shawn ritchie dot com

More Does Not Always Equal Better

I've got to think that, at least among Americans, writing is way, way up. Consider that 20 years ago (arbitrary time-frame chosen to predate the 'net being at all ubiquitous), your average American wrote... never? Of course, there were authors and professional writers, but that's not what I'm referring to and that body of folks is minuscule compared to the population as a whole. For most, maybe you'd churn out reports on a typewriter at work, if your gig involved that. A (very) small percentage of adults kept a diary or journal. Everybody else just, beyond the (very) occasional note in an Xmas card or a letter to family/friends, didn't have cause to write that often. 

Now, though, we're in the Web 2.0 age. Even grandma's on Twitter updating anybody who cares to read about it that her goiter's acting up. I'm pretty sure this means that, on average, regular Americans are committing more self-authored words to paper or screen than ever before, and by a large margin.

So, given that... why aren't any of these motherfuckers getting any BETTER at it? 

My gods, people... "GOIN 2 C MY GURLZ" is barely acceptable if you're a 12 year old girl texting from a 1990's Nokia brick phone with a numeric keypad; it is a CRIME WORTH DEATH if you're an adult doing it from a goddamned computer with a full keyboard.

What's the rush? Do you think your family/friends are going to assume you've died if you take an extra minute or so to actually FUCKING TYPE PROPERLY and SPELLCHECK and RE-READ YOUR FUCKING SHIT to make sure it actually sounds like at least a kissing cousin of English?

I know some folks who, though the last book they read was in high school, embraced the Internet, particularly social networking, with an insane fervor bordering on outright madness. You know the type: Facebookers who take EVERY quiz and update every five minutes on what they're doing, they twit while they shit, I can tell you with better accuracy what THEY had for lunch than what I had... yet, for all of that writing, any single sentence from any of it would make Bill Strunk weep tears of blood.

"Get with the times, old man! It's the Twitter Age, no one has time for your PARAGRAPHS and your GRAMMER anymore! You got 140 charac..."

Hey. 

HEY.

Fuck you.

Is that concise enough for your attention-deficit-addled brain? 

I want to code a social network that REQUIRES anything you post to be at least 100 words in length, with detectable punctuation, capitalization, paragraph breaks, the works. No quizzes or any sort of automata will be allowed. You will have to generate your own content and do it in a meaningful fashion to partcipate. That will hopefully weed out the mouthbreathers who have discovered, abused, overwhelmed and, eventually, destroyed every formerly useful social network out there, from IRC to Usenet to every website forum ever to MySpace... They're in the process of taking down Twitter and Facebook as we speak. 

I think we should fight this trend. Join me, won't you?

In Absentia

*burp*

Sorry... where were we?

Ah, yes. I seem to have become one of those bloggers who updates about once a season, usually to apologize for the lack of updates. Well, what can I say; I've been busy:

• The Blackhawks made a) the playoffs and b) me realize how much I've fuckin' missed hockey. So I decided to scare the wife by reverting to my obsessive hockey-fan self from the 90's and watched every minute of the Hawks in the playoffs. That sort of dedication eats up a surprising amount of time.
• My guitar chops have been rusting out... so I've been putting a ton of time into getting them back. Just because I ain't playing live much anymore doesn't mean I want to suck. You never know when Maiden's gonna put out the word that they need a fourth guitarist, y'know?
• My online writing has regressed to where anything I want to say can fit into a Tweet or Facebook status update.

So, I'll be trying to buff up the ol' writing skills again and getting some long-form essays going soon. It can't be good for one's long-term writing ability to only be writing <140 character tweets or short "STOP POSTING FUCKING FACEBOOK FUCKING QUIZZES YOU FUCKERS FUCK!" Facebook status updates.

O, Despair!

Chicago has about seven days a year of genuinely fantastic weather. The rest of the year can be divided into "Jesus Fuck it's so fucking cold and this three feet of snow has frozen solid and it hurts when I breathe and is that a hot chick or a fat dude under those eight layers of clothing I can't even fucking tell this sucks I'm moving to Arizona like TOMORROW" or "it's so hot and humid stepping outside is basically like walking into a well-cooked canned ham". 

When we do get one of those gorgeous days that SoCal asshats take so much for granted, we get 'em GOOD. 

Today was such a day. 80 degrees. Low humidity. Bit of a breeze. Blazing sunshine. On a Friday, no less. Just a beautiful, perfect day of the sort that makes even the fattest, antisocial video game nerd want to jump outside for a round of frisbee.

