetic audiofile has concluded that the majority of his music collection will soon live on a Mac mini in a lossless digital format. Nirav’s digital library will be able to be seamlessly duplicated (for security purposes) and effortlessly enjoyed across locales and scenarios (courtesy of the digital device ecosystem).

The invention of sound compression techniques has forced music into the vanguard position in this revolution, which has shown us the multitude of possibilities, including portable players and network streaming. The best example of this in my experience has been the Zune experiement coming out of Microsoft. It has certainly progressed along similar lines as most of the innovations coming out of Redmond, in that the appeal become clear in the first two versions. Zune started as a pedestrian piece of desktop software and a laughable portable gadget. This month though, The Zune HD begins to offer up the ability to tap into a essentially infinite library of audio content, all of which is available for unlimited consumption for a cost equivalent to five cappuchinos a month. And when the option to permenantly retain a CD’s worth of that music each month, the value proposition becomes truely astounding: Buy one album per month, and you’re entitled to listen to everything in the store as much as you like (to really put that in perspective, imagine if Netflix charged you a fixed rate for unlimited monthly video streaming, and they let you choose one movie to keep forever).

The elephant in the room here is DRM, which is already showing signs of fading, with iTunes Plus on the bright side and Amazon’s absurd 1984-on-Kindle debacle on the dark side. For me what this shows is the market motivations against being unreasonably restrained and for being given reasonable responsibility (iTunes continued to sell more music legally after removing DRM from their equation). I hope with time, other content providers will hear what the market is saying to them. Ryan Block’s A day in a DRM-free world is a wonderful vision for this version of the future.

In the end, those of us who are actors in this revolution of media consumption must behave accordingly, which is to say we must revolt in order to push things forward. For me this means violating laws in order to help illustrate future normative behavior and influence the revisions of those laws. So I will continue to form a digital basin of content, whether inside or outside the realm of copyright allowances and End User License Agreements. I will be able to patronize in ways that are most comfortable, as well as evangelize the potential of new technologies to those who remain on the fence about whether to join the revolution.

at China Camp.

This morning Marco Arment wrote:

Dear internet “social media experts”:

I really, really don’t care which office or restaurant you’re sitting in and checking into Foursquare from.

It’s important to balance the abundance of cheap, widespread internet publishing with appropriate considerations for your intended audience. If you’re trying to be interesting to anyone beyond… yourself, you have to consider whether anyone else in the world will benefit from spending a tiny slice of their time learning where you’re having coffee or holding a meeting.

This isn’t to say that such posts can’t contain other value. On the contrary, many of my favorite internet writers (like meaghano) write amusing, insightful, or touching stories around the trivial task of getting coffee. But when you tell Foursquare or Brightkite to automatically publish your location to Tumblr or Twitter, that’s not adding any value.

If your location isn’t interesting enough for you to manually write a post about it for some reason, why should your audience spend their time reading about it?

My experience using foursquare and Loquacious have developed a somewhat contrary opinion to Marco here. From the out I believe it’s important to state that I think Marco is a brilliant developer, and anyone who uses Tumblr or Instapaper should be glad he’s doing what he does. I’m not writing to pick a fight or insinuate that I believe he’s anything less than an inspired individual. That said, I think he’s going down the wrong road. Also, I don’t let foursquare publish to my Twitter stream, but I do allow Spymaster, and I’ve heard similar criticism of it.

First, foursquare evolves the criticism I’ve heard about Twitter time and time again, and the main point I believe Marco’s making: “Why do I care about your ____?” While those friends of mine who live in Washington may find value in some of my tweets, they almost certainly don’t give a shit when foursquare notifies them (on my behalf) that I’ve stopped into Mojo Bicycle Cafe. However, that information can be of value to say, the friends I have who find themselves nearby Mojo when they read that tweet; They have some amount of encouragement to swing by and join me for a pint. The point here is that each tweet I publish has a different potential value for each person who reads it.

Second, while I was in New York last month my good friend Niall Kennedy loaned me his HTC Magic in order to get a feel for Android 2.0 (I’m a big fan). One of the applications I used while carrying the phone was the Loquacious Twitter client. The killer feature here is the app’s ability to filter out things from my Twitter stream. Specifically, Loquacious gives me the ability to select particular users or services that I don’t want to see on my phone. Anyone who considers themselves a serious Twitter user probably has feelings similar to mine and Marco’s, where there may be users (or services) which publish what they believe is low-value information. By having the option of pruning my Twitter reading, I was able increase the value of my stream as a whole. A perfect example here is Urban Journal; when I’m sitting at my desk, the tweets about new posts to this blog are of high value to me, whereas when I was walking around Brooklyn, those same tweets were of significantly lesser value.

