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A surprising and delightful accomplishment: Heritage Blues Orchestra wields the full potential power of the modern blues arsenal but has the taste and restraint to deliver a varied album full of genuine dynamics, subtlety and intelligence.

What often ails contemporary releases in the ‘blues’ genre is that a new electric orthodoxy has taken root stemming from the 1960s electric blues revival. This “contamination” (as another reviewer called it) has become the new baseline assumption, the way we think the blues should sound—to the unfortunate exclusion of a whole slew of former related sub-genres. Electric gospel with harmony singing, field hollers/work songs, spacious country blues with minimal instrumentation: instead of remaining an organic part of the continuum of African American music, these have all become surprising ‘rediscoveries’ for us (witness, for instance, the sudden popular resurgence of the Blind Boys of Alabama when Peter Gabriel’s Real World label took them on a few years ago).

Heritage Blues Orchestra—a blues super group of sorts—re-assert that continuum. On paper (or on this screen), it may sound like a high wire act with little possibility of success (certainly, that was my assumption before actually hearing it): this sort of thing can go so wrong so quickly, taking a false step into pastiche or silliness by failing to bridge a 60+ year gap in our listening habits.

They succeed spectacularly, making a brilliant album from beginning to end that strikes me as the single most successful blues record I’ve heard in years. I’ve seen other reviewers lump HBO into the same category as the wonderful Carolina Chocolate Drops (revivers of the black folk tradition—of African American music prior to the blues, as it were), but that’s not entirely right. Heritage Blues Orchestra mostly reflects the sounds of black music from the beginning of its migration to the cities, but in its full richness. There’s juke joint blues, an intelligent working-up of Nina Simone’s “See Line Woman,” the aforementioned electric gospel (“Get Right Church”). The work songs that appear are presented through a modern blues lens, a respectful (and certainly accomplished) acknowledgment of one’s roots, but they aren’t the main thrust of the album. (They are, however, highly intelligent acoustic resting points between the faster, more electric tracks here, providing a counterpoint to the faster pieces. As a result, there aren’t any typical ‘slow blues’ numbers here—also a welcome change from modern electric blues orthodoxy.)

Some of my favourites here are harder to characterize: “Chilly Jordan,” a traditional gospel piece, is presented with a wide-screen, gentle acoustic blues backing. “Going Uptown” is a country blues shuffle that’s elegantly adorned with horns. “Hard Times,” the closer, is a 7-minute journey from country blues, via a standalone horn section arrangement, to an ecstatic electric blues jam (or is it more like ‘fusion’?—hard to say, really).

These pieces confirm that what defines a great album is the conscious inclusion of tracks that are, perhaps, a slightly uncomfortable fit in the context of the majority of the material presented. Our ears hold on longer to odd material than even; all the great albums in the history of popular music are masterpieces of sequencing, the tension between ‘the track I love’ and ‘the track I bristle at’ sometimes defining the listening experience more than the music itself.

I can’t recommend this highly enough. It’s both a dazzling achievement for a blues record and a must-hear album for anyone interested in American heritage music.

Metadata is a messy subject. So messy, in fact, that many SharePoint projects never truly deal with it.

Metadata is complicated, full of dependencies we cannot control and—to put it mildly—not exactly liked by end users. Once you move beyond the initial “oh wow” moment of demonstrating how metadata can help arrange documents in multiple useful dimensions and users encounter the additional work that’s required to tag a document—each and every time!—before they’re allowed to upload it, it’s typically game over for metadata.

You’re really only left with one of two options: an unenthusiastically adopted SharePoint implementation (grudgingly, your users do what they’re expected to do, but they’re openly hostile to it), or you scale back your metadata to “next to nothing,” which is the only way to ensure that people will keep using SharePoint. And what you’ve achieved is not much better than a shared folder—the very thing you wanted to get away from. (The open secret of Microsoft SharePoint is that what people really want is a folder.)

There is lots of really great advice out there about the practical ins and outs of working with stakeholders to capture and negotiate metadata properties for their libraries. And there are a lot of examples of poorly thought-out attempts at creating giant catalogues of enterprise metadata that look and act like a library classification system, and that SharePoint program managers seem to want to apply everywhere (whether appropriate to the purpose or not).

But beyond the typical high-level ECM advice that you should develop an enterprise-wide taxonomy before you engage business units at a lower level, nobody seems to have developed a pragmatic and outcomes-oriented framework for SharePoint metadata—a theoretically sound and practical approach that you can explain to end users, that they’ll embrace, and that will help you make metadata decisions.

So let me propose such an approach. I call it the “magic intersection” of metadata, as illustrated in the Venn diagram above.

In my ~10 years with SharePoint, it has emerged over time that there are three reasons—and three reasons only—for creating metadata. Three distinct business purposes make metadata necessary and useful in SharePoint. They are:

• To support business processes: This is the most immediately useful application of metadata—and the only one that users can own unequivocally. Metadata to support business processes consists of fields that have immediate applicability for day-to-day document-centric work processes. They may include things like “Status,” “Task Owner” or “Contract Value.” This kind of metadata is in daily use to organize libraries and views, for example to determine a project’s status, group items by owner or track summary financials of a project portfolio. Here, metadata is clearly an enhancement over a simple shared folder, and users are happy to embrace it (and the extra work it creates) because it is useful.
• To support search and findability: The pain related to searching for documents is delayed pain. While your document is still new and in active use, you don’t really care about whether you’ll be able to find it again in the future because you already know where it is. So the value of adding metadata fields that will support future findability is limited in the present moment, especially since the fields that will help you the most in the future (for example, “Customer Sector,” “Deal Size” or other broadly descriptive fields) may actually be a distraction right now. Search/findability oriented metadata fields are much harder to ‘sell’ to users than properties that support day-to-day work processes. (One approach that I’ve been tooling away at recently is to talk about some sort of social contract in relation to search-enhancing metadata: Tagging your own documents may not seem useful to you right now, but it is useful to others. Similarly, they would tag their documents now, for your benefit. Reciprocity may be the key to ‘selling’ this kind of metadata to users.)
• To support records management: Records management in SharePoint unfortunately requires certain metadata properties in order to work properly. Since you can’t keep everything forever (because that’s a compliance risk), you need to tell SharePoint’s records management functionality what it is and how long to keep it (from that point forward, most other activities related to records management could, conceivably, be automated). The problem with this kind of metadata is that users don’t typically have the information and don’t care about it—at all. Others are afraid of making the wrong determination in relation to records management, and their instinct is to overstate the importance of a document and ‘save it forever.’ From a records management perspective, the last thing you want is to have to train all users in the records management principles your organization is subject to. This is cumbersome, costly and a thankless, unsustainable task.

All other possible purposes for metadata can reasonably be subordinated to one of the above categories.

Next, it is important to discuss the strategic intent of proposing such a model.

I follow two core principles for metadata design:

• Principle #1 is that the number of metadata fields should be as small as possible while still meeting a reasonable number of business goals.
• Principle #2 is that—ideally—all metadata fields should be generated during the active portion of the document lifecycle, to support business process.

The reason for #1 should be self-evident: to minimize the amount of work required to tag each document.

The reason for #2 is that it’s easiest to ask users to create metadata when there’s a clear and practical motivation for doing so. Another way to look at it is that I’ve seen a number of SharePoint deployments where re-tagging of documents is required at the point of transition from one phase of the document lifecycle to another: for example, before entering the records management stage, users need to enter or select RM-specific metadata and ‘close’ a document to turn it into a record. Re-tagging is tedious and results in user frustration (and subsequent lack of adoption).

What follows from the principles is that the discussion about metadata should focus primarily and deeply on business process. Metadata design workshops should approximately follow these proportions:

The majority of the time should be spent discussing metadata that has immediate, practical application in the business process realm. While it is important to pay some attention to the search and records management buckets, the hope is that the majority of the required tags can actually be gathered under the business process rubric, making metadata collection easier and more transparent to end users.

Let’s look at a practical example to illustrate the proposed framework.

A local government legal department of around 5 lawyers and 5 legal and administrative assistants manages the day-to-day legal work in the municipal offices. Much of it is requests for legal opinions from other departments, but a substantial number of the department’s resources are in fact dedicated to managing claims against the municipality. Claims can include litigation brought against the city as a result of accidents that allegedly happened because of poorly maintained roads, municipally managed trees falling on private roofs during rain storms, etc. The city is subject to freedom of information legislation but also needs to be aware of privacy regulations, especially if children are involved in any of the claims.

We would start by mapping out the document lifecycle for this team once we have completed a basic content audit to understand the types of documents that are to be managed here. Let’s pick a SharePoint document set called “Claim” for our example. This set collects and manages all documents related to a claim, such as the original filing, any supporting evidence (scanned and uploaded), the initial legal opinion from the city’s in-house counsel, the court filing, etc.

The document set grows and changes as the claim moves through the document lifecycle, which is—to an extent—designed to be a mirror of the associated business process. When an assistant initially creates the document set, a small but significant subset of the full metadata is captured—we enter what we know at this time; this includes information such as “Opposing Counsel,” “Location of Accident,” etc. (information that will support both our short term business processes and our searchability objectives later).

As the document set increases in terms of the number of documents it contains, its related business activities—and metadata—also ramp up. From a business process perspective, the primary operating parameters of the libraries where these document sets are kept are the “Claim Status” and “Assigned to” fields, which allow us to support basic claim status tracking by employee using SharePoint views. These help us understand objectively where we are at and can be used as the basis for a weekly team meeting.

As more information about the claim becomes available, we are reminded to add it to the metadata for the document, for example by means of a workflow which asks for the now-required additional fields prior to allowing us to advance the status of a document (for example, from “Preparing” to “Ready for Court,” we now also need to capture whether the claim involves children under the age of 12, information that is relevant for counsel at this point).

Once the claim winds down, either through a judgment or a settlement, those final documents are included in the document set, and setting the set’s status to “Closed” prompts the assistant to enter the validity period of the settlement. This readies the document set as a record and applies the relevant SharePoint information management policies (IMPs) to set retention periods, etc.

This example illustrates the application of the proposed metadata design principles as follows:

• As much as possible, metadata is collected while the documents are in the active part of the lifecycle.
• Most of the metadata fields are captured to facilitate day-to-day business processes in the legal department, but many are also very useful to support searchability objectives (for example, this model enables is to search for ‘all claims we’ve settled where opposing counsel was Peter Smith’).
• Basic records management information is collected during the active part of the lifecycle: we know how long to manage this record for, and we know under what conditions we may disclose it under freedom of information if children were involved.
• The majority of metadata helps keep track of our daily work and makes the department’s activities more transparent and easier to manage. (While this may not be comfortable for all staff members, it’s a big selling point for management.)

As these “magic intersection” metadata design principles are very much a work in progress for me, I would welcome any comments and input you have from your own best practices in metadata design.

As the major label music industry continues to undergo tectonic shifts and devastating upheavals, one simple fact is coming more and more clearly into focus: there is more, and better, recorded music available now than at any other time in the history of recorded music. Clearly, this is because artists are no longer being forced down the same limited number of canonical decision-making funnels (A&R at major labels)—and because digital recording and distribution technologies have become so affordable that independent labels can release products that are technically and artistically indistinguishable from major label releases (and in fact are often better). The ‘plight of the music industry’ narrative, as told by content producer associations, major media and legislators everywhere is about as one-sided as anyone can imagine. Independent labels, meanwhile, are continuing to grow by solidifying new approaches to distribution and pricing. One of the key drivers of this evolution is that independent labels can afford to be fearless when offering downloads. Instead of engaging in format and DRM wars, they go where the market suggests they go: to MP3 and FLAC, to high resolution audio (better than CD quality), to subscriptions and streaming, etc.

Here is an updated list of my favourite classical download stores, with brief descriptions, highlights and things to watch out for:

First up in the classical digital download offerings has to be Linn Records. Founded as an off-shoot of the Scottish high-end stereo manufacturer in the early 80s, Linn Records is a boutique audiophile label that is slowly emerging with a limited but excellent catalogue of classical recordings (as well as forays into jazz and singer/songwriter material). Linn also offers a limited selection of high resolution downloads from certain other labels via its online store. These include Channel Classics and Pentatone (however, only a few titles from each are available in Linn’s store, and a wider selection can be found elsewhere).

The audio quality of Linn’s own releases—there’s an interview with Linn’s chief producer/engineer, Calum Malcolm, here—is outstanding on every release. I’ve now bought and downloaded 320 kbps MP3 and FLAC versions of a number of releases, and everything is breathtakingly well recorded.

Linn offers its own Adobe Air based download manager application, which works very well. The only complaint I have is about the somewhat awkwardly done digital booklets (they are PDFs of the print versions, so the pages are out of order in the PDF) and poor MP3 metadata. This latter issue is somewhat inexcusable for a download store—and while I understand that my 320 kbps MP3s are at the low end of Linn’s offerings and price point, there really is no reason why I should have to spend 10 minutes after every download importing and re-working the metadata in iTunes to ensure that it’s complete and accurate.

Another excellent digital music seller is Hyperion Records. Hyperion is primarily known for its outstanding efforts in chamber music, Lieder and the pre-classical repertoire, but also has a wonderful ongoing series of “the Romantic Piano Concerto” which highlights the immense range of writing for keyboard in the 19th and early 20th century. Hyperion sells only its own releases. It’s worth noting that they offer discounts if you buy more than one title at a time.

Hyperion offers digital downloads either as VBR MP3s (targeting 320 kpbs—I’m not sure why they haven’t switched to a straight-up 320 kbps yet) or FLAC. Hyperion now also offers a download manager, and its metadata-labeling is superb—I have no completeness or accuracy concerns to report (sometimes, I notice there are ‘special characters’ in the metadata which certain software players or converters can choke on, but it’s a minor concern).

Cedille is a Chicago-based independent label with a limited but interesting roster of artists (the most notable soloist is Rachel Barton Pine, the violinist). It sells most of its releases as MP3s as well as standard resolution (16-bit) and high-res FLACs (24-bit). I purchased 2 articles from Cedille in FLAC format. The verdict is that the files themselves were of good quality but came without a PDF booklet. The metadata was sketchy—it seemed to be complete, but there were non-standard/’special’ characters in the file names and metadata fields that gave iTunes a little indigestion. The fact that this happens in almost every independent label download store should give labels pause. I imagine that repeat business is an important objective; yet the poor importing experience into iTunes and other players only serves to irritate users casual and experienced alike. My mom wouldn’t be able to find her music in iTunes if she could successfully import it, and I just get irritated by all the extra work I have to do. This should be an easy problem to fix.

