David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

I’m approaching two years in my 180sq ft palace of an apartment, I and have to admit that its getting rather old quickly. The building is over 100 years old, I have a single small window that doesn’t open well, but doesn’t stay closed well without a screw either. My closet is a bit small, and honestly 180 sq ft makes me feel like I’m living in Tokyo but without the good sushi. Oddly enough my friends that live in Tokyo and Japan in general have larger places.

So I’d like a new apartment. In case anyone reading has a similar place that they plan on vacating soon, or perhaps you’re a real estate agent and you have something similar… you should contact me. This is simple a wish list, and I don’t expect that I’ll find anything exactly like this by any means. Real Estate nationwide is ’supposed’ to be tanking, so who knows.

• Neighborhood: Back Bay, Beacon Hill, South End, South Boston, JP, Cambridge or Brookline. Anywhere else is either too far away, too overun by students, or to be honest a bit too ‘urban’ for me.
• Either 2 small bedrooms, or a 1 bed + Office. I need my bedroom and project room separate. The project room need not have windows.
• Good electrical wiring. A single 15 amp circuit won’t cut it, and I need 30-45ampres of current available (3 breakers) to not overload it. How I’m not tripping this 20amp circuit now is beyond me.
• Hardwood floors. No carpet. It gets dirty good easy.
• Kitchen: Full sized fridge (not one under the counter as I have now), dishwasher, and hopefully disposal. Eat in kitchen not needed. Gas stove required above all else.
• Parking is a plus, but not a requirement as I have no car currently. If gamerDNA gets bought up by News Corp for 700M then I’ll put a Tesla in the parking spot. (No, they aren’t looking at actually buying us… just a joke).
• 550+ sq ft total. 750+ would rock my world.
• I don’t mind ground level at all, as long as the windows are secure.
• Cat friendly a must. Jade is cute AND a good kitty. She keeps the mice at bay.
• The thicker the walls and floors, the better. I can tend to be a tad loud, but not excessively so. I should be able to watch The Dark Knight at a reasonable volume and not disturb the neighbors
• Few requirements for bathroom. Preference to not having the ubiquitous pink tiles that are so prevalent in Boston apartments from the 50′ s rennovations. Jade the Cat has requested a Claw Footed Tub however.
• Walls must have real framing, that I can hang guitars from the studs. None of this 150 year old horsehair plaster stuff that you can’t even hang a poster on.
• The more closets the better.
• Must be accessible to the T (subway, not just bus). That doesn’t mean a 25 minute walk to the subway either. Boston winters are too cold for that.
• Looking to move either Sept 1, or better yet Aug 1/15th. I don’t relish the Sept 1 insanity and I’ll do anything to avoid it. Earlier opportunities will be considered.
• Preference to NOT put down First/Last/Security/Fee. 4 months is insane, and my sister put down less on her mortgage recently. Absolutely no reason so many are needed for just an apartment.
• $1200 max. Not a penny over. I’m not made of money. Aren’t Real Estate prices supposed to be falling?

Overall, I’m just looking for a nice little place for me and my cat. I’d like to have space for a queen sized bed, as being 26 with a twin bed is lame. I want a room that I can set up my darkroom, music and guitars in and not junk up the rest of the apartment, plus a living room to have a few friends over, or maybe have a couch in! I mean, my current apartment has only my twin bed and my Aeron chair to sit on. Not very good for having friends over. Plus we run out of oxygen if there’s more than 3 people + cat and don’t have the window open.

I hate Hollywood for showing that every struggling artist who lives in a big city has a huge, open, modern industrial loft apartment… even though they haven’t written a song or sold a painting in years. I am ashamed to admit it, but I thought that I’d actually be able to find such in Boston when I moved here, but then found that they barely exist and when they do are $6000/month. No starving artist lives in that, let alone someone working for a startup!

So does anyone have a lead on an apartment for me? In return, you get first dibs on my 180 sq ft mansion in Back Bay.

Somehow in my Wordpress migration between servers twice, and upgrading to WP 2.7 it seems that I killed all of my photos posted to the blog prior to 12/2008. Umm, opps. I could work to restore them likely, but for the time just go check out my Flickr account, which you can access via the “Photos” tab at the top of the page. Probably shooting myself in the foot SEO wise, but I’ll have to live with it until I can find my server backups of the photos and restore them.

A few weeks ago I was complaining about the audio quality of MP3s that I was listening to, when approached by Erik J. Heels (@ErikJHeels on Twitter) with a challenge that I couldn’t actually tell the difference between a well encoded MP3 and a CD. Since everyone in the audio world “knows” that the lossy encoding of any MP3 is far inferior to CD I took him up on the challenge that I would easily be able to tell the differences between MP3 and CD audio. It seems that he had a pretty good test put together (details in link) and a few days later I recieved a CD in the mail.

