a thaumaturgical compendium

You know what people in the future used to wear? Jumpsuits and shorts. By Blade Runner and Fifth Element, we had pretty much done away with that. But in a future in which air conditioning is shunned as unhealthy for ourselves or our planet, can we assume folks will be trading in their three-season wool for three-season linen and cotton suits, and doing away with neckties?

My partner’s white shoe firm is one of several known for forgoing the white shoes and encouraging “dress casual,” and now the UN building in New York is encouraging staff to forgo dark wool so that they can raise the temperature in the building and save power and the emissions that go with it. This makes a lot of sense in a walking city like New York, where the shift from inside hits the sinuses and the wardrobe alike.

Of course, at the same time there is a push back to 3-piece suits in men’s fashion; as seems always to be the case during economic downturns, there is a swing to the conservative. Hints of Victorian formality are pushing though as well, not least thanks to the influence of goth fashion in various forms.

I doubt we’ll see a sudden influx of Bermuda shorts or more extreme above-the-knee fashions for men, but if you don’t already have some linen, cotton, and bamboo to balance out the wool in your closet, it might be time to think about it.

With most of the loose paper now in electronic form, I’ve been starting to make slow progress in scanning some of the books. In practice however, I’m not scanning my entire library, and I’m not scanning it right away. As I go through the books, I find they fall into several categories:

Give away

I was surprised by the number of books, when faced with a decision, that were not worth selling because they would fetch too little, and not worth the time to scan. These include a lot of large-publication novels and the like. Somehow, a lot of “beach reads” survived beyond the beach. It also includes some odd copies that, like this one have already been scanned by Google and are available for download.

Sell on Amazon

When I moved from Buffalo to New York, I sold a couple of boxes of books to lighten the load a bit, so I had a rough idea of what sort of things sell well. Generally, these are books that have a timelessness to them, started out expensive, and have a rabid fan base of some sort. Both Code Complete and Mythical Man Month sold within hours of my listing them, for example.

There are a lot of hidden costs to selling books on Amazon. Of course, there is the cost of shipping (which may or may not line up with the shipping fee), and the commission Amazon pulls from the sale. There are also packing supplies needed to make sure that your book gets there in one piece. But the biggest expense is time. Listing the books, packing them up, and carting them off to the post office takes a lot of time. If you have a small bookstore, and already have sunk labor costs in the form of a part-timer from the local high school, packaging up books and prepping them for shipping is no big deal. But particularly when selling one or two books, it’s just not worth it unless they are fairly big-ticket items. At least the trips to the post office scale a bit when you are bringing 8 or 10 books at a time, but it is still a large amount of time, for little financial reward.

In the first week of listing, I’ve sold about three dozen books. If experience is a guide, things tend to sell quickly or not at all. I have a number of books still for sale, and will be adding to this list a little. Generally, I probably will only be adding books that I think I can price at over $10, since the $5 mark just doesn’t make sense for the time I’m spending packaging and such. Those books will either be left down in the lobby of my apartment building for others or scanned.

Destructive Scanning

The majority of books probably fall into this category: those that will be ripped from their spines and run through the page-fed scanner. Generally, these are books that I don’t plan to curl up and read again cover-to-cover, but that I keep around for the sake of reference or inspiration. I actually do not mind reading on the screen, and my hope is that I will be able to eventually read these on an eBook reader (Kindle-kin) at some point, though there are hurdles still before that can happen. By OCRing these books, I have a way of doing an index search across my library, which may prove useful. So far, I’ve only scanned a few dozen books; it’s taking longer than I predicted.

Non-Destructive Scanning

There are a number of books that I am not ready to tear apart, for various reasons. Some of them, for example, contain images that need special scanning attention. Some were gifts or otherwise have sentimental value. A number Some (very few) are “grandfathered” because of their age. Some are too big to scan using the current setup. Some are kids books, and story-time just isn’t the same in front of the monitor. A lot of the poetry and fiction will remain bound for the same reasons.

