vulgrin’s world

Yep, still here. Work and life have been crazy. More to come.

I’m (still) reading a very good book, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” by Thomas Friedman. In this book, Friedman speaks to the data behind climate change, and the possible horrors we’ll face, but he also spends a lot of time talking about the solutions we need to adapt to solve the problems (or at least stave off the worst of it) ahead of us.

The problem is that many of his ideas require the Congress and the President to take some bold new steps forward. One example would be putting a floor on oil per barrel prices. This will guarantee a higher at pump price for gasoline, which will be very unpopular. But, it is absolutely necessary to drive innovation forward in other fuel technologies. A higher price means more public pressure for lower cost, and greener, solutions. It also means that those companies that have to invest large sums of money into research will know for certain that they will recoup their investments. (A floor price on oil would guarantee that oil would not be able to go cheap again and undercut any new technologies.)

Without Congress and the President stepping out and doing something very unpopular however, innovation and our future will continue to be stalled for years or decades. Which might be too late.

I’m curious how many members of Congress actually understand these issues. I’m not proclaiming Friedman to be the only voice of reason out there, there are many from differing viewpoints. (Recommend any in the comments for me to go read!) But the points and logic he puts out there is pretty straightforward, and he includes a lot of quotes from various business leaders that I’m sure could be brought before Congress to explain their thoughts. Yet, this doesn’t seem to be happening.

So, I’m wondering how we, the people, can educate our Congress more. I’m not talking about letter campaigns to get them to support an issue. I’m talking about asking them to actually read these books that we believe in and learn more about the subjects, instead of getting their education from PowerPoint bullet points from lobbying groups. I’m wondering if there could be a small website or organization that would:

a) Make a list of books, articles and people that Congress should be reading or paying attention to.
b) Collect money to purchase those books. (Hopefully with a generous price cut from the books’ authors.)
c) Track which Senators and Representatives received those materials.
d) Track who read those materials.
e) Invite Congresspeople to write back with their thoughts or debate on the material, either via written, audio, or video.

Maybe this site could simply handle the tracking, and make it easy for other political organizations to track the material they send out. Maybe this is all being done already – but if so, it sure doesn’t feel like we have the “urgency of now” on this particular issue. It would take so little to put these changes in place, we shouldn’t wait for a year while we debate health care to get the ball rolling. Universal health care doesn’t mean a thing if we’ve destroyed the planet.

Thoughts? Feedback? Anyone want to take part in something like this? (Or better yet, take it and run with it…)

Quick photoshop artwork that came out of an idea executed poorly.

See it on Flickr

I don’t know why, but I love this image.

I’ve been reading Tom Friedman’s “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” as my uplifting book of the month.  As you can guess from it being a Friedman title, it gives all sorts of facts and references about how screwed up things are and enumerates all of the seemingly obvious links between acts that cause a lot of pain and suffering in the world.  One of his themes is that Americans are paying for the terror that is wrought against us and others, mainly with the gas we put into our cars every day.  Simply put, our gas money buys oil from countries like Saudi Arabia who then turn around and fund both terrorist groups and radical schools that teach hatred and terror.

So, in a fit of inspiration, I created the sticker below and set up a quick and dirty Cafe Press shop in case anyone wants one.  What you do with them is up to you.

The graphic below is creative commons: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Contact me if you want the source files.

Dave’s Note: Since I’m not sure I have the courage and could keep it together to deliver this eulogy at my Uncle’s funeral, I’ve decided to write it out publicly on the blog.

Jim was my uncle, but he was really a father-figure for me.  When I was a kid, I used to look forward to going to hamfests with him weeks in advance and I remember being so excited the night before that I could never sleep.  We’d go to Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, and countless other hamfests really early in the morning and walk for miles looking at all the cool junk that people were trying to sell.  We’d usually get done around lunch time, grab some lunch, and then be back to my grandma’s house by early afternoon.  We also used to help out with the Wabash County hamfests, getting there the day before to help set up, and then we’d either sell junk out of the back of his truck, or we’d help out running it.  (I used to help set up tables and pick out the tickets for the winners of the doorprizes.)

Uncle Jim also got me into computers and electronic geekery at a very young age.  I still remember him showing us Flight Simulator back on the Apple 2 computer, and I can remember playing games on it as young as five or six years old.  From there, I used to spend weekends on the computer, learning how to program in games from code listings in books and spent hours  playing around until my eyes hurt.

Because of those hours spent in front of a computer when I was a kid, I went on to get a job working on them on the east coast.  From there, I got into programming, worked for a couple large companies and then was fortunate enough to move back to Indiana and start up my own consulting company.

Because of his introducing me to technology, I carved out a pretty decent career for myself that gave me the opportunity to help put my wife through nursing school.  She is going to go out there and help people for the rest of her life when they need it the most.  My kids, who also have been using computers since a very young age, are going to be that much ahead of the technology game which will dramatically affect their entire lives.

