Oh yeah. Tell me about your terabytes, baby.
July 2, 2009
According to NaBloPoMo, it is National Blog posting Month, a “fitting occasion for posting regularly to your blog on the topics that interest you.” Since I am an irritable tech curmudgeon , I will take this moment to share what an irritatingly obnoxious idea it is to encourage people with the overdeveloped sense of self importance to post every day for a month, particularly when there are organizations working very hard to archive all this crap that we’re spewing into the collective eConsciousness.
The camera which recorded the plenary session on data storage. I took a picture of it in an existential moment.
A few months back I attended the Sixth Media in Transition Conference at MIT where the plenary session “Institutional Perspectives on Storage” primarily consisted of the panelists, archivists from various European organizations, getting off on how much storage space they had to offer. My favorite contribution came from Richard Wright, an archivist from the BBC who not only pointed out that they had the least amount of space to offer because they only archived items of value, but also shared that as the amount of space we have for storage has increased exponentially, the durability and reliability of the medium decreased exponentially. This is why we have stone tablets with three digits on them that are thousands of years old, but have to buy a new flash drive every other month or so.
I also admired Wright because he was brazen enough to not only illustrate a file corruption example using an image of Steamboat Willie, but also add the caption “Used Without Permission.” Wright has certainly got some balls bollocks going up against Disney, but perhaps the BBC is full of hardcore badasses cheeky bastards, and the archivists are the cheekiest. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Lets move on.
The issue of archival stayed with us well into the session on information sharing. In response to a fascinating presentation by Alison Byerly entitled What Not to Save: The Future of Ephemera, I formulated what some tweeters would call the “Scrooge McDuck Theory of History.” This was partly a mistake, since I only likened obsession with saving ridiculous amounts of useless data to Scrooge McDuck swimming in a pool of more money than he could ever spend. My real point was the fact regardless of the effort we put into archiving damn near everything, historians 10,100, and 1000 years down the road will be obsessed with whatever we don’t save anyways.
So yes, I refuse to support this silly cause, and it is only by mere coincidence that I have now posted every day in July. All two of them.
What’s the point? We all gonna die anyways.
-Meatwad
Dear Coupland-aholics (and Douglas Coupland, if you’re listening),
If you’ve had a conversation with me that’s lasted longer than 36 seconds in the last two weeks, you’ve probably heard me mention jPod, a doomed early-2008 Canadian television show based on my second-to-least favorite book written by my favorite author (Girlfriend in a Coma FTW!). I love my favorite Douglas Coupland books about as much as I despise television, which may explain my conflicting emotions when I not only discovered fairly recently that the show was made, but realized that it’s the one of the worst shows ever mistakingly syndicated onto the idiot box we call television…and I couldn’t stop watching it.
The Podsters
After four drafts of this post, I’ve yet to find the right words to properly describe the hearty plot casserole that jPod serves up in every episode, or how prime-time buzzword “edgy” translates to “brutal” in Coupland’s screenwriting hands. I love senseless violence as much as the next person (…), but to see characters fall victim to kidnapping, detonation, murder-suicide pacts, electrocution, assault with a deadly weapon, vehicular homicide (x2), heroin addiction, and assault with a cuddly weapon was a bit much for one season!!! Fortunately the super-saturation of plot actually made me feel like I got a twelve-hour jPod movie rather than one season of a TV show, which I kind of dug in a weird way.
Critics (read: myself and other people vaguely referenced on Wikipedia) chided Coupland for inserting himself into the jPod novel as an insufferably dickish character. In the series, Coupland merely cameos as a character dead in an elevator (woo hoo for gore!), but drops enough references to his books hat he may as well have written himself into the series. The Gum Thief got a few nods through the appearances of Glove Pond, while the series ends with a humorously literal nod to Girlfriend in a Coma. All Families are Psychotic could have been a working title for the series, and Microserfs is basically the show played backwards. He’s even nice enough to foreshadow his next book through a documentary on bees which plays on television in the final episode. I love you Doug, but please get over yourself or get over pretending to be way into yourself, whichever applies.
In the end, Doug, I’m still watching the show, well, because I love it. Not because it’s particularly good, 
mind you. It’s a disaster in every way a tv show can be. In fact, it’s a microcosm of all the strengths and weaknesses of both jPod and what draws me to your books in the first place. Like Ethan, Cowboy, John Doe, Caitlin Kaitlin, and Brie, I always felt like a twisted spawn of Generations X, Y, and whatever the hell we’re in now, conceived by the overactive gland we call the information age. I can’t help but be drawn to the unwatchable mess that is jPod because, good or bad, it presents me with what I’m looking for when I pick up each of your books, an honest interpretation of what it means to exist as an individual in the 21st century.
Thank you, Mr. Coupland, for giving me that experience.
…and thank you, WB for cancelling that gruesome, mindless train-wreck.
