This place feels expensive...*

SFB is coming to you live from a new-bought laptop.  It's an Asus U36SG-RX138SS.  These were new perhaps 12 months ago, and are now being cleared out at a discount to make room for the next gen of ultrabooks.  I considered some other options, but concluded I would save some money - partly because we are getting the house re-stumped and it keeps getting more expensive (there were some concrete stumps in place on the only exposed side, so I thought it likely it had been professionally restumped, which would mean all the stumps were done.  But no, after the restumpers dug around it turned out that almost all the stumps were still the original 1930 red gum. Shenanigans.)


Intel core i5 - 2430M (2.4GHz up to 3+GHz with 'turbo-boost')
750GB HDD with ~4GB of NAND Flash as cache, which means some things are supposed to be fast and low power. It has seemed extremely fast.
8cell, 83 Whr battery, claimed good for 10hrs, in reality good for 5+ hrs.
1.7kg - nice and light.
White - actually incredibly similar to my previous laptop that died in colour, although the new surface coating doesn't mark as easily.
3 USB ports, VGA and HDMI, gigabit LAN, a SD/MMC card reader.
Allegedly it gets hot when gaming,but its nothing compared to my old ASUS laptop.
Bundled with a USB DVD burner & Home&Student Office
Screen is 13.3" 1376 * 768, but really poor - noticeably grainy. The illuminated space of each pixel is isolated - you can see the fine pattern of the grid, and the 'gamma' changes wildly with viewing angle.
The touchpad has some multitouch and I'm getting used to it.

$800 from MSY. My last laptop (in addition to being this colour, rather light, and prone to overheating to the point that I remember swearing to buy Apple next) was also bought somewhat reduced as it was superceded.  Here is a very good review.

I don't have buyers remorse, but I am reminded of a pair of proverbs that used to be translated:
If a fool persists in his folly he will become wise.
Though a fool persists in his folly, he will never become wise.

* Homer Simpson reference

How it ends*

Looking forward, this essay sees the end-point of our civilization:

The planet’s metabolism has altered. The new Dark Ages will be socially, politically, and spiritually dark, but the economic Moloch — mass production and consumption, destructive growth, instrumental rationality — will not disappear. Few Americans want it to. We are hollow, Berman concludes. It is a devastatingly plausible conclusion.
An interval — long or short, only the gods can say — of oligarchic, intensely surveilled, bread-and-circuses authoritarianism, Blade Runner- or Fahrenheit 451-style, seems the most likely outlook for the 21st and 22nd centuries. 

Much of the material discussed in this review is drawn from Morris Berman's three volume epic.

That is indeed what Morris Berman concludes in his three-volume survey of America’s decline: The Twilight of American Culture (2000), Dark Ages America (2006), and Why America Failed (2011). 

The articulation of the inner truth that is being worked out in our history:

Berman seeks the source of our civilization’s decline in its innermost principle, its animatingGeist. What he finds at the bottom of our culture’s soul is … hustling; or, to use its respectable academic sobriquet, possessive individualism. 

The economic Moloch (Moloch symbolises murder of infants), also named Mammon (usually symbolises Money) in the essay, and the possessive individualism.  We have singularity now, and we know it as individualism.  The true singularity would maybe cause a great union.**

Hat tip: The Dish - a great smorgasboard blog, part of my daily diet.

* 'How it ends' [Scriptshadow] is a screenplay of the end of the world in which things begin shutting down, and falling down around America, and no one wants to make the sacrifices to save it, and many are delighted to watch it burn.

**Society is like a big game of prisoner's dilemma - you can usually benefit reliably by cheating, but greater benefits are available at the higher risk of trusting. Knowing you will play forever, or even knowing that the end is not likely enough, will make an equilibrium of trust a valid play.  But if the benefits of trust are lowered steadily (by hard economic times, for example), the threshold for thinking the end has arrived is lowered too.

Umm, Integration

I don't usually listen to commercial radio, because why would you? - but finding , myself sans iPod I was listening this morning. They were doing a bit about remembering the names of ypur coworkers - people you occasionally deal with and always need help from but who don't enter your sociality. The hosts had been around and met everyone the day before and now had a 'pop quiz.'

They had a girl, the last one. Make conversation: 'Where do you work?'
'In - oh, don't say it?' - she broke off responding to signs from someone off-mike - 'Ok, ummm integration.'

What do you think umm stood for? Racial integration? That would be quite a useful work area for a popular radio station to have. Mathematical integration? Probably not. Gender or other minority integration? No.

