Image from here

A little over ten years ago, before debit cards became ubiquitous and people cared more about having actual bits of paper for the monetary worth, I had a discussion with a friend about how the world would  eventually move to a cashless society.   I argued over the cost and extent of such a venture going forward.   He did have one good point in his argument – anonymity.

He believed due to corruption (or anything else you wish to argue for) that there would always be cash money to allow for citizens to have an anonymous usage of money in society.   I had several more arguments going against this back then, but I couldn’t truly get around the anonymity factor, especially with small unmarked bills.  I don’t believe the anonymity factor is going to last too much longer though.

Enter in RFID dust, this effectively will destroy anonymity in a cash based society.   The technology was developed as an anti-counterfeiting method.   With this knowledge in hand we can make some assumptions.  The first is that the dust can be used to verify the authenticity of the bills.   The second, when it is truly embedded in the bills and not sprinkled into batches of money – that the RFID will contain a serial that will match the serial number on the bill itself.

If the dollar can “beacon” the serial number, then how does it become anonymous.   In theory before you use any paper money you could microwave it, but eventually that will no longer work either.  The next argument would be that only the government has the readers – this would be a “for how long argument”.   Think of the theft and tracking of the flow of money analysis that could be gained solely on a research perspective.  I can see in 20-30 years as the technology becomes cheaper and centralized databases are more available – that this type of tracking could be the norm.

I’ve written about software currently that can track the flow of money, there is no reason we wouldn’t be able to see real time tracking of every single penny in circulation by utilizing this technology.   The only thing stopping it right now is cost, which will drop.

Image from here

Google reader, I love you – I also hate you.    You are like a bad relationship that I can’t break.   You save me so much time on the web since I no longer have to jump from site to site.   You however do not give me any good reason to use you and save items.    You are a cruel mistress who mistreats me and wastes my time.   Here are things you need to work on.

The first and only thing you need to work is how saved “starred” items work within your interface.     I have been trying to clear out “starred” items since the list was getting unwieldy for me.  Let’s start off by how I use starred items.   I use it to save personally interesting stories that are not relevant enough for me to share the story.   They are also too mundane in most occasions to e-mail to myself.    Yes I know this is in essence using you as a bookmarking service – a service mind you that Google has not officially ventured into.  You are designed to display information rapidly from multiple sources and your saved items is really an after thought.    Or it it?

You attempted to rectify some of this with tagging, the first problem I have with tagging – is other then by using search I can not find a way to find the “folders” made by creating a tag.   It’s all fine and great that we can create tags, but if you can not quickly get to them, what is the point other then to give me hope.   Maybe I’m just retarded when it comes to tags, but tags do not answer the second problem I have, only the bookmarking aspect (and answers it extremely poorly).

The second thing I use you for is saving stories that I can come back and read later.   I get in on Monday morning and I have 367 unread items that have shown up since Sunday when I cleared them out.   I don’t have time to leisurely read the stories, instead I go through and star the ones I want to come back and read later.   By Friday I have over one thousand story I want to come back and read, but who has the time or effort.  The other day to get back to my oldest starred items it took me over 5 minutes of scrolling all the way down and waiting for you to load.   There has to be another way.

A few methods I came up to help the starred overload issue:

Saved feed items by date – if you could categorize items in folder by month/week/or even day that you starred them that would be fantastic and save on a hell of a lot of scrolling.

Starred item by feed it came from – by being able to filter our starred items by source feed would also be awesome.   This would allow me to quickly dig into the stories I want to read when I sit down.   Sometimes I don’t feel like going back to starred items from feeds 6, 5, 89, 90, etc. – when all I want to do is read stories from feed78.     There should be a simpler way to do this then forcing me to tag or search.  I can set up labels and see them on the left in Gmail, why is the reader data so different?

Well next week I plan to publish articles of some of the saved links I have saved by subject.   I’ve been working hard, but like they say you go two steps forward and you end three steps back.     We’ll see how it goes.

Love,

Creeva

The above picture was from the VCMA’s performance of the Christmas tree arrival.  I don’t have a video of that performance, what I do have is a video of the VCMA Concert Band’s performance at Kingston of Vermilion which took place on Dec. 11. 2008.   Enjoy!

On Friday Google rolled out a new favicon to the world. This news seems to be so powerful that it inspired a Slashdot thread with 183 comments and a story about this received 1451 Diggs at last count.  I however think just smacks of slow news day syndrome, but what can I say – I’m writing a useless story about how other people found a useless story interesting.   Maybe this will be the post that makes it to the front page of Digg.

BTW:

Google’s new favicon

That’s for those that have not gone to Google.com and seen the new favicon in the address bar.

Recently I started contributing to the International Music Score Library Project and I’ve ran into a small snag.   Currently I’ve only uploaded two pieces ( I did say I was going to contribute more to the public domain going forward) and I received the following message the day after I uploaded the pieces:

Dear Creeva,

IMSLP is located in Canada and therefore operates under Canadian copyright law. A very important difference between Canada’s law and that of the USA is that the term is determined by the death date of the composer or author of the work in question (term is life-plus-50 years). I was able to find out that George Hendricks Rosenkrans died in 1955 and is therefore public domain in Canada. Gus W. Bernard is a different matter.

I was not able to find anything on the date of Gus W. Bernard, so I have to estimate his approximate lifetime. Please be advised that should info surface that he died later than 1959, the item you posted may well have to be deleted. Also, please try to include complete information on composers when you add a new name. You can often find out things quickly by means of a simple Google search.

