Friday, July 22, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
First Presidential Debate on Twitter is absolutely batshit fucking LOCO
TeamBachmann Michele Bachmann (Follow).@140townhall TY for this forum. I'm running 4 POTUS 2 bring the voice of the people back to DC. That voice requires fundamental changes.
via 140townhall.com
Now guys, you know me a bit. You know I'm crazy about the Twits, Tubes, Faces and Google Plii. So you'd think I'd be all for American politicians embracing the interwotsits and engaging via a new, vibrant medium in the first presidential debate via Twitter some six hours ago.
Ignore that it's a Tea Party thing. Ignore, even, the prevailing tired diatribe of righteous outrage at Big Government / debt ceiling / degrading American values / unemployment / piranhas / chemtrails.
(disclosure: I have not read the entire stream and do not know for sure if 'debt ceiling' was mentioned, but I stand by my statement nonetheless).
Ignore all that.
Imagine these are smart, rational people honestly and sincerely presenting the ideas they feel are the best for the people of their country. Now imagine them sitting in chair on a stage facing an audience. and imagine that this 140townhall.com bullshit is a transcript of that event.
Listen, with your mind's ear, to how empty and hollow their overly short, acronymized sentences are, how they neither acknowledge nor respond to one another, how they talk over each other when some need to say several sentences in a row. Every word serving one or two purposes: self-glorification or blaming someone for something.
I honestly couldn't even make it a quarter down the page; in my head I heard them chattering in studious discord, in complete ignorance of one another, each vapidly addressing the audience directly resulting in something that can only be described as a demented cacophony of utter bollocks.
Which, I guess, brings us back to the Tea Party...
- Alex F. Vance
Attorney busted for stuffing iPhone down gal pal's throat.
Brian Anscomb, 37, force-fed the gizmo to his 23-year-old gal pal in their York Avenue apartment early Saturday, bruising and cutting her mouth, court papers say.
via nypost.com
The whole patent litigation scene around software in general and lately Apple in particular seems to have driven a patent attorney to insanity.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
The Tay Bridge Disaster by William McGonagall: the terrificness of the terrible.
But when the train came near to Wormit Bay,
Boreas he did loud and angry bray,
And shook the central girders of the Bridge of Tay
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.
via taynet.co.uk
The son of a weaver, William McGonagall is remembered these days (by far too few) as one of Britain's worst poets. Even during his lifetime he was engaged to give readings of his work for audiences who delighted in his terrible poetry the way sci-fi nerds make a game of The Eye of Argon.
And yes, his poems are terrible. Some only grudgingly rhyme (even in his Dundee accent), all are bereft of linguistic sophistication, and on those occasions where he's moved to actually try his hand at metaphor or at least non-literal imagery the result is a plodding disaster. Universally, his poems' meter defies human scansion.
But I plumb love this guy.
Just as the terrible opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins, whose absolute lack of musical facility, sensitivity to tone, breath control or emotive delivery couldn't deter her from renting concert halls and selling tickets to very select groups of friends, McGonagall just wouldn't quit. And the literary world is just a little richer thanks to his tenacity.
As a struggling weaver of 52, with a snapper for a daughter to make life just a little more inconvenient, he discovered himself to be a poet.
"seemed to feel a strange kind of feeling stealing over [him], and remained so for about five minutes. A flame, as Lord Byron said, seemed to kindle up [his] entire frame, along with a strong desire to write poetry."
Until his death just after the turn of the 20th century (in his birthplace near Edinburgh, rather than Dundee where he'd spent his life) he was mocked, disparaged, rejected and sometimes rather cruelly pranked. He sought his fortune first in London and then New York, returning from both with empty pockets, but his chin held high.
The pinnacle of his career as a poet came when he hired out his services to a local circus, where he earned fifteen shillings a night for reading his terrible poetry while the audience were permitted to throw food at him. And this suited him fine. When the local magistrates shut down these disorderly events he wrote a public protest (of course, in verse) and this more than anything illustrates why I love this old coot.
He was indomitable.
Any writer who plucks up the courage to share their work or submit it for publication faces the very real risk of rejection. We're gradually hardened against it, but every fresh "no" chips away just a tiny little bit on our confidence.
