Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Sounds like the premise to a South Park sub-plot, but apparently true: The Army National Guard is experiencing its lowest volunteer signup rates in quite a while. To remedy the situation, they’re giving away three — yes, three free iTunes music store downloads to all comers. All you have to do is hand over your contact info to a recruiter. Fear not for your life, lad — music conquers all!
Amongst the perennial flotilla of product launches and buzzwords (anyone still using Orkut?), every now and then you stumble across a product that really gives you that tingly “Ah-Ha!” feeling. Organizing forces for the J-School site redesign, experimenting with various online collaboration tools, came across three {Ruby-on-Rails plus Ajax} products from 37 Signals: Basecamp, Backpack, and Ta-Da Lists. Basecamp for project management, Backpack for organizing your personal life, Ta-Da List for dirt-simple online to-do lists. All are optionally private or shareable.
It’s not like 37 Signals is the first to do project/life management online. What sets this stuff apart is the incredibly elegant simplicity of their interfaces. Something about them just reaches out and screams “Use me!” And so I am. Choosing between Basecamp and Backpack was tricky, because both include features I wish were present in the other — e.g. frustrated that Backpack only allows for a single to-do list (crimony!), and that Basecamp doesn’t include the Wiki (Whiteboard) module. Ultimately settled on Basecamp, and am up and running with a team. Add in the fact that you can subscribe to project changes via RSS, and publish project milestones to iCal format, and it all just clicks. A thing of beauty.
For the first time, starting to see Ajax in action in ways that are genuinely useful, rather than just buzz. Being able to drag and drop list items around on a web page (without resorting to Flash), you start to see the first real glimmers of why Microsoft has always been worried that web services could make Windows irrelevant. Google buying and integrating a product like this would push them into that futuristic space where the operating system matters less and less.
Will probably port some of my home and work tasks and schedules to 37 Signals stuff soon — the free versions are more than adequate for most purposes.
If a bit can be flipped on or off, what state is it in when the computer is powered down? Clearly “On” is incorrect, but “Off” is also not quite right. Wu. The proper answer to a loaded question such as “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Wu. Does a dog have Buddha nature? Wu. When language fails to provide mechanism for a logically adequate response, Wu. Accounting for the subtle distinction between “not” and “no,” Wu. Or, if one prefers, Mu.
Phishing isn’t just for email anymore — it’s always been about social engineering, and people are more likely to respond to false authority over the phone than via email, which has become an untrusted medium in most people’s eyes. Scambusters:
“Hello?”
“This is the county courthouse, wondering why you failed to appear for jury duty this week.”
“Jury duty? I never received a summons!”
“Let’s verify that. What is your social security number?”
Victim, afraid of going to jail, hands over their social without pause.
“Hmmm, that’s not coming up in the computer. What is your date of birth? Mother’s maiden name? …”
After getting the goods, the caller says something like “Ah, our mistake. Please accept our apologies for the error.” But it’s too late.
If you get such a call, ask for a callback number, then look up the number for your county courthouse in the phone book. Or just hang up on them.
In reality, court workers will never call you to ask for social security numbers and other private information. In fact, most courts follow up via snail mail and rarely, if ever, call prospective jurors.
The housing market explosion has, apparently, trickled down to the once-ignored playhouse market. Started talking recently about building a playhouse for Miles. Amy started searching online for inspiration and her jaw dropped through her desk. $123,000 for a treehouse, anyone? Last I checked, you can still put a family of four in a real house for that much in parts of the country.
One’s heart goes out to these overprivileged children, living without hot running water and with a barely functional mail delivery system, toiling from cello lesson to polo practice, struggling to make mortgage.
Granted, these playhouses are gorgeous, and gave us a ton of ideas. Daniels Woodland Monkey Mansions are somewhat less absurdly priced, but still off the charts.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes brookemaury.org, the personal web site of Brooke Maury: “Masters student at the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) at the University of California, Berkeley. My research and coursework have focused predominantly on multimedia metadata management, the intersection of technology & law and more recently, text-based music information retrieval.”
