Technobabbles - Voyagerfan5761's Blog

Updated Topify Gmail Filters

2009-05-06T21:08:00.004-05:00

Well, Twitter got prettier follow and direct message notifications today. Bully for them. Now I have to publish this update.

Update (05/07, 22:45): My update was broken, so the update had to be updated. The filter should now catch DMs, too. Believe it or not, I was wrong that Twitter changed the address that direct message notifications come from; it stayed the same. So that part of the filter didn't need to change. All's well that ends well, right?

Update 2 (05/07, 23:05): Well, scratch the new filters. Twitter went back to the old From addresses tonight. Y'all can use the old filters again. What a fast-paced 24 hours, eh? :P I'll leave this post up just for posterity, but please don't try to use these new filters and then complain that they don't work. ;-)

To make things easier for myself, I'll assume that everyone's seen the old filter setup I published at the end of last month.

The old method was quite convenient for those of us with multiple Twitter accounts, because the email addresses in the From headers changed depending on the address associated with each account (after October 30, 2008 and before this afternoon). Now they all come from noreply@twitter.com (as they used to last year), with the account-specific email addresses tucked away in the reply-to headers (which I can't filter on in Gmail, so that sucks).

Not only did the addresses again become uniform, but that was basically the only easy way to tell the difference between my personal account (which has Topify set up) and the others I run (which don't). Now I have to go through several hoops, and the filter string is longer.

Anyway, here's the updated updated filter string; put this all in the "Has the words" field in Gmail's filter settings:

(to:(you@yourdomain.tld) from:(noreply@twitter.com) subject:"is now following you on Twitter") OR from:twitter-dm-you=yourdomain.tld

As before, you@yourdomain.tld is the email address set in your Twitter account settings, the address to which all your notifications are sent.

I won't bother making an XML file for the new filters, because it's only one field. I'll probably leave the old one for posterity—at least until my Google Page Creator account is completely borked by the transition to Google Sites—because it's easier than deleting it and then updating my old post to reflect that.

Just for the record, Twitter, I'm not happy that I'm having to retool my filters this soon. If you want to make me happy again, put back your email headers the way they were last week. kthx

How To: Safely Use Twitter Notification Enhancement Services

2009-04-27T23:29:00.003-05:00

As you all have probably heard, Twitter is gaining popularity in leaps and bounds. All the new users mean more follower notifications arriving in my inbox, and Twitter's default messages aren't very useful. (The direct message notifications are pretty bare-bones, too, but I don't get many of those so it wasn't a priority.)

Update (05/06): Twitter prettified their emails, but I still think Topify's are better. Unfortunately, Twitter also went back to using the same address (noreply@twitter.com) for all users' notifications, putting the email-address–specific addresses in the reply-to header. So the filter setup in this post doesn't work any more. I had to come up with a new, more complicated filter... Stupid Twitter...

Update (05/07): Twitter went back to the old From addresses, so the filters from this post should now work again.

The Beginning

The first enhanced-notification service I discovered was Twimailer, created by a British developer named Jon Wheatley (and apparently later sold—shortly after I signed up—to a Romanian named Toni).

Despite the admonitions in the article above (on ReadWriteWeb) about changing passwords and all kinds of security precautions, I'm not worried about my own account. There's one simple reason for that: I never actually switched my email address in Twitter's settings. Instead, I created a Gmail filter to auto-archive follow notifications from Twitter and forward them to Twimailer. That way, I:

had all my follow notifications even if the service went down (it did for several days) or glitched (sometimes I get messages with no information)
only forwarded the messages Twimailer needed to be useful, rather than everything
made sure to keep password resets (which I haven't used for my main account in the last few months anyway) completely out of Twimailer's hands

I was very comfortable with this system. I can only guess that Jon's original intent was to simplify the setup process. After all, most people don't bother with email filters, and wouldn't necessarily know how to set one up. Changing settings on Twitter's website is a lot easier.

A New Age

Thanks to a TechCrunch post about fighting Twitter spam I read tonight, I discovered Topify, an invitation-only (for now) service based in Israel that offers all of what Twimailer did—and more.

I found an invite on the Topify blog (sorry, no link; you gotta dig through their site too so it's fair for everyone) and quickly signed up. The Twitter password field distressed me a little, but it's obviously necessary for all the extra features (like follow-back, reply to direct message, and block), all of which can be done via email with Topify. (In the future, I hope Topify will implement support for Twitter's OAuth authentication and delete users' passwords from their system. Consider this a request, Arik. :-)

Anyway, switching was pretty painless. All I had to do was change the address to which my Gmail filter forwards and add my direct-message notification From address to the filter. I'm currently waiting for something to happen on my Twitter account so I can try out the new service. (I considered running Twimailer and Topify side-by-side for a bit, but decided against it; redundant emails would increase my processing time, the opposite of the intended effect.)

Filter Details

For those who want to copy my setup (I'm telling you, it's a lot more resilient than the default instructions from either service), here are the filter settings to enter. Update (05/06): These settings are left here for posterity; they won't work anymore thanks to Twitter's changes from today. See the first update near the top for more detail. Update (05/07): These should now work again, since Twitter appears to have gone back to the old email headers.

In the filter's From box, enter:

Topify: twitter-follow-you=yourdomain.tld OR twitter-dm-you=yourdomain.tld
Twimailer: twitter-follow-you=yourdomain.tld

Replace you=yourdomain.tld with your email address, using = in place of @.

That's all you need to do for filter criteria. (If you have only one Twitter account coming into your inbox, it's even easier; you can omit the -you=yourdomain.tld part(s) of the filter criteria. It doesn't hurt to include them, though.)

For actions, I selected "Skip Inbox" and "Mark as read", and told Gmail to forward these messages to my secret Twimailer/Topify address.

Click the Create filter button, scroll down your filter list, and you should see something like the following (image is linked to full-size version):

(There's also an XML file available to import, for those with the Filter Import/Export feature enabled in Gmail Labs, but creating the filter from scratch is pretty easy. The file link might go dead in a month or two when my Google Page Creator site is moved to Google Sites, but I'll know because things like the site logo will stop working. If that happens, I'll definitely fix it.)

Note: As I was writing this, I discovered Chris Messina's post about this, published almost two months ago. My little hack is nothing new, I guess; but I'll publish anyway because his instructions are focused on Twimailer and Twimailer only.

Wrap

Let me know if you find this little hack useful. I haven't time to make a bunch of pretty screenshots (unlike Chris ;-), so if you have questions, post in the comments.

Incidentally, this is my 500th blog post. If that means anything.

I Never Thought I'd See This Happen...

2009-03-30T21:41:00.001-05:00

Fires show up on the news all the time, right? Right.

Fires happen in one's neighborhood all the time, right? Uh, no...

I never thought I'd see it happen in my neighborhood. But today, it happened. It got me out of the shower, too. (Yes, my schedule is weird, and late. Don't bother me. :P )

My mother just happened to look out the window. It was really a luck thing; otherwise, I would have missed the beginning part of it. I heard the sirens as I was getting into the shower, but sirens are common enough in this city that it wasn't anything remarkable. The smoke (that I couldn't see), however, was. I quickly cut my shower short and rushed to get dressed, grabbing my camera on the way outside.

Having my camera paid off, too; I got about two hundred shots of the scene, 132 of which I uploaded (after my mother helped de-duplicate and de-crappy-shot the set) a few hours ago. If you're interested, have a look at my fire photos. I went through a battery-and-a-half in the approximately three hours that I was shooting.

As you can see from the photo at right, the middle unit was practically gone. That tangled mass below the center fireman's yellow helmet is the roof, which is covering a burned-out car. (The car's gasoline tank—or it might have just been a tire, I'm not sure—actually exploded.

It was a pretty lucky fire, really. Nobody was home, and the two cats that lived in the fourth unit (I believe, though I'm not entirely clear) were rescued with no injuries.

Anyway, I don't have to re-hash the whole thing; KARE-11 and the Star Tribune both have decent write-ups. It's too soon to know very many details, so there are a lot of unanswered questions—like the cause. I'll watch the news for more information.

What I'm Doing

Above all else, I feel like the fact that I was there taking pictures means I have an obligation to help those involved in any way I can. In the case of the owners, it means I'm offering the use of my photos for insurance claims and such. (Lia Peterson's brother seemed appreciative of my offer, and I'll ask him to pass on the link to his sister's neighbors in my email to him. The cats rescued were Lia's.) I've also emailed the City of Minneapolis offering my photos for use in the investigation that will be taking place.

Obviously I had no place trying to help fight the fire—I wouldn't know what to do, and might end up getting myself or others hurt—so I ran around the three accessible sides of the property photographing all kinds of things, doing my best to stay out of the way of the firefighters and other officials. (Since nobody said anything, I'm guessing I succeeded.)

My mother also engaged a woman from Fire Station 17 in conversation, and I joined in. I gave this firefighter my photo gallery address, and also mentioned her in my missive to the City. She expressed interest in seeing my photos, but couldn't give me her email address, so I'm doing my best to get them to her. (If I don't get any indication that she's gotten them, I'll swing by the station at some point and ask.)

What Others Did

Those who weren't involved with the FD did their best to stay out of the way, as I did. There were one or two instances where I saw neighbors helping out, though. The most shining example was when a new supply hose was being run from a hydrant on the next block. By-standers pitched in to drag the hose up to the engine in front of the building so it could pump water on the fire from above using its ladder. I would have done it in a heartbeat, if I'd been close enough, but it was good to see people helping out.

Where Now?

The fire is out, nobody got hurt, and the cats were rescued. But the work is really just starting. The light-weight construction of this relatively new complex meant that the fire spread a lot faster than it would have in the older buildings that are common in the neighborhood. In turn, that means there are several insurance claims to be filed, rather than one, and a full investigation will be made.

Lots of things need to be done. The residents need to recover what belongings they can and find shelter. The site needs to be cleaned up and (most likely) redeveloped. But the important thing is, nothing truly irreplaceable (such as life) was lost.

Theatre Experience Q&A [via Facebook]

2009-03-19T19:17:00.001-05:00

Facebook is teeming with chain notes like this. Usually I ignore them, but this one was actually interesting. So, I'm filling it out. Facebookers, I'm giving you guys a link to this post; Facebook is still not getting any content from me, besides statuses and comments.

Without further ado, the "survey":

What was the first play you ever did?: I believe it was The Wizard of Oz. I was a munchkin. (I was also seven years old.)
What was your most recent show?: Interesting question. The last show I was really "in" was Romeo & Juliet at Children's Theatre Company (part of their educational division, not the production that just closed—which was awesome). It was actually just a series of five scenes from the show, not the whole thing. I've been involved in a couple other shows since then, including Imaginary Invalid (as a musician in the lobby, pre-show) and a selection of scenes, songs, and dance that really can't be called a "show" (it was a "revue").
What was your favorite show/role?: My favorite show would have to be Alice In Wonderland at Temple of Aaron. My favorite role was Martin in "Canker Sores and Other Distractions" from Performance Company last Spring.
What was your most challenging show/role?: So far, my most challenging show was Tristan & Yseult at Cherubs last summer. (Yes, I'll eventually get a post done. I hope.) The whole show was just so different from what I'd done in the past, it took some adjusting. Not to mention my character (Morholt, an evil Irish ruler) was actually a shadow version of another actress's part, so that was a challenging role for the same reason.
What is the most bizarre show or role you've ever done?: Morholt's "shadow", as mentioned above, was probably the most bizarre role. In some ways, TY was also the most bizarre show, but I think last Spring's collection of Christopher Durang short plays takes the cake.
Has anyone ever written a show for you?: Nope. I'm not that good/lucky/both. :P
Have you ever quit a show to accept a better one?: I haven't had the opportunity. I know people that have, though.
Have you ever completely blown character on stage?: Not that I can recall, but I can think of a few roles where I wasn't doing much acting in the first place.
What show(s) are you just dying to do?: I can only think of one, but it's not on the list any more. (Grease used to be on this list, but I'm now convinced I couldn't pull off any of the parts.)
Have you ever done one of your "dream" shows?: No.
Who was your favorite director?: I'm torn between Simon McAllister and David Chapman.
Who was your least favorite director?: Liebo! He's not even a theatre person; he's a temple youth director.
What is the most surprising role you have ever been offered?: King Duncan in the Scottish play. Me, kingly? No way. :D
Have you ever injured yourself onstage or offstage?: Once. It was last summer (dang I have to write the post!). We were in tech rehearsal and were practicing with blood packs. I had to get one on my face, because my character's eye was supposedly stabbed out. Laundry detergent sucks. (Since both of us eye-pack actors ended up with soap in our respective eyes, the packs were cut the following day.)
What show(s) have you done multiple times?: Aladdin (the British pantomime) and Nutcracker. Update (23:20): I forgot about The Wizard of Oz. Did that twice, too; the second time, I was the Lion.
Have you ever had an onstage kiss?: Nope. Don't want one. It's not that I'd be embarassed; I just don't want to kiss random people. That, I want to save for someone special.
What was your scariest moment in a show?: My monologue in Working (at StageCoach) as Rex Winship. Or maybe Tom Patrick. Both parts were kind of a stretch for me. No, wait. The tornado sirens going off during Working were worse.
What is your best show memory?: Pulling off my first real stage combat in the aforementioned production of Romeo & Juliet. (Hey, I never blogged about that one! Crap. Oh, I know why... Duh. Don't ask.)
What is your worst show memory?: I totally left a fellow actor in the lurch during a scene change in A Village Fable. (I never blogged about that one either? Double crap. I don't know why, this time.)
What is your saddest show memory?: Strike at Cherubs. That meant the shows were all over. All ten of them.
Do you have any theatrical superstitions?: Besides the obvious Scottish Play stuff? Three-night runs will always have a bad night... on day two.

GrandCentral Becomes Google Voice!

2009-03-13T16:44:00.000-05:00

It's taken 21 months—almost two years—but GrandCentral ("One number for all your phones, for life") has finally gotten an upgrade (and a new name). I'm totally excited, and happy that the long-awaited upgrade (previously known as GrandCentral 2.0) is finally here. Meet Google Voice: "One number for all your calls and SMS".

New Features

Yes, Google Voice added several new features. One of the things that always, always bugged me about GrandCentral was the fact that my number couldn't receive or send text messages. Well, now it can. According to TechCrunch's expansive overview, the same technology that powers the SMS in Gmail Chat Labs experiment (known as Gateway) is used in Google Voice.

Other new features include voicemail transcription (sounds promising), very specific per-contact settings (definitely a trap for us OCD types), a completely overhauled interface (w00t! Less Flash!), conference calling (cool factor = 100), and easy dialing out via the phone interface.

I have to stop and talk about the dial-out feature. First of all, it was nearly impossible to dial out from GrandCentral unless you either had a new voicemail from the person you wanted to call (so you could press '2' after it to call them back) or had access to a Web-enabled device. Simply dialing out wasn't considered. Now, in Google Voice, there's a "press '2'" option right in the main menu! Finally!

Also, under GrandCentral's auspices, calling out was free during beta, with the shadow of paying per minute after testing was over looming in the future. Google changed that in Voice, which allows free calls anywhere in the United States. International calls are at greatly reduced rates (compared to conventional long-distance). Each new user gets a free $1.00 credit toward international calls, though I don't know if they'll keep that up once sign-ups are opened completely—it could be something just for migrating GC users.

Migration, Stranded Data, and Missing Features

Existing GrandCentral users get (or will get this weekend) a migration link at the top of their grandcentral.com inboxes, which will begin the automated migration of a GrandCentral number to Google Voice. The process was pretty painless, even smoother than the transition to the new FeedBurner system last month.

However, much data is not migrated. Most of the settings are reset, custom greetings and names must be re-recorded, old voicemails/calls/recorded calls are left behind on grandcentral.com, and contacts must be transferred manually by exporting GrandCentral's Address Book to CSV and importing it into Google Contacts. The automatic merging of imported contacts only merged about half of the duplicates in my set, and I had very few contacts to deal with. That was fortunate, because the rest of the merges had to be found and made manually.

In the future, I hope Google will provide a utility to migrate old voicemails from GrandCentral, especially if grandcentral.com is eventually shut down or redirected. Currently, the top of my GrandCentral inbox says:

Since you have migrated to the Google Voice Preview, you can now access your new messages and update your settings by logging in at google.com/voice. Feel free to continue to access grandcentral.com for your older voicemail messages. We're glad you dropped by.

That's inconvenient. But really, how often do I visit old voicemails? Not much. Besides, a lot of them were inexplicably lost... Their listings are present, but they can't be played; I'm guessing the files somehow went missing. I'm not happy about that, but... at least it hasn't happened again.

