“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes realizes the guard dog didn’t bark because it knew the perpetrator of the crime. The absence of an expected happenstance is a signal.

This is what I was getting at when I was writing about spreadsheet errors being a signal that institutions are more robust than they initially appear. The spreadsheets they depend on have a surprisingly high error rate, but these errors are only rarely transmitted to their public behavior.

This was on my mind again this week because of the outcry over the Transportation Security Administration’s new screening measures that take nearly-naked photos of passengers or, for those who opt out, an invasive pat-down. The TSA claims that this policy strikes a balance between privacy and security, and that “We have to ensure that each person getting on every flight is secure.”

Which is not really news. The TSA justifies everything they do by saying it’s “for security purposes” like a magician says “abracadabra”. Words are uttered but no meaning is produced, the speaker is filling time while they do whatever they like.

When you look at those security purposes, the dog isn’t barking. There are no attacks on “soft targets” where people congregate like malls, churches, sporting events, and airport security lines. If the terrorists existed, why don’t they attack?

Carl Sagan pointed out pointed out that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, but he said it because he was dealing with cranks who tried to shift the burden of proof to scientists to disprove their weird theories about flying saucers instead of proving that they exist. Where’s the burden of proof for these searches?

No one disputes that terrorists do exist, the question is whether they’re adequately addressed by existing law enforcement or if the government has reason to employ low-trained workers to grope 3 year olds. U.S. law does not default to requiring everyone to submit to searches, it requires that law enforcement prove in warrants or articulable facts why each search is needed by the particular circumstances. Blanket searches are permitted to enforce immigration and import law, but searches of the person of every domestic airline passenger are far removed from that need.

In short, the TSA hasn’t made a case for these searches, let alone proved it or gotten judicial approval, and the curious incident of the terrorist in the strip mall is an indication we need to pay attention.

USER AGREEMENT FOR THE ARM ARCHITECTURE REFERENCE MANUAL

THIS AGREEMENT (” AGREEMENT “) IS A LEGAL AGREEMENT BETWEEN YOU (EITHER A SINGLE INDIVIDUAL, OR SINGLE LEGAL ENTITY) AND ARM LIMITED (“ARM”) FOR THE USE OF THE ARM ARCHITECTURE REFERENCE MANUAL. ARM IS ONLY WILLING TO PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE ARM ARCHITECTURE REFERENCE MANUAL TO YOU ON CONDITION THAT YOU ACCEPT ALL OF THE TERMS IN THIS AGREEMENT. BY CLICKING “I AGREE” OR BY DOWNLOADING OR OTHERWISE COPYING THE DELIVERABLES YOU INDICATE THAT YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY ALL THE TERMS OF THIS LICENCE.

The ARM Architecture Reference Manual is protected by copyright and the practice or implementation of the information herein may be protected by one or more patents or pending applications. No part of this ARM Architecture Reference Manual may be reproduced in any form by any means without the express prior written permission of ARM. No license, express or implied, by estoppel or otherwise to any intellectual property rights is granted by this ARM Architecture Reference Manual.

Your access to the information in this ARM Architecture Reference Manual is conditional upon your acceptance that you will not use or permit others to use the information for the purposes of determining whether implementations of the ARM architecture infringe any third party patents.

[emphasis added]

Tech-savvy readers might be reminded of Richard Stallman’s classic Right to Read, but I want to head the other direction.

In a case decided in 1908, a publisher included this notice in the front of a novel:

The price of this book at retail is $1 net. No dealer is licensed to sell it at a lower price, and a sale at a lower price will be treated as an infringement of the copyright.

It was a contract of adhesion to require the reader to give up their right to use it for all purposes (in this case, resale).

The Supreme Court decided that selling an item did not include the right to put these kinds of limiting terms on an item, but the decision was made in the other direction when there is a clickwrap license involved. The act of clicking a button to agree, even when classic offline rights are involved and no negotiation is possible, is binding.

So ARM can decide to never print manuals, only license them online, to help reduce patent attacks. It could easily reach farther, perhaps trying to restrict the licensee’s right to write a negative review, though there isn’t yet law or precedent deciding what terms would and wouldn’t be considered unconscionable.

