geekness

Being "the tech guy"

The other day I saw a great bumpersticker. It said "yes, this is my truck. No, I won't help you move."
Resist The Green Scare! event - 9Yesterday we had a big, all-day event with movies and workshops and a vegan dinner and Peg Millet singing and telling stories at the end. Peg is a famous earth firster who got arrested and jailed 16 years ago or so in a big FBI COINTELPRO operation.

The event, one of dozens around the world last week and this week to educate people about the Green Scare and raise money for the eco-prisoners, was a big success, I think, though it would have been nice to have more people, and I doubt we made enough money to pay for the space, though luckily a donor provided the cash up front for that. I also feel like it would have been nice to get more people from outside of "the choir", though we did get quite a few who none of us recognized from the usual circle of radical activists in town.

But it was good. Except that for me it was personally a huge disaster and a really bad day. I was the tech guy, doing sound and video, and i spent days beforehand preparing a DVD for the event. that was my only purpose, to be parachuted in to provide a service, to not really be part of the creative planning, to not help decide things, to just plug shit in and keep it running. I never wanted to do it, but I did it cuz friends asked, and I hated doing it all day and was just angry about it and didn't want to be there.

Similar to that sticker, I'd like to get a shirt that says "geek in recovery. No, I won't fix your computer." Or more accurately, it would have a list of all the tech stuff people are constantly asking me to do, for free: provide and set up a projector for an event, do live sound, shoot video of some event, make a DVD, help subtitle some video, host a website, make a website, revise a website, fix our internet connection, set up a computer lab, dub a video, etc etc etc.

I'm so fucking tired of it

How can I escape from that rut of being the tech guy? A few months ago me and the 2 other "techies" in the community sort of toyed with the idea of starting a tech collective. My hope was that it would take some burden off of me. But it quickly became clear it would have been just more work. i think we all, without talking about it, realized that and the project therefor never took off.

I just want out. And the most disturbing thing is that everyone always says, oh well, we should do more skillshares and trainings so that everyone can do what you do. Yeah, right. Call me cynical, but first of all, I just don't beleive there's that much motiviation in very many activist/progressives, none actually, to step up and allow that knowledge transfer to happen. They just don't care. They would rather just let all these high-tech tools and opportunities go away than take on the skills and do it themselves.

And that's okay. That's very wise. These people are smart. They know that technology and geekiness poisons the soul and they're keeping it at a distance. they know there's better, more fulfilling and healthy things they can do. And they have chumps like me and Walt and Jeff to do the dirty work, so fuck it.

Second of all, there's just way too much knowledge to be transferred. Look at that list up there. I'd have to do 19 skillshares to teach everything that routinely is expected of me to do. And like I said, most people don't care. If there was no video proejector, screw it we'll just use a white board. If there's no web, who cares, we'll print brochures and use a phone tree. no DVD? tell a story instead. people and activists lived without all these stupid gadgets anyway, for a long long time. People in their hearts know this, they know this is all extraneous, just frosting on their cake. But hey, as long as there's someone around who knows how to make and distribute the frosting, might as well slather it on, right?

I'm so tired of being that sacrificial lamb. fuck it.

The fucked up thing is, part of me LIKES being NEEDED like that. And though i'm not usually an insecure person and I usually have a pretty good self-esteem, a paranoid and fearful part of me worries that if i'm not "the tech guy" that people call for tech things, will anyone ever call me at all?

"If it wasn't for disappointment, I wouldn't have any appointments." -They Might Be Giants

RSS Courtship

I was looking for stuff about tracking RSS feed subscribers and I find on this Drupal mailing list a thread about it, and a guy who sounds like he really knows how to leverage his geek skills, if you know what i mean:

This may seem like a strange example, but I once ended up finding out that a cute girl who I'd assumed was out of my league was interested in me thanks to the amateur's mistake of tracking visitors by IP in drupal 4.5. Let me explain (I think this is a good example of how we should be thinking about our users needs when it comes to traffic analysis):

I mentioned to her that I had posted a certain essay called "The Renaissance of the Commons" on my blog, and told her to goole my name and the title to find it. The search popped up on my referrers log, and I marked down the IP associated with that search (I did have a crush on her). Later, I checked her IP's history, and found out that she was apparently a lot more interested in what I was writing, than I would have thought. For the next week, I noticed her return twiceto four times a day -- and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I should ask her out on a date. The end result was me being one satisfied drupal user.