A minor annoyance is the loss of custom ringback tones, the sounds played to a caller while the phone is ringing on your end. (Google does have a suggestion to bring this back on the Google Voice Feature Suggestion page.)

Future Ideas

Of course, Google Voice is not without holes. It can't forward to numbers that require extensions (I don't need it now, but might in the future). It can't take an existing number and turn it into a Google number (which would be eminently useful, I think, for my mother).

Image via CrunchBase

There are also no apps for iPhone or Android yet (and I don't care about Blackberry, kthx). But the feature suggest page I mentioned above has all these and more. I've suggested about 75% of the features currently on the list, including integration with Gmail and Google Talk. I'm hopeful that these and more ideas (like the two I posted on Twitter) will be implemented, and sooner rather than later.

Speaking of future ideas, Lifehacker ran a short post yesterday speculating that the reserved "Voicemail" label in Gmail is for integration with Voice. It's actually for Google Talk voicemails (GTalk has a calling feature that I almost never use because of various technological or locational constraints), but it could certainly be useful for Voice messages as well, if Gmail and Voice are ever integrated.

Reaction

Despite the inconveniences, I think I'm going to like the service. It's a vast improvement upon GrandCentral; in fact, TechCrunch's Leena Rao says (in the overview mentioned above), "Google is finally bringing us the voice service that was promised back in 2006." I agree; the old GrandCentral was convenient, but Google Voice promises to be many times as useful.

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich [Book In Review]

2009-03-09T12:24:00.000-05:00

Over the holiday break, and continuing after I got back from New York City (which I will probably never blog about, unfortunately; it's been too long now, and I have other posts to write), I read a series of books checked out from the local library on topics ranging from the history of eBay and Microsoft's hiring practices to the true economic impact of big-box stores like Wal-Mart and even a book on cosmic complexity. While all of them resonated with me to a certain extent (the latter, Big-Box Swindle, being the most compelling of those I've mentioned so far), I found myself moved the most by Barbara Ehrenreich's story of the low-wage workplace.

Cover via Amazon

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America contains a great many anecdotes that pull one into the story, encourage thoughts of "That's all they do?", "What?!" and "Oh yeah, that's annoying", and generally made me feel that a great injustice is taking place in this country. (The humiliations going on in other countries such as India and China are another topic entirely, worthy of three posts for each nation.)

Rather than summarize the book (which would probably be boring compared to reading the original), review it, or do anything of that ilk, I'll post a few passages here that I found particularly compelling. (Please note that the final section quotes from the end. If you don't want to read the "ending", click the "skip" link next to the "Working Poor" heading.) I'll begin with one particularly aggravating footnote.

Bathroom Breaks: Gotta Go? Too Bad

Until April 1998, there was no federally mandated right to bathroom breaks. According to Marc Linder and Ingrid Nygaard, authors of Void Where Prohibited: Rest Breaks and the Right to Urinate on Company Time (Cornell University Press, 1997), "The right to rest and void at work is not high on the list of social or political causes supported by professional or executive employees, who enjoy personal workplace liberties that millions of factory workers can only dream about. . . . While we were dismayed to discover that workers lacked an acknowledged right to void at work, [the workers] were amazed by outsiders' naïve belief that their employers would permit them to perform this basic bodily function when necessary. . . . A factory worker, not allowed a break for six-hour stretches, voided into pads worn inside her uniform; and a kindergarten teacher in a school without aides had to take all twenty children with her to the bathroom and line them up outside the stall door while she voided."

What hits the hardest, I think, is the mental image of a kindergarten teacher taking twenty five-year-olds to the bathroom with her because there's nobody else available to watch them for a few minutes. I don't think the awkwardness would be confined to the adult, either; I know I would have felt pretty awkward filing into the restroom with my kindergarten teacher.

At least we finally realized the omission in our laws. This quote, present on page 37, was one of the first to stir my emotions. I'm well aware of corporate greed, but to deny (or, more accurately, not recognize) such a seemingly basic right for decades after the Industrial Revolution before passing a law to remedy the situation seems a rather glaring mistake. Or is it? There are plenty of other things in the book that drew the same reaction. Besides, we Americans have been denied the right to use any cellular handset on the network of our choosing for ages.

Image by greenlagirl via Flickr

"Cleaning" Services: Superficiality to the Extreme

I've always had a rather disdainful opinion of how well cleaning services actually, well, clean, but this was still something of a shock. The following is from page 75, continuing to page 76, and contains observations Ms. Ehrenreich made during her first day (training) at a The Maids franchise in Maine.

[...] Our antagonists exist entirely in the visible world—soap scum, dust, counter crud, dog hair, stains, and smears—and are to be attacked by damp rag or, in hard-core cases, by Dobie (the brand of plastic scouring pad we use). We scrub only to remove impurities that might be detectable to a customer by hand or by eye; otherwise our only job is to wipe. Nothing is said about the possibility of transporting bacteria, by rag or by hand, from bathroom to kitchen or even from one house to the next. It is the "cosmetic touches" that the videos emphasize and that Ted [the franchise owner], when he wanders back into the room, continually directs my eye to. Fluff up all throw pillows and arrange them symmetrically. Brighten up stainless steel sinks with baby oil. Leave all spice jars, shampoos, etc., with their labels facing outward. Comb out the fringes of Persian carpets with a pick. Use the vacuum cleaner to create a special, fernlike pattern in the carpets. The loose ends of toilet paper and paper towel rolls have to be given a special fold (the same one you'll find in hotel bathrooms). "Messes" of loose paper, clothing, or toys are to be stacked into "neat messes." Finally, the house is to be sprayed with the cleaning service's signature floral-scented air freshener, which will signal to the owners, the moment they return home, that, yes, their house has been "cleaned."⁷

Many of these inane policies have actually had a direct effect on my own life, as for a time we were customers of The Maids here in Minneapolis. The propensity for housekeeping services (I do not even think of them as housecleaning services, nor have I for a long time) to rearrange things simply to create an aura of tidiness without really doing anything substantial has long bothered me. Not only are things like air freshener and making "tidy messes" incredibly superficial, they have even led to me looking high and low for something moved in the process – which I invariably find, eventually... weeks or months later, after the need for it has passed and I've already undergone inconvenience at not having it when I was looking for it in the first place.

I have long been irked by things like the "hotel fold" to toilet paper rolls, and the fact that putting toilet paper rolls on the holders in the bathroom—even if said rolls were sitting somewhere nearby, just fine and actually easier to use—seems to be a favorite pastime of housekeeping personnel looking for something to do to make the house seem "clean" without doing anything of consequence.

The ⁷ refers to a footnote that goes on to detail specific inadequacies in the housecleaning practices used by The Maids, as commented upon by various housecleaning experts. The final two sentences of the note are my favorite:

[...] But the point at The Maids, apparently, is not to clean so much as to create the appearance of having been cleaned, not to sanitize but to create a kind of stage setting for family life. And the stage setting Americans seem to prefer is sterile only in the metaphorical sense, like a motel room or the fake interiors in which soap operas and sitcoms take place.

For as long as I can remember, my parents—my mother especially—have admonished me to never go barefoot in a hotel room, never trust the countertops in a hotel room, and so forth. Somehow, before I got this ingrained into my brain, I picked up a toe infection in New Zealand (at least, I think that's where it came from) while on a tour with the Minnesota Boychoir; it proceeded to bother me almost constantly for the next two years or so. The end result, several years later, is me now wearing socks constantly, even in my own house (which I don't trust any more—and quite possibly less—than a hotel room). Fortunately, this habit ties in well with my dislike for dirty feet.

Image by Pete Zarria via Flickr

References to Movies and Friends

Page 122 brings a couple of gems. The first should mean something to anyone who's watched the 1980 movie "The Blues Brothers":

I pick up my Rent-A-Wreck from a nice fellow—this must be the famous "Minnesota nice"—who volunteers the locations of NPR and classic rock on the radio. We agree that swing sucks and maybe would have discovered a few more points of convergence, only I'm on what a certain Key West rock jock likes to call "a mission from God."

There's no way I was going to resist the urge to mention this reference; I loved "The Blues Brothers" when I used to watch it on AMC. For bonus points, this quote also references my home state and that wonderful myth that Minnesotans are super-nice. (They're usually only polite and courteous if you look respectable and aren't obviously a minority, despite the common impression.)

Image by zoom in tight via Flickr

The second—which pretty much continues where the last one left off, in the same paragraph—probably means something only to those who know my former Kumon Reading Program tutor:

[...] and an apartment belonging to friends of a friend that I can use for a few days free of charge while they visit relatives back East. Well, not entirely free of charge, since the deal is I have to take care of their cockatiel, a caged bird that, for reasons of ornithological fitness and sanity, has to be let out of the cage for a few hours a day.

My former tutor, Margaret (mother of NYC wine caper heroine Alia), has a cockatiel, too. (Sorry folks, this one was pretty superficial. No deep commentary here. I'll make it up to you soon.)

Image by extremeezine via Flickr

Rent vs. Wages: A Total Imbalance

OK, I know the last two quotes were pretty trivial, but have a look at this quote from page 199:

So the problem goes beyond my personal failings and miscalculations. Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don't need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high.

Yeah, I've been thinking that rents seem awfully high for years, ever since I was aware enough to read the advertisements for vacant apartments. With the economy as it is now, and people being laid off, the housing market can only be worse than ever (or so I believe, with my limited economic experience).

The "Working Poor": Unrecognized, Unappreciated Philanthropists [skip]

The last pages (220 & 221) of the book holds perhaps the most heart-wrenching conclusion I have ever read (at least, in non-fiction). I don't think I'll even comment on it; the words speak for themselves:

But guilt doesn't go anywhere near far enough; the appropriate emotion is shame—shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on—when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more chaply and conveniently—then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, he health, and her life. The "working poor," as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, "you give and you give."

Play Comparison

Image via Wikipedia

Looking back on the book, I have suddenly realized (weeks later) that the book reminds me of the Broadway musical Working. I imagine the individual descriptions of Ms. Ehrenreich's various jobs are a bit like the interviews in Studs Terkel's book, Working, just greatly extended (the interviews in the book are only a couple pages each). The main difference, I think, if I were to compare them, would be in the sentiments. Ms. Ehrenreich was generally displeased with the conditions of her employment; by comparison, most of the characters in Working love their jobs.
I haven't read the book—merely looked at reviews on Goodreads and skimmed its Wikipedia article—but I was in an abridged production of the musical at StageCoach this past Spring that concluded my ninth year in the program. (For those interested, I wrote a summary of the production about two weeks later.) Both of my characters (Rex Winship and Tom Patrick; a "boss" and a fireman, respectively) were pleased with their occupations, though they weren't low-wage positions like in Nickel and Dimed.

Conclusion

All these quotes and comparisons aside, the book was written from a very liberal perspective. I can't help but agree with some of the reviews on Goodreads. I have some liberal tendencies, but I'm really more of a moderate. This book was interesting, and I'd recommend it if you're into this sort of thing, but I realize now it's nothing more than a creative experiment or a jumping-off point for a discussion.

Gmail Chat FAILs with Ping.fm GTalk Enabled

2009-03-03T16:15:00.001-06:00

Image via CrunchBase

Last night, I found a chat in my Gmail account that I'd never seen. It was sent an hour after I left the public library on February 26, while I was offline, but never showed up in my Inbox. It wasn't even labeled as sent while I was offline. I was baffled completely until I realized this afternoon what I'd been doing that night at the library.

February 26 (a Thursday, the day of #snowmageddon here in Minneapolis/St. Paul) was the day I discovered that Ping.fm—my very favorite social networking tool, second only to Twitter—had added support for Google Talk statuses. Of course I had to try it out; I'm an early adopter.

So I went into my network settings on Ping.fm and added my Google Talk and AIM accounts. Next thing I know, Gmail Chat is complaining that I'm no longer invisible (I like to be invisible because it minimizes interruptions). It says I'm signed in somewhere else. That somewhere else could only be Ping.fm.
By that, I gather Ping.fm actually signs in to Google Talk and receives all chats sent to one's account, 24/7. Not only is that inconvenient (I'll continue with that in a moment), but it's a bit privacy hole, especially if you don't fully trust Ping.fm. And honestly, I trust a lot of websites with a lot of things, but I like my chats to stay inside Google's ecosystem, thank you.

Anyway, the fact that Ping.fm is always signed in to one's Google Talk account means that one always appears to be online, and offline chats won't work. Invisibility in Gmail Chat is also disabled. Both of these, combined with an apparent dysfunctionality (I couldn't get my GTalk status to update from Ping.fm), led me to deactivate the integration.

What I'm trying to say is, Ping.fm has a lot of work to do before I'll even consider re-adding my GTalk account to my Ping.fm networks. It doesn't work, and causes a lot of problems.

You Gave the Wine List to Me?

2009-03-02T20:00:00.004-06:00

I told myself I probably wouldn't blog about New York, but I decided this would be a worthwhile story. (Not to mention the fact that I promised a certain person I'd publish this; you know who you are.) Of all the things that happened in New York City, this is possibly the funniest, and the most unlikely to happen back here in MN. Aside from Broadway shows, that is.

Image via WikipediaPicture this: Times Square, a moderately upscale Asian restaurant, and a party of five. Two mothers, three "children" (though none of us were under 14). The age spread for us "kids" was 14, 17, and 23.

I suppose I should explain the situation a little better. We went to New York with friends of ours from Minnesota. The mother was a tutor of mine for a few years back, helping me with the Kumon Reading program. My mother ended up in college classes with Alia (the 23-year-old who has now, with the new year, become a blogger)

We came in reasonably late, after seeing Grease on Broadway. Alia had just gotten back from a trip-within-a-trip spending Christmas with a friend in Connecticut, narrowly missing the Broadway show (unfortunately, I think; it was better than anything I've ever seen here in Minnesota). Our table received three wine lists.

Obviously our two mothers got them. However, the third one was given to me. I'm 17, four years younger than the drinking age, but I suppose it could have been an honest mistake. After all, a lot of people offer me alcoholic beverages in restaurants, and I have been mistaken for a college student many times. But Alia didn't get one. That in itself wouldn't be too weird, and could even be interpreted as a compliment ("You don't look old enough to drink, miss." That would be a compliment, no?) But the fact that I got one is very strange.

And the story gets stranger. My mother, happy-go-lucky Jew that she is (I mean that affectionately), playfully suggested that we try to trick the waitress. So I asked Alia for the wine she wanted and waited.

When the waitress returned and asked me what I wanted, I pulled my best "I do this all the time" act and ordered. She didn't bat an eye, card me, or even give me a second look; she just took the list and went away. I tried not to laugh too much, but I guess I did, because both parents shushed me so I wouldn't give it away.

I myself can't stand alcohol of any kind. I only drink grape juice on Passover, and the one vodka shot I tried one Purim a few years back made my eyes water. Needless to say I had no intention of drinking the wine when it came.

A few minutes later, it did come, and the waitress set it down right in front of me. Throughout the rest of the meal, I behaved as though it were Alia's drink, and she treated it as though we were, at worst, sharing. By that I mean she insisted on keeping it by my plate, fearful that the restaurant staff would get suspicious if it was moved to her setting. Honestly, I don't think anyone would have noticed.

This isn't exactly Abbott and Costello material, I know, but it's amusing that, even in New York, underage people still get away with ordering alcohol.

Or maybe the waitress overheard our entire discussion and decided to just play along.

Nah.

Auto-Flush: Self-Reinforcing?

2009-02-19T18:30:00.001-06:00

Image by ancawonka via Flickr

I was at a rather spiffy library today with automatic everything in the restrooms. It wasn't to the extent of some places (airports and mondo shopping malls are worse), but there were a lot of sensors in there. When someone else came, did his thing, and just walked to the sink without doing anything, it got me thinking.

What if automatic flush valves are a self-reinforcing product? Think about it. It used to be that one had to be very meticulous to always flush before leaving. Now, with all the automation, some people just ignore the whole valve and trust it to do its job.

If people ignore the valve, they might start assuming that every toilet has automatic flush and just walk away without checking to make sure it actually does (and if it has, checking to make sure it worked). So that could mean more unflushed toilets (yuck), which would spur the installation of yet more automatic flush devices.

With my reasoning, the very fact that automatic flush devices exist and are installed in restrooms across the country creates a demand for them as society becomes less aware of the existence of manual flushes. Granted it's far-fetched—there's no way people will really forget until auto-flush becomes a household fixture—but we could be on the way there.

Or am I just reading all kinds of stuff into a situation for no reason?

Update (04/06): Hmm. Today, I found one auto-flush that missed, and twice had it flush on me while I was just in there getting a piece of tissue paper for my nose. If nothing else, the sensors are a tad unreliable.

Stop Direct Mail!

