Walt at Random

I was a member of LITA, the Library and Information Technology Association, before there was a LITA–back when it was ALA’s Information Science and Automation Division (ISAD), with JOLA, the Journal of Library Automation, as its journal. I joined ISAD in 1975.

I was fairly active in the division for some time. Here’s what I find in my vita, in reverse chronological order:

LITA Publications Committee: Chair, 2008-2009.

LITA Top Technology Trends: “Trendspotter,” 1999-2005, 2007

LITA/Library Hi Tech Award Committee: chair, 1997-1998

LITA Nominations Committee: chair, 1995-1996; member, 1999-2000

LITA Vice-President/President-Elect, 1991-1992; President, 1992-1993; Past President, 1993-1994

LITA Executive Committee: member, 1990-1994

Task Force to Appoint Chair of LITA 1992 National Conference: chair, 1990

LITA Board of Directors: director-at-large, 1988-1991

Information Technology and Libraries: informal LITA Newsletter liaison to Editorial Board, 1986-1987; ex officio member of Editorial Board, 1988-1994; member, Editorial Board, 1994-1995, 1999-2002

LITA Newsletter: editor, 1985-1994

LITA/Gaylord Awards Committee: member, 1984-1985 and 1988-1989

Programmer/Analysts Discussion Group: founded, 1981; chair, 1981-1983

RTSD/LITA/RASD Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information Committee [MARBI]: RLG liaison, 1980-1987; LITA appointee to committee, 1985-1987

Technical Standards for Library Automation Committee (TESLA): Observer/participant, 1975-1978; member, 1978-1982; chair, 1980-1981

And now I’m done. In 2011, I won’t be a LITA member. It seems highly unlikely that I’ll rejoin. Chances are, I would have left by now if I wasn’t a former LITA president.

I suspect the “first straw” toward my leaving was when the LITA Board enacted a substantial dues increase, to $65, the highest divisional dues at the time, without a membership vote (every previous dues increase had involved a membership vote).

But I stayed around a little longer–even after my working status was such that LITA cost me more than ALA did.

This fall, I graduated to ALA’s special category for continuing members who were ALA members for at least 25 continuous years and no longer earn livings in librarianship. The dues are really tough to beat. That encouraged me to look at LITA again… and, well, I’m out.

Sorry, but I really don’t get much out of Information Technology and Libraries. My attempts to nudge them toward Gold OA status (one reason I agreed to be PubCom chair 2008-2010, and my failures were one reason I resigned after one year) had no impact whatsoever, as far as I can tell.

Sorry, but I’m not thrilled about the publishing program with Neal-Schuman, particularly not the ten-short-books-at-a-time-for-high-prices “set” thing going on now.

It was a good 30 years or so, and the last five weren’t all that bad. But it just doesn’t speak to me any longer.

And, given the role of technology in contemporary libraries, maybe I wasn’t entirely kidding when I noted that ALA doesn’t have a Library Electricity Association.

Caveat

I am not at all suggesting that anybody else should leave LITA. If you find the programs or the publications or the interest groups or the committees or the national meeting or the journal worthwhile, by all means, make the most of them.

It’s not LITA, it’s me. I’ll miss the LITA Happy Hour (if and when I go to ALA at all, and that’s pretty clearly unlikely to be a regular 2x/year occurrence), since the overpriced drinks (LITA arranges it–it doesn’t and shouldn’t pay for it) were balanced with one of few chances to touch base with a lot of colleagues at once, but that’s the way it goes.

The special news first: Today (November 30, 2010), you can still get 25% off any or all of my books at Lulu. Just enter the code CYBER305 at checkout. It’s Lulu’s discount–I still see the same return, so we’re both happy.

That means that, through the end of today, disContent: The Complete Collection is only $37.50; tomorrow, it’s back to $50. You can also pick up The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008, which will soon go out of print, for $15 (or $7.50 for the PDF), or But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009 for the same $15 paper, $7.50 PDF. For that matter, if you’re so inclined, Open Access and Libraries would be $13.12 today, less than my copy of this 519-page paperback cost me. (That book’s PDF version is already free, and 25% off $0 is still $0.)

For that matter, what better time to acquire paperback versions of Cites & Insights–I’d already discounted them 20% (to $40 each) through ALA Midwinter 2011, and this one-day discount should bring that down to $30, which is a great deal. The 2010 volume is just out; the same price should also apply for the massive 2009 volume (longest ever, a record I hope stands for a while), the 2008 volume; the 2007 volume with its bonus Cites on a Plane non-issue (not available anywhere else), and the 2006 volume. And, you know, my very first (and most successful) self-published book, Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change, is only $18.75 today (or $12 PDF).

Heck, just go to Cites & Insights Books and buy them all. If you happen to be part of the Driver, Cockerton, Sweet, Wilkinson, Wiltfong, Higgins, Edmunds, Joyce, Saxe, Symmons, Gerow, Symons, Vivian, Eva, Rodda, McQuaid, or Spafford family, you might even want to pick up one of the family ancestry books my wife’s published–for less than we paid for our copies!

Ads Around Content: Pushing the Limits

That’s the title for the June 2001 “disContent” column. Here’s the start of the column; you’ll find the rest in the book.

We all know that “free” only goes so far. Somehow, somewhere, someone’s paying for the stories, organization, and infrastructure that make Web sites work. That’s true of any medium, and most of us cope with the tradeoffs fairly well. I expect to see ads on most Web sites that don’t come from government agencies, educational institutions, charitable organizations, companies, or people with strong interests. I expect to see ads in most magazines and newspapers, to watch them on most TV channels, and to hear them on most radio stations.

I remember a comment from some media guru that all media consisted of “enough content to wrap around the advertising,” and thought how sad it was that the commentator had never read a book, listened to a CD, or watched a DVD. At the same time, I understood what he was saying about free media: Those who pay the bills call the tune, while the rest of us look for a tune we find appealing.

Is there a Magic Number?

