Illinois Pedant

Comment Block, or Time Glitch?

2011-06-09T06:39:00.000-05:00

What is the definition of "limited time"?

For Reuters does it mean less than an hour? Or even thirty minutes?

Article post time.

Time here:

Storm-Related Power Issues

2011-06-05T06:15:00.007-05:00

I've been awake for several hours, getting pager alerts about system problems with the day job, related to power issues. Another wave of thunderstorms rolled through the area about 3 AM and with them came the outages.

Of all the places I've lived, this area has, by far, exposed me to the most power outages.

One of the nice things about our utility, Ameren, is that they provide a fairly good mechanism for advising the public of outages. Their website provides good info on outages, in an easy-to-read format, such as this map:

and a nice mobile report for a smartphone, which is really handy when I'm out and about and having to be actually dealing with storm-related issues.

The main website also has a tabular report that shows trends, which is quite revealing.

Their chart reports on 84 Illinois counties, but I've filtered it here to only show those that have more than three outages reported in the last eight days. This brings the count of counties down to 17.

My home county, Adams, takes the prize for the most current outages, and indeed the most for the last eight days.

Sometimes you really don't want to be known as the leader...

UPDATE 10:30 AM

After five hours things are looking worse.

Skype Phishing - GOWLO.COM

2011-06-04T19:30:00.020-05:00

I've been using Skype for some time now to have video chats with my parents. These generally are on a weekend afternoon.

A short time ago I received an incoming call from what was being announced as "Online Help".

This intrigued me as I did not request any assistance and thought that my privacy settings would block "spam-like" calls. Nevertheless I was curious and decided to answer the call.

I immediately heard a message that said that my "system number XXXX was compromised" and that I needed to visit "www.gowlo.com". The message repeated twice and the call was dropped.

I captured the info on the call.

Curious as to what was at the site I used a Linux workstation to (presumably safely) visit the site, and saw this page displayed -- another of the fake "System Infected" pages complete with a green "progress bar"

The Firefox browser running on the Fedora 15 Linux workstation was complaining about "missing plugins" which was an immediate concern. But I was fairly confident that this was an attack against a presumed Windows machine and that my system was safe.

The website then had a link to a form that collects user information such as name, email address, and credit card info. Of course I did not follow through with this.

The domain GOWLO.COM was just registered today with GoDaddy as noted here. I am reporting this attack site to them.

Now back to reviewing my Skype settings...

UPDATE 10:00 PM - after checking my Skype settings it appears that somehow the settings were allowing calls from anyone. I thought I had set them to not allow that but perhaps after a recent Skype update and/or running the CCleaner program to 'tidy up' my system, these went back to default? Here are my newly updated settings under Skype>Privacy:

Butchered Editorial Postings

2011-05-30T09:30:00.025-05:00

"Read the whole thing".

That's a common ending to a blog post by Glenn Reynolds, encouraging the reader to do just that to an article he has linked to.

Trying to follow a link from a recent post, I tried to read the whole thing and was struck by the grotesque layout of the page offered by the Ocean County Register. An article (highlighted below) that should have been on two pages, at the most, was spread across four, the flow of text disrupted by ads and call-outs to other features. The continuation of the article on my monitor was not immediately obvious, the ads in the middle were at the bottom of the screen and only the text "POLITICAL CARTOONS" was shown. My first instinct was it was a brief piece. Until I scrolled down and noticed the "1|2|3|4|Next" links did I realize there was more. Worse still, all the pages had the same presentation. Ack!

This is an awful display of editorial content and the developer of the site should be ashamed at the results as shown here. Such presentation does not encourage one to "read the whole thing".

Career Suicide

2011-05-21T10:15:00.006-05:00

We all experience setbacks in our jobs from time to time and sometimes rely on the grace and support of others to help us get through them. Learning from one's failures and mistakes is a good thing. Publicizing it, however, not as much so.

If you would not want to list a major operational issue such as this one on your resume, why would you post it on a mailing list with your full contact details? (identifying info redacted here to protect the foolish and the organization affected).

Well, after 2 ½ days of my email server being down, I finally got it up and running again. Thanks to xxxx xxxxx from xxxxxxxxxxxx for loaning me some SATA cables, I will be returning the cables I didn’t use. It was a cable issue but also a corrupt mail folder issue. I had to reinstall the entire server from scratch. Unfortunately all email was lost and I couldn’t get it to restore from backups. Oh well, I think I’ve convinced the bosses to switch over to Google Apps....

xxxxx xxxxx
System Administrator

Maybe you also convinced your bosses they might need to look for your replacement?

