ASCII by Jason Scott

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.

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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.

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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!

6 Comments

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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!

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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.

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