Analekta is a Montreal-based independent classical label that offers its entire catalogue as a download option. Its website is a little too ‘high concept’ for my liking: some of the functionality is not as obvious to use as the usability engineer might have imagined—it’s all very visually appealing but somewhat non-standard as e-commerce goes. Analekta features such Canadian artists as the Gryphon Trio and Angèle Dubeau. Downloads are available as 320 kbps MP3s, “better than CD” FLACs, come as a simple zip file, and the metadata is quite good. PDF booklets are available for free from the product page as a separate download.

Classics Online is Naxos’ digital download store. It offers a fairly wide variety of labels in addition to Naxos itself, such as Brilliant, Chandos, CPO, Analekta, ATMA Classique, EMI Classics, Challenge, Opus 111, Signum Classics, Virgin Classics, etc. While I don’t know how completely each participating label’s catalogue is, the selection is much larger than Linn’s.

The majority of the material on Classics Online is available only as 320 kbps MP3 files, which may or may not be high enough for your purposes. However, a growing number of releases are also offered as FLACs. Classics Online has its own download manager which is straightforward to use and works well, but the site itself looks old-school and is unfortunately a little slow. As a result, it’s not a particularly engaging browsing experience—I find it useful as a comprehensive last resort of sorts: if I can’t find it anywhere else but don’t want to order the CD from Amazon, this is a good place to buy the music in 320 kbps MP3 format. I have found the metadata and accompanying digital booklets (in PDF format) lacking (in more than one case, the release didn’t come with a digital booklet at all, forcing me to ‘reconstruct’ the proper metadata in other ways).

eClassical is a Swedish download provider with a clean design and a good selection of labels. It appears to offer the entire BIS catalogue (BIS is the major Swedish independent classical label) as well as a curated selection of other labels (most are also available on Classics Online and iTunes). eClassical ‘pioneered’ the idea of per-second charging: you pay less for shorter tracks than longer ones. Realistically, this doesn’t strike me as having much of an impact in the classical arena where almost everyone buys complete albums, but it’s an interesting gimmick.

eClassical’s FLAC metadata was very good but I was disappointed not to receive a digital booklet with my download (I realize that the digital reseller is completely dependent on what the label provides; I suppose this is a call to labels to make more of an effort with standardizing their digital deliveries to resellers—a PDF version of the booklet shouldn’t be optional, particularly since metadata inaccuracies are still fairly common).

Lately, I’ve grown very fond of Qobuz, the French download store. The site is only available in French—so if your French isn’t good enough you’ll struggle to navigate it. But it’s quite wonderful in almost every way: it has an excellent selection of labels (including Harmonia Mundi, one of my favourite classical independents, which is not available elsewhere online) and a high proportion of high resolution offerings with a differentiated pricing model (typically, below €10 for MP3, €11.99 for CD-quality/FLAC and €14.99 for studio masters).

Qobuz is also very well merchandised, with an e-commerce engine that actively (and intelligently) markets to registered users. I’ve downloaded several albums from Qobuz now and have found theirs to be a pretty seamless buying experience. They offer a French-only download manager that’s reasonably easy to use, and booklets and metadata are quite good (of course, some of the metadata is in French too, so I had to re-work it a little—but that’s hardly a complaint). I used PayPal to pay for my purchases and noticed that Qobuz processes these transactions an hour or so after the purchase took place (just something to be aware of). Here is a handy guide on how to use Qobuz for non French speakers.

Finally, there’s a directory service for finding high resolution music downloads online at FindHDMusic.com. I’m not quite sure who maintains it, but it can be helpful in a pinch. One thing FindHDMusic highlights is how much music still isn’t available as a digital download in certain territories such as Canada, particularly from the major labels. For example, Universal’s various classical labels are not available in Canada—and foreign download stores that carry their catalogues are not allowed to sell them to customers in Canada. Qobuz, for instance, will tell you, “This article is not available in your country yet (CANADA).”

* * *

After I had already published this post, my friend J.V. pointed out that Deutsche Grammophon also deserved credit for putting much of its catalogue online. I have to admit that I was unaware (thinking, in fact, that the geographic restrictions I mentioned above were the same regardless of vendor). Since DG has such a huge amount of desirable content (and pretty decent pricing—though certainly not aggressive—for FLACs) that I decided to give its download store a spin. The user experience is choppy at best because once you’ve added an item to your shopping cart, you are transferred to a generic Universal Music shopping cart. The PayPal transaction failed so I used my credit card; everything up to this point was fine. Unfortunately, DG/Universal does not offer a download manager, and it was just my bad luck to have spotted an attractively priced box set of the Hagen Quartett’s complete Mozart string quartets. Together, the 7 CDs are a weighty 2.2 GB download in FLAC format. DG, in its infinite wisdom, delivers this in a single, giant ZIP file. Needless to say, the transfer failed several times before it finally arrived intact. I spoke to a bewildered sounding customer service agent in the UK who had no particular insights to offer other than, “Keep trying—if you don’t come right, we can refund your money.” DG also did not include a PDF booklet, and its metadata is merely so-so. This store would benefit immensely from a ground-up re-working; the label’s repertoire is so amazing that a merely solid download store would put it in the first league of classical destinations online.

Over two days last week, I had the opportunity to attend an issue mapping master class at my place of work. Together with six colleagues and a couple of outside participants, I was trained in issue mapping by Australian trainer and facilitator Paul Culmsee of Seven Sigma Business Solutions.

Issue mapping is a subset of the discipline of dialogue mapping developed by Jeff Conklin, a facilitation process that creates a dialogue map as a live artifact while the meeting takes place. This is typically done on a laptop connected to a projector so that all meeting participants can see the map as it is developed by the facilitator. The map, in turn, may influence the direction of the conversation and helps keep the group on track (for example, it almost completely eliminates repetition). The process creates a shared understanding of the problem, a great, visual set of notes—and may point towards a solution to the problem. An ideal outcome would be for all participants to leave the meeting with a shared commitment to a collaboratively developed solution.

To clearly differentiate dialogue mapping from issue mapping, the latter primarily focuses on creating great maps (you can create maps by yourself, for example to map out a complex argument that has already been captured in text or on video) while the former places additional emphasis on the facilitation aspect (basically, dialogue mapping is a longer course).

Conklin thinks that there’s a particular type of complex problem which he calls a wicked problem (after Horst Rittel, a German design scientist (1930-1990)). If any of the following apply in your context, you might be dealing with a wicked problem:

• You don’t understand the problem until you have developed a solution.
• Wicked problems don’t have clearly defined boundaries and don’t stop being problems when you’ve found a solution.
• You can’t really say a solution to a wicked problem is either right or wrong.
• Wicked problems seem unique.
• The problem changes when you apply a (partial) solution.
• Wicked problems are wicked because of social complexity and diversity of opinion.

(The above points are my summary of information on Jeff Conklin’s website. You may also find his white paper on wicked problems useful.)

To give you a sense of what an issue map might look like, here is an example (click on it to see a larger version):

Obviously, this is a fictitious argument that I have made up. But the map clearly shows the map’s nodes, grammar and structural patterns that connect them. These rules are based on the Issue Based Information System (IBIS) notation and grammar, originally described by Rittel (good background information in this post). There are four types of nodes on an issue map:

• Questions
• Ideas (Answers)
• Pros
• Cons

Your leftmost question should state the problem as broadly as possible to facilitate capturing a broad first ‘layer’ of ideas/answers (a yes/no question isn’t a good starting point for a meeting that’s trying to tackle a wicked problem). If you’re interested in asking better ‘starting questions,’ this blog post by Paul Culmsee is a worthwhile read.

As your meeting gets started, you capture the starting question and ask your participants for ideas in response to the question. Each idea is captured on the screen and explored further. What are some points in support of the idea (pros)? What speaks against the idea (cons)? Does the idea raise another question?

There are a few simple rules of issue mapping grammar: Ideas can only be captured in response to questions (ideas cannot follow ideas). An idea, a pro or a con can be followed by another question (but not another idea without asking another question first). It’s useful to remember certain handy ‘transition questions,’ such as “Really?” or “To what end?” or “Why is that?” or “Such as?”

Compendium Screen Shot

The software used to map the meeting in this way is called Compendium. Compendium is available for free from the Open University in the UK and works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. There is a slight learning curve involved but it’s not terribly steep, and some of the initial frustrations eventually reveal themselves as handy features. (There certainly remain some usability issues that I’m hoping a future release will address.)

After the meeting has ended, most maps need to be refactored to ensure they properly capture and develop all ideas (spelling needs to be checked, repetitions may be eliminated and/or combined into a single point, IBIS grammar needs to be cleaned up). Compendium then allows you to share the map by exporting it to JPEG (for the general user) or XML (for other Compendium users).

My colleague Ruven Gotz is an avid user of MindJet’s MindManager mind-mapping software which I have recently started to use myself for collecting and structuring my thoughts before writing documents. Ruven has in fact created an IBIS-compliant issue-mapping template for MindManager that he’s been using to map meetings. While I love how slick and full-featured MindManager is, I do see the advantages of using Compendium for a variety of other reasons—for example, the fact that it is specific to the IBIS grammar and symbols (and I like its XML export and import feature).

At a basic level, I think I will enjoy using issue mapping to facilitate meetings where groups are trying to resolve complex, open-ended problems, such as determining a strategy or setting business objectives for an IT initiative. I’m not sure that issue mapping would help in meetings that are more oriented towards answering specific questions about software features, or during project execution.

At another level, I’m intrigued by what the patterns of larger issue maps could tell us. Data maps (info graphics) have become all the rage on the social web (sometimes they really serve to illuminate an otherwise hard-to-grasp subject; most times they’re just a clever ideological construct to deliver somebody’s partisan point). I wonder how issue maps from large meetings can help us analyze the ebb and flow of discussions afterwards to discover truths that nobody saw during the meeting itself. Issue maps might close the gap between the world of structured and unstructured data: if we can capture the trajectories and patterns of our conversations by using a universal grammar, can we then data-mine the results in the same way that we analyze a data warehouse to establish meaning and linkages we couldn’t see before?

Even maps from meetings that didn’t seem to result in a solution could remain useful and might yield new insights later.

In this year’s listening, the balance swung back from classical toward the popular a little again. In the non-classical arena, the focus for me is still on acoustic music, real instruments and warm, open production. The year has also been full of delighted rediscoveries and re-connections with ‘old friends.’ For instance—even though she doesn’t have a 2011 release—it’s clear to me now that I haven’t spent nearly enough time over the years listening to Laurie Anderson, who remains a singular creative talent and political voice in American music.

As before, I will limit my lists to records released in 2011. I won’t add re-releases that came out in 2011, though there were many (like U2′s Achtung Baby, or the Smiths box set).

Best new music – Popular, jazz, world, etc.

Alison Krauss & Union Station – Paper Airplane: Finally, another Alison Krauss & Union Station album! Even though I liked her excursion with Robert Plant, it didn’t really ‘stick.’ Krauss’ clear soprano is still best framed by the inimitable “newgrass” sound of her original band of ace instrumentalists and harmony singers. Another impeccable collection of modern country songs wrapped in traditional dress, this is well worth owning and listening to repeatedly. There is something very wonderful and grounding about this band’s output—a world where such musicianship can exist cannot be all bad, despite what the news may suggest.

Amos Lee – Mission Bell: Amos Lee is a talented songwriter and, as a vocalist, sounds somewhat like the young Cat Stevens. This is his fourth solo album and constitutes a sort of emergence from under the yoke of having been typecast as a sort of Norah Jones alike in his early recording career. On Mission Bell, he teams up with the producer-musicians from the wonderful Calexico (a perennial favourite of mine in their own right, and competent instigators of making others sound cool on a number of different records, for example on the I’m Not There soundtrack). Mission Bell is well worth hearing and becomes more rewarding as you listen repeatedly.

Helge Lien Trio – Natsukashii: I haven’t written nearly enough about Norwegian jazz here. Every jazz musician in the country seems to have a unique, Nordic take on the genre. And while the roots of this trio are clearly somewhere between ECM’s spacious acoustic and the minimalist groove of E.S.T., the focus here shifts from having bebop as its base to something simpler, less technical, more emotionally resonant. Perhaps it’s a conscious further development of the moment when Keith Jarrett is said to have brought ‘folk’ elements into his solo improvisations, perhaps it’s the influence of Scandinavian mythology (or heavy metal?), but this trio sounds like the architect rock stars of what jazz will turn into eventually—and increasingly, this is the kind of talent jazz needs in order to continue to be a vital genre in the 21st century.

Iron and Wine – Kiss Each Other Clean: I deliberately listen to very little ‘indie’ music these days, having somehow grown tired of it in the last few years. Rock rarely grabs my ears the way it once used to. But this caught my ear by surprise and hasn’t really let go. Bright, intelligently arranged songs full of strong melodies. There’s a kind of 80s sensibility to this record which seems different to anything else I’d heard by Iron and Wine—it’s more ‘pop’ than the more folk/country-oriented, subdued work we previously heard from Sam Beam.

Sierra Hull – Daybreak: Sierra Hull is a very young and very talented bluegrass singer and mandolin player. As an Alison Krauss protegé, she benefits from the same widescreen production values and outstanding musicians her mentor employs on her own albums. But there’s something so singularly well done about this that it doesn’t really fit into the “sounds like” category. She plays and sings with the confidence of someone much more experienced, and her songwriting is also excellent. And there are two mandolin-focused instrumentals here that’ll make your speakers smoke.

