Vint Cerf: Hide Yo Pics, Hide Yo Scans

Vint Cerf (yes, the father of the Internet, I know it's ironic what with "surfing" being an old Internet term) is quoted as saying:

"Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science this week, Google Vice President Vint Cerf warned of a “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century” that awaits us when "bit rot" takes hold and our digital material gets lapped by the new hardware and software racing around it."

In other words...



He even recommended printing out your favorite photos. What?? Look, I understand, the guy's a futurist and I think his point is that the technology to read digital archives is moving much quicker now.

If anybody knows the pain of trying to digitize and convert one's Quantified Self, it's me, I've been working for years to digitize my own stuff, my father's art & music, and my family's photos. And yes, it's hard to get photos off old floppies or VHS tape, but it's not impossible. CDs that were produced 25 years ago still play. Yes, I remember when GIF animations came out in the mid 1990s, but everybody still uses them.

I think Cerf's point is that it's not a commercially viable project to make sure digital files survive in the future. While that may be true, I don't think that will cause the death of photos. There are enough corners of the Internet that will still keep those things running, as long as we stick to major image formats.

And a weird AP Photo to go with that? Sure.

I Fought the 'Larms, and the 'Larms Won

The girls were down in York, PA last weekend when I was awakened by one of the smoke alarms in our house at 10:00 PM. Full-on alarm, not just a "dead battery beep." In a half-daze, I somehow determined the house wasn't on fire, and found the errant alarm in the hallway, disabling it by taking the battery out and disconnecting it from the power, and went back to bed, turned up the air purifier, put earplugs in, and drifted back off to sleep.



11:00 PM: I was awakened again by the smoke alarm's incessant ringing. Disconnected the alarm in the bedroom. Went back to sleep:

12:00 AM: Same thing. Disconnected the downstairs alarm. Went back to sleep.

1:00 AM: Same thing. Disconnected two remaining alarms, once again checked for smoke or fire, crashed back in bed.

9:00 AM: After a sleepless night, I closely read the instructions on the bottom of the smoke alarm and notice the text highlighted below:



The damn things were networked. So no matter how many I unplugged, if it wasn't the one that triggered the alarm, it wouldn't have stopped alarming.

I never really thought that they could be networked, but our house was built in 2003 (I bought it in 2006) so that's a nice piece of mind to have. Literally wiring smoke alarms together in house wiring seems amusing in a day when we can install smoke alarms that network amongst themselves and via the Internet, but it was a nice addition in 2003.

So why did the (one) smoke alarm think it detected smoke that night? I have no idea, but since it was only one, we can rule out fire, and ghosts. I remember once when I was a kid, a spider crawled into a smoke detector and set it off. Though you'd think they'd have spider-detecting smoke detectors by this year, it's possible that's just what happened.

I didn't cook anything, or even take a shower, before bed so I doubt it was anything in the air. The one thing I did not do though, was poke my nose out the door -- perhaps a temperature inversion forced smoke from nearby homes to enelope ours. I guess we'll never know. But next time... I'll know to look for the alarm with the little blinking red light.

The Puppy Bowl, With Katty Furry Halftime Show

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Sports just aren't my thing, so today I'll (once again) be watching the Puppy and/or Kitty Bowl today (complete with the "Katty Furry halftime show"), Superbowl Sunday. This is pretty much what I think of football:

Childish Gambino and the Countdown

(UPDATE 1/9/15 @ 7:30 AM)

About six months ago, I saw an especially lame, badly designed Amazon.com ad on AccuWeather.com. It was an ad for an album by an artist I had never heard of.

Oh great, Donald Glover. The guy from the TV show "Community." Let's see, he's named "Childish Gambino" and the name of the album is "because the internet." That's what I need, another lame actor trying music. Probably a comedy album, I thought. Ugh.

For the next couple months the ad followed me around everywhere I went on the web (Amazon, and many ad providers, read your cookies and try to present you with "relevant" ads). This was a FAIL in my opinion. Why would I like this album?? Eventually, the ad went away and it fell out of my memory.

Fast forward a couple months more, I'm surfing Amazon's $5 albums (they put out new albums every month and I sometimes bolster my music collection, or try out new artists). And there the album was again. It was labeled "Rap & Hip Hop."

I took the chance and hit the "Preview All" button, and found one of my favorite artists of all-time.



See, Amazon had it right all along. Donald Glover's stage name for his alter-ego rapper's latest album wasn't far from the experimental and brilliant "Yeezus" by Kanye West (yes, I listen to rap). Amazon matched me with it because it knew I would love it, based on the other hip-hop albums I had purchased over the years. And once again, Amazon's algorithms sparked a sale. Actually, several.

Childish Gambino is brilliant and transcends the entire rap genre in a way that few have. He's less of a gangsta rapper and more of a spoken-word poet who uses experimental music - music he wants to invent, not something he thinks he should invent, to get air play - to describe stories of life. When you explore his four albums, especially the later one, you'll be taken on a brilliant, heart breaking experience of a child growing into a man in Atlanta (OK, being from the South, I'll admit that is part of the allure). He's also a brilliant comedian, as proven on "Community," and for people who don't "understand" rap music: The comedy of the rhymes is part of the attraction of the genre.

