Twelve Black Code Monkeys

My family came in for the Thanksgiving Day weekend and I was lamenting with my brother-in-law, a fellow geek, about how I ran into a bunch of problems accessing email from work. I use a hosted exchange account that lets me access my email via a web-based “Outlook Web Access.” Unfortunately, though, this only works in Internet Explorer and you need to have ActiveX enabled and be able to install new ActiveX components. It just so happens that on the system I’m working on I can’t do this. This leaves me with a couple more options. One is to access email via a very dumbed down text-based interface. As it happened, this interface was not working on Tuesday. Normally, what I end up doing is just using my phone to send and receive email. This works ok, but I really can’t type long messages in it as it takes forever typing on the little keyboard. Also as it happens, I occasionally leave my phone at home, or it runs out of juice at some point, becoming unusable.

So my brother-in-law was telling me about this remote access tool that he uses called LogMeIn. I decided to install it at home and see how it worked. The install was simple and I didn’t need to fiddle with router settings at all. I tried it from another computer on my home network, but it should work the same from anywhere since it’s going out to the internet and back in via a browser. That’s how this works. You establish your home computer as a host and set up an account at LogMeIn.com, then you connect to that account over the web via a remote location. You see your desktop and any applications as you would, albeit a bit more slowly.

Remote control apps have been around for a long time and I remember hearing about Citrix years ago. The nice thing about this, is that at least for the types of things I would use it for, it’s free. LogMeIn has more premium services that you pay for, some of which I’m sure would be very useful to business users. A number of nice things I’ve noticed so far:

• You can access your desktop via various methods, including ActiveX and Java.
• You can access it via any system that can run a java-enabled web-browser
• You can change screen resolutions and desktop panning options on the fly without having to reconnect, etc.
• You can change the number of colors that it uses on the fly. This way, if you don’t need lots of colors (for displaying photos for example), you can decrease them, which will result in speedier displays.

Not only can I access my regular Outlook account, but Trillian, and just about anything else on my computer. No more worrying about whether I copied a file I was working on at home onto a key drive, or sending myself email with the file. Just log in. Seems pretty simple!

Of course, I haven’t tried this out for an extended period of time, but my brother-in-law seems to have been using it successfully for some time. Might be a good option for those of you who are always connected to the internet at home via a high-speed connection and whose corporate networks don’t allow a whole lot in terms of email access, IM, etc.

I’ve never been the best about IT security. Part of the reason is because in all the years I’ve been working or playing with computers (over 20 years total but about 15 years on a PC, 12 or 13 years on a Windows PC starting with Windows 3.0), I’ve seldom had any issues. I may have had a virus once, but it didn’t do any damage and was eliminated with a virus checker. But for years I ran no virus protection. Spyware is much more insidious and so I’ve run spyware checkers for a while. When it comes to passwords, I’m really lazy. I know the ideal thing to do is to have a unique username and password - or at least a unique password for every site you go to. But who wants to write all these down, let alone remember them. If you put them in a file on your computer, than you risk losing it, or someone getting access to the file. So like most people I’ve generally kept things simple and had a few variations on usernames and a few passwords, so that I can usually guess within a reasonable amount of time.

Luckily, within the last few days I heard Todd Cochrane mention something on one of his Geek News Central podcasts about a password management “bookmarklet.” I didn’t quite understand what it was, but Todd suggested it was a way to have unique passwords by just remembering one master password.

So I followed his link and found that this was indeed the answers to that kind of uneasy feeling I’ve had for a while that my way of dealing with passwords was really vulnerable. Basically, this guy Nick Wolf created a JavaScript that uses a standard encryption scheme, MD5, to generate a password by combining your own “master password” and the site’s domain name. So all you have to remember is your master password.

The “bookmarklet” is something that you link as a bookmark in your browser, possibly on a link toolbar for easy access. When you go to a given site, you click on this bookmarklet, enter your master password, at it automatically fills in your password (you need to be on the login page for it to do this of course). Of course before you get to this stage, you need to create the password. You can do this by going to the form that Nick has provided. However, while the form doesn’t save the information that you’re typing to some database, this is always a possibility, and even if you trust the site, unless it is encrypted via SSL (the URL would be https instead of http and you would see an icon of a closed lock in your browser), then there’s always the possibility that someone could intercept those bytes along the way and discover your master password. But because this is simply JavaScript, you can run it on any JavaScript compliant browser. It doesn’t need to be sitting on a web server, it can be sitting on your local PC. This way, communicating with it will not need access to the internet, and will not be sending anything outside of your PC. I’ve even tried this on my Treo 650 smartphone’s browser (Blazer) and while it took a little while to finish, it did provide me with the password needed.

There are some other people who’ve taken the script and made some changes to it that might be of value to some. For example there’s someone who changed the encoding scheme to one that allows for a potentially more random password as well as a longer one (Nick Wolfe’s is only 8 characters long). There’s another version of the script by Chris Zarate, which actually distinguishes between subdomains. This way, for example, if you had a couple of blogger accounts, bigtacos.blogspot.com, and sushicoma.blogspot.com, you could have unique passwords for both of these. Nick Wolfe’s script doesn’t distinguish between the two as their domain name (blogspot.com) are the same, only their subdomains differ.

There’s even a movie that gives you a quick demo of how it works if you’re still confused.

I think this is great and I’m starting to go through all my sites to change my passwords. But there are so many! I don’t know where to start and a lot of the sites I go to are logged in automatically via cookies, so I don’t have any recent memory of actually logging into them. I guess I’ll have to start looking through my history to jar my memory as to which sites I go to which might require passwords. As for the master password I’m using, it’s something that has a bit of meaning, but would be random enough looking to most people and included upper and lower case letters, numbers, and punctuation. It’s not hard to think up something like this especially when you consider that this will be the only one you’ll have to remember for a while. Just don’t use one of the passwords you have been using, because you never know if the server they were on has been hacked at some point.

