SansPoint

For the past two weeks, I’ve had a small, but nagging problem: one of the various things on my walls, the cut out center of Herb Albert’s “Whipped Cream and Other Delights”.^[1] I had stuck it on the wall with two dime-size hunks of Tack-N-Stick, a gray, sticky substance with a consistency like Play-Doh. While the goo had been enough to hold the thing to the wall for a while, heat and humidity reduced it’s ability to stick, and it fell down repeatedly. Stupidly, thinking that the small amount had been enough before, I just tried sticking it back up for it to fall again.

This seems like an odd example, and it is, but there is a lesson here. Needs change, and systems have to change to adapt. Increasing the amount of Tack-N-Stick was enough to get the LP center to stay, even with the heat. Likewise, I’m realizing that other systems that provide support have to adapt to changing needs. This sort of heuristic development is the center of all lifehacking. We change the system we use to adapt to our changing needs. Copying someone else’s lifehack whole sale tends to fail. You need something that’s going to work for you, with you, and support you where you need help. Merlin Mann may be a whiz at emptying his inbox every day, but it took a new heuristic for him to clean out his junk.

When I griped about needing a goal tracker widget, I was seeking a new heuristic to compensate for a failure of my support structure to accomplish daily goals. Requiring me to deliberately bring up the Joe’s Goals site to gauge what I’ve done each day was more effort than I tended to exert. Having the site as my browser’s home page is enough, at least for now, to force my mind to think about my daily goals.^[2]

Being a college student on summer vacation, the typical constructs that form a support system for my daily activities have fallen aside. My main requirement each day is to be at work by six PM. History has shown that the natural action for me, then, is to sleep in until 4 PM, eat some fast food before I go in, and stay up all night. Instead, I’ve set up a system where I force myself up at the time I’m going to need to get up when classes resume. This gives me the day to accomplish tasks, as opposed to the night which I would most likely waste goofing around online.^[3]

Even a small, simple change can do wonders. Systems like this are best implemented in small steps, bits and pieces working towards a larger goal. Forcing oneself into a massive, overnight life-change is a recipe for disillusion and failure. Examine your situation, and see if a little change to your heuristic for dealing with life can’t improve things. Evaluate the reasons for your actions, the advantages of changes, and implement something. You can always switch back if it doesn’t work. What do you have to lose, except perhaps a bad habit?

1. I know most people want this record for the album art, but if you like stupid 50s lounge music as much as I do, it’s essential. ↩
2. Of course, if I can’t be bothered to click a bookmark, what makes me think I’d bring up Dashboard? I find that I bring up Dashboard on a regular basis to check on my website stats, see my exercise routine, or just to use the calculator. Having my daily goals visible and trackable there is a logical extension of the idea. ↩
3. This isn’t to say I don’t goof around online during the day, but I do other things as well. Productive things. ↩

The biggest problem with using online tools to handle life tasks is accessibility. Take, for example, Joe’s Goals. I’d originally set up an account with Joe’s Goals to allow me to keep track of personal goals and break a couple bad habits. It worked to an extent. I can credit Joe’s Goals with helping me stop biting my nails, at least. However, in using it further, I ran into a wall—I have to open a web browser, bring up the site through my bookmark, and then check off the accomplished tasks. This is too much for me, it seems.

I tried a few ways around it, though none were successful. My favorite was using the Dash Clipping Widget to hold my Joe’s Goals checklist, but the scale of it (9 goal items) was too much. The widget was damned huge. Joe’s Goals displays a week’s worth of goals at once, with the current day on the far right. The week grid alone is a good 530 pixels wide. Then, counting the goal descriptions themselves, and the tallies at the far right, we have a box with the total width of nearly 800 pixels. Running at 1280×1024, having this widget left me without a lot of room for anything else.

Pass.

I’ve decided to set Joe’s Goals as my browser start page now, but I’d prefer to simply have a small Dashboard widget I could use to track goals, something small, maybe showing five days. I don’t need the ability to check off daily goals more than once: just to be able to check “Done” or not. Positive and negative goals, like Joe’s Goals functionality would be a bonus, but I could work around it not being there.

Some nice widget developer, please get on this.

Devolution: Nature’s U-Turn is a new viral video by the band Korn^[1], presenting a mockumentry on Devolution, the idea that humanity is regressing, not progressing. It seems kind of familiar… as if some other band had been making this same claim before.

And yes, Devo, the De-Evolution band themselves have been made aware of this. I have to approve of the statement by Gerald Casale on the Club Devo front page:

“We denounce this as imposters playing with fire.” Gerald V. Casale

My major problem with this is not that Korn is making fun of humanity’s decline, but that they’re essentially ripping of an idea, wholesale, from another band without credit. The video, as presented, lacks both the intelligence of Devo’s take on the subject and the quality. It feels like, in a way, a dumbing down of a creative and unique concept in order to sell to a larger populace. In the end, something gets lost in the translation: in this case, the joke.

