Thinkcorps

Well, last week I got screwed.

Several months ago, I presented a project to someone (I’ll call them A*hole), a project I’d sketched out in fair detail over the course of a year or so of evolution. We discussed it in detail, I expressed my wish to get the project up however possible and my need for help toward that end. A*hole was in a position to make introductions. There’s a subsequent big hole of time in the story that I was, of course, not privy to, and then lo and behold, my (albeit modified) project appears with big partner, staff, all apparently orchestrated through A*hole.
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I got heavily addicted to my RSS reader for a while, then decided that 1) I was wasting way too much time, and 2) I liked reading most articles in their natural Web environments.

One night several days ago, I was up late reading a magazine called Cabinet. There was a really interesting art project called VSSTV, very slow scan television, in which a video picture is printed using a plotter-type printer with red, blue, and green ink-filled syringes. The syringes fill the bubbles in a sheet of bubblewrap. It’s super-low res and prints out a frame every 20 hours or so.
(VSST is an art hack on SSTV, which is TV over ham radio.)

I thought, hey, why not try that over RSS? So, I deconstructed a relatively small image into its constituent pixel rgb values, and every 2 hours, I generate an RSS feed that contains the coordinates and rgb values for 30 pixels. With the new feed, I also update a new, reconstituted image.

The image will be fully reconstructed in one year.

:: for patricia ::
(i decided that this would make a nice gift of sorts for my girlfriend, patricia. thus, the name)

Just got the new Supercar CD, Answer, and I’m very excited. I love this band and I’ve bought all their albums and some singles (since they’re all Japanese CDs, that’s saying something, I think).

So, I open it, and I notice, thankfully, that there’s LabelGate protection on it. LabelGate is assinine protection in which you get keys from a center Sony server, good for one transfer of the digital files (no idea what format) to your PC. Subsequent transfers are like $2/song, and (maybe) available only to people in Japan.

Why would I care? Well, I just had to reinstall XP, so all my old OS tweaks weren’t in place yet. Suffice it to say, Sony spent a lot of money to protect all their CDs, a system I compromised by turning of CD Autoplay.

Everyone should turn off Autoplay. Autoplay is now like messenger (the unused service that hackers use to put popups on your screen)—it is a loophole, used to trick unsuspecting users. I don’t differentiate between the two. They are both insidious.

And BTW —Sony, you suck. A long time ago at Wired, our sage Kevin Kelly asked, “who’s the next Microsoft?” I answered, “Sony.” You had the brand, the expertise, the intelligence. And you’ve blown the whole deal. Your HD music player resoundingly sucks. Your music store sucks. Why? Because you accept that your customers should be treated like thieves and criminals. Man, was I wrong about you guys.

I think it’s funny that your tiny seasian suppliers are now poised to eat your bento box. Korea’s gonna whip your ass (and I bet that hurts), because they are willing to innovate—fast—and create cool new products that customers might actually want.

I fixed my Namiki Vanishing Point tonight and I’m very very happy now. I love this pen. I guess I had been futzing with it or something, and I took it apart while the nib was extended (several years ago – duh!). This is bad. Screw it back together and it didn’t work. I thought a spring popped out. What I think happened is that the little trap door that covers the nip opening (when retracted) was in the wrong position. I jiggled it until I got it back into the open position, reassembled it, and everything is wonderful. So, in case you’ve got a curiously busted Namiki lying around, go fiddle some more, it might just come together.