August 2006 Archives

Can't lie fast enough, so let's pay for some more!

Positive Press on Iraq Is Aim of U.S. Contract
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 31, 2006;

Page A20U.S. military leaders in Baghdad have put out for bid a two-year, $20 million public relations contract that calls for extensive monitoring of U.S. and Middle Eastern media in an effort to promote more positive coverage of news from Iraq. The contract calls for assembling a database of selected news stories and assessing their tone as part of a program to provide "public relations products" that would improve coverage of the military command's performance, according to a statement of work attached to the proposal.

Source: Positive Press on Iraq Is Aim of U.S. Contract

Don't ever leave a single serving, sealed, plastic container of milk in the car.

I did.

It exploded.

I didn't find it for 24 hours.

Nothing smells worse!

I'm certain that everyone who knows me knows what I think about the government's unfettered warrant-less spying on American citizens issue. I am very concerned that we allow the aggregation of massive amounts of information about everyone in our country: from cognitive ability and academic achievement test scores as children to every financial transaction made. If every thought and decision we make along with every detail of demography can be analyzed by god knows who (business and government), can we not be manipulated and controlled without our ever knowing it? Was this not the whole point behind ClickIt?! They make millions selling our surfing information. Just a thought.

Momentous NSA Injunction: Experts' First Impressions

Thursday's decision by District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor to permanently stop the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program on the grounds it violates the Constitution is nearly unprecedented and "astoundingly brave," according to William Weaver, an expert on national security law who advises the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

"There has never been a ruling like this regarding state secrets privilege. This is a ruling that stops a program that the executive branch says is critical to national security," Weaver said.

"This is obviously is going to go to appeal and I assume the government is already writing an emergency appeal to get a stay to this injunction, which I imagine will happen," Weaver said. "This case will go to the Supreme Court."

The only decision like it, according to Weaver, was a 1973 injunction from Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas that required the Nixon Administration to cease bombing Cambodia, which he considered to be illegal. That injunction lasted a mere six hours, until Douglas was overruled by Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Weaver is not optimistic that the injunction will stand. "This ruling sets up showdown between the state secrets privilege and the Constitution, and we have seen in the past that state secrets wins."

"The Supreme Court will take this opportunity to make a very clear statement about an expanded state secrets power. I hate to be so pessimistic, but the opinion in Tenet vs Doe was 9-0, and in that case, they said that sometimes the state secrets privilege should be more powerful."

The Sixth Circuit will likely clear its calendar to set up a panel to hear the government's appeal. If they uphold the ruling, the Supreme Court will likely hear the case immediately, as they did in the famous Youngstown case, where President Harry Truman attempted to seize steel mills to end a labor dispute during the Korean War.

Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, was more optimistic about the ruling.
'The decision in Detroit today is a very important affirmation that the government must operate within rule of law. The key point here is that this a decision was made by the judiciary as to the legality of the NSA surveillance program. We have been through a very long period of time under which the White House, the Attorney General, the President and the newly-confirmed CIA Director Michael Hayden have, on their own basis, said they believe the NSA surveillance program was permissible. But the critical decision had to be made by a federal court, and at least the preliminary ruling by a federal court as to the unconstitutionality of the program reaffirms the importance of constitutional checks and balances. At this stage in the proceedings, this is good news for people who are concerned about privacy and appropriate restraints on government surveillance.'

Source: Wired

Profcast
An interesting concept: Drop your Keynote or PowerPoint presentation onto the little application, begin your presentation, and Profcast times each slide and records what you say. When you're done: poof! A podcast to upload to your server! I plan to try it with a wireless mic connected to my Mac soon.

Life2Go
I've used this program for years. It was called Pod2Go for a long time. This comprehensive solution for managing non-music content for your iPod rocks! It loads your iPod with news feeds, weather, movies, gas prices, driving directions, syncs your Safari bookmarks and Stickies, grabs lyrics, and manages a backup of your system too.

iPresent It
I haven't used this but am including it here for my later exploration: According to the website, iPresent It creates slideshow images from any of your PowerPoint or PDF presentations and works with any iPod with a color screen. iPresent It saves presentations as sub-folders of a folder (such as the folder being used to sync to your iPod via iTunes). It easily updates your slideshows whenever you make changes to a presentation. Full drag and drop support for adding presentations.