Thanks,

[NAME REDACTED BY CREEVA]

Now I wrote yesterday that just because something is online it isn’t in the public domain.    Let’s look at the other side of the coin just because something is in the public domain, it doesn’t mean it is in the public domain.   In my normal mode of thinking, I think in US copyright law.     When we are dealing with other countries in our global economy and global communications infrastructure we need to be aware of their laws as well when interacting with other services.

Now the project above could get in trouble if the work is copyrighted in Canada and they display it.   I however uploaded it from the US so I broke no US law since both works were in the public domain here.   Did I break a Canadian law though?  I don’t know.   This is one of the problems when dealing with the public domain.   The question over the Canadian law comes to light when you consider while the service is in Canada, I physically performed the actions legally from a US computer.   Very fuzzy and gray in many aspects when you look at the big picture.

So when contributing ot the public domain – be aware where the servers are physically located in the world, be aware of the copywrite law in that physical location.   Now if only we could get a US Mirror to work off of for that project……..

You would think from the image I chose for the header that I was doing something cool with the Nintendo Entertainment System.   This unfortunately is not the case.  Where the Nintendo came into play was that it was the object of my desire.   I desperately wanted an NES.  This was sometime around seventh or eighth grade so the years would have 1988 -1989 and the Nintendo was in full swing, you can see one of the commercials below.

Now my father didn’t believe in video games.   About five years earlier he got us a Commodore Vic-20, this is all fine and dandy – my parents fell for the whole “give you kid a computer and he’ll be computer literate for life” crap that they were handing out in the eighties.  A computer was meant for learning and yes there were a few games we had for it, but it was meant to learn something on.   I learned I never wanted to be a programmer, that’s what I learned.  I could go to my neighbors and play the Atari 2600 or play Ultima on his Mac Classic – but me – I was going to have the Vic-20 and like it because I wasn’t getting anything else.

Picture from here

We moved to Vermilion the summer before my seventh grade year.   I’m sure I started begging for a NES around that time if not earlier.   I’m sure the logic explained to me was that if I wanted a Nintendo I was going to have to earn it.    This meant getting a job.   I don’t know about your area but for Vermilion, OH there wasn’t much call in the work force for 12-13 year old kids.   The one thing that did open up was the ability to get a paper route.  The area where we lived in Elyria was a bit too rough for a 11-12 year old to deliver papers, but Vermilion was a quiet small town where such things almost seem nostalgic.

Picture from here (not me)

Another boy was giving up his paper route that was a year younger then me (should have been a sign) and did a week long transition with me so that I could learn the route.   By the end of the week I learned the route, I had my little punch card slip ring for billing, I had a carrier bag, and I also had baskets on the back of my bicycle to carry newspapers in.   I would try to say it was pimp, but I can’t even type that with a straight face.   I rode my bike to school and I got mocked by how stupid it looked.  Of course being a geek on the nth degree anyways there is always other things to get picked on then a bike, so I struggled through it.  I was a newspaper boy for the Lorain Morning Journal.

You may say that I learned character and fiscal responsibility because of that job.   You would also be wrong.  I hated that job with a passion.   I struggled for the first couple months to get through it.  The NES was the apple of my eye and I was going to save the 99.99 (plus tax) for the Action System which included Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt (and the pimp NES Zapper).   I was impatient to get it, so impatient that I gave my mother the money to get it while I was at school.   You would think this being the first large purchase of my life I would have wanted to go and hand over the money and buy the system myself, nope I just wanted the damn thing home.

I get home, my mother isn’t there.   I go do my paper route and get back home, my mother isn’t there.   I sit in the grass on the front yard and wait.   Eventually my mother pulls up in that blue dodge caravan (minivan) we had.  She had done other shopping and had a ton of bags.  Which one was my Nintendo?????

My mother stopped me and said she talked to the sales person who told her the Sega Master System was the better system to buy since it was faster and supported more colors.  WTF?  I had worked my butt off in a job hated to have my mother go out and buy me a Sega Master Sytem.  No one owned a Sega Master System, only people with no friends owned a Sega Master System.   I was not going to own a Sega Master System.    I told her with certainty that she had no right to spend the money I earned to buy a Sega Master System.  We were going to get back in the car right then, go to the store and exchange it for a Nintendo Entertainment System.

My mother then started laughing.  Out of the back of the van she pulled out a Nintendo Action Set.   You do not mess with a pre-teen in that way – ever.   She said she was going to go upstairs and use the restroom, after which she would come down and help me hook it up to the TV.  I think by the time she flushed the toilet I was already on World 1-2 of Super Mario Bros.  I had hooked up the Vic-20 so many times that I knew how to do it in my sleep.   The NES was more of the same.

At this point I did not want to do the paper route any more, but my grandfather thought it was good for me so I kept plodding along.    I delivered papers a 3 AM Christmas morning wasn’t that quite the thrill, not.   I would definitely preferred to have been sleeping.    More and more of my customers were moving to prepaid accounts, which cut into my money.   You would think it wouldn’t have effected  my bottom line, but I lost out on tip money from these customers – and to this day I believe the Journal used some creative account billing to the paper boys.    My grandfather thought I was just doing it wrong, but I was let off the hook after about a year.

Me and my grandparents a year or so after the paper route.

My brother took over the paper route with the help of my grandfather and my mother in delivering the newspapers.   Now I don’t know about you but if someone would have driven me on the route every day, I may have been more likely to actually like the job.   He is five and half years younger then me, so they were not going to let him go off alone to do it.  The funniest thing was after about a year they started loosing money also and it became not financially viable for them either.    I guess it wasn’t just me.

You would think that this would end my families relationship with the Journal after so many bad experiences, it didn’t.  For the last few years my sister (now 22) has a motor route in Vermilion delivering papers.   I guess she makes really good money at it.   It would seem the third time is a charm.   I don’t think my brother or my sister ever hated it as much as I did.   I did get my NES though.

