ASCII by Jason Scott

Somewhere on my trusty newsreader came one of a hundred mentions of the new Wikia-supported search site run by my favorite person in the whole wide schoolyard, Jimbo Wales. I don’t know how it’s going to work. I don’t care.

This mention, however, was special. It came through a mention on BoingBoing, a site I had a great relationship with but which has gone a tad downhill. I’m still a faithful reader, of course, since one good nugget out of a hundred is still a good nugget. I’m the sort of fellow who is willing to jam through a megabyte of text to verify that a sysop’s software implemented XMODEM but not XMODEM-CRC. So I can handle the signal-to-borscht ratio.

Summary: I think Mark Frauenfelder‘s a great guy, think David Pescovitz is a competent and clever geek writer, think “Joel” and “John” are rounding errors, and think that Frauenfelder made a deal with the devil and brought in Xeni and Cory and turned it into something quite noisy but full of systemic issues that turn a galaxy of audience off.

Anyway, BoingBoing nut-taps aside, Cory Doctorow‘s story on this whole “Wikia has a new search engine coming out” event had a rather disconcerting final line:

(Disclosure: Jimmy Wales and I are writing a book together about a related subject.)

Woah. Hey. HEY! HEYYYYYYYY!

You have to be kidding me. I’ve seen some pretty crazy team-ups before, but somehow just visualizing what could arrive on the shores of the Internet Beach thrown from such a crazy boat just freaks me out. The thing is that I know, based on Cory’s work, that it’ll certainly be readable. Big words and odd phrasing, that’s not Cory’s style. Clear-cut chop-phrases are the order of the day, accompanied by the steampunk endless hammering of his special dozen themes knocking across the face of the reader until, ultimately, even a bowl of cornflakes wearing a corsage would physically summon the ability to say “OK! I GET IT!”

The idea that Cory Doctorow (the chef of informational fast-food) and Jimbo Wales (the two-faced boy-king of web 2.0) would be collaborating on a book makes my eyes water. What unholy scripture, full of slick and overreaching conclusions, will be loosed upon the world? Will I have to spend my browsing days sifting through a new generation of never-knew-IE-before-5.0 college students cutting and pasting from this thing’s CC-licensed maw as they try and win arguments and discussions? Is whatever cover art this thing gets blighted with show up in the margins of all my regular hangouts? Will I regret writing this entry at all?

Anyway, the point is is that about a year ago I had the pleasure of speaking in London about Wikipedia, and got some nice feedback from a few in attendance. Among these were Ted Nelson, he of Xanadu and tilting merrily at windmills because sometimes you gotta admit, that windmill’s a motherfucker. Ted and I talked then and a few times later, and he was positive I should write a book.

I deferred because I felt like writing a book in which all I do is point out what has gone spectacularly wrong with Wikipedia would be needlessly time consuming, take me off of other projects, brand me forever whatever horrifying crown people have nailed to Seth Finkelstein, and generally derail my life. So I’ve kind of set that one aside.

But no more!

If you’re an author, someone who likes to write, someone who always wanted to make a book but don’t have something burning inside you to do so, now’s your huge goddamn chance. Jason Scott, freelance Wikipedia critic at large, is saying he’ll collaborate with you on a book. He doesn’t want top billing, hell, he doesn’t want much of the cash. He wants to put out a book. No idea what the title will be, but we’ll figure that out while we’re hanging out in Las Vegas or Harvard Yard or wherever the hell we hang out.

I prefer to work vocally; I hate sitting and writing this stuff, and although I’ve done an extensive amount of it, I’d rather craft stuff in voice, have it recorded and transcribed (not by you, that’d be lame) and then we turn the thing into a book. A fun huge book that people will rip apart but maybe, just maybe, one which will be the one these never-saw-IE-4.0 college kids will cut and paste from when going up against the kids with the Wales-Doctorow cut and pastes. You’ll be an arms dealer, except you’ll be trading in debate weapons.

Plus you get to talk with me a lot. I’m fucking fascinating, like watching a Cadillac Eldorado slowly tipping over the side of a parking garage three stories up from a crowded pool. This is going to be interesting, you think. It’s like that with me.