Nitin Sawhney – Last Days of Meaning: Nitin Sawhney is a UK producer/composer/DJ who originally came to fame as part of a late 90s wave of “Asian underground” DJs who were pioneering a multi-culti dance sound (then) unique to the UK. Since that time, his songwriting ambition has steadily grown through a series of subtle and exceedingly well-produced records featuring guest vocalists from various cultural backgrounds (East, West, and everything in between). Lately, his albums have included more cultural/political commentary—usually told through fictional characters and their stories. In this latest effort, veteran actor John Hurt plays a hermitic old man with conservative, xenophobic views who’s been sent a tape containing songs that—at the surface—sound like everything he hates about the world. Listening to them, he gradually softens and gains new insights. Sawhney’s songs are outstanding miniatures, intelligently written and true to their specific genres. Highly, highly recommended (as is virtually everything else Sawhney’s ever released, including his soundtrack for the BBC’s Human Planet).

Coeur de Pirate – Blonde: My original review is here.

Tinariwen – Tassili: Another fantastic record from Mali’s most amazing musical export (currently living, that is). This is the blues in its original form, all two chords of it, and you can clearly hear where John Lee Hooker’s inspiration came from. Tinariwen are an excellent band with strong rhythm, a rock ‘n roll attitude and an uncompromising musical vision. The fact that Tinariwen are joined here once or twice by some people from TV on the Radio is only a minor distraction (and actually quite good). What’s consistently awesome is how sophisticated and engaging this trance-inducing music with the sing-song melodies and limited harmonic development is. It’s the sort of world music that gives back a mile when you give an inch.

Tedeschi Trucks Band – Revelator: I think Derek Trucks is currently the world’s best blues guitarist. He’s an unfailingly tasteful and minimalist player who seems to have no technical limitations and effortlessly puts simple licks into strategic spots in songs where they genuinely matter musically. Formerly a touring guitarist of the Allman Brothers Band and fronting his own outfit, the Derek Trucks Band, Trucks has now joined forces with his wife Susan Tedeschi (a superb blues singer/songwriter) and a cast of 11 or so others, including two (!) drummers. The results are astounding and exhilarating, half blues, half soul, all played true to the idiom with perfect phrasing on guitar and vocals. Two giants, really, at the top of their respective game. You should totally buy this.

Steve Earle – I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive: Another accomplished album by Steve Earle. Continuing the “new Steve Earle” trajectory he started in the mid 90s, this record reaffirms the departure from ‘country’ and mines an immense number of related genres: alt-country, folk, roots rock, Irish reels, even Tom Waits (who, let’s face it, is a genre unto himself). I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive is merely a solid Steve Earle record (certainly not the greatest he’s made), but as such is one of the better albums of the year virtually by definition. Deeply credible, critical of the political status quo, committed to social justice without being preachy, able to wield a simple lyric like a sharp weapon, and capable of connecting to a broad spectrum of listeners: Earle has become the social conscience of roots music lovers everywhere.

Patricia O’Callaghan – Matador: The Songs of Leonard Cohen: O’Callaghan is a Toronto-based, classically trained vocalist whose considerable skills are typically brought to bear on interpreting other people’s songs. On this record, she focuses entirely on Leonard Cohen songs—music, I’ve often thought, that benefits from being performed by people who are not Leonard Cohen. O’Callaghan’s performances (one or two of which have been previously released) are so assured, so incredibly well worked out, her phrasing so spot-on, the arrangements so good, they stake a reasonable claim for being better than the originals. Her version of ‘Who By Fire’ is astonishing, her ‘Hallelujah’ impeccable and her ‘Everybody Knows’ is clean and—without Cohen’s grit—takes on a different inflection entirely that’s just as good as the original. Highly recommended. I’ve also enjoyed Patricia O’Callaghan’s album with the Gryphon Trio from earlier this year, Broken Hearts & Madmen. It’s perhaps not completely worthy of a “best of 2011″ mention (or maybe I just think there are too many songs sung in Spanish on it), but it’s also outstanding and more than deserves to be heard. I love its version of Laurie Anderson’s ‘Pieces and Parts.’

Best new classical music

Eric Whitacre – Light & Gold: Eric Whitacre is a young American composer of mostly choral music. He has, in recent years, built himself quite a reputation on Youtube (virtual choirs and the like), and his last two records genuinely ‘crossed over’ into the outer layers of the mainstream. My inclusion of this album as a “best of 2011″ pick feels slightly tentative because I can’t entirely shake the sense that there’s something ever-so-slightly cheesy populist about some of Mr. Whitacre’s pieces… or maybe, I find myself reacting to the unbridled enthusiasm with which he’s embraced by all sorts of listeners who otherwise don’t know classical music from a bar of soap. His crossover ‘pop’ status puts him in close proximity (at least physically, in music stores) to the Susan Boyles and Andrea Bocellis of this world. Yet his music is often astonishingly beautiful, interesting and deserves a serious audience.

Kristian Bezuidenhout, Freiburger Barockorchester, Gottfried von der Goltz – Mendelssohn Piano Concertos: Mendelssohn’s early piano concertos are delightful confections of “Early Romanticism,” all pretty melodies and a string orchestra. Pre-Sturm und Drang, this reflects much of Mozart, Beethoven and Hummel’s technical advancements without yet carrying the weight of Romanticism. Bezuidenhout, who’s from South Africa, plays the fortepiano, a predecessor of the piano we know today, whose character is brighter, nimbler—but also more brittle and less ‘full’ than your Steinways and Bösendorfers. It works beautifully here (whereas I struggle with some of the piano solo material when it’s played on a fortepiano). The Freiburg Baroque orchestra does a lovely job. This is an immensely listenable release that continues to delight time and again.

The Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, Stephen Layton – Beyond all mortal dreams: American a cappella: This is a panoramic traversal of some very fine American choral music, exceptionally sung by one of Britain’s foremost choirs. All of this material is form the 20th century, but is about as far from serial music or other modernist art musics as one can imagine. Though harmonically advanced and interesting, this isn’t dissonant music. While it can sometimes be quiet, the recording’s dynamics demand your attention (this isn’t ‘casual listening music’). I hear connections between this and Arvo Pärt—much of it comes from within a distinctly religious tradition. If you’re looking for introspection and a wonderful showcase of the fine harmony human voices can produce, look no further than this.

Stephen Hough – Chopin Complete Waltzes: Stephen Hough, it strikes me, is one of the few pianists who seem to have absolutely no technical limitations. Like Marc-André Hamelin (the other pianist in the small group that immediately springs to mind), Hough appears able to focus all his energy on interpretation—on providing us with musical insights into the work. I say “appears” because I know that much of the dynamics of performance spring from “doing battle with” one’s own technical limitations, and I’m also aware that suggesting someone doesn’t have technical limitations implies that their performances would be particularly light (or that they don’t need to practice). Neither applies here or is in any way an issue (and Chopin’s waltzes certainly deserve a certain lightness of touch). This is a beautiful record—just like everything else I’ve ever heard Hough play. I would say these are definitive performances.

Heinz Holliger, Camerata Bern, Erich Höbarth – Bach Oboe Concertos: A lovely collection of well-played, well-recorded Bach concertos and sinfonias rendered for oboe and Baroque orchestra. Heinz Holliger’s research really shines here, rendering what are more often performed as works for the violin on the oboe (a legitimate transcription, and sometimes performed like that in Bach’s time), and surrounding them with sinfonias/chorale transcriptions to give them a longer arch, better shape and create a program that flows better. If you’re looking for one instrumental Baroque disc this year, this should probably be it. (Although I feel like I could have a whole separate post on “best Baroque recordings of the year.”)

Jean-Guihen Queyras, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin – Vivaldi Cello Concertos: Queyras is a young French cellist whose tone is more like that of a dark viola d’amore than a cello, and he has the same lightness that someone playing a handheld instrument could achieve. I was first drawn in by his remarkable Bach Cello suites a few years ago which showcased his dexterity, lightness of touch and depth of thinking about Baroque music. Performing Vivaldi may not require the same erudition as Bach’s solo works, but these works are rendered flawlessly (even if the recording has the tiniest bit too much treble). There are also some sinfonias here by Caldara, providing a bit of balance and welcome diversion between the three-movement sets of the concertos. The Akademie plays true to its usual fiery self.

Joyce DiDonato, Karina Gauvin et. al, Il Complesso Barocco, Alan Curtis – Handel Ariodante: This is hands down the best new opera recording of the year for me. Alan Curtis has been rendering Handel operas with his hand-picked European orchestra and an ever-more-amazing roster of singers for many years. This recording now also includes the incredible new Baroque mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato who sings this music so flawlessly that one might imagine it was written for her. What makes this even more special, though, is that every singer here is equally accomplished—so the whole enterprise never sags, drags or lags. Even if you think you don’t like opera, this may be good enough to get you into it. Handel wrote the pop songs of his era, staged with as much fanfare as a Lady Gaga appearance, and this album renders them terrifically.

Leif Ove Andsnes, Christian Tetzlaff, Tanja Tetzlaff – Schumann Complete Works for Piano Trio: The Tetzlaffs and Andsnes have established a kind of new European chamber supergroup through a few years of collaborating at Lars Vogt’s Spannungen chamber festival in Heimbach, Germany. Christian Tetzlaff, of course, is one of the current violin greats playing on modern instruments, equally at home in this repertoire as in Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas. The close ensemble work here is an expression of the three musicians’ finely honed listening skills, high musicianship and excellent preparation. I don’t feel equipped to say that these are definitive recordings (I love the Florestan Trio, too), but it’s an amazing complete compendium of Schumann trio music and consistently of an excellent standard. If you don’t know Schumann’s chamber music, you ought to hear this.

Alina Ibragimova, Cédric Tiberghien – Beethoven Violin Sonatas Vol. 3: The final volume in Alina Ibragimova’s Beethoven sonata cycle, this deserves being included in this year’s best of list: the whole cycle, which appeared on three discs over the course of the last few years, is the result of a series of very well received live recordings at Wigmore Hall. I had my heart set on not liking this as much as the Isabelle Faust/Alexander Melnikov Beethoven sonata cycle from a couple of years ago (which I thought was unbeatable), but Ibragimova and Tiberghien convinced me piece by piece. It is especially remarkable that these are live recordings; the consistent perfection delivered by these two young musicians is simply amazing. Ibragimova is rapidly becoming the new violinist to watch.

Honorary Mention

Adam Gopnik – Winter: Five Windows on the Season (CBC Massey Lectures 2011): Honorary mention goes to Adam Gopnik’s 2011 Massey Lectures which are a delight in terms of both content and delivery. In five one-hour lectures, Gopnik takes us on a whirlwind tour to explore how one might think about the ‘meaning of winter’ from various cultural and historical perspectives. He covers everything from Scrooge to fighting in hockey, arctic explorers to skating as courtship, and the intellectual enjoyment of it never lets up (if anything, he can be a bit of a fast-talker and I occasionally found myself struggling to keep up and had to go back). The book, which appeared before the audio lectures were broadcast on the CBC, is much longer and more detailed. If you want to learn something this season, try these.

I’m often asked: “Don’t you have something similar to this? Haven’t you done this before?” Seems like an innocent question, doesn’t it? Much of my work involves writing or designing documents that capture complicated subject matter, try to explain something in simple, practical terms, or give advice to businesses about their IT roadmap. I’m good at this work and I enjoy producing these kinds of documents—so over the years, I’ve written thousands of pages, drawn thousands of diagrams, created thousands of PowerPoint slides.

With very few exceptions, every one of these artifacts is owned by somebody else. Most often, my employer, who—by virtue of my employment contract—owns the rights to everything I produce while employed there. Upstream, the work that I do is almost always for a customer of my employer, who is paying typical consulting fees to have me produce it. Their expectation is that anything specific and identifiable that I create for them is kept confidential between our organizations and will not be disclosed to any other party.

I have often wondered whether our customers also expect the work done for them to be unique and limited to them. If you were to ask them, many would say—probably without thinking about it too hard—that yes, since they’re paying quite a chunk of change for our services, they expect the work to be unique to their purposes. But I think that their stated expectations are actually contradictory to what consulting is: most of our customers hire us because we have a lot of experience providing services to other organizations just like them; because we have the proverbial ‘best practices’ that we’ve learned from past consulting engagements; because we’ve done this before.

I suppose we could now dissect what precisely ‘best practices’—knowledge and experience, really—mean in this context. To an extent, of course, it’s what I and my coworkers have in our heads. We’ve seen the pattern before, and we know how to apply it to the new context. I am able to make a useful and valuable contribution because I’ve been in similar situations before. And no customer or employer is offended in the least by my exploitation of my previous experiences, at least not as long as they’re part of the knowledge in my head. In fact, I get hired because of what I know.

But much of what we produce in consulting is too complex to ‘know’ with any degree of fidelity without paper or electronic documents. And while it’s probably safe to assume that I can build the document or diagram again if I’ve built it before, it would be horribly inefficient to actually do so. It would make consultants bored by their work (having to do the same thing over and over), consulting firms less profitable and customers disappointed by how long everything takes.

So here we have a case where the ‘official version’ of what we tell ourselves and the reality of how things are done are completely different. Regardless of all the onerous confidentiality and intellectual property clauses in our employment and master services agreements, it’s pretty much ‘controlled chaos’ out there in the real world. Note that I’m not saying I do this, or other consultants I’ve worked with over the years—at my current firm or past employers—but I think it’s pretty prevalent out there.

The answer, I imagine, is discovered by most consultants as they move up through the ranks. It’s the ‘consultant code of silence.’ Everyone who works at any level of seniority does certain things that could potentially be legally questionable, but nobody talks about them. The key, I expect, is to strike a balance between the practical reuse of certain knowledge assets and the rigorous protection of former clients’ identities and specific business conditions. What’s required is to set up a somewhat porous but essentially functional ethical wall in one’s own mind. If that sounds tricky, it’s because it is.

