Tag: technology

Storage media creep, dismal future, and what if Lincoln had lived

Would Lincoln have run for a third term?

Jaquandor, Buffalo’s favorite blogger, who answered so many of my questions that you’d think I was from New Jersey, writes:
(Sorry to be so late in the game with these!)

You’re not late. One can ask me questions anytime, though I specifically request them periodically. Hey, if anyone else has questions, ask away.

To what degree are you tired of “storage media creep” — meaning, the progression from LPs to CDs to MP3s or from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray to streaming?

I am EXHAUSTED by it. I rant about it periodically, especially when it leads to what I like to call W.W.C.T.G.Y.T.B.N.C.O.S.Y.A.O. (the World Wide Conspiracy To Get You To Buy New Copies Of Stuff You Already Own). This is why I 1) still have an LP player, a CD player, a VHS player, DVD player, and 2) don’t jump on the next technology bandwagon very quickly. I’m not going to get all of those newfangled things, because of cost and some incompatibility with each other. I do have music in the cloud – I have no idea what that means – but it’s mostly stuff I got from Amazon for free or cheap (Lady Gaga’s last album for 99 cents.)

And what do you think of the increasing sense in which when we buy something, we’re not getting ownership of anything for our money, but merely permission to use it?

It angers me. One library vendor decided, after the fact, that library patrons can only take out an e-book, I believe, 28 times, because that’s some average book circulation number. Then the “book” would cease to operate. It’s also true of library databases, where what’s available seems to change from year to year, not to mention soaring prices.

To this day, I get peeved around Neil Diamond’s birthday. I bought his CD, 12 Songs. Then I discovered that SONY had placed essentially malware on its own disc which prevents me from copying an album that I own onto my iTunes or other devices; indeed, I believe that even playing the album on my computer could damage the computer. So I must play it on a CD player. I read, well after the fact, that there was a recall, but I keep the disc as a reminder of corporate copyright overreach.

When you think of the long-term problems we face, which one(s) bother you the most from the perspective of your daughter having to be part of the generation that deals with them?

The environment, clearly. I think that the melting ice caps will mean catastrophic weather. Corporations will dupe people into thinking that hydrofracking is a good thing until some disaster that will make the BP oil spill look like lint on a new pair of pants. I also expect that there will be major wars in the 21st century over potable water, more so than fuel.

We may have already passed the tipping points on global warming, say scientists at the Planet Under Pressure conference. Worse. on March 19, Tennessee became “the fourth state with a legal mandate to incorporate climate change denial as part of the science education curriculum when discussing climate change… The ALEC bill passed as H.B. 368 and S.B. 893, with 70-23 and 24-8 roll call votes, respectively.”

How different do you think the post-Civil War era would have been had Lincoln not been assassinated?

Wow, this is SUCH a good question, because it’s so TOTALLY UNANSWERABLE. Which won’t keep me from trying.

Like an assassinated President a century later, I believe that Lincoln was evolving on civil rights issues. I can only wonder how he would have dealt with the Radical Republicans that drove much of Reconstruction in his absence. Would there have been compensation to slave owners that remained loyal to the Union? Would blacks ex-slaves have gotten their 40 acres and a mule, which Lincoln supported but which Andrew Johnson rescinded? If these two things had taken place, might some of the racial animosity that exists in America today have been better ameliorated?

And here’s yet another question: would Lincoln have run for a third term? I always thought he felt his destiny to serve. It was only tradition, not the Constitution, which barred it at the time. And he may have proved more tolerable terms for Southern states to re-enter the union, without the seceding states feeling totally demoralized. I think it was the quick end to Reconstruction that helped allow for the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, and the like.

And I just had a debate with someone online about this, so I’ll ask your opinion: how much does the common usage of the phrase ‘begging the question’ bother you? This to me leads to a lot of interesting issues regarding how languages evolve. Thoughts?

It doesn’t annoy me. It has an ancient construction that most people don’t understand. Maybe because it involves “proof” and “logic”, and those are not elements of modern discourse. Politicians beg the question, in the classic sense, all the time.

Its more modern meaning, “raising the question,” the more pedantic complain about, and I can be rather that way, but not on this. Language changes.