When is enough too much? At what point does a Web site (or any other medium) change from an ad-supported content site to a pile of ads with a little content thrown in? I know the limits vary with different users. I suspect the limits involve not just percentage but intrusiveness. I might not have written this column if one of my bookmarked sites hadn’t gone over the edge—so far over the edge that I deleted the bookmark.

Don’t forget the 25%-off code, good today only: CYBER305.

If you want to buy The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008, the first really broad study of liblogs and the only one that includes an alphabetic set of individual blog profiles, act soon.

The book, now discounted to $20 print, $10 PDF, will go out of print the same day that The Liblog Landscape 2007-2010 is published. I’m not sure just when that will be. It will not be before December 6, 2010, and it’s likely to be some time during December 2010, but that’s as close as I can come.

Status: Chapters 2-11 are written and revised. I’m done with final revisions and copyfitting for Chapters 2-5 and, as a result, have about half of Chapter 1 written. I expect to do final revisions and copyfitting for Chapters 6-11 this week, revise Chapter 1, do some experiments on the extra “large graphs” document that will be available to book purchasers (do I do two 4.5×7.5″ graphs per page, or do I do one 7.5×10″ graph per page?)…and maybe start assembling the book and indexing blog appearances. Once the index is done, all I need to do is prepare a cover and upload the book. Depending on everything else (end of month stuff, reading, relaxing, etc.), this could take another one to four weeks.

Note that the new book will not have blog profiles, partly because that’s just not practical when 1,304 blogs are involved. But Still They Blog does have blog profiles, including brief comments from yours truly, but the profiles are not in alphabetic order.

Save 25% on this and other C&I books

If you buy today or tomorrow (that is, by the end of November 29, 2010), you can use the coupon code CYBER305 CYBER25 to save 25% on your order (up to $185 total savings). What a great time to stock up on the limited edition casebound and the C&I annual volumes!

The first time I held a hard disk in my hands–well, a removable device that contained a hard disk–was around 1977, when we installed a Datapoint multiterminal system in UC Berkeley’s serial processing department. (I wrote the timesharing monitor and data entry software and oversaw the system; that’s indirectly how I met my wife, so I count it among my greatest successes.) The removable disk was a 12″ round Winchester cartridge, maybe two inches tall (my memory is vague), and I believe each cartridge cost several hundred dollars. I believe it held 10 megabytes, but it might have been 40. It was a well-priced miracle, as was the Datapoint in general (running three terminals off a “minicomputer” that was a Z80 at 2MHz with 128K RAM, but also with Datapoint’s remarkable Databus operating system and ARCnet network).

If you had suggested to me at that point that I would some day not only use but own a one terabyte hard disk system, I would probably have laughed (you might have had to explain what a terabyte was first).

Coming forward to 1984-1986

I started writing what became “Common Sense Personal Computing” in Library Hi Tech in 1985, and published Common Sense Personal Computing: A Handbook for Professionals in 1986. In the first article in that extended series, I tried to suggest comparable system prices for a variety of personal computers, an interesting task since so many computers at the time were priced without needed peripherals. The article was based on June-July 1984 prices: that was when IBM dropped its prices by about 25% and Apple “finally dropped the IIe price to a plausible level.”

If you’ve forgotten or are too young to remember PCs in 1984, many of them didn’t have hard disks at all–including the IBM PC itself, which sold for $3,000 to $4,000 once you included a monochrome monitor and two 360K diskette drives (along with a 4.77mHz 8088, 128K RAM, a display adapter, and a dot matrix printer). That IBM PC ran “PC-DOS,” IBM’s version of MS-DOS–and cost just about the same as an Apple IIe + CP/M card ($3,000 to $3,600 with a 1.25mHz 6502, 128K RAM and two 140K diskette drives, an Apple monitor, Gemini dot matrix printer and some software–but a chunk of that money was for the “CP/M card,” a more powerful Z80A computer on a card with its own RAM). Remember the early Compaq “portable” computers? $3,500 to $4,000 for a 4.77mHz 8088 with 128K RAM and a built-in 9″ monochrome screen–and, yep, two 360K diskette drives.

Ah, but I did have two systems that make it possible to estimate what a hard disk actually cost. The Morrow MD2 with 4mHz Z80A, 64K RAM, two 184K diskette drives, 12″ display, the Star Gemini dot matrix printer I was quoting as part of most of these systems and a whole bunch of high-quality software (WordStar, LogiCalc, Correct-It [back then, spellcheckers were separate programs], Personal Pearl database, PILOT and two BASICs) cost $1,460 to $1.720. But there was also the Morrow MD11 (my second PC, actually), which differed in two ways: It had 128K RAM…and it had a huge 11MB hard disk (and a single 360K diskette). It also cost $3,300–at least $1,600 more. I’m guessing that at least $1,000 of that was for the hard disk. So let’s say $90/megabyte for a slow internal hard disk in 1984.

By 1986, you could buy an internal 20MB hard disk for as little as $600, although most name-brand drives went for $800 or more; an external 20MB drive would run around $900. So let’s say $30/megabyte for internal, $45/megabyte external. (At that point, ads for IBM PCs showed around a $400 differential between those with 10MB hard disks and those that had two diskette drives, or $40/megabyte.)

By 1989, you could buy a Seagate ST251-1 40MB drive for $439–internal disks were already down to $11/megabyte.

Remember, these are megabytes. A 1TB drive has the same capacity as 25,000–twenty-five thousand–40MB drives.

(Almost since the beginning, hard drive capacities have been quoted in decimal form. A 1TB drive is “actually” about 930 gigabytes, if by “gigabyte” you mean 1,024 megabytes, where a megabyte is 1,024 kilobytes and a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes. And of course there was at one point a class action lawsuit over the “missing” capacity in hard disks.)

Here it is almost 2011…

OK, admittedly this was a Black Friday price, but still: Western Digital WD Elements 1TB Portable Hard Disk, WDBABV001BBK. One terabyte of NTSF-formatted disk space with a USB 2.0 connector, powered by the USB port (no power cord or external power supply). 5400RPM. No bloatware, so you get the full 1TB.

At Target. $69.

