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October 23, 2005

Yet Another Cheese Sandwich Blog

Maybe the thing I hear most about my blog from friends is that they can't understand it. "It's too technical!", "Why do you always write about computer programming?", "Why don't you ever talk about your daily life?". Most of them read their friends' blogs in order to keep in touch, as a way of feeling close to people they know who are far away.

I think this is pretty different from the expectations in many blogging communities that exist primarily (or at least initially) online. These communities tend to form around discussions of sets of ideas or obsessions: commonly techie or political ideas, but there's plenty of groups around music (the thriving mp3 blog ecology of which Hype Machine offers a taste, for example), art (Drawn! and Art Dorks are popular), and local culture (PORT is a great Portland example).

Now, while I don't think that my blog is especially technical -- and it's definitely not about "computer programming" -- I do use it to participate in a community of ideas rather than to provide an illusion of proximity for far away friends. I can definitely imagine that, if you are not part of the "idea community" to which my blog aspires to contribute, the things I talk about here would seem technical or impersonal. I'm also not especially interested in changing my blog, in making it more personal. It's exactly this feeling of participation that I enjoy about blogging.

But I think I've got a solution for my alienated-feeling friends. If you're wondering what I'm up to and are particularly craving a "cheese sandwich"-style blog post from me, all you've got to do is send me an email (greg@mfdz.com works) with the date and the phrase "What Kind of Day It Has Been" as the subject line, and I'll send you your own personal post all about what I did and ate that day (I can't promise I won't edit out bad things about you or people you know, but that kind of cryptic tongue holding is exactly what makes personal blogs tantalizing to read). Plus, if you know where the phrase comes from you get extra points. Complain no more!

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Posted by Greg at 6:04 PM | Comments (2)

October 18, 2005

How To Do More Than One Thing At Once: On "Lifehacking"

With Clive Thompson's article in this weekend's NYT Magazine on "Life Hackers", a recent growing trend has reached a fever pitch: a kind of nerd revolution against nerd-made tools. As the article outlines, "Multi-tasking" became the expected mode of office work -- all computer-based work, really -- with the universal adoption of the PC and its subsequent networking. Once all your work and all your communication takes place through the same box, you end up constantly distracted, interupted, harried. Suddenly productivity geeks like Merlin Mann and Danny O'Brien find themselves trying to find ways to simplify, reduce, and focus, to turn off the metastasizing bundle of "multi-tasking" tools so they can, for godsake, actually get something done.

Part of the problem, it strikes me, is in the metaphor of "multi-tasking" itself. While the modern GUI is composed of an ever greater number of applications running simultaneously, the user ends up not using them all at once, but cycling rapidly through them one at a time conducting a series of different -- and often unrelated and mutually disruptive -- tasks. It might better be called "sequential tasking" since it's only ever the computer that's doing multiple things at once (keeping all those apps open in the background, patiently waiting for your attention to flit back over to them).

Now, after two years of working at a French dessert shop, I'm a pretty efficient waiter. You might say that when it comes to all the systems for prepping dessert and drinks at Pix Patisserie, I'm a power user, an alpha nerd. What makes me an efficient server isn't that I move any faster than my co-workers, or even that I know where everything is better than they do. My real advantage is that I've figured out all the places where I can do more than one thing at once: while I'm waiting for a teapot to fill, I prep the mug teabag, and other drinks; while a chocolate cake is heating, I scoop the ice cream that goes with it; etc. I've learned that their are some taks I can comfortably overlap (checking in with the host while making coffe drinks, for example) and some I can't (answering questions about prices while adding up tabs).

What it comes down to is if the tasks are different enough in mode (communication vs. dexterity) I can overlap them, but as soon as they get too similar (adding v. remembering numbers) I get confused and it takes me longer to do both tasks than if I'd taken them on in succession.

Similar limits take effect while working on the computer. I can listen critically to a podcast from IT Conversations or On The Media while working in Illustrator, but not while composing a Music For Dozens press release or reading 43 Folders. Contrarily, while writing or reading, I can listen to MFDZ tracks to screen out My Chemical Romance songs, but I can't watch a movie or TV show in the background and still follow the plot.

Finding sets of tasks like these that overlap well is the greatest possible productivity win. Much better than more efficient modes "multi-tasking" that let you switch rapidly between incompatible activities in order to minimize the ill effects of interruptions. When you've got a good overlap going, it's like your available time doubles. You are actually getting two sustained tasks done simultaneously.

The key to successful overlap sets is that each task utilize different sensory inputs and different modes of concentration: listening for recoginition of a song uses your ears and an automatic type of attention (when you hear a familiar song, you know it without having to do anything active).