The argument over what is and isn’t permissible in these contracts isn’t getting much attention, in part because people generally don’t even read these things. A frame shows them a hundred words of all-caps legalize and people skip on to check a box or click a button to move on, people have no idea what they’re agreeing to. I mostly use Free software so I see less than most people, but I can’t keep up with all the terms on the websites I visit, there’s just too many written too obtusely.

Geeks have proposed a variety of schemes for marking up these licenses so that a user could have software alert them or prevent them from agreeing to terms they don’t like, but usage is minimal. Aside from being a complex topic most users are happy to ignore, publishers don’t have any incentive to make it more convenient for their customers to decide they’re getting screwed.

Looking to the future, I think the present practice of a term or two a year being adjudicated after a long and costly court battle will continue for at least a decade, probably two. No one has an incentive to drain this swamp. Even the companies that can afford to dispute terms don’t want the system fixed because they themselves use clickwrap agreements and benefit from it being undefined and expensive to argue.

Does anyone see a solution to this problem of too many contracts going unread and hiding unwanted terms from users?

Any longtime readers will know I’ve been thinking about usernames. A little while ago I realized that, while it doesn’t include my name, ‘pushcx’ is a decent enough handle that can be dereferenced uniquely.

Twitter users, please leave your username in a comment with a tip for getting the most out of Twitter. I’d like to avoid as many newbie mistakes as I can. :)

Shocking video reveals the “$160 billion tsunami” that could wipe out Microsoft — and hand well-positioned investors untold millions…

But as you’re about to find out, that’s nothing compared to the gains we could see going forward. Which is why I thought you might be interested in an eye-opening video that reveals…

• The dirty secret behind Microsoft’s mind-boggling growth — and the 118-year-old technology that’s about to bring the computing giant to its knees.
• Why even Bill Gates admits that “the next sea change is upon us” – and why one of the world’s most widely-followed investors is convinced this massive shift will make in-the-know investors extremely wealthy.
• Everything you need to claim your fair share of the profits – including the full story behind a handful of little-known companies that are poised to rule the post-Microsoft world.

Click here to watch this video now

My friend asked me a simple question: “Is this anything new?”

I skimmed the transcript that comes up when you try to leave the video page.

Crammed with 21 pages of detailed stock research, Gold and Beyond: 7 Surprise Plays to Inflation-Proof Your Portfolio is the latest in a long line of wildly popular and performance-packed research documents.

Meanwhile, a few hundred miles south, on the banks of the Columbia River, a mysterious outfit known only as “Design LLC” quietly constructed two massive, windowless warehouses. This mammoth undertaking was code-named “Project 2,” and the International Herald Tribune described the towering monolithic structures as “looming like an information-age nuclear plant.”

The story of Google building its data center near hydro power is a couple years old, all the nerds looked at the announcement and went “Hey, yeah, when you have a lot of servers that makes a lot sense. Clever.” Since 2005, power – largely for cooling – has been the key constraint on very large data centers run by Google and a few other very large tech companies run. This is definitely not news, and not related to cloud computing services.

They spooked the Microsoft founder into an early retirement. … And that’s precisely why the two words “cloud computing” scare the hell out of Bill Gates. You see, he realizes that thanks to the thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable laid during the late 1990s, the speed of computer networks has finally caught up to the speed of computer processors.

The invocation of Bill Gates is a big red flag that this is targeted to unsavvy investors. He hasn’t been involved in the day-to-day of Microsoft since 2006, not in R&D since 2008. While this plays on the fact that the public associates him with Microsoft and will for a few decades, he spends his time on philanthropy. The author thinks you’re an idiot.

But cloud computing isn’t going to be just a modern convenience — it’s going to be an enormous industry. You see, everyone from individuals to multinational corporations can now simply tap into the “cloud” to get all the things they used to have to supply and maintain themselves. This will save some companies millions and make others billions.

Cloud computing is when a developer rents computer time from other people’s data centers. You likely already use many services that use cloud computing but you don’t directly use it, it’s infrastructure. It’s really only annoying to Microsoft because these servers almost always run some variant of Linux or Unix rather than Windows, but that’s a missed opportunity rather than anything that’s going to actually take money out of Microsoft’s pockets by hurting their sales of desktop software. It is not “the next big thing”, though it is perhaps still the current big thing. It’s been in use for several years; I used it at the Post to process an 17,481 page PDF in a couple hours instead of two weeks.

