A Place for My Stuff

Sunk Cost and Mobile Game Addiction

The Story

After 5 or 6 years of playing, I've made the decision to give up my Game of War: Age of Fire account.

Those of you who are well familiar with the game may read that and think, "Gee, Bill, I didn't think anybody was still even playing that game.  You may as well tell the world that you've stopped using A.O.L. for the Internet!" Those of you not so familiar with this the game may wonder why this personal event is worthy of a blog entry.

 

The Problem

Before I go any further, let me be clear about one thing: I'm not saying video games are all inherently life-draining and evil.  We do a lot of things that may seem to have no immediate real-world benefit to our survival: playing a game, watching movies, watching sports, gardening, stamp collecting, whatever.  There's nothing wrong with having something you like to do in your spare time.  Life would be pretty dull and pointless if we weren't allowed to have some fun now and then. As with any pleasurable things in life, it comes down to responsibility and one's true net enjoyment.  And even within the realm of games, there may be benefits:

• Maybe playing Monopoly with your family proves to be a interactive bonding experience. 
• Maybe playing chess helps keep your analytical mind sharp. 
• Maybe you learn new words by playing Scrabble. 
• Maybe you learn something about listening and teamwork by playing an RPG or co-op game. 

HOWEVER, if you find yourself...

• ... spending so much time and money on a game such that it significantly cuts in on other things you'd like to (or need to) do with your life?
• ... having lost most of the initial appeal you had in the game, and are now just playing out of habit? 
• ... driving loved ones up the wall because you're paying more attention to your smart phone than to them?
• ... playing mainly because you'd feel guilty about quitting? And it's a game with no definitive ending? 
• ... ultimately just looking at advertisements on your phone for hours at a time, interrupted by opportunities to play some spin-off of "Bejeweled" or "Minecraft"?
• ... using your game scoring as a substitute for real-life accomplishments?  

Then yeah, maybe it's time to stop and reevaluate whether you're still really "playing" this game, or if the game makers are playing you.

 

Sunk Cost

In reading Scott Adams' 2019 book Loserthink, I was introduced to a concept known as the "sunk cost" fallacy.  As I understand it, it's basically the human tendency think, "Right now I have options 'A' and 'B'. I've already invested a lot into 'A', therefore that's the option that makes the most sense to continue with."  The reason this is fallacious thinking is because how much you've invented in something doesn't necessarily determine whether it's the right decision. Whatever time or money you've invested into option A is now "sunk", and doesn't change the fact that option B might be better for you or more desirable in the long run.

For example, "This $1800 suit I bought no longer fits me well, and I'd actually look better in and feel more comfortable at the job interview tomorrow if I wore one of my cheaper suits.  But hey, I paid $1800 for this, so I should wear it."  Or to cite an example from my own career: "This device we use is hard to maintain and breaks down all of the time. We could hire somebody to just spend two months creating a replacement that would work ten times better.  But the company already paid some contractors in India a ton of money to create what we use now.  Therefore we need to keep using it."

So it goes with some video games.  What was it that was really driving me to log in and play "Game of War"?  Was the gameplay still really fun? Was it the game's aesthetics? Was it the social interaction with other players, especially those on the same team as me? There was a tiny bit of truth in all of those ideas.  But what mostly drove me to tap on that icon and launch the game, was this subconscious need to keep it afloat.  To justify my investment.  To justify my progress in the game.  And of course, the longer you play and the more you invest, the harder it is to quit, because the more that would feel like throwing it all away.  It was a spinning plate on the end of a pole that I had to keep spinning because, well, I just had to. And whatever tiny reward of fun or escape, or the hope for more fun, was also just enough fuel to continue too.

 

"Just one more level! One more fix!"

What makes these games so addictive in the first place?  For me, it's a couple of different things.  There's always a need in life for occasional fantasy and escape.  So there's incredible appeal in being able to procrastinate from stuff in the real world, and instead be a sword-swinging, dragon-fighting, gold-plundering hero of your own empire.  Granted, a good fantasy book or action movie can have that same sort of effect.  But what video games additionally provide is the illusion of accomplishment. 

See, unlike most other skills or challenges in life, video games provide you with a numerical measure of progress, and typically a clear path from one path to the next.  "If I just get enough gold pieces, I can buy this piece of armor.  Then I can kill the boss at the end of this level and advance to the next level!"  What's the next level after 33?  34, of course.  How close are you to getting there?  Just look at the progress bar.  "Hmm, I've been stuck on this part for a while and it's tedious.  But if I pay $4.99, I can get a boost that will get all of my buildings up to the next level, and the game will be more fun then.  Well, the game is otherwise free and I've gotten a ton of hours of play out of it for nothing, so I suppose dropping five bucks won't hurt."