2009-01-25T16:30:00.004-06:00

Image via WikipediaAnnoying. Wasteful. Downright useless.

What am I talking about? Direct mail.

Notice how that pile of paper you bring in from the mailbox (street-side, just-inside-front-door, wherever it is) is mostly stuff you bring in one door and out the other? Literally or figuratively, most of that mail ends up going right through the house and into the recycling (though sadly, some people – my dad included – just throw it away).

If one were to examine that bulk of mail, one might find that virtually every last piece is trying to sell something. From yard services to home-improvement solutions, dinner discounts to electronics, marketers just keep shoveling colorful, glossy paper into our houses, hoping that their message will be the one to catch your eye and result in a sale. Just think how much paper, ink, and energy that takes.

The practice is perfectly legal, of course. More legal even than telemarketing, since there's no Do Not Mail List (so far as I know) to worry about. At the very least, any residential address is fair game. Spam is illegal, and all it does is waste time; but why is this resource-squandering activity still allowed?

I would guess that when it comes to direct mailers, the United States Post Office is perfectly content to live and let live. Excuse me for being cynical, but just think of all the postage marketers pay the USPS to deliver their paper-wasting missives! It also guarantees jobs for postal carriers (can't say "mailmen" these days; it's not politically correct) because the sheer volume of paper being sent to homes across the nation virtually ensures that every house on every carrier's route will have mail every day.

So much for the government supporting "green" practices. What would be truly environmentally friendly, I think, is if the government changed the spam laws to allow electronic versions of direct mail, and outlawed the paper variety. Ah, but then people would complain that the government changed its mind and began condoning spam. There would be a difference, though: if paper direct mail is not paper spam, then electronic direct mail is not electronic spam. Logical? Of course. Acceptable to the public? I doubt it.

But I can provide further reasoning in favor of transitioning the massive direct mail industry to the electronic front. Consider: Every piece of paper mail that comes in must be sorted and processed by a person, generally a homeowner whose time would be better spent doing other tasks like taking care of the house or unwinding after a day at the office. When an email is received, the computer (in my case, a Gmail server farm somewhere) is already running many, many checks on the message to validate its origin, confirm that it isn't spam, etc. Many email servers have filtering rules built-in. So by simply programming a few simple rules into their email service or client program, people could have interesting direct mail delivered to their Inbox and the useless junk (probably still about 90-95% of it) sent to /dev/null – all automatically!

To be sure, email marketing is still an emerging field, but an electronic advertisement is certainly more environmentally friendly than a paper one; and to be sure, consumers could be saved a lot of aggravation if digital logic could be applied to the sorting of marketing messages. So why not go electronic? I'm game.

While we're at it, let's examine telemarketing and consider the less-intrusive alternatives. I might also write about investment reports, bank statements, and other excessive mailings at a later date.

FeedBurner Migration Troubles on feeds.swrobotics.com

2009-01-20T22:40:00.000-06:00

Image by rudolf_schuba via FlickrI didn't exactly blog about it outright, but I do remember expressing a reasonable amount of uncertainty when I announced that I moved my FeedBurner account to Google's servers. Yes I am an early adopter; the deadline may not be until the end of February, but do you really want to make something of it? Apparently Google did.

As part of the migration process, I had to ask the DNS administrator for swrobotics.com (I wish I could do things like this myself, but I can't) to change the entry for the feeds subdomain from feeds CNAME feeds.feedburner.com. — the easy-peasy old way — to <special-sub-sub-sub-domain>.feedproxy.ghs.google.com. — the (unnecessarily, I think) long new way.

The change seemed like a simple matter, and indeed I was emailed back the next day with a note that the modification was complete. Google, though, seems to have a glitch. Trying to access the feed at its usual home (feeds.swrobotics.com/swrobotics) turned up an error: "404 Server Not Found".

Research I did tonight turned up a thread on Google Groups with a solution to the annoying 404 Server Not Found errors I was getting. Apparently there are widespread issues with preexisting MyBrand (what FeedBurner's Custom Domain feature is referred to as) domain configurations. The easy solution is to deactivate the MyBrand service and re-enter the settings. Seconds after I implemented this fix, I was pulling up the feed once more.

So the moral of the story is, don't trust that automatic migration tools like FeedBurner's will fix everything up exactly right. Sometimes, hacks, kludges, and/or workarounds will be necessary to make sure things work properly.

Telemarketing Loopholes: FAIL

2009-01-18T16:30:00.003-06:00

Image by elh70 via FlickrI was relaxing at home in the evening on the Monday before Thanksgiving, around 19:30, looking through a Hebrew-English dictionary to try and figure out what the song title "הלב שלנו" means in English. (I never did find the meaning of the word הלב; it seems to be conspicuously absent from both dictionaries I possess.) But an interruption was about to occur.

The phone rang.

Normally that would be a simple matter – just pick up the phone, read the Caller ID, and decide whether or not to answer it – but this situation was remarkable in that Caller ID is unavailable at my house. Put more correctly, Caller ID is a subscription service that we do not subscribe to. The cost is several dollars per month, and the phones at home aren't used enough to justify the expense.

So, I must answer the call without knowing who is on the other end. It's usually either GrandCentral or my mother, but this time it's a "robot" call. A recorded voice begins speaking to me. On the off-chance that I will be hanging up on a real person who might at some point ask an actual question, I stay on the line.

I needn't have bothered. Upon coming to a spot in the text where a changing date is to be inserted, the voice pauses, changes, and continues in a vastly different tone. I hung up before the original voice could return.

For a fact, I know that the number I answered is almost certainly on the Do Not Call List, which is supposed to prohibit marketing calls. The only problem is, there's a loophole. Non-profit organizations, pollsters, and political campaigns seem to be allowed to dial blacklisted numbers without fear of repercussions. The content of this particular call is irrelevant; the fact remains that this is not the first time, and will not be the last.

Denying the possibility of prohibiting unsolicited telephone calls altogether (a most appealing option, actually), I honestly believe that there should be an option for numbers on the Do Not Call List (or a second list for the purpose) to block all unsolicited calls, whether made by computer or human. In addition, Caller ID should be a standard feature on all telephone lines, with no extra charge. (See "Caller ID Should Be Standard" for more in-depth coverage.)

With respect to blocking all unsolicited calls, some of us just don't want to be bothered by such an intrusive device unless we know the caller, personally or professionally. If you want to sell me something, convince me to vote for you in an election, or gain my good will and receive a donation of some sort, please take your marketing elsewhere. Interrupt me while I'm on the Internet. No, I do not mean that you should spam me or add me to an email list; I would find such practices just as annoying as unsolicited telephone calls. I mean you should advertise. Buy spots in Google AdWords or something.

See, I don't object to you getting your message out, but rather to the way you're going about doing so. The Internet provides a medium where a) people are used to being interrupted by ads, so they will be automatically less disruptive, and b) there is increased likelihood of your ad being relevant. A random telephone call is most definitely less relevant than a Web ad placed near text that relates to what is being advertised.

Feel free to ask me to donate clothing to your cause, vote for your candidate, or buy the latest and greatest in window-blind technology; just do it in a way that doesn't waste my time or interrupt something I'm already doing.

Feed Address Changed [Maintenance]

2009-01-16T20:20:00.000-06:00

Image via CrunchBaseFor those reading this site via the feed, this is just a heads-up that the feed address has changed due to my FeedBurner account being migrated to Google. Email subscribers are unaffected; all that's changed is the link I have here on the site, in the sidebar, for new subscribers.

If the address you subscribe to is on this domain (i.e. has voyagerfan5761.blogspot.com in it), you're all set. If you subscribe to the one on feeds.feedburner.com, you're set, too; but I don't know how long Google will keep the redirect up, so change feeds to feeds2 just to be safe.

Personally, I don't know why the addresses have to change, especially when the change is so trivial. It's possible that, once all accounts are migrated, the old addresses will again become the default, or there might be further changes (perhaps to feedproxy.google.com or something like that).

Given all this uncertainty, my suggestion for feed-subscribing readers who want to ensure uninterrupted delivery would be to change whatever feed currently in your reader to http://voyagerfan5761.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default so any future changes will be taken care of as quickly as I can update my settings. I say "would be" because I'm considering moving to my own domain name, which would complicate things even further. Since I don't plan to stop using FeedBurner, http://feeds2.feedburner.com/voyagerfan5761 is probably the best bet.

Comments On Google Changes

2009-01-16T08:05:00.014-06:00

Image via WikipediaOn Wednesday, Google announced changes to or shutdowns of several services. Google also shut down Lively, the 3D chatroom that I always looked upon as a rather silly Second Life knock-off, beginning January 1—just a few short weeks ago. ("Reasons Google should kill Lively" was actually a topic in my to-blog list for several months, but it looks like I didn't have to blog about it for Google to see that it wasn't a good fit with their other projects. Nice work saving effort there, self. :P Anyway...)

I'm rather unconcerned with the fate of Google Catalog Search, which was (I believe) really just a good way to work on the OCR technology Google now uses in Book Search. (Catalog Search's former homepage at catalogs.google.com now redirects to Google's main site.) I never used it; catalogs are pretty useless these days anyway what with online shopping and Froogle (now known by the much-less-punny appellation of Google Product Search and accessed by a link in the Google header called "Shopping", though I wish they'd bring back the old name).

Image via CrunchBaseAlso of little real consequence to me, personally, is the development stoppage on Google Notebook. I don't use it much, and my service will be unaffected anyway. Well, relatively unaffected, at any rate. When I do use Notebook, it's usually in conjunction with the "Clip" function of the accompanying Firefox extension—which will no longer work. But the service will continue for now as long as one already has an account.

I'm actually somewhat glad to hear of Dodgeball.com closing and Jaiku being open-sourced. Dodgeball was a premature service somewhat like Brightkite—which I occasionally use—that stagnated almost immediately after being acquired by Google in 2005. Its interface has always been phone-only (Brightkite allows use via text message, Web interface, or iPhone/iPod-Touch–optimized site). In my opinion, Google would do well to encourage Dodgeball's users to move to Brightkite. An agreement with Brightkite to ease the transition for users willing to make the switch would likely make Dodgeball's death as swift and painless as possible.

Image via CrunchBaseJaiku has also stagnated, the most notable annoyance being that it has been invite-only since its acquisition in 2007. With the transition to open-source (the service will continue to be run by a team of volunteer Googlers), Laconica might get some new features, competition, or perhaps both. Twitter may also be encouraged to develop long-overdue features like OAuth support, since Jaiku is slated to support OAuth right out of the gate when it is released to the open-source community. (Securely logging into Twitter from third-party applications and websites has long been a point of contention in the community, because the only option continues to be giving every app your username and password. Not a very secure solution, especially because there isn't even the layer of security provided by API keys such as used by FriendFeed and, yes, Jaiku. Google itself has supported OAuth authentication for its own services since as long as I can remember.)

Overall I think Jaiku's fate is the best and most (potentially) beneficial of all those announced this week. The potential for competition and improvement in the entire microblogging and status-update ecosystem is wonderful. However, potential users of the newly–open-sourced Jaiku Engine (hopefully that's the address where it will live—it 404s at the moment, but I'll watch and update if necessary) will still be dependent upon other Google amenities, namely Google App Engine. Jaiku was ported to App Engine last year, and the code base is now dependent upon being run in that environment. (This could be a ploy to get money, since App Engine charges—or will charge; I'm not sure of the time frame of the fee structure—nominal fees for applications that move beyond moderate-scale deployment—not a bad business move, if I do say so myself.)

Image via WikipediaThe one impending closure that I am really and truly saddened by is the shutdown of uploads to Google Video, which is now (and will shortly be, but for already-uploaded content) solely a meta–video-search site. I've always preferred Google Video to YouTube for a variety of reasons. Some of them are:

cleaner interface
more professional player appearance (nice for embedding on sites like swrobotics.com)

especially the lack of related videos and pop-down search bar

less cluttered site
fewer extraneous features
more focus on videos, less on social networking

(As an aside, there is also some uncertainty how the closure will affect users of Blogger who use the platform's video upload feature, which uses Google Video for hosting. I have never uploaded a video for a post through Blogger, so I'm somewhat detached from this particular concern—but I thought it was relevant nonetheless.)

I have many more reasons and thoughts on this comparison that I can't easily articulate, but I will be very sad to lose the ability to add new content to Google Video. Failing the motivation to deal with YouTube (which has limits on content length and filesize that may or may not be lifted in the aftermath of Video's shutdown), I suppose I might have to start uploading somewhere else entirely, like Vimeo (whose player I like quite a bit).

YouTube has always kind of irked me as a place to upload content. It's a great place to go to watch videos, almost always, but for hosting videos intended for display on another site... Despite the number of sites that do so, its player has always seemed out of place on the sites I'm involved with. The in-built social network (which includes profile pages, a messaging feature, "friendship", and so forth) has always seemed like an unnecessary layer to me.

I suppose I should have seen the writing on the wall when Google's own blogs, which used Google Video uploads themselves for a while even after the YouTube acquisition, all switched over to YouTube videos and left Google Video in the dust. Maybe I'm a video Scrooge, or maybe I'm just being resistant to change (who isn't?). Whatever the reason, I—honest and truly—will miss being able to add my videos to such a simplistically elegant site as Google Video has been.

Update (19:46): Some good news (depending on how you look at it) came this week, too: FeedBurner now shows a link to migrate your account to Google on the My Feeds page. That wasn't there a couple days ago...

Caller ID Should Be Standard

2009-01-11T16:30:00.003-06:00

Image via WikipediaI don't particularly like using the telephone.

Don't get me wrong; it's nothing against the concept of talking to someone who's not there – I do that all the time online. It's not the fact that it's voice-based instead of text-based. (Actually it kind of is, but that's not the point of this post.)

One of the biggest reasons I don't like telephones is that it's sometimes impossible to know who's on the other end of the line. Caller ID is considered a premium feature and carries a charge somewhere in the area of $5/month per line. (This doesn't apply to cell phones, which have it built in. I'm strictly discussing landlines here.) Since when is knowing who's trying to contact you a privilege, not a right?

I know, I know; it takes resources, it's relatively new. Telephones have been around in concept since the mid-1800s; Caller ID was conceived in the late 1960s. But let me tell you something: Flash memory was first presented at the IEEE conference in 1984 by a Japanese employee of Toshiba, who invented the technology in 1980. Prices for that technology have fallen steeply in just ten years.

How about some perspective? For as long as I can remember (five years or so, in this case), Caller ID has been a good $5-$10 per month. It hasn't changed, either, as far as I know. By comparison, flash memory prices started at a good $100 or more for a few megabytes when my mother got her first digital camera (which took the no-longer-developed SmartMedia memory card) and are now down to $100-$150 for 16GB. That hardly seems fair, considering that both prices are for technological innovations that usually depreciate very rapidly.

Perhaps the lack of price decrease for Caller ID is caused by similar factors to those which create the sky-high fees on SMS messages. That is to say, carrier greed. (I also notice that landline telcos don't include long-distance calling as part of the phone line price, but that's a whole 'nother subject; I won't go there.)

So what if Caller ID was standard? Sure it might raise the basic price of a phone line a dollar or two, but that would be better than paying the ridiculous rates currently charged to have it as an add-on feature. (I'm taking a page from my economic experience that says package deals are always cheaper than a la carte options. Not saying that's always true; it's just a good rule of thumb.)

If I had Caller ID on every phone, I could look at it and answer or not answer based on who's calling, without paying extra, and gain more confidence in answering landline phones. (It's debatable whether landlines are even still useful what with prepaid cell phones and all that, but sometimes they're required for alarm systems. In which case being able to use them as intended is a nice bonus.)

And all this because I hate listening to telemarketers and recorded messages. Huh. Fancy that: Marketing makes me hate the medium on which it is delivered. Same as commercial television and radio (I spy a future post idea...) – but not the Internet; I can block ads on the Internet faster than you can say, "I hate advertisements."

Parked In: A Yom Kippur Story

2008-12-18T16:00:00.001-06:00

I wrote this way back in October, but never got around to polishing it and posting it until now. Finally I found time and motivation to post! I hope you all enjoy this story; even now, I am still uncovering all its hidden meanings.

This year's Yom Kippur was interesting. After school, I went straight to dinner, and then to services. Specifically, we (my mother and I) were interested in Kol Nidre, a beautiful piece of music that is part of the evening service erev Yom Kippur.

The service started at 16:45, and I had what was basically a tech rehearsal for a production of scenes from Romeo and Juliet at 17:30. More importantly, we had a stage fight to completely rework, so I had to be at rehearsal as close to on-time as possible -- our fight choreographer would only be there for the first hour. It looked like things were going to work out pretty well; we'd just leave the service shortly after Kol Nidre and blast to rehearsal, perhaps catching the second half of the service later, around 20:30.

