Best face forward
I'm not a narcissist, at least as far as I can self diagnose. But, I think the way people use the internet and especially social networking is introducing a bit of narcissism that is very difficult to escape as a member of the connected population at large.
Like many people I know, I spend a lot of time on Facebook and to a much lesser extent now, Myspace. A couple of nights back I decided that my main profile picture was starting to feel a bit stale so I went through the handily linked list of pictures I am tagged in (758 and growing) to find a new virtual head shot. As I mostly failed at this task- skipping over many ridiculous and unflattering pictures before finally settling on a mildly ridiculous picture where at least I'm dressed in snazzy wear- old thoughts from the back of my mind returned about the nature of an individual's constructed online persona and how it correlates and conflicts with the real person's persona.
As I've said before, it's astounding how much things have changed in just the past decade with the advent of the internet and the ubiquity of the cell phone. It's just bizarre to look back at the evolution of how people have used these tools and how they're now converging. I remember early on even way back when my friends and I used ICQ then jumped mostly to AOL Instant Messenger, people's "profiles" would start to include more and more information, going way beyond a simple about me. When I hit college in 2001, AIM was somewhat of a de facto social network of its own, to the point where people were checking away messages and profiles much more often than they were actually chatting with each other. In hindsight, it's hard to imagine why social networking sites didn't explode sooner.
When Facebook expanded to Purdue's campus somewhere around 2004/5, I joined as a curiosity. It was mostly worthless then, just a picture and about me sort of thing, with ways to find common classmates. I already had AIM, why would I want to browse the all aim profile website? But over time something started to happen- as the network grew so did the value of the site. Imagine that. Then myspace came on the scene and though I was resistant to it as the home of idiot pre teens and idiots in general, the network of friends there and the new ways they were interacting with each other became increasingly interesting. And as the interactions increased, so did the intricacy in crafting the information that was the public face of the user to the network.
Cut forward to now- with the various networks copying and expanding features, even adding chat as a secondary feature (welcome back to AIM) they have become more than a way of looking people up, they're becoming integral in how people interact and communicate. I know many people who would first send a message or post on a wall before sending an email, even if they have the address handy. Event organizing and photo sharing have all been co-opted, because when you combine information with easy access to your network of friends and family it becomes even more valuable.
But, do we act the same as our online counterpart as we do in the flesh? How much is filtered out? The unflattering pictures, the bad moments, etc. How many of us are consciously or unconsciously limiting information in order to be seen differently than as we are? To be fair, this happens 'in real life' all the time. It takes time to get to know the real person rather than their representative, as Chris Rock will tell you. However, the amount of tools currently at our disposal to put our best face forward is greater than ever. In fact, not using them can have a serious detrimental effect.
With companies and colleges and potential dates searching social networks and the internet in general for information on people, allowing the real person to have too much visibility can be hazardous. Personally I tend to let the 'real me' out on purpose more than most, at least in my opinion. But you can bet I use those privacy controls to their fullest extent and with all their granularity. I am happy I'm not searching for a new job or school just because of the amount of effort required to make sure I look as good as possible is beyond exasperating. As for dates, the sooner they find out about the real me, the better. 
Since I enjoy pouring my thoughts and misadventures out onto the internet at large, I've even created this whole so and so pseudonym as a mild bit of security through obscurity. But as any security student knows, this is woefully inadequate. A google search for my name has my twitter profile on the first page of results. But not before a couple of results for someone who shares my name, the openly gay musical composer. Compose on, brother.
Either way, I hope as connectivity continues to expand and more of our communication is done electronically instead of face to face, we collectively find a way to maintain our sense of who we are really amidst the snapshots we leave facing the window. The more we have to dig to find the person the more time we waste.
Can you see the real me doctor?
iDespise iTunes*
*(the application, on windows)
I listen to a well above average amount of music while sitting at a computer, both at home and at the office. I have a very large collection of music, but I don't think my musical needs and computer music quirks are all that outrageous. It very well may be a symptom of my inaction or seeming inability to migrate away from Windows as a primary operating system, but iTunes causes me an inordinate amount of aggravation.
