the negentropic blog

Talent

2006-05-18T08:26:00.000-04:00

Malcolm Gladwell's writing makes my brain feel good. This article on talent vs. results is a bit old -- heck it focuses on Enron -- but still grandly done. As I get into Phase 2 of my own startup here, it's cool to think about these things as they apply to my army of one. Apparently, I have to avoid coddling the "star" persona in my schziophrenic inner drama, if I hope to have any success.

...

2006-03-16T08:29:00.000-05:00

OK - let's get started.

Three Years Blog

2006-02-27T00:01:00.000-05:00

Today marks my third continuous year as a Blogger. I really wasn't sure if I'd be interested in keeping at it this long, but it looks like I have.

I usually have at least 2 offline sketchbooks/notebooks going, but there's something different about keeping this public, digital one. I like typing without it being email, the friction-less ability to quickly cast an idea onto the web, the personal archive of my ideas in an easily browseable format.

I wish Blogger had categories, so I could have some statistics on what I've written about most -- my brain's perceptual slavery to quantifying with numbers. I wish I wrote longer, more substantial posts more often; I wish I wrote more about the world from my perspective, the story no one else can tell - instead of so many random links and one-liners. But I guess that's part of the fun, that it can be any and all of those things.

I think Kottke gets it right with a different format for things he's just linking to and longer posts. But I also admire to no end a blog like Izzlepfaff, which is always stories, almost always hilarious, and never just lazy links or quotes. Do we define our blogs, or do they help define us?

I'll commemorate the 36-month-a-versary with a two week trip to Ireland, in which there will be complete silence here and, as usual, I plan to come back with very little of interest that I'll actually take the time to say. Three years - why start changing now?

Consistency! Hobgoblins!

Die Cutie, Die

2006-02-26T15:56:00.000-05:00

I've been overdosing on the band Death Cab for Cutie lately, particularly their last album Transatlanticism, and am just now watching their tour film Sleep Well, Drive Carefully. It proves that my faith in their brilliance has not been misplaced.

Lest you doubt this for yourselves, observe: they play the song "Why You'd Want to Live Here*" which is a blastingly accurate depiction of what's wrong with Los Angeles, at a show in L.A. The front-row audience -- I kid you not -- is just standing there numb, not even mouthing the words. There's some sporadic clapping, but not enough to fill the room, and probably just because they rocked out near the end. Then Gibbard says, with great mock sincerity, "I hope you guys didn't take that personally. It's just a love song." Classic.

In the extras is a three-song semi-acoustic set that's great. My favorite sounds of theirs is the quieter stuff with pianos and harmonies, strange background noises; not that the rockers aren't great too, but something about his voice over soothing layered noise that does it for me. It's shot in b&w, but kind of shaky handheld. If it's fan footage that's one thing, but if it was the documentary crew, for god's sake use a tripod.

I was hoping to see "Blacking Out the Friction" and "Passenger Seat", but sadly no. Ah well. More interviews would have been cool, but I'm weird like that -- hell, I even submitted a request to Charile Rose last week to have them on, cuz I'd like to hear anyone with song names like "Prove My Hypothesis" talk about being musicians for an hour.

Still on deck, and this is really great for me, is their latest album Plans. I've heard it just a time or two thus far, but plan to freaking kill it in the studio when I get back from Ireland.

* Bonus: it's even got the word entropic in it's lyrics.

1 Day

2006-02-24T17:01:00.000-05:00

"Farewell, and hail. I'm off to seek the holy grail."

I'll Take Windows As A Mac App

2006-02-15T09:55:00.000-05:00

So the Mac running Windows idea continues to get more interesting with the possibility of emulating it on "native" Intel hardware using some tricks to work around incompatibilities like the BIOS and device drivers. This seems to have far more potential to shift the landscape than just dual-booting for geeks. If it can run with similar stability (ha!) and speed (likely) as we're accustomed to, that'd be the ticket. Some even suggest that it would increase Apple's market share:

"All the borderline cases where people aren't sure about a Macintosh because of their requirements for Windows applications and games will all of sudden be more willing to accept the Mac."
~ ZDNet.com

Coincidentally enough, that's me!

