The Contributors and The Creators

Posted by on December 3, 2014 No comments

Well, it’s been a year of lessons for me.  As I’ve mentioned in prior posts, I am on the board of a non-profit organization.  And after a little over a year of operations, that organization is shutting down.  The experience that I got out of it has changed a lot of how I view the world, especially towards the end.  The net take-away for me is that being a contributor to society doesn’t really have any payoff, either monetarily or emotionally.

Let’s look at the beginning.  When you start a business with a group of people, you might all be excited that you’re all building something great.  Don’t believe it.  Everyone has their motives for the creation of the entity and one or more people involved will only happy to be receiving the benefits of the existence of said entity.  The assistance you get from them will be minimal at best.

As time goes on, because of the lack of contribution, you will find yourself picking up the slack, through donations of time and money.  You will convince yourself that the business just needs to get over the hump and it can become self-sustaining.  As the excitement wears off for the others, you are left more or less alone.  Don’t believe in any “build it and they will come” dreams.  You’re going to have to drive people to your cause, and probably will have to do it alone.

Then, as you’ve put so much time and effort into your creation, and it actually seems like it might be stabilizing, you might be fortunate enough to be the recipient of an attack.  That attack could be in any form, whether financial, betrayal of a corporate officer, character defamation, or something even worse.  Maybe you can survive it.  Maybe your supporters rally to your cause and get you through it.  But, maybe, it just changes your entire perception of why you built the business in the first place.  Is it worth playing in the same playground as the bullies and the attackers?

And then, as time and negativity set in, there is no one left that believes in the cause.  The ones that were originally in it for themselves have already left.  If you’re lucky enough to have fresh members who you hope would feed the excitement for the cause, they may falter and leave.  What do you have left?  Start from scratch again with all the time and money investment that goes along with it?

The ideal life of a non-profit is like crowdsurfing at a concert.  The original people holding the surfer can’t keep doing it forever.  It needs to be passed on.  But when there’s no one available to pass on to, there can only be a collapse.

But anyway, back to the the title.  People may think being a creator is easy, since you just have to think the idea, get it started and off it runs.  That’s not always how it works.  Think of a for-profit business.  Sure you can run that until it explodes in a torrent of money or disaster.  But when you create a non-profit, you are not an owner.  There are NO owners.  You are a creator and a perpetual contributor until someone chooses to relieve you.  That time may never come.

What A Baby

Posted by on December 1, 2014 No comments

This is rather an oddball post for me, but whatever.  Mid-life, end-of-year, retrospective, introspective bullshit.

I want to think that the old saying, “real men don’t cry” is pretty much obsolete now.  So I feel ok with making a top 5 list of songs that get me choked up.  Sometimes, you just need an emotional release, with all the crap that goes on in our hectic lives.

I can say that I kind of need to be “in the mood” to cry.  Lots of times, I can power through these songs or just not actively listen to the song, or just not think about the meanings I get from it.  There’s plenty of times I hear the song and don’t even register any emotion, but sometimes, it just hits me – as the kids say nowadays – “in the feels”.

So without further adieu:

#5: Steve Morse Band – The Oz.  This one doesn’t exactly make me tear up, but the guitar solo is one that really gets to me.  Not as much anymore, but I remember a time when it was really something powerful for me.

#4: Kansas – Lonely Wind.  This one gets me with the “choir-y” arrangements.  It kind of brings me back to my grandfather’s funeral when I was very young.  Didn’t feel anything throughout the whole funeral until the end, when the choir started singing, then it was over.

#3: Flying Colors – Peaceful Harbor.  Another with choir arrangements and a message about “weathering the storm.” I’m not really sure why the nautical imagery affects me so much.

#2: Rush – Time Stand Still.  A song about getting older and how time seems to speed up.  How we don’t seem to realize how quickly things come and go.  How you should always live in the present and appreciate the current moment.

#1: Indigo Girls – Cedar Tree.  The worst: losing the love of your life.  And worse than Rush’s song, realizing in hindsight that it was “the best you ever had.” But then, it’s too late to appreciate it for what it is, because it’s over.