Here are some effective techniques I’ve seen consultants use:

• When talking about your learnings from other customers, keep it general. The risk of accidentally disclosing competitive information is of course pretty high, especially if you always consult to customers in the same (or similar) industry sectors. Always, always say, “At another customer with a similar set of circumstances, we saw…” instead of, “At our other customer X, we saw…” This should really go without saying, but it’s surprising how many consultants talk to one customer about another’s specific issues. A false sense of familiarity is an easy mode to fall into in consulting (it’s a people business, after all), but it’s best to find other, less problematic subject matter to help build your relationships.
• Harvest the good parts from documents (not the whole document). It makes sense to only keep the good parts of documents because they’re faster to find and easier to reuse in future.
• Genericize all document parts/building blocks before adding them to your library for reuse (minimizes possibility of error). The more identifiable specifics you keep—customer logos, ‘business background’ sections, etc.—the higher your risk that something accidentally gets out.
• Organize your library by subject matter, not customer. If your library is structured by technical or industry subject matter rather than by ‘customer job,’ it’s easier to argue that you’re working from generics than reusing customer-specific material indiscriminately.
• Change (re-write, re-draw) key portions of documents and diagrams before releasing them to a new customer. You know how students that plagiarize are routinely found out? Google. It’s mostly because they didn’t think they needed to re-write the quote/thought/Wikipedia article before trying to pass it off as their own work. It is, of course, a matter of degree: sometimes, making a document fragment more specific to the customer in question before putting it back in circulation is enough; sometimes, it’s better to take the basic idea but re-write/re-draw the thing to be on the safe side. Since you’re working from an existing idea, it should be quick work.
• Publish methodologies frequently. This is a fun—and little known—trick: if something has already been published on the Internet (for example, on your company’s blog or as a white paper), you’re free to liberally reuse it, at least in your own context (by which I mean that you can re-apply it to your documents if it was published by your firm in the first place). As for everyone else’s published methods and materials: copyright applies, so it may be problematic to copy it verbatim for your documents (both legally and ethically) but as with any publication (book, journal article, blog post, etc.) you’re free to incorporate the essence of the thoughts into your work with appropriate acknowledgements. This last point is also one of the few non-contentious, legally acceptable and completely legitimate ways individual consultants can take some of the work they’ve created with them when they change jobs. It is also, perhaps, the only reason you should consider blogging on your employer’s behalf. (And that’s another blog post I’m thinking about writing.)

In the end, I believe everything I’ve said above to be practiced in consulting today, but nobody really talks about it because everybody profits from turning a blind eye. Because of this widespread practice, consulting firms are better at delivering value to customers, and customers actually get better work from consultants, faster.

And while everyone on the business side is complicit, the lawyers keep drafting contracts with threatening clauses about confidentiality and intellectual property rights, and we all sign them. Every so often, someone doesn’t pay attention while playing the game and gets hurt in the process (usually as part of an acrimonious parting of ways between employer and employee). This mechanism serves to preserve the delicate balance of the consulting world, and does so very effectively. It’s similar to the law in general: you don’t get caught every time you do something dumb, but the fact that there are deterrents keep you from committing really egregious transgressions.

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Béatrice Martin, who goes by the stage name Coeur de pirate, is a wildly, fantastically talented singer-songwriter from Montreal. She has just released her second solo album—the excellent Blonde—and she’s only 22. Like many listeners outside of France and Quebec, I first noticed Coeur de pirate as a guest duet vocalist on Bedouin Soundclash‘s lovely ’Brutal Hearts’ from last year’s Light the Horizon. The song itself was definitely a departure from Soundclash’s usual indie-ska with its seductive and striking sing-song melody, and Martin sang her part accent-free and with an innocent country swagger that was both charming and a good blend with Soundclash lead singer Jay Malinowski‘s high tenor.

I didn’t investigate the mysteriously named Coeur de pirate any further at first, and when I finally did a couple of months ago, I briefly listened to her eponymous first solo effort. I might have been a little disappointed in it—it’s a straight-up French singer-songwriter record, very piano-based (the instrument she’s studied since childhood), and showing little of the indie crossover potential that could make some Quebec music interesting to the English-speaking world (including the rest of Canada). My French isn’t what it used to be, but I can work myself through the lyrics with the help of printed text. And even if I wasn’t too fired up about the music, it was clear that she was an astonishingly capable writer with a grasp of songcraft well beyond her years. The first record sold a surprising 400,000 copies worldwide, making her a household name throughout the French-speaking world. “In the rest of Canada I’m still seen as indie, which is nice, but where I’m from I’m not.” (Martin quoted in NOW).

Blonde was released a few days ago, and precisely, almost surgically fulfills the potential that Coeur de pirate hinted at for listeners outside the Francophone world. I won’t make any claims about understanding (or representing here) the history of how certain French pop has managed to cross over in the past 60 years, but of course it’s mostly been about what we’ve projected onto the French: Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin, Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour, Françoise Hardy, Édith Piaf, Carla Bruni, Manu Chao and—yes—Céline Dion all ring a bell for us because they embody what we think the French language and culture are. Much like Anglophone pop, our collective imagination of French popular music somehow culminates in the 60s, images of a busty Brigitte Bardot merging with Gainsbourg and Birkin’s 1969 scandalous single, ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus.’

And Coeur de pirate’s Blonde zeroes in on that sound—a fresh-faced take on 60s pop that sounds a bit like the Supremes, a bit like the Phil Spector girl groups, a little like Nancy Sinatra, with trace elements of the Bangles and Bananarama. “I really wanted Blonde to sound classic. To me, the ’60s are perfect—in change, in cinema, in culture. And I really like what they did in France as well when it comes to music. You could talk about very intense subjects with very light and happy music—but the lyrics aren’t so happy.” (Martin quoted in the Montreal Gazette).

The production is outstanding, with just the right subtle amount of strings and reverb, and with the slightest, faintest touch of analogue distortion meant to signal the limits of 60s equipment or the wearing-out of vinyl grooves. It’s classy and subtle and genuinely groovy without ever taking a turn into the clichéd. Blonde was produced and engineered by Howard Bilerman, who has serious indie credentials as a former member of Arcade Fire and producer and recording engineer to the who’s who of Montreal’s indie scene.

The lyrics? Like I said, I can pretty well follow using the lyric sheet, but I’m perhaps not entirely qualified to judge if they are any good. Knowing the importance of lyrics to the French, though, I think Blonde‘s meteoric climb up the French and Canadian iTunes charts this week probably speaks for itself. Broadly, the songs are about relationships between men and women, about the stories men tell women, and how women believe those stories (or not). About how we hurt each other and then make up. Martin’s words are those of an independent woman, intelligent and lyrical, classic songwriting skills that would translate anywhere. If you’re looking for specific tracks to try, musically the strongest are perhaps ‘Adieu,’ ‘Danse et danse’ (which has a fantastic shuffle sound that could, in fact, make you dance and dance), ‘Ava’ and the country-tinged ‘Loin d’ici,’ a duet with Sam Roberts. But it’s all great and deserves to be appreciated widely.

* * *

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Another interesting project Béatrice Martin is involved in is Armistice, an EP co-helmed by Jay Malinowski and Martin that came out in early 2011. Recorded and written in partnership with Mariachi El Bronx (apparently the mariachi alter ego of punk outfit The Bronx from LA, go figure), this is a collection of 5 widescreen tracks that seem like the logical extension of the previously mentioned ‘Brutal Hearts.’ All tracks are sung as duets by Martin and Malinowski (who are in a relationship), and are simply lovely.

The sound of this somehow evokes a Robert Rodriguez aesthetic from the Mexico Trilogy, or some of the soundtrack materials hinted at in the closing credits of Tarantino’s Kill Bill—music for a ‘fantasy western,’ from Mexico, Texas, California, Arizona, Nashville, and from nowhere at all. The video for ‘Mission Bells‘ (the first single) is seductive, evocative, funny and absurd all at the same time, with Martin and Malinowski happily walking through a dusty Arizona (Nevada? California?) desert landscape, then cavorting on rusty deck chairs in a deserted-looking coastal resort, all the while singing their hearts out. There is an obvious chemistry here that translates directly to the music, resulting in 5 unusual songs that are well worth having and lightly sprinkling into your hipster-chic playlists in the interest of some levity and an odd kind of 21st century authenticity.

For the first year or so after buying my Mac, I opted for a ‘dual life.’ My web life—blogging, surfing, personal email, banking, Twitter, Facebook, etc.—took place on the Mac. And my work life happened inside a Windows 7 Professional virtual machine in Parallels. Realistically, the MacBook was fast enough to handle this with aplomb, and it was kind of practical in a variety of ways (for example, I could ‘switch off’ my work life at the end of the day).

I obtained and installed Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, but—truth be told—it was about on par with Office 2003 for Windows. The main applications worked okay but were nothing spectacular and Entourage was simply a terrible excuse for an Outlook replacement. It wasn’t even particularly good as a POP3/IMAP email client. And while it was occasionally handy to use Word or Excel natively on the Mac (when it was too tedious to fire up the VM), Office 2008 basically just took up space in the netherworld of software-installed-but-not-committed-to.

Not that anything else replaced it, at least not any native OS X applications. iWork—though Mac people swear by it—felt a little like “Office for children” (can’t really say it any other way). The oftentimes militant public support that Mac people will profess for these applications can only be explained by a certain lack of familiarity of how work in an office—any modern office that’s not a design studio or one-person consulting firm—actually gets done. Sure, they look nice. And they seem to be stable. But they provide none of the advanced features that make collaborating on digital documents somewhat do-able. Yes, I can open some Microsoft Office formatted documents in iWork, but then I can’t really do anything much more than perform basic editing functions. None of the document review features work, none of the styles are the same (or function the same), etc. Now I understand that some would suggest that MS Office suffers from rampant featurism and therefore cannot be the yardstick for measuring all other contenders. But featurism or not, it has become—for better or worse—the de facto standard. It is what 90% of office workers use to compose, edit and circulate documents. And documents make up 75% of most knowledge workers’ work.

Here’s why one might choose to use Microsoft Office for Mac 2011:

• Outlook, because despite Apple’s best efforts to make Mail.app Exchange Server compatible, it’s still not as integrated with common business scenarios as Outlook and doesn’t have integrated contacts, tasks, or a calendar (I understand some of those things come separately on the Mac).
• Word, because things like consistent styles, formatting options and the document review functionality aren’t optional features when you’re trying to work in a modern office.
• Excel, because it is how business numbers are crunched, like it or not.
• Lync (this is an enterprise distribution only client for Microsoft’s software phone/VOIP/messaging platform) with Outlook integration, because if your office—like mine—only offers you a software phone line, you don’t really have a choice.
• (PowerPoint, for me, is a bit of an afterthought. I know there are some very strong—and possibly correct—opinions out there that suggest Keynote.app might actually have the advantage here.)

Some thoughts about each individual Office for Mac 2011 application, one year into the journey:

Outlook:Mac 2011

Outlook for Mac 2011, with Lync online meeting integration

Outlook on the Mac is great, plain and simple. I’m not advocating it for any purpose other than as an Exchange Server client with full Lync telephony/presence integration. If you don’t have those things in your office environment, I’m sure you can find something more native to the Mac that’ll serve you better (or just use Gmail on the web, like everybody else). But if you’re required to use Exchange, Outlook for Mac 2011 works great. There are some (minor) foibles that could and should be addressed by Microsoft: the behaviour of signatures is strange when compared to how it works in Office 2010 for Windows. It would be nice if the “out of the box” message formatting could be exactly like it is in the Windows version and I didn’t have to laboriously try to approximate how to make my messages look acceptable to the rest of the world. And I’m not 100% sure I understand why, when I have Outlook open on my Mac and on Windows (next to each other), messages arrive 30 seconds earlier in Windows than on the Mac. But all in all, it’s more than usable, has an appropriate number of configuration options, and works stably.

Word:Mac 2011

Word for Mac 2011, with inexplicable dual toolbar/ribbon

Word, ironically, has taken longer to get used to than Outlook on the Mac. I don’t know to what exact extent Microsoft re-wrote Word for this version of Office, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s 90% new code. It works, and works well most of the time, and—importantly—provides almost all of the features of its big brother on Windows. Unfortunately, it was initially plagued by stability issues, and there were a few months after the launch of Office 2011 when “auto-updates” would be shipped pretty frequently. This improved Word’s stability considerably over the course of the year: I would say we’re about 90% of the way to achieving the same amount of reliability that the Windows version has. Still, I get crashes on obvious activities far too frequently, and the recovery is graceful only about 50% of the time in terms of document preservation. I will say that this doesn’t affect me in my day-to-day usage because I’m a conscientious document-saver, but it’s a little irritating, and it occurs mainly in boundary cases that QA simply hasn’t gotten to with any consistency yet. (Example: I always repeat the first row of a table automatically if the table splits across multiple pages. Recently, I tried to ‘edit’ one of these automatically repeated rows instead of the one at the top of the table and Word crashed.) But in the greater scheme of things, Word 2011 works and (mostly) works well.

Excel:Mac 2011

Excel for Mac 2011, with hidden AutoSum icon

Excel seems stable and reliable. Functionally, it is more or less on par with the Windows version. I have to admit that I don’t crunch very large or complex sets of numbers, nor do I connect it to external data sources with any frequency, so if you’re a serious Excel user, your mileage may vary. But I use Excel frequently and have found it to be reliable. As with all of the Office for Mac 2011 applications, I find the “dual tool bar” confusing and unnecessary: I don’t fully understand why the command buttons aren’t on the same part of the Office ribbons on both platforms. Instead, the AutoSum function is on a toolbar above the ribbon. It’s as if the Microsoft product planners couldn’t let go of their beloved toolbars, and instead decided to divide the commands between the new-style ribbon and the old-style toolbar. On day 1, I literally searched for the AutoSum icon for 20 minutes. I would say the next version could clean up the consistency aspects a lot more between the two platforms, because—I assume—they’ve done the usability lab testing on the Windows platform and determined that that’s the best layout. (That sound you just heard? Doors slamming because the Mac business unit at Microsoft just figured out they have usability labs, and they’re quickly going to usability-test Office for Mac 2011.)

PowerPoint:Mac 2011

This one’s pretty good, actually. It’s the least-used of the apps on my Mac, but whenever I’ve had the occasion it’s been reliable and full-featured. I have yet to discover anything I can’t do with the Mac version that I can do on Windows. With the exception of the dual toolbar/ribbon problem (see above), which is just as confused in PowerPoint as it is everywhere else, it’s pretty great. I personally never warmed to Keynote so I don’t have a particularly sophisticated take on how it compares, but I think it’s reasonable to assume they have feature parity, and at the end of the day, it’s just a matter of preference.

