Author: gulley

All independent bookstores will soon vanish. I know this because Wordsworth Books recently closed. This was a well-respected independent book seller in a terrific location in the middle of Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. That’s got to be one of the most bookety-book-book places on the planet. And still! Ka-boom! There’s just no fighting it. I recently read that the entire American pastime of reading is going to be outsourced to India over the next five years.

One of the reasons bookstores are dying is that it’s so easy to comparison shop. These days you can literally pick up any book in a bookstore, scan the barcode into your cellphone, find a much cheaper copy, and ship it to your house within about thirty seconds. For a small additional fee, you can have it shipped to India to be read for you.

The comparison site isbn.nu appears to be a good agnostic site that compares most of the major places you might consider buying a book. Here, for example, is a search for a book about the Apollo space program that’s been out of print for some time. The URLs for isbn.nu are pleasingly short: http://isbn.nu/0786260033. If isbn.nu does a broad comparison shopping job, Pricenoia is impressively narrow in scope. It compares the prices for the same book at every Amazon location around the world and archives the resulting trends. Here’s a link to a book about Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson. Notice how the trend lines jump around. The volatility is surprising.

I am incredibly irritated with my iPod right now.

I just threw a big party (my 40th birthday party, in fact) and I wanted to have good music for dancing. My wife and I briefly considered hiring a DJ, but that was just too expensive for the size of the party. Anyway, these days iPods make it so easy to set up your own playlist, that I decided just to show up with a Bose and an iPod and press play. So I stayed up late a few nights setting up a dance playlist for my iPod. Apple’s iTunes store was so easy to use that I bought most of my music there. That’s right, I actually legitimately paid for all my music, mostly because Apple made it convenient for me to find and buy the tunes I wanted. So far so good.

The bad part came when I was at the party and realized that I didn’t have half the music I expected to see on my playlist. In fact, none of the songs I JUST PAID FOR got transferred to my iPod. There had been no hint of trouble; they played perfectly on my computer. My playlist was in good shape, and in the past the music on my computer always successfully transferred to my iPod. But this time it SILENTLY FAILED to transfer my newly and duly purchased goods. Not a peep of warning or error. I didn’t test the iPod ahead of time (I will now!), and I would have been truly screwed had I not thought to ask some friends to bring their iPods as backup in case mine broke for some reason. In fact, it did break, but not because I dropped it. It broke because Apple chose to break it. The reason Apple broke it is that they keep playing around with their digital rights management, and the best way to keep you upgrading to the latest lawyer-tweaked software is to stop you from playing newly-purchased music on older versions of the software.

The disturbing thought here is that you will never own information again. You will only lease it, and since you are forever on the upgrade treadmill, the lease can be revoked against your will at any time. Songs, cartoons, newspaper articles, jokes forwarded by email, horoscopes, fortune cookies, all these things will have digital leashes leading back to their masters. Imagine someone at Apple blocking your ability to listen to your own music because they believe you did something naughty. That’s not a farfetched possibility.

Here are two scatalogically entitled entries from BoingBoing by righteously potty-mouthed EFF maven Cory Doctorow on this topic, one recent and one from a year ago.

• Apple to iPod owners: “Eat shit and die”
• Apple force-feeds customers shit, calls it sunshine

For the last two nights, about the time I would generally use for blogging, I have been transfixed for an hour or more by Keyhole, a program billed as the “Ultimate Interface to the Planet.” They may even deserve that hyperbolic tagline. It’s an incredibly entertaining product.

I am amazed at the riches offered by the new breed of cheap satellite imagery. In the context of the war in Iraq, I blogged last year about two satellite imagery companies, DigitalGlobe and Space Imaging. Both of these are nifty (Space Imaging is currently sporting a nice zoomy swoopy view of Fallujah, that happy hamlet on Euphrates), but Keyhole dances far far ahead of these the same way Google danced away from Alta Vista in the early days of search (it’s only fitting, then, that Google recently bought Keyhole).

Seeing minutely detailed images of Saddam’s old palaces is one thing, but Keyhole has some tricks that will make your jaw drop. For one thing, you can fly smoothly and effortlessly to any point on the globe. I’ve flown to Martha’s Vineyard to see a friend’s house. I’ve located my dorms in college and grad school. After you get a little practice, it really feels like you have godlike power. You can fly to your parent’s place or measure the distance between any two points. My parent’s house is 650 miles away. It’s 9.22 miles from my front door to where I park my car at work. And I can tell you that it’s exactly 23.9 miles as the crow flies along the Boston marathon route from Hopkinton Town Center to the Boyleston Street finish line (Lat 42.229352 Long -71.518983, give or take a few inches). Does this matter? I don’t know, but it sure is fun.

In the last twenty years, introductory language instruction has improved significantly through the efforts of people like Dartmouth’s John Rassias. Learning a new language is more fun, more effective, and faster than it used to be. But beyond this, technology has provided some amazing extra help in the last few years through everything from computer-based drills and flash cards to reading the news and listening to the radio in absolutely any language in the world.

