Symmetry is magical, so 19-4-19 might make sense to dip back into the water. At least for a short swim and some thoughts littering an assortment of apps and inboxes.

Six Pixels is still going strong, and the talk with Paul on non-growth focus was sort of the tipping point to get back to journal mode. Because introspection sometimes needs verbalized ideas - the act of ordering words helps to map out the actual ideas.

Side hustle as a small thing, do it in between- a little at a time

Use it to test the waters, to learn and develop yourself. And maybe as a springboard — but don’t do it just to get somewhere else.

Makes a lot more sense than ruthlessly burning the midnight oil, at least if the goals isn’t to go all exponential growth, but to find a better you in a happy mindset.

That is all for now, as this is Safari doing the desktop editor - need to app it or perhaps stick with the alternative WP site, or make a new one to mirror automatically.

- ...and the sun is really back for summer...or at least spring 

Music makes me take control

Bodum Pavina - double layer for extreme isolation and clear taste

Two things for inspiration and finding the flow - coffee and music;

The coffee has reached room temperature. The bitter bite reminds me that it is time to refill the cup again. Morning will not move forward without this action. Refilled I can once again type. Let the words pour forth with the hopeful goal of something worth keeping.

Like the post on toes in the grass, this one called Finding the Flow came up over the weekend, by another member of the rat pack of social and digital media - aka Media Hacks.

CC is clearly carving his own path, doing speaking and books, along with being a dedicated dad, rather than working for an agency. Pushing the podcasts every now and again, as another item in the content mix.

And that is part of the joy of reading his post, hearing his thoughts and reflecting on his questions.

He brings another view and vibe, kicking it up with the music, relaxing with a cup, and generally bringing a smile.

I've had a lot more fun with music over the last few months, after I (finally) got on the streaming bandwagon and subscribed to Wimp (similar to Spotify, Norwegian based rather than Swedish, paid only and more focus on blog and recommending music across genres, less cover bands)

Rather than having it as background while doing things, I've used it to explore new ideas and themes, and to have a jump back into years long gone - songs that played on the radio that never bought, artists that seemed strange at the time but grew into something more.

Not simply a tool to tune out and zone in, it has added a little bit at times when that was needed. And all for one less pint each month. While feeling sort of good that some of that money is being kicked forward.

Better to have than never?

Just a short post, going out directly not from a draft but from a too long open tab, as summer vacation takes it toll on the posting streak;

Now or never, now or never, now or never—the words niggled at me like a song stuck in my head.

The quote is from the intro to the story in PodCastle 219: The Circle Harp - and you can listen in full, for free as with all the goodness from Escape Artists. The theme is about taking a chance or sticking to what you know.

At what point will it be better to go for something "a bit over the moon", rather than playing in the same small pond? Is it better to lose in the big leagues, than to dominate in the minors?

Can you develop your art without stretching beyond the comfort zone? Do we need to push it into the next gear? Or is there a place for doing it good enough, providing what is needed and valued by the audience we have? Trade off or cop out?

- ...and the sun is promising a warm wonderful day of summer, and 7 new drafts made it into the backlog via ifttt ...

I think I think you are

In the eleventh century St Anselm of Canterbury proposed that it was possible to prove the existence of God using reason alone

Despite the blog laxing a bit, I've been backfeeding the draft pile - and one nice source for inspiration in general is the show "In Our Time" 

It is truly #mindporn ... a weekly discussion and review of a subject, with 3 or 4 world class scholars sharing their insights, the latest research and generally having a good time.

The quote up above is from the show on the Ontological argument through the ages. spend 40 minutes listening, or read up a bit from wikipedia.

Perfection and existence 

Does the idea of perfection imply that it must exist?

And is that - by definition - divinity, namely God?

Why? Why not?

soundtracking; Madonna doing "Imagine" - a seldom foray into the album archive

Timeout: short sweet

An escapepod original, and that I have no problem understanding or endorsing;

EP352 Food for Thought

Play in Popup | Download

-
- SPOILER WARNING
-

“I am here to fulfill a causation loop.”

most
awesome
ending
ever


This is what makes short stories so great. Set up, execution and boom. Just mindblowing. Oh the implications.

