The Mind of Boz

Wow, that Dvorak post took a long time. I'll probably write more in the next 10 minutes than I did over the last 4 train rides. Silly. You don't realize how good you are at something until you throw a wrench in it and find out how bad you can be!

One of the things I've decided I want to do in this space is write down some of my stories. I don't expect that I'll ever write memoirs as such, so I suppose this is as good a spot as any to collect some of the odder things that have happened to me. And there have been quite a few. Part of me wants to start chronologically, but the fact is that most of the really old stories aren't all that interesting. So maybe I'll do a timeline when I'm done.

Today isn't story day, however.

Today, I'm going to wax poetic on my New Year's Resolution.

Generally, I don't do resolutions. Most of the stuff that I want to accomplish tends to be poorly defined; things like "get in shape", "dress better", "learn Erlang", "make lots of money." Resolutions like this don't ever let you pat yourself on the back and be done. Which is to say, you can't win. And when I know I can't win, I tend not to play.

This year, for the first time in a long long time, I managed to come up with a well-defined, reachable goal. I'm going digital. Specifically, I'm going to rip all my CDs to MP3, scan all my old photos and negatives, and scan all the archived documents (tax stuff, contracts, bills, etc). And then I'm going to relieve myself of all (er, most) of those unwanted atoms.

Of course, like everything else I do, this little project started off with a lot of research. What format to use? How to back everything up? What to do with the atoms when I'm done? How to organize, catalog, and tag everything? Should I scan stuff by hand or use a service? These are all questions I've spent the last month thinking about, and here are my answers.

What formats to use? I'm dealing with three types of media here -- music, pictures, and documents. For pictures and documents the choice seems pretty clear; jpg and pdf respectively. There exist higher resolution formats for both (TIFF), but I'm pretty sure it's not worth it. For the documents, all they need to be is legible, and PDF will capture that. For the pictures, well, you can make a case for high res is better, especially as the cost of storage falls, but it reminds me of the story of the engineer and the mathematician continuing to go halfway from here to there. I'm an engineer, and I foresee JPG being good enough for any future need I may have.

For music, it's a little more complicated. Especially for a free-software geek such as myself. All things being equal, my preference would be ogg-vorbis. What's Ogg Vorbis, you ask? A-ha! This is exactly my point! Ogg (as it's known to goobs such as myself), is a music encoding algorithm that is both as good or better than MP3 in terms of audio fidelity, and legally unencumbered. Unfortunately, while support for it is growing, it's still very much the underdog. MP3, on the other hand, is slightly lower quality, has some patents surrounding it, and is supported by everything under the sun. In the end, I'd be willing to buck the system on this one, but for one giant stumbling block. The iPod (and thus, the iPhone) doesn't support Ogg. And I'm probably going to fold and get an iPhone. And that's how that cookie crumbles.

What to do about backups? Ahh, backups. Perennial thorn in the side of all digital denizens. I don't really have a good answer here. I'm too much of a cheapskate to sign up for a monthly service (although I've read things that make it sound like it makes financial sense...). RAID arrays are still pretty expensive, especially considering that this is basically append-only data. So I think the right answer for me is two big (BIG) hard drives. One that I keep hooked up all the time so that I can browse through my pictures (and illustrate the aforementioned stories!), and another that gets tucked away somewhere safe and occasionally updated with new pictures, docs, and music.

What do I do with the hard copies? I think that's going to depend on the nature of the thing. For the paperwork, it's easy: shred it. No further need for it, and the IRS says I only have to keep stuff like that for a few years. For the music and the pictures it's a little more interesting since you run into the problem of fidelity. Because MP3 and JPG are both lossy there's a definite risk of wanting to go back to the original source. For now, my solution is to get rid of all the jewel cases, stuff all the CDs into a giant wallet and stuff them somewhere. Under my bed, at my parent's house... something like that. For the photos, I think I may get rid of the photos themselves and just keep the negatives (assuming that I have all the negatives). They're smaller, keep better, and have as much or more fidelity as the photos themselves.

