Play My Cards Right

Do you watch TV? Have cable? No? Yes? Who cares? Well, obviously everyone who doesn’t have it cares, because everyone I know who doesn’t have cable or a tv seems to bring it up constantly. I’m not talking about everyone, and I’m certainly not talking about my fellow teamforcers. There are any number of perfectly valid reasons to not have a tv. However, bragging about it as though the mere fact of your not watching tv is such a tired, useless cliche. But I have real reasons to call you out on it too! As a person who lives in society, who is an American, and who like most of my peers is driven to understanding in some way why we live the way we do, why wouldn’t I watch TV? I know what you’re saying, “TV is a nick name, and nicknames are for friends, and television is no friend of mine!” Be gone with you! How about instead of criticizing something outright why don’t you participate in it first, then get back to me and tell me how you feel. If you are working out some kind of cultural critique, political manifesto, whatever, and you really believe you are looking into the way Americans live and work, you damn well should be checking out whats on TV once in a while. It’s how people are informed! Don’t look at me like I’m crazy when i tell you i heard John Kerry is a French War Criminal Wind Surfer! I heard it on the news! You can’t begin to critique until you understand what you’re critiquing.

I’m so tired of people doing whatever it takes to prove they’re better than most people. We’re all people and we’re all in it together, flaws and all. What good does it do to simply step aside and say your better than the rest. If that’s the case then get the fuck out my brothers and sisters! People aren’t SHEEP and they aren’t CATTLE, they are social beings who do in fact look to each other for guidance and understanding, but they are also INDIVIDUALS! Imagine that!

So lets all get together and do what we can for this place instead of critiquing from afar. Its a lot more fun I tell you. How else are we going to talk about the new season of Veronica Mars?

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IPTV is quickly becoming a popular way of viewing content on the net. I don’t think it’s ready to take off just yet, but yet another of my favorite bloggers has jumped into the fold:

Evolve.tv = Kos interviews Middle East expert Juan Cole

Other IPTV Programs
Systm
Digital Life TV

Another aspect of IPTV is the rise of Vlogging- Video Blogging- which often combines the confessional aspect of blogging with interesting video and cell phone footage. In their terms, “Mundane is the new Subversive.” Here are some video blogs.

It’s funny to return to this kind of one-to-many viewing paradigm but even here the internet provides interactivity through the form of email and user comments as well as the democratization of televised media, and ultimately no censorship as there is no FCC and no advertising calling the shots. This is not necessarily the future of the medium, but it could well become a part of the larger media landscape.

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The chapter on HTML really hit me on just how difficult it could be for a user to create a web page without understanding the underlying structure of them and even the importance of a little server side knowledge. It took me a long time to understand how to do relative paths in web pages- hell it still seems odd to me.
In some ways the web as a collaborative medium is a failure- WYSIWYG html editors work to a degree but without a general understanding of what is being coded most users are going to get confused at some point in the game. In all honestly I have never coded a table by hand in my life, and honestly I don’t know that one should have to, but the basic understanding of how to lay out a page, link it up, and put it on a server has made things a lot easier for me.
It’s interesting to see how we have coped with this relatively high entry point, with such things as wikis and of course blogging tools. Wikis seem almost redundant to me in their design, but ultimately they make real the promise of the web by adding truly collaborative writing in addition to hyperlinking and rapid publishing.
Blogging tools on the other hand are the closest I think we may ever be to giving people a simple means of publishing on the web with a low barrier to entry. Even the big free sites may take some getting used to in teaching people the ins and outs of posting images, links etc, but they do make it a lot easier than finding a host, putting up the files and doing the design work. There are tradeoffs of course, mostly in the realm of design and individual creativity, but at the same time sites like blogger allow someone to publish what could be very important data or their most personal thoughts and feelings to the world for all to see, and they even provide a means of interaction for readers that makes their site a truly interactive medium.
My last rant was all about the disconnect between what users understand about computers and what they really are- the same can be said for publishing on the web, but in this case people are slowly making the tools to allow universal publishing better and better. Anyway, my father has been asking me to help him set up his blog, so let’s see if WYSIWYG is enough for Pops Ferdinand.

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Oh, Symantec, I do so love your FUD.

