ASCII by Jason Scott

Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2007 00:40:07 +1100
From: David Dean
To: Jason Scott 
Subject: article request

Do you get many (any?) of these?

Anyway, I figure as an obsessive hoarder, you've got some great system
for storing your old files - notes about projects ideas, half
completed code-bits, word files that you might just want in six months
but have no use for currently .. etc etc.

I'm in the process of copying everything off my desktop right now, and
I figure someone who cares so much about storage must have a better
system for this than me - I tend to just lose everything every few
years when I upgrade computers.

I think the fact that I've not once rummaged through burnt discs
looking for a file means that my system works for me .. but maybe
you're using tricks us mere mortals can learn from?

Thanks!
David

Thanks, David. Since I’m now up to a six-times-a-week blogging schedule, I have the space to take specific requests from folks who have questions and then ruin their opinions of me by answering them. In your case, I’m reading the question this way: how does one keep track of their own old shit? Or, to be even more specific, how do I keep track of my own old shit?

There’s entire courses in this, but here’s what I do, basically.

• Decide if something is worth saving, and dispose of it immediately if not.
• If something is worth saving, encapsulate it.
• Encapsulate the encapsulations.
• If possible, keep many copies of the encapsulated encapsulations.

This sounds a little weird and general because I use the same methodology for computer files, papers, books and magazines, and artifacts. At this level, it works for all of them, and it’s generally what I do.

Honestly, a lot of it comes down to realizing what you’re going to save and what you’re not going to save. If you’re storing it, you’re saving it. If you’re saving it, you might as well take the effort to save it well, or throw it away. I am reminded of a story by an old associate of mine. He’d moved from one apartment to another, and then to a house, and then to a house he was buying. In the basement, he found about a dozen boxes he’d packed while moving from the first apartment. He’d not opened them in six years. His decision? He threw them away, sight unseen.

I would never do this, but I understand his thinking. If he hadn’t needed the stuff in six years, he would likely never need it. But this pre-supposes that he would have a need for everything he owned at least once every six years. But there’s stuff that doesn’t fall under that: old medical records, family heirlooms, baby photos… basically, nostalgia and historical items. He’d decided he wasn’t a historical person, and moved accordingly. I have decided I am and therefore I save a lot more and continue to.

Assuming you’re a historical person, then, the goal is to take a few steps now that are easy to do and which will give you the most leeway down the road.

Physical artifacts are probably the easiest thing for me right now; I have a pile of comic book sleeves and backing and tape, and if some old pamphlet, magazine or catalog interests me, but I know I won’t be looking at it again any time soon, I bag it, tape it, and throw it into a box. After a while, I’ve got tons of these things in boxes. The boxes are in my attic. Maybe I’ll end up regarding them later and throwing them away (unlikely) or sorting all the catalogs into one pile and the magazines into another (very likely) and then sub-sorting the magazines by a specific issue set like Spy or Mad Magazine (also very likely). What happens then all depends, but I’m leaving my options open here. I don’t have an impossible-to-go-through-without-ripping-something pile of old magazines in the corner, and I don’t have the task of re-sorting things again and again because I keep leaving the piles untouched. This method also works for old video games, business cards (I have a special case for these) as well as CDs (I have cases and cases of old CDs, labelled “Shareware” and “Personal).

So we’ll leak over here into “files”. As I mention in a talk I gave at HOPE one year called “Saving Digital History” (which, I may add is itself, saved digital history), I think there’s a little too much stress put on getting things “perfect” than just saving things as best you can. If you can take the time to demarcate and describe everything going in, great. But if you can just drop things into general stuff like “Photographs”, “Audio”, “Movies”, and so on, you end up with piles that you can later go through quickly. For example, it used to take many days to browse through JPEG files; it would take up to 30 seconds to “render” one to the screen. Now you’re faced with a default thumbnail selection rendered instantly. Who’s to say it won’t get even faster, which recognition software that you can say “return every photograph with this car in it”? But the best thing to do is just drop them into massive directories and then subsort from there.

There is the potential to lose ethereal data, like “The reason I have this file is because my buddy steve told me to hold it” or “this was a girl I slept with and then never saw again”, where anyone but you seeing it will not know “the story”. There’s ways to attach these meta-descriptions to files, and if you can, good, but if you can’t, you can’t. I’d rather err on the side of data than not.

In the case of hard drives, we’re often very lucky that hard drives have increased so much that you can actually take an entire old hard drive and drop it in the new one as a folder. I have this situation, with a “Old Work Hard Drive” I have from my game industry days, as well as later computers I found. I have zipped up directories, collected images, and documents ranging from love letters to games I never finished. Some of it still has meaning and some has lost all meaning to me, but because disk space is so cheap, I just keep shifting it around.

And there we get to the final bit of our little sketch: backing up. I use a number of programs to back these things up, notably Synchronize It! and rsync to keep multiple copies across multiple machines. I also, when I have time, burn DVD-ROMs of everything I can, although who knows how well that’ll hold up.

There is data I consider “vital”. These are financial records, writings, and of course my documentary data. In those cases, I have a rule of “three hard drives, two DVD-ROMs”. The data has to be in those five places or it’s unsafe.

Could I still lose data? You bet. That’s the risk of being alive: of dying. You have stuff, you might lose all your stuff. Not doing your best with what you have because it can’t be perfect is no way to go. Sometime you’ll find an extra weekend or a bored evening and you’ll sift through your old crap and make it a little better. The key is to make it so the jump from “wow, a lot of crap” to sorting it is very short. This is why I have the magazines in bags and the files in folders. I just go in and make it “a little better”. That’s all we can ask.

I’m not perfect; I just discovered a day or so ago that some of my old macintosh disks are actually getting moldy. I’m going to go get them transferred off where I can and save the data from them… then encapsulate them… then encapsulate the encapsulations….

4 Comments

Being someone who finished a film, I get a lot of nice e-mails and discussions going with people who are working hard on films and want advice from me. Naturally I do my best to give them whatever I’ve learned along the way on both the previous and current productions, so that I can help them finish their films.

Unfortunately, there is occasionally a miscommunication. My advice and ideas about finishing your film are just that… geared towards helping you finish your production. It has turned out, however, that in some cases people are seeking advice on how not to finish their films. They’re hearing me talk in all these big sweeping manners about things they’d never do because it might actually cause them to get their work down and out the door. In doing this, I might have gained a reputation along some people as someone who isn’t flexible, who can’t see the trees for the forest. What about never actually completing your work? Huh?

So to help these folks, who also might be too shy to ask me how to kill their little seedling in the bud, I offer the following 5 pieces of advice. Get stopping, guys!

• Realize in your heart of hearts that your film isn’t real unless it’s on a large screen.