Timeout: rewind, reboot

As the sun is slowly turning the bottom skies pink and purple, and my son has fallen asleep after waking from a mix of fever and nightmare, I sit here still feeling the "punch" in the gut from the story of the day.

It fits into some of the other posts here lately, from Flich to just do it type discussions.

So, set aside an hour for listening. And then some time for reflection.

PodCastle 211: The Axiom Of Choice

 The Axiom of Choice [58:37m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download

Timeout: Nix magical journey

Another timeout? Already? And in the middle of the day?

Oh, the joys of async publishing, writing, listening and distribution. 

What better way to celebrate all that than with a podcast episode.


PodCastle episode #207: Hope Chest from May 8, 2012 is a "PodCastle Giant" - meaning that it clocks in at just over an hour. But it is time well spent. It is read by Mur Lafferty (the Mighty, Mighty) - their tagging, not mine - giving it that extra bit of geek-fu goodness on the way. 

And, most importantly, it is written by Garth Nix, amongst his 54 books on amazon is also an ebook collection of Hereward & Fitz who have made many a fun journey on PodCastle.

This story is a bit darker, it is in many ways a classical "coming of age" or "heroes journey". But with q few twists and turns along the way to keep the listener paying rapt attention.

Get it in iTunes, on the site - or via direct link (over an hour, so mind the filesize)

Timeout: Horror with Yeats

Nice a break? Take a trip in time and space with a 'horror' story from the poet Yeats. 

I'm still a bit backlogged on podcast, even after cutting down to the bare essentials, but the trifecta of story-goodness that is EscapePod, PseudoPod and PodCastle still maintain center stage.

But this story, namely Pseudopod episode #273: The Crucifixion of the Outcast by William Butler Yeats - originally published in 1897, and podcasted on March 16th, 2012 - is a standout piece. 

The descriptions, the characters, the tone. Dark, but not extremely scary or bloody. Poetry in action. 

Get it in iTunes, over at the site or from the link;

Glory, glory - what's the story?

Story inspiration this time - Pseudopod - is mainly a horror podcast, but episode 266 is as much about life as things that go bump in the night.

The theme brings to mind Bruce Springsteen and "Glory Days" (embed below) - looking back as much as ahead, or simply at right now. Living in the moment, or for the moment.



Sure there might be wonderful things hidden behind the fence.
But there might just as easily be things best left undisturbed.

We glorify youth, and by extension say that growing up is not a goal as such, just something that happens as you try to (re)capture that feeling of owning the world and everything in it. When everything was all about the here and now, when it felt like nothing outside mattered, and everything was still possible - because tomorrow hadn't started.

But every day is a new day, every dream another chance. Carpe Diem isn't just about the big dreams. It is also living life as it happens. Every day a little piece of the puzzle. Every (chance) encounter another moment to savour.

So, as summer is setting in, projects and deadlines are winding down, are you preparing for fall, or just staying in the zone of now?

Neuro-pattern-light

I hate the new blogger. It killed the original version of this post as I hit save. Then I tested a new blank post and it failed again. Could somebody please tell Google that there is this thing called iPad, and if their solutions continue to work as poorly a lot of users are up for grabs. I have already stopped most my newsletters to gmail because the use is a hassle (yeah, could add it as account, but with work email that was a hassle in the first iteration at least)


And now tumblr looks really good, why even wordpress is starting to come around to ios as a platform of choice with the app growing stronger every incremental release..




On to the recreation, thankfully only two paras in before hit the save, but still two too many...

Neuro-pattern-light...or why I love william gibsons writing.

I think it has a lot to do with growing up alongside his three trilogies.

Read neuromancer et al in early teens at school, when computers consisted of commodore 64 (or a 128 as I had), used mainly for games and the occasional demo. A friends father had a Mac that we got to use for a few school projects - typing up the report and putting in some pictures.

Then picked up the bridge books more or less at university, where dot com was becoming a phrase, but a bit before the boom/bust really started. Back when Fast Company was still mostly about business trends.

