ASCII by Jason Scott

3279 Memories

What the heck, let's go into the 3279 terminal a little more.

As mentioned previously, this was a terminal that my dad would plunk me in front of to give me something to do when he had projects at work to finish. As I am quickly nearing the age that he was when this was going on, I understand quite perfectly what the situation was.

This terminal and the system behind it (which I never got to see) was absolutely amazing. At a time when the home computers you might encounter would have an OK collection of colors and a little bit of storage, this thing was blazingly fast (connected to a mainframe, after all) in crisp color (a top-quality monitor) and had what seemed like infinite space and stuff to do.

When you're 11, one of these terminals dominates you. The keyboard was designed for data entry, and was the classic heavy-and-clicking keys that are relatively difficult to find anymore (although there is a small niche market that continues to sell that style of keyboard). It had buttons, status lights, and the layout of control was completely crazy. Luckily, whatever terminal I was sat down at had tons of little hint sheets taped to the table, so I could always refer to them when I got truly lost.

And lost I got, because instead of just wandering aimlessly at a prompt, Dad knew the secret menu. I feel kind of weird even telling you the secret menu's access name; it might still be in use for all I know. It was passed along between those in the know; likely my dad was given it in confidence, but violated this trust for my benefit. It was a foreign word for "games". Typing this would put you into a browsable menu (using arrow keys) that opened up hundreds of amazing little programs, all done in spare time (cough) by the hackers in the IBM system.

There were tons of written documents, like best take-out food around the Research Center, or reviews of movies. There were "standard" games ported to this IBM system, like Adventure (and an expanded version of Adventure with even more puzzles). And there were basically video games. This in itself was mind-blowing to me. I recall a slot machine that had spinning wheels, and ducks and spiders as some of the items. If a spider and duck were in the same set of wheels, the duck would actually extend its neck and eat the spider, getting you points. This may or may not sound as miraculous as it was for 1981 and an 11 year old.

At the time, of course, I was blissfully unaware of any machine time I was sucking up, that the machine doing all this work was in some heavily protected and environmentally controlled room far away, and that the reason the thing would pause when I hit the "send" key was because it really was "sending" the information somewhere. I just loved this huge fuckin' computer.

It has been many, many years after Dad moved away from that Research Center that I have ever had my computers at home or work show such elegance, power and skill behind them. And I do miss them, very much.

Informed

This is a product endorsement, but don't worry, the product is free. I'm also endorsing it on my own initiative and have not even communicated with the creator of the product.

One progression I have encountered many times in researching GET LAMP, is the following:

• See your first text adventure game (Adventure, Zork, or the later modern games). Play them.
• You are immediately blown away with them.
• You are inspired to make one of your own.
• You start hacking together an absolutely unplayable one.
• You give up.
• You keep playing text adventures until you stop. Or you never stop.

For me, this all happened in the early 1980s. I definitely came into contact with adventure in the 1979-1980 period, playing it on an IBM 3279 terminal (which had color!) and meandering throughout the outside portions of the game. For extra nerdishness, this all took place at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown. If I may say so myself, that is one incredible fucking building. It's a large semi-circle, and when you walk the hallways, they all curve, giving a sort of strange feeling to the proceedings of wandering past door after door, unknown crazy things inside. And throughout this place were terminals. This was during that great time in the divorce when you have a dad who's taking the kids on visitation but his life is not quite free enough to allow him to just blow the day off. So we'd go to work, which was this research building, and he'd drop me in front of a 3279 terminal, and I was one astoundingly happy bastard.

I'll probably go into those times with more detail later, but the point is that I encountered Adventure under ideal conditions, and I loved this game and the ones past it.

Later, I played Adventure at my cousin's house with the whole family and completed it. A different experience altogether, but memorable along its own lines. I also purchased, for a reason lost to time (likely it was the only game available at the store I was at), Zork II, bypassing that silly "Zork I" game that couldn't possibly have assisted just a little bit in playing the game.

So I had an IBM PC and I decided I should make one of these here text adventures, my own self.

Let's just stop for a moment and declare this clearly: I am a horrible programmer. My code works, but it tends to be very, very inefficient and since I am mathematically retarded, I avoid all those crazy "algorithms" and anything math-oriented and instead make stuff that approaches a situation artistically or lyrically. This does not translate to a great program. But it works!

I could program in BASICA on the IBM PC so I wrote my programs in that. As I recall, I made two text adventures.

One was called "The Slipped Disk's Castle" and had you wandering around just the kind of fine real estate you would expect from a 12 year old, or a top-charting rapper. Time has faded this a bit, but I'm sure it was just an endless barrage of rooms and crazy out-of-my-mind puzzles of the sort that the Interactive Fiction community files under "Read the Author's Mind Puzzles". It was a two word parser (meaning all commands were things like GO NORTH, UNLOCK DOOR, GET LAMP) and I'll bet it was really really hard to deal with.

Around this time, PC Magazine announced they were making a magazine that would come on disk, called PC DISK Magazine. They had a way for people to apply as authors to get on. I applied with The Slipped Disk's Castle.

I did not get accepted.

But I did get a great rejection letter, which I'm sure is located around this fine home of mine.

The other's title is completely lost to me. In this monster, I was going crazy trying to implement geographic relation. This is very hard to do when you're 13 and there's no programming mentors in your life of any major stripe. I recall, specifically, a hand grenade. You would put this hand grenade somewhere, pull the pin, and then you could walk around. Depending on where you were when it would go off 3 turns later, it would print a different message. If you stuck around, you died. If you were nearby, it was deafening. And if you jammed away as fast as you could, it would be a distant "boom".

This was an enormous pain in the ass to program. It was also not implemented well. I eventually gave up. I'm sure that thing's on a dying floppy somewhere as well. Maybe.

What I'm saying here is I had dreams and I had stories but I knew shit from shit about programming and I was suddenly finding myself spending 99% of the time trying to implement my ideas, and 1% of the time telling a story. It didn't take long to wear even my young enthusiasm to the nub and the little project died. Would either of these have been better? Maybe. Probably not something Nick Montfort would have been raving about in his book but probably something I'd have looked back on with fondness and maybe redone in my later years. As it were, the results probably weren't even solid enough to do a remake.

So, maybe you're reading this, and you're young (and giggling at my profanity) or older (and giggling at my haplessness of youth), and maybe you have an idea inside your head and you'd like to make a text adventure of your own.

Your problem is solved.

While you weren't looking, this program came out, called Inform, version 7 (usually called simply Inform 7). It makes Infocom-style adventures, with the full sentence parser and the advanced interaction with a virtual text world and the whole hoo-ha. It is available for Windows, for OSX, for Linux, and for Solaris. You cannot easily complain that you don't have a machine that can run this program. The program is free. You pay nothing to download it and use it.

Now, here's the critical thing.

It's a natural language parser.

No, not the resulting game.. the programming language.

Here's an example of how the code looks:

    "Midsummer Day" 

    East of the Garden is the Gazebo. Above is the Treehouse. 

    A billiards table is in the Gazebo. On it is a trophy cup. 

    A starting pistol is in the cup. 

    In the Treehouse is a container called a cardboard box. 

I am not playing games with you. I am not being exaggerating, or making things up. That is actual code written in Inform 7. Did you feel that little pop? That was your brain no longer concerning itself with how to build a vehicle from scratch, but instead trying to decide if you want to drive to the mountains and then the beach, or through the woods and across the desert. With the mass of documentation, examples, and written works accompanying this program, your bar to making a game has been dropped so far out of sight that you lost the bar in the darkness and heard a distant clang and a "ow".

The program includes an editor, a debugger, a compiler, and enough tweaky-knobs to make anyone happy. It will output your work into a variety of forms, including one that works with standard Infocom interpreters, meaning your work has the potential to instantaneously work on a dozen platforms.

If the documentary does nothing else, I hope it energizes a set of people who had dreams of making such games in their youth, or maybe a week ago, and who might not have been aware of the advances made, the hard work done.

The Inform program is waiting for you. Have fun.

Three Speaking Engagements

As of tonight, I now know I am speaking at three engagements in the coming months:

• The Vintage Computer Festival Midwest on July 14th, in Indiana.
• DEFCON 15, the weekend of August 3rd, Las Vegas, NV.
• The Black and White Ball, week of 18th-21st of September, London.

I always enjoy speaking, and it's nice to be able to speak at events I had planned on attending anyway.

