That’s not how they’re framing the question though. Instead it was a conflict of perspective. Lost opportunity versus bad opportunity. Weirdly enough, the debate gave me a bit of an insight into personal branding.

I made the decision to gather my internet identity because when I was trying to explain to clients that I was a great technologist, they’d come back and say, “Well how come Google has never heard of you?”

So now I own my name on the results page.  Personal Branding, Voila.  And now I’ve made this deal with Google, and people can and do find me.  But how do I keep this relationship positive for me?

Well, the obvious one is that I post more.  I can’t make that great an impression if my posts are years stale.  And I need to come up with some interesting content, but that’s hard.  They say you should write what you know, but my admittedly confusing selling point is that I don’t know anything, but really good at figuring things out.

But my 17-year-old cousin scolded me about saying that my blog is awful.  Apparently, while it may not get updated often, and it may not always be about the most exciting topics, it does sound like me.

Which is oddly satisfying.  Maybe I’ve got a voice after all.

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The concert was amazing, and as much as I wanted to get home afterward, I needed to walk a few blocks before the energy settled down enough that I could let go of the moment and fit inside my own skin.

Here’s the first problem. My cousins asked what’s new over Easter and I said, “Well, I’m going to a concert in June.” And they asked who I was seeing and I answered Zoë Keating. And they asked who is that? And I don’t know how to answer. “She plays the cello.”

She calls herself an avant-cellist. I view her as an experimental control freak. She plays in an orchestra-of-self, one of numerous artists who use loops and multiple tracks to build up layers and layers of their own sound until they have the whole background band against which to play.

Zoë does that too, but it’s a second-order effect. So that despite the fact that I’ve watched her on video, and now in person, there are times where things are happening in the music where I just can’t follow the combination of construction and music and it seems to swirl away from me, only to converge a little later in a passage that raises goosebumps.

I don’t know why I react to her music as I do. Some of it is just because I like the music. I don’t like the answer but suspect there’s some synaesthetic component that makes me respond to parts that are at least as much structural as musical.

She pointed out this thing about Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, and then proceeded to play it. In that if you loop the cello part on itself without any other tricks, it plays out against itself into an almost elaborate canon or fugue. Of course, I’m into classical music without knowing so much about names and things so I know I know the 7th, but had no idea which it was till she played and the light-bulb went off in my head and I could hear the violins in my head playing against the cellos on the stage. Like she said, there’s 16 of her. But I think she miscounts that, forgetting the extra Zoë that’s live.

Still, I need to get my hands on the score. Because I am not a music scholar but I know that Beethoven and his ilk were prone to this kind of construction, and now I want to read it, just to feel the technical detail of the beautiful sound. I want to touch the atoms of the song.

We stood for 3 hours. And almost two of them were just waiting for things to start. There were no chairs which is odd in a musical performance in a hall, but I guess maybe it’s cheaper that way. And when she came onto the stage, she apologized for the delay that had resulted from her getting her hair caught on a hanger. Which is kind of funny. And entirely credible given the fact that she’s tall and long with her red dreadlocks up in a strange sort of spike.

Long and thin. Her arms seem like they’d be thinner than my fingers. But she moves. My violin teacher taught me to notice that, back when I was 14, and it has gradually become a measure, to me, of musicianship. The people who know how to play, who really play, they can’t not move to the music. The performance isn’t just the instrument, or else the instrument isn’t just the machine, but it’s the combination of the two, and the sound would not be the sound unless the sound came with the sway or the lean. Pizzicato requires the head-bob. And the long draw of the bow is pulled by the chin.

It’s interesting to me that skill and proficiency almost always seem to bring a musician back to the same sorts of things that are the curse of a beginner. She made a passage of music that… I don’t know the word. It translated in phase, it swayed, it did whatever a guitar does when you put it through a wah-wah pedal. It’s the sound a string makes against a bow when the contact isn’t right, when the bow needs rosin, when the finger isn’t firm, but she uses those sounds and others, and she controls it and the result is a sound that Yo-yo Ma would likely only make in play (but with equal control)

How do I forget how much I want a cello?

I posted this elsewhere and I was asked what my favourite song of hers is, or what I’d recommend.  Right now, I’ve rediscovered “Escape Artist” from her latest album.  More info at ZoeKeating.com.

And if I’ve pointed you to something new, let me know.  She’s a fun artist to share.

