On sharing

Mike Doughty’s new album, Sad Man Happy Man, came out this week.  Mike has been one of my favorite singer/songwriters for years, so I have to pick up a copy.  Only one decision is preventing me from finalizing my purchase: Should I buy the physical CD or the mp3s?  There are a number of arguments for one side or the other, but for some reason I’m really focusing on one thing: Do I want to own a piece of plastic that will eventually end up in a landfill, or do I want to own the rights to data files that provide a lower fidelity experience but don’t require the manufacture and eventual disposal of physical materials?  Sure, it’s convenient that so many mp3s can fit on a portable player, but the environmental benefits of digital music files shouldn’t be ignored.

Music files can be purchased in innovative ways these days, too.  Lala.com, for example sells web songs, which play in your browser and only cost 10 cents.  Basically, Lala is selling rights to the music rather than music itself.  You can listen to your music as much as you want, and you don’t even need room in your apartment or on your hard drive to store the product.  (Bonus: Lala will also let you listen to any song in its catalog one time for free, and all users get their first 50 web songs free.)  In a way, it’s music as a service rather than a product.

I’m a big fan of this idea, mainly because it means people get to own less.  Car sharing companies like I-GO and Zipcar let people get by without owning a car.  Tool-lending libraries are springing up in cities nationwide.  Hell, I’m still surprised that so many people buy DVDs when movies are so cheap to rent via Blockbuster, Netflix & iTunes.

Well… I just bought Sad Man Happy Man on CD through Amazon, and it arrives in a week.  I’m sure it’ll spend the next month in heavy rotation on my computer, interspersed with my newly purchased web songs.

Rerouting

In July, I went to Paris.  Physically and mentally.  And with my girlfriend.  Amazing Paris comic journal courtesy of Lucy Knisley.

Lengthy vacations allow us to pull up the anchor and drift for a bit.  The difference between today’s Johnny and June 2009 Johnny is probably greater than the difference between June 2009 Johnny and the Johnny of one year prior, and not just in fromage content.

As such, New Johnny’s in charge now, and he’s plotted a new course for the ship.

For starters, I’m cleaning house.  Earlier tonight, I dropped a load of clothes and rarely-used household items at a local non-profit resale shop that funds LGBT services.  (If anyone needs a white noise machine or a shaving cream warmer, hit up the Brown Elephant on Halsted.)  More of my apartment detritus is going up on eBay later this week.  A friend is stopping by tomorrow to pick up half a dozen dress shirts that have been too big for my scrawny frame since the first day I bought them; their departure is long overdue.

I’ve also begun making changes in my computer use.  Patton Oswalt said in his recent AV Club interview, “You can replace the internet with five really smart friends,” and wow, there are a lot of things I like about that brief quote.  As a technophile, mitigating my habitual and at times junkie-like interaction with personal technology is a difficult and evolving process, but I’ve made a few inroads.  One big help: Leechblock, a Firefox extension that lets you lock yourself out of websites you choose, during time frames you choose.  I’ve configured it to keep me away from Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and several other sites after 9 PM.  It also locks me out of certain sites after a time limit of my choosing; this keeps me from spending all day on 4chan or some other such internet sinkhole.  Per Aldous Huxley via Neil Postman, I’ve ruined many hours on the internet, and I’d really, really like that to stop.

This post will have to end here.  I’m approaching the dangerously recursive territory of losing sleep to spend time on the computer writing a blog about how I should spend less time on the computer.

The burden of choice

Lately I’ve been mining the archives of presentations at the annual TED conference.  Each 20-minute talk addresses a subject from the field of technology, entertainment, or design, and many are presented by geniuses: Stephen Hawking and Frank Gehry’s talks are lined up in my downloads right now.  Three of the talks that I watched recently share a common theme: choice.  Their juxtaposition in my queue was coincidental, but maybe I selected them through a subconscious desire to excuse my occasionally lousy decision-making skills.  (I tend to vacillate endlessly and research exhaustively when presented with an important decision, such as which new brand of toothpaste to try.)

Barry Schwartz – The paradox of choice

More options don’t always result in greater satisfaction.  In this talk, Schwartz discusses the hidden costs that come with freedom of choice.  In his words, they are:

1. Regret and anticipated regret
2. Opportunity costs
3. Escalation of expectations
4. Self-blame

There’s an excellent anecdote in there about buying jeans that illustrates his point perfectly.

Malcolm Gladwell – What we can learn from spaghetti sauce

Gladwell explains how experimental psychologist Howard Moskowitz handles the difficult task of figuring out what we want when we don’t really know what we want, and how companies use the results to provide us with choices that didn’t previously exist.

If I asked all of you, for example, in this room what you want in a coffee, you know what you’d say?  Every one of you would say, “I want a dark, rich, hearty roast.” … What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast?  According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent.  Most of you like milky, wheat coffee.  But you will never ever say to someone who asks you what you want that I want a milky, wheat coffee.