My only wish would be that you could use this for things other than websites - mainly stand-alone applications or even network or system passwords. But I guess those will still need to be handled by some kind of password management application if indeed you have a bunch to keep track of.

Update: Chris Zarate just informed me that I got a bit mixed up. Apparently his version of this script actually ignores the subdomain, whereas the original script accounts for it. Somehow I’ve been using his script for months without noticing, oh well! Thanks for the clarification, Chris!

I’ve talked about the difficulty of staying on top of all the content I want to consume these days. This is one of the biggest double-edged swords to the net. You have so many choices that it’s hard to keep up with even a fraction of them. One might ask why you need to “keep up” at all, but perhaps that’s only my obsessive-compulsive streak playing out. In fact, that is part of the reason I haven’t posted for a while. This week I’ve been trying hard not to keep up, but just to get through some of the backlog that seems to build up in record time. I could seriously spend every waking second reading, listening, and watching all this stuff, but, although this is obvious, one really needs to create filters to pick and choose because there’s way to much produced in a single day for one individual to consume probably in an entire lifetime.

(A quick side note. I am going to try for the first time to divide this particular entry into a few different “parts” which will actually be separate entries. A fellow blogger has suggested this mainly because my entries tend to me so long and this will allow people to consume them in smaller and easier “gulps.” Let me know how this works for you. If it doesn’t, I won’t do it again.)
Content types:

“Content” is one of those way overused words, but I don’t know of anything else to describe the general conglomeration of all the different types of information you can consume. I can clearly categorize this content into three main forms: audio, video, and text:

Text: text for me is mainly about blogs and rss feeds. I use Bloglines to “keep up” because it lets you hold onto an historical record of what you’ve read or haven’t read. This way, I can come back after a week of not reading Boing Boing and have 200 old entries stacked up instead of just getting the last 30. Keeping up is still a struggle, but it’s mostly just a matter of time. As far as the portability issue, I can access my Bloglines account from any computer connected to the net, and even on my Treo 650, although its mobile interface has some inherent flaws that cripple its usefulness for me. There are other readers specifically built for handheld devices, but none yet with the same functionality I describe above - Bloglines seems to have an exclusive on both for portable and non-portable solutions. What about books, you ask? I’ve never gotten into eBooks, but of course there are plenty of old-fashioned paper books on my bookshelf. Alas I am a slow reader in general which means that I opt for audio books whenever possible because it makes reading faster.

Video: video for me is mainly about a collection of DVD’s much of which I haven’t even watched for the first time, and TiVo. The DVD’s are kind of like books. They tend to be movies that are at least a couple of hours long, and what with the bonus features, commentaries, etc., it could be many more hours to fully consume a DVD’s content. TiVo lets me record the programming I want to see and watch it as I have time or inclination. TiVo by itself can be quite different from consuming a backlog of blog entries mainly because TiVo’s have a limited amount of space to record. So at a certain point your TiVo will have to delete content in order to record new content. Of course I did an end-run around this limitation by buying the Humax DRT-800 which includes a DVD writer, so if I ever get too low on space, I can always just burn as many DVD’s as I want. And at around $.30 per DVD, I’m probably not going to go broke even if I’m recording 30 DVD’s a day! Luckily, I tend to record only about 9 hours a week max, and often less than that due to repeats or when programming simply skips a week or two or more. Using the 30-second skip that TiVo offers, this becomes closer to 6 hours max, and that’s very easy to keep up with for someone who used to watch probably 7 hours of TV a night as a kid! Even if I increased this programming and didn’t have time to watch everything at home, I could theoretically burn a lot of stuff onto DVD and watch it away from home. I can also take those programs and put them on my Treo 650 for viewing, although the small screen doesn’t make the viewing particularly enjoyable!

Audio, for some reason, has for me become the most complex part of the equation, perhaps because its nature falls somewhere in between text and video in terms of space needed, flexibility, etc., and at the same time it has its own unique qualities. The most useful of those unique qualities is something that’s so obvious that one doesn’t tend to think about it in its full implications; Audio does not require your eyes! Because of this fact, Audio becomes inherently something that you can multitask with as part of other tasks, like driving, working, exercising, etc. Audio can also take the place text. Audio books can provide alternative to hard copies. Even what normally would be seen can be transferred to audio such as radio theater, and entertainment that we would normally associate with TV but which doesn’t lose anything critical, such as stand-up comedy, talk shows, news reporting, etc.

Technically speaking, audio files (especially when compressed using MP3, OGG, AAC, or WMA) are much smaller than video but much bigger than text. As such, they can be handled with some degree of ease. However, even though MP3 players have been around for at least 7 or 8 years now, audio is still wrapped up in large companies trying to protect their revenue streams, just as movies and books are. Early MP3 player manufacturers were sued by the record industry and even today we continue to see efforts among these companies to keep a stranglehold on what they want you to hear when and how. The record industry along with the massive radio station chains pretty much control what you hear on conventional radio, but with satellite radio, internet radio stations, and the flexibility to buy individual songs from artists that don’t have to be officially “approved” by the powers that be, there’s a much bigger choice for consumers. As bloggers have opened up a world of textual content as an alternative to the mainstream media and publishing, the podcasting movement has done something similar around all forms of radio, in particular talk radio but also music. Audio Books are geared to a much narrower audience, but the main online Audio Book publisher, Audible.com, is beholden to similar interests in the publishing arena but if not already being done, we should very soon be seeing unpublished authors recording their own works and publishing them as podcasts or similar audio files.

Next - Audio listening Zen

I’ve never been the most organized person in the world. I’m not the least organized either. Sometimes I think I am an anal-retentive-wannabe. I feel a vague uneasiness when things are out of order, which is most of the time. Not that “out of order” means that things need to be perfect by any stretch. For example, here’s a picture of cubicle at work, which I haven’t actually cleaned for weeks:

(trust me it looks worse in real life!)

When I do clean up around the house, I feel like I can think more clearly. In this way I’m a little schizophrenic, or maybe just stupid. I know I feel better when things are clean and orderly, but I’m just too lazy or distracted to do anything about it! Maybe it’s a chicken and egg sort of thing.

