darkblog resonate

when i was renewing my car insurance, the rep over the phone clued me in to a new service that they’re offering called “MyRate”. it works like this:

you sign up for the MyRate plan. They send you a piece of hardware that you plug into your OBD-II port. According to the rep on the phone, it tracks three things: time of day that you drive, total miles driven, and statistics on acceleration and deaccelaration (not speed).

every six months or so, that information is uploaded to Progressive who analyze the data and then can either give you a hefty discount (up to 25% i think) or an increase (up to 9%) on your car insurance when it comes time to renew.

it’s an interesting concept, and i’m not sure how i feel about it. the main issue is, of course, privacy and what the balance is between saving money versus handing over detailed information about your driving times and driving habits. i’ve done some basic research online about it and the attitudes are very divided between those that say, “it’s awesome because i’m a safe driver” and those that say, “this has potentially dangerous implications for the mere savings of $30/month at minimum”.

for me, there’s a part of me that feels like it isn’t a big deal, but there’s an instinct that tells me that handing over that data is important and shouldn’t be taken lightly. I remember a long time ago Laurel mentioned something about supermarket cards, about how for the end user it seems harmless enough and saves money on those key money-saving items, but what people don’t know is that those companies can sell the data collected about the groceries that you buy to the likes of health insurance companies who can then offer or modify offered policies based on the data they’ve received.

But again, that sort of instinct - how important is it in the grand scheme of things for that information to be Actually Private, especially given my generally not-so-bad driving habits?

let’s work it out in my head.

maybe the instinct comes from what the big picture message is. In forming a relationship with people or with a business partner or whatever, there’s various rituals that you can do that are designed to inspire and forge trust between both parties. I keep a friend’s secret, i help him/her through it, he develops more trust in me. This company signs a mutually beneficial contract with that company, they both profit, they both are happy, they develop trust in each other. Usually in those instances, the trust has to be some sort of exchange. “Trust us, and we’ll trust you back,” or “give us an opportunity to trust you, and we’ll offer you the ability to trust us back.”

But in this instance, it’s not about mutual trust. Progressive is saying, “give us a reason to trust you, and we’ll give you money.” There aren’t any upfront promises about tangible reasons to trust progressive more as a result of the transaction. it’s as if Bob comes up to me and says, “I have a secret i want to tell you. Can i trust you?” And i come back and say, “i can’t tell you whether or not you can trust me or not, but if you tell me the secret regardless of that, i’ll give you $100.”

Putting it that way makes the MyRate idea seem like an amazingly unfair exchange. If i make no promises on what i do with the information Bob gives me, the allure of the money diminishes in proportion to the importance of the secret. If Bob says, “i peed my pants earlier today”, surely it’s embarrassing and could be the sort of thing i leak onto the internet with no real claim to truth, so the $100 may be worth that. But what if Bob tells me, “i stole money from the cash reigster” or “i raped this girl the other night” or “i killed someone” and tells me exactly where and how? Is the allure of money worth the lack of trust?

In this case, the implications and potential uses of the information we agree to share is likely invisible to us; again, a situation where the allure of the discount supercedes the need to question. Not only that, but the rules behind the terms of the discount and how it works is likely completely in the hands of Progressive as well; it’s not an agreement where i can say, “give me x discount if i only drive x miles and accelerate unsafely only x times a month.” it’s more progressive saying, “we’ll give you a discount in whatever way we see fit. we reserve to change this criteria at any time.”

i need to think about it more, but ultimately it feels like the wrong thing to do. i welcome any thoughts on the matter.

originally posted on darkblog resonate. i prefer any comments there.

Tags: Progressive, technology

people that don’t know me that well could find it head-scratchable to hear “anti-smoking adverts make me want to start smoking” come out of my mouth, particularly given my history of asthma. i’ll admit that as a non-smoker it’s nice to be in a public place and not have to deal with a stale smoke haze, particularly when i’m trying to eat. But the ire that gets raised in me when it comes to the concept of anti-smoking laws and general anti-smoking attitudes tends to supercede my own personal comfort because the principle behind it is something i’m strongly against.

This has come up in two recent forms. First, it’s possible that smoking will be banned in bars and casinos in louisiana, a surprising move given the sort of culture i’m living in. Second, i discovered that anti-smoking regulations in Oregon have become even more strict than they have before, moving beyond merely “can’t smoke inside of buildings” to “can’t smoke in outside areas that are mostly enclosed” or something similar, meaning that outside patio areas that have walls (such as the back area of the Espresso Roma in Eugene) is now non-smoking, giving those customers absolutely no place to sit down to have coffee and a cigarette.

To be clear, i think that there’s benefit to having non-smoking restaurants, particularly a family sort of establishment. although the true effects of second-hand smoke is widely debatable, the air quality difference is something that i think could deter proper enjoyment of good food, and i think that exposure to that sort of atmosphere to kids of non-smoking parents is a good thing to avoid. The problem is that the blanket regulation of non-smoking as a state law has now been used as a ‘gateway drug’, a precedent to instill similar regulations in establishments in which that context has less relevance. bars and casinos are 18 and over establishments. Everyone who enters such an establishment is an adult and should be allowed to make their own choices about whatever unhealthy habits they want, beit smoking or drinking or putting their money down on a situation that has unfavorable long term expectation.

There’s an argument out there about how “if i choose to drink, that’s my choice. But if someone else is smoking and i’m breathing it in, that’s not my choice.” I understand the sentiment, but the issue i have with that is that the solution that was put into place as a result of that has gone too far; blanket regulation of non-smoking in enclosed spaces eliminated the concept of individual choice in favor of a faulty sense of rights. Somewhere, the anti-smoking movement decided that they should have the right to go anywhere and not have to smell cigarette smoke, and innately that feels very wrong to me because of how it blatantly disregards the rights of smokers and those that don’t mind and/or like cigarette smoke. Where does the line stop? Will we eventually have non-smoking sidewalks because the anti-smoking movement can come up with some biased research that if a non-smoker happens to breathe in smoke from a passers-by that it will decrease that non-smoker’s lifespan by a day? Will it hit a point where cigarette smokers will have to buy some sort of bubble and any time they want to smoke they have to do it inside the bubble?

