The Brian Manley

I love watching movies. Who doesn’t? But my cinematic preferences are quite disjoint with my wife’s. This is a bit annoying, because one of the fun things about watching movies is talking about it! Especially if the movie is insufferably lame. Let the sarcastic remarks flow! Watching alone, for me at least, takes a lot of the enjoyment out of the experience.

So what to do when you want to watch Dune for the 67th time, but there is no one around to watch with? This is the age of social-everything, so why not watch with your online friends? Make inappropriate comments, pause, rewind and slow-mo the scene of the exploding head, talk about how old the leading man looks and how hot the cyborg sex-pot leading lady is.

How might you do this online, in a social networking style experience?

Well, first of all, you need the movie to stream. Let’s just ignore this problem for now and assume that we’re Hulu or Amazon or Netflix…we’ve got the content and the ability to stream it.

To kick things off, I invite a bunch of my online friends to join my “virtual theater”, where tonight at 8pm, we’ll be watching Strange Brew. I do this via Twitter or Facebook or whatever. The invitation includes a web link which directs them to a virtual lobby where we all gather and wait for the show to start. During this time, we can chat about the movie about to be shown or whatever…chit chat.

Now, at precisely 8pm, the movie starts. Everyone that was invited is now watching the movie, which is streaming to each of our computers and is synchronized so that we’re all watching the exact same scenes at the exact same times. This is critical.

While watching the stream, we’re also watching each other. Each user’s webcam and microphone is streaming upstream so that we can see and hear each other. When a scene is funny, we all laugh together. When it’s scary, we all scream together. Just like we would be in the theater or in your apartment. Fun, right?

Of course, you can easily imagine this being extended to television shows and sporting events.

Somebody. Please. Steal this idea.

As part of my lifelogging initiatives, I’ve decided to start going paperless. Not that I have anything against paper. But it’s the 21st century. Reading characters on dead tree pulp just doesn’t seem logical to me any longer. Not to mention the utility of carrying around your entire library of books, magazines, etc. with you wherever you go. That ain’t happenin’ with paper.

The first paper I’ll cut (ha! made a pun there, see?): books

Yes, I have an e-book reader. Specifically, a Kindle 2. And I really like it. And I really hate it. I like the portability and the display. I hate the lack of speed, crappy search and horrible annotation functions. Not to mention the DRM. Also, some books just don’t translate to the Kindle very well…magazines, comics, art books and other graphically rich publications just don’t work well on the current crop of e-readers.

Earlier this week, I decided I would try converting some pulp to bits. Happily, it turned out pretty well…

The first thing I needed was a good document scanner. It need to support various page sizes, work on a Mac, be simple and above all be fast. The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M is the scanner I chose. It was about $400 at Amazon.

With the scanner acquired, the next task was to get the pages in a condition in which the scanner could slurp them up. In other words, I had to rip the pages out and destroy the book. Oh well. Progress hurts sometimes.

The Victim

Armed with a $0.13 razor blade from Safeway and a ruler, I began to carefully extract pages like a surgeon performing a vasectomy; very slowly, very carefully. After about 10 minutes of that, I got fed up and started slashing, ripping and tearing; like a glue-sniffing surgeon performing a vasectomy. Anyway, after about 15 minutes, the deed was done and the pages where free from their bondage. (again with the puns! stop it!)

Easy does it...

There, that didn't hurt, did it?

Once the pages where out, I could feed them into the scanner. I loaded about 50 pages at a time, and the little scanner that could tore through them at about 2 seconds a page, duplex.
After 15 minutes of scanner action, I had a 400 page PDF that now resides on my disk. The remains of the book, incidentally, reside in the bottom of Buddy the Hampster’s cage.

Beyond the Desktop Metaphor.pdf

The project took about an hour in total (including the OCR processing in Acrobat). But now I have a book that I’ll never be tempted to throw away (disk space is cheap), is always available (via DropBox), is searchable via Spotlight, and can be easily bookmarked and annotated.

Now if I could just figure out a way to extract the pages more easily. Deli slicer maybe?

The Slicer

As you may know, I hate having clutter on my desk. That was the point of the Monitor/TV Shelf I wrote about in an earlier post. But boxy stuff isn’t the only thing that I want off my desk. I want paper off it too.

Now, while I’ll in the infant stages of going paperless (more on this soon), I still have papers sitting around in piles on my desk waiting for me to do something with them. Bills, post-it notes, receipts, dentist appointment reminders, etc. I have a little desktop organizer thing that let’s me at least pile stuff in there, but again…that’s sitting on my desk and is still pretty much an unorganized pile of stuff. Stuff that I’ll probably forget about.