And then here there is William McGonagall, who was genuinely terrible, and received gentle rejections, cease-and-dissist missives, open mockery and utter rage from publishers and audience alike, and he simply never quit.
Maybe his worldview was a bit skewed. Modern students of his work suspect he may have had Asperger's Syndrome. Who's to say.
Not only did he take rejections in stride, he apparently read them with rose-tinted glasses (with an anti-glare coating made of concentrated optimism). He wrote to Queen Victoria, hoping to secure her patronage, and was tremendously encouraged by the rejection letter he received from a functionary because he took "Thank you for your interest" as a great compliment to his talents. When an obviously fake letter from representatives of King Thibaw Min of Burma told him that he had been knighted in absentia he took it at face value and proclaimed himself a Sir from then until his death in penury.
Very, very few of us can hope to suffer such persistent insults to our talents, such frequent requests for us to please, please stop writing. Sure, we may not ever be satisfied with the size or the responsiveness of our audience, and we may water down our whiskey with manly tears when we receive another "thanks, but no" letter from a publisher.
"Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant, Burmah", a weaver's son and a Dundee boy, should be an example to us all: if you believe in yourself, honestly and sincerely, then you'll live and die proud and happy -- and the world's barbs be damned.
- Alex.
Full text of the Tay Bridge Disaster here: http://www.taynet.co.uk/users/mcgon/disaster.htm
Selected bibliography here: http://www.taynet.co.uk/users/mcgon/
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
"Apple Stoer": counterfeit shops in Kunming
Knockoff Apple Stores, down to the blue t-shirts with white name medallions, whose employees genuinely believe they work for Apple. Unbelievable. http://www.ifoapplestore.com/db/2011/07/19/counterfeit-apple-stores-popping-u...
Monday, July 18, 2011
The filter bubble and you, via @chipotlecoyote
The Internet presents far more information to us than any of us can realistically process even as it encourages us to subscribe to ever more of that information. You’ll be behind and uninformed if you don’t use this service, too—but don’t worry, we’ll make sure you only get the information stream from it you really want.
From the ever-insightful Watts Martin, worth a six-minute read: http://chipotle.tumblr.com/post/7768594711/the-filter-bubble-and-you
The Filter Problem has long been a fascination of mine.
Gatekeeping has been the traditional solution, as evident in traditional media: publishers evaluate content and select for profitability, rejecting what they believe will be unpopular in their market.
In the early days of the public, popular Internet For The Common Man we had the likes of CompuServe and AOL whose portals served similar functions, providing easy access to a selected subset of Internet content that the editors thought valuable.
This model is on the way out, and good riddance.
In its place there's a glut of content available to everyone at negligible cost. As a consequence, most of it has little value and the dream of a young creative to Make It Big with their artistic output (music, fiction, art) is becoming more tenuous by the millisecond.
Google had the right idea around the turn of the century: an Algorithmic filter. Good, solid, intuitive searching of the entire corpus of the digital collective consciousness, with sincere efforts to be unbiased and democratic, later refined to be more individually tailored.
This is the Pull model. Netizens actively perform a search on subjects of interest, or subscribe to the RSS feeds of sites and blogs they deem interesting.
In recent years, a new Push model has emerged. Rather than having our content selected for us by a monolithic agency like a publisher or a web portal, it's our individualized social graph that provides us with content that could be of interest, which we could never have thought to search for or subscribe to.
Twitter, Facebook, and apps and services that automatically aggregate content shared from the people in our streams and present it in a pleasing way, such as the iPad's flagship reader Flipboard.
This thinking also inspired some of the philosophies and long-term plans for SoFurry.com. No barrier to entry for any creative, minimized emphasis on a homogenized, democratic 'standard' of quality: every content item has an audience somewhere, and a good system ensures that the right content is presented to the right audience. That can also be read in reverse: the right audience is delivered to the right content.
But it's a long, hard, deep problem. Trusting your social network introduces significant bias in the content you receive, since birds of a feather tend to flock together, eliminating viewpoints contrary to yours from your awareness. The occasions where we are presented with something truly novel, unexpected and delightful are rare -- but this is what a good filter should provide.
