Category: Blog

General Blog Articles

An Ode to P______

⋅ Blog, Family ⋅ , ⋅

Oh to the beautiful wretched spawns of loins that bleed us of patience, sanity and money.

Kick us when we’re down with their opposing agendas and indifferent attitudes.

Mock us with a severity that rivals our enemies while they turn the daggers of our own words back towards our hearts.

Look – above the horizon, a cuddle has risen.

Listen – on the wind, the sweetest words ever spoken have been uttered.

Watch – on their faces, as the seemingly mundane transforms into an elation of discovery.

A mutual amnesia sets in as we quickly forgive and forget all the transgressions from mere moments before.

Muck and dirt.

Wash and rinse.

The cycle continues.

In the end,

I…..

A comfy pair of jeans with rips, worn knees,

And some mystery stains that won’t wash out.

– Jason Lee Shanks (2016)

In America you can buy bucket-sized cups of coffee in any flavour you like other than coffee-flavour.

⋅ Lifestyle ⋅

– quote by Josephine Baker.

I was on the hunt for some decent coffee and beans while in Boston and I stumbled upon this article on Boston.com that got me all fired up.

I realise this thread was 4 years old but it still comes up featured on the coffee week page of the Boston newspaper. I’m in the midst of a trip back to the U.S.A. after a couple of years and still struggling to find an acceptable cup o’ joe outside central metro areas (I’m happy to see the best independent coffee houses in Boston article and look forward to checking out some of the winners starting with Blue State Coffee and a haunt I’ve been in the past – Pavement.) Currently I’m listening to a drip machine at the only local roastery where I am (no need to mention names as it’s an iconically sad and repeatable experience) burning and boiling away any remaining flavour in the liquid and replacing it with a bitter burnt pre and after taste I’m about to confirm out of an attempt at respect for my host I’ve travelled to see.

Spend some time out of this country and you realise it’s the brunt of so many bad coffee jokes around the world. Thankfully they eventually drove Starbucks out of my current home in Australia with their over roasted, over sugared concoctions to cover up the mediocrity. Drip coffee in general has got to be the worst insult to coffee beans I’ve ever encountered — and I use to partake of it like it was meant to be. If you can’t at least palate your coffee black but have to immediately preempt that with multiple teaspoons of sugar and milk to make it so (rather than a flavour variance choice), you need to look elsewhere, seriously. Thankfully I finally did 35 years in to my life. Yes, I’m a reformed drip coffee drinker – the worst kind!

Later on in years I discovered the beauty, complexity and nuances of making pourover, chemex, aeropress, espresso: the feel of the grind in congruence with the kind of brew, the differing flavour profiles of these processes, the choice of beans, the affects of water temperature and humidity and so on, did I say the importance of a perfect and fresh grind? most important. Now you may not wish to concern yourself with learning and mastering all these intricacies, but if you haven’t at least experienced coffee by a barista that does, for the love of revealing to your mouth all the layers upon layers of complementary flavour elementals that can come from this glorious bean when properly prepared, then you are doing your mouth a serious disservice. Boot kick your drip machine to the curb (you don’t need to spend a lot of money or time, get a $5 pourover mug top or an amazing $30 Aeropress), avoid these 2 coffee hating chains like the zombie plague they are, and become a coffee lover for the first time in your life no matter what age or level of experience you are.

By the gods of Arabica and Robusta wake up America!

A personal journey of wrist watch wearing

⋅ Blog, Lifestyle ⋅

I have a fickle love affair with time. Sometimes I have a burning desire to know the exact time of day. I ‘watch’ any nearby clock with breathless anticipation. Usually coupled by an impending life circumstance I anticipate with joy or dread. At other times, maybe even for an entire day or week if I’m lucky, I’ll loose all sense of it save my inherent biological clock I can’t turn away from. I know I’m not alone in this transgression.

Also like many of us I was introduced to the concept of wearing a wrist-watch at an early age, likely before it was no more relevant to me than learning to understand this partly man-made measurement over the cycles of nature, at a time when my youthful abandon of necessity of this save when my body gave out from hunger or exhaustion. I’m reminded daily of this now as my 3 year old tells me it’s morning time at almost 5pm simply because it’s still light out. “No daddy, it’s morning time now!”

Mickey Mouse WatchThe first watch I can remember possessing was a thing of beauty for an entirely different reason. That of watching Mickey’s hands unhumanly spin around his cartoon body, managing to fix his carefree smile throughout the daily contortions.

Casio Calculator watchThe second had to be my initiation into the digital world with a Casio complete with these mind-boggling features of stop-watch, alarm clocks and even a calculator with an impossibly difficult to navigate user interface. Didn’t matter to me, it was so Dick Tracy!

