Peebo.net

Working at home and being connected (online) all the time is getting to me. On the train downtown I was visibly anxious about not being able to Google something (anything). My head was sort of spinning. (So much to do! So much to learn!) I started reading a magazine but my attention kept drifting. . .

I just recently came across the term “continuous partial attention”^[1] defined as “the state of mental blurriness thought to be induced when information is constantly pouring in from multiple sources”. This pretty much describes me on many afternoons after a day of delving into information (or at times just “data” as defined by Wurman^[2]) on multiple topics with multiple mental contexts simultaneously.

It starts with a single task and then multiplies due to the nature of the web; information linking invites associations and tangents—on-topic and off. I start looking for a simple bit of information, an answer to a query: work-related, personal, it doesn’t matter. I Google; I explore; I crosslink, and at some point my interest drifts from the primary task to a tangent. The tangent could be triggered by new or unexpected information related to the primary task or, due to the nature of my job^[3], brought about by some aspect of the web interface itself (which could trigger a digression involving the underling technology of the interface) or maybe it something else completely (unrelated to the primary task, subtask, or technology) that catches my interest.

Eventually I am confronted with: multiple open browser windows each containing multiple tabs (roughly one task/mental thread per window with multiple sub-tasks/sub-threads per tab), a text editor, a PDF viewer, some work application(s) (Word, Visio, etc.) and the ubiquitous Gmail window floating in there somewhere (and let’s not forget my IM and cell phone).

I can continue a session like this until interrupted by an outside force (a scheduled real-world event, human contact) or by sheer exhaustion.

This is especially the case when I’m coding something. Being completely untrained, I move through a project seeking supplemental information as the need arises, often going down a path of execution until I realize it was inappropriate, too complex for me to complete or simply wrong before retreating to a previous point of understanding and continuing again. It’s exhilarating in a way but perhaps not the most efficient method of working . . . or perhaps it is just a new way of working. When all the answers to all the questions that might arise in the course of completing a task are available to you via a simple Google query then why not learn and execute that learning simultaneously?

In any event, on a daily basis I am bombarded by this constant stream of new, external information that is commingled with my existing thoughts/plans/agendas/work. Then, when I abruptly unplug, leave the house and exist outside in the open air with nothing but my own thoughts and no ability to access additional data there is a period of disorientation, anxiety, even confusion. It can be difficult to concentrate and leads me to do things like write long rambling texts into my cell phone using only my thumbs.

* * *

The text above was written on my Treo while sitting in a dimly lit movie theatre waiting for a film to begin. (The movie was Junebug and it was really good.) A massive number of typos were corrected later.

I’m looking forward to my trip to Arkansas. I leave today.
-peebo

Footnotes

[1] continuous partial attention – This phrase was referenced in two separate articles in the July 31st, 2005 issue of Technology Review:

Social Machines, by Wade Roush – I was thinking of this reference (and copied the definition from the magazine I had in my bag) when writing this text.

“. . .the hosts of the conference. . .had decided that no one should have Internet access from the main ballroom. . .

. . .Forbidding live blogging at a technology conference, he remarked, “seems a very retrograde move. . . .

. . . Some commended Mossberg’s decision and warned against the perils of “continuous partial attention,” the state of mental blurriness thought to be induced when information is constantly pouring in from multiple sources. Others extolled the social benefits of “always on” connectivity. “During conferences the back channel can and does enhance the fore channel, especially if I’m able to look up information that would be too tedious, basic, or digressive to ask about during a Q&A,” wrote Gardner Campbell. . . “I can also share the experience, and be newly energized, by being in touch with staff and friends and family who are not able to attend with me.”

