May has actually been an easy month, challenge-wise. I decided to not buy any new physical media and reduce my consumption of the same, and with one notable exception (Diablo III, Collector’s Edition), I went the entire month without buying a single book, DVD or CD. Everything that I wanted to consume, I did either through online means or through a digital version of the media in question. I’ve even gone so far as to begin to digitize my (quite extensive) music collection into MP3 format so that I can finally put my albums into boxes and get some well-earned square meters of my apartment back. Somehow, the idea of albums, books and DVDs filling up all my shelves feels very 20th century and old to me.

I’ve got a good challenge set up for June; a challenge that I’m quite worried will be trickier to manage than May’s challenge was. I’ll write more on that in a couple of days, as June comes closer.

Earlier this month, I set myself the goal of not buying or consuming any physical media. So far, the challenge has been going really well, with a single change to the rule that I was forced to implement in order to keep things simple.

Instead of not consuming any physical media; my rule is now, quite simply, that I’m not allowed to add any more physical media to my already swelling collections. I can read books and watch DVDs that I already own (even though I prefer to try to (re)acquire them in digital format first if possible), but if I ever feel the pressing urge to re-read one of my books in the bookshelf, that’s fine too.

I’m taking steps to make this simpler for me, as I’ll be selling off a significant lot of books within the next couple of weeks. Erica and I will be sorting out which books we feel we have to keep and offering our friends and family to buy the rest from us. I can’t imagine asking for too much money for them, it’s mainly a good way to keep my bookshelves as empty as possible as I move ahead with this challenge. I feel really good about it, reading on my iPad and listening to audio books is a lot simpler than I expected, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes when we go on vacation in early August – will I have enough books on my iPad to read as I marinate my tender Scandinavian flesh in the sun? We’ll see.

One of my fascinations, as I’m sure you’ll understand as you read this blog, is that I am always interested in flexing a bit of mental muscle, so to speak. I enjoy experimenting with new ways of thinking, new ways of doing things and new systems to make life easier. One such group of systems is mnemonics. Mnemonics, loosely stated, is a mental framework that helps you remember something. This could be as easy as the ABC song or as complicated as a card-counting technique that nets you a competitive advantage at the blackjack table. It could be phrases like “Super Mans Help Every One” to remember the Great Lakes in order from West to East (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, Ontario).

My favorite mnemonic system has for a long time been the Major System, where every number is associated to one or more like-sounding letters, so that words can be built out of the numbers. My implementation of the Major System is slightly different from the normal, in that I have divided the numbers and letters thusly:

• 0: S or S-sounding instances of Z or C, such as Snake, Zoo, Cinema.
• 1: L
• 2: N
• 3: M
• 4: R
• 5: F or V
• 6: B or P
• 7: T or D
• 8: The CH or SH-sounds, as in ‘Shoe’ and ‘Choke’.
• 9: K or G

These numbers-letter correlations would translate the number 523 to the letters FMN or VMN, which sounds like the noun “Famine”. This system is all well and good for short numbers, as one can easily build words of three, four or five syllables from them. After that, however, words become longer and need to be split up into pieces, something that takes far more effort. The number 349,164, for example, would be transcribed M, R, G/K, L, B/P, R. As I’ve worked with the system for a long time, I quickly see terms like “Mark the Leper”, for example, but it is a far longer process to use.

Thankfully, there is another system out there that makes this far simpler, even though the investment is far larger. Using the Major System, one only needs to learn ten numbers and their associated letters. Using this new system, which I call the Person Action Object System, is much longer, but far easier to work with once you’re done. The first thing you’ll need to do is to have a list of one hundred phrases, in which one hundred unique people are performing unique actions along with an unique object associated to them. These could be something like “Aquaman, communicating with fish, holding a trident”, “Fox Mulder, shining a flashlight on an alien, wearing a trench coat”, etc. Each of these is associated to a number between 0 and 99 and learned by heart. It must be very easy to remember each and every one, and the images should call to mind the entire phrase, number, person, action and associated item.

