Digg is linking to a DailyMail article about McCain’s divorce. They emphasize that he ostensibly divorced her because she was in a car accident that left her overweight and with a limp. He divorced her for a younger prettier women. So what? Divorce exists to allow people who don’t want to be married anymore to stop being married. Did he divorce for bad reasons? Maybe, it was years after he returned to his wife, so it’s hard to tell. Is he superficial? Seems like. Would I do that to the woman I loved? I doubt it. But are any of those attacks on his policies and what his plans are to improve America? Not in the least. There are so many real issues where McCain is vastly inferior to his opponents, that sinking to this level and attacking him because he got a divorce is really unnecessary.

I like CDs; they’re a high fidelity standard that everyone agrees on. While SACD and DVD-Audio are higher quality and offer surround sound, most music is stereo — if only because we don’t care whether the rhythm guitarist was behind or beside us — and the increased quality is noticeable but not exceptional. They’re nice, but unnecessary. But CDs? CDs are awesome. They provide a permanent physical digital representation of music. The best part about them is their lack of copy protection. This isn’t a hippie/pirate thing, though I appreciate file sharing for the ability to get introduced to new genres and bands that radio doesn’t offer; I still buy music, but without file sharing you’re buying blind. No, the lack of copy protection and DRM is purely for historical purposes.

Many audiophiles rave about the warmth of vinyl records but because they’re analog the sound is not perfect. It sounds pretty much the same with each new listen but subtle variations can crop up. I mean, it’s not a huge deal but it matters when the same piece of vinyl has been played thousands of times and is sitting in a vault five thousand years from now, right? So CDs offer a digital alternative. There would be a bit of MacGyvering to get sound from ones and zeros, but if phonographs were lost and all the future had was the vinyl, it would be equally difficult to reverse engineer sound from those little bumps.

There’s a lot of talk about digital downloads taking over from DVDs and CDs and, in my opinion, it’s just the naivete of younger people who think that whatever new thing they grew up with is the wave of the future. People will always want that physical thing, that thing they can hold in their hands, that thing that was made by a professional, that thing that is theirs. It’s identical to all the others but it’s unique nonetheless. But I could be wrong. I still don’t see how social networking sites can replace real physical contact with friends and yet that’s just what they accomplish for many people. But I don’t want to be wrong. I don’t want CDs to be obsolete.

I have over a Terabyte of hard drive storage on my main computer. In fact, I’d have more but a couple of my drives are disconnected because my power supply doesn’t have enough SATA power cables. I store lossless copies of all my CDs there in FLAC format, and I also have mp3 versions for standard consumption. I don’t usually listen to the FLAC because my mp3s were made at very high bit rates and the difference is mostly indiscernible with my sound system and my ears. The FLAC is there for archival purposes. But that’s not what hard drives are good at. Hard drives, and similar media, are good at quickly erasing and rewriting data. And they’re susceptible to magnetic phenomena, so any attempt at using them for permanent storage would be foolhardy. What if, for example, during the great pole switch, that occurs periodically on Earth, the magnetic shift disrupts all earthbound hard drives? (I’m talking out of my ass here, someone please correct me if I’m wrong…)

The key here is that CDs remain. They are much more permanent than most other forms of digital storage. And they’re something you can hold. I still maintain that the tactile feeling of holding a CD can add a lot to the enjoyment of music. Flipping through the liner notes, reading the lyrics if the band prints them there (if they have lyrics), all of that lends to the mindspace that that particular set of songs imbues within you.

One claim is that with digital downloads you’re provided the luxury of buying only the tracks you like. There are two problems with that. The first problem is that it’s not always the best songs that get play time. An example from my own life: my favourite band is Interpol; I think their debut album “Turn on the Bright Lights” is the best album I’ve ever heard. Every song is amazing and gets better with each listen. There were four singles released from that album. They are all great songs but none of them are the best song on the album. Not only that, but the best song of the bunch that were released as singles has the part that makes the song so fantastic cut out to make it shorter for the radio. The point here is that if all you listen to is what mainstream media offers to you — or even what the band has to offer on their MySpace — you might not be getting the piece that speaks to you the most. Sometimes you need to take that leap and buy an album. If it sucks, it sucks, but then there are those diamonds in the rough that change the way you feel about the world. And all you went in looking for was a catchy single.