It was not ordained.

Exiting the shul at 17:27, I was horrified to find that the Temple's parking attendants had motioned congregants to double-park -- filling each passageway in the (relatively small, actually, considering the size of the congregation) parking lot with two lines of cars -- effectively hemming in those vehicles parked within the white lines on the asphalt (and each other, but I'll discuss that below). Worse, there was one BMW 525i that was just barely blocking the one possible escape route. Honestly, had it not been for that one car, I could have gotten to rehearsal five or ten minutes late -- not bad for a holiday. But that BMW was in the way, and I was stuck.

What could I do? We went back inside. There was nothing else to be done except wait for the end of the service and get to rehearsal as soon as possible.

As it happened, the rabbi delivered a very moving sermon that evening. I felt like I suddenly knew why that one BMW had been parked behind our car. If we'd been able to get out, we would have left and missed that sermon.

Even better, when I finally did get to rehearsal, everyone was quite understanding and the fight choreographer had stayed late just for me. I am grateful for that, and for the sermon that I came so close to missing. When something is supposed to happen, the universe rearranges itself to make that something possible. I find that amazing.

Badly Designed Websites: Improvement Sighted

2008-09-05T22:10:00.001-05:00

Yes, I know this post is short. It reflects my most recently added constraint: Time. I just don't have much of it these days. It makes me sad that I can't blog as much as I'd like, but I'll do what I can.

Image via Wikipedia
Remember that old post I made last October citing www.mcool.org as an example of a badly designed website?

Say hello to their redesign!

Yes, it's true! The site has been completely redone since the end of last school year, and it now features a great deal of improvements. Not the least of which are bookmarkable URLs (no more JavaScript-submitted CGI junk) and a menu structure that is fully functional without JavaScript enabled. I dare say time has been good to the site.

Well, that's one less annoying site off my list... Too bad I'm nearly done with my association with that organization; it would have been nice to have the current site about three years earlier...

Would I Ever Use BlogBurst?

2008-08-23T08:02:00.003-05:00

I wrote this post in late April, before I left for Chicago, and initially scheduled it to publish the morning of April 25. It was replaced by something else because I wasn't sure about it, but reading it again now I think it's pretty fine. I'm writing a big post to be published in the next week or two, so this looked like a good post idea to use in the mean time.

I don't remember how I initially heard about BlogBurst. It's one of those many sites I just got in my head somehow but can't trace. There's been a post idea nagging at the back of my head for a while, and I decided to let it out now.

BlogBurst is an RSS-based syndication network, where publishers submit their content and other sites can take it and display it under their own umbrella. The content producers make money (theoretically) and the other sites get content.

So would I use BlogBurst? That's a good question. There are a few problems I see. First, I probably can't sign up. (Due to the other niggling ethical issues I haven't bothered to check for an age restriction, but one probably exists.) Second, I'd be providing content for other sites to make money off of. Third, I'd be creating duplicate content, upon which Google and other search engines frown.

Putting my writing on someone else's site for their profit -- even if I would get a cut -- isn't something I want to do. I can't rationalize creating duplicates or taking traffic away from this site (or its feed).

On the one hand, it sounds like it could be some good exposure if my posts are displayed on popular news sites like Reuters, Fox News, etc., and could generate some revenue (if my writing is picked up, of course). However, it's a lot like turning blogging into a job, and at the moment I don't want to do that. (What sites would continue displaying blog posts that aren't replenished fairly regularly? Yeah, that's what I thought. I try to blog regularly, but if things get in the way I don't have to tear my hair out over it.)

I have been considering placing ads on this site, but first of all I can't (for another year) because of my age, and second I'm not sure I want to bug my readers with ads. (I wonder if I'm one of the bloggers who don't deserve to make money -- though I agree with the counter-argument from Geek News Central. Louis? I hear most sites don't make more than a dollar or two a day, anyway, if that.)

How Should I Respond to Copied Photos?

2008-08-17T09:24:00.002-05:00

All right, it's time to get this issue out there. I tweeted it a few times before, many months ago, but last night I was just reminded of the issue by an entire Facebook album of photos uploaded by someone I went canoeing with last summer -- but represented as original works. No credit, no acknowledgment, not even anything about the fact that someone else took the photos!

Fine, I did upload the photos to Picasa Web Albums and set them as public, and I did send everyone on the trip the URL of the gallery page... But still, those are my pictures that have been taken without any attribution and uploaded to a social website that claims a ton of rights to user-submitted content in the fine print of its user agreements:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

In short:

[...] this means you’re giving up copyright control of your material. If you upload a photo to Facebook, they can sell copies of it without paying you a cent. If you write lengthy notes (or import your blog posts!), Facebook can turn them into a book, sell a million copies, and pay you nothing. This deserves careful consideration!

Both of the above quotes were copied from a great post at Legal Andrew on the subject of Facebook. (See? Attribution is so easy to give, and yet it's so often left out.)

So there are issues with Facebook's terms of service. There are also issues with the emotional connection I feel with my own photos, and my desire to be credited for my work, and my wish to be recognized by others for what I've done. Oh, and let's not forget the horrible feeling that comes from knowing other people think someone else created your work.

I'm not going to mention who copied my photos, not by name. That doesn't matter; I can handle that person's abuse easily enough, once I decide what course of action to take. Which brings me to the point of this post.

Using a question as a post title isn't something I do often (despite it being advised). That means I really want reader feedback on the post, even more than normal. So, it's a simple question:

How should I handle this unauthorized, unattributed uploading of my content to Facebook?

Should I contact the person through the messaging system (or email)? Or just send Facebook a DMCA notice for the images and be done with it?

I look forward to any and all opinions on this matter.

What Does "Friend" Mean?

2008-08-16T09:37:00.001-05:00

Image by Veronica Belmont via Flickr This was inspired by a recent experience I had when I went back to Evanston, IL for the NHSI Musical Theatre extension presentation. I'd rather not talk about the details -- I've decided not to blog about that part of my life, despite its significance, as it's rather painful -- but I did get to thinking. This is what I came up with in the time since.

Social networking websites have really degraded the concept of friendship. I suppose it's not their fault entirely -- other things like amateur radio have been doing the same things (namely competing based on how many contacts a person has) for decades -- but none of the previous offenders used the term "friends" for the number being compared.

See, MySpace and Facebook both have a lot of users, and substantial subsets of those users often compare their friend list size with that of other people they know, and try to get the biggest number within their social circle. So we have people you barely know sending (and accepting) friend requests to (and from) you.

Now, I have always used the term "friend" to refer to people with whom I feel connected and with whom I have something of a relationship beyond simple collaboration and camaraderie (that is, beyond a "professional" or "working" relationship). Those with whom I feel a personal connection, I suppose. So now I see that there's no way for me to say that these colleagues, classmates, or whatever are just those; everybody I know (including family) is a "friend" in the eyes of a social networking site. That's annoying, very annoying.

See, it all boils down to this: I left Cherubs nearly two weeks ago. (And I still haven't written down all my experiences... I know, for shame.) I had thought I made a lot of friends there, but that was really wishful thinking as it turns out. In fact, I was fooling myself into thinking I had fit in much better than I had in reality. Sensing that I had been an outsider, I didn't want to accept that fact -- or admit it to myself -- and so I began thinking of all these people who greeted me courteously, professionally, in passing, as "friends".

The Facebook definition of "friend" has invaded my thinking, and it's probably affecting a lot of people.

Those aren't "friends" I made at Cherubs; what had seemed like real connections were really just the superficial, cordial niceties of working together in a focused group. They are acquaintances at best, strangers (yes, I managed to avoid even learning some people's names) at worst. The strangers are the ones I recognize as having been in the program but can't name or put in a role from the shows we did the last week of July.

Suffice it to say I was pretty disappointed, after the presentation ended, at the lack of warmth from those who had been my colleagues and cohorts for five weeks. More importantly, one boy who had seemed like a friend seemed more interested in the videos I took for him than in me. By him in particular I felt used.

So a "friend" is not a friend. Not even if you mentally drop the quotes.

I suppose managing relationships is a skill that comes with experience, and isn't innate to the human mind. My parents aren't exactly what you'd call socialites, and really nobody in my family is. So far as I'm aware, everyone I know can count the number of friends (not "friends") they have using ten fingers or less, and probably use less than five. I know I can. Unfortunately I have been unable to connect with any of my real friends for most of the summer, since we've all been busy and/or out of town.

My point here is that I've learned the hard (emotionally) way to not think of everyone as a friend, and not even as a "friend". Facebook may use the term. MySpace and Twitter can (though Twitter uses the word "Following" now). I most certainly won't. (I think I put more detail than I wanted to in this post, but it really does help illustrate what I'm talking about, so... I'll leave it all in.)

Hampton Inn Internet Issues

2008-08-15T23:32:00.000-05:00

Image via Wikipedia All right, so obviously I managed to get online. But it took about half an hour. Let me begin the saga... (And this was after something of a disappointment at the NHSI Musical Theatre extension's presentation... but I don't think I'll blog about that.)

We checked into the hotel around 22:00, then got up to the room. I set up my computer and started looking for clues as to how the Internet access was delivered (RJ-45 plug or Wi-Fi). I finally figured out that it was wireless (the amenities book gave the impression that it was wired) and tried to find it. No luck.

So I called the front desk. Duh.

DC: "Guest Services."

Me: "I'm having trouble accessing the Internet. Is it wired or wireless?"

DC: "It's wireless."

Me: "I can't seem to find the network."

DC: "Have you entered the code yet?"

Me: "On a Web page or in Windows?"

DC: "On the authentication page."

Me: "I haven't even managed to find the network yet."

Now she figures it out. (I am not dissing girls -- there are plenty of geeky girls out there -- it's just that the guest services employees at hotels never seem to know anything about technology.) After a few more sentences, she gives up and transfers me to the Internet support call center.

One would think they'd know what's up, right? By this point I've deduced that it was an out-of-range network, but I figured I'd see if the support tech knew something I didn't. After getting in all my hotel info, I was asked what the problem was.

Me: "My computer can't find the network."

ST: "Is your connection wired or wireless?"

Me: "Wireless."

ST: "Are there any networks in the list?"

Me: *Rattles off the two that were in the list the last time I refreshed it*

ST: "Is it plugged in?"

Me: "The computer's power cord is plugged in, yes."

ST: "Can you reboot your computer for me?"

I waited on the line for a good chunk of time while my computer rebooted in its slow, cautious way. During the wait, I was asked what kind of computer I had. Foolishly I answered, "Windows XP". I thought she meant the operating system, which is what most people mean when they ask "what kind" about a computer. But no, she wanted "Gateway". Anyway...

Me: "I have access to the network properties."

ST: "Is it in the list now?"

Me: "No." (after checking the newly-updated network list)

And that was it. The tech suggested that it was a weak wireless signal in the room and said she'd have the front desk send up a bridge. (The bridge is pretty cool; it gets the 'Net from the power socket. Nice!) And the call was over.

So, all they can do is send me something to plug in? I like wireless Internet, thank you very much. Oh well.

I'm not really complaining about the support tech; I know she's just reading from a script. The woman at the front desk should be able to figure out that if I can't find the network, that means I haven't gotten to the authentication page. But maybe the average traveler isn't too bright, and refers to the Internet as "the network"... I don't know. I suppose my point is that the hotel's wireless nodes aren't placed too well. And the last hotel we stayed at (same chain) had an Ethernet cable right on the desk. Never mind the fact that I was bumped over to the table by my mother's suitcase...

Travel is such fun sometimes...

Google, Please Don't Disrupt the Continuity of Google Page Creator Sites

2008-08-09T07:00:00.004-05:00

Don't worry, I'm working on a post about my summer at Northwestern University. It's just a lot of writing, thinking, and recalling, so it'll take some time. Meanwhile, this post has a very important message I wanted to get out.

All right, someone needs to think. Hard. Someone at Google, that is. Why? Because a lot of people, including me, will be potentially made unhappy when Google Sites takes over for Google Page Creator.

Google Blogoscoped published "Google Slowly Closing Page Creator" a few days ago, which got me thinking. How much do I use Google Page Creator? For its intended purpose (creating pages), not much. But I use it quite a bit for hosting miscellaneous images and bits of XML (like gadgets and FeedFlare units) that I use all over the Web. So what will happen if Google migrates me to Google Sites?

The Bad

The bad possibility -- one that I sincerely hope they avoid -- is that I will be moved from http://voyagerfan5761.googlepages.com/ to http://sites.google.com/site/voyagerfan5761/. Links all over the place will break. Images will be missing. My blog feed will be missing FeedFlares. Countless emails will no longer look right. Sure I can fix much of the damage, but that assumes Google will migrate my files, too.

The Hope

My hope is that, using the custom domain feature of Google Sites, migrated Google Page Creator users will simply have their back-end replaced, while the public-facing part of the site (pages and files) appear to remain the same. No broken links, no discontinuity, no user aggravation.

Conclusion

I guess my point in writing this (there are other discussions, too; here's one from FriendFeed and one from Labnol) is to try and get Google's attention. Please, Google, please let us know more details about your migration plans. If migration is going to break links and change URLs, please tell us now so we can begin preparations!

Update (12:51): I nearly forgot about files! Of course accessing existing files is covered under not breaking links, but I totally forgot to mention that there's a possibility of them being deleted in the move or (worse, I think) migrated but hidden in the interface, making deletions, changes, and new uploads impossible. (Thanks, Tony!)

Update (17:46): Ionut at Google Operating System posted on this a few hours ago, and I see he found a Google Groups thread that explains in a bit more detail what will be happening. Google Page Creator sites will be redirected to their Google Sites counterparts. However, it still doesn't mention how files will be handled...

Twitter's Problems: Getting Worse

2008-06-27T13:30:00.003-05:00

I once told myself I'd never write about Twitter's downtime, because everyone in the tech blogosphere writes about it. Today I'm going against that. The problems have simply become ridiculous.

Back when I first started using Twitter, it was very responsive. (I tried to find my first tweet as an example, but there's currently a paging limit of 10 which blocks everything but the 200 most recent tweets.) Posting was nearly instantaneous, the API allowed 70 requests every hour, one could get replies to one's own tweets using a convenient tab on the site or simple call to the API, you could add keywords you wanted to track and have matching tweets sent to you (via IM or SMS), and you could even use Twitter via IM alone!

Utopia Shattered

Now all that has changed. With the thousands -- nay, millions -- of new users that have joined over the last several months, plus the increases in highly tweetlific (tweeting prolifically) power users, Twitter has had lots of downtime. There's been more downtime than I could possible list here; even linking to reports of that downtime is something I'll leave up to the reader (search for "twitter is down" in Google and see how many results you get).

Not only has the service gone down a lot, but many features have been crippled or disabled. The API is limited to 20 req/h out of the original 70 (and has been for weeks); keyword tracking has been shut off for even longer; the IM bot has been offline for so long I can't even remember what using it was like; pagination is limited to the latest 10 pages (of 20 tweets) for each section; the Replies tab has been disabled, requiring the use of search services like Summize to gather responses to one's own messages; the list goes on and on.

Perhaps the most annoying part of all this is the fact that, no matter what the Twitter developers do, the site still goes down. Twitter was founded by the engineers who wrote Blogger, for crying out loud; it should be able to handle a little scaling. But maybe the fact that Blogger engineers wrote the service is the very problem.

Code-Level Problems

The fundamental issue is this: Twitter was written to be a content management system (CMS), not a messaging service. Blogger is a CMS, too. The capability to handle hundreds or thousands of inputs every second is not part of the normal CMS design pattern. Twitter needs to be fundamentally rewritten.

I know I'm not saying anything new; in fact, some of my ideas were inspired or taken directly from other blogs (too many to even begin to remember, unfortunately). It's just that, with today's outage, I realized just how true all the criticisms are. Twitter may disable feature after feature in an effort to reduce the load on the servers that make the site run, but the underlying architecture is a huge (er, very narrow) bottleneck. Technically speaking, you cannot make a messaging system out of a CMS; it's just not possible, code-wise. The two system types have vastly different ways of handling things.

Secondary Effects

Things might not be so bad, though, if being written as the wrong kind of service was Twitter's only problem. The excessive load caused by the incorrect architecture has caused other technical failures in the system, including the loss of an entire database about a month ago and, just this morning, an overloaded load balancer (how's that for irony?). But at least they launched that nice Twitter Status Blog so they can tell us that they're down after we've already known for half an hour.