Microsoft Document Connection

Document Connection 2011, shown with typical result

Where to start? This thing is an unmitigated disaster. It’s terrible. But let’s start at the beginning: what is it? Document Connection is a workaround disguised as an Office application. The problem it’s trying to address is that Microsoft’s other teams (the SharePoint team and the people who wrote SkyDrive, Microsoft’s attempt at copying Dropbox) still really don’t care at all about Mac users. To get a ‘full’ SharePoint collaboration experience on the Mac basically requires you to run Safari or Firefox, and even then you don’t really get the full  integration possible on Windows. This is partially true because to this day, Microsoft insists of using ActiveX for certain on-screen functionality in SharePoint. But more importantly, Microsoft’s lack of ability to control the end-to-end integration between the individual Office apps and a SharePoint backend library or list on OS X doesn’t really allow it to offer the same user experience that’s available on Windows. So all those infrequently-used but definitely nifty features like metadata integrated into the Word ribbon? Doesn’t work on the Mac. Uploading multiple documents to a SharePoint library at the same time? Not so much.

So instead of committing to re-writing those SharePoint controls in a standards-compliant way and making them available on all browsers and platforms, Microsoft decided to offer a workaround that doesn’t really fix many of the problems it sets out to fix. In addition to being a ‘SharePoint client’ it’s also a SkyDrive client. In each case, it basically offers drag and drop file upload capabilities and basic check in/check out of files. It cannot connect to most SharePoint sites I’ve tried to connect it to (and I have a lot of SharePoint sites to try it out with). I have no idea why, and it offers no troubleshooting clues in its error messages. It’s not worth the money you paid for it, even if you got it for free when you bought Office. Rapidly, I think, this will prove to be Office 2011′s Achilles heel. The Office for Mac team has significantly upped the overall ante in terms of platform interoperability, but its ability to do the same thing for SharePoint/Mac compatibility is severely limited, and the resulting product is—to put it mildly—not very good. Or very useful.

Lync:Mac 2011

Lync for Mac 2011

When Hunter from our IT group (a fellow Mac user in a Windows office) came to me with the news that there was finally a proper Lync client for the Mac, available through our Microsoft volume licensing, it felt a bit like Christmas. Okay, maybe not exactly like Christmas. But it was a pretty cool moment. Prior to October 2011, Mac users had to use Microsoft Communicator, which worked okay for some purposes (it supported voice, text messenger and screen sharing) but crucially did not provide any Outlook calendar integration, so none of that fancy “Click here to attend meeting” stuff would work on the Mac. And in Communicator, for some inexplicable reason, you had to dial phone numbers manually, which was a daily annoyance. It’s only been a week or three since its release, but so far, the Outlook integration works reliably, I really appreciate the ability to create “Online Meetings” directly from within Outlook, and screen sharing and all the other LiveMeeting stuff is excellent. For those of us who are trying to be Mac users in a Microsoft-based enterprise computing environment, this may well prove to be the clincher. There were some initial hiccups where we couldn’t get Lync 2011 to connect to our Communications Server from anywhere but inside our corporate network, but that issue has since been resolved (by changing my DNS settings to Google’s DNS instead of my ISP’s settings). Microsoft has also already sent a software update for Lync 2011 (what, precisely, was in it is a bit of a mystery), so it looks like the team is engaged in trying to iron out the early issues.

* * *

My decision to use a Mac in an office that’s otherwise 99% Windows-based is certainly unusual. But with the advent of Office 2011, at least it’s no longer a decision that puts me at a real disadvantage. I say ‘real’ because two other applications from the extended Office family on Windows are still missing from Office for Mac: Project and Visio. I know there are Mac world equivalents from independent vendors out there, but I would really like to see Microsoft push to close the gap completely, so I’m not entertaining any notions of spending more of my own money to see if I can buy something that’s ‘good enough’ and might be compatible with the Windows versions.

Apart from the missing Project and Visio, the penultimate disadvantage to using Office on the Mac only disappeared in October of 2011, approximately one year into the journey, when Microsoft finally released a native Lync client for OS X, which—delightfully—is the equivalent of its Windows counterpart.

So the final frontier remains the lack of SharePoint integration on the Mac. This can be addressed in one of three possible ways; listed from the most absurd to the least absurd:

• Create another version of Internet Explorer for OS X that supports ActiveX and natively provides the same SharePoint user experience we know from Windows;
• Ship a vastly improved client application that properly and reliably supports all the functions Windows users get natively;
• Focus the SharePoint team on standards-compliance, essentially making the user experience the same regardless of the browser or computing platform used.

I know what I’d vote for. But I’m not a product planner at Microsoft. Here’s hoping one of them reads this and takes it on. It’s important, not for the 5% of enterprise users running Macs, but because SharePoint deserves to get a truly desktop-independent shot at the market.

The Pure dock is about $300 cheaper than the nearest contender (from what I can tell, there are at least two other companies making something like this: Wadia and Onkyo), and at $99 (US), it seemed like a no-brainer so I tried to order one immediately when I first heard about it. Unfortunately, the manufacturer was out of stock for several months—I’m guessing manufacturing backlog in China.

Fast forward a few months (it’s not like I was sitting around daily waiting for it to be back in stock, so “fast forward” is just a lazy turn of phrase here) and I’m now the proud owner of an i-20.

You can look up the specs yourself, but to recap quickly, this is a powered iPod/iPhone dock that charges your device while simultaneously providing external playback capabilities for music and video (S-video is possible with an additional adapter available from Pure). Music can be played back either through a digital optical connector (TOSLINK) or digital coaxial (S/PDIF), or as an analogue signal generated by its built-in Cirrus 4353 hi-fi quality DAC (24 bit, 192 KHz).

The build quality is decent but not spectacular. Mounting and unmounting your device is best done with some care, and it took me a few attempts initially to understand that I had to press down firmly to ensure it was properly ‘seated.’ The manual helpfully says that it’s properly connected when the device starts charging—I suppose I could have guessed that. It’s also not a particularly good looking device, as you can see in the picture. It’s okay, but—now that it’s taken up its designated place amongst my suite of black Cambridge Audio equipment—I find myself wishing it were (matte) black (and didn’t have a glossy black, pastic-y top).

The remote control (pictured to the right) is very small and definitely feels cheap. It works fine as long as it’s aimed directly at the IR receiver right at the front of the dock. The buttons provide basic iPod navigation capabilities—you can select menus, artists, albums, songs, skip forward and back, pause/play and put the device into standby mode. It’s powered by a simple watch battery. I have not tried whether it’s possible to add the device to a universal remote control, but that might be a good option to explore in time.

The really important point, of course, is the sound. And it’s spectacular as I expected. The dock is connected to my Cambridge Audio dacMagic (previously discussed here) via a TOSLINK optical cable, and the sound is the exact equal of playing the same digital source material on the DAC using USB. Clarity, depth, excellent soundstage, musical, fast.

For me (and, I imagine, many others) this is an affordable, practical way of using one’s iPod as a music server without needing to invest in another PC or laptop. Even if you don’t own an iPod, it’s worth considering the mathematics of getting one together with the Pure dock—that would still be cheaper than the next-most-affordable competitor. I will say that the Wadia iPod dock (the 170i Transport, which is approximately $400) is significantly prettier and feels much more solid, but essentially performs the exact same function as the Pure i-20 (and does not have its own built-in DAC).

Another scenario I could imagine for the Pure i-20 is an affordable but ‘decent’ portable iPod playback solution for cottage trips (or the minimalist starter household). If you couple it with a set of Audioengine 5 amplified speakers (which have a hardware volume button on the front panel), I imagine you’d get excellent sound for ~$500 (US) all in.

I would definitely recommend the dock itself; I just wish the remote were slightly less cheaply made. But the sound is great.

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My partner Jennifer recently published her first book. It’s a slim volume of 145 pages called No Ordinary Boy: The Life and Death of Owen Turney. One could generically describe it as memoir or narrative non-fiction. No Ordinary Boy is the story of Jennifer’s journey with her severely disabled son Owen, who died last October—unexpectedly, and leaving us all grieving—at the age of twelve. I knew Owen for approximately 4 years prior to his passing, and I was there while Jennifer wrote the book, witnessing the trials and difficulties of a first-time author working through her grief as she captured the different aspects of her story and forged them into a coherent, intelligent whole that’s significantly more than the sum of its parts.

In the last few weeks, I’ve watched as Jennifer has struggled to succinctly ‘explain’ what her book is about to different people. Before it was published, it was easier. This is what the book is. It’s what I’m working on. Defined through the act of writing, of exerting control, of applying change, of restricting who could see it, read it, provide feedback. Who—and how. Trust was bestowed upon a very small number of trusted advisers and readers who gave feedback, made substantive and copy-editing suggestions, carried her forward through the gift of encouragement and positive response. Every so often, someone would say, What I read in your book was this. Which, I think, leaves first-time authors awe-struck and amazed: Really? I didn’t know that it could mean that to someone.

The surprise and delight of hearing about what others see in your work, and the stress of having to formulate a routine, short and universally resonant response to the question So what’s your book about? are, I believe, common occurrences after launching a book into the world.

We’ve known since the late 1960s that assigning a single, ‘authoritative’ interpretation to a text which is anchored in the biography and context of its author is at best limiting, and at worst simply incorrect. Roland Barthes argued this convincingly in The Death of the Author. While many more traditionally oriented schools of literary studies take issue with the idea, writers can experience it directly in their own work: the sense of ‘I didn’t know it could mean that to someone’ is an illustration. A book is always more than the author’s alleged intent; more, different, better, richer, more textured, more nuanced, more literary. It becomes these things in the eyes of the beholder: the reader sees—and produces, generates—these additional layers of meaning in the act of reading, interpreting and relating the text to his own context. Not initially an easy concept to wrap one’s head around, certainly uncomfortable for authors, and theoretically not entirely unproblematic, but practically true as anyone who’s ever written creatively knows.

No Ordinary Boy is multi-faceted and layered in this way; readers will find their own meaning in it. It will be a different book to every one of its audiences. Jennifer’s own surprise at how ‘the story came together’ into a coherent, meaningful, flowing narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end is an expression of a new author’s initial uncertainty. The book, in a sense, discovered itself through various ‘false starts.’ She writes,

Before Owen’s death, I had planned to write a guidebook—an Advocacy for Dummies sort of book. I started the project many times, each effort ending in frustration. I eventually realized: I have no universal advice to give. No tips or tricks [...] If I wrote a guidebook, I thought, it would be relevant only to people exactly like me (No Ordinary Boy, p. 8).

So what is No Ordinary Boy, and who is it for? At the most surface level, it’s a memoir describing approximately a 13-year time frame during which Jennifer discovers that there are medical complications while she is pregnant with her first child which require multiple surgical interventions prior to giving birth. She learns to care for a very complex-to-care-for baby who gradually reveals multiple severe physical and developmental disabilities; embarks on a bewildering journey through various therapeutic, educational and healthcare institutions (sometimes because of severe, life-threatening crises, sometimes in the interest of improving Owen’s or his family’s quality of life); and eventually experiences his sudden death and her (and her family’s) grief in response.

On a deeper level, No Ordinary Boy raises and addresses several key issues about disability and its relationship with family, institutions and the world. Jennifer tackles some particularly difficult and uncomfortable questions, such as: What’s best for my family, which consists of more people than just my disabled son? Or: Who are we doing all this educational and therapeutic work for? And: How can I make decisions on behalf of someone who cannot express his own preferences? The book traces the author’s personal growth through key insight after insight. Jennifer’s formidable intellect and keen intuition allowed her to ask and answer these questions for herself—and in the process, I believe, forge a better existence for her son and family. She does not permit the relentless demands of caring for a child like Owen to suppress her searching mind in favour of merely soliciting empathy. She knows that we (family, friends, institutions, the public) would be all too keen to respond with sympathy and pat answers to ‘disability’ and its various challenges. But our offers, though well-intentioned, would be meaningless to a family like Jennifer’s. There is a chasm between us and families dealing with disability that sympathy alone cannot bridge.

Unlike those who believe that disability is by necessity something that requires an outward-directed advocacy—an imperative to tell the world and demand its response—I believe Jennifer finds truth in a somewhat modern adaptation of Carol Hanisch‘s feminist idea that the personal is the political. In contrast to Hanisch’s notion that there are no personal solutions to the problems of minorities or those at the margins, Jennifer’s journey shows that an intelligent, awake, critical perspective can and should be applied to the ‘common sense’ truths of medical, educational and therapeutic disciplines and institutions. By shining a spotlight on the ‘small things’ and questioning their relevance, applicability and wisdom at each step of the way, she shows us how the courage to know ourselves can bring about positive change—in ourselves, our families and our environment. Her focus, however, always remains on the personal first and foremost: she challenges herself to discover and apply the right or correct solution to every problem, not just the typical solution, and she looks to things under her immediate control first instead of asking the world to change in response to Owen’s challenges. Her chosen approach is much harder but also infinitely more productive than merely following what society and its institutions suggest; it is also genuinely valuable to everyone else grappling with the same subject matter—and that, of course, elevates it from the personal back to the political.

In a healthcare system that’s chronically unable to provide comprehensive, patient-focused, holistic and programmatic preventative and responsive care, it is up to the patient (or his caregiver) to ‘own’ the trajectory of his interactions with the system, to decide what’s best at every step—particularly if what’s best is not what the specialists are saying, or what the ‘system’ thinks. When it comes to therapeutic practitioners and institutions, it’s always best to ask who is being measured, and to what end. Jennifer describes how she gradually learns that (communications and occupational) therapists have their own quotas, metrics and objectives to fulfill which often have little to do with Owen’s development. Instead, attempts to help Owen develop a system of alternative communications (he could not hear, speak or use his hands to communicate) mostly just result in a lot of incredibly hard work to which the author (heartbreakingly) dedicates a number of years of her life, to essentially no practical avail (other than finally gaining the key insight that “[no] matter what I do, it will never be enough” (p. 109). The government requires that all children receive an education, so Owen goes to school for a number of years. Some of the more touching passages in No Ordinary Boy chronicle Jennifer’s discovery of how schools for disabled children ‘game’ activity reports sent to parents when the evidence suggests that disabled children actually experience few educationally or socially useful activities and are mostly simply ‘managed’ until it’s time to go home.