The second problem is that offering single track purchases can deflate the purpose of the album. Despite what many of you might think, the concept album is not an extinct species. Not every musician in the world listened to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” and decided they’d never do better so they shouldn’t even try. Many concept albums may even masquerade as regular albums, or vice versa as was the case with American Idiot. There’s a song, Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt, on The Mars Volta’s debut album “De-Loused in the Comatorium” which is a good song if listened to independent of the rest of the album. But when listened to as the final song of the album, it transforms into a powerful conclusion to the ongoing, albeit vague and byzantine, story. You’re not only robbing yourself of the true potential of a concept album song by hearing it out of sequence, but you’re also disrespecting the intention of the artists.

This doesn’t mean that I think, or even want, digital downloads to go away. They provide a convenient source of music, both mainstream and independent. This gives independent bands the chance to get their music out there without going through the costly process of CD manufacturing and distribution. But it is not a replacement, it is an augmentation. Ultimately, if the music of these independent bands is good enough, a CD will be produced.

Humans are a social species, and it’ll take a few millennia of slowly evolving brain chemistry to change that, so the so-called “Brick & Mortar” stores of today aren’t going anywhere; we simply like the company, even of strangers, far too much to give it up. I love the convenience of going to amazon.com and ordering exactly what I want and getting it a few days later, but sometimes I want to wander around a store looking at band names, looking at album covers. Some of my favourite album have been purchased, or downloaded and subsequently purchased, on an utter whim with something as inconsequential as the look of the album or the weirdness of the band name to convince me that the album was worth my time. I think, and hope, that, by and large, most people are like that and that won’t change any time soon.

I’m not a fan of prescriptive linguistics. English is defined descriptively, not prescriptively. That is, English does not have a formal definition from which the language is constructed; the language is described by its usage. I’m misusing the terms prescriptive and descriptive linguistics a little here, but the essence is the same. Languages like French and Latin are predefined so they can be better studied using prescriptive linguistics. English changes all the time so the arguments for prescriptive linguistics don’t hold water.

Of course, prescriptive linguists don’t want English to change at all. They want it to be a dead language. Case in point: what’s the French word for internet? Internet. It’s not even a French word; it must be awkwardly placed into otherwise francophonic speech. And why? Because there is an organization that dictates what goes into the language. The language’s rules are prescribed like the speakers of the language are obviously too idiotic to speak the language.

This kind of stance will inevitably bite me in the ass because descriptive linguistics, where common usage is described and codified as the proper usage, means languages can change. And there are certain things I like about English. I like not ending sentences with prepositions; I might do it from time to time, but I get a perverse little kick out of reordering the words of a subordinate clause such that the preposition leads rather than lingers. Of course, it’s not like the language will ever outlaw that type of speech – English is described not prescribed, after all – it will merely be deemed archaic. I don’t appreciate being referred to as archaic but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Similarly, I tend not to brazenly split infinitives but I absolutely disagree that they shouldn’t be allowed. As others have said, the idea that we shouldn’t split infinitives comes from other parent languages which don’t allow it; of course, they don’t allow it because it can’t be done in those languages, but that point is typically ignored. That said, I would never want to live in a country where “irregardless” is seen as a real word; not only is there already a perfectly good word with the same meaning (regardless) but “irregardless” implies negation of regardless by its prefix. On the other hand, while normalcy is a neologism for normality, I accept normalcy because it has a poetic feel to it that normality cannot evoke.

But I don’t care if my stance on English is slightly hypocritical because, quite frankly, so is English itself. And I Love English. There’s no language I’d rather have gown up speaking. It’s weird, it has no strong rules of grammar, and it’s essentially learned through trial and error but it’s ultimately the result of five hundred years of brilliant minds borrowing from other languages to better evoke the feelings and descriptions they had. English is not a romance language. It has borrowed most of its vocabulary from romance languages but it is very different and should not be bogged down in the bureaucratic quagmire that is prescriptive linguistics. Languages are not created by the elite few, they are shaped by society. On occasion, it seems like society shouldn’t really be in charge of those things – especially given the preponderance of internet speak leaking into the vernacular – but most of the time I’m damn proud that our language isn’t locked away. Because if it were, a new Shakespeare could be born and we’d never appreciate the beauty of the words they bring.

