Clearing out some old notes from the last job and figured this would be a good one to preserve. It shows how many times tags were used on a collection of posts generated and tagged almost exclusively by the user community for a site I used to work on.

For instance, row 1 shows that tags were used only once in 12,602 cases; row 2 shows that tags were used 2-5 times in 2,735 cases, etc. So out of a total of 16,169 tags, we can see that tags were used only once about 78 percent of the time, and tags were used no more than five times about 95 percent of the time.

I wasn’t prepared to worry too much about the whole thing until the site (run by Drupal) started to crawl and the slow query log showed us that taxonomy-related queries were killing us. I even took to Ask Metafilter to see what everyone else had to say, and got an answer from the guy who coined the term “folksonomy.”

The thing that was maybe a shame was that a lot of those 12,602 tags were variations on each other:

• social networking

• social_networking

• socialnetworking

• SocialNetworking

• Social Networking

• Social_Networking

• Social_networking

• Social networking

• Socialnetworking

In the absence of any discipline at all and no overarching style guide for tagging, no real patterns emerged to make the tags useful. Search engine indexation sucked because we had 12,000+ tag index pages with only a single post, those thousands of tag pages netted well under 0.5 percent of site traffic and crawl times were ridiculous. You really should not have almost as many tag indexes as you have actual posts.

It wasn’t deemed a wise use of time to try to automate normalization. In the end, I wrote a VBO that allowed us to delete the 12,602 tags that were used only once (provided they weren’t newer than a month old, so we didn’t arbitrarily blow up a trend before it blossomed). We also locked the users at large out of being able to tag at all, leaving it to the curators on staff. Yes, it helped performance.

Dark side of tag normalization: At the job I held before this one, they just gave an editor a spreadsheet with the thousands of non-normalized tags and invited her to correct them by hand. I do believe I would have gone mad.

I think I’m probably going to have to own my last post because, you know, we’re not big on memory holes around here. And in my own defense, I meant every word when I wrote it because at the time I was comparing that Nexus 7 to some phantom device I hadn’t really held or tried out or, alternately, my iPad 3. It didn’t seem fair to compare it to the iPad 3, both because the iPad 3 is uncomfortably heavy for my main use cases (reading on the Max, reading in bed) and because the iPad 3s bigness and heaviness comes from the things that make it much, much better than a Nexus 7 for the cases in which I’d used it up to becoming a commuter (as a curiously smooth and low-functioning laptop).

I’d planned to sell the iPad 3 once I was convinced I’d keep the Nexus 7 around. So last week I found myself sitting in a Starbucks up in the Pearl District while a pair of nice but suspicious ladies made me connect to assorted networks and load web pages and generally demonstrate that I was not trying to sell them an iPad case stuffed full of nuts, bolts and wood shavings (which once happened to me while stationed in Korea, except not with an iPad—they didn’t exist yet—but a power amplifier for a radio set, apparently because a Korean depot-level tech decided the guts of an FM radio power amplifier would do him more good than they would my retrans team).

I don’t want to seem like I’m complaining about the ladies. They were nice enough and they were much better to deal with than the people who wrote me for two days straight asking if I wanted to trade my iPad for a hulled kayak, a mostly dry and ungnawed box of Life magazines from 1982, or $50. They were far nicer than the person who wrote me at two in the morning with the simple message “oh you fucking dirty scammer.” And they were less alarming than the elderly gentleman who attached a 1600×1200 picture of his smiling, stubbly face and a message that read:

Eventually the ladies were satisfied, so I initiated a wipe of the device that took an awkwardly long amount of time I filled pointing out the nice features of the case I was throwing in. The transaction concluded and me with some time on my hands, I wandered down to Pioneer Courthouse Square, and then into Pioneer Place, and then into the Pioneer Place Apple Store, where what I really wanted to see was the new iMacs (not there yet) and the newest 11″ MacBook Airs (because I’m a curious soul).