In each case, Jennifer eventually ‘opts out’ of the programming offered to her and Owen. This results in greater personal and family peace, a reduced-stress environment of her own construction consisting of providing Owen with educational, social and therapeutic experiences provided by a small, hand-picked group of in-home caregivers, many of whom have become our friends over the years. The final culmination of Jennifer’s ‘opting out’ is when neurologists suggest that Owen might be a candidate for deep brain stimulation, a new form of therapy that sees the insertion of a small electrode into the brain and delivers low-voltage electricity in order to achieve a certain (unpredictable) amount of relief from the involuntary muscle contractions Owen suffered from all his life which made caring for him extremely challenging. The parents decline, and Jennifer writes,

I left that appointment practically skipping. I felt I had passed a test, or resisted a strong temptation. Not because we decided against the surgery but because I knew we had reached the best decision for Owen, given everything we knew and all we had experienced, in spite of the forces moving us in a different direction. [...] With this one decision, I enjoyed a surprising new freedom. There was nothing left to hold out for, no more straws at which to grasp, no more hope for improvement, no more theories to explore, no further trials. Finally, Owen was just free to be. I have no doubt he felt just as much relief as I did (p. 139).

No Ordinary Boy, then, is the story of discovering  and experiencing individual freedom as the result of applying our critical faculties to the big questions we are challenged to answer in our lives. It is the story of a mother’s personal development and courage—not the ‘courage’ many people attribute to someone tasked with the Sisyphean task of caring for a severely disabled child (“I could never do what you do!”), but the courage to ask hard questions about every aspect of caring for such a child, and the courage to say no to following the typical trajectory, the path laid out by the institutions.

Asking—and answering—these questions requires tremendous strength, honesty and trust in one’s own abilities. It shows us the positive change that can come as a result of having the willingness to look at ourselves and our place in the world, and how to progress towards a better world—for ourselves, those who depends on us, and those who will come after us.  And that is what makes No Ordinary Boy relevant to all of us, not just to parents of children with disabilities, or healthcare practitioners.

*  *  *

I have so far refrained from commenting on Jennifer’s book as a written work. It is beautifully written, full of keenly observed and remembered passages brimming with natural, often elegant dialogue; relevant and witty internal monologues helping us understand complex medical or philosophical matters simply but never in a reductionist or dumbed-down manner. The author’s use of language is natural and conversational which should make the book well-received by, and easy-to-digest for, a number of different audiences.

It should also be stressed that, while No Ordinary Boy naturally highlights aspects of Jennifer’s and Owen’s story that illustrate some of the deeper philosophical issues it’s trying to address, it is by no means an incomplete narrative—or difficult to read. I imagine that parents of disabled children will find much to emotionally connect with here. They may recognize aspects of their own journeys in No Ordinary Boy—through the warmth, immediacy and confidence of Jennifer’s language and the ‘everywoman’ appeal of her narrative, especially evident in the early chapters dealing with the discovery of her difficult pregnancy and Owen’s first months in the neo-natal intensive care unit. It is, next to its intelligent and emancipatory message, also simply a great story that demands to be read.

*  *  *

No Ordinary Boy: The Life and Death of Owen Turney is available directly from Jennifer’s website or on Amazon.com.

I recently read this in an article in the Shambhala Sun, a magazine about Buddhism:

Here is another practice, rooted in Zen tradition, which you might enjoy. Sit down with someone you care about and have a cup of tea. The practice is just sitting and having tea and conversation for its own sake. Drink the tea together without an agenda, without wanting anything from the other person or trying to change them. That means not wanting them to think or feel differently from the way they do, without wanting them to appreciate you, or needing them to understand how you feel about them. Enjoy yourself. (From a piece by John Tarrant entitled, “Let me Count the Ways,” September 2011, p. 33)

I find myself buying Shambhala Sun quite often, lately. Trivially, I might say it’s become a guilty pleasure of sorts; the way one might buy an especially nice bag of coffee beans or a box of Belgian chocolates.

Guilty, because it’s hardly becoming for an atheist—an avowed religious skeptic with a decades-old penchant for expressing said skepticism—to buy a magazine of religious teachings. Yet: pleasurable, because the quality of thought and writing in the magazine strikes a chord for me almost every time I turn its pages.

I find myself drawn to its no-nonsense advice about becoming a better, more socially functional, more authentic person; about how to better endure suffering during the difficult times and be more conscious of the world’s gifts during the good. Grace, dignity, groundedness, being in harmony with our surroundings, developing an ability to let in the simple—and deeply frightening—truth that we are ultimately impermanent, as is everything around us (something I have had much recent occasion to experience): all concepts the Buddhist teachings I’ve read address very well.

As I grow older, I increasingly search for guidance that resonates with me because I’m better able to articulate what that is. The endless stream of self-help books (business or personal) that our culture produces mostly misses the mark for me. I believe they serve to trivialize teaching and learning; what was once the noble calling of moral philosophers has now been reduced to 20 new self-help titles per month, accompanied by showy performances on daytime talk shows. Thought as entertainment is about as nourishing as a burger from McDonalds.

I struggle with my discovery that much of the subject matter I’m interested in is primarily presented in a religious context—just not the religion I was raised in and that I rejected so readily (Lutheranism). Of course I know that Buddhism is different from other belief systems in that it seems to offer an extraordinary amount of freedom in how one might choose to interact with it, explore it, adhere to it. Adherence to doctrine may not be its central precept (though I don’t know this for sure). But I also read or hear about Buddhist activities that signal ‘organized religion’ to me and cause me to instinctively back off further engagement: hours or days of silent meditation retreats and other repetitive physical practices; the renouncement of conventional living to follow a monastic trajectory, chants and other activities to invoke the spirit of someone who himself wouldn’t have claimed to be more than an awakened, enlightened teacher.

I don’t reject religion with a young man’s need to be brilliant by being offensive to others anymore. I have come to deeply appreciate Christianity’s immense cultural achievements—in music, painting, sculpture, the art of publishing. Our culture would be nowhere without it. Rejecting it and its artifacts would be meaningless, unproductive, nihilistic. I am the child of Western civilization in every way, and I embrace it.

For years I fervently hoped to better grasp onto my poorly substantiated suspicion that it must be possible to argue for a universally true, secular set of ethical principles according to which we should conduct ourselves—in our private sphere, and publicly in our communities. Before I left academia in the mid-1990s (recognizing my increasing boredom with my graduate degree as indicative of any academic career I might eventually have), I had tried to synthesize a better understanding of Kant’s ethics through the lens of Michel Foucault, who himself (I think) held the belief that shining a public spotlight on certain otherwise unregulated exercises of power (deliberately hidden from view) might render them ineffective in time.

What was missing, though, was any real sense of why the public would perceive these transgressions of power as intolerable, and why it would be compelled to act once the truth had been exposed. Nobody could—or wanted to?—admit to the possibility that we all have a basic set of common human moral assumptions ‘built in’ that allow us to agree, in the moment, on what is right and good, regardless of our cultural, geographic or religious backgrounds.

Having been out of academia for so long now, contemporary philosophy is something I access through the popular media, if at all. (I’m moderately at peace with this mechanism; it’s fundamentally reliable if a little sluggish.) So it came as a welcome surprise recently when—courtesy of Jennifer‘s keen mind and New Yorker subscription—I heard about the British philosopher Derek Parfit.

Parfit, as I understand it, has just published a book he’s laboured on for fifteen years in which he tries to develop a philosophically sound, secular argument in favour of there being universal moral truths. The journalist Larissa MacFarquhar, who wrote the Parfit profile in the New Yorker, summarizes the main thrust of On What Matters as follows:

Parfit believes that there are true answers to moral questions, just as there are to mathematical ones. Humans can perceive these truths, through a combination of intuition and critical reasoning, but they remain true whether humans perceive them or not. He believes there is nothing more urgent for him to do in his brief time on earth than discover what these truths are and persuade others of their reality. He believes that without moral truth the world would be a bleak place in which nothing mattered. This thought horrifies him. (“How To Be Good,” by Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker September 5, 2011, p. 44)

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In a relativist world, this is immensely exciting. We are increasingly caught between the ongoing project that is modernity—in which indeed, as it turns out, nothing matters because there is no universal moral truth to anchor our judgment (or agreement on how to arrive at such a truth)—and the ever-increasing backlash of religious fundamentalism (Christian and Muslim alike), where universal truths not only exist but apparently need to be advanced by the sword once again, just like a thousand years ago.

What we variously describe as ‘pluralism’ or ‘postmodernity’ may be culturally entertaining to the rich and powerful but is also fundamentally unjust and destructive to the hundreds of millions who are not. Whether on a local, national or international scale, individuals and institutions struggle with how to make and justify moral decisions, and whether to assert them beyond their own immediate sphere of influence. Telling your neighbour to turn down his music when it bothers you causes no small amount of agonizing for a variety of reasons. An argument between members of different ethnicities or cultural backgrounds results in much private self-doubt (and sometimes, public outrage). ‘Tolerance’ becomes the yardstick by which everything has to be measured, and has also evolved into the primary weapon against freedom of opinion and expression. Our fragmented attempts at constituting our own moral authority in the international sphere are either short-lived populist movements (Band Aid, Bono’s debt relief, etc.), hollow treaty organizations that act without any genuine popular support (the United Nations, the International Criminal Court), or simply waging the odd war here and there.

How we feel about the future and about future generations is key to how we act in the present. “Parfit has always been preoccupied with how we think about our moral responsibilities towards future people. It seems to him the most important problem we have.” (“How To Be Good,” by Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker September 5, 2011, p. 53). Our ability to discover—and agree on—a universally acceptable moral truth that is not based in religion or the subjective views, preferences or indeed whims of every person will directly influence how well we leave the world for our descendants.

I am now sixty-seven. To bring my voyage to a happy conclusion . . . I would need to find ways of getting many people to understand what it would be for things to matter, and of getting these people to believe that certain things really do matter. I cannot hope to do these things by myself. But . . . I hope that, with art and industry, some other people will be able to do these things, thereby completing this voyage. (Derek Parfit in ”How To Be Good,” by Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker September 5, 2011, p. 53)

I’m not yet sure what my own contribution to Parfit’s “art and industry” may eventually be, but I have ordered a copy of On What Matters and I’m feeling strangely undaunted by the prospect of slowly working my way through its 1,400 pages. It seems like a discovery of tremendous personal importance. It purports to resolve one of the great “what if” questions I had often wondered about in my own intellectual journey. I look forward to being taught, and to seeing what I may do with what I’ll learn in the future.

This summer, we spent 10 days in London on a family trip. It’s a remarkable city that offers immeasurably much to see and do. No specific number of days would be ‘enough’ to see all of its significant sites, in part because — unlike New York — there are no natural boundaries confining one’s explorations. The closest thing we had was perhaps that our Oyster cards (London’s prepaid transit charge cards) limited us to zones 1 and 2 of the public transit system, which still cover a significant area.

To North Americans, London is an object lesson in evolving a kind of livable urban sprawl that remains, in a way, on a human scale despite its immense dimensions. The first thing that strikes visitors from the New World is how low the buildings are. Restrictions on building height are rarely lifted, and there are no condo towers and only a few corporate sky scrapers. The result is of course a city that looks usable, approachable, manageable.

In Toronto, we commonly take pride in having a ‘reasonable’ public transit system. But it’s only reasonable when compared to other places in North America that basically don’t have a transit system at all (such as Detroit or Los Angeles). London’s dense web of tubes, buses and regional trains puts even Germany’s public transit to shame. Sure, the tube is cramped at rush hour and you have to take a lot of escalators into the depths of the earth to get to your platform, but the net effect of the interconnected nature of the system is that there’s no single point of failure (both at the system level, and in terms of your personal travel options — there are always multiple ways of getting to your destination).

At surface level, it’s very much a walking city. To those of us unaccustomed to doing a lot of urban walking, it can be a bit of a shock to the system to be on your feet all day, every day. You do become used to it after a while though. In the inner city, everything is actually very close and easily walkable.

And the spoils of navigating at street level are myriad and wonderful: delicious restaurants, pubs and sandwich shops (offering healthy fast food) at every corner. Beautiful architecture as far as the eye can see. Markets, museums, parks, red double-decker buses, quaint (and basically unused) red phone booths, the South Bank. The bustle of Londoners and tourists dodging each other everywhere. (The dodging happens because Britons drive and walk on the left, and there are now so many tourists in London during the summer months who steadfastly cling to their own continental walking habits that the sidewalks turn into a very long and exhausting basketball game every day.)

We also spent several days visiting the ‘official’ sites. The Tower is surprisingly interesting and impressive, particularly the hourly tours led by a Yeoman Warder. The strange realization that every depiction of the British monarchy prior to the 19th century you’ve ever seen on television essentially takes place in the White Tower, which was the official residence until 1837.

The Victoria and Albert Museum was a revelation: I had expected something more like Toronto’s ROM (a hodgepodge of cultural artifacts, not-quite-art and not-quite-cultural-history). What I saw instead was a collection of some of the most priceless and timeless art, sculpture and historic craft I’ve ever encountered in a single building. (Even though I couldn’t quite shake the notion that the British were displaying everything they had looted in 400 years of Empire.)

The London Eye — built after I last visited London — is also well worth queuing up for (and it was a surprisingly short wait). It’s a marvel of technology and is much bigger than it appears in photos. I was so tickled by the sheer engineering achievement of the giant Ferris wheel that I’m afraid I missed taking in many of London’s famous sites while we were on it. I would go on another ride in a heartbeat, regardless of the relatively high cost.

Speaking of costs, I actually found London surprisingly affordable. The main cost, inevitably, is for accommodation. Acceptable (i.e. clean) short-term accommodation in London is possibly at even more of a premium than it is in New York. Our approach was to rent an apartment via VRBO.com, and so we lived it up in a South Kensington mews townhouse that left my Londoner friends somewhat speechless and assuming I was made out of money because nobody can afford to actually live in South Kensington (the per-person, per-night cost was still much lower than an acceptable hotel room would have been). The cost of food, however, seemed lower than it is in Canada, and perhaps somewhat more predictable because both taxes and restaurant service charges are included.

If it weren’t for the jet lag (I’m writing this blog post at 5:30 am), we would certainly visit it more frequently. It’s an unconditional recommendation and a must-see if you haven’t been.

Jennifer’s write-up and (much better) photos from our trip are here.

