An Alternative Source for Musical Nostalgia

I freely admit to being a huge nostalgia head, which only seems to be getting worse the older I get. (I can only imagine the calibur of “In my day…” curmudgeonry that I’m going to engage in when I’m 60.) I spent much of my childhood not really listening to music at all, believe it or not, but as my tastes started to evolve, I mostly became interested in songs from my early years or from before my time entirely.

So, naturally, there’s plenty of inventory for me to like at the iOldies Music Store, which recently contacted me to ask if I’d take a look at their site. They bill themselves as offering “Boomer Music”. Which is funny, because that would be my parents’ generation, not mine. Still, ever since I was a teenager I’ve been far more likely to spin records by Genesis, The Beatles or Billy Joel — almost all of it pre-1990 — than anything my peers cared about. In 1987 I didn’t care about Def Leppard, in 1993 I didn’t care about Beck, and now I don’t care about pretty much any modern music. Whether it’s metal, prog rock, pop or whatever, give me the old stuff.

iTunes may appear to have an iron grip on the music market, but there are alternatives — and my recent rants about putting all your eggs in one basket (by getting all your online services from the same provider) should make it clear that I like alternatives. The iOldies Music Store is laid out like a juke box and is obviously going for lovers of ’50s and ’60s music with its visual style, which frankly is kinda hard on the eyes, but once you start searching it looks like they have a pretty large catalog, including eclectic material and albums from foreign bands. Interestingly, not all of it is old, either — although some of these recently-dated albums might be compilation discs of older material from bands I’m unfamiliar with.

What’s interesting about iOldies Music Store is that they try to amalgamize a variety of music formats in a single store. So you can get songs as downloadable MP3s, or order CDs, et al. Some of these options may not be available for certain songs; I think we’re all familiar with the minefield that is digital music licensing these days, so this should not be surprising. They have a “Retro DVD” section too, which includes stuff like Soupy Sales and a motley crew of other oddities.

I haven’t actually purchased anything from the iOldies Music Store, but it doesn’t look like their digital tracks are DRM’ed in any way, which is a minimum requirement for me when buying music downloads. I do have some gripes, though, in that the site is a little difficult to navigate as it does not seem to use pages in a traditional way, and the UI is often slow to respond. The iOldies store appears to be in beta for the moment, though, so some of this stuff could be a work in progress. If they can iron out the issues, they might have a future as an alternative to the big music store players.

Social Media is Not an Equalizer

This morning, a colleage sent me a link to an article on Slashdot about some comments made by former Google executive Stafford Masie, who believes that “traditional [web] search is dying” because users are becoming more inclined to ask their social networks for information instead of searching static web pages. Go read the article if you’d like to delve more into Mr. Masie’s reasoning.

I see this same proclamation more and more often these days. Some people (almost all of them connected with Google in some way, it seems) are constantly falling all over themselves trying to assure us that one day soon all of our answers will come from the great social cloud: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, you name it. When we want answers, we’re going to start increasingly asking our friends instead of asking web pages in Google’s search indexes. I even saw one unconscionably arrogant individual pen an article asserting that we’re all going to be using Google+ “whether we want to or not.”

Frankly, this is just as much bullshit now as it was yesterday, last month, or last year when I penned my previous rant about this assertion. And it’ll still be bullshit tomorrow for all but a select minority of the Internet population. How many of you have a social network of thousands of people, all of them skilled individuals loaded with detailed knowledge about dozens of arcane fields? Twenty years ago, would you have thrown away your set of encyclopedias and asked only your friends at the coffee shop for information while writing a report or doing research? Even if you had very knowledgeable and influential friends, checking unbiased sources is always good practice. And what if you had only a few friends, or didn’t know anyone with knowledge on the subject at hand?

That’s why I am completely against the idea of social networks as a source of reference information, because let’s face it: that’s how most of the world uses Google, as a search engine for reference information. It might not be “reference” in the traditional sense (sci, tech, history) — hell, you might just be looking for a guide to completing a quest in some video game, or a list of episode synopses from an old TV show. This is still reference information. Google asserts that this kind of search is becoming archaic, and that we should want to search the social cloud because of its “constant freshness”. In some areas, seeding a search with recent developments via social media might be useful, but most of the time you want your reference information unclouded by potentially skewed or biased opinion (which is essentially what all social media is).