Now imagine somebody who is typically a procrastinator, has not only an impulsive behavior but an OCD such that he (and it's more often a "he" than a "she") can't stand to leave things unfinished and asymmetric, perhaps lacks some certainty in their own career or other life endeavors, doesn't otherwise get to command much in life, finds most humans unrelatable, and has such an imaginative mind that they can easily tune the world out and hyperfocus on something appealing.  Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of a mobile game company's income comes from exploiting the top 2% of its players who are, as people often nicely try to put it, "on the autism spectrum".

(On a related note, there's a common feeling that giving into an activity that serves no real purpose is just stupidity, and smug self-described "rational" people won't allow themselves to do such irrational things. But IQ has little to do with this. In fact, smart people with addictions are usually better at misusing their intellect to rationalize what they're doing. But that's a whole other topic.)

Fortunately, I've had enough sense of self-control and purpose not to go nearly as deep down that hole as I've seen others go.  One attitude that I've long maintained, even before I owned my first cell phone, was this: I want to look back at whatever I've done in the past month, and have some kind of real accomplishment to show.  By "real", I mean something besides "I got my Diablo game character up to level 99" or "I watched all 8 seasons of this TV show."  Rather, something I can be proud of.  Something that I felt was worth the investment.  Writing an article, solving a complicated math proof, learning something on a particular musical instrument, publishing a website, whatever.  Again, that doesn't mean avoiding video games or TV shows at all costs; it just means not letting those sorts of things being the only things I "accomplished" that month.  I think was really drove me to having this attitude was hanging out with some of my friends who'd just finished college, and seeing how some of them had gotten into the disillusioned zombie routine of coming home from work, watching TV for the next several hours, going to bed, repeat.  I promised myself that I wouldn't fall into that trap.

Denial

Alas, getting back to the question of why I quit playing Game of War: Age of Fire, it wasn't just a strong sense of resourcefulness that made me quit.  Frankly, the game had really come to suck.  Just when you thought you were getting a hold of things, they'd introduce some new feature that wasn't very clear at all.  There were lots of old features of the game that grew to become useless, and you weren't always sure whether you just weren't investing enough in some particular thing, or whether you should be working on some other part of the game. And this isn't just some sour grapes rationalization on my part; you can read the game reviews.

Worst of all was that you spend a lot of time and even real money building up your kingdom, then somebody who had just spent more money and was thus at a higher level could come by and completely wipe out the army you'd been building up.  Or once you got to a certain level of riches or equipment quality, they'd introduce some new tier of more things to get, which meant you'd have to start getting that if you wanted to have any kind of edge in the game.  More and more people ended up leaving the game.  So I'd log in, and it would be a ghost town.  Not that there still weren't a handful of players who'd search around for anybody vulnerable to destroy, of course.  

So once I decided this game was more trouble than it was worth, the next decision was to just delete the app, right?  Unfortunately, it wasn't that simple.  Again, I was haunted by the nagging feeling of, "You dumped all of this time and money into the game.  You can't just DELETE it!"  Then, "I know.  You could SELL it!"  Yes, there is a market out there for selling and buying game accounts where the player has reached a high level.  There are sites where you can buy and sell high-scored accounts for particular games.  Unfortunately, that selling price would be nowhere near the amount of money you may have dumped into the game.  As time went on, it seemed that you'd be lucky to get anything in exchange for your game, as interest in Game of War rapidly waned.   And you can't in fact delete your empire from the game outright; you can only transfer ownership.  Frankly, I didn't want to leave a game that the high-paying bullies could rape when I was gone.  At the same time, I also thought, "Maybe there's somebody would would actually appreciate this account of mine, and use it."

Acceptance

I did finally come to accept the fact that the sunk cost was sunk, and waiting to make any money back from a sell wasn't worth the time if I could give it away sooner.  So I went to a Facebook forum that some of the local kingdom players had created some years ago, stated my account level and said, "If anybody wants it, message me and it's yours."  There were a few jeering idiots, as well as a couple of other idiots who didn't realize that "message me" doesn't mean "post a reply on this thread".  Regardless, one guy did message me.  And now my old account is his.  And I have a burden gone from my phone. The end.