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Sometimes, it takes me a while to really start to like an artist. Beck is one of those. I have no excuse, really. This — and quite a few of his other records — is a masterpiece of a kind of modern, hip hop/electronica inflected pop. Beck has the same mastery of song craft that someone like Ron Sexmith has but his music is hipper and — it has to be said — more memorable.

Production duties here are handled by Beck and Danger Mouse. Danger Mouse is becoming the standard bearer of a new kind of pop classicism with techniques rooted in a DIY hip hop aesthetic, establishing a signature sound across the records he produces for or with a broad spectrum of artists such as Sparklehorse, Daniele Luppi, Martina Topley Bird or Gnarls Barkley. I’m starting to seek out Danger Mouse albums in the same way I might look for, say, Daniel Lanois (and it’s interesting to note that Danger Mouse is currently collaborating with U2 on an as-yet unnamed album to be released later in 2011).

In a nutshell, what I love about Beck is how he continually affirms that folk and hip hop are both part of the core of American popular music. They fit together beautifully the minute you stop thinking about it too hard. A few years back, David Gray made a big splash with his ‘integration’ between folk and electronic music, but it never quite worked for me. That was a case of someone thinking about it too hard — the whole music industry was in fact thinking about it too hard.

Beck’s career, and this record is just an excellent example, shows what can happen when you don’t overthink it. Folk + hip hop + a little 70s orchestration for hipster cred = 21st century rock ‘n’ roll.

When I first started blogging in 2007, the trend seemed to be that blogs should be narrowly defined and specific to a topic. I couldn’t see how I could reasonably blog about music and technology and consulting and food in the same place.

First there was Teabowl, a blog about music, food, books, traveling and that sort of thing. Then, there was Infowork, an ill-fated attempt at writing about consulting and Microsoft technologies (the field that I work in). When I started to realize that I had no place to talk about all the other things I’m interested in (business, politics, design, etc.), I started Changebowl.

Cleverly and quite effectively, I had created my own long tail, fragmenting the “Carsten content experience” to such a degree that even I was getting confused. You haven’t experienced self-inflicted stress until you’ve had three undernourished blogs stare you down every time you open a browser, demanding updates.

So I consolidated all my old blog posts into this new blog right here, reworking them where necessary and deleting those that simply weren’t doing it for me anymore (mostly old tech news and recommendations for products I’ve since stopped using because something better came along).

I will just stand by my “Renaissance man” persona and assume that my posts are either found via Google (in which case I believe the reader doesn’t care what else I blog about) or read by people who know me anyway and won’t be surprised when I follow a post about enterprise content management with one about death metal.

Happy reading, and thanks for staying the course!

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A review of Stephen Marley’s Revelation (Pt. 1 The Root of Life)’ (2011)

Voice-wise, Stephen Marley is definitely his father’s son, more so than his brothers Ziggy or Damian. He cut his musical teeth in Ziggy’s Melody Makers, then chose primarily a producer’s path — he is largely responsible for helming Damian’s solo records as well as 1999′s Chant Down Babylon, a collection of authorized remixes and mashups of some of his father’s most famous tracks featuring the cream of  conscious hip hop artists. Stephen consistently delivers (and may in fact be responsible for pioneering) a measured, intelligent and conscious (even spiritual) “new reggae” sound that remains true to reggae’s one drop roots while acknowledging everything that’s come since – dancehall, hip hop, etc.

This record has a lovely, meandering and — dare I say — summery feel to it. It’s by no means a collection of light anthems aimed at reggae tourists (far from it), but there is a woozy, dreamy quality to some of the tracks that (despite their often thoughtful and detailed political message) makes this play particularly well on a hot day.

There’s a broad spectrum of themes here, both musically and lyrically. On the musical front, the variations are fairly subtle. There are several rastafarian chants, scored — in typical 1970s reggae fashion — with hand drums and acoustic guitars. There are quite a few deep one drop anthems with strong tunes in the best Marley family tradition, played and produced with an impressive mastery of both the band and studio idioms. If the lyrics weren’t so sincere and the causes so noble, it would be impossible to completely escape the notion that these versions are almost cynically similar to some of the Wailer’s best 1970s material. Instead, I think the true accomplishment here is that Marley understands the classic elements of the signature sounds of reggae’s heyday so well, he’s actually able to produce authentic and charming new material that’s completely steeped in the tradition.

Oddly, the odd track out here is the first single, ‘Jah Army,’ featuring Damian Marley and Buju Banton. It has a choppy hip hop feel; while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s definitely the most contemporary of the pieces presented here and (for me, at least) doesn’t really work. I admit, though, that I struggle to wrap my head around Buju Banton’s presence on this record at all — he’s easily one of the most controversial figures in reggae, initially gaining international notoriety because of his openly anti-gay views and songs, and lately serving a 10-year sentence in a US Federal prison for conspiracy to possess and distribute approximately 5kg of heroin. As always when great artists also turn out to be despicable people, one struggles to reconcile the two extremes.

This Revelation shows us a panoramic, wide angle view of what reggae was at its zenith, and that those forms are by no means antiquated. According to interviews and press releases around its May 2011 release, Pt. 1 will be followed by Revelation Pt. 2, which promises to contain a wide selection of material that explores how reggae continues to exist, matter and grow in its various descendant genres today.

Also highly recommended: Stephen Marley’s first solo record (I’m actually surprised I haven’t reviewed it here before).

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An ear for music is very different from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever; I could not sing an air to save my life; but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

One of the reasons I think people without much exposure to classical music think they don’t like it or can’t relate to it is because they have artificially reduced the genre to orchestral music.

The most immediate sonic linkage for the non-initiated is film music: since the early days of the ‘talkies,’ we’ve been acclimated to a certain late romantic, big orchestral sound to underscore key moments in the cinema. The sound of 1940s, 50s and 60s cinema is best explained by the War in Europe and its associated wave of emigration to North America: a disproportionate number of film composers were European musicians who studied under Mahler and his disciples and fled their home continent in the 30s and 40s. They wrote what they knew: late romantic music. By unconscious association (or maybe downright transference), we have internalized this sound as the sonic imprint of ‘classical music,’ and now when we hear orchestral Beethoven, Schubert or Brahms, we recognize it and react to it.

Unfortunately, this misdirected connection taints much of (orchestral) classical music with arbitrary (moving) pictures which we may or may not have liked; called up out of context when we encounter the music outside of the film, we cannot help but remember the ‘music video’: the emotions it meant to conjure in that moment, the specific juncture in the plot line, our own preoccupations and memories attached to the movie-going experience.

Classical music, of course, is so infinitely much more than merely its ‘big,’ well-known orchestral or operatic works. There’s a whole world beyond conductors, symphony orchestras and divas.

Chamber music – through-composed music played by small ensembles without a conductor – opens up a whole world of listening pleasure. Regardless of its period of origin (the Baroque, High Classicism, the Romantic era or the 20^th and 21^st centuries), chamber music offers a number of key features that I believe would be very attractive to modern listeners for a variety of reasons.

Intimate scale – music for friends

Composers wrote chamber music for many purposes, but the two primary ones are key to understanding and appreciating it: to perform for and with friends in intimate settings (the home, the salon); and for pedagogical purposes.

In this way, chamber music is designed to speak to us immediately. Ideally, it should be experienced right in front of us and not in a concert hall 100 feet away from the stage. As recording and audio reproduction technology has become better, it’s now quite possible to ‘experience’ a chamber music performance closely – in one’s living room or headphones – close-miked, dynamic, impactful and present. Your ears, at least, can be sitting amongst the musicians anytime.

I like to imagine that many composers reserved their most important artistic work for chamber music because they knew that the intimate setting of the performance would promote a positive reception by an audience of initiates (their friends, peers and rivals).

Imagining an intimate scale – and picturing yourself close to the musicians so that you can not only hear them but see them and experience all the other sensations generated by their playing – certainly sets the stage for thinking about the connection between the human body and music-making.

Making music with the body, playing on a human scale

In chamber music – especially if it’s experienced live or well-recorded – we can hear how the human body is ‘instrumental’ in making music. No electronically generated sounds can be heard; nothing that is stored and triggered by means of a device that’s between the body and the instrument; nothing dissociated or technologically enhanced.

We can hear the human breath inhaling and exhaling; the rustle of clothing a tiny split-second before the beginning of a movement revealing the ‘synching up’ of the ensemble; the occasional thump of feet hitting the ground during a downbeat in a particularly intense or difficult passage. Some musicians (often pianists) can be heard humming along with the music they are playing (Alfred Brendel did this, for instance; notably, so does Keith Jarrett – but only when he plays jazz or improvisations, not in classical music).

Good modern chamber music recordings also showcase the grain of the instruments (particularly strings and winds): there’s a certain fragility, an impermanence, but also a distinct power and authority in running a bow over a violin’s strings (whether steel or gut). A piano in chamber music is so much more than 88 keys, strings and hammers: recordings frequently reveal the slight whoosh of the pedals being released, or the click of the pianist’s fingernails hitting the key a fraction of a second before the note sounds.

The interplay between this texture of the different instruments, which is quite separate from their pitch/register, is a very attractive feature of chamber music and reminds us of the human-constructed nature of the instruments being played, and the body parts involved in making music on them.

Chamber music, therefore, paints a sonic picture that should be easy to connect to because of its lack of artifice, its directness and naturalness, its relative smallness, its human scale.

I think those more accustomed to rock music can easily experience these pleasures by turning to other acoustic music, like bluegrass or folk, for many of the same reasons. There’s something important, primal and connecting about hearing highly skilled humans making music by operating instruments without any (undue, electronic) mediation – and hearing them make music together.

The difference with chamber music is that it’s written down and therefore ‘reproduced’ and not improvised or learned through folklore and oral tradition, as folk and bluegrass are.

Interpretation

The key to appreciating chamber music (all classical performance, really) is to recognize that every performance is an interpretation, and that what differentiates truly skilled artists is their ability to say something new and unique about the piece, even within the (apparently) strict confines of the written notes which – with the exception of a few optional repeats – may not be changed at all.

As a result, the scope for interpretation is subtle. But it’s by no means too subtle to hear or understand even when you’re unfamiliar with the written notes, particularly when you have the opportunity to hear different performances of the same piece next to each other (something our magnificent digital age increasingly makes possible).

Whether you like an interpretation or not is ultimately your choice; despite all the websites, books and classical music magazines I read, I find that I am still frequently unable to articulate clearly what I like about a performance. I do find that I have strong reactions, though; I know – often on first listen – whether the performance captured by a recording is a ‘keeper’ or not.

The parameters defining an interpretation that I think I can successfully detect most often are:

• Tempo
• Rhythmic coherence and drive
• Clarity of ‘articulation’ between notes, melody lines/themes, instruments
• Whether the performance communicates the overall architecture of the piece – does it congeal into something coherent and meaningful when I listen?
• How well rehearsed the chamber group appears to be and whether there is a certain sympathy between them – are they listening to each other and reacting to what they’re hearing? Are they adjusting to each other’s cues?

Listening and collaboration

For me, the key artistic achievement underscored by every good chamber music performance or recording I’ve heard is our human ability to collaborate by closely listening to others and adjusting what we are doing in response to what they are doing.

This is amplified by the narrow confines of the interpretive play in classical music: since both the overall shape of the work and the specific notes are ‘locked up’ in a manner of speaking, the group’s achievement lies in adjusting interpretive parameters that are very subtle and – to the casual listener – possibly quite hard to detect.

Often, of course, there is a ‘leader’ in the ensemble who may set the musical direction of a performance. But in the heat of the performance – and given the everything-laid-bare nature of a small group of musicians playing together at equal volume – even the leader has to trust in the group’s ability to listen, adjust and collaborate.

I particularly love the intense listening and collaboration required for accurately playing quiet ending chords together, often heard in slow movements: when the ensemble nails the pianissimo chord after a short pause in the music, it’s a breathtaking effect and a gorgeous reminder of how we humans are capable of genuinely paying attention to one another in a specific moment and not letting anything else interfere.

Together, chamber musicians regularly achieve something truly remarkable and enjoyable. I suspect we can learn much from this that applies equally in the worlds of business, politics and relationships.

Three recommended recordings:

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Or get the last one digitally, online at Hyperion Records.

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A review of Cee-Lo Green’s ‘The Lady Killer’ (2010)

Cee-Lo Green is that maddeningly brilliant, completely left-of-centre genius that only rolls around every few years in a genre. R&B has of course had its fair share of auteur geniuses: off the top of my head, Marvin Gaye, Prince, Bootsy Collins come to mind (and I would be remiss if I didn’t at least wonder if Hendrix belongs in that group, too; I’ve caught myself thinking his best work is more R&B than rock). Lately, new generations of the weird and wonderful have come thick and fast: Cee-Lo Green. Kelis. Janelle Monáe. Wonderful stuff if you care to find it.

Cee-Lo is a great melodist, first and foremost. His melodic invention seems to know few bounds: his stellar work with Danger Mouse in Gnarls Barkley showed that he could craft timeless melodies and lyrics — songs that indelibly embedded themselves in our musical memories, songs that were both the ultimate in radio-friendly pop and serious, funky R&B, at the same time. It’s a classic R&B sound to be sure: more Al Green, less Usher. More Wilson Pickett, less Chris Brown.

And it seems he learned quite a bit from Danger Mouse: his own productions have become more widescreen, more colourful, grander than they were prior to Gnarls Barkley. There’s a greater facility to the flow of the music, a greater ease with which it all comes together sonically. These are also thoroughly modern productions, employing the best technology has to offer (it takes a lot of tech to sound genuinely old).

Cee-Lo is both tied up and set free by his maverick public persona; be-hatted, giant-sunglasses, coats in wild colours, platform boots… Green is much larger than life, at least on stage. But the masquerade cannot possibly match the invention in his music. The Lady Killer is a classic soul album, a vivid technicolor Gesamtkunstwerk that deserves to find a place among the What’s Going Ons and Sing O’ The Times any day.

Like every great record, there are flaws; the (wholly calculated and anticipated) PR debacle of the single “Fuck You” and its inevitable re-casting as “Forget You” for mainstream radio’s faux public decency requirements seems an unfortunately misguided attention-grab. Great song, though.

In Part 2 of this post, I discuss my mobile tech (smartphones, tablets and such) as well as my music reproduction hardware. Part 1 (Hardware and Software) is here.