My mood, on entering the store, was a little melancholy. How friendly would the greeters be, I wondered, if they knew what I’d just done? And how would I feel, looking at the new iMac and latest MacBook Air, knowing that the Nexus 7 had shaken my faith in Apple just enough to be thinking the old heresy, that life with a machine I crafted myself, like a dwarvish smith, would perhaps break through the gray sameness of life in my 40s and allow me to stand a bit straighter and meet others with the fell gleam in my eye of a full-on mithril plated nerd? These are the thoughts a technical writer who works in the corner of a pod full of competent, opinionated developers. They aren’t really worthy thoughts. But sometimes, after you’ve just gotten done being scolded for leaving trailing whitespace in a trivial docs commit, or you’ve forgotten that Ubuntu—the training wheels distribution—lets you assign arbitrary ports to sshd with no hassles while CentOS—the training wheels distribution for grownups—has iptables up and running at install, you imagine assorted geek-flavored Charles Atlas outcomes that will allow you to start socking the bullies.

I worked through those feelings in the time it took to mutter “I’m good, just looking” at the greeters, then I brushed past the iPad mini display, not even intending to stop and look because what was the point? I’d forsaken that path. But in that moment, one of the people holding an iPad mini put it down and the person who seemed to be looking at everything but the mini to keep from seeming like they really, really wanted to hold the mini while it was being held by someone else was looking away. So I picked it up.

My main thought was “is the display as bad as everybody claims?” so I opened up Flipboard, which doesn’t have many meaningful or constructive design opinions in its pretty little head but does have nice typography. Before I could consider the display, I noticed how quickly Flipboard opened at all. Just *pop* and there it was. That was nice. I remembered when I finally found a working Nexus 7 at a Fred Meyer and how I actually rebooted it because it was running so slow and I’d just subconsciously made the excuse that it had probably been handled all day and who knew what state it was in. Maybe Flipboard had recently been open already, so that’s not a scientific observation, but it’s not like I was even making some list … I was just curious about the display and noticed. Even when an app is up and the cache is warm, the Nexus 7 doesn’t seem quite as responsive. You get used to it, then you notice when something else isn’t like it.

So I flipped around in Flipboard and thought “this display is not that bad, and it’s very bright.”

I closed Flipboard and opened Safari (also *pop* and then *swoosh* when I loaded Google news), and then I just bounced around, opening things and switching between apps and noticing that the mini was very nimble and smooth and its extra size compared to the Nexus 7 (it’s .6″ wider) didn’t render it impossible to hold (which is something reviewers who have felt hard pressed to notice something have fixated on, saying that only people with giant hands could hope to hold a mini and then noting how tragic that is because their giant hands will then crush the wafer-thin device and leave them weeping and smashing SWAT teams as they blunder down the street wishing they’d bought a Nexus).

At that point, the person who’d been pretending to not stare at the person who had held the mini before me had dropped all pretense of not staring. He wanted to get at that fucking mini. So I put it down and looked at him and sort of raised my eyebrows with a Spockian “hmmm” and walked back out of the store.

By the time I deposited my iPad money and got back to the office, my thoughts had largely taken shape: I was pretty sure I liked the mini better than I did my Nexus 7. It felt faster, all the iPad apps I knew would be on it, and it was lighter and thinner. The display wasn’t as nice, but it wasn’t horrible, either. At the same time, there was probably no getting a mini any time soon. The Apple store website said they were two weeks out. A few weeks earlier, when I’d been researching small tablets, I’d asked an Apple Store lady how they were selling she told me there were lines outside the store each morning. Then she shared a little trick about scoring a mini I’d filed away more as a curiosity of Apple’s ingenious ability to sell a thing it has in stock yet also render than thing unattainable: Going to the Apple Store website at 10 p.m. (no earlier, certainly not much later) would reveal whether minis might not be in stock for pickup the next day. All I had to do was put one in my shopping cart then step all the way through to just before checkout. I asked her why people would queue for something they could just order online the night before and pick up at their leisure. She shrugged and smiled in a knowing way that kept things on this side of respectful, but only barely. Looking back, I have labeled her The Naughty Apple Store Lady.

