Categories
Just Shelley

Philosophy of the turtle

In early 2002 I was living in a condo overlooking the bay in San Francisco. I had just finished a gig with Stanford University and was confident about quickly finding new work. After all, I hadn’t been unemployed once in the years since I graduated college. In fact, I could usually count on having multiple offers to choose from.

But as I walked past empty buildings, through streets made into homes by the homeless, and listened to the silence of my phone, I began to think that perhaps finding work wouldn’t be as easy as I originally assumed.

Living in San Francisco is expensive at any time, but the  expense can quickly break you if you have no income coming in. By April I knew I had to leave San Francisco, and take my best friend’s offer of a home in St. Louis. Perhaps away from Silicon Valley I could find work.

Decision made, I had only one remaining concern: what about my stuff? My roommate couldn’t fly out to help me haul the stuff back, and I couldn’t drive both my car and a moving truck. I checked into having the items professionally moved, but the cost was more than I could afford. I rented a storage space, instead, and hired a local moving outfit to help me move into it. I figured when I was bringing in an income again, I could hire a mover.

The steady jobs never came, though, and about six months later, I no longer had the money to pay for the space. I ran an ad in Craigslist, offering everything I owned that hadn’t fit into my car when I moved. All my furniture, my crystal vases, antique cobalt blue glass ware; the sheets and towels, and kitchenware; my photo studio lights and back drops;  the Vietnamese lacquered panels and Chinese embroidered tablecloth. And my books.  I had over 20 boxes of books, both paperback and hard bound.

I found a buyer, who ended up getting a better deal than he knew. I took one last trip to California, to drop off keys and see if I could salvage a few personal items from the storage. But the moving guys had done a good job, burying the boxes under a pyramid of furniture. The only items I could salvage were two boxes of books, too heavy for the movers to push into the far back reaches of the storage space, and of no interest to the new buyer.  At that I was somewhat lucky as the books I salvaged were some of the more expensive science books I’d collected, including the pricey Gravitation, which I’d always planned to read some day before I die. The boxes also included the only fiction book I was to salvage, a hard to find book by the legendary science fiction writer, James Schmitz.

I tell you all of this by way of explaining why I find it so funny when people criticize the Kindle because “someday Amazon may pull the plug, and you’ll lose all of your books”. Funny, because the main reason I bought my Kindle is because I had lost all of my books; my books of paper that were, somehow, supposed to be sacrosanct.

What is a frugal girl like me …

Typically, no special equipment is needed to read a book made of paper. All that’s required is the ability to read, and a light source. eBook readers, such as the Kindle, already have one strike against them because you have to first, buy the reader, and then buy the books.

Jeff Bezos understood this when he released the Kindle, and promised that many of the books available for the Kindle at Amazon would cost less than their paper counterparts. The $9.99 bestseller is famous, though there’s no guarantee that every bestseller would sell at that price, or even be released on a Kindle. Currently, Ken Follett’s World Without End in paperback format sells for $12.50, but the Kindle version sells for $9.99. However, the Kindle version for the second entry in the popular Twilight series, New Moon is priced the same, $6.04, regardless of whether you buy a paperback, or a Kindle eBook. And, in some cases, the Kindle books have actually been priced higher than available paperbacks; with the Kindle prices based more on the hard cover book, rather than the lower cost paperback.

Generally, though, I have found the books I’m interested in to be cheaper than whatever is the lowest cost paper version of the book— higher when the book is first released as a hard cover, with the price dropping when the paperback releases. Though some Kindle owners get angry when a book is priced over $9.99, I’m not adverse to paying more, as long as the eBook is cheaper than the paper book. That’s really the key to making the Kindle work when you’re frugal: setting a maximum you’ll pay for a book, and not buying it until the price is reached. And while you’re waiting for the book, you can always try out one of the thousands of free books available for the Kindle and other devices.

Project Gutenberg books have been converted into Kindle format, and many are now available for one click, free downloads from Amazon. In addition, several publishers, such as Random House and Tor, and others have been offering free books as part of a series or author promotion. The free books may be formatted in the Kindle format, in which can all you need do is drop them into the Kindle memory when next you hook it up to a computer. You can also email books to a special conversion address and the book will be uploaded to the device for you.

…doing with a Kindle?

I’ve not replaced all the books I lost years ago. For one, no matter how good the price, I can only afford so many new books. In addition, not all of the books I’m interested in have been converted to eBook format.

My reading interests have also changed in the last several years, and I’m now more interested in non-fiction works. With the new discussions about economic depressions and climate change, I’ve been trying out books on history and the climate, downloading a sample chapter and then buying the book if the sample is interesting. In a way, the Kindle has changed how I read, by making sample chapters so easy to access. It was through the sample program that I discovered David Kennedy’s excellent Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 and Havana Nocturne by T. J. English.