All Things Considered

Posted by on November 18, 2014 No comments

Since I’ve been working on my CD collection, I’ve been thinking about CDs a lot lately. There’s a lot of talk on the death of the CD format, with it being replaced by digital downloads. On top of that, there’s talk about the music industry not making any money anymore. On top of that, there’s the discussion of digital piracy and how to get people to pay for music again.

All these issues are intertwined.  The industry is losing money in some areas, but not in all.  Part of it is because of the third point, piracy, but another good part of it is that there are now multiple, durable playback mediums.  CDs are very durable, and where they may fail, digital copies and CDRs fill in the gaps.  So the industry doesn’t have the opportunities to resell an entire collection to a consumer in a new format, and the instances where the industry has to sell replacements has decreased, too.  You can see the industry trying to adapt by selling special editions and remastered versions.  It’s not working out all that well.

Some say the CD is dead for the same reason “books are dead” – because the physical media takes up space.  I recently read about a company whose purpose is to license out-of-print classical music and create CDs on-demand.  It made me wonder if the entire music business could be like this.  (I’ve also wondered if automobile sales could be like this, too.)

My issue with that concept is that CDRs do have a limited shelf life.  Supposedly, aluminum CDs also have a shelf life, but that is yet widely proven.  Also, for me, buying a CDR is no different than downloading the music and making the CDR myself.  So, unless someone is willing to archive the glass masters and one-off actual CDs, I’ll stick with my originals.

So, let’s think of the future where manufacturing CDs is obsolete and digital or CDR is pretty commonplace.  In that time, real CDs have value – they are elevated to collectables.  So, why can’t the industry make that happen a little sooner?  Just manufacture less CDs and let the market decide who wants to pay to own a physical copy of the music instead of owning a license to a digital copy.  The CD becomes the collectable.  The industry saves money from having a lower on-hand inventory.  CDs gain a marketing edge as “limited quantity”.

In some of my daydreams where I am a famous musician or maybe the owner of a record label company, I would brainstorm how to make my albums valuable and how to get people to buy instead of steal.  A long time ago, I thought including a video with the album would be a nice value-add.  Back then, digitally copying a DVD was prohibitive in storage and bandwidth.  Not so much anymore.  And now today, lots of special edition albums include a behind-the-scenes DVD.  So then what?  I also thought about books.  Books are more difficult to reproduce digitally and don’t hold the same allure when seen on a screen.  A recent album I purchased was being sold direct by the record label as a bundle with a DVD, a shirt and a poster.  It was 3x what I paid for it, but I think that’s a nice option.  Whatever the solution is, it has to be physical, because digital has no value.

And maybe in the future, the only physical thing needed to make the album special will be the CD itself.

Hard Times

Posted by on November 14, 2014 No comments

The last couple weeks have been difficult for me and have resulted in me performing a reassessment of society.

First, I have learned that intolerance, prejudice, and hypocrisy make up a holy trinity.  When someone publicly attacks you for something that they find offensive, and then pins a label on you that can’t be proven, you have little defense.  You can try to be rational with them, you can try to argue with them, you can try to dismiss them, but you cannot win.

Second, I learned that everything in life must be treated like open-heart surgery.  You get one chance to do anything and if you don’t do it the correct way and do it perfectly, you are an utter failure.  This is especially true when you are doing the work you have done all your life.

Now, I will say that these are not things I believe, only things that I perceive right now.  It’s going to be a while to recover from these latest blows to my faith in civilization.

Prediction

Posted by on November 5, 2014 No comments

A while ago, the world was abuzz with the celebrity nudes hack.  I was recently reminded of a recent update I had seen for Dropbox.  It’s easily understood that anything that can be used by you for good can be used against you for bad by someone else.  This feature is no different.

The specific feature that was added to Dropbox was “Remote Wipe”, which is intended to be used if you lose your phone or other portable device.  By triggering a remote wipe, your data is no longer available to steal.  That is a good thing.  This is presumably done through the Dropbox website.

But what happens if someone gains access to your Dropbox website account?  They can remotely wipe your data.  Now instead of your portable device being a backup copy if the service ever became inaccessible, now it’s vulnerable whenever the service is accessible.