Subliminal Messaging

2011-05-21T07:35:00.001-05:00

It must be tough to post an article without relevant art.

The LA Times must have really struggled with this one about colonoscopies.

The caption under the photo reads:

When Preisdent Bush was anesthetized for a colonoscopy in 2007, he briefly turned the reins of power over to Vice President Dick Cheney.

How exactly the use of this particular photo has any direct correlation to the article regarding a study on the effectiveness of repeat procedures is puzzling.

Unless you want to send an additional message.

Grammar-Check, Bob?

2011-05-07T20:58:00.002-05:00

Typo later fixed...see story and early comments by clicking the image.

Chest-Thumping at the NYT

2011-05-07T20:45:00.006-05:00

In my twenty-some years in my last career, the newspaper business, my most vivid memories are those of the "big story". Sure, I wasn't a journalist or work in the composing room. I drove a truck to distribute them or supervised those who did. I realigned delivery routes to get more papers into the hands of the public via newsstands and vending machines, make educated guesses as to how many more copies to place at sales spots and rallied street vendors to "hawk" them.

The Reagan assassination attempt, Challenger disaster, and Gulf War I are just a few of national significance. The theft of the Baltimore Colts from that city and the fire in the pressroom at the Baltimore News-American are but two from my time there.

There's a certain electricity that comes from being involved in the production and distribution of a physical product that is a also a contemporaneous chronicle of history. People save and hoard their copies of newspapers from those big events. I still have my copies of the D.C. papers saying NIXON RESIGNS. And somewhere, stashed away safely at my parent's house, are copies of the magazines and papers of the day from the JFK and RFK assassinations.

I've suspected that for the folks in the electronic media there could be similar feelings of "participation". But after the electrons passed through the transmitter and the radio waves vaporized, where was the permanence?

The Public Editor for The New York Times, Arthur S. Brisbane, devotes a column today on the "extraordinary efforts" of the staffers at his publication to report the capture and death of Osama bin Laden.

There's no doubt that there was some inconvenience, some disruption of schedules and hard decisions to be made. And truth be told the NYT appears to have done a fine job of reacting to this major news event.

Rebooking the space in the front section of The New York Times on short notice is no easy task. But that’s just what deputy director of news design Brian Fidelman was asked to do late into Sunday evening. Mr. Fidelman returned to the office around 10:30 to help reallocate space to fit the additional news into the section without the addition of any extra pages.

Back in the 60's, such an effort would have been "extraordinary". When type was set with Linotype, and pages cast in lead for printing (the Washington Post was still using Linotype as late as 1979).

In the 70's and 80's type was set on photo-sensitive paper and pages manually "pasted up", photos resized in the darkroom. Makeovers were done on the fly, editors and compositors working on intuition and instinct. There was no computer making recalculations of column-inches in milliseconds, editors often edited articles for length using an X-ACTO™ knife in the composing room, peeling off and re-waxing copy to paste back on the page.

In the late 90's newspapers began a move to "pagination" in which the entire page moved from physical cut-and-paste to be composed entirely on a computer screen and output to negative for creation of, and in some cases directly to, the printing plate. There was no paper "copy". Photos were taken and processed digitally. (I remember that the first digital Nikon camera used at one paper I worked for in the late 90's cost over $10,000 -- and the photographer who used it said the only only benefit to him was that it kept him away from the fumes in the darkroom).

But in this high-tech era, redesign of a newspaper page takes some thought, and then some mouse-clicks. The computer takes care of the spacing and justification, shrinks photos and text dynamically, and it all "fits".

So when Brisbane talks of "overdrive" in presenting the breaking news I think back to days gone by when there was a lot more effort, and true craftsmanship, actually behind it.

Trickle-Down Taxation

2011-05-07T19:30:00.004-05:00

Unable to make the necessary choices to cut spending to reduce budget deficits, Gov. Pat Quinn and the state legislature are looking at modifications in the distribution of income tax receipts to county and municipal governments.

Local governments will be forced to make the cuts in services and staff that the state is apparently unwilling to make. The proposed FY 2012 budget is larger than that for FY 2011.

The pols in Springfield can't cut expenses but find ways to attempt to send $6 million to Quincy, IL to develop an unwanted and unnecessary "transportation hub". But if the state follows through with their plan to change the revenue distribution, Quincy may lose $4.5 million in funds.