Basically, we need a Psychic Internet. Not only an Internet that understands what we want better than we do, but which can predict different future versions of us and provides us with varied nourishment to help us choose and cultivate one of those future selves.
For all the criticisms that can be leveled against the Social filter (ideological bias, limited broadening of horizons), there's just as much and more to be said against the Gatekeeper and Algorithm filters (deliberate manipulation of the audience to popularize selected content and the inability to present the unexpected, respectively).
Is there a radical alternative that's better than any of these? Most certainly, but it hasn't caught fire yet, so we don't know what it might be. Six years from now it'll be obvious. I'll reflect on the fallacies of the Social filter fad and laugh heartily, while the Psychic Internet feeds me a really, truly thought-provoking article on Creationism that makes me re-evaluate my place in the universe.
Just as it always does.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
"Life won't get me down."
From the back of a bike cab on a ride through Amsterdam, I saw this chap out of the corner of my eye and swung my camera into action. Four seconds, if that. I don't know this guy, and I don't think he noticed me, but for the brief moment I saw him, I felt I was a member of an indomitable and ultimately pretty okay species. From his bearing I got the impression he was alone. No family, few who cared about him. Used to being passed by and ignored. His hat and scarf and heavy coat, even in the (admittedly modest) height of Dutch summer might point to his being sick, if he felt so cold as to arm himself against it. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he was just waiting for his grand kids to drop by. Maybe he's a foreigner, a Moroccan or a Bosnian who, in his old age, finally decided to take the plunge and live his lifelong dream of a travel adventure in Amsterdam. Either way, though. Seeing his face, that cheeky smile, that acceptance and delight of all the troubles and wonders the world has heaped on him...
I think we'd all be well served by seeing the world through his eyes for a little while. - AlexThursday, July 14, 2011
Google+? More like Grammar+. Gender-neutral, singular 'they' and privacy.
Google+ is on a roll. Having learned from Wave's failed adoption there's a lot of engineering and development going on. This week they're rolling out a new contact importer and a privacy setting for gender, for those for whom it's a sensitive topic.
Like Facebook, Google+'s notification system is conversational. "Alan shared a photo with his circles," which, if Alan were to decide to keep his gender private, would then become "Alan has shared a photo with their circles."
In the words of the Googler who announced the feature, Frances Haugen: “Controlling privacy is more important than being grammatically correct."
Is it wrong, though?
The pronoun they has a very fluid place in the culture of English-speaking nations. Officially it's third-person plural, but it's also used as a third-person singular pronoun if the subject's gender is unknown. And further, it's used for vague abstracts that can be described in singular or plural.
From the play Ceasar and Cleopatra:
"No, Cleopatra. No man goes to battle to be killed.""But they do get killed!"
This use of they, and its gender-neutral application, is disputable. By the letter of grammatical law, the above example should be wrong -- but it doesn't feel wrong. Ceasar wasn't talking about a man, he was talking about men but chose a more elegant sentence structure to express his thought, which Cleopatra correctly interpreted.
Ah, Google. You've made me more interested in modern grammar and syntax than the evolution of social networking, and given my background in New Media, that's impressive. Firsth +You vs +Usted, then you defined +1 as a verb and charted the correct conjugations, and now you're putting proper thought in the role of gender in your automation systems.
Google, you rock.
Sorry, I mean they rock.
- Alex
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Moms like kitteh videos, and take lolspeak way too far.
Iz eezee tu cree-ate kwye-at wit teenagers. Jus’ menshun yu knead sumpfin done. Voila! Noe teenagers.
So there's this kitty video where a vet 'suspends' a cat by putting a binder clip on the scruff of its neck, rendering it passive and immobile until it's removed.
Here, knock yourself out: http://icanhascheezburger.com/2011/07/11/funny-pictures-videos-deactivate-a-cat/
My eye fell on the comments and the proliferation of lolspeak, or however it's classified now -- in particular to the diversity of interpretations.
I am an Internet Expert, just like Kim Jong-Il, so I've seen my share of lolcats. And I was under the impression, having, as I mentioned, seen my share, that there was more or less a consensus on the mangling of English that makes those kitties seem so adorable. Stuff like "o hai" and "I haz" this or that. Much in the way that a picture of a cat with a caption is only a proper lolcat if it's typeset in the Impact font.