First you come out and say Open Source Software is somehow responsible for the exploits of recent weeks due to volunteer developers being slow to patch- nevermind that all of the critical (IE actually damaging) exploits of the last few months have been Microsoft based.

Then you come out and say that Mac users are sitting on a ticking time bomb. Sure, the potential for viruses is there, but the truth is Mac OS is inherently more secure than windows. Gotta start selling that product…

Finally today you are running around screaming about botnets.

Sure, there is a lot to protect ourselves against, but I’ve used symantec products and you know what? They don’t work! I’d rather use a free antivirus with Spybot S&D than bullshit Norton AV. The product DOES. NOT. WORK.

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vs.

Think about it.

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How I Met Your Mother:
Mildly interesting premised almost entirely ruined by bad sitcom acting, timing, filming etc. After enjoying Scrubs and Arrested Development for so long, a “multi-camera” sitcom like this seems incredibly crass, staged and just fake overall. With that said, the one guy from Freaks and geeks is in it, Allyson Hannigan is in it and Doogie Howser absolutely steals the show as the womanizing “Barney”. I may watch it again but ultimately the format itself ruins it. I HATE CANNED LAUGHTER!

Kitchen Confidential
Looking back, I’m not even sure this was really funny- it played out like a half hour drama. That may be a good thing though- despite some braodness in the characters, they’ve got a really good jumping off point for drama and comedy with a great mix of types (the rube, the irishman) and setting. We’ll see if they can stay with it but I’d definitely watch it again. Single camera format makes for a much better show.

Arrested Development
Picks up where last season left off, and is great because of it. This show is amazing!

Total mentions of the word “blog”- 2 so far. I’ll update the count as they come. This either confirms my conspiracy theory that their are television production talking points that are supposed to be integrated broadly across shows, or that the two comedies I watched are either trying to be edgy (How I met your mother) or are edgy (AD). It helped that Doogie is the one who said it. The dude invented blogs!

More to come…

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I sometimes feel that I might seem a little irrational in my exuberance for the connected digital world. That may very well be so, but I think I have some pretty good reasons why. So in the grand old tradition of confessional blogging, I’m going to try and explain why my experience has lead me to my perspective.

I grew up in the small city of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Hazleton is a small, dying coal city that is close to no large urban center and very isolated even from neighboring communities. Growing up, I was shy, quiet and very much an outsider. I came to be interested in things- music, art and the like that it took a *lot* of work just to maintain an awareness of in Hazleton. There were very few people who shared my interests, so I always felt like an outsider in my community.

In 1994 I moved to Pittsburgh to attend Pitt. All of my friends had gone to other schools (mostly Penn State Hazleton) but I had decided to head for a larger city. Most people feel Pittsburgh is small beans, but this city to me is everything I wanted in a big city with a lot of the smaller town feelings that I *did* like about Hazleton. When we got to school, the Web was in its infancy. But we had access to email, and almost immediately, I found a way to stay in touch with all of my friends. Phone calls and snail mail were basically out of the question, but we were still able to maintain close contact- something I truly believe was much more difficult only a few years before. To this day, my friends and I stay in touch over a distribution list- and while that list has grown with friends we’ve picked up a long the way, we are still as tight as ever. We see each other only a few times a year now, but the closeness is there.

So there’s that. But here’s the big one: In 1997 I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s B-Cell Lymphoma aka lymphatic cancer. I had to leave school and for the next year I was essentially stuck in my house as my immune system was destroyed and I lost all of my mobility (as well as my hair) due to a year long chemotherapy treatment. At that point, though I could leave the house, it was a huge health risk- and there were times where I nearly died due to infection. I was sick and tired, I could hardly clime my stairs, but what I could do was sit at my computer and talk to my friends. I could find out about the world of music that was going on, even though I might not get to see my favorite bands. Before 1994, finding rare music was extremely hard- you relied on magazines or a college friend to clue you in; but now, finding out about new music was as easy as browsing to a web site, or subscribing to distribution lists devoted to whatever you can imagine. Instant messaging appeared around that time, with the program ICQ, and suddenly I could talk to my friends in real time. I had all of my friends in my Dad’s office, waiting for me, whenever I was well enough to get out of bed.

So when I go out of my way to defend human relations in the digital realm, it is because my life would be vastly different without the internet. I know I would not be as fortunate as I am. Like we said in class yesterday, fundamentally these things aren’t changing our fundamental humanity- the way we communicate and interact and think and feel, but the method in which we engage in those things has changed. In my case, it was for the better.