And pattern rec is one of the last printed books I bought (fiction and regular non fiction at least) - spook country and zero history were delivered directly to a kindle or the kindle app on iPad. Read digitally and instantly on release. No time lag for cross Atlantic distribution or priorities.

My teens, my twenties, my thirties. As the world has gone digital and then some, so has my life. as the future has become today, so his books have merged into "reality", blurring the lines more with each passing chapter.


For books and background, check the Amazon author page

INTERVIEWER: For someone who so often writes about the future of technology, you seem to have a real romance for artifacts of earlier eras.
GIBSON: It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable.... very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison recordings. ... It sounded like the devil, they said

 - Paris Review

The magic of not having. So good quote - had to brutally trim it down a bit, because you really should go over there and read the whole thing. Now. Come back afterwards. More to come here as well...






Because it is easy to add in the blanks, merge things (like a mobile phone and a mp3 player... Or a pc and a phone), but close to impossible to even remember back five or ten years, how much of a leap a simple innovation like the Palm Pilot was. An actual digital assistant in your hand. And it could do other things. Small games. Like magic.

Emergent technologies were irreversibly altering their landscape. Bleak House is a quintessential Victorian text, but it is also probably the best steam­punk landscape that will ever be. Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Ballardian passages in which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industry.

More of Dickens is definitely on my too read list, inspired this time by a piece on new bio on him. The British televised versions are great, and the podcast librivox version of two cities is killer. Like Stackpole, I firmly believe that the model he used to serialize his fiction is finding a new life in terms of shorter ebooks, faster turnaround for stories and generally more adaptability to reader expectations. 

... I remember walking past a video arcade,... seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games... were so physically involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games

...one day, I walked by a bus stop and there was an Apple poster. ... holding a life-size representation of a real-life computer that was not much bigger than a laptop is today. Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. 

Woot! Loop in time. Arcade games as the driver, then apple as the trigger for seeing it "everywhere". Merging insights and intuition, that's what makes the book so much more than just a cool story. 


Today Apple is slowly moving us away from the PC age, into mobile and tactile  with the iOS touch interface. And once more games are actively taking a huge part in both pushing the hardware (thereby feeding the need for upgrades and rapid development) and the user interface - Angry Birds as touch training. Speed, precision and flexibility. 


The best way to get someone comfortable with a mouse back in the win 3 age was Solitare or Minesweeper. Sit them down, show them some serious stuff, then give them a ten minute "break" - after opening the program. We learn when we want to learn, when there is a clear reward rather than just an obligation. 

I’ve always been taken aback by the assumption that my vision is fundamentally dystopian. I suspect that the people who say I’m dystopian must be living completely sheltered and fortunate lives. The world is filled with much nastier places than my inventions, places that the denizens of the Sprawl would find it punishment to be relocated to, and a lot of those places seem to be steadily getting worse.

Putting things in perspective? How to compare to Dickens? Is he dystopian or simply telling of the underbelly of the dressed up pig? 


I for one didn't really think of Neuromancer as dark at the time, compared to something like Alien it was a happy place all around, with cool tech and the chance of making it big. 


That is one thing that is changed with the latest novels - or perhaps as much with my reading and views - sure there is a potential big score, but you get the feeling that just getting out or onwards is as much of a goal for the characters. 


The settings are more "glamour" compared to the first books, but in many ways it still feels more empty and forsaken. The art hidden from view, giving only a select few the enjoyment or the experience. The secret clips and the chase for just a little bit more.






First read about the interview care of one of the @greatdismal musing, but at that time the only online version was via a sub to P.R, so that was $5 lost revenue for them, as I'd have gladly paid for just the issue or the article (more or less the cost of a single copy newspaper here, so comparable value)

But then I saw it rt and checked the link - lo and behold, the full version is up. So it seemed a great test for iOs 5 reader mode, and also for the new +style blogger. First is OK, but lacks page jump/pagination (skip full screen height down). 


The other is another crappy google conversion. As a blog writer, the original blogger was as good as or better than any seen since. New might be ok on pc, but today that is close to irrelevant. Same reason can't really care about plus itself. Plain sucks compared to any twitter app.

Shall I compare thee...

