At last check, I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Last.fm, Virb², Multiply, LiveJournal and probably a few other small-potatoes social networking sites I forgot about. I use Twitter the most, and almost for its intended purpose: a hybrid of microblogging and interpersonal communication. As for Facebook, which I use less, but spend more time on, I’ve yet to figure out a specific purpose to use it for. What began as a way to keep in touch with old friends quickly spiraled into adding anyone I have even the slightest personal connection to: friends from old, pre-social networking Internet communities³, former and current co-workers, casual acquaintances, people I met at concerts and bars…

At the time of this writing, I have 136 Facebook friends, which doesn’t sound like a huge number, but it’s turned my Facebook feed into a continual stream of information detached of context, throwing the site’s already poor signal-to-noise ratio into exponential decay with each new “friend”. Facebook’s proclivity to throw in more than just status updates, but crap about Farmville, or Mafia Wars, or whatever stupid application I wasn’t going to use, exacerbated the problem—and blocking one from my feed only resulted in another popping up. The amount of overwhelming noise eventually caused me to miss a good friend’s pregnancy announcement—the sort of thing one would presumably join Facebook to know about. Something needed to change.⁴

Then there’s the privacy thing. I decided to quit Facebook on May 31st, a good couple of weeks before the announced “Quit Facebook Day”, though the stated reasons overlap nicely. Consider that when Facebook began, it was a closed network: one needed a .edu e-mail address, profiles were locked down, and nobody could see a thing about you beyond the most basic of information, without your consent. Opening the site to everyone wasn’t such a bad thing, but back in December of ‘09, the powers-that-be at Facebook decided to throw their previous commitment to privacy out the window, and make sensitive data public without asking first. Next came the scummy defaulting of all personal data to public every time Facebook revised its privacy system. The final nail in the coffin was insisting that information on your profile such as interests, schools, employers, favorite forms of media, etc, be public—or not attached to your profile at all.

A recent article for Wired shows the situation as even more dire, as even your “status updates” become public knowledge. “Care to write a status update to your friends? Facebook sets the default for those messages to be published to the entire internet through direct funnels to the net’s top search engines. You can use a dropdown field to restrict your publishing, but it’s seemingly too hard for Facebook to actually remember that’s what you do.” (Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative) Just lovely, isn’t it? Use Facebook to complain about your job, for example, and it becomes a matter of public record that can be used to fire you. While these things can all be locked down, there’s no guarantee that they will stay locked down the next time Facebook decides to revise its policy on privacy.

With the recent talk of forming some sort of alternative to Facebook, such as Diaspora, thought should be given to more than just privacy, but how these things are even used. While I’m not adversed to having a social networking site where I am friends (or whatever term they come up with) with near-strangers, I would love for the ability to filter the information I receive in more than a binary on/off way. Certainly, it’s possible to do this with Facebook, but it’s significantly more complicated than I would prefer. In any case, I still need to wonder just why I am compelled to maintain an online relationship with people who are often casual acquaintances. I’m not about to invite them to a party, especially considering geographical distribution of some of these people.

Moving beyond privacy and information reduction, ditching Facebook is, on the face of it, a start in re-evaluating just how I’m going to use social networking tools. Certainly, the need to use Facebook, or its ilk as a collection of people one knows should have gone out the door with the death of Friendster, or at least MySpace. What I want a proper social network to be is a means of continuing and/or improving relationships with people, not simply collecting them and filtering through context-free nonsense. The key change is that the Internet needs to be a tool to strengthen interpersonal relationships, not to decontextualize and reduce them into short “status updates”. I suppose musing on that is for a different essay.

1. Meanwhile, I’m happily offloading to Google all my phone calls, contacts, e-mails, calendar appointments, and other things. I suppose the difference is that Google is a lot more transparent about how they handle that data.
2. I won’t have a Virb account for much longer. I only logged in to my Virb account for the first time in over a year just to see if I hadn’t already deleted it.
3. e.g. IRC, message boards and forums, etc.
4. I should have come to this realization a few months ago when I experimented with using the Facebook iPhone app’s Push Notification feature. It didn’t take long to realize I really didn’t need to know that someone I didn’t know had commented on a status update that I had commented on an hour ago.