  This is killer advice to shoot your pony right out of the gate. See, there’s this fantastic virus of an idea by filmmakers that only if their work is projected on a screen larger than 55 inches can what they’ve created be considered “real”. That candy-colored rainbow, that demand that they be shown in “movie houses”, “art houses”, and “cinemas” is something that a lot of directors will glady debase every single last aspect of their work for. They’ll change the title, hack up the timeline, remove characters, add sex scenes, and do everything they can for that chance to get it on a screen. A lot of this begging goes on at “Film Festivals”, where you run around like a bright-lights-dazed teenage whore offering yourself to anyone who promises you that they can get you into a a theatre. Oh, the things you do, the promises you’ll agree to, the places your puckered lips will go. The best part, of course, is that it doesn’t always work. You might go through all that and nothing will come of it! Bang! Instant death, because now your project is “old” and “out of date” and you’ll have no chance of convincing anyone it can go on the magic big screen the next time around. And since you’re convinced that’s the only way your film could ever be shown, you’ll shoot it in the head and go onto the next long project. Joyous Stoppings unto you!

  I have nothing to do with these guys, but you can see the creator of the Blair Witch Project go crazy drool over himself because his film didn’t go on the big white screen but only got onto DVD. He was paid to make the film, given basically free reign over editing, got to shoot it the way he wanted to, and they’re even distributing it for him! But he failed, in his eyes, and is heartbroken at how things came out. What a fantastic attitude! Take inspiration from this approach to things, and you to can be well on your way to not being well on your way.

• Treat your first film like your fifth film.

  A filmmaker embarking on his fifth project has been through a lot. He’s seen things that would make a war surgeon cry. His production team is like a well-oiled machine, knowing what he wants often before he does. He’s seen how the differences can happen from what’s on the page and what’s realistic at 2 in the morning shooting in that abandoned subway station after a full day doing the library scene. He knows how pacing is going to end up in the editing room, and shoots for that. And when things go all gaflooky, he knows what tricks he can do in the editing room to help a disaster become a triumph.

  To ensure your project slows down, act like you’re capable of all this already because you watched a lot of films, and you know your own script by heart. Assume that if everything then doesn’t go as well the first time through, you did it “wrong”. Don’t compromise; wait weeks to get the next perfect shooting time down with all your actors and people so that they get bored or change hairstyles or otherwise yank out of the project. This is the genius of this advice: by aiming for this idealized perfection in your head, you turn a passable production into a completely mediocre one. And since a mediocre one can get even worse, eventually you’ll give it up entirely. Voila! Instant stoppage!

• For that matter, treat your first film like your only film.

  Even better than rushing headlong into your project with this impossible vision in your head is to act like every single thing’s the end of the world. The idea that maybe you’d use this current work as a learning experience, not try to maximize its revenue-generating potential, and avoid compromising everything because you hope it’ll go on the magic screen and into those festivals… that’s the good stuff… uh, I mean the bad stuff. You don’t want that; you want to treat life like every single thing is an all-or-nothing, shoot-for-the-moon deal because all those burned bridges and idiot decisions you make will be that much more justifed, since there’s no chance you’re doing this again. And stop watching things like Evil Dead, where Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell shot the movie over three times before it became what we think of as the classic Evil Dead II. Be sure to forget how Spike Lee made nearly a half-dozen films before She’s Gotta Have It, including an aborted film that devastated him and which he bounced back from.

  I should note I’m horrible example myself, having made 6 short films (Headrush, Incubus, Incubus (16mm) Mr. Lazer Guy, Conspiracy Rock, Blessed are the Filmmakers), aborted two others (The Pie, Mr. Lazer Guy Meets the Evil Person), and worked on a couple productions by others before I ever started BBS Documentary. Don’t make my mistake! Please think you’ll only ever do this once! Bet everything on red!

• Interact in any way with a record company of any size and shape.

  This is a sure-fire way to slow things down to a crawl, and if you really want to, kill things entirely.

  Don’t let it be said I don’t follow my own advice: I spent nearly a year talking with a record company, and by a record company I mean a miniscule record company, trying to get the chance to put a single song on the BBS Documentary DVD set. Originally I was going to have it be credit music, but then I decided it would be menu music, because they were taking time getting back to me and I had to keep editing. Now, to really get a feel for this, you have to realize that the artist of the song, who wrote and recorded it, was all for me having it in the documentary for basically nothing. He’d get a small royalty per disc, but that was a-OK with him and he was glad to see his song, which at this point was 5 years old, show up somewhere appropriate. (The song mentioned BBSes, you see.) Well, his record company wouldn’t have any of that. First they would take months and months to get back to me, and then, with prodding, proceed to give me fantastic terms like demanding thousands of dollars for the temporary rights to use the song, with them disappearing if the songs ended up anywhere but on the DVD. That is, I’d have to renegotiate if it went on TV or Film Festivals or anything else. And as a bonus, this was all cash to go to the record company; they weren’t even negotiating for the artist, and told me clearly I’d have to negotiate a second contract with the artist, who might have a completely different set of terms. Wow! This sounded so great, I wanted to stop hitting myself in the face with a toaster right then and there because I’d found an even cooler way to experience pain! Oh, and even better, I had to then renegotiate after I’d printed a certain number of my DVDs! That is, if I’d sold something like 20,000 copies, I’d get to go through the whole mess again.

  Considering that the correspondence I was having with them was like shouting at a cemetery in terms of turnaround, I could imagine how long it would take for an actual finished contract to happen.

  So if you want to slow things to shit, please, use all that licensed music owned by record companies (not the artist) and avoid working directly with unsigned or content-controlling artists, like I will in the future. Convince yourself that only Mariah Carey or your favorite “alternative” band can properly convey the scene you’re showing, or that a specific musical piece which is owned by a company larger than twelve Death Stars strapped together with rubber bands is the lynchpin of your credit sequence.

  I’ve watched two associates waste a year each because they “had” to have music of a certain type. Please, if you need to stop your film, get on the phone with a company that just distributes works by other people. Your surviving relatives will thank me.

• Measure success by cash.

  Woo boy! This last one gets tricky.

  See, there’s nothing wrong with making money from your film. And in fact, that’s kind of a sign of success, no doubt about it. But to really kill your project and slow it down, you have to consider it the only way you could possibly consider your film a success. Forget increased visibility as someone who completes projects. Forget the contacts you make when people find out you made a film. Forget using it as a learning experience and then diving in again to get things even better the next time. No, see, if you want to ensure years of mired meaningless activity, wait out for the big bucks. And wait, and wait, and wait….

  Everyone wants to get paid, for sure. But if you’re seeking that endless purgatory of Films Not Yet Out, you gotta really sit on it, killing buzz, ignoring potential smaller venues, mediums and opportunities, holding out until you can buy so many black helicopters that you crash them into each other for fun.