Oh yeah, I should add that I don’t doubt for a minute that my idealism is in some way inherited from the utopian fantasy of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sad, but true

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I think for this first milestone I am going to gripe about GUI’s and inconsistent interfaces in the current crop of popular operating systems.

Although the desktop was a suitable metaphor for a generation of people who were unprepared to deal with a mouse controlled pointer and even a graphical user interface, I believe that it has outlasted its usefulness. Today’s computer users understand the use and control of a mouse and keyboard to a degree that they no longer need to rely on it, and for those new users who have not experienced it, they could well be better off without experiencing it. Today’s computers are filled with more files and programs than the desktop can handle. Windows has its start menu- though with Windows XP they have made it more complex in an attempt to simplify it- and Mac now has its “Dock” which is adequate until you have more than a few programs to launch from it. Even those concepts are tacked on and have no real world analog to the “desktop.” I guess what I’m saying is that the “Desktop” metaphor in the modern GUI is so abstracted as to be useless.

One thing that I am interested in is the current work in database driven file systems and what it means for managing the huge amount of data that resides on people’s computers. In this, I think Apple is really at the forefront. Apple did something completely amazing with the introduction of iTunes, and though I grant you that it may well have been done before, I have never seen it done as gracefully or in an application as popular as iTunes. What they’ve done is destroy the notion of files entirely. The modern computer has no more use for “files” than a filing cabinet does for playing CDs. Yes there are text documents on computers, but they also house people’s music, photo and video collections. What iTunes (and iPhoto, as well as the new Apple Spotlight search tool to a degree) has done is allow the user an interface to look at their music as songs, albums artists etc- in other words, those things that actually mean something to a music listener. It removes the need to organize the music and it removes the need to dig deeply into your hard drive (through an archaic file structure that itself should be replaced- why is the hard drive “C:”????) You simply rip your album or copy the files into itunes and at that point the files have dissolved and are replaced (metaphorically) with songs in your jukebox, which you are free to organize and play in a way that not only you can equate to your non-digital understanding of music, but can allow you to listen to music in ways previously impossible with non-computer equipment- 20 week, no repeat, randomly generated playlist of music that features the words “dance” in them, anyone? Hmm…perhaps not, but you could if you wanted, and pretty easily at that.

Spotlight is basically a search tool built on top of the Mac operating system that allows the user to look for their data based on what’s in it instead of what it’s called. It indexes every word of every file- excluding those you wish- on your computer and eliminates the need for you to organize your data through “folder” upon “folder” of confusing code names and improperly titled documents. With the spotlight tool you can create “Smart Folders” that automagically have all of the information you want in them, based on a few simple keywords that make up a database query- all with an interface that requires you only know how to use a search engine. Suddenly instead of searching your computer for lost data, you can create a smart folder of all your .docs or all of your .pdfs or anything else. All your Digital Governance papers. No searching. What a world!

This is truly form follows function. These are programs and operating systems designed to let the user do work by organizing their information in an intuitive transparent way.

One other quick note- “Clicking Around” really is a great way to figure out how a program works. Anyone who’s used a computer for a significant amount of time knows that despite some similarities, there are a lot of programs that just don’t follow a common paradigm. I never thought about it but “Clicking Around” is exactly what I do when I start using a new program. Ideally, a computer will teach you how to use it without coercing you- by making its interface reflect its use- but that is of course not always the case.

I wanted to write a little bit about “Fair Use” tonight, but it’s going to have to wait. Peace.

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Here is the long awaited controller for the next-generation Nintendo Console, the “Revolution”. Insane. So insane it might work?

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So I’ll be publishing my first milestone soon, but I wanted to throw up some content anyway. Today in class we discussed the idea of “My Daily Me”- the narrowing of an individual’s perspective through selective media consumption and the reduction of opportunities for chance encounters with other people and media that have opposing viewpoints. I thought I’d point to a piece I wrote a few weeks ago on my blog called “In Defense of Narrowcasting.” It’s a reaction a piece on NPR that was essentially about the “My daily me” idea. Follow the link below if you’d like to check it out:

In Defense of Narrowcasting (contains some “colorful” language)

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