Why do I use it you say? Well, until recently I lived a blissful musical existence without it even installed- until I bought an iPod. Since it was a new fangled revision, all the third party iPod syncing software was useless. So, I installed iTunes for the first time on my new desktop, and I was pleased that it didn't seem as molasses slow on Windows as it was the last time I tried to use it. However, I continued to use my personal favorite music player, the open source musikcube.
Then the last.fm plugin for musikcube stopped working reliably.
This presented a problem, because I happen to like last.fm quite a bit, it's a great tool for finding new artists and music to listen to, as well as a provider of cool analytics based on what you're actually listening to. Without a steady stream of data, it's not nearly as effective, so even though I soldiered on for a while, I became annoyed enough to seek out an alternate music player solution. Preferably one that integrated with last.fm's official application so I could easily integrate the radio.
While I was initially impressed with the iTunes speed improvement at a glance, heavy usage made it feel like a molasses bath coming from the snappy musikcube with its native ui and blazing fast sqlite database for music metadata. Then there's the library management. One thing I am pretty finicky about is my music collection's organization, and there's no way I was going to give up my intimate knowledge of my sizable music collection to a different format. But, I still hated having to manually add every new album I ripped or got online. Musikcube does this out of the box, and iTunes and I entered into a shaky truce when I discovered the iTunes Library Updater, which was somewhat of a MacGuyver solution to do this that I could set up a scheduled task for. But, recent iTunes updates seem to have turned my MacGuyver utility into a MacGruber, detonating my e-truce.
So here I am, installing the most extensible and powerful music player out there, (for Windows anyway, I've really liked amarok when I've used it in the past) foobar. Of course, it's also the player that requires by far the most tinkering and configuration out of the box, which is what I've been trying to avoid. However it is supported by the official last.fm application, is lightning fast, and it is possible to do some pretty incredible stuff with its interface. It just requires putting a lot of time and effort in getting it just right and making sure all the plugins I want are installed- time that I could be spending on other projects, but since my hand is now forced it's time to queue up a bunch of music (on iTunes) and commence to configuring.
For all the flak I give iTunes though, I will say I prefer it to Windows Media Player since I really never did like the way they organize their library, and when I think of Winamp, I think back to the days of a big long list of 1500 songs I downloaded off of napster and audiogalaxy. So I guess I will award a little something extra to the apple developers besides the parks & rec standard 'participant' trophy.
As for the iTunes music store, I have no problems with it. When I've bought an album from there aside from the annoyance of getting aac files to play outside of iTunes and iPods it has been a pleasant experience, but if given the choice I'll never again buy an album from there, given that #1) I like to own the cd and rip it myself in variable bitrate mp3, and #2) Amazon's music store provides all their music without drm and in high bitrate mp3, I really have no reason to ever look at the iTunes store again except for media that it sells exclusively.
For many nerds I know, how they choose to listen to their music is a deeply personal choice. Am I missing some grand solution?
2 Legit 2 Quit
Well here I am with my fancy new website, with my own hosted blog powered by WordPress, with syndication feeds powered by FeedBurner. Hooray! I feel like I'm now officially a king nerd, what with a main website that has actual content on it. I'm planning on always having the blog up front, but toying with a couple of side projects in Python and / or Ruby on the side with the same domain.
I have several ideas for new posts coming up, but like the infamous (at least to me and possibly two or three other people) grape Mr. Misty review, I'll have to sit down and write them soon or they'll vanish forever. Since I don't want to cannibalize the content of said posts here, I'll leave you with an idea I've been working on recently:
A line of designer purses, priced more modestly than Coach, named Dauber.
