VNC

VNC: Virtual Network Computing. Awesome.

A few weeks ago I got set up with LogMeIn.com, a free site that, using VNC software allows you to remotely control any computer you own, as if you were sitting in front of it, from any other computer, anywhere. It is so useful. For instance, tonight I needed to post an hour and half of footage for client approval. I didn't want to stay at work all night and wait for it, so I came home, logged into my work Mac using LogMeIn and I've been controlling the process from here.

If someone were sitting in front of my work Mac while I was logged in they'd see the mouse cursor moving on its own, opening windows and running programs, all directed by some unseen hand. I had a particularly chilling experience of my own, being on that end of the equation. I was working a night shift about a month ago. It was probably 11:30 at night. I was, and had been for a while already, the only person in the office. Then, out of nowhere the suite next door to mine starts blaring music. Then it stopped. Then started again. It freaked me out! I got up and tentatively poked my head next door. No one there. I walked in and saw the mouse cursor happily zipping around the screen, user absent. I knew then what was going on, but it didn't lesson the shock I'd felt initially.

So VNC is good for getting work done even when you can't be there, and for scaring the snot out of the people that are.

Bureaucracy, Simplified

I love the fact that even local government is going "online". I recently paid my water bill online through a Baltimore City service, and it wasn't convoluted, overly complicated or half functional, It was easy and worked perfectly. How often do you find yourself uttering the words, "government", "easy" and "perfectly" all in a sentence that isn't, "It's so easy to get angry at a government that so perfectly screws things up."

I think it's time to alter our perception of local government. Kate's on unemployment currently, as many of you know. Baltimore (or Maryland, I'm not sure at what level of government she's operating) has made the process extremely easy. Kate filed online, submits her weekly "proof of job contact sheets" through the same site, and almost never needs to speak with anyone in person. Her payments, which normally get added to a government-supplied debit card, are now direct-deposit to her bank account, an option she signed up for online.

Where we live parking permits are required. It would be such a hassle if we were annually required to drive into the city, on a weekday, to renew our permits. No need. Baltimore City has another online service that lets you renew and pay for your permits, and then pick up the display stickers at local pick-up spots on specific days around the city. As long as you remember to take advantage of the service (which we didn't this year), you never have to set foot downtown.

Is government transforming itself? I've only supplied you with three examples of efficiency in cyber-space, and I'm sure if I tried I could come up with stories of government waste and bureaucracy. But it's heartening to see local government moving in the right direction, taking advantage of the tools at its disposal.

The Ultimate Distraction

Since I sat down a half hour ago to start writing today's entry I've checked Twitter, email, and read Amy and James' most recent blog entries. And if it wasn't for the fact that I need to leave for work in another half an hour, I'd find something else to distract me. The internet is the ultimate distraction. With instant communication and the entirety of human knowledge at your fingertips, not to mention YouTube videos of people hurting themselves in a nearly infinite number of humorous ways, you can manage to never get work done if you choose.

But that's not positive, Jason? Western civilization would crumble if everyone chose to fritter their precious time away watching videos of Coke / Mentos eruptions and Twittering about how freakin' cool it is, writing useless blog entries with long run-on sentences to a very limited (but awesome) group of people instead of getting real work done.

True. But Coke / Mentos eruptions are freakin' cool. Let China do all the work.

Online TV madness

I love how Internet sites now provide people with the ability to watch about any new episode they want. If you miss an episode of something you can go to hulu.com or the station's website like nbc.com and see if the episode has been posted yet. Some other sites I just found that I've never tried out are fancast.com, television.aol.com/full-episodes/, www.sling.com/, www.yidio.com, www.sidereel.com, and digg.com. We are so spoiled these days with DVR and online capabilities. You will never miss a series we want to watch. Of course having DVR and Internet at home is key. On my lunch breaks I used to watch a show on my computer which was always a great way to escape from my work reality. Everyone whose a compulsive TV watcher like me should give this a try.

Buying Smart Online

The internet has completely changed the way I shop. I make most of my major purchases online. I researched and bought all of the appliances for our new house that way. Our new HDTV came from Amazon.com. And countless past purchases, including the computer I writing this post with, came from smart Ebay purchases. I think Home Depot is the only major retail chain that I still buy large items from at the brick and mortar store, and that's only because home repair usually requires instant gratification. Researching and buying online enables anyone to be a smart consumer.