To me, a better solution is to find some middle ground. Suppose you left the choice up to an individual establishment whether or not they were going to allow smoking or have a smoking and non-smoking section. Sure, if the top restaurant offered smoking in their establishment, the non-smoker reaction is something like, “but then i can’t or don’t want to eat that signature steak dish.” But that would also be true if you were a vegetarian. Or if the top chef only served spicy food and you didn’t like spicy food. You miss out, whether for health reasons or personal comfort reasons or what not, and that’s life.

Now, the idea of having smoking and non-smoking be a choice of an individual establishment creates some other issues having to do with customer base. Depending on the atmosphere of the community, businesses are going to lean one way or the other in order to be competitive. In a city like new orleans, given two bars of equal quality and repute, the one that chooses to be non-smoking would more profit less and even go out of business, so they’re not going to do that, and as a result of most bars having that attitude, non-smokers would be hard-pressed to find a permanent place where they could go to enjoy a smoke-free atmosphere. Maybe the solution to that would be to have some sort of ‘cigarette license’ in the same way that Oregon distinguishes between a beer license versus a liquor license.

Unfortunately, all of that is useless speculation as the general national aesthetic would never move in a direction that would respect both the rights of smokers and non-smokers simultaneously, and it generally disheartens me because it’s another example of how society can isolate, put the microscope on, and pass judgement on an individual or a group of people based on a label. “oh, she’s a smoker. oh, he’s overweight. oh, she’s sleeping with a few different guys. that’s just wrong. i think we should put them into a box over there far away from me so i don’t have to see them or deal with them or have that be a part of my world.” there’s a fine line between that being an acceptable form of personal bias/judgement call versus becoming the new version of racism. hopefully we can hit a point where societal trends will take the blur of that line into sharper focus than what i feel it is now.

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Originally posted on resonate. I prefer any feedback or commentary there.

Tags: new orleans, politics, smoking

for various reasons that would be highly tangental to this post, the tulane band staff recently got iPhones to use as work mobiles.

a few people who know me pretty well said, “it’s funny to think of you with an iPhone,” and it’s true. i’ve stated a few times on this poor excuse for a blog how i distinguish between technology innovations that i feel are practical or useful or worthy of note versus technology innovations that are fluffy and uninspiring, and in my previous post i went off on how mobile and easy-to-access internet potentially creates a new psychological standard that is hazardous to our mental health. I’d used the iPhone a few times before, borrowing from one of my colleagues, and I was highly undecided about whether i thought the technology was of the practical and awesome category or of the fluffy and uninspiring category. Now that i actually own one, it brings to light how the question of which of the two category it belongs to is the the wrong one to ask; it’s not the iPhone itself that can be practical or awesome or uninspiring or fluffy, it’s how people choose to use it.

This is something i had already grokked when it comes to other uses of technology, most notably when it comes to technology with music. Finale was the pioneer of music notation software in the early 90s and as i started to use it as my main tool for music notation, i discovered how easily Finale could be used as a crutch if used the wrong way. Because of the kind of composer i am, the crutch of Finale for me was initially using it too often as a composition tool as opposed to a notation tool, meaning that I would do my composing directly in Finale and use the playback as a measure to “hear” how the piece was going.

I discovered that while there are times when that’s fine and effective for the kind of composition i do, more often than not it would a) limit my compositional creativity and space, putting that music into a particular kind of box that could fall short of its true potential, and b) potentially lock me into treating the crappy MIDI playback file as “this is how the piece will sound” as opposed to trusting how it would sound in my head. As such, i changed how i used the program, first by conceiving it to be the tail end of the process as opposed to the initial process by sketching my ideas out on paper first to get a big picture and some details of what the piece would turn into and then put the notes into Finale using it to fill in the blanks; secondly, by preferring to hear everything on a piano voice as opposed to their crappy MIDI instrument equivalents so that playback was used only to double-check harmony and pacing and not to represent the actual color, timbre, or overall feel of the piece.

Additionally, the training that i had as an electronic musician from two excellent professors (Larry Nelson and Jeffery Stolet) as well as some strong influence from Robert Maggio in one of my undergraduate compositions originally written for solo mallet player and electronic accompaniment taught me an important lesson about the representation of real instruments using electronic sounds, namely to avoid it as much as possible. Now if i’m going to write an electronic music piece where i want a piano or a flute sound, i prefer to use acoustic samples or live performers rather than try to emulate those sounds electronically; electronic music in that context is better suited to creating sounds not duplicatable by other means. Again, how someone uses the technology being the problem rather than the technology itself.

The iPhone has a large potential for abuse and fluff, and worse, a psychology that can convince people that these potential misuses are a neccessity. The easiest example is email accessability; the ability to check and reply to emails on the go has its uses, but for some it’s become an expectation, and it creates a newer kind of social structure that has staggering implications - and it’s not even necessarily an expectation of the person who receives email on the go, but an expectation of the sender who knows that the recipient has email on the go. They send the email and in knowing that the other person can receive it right away can then make assumptions based on whether they get an immediate reply, such as “oh, he didn’t reply to my email right away. he must be ignoring me.” While the social tension from that may be small in comparison to, say, not inviting your best friend to your birthday party, enough of that can start to create a pollution that is grounded on a particular understanding of email etiquette that could be completely false.