The CD contained a wide mixture of commercial, high quality, well recorded material with 12 songs, each with both CD and MP3 format on the the disk but in random order. The MP3s were originally encoded at 256kbs VBR, and at 48khz even. I felt that the shift from 44.1 to 48khz would give it away, as well as the encoding. I felt confident.

I originally intended to go into Taylor Barefoot’s recording studio and listen to everything in a well treated room, with stereo subwoofers, multiple monitoring options, and a Benchmark DAC-1 converter. However times scheduling that didn’t work out, so one day I at work I pulled out some pretty high quality Sony in-ear monitors/headphones and gave the test a shot on my Macbook Pro. I listened to each track, quickly writing on a sheet of paper which I felt was MP3 and which was originally CD. Threw it all into a quick email and sent it back to Erik. Only two of them did I mark as “hard/unsure”. I felt that the other 10 tracks were pretty clear as to which was MP3 and which was CD. The Macbook Pro with good headphones isn’t the perfect listening environment, but I felt that it should be ok for telling CD vs MP3 if there is such a huge difference.

I got my results back later that day. Out of 12 songs/24 tracks, I had gotten half right. Yes, I had lost. Half right is the same as rolling dice or a monkey choosing them. I felt pretty confident about my answers, and consider myself to really have an ear for audio. I was shocked, but Eric admitted that few people, himself included, pass the test with 100% right. This all goes to show, don’t believe everything you read in audio forums. Go with your own listening ability. I might have been able to tell the difference between 192khz/24-bit audio and the MP3, but between MP3 and CD I can say that there were differences, but I couldn’t tell which was “better” and certainly not which was which.

You can find all of the details on his test on his blog at: http://www.erikjheels.com/?p=1236

Your personal computer, television and the internet have never been so close to being intertwined. Yet, there is still a vast distance to be breached before they are really are the same and connected as one. I have gotten a bit closer to getting things set up at my apartment to make this so, and I’d like to share it with you.

Not too long ago I was introduced to Boxee. Boxee is a media player, similar in concept to Apple’s Front Row or Microsoft’s Media Center application. It’s currently in private alpha, but anyone in the program already can send you an invite, so you can contact me for an invite. As being alpha software it has a few bugs, but they are being worked out quickly and the massive functionality allows you to overlook those easily for the time being. Boxee plays almost any DRM-free media that you can throw at it, including 1080p H.264 video with 5.1 surround output.

Additionally, Boxee is social and allows you to see what your friends have viewed and recommended for you, and for you to stream in content from nearly any RSS feed/torrent, and other popular services including Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube. Oh, and you can control it all through an Apple Remote.

Then there’s the Usenet. The Usenet is a nearly 30 year old discussion and filesharing service. It isn’t a peer to peer service like bittorrent, but has much of the same content that you might find through various bittorrent search engines. Basically, this is a great place to get files of almost any type, including audio and video.

The Usenet can be accessed publically via your ISP’s usenet servers, but that generally isn’t the best way. Most ISPs have caps on access and the speeds aren’t that great. Also they don’t archive the files far back. Basically, that’s not a great way to access the Usenet. To better access Usenet you need to use a Private Usenet server. At first I tried Giganews as a private server, and they were ok, but a bit expensive. I’ve found a better deal with NewsDemon. They have unlimited access from $17.99/month, with plans starting as low as $8.99.  To better organize them and interface with them you should use something like Newzbin which helps search, sort and access NewsDemon/Usenet. It isn’t free either, but it’s about a dollar a week or less. Both are reputable services and work well. Also with a private usenet server you have much less of a chance with the RIAA/MPAA should you choose to download copyrighted material since you aren’t forced/encouraged to re-share the files and there is no public record of you having downloaded the files.

As a client I use SABnzbd+ which is an automatic newreader. It is a free python program that is cross platform and is accessed once running through your web browser. It can be easily configured and can automatically pick out the bookmarks that you set in Newzbin, auto initiating downloads from NewsDemon. SABnzbd can automatically unrar files and move them to a completed folder upon download. Boxee can be configured to automatically scan these folders upon launch, and will pick up anything new that you’ve downloaded; unlike iTunes that would require that you manually add the new files if they weren’t downloaded via iTunes.

What this all ends up in is the ability to download high quality music, and even 1080p 5.1 surround full movies quickly, securely and with confidence. You can then play them back in an easy to use, flexible and social media player that works with a remote control so you aren’t tied to your computer at all times. I download at speeds in excess of 7 to 15Mb/sec consistently.

I  store all of my media on an Ubuntu file server that has over 2TB of attached storage. My friend Rich and I both share this server and queue up SABnzbd from Newzbin. We are connected between our rooms with gigabit copper ethernet. 1080p takes about 3MB/sec over this connection, so it never skips a beat. We have a gigabit switch connecting all of our systems (Wii, Xbox360, PS2, two macs, a router running DD-WRT and the Ubuntu server). I also use this server for backups and my Aperture storage of vaults. Adding storage to a system like this is super easy with external USB drives. I picked up a 640GB drive the other day for just $99 from Best Buy and they get cheaper every day. Surely I could have found it even cheaper online.