What it means to rock -OR- Reflections on guitar hero
Someone at Harmonix is/was a goddamn genius. It was Newton who said "If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants," but whoever came up with the idea of Guitar Hero by standing on the shoulders of Dance Dance Revolution deserves the highest entrepreneurial accolades possible.
Rhythm games themselves are not new, and Dance Dance Revolution (henceforth referred to as DDR) was the most popular. I remember when I was living in the dorms at Purdue seeing random people in the floor lounges and at the arcade in the union / in the bowling alley wildly convulsing over floor sensors, and having an absolutely fantastic time doing it. However, in order to participate in DDR, you either have to be unaware of how silly you look, or just not care (the recommended choice).
All great ideas seem so simple after they're implemented- basically Guitar hero is the fusion of the fun gameplay of DDR, combined with the common fantasy of being a rock and roll star by way of the mechanics of playing the air guitar, and it is a great time. It still takes a pretty large amount of self confidence to not feel silly playing it while other people are around, but nobody can say it's not a good time.
Every year a staggering number of people take up playing the guitar. Why? Because playing the guitar is effing awesome. It rocks. I loved music when I picked up the guitar at 14, and I love listening to and playing music even more now, but honestly one of the big motivating factors for sitting and shredding my fingers and absolutely sucking for years was to play guitar, rock out, and be cool. Now I play guitar because I love to make music, but it is a nice side benefit to look sort of cool in the process- but this video game taps into that base dream and makes it easily accessible to everyone.
With guitar hero, you don't have to shred your fingers and practice for hours a night for years to be able to rock out. Just plug in the guitar controller, set it on easy and play until you're capable of e-shredding on expert, it's an instant rock star fantasy camp, and it's even more fun when you're among a group of people who can enjoy it too. It's so simple, and they have got to be printing money with the concept even though the game and the controllers cost so much. The original guitar hero developers seem to be releasing a game soon that will incorporate singing and drums along with the dual guitars, so you and your friends can form your own little plastic rock band.
Originally I basically scorned this game because it allows people to tap into an experience that I spent a lot of time and work to get. I may not be the most talented guitarist in the world, but I worked pretty hard to get decent, so why should anyone else get to feel like a fancy pants guitaring person without building up the callouses first? Of course, this is a completely silly reaction as the two activities are wildly different, but it didn't help that I completely and totally sucked at the game the first time I tried it (hint: pretty much everyone does no matter their skill level, although I would like to have somebody like Clapton try it just to see).
In the end, when enjoying the game for what it is, an incredibly fun virtual fantasy camp style experience, there's nothing quite like it. Playing with a group of people who enjoy it makes it an even better experience. *BLATANT PLUG: In fact, if you live in Indianapolis come play with us at halftime of Monday Night Football games, details at IndyMojo.com.
However, even with my small time band that plays covers most of the time because it's the easiest way to get people to listen to our originals (and also because it's fun to play songs that you like from bands people know), the feeling of playing to a crowd of people who are enjoying the music and responding to what's going on up on stage is a million times more of a rush than hitting the star power or getting achievements. That's why guitar hero is insanely fun, but it absolutely, positively does not rock.
Ok fine, but keep those stupid white headphones away from me
I feel dirty. Not necessarily the ironically dirty feeling I respond with whenever the internet asks me what my mood is, but the kind of feeling you get when you finally give in to a phenomenon you somewhat despise.
I bought an iPod.
Yes, I now own a pair of the iconic white headphones, and they quickly found a place in my trash can. One vestige of my technology snobbery I won't be letting go along with my taste in mp3 players is my taste in better headphones. However, I do have to admit that I am begrudgingly beginning to accept and own up to the fact that this device is just about perfect for what I intend to use it for.
For a few years I've owned an iRiver H320 'multi codec jukebox' and it has been adequate for my mp3 player needs, in that I haven't really needed one. It stored 20 gigabytes worth of music, had a color screen, and half-passable navigation. However, the battery on it has recently become less than reliable, and I realized recently that it is literally 3 times thicker than a new hard drive based iPod.