On the mobile front, I’m a happy iPhone 3GS user and have been for a while. It’s still a great device, and even though I’ve checked out the iPhone 4, I see no immediate need to upgrade. This is similar to what’s happening with my MacBook (discussed in the first part): the original technology is so well made that it lasts and lasts. A refreshing change from most electronics, and kudos to Apple for that. (It means that making disposable things isn’t the only way to be successful in hardware. I think to have proven that at the same time as becoming the second-largest US company by market capitalization may be Apple’s true historical significance.)

In terms of apps, here’s what sees the most usage on my iPhone (I am leaving out the experimental stuff, and the apps that I downloaded and never opened again but have been too lazy to delete). Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Evernote, Dropbox, Skype, Shazam, Apple Remote, WeatherEye, Kindle, XE Currency Converter, LogMeIn, Bump, Hipstamatic, Pano, Flickr and Starbucks (very useful when you’re in need of coffee). (I opted not to give you links for all of these. Just search your local version of the App Store and you’ll find them.)

I also have a first-gen iPad (16 GB, with 3G) kicking around. After the initial “oh wow” factor had worn off, I realized pretty quickly that this was no productivity tool. Despite my best efforts, I’ve found no reasonable way to write anything on it — note-taking or blogging aren’t really possible because the on-screen keyboard isn’t terribly compatible with my sausage fingers. And I know I could buy any number of keyboard contraptions for it — but that would sort of defeat the purpose of a tablet, wouldn’t it? It is, on the other hand, very handy for consuming information on the couch or in bed. I would like it to have a better browser than Safari (c’mon, let’s stop pretending that the complete lack of plugins, tabs and other trappings of modern browser-dom is somehow more than just laziness on Apple’s part). Finally, I like my iPad well enough but it’s not essential to my workflow. So I will not be rushing to my nearest Apple Store to get an iPad 2 anytime soon. Is there a pattern here…? I’m also quite happy with my iPhone 3GS which I’m not rushing to upgrade.

Apps on my iPod are more or less similar to those on the iPhone (see above), but I also use Reeder, Adobe Ideas and IA Writer.

Finally — and this segues nicely into the section about music reproduction hardware — I own two iPod Classics (not sure what the appropriate plural is here… iPods Classic? Classic iPods?), each with a 160 GB storage capacity. This is the best mobile music solution I’ve found if you want to be able to take a reasonable amount of music with you that’s been ripped at 320 Kbps or higher. I would certainly like to have a single, higher-capacity iPod, but I guess I’ll be waiting for a few more years. The rate at which flash memory is becoming cheaper seems to be slowing down, so I don’t imagine Apple will make a 500 GB iPhone available anytime soon. But I’m happy with my Classics. In fact, I’ve been thinking about stockpiling another couple of them just in case one breaks.

As for playing music back from my various computers, I have two primary setups that are worth discussing in some detail as they are the ‘culmination’ of a few years of evolution, research and (mostly) careful investment of not too much money.

I would consider myself less of a typical audiophile (I know people who will spend thousands of dollars on interconnect cables, and I’m not those people) and more of an ‘affordable audio enthusiast.’ I’m delighted by how the long tail economy has brought us an ever-evolving array of excellent audio equipment at the lower end of the spectrum, much of it designed and manufactured in China. Of course, the line between what sounds truly terrific and mediocre rubbish is pretty fine. Determining what’s what is only possible by spending considerable time reading online reviews and following discussion boards where other enthusiasts discuss their experiences.

My living room setup has been Cambridge Audio based for a number of years. I have had their lower-end Azur 340A integrated amplifier for a number of years now. While it doesn’t have a huge amount of power, my living room is quite small and it’s quick, analytical and musical — all great qualities. The amp is coupled to a pair of Totem Arros and a Totem Storm subwoofer. For a small space, I have yet to hear better speakers (well okay, ones that don’t cost 1000s of dollars more).

A delightful recent acquisition has rounded it out: a Cambridge Audio DACMagic. This has meant the difference between actually being able to use a laptop as a proper ‘source’ for my stereo and not. I had previously tried a number of different things: for a number of years I used a Squeezebox 3, which was fine until you really listen closely (it unfortunately has quite a few digital artifacts; I think this is because of the fundamentally unreliable nature of ‘streaming’ over a wireless network). I also tried the coaxial digital out on Apple’s AirPort Express, but that, too, had horrible audio artifacts (it’s possible that its analogue audio out is okay, I never tried that). The DACMagic sounds like a proper stereo component, has a full, musical line out and generally integrates very well with the rest of my system. It’s definitely a keeper, and a recommendation for anyone looking for an above-average way to connect a laptop’s USB port to a stereo.

In my home office, my Franken-PC (see the previous post) now plays its music back through a Beresford TC-7520 high resolution DAC. This is a fairly recent addition and has been the result of quite a few months of research — reading reviews, forums, and just generally following the market. I think there are now a number of similarly-priced devices available, but because I was specifically looking for a USB DAC with a good headphone amp and a variable line out (to connect to my active speakers), the Beresford really was the best choice in this price range. And speaking of speakers, I’ve discussed my choice of desktop speakers before: I am very pleased with the AudioEngine A2′s.

The Beresford has replaced an M-Audio Audiophile USB external sound card which has done respectable service over the years but whose drivers are unfortunately really rather poor and required restarting either the computer or the sound card with annoying regularity. It’s an okay device when it works, but it’s abundantly clear that the Beresford is significantly superior in terms of musicality, clarity, speed and sound stage, particularly with headphones.

My headphones of choice are two different Grado Labs models: the original SR-60 for portable use and the original SR-125 for use in my study. When out, I use an in-ear headset by Shure which has been consistently very good; nothing entirely outstanding but remarkably inoffensive with all kinds of music even on long flights.

And that’s about it. I will spare you more laborious discussions of things like digital cameras and TVs — both things I care for very little and as a result haven’t done too much thinking about.

“One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop.” — G. Weilacher

“It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” — Albert Maslow

As I’ve mentioned before, I love reading every new post at “The Setup.” I find it infinitely fascinating to hear about what tools people use to forge their paths in the digital world. Since I have neither fame nor notoriety I’ll never be on The Setup myself. But people ask me surprisingly often about what hardware, software and other equipment I use. In a way, I think this harkens back to kids comparing Lego sets or Magic cards. But I’d like to imagine that the question also expresses a deeper curiosity rooted in the growing realization that we ought to take seriously our tools as digital workers, similar to the way craftsmen and artisans respect theirs. (For an excellent, but only peripherally related discussion of work that involves tools to master the real world, take a look at Matthew B. Crawford’s brilliant Shop Class as Soulcraft.)

Here, then, follows an encyclopaedic and meandering discussion of the equipment and software I use. For convenience, I’ve divided this post into sections handsomely illustrated with open source icons from the Open Icon Library.

Let’s start off with my various computers. My main work machine is a late 2008 aluminum unibody 13″ MacBook 2.4 GHz (MacBook 5,1). After discovering — to my delight — that it unexpectedly became capable of supporting 8 GB of RAM after an undocumented firmware update released in 2009, I shelved any plans of upgrading to a newer model for a while. Recently also decked out with a splendid 240 GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD hard drive, it’s now screamingly fast and wonderfully quiet. The only issue one could possibly have with it is that its battery life is somewhat lacking compared to the newer MacBook Pro models, but I get between 3.5 and 4 hours on a full charge, and I think I’m okay with that for the time being.

My main ‘home’ machine is a Franken-PC DIY desktop clone running Windows 7. It’s been built and rebuilt so many times that it really doesn’t have any sort of brand. It sports a (beige! & discontinued) Antec case, an Asus P5QC motherboard, an Intel 3 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS graphics card (primarily because it has no moving parts/fans and helps keep the noise factor to a minimum) and 4 GB of RAM. It also sports an older Samsung 19″ LCD monitor that’s getting a bit dated (dim and small when compared to its newer, more luminous and bigger descendants) but is definitely good enough for general computing. Since this computer is used largely for ingesting and managing digital music, it has lots and lots (and lots) of hard disk space. I don’t quite remember off the top of my head, but there are three disks in this machine for a total of at least 3 TB of storage. Franken-Clone also has a Cherry keyboard and a classic Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical in blue (which I’m quite fond of). For more about audio interfaces, see Part 2 of this post (to follow).

Recently, I inherited a Samsung R530 consumer notebook (Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 and 15.6″ glossy LED screen). Since I got it, it’s been upgraded to 4GB of RAM (its maximum) and a 500 GB Hitachi hard disk. It’s found a permanent place in my living room as a dedicated music server/movie watching source connected to my stereo via a high-quality DAC. The main thing about the Samsung is that it’s simple, doesn’t require a lot of bloated or poorly written OEM drivers to make it work and has a fairly nice screen. I can respect a modest but capable workhorse, even though it’s not as pretty as my MacBook and I wouldn’t want to lug it around.

Next up: software. On my Mac, I run OS X 10.6.7 (currently at least). My browser of choice (all platforms) is Google Chrome with the Google Mail Checker, Google Reader Notifier, Mailto:Gmail, Rapportive, RSS Subscription, Shareaholic and Xmarks Bookmark Sync extensions (Xmarks is only to keep my bookmarks bar synchronized across all my machines; I actually use Delicious to maintain my bookmarks).

I also use Microsoft Office for Mac 2011, which I think is a great product (it has actually enabled me to be productive on my Mac in a Windows-only office). In addition, I use Microsoft Communicator for Mac to connect to our digital telephony and messaging infrastructure at work.

I also use Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac. In it, I primarily run a Windows 7 Professional virtual machine for work. Now that I have 8 GB of RAM on my Mac, I give it 4 GB to run in, and my SSD makes firing it up and operating it a joy. It’s basically almost as fast as running it on the bare hardware. From a software perspective, there’s not a lot on the Windows 7 VM other than Office, Internet Explorer, the Microsoft Lync client and Microsoft Visio and Project 2010 (not available on the Mac, and I don’t feel like paying yet more money to buy-and-try the Mac equivalents, which I’m aware of). Once in a while, I think about switching from Parallels to VirtualBox because it’s free and said to be good, but then I balk at how much work switching would be — and the fact that VirtualBox now seems to be “Oracle”-branded, which somehow calls into question the whole ‘open source’ label for me.

To round out my Mac software list, here are the smaller apps I use on a day-to-day basis: TweetDeck, Skype, FileZilla, Evernote, Preview (truly an awesome thing), iTunes, Balsamiq Mockups, SharePlus (a SharePoint client for the Mac), SnagIt, Carbon Copy Cloner, Cinch, Clocks, Dropbox (the best thing since sliced bread), Cocktail, Coconut Battery, Deeper, Expod, Handbrake, MenuMeters (to put the blinking lights back into computing), Simply Burns, TotalFinder, TextWrangler, Time Machine (another inspired piece of Apple software), Transmission and VLC.

My two Windows machines both run Windows 7 Ultimate. The Samsung R530 notebook literally only has iTunes and Kaspersky Antivirus installed — it’s meant as a pure music playback machine, so I try to limit what else gets to be on it to minimize digital clutter and the possibility of inadvertently loading up the processor with tasks it shouldn’t be doing when I want it to play back music. I generally recommend Kaspersky for anyone who is serious about protecting their Windows machines from malicious software (I don’t recommend their “Internet Security” product which I think is bloated and unnecessarily slows down unsuspecting users’ PCs).

The Franken-Desktop runs Microsoft Office 2010 with Visio and Project 2010, Google Chrome, Evernote, Dropbox, TweetDeck, winLAME, a really old version of Helium Music Manager for tagging and re-tagging MP3s, the really amazing Beyond Compare 3, IrfanView (a little piece of software I miss daily on my Mac… wish that someone made something like it for OS X), the BitTorrent client, Medieval CUE Splitter, Burrrn, VLC and Kaspersky Antivirus.

Files (other than music and movies) on my two work machines (the MacBook and Franken-Desktop) are synchronized using Dropbox whose virtues I cannot stress enough. Also, all my machines pretty much permanently have Evernote and TweetDeck open.

In Part 2, I will discuss my mobile and music equipment. Stay tuned!

If we accept that Gmail has become the de facto future of personal email and is starting to ensnare large numbers of business users (by virtue of being free or near-free, even for domain users), then anything that steps up its game in terms of providing better context for email is a welcome addition.

Rapportive is a script-based plugin for Gmail that works in most major browser platforms (Firefox, Chrome and Safari; Internet Explorer is not yet supported). Rapportive replaces Google’s right hand advertising side bar with a panel that shows you information about the person whose email you’re looking at — gleaned from various social networks.

You can ‘claim’ your own profile using the handy drop-down menu Rapportive inserts into your Gmail, or you can just let Rapportive import information about you from various social networks. Currently, the plugin integrates with several major social networking players for user information retrieval: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and Gravatar.

The key to understanding how it works is that it’s your data that’s being displayed to you — you give Rapportive permission to access the social networks you’re on and retrieve your friends’ info. In addition, I believe Rapportive also indexes publicly available information and shows it to you, similar to you running a Google search for someone who wrote you an email and retrieving their “everyone” Facebook profile view or public LinkedIn profile. (You should know that the initial ‘indexing’ of your data takes an hour or so, so don’t expect Rapportive’s profiles to be terribly comprehensive — or even complete — right away; it takes time to retrieve and store all your content.)

Of course, the power of this is immediately obvious: context. You can connect with your correspondents on various social networks from inside your Gmail inbox. You can also comment on something they’ve recently posted when you respond to them. Rapportive allows you to enter and store comments about your contacts. It’s sort of a “personal CRM” system (customer relationship management systems power call centres and phone salespeople everywhere) and significantly enhances one of Google’s main shortcomings: its terrible contact manager.

What’s perhaps most exciting about it is that Rapportive is a platform that can be extended via APIs and partnerships. There are already a number of third-party extensions available that use Rapportive to embed actual CRM software into your Gmail. Once it matures, there’s no doubt in my mind that it will become part of the new cloud infrastructure. I also wouldn’t be at all surprised if Google were to acquire it eventually to permanently replace its own contact manager.

Either way, highly recommended even though it’s still in beta mode. Another plus: their supportive@rapportive.com customer support is really friendly and interactive.