February 2021 – joemac.io

I remember the first CD I purchased. It was actually two CDs. One was Chumbawamba’s Tubthumper. The other one was Daft Punk’s Discovery.

There used to be a music store in Fredericksburg, The Blue Dog. They were known for being able to procure pretty much any CD or vinyl you could want, back when that skill had value. My dad had a lot of love for that store – you could ask them to crack open pretty much any CD you wanted, and they’d do it, and they had a listening area – a try before you buy – with some expensive cans and multi-disc CD changers, and leather couches. It was cool.

I was not cool. I was an awkward 14-year old with a blue Sony Walkman CD player stuffed haphazardly into the pocket of his cargo shorts. But I did buy some CDs, and I did have (plenty of) cargo shorts to fit them in, and I do remember buying Discovery, with its weird liquid metal album cover.

At that age, I didn’t know what electronic music even was. But this was great. A literal “discovery” of an entire genre of music I had never even heard of. Every track meant something. Every pulse, untz, and blasting synth. I couldn’t tell you the number of times I’ve listened to Discovery, and (like many nerdy teenagers) fell into the allure of Interstellar 5555, the trippy concept anime based on the album. Most other people I knew listened to other stuff. I have never been into other stuff. But I was always into Discovery.

When I was 16, I went to a youth tech program in California. It was basically a week-long camp for computer-y people about how they might become a CEO, or something. This was when Silicon Valley was a thing, but not a thing that you could make a TV show about and have people think it was funny. It was just a place where you could go to work if you were a smart person, so I’m not sure why my parents decided to send me to this thing. As part of this event, you could take a tour of some companies in the Bay Area. One of the options was Apple, so I went on a tour of the Apple campus.

No visit like this would be complete without a trip to the Apple company store. I remember buying a t-shirt with a grey Apple logo on it. I also bought (to the disdain of my parents, who funded this trip with a debit card) a small, white box with four buttons on it called an iPod.

“You bought a what?”

In these times, of course, you couldn’t get anything wirelessly, so I got some weird electronic music from a friend (hi Matt) by plugging the iPod into his laptop and taking whatever he had.

(Incidentally, that music ended up being, mostly, that of Neil Cicierega, whom you’ve heard of if you’ve heard of Harry Potter Puppet Pals.)

As soon as I got home from California, it was my life’s mission to get Daft Punk on this thing. Blue Dog was old hat at this point, so I pulled all of the songs off of Discovery (remember “Rip, Mix, Burn?”) and turned to the nascent iTunes Music store. That next year, Pepsi had a promotion where there’d be a code for a free song in the cap of every nth bottle of Pepsi, and if you looked up from the bottle upside down just so, and you tilted the bottle just right, you could see if you had a code. I bought a lot of Pepsi, and redeemed most of the codes for other Daft Punk albums.

Daft Punk always persisted. In college I had some money, so I bought Human After All from the iTunes Store and downloaded it onto my iPod. Human After All wasn’t and isn’t as good as Discovery, but it still had some bangers. I figured out ways to sneak Daft Punk songs onto mix CDs, and give them to girls I liked. This was a thing you did. Or I did. But it worked in High Fidelity, so.

The iTunes Store had stopped being so nascent by this point, and had become the powerhouse for buying music and downloading it to your iPod. The Blue Dog had closed.

Around 2006, Daft Punk announced they were going on tour, and releasing an album of the tour, Alive 2007. I bonded with one of my best friends (hi Brad) a great deal about Daft Punk and this album. An incredible production, though my age has made it sort of a tiring listen – it’s just so damn loud. Brad loved Alive 2007. It became a hallmark of the late 2000s that Brad would drive around College Avenue in Fredericksburg in his orange Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible, blasting it as loud as it could possibly go. You could hear Brad and his rolling disco from half a mile away.

Things blur a bit here. Alive 2007 wasn’t much of anything new, more original mixes of their existing stuff, but turned up to 11. I had long since moved on from blue Walkmans and iPods and was in a blue Civic Si, a fun car that had a CD player – cars today don’t even have CD players anymore. I had moved on to using Spotify, and moved up to Boston where I met my now-wife.

