On Hamlet’s Blackberry
Sorry it’s been so long since I last posted. I blame the fact that I’m working now. How silly. Luckily, I have a backlog of things I want to write about, of which this is the first installment.
The May 23rd edition of the NPR show On The Media (yes, they capitalize the ‘the’) was about the future of paper. (I actually heard it on the 25th of May on my local station.) It covered a variety of angles to the story, such as e-paper and on-demand publishing, but what I found most interesting was an interview with a fellow (and Shorenstein Fellow) by the name of William Powers. In his paper entitled Hamlet’s Blackberry, he argues (among other things) that what makes paper so enduring as a medium despite decades-long predictions of its impending demise is the way we humans interact with it, and the information it transmits to us.
For example, when reading a long article, paper, essay, or book on a computer, information about how far through the work you must be obtained using the eyes and brain, by looking at a scroll bar or other indicator that tells you that you are on page 21 of 50. A reader of a book, in contrast, knows their progress by simply feeling how think each half of the book is. How often have you said to yourself, “Oh, I’m halfway through!” about an online article? There is a distinct cognitive difference, which makes for a different reading experience.
Another trait of paper is that it offers no distractions. I will admit that even as I write this post, I have not read in its entirety the essay on which I am commenting. This is because computers make it psychologically easier to skim. We want to find the singular piece of information we are looking for, then move on. Sustained reading on a computer screen is not something we have adapted to (Or is it that computers have not adapted to the conditions we find conducive to sustained reading?). I have read much of the essay, but I keep finding myself coming back to continue the post, look something up on Wikipedia, check the weather, etc. Paper, of course, would leave me with no option but to read what is at hand, which is a gift to those of us with disappointingly short attention spans.
Personally, I don’t know where paper is headed. Even as I try to elimitate as much paper as possible from my life (I am among the 15% of people meantioned in Powers’s essay who have opted not to receive paper bank statements), I find that I can get through a newspaper article much more easily if it is printed on paper. I also find that ideas flow more easily when I hand-write a personal letter, although perhaps the slower pace at which words can be written on paper allows for more advance thought, which leads to the perception of more contiuous writitng. Ultimately, I don’t know.
The Cost of Text Messaging
A couple of weeks ago there was an post in a New York Times blog about the cost of text messaging that I would like to briefly recap here. A British space scientist, Nigel Bannister, ran some quick numbers and concluded that
“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is [about 10 cents]. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 10 cents each, that’s [$734] per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs [of $166 per megabyte].”
So basically, consumers have allowed mobile phone companies to charge literally astronomical rates to send a text message: we pay at least 4.4 times as much to send a text message than NASA does to download data from the Hubble Space Telescope (in cost per unit data, anyway). I can’t believe we put up with that. Disgusting, I think.
The Uselessness of Public Transit, thanks to Google
I don’t know how long Google Maps has been able to give directions using public transportation, because I’m sure Detroit has been late to that party. Now that there are some places in my area that Google tells me I can get to by bus (the only form of public transportation we’ve got, not that I’ve ever used it), it’s been really interesting to compare how long they estimate it would take to drive a route versus riding the bus.
With the perfect storm of peak oil, climate change, and enriching some unsavory characters (i.e. funding both sides of a war), I would love to be able to take the bus. Here’s why I don’t:
- From my house to the local college
- Driving: 10 minutes
- Bus: 55 minutes, including a 35-minute walk
- From my house to my yoga studio
- Driving: 6 minutes
- Bus: 42 minutes, only 2 of which are on the bus
- From my house to my dad’s workplace
- Driving: 17 minutes
- Bus: 2 hours, 48 minutes
Pretty pathetic.
Newsletters-be-gone
Email is for correspondence; RSS is for news. That’s why I’ve been on a bit of an unsubscribe kick lately. Every time I get an email newsletter, I check to see if there’s also a syndicated version. If there is, I unsubscribe and add the feed to NetNewsWire. What a difference! Now the emails that I get are (usually) actually relevant, and I can read through Science @ NASA and other such cool-people stuff at my leisure.
So remember, kids: email is for correspondence, syndication is for news.
… and I have a problem
I admit it: I am an information addict. It really is a problem, a problem which is made worse by the fact that I have not been doing a whole lot these past few months. The problem manifests itself in my inability to pull myself away from the computer even when I am not doing anything useful. I am always checking and rechecking to see if anyone has posted anything new to various forums or Facebook, seeing if I have any new email, or checking the news and weather.
I certainly can’t say that this addiction problem has interfered with my success in other endeavors. After all, I did manage to do quite well in college and get into a master’s program in addition to managing to write a blog post now and then (and even create a whole blog site) without getting too sidetracked by NetNewsWire. (Ironically, I started using NetNewsWire in the hopes that having everything aggregated in one place would prevent me from browsing around so much. I don’t think it’s done that.) And it isn’t like there aren’t other things I’d love to read, like, for example, books. But there’s something so addictive about the computer. It really is horrible.
In yoga there has been talk of quitting the newspaper, and while I can appreciate why someone would want to do that, it seems like something of a contradiction: how can one be a caring citizen if they are not well informed? I have at least started to turn off the radio (generally tuned to NPR) while I drive.