Videogame Virtue, b Henry Jenkins – I round (then recalled reading) this reference when looking up the link above for this entry:

Arcadia began as a game about minigames-small, simple games that are increasingly embedded within larger and more complicated games. It evolved into a game about multitasking, one that links the management of game resources with the management of one’s own attention. That’s actually a core issue for many of us right now-how to manage our perceptual and cognitive resources in what digital community builder Linda Stone characterizes as an age of continuous partial attention.
Stone argues that there is a growing tendency for people to move through life, scanning their environments for signals, and shifting their attention from one problem to another. This process has definite downsides-we never give ourselves over fully to any one interaction. It is like being at a cocktail party and constantly looking over the shoulders of the person you are talking with to see if anyone more interesting has arrived. Yet, it is also adaptive to the demands of the new information environment, allowing us to accomplish more, to sort through competing demands, and to interact with a much larger array of people.

[2] Richard Saul Wurman coined the term “Information Architect“, which he defined as “The study of the organisation of information in order for the user to find their navigational way to the knowledge and understanding of information“.”

I was thinking of the definition of “data” as a precursor to “information” as described in Wurman’s 1989 book Information Anxiety. (This book is now out of print but a revised version, Information Anxiety 2, was published in 2000.)

• Data. Despite its abundance it’s not the driving force of our age. Data out of context is not information and, as such, is simply the raw material which we start with in order to reach understanding. A block of granite is not a sculpture until you take away all the spare stone, even though the shape “is there”.
• Information. It comes from the way in which data is presented and organised. This conveys, or lets it reveal, the meaning or, at least its interpretation. Going from data to information represents coming from sensory to conceptual. It’s data distillation.
• Knowledge. What differentiates knowledge from Information is the complexity of the experiences that you need to reach it. In order for a pupil to have a good knowledge of a topic he/she has to be exposed to the same data set in many different ways, from different perspectives and he/she has to elaborate his/her own experience of the same. For this reason, according to Shedroff, education is a notoriously difficult task. Knowledge cannot be transferred from one person to another, it has to be built by the person him/herself. In this sense, Shedroff promotes “experience design” as the way to create the experiences that build knowledge in the most efficient way.
• Wisdom. The ultimate level of understanding. With it we understand a broad enough set of patterns and meta-patterns in such a way that we can use and combine them in new ways and situations that are completely different to those that served us to learn. Wisdom is, like knowledge, something personal that has to be elaborated intimately, that unlike data and information, is bound to certain people and is lost when they disappear. For this reason it’s almost impossible to transmit it directly.

[3]. . . nature of my job – As in Information Architect/Interface Designer I feel that I’m especially vulnerable to the discursive aspect of browsing the web. I could be looking for something as trivial as a weather forecast or movie time and become distracted by a novel interface element or organizational feature of the site, which could then cause me to abandon my primary task completely in favor of exploring/understanding the mechanics the page itself. Meta browsing.

I can always find something to do other than the thing that I’m supposed to be doing. Some little project (many little projects) reasonable enough in scope to stand a chance of getting completed and just engaging enough to make me feel like they’re worthwhile. I have surrounded myself with little projects lately. I am up to my eyeballs in things I feel I must do before I… before I what?

Before I write a blog entry for one thing.

Here are a few things I’ve been doing instead of writing.

1) Household Infrastructure

This is a broad, rich category of tasks. I can spend a lot of time in this mode. It covers the acquisition of kitchen appliances, cleaning closets, washing clothes, the assembly of bookshelves, the establishment of a wireless LAN and everything in between.

2) Thinking about Consuming

The abrupt shift from a 300 square foot studio to a two-bedroom apartment with a real kitchen has made me feel more like a homeowner than a squatter. (This is despite the fact that I still don’t own a home. Are you kidding? In this market?) Thus, I’ve had a strong desire to fill up the joint with stuff–to create a perfect environment in which to relax with my thoughts and largely digital entertainment forms. My consumer instincts, long dulled by a lack of physical space to contain any but the tiniest of consumer goods, kicked in with a vengeance during my first month in San Francisco, so I did a lot of shopping. Well, browsing actually. I weighed the pros and cons of a lot of stuff but I haven’t actually acquired that much new gear (see next point).

