April 2008 Archives

As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm now on Twitter [CRA1G]...feel free to add me to your follow list.

p.s., I've added a Twitter feed to the menu-bar (on the right side of GearBits' main page), but I'm not yet sure it'll be a permanent addition.

Eugenio just read one of Clay Shirky's recent articles, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, and said it reminded him of a piece I posted here a little over three years ago:

The Great Decision: Consume or Produce
January 29, 2005

Every time I sit down at a PC and every time I walk into my office at work, I'm struck with a fundamental decision: consume or produce.

I'm talking about information. Any minute can be reasonably and justifiably spent either consuming information, such as reading research papers, news sites, emails, blogs, etc., or producing new information, such as writing my own papers, putting up blog entries, leaving comments on blogs (hint, hint), composing an email, and so on.

Some people are very content to be primarily, if not entirely, consumers. They feel little or no need to share their knowledege, opinions, and thoughts with others. Some are more biased in the opposite direction, churning out an unending stream of content. ...

Read the entire post

What's particularly serendipitous about Eugenio's note is that I recently signed up for Twitter and have been trying to figure out it can be the most useful as a communication tool. Twitter, as you likely know, is much more about production than consumption -- it makes creating and distributing tiny bits of information almost frictionless, thereby further increasing the load on us as consumers.

This is still an issue I struggle with every day. I doubt I'll ever resolve it.

Why does Steve Ballmer (photo borrowed from Gizmodo)

keep reminding me of Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein?

Seriously...is it just me?

If Florida gets the Christian license plates that some lawmakers there have proposed, this should be an equally justifiable plate option for Sunshine State residents:

I am no network expert, but I've dabbled in streaming content over computer networks at work. So I find it interesting to know how the various cable/phone/satellite companies get their digital goodness delivered to my house. Unique solutions, like this AT&T solution, pique my curiosity.

This wikipedia article summarizes the architecture:

Unlike traditional offerings from U.S. cable companies, video is delivered over IP from the head end to the consumer's set-top box. Broadcast channels are distributed via IP multicast, allowing a single stream (channel) to be sent to any number of recipients.

Multicasting rocks. This BBC radio page sums it up pretty well:

It's similar to Broadcast. If you think about your Digital Radio it's tuned into a specific station, it picks up data that has an identifier saying 'this is for the station you want', we just have to put one copy of the station on transmitters. Whereas Unicast is a lot more like us having to call each listener on the phone and play-back the station you request.

In the past I've mentioned to Craig that if my ISPs finally support multicasting to my home, then radio stations, like woxy, wouldn't have to pay a gazillion dollars for their internet bandwidth.

Multicasting isn't without it's share of complexities, of course. The U-verse details came to my attention when Comcast reportedly stated problems with U-verse multicasting traffic spilling out onto their network.

Pundits figured it would take gas at $4/gallon to curb driving. Looks like they were about right, but with the overall economy in recession, it only took $3.50/gallon or so to get things started. BusinessWeek has a good article on it.

I was perusing the Official Gmail Blog and found this gem of a tip: Google ignores periods and anything after a + in your email address, so you can use these characters to provide yourself with infinite custom email addresses that all route to your current account. Here's what they say:

• Append a plus ("+") sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan+friends@gmail.com or hikingfan+mailinglists@gmail.com.

• Insert one or several dots (".") anywhere in your email address. Gmail doesn't recognize periods as characters in addresses -- we just ignore them. For example, you could tell people your address was hikingfan@gmail.com, hiking.fan@gmail.com or hi.kin.g.fan@gmail.com.

Read the whole post.

So, spammers, please send me a note at craig.froehle+i.hope.you.die@gmail.com ;-)

I think we just experienced an earthquake here in Cincinnati.

At 5:40am, our house shook for about 20 seconds as if there was a huge wind gust, but there was no noise from outside and the trees weren't moving at all.

It's been about 25 years since our last one (there's a fault line in Kentucky) and, if this was another one, it certainly was a surprise.

Update: Apparently, it was centered in Illinois.

Enquirer.com

This story on InsideHigherEd.com describes the crusade that Senator Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, is directing towards the scourge of industry-sponsored research. Apparently, Mr. Grassley believes scientists/physicians shouldn't accept money from companies related to whatever they're studying.

Last August, in advocating for a national reporting system of drug company payments to doctors to help ensure that patients know about potential conflicts of interest for doctors who might prescribe medications, Grassley singled out DelBello, associate professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Cincinnati, for what he said was her failure to accurately report her outside income in 2003 and 2004 from Astra Zeneca, a pharmaceutical company whose drug Seroquel she had studied in 2002.

On April 2, Grassley stepped up his criticism. He took to the Senate floor to "report on the actions of one physician" -- DelBello -- "to explain how industry payments to medical experts can affect medical practice."

Read the full story

Don't think for a minute that his efforts are limited to "a national reporting system." It's clear that he feels industry money shouldn't go to not-for-profit and academic researchers.

While it's obvious that conflicts-of-interest are bad, most researchers that receive corporate support, either directly or indirectly, do not let their results be influenced by that funding. Beyond that, eliminating or further restricting industry support isn't a viable solution. Or is this Republican going to fill in those funding gaps for science with government money? I seriously doubt that.

What's even more ridiculous is the sheer hypocrisy of the Senator's statement:

He said, harshly: "This situation is unfortunate on so many levels. It is unfortunate...for patients who once believed that their doctor was not for sale..."