But again, while issues like that may be more easily brought to the surface because of the technology available, assigning the blame to those issues on the technology as opposed to how it’s used is an important distinction. The iPhone itself and what it has to offer is a pretty fantastic piece of technology in many ways both subtle and obvious, and while it has its share of issues, some of those i can temper based on how i incorporate it into my life. In particular, i’m very picky about how i use the internet on my iPhone, restricting myself mainly to email only, and then using the web only occasionally to keep up on livejournal and facebook, with the occasional wikipedia lookup when necessary.

After familiarizing myself with the iPhone and immersing myself more in the iPhone “culture” as it were, i can pick out what i feel is the strongest positive and negative thing about the whole deal. The positive is how the iPhone has helped revitalize the shareware paradigm that died after its prominence in the pre-broadband and pre internet 2.0 era. At first, the idea of applications that were “lite” versus “full versions” bothered me, but the more i thought about it the more i generally appreciated that the $1 and $5 application market exists as an avenue for basic apps and for the independent developers.

(Granted, i don’t know what sort of control Apple exerts over what gets put into the App store or anything else behind the scenes, and there’s the negative side effect of how some of those apps contribute to the overall fluff aspects of the iPhone.)

The strongest negative to me is that although i acknowledge that the iPhone is groundbreaking technology for the mobile phone market, i still feel that there has been too much value placed on the product rather than its innovation, and that has largely to do with Apple successfully marketing the iPhone to all demographics; as a power tool for corporate business folk, and as the new trendy technology fad for teenagers and college folk. As a result, AT&T can jack the price for a data plan and text messaging for the iPhone higher than that of other phones. This may be justified at some level due to the difference in the speed of the 3G network, but the extra price option isn’t sold that way, it’s sold as being “because you’re using an iPhone.” Those subtle forms of focus-shifting to increase the strength of the brand are the sort of thing that i both admire and loathe.

but more importantly, since the iPhone has defined the next generation of mobile phone technology, every other mobile company was forced to create their own copycat version of the iPhone in order to keep up with the trend. The best example of this haphazard copycatting was the LG Voyager. When the Voyager was first launched, it was basically a touch screen version of the LG enV; in other words, a touch screen phone in which the touch screen aspect added nothing to the functionality of the phone because the firmware was identical to the non-touch screen enV. Granted, they put out firmware updates and patches that started to use that, but instead of hammering all of that out and then releasing the product separately, they rushed the Voyager out hastily so they could boast that they had a touch screen too.

And as more of these touchscreen phones and 3g phones come out, i can’t help but feel that what the general consumer is starting to demand from its mobile phone is moving in the wrong direction, that instant connectivity at your fingertips, while having its benefits, will continue to enforce a set of values to this and future generations that i feel needs to be tempered or at least balanced.

as a post-note, i may blog a more technical review of the iPhone in the near future, as there’s a lot milling about in my brain about the effectiveness of the iPhone versus other mobile devices for what it is designed to do.

originally posted on darkblog resonate. i prefer any feedback or commentary there.

Tags: apple, composition, iPhone, technology, trends

i think most people would agree that i am generally an embracer of technology and the use of technology to enrich work, lives, arts, &c. in middle school and high school i was the geek who was addicted to video games, excited to learn how to use computers, and spent hours logging on to BBS’s everywhere in the Pennsylvania area to chat, play online games, and the like. I’m an advocate of technology in classical music, having composed several works of music for live performer and an ‘intelligent’ computer that reacts to what’s being played or reacts to the performer breaking an infrared beam. In my job prior to my current one, I was part of a team of reporting and reporting system analysts who were very tech-saavy, and we were always enthusiastic about (as my boss liked to put it) “moving reporting into 21st century”, streamlining as many data points as we could so that the company could receive relevant data quickly, accurately, and with as little human intervention or manipulation as possible.

But there’s a distinction i make between technology that i feel serves as positive enrichment versus progress-hindering. A while back i wrote a reaction to the Robotic Drumstick Haptic Guidance System, and i still stand by its thesis that such a device is poorly conceived as a pedagogical tool and that anyone who uses this as the basis for their musical knowledge and understanding could become an excellent “note player” but would become a poor musician.

i’ve also gone off on why i further disliked iPods when they could start playing movies and i still find value in that stance, although i think it needs to be refined somewhat. There’s no doubt that sometimes kids need attention and sometimes a parent needs to focus on other things. Distractions are a good answer to that, but i think that distractions need to be approached cautiously, first in the kind of distraction involved (i like to think that some degree of cognitive distraction is better than nonsense distraction), and secondly in the mindset that distractions of that sort of nature should never be an excessive or complete answer to everything (like if the iPod runs out of battery during a long car ride, the parents have no idea what to do beacause they’ve never actually talked to their kid in the car before). In that sense, the use and/or abuse of technology has to do with degrees and where to define the threshold of something moving from enriching/harmless distraction to harmful and potential long-term negative effects.

And now there’s a new technology trend that i feel is teetering dangerously away from its initial positive enrichment to progress hindering and backwards thinking: too much accesible information.

In the decades in which the World Wide Web continued to develop and grow, there were various stages of mindsets. In the early days, it was a “i can find useful academic information” mindset. As the internet became more mainstream and information outside of academics started to gain presence on the web, the mindset evolved into, “I might be able to find some of the answers i need on the web.” And then in what i consider the post-Google era, the mindset evolved into, “I can find anything on the web!”, or slightly more sinister, “Why can’t i find everything on the web?”

in a lot of ways, i think the easy access to any sort of information or opinions and the ability for so many people to connect in ways that weren’t possible before is fantastic and has a lot of potential to be more on the positive enrichment side of things. the problem is that there’s as much useless information as there is useful information out on the internet, and the ability to pull up any information at any point can make it too easy for people to transfix themselves on trivial information that ultimately serves no real purpose, and with the recent surge of mobile internet trend set by Apple and the iPhone, people can now increase their habit of merrily finding out whatever they want whenever they want whether they need to or not.