The beast is 3″ wide, 4.4″ long, 0.7″deep. Amazon says it weighs 12oz; I’d have guessed a little lighter. It came in the best packaging I’ve seen for this kind of device: Cardboard box not much bigger than the drive, two tiny plastic protectors at either end, and a plastic bag–probably less than an ounce of packaging, and both the cardboard and the little protectors are recyclable. The high-security seal? A peel-off circle. No muss, no fuss, one minute to open and one more to install.

It’s sitting here on my desk (I did a full image backup yesterday: took maybe half an hour; Windows7 includes System Image Backup software in all versions; now I only have 850GB available). It’s a cute little box. And it has ONE TERABYTE of storage. Which cost me $0.0757 per gigabyte or .00757 cents per megabyte, if you include sales tax (9.75% here). Oh, and Target printed out a $10-off-on-$100-purchase coupon, good for the next couple of weeks, so you could say this only cost $65 including sales tax. That does include the case and the circuitry for USB-powered operation.

I dunno. Maybe I’m getting old. This seems like a miracle. It’s also, to be sure, a whole lot more disk space than I’m likely to need unless I start doing a lot of photography or video editing–I mean, if I wiped out all the Windows checkpoints, I’d probably have 175GB free on my 250GB notebook hard disk. (All of my data files, excluding the MP3 files I could always rerip from CD, fit quite nicely in a 3.7GB backup on an 8GB flash drive. Text and spreadsheets just don’t use much storage space.)

But there it is: in 21 years, the price for hard disk storage dropped from $11/megabyte to $0.000757/megabyte. Put another way, 11 years ago disk storage cost 145 thousand times as much as it does now.

But that’s wrong–in two ways

It’s wrong first because portable (USB-powered) hard disks are inherently more expensive than wall-powered external drives and internal drives.

My brother was at the same Target a couple of hours earlier. He picked up the last of 39 Western Digital 2TB external hard disks. For the same price: $69 (not $69.99, but $69). So he was getting storage, including tax, for less than four one-thousandths of a cent per megabyte.

Yes, those are Black Friday prices–but a quick look online shows that you can buy a WD external 2TB hard disk for as little as $89, or a higher-speed 1.5TB internal hard drive for $70 (all drives are Western Digital for consistency, and the $70 is from Amazon)–so that’s somewhere between 4.4 and 4.6 cents per gigabyte, or less than five one-thousandths of a cent per megabyte.

It’s also wrong, of course, because you can’t buy a one-megabyte drive for five one-thousandths of a cent or a one-gigabyte drive for a nickel. The cheapest hard disk I found at Amazon was $37, an 80GB 7200RPM Western Digital; Fry’s had nothing under $40. Basically, you’re still going to pay $30 or more for an internal drive and probably $40 or more for an external drive.

Still, it’s amazing to think of a price change of 140,000:1 in just over two decades–for a disk that’s probably quieter (it seems to be silent) and faster than that 40GB disk was in 1989.

The book: iCon: Steve Jobs, the greatest second act in the history of business. By Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon, published 2005.

I figured the first word in the title was a play on icon, not some “con” indication, given that Jeffrey S. Young is a founding editor of Macworld and wrote the “classic hagiobiography” Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward. At worst, you figure the book will try to make Jobs’ fairly consistent behavior toward colleagues, friends and competitors (from the time he screwed Wozniak out of several hundred dollars by flat-out lying to him and his initial refusal to admit he’d fathered a daughter forward) some set of minor flaws wholly outweighed by his magnificence–after all, even the jacket copy calls Jobs in the early Apple era “avatar of the computer revolution” and calls him “the most influential figure of the age–a master of three industries: movies, music, and computers” and “the Digital King.”

What I got in the book is more interesting than what I expected–and it really appears to be two different books.

The first book, which takes up the first 230 pages and runs through Jobs’ triumphs at Pixar, is excellent: Well written, well edited, reasonably well balanced given the writers, mostly covering territory I’d already seen covered elsewhere but with a fair amount of panache. Yes, there’s too much discussion of Disney’s internal problems for a book that’s supposedly about Jobs, but that’s OK.

Then there’s Part Three, Defining the Future, the last 90-odd pages. It’s a flat-out mess: Badly written, with constantly shifting tenses, repetition and more; apparently unedited; veering into pure Jobs worship before too long. (Note that the book came out after the iPod and before the iPhone.) The writers seem to predict that the Mac Mini would restore Apple’s rightful dominance in the computer marketplace, that Pages would destroy Microsoft Word, and that “Steve Jobs is going to best Bill Gates”–that’s a direct quote, and it’s the full sentence. Oh, and that the flaws of “our heroes” aren’t important: “it’s not the flaws we need to remember but the achievements.”

Why such a disconnect between the polish of the first 240 pages and the fanboy draft mode of the last 91? I’m not sure. A few chapters deal with events within a year of the book’s publication, and may simply have been rushed to completion. Otherwise, I just don’t know. I do know this: I really felt as though I was reading a different book by different authors–and I was disappointed. Not because they wind up with a fatuous “Steve Conquers All” finale, but because the book falls apart in the final chapters.

Just for fun, I looked at reviews of the book available via Worldcat and on Amazon. I should not have been surprised: Most reviews seem to be by people for whom Steve Jobs Can Do No Wrong, and savage the writers for including the details of his earlier years, some of them even seeming to suggest that these are vicious lies by monstrous writers out to slander The Jobs.

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Updated 3:50 p.m. 11/27: “Page” corrected to “Pages” in antepenultimate paragraph (how often do you get to use that word?). Thanks to Dorothea S. for pointing out the typo.

Before you write a comment informing me that I’ve made one of the most boneheaded grammatical errors…I haven’t. I know exactly when you do and don’t use an apostrophe between “it” and “s” and used it quite precisely in this case.

This case? The May 2001 “disContent” column, one of the 73 you’ll find in disContent: The Complete Collection. Did I mention that this limited edition beautiful 6×9 hardbound (casebound) book is available now?

