Flagrant délit de manipulation

Il y a quelques jours, sur le parking d'un magasin, mon amie et moi-même avons été abordés par une jeune fille, peut-être une étudiante, nous demandant, sans introduction aucune, ce que nous pensons des jeunes qui "bougent" pour faire avancer leurs projets. "Probablement un sondage", me dis-je. Une question vague dont la réponse est pourtant évidente : nous pensons qu'il est positif que les jeunes s'impliquent dans des projets. Nous exigeons tout de même quelques précisions. Quelles sortes de projets ? Qu'entend-elle par "bouger" ? La conversation est engagée. Notre curiosité est piquée. Malgré nous. S'ensuit un discours assez bien rodé de la part de la jeune fille concernant une nouvelle publication réalisée par de jeunes écrivains et poètes. Qu'il serait bien cruel de décourager, j'imagine. Le numéro n'est pas vraiment bon marché, mais cela n'est pas un problème. En effet, il n'est pas nécessaire d'acheter un abonnement. La jeune fille est souriante et enthousiaste. C'est très efficace.

Je suis certain que, ce jour-là, de nombreuses personnes lui auront acheté ce qu'elle vendait. Et je serais peut-être moi-même tombé dans le "panneau", il y a quelques temps. De peur de décevoir la personne en face de moi. De peur d'être pris pour quelqu'un qui n'encourage pas les jeunes dans leurs projets. De peur de me contredire.

Et c'est bien là le fonctionnement du discours de la jeune fille : amener la personne, "librement", à n'avoir plus qu'un seul choix, celui d'acheter. Durant toute la durée de notre conversation, je n'ai pas cessé de penser à un livre que j'ai lu il y a deux ans et que je ne peux que recommander : Petit traité de manipulation à l'usage des honnêtes gens, de Robert-Vincent Joule et Jean-Léon Beauvois. On y retrouve les mécanismes qu'a utilisés la jeune fille du parking et bien d'autres : dépense gâchée, piège abscons, escalade d'engagement, effet de gel, amorçage, leurre, porte-au-nez, pied-dans-la-porte, pied-dans-la-bouche, pied-dans-la-mémoire, toucher, crainte-puis-soulagement, étiquetage, mais-vous-êtes-libre-de, etc.

Les techniques de manipulation sont nombreuses. Certaines sont évidentes. D'autres sont plus subtiles. Toutes sont régulièrement utilisées quotidiennement, en management ou en marketing, bien entendu, mais aussi, de manière plus générale, dans toutes les relations humaines. Nous n'en sommes tout simplement pas toujours conscients, car nous sommes tous des manipulateurs.

Alors, à quand remonte la dernière fois que vous avez été manipulés ?

"Little Miss Lover" sample in "Tick, Tick, Bang"

This is old news, but, a few days ago, I was listening to Jimi Hendrix's "Axis: Bold as Love" album for the first time in my life (yes, I know: shame on me) and it struck me: I had already heard the drum introduction to "Little Miss Lover" (MP3 excerpt) somewhere. Once again and as it was the case with Roger Limb's "Passing Cloud" track, I heard it in a Prince song, "Tick, Tick, Bang" (MP3 excerpt), from the "Graffiti Bridge" album, released in 1990. You can clearly hear Mitch Mitchell's drums throughout Prince's song. As you can expect from Prince, the sample is not credited.

Note that you can hear the sample more prominently in the 1989 unreleased version of "Tick, Tick, Bang" (MP3 excerpt), as most of the extra instrumentation is missing. As for the 1981 unreleased version (MP3 excerpt), it uses live drums instead of a sample.

Any other interesting samples I've missed?

Rivella Jaune + Ragusa Noir = ?

La Suisse est un pays calme et il en faut peu pour avoir l'impression de vivre une révolution. Je suis pourtant relativement hermétique à la publicité, lis très peu les journaux et ne regarde presque jamais la télévision, mais il m'a été impossible d'ignorer ce qui pourrait bien être l'évènement majeur de la fin du mois d'août en Suisse : l'introduction sur le marché du Rivella Jaune et du Ragusa Noir. Tout le monde en parle, je n'ai pas pu y résister : il m'a fallu y goûter. Résultat des courses : contrairement à la fondue pour micro-ondes, le Rivella Jaune et le Ragusa Noir sont parfaitement comestibles. L'honneur est sauf. À quand le nouvel Ovomaltine ou le nouveau Cenovis ?

