matsu

instant gratification

Well, this photograph is not only about instant gratification. It’s also about the value of good things.

This is my second pair of Red Wing 2233 boots, which I bought 14 years ago in 1996, and which are my weekend boots for general mayhem and destruction (I have a pair from 2003 which I use during the week). This is the part about the value of good things – sometimes it’s cheaper to buy more expensive but excellent things, as long as you take just a bit of time every now and then to take good care of them.

Which brings me to the title and the question of instant gratification – the boot on the right was exactly like the boot on the left before I spent ten minutes caring for it with lots and lots of shoe polish, and a good brush. Ten short minutes to go from a wreck to something absolutely stunning. This feeling of instant personal realization is priceless for our self worth, considering that we have jobs where the time scales between starting something and seeing (or not) the fruits of that labor can be measured in weeks, months, or even years.

That’s why it’s great to have a few things in life that are this quick and fulfilling.

[originally posted on my Flickr stream]

My artist’s manifesto

All artists, sooner or later, must make a manifesto, or in my case, a counter-manifesto. Chalk it up to youth! Here it is:

The Value of Things

Value is a complex thing. Either in a currency system, or in a system of barter, value is something that must be discussed, negotiated, settled. It depends essentially on the ratio between offer and demand, and offer depends on the scarcity of each of the components that make up each good or service. Demand is even more complex, depending on what is needed, but increasingly, on what is wanted.

The evolution of scarcity

In great part, the history of Humanity is the history of technology. Fire is technology. The wheel is technology. Writing, mathematics, farming, bureaucracy – they’re all technologies. And technology upsets the status quo of what scarcity is. The wheel made distance a less expensive commodity. Gutenberg made information so simple to disseminate to the point that it transformed something easy to safeguard to something easy to copy. The loom made textiles worthy of a King available to the poorest. And technology keeps its relentless pace.

The evolution of demand

Producers of goods and services, to safeguard their livelihoods in the face of dwindling scarcity, created fashion. It’s just the simple act of creating “wants” where before there were “needs”. It’s fashionable to have the latest clothing. To live in the best places. To have a finer car. You don’t need any of those things, it’s all a question of what is fashionable.

Meta Evolution

Digital is the meta invention. Digital + The Internet are the Gutenberg press squared. Cubed. What once was made easy is now completely effortless. If you can describe it or scan it, you can make it available to the world, and thanks to the search engines, if you tag it well, it will be found by those who need it (or merely want it). Even if you’re just copying what someone else created, even without their consent.

The Problem

If an artisan spends a considerable percentage of his/her time creating something physical, if you just go and grab what they created, it’s theft. In part because it’s easily enforceable (you can lock physical things up) and also because it’s our culture, of property of physical goods. If an artisan spends a considerable time creating something that can be scanned or is natively digital, and wants to sell it, the buyer can easily duplicate it. Physical goods vs. Informational goods. They’re very different (and even the design of physical goods is usually easily replicated).

Trying to stop the ocean

The intellectual property industry’s reaction was to try to lock content up with DRM (Digital Rights Management). Millions were spent trying to lock what can’t possibly be contained. What they didn’t understand is that it takes only a single copy to get freed to be replicated endlessly to everyone who wants it. Basically it was a big and shortsighted waste of money.

An opportunity

Instead of fighting what can’t possibly be fought, some intelligent people created the Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) – basically, the expanse between “All Rights Reserved” (full copyright) and “No Rights Reserved” (placing something in the public domain). Instead of only having only the extreme options, they created several types of machine/people/lawyer readable legal licenses under which you can license what you create. Want your work to be available for free, but only for non-commercial uses? But not used in derivative works? But you insist on having it attributed to your name? No problem, Creative Commons licenses have it covered.

For free? Why?

