danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

I am not succeeding lately. I don’t mean personally as a human being, but as a consumer of material goods. Since the beginning of the year I have made an array of purchases for the express purpose of improving my life in some small measure, yet I have been almost systematically thwarted at every turn, and have failed to truly enjoy a benefit from all my wild spending.

How does life hate me? Let me count the ways.

In January, after months of riding Miriam’s vintage bicycle to and from work each day, I was eager to get back on my own bike. Miriam’s bike is a delight – a 1968 English-made three-speed. But my American-made Cannondale is better suited for me and my seven-mile daily commute: it’s light as a feather, has many useful gears, and I can get to work on it in about two-thirds the time it would take on the Dunnelt. I only stopped riding the Cannondale because the tires were in desperate need of replacing, and so were the pedals. I kept putting it off because I knew I’d have to spend over a hundred dollars to take care of it. Then, one morning on campus a spoke suddenly snapped, instantly flattening my tire, and I could put it off no more. Well, I could. I could ride Miriam’s bike, which she had only just purchased from her friend Kat who moved away to Providence. So I put off fixing up my Cannondale for six months.

Then, last month, I decided it was finally time, and I went on down to Bikes and More on Sixth Street and purchased two new tires, two tubes, and a spoke. I even bought a snazzy new U-lock to dissuade would-be brigands. I cleaned the bike up nice, installed the tubes and tires, replaced the broken spoke, and put everything back together. I was very excited to get going again. Nope. The wheel was severely untrue. So I had to wait until I could take it to Bikes and More to get straightened. I had spent over a hundred dollars and was not able to ride my bicycle. I am riding it now, but it took a while.

Elsewhere, Miriam and I had a dream. A dream in which we had two televisions. Like royalty. This extra TV would go in the bedroom, and we could watch it from the comfort of our bed instead of falling asleep on the couch. Like royalty. While we were browsing stores for televisions, we came upon one that could connect wirelessly to the internet. It even has a Netflix button right on the remote. We brought it home, so excited to watch TV in the bedroom (like royalty). But I discovered that our wireless router didn’t emit a signal strong enough to reach the back bedroom. So I went and bought a new wireless router—which does give a strong, consistent signal to our computers—but the wireless receiver that plugs into a USB jack on the side of the TV is evidently not good, and we still cannot watch Netflix in the bedroom.

Elsewhere, after seven years of living with folded paper shades, we decided it was time to upgrade to deluxe, faux-wood blinds. Some of our windows required custom-cut sizes, and we bought those at Home Depot. Other windows, however, had standard sizes, and we purchased those blinds much cheaper at Walmart. They look almost identical, so it’s not a big deal that there are two different designs. It took me a couple weeks to install the blinds in all the windows because I did one at a time before work. And installing blinds inside window frames that are not wood is a frustrating experience. The old plaster in this house is crumbly, and behind that in some windows is not wood, but brick. So getting screws to hold brackets in was a tedious and time-comsuming task. The last window I worked on was in the dining room, and all proceeded according to plan until I put the blinds up and went to adjust them. Then I found that they were broken. So, all that work and I don’t have functional blinds.

And last but not least, I have had frustrating experiences ordering CDs. (I know, first-world problems.) Early last month I ordered a newly-reissued deluxe edition of Janowski’s 1980s recording of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (more on this soon). A week or so after placing my order, Amazon sent me an alert telling me that my order would be delayed for an undetermined amount of time; they had no stock. After about three weeks I got an email telling me my item would ship soon, then I waited some more until a shipping date was posted. The evening the package arrived I was very excited. I opened the box to show Miriam, but to my dismay, the set they sent me had been damaged – clearly dropped or crushed at some point. It is easy to return items to Amazon, and I wasn’t worried about getting cheated, but I Amazon informed me that this recording would not be released for another week. What? It turns out that the set they sent me was part of a very limited supply they received from the label before the February 12th issue date.

Elsewhere, on eBay I ordered a copy of Busoni’s opera Doktor Faust, featuring Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the title role. It was a recording I’d had on my to-buy list for years. When I opened the package and inspected the contents, I was again dismayed – this time to discover that the booklet was missing. I wrote to the seller to ask if he had simply forgotten to include it in the package. “No”, he wrote, “no booklet came with the set”. Impossible. Every opera recording ever issued by a major record label has included a booklet of some sort to, at the least, show the track list. This particular recording came with a full libretto and translation. The seller was just wrong, and I was particularly annoyed that he had listed the item as “like new”. Fortunately, though I did have to go through the trouble to return the package, the seller has refunded my money. Sadly, I do not have the Doktor Faust recording.

