> Tiga - 3 Weeks
> Annie - Heartbeat
> BT - Superfabulous
> Mylo - Drop the Pressure

Today I felt like an impostor in my own life. My company hired another worker for our office today (filling a long-vacated position) and I felt like the office was swarming with strangers.

I must confess: I love judging strangers. Our new hire was wearing a cheap collar shirt the color of blackberry sains, black slacks of dubious craftsmanship, and no tie. More importantly, he didn’t look very clean…or competent. I wasn’t introduced to him, but he reminded me of one of those mildly overweight twinks in those tedious Eastern European pornos. It cracked me up to watch him walk around the office and unintentionally picture him doing acts of debauchery.

I love dressing up in random outfits when I go to my classes so that people will form baseless opinions about me. It’s one of my main pastimes besides judging strangers. :)

Me and Royce had the longest conversation we’ve had in years last night on the phone. It was about people in San Francisco and the libertine culture of glory holes and sex clubs down there. I’ve been listening to this Tiga album a bunch this week, and the subtext of many of his songs is that whole lifestyle of going to bars to pick up guys to fuck. I wonder if I could ever be seduced to such a life. Last night I had this really great conversation with an old online friend named Rowan. He was the guy that convinced me to get my kilt, remember? I should totally dig it out of my closet and wear it tonight. Anyway, our conversation came to a certain point where I admitted that I was afraid of truth… the kind of grand, overarching scary truth that would happen once I read all of Baudrillard’s works. I think that the real truth is that I don’t care about anything and I would love to abandon my way of life, become a total sex addict libertine, and die at 24.

I don’t know. I like computers to much to do anything like that. I salivate to think what kind of incredible chips they will be producing when I’m thirty. Mmm…silicon. Wearable displays…petabyte memory cards…ah, a man can dream.

I guess I shouldn’t think that I could be seduced by a lifestyle like that. My drug is the future. I don’t think I could ever give that up.

It’s odd… on my drive home I had all these ideas of things I wanted to write about, but now that I’m here in front of my computer they’re all gone. I’ve been listening to this band/singer Annie, and she is so pathetically poppy but I can get her songs out of my head. At least I have my homosexuality as an excuse :) Anyway, I really liked training that new girl for my job. I felt really organized and professional. And I wore that new tie my mom sent me, it’s really cool. I think I’ll wear it tonight to my cinema class. The bruises from my encounter with Thomas still haven’t completely healed, so I’ve been wearing a suit and tie every time I leave the house. I love it. People just treat you different when you wear a suit. I take it as an exercise in how shallow people are.

God I love this software. I can dance and write at the same time. *rocks out*

It really bolstered my self-esteem to teach that girl today. I had typed up this detailed description of all the various tasks I do and I was all super-ridiculously organized like I am at work. It’s odd… I only organize things that contain information. My room is a total mess, except for my bookcase. I was searching for this beautiful illustrated edition of The Divine Comedy last night, and it was right where I needed it. I think it all boils down to that I can’t stand wasting time looking for information. My extensive experience with the Internet has led me to believe that everything should be put into an instantly searchable database. When we were doing that plant lab on Saturday I wished I had a laptop so that I could go on Wikipedia and read about what we were doing… but it would have seemed like I was just goofing off or something. And I don’t think they have wi-fi at the college either… the airwaves were silent when me and Kevin did the grand Crescent City wi-fi hunt.

And this brings me to a topic that I have wanted to rant about for weeks. The crux of this rant is one word that I feel is the most important word in the digital age.

METADATA.

OK, this may seem like random Darius geekery, but it is tremendously important. For example, yesterday I downloaded the new Depeche Mode album. In the folder with the music files, there was a text document containing all the lyrics and a JPEG which was the cover art. OK, for those of you who don’t know… you can encode the lyrics and cover art into the MP3. I was flabbergasted that someone didn’t bother to encode them into the audio files (a simple drag-and-drop affair). In the computer systems of the future, we will be able to search by metadata and not by actual file characteristics. For example, if you wanted to find a certain Depeche Mode song you could just search the lyrics embedded in your music to find the song you wanted.

I think my main gripe is that finding specific files is incredibly difficult in Windows. I have over 400GB of storage, filled with a whole bunch of random shit. Pictures, music, videos, essays, programs…anything you can think of from my first computer onward. Deletion is so 1996. Anyway, a few months ago, I needed to change a setting on my router. I thought, “I know that I downloaded the manual for it as a PDF, I will just search for router.” That’s exactly the logical thing that you would think to search for, just like if you were searching for a Depeche Mode song with a certain lyric you would want to search for that lyric. However, Windows XP doesn’t support searching inside of documents or music files, so I wasn’t able to find my router manual because the filename wasn’t “router.” It inordinately frustrates me.

I come across so many instances of people not understanding metadata. What is the point of having an encyclopedia of files if you can’t find the ones you want. a primitive example of how to use metadata to organize files is the photo sharing site Flickr. What I love about Flickr is that you can add metadata (tags) so that if, for example, I want to see all photos of Thanksgiving last year I could just look under the thanksgiving tag instead of wading through my ill-organized catacombs of past photos from around that same time frame.

Windows Vista is supposed to copy Mac OS X’s Spotlight search technology, which allows you to search inside Word documents, emails, mp3s, PDFs and the like. I hope that they do it well, because for the last month or so I have needed to find my router manual again. I don’t know exactly where it is, and I’m sure I could waste a half-hour or so looking for it or redownload it from the website, but the point is that I want easy access to my information. I already downloaded the manual. It should be in my computer. And since I treat my computer as an extension of my mind, not being able to find things quickly and easily frustrates me.

Another metadata-based frustration I have is people taking pictures that have the date imprinted on them with digital cameras. I see this on MySpace a lot, and I just want to bang my head against the screen whenever I see it. When you take the picture, the date created is embedded in the file. In any modern photo organization application (or even just Windows or Mac OS), it will show you all that information. Digital cameras imbed all sorts of information into photos, the date created being only one. You can plug a GPS into the digital SLR at my work and it will embed the latitude and longitude of every photo you take right into the photo’s metadata. I guess the crux of this is that I can see over the hill to the next technological epoch, and it’s all about having the exact information you need instantly. I saw this really interesting interview on Tech TV a few years ago and the guy was saying that all we use computers for is glorified filing cabinets. And it’s true. Iif you look at the way your computer is organized, it’s just folders inside of folders inside of folders. I want to ditch the concept of nested folders and move onto the more database-oriented world of metadata-based filesystems. And when I want to find my router manual, I only want to type one word in that search box.

So that’s metadata.

And until I get my Mac, there will just be certain files that are annoyingly impossible to find.