Monthly Archives: March 2010

Self Identification

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This was the first year that I ever got to fill out a census as husband, father, homeowner, and all around adult. The last census, both Angela and I were living in a dormitories (in two different states, no less). It was such an small but satisfactory sense of self-worth.

In the bigger picture, the U.S. Census is a constitutionally-mandated check-up on who makes up our country. But something that really struck me is that it is no longer about what labels can the government assign to us so much as it is a questionnaire of how we see ourselves. My wife was absolutely thrilled that she was able to check more than one box for race (you’d be surprised how many forms still only allow for one option). So, she able to describe to the government how she sees herself as well as how we see our children.

There is a short, cutesy video explaining to same-sex couples that they are allowed to mark how they view themselves and their relationship. It’s short and stars George Takei and his husband, Brad Altman:

The same concept applies here: the census is about discovering how we view ourselves and not what labels others want to use. Whether it be race or marital status on the census, or religion or even gender, I – and my country – am realizing that self identification is far more important that external labels.

In a country where individualism is celebrated, this is the census we should use1. The government of the people has to let the people define themselves.

  1. Though, in 2020, it damn well better be electronic!↵

Till the Chrome Wears Off

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I spent all of the past week using only Google Chrome (build 5.0.307.11 beta for the mac) as my default browser. I wanted to post a few of my observations as a ardent FireFox user.

Speed

First of all, it is very nimble when launching and page loads are fast. To give an example, I use a three year old iMac Core 2 Duo w 4GB of RAM. I always keep my browsers to load the last set of tabs that were open on closing. For a Chrome to launch and load ten web pages only takes under 13 seconds. Additionally – for you mac nerds – the dock icon only bounces twice. FireFox, eat your heart out.

Now, all of this isn’t to say that the browser is always fast (more on this in a bit).

Extendability

Extensions are available to replace most all of those that I actually used in FireFox; as well as some basic FireFox functionality which I was surprised wasn’t included. I currently am using:

  • Chromeleon – a user-agent spoofer
  • Delicious Bookmarks – a social bookmarking tool
  • Tab Buddy – a tab manager
  • BugMeNot Lite – a tool for bypassing web registration
  • Google Voice
  • RSS Subscription – A tool to add easy feed subscriptions (how was this not integrated to begin with?)

Another nice feature of Chrome is the ability to add web-site specific searches into the address bar, as opposed to FireFox’s separate search field, with a drop-down menu to select a search engine. Both are about as easy to add a new site to, but Chrome’s integration feels more seamless.

The lack of a history in the navigation buttons annoyed me. I actually use that when I’m doing some web searching to go back to a point I branched off on my current rabbit hole. It made for a lot more clicking on my part. It seems like the sort of thing that could be easily added in, but neither Google or any third party extension writers have done so yet.

Flash & Video

Personal preferences aside, the real downside is when it comes to video. Flash is really awful in this browser. If found that YouTube regularly locks up. Pages with lots of Flash-based ads can completely choke the browser. Further, Microsoft Silverlight isn’t even available for Chrome, which means1 no Netflix2 That may not be a deal-breaker for many, especially as many users (myself included) would like to move away from Flash and Silverlight. However, they are a reality of the web right now and something I end up using everyday.

I’m also notices some website tools don’t function so well in Chrome. For example (though albeit not a great one), the "Quick vote" poll tools on CNN.com’s site don’t seem to work for me in Chrome. I click Vote and nothing happens. It’s Javascript, so I’m not sure what is going on there because as I understand it this is the place where Chrome really excels. It’s not the sort of thing that has bothered me so much I’ve felt the need to even investigate it, but something worth mentioning.

Conclusion

I have to admit, I figured that I would find myself needing to open up FireFox everyday when using Chrome. Honestly, other than the occasional hard-to-remember login or accidental click, I haven’t missed it at all in over a week of using Chrome. I could easily find myself using Chrome full time on my mac and may even give it a whirl on my beleaguered Windows laptop (which needs all the corners cut possible in terms of speed).

And, for the Apple fanboys, my next experiment is to switch to Safari for at least a week to see how well that browser works for me. I haven’t seriously re-visited it since I got my mac three years ago.

  1. Silverlight works fine in Chrome, not sure why Netflix won’t play nice.↵
  2. A Safari-based extension, similar to the IE Tab extension for both FireFox and Chrome, would solve this issue. However, those are bulky and far from ideal solutions. What’s more, it’s only hypothetical at this point, as no such extension exists for Chrome ont he mac.↵

I Don’t Like These Numbers

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I’ve been poking fun at many of the number-goal groups on Facebook for sometime. It’s just seems so comical to me that there are a huge number of "I bet I can find 1,000,000 people for/against so-and-so" type groups there. They only get more entertaining the longer I’m on that site.