With the age of the personal computer, we have a whole new non-physical realm to deal with in terms of organization. We need to organize information, whether that’s in the way of files, email, bookmarks, whatever. In this area, which I’m admittedly sometimes more familiar with than the physical world, as disturbing as that is to contemplate, I’m not that better. Often it gets to the point where I’m getting warnings of only having 100MB of free space before I think, hmmm, I better clean things up. Certainly having done this for a couple of decades now, I may be a little better than the average person, but it is still a struggle, and one that seems increasingly challenging as my roles in the physical world becomes more substantive.

My main organizational issues right now center around two key parts of my digital life – email and bookmarks. Thankfully when it comes to RSS feeds, Bloglines has allowed me to get pretty organized, although of course I’m woefully behind at actually keeping up with all of the blog entries that I should be reading.

I first started collecting email back in ‘92 when I got my first email account in grad school. Somehow I decided that I wanted to hold onto these emails and because not a whole lot of people had email back then, my correspondence probably amounted to a hundred or so messages per year, maybe less. So every six months or a year I’d spend a half hour saving these to text files with a specific naming format including the name of the recipient, sender, and the date, plus a, b, c, d, etc. for multiple messages for a single day from/to the same person.

This continued until the Internet Bubble of the late 90’s made the flow of email so great that the time needed to do this expanded from 30 minutes to a whole day. So, the last archive of this kind happened sometime in 2000. By that time I had also started using Outlook as my email client and while it was probably just as easy (or difficult) to archive messages than it had been with Pine or Eudora, my laziness had gotten the better of me. Then in 2001 I started dating my now wife, and since then my time for such tasks has decreased even more!

In 2002 I started using a portable device to read email while away from the computer - The Danger Sidekick. Because of T-Mobile’s nonsensical resistance to allowing users to sync their Outlook data on the device, I was at a bit of a disadvantage.

Luckily, last summer, this changed dramatically when I bought my friend’s Treo 600. Around this same time I found a company (1and1)that among other things hosts outlook data so that you can access it remotely either via “Outlook Web Access” (a web interface to Outlook), or via an actual Outlook client or via a regular IMAP email client. 1and1 had by far the cheapest plan at only $6.99 per month and so far I’ve been pretty satisfied. After doing some searching, I finally settled on an excellent IMAP client for the Treo called ChatterEmail that let me synch whatever folders I wanted to. It’s still not practical to keep thousands of full messages from years of correspondence, it isn’t impossible. But ChatterEmail doesn’t use external cards the way some others do (Snappermail comes to mind). Still, for my needs, I felt ChatterEmail’s advantages outweighed this disadvantage, especially since it’s rare that I go searching for email that’s older than a year.

So, now that everything was more or less set up, what did I do? Not much. I know many people use an extensive folder system, even directing their email into various folders when they are received. I was never that big a user of folders, although I did use them in a minor way. So, recently, this lack of using such a powerful email organizational feature was gnawing at me and I figured I needed to come up with some strategic ways of using folders. What I came up with, ironically, involves more manual work. But at least it promotes organization. Basically I let things lie in the inbox for a while – sometimes it could be for an hour, sometimes for days or even weeks – but eventually sooner or later I have to go through and “clean house” which involves just going through the last umpteen messages and deleting stuff I know I don’t want to keep and taking other stuff and putting them in the appropriate folder. Luckily, I keep most personal mail from friends and family in my inbox, so don’t need to anything with these. This folder is synched with my Treo. I keep the last 3-6 months of messages in my inbox, and archive the rest going back a year or so to a separate folder which is still accessible on my hosted exchange account (but not the Treo). Last night I went through all the messages in my inbox and this archived inbox and created three or four folders for additional subjects that I figure I might need to go back and look at some time in the future: blog-related stuff, registration information, online purchases, posts with links to various references that I eventually want to read relating to photography, the Treo, etc. Currently I’m not synching these, but I figure eventually I can download these to the Treo very easily as needed.

Aside from all this on my hosted exchange account, I have some earlier Outlook data that I didn’t transfer because I was worried about using up the 500MB that the account gave me when I signed up. Even though they increased it to 1GB, I’m still a little reticent if for no other reason then having to go through an additional three or four years worth of email in that file. I guess eventually I should go ahead and put the stuff up there…

I’m surprised that there aren’t more tools out there to help people archive old email, and even keep it around for searching purposes. There’s a lot of information contained in years of email messages that could be useful to people. Old addresses, phone numbers, names, etc. It’s very easy to look up my name on the Internet and find up-to-date information about me because I have this blog and post messages online in various places. But most of my friends don’t have this kind of net-visibility, and so if I lose track of someone and they change their contact info, it’s sometimes next to impossible to find them again sometimes, unless of course they find me from something I’ve written and send me a line, as has happened a few times in the last year or so. The ability to create an archival structured document or set of documents, like a bulletin board with threads (something maybe along the lines that Gmail does?), could be really powerful. The main challenge in my mind would be not chaining it to a single program. Maybe creating something in xml or a similar standardized protocol so that developers could create many different viewers for it.

As I mentioned above, bookmarks (or “favorites” in MS parlance) are my next target area for organization. Again, I used to be better about these when there didn’t seem to be as much useful stuff to link to. I still have the remnants of a decent system bookmarks categorized into folders. However, I’m sure many of these are outdated – either long gone or simply out of date or not of interest to me anymore.

For a while now, I’ve been using My Yahoo! as a way to have an online store of bookmarks that I could access from wherever I am, and also to synch my bookmarks from home to work. It also got around what had become a separation of different bookmarking systems between MS and Netscape, although luckily these systems never got incompatible enough to really hamper the transfer of data from one system to the other.