Here’s the beginning of that column:

Sometimes an item in the press can push you over the edge. The following item in the December 26, 2000 [Inside] (the print magazine) served as the trigger for this month’s hunk of discontent: “Sony markets content. Sony markets hardware that plays Sony content. Now Sony provides a virtual space where the devoted can share their passion for All Things Sony…” There’s more, but the first two sentences told me that it’s time. That is, it’s time to say that only middlemen buy content.

Sony manufactures and markets motion pictures and sound recordings. Sony also manufactures and markets devices to play back sound recordings, television programs, and motion pictures converted to analog or digital video form—and another range of devices to create and manipulate video and sound recordings, as well as forms of digital data. In general, Sony does not make hardware that favors Sony sound and video over other suppliers (MiniDisc and SACD may be temporary exceptions).

Sony does not market content. I have never seen a Sony ad that urges me to “Go buy some Sony content.” But then, I’ve never gone into Tower and said, “I want $100 worth of content.” Neither, I would suggest, has anybody else.

To read the rest of the column, beginning with the subhead “There: Only Words.”…

Sucker Money, 1933, b&w. Dorothy Davenport & Melville Shyer (dirs.), Mischa Auer, Phyllis Barrington, Earl McCarthy, Mona Lisa. 0:59.

The opening titles call this an exposé of phony psychics—but it’s really a remarkably slow-moving B movie. Newspaper editor sees an interesting help-wanted ad, tells reporter to go undercover on what might be a human interest story. The job turns out to be one of the actors in a swami’s theatricals, as the swami works to con marks out of big money, then move on.

We get danger, hypnotism, lots of nonsense, a swami who’s fond of killing as many associates as possible, and an eventual happy ending. In the process, we also get some absurd acting and one of the most lethargic suspense flicks I’ve ever seen. Very charitably, $0.75.

The Chase, 1946, b&w. Arthur Ripley (dir.), Robert Cummings, Michele Morgan, Steve Cochran, Peter Lorre. 1:26 [1:22]

Down-on-his-luck navy vet, standing outside a café unable to afford a meal, finds a lost wallet at his feet. Has a meal—then, seeing the card for the wallet’s owner, returns it to a posh Miami house where two suspicious servants eventually lead him to the owner. The owner’s a tough guy, a successful criminal, who’s impressed with the vet’s honesty and takes him on as a chauffeur (firing his existing chauffeur). On the first drive, the thug shows off his trick car: He can flip a switch and take over control of the accelerator from the back seat, in this case running it up to 110MPH and seemingly racing to cross the tracks ahead of an oncoming train—before suddenly stopping.

The thug’s wife (I guess successful criminals who dress nicely are mobsters, not thugs) is desperate to leave him, enlists the chauffeur to take her to Havana…and she’s killed there, with the murder pinned on the chauffeur. There’s a complex chase…and we find out that it’s all a hallucination/dream…or at least part of it is. The vet takes a whole bunch of pills and calls his Navy doctor.

There’s more plot after that, and a happy ending of sorts. It’s an interesting piece of noir, with Lorre doing a good job as the thug’s sidekick and Cummings good in a non-comedy role. Unfortunately, the print’s frequently bad enough to be nearly unwatchable in night scenes, the missing four minutes could be significant, the romance makes little sense and the ending’s a little too easy. On balance, I’ll give it $1.25.

Woman in the Shadows (orig. Woman in the Dark), 1934, b&w. Phil Rosen (dir.), Fay Wray, Ralph Bellamy, Melvyn Douglas, Roscoe Ates, Ruth Gillette, Joe King, Granville Bates. 1:09.

As we begin, a man’s getting out of prison—with the warden saying he probably shouldn’t have been there anyway, and he needs to watch his temper. The parolee (Bellamy) gives back the money the prison provides on release—and adds some of his own, for whatever good purposes the warden finds. The man, who hit somebody in a fight and was in prison for three years for manslaughter because the other person died, is going back home to live in his deceased father’s cottage and stay out of trouble.

The story seems mostly to be about attitudes. The sheriff thinks any ex-con is a criminal and to be avoided, with his word meaning nothing. The sheriff and police think that a single woman (Wray) who’s beautiful and tried to make a living as a singer is essentially a prostitute—and her word means nothing. And, of course, a degenerate wealthy young man (Douglas) is the Pride of the Community, and his word is worth everything. A lawyer starts out by pawing his client and booking her into an adjacent room at a motel. Oh, and police are generally both incompetent and fully willing to violate anybody’s rights.

The heart of the story comes in the last seven minutes, which makes for some odd pacing. It ends happily, I guess. Great cast, some good performances, decent print, but I found the whole somewhat unsatisfactory. (By the way, the longest IMDB review is flat-out wrong, with its “shady gangster and on the run moll.”) On balance, $1.25.

The Scar (orig. Hollow Triumph), 1948, b&w. Steve Sekely (dir.), Paul Henreid, Joan Bennett, Eduard Franz, Leslie Brooks. 1:23.

Here’s the setup for this noir mystery: A bright guy named Muller—medical education, all that, but a habitual criminal—gets out of prison, with a job reference and expectation by the warden that he’ll be back. He immediately contacts his crooked colleagues and insists on setting up a casino heist. It doesn’t go quite as planned. Although Muller and one accomplice get away with $200 grand (or something like that), four others are captured and give up his name. The casino owner’s known as someone who never gives up when he’s crossed.

Muller goes to LA and takes the job, such as it is…and, delivering a parcel, is recognized. But he’s recognized as someone else, the psychiatrist Dr. Bartok, and when the person (a dentist in the same building) sees him full-face, he sees the one difference: Bartok, otherwise an exact double, has a large scar on his face. Muller also encounters Bartok’s secretary, who obviously had something going with Bartok.

After Muller encounters a couple of the casino owner’s hoods, he decides to become Bartok. He romances the secretary and gets some of Bartok’s voice records; he also takes a picture of Bartok so he can create his own scar. Except that the photo store screwed up doing the enlargement—flipping the photo.

Ah, but nobody notices—including the secretary, patients, the dentist and Bartok’s girlfriend. (Muller’s killed Bartok to assume his identity, naturally.) And so it goes, right up until the climax, which is a slight twist and has to do with Bartok’s own considerable failings.