Ebert asks of art:

Does art grow better the more it imitates nature? My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist’s soul, or vision. Countless artists have drawn countless nudes. They are all working from nature. Some of there paintings are masterpieces, most are very bad indeed. How do we tell the difference? We know. It is a matter, yes, of taste.

Do we really know? If we knew, even if it’s a matter of taste, why are we still banging on about this argument in 2010 CE? One would think it would be figured out by now if we “know”. I’ll certainly concede Ebert on the point of imitation. Realism in the visual arts often leaves me cold. It’s the Impressionists, the Symbolists, the Surrealists, and other people who use reality as a jumping-off point for expression that really excite me. We’re getting what Ebert would call “the artist’s soul” as a perception filter in those works. Maybe video games lack that.

I suspect the argument comes down to the relationship between art and the audience as determining whether something is art or not. It would seem that the interactivity of a video game is the key thing that splits video games from being “art” in Ebert’s mind. It’s a major argument in his most recent essay on the matter:

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

This seems to be the crux of the argument: art is experienced, video games are played. To put it differently, art’s purpose is left to the observer; a video game’s purpose is clearly stated. The stated goal of a video game is to score points, beat the boss, save the princess, etc.. By this same argument, one could claim a textbook is not art, as its purpose is delineated, but claim a novel is art, because its purpose is not… except in cases where the novel’s purpose is delineated, such as Atlas Shrugged or similar polemic works.¹ When an artistic work shoves its prescribed interpretation in one’s face, it’s hard to take it on anything more than aesthetic value. Honestly, I find most polemic artwork to be lacking in aesthetics, too.²

Certainly a video game can captivate the player into a story. It can even create emotion. I recall vividly playing System Shock 2 and wincing as ghosts replayed a massacre of part of the crew in the ship’s dining hall. The sequence in the original Starcraft where Sarah Kerrigan is lost to the alien Zerg, and her resurfacing later in the game as a villain is considered one of the most shocking moments in gaming. Had these scenes been in a film, someone would praise it for its shock, horror, drama, and possibly acting. Of course, in a film, the watcher is passive, while in a game, the player is active—for the most part. It is worth noting that in these games, the scene is passive; no action the player takes can save Sarah Kerrigan.

The other question arises: what of open-ended games like SimCity, with its emergent narrative? The “game”, for those unfamiliar, is simply to build a “city”, with newer versions of the game being remarkably flexible as to what constitutes such a thing. SimCity 4 lets one create anything from a tiny little farming village to a massive, sprawling metropolis. There is no defined goal, no points to be acquired. The only constraint is money. One could, if they felt like it, leave the darn thing open, running, and not build a thing.³ The ultimate point behind SimCity, and many similar games, is that one can’t win. The experience is open-ended and there is none of the defined outcomes or even objectives that Ebert uses as an argument. A pre-emptive counterargument would be that SimCity and its ilk are less games, and more artistic tools in themselves; something used to create art rather than be art in itself. Of course, who says that a thing can’t be both. Industrial design, as an example, is commonly held up as a form of artwork. Take the work of Dieter Rams, or that of his spiritual successor, Apple’s Jonathan Ive. What they design may be considered “tools”, but they are tools that carry with them an artistic weight of their own.

Of course, there’s another side to the argument that I’ve not seen thrown out there. The game itself is simply the manifestation of the real art—that of the programmers. A clever algorithm for dynamically resizing textures on the go may not sound like art to the layman, but elegant code is an art all its own in certain circles, both on what it does, and how it looks—enter the Obfuscated C Code Contest as an example of programming as an aesthetic. Massive amounts of applied art goes into games beyond the code, these days. Artists design characters, backgrounds and textures. Composers create soundtracks that have become hot commodities in recent years. Game design, in itself, can be considered an art; balancing story-telling, degrees of interactivity, difficulty curve, and a myriad of other things to create a compelling product.