Isn't that cute? To my knowledge no one I've crushed on, been involved with, or am involved with regularly read or reads my blog. But maybe if i did some detailed log analysis I'd be surprised. hah.

I just had a conversation with stillsecretperson (I am THIS close to just using her name. stay tuned!) yesterday, where I asked her if she'd read a blog entry i specifically sent her a couple days ago (cuz i know she doesn't regularly look) and said she hadn't had time. "I'm so busy it's a choice between spending time with you or reading your blog." Hmm, well, just out of bandwidth concerns the choice is clear, you'll get a lot more data throughput hanging out face to face with me, guaranteed. ;-)

Excellent, Very Wise AJAX Caveats

Somehow I am back in the business (literally) of thinking hard about website interface design, functionality, and user experience.

While checking out Digg extensively for the first time, I found this extremely smart article about AJAX. Read more>>>

email peeve

dammit i hate top-posting!!! i was gonna say top-posters, but that's hatin' the player, not the game. I'd hate most of internet-using humanity if i said that.
but you know why everyone does it? cuz of the fricking tools. pinche email clients all put the cursor ABOVE the text you're replying to. so no wonder everyone is a top-poster. but it's so annoying!!! it makes so much more sense to reply to something AFTER you quote what the other person said. like you read on a piece of paper, or a bathroom wall.

argh.

(stay tuned someday for the next peevish blog entry: Open Letter to All Motorists. I've been writing it in my head every day for the last 3 months, if not 6 years.)

More Subtitling

Sometimes I'm pretty thankful I'm so geeky.

Today I was helping someone from No More Deaths put subtitles on an interview with an undocumented migrant who was interviewed in the hospital here in Tucson after being picked up by border patrol. She was betrayed by coyotes and left for dead out in the desert, then rescued by suprisingly beneficient deer hunters.

I'm constanly surprised at how few real versatile, efficient tools for subtitling there are, especially for the Mac. There's just nothing that does everything you want. And so, often I'm stuck, massaging some text file into the right format, but luckily I speak the swiss-army knife of text processing languages, Perl. So when Shanti gave me a text file full of subtitles without time codes this afternoon, I just hacked together something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -n

$offset = 4; # time code to start.
$length = 9; # seconds each subtitle will last.

if(/^(\S.+)$/) {
$text = $1;
if($time == 0) { $start = $offset } else {$start = $time};
$time = $start + $length;
$start_seconds = $start % 60;
$start_minutes = int($start/60);
$end_seconds = $time % 60;
$end_minutes = int($time/60);
printf ("00:%02d:%02d:01,\t00:%02d:%02d:00,\t$text", $start_minutes, $start_seconds, $end_minutes, $end_seconds);
} else { print; }

Then import into DVD Studio Pro and voila! well, not quite voila, we still had to shift and stretch some things to get the timing a little better. But, y'know, if I didn't know Perl or some other way to roll my own text-munger, what would I do? spend an extra 5 hours on it I guess, getting the timing all figured out by hand. whew!

yay Perl!

Apple Should Be Ashamed at How Much DVD Studio Pro Sucks

what do the pros use to author DVDs?
i've been spending the last 3 days doing the authoring for the final version of my DVD of my juarez doc. i'm using apple's DVD Studio Pro and it's not the first time i've used it but i have to say it's one of the most frustrating pieces of software i've ever used. it's got me almost pulling out my hair. and it's so surprising because Final Cut Pro is such a pleasure to use and works SO WELL, and then this other software with apple's name on it just blows. i mean you can do a lot of cool stuff with it but the way the interface works and the general performance of the interface just is fucking shameful.

so i was wondering what people who do this for a living use, cuz the "pro" in dvdsp is obviously a lie.

Here's just one little dumb example: When working with subtitles, you can only move ONE subtitle at a time. You can't select a whole bunch in the stream and slide it around, or move them to a different stream. You just can't. Why? Why the fuck wouldn't they allow one to do that? After 4 versions of the software?

Or here's another one. Why is it that when you import subtitles from an STL file, it blows away any existing subtitles on that stream, even if they don't conflict timewise with the new ones you're bringing in? Why? There's no logical reason for that.

