Looking behind, looking ahead

A friend passed away this weekend– it was sudden and fast. We hope she didn’t suffer too much. She was a good woman who had already suffered and struggled too much in her short lifetime and yet still managed to be so sweet and nice and funny and…

I wonder what happens when we pass away… I don’t mean if there’s a heaven or a hell or anything like that. I mean, right after we pass away. Do we look back at our earthly lives and the corporeal world behind us? As I get older, more people I know are starting to pass away, suddenly or after short or long illnesses. I always picture them watching over us, but I wonder if they really are. Is what waits for us in the afterlife so compelling that we can easily let go of what’s behind us? Part of me hopes that they won’t forget us, but part of me hopes that they do as they look forward to so much better before them.

Protecting bloggers

I’ll eventually get back to my posts on safe blogging, but here’s an interesting item: a new site has been created to provide information to bloggers who have been threatened, punished or otherwise disadvantaged because of they have posted on their blogs:

Committee to Protect Bloggers

Creating content

A friend of mine once said that if you look for something on the Web and if it’s not there, it’s your personal responsibility to start a page about it– and it just dawned on me that Wikipedia lets the average person do just that! Look something up in this encyclopedia and if there’s nothing on the topic, create your own page. Brilliant! I’m a big fan of Wikipedia (and all the criticism around it is pretty much from the usual people that don’t understand emerging technologies) and wikis in general, and while using wikis in team environments, etc. is great for collaboration, Wikipedia is a really great concept because it’s on such a large scale and takes advantage of collective knowledge.

The other nice thing is that it really takes advantage of the whole “web” concept– you could look up one topic, start clicking through keyword links, follow some evolutionary path and eventually, you might stumble onto something that doesn’t have an entry, but that you want to educate the world on. Case in point: my first Wikipedia contribution.

More John Mayer missed connections

Unbelievable! Right after some of us had left XYZ yesterday, John Mayer walked in to talk with some Apple people! (My boss and our Apple rep happened to still be in the restaurant and spotted him.) Like I said, I don’t know if I would have actually wanted to meet him in person for fear of sounding like an asshole, but the irony!

Bay Area public transportation, missed John Mayer connections, and MacWorld 2005

It’s been a long day and I’ve still got more to do, but some reflections:

First off, Bay Area public transportation: If environmentalists around the country want to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, the first place to start is encouraging the improvement of public transportation systems. Case in point: you know why there’s so much traffic in Northern California? Because using public transportation is such a freakin’ hassle. Granted, my lifelong model of public transportation has been one of the best in the country– New York City– but still. First off, there’s multiple transit systems– BART, CalTrain, Muni, VTA, etc.– and there’s no unified way to use these systems. Because they each cover whatever weird area of the Bay Area that they do (BART covers the East Bay and between the East Bay and San Francisco, CalTrain covers between San Francisco and all along the West Bay down to San Jose, etc.), you have to switch between systems often to get around and a) switching between systems is not always easy and b) there’s no unified pass/ticket system (you have to buy different tickets/passes for each one). And on top of all that, the trains and buses don’t run that often (or that late) and it almost always takes significantly longer to take public transportation, so it’s not that convenient either. Basically, the likelihood of you getting screwed over because you missed the last train, couldn’t find parking, didn’t buy the right ticket, etc. is so high that most people, even with high gas prices and lots of traffic, will opt to just drive themselves wherever they need to go.

For example: this morning’s attempt to get to MacWorld– my big plan was to get into San Francisco around noon, walk to the Moscone Center, pick up my badge, and then tool around until we (Stanford ResComp folks) were to meet our Apple rep at a nearby restaurant. I live right near a major CalTrain station, but when I got there this morning, the entire parking lot was packed full. So, I drove up to the next station– this parking lot had space, but the parking ticket machine only took quarters and I didn’t have enough. So, at this point, I’ve given up on trying to get on a 10:30 train up to the city. I go back out, run some errands, get some more quarters, and return to the station. So now, I can buy a parking ticket, park my car, and get onto the train. Of course, while walking through the passenger tunnel to the other side of the tracks, I almost wiped out on the stairs (it has been raining constantly these past few weeks) and seriously pulled something in my leg.

Now, this part is genuinely my fault: Stanford has a cool deal where staff get this free “EcoPass” deal to take public transportation for free. It’s this little sticker they put on your ID card. However, I forgot that it goes by calendar year (versus academic) and hey, it’s 2005. Of course, a lot of people forget things like this, so there was a grace period, but that ended, conveniently, yesterday. So, I got kicked off the train by the time I got to the next stop, had to buy a ticket, wait 30 minutes for the next train, and then get back on. So, basically, it took me like an hour and a half to travel about 10 miles and then something like two and a half hours total to get into San Francisco. If I had driven, I could have gotten there in about thirty to forty-five minutes and paid about the same amount in parking as I ended up paying in parking at the train station, train tickets, and cab fare (since I wasn’t up to walking with my bum leg and was now running late). The only reason I stuck it through was because I needed to get some reading done on the train. This is the only real value of using public transportation in the Bay Area– it may take longer, but at least you can be more productive while you’re commuting.