David Pogue – When it comes to tech, simplicity sells

Pogue argues convincingly that extra features commonly hurt tech products.  I agree wholeheartedly, as this idea has fueled my recent interest in interaction design.  My favorite part comes at the end, when Pogue praises the latest version of his favorite speech recognition software.  The new version added no new features; the company just greatly improved the speech recognition accuracy and made the software much more enjoyable to use.

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PS – Our houseguests this week are Lucy’s comics friend Erika Moen (who does the fabulous webcomic DAR, please check it out) and her husband, Matt Nolan.  To see Erika interview Lucy, check out The Erika Moen Show on Ustream.

Externalizing my brainwaves

For starters, new blog with zee puppets.

 

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It's a new year, folks!  Did you rock in 2008?  Did you suck?  Yes, you sucked?  Is it time to stop sucking so much?  There are a number of things I'd like to work on in 2009: regrowing an attention span, not being a jerk to my mom when she asks me computer questions (ugh, so bad at this... sorry, Ma), getting more sleep like I promise myself I'm going to do EVERY SINGLE YEAR...

I'd also like to do a better job getting my thoughts in order.  These days, it feels like I keep ideas in too many places.  Here are some (not all) of the ways that I'm recording the thoughts that are worth saving - in other words, these are notes about my notes.

 

Text files (Google Docs & Microsoft Word)

All-purpose, simple, effective.  I use them for all sorts of lists, like words I love (most recent addition: zaftig) or blog ideas.  Lately I'm using Google Docs more often for the simple interface and the ability to view the files at any time from my iPhone.

 

Mind maps

Long my preferred method of choice for taking notes at work, via the freeware Java application Freemind (shown in the screenshot).  Mind maps make connections between ideas much more visual.  They're perfect for concepts with a hierarchical structure, which might be why I've found them so useful for tracking projects at the office.

 

Google Notebook

Great for capturing info on the web, especially with the Firefox Google Notebook extension: highlight some text, right click, and choose "Note this"; the text is recorded in your notebook, along with the web page title, a link to the page, and the date the note was recorded.  Tagging and search capabilities help you track things down, so you don't lose track of that great Churchill quote you wrote down a few months ago.

 

legal pads

I keep one at my desk and one on my nightstand for writing down the stuff that pops into my head right before falling asleep.  It's easier to relax when you don't have to worry whether or not you'll remember to add gummy bears to the grocery list for your fancy dinner party tomorrow; write it down and fall asleep with a clear mind.

 

back pages of books

Only done this a few times with my non-fiction reading.  It's nice having the notes on hand whenever I'm reading, and I try to fit them all on a single page that I can reference quickly.

 

I'm really interested to hear anyone's suggestions on this topic, so fire away.

Stories of the Road returns soon with a new international edition!

obsessed with Google Tech Talks

Reason #852 why it's awesome to work for Google: the company frequently brings in really interesting guest speakers and gives you the opportunity to attend for free.  Also, in another Google act of web benevolence, most of these lectures are recorded and posted on the Google Tech Talks YouTube channel where anyone can view them for free.  One of my coworkers pointed me to Merlin Mann's lecture on time and attention and I've been hooked on the channel ever since.  Usually I just let it play in the background while I'm working, but that doesn't always result in the best comprehension so I usually end up listening to each talk a number of times.  In the past week I've spent a few hours listening to each of these speakers:

• David Allen talked about some principles of his Getting Things Done (GTD) system, which is all the rage these days among organization freaks (like, ahem, yours truly).
• Tim Ferriss - entrepreneur, mixed martial artist, record-holding tango dancer, and author of The 4-Hour Work Week - explained some of the tips he uses to save time and travel the world.
• Soren Gordhamer gave a talk called "Stress Relief for the Creative and Constantly Connected," based on his book of the same name. 

It's kind of funny that I've been listening to all of these lectures on personal productivity and stress relief this week; I've never had fewer tasks to juggle (one) than I do at my current client.

Other cool-sounding talks that I'm queuing up for next week:

• How Ant Colonies Get Things Done
• Cooperation and Engagement: What can board games teach us?
• Poker Teaches, presented by Charles Nesson, Harvard Law professor and founder of the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society

Google, I heart you.

John Horstman, the recommendation engine

Hey gang.  Since my last post was all about recommendations made by computers, I thought I'd balance that out with some recommendations made by humans - namely, me.  The following recommendations are my attempt to better your lives.

Now that it's not so cold that every moment spent outdoors is spent swearing, I've started taking walks and listening to podcasts.  This American Life, The Savage Lovecast and Meet the Press are all about an hour long and updated weekly.  A single episode episode of any of these shows makes for a perfect companion to your daily constitutional.

Forget the iTunes Store.  From here forward, there's no reason not to buy your digital music from Amazon instead.  It's cheaper, it has no DRM, and it comes in .mp3 format (as opposed to the .m4p files Apple sells, which can only be played with iPods/iTunes).

