Comments were busted for a while there — my epic antispam solution didn’t make the trip to the new server undamaged (I think the cron job fired in the middle of the transfer, leaving the files out of sync). It’s all better now!

• On Saturday Emily and I (mostly Emily) made pretzels and cheese biscuits, then headed over to Jason & Lee’s to participate in their bake-off. I’m pretty sure I ate five different types of pie, then spent the rest of the night alternating between picking Spree off of a gingerbread house and complaining about what an awful candy Spree is. Overall: delicious, but incapacitating.
• After a Sunday morning train ride home, Charles was nice enough to bring me along to the Redskins game. On the way to the stadium our Metro car’s brakes malfunctioned, filling the air with a smell so acrid that it made my eyes water and almost certainly gave me lung cancer. Yet somehow the Redskins managed to make a painful, wasting death look comparatively good. God, what a sucky football team. Still, the Philadelphia Eagles remain the worst team in football, at least morally speaking.
• Yesterday I went swimming, and man am I bad at it. Forget the flailing and gasping for breath; it’s the kicking that really gives me trouble. It’s not that I can’t do it — I don’t sink and I’m a lot faster than the old guys, at least. But somehow my knee is now more sore than if I’d just run on the damn thing, making me think that my mechanics leave something to be desired. No-impact my ass.
• Then I drove down to Louisa to have dinner with my mom, which turns out to be a good way to come back from a holiday weekend feeling exhausted. Thanksgiving now, please.

Last week I began contributing posts to TechDirt — if you want to read my thoughts on why Facebook sux0rs or the RIAA is evil you can now do so with the help of a much smaller font. I’m pretty happy to be posting in the same location as Julian and Tim Lee — in Tim’s case it’s even better due to the potential hilarity that our names’ similarity holds. If you ever have trouble distinguishing our entries, remember: I’m the one who’s just making it all up.

I could be wrong, but I think this qualifies me as a Professional Blogger, Sort Of. In the past I’ve occasionally earned money for stringing sentences together, but never in a way that was totally separate from my ability to write code.

Now: where do I pick up my guild card and health insurance forms?

Last night I went to go see Ray’s band, Truman Sparks. They were supposed to play at Millcreek, a West Philly venue that Emily and I had been to before. We’d gone to see the final show by Bear Attack, a now-defunct punk band known for dressing up as an owl, bear and hunter and performing a catalog of songs solely concerned with bears and their sundry activities. Sadly, the band wasn’t in costume for their final show (I’m told that costume-related disputes are the reason they broke up), and it soon became apparent that their foremost and perhaps only non-ursine distinguishing characteristic was volume.

Millcreek was a weird venue. Picture a personality-free “fitness center” from a timeshare condo development, then imagine using it to serve alcohol — that covers the physical structure, at least. The bartender eyed us suspiciously, distributing Miller Lite while silently assessing our allegiance to Philadelphia’s sports teams. A steady progression of black, middle-aged couples arrived and immediately went upstairs and past a second bouncer, not paying any attention to the show or bar — it’s still unclear whether their destination was a poker club, a swinger’s club, or both. Outside, a West Philly club kid took drags from a cigarette and earnestly told us a story about entering into a sham green-card marriage with a guy she met on the road; each of them assumed the marriage was interracial until they stopped traveling and showered.

The venue was teetering on the edge of civilization in what I’m assured is a distinctly West Philadelphian way. Ray & co. showed up to play Milcreek and found it was closed. The only option left was left was to tumble right over that edge.

So instead we ended up heading to The Philadelphia Institute For Advanced Study, the online hilarity of which probably can’t be appreciated unless you’ve set foot in the place. Located in Fishtown’s warehouse-and-murder district, the building is actually a former sheet metal storage facility that’s been taken over (by UVA alums, according to Ray) and converted into artists’ studios. It was freezing cold, full of broken electronic slot machines, and in a wholly deserted neighborhood. After doing some superficial equipment unloading Emily and I set out in search of beer, but found only rotting industrial carcasses. The traffic consisted solely of very occasional ricers tearing down the wide, empty boulevards at 80 mph, killing time until the next Fast and the Furious movie is released.