I bet it was product integration, and you don't say that out loud because this radio station is like the domesticated warren in Watership down. There's some things we don't talk about. The not very hilarious hyuckster's of the morning show are, in the end, some money's way of making some more money.

It's not wrong to have that role - most people do. It is a bit wrong to hide it, and if you want to hide it that should be your cue that it is a bit wrong.

(Of course, given the station, minority integration might actually hurt their audience figures more, so I can't be sure.)

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Coda on the Nord G2 Engine

Interesting result on the G2 engine - listed on ebay.comau at $599, with a buy-it-now at $999, the auction was won at $1167. How does this happen?

I guess two or more people wanted it very badly, but worried they would overpay buying it now, and also worried they might not win it without bids well over that price. Effectively, they priced the saving if the auction settled below $999 against their unhappiness missing out, and both bid over $1150. Even the winner can't be happy at wasting $170.

The disappointed runner-up might find relief at musicswopshop.com.au, where an identical item is $1100. Or in the UK, where gumtree.co.uk lists two identical items for £650. Or using the free mono software version from Nord.

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Curious coincidence

On Jan 7, a clavia nord modular keyboard and a rack unit went up on melbourne.gumtree. I'm inclined to think they may actually be the same unit accidentally listed twice, but they do seem quite different.

Today a g2 factory went on melbourne music swop shop $1100, and the same day one in brisbane listed at $600 with a buy it now of $999.

The timing is so tight, for items of which there are maybe a few hundred in Australia that I am wondering what the hidden cause is. Collusion in a secret owners club? Terminal frustration with the pc / mac -based support programs? Software upgrade to Lion ceases support? Acquisition of a software modular synth that's easier and better? All of the above?

I think if you pay attention to anything, you find this sort of mystery.

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Gear Junkie

Have I told you about my home studio in detail, and how I acquired it? It's a sad tale, and dull.

When i was 22, i took up a little music production. I spent, over a few years, probably $3,600, on:
A roland xp-10 starter keyboard (disposed of)
A kawai k5000w 'advanced additive' digital synth (now wish i had bought the s variant, but never mind close enough)
a roland jv-1010 sound module
And a Guillemot ISIS maxistudio soundcard, bundled with a version of logic audiopro 3.6.
And evidence of how stupid I was - I never got out of the general midi soundbanks on any of them.

In the mid 2000s I bought a microphone and a preamp ($400).

Since completing the desktertainment unit, I've added (in order of importance):
An e-mu 1212m sound card (great card, great bundled software, great price)
Two korg nanokontrols and a nanopad
An m-audio 2x2 usb-midi interface.

There are a number of sad parts. The main one is that i am a very poor musician: my hands and ears are joined by nervous tissue that has about a second of jitter, and i lose the beat on the third repetition of it.

The other one is that I have now called in every conceivable birthday and christmas present but can't stop shopping. I see a Nord Modular G1 ($700) on gumtree and begin to fantasise forlornly about the email I could send to its current owner, about how much I would care for it, and how its value is significantly reduced by software instruments, doesn't he know. Sheesh.

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The Cynic's Kringle

I didn't join the office Kringle because it seemed like a great recipe for spending $20 and receiving something of no great relevance. Instead, I recruited a friend into a Cynics Kringle - we each identified a gift we wanted, gave very precise instructions on acquiring it, and then boughtfor each other.

I now own a paper copy of Hegel's Phenomenology, and translations of Heideggers Lectures on it. (When you want a complicated idea made clear, Heidegger is probably not your first choice. But I think Heidegger took Hegel very seriously - we shall see.)

Cynicism ftw.

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Nanopad

Well, my Korg Nanopad can eventually be made to work - the secret is to ignore Korg's drivers. Windows recognises it and it runs well, although with some latency. Also works well on the macbook, with no appreciable latency.

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The Internet and the end of Capitalism

This week I gave money to a few worthy institutions - wikipedia, paul sheeky from triptree, and others. They give good things without asking a price, and my gifts were scaled to be more than I would actually pay if they did. I think if we were ever to come out the far side of capitalism as Marx anticipated, it will be through this distributionist approach. The end of inequality is achieved when each of us treats others needs as our own, until my needs are being met from the generosity of others, not because I demand a price to be alienated from my labour.