So how about it, competent and communicative hyperwriter? Want to break your teeth in a new kind of bagel? I’m your guy. Wikipedia: it’s a forest of opportunity. Let’s burn it down. You bring the gas.

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As we now begin 2008, my little weblog project will be undergoing some changes.

As mentioned in the last entry, I’m dropping out of a self-imposed “post every weekday” rule, which was previously a “post every day” rule. The “every day” rule betrayed itself as impossible within a few weeks and the “every weekday” held up through nearly the whole year, but ultimately was costing me dearly in other contingencies. So that’s being changed.

Now, I’m going back to a pair of rules, both of which were in place before 2007: post whenever I feel like it, and don’t post more than once a day.

This means that you might get posts every day for a while, but then get nothing for a few days or a week. That said, that day or week will likely be followed with updates and information about other stuff I’ve done that I was working on when not writing entries. So you kind of win.

There is a possibility I will post even more frequently, because I don’t have a limit on weekends. But more likely than not, you’ll see a few larger entries a week, or postings that are long on the weekend and then shorter otherwise, but there might be skipped days.

The “no more than once a day” is because I hate that with weblogs, this endless process of adding a bunch of short dribs and drabs that are barely functional as information nuggets and which more often than not are constructed with a lot less care than a single, proper entry. This is a personal preference but I think it worked out very nicely and I’m sticking with that.

I’ll probably touch up the site a bit, maybe remove a few unneeded elements and also create a “best of” page for people. I’ll probaly add a menu bar, and I might even remove the entertaining-but-weird “anti-endorsements” at the top of the page. I probably come off as quite the boner with those, and it has been over a year with them there. Other links and information deserve that pleasant space, and I haven’t been insulted personally by SuperBanana in MONTHS.

I will probably trust in Flickr a little more than I have, and in doing so, we’ll have more images on this weblog, because I often have neat stuff to share and that would make it a lot easier to do so. We’ll see. Otherwise, I’m definitely writing scripts that will generate the raw HTML I need to have information albums or references to the images. In other words, I will find whatever is the most time-consuming repetitive process involved in this weblog and try and optimize it. That’ll help as well. Except more multimedia, in other words.

I show that a few thousand people read me, perhaps only lightly so and perhaps by mistake, but still, that’s a nice audience to have. I get some pretty crazy responses and mail telling me of others who are checking me out, so I know the audience is there. I hope they stick around even as my posting schedule switches around. In the age of RSS, that’s not such a big deal anymore.

So here we are. 2008. Watch the skies, it’s going to be a very Jason year.

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OK, that’s that.

It’s now January 1st. I’ve been writing entries in the time warp for a few weeks now, catching up from the 14 day gap I had from the massive California/West Coast trip I took, and I had decided that whatever we had up to today was going to be it for my weblog for 2007. So I hit December 14th just now and I think that’ll do.

It was an interesting experiment of mine. When I decided to do this initially, I wanted to do a daily weblog. Become a destination, you see. Be a place people go to, and then use that to drive other projects and collaborations. Be a more involved person and citizen, evolve a fanbase, and so on. These are all excellent ideas but they depend on several assumptions I didn’t make or, more accurately, conclusions that I failed to come to until I was well past commitment.

I was not wrong in thinking I could have enough to talk about to fill many hundreds of pages, and do so without doing the cheat-outs of a link dump (here’s a thing, here’s a thing…. GO) or simply copy and pasting news stories and then squirting out my own lame analysis of them, usually not more than a paragraph in length. (A girl died? This is VERY BAD. Girls should not die.)

No, my big miscalculation was in thinking I could do the sort of craft that I prefer with my wordsmithing, and be able to do it daily (or even five times a week), and have it be worth reading, and be able to do anything else of note.

I do things. I’m a doer. I am big into slaving away on stuff beyond reasonable measure and then coming along with the finished or near-finished thing and surprising everyone with it. That is a lot of fun for me. If the project is huge, then I also like doing during-project information dumps relevant to those who want to track my progress, and to share lessons learned. I’ve learned a lot of stuff and it tends to fade when you’re done, so in-project updates are cool to do.