A segment of the reading audience will be absolutely delighted to hear that all of these talks are centered around computer history of some sort and none discuss Wikipedia, licenses, or kidney stones.

I apologize for the shortness of this entry, but it is a stupid level of hot right now. It just saps my energy out the door. Still, I got a bunch of footage imported and I've been enjoying pulling out diamonds of statements from this coal mine of interviews.

Ring Detect

People sometimes hit me up with simple questions that you'd think I could just dash off, but a lack-of-pithiness reaction stops me from doing so. Sure, I could whip up some off-the-cuff answer, but it wouldn't be accurate, and that always stumps me. A classic one is "What's your favorite arcade game?" There's about five of them, for different reasons, but I feel a pressure to answer with the favorite and I still don't know what that is.

But another question, more rarely asked, is "What was something cool you learned making the documentary?" This one, after I've had time to mull it and decide, is easily answered:

Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems predate auto-answer modems.

Isn't that crazy? The logical way people might assume, looking back, would be "auto-answer modems and home computers show up, someone puts them together, and tah-dah, BBS". I know I certainly did.

But in fact, when the first BBS is assembled in 1978, auto-answer modems had not yet hit the market. Instead, hackers trying to piece together such an item utilized ring detection circuits.

The fun part is that now people are starting (just starting) to have a situation where ring detection won't mean the thing it used to, especially if your telephone is IP-based (like a Vonage device) and you carry a cell phone. But back when it was copper wires connected to your home from a centrally located facility owned by the phone company (called a Central Office), the central office would send various voltages and signals down the line, which your phone would deal with or respond to as needed.

By the way, when you picked up the phone, you were connected to a tone generator at the central office that would generate the dial tone while waiting for your commands. When it was pulse/dial dialing, you would be breaking and restoring the circuit with each "click" of the dial; 9 times meant "9", 4 times meant "4" and so on.

(This was also why you could, if you were talented, click the reciever button on the phone in sets of numbers and dial that way. This sounds like a worthless talent until you realize that they used to put locks on dials for "incoming calls only" phones in places, and so this way you could make free calls. Also, the dial-tone was sometimes just another phone number, so people who were screwing around could call that number and get the "dial tone".)

With the addition of "Touch-Tone", you could just send down pairs of signals down the line to replace the "pulse" signals you'd sent before. But the idea was the same; you were connected to a machine a few miles away that was sending you a "I'm listening" sound, take your signals, and then route your call.

ALL of this is faked up and replaced on cellphones and especially IP phones. When you pick up an IP phone, you get a dial-tone, but it's being generated by the telephone or routing box itself; there's no "central office" at play. There's certainly nothing like "Touch-Tone" having any meaning either; after you play with your box or your cell phone, a request is sent down to the switching equipment in toto. After the connection is done, your phone or your cell phone can generate "Touch-Tone" for the purposes of communicating with items connected down the line, but the tones themselves played no part in your call connection.

But back to the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) copper-loop days. Besides the signals sent down the line (including on-off/pulse and Touch-Tone), you had specific voltages that indicated the state of the line. One of these was "ringing": 40 Vrms. When your telephone got this voltage on this copper-line connection, it would start ringing. It was years and years ago, sometime the middle of last century, that the ringing you heard on the line when you called someone was ever actually their phone. In fact, you were being given a "ringing" recording by equipment. This is also why you might pick up on 2 rings but the person calling you would hear 3 or 4.

So it was inevitable that electronics people would be able to build a circuit that "listened" on the telephone line for a voltage surge from the 40 Vrms change on the line, and know that the phone was "ringing". (When you pick up the phone, the voltage drops, by the way.)

What was explained to me by Ward Christensen (and later Randy Suess) was that Randy built a ring detection circuit, and hooked it to the S-100 machine. Now here's where we get into more of a time warp.

What it would do, upon detection of ring, is RESET THE MACHINE. The S-100 machine would then boot, start the BBS program, and then pick up the modem and send a carrier.

In other words, it could boot the machine and run the "application" in the time between the first and third rings of a telephone.

This level of jiggery-pokery involving interacting directly with hardware is a hallmark of this era. The S-100 was a "home" computer in the vaguest sense; nothing like the pre-made plastic boxes most people associate when they hear that term. It was a hand-built project, and you knew, very deeply, what it was and how it functioned. It was a small but important jump for people like Randy to want it to "do" something with phones and to just add another circuit to it.

But this whole little world of voltages, circuits and telephones is shifting. Within a generation there will be acknowledgement but vague skepticism that we ever wired every single house and building, everywhere, with a circuit that was always kind of on and ready to go. And that to make a computer respond to a ringing phone on this always-on circuit, you had to whip out your soldering iron and get cranking.

Hacking Cracking

Well, this is something. I stumbled upon someone's attempt to do a "Grand Unifying" history of hacking, phreaking, and cracking. It jumps around everywhere from the dawn of the telephone system up through to mentioning my documentary (!) which is how I found it in the first place.

It gets a few things wrong, like crediting John Draper with the discovery of the 2600hz whistle (he most certainly didn't) and parts of it are obviously pasted-in swaths of text from other locations, but cheers to that guy for trying to take a shot at it.

I have a copy of the file over here in case it was going to disappear off the face of the earth... now it won't!

A part of me thinks that there's a danger of encrusting "hacker history" into a classic case of telling the same 12 stories over and over and getting facts wrong; but on the other hand, it's a lot of fun to see people try and get it "right", and unlike a lot of histories there's a bunch of supporting documents out there.

Sorry, no clever story today; there's more than enough gunk in that link for anyone. Let me know what you find wrong with it.

Online Cancer

Cancer, in case you haven't heard of it, is a horrid potential byproduct of the natural process of cell division. Things go wrong, a process goes out of whack, and the next thing you know you're doing all sorts of insane, crazy shit to fix it. And make no mistake; most cancer therapies are insane, crazy shit. The results are not always great, the earlier you find it the better (because then the madness is in one place) and in the meantime things are generally horrible.

The real bad part is, you can get cancer of the nearly everything. Unlike diabetes or migraines or breaking a bone, the problem can, quickly or slowly, spread elsewhere and make cancer happen there. It is pernicious and deadly.

Kind of a bummer, I know. Let me talk, then, about online cancer.

A while ago, I heard Tom Jennings say a brilliant thing. This is not hard to do, if you're listening to Tom Jennings. But it struck me how many levels of brilliant the statement was, over time, considering it from many angles. It was at a Vintage Computer Festival talk, the one where I beta-premiered the nearly-done BBS Documentary episodes. The organizer, Sellam, had decided it would be fun to have the Fidonet guy also speak at the same event, and then have the Fidonet guy sit through an episode about himself. I do believe that was the scariest part of my entire production!

Anyway, Tom gave a talk about the considerations of putting together Fidonet. And he mentioned some error checking, and he veered off into a rant about error checking. And what he said was:

"Error handling is 90 percent of the work. Most of your time is spent trapping for everything that could go wrong."

This may on its face sound either simplistic, wrong, or exaggerating, but once you consider it thoughtfully, it blossoms into brilliance. Rephrased another way, it could be considered that engineering is primarily the preparation for unwanted events both external and internal, not just the successful completion of a series of wanted events. The "holy shit it works" phase is rewarding and heartwarming and all the rest, but under controlled situations with little variance in user pool and approach, stuff can be made to work very quickly.

A buddy of mine worked on a lot of software projects, a well known instant-messaging environment. He told me how they'd check in a new revised version of the server and they'd know if it was working within 90 seconds; that's how long it would take for the onslaught of user interaction to slam it to pieces. It's not the "hey, people can message each other" part that kills you, it's the "everybody can do anything and that includes stuff that wasn't accounted for" part.

A lot of time has been spent on making sure stuff works, and can handle the onslaught of stuff that specifically makes a website crash. It's rather hard now to put in some magic set of control characters or paste in HTML or pile on the long-length words and make a site go down. When you're faced with an input window of text that you can fill out, chances are you won't cause the thing to die. The problem is exacerbated by the use of libraries, where the libraries are created by an entire other group of people outside of the ones making applications that use those libraries. Applying my rule of the two-way street, this is fantastic in putting in improvements -- everybody's stuff gets better! But it's disastrous when there's a security bug -- stuff you didn't even know used that library is now able to be dressed in a gimp outfit!

But all of this is well-tread ground. If you base the success or failure of your project/application/website on its ability to stay stable and online and handle whack-ass input requests and poorly-formatted queries and the rest, then you will have success relatively easily, and this "start to success" time has decreased as libraries are strengthened and people depend on the strength of years-and-years of quality control. There's an entire industry dedicated to software-level quality control and a lot of effort put into it.