Rebinding the Mighty Led Zeppelin Real Book, part 1

Here's the short version of this two-part blog post:

• I have a book that I use a lot, called The 'Just Led Zeppelin' Real Book.
• The book has gotten rather beat up through years of use.
• So I fixed the book by rebinding it.
• In part 1, I talk about the history behind this book.
• In part 2, I talk about how I fixed it up.

Now, let's begin!

Before describing this rebinding project of my copy of "The Just Led Zeppelin Real Book", there's some background information on this book that I'd like to talk about.  First, it might be necessary to talk about two other books: "Fake Books" and "The Real Book".  I'll get into the actual details of my rebinding process in part 2.

FAKE BOOKS

There are countless different music transcription books and "sheet music" out there.  That is, these pieces of paper with symbols on them which represent musical notes and other components of music (lyrics, rhythms, tempos, etc.), typically in the established conventional format known as standard notation.  Granted there are lots of musicians who learn songs purely by ear (i.e., listening to a recording of a song, then gradually trying to duplicate each note on ones own instrument) -- too many, in my opinion. But there's still a lot of power and convenience to having music in a written form that can then be passed on from one musician to another.  The works of all the great composers over the centuries would be lost if we didn't have such a system.

However, if a band or individual musician wants to reproduce a song, say "Day Tripper" by the Beatles, they don't necessarily need a full note-for-note transcription of everything in the recording.  Listeners, likewise, don't need to hear the original instruments and everything note-for-note, beat-for-beat from a recording to recognize a particular song.  Making a passable performance of a piece like this is called "faking" the song.  I have a "fake book" for the Beatles, which covers over 100 of their songs by just presenting the lyrics, sheet music notes for the main melody, and the chord changes.  That's really all you need to fake a lot of the rock and jazz songs out there, and those are the elements which a lot of fake books contain.  Heck, some don't even include the melody, since 1) they figure musicians who've heard the song can already sing the melody anyway, and 2) I think publishing the music along with the lyrics usually costs more than publishing just the lyrics, due to the way that copyright laws and publishing rights work.


THE REAL BOOK

Unfortunately, fake books aren't always reliable. Some are a bit too simplified.  Some transcriptions are flat-out wrong.  And as mentioned, some examples like the one above don't even include the melody line written out.  Some also have very impractically tiny writing, or are books that won't stay open on a music stand.  Back in the 1970s, some frustrated jazz musicians got together and compiled what's known as "The Real Book".  It's about the size of a phone book (hey, remember those?!?), containing hundreds of lead sheets for various jazz standards.  Anybody who's a jazz musician has no doubt run into The Real Book.  They cost about $50, and were essential. If they don't own a copy themselves, then they've no doubt had a photocopied page from it thrown at them before.  This was typical for me when I was playing bass in high school and college jazz ensemble.  "Here, Bill, do a walking bass line over these chord changes" was the usual command. 

Despite the huge popularity of The Real Book, it remained a black market item.  Apparently, the makers never got the copyright clearance on the songs.  Still, copies of "The Real Book", "Real Book II", "The Latin Real Book", "The Vanilla Real Book", and other off-shoots continued to be printed up in somebody's basement and sold under-the-counter.  Sher music DID finally make a legal copy of "The Real Book", not only clearing all of the copyrights but also fixing some mistakes along the way.

THE "JUST LED ZEPPELIN" REAL BOOK

The popularity and legacy of the original Real Book has lent itself to other music books being created in the same style.  One of these is The Just Led Zeppelin Real Book.  As the title implies, it's essentially every song from every studio album as it was originally released, plus the one and only one studio B-side they ever released ("Hey, Hey What Can I Do"), all presented in the same sort of format as The Real Book.  So that means it has the lyrics, chord changes, transcribed melody, and overall general structure of every song, all printed in the nice big Real Book font.  Like the original Real Book, it also has a plastic comb binding (remember what I said earlier about many books not being able to stay open to a particular page when you have them on the music stand). Sorry, guitarists: this isn't a guitar tablature book; expecting that here would be like expecting The Real Book to show you where Miles Davis put his fingers on the trumpet buttons to play the solo of "So What".  Though this book does additionally provide tablature transcriptions for several songs, as well as guitar chord diagrams, and which special tunings Jimmy Page used on different songs.