But all this is time consuming, and as soon as I had to do something relatively big, this approach would fall apart. Instead of treating this weblog as a companion, I made it a primary display of my competency, and that was a huge mistake. I needed to skip days and I had this setup in my head to never allow that, and so I kept having to play catchup as soon as I was hip-deep in work both personal and professional. And why was I doing it? Because of a goal I set myself. Not even a goal, per se. Actually a random metric I had decided would be a formula for fame and fortune: five well-written updates a week = competency = success. Anything less than this spontaneous magic formula meant failure, so soon I was scrambling on the side trying to pump in quality writing at the same time as getting other stuff done.

My day job took the biggest hit, with me missing a few deadlines and not getting back on track for a day or two after going in on something. That’s uncool and unfair to my co-workers. They’re very tolerant to have a world-class freakazoid like me on the payroll but there are limits.

Next came my actual projects, where I’d be trying to craft out something good while catching up and having to leave something on the burner, and then by the time I was ready to go work on the project, I’d be too tired to safely concentrate on the work. So another day would slip by. I probably lost a month of productivity in 2007 to this.

So was this a total mess? No, no, not at all.

For one thing, I generated an enormous amount of writing this year, possibly more structured writing than I have done in well over a decade previously. I wrote, all told, about 270 entries this year, some of them very long and some very involved. I tried to generally make them timeless, that is, not subject to the whims of the day and not related to quickly-fading fashions and soft chuckles of links. This wasn’t always the case but I tried to stick to it. So 270 essays/reports is a pretty good collection to have after a year.

I also got better at writing, or, I think, writing more quickly. I have stopped using the malapropism “literately”. I am also less likely to fly completely off the fucking handle at people, since I’ve had to engage in all manner of conversations both online and off related to these entries, and that’s put me in touch with a greater number of counterparts. Flying off the fucking handle becomes a very untenable choice after a while; I’ve run out of handles.

In the next entry, I will state where the weblog is going. It’s not going away, but this little experiment is over, and I’m making a note here: huge success.

Yes, I stole that from Portal. Just trying to stay trendy.

Thanks for a great year, people. Now back to work.

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Naturally, someone like MC Frontalot would not be stopping at a single video for his new album, and while my video for “It is Pitch Dark” was officially released in September (it was completed in April), November saw the release of the second video, “Bizzaro Genius Baby”.

As Frontalot told people in his news entry, it’s available in “tiny Quicktime or DIVX, elsewise YouTube“.

Just to be clear, I had nothing to do with this project, and found out about it like all followers of the Front: on his news page. It was done by Jason Thomas of Red Rocket Farm who obviously spent quite a bit of time on it.

It’s animated, and has some very nice effects in it, often illustrating the lyrics with scenes and shots. The character designs are good, and there’s a nice selection of inside and outside jokes crammed into the margins. The 100mb version of the film can be downloaded here and it’s worth the time. It’s there you can see things like how the cellphones calling the baby from various colleges all have the accurate main numbers for the college in them. Good stuff.

Someone on the YouTube posting compares this video and the one I shot. Different videos, different purposes. I don’t think it makes sense to compare them all that much. But I definitely love that I’m part of a library of someone’s work.

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I mentioned in a previous entry (which itself cites a previous entry) that I had ordered some Pinot Noir Grape juice, unfermented grapes in a bottle. Well, it arrived, finally.

I am happy to see the elaborate way that people pack wine bottles. Because I live in Massachusetts, I would normally encounter some issues shipping wine here, but because this is just some grapes in a bottle, I’m in the clear. What you get for your trouble when you order a half-case as I did is a huge styrofoam contraption, each bottle being suspended in the stuff (there’s some air there) and all of them having an inch of space between it and anything else. It has been a while since I’ve seen styrofoam used as an actual packing material, but I guess it can’t really come any other way yet.

The bottles are in every way like wine bottles. They have the shape and the label and a cork and the foil. I placed them near my collection of gifted alcohol bottles I keep around for guests and they fit right in.

Reading the label, I see that Navarro Vineyards chills the grape juice down to 29 degrees (to stop fermentation) and then “cold-filters” out the yeast, for the same reason. This results in pure grape juice, with that really striking aroma that can come from a really haughty variety of grape. And you can’t get more haughty than Pinot Noir!

Obviously, a tour is in my future.