Since becoming more involved with RSS feeds and using Bloglines as a way to manage the feeds I read, I have been yearning for a similar system for bookmark management. I have lots of feeds where there is some article that has so much detail that I either want to keep it for later reference, or simply to read it at a later date (because it’s too long for my slow reading speed, making it necessary to set aside a good chunk of time to read it). Bloglines allows you to clip individual entries and put them into hierarchical folders. This is great for managing such stuff, but unfortunately its interface is not all that friendly to mobile devices (even though it has a specifically mobile version of its site, some functionality is missing and they haven’t made any improvements for at least 6 months, despite clamoring from many users), and besides, you can’t insert your own links. For example, there may be a great entry by a blogger that links to something of interest, but also contains many other links. In Bloglines you can only save that entire entry, not just the link of interest.

I have played a bit with sites like del.icio.us, and furl, but it seems to me that they are either just inelegant compared to Bloglines and/or your browser’s bookmark system, or their interface is more about “social bookmarking” (sharing links with others), than it is about managing your own. There does seem to be some developers using the del.icio.us API to allow one to import and export your bookmarks, so I will need to look into this. It does seem a little odd that this isn’t a feature of del.icio.us to begin with, but whatever. I think this is just one of those areas thats just going to be a constant work in progress.

But then again, isn’t organization constant work? You can set systems up so that future work is minimized, but there’s always some work to do, and due to all the new kinds of information out there, people will always need to do the work to figure out what the best ways to organize things will be. For example, in the last five years or so, people have been able to rip their music to MP3, and this requires organization both within the ID3 tags and possibly also within a folder structure. But MP3’s are just the beginning. Photo collections are yet another big organizational task now that digital cameras have become affordable to most. Now that digital video has become more accessible to the masses with the proliferation of processors and hard drives that can handle the much more demanding content, this stuff will need to be organized as well. The next jump up to high-definition digital video will be even more demanding but eventually will be available to anyone with $500 to spare.

I think all of this begs a separate but related question: do we continue to manage all this ourselves on our local systems? Obviously the push has been more and more towards storing these things online, at least as an important option. This is being done not only so that one can share the content and information, but simply to access it no matter where you are, as long as you can connect to the Internet – a feat that is becoming almost ubiquitously easy, although you might need some hard currency to do it in third world countries. Having all your data online is of concern to privacy advocates and to simply to those who are paranoid about losing that data. Privacy is a valid concern for many, especially considering recent events around the T-Mobile Hacker’s breaking in to the Danger servers and getting access to Paris Hilton’s personal info on her Sidekick. And as always, it’s important to make copies of your data for local archiving in case of connections or servers going down, as they will do from time to time. It may be wise for such companies as hosting companies and the like to establish not only their own backup systems but backups that allow their own customers to maintain an up-to-date copy of what’s on the server. Perhaps offering this as special software would actually decrease their backup storage resources required, although it would at the same time increase their bandwidth usage costs.

Right now we are still at the beginning of the information age when it comes to information management. Those who are tech-savvy can manage their information with a good deal of effort and planning. Those who aren’t tech-savvy have much more of a challenge. Companies have by and large not seized the opportunity to cater to both sets of users to provide them with a much more seamless way to manage all this stuff both locally and online. Certainly we are moving in this direction, but I think we still have a long way to go before the average non-techy can simply have all their data organized and managed, backed up, and synched to whatever computer (or portable device) they happen to want to use, view, share, change, etc. at any given time.

I’ve been using Firefox for a while now and played with a bunch of the extension – I have a list here of the ones I like. Another feature that FF has is an integrated text field for searching for something on various sites. So instead of having to go to google to look something up, you can just type it in this text field on the browser. FF comes by default with “engines” for Google, Amazon, Ebay, Dictionary.com and Creative Commons.

I’ve downloaded toolbars in the past that did this in Internet Explorer, but was never very impressed, and my initial impression of this feature on FF was the same. One of the things that got to me was the inconvenience of having to click on the field. I tried figuring out a way to tab over to the field, but that didn’t seem to work, so I decided it wasn’t possible. I’m one of those people who uses the keyboard as much as I can over the mouse, especially when dealing with a situation where I know I’m going to be entering text – and that’s what the whole search thing is about!

Today I read a post on Engadget about how someone had created an engine for searches for their site in FF and that led me to Mozilla’s page dedicated to these. Like FF’s extensions and themes, one can install new search engines, and there are quite a few of them out there. I went browsing and came up with a bunch for sites that I go to on a fairly regular basis, or ones that looked like they might be very useful.

Doing a little more digging, I found that I can get to the search field easily with a control-K or control-E on my PC (probably the same for the Mac?). So far so good, however, there didn’t seem to be an obvious way of actually specifying what search engine you wanted to use. It’s one thing if you use one of these 99% of the time, but what if you use a variety of them? I discovered that when you hit control-K, and if there’s a no previous search word in the field, you can click the up or down arrow to present you with a scrollable list of previous search words. If there was a word already there, it will just highlight it and the arrow keys don’t do anything unless you hit delete to clear the field. Instead of hitting the arrow keys, if you hit control in combination with the arrow keys, the little icon that represents which engine to use changes! Voila! The only problem is that you now have to distinguish the search engine you want by this tiny icon. It’s better than nothing, but I wish someone would change this to simply pop up the same list that you see in my screen capture, which currently is only available by… yes clicking on the mouse on that little engine icon. The other little nigly problem I have is that I can’t see a way of removing these engines. It’s probably something I’ve just overlooked, but there should be some kind of “manage engines” screen linked to the pull-down list of engines.

