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Kevin Kelly on time vs. money

Here is what I learned from 40 years of traveling: Of the two modes, it is far better to have more time than money.

When you have abundant time you can get closer to core of a place. You can hang around and see what really happens. You can meet a wider variety of people. You can slow down until the hour that the secret vault is opened. You have enough time to learn some new words, to understand what the real prices are, to wait out the weather, to get to that place that takes a week in a jeep.

Money is an attempt to buy time, but it rarely is able to buy any of the above. When we don’t have time we use money to try to get us to the secret door on time, or we use it avoid needing to know the real prices, or we use money to have someone explain to us what is really going on. Money can get us close, but not all the way.

Source: More time is better than more money. – Ronda, Spain — A Hi Moment

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Mixed media, Sunday 23 August 2015

I’ve surprised myself by actually having read a few books over the last couple of weeks:

  • High Crimes by Christopher Sebela and Ibrahim Moustafa. Intense thriller. I knew from reputation that it was dark, but it was even darker than I had anticipated. Genuinely classic noir.
  • The Martian by Andy Weir. Great story, well told. Classic “scientist as hero” science fiction that runs at a super fast pace. It’s all action (survival action rather than fight scenes), with no filler.
  • Field of Prey by John Sandford. An excellent episode in the series.
  • Not strictly a book, but Tim Urban’s latest post on WaitButWhy.com, “How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars” is a fun read. It’s essentially SpaceX propaganda / Elon Musk fanfic, but I’m happy buying in to the whole space exploration thing, so I’m okay with that. I would love to personally see the earth from space some day. As far as I’m concerned, Go Elon Go!

Films:

  • Maleficent: Slightly sub-meh.
  • Magic Mike: Until recently I hadn’t spotted that this was directed by Steven Soderbergh. It was only when I read a couple of reviews that compared the sequel to the original that I caught on to the fact that – aside from the raucous stripping scenes – this is a melancholy film, reflecting on how easy it is to accidentally give up on your dreams, while you think you’re busy pursuing them. Very good.
  • Fast & Furious 7: Bonkers, but in a good way. Runs too long, though, especially the final sequence in LA.

Podcasts:

Limetown is a new 7-part podcast that starts off as investigative recent-historical reportage, but quickly moves into the realm of science-fiction suspense. (It’s fiction, cleverly disguised as reality.) The first episode is very good. Next one due in September.

https://soundcloud.com/limetown/episode-1-pilot

As well as 99% Invisible, I’ve added the Accidental Tech Podcast to my weekly listening. It’s soothingly geeky.

Music:

I’m going to see TV On The Radio at Paradiso tomorrow. They had to cancel the European leg of their tour earlier this year, including a date at Paradiso. For some reason I didn’t get a ticket for that show anyway, but I’m excited to be catching them this time round. I’ve been listening to their latest album Seeds a lot again over the last week, and it really is splendid.

I also remembered that I still have an eMusic subscription, so I plundered that for some new music: Working Girl by Little Boots, The Beyond/Where The Giants Roam by Thundercat, and Rips by Ex Hex — all excellent.

I’ve given up on Apple Music. I still listen to Beats One, but I’ve turned off auto-renewal for the trial subscription, and I’ve turned off iCloud integration to get rid of the tracks I’d “added to My Music” during the short time I was actively trying to use it. My main reason for ditching it is the way that Apple Music tries to blur the line between my music and their music. If I want to download a Apple Music track for offline listening (I spend a lot of time on airplanes and away from wifi and cellular signals; this is a key use case for me), its appearance in iTunes is identical to a track I have bought and own.

The DRM-free track I can back up and do whatever I like with. The Apple Music track is DRM-protected, and will be useless if and when I decide to abandon Apple Music, or when Apple Music decides to abandon me (by locking me out of my account for some reason, or by ceasing to exist). If you don’t download a track, but keep it as streaming-only, you can use the “iCloud download” status to distinguish see that it exists only in the cloud. But once you download it, short of doing a “get info” on the track and looking at its file extension, iTunes offers literally no way of selecting and filtering rented tracks in its UI.

Maybe if they did something about that, I’d give it a second try. Maybe. But for now, I’m getting comfortable with Spotify Premium for music discovery, collaborative playlists (also a key feature I use), and casual listening. iTunes is for the collection of music I own and can do with what I like (software licensing terms notwithstanding). I think that Apple Music is probably fine for many people. It’s just not for built for me. My next concern is that Apple keeps making iTunes worse and worse for the purposes I do care about.

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The week of rock, 2-6 November 2015

A few weeks ago, around the time that I buckled down and bought the Foo Fighters ticket I’d been dithering about, I went a bit mad buying even more concert tickets. In particular, I filled in all the gaps for that entire week:

  • Monday 2 November: Battles at Melkweg. (New album “La Di Da Di” out on September 18th.)
  • Tuesday 3 November: Dutch Uncles at Paradiso (small room, yay!). This is amusing because…
  • Wednesday 4 November: Garbage at 013 in Tilburg (20 Years Queer anniversary tour) — with support by…Dutch Uncles. (Previously)
  • Thursday 5 November: The aforementioned Foo Fighters at Ziggo Dome
  • Friday 6 November: Gaz Coombes at Tolhuistuin. I missed him when he played Amsterdam back in February, so I’m glad to get a second chance.

Oh yeah. It’s like my own private festival.

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Scratchcards

Once upon a time, shops would give you a promotional scratchcard, you’d scratch off the silver foil, and know straight away if you’d won a prize. Not any more. Here’s the workflow now, for an “everyone gets a prize” promotion at WE:

  1. Scratch off foil
  2. Go to the store’s web site (actually a third party domain running the promotion on their behalf) and enter the code under the foil. Enter my email address. Tick the checkbox to confirm that I’m willing to receive a single email with my prize details. Press the OK button.
  3. Open the incoming email. Click on the link in the email.
  4. Visit the store’s prize web site (same third party running things). Enter my name and date of birth. Tick one checkbox that I’m willing to receive further marketing offers from the store. Tick one checkbox that I’m willing to receive further marketing offers from the third party running the promotion. Press the OK button.
  5. Redirected to another teaser page. Message at the top of the page says something along the lines of, “you’re just a few steps away from fabulous prizes!” But first I have to click a button saying how often I’ve shopped at their store in the last year. Click “3 times”, because I go there regularly.
  6. I now seem to be in the middle of a survey. Three pictures: which of these styles of children’s clothes appeals to me most? Click on the middle style, which looks pretty cool. Click “continue” button.
  7. Nothing happens. Click a different picture and click “continue” again.
  8. Nothing happens. Fire up script debugger. Track down script error, which appears to be caused by the fact that the Facebook “Like” script didn’t load.
  9. Of course it didn’t fucking load. I block Facebook like a pro.
  10. Now I’m in a situation where they have acquired all my details and consent to be marketed at, but where I can’t collect on my half of the deal.Or they would have them, if I had actually entered my real name and date of birth. I’m not completely stupid.

Progressive disclosure used as a dark pattern. This is regrettably pretty much standard operating procedure for marketing these days.

Related: “The ethics of modern web ad-blocking” by Marco Arment.

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Don Norman on logic

Don Norman in RISKS digest 28.88:

[T]hat’s why we have so many accidents: engineers think sensibly and logically and are completely unaware of how people really behave. As I tell people over and over again, logic is an artificial way of thinking, invented by philosophers and mathematicians. if it were how we thought and behaved, it wouldn’t have had to be invented and it wouldn’t be so difficult to learn.