YouTube, SchmooTube

I want to know why YouTube thinks they’re going to take over my TV. Actually, to read that post it sounds like they expect to take over my freakin’ life. But have you watched a lot of long-form video on youTube? I don’t think I’ve successfully watched anything over ten minutes. I tried to watch some longer stuff, like political documentaries or some such, but it’s blurry and the content wasn’t interesting, and that is not the future of my TV.

And the rest of it, that’s not professional material pseudo-legally posted onto the site? Crappy home videos and shit. Sometimes literally, shit. I mean come on now. This cannot stand!

The future of my TV should be stuff like Dr. Horrible. Professionally (if rapidly) produced and acted, with good production values that looks awesome (ok at least passable) on my giant HDTV and sounds awesome on my surround sound stereo. I want to see laser beams and shit!

Not literal shit.

Shit as a metaphor for “more stuff like laser beams”.

I guess what I’m saying is really that I lament the idea that sometime in the future the only way to satisfy my entertainment jones, which mostly consists of science fiction, documentaries, and lifestyle television (y’know, like Project Runway and Mythbusters and Top Chef), will be watching short-form videos shot on consumer-level equipment (you know, real TV cameras cost like $100k), written, if they’re written at all, by amateurs, performed by amateurs, directed by amateurs, sound recorded by amateurs, lighting by amateurs, set-design by whoever’s house it was shot at, post-process done on somebody’s MacBook, etc. etc.

Granted, YouTube’s video quality will improve, bandwidth will increase, equipment will get cheaper (but it’s a function of size sometimes, lenses are physical things that have to be a certain size to be really really good). But that really doesn’t matter if the people making the material aren’t of a professional grade.

I want to be entertained by professionals, or people who have skills at a professional grade. Amateur videography, when it’s entertaining, is almost alway entertaining only because it’s shocking or unusual. Like crazy people who have cable access shows. By and large, amateur videography is not good drama, it’s not good sci-fi, it’s not good comedy. It’s usually the video equivalent of listening to a college radio talk show. UGH!

I think this is often because amateurs just don’t know how hard you have to work to make something professional. In their own day jobs they might know what a professional standard is for, say, making paper. Smooth, rich, creamy, perfectly bleached paper with little hearts printed in faded out pink at the top. But how far you have to go in some other industry is just plain lost on so many people who refuse to acknowledge their own ignorance.

How do you get that pristine video look, like watching The Big Bang Theory in its pristine glory in 1080i? The set is decorated with lots of detail that plays into the characters and backstory. The actors are dressed in complementary colors that go with the set and play up their character features. Everything is well-lit for the camera, everybody has the appropriate amount of makeup on to look natural on camera. It’s a professional job by a team of professionals.

Now, it could very well be that somebody might make something on a recurring basis that is amateurishly presented and yet hilarious, or gripping. Maybe people feel that way about Lonelygirl15. But we know now that the people behind that Web show are pros. And we have an idea, from interviews, how much time, thought, and work went into making the show work. And I would bet dollars to donuts that they’re constantly struggling to make the next piece, financially and creatively. It’s hard.

If it were easy, everybody would be doing it. And that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. I dread the day. Dread. It.

I think YouTube is the Great White Hype of entertainment. The professional entertainers are over there smoking and drinking and getting all fat, and betting on themselves anyway because they know the amateurs when it comes down to it just don’t have the skills to compete.

God I hope I’m right about that. Or if I’m not right about that then I hope I’m wrong about the other thing too, and amateur videography/filmmaking turns out to be just wonderful and content-rich and the blessing of my existence.

I invite examples that assuage my fears.

Refrigerator Dreams

I have a couple of serious problems I’m trying to address here. One is my electricity bill, which in Atlanta in August was like $250. This is only partly because we run the air conditioning pretty heavily and our windows are old. It’s also because we’re always opening and closing the fridge door, and putting items away and checking to see what’s in there and deciding what to get out.

There are good fridge-user habits that we could adopt, and I really try, but inevitably with a couple of people using the thing there’s a lot of energy wasted re-cooling items because all the cold air got out. And then there’s the horror of freezer burn, which is caused by the very slight melting-and-refreezing cycle that occurs when you open the freezer door and close it again. The more you open that freezer, the more freezer-burnt stuff’s going to get.

