Xark!

Perfect Things

The Opinel No. 10 wooden-handled lock-ring pocket knife.

There is nothing fancy about an Opinel. It doesn't hold its edge, offer any special features, or do anything slick. It's just a functional, cheap, light-weight pocket knife with a nice wooden handle that you use and sharpen and use and sharpen and eventually lose somewhere. And then you get another one. 

Its secret is that little pressed-metal collar just below the blade. It rotates, and has a slot in it that's just big enough to let the blade pass through it. Twist it, and the blade can't close. Which is a nice feature for people who enjoy having fingers.

If you've never plucked a wild green apple from an ancient tree and gazed out over a mountain meadow while cutting yourself a slice with a weathered old Opinel, you've missed one of life's greatest pleasures. 

 

Zippo lighters.

It's a portable candle. A hand-warmer.  It's something to fiddle with when you're waiting for a ride. A flashlight. It's a bar trick and a practical tool. It's fully serviceable and while you'll likely lose it someday, it will never, ever die. Just the feel of a Zippo in your hand will give you a sense of completeness and well-being.

These things have been around forever. Hell, they practically won World War II singlehandedly. And millions of people probably started smoking just so they'd have an excuse to carry one.

Engrave your name on it. Preferably with your Opinel. Just don't buy one with an expensive bullshit case.

 

 

Satya Sai Baba Nag Champa incense.

Trying to get some work done and need to clear your headspace and timing? Or at least change your perspective? You grab the blue box and burn a stick. 

You don't need any other varieties of incense, or aroma therapy, or whatever. Keep a box around the house at all times.

Wiha 153 series square-handled screwdrivers. 

I've used a lot of tools over the years, but after picking up one of these 2012, the rest of my collection of mechanical screwdrivers felt like rubbish. They're not particularly expensive, either. 

 

Moleskine ruled soft-cover pocket notebook. 

The story of my life, regrets and adventures over the past decade is largely contained in a collection of about a dozen Moleskine pocket notebooks on the bookshelf here by my computer. The early volumes have smashed spines thanks to the original hard covers, but I've been toting soft-cover Moleskines around for years and even the full ones are remarkably intact. 

A writer thinks way too much about notebooks, and I have different notebooks for particular purposes. I carry proper reporter's notebooks for assignments and interviews -- they're spiral-bound at the top, cut to fit a back pocket, and perfect for taking fast, loopy notes. You trash these when you're done with them. Over the years I've also taken to using cheap, small (48-page), cardboard-bound pocket notebooks (typically Moleskine, but sometimes other brands) for particular projects, particularly when I'm multitasking and want to keep things separate and organized. And for conceptual creative work at home, I tend to keep grid-lined, stich-bound black Moleskine 7.5-inch notebooks around my desk (you can buy them in three-packs).

But there's no pocket notebook quite like the Moleskine soft-cover lined pocket notebook.The paper is top-quality. The cover lasts forever.It a has a ribbon sewn into the binding to mark a place, or just to make it easy to open to your last used page. There's a folder at the back that's meant to hold loose notes, and the simple truth is it always fails, but there's an elastic band that holds the whole thing together, and so that doesn't really matter. 

Why love it? Because it's a fundamentally intimate technology. Because It becomes part of your "kit" as a writer. Because you can doodle in it, rant into, copy down phone numbers and scraps of dialog. Because you stuff receipts and found art into your Moleskine. Because mine are filled with folded bits of things I need that I staple to relevant pages, and poems written on airplanes, and plans for things that fell apart, and all sorts of aspirations. And once they're filled, I get a new one, write the dates in the old one, fill it with yellow Post-Its for quick future reference, and move on. 

I've also carried unlined Moleskines with art-grade paper with the thought that I'd paint or draw in them... but that's just not the way I work.

 

 

Olympus WS-802 digital audio recorder

So yes, my new phone as an audio recorder app, but ever since I wore out my old Sony MP3 recorder, this has been my go-to for interviews, ideas that pop up while I'm driving alone, even writing dialog for books when I'm away from the computer. 

The sound quality is good enough, and it's got all sorts of features I never use, and don't intend to ever explore. The main thing is that it's light, fits in my pocket, operates simply and reliably, and plugs directly into my computer via a built-in USB drive. The USB not only transfers my interview audio files, it also recharges the unit for the next interview. I hope it lasts for years.

SRAM Avid BB7 disc brakes

My Fisher Cobia mountain bike has a nice frame and solid components -- a good value-point bike for a guy who just likes getting out on the trail. But the original set-up featured entry-level off-brand hydraulic disc brakes. And that just wouldn't do. 

In the bike world, hydraulic discs are generally considered a step-up from mechanical (cable-operated) discs. That means that hydraulics are where the elegant engineering takes place.

The cable-operated BB7 is the exception to that rule. Ask your bike mechanic. He'll know what I'm talking about. 

These things just work. They're lightweight and super easy to adjust. They deliver great feel and control, and mine have been practically maintenance-free. So yeah, you'll notice a lot of expensive hydraulic brake sets around the trailhead, but pay attention to what your mechanic rides. There's an excellent chance he sold his original hydraulics on eBay and replaced them with these.

The Park PW-4 Professional Pedal Wrench.

Park Tool up in Minnesota makes some great stuff for bike mechanics, but this tool is so perfect for what it does that it's practically in a class by itself. 

It's got leverage. Angles. Power. Gravitas. It's designed for the way bikes are, not the way they should be, a great big beast of a pedal wrench that will blow up even the most horribly cross-threaded, jammed-on, fucked-up platforms anybody ever shoves your way. 

You know when I felt like I'd finally arrived as a professional mechanic? The day when I decided my mobile repair service had earned enough money to upgrade my toolbox to include the PW-4. It's the luxury of professionalism.