As Penny Arcade puts it in the aforementioned comic, “If a hundred artists create art for five years, how could the result not be art?” The argument needs to change from not whether video games are art, but to whether video games, as art, are quality art. Is the story compelling? Is the gameplay well thought-out and implemented? Does the game accomplish what it sets out to accomplish? This is already part of the established base question of video game criticism, though video game criticism still hasn’t left the level of a determination to buy the game or not. Film criticism and other art criticism work on that level, but also the larger level, exploring the aesthetic value of art, the meaning of art. Certainly, I’d say that most video games don’t hold up when given that level of scrutiny. That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try to not only scrutinize games on that level, but also to make games that can stand up to such scrutiny.⁴ That might be enough to convince the unconvincible skeptics of gaming as art.

1. Atlas Shrugged is used here, simply as an obvious example. As for its artistic value, I subscribe to Dorothy Parker’s view: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” I love Dorothy Parker.
2. Not to harp on here, but Ayn Rand couldn’t write her way out of a wet paper sack with a diamond tipped pen.
3. I think somewhere, a too-clever-for-their-own-good installation artist is going to try just that. One may already have.
4. How one could do that would be an essay all its own. I will say that the examples cited in Kellee Santiago’s TED Talk, I’m inclined to say that they don’t stand up, even without playing them. “Waco Resurrection” does look like just another shooter, and not even a well-done one. “Flower” seems to barely be a “game” at all. “Braid” might come closest to having critical depth, though.

The difficulties I ran into were small in number, but large in scope. The first was volume. The original intent was to match the Apple news sites like http://www.macrumors.com or [http://www.appleinsider.com](Apple Insider), reporting on the same essential events they did with a humorous twist, such as obviously false information, fake spy shots, deep personal gossip on the major players at Apple, etc. These sites however push out multiple high-content value posts per day. Keeping up would be very difficult. I intended to pre-write a significant quantities of articles but when doing so, I ran into the other problem: lack of material.

Folks, the tech world is a dry, dry place—current freakout over the iPhone prototype aside. It is damned hard to find humor opportunity in a rumor about the impending patch for iPhoto or when the next OS update is supposed to come out. Major events and announcements come rarely and while it’s easy to pole fun at the endless rumor cycle, it’s usually the same damn jokes over and over again, which is no fun. The gossip was to fill that hole, but how many jokes can you make about Steve Jobs’s secret personal life anyway? I did enjoy working in Highlander references into the Apple/Google feud but that ran out of fire fast.

I also found out that to stay current on Apple news and rumors would be a full time job in itself. Working a full time job, and not having eight hours to day catching up on Apple minutiae leaves a lot of gaps. How was I supposed to keep up? Other parody sites, like The Onion have full-on teams of writers to maintain its massive output—as well as a broader focus. A one-man show simply wouldn’t be able to cut it. In the end, I’m glad to let Apple Outsider go. It’s one less albatross around my neck keeping me from other projects, plus one less domain to renew each year.

I do not have this application. I have tried many, and many have come close. Some have come far closer than others. What I need is classified under the category of “junk drawer applications”, and there are more than a few for the Mac. Of the many I have tried, I have settled on a single solution—or rather a pair of solutions that are best at handling two major groups of data that I work with. Actually, there’s three applications in this solution, but two of them work so seamlessly as to almost be one. These solutions synchronize data to the cloud and to my iPhone, allowing for quick reference of data wherever I may roam.²

Notational Velocity and Simplenote

The key pairing of Notational Velocity on the Mac and Simplenote on the iPhone has been a lifesaver and a half. The vast majority of my data is stored in some sort of text format, varying from plain text to structured text (e.g. HTML and Markdown) to Rich Text. Notational Velocity handles all of these with aplomb, and has a darn spiffy incremental search feature in its UI. Assuming I wanted to search for a serial number for an application, I type in “Serial” into NV’s field, it shows every single note with “Serial” in the contents. It’s beautiful and simple.