3) Why I don’t have a Home Theatre

I always told myself that when I had the space and a sufficient acoustic distance from my neighbors I’d setup a badass home theatre system: Dolby 5.1 surround sound with high-end speakers and an HD TV. I would create an audio-visual womb into which I could retreat after a hard day in the corporate trenches. Now that we have some space, a living room wall that isn’t also someone else’s bedroom wall and a car (thus providing easy access to big-box retail stores) I began to obsessively research home theatre hardware: speakers, televisions, receivers, DVD players and all the cables devices to tie it all together. This is what I discovered:

• HD CRT televisions provide a better picture than LCD, Plasma or any of the flat screen models. They are cheaper too. However, hey have the aura of something dated, max out at about 32 inches, are damn heavy and just don’t look as cool in a living room so they’re not selling well.
• The variety of digital audio and video connectors, standards, cables, outputs, inputs, resolutions, and competing technologies is mind numbing.
• Good speakers are really expensive.
• Everything associated with purchasing and installing the home theatre of my dreams is more complex and expensive than it should be.

Screw it.

I the end I bought a composite video cable, found and flipped the switch on my 15 year old non-surround sound amp that was causing a buzzing sound in my speakers, scrubbed off the black stuff that had accumulated on the surface of my television and postponed the whole digital womb thing indefinitely.

4) The Network is the computer

Now that I have multiple rooms it is imperative that I have a seamlessly operating wireless LAN to help me manage my digital lifestyle. (How else could one live, really?) This is the rundown [WARNING: extreme nerd content ahead!]:

• A DSL Modem jacks into a router with a static IP address.
• The router is connected (via Ethernet) to: Replay TV (poor man’s Tivo), Xbox and Airport Express base station.
• The Airport Express creates a wireless network for an aging Dell laptop, lampshade iMac and refurbished 12′ iBook.
• The iMac is a workstation (for fun, coding, email, typing), web server (all port 80 requests to the router are forwarded to the iMac), and media server (two external hard drives [named Grande and Frank] holding nearly 200 gigs of music, video, photos and backups); the iBook is the roaming, all purpose household client machine; and the Dell is for work.

All the macs work together in perfect harmony via Rendezvous (now called Bonjour) sharing drives, iTunes music libraries, and a printer but I can’t get Windows 2000 to play ball. (This is complicated by the fact that the Dell is really a work machine to which I have basic admin rights but lack the administrative user passwords necessary to alter some key network settings. Life is hard.)

The network is pretty stable now, but the storage/file management/file organization side of the house is still a mess. I’m still consolidating MP3 collections, organizing hundreds (thousands?) of digital photos and trying to come with a manageable backup routine for the whole mess.

3) It’s work related… really…

I’ve also been playing around with a lot of new tech (or tech that’s new to me). For example, I am completely fascinated by what is now being termed Ajax. Before it had a cool name I knew it when I saw it (and loved it), but when Jesse James Garrett (we do basically the same thing for a living, by the way) coined the term in his February 2005 blog entry I was like, “Yes. It is named.” Getting my head around the capabilities of a smart combination of JavaScript, CSS, XMLHttpRequests (and here), and good old iFrames and what that means for web interface design gets me completely stoked. As developers and interface designers become more experienced with these technologies the whole conception/expectation of how a web interface should function will change. The way we think about the use of online tools and information will change dramatically. Exciting stuff. Therefore, I waste a lot of time proving concepts to myself and boring the hell out of any co-worker/wife within earshot.

Also on within this category of geekly interests are: RSS, collaborative information sources, podcasting, bittorent, struggling with vi (my new host doesn’t have emacs!) and making my CueCat work. (An operating CueCat is the cornerstone of an ambitious book cataloging effort that’s also in the works.)

6) I know where to get good parking at Fisherman’s Warf

I’ve also hosted a number of visitors over in the past month. It was actually great timing because they forced me to get out of my neighborhood (not to mention my house) and explore the city. First there was Dan-the-Man (still crazy as a shithouse rat), followed by Leah and Brian (Queens in da house!) and finally rounded out with my Mom (she’s the shit—and doing very well, BTW) and her entourage of lovely ladies: Tanni, (the crazy one), Linda (the wild woman in conservative clothing), and Rebecca (the sane one).