Sadly, I must report that one of my friends who was working so hard to ensure his film never really got out has failed and his film is now out. His name is Chuck Olsen, and he was so close to ensuring that his film was never going to get out; he spent years on it, kept redoing aspects of it over and over, insisted on having a show on a big screen, used music from record companies instead of tons of cool creative commons music, and then he has to go fuck it all up and release it for free on Google Video. Damnit, Chuck! Now everyone’s going to hear about you, you’re getting on all these weblogs, and you’re going to be inspired to work on another film sooner rather than later, treating Blogumentary as the excellent first film it is, only to achieve greater and greater things!

So take my advice, all of you who were looking to dive your project into the mud; follow these five steps and you’ll be able to follow a whole haystack of projects I won’t bother to list, that are in various degrees of completion and have been so for years, lost forever.

GET STOPPING.

1 Comment

It is very important, nay, critical for a weblog writer to not just consider an idea but to coin a nonsense word which makes it sound like they originated the idea, when in fact nobody else might have thought it worthy of calling it a special term. It’s the weekend, so it’s my turn. The term I’m coining is Conceptporn.

To accept the term Conceptporn, you’re probably going to have to accept a specific definition of the term Pornography, which is “Decontextualized presentation of attractive or compelling subjects.” This actually ensnares things like catalogs under pornography, which I do buy into, after a fashion. It’s probably getting into a weird space to say so, but the idea of pornography by itself being this specific destructive process is because of how it can be utilized with regard to human beings as the objects, which is really the case with most anything. Shipping containers aren’t evil; using them to transport human beings illicitly such that you end up suffocating a few, is.

Catalogs are a good example of non-evil pornography. Catalogs present you items devoid and lacking reality; the items are clean when nothing stays clean and the cords are neatly arranged when they never will be. They’re shiny and nothing stays shiny. They’re in an attractive open space or even more likely shown with no other identifying background items, so that you’re focused just on the saleable object itself. I’ve digitized a bunch of examples of this. And nothing about this idea is new; I saw a discussion of this in the same terms in SPY magazine in the late 1980s and Wired has had a column called “Infoporn” since at least 2001. I found a Boston Globe article covering this concept as well, although they won’t let you have access to it without cash.

But Conceptporn! That idea is totally mine! Here’s how it works.

I started noticing some time ago that I would have articles in my feed reading software or in my browser that were open, but which I would not read and which I could not close. I don’t mean because of a software bug, but because I was stuck in some quasi-reading state, where I would see the thing, and it would interest me, and yet I couldn’t just read it; I had to study it carefully, and that time had not arrived, and yet I didn’t want to close the window and read it later because the concept was just too interesting and I knew that the minute my next opportunity would arise, I would want to read it right away. In some cases, these pages have sat there for a week, and because Firefox sometimes memory leaks, it would slow my machine down, with me unable to close the browser, because it had a couple tabs waiting for these sites.

The most recent of these is the Micro Compact Home site, which has photos, tech specs, galleries, news stories and everything else you could imagine you’d want to know about the Compact Home. This is a roughly US$50k home that is very tiny and which is designed for you to have as minimal a footprint on the earth as possible, plus encourage an austere level of living. Just in case you thought, say THX-1138 was a lifestyle choice and not a Science Fiction film. There is no way I’m getting one of these things. I just don’t need it; I have a big house and it’s full of shit and I like this situation. Were I to acquire a second home, say, in Maine or New Hampshire and I’d want to have some small living space there, it’s more likely I’d hire a local contractor to make a cabin and I’d still turn the thing into a two or three-room cabin, and it’d have heating, and hey wait a minute that’s not going to happen either.

In other words, the whole thing is utterly fascinating to me and yet it can only ever exist as a concept; it’s not just incompatible with my current life, it’s incompatible with how I have ever lived. There was never a point that this thing and I would have intersected and it doesn’t look like it ever will. It’s the concept that has grabbed me, and this site presents this concept so compellingly that I’m unable to close the window because I need to understand the concept more. Like that matters.

Websites are utterly perfect for Conceptporn. Between the fact that you can add flash, criss-crossing links, quality photographs and the rest, you can set up an entire other existence laid out in perfect Conceptporn fashion. I’m always stumbling on these pages, and I feel that rush of oh no another one and it sits on the page or in a bookmark and reminds me how much more living I want to do.

Do I ever finally read them? Yes, often I do, but sometimes not for weeks after I first find them. Sometimes I’m enlightened, sometimes I’m not. It’s another crazy thing I can bring up during one of my endless party rants people have been unfortunate enough to sit through over the years, but I don’t know if the people listening are any more or less fascinated than I was, running into the concept without any other context.

So what happens with this term? Well, it either becomes amazingly popular, spreading throughout the online world and used everywhere in a dismissive manner by fat nerds: “Oh, yeah, browsed some Conceptporn on that new USB RAID.” Or it could be used in that fantastic halting phrasing I see newspaper reporters use when that newspaper’s readers are as technologically savvy as a pile of firewood: “This terrible new online trend of ‘Conceptporn’ may ensnare children, experts say, and there is little currently being done to stop it.” Or maybe this is the last you’ll ever hear of it.

But man, what a concept.

4 Comments

Besides being an idea guy, I’m also an impulsive idea guy. Hence, I can now announce:

http://www.wozipedia.org

This is basically a wiki with a bunch of initial work by me and a few others, with some room for expansion and some rough ideas sketched out. If my previous behavior is any indication, this will progress in stops and starts depending on my other priorities and projects. Since I’ve been collecting stuff for something like this for years, I suspect it’ll grow steadily over time, even just pulling from my own collection and placing it on there.

There’s two sides to this: the ideals of doing a project, and holy shit Mr. Wikipedia critic has a Wiki.

I’ll address the first by saying that it was pretty trivial and inexpensive to put this all up; I already had a hosting account with Dreamhost that could add things like Mediawiki or gallery software, so this was just a case of attaching it to it. (The other site running under this account is dankaye.com, in case you’re wondering.) Isn’t it great that we live in a world where the time from idea to implusive setting up of a worldwide-accessible information portal can be measured in minutes? Isn’t it terrifying that we live in a world where the time from idea to implusive setting up of a worldwide-accessible information portal can be measured in minutes?

The second part is worth going into because it tackles, head-on, the most common misunderstanding about my Wikipedia criticism: that I don’t like Wikis. Or I want them all to go away.

Hell no! Anyone who has suffered through my multiple speeches and essays about the subject should be able to infer that I actually like the medium of Wiki-stuff, as long as it’s handled correctly and intensely stupid mistakes that we made 20 years ago aren’t repeated in a 2.0 fashion. I’m dismayed that in some cases we’re making the exact same mistakes and just letting them fly until they’re fixed in almost the exact same fashion, except instead of wasting the time of a dozen people you waste the time of thousands.

