Category: Me Myself&I

I’m stressed out. Some big decisions to make, important things not coming on time and a little low on money (though it’s always good to see that 100$ is “only” 67€). California sun is smoothing everything but still.

I feel the biggest point of this stress is the difference between real life and the virtual one. Hell sometimes I complained that it takes a couple of minutes to share to the world a picture while finishing a track or finishing a game takes days, months, years. Moving very important digital stuff takes a second and is free, moving very important furniture takes ages and costs a kidney.

The differential is huge. Internet makes me go anywhere I want in the world without a visa for as long as my computer is on. In real life it’s so not the case even if at some point of civilization, we eventually will be as free to move as we are on the web.

But it’s slow and hard. Or Internet is too fast and too easy, I don’t know.

Anyway, I have to go back in France at the end of the month. Needless to say it’s a fucking pain in my ass. Needless to say, I don’t like it.

Bye Eggs Benedict and Granola..

It’s temporary of course. Also I don’t blog a lot because I’m playing like crazy. More in the next post.

• Widescreen

Open wide

“According to manufacturer NEC: "The vision of humans naturally moves horizontally rather than vertically, and ergonomics experts have recommended a broad format for a long time. In a professional setting, the use of large screens better facilitates execution of the tasks on the screen and thus contributes to increased productivity."

Couldn’t say it better. From the first 16:10 laptops to big wide screens for desk or TV, this aspect ratio is just a drug for me. I had a good CRT 4:3 19” monitor but I felt constricted. Doing sound and having a timeline in all my apps made me want to have a landscape setting and much more room which means much less scrolling. I can now stare at my 24” widescreen 12hours a day when with a 4:3 I could not (also the LCD technology is easier for the eyes). So it’s better for work, it’s better for movies, it’s better for games and everything. It took so long. Now you can buy a good 24” widescreen for less than 200 bucks.

• SSD

 
A mechanical fragile piece of hardware on the left, static realm on the right.

The Solid State Drive. Once again it’s a lot for work purpose that I bought one two years ago and I was blown away. The HDD has three major issues: it makes noise, it heats and the more the disk is full, the more performance is going down. I had a Fujitsu 15K SCSI HDD and it was ok but the SSD just kills it in every way.

You launch a window, it’s instantaneous. You install/uninstall an app, it’s fast as hell. You launch Photoshop in 4 seconds etc It doesn’t heat at all, it’s totally noiseless and even full at 99%, performance are exactly like if the SSD was empty. So for your system –because to stock music and medias hard drives are way cheaper and efficient- I highly recommend them. I guess with a 64bits OS, a lot of RAM and one of the last SSD available, you’re not gonna wait often in front of your computer.

• TNN

A vacuum cleaner on the left, a monolith on the right.

This is the biggest change I have encounter in all my computer life. You launch YouTube in HD, or any media player made with Flash and fans are kicking, blowing. You launch an app, fans are blowing. You launch a heavy javascript website, fans are blowing. It’s just a terrible experience but we are so used to it we don’t pay attention to it.

Until you experience a total free noise use of a computer.

Everything I do on it doesn’t make any noise at all. No low fan blowing, no water pump, not even an electrical buzz or something, just no-thing. Scary as hell at first, so used to monitor computers with sounds. I have no longer this survival aural need, I don’t have to mentally kill the noise and my ears, my focus are enjoying that so hard. The only thing is that it adds heat to the room, in a good way though (passive convection). In LA it’s not very useful but in a colder environment, this hidden heater function is pretty great.

Main problem is very few people had the opportunity to experience that but when you do, without compromise on performance ( I have a desktop dual core, and I can go quad core) you just can’t go back. When I hear the G5 of my girlfriend screaming, or my laptop vacuuming it annoys me a lot because I know the effect of noise on the brain: fatigue, irritation. IT people know that very well.

I wish I could invest into or create a company around totally noiseless computer tech. Seriously it’s just teh awesome.

• Netbook

And I wash my hands as much as possible.. We need washable keyboards.