That’s why I’m so eager to tell you all about the three companies that are leading the charge and look poised to rule the post-Microsoft world. … It all starts with taking us up on this special offer and claiming your FREE report: The 3 Kings of Cloud Computing. I want you to have it right now, with my compliments. And here’s one more thing I’d like you to accept with my compliments: an invitation to join our Rule Breakers community absolutely without any risk.

If you want to put your money behind cloud computing, buy Amazon. They sell what is by far the best cloud computing platform and will be for the next few years. Yes, the retailer. They built an incredibly smart backend to Amazon.com, then built good developer tools on top of it and started selling access in 2006. The company in second place is Rackspace, one of the biggest and best Internet hosting companies in the world, who bought a cloud computing company to expand their offerings. They have decent products, but Amazon is simply doing a better job.

Isn’t it too late to buy Google?

Not at all! In fact, as I mentioned, one of America’s most trusted stock pickers is convinced that right now is the perfect time to get invested in the future of cloud computing — and especially in Google.

It is a non-sequiter to suggest buying Google based on cloud computing. Google does sell a little bit in the form of Google App Engine, but even without looking at their FEC filings I’d guess it accounts for <1% of their revenues and they're not heavily promoting it. Google is still an advertising company.

It is not a bad idea to consider buying Microsoft based on cloud computing, despite the screaming hype of this sales letter. Earlier this year Ballmer said they’re going “all in” on providing cloud computing services. Nobody knows quite what that will look like (and MS has a three-decade history of pre-announcing projects to try to scare away competitors), but they have enough developers using their services that they whatever they eventually produce is at least unlikely to flop.

But why should you trust him? … Here are just a few more of the top dogs and first movers he’s uncovered recently:

• Myriad Genetics — Locked in 225% gains
• Baidu — Up 1,251%
• Vertex Pharmaceuticals — Up 259%
• Green Mountain Coffee Roasters — Up 260%
• MercadoLibre — Up 340%

I can even duplicate his prediction feat: on the NYSE, I recommend you buy every stock whose ticker symbol starts with a vowel. Come back in a year and I’ll point out the half-dozen that have skyrocketed.

In closing, always ask yourself why anyone would be stupid enough to sell this information. If he seriously thought that just buying a stock would get a three-digit return, he would be selling his house and kids and borrowing from loan sharks to buy before the market moves, and then building a large, Scrooge McDuck-style vault so he can swim around in his acres of money. Not selling PDFs by monthly subscription.

So far, the plan is:

Jan 1 – Jan 14

Colorado west of the Rockies, including Grand Junction, Durango, and more

Jan 24 – Feb 11

Colorado east of the Rockies, including Boulder, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo

Feb 21 – Feb 28

Minneapolis

Mar 1 – Mar 20

Austin

Apr

probably NYC

May – onward

completely open, likely international – maybe traverse Canada east-to-west

The unlisted gaps are private travel with friends and family, but I’m otherwise looking to meet up people with similar interests like web development and gaming (online and tabletop). If you’re along my route, please don’t hesitate to get in touch to recommend places I visit, to meet up, or just to chat.

As I’ve started talking about these plans, everybody asks how I’m going to pay for it. Working on the web means I can build my sites or do contracting anywhere I go, but mostly I’m traveling cheaply – discount airfare, staying in hostels and on friendly couches, and staying light enough to keep everything in one backpack. After wanting it for long enough, I’m by damn going to find a way to make it work.

Hope to see you out on the trail.

The non-spam review sites might have more, but they also have professional photographers taking the pictures. (And if they’re not professional, someone who reviews dozens of cameras is going to take better pictures than you.) It doesn’t help answer the important question, “If I buy this camera, what will my pictures look like?”

The solution is the Flickr Camera Finder. When you take a picture, the camera embeds metadata that includes the brand and model. With tens of millions of photos, Flickr has samples from ordinary people using every kind of camera. (If you’re considering a camera that is not yet released, read the manufacturer’s and professional reviewer’s sites to find out about the sensor other internal technology; most new cameras are pretty close cousins to previous models.)