But the idea, the concept of collaborating via software, the mechanism of providing a historical record of changes and opportunity for verification and internal note-taking… I like that! I work on a bunch of wikis, for my day job, for Rotten Library and so on. So no, actually, I dig it. Otherwise, why would I waste so much time arguing about specific flaws incumbent in the Wikipedia organization of data? Or, put another way, why would I point out the issues involved in collaborative software like Wiki if I didn’t think it would have echoes and relevancy years and decades from now?

So, let’s see what I did with the Wozipedia that is unusual compared to Wikipedia (but not other Wikis) and why I did it. I likely did other things differently, but let’s go with the biggies.

• No anonymous editing. You can’t just come in and whiz all over the thing without contacting me to get an account. Yes, that means I cut out all the potential people who just want to drop a mouse-nibble on the site and walk away, say someone who can tell me Wozniak’s score in the last Segway Polo games and nothing else. But on the other hand, I build a relationship with the people working on the project, and I maintain the social “glue” that means long-term success. Eventually, given enough people joining, that glue goes away, but it gets replaced with conventions regarding behavior that were formed during the initial period when the glue was still around. Most long-term organizations (Lloyds of London and 4-H Clubs come to mind) then use this foundation of “it works” to say “if we make changes in how we run, it’s a pretty big deal”. So right now, you have to do the minor activity of contacting me to jump in. This sets the bar too high for Opinion Tourists but not for most interested parties.
• Head Editor and Guidelines Set by Same. So here I am. Jason Scott. Guy running the Wiki. People help me but I’m the guy, and the place will rise or fall based on me, my personality, and how I can lead. This means that it’s possible that I may be an ass and the place will collapse, or it means that I may lead well and the place will thrive. If people think of the project, they know I should be talked to. If the project is in trouble, it should be brought up with me. If the project is in trouble and I’m the trouble, then you know you should walk away. This decreases “management collaboration” which I think is part of the problem with Wikipedia, the feeling that just walking into the project gives you unfettered control over every bit of the project, up to and including guidelines, procedure and serious decisions of what goes and stays.
• Easy-to-Recount, Truthful Credo. “One Step from Steve”. Pretty easy. If Steve Wozniak touched it, it can go in. That’s a ton of shit. It’s not everything in the world, but it’s a lot. It’s a solid phrase, easily recounted. People say “Two Steps from Steve” and they’re saying “We shouldn’t be putting that in.” People can play games with “Well, Steve MUST have touched this. One step from Steve!” but that only works so far, and ultimately you still keep the general idea. Meanwhile, Jimbo constantly says “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” Unfortunately, this is not true: a lot of human knowledge is disappeared from Wikipedia every day. In fact, people constantly fight over what’s ‘worth’ going in. What a waste. But off goes Jimbo, the de facto head and spiritual leader of the project, making promises that can’t be kept. That’s what we call “a problem”. People can agree or disagree with the wisdom of “One Step from Steve” but I’m going to stick with it.
• Inclusion of Primary Sources when possible. Some parts of the Wiki will not be editable. They will contain primary sources yanked from speeches by Wozniak, scanned from magazines and books, and so on. If the source is primary, it should be marked off, i.e. it doesn’t need collaboration. A discussion tab will allow notes on the source and aspects of it, but it stays static. The idea that every single thing on a Wiki needs to be subject to collaboration is like saying that every single file on an FTP server needs to be world-writable. No. In cases where the creator of the primary source doesn’t want it browsable, a local copy will be kept in a non-browsable location, so it’s verifiable.
• Not acting like I’m the superior fucking be-all end-all glowing assclown of the pile. Just because I’m doing this, and just because I’m compiling it, does not mean that I am automatically the most superior place for information on Steve Wozniak and the Apple II. An awful lot of people, and I mean hundreds, have worked very hard for decades to collect an amazing amount of information about the Apple phenomenon and Steve Wozniak. Steve Wozniak, in fact, has done an amazing amount on his own. His woz.org site is a treasure trove of anecdotes, ideas, and statements by the man himself. Some might be misremembered, and he does admit this, but he’s doing his best to get the word out, and doing it directly and not through the efforts of some PR flack or agent. That’s a big help. I can’t possibly see how a wozipedia would outdo Woz himself. And acting like just because I sprinkled magic Wiki-dust on an idea makes it a superior invocation of history is ludicrous. “If you see something broken, just fix it” is a common Wikipedia phrase. “If you are totally convinced that something is wrong, just go ahead and jam it in the direction you want it to be” is a common Wikipedia action. It’ll likely happen here as well, and we do our best to fix it, but it’s what happens with collaboration, and that’s why sometimes static information can excel in dependability. It’s not clear cut.

Will this succeed? Well, what’s success in this case? Will it be a large pile? Likely. Will it be fun? I hope so. Will Wozniak kill me? Probably not, he’s too snuggly and too great a guy. But time will tell.

Again, contact me if you want in. There’s quite a lot of space to play in. One step from Steve!

3 Comments

I’m an idea guy; I like coming up with ideas. Some of them come to fruition and some are in a sort of holding pattern. Maybe I’ll pick them up again, and maybe not.

There’s one I’ve been kicking around for well over a couple years. It’s had a number of names, and “Wozipedia” is just me being cute. But here’s the basic idea.

Steve Wozniak is a great guy. I was just listening to a recording of him talking during a 4-hour radio program (a Kevin Mitnick fill-in for Art Bell on the Coast to Coast AM radio show, in fact), and I was struck anew at how well-spoken, how inspiring, how damned intelligent the guy is. He can talk in general themes of tinkering and excitment and learning, and then spontaneously back-flip into a discussion of register flipping to achieve color in television scanlines. I’ve got many, many hours of him talking like this; he’s covered a lot of subjects and he never sounds like anything other than the coolest uncle or buddy you’d want to meet.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him on a half-dozen occasions, and again, he’s great: either astounded by something he’s looking at or answering endless questions and queries from people surrounding The Woz.

The Woz is known as The Woz because of his masterpiece: The Apple II. This computer is basically the last home computer to be designed by a single person. Later peripherals have others contributing significant parts of the hardware and design, but the Apple I and Apple II are basically Woz’s. And the Apple II is, to me, a groundbreaking, true classic. Classic like a 1957 Chevy, like a Pac-Man machine. It stands on its own; you put down an Apple II and people just “get” it. Yes, there are other “classic” home computers, but none had that level of intense openness Woz put in, or such a fantastically communicative and friendly designer.

I realize some small portion of this is personal opinion.

So, when you sit down and think of it, consider how much of the world can be explained via the Apple II and Steve Wozniak: Engineering. Marketing. Programming. Design. Personality. You could pick any aspect of this machine and its creator and start to understand the computer industry, the idea of chip design, the nature of port expansion.. you could go in so many directions, just from these two simple data points.

