Thinkcorps

I lost power last week for 4 days in a 6 day span. My House was completely dark, and consequently, I was completely up sh*t creek. Doing what I do, I kinda rely on power for the PC, phone, DSL, etc. For most of the first day, I thought it was a blackout in my little outage block, but as it turns out, it was just me. Somehow, my meter blew (only my PC was on, as it is every day, I swear), as the PGE guy told me later that afternoon.

Now, replacing your meter is a ridiculously long process, made that way, as someone pointed out to me, because of the many intrepid homeowners who probably had their asses fried while messing with live wires. PGE has to come out to both disconnect and reconnect the power, while an electrician had to bang around outside for two days, setting up the new box. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time with The New Yorker over these days.

What did I learn? Email’s a drug, and you can get hooked on it. The New Yorker is a really good magazine, despite its Conde Nast parent. I really need to move.

Since I had so much time to sit around and read and think, it occurred to me that beyond our general American reliance on Mid-East oil, our electrical power grid is stupid. How is it in an age where the Internet is all-pervasive and a company like Enron can divert thousands of megawatts of power to Vegas just to fuck with people in California, that there is no fault tolerance built into the power grid? I.e., why can’t neighboring power blocks feed power into a broken block? I realize that at some level, if a block fails, it has to be fixed, but there has to be a way to better isolate the problem than taking hundreds of houses offline indefinitely.

Any upgrades this entails won’t probably happen for 20 years at least, since local utlities are monopolies and PGE especially has garnered a deserved reputation in California for, well, let’s say “less than optimal responsiveness”.

It’d be nice though. Maybe with a grid upgrade we could build in capabilities and incentives for more consumer-based, alternative enegry systems to feed power back into the grid. I love this idea, though I wonder what kind of impact it would really have. Probably small given how businesses are so used to wasting power—why don’t those highrises turn off their lights at night anyway?

Apple rocks. This Airport Express device is very cool. It will output either a digital or analog audio stream to the external stereo device. What’s important, however, is that Apple’s separated iTunes audio output from your PC audio output. I have my PC hooked up to my stereo, which works great with iTunes, until I hit a Web page with audio or get an OS error beep which then blares out of my stereo (usually scaring the shit out me). Separating music audio output from other audio output is a huge step forward, IMO.

Good article here: http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/archives/000212.php

craigslist has rss feeds for searches – woo! link

Yay! Lakers are falling apart. Even Shaq/Kazaam looks to be feeling a way out. I wanna watch game 5 again, right now. :)

I stayed up late last night, reading Blankets, by Craig Thompson, a graphic novel I’d been meaning to pick up for quite a while. It’s a very personal story about his Christian upbringing and brief first love. It’s a really beautiful story and well told. It reminded me in so many ways of myself and the emotions I struggled with as a teen (probably everyone struggled with). It wasn’t any specific details, though I grew up in Wisconsin, did some church youth group, too. It was simply an intense emotional resonance, basically one of the reasons the world needs writers: they remember the things we don’t. After reading the book, wisps of those recalled emotions clung to me until I finally fell asleep.

This morning I woke up and stepped back into my work routine in front of the computer. Alex demonstrated for me the new address autocomplete feature he just added to his Webmail product, ATPmail. He’s also going to add a filtering mechanism, so that the addresses come up in order of most recently used. With every feature added, ATPmail becomes more of a suite of database tools—your mail, addressbook, etc, is the data.

Which brings me to Gmail. Why a free Web-based email program has become so popular, so desperately wanted, is beyond me, but it’s obviously got a lot to do with the abstract allure of “search”. Alex and I tinker and discuss ATPmail, his Web-based email system, every day, and Gmail is a welcome step forward and innovative competitor (note: we’re tiny, Gmail is, naturally, big). But email is not unstructured text, like a Web page. Email has lots of headers, a subject, a body, and most important, a date. The reality is, there’s a lot of value in “filtering” email, but not so much in full text search on a 1GB archive of old mail.

As email ages, it loses most of its efficacy. Like most things, its context and relevancy fades. Gmail retains the conversation thread, which I suppose allows you to rebuild as much of the context as possible, but that assumes a long and detailed conversation, an epistolary form which I’d argue has been dealt a somewhat permanent blow by email itself. We note things in email, we shout out, we remind, we ask—we don’t often discuss at length. Email is sparse and direct, which further erodes its context over time—there’s just not that much to contextualize in a typical message thread.

But each of us has already invested so much of our lives in email. Most of us have mail archives, from work or a previous email program, deep in a folder somewhere on our computers. We’ll probably never retrieve that old mail—those experiences—whether because of neglect or simple technological incompatibility. That record of our lives is lost. And that’s frightening. So many days and interactions, so many events and stories, all lost in the ether or locked in a bit.

Maybe that’s the great promise of Gmail (and desktop search as well). An accessible archive of experience, transcoded into hard drives across the Internet. We might forget, but Google won’t. I don’t think it matters so much that the context will be indecipherable, that we won’t remember who that person was, or why that line was supposed to be funny. It will all be in there, ready for reminiscence if we ever want it.

I think that’s comforting when your life is lived on a digital plane. Google sees your tracks in the sand, even if few oth-ers do.
—end ramble

I just got one of these from Engineered Audio for my gen2 iPod. It pretty much rocks.

My headphone jack broke, like many gen2’s. Half of the internal plastic ring snapped off, so the remote jack won’t seat firmly anymore, and usually works its way out quickly, disabling the remote. Plus, whoever designed the clip for the wired remote put form way ahead of function—not so great for clipping effectiveness. So I was looking for a better solution.

The RemoteRemote works on RF (sweet). The keyfob control is small, and the buttons are maybe a bit too small—sometimes it takes a couple presses to get it to function, but it does work exactly as advertised (unlike the iTrip, which I was spectacularly unimpressed with).

The receiver unit constantly draws power from the iPod battery, which is an issue, if like me, you taped it in place. (I did that to solve my broken jack problem). The battery power issue doesn’t bother me, since I’ve already got a battery life problem as it is. I just keep the Ipod plugged in to my PC most of the time.

So, I can now dump the iPod in my bag, and keep the keyfob out – either in my hand or attached to my bag. I am very happy.