An odd story but an interesting one, well played by Henreid as Muller and Bartok and Bennett as the secretary, with a strong supporting cast and excellent, subtle lighting and photography. (For what it’s worth, a 28-year-old Jack Webb is in the movie—for about two minutes in a tiny uncredited part as one of the hoods.) I wouldn’t call it great, but it’s quite good and the print’s consistently very good. Worth $1.50.

Have you ordered your copy of disContent: The Complete Collection yet? I could take this either of two ways:

1. It would make a great Christmas present for the econtent mavens in your life.
2. Depending on how you think of my writing, you’d get all the turkeys from the set of columns, which won’t be available anywhere else…just a week or two after Thanksgiving.

Of course, the real reasons are that purchases will help me keep writing & researching…and that it’s a great hardbound book, quite possibly the last hardbound book I’ll ever publish

Here’s the first couple of paragraphs of another early column. For the whole thing, you need to buy the book–and I would note that, should Iris actually prepare that (German) bibliography of bibliography of bibliographies, it would be a perfect item for Cubed (or, rather, Cubed‘s offspring, Metametameta…). And a MARC record (or RDA resource or whatever) on the metametabibliography would be an incredibly rare meta-to-the-fourth-power.

Cubed: Media about Media about Media

A Note on the Following:

Dated March 10, 2001—and apparently a draft version—a press release and attachment were found by an acquaintance in mid-May 2001, discarded somewhere in Silicon Valley. I’ve omitted the contact names and Web addresses because none of them seem to work.

Well, no, that’s a lie. Five paragraphs of this column are factual (right after “Media about Media”). Otherwise, think of it as a bad dream after reading a little too much content about content…

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Coming soon to a newsstand, Web site, or cable channel near you: Cubed—media about media about media. Such media are long overdue, given the explosion of media about media. ThriceRemoved.com (a subsidiary of Triple Whammy Media) is building the true media of the future—media that take the next step in using distance to save time.

What can I say? Buy the book!

I just don’t get it. Which is nothing new.

What don’t I get? The thunder of voices saying not only that they all use Netflix streaming (or Hulu) instead of DVD and Blu-ray, but that everybody should. (Well, some of these voices just mention DVD, either saying that Blu-ray is a fraud or simply ignoring it.)

And, in many cases, asserting that there’s no difference in picture quality between streaming through any ordinary broadband and DVD/Blu-ray.

It’s your choice

So far, it’s your choice. Netflix is certainly encouraging people to go with streaming, especially given the changes in subscription prices. They won’t offer us a “no streaming” option for a slight discount, but they’re now offering a “no DVD” option…and increasing the prices for DVDs, albeit only slightly.

Here’s the thing, though. We didn’t get an HDTV until just three or four months ago–in part because our 12-yr-old Sony XBR had such a superb picture, one we’d paid a lot of money for at the time. But with the cutoff of analog TV (although we could still use cable) and the growing percentage of shows broadcast widescreen, we finally took the plunge.

We took some care to buy a set with a first-rate picture. We picked up a Blu-ray player. After watching one movie in Blu-ray, we switched our Netflix subscription to Blu-ray as a preference, and probably 80% of the movies we get now are in that format. Yes, we can see the difference–although DVD as upconverted by the player is certainly still very enjoyable, Blu-ray is a lot better.

As for TV itself (an antenna isn’t an option here without a humongous rooftop tower), Bones is the extreme example: Comcast gave us a consistently crappy analog image last year–and Bones in HD is magnificent. Just magnificent.

We don’t watch much current TV–it comes out to 7.5 hours a week. Some nights, we either watch a full-length movie or catch up on old series, using Netflix discs for some of those.

Yes, we tried streaming

Our TV has internet widget support (and we added the wifi dongle), including a Netflix widget. I got it working. And we tried it–a couple of little tries, then five minutes of a Lois & Clark episode, since that’s one of the old series we’re watching.

Neither my wife or I could stand it after five minutes: The picture quality was so vastly inferior to the DVD, at sort of a sub-VHS level, which might have been acceptable on a smaller screen but was just unpleasant on the big screen. Netflix surveyed me on the streaming quality. I told them: Unacceptable.

Oh, it’s your broadband…

Maybe. We have the fastest DSL AT&T will currently provide at our address. It typically tests out at 1.5 to 2Mbps download–right now, it’s 1.6 as I run speedtest.

You can’t stream true HD at 1.6Mbps. Hell, you can’t stream DVD quality at 1.6Mbps. (True Blu-ray quality would require a minimum of 30Mbps.)

So should we upgrade our broadband?

Well, Comcast (shudder) will sell us “6Mbps” broadband for $54 a month–$29 more than we’re paying for AT&T DSL. Want 20Mbps? That’s $100/month. Still not enough to stream at Blu-ray quality, but close. 6Mbps? Probably better than we’re getting now, but certainly nowhere close to Blu-ray, probably not even DVD quality.

And, of course, from everything I’ve heard, Comcast isn’t going to let you happily stream at full speed for hours on end: “usage caps” do come into play.

Plus…hmm. $29 more, plus $8 for a streaming-only Netflix subscription. That’s more than we’re paying for Netflix now–and if we drop back to a 2-disc subscription, it’s a lot more than we’re paying now. Since 1.5-2Mbps download speed is just fine for everything else we do, we would wind up paying more money…for still-inferior quality and the loss of Blu-ray and DVD extras.

What a deal.

(No, neither Fios nor I-Universe or whatever AT&T’s fiber-almost-to-the-home is called are options, at least not yet. And the I-Universe prices, after the first six months, aren’t all that attractive either. We have Limited Basic cable, $17/month including all the fees, and it suits us just fine.)

Just don’t tell us our choice is wrong

If you don’t see the difference between streaming and Blu-ray or streaming and HD, that’s your business (and maybe your TV set). If you see the difference but don’t care, that’s also your business: I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong, any more than I ever said people listening to 128K MP3 were wrong.

