Are Seven

I was just playing around with the new Google data tables, taking a look at the public table for most popular baby names from 1880, and after playing with the filters and visualizations, I got a line chart showing the ranking of the name Reid over the last 129 years.

(click for a bigger view)

It’s a shame that I can’t invert the order on the Y axis, since it looks like it’s getting less popular with time, when, in fact, the name is getting even more popular. Please note the massive increase in popularity since the early 70’s. No coincidence. It hit an all-time high last year, a rank that is clearly correlated with my joining Twitter.

I don’t know what happened there in 1894, but the name took a huge surge, apparently with really foul-tempered and ugly babies, as the name plummeted in popularity two years later and reach an all-time chart low in 1907. I don’t even want to think too hard about those bleak years when it fell off the charts entirely. I’m not sure what people wanted in the years 1908 through 1911, but one thing they clearly did NOT want was for their kids to be named Reid.

What’s really fun is that, when you filter out your name in the database, it will give you your name, and then the opposite gender’s corresponding name at the same rank. For example, in 1890, Reid was the 940th most popular name for boys, and the 940th most popular name for girls was apparently Izora. Other girls names from the 1800s with the same rank as Reid are Ottilia, Lotta, Delphia, Idell, Cammie, Henry (??) and Minta. Looks like Reid was able to persevere where lesser names died away.

So Reid beat its competitors in the 1800s, but in 1985, though, the rank equivalent of Reid was Raven, which the girls won there, since nobody’s going around saying, “That’s so Reid!”

Sorry for the image instead of the embed, which was supposed to work. Google isn’t kidding around about the “pre-Alpha” tag they slapped on their Tables feature.

Shaking off the blogging sleepiness (and taking another stab at the “drawn-out Twitter” style of posting that’s the only hope of posting here any more) to weigh in on a couple of the tech things that have crossed our paths recently.

Google Wave is pretty fascinating. After watching more of the video, I’m more intrigued than before, mostly in that it’s as much a collaborative tool as a communications tools; more Google Docs than gmail.  The more features they go through in the video, the more I started thinking about how incredible it would be in the workplace, and that just as I wish that Word would be more like Google Docs and Outlook more like gmail, I would wish that they would all be more like Wave.

But that’s the initial excitement. I wonder (along with everyone else) what it’s going to take to have it catch on. Again, the more I watched that video, the more I thought that the workplace would be the takeoff spot, but workplaces are notorious for taking a long time to implement software, and IT departments love cracking down (or at least “discouraging”) outside softwares like Wave. But it is possible.

One of the interesting parts of the video was when they show Wave interacting with Orkut, Google’s purchase of a social network (translation: it’s like Facebook).  So I went back to Orkut and re-signed in for the first time in a very long time and started playing around.  It’s terrible. It’s about as basic of a social network as you can imagine. 

Google has an incredible chance to build fantastic social networking tools through Reader and through their new profiles without people even knowing that they’re on a social network. So why are they even bringing Orkut into the Wave conversation? It seems strange.

But damn I want my hands on Wave, though…

A washout of a weekend led logically to a couple of movies about people struggling with their careers well beyond their peak years: one non-fiction (Anvil: The Story of Anvil) and one fiction (The Wrestler).

As a review aside, I’d recommend both, but I’d push you to the theater to see Anvil, even in spite of the fact that the metalheads have been hearing of it and making their way to the theater, a fact that’s as unsuprising as it is annoying. But it’s a brilliant film. It immediately renders This Is Spinal Tap obsolete: you just can’t believe that it’s real. But real it is, and it’s as touching and moving as it is funny. A must-see.

The obvious common thread in these two stories is the chasing of chances that have long passed. But the more I thought of it, the more I saw what surely led to this inability to give up a dream: that their dreams were realized halfway. Anvil were recognized by famous peers of theirs as innovators and inspirations. They played huge festivals and toured the world and were featured on television shows. Their fame was right there and yet…it just didn’t happen. In The Wrestler, Randy tasted actual fame, but still couldn’t turn it into the long career–or even life-sustaining career–of some of his peers.

I have to admit to the occasional daydreamed regrets of my college band, but besides some praising letters and a couple knowledgable and sincere expressions of disbelief that we weren’t signed, we never had any real success. But then I think of a band that I knew in Greensboro that was pursued by every major label there was, ended up on a major with a huge advance…and never did anything. They were extremely nice, down-to-earth guys, so maybe they were thankful for the chance that they had, but it seems like a recipe for exactly the type of bitter inability to let go. They were given every chance in the world and yet, for whatever reasons, they could never cross the line to fame and success.