You can get glass-door refrigerators, and space-maximizing “French door” refrigerators too, both of which I want I want because I am an acquisitive American who loves kitchen toys.

But even these awesome fridges don’t quite measure up to what I think is the Ultimate Fridge.

This concept fridge, which is designed to compartmentalize a refrigerator so that students can make sure nobody else gets into their stuff, is pretty close, but no cigar. For one thing, it assumes that only students want compartmentalization in their refrigerators, and it assumes that they want it just to keep other students’ grimy germ-laden mitts off their leftovers. It’s a fantastic piece of concept art, but I find it shallow and immature in its ambitions.

So, with a great deal less artistic ability, here is my rendering of what I want in a refrigerator. It’s my Dream Fridge.

Refrigerator Concept

The clear glass windows would allow me to see the contents without opening the compartment and losing cold air. I’d actually rather have the whole door be glass, but it seems more efficient to minimize the glass space, and anyway all I need is a peep to serve the purpose. And portholes are cool lookin’.

Compartmentalizing the fridge allows me to retrieve items from one area without compromising the cold air in another section, resulting in less freezer burn for frozen items and less spoilage for refrigerated items.

Giving each section its own thermostat lets me manage the space in the fridge more efficiently and keep items at their optimum temperature. If I’m stocking up on ice cream for a party, I may dedicate one compartment to be a really really cold freezer, and another to be not as cold. If an icemaker were installed in one compartment, that one might be kept at a lower temperature to freeze ice faster.

Since the fridge needs a compressor, that could go on top, like the SubZero example above, or maybe make the fridge shallower and put the compressor along the back. Or even, since I can do anything I want because it’s my dream, why not put the compressor outside the house, or tie it into the heating and cooling system of the house? Let my central air conditioner do the work. I have no idea if that’s a good idea, but without any research or examination it seems like one. Heh.

Semantic Web Practical Use Case: “Webcursions”

JB says: Here’s an idea; call it “Web Excursions” (Webcursions?)

You write a blog post, and in that post you have contextual links– hyperlinks –but they’re special, because rather than just linking offsite, these links take you down a pathway, on an excursion which eventually circles back to your blog post, or article or story or whatever.

For example, somehow you link off to Wikipedia, and in that Wikipedia article is some kind of mechanism for you to take the next step down the pathway that the author has chosen, sort of choose-your-own-adventurey style. Maybe the pathway links are a special color or have a special icon next to them

Steve says: Hrm, kind of like the old fan ring networks but different.

JB says: Right. The next step in the path is clearly identified, so you can follow the steps and don’t get lost in branches. Seems kind of semantic-webby.

I was just reading this blog post and it generated that idea. If you scroll down to the section headed “so how exactly did i get here?” where he talks about making a CD rom that contained “excursions”.

We should be able to build “excursions” into any kind of Web content. We can already link offsite, what’s missing is the mechanism to bring the user back around to our context. We can only do that if we build it into our web site ourselves, but that eliminates the possibility of (easily) referring to other people’s work to supplement your own. Maybe it shouldn’t be easy, but I kind of think this kind of reference is what the Web’s ultimate purpose really is.

Steve says: Right. Did you ever watch James Burke on PBS? He had a couple short series

Connections and The Day the Universe Changed

Where he’d start with one thing, go off on a whole series of contextual type links and then bring it back around to the starting point.

JB says: Right. Exactly.

[OK Internets, I have pushed the idea into your ethertubes, now spontaneously generate a startup that will build this for me! Just like you did for the Networked Archive idea. Here is some more chat, in a more practical vein, about how one might actually pull this off.]

JB says: I think you could pull of this Webcursions thing with an Apache plugin. So in the originating page, the links that start a Webcursion point back to your server.

Steve says: ah, yes

JB says: The Apache server grabs the destination page, parses it, and replaces any links to the *next* pathway step with the special Webcursion code, and so forth, so the user never leaves your server.

I mean, this wouldn’t do for a real site but rather for a Proof of concept

Steve says: ah, yeah

JB says: Since controlling other sites like that is kind of evil.

Steve says: spoofing and stealing content… yeah

JB says: but just to show “here’s how it’d work if we all agreed to do it”.