So where's this online cancer I'm talking about?

My web browsing puts me into a lot of forums, in a lot of websites, in a lot of places. Sometimes these forums are fully-formed groups of people with a specific theme. Other times, it's just the commentary at the bottom of an article or weblog posting, or under a Youtube video. They're all, in some way, forums, just at different levels of complexity and thought given into the process of people being able to communicate with each other.

Obviously, I'm looking at these places with a more historically-aware eye than most. I passed my quarter century of using "message bases" last year. In fact, let's pull one from that time:

http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/PRINTOUTS/198408shpolitics.txt

This one is interesting, because it's about politics, always a contentious issue. Yet, generally, discourse is outward-focused (Reagan, Mondale, Heavy Metal) instead of inward focused (users, the political structure/system, the quality of posts). The reasons for this are pretty clear: very small group, and very long turnaround time. Remember, only one or two people can use the Safehouse at once, and so the first post is on August 3, 1984 and the last post is September 10, 1984. 38 days later. With 26 total posts, that's an average of less than a posting a day. 24 hours between posts.

Now, compare that to a thread on Fark.com. Here's a good one:

Ex-Marine kills bear with log.

This thread, meanwhile, started at 9:04am on June 21, 2007. Within 12 hours it has 187 messages. The majority of those 187 messages are posted in the first 3 hours.

So we go from a posting rate of once every 1,440 minutes to once every 45 seconds. In the first example, it's about "politics". In the second, it is "An ex-marine fought off a bear with a log." and a link to a news story.

The conversation, and bearing in mind this is one of sixty new stories/topic threads started on Fark the same day (two an hour, every hour, the entire day), starts off with jokes and commentary on the story. Then it divests into discussions of camping and marine egos. Then it turns, discussing the motivations/choices of the marine in the story, and the wisdom of the other posters. Bear in mind, too that Fark implements moderators who remove particularly offensive or attacking letters, so this represents, if not the cream of the crop, the best of the remaining.

Keeping up with all postings on all threads of Fark would be a full time job. There's another online community-thread site called Metafilter. They had 22 story postings for the "main" page (there are sub pages), and over a thousand comments between them. Another full-time job.

Fark and Metafilter are both working very hard to control what I'm talking about, the online cancer where the pure mass of postings into a forum from so many disparate folks inevitably leads not just to bickering and misunderstandings but screaming, blind hatred within an hour. Fark and Metafilter have subscription levels, inexpensive, but functioning as a barrier to entry (in the case of Fark, to see topics before they're posted, and in the case of Metafilter, to be able to post). Metafilter, in fact, has gone years ahead of a lot of websites and has moderation of comments, history browsing of users, and a very, very strong ruleset about quality of topic threads, duplicates, and so on.

I don't think a lot of people are recognizing this cancer for what it is, this rapid, rapid posting of messages where any out-of-lockstep post can send the entire conversation flow cascading down into bitter side-taking and attacks. Mention a political party. Mention a hot-button topic from recent news. Mention a place, a job, a race, and watch as everything turns on itself and makes a horrifying feedback noise. As much as actual cancer comes from too-quick division of cells, I feel like this online cancer comes from uncontrolled, unchecked cascades of off-topic messages with no real moderation/quality control capable by the site or the users themselves. Sure, a place will send their guy in to delete an article with someone's social security number or which informs another user that they are going to be killed in their sleep; but that's the level of baseline legal protection. It's what you do because you don't want the site sued. But what about the quality of the conversation, the working together to end up with a conversation that makes everyone who plays a part in it better for contributing?

Choose a youtube video. Choose any popular Youtube video and you will watch the cancer eat out the bottom of the page with people turning on each other, insulting each other, dragging topic into places that make no sense and have no bearing. And there you go, someone might have spent weeks working on a great video and below them lies absolute garbage. Sure, they can turn off comments 100%. Is that really a solution? No.

Will the conversation and the engineering really turn its priority from ensuring that there's no buffer overflows in input windows to coming up with a lightweight "personality" that you can have from site to site? Or devising improvements to moderation, or determining solutions to this online cancer? Cute little conferences are being held around the world lightly touching on this, but the idea, which should be as fundamental a goal and question as getting the webserver machine running, is an afterthought, a hindbrain twitch, a quick sleeve-polishing of the glasses before throwing it out to the wide world.

It shouldn't be. The cancer is going to grow.

Your Home Computer Alarm Clock

So, if you needed some sort of incentive to start going through your collection of old home computer crap and send it to me or someone else to digitize/curate it, here you go.

It's now 30 years since 1977. 30 years since the real send-off of the "home computer" era, where sales are measured in many many thousands and stores selling them are selling toys and clothes down the aisle. Obviously there are many precedent computers and home computer-like models before 1977, but by 1977 people are catching on that these things are going to take off and you better make some space on your shelf.

30 years is a long time. People don't always effectively store things for 30 years. In 30 years many things break down. Floppy disks don't wear entirely well; I've received collections of them and found a 10-40 percent failure rate. Luckily there's a lot of overlap, but that's still quite a bit.

Paper fades, machines die. Stuff rusts out. Batteries do that crazy thing where they turn into the Alien and barf liquid brown death over everything for an inch around them. You've kept this crap because it was part of your history, part of what you enjoyed, part of what made you what you are. But it's now the 21st century. We're in flying cars and it turns out that Skynet showed up but it's OK because all it wants to do is sell you shit. And your home computer stuff is disappearing.

Please consider a rummage through the parents' basement on your next trip home. Consider opening that file folder of printouts of old stuff, whether it be BBS messages, film, video, books, you name it. This is your warning sign; I've stopped getting stuff that's made it through and I'm starting, just starting, to see stuff arrive in a crash-landing fashion, or a few months past when it should have.

I and others have ways to deal with this stuff. Some of it is still quite common. A lot is not. I can put you in touch with people who can take your stuff if you don't trust me or want someone specializing in your stuff. But please, you've been holding this stuff for decades and you've got to make your mind up with what you want to do with it, because Time is about to make the decision for you.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

Productive

I have a reputation among some people as being quite productive.

I appreciate the reputation because my other reputations of being an intractable asshole and dominating ballyhoo can take a backseat anytime, thanks. Tonight, one of my buddies asked me for any rules or policies or whatever I follow to be productive (a la 43 folders or Rands in Repose). I told him I'd probably turn it into a weblog entry, making me more productive!

So here we go, Jason Scott's ideas on being productive.

First of all, bear in mind that something has to interest me for me to work hard and quickly on it. So, things involving gathering new history, collecting rare artifacts, talking with famous or interesting people, and corresponding with fun folks... these all get my top attention, and fast turnaround. If something is a little more tedious, more low payoff personally, it gets shunted to the back almost immediately.

Second, a lot of my most productive stuff has a very public face; I tell people about stuff I've done, post pictures, drop files and point to them. As a result, you can actually see me doing "stuff". I am sure there are people much more productive than I am, but you can't see the stuff they're doing so it seems like they're not doing much. Such is the price of doing so much of one's life online.

E-mail

I get hundreds of e-mails a week. This is probably the most pressing of my tasks, because there's a lot of incoming stuff and it's too easy to get lost with it. I don't have an assistant. So it's basically me and whatever's coming down the pike. I split the letters coming in into these levels:

• Financial/Business (BBS Documentary orders, invitations to speak, questions about my for-sale product)
• Questions (about my work, my projects, me, and so on)
• Crankfucks (Letters to which any response would be a flag saying PLEASE SEND MORE)
• Responses (to things I've sent out, that I requested)
• Hey, How Ya Doin' (from friends, family, and so on)

I don't get much else outside of these. This is probably 99 percent of everything I get.

Financial stuff gets immediate response. People who are giving me money have to be treated with respect, and they have to feel they didn't just shove their stuff into a bonfire. So I thank them, or give details or answer questions. Sometimes, these financial/business letters are in the form of offering me services. I browse them and often re-file them under "questions", since the question is "How can you possibly have survived this long without our product/vending relationship/distribution network?"

Responses get my attention after that. People are responding to me after I wrote to them (can I interview you, what's the source of this, where is this thing you mentioned located) and I refuse to be the slow side of the conversation. I thank them or fire right back with a further response based on their response.

Everyone's got a "OK, I REALLY HAVE TO DO SOMETHING" limit. Mine is two weeks. After two weeks of not handling a mail I feel absolutely horrible. I almost never let it get to that level. Sometimes, however, I've had things take up to six months.

