Are Seven

If you’ve ever heard someone go off on why one sport is stupid and another is truly the greatest game, you know that there’s a common thread between that and the same rant about the best kind of music or TV shows: it’s what people grow up with.  It’s a simple psychology, but it’s so often overlooked. 

How often do we not notice the correlation between the things we think are the best and the things that we knew as a child? How could someone not notice that they just so happened to have grown up in the years when the music was better than it is today? And one that’s stuck with me for years: how can a guy a seemingly smart as Billy Bragg not recognize that it’s a lot more than coincidence that he judges a sport that he’s loved since before he could remember (soccer) as vastly superior to a game (American football) he’s probably not watched more than 10 minutes of and has never asked a fan for a pointer of what to watch?

It’s irritating at best when it’s entertainment, but when it’s something political—something that affects more people than just you—it becomes a lot more bothering that people won’t take a few seconds to see if there’s a convenient correlation between what they’ve known and what they think is “right”.

I don’t get why everyone seems to think that either Facebook purchased Friendfeed to take on Twitter.  It’s comparing apples and oranges.  Let’s look at the three services:

Twitter: a simple (almost too simple) service that has one purpose and virtually no settings or features.

Facebook: a complex site with tons of settings, addons and features.

Friendfeed: a relatively complex site the requires a pretty good amount of configuration to really use effectively.

Now, all three services can get very loud, very fast, including Twitter.  But I’m just having a hard time seeing how taking FriendFeed, a service that only dedicated social media geeks ever seemed to have interest in and combining it with another service that many people get tired of after a while can possibly result in a service that’s about as simple as they come.

It’s well known¹ that my first world-changing, best-selling book that will never actually be written is called People Are The Worst and is about how all of life’s problems are caused by people and their basic inability to organize themselves. It basically answers the question of “are people inherently good or evil” with “Neither. They’re self-centered.”

It’s less well known² that the follow up book that will never actually be written is a corollary to the first book called Things That Should Be Obvious But Apparently Aren’t³, which focuses on wisdom that rarely gets followed.

Both of these pet theories of mine funnel into what’s become a core belief: that if you have an opinion whose conclusion is convenient (or outright flattering) to you, then it’s probably wrong, and you should re-examine it until you’ve found a tight defense that acknowledges that flaw, or are able to just stick to your belief while fully acknowledging that it’s a self-serving way of thinking, rather than a carefully reasoned one.

¹ meaning that more than one person knows about it
² meaning that only one person knows about
³ rejected alternate title: You Say ‘Duh’ But Why Isn’t It Done?

A slowing laptop and a few month’s of savings means I have a new computer in my future, so I’ve been pondering which direction to go in, because I’m a nerd, and it’s a nerd’s lot in life to ponder these things. You can tell I’m a nerd because I use antiquated phrases like “lot in life to ponder these things”. And words like “antiquated”. Jesus, this could go on all day.

Anyway, I’m sticking with Mac, because as arrogant as the company is, I love their products. I’m just juggling between these two things:

1. Replace my old MacBook Pro with a new one. Easy.
2. Buy a nice iMac and then get a little netbook for travel and sitting-on-the-couch use.

Option #1 is pretty straightforward in its advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages: one my computery stuff in all one package, with the processing power to do everything I want and the OS that I love. A nice laptop that I know I like and will work well.

Disadvantages: The MacBook Pro is a pretty heavy laptop, and even though I don’t travel much with it, it’s kind of a beast to carry around. The screen is actually a fine size, but there are times when something bigger would be nicer.

Option #2 is where things get interesting.

Advantages are the very light laptop that I can take around much more easily than the Macbook, plus a much more powerful desktop computer with a nice big screen, which will be much faster in playing and importing music and updating my various iPods and Phones. Plus, I can actually use a Linux OS for once.

Disadvantages? For one, though a netbook wouldn’t have the computing power to do some of the things I do, though I find myself with less need to do those things. But I’m sure there would be times when I would need Excel or Photoshop and would have to switch computers, something I don’t currently have to do.

Secondly, though I’d love to give Linux a try and am looking forward to the Google Chrome OS, I do love Mac OSX and would be sorry to give it up.

I keep going back and forth between the two, convinced that both would be perfectly fine options. If anyone has any thoughts, they’re more than welcome. And if anyone has any netbook experiences, I’d love to hear those as well.

Moving is a tough exercise, not just because of the expense and hassle, but because it’s a dredging up of emotion via all the posessions that snuck into the corners of your place in the years you were there. It’s a harsh exercise not only in the inevitable passing of time, but in the difficulty of how much to keep with you and what to let go.