Shakespeare Empowers Me to Speak:

My response is always, “Once you’ve had a donkey head on stage reciting Shakespeare, you can do anything.”

- a great quote from the post by CC, reminds me of way way way back when memorizing one of the sonnets, mostly for recital in English class, but also partly as a conversation piece and memory exercise.

Today is The Bard’s birthday and I’m writing this post as part of the global celebration.

Strange how many things happen on a given day, and which ones we choose to mark, remember or let move us to action. 'tis truly a mystery how man walks the stage.

Paint me a picture, cut me a film

Riffing off of "the other" Chris Anderson, and his TED talk on video as the great enabler for new innovation in a broad sense, "the wired" Chris Anderson promoted the maker-agenda in issue 19.04 of Wired;

"There are also so many really great websites where people can share their projects. We have Instructables and iFixit and Etsy and Make and Hack a Day and our own Adafruit. So people who used to do this stuff alone now have even more community. It used to be just freaks in garages; now it’s freaks in garages working together." - Limor Fried of Adafruit

It is the same in web development - with new bite-sized video tutorials popping up every day, from the to the point experimentation of jQuery for Designers, to the slightly more quirky Rails for ZOmbies. With the ability to chose or mix and match between the written word (and most importantly copy the code) and the video presenting it gradually and immersively (not a word, but mayhap it should be?), learning picks up pace.

The video in and of itself is also good, because it can be consumed in a more "leisurely" way that a written tutorial, giving more room for reflection since you are listening rather than reading, often leaning back rather than forward. iPad and tablet based reading slightly excluded - whilst it is a more relaxed setting and mode, for code related tutorials it is less useful since jumping into JS Bin to test is a slight hassle compared to cmd-tab'ing or even ctrl-tabbing within the browser.


"We’re a tutorial company. We’re a project company. We do video shows and tutorials and teach people, and then there’s a gift shop at the end" [p2]

The sentiment in many ways mirrors some of the discussion regarding books and authors in the digital economy; you buy the e-version of a story for $4.99 - but if you really love it and want to display it (or simply support the author, be a patron of the arts), you get the $29.99 special edition hardcover with bonus short story and illustrations. I subscribe to this view, as promoted/explained by amongst others Michael Stackpole in his blog - and as 'lived' by both up and coming authors such as Scott Sigler with his Galactic Football League series, and truly established authors such as Tracy Hickman, doing a subscription based book with his wife.

On a side note I'm still a bit peeved with Mike&Mike at the Dragonpage for not pushing the guest authors about lack of digital version (like a Kindle version of Song of the Dragon, I'd have bought it last July, and pre-ordered vol2 by now!) - especially when talking so much about new models as they did with Tracy



- ...and the sun shines brightly, 'tis a feeling of summer in the embrace of May ...

Fictional dimension

Dimensions in Mathematics - a phantom, a chimera

Readers who will have snagged a copy of Stieg Larsson's newest thriller The Girl Who Played with Fire ... HUP blogpost de-bunking the book - a shame since it sounded like a great read. As is the Millenium Trilogy by the afore mentioned mr Larsson (Stieg not Steig as the have it), crime with a twisted backstory and a bit of tech thrown in more or less likely.


As for the more meta dimension on this blog - I've been blogging a bit in Norwegian on two different WP blogs (consolidated them last week) the last six months, as well as playing around with Tumblr and WP in general to get a feel for the systems. Also Twitter has been eating up a fair share of time - skimming tweets, reading articles and re-tweeting rather than reflecting a bit more in-depth. But today being 2-2-10 (or binary 2 ;D) it was time to get some thoughts flowing again for the new month, year and decade

...and the sun shone somewhere behind the clouds today - as the snow kept on falling...

Soundtrack; Gareth Emery podcast, epi 87 - bit of backlog there as well

Immature subset

"In the last week I've gotten ads that range from 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 41 seconds and 60 seconds. What is going on?"
- Streaming Media post [track]

there seems to be little doubt that online video or web-tv as both a narrative medium and as a commercial vehicle is immature. Being on the 'forefront' of online, which is itself still a bit underdeveloped in terms of sustainable monetization.