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Cakewalk

Just a brief plug for Cakewalk Music Creator 6. It is an astonishingly serious music package sold for under $100 (currently USD$50).  There are some rough edges, and I've had some difficulties - but mostly because there is much more under the hood than you expect.  And the difficulties I've had have been addressed efficiently and (even when they're really my problem) politely.  Arianna Huffington apparently said 'Self expression is the new entertainment' - which is partly true.  It's becoming more popular.  And this blog, and Music Creator show why - its getting very easy to access great tools.

Perpetuity

Have you noticed that there are a lot of perpetual motion machines, insanely efficient engines or pumps or gearboxes or power generation systems on the internet?

I think most of them survive indefinitely because to seriously test them would often require that they be professionally constructed, instrumented into a high quality test rig, and then tested by independent professionals, all of which are beyond the reach of inventors.  Until that happens, the inventors can continue releasing video's of themselves with mockups, diagrams about how they work, and excited testimonials.  They always approach universities and research institutes and companies looking for investment and validation, and they almost never get it.  Who wants to spend $500,000 to show that something is not a perpetual motion machine?  If the claims are more compatible with thermodynamics, they are still likely to violate other constraints - be impossible to build, or be unmaintainable or just unbalanced.

What is needed is a sort of reverse KickStarter or Pozible, in which sceptics, institutions and companies volunteer small amounts of their resources to collectively clear away the rubbish by testing it properly.  There is no shame in NASA spending $5000 to disprove an outlandish claim if many other institutions joined in.  Perhaps it could be called KickOuter or ImPozible.

(Interestingly, the best candidates would still attract the most funding (except from bully-boy sceptics, I suppose).

A patchy survey of some Windows laptops making an effort

The Samsung Series 9 is a lovely thing - $1499 now for the 11inch.  The main weakness of this unit is the price. Lacking the confidence of Apple to say 'We reckon we can sell millions of these' the cost seems high.

The ASUS U36 - thin, with a full voltage cpu.  The screen is apparently a bit patchy, less luminous in some quadrants than others (can't find that review now).

The ASUS UX31 - thin, shiny. Too shiny?  I also expect it to be hot. You could fry an egg on my last Asus laptop, and it was plenty bulky.

But unless you hate OS/X, these are all not beating the Air in the things you want (size, weight, screen, keyboard, touchpad, battery life) by enough. Screens are small, or low-res, or patchy with less of the Apple secret sauce (I suspect it is their attentiveness).

Macbook Air vs Pro vs future Pro

As mentioned, one of the things I'd like to pay triple for by owning it now instead of paying off my mortgage, is a new laptop. At the moment, I would probably like a basic 13" MBP, with a hdd upgrade to 500Gb. Alternatively, for the same price, I could get a 13" MB Air, with lots less stuff in it, but that SSD goodness (128GB). Both are similar cpu pace, battery life, OS. The Air has no optical drive and a few less ports, but it weighs almost nothing and looks awesome. I can live with the small HDD, by keeping my huge and growing iTunes podcast library externally.

Complicating the scene, macrumours estimates that macbooks are due for an update in the next few months. So I have to compare both present options against my fantasy macbook:
- onboard SSD (say 40Gb) for OS and Apps in addition to conventional HDD. This would need to be integrated with the OS though (ability to manage finite space for frequently executed executables), and if it was in Lion, I think someone would have noticed. I'd guess once full, you'd manage it as a cache of most-used executables with a clever defrag routine.
- more everything, and cheaper.
- blu-ray capable super-drive?
- longer battery life. 7 hrs is great, but you know what's even better? 8 hrs.
- smart management of iTunes library would be nice.
- displayport-to-something-useful adapters cost less. (I think displayport is now Thunderbolt).

Any readers want to speak up for a Wintel option that has very long battery life, looks as good etc?

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The Ideal Consumer Journey

Chatting with a woman at a party, my wife's research on the mission stations set up for aboriginal people came up. 'Oh' she said, 'I think that's terrible.' 'What?' 'The work missionaries do.' Certainly there are some terrible accounts of missionary behaviour and principles, but she objected to the very idea of going to another people with the intention of introducing them to Christianity.

What did she do? She worked in marketing for supermarkets - specifically designing the 'ideal consumer journey'. She or someone like her puts the milk in the corner diagonally opposite the entrance, puts the displays of kids treats at kids eye level, and ranges all the other attacks on the subconscious motivation system that can be discovered, with the goal of turning us into ideal consumers. We begin the journey as human beings, but finish as ideal consumers.

Is there a difference? The missionaries aim to share the best thing they have for free. The marketer gets paid a lot to lead the consumer cattle right up to the stun-bolt unafraid, even eager.

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