It takes guts to stand up and criticize a state university researcher for "being for sale" when he, himself, has accepted nearly $1,000,000 in campaign contributions from medical organizations and related companies since 2003.

Is it possible that Senator Grassley feels that if he makes it too difficult for the healthcare industry to fund research that it will simply divert those funds to their lobbying efforts instead (and, therefore, into Grassley's hands)? Talk about a conflict of interest.

Remember that pack of teenage girls behaving like lunatics and videotaping the beating they planned and dished out on another girl?

Well, the supposed "ringleader" of that group has been bailed out of jail (for $30,000) by...Dr. Phil! Supposedly so that the Dr. Phil Show will have exclusive rights to interview her.

It takes a lot of gall to glorify adolescent violence (purely in the name of ratings) and then decry it as a social evil.

I don't know if there's a TV Personality Scumbag award, but if there is, I'm sure Dr. Phil is a shoe-in.

"...I began to wonder about the phenomenon of text messaging as a whole. Sometimes it seems that it would make more sense to call or send an email, but that crap is for old people."

I think the biggest drawback I see to texting is the whole temporal retention issue. I rely extensively on my ability to search through my emails, both professional and personal, sometimes going back years to look up something. In contrast, I don't know anyone who saves their text messages for even more than a few months. I asked a classful of college seniors how long they kept text messages on their phones. Less than 10% keep them longer than a week!

Do I txt? Yep, everyday, but I still use email a lot more. I'm not going to pull the "age = wisdom" card and claim that "old people" (per the Gizmodo story) use email more because they're wiser (I'm not even sure I'd be considered "old"), but my perception is that email offers a lot of advantages that texting just can't match right now.

Introducing the newest addition to our family:

Born: April 2, 2008 at 3:18am
Weight: 7 lbs, 3 oz
Length: 19.75 in

Everybody's just fine. :-)

Some things you just couldn't make up if you tried:

Pamela McNeil, 44, of Northside, had just been released from the Hamilton County Justice Center -- where she was taken on a theft charge and nine minor arrest warrants but released because of overcrowding -- when she was arrested less than an hour later, accused of stealing from the blind man who runs the deli inside the Hamilton County Courthouse.

Full story (Cincinnati.com)

The sheer power of social computing had me wondering how I could best capture some of these new technologies in my everyday life. What occurred to me was that I spend a lot of time sharing: links, stories, photos, videos, etc. Sure, there are lots of tools for sharing these days. Sites like Digg and the sharing feature in Google Reader are just two examples.

But those tools rely on my friends/colleagues to use those same tools, go to those sites, or interface with them in some other new way. No, what I'd really like is a sharing interface that spans multiple media and methods. My idea for that is...the Buddy Bar:

Basically, the Buddy Bar combines (some of) the functionality of an IM client, an email client, a photo/document-uploader app, and blog interface. Here's how I envision it working:

1) You add some friends to your Buddy Bar. You include their name and all contact info you have for them: phone number(s), email address(es), IM/Twitter IDs, and so forth.

2) Simply clicking on a friend opens up an IM dialog. Buddy Bar would be service agnostic, so it would use whatever IM service your friend used.

3) Drag and drop a URL onto your friend's avatar would send it to your friend via one of the predetermined methods you set up for him/her (e.g., email, IM, etc.).

4) Dragging and dropping a file would generate a pull-down menu for you to send that file via one of the various methods you set up for that friend. For example, drop a JPG and the menu might include
• Email
• Email
• IM
• MMS
• Flickr
• Webify*

*Webify could be to upload it to a web space under your control and send your friend a URL to that location.

Drop a Word file and you might get a different set of options:
• Email
• Email
• IM
• Google Docs
• Webify*

5) Select some text from a webpage or document and drag that over to your friend's avatar and you'd get a similar drop-down for methods of delivery.

6) Drop something big on their avatar (e.g., a 200MB home movie file) and it could initiate a Torrent invitation to your friend.

7) Right-click a friend and you get options for audio/video chat, invite to room, ping, and other options.

You get the idea. Basically, it would be an automator for distributing content and managing communication with those in your private social network. I think it could also be very handy for people who work in a distributed environment and constantly need to share info (extra functionality could be built in if it was being used in an intranet setting).

One thing Bob mentioned is the chance for abuse. "Stop sending me this crap!" was his actual comment, IIRC. So, you'd have to have some sort of content/contact moderation much like you have in good IM clients, but with better discrimination based on the type of content being offered.

Anyway, I'd love to see something like this developed. Anyone know of an app/service that accomplishes even most of this?

T-Mobile is being a collective asshat. It's threatening to sue Engadget by claiming, ridiculously enough, that the website is infringing on T-Mobile's use of the color magenta.

So, GearBits is painting itself magenta for the day in an act of solidarity against such stupid abuse of intellectual property laws.

I work from home a few days a week. Unfortunately, my office, which transitions to a guest room when the grandparents visit, is cramped. My desk was way too large for the space, and my chair kept bumping into the bed. I was on the lookout for a new desk.

In the back of my mind was another issue. I have terrible posture when working. I slouch. I can almost always be found working with my laptop in my lap and my feet kicked up, resting on my desk. It's just not good, in general, for my over 6-foot frame.

So I performed an experiment -- I killed my desk.