But is the length of an ad really the main point going forward? On tv you can get 15 as well as the more standard 30 second spots, but you can buy longer blocks and keep the story rolling. Or you can get a burst-ad (several small spots of a few seconds each combine to tell a larger story).

Isn't the real challenge finding a better way to match ads, content and viewers? The holy grail of behavioral and predictive matching, how the web was/is (???) supposed to move beyond billboards (aka banner-ads on mainstream sites) and into the land of quality - thereby breaking the old adage about half of ads being wasted.

Search ads have been one step in the direction, with Ad words also potentially stepping forward. But with so many advertisers and so many "non essential" or "non engaging" products, how can you keep the dream alive?
Detergent ads after surfing for several hours straight? Or only if you don't visit online ordering for pizza delivery?


Some good thoughts and questions in Six Pixels - both a blog post (Display Advertising And Search Are Connected At The Hip ) and the 'breakfast talk' with mr analytics (SPOS #152 - Orgasmic Digital Marketing Avinash Kaushik )

Things will change. Radically. But it will take time.

Do you want to make it change?
Or hope to get by until retirement or similar before it does?

Latest fix; Metamor City

The Metamor City Podcast: "a sci-fi/fantasy audio fiction series that is distributed for free... a mixture of short stories and full-length novels, all taking place in one large world with an overarching story arc."

As Scott Sigler is winding down Contagious, and Mur still is short on fiction I decided it was time to track down some new additions to the audio menu. (Did I mention the drooling over Rookie limited editon? Ordered and confirmed.)

Heard a bit about Metamor during the time it has been on (intro post from june 07), so decided to grab the first few episodes and listen in. Really enjoying it so far, there are a few stand alone episodes up front - getting to know the setting and the feel. Then the first major work (Making the Cut) has just wrapped up at 31 episodes, so there is a bit of content to indulge in.

Xmas in march

CoffeeGeek - Baratza Vario Grinder: "Baratza partnered with Mahkonig to produce the burr set and burr housing on this grinder, and it's unique to the Vario - 54mm flat burrs made out of ceramic"

As I've learned today while looking around for the euro relaease and pricepoint, Mahlköning is a maker of professional grade grinders - and will be pushing out the Vario under their brand with a 220V set-up - listed now as march 2009.

At a bit over €300 it will take some time to "sell it" internally, but by the time easter arrives I hope to have one to play around with - for doppio, presspot and the huge presspot.

...and the sun is coming back...

Cross-post

Comment on the post
Podcasting Is Not Dead:

...from being "one" phenomenon where almost everybody knew a lot of the same references (DSC, Dawn&Drew, ...) podcasting is now nothing more than a way to get audio (and video) content

Even if I'm using Google Reader to skim headlines, I'm not rss'ing the news - I still read them.

Same for audio - now I have a way of getting shows conveniently whether they are broadcast locally, nationally or abroad. Whenever, wherever.

But it still comes down to time constraints - take out work, sleep and family time. What remains is leisure - surfing, reading, watching video, playing games - or working out...

Subscriptions and loyalty are great, but pull-based push doesn't equate to actual use. There is a reason iTunes has built in limits for backlogged content

So - text, audio and video are all alive and doing quite well, each across a multitude of platforms, formats and distribution channels.

So - now what?

Three small clippings to start off the summer season - and then some reflections on short term and long term implications of online transaprency, business models and actual insights

"it’s important to recognize that a lot of advertising numbers have historically been crap, with pricing based on promises of “reach” and other fuzzy math extrapolated from circulation numbers and Nielsen ratings.
Advertising will find its place in new media, but it may be a necessarily smaller chunk of its former self because accountability will only continue to improve online." (NewTeeVee)


"Marketers need to start thinking about how we do business and how, in a world where reproduction, distribution and categorization is becoming ubiquitous, where we're going to add value and differentiate" (Twist Image)


"long-term thinking entails the confluence of the linear and the exponential. ... Balancing that point where the linear crosses the exponential is what long-term thinking should be about"(Kevin Kelly)

So - media as we know it (newspapers and television, radio and online) mainly relies on ads to support the business. And as it has been stated and quoted a lot over the years, a lot of it is hit and miss (or miss, miss, miss and maybe hit). You have no good way of actually knowing if someone sees your ad, if the react to it or if it is something else that makes them pick up your cereal in the grocery store the next week.