Unfortunately, many of our tasks are stuck in one media type or another and so we're stuck tackling it using a fixed sensory input. I can't read email while I'm working in Illustrator, not because my brain couldn't handle it, but because both of those taks want to use my eyes as their input paths. We don't just need bigger screens, as the Thompson's article seems to suggest, we need ways of translating our taks away from our eyes, more information chanelled through auditory, and even haptic outputs. Here are some wild ideas for accomplishing this:

  • automated email reading using good voice synthesis: When I'm using Illustrator and I get a new email, my mail client should know to read its content aloud without Mail ever having to switch into the forground or even display anything on the screen. (For this -- and some of my other ideas here -- better voice synthesis than at least I've heard would probably be a necessity, or at least a great luxury).
  • haptic alerts: My chair pokes me or my bluetooth cell phone vibrates when a process completes and my computer knows that I'm in the middle of reading a web page. In order to never have to break my task overlap, I should also have a button or key-combo I can hit to trigget an obvious next action to follow the alert (for example, opening a disk image that just completed downloading or playing some audio files that just finished ripping).
  • smart web page readers: A tool that can read the actual content of a web page while ignoring the ads and other navigation. Maybe this exists already (it seems like it must for accessibility) but I've never seen it packaged as a productivity app. Again, this requires really good voice synthesis that I don't have to struggle to understand and that won't drive me batty over a long article. Another way of accomplishing this would be for more content providers to offer audio versions of their articles. In the world of podcasting, this seems desirable under its own merits anyhow.
  • tools that make it easy to switch seamlessly between modes: If I start reading a long NY Times in front of my computer and then I have to go downstairs to get and fold my laundry or if I have to go out to run my errangs, I should be able to switch over to an audio version (either speech generation or a provided human-read mp3) at exactly the place I left off. And then I should be able to switch back to reading when I return to the computer so that I can simultaneously listen to music.

(If anyone can think of any other wild ideas like these, or ways of accomplishing some of what I'm dreaming of I would love to hear about it in the comments.)

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Posted by Greg at 1:07 AM | Comments (3)

October 7, 2005

Business Proposal: Free Musak

I had a good idea for a business tonight. It's actually close enough to what my real business does that I'm almost afraid to mention it in public. Almost, but not quite. What's the idea? Building and selling a music library for restuarants and businesses out of Creative Commons-licensed works.

With more than 50,000,000 Creative Commons-licensed works out there, there is a lot of music, and amongst that music, at least some of it is under the Attribution No Derivatives license, or a weaker one. The Attribution No-Derivatives license "allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you."

That means that anyone can use music licensed "by-nd" in any commercial enterprise they want as long as they don't allow anyone to alter the music. The weaker licenses (Attribution Share Alike and Attribtuion) even allow you to change or remix works and still use the results commercially. This would make it free of (non-labor) cost to accumulate a library of songs which you could then package and sell to businesses like restaurants and clothing stores and malls. Since these businesses seem to be relatively "quality insensitive" when it comes to the music they play, being able to dramatically undercut the professional Musak services on price might be all that's needed to win some of the market. This proposition might be especially desirable to small businesses (like the pastry shop where I work) that have been sent nastrygrams by BMI or the other major label toadies irrationally cracking down on normal people listening to music they like. Since the legal fees in even a frivolous lawsuit are such a devastating threat to small businesses that survive from rent payment to rent payment, a cheap and safe music service might be quite appealing after reading a letter from a record label lawyer.

This would also be a total win for the people applying these licenses to their music. Artists pick such a license out of a desire to see their work heard as widely as possible. I don't think I've ever gone up to a clerk to inquire after the great song I'm hearing over the piped-in Musak, but I would definitely be pleaseantly surprised to find myself doing so.

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Posted by Greg at 3:23 AM | Comments (1)

October 6, 2005

Pocket Review: "Broken Social Scene" by Broken Social Scene

In the movie Wonder Boys, Michael Douglas plays a writer and English professor nursing the gigantically long and long un-finished follow-up to his much admired masterpiece, "The Arsonist's Daughter". Everyone is always trying to get their hands on the towering mess of a manuscript: his editor, his admiring peers, his star student, Hannah Green (played by Katie Holmes). Eventually, during the course of the movie's wacky hijinks, he leaves the thing out and Hannah gets ahold of it. She stays up all through the night reading it.

Her opinion sums up pretty well what I feel about the new self-titled Broken Social Scene record. She says, "In class you're always telling us that writing is about making choices. And it kind of seems like you didn't make any. At all."

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Posted by Greg at 2:14 AM | Comments (0)

October 1, 2005

The New Music For Dozens Blog

An announcement: In keeping with the current fashion amongst hip Web 2.0 companies, we've started a Music For Dozens blog. We'll be keeping track of all the new features we add to the site and pointing out some of the great new music that people have started uploading. I was reading the Odeo Blog before the Odeo even premiered (in some ways, I think the blog is actually better than the site itself) and the Flickr blog is always a good read, so it feels fun to be have a voice in that conversation (even if a tiny one to which no one is listening, yet).

So, check it out and let us know what you think. And, don't forget to come listen to all the new music that's been showing up, including some great local jazz, lo-fi spanish-language balladeering, psychedelic rock jams, minimalist new wave pop songs, and even growly metal.

Even better, sign yourself up, upload some of your own music, and join the party.

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Posted by Greg at 2:44 PM | Comments (0)