As Far As I Can Tell

In a handful of minutes I’ll be on my way to Chicago to pick up my brother from the airport. I just checked his flight schedule and it’s delayed, meaning he won’t touch down until 1:30a.m. tomorrow morning. It’s going to be a long and tired drive to Sturgis afterwards. On the upside, I get to hang out in Chicago for the evening. On the downside it just started snowing like crazy.

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I was looking at my server logs and noticed that lots of people (167 this month) are finding my site though an incorrect spelling of the current holiday: “thanksgiven”. I made a post with that title two years ago and meant it to be a way to say “after Thanksgiving.” The weird thing I just noticed from Googling is that Miguel made a post with that name last year. How odd that now both of our weblogs show up on the first Google results page for a misspelling.

Anyway, enough rambling. Enjoy your family and friends. Eat till you puke.

I don’t take a ton of photos but I want to start doing it more, and more consciously. I recently bought a new camera, my third digital model. My first was the Nikon Coolpix 900, which I really liked but the technology quickly outgrew it. That was back before they measured cameras in mega-pixels and just listed the resolution. My next purchase was the Canon S200, sometimes called the Digital Elph. The attraction was entirely size; I can slip it in my pant’s pocket and have it with me anywhere. Lately I’ve been disappointed by it’s features and quality though, which brings me to my latest buy, the 8 mega-pixel Olympus C-8080 Wide Zoom.

Some of you probably thought I was leading up to a digital SLR. After all the DSLR is the professional choice, and with its larger sensor size it takes crisper pictures in a range of ISO settings that can’t be beat. I was considering it for a while, weighing the options and nearly getting either a Nikon D70 or the Canon Digital Rebel.

The reason I went with the Olympus is because it has all the manual controls, but still feels like a digital camera. I want live preview, I want a constantly updated histogram, and although more serious photographers always deride it I want to take crappy little video clips. The C-8080 has the best of all worlds for the way I use digital cameras. I’m blown away by all the options on this thing, and I haven’t played with half of them yet.

So maybe I’ll start posting more photos to this weblog, or start a photo-blog. Who knows.

MemoryLifter is a free program to help you reduce your learning time on all sorts of topics like learning a foreign language, studying geography, flags of the world, or my favorite: “college slang”.

There’s another interesting story about RFID in the NYTimes: Texas, 28,000 students test an electronic eye. It’s a straight forward example of people willingly trading privacy for a tiny bit of security, fueled by the politics of fear. In short, a community in Texas has adopted an RFID based system to track their children as they go to and from school. The rationale is to prevent kidnapping and ease parental fears, though the district admits to having no cases of kidnapping in their past.

The complete lack of objection from parents or teachers is disturbing. It seems that increasingly people are willing to accept Big Brother technology as long as their not the prole begin monitored. Those in power get to feel “in control”, and the students being tracked are too young, powerless, or uninformed to do anything about it. The thing that kills me is how useless this is. The kids are already getting to school safely, so why implement this costly and invasive system?

“I’m sure we’re being overprotective, but you hear about all this violence,” said Elisa Temple-Harvey, 34, the parent of a fourth grader. “I’m not saying this will curtail it, or stop it, but at least I know she made it to campus.”

Paranoia is making people abandon common sense.

…they do see broader possibilities, such as implanting RFID tags under the skin of children to avoid problems with lost or forgotten tags. More immediately, they said, they could see using the technology to track whether students attend individual classes.

They want to embed radio transmitters under children’s skin so they don’t have to call their names for attendance at the beginning of class. Pure techno-lust mixed with fear and irresponsibility.

Update: There’s a great comic strip satirizing this topic over at OK/Cancel.

Today in the New York Times is an article entitled Wanted by the Police: A Good Interface that details the failures of a new in-car computer system in San Jose. It’s a classic case of bad design with little research and no testing with end users. Good interface design is particularly important for such specialized systems and brought to light here because cumbersome interactions could be a life or death matter.

There’s a telling paragraph near the beginning:

At the heart of the dispute is the question of how much the technology itself is to blame, how much is a training problem and how much can be attributed to the predictable pains associated with learning something new.

While any specialized system requires some training it’s inappropriate to blame the users when it so clearly wasn’t researched or tested. It’s a classic situation of blaming everything on “human error”. That may be true, but the humans in question for this case are the designers, not the users.

Maybe I can relate because we’re both trapped in advertising land, but lately I’ve been really enjoying The House of Wigs. From November 4th:

OK yesterday I’m reminded that to be an American is to be both arrogant and incompetent (you�d think one would cancel out the other! so weird!), and the problem is then I come in to work at an ad agency. And if you�re already thinking “our country is fuckola’d,” the last place you want to walk into is an ad agency. The last thing you want to have to do is sit in a meeting and talk about how to coerce people into buying more processed cheese, because then it�s really hard to dodge the fact that you are The Problem. Yes I’m using second-person to distance myself from the horrible truth — it’s the magic of writing.

I don’t know if you’ve been sucked into the world of RSS and syndicated content yet, but I sure have. Luckily most of the sites I read offer a feed I can subscribe to. Now-a-days I hardly ever visit a website without knowing ahead of time that it’s been updated. Not all websites have jumped on the bandwagon though, most notably Dairyland.

Luckily today I stumbled across Feed Fire, a website where you can make RSS feeds for any website. It has to guess at the structure but does a pretty good job. It works particularly well when pointed towards links pages like Diaryland’s “older entries” archive page.

Now I can enjoy the diary stylings of The Red Army through my favorite newsreader. If you’re interested in any of this at all I recommend FeedDemon as a good RSS client on Windows.

In contrast to all the positive press we’ve received lately, the Western Herald’s Peter Schinkai has published an opinion piece today that directly attacks the Moped Army. He calls us a “plague”, refers to mopeds as “fake motorcycles”, and tells us to “join the world of adults” by driving our cars to the bar instead of our mopeds to the Rocket Star. His piece misinforms people about mopeds, directly attacks those who ride them, disrespects the Moped Army, and advocates mindless conformity to societal norms.

The article isn’t on the Herald’s website yet, but you can read a copy I scanned from today’s paper.

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Update: I have removed the contact information and call to respond because the Herald has now printed four of our letters. Read them here: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Of course by now everyone knows that Bush has won, leaving me terribly disappointed in this country. How can this administration actually gain support while acting so irresponsibly?

There are many others mourning today, both in and outside the United States. Bush has turned the world against us, and up until today we could say “Hey, don’t blame us, our president is out of control.” Now it’s our fault; given the choice we picked him again.

I think it’s telling to look at some of the leaders who are happy with the outcome: Ariel Sharon, Vladimir Putin, and Silvio Berlusconi among them. God help us.

Electoral encouragement via hand-cut paper by Nikki McClure.

This election year there’s lots of talk about provisional ballots, but each state has different rules. For all my fellow Michigan voters the important thing to know is a provisional ballot will only be counted if it’s cast in the correct precinct. So unlike some states, it’s usefulness is rather diminished here.

Hopefully everything will go smoothly with your voting and you won’t have to cast one anyway. Please make sure you go to the correct precinct tomorrow — use the Michigan online precinct finder to get the address and hours of your polling place.