Conclusion

If I didn't love Twitter to death I'd probably have given up on it by now. Lots of people already have. The latest darling in the social media space is Plurk, which I personally can't stand (the UI is ugly). I like Jaiku better, but it's been invite-only ever since being acquired by Google, which means it's hard to get an account. Pownce is just too weird for me. All I can do for now is deal with the ridiculous bugs, outages, glitches, and all the other crap we Twitter users have to deal with. Then, during the downtimes, I can hope that when I get back in August, Twitter will be back to normal.

If only I had any confidence that it'll happen that quickly.

Update (08/17): Well, actually, Twitter got a whole ton better over the last six weeks or so. After continuing to use it for almost two weeks (back in normal, twhirl-using mode), I'm finding the upped API limit (100 req/h) to be absolutely great, and the site is much faster than it was in June. Looks like a lot of my complaints from this post are no longer relevant. Yay! I just wish that some people (*cough* possible248 *cough*) hadn't moved to other sites in the interim...

Blogging vs. Social Life

2008-06-21T06:30:00.000-05:00

I've found a pretty compelling trend in the last few months. As my social life in the "real world" space has expanded, this blog is one of the things that have suffered. Whereas a year or two ago I was writing posts a mile a minute (especially last Fall), posting is now spread out over increasingly long periods of days and even weeks.

I'm really not sure what to make of the trend, but I do know it's there. Whether it's a universal constant or something peculiar to me, I don't know. Perhaps Twitter has something to do with it, as well; I do a lot of chatting on there, along with writing short little thoughts that would never do as full blog posts.

Another thing that seems to have been affected is my focus, both in terms of my ability to concentrate and the scope of topics I cover here. This blog started as a small personal journal over on MSN Spaces (now Windows Live Spaces), moved to Blogger, became a technically oriented publication of fact and opinion, shifted more toward opinion, and is now becoming more of a personal journal again (sans most of the intimate details, because people who know me actually read it now).

Now, as I blog in the shadow of my looming departure next week, I'm finding less and less inspiration for posts. Sure, I have a list of ideas, but it seldom gets additions or subtractions any more; the ideas are more "someday" and less "do it now".

This coming school year will be my last of high school, should all go according to plan; it may also be the first in which I find myself thinking more about what's happening outside regularly scheduled things like classes and less about the classes themselves.

It does seem strange that having more of a social life has diminished my own desire to blog. Perhaps that lack of drive stems from the simple fact that I have more places to express my opinions. Why go to the trouble of typing up a few hundred words, later, when you can simply talk with a friend about it?

Hopefully I'll be able to find a better balance between my social life, school, and blogging this coming year. After all, my social life isn't going to go away.

Grammar Photo from Chicago Published

2008-06-14T14:30:00.003-05:00

Image via WikipediaIt's pretty well-known in my circle of friends and family that I'm a grammar nut. While I was in Chicago in April, at Union Station [right] on the way back to Minneapolis, I saw a great sign at the check-in desk. I submitted it to Bethany Keeley's "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks a few days after I got back, and this morning I got an email that she'd posted it. I have another email in requesting a correction of my display name and blog address (lack of numbers and extra [incorrect] tracking data, respectively), but that photo is mine.

So head on over to "except special people" (not my headline or text, though; just my picture) if you're into grammar. If you like that, I'd suggest subscribing to the site, because that's what Bethany posts. The vast majority of posts are photos from user submissions, so get busy with that camera!

Very Belated Summary of "Working" Production

2008-06-14T06:03:00.003-05:00

I know it's been ages since I last published on this blog (or on any blog, really), and even longer since the show actually took place. I'm really sorry about that; last week was spent fooling with the end of school, and this week (still on-going) has been lots of socialization and more dealing with the end of school (most notably the computer I'm using, which has to go back by Wednesday [realistically, earlier, because of shipping]).

Aside from everything going on in my own life, I've been remembering the scheduled posting bug from a week ago. I don't know if it's fixed yet. We'll see. I haven't seen any updates from Blogger about it. So I don't know whether this post will even publish when I want it to. But it'll have to be a gamble, because I can't hold off writing this any longer. [Update (06:12): It didn't publish automatically... Somebody please fix that bug!]

Image via WikipediaOn May 31, I participated in a production of Working, the musical by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso, based on a book of the same name by Studs Terkel. I played the roles of Rex Winship (CEO, I believe, of an unidentified corporation) and Tom Patrick (a fireman). Two very different characters to be sure.

The full list of characters and songs we did went like this (in show order):

"All the Livelong Day" (all)
Mike Dillard - Ironworker
"Traffic Jam" (all)
Several office workers
Amanda McKenny - A project manager
Rex Winship - "Boss"
Pam "Babe" Secoli - Supermarket checker
"I'm Just Movin'" (Babe and Checkers)
Roberto Nunez - Supermarket bag-boy
"Un Mejor Dia Vendra" (Roberto and, er, me with no character name)
Conrad Swibel - UPS man
Kate - Housewife
"Just a Housewife" (Kate and two other housewives)
Roberta Victor - Hustler
Grace Clements - Millworker
"Millwork" (Grace)
"If I Could've Been" (all)
Frank Decker - Truck driver
Heather - Telephone operator
Sharon Atkins - Receptionist
Enid DuBois - Telemarketer
Delores Dante - Waitress
"It's An Art (The Waitress)" (Delores and Customers)
Tom Patrick - Fireman
Ralph Werner - Salesman
Charlie Blossom - Rebel (?)
"Something To Point To" (all)

We were having some weather that day. First rain, then hail, then high winds. Our director delayed the show due to the weather, giving our audience more time to navigate the storm. The tornado sirens went off later, during the performance. Which freaked out about half the cast.

Despite a rough start (the whole cast, practically, was late on a dance move in the opening number), the show went pretty well. It was still rather unpolished, but I think that may have added some realism. We did have a lot of energy through most of the performance, and the audience didn't notice any of the few very tiny glitches that happened. The workers' monologues all had a lot of feeling.

Hey, I even got through the dances! Remembering dance steps is, for me, like climbing Mount Everest. For comparison, remembering song melodies and lyrics is like sleeping. I must be a very musically inclined geek. Or a very geeky musician. One or the other. (Or neither; there's something to be said for me liking to write and act, as well.)

After the show, we had a sort of cast party at my house. We got four other cast members plus a few outside friends. The show was short enough that my mom managed to tape a good chunk of the party, encouraging reprises of musical numbers in a capella style.

I hope to eventually get both Working and the recent Performance Company show digitized and uploaded to Google Video, so I can share links with family and friends who couldn't make it. That'll probably take a while. If it takes until after my stay in Evanston, IL, don't be surprised. I have to get my dad to do the capture and encoding, as he's the only one with the hardware, software, and available storage space necessary, but he's quite often busy.

So, there's my summary. I'd summarize the show, but Wikipedia's already done a pretty good job of saying what it's about. The list of characters and songs we kept (above) should be enough to personalize our particular production.

By the way, if you want to hear songs from the show, I found a student- or faculty-maintained (can't tell which) page with links to MP3s. That page might change in the future, so listen now if you want to. If it disappears or changes to no longer include Working material, please post a comment below.

SPAMfighter Tagline is Just Spam to Me

2008-06-05T23:25:00.000-05:00

This is what I was doing while I was supposed to be finishing my coursework for the year. Don't worry, I'm working on homework now; this was supposed to publish four hours ago and didn't, so I tried again. Manually, because scheduled posting is temporarily borked.

Image by Josh Walker via FlickrSpam is something everyone's heard of, and probably gotten at least a few times. Messages like the one on the right have been going around with different month names for a long time. These are the kinds of things most of us know to ignore (but somebody must be buying or else the spammers wouldn't bother).

Email taglines have probably been around longer, but they're not the work of spammers. Legitimate companies like Yahoo!, Microsoft (*cough*), and AOL (*cough cough*) have all used advertising taglines on their free email services, and only Yahoo! has so far gotten rid of them. I just wonder how effective they are. Personally, I ignore everything below the signature unless it says "PS".

Tagline ads are, to me, a pretty stupid marketing ploy. When software you've installed on your computer to protect you from ads starts sending out advertising of its own, however, I get very, very annoyed.

Personal Experience

My mother forwarded to me a message from one of her friends. It was a joke about the "ID-Ten-T" error -- I'm sure you've heard it (and if not, just click the link).

Granted, the ID-Ten-T error joke isn't all that funny, but the tagline on the email was worse. See, this friend of my mother's uses SPAMfighter to fight spam. (Yeah, yeah; what else would you use it for, etc. etc.) It has apparently caught 377 spam messages to date.

I'll just paste the whole tagline here:

I am using the free version of SPAMfighter for private users.
It has removed 377 spam emails to date.
Paying users do not have this message in their emails.
Get the free SPAMfighter here: <link snipped>

That, frankly, makes me want to stay as far away from SPAMfighter as possible. I am told that paying users don't have the message, and am then offered a download of the free version, which will cause me to spam everyone I email with that same message.

Do they honestly think I'll download their program if I know for certain that it will do that? Seriously, I hate email taglines. Signatures are fine -- in fact, I have one myself, all of two or three lines -- but ads make me crazy. Especially if the product being advertised will cause me to send out those same taglines to other people.

So, you want me to use your anti-spam product? Limit features instead of tagging my email. Of course, I don't need an anti-spam product anyway because I have Gmail's spam filters. :D But not spamming your users' innocent contacts with ads would be a nice touch.

As a side topic, while I was composing this post, Zemanta showed me a couple of my own screenshots from Wikipedia as image suggestions. Cool!

Two Types of Friends: A Found Poem

2008-06-02T22:00:00.001-05:00

I did not write this. It sounds so cold to say it, but I didn't.

Nobody I know wrote this. The same.

The truth is, I don't know the author of this poem. It was posted to the discussion board of one of my courses today, and I thought it so moving I had to post it here. It'll be a good tide-over for my next "real" post.

Obviously I haven't blogged in a while (more than a week). Since the school year is ending, I have final assignments to attend to, and no time to really sit and think about a meaningful post about last Saturday's show. (I'm journaling facts, though, and I'll post the finished piece in a week or two when things slow down.)

So, without further ado, the poem I came here to post:

Two Types of Friends – Real & Simple

A simple friend has never seen you cry.
A real friend has shoulders soggy from your tears.

A simple friend doesn’t know your parents’ names.
A real friend has their phone numbers in his address book.

A simple friend brings a bottle of wine to your party.
A real friend comes early to help you to cook and clean.

A simple friend hates it when you call after he has gone to bed.
A real friend asks you why you took so long to call.

A simple friend seeks to talk with you about their problems.
A real friend seeks to help you with your problems.

A simple friend wonders about your romantic history.
A real friend could blackmail you with it.

A simple friend, when visiting, acts like a guest.
A real friend opens your refrigerator and helps himself.

A simple friend thinks the friendship is over when you have an argument.
A real friend knows that it’s not a friendship until after you’re had a fight.

A simple friend expects you to always be there for them.
A real friend expects to always be there for you!

Performance Company Spring 2008 Show Summary

2008-05-24T20:00:00.002-05:00

Image via WikipediaAll right, the "hell week" is over. Three audiences have seen the show, and today marks the start of Memorial Day weekend. There will be no show tonight; we moved our schedule up a day to account for Memorial Day weekend. But it was still three shows.

And a memorable three shows they have been. From George's early pants removal at the beginning of the first night's show to skipping half a scene the second night (something from the last night would have been better, but I couldn't think of one), we've had our share of mix-ups and mistakes. Fortunately, many of them actually made the show funnier.

Lots can happen in two hours, and this show was very near that total. The beat sheets backstage had a list of eleven scenes and songs, some long enough to be shows in and of themselves. But we combined them all together. We even faked an intermission during entry #8, "Intermission Song". But there wasn't really an intermission; it was all a practical joke.

The full program went like this:

The Actor's Nightmare (scene) *
BusyBusyBusy (song) *
DMV Tyrant (scene)
Belly Button (song) *
Canker Sores and Other Distractions (scene) *
On the train (dance) *
Funeral Parlor (scene) *
Intermission Song (song, duh) *
Under Duress (scene)
Nobody Understands Me (song)
Medea (scene, not the full play) *

See, the entire show was composed of scenes ("short plays") by Christopher Durang (a Tony and Obie award winning playwright) and songs by the Philadelphia Chickens (On the train was choreographed by our, er, choreographer). Every item is funny, each in its own way. There was a good mix of all kinds of humor, from political commentary to slapstick and just plain weird stuff.

By the way, items with an * are the ones I took part in. Just thought that would be useful. As you can see, most of the list is items with *s. I was very busy.

The Acts

I'll summarize each thing here, just to give those who didn't see the show -- probably a lot of you -- an idea of what went down. (I'm thinking about asking my dad to edit and digitize the videos so I can upload them. More on that at a later date.)

The Actor's Nightmare

George Spelvin, an accountant, wanders into a theater just before a performance, and is told he has to go on for one of the lead actors (who has been in a car accident and broken both legs, taking the traditional good-luck wish a bit too far). But the situations he faces quickly get out of hand. Is it a dream or is it reality? Who knows?

BusyBusyBusy

This song is just pure funny. There's even a cellphone involved. I should know, I was part of that bit.

DMV Tyrant

James Agnes, a permit-holding student who has just taken and passed the driver's test, wants to get his (yes, his) license, but the counter clerk is none too cooperative when it turns out that neither James nor his test score is in the computer.

Belly Button

I performed a part of this song, and I still don't know what the point is. I think it's just supposed to be weird.

Canker Sores and Other Distractions

Martin and Prunella, a divorced couple in their middle age, meet by chance after ten years and are swept off their feet into love, but their choice of restaurant leaves much to be desired. The other painful afflictions don't help matters.

On the train

This is just set-up for the funeral parlor scene.

Funeral Parlor

A very strange woman whose father won't even return her phone calls any more shows up at the funeral. Very. Strange. Woman.

Intermission Song

Comic relief, and a practical joke on the audience.

Under Duress

Someone is unhappy with the way the President is running things, and decides to make her views on global warming heard.

Nobody Understands Me

Pure jazz.

Medea

Not your ordinary Greek tragedy. It's also supposed to be The Trojan Women.

The Glitches

As with any show, things don't always go according to plan. Each night had its own share of little hiccups. I've listed all the ones I noticed here.

The Actor's Nightmare

First night: George (Stanley?) drops his pants way too early, prompting a hilarious bit of cover-up (which was really fun to come up with: "Look, nobody's allowed backstage before a performance -- especially people without pants on -- so you'll have to leave..." Great fun!); part of one of George's lines is dropped in the Hamlet section; the executioner messes up kicking the cutting block over and has to try again; the entire Man for All Seasons section is totally whacked.

Second night: Tiny flub during the Hamlet section (not sure who messed up, though); Man for All Seasons part whacked again, even after multiple run-throughs before the show.

Third night: Very small line flubs and a slight mix-up in the final scene.

BusyBusyBusy

First night: Umm... It went quite well, given that it was nearly cut the day before.

Second night: The cellphone bit ended up being a bit crackly due to the transmitting end having to be relocated on account of noisy ballet dancers from the show next door (this one was most likely my fault, folks).

Third night: Great!

DMV Tyrant

I couldn't find anything wrong with this one, except that the clerk was a bit hard to hear the first two nights.

Belly Button

Failure FAIL (can there be such a thing?). Meaning nothing.

Canker Sores and Other Distractions

First night: Midge took a little long coming back a couple times, forcing a bit of ad lib.

Second night: It went pretty well; nothing comes to mind.

Third night: I definitely paraphrased a line somewhere in there... But it was a good rendition nonetheless. Which was great because I had people actually there that night.

On the train

First night: Quite well, just not always together.

Second night: Better. The downstage boundary of the train apparently moved somewhere between stage right and stage left. One or two people were too far downstage.

Third night: Very good, but there was one outlying cast member stage left. Too far downstage, again. Oh well.

Funeral Parlor

First night: Almost all the extras (everyone but me) left, and way too early at that. Only some of them are supposed to go, and not till much further into the scene.

Second night: A large section of dialogue was dropped, including the cue line for extras to start leaving to go change for their next role (the cows in the Intermission Song) and the first bit of keening by Marion. Oh, and the set was missing (a few chairs).

Third night: The best run!

Intermission Song

First night: I didn't notice anything.

Second night: Nobody fell for it! Rats.

Third night: Almost got 'em, but my triangle finger was too itchy. People were this close to getting up when I rang it.

Under Duress

Worked for me...

Nobody Understands Me

First night: Flawless. (No, that's not a problem; it's another way of saying I couldn't find anything wrong with it.) We were just missing the bass part, because it turned out the notes in it were wrong.

Second night: Very good, and we even got our bass part back (because the director figured out the right notes before the show).

Third night: I think the best one of the three nights.

Medea

First night: I flubbed a couple of the chorus lines, because I lost my script a month ago in Chicago.

