LibraryThing, Goodreads, Shelfari, Google Books, Anobii, WeRead

I’ve been a bookworm my whole life, and for as long as I can remember I’ve wished I had a list of all the books I own.  I’d also love to have a list of all the books I’ve read.  I think it would be impossible to create the second list, but the first list would only be a matter of typing.  And now with the Internet and the ISBN book number, it’s even less typing than before.  I could even buy a barcode reader that looks up information automatically online without typing at all.  My first consideration was to buy a standalone computer program like Book Collector from Collectorz.com, or even design my own database or spreadsheet with Access and Excel, but I decided the fun solution is to use a Web 2.0 online book cataloging site. 

The Internet has added an extra twist to this list making activity, called  social cataloging.   By entering your books into an online database it allows social network programs to compare your list to lists created by millions of other bookworms.  The synergy of doing this offers endless social networking possibilities.  The obvious one is to find other readers who have similar reading tastes to yours that will help you find great books to read that you’ve missed.  For people trying to build big personal libraries, it’s fascinating to know the size of other collector’s collections.  The largest on LibraryThing is 43,061 books.  Also on LibraryThing, the most reviewed book is Twilight (1,386 reviews), the most owned book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (47,598 people out of 1,035,403 members), or that my favorite science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein has 72,427 books in those collections, as compared to my second favorite science fiction writer Philip K. Dick who has 46,991 books in LibraryThing user’s homes.  That’s out of 48,365,418 total books catalogued.

The trouble is there are many wonderful book cataloging sites to choose from, each with their own plus and minuses.  Luckily, all are free except LibraryThing, and it’s free for your first 200 books, so you can try them all.  The sites I’ve found so far are (there may be more):

• LibraryThing
• Goodreads
• Shelfari
• Google Books “My Library”
• Anobii
• WeRead (Facebook)

Each of the sites try to make it easy to enter books, but they all do it differently.  They each have millions of books already catalogued, so the quickest way to add a book to your list is to find it first on their list by searching on the ISBN and then hitting the add button.  This can be made even faster with a barcode reader, but I don’t have one.  I’d say it’s taken me a couple hours to enter in 58 books at LibraryThing.  This is slow because I like selecting the right cover photo to match the cover of the book I own, and I started with a shelf of old books without ISBN numbers.  That means searching by author or title, or even entering in all the book info myself.  I could probably do 60 books in 20 minutes if they were all recent and I only needed to use ISBN.  Usually when you get a book with ISBN, the cover and all the other information is already there.

I’ve taken to LibraryThing, but when I finished building my list I could export my library to another site to see if I like their social networking features better.  Or I’ve thought about using one site for listing books I own, and another for books I can remember reading.  Or use another site for just my non-fiction science and history books to see if I can find readers with my exact interests.  The different cataloging sites have discussion groups for books, or linking systems to Facebook and blogging sites, so if you like to discuss and review books, these systems connect you to other people who are looking to read reviews or talk about books too.

On one blog I read a post by a woman who said her family paid for three separate $25 lifetime subscriptions to LibraryThing, for herself, her husband and her kid, so I’m assuming there’s long term rewards for doing the work of entering a book collection into the system.  I won’t know for awhile.  I’ve got 18 more shelves of books to enter, and then I’ve got to try all the different features, but I’ll get back to you with more info.

I’ve added books with all of these systems and I find it easiest to add books to LibraryThing, especially when dealing with manual adds.  LibraryThing was the only site to have any books by Lady Dorothy Mills, an author I collect.  Her books are very rare, and they only had 3 of 15 I own.  These systems are far from perfect, and the quality of the data is imperfect.  It would be great if everyone catalog the precise edition they owned, but that doesn’t happen.

Anobii, Shelfari and WeRead are probably best for people with newer books and people looking for more social interaction since they have the largest number of members.  They are slicker sites with more glitz than LibraryThing.  GoodReads is in the middle.  Google Books merely lets you tag books without any reporting features or social networking.  It is good for links to the web, and if you’re a complete Google user in general.

One of the fun things about adding books to LibraryThing is it tells me how many other members own the book when I add it to my collection.  For books by Lady Dorothy Mills, out of over a million users, I’m the only one that has any of her books.  I really like it when I find just a few people who also own the same book, like the 2 other people that own In Search of Paradise a biography of Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, the guys who co-wrote Mutiny on the Bounty.  Are those two people much like me?