Obviously, no one can only chase dreams that they think are guaranteed to be fully realized, but I wonder if it’s the failure to complete what seemed so inevitable the leads to the undying belief that the moment to make it all happen never goes away.

A tweet about an article this morning combined with a comic got me a’thinkin’ on a point that I was a’thinkin’ on for a while now:

A blog is nothing–absolutely nothing–but a medium for writing. Everything else–the comments, the whiny subject matter, the crackpot opinions–are no more reflective of the blog as a medium as a Weekly World News article is reflective of newspapers. Twitter is conversation that allows public comsumption about all news and experience, not just (or even mostly) what individuals are having for breakfast. Facebook allows contact with other people in your life. These services should be judged by their utility, not by their poorest content or ancillary products.

I don’t mind if people have no interest in any of these things. What really sticks in my craw (at least, I think it’s my craw. I’m not a doctor) is that the dismissal of these mediums as nothing more than tools for the attention-starved and the stupid is simply fear of the new, something that we think is unique to cranky old people with rock-salt shotguns and onset dementia. Take things as simple as writing and conversation, give them some new terms (especially ones as silly-sounding as “blogs” and “tweets”)  and watch as people of all ages react as though amateur porn was being broadcast on prime time TV.

It doesn’t bother me when people opt out of new technologies due to disinterest, just as it doesn’t bother me when people don’t like the same music I do. But with music, not liking a band because of the generalized type of person who listens to it, or dismissing an entire genre of music because of the bad sounds of a few of the bands…these things are ridiculously flawed, no matter how tempting it is to do that. But this is exactly what happens with new technology: creates cranky people who rail about new things.

Today’s post on the usually-brilliant Seth’s Blog brought to mind a topic that eats at me almost every work day: the problem with email. Seth talks about the freeness of the email creating so much noise that email is losing its value.  He’s talking mostly about email as its use for marketing, and in that sense, he’s right, even if the excessive noise of email has been the case for years.

What he misses, though, is that, at the workplace, email is failing because it’s become a crutch; the ultimate tool of the passive-aggressive. Email is miserable as a tasking system, and yet people continue to use the ease of sending an email as a way to pass on tasks and then pat themselves on the back for taking care of the problem.  Conversations that could be over and solved with a 2-minute phone call turn into days-long email threads, owning to skittishness of confrontation (which I can’t condone, but do understand) and the perceived ease of emailing, when it takes much longer to write (and read) an email than to have a conversation about it.

Email has its uses: it’s nice to have a formal write-up of verbal requests, or to follow up on the understandings of a conversation. It’s good to track what’s been done and understood.  But if you’re getting mad at people at work for not replying to your email or not taking an action on an email request of yours, go talk to them.  It’s a hell of a lot more effective.

Not that it was any mystery, since I blasted the fact over every square inch of internet, but I was in Winston-Salem, NC last week for the River Run film festival, an amazing feast of fantastic films that just coincidentally has my little sister as one of the two organizers of the entire event. But that’s pure coincidence.

I got there on Wednesday thinking that I was just going to go to a few movies, but as I read through the descriptions in the program, my brain changed from dabbler to glutton, and I wondered how I was going to fit it all in.

But fit I did, and I saw more movies in the span of four days than I think I’ve seen in the last year, DVDs included. So here, in bite-sized nugget reviews that contain zero high fructose corn syrup, are the movies I saw. My descriptions of the movies are as basic as I can make them, so click on the link for the full descriptions at the River Run site.

In order in which they were viewed…

(500) Days of Summer
If High Fidelity had a kid, it would be this movie. It’s an indie rom-com that comes equipped with everything that that description implies, but done absolutely perfectly. It’s hilarious even with familiar jokes, heartbreaking even when it feels kind of corny, and feels universal even while it is, from the opening disclaimer, clearly a movie for dudes.  It perfectly blends the quirkiness of an indie with the slick feel of Hollywood in ways that would make Little Miss Sunshine puke with envy.

Zoey Deschanel finds a perfect role with her unconventional beauty and spacey acting, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a revelation. You may remember him as the kid from Third Rock From The Sun, but if this perfect performance as a naive romantic doesn’t give him a whole new career, then I don’t know what.

Note: I may not know what.

Herb and Dorothy
One of the things that I noticed about a lot of the smaller-budget documentaries is that they’re quilts of film styles. Since a lot of them were filmed over the course of years (12 years was the max that I heard at this festival), the filmmakers have to film when they can with whatever they can get their hands on.

