Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer
Nineteenth year. I almost forgot to do this—I did, actually; it’s May 20 as I type. But through the magic of back-dating this is living in its rightful place and chronicling the march of time, and my travels, such as they were last year. Repeat visits starred as always.
New York (home base) *
Palm Beach Gardens, FL *
New City, NY *
Peru, VT
Lenox, MA *
Edgewater, MD
Gloucester, MA *
Edgartown, MA *
Buffalo Grove, IL
I revisited my 25th-anniversary blog post today and discovered that the Eatonweb Portal clickthroughs are functional in the Wayback Machine.
Back then, according to the portal, I described the Ideapad as, “Views, opinions, emotions, essays, proper grammar.”
That’s still pretty much the case. Nice job staying on topic, Wertheimer.
A year later, I wrote up the sidebar description that also still rings true:
3 parts observation
2 parts introspection
1 part links
1 part creativity
1 part stinging wit
dash of sarcasm
Part of longevity is just sticking to it.
I worked on and off for six months on a 25th anniversary Ideapad post, and then I went and missed the deadline. Tonight I finished the post, backdated it to November 1, and belatedly got it live. Take a look. And thanks for being here.
A blog meme! I recently discovered that early blogger Chris O’Donnell is still at it, and now we’re reading each other again, and he pulled together this list (which I’m guessing started on yet another blog) so I thought I’d join in the fun.
My phone, remember, is an iPhone 13 mini.
I have had this self-congratulatory fact in the Ideapad sidebar for some time now. On November 1, 1998, I started the Ideapad. So this marks a full quarter-century of posting my thoughts online.
When I began blogging, the community was small enough that Brigitte Eaton was able to hand-compile a list of all of them. I remember there being 500 or so when I first came across it; the farthest we can see in the Wayback machine shows 1285 weblogs, including this one. The web has come a long, long way since then, and while innumerable blogs have come and gone, the Ideapad endures.
I’m not a real milestone guy, and I covered this lightly when the blog turned twenty, but I do want to acknowledge the moment.
When I reflect on what twenty-five years of blogging means, mostly it’s the persistence: my blog is still here, still publishing new content, at the same URL as when it was launched, and with almost all of the archives intact and readable. It’s not hard to do, but few do it, and when I’m blogging I’m continuing my commitment to digital longevity.
I revisited the bookmarks file referenced in 2018 to see who is still blogging, and oh, the linkrot. Let’s pause to appreciate those who keep at it. Jason Kottke, who inspired me to put up my own weblog, blogs for a living, of course. Peter Merholz, coiner of “blog,” is, blessedly, still maintaining his. Journal-bloggers like Jessamyn and Cat are still journaling away. A tip of the cap also goes to those who stopped blogging but keep their sites live, so their contributions to the formative era of the internet aren’t forgotten. I hope some of these folks see this, and I hope they realize the value of their efforts.
And to you, dear reader: I’ve long stopped looking at my site metrics, and for all I know, my only regulars are me and my mom. (Hi, Mom.) But I’m glad you stopped by, even this once, and I hope you enjoy exploring everything I’ve shared with the world these past 25 years.
Benedict Evans, on his decision to stop using (f/k/a) Twitter:
Until recently, though, the bullshit was mostly about cars or tunnels. It wasn’t repeating obvious anti-semitic dog-whistles. It wasn’t telling us that George Soros is plotting to destroy western civilisation. It wasn’t engaging with and promoting white suprematists. It wasn’t, as this week, telling us all to read a very obvious misinformation account, with a record of anti-semitism, as the best source on Israel.
And Dan Sinker, on his same conclusion:
That Twitter still exists, hollowed and hateful, feels like an insult. It’s just a flimsy facsimile of itself now too.
I largely stopped engaging with Twitter back in May; I haven’t created, replied, retweeted or faved in months. And I don’t plan on doing so again; as Evans notes, any business that endorses anti-Semitism is not a business worth patronizing (and certainly not worth creating content for). But I am also faced with the same problem Sinker clarifies—nothing has replaced it, and nothing really will.
Over on Music Industry Blog, Mark Mulligan argues that today’s streaming platforms have created a just-in-time economy for popular music, with algorithms pushing artists and labels to release a song once a month to maintain relevancy.
Mulligan’s thesis is that this is bad for creators, and in turn the industry, and it’s going to hurt musicians who need to crank out songs and feed the beast.
I have a countervailing opinion to this, which is that while Mark may be right, the shift is also fantastic—for fans.
The phenomenon of musical acts taking years to craft an album is not consistent through the history of recorded music. Indeed, it only dates back to 1983, when Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was such a phenomenon that Epic released seven of its nine tracks as singles, drastically extending the active shelf life of the most popular album in Top 40 history.
Before that, albums were thought to have a six- or eight-month sell window in record stores. So artists made a lot more music. Pick any artist from before the disco era and the volume is amazing.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers taking four years to perfect an album is not a “normal” music routine. It is the result of record labels manipulating album release cycles to maximize the return on investment of expensive studio recordings. The Chili Peppers are proof: their fourth album came out just five years after their debut, and after they got popular and major-label marketing kicked in, it took another thirteen years for the next four to come out.
Now the pendulum has swung the other way, with release cycles condensing for the same reason they expanded—maximize ROI, this time of the artist’s visibility—and artists adapting accordingly. And as a music listener, this is great news.
Most fans will be thrilled to hear a new song from their favorite artists every month or so. This harks all the way back to the 1960s, when people couldn’t get enough of the Beatles, and they locked up the top five slots of the pop chart (and twelve of the Hot 100) at the same time. Perhaps things will get further contorted, and we’ll go back to the pre-rock era, when an artist’s albums were often compilations of songs people already largely knew. This may further antiquate the concept of an album as a cohesive artistic statement, but then, MP3s started that process decades ago.