So how did I get to spend it? Well, thanks to the fine folks at the fuckin' deli up the street from work, I spent it speed-shitting at home while chugging enough water to make sure I didn't die of dysentery. And fighting off the strongest urge to puke I've had since I was like six (I may drink a lot but I am NOT a puker. That shit's weak).

Oh, and trying to sleep, since this crap (ha) started yesterday around 3pm and carried right on through the evening and night into today. Good thing my wife's a deep sleeper because I was one back'n'forth power-pooper last night.

So, where does that leave us on this absolutely gorgeous Friday night? My wife is at the neighborhood BBQ we were both supposed to be at, enjoying the nice weather, having a drink or two, eating grilled meats... me? I'm at home alone celebrating the fact that I can squeak out a fart without soiling myself for the first time in 30 hours.

Go me.

Things I Like and Things That Suck

I haven't been posting much lately due to having too much cool shit to do/play/read/write elsewhere in my life lately. Thought I'd share some of 'em.

BOOKS

Thing I Like: "The Night of the Gun" by David Carr. A journalist goes back 20 years to the time of his severe booze & coke addictions and tries to determine the truth of what happened using reporting techniques and interviews with the survivors. Sparsely written but entertaining as hell, Carr's memoir of a life gone off the rails doesn't suffer from the over-embellishment problems of the James Frey stripe, though the slight whiff of self-help-y bullshit that permeates the genre is present once the book leans into his recovered period. That said, I will always enjoy reading about talented, lucky folks who do their damndest to piss it all away in entertaining (for the reader, anyways) fashion so long as the writing is snappy, which it is in this case.

Thing That Sucks: "The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe" by William Hitchcock. This book is a classic case of "the scholarship is sound, but the thesis it's trying to support sucks all kinds of rocks". From what I read, his point seems to be that when you send millions of armed young men to conquer another country and defeat its armed forces, they often act like superior dicksmacks to the folks of the occupied lands, whether or not those civilians are on "your" side or not.

No shit. You think?

Sure, every 20 pages or so Hitchcock tosses in a "the British tried hard" or a token "the Germans were, of course, worse" to mitigate things, but, overall, it's basically a few hundred pages of "the Allies liberated Europe but then things sucked for a few more years oh what cocks they are!" that grates on the nerves. I did appreciate the fairly detailed histories of occupational policy in the American and British zones, though. I can only recommend this book, though, to folks already well-versed in the liberation and occupation of Europe who therefore have an understanding of why, even with the best of intentions, the Allies weren't able to immediately restore a shattered continent to peace and prosperity and make everyone happy.

MUSIC

Thing I Like: "Red Fang" by Red Fang. Epic new stoner rock that combines the better aspects of Kyuss and Roadsaw with great vocals and a heavy sense of humor. Best new rock band I've heard in a while. Check out their first video for "Prehistoric Dog" here.

Thing That Sucks: "Scream" by Chris Cornell. My reaction on hearing this was, and I quote, "a-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA what the fuck?". Terrible piece of work. The falloff in the quality of Cornell's work since Soundgarden's "Superunknown" album is almost Malthusian in its progression. Just reunite already and cash cow that mother. Or at least stop doing stupid shit like teaming up with Timbaland to produce this crap.

VIDEO GAMES

Thing I Like: "Wheelman" for the Xbox 360. Think Grand Theft Auto without the dreary seriousness or physics fidelity in the controls. It's basically a fighting game 'cept with cars instead of people. Maybe I'm just a sucker for big dumb games set in towns I've been to (Barcelona) with cars I know of (the Pontiac G8 and Alfa Romeos feature prominently) but I'm having a ton of fun with this thing.

Thing That Sucks: Empire: Total War. I'm sure in about 18 months there will be some mods that make this ginormously convoluted beast worth playing but right now the AI's just not up to it.

SOFTWARE

Thing I Like: Windows 7. This OS gets better with every new build. Greatest improvement in Windows since the jump from Win3.1 to Win95. I'm not kidding; it's that good. Due to an issue with a piece of audio hardware that I assume will be fixed once Win7 goes retail and/or the manufacturer of the device updates the goddamned drivers, I recently had to revert my home machine to Vista for a while. And I could weep every time I use it. It's significantly less responsive and significantly more annoying to use. I really hope all of the "I hate change!" retards out there suck it up and get on board with this, because I'm going to be refusing to help friends/family with tech support unless they agree to upgrade to this.

Thing That Sucks: Internet Explorer 8. This browser still blows goats in hell. Tho', at least in Win7, you can actually make it go almost entirely away.

---

So there you have it. A small glimpse in the consumerist hankerings of smr. If you want to be like me, buy the above things I like and don't buy the things that suck. And start drinking a lot more.