JWH – 2/7/10

Repairing Broken iPhones

Everyone loves their iPhones, and until they drop their iPhone and smash the glass screen, they won’t know just how much they really love their iPhone and how much they can hate Apple and AT&T.  The iPhone isn’t engineered to be repaired, and its especially not designed for the average user to repair.  It could have been.  Until people get addicted to smart phones, and learn how easy it is to break them, and how expensive they are to replace, they’ll never ask why they can’t be repaired.  They should be easy to repair, but they aren’t.  Our throw-away society doesn’t promote that.  It’s a shame, because these elegant devices could have been easily engineered to allow owners to replace a broken screen, or a broken screen/LCD combo.  Actually, the glass touch screen and LCD should be one unit that could be quickly replaced with only a small screwdriver, for about $30-40, or at a repair shop for $60-70.

I’m a computer guy at work, so people tend to bring me their smart phones to configure for the Exchange server or ask for help and advice even though it’s not part of my job.  And some people have a knack for breaking their smart phones repeatedly.  The other day a young woman brought me her shattered iPhone and a repair kit she had bought online.  I told her I had no experience at repairing iPhones, couldn’t guarantee my work and iPhones weren’t designed to be opened by users.  She had seen several films on Youtube and urged me to try.  So I did – and we almost succeeded. 

It’s an extremely tedious process to replace the glass touch screen on an iPhone, and we succeeded, but unfortunately, in the process we damaged the LCD.  One online repair site kept telling us to use a hair dryer to soften the glue that holds the glass screen to the frame.  They should have warned us not to use the hair dryer before we had gotten the frame off the phone.  Here’s the best Youtube video we found.  It runs 5 parts.  Watch all 5 parts before thinking about doing this repair.  This video does cover the missing steps that other videos and web sites don’t cover, which is how to carefully remove the broken screen from the thin frame, and then how to remove all the old adhesive.  Even if you don’t need to repair an iPhone, these videos are an education in how smart phones are put together.

The iPhone I was working on was the third one this lady had dropped, and understandably AT&T wasn’t going to replace it.  They wanted $199 and two more years.  But since this woman is a poor graduate student, she couldn’t afford the price of replacement.  She started looking around the net and found various repair kits and videos.  Don’t be fooled, these are not easy and cheap solutions.  You can also shop around and find repair services that run $60-250 to repair an iPhone, including at your Apple Store for $199.  I would really advise using one of these services before going to the do-it-yourself route unless you are very patient, have great skills dealing with small parts, and are willing to risk failure.  We got everything back together and working but the LCD was blurry because of heat damage, so she had to order a replacement LCD. 

The young woman I was helping is buying a second touch screen now because the first one got a tiny crack in our first repair that got much larger in the second LCD repair, which she had found a Mac repair guy to help her with, and then got completely damaged in her day-to-day use.  I’m not sure these glass touch screen replacements are as sturdy as the original Apple screens.  She wants me to help her with the third repair, but I’m mentioning this because they teach another lesson.  If you start fixing iPhones, you’ll probably have to keep fixing them.  I’m urging the young woman to hone these skills herself if she remains poor and keeps breaking her phone. 

Another warning, it takes a lot of careful pressure to disassemble an iPhone and reassemble it, and you’re working with two very delicate parts:  the touch screen and the LCD.  If you break your iPhone regularly, developing the skills to replace the touch screen or LCD might be worth pursuing, otherwise, I’d recommend paying a service company to do the job and hopefully get a repair warranty.

Also the repairs are iffy at best because they require taking glued together parts apart, and then reassembling them with bits of two-side adhesive, and the results aren’t as solid as the original glued assembly.  They phones really were NOT meant to be repaired, but sadly they are easily broken.

The iPhone is a beautiful device on the outside, but on the inside its just a bunch of ordinary parts.  It’s a shame that it wasn’t designed in a modular fashion so replacing the screen/LCD only involved a few screws.  Ditto for the battery and memory.  If we’re going to save mother nature we need to build machines that last and are repairable.  The current design of the iPhone is obviously meant to sell more iPhones, and keep users tied to contracts.

What’s needed is a smart phone that’s completely modular in design so it can be easily repaired and upgraded, and one that isn’t tied to any phone service.  Phone and broadband data service is expensive because the cost of the phones are subsidized in the contracts.  We need to separate the phone from the service.  Remember when AT&T owned your household phones?**  Remember how cheap phones got once we got to own our own phones?  There’s no reason why smart phones should cost as much as they do other than that’s what the industry wants.  Cell phones are a commodity sold in the millions, so they should be cheap to make.  I’m hoping Android phones will bring down the price of the smart phone and the monthly cost of broadband service. 

I hope we can get phone makers to go green by making their phones repairable.  The iPhone I worked on should have had the touch screen and LCD as one solid piece that snaps onto the phone body, held in place by four tiny screws.  If the user breaks their phone, just buy that piece and replace it.  That way the phone could last years, making it a much greener device.

JWH – 2/6/10

**Kids, a long time ago phones were rented from Ma Bell, the affectionate name we gave AT&T, and when you cancelled your phone service you had to give back the phone.  This was before cell phones.  Most homes had only one phone, and it was tied to the wall with a stout wire.  Kids and parents would fight over sharing the phone.  Oh, and it came in one color, black.

Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge by Mike Resnick

“Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” is the Hugo and Nebula Award winning novella from 1994, that was produced as an audiobook two years ago by Audible Frontiers.  I read the story when it came out and remembered being impressed, but I just couldn’t remember the details, so I listened to audiobook version, beautifully  narrated  by Jonathan Davis, and now it’s etched into my brain again.  I wonder how much I’ll remember about the story in 16 years?  I hate that my mind is a sieve.  And maybe, since I’m writing a review here, that will further reinforce my memory.

“Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” is available to read online at Subterranean Press, and reprinted in these anthologies.  “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” is a fantasy allegory in science fiction drag about alien anthropologists finding seven artifacts at Olduvai Gorge that tell the story of extinct mankind.  Mankind had conquered the galaxy and the aliens both admired and hated us.  They wanted to know what drove humans to destroy everything we touched.  You can think of the recent film Avatar as an eighth story about homo sapiens’s impact on the galaxy.

I really hated the way Avatar painted humanity so thoroughly brutal and selfishly uncaring.  When I tell friends about this, they tell me that’s how they see humans too.  It’s certainly the way Mike Resnick paints us in “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge,” but he does it with more finesse than James Cameron.

The audio production of “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” runs two hours and twenty minutes and is seven short stories encased in a fictional frame.  Resnick infuses his firsthand knowledge of Africa into this tale, and uses Olduvai Gorge as the touchstone setting for the seven visions and the frame.  It works fantastically well on audio, and reminds me of a shorter version of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man.  I’ve always considered Bradbury the anti-science fiction science fiction writer because he fears the future, and sees so much horror in the nature of man.  “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” could be a homage to Bradbury.  I always like Mike Resnick’s prose because he’s better than most science fiction writers at blending emotion into his stories.  One of my all-time favorite short stories is his “Travels with My Cats.” [Also on audio at Escape Pod.]

I review a lot of science fiction, but the story review that gets the most hits is “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury.  My guess is the story is often taught in school, and if it wasn’t so long, I’d suggest teachers should replace “The Veldt” with “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge.”  Both are cautionary tales about the evil side of humanity, a perfect Rorschach test for young minds to contemplate our reality.  How do you judge humanity after reading “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge?”  Are we inherently flawed?  Are we evil?  Not only do we threaten all other life forms, we lean towards the self-destructive.  And if we’re not evil, are we just stupid, aggressive and unrelentingly unaware?

Robert A. Heinlein used to brag that mankind is the most dangerous animal around and any intelligent life on other planets should get out of our way.  There’s a lot of extinct species on this planet that would agree with him.  “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” agrees with this sentiment, but who is Mike Resnick warning?  I don’t think his message is to aliens from outer space.  Are we merely meant to accept this story at face value?  Or does Resnick expect us to smarten up?

JWH – 2/2/10

Books versus Ebooks

I love science fiction and futuristic ideas.  I love computers and neat gadgets.  I love reading.  So, you’d think I’d love ebook readers.  I’ve owned several, including a Kindle, but I’ve sold or given them away.  I’m still anxious to have another ebook reader, but I’m not so much waiting for the ultimate ebook reader as I’m waiting for the revolution in publishing that will create super-books that have to be read on an ebook reader.  Right now ebook readers have a few conveniences that might appeal to some bookworms, like being able to change the font size, carry many books around at once, going green and saving trees, but for the most part, reading an ebook isn’t different from reading an old fashion book.

What I want is an ebook like the magical books we see in Harry Potter movies, where the pages have moving photos and words and letters dance with animation.  I love reading about science and history and I believe that adding multimedia to the words I read would create a quantum leap in learning fun.  Actually, web pages are heading more in this direction than ebook pages.  Take for instance my blog here.  I can add videos, photos, maps, music to my page to spice it up.  I can link to other pages all over the web.  These additions are still clunky, so the page isn’t seamlessly animated like a book in a Harry Potter story, but I’m sure WordPress.com is working on that.

Last year I was at a book giveaway where I picked up several modern high school textbooks.  They were stunning productions, taking the potential of the printed page further than I’ve ever seen before.  No current ebook reader can come close to duplicating what they can.  If the iPad had a 15” screen it could, and if the layout was adapted, its 9.7” screen, it could theoretically compete well.  The iPad represents a new generation of ebook readers, and it has the potential for being a fantastic device.  Will it become the fabled Dynabook, we’ll have to wait and see.  Tablet computers have been around for awhile, but no one has really programmed the content to showcase the design.  The iPhone is a huge success because programmers maximized the design of their networked programs for the 3.5” screen.

