Runaway Future

Everyone’s heard of love at first sight. Recently, I was enamored with great design.

The site is Noah Kalina’s. He’s the guy behind the iconic “photo of himself for 6 years” video. His blog is just amazingly put together. It’s minimal, most of the content is multimedia, with embedded videos, playable music and pictures, even has a nifty little way for permalinks.

Looking further, the platform that the site is built on is Tumblr. The platform is part of a new breed of “tumblelogs”, designed to focus on short-form, minimalistic posts of multimedia, be it video, music, photo or whatever and quick quotes, links and the such. The idea appeals me as a fast and easy solution to share things I come across.

But the obvious question is what would happen to this Wordpress location and the accumulated three years of content I have here? I’ve spent time over the past few days reading through the content I’ve posted here. There’s a lot of crap, drivel about my day-to-day happenings, complaining about work. There’s also a lot of decent reflections of my feelings and thoughts. So much so, I’ve been toying with the idea of making a “Best Of” category to highlight what I feel provides the clearest view of self, with some sort of comment or explanation of context. I’ve also been pondering clearing out the crap that serves little to no purpose, filling up space for no reason other then to document another weekend of boozing. That’s more unlikely, simply because I don’t think I’m at a point when I can look back and judge the value of some of that stuff.

However, in the end, I was surprised by some of what I posted. Though long and sometimes plodding (as this post is getting close to being), there’s still some value in those words and so they will remain. Which is why I’m glad I found this plugin: ReBlog. It allows for blogs to be consolidated from multiple locations.

I’m not sure if a Tumblr blog is the way to go, for at least some of what I want to create. Maybe it’s just refreshing the design here, adding some new plugins and going from there. But I’m going to continue to think of ways to improve my content.

It’s been many months since I had the original conversation that planted the seed for this entry, but if anything, the main idea behind it all rings truer now then ever before.

Back in April, I was at the old place on Carleton Street talking with my former housemates about Facebook, among other things. Like most people, I got a Facebook account on a whim and slowly but surely got sucked further and further into it. Checking out pictures, seeing what people I know are up to, seeing what’s going on, looking for hot girls that I can have awkward conversation with. It could even be considered ironic that this will be auto-fed onto Facebook from my website.

However, the technology is coming at a cost. I had my birthday a month ago, and save for the family that called and the friends that came to K-Murf, no one actually said Happy Birthday to me. Now that might seem petty, but bear with me. Sure, I had a good two dozen people post on the Facebook wall, but it’s communication without talking, ringing hollow. Why “waste” that extra effort to talk to your friends and see what people are up to, when in three clicks, I can go to their profile and learn all about them and their news. Obviously, there’s still the close friends, but those a little farther out, maybe the ones you don’t see as often as you should, they are the ones who suffer from this distance we’re all erecting.

It’s been almost 15 years since I was first introduced to the Internet. Before then, and even for the first little while afterwards, I would still make phone calls, write letters and so on. Slowly but surely, those forms of communication are being phased out. I use MSN and Facebook much more then my cellphone, I don’t know when the last time I wrote a hand-written letter. I feel disconnected when I go to my parents’ place and they have a dialup connection that I don’t use and a phone number that barely any of my friends know. Sometimes that’s a good thing to be away.

I assume this same debate was raised when phones were first introduced and again when email gained popularity. But now, as technology continues to encroach on our day to day lives, the personal touch is lost.

And it’s only going to continue at this pace. Someday, probably within the next ten years, we’ll have one object, integrating all forms of communication into a single platform, phone, email, text, instant message, your business life, your personal life, your finances. It’s very close already with the rise of the Blackberry. Soon, everything we will do won’t exist at all, except electronically.

Before I sound too much like a Luddite, keep in mind that I’m just as dependent as anyone else. I wouldn’t be employed in either job I have if it weren’t for computers, I spend just as much time scaring at flickering screens as anyone else. But it’s making me wonder if it’s all worth it.

As a sign of thanks, I made an effort to call Daniel, my former Carleton Street housemate on his birthday back in April. For one reason or another, I was busy that day and couldn’t make it over to wish him a proper happy birthday, but still a phone call, a voice, means so much more then words on a screen.

Way back in January of 2006, I wrote about Pandora. Pandora is an internet radio that tailors the music towards your preferences, so you type in a song or an artist and it plays songs/artists of similar attributes.

Ever since then, I’ve been using Pandora almost religiously, with four finely tuned “stations” set up to listen to different types of music.

Today, I went to load it up as normal and got this page instead.

Doing a little digging, I came across this blog posting from the Pandora blog:

Much to our chagrin, on the heels of our being forced to block virtually our entire international listening audience, we now have to add Canada to the list (beginning May 16th). We had been hopeful that the licensing situation with our Northern friends might have some hope of imminent resolution. However, after a tough week, and in the wake of the substantial attention the blocking has clearly brought to this issue, it’s been made clear to us that we cannot continue streaming into Canada.

No need to reiterate just how difficult this is. It’s just a terrible thing for music that there’s not even a licensing structure available that would allow a webcaster to stream legally outside the U.S.

I’ll reiterate our commitment to fighting as hard as we can to fix this absurd problem - we only hope that reform will come soon so that we can get back to the business of listening and discovery.

My sincerest apologies.

Tim (Founder)

LINK

Ridiculous.

Here’s some further explanation. Again, ridiculous.

The future of online music, film, etc. is becoming increasingly bleak. I fear what will be in a few years time.

So having a gander at the ol’site stats and I notice that there’s a myspace site referring to me. ‘Myspace?!’ I say, ‘I don’t have Myspace.’ So I do a little investigating and I find that someone is using one of the images I hosted. That’s a little impolite, not only jacking my images but also using my bandwidth.

So a few small changes and a good idea courtesy of my friend Chris and here’s the ‘improved’ version of the site: scroll right

It’s like one of those double-wide trailers. More room, wide open spaces. I’m a big fan of whitespace on a website, so I did the best I could.

First off, check this article out.

For those who are to lazy to, scientists in Senegal have witnessed chimpanzees making spears and using them to hunt other primates.

Let’s ignore the evolutionary impact of this, which is obviously huge (here we have an animal independently learning and growing in their environment at such a level it is becoming habitual). So throwing that all aside: the monkeys have spears.

For the longest time, humans have been the only ones on this pale blue dot who have had the spears. Granted, we’ve developed spears that could launch in the air, explode and cause catastrophic pain and destruction. But that’s all beside the point.

We’re no longer the only ones with the spears and that’s just what they’re showing us. Who knows what the monkeys are developing behind closed doors in their executive simian studio apartments.

I always had a bad feeling about teaching them language, but now they’re making weapons. I smell a revolution coming, do you know what side you’re on?

On a side note, I think Israel and the Phillipines are in on it.