Gaskell's Masquerade Ball was a blast last night. It was a little lower-key than past balls (especially halloween balls) but it may have been even more enjoyable for that. People did a great job on costumes all around, and it seemed far more towards positive, fantasy-oriented outfits, rather than anything negative or literal. The ripples are still obviously still with us and will be for some time.

A few windows into the evening:

Here's the entire gallery (unedited, uncorrected, and uncropped).

If anyone wants the high-res version of a pic (1600x1200 instead of 800x600) email me with the file name and I'll get that out to you.

(for a blast of Samhain past, here's last year's gallery)

I'm sitting here on a Saturday afternoon, thinking I should do something with my blog. I've realized that the frequent exercise of writing on the train has resulted in the habit of spinning what I intend to be a one or two paragraph post into the huge yarns or rants.

Part of me thinks this is for the best, as it's a sort of storytelling skill, but another part inhibits me from writing short posts, since I think that if I just sit down to shoot off a quick 'what's on Kevin's mind?' entry, it'll just snowball into something big.

This post is a good example. This is already about as long as I intended it to be, and I'm still going.

I'll try to restrain myself.

I'm feeling burnt out on the web.

No, Internet, it's not you. It's me.

Okay, it's both of us. I know you think you can change, but you can't, and neither can I. Most of the time you're filled with the same crap worded different ways and with different graphic treatments. Whether you're wearing your c|net mask, or CNN, or ABCNews, or wing-nut news links off of MeFi, it all starts sounding the same. There's nothing new. It was fun for a while, and then I grew dependent, spending more and more time with you, hoping that if we got closer, I'd understand the subtleties, but instead I've just been pounded over the head by your pervasive generalities.

Okay, I guess that's true. If I wasn't so co-dependent I could take a few steps back, resist pumping CNN looking for the latest, or at least a distraction.

I know I have a lot to give, a lot that I haven't been, both at home and at work. I'm frustrated by the great ideas that share cycle-time in my head, but don't make it unto the world because my interface has become so one way, with data flowing in in such a torrent that almost nothing ever gets out.

This is probably why my posts have gone down 60% in the last few weeks, while the average length has gone up fivefold: With all the data-pressure flowing in to my head/brain/soul/reservoir, it's rarer that I can dam up the flow for a bit, and when I do, I can reverse the flow, a huge outpouring of content, a torrent of words, ideas, feelings. A desperate attempt to relieve the pressure, the imbalance between data-in and data-out.

It's no wonder that my posts are mostly written on the train nowadays: It's the only time I have access to a computer without having access to the net. It's the only time that the noise stops and I can concentrate.

This has got to stop.

I'm cutting myself off. For every good thing there is that point when it polarizes into something just as bad. For some substances, this happens quickly. I learned this the time nothing sounded so good as cheddar cheese, so I cubed up half a block into a cup. One piece, two pieces, five pieces, and I was looking at the remaining 15, not with disgust, but with utter lack of interest.

Other things take more. There are things you absolutely adore and can't imagine feeling otherwise, but that tipping point is out there, whether you ever reach it or not.

I hit that point right now.

Today I reverse the flow.

Starting now, I'm releasing the pressure.

This isn't a manifesto on how I'm going to finish all the personal projects on my plate in short order. This isn't a promise to kick out the purity survey, randompixel, underblog, metacookie, more aoliza, and all the rest in one week. This is a reclamation of my life. This is good.

So what? This isn't a plan, it's just an action. I'm not going to wait up 'till midnight on Tuesday to read The Onion. I'm not going to read CNN before my morning shower. I'm not going to compare Wired articles to News.com. I'm not going to karmawhore off slashdot or Kuro5hin. I'm bringing my net umbrella in a little tighter, shunting off as many tributaries as I can. I'm not going to ping people on IM just because I saw them 'walk in the door.' When I finish a task and ask myself 'what now' the answer isn't going to check if a new story is up at macosrumors or the-gadgeteer.

I got in this business/lifestyle because after too long I realized that my desire to know is surpassed only by my desire to make and it's time my actions reflect that throughout my life. It's a shame that it took so long, and such a severe case of diminishing returns on surfing/enlightenment to recognize that. Maybe that was the end lesson after all.

I'm going to find balance before the teeter-totter breaks in half.

This is a good thing.

I'm sending all the luck I can to Ammy and Tigger today. I encourage others to do the same.