The purge of CDs has been particularly difficult. I’m lucky that I can keep the music while getting rid of the clutter, but so many of those CDs—even the ones that I don’t really like much anymore—tell a little story of a place and time, and banishing them from my life for good has been tougher than I would guess.

Likewise for the cassettes. Do you keep the old mixtapes, knowing that you don’t have any way of playing them? It’s a physical artifact that you won’t visit and will sit in a box or a drawer and only be revisited when you move again, but when the option is just throwing it away? Even an old cassette of Olivia Newton John’s Greatest Hits that’s labeled in my twin sister’s handwriting in paint pen on a blank case is too difficult to me to throw away.

I have furniture that’s older than me, a table and a stereo cabinet from my dad’s bachelor days in New York. I don’t doubt that this stuff was the 60’s Ikea equivalent, but it’s been in our houses for my whole life, and what now? He says it’s okay to get rid of it, but how can it just go?

There’s cards and small gifts, books that I’ll never read again but still have a hard time parting with, t-shirts that are long past their wear-in-public stage but whose symbolism is too powerful to give up.

Having to throw so many sentimental objects out only increases the sentimental volume on the prized possessions. I had forgotten that the book my Grandfather (who died last winter) wrote about his experiences during WWII had this handwritten note to me in the front:

My love to you, Reid. As the years go by, this book may help you remember me now and then. Papa.

That one just about wrecked me for a few hours. And is still tough to recall.

Even beyond the old history lessons are the little bits of the history of my last four years in this apartment: the people and jobs that have been part of those years, the commutes, brunches, incidents, events.

I’ll miss my neighborhood, and I’ll miss these last four years, no matter how happy I am to have the ones coming up.

Between Twitter, Google Reader and Facebook, it shouldn’t be too surprising that this site has stayed untouched for months. It’s not just that those services has taken my thoughts, but that they allow for such quick and easy self-expression that it’s hard not to let them be my soapbox and let this site–one that’s fueled by links and pictures and considered thought–slide.

But I miss thought-out writing, so baby, I’m comin’ on home. It’s with a caveat, though, that those other services will get most of my actual thoughts, whereas this will scratch the one itch that those can’t. This will be mostly philosophy, for lack of a better word: those thoughts on life and people that I would love to debate, but people look at me funny if, after asking them “How have you been lately”, I ask, “What conclusions have you come to lately?” There’s so much in the world to talk about and get to the bottom of, and while I’d love for whatever I write to spark discussion, it’s also nice to just be able to put it down.

Warnings: I’m not going to spend much time on these. Part of the reason this stayed and been neglected is because I found myself spending far more time on a post than it should take, ending up adding more to the litter of my draft pile. I don’t want to do that anymore. These posts are probably also going to be a lot about tech, will have poorly-introduced and ridiculously widely ranging subjects, and will probably seem ridiculous. You know…the way blogs used to be. But I want to go back to writing every day, no matter the litter it creates.

In other words, it’s not going to be pleasant for anyone. I recommend unsubscribing.

I was just playing around with the new Google data tables, taking a look at the public table for most popular baby names from 1880, and after playing with the filters and visualizations, I got a line chart showing the ranking of the name Reid over the last 129 years.

(click for a bigger view)

It’s a shame that I can’t invert the order on the Y axis, since it looks like it’s getting less popular with time, when, in fact, the name is getting even more popular. Please note the massive increase in popularity since the early 70’s. No coincidence. It hit an all-time high last year, a rank that is clearly correlated with my joining Twitter.

I don’t know what happened there in 1894, but the name took a huge surge, apparently with really foul-tempered and ugly babies, as the name plummeted in popularity two years later and reach an all-time chart low in 1907. I don’t even want to think too hard about those bleak years when it fell off the charts entirely. I’m not sure what people wanted in the years 1908 through 1911, but one thing they clearly did NOT want was for their kids to be named Reid.

What’s really fun is that, when you filter out your name in the database, it will give you your name, and then the opposite gender’s corresponding name at the same rank. For example, in 1890, Reid was the 940th most popular name for boys, and the 940th most popular name for girls was apparently Izora. Other girls names from the 1800s with the same rank as Reid are Ottilia, Lotta, Delphia, Idell, Cammie, Henry (??) and Minta. Looks like Reid was able to persevere where lesser names died away.

So Reid beat its competitors in the 1800s, but in 1985, though, the rank equivalent of Reid was Raven, which the girls won there, since nobody’s going around saying, “That’s so Reid!”

Sorry for the image instead of the embed, which was supposed to work. Google isn’t kidding around about the “pre-Alpha” tag they slapped on their Tables feature.