Crankfucks go to a folder called "fan mail". (Fan mail does too, I enjoy breaking up the "thanks for what you're doing" with the occasional "you are going to burn in the hell they threaten to send people in hell to".)

Next comes the personal letters, responding to buddies or friends, probably what most people consider regular e-mail.

Finally, there's the questions. I get a lot of questions asked of me, like what are my approaches to being productive, and I like to mull those over for a day, or a few hours, so I don't give people this dashed-off answer with very little depth and accuracy. Thinking stuff through and letting it set for about a day really makes me sound a little more coherent.

Occasionally, of course, I get mail messages that sit for a few months. A lot of times, they're serving as reminders of long-term projects. I might be scanning something in for someone, or I've got this open invitation somewhere and I haven't wanted to act on it until some other pieces are in place.

Currently, I have 9 e-mails in my inbox. The oldest is 3 weeks old. Most are from this week. At one point in the deepest darkest depths of the BBS Documentary, I think I hit 150 e-mails sitting in the inbox, almost all of them questions or interviews in various states of scheduling.

So that's e-mail.

The blessings of OCD

I was diagnosed with possible Obsessive Compulsive Disorder a few years back. The doctor wanted me to take drugs. I fired him.

This intensity of my personality mostly translates to me getting whatever I set my mind on "done". This is great when it's a pile of files that need descriptions. This is not so great when it's a game on the Nintendo Wii. I've applied equal energy and verve to both. If I aim the laser in the right direction, and I set myself some clear goals (finish this pile of papers, do this pile of files, read this book) then I will not stop until I'm done.

So the biggest part is not the doing, it's understanding the aspect and constraints of what I'm doing. If I have a pile of files that's thousands of different sets, I'll tell myself which sets I need to get through and throw them up on the site. I have more to do, but I did more today than I had before.

Knowing what's not happening

Some stuff isn't going to happen. That is, not within any reasonable time. In these cases, I quickly collect it into a box, put the items in bags if necessary, and store the whole thing. I used to use cardboard but now I use plastic/semi-opaque stackable crates. These go into my attic or elsewhere. They might never be touched or they will be. But they're not sitting in huge piles, being ruined, in my office or within arm's reach.

This is tougher than it seems. It's too easy to treat this as a "failure", when many times it's a case of you being a role you didn't expect to be, i.e. caretaker instead of restorer. It happens. I'd rather be saving something and admitting I'm not going to the next level with it then hold it bitterly waiting for a day of use that doesn't come only to find that the thing has rotted/messed up beneath me.

Upside-down Fuckup Day

Every few months, I throw all this out the window, go through as much random crap as I can, and get inspired. I might find something I forgot about, run into some ideas I didn't know I'd had, or recover something that was lost. I also find a ton of stuff that is right where it needs to be. The total "productiveness" of this is near zero, but it's good to remember where things are. It's like being a tourist in my own collection.

Mortality

People have different relationships with mortality. Sometimes it paralyzes them, and sometimes it drives them.

Mine is basically that of the Millenium Falcon from Return of the Jedi, right after it blows up crap inside the Death Star and is trying to get out. Jamming at top speed, the glowing sphere of annihilation growing behind it, desperately speeding faster and faster to escape this tidal wave of destruction?

I'm like that all the time.

Flickr

I spend way too much time telling you what's wrong with the world. Let me mention an example that, for me, is exactly right. flickr. I have an account there, but big deal; that's mostly reprints from digitize.textfiles.com, anyway. That's not what I enjoy about it. Here's what I like about it:

• Very simple to use and work with.
• Items uploaded are maintained in original pristine form as an option.
• It is possible to download these original pristine forms.
• Downloading is not like trying to pull the fire out of a runaway steam locomotive.
• The "tags" system thing actually works as intended, providing additional search vectors when looking for items.
• Crazy little toys, like being able to search by camera type or model, don't interfere with using the site.
• Creative Commons aware, allowing you to search by license. (While I again don't think people always entirely understand the repercussions, they are definitely voluntarily adding these licenses.)
• If there's 5 of something I'm looking for, there's 500.
• It's quick as a whip.

The archivist in me likes being able to get my hands on the original material for saving. But the kid in me likes the crazy shit!

The collaboration is, in some ways, not dissimilar to what people think Wikipedia's is, except at Flickr, the smallest possible unit is the Photo. A person puts a "photo" up and that's about it. People can comment on it, add their own photos with similar tags, and so on. In this way, you can have a bunch of people "collaborate" on providing photos to an event with the use of a similar tag. Thumbs up from doesn't-like-watching-everything-turn-into-grey-goo boy.

And the breadth of it!

That ability to dive in and just grab handfuls of amazing shots is quite something, and every once in a while I grant myself a couple hours of photo swim time, just to blow through hundreds of images, savoring the weirdness.

This all is especially amazing considering it was bought by Yahoo and doesn't in fact get turned into suck. I bought a "pro" account, and that's saying something. I never get tired of that place, and literately have to tear myself away to get "real" stuff done.

So there we go. Flickr. I Like Flickr.

Now, back to the whining.

Good Copy Bad Copy

So I saw this free documentary just now. It was fantastic.

It's called Good Copy Bad Copy and it's one of a number of films discussing "piracy", "copyright" and the typical intellectual property hoo-hah. Personally, if you tried to make me shoot a documentary on intellectual property law and trying to tell a balanced, interesting story about these issues, you'd have to utilize some sort of weaponry. That said, I can really appreciate good work on a tough subject, and these guys have done some great work.

The fundamental theme of the movie (the nature of media is changing radically and the "old order" will have to adjust to this, and also it's all really exciting!) is not new ground, but it's well-edited, sounds great, and has an impressive barrage of speakers, from ol' Larry Lessig (Creative Commons) and Dan Glickman (MPAA) all the way through to artists and distributors. Just for getting an interview with the self-proclaimed largest distributors of reggae records in the world, you have to credit the ingenuity and approach of who to talk to. This is not another echo chamber movie (which is essentially what the documentary Steal This Film ends up being) but instead does try to bring in a spectrum of voices. Lawmakers next to lawbreakers, distributors and producers and musicians and the guy on the street in Brazil selling off copies of music.

What takes this to the "next level" is how the filmmakers (or assistants therein, but every indication it was the filmmakers themselves) actually travel worldwide to get "the story". Like, really and actually worldwide. United States, Brazil, Russia, England, Sweden... even frigging Nigeria. It's one thing to say "this happens here" and use the word "worldwide" to describe what you're shooting in your backyard, and it's another thing entirely to see tons of footage of real places, real people. For the travelogue alone, this gets my full five stars.

You see the jury-rigged vehicles blasting music that sell CDs on the streets of Brazil. You see a guy talking about Moscow piracy in a Moscow record store. You see a Nigerian producer/film star talking about the Nigerian film industry, which I had no idea was the largest in the world in terms of sheer numbers (1,200 films a year). Which, he explains, contains a large amount of crap. But then he goes into the distribution approach and you realize they don't care and are working to build their own approach to making films.

It's just a spectacular ride. And did I mention it's free? Free free free. You can download the torrent here and read about the movie over here.

Bravo!

Halfway

Here we are, halfway through the year. Time for feedback!

You've seen historical Jason, screaming critic Jason, personal-stuff Jason, any of a number of combinations therein. What's working for this thing? Doing this 5 times a week is no easy matter, but I am enjoying having the location. According to my statistics, I have roughly 2,000 regular readers, although maybe I'm being tricked or maybe it's more, thanks to cascading feeds.

I'm looking for some idea of what the audience thinks.

Abuse the comments. Thanks.

That Really Cool Phone

I was lucky enough to have three phone lines in the house when I lived with my dad in Chappaqua. One was the house phone, one was the BBS line, and one was a dial-back line for my father's job, which I proceeded to use mercilessly until Dad almost got fired for my charges and I basically left the house forever. Wait, that's not nostalgic at all. Let's back up.

The phone line was the host to a ton of phone conferences. Basically, this involved fraudulently making calls to Alliance Teleconference, a company that had 0-700 numbers that you could call and start multi-party phone calls on. Since it was galactically expensive, you were either a major business, or a bunch of punks stealing the services. Let's just say I was never in the first group.