But when you say there is no difference, or that anybody who wants Blu-ray or HD broadcast quality is either foolish or wrong, then my back goes up. My wife professed not to care about the differences…until she started seeing the higher quality. She was the one who said to stop the Lois & Clark streaming, although I could certainly see that it was crap video quality.

As a sidenote: We don’t own a DVR. I’d love to be able to record shows in HD. What I wouldn’t love: Increasing our total electricity usage by more than 10%, because the DVR is running 24 hours a day and consuming 50 watts all the time (according to the tests done by somebody who refuses to give up the DVR). Sell a DVR designed for those of us who don’t record all that much, that spins down and uses 0.5 watts or so when it’s not needed, and we’d probably buy one. (Yes, adding 36 kWh a month to our usage would be at least a 10% increase.) That’s a different discussion.

As I’ve been finishing the draft of Chapter 11 (the final chapter, but Chapter 1 isn’t begun yet and the others all need revision), I’ve thought about one topic that could deserve a special discussion in Chapter 1, but won’t. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s call it “The AutoCompanyBlogger“–for a couple of reasons, neither of them terribly compelling.

In practice, I’m not discussing bloggers this time around, only blogs: Blogger’s names only appear in cases where the blogger and the blog name are identical, e.g. David Lee King. (And this year’s index will only have entries for David Lee King, not King, David Lee–because, again, I’m not discussing bloggers as such.)

TACB, for short, is a special case.

Most libloggers have one blog, or sometimes participate in a shared blog. A fair number have two (or control one and participate in one shared one). Several have three. A couple might even have four or five.

TACB has at least 22 blogs. Six of them are represented in the study. Two more could be, if I’d ever encountered them anywhere during the study. The other 14 are sufficiently removed from library interests that I’d probably never encounter them under normal circumstances.

Five of the blogs are active, sort of–that is, five have at least one post in 2010.

More typical patterns:

• Four posts over three months.
• 26 posts over two months.
• Eight posts over three months.
• Thirteen posts over three months.
• Nine posts over two months
• 27 posts over three months.
• Seven posts over four months.
• Three posts over one month.
• Four posts over three months
• One post over one month–two of those, actually.
  
• No posts whatsoever: A blog that doesn’t even have a “hello world” post!

The unfortunate thing about all this is that the blogger comes up with some fairly good blog titles, which then are essentially unavailable to bloggers who actually have something to say about the topics.

Of the blogs that made it into the study, one is active and visible enough to be a Group 1 (Core) blog, among the 500 liblogs currently most active. Three more make it into Group 3, the blogs that are essentially invisible and/or inactive, but have had at least one post in the past six months. The other two are in Group 4, apparently defunct. Of the two I didn’t pick up but could have, one would be in Group 4, one would be in Group 3.

And maybe that’s more than needs to be said about TACB. You can probably guess what platform all 22 of the blogs are on (if there are others on another platform, I’ve been spared knowledge of them).

Am I suggesting TACB should stop founding so damn many blogs? Not really; that’s TACB’s business, and I already know TACB’s response when criticized about any of his/her/its/their self-publicity or other activities. I found the whole thing amusing, but probably not bookworthy. But hey, it’s Sunday afternoon and I’m too lazy/tired to do anything productive…

If you didn’t read the original post, you should–if nothing else, for context.

Here’s what’s happened since then:

• The autorenew clearly didn’t take.
• Today, down to her last two days, she went through the Renew process this time–and managed to take the right set of links, yielding a $40 renewal rather than a $70 renewal.
• She clicked on the “Download” link…

What should have happened

Given that she has an up-to-date subscription, the link should have updated some settings in her McAfee Internet Security, maybe taking 30 seconds tops.

What did happen

First we got a sizable download.

Then that download uninstalled all existing McAfee software. Slowly.

Then it started a 122MB download. With nothing else on our DSL, that took about 30 minutes…

Followed by various nonsense, followed by a Restart request.

After restarting, it started installing (I may have the order wrong here; let’s just say we’re at about the 1 hour 15 minute mark here…) with, of course, Windows Security popping up a warning about security setting issues.

Eventually–I’d say after about 90 minutes–there was a McAfee shortcut, the McAfee blob back in the tray, and a screen telling us it was starting various services. Until it got to “starting anti-spam”–which would seem somewhat useless since she doesn’t use Outlook or any PC-based mail system (and Gmail has its own excellent spam filter).

And the little animated swirl kept spinning. And spinning. For 10 minutes or more, there was disk activity–for what would seem to be at most a 1-minute job. Then the disk activity stopped, but the little swirl kept spinning.

Exit capabilities: None. Response to a right-click on the toolbar icon: None. Response to any keys or mouse clicks: None. The computer was apparently hung.

I logged on to McAfee on my system, brought up chat, and got into another fruitless session, with the bot (or, I suppose, conceivably person) on the other end telling me to forward her email (on her frozen system) to verify that she’d renewed and apparently ignoring any input from me.

At this point, we were well over two hours into a renewal update. Two hours, to do what should have been a code change at most.

What she finally did

A cold reboot–that is, forcing the computer to turn itself off (holding down the power switch–nothing else had any effect, given McAfee’s marvelous ability to take over the entire computer), turning it back on, letting Windows finish its “abnormal shutdown” routine…

After opening the Windows Security Manager and letting it fix settings, she seems to be fine. McAfee now gives the right termination date (a year from now). She’s fully protected (maybe over-protected: It’s possible that both McAfee and Windows firewalls, and McAfee antivirus and Windows Defender, are operating, but she knows what to do if she gets apparent slow downs).

And neither of us is, how you say, real happy with the competence shown in McAfee’s renewal operation, updating, or other indications of software excellence.

For me? I’ve turned off autorenew. Some time before my subscription expires, I’ll download Microsoft Security Essentials (and uninstall McAfee). If that turns out to be inadequate, I’ll buy something else…or, if I’m feeling masochistic, I can always add myself to her 3-user Internet Security subscription.

I don’t know if this is a farce, a comedy, or a tragedy…

Background

When my wife purchased her Toshiba notebook (three years ago), it came with McAfee Internet Security preloaded.