I had a great time with all of them. I watched Dan trade one of his paintings for… some stuff… at Ocean Beach, played scrabble at Finnegan’s Wake with Leah & Brian, and saw every significant tourist spot in the Bay Area from the driver’s seat of a rented SUV with four delightful ladies.

7) And then there’s work

I’m still working as a contractor for my old employer. The pay is good and so are the hours. I hope it continues.

This week I’m starting work on a project (un-paid) for non-profit organization called the Poniecki Foundation based here in SF. I’d give you a link to their web site but… well, that’s the project.

I’ve also joined a few of User Experience/Interaction Design/Online Media type of organizations. The most interesting so far has been BAY-CHI (the Bay Area chapter of ACM SIGCHI). I’ve gone to a couple events down in “the valley” and I’ve been pretty impressed with the people, the level of discourse, and the sweet job opportunities.

The first meeting I attended was at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC, as in XEROX PARC, as in the place that gave us the Graphical User Interface (GUI), client-server architecture, and little thing called the mouse to name a very few.) To me this place is like a geek Mecca. The speakers that day weren’t so great, but I was just happy to be there. At another meeting an Intuit user experience team talked about the development methodology behind a new product they released this year. Before the meeting they announced they were looking for interface and usability people and then a guy from Yahoo stood up and said he was also looking. Sweet. (Every conversation ends with “send me a link to your website,” however, so add “develop work/portfolio web site” to my list of projects.)

How about the wife?

We’ve found time to go hiking (or at least walking with a view) pretty regularly and watch a few good movies. Katy is studying for the CFA exam, however, so she’s actually much busier than I am. She’s putting in 2-3 hours per night plus 4-6 hours per day on weekends. Jeesh.

She’s in London this week for work. Some sort of Risk Management training. We rendezvous in Little Rock on Friday where we’ll spend a little time with the extended Peebo family.

9) What’s a blog post without discussion of the blog itself?

During the move one of the boxes that made its way slowly cross-country via UPS Ground contained my iMac, which until recently was my primary web server and the home of peebo.net. During the move I redirected the domain to a hosting facility and slapped up placeholder page. I could have probably migrated everything to the hosted server before leaving NYC, but I figured the downtime would just be a couple of weeks. Weeks turned into over a month (see above).

After struggling for days with setting up a new Movable Type instance on the remote machine (fucking Perl modules) I chucked the whole app and moved to a very cool tool called WordPress. It’s free, open, extremely well documented and PHP-based, which makes it much easier for me to manage and modify. The initial setup takes five minutes.

After it was up and running I spent some time extending the functionality and tweaking the interface (the look-and-feel is just a slight modification of the default theme) and now Peebo 2.0 is alive!

There’s also a new subscribe/unsubscribe feature (see right column). I took the liberty of adding a number of you to my initial distribution list, but please feel free to unsubscribe if you don’t need yet another email or if you’d prefer to keep up-to-date via the RSS feed. (You can unsubscribe via a link in the notification email you may have already received.)

Enough?
So, there you have it. Another marathon update. I know I always say this, but I will attempt to post more regularly (and briefly) in the future.

See ya.
-peebo

So, if you’ve stumbled on Peebo in the last day or so, you’ll notice: (a) there is actually a site here now; and (b) it looks a lot different.

It’s been a completely bitch to get everything setup here on the west coast. I migrated from my own server to a new host; I had configuration and migration problems, etc. (I’ll probably do a geeky entry about it eventually).

Anyway, I’m not up and running again and using a new blogging tool called WordPress. I still need to make some modifications, but so far so good.

More soon,
-peebo

I finally found that cable for my camera! There were over 300 pictures trapped in there dating back to December. Don’t worry, I won’t inflict them all on you.

I do have some pictures of the apartment to show you. Turn green with envy as you peruse our non-one-room apartment.

Enjoy.

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Geek Note: I created the album above using iPhoto and a pretty cool templating plug-in called BetterHTMLExport. I’ve never liked iPhoto’s default HTML export templates and so I end up doing a lot of manual clean up–a pain in the ass.