Great Band = Funny Blog

2006-02-14T13:44:00.000-05:00

"Nick has this idea that someone needs to start a new sitcom starring Jennifer Aniston called 'Friend'. "
~ Death Cab For Cutie site

Consistent Hobgoblin

2006-02-11T03:47:00.000-05:00

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day."
~ Emerson: Self-Reliance

Digital Distribution Makes Better Music

2006-02-10T09:13:00.000-05:00

Finally the economics of the music industry start favoring the bands that can put out consistently good music:

"'I have to ask my artists to make better records... I need at least four singles. We lost a lot of fans over the years because we gave people average albums, with one or two singles and the rest of the album was trash.'"
~ Talent manager Michael "Blue" Williams

The beast deserves to starve to death so it can be reborn as something else.

15 Seconds

2006-02-09T16:01:00.000-05:00

Hey, I've been kottke'd! That's how it's done - just gotta be accidentally 8 hours ahead of the New Music Tuesdays email blast.

Uncertainty

2006-02-08T14:44:00.000-05:00

A variation on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies to bureaucratic systems:

Bureaucracies can know:
a) What they are doing
b) Why they're doing it

But not:
c) Both at once

Billions and Billions

2006-02-07T16:37:00.000-05:00

For all my carping and whining, the fkrs at Apple sure know how to market: iTMS Billion Songs Countdown. The cascading column of album covers with the live counter are awesome.

Now, I'm not saying it's gonna happen, but I'd have to revise some of my previous criticisms if I scored the grand prize*: an iMac, 10 iPods and a $10,000 gift card. That's a lot of songs.

* No purchase necessary to win; limited to 25 entries per day

Fonder and Blonder

2006-02-06T10:45:00.001-05:00

Today I'd like to address a sad oversight: the general lack of appreciation for the fine album The Bottle & Fresh Horses by the late, great Refreshments. Granted, 1997 was long ago, but I keep coming back to this album and loving it more each time. If there's a bone in your future corpse that likes the rock and roll music, it'll rattle for this one. Really. It's juvenile and honest and heroic in all the right ways, and almost never fails to make me air-guitar through the solos in each song.

It's also one of those albums where I can't listen to only one song; each one suggests how fun it'd be to hear more and I usually just cue up the whole damn thing.

I think The Refreshments get knocked because Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy, their major label debut, was an overproduced, too-poppy version of it's phenomenal indie precursor Wheelie. Since the original went out of print and is a rare find, Fizzy's relative success helped the general public file them under teenie-bopper rock and then largely ignore Bottle & Horses. The tragedy here is that it, their 2nd major album, went back to their strengths, has great songwriting and enough of their original gritiness to be great.

Surely my love of this band stems in part from my year in their hometown of Tempe, AZ at the height of their powers. Ah... man I loved 1995. Wheelie was the classic local recordstore discovery, back when the WWW was still too new to be really useful for finding music and you actually had to go to a store to seek out new stuff. It was playing over the house speakers at the shop right around the corner from the art building and within about 5 minutes I thought "who the hell is this?!" Sold! Naturally, the punkish young woman behind the counter sneered at me when I asked "who the hell is this?!", since in her world they'd probably jumped the shark 15 minutes earlier.

The band split from their label and each other after the release of Bottle & Horses, but happily one half went on to form Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers, who've retained some of the same good stuff_____.

"Who said absence makes the heart grow fonder?*"

*Apparently it was one Thomas Haynes Bayly. Seems he also wrote gems like "Tell me the tales that to me were so dear/ Long, long ago, long, long ago" and "Oh pilot, �t is a fearful night!
There�s danger on the deep".

Don't Steal My Song Title:

2006-02-03T14:42:00.000-05:00

Randolph Farmer dies in storage bin.

Job

2006-02-02T16:01:00.001-05:00

Early Retirement: "Retirement forces you to stop thinking that it is your job that holds you back. For most people the depressing truth is that they aren't that organized, disciplined, or motivated."

Clarity

2006-02-01T10:04:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about perfect songs lately, and this one is just stuck in my head today - Clarity, by Jimmy Eat World.