If you've always found online blog authoring tools to be too clunky, give Windows Live Writer a shot.  It's an offline tool that's helped me to rediscover the joy of blogging.  Adding links, pictures, tags, video, etc. has never been easier.  You can save drafts of your blogs, preview them before you post, and when they're ready to go you can publish directly to most blogging services with a single click.

Watch Helvetica.  It's a documentary about a font.  And I love it.

Listen to the new song I posted to the Tiger Stance MySpace page a week ago, Trees in Retrograde.  Here it is:

Read Lucy's blog.  Seriously!  It's so good!  She updates regularly, she gets plenty of comments from her fans, and most of the posts include a new comic.  Also, I'm in there sometimes.

Finally, I'm participating in Walk Now for Autism this May, so if you'd like to do a little bit of good in the world then I recommend that you make a donation on my page.

New puppet blog to come soon, featuring puppet me!

Knowing you better than you know yourself

In his 2005 interview with Giant Robot magazine (.pdf posted here), the artist Ryan McGinness (whose work is featured at the beginning and end of this blog) talks about how the role of the curator is increasingly important as it becomes easier and easier for people to produce creative output.  McGinness says that technology has created many more writers (thanks to blogs), musicians (thanks to cheaper computers and recording software), etc., and that it is "more and more difficult to separate the extraordinary from the average."  That observation has always stuck with me because it struck me as an excellent observation, and it becomes especially interesting when extended beyond creative output to apply to information as a whole.

The strength of the curator lies in finding someone whose tastes you trust - in a way, someone whose tastes are similar to yours.  Many internet sites now provide us with automatic curators in the form of recommendation engines, the algorithms that try to figure out what you might like based on what you do like.  The interesting thing that distinguishes recommendation engines from curators is the absence of another human being's bias; recommendation engines make us curators for ourselves.

For example, the Amazon.com homepage will display products that you might be interested in purchasing based on the products you've looked at in the past.  Usually the connections are pretty obvious here: you'll see books by the same author, movies with the same actor, and so on.  A more sophisticated and impressive recommendation engine powers the internet radio site Pandora, which builds radio stations based around certain artists.  I created a Pixies radio station and Pandora started lining up songs that featured "electric rock instrumentation, punk influences, a vocal-centric aesthetic, minor key tonality, and electric guitar riffs."  A Talking Heads radio station played music with "basic rock song structures, subtle use of vocal harmony, extensive vamping, a vocal-centric aesthetic, and major key tonality."  In each case, the recommendations are only about one step away from a personal preference you've demonstrated to the engine.

Many recommendation engines are perpetually being tweaked in a quest to find the best possible combination of algorithms to get inside your head.  In fact, Netflix is holding a contest to see if anyone can build a recommendation engine that is 10% better than their current engine at guessing how many stars you will give a movie.  The prize: $1,000,000.  The Netflix executives have said that they're not sure how to quantify the financial benefit of a better recommendation engine, but they're positive that it's worth more than a million dollars.

Recommendations don't just help us to find new products to spend money on (and hey, who doesn't need help with that?); they help us to find emotional fulfillment.  Dating sites are starting to evolve beyond simple search algorithms.  eHarmony prompts you to move beyond "traditional" dating by using their patented Compatibility Matching System to pre-screen partners across 29 dimensions.  Whether or not this system facilitates a more satisfied clientele than a rival dating site with a more primitive matching system - like, oh, I don't know, Adult Friend Finder - remains to be proven.

Attention span approaching zero

For those who haven't seen this yet on my tumblog, here's proof that my girlfriend is the best girlfriend in the world. In your face, chumps!



I remember reading something online a little while back about how Google is actually having a detrimental effect on people's memory skills. Because so much information is now available at all times and can be accessed with a negligible amount of effort, not only is there less incentive to retain information but the ways that we acquire that information are less thorough. These days, you can answer pretty much any bit of trivia that pops into your head - like, what's the name of that caveman-looking dude from Boogie Nights? - within 30 seconds of conceiving the thought.

Tyler & I talked about this yesterday and he said that he read something else about how the internet is actually making a number of us better learners and communicators. I think the reasoning there is that we have to clearly organize our thoughts in order to make the best use of a search algorithm, or to write a blog interesting enough that anyone will actually read it.

Um... I wish I had the links to back these up, but I couldn't find either of these articles via Google. So much for answering any question in 30 seconds.

Maybe the verdict is still out on technology's effect on memory, but I can say definitively that my attention span has been destroyed by my gadget lust. I can't read an article online, listen to a complete song, write an email, or even make it to the end of most YouTube videos without stopping at least 5 times to search for random shit, relevant or otherwise. At the beginning of my workday today, I caught myself listening to my iPod while reading a New York Times article on my phone and writing a 3 sentence email that took me almost 10 minutes to complete. Some would call that multitasking, but that description is a little too flattering.

In somewhat related news, today I created an account on twitter, which is a microblog that provides a service along the lines of the Facebook feed by allowing you to keep in touch with your friends in the most trivial and expedient way possible. Feel free to sign up and friend me!