Besides being a big Led Zeppelin fan ever since I was a young teenager, I've also enjoyed playing Zep on the bass, and in more recent years I've been the singer for no less than 5 different Led Zeppelin tribute bands.  In addition to singing with these bands, I've also done a little bass playing, mandolin playing, and harmonica playing here and there.  So this book has been vital to me.  There have been times when I've had to look up and check things to tell OTHER band members what chords were being used and what not.

This is a big book that's been slapped open and closed countless times, shoved in and pulled out of gig bags, traveled with me, and has a cheap plastic comb binding.  Needless to say, it became beat up.  It was time to do something about this.  The details of that story are continued in part 2.

 

CLICK HERE FOR PART 2

Fixing the "SIM Card Removed" error on a Samsung Galaxy S4

Recently my smart phone has been doing strange things.  I'll look down, and I'll get an error message saying "SIM card removed -- Unable to detect your SIM card.  Your device will restart to check for your SIM card.", or something along those lines.  No, I didn't open up my phone to actually remove my SIM card.  It just does this magically on its own.  Unfortunately, this means people can be trying to call or text me and I won't get any notice of it because my phone is in this "SIM card removed" state.  Rebooting fixes the problem temporarily, but I wanted to try to fix this problem before I consider buying a new phone.

These are the times I ask that all-important question: "Hmm, what would MacGyver do?"

So here's a solution I found on-line, and worked on tonight:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-s4-att/general/how-to-fix-galaxy-s4-sim-card-removed-t3113480

You'll need scissors, a micro screwdriver, and a foam earplug.  Of course, MacGyver would just use his Swiss Army Knife for the first two.

So far, so good.  We'll see over the next few days if this really worked.

Upgrading is Compuslory! Changing batteries on a talking Cyberman.

If you found this blog entry via searching the web for solutions on how to replace the battery in your talking Cyberman figure, well then, you're at the right place!  If not, well, then you might learn something about wristwatch batteries.  And Doctor Who.

I've been a fan of Doctor Who since I started watching as a toddler in the 1970s. Not surprisingly, I do have a lot of Doctor Who stuff.  One of these is a talking figure of my favorite Doctor Who enemy, the Cybermen.  I bought my talking Cyberman in a comic book shop a few years ago.  Press the button in the middle of the chest, and you can hear one of several recorded phrases.

The talking of course is battery-operated.  Unfortunately the phrases eventually became no longer audible, so I knew I had to change the battery.  For a lot of collectors, I'm sure the mentality is "Don't press the button so much!  You don't want to ever have to replace the battery!  That's because it might involve opening it up, and you could scratch or break it in the process!"  I can understand that.  But if like me you'd rather have your Cyberman figure talking, instead of having the batteries rotting away inside, then here's how to change the battery.

First, disconnect the hose that's attached to the front of the Cyberman. Yes, it pulls off.

Now pull off the entire head and chest plate.  It's all one piece, and there's a peg underneath the back that holds it in place.  If you pull the back piece away from the body, you can pull it off without breaking it.



Underneath is a little gray plastic box, whose top door is screwed shut with a tiny philips screw.  Get a small philips screwdriver and unscrew it, then take off this lid.  You'll see two batteries inside.

So what kind of batteries do you need?  That's a good question.  It turns out that there are multiple correct answers.  The etchings inside the case itself say to use two 1.5-volt "LR44" batteries.  I removed the dead batteries, put them in my pocket, and went down to the store to look for new LR44 batteries.  I couldn't find any. I certainly saw other watch batteries, but none with that size number.  I thought that surely I could only use LR44, right?  I mean you wouldn't be able to put C batteries in a device that takes D batteries, or AAA batteries in a device that takes AA batteries, right?

Well it turns out that watch batteries, also known as "Button Cell" batteries, are a little different.  I learned that there are actually multiple model names for these particular batteries which are all compatible.  Whether it's "LR44", "303", "357", different manufacturers use slightly different names, but they're all 1.5 volts and roughly the same size.  Wikipedia has a handy page on the topic.  I bought a pack of Rayovac "303/357" and put them in.  Screwed the lid back on, put the Cyberman head back on and...it works again!

Have I already told you enough about a topic you don't care about?  No?  Then watch this clip with a review of the figure:

 

20 Years of Using the Internet

It occurred to me recently that this month marks 20 years for me using the internet.  Granted, I do have some friends who've been using it even longer than that, since the 80s.  In fact I did have a computer in the 80s and wanted a modem at the time, but never got one from my parents.  (I'm wondering if seeing the movie "War Games" with my family at the time had a lot to do with that decision.  It would be another 10 years for on-line access.)  But still, 20 years is a long time, especially since most people by far and large didn't start using the internet until much, much later.