A big forgotten secret to the success of online life was how much of it was offline. And what of it that was offline (meeting in person, hanging out at restaurants or someone's house or going through trash bins looking for cool crap) was augmented by telephone calls. Telephone was great when you wanted to pass a lot of information around and talk about a lot of stuff to people, but you all weren't nearby or didn't have cars. As it was I didn't learn to drive until I was 26 so I mostly stuck with the whole telephone conference arena, occasionally making use of the commuter rail to head down to White Plains or points North and South to hang out.

Since so much of stuff was centered around the phone, I really really liked screwing with the phone. I was so far from a electronics-aware kid that I couldn't even give you directions to where the electronics were. Everything I got was kind of by osmosis or screwing with stuff until it either died or did what I wanted (sort of, with a lot of crackling). One of these was to hook up RCA cable to the monochrome output of my IBM PC so I could have a remote monitor near my bed and see what people were doing on the BBS. This is very geeky. But on top of that, I hooked a switch up next to my bed as well. This switch, created using a Radio Shack-purchased item driven into a 35mm photo container, was hooked directly to the phone line itself. In this way, I could see someone being an assnut on the BBS, press this switch, and POOF! Off they'd go, having "lost carrier". Word of my BBS's special feature spread among friends and became known as the L00ZER-B-G0NE button.

But the other thing I did was majorly screw with my telephone, back when screwing with telephones didn't need an EEPROM burner and a web forum. Instead, I jerked around with clipping wires and attaching parts and eventually I had an RCA out on the phone itself. This meant I could hook it up to my stereo and blast out whatever I was dialed into. Cool stuff. And then, when I was on phone conferences, I could record them, simply pumping the RCA out into the tape deck and recording it on tape.

All well and good, but when I ran a phone conference, I went a little farther. I'd hook the phone up to the tape recorder, then dial myself into another phone in the house, and hook THAT phone up to the tape recorder. Each recorded phone would have a stereo channel in the recording. These recordings are somewhere in my collection and I will do my best to digitize them, but until then, I'll just describe what was neat about this.

When you ran a conference, you could either be in the conference, or in an "operator mode" where when you pressed a button, you'd go off and get a dialtone and dial in a person, talk to that person, then press the button and you'd both arrive at the conference. (Nowadays, a machine/software program does this work for you, or a hired hand does the work.)

So imagine, if you will, this stereo conference going on. It sounds almost mono when everything's connected. Then you hear a button press in one ear, and the conference goes on in the left channel, while the right channel has two people talking, as the operator dials up, chats with the newcomer, and then you both return. It's surreal and lovely, one of those bits of fun I still like to think about, when I don't want to think I wasted my teenage years.

That's the kind of memories a kid has when his life was around technology: the cool hacks, the weird little things you do with what you have to make it cooler. This isn't to say I don't have plenty of memories of people, but there's something special about these whacked little tools I made on my own to make whatever I was doing a little more fun, even if it was totally ungrounded and outside the building code.

There is a (slight) danger that the MAKE magazine fad that is sweeping through the online/tech/engineering world could lead to an impression that your projects have to ultimately do something. For my really cool phone I made, I must have killed five, their little husks buried about my bedroom like forgotten murder victims. Sometimes I tried to wire music directly into the phone, and this was spectacularly unsuccessful (and cost a few friends good hearing for the evening) until I got it (sort of) right. It doesn't always work out, I wasn't always the hero, and I still can't tell you what's what with electricity, no matter how many times I've looked at drawings with water and pipes and symbols for voltage and so on.

But that phone? That phone was cool.

Here's hoping we never lose that urge to make something else cool too.

Detox

I spent most of today in bed.

There were several reasons for this, but probably the biggest contributing factor was cutting out soda utterly and completely. I've done this before; the last time was for a year. This time may be for forever... at least, as a regular staple of my diet; who can really resist a gentle swish of Boylan's Cane Cola when toasting good friends around the table?

Bear in mind that I don't just drink soda, just like I don't "just" collect stuff or "just" launch into a discussion. So if I don't watch it, and I often don't watch it, I'm capable of drinking 20+ cans a day. Without even thinking, I'll do this. It's diet soda, but diet soda is basically a chemical injection of crap, so 20+ cans of anything would be pretty bad but this is likely even worse.

My bestest friend Chris Orcutt mailed me a gift book, another diet book in a range of diet books. I like this one; in fruity, talk-normal-with-you paced writing, it takes 300 pages to inform you of these rules:

• Don't eat garbage.
• If you do weird shit to your body trying to lose weight, it will put a tumor in you the size of a basketball.

Pretty clear stuff. So one side of that is getting the chemicals out, dropping this-side-of-radiator-fluid drinks and switching over to "whole foods", that is, you know, food. In correlation with my exercise regimen, this may actually fix something. I'll let you know.

But taking in 20+ cans of anything and then stopping makes my body freak out, so I got my headache and my stunning fatigue and that was it for most of the day. Then I wake up and realize I've got a lot on my plate that needs doing, and there I go into the vortex again.

This is all basically detox; taking something so inherent in your system that you end up not knowing how much of it has caked up into your existence until you start to scrape it out with a butter knife. Then you go "holy crap, how was I even functioning". Whether you feel better or not for having scraped it out, you certainly feel different, and your perspective on the stuff you were doing.

So really, what I actually want to talk about is blogging.

If you've been reading me for a while, you might have noticed, or not, that I don't use the term "blog" and the verb "blogging". I hate that term, avoid it like the plague, unless I'm referring to it derisively, which I am doing now.

I have never liked cutesy, invite-everyone-in terms that are constructed mostly because others find multi-syllable words for common actions off-putting. I don't like dumbing things down in the process of making them easier to digest. I don't like... well, I just don't like a lot of things, don't I.

And therein lies the problem. There's so much to dislike, to get myself riled up over when I read the 100+ weblogs I'm currently reading. Livejournal, if you haven't determined this yet, filters for emotion; if you read the entries, a lot of them are written as an outgrowth of passion that has inspired the person to write stuff down. This is mitigated, heavily, by the rash of idiot "quizzes" and "badges" and what-not that people decorate their livejournal entries with like bumper stickers, but if you read an entry of any length, chances are the person is deeply affected by something and wants to express it. So what you're really getting is a person's peaks and lows, the times when they are most off-kilter, or hyperfocused, or despairing, or whatever. A personality centrifuged for their emotional extreme.

There are classes of weblogs, just like there are classes of newspaper, video, music... if someone told you that a certain recording technique was "bouncing around the musicsphere" you'd find them a bit odd. "Newsosphere" would probably not go over well either. Some weblogs are simply reprints of AP newswire stories with a pithy comment from the "author" of the entry, while others are intense, deep-linked essays not out of place in a top quality magazine.

Yet there's this interest in clumping them together, putting all blogs together into a huge gelatinous mass that will somehow have a similar outlook on certain aspects of online life and motivations, while demonstrating absolutely no similarity in any other way. It drives me nuts.

But why does it drive me nuts?

It drives me nuts for no good reason. Food has empty calories, and a lot of online conflict has empty emotion.

I am unhappy when I see Cory Doctorow approach a nuanced issue with the equivalent of an electric mixer and a firehose. I am despairing when I see Clay Shirky trotted out to act like Internet is the aspirin for the world's headaches. I am distressed when I watch someone describe the Wikipedia of dreams, not the Wikipedia of reality.

But these are empty emotions. They're someone's ham-fisted writings of some situation, presented for free on an accessible site, and often lacking footnotes, references, or even evidence they've ever been more than the resultant musings of a dozen subway or plane rides. This is crap. It gets into your system and it fills your days and then you sit back and wonder why you're so much older than when you did something and you strain to wonder what you did in the intervening time.

Meanwhile, at the Vintage Computer Festival East, I met this guy.

His name's Claude Kagan. He is rather old. It is unlikely he will see too many more years. His eyesight is failing. He also knows a metric ton of "stuff". We got into a discussion because it was noted I was making a documentary about Adventure games and he was miffed I wasn't aware of the cool port he did into a language he developed called SAM76. Bear in mind I get miffed at a lot in life, so that was no big deal. He launched into a very intense description of the SAM76 language, which unfortunately was somewhat lost on me because for better or worse I'm not that great a programmer. I can get by to get some stuff done, but it's the result of methodical block-building and being bonked with an entirely new (to me) programming language variant is a bit too much for me standing up in a conversation on a porch. But it was quite real. Quite well-thought-out, worthwhile historically, likely containing importance that time will bear out.