Whether writers and publishers jump on the tablet ebook potential is a whole other story.  I was thinking about buying a Kindle 2 or a Sony ebook reader, but after seeing the iPad I doubt I will.  The iPad’s larger full color screen, able to show high definition video, play sound, and computer animation makes me think I could have a Harry Potter magical book.  But remember, the iPad is worthless without the content.  I’m surprised Steve Jobs didn’t commission a writer to produce an ebook that showcased the iPad’s real potential.  If I was just going to read novels, I’d get a Kindle.

I recently reviewed The Bible: A Biography by Karen Armstrong.  It has 34 pages of footnote citations.  I own this book in hardback and unabridged audio.  I’d like to have an iPad edition that has both the text and audio narration built in, and hyperlinks to the full pertinent portion of the texts to all the footnote references.  Armstrong summarizes the work of hundreds of individuals over thousands of years.  I’d like links to their original work (it should all be in the public domain).  Also, if her research for the book included documentaries and interviews, I’d like the videos and sound recordings added.

But most of all I’d want two extras that I haven’t seen before, even on the web.  First, since the book is about The Bible, I’d like her annotation of The Bible presented and for each verse I tap with my finger I’d want Armstrong’s text related to that passage, and a listing of links to all the people who offered commentary on that verse that Armstrong reviewed.  Second, I want a time-line.  Armstrong is summarizing thousands of years, so I’d like a year by year listing of when various portions of The Bible was written, related history happened, or commentary took place.  That way I could read the text of Armstrong’s book in three orders:  As it was published in print, in time order, and in Bible passage order.

I’m sure other people can think of other features to add to this super-book version.  For example, having a fun trivia type game to test me on content would be an another extra feature.  Hell, another cool idea just popped into my mind.  Since The Bible has spawned endless denominations of Judaism and Christianity, I’d like a family tree of denominations showing how each sect got started and by whom.  All the philosophers and theologians Armstrong mentions created a spider web of interconnected ideas, with many branches forming new churches.

Essentially what I’m asking for is what’s already in the book that Armstrong wrote and her notes, annotated with what she read and studied to write the book.  I’m just asking to see the same information from a variety of angles, and to follow different paths through the information.  For example, Armstrong gives us a taste for many Christian thinkers, like Origen, but because her book is short, she flies by these philosophers rather fast.  Including the Wikipedia entry for each person mentioned would also be helpful.  This is the second book I finished this month that mentions the Christian theologian and heretic Origen, the other being The Rise and Fall of Alexandria by Justin Pollard and Howard Reid.  Neither paint him as well as his Wikipedia entry.

This would not be practical as a printed book.  I’m not even sure if EPUB formatting can handle it.  But when publishers start selling books like this, then people will see the obvious value of an ebook reader like the iPad.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the iPad is special.  I think HP, Asus, Acer, Toshiba, Samsung, MSI and other computer makers will quickly take over the market and create iPad like devices that are better and cheaper.  They might all be called iPads, like all copiers are called Xerox machines.

Ebooks should revolutionize the textbook and non-fiction book industry.  Each book should have multiple ways to read through the content, and reading might take place with the eyes or ears or both.  Can you imagine a fully multimedia math book?  Or what about textbooks for studying French and Spanish?  What about a detailed history of astronomy?

So far I’ve been talking about super-books.  But what if a publisher took the 10 best books on a subject, like The Bible, and blended them together to for a super-super-book?  Certain books would have fantastic synergy is woven together.  This would be perfect for college courses too.  Also, use the same techniques to annotate fiction.  Imagine what could be done with On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

The reason why ebook readers haven’t been convincing buys to many bookworms yet, is because they haven’t presented the potential of Reading 2.0.  Or is it Reading 14.0 by now?

JWH – 1/31/10

Libraries in the Age of iPads

If everyone owned an iPad would we need libraries?  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating the demolition of libraries, but with the advent of the internet and ebooks talk about the death of newspapers, magazines and books get more common every year.  If we don’t need those physical objects anymore, why do we need a building and institution to maintain them?  Think about it.  If books, magazines and newspapers disappear from our houses and move into Kindles, Nooks, and iPads, why would we go to the library?  Why would we go to bookstores, new or used? 

Modern libraries are about more than books, patrons also check out movies, audiobooks, music, and periodicals.  But all of those media types are now available on the iPad.  I know older people who grew up with libraries will immediate protest, but remember, us older folk are a dying breed and the up and coming generations are gadget afflicted.

Libraries used to be storehouses of knowledge and librarians worked to collect and preserve the printed word.  That’s still true of academic libraries, but public libraries have moved into an era of supplying what their patrons want, so as soon as a book is ignored for a specific period of time, it gets jettisoned from the collection.  Most people think of libraries as free books, free movies, free music albums, and free magazines and newspapers.  I think a lot of people think we should have libraries to provide a cultural outlet for the poor.  But the internet provides more free stuff to read and watch.