The plug-in allows you to use the iPhoto export function with your own custom HTML templates. The templating system itself is fairly robust. It supports things like if/then conditional statements and includes. You can also access and display (or drive a rule off of) any of the metadata associated with the photo or album. It even has good documentation. (There’s also a good How To / Getting Started article here.)

It’s not a full-featured online photo management app like the PHP-based Gallery, but it’s very nice for creating albums to post and share. (HTML knowledge is required.)

As of today I’ve been married for three years. So far so good.

Happy anniversary, Katy!

Several years ago my mom was thinking about alpacas. Big, wooly alpacas. She’d done about all she could do with three dogs and was considering a move to larger animals. She ruled out llamas when she learned they could spit, she feared my dad would eat a cow and so she was actually looking for alpacas (and maybe miniature goats) when she came across an ad in the newspaper for a horse named Sugar.

When she went to see her, the horse looked bad. Rundown. I remember a description of a dilapidated barn and malnourishment. Mom has a weak spot for the underdog, the left behind, the needy (two of the dogs were strays) and she felt sorry for the horse. So, she fixed up an old barn on their property up near the lake house (The “first” farm for those keeping count), bought Sugar and started down the slippery slope to becoming a “horse person.”

Soon after starting Sugar’s rehabilitation routine–new diet, new vet, shots, something to do with hooves–she discovered, much to everyone’s surprise, that Sugar was pregnant. Anxious nurturing months passed and mom helped to deliver a foal. She named it Lulu.

During the pregnancy (the gestation period of a horse is almost twelve months) mom began investigating Sugar’s previous life. (She’s always been a fan of the mystery novel.) Inquiries to vets and former owners revealed that Sugar had given birth to another foal a number of years before. Arkansas being a small place and the horse people being a pretty tight bunch, she eventually tracked down the offspring and proceeded, through an alliance with an old family friend, to gain possession of Sugar’s firstborn. This is how she got Millie.

Millie was also living far from lap of equine luxury when she was finally found so there was yet another rehabilitation period and (bizarrely) Millie was also pregnant. Additional months of anxious nurturing passed and Millie went into labor. Unfortunately, there were complications during delivery. Mom stayed in the barn with the baby through the night but the foal was too weak. To quote my dad, “Your mother cried her eyes out.”

A year or so later Mom got wind of a horse farm that was folding. All the animals were being sold or liquidated. These were actually “high-dollar horses” (to use the horse person vernacular). These were animals with officially certified documentation and bright futures full of horse shows where they’d do that weird high-stepping horse walking thing. All except one. The mutt. The one with a questionable lineage. The one that wouldn’t sell. The one named Coco. The one my mom took home. And, once again there was another surprise package inside (those studs…) but this time the delivery went smoothly. Mom named the foal Cody.

The latest addition to the heard came just last year when a family friend, apparently out of sheer curiosity, decided to look through a hole in a fence. She put eye to hole and spied a three-foot tall horse tied to a tree outside of a mini-storage unit. It turned out that this was a full-grown, miniature. Not a pony, but a perfectly proportioned horse… just smaller. (I’ve seen bigger dogs. Seriously.) Further investigation by said friend (a lot of investigation going on down south) uncovered the fact that the current owner of the wee horse, an apparently foolish and shortsighted woman, impulsively bought the animal for her daughter’s birthday a year or so before. The horse was small so it could just live, she reckoned, in the mini-storage unit. Needless to say this arrangement wasn’t good for anyone (least of all the tiny horsy) so after some consultation with my mom, and some subterfuge involving notes left on doorsteps, the friend was able to relieve the shortsighted woman of her animal. Blaze has lived side-by-side (or rather side-by-knee) with the other four ever since.

What started as a tangent in a line from dog to alpaca has resulted in the total transformation of my mom’s life from that of wife, business manager, avid reader, and dog owner into a full-fledged, barn owning, saddle hefting, feed store patronizing horse person. Over the years she’s adjusted her life in order to create a more comfortable situation for her (formerly rejected) “babies.” The transformation extends from the physical–weight loss due to the constant barn activity, ropey arms from lifting hay–to the geographic—relocation and a new home based not least of all on access to, and availably of, eighty acres of pasture that backed up to the lot on which the home was built. (Well… there’s also the grass airstrip in the middle of the neighborhood and the airplane hanger in the backyard… but that’s another entry.) In short, the woman is horse obsessed. She talks about farriers and hackamores. She buys feed by the truckload. She has horse magazines, horse books, horse clothes, horse jewelry, and horse pillows. She loves those animals. She treats them like her children. Very large, spoiled children… that eat grass.