That trick was on my mind a little on the way back to the office, but I was mostly telling myself that by the time I could just go buy a mini or just put a mini in my shopping cart at the Apple Store site, I’d be over the whole thing and happily entrenched in the Nexus. Heck, I told myself, maybe I’d even build that Linux box and forget all about it!

But that night, in bed with the Nexus, after the last email was read, the last Pocket item checked off, I thought about the trick and wondered if it was true. So I opened up Chrome and browsed to the Apple Store and put a mini in the cart. Then I visited my cart. In the split second before the page loaded, did I see the twinkle in the eye of the Naughty Apple Store Lady? I think I must have, but I couldn’t swear to it now, and either way I was definitely remembering her barely respectful smile as the Apple Store cart page told me I could have a mini held for me for pickup, and that was that. I was down there at lunch the next day.

What can I tell you about the thing? It’s smoother than the Nexus 7 for the things I use it for (page scrolling, especially, is comparatively amazing, but the apps in general are just better put together) and the battery life is great. It’s a much more familiar experience, and after over two years of using an iPad, that counts for something. It handles just fine one-handed on the Max and it’s far more comfortable for the ways I use it than the iPad 3 was. It cost more than the Nexus 7, but I think it was worth it.

Now to endure a few more days of

and offers of slightly rusty but functional bicycles in trade for my Nexus 7.

I suppose the change in job surroundings probably had something to do with it, but once my Kindle 2 started circling the drain and I realized my iPad 3 was no good for commuting, I decided an iPad mini wasn’t automatically the very best choice for consolidating my tablet and e-reader, mostly because I’m not spoiled by the Retina display, exactly, but because the mini’s lack of one bothers me in a device I want to use mostly for reading.

It took a few days to find one on a showroom floor that was actually running, but after poking around at Best Buy, WalMart and a pair of office supply stores—all of which had units for sale but not for trying—I found a Nexus 7 at a Fred Meyer I could play with for a few minutes.

I don’t have a lot of time with Android. I was once sent an Android phone so I could review an instant messaging app and was left with a distinctly poor impression, mostly owing to the device itself, which was slow. I’ve played around with other peoples’ Android devices here and there, but never for more than a few minutes. So after ten minutes with a Nexus 7 at the Fred Meyer, I decided things were better enough to give one a shot.

So:

If you asked me to describe only the good things that come to mind when I think about my Nexus, I think I’d start with its physical characteristics (I’m treating it more like a Kindle replacement, so how good it feels in the hand and how crisp its display is matter a lot) and I’d give a cautiously respectful nod to how flexible Android itself is.

Some pros:

• Very nice size. Easy to read one-handed on my daily Max commute. Grippy back that feels a bit more secure than the metal back of an iPad probably does.

• A lot of apps register themselves as share/data handlers in ways I appreciate (e.g. sending a URL to Pocket or org-mode for Android). I think iOS must have this backwards, because I was astounded the first time I shared a link from an app and found so many possible recipient apps for the data. I’m guessing a few things in iOS are native handlers, and it’s on developers to name other handlers from within their apps. On Android, it seems more as if anything can declare itself a handler. It annoys me that Apple knows all about the value of system-wide services and isn’t doing it better in iOS.

• Customizable in smart ways: You can designate hotspots where the device shouldn’t attempt to download updates or automatically do background data pulls as a way to conserve bandwidth for cases where you’re using your phone’s personal hotspot capabilities. I think Apple “solved” this by forcing users to explicitly request updates, and by imposing some pretty strict limitations on how long an app can run in the background.

• Nice display. Not “Retina” quality, but close enough that I can’t tell a huge difference.

• Clever gesture typing (you drag your finger over the keys and it figures out your intent rather than requiring you to peck each key).

• The Google Play app store lets you try an app out for a few minutes and delete it for a refund if it doesn’t work out. I’ve done this four or five times in the last several days. There’s a “con” lurking under there, though.