After that, you simply use the various numbers you are given to combine the person, action and associated item from a number of phrases. If your phrase 23 was “Superman, flying through the sky, cape flowing in the wind” and phrase 56 was “Bill Clinton, smoking a cigar, hiding a stained dress” and the phrase 88 was “Adolf Hitler, holding an impassionate speech, nostrils flaring”, the number 235,688 could be remembered as “Superman, smoking a cigar, nostrils flaring”. This mental image is very easy to conjure based on the numbers and far easier to remember than what the Major System would have given us.

Just for reference, the Major System for 235,688 would be N, M, F/V, B/P, CH/SH, CH/SH. Even though I’ve used the Major System regularly for two years, it still takes me some time to figure out that a phrase like “Enemy Fop Cheech” could work, which would force me to try to picture Cheech Marin at his most foppish as well as being my enemy. It would also force me to remember that it’s “Enemy Fop Cheech”, and not “Cheech, Enemy Fop” or similar. Superman smoking a cigar, nostrils flaring, took less than a second and is far more memorable.

Every now and again, I set myself a challenge. Typically, they’re set for a day, a week-end, a week or a month. The challenge can be anything from “ten pushups every two hours that I’m awake” to “no carbonated drinks from waking up Friday to falling asleep Sunday” or “Don’t use the is of identity when speaking out loud this week”. Sometimes I manage to complete these tasks, other times I fail miserably. At the moment, I’m going through what I have to consider a moderately successful attempt at a four-day fruitarian diet, which is failing on two counts; I’m definitely feeling the caffeine abstinence from the massive amount of energy drinks, and I’m having problems with keeping up with the proteins that I’m used to. With the exception of a hamburger yesterday, a small bit of candy today, and the occasional caffeinated drink to avoid the massive headaches, I’m doing all right. Next time, I’ll be weening myself off of the caffeine addiction before making such a massive change in my dietary habits, however.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor now. Today, I’d like to talk about a challenge that I’m setting for myself during this month of May, and – if it’s even remotely successful – for a large portion of my life moving forward.

I’ve made the conscious decision to stop buying physical media; whether this be DVDs, books, albums, magazines, comic books or anything else.

Instead, I’m going to be going for an all-digital media diet, doing my best to use my computer, home theater, iPad and iPhone to consume the various types of content that I would ordinarily have done via physical media. I’m even going to avoid reading the free newspaper they hand out in the subway system. Every time I end up in a situation where I need to access something from my already extant collection of physical media, I’ll do my best to (re-)acquire it on digital media or convert it to digital media so that I don’t have to walk around with books or worry about scratching discs or anything like that.

If this experiment goes well, I’m going to start working on converting my 400+ CDs, 300+ DVDs and 900+ books to digital format. They’re already filling up an entire room of my apartment, and there really isn’t any point in keeping so many books and DVDs that I don’t ever read and/or watch and/or listen to, is there? In fact, I might just have a whole lot of books and DVDs up for sale pretty soon. While I know I’ll be keeping some of the more nostalgic or hard-to-find volumes in my personal collection, I don’t see why I can’t get rid of A Game of Thrones, both the DVD and book versions. I’ve got the books on my iPad and the first season on my home theater system in blu-ray format already, so the DVD box and the books are really nothing but a waste of space.

I’ll keep you informed on how this goes.

It didn’t take long for Google Drive to attract the inevitable ire of people who are convinced that our information isn’t safe in the cloud, that the corporations are trying to steal stuff from us or whatever the case may be at the moment. In this case, everything comes from a paragraph in the terms of use for Google Drive that reads:

[Y]ou give Google and (those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.

I’m sure there are several dozen authors and photographers out there who have had the thought: “Wait a moment! If I put my stuff on there, won’t Google be able to use it in their advertisements and earn money from my hard work?” The answer, in as few words as possible, is: “Well, not really, but kind of”, and this is for exactly the same reason that a Sun employee can’t upload the Java API:s to his Google Drive and cause Sun to lose their lawsuit (more here if you’re not familiar with that story).