Because the money to be earned is not on things that can be copied. That’s a lost battle. If you’re a musician, you can make more money on concerts and events. If you’re a photographer, more money can be made by shooting specific assignments for customers, or on photography workshops. If you’re a writer, you can make more money by participating as a speaker at conferences. The era of making something and making your livelihood from just selling copies of it is nearing its end. And getting your creations known to the widest possible audience is the key for getting work that can’t be replicated.

Summing up

This is the reason why I don’t create single copies of my photographs or limited editions. I want people to enjoy my photography not because it’s scarce, but because they like it. I do sell signed and numbered copies (limitless editions only), but only for the people who voluntarily want to financially support my art. Don’t buy it as an investment – buy it because you enjoy it and want to see more of it! Everyone else is welcome to just download and use (non-commercially) my photographs any way they like it – on your computer desktop, on your blog, by printing and hanging it on your walls!

You can visit my portfolio at pedromourapinheiro.com

Codebits 2009

For those of you who don’t know what Codebits is, it’s a three day international event of programming and hacking held every year by Sapo, with talks, workshops, quiz competitions, a 24 hour team coding contest, and a live music show (this year by pornophonique). It’s free, and it hosts, feeds, and powers (two full time generators for all those multi-core laptops) around 600 participants for three days of fun, work, meeting people, and lots, lots, lots of pizza.

Although I’m not a real programmer, I submitted a LEGO Mindstorms NXT project, and we ended up being the biggest team, with nine members!! Here’s the video:

And besides the project, I had two very unique experiences: first, meeting Mitch Altman and buying a TV-B-Gone kit and assembling it right there and then with his help, and the second, meeting the people from AltLab, Tiago who I had met before at Twittlis, and Catarina, who were demoing their Makerbot Industries open source 3D printer.

Putting 2 + 2 together, I managed to challenge Catarina to design and print an enclosure for my assembled TV-B-Gone, right there at Codebits!

TV-B-Gone inside an enclosure printed on a MakerBot Industries CupCake CNC.

If you have your own 3D printer, you can download the model files here, and print your own TV-B-Gone enclosure!

Kids, *this* is the future, and you probably saw it here first!

The bad design from 20 years ago, today!

Look at the cover from this “business” pocket guide which was given for free with a Portuguese business newspaper, no words are good enough to describe it…

This would have been bad 20 years ago...

The graphics inside suffer from the same design genius.

The value of autonomy

I’m often reminded of my third and fourth grade teacher, Mr. Reis.  We went to our summer holidays after the second grade in shock when we learned that he’d be our teacher for the next two years – for he was known to be the most strict teacher in our school.  He was already 76 years old when I became his student, and he had also been my father’s teacher thirty years before.  And yes, he was a no nonsense teacher

This story is almost 25 years old, and fortunately I still had the privilege to meet him and his son by accident a few years ago before he passed away, to thank him and tell his son how important the lessons he taught were for me and the person I am today.  It was not what he taught though, it was how he did it.

Now that I see it through the eyes of an adult, his system was brilliant.  The only thing that had a scheduled time of the day was dictation (obviously), the rest was our responsability.  Yes, he gave eight year olds responsability.  He’d write up on the blackboard the day’s chores and exercises on the various subjects, and transcribing it to a specific notebook was the first thing we did in the morning.

It was then up to us to follow whatever order we wanted to accomplished the set tasks.  If we finished everything before the day was over, we had a bookcase full of classic comic books we could read (Tintin, Asterix, Blake and Mortimer, Lucky Luke, etc.); if we didn’t finish, whatever was left was our homework.  He changed the amount of work from day to day, both in amount and complexity, to allow all students to experience the excitement of not having homework, and to slowly goad us into greater productivity; other days he gave enough work that nobody could ever avoid taking it home.  He was quietly present in the background, correcting the previous day work, there to answer all questions we might have.

At the time we couldn’t really understand the value this system had, it was more of a drag (even with the possible reward) than anything else.  It was only years later that I realized how much of a difference those two years made on everything else later in my life.

Thank you, Mr. Reis.