So I noticed the wild divergence among the comments on this page and, my interest being piqued, I tried to suss out who these people might be.
It seemed unlikely they were hip, clued-in young nerds -- they have always shown an intense bias toward conformity in the context of emergent Internet culture. Memes spread because these guys take pride in taking a new artefact and emulating it correctly; straying too far from the original parameters dilutes the humor.
They also couldn't be Internet Experts like me and Mr Kim because they were polite and cheerful, and actually conversed with each other in this comment thread as if they knew each other from other threads -- but I got the distinct impression they ONLY knew each other from these threads.
When I noticed many of these comments, like the one here quoth'd, the answer revealed itself.
They were moms.
Not women. Not adults. Moms, specifically. Moms who have a computer and enjoy funny cat pictures and who don't care about the conventions of lolspeak, but delight in the silliness and creativity of mangling their spelling.
How adorable is that?
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Photo: "There's something I have to tell you..."
Shot this weekend with my iPhone 4, edited in Camera+.
This is why we backup.
I bought a 2TB external drive about a month ago to replace my collection of aging drives. Between Heathen City, some archival videos, and a photo library nearing 100GB (not to mention about as much in music and porn respectively) it filled up right quick, and it was nice to clear some more space on the internal drive on my iMac, which incidentally just turned two.
I bought it when my MacBook Pro melted, right in the middle of production of Heathen City 2. Fortunately, since I store all my active projects in Dropbox it was a matter of dusting off my older black MacBook (aka The Blackintosh) and a half-hour's downloading, and I was back on track.
I'd noticed that the drive would occasionally fail to reactivate after my iMac woke up from Sleep, which was remedied by unplugging and replugging the USB cable. Annoying, but hardly a deal-breaker considering how cheap the drive was. And then last week it simply didn't start up under any circumstances. No light, no power-on whirr.
I brought my new external drive back to the shop. As soon as I mentioned the product, the helpful chick behind the counter immediately began filling out forms on her workstation, correctly predicting the model (a Samsung G3 piece of shit) since so, so many had been returned. She recommended against getting a replacement, instead giving store credit for another model.
So what about all my precious data? My video and HC archives? The Bad Dog Books production files? A decade's worth of photos? All my precious porn?
No sweat.
I am so, so fastidious about backups. Earlier this year I bought a subscription to Crashplan, which is simply awesome. For fifty bucks a year you get unlimited cloud storage for one machine and boy howdy, do I make use of it. Crashplan sits in the background and quietly uploads the folders you specify to the cloud, keeping track of any changes and uploading only those bits of data that have changed.
So for the next two weeks my iMac will be hogging all the neighborhood bandwidth to retrieve basically everything. It's a bit of an inconvenience, but it's so, so worth it.
Are your backups up to date?
- A.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Insular, crotchety, misanthropic, and how to deal with them on Google+
LET IT BE KNOWN that I have made a Circle specifically for those people I a) like b) admire c) compete with but who are, in all objective terms, jerks. Some are merely dismissive and insular, some are old-fashioned and crotchety, some are outright misanthropic. Some are close friends of mine, some are enemies. But everyone in this Circle is a jerk.It is my Jerk Circle. You want to be in my Circle, Jerk?
Friday, July 8, 2011
This is the greatest self-portrait of all time. Vanity: thy name is Crested Black Macaque.
via metro.co.uk
Further reading here: http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/news/Aperture_priority_photographer_play...
The news sources that ran with this pic gave the impression that this chap and his monkey brethren made off with the camera; the photographer says his camera was mounted on a tripod and the primates started playing with it in-situ.
Once they figured out that the button ont he shutter release cable made the thing click, one of them shot this fantastic snapshot of his own bad self.
After that he promptly uploaded it to MySpace, which remains popular among hipsters in the context of irony.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
The iPhone SLR Mount from Photojojo
via photojojo.com
On Flickr, more photos have been posted that were taken with an iPhone 4 than with any other camera.