And finally, he seems to enjoy Hawaiian shirts, though they, I suspect, are part of a statement that he's not a typical ghetto rapper, he's well-off, educated, preppy, and not afraid to go against the hard-core rappers out there.

He's also a bit of an enigma. Despite the name of his last album "because the internet" and a crapload of references to technology in his lyrics, he literally disappeared off the web on the one-year anniversary of the album dropping (12/10/2014). He zeroed out all of his Social Media accounts and his website, and had not been heard from again online... until yesterday when he put up a simple countdown clock on a random URL via one tweet that was live for only minutes.

The countdown ends tonight.

UPDATE: The countdown gave way to a new video premiere for his recently released song "Sober." I agree with what NPR said about the video:

As with much of Childish Gambino's work, it's both comical and kick-ass. Just when you think it's all a joke, he busts out some genuinely cool moves. And when "Sober" starts to feel a little too cheesy, like some steamy seduction we've heard a million times, it erupts into a gnarled, dark grind. Is this guy for real? Is it all a put-on? Not knowing is part of the joy in watching it all unfold.

Y2.015K

Once again it's New Year's Eve. But this time, it's the future. 2015 is the year that Marty McFly travelled through time to see in "Back to the Future Part II" in 1989.

Then, I was 15 years old and couldn't imagine how the world would look in "two-thousand and fifteen." Even now, I couldn't tell you what things will look like in 2041 (perhaps future Jesse would be kind enough to leave a comment on this blog to tell me).

There's a great article here by leading futurists as to what BTTFII got correct, and what it didn't. The truth is, things don't change that much. Kristi's Dad and I were discussing this at lunch today. We still drive the same cars and fly in the same planes as we did in 1985, and we probably will in 2041.

What changes is the nuances, and they change so gradually we don't notice. The biggest change in the last 25 years has been cell phones, but they're small enough that you don't really miss them if you look at a movie from that prior era.

In 1985, there weren't ads plastered all over the windows of fast food restaurants, toll booths, gas pumps, even the concrete poles that keep you from driving into a Wal-Mart. But now there are. It happened gradually, and we didn't even notice.

15 years ago tonight, I was proposing to my first wife, and worrying about what havoc Y2K might wreak (other than my Windows 3.1 clock saying "Jan. 1, 100" there were few issues). I certainly couldn't imagine then that, 10 years later, I'd be divorced on New Year's Eve. And that night, I couldn't fathom that I'd be happily married three years in, by 2015.

White Thanksgiving 2014 & Past

Yes folks, it's that time of year. We're at Kristi's parents' house for Thanksgiving and Black Friday. This year the Thanksgiving Snowstorm caused us to change our plans and drive Thursday morning. It was a beautiful drive though.

I've also ported a couple early AccuWeather Thanksgiving blogs over; you can now read all my Thanksgiving blogs and Black Friday blogs, since 2005 here.

Post by Jesse Ferrell.

Once again I've stuck to Black Friday shopping primarily online. It's just not worth the hassle to do it in the stores anymore. The amount of money people spend in the brick-and-mortar stores appears to be increasing each year, though that surprises me, as I know so many people who have turned to their computers instead.

I've also been busy taking pictures with my new Smartwatch which Kristi got me as an early Christmas present; here's what else happened:

[NEWSPAPER]

I've always enjoyed publishing weather news to the masses, even when it was on paper my audience was only Mom & Dad. I've started to scan these "newspapers" into my blog. These entries will have "[NEWSPAPER]" appended after their titles. This is the first "newspaper" that I wrote in 1985 (at age 11), reporting on the Cold Outbreak of 1985 in the foothills of North Carolina (that's right, the extreme weather spurred me to start publishing). Little did I know, ten years later I would write my first weather report (complete with photos) on the Internet, for the world to see.

This first "front page" was done on a Commodore 64 dot matrix printer. The "Emergency Edition" (which was issued later in the day) was printed on an ancient typewriter (yes, one you had to jam the keys down on) -- ironically I must have found this quicker than loading the word processing program (from cassette tape) on to the computer and composing it there.

- CLICK TO READ ALL "NEWSPAPER" ENTRIES

ABBREVIATIONS, NAMES & PLACES:

• D.E.R./ DOWN_ERE_RES.: "Down 'Ere Restaurant," a fictitious business that I ran when I was 10 years old.
• Shanberg & Pink Island were designations for certain areas of the 50-acre forest where I lived as a child.
• WWX & WWXY (Channel 5) were a fictitious radio and television station to which I "broadcast" local news & weather (to cassette tape).
• Frank (Ferrell) was my father
• Sally (Ferrell) was my mother
• The Site / The Shop refers to the workshop building behind the house.