Below is a link to Google Maps that shows the actual route location of my paper route.

The recent twitter phishing scam had non twitter users scratching their heads on why this service would be targeted for a phishing scam at all.. Most people view little or no monetary value to twitter accounts. For most people this may actually be true. For people like Scoble or companies that promote themselves over twitter, well the brand name damage caused by a hijacked twitter account could be quite costly.

One of my friends on twitter had a reply about this issue (I’m assuming the other person didn’t realize the long tail potential impact (yes I used the term long tail – get over it)). What I saw was this:

@jeremyasmus could be any number of reasons, spread malware, spam, get passwords, us humans tend to use the same password over and over.

This is the crux of the issue isn’t it? The problem isn’t average user with nine friends directly, it’s the large power users and the passwords for other services. Let’s look at each of these.

Let’s say you are Scoble and your account get’s hijacked. Scoble has a level of trust built from himself, he is known to get the inside scoop on information, people click his links. Scoble has over 47,000 followers. If his account was hijacked and ten percent clicked a link that was really a malware installer – that would be 4,700 people infected within a matter of minutes. I think however the number of Scoble followers would be much larger probable in the 50-60% range. For a malware distribution this is a great return for the time frame, with the added benefit that you may get some other high profile names in the attack.

The cost to deploy such an attack is extremely low – under ten dollars, while the net return would be a few thousand, potentially more. Since there is little risk to getting caught if you know what you are doing, you could make some decent money by exploiting this chain of trust that exists and is protected by a mere password.

Let’s look at the side of this coin, the normal user.  Adam Baldwin nailed it right on the head when he stated “us humans tend to use the same password over and over”. I know I do, though different level of things have different passwords – my banking account does not use the same username/password combination as my twitter account – neener/neener. It is however shared with some other web 2.0 services. Some other people may not be so diligent. This once again is a chain of trust issue. You are trusting the companies that you give your passwords to are truly them, so once your password is in the wild it’s exposed and all of your accounts are open to attack.

Let’s look at the information an attacker can get from you if they have your twitter password:

User Name – while by itself it’s exposing a little bit about your account and your password – the problem lies in having both bits of this information. That part should be blatantly obvious. The issue lies in the fact that most of us use the same username or “handle” across many sites on the web. Doing a Google search for “Creeva” yields over 46,000 hits. A lot of these hits are different services that I play with and over 90% of the hits link back directly to me in some fashion. Since most sites use you username as your login name, if I used the same password every single one of these services would be exposed if I fell for the twitter phising scam.

E-Mail Address – Yes though it maybe only a small amount these days, your e-mail address is still worth a few percentages of a penny to the spammer. This would get you on more mailing lists, and ones that would be quite hard to get off of. It is also normally used as a login name for service that do not use your handle. More accounts have now been exposed because of this. If your e-mail account passwords is the same as your twitter account (dumb mistake) everything about your online life, accounts, and transactions can now be exposed and utilized against you. Would you notice a gmail filter that someone setup to clone every incoming e-mail?

The other issue is even you do not have accounts that show up in a Google search they could use a service search engine such as Spokeo to find accounts even you may have forgotten about.

Mobile Phone Number – This probably would be one of the most annoying things, that your phone number has been exposed to the internet underground. Phone spam, call back charges; there are a few things they can do with this number. I do think this is small annoyance compared to loosing your email account.

Being a good security professional my recommendation is to use strong passwords that are unique to each service and are rotated regularly. I am also a realist and know that you won’t. This may be the time to start doing segmentation where different accounts do get different levels of passwords. This is what I do so if my twitter account was compromised only the services that I consider on par with Twitter security-wise was at risk. Lower level accounts would be safe and higher level accounts would be safe. I also think with the range of accounts, I could move faster then the phishers going through and knowing what to change faster then they could try all 46,000 sites. It’s a thought – now what are yours?

Picture from here

Though I don’t think it’s related to the search engine privacy story, Google has just released a web book for free titled Browser Security Handbook.   Some people are relating to this as Google’s answer to the security (and privacy) issues raised by Chrome.  Others belive it’s a way of giving back to the community based on the way Google looks at these concerns and how they address them.

Currently I’m reading through and thought I would share.   You can go to the project page, download test cases, or read it online.   If you have any interest in this field I suggest you at least do one of them.

Picture from here

Techtree.com in India is reporting that there are privacy concerns with search engines saving your browsing information.   Really?  This was news a few years ago in the US, we know what we are giving them and respect that they will use the information to make their products more marketable.  In turn they will conitnue to give us “free” access to their services, and we should be guarded with what information we give them.   At least the tech and privacy savy user does.

Why I ran across this on Google News this morning I have no idea.   This should be nothing new, yet it makes the news.   Sorry just dealing with a little annoyance in my cereal this morning.

The Internet with it’s promise of a revolution has succeeded in it’s goal of changing the landscape of information and how it is disseminated to the public at large.   We deal with issues that new media and remixing is causing in the areas of old copyright.   I’m one of those that bemoan the constant increasing of time before works enters into the public domain.   I would like to see more information enter into the public domain quicker and I think the creative commons idea is the future of copyright law, but this isn’t about that.   It’s about the loss of public domain works.

It is true that efforts are underway to save and collect media that exists in the public domain.   There are even people creating new work specifically for the public domain.   We have libraries of public domain works and sites that collect information form past websites.   Videos are being collected and maintained where the copyright slipped by and were not renewed in time.  These things are great.   However there are too many people that could care less about the public domain or the ideas that spings out of it.