Now, do not misunderstand me. I totally get that these are trivial problems. Especially compared to the problems faced by Spartacus*. But my point is that I have spent a lot of money lately and not enjoyed the things I have paid for. I count myself very lucky that these are the sorts of problems that I have.

*I apparently have a history of sleepily dismissing people’s problems if said problems do not strike me as severe as those faced by Spartacus.

Filed under: Music, Rantings, Technology, Transportation on February 12th, 2013 | 3 Comments »

As you might expect, I was interested in the United States Postal Service’s announcement yesterday that Saturday delivery of letters will be suspended come August. You might expect that I am outraged, but I am not. I mean, I’d prefer that the USPS continue six-day full-service, but I recognize that this change is needed given the current state of things. What actually upsets me is that Congress has not taken action to remove the unnecessary burden the USPS faces when it comes to pre-payment of retiree benefits. Nearly everyone who looks at the issue recognizes that these pre-payments are the source of the Postal Service’s woes. Absent these unnecessary and unusual pre-payments, the USPS would be entirely solvent.

But what is most upsetting to me, and what causes genuine annoyance, is how the Postal Service is treated in electronic media. I am reading stories that suggest that this is no big deal, and who cares, because nobody sends letters anyway. Indeed, judging from what I read on the internet, mail, books, CDs, and so on are totally outdated technologies that should die already so we can live in a blissful world of tweets and tumblr. This is ridiculous.

The United States Postal Service still delivers tens of billions of pieces of first-class mail each year, and billions more periodicals and bulk-rate items like junk mail. And while dispatch first-class letters is on the decline, shipment of parcels is on the way up, as more people order items online. I personally receive several packages and letters each week. Most other Americans do, too.

I strongly feel that some subjects are poorly covered by the media precisely because those in the media are so unlike the majority of Americans. That is, reporters and bloggers are early-adopters. They are much more connected to technology than most other people, and, in fact, are more connected than most people want to be. While many of us are comfortable paying our bills online, most wouldn’t trade a handwritten birthday greeting to some cheap e-card. And while some people are content to read magazines and books on tablets, and listen to music on iPods, etc., the overwhelming majority prefer physical media. Like, it’s not even close. Now, that doesn’t mean it will always be that way, or that I am putting down people who like their Kindles and MP3s. I’m not. I’m just saying that the same people who are glued to Twitter all day aren’t the best people to write about these kinds of issues.

I believe this Postal Service matter will be resolved. And even if Saturday delivery doesn’t resume, Congress will finally reexamine the facts and address the issue of unnecessary benefit pre-payment, and the United States Postal Service will once again be in the black.

Filed under: Current Events, Technology on February 7th, 2013 | No Comments »

Today, TheAtlantic.com acknowledges the thirty-second anniversary of the compact disc. Like most such tributes, this one reads more like a eulogy, and contains a common, and entirely inaccurate assertion:

You are part of the long line of data storage devices — the cylinder phonograph, the vinyl record, the audiocassette, the CD-ROM, even the flash drive — that have been made either obsolete or quaint by other, better storage technologies.

I won’t dispute that wax cylinders and cassettes are history, and for good reasons. And I won’t dispute that the compact disc is less popular than it once was. I won’t even dispute that there are “better storage technologies” than the CD. But that’s not really what this piece’s author, Megan Garber, is trying to say. It is clear that she is suggesting that MP3 is the obvious, logical, and “better” successor to compact disc. It is not.

MP3 would have been a superior alternative to the wax cylinder phonograph, and even the 78-RPM record. I can even see its plausible advantages over the audio cassette. But by almost no standard is MP3 superior to compact disc. Smaller file size? In an age in which one can fit 256 GB on a drive the size of a thumb nail, storage capacity is hardly an issue. Portability? Maybe, if you only think about the ability to carry a lot of audio with you in your pocket. But MP3 isn’t especially portable from a legal standpoint. That is, while I can loan you a CD to listen to, I cannot legally loan you my MP3s. In fact, many MP3s have built-in technologies that prevent sharing, so I may not be able to loan you an MP3 at all. Sound quality? Not hardly. MP3 has substantially inferior sound compared to compact disc. Price? Nope. At $0.99 per track, MP3 is not really any cheaper than CD if you enjoy buying albums, especially older titles which can be purchased on CD quite cheaply.

Then there are the tangibles. While LP record enthusiasts lamented the decline in the quality of album art with the advent of the compact disc, MP3 represents the absolute death of album art. For young people who have never seen an LP, this may not be such a big deal, but for people who still care about physical things, this is a big problem.

