Steven Rubio's Online Life

the new google music needs a new name

I mean, Google Play Music All Access doesn’t roll off the tongue, does it? (Not to mention the “Listen Now” angle.)

Longtime readers know that I lust after streaming music services, and am willing to pay if they do what I want. I don’t mean Pandora, although that has its uses. I mean services that give you access to enormous catalogs, while also allowing you to integrate your own music into the mix. (This is still the only way to get the Beatles or Led Zeppelin whenever you want them.) I want to be able to pick a song and here it, right now. I want to make playlists that mix the online catalog with my tunes.

I’ve gone with Rhapsody more than once, and in terms of total time being subscribed, they are probably still #1. But their desktop software always sucked, and (perhaps correctly) they gradually lost interest, moving to improving their web version. I tried Microsoft’s Zune for awhile … it wasn’t bad. I loved MOG, still do, but the absence of integration with my own music files is a dealbreaker. Like many people, I’m now on Spotify. I pay the extra to avoid ads, and so I can take advantage of all mobile functions.

And now, here comes Google. The new Google Music (I’ll call it that until they come up with something better) has a large catalog good for streaming. It allows you to put your own files in the mix. It has playlist-creation capabilities, and the kind of “smart radio” stuff that’s pretty standard now. The main difference, at the moment (and I’ve only been messing with it for a few hours), is that there is no desktop software. You access the music via a web browser. OK, it’s 2013, I can handle that. But it means something particular for the part where they integrate your music with theirs. Spotify just plays tracks off of my hard drive. Google Music uploads my music to their servers, and plays it from there. They seem to have a matching service (if they have the track in question, they won’t upload yours but just play theirs), but whatever … it’s a long process to get thousands of MP3s to the cloud.

I can’t tell yet if I like the interface, and it’s too soon for me to say how solid their catalog is. So this is a very preliminary post. Some of the other Google changes today have made a more instant impact on my regular computing … Google+ looks entirely different, now, for instance. If nothing else, Google Music will hopefully goose their competitors to do better, as well. Meanwhile, the price for all the good stuff is $9.99/month, like most of the services, but if you get in now, it’ll be $7.99.

adventures in customer service

To cut to the chase: sometimes you really do just have to update the drivers.

I’ve had my Dell XPS One 27 Touch for about six months now, and in general, I’ve been happy with it. Windows 8 is having growing pains, at least for desktops (yes, I’m showing my age, I still use desktop computers), but the machine itself is very nice, with the most stunning graphics I’ve ever had. Still, not long after I got it, I started having an occasional sound glitch. It’s a bit hard to describe … kind of like when your speaker wires aren’t connected properly. It happened often enough to bug me, not often enough to convince me to fix it. But I knew that sometime before the one-year warranty ran out, I’d have to deal with it.

In the last month or so, though, the entire machine has become sluggish. Things take forever to load, to process, to, well, anything. It got to the point where I was getting crashes (which haven’t been a regular part of Windows in years). On one of those crashes, the computer did an “Automatic Repair”. On another, it restored an earlier version of Windows. It was time to get it fixed. So I went to the Dell support site, and, being a good customer, I did whatever do-it-yourself stuff they had before I started bugging someone.

I ran a bunch of tests, and passed all … all but one. That was the SMART short self test, which failed. So I began a lengthy session in chat with customer support.

I got someone named Samarjeet, who was very helpful and very patient. OK, I was patient, too … this took awhile … but it was clear early on that Samarjeet knew what they were doing, which sadly isn’t always the case. I explained about the failed SMART test and the sluggish performance, Samarjeet asked a few questions, and then said I’d have to replace the hard drive, which I expected. They were going to send someone out to do this (part of the one-year warranty service). In my mind, these weren’t connected, but for some reason I decided to bring something up:

Steven: "there is one other problem, not as serious, that may even be connected to the hard drive problems ... should I wait and talk to the technician about that when he comes, or do you need to write it down for him to know in advance"

Agent: "Please let me know all the problems you are facing with the system."

Steven: "occasionally, there is a sound glitch ... a slight pause in the music or whatever, accompanied by a bit of a buzz (sorry, I know this isn't much of a description!) ... doesn't seem to be attached to any particular piece of software, can happen with Spotify or YouTube in a browser or whatever”

Agent: "Thank you for confirming that."

Samarjeet then informed me that the problems might be connected, and that they would have to solve the sound problem before they dealt with the hard drive. I loaded one of those “let the other person control your computer” programs, they fiddled around, downloaded some drivers, then gave me links to four other drivers that needed to be installed. Finally, I got an appointment for a phone checkup on Wednesday to discuss the changes we’d make, and to make the appointment to fix the hard drive.

You know where this is heading. The computer has run just fine all day long. No sound glitches, no sluggish performance, no crashes. I ran the SMART self test again, and this time the computer passed. I’m wary of saying it’s all fixed, but I suspect that’s the case.