Wearing such devices at that time was equally about pure gadget status factor than the necessity of function. I fondle my grandfathers gold-plated pocket watch from time to time and imagine the same: 1 part time-keeper, 1 part status symbol.

Later in life I waffled between the choice of analog vs. digital timepieces, caught between the representation of time as a daily cycle or the slow LED glow march to the end of time itself. But always, with my piece du jour strapped to my wrist.

Then other devices came along that added time as a functional after-thought as it was back-staged by cooler tech such as pagers and later mobile phones. It was around this stage that the cracks began to appear in many of our relationships with our wristwatches. Why must I suddenly be burdened with 2, 3 devices that provided the time of day…the sexier tech prevaled. I started wearing a wrist watch less and less until about the time of my first Palm pilot it left my wrist altogether.

I became quickly accustomed to the newfound freedom of the naked wrist. Complementary bracelets went by the wayside as well as they ‘threw my symmetry off’. I personally had another motivation as a musician who occasionally played percussion and keyboards and these accoutrements only got in the way, or forgotten if I took them off and left them somewhere.

My new shackle was the flick of the wrist in and out of my pants pocket to quickly avail myself of the time and move on. In retrospect, this lessening of the time being so readily available without this extra friction started to have a fundamental affect on my relationship with time. I became less reliant on this acute information unless absolutely necessary. Of course this relationship differs greatly from person to person or from stages of life and responsibilities. If you’re not punching a time clock, tied to a class schedule or responsible for getting kids to a thousand different places on time or calculating yet another round of antibiotics or pain medicine for this weeks child-care bug, etc etc then this punctuality is perhaps less important to you. Then there’s vacation, especially if you’re camping for a few days or plopped on a beach — time becomes a fluid stream of consciousness.

Despite my embrace of the digital world to a viral level: early adopter of personal computers, smart phones, tablets, reading ebooks for 15 years, here and there my analog brain found ways to fight back:

  • I’ve used a ‘fuzzy clock’ in my menubar for years. Ironically, I actually contributed spanish translation to one years back.
  • 2 years ago I grew weary of wrenching time out of my pocket and the accompanying fear that my precious iPhone would go flying onto the ground. I intentionally selected the most minimal time-piece I could find — a blackface Nixon with white hour lines, not even a date for extra features. A bracelet on my other wrist came back…symmetry.

Until last month, my life was in balance around time issues (not time management, that’s an entirely different if related story!) Finding out the time was still minimally distracting yet quickly available. My phone flicked in and out of my pocket probably more than ever but for entirely unrelated information fiending.

Apple WatchThen the  Watch announcement happened. The concept of the digital watch evolved even far beyond the digital communicator of our Dick Tracy youth. Lust quickly set in, colours and material choices meticulously pondered over. There’s no avoiding now I will likely be waiting in line, possibly overnight at my nearest Apple store. I’m sure I can easily convince my 6 year old to camp out with me (his Santa list was after all recently collated to include:

  • Google Glasses
  • an iPhone
  • an  Watch

Dream on son…gawd what have I done!?

The abyss of time in anticipation of this yet to be announced product availability is now filled with pondering how this will change my life —and my ever-shifting relationship with time. I’ve already drenched my thoughts in possible software angles and renewed my interest in learning Swift and WatchKit to try my hand at developing something for an entirely new platform — how exciting!

New lifestyle questions arise however!

  • How will this affect my association with my wrist-watch now being a simple utilitarian point of reference to suddenly being a constant source of fascination?

  • How will this now usurp my iPhone as the centrepiece of my technological window on information?

  • How long will it be before I yearn for simplicity again and start wearing my grandfather’s pocket watch?

Congratulations! You’ve been Fired!

⋅ Blog, Miscellaneous ⋅

They always have such fancy terms for being fired.

  • let go. No we don’t want to hold you back any longer, we’re ‘letting’ you go. Or maybe you were holding on too tight to the security rope of your job and they couldn’t hold your weight any longer, so they let go…aaaaaaaayeeeee!
  • re-trenched sounds very war or sports analogous. We’re putting you back in the trenches, you’ve been benched. Or worse, having a ditch dug for you to lie down in — permanently.
  • redundant. what does that even mean? They hired 2 people (or more) to do the same job? Who stuffed that up? Ahem, I think the hirer should be fired first!
  • Then you hear down-sized a lot (especially after the dot com boom), very politically correct and impersonal. Hey, nothing to do with me, it was the company, got too big, market turned sour. Usually more true than any other scenario.
  • Then there’s always the ol’ getting the pink slip. Very early 20th century.