What people seem to fail to notice is the context that all of this appears in and the way their user agreement compares to, for example, Dropbox (Obligatory Affiliate Link Here) and Microsoft’s recent Skydrive. While there have been many posts comparing the two, explaining why Dropbox is so much better than Google Drive, they’re really saying more or less the same thing, with a couple of different phrases thrown in to please the lawyers. Google is very clear in their promise that their users “retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours”. The terms are quite simple and very easy to understand in the context of the services they offer. Google wants a worldwide license to:

• use - in order to actually do anything your documents (display them in an online editor, for example)
• host - because you’d be upset if the cloud service didn’t work
• store - because you’d be upset if the files vanished
• reproduce - needed for mirroring and backup
• modify - needed if you ask the service to translate, reformat, rename or otherwise alter your documents
• create derivative works - thumbnails, copies, etc.
• communicate - needed for sharing documents with others
• publish - in case you want to show your friends what you’ve been working on
• publicly display – this one is a tricky one, but basically this is in there because these terms and conditions also cover YouTube.
• distribute - allows them to make their Google Drive available via various services as long as you’ve authenticated.

These things all allow Google to, for example, mine the content of document you’re writing so could target you with better ads, but we all know my feelings about that. Basically; if you want Google Drive to be able to do all the sorts of things you want it to do, you’ll need to give it pretty broad permissions in order for it to do so. It’s not malicious, it’s not a conspiracy, and they’re definitely not interested in those short stories you’ve written in Google Docs. Google is not going to take your screenplay and make a movie out of it. Google isn’t going to take the nude pictures you took of your ex-girlfriend and sell it on their as yet unannounced Google Pr0n site.

Almost everything we do on the Internet nowadays is free – at least when we consider “free” to mean something on the lines of “zero dollars paid out of my pocket”. Still, as we learned as long ago as back in the 1930s; There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. We are paying for these services in one way or another, and it seems that an ever growing group of people are becoming more and more annoyed over the what the price of free has turned out to be.

On March 1, Google changed their privacy policies, moving towards a more unified policy across their products rather than having different policies for different products. Naturally, everybody and their mother wrote articles, blog posts, Facebook and Twitter entries about how to clear your Google Search History, keeping that great behemoth of a search engine in the dark as to who you really are. I think doing this is a mistake.

The reason Google – and other companies – want to be able to see what you might consider to be personal information isn’t to punish you in some way or learn your weaknesses. It’s not so that they can buy stuff with your credit card. It’s not even so that they can tell your insurance company that maybe you shouldn’t be getting such a high premium, due to the fact that you have a birth defect of some sort. No; the truth of the matter is much more benign than any of that. They’re trying to figure out a couple of anonymous details about you so that they better know which ads they should be showing you.

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.
- Jeff Hammerbacher

Now; if people object to this by deciding to opt out of tracking or begin to use plugins to hide ads or block the various third party tracking scripts, the various advertisement companies will be unable to tailor their ads for you. Because of this, they will either show no ads or show just random ads – which you’d probably not see because you’re blocking them. This will invariably lead to a decrease in the advertisement click-through rates. As soon as the click-through rate decreases, the revenue also decreases. If revenue decreases, they discover that they have to find new ways of earning money.

This is why we’re getting things like paywalls, where companies like the New York Times simply decide that they will no longer be offering you their content unless you give them some money first. Naturally, to give them money you also need to give them some personal information; name, address, credit card information and e-mail address tends to be the standard here.

Because such a large amount of people are blocking advertisements and blocking tracking scripts, content providers across the Internet are not making the money that they feel they need. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense for them to implement paywalls, as that means that they’ll definitely be earning money from the few users who decide to pay instead of maybe earning money from their many visitors who might turn out to be blocking the ads.

What this leads to, as more and more content providers begin hiding their content behind paywalls, is tantamount to destroying the Internet for the people who want to continue reading the “free” content.

Now, don’t get me wrong here; I think privacy is a hugely important question. I’m a member of the Pirate Party, and not because of any misguided desire to ‘leech the latest warez’, but because of my passion and desire for us to be able to carry out a sane and healthy privacy debate.

I think it’s crucial for us to be able to determine who knows what about us as individuals, and the entire privacy debate is needed in society as a whole, but I think it needs to be about something more fundamental than whether or not our search history is tracked. We need to discuss questions like: What is anonymity? What is privacy? What is an identity? Is my search history part of my identity or not? What’s the difference between public information and private information? How wide is the grey area between the two?