And then there's all the ridiculous wait times. Why can't they come up with some some kind of preview mode so that you aren't waiting for the spinning rainbow wheel of death every time you click? ARRRGGH!! Apple, get your fucking act together!!

Some Just Don't Get It

Over the last 12 years the world has seen the general public gradually catch on to what the Internet is good for. It's been a long slow process.

First it was an "Information Superhighway," which most people didn't understand. Nice try, Al.

Then it gradually turned into a giant shopping mall, and then, sort of after the fact, a library. And a few other uses are seeping into the zeitgeist. It's a place to pick up dates; a place to promote your band or sell your band's indie recordings; a place to share photos of that trip to Disneyland with grandma; a place to auction off the old stuff in the attic; Even a place for a sort of public diary and/or soapbox.

The last, frustrating frontier: a place and a tool for distributed collaboration; a lot of people still just don't seem to get that. I first started thinking about it in 1994, as soon as I found out about the web. Well, actually before there was a web, but I won't go into that (early participation in what would become SITO...) And this stuff isn't rocket science. I'm talking about simple shit, like, say you're an artistic collective or a nonprofit of some kind. Wouldn't the web be a good way to make available files that different members might need regularly? Like hi-res versions of the group's logo, or letterhead, or common templates for documents? Oh, yeah! good idea! Never thought of that!

sigh... suspira...

new touchscreen tech and tibetan-swiss electroclash

Vic Divecha's blog brings us a video demonstrating some cool new touchscreen interface technololgy.

I had trouble deciding to blog about this or not, because it's so geeky. But I started sending it as an email to my geeky or designer friends and then just thot, hell with it, blog it. it's geewhiz cool. (thanx, Ryn.)

Apropo of nothing, while i type this i'm listening to an interview on a German radio station with a Swiss musician/DJ sort of like Peaches, named Kate Wax. She's actually half Tibetan, she reveals at the end of the interview. Her stuff sounds pretty cool, and I like listening to her and the interviewer with their germanic accents as they (sometimes awkwardly) talk to each other in english. I guess she might be from the Italian part of Switzerland and hence they might not have German in common, but she doesn't sound like it, so it's interesting that they're talking in English. I feel guilty to be so lucky and so unlucky as to be a near-monolingual native speaker of the language that everyone speaks worldwide.
suspira...

Geek Abuse

I just remembered something that happened yesterday that annoyed me slightly. I stopped by the Dry River space to see if the internet connection was up, because it had been out all the day before. I'm one of the 2-3 people who set up the computer lab and sort of maintain it. So I come in and boot up one of machines, it's just opening time so nobody else has tried them yet, and I'm waiting for it to boot and this guy that hangs out there, one of the many eccentric street characters that hangs out there, asks me "So what's the scoop, Perfessor? Is there internet?"

This is the equivalent of being called "4-eyes" or whatever back in grade school. It was said semi-jokingly, or maybe the intent was to be completely humorous. But I was irritated. And to some extent "perfessor" is an honoriffic, so it's complicated. It's a bit like beefy jock types that call people who are less beefy "big guy." (this has happened quite a bit in my past). Obviously it's an insult, it's sarcasm, but it may be unconcious, or if not it's easily deniable that it was intentional.

I'll qualify these gripes by saying that as I'm a privileged white middle-class straight male I actually have no real idea what I'm talking about, but in no way am I comparing it to the daily abuse that women and people of color and other opressed peoples are subjected to. However it's interesting to notice through that lens, so to speak. For instance how often are women annoyed when they're called "girls"? How often in general are people mean to each other, especially to those different from them, without even noticing?

Looking for an Audio CMS

So I have this site, Phonophilia, which is all about field recordings and other sound. I want to keep adding to it and I want a better way to do that and manage what's there. So I've been looking for days for some kind of content-management system for audio. I basically want something that can look at a directory full of sound files and make a nice looking little index page, reading the ID3 tags of each mp3 file to get details... stuff like that.

I don't want just a podcasting tool, if I wanted just that I would just use LoudBlog, which seems pretty cool for that limited need. Though something that generates RSS for each page would be nice. the thing with podcasts and blogs is it's all about the NOW, the latest, not about managing content that's both old and new.

So, dear reader, do you know of anything like this? (I was spurred to asking you from reading José's blog where he just asked a couple real questions of his readers. And I had answers!)

Syndicate content