Mile
Zero

I'm writing from our new home, Seattle! We arrived at our new apartment yesterday, after a long, six-day road trip across the country with the dog and the cat in the back seat.

Turns out there's a lot of country between the two coasts. I wouldn't necessarily want to do it again, but it was neat to drive through parts of the United States that I'd never seen, like the deserts of New Mexico or the overwhelming flatness of Oklahoma, and to revisit a few, like my birthplace of Lexington, KY.

In any case, now we're just settling in, getting to know our new neighborhood, and waiting for the shipping containers to arrive with all our stuff. Regular blogging should return soon. Thanks for your patience!

This weekend, Belle and I got married. It was a small, homemade, personal kind of wedding. Among the crafts we made was a "photo booth" consisting of my laptop running a bit of custom ActionScript and a box of very silly props. Unfortunately, we didn't have power and I'm not sure I had the screen saver all set up correctly, so some people may not have had a chance to take their pictures with it before the batteries died. If you'd like to give it a shot, feel free to download and install the Official Nerds Get Hitched Photo Booth (works on Mac or Windows, requires Adobe AIR). It'll take four pictures of you, then save them to a folder on your desktop. There's no quit button (it's a kiosk), but you can hit Escape to leave full-screen mode and then close the window.

This is a great case of what ActionScript (and the AIR platform that Adobe built out of Flex/Flash) does well: pair a better version of JavaScript with a comprehensive runtime library for exceptionally fast, easy multimedia production. I procrastinated on this project like crazy, but in the end it only took me a few hours of real work to create. Sure, we could have paid for software to do the same thing, but if it's so simple, why bother? And this way it's all under our control--it looks and acts the way we wanted it to look.

Anyway, feel free to install our photo booth and send us a picture. And thanks to everyone who came out to our little wedding celebration!

IT'S ALIVE.

• Best. Crowbar. Ever.
• I for one find it impossible to believe that David Pogue is a shameless industry shill. No, wait, I don't mean impossible at all.
• Why I was looking for the details of the NES Game Genie, I really couldn't tell you. But here's how it works, which is pretty much what I figured. I'm amused by the way that they obfuscated the codes in order to keep people from figuring them out. It would be fun to do something similar with URLs.
• Twitter recently released a guide called Twitter for Newsrooms. And while the jokes practically write themselves (we should all take a crack at it in the comments), what they've written is less a guide to Twitter specifically, and more an introduction to "how people interact on The Internets." It's all about leveraging scale, writing feed-friendly copy, and linking out to other writers/sources. So while I don't actually think it's bad advice for journalists who are newcomers to the web, I wish it weren't identified so strongly with a single brand--especially one that the Innovation Editors of the world are already overhyping like crazy.
• If you're in the DC area tomorrow, Thursday the 30th, you should come by the National Mall for the Smithsonian's Soul Train music and dance event. The artistic directors of Urban Artistry (the dance company I joined about six months back) will be performing, and Questlove from the Roots will be on the ones and twos.
• That reminds me, by the way, of one of my favorite video clips from this week: Talib Kweli on the Colbert Report.
  
  The Soul Train show tomorrow is part of the Smithsonian's Folklife Festival, and one of Kweli's points during his conversation with Colbert is that hip-hop is folk music. As one of my friends once said, even if you don't care for hip-hop, you have to remember that it not only spoke to parts of America that were ignored by mainstream music, but it was also something that ordinary people could do with nothing more than a beat and a rhyme. Even though I haven't been listening to the genre very long, that definition really resonates with me, and with the reasons I started b-boying in the first place.

Last week was the budget. This week is the leftovers.

