Minutiae by Mike Tigas

On reality and authenticity

2010-03-03T21:32:40-06:00

Mark Lamster, returning from a trip to Las Vegas:

Drinks at Prime Meats, in Brooklyn, with my wife. Realistically, this place is as much an artifice as anything on the Strip, a re-imagining of a 19th-century saloon, complete with polished bar, antique typography, Edison bulbs. Why, then, does it feel so much more honest? Because its aesthetic is filtered through a contemporary sensibility? Because it seems a natural part of a vibrant neighborhood? Is this all bullshit I invent to make myself feel more comfortable?

— Mark Lamster, What Am I Doing Here? Tall Buildings and High Anxiety in Las Vegas

Carnegie Mellon Professor, Jesse Schell, on the psychology of games: Video here. It’s good in it’s entirety, but the relevant parts start at about 10:25. Segment quoted below starts at about 12:15:

Go look at TV — the people on TV, their heads are spinning! Everything is about reality TV. Go to the grocery store: it’s not just groceries anymore! Organic groceries — they’re more genuine, they’re more real groceries. You go to McDonald’s, and a Big Mac — well, you could get a Big Mac, or you could get the real burger, the Angus Burger, made with real this and that and whatever. Everything’s suddenly about reality.

[…] Gilmore and Pine put forth this interesting concept: that the most valuable thing in products today is are they real, are they authentic. Which is a bold hypothesis. And then they go further and they say, “Well, now why is it? Why now? It didn’t always used to be this way. Certainly it’s not what sold stuff in the ’80s. Right? […] What is it now that people are demanding reality, demanding authenticity?”

And they’re arguing that all this virtual stuff that’s been creeping up on us over the last twenty years has really cut us off from nature. We’re cut off from nature, we’re cut off from self-sufficiency.

[…] We live in a bubble of fake bullshit and we have this hunger to get to anything that’s real. Even if the best we can do is a Starbucks mocha with real Swiss chocolate — we’ll take it! Oh, that’s real! Look how real that seems to me, relative to what I’m used to!

— Jesse Schnell, Design Outside the Box Presentation

In that segment, Schnell frequently references Authenticity, by Gilmore and Pine, so you might also want to check that out.

This is something I often wonder about, as the Internet grows by leaps and bounds. For example, my recurring love-hate relationship with the Great Internet Timesuck and my tendency to quit Facebook and invoke Vonnegut just about every year. As I said before, I feel as if there’s some sort of cultural push back on the horizon — maybe this “thirst for reality” is already here, just in some other form?

You can comment on this, here.

NationBrowse

2010-02-22T18:56:03-06:00

I haven’t quite graduated yet, but I did take my “capstone” class last semester. The objective was vaguely, “do something innovative,” so I pitched (what I thought was) the data app of my dreams.

This is how it all went down. This is essentially a brain dump of all the little notes I’ve collected while working on this project. Boy, do I collect a lot of notes.

The end result

Quick note: The server running the demo is ill-equipped for the massive dataset size — I’ll talk more about this below. …If you click around and you get a timeout error, wait a minute to let the server catch up (or cache up…) and try again.

In it’s current state, nationbrowse.com is a mess, but showing it off is the easiest starting point to work from:

Warning: A lot of technical talk, from here on out.

Background bits

Heavily inspired by: The Apps for America contests [1,2], ThisWeKnow, DataMasher, this Mapping L.A. Neighborhoods project from the Los Angeles Times, and EveryBlock. (ThisWeKnow and DataMasher, we actually hadn’t heard of until partway through the semester — was really great to see more reference projects show up along the way.)

The team: Graham Greenfield, Jeremy Howard, Nick Roma, and myself. While all had programming experience, none of the others had used Python, developed GIS software, or worked on a Web app with real-world data. (It went extremely well. They picked up quickly. Python is awesome.)

Source code: Here, on github.

The basics: Python, Django, and PostgreSQL. GeoDjango via PostGIS.

Server: Served over Apache+mod_wsgi, on an internal port. nginx sits at port 80 and proxies requests over to the Apache instance.

Caching: Memcached. Using python-memcached instead of (the now unmaintained) cmemcache. Using the cache middleware along with custom caching all over the place. (There are a few notes in the next section, regarding nginx+memcached.)

Mapping: OpenLayers, for client-side shape rendering.

Graphs: Google Chart API.

Data: U.S. Census TIGER/Line for shapefiles. U.S. Census 2000 & American Community Survey 2008 for most statistics. FBI Uniform Crime Reports for other numbers.

Issues & things we cut

A lot of our initial ambitions were fiercely struck down by performance considerations. Last I checked, a bzip2-compressed database dump sat at over one gigabyte due to the sheer number of states, counties, and ZIP codes stored and the precision of the shapefiles and statistics. On a VPS with 256MB of RAM, pitting PostgreSQL against a set of data at this size proved to be a royal pain in the ass.

Wanted to use TileCache/Mapnik, the “EveryBlock stack,” to generate maps server-side: performance was awful given the hardware/dataset circumstances. (Not to mention adding the configuration complexity of having a whole Apache mod_python instance running alongside the site’s Django wsgi instance.) Instead: we found a way render shapes in OpenLayers, on the user’s Web browser, by sending along raw WKT geo data in the Javascript for a given map. The (sometimes huge) file size increase far outweighed the (dangerously high) server load.

Wnated to use MatPlotLib, to generate server-side graphs: again, performance was killing the site. This was actually completely implemented [1, 2], but not strong enough for us to demo with. Instead: we built wrappers around the Google Chart API, which offloads the rendering work to some magical Google server.

nginx is being used as a reverse proxy and we’d hoped it could serve cached results, directly out of memcached. There are still some issues with corrupted/misencoded data being returned to the browser. (The classic “gibberish loads in browser” effect.) Not sure if this is due to the large size of things being stored, or what some encoding misconfiguration — if anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear ’em. (I’m using this serve-from-cache method on this blog, and it’s working just fine, with a near-exact configuration.)