Next gen gaming is hip. Until it’s the current generation. Generations are simply iterative development. The next generation of humans is the people who are alive after their parents are dead. The next generation of games is the gaming systems that are used after the current system of games. (Really, all this “next gen” talk is a bunch of nonsense by now because the next generation to which everyone refers is now.)

Will Wright recently made the claim that the Wii is the only next gen console which, beyond being an inflammatory statement, is false. The PS3 and Xbox 360 are next gen systems because they are the next generation of systems. A new generation does not imply a startling shift in how games are played. Did games really drastically change from N64 to Gamecube or from PS1 to PS2? Of course not, they go prettier but the games were essentially the same. If the Wii is the only next gen console then the definition of “current gen” has to define the Commodore 63 as equal as the PS2.

Beyond this idiotic rebranding of what a generation means in relation to games, there’s the even more idiotic need of this world to be buzzword compliant. Though rendering speed and resolutions can satiate computer and video game geeks, the layperson needs simple direct statements implying that something is better than the other (at least according to marketing douches). Ajax is just one of the buzzwords one must throw around to seem like they are aware of the current internet culture. Web 2.0 is another one though, unlike Ajax, it has no specific meaning.

But unlike Ajax or Web 2.0, generation is a real term that has been stolen and twisted until its true meaning is rendered archaic. I’ve ranted about fanboyism before so these kinds of idiotic statements are obviously distasteful to me, but that’s not why I wanted to write this. As much as I love to slap fanboys down for being more resolute than Franciscan monks in their views, the reason I wrote this is because the world needs “generation.” This is not impeding the growth and development of the language. This is not the actions of a greater mass slowly shifting the perception of a word, this is a marketing ploy that has managed to ingrain itself into gaming culture.

When I was a teenager I listened to emo music. This was in the middle age of emo. In the beginning emo was an outgrowth of hardcore rock which was explified by more emotional lyrics. Then somehow the soft acoustic music of Dashboard Confessional in addition to the pop-inspired rock of Jimmy Eat World became associated with emo. The story goes that early in their career Jimmy Eat World was an emo band and when their first commercial success, Bleed American, came around everybody called them emo despite the change in their musical style. Similarly, Dashboard Confessional was the side project of the lead singer of a band called Further Seems Forever who were a heavy punk rock band with emo sensibilities and so it seems likely the label simply traversed the chasm between the parent band and the side project. The middle age of emo was a mixed bag. A lot of it was simply duplicating the pop-punk Jimmy Eat World style rather than duplicating the lyrical style. But there were a precious few who wrote heartfelt songs about love and heartbreak. I should state here that when emo began it was not exclusively romantic in nature; the lyrics had to resonate emotionally with the listener but it could be about anything which came from the heart. The middle age of emo changed that of course.

In my eyes, the middle age of emo is not exemplified by bands or even albums but individual songs. Dashboard Confessional’s earlier works (essentially everything earlier than “A Mission, A Mark, A Brand, A Scar”) are the closest you can get to the prototypal emo band, but even then certain songs are more immanently emo.

Of course you can see where the path of emo went. It followed the path of the superficial pop-punk. And so now we have bands like Fall Out Boy who are considered emo. And thus the pejorative use of the word began. I don’t want to get into a huge rant about how the changing definition of emo has marred the works of the middle age emo bands I just want you to know that emo isn’t all bad. In fact, there are songs from the middle age of emo that I still listen to on a regular basis.

The real problem here is that emo has forgotten its origins. Emo was an offshoot of punk at first and punk’s primary philosophy is “Fuck You.” So in my eyes, which are tainted by my understanding of emo, emo is about guys saying yeah I’m a romantic and I’m not all about female conquest. I have meaningful discourse and don’t limit myself to what’s appropriate. I don’t care if you think I’m a pussy because I like cuddling. I don’t care that you’re a misogynistic douche and can’t understand guys who want co-operative and equal partnerships with their lovers. Fuck You.