Naturally, the hacker would either change the password and/or copy off all the files for their own potential ransom request or personal use.  Can you imagine opening up your Dropbox folder one day and have it be empty except for a text file with instructions on submitting a ransom in bitcoin?

I keep saying it one way or another.  The cloud is not to be trusted. 

You need to:

  • Keep your data locally.
  • Have unique usernames at each website – Use a password manager like KeePass
  • Have unique passwords at each website – Use a password manager like KeePass!
  • Keep a PIN on your phone.
  • Keep catastrophic data in an encrypted file – Use TrueCrypt 7.1a

The more of this you do, the more secure you will be, which means the more comfortable you will be. 

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Posted by on November 4, 2014 No comments

I absolutely despise this season.  I’m not talking about the holiday season, I’m talking about politics season.  This is the time of year where everyone that has an opinion has an uncontrollable urge to convince you that they are right about something and you should think the same way.  It’s like a Caribbean straw market.

And of course, nothing is off the table when it comes to pitching your case.  At a public event a couple weeks ago, a crotchety old woman came up to me to explain why I needed to be opposed to a public transit initiative.  “It’s going to go from City A to City B.  What’s in City B?  Nothing.  There’s no reason to go to City B.  It’s stupid.”  Well, that’s a convincing argument.  Especially for people who live in City B.  Since I didn’t live in that county, I couldn’t vote on it anyway.

But yesterday, I got a spam political email for a public transit referendum in my own county.  What is it with the hatred of public transit?  There’s a bunch of selfish fucks that think if it’s not for them, they’ll fight it to the bitter end.  But before I rant on that too much, this is the point of contention for that email.

The email was delivered to an email address used exclusively for paying my electric bill.  I’ve mentioned before that I’ve started using a single email per website, so I can track how my addresses are misused.  So I responded and asked how he was able to acquire an email address that is used for a single purpose.  Did my electric company sell my email address?

I was surprised I got a response and more surprised by what he said:

No, they did not.

Beyond that, I will say nothing other than what I do is in full compliance with the law.

I chose not to engage him any further.  It is clear that the best criminals are the ones that use the law to their advantage.

Knowing that my email was not sold tipped me off as to how the address was collected.  Somewhere in the electric company’s website (couldn’t find it on a quick search), there is a notice that says that communications with a government agency – which my electric company is – are public record.  Somehow, somewhere, there is a way to request these communications, which would include email addresses.  It’s legal, for sure; it’s also immoral, for sure.

And that pretty much sums up this season.  It’s a bunch of fuckasses doing anything they can to manipulate you and get done what they want done for their own personal gain.  It’s all selfishness.  Two generations before mine – the “greatest generation” – knew that by creating infrastructure for everyone, everyone benefits.  The current in-power generation, throughout their entire life, has created an a la carte existence, where you pay only for whatever you want.  More importantly, you don’t pay for anything that you don’t want.

There is no sense of community anymore.  There is no sense of making the world a better place.  There is no sense of altruism.  The selfish pricks keep screaming their heads off about taxes and how “I’m just looking out for my children’s future!”  Well, how about you do some looking out for other children’s future? 

Gas Runners

Posted by on November 3, 2014 No comments

A few days ago, I was driving home and saw a couple of gas stations with different gas prices.  The one station’s prices were “cash only”.  It got me thinking about a couple of things.  First off, I thought that there isn’t any incentive to go to a cash-only station if the prices are practically the same.  I wondered if it was a desperate concession for the station owner to implement surcharges for credit cards.  This led me to consider gas stations as a whole business.

With any business, you have income and expenses.  You can play with these elements in any possible way to create profit, that is, more income than expenses.  When you are selling gas, you have one income source – gas sales.  You would have many, many expenses – licenses, maintenance, labor, taxes, utilities, and on and on.  One of those expenses would be credit card processing fees.  Like I said, play with these sources to create profit.  Eliminate CC fees and you may make a profit, or more of a profit.

With larger gas stations – ones with integrated convenience stores – you would have multiple sources of income, including food/merchandise sales and possibly lottery ticket sales commissions.  Your other expenses may go up too, but we all know that buying anything from a convenience store is not the cheapest choice.  You are paying dearly for the convenience.