I use and used it everywhere. Equipped with a ssd, it’s just the most reliable piece of tech I’ve ever owned. I poured a big glass of sake on it while using it, screen and sound stopped. The alcohol was dripping out of the RJ45 port. Made it dry under the sun a whole day and Windows restarted perfectly. It would be dead if I had a mechanical hard drive. I made it fall a couple of times, still here.

I like to type on it because my hands are more curved and my wrists love it. The only problem is that for the one I have, the screen is not very good (no LED backlit). Also it’s hard to switch keyboards size (from netbook to laptop to full keyboard). But like the last phones pocket computers, this piece of hardware allowing me to get the hell out of a desk without compromising my computer addiction, has changed my lifestyle. I’m currently editing this blog post laying down in bed.

I love when technology is affordable and makes the life easier.

There is definitely a difference.

This is pretty much the diet of CA people for what I saw. I’m almost kidding.

After a couple of months living in LA, here is what strikes me about food.

• Calories

Over nine thousand!!!!!!

It seems like everybody is counting that. Calories. I know what it means from a scientific point of view but when actually eating, knowing how much I need per day, knowing where the calories are.. They are in my belly and I don’t give a shit about these numbers (when I do care a lot for them everywhere else!). I subconsciously know that a waffle is heavy, I don’t need to know how much. People can have conversation on how much thousand calories they are aiming through diets, it’s like Klingon to me. Having the chance to have parents cooking everyday for every meal, doing it myself since forever, it seems like it helps to know what my body needs. My mind is bypassed. Then if I go to a restaurant, I just enjoy, knowing that next days have to be light on food. I feel quite alone on this behavior. Here the Now is strong. Enjoy the Now. And then regret it watching your body getting fat. Whatever. Maple syrup, sodas, peanut butter are almost banned from my diet anyway.

• Vegan

I don’t know what it is, but there’s no meat in it.

My first trip in the US showed me how much vegan food is developed here. From store to restaurants, there’s vegan food almost everywhere in LA. I like it, it’s just that I feel I need to eat more often and being used to the classic three meals per day, sometimes it bothers me to eat four or five times a day. The good thing is when I get back to meat it’s sort of a fiesta for my taste buds. It’s great to have this choice though. And healthier of course (I mean compared to 3.99$ meals with two big macs, fries and a taco) and overall better for the earth.

• Quantity

For one

In restaurants, all meals are heavy. Like, ridiculously heavy. I almost never finished one. Good thing that the doggy bag exists but now I know that if it doesn’t in France, it’s because we don’t need it. Here it’s just an obligation. I always feel bad not finishing my plate so I’m happy to get the leftover home. Still, it’s really too big for me and dare I say, for anybody. I’m not the only one not finishing what I order.

• Waste

Wasteland

There is a lot compared to what I know in France and it’s of course related to quantities of food. As food is pretty cheap, people don’t feel the need to save it as much as we do in Europe I guess. At first it was shocking for me. I try not to focus on it. Sort of America Waste Of Life.

• Bacon

Flickr comment: “My two favorite things in the world.. … ….. with BACON!”

Bacon is a religion here. You just have to watch Jim Gaffigan stand up about bacon to understand what it means to the US culture. It’s everywhere, I even ate some chocolate tablet with bacon. Of course it’s pretty bad for the health to eat that everyday. In a sandwich one time I had four slices of it. Four, between a salad leave and massive bread around. This day I realized I could not eat that more than once a month. If I can escape it.

Other than that, eating in the US is not really different than it is in France. Sure, having a cheese store nearby selling Pont L’évèque and Vouvray helps a lot :)

The other day I just tweet-censured myself:

“Maybe I shouldn’t have add "Black/Afro-American Male" in some form this morning. "Other" would’ve been better http://okcupid.com/z/2v”

Saw these stats/facts from SexActu. So annoying to see what I felt. So annoying to censured myself in the real-time blogging realm. Just because I don’t want to be seen as the angry/whiny black man. Because it’s another bad thing society-wise you know.

But yeah, nothing new actually. That is maybe the worse part.