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After all, I come from a large family so I have some exposure to the "sibling" syndrome, where you suddenly go from master of your sandbox to "Can you keep an eye on Billy while we run out to the store?"  And don’t confuse this with any lack of faith in the capable malevolence of my younger kind, because what I’m talking about is purely that state where you’re both young but there’s a big age gap.  Which is how your plan to finish beating the stuffing out of your opponents in a computer game gives way to wearing a wicker hat and sipping imaginary tea with Barbie and your little cousin Alice.

Archnemesis = Partypooper

That’s the Archnemesis experience, right there, that sudden whipcrack stop to your headlong plunge as you discover that you have a leash.  You’d be doing something interesting and cool, but instead you have this unwanted *thing* that won’t leave you alone <s>and wants to play "Pretend."</s>.

You don’t need a sibling to see how thie metaphor applies broadly.  I’m sure this captures how Lex Luthor feels about Superman.  Or how the banks feel about governments.  Or teenagers feel about chores.  Inevitable, implacable, and omnipresent and so hard to defeat.

I suppose this semes like an awfully long monologue, circuitous and without a point, but I need you to understand this.  I need you to understand the kind of mental and emotional commitment that comes with having an Archnemesis.  It’s a deeply personal relationship; something profound and affecting, and quite independent of whatever words you might exchange.  People assume you hate your Archnemesis, just like they assume you love your wife, but whatever emotion you feel in either case doesn’t capture the whole of the relationship.  Because after that discovery phase, after the dating or the combat and after the honeymoon or the incarceration period, when all of that getting-to-know-you stuff is past, you find that your Archnemesis (or your wife, assuming that isn’t redundant) have come to eclipse the other priorities you had before you met.

The Price of Victory

But like the saying goes, be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.  In my case, I won.  I stood over the body of my fallen adversary and buried him in an unmarked grave in my backyard.  And I’ve been grieving the loss ever since.  Sure, my Archnemesis wreaked havoc on the garden vegetables, and snacked on the flowers, but it turns out that our games were the real joy, as he (or she) tried to snack and I tried to sneak up on him.  For years we’d go back and forth as he raided my yard and I tried to get better and better photographs, and I enjoyed the challenge, and, I discover in retrospect, the company.

It didn’t take long for his final victory to sink in, for me to realize that I missed the mad little rodent.  I find myself looking back at the pictures I took and thinking about the curious and improbably circumstances that brought him so far from where he might have had a home that our paths could have crossed. 

The Game is Afoot

So imagine my surprise at seeing a ghost, this past weekend, an unexpected doppleganger calmly nibbling dandelions in the green grass field.  Not my dear old enemy, there can be no question there.  But a new adversary, cut from the same cloth. 

Except then he flopped over onto his side like a lazy cat in a sunbeam.  Clearly not my old enemy, who was cagey and much more aware of his surroundings.  My new opponent is young, and inexperienced.  Or much more confident in his strength.  The fool.

But for all that the new Adversary is not what the old one was, he is enough for now, and by the time we are done jousting, perhaps he shall have a little more respect for sharpness of my cunning and the depth of my aperture.  Perhaps with time the forge of our enmity will be enough to make him into what he and I both need.

Our Archnemesis.

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So I let go.  I accepted that my Google reader unread count was at 1000+ (the most unread it’ll admit to) and that most of my feeds were close to or well past that mark as well.  I took my fingers off the pulse of the world.

And not all that much changed.  I didn’t get left behind.  Between Twitter and social contacts and occasional glances at the newspaper, I was still aware of real world events.  I was missing out on technology releases and concepts, sure, so I was occasionally caught by news I just hadn’t heard as my friends and I talked.

Still, I didn’t get the kind of bliss that some folks seem to associate with being disconnected.  Sure I didn’t feel the need to check my news reader every 10 minutes, but I felt disconnected from the world.  Which bothered me though there were personally interesting blogs I wanted to keep up with, and keeping up with technology is kind of a professional necessity even aside from personal interest.  And it bothered me because I feel a little like letting go of the pace of news let go of my own sense of pace.

In response to that feeling, I’ve been rejigging my Google Reader configuration.  I exported all of my feeds and opened up the list in a spreadsheet.  And then each feed got a single tag, a single priority, and a noise level.

Tags are easy, that’s just a grouping.  This blog is about food, that one is about information secuity.  Priority is easy.  If I could only read some of my news on a given day, is this one important, High, Medium or Low.  Noise is easy too, but not necessarily obvious.  You could also call it Volume, or Traffic.  How busy is the feed?  Because if I get two news feeds and one generates 2 articles a day, and another generates 100, I want to handle those differently.