Hmm. Or this is better: other Apache servers could recognize requests for pathway steps. That’s a better proof of concept. You get to leave one site, go to another, but it recognizes a special request and formats appropriately.

Steve says: Yeah, that would do it. Maybe a combination of a web browser plugin and an apache module. The web browser plugin would put something extra in the HTTP header which the apache module would recognize

JB says: Well, it could be a new protocol request couldn’t it? One that’s almost http but with semantic additions for the pathway built into the headers of the request.

Steve says: Yeah, thought about that too, but http is so entrenched

JB says: Well, yeah, i think this would be a whole grassroots sort of exercise.

Steve says: And then you’re talking W3C RFCs and such

JB says: And i don’t think this’ll ever actually get built, so I’m just thinking about what would a good way to do it that didn’t require everyone to have a browser plugin. ‘Cause shit, even Flash isn’t in *every* browser yet

Steve says: right

JB says: But there’s only two web servers to speak of. Apache and IIS. I bet the semantic web people have already done all of this thinking, but i also bet a new protocol is the trick

Steve says: maybe a different apache virtual host

JB says: yeah, kind of like how SSL is done

Steve says: So, rather than linking to www.hogswallowing.com/page.html you’d link to webscursion.hogswallowing.com/page.html

JB says: or instead of http:// you do sttp://

Steve says: A new protocol would certainly do the trick. That’d probably require a web browser plugin, though too.

JB says: really? why?

Steve says: For the browser to know where to direct sttp://  — what port

JB says: hmm, true

Steve says: or, make port 8222 the one used for this and run two instances of apache, the one at 8222 modified to do the webscursion, and link to http://www.hogswallowing.com:8222/page.html (or whatever port)

JB says: yeah, either your destination supports webscursions or not. Any way you link to it, it has to support them, so it’s finding the way to accomplish the link without burdening the reader/user that is key.

Steve says: right

JB says: It would read the page, find the next link in the path, and format appropriately. You would have to figure out “what do you do if links disappear”. On receiving a 404 does it go to the next step on the path? Does it mention anything? Put some kind of coding in the request headers to indicate the health of the path and let the browser or scripting interpret it, and include reference to the “Originator” of the path to allow authors to monitor the health of their paths and make adjustments when necessary.

Steve says: gets complicated

JB says: yeah, but it started complicated

Steve says: that is true

What went wrong? A good day goes to Hell!

Doors are slamming here right now. People, myself and my girlfriend, are pissed at each other and the world in general.

It started out as a great day. Went to brunch at a nice little place I hadn’t been to before. Really good breakfast, fresh fruit, nice company. It’s kind of a regular thing for my girlfriend and I, brunch with these two other couples.

We had our day sort of mapped out. Brunch, then to Buckhead to buy a thing for the back of our pantry door, so we could put spices there instead of all over tucked in everywhere else. We’ve seen a couple of people who have similar deals on the back of their pantry doors, and we wanted in on the action.

So off to the Container Store we go. We buy our back-of-pantry shelving, and some hooks that we intended to screw into the built-in bookshelves that are in our dining room. These are bookshelves that we had our favorite handyman’s crew build last year, and we love them. Now we want to add some hooks and a canvas pouchy thing so we can sort our mail more easily. I was a bit nervous about screwing things into the nice bookshelves.

After the Container Store we stopped by the mall, where the GF bought a giant fake diamond ring to serve as her wedding band while she portrays Lady Capulet in an upcoming production of Romeo and Juliet. Cool, things turning out so far as we expected.

Then, the Apple Store. Are they really called “The Apple Store”? Outside there’s just a big bitten-apple logo, not a sign that says “The Apple Store”. Just wondering. In the “Apple Store”, if that’s it’s real name, my girlfriend inquired about bringing her iPhone to the Genius bar for some looking at. Her Google Maps application won’t start. Add to that the fact that on her iBook, which she uses to sync her iPhone, the Address Book application won’t start. And she has all her contacts, which she needs for her job, on the phone. We can’t back up her contacts, so what to do?

There’s an hour-and-a-half wait for a standby appointment with a Genius. She puts her name in, but we decide not to wait around. This iPhone thing is a sore spot for her already, and consequently myself as well. I’m frustrated when technology that I want desperately to succeed only succeeds in making my loved-ones lives more difficult.

