Tascam Digital Pocketstudio DP-008

I’ve used Logic Studio, GarageBand, and a host of other multi-track recording systems before and, in all honesty, Logic and Garageband are probably much more suited for professional use. But the simplicity of the Pocketstudio makes it wonderful for experimentation and composing, and basically just “messing around” with music. It’s not going to replace the high-end, computer-controlled systems, but its ease of use gives it a special niche.

For example, if I want to record a guitar track, all I really need to do is to turn it on. It has two built-in microphones on the front of the unit, and they do a perfectly adequate job. For better quality, however, I can plug the guitar into the 1/4″ input socket in the back, and this eliminates extraneous noise.

With Logic, for example, there’s a ton of overhead for even a simple recording. From ensuring that the audio interface is connected to setting up tracks in the software, there’s a ton of complexity. With the Pocketstudio, it’s just plug-in and go. Frankly, a (small) number of knobs and buttons is a much simpler interface than trying to use a mouse to navigate through multiple levels of menus on the computer screen.

The DP-008 lets you record two tracks at once (i.e., you can’t record a full band all at the same time). It records to a standard SDHC card (I’m using a 16GB model, which lets me record hours upon hours of music). The back has 2x XLR mic inputs (phantom-powered if desired), 2x 1/4″ guitar/bass/mic inputs, a 1/4″ plug for a foot switch, a 1/8″ headphone jack and volume control. Side ports include the SDHC card slot, USB port, and a socket for an optional power adapter.

Tascam also has a four-track model that’s significantly cheaper (and is actually almost pocket-sized), but is missing the XLR inputs and balanced outputs of the 8-track version.

Here’s a sample track that I put together in under 30 minutes yesterday (this would have taken hours in Logic). It includes 2x ukulele tracks, 2x vocals, plus a rhythm track.

The prom queen

This individual (and it’s just as likely to be a “prom king” as the queen) is a true social butterfly. Online media—Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, MySpace—is just another one of many tools she uses to keep her social circle intact. While she may not have been her high school’s actual prom queen, she almost certainly still keeps in touch with her.

She’s a planner—she organizes gatherings, soccer games, poker games for her spouse, and feels involved whenever she has direct control over an activity. Whether it’s running the annual candy sale for her children’s junior high school orchestra, or putting together the annual reunion for her college graduating class, she’s an integral part.

She drives a minivan.

She is frustrated by limits imposed on her: why, for example, does Facebook limit her to 5,000 friends? She went to high school with 3,000 people, and to college with 12,000 more, and she knows at least half of them by name.

She has a blog and writes regularly on women’s issues.

She dropped out of the work force when she had her first child, but has since returned, now that her kids are in elementary school. Her job title will be “Event Planner” or  maybe”Marketing Manager.”

She ran her first marathon the year after her youngest child turned 7.

If you’re building a social media experience for her, then get out of her way. She needs tools and she knows how to use them. Your job as a developer is to make sure that those tools always work, even in ways that you didn’t foresee. Give her ways to bring people together (“groups,” “events,” or “interests”) and ways to communicate with large numbers of people, and she’ll be happy. Whatever you do, don’t force her to work in a way that fits your expectations: that’s a sure way to drive her away. Expect creativity—if she finds a way to embed a Google Map into her comment, then embrace that and leverage it, don’t quash it. She is quite possibly the best way to see your social media site expand because of all the new members she keeps bringing in.

The marketer

He is only interested in social media as a way to expand his market. He talks about “reach” and “distribution” as if people were meat channels for the delivery of advertising. He dreams of viral videos about his product. Often, he’s a consultant and uses words like “leverage” and “synergy.”

On Facebook, he has 4,992 “friends” that he met at conferences. He considers them his “vital business connections.” He values his Porsche more highly than either his wife or his girlfriend. Both his wife and his girlfriend, in fact, are less “relationships” and more “strategic alliances” that he will discard once they’ve outlived their usefulness.

His Twitter page uses a full-screen image of himself, wearing sunglasses and standing next to his car, and a trite slogan like “improve your throughput.”

He sometimes thinks about his upbringing in the Roman Catholic church and thinks that they have a really well-connected graph.

He is great to go out with, since he will always pick up the tab, trying to impress you. On the other hand, you then have to listen to him.

Given a free reign on your socially-enabled website, he will kill whatever community that you have painstakingly built over the years, often with a few well-directed comments.

He sells Amway to his relatives on the weekends.