• I've developed an interest in correction tracking for new media lately, and there are two interesting developments on that front. Kurt at Ars Technica has debuted Copypasta, a tool for adding collaborative editing to any site. Mediabugs, on the other hand, is more of a centralized database of errors, and they just introduced a WordPress plugin for journalism blogs.
• Know how we used to post corrections to blogs in the old days? The comments. Uphill, both ways. Now get off my lawn.
• I don't know what's more terrifying: that they've actually finished Atlas Shrugged, The Movie, or that this is "part one." As always, we quote John Rogers:

  There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

• Yeah, so maybe buying a Robocop statue for Detroit is not the best use of $50,000. But on the other hand, if you needed a great example of the ways that the Internet tends to privilege frivolous gestures over useful action, it's the best thing since OLPC.
• Speaking of Detroit, it does actually have grocery stores. Some good thoughts on urbanization, corporate branding, and perceptions of poverty.
• I complain a lot about the current state of rich HTML graphics: <canvas>, for example, is in the running for the worst API I've seen since the original DOM. If you're used to Flash's excellent display tree API, you may want to look into AS3 guru Grant Skinner's Easel.js library. Myself, I think it's still unclear that browser performance is there yet.
• Android 2.3 ("Gingerbread") was just pushed out to my Nexus One. Right off the bat, the new power off animation cracks me up--it's basically the "shrink to a white dot" from very old CRT television sets. Of course, that effect was caused by the physical movement of the cathode ray gun inside the set, which has no equivalent in the LCD/OLED screens we use for almost everything today. It's like a comedy record-scratch: cultural artifacts that everyone recognizes more for semantic meaning than through any direct physical experience with the original. There ought to be a name for that.
• I switched my laptop to a solid-state drive this week (an Intel X25, after a Corsair drive flaked out during sleep mode). I'm not getting the full use out of it, because my BIOS doesn't support full SATA2 speeds without a hack that I'm a little scared to install, but the improvement I have seen is impressive--games, especially, load almost instantly, which has done a lot to move my spare time from the XBox to the PC. Given that CPU speeds have topped out, if you're looking to rejuvenate an aging laptop, this is probably the way to go.

Scare y'all quicker than a mean ol' goblin.

• Between the hectic end of session rush, the loss of several key team members, and the holiday season, it's been hard to free up the mental space to write here. But here are a few of the fruits of my efforts: an interactive earmark database (with a fully-browseable version in development), another map on immigration patterns, a look back at the 111th Congress for Roll Call, and of course, our live midterm election coverage. Unfortunately, things show no real sign of settling down.
• Law and the Multiverse answers your awkward comic-related legal questions.
• This is a slow month for dance jams, but my teachers at Urban Artistry put together some videos as introductions to the different types of urban dance, and I think they're really well-done. Check out breaking with Emily and Russ:

  And popping with Ryan:

• As a journalist, I'm generally pro-Wikileaks (although not necessarily pro-Assange--the distinction is important). More interesting than the releases, I think, are the reactions to them, and the questions that they raise: are activists endangered by a mostly profit-driven Internet? (Yes.) Should we consider denial-of-service attacks a kind of civil disobedience? (Probably.) Were the actions of Anonymous legitimate protest, then? (Good question.) When it comes to the organizations I lump under "New Protest," Wikileaks and Anonymous rank prominently due to their effectiveness, not to mention their eccentric, decentralized, and anarchist tendencies. Having them acting in concert (such as it is) is fascinating.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates on Dr. Doom and hip-hop. On a similar note, racists are not happy with the casting of Idris Elba as a Norse god for Thor.
• It turns out that if you examine Ray Kurzweil's claims, he's usually wrong--or at least, right in a way so vague as to be meaningless. Perhaps he should enter the business of political punditry.
• Wheat linked the other day to this tutorial on using Mobius and Ableton together for live looping, by bassist Russ Sargeant. I had almost forgotten how awesome the combination--it is no small endorsement that a free plugin is better than Ableton itself for this kind of live instrumental performance.

  It may be hard for non-musicians--or even non-loopers--to understand how big a deal Mobius can be. You have to understand that, much more than other effects (and I've tried my share), looping is like learning a whole new instrument, and each looper brings its own set of constraints to the table that you have to learn to work around. For years, the gold standard was the Gibson EDP, but it was A) expensive, and B) discontinued. Then along comes some guy with a complete software emulation that anyone with a decent soundcard can use for free. Oh, and it's scriptable, so you can rewire the ins and outs to your heart's content (I made mine control like my beloved Line 6 DL-4). That's no small matter. Every now and then, I almost talk myself into picking up a netbook just to run Mobius and a few pedal VSTs again, it's that good.