And it's good, it's really good. You've always got it in your pocket. Although attaching a big fat honker of a telezoom kind of puts the crimp on that.
For $250 it isn't exactly a bargain and the sample photos on the promo page aren't exactly stellar quality, though DSLR lenses of course do allow shallower depth of field than the built-in camera itself.
Still, it's a damn cool invention!
Video killed the radio show and Google+ is pretty cool.
I have the distinct impression I've used that quote in a blog title before, but whatever.
Some observations. Google+ doesn't have any crossposting functionality, neither offering any way to automatically post content from any of your other networks to Google+, nor to update any other network with your activity on Google's new social networking site. It's its own little continent. This could be attributed to the service currently being in 'field trial', but considering how polished and fleshed-out it is it would seem this descriptor was only used to indemnify Big G against the kind of privacy backlash that mired their previous social effort, Buzz.
Fortunately they've learned valuable lessons from the Buzz failure, by actually raising the bar on the concept of social networking privacy. They also clearly learned another lesson from that experience, which I believe is the reason why there's no in or out function in G+ so far.
A Googler friend of mine swapped Twitter for Buzz once it became available, because it really wasn't that bad and it was very convenient, being integrated into Gmail. After some months, though, he disappointedly 'came back', observing that the only people posting anything to Buzz in his circle of acquaintance were merely autoposting their Twitter or Facebook activity to it. And what's the point of following a social stream that's just a reflection of other, more active social streams?
Okay, to be fair, they're playing it smart and rapidly iterating the service before giving out an API to let third-party developers post stuff to G+. That's totally fair, too.
What I'm really interested in is how they'll treat the posting from G+ to other services, which is a non-trivial, but entirely doable undertaking even at this early stage. Maybe you could link with Facebook so that it becomes a virtual Circle you can add to any post, or you can configure your Public feed so that everything you post to it is also pinged on Twitter.
Given how smart the people involved in this project have been so far, I can only assume it'll be magical and revolutionary.
- Alex F. Vance
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
The art is in the finish: variations of a lighter.
Obviously I'm into photography now. I really approached this craft from the wrong angle; before I learned about aperture and ISO I was already an adept image editor, so my early experiments with my lovely Nikon have been rather casual. "I'll fix it in post."
I'm trying to develop more affinity with my tool (har har), trying to get better results straight out of the camera -- although the creativity of careful, meticulous post-processing is still a tremendous delight. Case in point: one pic of a lighter on a table under the fluorescent light of the smoker's corner in the company's basement car park, shot on an iPhone 4, processed six different ways with Camera+ and sextyched with Diptic.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
WordPress for WebOS: a rare example of a non-iOS app that looks to work better than its iOS counterpart.
Disclaimer: I haven't tried it myself, but I do like what I see, and I wish it were available for iOS. Rich text, elegant navigation... that's how it should be.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Open Day at the Dutch Royal Navy
http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649 After we made some navigational errors in trying to explore the great dike that protects our country from the North Sea and its manifest destiny to flood us all, we discovered that in nearby Den Helder the royal Navy was having an open day, so we immediately went to have a look around. I paid so little attention to the information provided that, honestly, I haven't a damn clue about pretty much anything in these pictures. I have therefore decided to completely fabricate some information, so that it will be at least somewhat interesting, if not almost wholly inaccurate.
I regret nothing. - Alex F. Vance
I regret nothing. - Alex F. Vance
Saturday, July 2, 2011
The Difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England Explained
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10]
via youtube.com
Around 2001 I spent an afternoon trying to convince an American friend that Ireland was an island consisting of two independent countries. He consulted with his coworkers, who had never heard of this, and was very suspicious of my insistence even when I indicated that I had lived in Northern Ireland as a child.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Today I saw a putty tat bathing in the Sun.
I wish my world were as comfortable as his. I'd lounge everywhere. Le sigh!
Help @rudderbutt release an all new original rock EP on Kickstarter. I've made my pledge already.
via kickstarter.com
Here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tratledge/help-travis-ratledge-release-an...
Minimum lay-in is $1. A little more and you get a free download of the EP when it's done!
I've laid down a fair bit more. I wonder if it's enough to have him do a sexy dance for me over Skype. Fingers crossed!
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