To be continued…

Waterlogged school buses in New Orleans, August 2005 (photo by Allan Campbell)

Approximately five years ago, one of the most devastating natural(?) disasters in US history occurred. Early on the morning of August 28, 2005, Hurricane Katrina plowed into the Mississippi river delta and up towards New Orleans.

The first reports seemed to indicate that the city had survived relatively unscathed. But an hour or so later, the world began to receive reports that the levees, long viewed as the weakest part of New Orlean’s hurricane defensive shield, had begun to fail, and the city was filling with water.

The story is fairly well known, but I had a small part in the midst of it. At the time, I was an engineer for Yahoo! News, and Katrina rapidly became the top story. We watched as our traffic doubled, then tripled, then quintupled our normal daily rate. And it stayed at that level, with little variance, for the next week or more.

My nephew was a flight mechanic and rescue winch operator for the US Coast Guard at the time; he took the top photo you see here on one of his (many) flights over New Orleans and the Mississippi coast. He had, in fact, transferred out of the New Orleans Coast Guard station several months before Katrina but was recalled (along with hundreds of fellow Coast Guard men and women) in the aftermath of the storm.

They flew inland, landed in the parking lot of a Home Depot store, and purchased every chainsaw available. They flew back to New Orleans, distributed the chainsaws among the Coast Guard rescue crews, who used them to speed their entry into the attics where residents had retreated from the encroaching floods.

The Houston Astrodome after Katrina

One of the problems in the immediate aftermath was how to reunite the evacuees from New Orleans with their friends and relatives who were looking for them. Yahoo! put together a team of volunteers, including me, who flew to Houston to set up a computer center to help the evacuees search for and contact their relatives.

Yahoo! employees worked with a local computer networking charity and Verizon to set up a telecommunications center and a computer facility.

At the end of the first day, we reviewed the situation. One of the problems was that there were too many people trying to help. There were at least sixteen websites, many of them small, local sites, that carried lists of people trying to make contacts with their friends and relatives.

David Filo, one of the founders of Yahoo!, was on the call and realized that this was an area where Yahoo! could help. He had Yahoo! build a special search index that integrated data from all of the sites, and thus gave us a single site (by the next morning!) that linked out to all the necessary information.

A volunteer helps a Katrina evacuee find her family

The tragedy was great and is still ongoing, but it was an awe-inspiring site to watch a company like Yahoo! use its huge resources in such an open and rapid manner; this is one of the reasons why many of us are still here.

In keeping with my homage to William James, I suppose that this blog post should be subtitled, “A Study in Human Nature.” However, my goals are not quite so lofty as James’s; I am merely an observer, and not a philosopher, of online social activities. Perhaps a better title would be, “A Field Guide to the Social Media Participants of the Online Realm,” but even that is a bit pretentious, don’t you think?

Those of us who live in the rarefied air of Silicon Valley tend to assume, almost always incorrectly, that the “rest of the world” experiences social media the way we do. It therefore comes as quite a shock, at times, to discover that there are enormous hordes of online users who do not experience the Internet the way we do. Here are some facts about the “other half” of the online world:

• Many of them do not know what a URL is, nor what a search engine is. There’s a reason that the most common search query at Yahoo! is “Google,” and the most common search query at Google is “Yahoo.”
• The term hyperlink has no meaning and is probably confused with something in science fiction.
• They have never heard of Techmeme, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, TechCrunch, or any of the other dozens of sites that we tend to rely on for our daily news.
• They believe that the Internet is a scary and dangerous place, and will rarely, if ever, divulge any personal information, much less their credit card numbers, online.
• They have no sense at all of the relatively safety or security of one website versus another. “https://” vs. “http://” is meaningless.
• They tend to perceive Internet sites as TV channels: different content, to be sure, but fundamentally the same technology.
• If they notice the URL, they get concerned if the site does not use “www.” before the domain name, thinking that it somehow controls the behavior of the web.

It’s not surprising, then, that these people tend to have different experiences of social media. This is an attempt to catalog, based solely on my personal experience, the various types of social media behaviors that occur.

The grandma

She has an account on Facebook after frequently seeing her grandchildren using it. She has had a computer since the 1990′s, and it’s mostly used by her grandkids when they come over to visit. She’s good at a few tasks using the computer: she can print out maps and directions, she can retrieve her email, and she can upload pictures from the tiny little Canon point-and-shoot camera that she carries everywhere.

Unfortunately, she has no fear and little understanding that there are Very Bad People on the Internet who would like to take over her computer and use it to send thousands of spam messages per hour for the next few years.

Her social graph consists of a) her immediate family members, b) some people she knows from church or the local community, and c) scammers who would like to inherit her modest fortune.