Notational Velocity gets really fun when I integrate it with Quicksilver. By default, NV stores all of its content in a single database, but it can be set to store the content in individual HTML, Rich Text, or plain text files, all kept in a single folder. Setting it up as plain text files allows for all sorts of fun with Quicksilver and its Text Manipulation Module functions. Example: among the files I keep are lists of books to read, fiction and non-fiction. I also keep running lists for music to check out, jobs to apply for³, articles to write, and an Agenda file for just getting little bits down on the run. Should someone suggest I read a new book, I summon Quicksilver with a quick Cmd-Space, type in the name of the book, hit tab, type “App” which selects “Append to…”, tab again, and then type “Fiction” to select the text file with my list of books. Once I hit return, the file is updated. This sounds more complicated than it really is. I can also use Quicksilver or Mac OS X’s Services menu to make new notes from selected text, or whatever, without touching the application. I don’t lose my focus from whatever I’m doing at the time either. Keeping all my notes as text files also allows me to use TextMate, my text editor of choice, rather than NV’s built in editor.

While on the run, I am able to access all of these things with Simplenote. Simplenote and Notational Velocity work together, keeping all my textual data in sync via the Simplenote web service. On the iPhone, Simplenote exists as almost a perfect clone of NV, right down to the minimal UI and incremental searching. While I might not need everything I keep in NV on my iPhone, text is so lightweight that it doesn’t take up a great deal of space. The combination of the two applications keep my synchronized at will. Of course, Simplenote and Notational Velocity only work for the aforementioned text stuff. Anything slightly more intense requires its own solution.

Evernote

Therefore, the other half of my setup uses Evernote which serves to hold all that which Notational Velocity can’t. Where NV manages text, Evernote manages PDFs, images, audio files, and other bits of this-and-that. It has its own native, first party iPhone app with cloud synchronization. It also has granular control over what gets synchronized, so if I need to have the receipt for my bus ticket, I can find it on my phone, but tax forms and things don’t ever leave my desktop. This sort of control is something Notational Velocity lacks, but considering the sort of data likely to end up in Evernote versus NV, it’s a requirement on this side, and not a wish-list item.

One of the best use cases I have for Evernote is for business cards. When I get a new card, I snap a picture of it with my iPhone in the Evernote app. The picture is then run through some sort of OCR⁴ and the text in the image is made searchable. A quick search for a person’s name, or their company will bring up any cards from them, and there’s no need to keep the actual card or enter their contact information anywhere. Far from being a simple Rolodex, the image-to-text capability of Evernote has plenty of other uses that I am still exploring. I plan to start using it as a way to develop a scrapbook of design inspiration, whether by taking photos of real-life items that inspire, or by using the Web Clipping feature to snap bits of websites and hold screenshots.

The biggest downside to Evernote is that it’s a freemium service. The desktop client has small, unobtrusive ads, but there are also limits on what you can load in, and how much you can synchronize per month. Paying removes the limits, and adds PDF searching along with encryption.⁵ At five dollars a month, It’s a tempting consideration, perhaps when my income levels stabilize I will go for it.⁶ Evernote would also be wonderful if I could encrypt and password protect certain bits of data, like my financial documents.

Room for Improvement

Honestly, while this setup is perhaps the most optimal of the current solutions, I would kill for a single application that I can use for both. As stated before, some have come so amazingly close. The closest has been DevonThink is stupidly powerful, holds anything you throw at it, and is also great at connecting little bits of data. Where it fell down for me was the lack of portability. While the newest version has an iPhone web app to access things, it works with an embedded web server in the application. I’m not going to leave my computer on all the time if I’m on the go. Without a native iPhone app, it’s just useless. Other applications I’ve tried, and that have failed are Yojimbo, MacJournal, Journler , and Mori. Each failed at scalability, portability and sometimes even stability.

If any Mac developer out there is reading this⁷, if you could put together an application that combined the flexibility and openness of Notational Velocity, the text recognition and granular syncing of Evernote, and the “throw anything in here”-ness of DevonThink, mix it with web-based syncing and note-level encryption and/or password protection, give it a simple but powerful UI, and add a native iPhone app, I would pay good money for it. I mean, really good money. Considering that over the past four years, I’ve probably dropped about $100 on “junk drawer” applications in one form or another, I’d gladly spend that much again on one really good application that does all of the things I want and does them well. I’d even be willing to spend an additional $10 on an iPhone version. Someone just needs to make it happen. Until then, I suppose, “good enough” will have to be good enough.