Most of the time public domain media is considered old and out-dated.   People want things that are new and exciting.  They want constant progress with no respect for the ideas of come from,  and don’t what forge from which the ideas have be tempered.  This leads to a loss of ideas, stories, pictures and music.

I once had an argument with someone in my support for the public domain.   I pointed out all the music and stories that have been lost to the ravages of time and may never be recovered.   Their response was if it was popular it never would have been lost.   This statement is almost as asinine as stating that I have nothing to hide, so it’s a good idea to perform surveillance on everyone.   While the latter statement points to no respect to your own privacy, let alone others.  The former statement has no respect for what has been created.

While we can look at three hugely popular sites for public domain media, Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, and Wikipedia; these are all very niche sites that serve a particular purpose.   They each have a primary focus in what they want to maintain.  Since these are the big players in their directed niche they are considered one of the authoritative sources for the type of public domain media and information that is able to be retrieved from their site.   What about some of the niches that aren’t covered?

Project Gutenberg has a long standing history of salvaging books that have entered into the public domain.   They do a great service that literally takes hundreds of volunteers to take books form a print medium and convert it to digital text available to all.  They are known for their e-books, while they do have some other things that they try to maintain, this is what they are known for.   If you are looking for a book that is in the public domain chances are you will be directed to them first.

Archive.org on the other hand, while authoritative in some respects is the jack of all trades in the public domain sector.   You would use them for website history research using their way-back machine site, or you may check with them for public domain video or audio.   It is a haphazard gathering of people that seem to utilize the best of breed mentality, the problem with being the jack of all trades, is sometimes it’s a pain in the butt to use.   Archive.org’s usability is one of the worst of the mainstream big sites that I’ve used.  It’s hard to find exactly what you are looking for.

Then you have Wikipedia, which essentially the public domain research encyclopedia.   Yes, there are issues with it.  Sometimes you can’t trust.   Sometimes it can be edited.  With all these problems, it’s authoritative.  You can’t do a Google search on a subject most of the time without seeing a Wikipedia link on the front page.   People link to Wikipedia since it’s trusted and becomes the cumulative knowledge of humanity over time or does it – the question will be discussed in an upcoming blog article.

However there is plenty of other types of information and media that is not collected and adequately cataloged so it’s easy to use for a layman.   There are for-profit companies cataloging and maintaining repositories of public domain information, but these companies charge a fee for information that truly and legally wants to be free.   It’s just that no one cares enough to invest the time or money to create archives.   I’m not saying companies can’t make money from these ventures, but I think our higher institutions and governments should take first run at them until they are large enough to be spun out into it’s own non-profit organization.

What type of information am I talking about?

Legal Transcripts

Architectural Plans

Sheet Music

Video

Audio

Photographs

General Art

Etc, etc, – if it has been created it should be saved.

I will state of the big three mentioned above, some of those dabble in all of these things, but not to any appreciable level that exists outside of their primary focus.   Yes there are niche sites, this whole thing started out of looking for public domain sheet music.    No site is authoritative, they all have their own issues, and ironically enough they don’t normally have the same data the other site has.    There is no reason for this, scans are not proprietary or unique, nor do they count as a derivative work.

The other issue with this is global acceptance and resources.  Most of the collections of public domain works exists only within themselves.   There is a lot of cross work done by universities scanning the exact same item to be in their collection that another university has already scanned.     This is wasted man power since their is no authoritative repository to put this information into, or cross reference against.   So this leads to the popular stuff normally being at the front of the list and most likely to be duplicated again and again and again, while the more obscure things are left unread and unfound.

Archive.org, Wikipedia, and Gutenberg all of something else that these other niche sites do not have, global mirrors.  Being an American I could easily say the library of congress will eventually have everything public domain online.   The first part is if I actually made that statement it would be naive on my part.   The second thing is that it means other countries are counting on the United States to save the public domain data.   I’m sure we won’t put the same care to local translation and books, compared to American editions when it comes to preservation or public dissemination of the work.

I’m angry and annoyed.  I’ll be revisiting this topic, but hopefully this primer of where I am coming from is something for you to think about and comment on.

Maximum PC recently ran an article titled 50 Skills Every Real Geek Should Have, I wanted to go through and see how I ranked in their skill list.   Let’s find out.

1. Name the Connectors – yes I was able to :)

2. Run your essential apps on a USB stick – no I don’t do this, I could – I just prefer to run everything in the cloud or on my N810 – which is with me most of the time.

3. Straighten Pins on a CPU – I have done this too many times

4. Know the 13 basic HTML Tags – well I kinda know most of them – I use freaking wordpress I hardly need to use HTML and when I do I look it up and hav ethe answer in seconds.   Though I do know quite a few by heart that aren’t listed in the basic 13.

5.  Get through to executive customer service – hey I read the consumerist.

6.  Beat quake in 60 minutes – maybe at one point in time, but I’m not big on FPS games.

7.  Build a Hackintosh – I know how, I just don’t the components that seem to work, and I’m a cheap bastard that won’t buy parts just to run OSX - I’ll stick with ubuntu as my alternative OS.

8.  Watch TV Online legally – um that’s how I watch 100% of my TV these days.

9.  Get around a content filter from a public computer – yes I know how, I’ve helped friends at other companies, it’s not worth it to do it at my own job though.

10. Recite Pi to 23 decimal places – nope – I have no inclination to ever learn either.

11. Replace the controller board on a hard drive – hey I did that once, it’s not a skill that comes up at parties though.

12.  Benchmark your computer – really?  Is this even on this list? Yes, I was doing this before I fully understood what the benchmarks meant on my 386 DX40.

