Category: Uncategorized

Housing FUD

It didn’t take long for all the smiles and back-slapping that accompanied record low interest rates and skyrocketing housing values to enter a death-spiral. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt from MetaFilter and Scalzi questions why families live in cities under these conditions. Either way, SatireWire totally nails it.

Bottom line: I’m glad I rent, travel light, don’t own a lot of possessions, and have no desire for a family.

Mare Quisquiliarum: The Sea Of Garabge

Lying in between Japan, North America, and Hawaii, the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is at the center of the large circulatory currents in the northern Pacific Ocean. There’s not much wind there and little current so few sailors cross it. One who did discovered a floating patch of garbage that not just dwarfs most civic landfills, but is truly planetary in size.

I often struggle to find words that will communicate the vastness of the Pacific Ocean to people who have never been to sea. Day after day, Alguita was the only vehicle on a highway without landmarks, stretching from horizon to horizon. Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic.

It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. Months later, after I discussed what I had seen with the oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, perhaps the world’s leading expert on flotsam, he began referring to the area as the “eastern garbage patch.” But “patch” doesn’t begin to convey the reality. Ebbesmeyer has estimated that the area, nearly covered with floating plastic debris, is roughly the size of Texas.

RFIDs in US Passports soon

A couple of the regulars from WFMU’s “Off The Hook” show went to the CeBit conference in Germany and reported back some interesting information with respect to biometric and RFID chips. Specifically, one company is currently in negotiations with the US government to provide RFID chips for inclusion in US passports beginning next year. (story begins 24min 30sec into the March 24 show)

Background information on RFID-implanted passports from EFF and Privacy International. Meanwhile, beginning in October the US will be requiring RFID or biometric-encoded passports from visitors entering the country and the EU is complying.

Take it to The Man

Victoria mentions a cool party idea that she and Johnzo are doing so in the interesting of meme propagation, I’m reposting here:

This Sunday evening, Johnzo and I are throwing a letter-writing party. Come on over and do your part to shame County Executive Sims into doing the right thing by the people who got him elected! Letter-writing for other causes is, of course, most welcome. Whether you want to get married, finally, after all these years; to urge stronger penalties for people involved in dog-fighting; to save the Hubble; or just to tell your local sewer commissioner that she’s doing a bang-up job, come on over and work that democracy-mojo. We commence at 7:00. Postage, envelopes, the internet, and stationery will all be available. If you don’t know where we live and want to come, respond to this and I’ll clue you in. I expect that most of you will be getting a redundant e-mail invite tomorrow. Bring friends, s.o.’s, parents, you name it. We want to pack the house.

Orange County battles the dihydrogen monoxide menace

Ladies and gentlemen, the Orange County education system at work:

City officials were so concerned about the potentially dangerous properties of dihydrogen monoxide that they considered banning foam cups after they learned the chemical was used in their production.

Then they learned, to their chagrin, that dihydrogen monoxide – H2O for short – is the scientific term for water.

“It’s embarrassing,” said City Manager David J. Norman. “We had a paralegal who did bad research.”

The paralegal apparently fell victim to one of the many official looking Web sites that have been put up by pranksters to describe dihydrogen monoxide as “an odorless, tasteless chemical” that can be deadly if accidentally inhaled.

Real Arrogant, Obnoxious, and occasionally Playing

Everyone’s been linking to Jogin’s spot-on rant on RealPlayer, but the follow-ups including a forwarded internal memo from Real and an email from a consultant who used to work for Real are a must read.

All of the issues you mention with regard to ease-of-use (or the lack thereof), super commercialism, and downright misleading customers were things that we addressed during this design program.

Real spent $2.5M in design fees and over a year and a half with my company. When the relationship ended we had produced detailed design documents that were about a foot high when stacked on top of one another. While we had designed solutions to all of these problems, Real ultimately chose to ignore them. Only some of the graphic design changes we recommended ever saw the light of day.

In my experience with Real, I found a company that had absolutely no respect for the user, that was supremely arrogant, and completely mismanaged by Rob Glazer and his team.

Though I have to smugly admit that the Mac OS X version of RealPlayer has no ads and has been very stable. Still, gimmie QuickTime though.

Brainless Reserve

I originally stumbled into Laura’s NYC Tales from MetaFilter’s story on the fallout of what happens when you get a celebrity’s old cell phone number (a potential Curb Your Enthusiam episode in the making). However I’m also a sucker for true-life tales of workplace dysfunction and her story of what happens when you work for a “futurist marketing consultancy and AmericaÂ’s foremost Trend expert” is horrifyingly priceless.