1. This bit should be taken with a half-shaker of salt.
2. Of course, this assumes that I have a connection to the Internet, but that’s almost a given anywhere I go these days.
3. Hooray, unemployment!
4. Or, perhaps, a human being looks at it. I’m not sure.
5. As a matter of fact, Simplenote is Freemium as well. Without paying something, there’s ads in the iPhone client, and you’re limited to how many times you can Sync. I don’t come close to the limit.
6. Hooray, unemployment.
7. Someone from The Omni Group could probably make this happen.

The key thing that unites all of these ideas is that the creation a curated experience—not just hitting shuffle on your MP3 player. Mix CDs needs to do more than just be a collection of songs, they need to provide an experience, on par with the best albums in your collection. They need to stand on their own as individual works, not just as collections of parts; works that show off more than what songs you have. The best mix CDs show something about their creator, too. What follows can help with that.

The Basics

Theme

Every good mix CD has, at its core, a theme, which will let you define the songs you put on your mix. If you’re just throwing songs on a CD willy-nilly, you’re not really making a mix. A theme doesn’t have to be anything complex or fancy. “Songs that make me happy” is a good, basic theme. “Songs about travel,” or “songs with funny lyrics,” might work as well. Some of my favorite mix CD themes have been “songs that have questions for titles,” “songs that are the first song on their album,” and “songs about food.”

It helps to have a theme that lets you cast a wide enough net to fill the majority of a CD, but is specific enough to tie things together. One of my most difficult mixes to make was a “days of the week” mix—with songs referring to each specific day of the week. I had to expand the concept slightly to songs that talked about yesterday, tomorrow, and the week as a whole, just to fill things up. In general, it’s better to err on the side of caution, and have a less specific theme that you can whittle down. It’s easier to remove songs from a mix than to add them if you’re out of ideas.

Flow

In this fancy-pants digital age, making sure your mix CD has “flow” is far easier than it was in the cassette tape days.¹ What is “flow”? It’s making sure your mix transitions from one song to the other in a way that isn’t jarring or disjointed.² If you’re putting your mix together in iTunes or whatever media player you use, you can easily rearrange tracks to make sure things match up nicely. While assembling a mix, I often play the last 20 seconds or so of a song just to make sure it matches up well with what follows.

Protip: Be conscientious of silence at the beginning and end of tracks. A song with 4 seconds of silence at the end can wreck flow. Some media players let you adjust the start and endpoint of a song. If yours doesn’t, you might need to actually edit the file. I recommend Audacity for this task. This is also useful for incorporating live tracks which may have commentary and other non-musical stuff that breaks things up.

“Flow” isn’t just on a track-by-track scale, either. It also can modulate the disc as a whole. Your mix can start quiet, slowly building in intensity and speed along the tracks, or it can be up-and-down, or anywhere along the spectrum. The flow has to be there, however, so it doesn’t just sound like you put an iPod on shuffle. Mix CDs require attention to detail. Of course, the flow of a disc as a whole is largely dictated by…

Structure

Structure is actually more of an intermediate tip, but if you’ve gotten good with themes and flow, you should be ready to tackle a slightly structured mix. Structure is intrinsically related to flow, and a mix with good structure has to balance the flow of the songs with the overall mode of the mix. A good example of a mix that would require serious structure is a Narrative mix. Here is a self-created example. Each song has its place in the overall story, and are structured to provide a narrative, while still providing flow.

On a less rigid scale, a structure for a Mix CD can help to reinforce the theme of the mix. Often, I like to start off mix CDs with a song that epitomizes the theme of the mix. A mix I created for a convention happening in my hometown of Philadelphia began with the theme to “American Bandstand” which tied together both the theme of songs by Philadelphians, or about the city, with the historical connection to Bandstand and the long tradition of rock and soul music in Philadelphia.³ Another good way to add structure to a mix is to group related songs together, relating by subject matter, tone, artist, or any other criteria—making sure to pay attention, of course, to flow.

Advanced Tricks

Filler Tracks

For lack of a better term, “filler” tracks can help strengthen a mix CD. They can reinforce a theme, provide flow between disparate tracks, or break a disc up into sections for structure. One of my favorite mixes, “Come On and Buy It”, themed around commercialism and business, used a selection of short advertising clips I had by Raymond Scott. Another mix, themed on science fiction, included quotes from the show “Futurama” to break up songs. Filler can be almost anything: comedy clips, audio commercials, very short songs from a CD. As long as it fits the theme, go for it.