Which is why a lot of ads are more focused on "branding" than actual purchasing. But with online ads the metrics are (almost) all there. Do the click through, sign up, engage or even buy? You can measure it, compare and contrast on the spot. Run six different ads on the same site - and then scrap the bottom four performers the same night.

And as that kind of information, insight and understanding spreads - how much mass advertising is really needed to help support the sales of product X? Only the 50% that isn't wasted right now? Or perhaps only 20% because the message is even better suited to the audience.

Then the big question and the long term view becomes; will it be sustainable - and for whom?

YouTube is filled with "professional" content - but also with a huge amount of user generated "free content". Made by the users for the users. Ditto for most of the newsgroups and forums out there. With 24hr news channels and talk radio producing more content in a day than you can consume in a month or year - is the glut of content needed? Will we be able to achieve a balance, with some professional content (or sorting, or prioritizing) being valueable enough to attract ads?

Or is it the HBO and NPR models that will win out? Subscriptions and donations - since the time to sift is more valuable than the cost of getting the content? Convenience or lazyness. How often do you go around actively looking for new blogs, podcasts or websites? Or do you wait until someone somehow reccomends them? When you hear a promo or see a link in a post?

Consumption often trumps discovery in terms of time - but there is also hoarding or gathering, chances are that quite a bit of p2p content is never consumed. Becuase it is easier to pull it down and think that someday I'll want to watch four seasons of it. When in fact it is all to easy to just turn on the tv and surf the channels for 20 minutes rather than starting that first season.

Yes, no, both, neither? One thing is for sure. Media consumption is changing rapidly, while advertising is (still) changing relatively slowly. So - when do we reach the intersection?

measure or count? (Update)

FoE2 Podcast: Metrics and Measurement

"the metrics and measurement panel from FoE2 available for download in audio and video forms.

information here, can be accessed in audio, 320x240 video, and 640x480 video. "

(more comments when I get around to watching the whole piece -note that the small video is a 600 mb download)

Top line: some interesting points and case discussion, a bit of numbers on dvr and online use - especially interesting putting it in context of total time spent and multiplying up the numbers. In short: Yes, there is a lot going on, but "most people" are still watching television - a lot.

Biggest game?

"Halo 3, the third and final episode in the hugely popular franchise, netted $170 million in sales in the U.S. in its first day" (CNet)

That is a pretty amazing number for a single day (at $60 each it's close to 3 million copies), considering that a large part of the "mass market" will probably begin picking it up from now and closer to the holidays passing 10 million copies in circulation seems likely, thereby outpacing Halo 2.
(Final Fantasy X hit around 5 million, while GTA III and both of the two first sequels topped 10 million each - also interesting to note that while the original Xbox only has seven million+ sellers, the 360 had already passed ten games before Halo 3)

Personally, I won't be getting a 360 for Halo 3, but if (when) I get around to getting one, I'll certainly pick it up as well. As a Bioware fanboy, it is no surprise that the big decider for my most likely near future purchase is Mass Effect. The latest hype-build up is an article on MTV about the use of Machinima, or more to the point people with a machinima background working on the team

"In their effort to create the most cinematic title gamers have ever seen, the "Mass Effect" development studio, BioWare, has hired people who make movies out of video games" (MTV !)

There is also another installment (in three parts) of the so-called podcast out - and for those wanting to get their toes wet the Dummies guide for machinima might be a nice starting point. It is written by some of the Bloodspell creators, and also gives you a dvd packed with tools and video to get you started playing. Or, to take this full circle; grab Halo 3 and try out the new tools included there for capturing gameplay as well as the editor

...and the sun is creating some screen glare here down south, and it is a wonderful feeling of warmth and relaxation...

Update (4.10): week-one sales have clocked in at a rather reasonable $300 million worldwide - Forty million hours of online games, which adds up to 4,500 years, have been played in the first week [Cnet]