Let’s take a hypothetical example and compare mentalities:

You’re walking in the park or in a long car ride or whatever with a friend and you’re discussing the three live action x-men movies. In trying to compare the three movies, you remember that in the last movie, Kitty Pryde has more of a spotlight role than the previous two movies and that triggers a question, “wasn’t Kitty Pryde played by a different actress in the second movie? maybe even the first?”

in today’s Mobile internet world, finding the answer to that is a snap. pull out your smartphone, go to IMDB or wikipedia, find the answer you’re looking for instantly.

in yesterday’s world of internet-houses-all-information, you have to wait until you’re in front of a computer to find the answer. So one of two things happens: a) after the long car ride, you remember that this was information you wanted to know, so you find a computer, find your answer, and receive satisfaction for having answered an unanswered question, or b) you completely forget that you were curious about this tidbit of trivia and the question never gets answered which is fine because you didn’t remember that you asked the question in the first place.

in the pre-internet era, finding the answer would be damned difficult. likely it would involve more thought than the information really warrants; trying to trigger a memory, calling up someone else who has seen the movies on the offchance that they know the answer, or something similar. And eventually in your head you discover the answer (or what you think is the answer) or else you let it go or shelve it for later and move on with your life.

What’s striking to me about all of these scenarios is that i feel that the end result doesn’t actually change anything or fulfill any sort of enrichment. Whether you discover the answer to that question or *any* trivia question or not, the path that your life is taking remains the same. You could say that now you know something that you didn’t, but that doesn’t say much about how well you will retain that information (and in a world where the information is readily at your fingertips, there is less incentive to retain it on your own) nor does it speak to the value of the information.

So then you may argue, “if the end result is the same, then why does it matter? If immediate access to the information is a different means to the same sort of end, then i don’t see the problem.”

The problem is two-fold:

First, the easier it is to discover useless information, the more useless information people will fill their lives with. In the above example, particularly with IMDB and wikipedia, it becomes too easy to start link-hopping to tangenting articles, statistics, and other random findings. Oh, that’s right, Kitty was played by Ellen Page in the last x-men movie. I wonder what else she was in? Ooooh, she was the one that was the lead role in Juno! I loved that movie! When did that come out again? oh, i didn’t know that John Malcovich produced it! That “Being John Malcovich” movie was so cool. Didn’t that have John Cusack in it?… and on and on and on, so that now a harmless curiosity with a simple ten second answer turns into a thirty-minute tangent filled with information that is likely forgotten a month later, and that thirty minutes could have been used in a different way. And sometimes that thirty minutes can turn into hours of wasted time.

Secondly, becoming used to a paradigm in which information is expected to be so accessible can resultingly cause a new kind of psychological anxiety when that information is no longer accessible or if a partiuclar piece of information is not easy to find. this is well parodied in the South Park episode Over Logging, and it’s also reminiscent of the reason why i decided a long time ago to never wear a wristwatch which i blogged about on oscillate in 2004:

many many years ago i wore a watch around my wrist and… I reached a point where i would look at the time every two minutes out of habit, and that evolved into a *need* to know what time it was every second. I remember distinctly the first time i forgot my watch or lost my watch and there was no time piece nearby. i was in a state of total panic. I felt so afraid and insecure and alone and kept on looking around everywhere for something or someone to tell me what time it was. After that i… vowed never to ever wear a wristwatch on a regular basis ever again, opting for some sort of pocket timekeeper instead. because of this, a) i’m a much more relaxed individual, and b) i’ve developed the skill of knowing pretty accurately what time it is when asked even if the last time i checked a watch was hours before.

While not exactly analagous, i think it’s a close enough resemblance: we’ve reached a point in our culture where the expectation of information is so great that any information gaps regardless of its value can cause stress.

Again, the issue i have isn’t really with the technology itself, it’s with how it’s being applied. And it’s something that i have to be particularly careful about because of my own addicition to information. i love absorbing a wide variety of information whether important or not, and it’s for this reason that i’ve determined that mobile internet and smartphones are something i need to keep out of my life or give myself strict restrictions on how and when it is used. i’ve developed enough bad internet habits as it is.

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Originally posted on darkblog resonate. I prefer any thoughts or comments there.

Tags: apple, iLife, oscillate, South Park, technology, trends

i have to give Steve Jobs props for revitalizing Apple as a dying company when he helped introduce all things iBrand back in the late 90’s and early 00’s. The first iMac was noteworthy for its attempt to make computers fashionable and helped to establish the momentum that paved the way to the iPod, the iBook, the iLife software suite, and now the iPhone craze.

As a loyal supporter of Apple computers since about 1994, the direction that Jobs has taken Apple gives me mixed feelings. On the one hand, it’s nice to see a company that was such an underdog to Microsoft bring itself back into the spotlight, and i admire the company for finding ways to evolve outside of its original box and continue to push technology innovation and trends. The iPod pretty much blew away any existing portable MP3 player at the time through its marketing scheme; the iBook (and now the MacBook) has helped make laptops of any sort more mainstream, affordable, and trendy, and the iPhone caused all of the competing mobile phone manufacturers to scatter like chickens with their heads cut off to develop their own touchscreen smartphones.

But a side effect of the growth and development of that level of iCraze is that Apple’s flagship product of desktop computers (currently the Mac Pro) has further distanced itself from the mass market.

yesterday when i went to the lakeside mall i decided to skim my way through the new Apple store that had only recently opened there. the last time i was in an apple store was a couple of years ago in san francisco, and at that time i was going in with the attitude of ‘let’s just wander around’ as opposed to this time, which was ‘let’s assess the situation’.

and as i walked around this particular store, i saw iPods and iPod accessories, iPhone and iPhone accessories, iMac and iMac accessories, and MacBooks - none of which i was looking for. There was no sign of the Mac Pro, no corner where a user looking for a more power computer user that has expandability out the wazoo could find information. It made me think that the store should have changed its name from the Apple Store to the iTrend store.