And, finally, most of the Web services I use have an official Android app, including:

• HipChat

• Trello

• Evernote

• Pocket

• Amazon Kindle

• Netflix

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Google+

After five days with it, I liked it a lot. As an e-book reader, I’d say “mission accomplished,” at least as far as using it with the Amazon Kindle app goes. But there are a few cons, too:

• The notification interface feels a little busy and I haven’t yet figured out how to get in the sweet spot of looking over recent notifications without getting notified. So there are times where I feel a little pestered, or just bemused because an app has decided to make some icon up in the top left corner blink at me for reasons I’m not clear on. One thing I like about iOS, now that I know to do this, is being able to tell apps they can’t notify me about anything at install. If I use them enough that I think it’d be nice to hear from them, I go back and enable them in Message Center later.

• Many of the apps I’ve tried that aren’t official apps from large Web services feel sloppy. The icons look cheesy or aren’t very descriptive, color schemes have a nasty Windows ’95-era flatness, and ad-driven trial editions place the ads over bits of the UI in a way that suggests slipshod design. From app to app, things aren’t very consistent, either. Lots of different color schemes, icon arrangements and configuration conventions. I’ve found myself using that refund feature a lot.

• I feel like I have to “reach” to the top of the screen to do a lot more stuff in Android apps, but that could be because some of the apps I’ve used haven’t been built with a tablet form factor in mind and elements that would be thumb-able on a 3.5″ or 4″ screen simply aren’t on a 7″ screen. I read some Nexus enthusiasts on reddit arguing that apps “just working” in Android regardless of the display size is a great feature. I think it’s not so much. More on that below.

• Some of that flexibility/customizability I mentioned as a pro contributes to a sense that there’s an awful lot that probably needs to be managed. I don’t know if I’d have more or less of a sense of that with an iPad, because I’ve been using iOS for years now. I’m sure there are ten or twelve things I do with any new iOS device to get it feeling more comfortable that I don’t even think about anymore. I also know there are a number of things in iOS where Apple simply requires your deference since there’s no changing them short of jailbreaking.

The biggest con for me—not you, me—is probably the missing iOS/iCloud/OS X ecosystem. I’m not horribly locked in to iTunes or anything like that. I do, however, enjoy the way Apple has integrated the messaging app on my iPhone with iCloud, and that in turn with Messages in Mountain Lion. I like the smooth integration between the notepad app on Mountain Lion and iOS. I like Siri and its integration with a bunch of things, too. Google provides an ecosystem that does a lot of similar things, but Google also mostly lives in a browser, and I’m not completely sold on life through a browser viewport.

On Yet Another Hand

A lot of those notes were written a few days ago. Since then, the newness of the thing has worn off a little, I’m through that new device phase where I’m willing to accept that this or that peeve is me just not getting something, and some things just annoy.

While my main purpose for buying a 7″ tablet is to have something I can manage one-handed on my commute, I’d like to do other stuff besides read books. I’ve found a few Twitter clients, a reddit reader and an RSS reader, for instance, and there wasn’t much way to avoid comparing them to Tweetbot, Alien Blue and Mr. Reader. They don’t compare very favorably at all. They feel cramped despite having 7″ to walk around in, their type can be pretty tiny (in a way you wouldn’t mind on a phone but that feels exhausting when the amount of text in such a small font goes on for so long), and it’s pretty hard to hit the right link or button. Android does some nice things to help solve that problem (Chrome for Android does, anyhow) by zooming in on proximal links so you can hit a big, fat target instead of mashing two links at once, but in other apps it’s just a bunch of tiny buttons and links that are hard to hit just so and eventually make you feel mistrustful and burdened because it’s so easy to hit the wrong one.

One other annoyance—I’m not going to catalog every one I’ve experienced—comes from the automatic brightness setting, which is far too aggressive. I can be sitting and reading in a room where the light isn’t changing and the display brightness dips up and down every minute or so. Since the Nexus 7′s battery life isn’t stellar, automatic brightness is a common sense battery saving measure, but it’s a nuisance right now, which means screen brightness becomes A Thing You Have to Manage if you aren’t near an outlet most of the day and don’t want to worry about your battery. Either that, or just put it in airplane mode a lot.