So, why am I telling you all this? Because I want to share a little bit about my family? Sure. To subtly imply that they’re also a little nutty and obsessive? Of course. But also to provide some context for (and perhaps highlight the irony of) the thing I originally set out to write about: The fact that my mom was thrown from a horse (Cody) about two weeks ago and suffered a compression fracture of the T-12 vertebrae. My mom broke her back.

The good news is that this sounds worse than it is. Or more precisely, it could have been worse. There was no spinal damage and they’ve also ruled out the need for surgery. I suppose as far as broken backs go this is one of the more positive outcomes. Of course she doesn’t blame Cody for the accident. (His tail (Cody’s) got snagged in some barbed wire during a ride, it spooked him and he bolted.) If anything she blames herself for riding the least experienced horse in the first place.

She spent a week in bed, immobile and in extreme pain (no one bothered to call me until the next week! “we didn’t want you to worry”… parents….), but now she’s able to get around inside the house. She claims that first week was the worst but now it’s “not so bad.” (But I’m not sure I believe that.) She says the pain is manageable during the day but she’s having trouble sleeping through the night. Of course her primary complaint is that she can’t spend time with her horses. The fence line of the pasture is at least fifty yards from the rear of the house so she can only see them from a distance. A horse trainer who’s been working with the animals during the day rides the horses up into the yard so mom can see them (seems kind of cruel to me, but mom really likes it). That’s as close as she can get to them right now.

The doctors (and Google) say there’s a 6-8 week recovery period for this type of injury. She’ll also have a series of steroid injections (starting today, actually), wear an incredibly uncomfortable back brace (it extends from waist to neck on both sides—my dad calls her the Bionic Woman) and eventually start physical therapy. A full recovery is expected.

I’m worried about her, but it sounds like she’d making good progress. When I talk to her on the phone she sounds upbeat but tired. I’ve been trying to get her to join Netflix since she can’t get to the video store. I’m also STRONGLY encouraging her (she’ll probably end up reading this) to TAKE IT EASY, and to relax, and to take her time, and to not try to do too much just yet. If she does all these things, and listens to her doctor she’ll be back in the barn in no time.

Of course none of this would have happened if she had stuck with the alpacas. But I suspect that even if she could, she wouldn’t change a thing.

(Right, Mom? Take care. I love you.)

* * *

I know at least a sliver of the vast peebo readership knows my mom personally. If you’d like to contact her I’m sure she’d be thrilled to hear from you.

Email: momparker (at) yahoo.com

Sunday April 17th. Night. 9pm EST, 6pm PST. Thirty-six thousand feet.

I just finished my first full week in SF. I liked it. A lot. I had to get up early and work on NY time (10am EST meeting translated to 7am PST meeting) but it was good. I got more work done in my home office overlooking a sunny SF skyline than I would have in my work office overlooking Third Avenue in midtown.

I was also spared the carnage of the NY office. Layoffs this week. Not sure how many total, but three people I know well. It sucked. Hurt feelings and sadness. It helped (me) being separated by a continent. I got calls and made calls, but the distance allowed me to remain somewhat removed from the emotions. I put my head down and kept working while my compatriots at the home office gossiped and commiserated and packed their belongings into cardboard boxes.

Advertising sucks.

* * *
I just finished watching “Ocean’s Twelve” on the in-flight. The screen was too far away, the picture was washed out, and I had to lean to my extreme right the whole time to see over the head of the guy in front of me, but I still liked the movie. So it must have been pretty good, right?

* * *

I love our new apartment. (There would already be pictures posted but I can’t find the damn cable that attaches the digital camera to the computer!) It’s so different having space, furniture, a real kitchen!