So, call MP3 “newer” technology; call it “trendier” technology; call it “popular” technology; call it a lot of things, but don’t call it “superior” technology. It is not.

Is there something better than compact disc for music? Certainly. Super Audio Compact Disc, which is used primarily by audiophile classical and jazz labels these days, has better sound than CD and has multi-channel capability, making it ideal for reissues of vinyl-era quadraphonic recordings. And Blu-ray audio offers all that, plus enormous storage capacity. This month, Decca will release a deluxe reissue of George Solti’s classic recording of Wagner’s Ring. In addition to standard compact discs, the lavish package includes a Blu-ray disc containing all four operas in remastered high-resolution audio. Fourteen hours of music on one disc in better-than-CD sound quality? Suck it, MP3.

Filed under: Music, Rantings, Technology on October 1st, 2012 | 2 Comments »

In 1915, the Snead and Company Iron Works of Jersey City, New Jersey, a manufacturer of custom library shelving systems for large institutions, published an elaborate catalog disguised as a textbook. Library Planning, Bookstacks, and Shelving, with Contributions from the Architects’ and Librarians’ Points of View, was written to “give general information regarding planning of library buildings”, and provide “specific facts in connection with the problems of book storage”. The hardcover book—lavishly illustrated with diagrams and photographs of what today would be considered remarkably sophisticated and ornate shelving in library settings—goes to great lengths to describe the principles and development of “the modern bookstack”, which, its authors argue, was fully realized in 1889, when Bernard R. Green designed a structure of “three nine-tier stacks containing [forty-three] miles of shelving with a capacity of [two million] volumes” for the Library of Congress in Washington. The contract for that enormous project was awarded to the Snead and Company Iron Works.

(It should be noted that Snead’s bookstacks were designed to be free-standing. That is, they were built as cast-iron skeletons that were self-supporting from top to bottom. The ranges of shelves, the staircases, and the flooring, were all separate from the structure that sheltered them. It was an impressive system.)

“The modern bookstack”, according to Snead and Company, was developed to adhere to a set of principles pertaining to “the successful storage of books in a large, growing library”, and provide:

• Accommodation for books of every variety, shape, and binding;
• Direct and immediate access to every volume with a minimum distance to travel;
• Location in close communication with cataloging, reading, and delivery rooms;
• Thorough illumination, either natural or artificial, by day and night;
• A constant supply of fresh air and an evenly regulated temperature, in order to prevent the deterioration of both paper and bindings;
• The greatest possible freedom from dust;
• Facilities for proper classification, arrangement, and rearrangement;
• Maximum development of book space and provision for indefinite expansion.

If this seems like strange thing for me to think about, it isn’t without reason.

When I considered the particulars of my own music library and my project to redesign it, I thought about these standards. I quickly realized that I did not need to meet all of them. I don’t have a separate “delivery room”, for example, unless you count my living room, since that is where I bring my mail after I walk in the door. And, in any case, I do not handle the same volume of material an institutional library does. And since I listen to my music no more than fifteen feet away from where I store it, the problem of “close communication” is hardly an issue. Likewise, my home is air conditioned, so temperature regulation is not a problem, either.

But I was quite concerned about some of the other principles Snead and Company identified. For example, although my collection consists of compact discs and not books, the problem of designing accommodation for different shapes and bindings is not wholly irrelevant. My collection is not uniformly-sized. Were I to only store single-disc jewel cases, I could have designed my shelves to have a clearance of five inches and been done with it. But box sets, of which I have many hundreds, come in a variety of sizes. Many would fit in a five-inch space, but many others would not. Some need 5.25 inches. So I had to identify the largest dimension of any box set I own, and design shelves that would accommodate that, supposing that few recordings would ever be more lavishly-packaged. In this way, I settled on 5.75 inches, which is big enough to hold Solti’s recording of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, with a fraction of an inch to spare. A few of my box sets would not fit on my old shelves, and this was a problem I had to overcome.

My old shelves, with sliding doors, provided full protection against dust, but the doors also reduced access. That is, the doors did not open completely, making it difficult to get to CDs that were further inside the cabinets. I decided that my new shelves would be entirely open, which also allows “thorough illumination”.

Though I, of course, never experienced issues related to “distance of travel”, my former shelves did not provide “direct and immediate access”. This was a problem of capacity. They could hold 2,400 CDs at most. Once I exceeded that number, I had to begin putting discs elsewhere. Initially, these went inside a separate cabinet in the room. When that got full, they started going in piles on the floor and under the bed. This was unacceptable. And while no single-room library design could afford me the luxury of “indefinite expansion”, I could devise shelves that would more than double my former capacity.