Here’s the new rule: forums no more than once a day for twenty minutes unless it’s work-related. (There, it’s out in public, so now I really have to stick to it.)
I think the big thing I need to get into my head is that it doesn’t matter if someone posts something new. My life is not going to change. Checking Apple’s website once a day is plenty. Ok, I need to go see if any Adium Trac tickets are updated….
Managing the Snippets
After over a year of on-again, off-again looking, demoing, playing, and stalling, I think I have finally settled on a note/snippet manager: Yojimbo, from Bare Bones Software.
When I first started thinking about a snippet manager, what came to my head was something that looked basically like Mail, except that instead of messages it would contain notes. They could all be tag-able, and you could create smart folders out of those tags. When I started looking around, the product that satisfied this “dream app” exactly was Notae, from Code Poetry. So why Yojimbo?
Yojimbo has several features that I really like, even though the program as a whole is not as elegant as Notae. I really like the quick-entry box that can be called up with a system-wide shortcut key, I really like that it has a separate note type for passwords, and I really like that it supports syncing (not that I have any devices that need syncing to—yet).
Notae’s inability to sync across devices bothered me, but what worried me more was that the Code Poetry blog identified a major performance problem in Leopard back at the beginning of January that has yet to be addressed nearly three months later. I can’t say I blame the developers for having day jobs, and I absolutely love the independent developer community out there for the Mac, but there is a little bit of comfort knowing that the Bare Bones folks are working on their products full time.
Another distinction that would explain why Yojimbo has note types for things like passwords, serial numbers, and bookmarks is that it is designed as a snippet manager, whereas I guess Notae is designed as a note manager. Since I’m looking more to manage my snippets than my notes, Yojimbo may be the better choice.
I’ll see how the 30-day demo of Yojimbo goes, but so far I like it.
No Google Calendar in Google Groups?
This seems so obvious. Why should a group not have the option to have an associated calendar? And documents, too. Everything else is great: discussion, files, pages. All very cool. But a group calendar and group documents would be really excellent.
I hope this is a stop-gap solution.
SI Visiting Days!
It’s been over a week since my last post. Whoops. But if I couldn’t make it to yoga for a week, do you really expect me to blog? But, I did have a really good weekend.
This past weekend was Visiting Days for perspective admitted students to U of M’s School of Information, and it was really cool. I’ll admit, they are marketing masters, but even without all that, I am pretty pumped for the program. Here are a few highlights:
- I changed my intended concentration. I had been thinking Incentive-Centered Design, but after hearing current students talk about what they’re studying, I think I’ll go for Human-Computer Interaction. Of course, almost all of the concentrations seem interesting to one degree or another, and the opportunity to take classes outside SI excites me, too, so I’ll probably go in HCI, but ultimately change to some sort of tailored program. In addition to Social Computing and other concentrations within SI, I’d also like to take some classes in the Business School, and get a taste of other related fields like Cognitive Psychology and Sociology. Basically, I think two years will be too little time to really experience everything I’d like to.
- I met other prospective students, which was great not only because these are the people with whom I’ll be spending the next two years, but also because I found that they are a group of people with whom I can relate. They come from very diverse backgrounds, some of which were very similar to mine, and some of which were very different. The same goes for the future goals of my soon-to-be classmates: some are very different from mine, but there are some with whom I could see myself working beyond SI. (Yep, definitely jumping to conclusions here.) The discovery that SI is a common route for people like me who are trained as engineers but do not want to work as engineers was also very encouraging. And a lot of SI people are also musicians. Cool.
- I met current SI students. Dinner at Pizza House was really nice. I sat with a couple of current students, one of whom will be opening up a usability consulting company (a route I may go), and the other is going on to get her Ph.D. in Medical Informatics (also cool, but not my thing). The fact that SI prepares its students to do both of these things is really excellent. At expoSItion, where students show off their projects, I was encouraged by the fact that the students who did some of the coolest projects were first-years. It seems like they dive right in, which I like.
- I met faculty. Not only is their work interesting, but they’re very approachable. I lucked out and was seated at a table with one professor who moonlights as a consultant to start-up companies (and getting equity ownership for it!), and the professor who teaches the entrepreneurship class. Very cool.
- I had some really good conversations with recruiters at the Job Information Fair (which is different from a job fair because they’re not actually recruiting). I made some good contacts, and was encouraged by everything that’s going on.
All in all, Visiting Days was a great experience, and now I’m pumped for school to start.
The Donor Next Door
So, they tell me “Mash-ups” are all the craze, which means, of course, that ever imaginable kind of information must be piled on top of a Google Map.
A very cool example of this is The Huffington Post’s Fundrace, which is a Google map of the United States with public political donation information on it. The points are color-coded by party or candidate, and the size of the dot corresponds to the amount given by that individual. That’s right: individual. You can zoom all the way down to individual people or households. It’s kinda creepy, I’m not gonna lie, but it is a good thing that campaign donations are all public information.
On Links That Change Size On Hover
Sometimes site designers style links so that when a user hovers over them they either change size or weight. That has the unfortunate consequence of appearing to jump, or worse, shifting other elements on the page around. Change color, add text-decoration, just don’t change size or weight.