The death of libraries is pretty much unthinkable now, but don’t be surprise when city bean counters start making suggestions about closing them.  I grew up  loving libraries, and even worked in public and academic libraries.  They don’t seem as crowded with patrons as they used be.  I hardly go to the library anymore myself, not since the internet.  I saw the video of Steve Jobs presenting the iPad and showing off its ebook features and it struck me that devices like the iPad will be the library of the future.  When I was growing up futurists would talk about having a handheld device with the Library of Congress in it.  We’re getting spookily close, aren’t we?

The book is evolving too.  When it escapes the limitation of the page, adding multimedia and hypertext the book will no longer fit on a library shelf.  Printed books, newspapers and magazines might become extinct, but imagine what will replace them.  There is no reason to make a distinction between newspapers and magazines anymore.  That might become true for books and novels too.  Newspapers used to be frequently published information printed on cheap paper.  Magazines and journals had longer periods between publication and were printed on better paper, suitable for long term storage in libraries. 

The electronic page is not limited by time, paper quality or cost of printing.  Newspapers and magazines use to be text plus photographs.  Electronic publication is text plus photographs, video, sound recording, animation and other multimedia.  Go look at the iPad video and tell me if kids will even want to go to the library or read books and magazines.  And what about you?

I like the name iPad, just one vowel different from the iPod, but many of my friends have expressed a dislike for the name, and some of my women friends tell me the name brings up bad connotations with them.  I think Steve Jobs should have named it the iLibrary.

JWH – 1/28/10

The Bible: A Biography by Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong presents a precise history of how The Bible was written and assembled and then she concisely chronicles how Jews and Christians have used The Bible for the last 2,000 years in her short volume, The Bible: A Biography, from Atlantic Monthly Press.  Armstrong’s narrative runs just 229 pages – it’s intense, scholarly, and very readable.  If there’s a better short one volume overview of The Bible let me know, but for now, this is the book I’ll recommend to anyone who wants to study The Bible in a historical context.

The Bible is not a single book, but an anthology of narratives written over hundreds of years, by many writers, with some text blended together by unknown editors from multiple earlier sources.  The books of The Bible are not always in chronological order, and most of the main characters are presented differently by various writers.  How do you sum up the most read, most written about, book in history?

To understand the scope of Karen Armstrong’s task, I thought I’d list pertinent Wikipedia articles.  Reading these articles will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of The Bible: A Biography.  Whether you are among the fundamental, faithful or unbelieving, The Bible is completely woven into the fabric of Western society and history.  The Bible is actually the Rosetta Stone between prehistory and history, between oral tradition and the dawn of writing.  Studying religious texts written down in the Iron Age reveals concepts first formulated in the Bronze age, giving clues to the childhood psychology of homo sapiens.

Take the time to read these articles even if you don’t buy Karen Armstrong’s book, but I really recommend her elegant digestion of this vast intellectual feast.  I was especially impressed with her whirlwind survey of how The Bible has been used to back so many different belief systems, and inspired so many philosophers and philosophies.

• The Bible
• Books of the Bibles
• Authors of the Bible
• Dating the Bible 
• Documentary hypothesis
• Biblical criticism
• Exegesis
• Midrash
• Jewish Commentaries on the Bible
• Christian Commentaries on the Bible
• Rabbinic literature
• Hermeneutics
• Biblical hermeneutics
• Higher criticism 

I read Armstrong’s book first, and now I’m going back researching all this stuff on Wikipedia.  I wish I had found a review like this one, telling me to read the Wikipedia articles before I read Armstrong’s book because I think I would have been even more impressed with her writing.  I just finished listening to the unabridged version of this book and I’ve already started back at the beginning and I’m now reading a hardback copy with my eyes.

Edward R. Hamilton Booksellers has the hardback edition remaindered for $5.95.

The Bible: A Biography is part of a series from Atlantic Monthly Press called Books That Changed the World.  Other books in the series are:

• The Republic by Plato
• The Prince by Machiavelli
• Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin
• Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
• The Qur’an
• The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
• The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
• On War by Clausewitz
• Das Kapital by Marx

JWH – 1/27/10

The Age of Wonder and Joseph Banks

I started reading The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes, but because each chapter features a different historical person, I decided to review the book chapter by chapter, as I read it, and discuss the biographies separately.  The Age of Wonder came out last year, getting glowing reviews.  I immediately bought it, but didn’t start reading it until after I saw it on several best books lists of 2009.  Chapter one starts off like gangbusters with a thrilling tale of Joseph Banks, an unknown historical figure to me, but after finishing the chapter, I wondered why he isn’t one of the more famous dudes in history.

Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) was a handsome Englishman that would have put Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy’s riches to shame.  Banks was wealthy enough to finance himself, and his assistants, as the botanist on James Cook’s first voyage around the world in 1768-1771, and he could be one of the many models for James Cameron’s Avatar, because Banks went totally native in Tahiti decades before Fletcher Christian, falling in love with sexual free island women, the Eden-like Tahitian culture, learning their language and ways, shocking his fellow crewmen on the Endeavor, and bringing back concepts of free love and earthly paradise to European society on his return.  By exploring new ideas about morals and behavior, Banks became a proto-anthropologist.  Joseph Banks became famous in a time when it was hard to become famous, when the only mass media were the newspaper and the recently invented general circulation magazine – literacy was far from universal.

Richard Holmes could have written a whole book on Joseph Banks the size of The Age of Wonder and it would have been riveting,  leaving his readers begging for more.  I know I wanted more, but when I went looking, the pickings were slim.  Patrick O’Brian, author of the popular Jack Aubrey-Stephen Maturin  sea novels, wrote Joseph Banks: A Life which I plan to buy, even though the reviews on Amazon have been less than enthusiastic.  Amazon also offers Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks: During Captain Cook’s First Voyage in H.M.S. Endeavour in 1768-71 to Terra del Fuego, Otahite, New Zealand, Australia, the Dutch East Indies, etc, but I don’t know if I’m hard core enough to read that book yet.   I really wish for a David McCullough biography of Banks, because I love reading the big predigested cerebral view of history, rather than reading contemporary journals and diaries myself.  Amazon also has Sex, Botany, and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks by Patricia Fara, which tempts me with the big picture, but not enough to buy yet because of limited reviews.

Banks claim to fame now, and in his own time, was more than just titillating adventure stories about getting his penis polished by South Sea babes.  Banks was the Internet Entrepreneur of his day, not for being rich, but for being part of a 18th century gang of geeks ushering in the new paradigm shift of science.  We think we live in exciting times because of the Internet Age, but is that really true?  What blows our minds today are but spring storms compared to the mental hurricanes of the Age of Enlightenment.  We debate freedom of information, they fought for personal freedoms, and dared to step away from God to discover science.  We’re excited about ebooks, but they were excited about real books becoming popular with the common man and woman.  We’re excited by Twitter and Facebook, but they were discovering scientific journals and the magazine.  We have Google, but Joseph Banks was promoting Carl Linnaeus and the classification of plant and animal life and building a natural history database.  Banks crawled the real world indexing its features.

We take too much for granted in the 21st century.  And we’ve all forgotten far too much about how we got here.  Few of us even have a glimmer of the real story.  Reading The Age of Wonder is a voyage of discovery into the 18th century where the foundation of modern mind was created.  Slowly, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been working my way backwards in time.  Growing up meant getting comfortable with the 20th century, but I’ve spent a lot of time exploring the 19th century in books, and only now at 58 am I starting to really push back into the 18th century.  I routinely flit up and down the timeline of history, and even prehistory, but I seldom get comfortable in any era for anything length of time.  Reading The Age of Wonder convinces me I need to make a major expedition into the 1700s.

Some websites to browse:

• Joseph Banks 1743-1820 at Plant Explorers
• The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks 1768-1771 (volume 1)
• The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks 1768-1771 (volume 2)
• The Papers of Sir Joseph Banks

JWH – 1/23/10

Being An Old Dog Learning New Tricks

I’ve been in my present programming job since 1987.  I’m a database programmer, but I’m not part of IT, but was hired by a college within the university where I work.  I was employed way back then to set up a Novell network and develop a multi-user dBase III system to shadow the university’s canned student information system.  In the mid-nineties, I rewrote everything in HTML and classic ASP for IIS and Microsoft SQL Server, and switched our network to Windows and TCP/IP.  I have cranked out hundreds of thousands of lines of custom code since.  Now our university IT department wants all us non-IT programmers to rewrite our code to meet IT standards that runs on their servers.  I’m totally behind that, because I know when I retire someone will have to maintain my code.

The trouble is, I’m 58 and this means I’ll have to learn a whole slew of new languages – XHTML 1.0  Strict, CSS 2.0, PHP, and JavaScript, new frameworks JQuery and CodeIgniter, switch from Textpad, a programming editor to Eclipse, an IDE, and they want me to learn generic SQL that works with an abstraction layer in case we switch backend databases.  Plus I’m switching web servers from ISS to Apache.  This is a lot of new stuff for an old dog to take in.  My very comfortable environment that I’ve lived and worked in for 15 years is now totally Alice in Wonderland.  It’s like moving to Paris and having to learn French.

I do believe this is good for me, especially for exercising my aging mental stamina, but I can feel that it’s pushing the limits of what my mind can handle.  I’m sure in several months I’ll be comfortable in the new paradigm, but for now I feel like I’m a couch potato going on the Biggest Loser.  I wonder if all this mental weight lifting and running, all this programming huffing and puffing, is going to kill me.