Second night: It went much better. But nobody brought the boxes for the chorus (needed because the other three members are so much shorter than I am ;-).

Third night: Boxes were planned better and we all knew what we were saying. Completely.

Conclusion

So obviously we had our share of flubs. But the great thing is, the audience hardly noticed a thing! And that's the magic of theater.

One interesting little tidbit came this morning, at the end of a rehearsal for another show with the same theater school. The principal of the location I attend (the only one with a Further Stages™ program) was trying to inspire the cast of that show, Working, after an abbreviated run-through. After giving her notes, she made a short speech about the Performance Company's show.

She called it the most phenomenal show she'd ever seen at the school.

That blew me away. I guess it was better than I thought.

Since we have a tape of the second and third nights, and the third night was (I think) the best, I'm considering doing a showing for the people who didn't get to come (most of the Working cast). Also, an upload to the Internet (for family and friends who are out-of-state and/or couldn't make it) is on my mind. I'll see about getting the tape captured and encoded sometime next month. I'm really low on hard disk space, so it's going to have to go on someone else's computer.

Now I get to study for the next show. Which is next week. At the same time, in the same place. So I've now been to the same theater room on seven of the last eight days. And we're using the same sound system for Working. But that's all part of being in multiple groups within the same theater school.

First Show Done; It Went Pretty Well

2008-05-21T23:10:00.000-05:00

Tonight was the first performance of that show I've been working on all week so far. All told, it went quite well. Aside from a few glitches (which I'll compile at the end of the week, along with a short summary of the show), it went better than I ever imagined. But that's what always happens on the first night: Things pull together.

I wish I felt comfortable saying more, but I think I'm going to have to channel most of my notes into the post I'm planning for this weekend, so as not to spoil the show for people who haven't seen it yet. There are at least a few people who read this site that also live in the area and come to see me. So no details; sorry.

All I will say, is that I'm tired and my feet hurt. Two hours is a long show. And I was running around for three hours before that, doing the final dress rehearsal. But I can't wait to do it again tomorrow.

Google Health First Impression

2008-05-21T10:11:00.002-05:00

It resonated throughout the blogosphere a couple days ago that Google Health (<-- the actual service page) finally launched. This has been coming for a long time; it's more than six months since I found out about it, and it was in the works for a while before then. Glad it finally came out (marked "BETA", as is Google's routine).

So, I signed up for it. What else would I do? (And I think my mom was trying it out, too; she read the TOS at the very least.) Though it's going to be a fight between Google Health and Google Web History for the gh network shortcut...

The interface was a bit disappointing. It takes a while to load, and isn't really as "pretty" as Gmail or Google Reader. It's usable, but doesn't seem quite Googley enough (though I think it's built on the Google Web Toolkit, given the script and image file paths containing /gwt/). There are also several functions that load different pages and make you reload the interface when you're done (like the service- and care-provider directories).

Ignoring those things, it's pretty neat. There are great auto-completion menus for all the data fields and it allows for the creation of multiple profiles. I'm just waiting for the day when some local care providers are supported for importing, but meanwhile I suppose I could get my records and enter things myself (next month, not now, if at all; see below).

I know this is a terse review, but I haven't had that long to play with it and don't have time to write too much right now. Sometimes, I hate tech weeks. But that's just how it goes. The sites I linked at the beginning of this post have more information if you're interested. This is basically just my "w00t!" post that shows I've noticed the launch and have played with it, no matter how little. Now back to homework and reviewing lines for tonight's performance (our first one).

Digital Voice Recorder Upgrade

2008-05-21T00:56:00.000-05:00

This is just a quick note that the post I was planning to do about a week from now detailing my experiences with the Roland EDIROL R-09 I got last month won't be happening. I turned it in to Best Buy today (technically it was yesterday, because of the midnight thing) and am waiting on a specially ordered R-09HR unit. The estimated arrival is 4-6 weeks. If it arrives in five weeks or less, I'll get it before going to Northwestern for the summer; if it takes too long, it will have to wait until I get back.

Anyway, I decided to upgrade because of a lot of reasons. First, there are new features in the new version (well, duh) like an integrated speaker and a remote (see my reasons for considering the upgrade for more). Second, the price is actually exactly the same. I was wrong when I said Best Buy doesn't carry it. According to the salesman I talked to, the stuff in the musical department shouldn't be on the website, and said my finding the R-09 on there was a mistake -- yeah, one that got them an extra sale.

That means the listing I found on eBay was apparently overpriced by $20, and it didn't even include shipping from Japan (who knows how much that'd be). Suffice it to say I'm glad I didn't decide to figure out a way to get that one. I'm getting the updated version with the speaker, included software, remote, and all kinds of stuff, for the same price, and all it costs me is a month of use (of the old one, because I had to return it). I say it's a good deal. All my performances for the rest of this Spring will probably be videotaped anyway, if recorded at all.

Gmail Tips

2008-05-21T00:15:00.003-05:00

There are tips and then there are tips. I was just emailed by someone from another site, which yesterday published a lengthy list of tips for using Gmail effectively.

Some highlights include a few I've already heard of (Zoli Erdos' guide to importing old mail comes to mind), and a few ingenious hacks (like embedding MP3s in email; no specific link, just go near the bottom of the above-linked list). While the list mentions using Gmail's labels, it didn't seem to explain anything about them; so my views on using labels properly might complement those other tips.

It's not something I usually do here, blogging just a link -- I think such practices contribute too much to the "echo chamber" view many people hold of the Internet -- but rather than just submission to StumbleUpon, etc., I thought this one deserved a mention. Partly because it's a great list, and partly because the author took the time to reach out and ask me if this list would be useful to my readers (the few of you that there are, heh heh).

I note that the Gmail tips list is that blog's inaugural post, and I just left the third comment ever on the site (judging from its fragment ID, #comment-3). It might still be awaiting moderation; I haven't time to check.

But anyway, go read the list. Even I learned a few things, and I (at least like to think I) am an expert Gmail user. There's something in it for everyone.

As a side note, I probably will be continuing my sparse blogging schedule, as this is tech week for one theatrical production and next week is another, then I play in the orchestra at a graduation ceremony for my local high school. Plus I am behind in schoolwork. So all this Internet stuff is going to have to go on the back burner until a few of these commitments are out of the way.

Yokway Review

2008-05-19T08:05:00.012-05:00

Last night I got an invitation to try Yokway, a social sharing service that seems to focus on the sharing of useful information (in the form of links and info about music, restaurants, and movies). The invite came from Stephan Osmont, the site's co-founder. Stephan's email asked for my feedback, and this is how I'm providing it.

Purpose

As part of the email conversation I had with Mr. Osmont while revising this review, I received this paragraph regarding Yokway's purpose and mission, along with some general future plans:

Indeed, Yokway is about sharing useful information, and news articles are useful as well, it all depends on context. Yokway makes it easy for users to define their context in order to get the information they need daily. Today the context is defined by the people you want to follow, and the topics that interest you. We're about to unveil location-based context, which will make a huge difference with users Yoking from portable devices. We have also a bunch of features to unveil soon, based on our powerful semantic engine doing some underlying magic to better tie everything together and fully contextualize the user experience.

It looks like a lot of stuff, far beyond what I cover here, is on its (Yok)way (er, yeah, that one was bad).

My personal first impression was of a FriendFeed with just the internal sharing feature. Of course, I compare most things to either FriendFeed or something from Google, so... Yeah. This initial impression was pretty inaccurate, and a bit into my discussion with Stephan I found a post about Yokway from Louis Gray -- on Yokway, actually -- who called it Digg for only your contacts' submissions. You only share what you specifically share using either the Yokway site or its bookmarklet (though Mr. Osmont hinted at an auto-sharing feature in the works, for feeds like blogs or del.icio.us favorites; in fact, there are a ton of possible uses for such a feature, reducing the amount of manual re-sharing from site to site).

Also part of our conversation was my own initial confusion over the purpose of the site. I initially totally missed the mark (even further off than the FriendFeed comparison). I no longer remember what I thought it was for at the beginning, but suffice it to say it was really, really far off. Then I read the above-mentioned post by Louis Gray and had an epiphany, which helped me rewrite the review.

Mr. Osmont responded to my confusion with an acknowledgment ("We definitely haven't spen[t] enough time explaining our positioning and we need to start taking care of this.") and another future goal for Yokway ("Shows us how much we really need to start focusing on our message and positioning a bit more."). Part of that future focus on message and positioning will likely be on the Twitter account he mentioned, @yokway. I've added it to my list; if you're interested in Yokway, you should too.

During all the discussion, of course, I was busy trying out the site. I started with registration, then uploaded an avatar and tweaked my contacts. I also tried sharing something and checked out the reading interface.

Registering

On first registration, I was at first annoyed to see first- and last-name fields, but then tried my new trick of not filling in the last name box. It worked, and I got an account that simply displays Voyagerfan5761 as my name. Works for me. Point for Yokway.

Other than the names, the registration form asks for a username, password, and email address, pretty standard fare these days. There's only one password field, though, so if you mess up and hit the registration button, you might have to guess or reset your password before you can safely log out again. For the unconfirmed password on registration, Yokway loses a point.

Picture and Contacts

I then went into the settings panel (following the quick instructions provided in the invitation email) to upload my avatar, the standard blue logo I started using last month. Alarmingly the Last Name field (profile info is on the same page as picture uploading) was filled with that literal text, but cleared itself when I submitted the form. For a minute there I thought my name was going to end up being Voyagerfan5761 Last Name, but it didn't. Point to Yokway for ignoring default values.

Then I checked My Contacts, which listed the site's founder as my only contact. I unsubscribed and then searched for people, finding Louis Gray in there (he started using the site a few months ago, it looks like, and added me back soon after I subscribed to him -- guess he's still using it). I subscribed to Louis and went back to the homepage, where I saw a stream of shared items. The subscription functionality works without page reloads (take note, FriendFeed), and the people search box (for lack of a better term) seems pretty easy to use. Another point.

Sharing

Here's where we get into the meat of the site. Yokway says it "makes it easy to share things with the people you trust." I trust most of the people I see on FriendFeed, and I've definitely seen Louis there, so he's added. Other than him I know no other Yokway users. So we'll stick with just the one person for now.

The sharing interface is pretty intuitive. All you have to do is click a button and up pops a dialog box. (Nice touch that it's draggable, so if you want to read something under it, you don't have to cancel sharing.) It starts with a Web search box, which you can change to Music, Books, Restaurants, and Movies. I'm going to try sharing my blog, this site, so I've typed in its URL.

Now that Yokway has had a chance to search for it, we see the sharing page. Since there's only one thing that matches this site's URL, there is no list of results to bother with. We can enter a text comment, or record a video comment using Seesmic (very cool), then select a thumbnail image and optional description to accompany the site. I've scrolled the list of images to a capture of the first screen of the site, entered a message about testing as the comment, and added a dummy description.

All that's left is to share! Which means clicking the button. And then the page reloads (Yokway loses a point for this; all that JavaScript and this transition is still slowed by a full refresh) with the newly shared item. (Plus, presumably, anything else shared by contacts since the last page load.)

Reading

Of course, sharing things is no use if nobody reads them. Yokway follows the same sort of follower/following as Twitter, FriendFeed, and a lot of other sites. Digg has Fans and Friends. StumbleUpon has its own similar system. Reddit doesn't have one that I know of, but maybe...

Anyway, Yokway displays all shared stuff from your contacts in a list on the home page. You have the ability to comment on and rate your contacts' material, as mentioned above, and discussions can form on especially interesting stuff. This is like lots of other social sites, where there are items and comments. There's even a great little summary widget that displays recent activity from your contacts:

Each item has a star rating (standard 1-5 like YouTube et al), an option to add a text or video comment (again, the video's through Seesmic), and a link to save the item to your favorites (in Yokway, not browser bookmarks/favorites). Some are missing from the owner's perspective (like saving), but interestingly owners can rate their own items. That shouldn't be possible, in my opinion; only readers should be able to rate items, to give an impartial (presumably at least less partial than the owner) measurement of how useful and/or interesting the shared thing is. But perhaps Yokway is intended to let sharers indicate how useful/interesting the content is to them...

Here's what things look like after other users (your subscribers) have had a chance to comment on and rate them:

One nice thing is the fact that links open in a new window (or tab, depending on browser capabilities and settings) and so don't complicate the on-page commenting and rating. No reloads are necessary for reading until and unless you want to update with new stuff, or if you share something yourself from the page you're reading.

Conclusions and Opinion

So the core functionality is all pretty easy to use, if slowed a bit by the page reload after sharing. Yokway seems to have been carefully developed for the most part, and I can see how it can be useful.

While probably not one of those sites I'll make sure to visit every single day at the moment (that's basically Twitter, Gmail, and Remember The Milk; core communication and task-management stuff), I'm still more likely to visit Yokway than I am Facebook, which currently is graced by my presence ( :P ) once every week or two. As it has been with Twitter and FriendFeed, and even Google Reader (with feeds instead of users), the more interesting people I find on Yokway, the more likely I'll be to go there.

My visits will probably be a bit more for reading than for sharing my own stuff. I just don't share things that often while I'm browsing. I use StumbleUpon to bookmark things (thinking about adding/switching to del.icio.us at present), and Digg and reddit to submit and vote on news & other interesting things. Sharing things on all the sites I have accounts with right now takes at least five minutes (unless it's just on StumbleUpon, with the toolbar, which takes ten to sixty seconds, depending on whether I'm Discovering or just voting). But I have a feeling Yokway will turn out to be a useful tool for finding more interesting articles to read. Digg especially is overrun by crazies, idiots, and jerks anyway, and FriendFeed is getting really noisy.

Update (12:20): The thought of adding even more words to this review is unpleasant, considering how long it is already, but I think these are important points... I notice that there is a way to delete comments, but the link sometimes ends up floating off to the side, hidden among the sidebar items. More critically, there doesn't seem to be a consistent way to get the URL of a specific item, unlike FriendFeed (Yokway seems to use the same hashing strategy to get identifiers). Finally, and most excitingly, I just noticed that Yokway uses jQuery! w00t!

Users to Twitter: Get Stable

2008-05-18T21:29:00.003-05:00

I myself am included in those users. While I probably won't be participating* in the event, I thought I'd still call attention to it, within my small sphere of influence, in case some of you want to take part.

Anyway, this Twit-Out, as it's being called, was started by a couple people on FriendFeed: Shey Smith and Bwana McCall. Shey came up with an initial what-if question that sparked Bwana's idea to actually do something. Then Andrew Dobrow came along and made the logo you see at the beginning of this post.

So this Wednesday, May 21, is the first Twit-Out event. If you want to join in and try to get Twitter to realize that reliability is important (I'm sure they do already, to play the devil's advocate -- at least to some extent), just don't tweet on May 21. It's pretty simple. If you have accounts at Pownce and Jaiku, just use them. Heck, use Twhirl to post to FriendFeed instead of Twitter.

I have cross-posting set up within Twhirl so my stuff shows up in three places, but I'm not sure if I could kill posting to Twitter (with an incorrect password or somesuch) while retaining the other two services. Since I don't plan to officially participate*, I'll let you come up with your own solution. Unfortunately I have other things that need doing tonight.

While I'm not sure it'll accomplish anything, it's certainly a worthy cause. We've already seen Twitter become a very useful communication tool, and some people and even businesses rely on it daily. If it keeps going down, that's a lot of potential lost profits and time for users (however legally exempt Twitter is from actually caring about that). Though people not using Twitter is kind of the opposite thing one would expect to get them to beef up their systems...

* - May 21 will be the first performance of a show I'm in, so I anticipate being busy and away from Twitter for much of the day anyway. My tweeting will likely be pretty low all next week, actually.

[Image credit: Jersey, Suburbia by Andrew Dobrow; used with permission. Notes: I converted the image to PNG format; that is the only modification. Originally Andrew's blog had the ability to link to specific comments, but in the last few days the theme has been changed and that feature removed.]

Blogger Accidentally Reveals Rating Feature

2008-05-15T06:30:00.000-05:00

Blogger In Draft definitely doesn't have all the new features. Just yesterday, some Blogger users saw "star ratings" -- common enough widgets, but not integrated into Blogger yet -- appear on their sites. This from multiple sources, including Blogger Status and Garett Rogers.

Since Google is usually so very quiet about upcoming releases, I thought this slip-up was extremely funny. For the record, I'm looking forward to seeing this come out on Blogger In Draft and then to mainstream Blogger. I'd like to try it out on this site.