And the “what did you expect?” award goes to…
June 2, 2009
Microsoft released its new web browser “Bing” today. According to PC World, apparently there is some surprise that it efficiently finds pornographic video clips and displays them in convenient previews. I guess what surprises me the most is that the words “shocked to find porn” actually found themselves together. I mean, in this day and age should that ever be a surprise? Anyways, PC World reports:
One spicy Bing-related topic popping up on the Web today is the Bing Video Search preview feature. Some say it is every adolescent boy’s dream come true. Just set your preferences for Bing Video Search to unfiltered search results, and run a search for “porn” or whatever naughty search term you like on Bing. What you’ll find are explicit video previews from the deepest, darkest corners of the Web. As you can imagine, this trick has gotten some serious attention, and some bloggers have apparently spent the entire morning running these searches (in the name of news of course).
So…you typed “porn” in the search bar and found pornographic videos? So far, the only thing surprising about this is that it made the news. Of course, if the search engine could somehow produce a pornographic result in the top five results of ANY search, well, that would be newsworthy. Imagine typing in “Viola de Gamba” and getting…um…Renaissance chamber music..and smut.
Wow, I’m essentially 0/3 the last three posts on keeping things clean. Jeez, what does that say about me?
The Internet is a communication tool used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another.
-Holden McNeil
My coffee and my desk. Sideways.
Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve lost all patience and interest in the American mainstream news media, opting for NPR and the occasional BBC headline ticker. As if just to spite me this morning, first NPR reports that pirates may “very possibly” team up with Al Qaeda to threaten national security, and now the BBC posts a headline entitled “Girl Chooses Japan Over Parents.”
If I wanted to listen to CNN, I’d shoot up 16 oz. of valium, saw off my frontal lobe, and listen to CNN.
In fairness, the BBC news article did report on the actual story of a Japanese-born Filipino whose parents bent immigration laws. The girl, and most importantly the parents, decided she would be better off in the custody of her aunt in Japan. Given the headline, however, I had expected some story about an American teenage super heroine that jetted across the globe at supersonic speed to save Japan from a meteor attack only to return seconds too late to stop the propane explosion in her parents’ basement.
By the way, while I don’t condone pirate attacks, I’m pretty sure Fisher Price toys have killed, or at least injured more Americans this year than pirates have. Hell, registered Democrats and Republicans have killed more Americans than pirates have, and we haven’t sent the Navy after them. How much mileage do we really have to squeeze out of this story? While I understand that Al Qaeda is a legitimate threat, we should really just be thankful they haven’t formed an alliance with ninjas.
Perhaps my standards for the BBC are too high. I nearly forgot that a guy in Norway who got pulled over for having sex with his girlfriend while exceeding the speed limit on the motorway also made the global BBC news ticker. No, really. He did.
“[The vehicle] was veering from one side to the other because the woman was sitting on the man’s lap while he was driving and doing the act, shall we say,” he added. “He couldn’t see much because her back was in the way.”
- Tor Stein Hagen, a superintendent with Soendre Buskerud Police District
It kinda looks like a milkshake.
January 24, 2009
Au Lait & Blueberry Cheesecake
I enjoyed a fun little Kristin Lagasse performance at Twin Paradox Coffee in South Portland.
I brought along one of the moleskine notebooks that my fiancée was thoughtful enough to give me for Christmas, mainly because I somehow couldn’t justify paying six bucks for a notebook (that I really wanted). That’s particularly odd for me since I’m not even willing to admit to all the other crap that I’ve blown money on. I think it’s more an issue with their selling point that “it’s the same notebook used by Hemingway, Alexander the Great, Chester A. Arthur, Pope Gregory I, and Jesus.” Ok, ok, that’s not exactly the tagline, but it’s something like that. It’s like they’re just trying to encourage people to be pretentious douchebags about writing.
Done, and nothing written.
You know, I said that this would be more civil than my last blog. Well, there goes that. I’m done, and so is my cheesecake.
“Writers block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.”
-Steve Martin
“God bless the absentee…”
January 20, 2009
Coffee on I-Day at the East Burn.
I really don’t want to post about Inauguration Day. I’m not sure what’s more depressing about this election: people who waited for a new administration to become agents of change, or people who griped about the previous administration and won’t change as much as their socks with this new one. I guess can admire the latter for consistency.
When it’s all said and done, I’d love to have the honor of meeting either George Bush or Barack Obama and being able to sit with them away from all 
the press and politics, and chat about something real. Perhaps we’d talk about those last moments right before you fall asleep and those first few in the morning as you wake up. Those brief moments when you are simply you with no real effort or concern about anyone or anything else. Or maybe we’d talk about music, or history, or food. I don’t know really. All I know is that the responsibility of final judgment—whether you believe it belongs to God, fate, history, or no one or thing at all—is thankfully not my burden to carry. I respect both men just on the basis that both were willing to rise to the challenge of having one of the worst jobs there is. I’m just here for the ride…and obviously the coffee.
As an aside, “Barack Obama” gets flagged by the spell checker. I don’t know why I find that funny.