Then, when I turned 24, I heard that there was a Daft Punk movie coming out. It was called Tron: Legacy. I think Tron: Legacy is actually a fine movie. The soundtrack was the first truly original stuff from Daft Punk in a while, and it was mostly great – though there are some tracks in there that they had to make for the movie, and they don’t really sound like Daft Punk. By and large, though, it was solid stuff.

And they are in the movie!

I was at work when the teaser for Random Access Memories dropped in the form of a clip from “Get Lucky.” This was classic Daft Punk sound. The most Daft Punk of Daft Punk-ness, without Disney’s meddling. Then the album launched, and people were…confused.

Random Access Memories has gotten better with age. When I first listened to it, I thought it was weird. It was Daft Punk, but a new direction. Unafraid of the consequences, they made something they knew wouldn’t be for everyone. A concept in the same vein as Dark Side of the Moon. Less iconic, but certainly a grand work of art, and it did win the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2014. In retrospect, I know better now – that its old, weird sound, evocative of the late 70s and into the 80s was the point. It was eight years ago, but it’s easier now to look back on Random Access Memories and see it as album created in Daft Punk’s twilight. Maybe they saw it, too.

They’ve done some work since then – I remember hearing The Weeknd’s “I Feel it Coming” for the first time and saying out loud to my wife, “hey, this sounds like Daft Punk,” and she says “it is Daft Punk.” Because really, only Daft Punk sounds like Daft Punk. And sure enough, they’re in that music video too, as alluring and mysterious as ever.

I heard about the news today from none other than Brad. His text read “love is over,” with a link to the Pitchfork article.

“Daft Punk Break Up”

I watched the Epilogue video they put up on YouTube, where one of the duo decides to have the other activate their self destruct sequence. (Is that one Daft, or is that one Punk? Or are they both just what they are? Are we all Dafts and Punks?) Funny and bizarre, and a little surreal.

Then, the chorus from “Touch” comes into the focus through my headphones, and as it rises and falls, I feel my chest tighten and ache, the emotion comes to my eyes. Grief. The song cuts away, and I am left in an existential ennui. A reflection of my own self through music that’s been with me well into my adult life. A reflection of changing times and changing technologies. No more.

When you get into your 30s, you get to be old enough to lose things you care about. (Chumbawamba is gone too.) As time continues its inexorable march, the more of that lost stuff you hold on to. I remember the long road trips in my dad’s pickup truck to my grandfather’s old house in Pittsburgh, listening to The Doors, and my mom’s “cleaning parties” where she’d listen to Blondie. I am one of those people now, another one of the olds, still listening to “Aerodynamic” and “Human After All” and even “Around the World.” The gen-z’ers are already old enough now to realize that their elders are wrong and bad, as is the way of the universe. What will my son say about Daft Punk when he’s old enough to have a real opinion? “Dad, this is crap.” Maybe he’s right. Maybe everything we hold on to is just nostalgia, the idea of the thing. Like an ex-girlfriend. I hope I’m wrong about that, and that there really is something timeless to Daft Punk’s sound. We’ll see.

“If love is the answer, you’re home. Hold on.”

My son retreats into his iPhone 17, listening to the latest from whatever genre the music industry decides to remix from the past. The phone knows what he wants to listen to before he does. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift, greying, plays an intimate but sold-out show at The Birchmere. I get into my family-hauling vehicle and press the start button to the hum of the electric motor, and I ask it queue up Discovery. One more time.

This is one of those posts that isn’t that long, but since I have some aversion to Twitter threads I didn’t want to turn it into some “1/n” thing.

I’m going to start by talking about network requirements, even though that’s not really what this post is about, because network requirements are interesting and topical. The “new normal” has created some considerations/constraints on resources that most organizations don’t usually have to contend with, like “how do we deliver this service reliably to people who are hundreds of miles away and to people in our office at the same time?” At my place of employment there has been some discussion about network requirements and bandwidth needs for schools implementing hybrid learning; a school running teleconference equipment with teachers live-streaming their classes has greater network requirements than a school that doesn’t.

The typical solution to this problem is simple: overprovisioning, or buying more bandwidth than you think you would ever possibly need. For an organization of means, this is a fine solution, although inelegant if you subscribe to the systems engineering principle of “free capacity is wasted.” However, bandwidth is relatively cheap, and future use cases are hard to predict.

