One big ass text file
Recently I successfully migrated most of my personal information apps (calendar, mail, addresses) to a new system. The only thing the new setup lacked was a way to keep track of the hundreds of scraps of information (password, registration codes, etc.) that I had previously kept in Outlook’s cumbersome Notes. Like the other aspects of my personal info I wanted local access with complete online redundancy. Nothing seemed to fit the bill. Then I came across this post at 43 Folders describing über-geeks who actually put all their information into a single, gigantic text file. I laughed at this as completely impractical and moved on.
But I kept thinking about it, specifically about the actual difference between hundreds of tiny files and one huge file. In both cases search is the only practical way to find anything. But a single file reduces redundancy to the act of merely uploading the file ocassionally. And ASCII is the ultimate cross-platform, app-neutral, read-anywhere format. As long as you have a good text editor, you’ll be fine. But even if you don’t you can always at least open the file and roam around. Call it the toilet paper roll method of info management.
Mark thinks Tinderbox is a better solution. I’ll give that a spin when the Windows version is released. But, for now, my life happens inside a single unnavigable-except-for-search text file. Restaurant notes, aborted blog posts, credit card info, SMTP server information from seven years ago, words I like, a Blackjack cheat sheet, domains I’d like to own one day, hundreds of pairs of login info, and on and on. It is stranegly comforting to know that it is all in there, including stuff I will never see again because I don’t know the keywords for it. But it is there.
Three things I did yesterday
(1) Had a 30 minute discussion on what designing a website for a user characterized as a “tattletale” would entail. (Not to be confused with a “gossip,” which was also a user profile we had to deal with.) I’ve never thought so much about the concept of the tattletale in my life. Basically this person has information, must convey it, and must convey it to someone of higher status for personal gain. Try designing a website for that.
(2) The Tolva family challenged the City of Chicago and won. Don’t tell us we left “materials/junk” in the alley, goddamnit. Turns out they had the right address, wrong street. Sometimes I marvel that this city doesn’t sink back into the swamp it emerged from.
(3) I took my oldest son to see Star Wars in Grant Park with a few thousand other residents. I had forgotten how much fun it was to watch movies with large audiences. Hell yes I’m going to cheer when Han knocks off the tie fighters at the end! Might even high five a stranger!
Sweet language
I met Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, last week. He was describing the new Museum of Tolerance to be built in Jerusalem. It is, in part, a learning center and so in describing the philosophy behind the center’s outreach he used an analogy from a tradition in teaching the Hebrew alphabet. When first encountering the alphabet Jewish children have a drop of honey placed on their tongue as they pronounce the first letter, the aleph. This is meant to equate learning — perhaps language too — with sweetness.
Honey on the Aleph. This I like a lot.
Colorful language
Data visualization master and Most Admired Colleague Martin Wattenberg has created a new info map. Color Code takes English nouns and represents them using the color average of corresponding images of that noun found on the web via Yahoo. Interesting how earth-toned nouns are, but then I suppose much of what we name is human or organic. Yes, all your favorite sexual nouns are included. Yes they are fleshy.
A great extension of this would be to infer colors for verbs based on the images of nouns that the verbs most often operate on. For example, the verb “to fly” might be bluish because of its association with the sky and because the machines that do fly are often colored similarly.
Things I have learned in the last 24 hours (exactly)
(1) A run to the Chicago lakefront is made easier if you’re chasing the chance to see the sun rise.
(2) The astronomical cost of jet fuel costs does in fact hurt the customer. My flight only had decaf on board. (The end is nigh.)
(3) A blonde white girl singing country music at Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem stands not a chance in hell.
(4) Urologists don’t exactly know what the prostate does, other than supply a small fraction of coagulum for the ejaculate.
Audiophile
Here are the characteristics of my perfect digital music file format. Would someone please invent? Note that most of these are not compression type specific. It stands to reason that much of this functionality could be included in new ID3 specs and/or extensions to the MP3 file type.
