Fungible Convictions

Right around the 55:45 mark:

The transitive property of equality states for any real numbers a, b, and c: If a = b and b = c, then a = c

Lindsay secretly loves math:
“One of us needs to walk Gatsby.
Walking Gatsby means putting on pants.
Therefore, you are walking Gatsby.”

Same shoulder bag, same watch, same hair (eventually). (The dog couldn’t be helped.)

Lindsay and I picked a couple Evos on Friday with a great deal reupping my old Sprint plan to a family plan, with unlimited data. Hence, this first-ever mobile post.

Thanks to Alan, Jade, and others for initial app recommendations…the Boston bus map realtime app is astounding. I can watch the #77 bus from my window at the same time the icon passes home on the app’s map. If I had that in 2008, I might have literally stayed at Tufts a few months longer instead of applying for new jobs near reliable T stops.

Of course now I get to work with people who make the apps, so it’s a good deal all around.

Anyway, we’re both geeking out. Or as my now-working-in-Silicon-Valley sister-in-law said Friday: “Welcome to 2006!”

On September 25, 2001, XM Satellite Radio (XM) launched a service to provide paying subscribers with radio that they would traditionally receive free of charge. With in hand an $80 million Federal Communications Commission license to broadcast its signals via satellite rather than through a network of ground-based transmitters, XM had raised $1.1 billion to launch two Boeing-made satellites and to build a 60,000 square-foot broadcasting headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Colker T1). XM also secured deals with electronics manufacturers and auto-makers to make certain the public can buy XM-ready receivers, and by pouring $100 million into a preliminary advertising campaign, it made sure the public would know about this new, “revolutionary” technology (Taub G1). What was supposed to be revolutionary was that this new conception of radio would financially support its 100, genre-specific channels with almost no advertising within their programming (see appendix for full channel listing). Instead, the commercial-free programming is funded directly by the listener through subscription fees.

The opening paragraph of my Wake Forest honors thesis just begins to hint at my enthusiasm, at the time, for the new medium of satellite radio. Indeed, at that time, I was still furious about the loss of my beloved 90.1 FM WDCU jazz station three years before—as a high schooler, I had written something of a precursor, citing Eric Boehlert’s Rolling Stone article “Radio Land Rush” warning about the dire effects on music quality and diversity of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which eliminated ownership restrictions on radio stations under the forward-looking but narrow logic that the public would soon be getting their music and information from sources other than radio, that radio needed to homogenize to survive. (Boehlert’s piece isn’t online, but he made a similar argument in “One Big Happy Channel?” for Salon.com in 2001.)

I hated those effects of the Telecom Act. WDCU went under (my friend Jon arrived at school, agitated, and told me the station, at midnight the night before, during a Miles Davis solo, had fallen to static). 99.1 WHFS, the alt-rock station that introduced me to Pearl Jam and Ted Leo, become a shell of itself, and in a few years, following the market, became a Spanish-language station. The Telecom Act allowed media companies to buy up many stations and program music from a single central list, rebroadcasted identically throughout the country. Except in the preposterously upped number of local furniture company ads, radio no longer had any connection to geographic communities.

But I was optimistic about satellite radio when it came along in 2001, after nearly two decades in the works. It had some of the same limitations…XM was broadcast entirely out of its DC headquarters, for example. But it had no ads, meaning the only way to make money was to play music the subscribers wanted, including new music the DJs thought their listeners would really like. And as the tone of my thesis can attest, I loved it. By 2004, XM had a 100% commercial-free lineup, had struck a deal with Major League Baseball to broadcast all their games nationwide, and, thanks to savvy deals with automakers, ended the year with over 3 million subscribers.

Despite this, it wasn’t long before the landscape around satellite radio changed enough that “playing music the subscribers wanted” became nonsensical. You no longer needed to subscribe to anything to get what you wanted; you had your iPod and your music sharing services and, more recently, social media and online recommendation engines that, to many, made the DJ role obsolete.

It was a few years later, in 2007, that XM and Sirius, pushed by their investors and a bad economy, decided to merge and were able to make a compelling case to the government it this wasn’t an anti-competitive move. Yes, these were the only two satellite music companies and had gotten a lot of what they wanted by dint of a promise that they’d never merge. But now they were up against traditional radio, web feeds, podcasts, iTunes, concert footage on YouTube, radio on cable TV, legal file sharing, illegal file sharing, and dozens of other distribution networks for music and information.

The government approved the merger, and on July 29, 2008, when the merger was completed, satellite radio officially began to suck.

DJs were laid off on stations like XMU—Sirius-XM’s alt-rock station—destroying the last human connection between listener and company. This is the primary reason I had decided to cancel my subscription. In the past year, though, Sirius-XM began to charge for listening on the web, even to existing subscribers, and the overall monthly cost continued to increase ahead of inflation. It got harder to justify paying more for so much less of a product.

From a business perspective, Sirius-XM weathered the recession with relative aplomb, avoiding a bankruptcy that was seen as all but certain after its shares fell to $0.05. But from a music-lover’s perspective, the service is, like terrestrial radio in 2001, a shell of itself. I recently listened to the station RealJazz, for example, and heard entire blocks of music repeated during one afternoon, reinforcing the fact that I was no longer listening to a radio station staffed by fellow music lovers. I was listening to a computer program run by Wall Street investors.

