Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

A week or so ago, I read about the new company RipDigital in a Metafilter thread. RipDigital takes your audio CD collection and rips them to MP3s for you en masse. 100, 200, 500 CDs? RipDigital says they get is done in a couple days.
Michele and I would really like to have our music available in this form. Most of our CDs live in a cabinet up front and we rarely dig through it. Converting these one at time is quite unappealing.
I had a few questions about the way they tagged the MP3s and I wrote off an email to RipDigital. I recieved a reply from Dick Adams, the founder, offering to send me a sample disc so I could see for myself. Kick ass.
The CD arrived today with 5 clips encoded at various bitrates. The RipDigital site says they encode at 224Kb/s, but the sample disc had a wide range.

After hearing the President’s address last night, I’m glad to hear that we are working hard on two hugely important issues, steroid use by professional athletes and stoping sex between high schoolers. Well, we must have solved the sex tourism issue already.
Sean made a wonderful graphic of the President’s key points.
George Bush is truly a disgrace to those that believe in fiscal responsiblity and personal liberties.

I present to you my review of Space Food Sticks.

I love my mother, but she’s crazy.
Yesterday we were over at my parent’s house for the big surprise party for my father. My Dad turned 65 and we had a big party for him.
I was looking my mother’s freezer for ice when I spied this:

At Christmas I recieved this wonderful shirt. My brother Matt found it and thought I would like it.

The weekend is almost here. My brother arrives tomorrow and we will spend the weekend celebrating my Dad’s birthday. This has been a long week.
The time at court gave me some time to get into my latest book, Perdido Street Station. The book came highly recommended and I picked it up after Christmas.
After the first hundred pages I began to wonder if I was going to like the book. It got off to a slow start and didn’t throw out a lot of goodies for me to think about. I kept asking questions in my mind and the book wasn’t answering them.
Around page 250, the author finally kicks the story into overdrive and the story launches full force with a host of neat ideas and concepts. Much more of a fantasy novel than sci-fi, the book leaves reality far behind and drags you into a wierd alternate plane were there is no electricity, but there is magic.
I look forward to the second half of the book.
Other good stuff:
Extreme Segway
Caffeinated Hot Sauce
Missile Defense that doesn’t work
Jar of Toothpaste

I spent my second day on the jury during voir dire and I thought I would end up on the final jury panel. Out of the blue, the defense attorney said “Juror #12, thank you for your time.” With that I completed my duty. Being on the trial would have been interesting, but I must admit some relief.
In other news, I order a new Toyota Prius today with all the options. The trusty Oldsmobile Intrigue is well past it’s prime. I am looking forward to the GPS navigation system with audible directions.
That’s all for now. Back to your regularly scheduled web surfing.

I’m on Jury Duty. I’ve been placed in a Jury Panel and unless I get taken out via a preemptory challenge, I’m going to be on the trial jury for a SEVEN day trial.
One of the great things about America is trial by jury and I respect our legal system, but even I am wincing at the thought of seven days on a jury. The court operates from 10:30 to Noon and then 1:30 to 3:30. Three and a half hours in the courtroom per day max. I wish it could be a little more, but the judge says it’s due to budget constraints and overtime.
Who knows, maybe I can spend my lengthy lunch hour war driving downtown LA.

I was reading the Many 2 Many site and saw the Blogging the Market entry by Ross Mayfield.
Now for a lot of the big thinking in the blogosphere, I am a bit disconnected. I’m not really into the ‘power laws’ or the ‘fairness’ issues. But when it comes to weblogs in business, I think I know enough to discuss things.
The entry is about the Blogging the Market essay by George N. Dafermos. Mr. Dafermos deals with several issues, marketing blogging, employee external blogging, and internal company blogging.
Several times in the essay he claims things like “massive productivity gains through far more efficient communication, collaboration, and knowledge management.” with no real justification. In my day job, I deal with this kinda stuff all the time. The idea that business processes are so horribly inefficient that there are huge amounts of productivity to be gained is anecdotal and unproven.
Mr. Dafermos comes close to the real benefit of weblogs inside a company but misses it. The benefit is not found in Knowledge Management, the search and retrieval of information, the benefit is found in workflow.
In any business, information and ideas FLOW though the organization up and down the hierarchy. The flow happens via email, paper, conversations, specialized software and a multitude of other means.
This flow of ideas, approvals, and comments is key to a business’s success. It is not simple search and retrieval, it is directed flow of information to the right places to allow people to do their part.
It is in this area of workflow where weblogs can play a vital role. Weblogs alone are not the ‘killer app’, they are simply part of the new wave of information flow such as RSS, ATOM, media encapsulation, commenting, and other blogosphere friendly technologies.
The information must flow from weblogs in the right direction. It is not enough that a weblog shows a new post, the groups down the workflow chain must know that new information is available. It is nonsensical that the write people, randomly surfing internal weblogs would stumble on all the right information at the right time. You might be able to pull it off in a 50 person company but in a 500 or 5,000 person company it would be madness.
As companies remake their workflow processes away from the traditional paper and email chains into application based systems, they will be faced with a choice. Customized niche workflow applications built by high priced consultants or weblogs tied to simple routing and approval systems. For those that choose the weblog path, they are likely to find the productivity gains without spending millions.
But the key to success is keeping the weblogs focus on the task at hand and using some method to keep the information flowing through the business. Business weblogs cannot be passive like more personal weblogs, they must actively push their content along the line.
There is definitely some side benefit to employee weblogs about ideas and feelings, but the real driver of weblogs in business will not be an unstructured free-for-all.
Businesses are structured by necessity, unlike the internet where chaos fuels innovation. For weblogs to help businesses, there must be structure and purpose.