I look at my music collection as a library, just as I see the record library at my work, or the music library at the University of Florida. I needed to make some modifications to make it better suit my needs. In the next post, I’ll explain how I did this.

Filed under: House, Technology on August 27th, 2012 | No Comments »

Allow me to offer some free, unbiased financial advice. Do not buy stock in Facebook. Actually, allow me to qualify my statement, and offer some explanation. If you can buy Facebook stock on Friday when it goes public, go ahead. If you can buy enough of it you will make a fortune. But if you cannot get it when it goes on sale, forget it.

For the record, I use Facebook. I find it a convenient way to stay in touch with a small group friends and family, some of whom live in far away places. I may see most of these people in person on a regular basis, but some I cannot, and Facebook makes staying in touch much easier. I have frequently noted that I graduated high school just before the internet became the ubiquitous entity it is today, and, in spite of my best intentions, within a year or two of graduation, I found it impossible to keep tabs on the many friends whose company I enjoyed, but who had moved away to attend college or see the world. I wasn’t able to exchange email addresses with my classmates, and none of them knew at the time what their telephone numbers would be for the next six months, let alone six years. (Remember, too, that, at that time, almost no one had a mobile phone, and even those who did had to get a new number each time they moved.) Facebook, for better or for worse, has made it possible to keep up with the lives of the people you care about, even if you cannot be near them.

Facebook reportedly has nearly a billion active users worldwide, with revenue, mostly from advertising, at over $3 billion per year. When its stock goes public on Friday—at an initial price of nearly $40 per share—it is expected to bring in more than $100 billion, and make its CEO one of the richest men on earth.

But let us put this in perspective. The Coca-Cola Company, in business since 1892, sells well over a billion drinks every day. It earns tens of billions of dollars each year in revenue and employs well over a hundred thousand people. There is a Coke bottling plant in my town. The Ford Motor Company, in business since 1903, is the world’s fifth largest auto maker, selling millions of vehicles each year in the United States alone. Its net profit in 2011 was over $6.5 billion. Ford employs over two hundred thousand people not including the many thousands who work at Ford dealerships across the country, selling and servicing the vehicles. As I write this, Ford stock is trading at $10.28 per share; Coke is trading at $62.46 per share.

By the end of trading on Friday, who knows where Facebook’s stock will be trading? Maybe $75 per share. Perhaps $100. It will certainly be trading higher than Ford, but may trade higher than Coca-Cola, or even McDonald’s. It will be trading higher than Microsoft, the company that makes the software that a vast majority of Facebook users use to access the site. This defies reason. Facebook may have millions of users; it may be hugely popular; it may be open in your internet browser right now, but Facebook is not worth more than Ford, or Coke, or McDonald’s.

I am not saying Facebook is not a valuable brand. Obviously, with so many users, the potential for ad revenue is substantial. But the internet is an entity even more mysterious than the stock market, and history has shown us that investor enthusiasm for internet companies has a tremendously costly downside. America Online was once the most-used internet service provider in the United States. Its name was practically synonymous with “internet”. It became so large that it was able to buy Time Warner, the company that owns half of the entertainment you consume each year. A decade after the AOL/Time Warner merger, AOL had a net revenue of -$700 million per year.

I don’t know if I believe that Facebook will someday crash as spectacularly as AOL did, but I don’t believe it will be the final social networking site on the internet, and I don’t believe it will worth much ten years from now. Amazon.com is one of the few websites that survived the dot com bubble of the early 2000s and came out stronger. But Amazon actually sells things. Lots of things. So does Ford. So does Coke. Facebook doesn’t. In fact, if Facebook tried to sell its service, tens of millions of people would immediately stop using it. Likewise, the advertising that supports the site can only become so pervasive before users resent it and flee to some other, perhaps yet-to-be-developed service. This may already be happening. Ask yourself how Facebook, whose revenue is dependent on advertising, could become worth more than the Time Warner Company (trading today at $35 per share), which owns Time Warner Cable, and at least ten cable television channels, all of which are bursting with advertising. It doesn’t make sense. And when you consider how readily users abandoned Friendster and MySpace, the future doesn’t look bright for Facebook.

So, consider my warning: Unless you can buy Facebook stock when it goes on sale on Friday—and quickly dump it—don’t buy it at all, because I don’t see any way that, ten years from now, Facebook’s stock price will be anywhere near where it closes on Friday afternoon. And however popular it is today, no serious person could believe that Facebook will be around as long as Ford or Coke.

Filed under: Current Events, Technology on May 15th, 2012 | 7 Comments »