I get it. I do. I know it’s a business and Sirius-XM has to do what it can to survive and thrive financially. But like the changes made by conglomerates the wake of the ’96 Telecom Act, these changes feel more like a betrayal to a community than forgivable good business sense.

Anyway. So I made the call yesterday. After only a little well-trained pushback from the person at the other end of the phone, my XM radio, for the first time since 2001, fell to static.

Three years ago today, I went to the hospital with memory loss and ended up with a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. (The full run-down written on cancerversary #1, when I’d long been given a clean bill of health.)

My wife and I were chatting about this on the walk to work today, noting how natural it has become to celebrate the anniversary of something so nasty. We’ll go out tonight, toast each other, toast to some friends who supported us. But the celebration, as it were, is to recognize the dramatic before-and-after. July 16 is the watershed date. It’s when we knew how we would react as a family to crisis. It’s when we knew that our best friends would remain our best friends forever. So it’s a date worth celebrating.

We couldn’t have recognized it at the time, but now we know that an incident in 2007 gave us a comfort we can rely on the rest of our lives.

But boy will we need it. Back in January, my primary care physician, whom I will not be visiting again, told me it looked like I had developed a related cancer. His turned out to be incompetent doctoring (he ignored the fact that I had a cold sore during my bloodwork, which skewed all the numbers), but for the several days it took to clear up the misdiagnosis, we thought we were heading down that same road again. And worse, the realization that it could recur meant…it could recur, again and again. I was no longer cancer’s asskicker. I was another guy subject to the whim of the universe and the talents (or lack thereof) of doctors.

Amazingly, that put life into perspective much more than the original diagnosis did. While the first diagnosis taught us we truly could handle anything and we had the people around us we needed, the second (mis)diagnosis taught us, a little more darkly, to avoid needing to handle anything, to stay healthy, and to treasure the people around us.

The first diagnosis showed us life is nuts. The second, that life is short.

So on this third cancerversary, I want to highlight the things we’re loving in our short lives. We love that we’ll see our families next week and in October, after this month having seen my wife’s family two weekends in a row. We love that we have this ridiculous dog:

We love that we’re taking our involvement in our communities–particularly cancer charities and friends affected by cancer–a little more seriously. We love reading, maybe more than ever now. We love our dreams–from finding the right house to raise kids in to finding a Saturday to go to Curtis’ Bar-B-Q in Putney, Vermont. We love that my dear friend Patrick, whose first wedding anniversary is in two days, is now a proud father.

These things, they’re not anything that a little worry about illness can ever get in the way of.

Today we said a sad goodbye to the greatest of all vehicles, a 1991 Ford Explorer: the Wee Beastie.

Even after more than 100,000 miles, the Beastie never complained, always performed, and even once saved my life, hurtling down I-93 to get Lindsay to Somerville and me, soon there after, to a good hospital.

It was the car my wife learned to drive on. She and her sister both drove it during college. It drove on the beaches of East Hampton and in the snowdrifts of Cambridge and, countless times, along the roads between us and our families.

Two weeks ago, though, after one of those trips visiting family, the Beastie had some trouble. Our mechanic, who loved the Beastie nearly as much as we did, told us what it would take to make it better…and then we knew. It was time, after nineteen years in Lindsay’s family, to part with it.

So today the American Cancer Society “Cars for Cures” program arranged for a truck to come by and accept our donation of one 1991 Ford Explorer. I watched the driver load up the Beastie along with other donated cars…

…and I watched the Beastie go:

We love you, Beastie.

I read with my wife’s Amazon Kindle for the first time tonight, and I have to be honest, I didn’t like it very much. These are the things I don’t understand about it:

• Why did Amazon choose a slab serif font as its universal typeface? While Caecilia is a lovely typeface, slab serifs are about as pleasant for long-session reading as sans serifs, that is, not very.
• Why didn’t they style the subheads or, quite confusingly, the pullquotes?
• Why didn’t they use “keep” settings so that there aren’t widow or orphan lines?
• Was there no other way to represent progress through a book other than that meter at the bottom of the screen?

These are aesthetic concerns, yes, but they have a lot to do with how I read, process, and remember stories and information. I have no confidence in my ability to remember something I’ve read on a Kindle, because there are no design cues to help me collate what I read. Turning letters into narrative or knowledge needs a storyteller or a teacher, functions good design have traditionally served…that is, functions books have traditionally served.

Coming as I do from remarkably hard-working parents, the question “Do I fear work?” has nagged at me for years. It nags at me because my parents are hard-working: their example both makes it essentially genetic that I’ll work harder than other people but as a son means I’ve learned their lesson and will be protective of my downtime.

Thus it means I get into the office first every day and I get an enormous amount of work done. But it also means I block my office webmail on my home computer and take all my vacation days.

This balance has one bad feature in particular. I tend to read books far less than I used to, because reading feels like work. When reading was work, like in grad school, I read a ton.

I dunno, just a fragment of a fuller thought somewhere out there. I just want to figure out why my leisure activities—working on Readsfeed for example—are so much like work, when actual play, whether it’s reading or bike riding or softball, are things I’d like to do but don’t.