I get frustrated when a problem arises and “experts” say “check your drivers”. It’s such an easy answer, and it assumes we’re dunces who don’t know anything. I always set my computers up so I am notified when updates are available (Windows, drivers, software, etc.), although I don’t use automatic updates … I like to know what’s being “updated” before it happens. I don’t know why my computer had some outdated drivers, and it seems to me I should have gotten notification at some point.

But that’s not really what matters in this case. What matters is that it may well have been a simple case of updating drivers, which is why that’s often the first thing you are asked about. I know just enough about computers to get myself into trouble. I think I know more than I do. Samarjeet had me update the BIOS … was that especially important? I have no idea. I just know that at this moment, the computer is working.

what i didn’t really watch last week

Perhaps it’s time to question the ability of AI recommendation systems to tell me what I’ll like.

I got the movie Samsara from Netflix. I knew nothing about it, but MovieLens predicted I’d give it 8/10, so onto my queue it went, and into my house it came. When I took it out of the package to watch it, I peeked at the description, and I knew right away it was not the movie for me. I tried … got through just over an hour, although much of that time was spent sleeping. Then I gave up, put it back in its package, and placed the mailer in the mailbox to be taken away forever.

Samsara is the sequel to director Ron Fricke’s last movie, Baraka, which, it should be noted, came out nineteen years ago. Fricke takes his time getting his movies just right. There is an audience for Fricke’s films … Samsara won the Best Documentary Award at the 2012 Dublin Film Critics Award, for instance, and the reason I saw Baraka many years ago is because one of my students told me it was the movie that changed his life or something like that, so I felt I had to see it. I gave it 5/10 … in deference to the fact that I slept through what little I “saw” of Samsara, I’ll give it an “Incomplete”. Both of those movies are stunning, gorgeous, pick-an-adjective. There’s another movie, Fricke’s first as a director, Chronos, that I might have seen (although since I’m not sure, perhaps it didn’t impress me much). I saw that one in a theater … I feel like it was the first IMAX movie I ever saw. My memory is I liked it, but then, it was only 43 minutes long.

Samsara looks stunning, gorgeous, pick-an-adjective on the Blu-ray … if you can’t see it in a theater, Blu-ray is a necessity. Fricke’s movies are documentaries with beautiful cinematography shot all around the globe, with a nice interplay between picture and music, and no narration or apparent plot. In short, they are moving picture versions of coffee-table books. If that sounds good to you, check it out … if you liked Koyaanisqatsi, check it out (Fricke worked on that picture, as well).

The point of this post, though, is that I am not the audience for Samsara, which I’d think was obvious given the 5/10 rating I gave Baraka. So why did MovieLens think I’d give Samsara 8/10?

First, it’s a documentary. Of the 19 genres MovieLens lists, documentaries get the third-highest ratings from me (7.6/10) behind “Film-Noir” and “War”. Next, only 42 MovieLens users have rated Samsara, which doesn’t leave much for comparison, and their average rating is 8.4/10. I’ll see this happen a lot when a movie is first released. The first people to see a movie and rate it tend to be fans of the film, so the average rating is high. The rating drops over time. Samsara hasn’t had a chance to drop, yet.

Netflix, where I got the movie, predicted I’d go with 6/10, which is a lot closer to reality. Netflix has a good AI system, but I think my ratings are affected by the stuff Robin watches, so I’m not sure their ratings are “pure”. Criticker, though, agreed with MovieLens, predicting 8.4/10.

Obviously, the real question is why I let AI systems pick my movies for me. At the least, I should have an override button when something turns up that is clearly outside my interests. But I hesitate to do that, because relying on AI means I regularly watch movies I wouldn’t have chosen on my own, and most of them are good movies. Maybe I can just call it progress that I gave up on Samsara, instead of keeping it around the house for weeks while I decided whether to watch it.

my xmas story

Last night (Xmas Eve), I was settling down to bed at my daughter’s house, where we were spending the night. I got out my Nexus 7 to look for something to listen to … I’ve had noise going while I slept since I was a kid, nowadays I use a “pillow speaker” (a small foam earphone) so Robin isn’t bothered by the sound. I found the app for the Internet radio I have at home. It’s a Squeezebox Radio, but Logitech has discontinued the line in favor of … well, I’m not sure, but they gave me the opportunity to upgrade the software on my Squeezebox to match the new thingie, which I did, about a week ago. I haven’t figured it all out, but I have an Android app for it on the Nexus and on my phone. I thought I’d use that app to access something to listen to, but when I started it up, I couldn’t hear anything.