Google Friend Connect: Interesting Service, Can't Sign Up

2008-05-13T06:30:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, Google launched a preview release of Google Friend Connect at Campfire One. The premise is neat: Google provides you with a directory of pre-programmed social widgets (slash gadgets, slash modules, slash whatever you want to call them) that you can install on your website simply by pasting HTML code. All kinds of authentication formats are accepted, from Google Accounts to OpenID and beyond. For more nitty-gritty details, head for the official blog post or the Google Webmaster Central version (the latter is simpler).

Incidentally, there was a huge blogstorm about this yesterday, before it was officially announced and before the site was available. Rex Hammock thinks it might be the highest single-day pageview count for a 404 Error page, as he briefly states in a post entitled "Google's new Not Found feature is really fun". Go ahead, it's worth a click. (Well, Ctrl+click or Shift+click if you want to keep reading this ;-) but you already knew that, right?)

Sign-Up Error?

So, it sounds interesting enough that I want to get in on it. Like Google App Engine (my own coverage) from last month, there's a waiting list. (I got into App Engine, by the way, and immediately wasted one of my three indelible applications with a useless test listing I'll never code. There really should be a delete function in App Engine, but I digress...)

Unlike App Engine, though, this waiting list is powered by a Google Spreadsheets form. And this one doesn't work. I get a nice generic error message, which leaves me totally in the dark as to what went wrong. Argh. (It did get fixed though; see update below.)

Until it's working (I'll speculate why it's borked in just a moment), I'll paste my additional info paragraph here, just as an example (who knows, you might want to use it as a template :D ):

Initially I plan to just experiment with the service and see what it can do, but I think I might come up with a brilliant idea to actually use it for real as part of one of the sites I manage. http://www.swrobotics.com/ comes to mind as another possible site where I'd use it.

So anyway, why might this Google sign-up form not be working?

Since it's based on a Google Spreadsheet, it's bound by the limitations of the platform. Spreadsheets are limited (only one thread of many) to 10,000 rows, and with the publicity this launch got it's completely believable that 10,000 developers already applied. This is the price for Google eating its own dog food (so to speak). I guess in a way it's a good thing that they don't give themselves superpowers in their own services.

Meanwhile, I can't sign up for the waiting list. Oh well, it's not like I'd get immediate access anyway. Being locked out has increased my interest, too, so perhaps using a limited submission system was a calculated move on Google's part to generate even more desire to sign up. Who knows? It's working on me.

Anyone who gets in on it, please let me know what the interface is like from the inside. I'll probably post again if and when I gain access myself, but advance knowledge would be nice to have. (Yes, I will be watching Google blogs, official and unofficial, for more info as well.)

Use Cases

Meanwhile, I can brainstorm. This site already has social features (comments), but perhaps I'd like to do more. A sidebar game or something. Perhaps not, but you get the idea.

The Southwest Robotics website might have a comments area added where people can chat about the team's efforts or robots in general. There's definite potential in that idea. I'll have to take it up with my teammates.

Other than those few examples, I'm sure there a vast number of gadgets that I don't know about yet. Only getting into the service will allow me to really see what's possible. Stay tuned for more opinions as I can generate them.

Update (05/14): OK, the form is working again. It's also been completely changed; the number of fields has at least doubled. So much for just copying and pasting what I tried to send in yesterday.

[Google Friend Connect logo from the Google site, displayed under a Fair Use claim; error screenshot taken myself, site design and imagery copyright Google, also Fair Use claim]

Summer Not Quite as Booked...

2008-05-07T21:40:00.000-05:00

I know I haven't been posting a lot lately. I've been distracted (so what else is new?) by homework, SimCity 4 (which I actually succeed at now), and (the largest offender) being sick. Writing has definitely taken a back seat, but I have some things I definitely want to blog about when I find the time. This one is just the most breaking.

Sometimes things are too good to be true.

Remember when I said I'd been accepted to the Musical Theatre Extension at Northwestern? Turns out that was a mistake. Let me explain. (I'm still in the theatre program; just not the Extension.)

In the list of requirements for the Musical Theatre part, there was a request for a video of me singing a solo piece, accompanied. That was never made, and never sent. My mom called the office (I don't like talking on the phone) to ask about it, and they said not to worry about it.

Apparently, I wasn't considered for that program. I made it into the five-week regular program only, which also means I don't need the digital recorder after all. (I can still bring it -- could be useful; it's just not on the packing list any more.)

The woman at the office made a note of my change, but it never got entered into the database, and so the letter was sent with incorrect information. (That's what she said in the voicemail I got today, at any rate.) Oh well, I guess I get more time to relax this way. Two more weeks to not be bustling about campus.

Blogger Scheduled Posting Polished and Officially Launched

2008-05-01T23:45:00.000-05:00

No more having to go to draft.blogger.com to schedule blog posts in Blogger; late this afternoon (Central time, of course) the Blogger team announced the release of scheduled posting to the mainstream interface. Not that I'm switching -- I still like getting the new stuff -- but it's still nice to know that the feature I started using two months ago (give or take) is now live for everyone.

In other news, I've kind of forgotten to write about the fixes made a week and a half ago, including scheduling for FTP blogs a week or two back and a few other miscellaneous bugs with the feature (like mailing scheduled posts with BlogSend when they publish).

Just thought I'd post a brief thing about this. You can find my previous posts on the subject (including notes on the bugs) in the archives.

My Summer is Officially Booked

2008-05-01T22:20:00.002-05:00

Well, it's official. I have something to do for this summer.

As I said in a recent canned post (the one on Web form usability), I applied to two summer programs this year. Both of them have admitted me, and I'm going to accept the invitation to attend the theatre arts program at Northwestern University's National High School Institute.

It's funny, because I didn't technically complete the application requirements for the program I wanted to do (the Musical Theatre extension). They let me in anyway. Which means I have a seven-week commitment this summer. Update (05/07): The letter was mistaken; details here. From the end of June through ~~mid-August~~ early August, I'll be in Evanston, IL, working really hard on everything from acting to movement, lighting to scenery.

Summers usually bring a lull in writing for this site, and I don't anticipate having any meaningful amount of free time for anything. The literature for the program continually reiterates that it is an intensive academic institute, and specifically states that free time will be rare. Given the chance, I may decide to dash off a few paragraphs once or twice during the summer about my progress, but consider this a heads-up that I probably will be pretty silent. Par for the course, right? At least this summer I'll have a library and Internet access...

Am I excited? You betcha. Nervous? Uh... Who wants to know? *nervous (dang it!) chuckle* It looks like a very good opportunity.

That brings me to my next point: This is the only year I can do it. The Institute is open to high school students completing their junior year, which means that's me. Next year isn't an option, though I can still do UChicago's travel program next year (which is why it's OK to postpone that one). No, I can't do both; the dates overlap.

So there's the latest news. Now I have to go and add writing letters to my ever-growing to-do list. One to accept Northwestern's admission, and one to politely decline UChicago's. Writing, writing, writing... Now I know why I feel like knowing how to write well is so important.

Update (22:30): I knew I forgot something! Turns out that my research on digital recorders will be good for more than just capturing orchestra trips and anecdotes; the Musical Theatre extension has a digital voice (or microcassette) recorder listed as a necessity. Well, I guess I'd better make sure I get on that upgrade.

Update (05/07): Got a voicemail from Northwestern today correcting the letter I got. I only got the five-week program after all. I was kind of wondering... More details in my latest post.

Thinking of a Recorder Upgrade

2008-04-30T23:00:00.003-05:00

About missing yesterday: I was pretty much offline the whole day, with no time to blog. Posting will probably be slightly less regular for now, since I have more things to do these days.

Remember my research on digital voice recorders? That was last week. I didn't do very well. Apparently I neglected to find the Roland EDIROL R-09HR, which is an improved version of the R-09 I got last week. It includes a built-in preview speaker, a remote control, editing software, and more sampling frequencies (higher ones).

The higher sampling frequencies aren't particularly useful for me at the moment -- the highest I plan to go is 16-bit wave at 44.1 kHz, or CD-quality -- but the speaker, remote, and software would be useful to have.

There is a problem, though: Best Buy doesn't have the new model yet. Their customer support department (I sent a message through their website) doesn't know about future product lines. I remembered about Guitar Center last night and checked their website to find that they also sell the R-09, and sent another message. I got a response a few hours ago saying to check with my local store.

Fortunately we were near that store earlier today (before I got an answer, actually) and had stopped in to ask. The salesman I queried didn't know anything more specific than "it hasn't shipped yet". He gave me a vague time-frame of a month or two. (The stop made me half an hour late to a workshop with the robotics team this evening, too. My mom decided we needed to try the wall of digital keyboards... OK, I also got carried away. ;-)

I found a listing on eBay for the R-09HR, priced $20 more than the R-09 unit I got last week, which gave me a release date of March 28 for the new model. That was a month ago. Why hasn't it shipped yet? Strange... Oh wait, the seller was in Japan, where Edirol Corporation is based. Duh...

Anyway, my current plan is to find a time to stop by Best Buy and see if the store I got my current unit from will take it back around the end of next month and give me credit toward the new model. Better yet, I'll ask if they can pre-order one for me. Beyond that, I don't know what to do until it hits shelves.

Anyone else have a better idea? (Shopping on eBay isn't an option, I'll state right now. I'd be using my mom's credit card, and she doesn't trust eBay.)

Update (05/21): It's coming in a month or so!

Chicago Trip Recap

2008-04-28T18:45:00.000-05:00

Looks like I was right about my next post after the trip, eh?

I got back from Chicago late last night. The train was nearly 30 minutes early, but the delay in baggage handling made up for it; we waited about 20 minutes in front of the carousel before it even started turning. (It was made slightly better by the fact that we could see into the baggage room; the flaps on the carousel were pretty broken.)

All told, I think it was a pretty fun trip. There were only a couple things about it I didn't particularly like.

The first thing I didn't like was one of the pieces the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) played in the concert we went to Thursday night. It was some contemporary piece by a Korean composer named Unsuk Chin. I wasn't the only one who found it, shall we say, unappealing. (Worse, she was there at the performance. Yipe!) No, I'm not a big fan of contemporary music. Of any kind.

The second thing I didn't like was also a piece, this time in the violin recital I went to with our conductor and one other student -- the recital option wasn't very popular last year, either. That was a piece by a Finnish composer -- name of Kaija Saariaho -- written for solo violin. It was more contemporary music, composed in 1994 as a memorial tribute to Witold Lutoslawski (who passed away less than two weeks before the piece's premiere -- quite fast work). As I said, I'm not very fond of contemporary music.

Third came Verdi's Requiem, which we went to as a group on Saturday night. Obviously Verdi isn't a contemporary composer. It just wasn't what I had been expecting, and it wasn't particularly entertaining. It somehow reminded me of Gregorian chant, I think because the soloist(s) would sing a line and then be echoed in chorus and round by the choir. It was largely monotonous. However, I think that was the only concert I truly felt had been wasted time.

The fourth thing I didn't like (wow, were there that many?) was sleeping on the floor. Well, it was perfectly comfortable. I wouldn't exactly call it a dislike, since I slept relatively well, but coming home to my bed was nice. There would have been two of us on the floor, but a couple of my roommates were good enough friends (and small enough, as they were freshmen) to share a bed. I could have insisted on getting a bed at least one night -- my birthday was Friday, hold the singing, please :-P -- but I hate kicking people out of their accommodations, and I was used to the floor by then.

Now why did I do the bad stuff first? On to what I enjoyed, immediately!

Aside from that second piece at the symphony concert, I enjoyed listening to Wagner's Prelude and Libestod from Tristan und Isolde (which was slow, but still reasonably interesting) and Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14. The Berlioz was the best part of that concert, in my opinion. And well it should have been -- the concert was billed around that piece.

Friday morning saw a trip to the Sears Tower for breakfast and a walk around the Skydeck. I took some pictures up there, one of which can be seen to the right. Isn't it a great view? (The rest of the pictures will have to wait a while; I'm running out of disk storage at the moment, and the card they're on has gobs of free space.) There were also some displays up there (the Skydeck is on the Sears Tower's 99th floor) including such notable personalities as L. Frank Baum (author of The Wizard of Oz), Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi (better known as The Blues Brothers), Studs Terkel (upon whose work the musical Working is based, and which I will be participating in late this Spring), and even Oprah Winfrey (whom I include here only because I've heard her name, not because I really care one way or the other). A lot of great stuff has happened in Chicago; I think there was even a film crew out while we were there (one of the other sightseeing groups mentioned something to that effect).

We played a concert at Navy Pier around noon. The wind ensemble played outside and got rained on, which meant their performance was cut short (I got only pictures of them, before it rained). Then we in the orchestra set up our performance inside the very noisy mall. I got a full recording of that, enlisting a chaperon to hold the recorder. As a result of that, there is some chatter in it, but mostly during the pauses, which means it can just be edited out when I get some software to do so.

Friday afternoon we (well, just a small group of us -- around ten) toured a string instrument maker's shop (William Harris Lee & Co.) and tried out a few of their hand-made instruments. They might even have a sale coming because of that; one of our group fell in love with the cello she tried. I grabbed a 1:40 sound bite of the room while people were playing (after I had done my own tryouts of violins), but I don't think I'll upload it right now. I have to do some thinking about what to do with those recordings.

Oh yeah, that reminds me that I really like the Roland EDIROL R-09. I think I'll keep it. I also used it to record our concert at Navy Pier on Friday and the clinics Saturday morning. I'm just blown away by the sound quality of that little box. My only wishes right now are for sound-isolated headphones (to set input levels and monitor) and an external microphone (to reduce handling noise). A case would be useful, but is not a priority. (Priorities are actually the same as the order I used here: headphones, external mic, case.)

Friday afternoon was me studying lines in my room, then Friday evening was the violin recital I loved so much. It was at Ravinia Park, which meant a 45-minute train ride each way, but the performance (a certain Jessica Lee, violinist) was exemplary. The only thing I didn't like was the contemporary piece. Well, and the half-mile walk in the rain -- with no rain jacket -- because we got off the train one stop too late. It was just the three of us: me, our conductor, and a flute-player. The rosin dust cloud at the last bow stroke was incredible!

Saturday morning was our own breakfast (like most of the meals on the trip) and the clinics. I recorded over two hours of 320 kbps MP3 audio footage that morning. There are 300 megabytes there, but I don't know what to do with the recordings. If nothing else, they make good documentation. Maybe with some editing, I could turn out a CD-length copy of each one. Hmm...

Saturday afternoon was my downtime, spent reviewing recordings in the hotel room and watching a movie. I think it was 2 Fast 2 Furious, since the Wikipedia article's plot summary matches what I watched. (The only word I could get out of the horizontally-squished, accelerated credits was "Furious", so I had to do some sleuthing to figure it out.) Saturday evening was the pretty-boring -- but still technically impressive -- Requiem concert (which included recognition of the Midwest Young Artists' graduating class for this year), followed by a short hang-out in the floor lobby at the hotel before the rest of the group got kicked out around midnight by a burly security guard.

Sunday morning was a good sleep-in and then packing. I'd packed Saturday night, so I didn't have much to do. It was, for me, just getting up, getting dressed, and tidying up my stuff. We checked out around 11:00 and took our shuttle to Union Station, where we got lunch and boarded the train.

The rest of the trip was either sleeping or train rides, neither of which were particularly interesting.

A few memorable things happened. First was the accident on the Red Line, in which a semi crashed into an elevated-train station. Some of our group were in the area at the time and were evacuated from the train they were on, getting redirected to bus transit.

Second was the rain on the way to Ravinia. I mentioned this above, but I'll go into more detail here. We got off the Metra train one stop too far and had to walk back to Ravinia Park for the recital on Friday night. It was raining pretty hard, and the trip was a bit longer than we'd anticipated. The only one of us with a rain jacket was, of course, our conductor. By the time we got to the recital, we were sufficiently damp. On the way back we got smart and took the train from the nearer station.

Third, after the White Sox game was rained out (also Friday night), some of our group got into a pull-up contest with some Chicago teens (14-16) and won a hip-hop CD. They played it in our floor lobby later that evening. I'm not much for hip-hop, but at least some of the lyrics were reasonable.

So that about wraps up the trip. I think it was worth the time. Now I just have to get used to
my school stuff again. Oh, those five days were bliss...

Enhance Web Form Usability with JavaScript

2008-04-27T08:26:00.001-05:00

This is my last canned post for the week. I wrote it on Wednesday, before leaving for Chicago on Thursday morning. I'm getting back tonight, so hopefully a fresh post will arrive sometime tomorrow. I didn't can any more, so I better be up for writing. Probably a recap of my trip.

Earlier this month, I had the dubious pleasure of filling out applications to a couple of summer programs. The first was at the University of Chicago, studying Greek drama -- in Greece -- for three weeks. The other was at Northwestern University, studying theater -- just in Chicago -- for five weeks. Both applications were completed online, with supplemental materials submitted in other ways (email, postal mail, etc.).