And I’d like to think that if Coleridge and Wordsworth were around today, they’d be in emo bands. The good kind though.

Don’t wear the shirt if you don’t mean it. Of course it’s not your fault, vapid girls. The real problem is that the shirt should be saying something else, the thing you really mean: “I ♥ Nerds… If They’re Hot.” You’re not actually interested in nerds per se, you’re after what’s called a superficial relationship. Wow, you like hot people? Me too! Of course, my interest in that person is tempered by my interest in their personality but you don’t need to worry about things like that.

You see, what you’re really saying is that you care so much about looks and so little about the personality of your partner that a nerd “will do.” Nerds have a stigma as the guys who take whatever they get; if you’re a girl who can stomach our eccentricities and sit through our nerdly monologues we won’t care. Maybe if you were someone with actual ideas in your head you’d realise that having a cardboard cutout to talk to isn’t really the same as having an actual conversation.

Now I sincerely apologize to any interesting girls out there who happen to wear the shirt. This isn’t aimed at you. (Though if you’re really interested in the eclectic and quixotic characteristics we nerds imbue, you’d be wise to pick up a more subtle shirt like one of the great ones over at xkcd. If there’s anything that gets a nerd interested its obscure references.) I’m here simply to let girls know that wearing a shirt isn’t enough.

Wow, you ♥ nerds? Well I’m a nerd. What are your interests? Getting wasted at frat house keggers? Hmm… well I’m gonna go watch Babylon 5. Have fun.

See what happened there? Once you got my attention, you lost it. Now I’ve got a lot of t-shirts that are ostensibly there to entertain so I’m being a tad hypocritical, but at least my shirts are representative of my personality. You’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover but we do. The least you can do is be honest about who you are. If you’re an A&F girl who loves guys who pop their collar and drive Honda Civics then don’t pretend that nerds are of any interest to you.

This post has gone through a number of revisions. First I discussed why the actors in the upcoming film Watchmen need to really understand and embrace the atypical nature of Watchmen the comic to ensure the film doesn’t fall into the trap of becoming a “comic book movie” but with the recent announcement of (most of) the cast I’m relatively at ease regarding that. Then this post was to be a rant on Zack Snyder, the director of the film, his lack of experience, and his dogmatic relience on the original comic for visual details. Then Comic-Con came around and Zack Snyder represented himself as someone who knew what the fuck he was talking about and that eased. (He still seems to have some issues with deviating from vision of the text for the purpose of retaining the message of the text, but at least he’s shown that he’s a real fan of the comic and understands why it’s great.) So I figured I’d discuss the reason I began to write this post in the first place.

Watchmen is a great comic. It’s a zeitgeist for a time which our world managed to avoid, filled with mounting conflicts on a global scale and the constant fear of mutually assured destruction. Watchmen is set in a world where superheroes really fight crime through vigilante justice; most of them are good-hearted people who want to make a difference in their city. The key difference from the classic superheroes is that they have no mythic origins, they have no extraordinary powers. They saw this terrifying world and decided to make any difference they could. These are people who took on a battle larger than themselves not because they thought they could win but because it had to be done.

All except for one. Doctor Manhattan is a God among men. His powers seem limitless and we are to him little more than particles of dust flitting about in Brownian motion. He has all the trappings of superheroism but because he is inherently inhuman he becomes a complex compelling character whose decisions sometimes impress and often horrify. But the story of Watchmen isn’t about Doctor Manhattan. It is the story of the people who didn’t wake up one day with superpowers and then decide they should fight crime. They didn’t need a convoluted catastrophic event like an uncle being killed by the robber they could’ve stopped earlier to make them take the leap into the selfless, unforgiving, and sometimes overpowering, world of crimefighting. These people walked down a street one day, saw a mugging that everyone else ignored, and stepped in.

Watchmen is quite probably the greatest comic ever made. Because the characters feel real, and because the questions of morality and power are substantive and have a real, though ambiguous, contribution to make. And for reasons which are intrinsic to the paper; it must be read to be understood. So when I heard about a Watchmen movie I first felt elation. The idea of it happening was fantastic. Of course then I realised it’s the implementation that would destroy it. The odds of the film doing justice to its source material are so mindbogglingly high that anyone genuinely and purely excited without a hint of doubt or hesitation isn’t a true fan of Watchmen.