Where's the logic in this example? I'm sure it's "the transportation money comes from a different fund" argument.

My household budget does not allow me to spend an extra $200 per month on gas without finding a way to reduce expenses (or savings) elsewhere. I can't put off paying the electric bill for three months to make up the difference in the cost at the pump.

Making a dent in the state's budget deficit started with an increase in the personal income tax rate from 3% to 5% at the start of the year. This allowed the state to collect 34% more in tax revenue last month as compared to April 2010.

But history shows that this revenue boost will likely be short-lived as more businesses will continue to choose to conduct business elsewhere.

And the death spiral continues...

Marketing Hype?

2011-04-30T08:45:00.002-05:00

One of my online banking accounts has a notification feature that lets you see the dollar limit of transfers available.

To be so lucky as to have to worry about such a situation.

iPhone Daylight Saving Idiocy - Redux

2011-03-13T03:09:00.000-05:00

You think they'd have fixed the Daylight Saving Glitch.

As I was up late catching up on the news I watched my PC clock jump from 1:59 to 3:00 AM.

And my iPhone, when I woke it, proudly displayed 1:00.

(The Blackberry I use for work said 3:00, as expected).

Good job, Apple.

What Were We Thinking?

2010-11-16T01:15:00.004-06:00

We've embarked on some long-overdue updating around the house. One project involved removing the aged carpet in two bedrooms and the living room. While the living room had a fairly traditional carpet, the master bedroom contained this horror from the 70's.

Fashions and styles seem to come and go. Sometimes not for the better. I read that shag carpeting is making a resurgence in the 21st century. This, along with disco, should stay in the distant (and forgotten) past.

The avocado color is bad enough, but at least it was a short shag. You could drop some change and at least find it unlike the dark brown three-inch shag that graced an apartment I once rented in Denver where items dropped quickly disappeared.

On the plus side once the carpet came up we were treated to some nice, finished hardwood floors. At some point in the future we'll get them refinished but after at least 30 years of being hidden, they were deserving of some exposure.

The basement still retains this work of art. Laying on the painted concrete surface, we'll probably suffer with it for a while until we complete the rest of the updates upstairs. No question that the backing has become effectively glued to the floor so it will be an effort to get a clean, smooth surface were we to put tile down.

Sadly this pattern, in an avocado shade, also graced the kitchen. I never understood the concept of carpeting in a food preparation area, but I guess the former owners needed something to complement the avocado refrigerator and dishwasher. And it's seen yet again on the back porch, but in a more vibrant red color.

And as bad as these carpet selections were, I need only open my high-school yearbook and look at the textured polyester that I was wearing to wonder "what were we thinking?"

Voting for Pac Man

2010-11-13T11:30:00.001-06:00

You can run but you can't hide..

Be sure to check out the video on hacking to change voting results.

Hidden Meanings in Logos ?

2010-11-13T11:00:00.002-06:00

The mind can certainly play tricks, interpreting in various ways what is seen based upon presentation.

In the case of the logo for the Massachusetts Literacy Foundation, I see incorporation of a book into the letter 'M' in an acronym based upon their name as a natural.

Looks pretty innocuous to me.

Now take that and modify the artwork ever so slightly. Add a line to the text on the page of the "book" and make the page slightly larger. The stroke up and to the right in the 'M' is now basically obscured.

To my mind's eye the acronym has been transformed, a letter added. Do you see it?

The logo here is completely different artwork, shown after a story on the newspaper's website . Whether it was a deliberate distortion of the version shown above it is subject to conjecture. But the placement of the two objects to the left of it raises more questions about any implied symbolism. By themselves no issue. But in this orientation?

At the bottom of the foundation's website we see another representation.

This one is again different art.

And finally, back at the newspaper's NIE site, we see the logo appear two more times.

The same "Got Books" message as before with the "full M" version of the logo.

The inconsistencies shown here have me rather puzzled. In this digital age I find it odd that there are so many variants of this one logo.

Even more amazing is that the site that "Got Books" image links to drops the logo completely.

Maybe someone there saw something too!

Now time to get my mind out of the gutter...

Or Maybe It's....

2010-11-10T00:56:00.026-06:00

...just a plane.

The same visual effects and view from a perpective that also make for a giant setting Sun could never, ever distort the vapor trail of a jet.

Nothing like a good old-fashioned jump-to-a-conclusion narrative in this piece.