So, by having the C-store, your profits from one sector can offset the expenses from the other.  You can absorb the CC fees because your C-store sales are subsidizing them.  This made me wonder how gas stations could even survive without solid c-store sales.  Maybe this is why they have to sacrifice CC processing.

So now, on to my idea.  You have a gas station with customized gas pumps.  The pumps have a large touchscreen that performs as a kiosk.  After you swipe your card to activate the pump, the screen allows you to purchase items in the store.  Within the store are one or more “runners” that will pick and run the items out to you at the pump.  That’s it.  A simple idea.

But more than just simple, this is an improved form of convenience – you don’t even have to go inside the store.  You don’t have to run your credit card twice – your gas and purchases are combined on one receipt.  The store doesn’t even have to be customer-accessible.  It could be optimized for quick-picking.

The ordering kiosk software could remember people by their credit card numbers and provide frequent, recent, and favorite item lists to choose from.  As with everything modern now, you could tie it to an online profile where the customer could review purchases and create lists of favorite items to be shown on their next visit.

If you haven’t determined it by now, this is how a small station could compete with a large C-store.  You have the extra income stream of the merchandise sales, but a much lower overhead of running a large store, including maintenance, taxes, cleaning, utilities, and more.  And, in some ways, the service level would be higher.  With so many people in a rush, saving the time of going in, shopping, and standing in line to pay (again), all that time is saved.

Cleaning Up

Posted by on October 30, 2014 No comments

At this point, I’m solidly in phase 2 of my music enhancements.  Phase 1 was ripping my CDs to a lossless format (with a .1 of acquiring a specific label’s full catalog).  Phase 2 is scanning the album covers in high quality.

Phase 2 is a MUCH more labor-intensive process.  The scanning part is easy, the cleaning up of the scans is tedious as hell.  I’ve been doing this for four days and in those days I managed to complete 21 covers: 5 the first day, 2 the second day, then 6, then 9.  It takes about 15-30 minutes per cover.  I’m getting better and learning more time-saving tricks as I go, but still, 750 covers is going to be ~250 hours of work.  Being able to put in only a couple of hours each night, 5 days a week, I’m looking at almost 6 months of this work.  That’s pretty insane.

Sometimes, I think I should only focus on the covers that are unavailable online or are rare or out-of-print.  Other times, I think I need to represent my entire collection.  Sometimes I think I need to focus on the MCA Master Series, so I can move on to phase 3 – framing.

So, what is my process?  I scan the cover at 1200 dpi, which gives me a 10mb, 5700×5700 jpg.  I take that into Photoshop and run a descreen filter on it.  This blends the “dots” into a more-or-less solid color.  Then I do cleanup of the stains, dust, and scratches.  Sometimes this is easy, sometimes it is extremely difficult.  Then I add an adjustment layer for Levels, in case I want to tweak the black point or contrast.  I save this to a PSD file, which ends up being 80-180mb in size.  This will be my “master” from which I will do further refinements and resizing.  When all is said and done, I’ll probably have near 100GB of cover images.

Looking at my post history, this conquest has been going two months so far.  All I can hope is that another unexpected obsession doesn’t appear in the next six months.

In Time For Thanksgiving

Posted by on October 28, 2014 No comments

I’m starting to make some steps forward with phase two of my CD collection plan – scanning the artwork.  I did a couple trial runs on an old scanner at the house and it was way too much of a headache.  So yay, I get to buy more stuff.  A new scanner, but not such a big expense.  $65.  I can’t believe how cheap that tech has gotten.

While preparing for that effort, I researched communities that I could benefit with my efforts.  I found one that was appealing, if just a touch elitist.  When I went to sign up, I took the time to read their terms of service.  I didn’t like what I read.

In summary, when you upload to their site, they become the owners of the content.  Further, they insist that they will be the only source for that content.  You can’t post your artwork anywhere else.

First off, let’s just make it clear that it’s very odd to be discussing who “owns” owns a replica of a copyrighted work.  But, ignoring that for a moment and moving to a secondary “IP market”, let’s think about what this ToS means.  I “created” the work with my effort of scanning and cleaning and when I upload it, I effectively lose ownership of that work.