What would Douglas Adams think?

Before, and After...

So I finally got rid of the source of one of my Windows frustrations. A while ago, I don't know how, a malicious program hacked into my computer, so that whenever I type in an incomplete URL, instead of going to MSN search, I get redirected to 'spacesea.net', a broken search frameset. When I close that window, an invisible window is spawned that throws up popup ads as much as an hour later.

The bitch is that it took a while to figure out that's where the ads were coming from. I never noticed the invisible window, discernable only by the box in the taskbar that says "Internet Explorer" but I could close all the windows on my screen, and 20 minutes later a stupid popup would come up.

Okay, long and short (and I'm posting this as much so people searching for 'popups' 'popunder ads' 'search takeover' or any of a number of other keywords will find this) is that the program adds a line to your 'hosts' file in Windows. This tricks your computer into thinking that the MSN search domain actually points to the spacesea.net IP address. to fix it, search for 'hosts' on your computer. Open the file in Notepad. Erase the entire line that has an IP # and says msn.search.microsoft.com or somesuch (*don't erase any other lines*). Save the file.

That oughta do it. you might have to restart to have it take effect.

So, since so many people have said I should share the story, inciting others to be oh-so-curious about the eighth wonder of the world that is my laundry, I will now proceed to relate the ending of this story. As Jessajune said, at this point it can't help but be anti-climactic, but there it is.

For those of you who haven't read, or have forgotten, the first part of this story, I invite you to (re)read it.

So Monday I had brought my huge oversized bag full of dirty laundry to work for cleaning, and it was dubiously picked up that afternoon. Their policy is that simple 'wash and fold' laundry has a next-day turnaround, so it should be back on Tuesday. Of course, that doesn't take into account that I only authorized them to do one bagful, and that's a 'normal-sized' bag, not my uberbag.

Tuesday: No word. They're probably still trying to lift the thing.

Wednesday I get to work to find a voicemail from the laundry service. The woman asks why I didn't use the regular bags. you see, they have these specially sized laundry bags for this sort of thing, and you pay a $5 deposit per bag. (This is not nearly as god a deal as the $3 deposit I put on my nifty green stackable WebVan crate which, now that WebVan has gone belly up, is the permanent kitty-food and toys crate. But I digress...) The relevant point is that I had committed not only a faux pas by using my own bag, but one that apparently befuddled the laundry officer charged with my load. The good news (made all the more quaint because she thought it was the bad news) was that the normal bag (the 'red bag', to be differentiated from the ne'er again referenced '3 sinkful blue bag' I was shown when my 'gargantua' bag was picked up) was intended for 14-24 pounds of laundry, and my bag weighed in at 48 pounds, and so I would have to be charged $49.90 instead of the single-bag $24.95 price. What's more, they would give me a free red bag for next time (not quite sure why they didn't give me two, after witnessing my extreme laundry needs).

I call her back, assure her that the $49.90 is completely acceptable, and I am happy to receive their services and their red bag. She informs me that the laundry will be taken care of today (Wednesday) and returned to me tomorrow (Thursday). Three-day turnaround instead of one, but I don't mind.

Thursday morning I come in to work, making sure to drive, as 50 48 pounds of laundry (does laundry weigh less after being washed? Does the removal of dirt result in a smaller mass? And what about the lint?) is not what I want to bring on to Amtrak, along with my regular backpack.

Email, work, and morning meetings. I return to my cube with anything but laundry on my mind and I find... Three stuffed, white, tall kitchen garbage bags, double bagged, with the red pull-handles neatly tied into bows. The feeling-before-thinking part of my brain recalled that I have exactly the same bags at home (well, yellow pulls instead of red, but close enough) and the only time I would double-bag is if there was something particularly noxious inside that I wished to doubly insure against accidental escape, in much the same way that young lovers use a condom and the Pill, because sometimes 97% just isn't enough. But I digress...

After a poke, and a flashback to the Simpsons, when Marge and Homer are caught naked in the minigolf windmill ("feels like a hefty bag full of meat") and people are groping inside to figure out what's making the balls stuck ("maybe it's presents for all of us!") it dawns on me that, despite being in neither the gargantua bag, nor two 'red bags,' the contents of the three (six, really) garbage bags is, indeed, my laundry.