Furthermore — and this is the biggest factor for me — I see web search as an equalizer. I wrote about this once before, but search engines like Google are incredibly powerful not just technologically, but socially and politically as well, because they put the power of information in the hands of everyone with equal measure. You don’t have to have a circle of six hundred friends from Sandia National Laboratories, or personally know people who actually experienced a historical event you want to learn about. Those people have created information and placed it on the web, and Google is the directory through which you are connected with that information. You don’t have to know the author of said information. You don’t have to have expensive tastes or exclusive contacts. You only need a computer and an Internet connection.

Former Google executive Stafford Masie foresees a world in which this great equalizer of information is downplayed, and replaced with a hastily-erected resurrection of the social caste system that we deal with in real life. Social-driven search pressures us all to build wide and vast social networks online, almost competitively, in order to have access to information. We’re moving away from the idea that curiosity and intellect should catalyze information acquisition, and back to the idea that the key to acquiring knowledge is social extroversion.

Call me bitter, but as an introvert who never had much taste for socializing in real life, and who has relished the rise of the great equalizer of web search, the idea of a socially powered search network is an enormous, eye-rolling step backwards.

Lest you think me a Luddite, social media is far from devoid of merit. Your social network will undoubtedly be a better place than Google for information on temporal media (TV shows, movies, current events) precisely because of that constant freshness that I mentioned earlier. It’s a great place for restaurant recommendations, references for local service professionals and case studies. And of course, it’s the best way I know of to keep up with family and friends who live in all corners of the world; that is a technological marvel in and of itself.

But a social network is not, nor will it ever be in my estimation, a replacement for in-depth, unbiased and accurate reference information on a vast array of subjects, many of which professionals like myself deal with in our careers on a daily basis.

Lastly, we would do well to remember that as a business whose revenue stream is based on advertising, Google is naturally inclined to talk up social networking because it benefits them financially. Anyone who believes that Google is more than superficially concerned about anything other than how much money they can make from social media is living in a utopian dream world.

I’ll leave you with another user’s comment from the Slashdot article mentioned above, which I found particularly on-target.

There are social network ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. Some people have 500,000 twitter followers, and can ask just about any question and get a slew of responses, some of them excellent. Some people have 15 with nary a high school graduate in the list; getting insightful and timely answers from that list is not nearly as likely. People with hundreds or thousands of followers think that social media is going to change the world; they literally do not realize that not everyone has the same type of network that they do. That, in fact, they are blessed with a surplus of social power in the same way that some people have wealth.

Search engines don’t care how many friends you have. They have answers. Search is an equalizer; social networks are not.

World Series of (Videogame) Poker

I remember where I first learned how to play poker, and from whom. When I was a kid, my mom taught me the basics of the game so that we could play it to pass the time in the airport while waiting for a flight to a now long-forgotten destination. I seem to recall reacting with some modicum of surprise that my mom, of all people, knew how to play poker! But neither one of us, naturally, could play to a competitive level. This was a purely recreational pursuit.

Since then I’ve rarely picked up a deck of cards, but I’ve played countless hands of poker anyway — in the videogame world. I’m not actually talking about online poker houses where you can play on the Internet — click here for one such example, which also handily offers up some basic competitive poker tips for the true beginner — but rather about console games that on their face appear to have nothing to do with poker, but actually contain some very entertaining poker minigames built in.

Since it’s relatively trivial to build a poker videogame compared to the open-world adventure games, shooters and simulators that abound today, sometimes you will find a really good poker game in the most unusual places. One example is Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 on the Xbox 360, where each in-game evening offered the option to visit the Zack Island Casino for a suite of Vegas-style games, including poker. I often looked forward more to putting the smackdown on Tina or Hitomi at the poker table than kicking their bikini-clad butts off the volleyball court, which was the central focus of the game. I found, however, that playing poker in DOAX2 was often incredibly unforgiving, unpleasant and too difficult to win any actual money in. (I guess you might say that makes it realistic?)