Walking through the courtyard, a student sits at a laptop, gazing into the screen, rocking softly side to side, eyes half-closed. “It looks like you’re composing,” I said, thinking he looked graceful, peaceful, like a sonata. “I am,” he replied. I glanced at his screen, and he pointed to the grey “Compose” button on the Yahoo! Mail interface.
If I gave a tinker’s cuss about advertising, I’d give an award to Hitachi for best ad in a magazine. Doing the usual dump of blow-in cards from the current issue of Wired, encountered a thick page, which turned out to be a standard beer coaster attached to heavy stock. On the reverse of the page, a gen-yoo-ine U.S. patent application form, ready to fill out, tear out, and send. On the back of the beer coaster, these instructions:
1) Ask your waiter/aspiring actor for a pen.
2) Sketch plans for cool new device utilizing a Hitachi hard drive.
3) Fill out patent form on back of page.
4) Raise a glass in a toast to your brilliance.
OK, it’s corny, but it’s also the closest I’ve seen a print ad come to the kind of engagement/interactivity common online.
What are all these duplicate entries doing in the Admissions Request database? Hmm… there’s a pattern here – when there are duplicates or triplicates for the same person, the first one is always short, the second a bit more detailed, and the third or fourth is a complete entry. Aha! Some people get confused navigating web forms and hit Enter/Return rather than Tab to move to the next field. This should be solvable… Yep, there’s a simple JavaScript fix. Works nicely. In fact, this could be useful all over the place.
Rarely find “aftermarket” stuff I think should be built into the HTML specification, but this is a good example of such a case. It should be possible to put some kind of enter_submit="no" attribute into the form tag to save users from themselves. And developers shouldn’t have to code hacks around (and add byte-weight to pages on account of) common user errors such as this.
Update: Once again bitten by users running that infernal Norton Internet Security, which throws absurd and confusing warnings when it encounters javascript it doesn’t know about. Had to disable the work above — it’s more important that all people have access than that we avoid duplicate/partial entries.
Last night finished watching Martin Scorsese’s two-part documentary on the early part of Bob Dylan’s career, No Direction Home — fascinating and beautiful. The film spent a lot of energy not just on concert footage and interviews, but on context — the musical and social environment from which he shot like a weed into mesmerizing strangeness.
Scorsese put a lot of weight on Dylan’s slippery nature, his refusal to be pinned down or labeled. The establishment media was absolutely fixated on making him “The spokesman of a generation,” “The father of protest music,” though relatively little of his output was actually political or topical except in the most obtuse way, and he consistently confounded reporters’ attempts to get him to make political statements, or to actually speak for his generation. Priceless footage of a Swedish photojournalist asking him to “Suck on the arm of his glasses” — wanted to stage Dylan looking thoughtful or something. Dylan walked up to the photog and held his specs up to the guy’s mouth. “You suck on them.” A student journalist looking ridiculous as he demands to know the symbolism of the barely visible motorcycle on Dylan’s t-shirt on the cover of “Highway 61 Revisited,” Dylan looking incredulous that people were so desperate to find hidden meaning in his every move. “Umm, I was just wearing that shirt that day, I really don’t remember.”
Much of the footage is chilling in its beauty, Dylan so in the moment, so completely absorbed by the muse. Allen Ginsberg: “He had become identical with his breath.” Lots of interview footage with Joan Baez on their difficult relationship, and her frustration that Dylan wouldn’t throw his weight behind the protest movement, as she had assumed they would do together. “He was the most complex person I’ve ever met.”
Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.
– It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Focus on Dylan’s transition from folk to rock, and how his freewheeling mixture of the genres frustrated folk purists. Crowds booing, hollering “Traitor!” Pete Seeger admits wanting to take an axe to the power cords at one electric performance, Dylan today talking about how painful it was to learn that one of his own heroes was rejecting that music so completely. But truthfully, some of the electric performances are painful to watch in contrast with the solo work, even as they’re tremendous in their own right.
The doc stops abruptly in 1966 with Dylan’s motorcycle accident, and you’re left hungry for another four (or more!) hours covering the years that have gone between.