The Mac As Muse

I don't use my Mac nearly as much as I used to. It's an old Powerbook G4 that's getting really long in the tooth. We got a new Windows machine late last year and it's running Windows 7 right now, which just makes for a super-speedy, very pleasing user experience. Fast and pretty, which is basically what I always want out of a computer.

My Mac, while very pretty, is damned slow. Takes forever to boot up and launch apps, it beachballs way more than I would like... it's just not really up to the task of being a primary machine in 2009 anymore.

That said, there is one aspect of the Mac that makes me loathe to get rid of it or to stop using it entirely... it's inspiring. I don't mean that in some goony, Steve-Jobs-Is-God kind of way, but in the simple aspect of, when I sit down in front of it, I usually get some ideas in my head, be they an article idea, a riff, a drumbeat... whatever, for some reason, this thing makes me want to create.

I wonder if I can use this simple fact to justify to my wife why I really, REALLY need a new Mac...

Anything Anywhere Anytime

Not to look the gift-horse in the mouth, but I'm basically overwhelmed with the number of places I can post, store, organize, distribute and view the various shards of my online life these days. I've run my own website for years (as you would know since you're, well, here) and ain't giving that up anytime soon. But there's also Facebook, Twitter, Flickr for good photos, Facebook or this site or Twitpic for quick random picks, or my TypePad Photo Galleries... or I could just use my Gmail and Picasa accounts to organize my pics there, but then I'd lose my contact and syncing through MobileMe...

I think you see where my problem is.

If any one suite of these things was perfect, I'd ditch the rest like a bad lover. For example, I think MobileMe's gallery features kick the shit out of Picasa's for web-based organizing and just beauty of display, but MobileMe's email client sucks dong whereas Gmail is aces. Then again, neither Google nor Apple's online photo galleries have the organizational depth of Flickr. And, actually, Gmail's not entirely aces 'cuz there's no inline image attaching and it has ads, too, which I would gladly pay to get rid of but Google Apps for Domains is still kinda jilty compared to regular Google stuff.

What I want is this: a unified, social everything motherfucker of a desktop app (Mac & Windows, pls. Linux can get fucked) with a killer web version as well that allows me to post to or manipulate any of the other services out there. Or just rolls the best version of them inherently. At best, I see it managing two discrete sets of applications:

PRIVATE LIFE MANAGEMENT

• Email
• Calendaring
• To-Do List/Tasks
• Financial Management (think Quicken/Mint)

SOCIAL MANAGEMENT

• Pictures
• Social Streaming (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Apple gets closest to this with their iLife/MobileMe infrastructure and integration, but, let's face it... it's tied pretty hard to just the Macintosh ecosphere and the MobileMe webapps still all have glaring, horrible usability issues. And it's a closed ecosphere; they're not going to let two-way integration with a Facebook or Google Picasa happen easily anytime soon. Yes, I'm aware that there are plugins that allow iPhoto to work with Picasaweb, but it's kludgy at best and it still would leave a Windows-based MobileMe user (trust me, they're out there; blame the iPhone) at sea.

Speaking of the iPhone... I want this uber-app to sync with whatever phone I have, too. I would only expect it to work with smartphones, but I don't want to have to be locked to Apple's phone or Windows Mobile or Palm... I want it to work with ALL of them. If I have an iPhone, I want to be able to pick a contact and send all of their info via this service to a friend who needs it but has a WinMo device. And have it update their desktop and cloud databases in the uber-app as well.

Basically, I want the promise and push technology of MobileMe with the cloud-not-computer-centric nature of Palm's WebOS, all available on the phones and via a web interface with the best aspects of Google's Gmail or Yahoo's Flickr AND via Windows AND Mac desktop apps with the general polish of the iLife tools for when I want to do the heavy lifting of organizing my life.

On the social media front, I want to be able to manage my MyFaceTwitBookSpace crap through it, too. Mostly because I can't stand the actual interfaces to most of these tools, but they've become pretty important to arranging the ol' social life so I have to interact with them on some level. I'm glad MySpace is losing traction just because MAN is that interface a disaster, but none of them are great and I'd like to be able to use a desktop app that looks like a regular OS app to interact with this shit, not whatever fever dream the web/UI dev guy at the startup had the day they launched it.