In any case, despite the fact that the interface isn’t optimal to my peculiar preferences, the feature does seem to be potentially extremely powerful. It theoretically lets you find a piece info by hitting a key combo (control-K), typing a word, number, etc. into the field, and if necessary hitting another key combo of control-down-arrow until the desired engine is selected, and then finally hitting enter. Seems like a process that could take a few seconds before results pop up as opposed to browsing to a new site, clicking into the field you need, typing the search, and hitting return. I just tried this out and it took me approximately 3 or 4 seconds to look up Liv Tyler in IMDB and get the results on my screen – from thought to result in a few seconds. Doing it in the standard way took at least twice as long. The differential will vary, I know, but all in all, I feel a bit silly for initially discounting what could potentially be such a powerful tool! Here’s a list of the ones I installed with links to install them yourself if you are using Firefox [correction: there doesn't seem to be a way to easily create these links, but I'm trying to contact th developer community to see if it's possible and if it is I'll be updating this entry - for now, you'll have to settle for just a list - you can go to the site to install them yourself]

• Wikipedia - the collaborative encyclopedia – the English version
• IMDB – Internet Movie Database
• Pubmed Books – search for books geared to professionals in Medicine
• WebMD – Medical lookups
• Moviefone Location – type a zipcode to get a list of theaters and what they’re playing
• Moviefone title – type in a movie title to get a list of theathers it’s playing in
• MRQE - search printed or online reviews for a film
• Daypop – search both regular websites and the blogosphere in one shot.
• Froogle – search Google’s comparison shopping engine for a given product
• Shopping.com – similar to Froogle
• PriceGrabber – another price comparison engine
• Yahoo! Auctions – why be satisfied with only eBay’s auctions?
• Amazon.com Auctions – yet more auctions
• Yahoo Yellow Pages – find a store or company, etc. (this is one of those where you need to also specify where you are searching, but if you already have done this previously, it’s probably set in a cookie and doesn’t need to be done again)
• Torrentsearch – Mmmmm files….
• Craigs List For Sale – the local version of eBay, or something like that. I’ve never used it personally but have heard a bit about it
• The Quotations Page – to figure out where the hell that thing you just said came from!
• Jewish Encyclopedia – never used it, but figured it might be useful when a non-jewish friend asks why shellfish isn’t kosher, or somesuch, and since my own knowledge of this stuff is lacking to say the least!
• HowStuffWorks – when you really need to know why that evil sump pump just decided to stop working and create an indoor pool in your house
• AllRecipes – give the microwave a break and cook some real food!
• Epicurious – I think this is another recipe sight or general culinary/food info site
• Acronym Finder – What is this damn “FF” I keep seeing everywhere?
• Webster Thesaurus – like, uh… you know!
• Wordorigins.org – for when you’re really bored

It recently occurred to me how much time has become a factor in all things technological. It’s a bit obvious, given the fact that speed is something that has been constantly sought after with everything from transportation to computers. When people talk about “power” or performance what they are really talking about is time. How much can be accomplished in X amount of time.

Even when you start talking about simply using technology to view things like movies, or listen to music, etc., time is a critical variable. Make a movie too long and one’s attention starts to wonder. Make it too short and people feel ripped off. Attention span has of course gone down with the advent of music videos and today’s ads geared at the teenage to 20-something market are much more rapid fire. Heaven forbid having the camera “glued” to a particular scene for more than a couple of seconds!

Part of the problem with this is that while time is contracting in many ways, there’s more to do, and even more to see, hear, and read. As production equipment costs shrink, and the Indie marketplace grows, so too does the number of films being produced each year. Similarly the Internet and the popularity of digital audio files has made it possible for virtually anyone with a couple of bucks to produce his own album. Finally, the Internet in general, and the Blogosphere in particular, has caused the amount of media content output on a daily basis to explode exponentially.

A big part of the file-sharing brouhaha with the media companies on one side and the advocates of a freer distribution of digital content on the other really also has a lot to do with time. A lot of the advocate’s argument is about being able to experience media in the way one wants to. For example, instead of just being able to watch a movie on my TV at home, why can’t I take that piece of digital information and put it on any device I choose (that is capable of playing it), like a phone, or a portable media player, etc.? Or even send it to a friend so we can watch it at his place? So sure it’s partly about the freedom in the way you get to watch something, but part of that has to do with when you gets to watch. Tivo is the really big obvious example here. It lets you “time shift” TV programming so that you can watch the things you want to watch when you want to watch them. No more having to wait for commercials in between segments of a show, or even to rush home so that you can catch the beginning of some program or game. You’re no longer constricted by time.

The big media companies are still somehow scared of giving people this flexibility. XM Satellite Radio recently removed a version of their tuner that you plug directly into your computer and which some companies figured out a way to create a time-shifting mechanism similar to Tivo. Already there are companies out there that are making these imposed limits meaningless. Tivo had to fight for its customers to be able to take their recorded programming and make it easily transferable to a PC, which can then be either taken on the road via laptop or some other portable device. Of course it’s all about money, or the perception of losing it. These companies are mortally afraid that giving consumers too much control could mean decreased or eliminated ad revenue, since it becomes harder and harder to determine who your audience is at any given time, or even if ads are being watched at all. Likewise, allowing people to copy things willy-nilly ads to the fear of piracy, even with DRM. As I mentioned, part of the problem is the amount of content becoming available. It is so large that no longer can anyone conceive of buying a majority of the content one might want to watch or listen to ala carte at previously standard prices. So it’s no wonder that subscription services like Netflix and Audible.com have taken off. This is also why Apple’s online digital music store iTunes, which sells individual songs for $.99 a pop, has also had a lot of success. This shows that most people (or enough, anyway) will buy a lot of their content legally instead of pirating it if they feel that the price is fair. That “fair price” just happens to be getting lower because of the overabundance of content and outlets for that content.

Of course, ultimately, you still need time to actually watch or read or listen to the content, but even here, we’ve have found ways to speed things up. One of the aspects of blogs that I’ve come to appreciate is their utility as a kind of filtering mechanism for the web and the news media as a whole. Many of them distill content that’s of interest to their particular audience and give brief synopses with a link. If the reader wants more, they can click on that link. Or they can move on. But it makes the endless web and the vast array of daily news at least slightly less intimidating. The most recent generation of Apple’s iPod has created a very blatant feature for saving time – a facility to speed up audio books which allows one to listen to a book in only 80% the time it would take normally, albeit with some caveats.