Like an old friend coming home from an unexpectedly long trip, I ripped open one of the bags to see it. Okay, that's a really inappropriate metaphor simile. Let's try that again: Like one would embrace an old friend returning from an unexpectedly long adventure, I strove to see, touch, and smell my laundry, to affirm its existence, and verify that the double-bagging was to protect this newly-revirginized clothing from the comparatively dirty outside world, rather than vice-versa, as was the case when last I saw my good friend.

Struggling with tie-handles drawn thin and tight by the weight they recently carried, finally I have the two bags of the first bundle open. I spy the tightly folded stack of shirts within, and bring my nose close for a good inhalation--

Let me once again break from the story for a second for a little necessary background: I love the smell of laundry, and others love (well, like. Well, actually, let's be fair, like, like, in the Jr. High gossip sense) the smell of my laundry in particular. I don't use dryer sheets. I don't use fabric softener. I don't separate my delicates (I don't think I have any delicates) from the rest. There's just two piles, white/light, and dark/bright, and each gets its own load. The Tide is my shepherd and I shall not want for another. (Or, to put it another way, for religious sensitivity: There is only one god Tide, and Procter & Gamble is its prophet.) Suffice it to say that the smell of my clean laundry is a comforting force in my life. Suffice it to say that I am a freak. But we knew that. Now, to continue:

I touch my laundry. I peek into the bag to see the nice, neat stacks. I bring my nose in to get a nice whiff of laundry smell, and I swivel my chair back to the monitor and go back to checking email.

...

About thirty seconds pass before I stop typing mid-sentence, and turn back to the bags. I go back to the opened bag, again smother my face past the plastic of the bags, take a sniff, sit back up, and return to my computer.

...

I stop again. This is strange. Did I smell my laundry? I remember the physical act of doing so. I remember doing it twice. Despite this, certain very specific olfactory nerves have gone unexcited, their G-protein reactions at the ready, but with no impetus to send their firings of pleasure into my brain. I remember the act of smelling, but not the consequence. I remember checking twice, just to be sure.

It's not that it didn't smell like my laundry should, it's that it didn't smell like anything.

Scratch that. Let me put it another way: Look at the air in front of you right now. Sure, you can't, because it's invisible, but you can see things through it. My laundry was not an olfactory analogy to transparency. Now picture a black hole. You can't see it, but even more so, you can't see past it, because it sucks up all the light around it (okay, smarty, a black hole isn't the perfect analogy, as light bends around it and there is no true 'black' spot. For you, imagine that there's a square meter of void in front of you, different than a vacuum because nothing exists within it, not even the photons looking for free passage through it. Essentially, a perfectly black cube).

The point I'm trying to make is that not only did the laundry not smell like anything but, nose in laundry, I couldn't identify any smells at all. Take a good deep breath through your nose right now and you can probably identify a few smells, or at least a general milieu of scent, be it office-y ozone or homey smells. Nose-in-bag there was nothing at all. The nothing was so strong, it even made even the memory of checking a weak and uncertain one.

I get off my chair and on my knees, in front of my laundry. Head inside the bags, nose in deep, an airtight seal (weird images of autolaundreic asphyxiation notwithstanding) I take a good long breath.

Nada. Nothing. Zip.

You know, wine connoisseur have ratings for just how good or bad specific kinds of vessels are for the purposes of wine tasting. Since the mouth and tongue can interact with the material of the vessel, it can therefore bias the taste of the contents as you sip. Glass is especially non-reactive. Leaded glass, crystal, even more so. This is why we have wine glasses. Plastic is a middlingly bad choice, making the contents taste a little stale. Wood captures earlier tastes, so wisps of the previous beverage (or detergent) may slip in with the wine. Metal is all bad, as its taste overpowers the subtleties of any beverage it carries.

Could it be that laundry simply isn't best appreciated while encased in polyurethane? The stuff is, after all, designed to trap the odors of refuse. Could it have trapped the spirit of my laundry as well?

I may never know where my laundry lost its scent and conjoined soul. Maybe it was while sitting in the scent-sucking bags, maybe it never survived the cleaning process, killed by harsh chemicals and sterile, allergy-free cleaning products. Maybe the soul drifted away when I sent the laundry off to be washed by another's hand.

Outsourcing my laundry seemed so efficient, but what is the true price?

...