I guess if I could sum up the differences I've seen over the years, it really comes down to the same thing that seems to happen with most other technologies: improvements and new features come along that benefit the user, while simultaneously allowing more stupid and technically-incompetent people in on the action. 

Like a lot of people at the time, I got my first email address when I got to college.  That was likewise first got on-line.  We had a number of UNIX servers all around campus.  No mouse, and no graphical web browsers.  You just signed in to your UNIX account, and did one of the following:

• Email.  Elm and Pine were the big mail readers at the time.  I think it's worth mentioning that spam was pretty much unheard of around this time.  Finding unsolicited email in your inbox was simply not something that happened.  When it did happen, it was really rare.  That changed for me a few years later when I was still posting to newsgroups which got scanned by spam bots (programs that tried extracting email addresses from whoever posted).
• Chat rooms.  I stayed away from these for the most part, and continued to stay away from them for many years to come.  Though I did have a girlfriend at the time who always wanted to use my account to use IRC.
• MUD and other LARP games. On-line multi-player games most certainly existed.  The lack of graphics didn't stop anybody from playing them.  I saw some classmates who got really, really hooked on MUD.  They'd skip classes and spend up to 24 hours straight at the terminal, playing MUD.  So I steered clear of MUD.
• Gopher.  About the closest thing that we had to the World Wide Web.  Though that's really, really stretching it.
• Usenet.  Now here's where a lot of hours in my life got sucked in: posting to newsgroups!  Newsgroups are internet discussion forums on Usenet.  The flame wars of today have got nothin' on Usenet.  I have scars to this day from the arguments and flame wars that I'd get on Usenet.  I did however meet a lot of real-life friends thanks to Usenet.
• Instant Messages.  You could send instant messages to other people who were on-line at the time.  You could also set up a private chat with one other person, in a split screen.
• Edit your Public Profile.  Before the days where you could set up a website or even join a social networking site, the best you could do was write up some files and make them publicly readable.

Some other musings about the internet, then and now:

• Usenet was the place to find porn at the time.  But you didn't have the luxury of being able to browse items by thumbnails. Oh no no no. Your only real hope at the time was to go to a newsgroup like alt.binary.[whatever], wait a minute or two to download a selected image, and hope that its description was accurate.
• Was Napster (circa 2000) where all the illegal music downloading began?  No, not by a long shot.  Ripping music to sharable files, in and of itself, was nothing new.  I remember a classmate around 1994 who had obtained a leaked copy of Rush's album before it had come out.  You needed some hacking skills to know how to get it, it took a whole day to download it, and the quality was extra crappy.  But it was doable.  What happened though, is that 1) computer hard drives got bigger, 2) affordable broadband (to replace dial-up) became more widely available to people, 3) the mp3 format allowed music to take up much smaller sizes, 4) way more people than before were becoming internet users.  So when Napster came, having those other elements in place as well as a popular central "go to" spot is what made the piracy hell break loose.
• Most of the people on the internet in the earlier days seemed to be college students and scientists/engineers who had access from work.  This meant that the mean IQ of the people you'd run into on a given day was higher than what you find now.
• If you weren't one of the above in the 1990s, then there was a 99% chance you were using AOL.  And if you asked people for their "screen name", then it meant you were one of those dolts who assumed that AOL and the Internet were the same thing.  I'm proud to say that I never used AOL, at least not as my main means of getting on-line.  I eventually set up an AOL account for myself just so I could help debug issues that my father was having with his own AOL account.  My rants on AOL are old and are enough to take up a whole other blog entry, so, moving right along...
• When did the internet "jump the shark"?  For me, I thought it was when I saw a commercial for AOL, which showed off one of AOL's newer features: a drop-down menu for emoticons.
• Those of us who weren't connected on a T1 line at a college computer center or at the office, were using a dial-up modem from home.  Anybody who had to use one of these probably doesn't miss them.  You had to hook up your telephone to dial a number provided by your ISP, and if all went well (no busy signals or other surprises) then you were connected.  Eventually though you had to disconnect, especially if you wanted to use your phone again.  Depending on your settings, sometimes an incoming phone call could bump you off the internet too.  And all this for a whopping 56k speed.  (At MOST!  I think my first modem was about 14kb/s, and I know there were ones even slower than that.)  Dial-up was cheap though.  I hung on to dial-up at home at late as 2004 or 2005, paying a measly $6 or $7 per month.
• Remember web rings?  They worked great, until you got a dead page.
• I remember a book in the early 90s called "The Internet White Pages".  It included the email addresses of various celebrities.  Really!  I guess given that so few people were on-line, it wasn't considered much of a threat.
• Here's a term that never caught on: "Information Superhighway".  It was a nickname for the Internet.  Mst of you have probably heard it but I'm sure there are some who haven't.
• One nice thing I'll say about having more and more people on the internet is that it allowed you to get more and more specific about finding the type of people that you wanted.  For example, I used to trade bootlegs of the Black Crowes, but if you wanted to do that on the ineternet in the early to mid 90s, your best bet was to go to the newsgroup alt.music.bootlegs, make a post there, and hope that there were some other Black Crowes fans who read the newsgroup, would have something to trade, and was willing to trade.  By the early 2000s, I remember seeing a whole mailing list dedicated just to Black Crowes bootleg trading via CD-R.