Similar to DataMasher, we wanted to develop a way to let users automatically create comparative (and inferential) statistics. Unlike DataMasher, we sought to build something statistically sound — we were talked out of this by some folks at the Social Science Statistics Center, who noted that blindly comparing Census data would create junk data in nearly every case. At this point, we just threw our all into descriptive statistics — hence a focus on maps, charts, and tables.

Pieces of note

The cacheutil library is a little “swiss army knife” that includes a few useful functions: the safe_get_cache/safe_set_cache/safecache methods and template tag, which sanitize and hash cache keys; some decorators for caching methods, class methods, and class properties; and a middleware for those wanting nginx to serve directly from the cache [1,2].

A threading shortcut function that allows you to call some function in the background, while the rest of your view moves on and gets returned to the user’s browser. (Useful for loading views or calling functions in advance, to pre-cache ’em before a user actually goes there.)

Some pluggable utilities for generating Google Graphs URLs.

A ton of Javascript magic, using jQuery and OpenLayers. Between the template and the static helper functions, you get that nice map with toggle-able shapes (to change which variable the map is shaded by) and the nice hover effect on the shapes — as seen on the homepage.

If you are interested in using MatPlotLib and Django, you can split your chart generation functions and the bits that actually grab the data & generate a PNG response. While this project couldn’t use it in the end, here’s a lot of potential for dynamic awesomeness there.

Credits due

Ted came up with the name a long time ago, when I first threw around the idea of a data project like this.

My team was awesome for going along with something so ridiculously ambitious. For a one-semester undergraduate capstone project, in which 75% of the team hadn’t even used the language, it really worked out. Graham and Jeremy were troopers and put a lot of work into the MatPlotLib renderers [1, 2] that weren’t fully implemented in the end product. Nick, without any prior Javascript or jQuery experience, built a GUI “query builder” (which, unfortunately, is not functional in the live demo).

After repeatedly shooting down Flash-based maps and discovering that server-side map tiles were out of the question, the dynamic elements of the map are heavily inspired from staring at the source of this Los Angeles Times mapping project. (And weeding my way through the OpenLayers documentation and mailing lists.) It’s not the prettiest, but there’s a lot of dynamic flexibility to it that I haven’t yet seen in other OpenLayers implementations.

Last complaints

Setting up a PostGIS database is a pain. Importing the entire State, County, and ZipCode sets is even worse. I did it here — note that I had to manually import Puerto Rican municipio (equivalent to counties) by tweaking the INSERT statements and unescaping some of the characters with diacritics and forcing PostgreSQL to run it as UTF-8. Hopefully that’ll save you some pain if you try this someday.

Census data is a mess. Know how to get to raw data from the homepage? Yeah. (Try the Download Center over here.) The data was pipe-delimited (and therefore, PostgreSQL could import it directly), but turning the many, many arbitrary columns into model fields was a pain.

Oh, and mixing data from disparate sources? (Say, the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, whose data is entirely distributed in Excel spreadsheets.) Good luck.

I would really love to see a more open method to access a lot of this data. After working on this project, I have to say that there are still significant barriers to doing useful things with open government data. ThisWeKnow uses RDF/SPARQL and is — judging from their goals and execution — an excellent start.

Epilogue

I don’t believe NationBrowse is “complete.” It’s a nice technology demo and was a nice experiment in building a large data app can be built with very few resources. But it’s a data ghetto. It’s a standalone site, with very little context and very little use of the massive underlying dataset.

If I could have another go at this, I’d have emphasized data export functionality or some other way to get “joined” data from disparate sets and sources. Possibly create an API around the underlying data. And even then, the data still needs to go in, somehow.

But hey, if four guys in college can find a way to make something of that data, for (near-)free, maybe there’s hope.

I implore you to dig around in the repository and especially check out the notable bits.

You can comment on this post via Google Buzz. Or, you can contact me directly.

2010-02-12T03:05:36-06:00

This is a quote I love to come back to, time and again.

Even as a Web developer — a person who gets paid to go out and build up the great expanses of the Internet — I love this quote. And, to a great extent, I believe in it.

Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.

— Kurt Vonnegut, in A Man Without a Country

Google Buzz was released earlier this week. Facebook redesigned it’s main page. A lot of people paid a whole lot of attention to these things.

I had a good conversation with Carolina a couple nights ago, about the substitution of real social interaction for social networks. (Her friend Amanda expressed dismay at the whole thing, which is what got us on the subject.) And while I concede, there are plenty of uses for these communities — reconnecting with distant folks, planning events, having non-live conversations in comment streams — I can’t help but notice:

There are an increasing number of people I speak to that believe we’re placing far too much collective importance on these things. Me? I fear the people to young to remember dial-up Internet and earlier. And seriously, think about it: I’m sure there are some kids who communicate through these networking sites more than any other medium — text, phone, or in-person. This is all they’ll have ever known. (In practice, I’m sure the reality lies somewhere between texting and the Internet.)

In my wildest dreams, I imagine we’ll get to a point where this dawns on everyone and we have a large cultural push back. Maybe, like the whole/organic food fad, it’ll only be a minority. But sometimes I feel like the undercurrents are there.

Does anybody even remember Google Wave? Friendster? Xanga?

The iPad & Game Consoles

2010-02-03T18:01:52-06:00

A quick thought or two on the iPad hubbub and the “casual computing vs. tinkering” conversation that’s been happening as of late. But first:

ThinkPad, anyone?

I concede “iPad” is a terrible name simply because of the similarity to Apple’s existing “iPod,” but I really don’t understand the fascination with “pad” jokes. A “-Pad” name has been pretty successful — without the toilet humor — for about 18 years now.

There are examples of names like this in recent history — take the Nintendo Wii, for example. Like the Wii, I’m pretty sure we’ll move on from picking on nomenclature once we start using the damn thing.