Anyway, I scored them all, and then I combined the priority and the noise level into a single scale using magic and math.  And now all of my feeds are classed by tag and high/medium/low value to me.

And it’s working.  (Well, it’s working sort of.  Unfortunately, an alphabetical sort means that “News_High” is followed by “News_Low” and then “News_Med” and that means I will probably rename those so they sort better in Google Reader.)  But suddenly I can actually target “The ones I really want to read” and shed the ones that just aren’t as critical.

The new system has been running for two days.  I’ve gone from tens of thousands of unread to 516 with about 20 minutes of effort.  And with the return to the world, I feel a little bit energized.  And definitely more in control.  Obviously it remains to be seen jsut how well my organization system works in the long run, I mean it took 4 years to really overwhelm my two-tier system.

I could probably manage better if I used a different client, but Google Reader is convenient for being in the cloud.  I do wish that I could set “maximum unread” for some feeds.  By number of days and by number of articles.  Because my weather and deal-of-the-day feeds are just noise after the day.  And there are other feeds where my attention span really doesn’t last more than a 10-20 articles.

Oh well.

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(Okay, so I didn’t stage the picture very well, but I was really hungry.)   It’s a plate of Lisa Mantchev-y goodness.  Well, except for the bread, I made that.  The jam is a bottle of Lisa’s “Bruiseberry’” that I have been saving without knowing what I was saving it for.  And the book…

The book is number 3 in Lisa’s Theatre Illuminata series, the end of a long road for Beatrice Shakespeare Smith and her merry band of hungry rogues.  And I’m very excited to see it.  Partly because it’s delightful to hold it in my hands after the glimpses and fragments to date.  And mostly because the EVIL author rewrote the ending and never shared the last chapter, so I know the ending but I don’t know how it ends. 

(Plus, this time I don’t have to MURDER a copy!!)

I’m so excited!

P.S. It’s surprisingly stressful to arrange a book you’ve been looking forward to on a plate of jammy bread

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Just to try something different, I’m going to start with the punchline.  I’ve got a bunch of APS film canisters and I’d like to scan them.  There are various options available to me, but in the end, I’ve decided that I’d like to see if I can rig a homebrew film scanner.

The rest of this post is just about…

How I got here

I’ve only been comfortable calling myself a photographer for the last few years.  But I’ve loved photography since my childhood.  Like many folks, I took the classes in high school and got to develop prints on paper.  (Unlike many folks, I’ve also used the same techniques to create circuit boards from copper-clad sheets).  And during school and since, I’ve always been quite happy to wield a camera.

As for most people, digital was a gamechanger.  Being freed of both the cost and the time of developing film really left me free to discover just how much I enjoyed taking pictures, and by taking so many, I really started to learn what I was actually doing.  But before I went digital, I got hoodwinked by brochures promising the future.

Digital was a big threat to the film companies.  Even though the first consumer digital cameras would be embarrassing compared to what’s on your phone right now, the promise of the idea was clear.  No more fillm, no more developing.  Unless someone had a really good idea.

Or really good marketing.  Which is how the APS film format was born.  It’s analog which was still better quality than digital at that point.  And the cameras could shoot three different kind of shots, normal 4×6″, panorama 4×11″, or HD 4×7″.  How cool is that?

Not very, in retrospect, though I guess I was pretty happy at the time.  Those long panorama prints were impressive, and fun to pin up on my wall at work.  But what was really happening was that I was just telling the developing machine to zoom on part of my print.  And the film itself was smaller than 35mm, so really compared to the 35mm alternative, I was giving up image quality for the opportunity to pay more for less actual film.

As much as I’m annoyed that I fell for it at the time, I did have a lot of fun.  And after I moved to digital, my parents spent a while using my old camera because it was still better than theirs.  But that of course means more little rolls of film.

Now my parents are digital too.  Now we’re a digital household and I’m starting to look at how to digitize the pieces that aren’t already loaded into my parent’s iPad. and the starting point is the box of APS film canisters.

Option 1 – Use a flatbed scanner

The nice thing is that lots of scanners have this attachment.  But not for this size of film.  It’s a weird format, and it gets stored inside the film canister so It’s pretty laborious.

I’m not ruling it out, but it’s a lot of work and I’d have to buy extra parts and hope they really worked and fit.

Option 2 – Use a service

I’d honestly prefer this option.  But the last time I checked, it costs something like 20 dollars a roll, and that just seems prohibitive.  And the results are not very high quality scans so they aren’t even detailed enough to reprint a 4×6 later.