In my little dream, you go to a site or a program and there’s an Apple II. Standing next to it is Steve Wozniak. That’s it. You could then click or activate anything and it would zoom in. Click on Steve Wozniak and get his bio. Or his pedigree. Or his accomplishments. Click on things from his life and see photos or hear Woz from any of his hundreds of speeches talking about that subject in his own words. Same with the Apple. Click on it and get ads, get photos of people, get schematics, get tutorials. Some would have Woz and some wouldn’t.

With this approach, the result is both limited and unlimited. There’s little room for, say, Pokemon or Oil Lamps, but there’s room for a little Silicon Valley history, for Macintosh, for Atari (Woz worked there one week), for HP Calculators, and so on.

The Wozipedia would be like something between one of the interfaces from a Neal Stephenson novel combined with the positive aspects of Wikipedia: the strong interlinking, the range of subjects, the feeling of walking in any direction and it will be there, teaching you and inspiring you, however far you walk.

I would love this thing. Maybe some day I’ll do it.

As if to inspire me, I was listening to Woz speak at last year’s Vintage Computer Festival and he dropped this little tidbit: he saved everything. All his notes, his diagrams, his notebooks, his documentation. All of it; it has every last bit. He thought it was important and might have use in the future. He was so right.

Now, who wants in?

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I made the relatively hard decision not to have Vista in my home. This is tough for me, because I’ve been using Windows computers as my front-end to my stuff for over 10 years, and I have done an awful lot of work on that operating system family. Walking away has the potential to be difficult. (I should note that my system at my day job will probably be Vista, because it’s not under my control.)

But walking away is what I’m doing; crippling cards and drivers and messing up the whole user-OS balance in the name of ensuring access to the latest Adam Sandler movie doesn’t strike me as a fair deal. In fact, it has that heady perfume of a forced ass-raping, the coquettish sounds of laughter and snickering behind my back as I pay through the nose to have “approved” monitors and cables and who-knows-what-else so there’s a clearly defined red carpet for major studios to protect their little flicks.

There are professional/amateur whiners better suited to make the case for why you should or shouldn’t convert (upgrade’s not a good word here) to a Windows Vista system. I’m more interested in the meta-situation, that of changing your operating system and what that has meant.

There are computers you touch and computers you work on/own. If you define “own” as “it was partially or completely mine, and I did stuff on it beyond testing to see if it beeped”, then I have owned the following computers:

• Commodore PET.
• Atari 800.
• IBM PC (5150! I had one of the first 1000).
• Apple IIc.
• Commodore Amiga (500 and 1000).
• Macintosh SE.
• Sun 3/60, 3/280, Ultra 2 (COW.NET once ran on Sun 3s)
• SGI IRIS 3000.
• Six Billion Anonymous x86-based machines.

Obviously, as a computer historian guy who gets sent or buys an awful lot of old crap, I’ve “owned” a lot of other machines and my basement laboratory that I do my research in is what the experts call “chock full”:

But just because I have something in my house doesn’t mean that I can harken back to long-spent weekends or nights hacking away at the box trying to make things boot or try stuff out. Hence I have Commodore 64s, Lisas, Atari STs, Apple Powerbooks, TIs, and a whole other range of computerized doorstops, all waiting for their short moments in the sun when I boot them up to test a theory or try some donated software. You can rest easy, Fan of Your Chosen Old Computer, that I’ve definitely played with your favorite platform or machine. But when I say “own”, I meant it was in the bedroom or the office, not the basement or attic.

As should be obvious from the last few paragraphs, I love these fucking things. Just adore them. They’ve ruined my vision and they’ve horrendously inflated my sense of self-worth and social context, but it’s a fair swap. I’m fine with the damage they’ve caused because of all the weeks, nay, the years of what they’ve given me in return. The chances I’m going to wake up one day and go “Gaaahhh, what have I done, I have wasted my life” are very unlikely, at least as far as blaming computers for any of it. I state it clearly: I am a computer guy.

Therefore, what computers I’m doing “stuff” on are very important to me. I have been expressing myself using them for a quarter-century now; they’re an extension of me, of what I do, how I am known, and how I know. Sometimes they disappoint, sometimes they freak me out, and sometimes they have left me shivering in my chair, crying. But other times they lift me out of myself, raise my hopes, bring me dreams to join my own. I use them for communication, for entertainment, for work, for learning. And like any tool, I can react very positively or negatively to shifts in how a given computer “does” things.

It has always been possible to configure or change a computer to suit the user, but more often than not the user has had to configure or change to suit the computer. There’s a big difference between prodding around in the back of a circuit board to solder in a modification that lets you change how memory works, and plugging in a USB device that immediately adds a new port or peripheral.

In the rush to define themselves, home computers were more often than not “open” affairs, where the best and most successful plan was to focus on getting the things out cheaply and to as many distribution networks as possible, not to lock the thing down. There are, of course, exceptions to this everywhere, from the demand that Macintoshes have no slots to the artifical limiting of memory in Commodore computers to ensure future models would be purchased. But you didn’t feel, at any point, that the computer was “against” you, just that the company was being a short-sighted basket of fuckfruits to make a few extra bucks or cut down on maintenance calls.

But bear this in mind: if they could have, they would have. Texas Instruments tried to control the market for TI 99 cartridges so that you couldn’t have third parties come out with cartridges without paying TI. Atari sued the first third-party makers of cartridges for the 2600, Activision. (Activision won). Situations like this occurred in mainframe eras too, with IBM pounding the stuffing out of “IBM-like” resellers or vendors, or charging significant amounts of cash to “upgrade” a machine by removing a wire inside, unblocking access to additional capacity. What I’m saying here, is there’s no Garden of Eden situation with commerce and machinery/computational hardware, just periods when the greed hammer hadn’t yet pounded every potential nail.

That said, just because the situation has always been around, doesn’t mean you have to swallow it like a tasty gumdrop, either. If something you buy doesn’t work the way you expect it to, if it turns out that you were promised one thing or given another, or if you realize you’re being slowly cornered into someone else’s revenue stream and they’re pissing away freely into it, you can mostly say no. Or at least, you can try, and not just live in a constant BOHICA mode, getting slowly drunk on bad beer and thinking that singing along with songs on the radio constitutes freedom.

The vital situation, the step here that I think Vista finally took, was turning what was traditionally “your” computer and “your” operating system, and vitally shifting the total balance of power to where you were now a “user” like a junkie or lab rat is a “user”, not like a bulldozer operator is a “user”. You got voted off the island. You were charged for a membership to the club but you can’t use the steam room. Meetings you weren’t allowed to attend and which claimed to be in your best interest were adjourned and the minutes all said the same thing: Praise the user’s money. Fuck the user.