When I purchased my Gateway notebook (two years ago), it came with McAfee Total Security preloaded.

We both auto-renewed for a year (I think). McAfee was obtrusive at times–the update process is the only thing I know that seems able to use 100% of both cores in my Core 2 Duo, hanging the machine until it finishes–but had, for a while, top ratings. More recently? Not so much.

Foreground

My wife’s one-user McAfee Internet Security license expires in a few days. She deliberately turned off autorenew. My three-user McAfee Total Security license expires in January. I had autorenew on.

But my wife’s doing volunteer work that requires her to visit sites that I might not choose to visit. She needs topnotch online security more than I do. So…

Well, I thought, there should be an easy way to add her to my Total Security license, so her software gets upgraded; I’ll pay the autorenew rate for both machines.

Not so easy, as it turns out. After struggling to make sense of McAfee’s online support, the only answer was for her to TOTALLY UNINSTALL her protection, leaving her computer wholly unprotected, then download Total Security after going to my McAfee page. Of course, if anything went wrong with the download, well, she’d be totally unprotected–the instructions required her to wholly remove the software before doing the new install. Provide a code so she could simply attach to my license? Nah, that would be too logical.

Well, OK. Thinking about it, and the likelihood that we’ll upgrade her notebook in the next year or so, maybe she should go ahead and renew her McAfee. I’d turn off my autorenewal and switch to Microsoft Security Essentials instead…and if that seemed inadequate, I’d definitely be able to buy a new copy of Norton, McAfee, AVG or something else for $40 or less (as opposed to the $80 McAfee wanted to autorenew my Total Security).

The chaos

My wife–who has two masters degrees, who taught computer programming at one point, who is a first-rate analyst–followed McAfee’s instructions for renewal. And wound up with an about-to-expire existing subscription and a new one-year/three-user subscription, which she’d need to download. For $70.

Huh?

So she went to technical support…an online chat, similar to the one I’d endured, but worse.

After wasting half an hour or so, she got the new subscription canceled and refunded (I’ll check the credit card account online to make sure that’s actually happened, and she does have a confirmation number).

She found a different “renewal” link on the account page. But, whoops, it seems to go to an order for a one-year subscription, not a renewal…although this time, it’s $40, not $70, and it’s a three-user subscription. Nahh…

Now, she’s turned autorenew back on. Will it actually autorenew, since she only has a few days? If not…well, if she does the renewal, it seems as though it requires her to download the product again. And avoiding all that hassle is the only reason she was willing to pay the higher price.

To sum up:

• The link in McAfee’s email explicitly leads to the wrong place, adding a second subscription for the same software.
• So far, we’ve been unable to find a route that actually allows you to do something that is, explicitly, continuing your subscription for another year…except by having a standing autorenew.
• McAfee seems to want twice as much to renew a subscription as they do for a new one…maybe, or maybe not, depending on which set of links you follow.
• Oh, did I mention that it seems to regard her fully valid Visa card has expired? It would take a new Mastercard number but not, apparently, a new Visa number.

The outcome

I don’t actually know yet. We’re hoping the autorenew takes. If it doesn’t, I’m not sure what to do. I know I can go buy an actual physical copy (CD and all) of Total Security for $40 if I do it by Saturday. I know she has a lot better things to do with her time.

And I know this: If McAfee has screwed up their renewal, pricing, link and other structures this badly, it leaves me in considerable doubt that their computer protection is as top-notch as they claim.

(I’ll add this: We used Norton for years, but at some point it became too intrusive. Norton never, never, ever had this kind of renewal incompetence associated with it.)

Postscript

If someone from McAfee feels offended by this, there’s a simple solution: You need to provide us–my wife, who I can put you in contact with–with a straightforward working procedure by which her subscription continues to be valid for another year, without having to download the whole damn package once again. Seems like that should be simple. It’s called renewal: You may have heard of the concept. Or not.

Another post about the cover–and, by the way, there are still 98 chances for you to support Cites & Insights and my liblog (and other) research by buying this limited-edition hardbound collection.

This cover isn’t quite so large (9.25″ high, about 13″ wide). It was the last cover I prepared using Corel PhotoPaint before that 13-year-old program started crapping out. Now that I’ve figured out the text-placement/rotation tricks for Paint.Net, I’d use that anyway: Cleaner, simpler, faster.

The story behind the cover

In the book, I say this photo was taken on the Delta Queen while on the Arkansas River. Looking at the photo album now, I think that may be party wrong. It’s definitely the paddlewheel of the Delta Queen, as it’s driving the steamboat: for the Delta Queen, the paddlewheel (driven by an authentic steam engine) was the only means of propulsion. But I’m not sure which river we were on at the time. It may have been the Ohio River, somewhere outside Paducah. Or it might be the Arkansas River. It’s just not clear from the context of surrounding photos or the flyers included in the album (which seem to combine two different river cruises).

The Delta Queen is no longer an operating paddlewheel steamboat, unfortunately. The company that revived the three Delta Queen boats after the Delta Queen Steamboat Company went under (another casualty of 9/11) later shut them down, focusing its entire attention on the Windstar line (purchased from Holland America/Carnival). The Delta Queen itself is now a floating hotel docked in Chattanooga, Tennessee, just as the twin Delta King is a hotel/restaurant in Old Sacramento (California). It couldn’t have kept on cruising in any case: Congress did not renew the special exemption from Safety of Life at Sea regulations that allowed this wooden-superstructure boat to operate as an overnight cruiser. (Both times we were on the DQ, we had to sign special waivers.)

The DQ is a small boat with (at the time) tiny cabins–but that didn’t matter much, because you’d spend all your time out on deck and the decks were all ringed with rocking chairs. DQ and Delta King aren’t named for the Mississippi Delta–they’re named for the Sacramento Delta, since both were built in 1927 (in Scotland, reassembled in California) to run between Sacramento and San Francisco. My mother-in-law used to use the DQ for its original purpose. The engine is original, and was kept in magnificent condition: The engine room was always open to visitors and purportedly had the best coffee on board.