Cost and quality rule this one out for me.

Option 3 – Digital Camera

I got this idea from the cult-of-productivity folks.  They were talking about scanning notes or business cards, but it’s the same concept here.

1. I have a DSLR, so I can get a high resolution scan
2. I have macro hardware, which means I can fill the shot with each frame on the negative
3. It seems faster than option 1 and better quality than option 2 and gets me past the problem of the film size being so small.
4. It seems fun.  Does’t it seem fun? I think it’s fun.
5. It still leaves me the chance of going back to option 1 or option 2.

So.  That’s how I got here.  That’s the project. Build myself a film scanner.

Now I need a scanning bed.

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In The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, Batman is running across a wire between two buildings when he gets shot right in the bright yellow oval on his chest.  And as he’s falling, his internal monologue explains it to us:  "Why do you think I wear a target on my chest — Can’t armor my head"

Well, I’m no crime-fighting billionaire, but the logic applies here too.  I can’t stop the companies and organizations that are all trying to reassemble my identity from the traces and receipts I leave out there in the world.  So instead of letting them assemble all the weak relationships into a maybe-me, I’m creating strong defined relationships to a definitely-me.  And with all the attention now drawn to definitely-me, well, if that means that my  quiet secret alter-egos get lost in the noise, so be it. 

Not that I have any great, dark secrets.  I have things I’d rather not talk about, like anybody, but all that happens if my "secrets" come out is that I have to wait patiently for you to stop laughing at me.  It’s not a life-threatening consequence.

So here I am, with a public, named blog, in the world for all to see.  And this is where we come back to my friend who was very startled to find that I’d gone to the dark side and exposed the collection of various online efforts into this public persona.  I understand part of his reluctance.  It’s my identity, and exposing that identity to the world offers a target for scammers, spammers and their close cousins, targeted marketers.

But what convinced me that I needed to put myself out there was the realization that by making all my work anonymous, it means that there’s no evidence that I’ve done anything.  It means that when I wrote a traffic-attracting review of The Giver (by Lois Lowry) for an online magazine a few years ago, all the traffic that it drew did me no good.  Same with the work I do on websites, or the work I do for clients.

I don’t care about the credit.  I know what I’ve done, and you know what I’ve done for you if you’ve had my help.  But I do care that I have credibility that comes from having a trail, and not having a trail reduces my credibility.  Just like my resume provides some weight for an employer, or my portfolio demonstrates some of my capability for a client, the collection of my online activities becomes a credential for the online me.

I post, therefore I am.  Here I am.

I was expecting my friend’s surprise at my embracing the search engine.  What I didn’t expect was that he’d be disappointed for me not mentioning this project.  Except I haven’t gotten past the existential aspect of it so I’m still very much embarrassed by the "in progress"ness of this place.  I have all these ideas for what I want to do with it.  And no time left to pursue them. 

But for now I’ll keep posting what comes to mind.  And if you’ve got a thought or suggestion for me, let me know, would you?  Talking to you would be a lot easier than coming up with things to say on my own.

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But life happens, of course, and university and careers swept us across the world on the wind.  At this point we’ve mostly been out of touch for years.  And it took this loss to draw our threads once again briefly together.

I don’t like funerals.  Not that anybody does, but I still feel the need to say so.  On the other hand, I think those are important.  Of all the major moments that we mark with ceremony, they’re the only one that is based in loss and not celebration.  And they’re the only one where the featured guest at best only half the point.  But you go because the person who passed away was important.  And you go because the people left behind are important.   Either way, I had to be there. 

I wish it was because I’m comforting or something like that but honestly, the big life events are more about the masses.  I think that people are too busy with grief and shock and dealing with the event handling to really register that I was somewhere or not.  But I also think it’s comforting to people when the shock passes and the healing starts, and they look back and see that there were a lot of people there to mark their loved one’s passing.

So being an unimportant cog in the system, I went to pay my respects and to say hello to old friends.  I got to meet the younger brother’s new wife, and see their mother for the first time in ages.  And while I was talking to the older brother, and reflecting on the long time since we’d talked, he mentioned that he’d discovered this blog.

And that’s how someone else’s funeral becomes about me.  Because after the reflective navel-gazing about life and death, now I’m thinking about the fact that someone found this place that I admit was set up to be found.  Except I never really thought about that aspect of it, and now that I’m thinking of it, I realize that I’ve left this particular front door profoundly neglected.