Introductions and Conclusions

As a variant of filler tracks, it can help to start and end a Mix with unique and distinctive tracks. A mix CD themed around New York City, for example, may begin and end with different versions of “New York, New York”.⁴ Short instrumentals, clips from movies, any sort of sound that matches the theme of the disk can help bring the listener into what your mix is trying to do.

Manually Editing Songs

Though alluded to in the section on Flow, actually editing songs can be a great tool to really take your Mix CDs over the top. You can utilize this trick to do all sorts of neat effects, ranging from simple crossfading, to creating medleys of songs. Manipulating the audio of your mix CD tracks is an absolute power tool. Use it wisely. I tend not to bother, but I know it has its place.

Don’ts

Please, please, please do not do any of the following:

• Ignore your audience. If your buddy Bob is getting into Japanese Noise Rock, then go hook them up with it. Your mom might not be so into it.
• Crossfade every song into each other, especially if they don’t crossfade right.
• Forget to include CD Text, or at the very least a printed track list for people to put into their media player.

Putting it over the top

If you follow all of the basics, you’ll have a great mix. If you do some of the advanced tricks, you can have an amazing mix. If you give it cover art, package it nicely, and deliver it, you’ll have an spectacular mix.⁵ A clever title helps too: I like to use lyrics from songs that fit the theme. Don’t just hand over a bare CD, either: get a jewel case or make your own packaging. If the effort shows, the impact will be there.

In Conclusion

What makes a mix CD great is a combination of thought, style, and content. The entire point of the above is to force you, the mix CD creator, to think and to put effort into your creation—make it something of value. The ultimate mix CD is a statement, not just of musical tastes, but of creativity and mindset. The easier it is to do something, the easier it is to half-ass it, and such is the inevitable consequence of the otherwise awesome digital music revolution.⁶ If this screed convinces just one person to put some effort into a mix, then so much the better. Give it a try. Make a mix CD. Share it with someone. Enjoy the reaction.

1. Admittedly, those days were before my time, but when you recorded to a cassette tape, it was a damned time consuming process. The digital music revolution makes the process much easier, but also encourages laziness. The point of this essay is to encourage the art to go back into it.
2. Of course, jarring and disjointed may be something you want to use for effect. It depends on the theme and structure of your mix. A quiet, slow tune leading into a high-energy, loud song can serve a mix well, when done right.
3. This mix then switched into the sardonic “Philadelphia” by Atom and his Package, which pokes fun at this city in the way that only a local can.
4. I’m actually using this trick on a mix CD for an older friend who wants a disc of his favorite songs. As he asked for the two different versions of “New York, New York,” it made sense to do it this way.
5. If you’re making a Mix CD for your significant other, or would-be-significant-other, you darn well better at least package it nicely.
6. “Digital music revolution” used here purely for lack of a better descriptor.

With $600 to spend, I rolled the dice, and chose the bottom-of-the-line G4 Mac mini, with a 512 MB RAM upgrade. Along with it, I purchased an Apple Keyboard to replace my beloved IBM Model M keyboard³, a necessary investment the IBM lacked the Command key. Within a week of ordering the mini, Apple refreshed the line, making 512 MB of RAM standard. Apple immediately refunded my upgrade cost, which earned them brownie points from the get-go. Waiting for it to arrive was the hardest part, but at last, come late July of 2005, I found the Mac mini at the door, when I left to go to my summer class at the Community College of Philadelphia. I had to be patient.

Once I had set everything up and copied over all the data from my old computer, I connected my digital camera to transfer over the photos that I had neglected to transfer for months. As soon as the camera turned on, iPhoto opened and displayed a message asking if I would like to transfer my photos. I did not have to install anything. I did not have to configure anything. I did not have to perform an arcane set of commands to make sure I could access the files.⁴ I could have cried when it finished. After all, it was 2005—why should I have had to bother with arcane terminal commands to do something so mind-numbingly simple?