I remember that my good Internet friend Arthur was complaining about those folks in the Guy Fawkes masks not knowing who Fawkes really was, or what he stood for. Didn’t bother me.

Whereas I’m still bugged by it’s/its, et al. And the word among no longer seems to be in use at all. I learned that it was between two, but among three or more, yet between is now being used to the exclusion of among. I’ve pretty much given up that fight.

Jaquandor, this begs the question (modern sense): what was the nature of the debate you were having?

March Rambling: Accidental Racism, Verb Tenses and Marvel Movie Boycott

The first Atelier Mends iPad app, uJigsawArt©, is here

The Kind Of Intellectual

(From The Bad Chemicals; used by permission)

God is a second-rate fiction writer. “There are true stories, short stories, fabrications, misrepresentations, novels, insurance reports, family sagas, testimonials, memorials, fairy tales, myths and arguments, the point of all being some kind of narrative persuasion. It’s a kind of stubborn, human-nature way of insisting things be seen from my point of view because that particular point of view is more entertaining, or more valid, or funnier or more beneficial.”

“When the news broke that ‘This American Life’ was retracting the episode ‘Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory,’ Ira Glass made an effort to be clear that the show has verification standards, but that they fell short in this instance.”

The sequence of verb tenses: “You get to decide which verb forms to use based on your intentions and your understand of the language from reading, speaking, and hearing it.”

Dangerous Konymania, and that was before the story got really weird
On the other hand, Carl Weathers is not your enemy, plus more fun examples of accidental racism.

The Nazis’ rules for jazz performers.

The Othello rap (via HERE).

From Robert Reich: “America’s problem isn’t a breakdown in private morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality. What Americans do in their bedrooms is their own business. What corporate executives and Wall Street financiers do in boardrooms and executive suites affects all of us.”

Interesting piece on body image.

Albert Wood and the secrets of the funeral reveal

Advance review of the new John Grisham novel about baseball, Calico Joe.

Jim Shooter explains The Cory Doctorow Doctrine and Other Techno-Tectonic Upheavals HERE and HERE and HERE.

The Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon series (1966). And re: those superheroes, Steve Bissette on boycotting Marvel/Disney movies such as The Avengers because of the treatment of Jack Kirby HERE and HERE.

500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art

Military STD Posters, 1918-1945.

Do you want to know a secret? Secrecy News: a favorite source

The first Atelier Mends iPad app, uJigsawArt©, is here and available on the Apple Store for free!

A maker in Scotland has created an elaborate, steampunk-style, hand-cranked corkscrew. Rube Goldberg would be pleased.

Plane 101, verified by Snopes, no less.

Whatever that guy said? Do the other thing! Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation gets the short end of EVERY conversation.

Here is a video of a person in a Darth Vader mask and cape, and a Utilikilt, riding a unicycle, playing Star Wars music on a bagpipe, in Portland, OR, which took you longer to read than the video runs. Plus, Seussical Siths.

In honor of Robert Sherman, who died this month, one of his and his brother Richard’s most famous compositions, It’s a Small World (via HERE). Oh, and some more Sherman Brothers songs.

Eddie discusses how he sells stuff on Craigslist, much of which could be used selling on eBay, e.g.

GOOGLE ALERTS

From Australia: ROGER Green may be a modest man, but for Vicki Doherty and many others in the Clarence Valley, the well-known Grafton musician is a living treasure.

Unemployment numbers down for sixth straight month: “Roger Green is also looking for something more. ‘I’m an ex-felon, it’s been pretty hard for me personally,’ Green said. He has a part-time gig now but wants to find something full-time. This morning, he’s feeling inspired.”

 

A Sense of Proportionality

Getting lost is the fact that OWS changed the conversation. The narrative that wealth trickling down works has been largely rejected. The notion that your can’t fight back against the banks has been proven to be false.

Things in the world have been annoying me, and I think there’s a common theme: everything seems to be perceived as equal as everything else. I go to a news aggregator and I see the latest on the wars, a bad weather event, and the most recent person voted off a reality show, and it’s all treated similarly, as though they have the equivalent news value.