Claude was one of the organizers of the R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S., a 1960s computer club. This was a rare animal, indeed. There's a web site up about it, although really a scattershot set of essays written hastily, even if they're all full of truth and memories and facts as were seen by the person. It is honest and true and sometimes that doesn't come in a clever little package with a clever little CSS-generated look that resembles a candy bar.

Focusing on stories like Claude's is like eating natural foods over fast foods. It's not convenient. It's not always enjoyable. There aren't clear little labels for everything so you don't have to actually think. But it has heart and honesty and for all the roughness, you are hearing something real, not someone's approximation of what "real" is supposed to be.

So maybe I will try a little detox in my regard of the "blog" world as well; I wonder how big the headache is going to be for this one.

Where Did You Get These?

This story is located elsewhere on the textfiles.com site, but it seems appropriate to put it here.

WHERE DID YOU GET THESE?

When you're in the 9th grade and it's the middle of Social Studies, the last thing you expect is to hear the principal's voice booming over the speaker system calling your name. On the other hand, it provides you with an amazing excuse to get out of class and out into the (relative) freedom of the hallways.

In fact, it was well along on my trip to the Main Office that I even started to think about what possible reasons existed for me being summoned out of class. Brewster High was a real lock-down dump of a school, all of the inner-city grey pallor and lack of hope without any actual gang violence or gunplay. Very few opportunities existed for getting in trouble, unless you cut class or beat someone up. I hadn't done either in distant memory. So, happily, I figured it was just some neat errand they needed me to run or maybe an important set of questions that had to be asked of me in regards to my school records or something.

When I rounded the corner and went into the office, there was the principal, which I expected. There was also my mom, which I did not expect. And there was a tall, stolid looking man, which I also did not expect. He was dressed in a nice neat suit and had the kind of look that said he was sizing you up out of habit. Mom, of course, looked somewhere on the dark side of devastated, which tipped me off that things were awry, but not yet without a positive side. After all, mom was the skittish type.

After motioning me into the office, all three watched me intently while the principal went on a nice roundabout path of speech, a real work of art that I now know takes years to perfect. For a while, I wasn't even sure the problem rested with me.. Maybe something was wrong with my dad? My brother and sister? Had something weird come up on my medical exams? The principal talked in buzzwords about personal responsibility, and finally, the other man said:

"We'd like to know about where you got the plans for Nitroglycerin."

Ohhhhhhhhh, crap. The man introduced himself as being from the FBI (double ohhhhhhh crap) and they weren't here to punish me, they just wanted to ask me where, and if at all possible, to maybe explain why I was selling working plans for Nitroglycerin at $.50 a pop to fellow students.

You know, I'd forgotten all about that. A bunch of us had hung out in the computer room after school, taking the late bus to get home, and there I knew a ragtag bunch of computer kids with Apple IIs and Commodore 64s and the like. Unlike a lot of them, I had a modem, and unlike a lot of them, I was downloading textfiles from a whole slew of boards. When I had smarmily mentioned that I had found plans for Nitro, they all got wide-eyed and wanted some, so in a great fit of bravura, I'd been selling them copies of the printout. I wasn't even sure it worked.

Well, turns out one of the kids' father was a policeman, and he'd handily forwarded it down to the local FBI office, and they'd sent an agent over to have a little chat with me, having them call ahead to my mother to come attend the discussion. I can imagine what they'd told her.

Luckily, even though my collection of textfiles was dozens of disks deep by that point, I could tell them exactly where I'd gotten them; from The South Pole, a survivalist BBS in 312, Chicago. I remembered the place because they were loaded with file after file about building silencers, pipe bombs, nitro, gunpowder, handguns... in short, if it blew shit up, The South pole had a listing for it. I was 13. This was cool. I stayed up until 5am one night and just took every file they had. Humor wasn't the order of the day for these people; they were into the coming revolution, and they wanted to be prepared. How old they were, what they were really up to, I have no idea.

The agent took the name of the BBS down, shook everyone's hand, and said he would investigate things (The BBS went down three days later.) So, having just flipped on a BBS I'd barely known, I was left with a Principal trying to remember So The Kid Had Bomb Plans Speech #45a and a mom who wasn't sure where this fell in the parenting handbook. My mother indicated I would be dealt with, and explained how I was a nice, intelligent kid who'd messed up, and she'd speak with me. They left me alone with my mom in an office for a while, and the first thing she said to me was:

"I think you should take a break from the computer for a while."

Vintage Festival East 4.0

Saturday morning at 3am found me doing one of my favorite things: getting into my car and heading off into the darkness. Don't ask me why, but something about the endless abandoned roads and a world lessened in people but not in their artifacts appeals to me. The drive was uneventful, going from Boston towards the township of Wall in New Jersey. Well, except for the issue of the gas can.

I had taken a quick diversion into upstate NY to get a few moments with my dad, just to tell the guy I loved him. Along the last of the roads to where he lives, I happened upon a poor guy who had run out of gas. Realize that at 5am I'm an unbelievably paranoid person, so it took an interaction not unlike consulting with a rabid dog to get me to come enough out of my car to shout across the road at him. So much for brotherhood. I felt bad enough about my attitude that I took his gas can and went to a nearby gas station, filled it, and bought a Mountain Dew for the guy. He was unbelievably appreciative when I returned, and even mugged for the camera.

Only problem was, I guess the top of the gas can wasn't on entirely straight, and I leaked some gas into the cab of my car. This, I can safely say, is bad. I got it on my laptop bag, and ended up throwing that away after emptying the contents. It actually ate through a copy of my documentary I was bringing along (although that, in it's own way, was really cool). And the car smelled like a lawmower. Suddenly, I was enjoying my trip a little more in that delightful gasoline-fume-high sort of way.

It's very surreal to think of these as photos that are within a mere half-mile of New York City, but there you go; this is the Henry Hudson Parkway, one of Robert E. Moses' great forced public works. The George Washingon Bridge overlooks it, and a few quick turns and you find yourself on it, heading to New Jersey. Between the mist and the morning, it was a beautiful sight.

As mentioned, the festival took place in Wall at a building called the InfoAge Science/History Learning Center, a still-being-renovated facility that has been getting steady upgrades for a few years and whose main ballroom held the exhibits that reign at the heart of the event. People bring in computer systems from all over the countryside to this event, putting up spot-on recreations of machine rooms, displays of prestine historical items, and a smattering of stuff you never quite knew existed.

Naturally, this sort of thing is very much about machines, but even more about people. A lot of buddies I've spent con time with were at this event, people who I spend much more time talking to online than hanging with in person, including my biggest fan, Michael Lee, Commodore software collector extraordinare Bo Zimmerman, Ms. Jeri Ellsworth, hardcore Commodore guy Robert Bernardo... many names, many cool people.

As a bonus, I spent time with Curt Vendel, who viewers of the BBS Documentary might recall as "The Atari Guy". He had a nice display up, containing prototypes and faked-up demo units related to Atari from the last 20 years. He's doing well, I'm doing well, life is good.

I was especially touched by the half-dozen people who not only came up to me and said hello to me by name, but asked me how GET LAMP was doing. I showed them some footage as a thanks.

All in all, a solid time spent, a reminder of the ever-happening events that happen while I work away in my office, cutting things around and scanning in history. (8 more Krakowicz files just joined the Apple II Cracking Section on textfiles.com, for example). Files and artifacts are good, make no mistake, but what a pleasure it is to spend a moment outside in the sun talking with fellow history-minded folks over a hot dog and a soda.

Oh, and my car still smells like a lawnmower.

Mark Weiser and Calm Technology

Every once in a while I remind myself how cool Mark Weiser is, and then I go see what he's up to and remember he's dead.

He did a bunch of cool things, but the one that I keep going to again and again is the idea of "Calm Technology". Such a simple idea, such a brilliant little nugget that warms my hands again and again while I think about my relation to the world. The paper/explanation of Calm Technology I like the most is here. Ignore the part about the MBONE going anywhere (the internet at large ended up going for peer-to-peer and using it for file transfer, and then later Skype and similar technologies totally paved over the filled-up hole). Instead consider what it's saying in a more grand sense.

In opposition to the general world where we associate a blinking light with "this is something" and a switch as "make it do this or not do this", the calm technology outlook instead provides a place, an environment where stuff is arranged, and all manner of ideas are presented in that arrangement. I was first turned onto this whole thing when I browsed over to the page for LavaPS, which is a lava lamp that sits on your desktop and relates multiple vectors of your machine's performance and state via a graphical lava lamp.