If I were interested in having a 10″ tablet to use as a notebook replacement, I’d probably prefer an Android tablet because it would walk closer to the laptop/productivity side of the tablet/laptop divide, and I’d appreciate that. With a 7″ tablet I want to use primarily to read books or saved articles on the Max or on a break at work, the things that make iOS more limited aren’t such big liabilities, and the relatively staid and low-maintenance approach Apple pushes on iOS seems like more of a plus.

More Hands!

But I’m keeping the thing. I thought for a day or two that I might get rid of it and get an iPad mini instead, but it’s good enough for its central purpose right now, which is reading books and saved articles on the train, and I get the impression that the software catalog is improving. With the new cellular data Nexus 7s and the growing sense that 7″ is a good screen size for tablets, I think the device will improve over time as it becomes a desirable target for developers and the software grows up around it. As I noted earlier, most of the web services I use have Android apps, and those apps tend to be the most polished that I’ve seen. It’d be nice to have a deeper catalog of independent apps, but I think I believe that mainly because a 10″ iPad is smooth and powerful enough to do an awful lot more than I expect of an ebook reader with benefits. In other words, I don’t really need a deeper catalog of apps for this thing, and I need a few more weeks to let that sink in.

I also think that at some point it will either die, or I’ll decide to hand it off to Ben, and by then Apple will have improved the iPad mini’s display enough to justify a bit more of that $120 premium it’s charging now. Once that Retina mini comes along, it’ll be more tempting. Once that Retina mini comes along and is on the market for six months and starts popping up at a nice discount for refurbs, it’ll be even more tempting. By that time, though, there’s a good chance I’ll be feeling better about Android in general and won’t care. We’ll see. Meanwhile, I’ve got a decent Kindle replacement for my commute.

One Quick Update: Anandtech is of the opinion that we should not hold our breath for a Retina mini. It makes sense. I think I’m still going to keep the Nexus 7 for now and see what the next-gen mini looks like. I don’t think Apple meant to make a mini at first, so I’d like to see how it does iterating the design once it has a generation of feedback.

If This Then That (ifttt) can be used to create rules that append arbitrary text to a file in a Dropbox folder based on triggers from things like social networking or bookmarking accounts.  A few years back, when I sketched out Panopticon, I was thinking about stuff in terms of getting recent bookmarks, flagged mails and other stuff into Things where they’d become reviewable items. 

I don’t use Things anymore, find myself unable to muster a ton of enthusiasm for its closest competitor, and am not generally interested in anything that’s not going to be stored in a  simple plaintext format. That mostly leaves me with an informal format of my own devising, one of the simpler human-oriented formats (e.g. Markdown or TaskPaper), a human/machine format (e.g. YAML), or something else. 

Right now I’m really enjoying org-mode for outlining and to-dos, but I’ve also got a soft spot for TaskPaper. Either can work pretty nicely with ifttt to create a lashup Panopticon for a lot of different services. I’ve got ifttt recipes that log a few social actions, starred Google Reader items and other bits and pieces going into a plaintext file in my Dropbox account. 

To review, the point of this logging is pretty simple:

If you’re one of those people who needs to stop at the end of the day and turn out your pockets, making sure you put your keys in the key place, and your change in a little bowl, and loose receipts wherever you put those, that’s what panopticon is doing for me: Helping me put everything I’ve accumulated from the ‘net over the past day in a little glass bowl. That way it won’t get run through the wash or carelessly emptied into the trash.

It’s a big tickler file for the next morning, so I can say “Oh, right … meant to follow up on that” or “meh” or “yeah, I was there,”  then either do something about it or just mark it as “done” so I don’t have a feeling that things are quietly piling up behind my back. They’re still piling up, but the difference is that I’ve decided it’s o.k. for them to do that as long as I observe them doing that.