13. Decorate your room with only printer paper – am I physically in the skill set to be able to do this?  Yes I am – would I?  No.  I’m more likely to decorate with NES cartridges.

14. Securely erase your data so it can’t be recovered – yes I am capable – it would be easier if you encrypted it first though.

15.  Get into a windows computer if you don’t have a password – yes I’ve done this quite a few times.

16.  Hide data from anyone – yes encryption, hidden volumes, stegnography (which I got bored with in 2001) – I am capable of doing all that – I’m more likely ot share my data then hide it though.

17. Explain what e=mc2 means – yes I would like the e=MC2 with a side of fries please – yes I am capable, but refuse to put in the details here since I want to make it through this list.

18.  Abstain from buying extended warranties – I may have bought one, once – it was on something i thoguht it fall apart though – so it’s all good.

19.  Use photoshop or gimp – yes I am capable.

20. Use a DSLR in full manual mode – I can – I’m just lazy and prefer it to do the work.

21. Mooch your neighbors wi-fi – my neighbor doesn’t have wi-fi but I’m ready to mooch when they do.

22. Protext your wi-fi – Wep2 currently – For a while I had mac filtering, I hated to keep getting mac addresses from visitors though.

23. Create an animated spray in Valve games – um – I don’t think I’ve played a single one for more then 5 minutes….so this one is a no.

24.  Setup RAID – yes I’ve done this a few times over the years for my home network.  Now implement Iscsi raid across multiple computers – that’s a challenge.

25. Calculate a Pitchers ERA – no I don’t know how – but I know google will give me the answer quicker then I can calculate it.

26. Run two Operating Systems – um I dual boot currently……

27. Install a hard drive in laptop – done before and some day I’ll do it again.

28. Pull off an elaborate prank – I think have the skill set and knowledge – I just never have – unless stealing street signs as a teenager counts.

29.  Rocket jump with a macro – um – I said I don’t really do FPS games – so no I can’t do this.

30.  Wire your home with ethernet – um every place I’ve lived with my wife we have had wired ethernet – we even used RG58 at one point.

31.  Know the 6 most important linux commands – yes I get command not found when I’m not thinking and run them in windows.

31. Rip your CDs to Flac – we did this for awhile then went back to MP3

32.  Stream Music, Movies, Pictures to any TV in the house – I’ve done this before – now we just carry our laptops around – shrug.

33.  Install and configure a VM – yes I’ve done this for literally years (maybe even a decade by now)

34.  Run multiple monitors – yes I use to dual monitor and run SWG on two different ones at the same time – I’m sad I know.

35. Run hacked firmware on a router – yes liek the rest of hte world I have a hacked linksys router /yawn.

36.  Pick a lock – I’m not good at it, but I’ve done it a couple times.

37.  Tell the difference between Dr. Pepper and Mr. Pibb – it’s been awhile but I think I could.

38.  Avoid DRM on everything – well streaming video legally that they talked about above seems to contradict this one doesn’t it.   However all my local video, music, picutres, and ebooks are DRM free.

39. Download a flash video and reformat it – yes I’ve done this – youtube videos locally stored on the N810 ftw.

40.  Get around in DOS – I grew up and DOS and resisted windows for a long time – so let’s just say yes.

41. Rip a DVD to h.264 – yes been there done that.

42.  Overclock your PC – yes I’ve done this my pride and joy was overclocking my AMD 133 mhz 486 to 160 MHZ – and it benchmarked and ran like a pentium 133 for half the cost.

43.  Use remote desktop – it’s part of my job – so yes.

44. Debate the merits of a star destroyer vs. the enterprise – yes, and the star destroyer would win.

45. Buld your own computer – built too many to actually count – I’m serious to – I worked at a small PC store and we sold hundreds – thousands of machines – so I cna build my own.

In irony they don’t seem to actually have 50 things on their list – so I think most geeks should know how to count also.

A while back I received the following email from my sister (It’s been mildly edited to protect names and some grammar):

So I just read your blog..

I must add something.. and you make me realize mom doesn’t ever say anything nice about me.. and I’m not writing this to bitch about her either but its true.  I went out to eat with her, our sisters,  and our youngest brother the other day and she told our youngest she couldn’t get any peircings because “no preppy girls have them” and how they look like trash.
okay, well she was refering to me

Second.

I told summer she should really think about going to EHOVE (the local vocational school – creeva). Mom goes EHOVE is for people that don’t do good in school and our youngest sister doesn’t want to be apart of that (the sister writing this went to EHOVE – creeva).  Okay.. diss to me again, which i said something.

Third.. mom asks me if i went to Trip Ohio in 8th grade cus our youngest sister will be going next year.  I say, no because she didn’t have the money for me to go so I couldn’t.  I told our youngest sister that at the dinner table and mom denied all of that and said i was lieing.  Right.. my older sister said the same thing thats why we both didn’t go.

THEN..

mom tells me to shut up, then our youngest brother makes a comment to our youngest sister..

“You know why mom is mad at you?   Because you act like [sister writing this email] that’s why she hates you..”

So i wonder what she tells our youngest brother, she hates me?

Nice.

I stormed out of there and left.

Obviously I have replaced my sibling’s names with their rank and order.   We don’t refer to our youngest sister as our youngest sister (who by the way is two years older then my younger brother).   I just don’t want to be the reason their name shows up in a google search.  I did think it was important to show that my views on my mother are not mine alone.   I did receive permission from my sister to use this email, so there is no surprises.