Windows XP, this previous revision, had a measure of dumbassery I could live with. It’d bitch like a kid who lost his ice cream cone when I installed certain pieces of software, but then it’d let me do it anyway. It would slow down noticably after a few days of being up, and occasionally would go into conniption fits when I happened to request a thumbnail of a movie with whacky codecs in it. But it was possible to go play whack-a-mole with processes and bring it back to some level of normal. And it was comfortable, and I could do stuff on it.

And like I said before, it’s not like this stuff hasn’t been creeping up, nesting, making little catacombs in your freedoms as a user of technology. You can point to End-User License Agreements and maintenance plans and nutbag intellectual property laws and all manner of maneuvers conducted over the past few decades. They were all there, but like a lot of people I mulled them like water buffalo down the hill, knowing in the back of my mind that those fuckers were eventually going to stampede and possibly trample over something I cared about. It was just a matter of when, and whether I’d be around for it.

Well, I’m officially around for it. So !VISTA NO!, if you please.

Some time ago, I started putting more and more of my efforts into working in FreeBSD. Textfiles.com is basically a BSD shop, with my scripts and programs for mantaining it all in BSD and with the applications that people connect to also in BSD. I rsync. I work in Perl, script in bash. A lot of my “work”, therefore, is not on the Windows boxes on my desk but downstairs on the BSD boxes or across the country on same. I’ve been splitting my efforts for years, in other words, spreading the love around, embracing computers but not just the one that plays a chord when it boots up.

So then the question becomes what exactly do I do in Windows? This is the calibration, the tough part, the self-assessment of realizing what I do. Here’s my list:

• Edit my video.
• Master DVDs.
• Burn DVD-ROMs and CDs.
• Connect to IRC.
• Telnet or SSH to other places.
• Web browsing.
• View PDFs and Flash Animations.
• Play music or movies.
• Write in notepad.
• Play demos or games.
• Variations thereof.

Immediately, we see stuff I can do equally well on a FreeBSD box: ROM burning, IRC, ssh, telnet, viewing PDFs/flash, web-browsing, writing in a text editor, play music or movies. There’s almost no definable difference between doing it on a Windows box and a box running a X server. The only reason I don’t do that now is because the Windows boxes are the ones on my desk.

The others are the sticking points. Video editing and DVD mastering persist because I’ve really grown comfortable with Vegas. I really like the way it does stuff. I like the speed, the ease, the way I work with it. I’ve grown comfortable with it. The demos and games, well, that’s because they’re written for Windows, right? They use the Windows stuff and so they won’t run anywhere else.

So there’s it. I am basically on Windows because I want to edit video and play a few games. (In marketing terms, these tasks/attributes are “sticky”.) That’s not very much, is it? If I got comfortable with Adobe (which runs on Apples) or any of the free video editing software programs that are getting progressively better, I could ditch that part of Windows. And the demos and games? Well, I could probably just watch the demos at work occasionally, or at a friend’s house, or something similar. That’s hardly a reason to keep around a system, just to play a couple games. Hell, if I got my hands on an old copy of XP (when it becomes old), I could probably just keep that in a separate partition, dual-boot or use a vmware-like thing, and then play the stuff that way. I’d have choices.

And there we see; a little time of thinking and I can know exactly why I’m staying and how easy it is to leave when I’m ready.

It took me quite a while to compose that list up there, racking my brains for what I actually do instead of just saying “I need Windows, so too bad about the raping.” I would start to consider what I thought was an intractable, Windows-only thing, and then I realized there were free programs, running in a BSD system, that did the exact same thing out there. Often better. (Sometimes not better, but good enough).

It is very uncomfortable distilling your life, your love, into a little list. But when you do it, you realize what’s really important to you, and you can step forward and make decisions based on facts, not hopes and rough sketches.

There’s a big difference between a vista and a horizon.

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For reasons that become less clear with each passing day, I have a feed coming from Wired News. I think part of it is a nostalgia regarding how Wired used to be when I first stumbled upon it when I was 24, and the other part is that over time I’ve appeared in it. And don’t think I don’t appreciate that very, very much.

But in my battered and arrow-pierced helmet as Wikipedia Critic, I can’t help but be particularly galled by the efforts of one Tony Long, cub Wired reporter (actually, the Copy Chief), whose stories keep showing up in my feed reader, along with all the other ones.

I happened to click on one, found the article a little short, and then, at the bottom, the dreadful words: (Source: Wikipedia). Well now, that’s fantastic; next I’d be inspired to have (Source: Guy I Know). I simply assumed he was on deadline, had to shoot some thing at his editor to make them shut up, and then he’d get back to, you know, work.

Wrong. Here’s some articles from the last two weeks:

• Jan. 28, 1986: Challenger (Source: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 24, 1848: Gold! (Source: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 23, 1978: Pfffttt…. (Source: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 22, 1984: Dawn of the Mac (Source: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 18, 1911: Clear the Deck (Source: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 17, 1985: Please Hold (Souirce: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 15, 1969: White-Knuckle Ride (Source: Wikipedia)

Notably, none of these articles are listed as being “written by” Tony Long; they’re marked off as “compiled by”, as if the Herculean effort of going to en.wikipedia.org and pressing Open-Apple-C deserves the same nomenclature as contacting a series of individuals to create a summary. Those graphs and charts in a newspaper that show clearly what happened in the last 20 years in a subject, or which show exactly which states have the most beehives? That’s compiling.

Obviously, newspaper journalism has a long and studied history of just yanking whatever comes down the newswire or which goes by on TV, and then just printing it, meaning something completely wrong or misheard can become canon. My favorite band, Negativland, did an amazing album about this whole phenomenon called “Helter Stupid”. Check it out sometime.

But even if this is the usual way of doing business, there’s something about the wikipedia angle that irks me. I think it’s the fact that the use of Wikipedia as the primary (and only!) source for an article is considered kosher enough to credit it at the bottom, and this is A-OK.

We do this everywhere: claim something is still being worked on, acknowledge it’s got some pretty major flaws, promise we’ll work them out in the future, and then dump more and more infrastructure on it. I guess it’s what people just do. But doesn’t mean I have to like it.

(Source: Wikipedia)

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I had a very successful weekend in Colorado. I got to interview two interactive fiction authors for GET LAMP, and even got in an interview with an arcade owner for the arcade documentary. As previously stated, if I can fit in something for ARCADE, I do it, but never at the cost of a text adventure interview. This is why when I was just in Chicago, even though it’s the center of the coin-op universe, I only filmed text adventure authors this time through. One of the Colorado-based IF authors, Robb Sherwin, was kind enough to point out the existence of the Lyons arcade near where I was filming, and after some contact with Kevin and Carole Carroll (the owners), an interview was arranged the same weekend.