I’m not sure what it means, exactly.  But the goal is to feel a lot less embarrassed the next time someone mentions that they’ve read my blog.

And to my aunt and her boys, my condolences.

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In fact, it’s not just boxes that I like, but tins (*LOVE*), pouches, bags, blister packs (Most of them are outright evil, I usually hit a well-designed one just before I reach the homicidal stage of accumulated frustration).

It’s gone beyond the childhood magic of being able to play inside them.  Which is good since I don’t fit inside the box for my bluetooth headset.  But even if they aren’t viable as fortresses or spaceships any more, they are still magnificent articles of function and design.

For functional value, you can’t beat a box.  It packages whatever original item you got that the box contains.  Small ones can help to organize the litle doodads that seem to magically breed on my desk.  Larger ones become storage for cables, or pencils.  Shoeboxes store photos or cards or pens.

And all of that is assuming I’m ready to give up their originally designed purpose of allowing the safe transport of their intended containee.  I got an LCD TV.  And I can’t imagine what happens if there’s ever a defect that forces me to return the TV to the factory.  Because you don’t get a flatscreen TV sized box at any random box store.  Certainly not one with perfectly sized and cut styrofoam shoulders.   What if I need to send my laptop in for warranty repair?  Or my running shoes?  Or this tub of yogurt?

Every once in a while, having a box that’s just right for a job only reinforces the perceived value of the rest.  I had to return a dead disk drive and the stringent packing requirements required considerable care, and a box, a box sized just so, a box that I had because I’d bought a just-so-sized device just a few weeks before.  Being right, that one time, every  few years, that’s what makes it okay to stack the boxes of boxes of boxes of boxes on top of the other boxes of boxes of boxes.

I’m a prisoner, in fact, of potential.  Of my collection of tins that are bound to be useful, of my boxes which could definitely do something, and the giant boxes which couldn’t possible do anything else.  My basement is full of boxes which contain other boxes in a recursive cardboard matroshka fractal.

But I have an escape plan.

For one, I’m going to dispose of boxes that are more than two months old.  That’s long enough for any immediate warranty issue, I think.  If I can find them a home, that’s great, but I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it.  More important to get them out of my way, so that they stop stressing me.

For another, I’m just not going to buy candy tins anymore.  Not if I can at all resist.  I have no practical use for the tins I already have, and I don’t need the candy that’s inside.

For a third, I’m going to replace the mysterious shoeboxes on my desk with transparent tubs I got from the dollar store.  Being able to see inside means that my searching is a lot more efficient.  And the standard look and feel makes me feel a lot more organized and ordered.  A lot less stressed.

And last…  I’m going to keep a few of my favourite tins.  Just a few.  Just enough to make getting rid of the rest not hurt.  You can’t expect me to go cold turkey.

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Yes. But, Be Careful.

I killed a computer that way.

Yes

USB is designed to let you use 127 devices per controller, and most computers have one controller per port.  Which means that hooking up 2 drives (or more)  isn’t going to be a problem for your operating system.  Most of the time.

But…

You know when you plug in your memory stick and it doesn’t require a power cable?  That’s because USB is a “bus-powered” connection.  Which means that your computer is providing the power to run the thing you plugged in.  This works great for low power devices like a thumb-drive, mouse, keyboard or camera.  But high-power devices, like printers, usually require an external power cord.  And the reason for that is that USB is designed for low power, so the device needs a little help.

Hard drives are in between printers and flash drives.  Spinning the disks requires power.  If the disk comes with external power, you’re free to connect as many of those as you like.  But if the disk uses USB power, there’s a bit of a danger-zone.

My drive drew too much power from the USB port.  Which fried a fuse or something, and killed all four ports on the back of my Mac.  Apple kindly offered to “repair” the dead part for more money than the cost of a new Mac, so I thanked the “Genius” and left.

Be Careful

I could have avoided this with a powered USB hub.  Plug the hub into the wall power, and *if* a device ever misbehaved, this time I’d be down a $10 dollar hub, and not a $700 Mac Mini.  The critical thing is to make sure that it’s got a power source other than the computer.

Sometimes you’ve got your laptop in a hotel room, and you’ve got no choice.  And that’s fine, use the device, it’s meant to work.  But  when you’re home, it pays to be pessimistic.  Most of the equipment you’re using was built by lowest-bid manufacturers, and a little paranoia can save a lot of money in the long run.

• Picture is “Finished 4” by oskay.  Click on the image to see the original

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