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Saturday was the VHS Alumni Bands 22nd performance at the Vermilion High School Band Festival.   I originally marched for the Vermilion High School Sailor Marching Band from my Sophomore to Senior years (Senior Year Video) which encompass the fall of 1991 through the summer of 1994.   I had the option to put on the band uniform one last time for the Vermilion Fish Festival in 1994, but I declined that was the first time I performed with the VHS Alumni Band.

My first band festival (Fall 1994) outside of high school I didn’t get a chance to perform, I was marching with earlier that day for a home game with the Ashland University Marching Band.   I did show up that evening to watch the performance and hang out with friends.  I heard a lot of people say that this was their best year in Alumni Band, no disrespect to Joe, but I have to disagree, at least for myself.   The best year for me was my first festival back with the group at the Band Festival of 1995(?) which was Willy B’s (William Burt’s) last year as the Band Director for Alumni.   If it hadn’t been for Mr. Burt and his loyal students there wouldn’t have been an Alumni band today, so all of us can look back and thank them for making this possible.

I’ve marched many years with Alumni at the festival (1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2006, 2007, and 2008) and I only missed it five times because I was living in Oregon.  I can say I was extremely tempted to spend the money for a plane ticket and fly back for it during those missing years.  I’m extremely happy that I was there for Mr. Henry’s final year as both a high school director (my senior year) and his last year as an Alumni Band director.  Last year when he announced he was retiring as the Alumni director I had tears in my eyes (HEY I’M A SENSITIVE GUY!!).   David Henry is probably one of the greatest influences on my life, and I don’t know where I would be today if Jeff Luther hadn’t tried to convince someone who didn’t know how to play a note to join the marching band.    Someday I’ll write a whole article on Mr. Henry, today isn’t that day though.

My own personal tradition is to show up early for Alumni practice, I was always the first to arrive and just enjoyed being there sitting in the back of the band room anticipating the day.   This year I was dropped off and there already was another car there, three majorettes beat me.  For the first time I wasn’t the first one there.   Next year I guess I have to arrive at 6 AM.   My wife dropped me off, then she went a visited the grave of a friend to tell him about the new pregnancy.   Later in the day I told that friend’s sister, who is now in Alumni,  that we are planning on giving our child his name if it is a boy.

Mr. Price ran us ragged through out the day for the performance.   I’m not saying it wasn’t worth it, I’m just saying….   After lunch was practiced our closing routine for the first time and at the end we practiced the high step.   My ankles felt like they were going to break at any second.  It may have been the shoes, but I think it was age catching up with me.    I went out and bought a pair of ankle supports at dinner time.   I wore these for the rest of the night.   I managed to high step and I didn’t break an ankle.   On Sunday however I could hardly walk on my ankles at all.  By Sunday night it had migrated to just my left ankle.  It is still sore and tender four days later.

Pain and sickness isn’t new to me at Alumni Band though.   Two years ago I blew out and gave myself a sore throat in the morning practice.   Compound that by the fact that it was raining that night and eventually it got bad enough they moved the festival inot the high school gym – I was laid up sick in bed for four days afterward.  Last year I got the sore throat again, but it didn’t develop into anything more.  After last year I decided I wanted to be in playing shape – no sore throat and no dead lips.   I joined two community bands and that corrected the issue from that side.  I do think I’m going to have to start running again just to get my ankles in shape for next year.   These are the the things I do for Alumni Band.

Some things are funny, like the people being amazed that the current seniors were freshmen when they were seniors.   I pointed out that the current seniors weren’t even in preschool when I was a senior.   You have the differences in band style from the Burt to Henry to Price eras, and of course all of us think that our own era was the best.  There are things I missed from the past in Alumni.  Large groups of us used to sneak in Alcohol in water bottles and get lit before marching.   Before he did Dennis Pintur used to be notorious for that.   He was also notorious for blowing out his lip playing tuba and showing everyone his bloody white beard also.   The tuba’s back then actually did tuba chases, which I haven’t seen in the last few years.  During the drum breaks our tubas also used to twirl their instruments.   My first year in the band festival Mike Lewandowski put me on his shoulders during the drum break and we did a dance in our section of the field.

The band has changed and grown up.  This isn’t really a bad thing.   It may be why some of hte older members don’t show up still, but that happens.   The experience isn’t the same, people move away, people are busy – there are alot of reasons people don’t show up.   The rest of us… Well the the rest of us want to relive our glory days like Al Bundy.   In a way we are sad like some people think.   It is also glory.   The excitement of going onto that field, feeling the rush, and doing it one more time.   I’ll be there as long as I am physically able.  I’ll be there in a wheel chair and play for the middle songs only.   In the end I’ll be there.   I’ve lasted longer playing with the band then the band has played in the Vermilion Fish Festival (which BTW I think they need to start doing again).   I’ll survive and do it until there isn’t a band festival to march at anymore.   If it ever comes to that point I’ll just invite all the band members that want to show up on a fall Saturday, pull out some music, and play on the football field even if it’s just for ourselves.   Those that understand that, they are the ones that really want to “Do it One More Time”.

Videos:

Star Spangled Banner – Google Video Link

Festival Show – Google Video Link

Sideline Footage – Google Video Link

If you somehow missed it you can also always watch last years video here.

If you want to see the pictures I took – scoot on over to my Flickr set.

Image from here

You know how your browser tries to guess where you go by what your typing in?  These are the sites that come up as my suggestions (from browsing history) when I go through each letter of the alphabet:

A -Google Analytics

B – The Other Guild

C – Creeva’s World 2.0

D – Digg

E – Gmail

F – Feedburner

G – General Discussion -Vermilion News

H – Slashdot

I – The Other Guild

J – Journey To Get Paid

K – Kwippy

L – My Lifestream

M – VCMA

N – Network Solutions

O – Oh My Yod

P – Ping.fm

Q – Disqus

R – Google Analytics

S – Slashdot

T – Twitter

U – Yahoo Login

V – General Discussion -Vermilion News

W – Statcounter

X – Yahoo Login

Y – Yahoo Login

Z – Dad Hacker

Interesting?  Not really.   I found this post amusing however.