To White people who could be offended by such statistics, I would just say to you something I’ve learned from Dave Chappelle here:

Calm down motherfuckers, you win by default.

I have one problem with music: lyrics. I can’t really listen to them. Sometimes I cam hum every single instrument of the song, know every note triggered and yet being totally unable to sing some simple english I have listen to a gazillion time.

“That’s weiird”

Though I always found that french was not a really good language to sing with, even young and listening to french stuff I could not pay attention or care about it. Learning song lyrics by heart was annoying for me.

Music first. I automatically focus on music you know, the background noise that make lyrics shine. So much difference between being before, not understanding at all what is going on to now, where i can dissect almost any complex piece of music and give you the name of that synth or see the waveform in my head. Mmmh ADSR..

Problem is lyrics from songs are a big part of pop culture. I could not sing anything, except what I did search and learn patiently making myself, karaoke-wise, a pure disaster.

I do learn some from time to time, well after digging the music of course.

“Hey wait, what is he/she saying? Let me see from what I feel with the music”

Now that I did that for a couple of years, I think what I like the most in lyrics is canevas of ideas, not stories. I’d rather have some EW&F:

“Celebrate, change your thoughts to love
Celebrate, what you’re thinking of
Time ain’t long, soon we’ll be moving on,
Moving on…”

than some DJ Quik:

“This is for the ho in you
In you, the ho in you
This is for the ho in you
In you, the ho in you”

Ok it’s a bit extreme but I took this example because in both case I appreciate the music. But I can’t sing something as shitty as a fake sexy-porn story. Sorry, I’d rather do it for real.

I think it’s not just coming from the fact that I do music. I was not at 5/6 –well barely starting- and I can’t say that I hate words, I always loved to read.

Sorry mermaid, it.does.not.work

I think it has to do with mind independence.

Having someone telling me a story 10 000 times, with the same tone, the same manner, the same words is not something I search for. Actually this is something that my brain fight against because it knows how speech is powerful. Reading is my own voice. I can interpret, do what I want.

I know it’s a bit of paranoia and autism that I experience. It’s underneath, I can’t control that. It’s like if I can’t make the audio speech mine, if I can’t relate deeply, it just goes from one ear to the other.

Or the opposite: with sad lyrics it’s really easy to feel the same. I can’t sing I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo. Hell no. I know I am a weirdo, no need to accentuate that by singing it hundreds of time! You just have to search “creep” to find the Radiohead song, first result. Scary.

I would not say that lyrics make people do stuffs. It’s just that they’re part of the culture and if a song can change the world in a good way, hundreds of them storytelling gangbang with whores for entire generations of men, cannot not have an impact. The impact is the glue that makes them so slow to move on but this is not the subject. Gladys Knight is right.

I listen to the singing melody, not the lyrics. I listen to it musically –voice grain, rhythm, flow-. This is what I love with some hip-hop songs, I don’t give a shit about what the dude says –bragging stories, nostalgia blabla- but the voice is so greatly part of the sound that I can loop it over and over. Now that’s a musician behavior.

Anyway, this all thing is socially impairing to me. But surfing this ocean of sounds is so good.

This year I told myself that I would take any opportunities in front of me and that it would be the year I exploded. Whatever it means.

Et on reprend les bonnes habitudes..

I moved to L.A. found an oustanding partner and am so ready to push it hard, doing audio like crazy. I miss some tools, they’re on their way. After three months without producing new content, without my dear 5.1 that makes me want no tv no movies no nothing because sound is all I need, I’m frea-king starving.

Years and thousands of hours of the same routine stopped temporarily, some important details to solve, money flying by no doubt why I did get back smoking cigarettes. Damn it, I should stop already.

I have to shut down ideas in my brain because I can’t realize them. As you know ideas are cheap, making and finish them is what is hard and all about.

The production of SideFlip the iPhone game I’m working on didn’t go very well. Too much experience of what we should fix and go for first, not enough experience of managing people, especially without contracts and just trust from words. Eventually it’s gonna be out soon (we’re in beta).