The one thing I wish ifttt would do (and in a brief Twitter exchange they said it’d go on the list) is write to a plain text file with an arbitrary extension. Right now, it assumes that your filename should end with “.txt,” which makes it a little harder to automatically open the log in org-mode in Emacs. On the other hand, that’s what Emacs’ `auto-mode-alist` variable is for:

(add-to-list ‘auto-mode-alist ‘(“\\Dropbox/org/.*\.txt\\’” . org-mode))

That just tells Emacs to treat any .txt file opened up in my Dropbox “org” folder in org-mode, which includes the file I’ve got ifttt writing to for my log.

I’ve been fiddling around with Mountain Lion since a day or two after it landed. Every new release of anything provokes some anxiety among people who were used to the previous version, and Mountain Lion has not been exempt from that.

What’s driving the anxiety for a lot of people this time around is how Apple’s vision for user experience on a Mac is converging with its vision for UX on an iPad or iPhone,  the ways in which Apple is deciding things in favor of “the average user,” and whether or not the next iteration of OS X will push things even further along a path that eventually involves people having to jailbreak their MacBooks to get any real work done.

I don’t think we’re quite there yet, and I’ve been pretty pleased with how well Mountain Lion has been running on both my 2009 iMac and 2010 MacBook Air. That doesn’t mean I’m comfortable with everything I’ve seen, and it means it’s time to start making sure I know how to get off a platform that may make changes I can’t accept when it comes time to decide whether to re-up. 

I had a chat with my boss about this last week. As I was talking about the things iCloud makes pretty convenient: Automatically synced Safari reading list and tabs, synced notes, synced documents between iPad and Mac, he argued that there has to come a point where you don’t really want to cede too much to Apple to make “just work,” because you could eventually lose control of the things you care about most based on Apple’s whims. I think a lot of people have hit that in the past: You get to love some feature, a new release comes out, everyone insists there are no barriers to upgrading right now, and then you discover that nobody telling you to come on in because the water was fine cared about that one feature you loved that is now gone, maybe taking the data you kept in it with it.

That’s why I haven’t really allowed iCloud to get at anything I can’t easily export into a more open format. To Apple’s credit, there are a number of things that are easily converted into something useful by other software. Calendars, addresses and bookmarks can all be exported from a user-accessible menu. The new Notes app doesn’t have an export option, but it’s got a scripting dictionary. The new Reminders app is similarly provisioned. iWork allows users to quickly export any of its files to their Microsoft Office analog format. 

At the same time, Apple’s new sandboxing rules, and the way it is restricting what can be sold through its Mac App Store (MAS) suggests that things could get dicey for apps more complex than a notepad or reminder list. Developers who depend on a freer run of the computer than Apple is willing to grant can always just sell outside the MAS, but they’ll be competing against products that might be willing to trade away some functionality to stay in the MAS. What’s good enough for the bulk of MAS users may not be good enough for me, and that gap will widen as we bring in apps that address more sophisticated functionality. That will have to place some pressure on developers. We don’t know what that’s going to mean, but that’s enough uncertainty for me to be thinking about what might have to be next. Which gets us to the point of this post: 

I’ve started working on an outline that sketches out the issues I see involved in moving from a closed system (like a Mac, but it could easily be Windows) to a more open one (like Linux). This isn’t a new set of considerations for me: Keeping my data portable, or in apps where it can be easily exported, is something that has always been important to me, but I want to start thinking about more practically about how to make the move to a more open system in a way that doesn’t hamper my ability to keep getting work done all through the process, and that doesn’t force me to renounce the wonderful utility I get out of my current Mac software. So, the outline defines some terms and provides a place to think about the issues and also serves as a very practical inventory for the software I’m using, what its analogs are in the world of free or open source software, and whether those analogs are good enough yet.

It’s also a work in progress. I started work on it in OmniOutliner (which is excellent), but in an early effort to test OmniOutliner’s own export to more open formats I learned that its export/import capabilities are a little limited (maybe due to gaps in the OPML spec, maybe due to an oversight). I also didn’t want to pay $20 for an iOS version when document syncing still isn’t there and I’m not sure what my upgrade costs would be to get that syncing when OmniOutliner 4 comes out. So I decided to move the outline to Emacs’ org-mode, which uses flat text files and, as I’ve already been half-sorry to discover, has an iOS app.