If you're willing to forgo having your new purchase in hand immediately, you'll almost always get your best price online. But even the impatient among us can benefit from online research, which is the first step in smart shopping. I like to start by going to product review sites. For example, I'm researching Blu Ray players right now, so I spend time at cnet.com reading product reviews from both experts and other consumers, comparing features and general price ranges. I think it's important to find a site that features expert reviews for the product you're searching for. Consumer reviews are useful as a general barometer of product quality, but someone writing, "Dude, I freakin' love this TV!" is hardly authoritative. Use Google to find review sites.

Once you've narrowed down which model or manufacturer you like, use price comparison sites like, Bizrate.com, Google shopping, or Pricescan.com to find your best deal. These sites maintain a constantly updated database of online retailer prices for (probably) millions of items. They give you one spot to compare dozens of online prices. Plus they give you shipping costs, for a true comparison. Each retailer is rated as well, and often reviewed by consumers, to help avoid trading price for poor service.

All of this research is free, and worth doing even if you ultimately buy offline. And on the flipside, offline brick and mortar stores are still great places to research prior to an online purchase. I went to Sears and Best Buy a number of times to compare TVs in person before I ultimately purchased from Amazon. You can't truly rate a television's image quality for yourself from pictures on a website. And had either of those retailers been able to compete price-wise with online-only retailers I would have purchased from them, but of course they couldn't. The overhead B&M stores impose on retailers always results in higher prices, another reason to avoid the major retailers online.

There are also services that track price changes for you. Pricepinx.com is one I've used before. You enter the item you're tracking and the sites you want Pricepinx to watch. Then, whenever the price goes down at any of your chosen retailers, Pricepinx sends you an email. It's a great way to automate a normally tedious task.

Finally, if you're willing to do some extra legwork, using Ebay is a great way to nab a good deal on used and often new products. Use the seller ratings to make sure you buy from a safe source.

Lastly, and this doesn't apply to Ebay, once you've chosen your vendor and you're ready to make a purchase, check out coupon code sites. Just search for "coupon code" with Google. If you've bought anything online before you know that often retailers run special offers, represented by a short code you enter at the purchase screen. The retailers usually email these offers to previous customers in an effort to spur further sales. Coupon code sites track them and let new customers in on offers they otherwise wouldn't be aware of. It doesn't work all the time, but sometimes you'll find a current code for the retailer you've chosen and save even further on your purchase.

The best part is that all of this is free. I do pay for a yearly subsciption to consumerreports.com, which is very helpful, but not necessary. You can find most of the information you need from free sites across the net.

The InterBrain

I think we, or at least I, take for granted sometimes just what a staggeringly powerful and unprecedented resource humanity has in the internet. In many ways it functions as a fully accessible, completely searchable (thank you Google) repository of human knowledge. The important stuff and the completely irrelevant.

It's a trivial little search I do pretty frequently that got me thinking about this. Often I hear a song on the radio, and either because the DJ doesn't announce them or I have to leave the car before he or she does, I can't find out the song and artist names. So now, as a matter of habit, I commit a short but unique cluster of lyrics to memory. Later I look up that phrase with the word "lyrics" tagged on to the end, and find the song and artist nearly every time.

It's easy to take that for granted, but imagine trying to get that simple bit of information even 20 years ago. You'd probably have had to call the radio station. If they answered and were willing, you'd have to hope someone there could identify the song based on the lyrics you remember. Barring that they'd have to be willing to go over the play logs for the day and tell you the songs that aired around the time you were listening. That might work once or twice, but the stations management would likely tire of constant calls. In fact, frequent calls of this nature from multiple people would likely cause them to institute restrictive policies. So then you'd have to remember to ask friends or a clerk at a record store until you got an answer or forget the song entirely. Not very efficient.

With the internet, the answer comes quickly and easily, with links to band information, gig schedules, YouTube videos for the song in question, and chances to instantly download it onto your iPod.

Trivial in a sense, but in the grand scheme, enormous.

Now imagine what it would have taken 20 years ago to get a solid explanation for say the role of enzymes in the breakdown of industrial pollutants. Or the schedules for most of the known comets. Or train schedules in Glasgow. If you could find answers at all, the process would be laborious and far from instantaneous. Plus you'd have to leave your house!

The internet is just staggering.

Brilliant Little Flash Games

Yet another reason to love the internet. Quick but interesting little one-off flash games. Really more diversions than games, these addictive little gems fill a void left open by giant uber platform games which require months of otherwise productive time to complete. Flash games give you a short but stimulating fix, without the withdrawal.

Albino Black Sheep (www.albinoblacksheep.com) is a great place to find flash games. Like anywhere, a lot are wastes of time, but some are truly inspired. Here are a couple all-time favorites.