She loves seeing the pictures of her children and grand children, and she’s a big fan of casual games online. She has a farm on Farmville.

She reads every word of text on a web page before taking any action at all; because of this, she does not distinguish between actual content, navigation, and advertising.

Because of her innocence, she needs to be protected. Default privacy settings that reveal her name and location to the world could put her in very real physical danger. She will never be a mobile device user, and strategies that encourage her to become one will only confuse and frustrate her. She gets far more value out of “real life” social interaction than she does online, and she will drop the online interaction in a heartbeat if she has an opportunity to do something that involves real people.

The student

He is in high school or college, and has never known a world without the Internet. He does not wear a watch and probably never will. The concept of a “landline” is a novelty, since he’s never known a phone that would not go everywhere. He will not use email personally because it’s too slow, instead relying on SMS (text messaging) for most of his interaction with his peers.

His attention span is under two seconds: if he looks at a web page and cannot figure out how to use it in that time (or if it takes longer than that to load in the browser), he will drop it and move on to something more interesting. He is incredibly frustrated with his college’s website, and will scream out loud at how difficult it is to use.

He is completely and totally paranoid. He was raised hearing horror stories about online dangers and will go to great lengths to avoid giving any personal information online. He has no way of determining the difference between real and imagined risks. He will grudgingly order things from Amazon, but he will not allow them to save his credit card information for later, preferring to enter it each time.

He uses Facebook almost exclusively on his smartphone. He updates his status several times today, often with totally introverted comments about his state of mind.

Because of his paranoia (some of it justified), the student needs to be enticed to expand his social media horizons. For people his age, the best way to do this is with sex. The ability to share with people of the opposite gender is a strong attractor, overcoming many fears. Seriously, however, the student needs to be introduced to things gradually; he needs to be assured that he has control over who can see his personal information, and what it will be used for.

To be continued…

(My favorite part is the final ukulele solo as it fades out.)

It’s very creative, and it’s an insightful look into the process required to produce something of this quality. If you’ve ever been involved in professional music production, you’ll understand that much goes on “behind the scenes,” and this video gives you some insight into that.

Little bacon cheeseburger (top), regular (two patty) bacon cheeseburger with grilled mushrooms (bottom). Fries in the middle.

If you’ve been in California for more than a few minutes, someone has probably told you about In-N-Out. This venerable chain of restaurants has more rabid fanbois than Apple, and for a good reason. They sell excellent hamburgers and french fries; and that’s really all they do. They have drinks and shakes on the menu, but the In-N-Out menu was probably the inspiration for  Steve Jobs’s dictum to keep things simple. There are very few options, but the quality of what they sell is exceptional.

However, an upstart chain called Five Guys Burgers and Fries, started in Virginia, has moved into California in the last few years, mostly around the Los Angeles area. And, in the last few months, they’ve moved north into Silicon Valley. They are often touted as an “In-N-Out Killer” (sound familiar?), and yesterday was my first chance to sample their stuff.

The Five Guys menu is much more feature-rich than that of In-N-Out. In addition to hamburgers (they have a “little burger” with one patty, and a regular “burger” with two), they also sell hot dogs. Moreover, and much to my delight, they also have bacon cheeseburgers, which is the height of burger gastronomy in my humble opinion (In-N-Out does not sell bacon at all, even on their famous secret menu). Five Guys is awash with options: you can have mayo, ketchup, hot sauce, BBQ sauce, A-1 sauce, or any combination. You can top your burger with grilled onions, green peppers, jalapeños, or grilled mushrooms.

Both chains offer fresh (never frozen) beef, and they are roughly comparable on that front. In-N-Out offers small, crispy fries, while the Five Guys fries are much larger and correspondingly less crisp. Five Guys does, however, offer a Cajun variant of their fries.

Unfortunately, Five Guys’s burgers cost about double what In-N-Out’s cost. My verdict: if you’re looking for a good burger, you can’t go wrong either place. If you want to save some money, however, go to In-N-Out. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a flexible, ultimate burger experience, Five Guys can’t be beat.

Kodak DC20

In August, 1996, I purchased my first digital camera, a Kodak DC20. This was, in fact, one of the very first (if not the first) “consumer” digital cameras. It was well within my price range at the time, which was indeed rather limited.

Unlike today’s digital cameras, this little gem did not have a built-in LCD display, high-speed USB transfer (USB had not been invented yet), a flash, or any of the other features we consider normal. Its resolution was measured in kilopixels, not megapixels, with a maximum photo size of 320×240 pixels. It connected with the computer via a serial cable terminated with what appeared to be a 1/8″ headphone plug. There was not an electronically-generated shutter sound; instead, there was a reassuring but mysteriously mechanical “thunk” when you pressed the shutter button. It would hold approximately 20 images, even at that low resolution.