Herb and Dorothy was the quilt-iest of the bunch. It combined cheap camcorder-like digital video with slick re-animation of old photos and just about everything in between. It’s a interesting story of the evaluation of art and obsession that goes well beyond appreciation, but the jumbled timeline meant that it was a great watch because of the fascinating story rather than any kind of impressive craft.

Waveriders
Waveriders, on the other hand, was almost the opposite.  It’s not that I don’t like surfing movies, but surfers are generally not a highly articulate bunch, and the filmmakers insistence on relying on repetitious soundbites of surfers trying and failing to describe the trancendence of surfers bogged this movie down in parts.

But that’s the bad news. The good news is that the footage is incredible, with waves whose height is unbelievable and surfing moves that even those of us who’ve never set foot on a board could gasp at. The back story of the development of surfing and it’s movement away from Hawaii and California and to Central America and ultimately to Northern Ireland is interesting in and of itself.  It’s absolutely worth plowing through dudes fumbling to express themselves to get to some of the most amazing footage I’ve seen in a long time.

Documentary Shorts
Among these short documentaries were some good ones–a simple film about an immigrant woman cleaning offices in Australia and a fun film about the Jewish singles in the upper west side–but they were all overshadowed by Witness, an incredibly powerful story told from the perspective of one of the preachers on the balcony of the motel where MLK was shot. Witness was saved for last, and it’s a good thing it was. Everything else would have been a letdown after that.

Rumba
My review to Mary when Rumba ended was, “What a strangle film.” It was a blast to watch the brightly-colored dark humor and ridiculous physical comedy, and marvel at how much was done with so little dialog, but it’s an odd one.

Unmistaken Child
Behind (500) Days Of Summer, this was my favorite film of the festival. It’s a documentary that could succeed on the incredible scenery alone, but the story of young Buddhist monk who’s looking for the reincarnation of his recently-deceased master in the infants of small towns is one of the most amazing stories I’ve ever seen. It’s one of those moments where fantastic scenery and cinematography mesh with a story that’s totally foreign that really shows why the documentaries are some of the best entertainment around.

Food Inc.
This is basically the film version of Fast Food Nation (a book that permanently changed the way I think about business and industry) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (a book that I’m in the middle of and has already had a big effect on me), and features both authors prominently. But even though many of the points of the film were already familiar to me, it’s still an amazing tale of how business has changed the way we eat for the worse.

If you’ve read the books, this film is highly recommended.  If you haven’t read the books, you MUST see this movie.

Kalinovsky Square
This was the only disappointment of the festival. A documentary of the recent corrupt elections in Belarus, it was nearly impossible to figure out what was going on. That the filmmaker leaned on sarcasm to make the film a little lighter made it that much harder to figure out both its timeline and its points.

That the sleaziness in Belarus constantly reminded me of the days of the Bush administration may have reminded me just how bad things got in this country, but it also made me think that maybe things weren’t nearly as severe as the film made them out to be, and that this film was really the equivalent of talking to some IMF protesters and presenting it as the horrible conditions of modern America.  Of course, Belarus is much worse than that, in that the citizens have difficulty leaving the country, but not that you could really tell from this film.

But this film also showed how great it is to see these films as part of a festival, because almost every one of the films I saw had a Q&A with the director afterwards, illuminating the motivations for the film’s creation and making the quality of even confusing films like this one jump dramatically between the end credits and actually leaving the theater.

The Burning Plain
Take a dramatic narrative about infidelity and mysterious death. Now take it so that it starts with the end. Now take it and chop it up so that the end is at the beginning and the climax and almost every part of the plot becomes a puzzle that slowly gets put together as it goes along. It sounds infuriating, but it was one of the most riveting films I’ve ever seen.

Goodbye Solo
I love Winston-Salem. I’ve never lived there for longer than a month at a time, but it’s the closest thing I have to a hometown, being the only place that I knew from the start of my memory that I still return to often.

So I’m biased, but I really think that Winston is a little-known treasure. It has a fantastic arts scene for a town of its size, and has a unique character that never ceases to amaze me.

Setting a movie entirely in Winston-Salem, with scenes and shots that were recognizable even to a semi-hometowner like me is a sure way to get it into my heart.  Goodbye Solo isn’t–as the New York Times apparently said–”nearly perfect”, but it is a fantastic film with uncommon and extremely moving story.  I hope that it finds an incredible amount of success and becomes a cult classic, so that the shots of Winston-Salem get burned into film history.