How to make a bootable USB key with a Debian installer from Windows

This is something that should be obvious, but I managed to lose several days on this problem. I wanted to install Debian on my brand new mini-ITX server (with no CD/DVD drive, only several USB ports and an SSD drive), but I only had a Windows machine available. These are the steps I followed:

1. Download NTRawrite.
   
2. Download syslinux. The file that you need is syslinux.exe. It is located in the "win32" folder of the ZIP archive you downloaded.
   
3. Download a Debian installer, e.g. the current installer for Lenny.
   
4. Download a "netinst" ISO image for Debian, e.g. the most current image.
   
5. Uncompress boot.img.gz.
6. Format your USB flash drive, using FAT16, if possible.
7. Use NTRawrite to write boot.img to the USB flash drive. Just launch NTRawrite.exe, enter "boot.img" and the drive letter of the USB flash drive. This step can be quite slow.
   
8. Use syslinux to make the USB flash drive bootable. Just launch syslinux.exe with "-F e:" as argument (replace "e" by the drive letter of the USB flash drive).
   
9. "Safely remove" the USB flash drive and put it back (I'm not sure this step is mandatory/useful).
10. Copy the ISO image to the USB flash drive.
11. "Safely remove" the USB flash drive again. Voilà. It is ready.

If, for a reason or another, you don't manage to boot on your USB flash drive, try formatting it using HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. It might help.

Delia Derbyshire and Prince (Jamie Starr's a thief)

I admit it: I like bootlegs. They're a way for me to stay interested in musicians that don't release music as often as they promised (Prince) or that don't release any music anymore (Miles Davis). From time to time, they also contain a few surprises.

Last week, I was listening to a 2-CD bootleg called "Wow!", released in April 2008 by "Eye" Records. Nothing too special, but, at the end of the second CD, a track particularly caught my attention. It was an instrumental recording, not by Prince, but by someone called Delia Derbyshire, which I had never heard of before. I quickly learned (thanks to Wikipedia) that she was a British musician, a "pioneer of electric music", whose best-known work is the theme music to Doctor Who (MP3 excerpt), first recorded in 1963.

What struck me was that the track I was listening to, "Clouds", by Delia Derbyshire (MP3 excerpt), was something I had heard many times (maybe even hundreds of times) before. It was the beginning of my favorite Prince album of all time, "Lovesexy" (MP3 excerpt), released twenty years ago, in 1988, without the synthesizers, sound effects, and Ingrid Chavez' "poem". Listen to the MP3 excerpts. You should notice the similarity...

Apparently, "Clouds" was part of a project called "The Dreams", recorded in 1964 (according to Wikipedia) and it circulates on a 131-track compilation entitled "Complete Works Compiled", possibly a bootleg (according to a thread on housequake.com).

Conclusion: the first seconds of "I No", the opening song on "Lovesexy", are not Prince on synthesizers, as I had always assumed, but the (uncredited) work of Delia Derbyshire, who didn't use any synthesizers, by the way!

The questions that remain are: how did Prince get ahold of this (officially unreleased?) recording and did he use it with permission?

(One last detail, for the non-Prince fans: Jamie Starr is one of the many pseudonyms Prince used in his career. He's cited by Prince himself in "D.M.S.R.".)

Update (May 14, 2008). After listening to "The Dreams" (1964), it appears quite clearly that "Clouds" is not part of that recording. According to a thread on prince.org, "Clouds" probably comes from one of the sound effects collections released by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. My guess: it might come from "Out of This World", but listed under a different name. If you know the exact release on which "Clouds" appears, please let me know!

