Lost in Translation

I learned this today and it’s come in handy twice: Broken or severed headphone cables can be repaired with a utility knife, some electrical tape, and a lighter or matchbook.

1. If the cord isn’t completely severed, use the knife to cut it at the break; then cut again about half an inch in either direction. This will leave you with clean ends on the cord.
2. Very carefully slice around the cord about an inch away from the end. You should be cutting through the insulating sleeve around the wires, but not through the wires themselves. Once you can see the wires, use your thumbnail to pull the sleeve off and expose the wires. Do this on both severed ends.
3. Modern headphone cords generally come with one of two kinds of wiring: either copper wire wrapped around an inner core (with more wiring inside), or a set of three or four colored wires. Which you have determines which step you should take next.

   For copper wrapped around the core:

   • Carefully unwrap the copper and pull it away from the core (without breaking the wires). Then use the knife to even more carefully slice the core casing about 1/4″ from the end of the outer sleeve. You’ll expose a very slender set of wires, probably with some white insulating fiber mixed in.
   • Separate the inner wires from the fibers and snip off the fibers as close to the “base” as you can.
   • Spread the wires so that they’re pointing in opposite directions.

   For colored wires:

   • Spread the wires apart so that they’re as far from each other as they’ll go.
   • Light the lighter or a match and hold it to one of the wires. The wires are colored because they’re coated with enamel; the enamel will melt if you apply enough heat. Repeat this step for each of the wires, being sure to blow out the flame on the wire if it gets too close to the “base”; you want to have some color remaining at the base so that you can tell which wire is which. Do this even for the copper-colored wires; many manufacturers use clear enamel on that wire too.
   • Use a very, very sharp utility knife to scrape away the remaining enamel (which will be black and lumpy). Ideally you’ll be left with gleaming copper wire. You can also use solvent to remove the burned enamel.
4. Now that you have clean, separated wires, bring the ends together. Twist together each set of matching wires – one from each end per pair – as tightly as you can.
5. Make sure that the exposed wires don’t touch outside of their assigned pairs. (This is the other reason for leaving enamel near the base of the colored wires; the enamel is non-conductive and won’t complete the circuit like the bare wires will.)
6. At this point, plug your headphones in and test them. If the sound is satisfactory, continue. If not:
   • For colored wires, red is generally left channel, green is right channel, and copper is ground. If the sound is coming through both headphones, but it’s very quiet, you need to adjust the ground connection.
7. Once you’re satisfied with the sound, cut short lengths of electrical tape (no more than 1/2″). On each twisted pair, set the wires in the middle of a length of tape, with the tip just inside the end of the tape, and fold the tape over, producing a “flag”. Do this more than once if the exposed wire is longer than the width of the flag.
8. If you can do so without affecting sound quality, lay the flagged wires along the insulated cable and tape them down. (This provides stability and means there’s less of a chance of you accidentally banging a connection around.)

And you’re done!

“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adults themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence… When I was ten, I read fairytales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” – C.S. Lewis

Imagine that you have a large DVD collection, all of which have been given to you by well-meaning friends. Your collection requires several shelves. Each DVD case has a unique name printed on it by the friend who gave it to you, but the names are things like “movie” and “My Movie” and, if you’re incredibly lucky, “AScorseseMovie”. Every time you want to watch a movie, you have to figure out which one it is, and you have to do that by putting them into the DVD player and seeing what title screen comes up. If you’re feeling particularly enterprising you can then write the real name on the cover with a Magic Marker, but most of the time, frankly, you just want to watch a goddamn movie and can barely be bothered to put the ones you don’t want to watch back in their cases.

I download a lot of ebooks. Right now I have 238 PDFs in my “ebooks” directory, and that’s not counting the ones that I’ve downloaded but haven’t sorted yet (which is in the double digits). I’ve read most of the ones in “ebooks” – I’d say about 60% – and none of the ones in “Downloads”. The ones that I’ve downloaded but not sorted yet often have names like – I am not making this up – “download.pdf” and “My eBook.pdf” and “blogging.pdf”. These are not helpful names. These are names that are easy and convenient for the producer but have little to no bearing on the content or the source and are therefore of little to no value to the consumer.