Well that's it for now.  We'll see what things are like in another 20 years.

Mailing lists, mailing lists, mailing lists

I find myself rarely checking my personal email account these days.  I guess that's because I simply use email for less things than I used to.  I'm sure it's the same way with many people.  Now a days it's easy enough and more common to send text messages (including to yourself), program events into a cellphone, use social networking sites, do more discussions on message boards rather than mailing lists, etc.  Even when it comes to my podcast, the feedback and questions I get from listeners more often comes through on Facebook or some message board.

That's not to say that email is obsolete.  Far from it.  However, I've noticed that by far and large, the new emails I do get are either spam or from mailing lists. I've talked before about deleting existing emails that amount to "digital hoarding clutter".  This blog entry is more about stopping the inflow.  

The spam is thankfully pretty well under control these days.  A lot of web-based mail services like Gmail or Yahoo mail tend to do a good job lately at keeping spam separated.  It's not flawless, but it seems to work much better than it did in internet days of old.  Then again, I also use a special forwarding address in cases when I suspect it's going to be used for spam (e.g., contests, department stores, or services that I seldom use).  A lot of spam these days incorporates misspelled words and special characters to avoid being picked up by spam filters, but ironically this makes the spam more easily recognizable!

So it's time to weed out some of the mailing lists I'm on.  Here's what I see in my inbox.

• Freecycle newsletter.  I've mentioned Freecycle before. In summary, they can be a double-edged sword for hoarders: good for giving things away, but rather dangerous if you don't have the self-control to not take the other free stuff people are giving away.  While I have used Freecycle before, the bottom line is that I haven't used it in quite some time.  There's really no need to keep getting emails about it every day, so I'll unsubscribe to this list for the time being.
• Music gadget mailing list.  A couple of years back I bought a Yamaha rack for one of my all-too-many "back burner" projects (in this case, a musical one).  I played with it for a while.  Then I had to take my set-up down since the room was being swallowed up by something else.  I kept on the mailing list, because in the back of my mind, I kept thinking "Well seeing these newsletters will be a good reminder to get around to using it."  Well, that didn't happen.  Will it someday?  I'm sure.  But there's no need to keep subscribed to a mailing list I'm not reading.
• Musician's Friend.  This is a really great website for browsing and buying musical instruments and related accessories.  Great deals, fast shipping.  I recommend them, and I know I'll purchase from them again in the future.  However, I don't need to see a bunch of things every week I could blow my money on and not use.  So here's another unsubscribe for me.
• Concert venues, band sites, ticket vendors.  I've lost track of just how many of these I get.  Here's how it happens: I buy tickets to see a band or comedian at a particular venue, and from that point onward, I get updates about who's coming to town.  Ditto for a few band's official fan sites.  There are some places I do visit frequently and I do want the updates.  On the other hand, there are venues I barely go to more than once in a 2-year period.  I can drop these.
• Golf Equipment Site.  A few years back, I bought a gift for my father through this website.  Since then, they've been sending me the emails.  In the back of my mind, I think "Well my father is frustratingly difficult to shop for, so I might buy from them again, especially if I do one of these discounts they're talking about."  Well, that hasn't happened.  Unsubscribe -- FORE!
• Amazon Local Deals.  Do you get these?  I've used some.  Though I may very well drop this.  I don't need coupons every day.
• Restaurants.  Same as the concert venues: some I go to, some I never go to anymore.  Keep subscribed to the former, unsubscribe from the latter.

