Random shots: Workspace(d)

THE NET IS A WASTE OF TIME …and that’s exactly what’s right about it.

Old, old article, in terms of our current time of reckoning, yet so salient overall and refers  the media of today’s internet back to a previous visionary time. How much is true, how much prediction? I am especially interested from a historic standpoint as I don’t use Twitter, Facebook or most (if not all) forms) of “social” networking. What *is* the future? Commerce? I think this is the ultimate answer. Knowledge? I hope this is the final answer, and most constructive. Purely “social” – jeez, I hope not!

THE NET IS A WASTE OF TIME
…and that’s exactly what’s right about it.
by William Gibson

published in ‘New York Times
Magazine’ (July 14, 1996)
I coined the word “Cyberspace” in 1981 in one of my first science fiction stories and subsequently used it to describe something that people insist on seeing as a sort of literary forerunner of the Internet. This being so, some think it remarkable that I do not use E-mail. In all truth, I have avoided it because I am lazy and enjoy staring blanky into space (which is also the space where novels come from) and because unanswered mail, E- or otherwise, is a source of discomfort.

But I have recently become an avid browser of the World Wide Web. Some people find this odd. My wife finds it positively perverse. I, however, scent big changes afoot, possibilities that were never quite as manifest in earlier incarnations of the Net.

I was born in 1948. I can’t recall a world before television, but I know I must have experienced one. I do, dimly, recall the arrival of a piece of brown wooden furniture with sturdy Bakelite knobs and a screen no larger than the screen on this Powerbook. Initially there was nothing on it but “snow,” and then the nightly advent of a targetlike device called “the test pattern,” which people actually gathered to watch.

Today I think about the test pattern as I surf the Web. I imagine that the World Wide Web and its modest wonders are no more than the test pattern for whatever the 21st century will regard as its equivalent medium. Not that I can even remotely imagine what that medium might actually be.
In the age of wooden television in the South where I grew up, leisure involved sitting on screened porches, smoking cigarettes, drinking iced tea, engaging in conversation and staring into space. It might also involve fishing.

Sometimes the Web does remid me of fishing. It never reminds me of conversation, although it can feel a lot like staring into space. “Surfing the Web” (as dubious a metaphor as “the information highway”) is, as a friend of mind has it, “like reading magazines with the pages stuck together.” My wife shakes her head in dismay as I patiently await the downloading of some Japanese Beatles fan’s personal catalogue of bootlegs. “But it’s from Japan!” She isn’t moved. She goes out to enjoy the flowers in her garden.

I stay in. Hooked. Is this leisure – this browsing, randomly linking my way through these small patches of virtual real-estate – or do I somehow imagine that I am performing some more dynamic function? The content of the Web aspires to absolute variety. One might find anything there. It is like rummaging in the forefront of the collective global mind. Somewhere, surely, there is a site that contains … everything we have lost?

The finest and most secret pleasure afforded new users of the Web rests in submitting to the search engine of Alta Vista the names of people we may not have spoken aloud in years. Will she be here? Has he survived unto this age? (She isn’t there. Someone with his name has recently posted to a news group concerned with gossip about soap stars.) What is this casting of the nets of identity? Do we engage here in something of a tragic seriousness? In the age of wooden television, media were there to entertain, to sell an advertiser’s product, perhaps to inform. Watching television, then, could indeed be considered a leisure activity. In our hypermediated age, we have come to suspect that watching television constitutes a species of work. Post-industrial creatures of an information economy, we increasingly sense that accessing media is what we do. We have become terminally self-conscious. There is no such thing as simple entertainment. We watch ourselves watching. We watch ourselves watching Beavis and Butt-head, who are watching rock videos. Simply to watch without the buffer of irony in place, might reveal a fatal naivete.

But that is our response to aging media like film and television, survivors from the age of wood. The Web is new, and our response to it has not yet hardened. That is a large part of its appeal. It is something half-formed, growing. Larval. It is not what it was six months ago; in another six month it will be something else again. It was not planned; it simply happened, is happening. It is happening the way cities happened. It is a city.