We get home. The shelving thing that attaches to the door is too short, and there is only one screw-hole that we can use to attach it to the door. GF is all “I don’t want to go the whole way back up there” so I volunteer to take the thing back and exchange it.

Meantime, we’ve begun the process of attaching the hooks to the bookshelves. Remember the hooks? Yeah, well, that doesn’t go very smoothly and now the shelves are marred a bit where we tried to get the hooks to slide onto their attachment thingies only to figure out that we put the attachment thingies on upside down, and so we’ve now taken the screws in and out of the wood about three times, each time lessening the grip of the screws. Great.

We get that sorted out, and I leave to take the shelving back to the Container Store. I’m in my car when GF calls. The hooks won’t go through the eyelets of the mail-sorting canvas thing we got, can I get new hooks please. So now I have marred my bookshelves and we have to take the screws out *again* and I’m getting pretty frustrated. I really hate when my stuff get’s fucked up. Hate it even more when it’s through my own stupidity.

Oh, and GF cut her finger on the god damned hook while we were putting it on upside down. That scared me, not only for that moment but at the prospect that we might have this sharp thing waiting to cut her again as she breezed by unwarily on her way to get some tea from the fridge.

I get the stuff and the other stuff at the container store, and go back home. We take off the bitch-ass too-big yuppie hooks and screw in the new ones I got. There’s an extra hole staring at me from the wood now, just taunting me with “nice work, asshole, you fucked up your dining room”.

I try to shake it off, and we manage to attach the new thing to the back of the pantry door without any trouble. Woohoo! We start putting stuff in, and our frustration is kind of evident as we’re very close to snapping at each other over where to put stuff in the fucking pantry and our newly-empty shelves. What a petty thing I am sometimes. God.

I forgot to mention that we had also stopped at Lowe’s where I got some nylon anchor things. I wanted to attach a piece of wood to the wall inside the pantry, so I could add a shelf. There was already a piece of wood on the other side, so all I had to do in my vast manliness was cut a piece of wood to size and fix it to the goddamned motherfucking sonofamotherfucking bitch wall. Cock!

I tried to insert the anchors into the holes I had drilled, carefully following the scanty instructions. Failed. The anchors wouldn’t go the whole way in, and when I tried to push them in they wouldn’t budge. And then when I tried to pull them out they wouldn’t budge either! God damned plaster fucking wall.

While trying to pull one of the anchors out of the wall, I managed to pinch the hell out of the meat of my finger. Then I re-noticed something I had forgotten: one of the hinges of the pantry door is not actually attached to the door. The screws are totally loose in the holes, and you can’t screw them back in. Great, all this effort is going to result in the door falling off.

So by this time I’m completely fed. The. Hell. Up. I decide to try one more time to stick the wood on the plaster wall. I try just screwing the screws in real fast. Of course not. Then I try nails, because it looks like the other boards are all affixed using nails. No good, it just hits something inside the wall and starts to bounce. Like I’m pounding on a rubber ball. ARGH the FUCKING ARGH!

Yeah, I totally failed. I also failed at this same task a couple days ago. In the process I totally bitched up the wall so even someone who knew what the fuck they were doing probably couldn’t put a shelf in there now. Nice work, asshole.

And you know, the handyman I want to call to make it all better has completely and totally flaked on me lately. He did some work on my doors and was going to return the next morning to do the basement door– and never showed up. I called him a couple times; the second time went straight to voice mail. I left a pleasantly perplexed messaged, and he’s never called me back. It’s really frustrating, because I like the guy a lot and he does good work. His crew built the bookshelves, like I mentioned.

Not only because I’d love to call him and have him make my pantry pain go away, but we also wanted to hire him to build us a deck and enclose our little side porch. I wanted to give this guy like $12,000 and for him to help make my house more awesome. And he won’t call me back. Fucking A.

When he was here last week working on the doors (he was kick-proofing them, because it’s a dangerous part of town, another frustrating recent item) we got to talking about how I’m afraid to do handywork myself. I want to learn how to do some basic wiring, and change the light fixtures in a bunch of rooms. But I’ve never done much of this sort of thing– I didn’t grow up in a handy-household. I wouldn’t know where to start in changing my car’s oil. I don’t have much idea how a toilet works.