Second, missed John Mayer connections: so, I finally did make it to San Francisco and found out that John Mayer had appeared at the keynote this morning. Unbe-freakin’-lievable! I have been obsessing over John Mayer and his music lately and then he turns up at MacWorld to help Steve Jobs demo GarageBand. Of course, the rest of the day was spent intermittently looking around and wondering if he might just be hanging out somewhere and would turn up around the corner. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t want to meet him in that situation anyway– I mean, there’s nothing really spectacular you can say (”Er, I really like your music…”) and I’m not really into getting autographs (aside from the fact that I didn’t really have anything for him to sign), so, I would probably just feel like an asshole if I met him. But alas, it would have been cool to see him during the keynote. I am going to have to figure out how to get a stinkin’ video of it.

And finally, MacWorld 2005: as for the conference itself, we only went around the Exhibit Hall and as expected, it was more like iPodWorld than MacWorld. There were some interesting things– the new iMac, the new Mac Mini– but in the end, it showed that what Apple does well is software and consumer electronics products. OS X. The iLife series. The iPod, in all its forms (including the iPod Shuffle). And of course, they’re great at design– the Apple hardware does just look really cool and slick (although, I fear it will also look dated really soon). But Apple continues to hold on to the Motorola chip and their architecture and despite what Macheads might say, I’m still not convinced that Apple hardware is intrinsically, in the very guts, any better than Intel hardware. I mean, plenty of technical folks have made the clear argument as to the advantages of AMD over Intel, but the Motorola argument isn’t that compelling and in the end, Apple could deliver the same value and innovation to the market with different hardware inside. Nobody buys a Mac because they want the Apple insides necessarily. They buy a Mac because they want the operating system, the iLife software, and the integration with all of the Apple peripherals, and they go along with the Apple insides because all of that will only run on those insides. Will they ever abandon it? No, probably never. It’s what makes them who they are and switching to Intel or AMD hardware, no matter how sensible, would symbolize giving in, giving up in some way (although taking Microsoft’s money to bail them out didn’t seem to bother them that much). And nobody really cares either way because as the underdog, we let them do it their way and cheer them on. But let’s imagine a world where 95% of the world’s computers were Macs– would we still hold them to the same anti-trust standards that we hold Microsoft to? I mean, if their software only runs on their hardware and they were to suddenly have an overwhelmingly large share of such an important market, would we still just look the other way? The iTunes user who has already filed a suit against Apple may be on to something that will grow to haunt the company as they gain more success and even though we always like to think of Apple as the “nice” computer company, their actions against ThinkSecret shows that when challenged, they’ll play just as dirty as the Evil Empire.

Serendipity: downloading comics

Coincidentally, after recently reading so much about comic books and the comic book industry, an item is circulating around the net on the issue of downloading comics versus buying the paper versions. Comic books enter the world of file-sharing! But of course, here’s one situation in which the rationale of keeping digital copies is particularly compelling– comic books, not being in a digital, non-degrading format, suffer greatly from use, both physically and in monetary value. One fan justified downloading comics by noting that it’s one way to reread your favorite comic books without having to damage the originals. Read more:

Downloading comics: threat or menace?

Comic book heroes and history

Well, the bookshelves are starting to fill up. Latest on the list: Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones. When I first picked it up, the colorful book jacket made me think it was a fictionalized account about comic books, the comic book industry, and comic book heroes in the same vein as Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. However, instead, I was treated to an exploration into the history of the comic book industry, including the publishing industry from which it was born. The book generally follows the careers and lives of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, the creators of Superman.

In hopes of evening out the DC-centric book, I also picked up Ronin Ro’s Tales to Astonish which focuses more on the life of Jack Kirby and, by extension, Stan Lee. To be honest, not as well written, but still an interesting read if you want to learn about how Marvel and some of Marvel’s most famous characters came to be. Next up at some point will probably be The Comic Book Makers, written by Joe Simon, one of Kirby’s early collaborators, a co-creator of Captain America and the first editor-in-chief of the company that would become Marvel, and his son Jim Simon (who has also worked in comics).

There’s so much hype around comic books again lately with the success of movies like Spider-Man and X-Men, but I’ll say this– I wonder how many people realize how profoundly comic books and the comic book industry have affected popular culture? Think about how many movies, television shows, and more are based on characters that were born over forty, fifty, sixty years ago. The stories in those cheap paper books would go on to shape filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, but, more importantly and among other things, how generations of people would think about good, evil, and all the shades of gray in between. And within the industry itself, it’s a sometimes inspirational, sometimes tragic story– they were, for the most part, poor children of immigrants, struggling kids from the streets, who received little credit or compensation but, in the end, gave birth to an industry that pervades every corner of our culture and our lives. The overarching theme of the aforementioned books, rightly so, is how these comic book artists and writers came to create such incredible, such magical, such wonderful things, but received so little compensation or credit and in many ways, we continue to do this in the back of our minds as we make fun of geeky comic book collectors and fail to realize how much the comic book industry has influenced business, art, literature, culture and, in general, our consciousness.

Paranoia

After putting away the file-sharing software for a while, I took it back out to download some legal material: recordings of live shows by trade friendly bands. Specifically, I’m currently obsessing over John Mayer, although I used to do a fair amount of tape trading (tapes!) for Dave Matthews Band shows.

Of course, although it’s perfectly legal when done according to each band’s/artist’s trading policies, just using BitTorrent on my computer makes me nervous because of my employer’s current policy on copyright complaints (for staff, three strikes you’re fired and my home network is currently on their network). Can the music industry really think it’s good to make its customers this paranoid, this scared?

In any case, if you’re interested, check out bt.etree.org, the community tracker site for etree.org and get connected. And remember, don’t be a leech!