Toward the end of the age of wooden televisions the futurists of the Sunday supplements announced the advent of the “leisure society”. Technology would leave us less and less to do in the Marxian sense of yanking the levers of production. The challenge, then, would be to fill our days with meaningful, healthful, satisfying activity. As with most products of an earlier era’s futurism, we find it difficult today to imagine the exact coordinates from which this vision came. In any case, our world does not offer us a surplus of leisure. The word itself has grown somehow suspect, as quaint and vaguely melancholy as the batterend leather valise in a Ralph Lauren window display. Only the very old or the economically disadvantaged (provided they are not chained to the schedules of their environment’s more demanding addictions) have a great deal of time on their hands. To be successful, apparently, is to be chronically busy. As new technologies search out and lace over every interstice in the net of global communication, we find ourselves with increasingly less excuse for … slack.

And that, I would argue, is what the World Wide Web, the test pattern for whatever will become the dominant global medium, offers us. Today, in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time, to wander aimlessly, to daydream about the countless other lives, the other people, on the far sides of however many monitors in that postgeographical meta-country we increasingly call home. It will probably evolve into something considerably call home. It will evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun – we seem to have a knack for – but in the meantime, in its gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes phase, surfing the Web is a procrastinator’s dream. And people who see you doing it might even imagine you’re working.

Worst corporate advert ever?

In the latest issue of “The Economist”  magazine, an advert for Microsoft’s Turkey division. But, and it may just be me, but it doesn’t portray the company or it’s products in the most favourable way…

Random shots: New batteries

I recently needed to get some new rechargeable AA size batteries, and seeing a good deal on the PhotoMalaysia forums, I ordered a set of Sanyo Eneloops in the the new Ltd. edition pack.
I like these batteries because they are hybrid NiMH technolgy, meaning that they still hold 85% of their charge after a whole year of storage or non-use, whereas normal NiMH batteries can totally discharge, even if not used, in a month or less. So these are very convenient. This latest edition also sustains up to 1500 recharges, beating the previous 1000 cycle claim.
And I just love the colours! OK, when in the camera or appliance they are not going to be seen, but they *are* kind of cute looking and a little tasteful design is always a good thing IMHO.

I promised that I would never buy this…

As many people do, I get increasingly jaded by the media hype that inevitably follows any Apple product release. The iPhone, and now the iPad show Apple fanatics as completely obsessive consumers, who would buy anything with an Apple logo on it, and the branding, “Designed in Cupertino – Made in China” which has been discredited by factory inspections in Shenzhen where workers work under very troubling conditions.

*sighs. So I said that I would never buy another Apple product.

Then I assessed my mp3 collection, and at 10,000+ songs I reckoned that I needed a huge mp3 player to hold them all. And I looked at the latest iPod, and saw that it now has a 160GB drive. And it looks damn good in matte black. It really is beautifully designed and made. And I chose to have it laser engraved with the title of a book about the corrosive effect of electronic media on a democratic society. Seemed very fitting for this product. It was recommended to me, and in return I highly recommend it if you are interested in the development of new media, and population “programming” creating a cretinised society of TV addicts.

And the iPod Classic is *really* nice, and holds all my music collection. Mission accomplished.

Yawns with boredom, and wonders quite what is *wrong* with Apple Fanatics.

Honestly, you’d think they had discovered the cure for cancer or something. These people need help.

Cleaning the Apple aluminium keyboard – don’t!

As a user of this keyboard, which frankly I am extremely underwhelmed with, I was both amused and horrified to read this article.

I make no apologies for disliking this “design icon” from the hallowed design department of Apple, and of course with it’s white keys it gets dirty pretty fast – I use a wipe over with glass cleaner to bring the keys back up to a decent appearance – and I dislike the feedback that the keys give, but hey, I am no touch typist, so when I found this article via Boing Boing I had a quiet chuckle to myself whilst also realizing that there is no way that this thing can be seen as a self-maintainable product. Mind you, one could say that of so many Apple products, sealed batteries and the arcane Mac Mini case opening procedures spring to mind.

I remember cheerfully taking a basic Logitech keyboard into the shower, scrubbing it clean under running water, rinsing it out, drying it off, and it was back to looking and feeling brand new. I doubt that I will do the same with this one.

(Picture shamelessly copied from the original article)

Apple IPod shuffles are amazing.