The documentary movie Cinemaniacs which came out last year is about a group of New York eccentrics whose lives are comprised of sleeping, eating, and watching one movie after another every single day from morning till night. While sad and screwed up in many ways, the ambition to watch everything out there, or at least everything of quality, was something to which I could relate. One of the people they followed said that he was “a bit of a completist.” I don’t know how many others out there share this goal (or obsession), even if on a very minimal level. Maybe it’s the exponentially growing amount of media available. For myself, maybe it has to do with my slow reading speed making absorbing written material as slow as listening to someone reading it. I don’t pretend that everyone has such wishes, or even a majority of people, but I do think that even if you don’t want to see, hear, or read “everything” or even just the vast majority of “high-quality” content, many people do have a lot more in the column of things that they haven’t yet experienced but want to, as in the column of stuff they already have.

The issue that underlies all of this which is not one I like to think about, of course, is that our time here is finite. The amount of content we can experience, or really the number of possible different experiences that we can have in general, is if not infinite, at least much more plentiful even than any one person can experience in, lets say, 100 long-lived life-times. Speculative fiction has brought us the idea, and its now even been made into serious predicutions by futurists, that at some point we will be able to transfer information much more directly and instantaneously both into and out of our brains. I’m not sure if we will ever be able to, like Neo in The Matrix, download an entire training program of jujitsu in an instant. But one can always hope!

I recently traded in my older 30GB third generation iPod for one of the newer 40GB 4th generation ones. Other than the added capacity and storage space, the main reason, I told myself, I needed one, was the new iPods’ ability to speed up or slow down audiobook playback without actually increasing the PITCH of the speaker’s voice and making it sound like you were listening to Alvin recite Master and Commander – or alternately Fat Albert.

As some who’ve been following my blog for a while know, I like listening to audiobooks. I have a subscription with Audible.com, which is a great service if you like Audiobooks, have a high-speed internet connection, and want to pay less than what you would if you bought the same thing at a store. Of course going to the library would be much cheaper, but then you have to return it within a given period of time, among other issues. Once you buy a book on Audible, you can download it as many times as you want from your central “Library.” You can buy books ala carte, or you can subscribe to a “Listener” program where you get a couple books a month at $10 each. Audible has radio programs and newspaper and magazine transcripts read that you can subscribe to as well.the iPod is one of the devices that can play Audible content, which isn’t in an open format like MP3. In any case, I have subscribed for about five years now, although after starting to date my now wife I put the subscription on hold as I simply didn’t have the time to listen. After we got engaged I got her a subscription and renewed my own. Now we both listen so that we don’t have to talk to each other! Just kidding!

While two books a month may not seem like a huge amount, that might average out to 20 hours, or about 45 minutes a day just to keep up. Of course along the way Audible has thrown a free book at me here and there either because I referred someone or because I made a complaint about a problem or for completely unknown reasons. This and the propensity for me to be addicted to NPR radio, thus usurping prime downtime away from audio books, has left me with a large backlog of books I haven’t read. Something on the order of 35 books. Just stop listening for a couple of months and you’re yet another 4 books in the hole!

When we stopped by the Apple Store in Tyson’s Corner in order to get an iTrip for my wife’s new iPod Mini, I had no clue that we would be confronted by the new “4G” iPod models as they are called. I convinced myself that I should buy the new one and sell my old one, thus getting away with simply paying a small “upgrade fee” and potentially benefiting by getting through audio books faster, and thus having a real hope of reading all my Audible content within my lifetime! Of course, this was back in July when I had started listening to NPR again and hadn’t listened to an audiobook in several weeks. Getting the new iPod somehow didn’t remotivate me to get back into audio books until now. After all, there was the Democratic National Convention, the Olympics, and now the Republican National Convention, and we also had a vacation.

Now that I’m finally back to the books, I decided to try out the speeding up feature of the new iPods. It does what it’s supposed to, but with some caveats. You can definitely hear some “clipping” of some of the voice here and there. It hasn’t been so bad that it’s distracting or makes it harder to understand, although once in a while it does seem to cut something out that makes a difference and I have to just accept that I’m not going to get that particular sentence. Because things go faster, it does actually encourage you to pay more attention. Depending on the audio book, I can sometimes lose focus, just as with a book, then I find myself realizing that I’ve been thinking about something else while I’ve lost seconds or minutes worth of the book! But I found myself paying more attention because without that, you can easily miss things, or more things than you would at a slower playback. I don’t know if it is the clipping or something else, but the other issue I’ve had is that the playback seems like it is of a lower quality. It almost sounds like the audio artifacts you might get from a satellite phone, but not nearly as extreme and only for split seconds here and there.

Finally, I just decided that I needed to quantify the benefit I was supposedly getting from this speeding up of the book. I expected it to be dramatic, but I also wasn’t sure how it worked. In principle it’s very easy to imagine how programmers might simply scan ahead through a file and look for spaces where there is very little in the way of sound, and then tell the iPod to skip over most of this blank space. Thus, I figured, the amount you save it time must vary a lot based on the book. If a narrator has lots of dramatic pauses, and generally speaks more slowly and methodically, the time savings could be much more dramatic than a narrator who speaks quickly and with few pauses. So, I played a couple of audio books with the speed set to high and looked at where they were at 1, 3, 5, 10, 20, 30, and 60 minutes. At first it seemed like as I was taking the numbers down, the “time compression” rate was changing, but I soon found a pattern, and that pattern was repeated in two different audio books I tried this with, ‘Tis Unabridged by Frank McCourt, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. Perhaps others could confirm this with other test, but the testing was too similar to deny this pattern. What I found was that for every X amount of regular time that went by 1.25 times that amount would go by within the audio book. In other words, to read a 10 hour book, it would only take 1/1.25 x 10 hours or 80% of the normal 10 hours being 8 hours. This is a decent amount of time saved, although it does take a lot of books before it really gets noticeable. If my 35 or so books average out to 10 hours (it’s probably a bit higher), than that’s 350 hours, and so if I play them at the higher speed, I end up saving 70 hours of time! That’s almost 3 days! Or more applicably, it’s probably a good 2+ months worth of listening to small amounts on a daily basis.

