Employment 2.0: Business Owner
So this is weird. I own one third of a business.
Back in June of 2009, the repair shop that had employed me for the better part of nine years folded. For some this was good news, for some this was expected, and for the formerly employed this was very sudden (we had in fact just hired a new technician when the news hit). Repair shops tend to have a very polarized client base: some love you, some hate you, and both are usually deserved at some point. Still, myself and the core group of technicians tried our best to make it the most kick-ass Mac repair shop in Toronto, and while there were certainly challenges to overcome (that’s putting it politely), I feel like we succeeded to a degree. Diagnosed by the next business day? Check. Earn Apple’s Top 5% plaque? Check. Make every single person happy?
Well, there’s the point about a very polarized client base, but the number of happy people well outstripped the the unhappy. I never wanted to work in the sort of service centres they portray on TV or in Dilbert comics, or god forbid the actual real life service centres they’re satirizing. You’ve probably seen these, where workers and customers are bitter enemies struggling for dominion and witty remarks. No, we wanted to be awesome. The service industry is unforgiving, so believe me when I say that life is much more pleasant when you’re sending people home happy rather than cursing your name.
So as you can imagine, not being employed put a bit of a kink in things — but we got better.
This week, myself and two colleagues became self-employed. We opened our Mac repair business in the University of Toronto’s Campus Computer Shop inside the downtown Koffler Centre, taking over the repair operations from the former staff. Our philosophy is the same as ever: be awesome, make people happy. As expected, there will be hiccups as we get going, but so far we’re pretty happy with the first few days. So, tell all your friends, and even a few strangers! Despite the shop’s name, our scope is not limited to U of T students and faculty, so anyone at all is welcome to drop off their grievances with us. Ideally you’ll get something nicer back.
Hey Dave!
Hey Dave! is a social experiment/exhibit/event being run by some good friends of mine at Nuit Blanche. If you know Dave (or especially if you don’t), mark October 3rd on your calendar and go visit him at Bay and Queen Street.
Move Over Tic Tacs
Now, I’m not the sort of person that goes out and buys a giant screw driver set on a whim, but this weekend I had need for three uncommon drivers. Thus, it was off to the hardware store, that special place where you can find gardening tools and chain-saws under the same roof. The most important driver, a phillips 00, usually only comes as part of a larger set and in this regard I get pretty lucky: a 75-piece driver set on sale for $35. To put this into perspective, a respectable screw driver tends to retail for $5-10 on its own. Phillips 00? Check. Torx T8? Check. Hex drivers? Check, and we’re done.
Here’s where it gets crazy. On my way to the register I pass another box, this one almost identical save for that it has 95 pieces and it’s not on sale. Instead of doing the rational thing and laughing my way past it, I stop and begin to wonder if this larger set is a better deal. Sure, it costs more, but it has more tools, and it’s favourable to grabbing the (marginally) smaller kit and topping it up with twenty more tools at $5 apiece. Wait! There’s a problem: I only need three screw drivers. What good are twenty extra tools that I don’t actually need? Maybe I’ll build a rocket ship one day and need a reverse-robertson 2.8x wireless hammer, but that’s still nineteen rocket hammers short of a good deal unless I actually end up using every piece.
Fortunately the madness passed and I left with the smaller set, but I had to wonder: what sort of person impulse-buys a 95-piece screw driver set?
Media Clouds
It’s time. In my last post I mentioned Danny’s discovery of Wordle, and after playing around with it for a few minutes I started wondering what would happen if you fed a whole news site at it. Would it be possible to quantify how much attention a story gets? Better yet, would it be possible to quantify the language used by different media sites if they all ran similar stories and you could compare the coverage? What type of stories does a news site prefer over its competitor?
Wordle may not be able to answer these questions, but perhaps it will provide a starting point. Wordle’s function is to absorb whatever text you throw at it, determine what words appear the most, and then create something that is at once pleasing to the eye, and full of useful information. Words that get repeated are made proportionally bigger, and since we’re visual creatures, the results may speak louder than a simple word count.
Of course, the news doesn’t stand still, so it trying to find answers from only a single day of stories would be inaccurate. Using five days worth of material would be better, and though it would probably be better still to take a whole year worth of samples (slightly difficult with the constant 24-hour news cycle), five days seemed like a sane way to start before committing to a schedule of daily copy-and-pastes. The following are tag clouds generated from five days worth of news site front pages, July 13th, 14th, 16th, 21st, and 23rd. Read on to kill your dial-up modem…
Litmus Test
The other night Danny and I were talking about tag clouds and a possible experiment that could be done using something called Wordle (see this post for more info about Wordle). The experiments requires that the news cycle be on “autopilot,” i.e., a general representation of what’s going on in the world over a long stretch of time. The recent swath of high-profile celebrity deaths has thrown a kink into the works (to put it lightly), so hopefully I’ll be able to put up some results in a week or two.