I noticed a big difference between the two applications. In terms of usability, they were like night and day. The comparison is almost like trying to compare apples and oranges; there's just no way to reconcile the differences.

Northwestern University's was very easy to use. It utilized the principles of unobtrusive JavaScript quite well to create a highly usable and nearly frictionless form to fill out. Phone number inputs moved the caret to the next box automatically when the correct number of digits had been typed; sections expanded and collapsed depending upon other options; the whole nine yards. It was not just an application; I actually enjoyed watching the care Northwestern's development team had put into the one-page form.

The University of Chicago, on the other hand, had a rather annoying multi-page (six, to be exact, counting confirmation and registration fee payment pages) process, and no JavaScript helped along the way. Not only that, but the essay I had carefully constructed in Microsoft Word (for a change) blew up when copied and pasted into the textbox provided in the form. It kept all the letters and everything, but all the special "smart quotes" that Word makes by default got turned into question-mark strings when I saved, and then returned to, the page. I had to spend about ten minutes figuring out how to keep that from happening. Proper encoding would have been nice. (Or whatever the problem was; I was too focused to pay much attention.)

So, while the two forms are kind of like apples and oranges (only one of them had an essay input), the JavaScript assistance was still quite welcome on Northwestern's site. It's a perfect example of how JavaScript can be used in a way that the average user probably won't consciously notice as script at all. Well done, Northwestern! UChicago, we'll take a look at your form again next year, eh?

Just so y'all know, I got accepted to the UChicago program this past week, before I left (for Chicago, even; not that I'll be anywhere near either school). Still haven't heard anything from Northwestern. I'm crossing my fingers; this is the only year I can do that program. UChicago's can wait a year (can't do both, as they overlap).

I Really Dislike This Branding Thing

2008-04-26T08:10:00.002-05:00

This is a canned post, written before I left for Chicago two days ago. I get back tomorrow night, worry not!

All right, it's time for another rant. This time, it's about brand labels.

I don't know if you've noticed, but it seems that sometimes the label on a piece of clothing (or accessory; pretty much anything falls under this umbrella, actually -- including electronics) is more important than the thing itself. It drives me crazy.

Oftentimes I've noticed that "no-name" brands have better quality than the label does, at a lower cost. What's up with that? I have never understood the thing we have in American society with buying a name rather than a product. (Are you from another country? How's the label situation there?) All I care about is the thing, the tangible, useful (hopefully ;-) product I'm paying money for and will use. I couldn't care less who makes it, unless the brand really provides something better than the competition.

Take my shopping for digital voice recorders, for example. Sony, Olympus, and Roland are all well-known brands. Roland is, in my mother's words, "the Cadillac of those things," not that it matters to me so long as it does what I want for a reasonable price. Olympus is a good brand, I know; my mom's first digital camera (and the first one I ever used) was an Olympus, but despite that I don't like the format their recorders use and find Sony's to be preferable. Sony's not (arguably) as big a brand as Olympus or Roland, but their products are quite good. I didn't see anyone complaining about their durability (people said the Roland recorder I'm thinking about feels flimsy).

The point here is that brands seem to carry more weight than they should. I don't have a solution for the problem; I'm just pointing out that it exists, as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately I couldn't come up with a clothing example (the original inspiration for this post). Oh well, at least I expressed my sentiments. (If you don't think this is a problem, you're welcome to sound off in the comments. Hint hint. :-)

Useless Apologies

2008-04-25T08:23:00.001-05:00

This is a canned post, written before I left for Chicago yesterday.

Apologies have their uses. When one makes a mistake, messes someone else up, causes harm to another person or someone else's property, etc., it's nice to be able to say you're sorry. But apologies don't extend, as far as I'm concerned, to events beyond the speaker's control.

Example

When I was shopping for my Roland EDIROL R-09 the other day, we first went to the wrong store (Best Buy has a lot of locations here in Minneapolis, the site of their corporate headquarters). I said it was the wrong store, but my mom (my ride) insisted that it was right. We went in, asked about the voice recorder department, went back, looked, consulted with another salesperson, and were astonished to learn that the store didn't have the R-09. Then we asked which location it was.

I was right! So we went to the other store, got the recorder, and the rest is, as they say, history.

Before we left the first store, though, the saleswoman we were asking apologized profusely for our coming to the wrong store. No matter that sounded like our mistake was a common one (the two locations are often confused, apparently; they're a mere two miles apart). There was nothing she could have done to influence our choice. No input, no knowledge of the problem beforehand, no way to issue a correction. Why did she apologize?

Yes, my mother and I were good-naturedly needling each other about the mistake -- mostly me, because I had been correct :D -- but was that why the saleswoman was so sorry about our mistake? Perhaps I was acting too belligerent. I have noticed a trend around here (I think it's a Midwest thing) that sarcasm is often taken as fact by people outside the primary group in which the sarcasm is taking place. This is by no means the only instance. Maybe she thought I was mad at my mother? I don't know. (I wasn't, not at all!)

This kind of thing drives me bonkers the same way it does when waitresses and waiters at Oriental restaurants thank me when they fill my water glass (or whatever beverage I have). That's a subject for another post -- maybe; it might be too small a topic -- but these kinds of things make no sense to me at all.

Chicago Orchestra Trip

2008-04-24T06:15:00.003-05:00

Well, wish me luck! I'm leaving for the train station in a few minutes to go to Chicago for four days. It's a trip with the orchestra at my local high school, where I play violin. (Same school as my robotics team, yes. Remember that trip? Probably no from-the-road posts this time; I'm not bringing my computer.)

We're going to a symphony concert, playing our own mini-performances (we'll have two groups, each with their own concert), sightseeing (including the Sears Tower), having clinics with ~~members of Chicago orchestras~~ (I FAIL; see update below), and generally enjoying the city. It'll be a busy four days, though that's mostly crammed into three days due to the eight-hour train rides (plus time for boarding and disembarkation). Probably no time for or access to a computer, unfortunately. I don't look forward to catching up on Monday (after a late arrival Sunday night), either.

Nevertheless, I think it will be a fun trip. We went to Philadelphia last year, and I had fun. That's where I met the friend who introduced me to the robotics team. The team captain is coming this year, and he's in my room. Maybe some time to chat there.

As with Milwaukee, I've prepared a few posts in advance so there won't be a paucity of content on this site. More back-burner stuff that's not time-sensitive. I think I have a post scheduled for every day I'm gone, but I don't have time to check; it's time to leave, well, now. If there's a gap, you know why. I had a million and one things to do yesterday.

I should also mention, I turned on comment moderation temporarily to prevent any spam while I'm away and can't delete it. Any comments you leave will be visible after I get back, when I go through the moderation queue. Late Sunday night (if I'm lucky and not tired then) or Monday, Central Time.

See you in four days! Try and enjoy the canned words, huh? :-)

Update (04/28): Whoops, the conductor for our clinics wasn't a Chicago Symphony Orchestra musician. He was the conductor for a local arts program. Oh well, can't get everything right.

Researching Digital Voice Recorders

2008-04-23T13:05:00.002-05:00

I've been having so much fun lately. Not really. Researching products, whether on the Internet (as I've been doing for the last few days) or in real life (which I've done in the past), is a pain. Specs for one company's product are formatted completely differently from another's, similar devices turn out to be completely different on close examination, etc. Bah!

The backstory here is that I've been researching digital voice recorders. I have been thinking about getting one for a few months now, as a way of preserving all the stories my parents and grandparents tell (but only when we have company). I've been pondering since before my last post on the subject of anecdotes, and recently the thoughts have taken a more proactive path.

Beginning with a simple search of Google Product Search for [digital voice recorder], I've since found dozens of models, each with different pros and cons. Looking at the specs for each, I devised a list of requirements:

MP3/WAV format

Not WMA!!!

Stereo recording
Easy recorder-to-computer transfer
Removable storage, preferably Secure Digital

Large internal storage (as an alternative to removable media)

Simple baseline requirements, really. I immediately ruled out a bunch of the products I had discovered.

Olympus has a large selection of digital voice recorders, but they all record to WMA and are compatible only with Windows machines. The few with removable storage capabilities use Olympus's xD cards, which I don't have (and don't wish to purchase, as that would be their only use). So Olympus is totally out.

A lot of voice recorders turned up in my search were microcassette devices, which I don't want (tapes? seriously). Those were mostly at Target's website.

I hit one jackpot when I discovered Sony's ICD-UX80. Two gigabytes of internal memory, recording in stereo to MP3, alkaline batteries... Thought I had it made. But then I discovered another one (no, not a different Sony model).

What I found was the Roland EDIROL R-09.

Removable media, in Secure Digital! Stereo! WAV (and MP3)! Small! Perfect! Sure it's nearly three times the price of the Sony, but it has theoretically unlimited storage. It also runs on AA batteries, which we already have lying around in rechargeable form (the Sony runs on AAAs).

I found a bunch of glowing reviews for the R-09. There were a few neutral ones -- mostly complaints about sound quality and durability -- but those were pretty isolated. Only three out of 17 reviews were lower than 4 stars (out of five).

Basically, this is where I should take a picture of the thing and superimpose "WANT" on it. I won't though; copyrights, time, tools (not at my own computer right now, so no GIMP), blah blah blah. But I am planning to go and play with one at Best Buy this afternoon, where they have it in-stock (as of last night). No, probably no review until after my trip to Chicago, if I even buy an R-09.

So, final "at home" post before my trip. I'll post an announcement-type post with more details on the trip itself tomorrow morning before I leave.

Update (17:16): Bought a Roland EDIROL R-09 this afternoon. I'm taking it to Chicago. I have a month to figure out if I like it or not, so we'll see how it goes.

Update (05/21): After finding out that my research was incomplete at the end of last month (and forgetting to update this post; d'oh!), I just completed arrangements to get a newer version of the R-09 in a month or so.

An Engineer's Guide to Cats (Plus a Brief Explanation for Missing Yesterday)

2008-04-22T23:59:00.001-05:00

Yes, I know I missed yesterday. I went to a social gathering for Passover (here, I'll give the English version -- not that I know Hebrew anyway, yet :-) that went a lot later than I had expected. Not only did I miss blogging, but I also missed homework, which is arguably (ha-HA!) more important than this site. Daily posting is more difficult when my already crowded computing (and real-life) schedule becomes even more crowded with one-off events. Hopefully I can get a bunch written tomorrow so this place won't go dead over the weekend when I'm away. On to the relatively short post now, with one minute to spare...

I saw this video shared on FriendFeed (in a rather roundabout way) a while ago, and I'm pretty sure most of the people who read my blog probably don't even have accounts over there. With that in mind, I thought this one was so amusing and well-done it had to be blogged. The clip is titled "An Engineer's Guide to Cats"; before I commentate and ruin the whole thing, just watch it:

For some reason I just find that to be really amusing. I'm not an engineer by any definition of the word, but I do find myself occasionally being very analytical. That's exactly what these guys did for the video.

Sorry I can't offer more of an opinion, but it's late and I have to be up really early tomorrow. And I still have a bunch of stuff to do. Blogging is going to have to be moved down a notch in priority for a little while, unfortunately.

WOT 3.0 Review

2008-04-20T14:00:00.002-05:00

I decided against delaying this post until next weekend, because this way it comes before the press release and will inform people (potentially) before the new version is pushed out.

I've been sitting on the new version of WOT for a little while now, after having been invited to the beta-test team (thanks guys!) on April 15. Almost a week has gone by (well, five days), and I feel I have played around with it enough to form a reasonably complete opinion.

The Good

First of all, I'd like to say that the new rating icon is wonderful and much better than the one in the previous version. That little bust (it was head and shoulders, to be precise) was really difficult to use, since there was no centerline to judge from. The dot is much easier to use!

The rating bar now changes from appearing convex to appearing concave when you rate that particular component. (One could also say it dims, but either description works, in my opinion.) It makes a good at-a-glance indicator of whether or not a particular category will carry your input. There is also a message displayed beneath each component's bar if your rating differs from the averaged value from other WOT users, enticing you to leave a comment on the site.

That brings me to a little sidebar here. The WOT site has undergone a major overhaul, now appearing much more like McAfee SiteAdvisor's (rel="nofollow"; sorry, McAfee) in the information provided. The new website scorecard feature is what I'm talking about. There is data on popularity, a link to the WHOIS entry for that domain, detailed rating information with graphics that mirror the add-on's rating popup, and a section for comments and (something SiteAdvisor doesn't do) references.

This new "references" feature is particularly interesting. It takes mentions of a site from Digg, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, and a multitude of other places and displays a summary of that activity right on the domain's scorecard. Sites mentioned in Wikipedia, for example, are rather unlikely to be bad; domains bookmarked on del.icio.us or submitted to Digg are much less likely to be spam. I think it's an especially good new feature.

Besides the "references", the comments provide a space for users to provide free-form feedback about the site. There are a bunch of categories to place your comment in, ranging from "Useful, informative" and "Entertaining" to "Spam" and "Browser exploit". The categories of comments are summarized and graphed (!) above the comment display area to give a general idea of the overall user feel for the site.

The Not-Quite-Perfect

With all these improvements, it's hard to imagine that there could be things missing, but there are. (Hey, I'm not paid to write this. I can say whatever I want! :-)

Most importantly, I would like to see a way for webmasters such as myself to claim their sites. That is one thing I think McAfee SiteAdvisor does well. In fact, it would be doubly useful if WOT allowed verification via <meta /> tags in the site header as an alternative to file upload. Google Webmaster Tools (or Google Sitemaps, as it was called before) has both options, and for free hosts that don't allow file uploads (<cough>Blogger</cough>) the meta tag option is very useful.

Now that I think more about it, the only other thing I can think of is a minor interface change. In the old version of WOT, clicking in the border to the side of a rating bar caused a rating of 100 or 0, but now those ratings are difficult to enter as the borders are no longer clickable areas. If there's still time, I'd love to have that back. For some sites, a rating of 97 or 4 is insufficient.

The Optimistic Conclusion

All told, the WOT 3.0 upgrade is definitely worthwhile. You can grab the update from the beta page if you don't want to wait for the release. With the last two updates, I'm looking forward to WOT 4.0 coming out, whenever that happens. What will they think of next?

Update (04/23): Sami Tolvanen, one of the WOT founders, comments below that the clickable borders have been restored in the latest version of WOT 3.0, which is also now out of beta. Thanks for letting me know, Sami; and you're quite welcome for the review. :-)

The Evolution of Dance

2008-04-19T16:50:00.000-05:00

I didn't have time to write a post this morning, so I'll do it now, in the afternoon. Better late than never... Not that this one would draw major traffic anyway, no matter when it's posted.

All right, it's the weekend. I don't really have anything new to report -- well, nothing that I find exciting, at any rate. A lot of things have happened this week, to be sure, but none of the events really caught my attention beyond the usual read-it-star-it-share-it-move-on in Google Reader (or the read-it-close-it-Like-it-keep-going in FriendFeed).

So I thought I'd take advantage of this uninteresting period to dig through my YouTube favorites and pull out a couple entertaining videos I've seen over the last several months. One came from a recommendation (I think) -- that's today's -- and the other was posted on FriendFeed a while back. The one I saw on FriendFeed will be tomorrow's post if nothing interesting comes up.

On to the video. You've probably seen it by now. It's the #1 most viewed video on YouTube, having been watched nearly (as I write this) 85,000,000 times. I present Judson Laipply's "Evolution of Dance":

It's a six-minute clip, as can be seen by the counter in YouTube's player. The dimensions are 425px by 355px... Oh, who am I kidding? This isn't a scientific analysis; this is commentary!

I only saw this after it had become immensely popular. Always behind on memes, I am. Such is my nature.

The video was amusing to me then, and it still is. As I recall I was babysitting my two-year-old nephew the day I discovered it. YouTube makes a great time-waster for those periods of an hour or two when I would get the job of entertaining him. That was just one of the videos we watched that day, but I think it was my favorite.

Most of the songs are familiar to me, in melody. A few are obscure, and there are several for which I don't even know the artist -- but for the most part, they're known. The dance moves are also mostly familiar.

So, hope this made a good diversion. I'm trying to save some ideas for scheduled posts that I can set up for next weekend, when I'll be out of town (in Chicago, on an orchestra trip). More on that next week, probably Wednesday or Thursday morning.

If you've watched this video again and again, and now hate the guts of anyone who shows it to you one more time, I sincerely hope you'll forgive me. I've avoided posting the Numa Numa Dance because I know everyone's really tired of it, but this one doesn't seem to have become quite as large a phenomenon. At the very least, nobody rolls their eyes when it's mentioned (that I've spoken with). And at least some thought went into this video...