isn't quite ashamed enough to present

jr conlin's ink stained banana

2010-03-08

::Game Over

Can i say, first off, that this Semi-Utopian vision scares the hell out of me:

For those of you running flashblocker or freshly stocked on caffeine, Brian Schell presented a talk where he talked about the future, where your life becomes a "game" and you're awarded points for successfully accomplishing tasks like "brushing your teeth" or "watching commercials".

The openly paranoid will note that in addition to determining how many points you get, there's a lot of highly invasive activity going on here. Kinda reminded me a little of this little chestnut from the past.

Sorry, but honestly, i'm really not that much of a gamer. Having only seldom managed to get my initials on any arcade box, i really don't care how many points i have when i finish something. i only finish it because i enjoyed playing the game. Playing "Reality: The Game" doesn't really thrill me, and frankly, if the planet were to suddenly start, i'd be spending all my time trying to figure out how to hack it and cheat. "Oh, darn, you caught me. Looks like i'll lose 10,000 points and not qualify for that free bag of Cheetos. Horrors."

See, that's the one thing that's missing from good Mr. Schell's talk. Games are supposed to be entertaining. Being able to buy my way into a game, or gargle Listerene for extra points, not really that entertaining. Sure, some folks will definitely go for that sort of thing, but then, those are the same obsessive Type A folks that race you to be first to the red light and then swear at you because by the time you got there, the light just turned green and you've not lost any inertia. (Ah, physics.) After all, i don't believe that chess has points.

2010-02-22

::What Can I Bring?

This Saturday, the Wife and i are having a New Kitchen Party. (Sorry if you weren't invited, but we're already up to around 40+ people in a 1400 sq ft house. Feel free to pester me and i'll invite you to a proper sit down dinner after we move the hordes through.)

Needless to say, everyone is asking "What can i bring?", to which we generally respond "Nothing."

Of course, everyone ignores that. They want to bring something because if they don't they know that all the other kids will laugh at them… or something. i'm not really sure what the reason is, but quite truthfully, with 40+ folks in the house, having more stuff isn't really a good idea.

Still, folks feel the need to help, and if left to their own devices, they'll probably bring Edible Bouquets or ice sculpted statues of Han Solo or something. What i (as host) need to do is figure out something that makes them feel like they're contributing when in reality, they're on a snipe hunt. Here's a list i'm tempted to have folks fetch:

  1. 4 eggs
  2. 7 #2 pencils (unsharpened)
  3. a bag of medium rubber bands (around 20 or so)
  4. a roll of peppermint mentos
  5. 10 paper clips (medium or large will do)
  6. 5 packets of hot sauce

Basically, it's like a hobo bridal registry for folks that are just very eager to be helpful. The more eager, the more detailed the request. If they ask why you need 17 sticks of mint flavored gum, i'll just wink, smile slyly and say "Well, you'll see at the party."

And if they REALLY press, i'm not terribly sure they'll be that enthused about sampling the gummy mento-chip cookies with hot sauce.

Toby
2010-02-25 - 12:27:15

I really don't want to know what the paper clips are doing in the cookies.

We'll be bringing beer, since it tends to not leave the host stuck with something they didn't want at the end off the process (hmm, neither does the ice sculpture….)

Plus, it can only improve the cookies.


2010-02-21

::Prodi-book

This morning @kentbrew tweeted that he found much to agree with Tim Maly's Unlink your feeds manifesto. Good Mr. Maly notes that with the proliferation of services intent on letting you inform everyone you know what your cat had for breakfast this morning, there's an increasing liklihood you're spamming your friends rather than being helpful. Granted, it's something i'm well aware of.

Being a community geek, i have presence on just about everything out there, Friendfeed, Twitter, Yahoo, Yelp, Facebook, even Google Buzz. Shortly after buzz showed up, i started cross linking everything in hopes of setting up a feedback loop where Friendfeed tweets to Facebook that i've posted a buzz about a Friendfeed update. Sadly, i was not more evil than someone diligent programmer out there since the echo loop failed to materialize. It still doesn't mean that i wasn't well aware of what i was doing, which means that there's the equal chance that any number of folks would duplicate what i did with absolutely no knowledge they were doing it.

Getting back to Kent's tweet, i agreed with it, noting that if it wasn't for a few similar feedback loops i'd built up i'd never post to some services. Then @MikeHart (who is not only intellectually acute and a snazzy dresser but also the guy that signs my paychecks) noted that the best thing would be for various aggregators to provide a way for folks to manage their own collection of who they follow, as well as what bits they want to ignore. It's true, and some services actually provide it, but i can't help think that this is just like email used to be.

Back in the early Jurassic, when you had to fork over good cash for a 33k baud modem, there were several big services that all offered the "Internet". Only problem was that there was an inverse relationship between how "consumer friendly" they were vs. how much "Internet" you were allowed to have. CompuServe was the most open allowing members to freely set up completely opaque email addresses like "192813.448172@compuserve.com", view gopher sites and all sorts of crap that would confuse the hell out of anyone not familiar with a TCP stack. On the opposite side, there was Prodigy, created by Sears, IBM and CBS and was the proto-AOL / Complete Digital Portal where Mom could store recipes, Dad could follow golf scores, and Junior could get help with his math homework. The Internet was kinda there, if you looked the right way and gave the secret knock, but why would you want to since Everything you Want is Here. Stuck somewhere between the extremes was GEnie.