I think of all the synonyms, I like freed the best.

Congratulations! You’ve been freed to pursue the next best thing in your life! I realised it was unplanned on your part, but everyone needs a little nudge now and then. The bright side is you can think of it as a favour.

[written to a friend who recently got [ahem] re-trenched].

It’s time the Flat vs Skeuomorphic Design debate grew up

⋅ Blog, Design ⋅ , , ⋅

Flat Design has been a trendy topic of discussion in design circles of late. While some have extolled its virtues as a panacea to the overly skeuomorphic application design of say some of Apple’s previous incarnations of it’s core apps such as Calendar, Contacts, Game Center, etc., or websites that are over bloated with 3D effects that weigh down the experience — especially when trying to access them on small screens or slow connections.

But I think it’s important not to reduce this argument down to base comparisons that become as reductive as ‘Black vs White’ or ‘Good vs Evil’. As is often the case, the ‘truth’ lies somewhere in the murky grey area between these polar opposites.

I’m viewing Flat Design as more of a trendy backlash…or a Reset Button if you will for some design choices that have gone way overboard on 3D or skeuomorphism. As I teach in my Web Design tutorials, Flat Design is just one extreme of a pendulum of design sensibilities and the better choice for Ux is often somewhere in the middle.

While Microsoft has gone extremely flat in their design choices of late, I think they’ve lost a lot of usability in the process. Some of the more enlightened design language I believe is being practiced by Google in a lot of their recent UI makeovers that pepper flat design with skeuomorphic elements that ‘pop out’ and grab your attention when needed, or Apple with their upcoming iOS7 and it’s 3D use of layers to differentiate functionality, in an otherwise deceptively flat UI design. As users have become more sophisticated and familiar in navigating digital interfaces, naturally some of those elements that needed ‘spelling out’ before can now be backgrounded or even eliminated.

Just as we as users have ‘grown up’ in our instinctual understanding of UIs, so should this debate of one extreme of design vs another.

How to make millions in a day using Facebook!

⋅ News Analysis ⋅ , , , ⋅

No, I’m not trying to sell you a new crazy scheme! No need to scroll down to the bottom to buy my special offer today only 😉

I’m referring to a story that went wildfire yesterday through the machineries of punditry and journalism almost as fast as the actual viral subject matter itself.

Consider the case study of Kony2012.com:

  • pick a heart-wrenching news story (doesn’t matter that it’s 6 years old and largely innaccurate at this point)
  • create a slick Final Cut production set to stirring music
  • have it either narrated by a kid, or centred around a child’s perspective (that is proven heart-wrenchingly effective on the purse strings)
  • Post it to your Facebook page (if you don’t have one, just create a charitable sounding name. No reputable track record needed, this crowd Invisible Children apparently raised 13 million last year and only passed along 24% of it—indicative of so many other unscrupulous ‘charities’ out there.)
  • Watch the 70 million hits and $5 million dollars pour in over just the first 2 days!

Ka-ching! I’m not sure about you but that certainly tickles my inner entrepreneur’s fancy.

Expect to see many more of this formula to come. Beats ye olde TV infomercial with gratuitous footage of emaciated african children hands down!

Please don’t take this the wrong way. There are many sad states of affairs in our world that need serious addressing and I consternate over them just as much as any self-respecting progressive. But for the love of anything worth your actual empathetic attention:

  1. DON’T click away your money from your armchair solely for the sake of satiating your inner charitable nature and expect to be actually making a difference. Do you know the issue first hand? If not, have you researched it beyond a day? Chances are your contribution could easily be doing more harm than good to the root problems.
  2. Look with scrutiny at all the options out there for Aid in this and similar causes and try to go as direct as possible. I also like the latest trend of crowd-sourcing where some collective scrutiny can help worthy potentials rise to the top, for instance:
  3. DO expect it to possibly take generations to undo the damages our cultures have sometimes spent generations contributing to — through colonisation, questionable foreign policies, needs of the many outweighing the few, slavery, cheap labour, etcetera.
  4. Consider if it is really targeting root causes and not just a temporary bandage to the symptoms. For example: are you about to pony up for a poverty issue somewhere or inequitable labour while at the same time shopping at WalMart, CostCo or about to purchase another ‘relatively’ cheap techno-gadget like perhaps the one you’re reading this on?

 

Further Reading:

Huffington Post, US

Herald Sun, AU

The Age, AU – this one had me at: reposting Nigerian-American author Teju Cole’s Tweet: “…..White Saviour Industrial Complex…..” Reminded me of another coined term I’ve endeared myself to lately ‘First-World Issues’

Dude, what MP3 quality should I rip my tunes in?