In completely other news, I’ve located another excellent source of OpenGL ES tutorials, this time from Simon Maurice. Jeff Lamarche, whose tutorials I posted a few weeks ago, has also added some new content and updated his project template to work with the new iPhone OS. Good stuff.
Changing Gears
About half an hour ago I was repeating the same motions that I’ve been going through for the past week: hit all the job sites and look for something matching my qualifications. There’s not much out there for unproven Mac sysadmins though, with Active Directory and MS Exchange being far more ubiquitous in job listings. The best course of action at this point would be to panic, but instead I somehow got this crazy idea into my head:
You know what, why not? Beating Macs into submission for a living means limited exposure to the command line, and if you want to be really good at what you do, it means embracing it. Unfortunately, saying that you like Mac OS X’s BSD implementation isn’t the same as having the college credentials. Maybe my plan is still to walk into the first great job I find, or maybe it’s to find a just enough temporary employment to last until the fall semester. There would be a great irony in returning to school for computer studies, but that’s another story.
Decisions, decisions…
Computer up for Grabs
Several months ago I had some M-Audio hardware break down on me in a way should be hilarious to any tech who worked during the capacitor plague and thought themselves unaffected. The less hilarious result is that the audio hardware needs to be replaced; the catch is that it leverages traditional PCI technology which is now 16-year old and perhaps not the best choice moving forward. So, I’m kicking out my old computer and bringing in a new one. What this means in practical terms for you, the reader, is that I’ve got a computer to give away for free to anyone willing to give it a good home. If it goes unloved, Reboot Canada will get it. Here’s what it is:
- PowerMac G4 (Mirrored Drive Doors, year 2003 model)
- 1.25GHz single processor G4
- 167MHz front-side bus
- 768MB PC2700 DDR memory
- One 80GB ATA hard drive and one 40GB ATA hard drive
- One DVD-writer and one DVD-reader/CD-writer combo
- Radeon 9000 video card with 64MB VRAM
- 10/100/1000BaseT ethernet
- Mac OS X 10.4.6 (Tiger)
You’ll have to provide your own mouse, keyboard, and monitor, but that’s about all you’ll need to make it work. Note that this is not the most energy-efficient computer ever made; the power supply is rated for up to 360 watts and there are quite a few moving parts inside. At this stage in its life it’s mostly good for light computing and internet stuff, though it was a beast in its day and will still do multi-tracking if you can get your hands on six-year old software and aforementioned obsolete hardware.
If you’re interested, curious, or have any questions, drop me a line and we can discuss specifics! Bear in mind that there will be no warranty, and this offer is only good to people I know.
UPDATE: The offer is now closed.
High Score
So Leora has written another insightful media analysis, and it makes me wonder who’s steering this ship. Although we as a society generally disapprove of sidelining our ethics, we also seem to take it for granted that large corporations, politicians, lawyers, and the misery industry all run on a diet of immorality and corruption (part of this complete breakfast). Last I checked, all of the above are run by the same people who complain that we’re headed towards dystopia thanks to our many vices. How did we gain this split personality, doing the devil’s work from 9-5 and then transforming back into indignant masses on evenings and weekends?
(Disclaimer: the author doesn’t believe in the devil, but presumes that anyone starting a career in malevolence would work for him.)
Our generation is getting ready to inherit the Earth (and her wonderful deficits), so keep this in mind, generation: now that it’s almost our turn to decide how the world turns, let’s try to beat our parents’ high score.
Bricked Hard Drive
A hard drive that makes horrible grinding noises is a bad thing. A hard drive that makes awesome grinding noises is just plain awesome. Found c/o Marc:
Here to Stay: Our Brave New World (Part 1)
Gigi has found a fascinating book (as is her habit), The Cult of the Amateur, a book whose arguments boil down to the following: the internet is destroying our culture. Despite that I’m one of the first to shake my head and exclaim, “Oh, internet!” every time something ridiculous happens online, I strongly disagree with Andrew Keen and his silly book. Yes, I’m passing judgement, but to be fair, he started it. I’m not starting where I should, so let’s turn the clock back to Composition 101 at York.