The Kindle isn’t perfect, and the imperfections have less to do with the design of the Kindle 1.0 and more to do with Amazon’s policies. It does bother me that the Kindle is a closed loop system, at least for books protected by DRM. I have grown increasingly uncomfortable buying books at Amazon, knowing that I’m locked into one vendor if I want to read them. So much so that lately, if I’m interested in a newer book, I get a paper one from the library; all my recently added Kindle books have been freebies. Between both, I’m covered. For now.

Still, Amazon does sell eBooks more cheaply than any other eBook vendor, and the money you save can offset the cost of the device. But that’s not the reason I bought my Kindle.

Philosophy of the turtle

I was watching a news story last week about one new industry that is adding jobs, rather than shedding them. So many foreclosed homes have furniture and other items left in them, abandoned when the owners moved. When you lose your home, I imagine you don’t care how it looks. I also imagine that most people having to move have to move into smaller homes.

There are now companies whose only task is to clean out these homes, and I watched workers from one as they tossed furniture and toys into a truck to haul off. Furniture, toys, and books. When you move from a house to a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment, or into a friend’s basement, or a parent’s attic, books take up a lot of room.

Whatever other advantage the Kindle provides me, the ability to pick up all my books and put them into my purse remains the primary reason I like my Kindle. No matter what happens in the future, I’ll never have to leave my library behind, again.

Categories
Copyright Photography

Appropriate the visual

Jonathon Delacour has an interesting writing on appropriation art, the controversy about the Obama HOPE poster, and Walker Evans. I must admit to being mostly ignorant about appropriation art, where the artist takes another work and either creates a variation of the work, as Shepard Fairey did with the HOPE poster; or actually makes a direct copy of a work, as Sherrie Levine did by taking photos of Walker Evans public domain photos, claiming the works as her own, and then applying her own copyright.

Leaving aside all other issues, the legality of such appropriation is based on whether the new work is derivative or transformative. For instance, Picasso is consider an early appropriation artist, because he would appropriate things he found in the everyday world for his work. However, the materials Picasso appropriated were not works of art themselves, but everyday things that he would then transform into original creations of art. I had an uncle, heavily inspired by Picasso, who was also an appropriation artist, as he would take clothes hangers, paper, and paint, and create statues—one of which I, in the midst of my plebeian youth, threw away, thinking it junk.

I suppose that Fairey’s work could be considering transformative, too, as he took a photograph and transformed it into a painted, or more likely photoshopped, effort. Tom Gralish is the person who helped uncover the original photo behind the transformed work, and as the images he display demonstrate, Fairey used the same technique more than once with more than one photographer’s effort.

Fairey's appropriated art

The AP, who hired the photographer, Mannie Garcia, to take the photo used in the HOPE poster, disagrees that the “appropriation” of the photo is fair use, and have contacted Fairey to make arrangements (though there is some debate that the AP does own the photo copyright). It would seem that Fairey, himself, didn’t even know whose image it was he used until he was contacted. I found his ignorance of the original photographer to not only be offensive, but sublimely arrogant. If one is going to appropriate another artist’s work, shouldn’t one at least take a moment to discover the name of the artist? Evidently, to Fairey, not. To Garcia, his photograph is art; to Fairey, it’s raw material, the equivalent of a coat hanger.

I am not an expert in copyright law to know whether Fairey’s work is a violation or not, nor am I necessarily in sympathy with the AP, though I will watch the ongoing story with interest. However, I don’t have to be a lawyer to know that Sherrie Levine’s appropriation of Walker Evans work is legal, but morally reprehensible.

In Levine’s case, she took photographs of Walker Evans photos that were in the public domain, printed them out for a show titled After Walker Evans, and then copyrighted her photographs of the photographs. Since the Evans photos were in the public domain, she could do what she wanted with the images.

I gather, according to Jonathon, she had some postmodern feminist story to accompany the work that sounded all grand and really brainy, I’m sure, but strip away all the mental cotton candy and what you’re left with is a photographer exactly duplicating another photographer’s work, and then attaching her name to it.

Applaud, the postmodern Athena is avenged on the paternalist Zeus. As others have written, Levine’s disrespect for paternal authority suggests that her activity is less one of appropriation: she expropriates the appropriators. How could I, as a feminist, not applaud such an act?

What if we were not talking about visual art, though? What if I were to take a work by another representative of paternal authority, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, type it exactly as written into my computer, sign my name as writer, convert the document into Amazon’s Kindle format, copyright the effort, and sell it at Amazon? According to both Levine’s viewpoint and this modern variation of appropriation artists, not only would such be acceptable, I should be praised

In 1979 in Sherrie Levine rephotographed Walker Evans’ photographs from the exhibition catalog “First and Last.” Her post-modern assertion that one could rephotograph an image and create something new in the process, critiques the modernist notion of originality (though it creates an alternate postmodern originality in the process.) In dialogue with the theorist Walter Benjamin, who explored the relationship of reproduction to artistic authenticity, the reproduction becomes the authentic experience.

