summer evenings

image1538824538.jpgThe summer heat finally arrived after a pretty pleasent June & July. The early evening gloaming in Brooklyn is when things finally cool off.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]


Newspapers & Presses

This is a pretty good article:

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

Which kind of gets back to one of my thoughts that the media piracy (Albums, Movies, Books, News, etc) are all basically 'ideas' that can be sold.  They are commodities because of technology used to store them turned them into physical objects.  Without this storage technology, News is just gossip, novels & movies are just tales or plays, and albums are just music.  But of course they don't last- you have to be there to see and hear the performer to experience these things, and the performer had to hope that his tip jar would be full by the end of the evening.  So the ability to record them allows people who can't physically be there still experience these things.  And the records are now objects and can be sold like apples or bricks.  And since the tools and the skills to do this were hard to come by, there was an inherent scarcity that kept the price high.

Now we are in a world where these is less physicality- a man in Australia can play a song on a guitar in front of a webcam, and everyone anywhere who wants to can see it live.   The technology to record it is practically free and available to anyone.  So we are in a phase where the people who have a vested interest in the old models are fighting tooth and nail to keep the status quo.  But there seems to be an even older model that we are naturally gravitating toward.

comfy

image1586055970.jpgOn plus of my workplace is the fact we have beanbag chairs everywhere. Makes it hard to not nod off during a long confrence call...

rrrr.. Wish the image thumbnail didn't cut off the tag text.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]


Kindle thoughts

Having had the Kindle2 (K2) for about 2 weeks now, I have to say I really like it.  It facilitates a particular kind of reading, but it does that really well.  I think owning one makes you more aware of the difference between 'Books I want to read' and 'Books I want to own'.  If I was a regular Library user, and I lived near a library that was pretty extensive, the kind of books I would check out are the ones I now read on the K2.  Stuff I want access to, but don't care to store or display.

One exception would be books I feel embarrassed to be seen reading...  the K2 is a perfect 'plain brown wrapper' over the cover of what ever trashy novel or self help book you might feel like diving into on the subway.  Now I can finally read those Wheel of Time books without fear of ridicule.  (kidding)

You might say 'checking books out from the library is free, while buying books on the kindle is expensive." and you would be right.  But I think alot of the material I am interested in reading these days is public domain works.  So it really is the work of a couple of minutes to pull it down from Project Gutenberg and email the text file to Amazon to be converted for Kindle reading.

On that note, I have been reading Kenneth Hite's excellent Tour de Lovecraft book, (funniest book book of Lovecraftian literary analysis to date,) and at the same time reading the old Lovecraft stories on the K2.  Becasue that's how I roll.  Some thoughts on that I recently tweeted:

1 - The builtin dictionary tool makes a new vocabulary experience; ah the forbidden knowledge of the gibbering polysyllabic monstrosities

2 - short stories work really well on the Kindle. Lets see the return of the pulp writer, able to sell individual stories directly on Amazon

3 - I am soo entertained by hearing Text to Speech try to parse the pronunciation of the names of the Great Old Ones. Much too entertained.