And this reflects a particular attitude that Apple seems to have about their two lines of desktop computers. The Mac Pro is a powerful machine and has been generally received well by the critics, but Apple decided once it went Intel to make it such an Ultimate High-End Machine that it doesn’t pander well to the consumer market. The base model starts at about $2300 (without monitor) and customizing the machine to give it more oomph can easily put it into the $3500-$4000 range. For what you get that’s not unreasonable (from what i understand after basic digging) but the bottom line is still pretty steep and more computer than most people have a need for.

Which is fine because it’s nice that that option is available, but the problem is that the only alternative cheap option is the iMac. The base model of the iMac is $1200 (without a need for a monitor) and can be upgraded and oomphed up to a price that hits the low end of the Mac Pro specs for a much relatively cheaper cost. And i’d be completely happy with that except that the All-In-One design of the iMac restricts the kind of expandability that i’ve always had and still want with my desktops. i want multiple RAM slots and multiple PCI slots and multiple hard drive and optical bays. i want the ability to add a second monitor to my set up and then replace it if i get a new one or need to transfer my current monitor somewhere else. I want to be able to put in a RAID card or upgrade my graphics card. etcetera.

Ideally it would be nice if Apple brought back the PowerMac series as a reasonable compromise to fill that gap: consumer level processing options but with the expandability of the Mac Pro. I believe the audience is out there - the ones who want a compact and efficient workstation that gets the job done but can be modded as time goes by. A Powermac G6 could start somewhere mid iMac price range and ramp up to the beginning of the Mac Pro range, offering similar if not identical processor specs to the iMac.

But honestly i don’t see that happening any time in the near future. Apple’s desktop computers already seemed to be taking a backseat in development before the iPhone came out; now, between the newest MacBook Pros, the MacBook Airs, the iPhones, the iPods, &c., i think that the Mac desktops will continue to fade into a niche obscure market and fanbase comparable to that of Linux.

Which for me means two options: buy an old Mac Pro or G5 off of a distributor site that’s cheaper and more in line with what i want, or, for the first time in many years, consider buying/building a Windows machine as my main operating computer.

Buying a Windows machine as my main computer seems absurd because i’m much more comfortable with macintosh hardware and software, and i have all of these programs and files and archives of things that are Mac only. I hate Windows Vista, am not terribly fond of Windows XP, and don’t relish having to find a whole new suite of applications that will likely be unable to read my mac files.

And yet it still falls under consideration simply because of the question: “what do i really need in a computer and how much is that need worth?” against all other considerations it seems horribly imbalanced, but it’s a valid concern since there are many other things i should be using my money for other than a $4k computer and i bet i’d be able to build a PC that meets my needs for half that price (although i’m not sure if i feel like it will last as long).

But we’ll see. All this is moot until 2009 in any case, so when it becomes relevant i’ll look at the current offerings both present and recent past and then assess the situation then.

originally posted on darkblog resonate. comments are preferred there.

Tags: apple, technology, trends

video games have evolved a great deal since their introduction a few decades ago, and to me, the past couple of years have shown an interesting shift in the popular video game trend and its audience that feels like its bringing the entire history of video gaming around full circle.

in its infancy, “video game” meant “arcade game”, starting (essentially) with Pong and then developing into a thriving arcade culture of individuals who plopped quarter after quarter gobbling pellets, shooting asteroids or space invaders, or jumping over barrels. And whlie my personal experience in arcades growing up didn’t match the stereotype of angsty/rebellious teenagers, society definitely bought into that impression on both sides of the fence, and as the popularity of video games started to rise so did the concern of parents that video games were a bad influence on youth. Video games are a waste of money, they make our kids not interested in reading, they make our kids violent or lose touch with the real world, &c.

It’s impossible to say where video games would be right now if the Nintendo Entertainment System hadn’t revitalized the home video game industry after the video game crash of 1983. I think it was likely a mixed blessing for arcade machine developers; on the one hand, the success of the NES console took people away from the arcades and more money into cartridges, but on the other hand, if the NES hsdn’t resurged video gaming back into popular culture, the arcade industry would have probably died on its own.

The interesting thing to note about the arcade industry versus the home industry was how those competing yet co-dependent paths slowly diverged over time both in society’s attitudes about them and the experiences they tried to create. During the third and fourth generation of home consoles from the mid-80s to late-90s, home consoles were still “behind” when it came to replicating the arcade experience. The graphics weren’t as sharp, the home joystick didn’t have the same sort of “feel” as an arcade joystick, and more importantly, home consoles couldn’t match the social aspect of arcade video gaming, particularly in the early 90s when Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat brought people back to the arcades. But the home console market at that time was able to compete in a way that the prior home console market failed because they had a particular slice of video game aesthetic that wasn’t meant to replicate the arcade experience, it was supposed to stand on its own. Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Sonic the Hedgehog, and early RPGs like the early Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior games helped define the home market audience versus the arcade audience.

It was the next generation of video game consoles (Playstation, N64, Saturn) that started to shift the dynamics and attitudes in game development as technology and graphics for home consoles started to accelerate and create the market that still has strong influence today. The long platform/RPG and other “console specialized” sorts of games still had a strong following, but it was also around this time that consoles had advanced enough to create a truer arcade experience or create an experience that (in some views) *surpassed* the arcade experience in gaming. And when the next generation of consoles came out years after (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, Dreamcast), the arcade video game industry had to change its tactic to keep the arcade experience unique, which is how games with non-standard controllers rose to dominance, particularly music video games like Dance Dance Revolution and other bemani.