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/hapland

Hapland is a brain boggler. By clicking around the environment and doing things in the right order at the right times you aim to light two torches and open a portal. Why a portal? Don't know. It's never really explained. But the fun is in getting there.

And these I love. All of them. Their creator calls them "Grow" games, and there's a bunch of them.

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/grow
http://shingakunet.com/school/0000002190/special/19024701/0285/index.html
http://www.eyezmaze.com/eyezblog_en/blog/2005/09/grow_cube.html#monster
http://www.eyezmaze.com/eyezblog_en/blog/2006/06/grow_ver2.html#monster

This is just a sampling. There are many others, but you have to be resourceful to find them all. It's hard to describe them if you haven't tried one. But in essence, each game starts with a selection of items. You select the order in which you add each item into the game, one at a time. As you add new items, earlier items begin to level up, or "grow". As they advance they begin interacting with each other. So the order you add items is very important. In fact, there is only one correct order. After you've added all the elements, the game will show you how far each item advanced. The goal is to get every item to max out its advancement. You can use this end screen, along with the way elements interact with each other as clues to the proper add order. All the "Grow" game use this same premise, but each twists in very inventive ways. Really the best way to learn about them is to try one.

You'll likely be up till three in the morning like I was when I first discovered them a couple years ago. It's worth it.

NOTE: Some of the grow games end up further down the page than you can see initially. You have to scroll down to find them.

Web Video: A Thousand Britney Spears Lip-Synchers Can't Be Wrong

I think the proliferation of video on the web is one of the greatest things to happen online in at least the last five years.  Video has an immediacy that the printed word can't capture.  If a picture is worth 1,000 words (it's probably down to 835 due to the global economic slowdown) a video is worth far, far more.

Yes a lot of the content is specific to a particular audience, often times an audience of one.  Maybe 70 to 80 percent of the video content on the web is useless to all but the few people it was designed to reach.  But the point is that even those limited conversations can happen instantaneously, and meaningfully, for those people.  And the leavings of these closed circle communications comprise and gigantic amount of information and entertainment intended for mass consumption.  Of course you have the big media outlets creating content.  Content normally broadcast through TV or cable outlets has made the jump online, whether legitimately or through pirate activities, creating a whole new way to watch television and film content.

But the really exciting segment of online video is the content created by small organizations, or single individuals.  Small or no budget productions.  Projects that, prior to the web video revolution, would have had no way of reaching a mass audience.  Web video has democratized video content creation and distribution, and allowed any segment of the population the ability to communicate visually with the rest of the world.

Yeah, you're going to get 760 videos of people standing in front of their video camera lip-synching to Britney Spears tunes.  Nobody would want to watch one of them, likely, let alone the whole lot.  But isn't it cool that we have a medium for transmitting even inane video content like that around the globe?!  At no other point in history would that have been possible.  We have the ability to document, transmit and share every useless, pointless, uninteresting thing that happens in our lives with everyone else on the planet.  That's great, because somewhere, in that din, there is really important stuff waiting to be found.  The more content you can create, the more likely it is that interesting and new uses for that content can be found.  It's a beautiful mash-up cycle.

For all those interested, after I finish this I'll be posting a real-time video of myself typing this blog entry.*  Why, because I can.

* I won't actually be posting that video, but only because I don't have a webcam.

Magazine Subscriptions

I've read articles pushing the theory that magazines and newspapers are on their way to the dustbin of history, replaced by information on demand, internet-style.  While I don't doubt that readerships are down, I don't see a complete extinction of daily, weekly and monthly publications happening any time soon.  I think there are plenty of people like me that love the magazine format.

I've been getting Discover Magazine since I was in the seventh grade.  I borrowed a few copies from Mr. Stauffer, my science teacher then, and was instantly hooked.  My mom got me a subscription shortly after, and I've gotten it every month since for the last 22 years.  I think I have most of them still, in boxes in the attic.

There's two elements to the attraction.  First, magazine subscriptions give you something to look forward to.  I get a burst of excitement every time a new issue of Wired, or Family Handyman is delivered.  There's the thrill of the unknown, and the hope that something really important or illuminating is waiting just underneath the cover.  Second, just like with books, I love the artifact itself.  I like having the magazine, reading it, and then sticking on a shelf somewhere for perusing years later.  I've gone back and leafed through 10 year old Discover's and have always been shocked to discover bits I hadn't read the first time.

I don't know.  I don't think the internet and digital delivery will ever completely replace print.  The portability of books and magazines, and totemic quality they seem to always form for me keeps magazine and books distinct from digital media.  I think they complement each other, not compete with each other.

Newspapers are a different matter, but magazine aren't going anywhere.