jazzsequence

robot ethics

jazzs3quence — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 06:59:50 PST

i find it interesting that our country is really only recently thinking about ethical and social issues revolving around artificial intelligence in science and pop culture. battlestar galactica and the upcoming caprica are recent examples of america coming to terms with realistic artificial intelligence scenarios. before that, what, the terminator? japan has been thinking about this stuff for decades — what makes us so slow?

Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House – NYTimes.com

jazzs3quence — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:54:48 PST

Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House – NYTimes.com. Related posts:jazzs3quence: RT House passes historic reform to provide health care for every American. (via @BarackObama)jazzs3quence: To Rep. Rob Bishop: Americans need you to vote in favor of passing health reform. http://bit.ly/1xhcYF #hc09 #UT #84103::9.23.2003::house!!! Related posts:

learning to do less

jazzs3quence — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:58:32 PST

i just got done reading Seth Godin’s manifesto, Do Less. i’ve actually been reading quite a bit of Seth Godin recently, having decided that his blog is pretty cool. Seth Godin is a smart guy. he’s not saying anything revolutionary — in fact, a lot of what he blogs about should be common sense. but it’s not. Seth is really good at calling attention to the things that we need to hear and present them in a way that makes it easy to hear them. in my opinion, that’s what makes him a big deal.

the basic premise of Do Less goes right inline with something erin and i have discovered on our own: when the product we want to make is supposed to be a creative and limited, one-of-a-kind thing — something we like to think of as a work of art — you can’t take on every project you get. this is tough. a lot of web designers out there, including the design firm that we did freelance stuff for over a year ago, just has a “take all comers” approach. they will scale a plan to fit any need and do it quickly and — presumably — well. but if you take everything you’re offered, you can’t produce anything that’s exceptional. because a lot of people don’t want exceptional. there are some people who want budget. there are some people who want functional. there are some people who want fast. and you can do these things, but they do not produce an environment conducive to doing something extraordinary, and, for the most part, these people aren’t looking for extraordinary anyway — they want something that looks like the stuff they look at every day: clean, professional, businesslike.

and we started out this way — taking what we could get, and working for cheap, because we needed to start building up our business and portfolio. but we knew that wasn’t the type of business we wanted to run. as we grew, we were torn with the desire to stay true and fair to our past clients, and the need to raise our rates, focus on our niche and unique talents, and brush off projects that would not benefit us in the long run.

it feels counter-intuitive to decline projects, even when they are under your budget. as a consumer, we’re always looking to make the most out of our buck, and as providers, we feel inclined to respect that wish for value. but quality is worth something. Seth opens Do Less with an anecdote about a real estate investor. This investor does just one new investment a year. The reason?

In any given year, we look at a thousand deals. One hundred of them are pretty good. One is great.

I don’t think we’ll be at the point where we can do just one gig a year and spend the rest of the year making art, and writing, and working on projects that are self-gratifying, and working on being great parents to our kids. it sounds great, i just don’t think it will happen. but we probably did more than 100 projects our first year — for ourselves, and freelancing for another company — and we still brought in less money (with a part-time second job I carried at Whole Foods) than the $40k/year job I left to do design full-time from home. a lot less. and sure, we could have continued working as freelancers, getting paid $20 a page for a slew of subpar projects that really didn’t interest us all that much for someone else who didn’t care about individual designers’ talents as long as they got the job done quickly — we could have learned to do more, faster, using as many shortcuts as possible and not spending too much time on the process, but that went against the whole reason for doing this. it wouldn’t be something we loved, it would be just another job. and i think that doing something you love shows in your product.

it’s interesting that i decided to read Do Less at precisely the same time that we started having conversations about the types of projects we take on and how we want to do business now and moving forward versus how we used to do business. we were already on the do less path, because what Seth says is true — you can’t be everything. you can’t have quality and speed, you can’t have cheap and have time left over to spend on side projects or with the fam. we’re learning this, learning to go against what feels natural. if you’re in the business to sell the most thneeds as quickly as possible, then bigger, faster, better, more is a good mantra. but that’s never been something that’s meshed very well in my brain. when you’re learning to Do Less, you need to think more like Turtle: slow and steady wins the race.

fix the broken music industry, revisited

jazzs3quence — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:51:58 PST

Upstart Blogger restates some ideas I’ve been blogging about for a while. The question is, will anyone listen?

Now is the time to force the music industry to change.

packaging…fail…

jazzs3quence — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:34:20 PST

aargh!

jazzs3quence — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:44:37 PST

the sincere idiocy of some people truly astounds me sometimes.

No related posts.

wake up, music industry!

jazzs3quence — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:28:25 PST

a couple of weeks ago i posted my reactions to some stuff that sam rosenthal was talking about on his projekt newsletter and facebook page. sam graciously took the opportunity to comment on my post, and one of his main points was this:

Just because *you* buy music after nabbing it illegally, you are mistaken to assume that other people do the same thing. According to many recent surveys, the majority of college students illegally download 100% of their music. That means they don’t decide to buy the records when they realize they enjoy the band. They are happy with the MP3.

well, it’s time to burst that bubble. according to this article in a uk digital media journal:

Adults who download music from unofficial channels also spend £30 per year more on physical and digital music than people who don’t, according to a survey by the Demos thinktank of 1,008 people aged 16 to 50.

The study – funded by Virgin Media - says a third of adults go illegal. But the additional money they spend contributes £200 million to the music economy each year.

now i’m sure you’re going to try to get me on the “the survey skirts over the vast cost of piracy to the industry” part, but the main point of the article — and what Virgin was studying — was that digital subscription sites — exactly like what i was proposing a week ago — are viable options as a deterrent to piracy, if the price is right. and honestly, it has been proposed for a while that this could be an option for college campuses where, as sam pointed out, piracy is rampant. it’s my opinion that if colleges were able to offer some kind of subscription service — maybe even bundled in tuition or room and board — students could download all they wanted, and not even realize that they were doing so legitimately. they’d be happy, sam would be happy, the riaa would be happy, and whoever developed the software infrastructure to cover the service would be very happy. this article just confirms what i’ve been saying for a while, so i just wanted to take this opportunity to say: nyah nyah, i told you so. what the music industry needs to realize is that you need geeks. you need us to tell you what is going on outside and how you should adapt to the changing times. because it’s obvious that you are way behind the times.

wifi encryption lifehack

jazzs3quence — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:00:13 PDT

random thought: if i had a wifi router but disabled dhcp, theoretically you could almost disable any kind of encryption or wireless security with the theory that most people wouldn’t be smart enough to know how to hard-code their ip address to connect to your unsecure network to connect to the internet. Related posts:laptoppagedomain name lack-of-serviceargh [...] Related posts:

cancel that

jazzs3quence — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:46:23 PDT

nope, that didn’t work :/ Related posts:adventures in tyria: save the world from the undead lich, check Related posts:

adventures in tyria: save the world from the undead lich, check

network troubleshooting

jazzs3quence — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:17:00 PDT

got a brilliant idea from this post on dslreports that may solve my network lag issues…