When you bring up Flickr’s page for the specific camera you’re interested in, search for the kinds of photos you’ll be taking. I knew I’d be taking lots of indoor shots of my friends and medium-range snaps of interesting things I see in daily city life, so I searched terms like “party”, “basement”, “couch”, “hanging out” for the former and “graffiti”, “bus”, “intersection”, “storefront” for the latter. I was able to avoid two cameras that I thought were great but turned out to be fairly poor for my needs.

1. Get a marker and an index card or piece of paper. Copy this and substitute your personal information:

2. Take a picture of it with your camera (or phone). Poke around in the camera’s menu, almost all have a way to mark photos as protected from accidental/mass deletion, so set that on this picture.

3. The last step is hard: don’t lose your camera. You might not succeed at this step, but if you’ve done the first two steps maybe you’ll get it back.

I’ve had this little collection at my bedside for a dozen years. Well, not this collection.

I go through the index cards pretty quick, so they need regular replenishment. And sometimes they’re a tear-off pad of paper. Or sticky notes.

And this pen is a pretty recent replacement of the one I emptied. The brand and model don’t matter one whit, don’t be a moleskine nerd.

There isn’t usually a little flashlight, that’s way optional. It’s nice, at night, when I’m adding to a note, but I can use the backside or another card if I don’t have a light.

And for a couple years the whole pile was actually a small digital voice recorder.

This is not a post about some clever tool for increasing productivity. That’s a picture of a sleep aid.

When I lay down to fall asleep I’m still sorting through the jumble of the day and I think of things I left undone, or I plan tomorrow, or I have little inspirations for projects, or I realize I forgot to do something, or I have an upsight about how to improve some code, or, or, or, or…

I can’t fall asleep when I’m juggling several thoughts, trying to keep them all in the air until I get up in the morning. I have to get rid of them, get them out, evaporate the fear that I’ve lost track of something. Keeping a pen and notecard, or any other way of recording thoughts, in easy reach is how I relax to fall asleep.

Some nights I don’t write down a single thing. Some nights I write down three dozen. Most nights I write down one or two things. Very infrequently, I jot down all the clutter and with it all cleared away I realize I have an idea so big and important I have to get up and get a full-sized piece of paper to sketch it out, to get it all down or to dive into it and start exploring the implications and producing the work and making things happen. But most nights I sleep very well.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my personal finances, mostly I adopt a policy of benign neglect and it’s allowed me to save up enough to work for myself exclusively. Instead of designing a precise system that accounts for every wayward penny (which is pretty much what my inner nerd cries out for) I’ve designed good habits and trained my intuition to create a low-key monitoring system that keeps expenses down.

The most important thing is that whenever I feel like I’m spending more money than I want or don’t have a good feel for where and how much I’m spending, I start a spreadsheet. Here’s an old example (with a few numbers fudged for privacy and example purposes):

Category

Category is whatever’s useful: when I worked in an office, I had a ‘Lunch’ category for when I bought lunch instead of bringing my own. Learned the expense of that fast. Sometimes I have a generic ‘spoiling myself’ or ‘entertaining in’ and ‘entertaining out’ categories. You have to invent your own.

Amount

Both positive (income) and negative (expenses), making it easy to select the column to see the sum at the bottom of the window. Usually I use the menu item Data -> Filter to create a filter on category to make it easy to add up these subtotals.

Essential

Similar to ‘Amount’, this is for the bare necessities: rent, groceries, medicine, schoolbooks. When I enter some groceries, that might be Amount -$72.18 but Essential -$51.52 because I bought some wine and candy. It’s a lot harder to reduce this category, but it helps for exposing optional purchases.

Notes

Reminders to myself about what this was or if I could’ve done it differently. The goal of the spreadsheet is to train my intuition into sync with reality, like remembering that movie tickets and popcorn for two cost $29.50 now, not $12 when I first started going on dates.

So when do I feel like making a spreadsheet?

