The internet always remembers?

Does the internet really remember everything? Do we need to teach computers how to forget?

I wonder if it won't just happen "naturally", like by attrition.

I imagine that sooner or later, irrelevant information will be pushed to the bottom of the pile (or search list) and then eventually be "forgotten", if not completely erased. Google already does this to a certain extent, arranging search results by relevance, estimated by factors like how many other sites link to the information and so on.

If a piece of information exists on a computer connected to the internet, but no website links to it, will anyone ever recover that obscure information? And what about when computers disconnect from the internet? Unless their data are cached somewhere (which, admittedly, Google and others do on a large scale), that information is no longer accessible. Also, over time, as formats and computer languages change, much more information will become inaccessible without translation.

Maybe it's just the same as with current information in "legacy" formats: there's a lot of it that exists, but which we are completely unaware of—like in dusty old tomes in libraries that we would have to spend hours or years searching for because it's not indexed. Still it's there.

I understand the ideal of going "off the grid", and avoiding trails of data that can tell others about one's daily habits or personal life. At its simplest, it means I can just go somewhere and no one will know where I am, or I can do something, and no one will know what I'm doing. Without such protection, we end up in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, never sure if someone is watching, always afraid to act.

It's not about living by the law or not. I'm sure that for many law-abiding citizens, once they believe that someone is watching their every move, they will reconsider some or many of their actions; they will become unnatural, separate from their desires, alienated from their selves.

Of course, time won't help if someone wants to remove some damning information from the internet right away. Facial recognition certainly won't make it any easier. It's almost enough to make me want to give up on Facebook. Sometimes I don't want to worry about someone seeing my photos or personal information (despite security measures).

I do believe that, in time, much digital information will be lost, in the ways I've mentioned and others. As disasters and time have destroyed copious past knowledge, so they will do to current and future knowledge. Most people probably have little to worry about when it comes to their personal information. That is, besides marketers, identity thieves, and future historians and archeologists, few people care about the average person's information. And for the time being, going off the grid can be as simple as leaving the house without your phone and wallet, and paying for things with cash.

We make much of our dependence on technology, and surely much of the talk is true. Perhaps fewer people each year could survive "in the wild"; and the idea doesn't interest them. Can we say that these people are worse off than others? Is it as dangerous as some say to trade our privacy for convenience? Is it harmful to trust technology with our secrets, some of which we would never even tell other people? Read on..!

iTunes should not exist

I had a nerdy inspiration one night last week as I was falling asleep. I can't explain why at all, except maybe that I am perpetually looking for a music organizer with certain specifications that I can't find in any existing application. (More on that after.)

The inspiration was this: iTunes, and most other music player/organizers (e.g., WinAmp, doubleTwist, Windows Media Player) add an unnecessary layer to users' daily computing activities. Everything that they do can (or could with little programming or scripting) be done via folder actions in a file manager (i.e., OSX's "Finder" and Windows' "Windows Explorer"). The only difference is that dedicated music players make it all look so pretty. (That's mild sarcasm, by the way.)

Okay, so I'm probably getting ahead of myself. File managers could easily perform all of the basic and most (if not all) of the advanced functions of any given music player. It's just that the developers of these programs would have to integrate some of these advanced functions into the file manager rather than separating them as they are now. One might argue that including these advanced functions is unnecessary since not all people will use them, but this is completely a non-issue. OSX and Windows both come with music players pre-installed, and few people will ever remove them.

Let me clarify. The basic functions of the average music player include:

• Playing music
  
• Organizing music
  

These actions are of course more diverse than I want to make them appear. The first might mean playing audio from a CD, MP3s or other audio files, podcasts, streaming radio, shuffling, crossfading (or other effects), and so on; and organizing music includes sorting in various ways, searching your collection quickly, creating playlists, updating song information, &c. Also, people use iTunes and the like to fill their portable music players, to buy music, to rip and burn audio discs, to convert audio files to different formats, to look at visual accompaniments (visualizations), and even to share musical recommendations and files.