Which sort of leads into my main point

One of the general arguments against the iPad being successful is that it’s more expensive than a netbook, it’s not as full featured, and it doesn’t even multitask, etc.…

Who cares? Between my brother and I, we own several high-end computers that, by default, are closed systems. They don’t multitask. You can’t easily make your own content for them. You can’t really mess around with a lot of the performance-oriented settings.

They are: a Playstation 3, an Xbox 360, a Wii, and a few other systems.

For the most part, direct comparisons between these devices and “general computers” tend to be “apples to oranges” comparisons. (The classic “console vs. PC gaming” argument is probably the best example.)

They’re purpose-built machines, they’re in a different league and that’s that.

There are lots folks who own Macs or older PCs that want a way to play the latest games — and many of them own game consoles because that provides the easiest out-of-the-box experience as opposed to buying and maintaining a PC gaming rig. And it’s much easier than trying to play Crysis on a PC whose hardware is dated four or five years or one at a sub-$500 price tag.

My point is, there is a place for the iPad and people will buy it even if it is (several orders of magnitude) less versatile and far more expensive than a netbook. It doesn’t have to be a netbook to succeed. As long as the iPad gives the user enough of what they want (presumably: Web content, books, and apps) and wraps that up in an enjoyable experience, then Apple has a legitimate competitor against the netbook market.

Another point of reference: Some folks will go out and buy an Xbox 360 because of the platform-exclusive titles, like Halo. I could try to talk about how technologically superior the PlayStation 3 is to the Xbox 360, but I can’t specifically dissuade someone who loves Halo. Some folks will go the iPhone/iPad route specifically for the exclusive apps and features, too.

On hackers and tinkerers

On the other hand, there is the “tinkering argument” — that the spread and adoption of these “closed systems” will bring an end to the days of tinkerers.

Video game consoles also provide great analogue to the iPad’s “closedness” in this regard: they come “closed,” of course. But my Xbox 360 is modified to play burned games and doing the same to the Wii is, supposedly, a piece of cake. You don’t have to look far to find people willing to do the same with Apple’s closed systems.

(My brother and I do live on the far end of the tinkering range — in both PCs and game consoles — so my experiences are obviously a tiny bit skewed.)

Interestingly enough, I do notice that a great percentage of the PC gamers I know do tinker with the settings, update their drivers, upgrade their parts, etc., on a normal basis — or at the very least, know how to perform those tasks. And while I know of primarily-console folks who’ve modified or hacked their systems, they are a much rarer breed. This is exactly what the fear is: tinkering falling to the wayside because the closed-off systems inherently have fewer things to tinker with.^[1]

While I have no reservations on the “closed” nature of the iPad specifically, I am one of the people that will be concerned if this truly is the “future of computing.”

At best, some console hacks are merely inconvenient^[2], while at worst there are those that are outright illegal. I strongly believe that those who want to do more with their computing devices will inevitably find a way to do it. I just think it will play out better for everyone if we encourage and facilitate rather than criminalize curiosity and innovation.

[1] Alex Payne & Jim Stogdill both have excellent points on this, which inspired me to write a bit about it.
[2] Older PS3 models do allow you to install Linux on an unmodified console. And as far as I know, there are no hacks for the PS3 that allow you to play burned games.

I don’t have comments set up on this site yet, but if you’d like to, you can comment on this blog post over on Facebook. You don’t even have to be my friend.

2010-02-02T01:44:44-06:00

I'm a three-time (soon to be four-time) published author. When aspiring authors learn this, they invariably ask what word processor I use. It doesn't fucking matter! I happen to write in Emacs. I also code in Emacs, which is a nice bonus. Other people write and code in vi. Other people write in Microsoft Word and code in TextMate+ or TextEdit or some fancy web-based collaborative editor like EtherPad or Google Wave. Whatever. Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening -- really listening -- to what people say about your writing. […] Just fucking write, then publish, then write some more. One day your writing will get featured on a site like Reddit and you'll go from 5 readers to 5000 in a matter of hours, and they'll all tell you how much your writing sucks. And most of them will be right! Learn how to respond to constructive criticism and filter out the trolls, and you can write the next great American novel in edlin.

— Mark Pilgrim, on The Setup. (Emphasis mine.)

Cop out

2010-01-30T15:09:40-06:00

I owe you some vacation photos, but alas — I don’t have them yet. For now, enjoy a set of photos from a previous trip to New Jersey & New York City.

Oh yeah, and I probably owe you a mention or so about the rebuild of this site, don’t I?

Trust me, I’ll have something current up soon.

I'm kind of a big deal

2009-09-06T22:01:52-06:00

Okay! I think I've just about cemented my claim as a New Media Douchebag by virtue of the ridiculous domain name I acquired for this site:

miketigas.com
↓
mike.tig.as

I've heard that in this day and age, "your name is your personal brand." I'm glad to say that I've successfully taken it to THE EXTREME. (Note: all caps means SERIOUS BUSINESS.)

Ahem. Apparently extreme coffee intake has a direct effect on my usually-latent ego? No, that can't be it. The domain name and phone number have been in the works for months now. Oh, I'm an iPhone and MacBook Pro owner now — yes, for the first time in my life, I own an Apple product that isn't just a music player — maybe that's added a bit to my smugness.

Related to the ego front

Spokesman.com — the Web site of the Spokesman-Review and the Web site I've been working for over the past 15 months — is a finalist in the General Excellence (Medium site) category of the Online News Association's Online Journalism Awards.

For a newsroom of our size, I am thrilled by the amount of multimedia we produce each week (and it shows and looks great on our site). More than anything, the people who create all of our awesome content deserve the shout-out.

Now, moving on in somewhat-less-narcissistic fashion… (Warning: cliché, "this is what I'm up to" personal blog post coming your way.)

School outlook

I have a 9am class this semester. I'm not a morning person; hell, I normally started work at 10am all summer (with the trade-off of staying long after 6). Previous semesters have seen me falter under start times as late as 11am.