I did the 8 mn original music, all audio fxs, design 20+ puzzles –some I can’t solve now!-, manage the consistency and ergonomy of the GUI, report bugs and all that boring stuff but I failed at making it happen in time. Like says my friend Sean Bonner I’m just shit at providing structure to people I work with. I want to get better at it. Or find people who don’t need it.

Anyway some music from me is gonna be featured in Boxgame by Sophie Houlden, the internet game of the month in Edge magazine next month! I can’t wait. Oh and play it, it really is a fun platform-puzzle game.

I did not explode yet but the fuse is burning steadily.

Family time.

During that time, August in Paris makes you believe that the capital is at least half black, half asian demonstrating who can go on vacation, sort of. It makes me feel bad that my white friend after four years in China seeing that too is feeling “invaded” while at the same time he loves black pussies.

And then I see angry young black men at la Def. Usual stuff for a suburb parisian like me. Never had relation with french black communities. Not nerd enough for me I guess.

In L.A. it’s different. Black people are quite rare where I live but they all share the streets and card boxes. A large part that I saw for now are homeless or poor with shitty jobs. Last night I paid a vegan taco to a big black man with a guitar before he did go to Mc Donalds.. “Black man.. Guitar..”

They all have this “sympathy by default” bro’ thing with me, always smiling with the classic “how’s it going?” coming out from their mouth shortly after. Sometimes I want to talk and share.

Then of course there’s Barack the Boss. Health care debate on TV. Openness.

And then I read that, here’s an excerpt:

“People of all races got sucked into subprime and adjustable-rate mortgages, but even high-income blacks were almost twice as likely to end up with subprime home-purchase loans as low-income whites — even when they qualified for prime mortgages, even when they offered down payments.”

Something that follow the analysis of the End of Work which explain how technology has killed millions of jobs for minorities since half a century:

“In October 1944 the first mechanical cotton picker was successfully demonstrated in the Mississippi delta.vIt could pick 1000 pounds of cotton an hour, thereby doing the work of 50 seasoned pickers. 1949 only 6 percent of the cotton in the South was harvested mechanically; by 1964 it was 78 percent. Eight years later, 100 percent of the cotton was picked by machines.

More than 5 million blacks migrated north in search of work between 1940 and 1970. The fortunes of black workers in the North improved steadily until 1954 and then began a forty-year historical decline.”

“In the mid-1950s, automation began taking its toll in the nation’s manufacturing sector,” he wrote. “Hardest hit were unskilled jobs in industries where black workers were concentrated. Between 1953 and 1962, 1.6 million blue-collar jobs were lost in the manufacturing sector. While the unemployment rate for black Americans had never exceeded 8.5 percent between 1947 and 1953 and the white rate of unemployment had never gone beyond 4.6 percent, by 1964, blacks were experiencing an unemployment rate of 12 percent while white unemployment was only 5.9 percent.”

It seems like the economic race is always lost twice as much by the same people. For no reason. Just History and slow progress.

I’m fortunate enough to be in the tiny knowledge and high profile economy,I’m lucky enough but I know that without my unique experience and “white legacy”, I would probably not be here. It hurts. It fuels me too.

In the game industry where there’s less than 2% of black people (yeah, less than women can you imagine?), it’s just not the representation of western societies today. Didn’t see a change in ten years. On the consumer side of it, I read that and I feel sad that people just don’t get the solution (Valve totally got it with L4D, Sega totally got it with Streets of Rage in 19 fucking 91) and get angry instead. And sure thing is, there is never been a time more multi-cultural than now.

These gigantic contrasts between what I live and what I see around me, what should work and doesn’t make me contemplate all that shit. I’m in the middle. No sides, nothing to say except that everybody’s to blame. Not very useful.

Also, there’s the fastest man ever. Coming from the country more known for its slow tempo music and slow motion grass. You can’t invent that.

Sometimes I want his legs. I want to run. Run away from you, society you are so slow! I want the Future Now.

Watching everything that goes on in the tech and computer world –well as much as I can-, here some thoughts.

