October 24, 2022

s13e13: If we could just put our music within reach of people; Wordstreams; As a military officer, I want to; Forty Four Thousand, One Hundred Times A Second, Twice

0.0 Context Setting

It's Monday, October 24, 2022 in Portland, Oregon. Our air quality is good at an AQI of 21, and the rain has come.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has a new Prime Minister-somewhat-elect in Rishi Sunak, who most likely has an Eve Online account¹.

Playing: Vampire Survivors and Trombone Champ, both PC games on a Valve Steam Deck.

Listening: yes, yes. I too am listening to Taylor's new album.

Watching: the first two episodes of The Peripheral, admittedly somewhat on in the background while also playing Vampire Survivors. I had forgotten about Lev! (There is a thing at the moment about hour-long dramas being... a lot of effort. 30s are totally fine.)

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A brief interlude

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On with the show!

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

Short bits today, I think.

If we could just put our music within reach of people

Via 512 Pixels², The Guardian's excerpt of Bono's memoir³ includes an excerpt about That Moment Every Single iTunes Music Library Inexplicably On Purpose Gained A Copy Of U2's New Album, where Bono admits that it was his idea to just push straight past getting their music to people who liked it to "people who might not have had a remote interest in our music" and (flippantly?) disregarding the answer to the question "what was the worst that could happen?" Well, he thought it would be "like junk mail". Nope, worse than that:

On 9 September 2014, we didn’t just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town. In some cases we poured it on to the good people’s cornflakes. And some people like to pour their own milk. And others are lactose intolerant.

Caught my attention because: even junk mail, or egregious junk mail, is while not the worst thing that could happen, it is incredibly disrespectful and was one of the rare mass-moments that we got to see how people treat and regard their personal devices, and I say this as a warning to anyone who wants to pre-load content or, you know, increase advertising services income. Yes, there's a difference between putting something in a user-curated [sic] library (i.e. your personal music collection) that's an egregious invasion of agency and autonomy, versus yet another push notification, but, you know. Death by a thousand APN calls and all that.

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Wordstreams

I like checking in on Flowingdata, a blog about... data visualization? Every so often I get to see something that I file away for potentially using somewhere else. This time it's WordStreams, a combination of streamgraphs and word clouds. Now you can make your own wordstreams through a Github-hosted service⁴.

Caught my attention because: trends over time, but also words! By using wordclouds! What's not to like?

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As a military officer, I want to

There's a medium article that's been doing the rounds about how a Ukranian IT professional joined the Ukranian military as an officer and has agiled-all-the-war-things⁵, which I am trying very, very hard not to call wargile.

I predict a best-selling business/airport book out of this, which is not really the best nor appropriate thing to expect given the horrific conditions in Ukraine and the laundry list of war crimes being perpetrated by Russia.

In any event, caught my attention for the following in war, everything is agile observations from Yarmak:

• Another real-world example of the Cynefin sense-making framework of what to do when you are in chaos to get out the loop, which was to be very agile, or in the words of Maverick, don't think, just do ** Pushing down leadership by providing clarity (one of my favorites), psychological safety (which turns out to matter in war, too, and taking the time to know your team is a good thing (or at least, Yarmak got good things from it)), and lots of training for raising competence.

I mean, yes, it's agile. I guess if that makes you allergic (recent joke going around one Twitter community: Q: what's an alternative to SAFe? A: Knowing how to make software), then ignore the agile stuff and see if there's anything underlying that can be abstracted out. I mean, you know there is. Perhaps more "remember this as an example to use with people for whom it will make sense".

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Forty Four Thousand, One Hundred Times A Second, Twice

Via Michael Tsai⁶, Into The Pre-Gap: Forty Years Of The CD⁷ is a Quietus piece looking back at, er, the forty years since Billy Joel's 52nd Street went on sale in Japan.

Caught my attention because it's an in-depth reflection of what changed with the mass consumer digital audio, in particular random-access digital audio, in contrast to Digital Compact Cassette. Some call-outs:

• The CD was the beginning of the end for the album, what with marking a track and setting it out for single-track repeat
• ... and not just single-track repeat, but being able to re-program the play-order/track order of an album

Some quotes:

The fact CDs can be programmed, and tracks easily skipped, is perhaps their most significant feature when it comes to their legacy. They loosened up the album as a fixed document. You could more seamlessly put one track on constant repeat, skip the interludes you didn’t like, or imagine a hypothetical ‘better order’ for your favourite album.

They prefigured many of the key features we’d associate with mp3 players, iPods and, most recently, streaming. CDs introduced randomization and customization to a physical format, and that bled through into later music technologies. It presented a possibility to mess with sequence which artists and labels embraced and explored.

So: the blowing up of constraints allowed a different kind of creativity, and yet I'm also reminded that creativity breeds constraints. Which is a bit of a trite thought for 9am in the morning, but I'm not quite ready or caffeinated enough to put it better.

Rather, at this stage in the development of digital technology, many [citation needed] constraints are more of an active considered decision, rather than a physical constraint.

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Okay, that's it for today. Back to taking around 20 minutes, and 1,200ish words in that time.

How are you doing? How was your weekend?

Dan