Why is this so common? Because it’s easy and convenient for the producer. Maybe the producer assumes you’ll be reading it right away, so the knowledge of what PDF it is will be fresh; or you’ll be reading it in a browser, so the filename won’t really matter; or that this is the only ebook you’ve ever downloaded (believe it or not, I know one producer who relies on that).

But the truth is, people Save Link As… and then forget about it. Once a week when they clean up their Downloads folder they find “mygreatpdf.pdf” and decide to delete it so they’ll have the space for more downloaded episodes of “Laverne and Shirley”. Your ebook doesn’t get read, because your target reader doesn’t remember what it is, or from whom they got it, or why they even have it in the first place.

The important part:

Make sure the name of your ebook (or audio file or worksheet or whatever) is an accurate reflection of both the source and the content of the file. Sure, the consumer could rename the file to whatever she wants. But that requires opening the file, finding the name of the content (actually not always very easy), finding the name of the author, closing the file (since Acrobat won’t let you modify an open PDF), and renaming the file (“I double-click on the name to rename it and it just opens the damn file again“). Why take the risk that she’ll just say “eh, can’t have been that important” and delete it? It is trivial effort on your part when you’re making the file – you have to give it a name, after all, and you may as well give it a useful one – and significant effort when your reader is looking at the file.

As a brief follow-up to my last post, I’ll give you a quote from Colleen Wainwright (@communicatrix)’s brief but excellent review of Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code:

There is a little bit of luck to greatness—at least, there is in an uninformed world where we don’t know how to make “magic” happen. In quotes because of course, it’s not magic—it’s science and awareness and commitment (a ton of commitment) and love (so much love). But that is what The Talent Code is for: to get the word out there, to spread that love.

I ran across this panel in the comics page today, and couldn’t get my mind off it. I see this kind of unconscious condescension (and I do think it’s unconscious) all the time among people who are considered “creative” (and the reciprocal self-deprecation among people who aren’t). “You don’t decide to be an artist, you’re born one” and, conversely, “oh, I couldn’t draw a straight line to save my life, so I could never be an artist”. Guys, let’s stop this right now: the only thing preventing a person from becoming an artist is the lack of reinforcement for the process of becoming. In plain English: there’s not enough apparent reward to make us want to put the work in. In plainer English: if we’re not artists, it’s because we don’t want to practice.

Consider this hypothetical parallel (cribbed from Betty Edwards). Imagine that when a child arrived in preschool, she was given a book (no pictures, just words) and told to figure out what to do with it. No instruction, no examples. If, at the end of the day, she’d managed to piece together a few words, the teachers would label her “a reader” and encourage her to further develop her reading. Her parents would smile and say “oh, her uncle Dan was a reader – it runs in the family”. The other kids, the ones who hadn’t been able to make sense of the book (again, without instruction or guidance), would have mandatory, rudimentary classes throughout grade school, with assignments like “read this short story” – without any explanation as to how one was to do that – and by the time high school rolled around, reading would be an elective, taken at high levels by the “readers” and avoided by everyone else except to fill requirements.

If it’s unacceptable to think of reading that way, why do we treat art exactly as described? Show an early predisposition toward art, and you’re a “born artist”. Don’t, and you “just don’t have the talent”.

I’ll follow that with a caveat: I do believe that there are people to whom practicing a creative craft is more inherently rewarding than it is to others. At the same time, there are people to whom the practice of law is more rewarding than it is to others. I don’t think anyone would argue that law takes vast amounts of study and practice. Why would we believe that art is any different?

One of the songs I learned when I took piano lessons in my youth had the lyric “If I had even a fraction of Vladimir Horowitz’s talent, I’d practice all day”. It’s exactly the opposite: Vladimir Horowitz has his talent because he practices all day. Artists don’t draw/paint/etc. because they’re talented, they’re “talented” because they’ve spent years drawing/painting/etc.

Why do we persist in the “talent” myth? Because it’s reinforcing. Talent allows those with to believe that they’re special, that they possess a gift that separates them from the unskilled hoi polloi; and it allows those without to believe that their inability to do what they want to do is out of their control, instead of something to be worked past.

This is not to diminish the accomplishments of artists – far from it. But let’s recognize them for their hard work and real accomplishment – not for some imaginary “talent”.