Somehow we managed to get back to the warehouse without being robbed or murdered. The band had acquired some PBR tallboys in the meantime, which made the earnest Minneapolitan openers’ set considerably easier to take. After their triumphant acoustic-guitar-and-clarinet alt country finale, the crowd retired to the more rock-capable photography department, where Truman Sparks made good on their promise to melt our faces off amidst scattered photochemicals. At some point a threatening-looking guy in gold chains and an orange blazer showed up wearing airport-style ear protection. But he didn’t end up trying to murder us, either, which was strangely disappointing.

But the show wasn’t. I’m sure the band would’ve preferred to be somewhere with heat, comped beers and a functioning PA, but I don’t really feel any need to revisit Mill Creek until I’m a graying African-American professional looking to spice up his marriage. PIFAS was rock and roll, goddammit, and I had a great time.

• Yglesias’s FreeDarko guest post is the best thing I’ve read in a while.
• Not that I’d know, but this sounds like pretty good (and funny) advice for aspiring tech writers.

Over the weekend I briefly considered writing a FaceBot to take the reins of my completely-neglected FaceBook account. I have no interest in logging in and grappling with my acquaintances’ neverending lycanthropic demands. But it shouldn’t be too hard to write a script that does, thereby proving that I exist as a social entity. For an extra layer of authenticity the bot would watch the RSS coming out of Google News and periodically create a new group with a title like “WE WILL NEVER FORGET YOU Musharraf Declares Martial Law”.

The possibilities were endless. But then I remembered that I’m supposed to be doing a million other things, several of them arguably more important.

Besides, I’m growing convinced that Flickr’s already implemented this sort of breakthrough technology. Check out these comments, all of which I’ve received in the last week:

deadhorsela says:



Cute!

You should submit to this contest for viking costumes,

www.cwtv.com/upload/file/ snickers-cwnow-halloween-contest

Kotie Bear says:



Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Special Men: who cook for you, and we’d love to have your photo added to the group.

And my personal favorite:

filterless2006 says:



Hallo, ich bin der Administrator der Gruppe The Beauty of a smoking Woman, und wir freuen uns, Ihr Foto unserer Gruppe hinzuzufügen.

They even built support for internationalization!

(Wolfson, your fight is with Babelfish, not me)

Back online! See, the new machine uses CGI and suexec instead of mod_php, and so files with permissions greater than 0755 throw an error, but Movable Type creates files at 0666 by default. It’s obviously all pretty fascinating, but the short version is that everything should now be fixed.

I’m switching servers, which may result in some site downtime — hopefully this entry will weasel its way into your RSS readers before that happens. Just wanted to provide some advance warning, lest a big ugly error message catch you by surprise. I am a competent internet professional, I swear!

Apparently the Top-N List format is now being applied to blog posts. This doesn’t seem like a positive development.

I was making my usual rounds of anti-telco, pro-neutrality, red-meat-servin’ blogs the other day when I came across this proposal from TechDirt’s Mike Masnick:

[H]ere’s a simple suggestion for mobile operators: Be the first to be totally upfront about your plans and services, remove any high pressure sales techniques, stop making it difficult to compare plans, phones and service and dub yourself as the customer friendly mobile operator. Then see what happens. Of course, some mobile operators have taken steps in this direction over the years. They’re a lot more open about where various deadspots are than before and they’ve tried to be more open about specific features and plans — but the problem is that this “secretive” mentality exists up and down throughout the organization. If a company makes it clear policy from top to bottom that openness, clarity and customer satisfaction are keys, it would capture the interest of an awful lot of people.

The same criticism could be leveled against Comcast for their recent Bittorrent-throttling antics or their not-actually-unlimited plans. And Comcast would be just as likely to take the advice to be upfront and forthright as the mobile operators are, which is to say not at all. You can see the reason for this in the very first comment left on Mike’s post, which appears to have been authored by a defensive employee of the cellular industry:

If you don’t like wireless companies it is simple…this is not a commodity or necessity of life such as water or power, this is a instrument that you choose to purchase and pay for. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.

I think that this demonstrates the problem with the cable companies, the mobile companies, the record companies and (before they decided they wanted to be Google without the technology or marketshare) AOL, too: they don’t understand or won’t admit the nature of what it is that they’re actually selling. It’s not what the commenter thinks.