Entertainment on Demand

2010-11-07T22:00:00.001-06:00

I've been a Netflix customer off and on for about eight years, finding it a convenient service. No more treks to local video stores, the pickup and return of DVDs occurs just outside my front door.

Since they started offering their streaming service a while back I've been making use of that service. But being tied to the computer can be uncomfortable. And while I'd known about the Roku player since it's introduction the initial price tag kept me from a buy-in.

However with the introduction of the new Roku HD model with a $59 price tag I decided to take the plunge and ordered the unit directly from Roku (oddly Amazon was taking 'pre-orders' at a higher price).

Three days later a small box arrives. Inside is a small box, roughly 5 inches square and 1-½ inches high along with assorted a/v cables and a simple remote control. Set up was simple, in less than 10 minutes the unit was online (and downloading it's first software update).

My Internet connection is limited to 1.5Mbps, but that is more than enough for Netflix streaming. I don't have an HD television so I don't require the bandwidth needed for a HD video stream. Even with someone else in the house doing some light internet activity I've not encountered many problems with the "buffering" that I saw with the PC-based player.

While the Netflix application was the primary driving force behind the purchase, the availability of additional "channels" is an added bonus. Though I've not tried it yet, the Amazon video-on-demand service is available to me. I was especially pleased to see that my last.fm subscription was available as well. The free Tune-in (Radiotime) service lets me listen to some of my favorite radio stations from Washington, DC, Tampa and Denver. I can also watch Leo LaPorte's videocasts on the big screen instead of the PC. Very nice.

My options are also available on the small screen as well. The iPhone in this case.

Since 3G service is not yet available here I rely on WiFi functionality for my iPhone 3GS Which means that I don't have to concerned with my data plan. And the quality is typically outstanding.

On the iPhone I can access the Netflix content as well as the music content of last.fm and the Radiotime service. The audio services, of course, are not subject to the screen size of the device.

last.fm and Radiotime service screenshots.

The Netflix service works quite well also, with clear video and sound. A feature that I started to watch on the Roku device was available for me to continue viewing on the iPhone, with no fuss.

The application forces the display into landscape to ensure the best use of the screen.

While probably not the method of choice for viewing a video, paired with headphones it's a perfect way to escape during a lunch hour or when stuck in a waiting room...

Illinois -- Blue State?

2010-11-06T01:00:00.001-05:00

Not exactly. This neat interactive map at washingtonpost.com confirms what most Illinoisians already knew. One city and county hold sway over the entire state.

The results for the governor's race are shown here. Click to see the similar congressional and senate results.

It's Not My Job (to Care - or Think)

2010-11-05T16:15:00.001-05:00

"Not my job." "Someone else's department."

How many times have you heard that in the workplace?

For a couple of months I've been driving past this toppled "pedestal", used by a local utility. Originally leaning over about 45 degrees now it's literally sinking into the ground.

I'm fairly confident that this part of communications infrastructure contains copper pairs and/or fiber-optic lines that supply telephone and internet service to a number of businesses and residences. Located about ten feet off a major east-west travel route (according to traffic counts in 2000) passed by more than 6800 vehicles per day, you would think it is extremely likely that it would be visible to at least one employee of the company who is responsible for this facility.

So why has this situation existed for so long? At some point it is likely that moisture, rodents and/or additional physical damage will impact the end-users serviced by this facility. It would surely be easier to correct the issue now when the weather is mild than in February when the ground is frozen and there's a 20-below wind-chill.

Do the employees who drive past this on a daily basis really not care? No one wants to be the one to start the process of getting this situation resolved, even if you're the one who'll get called out at 4 AM on a frigid winter morning to restore service to the customers who have lost it?

That's right. It's not your job.

Jimmy Mack Places Fifth

2010-11-04T01:01:00.001-05:00

With nearly as many votes as the Libertarian candidate in the New York gubernatorial race.

Better campaign video, for sure.

Back Into the fold

2010-11-03T23:57:00.001-05:00

Perhaps that's not the best way to describe a re-entry into blogging. Nevertheless I've decided to succumb to my urges over the past four months and start posting in this space on a regular, if not daily, basis. Quite honestly with all the goings-on in the political arena it was indeed quite tempting to fire off a reactionary post to something I saw, heard or read. The urge was strong but I fought it. Although I stopped my own blog posts, I still continued to read the writings of others and in fact the number of blogs in my Google reader increased about 50% during this time. More input.