Oh, and one final word of warning: sometimes when you think you're unsubscribing from a list, you're unknowingly signing yourself up for future lists.  This usually happens if you find yourself on a mailing list that you DID NOT sign up for in the first place.  When this happens, just delete the email.  Otherwise, if it's something that you've knowingly subscribed to or did an on-line purchase from, it's not exactly "spam", so unsubscribing is typically safe.  As always, when in doubt, use a throw-away email address for subscriptions!

AOL's Wolfenozzy 3D

Another batch ready for the trash.

• AOL installation discs.  I'm proud to say that my introduction to the internet was not through AOL, let alone at the end of the 90s.  But it seemed like EVERYBODY else was on AOL, and boy most of these people were clueless and annoying.  "Hey, you're on the internet?  Cool!  So what's your screenname?!?"  Then I had to explain to them that not everybody on the internet was on AOL, and that while I did have an email address and a number of personal websites, I did not have such a thing as a "screenname".  There was more to the internet than AOL.  Most of them didn't get it.

Of course, AOL didn't want you to think that there was a world outside of AOL.  Let me put it this way.  Instead of a search engine, they had an "AOL Keyword" look-up.  Some companies back in those days had not only a URL for their website, but an "AOL Keyword".  That way, AOL uses could just type the keyword and be delivered to the site.  Funny things happened though if you tried to look up AOL's competitors.  The AOL Keyword "yahoo" for example just took you to an AOL page explaining how you can use their own search engine to search the web.

Anyway, these free AOL installation discs, which always included "First [however many] hours FREE!"  Yes, in those days some services charged by the hour of internet use time.  But these damn discs were everywhere.  I knew some old college classmates who seriously used them as coasters. 

So why did I have these?  Well some people got so fed up with getting these in the mail constantly, that they decided to start a campaign where they wanted people to send them the AOL discs they received, so that they could do a mass mailing of these BACK to AOL.  It was a gesture to say "Enough with these damn CDs!"  I guess I was keeping them for that purpose.  Of course, I never sent them in.  Time to toss these once and for all

• Wolfenstein 3D map, hand-drawn.  On graph paper.  Aside from not having played this early 90s computer game in quite some time, I understand that maps for every level are available anyway.  Yes it sucks to have to throw away hard work, but really, this isn't needed.
• List of stuff on my old PC which I sold a couple of years back to a friend.  Or maybe this was the PC I had even before THAT one.  Regardless, the list served its purpose back then for transferring stuff.  Don't need it now.
• Extra photocopies of CD inserts from some set of Ozzy Osbourne bootlegs.  Don't need them, and I could do better if I really wanted to.  But I don't . Into the trash you go.

APlaceForMyStuff.com - We've got DOT COM!

While I'm sure most of you have already figured this out, I originally wanted the URL for this site to be aplaceformystuff.com, but that was already taken.  Fortunately, aplaceformystuff.org was free, so I ended up taking that.

I did however manage to put in a virtual bid for the .com name, which somebody had been parking for a long time.  Recently, it came through.  So now, I own aplaceformystuff.com.  If you go there, you'll just be redirected here.  As of now, I have two domain names for the same exact site.

Though I don't know how much good this does me now.  I'm sure you regular readers are already used to going to the .org address anyway.  But I figured it was worth mentioning in a blog entry.

My "stuff" featured on Terror Transmission

Among one of my several big bins of stuff-to-sell, I found a lot of stuff related to horror movies:

• A novelization of The Omen
• Promo pin for a King Kong movie or attraction ("Coming June 1986"!).  From universal studios, I think.
  
• The Ape Man, a Bela Lugosi DVD.  One of his lesser-known movies, of course
• Dial D for Demons, a Japanese horror VCD that I bought years ago in China Town in Boston
• Multimedia CD single of Iron Maiden's The Wicker Man (inspired by the movie, of course)
• Matchbooks that say "Bates Motel" on the back.  I bought these in Hollywood 15 years ago.
• Bride of Chucky mini promo poster and frame

Rather than trying to sell these on eBay or give them to a thrift store where they'd be unappreciated, I decided to send them to my friends who host Terror Transmission. From the website:

Terror Transmission is a free podcast program dedicated to horror cinema, particularly classics of the genre and/or those hidden gems begging for rediscovery. Each episode, your hosts will select a film and view it, while providing listeners with real-time commentary, behind-the-scenes ephemera, and a dash of ribald humor. This creepy cocktail will then be edited down to its best elements and presented to you. Other material related to the world of horror will also be featured when deemed applicable.