Last semester I visited a counselor a few times because I couldn't tell if I was depressed or what—for a pretty long stretch, I was entirely disinterested in school, work, and socializing. (If you interacted with me at the time, you may or may have noticed just a bit of reclusiveness. Just a bit.) And I think it basically boiled down to a lack that rewarding feeling from anything I was doing at the time. It was a matter of me being disenchanted and not being able to suck it up and go anyway. Missed a lot of class, let a whole bunch of things slip by. I done fucked up, to put it lightly.

But back to today: It's going to be good semester. Yes, even with the 9am. No, really. It's going to be different this time.

My class schedule is essentially anchored by that 9am — an inter-division iPhone development class with CS/IT and J-school students. You really can't convince me that the concept isn't right up my alley.

Similarly, my capstone class wraps up most of my school days; and that's another long-term, team-based project class. I've convinced my team to do a Django-based app that does things with Census data and various datasets from Data.gov. That is going to be fun — and a lot more interesting than most of the standard-issue class projects out there.

If anything else, I have one goal that I think (or rather, hope) will get me through: the sheer idea of graduating and actually being done with it. Mathematically, I'm going to barely get by as it is — dragging my feet through these final two semesters will definitely result in failure.

I've got a good feeling about this. I've got a lot of momentum going into week three. And hell, as a superstitious baseball fan, I believe in momentum.

Coming soon

I'm writing some brief tutorials on Git (and using it with GitHub) for my capstone team (some of them have used it, some of them haven't), chances are I'll actually get around to finishing and posting that. And hell, I might tease some things I've been working on recently. We'll see.

Now, excuse me while I put my ego away.

Summer Reading: High Fidelity

2009-07-18T18:05:28-06:00

A book review! Trying something new with writing in the blog today.

An admission: I’ve only seen High Fidelity, the film, once and I did not believe it to be the tour de force that some friends had made it out to be. Perhaps I was too young for it then—even though, okay, it was only about a year and a half ago.

But now! I’ve been single for quite some time, recently hanging out with a group of friends whose median age is give or take one decade older than my own (although this is probably moot because, for better or worse, I’m very often mistaken for at least five years older than my actual age), and suddenly dealing with the mythos of “having a career” and “getting old(er)”—and maybe this is exactly the “mature” (is it possible to put emphasis on quotation marks?) perspective and angle that one should consume High Fidelity from. Or not, but at the very least picking it out in book form seems pretty well-timed for where I am in my life. (And run-on sentence, much? Yeah, deal with it.)

(I think I have a propensity for “accidentally” picking out books that are “well-timed for where I am in my life.” Ever try a solo, cross-country drive, going through the parts of Western Montana and the Inland Northwest while reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? Maybe my own philosophical tendencies blow that one out of proportion and maybe I just have a knack for picking out parts of stories that I most deeply relate to. But still.)

So the über generalized plot of “girlfriend breaks up with guy, guy goes off to figure himself out” isn’t that creative at all, alright. But there’s something about the execution of the novel—from the heaps and heaps of pop culture references, to the rambly internal monologue, to the snarky, self-deprecating sense of humor—that makes it stand solid as a contemporary rocky relationship story. I tried hard to avoid saying love story or romance because that’s so far from what the book is—and that characteristic is, I think, what makes it feel so real and modern. (Even moreso than the copious 90’s movie and music references.)

There’s a bit of deus ex machina that happens with a death, a funeral, and “oh, let’s get back together because I’m so tired of working so hard at being with someone else and making myself miserable for it.” But I let it slide because, hey, strange shit like that happens in real life sometimes; relationships do have that transient quality to them that lead them to go back and forth in strange times. And disaster, indeed has a way of making the unlikely happen. It might not seem perfect from a storytelling standpoint, but eh, I’m OK with that.

I don’t think I could have appreciated the overwhelming amount of snarky, self-deprecating humor a couple years ago. (But I'm all about it now, though I'm not that way myself. A lot of my favorite people have those qualities which some people misconstrue as abrasive but I find hilarious.) But in general, over the past decade our society’s shifted more and more to accepting (often offbeat) satire, parody, and snarkiness as the status quo in humor and entertainment. (Indeed, I had a conversation last night in which it was pretty much agreed on that the live action version of The Tick would have been more successful today than it was eight years ago.) I wasn’t very old in the 90’s so I can’t really say much about the relevance of the of sense of humor back then, but I think it’s as relevant now as it’s ever been. (Although it might be a British thing that’s only recently grown on us—the sense of humor, I mean. We imported Monty Python from there and that’s pretty much the classical bar for snarky, tongue-in-cheek TV, isn’t it? And the Hitchhiker’s Guide novels? And The Office?)

Oh, and the pop culture references?—“…looking like Susan Dey in L.A. Law…” “…the Meg Ryan of Sleepless in Seattle…” “…We’re like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies…”—all had their place. It was more than just name dropping: every analogy painted a very specific—and modern!—picture of the given characters or situations, much more than a billion adjectives could have done.

Near the end I started to feel that, if a book like High Fidelity were to be written today, in 2009, it would undeniably have to reference “John Cusack in High Fidelity” in very much the same way. In fact, I’ve heard people use that exact same analogy to describe parts of their lives. Like every pop culture reference in the novel (though now some of them are becoming dated), it’s a kind of hip, yet subtle cultural touchstone that you can’t help but relate to and relate through (in using it as an analogy).

Weird how that works out.

Okay, okay. To everybody who absolutely adores that movie, I think I get it now. (Though, as is common these days, the book was better.) I may forget the story entirely by next week, but there’s a part that struck a chord with me that’ll probably stick with me just for that one time I end up saying “like the main character in High Fidelity,” when in conversation. And, to it’s credit, I thoroughly enjoyed it—few books make me chuckle out loud while reading. (Nor do they ever compel me to up and review ’em.)

It wasn’t a landmark, historic book for the ages, but—as if a breath of fresh air—it just felt damn good to read.

Google Chrome OS

2009-07-08T01:39:02-06:00

I feel like this should have been expected.