The Q&A of this film was done with Angus MacLachlan, the write of Junebug, and at the beginning of the Q&A, both writers laughed at how you could watch Junebug and Goodbye Solo back-to-back and be amazed that they’re set in the same small city.  Goodbye Solo is pretty gritty, and shows a side of Winston-Salem that’s much more diverse than the one that I ever saw.

Roccaterania
A decade ago exactly, my friend Becky mentioned to me a guy who worked with her at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and mentioned an  odd guy who worked as an illustrator at the museum, and was brilliant at his work in spite of his eccentricities.

It turns out that this guy–Renaldo Kuhler–was both brilliant and eccentric enough to warrant his own documentary.  It focuses mostly on the country of Renaldo’s invention: a country called Roccaterania that existed in between New York State and Canada.  This imaganation went as far as creating an entire history that coincides with the events of Kuhler’s life, and it’s endlessly fascinating. Kuhler may be an odd guy, but this movie is actually really inspiring in a lot of ways.

Wrap-up
Okay…so, in order to give it to you nice and easy, here’s the wrap-up:

Make sure you see them in the theaters: (500) Days of Summer and Unmistaken Child.

See them in the theaters because, even if they’re not amazing films, they look really great: Waveriders and The Burning Plain

If you can’t see them in the theater, at least put them on your Netflix queue: Goodbye Solo, Food Inc. and Rocaterrania

And finally: support your local film festival!

Whenever I check the little box that categorizes one of my posts as “Tech”, I do it knowing that about half of my little audience tunes out immediately.  This is a shame, because whenever I talk tech here, it’s only because it’s something that I think could benefit the people who don’t consider themselves at all tech minded. Trust me: if I was really talking about the tech that interested me, you’d be getting a lot more about Google Analytics and Excel formulas. Seriously.

I’m ticking off that tech box today because, in the last few weeks, I’ve seen a slew of status messages on Facebook that are bemoaning the loss of their hard drive and all the important files that go along with it. It just doesn’t need to be this way.

So today, I’m going to tell you to install Dropbox to back up your files and share them, and that if you don’t and lose a whole bunch of important files, I won’t feel the slightest bit sorry for you.  In fact, I’ll laugh at you, and will send you cards taunting your loss, and write out TOLD YOU SO on your front lawn in gasoline.  Okay, maybe not that last one, but only because it would be environmentally irresponsible, and not because you don’t deserve it.

Here’s the reasons you need to put Dropbox on your computer. There’s only TWO, so don’t tell me you don’t have the time to read it.

REASON ONE: Everything you put in the folders gets backed up.

See, all the installation of Dropbox does is put some folders on your computer called “My Dropbox” (or just “Dropbox” on the Mac). You interact with them just like you would with any other folders on your computer and can create as many subfolders as you want, but everything that’s in these folders is available on the Dropbox site and is getting backed up and versioned.

The backup thing is good enough. If your computer totally crashed and you lost everything, then at least everything in Dropbox would be instantly retreivable. And when your computer gets fixed up or you’re starting on a new computer, you just re-install Dropbox, and all your files are there again.

But the versioning is great as well.  I had deleted a PDF from one of my folders in Dropbox, but wanted it back when I was at work.  No problem: I just went into Dropbox, selected “Show deleted files”  and reverted back to the version of the folder that had that file in it, and there it was in my Dropbox folders again.  Brilliant.

REASON TWO: Synching your files between two computers.

I used to think this was the main reason to have Dropbox, but it seems to confuse people.

You can install Dropbox on more than one computer and then you see the exact same contents in both places.  I have Dropbox on both my work computer and home computer, and it’s been a lifesaver more than once. Recently, I had my employee evaluation form to fill out in a Word document, and I just plunked it in the “Work” folder I’d created and worked on it at home.  When I got back onto my work computer, there was the file, right where I’d left it, except it had all of the changes I’d made at home.

Now, a lot of people can’t go installing stuff on their work computers like that, but it’s still definitely worthwhile installing on your home computer just for backup purposes, but if you can have it on both home and work computers, it’s invaluable.

BONUS REASON: Share files

Anything you drop in the “Public” folder has a public link that you can get as easily as right-clicking on the file:

I know this isn’t necessarily something that people need, but it’s really handy.

So there you have it: one quick and easy sign up and installation, and you won’t need your little flash drives much anymore, and you’ll have backups of all your files.  Use this link to sign up and install it and you’ll get a little extra room in your Dropbox (and so will I, thanks).

You can’t hear me right now, but I’m practicing laughing at those of you who read this and still lose your files.  I’m an obnoxious jerk for your benefit.

