Disk-a-bob

3 Great Names! 1 Great Product!
Disk-a-bob
Disks-on-a-Stick
Shish-ka-disk

10/4/97, 9:30 p.m. Began "25 is 27; 27, 25"; pried open 35 diskettes in my suburban garage under a fluorescent light fixture with a Swiss Army knockoff pocketknife.

In the beginning, there was the garage

How many things begin in suburban garages? How many end there?

Trash-Picking for Fun and Profit I found the 35 diskettes at my office, in a box next to the trash. The disks were manufactured for an external survey my company periodically mails. They were labled "Software Diskette 1 of 1" and "Copyright 1994 [my company name]."

Executive Deniability

So if you're looking for 35 disks, hey, it was me.

My company shall remain nameless; I like my job, thank you, and the last thing my boss needs to worry about is conceptual art.

Color The disks are bright orange.

Relevance This is not important.

Seriously

Electronic writing may not take itself seriously, states Jay David Bolter, but the media on which electronic texts are inscribed certainly do. Not only the PC itself but the diskette prides itself on reliability, long life, storage capability, accuracy, imperviousness to the elements or time. It's not impervious, however, to hardware changes: Let us now praise famous 5 1/4 disks.

Sharp

Nor is it impervious to a reasonably sharp pocketknife.

Deconstruction/Deacon-jonesion Electronic texts cannot be deconstructed, concludes Bolter, because deconstruction requires a fundamental seriousness in object. I took that as a challenge. I wanted to figure out how to deconstruct electronic text--text that is already pre-deconstructed for your convenience, that is its own enemy. Which is why I turned to the fundamentally serious three-point-five-inch diskette and began the process of what I called, for lack of a better name, deacon-jonesion.

Deacon Jones

Retired pro football player Deacon Jones was a defensive end and member of the "Fearsome Foursome." He is credited with inventing the term "sack" in 1967 to describe the devastation he wreaked (deaked?) on opposing quarterbacks.

How to Deacon-jones You can deacon-jones a disk in many ways and with many tools, including a 12-inch circular saw. For my purposes, careful work with a knockoff Swiss Army pocketknife worked best, allowing me to open the disk without damaging the soft, absorbent, Charmin-esque surface across which the actual disk rotates. Picture a disk ready to insert into a drive; its four corners are labeled north-east (NE), north-west (NW), south-east (SE), south-west (SW):

First, pry off the metal "slider"
Then, pry open the SE corner.
Pry open the NE corner; now you can slide out the round black disk itself, onto which the data are written.
Pry open the NW corner (the spring that holds the metal slider should pop out)
Finally, pry open the corner with the read-write tab (SW), which should pop out.

I also popped out the round metal slug at the center of the disk, in order the fully realize the "Disks-on-a-Stick" concept. The slug is held in place with a thin coating of rubber cement, which is easily rubbed off between thumb and forefinger.

Please Don't Reinscribe the Charmin

Initial efforts to inscribe this paper-towel-like surface proved difficult. Ball-point, felt-tip, pencil, applied with various pressures and tracings, led in almost all cases to blurred, illegible letters.

Mr. Whipple: Irrestibly illegible!

} diskombobulated

Overwriting With my ball-point or felt-tip or pencil, I'm trying to overwrite manually what's been written digitally, magnetically, electronically, in a series of zeros and ones not visible to the human eye, on 6/30/94 between 1 and 2 pm. . .

8 files total, 3 batch, 5 executable.
Free 266,240 bytes
used 460,421 bytes

My knockoff Swiss Army pocketknife and I have now freed all that space, all 3.5 inches, ready to be reinscribed, overwritten.

In these senses, transparency and opacity are opaque terms; they can mean one thing, or its { opposite.

An Opaque Lesson Learned

If you want to know something, take it apart. Thoreau wrote in Walden of his increased understanding of and communion with trees, having chopped down several in building his house in the woods. What did I learn by deacon-jonesing 35 disks? I have a better understanding of how a disk fits mechanically in the drive, and what's happening when the green light comes on and the black round surface is written to or read. But past this point a disk cannot be reduced, and therefore remains opaque.

In "A Tale of Two Aesthetics," a chapter of Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle writes of the "transparent" IBM versus "opaque" Macintosh styles. The first allows users to tinker beneath the surface, "under the hood"; the second restricts users to the graphical user interface. But we could also say that the IBM aesthetic is opaque because it relies on obscure, user-vicious codes, and the Mac ethos transparent because it's comparatively clear.