The same day that Google Apps came out of beta—Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk—Google announced that oh yeah, they've been building an operating system.

Now, the premise of a Google OS is not new in the least. As recently as December, rumors of a Google OS abounded when a statistics tracking firm, Net Applications, detected a significant amount of traffic out of Google HQ—with OS information hidden. Similarly, rumors of a Google Browser were fierce for years until Chrome was released last September—and Google had apparently been using it internally ("dogfooding") as it grew and developed over the course of two years.

When Google officially announces the project tomorrow (Wednesday), I'll be wary of the hype—Google doesn't do it themselves, but everybody else seems to hype their products up quite a bit. And I'm sure that misconception/misrepresentation will be rampant on Twitter and around the Web.

I'd like to point out that it's called Google Chrome OS, implying it's an extension of the Web browser. It's going to use a Linux kernel, but operate Web-based in terms of software. (Think apps like Google Docs and Gmail, but for all of your standard computing.) They swear they're making it a full-fledged OS that'll run on things from netbooks up to full desktop computers—but I find it hard to not emphasize the thin client/netbook angle, as they admit they're targeting netbooks first. (Which, too, is unsurprising since netbooks are hot but the OS market for low-end hardware is severely lacking in quality and/or user-friendliness.)

I'm sure I'll use it (like I use the work-in-progress Chrome version for Mac as my main Mac browser), but I'm still not entirely sold on the fact that this thin client thing is that great, amazing Google OS that people have been wondering about for years. Maybe I'm throwing the "thin client" buzzword around too much and maybe Google will surprise me. I felt the same apprehension toward Chrome (though the V8 Javascript engine and the multiprocessing intrigued me), but have since been won over. (More on that some other time.)

Side note: (Taking off the "newsroom Web developer" hat, putting on "online news consumer" hat...) I like the fact that the New York Times article links to Google's blog post in the lede. I love seeing news sites externally link like that. I have a Wikipedia-induced habit of middle-clicking bunches of in-text links that I think are relevant or interesting; that's just being helpful to your reader.

Learning to crawl

2009-07-03T02:21:32-06:00

To say I'm rusty at "blogging" may be an understatement. I can't say I haven't been trying, at least.

What's that you say? These numbers? This screenshot? What's all this, then? That's Daytum, which I've been using lately—but that is entirely a story for another time.

Again, it hasn't been for lack of trying that I haven't updated lately. But I think I've narrowed down some other reasons for the sheer wall of writer's block that I've encountered.

I love to over think and turn every small argument into a multi-paragraph explanation. "Think before you speak?" Yeah, try speaking when your brain likes to stay in overdrive all the time.
"If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all?" I don't believe in this so much in this day and age, but I grew up under that mindset and I often cannot shake that self-consciousness.
Yes, fine: I'm rusty. Sue me. Sometimes it's plain hard to let go once you're used to having so much restraint. (This, too, is an understatement when applied to my life.)

In all honesty, I wrote a lot (you've just seen the numbers, above) over the past week—most of it related to the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson last Thursday and the circus that took place between the "old media" and "social media" (or "new media," nomenclature isn't that important). In a cliché sort of way it very much tested my resolve in choosing to work in this particular industry—for goodness' sake, I'm a Web developer (an enabler of "new media") working in a newsroom (which, I guess some would call the heart of "old media").

I wrote over 1,700 words, venting all sorts of frustrations: public spite and lack of trust of the media, new media douchebags, the crowdthink behind America's Twitter hipster support of Iran (but apparently not Honduras or any other recently rigged election)… But I couldn't bring myself to publishing it, thinking it more noise among the noise.

Today, the newsroom had a little get-together to say goodbye to a few folks. One of the radio folks (whose desk is near mine), had a mini speech regarding his departure. As a radio personality, he said, he never thought he'd get to work in a newspaper's newsroom—although growing up, his family always figured him for a reporter or columnist type. His time here was shorter than other jobs he'd held, but what will stick with him the most was that he was given the chance to do something he loved in a place he loved and never expected to work.

I couldn't help but think of the short-lived year I took on photojournalism at school and the divine providence that somehow brought my other interests and skills (technology, computers, Web programming) into that very journalism industry that I was enamored with.

That one little comment about "doing what you love, where you don't expect to" was the best thing to help me forget about that "Internet versus news media" shitshow. This post (spontaneously written and posted since I promised myself I'd post by week's end) is a lot less eloquent than what I'd written on that subject, but I'm quite happy that I didn't add any fuel to that fire. It's shaped up to be one of those hits that just needed to be taken and not dwelt upon.

Look. I love what I do, I love where I work, I love the things I'm responsible for doing. I work on things that I think are cool (and I am not often impressed by things online) and I get to work on a relatively well-trafficked news site. (Caveat: it really sucks when you break it.)

Sure, I'll probably find reason to be a critical asshole on the Internet when I lose my optimism in the above. (Which I hope never, ever happens.) I'm young, I'm naive, and frankly I don't believe I have the experience or the bravado to perform such iconoclasm (*ahem*) on the media industry.

And either way, arguing on the Internet is still, to this day, one of the less productive pursuits out there. (Cue generic messageboard meme image. You know the one I'm talking about.) It's silly and it brings to mind Vonnegut's quip that "electronic communities build nothing."

It is noise that makes me unhappy and I am much happier keeping my head down and working. Newspaper's spending good money hiring a programmer like me, so why don't I help them out a bit instead of biding my time with the online circlejerk?

Folks interested in some actual commentary on the Michael Jackson "old versus new media" circus should read this excellent blog post by Wendy Parker and this L.A. Times column by Tim Rutten. Chances are I'd have repeated everything they'd said.

I need to find something better to talk about for next time; may be Django and programming-related or a "recommended reading" of the blogs I read and my sheer resistance to using an RSS reader. (I middle-click that "blogs" folder several times per day.) Maybe. Who knows?

Woah there.