You people with houses! Multi-room apartments! Condos! Stand up! Walk slowly around your place. Look at the rooms, the floor, the couch, the windows, the chair (you never sit in), the hallway, the closet, the garage, the back yard. Now consider this fact: For eight years my wife and I have lived in a “studio” apartment. One room. (Plus a bathroom.)

Don’t misunderstand. This is not a complaint. We lived there by choice. We could have moved but we loved the place, Tenth Street our neighborhood (day or night), The City.

There are sixteen movie theatres within a half-mile of the NY apartment… but the new place has multiple rooms—two have a view of downtown San Francisco. It’s a transition, but one I will enjoy.

Hello.

I feel a little sheepish even writing this. It’s been so long. Too long. My last post was on November 24th. Two days before my birthday. Over four months ago. It’s gone so fast.

I’ve been in a state of constant activity (I was going to write “I feel like I’ve been…”) for the last several months—mentally and physically, happily and miserably—and I’m just now finding the time to wind down.

A lot has happened. The biggest news is that after eight years we’re leaving New York City. In fact, we’ve one foot out the door already.

In December Katy was offered (and accepted) a job in San Francisco. This on the eve of my own self-imposed New Year’s Day deadline for leaving my own job. We both wanted a change (job-wise) and some of those little inconveniences that make New York City what it is were starting wear just a wee bit. (I am writing this after midnight on a Monday. Outside my window there is, literally, a man with a jackhammer. There is also a backhoe–in reverse… beep.. .beep… beep–a Zamboni-looking vehicle that spits tar, and something I can only describe as a “stomping machine.” They are paving the street. Right now. Tonight.) We’ve talking about going out there for years but the conversation always ended “in another year or two.” This time, though, there were catalysts. There were collective wills. There were offers of paid relocation expenses.

It’s all about timing. Kismet.

Katy started her job at the beginning of April and I’m in the process of “transitioning out” of mine. I’m still spending the majority of my time in New York but the plan is for this situation to reverse by the summer. In the meantime I’m getting a lot of frequent flier miles.

Our New York apartment is almost completely empty. No books, no bed (futon), and a few uncomfortable chairs but I’m not complaining. I kind of like it. Very minimal and more like home than a hotel.

The San Francisco place is also empty, but so much room! Eight years in a studio. Eight years we lived in one room together. The new place has two bedrooms, a huge kitchen, a walk-in closet, and a view of San Francisco from the living room window. Of course the living room contains nothing but an unplugged television and two lawn chairs–the folding canvas type with cup holder and leg rest. Nice. However, there is space! There is potential! There are multiple rooms!

—- time passes—

It’s now almost two weeks since I started this post. Today I’m sitting in our San Francisco apartment looking out the office window at gorgeous view of the downtown in the distance. I’m working remotely from here all the week, (The transition has begun!) but I’ll be back in NYC on Sunday.

The apartment is less empty now. We have a couch! We have chairs! We have a wireless network! It’s starting to feel like home.

Now that I have broken the silence, you can expect more from peebo.

If a picture is worth a thousand words… here are 82,000 words.

Enjoy!

Following is part of conversation between two women, in their late-forties or early-fifties, that I recently overheard on the M15 downtown bus. Note that the movie “Ray” was just released in theatres approximately one week before the incident.

Woman 1: You know what I want to see? Ray!
Woman 2: Oh… that’s a real good movie.
Woman 1: Did you go see it?
Woman 2: [shakes her head "no"]
Woman 1: You got the DVD?
Woman 2: [nods her head yes]
Woman 1: Ohhhh! You gotta bring me that tomorrow.
Woman 2: Alright.

They then went on to talk about how “going” to the movies was too expensive.

In case you missed it, Woman 2 has a DVD bootleg of a film currently in theatrical release–long before the DVD is legally available in stores. The existence of a bootleg in itself is not so surprising. (I know a guy who regularly downloads pirated movies before they are even released in the theatre.) What surprised me was: (i) these women’s age; and (ii) Woman 1′s immediate recognition of the situation.