It rocks, it rolls, and it's peppered with astoundingly good lyrics:

Say what I know you'll say and say it through your teeth.
~
Now in the deep and down, I don't know how but I know I want out.
~
Pull one excuse from another.
~
And with pride keep every failure in.
And with pride hold on to your thinking.

Pop Songs '89

2006-01-30T10:29:00.000-05:00

I wonder if I'll ever fall out of love with R.E.M.'s Green album? As a high school senior, that pretty well set the foundation for my future sensibilities in music - everything from Nirvana and the Pixies through Whiskeytown and The Postal Service.

Thank god something like it came along to overwrite my thirteen-year-old fascination with Men at Work.

No One But The Fool

2006-01-27T15:36:00.000-05:00

Every institution needs a Jester. If your company, PAC, book club or school has more than about 5 people, give it some serious thought. Here's what a modern-day Jester can do for you:

a. Tell the truth
b. Make fun of power
c. Get people to laugh at themselves
d. Wear ridiculous clothing
e. Dance around, rhyme couplets on the fly, carry a sceptre
f. Minimize groupthink, bureaucractic nonsense and agenda bullshit
g. Question habit, process, dogma and dumb ideas

Man, that'd be a sweet title: Company Fool.

More Mac Funkiness

2006-01-25T10:18:00.000-05:00

Two other items of interest in the It Just Works category (by which I mean, of course, that It Just Doesn't):

1. I plugged my 1st generation iPod into my 3 yr. old iMac over the weekend and tried to load some Protected AAC files bought from the ITMS. (This was brazonly revisiting the vile waters of my last attempt.)

It seems I was successfully authenticated to access the files this time, but now iTunes isn't happy with the freshness of my iPod. A dialog box appeared indicating that the my iPod software was out of date, and prompted me to go to apple.com/ipod (no link provided) to fix it. So I dutifully open Firefox and go to the Apple site. Unsurprisingly, there's nothing about iPod software on that page, so I hunt around for a while in the Support section. To their credit, the iPod Updater claims to support the original version - I think. Since these things get a new, non-sequential name every six months, I have to parse the list to make sure I'm not downloading the wrong thing. (Yay - more work for me.) Somewhere in there, I got confused/bored/tired and walked away from it. I may have started the download, maybe not. So I'll take some of the blame.

But when I came back to the machine, Software Update popped up and reminded me that there were about 2GB of items it wanted me to want. Right at the top of the list? iPod Updater 2006. So I uncheck the 19 other recommended updates and let it do it's thing for a bit. "Software Update ran successfully." Great. So it'll "just work" now, right?

Nope. No installer file on the Desktop or in my Documents. No idea if it actually did anything. Dead end. So I restarted iTunes. Plugged and unplugged the iPod a few times. Did it all again with my toes crossed. Nada. Realizing that I was now mildly pissed and getting completely sidetracked, I gave up again.

I suppose I'll find the compute cycles to sort this out eventually, but here's the problem with making music so complicated: you want to hear it when you want to hear it. I went all day without hearing Weezer, and I blame Steve Jobs personally. Hell, isn't my musical experience more important than playing corporate raider at Disney?

Is it possible that Apple has some motive to making life with - gasp - an older piece of their hardware highly difficult? Is it mere coincidence that the URL provided by iTunes goes to a splashy ad for all the new iPods, instead of the support site for the old? I think not.

Update: So I did the software update for my antique iPod, and can now load Protected AAC files from the iTMS. Good enough. Sorry for all the carping. OK, not really.

2. Later, on a different machine, I watched a .mov video in Firefox and was prompted to download a new version of QuickTime. Feeling lucky, I started the download. Then, lo and behold!, the setup file is called "iTunesSetup.exe". First, hunh? And second, WTF? I thought this was supposed to be a seamless user experience; i.e. minus the logical disconnects of every other software package in the known universe.

(Apparently not).

It ends up that the iTunes 6.0.2 installer is now "Including QuickTime 7", so, effectively, they are now one and the same.