Picture from here

I have a profound fascination with cloud computing, internet computing, bamboozled processing (whatever you want to call it).  The problem when you start using these terms in the IT world it becomes “Software as a Service” (SaS) in some attempt to legitimatize the business model.   There is a distinct difference, however.   That difference is money.

“Cloud Computing” is still one of the ephemeral terms that no one is quite sure what it means.   It’s akin to the “Network Computer” model pushed out by Oracle in the mid 90′s – it’s all as hard to explain, ridiculed, ahead of it’s time, and understandable as the Network Computer was.  The idea of cloud computing means why you process your data locally through some window (Browser, Local PC) into the cloud (Internet), your data is stored in the cloud and accessible from anywhere.  Terms like Webmail have become keeping your email in the clouds – I like the concept but we are bringing back the 90′s terms about “thinking outside the box” with this type of labeling.   Social networks such as Myspace and Facebook are also considered to be cloud platforms, I assume this means because you can annoy your friends anywhere with applications invites – even if you’ve never met them in meat space.

Current definition essentially is if you are doing anything online except reading a static web page (library interaction in the clouds?) – is considered cloud computing.   Some people are referring to any of this same type of activity as SaS whe nit is in the IT realm.  It’s not, please change your wordings, understand what you are talking about, respect both the IT world and the non-IT world.  You are confusing people with concepts that are also completley non-explainable already.

SaS is much similar to cloud computing, much like a cheetah (SaS) is similar to a bobcat (cloud computing).  Both of the latter animals are members of the feline family and have similar body makeup, but we can also recognize that they are not the same and have vastly different feature sets.   A bobcat is also more common.  First I’ll say it, most SaS is boring.  It’s the kind of stuff you do at work.  Whether it’s Peachtree’s online application,  it’s the remote backup service and outsourced server monitoring your company purchases.   These are software packages your company can buy and manage but they’ve moved them off site and out of their direct control over the hardware.  It’s on the network and that’s all that matters.

SaS products come with service level agreements that guarantee up time and will compensate you for excessive (which is sometimes 15 minutes) of downtime.   I have yet to see a check from Twitter or Myspace, and I’m sure some users can show actual cause and effect of damage to their online businesses if their is an outage.   SaS is normally pretty niche, costs money, and replicates things you already do.

I pay for Flickr?  Does that mean it’s an SaS?  No it doesn’t, the Flickr “application” is free, what I am paying for is storage space and a small number of features – not the application.  The same goes with Google Apps and Smugmug.  If it’s a consumer grade product it’s still a cloud computing application.  When we move into things like Microsoft offering remote hosted MS Exchange packages, we are entering into SaS.

The other day I received this e-mail in my inbox:

Hi Creeva,

I would love a review of my site if you feel it would be worthwhile…

Twiggit is an automated service that lets your friends on twitter know what articles you digg. every so often we check for the last article that you voted for on digg, and update your twitter status to reflect this.  Options include the ability to only tweet the articles you submit rather than digg, pause the service at anytime, change the frequency of when to check digg, completly remove your twiggit account.

There is nothing like this in the market, we aim to bring digg and twitter closer together!

http://twiggit.org/

Any questions please let me know :-)

Jason

It took me a few days to add this onto my plate, but I did get around to signing up for the website.    At one time I attempted to crosspost all of my online activities over to twitter – this got way to spammy.  When I set it up this account I configured itto send everything I submit on Digg to crosspost over to Twitter.  Since I sometimes will go on a digg spree and digg 50 stories in a day I didn’t want all of them to show up as tweets.   Props to them for thinking about this.

To test this out I submitted a recent story I wrote onto Digg attempting to find out a title about a movie I was tracking down.   The product works as designed.  All in all there is no frills, it’s single purpose – but single purpose that works quite well.  There are other methods of doing this such as importing feeds into twitter – but while Twiggit is essentially doing this at the back end – it makes it easier for people that would be intimidated by the level of understanding that this takes.  Twiggit is something I would send over so my parents could set up (if any of them used Digg or Twitter), versus something psuedo complex that I would have ot configure for them.

On the downsides, there website shows the following image:

If you look at the bottom of the image it says it received it 2 minutes ago from Twiggit.  This acknowledgment seems to be missing from my tweet which states submitted 1 hour ago from web.  I’m assuming this is a bug.

All in all Twiggit is not something groundbreaking, but it’s deserves it’s niche.  In the era we are moving into of micro-niches it fits in quite nicely.   With all the sites that integrate with Twitter, Twitter needs to start setting up a developer API similar to Google or Flickr so we don’t actually have to give these sites our Twitter usernames and passwords.  That however is a rant for another day.

UPDATE:

Originally the title mentioned Twiggit.com – which is the parent website of twiggit.org – the application is at twiggit.org.  Unfortunately I can’t catch everywhere I crossposted this story to, but I’m editing here on the source site.

Picture from here

Though previously I wrote (a bit tongue and cheek) that I was writing reviews because I had nothing else to write, that’s not the complete truth.  Granted it is part of it, but here I am writing about writing reviews and not actually writing a review, I’m just writing (I wanted to see how many times I could use the word writing and make the sentence coherent).   The other side reason I have for writing reviews is there are some other communities I’ve wanted to contribute to that I haven’t.  Most of these are review sites.   The main two are All Consuming and Amazon.   Though there are some other sites I’ve wanted to contribute thought and effort into such as Netflix and Google Books.   