It’s so cute that there’s now a FB group which wants to sign up the entire US population (they even used an old number; about 3 million too low as of last year) against our new Healthcare Reform law. Never mind that these are the people who won a democratic election and did what they said they’d do. Or that current polls show support for the law solidly north of 50%1.

What’s so cute about this? These are many of the same people who complain about the account problems with the law.

  1. Actually 49% called it good vs. 40% called it bad, according to a Gallup Poll reported in the Christian Science Monitor.↵

News of my High School Leaves More Questions Than Answers

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I attended high school like pretty much any other kid in this country, though this high school was a little different. Founded as a private school by Tennessee’s WWI hero, Alvin York, it was later handed over to the State of Tennessee as the only general, state run high school in Tennessee1. York felt strongly that the rural children of Fentress County needed the opportunity for a sound education and this is how he chose to spend his good will earned fighting overseas. And so, the school was expanded and managed all on state funds since 1934.

At least, until last month. Apparently, with no warning, the state informed Fentress County – a rural county which has historically had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country – that they would need to begin paying for over $2 million of the school’s $5.5 million budget. Today, it seems, the picture has gotten even more grim for the children of Jamestown, Allardt, and surrounding areas in Fentress. The State Dept. of Education is handing out termination notices to all faculty and staff which are likely to go effective at the end of the term (May 2010). So, there are so many questions I have but no would appear to make the situation much better:

  • Who will own the school property and grounds? Will Fentress Co. be allowed to continue using this regardless of funding capabilities?
  • Is the termination of employees part of the $2 million cuts or is this in addition to those? That is, are the salaries what Fentress County Schools will need to find money for?
  • Why has this been done with no warning or plan? Can’t this be graduated over some period of time?

I’m sure there are many more questions, but right now it appears that either no one knows or they aren’t making it public. I urge anyone who gets credible information to inform the local and state news as soon as possible.

Here’s a quick calculation just to put some perspective, based on Wikipedia’s demographic data for the county:

  • The population of Fentress Co. is under 18,000, with 6,693 households (of which 4,818 are families) residing there.
  • If each household has to take the additional cost, that is $344 annually.
  • The average income level is $23,238 ($28,856 for families), which puts the school funds needed at 1.5% of the average income.
  • It’s also important to note that nearly one quarter of Fentress County lives below the poverty level (23.1%) and the unemployment rate is historically much higher than the national average.
  • It actually gets worse when you compare the median household income to the rest of the state. Fentress has a median family income of just $27,8742 where the state median family income is over one-and-half times as much ($43,614).

  1. Other state run high schools are for special needs children such as the blind or deaf.↵
  2. In the county seat of Jamestown, where the high school is located, the median family income is a sickeningly low $15,149.↵

Liberals Who Pine for Conservatives

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As a liberal who grew up with, works with, and lives with great people who are conservatives, this piece by the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne, Jr. speaks volumes about how I feel about them. Which is that conservative voices are an important party of a progressive society. Unfortunately, as Dionne points out, we haven’t seen that kind of conservative in the past year when discussing the current administration or health care reform:

Many who call themselves conservatives propose to cast aside even government programs that have stood the test of time. They seem to imagine a world in which government withers away, a phrase that comes from Friedrich Engels, not Buckley. Or they tie themselves up in unruly contradictions, declaring simultaneously that they are dead-set against government-run health care and passionate defenders of Medicare.

And while modern conservatism has usually supported the market against the state, its oldest and most durable brand understood that the market was an imperfect instrument. True conservatives may give “two cheers for capitalism,” as Irving Kristol put it in the title of one of his books, but never three.

The world and this country desperately needs both liberals and conservatives, but those who truly champion those values and can peacefully and constructively reach a compromise.

Top Level Domains for Companies

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Yesterday, Canon announced they were acquiring the generic top level domain .canon. I predict as this practice becomes more commonplace, it is going to result in a web-browser security nightmare. There are already plenty of people who don’t understand how to read a web address to comprehend if they are actually at the site they think they are. This is going to open up a whole new world to shady folks who use confusion and social engineering to pull off all sorts of bad things.

Archaic Iconography

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In many computer applications1, you’ll find a toolbar which contains a save tool & icon. Almost without fail, that icon is of a floppy disk (most closely resembling a blue 3 1/2″ floppy). But why not a computer hard drive (though those often end up looking like sardine tins in small icons) or a reel-to-reel tape? It is interesting that we sort of all agreed on one slice out of our technological history to agree upon as the standard for saving data. Of course, the irony of using this for to execute a save command is that very few computers today have a floppy drive at all and using these as a primary method of saving predates even the 3 1/2″ floppy itself.