If you know a moderate amount about today's operating systems, you recognize that the file manager can already do pretty much all of these things without any added software. In fact, you might even have done some of these things yourself via your file manager: if you navigate to a folder containing music in OSX, and select a file, a "preview" window appears in which you can listen to the song and view some file-related information, along with the song's cover art, if available. It's much quicker than opening iTunes, but inefficient for listening to many songs. Still, the functionality is right there in Finder. Searching, too, is built into file managers: switch to your file manager, press Cmd/Ctrl-F, start typing the name of the song, artist, or album you want, and presto, all the songs with your criteria are on display, hopefully including the object of your search.

What else? Ripping and burning functions have been part of file managers for years; and only iPod users are forced to use iTunes to load music to their players (although with exceptions)—as far as I know, other music players allow users to drag and drop files from their file manager.

In fact, in some ways, file managers are more versatile than iTunes and the like. For example (and this is my desired specification I alluded to above), file managers commonly allow users to arrange their windows in much more diverse ways. I want to be able to look at my music in two side-by-side windows. Is that too much to ask! (As far as I can tell from this miniscule screenshot, WinAmp includes this feature; but the program isn's available for OSX. If anyone wants to offer step-by-step instructions on installing it with Wine, please let me know!)

Anyway, here's my vision for this infinitesimal fraction of the future:

A file manager "Music" window setting (like the "Filmstrip" folder option in Windows XP) that, when selected, would display the contents of a folder like a music management application. This new setting would be accompanied by a "Music" (or "Media") menu incorporating the features listed above. In other words, I don't want to click and open iTunes to get at my music (time-consuming, inefficient). I just want to open a folder that looks basically like iTunes and that will do all of the same things (quick, efficient).

I suppose there are reasons why this hasn't taken place yet; but I suspect that it's just status quo and marketing thinking. It's far easier to market a distinct application with a name than one that's simply there, doing its thing mostly invisible to the user—even if that program is free, which most music applications are. Also, if Microsoft and Apple maintain separate programs like iTunes and Windows Media Player, they can say they are adding clear value to their operating systems with these programs. Not so easy to say when there's no program to talk about.

Somebody tell me I'm wrong. Read on..!

A clean desk is a productive desk

Yesterday, I was inspired to clean my desk in order to finish off my workyear on a high note.

Okay, I was fed up of the cat hair and bumprints all over the place, and my keyboard had reached a critical level of greasiness.

Here are the results.

Before:


After:


You might not notice a large difference between the two, but the before picture doesn't come close to portraying the coating of cat fur that my desk had attracted, or the depth of the pile of papers under the indeterminate stuff and wires at the left side.

The main culprit:


Of course, the mess didn't even come close to reaching the proportions here!

As you were. Read on..!

More thoughts on laptop DJing (in response to...)

Recently I wrote a post for BlogCampaigning on my experience transitioning from a vinyl DJ to a laptop DJ, which, from personal comments, appears to have been generally well received. But the only comment anyone actually posted on the blog was quite negative and passively critical. Initially, I wanted to tell the semi-anonymous commenter where to go, but I decided to take the high road, thanking the fellow for his post and offering a very brief apologetic response.

I was wrong. I've thought about it, and I now recognize that that person's comment was uninformed and thoughtless, and I had no reason to apologize. I don't want to insult him, and I hope this response doesn't simply come off as petty. I have a far more appropriate response in mind, and it is basically a brief description of the nature of entertainment media today.

In his passive-aggressive note, the commenter appears to make three points:

1. DJs who use iTunes (or similar software) don't deserve to entertain club or bar crowds.
2. Whatever happened to DJs who can match beats by simply listening to songs (as opposed to using software to digitally and automatically beat-match)?
3. DJs today suck.

Check out the post at BlogCampaigning.com Read on..!

Learning to love laptop DJing

Hey, recently I've been trying to get back into DJing around town, and I spent a few nights at a newish bar called the Painted Lady on Ossington. Since the place is small, I don't have a lot of gear, and more of my music is now in digital form than physical, I've taken on the challenge of laptop DJing.

