Two Cents and a Thousand Words

Home for a few days. Thanksgiving went well, and I’m finally starting to get organized.

One thing I’ve noticed about myself over the years is that I have to be organized to be successful and feel “normal”. A lot of my life’s been in disarray lately due to the amount of stuff I’ve been doing; I’ve been trying to make a conscious effort to organize the dorm room and my computers.

Today’s task was going through the files I’ve kept for my Internet sites over the years. Looking back it’s clearer to see how much I’ve improved than I thought ever possible; it’s also scary to see how much I’ve saved. I have folders for about 50 sites, ranging from ones that aren’t online anymore to ones that I’m designing in my head right now. Seeing that I had that many unique ideas for just web sites made my feelings lately somewhat tolerable. I just don’t have time right now to be creative, and that’s something I’ve missed for a while. Hopefully after I get things organized, I’ll be able to do some of that.

Strange as it seems, I’m hoping that I can do most of the creative work off of the computer. I’ve been talking about that a lot lately, I know. I want to do design on paper instead of on the computer; it makes me feel better. Over the last week or two I’ve actually wanted to get outside and bike or hike or do something else; it helps me creatively as well as physically. Again, it all comes down to having a few too many things on my mind at once.

I found the video to Cylob’s “Rewind” a couple days ago. It has talented young female martial artist Chloe Bruce and some really interesting/innovative choreography. On top of that, it’s one of those painfully catchy songs that I just need to find.

You don’t know how happy it makes me to say that.

I finished bumstock.com early this morning. For the next week, campus band information and MP3s will be available as part of a chance for students to vote for their favorite band. Soon it will have information about bands confirmed for the show as well as random other cool stuff. Check it out – it’s the first really multimedia site I’ve done.

I have to say I’m really mad at CNET right now – they’re taking away my favorite site.

About a month ago, a NYC company purchased emusic.com, a great service that allowed you to download all the MP3s you wanted from their catalog, legally, for a monthly fee. The new management is limiting the number of MP3s, and it hardly makes it worth signing up in my opinion (it’s still a good service). In addition, their “revolutionary” live music service is available for free at the Live Music Archive (my new favorite site).

CNET comes along a couple days ago and buys MP3.com. Let me stress how great of a site MP3.com really was. First of all, it showed how a lot of content could be contained on one site and be easily accessible. MP3.com sorted music into genres, made streams AND free downloads available for thousands of songs, and allowed users to make customized stream playlists for whatever music they wanted. I’ve discovered tons of great music there – Maroon 5, Yuko Ohigashi, Paul Spaeth… the list is almost endless. CNET gave artists and listeners a month to relocate to a new service. How generous.

I’m not sure if I’m sadder about losing this great resource or about losing the wonderful collection of services it offered; that was some BEAUTIFUL programming. It seriously reminds me of an amazon.com-like site.

CNET is (creatively… psh) going to turn MP3.com into a music download service. Congratulations, CNET, on being a sheep – if it works for Apple, Listen.com, Buy.com, Napster, MTV, Real.com… it can’t be wrong. This after they put 5 reasons not to buy an iPod story on the front page as the main headline of CNET.com.

All hope, thankfully, is not lost, though: Amazon has started a free download service, and there’s a good community at dmusic.com. I hope those can fill the void.

This week (well, the last month or two) has been crazy in a lot of ways. Most people would probably say it’s because I have a lot of things going at once, and that’s partially true. I don’t mind being busy at all – in fact, I enjoy it – but I hate doing lots of work for something that I don’t enjoy doing.

So my changeover from computer science to new media is complete, short of finishing my classes this and next semester. I’ve shifted dramatically from a technical to a creative slant on life, and though I love doing some very high-level programming, it mostly focuses on design and the display of data. Work for computer science this semester seems tougher than usual, and I think it’s because it’s hard for me to get out of the new media mindset. Most of the stuff I’m doing is based heavily in that.

Add that all to the fact that I really, really want to get away from computers as much as I can. I want to spend some time away from them, but a lot of my work – especially CS – involves them. Most of my other projects involve some amount of design that can be planned on paper and followed by a minimal amount of actual programming. I’m sick of staring at a screen to complete an entire project, and I feel that’s what I’d get if I majored in CS.

Today’s a weird day, too; I had a CS presentation this morning, but now it just gets better from now on. I have psych now and then English, both classes I really like. From there I head to Ayers for a meeting, and then I’m off to see Paranoid Social Club (for free!) tonight. After all that, it’s officially the weekend. Ahhh, sleep.