Shaking off the blogging sleepiness (and taking another stab at the “drawn-out Twitter” style of posting that’s the only hope of posting here any more) to weigh in on a couple of the tech things that have crossed our paths recently.

Google Wave is pretty fascinating. After watching more of the video, I’m more intrigued than before, mostly in that it’s as much a collaborative tool as a communications tools; more Google Docs than gmail.  The more features they go through in the video, the more I started thinking about how incredible it would be in the workplace, and that just as I wish that Word would be more like Google Docs and Outlook more like gmail, I would wish that they would all be more like Wave.

But that’s the initial excitement. I wonder (along with everyone else) what it’s going to take to have it catch on. Again, the more I watched that video, the more I thought that the workplace would be the takeoff spot, but workplaces are notorious for taking a long time to implement software, and IT departments love cracking down (or at least “discouraging”) outside softwares like Wave. But it is possible.

One of the interesting parts of the video was when they show Wave interacting with Orkut, Google’s purchase of a social network (translation: it’s like Facebook).  So I went back to Orkut and re-signed in for the first time in a very long time and started playing around.  It’s terrible. It’s about as basic of a social network as you can imagine. 

Google has an incredible chance to build fantastic social networking tools through Reader and through their new profiles without people even knowing that they’re on a social network. So why are they even bringing Orkut into the Wave conversation? It seems strange.

But damn I want my hands on Wave, though…

A washout of a weekend led logically to a couple of movies about people struggling with their careers well beyond their peak years: one non-fiction (Anvil: The Story of Anvil) and one fiction (The Wrestler).

As a review aside, I’d recommend both, but I’d push you to the theater to see Anvil, even in spite of the fact that the metalheads have been hearing of it and making their way to the theater, a fact that’s as unsuprising as it is annoying. But it’s a brilliant film. It immediately renders This Is Spinal Tap obsolete: you just can’t believe that it’s real. But real it is, and it’s as touching and moving as it is funny. A must-see.

The obvious common thread in these two stories is the chasing of chances that have long passed. But the more I thought of it, the more I saw what surely led to this inability to give up a dream: that their dreams were realized halfway. Anvil were recognized by famous peers of theirs as innovators and inspirations. They played huge festivals and toured the world and were featured on television shows. Their fame was right there and yet…it just didn’t happen. In The Wrestler, Randy tasted actual fame, but still couldn’t turn it into the long career–or even life-sustaining career–of some of his peers.

I have to admit to the occasional daydreamed regrets of my college band, but besides some praising letters and a couple knowledgable and sincere expressions of disbelief that we weren’t signed, we never had any real success. But then I think of a band that I knew in Greensboro that was pursued by every major label there was, ended up on a major with a huge advance…and never did anything. They were extremely nice, down-to-earth guys, so maybe they were thankful for the chance that they had, but it seems like a recipe for exactly the type of bitter inability to let go. They were given every chance in the world and yet, for whatever reasons, they could never cross the line to fame and success.

Obviously, no one can only chase dreams that they think are guaranteed to be fully realized, but I wonder if it’s the failure to complete what seemed so inevitable the leads to the undying belief that the moment to make it all happen never goes away.

A tweet about an article this morning combined with a comic got me a’thinkin’ on a point that I was a’thinkin’ on for a while now:

A blog is nothing–absolutely nothing–but a medium for writing. Everything else–the comments, the whiny subject matter, the crackpot opinions–are no more reflective of the blog as a medium as a Weekly World News article is reflective of newspapers. Twitter is conversation that allows public comsumption about all news and experience, not just (or even mostly) what individuals are having for breakfast. Facebook allows contact with other people in your life. These services should be judged by their utility, not by their poorest content or ancillary products.

I don’t mind if people have no interest in any of these things. What really sticks in my craw (at least, I think it’s my craw. I’m not a doctor) is that the dismissal of these mediums as nothing more than tools for the attention-starved and the stupid is simply fear of the new, something that we think is unique to cranky old people with rock-salt shotguns and onset dementia. Take things as simple as writing and conversation, give them some new terms (especially ones as silly-sounding as “blogs” and “tweets”)  and watch as people of all ages react as though amateur porn was being broadcast on prime time TV.

It doesn’t bother me when people opt out of new technologies due to disinterest, just as it doesn’t bother me when people don’t like the same music I do. But with music, not liking a band because of the generalized type of person who listens to it, or dismissing an entire genre of music because of the bad sounds of a few of the bands…these things are ridiculously flawed, no matter how tempting it is to do that. But this is exactly what happens with new technology: creates cranky people who rail about new things.