⋅ Music ⋅ ⋅

Recently a friend asked me (and I’ve got this question a lot since I started compressing my own and friends collections since the late 90’s) – what kbps should I choose when ripping my music to mp3s?

Well, not mp3 format firstly – that’s so 90’s! 😉

Sure, there’s the withering away argument that it is still the most universal format and not hindered by any licensing issues per se (keep reading).  But over the years more and more devices and software have come to support it’s replacement: MP4 (MPEG layer 4) with AAC – you might know it as the file type m4a.  If you’re an iTunes user or have an iPod or iOS device you’ll know this format all too well.  But there are other choices, let’s look at the options:

  • mp3: Okay, it’s still worth considering if you absolutely must ensure that any possible antiquated device or software you try to play it on will work, and at the highest 320kbps (LAME encoder preferrably), it’s essentially indiscernible to uncompressed CD quality.
  •  m4a: highest quality mp4 (essentially the AAC (advanced Audio Codec) wrapped in the m4a container. This is the default iTunes Store settings these days is 256 plus which ON MOST speaker systems and ears is indiscernible from the CD quality – which by today’s standards itself is not considered hi-fidelity.  That would be DTS digital surround and the likes but limits what you can play it on.)
  • ALAC: Apple Lossless Audio Codec (also in m4a container but is file compressed to half the size with no lossy audio!).  For example: a typical hour long CD will be reduced to ~350MB file size. You might be surprised to know this has been an option in iTunes for many years now, but often overlooked if you don’t dig into the Preferences.  A couple weeks ago, Apple announced that they were finally open-sourcing this format, essentially equating it to FLAC in my mind but far more accessible: it will play in iTunes obviously, as well as any of your iOS or iPod devices!*
  • FLAC: The Free Lossless Audio Codec was developed by the Vorbis group as a file compressed non-lossy file type unhindered by patent restrictions.  It sounds great, can be quite commonly seen trading around the interwebs, but has limited playback ability.  With system plugins (such as Perian on Mac OS) you can get it to play in Quicktime-supported apps, but good luck taking it on your portable devices.  Until the recent open-sourcing of ALAC, this was a very attractive option to me but, alas it has never been supported by Apple on their players.*
  • PCM (the raw original CD tracks): sure just drag the original files right from the cd into iTunes (no conversion), but there are better options here, and you’ll limit yourself to playing only off your computer generally. Ok, you could re-burn another CD but…wait, what’s a CD player!?
  • AIFF/WAV: common uncompressed audio file types used by professional audio apps mostly.  Both are universally supported by most software/devices.  This is a good choice if you absolutely have no concern for storage capacity.
* non-lossy audio: before any audiophiles out there get on their mantle with me on how there are slight deviations from the original audio, remember where’ talking real-world usage here, not audio-spectral analysis that only a computer could care about!  It’s generally agreed that these non-lossy audio compressions can not be told apart from the original — even by most professional audio engineers on top-end amplifiers!
So my suggestion?
If you have an iOS device or just use iTunes — go with Apple Lossless.  It’s the last time you’ll ever need to rip those old cd’s, it sounds equal to the original quality, and it’s now an open-source free alternative!  Plus with the ever-constantly dropping prices of storage media, it’s an excellent compromise between quality, accessiblity and space.

Welcome to my Bloggy thingy…the rebirth

⋅ Miscellaneous ⋅ ⋅

I dabbled in running a weblog back in the late 90’s early noughts. Remember Movable Type, and my ultimate favorite in simplicity Blosxom? The former is still going strong as far as I can see. But then came the big guns of WordPress.com, Blogger.com (later bought by Google), and countless other CMS and online-only platforms that fulfilled a similar purpose. I’ll spare you the history lesson.

Then this past decade has been increasingly dominated by social networks (you know who I mean: Facebook, Twitter, and now Google+) where you can quite honestly get a much larger audience than ‘ye olde personal blogging engine’.

So why start yet another blog now? Mostly as a desire to collect my longer-form writings in one place (and link/publish them anyway to the larger social networks). Partly to experiment with, and observe site traffic as a result of this endeavour. Partly to explore the less-limited boundaries of a dedicated blogging software (in this case WordPress) that can’t be fathomed in the rather homogenous experience of Facebook/Twitter/Google+ — despite their constantly adding new applications and partnerships.

I might repopulate this with a few of my choice (highly subjective) previous blog posts over the years. Check the archives later!

Of course, it should go without saying that I welcome any and all feedback, thoughts, dialogue, et al.

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© 2019 jason shanks
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