Go into any restaurant with a short-order cook, and you’ll probably see a metal wheel on which the wait staff place orders. When the cook is ready, it spins the wheel around to the next order, removes the order ticket, whips up a nice plate of hash and eggs, and spins the wheel again. It seems pretty efficient, and it keeps the order tickets off the counter.

That might be useful on a desk. But it would be a little weird to hang one of those from your ceiling. But what if you could integrate a somewhat smaller version on a desk lamp? Do it up nicely in brushed aluminum and a thick, heavy slab base and it might actually be nice to look at.

I hate advertising. Hate it. And it’s not because I’m not interested in what services or products are available. Got an interesting gizmo, doo-dad or jeejaw, and I’ll be the first in line to pick one up. The problem with advertising is that advertisers take a shotgun approach to targeting. This is especially true in television, where targeting seems to be focused on age or gender and not much else. The web is a bit better in that sites often have a much narrower demographic than, say, the latest NBC sitcom.

Still, this is a scattershot approach. Just because I’m on your site doesn’t mean I fit your demographic. For example, I just pulled up the site for the FOX show “House”. The advertisement was for Windows 7. I use a Mac. The main FOX site shows ads for AT&T. I already have AT&T. Those bits and my attention where just wasted because FOX (or its advertising network) attempted to guess what I wanted. Or, maybe they didn’t guess at all. Either way, it was opportunity lost for the host and the advertiser.

A better approach would be to actually ask me what I’m interested in. Then ONLY hit my eyes with advertising that appeal to my specific interests. This is what I call Consumer Specified Advertising.

These interests might be general (gadgets, for example) or specific and time limited (vacations to Mexico in May). They might even vary during the time of day, or my current location. For example, if I’m working from my work computer, an advertiser might try to focus ads related to my work interests. While at home, I could receive ads for interests related to hobbies, etc.

Doing this on a site-by-site basis won’t scale of course. If I have to enter advertising preferences on every web site I frequent, I won’t do it. But if I could provide that information to a central location and let sites know about that location when I visit their pages, then it wouldn’t be such a chore. Additionally, my preferences can follow me to ever site I visit. By doing this, I hopefully never see another ad for mortgages or cruises when I’m not likely to purchase such an item.

So, here’s how I believe something like this could work:

1. Create a online service where I can store my preferences. My preferences consist of words chosen from a controlled vocabulary or loose folksonomy of topics. Each of these preference items are represented by a URL, which when resolved returns a list of synonyms or similar terms to the preference value I’ve set.
2. Serve my preference values from a single URL. Perhaps my preferences can be found at http://www.csa.org/thebrianmanley. Fetching that URL returns my list of preferences and some number of similar terms. Alternately, if I have a web site of my own, I can simply host a file containing my preferences there.
3. Tell my browser where my preferences URL can be found. Using a plugin of some sort, configure my browser to include a HTTP header that indicates where my preferences URL is. For example, a header such as “CSA-Profile: http://www.csa.org/thebrianmanley”. The browser should then, for every request I make, include that header.
4. Implement, on the server, a method to fetch my preferences URL, extract the preferences I’ve set and then find advertising that matches those preferences.
5. Profit!

It’s easy to see how you could also extend this in several ways. For example, including a list of my friends; their preferences can be fetched and used to enhance my own since we’ll probably have similar interests and tastes. Also, let me “announce” in my preferences what I’ve bought so that advertising for accessories, refills, whatever could be shown to me.

Yes, there are issues. How do you get people to opt-in to something like this? Is the promise of better advertising enough? You also need to get content providers to buy in and either partner with an ad network or create your own. Not a weekend project, for sure.

Now, somebody get cracking on this so I don’t have to see another stupid home mortgage ad ever again!

Desk clutter drives me insane. In theory, I could hide most of the the things ON my desk by putting them UNDER my desk. But for most things on my desk, that’s not practical. I need to see it, fidget with it, put a disk in it, watch the lights on it, etc.


So I came up with the idea of attaching a shelf to my monitor(s) on which I could place stuff. I built a prototype, but the build quality sucks and it’s less than attractive. Nevertheless, it works pretty well. I can put my XBox, my PS2 and a Roku player on top of a 26″ LCD television with no problem.