Also, I recently purchased a new car. It didn't come loaded to the brim with options, but it did come with a decent stereo, and I didn't pay more for the super fancy stereo because the base one comes with an auxiliary input jack right there on the front. Hooray! Welcome to choose my own musical entertainment device shopping.
As I did the research and various web buzz started swirling around, I realized two key points-
1) pretty much everybody besides apple has given up on producing a high capacity hard drive based music player
2) probably because there really aren't too many people who require more than a few gigabytes of storage space for their music.
Not me- if I'm driving more than 10 minutes, I want to have every album I own on hand to pick from. This mp3 player will be automobile based only, and not really used for video watching outside of a random few occurrences. Therefore, the new iPod Classic was pretty much the only choice, and with 80 gigs of storage for 250 bucks, I decided to give it a shot.
For my purposes using it in the car is great, scrolling is fast and easy- worlds better than the 4 directional navigation on my iRiver, and the audible clicking you get when using the scroll wheel is helpful, sound quality is more than good enough just out of the headphone jack into the aux input, so long as you don't crank the volume all the way up. Once I get to cleaning up all my tags on my music files, it should be a snap to pick whatever album suits my fancy.
I may not like you Steve Jobs, but damn it I respect your product.
4.5 out of 5 fountain cokes
Feed me!
Over the past 10 years or so, my day to day life has been almost completely changed by the presence and evolution of the internet. I feel guilty for not reading as much as I used to, but really I read so much more- it's just spread out over countless topics and discussions and articles on the internet. It's a testament to the quality of Newsweek that I continue to subscribe to it despite being able to get almost all the news related and hell, anything related information I need from a computer.
Now, of course it's obvious my web habits have changed over the past 10 or so years, everyone's have I would imagine. Email, instant messaging, discussion forums, and now social networking have all shaped and changed the content I view on the internet. Now over the past 6 months or so and escalating recently I've finally jumped on the bandwagon of feed syndication (through RSS, and Atom, although the specific protocol isn't really the main idea here). While this hasn't changed the way I use the internet in the same way things on that previous list did, it has streamlined the way I absorb content remarkably. I'm already having trouble imagining using the internet without my feed reader.
Any time I find an interesting or funny article on a site or a blog, I immediately look for the feed to add. If they post infrequently, I don't have to remember to keep checking back. If it was one gem in a sea of crap, then I just remove the feed.
While the main use for this is syndication of articles, it's great for other things like web comics I enjoy, and keeping up to date on craigslist listings (I keep track of the musical instruments) and almost any other items of interest you can think of. I even have a feed that syndicated content on the frontpage of digg.com so I can browse over it and not miss interesting stuff that hits the front page, but the feed just gives me the link itself so I don't have to mess with all the mob mentality and general idiocy that goes on with sites like Digg.
Between social bookmarking sites, discussion forums, social networks, and my subscribed feeds, surfing the web is virtually dead for me. I don't have to go surfing, the ocean of the internet is pumped through a pipe right to me, and through those other social gathering places I can continually find new and interesting things to discuss, laugh at or just read and think about. My only concern is that eventually I'll build up too many feeds and not have time to blow through them all. As long as I still take time to focus on singular things like individual books and et cetera I don't think it's too big of a problem.
For those of you who havent heard of or looked into using feeds, or have and are just lazy like I was, I recommend using an online feed reader. Personally I use google reader (http://www.google.com/reader/) but I'm sure there are plenty of other options out there. There are also some great local readers, but I like having all my feed subscriptions available from wherever I am if I choose.
Also, the personalized google homepage (http://google.com/ig) allows you to add whatever feeds you want and arrange them how you like along with all sorts of other widgets for checking email, keeping track of notes, etc. I love it.
It'll be interesting to see what the next great phenomenon is that comes along and changes the way we use the internet, but I'm certainly happy to have the current experience streamlined a bit more in the meantime.