In my angrier moments, you're likely to hear me remark that laptop DJing resembles spinning vinyl in no respect whatsoever, but that's simply untrue—it just poorly resembles spinning vinyl. While using a laptop to DJ resembles spinning vinyl records in the most fundamental ways (selecting and playing songs), it has none of the other pleasurable aspects, such as flipping through records, handling records, placing the needle, actually spinning the record backward and forward, beat-matching, crossfading, mixing, &c. Unfortunately for me and laptops, these activities make up a large part of what I find enjoyable about DJing in the first place, so you can imagine I've had a mixed experience using a laptop to play songs.

Still, I press on, and I know there are ways to improve the experience, for example, by adding quality software, or better, hardware.

I wrote up some thoughts on my first night of laptop DJing at the Painted Lady. Take a peek at blogcampaigning.com.

You can also check out some songs I played that night at Parker Mason's music blog, Nineteen Ninety Never. Read on..!

Apple sells magic

I don't know why I never thought of it before.

Apple lovers and haters alike understand that there is a certain unmeasurable “cool factor” to Apple products that is the main reason why people buy them over other similar (and perhaps better) products. I think it's clear that this cool factor has a lot to do with Apple's Advanced Marketing Techniques. (There are other disputed factors, of course. Among them quality, design, vision, and market savvy.) The people at Apple (along with their marketing team) know how to make the most of products that may not be revolutionary, but which certainly appear that way to the average person. That's the magic. (And so you know, I'm using “magic” in a value-neutral sense here.)

Celebrated science fiction author and physicist Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I'm not sure if he has considered the effect of marketing on this so-called “law”. I think Apple has, if only tacitly. You see, Apple does not develop exceptionally advanced technologies. They are, however, quite good at using current advances, and putting them in fancy packages. The thing is, most existing pre- or near-market technology is far beyond what the average person understands. (Despite constantly increasing usage of technology, I'm certain that most people actually have little understanding of how their gadgets work.) And when that fact is combined with a futuristic design, the result can be startling to the lay person. Basically, with their marketing Apple takes advantage of the knowledge gap between us and their products, which makes them seem more advanced than they actually are. It appears that a sufficiently advanced marketing strategy can make a moderately advanced technology seem like magic.

I have no idea why it took the MacBook Air (MBA) for me to recognize this. I guess it's because unlike recent Apple products like the iPhone and Apple TV, the MBA stands out for what it doesn't have rather than what it does. That is, with the iPhone, Apple combined several still burgeoning technologies (Wi-Fi, portable web-surfing and video, touch screen), with the lifestyle standards of the day (digital music playback and mobile telephony), and added their unique software and design flair, thus creating the new must-have cross-generational lifestyle device—nearly superseding their own iPod (they even redesigned the latter product to match it). All of these technologies exist separately, but Apple put them together and created what appeared to be an highly advanced device that has no peer in the North American and European markets. The MBA on the other hand is a product that already exists—a laptop—and it's functionally inferior to other laptops on the market. Still—and this is crucial—it speaks to the future of the laptop and of personal computing generally. Apple has tried a similar formula as they did with the iPhone: they've taken several upcoming technologies (solid-state “flash” hard disk memory, wireless data transmission*, “multi-touch gestures”, embedded video recording), but then they've actually removed certain standard features in the hope of appearing more advanced and cornering a new lifestyle standard—ultra-portability (the computer has no CD or DVD drive and only the barest minimum of ports). But they've made it seem shockingly thin, and this, Apple is betting, is the main feature that will make this laptop appear sufficiently advanced for us simple people to see it as magic. And importantly, they've done it before anybody else. (Other companies have developed ultra-portable devices, but had you heard of any of them before the MacBook Air? Maybe you geeks had, but I bet the average consumer had not.)

I see through you now Apple! Not that I believed that the fanaticism around Apple wasn't half marketing, but now I understand better what constitutes that “cool factor”: simple magic!

Very clever. But will it work?

*Of course, we have been able to transmit data wirelessly for decades (not including by voice!), but you all understand that I'm talking about current mainstream computer technology. Read on..!