You can easily remove slideshows when they are no longer needed. Removing them from iPresent It ensures they will be removed from your iPod the next time you sync. You can preview slides as they're converted into a slideshow and also save presentations as albums in iPhoto. iPresent It will create slideshow images from any of your Keynote presentations.

CastAway
Full and comprehensive Podcast management. I've downloaded it but not really used it yet. I've not been pleased with iTunes' Podcast management tool as I want to keep all of the podcast episodes in some of my podcast subscriptions but only keep the last few episodes in others. CastAway allows the user individualized subscription control. Cool!

When I bounded out of the car upon arriving at the mountain house, I heard the loud persistent meows of a baby kitten. High above in the shed was a lone, dark smokey grey, baby kitten whose dark grey-blue eyes had barely opened. I climbed up and fished it down from the precipitous ledge, fearing it would wobble over the high edge and plunge to its death.

No other kittens could be found. Did the mother abandon it? It appeared healthy and well fed but was obviously upset. Easily fitting in the palm of my hand, I held it in a wash cloth to warm it. It began to purr. With no eye dropper, I was able to coax it to lick some warmed milk from my finger tips.

After about 15 minutes it was fast asleep. I placed it back in the shed but in a large box with the wash cloth. Sure enough, mother cat came in the night and took the little kitten away. I hope both are doing well.

Reasonable people will think you're crazy if you're trying to fix something that isn't broken. If you haven't read "The Manufactured Crisis" you need to do so. According to those authors test scores in the USA have consistently been on the rise. But rising test scores doth not political careers or market share make! The "crisis" all started back in the Reagan administration with "A Nation at Risk." Yes, we were at risk alright. But we identified the wrong factors and have followed an ill advised course of action. This article snippet below is also interesting.

USAToday published an opinion column written by Colorado’s commissioner of education in which he bashed schools and teachers for causing an “illiteracy crisis” that puts “the fate of our nation in serious peril.” Citing scaredy-cat luminaries Rudolf Flesch and E. D. Hirsch, Commissioner Moloney predicted that the sky will fall on our once-great nation because “85% of U.S. reading teachers were never properly trained.” This dire claim is based on data from The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NIHCD), a quasi-science propaganda front for the US Dept. of Education.

The federal government regularly exploits mainstream media to relay its message of fear and failure through mindless mouthpieces like the commissioner, in order to promote its reformist agenda. An ignorant public will accept any data as fact, so long as it’s cloaked in official-sounding rhetoric. Joann Yatvin, president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English, responded with an indictment of her own, and says, in part:

'NICHD, well financed by the federal government, supported by the Bush administration, and cheered on by publishers seeking profits, has done its best to persuade the American public and educators at every level that its ideology is based on science, moreover, that it is THE SCIENCE OF READING.'

Source and complete post: Borderland » The Illiteracy Lie

Suggested Book:

"The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools" (David C. Berliner, Bruce J. Biddle)

Republican Strategy Emerges

In a speech to supporters, Virginia Senator, and likely Republican presidential candidate, George Allen took to calling a man of color a monkey. It wasn't a slip of the tongue. He did it several times.

Soccer fans in Spain shocked the world last year when they made ape noises and threw bananas at players of African descent playing on opposing teams. Now we have a United States Senator who feels so confident in brandishing this type of racist insult that he says it numerous times. To a man filming him. Whom he knows works for his opponent.

On this video here, S.R. Sidarth, of Indian origin, is called "macaca" several times by Senator Allen. A macaca is a monkey. It's also an ethnic slur.

The campaign strategy of the Republican party is coming into focus. Republicans have indicated their intention through a few news stories that, in a desperate election year such as this one, they will resort to race-baiting politics.

That a national leader from the ruling party in this great nation would conduct himself in the manner of a European soccer hooligan thug is downright despicable. That Republicans feel this is the only way to win is a clear reason why they need to step aside and let real leadership take over.

Source: John Conyers, Jr. -- ConyersBlog

I hate the Caps Lock key. I rarely use it: only when I hit the damned thing by accident. It annoys me. It gets in the way of the flow of thinking for me. Do you use yours?

Well, appears there's a movement afoot to get the keyboard manufacturers of the world to ban the beastly key.

"The Caps key is an abomination," Hintjens writes on his blog. "It's a huge key, stuck right there where the Ctrl used to be, and as far as I know, it's only used by 419 scammers and Fortran programmers."