The tags your tags could link like.

• Jay Rosen argues that Wikileaks is a "stateless" news organization, by which he means "decentralized." It's an interesting parallel to my own thinking on information-age activism. Of any group in existence today, Wikileaks probably best embodies what it would mean to do decentralized advocacy, for better or worse.
• My new favorite blog is Awful Library Books. I mean, come on: The Burt Reynolds Hotline? Your Three-Year Old: Friend or Enemy? A New Look At Dinosaurs--from 1983? Awesome.
• In the future, we will get our meat protein from insects. Or as I like to think of it, we will "become vegetarians."
• There's kind of a big gap in Time's best blogs of 2010.
• I love scripting languages, and I especially love this series on using JavaScript--highest of the high-level--to emulate the original GameBoy. It's kind of an amazing learning tool, if you think about it. Someone should do this for X86.
• Never say no to Panda.
• While it's true that b-boys and b-girls love correcting people who call it breakdancing, I actually think it's more depressing that most people think the dance is entirely about acrobatics--flares, windmills, and backspins--to the exclusion of toprock and footwork. That's not their fault, of course: that's how the dance has been sold in mainstream culture since the eighties. But check out this video by Zeshen of Havokoro, and consider how much people are missing. He starts out with some pretty standard stuff, and then about a minute in starts going off on impressive combinations of strength, flexibility, and creative movement. It's one of the coolest footwork displays I've seen.

• Consider this part of an infinite series titled "Innovative, Magical, and Stupid." Long story short: an iPhone developer wants to make a service for doing enhanced copy-paste functionality, but you're not allowed to do that on the iPhone. So instead, they have to play music (or an .mp3 of silence) the entire time that they're backgrounded in order to pass muster. They refer to this "a very elegant solution," but let's call it what it really is: an awkward hack required by a patronizing, artificial requirement.
• Finally, this Washington Monthly story is a fascinating read on how Google Maps has touched off a new generation of border disputes--especially interesting for the crisis-mapping crowd. People in developed countries, and particularly urban areas in developed countries, tend to forget how political and contentious seemingly-neutral documents like maps can be. But of course, this is only the start. In a world where our surroundings are tagged with metadata by a combination of community processes and automated spiders, we're going to see these kinds of scuffles a lot more often.

I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to the users of NPR's Android application, whose playlists crashed after last week's update. That was my fault--I wrote a 2 where there should have been a 3, or maybe a < where there should have been a <=. Either way, I'm sorry I broke your application, and a fix is on the way.

I'd also like to apologize to baby freezes. Lately I have been leaving them out of my breaking runs, and if they had feelings, I bet they'd be hurt. But I can explain! See, if you mess up a shoulder freeze (the only other footwork freeze I know), it's an big, dramatic mistake. It looks difficult--you're balancing upside-down on your shoulder! In theory, you're not supposed to get credit for tough moves you don't land, but I find that people (particularly non-dancers) can respect them. Whereas, if you mess up a baby freeze, it just looks like you curled up in a ball and fell over. From a risk management perspective, it's a no brainer. Sorry, baby freezes.

While I'm at it, I'd like to apologize to Stieg Larsson, whose book "The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest" I was unable to finish because there's only so much Swedish hospital intrigue a man can take. Also, there are about 700 billion characters, and they all have ridiculous Swedish names like Torsten Edklinth and Gunnar Bjork (only with an umlaut, a punctuation mark that I find personally offensive and for which I will not bother to look up the HTML entity, no matter what the New Yorker says). Unfortunately, Mr. Larsson is deceased, and cannot accept my apologies, but that's never stopped me before.