If you’re more interested in playing electronic poker against actual people, you could hit up an online poker house (though you’d be advised to first click here to learn some strategies about bluffing, bonuses and researching professional strategies). Or you could try a risk-free poker fix in the least likely of places: Red Dead Redemption, a video game about violence and deception in the Old West. There’s a poker minigame in Red Dead that is simply tons of fun, and will have you going up against a whole myriad of opponents who are just as good at calling your bluff as they can be at bluffing you out.

What’s really cathartic about Red Dead’s poker minigame is how, if things are going really badly for you and you just can’t take it anymore, you can jump out of your chair, unholster a pistol and fill your opponents with lead in true Old West Bad-Guy style. You’ll then get in a lot of trouble with the law, but you can just reload your last saved game to clear away your impropriety — you were probably going to do that anyway, if you were losing your shirt at the poker table!

I’m perfectly content to stay with Red Dead’s idea of a poker simulation, but anyone wanting to take the challenge of electronic poker to the real world (where you don’t need a poker face, per se, but you will still need a cool head) could click here to get some beginner’s tips at PokerInsider.com and register to play online with others via their online poker provider.

But don’t try to pull a John Marston if things don’t go your way. You’ll just wind up putting a hole in your computer screen.

The PC is Dying? Hardly

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of proclamations that the personal computer as we know it is rapidly being replaced by smartphones and tablets, with today’s CNN Money article about the slow death of the PC being just the latest example. Personally, as someone who works in the IT field and uses a PC to create tangible content, I feel that there is a salient point often left out of analyses such as this: if the PC is on its way out, then on what device will producers create all of the content that we will consume with our new phones and tablets?

Tablets are great for consumption of media: checking email, browsing the web, updating your Facebook status, reading magazines or books. Some of these things were the sole reasons why many households had a “family computer” in the first place. For those households, tablets are a great option because there’s a lot less cruft, a lot more simplicity and lower energy use, not to mention no more need to dedicate an entire piece of furniture to a desktop computer. But for somebody who is creating intricately detailed websites or graphic art, or coding and testing an application in an integrated development environment, how can a small, simple tablet possibly hold up?

It can’t, in my world. While it’s possible to create compelling art on a tablet using a stylus or even your own finger — similar to what a Wacom tablet on a PC would do, although much less precise in my experience — this allows for only fairly broad strokes. I have no idea how it would ever be possible to use a relatively fat, stubby, imprecise thing like a finger to design things like pixel-precise layouts and finely detailed icons. I simply need to have the precision of a pointing device.

Multi-monitor setups are another thing that’s not happening (yet) with tablets, and I’m not in any hurry to give up my three-screen array with Photoshop’s canvas on one screen and its tool palettes on another so that I can cram it all onto a 10-inch tablet. No thanks. Programmers surely fall into the same group, and I know many who live and die by multi-monitor arrays consisting of as many as four, five or even six screens. Even with one screen, you’d need significant enough real estate for all of the tools, browsers and panels that typically go along with IDE-based development.

I found the CNN Money article somewhat telling because it indicates PC sales are actually up significantly in markets like China and India, while they are down in North America. Factoring into this, I’m sure, is the fact that China and India’s economies are growing very rapidly, affording more and more households the ability (and desire) to purchase a PC. Whereas here in the West, PCs have surely already reached a sort of saturation, and tablets are looking much more appealing to families who just want a device that can check email and surf the web.

At the same time, though, I wonder if part of this is because India and China are doing a huge amount of actual producing of content now, not just manufacturing of tangible goods but also development of software and systems.

Although there’s no doubt that the PC’s market share stands to continue declining slowly as more consumer-friendly “consumption devices” become both available and more affordable, I don’t see the PC truly “dying” anytime soon. It’s simply too important a tool for too many professionals, a tool for which there is not yet anything close to an apt replacement.