As far as I can tell, there are only two ways to make money by selling data to consumers. First, you can sell the signal: a catchy song, a fascinating print article, an entertaining video — you make it and you charge for access. It’s a pretty straightforward way of earning a living. Second, you can sell the delivery: you can charge for transmuting and transporting the signal into a location and form that’s easy for consumers to use.

These both used to be noble and lucrative fields of endeavor. The world will always have an appetite for original creative works. For a while it looked like the same could be said of novel methods of data delivery: radio was great, television was better, the telephone turned out to be pretty handy, and recorded music attracted something of a following. It seemed like the world had a bottomless appetite for new, increasingly efficient and ever-more specialized methods of delivering signals to consumers via enormous, capital-intensive infrastructures.

But it didn’t! Digital technology arrived and the world, while hungrier for content than ever, found that it preferred a steady diet of packets. The arrival of cheap and incredibly flexible signal processors on our desktops and in our entertainment centers made the old, centralized and largely analog infrastructure increasingly unnecessary. The development of information theory let us identify and draw very close to the theoretical maximum efficiency for signal transmission.

These days any signal can be made into packets, and we’ve pretty much figured out the best ways to move those packets. All that’s left is to do the actual moving. That’s the business the aforementioned companies are in: they ship bits.

Unfortunately, as Nicholas Negroponte noted, “Shipping bits [is] a crummy business.” That’s because bits are a commodity.

It must be pretty awful to wake up one day and suddenly realize that you’re in a commodity business. As a software developer I’ve at least had a taste of it — it was unsettling to realize that an army of developers in Bangalore could churn out code better than I could, dollar for dollar. I had fooled myself into believing that what I was selling was so extraordinary and great that people would be begging — begging! — for me to deign to craft some SQL and PHP on their behalf. Such a rarified gift! Such a technical artiste!

When you realize that you’re selling a mere commodity your ability to profit (and extract rents) from your cleverness is severely limited. It won’t help to roll out an ad campaign or make the product mint-scented. You can’t differentiate your product from your competitors’. It’s all pretty much the same. The users can’t tell the difference. All you can do is sell as much of it as you can while spending as little money as possible.

It’s probably pretty hard to show off all of the fascinating things you learned in business school if all you’re selling is bits. Rather than face this fact, the signal-deliverers choose to delude themselves and their customers. They use their existing market position to sign exclusive deals with content providers, forcing consumers to stick with Sprint if they want to see NFL highlights on their phones, or AOL if they want to hear Ted Leo cover Since U Been Gone, or visit Hulu if they want to watch their favorite show. They fool themselves into thinking that it isn’t their lingering monopolistic power that keeps the money coming in, but rather their unique talent for both running a cable company AND reinventing Tivo, or managing the production of television series AND building a YouTube competitor. Somehow, they maintain, it just happens that the sole firm allowed to provide these services is also the one best positioned to provide them efficiently.

Data is now a utility, just like the gas and electric lines running into your house. The present situation is as if the gas company gave customers specialized ovens that could only heat up prepared meals bought from the utility — and refused to connect the gas line to any other kind of oven. It’s ludicrous. We don’t want their ovens or meals or online music portals or mobile video platforms. We just need them to get out of the way of the original signal, then shuttle the bits we ask for as cheaply as possible.

But if the bit-movers admitted this they’d also be admitting that they’re less necessary than before — that there’s going to be fewer of them, and that they’re going to be making less money. That’s not the sort of thing that a corporation is eager to recognize. Nor is there an advantage to being the first to recognize it: there’s still good money to be made squeezing the last dregs from this dying business model, and rocking the boat will only hasten everybody’s inevitable demise. Who knows, you might get lucky and make it to retirement before the whole thing collapses. Might as well give it a shot.

So I think Mike’s proposal isn’t very feasible. It’s not a question of a needing a company to step forward and begin treating its customers with honesty and respect; it’s a question of needing an industry to admit that it’s less relevant than it used to be and quietly retire to a life of unassuming, unexciting competence. And that wouldn’t be much fun at all.