And the chain goes on.  This guy who pretty much kept to himself sparked a series of events that will go on for a long, long time.  Even though we’re only here on Earth for a few short years, its not just our lives that define us, but all of the lives we touch along the way.  Keep that in mind with everyone you deal with – your kind words and advice might spark the next Nobel prize winner, or the cure for cancer, or the next great humanitarian.

That is the true meaning of life.

Dave’s Note: I’m having a rough time right now, so I’m trying to write what I’m thinking over the next few days or week while its fresh in my head, so I can revisit it later.  I can’t promise that it will be uplifting, insightful or even worth reading, but you never know.  These blogs are for me.

My Uncle Jim (James) Black died yesterday.  He was 64 and as far as we know right now he had a heart attack at work, channel 21 WPTA here in Fort Wayne.  He worked there for (best as we can remember) somewhere between 35 and 40 years.  He started there right after a couple years of college after he served his years stateside in the Army during the Vietnam war.  (He was an instructor, I believe in computers and the gun systems on the Huey Hellicopters.)

He had a heart attack, they did CPR until the EMT’s arrived but they called him dead at the hospital.  Time of death was 3:14 pm, February 25th, 2009.  (I take a little humor in the 3:14 time because he was a geek and an electronics guy.)

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The run down for those in a hurry – details further down:

1. This would be a website where users would sign-up and post ideas.
2. Ideas could be pretty much anything, within reason.
3. The community of users could comment on those ideas.
4. As a community of passionate folks start forming around an idea they can “graduate” an idea into a project.
5. Initially the site would let them just run off and start their project.  Later, it might add features such as email lists, to-do lists, etc.
6. All ideas would belong to the Creative Commons.  No patents allowed.  Implementations of ideas are completely up to the teams implementing the idea – including whether to charge for the product, start a company, etc.
7. I need help to implement such a site.

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I used to hoard MP3s. Back in the day (like six years ago) I used to rip MP3s from my CDs all the time and my day consisted of listening to nothing but WinAmp, playing the same songs over and over.  I literally had gigabytes of MP3s sitting on my machine or on a server somewhere and at any time I could listen to just the right music for my mood.

But I realized today that I just don’t play MP3s any more.  While I do spend the majority of my day listening to podcasts like This Week in Tech, or NPR, whenever I feel the need to crank up some tunes I’m almost always going to Pandora or LaLa.com.  I choose Pandora most of the time because I can easily select a channel based on my mood, and I let IT do the DJing for me.  I don’t have to waste time queuing up songs only to have to skip over the ones that I just don’t like.  I don’t need to spend hours making perfect playlists that I then get tired of.  It just works.

With LaLa, I can get access to specific songs and artists, and don’t need to worry about managing my music collection across my various machines.  The prices for web streaming only versions are cheaper and I can easily build my collection without having to manage hard drive space or worry about losing my collection.  My music is moving to the cloud.

It dawned on me today that MP3s are a lot like cassette tapes when CDs started hitting the mainstream. I used to have shopping bags full of tapes, and got hooked into that Columbia House subscription model in my teenage years.  The type of music I listened to then was never on the radio, so tapes were my main music consumption device.

Then I started getting CDs, but I couldn’t play them everywhere so tapes still had their place in my car or on my Walkman. (Just like now I can’t reliably take my “cloud” music with my on my iPhone where I still have to cart around a small number of MP3s.)  Tapes were still in my life, but they weren’t my preferred music format and the stacks of cassettes were largely ignored and rarely purchased.  I still listened to audio books on tape for years and I would equate those directly with my downloaded podcast collection.

I’m sure billions of MP3s are still being downloaded and purchased every year, but I think we’re on the cusp of the format’s popularity.  As networks become faster, mobile devices become more reliably connected, and costs come down, cloud music will become the dominant force.  The record companies will love this because they will finally have more control over their music and will have very, very precise data on who listens to it.  End users will love it, providing they have some way to “move” their collections from provider to provider – or they will just use Pandora-like “radio” services.   Hard drives of loss-less MP3s will become the new vinyl with hard core collectors and audiophiles always yelling that “streaming compression bit-rates take the soul out of the music.”

And like the height of the cassette craze, its very hard for me to see what’s beyond cloud music.  Back in the late 80’s I would have never thought that I could link up to a music collection and listen to almost any song I wanted in a few seconds.  I never thought about A.I. DJs spinning out tunes based on my likes and dislikes.  I was still flipping to the “B” side, by hand, and cursing whenever the tape got tangled up in the machine.

Do you agree that MP3s are at their peak and will only go down from here? What do you think is next?

So today I finally got my first 1 Terrabyte drive. I’m currently formatting the sucker (not quick format – so its taking a loooong time – probably overnight) and then I’m going to do a rebuild on my machine. Right now I have two drives in RAID 0 (yes, I know, I know) that I’m going to move everything off of and reformat. Then I hope to set up two partitions – one for Vista and one for Windows 7 beta with the 1TB drive being my B.A.D. for data storage and what-not.

I will still use Mozy.com (a service I recommend to everyone needing backups) for my primary backup of work files and so on. So, even with no data redundancy, I should be ok to run without a RAID. Maybe when I’m rich and famous I’ll go buy a Drobo or something.