The Mac mini was my primary computer for nearly three years, even as the entire Macintosh line went Intel. I upgraded the mini to a full gigabyte of RAM, and added a 250GB external HD. Before starting at Temple University, I picked up a refurbished, last generation iBook G4 to take to classes, and used the two machines in tandem.⁵ When my roommate’s computer died in 2008, I lent him the Mac mini, and I used the iBook as my primary computer for over a year. In May of 2008, for graduating, I got a MacBook—my first Intel Mac, and it’s still here. I’ve drank the Kool-Aid, and I like it.

1. To give you an idea, one of them now works for Dreamhost, and could write shell scripts in her sleep with one hand tied behind her back, with a Dvorak keyboard.
2. Some of these, I should actually go back and read over again. I really would like to automate more stuff on my Mac.
3. The IBM Model M is, without a doubt, the greatest keyboard ever made. Other keyboards have their partisans. I know John Gruber stands by his vintage Apple Extended II keyboard, but nothing is quite like a Model M. The darn thing was built like a tank. The key caps were two pieces, so you could rearrange to, say, Dvorak, without breaking a sweat. It clicked, loudly, so you always sounded productive. What’s not to love? I currently rock an aluminum Apple Wireless Keyboard, and it’s almost as good, just too quiet.
4. While using Linux to get photos off of my camera, I had to open a terminal session, switch to root, run gphoto2, and then change the ownership and permission for every image. This was due to some sort of quirk involving USB device permissions, and it was a pain in the rear to do.
5. Oddly, this iBook had a problem with the main exhaust fan—it didn’t work. I didn’t figure this out for over a year, as the machine didn’t have any problems unless I kept it running somewhere that would let the heat build up. Another piece of electronics built like a tank.

In celebration of the long overdue remastering and re-release of their most famous albums, 1978’s Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are DEVO!, and 1980’s Freedom of Choice, DEVO went on a too-brief tour of two-night stands. Each night featured the full performance of one album, and a brief encore set. Far from just being simple concert performances/museum pieces, they took the opportunity to use these shows as an excuse to relive the past fully, replicating the costumes, stage sets and choreography of the respective album’s tour, though with a dose of modern technology to make the job easier. When combined with tight performing, and a band more enthusiastic than I’ve ever seen them², it may as well had been time travel to the days when DEVO’s live show was at its peak.

On the first night, the show began with a required viewing of the short film In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution, ending with the video screen rising to show DEVO in their yellow radiation suits and 3-D glasses, bursting into “Uncontrollable Urge”. The stage was covered in black plastic sheeting, and the lighting was suitably low-tech and retro. Dominant colors of orange, yellow, and green bathed the band in sickly shades as they ripped through the album with more ferocity than I’ve seen in most younger bands. Even the crowd was intense: from the first note they pushed forward like a wave. My sternum, pressed against the barrier in front of the stage, came close to snapping from the pressure. By the time the band reached the final song of the record, “Shrivel Up,” the time travel was complete. You can see for yourself.

The next night, the process repeated with the band showing three music videos: “Girl U Want,” “Whip It,” and “Freedom of Choice” before the screen rose for a modernized recreation of DEVO’s 1980 tour set, and the band themselves in gray jumpsuits with red duct tape details—and the requisite Energy Domes. Bob 1 even brought out the once lost custom, blue potato shaped guitar from the 1980 tour. After a brief moment for a man in a doctor’s outfit to indicate the song’s track number,³ the band launched straight into “Girl U Want,” and did not relent. By far, the most amazing part of this show was seeing DEVO perform songs that they’d never performed live. Half the album had never left the studio, including the remarkable “Ton O Luv” which I gained a new appreciation for in concert.

Each night showed a different side of DEVO. Night one showed the punky, raw, dirty DEVO from the post-industrial wasteland of Akron, Ohio, relying on distorted guitar, thudding percussion, and manic energy to drive the music. Night two showed the smooth, futuristic, synthesizer and bass driven DEVO most people know. All of this served as a wonderful appetizer and summary of what makes DEVO great, as they prepare for their first new album in twenty years.⁴ From the perspective of a hardcore fan, it’s also a great exercise in revisiting these albums that I’ve listened to so many times. Side two of Freedom of Choice always stuck me as slightly weaker than side one, but not any more. Check out the performance of “Cold War,” which was my least favorite tune on the album until this show.