Yeah, yeah, it might be standardized language.  But there’s other standardized language that is more lenient.  Something like: By uploading, I am granting an unlimited license for the site to use my work however they want.  In that case, I retain the original rights (yeah, of a copyrighted work; just ignore that…).

So my problem with the site is that they are taking my work and making it their own.  It’s Christopher Columbus on the Internet.  Why should I be outraged?  Tons of websites have a similar model.  Or do they?  The first thing I’m thinking of is Huffpost, that site that pays people in “exposure”.  But even there, after reading their ToS, you grant them rights to use your submission any way they want, even through derivative works.  And, you still own your stuff.

That thinking and research made me start questioning the entire publishing for exposure model.  If you create something awesome and it gets posted on HuffPost, and gets scooped up by multiple news outlets (licensed? paid-for? maybe.), what do you get out of it?  Your name is attached to it, but does that really help you?  There’s just so much happening.  You would have to repeat that success over and over to get recognized as consistent talent.

I’m much more agreeable to the “toss it to the ether and let other do what they want with it” ideal.  So, my choice is not to affiliate with any artwork website, but to use Flickr.  Hypocritical?  All I’m doing is providing great content to a huge corporation.  Yes, but, all I want from them is hosting space.  If someone wants to use my cd scan for an ebay auction, great!  I would encourage that.  See, it’s not about just making your world better – which I’d already have done for my own cd collection – it’s about making everyone’s world better.

Time, Money, and Music

Posted by on October 22, 2014 No comments

imageHere’s an update to my music label collection: I am down to six remaining CDs.  This leads to the questions, “what’s next?” and “and then what?”

Well, the next thing is CD cover scanning, so I have pristine artwork for all my CDs.  Over time, reissues and re-releases will change the cover artwork, usually to the album’s detriment.  For example, all the Ozzy Osbourne covers got some massive, dumb border around them, with the actual album artwork in a tiny box in the middle.  Who came up with that stupid idea?

So, yeah, I want my album artwork to be exactly like my CDs.  And, I want some album artwork framed and hanging on my walls.  But then what?  I think the next step is owning a real listening stereo system (again).

What’s up with that graphic?  That was the image I got when thinking about owning a high-quality stereo system.  Right now, I can get by with my home theater system, but there is a certain appeal to having a real stereo, with dedicated speakers and amplifier, and components.  Why?  I have a computer with every CD ripped to lossless format playing through studio monitor speakers in my office.  Why this?

Let me first explain the graphic.  I think that owning a dedicated listening stereo is the realm of young, single men and old, retired men.  Exceptions abound, but bear with me.  The graph illustrates the likelihood of owning a stereo between the start and end of your adult life.  Yes, I had a great system in my 20’s.  I got into a stupid relationship and sold it all off for pennies at a garage sale.  Now, 20 years later, I am reconsidering the purchase again.  I’m not sure now is the time though.  Maybe a little later.  When I thought of why now might not be the right time, my rationale illuminated why the parabolic curve makes sense.  It’s about time.

Being young, single and free, you have the free time to indulge in nothing but music.  The same freedom applies once you are an empty-nester or a retiree.  You can also apply this to book-reading or really, any hobbies you had to give up because of the rat race of life.  For me, I’m not sure I’m nearing the end of the rat race yet, but I want to slow down, definitely.  I can say I haven’t exactly disliked any point in my life so far.  I sacrificed some things at certain points that may or may not have been wise.  But overall, life’s been good to me.

Now, about that stereo.  Why is that something to desire?  This sentiment would probably be shared by many hobbyists who have had their hobbies “stolen” by modern convenience.  There is an effort you must make when using older, dedicated equipment.  One might go so far as to say there is a ritual involved.  It’s the performing of the ritual that matters.  If you don’t do it right, the results won’t be good, or said another way, the more precise you are performing the ritual, the better the results will be.  And you can take pride in that.

Sure, the ritual of listening to an album involves choosing a cd, placing it in the tray, pressing the play button, then sitting down.  But that’s more than using a wireless remote to scroll through a huge list of albums, then clicking one.  Book people, you understand.