Mostly by not using credit or debit cards; aside from the former’s fees and debt eating me alive, I use cash so I can see it go. If I’m at the cash machine more than once a month or wanting to withdraw more than usual, that’s my cue to stop and look at the spreadsheet a bit to figure out where I’m overspending. When I’m at the bookstore on the 8th with a stack of books under my arm and I look in my wallet to see that I’d have $20 left after buying them, I’ll tuck the cash back in my wallet and look at the library card that’s in there instead. It’s much easier to physically look at my budget in my pocket than to stop and try to recall the current numbers.

I don’t think I’ve ever run one of these spreadsheets for more than 10 weeks or so – I find out where I’m spending money, I make changes, and I track again when things feel off. I’ve done it I think four times in the last 8 years, mostly after I move. I put all my receipts in my wallet and trained myself to fill in the spreadsheet anytime I hit reload in my feed reader – which usually means once a day in the evenings, but of course you can tie to any daily event.

As I’m building a feel for my expenses, I’ll also try to lower them. The best thing is to look at monthly bills. For rent, search Craigslist for places your size and in your neighborhood with a max price of what you’re paying now (and min price of $5 to avoid the unethical marketers who enter $1 or $2), then subscribe to the RSS feed in the lower-right corner. After a few days or weeks you’ll have a feel for what your budget can get you and know if you should renew your lease or even think about breaking it.

All you can do for utility bills is reduce use, get better about turning off unused lights, turn the thermostat down and wear all those nice long-sleeved shirts. That’s the blessing and curse of regulation.

Reducing other bills, well, there’s a pain-in-the-ass way to lower them. Call every single one and say “I’m concerned about my bill. I think I’m overspending. I’m considering other companies. Can you do anything to reduce my bill?” It’s an awkward conversation, but a lot of times a loss prevention department will give you a big reduction in price to keep you on. Works especially well on phone and cable companies.

It’s really easy to procrastinate on this one, no one likes to feel demanding or chintzy, but that attitude only helps them. I get over it by asking every time I’m annoyed at poor service, outages, or friends bragging about the deals they’ve gotten. Anytime my internet connection is being particularly Comcastic, I would say something like “How are you going to compensate me for this?” or “I just got a flyer from [the other guy] offering $x/month” (and not mention this is only the first Y months). In the last few years my internet connection has been on some kind of teaser or discount rate roughly half the time.

In short, I’ve avoided designing a complicated, explicit system in favor of an implicit system based on habit. I’m writing this out because a friend asked, but I think the worst thing he could do is adopt it. The particular habits don’t matter, design habits for your particulars. I share mine to explain the thought process and give some food for thought, anyone care to share their own?

This annoyingly true aphorism has an important implication: an unfinished project, however close it seems to completion, is worth far less than a completed project. With that in mind, I’ve created a useful tool.

It is a text file named todo, and it appears as follows:

small todo:
  research thesauruses
  find a better launcher than fbrun
  finish jQuery Cookbook
  ~/.profile: print a random alias on login

sometime todo:

http://masanjin.net/sup-bugs/issue7

  get bike ready for spring
  tag and caption photos

business ideas:
  blog edit sharing - ask friends to preview a blog post
  online origami database
  ...

project ideas:
  roguelike: vampire in a town, hide and drain mob abilities
  patch MySQL to not allow blank WHERE in update/delete
  ...

purchases:
  bookends
  hat
  standing desk?
  measuring tape
  micrometer
  uninterruptable power supply

tv:
  House s5
  Mad Men s1
  Heroes s1
  Lost s1 (if it ends well)
  ...

games:
  World of Goo
  Dungeoneer (card game)
  ...

music:
  Bat For Lashes
  OK Go
  ...

[For boring historical reasons, the book/movie queue are elsewhere.]

Every time I have a brilliant idea to fix something or research a product to buy or take someone up on a media recommendation, I put it on the list. And every time I have a brilliant idea for a new project, it emphatically goes on the list so I don’t start working on it. (This is the hard part.)

When I’m going to relax, I’ll pick something off the list of media to check out. And when I happen to have the file open, I’ll occasionally move more-interesting items upwards and prune off anything uninteresting.

It’s neat to have the last couple years of game, business, and hobby project ideas collected in one place; the most interesting of them have a text file or a directory for notes and plans. I find that if I let myself spend a few minutes or hours pondering a project and then write it down, I can stop obsessing about it, perhaps because I don’t need to think of it to keep from forgetting it.

