Main Screen Turn On

It occurred to me that my bookshelf tells a person who I am. It has my philosophy books, in addition to other courses whose books were deigned significant, as well as my favorite works. Yet in the age of digital media the representativeness of my bookshelf is decreasing. Bookshelves are a type of indicator to everyone, friends new and old, of what kind of person you are – how are they going to discover you if you don’t have anything there?

Sure I could show off my mega library of digital content, my downloaded games (books and movies too) are equally a testament to my personality, but it doesn’t have the same oomph for at least two reasons. The ease in which a person looks at a bookshelf is vastly superior to combining the myriad digital content sources. I have downloaded games on no fewer than 4 systems; my xbox, ps3, wii and computers. Are my potential-friends forced to nose about each and every one of these just to discover what I have played? The issue with digital books is similarly frustrating.

I suppose that’s the purpose of the achievement system for xbox live, it shows everyone what you’ve played, and not just what you own. That leads me to the second concern. I have over 800 books downloaded on my Sony PRS-500. Despite my best and sincerest attempts, I haven’t read every book. There comes an over inflated sense of achievement by having the largest library. Most collectors haven’t watched every single video they possess, enjoyed each song. They don’t want to. It’s just a giant game of who has the most impressive collection. It doesn’t matter if the prized horde of junk is of poor quality or every single Britney Spears track, it makes the wrong kind of statement about who they are.

There isn’t a grand solution to this predicament, far from it. Maybe there should be a blending of both bookshelves, digital and analog. When you buy a book you should get the digital rights to it as well, I’d pay an extra 5 dollars for the convenience. The movie industry is making a decent go at DVDs with itunes or windows media compatible versions included. Since I am very much like the average consumer, when it comes to converting dead-tree from of media as they are of the poorly encrypted DVD, I would gladly pay that fee. People who want to have the digital form for convenience would still buy books,and have a proper digital reflection. By doing this we would still retain our bookshelf means of expression while having access to what may feel is a great way to read content.

Geeks around the world understand why it’s so easy to move their CDs or DVDs into the realm of purely zeros and ones on our hard drives. It’s a shift from one set of bits to another. When we buy books at the store, I’m sorry, at Amazon.com, we get an analog version. Moving that into the digital realm is far more difficult, requiring high quality scanners and software designed to “read” the text and convert it into the digital equivalent. harder than you might think.

According to The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) facebook (no link necessary guys) has updated their iphone application to 3.0. I have to wonder if the interface is all that much better. I’ll play around with it first, but so far I am not too miffed with it.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

I rather enjoy the game Plants Vs Zombies, the ability to waste untold number of hours defeating the brain-loving undead with only the power of fruits and vegetables? Sign me up! It does get a tad over the top, as indicated in the below image. Worth every cent, or if you must you can steal it from your lovely friends. The choice is yours.

PS, the MJ zombie is poignant

Having a chance to listen to Macbreak Weekly for the 18th of august, 2009 I’m going to try and live up to their suggestions about writing.

For instance, the issue iwth the delete key is I keep trying to fix my stupid writing. What’s this mean for me? I can’t delete what I’ve written before, even if I think it is crap.

Shame my fingers don’t listen to me. I agree that without a delete key my writing would meander and quite possibly amuse everyone.

Forget ignoring the internet, however useful that is I would rather get past the desire to delete everything I wrote before! The problem is as Andy Ihnatko once said; when you look back at what was written and you realize it’s not good you have to conclude there was (and still is) a time you weren’t completely awesome at writing. Putting those two together makes an interesting way to avoid never writing.

I wish, desperately for a program that doesn’t have a delete key. It should be possible, if people wrote the varying levels of software on every platform ever, how come I can’t get the best of every single writing application for the mac? Perhaps it need only be textedit without delete.

Times like this make me wish I could write software better than i can, which is I can’t. Then I could do that. Because I respect how difficult it is to do things like program, design, and be awesome like that. My hats go off to all of you, those who can, at least.

Writing is a pain, but I have the free time, may as well make the best use of that. When I’m not rereading entire sagas of science fiction literature, the likes of which should be required reading for everyone under the age of 15, I may as well write for the edification of all.