Reviews are a mainstay of communities, especially online ones.   The old psychological study on mirroring proves we relate better with people like ourselves.  When someone shares the same thoughts and ideas we have an attraction to them, a kinship.   Writing reviews and contributing to these other communities give me a bound and a vested interest in these communities.   I think moving into movie, book, and game reviews were a natural progression for me after signing up for Yelp.   I joined Yelp to check it out and I find it intriguing.  Review the restaurants you go to, sharing the experience with the world.   

In the new era of personal publishing and media, we’ve all become food reviewers, movie critics, book analysts, and game raters.   The power is to the people.  Our voices may not be strong, but they exist.   When we find people with similar tastes in the areas that we love, we trust their reviews.   I’m not saying I’m an expert, I would never pretend to know what you like or you enjoy in your heart.   I can show you what I enjoy and maybe we’ll have a mirroring relationship.   One that spurs on conversation and gives us a two way street in which we can share and trust reviews from one another.   Not everything will be a perfect match, but I’m sure it will lead to some interesting discoveries.

Picture from here

In part 8 I was going to write about crossposting to blogger, but that’s been delayed for the time being.  I’ll get back to that subject as soon as I get a chance.   Let’s move onto monitoring your crossposting.

Some people may have noticed that on my lifestream there seem to be duplicate posts.   This is because I’ve been working on adding all the RSS feeds from all the services in one trackable lifestream.   The benefits are that you can see and track how long information takes to get from one site to the next.   This also allows you to see where your crossposting is failing.   For example I’m noticing that my posts going to pownce are not getting through so when I get a chance I’ll look into what is actually causing that.

Lifestreaming all of our sites into one endpoint site that you can control and maintain allows all the little maintance to happy at a single glance.   We all know that crossposting is usually best effort delivery.  Not everything shows up in all the sites, but that happens because your not actively maintaining those sites and sometimes things just go wrong.

By having a single stream of all of your sites you are not bogged looking at RSS items for every site all together.  If I put all my feed items in google reader then it would take me an hour each day to get through all of them.  Having a quick glance allows the information to be singled out in a daily quick view.

Currently I’m using the wordpress lifestream plugin to handle my lifestream page.  It gives me the benefit of having a daily summary post generated automatically.  This allows me to have a permanent archive of all of my daily archives that I can go back search and vault away in my own life vaulting fashion.

Life is good.  Maintaining and monitoring in a single glance – that’s great.

Previous Entries in The Crossposting God Series:

The Crossposting God Series Part 1 – The Introduction

The Crossposting God Series Part 2 – Vox

The Crossposting God Series Part 3 – Live Journal and Derivative Sites

The Crossposting God Series Part 4 – Entry, Distribution, and End Points

The Crossposting God Series Part 5 – Myspace

The Crossposting God Series Part 6 – RSS Feeds to Crosspost

The Crossposting God Series Part 7 – Where Can You Post By E-Mail?

There was an article on mashable today questioning if ping.fm and hellotxt were helping the web world or hurting it.  I understand the authors point that if you are using these services that you are not taking an interest and active use in the social community that you are using these services to post to.   I can say from hits for ping.fm beta code requests on my blog, that lots of people are interested in getting access to ping.fm.   Now that it’s out of private beta I’m sure I’ll lose my number one spot in google for the term “ping.fm beta code”.  

If people want this what does this say?  It really means that we have diverse friendships.  We have communities that we want to share information with.   We don’t have time to manually copy or paste, nor do we have the time to try convince everyone we know to use a single service.   Since we can’t bring our friends to the service (much to the dismay of the social network providers), we take our information to them. 

We want to share our information, we don’t want to hoard.  I for example do all my writing on my main blog, twitter, and handful of other services.   Yet I have friends on almost every little social network out there.   Why should I be forced to chose between friends and the information I share with them.   Yes I’m sure some actual readers that are not into crossposting get annoyed over the repeated information on multiple services.   What about my friends though?   Where does the line of a healthy blogging business end and friendship cross?  My friends are the ones that inspire, the will always have the information directed towards them.    I am more then willing to take my information to them.   At what cost, a minor annoyance to literally a handful?

No one is forced to read my messages.   No one is forced to follow me.   No one is forced to my site.  If the author doesn’t follow ping.fm links, so be it.   I’m not losing what I truly care about.   Maybe when the a single network has all the features I want and 99.9% market dominance – then I’ll stop cross posting.   Until that time I’m proud to be a crossposter.

It’s been a long time since I’ve beeen excited about a new browser.  Theoretically I’ve never been excited about a new browser that was announced.   I remember being excited when AOL resurrected Netscape – but that turned into a flaming pile of poo and Netscape lost dominance being THE browser to use.   Like many users at that time frame I used Internet Explorer 5 and at the time it was best of breed, then a new challenger arose.

The Mozilla foundation announced they were taking the open source bits of the Netscape browser and making a new slimmer browser called Firebird.  Because of issues of legal and copyright, Firebird was renamed to Firefox.   I’ve been using this browser since Firebird and I have had no reason to move to a different primary browser.   I’ve tried Flock and Safari, there hasn’t been a sticky reason to keep using those over Firefox.   I was excited, kind of, of the release of Firefox version 3.   But that wasn’t a new and different browser, it was more of the same.

With last nights announcement of Google’s New Chrome Browser, but they put up a nice little web comic that explains the features it offers.   The security, privacy, performance enhancements alone make this a must watch for browser.  WHen it is actually released later today, we’ll see how I feel then.

UPDATE:

Found a site that has some Chrome screenshots you may enjoy.