Despite my “hatred” for all things Apple (he says, typing on an Apple keyboard into his dual-boot Mac Mini) I admit to being amazed this morning when I fell asleep, leaving my Shuffle still playing. Bugger is still playing as I wake up – it is much  smaller than a matchbox – and so I’m listening to it for wake up exercise duties. Amazing. Just invest in proper headphones (Sennheiser PX100s in my case – unbelievably good.)

A quick moan about Apple keyboards.

So what is this thing? OK, it’s sculptured, ultra thin, looks great as an example of minimalist design and is also very robust (take my word on that one!).

So what’s not to like (to use an Americanism)? I hate the fricking keys, that’s what! I have recently, and for the foreseeable future, got a shit load of typing to do. I am no touch-typist, but also I am faster than the average hunt & pecker. I use probably 6 fingers when I’m really motoring, or only 4 if I want to be accurate on this keyboard.

It’s the oh so cute “chicklet” keys! Not enough tactile response, and a slightly indecisive feel which means I have to pound on it to be absolutely sure that I am actually creating type on the screen. Which makes it noisy, which somehow undermines the sleek, modern, oh so Apple, design. If I wanted to recreate the sound of a 1950s Selectric typewriter, I would have bought one, ferchrissakes.

Solution: Laughably, in view of the cost of this “industrially designed marvel,” is that I may shortly be going out and buying my favourite brand of keyboard, Logitech. OK, it will have Windows keys, so a little minor readjustment required with the command and option keys, but I can bet it will much quieter, give better feedback, and be more accurate than this svelte little slice of aluminium. And probably cheaper too.

OK, rant over. Rest fingers time. Go cut nails before testing new keyboards. Calm down. Go shopping.

Images shamelessly stolen from Apple’s website – because mine is dirty, and because it’s their fault! 

An early Xmas present.

When I was in Singapore recently, I bought Mrs.S. her Nintendo Wii that she has been keen to get since it was released, and which I promised to get for her birthday. Fortunately I was able to get a good deal on a Japanese imported version, with games and extra controller etc. all for a price that still worked out cheaper than buying a grey import chipped version here in Malaysia. Carrying it back on the bike, along with my weekend’s luggage was, hmm, interesting. Didn’t slow me down though! If anyone spotted a bright yellow streak on the highway loaded somewhat precariously up to the max with luggage, doing about 200km/h then you had the pleasure of seeing Suzi the Flying Banana in action.

But as Mrs.S. and I went shopping yesterday for Xmas sundries for the cafe, I decided to cheer myself up by buying myself a present. Please note that I refuse to use the term “retail therapy” because it is simply used to mask consumerist greed, and I have no issue with buying things just for the hell of it.

Modest spending was the order of the day, and with my well known preference for minimalism, and the concept of small=beautiful, I purchased an iPod Shuffle. In my favourite colour, orange!

There are many beautiful things that have blown me away recently, and this tiny marvel is no exception. Smaller than a box of matches, superbly finished aluminium casing, and of course the Apple minimalist touch, no screen or unnecessary features. I have a 6GB Creative Zen for other duties, but wanted this purely for the form factor and the sound quality which is absolutely superb – not using the enclosed earbuds of course, but with my trusty Sennheiser PX100 headphones – with richness and clarity.

And I find the shuffle feature – which I never bothered using on the Zen -  to be great fun! I download a totally random set of songs, and then just switch the machine on, and do whatever I need to do. When Ella Fitzgerald suddenly morphs into Nine Inch Nails, and the Bob Dylan Theme time radio hour playing 50′s and 60′s music before a wall of Smashing Pumpkins comes along is a really pleasurable experience.

A quick and dirty snapshot shows the extremely tiny nature of the machine, but it can really crank out the music, even for my partially deaf ears If people mumble then they might as well be speaking Mongolian for all I know, and I have now developed the appalling habit of mumbling as well. Makes for long drawn out conversations, with lots of repetition required to catch the drift of the conversation. Especially bad in clubs or bars, when I simply cannot filter sounds and voices to manage a conversation Too many loud concerts, a liking for high volume music, and probably the main culprit, noisy motorcycle helmets. 25 years of helmet noise, at speed, will definitely have a deleterious effect on one’s hearing in later life.

But I digress. I love this little gadget, it’s quality and size and ease of use, which means that I end up listening to tracks that I wouldn’t necessarily choose for a playlist, and that’s great because surprises lurk at every song change. Highly recommended!!