2009-06-23T02:27:18-06:00

Let's play catch up, shall we? I got through the end of the school year—and bid bittersweet goodbyes to close friends graduating. I spent a week on the road, with highlights in Colorado and Utah. And now, I'm in beautiful Spokane, continuing my work at the Spokesman-Review. Not technically an intern this time around, but with a mere three-month stay, I might as well be.

Let's count the number of times I've written on this site since I last stepped foot in Spokane. One, two, three, four, and this should be five. And how many months has it been? (Ten.)

About this time last year I decided to try and "go legit." Trim the amount of minutiae I'd write and leave only "professional" material, you know? Since then I've only occasionally written—and due to a strange sense of apprehension, rarely have I posted any of it.

I've been asking myself exactly what I want out of my blog on the internet. I've been tweeting semi-regulraly, but I've yet to really enjoy limiting myself to 140 characters—anybody that has read my blog before the drought and anybody that has gotten an e-mail from me knows that I'm pretty uh, verbose. And that apprehension and lack of updating has been gnawing away at me, little by little.

Admittedly, this drought tied in with some intern drama and discussion that happened around this time last year, a lot of it having to do with some "inside baseball" talk of newsroom affairs. It didn't happen here, near, or anywhere involving anyone associated with me, but this whole bit with Jessica DaSilva hit a bit too close to home for me: I, too, was a newspaper intern at the time, in a newsroom constantly bracing itself for an uneasy future. It was an okay time to learn to bite my tongue.

So I had this seed of doubt planted in my head for a while now, unsure of exactly what I wanted to write or what I could write. In some side writing, I jested that the overwhelming connectedness of the Internet was causing hysteria regarding what you could get away with saying or having online. In school, a lot of teachers preached the double-edged sword of "you really need to be in social media," but "you really need to keep it all super professional." You got told about Twitter, but you were also told to try and sterilize your Facebook profile.

But, I counter: if I'm going to be social media "friends" with folks and if I'm really going to operate profiles and a Web site that employers and the public can see—well, I'd rather have them judge me on the honest fucking truth than some high and tight face I'm trying to put on. Mostly because I realize that:

I trust my judgement. As it is, I don't regret a lot of things I've done and I think I'm mature and steady enough to not make a complete ass of myself. (Although there's a particular frightening photo of me on Facebook that seriously invokes Rufio from Hook... I dare you to find it.)
I'm a terrible liar. That is, I'm not very good at it and (as I have recently found out) I'd rather be dead silent than play a face.
…I had other reasons, but I guess one and two seal the deal in my mind.

I'll admit, I'm unusually deliberate and self-conscious, but aren't most of us raised to be responsible for ourselves anyway?

Okay then.

See, we're all human, we all grow up, we all make mistakes. Blogging here doesn't mean I'm going to be perfect all the time—more likely, it should be, in itself, a timeline of what I've done, where I've traveled, what I've thought, how I've grown. It's been a personal blog, it's still a personal blog, and while I'd love to see it do something else, them's the breaks for now.

I've missed writing only somewhat—since I've obviously been writing all along. What I've really missed is being Mike Tigas when I write in the open.

The worst thing you can do to a career in media—especially in this so-called Information Age—is forget who you are and that you have the ability to voice your own distinct opinion. Watch what you say, yes. But be yourself and say what you need to say. There's a reason why everyone and their mother has a blog: it's easy to do it.

Think I just fell into the habit of over-thinking it, 's all.

I used to be a lot better at this blogging thing. Here's my way of saying (mostly to myself) that I'm back at square one and I'm willing to give it another shot. (God, doesn't that sound like a relationship "make-up talk" right there…)

And I swear, I will stop writing in my verbose, self-serving tone as soon as I can. Okay, I might be lying on this one.

Amends

2009-05-18T02:38:23-06:00

This coming week is that dreaded "transition" week that I've put off thinking about. (I said months ago that I'd wing it. Aside from places picked out, I'm fairly golden with wide-open plans.) I'm going to pack up here in Columbia, go back to St. Louis for a day, then drive to and spend the rest of the week in Denver. Next Monday, I'll work my way up to Spokane, where I'll be living for the summer, once again.

I didn't graduate this weekend and I'm entirely okay with that. What really does bother me is the fact that I've spent most of the past week ill and bedridden. (Quick fact: I slept around 18 out of the 24 hours of Friday.)

What bothers me is that I'd considered this past week the last week, of my life as I knew it.

In hindsight, I can't remember a more stressful month since I moved to college. There are few things more stressful to me than the idea of closure, fast approaching. I like open-endedness. I like saying "see you later" instead of "goodbye." But what bothers me more than closure proper is poor closure or no closure at all when something comes to an end. (Example: any shitty, non-resolute but non-cliffhanger movie or TV show ending.)

Look, I used to live by the mantra of never regret anything (hand-in-hand with taking responsibility for everything you do) but lately I've regretted how far I've drifted from my friends here in Columbia. The popular conversation topic with me as of late has been "I haven't seen you in forever! What have you been up to?"

To which I'd normally reply with something about work or school. But the honest answer would really be more along the lines of "I don't know."

I've had the past year slip out from under me and I'm sorry about that.

If I never see you again, I wish you the best of luck. But I really, truly hope I see you again.

Eulogy on a student center

2009-05-11T01:05:58-06:00

It's been an arduous Spring in a lot of ways, but I think the toughest part has been the near-graduation nostalgia that many folks close to me are experiencing. The trips down memory lane, the old emotional baggage, the skeletons in the closet... Come on, you know what I'm talking about.

I won't say I wasn't affected by it, but I'd like to stubbornly believe that I got by just fine until last week.

Last week on the Mizzou campus, part of the ol' Brady Commons was torn down, so that construction could begin on Phase 2 of the new student center replacing it.

Although I'm not graduating this month like I want to, I feel like the loss of that building still signifies the end of an era of my life as it stands in Columbia, Missouri. It's an era that has seen my life cross paths with that building over the past six years--often to great effect. Yes, it's just a building, just another stupid building on campus. But the loss of that stupid building just feels like a sign, telling me that my time here has mostly passed, that I should probably get going soon.