Source: Wired News: Death to Caps Lock

Complete with continuously streaming high quality music from his recordings, this artist includes an RSS feed on his web site. I so enjoyed his performances while visiting his site that I immediately bought 2 of his albums at the iTunes store! What a way to market yourself!

I like it!

"We all miss album cover art work, and the tiny digital cover art on your iPod just isn't the same. English designer, Michael Kennedy, has the answer that makes retro meet modern in a funked up way. I-Deck is a touch screen music player that revitalizes album art and user interaction which has been lost in current mp3 format. You simply dock your mp3 player into the base and use the touch screen to cycle through and select your tracks, flick it to skip, spin it to fast-forward and turn it to play. Then sit back and watch the album art play. From the Nirvana baby floating through to Madonna in a leotard, album art is back in vogue. Contact us if you require designers contact details." by Andy

Source: the cool hunter - gadgets

Side by side comparisons of Dell to Apple high performance machines reveal that the exact same hardware (including Intel processors) is significantly less expensive at Apple! In fact starting at $800 and going up quickly. Where I work we have both Apple laptops and Dell laptops. The Dells die twice as fast. And now they're more expensive too?! This is an interesting article.

Apple’s Leopard Strategy: Screw Microsoft, Kill Dell, Save the 4th Quarter
By: Rob Enderle
August 11th, 2006

This week Apple’s Leopard Strategy became more clear and it seems to have less and less to do with Microsoft and Windows Vista. In fact, looking underneath the covers it would appear that Windows Vista may run just fine on Apple hardware along with Leopard (if that’s what a user wants), even though they increasingly may not need to go that route.

In looking at the detail coming out of the Apple developer’s conference my conclusion is that while Microsoft may be a target for the purpose of publicity and media, from the standpoint of competition, Apple is putting the cross hairs more appropriately on companies like Dell. This is where they should have been from the very beginning.

Read entire article: Apple’s Leopard Strategy: Screw Microsoft, Kill Dell, Save the 4th Quarter Page 1 - Talkbacks - Digital Trends

I really enjoy reading Christopher Sessums' work. The guy is smart and frequently challenges me to think new thoughts--something we never do enough! I've been ranting lately at work about meaningfulness. I see too many people just going through the motions of life yet not living it. I want the teachers at my school to live life meaningfully, to teach their students in meaningful, substantive, significant, and connected ways that empower them to memorize those minimum standards! Yeah, right! How absurd!

I want them to empower their students to perceive, celebrate, and contribute to meaningful living, sustainable solution-finding, invention, the creation of beauty and the feeding of the heart. I am convinced that meaningful living is stolen from our souls for several reasons. Here are but a few:

• Our national obsession with divisiveness: things that drive us apart instead of bringing us together
• Our cultural obsession with levels of fear disproportionate to the realities within our actual life experiences
• Pervasive, repetitive media imbuing the vacuous with artificial levels of short-lived significance
• Practical acceptance of marketing's unending message: things bring meaningfulness
• Our unwillingness to invest the time to engage with people and ideas, especially those we discount or fail to understand at first blush
• The unspoken capitalist belief that worth and value be immediately maximized with minimal investment of resources

So here is his article without his excellent illustrative photographic choices and embedded links. Visit his post to explore them.

Source: Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog:

Fire on the mountain: Envisioning the future of school

"As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider." -- E. M. Forster

What will learning and schooling look like 30 years from now? This question was posed to me recently and I found myself really wanting to chew on this for a while. I think the question is critical for us to think about on a number of levels. I don’t think schools as formal learning institutions will disappear. Schools are a hub of sociality. They are like bee hives buzzing with activity both organized and unorganized. The schools as factories metaphor is tired and ineffective, yet that’s still what’s in place.

"They go forth with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts. An undeveloped heart-not a cold one. The difference is important." -- E. M. Forster

Forster makes an important point. Driven by test scores and a uniformly uninformed view of accountability, most schools (at least in the U.S.) have ignored the fundamental composition of schools: people engaging with people. Thus the factory model might develop minds but it does little to develop hearts (read: tolerance, good temper, empathy, compassion). The difference IS important. So it would seem rather important for us to begin to develop a new vision for schools and learning that places a premium on matters of the heart.

Lately I've received several emails and a comment with questions about my blog traffic and the equipment I use for my photos. I've compiled these answers so I can reference them in the future if needed.

What kind of camera equipment do you use for the photos posted in the Photo Albums?