This set into motion a whole bunch of stuff that was brand new to me. Naturally I had to try it out in a real wine glass, and I had to wash a few to get rid of the dust. And then I realized I had no easy to find corkscrew! This took quite some time, going through drawers and cupboards, until I finally found one and did all the elaborate opening these things required.

I know you’re supposed to turn the bottle while you pour out the wine, but I’m still too uncouth for that. I did, however, use a “seals the bottle” device I got some years ago to protect the grape juice while I chilled it.

I’ve already nailed a couple bottles down, and let me say how weird it is to be working on my computer and doing the usualy projects while sitting next to me is a wine glass filled with the juice of grapes and look at me, I’m an adult. It’s kind of neat, as long as nobody drinks my purple stuff and finds out my horrible secret.

I also discovered that I can make myself sick on it if I drink too much. I’ve totally become a low-rent version of Bacchus.

Anyway, thumbs up over here. Burp.

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If you have time, this is worth reading. It shot into my awareness because I have a RSS feed looking for people selling CD Shareware on Ebay. When the feed finds something worthwhile, I buy and then duplicate it onto cd.textfiles.com. Unfortunately, anything with the words “CD” and “Shareware” get picked up, but there’s no other way to do it. I can handle it, and every once in a while something completely off the wall gets trawled into my net. This is one of those cases.

This is for a small collection of Macintosh CD-ROMs, some of which are shareware. It’s not overly important what they are. What’s important is the disclaimer/introduction the seller provides.

It is very long. It gets more hilarious and over the top as it goes. When you are done I will muse about it for a few more paragraphs. Here’s the text from the auction.

READ ME BEFORE BIDDING. Please note: ALL SALES FINAL SALE. No returns, refunds or exchanges.

BE A SAVVY EBAY SHOPPER IF you are unsure about anything, have a question or would like additional photos PLEASE ASK BEFORE bidding, I’m more than happy to show more photos & answer all your questions to the best of my ability! So READ the listings carefully, look closely at photos, measure your OWN clothes to see if MY approximate measurements match up with stuff YOU OWN, to see if it will fit you (no returns due to fit). If an item is pre-loved (used) &/or not in perfect condition, i try to the best of MY visual ability to fully disclose any problems – because – TRUST ME – it’s more of a headache to deal with an upset customer after the fact, than it is to just be honest in the 1st place. Used Clothes are USED, so slight imperfections MAY be present, so unless i somehow missed a HUGE stain, hole, rip or other major damage – All pre-loved items SOLD AS-IS. IF there is a circumstance that a return is necessary i will refund the winning auction amount for item ONLY not shipping & handling AND i will also deduct ALL associated ebay listing fees as well. You will get your paypal refund ONLY after you fill out the ebay Return Item email from them – PERIOD. The item must also be returned in PERFECT condition with all original tags attached (if applicable), and shipping is your financial responsibility. I suggest getting tracking #’s & emailing me the # immediately after you ship it, because if you don’t & then try the old “but i’ll mailed it back routine”, with no physical proof, then its not my problem & you are the one out the money. If you have less than 6 Positive stars, you must CONTACT me before bidding – as it seems those new to ebay don’t quite get “IT” yet – that when you BID it’s a binding contract that means if you win, you PAY. S&H handling charges will be combined for shipping portion ONLY on multiple items, most of the time combined S&H is full price for highest item & then 50% off the S&H fees for each additional item (read my “about me” page for explanation of my S&H fees). payment is by PAYPAL ONLY & winner must pay within 3 days of winning! Rules of ebay you bid you win you buy – period! If there is a problem LET ME KNOW asap so we can figure out a solution otherwise you will be reported to ebay given a strike & negative feedback. If there is no payment or email, the Item gets relisted in 7 days. PLEASE BE AWARE once item is shipped, its gone, out of MY CONTROL! i get confirmation #’s for tracking purposes on everything i send out (customs tracking # for overseas). SO DON’T BLAME ME if the USPS loses your package. Concerned? then take out insurance for the full value of it! I am not a retailer or authorized seller of any of the items, EXCEPT all the leather Goods – which i AM an authorized reseller… so point is that i am just a compulsive shopper. i shop at big department stores, outlets, ebay outlets, sales & off-price department stores. so i’m 99.99% sure that all my items are authentic – as i have this thing against wearing fake stuff – i just don’t do it AND i don’t sell it! So don’t ever try telling me my items are not authentic, cause i know they are! Unless you can fax me documented proof from the manufacturer saying they are not authentic with a managers name, that can be verified by me calling for myself, i WILL NOT REFUND any monies based on your interpretation of whats real & whats not. If you do not agree with this statement – then do not bid on my items. i also cannot guarantee the longevity or the quality of an item, as i just resell, not purchase direct from manufacturer. If you think you are being vindictive by leaving me Negative or neutral feedback… don’t even bother, because that basically just MEANS you get the SAME negative feedback – so contact me 1st if theres a problem. as most parents always teach their children “if you don’t have something nice to say… don’t say it at all”. Ebay & paypal charge HUGE fees for every item that gets listed. If you return something I wind up LOSING money on the original listing fees and sorry… but I’m not in the ebay business to LOSE MONEY. I’ve SOLD TONS of GREAT items to hundreds of very HAPPY EBAY campers, so please don’t be put off my this disclosure. if anything feel secure in knowing that you are dealing with a woman who understands FAIR BUSINESS practice & will treat you with the highest level of respect. Read my ABOUT ME bio for more info on who i am… and since i am a HUMAN, mistakes & typos CAN happen (& i am not responsible for typographical errors) – so if something seems not quite right OR you have a question, ASK BEFORE BIDDING. By you placing your bid on my listing, it means you have READ & AGREE TO MY EBAY seller terms & conditions. So once again… ALL SALES FINAL SALE – meaning no returns, exchanges or refunds! all images, original created composites, text & in-depth item description verbiage… is all COPYRIGHT 2007 Apple Graphics & Advertising Inc. – so don’t STEAL it, copy it, swipe it or borrow it.