Woman 1 had no trouble processing Woman 2′s incongruous responses–her praise of the film followed by her acknowledgement that she didn’t “go see it.” She immediately understood that Woman 2 must have a pirated DVD. No surprise. No need for clarification. Watching a new release (i.e. bootleg) without “going out” must be commonplace in her neighborhood and/or amongst her peers. From their discussion it was apparent that for them the $5 or $10 street corner DVD was seen as just another media option. Like Blockbuster or cable. Nothing more, nothing less.

When I first moved to New York I’d regularly see vendors on the street selling bootleg videotapes. There must have been a good market for them because they were all over the place. I watched a few minutes of one of these tapes once, and the quality was horrible. Someone goes into a movie theatre with a video camera and tapes the screen. The sound and picture are bad; there is crowd noise, and the occasional head in the frame. It’s just like… well… someone went into the theatre and videotaped the screen!

In the last few years the videotapes have been replaced by DVDs. I’ve been curious about their quality but never bought one. I assume these are digital bootlegs—digital files downloaded from the web and burned on DVD. (But I suppose they could be the same old crappy, videotaped versions transferred to DVD. And these articles would seem to suggest this old-school method is alive and well…. or maybe it’s a case of too little too late.)

Regardless, if they’re not all digital right now, they will be. So consider this: First-run movie tickets in New York City run just over $10 with very few exceptions; so, it would cost the woman from the bus over $30 (excluding snacks) to go see “Ray” with her husband and one child. Or, she and the whole family (and the neighbors, and the friend from the bus) could see the same movie, in digital, DVD quality, for $10. (And she can keep it forever!)

Again, I know this is not new. But what is new is the dramatic increase in availability of high-quality digital files (online), the resulting increase in quality of the end products, and the cheap and easy means of physical distribution.

I just looked on Amazon and saw a DVD burner for $64 (assuming one didn’t come with your computer) and a pack of 100 blank DVDs for $40. Add another $100 for miscellaneous software (although I could get that for free as well… but that’s another entry) and $50 a month for Broadband, and I’m up and running for $250–excluding my time spent downloading (while I sleep) and burning (while I watch TV).

Even at $10 a pop I’m profitable after selling 26 units.

The film industry should do something quick, and it looks like they’re at least thinking about it. The most interesting development that I’ve seen is the new partnership between TiVo and NetFlix. The pair is now saying that they plan to deliver video on demand service sometime in 2005. If this works as they (and I) hope, then anyone with a TiVo and a NetFlix membership could have access to NetFlix’s catalog of over 25,000 films. On demand. Anytime.

There are still obstacles to wooing the Women on the bus, though. You need a Tivo (at least $100) plus membership ($12 a month), a NetFlix membership ($20 a month), and broadband ($50 a month). Plus this person is probably already paying for cable. On the other hand, Tivo is hoping to reduce its subscription fee if its new advertising strategy works out. Broadband prices continue to fall… but still. The $10 DVD is still looking like a pretty good option.

Another gambit is the use of disposable DVDs. These specially made DVDs retail for about $5 and literally self-destruct about 48 hours after you remove them from their protective wrapping. The technology has been kicking around for a while, but with little adoption. Blockbuster did a trial last year and dropped it in favor of a subscription model similar to NetFlix. The newest angle is releasing these disposable DVDs concurrent with the theatrical release of the film—addressing the needs of the Women on the bus. Plus, it will have the advantage of being distributed via legitimate distribution channels and thus reaching a much broader market than the street corner pirates. We’ll see.

The ways in which we consume media are changing. What if everything was on demand–TV shows, movies, video games? What if we paid a nickel to watch an episode of the Daily Show or $5 for a year of Comedy Central (without having to get 10 channels of home shopping)? What if our broadband fee included subscriptions to digital cable channels and NetFlix-like services?

What new tech is going to make this whole discussion seem silly? Remember cassette tape drives for loading software? (Remember cassette tapes?!) Annual membership fees at video stores? Laser disks? I suspect that in five years our current models will seem quaint at best.

In the interim, expect a lot more people to figure out what the ladies on the bus already know.