Westcott, the musicianship professor (and excellent ragtime pianist) was following his regular lesson when all of a sudden we realized he was on a tangent: music was dangerously in need of being democratized, he said. The superstar had existed for hundreds of years now thanks to modern roads, the printing press, airmail, and all other methods by which we shrunk our world. If you were Mozart, you were no longer simply famous in only your home town; now you were famous throughout the whole country, then several, and finally worldwide. Michael Jackson is another household name, and even anyone who hasn’t heard his music will recognize the name. The goal for musicians became to compete on the world stage and success was measured against the same. What about local talent? Completely overshadowed. Westcott was now very animated, and the message was clear: take back music from the few elite, put it back into the hands of everyone. Form a community orchestra, join a band, join a choir, perform locally and rise above the siren song of fame. Unfortunately, marketing yourself becomes problematic without the millions of dollars promised by The Industry. Enter the internet.
Arguably, Westcott’s goals have already been accomplished. Music, film, news, open source software and opinion now belong to anyone with an internet connection. To Keen, this is a terrifying notion, and it forms the basis of his book. For example, his claim that today’s generation can’t tell the difference between credible news by objective journalists and what they read on an uninformed blog lacking citations — like this one. In this respect I partially agree with Keen, but I find his implications off-base. Without critical thinking skills, it is difficult to tell the difference between objective journalists, ill-informed opinion, and outright lies. I find it a dangerous idea that we should trust only our “traditional” news media. Traditional media is susceptible to bias, misinformation, and propaganda, to different degrees than independent bloggers. Yes, traditional media has a dedicated staff who draw their salary from doing the job right, but that doesn’t make them bullet proof. Case in point: Keen presenting himself as an objective journalist.
Another target of Keen is Wikipedia. Believe it or not, we’re only on page four of the introduction. We, the reader, are told that none of Wikipedia’s nearly three million entries have ever been edited or vetted for accuracy, which is tantamount slander. Jimmy Wales actually tells us that Wikipedia has been compared favourably to Encarta by traditional magazines (but don’t believe him, I bet no one vetted that claim). Wales even goes on to point out Time Magazine misquoting him, so don’t tell me that Wikipedia is the only one ruining public understanding. Let’s move on though, because we’ve still got a lot to cover.
Ah, YouTube. Among the videos Keen cites is one which he describes as a young woman watching another YouTube user who is watching yet another user, all leading to a woman making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in front of the television. Read that back a second time. Is that art? Don’t agree? Welcome to all of recorded human history. The concept of art vs. mediocrity isn’t new. Going back to Westcott’s complaint against the superstar, mass media was an enabler to an elite few to become world famous, but world fame did not equate to art, talent, or creativity; just fame (though certainly talent and creativity help). Some people think John Cage is a hack. I think Top 40s radio is a cesspool. Now that we have the internet, there are much deeper depths to plumb, and even if you think most of it is coal, you have to start somewhere to find diamonds. It’s now possible to find alternatives to world-famous superstars, and those who never used to have a chance have now been given an audience.
We’re not done yet though, for Keen is about to play the “think of the children” card. Cited is the brutal war going on between Israel and Hezbollah, juxtaposed against digg’s tendency to publish more banal stories. Keen is now placing the responsibility of publishing the information he wants on sites that publish, well, other things. If you want to read about the latest Ext4 file system, you head to Ars Technica. If you want to watch Stephen Colbert act wilfully ignorant, you hit Comedy Central. If you want world news, you read one of the many respected online publications, many of which have risen from traditional dead tree methods of circulation. Digg is a news aggregator, not a news substitute. Keen’s point does not escape me though, which is that Digg indicates what is most popular among internet users, and his concern likely rises from the fact that banal stories are more popular than important ones. Actually, it’s my non-expert opinion that this was true before the internet, so let’s move on and wrap up.
One of Keen’s final assertions is that new media such as YouTube and MySpace are starving traditional media of their advertising revenue. This is one of the biggest told-you-sos of the internet: everyone knew there was money to be made on the internet, everyone. Instead of embracing change, the dinosaur that is old media resisted it. Newsprint knew that they were losing customers to internet media: their competitors could produce content inexpensively since there was no physical circulation. Sounds like cheating, doesn’t it? If you think old media should have borrowed this idea instead of fighting it, you just won the internet. Why could old media not play that game too? They did eventually, but too late if you ask me. The music industry is another one that shot itself in the foot for years. Music piracy skyrocketed on the pirates’ assertion that downloading was convenient until someone figured out that people would still pay for the music as long as you made it convenient, and it’s been hugely profitable ever since. Replace “downloading was convenient” with “stealing was convenient” and you see the shutter-vision that prevented this from happening sooner. The movie industry is just the same: internet rental services and internet to TV streaming is more convenient than ever, and the main detractors are not the studios but the consumers who worry that electronic distribution gives too much power to the studios. So have traditional media been robbed of their revenue by the new? Arguably some have, and it’s the price for not keeping pace.