I think this is actually a marketable idea, but as usual, I don’t have the time or interest in actually trying to build a business out of it. So if you’re so inclined, please steal this idea, bring it to market and make a bunch of money. Just be sure to send me some for free!


Okay, so here’s the thing: Mount a bracket to the VESA mount found on most if not all monitors and televisions. To this bracket, attach a set of telescoping extensions arms; one going up to support the shelf, and one going down to add support. Slap a shelf-like surface on the top of the upward moving extension arm. Profit!

I forget stuff. For example, I forget that this blog is here and that I should post something once in awhile. But I also forget important things; did I take my medicine? What did I eat yesterday before my headache started? How many cigarettes did I smoke today? Have I paid the mortgage this month? Who’s this person in this picture? What did I accomplish at work this week? You get the idea…

Buckminster Fuller (of geodesic dome fame) didn’t seem to have this problem. He simply wrote down or filed away everything into a giant compendium of his life which he called the Dymaxion Chronofile. “Dymaxion”, because he seemed to give everything that name. And “Chronofile”, because the files were created and kept in chronological order. Get it?  Anyway, every fifteen minutes Bucky would note in a journal what he was doing or feeling or did or was about to do. His was probably the most documented life ever lived. If stacked, the pages would be 270 feet tall.

Vannevar Bush proposed a machine, the “memex”, so solve this sort of problem for people like me (and you). Writing for the Atlantic in 1945, his article “As We May Think” proposed a wonder-desk that would store, catalog, classify and retrieve all the information that we generated or acquired as part of our day to day lives. This would be done “simply by the clever use of relay circuits”. Uh, right. Not in 1945 you ain’t.

Gordon Bell (of VAX fame) at Microsoft Research picked up on these ideas several years ago and decided to take a stab at documenting his life also. Box by box, he began scanning documents and photos, creating complicated directory structures and file naming conventions, recording phone calls, every email, means, biometric information, location information, etc. This “lifelogging” project and the resulting software tools were dubbed MyLifeBits, and is the subject of his book “Total Recall”. Oddly, he seems to have omitted any mention of Buckminster Fuller, but does tip his hat to Bush several times.

Total Recall is a fine book, if a bit light on the implementation details. Bell spends most of his time creating use cases and then demonstrating how situations can be improved when an “e-memory” is available to assist us. His scenarios include the typical office worker, health care, education, memorials, etc. Bell also considers the negative ramifications of storing everything. Obviously, if you store it, you can loose it or someone can steal it. Certainly privacy and security are issues when dealing with e-memory systems. We should probably spend some time figuring out the legal framework that will protect (or not) your life’s data. But I guess we’ll cross that road when we get to it. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, you might check out Robin Williams in “The Final Cut”, where all sorts of thorny issues surrounding e-memories are explored.

So while I’m convinced that storing everything is generally a good idea for us, society and future generations, I’m stuck on the implementation. When so much of our information is scattered among dozens of applications, devices and web sites, how could it be tracked, cataloged, annotated, archived and searched? A giant bucked of data in the cloud to which all your stuff is dumped? Distributed data stores that are crawled by software agents to gather information and synchronize it? Some hybrid approach?

This is fun stuff to day dream about. And I’m tempted to actually do some development of small tools to help bootstrap my own e-memories. What about you? If you could save everything, would you? Why, or why not? I’d love to hear your thoughts…

In his book Anathem, Neal Stephenson paints a detailed picture of a futuristic other-world in which the intellectual elite confine themselves in concents. These concents are comparable to the monasteries that we know today. But instead of religious contemplation, the avouts that populate these concents spend their days studying physics, mathematics, genetics, astronomy and other heady subjects. These avouts spend their lives in the pursuit of truth without consideration of fortune or fame.

While reading this, I could not help but find myself drawn to the idea that living in such a place could be utterly fulfilling. I’ve always been discouraged by the fact that we spend so much of our lives making a living instead of making a difference. What a joy if your entire existence revolved around nothing but the pursuit of discovery in the field of knowledge that you love, for the benefit of mankind, and without the overhead that modern life imposes on us.

There is little doubt that society is running headlong into a plethora of social, scientific and ethical problems. Global warming, energy demand, emerging diseases, genetic engineering, overcrowding, famine and war seem to be ever more present on the news each night. Government certainly won’t solve these problems, and the general public seems to dismiss them as either conspiracies or problems that can be ignored for the time being.

Would a system of technology focused “monks” be able to solve these kinds of big problems? How would it be funded? Who would be chosen?

Just a thought…

Image CC BY-NC 2.0 by tranuf via flickr