We are using DD-WRT’s built in tracking of bandwidth per month to make sure that we don’t go over Comcast’s 300GB/month cap (resets on the first of each month). We only of course download open source, creative commons, and public domain materials via this service but should you choose to download commercial sources they are fully available. I no longer have to worry about completing downloads using my laptop, having my laptop overburdened space-wise with HD content.

I connect to my TV with a DVI cable, and to my studio monitors for audio via a Mackie 400F interface. You can also use a 3.5mm to TOSLink optical cable to use the built in output of the Macbook Pro/Macbook to connect with 5.1 to your reciever for full quality surround output. Boxee and OS X fully support this.

So there you have it. Content, delivery, simplicity and control. All the HD and surround sound goodness that you’ve been dreaming of your computer doing for years. I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

I’m a fan (or maybe it’s what I hate it when people make me play) of Buzzword Bingo. That’s where you’re sitting in a meeting, conference, classroom, presentation, or maybe just on Twitter and you’re being flooded by Buzzwords. Buzzwords are generally meant to try to show that you’ve “got it” and that you’re on top of the newest trend. They are made in a poor attempt to try to make an old concept new, and thus inject marketing dollars into it, or get something sold.

The one that grinds my gears the most is “Viral”. “Omg, we’re about to launch a viral video”, someone might say. The moment someone says that, you should quickly cover your ears, or at least stop paying attention to that person. On the internet viral actually means this: Something that has unexpectedly spread due to people sharing it with others in a rapid way, generally going past a certain tipping point and becoming an epidemic, where nearly everyone says, “yea, I’ve seen that”.

Let’s look over this again:

1. Unexpected- Unless someone is damn good, and there are less than .0001% of you out there that are that good, you can’t “make” your video go viral. You can try to seed it in the right places, but unless its something people really love and need to share its not going to spread. The curve should go up for views, not spike and then fall off the face of the earth. Every damn video your company puts out will not be viral. Soulja Boy’s main “Crank That” videos have gone viral. The rest of his stuff just gets a lot of views. If you can actually consistently make viral videos, then you’ve probably been getting 7 figure paychecks for it in the past year, and no one knows what you actually do because you don’t want to spoil the secret. It is nearly impossible to conceptualize in your head what the internet will take and run with. When you watched what we know now as the “Rick Roll” in the 80’s, when it was just a music video did you think, “OMG THIS IS VIRAL?”. No you didn’t. You can’t figure it out. Stop trying.
2. Rapid- Just getting a lot of views slowly over time doesn’t do it. Once people catch onto it, it needs to spread like wildfire. This often involves 4Chan picking it up, it hitting the front page of Digg, and it getting reposted to a few hundred if not a few thousand forum posts. Janet Jackson’s boob falling out was viral. Within 24 hours, the entire world knew exactly what she had under that costume.
3. Tipping Point- If a few thousand people see it, that’s great, but it doesn’t make it viral. The internet is huge these days. If you aren’t hitting hundreds of thousands of views in the “rapid” stage, then you likely again are missing viral.
4. Everyone’s seen it- I don’t think anyone who was on the Internet in the late 90’s didn’t see the hamster dance, then you probably weren’t actually on the internet.

Viral videos often turn into memes of some sort if they are really on-key and accepted by the internet.

So what are your videos if not viral?

• Popular- Just because people watch the Presidental Debates didn’t make them viral. People sent them around, sure. They weren’t viral.
• Funny- Don’t confuse every funny video with viral. It’s just not it. The joke that you thought of and told your mom in 4th grade might have been funny, but it wasn’t viral.
• Promotional- There’s a good chance that this video is promoting you, your company, or your product. Sometimes this will get spread around
• Well Promoted- So you just got 30,000 views of your video after blasting it out to twitter and having dozens of people make best attempts to distribute it. Then it falls off the face of the earth. Guess what? Not viral. You just promoted the hell out of it. What’s why it got views. If it was so good on its own merit, it wouldn’t have needed that.

In short, the internet takes care of viral for us. It acts as a hive mind and distributes it for you. Sure, there’s tricks you can do, promotions you can make, but what you’ve done at that point is promote something well, not create something that went viral.

Having a “viral video” isn’t the only mark of success. Your video can serve its purpose without being viral. Not being viral doesn’t mean you’ve failed (unless that was your goal), or made a bad video. There’s probably a few hundred actual viral videos every year at best. Yours just doesn’t happen to be one of them.Viral isn’t always good in fact. The “Motrin Moms” ad recently went viral. I don’t think it had the same effect that they had intended.

Instead, try making a video with a purpose and content, that isn’t intended to be viral. Maybe it will become viral on its own.