There has been a run of misstatements by US politicians recently, and they are not the same at all. US Senate Majority leader Harry Reid recently talked about being done before the Easter recess, then quickly corrected himself to say Thanksgiving. In a debate, Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry has a brain freeze and can’t remember the departments he’d eliminate, and some pundits declare his candidacy over; it WAS bad but human. GOP candidate Herman Cain not seeming to know that China had gotten nuclear missiles – over 40 years ago! – or the US position vis a vis Khaddafy’s Libya seems less like a gaffe, which I think means a relatively trivial matter, and more like a fundamental shortcoming.
***
Re; the Occupy Wall Street, et al movement. There were basic truths about income inequality that fueled the protests. But recent polling suggests that the OWS has become less popular, not, I submit, because of the wrongness of the original premise, but because of the obfuscation over whether or not the protesters had the right to essentially live in public parks, and the manner in which they were removed by the police. In fact, it has been the heavy-handed response by authorities in many cities, such as NYC; Oakland, CA; Burlington, VT; Portland, OR; and Chapel Hill, NC, which has actually energized the movement, rather than defeat it. Of course, I know from too many rallies that “the people, united, can never be defeated.”

Getting lost by critics is the fact that OWS changed the conversation. The narrative that wealth trickling down works has been largely rejected. The notion that you can’t fight back against the banks has been proven to be false. There’s a pushback against the idea that unions are all costly, terrible mistakes. There is an economic disparity, and if there is a class war, it isn’t the 99% waging it. So a poll of whether one supports the movement is facile at best.
***
Another issue: the alleged sex crimes at Penn State. Jaquandor hit on much of it when he noted that PSU isn’t the victim here; children allegedly are. And I should say here, I suppose, that Jerry Sandusky is innocent of the charges against him until proven guilty. What I am compelled to note, though, is guilty or not, Jerry Sandusky is an idiot. Who thought it was a good idea to agree to a phone interview on national television? His lawyer, who had a child by an underage girl more than 30 years his junior? His lawyer is an idiot too.

I read an article by a local retired journalist, which I cannot now find, that suggests that people have watched so many “real” people interviewed on TV after a tragedy that they feel some sort of obligation to do the same. This is a false assumption, and especially when one has been indicted. Sandusky, from everything I’ve seen of him, seems to think HE’S the misunderstood victim here. Some free legal advice: Jerry Sandusky should say NOTHING, at least until his trial.

What the heck is behind Congress considering a bill counting pizza as a vegetable? A paean to some fast-food lobby or hostility towards Michelle Obama’s efforts towards healthier living? Or something else?

I believe in intellectual property rights, but the Stop Online Piracy Act, proposed in the House of Representatives, and the companion bill PROTECT IP (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) is a pair of oxymoronic newspeak titles, just like peacekeeper missiles and the USA PATRIOT Act. As an intellectual property attorney I know puts it, the proposed law is “insidious and dangerous. It will change, some say break, the internet as we know it, by turning the internet into a limited portal where you can’t do much more than buy what they want you to buy, and only from them, and to read only what they want you to read, and for a price.”

Yet the legislation has a good chance of passing with bipartisan political support, despite the opposition of Google, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Linked In, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo, and Zynga. This is bad law, and could easily affect those not in the United States as well,

Done ranting. Or, I’ve run out of time.

Rear View Mirror QUESTIONS

What new technologies have you embraced? For which do you decide, “I prefer the old-fashioned way?”

Film critic Roger Ebert wrote an essay called Clinging to the rearview mirror. He quotes Marshall McLuhan:

Most people…still cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world.

Ebert notes, among other things:

He doesn’t like video games, 3D movies, or reading books on the Kindle.
When he owned LPs, he “possessed something tangible. When I download an album from iTunes, I can listen to it, but I possess nothing I can touch.”
*”When I enter a theater and see a movie, I experience it differently than when I watch a video.”

These new things aren’t worse, or better; they are just different.

I too am an analog man. While I bought CDs, eventually, my first love is the LP.
I haven’t really played video games since the 1980s.
I HATE 3D movies and think they are a scam.
Video is definitely secondary to seeing a film in a theater.
I have a cellphone, but I don’t give out the number, because I don’t want to be available 24/7. I use it to call work or home when I’ll be late when I’m out of town, and for emergencies.