The typical thought process for capacity planning is something like “if I have 10 users who need 100mbps each, I need a 100mbps connection.” That’s wrong for a number of reasons, but most obviously, it assumes each capacity-consuming entity is using 10mbps all the time, which they almost certainly are not, even in 2021. However, there are other factors in play, and networks are bottlenecked all the way down to the endpoint.

This is actually interesting stuff; if you want to get into it, you have to dig a bit. I wanted to freshen up my memory on it, so I decided to do some of that.

I was fairly disappointed in what I found, which is an increasingly common feeling I’ve been having using Google. Google is becoming less and less useful, partially because I’d consider myself mid-career at this point, and I know what I don’t know. But Google as a tool is increasingly becoming a victim of the things that make it a viable product in the sense of “we have this thing and it needs to generate revenue.”

Anyway, after reviewing multiple sources, I found out that a pioneer of doing “network math” is William Stallings, an MIT-educated author who has written many books about computer science and systems engineering, and he writes about calculating network load in his book Local and Metropolitan Area Networks, which appears to have been last updated in 2000.

Bandwidth was not cheap in 2000.

My source for this information ended up being a Cisco Press text – Top Down Network Design – I accessed via my O’Reilly subscription. The O’Reilly subscription is an excellent and comprehensive technical resource. A Library of Alexandria, but for neckbeards. It is also $499 per year if you are an individual – I’m fortunate enough to receive a subscription to the service through my employer. Some libraries may offer it as well.

Google would have you believe that network capacity planning is a problem that can only be solved if you are one of many vendors leveraging inbound marketing and optimized SEO to provide your viewer a surface-level understanding, with maybe a smattering of technical information, of the content they are trying to understand. If you do a Google search for “network capacity planning” (without quotes) – of the first 10 results, 9 are vendors. On the second page, I get this result:

It looks like this would be pretty good, but (like many SEO-optimized inbound posts) it’s not really a “guide to bandwidth capacity planning.” More like “a list of bad things that will happen if you don’t pay us to do this work for you.” (God help you if you need to do work on your house and you search for something.)

What this marketing vehicle provides can be pretty informative, and is often engaging, but is not really a path to understanding, more of a path to purchase. To be clear:

I understand this is a valuable business practice, and some of this content is truly useful. Compared to the advertising of the early web, inbound marketing is much less sinister. It’s also easier. I used to ask vendors for whitepapers all the time. The information here is no different.
Most people are pretty good at knowing when they’re being sold something, especially when given time and space to read and reflect on it.
Almost all vendors set up the next step of the engagement for you, which is usually getting ahold of someone inside the sales organization of that vendor.

So what’s the problem? Getting paid is good. I guess.

The early internet was created and used for supporting defense programs and research institutions. A place where knowledge existed for the sake of knowing it. Like many things, capitalism has turned this model on its head. Rather than looking for information, many have leveraged the internet to placate an algorithm they don’t really have any meaningful control over, regardless of the quality of their content or its factual accuracy. The marketplace of ideas has become…a marketplace. The impressions seem to matter, the SEO, the algorithm, but little else. Whatever draws your eyeballs the fastest, not the best. This is dismaying, and has made Google less useful – which of course it would when you consider Google’s incentives as it acts as a mediator in this exchange.

Then, if you actually want to get to quality information, you have to pay for it, behind a paywall or an article limit or a subscription, like the one I used to eventually find the information I was originally looking for. I have some sympathy for publishers here as much as I have disdain, because quality content takes time, effort, and resources to create and distribute, and that effort should be rewarded. At the same time, these controls over information enable questionable content (in accuracy and intent) to thrive, for free. I don’t know what the solution to this is, because this problem seems intractable, but I imagine the solution will include free or mostly free access to the internet at some point.

Maybe this is all one big nostalgia trip for a bygone era, where we sat wide-eyed at our desks in college and embraced the quirky and unknowable “Web 2.0.” Before the machines of capitalization and monetization repaved the information superhighway into a toll road, adorned with billboards of the highest bidder. Garish, wide, a sort of subliminal horror. As I look in the rearview mirror, I wonder if this is the best we could’ve done.

Maybe I’ll try Bing.