One of the two cruises–possibly the one this photo was taken on, possibly not–was a little odd. It was a “tramping cruise,” where only the start and end points were announced. The captain would stop at whatever places looked most interesting. A great idea in theory–but given the distance to be covered and some weather and traffic-related problems, it was a little strange in practice: We had a two-hour evening stop in Memphis (mostly to take on supplies), a Sunday morning stop in Paducah without advance warning for the Quilting Museum, so basically nothing was open…and that was it. We were on the river, and by the end of the week it was a little old, given the very limited recreational facilities on board. (A couple of younger passengers–most people were even older than we were, but there were a few under 45–were threatening to jump overboard if we were within five feet of land…)

But it was still fun, as were the other three heartland river cruises we took. I’m sad to report that the Mississippi Queen, a wonderful boat, has been sold for scrap. The American Queen, the largest passenger steamboat ever built (but still only 222 rooms), still exists but isn’t cruising: It needs a new owner. (We cruised during the inaugural season of the AQ, and loved it too.)

No, this isn’t a sales pitch for Cites & Insights 10 (2010), although it is on sale for $40 for the next couple of months.

This is a post about the cover–and, for that matter, the only way you’ll see a tiny version of the entire wraparound cover without buying the book. I may do a few more posts about some of the other book covers I’ve put together for C&I Books. With one exception, all of them are photos taken by my wife (the actual librarian in the household, the talented photographer, and the smart person) on various travels, mostly cruises. So far, entirely taken with 35mm film cameras; when we start traveling again, they’ll be digital photos (and I won’t have to scan the prints at 1200dpi to get the cover shots).

The cover size and prep work

One aspect of wraparound covers in general, and those for Cites & Insights annual volumes in particular, is the sheer size of the image. For a 6×9 book, the cover image needs to be 9.25″ high and 12.25″+x wide, where x is the thickness of the spine. For an 8.5×11 book like the C&I annuals, it’s 11.25″ high and 17″+x wide–in this case, 18.196″. That’s a big photo–18.4 megapixels, where an 8×10 print (at the same 300dpi) would be 7.2 megapixels. For 6×9 books, the width-to-height ratio’s not much different than a standard print; for 8.5×11, it’s considerably different. To get there, I scan a 4×6 print at 1200dpi, then trim to size (mostly trimming vertically) and, usually, resize to the exact dimensions.

I’m no graphic artist…and I can’t really justify having a high-end graphics program to do two or three book covers a year. More to the point, no matter what program I use, learning retention is an issue when it’s being used so rarely. I’d been using a 13-year-old Corel PhotoPaint, but that’s stopped working entirely (really not too surprising!). I tried GIMP, but the learning cliff was too high for me to scale. My wife uses Corel PaintShop Pro, but that’s a one-computer license, and I see a learning retention issue. So I tried Paint.Net (free), and so far that seems to be a good fit. For this cover, I figured out a couple of technical issues that made life easier (using temporary layers). Actually, this is the first cover using Paint.Net; Corel PhotoPaint didn’t crap out until after I’d done the disContent cover.

I don’t really do much to the pictures, by choice–possibly flipping them for better arrangement, possibly doing a little touchup, but mostly adding text…and making sure it’s in the right place.

This particular cover

This photo is of Moorea, taken from the Renaissance cruise ship (R-3) we were on, March 26, 2001 (the third day of a one-week French Polynesia cruise). It was the first time we were in French Polynesia (we’ve since returned twice–it’s really no further to fly there than to fly to the Caribbean, given that we’re in California).

The R-3 is still operating, but not as the R-3. I believe it’s now the Pacific Princess. You’ll find other Renaissance R-class ships (all around 670 passengers, with distinctive features such as an expansive, 24-hour-a-day library space and four restaurants) cruising for Oceania, Pacific, and Azamara.

Therein lies a tale of sorts. We booked the cruise because we’d always wanted to see French Polynesia, the timing was right, and we got a really good price–much lower than we expected for a fairly small ship and a line with a fairly good reputation. Then, a couple months before sailing, our travel agent called and told us we were getting a substantial refund because Renaissance had lowered the prices (and this agency had price guarantees).

Once we were on board, we said “There is no way Renaissance can be making money with this”–the prices were just too low for the quality of food and service and the known costs of operating a cruise ship.

As it happens, we were right: Renaissance was losing money at a rapid clip. The line expanded way too fast (building eight R-class ships in a three year period after previously building another eight very small Renaissance-class ships), never really found its market niche (it was pricing below Princess levels and trying to offer near-luxury-class cruises), and went bankrupt in September 2001, two weeks after 9/11. It had been in trouble for some time; as with other marginal travel operators, the 9/11 situation was the final blow.

It was a great cruise. We saw a lot, French Polynesia (other than Papeete, Tahiti) is remarkably lovely and pleasant, really not much negative to say.

Note: Seeing this post in context, I see that the photo has right sidebar text superimposed on it. Click on the photo itself to see it in a separate window.

The paperback version of Cites & Insights 10: 2010, is now available for purchase through Lulu.

The 419-page 8.5×11″ paperback includes all twelve issues, the indices, and an overall table of contents.

All print volumes of C&I are now priced at $50 paperback, $40 PDF, but there’s a 20% discount on all print volumes of C&I through the end of ALA Midwinter 2011, so that the paperback currently costs $40 and the PDF currently costs $32.

(No, I don’t expect to sell many copies; I produce these at least in part because it’s the easiest and cheapest way to have a high-quality bound volume for my own use. I think they’d be great for library school libraries and possibly collections on experimental publishing, but if I got even five sales for a given volume, I’d be astonished–and pleased.)

The cover is based on a photograph taken by Linda A. Driver off Moorea in 2001.

By the way: The non-issue that came out around Midwinter 2010 is not in this print volume. Given that it was entirely reprints and not widely circulated, I didn’t see the point in adding 50 pages to an already-thick volume and $1 to the production costs. Cites on a Plane 2007, an earlier non-issue, is exclusively available in the paperback version of volume 7.