I’ve often wondered if I’ll have to show my kids a old floppy disk to explain the history of the icon. That is, assuming I can even find one around here. When I did my Spring cleaning last year, I had to borrow a USB floppy drive from my father-in-law since I didn’t have a computer handy to even read those disks. Regardless, I believe the icon itself will be largely abstract to them; though I don’t doubt they’ll learn to recognize what function it represents immediately. They will become symbols more than direct representations, which isn’t a bad thing in of itself2

Similarly, you might find a old phone handset representing calls or phone functions and a snail-mail envelope for creating or checking e-mail. These, too, are outdated (or nearly, in the case of the envelope) tools to represent their digital replacements.

But then, what icon better represents saving data? Or making phone calls? Or sending mail?

  1. This is mostly a Windows and Linux GUI convention. You’ll occasionally find it in Mac applications, though mostly in those written by Microsoft. This is because in most Mac applications, the file-level commands are only found on the menu bar and not in a window toolbar. A lot of web applications use a similar icon, as well.↵
  2. Pretty much all letters, numbers, and other symbols all had more concrete meaning at one time. Take, for example, the octothorpe/pound/hash/crosshatch/number symbol (#). According to The Elements of Typographic Style, this was once used in cartography to represent a village. That is, it was a symbol for a town square surrounded by eight fields. The fact that we have so many different names for this symbol is indicative of its many modern uses and that we have all but forgotten its original, more literal meaning.↵

Using Location Based Social Networking Sites

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As I’ve become more and more attached to using Twitter, I (like most everyone else) has enjoyed adding more rich information into tweets. I personally love including links to a photo, which essentially renders a tweet to a caption (Arguably it also adds a 1,000 words or so to your actual tweet length). I have also been trying to use some of the location-based social networks on and off for a couple of years now, most of which seem to thrive based on their integration with Twitter.

First, we had BrightKite, which – while an attractive site – was trying to do too much. Foursquare and Gowalla both seem to be restricting themselves to I was here and did this1.The value I see in these is to add some location context to a tweet (rather than the game of Foursquare or Gowalla, for which I couldn’t care less). It also provides a way for any additional data I wish to add to be made available to others if they happen on the same spot.

That being said, it is very annoying to me that these two methods for adding information to tweets (images and locations) aren’t really integrated better. After struggling for the better part of 15 minutes to add a Flickr2 photo to a Foursquare post, I figured I’d likely never try that again.

Twitter + Foursquare + Flickr = headache

Perhaps it could be argued that having multiple URLs in a single tweet is a bit much information for a system that was built around minimalism. To that end, I at least try to provide enough information in the tweet itself to make it of some value. I almost never just use the default “I went to [blank]” text in Foursquare. If it is worth posting, it’s worth letting others know why I did it. This is how I choose to use Twitter. That is, letting anyone interested in what I think know what I’m doing and why it is of value. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t seem to be the intention of many of the services on Twitter.

  1. It’s no coincidence I use the past tense here. One of my issues with putting my location online, in real time, while doing something away from home is best explained by the site PleaseRobMe. While I don’t worry too much about actual thieves tracking my whereabouts via the web, I find it best practice to limit who knows where I am and when. Thus, I generally post to Foursquare just after I’ve left. I’m just cagey like that, I suppose. Some feel this abuse of Foursquare is cheating the game. To those I would point to above and remind them that shit = not given.↵
  2. Despite Flickr’s adoption of their own URL shortening, it has been poorly adopted by Twitter, its clients, and its services. The lack of integration there really puts a damper on my interest in using these as well. Why must I use TwitPic (less attractive and interesting to me) when I already am a long-time Flickr user?↵

Ad Blocking Software

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I don’t have a really good solution to what Ars Technica’s Ken Fisher describes as devastating to websites (ad funded sites, anyway). However, I don’t use ad blockers myself. I’m a big fan of ad-supported, freemium versions of software and sites, and it’s my way of supporting those which I am not willing to out-right pay for. It’s not that I don’t know now to install or use these, I just choose not to. Frankly, when a site, application, or even a television program offers relevant ads, I’m often thankful to have seen them. I subscribe to the idea that effective advertising is just seen as information, not a sell.

Screencasting 101 at PodCamp Nashville 2010

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You can watch the director’s cut (extended edition with DVD extras) of my presentation here.

Screencasting Session

Unfortunately, my small HD video camera gave out only 22 minutes into a 32 minute presentation. The above is from the still of the actual presentation at PodCamp. However, I have re-recorded the audio (and hopefully adding back in a bunch of the tips I forgot to tell the audience or ran our of time to include). You can watch the whole thing in the link above or head on over to SlideShare to watch.