Going back to the Apple download site, I now see that it's labeled "QuickTime 7 with iTunes 6 for Windows 2000/XP" - a slick reversal of terms - and apparently there is no way to get the QT browser plugin without all of iTunes. That's like a little Trojan Monkey riding the back of a big Trojan Horse! Apple must know/fear something about the future of digital video distribution* to go to such extensive, alienating lengths to get the front door of the iTunes Store in our faces.

These are not good human/computer interface guidelines. They are marketing subterfuge and obnoxious crap that dearly makes me wish for an alternative. "Welcome to the digital music revolution," indeed!

* Perhaps that Google is preparing a pre-emptive nuclear salvo?

#

2006-01-25T08:13:00.000-05:00

Design by committee is a really good way to get a platypus; the bigger the committee, the bigger the platypus.

~

2006-01-24T07:43:00.000-05:00

Good artists never retire;
they just die trying to make next month's house payment.

Apparently, Google Thinks The DOJ Is Evil

2006-01-21T11:34:00.000-05:00

"The Justice Department stated that Google had refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for one million random Web addresses from Google's databases as well as records of all searches entered on Google during any one-week period.

The Justice Department said on Friday that America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft had all complied with similar requests."
~ Reuters.com:

You, Cringely

2006-01-20T17:05:00.000-05:00

"Google is going to let the telco and cable companies burn their capital building out IP-TV, knowing that Google will still be the only game in town for the crux of the whole thing: the ability to show every viewer the specific ads that companies will pay the most to show him at that specific moment... Google wants to SERVE EVERY TV COMMERCIAL ON THE PLANET because only they will be able to do it efficiently. Only they will have the database that converts those IP addresses into sales leads, only they will have the servers and disk space close enough to the viewers to feed the ads. Only Google will have the chops to run a constant, real-time auction for the next ad every consumer is about to see, and then serve that ad at the moment the program goes to commercial."
~ I, Cringely - A Commercial Runs Through It

Lost

2006-01-16T12:08:00.000-05:00

I hate lost creative energy; not the ideas so much - hell, I've got enough ideas for a decade - but the energy required to act on them. Even when its the ill-considered, random, coffee-inspired variety, it just kills me to feel the creative impulse drain away unrealized.

And that's the thing: when the impulse arrives and I act on it, its possible to sustain it long enough to see results; to ride the wave*. Thinking of it like this -- a force bigger than myself that, with practice, I can learn to use -- is quite compelling. And, to extend the analogy a bit, every wave you miss is one you never get a second chance at**.

So. There's an assumption here that these bursts of creative drive are valuable (i.e. not just a bad night's sleep or an unfortunate meal), and that they're unique as well. Factoring in all the possible variables to motivation/inspiration, I think this makes sense. Act on it this morning, and you'll get a different result than if you wait for the next one tomorrow. It follows, then, that unrealized creative possibility = sad.

* Yes, you're absolutely right - that is a ridiculously cheesy surfing analogy, and what's worse it's coming from a California kid who never learned to surf. So, news flash, I am lame and may have no idea what I'm talking about.

** There's also a built-in reaction mechanism at work here: the more constraining the circumstances, the more I crave breaking through them. I want to shout my Yawp ~ chop things up, organize, destroy, sort, decorate, form from emptiness. Every format and material seems exciting and bursting with promise at once. Is it just a trick of perception? Who am I fooling? Why can the desire to make things seem as powerful as the survival instinct?

More Music of O-five

2006-01-13T11:37:00.000-05:00

Here's another view of my listening habits in O-five; my top ten tracks of the past 6 months at Last.fm:

1. Coldplay - Speed of Sound
2. Ryan Adams - Sweet Lil Gal (23rd/1st)
3. The Postal Service - Such Great Heights
4. Elliott Smith - Alameda
5. Peter Gabriel - Powerhouse At The Foot Of The Mountain
6. lou shoes + sweaters - Longing to Stare
7. Violent Femmes - Prove My Love
8. David Gray - This Year's Love
9. Peter Gabriel - Passion
10. Death Cab for Cutie - Blacking Out the Friction

~ negentropic's Last.fm