I wrapped the items individually and gave them to co-host Matt Paradise when I saw him in Boston a few weekends ago.  I gave him the stipulation that he and Jason had to open them during an episode of Terror Transmission.  I figured they'd spark some discussion and trivia about the various movies.  So if you listen to episode #19, for the movie Black Sunday, you can hear them opening the gifts at the beginning.

Facing the Inbox

(From Mad Magazine, 1985 "Computer" issue.
The picture, not my article, silly!)

A while back I wrote a post on email clutter.  One one hand, it's great that we live in an age where we can electronically archive writings, photos and even music.  These days you can buy a hard drive for under $200 that's smaller than a toaster and holds the equivalent of a record store or a public library.  Or probably both, come to think of it. 

The inevitable downside of course is that we have a lot of "electronic" clutter: disorganized messes of old emails, mp3s that either aren't tagged right or that we aren't really listened to, too many shortcut icons, etc.  And there's also the risk of loosing or damaging a disk or hard drive and thus possibly losing your only copy of hundreds or thousands of documents.  I'm sure there are AOL-twit families from the past 10 years who've taken nothing but digital photos of their kids and family trips, never bothered making prints or back-up copies, and saw their entire family photograph collection disappear when their hard drive bit the dust.  Granted I'm a hell of lot more cautious than those types, but even so, you can't be TOO safe.

I've been using email now for about 16 and a half years.  I still have saved copies of certain older emails, which hardly take up any room since they had to be all unformatted text-based and typically didn't have attachments.  Though I've been letting the email in my Yahoo account get enormous.  I have at least 1300 in my Inbox, and over a dozen folders with other saved emails.  I needed to find out how to get copies of all of these to my hard drive, so that I could make copies to burn to disc or what not.  This way I'm not relying on Yahoo to keep everything safe.

After sifting though numerous stupid replies (e.g., "u like go highlite the email than copy and paste it to a word doc and do that 4 evry email") I did finally figure out how to transfer Yahoo emails saved to my hard drive.  As for whether the same trick will work with other web-based mail providers (Hotmail, G-mail, etc.), I really don't know, though I suspect it would for some and not others.

Anyway, in essence here's what you have to do:

1. Get a mail-reading program that you can run from your desktop (Outlook, Eudora, etc.).  For the sake of simplicity, let's say it's Microsoft Outlook.  If you have Windows, then you already have some version of Outlook installed.
2. Configure Outlook to connect to your web-based email account.  For the sake of the argument, let's say your email account is with Yahoo.
3. Let Outlook sync with Yahoo, so that a copy of all your saved emails on Yahoo end up in Outlook.
4. Export your emails in Outlook to some type of file (document, archive file, whatever).

Though even all of that is easier said than done.  Here are some details you should know:

• Your web-based email service has to allow "POP" email access.  The free version of Yahoo Mail doesn't let you do this.  But I pay a little money for "Yahoo Mail Plus", which gives you this ability, along with other perks like bigger storage space, no advertisements in your sent emails, etc. 
• Configuring Outlook to connect with Yahoo was easier than I thought, though it has to be done right.  Yahoo gives instructions on how do this here, not just for Outlook but for a variety of other email programs too.
• When you make Outlook grab mail (select "Send/Receive" from the menu) it only copies what it sees in your Yahoo's "Inbox" folder.

Soooo....here's MY plan for the next day or two:

1. Organize my Yahoo Inbox by emptying it.  This is going to take a while.  Every email that's in their now either has to go to some appropriate folder with similarly saved emails, or go into the trash.  I've already cut it down from about 1300 emails to around 650.  
2. Move emails from one of my saved email folders in Yahoo, to the now empty Yahoo Inbox.
3. Go over to Outlook and have it grab the emails from Yahoo.  Remember, it only copies from Yahoo's Inbox.
4. Save these emails in Outlook by moving them to a new Outlook folder or exporting them right away.
5. Empty the Outlook Inbox
6. Repeat all of the previous steps for each folder I have on Yahoo.

Yeah, I know.  It's a clutter project that doesn't decrease physical volume.  And it's not as photographically fun as something from my living room.  I'm sure I've bored some of you.  But it's still another long overdue "cleaning" project.