I could have copied and pasted the plain text export of OmniOutliner into an Emacs buffer and reindented it, but it was easier to write a few lines of Ruby:

It doesn’t, obviously, do anything besides tack some asterisks on to the front of each topic row and drop in a row note if it exists, but it saved me some fiddling around.

Ben wanted to rewatch Poltergeist last night, which entailed a quick trip into the garage, where all the DVDs live now. We don’t have a lot. There’s just one Ikea Billy’s worth, plus a small amount of overflow on another shelf. The collection consists almost entirely of plain old DVDs, but includes exactly five Blu-ray discs (one Blade Runner plus four Cohen brothers movies from a box set). 

It’s not the most consistently thought out collection in the world. A  chunk of it could count as curated, were the collection not hidden from everyone in the garage, and that chunk represents things loosely classed under “will want to see again and again and again until dead,”  ”believed to be important and so need to have on hand,” and “sentimental favorites.”

With the advent of streaming video rentals, the calculus for inclusion has changed some, so the classification “will want to watch again” has become more stringent. An iTunes or Amazon rental is $3 – $5, so for the average DVD under consideration for inclusion, “will want to watch again” has become “will want to watch again at least four or five times.” Probably more, for reasons I’ll get into below. Having no idea how long I’m going to remain alive, but believing — based mostly on the sort of anxious grandparent math people start doing some time in their 30s — that I’m getting close to “over the hill,” there aren’t a ton of movies that can tumble into that designation with much grace or conviction.

The other chunk of the collection — the things that are not Star Wars, The Godfather, or a number of things from 1999 (the year I noticed that Hollywood was suddenly not in the early ’90s any longer) — is less well considered and reflects a period after my four-year-long post-army slump when plunking down $20 for a movie I’d sort of enjoyed in the theaters and figured I might some day enjoy discovering again during a fantasized period of silver-haired maturity seemed like a fine value. An investment, even.

One thing I’m glad of, I guess, is that the collection doesn’t seem to include much of anything I thought I should have, which is maybe surprising when you consider this:

Over the past several years I’ve been periodically taken by how much stuff I’ve got. Lots and lots of it.

I think back to the winter of 1994, when I left for Ft. Knox with a small gym bag that had everything I felt I needed and a number of crates scattered around two houses that had everything I figured I’d get back to some day. I think back to some time in 1995 when I told people we might think of as executors for my last life that I was fine having a lot of that stuff consigned to a burn pile. That was not a bad place to be, where stuff is concerned. In fact, I’d say be that it would be better to be without most of it.

But from 1997 on, I began the process of re-accumulating. Here we are 15 years later and I’m back up to lots of stuff. Well … almost back up to it, because I’ve been shedding stuff again. Nothing like asking people to burn it for me while I hide out in Korea, away from the smoke and flames of burning consequences and encumbrances, but the Woodstock Goodwill has been writing out a lot of receipts lately.

So, for a few years I’ve been thinking about the whys of having all that stuff. One uncomfortable thing I see out of the corner of my eye now and then, when I relax and don’t look for it, is the idea that a lot of things — books, movies, discs — are assertions. “I’m the sort of person who likes this thing.”

That creates complications, because I don’t want to be a person about to whom that motivation can be ascribed.  It’s just a terrible reason to make life harder with the weight of stuff that must be maintained, placed, kept track of and kept out of the way when unneeded. 

Anyhow, that’s not what this is really about. It’s mostly about the fact that  there’s a big, problematic collection of plastic in the garage that takes up space, and Ben wanted to find part of it to watch it. Great. For the record, Poltergeist is a good thing for the collection. I think it’s there honestly. Not for the stilted “you only moved the tombstones! You didn’t move the bodies! You only moved the tombstones!” bit that briefly reminds us that we live in a world where people needed to hear that to better understand a swimming pool full of coffins, but for the better moments before everything goes completely wrong. 