I wish that were a misleading inflammatory title but it’s not; the world is filled with douches. Already, people on digg are submitting misleading titles which link directly to spoilers for the entire final book of the Harry Potter series. Now, I’m not perfect; I laughed just like everybody else at that video of that asshole spoiling a midnight Harry Potter book release but enough is enough. You guys are douches. The whole world is a stinking pile of douche. (By the way, douche is the proper plural of douche, but it just sounds weird to say “you guys are douche.”)

I really wish that there were some people out there who would respect people’s desire to read a book without holing themselves up to avoid people spoiling it for them! Unfortunately, everybody seems to gain an inordinate amount of pleasure from these heights of douchebaggery. I don’t care if I read these spoilers because I’ve never read a single page of Harry Potter nor have I seen any of the movies but I can understand not wanting to be spoiled. When the super-sized spoilers for the Lost season finale came around a couple months back I ducked away. I didn’t want to know what happened because the mystery and the ultimate reveal is worth the wait. Do some people overract to being spoiled? Absolutely. But should you ruin it for the moderate readers who don’t want to be spoiled? But did you want to be told the twist to Fight Club or The Usual Suspects before you watched it?

Maybe I am unnecessarily exaggerating. Maybe this is only the increasingly immature voice of the digg mob with their five-year-old mind set. But I can’t explain it. Do these people have no restraint? No desire for suspense? No respect for the creator’s wishes? No respect for your fellow human being? Has the internet so completely destroyed your moral core by its anonymity? Or is it that the internet abolished any patience you may have once had through endless spoiler websites? Whatever the cause, I know that saying this will do nothing to change the mind of the degenerate spoiling assholes out there. But maybe, just maybe, some of the people out there simply following for the sake of the joke will consider that purposefully ruining a story these people have dedicated thousands of pages of reading time to might not be something you want to do.

First off, that theme song fucking rocks. It’s “Johnny Appleseed” by Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros and I’ve become infatuated by the song. I’ve been listening to it incessantly since I found out what it was. I’ve never been a huge fan of The Clash but damn if this song isn’t rocketing up the ranks on my favourites list.

Now onto the show. This is a show that I shouldn’t like. I really truly hate the Jack Johnsons of the world: the people who just let everything wash over them and don’t seem to care about anything except killer waves. That being said, this so-called “surf noir” show is drawing me in. HBO seems to have a particular skill about it when introducing people to disparate genres. When I started watching Deadwood, I hated westerns. I probably never would’ve watched Deadwood if I hadn’t been vacationing in Florida and the house my family had rented had HBO. I had never seen HBO and I’m a TV junkie so I sat there and watched as much as I could. So I sat down and I watched the very first episode of Deadwood and just like John From Cincinnati it drew me in. David Milch has a great skill to take a known genre and turn it on its head. And this show is pure Milch: the dialogue, though separated by over a century, is pitch perfect to that of Deadwood. This is most noticable during the monologues but the touch is sprinlked throughout the series.

I’ll be honest and say that when I first went to watch JFC I wasn’t that enthralled. In fact the first time I went to watch it I turned it off in less than ten minutes. Luckily those first ten minutes had something that made me want to go back: the opening credits. While not as rich and representative of what the show is — as far as I can see, but the show is still young — as Deadwood’s or Carnivàle’s, they are HBO credits through and through. So few shows take the time to create truly memorable credit sequences, that it’s refreshing to see a network sticking with it.

I can’t say I’ll be going surfing any time soon, but for the time being I’ll enjoy the waves. (Oh God, sorry for that really bad pun…)

During a meeting at my job we were discussing the core characteristics we wanted both our company’s public image and its products to exude. Almost everyone in the room decided that we wanted to be innovative. We wanted innovation to be something that mattered and was a core part of the future direction of the company. When I say almost everyone, I mean one person didn’t agree. And that one person had a serious bias against the word “innovation.” In her mind, she felt that innovation was a bad idea. She felt that to be innovative meant to ignore your users. There is some validity to this statement but in so many other ways that’s just dead wrong.