Nonetheless, that camera captured some of the most important moments in my life. We had moved to England earlier in 1996, and so the Kodak’s digital images record much of our wanderings and explorations in and around the area where we were living. It also captured my son, age 5, on his first day of school.

Some of the best images from that camera are included below, in their full original size and glory.

Crater Lake, looking north, July 2010

Hollywood has used this technique with great success; look at the recent reboot of the Star Trek movie franchise. A wormhole, some time travel, and the whole scenario starts over from scratch.

I’ve maintained a blog, off and on (mostly off), since 2003. It’s been a random collection of, well, crap. Some of it very, very good crap (if I may say so myself), but most of it crap, plain and simple.

So consider this a reboot of my blog. My old blog content still exists, though it’s moved to a permanent archive site. It’s searchable, and there is still stuff of value there, but I’m going to focus my efforts here.

“Focus” is a very important word: one of the problems with a blog like mine is that it was very unfocused: mostly a random collection of stuff I found here and there, and things I wanted to rant about. Here, I’m going to try to be more focused: I really am interested in the intersection of technology and our society, and I want to keep things focused on that.

I also want to be more consistent in my updates. I cannot guarantee a new post per day, nor a new post a week, even, but I do hope to do better than I did before. And I invite your participation and feedback as, together, we explore new worlds, search out new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before.

Urbanears Plattan headphones, army green

I’ve now been using these headphones for more than a week and, quite frankly, it’s pretty upsetting. A few years ago, I paid more than $300.00 for a pair of Bose Quiet Comfort 3 noise canceling headphones, and I’m seriously thinking of throwing them away.

Don’t get me wrong: the Bose headphones aren’t terrible. But the bass is so amplified, so overwhelming, that the impression I get from them after hearing the Urbanears is that everything sounds muddy. The Bose have the advantage of noise cancellation, which actually works very well if there are repetitive, droning sounds (like a window fan, and air conditioner, or airplane engines). And the Bose are extraordinarily comfortable; I could wear those for hours and never get tired of the feel. The Urbanears have a tendency to pinch my ears after an hour or so, and the material of the cushioning is more like vinyl than leather so that my ears get sticky and sweaty after a bit.

I also had the opportunity to compare the Urbanears with a pair of Sony headphones in roughly the same price range; very similar in sound, though I think the Urbanears are a bit brighter and have more clarity (and my friend who loaned me the Sonys agrees).

My summary of the Urbanears:

• Pros: Absolutely superb sound clarity and reproduction, approaching the quality of the best studio headphones and monitors I’ve used; elegant design; foldable; spare plug on the side lets a friend connect and share the music with you; microphone and button to let you use them with the iPhone (adapters for Nokia phones or simple stereo plugs are also provided).
• Cons: tends to pinch and get sweaty after a while; no active noise cancellation; makes me hate my $349 Bose headphones.

All in all, a very good value for $60.00.

Urbanears Plattan headphones in Yellow

This afternoon, I came home to find a package from Sweden waiting for me. It was a pair of Urbanears “Plattan” headphones that I had ordered a few weeks ago.

Urbanears is an upstart headphone company; they say that

Urbanears is a collective out of Scandinavia, motivated by a common interest in global relationships and shared involvement in the relevance of the living brand. Urbanears promotes a deeper connection to color, form and people while providing the freedom to transcend individuality and unify the sound experience.

High ideals, certainly, and they’re certainly eye-catching, but how do they sound?

I’ll have to admit that my very first impression wasn’t good. I had been listening to my $349 Bose QuietComfort 3 headphones at work, and my initial impression was that the sound was very flat with the Urbanears. After flipping between several songs on my favorite playlist, I soon decided that these weren’t flat; the Bose headphones were indeed very muddy, with artificially-enhanced bass and poor quality high tones.

Having spent some time in a recording studio, the best analogy I can make is that these sound like a set of highly-balanced studio monitors, with an extremely flat response. I can hear high notes better with these than I ever had with the Bose. The clarity is amazing, at least to my aging ears.

I don’t think these are for everyone. If you live for the thump of the artificially-enhanced bass lines in some music, you probably won’t like these. If you like classical, jazz, or more complex music, you’ll probably appreciate the clarity.

This is just my initial impression, so I hope to report back in a few weeks to see how they stand up to repeated use.