He encouraged me to just try it. Just try doing something, and let yourself screw up. Well, here I go trying this, attach a board to a plaster wall, and it did NOT turn out well. So that’s frustrating. Yeah, I know the thing to do is try try again but god DAMN it that motherfucking piece of shit plaster wall! And, I didn’t even know it was plaster when I started; I thought it was drywall like the rest of the house. That’s how ignorant I am– I even knocked on it to make sure it was drywall, and thought the “tok tok” I got confirmed my theory.

Sigh.

So we’re cleaning up shortly after all of this goes down. GF is putting stuff away, anticipating that the cleaning service will be coming tomorrow. She’s doing her best to be helpful, and kind of being hands-off with me because I’m obviously at my wits’ end. I start putting stuff away, occasionally scratching at a mosquito bite. Where did that come from? I’ve been inside all this time! Fucking mosquitos! I got five bites this morning just standing in the back yard watching the dog do his morning business. (Yeah, that’s on my tally of frustrating recent things.)

Anyway, we’re cleaning up like I said. Unfortunately, she also is using the tone of voice that you use with a crazy tiger that you’re trying to convince not to eat you. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it, but this bugs me.

I feel like she expects me to explode at any second, which is frustrating because I never explode like that. That’s probably not what she’s thinking, she’s probably just trying to make me feel better about failing a something so simple and yet so masculine as putting up a shelf. It doesn’t work, and I snap at her: “You don’t need to use that tone of voice like I’m about to freak out. That’s almost more infuriating than anything else.”

Why? Why did I say that? Was I lashing out, in this sad little way? Biting the hand that’s trying to rub my back and make me feel better. She sure didn’t have it coming.

I apologized almost immediately. I don’t think it worked, really. I’m going to have to just wait for her to accept that I know I shouldn’t have said that and that I regret it. For now, it’s tense. She’s going around with that air of ticked-offedness about her, doing the same thing I do which is get all uber-efficient and get-things-done-I’ll-show-that-bastard. It would be cute if I didn’t feel queasy at the knowledge that I’m the reason she’s angry. It’s very cute because it’s exactly what I do when I get mad. Well, except not this time, because she beat me to it, so I did the so-weary-at-the-world thing and dramatically paused at the pantry door rubbing my face for effect.

I felt compelled to write this all down. I dunno why. Maybe because I know she’ll read it, and because I hope it exorcises some of this pent-up frustration I’ve been experiencing.

Now I’m going to finish this and go nurse a soda and hope she lets me sit next to her on the couch while I wait for the last few hours of this godawful Sunday to expire, and I’ll try to work the kinks out of my back, and I’ll try to ignore the pinched meat of my finger, and the hangnail on my other finger, and the bitter thorn in my stomach that I always get when the girl I love is mad at me.

Let’s Have Some Perspective, People

So this guy made an iPhone app called “I Am Rich,” which does nothing but show an image of a red gemstone– presumably a ruby. He priced it at $999.99 and managed to get it added to the iPhone App Store.

The "I Am Rich" application icon

When I first heard about this, I thought “hmmm, I guess some people with too much money might want that, as a sort of joke-but-not-really-’cause-look-i’m-so-rich-i-spent-a-grand-on-a-joke.” Or maybe even because they wanted it for its face-value function. Y’know, kind of like any other useless luxury item. People go for that shit. “Look at my gold fingernail clipper with the inset diamond hinge.”

It never occurred to me to get angry at the guy who made the app. I’m still bewildered by the furor.

It’s gotten enough attention that the New York Times has written a story about the whole deal. According to the NYT, the guy who made the app’s been getting hate mail– “Mr. Heinrich was bombarded with e-mail and phone messages, “many of them insulting,” he said.”

Come on now. Really? Yelling at a dude because you “fell” for his joke/art? It did exactly what it said it would do, and it cost exactly as much as it told you it would. It’s the iPhone equivalent of touching a land mine to see if it will go off. It’s pretty and cute, and I know it’s going to kill me, but there must be some way I can try it out and get back to cover if what I know is true actually turns out to really be true.

A modern land mine. I assume the dude isn't going to poke it with that wand...