Innovation is so many different things depending on context that it’s an easy word to be scared of if the context is misunderstood. In its absolute simplest description it is merely doing something which has not been done previously. This could be driven by your users but, barring the occasional genius, users aren’t well known for innovation; for one thing, if they truly had something new and innovative they would also be smart enough to develop it themself rather than just give it away. This however does not mean that innovation doesn’t work to the benefit of the user. In that meeting, one of my colleagues stated this idea very succinctly that there is, and must be, a divide between understanding your users and following them.

An excellent example of this would be what is most likely plugged into your computer right now: an iPod. When the iPod first came out, not only was the tech industry generally unimpressed but so too were the Apple users. They didn’t simply want an mp3 player. They wanted something grander, something like they had been discussing and (most likely) requesting from Apple, whatever that was. And today the iPod has changed the face of not only that industry but our culture itself. It was an unwanted innovation which, once used, showed the wisdom of the developers behind it. It wasn’t what the users requested that was made, but what they wanted (whether they realized it at the time or not). They understood their users.

Is striving for innovation dangerous? Hell yes, but so is running a company. You can try to create something no one’s thought of before and end up with a whole new paradigm or you could create a waste of time that no one will ever use. To me, there are only two types of software companies: those who innovate, and those who mimic the innovators. Anyone who wants to be a part of the latter group shouldn’t be a programmer.

A note to readers. I realised after writing this that using the words “Wow” and “campaign” so close to each other was probably a bad idea. To any World of Warcraft players in the audience, you can turn back now; I’ve got nothing for you.

Apple has really good marketing. However, given the recent Photosynth demo given at TED (available for viewing and download on that site) it’s pretty clear that Microsoft has a good idea of where computers need to be headed and they have really smart people working on it. People say that all Microsoft does nowadays is buy up new technologies, but even if every piece of interesting code that came out of Microsoft was from outside acquisitions, they’d still be showing their foresight in buying the technologies that really can change the way users interact.

Unfortunately, they have really shitty marketing. Now, I was one of the few people who thought that the “Wow” campaign for Vista was pretty interesting; they weren’t the best commercials I’d ever seen but they definitely got me interested. Having noted that, Windows has a pretty lousy track record with engendering interest through marketing in recent years and the fatal flaw they carry with each new advertisement is at the core of the “Wow” campaign. Microsoft tries to instill its products with a sense of awe for public consumption.

Apple’s recent iPhone ads show the exact opposite. Besides being very simple in presentation, their content is itself simple and easily relatable. Where Windows shows someone experiencing the Great Wall of China for the first time, Apple shows you a person using Safari on a cell phone. They have trouble expressing to users the reasons they should be excited about software. This goes back to one of the subtle, implied but not described, points I had about Microsoft in an earlier post. Microsoft likes developers. They understand developers so most of their publicizing efforts go towards informing developers of the new features available to them. They can sell new technologies to developers because they know what to say and what to show to get them interested.

So what does this discourse on marketing have to do with Photosynth? Microsoft really sucks at marketing. That simple 5 minute tech demo is more interesting than everything they shoved into Vista and has instant appeal to users. And the silence is deafening. I know that the software is still under development and there are bugs. I’m not expecting that they continue to release buggy software and patch it later. But they were touting Vista (back when it was Longhorn) for it’s new fantastic features and most of them didn’t even make it into Vista. (In particular their new WinFS file system – ostensibly NTFS with a database layer for enhanced searching – was to revolutionize how users search and interact with their data and the project has been shelved. Not delayed, shelved. Some of it’s features will be available in Windows Server 2007 which users won’t use because it’s a server.)

These two things are the two failings of Microsoft when it comes to marketing and, paradoxically, they are contradictory. Microsoft is too humble and too brash at the same time. They promise advanced features they cannot deliver within their deadlines and they create fantastic software which is spoken of in whispers and only to a select few. This simple tech demo is more intriguing than anything Microsoft puts on TV. I know that I’m a developer, so I speak with a forked tongue on this topic, but even if I weren’t, I would still think SeaDragon (The rendering technology behind Photosynth) is one of the most impressive pieces of software I’ve ever seen. This piece of software is one of those rare occasions when developers and users alike will look at it and say “Wow.” And nobody knows.