I _would_ pay for this, and handsomely, because a) I already know how much I'm paying for TypePad, FlickrPro, MobileMe and my regular hosting account and I'd happily cut one annual e-check to the Uber-App makers rather than manage (read: occasionally forget to renew/cancel) multiple services, and b) I damned well want all of this to be ad-free. Free services that are cool but entirely ad-supported and DON'T offer a way to buy the ads away via a Pro version or something annoy the crap out of me. When I'm working on something, I want the app to be dominant on my screen and entirely devoted to the task at hand, which precludes having a sidebar full of fuckin' ads blinking away. I logged into Yahoo Mail recently just to see what's up with their mail client and WOW do they have that thing shitted up past any usefulness. And fuck me if I can find a way to give them some cash to make all of the blinky-blinky marketing bits fuck off. That's just antagonistically unfriendly to the user. I _WANT_ to give you money to make my life easier. Let me.

I get the feeling somebody's going to nail this concept in the next year or two. Apple did good to get the Push tech working between app-web-phone, which in turn drove MS to get cracking on their own version (which is looking pretty bad-ass, actually). Palm seems to have really gotten it, if even 75% of the promises of their new WebOS for smartphones are true. Now we just need a Universal Social API to tie all of this shit together and for someone to build the killer UI for it all and I'll be happy.

I'm not asking TOO much, am I? Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to log into eight different apps/websites to update the four people who care as to what I'm having for dinner RIGHT NOW.

Let the Coalescing Begin

Found an old archive of posts from my various websites going back to 2002. Anything that had pictures in it is without them now, but it's nice to have a good 80% of what I've published to the web back in one place. There's a serenity to having that much content still stored somewhere.

I do wish I still had the posts from my old the-smr.com site from before Content Management Systems like WordPress or TypePad were prevalent. Hand-coding every new post in HTML and trying to make sure it kinda-sorta looked like every other "page" on your site was a fun* challenge.

I do wish, though, that TypePad featured collapsible Archive and Category listings. When your archives go back seven years, the list gets a little long...

*not fun

iPod Features I Demand

If there's one feature I really wish the iPhone/iPod/iTunes had, it would be the ability to link two tracks so that they always play together. Like, I have a lot of albums that feature killer, short instrumental pieces that then naturally lead into a following full tune. Or, there's like an epic, long song that's divvied up into separate tracks for management purposes. If yer listening to the album in sequence, ain't no problem. But if yer listening to shuffle, you often get this:

• iShuffle's doing its thing, comes up with awesome short intro piece
• smr thinks: "Aces! I haven't heard "Towards the Waves" by Twilight Singers in forever! It totally fades seamlessly into the even-awesomer "I'm Ready". That combo totally rocks my balls!
• "Toward the Waves" ends
• iShuffle thinks furiously about what to play next
• smr anxiously awaits killer next tune
• iShuffle says "fuck continuity, fuck "Toward the Waves", and FUCK smr. He gets "More Than Words" by Extreme and he'll fucking like it
• smr goes "oh oh AWWWWWW what the fucking fuck"
• ... :(
• wait. Why the fuck do I have Extreme's "Extreme II: Pornografitti" on my goddamned iPhone? 

I would pay good money and/or kill any number of small animals to get this feature. Just sayin'.

My Skin Is Old

There are many, many things that suck about getting old:

• My hair. Where the fuck is it going?
• My joints. Why do they ache so much?
• My stamina. Why can I not drink for three straight days without needing six to recover from it?

To be honest, though, I expected these. I’ve never heard someone older than me claim shit gets better, body-wise, as time passes. So, fuck it, I was prepared, it sucks, but it’s inevitable, have some “Oh, Well!” flakes for breakfast and move on.

However. Dry skin. What the FUCK is this shit? I’ve never had skin problems of any sort, really. I’m not even getting wrinkles, and I’m an increasingly older smoker. Nowadays, however, my knuckles and elbows look like I sleep on all-fours in a tub full of chalk. 

Worse is that, apparently, the only way to mitigate this shit is to slather one's ashy parts with with a layer of scented petroleum product. Worser, there's, like, RULES as to how one should do this. Maybe I'm just a big dumb guy, but I figured the process would go like this:

• discover part of body dry enough to be annoying
• apply moisturizer to that part

My wife, however, informs me that this is ALL WRONG:

me: Ahhh, what a refreshing shower!
her: Don't forget to moisturize!
me: But... I just showered. This is as wet as my skin's going to get today.
her: Exactly. That's why this is the best time to moisturize.
me: Isn't that kind of like pouring water onto water to make the water more water-y?
her: No. Just do what I say.
me: Yes, dear. *starts slathering*

All I know is that I never thought my knuckles would have cause to bleed that didn't involve punching someone/thing and I don't like it.

What other glorious surprises does aging have in store for me?

Back to Typepad

I missed some of Typepad's feature. Alright, I'm just an ADD-addled freak who's never satisfied by anything and will constantly create chaos and seek change for its own sake. Sue me.

I'll also get to the book reviews... at some point.