Before college, I had the privilege of going to the Missouri Scholars Academy, Missouri's version of what some other states call a governor's school. Those of us taking part endearingly called it "nerd camp."

Over the course of the three-week program--so packed with activity that I still recall it as if I were there for months--I met a lot of interesting people and made a lot of life-changing friends. And (I guess) most importantly to me, I met and befriended my future first girlfriend there.

We had a little group that would go over to T.A. Brady's and play DDR during our free afternoons. We weren't allowed off-campus, so the Subway in T.A. Brady's was often the secondary meal option to the (then-newly remodeled) Mark Twain Hall cafeteria.

Two years later, I came back to Mizzou for college. Considering it was not even on my list until after Spring Break (read: after scholarship deadlines), it was what you could definitely call a brash and last-minute change of heart. I came to this town, naturally because I had plenty of friends going, but also because I'd grown up in the town (until third grade), and because of the whole Missouri Scholars Academy thing. There were a lot of little things pulling me here, but I'm not sure I would have gone here if not for the spectacular three weeks I'd spent there, years ago.

I was only remotely interested in journalism at the time, with dreams of computer programming and cyber security and hacking and NSA cryptanalysis. Late in high school, I'd developed a lust for photography, but that was about the only thing journalism had on me--I didn't care for the form or the ethics or anything, I just liked taking pictures.

Along with a friend (and future roommate), I went to Brady Commons and attended a news meeting at the student paper, The Maneater; I was looking to be a photographer. Just something to do for fun, so I could get better at it and hell--they paid you!

By the end of my freshman year, I was a journalism major.

Over the course of the next two years, I met Ron Jeremy, started to care way too much about work, failed out of school, got back in, went from being a photographer to being Online Editor to just being a programmer again... And somehow all of this (via an alum at the New York Times noticing me) launched me to my current job as a Web developer at The Spokesman-Review.

That final year, our online team turned a (supposedly) one-off podcast experiment into a standard feature. And (after three years of development hell) we launched a new Web site. I can't tell you how many times we'd stayed at the office 'til sunrise--even after the paper went to the printer and everybody else had left. There was a lot of mojo in that office, something driving us to work on these awesome things to our own detriment. I had never been so proud of anything I'd previously worked on.

For a few semesters, I joked that I lived in that building more than I lived at my apartment. And it was kind of true.

I'm not joking.

During my heyday at the Maneater, I started taking darkroom classes at the Craft Studio just down the hall from the production office. Started revisiting T.A. Brady's regularly with a newly-formed DDR Club. There was the Filipino Student Association down there, too.

It's not like I intentionally sought out things to do within the building, but rather, it was just coincidental that everything I did for a couple years as an undergrad took place there. (Which, I suppose, is just good use of a good student center.)

I've met so many people through that place and I've made so many friends. I've been through drama, I've had a lot of fun, and I've had my share of all-nighters in there. And while I'd love to say that it was in there that I found a place where I belonged, I think the more striking thing to me today is that most of these connections have far outlasted the battered remains of the old building.

And that makes the nostalgia a lot less painful.

T.A. Brady's is gone. The Maneater office moved across campus. The Craft Studio moved down the street.

It's time here has come and gone. And I'm not quite gone yet, but I can sympathize since my time here is running short. (Twenty-one credit hours, give or take a couple.)

Buildings come and go and the beating heart of the university will go on. (In all the hustle and bustle, I'm sure a lot of folks who live off campus don't even know that it's gone.) But to me, in a lot of ways, Brady Commons was the beating heart of the Mizzou campus.

Indeed, the in-construction branding for the new student center dubs it "The Heart of Mizzou." I hope that someday, someone else can look on that building and understand what the old one meant to me.

My first relationship, my college choice, my career path were all (in)directly influenced here. Plain weird when I wonder how life does that, but so it goes.

Thanks, Brady Commons.

Facebook blowback blows

2009-03-19T05:00:00-06:00

or, "Facebook, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden" (this is a terrible reference)

You know why I'm sick of this Facebook redesign (and every Facebook change, ever)? The inevitable and inexorable whining.

Yes, I realize that whining about people that are whining is standard-issue hypocritical. But I'd like to believe that I'm putting forth a more reasonable case than the thousands of one-line comments to the "New Layout Vote" Facebook app.

People cried "stalker feed" at the introduction of news feeds. People hated tabbed profile pages (I loved it, I was sick of all the app boxes) as much as people hated the loss of "Facebook guy." Yadda yadda yadda. Facebook seems to go through it's period every six months or so.

But for some reason, Facebook has been surpassing MySpace in active users and traffic. (And it's still getting bigger.)

In the end, we'll all just deal with it and move on, because the most common suggestion ("go back to the old one") is literally a step back and a waste of Facebook's time and money. It's coherent enough and I think, with time they'll make it work (like every design change they've made). The naysayers can have their fill, but this is not a branding disaster that Facebook should backpedal upon. (Aside: the new name for Sci Fi Channel should be.)

But! Instead of simply bitching about the whole blowback overreaction—I got heat for this last time Facebook made changes—I challenge folks to "put up or shut up" and actually develop a coherent argument against the changes. This is how sick I am of seeing that app and those statuses on my home page.

Keep reading. Really.

Speaking of, I wonder who runs that one Facebook app, because it's obviously not Facebook themselves.

That screenshot image on the app's page, comes from one of those previews on the official Facebook blog. The ol' "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" images on the app page come from 74.55.245.18. That IP reverses to "elnexus.com," according to samspade.org. Just a regular ol' site that sells computers. That domain, in turn, shows a private registration as opposed to a company name or contact. (Yes, I'm aware I'm a little crazy, digging into the reverse DNS record and the domain whois records and all. It's that hackin', web developin' side of me.)

Hrmm.