So yeah, maybe the Spotify effect is changing music release cycles, the same way it’s shortening song lengths. But hey, bring it on! More music sooner is a good thing.
My last-out-the-door iPhone 13 mini arrives today.
I’ve been using an iPhone 12 mini since spring 2021. With the exception of battery life it’s been great. For me, the most important thing is that the size is reasonable: I want to be able to hold it in one hand; I want to throw it in my jeans pocket without protrusion. Modern iPhones don’t meet those criteria.
I have been advocating for reasonable phone form factors for quite some time. Back in 2016 I skipped technology upgrade cycles and bought older hardware in order to own a right-sized iPhone SE that fit in my hand.
My hands aren’t getting any larger, but the iPhone is. So I made it a point to buy the 13 mini the day before this year’s September iPhone keynote. I was actually holding out hope that we’d get a surprise small phone and I could cancel the order, but the opposite occurred. Apple discontinued the mini the next morning.
There’s an interesting case study to be made on smartphone usability optimization, and how “I want a big screen” consistently trumps “I want it to fit in one hand.” I’m not alone in my desires, but I’m certainly in a minority segment.
Here’s to hoping my new phone lasts until Apple tries a return to smaller form factors.
Last week [sic], my boss scoffed at my iPhone SE and told me to get a bigger phone, so I picked up an iPhone 7 Plus just for work. Its 5.5″ screen creates a different productivity profile than my SE, and I’m excited to see how it plays out, as I’m now carrying both devices around the office. (The SE is still my main device, and retains my phone number and core suite of apps.)
But I also maxed out my 7 Plus with a 256 GB hard drive, and I’m testing whether I can finally bid a fond, loving farewell to my old iPod Classic.
While I enjoy streaming music services, I love having all my music ready for travel, impervious to drops in network connectivity. For years, the iPod Classic, with its hearty 160 gigabyte hard drive, has been my go-to device for the car, train, plane and hotel room, and allows me to drag around nearly 20,000 songs wherever I go. While the screen and clickwheel are in good shape, the battery is starting to give out, sacrificing some of its portability.
More importantly, I have a lengthy car commute these days, and my car’s touchscreen head unit does a terrible job navigating a music library of this size. I bought a bluetooth dongle instead, which has worked well, but now I’m constantly reconnecting and managing the battery life of two gadgets, three if you include my phone.
The 7 Plus should solve much of this. Its bluetooth will connect seamlessly in the car, as my SE already does; I’ll be able to use Siri, keeping my hands and eyes focused on driving; and the big hard drive ensures I have lots of runway to add more music. (I’d been considering an iPod Touch, but they never got past 128 GB, and I couldn’t bring myself to downsize.)
I’ve been joking about the goofy system profile of my new gadget all week: half a dozen work apps and eighteen thousand MP3s. I think I have a win-win on my hands, though. I’m looking forward to trying it out.
Drafted 2017/02/16 at 1:22 am. Published unedited. I still have the iPhone 7 Plus, and it’s still my main music hard drive, keeping up with my Apple Music library adds.
I am a voracious reader and always have been. As a kid, I read the Star-Ledger sports section every morning at breakfast; as a young adult, I read magazines while brushing my teeth; nowadays, it goes without saying that I’m constantly on my laptop and phone, reading.
My reading sources run the gamut, from newspapers to magazines to websites to RSS feeds of dozens of blogs to Twitter and its successors to fantasy baseball experts. The best writing leaves me both informed and entertained. I gravitate toward news and well-thought-out opinion pieces. I will read and devour most anything discussing rock music, New York City, pro sports, new cars, the entertainment industry, Apple, business strategy and current events.
What I haven’t read, in many years, is a novel. Or pretty much anything in book form.
It’s not for lack of trying. I bought The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles and carried it on so many vacations across several years that it became a point of amusement for my children. (I think I’m on page 87.) Two years ago, I decided that the issue was the fiction angle, so I bought The Power Broker, and I’ve only managed the first 27 pages of that, which has made the travel bag a lot heavier with the same result.
I bought Moneyball, but never cracked it; my son has it right now. I thought about re-reading the classics, but I never get started. At one point my sister-in-law bought me a thoughtful Adam Gopnik compendium, and I thanked her, and never opened it. “But you’d absolutely love it!” she said, when it slipped out that I wasn’t reading it, which was probably true, but it was a book. “If you had given him the link to it in blog form,” my wife said, both needling and truthful, “he’d have read the whole thing.”
This summer, in my building’s community bookcase, someone left two Carl Hiaasen novels. I brought them upstairs and wound up taking the first one (Bad Monkey) on vacation last month, where it came to the beach a couple of times, instead of the usual Sunday New York Times Magazine. And that did the trick. I read maybe 75 pages on vacation, and the book was fun enough for me to keep going when I got home, and before I knew it I’d finished the book and whipped through its sequel, too.
Fiction! I’d finally gotten back into reading something that wasn’t designed to advance an angle or teach me something. Hiaasen is fairly light reading, but he’s good at telling a story, and the books kept me going. And, happily, reading the books didn’t detract from my other reading; it pulled me away from sitcom reruns and video games, making for a much more rewarding diversion.
The two Hiaasen novels are headed back to the basement for another neighbor to enjoy, and next up is my first book on Kindle, an Amor Towles novel that my wife says is fascinating. I’m looking forward to reading it.
Ideapad © 1998–2024 David Wertheimer. All rights reserved.