How should I organize everything? This is truly the bane of projects like this. Both deciding on a schema and then carrying through on it. For the papers, the scanner I'm using takes a stack of papers and turns them into a single PDF file. My plan is to sort them by service provider, and then by date. And then scan them into documents by year (so I have a PDF of all my phone bills from 2006, another from 2007, etc.). I use Adobe's Lightroom to organize my photographs, and it offers all sorts of ways to sort, tag, and otherwise make things findable. The trick will be to set creation dates in the meta-data for all the image files. Once that's done, I plan to take an afternoon (or a weekend, or a few...) and tag everything. Preferably a very rainy weekend when everyone I know has left town. What tags to use and the ways of folksonomy are far beyond this post (and often, they're far beyond me as well!). Of the three, the music is easy. Basically every modern MP3 ripping program has hooks into either Gracenote, CDDB, or FreeDB, which are giant databases of recorded music information. When you put a CD in the tray to be ripped, the ripping program asks the database and viola! everything is there. I've been hugely impressed with these DB's in the past, they even have data on obscure CDs that I've picked up at live shows in tiny little cafes.

Should I do it myself, or use a service? Do you have more time or more money? I'm doing it myself, because I'm a miser. And I spend an awful lot of time in front of a computer. And I have access to a sheet-fed scanner in my office. However, the pictures are an exception to this. As of this writing, I haven't decided what to do. I could buy a negative scanner and spend a lot of time on it. Or I could take it to some service somewhere and have them do it. The upside of the service route is that you're essentially buying a Sunday afternoon. Or several Thursday nights. Also, if they're anything like photo labs of old, if you don't like the results you can send the negatives back and have them scan 'em again (of course, that was usually done for color problems and color problems are easy to correct in post-processing now). My current plan is to take a couple of rolls of 35mm film down to Costco and see what it will cost and what the results look like. If they're good, I'll probably have them do the whole shebang. If not, I'll probably start looking for a negative scanner.

So that's my New Year's resolution, probably in far more detail than you hoped for. Along the way I'm sure I'll learn a few things, and maybe I'll even update this post.

I'm writing this post with my keyboard set to the Dvorak layout. Don't worry, there won't be any mistakes -- I'm still at the point where I'm going slow and working on accuracy. If I wasn't, this would be entirely illegible!

So why Dvorak? As I type this (very slowly), I have plenty of time to contemplate that question...

Theoretically, it's much faster. But anyone reading this has either already read all about the pros and cons or is more than capable of looking them up. So far these three paragraphs have taken me about 20 minutes, so clearly speed is not an advantage ... yet.

[Ed: the time sink right now is less about typing and more about editing. All the edit keystrokes that I've spent years training my fingers to JustDo™ are worse than useless. When I go to make a simple change I find myself accidentally rearranging entire paragraphs!]

There's a Neal Stephenson character, Jack Shaftoe, who blames all sorts of things on his personal demon, dubbed The Imp of the Perverse. That's definitely a part of it. There's a certain evil grin that accompanies telling a guitarist that they can play my guitar and then watching the irritation dawn as they realize it's left handed; I imagine I'll get the same schadenfreude from watching people struggle with my re-mapped keyboard.

There's the challenge of doing something new and different, and of seeing how long it takes my old brain to learn some new tricks. For example, I'm now at the point where I know where the keys are, but finding the forefinger stretch keys (rtyu and vbnm on a standard layout) is hard

Really what this all comes down to though is me unabashedly following people that I respect down a rabbit hole. Lots of coders, many that I count as close friends, sing the praises of this particular brand of silliness so I have to at least give it a shot. Geek cred. That's what this is really about.

This post was written over the course of 4 train rides, totalling well over two hours. And not because I was taking long pauses to choose my words either. I think I might go back to QWERTY for a little while...

Mostly, this post is so that I can say that I haven't gone an entire year without blogging. I haven't. See, last post was last Thanksgiving, this post is before Thanksgiving, thus I'm good.

For some definition of good.