Oddness aside, the overwhelmingly negative response indicated by that app is (in my eyes) severely based on response bias. As in, most of the results come out negative because dislike of the change solicits a stronger vocal response than the positive opinion of a user who likes or tolerates it. There aren't a lot of people who love it enough to voice that about it, leading to the lower positive response percentage. Everybody else on the middle-ground to positive end of the scale won't care enough and won't care for your app invites.

So, a challenge. Don't like the design? Create an opinion of more than 20 words. Hate the design a lot? Quit Facebook. All of your stuff will still be there if you decide to come back. "Put up or shut up," or "shut up and jam," if you will. If people are still talking about this redesign when my Spring Break is over (March 29), then I'll delete my Facebook account for at least two weeks from that date.

It's part "I guess the new iteration is that bad," part "I need to get away from the whiners," part "here's an excuse to deactivate my account again."

Actually, scratch that. I'm going to deactivate my account come Spring Break (midday Friday) and we'll see what happens from there. I just remembered how liberating it is to disconnect from that and reconnect with everything else in life. (How many hours do you use Facebook or MySpace or Twitter, eh?)

I've used this quote before and someday, I swear I'll write something really meaningful around it:

Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.
—Kurt Vonnegut

So maybe let's (you, me, whoever) stop complaining about some intangible pixels and words on a screen for a little while. Maybe I shouldn't have bothered to write this and maybe we shouldn't care so much about minutiae in our technological niceties, after all. There are better things to worry about and better ways to waste our time.

Maybe.

One week with Windows 7

2009-02-20T02:47:31-06:00

I like Macs, I really do.

But there's something about having 18 GB of music as FLAC files (which iTunes, due to Apple's proprietary ways, will never support) that keeps me from wanting to make the plunge. That and a legitimate, PC-only copy of Adobe CS3 Design Premium that I paid for. And those good ol' PC games. Among plenty of other things.

So what's the next-best thing? Non-stop bleeding-edge PC software, that's what. Last week, I broke down and decided to install Windows 7 on my main computer.

(Please don't follow my example without thinking it through. I essentially have a software deathwish with all the nightly/beta versions of software I use—my e-mail program is called "Shredder," for crying out loud. I have an external hard drive and Amazon S3 that I backup to for a reason.)

tl;dr summary version: Windows 7 does not suck, takes some awesome interface cues from OS X, would buy again A+++++++++++

Interested parties, read on.

At first glance, the Windows 7 beta installs and operates just like Vista does. I can't say too much about the performance (I'm running on awesome hardware), but I will note a few of the more noticeable ways that Windows 7's user interface moves forward from Vista.

One webcomic I read lightly noted that Windows 7 is "like Vista, only minus the huge amounts of suck, and they decided to stick awesome in all the places where the suck used to be. Also, puppies." Minus that puppies part, that's pretty spot-on.

First things first: User Account Control

I figured I should put this at the top since it was essentially the biggest public gripe against Vista.

The infamous UAC prompts are a lot nicer on the intake. There's a lot less "alert fatigue" by default, as Windows only "shades" the desktop under certain circumstances, normally presents only one prompt at a time, and prompts a whole lot less than before—all significant improvements over Vista.

It's a lot less annoying than Vista and probably near the same level as OS X—although I'm going to give this one to Windows 7 since alerts don't always come looking for an administrator password.

Biggest, perhaps best change: Taskbar

Nothing else in Windows screams "I want to be like a Mac" as much as the new taskbar in Windows 7. The ol' window title stripes—from every Windows version since Windows 95—are gone and are now replaced by a combined taskbar/quicklaunch area that Microsoft has nicknamed the "Superbar."

Icons work in a very Mac Dock-like fashion, in which running programs will show up in the taskbar, but are joined by the ability to "pin" items to the taskbar, essentially creating a permanent shortcut to that program.

I repeat: it's very OS X. In terms of usability, it's essentially a variation of the Mac Dock. And that's not a bad thing. I tend to have way too many windows open at once, so this UI style appears a lot less cluttered than vintage Windows.

Main differences from Mac are the addition of the window preview and what Microsoft nicknamed "hot track coloring," where an icon's background color (on hover) matches the icon's most dominant color—both of which can be seen in the images above. (In cases with a low-saturation or greyscale icon, I've noticed Windows default to a theme-dependent color.)

Another nice feature is the "Window Peek." Not only does the taskbar give you a window preview, but if you hover over one of them (and if the window isn't minimized), Windows will hide all other windows to show you that one.

Everything else I liked

Drivers are entirely the same as Vista's. No breaking changes here, I got up and running nice and quick.
The Windows 7 desktop operates just like Vista's, with the added ability to select multiple wallpapers and make a "slide show" of your desktop. Yes, Mac OS X does this already. Nice touches that go beyond the Mac method include the ability to select specific wallpapers to slideshow (versus OS X which can only select whole directories) and an added "Next desktop background image" option when you right-click the desktop
Like XP and Vista, you can choose to hide system tray icons (those little things next to the clock). With Windows 7, I've found the ability to actually click and drag icons into the "hiding area." I'm only vaguely sure this is new, but it's still nice to mention.

Things that did not impress

"Aero Shake"—If you drag a window and shake it, all other windows become minimized. I don't see how that's necessarily useful at all, outside of people who get distracted by windows in their periphery.
"Desktop Peek"—like that "Window Peek" feature, if you hover over the "show desktop" strip at the end of the taskbar, all the windows go transparent and you can see the desktop. Great. The moment your mouse leaves that area, it goes back to normal. You might as well just click that button. I don't see the novelty in showing all the window borders and the desktop without being able to actually use the desktop directly. (Caveat: I don't like widgets, I don't use Mac's Dashboard and I don't use Windows Gadgets. I could see how a "peek" could possibly be useful for that, but I'm still not sold.)
"Libraries"—or, "yet another way for you to find 'My Documents.'" No, really, it's nice that there's an aggregation of all the shared "My Documents," "My Music," and etc. folders you have available to you. I just don't see it very useful since I don't know anybody that uses Windows sharing on their home directories like that.