What new technologies have you embraced? For which do you decide, “I prefer the old-fashioned way?”?

Random Post-Funeral Thoughts

The week before my mother died, I had nothing on any credit cards, save for any recurring expenditures.

TIMING

My father died on a Thursday; we had the funeral on a Sunday, and he was buried on a Monday. My mother died on a Tuesday, and our first inclination was to have the funeral on the following Saturday. But, instead of working on the obituary or the program on that day, we sat around telling Trudy stories. I think, in some way, we died my father’s death the way he would have wanted his death to be handled, quickly and efficiently; it also helped that we knew my father was going to die at least the day beforehand. Whereas mom’s death took us, and indeed her long-time doctor, by surprise; her heart was still strong, even after the stroke, and we were having conversations about placing her in some medical facility after she got out of the hospital the very morning she died.

Once Saturday was off the table, we considered Sunday, but it was Super Bowl Sunday, on which my mother’s mother died; I remember getting the call during the 3rd quarter of the game in 1983. Besides, it was just different. My dad was the hare, my mother, the tortoise, and we all know that slow and steady win the race.

So, it was a Tuesday funeral, which had an enormous number of people outside of the family wanting to speak, and a Wednesday burial at the Salisbury National Cemetery in Salisbury, NC, about 40 miles from Charlotte, Section 8, Plot 358, next to my father. I read a few passages from the Proverbs reading my eldest niece read the day before, then sang a little, then I, then my sisters, in turn, shoveled some dirt on her cremains, then we sang some more. Then we went to Waffle House, which was one of my father’s favorite places. I believe I had only been to that gravesite once since his burial there.

FOOD

One of the traditions in the South, at least in my parents’ circle, is for people to come over, often bringing various food items, usually homemade. And by “come over”, I don’t mean that they call and ask, “Would this be a good time to come over?” I mean that they just show up. I became aware of this tradition ten and a half years ago; can’t say that I’ve gotten USED to it. But it was (mostly) nice.

MONEY

The week before my mother died, I had nothing on any credit cards, save for any recurring expenditures, such as the newspaper. Can’t say THAT right now. The next bill will be a whopper; it will include:
The funeral parlor. When my father died, the same funeral parlor accepted the promise of payment from his insurance; not so this time. So it went on my credit card. I’ll get reimbursed eventually. But it was the least amount of money we could spend, which would have pleased my mother, $840.
The obit. I totally miscalculated how much it was going to cost: $472.75. I’ll probably eat half of that.
The niece’s last-minute plane ride from California. Somewhere north of $600, which I hope to get back eventually.
The hotel. Once my wife and daughter arrived, the house would have been too crowded with my sisters, my nieces, and a family friend. Five nights, $330; not bad actually.
*Miscellaneous stuff, including a meal after our bizarre visit with the funeral home – was she high, merely incompetent, or uncaring because we weren’t spending enough? She couldn’t even spell Charlotte, and at one point, my sister threw her out of our meeting.
This doesn’t even count the train tickets or the rental car, which are on my WIFE’S credit card. BTW, 3 days out on Amtrak is a better rate than 2 days out, which is WAY better than one day out.

TECHNOLOGY

I had access to the home computer, but I didn’t have one of my own. My wife actually brought the daughter’s laptop, but it was uncharged, and she forgot the plug, so it didn’t work.

Of course, I had to focus on the funeral stuff and managed to write four blog posts in the 12 days I was down there. Viva the blogger’s reserve, which I was trying to create for our vacation this fall. C’est la vie.

The hotel had one (count’em, ONE) computer in the “business center”, which was often occupied. Once I was on it – at 2:48 a.m. – and some young woman came down and said, “This is the ONLY computer here? I have to do my homework!” I ceded it to her at 3 a.m. after I’d spent an hour on it. BTW, it needs a new keyboard; the a, c, e, m, and n were unreadable.

The house printer didn’t work. The hotel printer was quirky, at best.

I used my cellphone more in that two-week period than I had in all the previous two years.

One Twitter tweet, one Facebook post. Just no time for it.
***
The train ride back from Charlotte to Albany last Friday.

 

Ramblin' with Roger
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