Success? Yeah, it helps. It’s unfortunately not a free Finish Everything You Start Ticket, but I’m coming to terms with their lack of existence. I’ve finished more in the five years I’ve been keeping the file than the five before and I’m tempted to attribute it to growing wiser and more experienced, except that keeping this file is one of the mechanisms that help me get wiser and more experienced.

Watching Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero video and reading the preceeding articles was the impetus for the final push to zero. It’s not that there’s anything I didn’t know in there. But there was the sense that it was not only possible but achievable.

So I immediately did what Mann suggested not to do and spent, oh, a full day changing email clients from mutt to sup. It sounds like an awesome amount of time-wasting, but I read the sup philosophical statement a while ago and it resonated:

The problem with traditional clients like Mutt is that they deal with individual pieces of email. This places a high mental cost on the user for each incoming email, by forcing them to ask: Should I keep this email, or delete it? If I keep it, where should I file it? I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life laboriously hand-filing every email message I received and feeling a mild sense of panic every time an email was both “from Mom” and “about school”.

The flip side of this is that once if you’ve set up automatic filters you have to remember to go check those folders, which is a habit I’ve never been able to form. And once I’ve ignored a folder for two weeks, hell, I’ll leave it another day or two, why hurry to find out if I missed out on something interesting or if I let someone down? Or three days. Or…

And so I’ve poured all of my email into sup’s index and started mercilessly hacking away at that last couple hundred messages I hadn’t yet dealt with. Read and delete, or archive, or note on my to-do list, or suck it up and start another email with “I’m sorry it took so long to get back to you…” And now it’s cleaned out, to my pleasant amazement.

There is, of course, the terrible chance I’ve missed something important, but I couldn’t let that risk of something getting lost in the upheavel continue to paralyze me. Perfect is the enemy of good. If you’ve been waiting on a reply from me about anything and didn’t get it in the last few minutes, I’m sorry, please let me know. And if you’ve thought about contacting me but haven’t because I did so poorly with the last few emails, I’m sorry, I’m going to keep trying to do better.

The backstory for Firefly is pretty simple, China and America expanded into space and were the dominant cultures as the resources of Earth were exhausted. Humanity left for a new solar system to make its home and along the way the two cultures fused into the amalgam depicted in the show.

Why, though, does it depict a culture with Chinese style, language, and art without any Chinese people? Is it cultural appropriation? Outright racism? The vagaries of casting?

No, no, of course not. In the proudest tradition of fanwanking, I’ve discovered an entirely in-universe explanation. There are dark hints of the answer to this question.

In the episode Shindig, River (who knows government secrets she’s not supposed to) has a minor freakout and tears the labels off some cans of food. Book helps settle things down, saying “She didn’t harm much. We’ll have a few mystery meals.”

But what a dark expression for such an innocuous comment.

In the pilot, May lays out the ship’s amenities and says they offer “protein in all the colors of the rainbow”. So the fare must be pretty bland, Book soon says “The important thing is the spices. A man can live on packaged food from here ’til Judgment Day if he’s got enough Rosemary.”

Later in the show it becomes clear that Book isn’t all he seems to be — he has a government ID card that gets him prompt service from otherwise hostile bureaucrats and a bounty hunter claims he’s not really a priest.

The character Jayne, though, is exactly what he seems. Big, dumb, strong, tough, and heavily armed. Mostly dumb. He has a hard time keeping up in conversations.

And yet Jayne speaks and understands Chinese fluently, never even a pause when he or another character switch languages. Does this guy look like he spends his evenings curled up with a language workbook?

No, clearly he’s learned by osmosis, and it’s not cultural osmosis. Let’s put the pieces together.

Government secrets, dark mutterings from someone who’s not who he claims to be, multilingual morons. And endless cans of protein.

Yes, it’s what you’re thinking. The Americans and Chinese may have left Earth together, but the Chinese never arrived. The Americans turned on them and, using the technology behind Spam and other abominations, manufactured canned protein from their companions.

This cannibalism is the darkest government secret, the reason River lost her mind and tries futilely to destroy food while a hidden government agent downplays the outburst.