In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, "let me 'splain. No, is too much. Let me sum up"

• Seattle was great
• BadThings™ happened
• Neuropace offered me a job, on condition that I move to San Francisco
• I took the job

Now, life is good. In fact, life is better than good; life is fantastic. Every morning I walk from my house (on top of Potrero Hill) down to the CalTrain station for the ride to Mountain View. Every day I look north at an unobstructed (if occasionally foggy) view of all of downtown as well as the entire length of the Bay Bridge. The scene is lit by sunrise (for better or worse...). The air is crisp, still. The city is still sleeping. And every day I reflect on how much I love my life here. Seriously. It's fantastic and the view is the least of it.

The least of it

In the three months that I've lived here, I've made quite a few realizations about the city. First, nearly everyone that I thought highly of in my graduating high school class now lives here. (There are some very notable exceptions, but hey...) Second, and perhaps more profound, is that I'm normal here. I fit in.

I don't know how to emphasize that enough. I tell people I do yoga, and they nod. I tell them I usually commute on my bike, and they nod. I tell people I like to climb rocks, and they nod. I tell them that I'm a computer programmer, and they nod. I tell them I've visited 43 of the 50 states, and quite a few foreign countries, and they nod. I tell them I prefer quiet dive bars where people can talk, and they nod. They nod because all of that is common, standard even. More than that, they nod because they agree with me! They do those things too!

Now this is where my Seattle friends butt in with, 'but we're like that too!' and it's true. They are. Which is why I loved Seattle. And I probably said a lot of the same things when I moved there. But for whatever reason it didn't affect me as strongly then as it does now.

On top of the fact that I find myself among kindred spirits, there are lots of other things that are improving my quality of life lately. Being in the same town as two of my oldest and closest friends. Being in one of the great food meccas of the country, if not the world. Not needing my car. Not worrying about how many hours I've clocked this week.

There have even been some surprise bonuses! It turns out that taking the train commute allows me time to do things like read fiction, blog, catch up on email, and read my feeds (hurrah for google gears!). I've cleared my to-be-read shelf of fiction and I'm picking up new books for the first time in what seems like a long time. Working in an office has been unexpectedly pleasant too -- always someone to have lunch with, people stopping by to say hi, a coffee pot that's always on (something of a mixed blessing...), a fast network that someone else maintains... I was really prepared to dislike the whole 9-5 thing, but it seems to be working out so far.

All of this is to say, life is good! So anyone who hasn't heard from me in a while and might be wondering, wonder no more.

Update:I wrote this in November, then things got busy and I haven't managed to post it until now... I'm really strongly intending to write more frequently though, so watch this space! Really!

I just got in touch with a friend from college that I haven't seen since 1998. In passing, he asked what I'd been up to, so I gave him this list :

• 1999 - 2000 Grad school, Pittsburgh. Computer engineering, very cold.
• 2000 - 2001 San Diego, working for big corp.
• 2001 - 2002 laid off, got a job at a ski resort in Utah for the olympics
• 2002 - 2003 San Diego, working for a smaller corp
• 2003 - 2005 started a company with a couple guys from grad school. Lots of fun
• 2005 - 2007 random contract and startup jobs in SD. Started dating Lindsay
• 2007 - 2008 moved to Seattle with Lindsay (seemed like a good idea at the time)
  

Looking it over, I have to say that I'm pretty proud of the breadth of stuff. Moreover, I love my life.

Just thought I'd share.

Is it national tech recruiters month or something?

Seriously, I've gotten about three recruiter emails a day for the last 2 weeks. It's ridiculous. And a little flattering. But more ridiculous.

The worst part is, most of these emails are totally vacuous. Here's a quote :

Hi Matt,

I am a technical recruiter working with some clients in both the Seattle and Bellevue area. I think your background is very interesting and I would love to discuss a new opportunity with you. Let me know when it is a good time to talk.

Looking forward to it,

Robin

That, followed by 30 lines of signature. Oh, and don't look at the code. I copied the html directly from the mail, but it hurts. It's got a font tag.

So after a phone call and three emails yesterday, I decided something needed to be done. And LindsayDayton gave me the answer -- an open letter! So here it is A message to recruiters. Go take a gander. Then write your own! Maybe together we can stem the tide of time-wasting, content-free crap flung around the internet. Well, maybe not, but at least we can point at it and snicker.