Each of these were built so you could easily send messages to folks on your own service, and maybe another one. SMTP was around for quite some time, so it wasn't a technical limitation. They just wanted to keep you on their site so they could charge advertisers more and boost their numbers. (Sound familiar?) What broke the web free was not only the introduction of HTTP, but the fact that the folks ponying up for these services were geeky nerds that demanded the ability to email others. There was a darn good reason why CompuServe was the leading service even though it was the least "friendly" service, because the folks most likely to use it were geeks.

These companies didn't embrace openness, they acquiesced to market driven forces.

Today, we have great efforts being made in things like ActivityStreams, OpenID, and other like protocols all trying to step up and be the way that you share your cat's breakfast. They're great ideas, and certainly something i long for. In some respects, Google is right. Status updates, tweets, micro-blogs or whatever you want to call them are just another form of messaging, just with a larger, more public aspect to them. Some folks are fans of having all of that lumped together. i prefer having some context and thus have rules set up for how and when i browse that sort of thing. In many respects, i view it as another of my many email addresses, which i distribute to various services so they can self-select if i think they're important or not.

Only we don't really have that.

Although i don't use it, i'll grant that right now Facebook has the best control mechanism for aggregation. You can block posts from individuals or from apps posting on their behalf. It's also the least usable since the only way to consume that stream is to be on Facebook. It's a bit like saying "Well, you can pick what flavors of water go into the firehose." Like Prodigy, there's little incentive for facebook to allow you to consume your friends activities outside of facebook, and tons of reasons to not provide it.

Only, this time, the market forces aren't being driven by geeks. Of the tens of millions of heavy Facebook users, a microscopic fraction of which are geeks even aware of things like ActivityStreams or OpenID. If they were to go somewhere else, they'd hardly be noticed. i don't doubt for a second that if ActivityStreams ever really caught on, facebook would have a means for you to include them into your Facebook stream. Just don't expect them to reciprocate.

And we end this journey kind of where we started. All those services i noted before feed into my facebook news stream. i do this because i know there are some folks that only live in that world. Sadly, if a heated discussion were to break out around anything i have cross-posted into facebook, i'll probably never know about it. Facebook is a black hole as far as i'm concerned. Stuff goes in, but never comes out. (While i can link to things, you can't always see them for any number of reasons, unless i completely bypass facebook and do things like this: )

Sorry Mr. Maly, while i agree with your manifesto and dream of a day where i can run my own client with my own rules about determining what news i want to see, i'm going to have to keep spamming at least one group of "friends".

2010-02-17

::Show Tunes!

No, not those kind, well, unless you're thinking like i am.

Recently, i've taken it upon myself to load up on various show themes. i figure that for various reasons, it might be useful to have a few on call for various reasons. Since i'm also a fan of more obscure references, basically, shows that didn't create original music as their theme, but instead use music that predates the show. (So, no Small Wonder theme song.)

So far, i've got the following:

i'm debating including Big House Blues (Ren & Stimpy) and Hawaii 50 since both were created for the shows, but they're also damn catchy anyway. Still, there's undoubtedly a lot more that i'm missing. There's also some show tunes that i'm not sure if i should include, things like Left Bank Two which would be immediately familiar to anyone who's watched Vision On as a kid.

Still, there's probably a bunch more i'm missing. Care to suggest some?

and just because i know Steve will add them (and that i remembered these after i posted):

WHICH i HAD FORGOTTEN ABOUT FOR A GOOD REASON, THANKYOUVERYMUCH!

2010-02-16

::Manually Rebuilding an iTouch

argh.

See, this is why i don't have an iPhone.

A few days ago, the media database on my iPhone crapped out. Suddenly, the 6GB of music and podcasts were no longer accessible. This, of course, was right before i was planning on a long trip, which made me say lots of very naughty things. So i did a "Restore from Backup" (which i had thankfully made a few days ago). Nope, no soap there. Still no media. So did a hard restore of the beastie and then recovered again.

The apps were there, but the media database wasn't. Yay!

So i did the following:

  • mounted apple under linux with iFuse
  • removed /com.apple.itdbprep.postprocess.lock & /com.apple.itunes.lock_sync
  • copied /iTunes_Control/Music/* to backup location (got DRM'd stuff? your life sucks.)
  • deleted the contents of /iTunes_Control/Music/*
  • find $backupDir -type f -exec grep -i podcast {} \; -delete
  • reconnected under windows
  • relaunched iTunes.
  • copied my remotely mounted backup dir to local windows box
  • dragged contents of backup into ipod's "Music" directory in iTunes.
  • interrupted "gapless playback" bs.

Hey look! Media's back!

Lessons learned:

  1. "Backup" doesn't do what you think it does.
  2. DRM sucks in ways you can't imagine, never buy music you can't play with vlc.
  3. iPods may be running an advanced OS, but apparently rebuilding an index from stored files is beyond it's capacity.
  4. Music playback is the NUMBER ONE THING that this device should do, yet it's fragile. Why should i spend several hundred dollars for a phone built on the same technology?
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