– Robust metadata, at least equivalent to current ID3 spec plus ability to embed dynamically updatable rating data (good idea, Greer!), links to websites, and machine-readable score data for classical pieces.
– Artwork support for multiple files (images or rich media) including the ability to reference an external file or the embedded artwork of another audio file. For instance, it would save hundreds of MB of file space if you could have a single file on an album contain the artwork for all the tracks on the album.
– Ability to recall point at which the file was last played (bookmarkable), like an m4b file.
– Ability to designate (or not) totally gapless continuous play for a selection of tracks (normally an album).
– File type that is essentially a pointer or shortcut. An application of this would be to allow you to delete two of the three identical versions of, say, How Soon Is Now? because it exists on Meat is Murder, Hatful of Hollow and the Smiths Greatest Hits. The track could live at one place but be included as an alias in the other. When copying the albums with shortcuts the system would offer you the ability to copy the full track or just the pointer. (Would do the same for the externally-referenced artwork in the idea above.)
– Variable compression including lossless. Same file format, just different compression schemes.
– No DRM of any kind.
The coolest LEGO brick ever
Came across this recently while sifting through our LEGO bins. This brick — this single brick — could transform an otherwise completely uncool assemblage of 2×2’s, 4×1’s, and slanted roof bricks into a state-of-the-art lunar outpost.
And by state-of-the-art I mean in the way computers were before GUI’s made them all sissy. This terminal was for minifig people who could read computer code straight off the monocrome screen. Hell, that’s probably assembler on there. And they only needed three buttons. Yellow to evacuate the launch pad. Green to light the candle. Red to blow it to smithereens if it veered off course.
Now that would be a cool casemod.
Macaroni fest
This past weekend was our annual neigborhood festival. Just a few short blocks of food, bands, kid stuff, carnival games, and beer. By day relatively laid back with neighborhooders milling about; by night some 50,000 Chicagoans pack in to hear the headliners, normally just above-average tribute bands. Great fun, though.
Saturday night I was ambitiously over-served. So waking up with the kids on Sunday morning was especially painful. But it wasn’t until I reported for my volunteer shift that morning and was told that I had been put in charge of the children’s entertainment stage that I learned just how cruel a turn my life had taken.
So there I was, still legally intoxicated, surrounded by a few dozen sugar-addled children and their Starbucks-addled parents, chatting it up with Mary Macaroni and the Jabberwocky Marionettes. It was too surreal to be hellish. All I recall is that Mary’s real name is Karen and that the Jabberwockys don’t like to be called puppeteers.
Not sure I’ll be invited back to volunteer next year.
Sausage fest
We’re all about penises today.
Wife: “Son, why are you holding your penis?”
Me: “Why not?”
Wife: [disapproving glare flashed my way]
Son: “Because it likes me.”
Me: [laughing into pillow]
Then, later, the same son spotted mommy in the bathroom.
Son: “Hey, you don’t have a penis.”
Wife: “That’s right. Boys have penises. Girls don’t. Mommy’s a girl.”
Son: “Well then you can’t live here. This is a boy penis house. But you can live next door so I can come outside and see you.”
Brilliant.
PIM system, now with pretty icons
What’s missing? It isn’t a perfect solution. Here’s what would make it so.
– Faster Mozilla Calendar with functional equivalence to Outlook’s calendaring.
– Full integration of calendar functionality into Thunderbird. (This is underway in the Lightning project, as I mentioned below.)
– Some way of moving sent and saved e-mail from years past into the Gmail environment without just mass-forwarding it all.
– Stable auto-publish of changes in Mozilla Calendar. Right now auto-publish eventually corrupts the data file locally and on the server. I have to manually publish. Shouldn’t be that way.
– Robust PC-based phone synching. Right now I’m going from PC to online to Mac to phone (and iPod). This is easy but needlessly complex.
– Two-way synch between Mac Address Book and Plaxo, just ’cause.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
Recently this blog (and my Flickr account) turned 20 years old, forever in Internet years. I went back through it all, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