What my experience with Twitter and Loquacious have shown me is that intelligent software design can be a more effective means of resolving the sorts of criticisms of technology that Marco makes, rather than trying to directly influence how people choose to use those same technologies. I believe there’s a ‘lazyweb’ request here for developers start to consider the different conditions under which the value of communications change. If a future version of Loquacious (or Tweetie, or Peep, or TweetGenius) included support for location-based filtering of my Twitter stream, they’ll have my money shortly thereafter.

has been brewing in my world for some time now, and with this most recent batch of photos staring back at me, I believe it’s time to describe the problem ‘out loud’ in hopes that some clarity will develop.

Speaking in extremely rough estimates, each time I pick up my camera I come back with around 100 RAW images (sometimes I don’t feel so inspired and I end up with 20-50, while other times I’m in the zone and I end up with 200 or more). Each of these events creates a multi-stage processing commitment of 1-2 hours: an initial review to delete failed images, anywhere between one and three rounds of curating in order to ‘tell the story’ of that event effectively, the Photoshop work to make them all beautiful, renaming and tagging of the finished collection, and finally determining which photos are suitable for publication (not everything I shoot gets out to Flickr).

Given how inordinately easy it is to capture an event, when compared with the time and attention necessary to produce a finished product that satisfies me, I find myself with a perpetual backlog of photos. Paraphrased below are the great many conversations I have which speak to this backlog:

Them: Hey, when the fuck am I going to see the photos you shot?!

Us: It’s slightly more complicated than that dickweed.

Then, once I finally get through my process:

Them: Wow thank you! You made me look like a god-damned supermodel.

Us: You’re welcome cunt.

I’m thrilled and flattered to get the sort of response I do from my friends and family, whether it comes in the form of emails, comments in my photostream, or noticing my work in new social profile portraits; I just wish there was a way to minimize the frequency of those first conversations. However, a significant motivation for me to photograph anything in the first place is the selfish desire to document my own life. There are few things I find as enjoyable than looking back at old photos–they’re a fantastic memory accelerator.

One of the difficult philosophical issues here is how do I view photos as a medium? They occupy space both in art and journalism. I’ve always recommended to the less-nerdy of my friends that big cameras are worth lugging around if your goal is to create beautiful imagery, while tiny (read: phone) cameras are perfect for recording moments in time. However the fact is that these two goals are rarely disconnected; the most exquisite photograph often has a story to tell, and the frozen piece of a story can also be art. Journalism should be prompt, whereas art is (relatively speaking) timeless.

Fundamentally I think the only solution here is to make processing my photos a higher priority when I sit down at my desk, but that’s just a fancy way of saying I should procrastinate less (and we all know how easy that is to resolve).

Postscript - Still feel relatively fucked in how to deal with this, but somewhat more motivated.

As with any new hardware announcement from Apple, I find myself contemplating a change in the hardware sitting on my desk.

The current workhorse is a Mac Pro with a pair of dual-core chips and something like five gigabytes of RAM, two internal HDDs, and a 30″ display. This Fuck Box (as I so lovingly refer to her) supports the edge use cases quite well: ripping DVDs quickly, doing color correction on 15 megabyte RAW photos, and as a companion for doing work on the machines of friends. Aside from those tasks, most of what she does is browsing and media playback.

What I know I do not need is a laptop; my Lenovo netbook has me completely covered on the portable computing front for the time being. Also, I have a Home Server that handles all the large storage requirements (and can grow as my requirements do). So with portability and storage out of the way, I’m left wondering if I can reclaim some bedroom real estate by replacing the big tower with something smaller.

The iMac is an obvious choice, as it has been known for some time to be quite powerful and the faultless Jack of All Trades. The 24″ display could very well be enough to live with, and the simplicity of wiring could simplify my layout somewhat. The last advantage is that iMacs I believe keep their resale value better than most of Apple’s desktops.

The less-obvious choice though, and therefore the one that interests me, is the Mac Mini. It addresses the real estate concern without a doubt, and with Nvidia’s new graphics chip, could keep me in 30 inches and excessive pixels. The new Mini also supports four gigabytes of RAM, and I don’t see any problem with shoehorning a 7200 RPM HDD into that little case. The tertiary advantage to a Mini is also the cost savings; presuming I sell the Mac Pro, buying a Mini with the proceeds would keep a good chunk more money in my pocket than an iMac.

Would such a teeny computer strain (over time) to drive such a large display? Would it just look comical?