When I was a kid, we’d take trips to Santa Cruz, a couple of hours from our house, and I never understood why we couldn’t hear the little AM station near our home … it always came in loud and clear, and I didn’t understand about how radio worked, I just assumed that particular channel came in wherever you were. I had a similar thought about the Internet radio, and laughed to myself. Of course I couldn’t hear anything … I was in Sacramento, trying to access the router in my attic in Berkeley.

So I switched to something that worked better, and forgot all about it.

We got home to Berkeley around 11:30 on Xmas morning. When we opened the door, we could hear voices talking very loud. It gave us a bit of a fright, but I quickly identified the noise as coming from … the Internet radio.

Turns out the app on my Nexus is actually a remote control for the radio. I was indeed able to get to the router in my attic. When I booted the app on my Nexus, and no sound came out, I cranked up the volume as high as it would go. Meanwhile, back in Berkeley, my actions had turned the radio on full blast, where it stayed for half a day, entertaining the cats, until we came home and shut it off.

Just more adventures in modern technology.

a week or so with windows 8

I suppose it’s time for an update. Early last week, our new computer arrived, a Dell XPS One 27 Touch. It’s our first all-in-one, runs Windows 8, and has a 27” touch-screen monitor.

To get the hardware out of the way, it’s pretty impressive in that way new things are when compared to what they replaced. Our old screen was a perfectly acceptable 21” 1680x1050 model. The new one, besides being a touch screen, is 27” and 2560x1440, meaning it has a higher resolution than our big-screen TV. It’s not perfect … the glare is pretty significant … but pictures look beautiful on it, and while I worried that it would be too big, I’m already used to the larger size. The audio is actually a bit of a drop from what we had previously, since it has 2.1 sound while the old computer was 5.1. The vast majority of what is played on the computer is plain stereo, though, so the extra 3 speakers aren’t really missed.

Windows 8? Despite what you have heard, it is very easy to get used to, if you accept that some things have changed. The idea of running two different UIs at the same time is disconcerting when you hear about it, but the truth is, I got accustomed to it quite quickly. Legacy programs run in desktop mode, which Windows users will recognize … Windows 8 in desktop mode is like Windows 7, only improved. Other software is matched with Windows 8’s “metro” mode (they call it something else now, but I’m sticking with Metro). This is what you’ve seen in the advertisements. It looks like a giant tablet or smart phone screen, which is purposeful, since Microsoft’s idea is to create an OS that runs on computers and mobile hardware. It’s fun to use the touch screen, although I have a feeling there’ll be a new version of carpal tunnel syndrome down the road, when enough people get sore forearms from reaching out to the screen.

What needs to be emphasized, though, is how easily you can control even the Metro apps using just a keyboard and mouse. It’s seems counterintuitive to say this, since what makes Windows 8 so new is the use of touch, but if you are a keyboard-mouse person, you’ll be fine right from the start. In other words, when I write this blog post, I’m not touching my screen, I’m using my keyboard within Windows Live Writer, just as I’ve done in the past with other OS.

So there is the essential paradox: Windows 8 is the most different Windows ever, yet users of previous versions of Windows will be able to get along just fine.

I’d mention one other thing Windows 8 offers that is terrific. I had a problem with the touch screen not swiping properly, and I couldn’t find any help online. So I did a “refresh”, which basically re-installed Windows while leaving my files and programs intact. It’s not perfect … the only programs it keeps around are the “Metro” apps. But a helpful html file shows up on the desktop, explaining what software didn’t get re-installed, in many cases including a link to the download site for the program. And it took maybe 20 minutes, tops.

What’s the verdict? Too soon to tell. But it’s fun, and I’m already up to speed on productivity and gaming and video chatting and everything else a computer is good for. When you are ready for a new Windows machine, don’t believe the anti-hype. Windows 8 is OK. If that seems like damning with faint praise, well, a lot of what I’ve read makes it sound like Windows 8 is a disaster. You need to know that is simply not true.

new toy

blast from the past: vic-20

Blast from the Past day on Google+:

Our first computer, c.1983:

We got this near the end of its run, the Commodore 64 having already appeared. As I have mentioned before, we can thanks a salesperson at Macy’s, where we bought the machine … I wanted a Timex Sinclair 1000, which would have quickly become a doorstop. He recommended the VIC-20 because it had a real keyboard. The two most important things, personally, to come from the VIC-20 were that we went online for the first time with the addition of a VIC modem, and I was published for the first time when a BASIC program I wrote showed up in COMPUTE!'s Gazette. The day after I quit working in the factory, a check arrived for something like $1500 for that little program.

boys and their toys: samsung galaxy s iii

It’s a bit awkward when the thing you most want for your birthday doesn’t become available until the following month. But when the present arrives, it’s just as nice! And so, today, my new Samsung Galaxy S III came.