There are people spending months out of their year many jumps ahead of this, and there are most certainly preceding and post-dating examples of this line of thinking, but somehow Weiser (and Brown)'s overview of this thinking always makes me think of stuff anew.

For example, Wired paused momentarily in its endless cascade of remixed Wikipedia articles and idiot opinion pieces to mention some possible new animation frameworks within the new version of OS X. As an example, it mentions the idea of smoke rising from the logo of DVD Burning software to indicate it's burning, and then the idea that you blow on your microphone to dissipate the smoke. "Feh, Style over Substance" read the comments after that idea. But looking at it from a Calm Technology approach, you instead could have the smoke grow thinner and thinner as it goes (much like a burning-down candle or log) and change the color of the smoke to indicate errors, slowness, and so on. In other words, you have the smoke itself (style) become the substance of a range of messages you would otherwise have to open the logo to understand. Numbers work too, but you don't have to process the numbers; there's just smoke going on. A totally fantastic idea? Probably not, but it's amazing the kind of riffing ideas you do get when you apply some of this calm technology approach to things.

Like all pretty OK ideas, calm technology has a funky start-up/company associated with its implementation, that bucked all odds and survived the dot-com crash. It's called Ambient Devices and basically allows various devices to give you ambient/calm information while not giving up screen time. One of them is the "Ambient Orb", a plastic ball that changes color based on whatever scale of stuff you want to be tracking. Turn red for lots of traffic on your ride home. Turn green for clear roads. And so on, and so on, many cool ideas coming to you as you think about expressing some aspect of your life in colored plastic balls. Too bad the story of this Orb with me has been the same for 5+ years; "Hmmm, Calm Technology... hey! Ambient Orb! Holy crap, it's expensive." And it is, $150 for one of these little bastards. I consulted for a while in the office where Ambient Devices is located in Cambridge, and I've held a bunch of these little Orbs in my hands. Cool! But not worth $150.

See? I went off again, just because of Mr. Weiser.

Probably because I'm the documentary-making guy, I think of the logical way to honor a person to be a documentary about them. But that's not particularly necessary to find out a lot about Weiser, who did stuff with what he called "Ubiquitous Computing", the idea of computers being embedded everywhere. Academic circles are good at knowing who did what when, but the whole "computers everywhere and where do you go with it" thing is Weiser's in my book. If you do a Google search for "Calm Technology", "Ubiquitous Computing" or "Mark Weiser", you'll find dozens of links mentioning him, his work, and what he was about. A worthwhile endeavor.

I miss you, dude, and I didn't even meet you!

Cast and Photos

See? I knew there'd be a benefit to reading my weblog eventually. Or, at least, a benefit for some people.

Obviously, when I make a documentary, I need a lot of help. Among the help is a series of tools, ranging from the mechanical (HVX-200, piles of energy drink cans), to scripts and software. And among those scripts are little efforts that generate web pages to help me keep track of potential interviewees and completed interviews. The idea is, after the whole thing's wrapped up, I put the resultant pages up and people are very happy with the ability to see all the names and backstories and history of the interviews. I hate it when people put up documentary websites that give you crappy flash intros and obviously-designed-by-an-up-and-coming-art-student pages but not a whole lot of actual researched "meat". I'm not sure why that happens a lot. Maybe people focus too much on the wrong things.

So, I've got these pages that are generated by my scripts that have been helping me along for the past year and a half. I'd like to share them early, because I want to make sure I'm not missing people that could really add to the quality of GET LAMP.

PAGE OF PEOPLE IN THE FILM: http://www.getlamp.com/cast

PAGE OF SCREENGRABS AND WHO I INTERVIEWED SO FAR: http://www.getlamp.com/photos/interviews.htmll

Some caveats. Obviously this is a rough beta; I'm inviting people who read my junk to take a look over and help me clean up the most obvious whoppers before it gets directly affiliated with the site.

The idea with the cast pages is they will eventually look like the Scott Adams, Lance Micklus and Steve Meretzky pages. I'd also like to get the photo pages up around where they are for Austin Seraphin although I suspect I'm going to touch up the layout a bit better.

I am doing this to spur myself to the next phase of things; I'll be filming into September (hopefully the UK trip will be the last of my filming for this documentary) and hopefully be on track for it coming out early in 2008. Only three years of production this time!

Now go be merciless.

Found

This is a weblog entry that's in response to my friend Trixter's weblog entry "Lost". (archive) I suggest reading that first.

To my good friend Trixter, here is my own life preserver tossed in your general direction.

Do not despair, buddy, just because you don't always switch seamlessly from your job and homelife as a father and husband into a cyber-tastic historian tech expert. Sometimes one is more fun than the other, more compelling, or taking more of your energy. There is no failure here, no missed level-ups, no dissed homies waiting outside with your bling and your colors.

Your weblog entry provides things that should be "fun" as a series of dreary lists, unfulfilled numbers that will slowly increment as you work on them, as if they were dirty floors awaiting intense scrubbing square by square and never quite achieving "clean". This is a good way to convince yourself you're doing nothing, accomplishing nothing, when you know that's not the case.

There's a perception of me as this eternally busy, laser-focused driven person, but that's just simply not the situation. I've lost weeks, even in the last few years, where I've been without direction, unable to focus too much on anything. Knowing I need to do stuff, knowing I won't tonight. It happens, it's part of being alive, I think. I may be able to scare myself with tales of mortality and concerns of growing old with unfulfilled "things" in my attic and to-do list, but if I sit back and look at what I have done, that's some pretty cool stuff there.

Same with you! Look back at the things you've accomplished, the projects you've completed, the skills you show with the application of your scant time. Your handle and your actual name are in places I'll bet you'd have never dreamed they'd be ten years previous, including on the birth certificates of two loving sons.

You are not static, unchanging, irrelevant in these days not spent on your pile of self-assigned projects. You are recharging, getting ideas, watching entertaining dreams of others while mulling over your own. This is not a situation to be depressed of, or ashamed of. This is living.

Just this past Sunday, Juan Antonio Argfuelles Rius (known as "Arguru") who was involved in Buzz, Renoise, NoiseTracker, FruityLoops and a bunch of other music software, ran his car off the road and died. Just like that, a list of projects to do wiped away, a bunch of future ideas gone. No doubt he had days or weeks without music software at the forefront of his mind, too. But there they stay and the things he's done have made a million songs bloom where there were none before.

If I sound like a series of platitudes and one-liner morals here, it's because sometimes life really is that simple. You do some things, you do other things. You're not handed a list at the start and get graded at the end over how well you did the list. You do what you do until you don't. Simple as that.

Now go relax. The world will be here when you return.

Chowderbox

A number of items, all trivia, all this and that. Presented in handy list format for you to print out and mull over as you make your way down to the local tire fire.

• Added another few dozen artpacks to artscene.textfiles.com, some of them hidden away and lost for a decade. Thanks to Cleanah and a few other folks for sending them along. I've written a script which makes it much easier for me to study and integrate ZIP files, so expect a bunch to fly off the shelves in coming months.
• I have been given an invitation to speak at an event in England called The Black and White Ball. The website has a lot of information there about it, the venue, and the rest. I'll be using this as an opportunity to get one last round of European interviews for GET LAMP. This event is being put on by veteran members of the textfile group SOLJO, which is how I sort of get wrapped up in it. My presentation is a dramatic (but factually accurate) retelling of the ARC-ZIP battle. I had originally intended to propose this speech to DEFCON, and now I can't. (I don't recycle speeches.) Maybe I'll get something before the deadline for DEFCON and actually speak there for the first time in a few years.
• I'll be running the film festival/room at Vintage Computer Festival East 4.0 this weekend. I'll also be travelling up and down the boardwalk doing tapings for the Arcade documentary.
• As of this writing my cat has 56 followers on Twitter.
• I'm going to lay off social/technical/media criticism for a while. It gets dreary.

Cleverness Cash

Bear with me on this one. It gets weird and tangential fast.

A number of times when giving speeches and writing essays about my Documentary and the whole issue of "pirating" it, I talked about something that was, but never called, a "Piracy Spectrum". The description went something like this.

The users who currently interact with media, especially in the modern era where duplicating media is pretty simple, tend to fall along a spectrum. On one side are people who would never think in a million years of duplicating or copying media. On the other side are people who would be morally offended if they actually had to pay for a piece of media. The problem with most laws and protection schemes is that they end up alienating and angering the people on the "pay for it" side of the spectrum, while doing very little to prevent the folks on the "never pay for it" side. A lot of schemes, laws, dragnets and busts are intended to drive the weight of the spectrum in the "pay for it" direction, but the collateral damage increases as you increase this pressure.