The real question, though, is all this added time I will have worth the lesser audio quality of the books. I also assume that some books just will not take very well to the faster pace. You lose something tangible but also something intangible in a beautiful narration of some books. A dry non-fiction piece would probably be fine, but a novel with a skilled narrator that inserts dramatic pauses, and has a very specific and effective timing, which is dashed by the speeding up, would not work very well, I’m afraid. I guess the conclusion, then, is just to take it book by book. One strategy might be listening to the first 10 minutes in normal speed to get a feel for the narration, and then switching it and seeing how they compare – whether too much is lost or whether it gives about the same feel, just faster.

I sometimes think of myself as someone who want’s to be super-organized (anal?) but my laziness and propensity to get distracted get in the way! I do feel a lot better when things around me are neat and organized, does that count?

I think my first PIM (Personal Information Manager) software that I used must have been Time and Chaos, which was a pretty sophisticated application even way back in the early 90’s. My brother introduced it to me, or maybe it was the other way around. Time and Chaos is still out there and apparently was just completely rewritten. The problem, though, is that if you want to have a solution that a lot of people support, you are probably looking at Microsoft Outlook. But more on that below.

After a while I found Lotus Organizer, which was a cute application which had a more graphical interface based on a date-planner.

Eventually, in ’97 or ’98, I started Using MS Outlook. I liked the fact that it was both an email client as well as an organizer in one. It was the first such integrated solution that I knew of. I finally made the switch and have been using it since. I still think a lot of the features in Time and Chaos and Lotus Organizer were/are more intuitive, but what are you going to do? MS is that 50,000 lb gorilla that is supported by all the other devices out there (phones, PDA’s, etc.) for synching. Of course most organizers can import and export via CSV files and such, but more integrated synching seems limited to only a handful, and Outlook is at the top of that list.

My goal basically is to have one database of contacts, tasks, appointments, etc. that synchs as seamlessly as possible between my home computer, mobile device, and whatever computer I happen to be using away from home (be it my own laptop or a friend’s computer or a public computer at a library, etc.).

In this vein I’ve tried a number of things. One was an Intellisync Go Anywhere (no longer available), which lets you host your Outlook Data and access it from any web browser. The problem with this is that you need your computer to be on and connected to the internet at all times. Mine is, but there’s always issues where the connection might go down and with my luck I would have just left for vacation when some service interruption causes the router to freeze up and require a manual resetting! Also, it was just slow. This was undoubtedly because my upstream pipe is 128KBps!

The other issue that I’ve been wanting to solve for a while is just the whole management of personal email between home and work. I used to work for a place where I had Outlook installed and I would just upload my Outlook data file (at that time it was 10-20MB) to an ftp site, redownload it at work, and then do this again when going from work to home. Quite a few times I would forget or not have the time to wait and with a somewhat iffy connection I would sometimes start the transfer only to get home later and find that it would crap out (or this would happen in the morning. When this did happen I would have to change it so that my messages were not deleted off the server until I got back to my most recent data file, and then redownload the more recent mail and then finally change it back to delete messages off the server. A major pain, as you can see. Eventually I ended up using mainly a web client at work, but once I got home and downloaded my mail to Outlook, it was no longer available on the web! Sure, I could have left a lot of stuff out there, but what with storage limits at the time and not wanting to rely on my web connection for doing everything with email, that just wasn’t going to work.

Then I found out about Fusemail, which is a company that offers a bunch of services that go towards what I was looking for. First, it lets you collect email from various accounts – or “fuse” your email accounts into one. Second, instead of the ubiquitous pop protocol, it offers IMAP, which basically means that the email stays on the server and your client (be it the web or a specific IMAP client like Outlook) is simply a “browser” of sorts reading headers and only retrieving what the user wants to see at a given moment. I still had the issue that I didn’t want to keep all my email up on this IMAP account, and not on my computer, because what if the site goes down, or goes out of business, etc? Also, storage quota was limited, so I couldn’t keep everything up there. So what I did was I would keep the last 3-weeks or so of email, and save the rest back to a local Outlook file. Fusemail also offers an “Outlook plugin” which basically recreates some other types of Outlook data on their server, like Calendar, Tasks, etc. You can synch this with your Outlook File. What I found was that getting this to work properly was troublesome. I got some excellent support from the Fusemail owner, but a few things have caused me to look elsewhere. One is that the web interface to all this Outlook data is uneven. The email client is pretty darn nice, but others are fairly bare bones and some don’t even display things really accurately. For example, if I have a multi-day event and look on the 30-day calendar, it is only listed for the first day of the event. I’m sure that Fusemail will eventually fix these problems, but I just have no idea how big their staff is. It very well could be two guys in the owner’s basement. It could be a dozen more than that, and it will likely grow with it’s increasing success, but right now I’m looking for something more polished.

I think I would have stayed with Fusemail if I had not looked around for an exchange host and found one that was only a couple bucks more per month than my Fusemail account. 1and1.com offers the cheapest hosting package for exchange that I’ve seen, coming it at just $6.99. They also offer a bunch of web hosting packages, but the Exchange hosting is what I needed. Basically, Exchange it Microsoft’s product that takes your Outlook data and makes it into a client-server account, rather than just a stand-alone application on an individual computer. It does a lot more than this, including letting people communicate between their Outlook data – for example schedule meetings and notify/invite others, etc., but the main thing is that it keeps all your data in a central location and then lets you access it in different ways from any computer or device that has the requisite client. So I can use my actual Outlook program at home, but the “Outlook Web Interface” via a regular web browser at home. The web looks and acts so much like the regular Outlook client that it’s easy to get confused which you are actually using. The one big disadvantage is that the web interface is about 1% as configurable as Outlook itself is, which is annoying to anyone who likes to customize their display, or even do some editing of things that isn’t possible on the web.