Fun with Mathematics

Each read-write tab on each disk I deacon-jonesed is inscribed with "DW1" above a number between 1 and 28 (in my sample, anyway). On the 13th disk I deacon-jonesed, I noticed and began recording the numbers, which came up in the following order: 27 (the day of my birthday, and my favorite number, because it is the first four-syllable number), followed by 14, 12, 3, 17, 18, 27 (again), 28, 17, 13, 1, 2, 27 (yet again), 15, and 25. The last eight numbers (equal to the number of files written on the disks) were 21, 8, 17, 10, 20, 5, 20, and 13.

Oh, another numeric thing--the yellow bars in this and related pages were constructed by writing a table with table data (td) widths of 1%, 2%, 3%, etc, through 27%.

Department of Meaningless Observations: The read-write tab is shaped like a TV on a rolling cart.

this space intentionally left blank.

sort of a moebius strip thing going down. {

More Fun with Mathematics

When writing the 26 parts of 25 is twen*ty-sev*en; twen*ty-sev*en, 25, of which each line is no longer than 27 characters, I used the DW1 numbers from the deacon-jonesed disks to designate uppercase/bold a given character in each line, if one existed. So beginning with the 13th section, "m/z," I marked the 27th characters uppercase/bold (there were none), marked the 14th characters in the 14th ("n/z"), the 12th characters in the 15th ("o/z"),
the 3rd in the 16th ("p/z"),
the 17th in the 17th ("q/z"),
the 18th in the 18th ("r/z"),
the 27th in the 19th ("s/z"),
the 28th in the 20th ("t/z") (again, there were none),
the 17th in the 21st ("u/z"),
the 13th in the 22nd ("v/z"),
the 1st in the 23rd ("w/z"),
the 2nd in the 24th ("x/z"),
the 27th in the 25th ("y/z"),
the 15th in the 26th ("z/z"), and
the 25th in the 27th ("a/z"), which is really the first, but is really the continuation of the series.

Then what? Then I took the 15 DW1 tab numbers I'd just used, put them in numeric order, and started out again, marking the 1st character in the 2nd section ("b/z"), follwed by
the 2nd in the 3rd ("c/z"),
the 3rd in the 4th ("d/z"),
the 12th in the 5th ("e/z"),
the 13th in the 6th ("f/z"),
the 14th in the 7th ("g/z"),
the 15th in the 8th ("h/z"),
the 17th in the 9th ("i/z"),
the 17th in the 10th ("j/z"),
the 18th in the 11th ("k/z"),
the 25th in the 12th ("l/z"), and
the 27th in the 13th ("m/z"), as the popular 27 reappears, just as it began the cycle 26 letters ago.

But Why?

Again, the question arises, "What was I thinking?" Was I thinking? What?

In this case, with the numbers, what I was getting at was the indeterminacy of all electronic texts, their deep, innate reliance on numbers, usually zeros and ones. Also percolating through my brain was the significance of layers of deferral, how far removed all e-text readers are from the physical existence of those zeros and ones (if indeed they can be said to "exist" anywhere).

Also, I would have liked to have taken the letters arising from my alphanumeric comparisons and constructed some sort of metatextual ur-text. In a few cases it just happened (with a little fussing)--in "a/z," for example, the highlighted words spell "MOO" (as well as "MOOT"), the subject of "a/z" itself.

Perhaps I will leave this to the readers, to discover for themselves any convergences or divergences, to free-associate just the way I have in creating this site.

Take my Text--Please

TMOO
CSNS
HORE
STT
PUBS
A
TG
TUSI
OUL
RI
RR
AW
ECEE
PLSR
STO
RC
DIMD
YNE
IPMG
YHYA
R
OLN

Notes on Construction: Underwood-word

The block of wood upon which I cut open the disks and wrote down the DW1 numbers is marred with pocketknife slashes. Each slash is larger on one side, with each slash pointing in the same general direction (broader to the left, narrower to the right). With some imagination, the slashes resemble stylized, streamlined sperm cells.

Beavis: Heh-heh, he said "wood."

I typed the words that are taped to the disks on my grandfather's ancient Underwood typewriter. It weighs 25 pounds.

Beavis: Heh-heh, he said "wood" again.

Stick-to-itive-ness

I found the stick upon which the disks were impaled in my yard. It is 17 inches long. I do not know what tree it came from, or what type of tree. It is every-stick, the stick-on-the-street, John Q. Stick. The sort of stick you might throw to a dog, a golden retriever, who might then retrieve it. A stick the size of a set of handlebars.

In the future, every stick will be famous for 15 minutes.

Originally I was going to string the diskettes onto a stiff circular wire. The stick, however, offers that elemental feel, that sensory disconnect (plastic and. . .wood?), and that great product name (Disks-on-a-Stick) that won me over.

Pyramus: Thou stick, O stick, O sweet and lovely stick.

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