Epilogue

A few loose ends:

• Back in my apartment, unpacking the three bags, I found both my original gargantua bag, nicely laundered, folded, and pressed. I also found a single 'red bag,' possibly a tacit message that 24 pounds of my laundry is all they care to handle at any given time.
• All my socks were nicely matched, except for two strays with no partner. It occurs to me that one could bring down the entire laundry system by taking advantage of this: If you give them one bag full of socks, each having one and only one unique mate, it's quite a lengthy task to find each pair. If you bring them two such bags, it would take quadruple the time to sort through them. This is an O(n^2) problem, where n is the number of socks. Given that the price to do the laundry is a linear, or O(n) problem, give then enough socks to launder and match and they could be driven out of business. Or at least they'd send goons to smack you around.
• Laundry can be reborn. Since the time that this story took place, I've had the opportunity to wear and wash several items in this story, and they come back from my own laundering rejuvenated, with no hard feelings.
• To this day, I can go into my chest of drawers, pull out an item, smell it, and tell whether its soul is intact.

Talk about time-sensitive: This post is really only interesting for the next hour or two. At 10am Apple's announcing a new 'breakthrough product' that's not a Mac. There's been tons of speculation on what it will be, but I think this MacSlash article sums it up best.

Of course, by the time most of you read this, it'll all be old news.

I've been thinking about the interesting mix of functionality credits and deficits of the iPod, and I knew there was something off regarding the use models people follow and this device meant to facilitate them. I think I just figured out what the problem is:

The iPod lets you store 1,000 songs. That's 4,000 minutes, 66 hours, or 2.7 solid days of uninterrupted, unrepeated music. The battery lasts for 10 hours. As sold, the iPod can only be recharged by connecting the firewire cable to your computer, and incidentally, your music collection. An AC adapter, presumably for travel yet unusable on an airplane, costs $50 and takes up approximately as much space as the iPod itself. (Can you say 'road trip'? The iPod can't, but that's beside the point.) [My bad. the iPod does come with an AC adapter. Extra adapters are $50. -KF]

So, in the ordinary use case, a person synchronizes all 4.6 gigs of their music to the iPod, but can only listen to around 10% of it before having to plug the device back in to the computer to recharge, at the same time giving it access to the computer's master music collection again.

Essentially there are only three rationale for the extra 90% of the storage space. First, if you want to listen to specific songs or albums in the ten hours, but you don't know what they are when you're at the computer. Second, if you're using the iPod as a portable storage device in order to copy data to other computers, and the ability to play the extra music files is superfluous. Third, you use the adapter 9 times for every one time you plug your iPod into your Mac.

While it's an attractive idea to have all of your songs in your pocket/hand/bag/jacket, for that moment when you have the inspiration to listen to that one specific song, I have to speak up as a member of the crowd that's big on genre playlists and random shuffle within them.

To me (and your mileage may vary) the more valuable iPod would be the one with 512 megs in RAM, not flash rom, but good ol' lose power and lose the data RAM. This, incidentally, would cost about $20 from the OEM as opposed to several hundred for the flash memory. (This is not the problem that it might seem, because you're talking about a device with a high-capacity fixed battery carrying redundant data. If the battery goes flat and dumps the songs, it doesn't matter because charging the battery by firewire-ing to your Mac takes an hour, while restoring all the songs will take only a fraction of that time over the same connection, and it'll happen simultaneously.)

512 megs would be enough RAM for over 8 hours of music (15 times more than my Rio). At the end of the day, when you plug your iPod into your Mac's firewire port, the computer can take a look at the music you listened to since the last sync, chuck those songs from the iPod, and randomly select more titles from the computer's iTunes library (toss 8 electronica songs, load up 8 fresh tracks, etc.).

Of course, if there's a song you listened to during the day that you'd like to keep on the player, you can always mark it with a button, to 'save until I delete' and it'll stick around. Further, you could, via the iTunes interface, choose specific songs or albums to be saved temporarily or indefinitely on the iPod. Basically, songs would be ephemeral unless specifically marked as eternal.

Think Different: Think TiVo. You get new stuff, you view (listen to) it. The next time: you have new stuff.

What's the advantage? Size and price. Truth be told, without having to power a winchester drive, you'll also get a lot more than 10 hours out of the thing, likely twice as much (with 100% skip protection). So make it a gig of RAM, or a device that can 'sleep' for a week without fear of losing the songs. I love the idea of a device half the size of the already petite iPod, with a little white breathing 'sleep' LED for good measure. Of course, without the 5 gig, 1.8" state of the art profit-margin drive, the price for the device could drop to $225. Heck, call it $299 for the early adopters, and drop it down after Christmas. Call it an Expo Special.