I recently finished reading The Golden Transcendence by John C. Wright.  A great novel that serious science fiction readers should pick up.

The Golden Transcendence is the third book in The Golden Age trilogy.  The first two books were The Golden Age and The Phoenix Exultant. 

The book are firmly in the space opera genre with a dash of Heinlein libertarianism tossed in for good measure.  The story takes place in the far future when artificial intelligences (known as sophotechs) and humans live immortal lives in a libertarian society of near unlimited technology.  The experience of real physical interaction is replaced in many cases by remote bodies, recorded experiences of others, and complete control of what a person perceives.  Humanity has moved beyond the one body – one brain system and has adopted many different systems of thought and even physical form.

Mr. Wright puts forth a brilliant vision of technology and society in the far future where wealth is measured in seconds of computer time and physical labor is non-existent.  In this future, there is are still wealthy and poor people but in a different way.  In a good interview, Mr. Wright explains:

"There would still be rich and poor, even if the poorest of the poor were absurdly well off by our standards. No advancements can eliminate differences in the abilities of men, or the differences in how men value the abilities of their fellow man (which is what causes inequality of prices and hence of incomes). If only by comparison, there will be poverty, even in Arcadia. My characters Ironjoy, Oshenkyo, and the Afloats […] are meant to represent this idea of future poverty; the Seven Peers represent wealth."

As an example as just one of the concepts presented, we can look at the idea of ‘sensefilters’.  Perception is no longer what organic senses directly tell the mind.  The signals received by the body or remote bodies are processed to be acceptable to the person’s particular preferences.  If a person doesn’t like to see advertising, their mind eliminates the advertising from their vision and fills in the scene with what would be there if the advertisement wasn’t there.  Consciously, the person isn’t aware of this, only that they have requested not to see advertisements.  Sensefiltering can be used to remove (or add) objects, people, and even ideas from an individual’s perception.  The plot devices are interesting stuff that Mr. Wright explores in just enough detail to keep you wanting more throughout the trilogy.

The protagonist, Phaethon, is the son of one of the most important people in the society (known as the Golden Oecumene).  In the first two books, Phaethon struggles against first the realization that he is missing parts of his memory, his struggle against society, his fall into exile, and his return to strength.

The third book finds Phaethon poised to fight against the true enemy that has been revealed to him.  Without spoiling too much, Phaethon is forced to fight for the very survival of his society (which tossed him out) or allow it to be destroyed.

The author, John C. Wright, obviously has a libertarian heart and embodies the attributes of individuality, resourcefulness, ingenuity and desire for progress in Phaethon, the hero.  In the opening novel, we find a society content with things how they are, willing to simply stop progress to prevent anything from changing their utopia in any meaningful way.  Phaethon is a man of action in opposition to the statist Golden Oecumene.  The underlying theme is that without mankind’s strive for exploration and new goals, it is doomed.

Overall, an excellent book and series for the science fiction reader looking for something more than blasters and evil six-legged aliens.  Getting used to the terminology and concepts is slow at first but well worth the effort.

If you enjoy Iain Banks’s Culture series, Peter Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn, or John Varley’s Eight Worlds, you will enjoy the The Golden Transcendence and the entire Golden Age Trilogy.

The author, John C. Wright, is a retired attorney and is working on the upcoming novel, Orphans of Chaos.