Through these decades of video game history, the overwhelming majority of consoles and systems were still aimed at the everchanging youth. Video games that were smash hits in the 8-bit era were abandoned as a home market aesthetic in favor of games that emphasized graphic superiority and/or a greater sense of epicism. and as that philosophy of “better graphics! more dazzle! who cares about gameplay? just blow things up!” gained momentem and became a standard to uphold in entertainment in general (don’t even get me started on the Michael Bay’s Transformers), it created a separation between the older and newer generation of gamers, leaving older gamers in the dust.

Until a new video game aesthetic started to creep into the mainstream which in its infancy was pretty invisible to the likes of me but is now impossible to ignore: the online casual flash game.

I’m not sure when casual flash games rose to such popularity, but it’s evident how much it has a strong foothold in the new video gaming culture not just because of the popularity of sites like kongregate, yahoo games, the casual game apps that exist on facebook &c, but also how much prominence casual games have in the current gen. consoles. The PS3 and XBox 360 certainly still have the genre of hardcore gamers that are looking for games that make full use of their power to give them that Next Dazzling first person shooter/racing game/sports game, but there’s an entire online paradigm for both of these consoles that is dedicated to the downloading and buying of casual games not unlike what is possible to do on the internet. In fact, some of the games that are available through those consoles’ online services are ones that were found on the internet first and developed as an enhanced version, such as N+ and Flow.

In addition to this, you have the Wii. Nintendo’s whole marketing strategy for the Wii other than its innovative controls is that it’s the video game console for the whole family, and with launches such as Wii Sports, Wii Play, and the like, it’s clear that part of the new controller design is optimized to help enhance the casual game experience with the unique Wii interface.

When i think about how and why casual games have risen to such prominence, a few key factors come into play. First off, i feel that the online casual flash game was the first video game genre that was targeted towards older people, particularly corporate office workers. Even small businesses have integrated high-speed internet as a part of their infrastructure, and when people need a break and are tired of reading news or looking at pictures or whatever, more people find a casual flash game to occupy their time. it’s the new version of the newspaper crossword puzzle or word scramble, and it succeeds at grabbing that new audience because a) the games are generally simpler in concept and execution than typical video games (compare point and click or finding words as opposed to executing a haryuken), and b) the games are generally short to finish, an instant gratification/momentary distraction sort of thing rather than a long involved mission that involves more walking and random encounters than people want to have even in real life.

Secondly, there’s the ease in which any random joe can program and develop a quality casual game. As opposed to console games which require a team of programmers and artists and what have you to put together, flash is relatively easy enough to learn that basic games can be a one-man show, and with sites like kongregate, they can gain free and instant exposure to tens of thousands of people. It’s even hit a point where those that can’t comprehend Flash can go to sites like simcarnival where a special application exists to make that process even easier, requiring practically no programming experience whatsoever.

Third, and in my opinion the most significant, some of the casual games that have come out of this have risen to true brilliance, and this is where i feel the video game trend has come full circle. Because surely there are current more standard video games that have their own sense of brilliance and success such as WoW or the Final Fantasy series or GTA or Mortal Kombat, but it’s been a long time since there has been a video game in which the brilliance matches the sensibility of how Pac Man and Tetris and Centipede and Asteroids were brilliant, or how Legend of Zelda and the original Super Mario Brothers were brilliant: that despite its seeming simplicity in concept, gameplay, and graphics, they never get tiresome or old.

And because of all of this, i have a suspicion that the Big 3 console companies are on their last legs in the market of video games unless the momentum can be rebuilt up because of the likes of Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Otherwise, i strongly suspect that people will soon be more likely to buy a $5 texas hold ‘em application on their smartphone or pull up a game of chain factor or their favorite kongregate game than spend $50+ on a console video game.

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Originally posted on darkblog resonate. I prefer any thoughts or comments there.

Tags: flash games, technology, trends, video games

Very recently more people from my high school years have been finding me on facebook and friending me. When this first started happening, i was wary to accept their requests, mainly because the people who i’m still friends with from my high school i still keep in contact with, so why would i start rekindling interaction with other former high schoolers whose relationship was such that i haven’t seen or talked to them in over a decade and a half? it again felt like it was a degree of voyeurism and a particular sense of artifice that i touched upon when i first joined facebook.

since then, i’ve been much more open about letting any random high school acquiantance or former friend into my… “facebook life” as a self-psychological experiment, which is too complicated to get into with this entry. And since i’ve started doing this, a particular line of thinking has come into my brain having to do with the difference between facebook users of my high school/college generation versus the current high school/college generation.

For me, seeing these faces come back onto my radar in little snippets slowly but continuously feels like a very time-stretched version of the 10-year or 20-year high school reunion - and those sort of reunions have always seemed odd to me. After high school, i don’t hear anything from some of these people and then a decade later, the fact that we went to the same high school and maybe had passing conversations in the hall or were in classes together during a highly developmental time in our lives is supposed to be some sort of relevant “common ground” to shake hands?

One thing that facebook has taught me about this is that at least in an online concept, going through that is not merely not as painful as i thought it would be, it’s actually fun. i’m so fascinated with people and their experiences in general that any excuse to see where people are in their lives and the direction their paths take is awesome and valuable even if they’re strangers, so having some background on even casual acquaintances and where they are now is fascinating. But with some people, i scratch my head as to why they would be interested in anything about *me*; in my head, i’d be thinking, “who are you again?”, or “didn’t we talk maybe twice in the whole time we were in high school?”, or “didn’t you think i was a total loser?”

granted, again, all of us are in different places than we were, and so maybe the reinteraction is a reflection of that.