When you see something like this, the really fun mind game is to realize that for every condition, term and restriction in this Godzilla of a paragraph, there was likely a situation where “Apple Graphics” encountered it during sales on Ebay. That is, someone DID complain about the quality of the clothes that were used. Someone DID try and get refunds they didn’t deserve. Someone with less than six stars tried to conduct business and was a bit of a dope. All of this likely happened.

Ebay is what we would call a mature web entity. People know it means “Auction”, and specifically “Web Auction”. (Less people know it stands for “East Bay”.) And they know it’s the place to go to when you want to sell something. Everybody knows that. And therefore there’s a lot of people, and a lot of sales and auctions (millions, really), and naturally, there’s fraud.

But I’m fascinated at some of the real interesting terms and conditions they’ve dreamed up. For example, this one:

If you think you are being vindictive by leaving me Negative or neutral feedback… don’t even bother, because that basically just MEANS you get the SAME negative feedback – so contact me 1st if theres a problem. as most parents always teach their children “if you don’t have something nice to say… don’t say it at all”.

That one’s spectacular. It basically says that if you leave negative feedback, you are going to get equivalent negative feedback. Also, neutral feedback is the same as negative feedback. And you should always complain to the seller first, even if you feel truly wronged. Wonderful stuff. This is part of the interesting side-effect of Ebay’s reputation metric and system; people take those feedbacks really seriously, and they want 100% positive feedback, not even neutral feedback, or they will feel truly wronged and mistreated.

This is a rant paragraph/EULA that is years in the making, hundreds of transactions later (they have over 1,300 auctions listed), the result of the sparks that fly when human meets human over the computer and through the postal system. Hard-won knowledge, crafted in pain and wasted time, all about selling online and the inevitable missed communication, lost transactions and desperate situations that arise.

This is the part less discussed, the situations where things can go very wrong, and all the attempts by the seller to head these off at the past beforehand. This is the lesson and the interest for me; to see in all its boldness and glory the reality of online transaction.

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Actually, “Overextended” may be an inaccurate term here; I am possibly Hyperextended. Even that term doesn’t seem to apply to me; and so I would probably have to devise a new, even more extreme prefix of “extended” but not surprisingly I have no time to do so.