The Firefly movie, Serenity, revolves around River’s knowledge of an atrocity the government has kept secret for years or decades. Maybe River uncovering shocking secrets was going to be a recurring element of the series. With the show canceled, we’ll never know. But at least now we know why there are no Chinese people on the show.

I’ve been pondering authenticity a fair bit lately. As this is my thought process we’re talking about here, of course I got to the topic through a totally ridiculous path. Watch this if you’re too old or (worse) too young to know the song Total Eclipse of the Heart:

It’s a song about love and longing. Yeah, the tune is definitely a product of the 80s, but she performs well and the lyrics tell her story in an interesting way. It may not be Shakespeare, but it paints the scene, sets a mood, and was catchy enough to be a hit.

I want to compare it to this cover by Hurra Torpedo:

Featuring a monotone singer, percussion on kitchen appliances, and blue track suits, it’s definitely weirder than the original. In some ways it feels more authentic than Bonnie Tyler singing and swaying. She’s a professional musician with a solid backup band. Her video is a deliberate, well-executed show.

This cover is awful, but it’s a couple of guys that think they’re pretty hardcore rockers. The lead singer has to do his own backup because the backup singer is trying (failing) to keep the beat by demolishing an oven range. The set is an austere corner with a rough tromp l’oiel to make it appear more substantial. The camera is pretty consistently pointed away from every crescendo. But the low production values make it more authentic because it’s not a carefully considered consumer product, it’s just a performance.

But then there’s this other cover by Hurra Torpedo:

Joke blown. There’s footage from several concerts, it’s professional edited, the band engages in premeditated spontaneity to appear wacky. This video was cut from a fake tour that Ford financed as part of a “viral” campaign. (There are some other awful clips from their mockumentary on YouTube, if you’re curious.) In their Total Eclipse cover video, that couple seconds of intro and outro is the logo of a Norwegian variety comedy show roughly similar to Saturday Night Live. It was a gag from the start, but it works very differently when divorced from that context.

The joke is that it appears to be a couple guys who have no idea how uncool they are but are playing their hearts out anyways. It’s a great joke, pretty much everyone nervously laughs their way through their first viewing while wondering how the performers could think this was possibly a good idea. It’s funny because it’s playing with our notion of authenticity. It’s not nice to mock people who are enthusiastically, genuinely bad because they’re being true to themselves in the attempt.

That brings us to the last video, a cover of the cover:

Bonnie Tyler was actually completely inauthentic. Total Eclipse of the Heart was created by a professional composer and producer who tried to sell the song to a few other singers before her record label bought it and had her perform it. The song was created to sell some cassette tapes, not capture the expression of a heartrending emotion.

This last video, though, is completely authentic. It is what it appears to be: two friends covering a funny video they saw online. They’re not professional performers — they don’t even look at the camera (probably to avoid cracking up). It’s honest, it’s done decently, and it’s plain fun to watch. The singer’s trying to do the accent, they’re confused about who’s doing the backup, the percussionist nearly knocks away the pot he’s crashing.

Is this what authenticity comes down to when the Internet gives everyone a global distribution platform, that all commercialization is proof of inauthenticity? Does authenticity stop being important when we’re all drowning in terrible but terribly authentic self-produced media? I don’t know the answers here, I’m just pondering out loud.

(Now, of course, you have to ask yourself if I authentically thought this was a topic worth pondering or if I’m a jerk who just wanted to get Total Eclipse of the Heart stuck in your head. Maybe you should just be glad I didn’t bring up punk, a genre hamstrung by its notions of authenticity…)

disharkins

Chicagoese for ‘this Harkins’, contrariness in that ‘dis’ means ‘not’. Amusing anagrams like ‘radish sink’ and ‘I risk hands’.

malharkins / harkinsprop

Riffs on my old usage of ‘malaprop’ as a handle.

preterharkins

Preter- echos the hyper- prefix that used to be faddishly applied to everything Internet. Only a letter away from my name, which is good and bad.

yharkins

Aweomsely archaic y-, now really only known in the Scrabble-valuable ‘yclept’, meaning ‘to name’ (you could choke on all the meta in this post). Also looks like a question. A little potential for collision, though there aren’t many first names starting with Y.

harkinsant / harkinsarian

Means ‘a person who’, as in servant or librarian.