I’m tangenting again. The point is, people who use fb that are in high school and college now will never have that “stretched out 10-year reunion” sort of feeling. Facebook takes away that potential whether negative or positive to link to a past that was forgotten because facebook makes it much more difficult to create a true “past”. Ten years from now, they’re not going to be suddenly contacted and friended by people that they haven’t heard from in all that time since high school/college. Instead, ten years from now, they would have been casually reading through ten years of status updates, and casually looking at ten years of photos.

i feel like there’s a significant long-term implication about that, and i’m not quite sure what it is. Maybe just that people who are a part of the current fb generation get more of a blur between what their past is to their present. The cynical side of me thinks that this can be problematic. i’m certainly not the same person now than i was in high school, and some of what i put into the past i want to keep in the past. Seeing how people are now after the decade gap is fine because i see them more the way they are now and how they’ve changed, so they don’t feel as much a part of my past as much as a different form and hybrid version of the present. But with people now, what happens when they change, when their lives meander down different paths and they don’t feel connected to the friends that seemed so important to them in those years? Do they defriend them on fb? ignore them?

And that’s another difference between the current internet generation versus the past non-internet generation: before, when people went their separate ways, it was more acceptable to fall out of contact simply because keeping in contact wasn’t an easy task. Now, even when people move to the other side of the world, the internet can keep them connected whether they want to or not, and there’s almost this internet social stigma, a pressure to not lose touch with people who they may only vaguely know or relate to. You defriend someone on facebook and it can cause drama and turn an anthill into a mountain. “why did she defriend me? are we not friends anymore? do i ask? what does it mean? do we no longer say hi when we pass in the hall? do i not call or invite her to a party if i come back into town visiting?” as if the concept of “friend” on facebook or LJ or anywhere in that “slice of life” paradigm actually is necessarily equivalent to a real friend.

For me, i still have a fairly clear understanding that fb is a mere touchpoint of what actual human interaction is supposed to be about. That said, i do accept it more than i used to because honestly it is kind of nice to see what people from my past are up to and how they’ve changed (or maybe it should be more accurate to say how they present themselves as changed). In the long run, though, it can still feel cheap, especially because since i’m not always the greatest at getting back to people nor sometimes being the most organized about important things, fb can make it seem like those shortcomings are amplified, and that may be somewhat true, but some of it is also sijmply that the more people i get exposed to on fb, the more my people energies can potentially get spread too thin.

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Originally posted on darkblog resonate.  I welcome any thoughts or comments there.

Tags: blog, facebook

it’s odd to think that my first “real” music project in several years is using an aesthetic that i’ve never felt comfortable with - singing and piano accompaniment. One of the last works i wrote as a masters student, Remembrance, is the only serious vocal piece i’ve ever written, and i think i got lucky in how successful i feel it is.

The challenge i have regarding vocal music is three-fold: a) there’s a lot of text out there, and finding text that i would feel comfortable setting to music gives me that whole needle-in-a-haystack feeling, b) once i actually have the text, i can overanalyse exactly how much meaning needs to go into the music to reflect what is occuring in the text, and c) even though i’m a pianist, i’m not that great at writing piano music and piano accompaniment.

But after talking to Jenni on the drive back from the Gustav evacuation, i determined that not using her choir as an available resource to perform some of my creative outlet is simply dumb, so we both talked about me writing a piece for their 2009 performing season.

As i was completing my drive back to NOLA, ideas started flowing into my head - oddly enough, coming up with how i wanted the beginning to start without knowing what the text was going to be. I know that it’s been done before, but i wanted to explore the idea of starting the whole choir doing a “sh” sound that led into music and then turned into text. And this led directly into the next formal idea of the piece, of starting the piece in the *middle* of the text as opposed to the beginning, mainly because i thought it would be too difficult to find a quote or a passage to use in which the first sound was a “sh” sound.

The concept then turned into a hybrid of what Steve Reich did with Proverb - instead of using a long passage and through-composing the music relating to the passage, find a single quote and build the music around the single quote. And since i was looking for the “sh” word to be in the middle of the quote, slowly reveal the quote from the middle outward.

Once i came up with this idea, i asked some people for some of their favourite quotes with “sh” sounds in the middle, and one of my former coworkers from Oregon gave me exactly what i wanted, a quote from Henry Miller:

“in this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.”

The quote is perfect to build from the middle outward because if you isolate the middle of the quote carefully enough, it can seem to convey the complete opposite message of its point: “There is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned.” And instantly the form of the entire piece was in my head. Start with the “sh” sound, develop it into the SA singing “short cut”, develop that into the SA singing “There is a short cut”, then “There is a short cut to everything.” Create a call and response between the SA of that phrase with the TB singing “the greatest lesson to be learned.”

In my head, i have the idea of shifting the perception of the order of the quote at this point to make it seem like “the greatest lesson to be learned” comes *before* “there is a short cut”, so it’s conceivable that maybe i’ll make the TB development phrase “the great lesson to be learned is:”. I may also add “in this age” as an isolated segment so that it can read “in this age, there is a short cut to everything.”

From there, the transition from the deceptive meaning to the actual meaning is still fuzzy in my head. The ending is somewhat uncertain as well, though the idea i have right now is to layer parts of the quote on top of each other as tension into a climax before returning back to “A” accompaniment material (that i use in the beginning) to set the stage for the entire quote being sung in unison at the end, but the “A” accompaniment material takes on a slightly different character (maybe something as simple as minor in the beginning, major at the end).

Having finalized that concept in my head about a week ago, i started to try to put down some of the opening on paper and discovered a couple of issues that i need to work through. The first is that the style of the piece in my head is fairly post-minimalist, but i don’t want to make the piece so minimalist that it’s not enjoyable to perform, and i need to try to keep the piece under seven minutes. Resultingly i’m already shifting some of the creative ideas in my head to allow for more interest and faster development. The second issue is that, as i had stated, i’m not the greatest at writing proper piano accompaniment - most of the piano stuff i’ve written whether accompaniment or soloish or electronic music integrationish has used the piano mainly as a backdrop to create tall chords, and i see this very similarly.