The Amazon sales have already paid for my duplex, sheet-fed scanner. Putting together a scanner that can handle bound materials is going to take a lot longer and cost a lot more.

One of my tasks this summer is digitizing all that is digitalizable in my apartment. Like anyone who lectures on media, I have for more than a decade argued that the ability to make something digital is one of the core pieces of technology that is part of the rapid social changes we are undergoing: our “digital revolution.” It is, perhaps, strange that I write this surrounded by several thousand books: ink on dead trees.

CDs and Tapes

The earliest step of this process, I completed many years ago: cutting my Audio CDs over to MP3s. For years, I kept the physical CDs around, as a backup in better audio quality. When I got rid of them, I kept the jackets, for lyrics and album art. But under the principle that not touching something for a year or more probably means you don’t need it, I finally got rid of them as well, years ago.

More recently, I’ve freed myself from all tape. I went through boxes of video cassettes and cut over anything I wanted to keep to my DVR. I did the same thing for some of the old audio cassettes my wife had collected, a recordings of her grandfather that had deteriorated on audio cassette.

The machines that supported these formats are also gone. I am gradually disassembling them, recycling the interesting bits into my “junk” files; consumer electronics from an era not so long ago when they contained lasers, electric motors, switches, knobs, and connectors.

Bills, Correspondence, Manuals

I am nearly through the next part of the process, working my way through several drawers of a file cabinet, scanning bills, letters, forms, receipts, various manuals, appraisals, health records, contracts, and the like. Incoming mail is now opened and either scanned or shredded. After some hunting, comparisons, and advice from others, I ended up getting a ScanSnap S510. It was an expensive purchase, but well worth the satisfaction of being able to drop in a document and have it quickly turned into a PDF on my hard drive, findable without taking up space.

The final step will be to scan the majority of my library. It took me some years to decide to do this, but I think that most of it will be scanned “destructively,” using this sheet-fed scanner. The result will be more space in my home office, which I’ll be sharing soon, but it will be strange to be without those pages around me.

Of course, I have already run into things that have a particular “aura,” that makes them especially difficult to part with. Anything hand-written to me by my partner, no matter how trivial, is impossible to throw away. And I don’t think things like my passport or birth certificate will do me much good in electronic form alone.

Services I Maybe Should Have Used

Some lessons learned? If I were to do this again, I might try a couple of services I now know about. I would use a service like Ship’N'Shred which will pick up a 30 lb box of paper and shred it for $30. Yes, I only paid a little more for my own shredder, but hand feeding paper into it and constantly emptying it is a pain. Obviously, I’ll shred my own stuff going forward, but for the massive one-time effort, it probably would have been easier to box it and send it off for shredding.

When I decided to cut my CDs over to MP3 many years ago, I sat in front of the computer feeding them in one-by-one. I was a starving student then, and a starving professor now, and don’t think I can shell out the $299 for a week’s rental of ripping machine that will transfer over a stack of CDs. Since a number of my CDs were imports, or strange, or both, and didn’t have CDDC, which apparently means their system wouldn’t work.

What about dealing with the incoming mail? For now, at least, it is not worth the $120 a year to get someone to do that processing for me, though that would be far more enticing if I were still nomadic. Being able to have a stable mailing address every time you move is almost worth it in itself.

I’ll write a bit more about this process, if I get the chance, detailing some of my decisions in scanning and some of the things I find out about during the process.

I’m interested in this new guitar from Moog for a few reasons. First, I’m curious as to how it will affect music: will we be hearing this instrument to a much greater extent? Given that similar music could be produced in post-production or digitally, why is it that this will happen? Is it a question of defaults?

I’m also wondering about the loss of creative instrumentation. If virtuosi performers on traditional instruments (not that electric guitar is “traditional,” but it is far more traditional than a desktop computer) become more rare, will there still be people who develop instruments like this?