So we went into the garage and started looking. Then we fed the disc to the Blu-Ray player, which spent an inordinate amount of time wheezing and vibrating before actually playing the movie, reminding me that it was only the movie’s relative age and the studio’s treatment of the content as a passing opportunity for a few bucks —not as part of some marketing gestalt—that kept us from being held hostage by no-skip commercials or  a ridiculous and unnavigable menu structure.

There was a moment, too, after the initial moment of “this technology sort of sucks because it exists to do more than just show a movie” grunting from the player that I felt myself become nervous because a number of discs Ben has enjoyed have been handled with less than archival delicacy and I wondered if this would be one of them. It had taken us a while to get around to deciding on Poltergeist, and I didn’t want to have to pick something else. 

So when Ben got up to go the bathroom, I went into the garage and picked out five movies Al and I have agreed we must watch again some time soon and started feeding them into Handbrake, which in turn handed them off to MetaZ, where I could tag them and drag them into the archive drive, where iTunes will serve them up to our Apple TV when we’re ready to watch. It seems to take about 3/4 of the running time of the movie to make a version that will look pretty good when streamed to the AppleTV (I’m still trying to fiddle with the settings needed to get the darker scenes and blacks a little better) and comes in at under 2GB. 

In some ways, this is a project that will complicate other things while slowly relieving me of the weight of physical objects. Instead of imaging a be-sweatered and silver-haired me walking into the library to retrieve a disc, I have to imagine a be-sweatered, silver-haired me noticing that the backup drive is making a funny noise, or realizing that the switch behind the t.v. has blown a port. There are other possible horrors, too: What if a space goat eats all the world’s knowledge of playback of an mp4?

I used to stream OPB live on my morning walks, but after spending a little time looking for interesting things to listen to, I turned to the NPR News iPhone app. It’s pretty nice:

It includes a list of the main NPR news shows — All Things Considered, Morning Edition — along with a selection of others you might think of right away — Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, Weekend Edition — and a few you might not recognize. The app will tell you if the program is being aired somewhere and allow you to stream it from an NPR affiliate of your choice, add it to your in-app playlist, or get it as a podcast from the iTunes Music Store. 

Those options are all great, but my favorite part is the way many of the programs — particularly the two major news shows — are broken into their individual stories, each of which can be added to an in-app playlist. So before a morning walk I can open the app, go to the Morning Edition section, pick the stories I’m interested in (with an eye to filling up the 30 minutes I’ll be walking as closely as possible) then start playing my queue. 

The “pick a segment” capability works with a few other programs. For instance, I can get just the book, music and movie reviews from Fresh Air without dealing with any interviews I’m not interested in.

The one thing I noticed about my sudden ability to control the items I was listening to was that I had to think twice about a few things. Wednesday morning, for instance? I really just didn’t want to hear anything at all about the Wisconsin recall vote and I caught myself skipping that item. I finally decided that I needed to go back and make myself listen, because all I really knew about the story was what I’d picked up from Google News headlines just before going to bed the night before. So I made myself listen. I didn’t like what I heard: The cheers from the winning side were aggravating, and the moans from the losing side were pretty hard to hear. But I made myself listen, because not listening would have felt like I was  allowing it all to matter a little less. 

I like Adium for IM on Macs, and we use Skype for just about everything at work. I sort of don’t like having two IM programs running, so I’m pretty happy to know about the Skype API plugin for Pidgin/libpurple/Adium.

You don’t avoid having to have Skype on your machine: For the Adium plugin to work, Skype still has to be running. But once the plugin and Skype are talking, you can do all your Skype IM stuff through Adium. You can even link statuses, so if you set yourself away on Adium, the Skype app picks that up, too. It also turns custom Adium status messages into Skype “mood messages.”

Another sort of cool thing I came across a while back and have started using a little more is Prowl, an iOS app for use with the Growl notification system. You pay your $1.99, set up an account, then install a Growl plugin on your Mac. Prowl then becomes a display style you can use as you would any other Growl theme, except it sends push notifications to your iPhone. It goes well with Adium, which includes the ability to tack Growl notifications to any of its numerous events. I like getting a specific push notification to my phone for the initial message from a new chat or a Skype call, in case I’m in another part of the house when they come in.