Years ago I used to try to buy a copy of Paris Match magazine before a trip to France, just to have some vocabulary to chew on. My French isn’t really very good, but it always helped to get my brain ready for the shock of travel. Now, of course, you can just go to the Paris Match website (careful, it’s annoying) or tune in to French TV. Beyond this, it had occurred to me in the past few years that someone must have made it possible to arrange for language pen pals by Internet. And so they have. A site called My Language Exchange will arrange for you to meet a friend matched to your level in the language of your choice. And since that person will necessarily have a computer, a free Skype phone conversation is only seconds away. It’s an ideal way to learn. I wish this had been available when I was in high school. Then again, I’d probably be wasting all my time playing Half-Life and Doom instead.

I learned about My Language Exchange from a thread on the kuro5hin site called How to Learn a Language. It’s a good article, and the comments are well-informed and entertaining, too. Through these, I found the Kanji Clinic and a fun article called Kanji tattoos are primarily for Western eyes. I suppose they are, but I prefer to think of bizarre Kanji tattoos on Americans as our revenge for bizarre Engrish t-shirt slogans.

When I go through my referral logs every now and again, I always find several searches for “dog tranquilizers” leading people to my site. My nephew Ben, famous Elkin high school graduate and salutatorian, is responsible for this. (Although now that I think about it, this post is going to draw people for the same reason. At least I didn’t mention “dog tranquilizers” and “Britney Spears” in the same post. … Doh!)

Anyway, Ben recently sent me a link to a fascinating story about the software development deathmarch behind the recently released (and much hyped) game Half-Life 2. Ben says:

One of the things I’m interested in right now is the video game
industry, which has been recently edging out the movie industry in
terms of yearly revenue. Anyway, here’s a story that isn’t
necessarily that interesting, but the similarity between it and a
typical hollywood “movie out of control” story.

Here’s the article: The Final Hours of Half-Life 2. As a software developer, this story hits close to home. Predicting when you are going to be done writing software is incredibly hard, and the pressure surrounding a high-profile game must be miserable. The article (which is looong, by the way) makes it sound brutal. It’s just one of the games chronicled by Gamespot writer Geoff Keighly as part of his Behind the Games series. Thanks for the link, Ben!

I have the self discipline to keep myself from peeking in a friend’s medicine cabinet, even their liquor cabinet, but when it comes to bookshelves, I have to hover and peruse. What does this person like? Do they have books I have read? Books I want to read? Strange books? Runs on fiction by a single author?

Flickr is a photo service that lends itself to socializing by sharing annotated images. One Flickr image descriptor, or tag, that has taken on a life of its own is the “bookshelf” tag. Follow the link and you’ll see lots of pictures of people’s bookshelves. Some of them are even annotated with little callouts. Some are organized by color. Of course, the books you read and the books you show people are often two very different things. Predictably, some bookshelves are pretentious. Have you really picked up that book since your philosophy class? Did you even read it then?

I love shelves lined with puzzling books, disturbing books, tempting books. Looking at all these pictures makes me want to go organize my books and take some snapshots. Then again, moving books is work; building a virtual version of your library may be the next best thing. A company called Delicious Monster has cooked up something (for the Mac only right now) called Delicious Library that lets you create virtual shelves filled your favorite bookly booty, CDs, and DVDs. I wouldn’t mind having something like this, but this particular company seems to have swallowed a few too many wacky pills. So I’ll wait.

Playing around with a new look for the site definitely makes clear the value of Cascading Style Sheets. With the help of some of Jesse Ruderman’s excellent web development bookmarklets like Edit Styles and Ancestors, you can find a site you like, grab (steal) some of the styles, and painlessly put them in place on your own site. Another good resource is the EditCSS plugin for Firefox, but it stopped working (at least for now) in Firefox 1.0. In fact, I just noticed that EditCSS is based on Ruderman’s bookmarklet. What an incestuous place the web is!

Before the noise of the election dies away completely, you should take a look at some of these electoral maps. They’ve been showing up all over the place, but I would direct your attention in particular to the purple county-by-county map near the bottom of this page: Tim Pierce – maps maps maps maps maps. Anything that smooths out the awful abrupt contrast between the rising red tide and the blue periphery makes me feel a little bit better about the future.

In other election-related news, the George Bush and John Kerry pages on the famously promiscuous Wikipedia joined a small list of pages that had to be “locked down” (made off limits to editing by the public) due to editorial abuse by patrons. Bush’s picture was vandalized multiple times, and even the Wikipedia, it seems, has its limits. Some pages are such hot topics that the editors nail the door shut for an unspecified time. In achieving this distinction, Bush and Kerry join such company as Ariel Sharon, Henry Kissinger, and Jane Fonda. Here’s the article about it in the NY Times: Mudslinging Weasels Into Online History.