Greg:
With Facetime in the hands of tens of millions of iOS users… Google+ creating a new term with video “Hangouts”… and now it looks like Facebook is going to have major Skype integration…

30 years later, are we FINALLY entering the video chat era?

Dennis:
I don’t see video chat taking off anyway. It’s uncomfortable. Voice is easier/better b/c you can divide your attention without harming communication.

Maybe the kids will like it…

Bryan:
I agree with Dennis and I think the shift away from telephone calls to texting shows that most people, even the kids, want to multitask or have asynchronous communication. I’m sure there will be a good number of people and some interesting uses for video chatting but I don’t think its going to become the dominate communication form we originally thought it would be.

and thanks Greg from starting a conversation on gmail instead of g+, I feel like i’m missing the party.

Greg:
It’s funny you say that. As I was writing that email, I stopped and said to myself, “Should I turn this into a blog post? Nah” “Hmm, I don’t want to post to Facebook, because I’ve already posted something today…” “I’ll just send an email.”

With all of these broadcasting options, I went with email. Go figure.

FYI, I’m about to tweet it.

Dennis:
I might have already sent this once before (or twice…?), but the great, late David Wallace nailed this topic in his 1998 near-future, quasi-scifi, novel, Infinite Jest: A Novel.

e.g. –
The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, and (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.

First, the stress:

Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation [...] let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet — and this was the retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided.

[...] Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener’s expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those caller who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking extra rude, absentminded, or childishly self-absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.

And then vanity:

And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn’t. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hair-checks in the foyer mirror before answering the door.

Dennis:
I just saw your tweet! Whoo hoo!

Bryan:
is Infinite Jest 1000+ pages of shit like that?

Dennis:
Actually, I think it’s just shy of 1,000 pages. But there are footnotes.

Greg:
Bryan, when you say “shit like that”, is that good or bad?

Dennis:
I think it’s the shit.

Bryan:
I guess without seeing my face you could not tell that I was using the word “shit” in the positive light.

Sent from my iPhone

—-
Thanks to Dennis, Bryan, and David Wallace for participating.

Related posts:

1. Cloud iTunes
2. Double Complete Rainbow
3. Informal survey

Related posts:

1. Surf The Train??
2. Are We Alone?
3. Kickstarter

No related posts.

Is this a big enough problem where we need signs to remind us to not surf fucking trains? That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m quite curious. Are kids and drunks really surfing trains? Our future? What the hell is going on?

I blame the internet. Generations of kids knew not to surf trains. Even when trains were slow, people knew it was at least a bad idea. Now, from the day they are born, they have this monstrous web of all the world’s information at their fingertips, and they decide that surfing the train is a good idea. It’s gotta be connected somehow.

Surfing the train utterly reinforces my belief that there should be an age limit on the internet. Kids really have no business being on this thing. Have you ever looked at the comments on YouTube? It’s pointless because there are absolutely no good comments. It’s all just stupid kids bickering about bullshit or being as racist and jingoistic as humanly possible. Go ahead. Look at the comments for ANY video on YouTube. There’s billions. I’ll wait…

See what I mean. I blame the kids.

Surfing the train. Who ever heard of such a thing?

What ever happened to peacefully taking bong hits in your parent’s basement? Ride the snake.

Related posts:

1. Spaced
2. Awwwkwarrdd
3. Double Complete Rainbow

MobileMe is Apple’s cloud-based suite of services that includes; me.com mail, calendar/address book/bookmark syncing, photo galleries, online storage called iDisk, and a few other neat tricks. First let me say that I do pay for this $99 a year service. Almost exclusively for the syncing features. I have four devices that are all completely synced up. Add a contact on my laptop at home, and it’s on my computer at work when I get in. Bookmark a webpage on my iPhone while waiting in line at Penn Station and it’ll be there waiting for me on my iMac back at the apartment. The syncing is flawless and done in the background and I love it. However, with the exception of “Find my iPhone”, a service that allows you to locate (and wipe if you have to) a lost iPhone, you can do all of the things Apple offers in MobileMe with other, freer options. And in most cases, better. Me.com is ok, but Gmail is light years better. Apple galleries are ok, but Flickr and even Facebook offer more for less. Even syncing between all of your devices can be achieved in a number of ways other ways.

The point is, it’s really hard to justify spending $99 a year on MobileMe. Unless you’re me.

And until now. Maybe.

I really don’t like to write about Apple rumors here because it’s usually pretty fruitless and too techno-lusty for me. But there IS a lot of chatter pointing to an upgraded MobileMe with a seeming focus on a cloud-based iTunes option. It makes a lot of sense. Keep the costs down on the iPhone by offering less local storage and the ability to stream your music (haven’t heard squat about video content) to your phone or other computers away from home. Obviously this is not a perfect solution, yet. My commute to work is completely underground and that’s where I do most of my music listening. But it would represent a major dive into living in the cloud where we’ve only been lounging in the warmer waters of the baby pool. Apple even recently built a massive server farm in North Carolina which many assume is expressly for this purpose. This one is a little more solid than a rumor.

Here’s my question… How do I get… 16,184 songs (76.48GB); 1,275 episodes worth of TV (306.92GB); and 386 movies (347.85GB)… How do I get all of that into the cloud? Do I strap my 1TB external drive to an Estes Rocket and launch it at Apple so they can do it for me? Because I’m sure as hell not uploading all of that to MobileMe. It would tie up my computer a take MONTHS to transfer.

I see two options. Turn iTunes into the server which streams your media library from your computer. But that would mean having to run your computer all the time. And I suppose would present some security risks. Another option would be to upload all of your music to a central pool of sorts. You don’t have to upload “Teenage Dream” because it’s already up there. You’ll simply be given access to it. Sounds tricky, but I’m pretty sure this was where Lala was headed…before Apple bought them. You’ll still have to upload all of those mp3s of your friend’s band and depending on how much of that you have, it could take some time and resources. Dont worry though, I’ll be uploading “Satanic Mass” by Coven so you don’t have to.

NOTHING beats having your entire music collection in your pocket like I’m able to achieve with my 80gb iPod, but I’m not carrying around both an iPod and an iPhone. Not happening. An 80gb iPhone would be nice.

A cloud-based iTunes is a pretty good workaround and in line with what most of the major tech players have decided is our destiny.

Related posts:

1. Bloggers aren’t real writers
2. The Race to Touch
3. The Science of Sleep (Paralysis)

Love seeing Robert Englund make an appearance. Three cheers for Lou Ferrigno and Berlin too!

No related posts.

So this little code turns any page into a game of Asteroids. Works best if you put it in your bookmarks bar. Arrows steer, space bar fires. That’s about it. Very effective against ads. Give it a try and don’t let your boss see. Unless you like your boss, then share it!

Related posts:

1. Pinch Me

Related posts:

1. Geocitiesizer

And then there’s videos like this. Enjoy…

Related posts:

1. Advanced Food Service
2. A-holes

I was introduced to the site through someone I had briefly worked with and her comedy pilot, Sleepwalkers, reached it’s funding goal this summer. Can’t wait to see what they come up with.

I put forth, in the vein of crowd-sourcing and putting an amazing idea to good use, anyone interested in collaborating on a project with Miabi Films should respond to this post. We’ll use the technology available to us and fund it through Kickstarter. Now we just need a great concept. I have a few, but I’m all ears.

Related posts:

1. Scene 315
2. Conductor
3. Double Complete Rainbow