The entire weekend was something amazing and special: a once in a lifetime experience that I will not soon forget. To watch your favorite band relive their glory days in such a remarkable fashion is something out of a dream. Ten years ago, if I told my adolescent self of what I got to experience, it would meet a look of pure disbelief. I leave you with a few links to photographic evidence of these amazing concerts. Just look for the heavyset guy with the energy dome and goatee: that would be me.

• My photos on Flickr
• Metromix
• Brooklyn Vegan

1. Well, I suppose it’s now the Fillmore East at Irving Plaza, but nobody calls it that any more.
2. My previous DEVO shows are 2004 in Central Park, 2005 in Atlantic City, and 2008 in my home town of Philadelphia.
3. This was one of the few new elements to the show.
4. Supposedly to drop on April 1st, 2010, but that could have been a gag. It is confirmed that DEVO is playing Coachella, which is mid-April, so the album should be out by then.

My weight hasn’t been a dire health hazard. My most recent checkup proved as such, as the doctor evaluated me to be in pretty good condition.² Over the years, I’ve actually maintained a very philosophical attitude towards my spare tire. I’ll joke about it when talking with thinner, healthier friends, and damn it, it’s sincere humor. If I can’t laugh at myself, then who can I laugh at, anyway? This would seem to be the first year I’ve bothered to take the whole weight loss enterprise with a bit of sincerity, and with a legit approach beyond simply “eat less, move more.”³

Eating less is the bigger part of it, which is translating into keeping track of calorie consumption. Thank whoever for the Lose It! app for the iPhone. Lose It! calculates the number of calories per day one would need to consume to lose x amount of weight, with a plan of losing y pounds per week, based on age, height, and other basic factors.⁴ Combine this with a database of food and calorie information, it allows me to keep tabs on the things that pass through my lips. There have been some shockers.⁵

The other thing I’ve decided to do differently is a promising myself joyous rewards at different milestones. I’ve decided on the following:

1. Below 215 pounds: Purchase a six pack of St. Bernardus Abt 12 beer.
2. Below 200 pounds: Allowed to order an absurdly bad for me meal.⁶
3. Hit 180 or below: Go out to a really nice restaurant for a really nice meal.

It’s early yet, but I think I should be able to buy myself the beer by the end of the month. It’s a start. I’ll be evaluating whether I can afford to get a gym membership next, but even if I can’t, I’ll probably step up the exercise end of things soon. The Two Hundred Situps plan sounds like an appealing start for home fitness.

1. My mother is a wonderful cook, and as she often had to cook for a family of 7, often made far more food than an appropriate serving would be for one growing young lad. Living on my own, I’ve had the same issue of quantity cooked versus quantity to consume.
2. Blood pressure good, cholesterol on the highish side (195), but still reasonable, and every other basic test showing me to be in little danger of keeling over and dying in the near future.
3. This approach, however, is the foundation of how I’m trying to shed the pounds.
4. In my program, I’m looking to get down to 180 pounds, losing 2 per week. Right now, this is allowing a daily budget of about 1800 calories a day.
5. One little chocolate covered donut hole is bloody 80 calories!
6. I’m not sure if I’ll make this pizza and wings, or a cheesesteak and wings.

It’s both embarrassing and amusing to go back in time and read the earliest things I posted on this site. The Wayback Machine has provided a number of snapshots of my college years, few of which are flattering, though this is biased. In the intervening years, I’d say the best thing I ever wrote for this website is my essay on the death of David Foster Wallace. For this attempt, I have decided to begin with a blank slate², retaining only that particular essay as a static page.

Ultimately, I expect that this will be an experiment in making the “clackity noise” that Merlin Mann harps on about. If there is a constant, as always, I know that part of the first thing I wrote on this domain remains true.

I’ve never been good with welcome messages and similar things for websites. Therefore, this will be the best welcome I can give.

Please join me. I expect things to be interesting.

1. This is complicated by my current situation of working two jobs, and having limited free time. I suspect it’s less of an issue of finding the time, and more of using the time I have better. More on that, I expect, in the future.
2. This will be, if I recall correctly, the fourth attempt at starting with a blank slate.