Just so nobody can’t say nothin’

Closed/Open technologies and monopole.

It’s an endless loop I guess. Usually at first we use the closed ones because they are better and when the technology is mature enough –when people really need it while the tech reaches stability- we move to alternatives to the point where we’re almost totally free to use this technology seeminglessly and endlessly. And then a new closed tech comes etc

So there’s nothing wrong using closed tech. Opera offers a great browser experience and it’s a closed tech. The only thing to do with closed technologies is to not giving up everything on them. Using them to get things done and have a boost of productivity is fine.

Adobe Flash is an excellent example of a great productivity tool for which we tend to give up everything, building a monopole based on a proprietary technology where only a giant company like MS can compete with (Silverlight). But Flash is cool –though not as fast as the Grandmaster-, it is used by visual designers. They are the coolest guys of the entire universe they can’t be wrong!

That’s weird. The stability of the open source alternative should be here and competing. I can’t wait to have the open source equivalent of the PDF format, without any restriction and gazillion of devices capable of reading it while offering perfect performances, feeding great apps.

I see some people complaining about the monopole of iTunes these days and people going away from a market so tightly controlled by the California based company that apps are refused arbitrary.

Well, Apple is known for that –just having to install iTunes to see the music catalog is the first step-, it’s closed closed closed. The size of the iphone market is now enough to make people think twice before being stuck.

It’s like the cooler you seem, the more you can fuck people. Open or closed technology doesn’t even count. That’s why I don’t want Chrome. Way too nice Google, and you already have me with mail and rss.

OS/Apps and updates.

They all fail at some point. Whatever it is, from Snow Leopard to WordPress to Windows, a major update on a major system has to break some stuffs. That’s why 7 is impressive for me, it didn’t break anything and everything worked out out of the box on three very different computer. Because doing an operating system is one of the most complex task in the world, sometimes it doesn’t deliver. Hopefully it’s less and less the case whatever the flavor of what is running your computer on.

Also the more the app is used, the more it’s vulnerable and needs updates. WordPress and Firefox come in mind. It’s just like that. And no system is unbreakable so.. All this noise on news about what is normal in the software world is pretty annoying because during that time, they don’t talk about great apps and services that would be worth the word.

Patents & lock-in.

Well, I agree with Raph Koster on this one. You have a great idea, you did work hard on it, it seems fair that you want some revenue from it. The point is to what degree. It seems that people always want to abuse that, largely. The lack of competition because of abusive patents especially on hardware is slowing the spread of progress so hard (multitouch mess).

Anyway the only way to prevent abuses or slow generalization of great tech things seems to make sure to be in the middle of it. No sides, just going here and there, getting the one that fits your need without compromising your freedom.

I feel like I’m overcapacity. Too much information, I can’t process them all. Facebook was not a really good idea for that. I am officially scared to launch the website. It’s a time-elapsing hemoragy.

I have some trouble to find a way to filter, priorize all this digital social information creation thing. The more I create, the more I get feedback. The more I get feedback the more I need to answer it. The more I answer it, the less I create. Then I switch for another period, endlessly.

Quite exhausting. A blog comment appears in the mail, I click, read it, prepare my answer then see 4 tweets with 2 links with one to a picture. Internal dialog:

“RT the article? Haha funny picture. Where was I. Oh I didn’t read this tab yet, good 5 pages article. Let’s see. Oh, it blinks in the taskbar, the discussion is on. Correcting, the three conversations are on. Another link ok but quickly then because I was doing.. Oh damn the answer to the blog comment. Oh. I was writing an email at first and needed a starred rss item. Let’s see. Oh new items. And new tweets. And it’s blinking again. And it feels exciting.”

This little reward loop in my brain is saying to me: “yeaaah, encore”. I’m a fucking mouse in a laboratory. With a scroll-wheel in the forehead.

I have around 400 streams of information to check everyday, some of them are enough alone to occupy my brain for hours. Videos. I now avoid them widely, so time-consuming.

I know. But the Internet is so addictive. Especially when Gmail is down.

I guess we all are in the same shit.