Finally, I'd like to apologize to the general public for the Twilight series, both the books and the movies. I'm not responsible for them in any way, of course. But someone needs to apologize, and nobody actually involved with the production of these glitter-drenched grotesques seems likely to do so. It might as well be me.

Look, I'm not saying George Clooney's character from Up in the Air is right about wanting to unload all personal relationships. I don't have that many to spare, after all. But getting my worldly possessions down to a backpack (and then ditching the backpack)? Reducing my carbon footprint, my level of mindless consumerism, and my reliance on cheap, over-designed crap created by underpaid factory labor? Great. Let's do it.

..in theory, at least. In practice, it is tough to get rid of stuff. Learning to live frugally is a multi-step process.

Belle started with a simple rule for our apartment: if you bring something in, something else of equivalent size has to go out. This is a great rule, if for no other reason than that the apartment is very, very small and we can't stuff anything else into it without learning to stack the pets like Tetris blocks. And it incentivizes sustainability by making it easier to use trading/swap services than to buy new books/games/movies.

The second step has been learning to embrace digital media. I still buy a few CDs and paper books, but not nearly as many as I used to, and usually only if they're something I'll want to loan out, or if they're not available online. And we almost never buy DVDs--Netflix has that covered. While it has taken some time to get used to not 'owning' my music or movies, maybe that's the point--'ownership' shouldn't be the defining characteristic of cultural engagement.

Next up is learning to be happy with last year's model. This is not easy to do, especially given the constant deluge of electronic follow-up that companies can leverage these days. Most recently, for example, TiVo sent out messages offering new versions of their DVR box to subscribers at a discount. That's tempting: we've still got the old Series 2 box, the one that came out in 2006, and it doesn't do HD, or Netflix streaming, or... well, lots of neat features. But do we need that? I mean, we don't have HD cable anyway, and it doesn't really bother us. We've got the XBox for streaming, and we'd have plenty of space on the current TiVo if we'd stop using it to store whole seasons of Damages. There's nothing wrong with it to justify a replacement, so we'll stick with what we've got.

At some point, I want to start simplifying--giving away, selling, or (as a last resort) trashing the objects that I only keep out of habit. You know what I mean: old purchases that you don't use anymore, but you keep just in case it comes in handy somewhere down the road. Ruthlessness is the key--you're never going to turn that old Super NES on again, and you know it--but I probably lack the outright willpower. So instead I think I'll get a roll of those little green dot stickers, the ones they use to mark prices at flea markets, and put them on anything I haven't touched in a while. If it actually gets used, I'll take the sticker off. Anything with a sticker still on it at the end of the year has got to go.

Which brings us to the toughest part: our book collection. Already, heavy boxes of books books are the moving experience we dread most. But paper texts have another type of inertia, a weight derived more from their intellectual and emotional impact than their actual mass. Especially if you love books--and we do--it's hard to discard them. It's like throwing away knowledge! And yet we'll never read many of them again, and some of them we bought and may never read in the first place. Everyone would be better off if they were donated to the library or recycled. Of all the steps for reducing our material footprint, cutting the number of books sitting around on our shelves will no doubt be the most painful, but it may have the biggest impact.

Belle and I will probably never get our lives down to the point that they can fit in a backpack, or even an overhead luggage compartment. In reality, we probably don't actually want to get there--we're not monks or masochists, after all. Yet just as the best essay can benefit from judicious editing, I think it's appropriate to take a critical scalpel to our lifestyles from time to time. There's a lot of pressure out there to accumulate, to the point that "consumer" has too often become synonymous with "citizen" or "person." That pressure has consequences, in the labor system, in the environment, and in our financial stability. It may be true, as Slate's Farhad Manjoo insists, that we can't actually opt out from American materialism, but maybe we owe it to ourselves to try.

He is a dreamer; let us leave him.