If you don’t want to wade through a bunch of paragraphs being sold on this place and why you must immediately buy a plane ticket or get into your car and go there, I’ll just give you three words: Joust Pinball Machine.

Only 402 were ever made. All of the surviving ones are in the hands of collectors. It’s one of the rarest machines to find. And you can walk right in the door and play one. I swear to you, I was sure that I was going to take a dirt nap long before ever getting near one, much less be given the opportunity to play one. Not only did I get to play, but Kevin gave me a tutorial and matched me up against another regular, so we could go head to head. Oh, did I mention the Joust Pinball Machine is a head to head pinball machine? You might not have known that, which I inferred because you’re still reading and not in your car driving directly to Lyons, Colorado.

Lyons Pinball is the dream and family business of the Carrolls, who were inspired to open it by the sight of the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. This isn’t some worn-out busted pinball hall gripping onto its last days; it was opened just 4 years ago, designed from the ground up to be a primo pinball location. The arcade is open 4 days a week; Kevin explained to me how they spend the “closed” days performing maintenance and upkeep on the roughly 40 pinballs onsite. Their policy and promise is “100% maintained”, which means that when you walk up to a machine, whether it’s 10 years old or 40, it’s going to run properly and not ruin your game with a stuck bumper or broken flipper.

The machine selection’s great; besides a wide range of pinballs including Black Knight, Theatre of Magic, Cyclone and Eight Ball Deluxe (Limited Edition), they have the almost impossible-to-find-working Discs of Tron in an environmental cabinet, as well as the equally-rare fully-working Hercules by Atari Pinball, the largest commercial pinball machine made. (It uses a cue ball for a pinball).

Here’s a couple screengrabs from the interview, with Kevin in them, next to a few of those well-maintained machines.

Wait, are you still here? When’s your flight?

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Like a lot of people on the web since 1993, I have a semi-static defunct webpage about myself located on my cow.net website. (I think the fact I own the domain COW.NET also indicates how long I’ve been around.)

On the COW.NET page about myself, I welcome people who are browsing, and invite them to “buy the T-shirt”. This was just a throwaway statement, a little joke. Sometime later, I heard about this new company called Cafepress, which takes your images and allows yourself or others to purchase items with those images on them. Since I thought this was pretty funny, I created a “Storefront” with a Jason Scott image.

And then promptly forgot about it.

Almost seven years later, I got mail from Cafepress, saying “You really need to clear up your mailing address and some other account information before we can pay you.” I went and checked, and I guess I was owed money for all those sales! So I filled out the crap and then forgot about it again.

This week, this showed up in my mail:

Drinks on me!

Vaguely avid readers might note that I do my best to avoid fad jargon, those phrases that weblogs like to use to seem hip or at least cynically superior to others by keeping track of whatever twisted refashioning of language is hot this week. I sometimes fail, of course, but I really do my best.

However, I can only imagine that a certain percentage of people would look at my mad sack of cash and say “That’s the Long Tail at work.”

If you’ve not heard the phrase “Long Tail”, therefore, let me summarize it as best I can: A guy from Wired is making a living selling people a fucked-up bell curve. Or, if you prefer, we’ve acquired a new messiah who says, in book, weblog, magazine and audio form, that Given Enough Time, You Will Eventually Sell All Your Stock.

The “long tail” is the slow, steady trickle of people wandering into your virtual (or real) storefront weeks or months or years after you set up shop, and finding that they still want your product. If you make a graph of sales, this drawn-out plateau/line resembles a very long “tail” attached to that sweet, sweet lump of sales at the beginning of the graph.

If reading about it makes no sense, don’t worry; there’s a website, article, book and walrus all explaining the concept in intricate detail. OK, fine, the last link doesn’t give you anything but a walrus.

I mostly ignore this whole fad because it has the same attributes of a lot of classification fads, that is, a lot of obvious statement followed by a branding which is then used by person or persons capitalist-minded to cash in on the resulting rush of interest. This is how downloadable recordings became “podcasts”, adding a comments section became “peer-to-peer collaboration”, and how, way back in 1998, removing the “(y/n)?” from downloads became Push Technology.

Unfortunately, I’m now seeing it leak into an area I care about, namely, moviemaking. Long Tail Wired Dude made this entry about making a “Long Tail Movie”. As far as I can tell, his brilliant idea is to make shitty movies cheaply and make back the meager budgets by never throwing away the stock.

Because what we need are more people whipping out lame, fastly-produced shit and demanding twenty bucks.

The best part about “The Long Tail” as a “movement” is that, like Humpty Dumpty, you can make the word mean whatever you want it to mean. Anything where something takes a long time to run out can be a “long tail”. Any case you have trouble with sales after the initial curious rush of people is really a case of you exploiting the “long tail”. If you sleep with someone a lot and now not quite so much, your not getting some tail is part of the “long tail”.

I’m not saying the concept doesn’t have merit or isn’t in some way true; I’m just saying it’s another case of rebranding being used to grab concepts and then market them into the ground. If you recognize that this isn’t a revolutionary bit of thinking and is what it is, then have a great and fantastic time using the hot new fad jargon.

There, a blog fight. Where’s my posse? I gotta spend this mad Cafepress cash, and I’m all about the Washingtons.

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I hated a lot about the middle school I was transferred into in 7th grade. This is good, because there really was so much to hate, and it was best to get started on that right away. But let’s focus on two things: computers and fear.

The school had a computer lab, like a lot of schools of its type, and in our case the lab was a locked room containing roughly a dozen Apple IIs with green-screen monitors along the walls, some long tables in the middle, and one Apple on a cart in the front that had its own monitor. This room also had a desk, which was a ludicrous addition, taking up valuable space, because this was the kind of school that figured a computer lab was just a classroom with computers in it. It was also devoid of any character; if it had posters on the wall, they were meaningless pseudo-educational crap. Or, they were something a school psychologist believed would prevent the students from stabbing each other. The view out the windows was of the roof of the school, a bunch of heating and cooling elements and the steam coming out of the cafeteria. This was not a fantastic place of computer presentation.

This bland little room was lorded over by a single teacher. I previously used nicknames instead of real names when referring to my teachers, out of some mutated sense of privacy and not giving them reason to sue me. So let’s just go with calling him Mister Slick.

I still remember Mister Slick, like a beating. Imagine circa-1979 Steven Wozniak with 1/100th the computer knowledge, the same grin and beard, and with a dash of sneering superiority… and you’re getting there. He was already Lord High Supreme Master Overlord of the computer lab when I started attending that school, and I want to speculate that he was the one teacher that saw these things coming in and offered to be the go-to guy for maintaining, teaching and working with them. I have grave doubts any of the other teachers wanted anything to do with the silly boxes on the second floor, and that they would bless and praise Mister Slick for taking the problem out of their hands.