I use the land mine analogy, which essentially compares stupidly wasting money you didn’t deserve to have in the first place with being rent limb from limb by buried explosives because that’s how important this subject is.

Judging by the amount of press, anyway.

And all this hoopla for 8 people– “I Am Rich” was purchased a grand total of 8 times. So the hooplateers are offended just on principle that anyone would dare create such an application and sell it on the holy App Store. That lofty perch must be reserved for fifteen different applications that all emulate a flashlight. Some of which actually would have you pay them money, more money than it costs to buy a real flashlight, for the privilege of using an application to set your backlight to its highest setting and turn the screen white.

Of course, Apple doesn’t give you a way to try out an iPhone app. Once you’ve bought the app, you’re kind of screwed if it’s terrible. Don’t go purchasing any of those $40 industry-specific applications unless you know they’re going to suit your need. So there is some room for criticism of high-priced applications on that basis.

Nintendo does the same thing. You can’t try out the games on the Wii shop, you just have to spend the ten bucks for SPOGS Racing and then spend the next hour cursing at Nintendo for loose quality control. SPOGS Racing is really horrible.

But anyway, I’m having a  hard time dealing with the fact that

• a) people give a crap about “I Am Rich” and that
• b) the crap they give is flung at the developer instead of idiots who clicked the app to install it and then have the nerve to claim they’ve been scammed, and that
• c) people are really as stupid as I always knew they were.

Maybe my real problem is that this time I can’t just shrug and be all cynical, because this time people are being stupid in a completely different way than I expected. Like when you kick that landmine and it springs up and decapitates the guy next to you, and you get off with only an amputation or two.

Don’t confuse users with customers

This post on Web 2.0/Startup focused blog “Mashable” seems to make a classic mistake.

A fellow got locked out of his Google account, and couldn’t get the company to respond to his requests for support.

This guy’s experience sucks and Google should fix it, but maybe not exactly for the reasons that you. Always remember that unless you’re paying somebody money, you’re a user, not a customer. Customers pay for service, and Google’s customers are by and large, advertisers.

I have a hunch that Mashable and the commenters on that post are confusing being a user of a Web site with being a customer of that Web site.

One could argue that you are a customer of Google’s because you see the ads they serve. But from that perspective your actions contribute such a negligible amount of value in that manner that it’s not economical for Google to care that much about what happens to individuals. Your Lifetime Value as a viewer of Google advertisements probably doesn’t add up to the hour it’ll take some technician to fix your problem.

Ads are paid for in “CPM”– that means “Cost Per Thousand” views. The “M” stands for a thousand; I presume they use roman numerals for some reason you could look up on Google. So an advertiser gets paid every thousand times you view a page. Over your lifetime, you will view thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pages of ads. But even though Google doesn’t release the prices of their ads, and some ads are worth more than others, lemme tell you that it doesn’t cost all that much to buy a view thousand CPM ad. So Google’s gotta weigh the probable value of your ad-viewing vs. the time it’ll take to fix your problem.

Actually, they weigh the average value of the average user vs. the average time it takes to fix the average account problem. Apparently, that calculation adds up to only a certain amount of customer support per single-user-affecting incident. They do try, as the Mashable post attests, but they don’t try very hard.

In the case of this poor guy locked out of his account, as Rob mentions below, he’s actually a paying customer of Google– he pays for extra storage. Does the calculation still return a result of ignore-him-’til-he-goes-away? I think it might.

Google isn’t necessarily looking to create the most robust and dependable service online, even when you’re willing to pay them for it. I think Google’s primary focus is page views, and throwing things onto the Web that will increase their page views as much as possible. So the calculation of “should we go the extra mile to fix an individual extra-storage customer’s problem” probably still comes out negative.

Do you think advertisers on Google’s network suffer the same lack of response to their problems?

Now, if everybody on Gmail got locked out, well then Google would respond, because it would impact their volume in a tangible way and pinch their REAL customers in a very painful place. Even then, the user clamor would only be a telltale alert that the ruckus that really matters is on its way from the corner where huddle the wretched masses of businesses whose ads weren’t being served. Ads they pay for in advance.

[Note: I failed to notice in the Mashable post that the person in question pays Google for storage, so now instead of being certain about whether the poster and commenters are making that "classic mistake", the post now just assumes they are and makes its silly point anyway.]