Update (May 24, 2008). I just had a listen to the "Essential Science Fiction Sound Effects, Volume 2" CD. Track 61, "Passing Clouds", credited to Roger Limb, not Delia Derbyshire, is the track Prince used on "I No". This CD is the 1991 reissue of the 1976 LP "Out Of This World". The conclusion is that Prince just used this track from "Out Of This World". Since this is a compilation of sound effects, he didn't have to ask for permission or to credit anybody. End of the story. Or, almost. The only question that remains is: why did "Eye" Records wrongly credit "Passing Clouds" to Delia Derbyshire? The likely answer is: because they're bootleggers and they make that kind of mistake very often... Anyway, I've updated the articles on Wikipedia.

A user manual for my life

Today, I read a post by Dustin Wax titled "I Need a User Manual for My Life!":

"I was doing something routine a couple of days ago — paying some first of the month bills online — and I got stuck. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the name of one of the people I send payments to. All the information is saved in my bank account’s settings, but I have to enter the name of the recipient, exactly as it appears in my records, to bring everything else up. That’s when it hit me: I need a user manual for my life!"

A user manual for my life... I really like that wording. I had never thought of it that way. I've started writing my own "personal user manual" a couple of months ago. Like many people (I guess), I already had checklists, such as a travel checklist, i.e. a list of things I need to do or take whenever I leave home for more than one day, but I quickly realized that I needed more. So, I started writing "how-to" lists for tasks I need to do regularly. These lists usually consist of pointers to Web sites, names of utilities, command lines, etc., but I suppose that, as time passes, they will include more non-technical stuff.

The idea here is to centralize all that information in a single place. For me, that place is Google Docs. This is where I already have my to-do lists and GTD-related documents, among others. The advantage of Google Docs is that the documents can easily be accessed, modified, shared, exported, or printed. At some point, I thought about using a personal wiki, but Google Docs is just ideal, after all.

So, next time you have to spend more than a couple of minutes to do something, because you don't know how to do it, ask yourself if this is not the perfect time to start writing your own personal user manual!

Read "Getting Things Done": done.

I've finally read Getting Things Done, the famous book by David Allen. It took me six months to finish it, which is a pretty long time to read a 267-page book. There are several reasons for that:

• The book is too long. Let's admit it: it is sometimes a bit repetitive and I'm pretty sure it could have half as many pages and still contain all the necessary points and ideas needed to understand the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. I know another writer who tends to write long books: Ray Kurzweil. I guess he and Allen, among others, are so excited about their ideas, in a way, that they feel the need to repeat them over and over.
  
  
• I had been implementing GTD for a long time without even knowing it. At least partially. I've been making to-do lists for a very long time. I still have handwritten lists of project ideas dating back from the time when I was programming on Atari computers (i.e. when I was 12-15 years old). The result is that a lot of Allen's ideas sounded quite familiar to me ("I like lists. Don't try to convince me that lists are good."). Somehow, the fact that these concepts weren't completely new to me didn't encourage me to read Allen's book more quickly.
  
  
• You don't have to wait until you reach the last page to actually implement GTD. You can change the way you already organize your work as you progress into the book. That's what I did.
  
  
• There are a lot of GTD resources on the Web. I've watched videos and subscribed to blogs about GTD. A lot of these resources sum up quite effectively what GTD is about. Again, it didn't encourage me to finish the book.
  
  
• Allen's book is starting to get old. It's from 2001, after all. Most of his examples are related to paper- or Outlook-based organizational systems. Since I hate both paper and Outlook, again, it was a turn off. Isn't it time for a new edition of Getting Things Done? Or are the Web resources I was talking about sufficient?
  

I will definitely post further articles about the way I'm implementing GTD. I've already dedicated almost two whole days to completely rewrite my personal to-do list, a few weeks ago. My professional to-do list is now also "GTD-compliant". Okay, here's a spoiler: I use Google Calendar for my calendars/reminders and Google Docs for all my other lists/reference documents. It's simple, but effective. Nothing original, I guess. At least, I no longer use e-mail for my to-do lists, and I've learnt the importance of clearly separating my input baskets, my "as soon as possible" actions, and my "someday/maybe" actions. You don't need complex tools to implement that. Only discipline.