His “real” classes were in Mathematics, where he’d cover the usual aspects of taking a bunch of numbers and making other numbers, a subject i’ve always been rather poor in. But he also taught computers, using these Apple IIs, and the combination of comedy and tragedy in these classes still haunts me.

It is a time-worn tradition for a person narrating a story about using computers as a youth to portray themselves as being the best at it and leaving everyone else around them, authority figure or contemporary, in the dust. So I will immediately say that there were at least a dozen people better than me at the school in all matters and subjects. I am not the fucking hero at the top of the heap with his sword held alight. I was probably in the upper percentiles but in the grand scheme of things I was just another 12 year old messed up nerd.

But I did like computers a lot. So that’s something.

The computer at home was an Atari 800 my mom had bought for me for the holidays one year. My computer at my dad’s house was an IBM PC. It was on this Atari 800 and the Commodore PET before that and the IBM PC that I’d been doing computer stuff. Before the Commodore PET came home one day, my dad used to bring home whacky little half-calculator half-computer things that IBM had lying around the research lab. I wasn’t able to solder or unscrew panels, but I could certainly handle my way around a dozen sort-of-operating-systems and do programming to an extent (in BASIC). I could also rip through the source code of other programs and do that very important surgical procedure of replacing all the status messages with profanity. So by the time I was transferred to this horrible middle school, I had about 4 years of computing experience under my belt.

This was, just to give some perspective, a time when you had to get a lecture about not touching the part of the floppy disk that was shiny. A time where you had to be told to keep the disk in the paper envelope that came with it so it wouldn’t get dusty. It was also a time when Mister Slick was offering to the students a special deal of just five dollars a floppy disk if they didn’t have one of their own. Just five dollars! Times a hundred students. Way to go, Mister Slick.

What I remember of my classmates at the time is the fear, that horrible, sickly fear that so many showed around computers. Most didn’t have one at home. Many were truly terrified of them, as one might be of an open flame or a handgun, convinced they were one wrong move away from disaster. Computers weren’t wonderous toys; they were vicious tools they would never master and which would cost them grades because the big Box of Mystery didn’t work in a way that made sense. Their eyes would grow wide when the floppy disk drive churned. “What’s going on?” would be whispered between them as it booted. “Did I break it”, “Is it supposed to do that.” “Please, you use it, I can’t type”. I still hear those voices, if I think back to them.

The thing is, I think a bunch of my classmates were proud of their ignorance. Not knowing something, in a place where knowing things was ostensibly the goal, was a twisted sort of accomplishment, especially if you could cull out a passing grade from it. It’s hard for me to really describe this pervading sense of accomplishment of non-accomplishment, but it was there, and I hated it. Learning was fun to me. To others it would just result in more responsibility, more things to get wrong, more things to not seem cool to your buddies with. Teachers like Mister Slick never seemed to get inside his students’ heads about this stuff, try to help kids rediscover how big and wonderful the gift of learning was. Rote memorization and dull lectures punctuated by surprise call-on questions were the orders of the day. Every day.

Mister Slick didn’t like me, and I didn’t like Mister Slick. He wanted everyone in the class to know nothing about computers, so he could proudly stand at the front of the lab and tell the groups of huddled students what GOSUB was and how to set a variable. He’d put out an assignment, like writing a program to convert temperatures (with the formula in the assignment) and then he’d slowly talk people through it. Unfortunately, his pristine lectures would be interrupted by the tap-tap-tap of my group chowing through a beta version of the assignment. Guess who was typing. Since Apples would beep occasionally, his haughty monologues would be interrupted by one as I did my best to refine the now-working assignment I’d finished in the first 5 minutes of class, ignoring the tapping shoulders of my terrified groupmates who were well and truly convinced I was doing some sort of satanic spells to make things function with this box of mystery. What he wanted was a room of dull sheep. What he got was 22 sheep and one somewhat-sharp sheep. God, did he hate that.

How much did he hate that? I was given a -20 for class participation in my math class grade.

Let’s cover that again. I was given a negative number for the class participation grade, chosen as such because it would drag my final class grade below the “passing” threshold.

Who does that sort of thing to 12-year-olds who are a little too far ahead in the class and a little too unwilling to sit around while the lectures cover subjects and programming skills learned years ago? Well, Mister Slick, apparently.

Ultimately, my parents angrily got the grade raised to 66, to make it so I wouldn’t have to take that class and possibly that grade again. I wasn’t allowed in that parent-teacher conference, but I’m sure it was as civil as could be, Mister Slick explaining in some amazing jumps of logic how a negative grade could actually exist in the educational toolbox, ready to shove into an errant student’s eye. I’m sure he smiled that winning smile of his the whole way, too.

Somewhere in here, I started work on a program called “Applejack”.

“Applejack” sounds like a cool keyword, which is probably why I started using it. Written in Apple’s default BASIC, this program started out with a pretty cool title screen (composed of percent signs and pound signs alternating) and a set of instructions and a cool blinky menu. I was interested in the chrome and the flash, and getting it just right so that it’d be funny and neat. I got to a few dozen lines, optimizing it, trying to get it to run fast and have lots of room for expansion. “WELCOME TO APPLEJACK”, it would say. “WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?” I tinkered with it, considered how to make it read and write to the disk, make it be able to take instructions to write itself somewhere and do something later, and maybe even check back with me, somehow. I had only a rough idea of what Applejack was about, and when I had time on these computers, I’d intently type this or that, testing, honing, practicing.

It is only now, looking back across a quarter of a century, that I realize what was going on: I wanted to write a computer virus. A virus borne of sadness, of hatred, of a feeling of powerlessness. A program that would listen to what I had to say, and carry out vengeance against the prideful ignorance I saw around me. “I’ll show them, I’ll show them all bwaa haa haa” is not a particularly complicated or insightful action plan, but like a toked-up venture capitalist, a twelve-year-old can sometimes forget the bigger picture in spite of himself.

Luckily for, well.. for everyone involved, really, Applejack stayed the way it was, a few forgotten boards nailed into a tree in back that could have been a treehouse, but ended up as nothing. An especially good outcome since the rough plan was to make the treehouse capable of levelling a city block. As they say in programming, Applejack never got any “teeth”. It was a empty vessel, ready to wreak havoc as soon as I finished writing that pesky “havoc” piece that was missing.

I had so much rage back then. Rage and loss of hope. Most of my classmates, however, had no rage, just fear and lack of perspective. This was 1982. I’ve seen articles in the last decade or so talking about how schools have “changed”, how kids are “different” and new measures need to be implemented to handle this current generation which is more illiterate, more violent, more in need of drug therapy than any before.

I don’t know; I think it’s the same old feelings in a world where communication is now as common as water and air and electricity. Just another resource, another thing you can just yank into your teenage world on demand. I don’t think the kids are different; we can just hear them better than ever before.

I hope someone’s listening.

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