Now that I’m getting old, I know why old dogs don’t want to learn new tricks.  It’s so much easier to stay in the comfort zone of doing my old tricks.  What’s weird is I’m learning all this new technical stuff at the same time I’m becoming so forgetful in everyday life.  More than anything, I’m in a USE IT OR LOSE IT phase of life.  It feels like I’m surfing and the only thing I can remember is the wave I’m riding right now.

The famous urban legend is we only use 10% of our brains.  I’ve read about scientific experiments that disprove that.  One set of experiments had test subjects learn something new and test their retention ability, then after awhile, switched them to studying something different.  As they learned new stuff they forgot old stuff.  Other experiments mapped the brain with various scans.  There aren’t any unused portions.  What they learned is we all use our brains fully, but fully varies from person to person, and I’m guessing also varies at different times in our lives.  It’s like that circus act where a guy keeps 30 spinning plates all twirling at once.  When we’re young we can keep 25 things going at once, but as we get older, that number decreases.

Learning my new programming paradigm is like trying to be young again.  It’s fun and exciting, but this time around I realize I’m pushing my limits.  I can feel my limits in a way that I never imagined when I was young.  I wonder how far and how hard I can push those limitations, and for how long.

JWH – 1/20/10     

There’s No Such Thing As Free TV

In the early days of television it appeared the shows were free, just put up an antenna and watch your favorite programs for nothing.  But as we all know, we paid for our viewing by watching commercials.  Then came cable TV.  We paid a small fee to avoid the hassle of messing with antennas, but we still watched a lot of commercials.  However, this started the upward cost of watching television.  Cable providers slowly added more channels and raised their fees.  They even offered commercial free networks like HBO and Showtime, but at an even greater cost.  It’s not uncommon today to pay over $100 a month for cable or satellite access.  Then they charged even more for DVR boxes and services so we could skip over the commercials.

Now people are abandoning their cable/satellite services to save money and going retro by using antennas again, and getting over-the-air (OTA) HD television.  They supplement their viewing variety with Netflix, HTPCs and now DLNA compliant devices.  Getting TV from the Internet gives the illusion that we’ve finally found a way to get free TV.  Don’t count on it.  We still pay $25-50 a month for broadband Internet access, and we still watch a lot of commercials.  And if the movie and television industry has their way, they’ll find new ways to charge us for watching our favorite shows over the Internet.

Netflix, at $8.99 for 1 disc service and streaming video via a Roku box is probably the cheapest way to get the most TV watching bang for the buck.  Now Netflix is under attack by the Hollywood Studios.  As the Business Week article points out, studios don’t like the all-you-can-eat streaming pricing.  They want a cut of the action for each movie you watch, because they consider streaming equal to cable/satellite pay-per-view movies, that cost viewers $4 a pop.  And the studios, like Warner Brothers, want to slow the access to movies that Netflix rents because Netflix is cutting into sales of DVD/BD discs.  I know I don’t buy discs anymore, so I can understand this.  And if you haven’t noticed lately, a lot of streaming content on Netflix started showing expiration dates.  Bummer.

Generations of television viewers who grew up after the Baby Boomers don’t remember “free” TV.  Every house had an antenna sprouting from the roof and you didn’t have to pay a monthly bill to watch your shows.  Of course, we didn’t have the power to skip commercials, and we only had 3-4 channels in our nightly lineup.  We had NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies showing new to broadcast films, and each station had a library of old films they could show at odd hours of the day, usually in the middle of the night.  Life was simple then.  Of course, so were the shows.

Decades later, television shows and movies cost untold millions to make, far more than what broadcast commercials and movie tickets can finance.  Movie makers want to maximize their profits by selling their films several times, in a standard tiered released system where they get the maximum revenue at each stage:

• Theatrical releases
• DVD/BD sales
• Pay-per-view
• Premium cable (HBO, Showtime, etc)
• Basic cable
• Broadcast networks
• [Netflix streaming?]

So where in the hierarchy do they release titles to Internet streaming?  And if DVD/BD sales are hurt by rentals, when do you release titles to Netflix?  Right now, I pay the most for movies because I watch a lot of flicks on the big screen.  I could probably save $500 a year by waiting for movies to come to Netflix.  This is one reason why I don’t care about getting cable TV anymore, or when movies get to Netflix.  But if you aren’t big on going to the movies, this does matter.

The trouble for movie makers is Netflix is so damn efficient and cheap.  Even without streaming, for $8.99 a month you can watch about a 100 movies a year, and with streaming, your selection is overwhelming.  Who needs to watch more?  And if you count that Netflix rents/streams TV shows and documentaries, that makes $8.99 a month the cheapest form of TV watching other than OTA viewing.  Sports is the main thing missing, and probably why more people don’t give up cable/satellite.