I guess we’ve become a Samsung Galaxy family. I’ve had the first edition for a couple of years (called the Epic 4G in the Sprint version), and recently, Robin got a Galaxy S II. The latest and greatest (at least for a week or two), the S III runs … well, if you understand smart phone crap, you’ve probably already heard of the phone, and if you don’t care about that crap, there’s no use wasting time here. Suffice to say that it has a bigger screen than my previous phone, and is longer and wider, but it doesn’t seem to weigh any more, because there is no pullout keyboard.

It’s funny, one reason I got that Epic 4G was because I wanted a “real” keyboard. But I rarely used it … Android phones have something called Swype that works very well on the “pretend” keyboard, so I no longer want the extra weight of the real. One result is that, within minutes of taking the new phone out of the box, my old phone looked like an old rock, thick, short, kinda ugly. Of course, when I got the 4G, it replaced my Palm Pre, and that Pre, which was the pride of my techie life at the time, instantly looked like an old rock, so there you go.

I need more than a few hours to have any sort of opinion about the Galaxy S III, outside of it looks nice, and it’s way cooler than my last phone (which was cool itself just a couple of years ago). Eventually, I’ll have time to enjoy the added power of the phone, the improved camera, the better screen resolution, and the newer version of the Android software (Ice Cream Sandwich … isn’t Google precious with their names?).

If anything, this is an advertisement for Sprint. I don’t think they have the best coverage, but the truth is, I rarely use my phone to actually talk to someone. And Sprint is the only carrier left that offers real unlimited data plans, which means I’m not changing carriers anytime soon.

when twitter breaks down

Twitter has become the place we look to when breaking news hits. It’s silly to complain, as some do, that the reduction of great events to 140-character posts makes it impossible to convey what is happening in any meaningful way. Twitter doesn’t replace the work of historians, or even of journalists. Their job is to evaluate what happened and give us context for those events. But while we’re waiting, Twitter is here.

You’ve probably seen examples of how this works, like when there was that rare earthquake on the East Coast and you could follow the path of the quake by seeing when people tweeted about it. And there are the so-called “Twitter Revolutions” in Moldova, Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt.

Today offered a different kind of breaking news, though. Twitter itself had what they called a “cascading bug”, resulting in a period of about two hours when Twitter was mostly unusable. And, obviously, this isn’t the kind of breaking news you can check out on Twitter. I noticed because I was following like-minded soccer fans during the Euro 2012 match between Portugal and the Czech Republic, and I realized my Kindle Fire wasn’t updating tweets.

You don’t miss your water, ‘til your well runs dry.

This was a minor annoyance to me, and a lesson in how ubiquitous twitter has become in my life (I don’t tweet often, but I’m always checking in during live public events like Euro 2012). What was especially interesting to me was Twitter’s own comments, in the blog post mentioned above about the cascading bug:

We know how critical Twitter has become for you — for many of us. Every day, we bring people closer to their heroes, causes, political movements, and much more. One user, Arghya Roychowdhury, put it this way: “OMG..twitter was down....closest thing to living without oxygen for most of us....” It’s imperative that we remain available around the world, and today we stumbled. For that we offer our most sincere apologies and hope you’ll be able to breathe easier now.

I don’t know whether to nod my head in agreement, or laugh at the self-important feel of their apology.

marketing

G+ aficionados like to talk about the depth of their conversations, and the point is often made that a judicious use of circles means you don’t necessarily know everyone you follow on G+, but you likely share interests, since that is the reason you place people in circles to begin with. I have 19 circles at present (if I was diligent, I could clean them up a bit and end up with around 15). Several are included in “Your Circles”, a concept I only recently understood. (I often post things meant for family and friends, rather than the public, and I would painstakingly add each family/friend circle, six of the nineteen, to those posts. But I can define “Your Circles” to mean those six family/friend circles, making my life easier.) Then there are the many circles devoted to a particular topic: technology, music, film, TV, and so on.

Lately, though, I’ve begun adding entire circles from other users. This is a quick-and-easy way to find new perspectives, and I’ve gotten a lot of good reading from these circles, although there is a tendency to quickly fill up the primary stream of posts. In the process, I’ve found that many posts concern marketing.

It is common to promote your work on G+. Hell, I do it myself, every time I cross-post something from my blog. And those aren’t the things I mean here. I’m talking about people talking about marketing: how to do it, how to maximize the online social presence of your business, where the next money is to be made. All viable topics for discussion, but not what I expect to see.

I can just selectively un-circle folks whose main interest is marketing. But, as I add more people I don’t know to my circles via circle sharing, I find more and more “marketers” in my news stream. I guess I’m just drawing attention to my own naiveté, but I’m surprised that this is true. It appears I am idealistic about Google Plus, and, of course, by “idealistic” I mean “my ideals”, not anyone else’s. I just forget sometimes that among many things, the Internet is a place where people market themselves for ultimate profit. It’s like realizing there’s an entire subculture going on underneath the surface that you know nothing about, except in this case, I am the one under the surface, while marketing exists happily above ground.