Yet, it is likely that those who would praise Levin and her work, would condemn me and mine. She is artist, I am vile plagiarist. A plagiarist easily caught, because the original story is so well known.

If the work of Twain is too well known to be vanquished by a single act of unattributed duplication, then what of our replication of syndication feeds, or weblog posts? The casual page such as those I quote from in this story? Would our writing not be like Mannie Garcia’s photo, in the public sphere but not well known enough to have self-defense against such deception?

I don’t know of any writer who would willingly allow their writing to be duplicated and attributed to another, without even a semblance of a nod to the originator, but we don’t have the same problem with visual works, such as photographs. As Jonathon states, We are in a hall of mirrors, but mirrors that shatter with text. If one can’t take the concept from one artistic medium to the next, then the concept is suspect, the art tainted.

Categories
Weather

To our Southern neighbors

I can’t imagine temperatures of 117 F. I also can’t imagine being surrounded by oil rich eucalyptus trees, as flames are driven straight at your home at 65 miles per hour. The winds of hell must be an apt description.

My sympathies to those of our southern neighbors in Australia that have suffered loss the last few days because of the fires.

update DaveD, in comments, linked to extraordinary photos at Boston.com related to the fires.

Categories
Stuff

DTV cutoff officially delayed

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Congress today voted to make the DTV transition even more confusing by pushing back the date given on every billboard and in every commercial an additional four months. The cut-off date is now June 12th…sort of.

According to a Washington Post story on the delay

The House today has voted to delay the nation’s transition to digital television by four months, less than two weeks before broadcasters were scheduled to turn off traditional analog signals and air only digital programming Feb. 17.

An additional impact of the new legislation is that DTV conversion coupons that expired are now good again, for a limited time.

What all of this means is that the people who ignored all of the warnings and pleas for the last year, can now ignore another four months of the same. This also means that those of us who did what was necessary for the transition have to put up with the constant barrage of noise about the DTV switch for another four months.

What’s worse, though, is that those stations ready to make the switch can switch, which will now result in a patchwork of cut-offs, rather than the one clean cut-off date for everyone.

Acting Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael J. Cops said today that 143 broadcasters have already terminated their analog signals and another 60 stations plan to do so before Feb. 17. Other stations have told the agency they plan to shut off analog signals on the original transition date, but they may choose to remain on the air.

Except that it typically costs a station $10,000 a month to continue with both analog and digital signals at the same time. I think we’ll find more than a few stations making the transition on the earlier, February 17th date.

Additional information at Broadcasting and Cable.

Categories
Stuff

The video online crap shoot

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The premise sounds good: rather than subscribe to a cable or other video service, access movies and television shows via the internet using either our computers, or specialized set top boxes.

I bought into the concept when early last year I purchased an AppleTV, followed up by purchases of not one but two Roku boxes: one for me, one for my roommate. After all, the cost of the equipment was more than compensated for by the savings I achieved by not subscribing to either the local cable service (Charter), or the newly available AT&T U-Verse.

We already had a subscription to Netflix, and the Watch Now capability delivered through the Roku boxes was, for a time, very satisfying. The service supplemented our access to local programming through indoor antenna and digital conversion boxes, and at a fraction of the cost of cable.

Then came the big change at Netflix: support for streaming HD movies and TV shows. Of course, some would say the HD quality isn’t true HD, and the streams left something to be desired, but I found them to be excellent on my 720p television, as did my roommate on his older CRT-based TV.

However, when Roku started rolling out HD support to all Roku users, something started to go wrong. The first public releases of the beta software would cause the Roku boxes to spontaneously reboot. Later releases coincided with several people, who previously had reliable service, suffering stream and buffering issues, especially during peak media times, such as weekends and evenings. By the time that build 1.5 909 was released, both my roommate’s and my boxes became unusable, with the constant, and extremely slow, rebuffering.

Though the Roku people have since released another build to try and address the issue of re-buffering, the problems associated with the service have not improved, leaving me to wonder whether I am now the proud possessor of two black bricks.

The issue is further compounded by the support forum where every time I, or others, would report problems, some Roku user would come along and say something to the effect that “My service is great. I have no problems. The problem must be happening at your end.” And therein lies the real difficulty with streaming Internet video: there are so many places where the stream can fail, and so few tools available to help us really spot where the problems are happening.

For instance, Netflix uses the Limelight content delivery network to stream its video, and problems could be happening within the CDN. The load balancing mechanism could fail, as well as the file caching, and any of the bits inbetween.