• I actually don't like programming--I like solving problems. It just happens that every good application usually has at least one brain-teasing problem inside. Here's a cool one: BK trees are a method for organizing words to find close dictionary matches, as in a spellcheck or a keyboard auto-correct. I was wondering the other day how to do this, and now I know.
• Flotilla is my latest indie game acquisition, and it fits in well with the release of Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy. While fleet combat in Sins relies on upgrade trees and swarm composition, Flotilla actually models small-scale, 3D space tactics--it's all about positioning, orientation, and group coordination. It gives me flashbacks to the great Kirk vs. Khan space battle in Star Trek II. Also includes a surreal, darkly-funny campaign mode played out around a randomly-generated galaxy.
• Humanitarian.info tears into Ashraf Ghani's fetish for technocratic governance in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, over at Afromusing, Juliana Rotich tosses out five ideas on futurity in Africa, and asks: where are the African futurists?
• Strife.tv put up footage of the battles at Unbreakable 3 a couple of weeks ago. It took place at my old alma mater, George Mason University, and I had a great time there. I especially love the exhibition between Iron Man and Meen187, who are both really musical dancers:

  When the camera dips down behind someone's head and you can't see anything for a moment, that's basically what it was like to actually be there. As I told someone later, I'm glad I went, but I'm also glad we have YouTube.

• Blog plugin to-do: Reader Achievements.

Oh, man. Budget season. What a drag.

• I committed a new version of Underground to its Google Code repository the other day, adding support for Home app replacements like OpenHome, as well as Android 2.1 devices with new launchers like the Nexus One. I'll push a new version out to market as soon as I've tested it a bit. This is long overdue--hardcoding the launcher Intent was always a hack, but it was relatively low-priority until the Nexus broke it.
• Speaking of Android, remember how it's supposed to be fragmenting all over the place? Turns out that even for game developers, who are relatively "down to the metal," that's not true at all. I look forward to retractions.
• Jo Walton discusses reading science fiction as a skillset. Interesting meta-commentary, which should ring bells for anyone who's tried to get a friend or relative into the genre.
• It turns out that GPS proves the Theory of Relativity in interesting ways. Take that, Newton!
• As a tinkerer, I found Mark Pilgrim's post on the 'Tinkerer's Sunset' to be really interesting, moving stuff.
• Some Foursquare badges I'd like to see. Personally, instead of joining Foursquare, I'm just going to constantly post snarky commentary about my location on Twitter. Pretty much the same thing I do now, in other words.
• The Berkman Center hosted a lunch to discuss piracy research from the perspective of developing nations. They'll probably have a video and audio soon, but David Weinberger has a good liveblog summary. The most interesting note was that piracy is bad for open software advocates: it lets closed, for-pay software propagate as long as the software developers turn a blind eye. To what degree are grey markets (here and elsewhere) becoming a legitimate business strategy?
• Microsoft is making their own 2D data tag, in competition with QR codes and datagrid codes. You may have seen these already without knowing it: they use these on some XBox games, largely for cross-promotional and inventory purposes. I believe them when they say that these are better than QR codes, but they'll never take off for the same reason that Ogg Vorbis hasn't beat out MP3: a good-enough de-facto standard can practically live forever, and the other 2D barcode formats have all the momentum.

A little story to go with that last item: last time I ordered business cards for myself, a couple of years ago, I integrated a QR code into the graphic design of the front, and stuck one containing my v-card on the back. I thought of it as a demonstration for potential employers: who's got two thumbs (the card symbolically asks) and can navigate between the world of print and online journalism in innovative ways? This guy. But I never really thought that it'd be usable, since this was before I had a smartphone, much less anyone else I knew. I made it with a chunk of badly-translated Taiwanese freeware, and tested it with a webcam at work.

The other day after a breaking class, someone asked for my contact information, and I noticed that they had an Android phone. So I showed them how it worked, told them to grab Barcode Scanner from the market ("But I've got a different phone." "Doesn't matter, it's all Android."), and passed them a spare card. Pretty much instantly, they were able to import my card to their contact list. It was pretty cool for me, but it was even better to see the enormous grin on their face when my friend realized they had basically just pulled information out of thin air, like magic. Sometimes, technology's okay.