 

The M1911A Colt semi-automatic.

You know why they named this thing the 1911? Because that's the year it officially entered service in the U.S. Army. 

As a tanker in the mid-1980s, this 45-caliber automatic was my first service weapon. It was heavy, ancient, loosely constructed and had a maximum effective range of 50 meters. And we loved them. Even after I gave mine up for the new Army-issue Baretta 9 mm in 1988, I missed the old Colt, and apparently I wasn't the only one. There are Special Forces units that still use this weapon today. Because it works.

It breaks down easy, cleans easy, reassembles easy. That loosely engineered standard makes it relatively quiet (because the gas escapes in lots of places instead of one) and surprisingly easy to keep on target (because it kicks less than many smaller-caliber guns) if you're trying to put a bunch of bullets onto something in a hurry.

And while there are people who will tell you this guy isn't as accurate as newer designs, I say, who cares? I qualified expert with this pistol multiple times, and twice earned perfect scores. It's accurate enough.

If the world fell apart tomorrow and I could take only one weapon with me on my way out the door, I'd take a Kalishnikov. Duh. But along with that Kalishnikov I'd pack an M1911A1.It's the perfect blend of reliability, simplicity and effectiveness.

 

What are your perfect things?

Today's alert

If the NSA freaks you out & you still use Google, you are an idiot

A few years ago, back when I was devoting much of my energy to developing semantic journalism products that seriously interested absolutely no one in the newspaper industry, there was one thought that could jolt me right out of any nice nap: The other word for the new media business model I was describing was "surveillance."

Because here's the thing: Collecting information is easy, traditional, and essentially inconsequential. Connecting information, however, is the radical act that will either empower or destroy us.

So back in 2010-11, when I was arguing in public that we should consider the atomic unit of journalism to be the fact, not the story, and the rest of the industry was furiously busy not noticing anything I said,, the worry that consumed much of my going-to-sleep time wasn't whether I'd find investors, but whether my hypothetical machine -- Fintann -- would wind up turning into Frankenstein's monster. 

The lesson that should be learned by anyone who spends any amount of time staring into the abyss of 21st century networked informatics is that information is not power. Garden variety information is just static. Only connected, useful and predictive information is power. And the richer you make it, the more authoritative and complete your hyper-connected data archive grows, the more absolute your power becomes. Fintann didn't get built, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. From what I've seen of newspaper executives, I don't know that giving them that kind of power would have a civic good.

So when I hear people arguing about The New York Times editorial stance on Edward Snowden, or read civic-minded freakouts about the National Security Agency violating the civil liberties of "ordinary Americans," I turn away in frustration. 

Sure, we need to be concerned about the power we give to government. Duh. Glad we're finally having that conversation. 

But the public media freakout over NSA data collection misses the primary point of those systems entirely: The NSA's email metadata campaign is designed to efficiently collect and then discard information. Not because the NSA is a civic-minded agency that wants to protect our theoretical privacy, but because your personal email isn't the target of the fucking machine. Your mundane metadata is the shit that NSA machine operators have to shovel in order to find covert organizations.

Granted, at any moment, any one of us could become a target of that machine. But if you're focused solely on the abstract possibility of abuse, you're likely missing the big-picture understanding of what that NSA machine was engineered to do in the first place.

The NSA sucks in massive amounts of metadata because it's searching for a subtle signal (some indication of covert terrorist communication) in a vast sea of static (like me emailing a fantasy football trade offer to my buddy). Got it? The system isn't designed to care about you and your private data. It's designed to efficiently eliminate anything it determines to be not-bad-guy. 

Now, compare that mission to the private informatic projects being conducted by Google, or Facebook, or Target, or Amazon, or your local grocery store's rewards card. Because Target isn't looking for terrorists. It's looking for every last dollar it can squeeze out of you. 

Google knows where you are, what you search for, what you bought. It knows what porn you stream, what political rhetoric you consume, and -- through G+ -- it can compare that knowledge to your social graph. Facebook is doing the same thing, in increasingly annoying ways. Target uses informatics and inference, based on massive data sets compiled from your shopping and mine, to spot women who've just learned that they're pregnant, and to send those women special offers and coupons for expectant mothers. 

Why does Kroger give you a break on the price of orange juice for using its rewards card? Because those marginal discounts you recieve are nothing compared to the value of your data to a company that's trying to sell you and those like you more and more stuff. 

And there's nothing wrong with that. In some ways it's nice to have people and companies that anticipate my needs, remember my birthday, treat me like a trusted and valued member of a community. 

Until the inevitable day when there is something wrong with it. 

Today we're worried about an NSA program that looks big and scary, but really isn't . But the day is coming when corporate control over our information will produce a civil liberties crisis that will make our NSA worries look quaint by comparison That day will come because that day must come, because in the same way that atomic fission was neither good nor bad, smart, unregulated, authoritative networks are neither good nor bad.

The problem with humans isn't that we're inheriently good or bad, it's that eventually some greedy asshole turns everything we learn into a weapon.

So if you're talking about the NSA in the context of 20th century notions of privacy, stop. And if you're making a big wailing deal about government intrusion via the collection of our metadata, prove you're not a nut and devote at least 75 percent of that outrage toward the larger threat: The private, unregulated, unreported, unseen world of corporate Big Data.  

I am convinced that connected information is ultimately going to be a boon to humanity, and that it's entirely within our power to write rules for the collection, use and control of the "public" information we all contribute to the commons. But to prevent that power from turning on us, we simply must start a conversation that relates to the actual threats, conveyed in the context of their actual potential for abuse. 

Of course, that's not going to happen. But every now and then I like to shout important things into the void, just to heard that echo that says "Forget about him! He doesn't know what he's talking about!"