Granted, the accompaniment to Remembrance was fairly successful even with the chordal backdrop because of the bitonality and the rhythmic interest generated - even just the simple two-against-three in the beginning. i don’t conceive of this piece as having much bitonality or pantonality in it, but i may be able to create some sort of countemelody or “future fragments” to generate more interest so long as it doesn’t distract from the main ideas and prevent the choir from finding their pitches. Resultingly i may have to compose the ending fairly soon so i can swipe the material from that final singing of the quote for developmental material in the main part of the piece (a technique i’m quite fond of thanks to one of my former composition professors at West Chester).

Likely i’ll be working out some pacing in my head and then putting more ideas on paper on thursday. Next week will be busy with lots of various marching band stuff and the (hopefully) final stages of unpacking, but at least in the next couple of weeks i want to take some of the sketchwork and do some of the computer notation parts so i can see and hear how it Actually Sounds in my head and figure out if it’s going okay or if it sucks and i need to rewrite it or reconceive my idea.

Tags: composition, music

i’ve always had a pretty healthy disregard for television news and rolling news channels in particular (CNN, Headline News, etc.) but it wasn’t until i watched Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe special on news that i could understand my distaste for it in concrete terms. Now whenever rolling news tries to put itself in the spotlight during big stories, all of the faults that Brooker brings to the forefront seems amplified to me, and now that i live inside of the city of New Orleans, the overhype of hurricane gustav is a glaring example.

clearly anything that has destructive potential of this magnitude is not something to be taken lightly and measures need to be taken to preserve both life and order.  And in that sense, i think the city of New Orleans was fairly successful - the mandatory evacuation of the city, though inconvenient, was, in my opinion, a decent preemptive measure that helped create a sense of calm amongst what was potentially chaotic even though the landfall prediction at the time of hurrication wasn’t slated to hit the city.

the problem is that when something like this is poised to happen, it’s going to cause stress in the citizenry, even those who are used to dealing with hurricanes and particularly those that went through katrina three years ago.  And whether the public’s individual level of stress is high or low, it should be the responsibility of the news and the media to help alleviate that stress and keep the public calm, and the approach that the media took did exactly the opposite.

In the third part of the Screenwipe episode starting around 05:55, Brooker discusses the incident in which Northern Rock Bank was suposedly in danger of going bankrupt and his theory that the media helped contribute and almost seemed to *will* the public to panic based on the way they presented it, and it bears a striking resemblence to how i feel the media handled Gustav several days before the impending landfall.  Local New Orleans news and rolling news channels were giving out contradictary signals in their broadcasts - they would spout out the obligatory, “everyone is urged to stay calm,” while at the same time flashing “GUSTAV IS COMING!!!!!” in big bright letters on the screen, showing weather projections that made it look like it was a certainty that it was going to hit New Orleans dead center, and saying things like, “If this storm remains a category 4 for landfall, there could be catatstrophic consequences!  And it could turn into a category 5, which is not something you want to mess with!”  Mayor Nagin went on record to say that “You need to be scared.  You need to be concerned.  You need to get your butts moving out of New Orleans right now.  [Gustav] is the storm of the century.”

Let’s make sure we have our facts straight.  When the National Hurricane Center makes a five-day forecast projection path, the “projection circle” is predicted based on historical hurricane data for the past 50-60 years.  About a week before landfall, the “projection circle” was stating that the storm could make landfall anywhere from about Houston, TX to Tallahassee, FL - a 700 mile span that had its own margin of error of up to 250 miles.

The reason for this is because even with all of the advancements that have been made in weather technology and prediction, weather in its finest detail is ultimately unpredictable due to chaos theory.  The movement and intensity of tropical storms/hurricanes fluxuates so often that relying upon a five-day landfall projection forecast to tell you what you should do and where you should go is no better than relying on gambling on a roulette table to pay your rent.

But the public isn’t given those sorts of facts.  Instead, they’re given a projection map without proper understanding, they’re given news stations and public figures that scream, “IT’S THE NEXT KATRINA!”, and they’re overwhelmed with other alarmist sorts of sensations that perpetuate and encourage the potential landfall areas to panic and the rest of the nation/world to be given a horribly skewed picture of what is actually happening.

The whole thing was pretty sickening.

And what was even more disgusting to me was watching some of the news coverage after Gustav actually made landfall because i got a very strong sense that the media was *disappointed* that Gustav didn’t hit New Orleans directly.  CNN and CBS’s strong hurricane disaster erections never got to orgasm, and reusltingly they’re all scrambling to find *any* sort of nonsense to report.  Video footage of the Industrial Canal levee which frustratingly refuses to actually break, talk about how New Orleans “isn’t out of the woods just yet!  You never know!”.  And they put on a public face of relief and an implied message that they should be congratulated for helping people feel watched over and thankful that Gustav had little damage impact whilst behind closed doors their debriefing about the whole affair is probably something like, “well, at least Hurricane Hanna could give us good disaster coverage in Florida.”

One of the things that stuck out to me about my first hurricane experience was how different people’s reactions were to it, particularly some of the old citizens that have lived in New Orleans all of their lives.  The common feeling amongst those people was annoyance - annoyance that the city and the universities and the general populace were panicking prematurely based on overhyped and skewed information.  Out of all of the stories and reactions and etc., that one was the one that resonated most strongly to me, and when i thought about it, i realized that their attitude is purely a product of their generation - the ones that grew up before the current paradigm of rolling news and alarmist style media, the ones that watch all of those people scurrying around like headless chickens and laugh, sit on their front porch with a scotch and a cigarette, and wait to ride out whatever comes their way.  The experience and the attitude they have feels like it can be summed up into one basic credo: “Life happens.”  Hopefully it’s one that i will continue to abide by.

Tags: charile brooker, hurricane gustav, new orleans, politics