Ultimately, Devolution: Nature’s U-Turn fails to provide anything beyond a bit of pointless humor, and no real concrete criticisms. It works on one level: people are doing stupid stuff, and that’s scary and funny. There’s no major point, as far as I can tell. Devo’s videos and music provide context, criticize, and even offer solutions in some cases.

Comparing the two products, I’d take the original, and so should you.

1. which I refuse to link to on general principle ↩

A recent post on the Freakonomics Blog on whether someone could start a library system from scratch today^[1] has me thinking. Stephen J. Dubner argues that if such an attempt were started today, there would be a huge pushback from book publishers to prevent these new-fangled libraries from freely distributing books. After all, one copy of a book being read by twenty people means that the publishing companies are missing out on twenty potential sources of revenue.

Dubner guesses that “Perhaps they’d come up with a licensing agreement: the book costs $20 to own, with an additional $2 per year for every year beyond Year 1 it’s in circulation. I’m sure there would be a lot of other potential arrangements,” but I don’t think this would go far enough for the publishers. They’d try to milk money out of the library, and the reader, and possibly the reader’s mother if they could. It would be more like joining a video store: you pay per title, and a portion of that payment goes towards the store, and another goes back to the movie studios. The store pays the studio for a copy of the movie, and so the studio gets double profits. In a library system, the publishers get the money per copy of the book, and then that’s it.

It wouldn’t stop there, either. With concerns over intellectual property, there would probably be some attempt to ensure some form of ARM on the books: paper that could be read but not photocopied, books that are encrypted requiring a code to read, or some other absurd technology to prevent redistribution and unauthorized reading. Perhaps, at the utmost extreme, libraries would sell you an e-book reader, and distribute books digitally, with enough DRM to choke a horse. If these things seem somewhat far-fetched, the music industry has pulled the same crap on music sales for years.

As someone with aspirations of writing professionally, who wants people to read his work, and believes in open distribution of information, the idea of rights-managed, pay-to-read libraries scares the hell out of me. Fortunately, we have free libraries, which allow people to read for free, without worrying about paying for anything, except late fees, and open access to the written word. It has also provided us with some absolutely beautiful library smut. These pictures are simply beautiful.

1. At the time of this post, the site is suffering heavily under the Digg effect, so it might not load. ↩

Thomas Pynchon’s novel, The Crying of Lot 49 famously depicts an underground communication system, WASTE, which is utilized by society’s outcasts: political revolutionaries, sexual deviants, the poor, minorities, etc. The role of WASTE as underground postal service ties in heavily with the Cold War paranoia, not of nuclear war, but of government intrusion into communications. “Write by WASTE,” says a woman in the novel to her activist son, “The government will open it if you don’t.” The start of the Cold War was, arguably, the start of a new era in control over the populace by the Federal Government. Spying on citizens, opening of mail, and a general culture of enforced conformity were all weapons used by the United States Government to enact controls on the populace, and reduce dissent.

The idea of an underground postal system on the scale of WASTE in Lot 49 seems absurd, the concerns of government intrusion into communication are still real. Reading the news beings up no shortage of recent stories on warrantless wiretapping of phone calls. In addition, the PATRIOT act allows the government to see what you’ve checked out of the library, and the Bush Administration has even claimed the right to read your mail. You don’t even have to be a potential dissident—ordinary citizens are having this happen to them. Government intrusion into private communication is more prevalent now than it has been, even at the time Pynchon wrote Lot 49. Despite the increased scale, the rational is the same now as it was in the 6s, it was Communism, and now it’s Terrorism.

Pynchon, however, in writing Lot 49 could not foresee the development of the Internet, nor its rise as a means of mass communication for millions. In its own way, the Internet has become a digital WASTE system, allowing for underground communication on a massive scale, unprecedented by anything, even the telephone. Its semi-decentralized structure allows for a strong level of anonymity, which can be increased by proxy servers, encryption software, and other technologies. Furthermore, encryption technologies and darknets allow communication that is made much more secure from outside intrusion than ever before.^[1] This has been both a strength, and a weakness of the Internet. Groups of all stripes, from harmless perverts^[2] and drug users, to terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda and its syncretic offshoots.

Unsurprisingly, the American and other governments have tried to crack down on the ability to communicate, privately, by the internet. The FBI has even developed a wiretapping like system for the Internet, Carnivore, to spy on e-mail and web browsing. Nations like China establish firewalls to block websites that could be damaging to social controls. It is a tug-of-war struggle for communication that, like the fictional conflict between Tristero and the agents of Thurn und Taxis in Lot 49 ultimately determines who has control over the people’s ability to communicate. In this case, we can only hope for Tristero, and the decentralized Internet to win out.

1. It’s not a surprise that a secure peer-to-peer file sharing app was named WASTE in reference to Lot 49. ↩
2. Also, admittedly, not-so-harmless perverts such as NAMBLA ↩