You of course still have the problem that all your data is kept on a server, and if that goes down you are out of luck. But I think I’ve finally gotten to a point where I’ve figured out an adequate solution for this. First of all, 1and1 gives you enough storage space – 500MB – to where you don’t have to worry too much about running out of room unless you do a lot of emailing of large files. My idea is that you archive your Outlook data every few months, but you just archive the stuff that’s 6 months or older. Of course, this needs to be based on how reliable your exchange host is, and I have no idea how reliable 1and1 will be. I just signed up yesterday. As one of the cheapest out there, I have to consider the possibility they won’t be one of the most reliable, but they look like they have their act together. I will say that setting up the account and getting it working the way I wanted to was not a quick and easy process. It wasn’t horribly difficult, and the information is available on their site, but you do have to hunt for it a bit and certain things do not happen instantly, so after you activate your account, you may not actually be able to log in for a little bit. Or email confirmations with activation codes may not arrive in your inbox instantly, but only after several minutes. This can cause a bit of confusion, but in the end is not too debilitating. I just wouldn’t recommend it for someone whose not particularly technical/computer-savvy. I will give 1and1.com credit for their speed, though. At least for the Web interface. It is very fast to the point where sometimes it really does seem like I’m using Outlook locally…

Now, some of you may be thinking – why not just host your own? This may be ok for those who are lucky (rich?) enough to have a huge pipe going to their house, or basically use their corporate network for their personal use, but neither of these apply. Plus, the cost of an exchange server is prohibitive, plus I simply don’t have time or patience to do all the configuring and playing with such a server even if I had everything else. Once you own your own home, or at least if you own it and take care of it yourself, you find that the free time to play with servers is not all that plentiful – unless you are already a network or systems admin by profession and so all this stuff comes to you second nature.

I’ve been looking for something to fight for quite a while. I sign up a lot of places online and give out my email address, so I get a ton. I am talking hundreds of messages per day! I am not too hopeful about the national anti-spam legislation that mimics the recent do-not-call list. Even if it does go into law, spammers will just go overseas. Unless there is some international treaties on the stuff, I’m not sure much is going to change. I use Outlook for email and have been looking for something that not only filters spam but also lets you report it and/or bounce it.

Looking on the very helpful site spam.abuse.net, I found the name of an application that looked like it would fit my requirements. Giant Company Software makes Spam Inspector, a program that is kind of a plug-in in your Outlook inbox (actually, though, Spam Inspector is supposed to work within Eudora and even with Hotmail accounts – as well as something I’m unfamiliar with called Incredimail). It will filter suspected spam into a separate directory. You can tag messages as either spam or not spam (it learns this way and after using it for a week or so, it’s about 99.9% accurate – the only missteps I’ve seen have been just mass mail notes from various sites I’ve signed up with). You can bounce messages back to the sender in an effort to make it look like your address is invalid. This probably has no affect most of the time, but maybe in a few cases it might get you off a list? And you can report spam. It analyzes the headers of your message and generates a standard email to get sent to spam.abuse.net as well as any isp who’s address is referenced in the headers. A lot of times spammers spoof such addresses, so it doesn’t matter, but can’t I be hopeful that at least by reporting some spammers are getting kicked off of their ISP faster than they would have otherwise?

Maybe it is a losing battle, but this is a heck of a lot better than having to look at the subject and sender of each message to try to figure out if I should just delete it or actually take a chance and open it!

I love to read, but I’ve been cursed with this lack of ability to read at any reasonable pace. I’ve tried speed-reading on my own and through a class but without extreme dedication to the program, it’s just not worked. The fact that it takes so long to read for me (generally in the vicinity of 10-20 pages per hour) makes it much harder to pick up a book in the first place. After all, if it takes you forever to read a book, you can spend that time a lot more efficiently elsewhere.

Back in college I got addicted to talk radio. I’m not talking about Howard Stern or Dr. Laura. Rather I was an NPR junky and even listened to short-wave stations from around the world. This was when the USSR was first starting to open up a little with Gorbachev’s Glasnost and listening to the state-run propaganda while they were trying to muddle their way to more open discussion of at least domestic matters was fascinating. Anyway, I began to see that one could listen and learn stuff and not have to be tied to one spot (vis-à-vis a walkman), or even have one’s full attention one thing. After grad school when I got a car and started commuting to work (some of these commutes could be long), I would listen to the radio all the time. Although I still enjoy NPR, especially in the last few years, much of the news has been rather depressing. I would rather glance at Washingtonpost.com or CNN.com when I get to work, then to be drowned in very in depth coverage of a rather depressing issue. So audio books seem to be the best solution. You can pick the topic and it can be a serious look at history, a language lesson, a travel narrative, a mystery, or really anything you’re in the mood for. You’re not at the mercy of others for what you will hear.

Many of you may have read my previous book reviews here, most of which have actually been reviews of books I listened to as opposed to “reading.” I use a service called Audible.com. It’s been around now for several years and they have quite a nice selection of books, a lot of them being unabridged and read by the authors or by skilled narrators. You can buy books ala carte, and even in this way you save a good amount over what you would pay for, say a book on tape or CD in a bookstore. But the real savings comes when you subscribe to one of their “listener” plans. I am on one that gives you two books a month for $20. $10 for a recent best seller in print is a steal, let alone an audio version of it. They also have tons of magazines, radio shows, and newspapers in their catalog that you can either subscribe to or just buy individual editions. Many of these are even on a daily basis like the New York Times digest or various public radio shows.

Because of Audible I’ve probably read 60+ books in the last few years, probably a 10-fold increase in what I was doing before that with standard printed books. This brings me to the part of the blog-entry that is hardest. It’s the one where I grovel for financial support. Actually, not quite that bad, but just a request that if you’ve found my reviews and info about Audible helpful and you happen to then subscribe to them, I would be grateful if when asked you entered my audible id (‘leviwallach’) when asked who referred you. I get a couple of free books when people do this, not cash, and you can in turn recommend them to others and get the same thanks in return. Grovel, grovel.