The DNS server that routes requests could be failing. Most of the larger CDNs try to embed their own specialized DNS servers within local ISPs, in order to handle routing to the appropriate server. However, if this isn’t happening, or if the DNS requesting service is not optimized, a request for a video could be routed to a server many hops away, slowing down access of a video.

During transmission, access could be lost, or degrade, causing the clients to either have to shift down to lower quality streams, or struggle to re-establish access to the video stream. It’s frustrating when this happens at the start of a video, more so when it happens midstream.

The ISPs themselves could be at fault. For instance, we know that Comcast will throttle heavy users during peak times, but we suspect other ISPs may do the same. However, despite Google’s efforts to discover such hanky panky, it’s difficult to tell when deliberate throttling is happening.

Then there are those times when the ISP just plain fails: too overloaded, infrastructure too old, too many people using the service, etc.

In addition, even if we’re subscribed to Charter’s new big mouth plan, with 60mbps capability, the good service is for naught if we run into bandwidth caps five days after the beginning of the month.

Our own setups could be the problem, or at least part of it. For instance, a wireless router that fails, or not subscribing to a broadband plan that provides enough bandwidth. Perhaps a firewall is running amuck, or junior is playing World of Warcraft on one computer, while you’re trying to watch Terms of Endearment via your Roku.

Even world events can conspired against us: extraordinary events may send so many people to their weblogs, Twitter, newsreaders, et al, that the entire Internet groans under the burden of a billion tweets.

To recap then, from micro to macro the following are possible points of failure in video streaming:

  • Your system may have configuration problems, or you may not have the proper internet connection, or equipment, for streaming video
  • The equipment you use, such as a Roku box, or XBox, or the like, may have software glitches that don’t ensure smooth delivery of the content. For example, video is compressed, and software that doesn’t decompress the video efficiently could cause the overall stream to slow, or even begin to fail. If the box doesn’t have adequate buffering space, it could also add to you having intermittent problems with the service.
  • Your ISP may have oversold its services, be having temporary or infrastructure problems, or be especially busy. Even if all the technical pieces succeed, your ISP could be throttling you or applying a bandwidth cap.
  • The DNS server you use may not be optimized to ensure your video request goes to the closest or fastest server in a Content Delivery Network.
  • The network at any spot between you and the server could be suffering problems, including any of the previously referenced issues specific to your ISP.
  • The Content Delivery Network could be failing by not ensuring your request is going to the proper server, not providing enough servers or the proper caching to ensure that there are no hiccups in the service. The failure could be one based on too much of a burden for the server, or software that doesn’t do a good load balancing job.
  • Obama is inaugurated, and half the world is watching it via a live feed.

Many possible points of failure, and aside from some trivial changes we can control—such as subscribing to a broadband service that gives us enough bandwidth, or ensuring that our setup is correct, and junior is doing his homework— what happens to the video as it travels to our homes is mostly out of our control. Worse, we have very few tools that we can use to exactly pinpoint where the problem is happening.

So we have thread after thread in forums such as those for the Roku box where someone comes in and tells all of the people to run trace routes between the CDN server and yourself, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you anything useful. Nor does the individual who always shows up and tells you how they’re not having problems. In a way, this person is like the friend who responds to your news that you just lost your job, your boyfriend, and your cat with the information that they’ve been promoted, are getting married, and their cat had kittens. All cute.

I digress, though. If you have good access to Hulu but not Netflix Watch Now, you might think the problem is happening with Netflix, but the problem could be your ISP is throttling Netflix, and not Hulu. The Roku’s software may not be handling minor interrupts in the stream well, but how can you tell? You can monitor input and output on your modem, but that just tells you what’s happening, not what’s capable of happening.

You could switch DNS servers, but chances are, you’re going to have the same problems with OpenDNS that you have with the DNS server automatically assigned you by your ISP—and you have to deal with OpenDNS’s annoying habit of overriding your internet surfing experiences.

Then there’s the largest block of all: hard geographical borders built into what was once a borderless medium. You can’t watch Hulu? Well, you must live in Australia. You can’t watch Doctor Who at the BBC? You must live outside of the UK.

Streaming video troubleshooting is not for the faint of heart. Not when we have to become pseudo telecommunication engineers, just to try to troubleshoot our systems. Frustrated that your online video access isn’t working? Sometimes I think its a miracle when online video does work.

Though I look at my Roku brick in sadness—bereaved at what I once had, and wondering if I’ll ever have it again— I still believe in video over the Internet. I still believe that it provides options stripped by the government given monopolies to telephone and cable companies. I still believe online video opens doors and minds, and brings the world just a little closer together. But we need better tools̬not only to support online video, generally, but also to pinpoint where failure is occurring, and why.