We launched the Pool last night to a group of students at Berkeley. The pre-launch festivities (ie, making sure all the code worked and fixing every last bug… heh… right…) lasted from around 4 PM to 2 AM for me. Everything (hopefully) works now, though, and it looks really good. More information as it develops.

Between stomping PHP bugs, I took some time to complete my latest project for technical writing: an instruction manual for the Pool. I’m really proud of how it turned out, and that’s a very good thing; I haven’t produced anything for a class that I’ve been really proud of for a long time.

Doing PHP and writing really made me realize how much I enjoyed both of them. During debugging the Pool team and I were rushing in and out of FirstClass chats, e-mailing, and talking face-to-face; frankly, it excited me. I love doing this kind of work. I love writing about this kind of work. Now I’m almost 100% sure that I’m glad I made the choice I did concerning new media.

On a somewhat related note, can anyone explain to me why I understand material in computer science class much better when I’ve had 4 hours of sleep? Maybe there is something to the old theory that sleep deprivation leads to better coding.

I must be popular now… looks like I finally got comment spam. So much love.

That reminds me… sometime in a few years when I have an free minute or two, I have to build in editing functions to this blog thingee.

Well, I don’t care. At least I finally got a comment. :-p

“PhotoLocale.com [working title]: browse photos by location” – from ideas.txt (2002/08/30 archived version), my list of ~20 site ideas that are on the back burner

My dad always likes to remind me that I thought of the idea of an Internet flea market way before Half.com came around. Unfortunately, I don’t remember that far back. Projects I’ve been thinking of lately, though, are still in my mind.

A couple years ago I came up with the idea of doing a geographic locator for photography. This idea was springboarded to the front of my mind during my trips around the state; I thought a geographic locator for where my photos were taken would be very convenient. I was thinking about Mount Desert Island (Acadia) as an example; it’d be great to click on a place and see the photos from around there.

Then my good friend Matt James and some friends developed UMaineWiFi for a new media class. Looking back at it, it’s almost the same thing; browsing content by location. The connection didn’t happen until I was browsing BoingBoing and saw a post about an artist’s travel log. By that time, I was talking to Matt and the rest of the Pool team about how it could be done for my trips. Then, this morning, I came across this at BB: a map of nighttime photographs. I held back my cry of “idea thief!” and thought about it; I must’ve had a good idea. I don’t usually have good ideas; I have good methods of implementation, maybe, but not genuine good ideas. But maybe that’s not true; maybe there really is a reason to write down everything that goes through my warped brain. I’ll try that and see what happens.

Mike brought up a psychological principle I’d all but forgotten last night at the ASAP meeting: familiarity limits creativity. The observation I learned in psych was that children are more creative than adults because they haven’t been exposed to the way the world actually works; they don’t limit themselves on what they can create based on the laws of physics or matter or anything else. Mike put a different spin on it; he said that ASAP may have been more innovative before new media students came in because the creativity of students from other majors weren’t limited by what computers can do (or usually do).

That, in some weird and twisted way, got me to realize how much time I actually spend in front of the things. It also made me wonder how I would be without them.

Here’s the plan: two months from today, I’m planning on spending a week without touching computers (midnight on January 4 to midnight on January 11). That basically means no Internet, no e-mail, no instant messaging, no (coded) Web design. DVDs are pretty much out, since the player I have is on my PowerBook. I’ll have to listen to music from CDs. I’m fine with using my digital camera, and I should be set; I can fit over 400 pictures on that new memory card.

If I don’t go clinically insane, I think it could be really valuable. I think I could get a lot of work done. I also think that it might make me a lot happier; I tend to get depressed a little when I’m sitting in front of a screen for hours and hours each day. I do it now because I don’t have a choice; I’d like to see what happens when I do and choose not to. Hopefully nothing will come up that will make me use one during that week, but if it does, I’m open to trying it at a different time. And strangely enough, I’m really looking forward to trying it out.

On November 1 you can show all your friends the wonderful blackmail… err… pictures you took of them last night.

On November 1 you can get candy at the supermarket at half price (a Halloween bag each of Skittles, candy corn, and peanut butter M&Ms for under $3.50, woohoo!).

On November 1, while you’re there, you can see the supermarket managers replacing the orange and black displays with red and green. That’s right, boys and girls, time for Christmas stuff!