They’re all Googlenopes except yharkins, which got one use a few years ago on a soon-offline fan forum.

Barring any last-minute wildcards (feel free to suggest), I’m going to go with one of these handles. Please post a comment to let me know which you like or dislike.

I switched to “Harkins”, which is what I’m still using today. It’s DRY (rather than two names for the same person), short, easy-to-spell, but it’s available less and less regularly as more people get online.

I’m trying to pick a new username. I’d like it to be based off my real name, but I’d also like to balance that with brevity. “Peter_Harkins” is plain too long, I don’t want to use more than 10 characters. “PHarkins” is right out, I don’t need to be conflated with phone phreaks and other creative spellers. I’ve been assigned “harkinsp” at too many schools and workplaces to enjoy it, and it’s not very unique.

I’m tempted to get a bit playful and do something like “hark_ins”. I’d have some hassle with the various underscore/hyphen rules of different sites, but it’d always be available.

Any suggestions? What handle have you based on your name?

I don’t know what I would do with a Monome sixty-four, but I know it’s a box of awesome and I want one. So I’m now struggling mightily to rationalize a purchase with a brilliant application.

I can imagine using it for server monitoring. A light (or several) could represent a server (or its load/ram/etc.) and pulse steadily if it’s happy; fast if it’s overworked. Tap it to switch into a detail view. I just don’t have 64 servers — heck, I don’t have 4.

Any suggestions?

Recently I was bullshitting about former employers and described one as a “tramagedy”. When I went to look it up, nobody else had ever used it, but my girlfriend and I have been using it for a year or so. So here’s a definition:

tramagedy

n. from tragedy + drama; Tragedy seen through the eyes of lolcats; drama provoking immediate schadenfreude.

Cat knocked over your dessert? Tramagedy! Friend A is fuming because Friend B dinged his car? Tramagedy!

Consider yourself edumacated.

Me: Hey, did you hear about [random technical development]?
Googler: Yeah, it’s real cool. Especially for [slightly offbeat application].
Me: That’s an interesting idea. Hmm, especially if you wanted to use it for [related research topic].
Googler: …
Me: I mean, that would work out great. It would have an [interesting performance characteristic], especially for large datasets.
Googler: …
Me: Hmm, do you think it might fix [persnickety sub-problem] if you also use [other technique or product]? I think it’s likely…
Googler: [deafening silence and refusal of eye contact]
Me: Hello?
Googler: …braaaaaains…

OK, the last line is whimsy, but the rest is the verbatim compilation of a dozen conversations. Google employees get distracted by mentally rereading their NDA and figuring out what they can say, can’t say, and can’t say that they can’t say. It just gets worse if you keep talking and extrapolating (that is to say, holding a conversation) because you’re giving them O(n² interrelations + m potential suggestions from them) more topics to analyze. I’ve never quite managed to crash them, but I imagine it’s entirely possible given the NP nature of conversations.

The fellow coder who inspired this post by pointing out the blank stares to me must remain anonymous due to their recent zombification.

* I know it’s odd, but I just don’t like lots of things around to keep track of. I don’t feel like a happy consumer to be surrounded by posessions, it’s just more and more stuff to keep track of.

Just mail me to say what books you’d like. If you’re in Chicago this could be an excellent excuse to drop by for dinner, or if we just know each other from a local user group I’ll bring ‘em there for you. If you’re outside of Chicago and not dropping in anytime soon, send your current mailing address and I’ll ship them to you.

Five years ago I donated about 200 books I didn’t really care for to my to my then-local library. I got the idea for this giveaway when I realized that I only reread a few of my books on any regular basis. As soon as it occurred to me that I might be able to fit them all on my little blue bookshelf, I had to try. I’d have made it if I could give up my dream that someday I’ll write a comic, so I have another shelf with 50 or so books I’ve promised myself are “reference”.

One last note: I received some of the books I’m giving away as gifts. If you see a book you gave me on the list it’s not there because I don’t like you/it or didn’t appreciate the gift, it’s only that I want to reduce how much I own and I deliberately picked a difficult constraint.

2007-05-10: All of the books have been given away.