Now Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is catching on, allowing you to stream video content off the Internet directly to your TV, without using a computer.  Geeks have been hooking up their computers to their TV for years, but it’s not an elegant consumer oriented solution.  All the major TV manufacturers are starting to build DLNA technology directly into their TVs, meaning you won’t need a Roku box to stream Netflix and Amazon videos.  Each manufacturer can choose which streaming system to support, or in some cases, they can support PC servers like PlayOnTv that will talk to your TV directly, or via your Wii, PS3 or Xbox 360, so you can watch Hulu and other emerging Internet TV networks.

Essentially, online TV networks like Hulu.com, CastTV and TV.com are ways to get broadcast and cable network shows free off the Internet, or free if you ignore your ISP bill.  But when content providers realize that these services will undercut services higher up the economic viewing ladder, will they continue to offer their content for free?  Will there be more commercials, or even subscriptions required?

I installed PlayOnTV on our Wii and played around with Hulu.  The Wii remote made a decent TV remote and worked well with the Hulu menu system.  This bit of testing provided an epiphany for me.  Internet TV is like cable TV – too many channels and too much to see!  Since I’ve given up cable TV and lived for a few months with just ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and Netflix, I’ve learned to love simplicity.  I thought I wanted more documentaries which Internet TV might offer me, but it’s not worth the hassle of finding them. 

I like the higher quality of watching Blu-ray discs, or even DVD quality, over watching Internet TV quality.  Broadcast HD seems better than cable HD, and Blu-ray 1080p is even better yet.  I’ve gotten used to pristine picture quality, and for me at least, visual quality is better than viewing quantity.  I don’t mind waiting for BD discs to come in the mail.  I know my viewing habits aren’t typical.  My wife is a channel surfer and loves to see what’s on by flipping through hundreds of channels.  If you’re like her, then you’ll need to pay for cable/satellite, or spend the money for Internet TV options.

I pay $16.99/month to Netflix for 2 discs out at a time with Blu-ray.  That’s as cheap as I can get while getting the most TV watching for my dough.  If the movie studios force Netflix to charge more for streaming, I’ll live without streaming.  I’m a little annoyed that Blu-ray discs cost more to buy and rent than DVDs when they look physically identical, but the extra visual quality is worth it to me.  I don’t mind watching Big Love or Weeds months after their HBO and Showtime broadcasts.

TV isn’t free, but it doesn’t have to be expensive either.  How much you pay for TV depends on how impatient you are to see new shows and films.  As I get older I’ll probably stop going to the theater as much, because paying $10 to see a movie the first week it’s out won’t be as important.  I know a lot of old guys who stopped going to the movies altogether.  If you’re young, restless, twitchy and impatient, then you’ll probably love flipping through 300 cable channels and won’t mind paying $100 a month for that pleasure.

When I heard Warner Brothers wanted Netflix to wait a whole month before renting movies that had just gone on sale, I laughed.  At 58, a month is nothing.  To a teenager or twenty-something, waiting a month is probably unbearable.  I’m still finding new movies from the 1930s to watch, and I’ve seen thousands of them already.  I’d much prefer Netflix maintaining it’s low rates than getting movies sooner.  Let the young finance the movie and television industry – if you’re patient you can save your money for retirement.

JWH – 1/17/10

Songs Rated 10

I am home today because of a snow day, and I felt deliciously sleepy, so I put on my Songs Rated 10 at Lala.com, turned up the volume, kicked back in the La-Z-Boy, covered up with a warm fuzzy blanket and let my mind float away with the music.  I absolutely LOVE listening to my favorite tunes when I’m half asleep, drifting in and out of slumber land.  I play the music loud so it constantly jerks me back to near wakefulness, usually as each song begins, and then I slowly fall back into unconsciousness.  This is as close as I can get to listening to music high anymore – it’s been decades since I  mixed music and smoke.

My Songs Rate 10 playlist are cuts that I can listen to anytime, in any order, and repeated endlessly.  My lullabies currently represent 47 songs from various genres dated from 1965-2009.  Click on the link and you can see and even play the list.  This is the magic of Lala.  They let anyone play a song once for free, so it’s a great site for sharing music.  I wonder if anyone else in the world has this particular list of 47 songs?

These songs resonate in my mind in a way I can’t comprehend.  Somehow these songs are on the same frequency as my emotions because when I play them they make my feelings well up and become highly sensitive to the music’s words and notes.  Their rhythms stimulates my thoughts, their melodies flow around my synapses freeing old memories.  My mind releases random images stored away in neural chemistry that float to the surface of my dreamy consciousness.  I’ve often thought this is the state of mind I want to be in when I die, so I’d just drift away, returning to the blackness of nothingness while my awareness floats between two notes.

JWH – 1/8/10