Some of the same conditions that lead to my absence from this space still exist or will soon be returning. But I've found that I miss the self-imposed discipline of regular posts and the outlet for expression. Not that there was necessarily a lack of material to inspire me, but too often I felt like I was simply "+1" in the sea of voices. And that just plain bothered me.

However I've got 100+ days of observations and opinion stored up. And they need an outlet.

More to come...

__________________

2010-06-30T00:01:00.022-05:00

After 546 days and ~~675~~ 676 posts it's

— 30 —

Stormy Weather

2010-06-22T17:00:00.004-05:00

Had a bit of it lately in these parts.

Took these shots in Mendon, IL this morning as I was travelling between offices.

WGEM's Saturation Storm Coverage

2010-06-21T18:43:00.000-05:00

WGEM, the local NBC broadcast affiliate, also transmits two other DTV channels, one carrying CW content and the other carrying FOX programming.

Granted, severe weather is certainly newsworthy, tornado activity especially so, but co-opting all three channels simultaneously for non-stop weather coverage with three meteorologists on air? Really.

Choose one channel for the talking heads and put a crawl on the other two directing viewers to full-time weather coverage. Some folks, like me, only get on-air content and you have commandeered fully one-third of the channels available to us.

I don't discount the importance of coverage of severe weather. But you guys are obsessed. Get over yourselves.

Head In The Cloud

2010-06-17T23:50:00.002-05:00

Cloud computing seems to be all the rage these days. Yet sometimes when I hear the discussions (and raves) about it I become annoyed by the hype. In many ways attaching the "cloud" qualifier is seen as some sort of (r)evolutionary offering. Perhaps it is, as far as the applications go. But in many ways it seems to me to be nothing more than a cool way of saying "hosted application".

In the days before PCs and the Internet we had such a system. You sat at a "dumb" terminal and ran an application on a host system. You may have been connected by a coaxial or serial cable, but you were connected, albeit it ever so slowly and typically with text-only input.

Then the PC came along and that which was done on the "mainframe" was done at the desktop.The big line printer was replaced by the desktop dot-matrix and laser printers. Fancy GUIs were developed, both for the operating system and for the applications.

As networking evolved standalone PCs became interconnected, resources were shared, common disk storage and print spools evolved. The web browser, combined with add-ons like Flash and Java, became a "front-end" for server-based applications.

The advent of broadband Internet services removed the distance barriers and has allowed for the economy of scale. The word processing that was done back in the 70's on the mainframe using systems like that from Wang moved to the desktop using software like WordPerfect and has subsequently moved to the cloud in the guise of Google Docs and Microsoft's Office Live.

I've been using several online services for a while. Turbo Tax. Dropbox. And of course hosted email on a number of providers.

Today I started to play with Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service) as I was researching off-site data backup solutions for a client. While Amazon provides a web interface for accessing the service, I was looking for a client app that could allow one to set up and manage an automated backup solution. Enter Cloudberry. As I write this I'm copying the 700M+ of files that I have saved with Dropbox over to my AWS S3 "bucket". So far since setting up my account I've incurred 2 cents of usage. It's kind of hard to beat these rates.

While I'll plan on a set of local backups (both on site and a local off-site set) for the client I can see tremendous value in the use of a service like Amazon's to provide greater data protection in the event of a localized disaster (tornado, flood, zombie outbreak, etc.). Thinking of disaster recovery scenarios have got me with my head in the cloud.

Compare and Contrast

2010-06-16T00:15:00.000-05:00

Thirty-one years ago Jimmy Carter spoke from the Oval Office about the concerns of the day. Compare the first ninety seconds of this pivotal address to the current state of Obama's presidency.

"Mr. President, you are not leading this Nation— you're just managing the Government."

"You don't see the people enough any more."

"Some of your Cabinet members don't seem loyal. There is not enough discipline among your disciples."

"Don't talk to us about politics or the mechanics of government, but about an understanding of our common good."

"Mr. President, we're in trouble. Talk to us about blood and sweat and tears."

"If you lead, Mr. President, we will follow."

"I feel so far from government. I feel like ordinary people are excluded from political power."

Contrast Obama's lead and subsequent comments on meeting the challenge of the Deepwater Horizon incident.

But the one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is somehow too big and too difficult to meet. You know, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon. And yet, time and again, we have refused to settle for the paltry limits of conventional wisdom. Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is the capacity to shape our destiny -– our determination to fight for the America we want for our children. Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there. We know we’ll get there.

Leadership in action. Feeling reassured?