I don't like thinking about music half as much as I like listening to it, and it's my bet that you don't either. Have you ever had the experience of deciding what to watch, looking through your tapes and/or DVDs, shrugging, turning on the TV, finding something on TV that you own, but deciding to watch it on TV, even though you passed over it in your own library? There is an appeal to non-premeditated media. It's why random shuffle exists. It's why having a random tenth of my music collection in my hand is just as good as all of it. Better if it means twice the battery life, half the weight, and a third off the cost.

Heck, though I dislike digital rights protections as much as the next hacker, I'd be happy with a netflicks model: You get an iPod-full of music, downloaded straight to the device in a format you can't offload, and every time you're done with some music, it gets tossed and new music comes in, and all you pay is a monthly fee for the service, no matter how much music you get. Think of it as subsidized, commercial-free radio, only you can skip, repeat, and tailor your station to the precise genres and/or artists you like.

Lastly, to think really different, firewire should be rethought. Yes, an album transferred in 10 seconds is gee-whiz wow, especially when compared to the nearly two minutes it would take to transfer over USB, but isn't Apple trying to show us a world without wires? What could be cooler than an airport-equipped iPod? (Don't answer that. It's rhetorical.) With an 802.11b Airport card in the iPod, it could sync an album in 45 seconds, and all it would have to do is come within 100 yards of your mac. Most of the time you wouldn't even know it's doing it. Just bring the device home, and while you're watching TV, doing homework, sleeping, whatever, it's refreshing your music, even if it never leaves the pocket of your jacket on the coat rack. To fully swap a gig of music would take 15 minutes.

Okay, so that would suck power, so you'd need a charging stand, at which point it's just as easy to plug it in to the computer, so maybe Airport has to be better thought out for this particular device, but the rest still stands. Time to completely swap a fresh gig of music via Firewire? 2.5 minutes in the background.

Even this new Fury-iPod would not be a 'groundbreaking device,' but it would be a little more innovative, ditching the metaphor of an MP3 player as a storage device plus playback, and giving it a more organic existence; indeterminate, but welcomed. I don't expect everyone to feel the same passion about what I'm saying, but I bet those with TiVos are nodding their heads...

This piece is still rough. I'd love to read your comments, and continue a dialog. What do you think?

One vowel off...

Today Apple announced the iPod, a nifty, small mp3 jukebox with a 10 hour battery life, 1,000 song capacity, soopercool iTunes integration (artist, album, playlist integration), a great physical design, and a $399 price tag.

The trouble is, I already have one, and while I'm currently fighting with Archos to get a recordable version, I don't see it as worth the $$$ to get iPod (which, admittedly, is better than the Archos in every way) when it doesn't actually give me much more than what I have now.

iPad, where art thou?

As a Berkeley native of 10 years, I feel like I'm part of the community, and that my City Government should reflect the aggregate views of its constituents, especially when purporting to send a message to the nation and the world on our behalf.

This is why shit like this pisses me off so much. The people of Berkeley as a whole don't support the City Council's condemnation of US attacks on the Taliban, but the vocal minority, along with the Berkeley City Council's self-declared mission to 'be as Berkeley as we can be,' gets in the way of what a democracy should be.

It's ironic that one of the leftmost cities in the country has become a true republic, and not a democracy. In a democracy, official acts mirror the majority will of the people as closely as possible. In a republic, people just elect officials, and from there, the officials do whatever they want, because at least we got to choose who's up on the pedestal. In the US, the elected officials usually try to keep their votes in line with their constituencies, but apparently not in Berkeley.

Sadly, Berkeley is interested in profit more than democracy. The City Council's actions are attempts to differentiate Berkeley from the mainstream, cashing in on the 60s hippyism legacy to maintain a fading individuality because it's good for tourism.

The trouble is twofold. As if I wasn't offended enough that my elected representatives have decided to sell themselves out under the guise of an altruistic purpose, their ill-conceived and politically dishonest tactic backfired, with companies and individuals boycotting Berkeley businesses, and unthinking journalists projecting the will of city council members onto the citizens of Berkeley.

Not to be a linkwhore, but I hope that some of you with weblogs might point out that the People of Berkeley and the City Council of Berkeley are two separate realms that, sadly, only seem to touch one day every few years, when elections roll around.