Taken further, the spectrum breaks down in the middle for people who have no particular moral code one way or another, with regards to "pay for it" and "not pay for it". They just want "it". If their iTunes gives them a song for a buck and it goes in smoothly onto their iPod along with a pretty picture, that's A-OK. And if a bittorrent gives them a movie in less time than it would take to find which theater is playing it and get out there, that's A-OK too. Refusing to pay an "exhorbitant rate" or not buying something because of "the draconian measures of the HDMI standard" isn't really part of the equation.

Subsequently, I saw the negatives to enforcing draconian copyright restrictions; launching some sort of "anti-piracy" rant/campaign/position with my own film was a ludicrous idea. First, I'd have no real way to enforce any such measure, instead launching into a life-sucking "John Doe" lawsuit against random persons as it got my gander to go after them. Large content firms have enough cash that they can afford to throw a few million in the direction of being insane jerks, because not enough people make noise about them being insane jerks in that way. A single person is not so lucky in that regard. Second, I would be quickly thought of as "that asshole" quicker than the usual methods I employ to be thought of as "that asshole"... with no personal gain in the process. Finally, a work of the length I was releasing, released in the Creative Commons license I chose, and with a statement that I was fully cognizant of what I was doing, was unique and rare. This was marketable and a way to turn the realism of the situation (I could never prevent unauthorized copying, where I to "unauthorize" it) into a benefit (I see my stuff go far and wide, that 1000 mile round trip I took to record David Terry of PC-Board Fame was worth it, fan mail would come pouring in, etc.). This guess (and it was a guess) turned out to be a good choice: I made a ton of money. I still make a ton of money from it. Not stop-working-forever money, but an amount that would make most suburban families jump up and down like maniacs on a game show. This works for me.

Readers of the ASCII weblog have heard this all before. Now let's go weird.

Throughout life, it's possible to get something easier or cheaper or with less blowback if you show cleverness about it. The cleverness could be direct, that is, you yourself are clever, or it could be social, like, you hang with clever people and get the benefit, hopefully by being someone or something worthwhile to the clever people. For example, there might be some huge-ass multi-hour line to get into something, but you, the Clever Person, figured out that the line can be skipped if you phone in your reservation the day before. You therefore get in, and the person accompanying you benefits from your cleverness and ostensibly provides you with something worthwhile for your indirect cleverness, that is, oral sex.

This happens all the time; people who get copies of stuff before it's out, people who get into the backstage, people who acquire better sushi or proper engine repair or any of a number of services and goods that come from them implementing a level of thoughtfulness, analytical prowess, or even just the sense to ask a couple questions firmly before committing to the crap trough. Naturally, if people just pass along basic info like "Demand option 5" or "Use the side door" or "Tell them you found a railroad spike in your burger", these exploits quickly dry up and new ones have to be found, again, using cleverness.

What people are doing, basically, are trading in a different currency, which I call Cleverness Cash, a coin of the realm of smarts, where you are substituting money or time investment with intelligence, so that you find a better way of achieving the same goal without paying for it.

Here's the thing, however. Cleverness Cash is pretty much non-transferable. It has a dismal exchange rate, doesn't accrue with time, and it certainly can't be turned around and traded for its worth in gold. Forget the "gold standard".. Cleverness Cash can't even hold up to the Smell Test.

Piracy, and by Piracy I mean the duplication of stuff that is for sale without the permission of the people who are selling it, is incredibly easy, almost to the point of losing any relevance to the original term of "Piracy", which at least implied some amount of effort, skill, or risk. Going down for being a "pirate" in the modern age is an event akin to a house fire or a driving accident; a horrible event for the person involved, but a totally logical set of circumstances leading up to it and not so rare that it makes the front page. Contrast this with, say, a plane crash, which gets immediate and distinct worldwide attention, is rare enough to make front pages, and has resulting pain in dozens, sometimes hundreds of families for generations.

Content providers want Piracy to be thought of with the fear of a plane crash. But in a way, Copyfighters want the actions associated with content protection to be thought of as a plane crash too. Neither gets their way. And there is a lot more attention spent heralding the stupidity and backwards thinking of the content providers and their silly copyrights and their draconian copyright push than the stupidity that is shown in the other direction.

Maybe that's as it should be to some people. I don't like it, and it irks me.

It irks me when I see people who are copyfighters who are so filled with a sense of hubris, such a sense of having earned Cleverness Cash by the truckload that they think it transfers to another discipline, like business administration and economic analysis. "Here is what the [companies] need to do to get back on track", they blort from their weblogs and comments, as if it was merely a matter of yanking a few levers and pressing some buttons to fundamentally shift a 70+ year business in a fundamentally different direction. They assume that because a lot of people use Limewire, those people buy into the political/social structure of free culture, anti-copyright, and pro-creative-whatsis. In point of fact, Limewire isn't a vote, Limewire is a very simple-to-use music download service, devoid of a loyalty test upon usage to any tenets of any position on what represents ownership in a digital age. They're at best free-floating agents, sway votes, but they're not signed up and ready. They'll abandon Limewire for whatever's next in a heartbeat, and have a dozen times before.

There is no Cleverness Cash in the acquisition of music online for the last seven years. If you can install a program, you can get music. If you can run a browser, you can get music.

There is some Cleverness Cash available for things like hacking hardware (although that era/outlet is coming to a close thanks to magazines like Make and a rebirth of advancement in electronics education thanks to internet-based teaching). There is some in the realm of doing really whacky, actual law research, as the EFF is doing and which a bunch of law students and people are doing. The painful act of tracking legal precedent and encountering legal battles and challenging bad law - that's action, that's earning you some C-Cash right there. Weblogging about it, bringing to bear your completely-made-up theories of what companies "should" do and what laws "should" do is actually worse than no action at all, because it is anti-action, action you are taking that convinces you that you're making a difference in where the world is going. It's pushing rocks around in a back lot while acting like you're farming.

I rush to clarify, however, that I am not against people outside of an industry analysing that industry; we've produced an awful lot of engineers as a race at this point and it's a preferable idea to have them figuring out how to make the world in some way "better" than figure out how to project pop-up ads into the eyes of unborn children. Huzzah to the outside observer, dispassionately adding up the numbers and saying "so, what the dilly-o with you claiming you bring in X and lose Y but I show you bring in X^5 and lose Y/2?".

More of that, seriously. But at the end of the say, the organic nature of the world and of the minds of human beings, actual human beings that think, fear and love, are more than a rounding error in the calculations. That is, more often than it should be, forgotten.

I say all this knowing that I am guilty and have often been guilty of these same crimes, even within this entry; I weblog on my little site here about matters universal in nature as if I was in the room when they were first conceived. I certainly act, in most cases, like I am the first to come up with an approach or an idea. This is my failing, and i am quite aware of it. I suspect I will fail often and frequently in the future.

But I do know this, at this point: that the assumption that all those staring at you agree with you, that your position is a depression in a bowl of opinion that all minds will roll naturally to if given enough time, is a bankrupt theory. And no amount of Cleverness Cash will make up for that deficit.

Spend wisely.

The Big Push: Six Months In

As per previous entries, I have been going to a gym and generally trying to improve myself physically, to make up for a 16 year slackfest that may have actually turned me into human Silly Putty were I not to have tried and stop the slide.

So here we are, nearly six months in. I made reference to being a sexy little pineapple by this point, all things being equal.

Well, I'm likely not a sexy little pineapple by most standards, but compared to how I was, things are a lot better. Drugs have brought my blood pressure from the "hypertensive" level to deep into "normal". My acidity level of my blood is way down, and in fact I'm seeing a specialist about my kidneys so I avoid spending too many more "screaming at the moon" evenings in my future.

Weight is steady, strangely, although I definitely have significantly more muscle mass. Crap doesn't just snap into a new shape so parts of me have something obviously muscular going on underneath Not So Muscular.

But what has definitely happened is I feel better. I feel healthier and I feel stronger. I added weight training to my regimen, and this past week, I added the Elliptical trainer into the mix. I couldn't have imagined being able to lift, run, or move the way I can now, say, a year ago. Improvement has happened.

I am not going to fill this entry with endless details of my techniques, thoughts and theories. All I can say is that in five months, I've made something that wasn't so good into something good. I will try to soon make it something great. The single most important thing has been making a decision and sticking with it.

So hurrah.