I’ve heard a number of people lately talking about how they’re going to give up on Twitter or Facebook, and read a few articles about “social media exhaustion”.  I can understand it to a certain extent, but I feel the same way about computers in general: the appeal is not in the technology itself, but the fact that the technology just happens to provide me with the perfect medium for various parts of my life.  My blog gives me an outlet for the writing that I always like doing, but that journals never satisfied.  I love Facebook because it’s gotten me back in touch with tons of people from my long ago past and keeps me in the lives of people that I care very much for but rarely get to see. I love my RSS reader because it lets me devour enormous amounts of information and I love mp3s because it lets me devour enormous amounts of music.  I love Twitter because I can scratch little thought itches and then continue on my day.

I’m not going to predict that I won’t give up on Twitter, Facebook or any of my blogs–realized or imagined–because I could give up on them at any moment.  But the reason that I’ll be giving up on them isn’t because of social media fatigue or because I think they’ve gotten stupid: it’ll be because they’re no longer the right tools for what I looked to them for in the first place.  No matter how much people like to think of me as a tech geek, I’m really not.  I just get excited about the fact that it lets me do the things I want to do.

Nutshell: Get your Outlook calendar showing up as a separate calendar in your Google calendar. Warning: this post will use the word “calendar” often.

Let’s get it out of the way: if you use gmail and have a phone capable of a calendar and contacts, and don’t use Google Calendar (gCal, for the sake of not repeating the C word so much), you’re crazy. The new auto sync for gCal and Google contacts is awesome, making your iPhone about kabillion times more powerful that any dumb ol’ Blackberry. Make a change on your gCal or in your contacts and it shows up a few seconds later on the other. Amazing.

Insults aside (oh, let’s not kid ourselves: insults are always possible around here), it’s a powerful tool, and when you use the gCal/Outlook sync tool, it means you can have your work calendar on your phone and gCal as well.

The problem with that, though, is that the gCal/Outlook sync tool only syncs up one calendar, so when I went into gCal, I saw a whole ton of events all on my main calendar, when what I really wanted was a way to have my work life and personal life separated out into calendars that I could turn on and off.

Figured it! And it’s easy. Basically, all you have to do is:

1. create another Google account (no problem for me: I always create a separate Google account with my work email address as the username)
2. have the gCal/Outlook sync tool sync to that account
3. share the calendar in the work Google account with your personal account

And there you have it: two calendars that can be turned off and on as necessary, both in gCal or on my iPhone (here’s the instructions on how to show multiple calendars). The people that I share my personal calendar with no longer see all of my daily meetings, they only see the stuff that takes up my nights and weekends, which is all they’d be interested in anyway.

This does have at least one drawback that I’ve found: times when the work and personal calendars converge (like vacations or work-time personal appointments) take more managing than if you just have the gCal/Outlook sync dumping your work appointments on your main Google calendar.  I’ve found that it means that I have to duplicate the appointment so that it shows up on my work calendar, showing me as busy so that no one invites me to a meeting only to have me break their heart when I decline their meeting invitation.  I hate it when they cry.

And now, to sign off as I sign off so many of my work emails: hope that makes sense.

The common line on Twitter for those that aren’t on it is, “I don’t get Twitter”. But when I go to try and explain it, I realize that, in spite of using it on a daily basis for well over a year, there’s a lot of times that I don’t really get it either.

Yesterday, one of my Facebook friends mentioned he had got on Twitter out of professional necessity, but still didn’t get it, and in trying to explain it to him, I crystallized to myself what it is about Twitter that make me continue to use it as well as why it’s so popular.

Twitter rarely gets called a “microblogging platform” anymore, which is kind of a shame, because a blogging platform is exactly what it is. And, like with full, long-winded blogs, it’s the desire to find a medium for an already-existing message that keeps it going. If you get on Twitter just for the sake of Twitter, then you’ll likely be one of those annoying people who writes things like “@repliedperson Yeah, totally” or “@repliedperson Sounds great! How does Sunday at 1 pm sound?” But if you have a desire to express something but not the time or inclination to organize it into longer expressions, Twitter is your platform.

And this was the big realization: Twitter has survived and flourished because it forces brevity, making it not only easier and quicker to write, but quicker and easier to read. The web is littered with abandoned blogs, but people stay on Twitter because it’s an outlet without being a time suck. Which explains why many of those people that rarely-if-ever-updated blogs are still on Twitter: put half an hour into a post and no one reads it, and it’s frustrating, but 10 seconds of a Twitter post and no one reads it? Big deal.