Finally, there are lots of people inventing musical instruments: a kind of makers’ market of such beasts, both using electronics (including circuit bending), and using either constructed or found physical objects (like buildings!). With rare exceptions, these tend to be played only by their inventors, since the sunk cost in learning to play a new instrument requires some common cultural value that can be exchanged. By evolving an existing instrument that is widely known into something that produces a different musical effect, does this encourage greater diffusion? I think the answer is clearly “yes.”

You know how to get my attention:

encephalopod robot dirigibles

Those three keywords are enough to get me excited. But who wouldn’t get excited by this:

I realize this has already been posted everywhere, but it is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time, so I’ll put it here in case you haven’s seen it yet:

There has been a lot of talk lately about the long tail, and its effect on online retailing. Basically, the idea is that as the cost of inventory, advertising, and delivery come down, there is an incentive for online retailers to have very large inventories. This means that they can mine niche products, rather than only carrying the most popular items. In fact, for a store like Amazon, or like iTunes, a substantial proportion of their sales may come not from the items that are most popular, but from the deeper stock. Sure, they still sell U2 and Radiohead, but you can easily find slightly less popular acts, like Metric or SoKo. I was a bit surprised in my Christmas shopping to find that tail cut off.

The mastiff we live with likes a particular dog toy, manufactured by Fat Cat, Inc. It’s a large and fairly expensive stuffed kitty toy that flops around nicely when a dog shakes it. You’ve probably seen a version of these if you have been in a pet shop: either in the smallest size, or the larger 14 inch size. You may not have seen the giant size that measures over 22 inches, and is our dog’s favorite. Although they are expensive, in the long run they make sense for us because even though the dog is fairly gentle with them most of the time, he would generally destroy the smaller size in a couple of days, and the larger ones tend to stick around much longer. When we went to order them, we found that pretty much every retailer has them listed as “discontinued.” It’s possible we were the only ones buying these toys, but I doubt it. Had we known they would stop making them, we probably would have stockpiled some. As it is, I guess it’s time to start watching eBay. I’m sure we can find an alternative he’ll be happy with for Christmas, but he does love a new “baby.”

My partner asked for a trackball like the one I use on my computer so that she could use it for work. She’s impossible to shop for, and so I was relieved to have such an easy shopping task. She is talking about the Microsoft Trackball Explorer, the best pointing device I have ever used with a computer. Microsoft really got it right with this thing. Anyone who uses it for more than five minutes covets it. When I bought mine, I think I paid something like $40 for it, so–given how the hardware market works–I hoped I might be able to find a discount on it. Despite wide adoration, Microsoft no longer makes it, and no one has stepped in to clone it. As a result, scratched and abused used versions of the trackball routinely sell for $150 on eBay, and that price is likely to continue to rise. I have bid on some of the lower-priced used versions, but I don’t hold out much hope for actually winning one of these auctions.

Now, these are both probably niche products. The big dog toy is probably a novelty unless you have a dog the size of ours, and there aren’t very many of those in the world. Likewise, although it turns out my trackball is nearly a fetish item for some geeks, the vast majority of computer users will continue to be happy with their mice, and wouldn’t even consider trying a trackball. (Like I once did, they probably associate it with Missile Command and Atari Football.) So these two products are both residents of that long tail–a tail that may have reached online retailing, but doesn’t stand up well to the scaling needed for Chinese electronics manufacturing.

We can probably try to replicate the dog toy. We do have a sewing machine, and I guess we can try to draw faces on with a permanent marker or something. I don’t know when we’ll find the time to make dog toys, but at least it is in the realm of possibilities. The same cannot be said of the trackball. The obvious way to do this would be to track down the factory that made the device in China and get them to do a short run. Even though there are people willing to exorbitantly for the devices, however, I suspect that the market is actually pretty small and deep. Unlike a short run for a T-shirt design or a book, I suspect there must still be a mass market before a complex gadget like the one I am using at this moment can be reproduced efficiently.

In the meantime, if you see a Microsoft Trackball Explorer on the back shelf of a computer retailer somewhere, and it’s priced at retail or below, snap it up–eBay is waiting.