This situation is heaven to me, honestly. That there are things I need to do, all the time, and that all my time is spoken for if I choose it to be means that I have goals, dreams. I am lucky to live a life where I am not merely surviving doing other peoples’ tasks, but am facing a mountain of my own, self-appointed tasks that I can dive into at will.

Some of this bad planning, to be sure. And some of it is because I’ve taken on a number of projects that are unlikely to ever end. When I interviewed the cavers for GET LAMP, a couple made a mention of being involved in a project bigger than they were (mapping the cave systems), that they could never hope to finish but which they could be happy knowing they contributed to. I’ve got a few of those!

The danger signs are there; half the office now has piles of projects waiting for my attention. There’s a few cases where I have to make a serious attempt to box up and label things that do not need me right now, and which can wait. And my insistence, like all collecting maniacs, to have a display case of sorts of my favorite items means my living space is more cluttered than it needs to be.

But you know, I sit here writing entries and thinking of my documentary and the scanning that’s on the burner and the movies unwatched and the books unread and I just smile maniacally at all the wonderful moments I can look forward to. The discoveries, the laughter, the anger, the triumph and defeat. All waiting for me. All ready to go, when I move in that direction.

Here’s to hyperextension!

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I had this thing done to me back at the Vintage Computer Festival. I keep forgetting it and then I remember it and get cranky, so let’s just mention it right now. It won’t stop someone from doing it to me again because those kind of folks wouldn’t have read my weblog, so this is, as they say, utter self-gratification. Stand back, don’t get any on you.

I was chatting with a few people out in the lobby area of the Vintage Computer Festival this past November. This put me in a nice chair next to a little table, both set away from the reception table that Sellam Ismail was running. Sellam is very busy when stuff is going on, but he does his best to help people when he can.

A mother and her son were asking some questions and he referred them to me. I think there was mention of the kid having an interest in film and being a film director or something. So Sellam, busy as anything, pointed them towards a nearby buddy film director. Couldn’t hurt, right?

So here I am, chatting with a kid. I suspect he was between 10 and 12. He asked me a few questions about what was important. Somewhere in there, he drops this one: “I was told I need to do better in math to be a good director. Is this true?”

Mom was standing behind him during this, and I glanced up and noticed her making this face. Eyes wide, head going up and down.

This is the universal sign for I want you to say yes, yes this is very important.

What I should have done was tell him the truth: I had no formal math education past the 10th grade. I took geometry and barely got through it in 9th grade, and did so bad in algebra that I stopped attending those classes regularly and I actually walked out on pre-calc, and it would likely be shocking to some manner of person that there are tons of mathematics I have not the slightest clue about. I mean, I know some amount of mathematics and the term variable doesn’t scare me. But sometimes, when I feel like being amused, I will take one of those “basic math tests” on a college level, to see how totally lost I am. And man, am I lost.

I ascribe this 100% to bad teachers. Algebra teacher was competent enough but I was definitely the low end of the curb and should have been thrown at a tutor and she kind of shunted me out of the way. Pre-calc, well, if in 1987 I had been as lucky as today’s kids to have the term “Die in a Fire” at arm’s reach, I’d have snagged it. Die in a fire!

So what I ended up doing was burbling out some half-ass explanation that math sort of plays a part in filmmaking, and that yes, it wouldn’t hurt, and so on. Mom smiled and looked pleased.

(I also told the kid that more important than being able to direct a film is to be able to write, because it’s someone who understands scripts and how to put ideas on screen who is going to go farther than someone who just wants to film any old thing. I have no positive outlook for retention of this concept.)

Anyway, it just really gets to me, this idea that the mom is using me, just fucking wielding me like a tool, to get her little sprout to move in the direction she wants. Poor performance in school in a class? Well, let’s just get a random authority figure to say any old thing to push your agenda. It’s insulting to me, it’s insulting to the kid and I want to hit you with the side of my laptop.

The worst part was that I knew flipping out would not help anything, make Sellam look bad for directing them to a maniac, and not convince the kid that you have to find your own path in life. And mom looked like, with incentive, she could move fast. So I’d have missed with my laptop swing and then where would we be.

Plunking random authority figures to parrot your agenda is a huge bag of fuck. If you’re going to do it, at least pay them for the service.

I start at $100.

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