Well, I've only owned two digital cameras in my whole life. My first camera, which I still own, was (is) the Canon Powershot G2. I bought this 4 megapixel camera in May, 2003, and have taken over 6,500 pictures with it. I love this little guy. It's fairly lightweight, not too big (not too tiny either), and has taken excellent pictures.

In June of this year (2006), at the recommendation of Chris, an incredible photographer, I got a new professional grade camera, the Canon EOS 30D. Much to my shock, in just 2 months, I have already taken 3,470 pictures with it! Chris also suggested these lenses, which I got and absolutely love:

• Canon's EFS 10 - 22mm (a glorious wide angle lens--I just had no idea what difference a lens doth make!)
• Canon's EFS 17 - 85mm
• Canon's EF 70 - 200mm (I love this image stabilized zoom lens! It's just heavy as sin.)

I got the camera anticipating my trip to Norway this past July. I wanted to learn how to use it before the trip, as I was never any good with an SLR. Before digital photography, I simply couldn't afford to take enough pictures to master the art and science of photography.

I still am really not really very good at what I do. I just play the odds: try to frame 10,000 good shots and if only 1% turn out great... So, I'm just a picture taking fool trying to sharpen my eye and learn the equipment--so many variables: some you can control, others you can't; some I now understand, others...

With my 4 gig compact flash card, I can shoot almost 1,000 high quality shots on any given shoot. The most I've ever shot in a given day is around 400. So now I can take an endless stream of pictures while experimenting with composition and equipment settings. When I download the pictures to my computer, I study the file metadata to see how the different settings affected the shot.

In the photo albums at my site, the early pictures were all taken with my PowerShot. The most recent pictures were taken with the 30D. To help distinguish between the two, I've made the thumbnails of pictures shot with the 30D a little bit larger.

Are you altering your pictures?
Absolutely! In November, 2003, part of my two week vacation in Europe was aboard a cruise ship in the Mediterranean Sea. Each day was spent exploring some exotic port of call. Each evening was spent on the ship. On one of the first evenings aboard the ship, I struck up a conversation with a man sitting in front of his Mac PowerBook G4. I began the conversation as a fellow Mac lover and asked what he did with his computer.

He said he was a professional photographer who would shoot pictures by day and edit and upload them for sale by night. Right. Sure. Whatever. He then asked if I wanted to see any of his work. O dear god in heaven! I had just been on the same Greek island and my pictures looked nothing like his. I commented on the magic of his professional camera. He corrected me: it was in part the equipment, but more importantly it was also post production work on the computer.

He asked if I wanted to see what he did to the images after he downloaded them to his Mac. I was spellbound! This was magic! For several nights I studied his work as he explained what he was doing and why. His only request: that I never let anyone know who he was and what he taught me--they were like his signature trade secrets. To this day I have honored his request and have generously used what he so graciously taught me.

What software do you use?
I have mostly used Photoshop. I have yet to use raw camera files but will be starting soon. I have also recently begun using Aperture. I have a love/hate relationship with that Apple program. The latest product upgrade (1.1.2) fixed some significant stability and operability issues, but the program is still excruciatingly slow and problematic. Granted, I have over 10,000 photos in my library, but most professional photographers easily have hundreds of thousands. I can't imagine how slow that must be!

I anticipate that since Apple replaced most of the Aperture programming team, the new release will be a significant improvement. If it isn't, I'll be forced to quit using the product. As is, I swear like a sailor almost every time I launch the program.

In its defense, I love what it can do. All of my recent online photo albums were created with it. I even have grown to understand some of the less intuitive functions of Photoshop as a result of using Aperture. Below are some examples of before using Photoshop or Aperture and after. The thumbnails below are a little blurred. Click to see a larger, clearer version.

Before: With the power lines in the way and a person in orange on cellphone; After: Power lines, person, and cellphone be gone!

Before: Drab with light off; After: Zing! with light on?!

Before: Big wire under door sucks away interest; After: Vivid with missing wire

Before: The bright light from outside makes inside the room too dark. After: The challenge: Lighten up the room without blowing out the view outside the window. Have you ever done this? It's easy magic if you know how!

How many hits do you get?
In September, 2005, I moved my blog to the DreamHost server--so, not quite a year ago (320 days). Since that time I've served well over a half million files from their server (3.76 gigabytes). I'm averaging over 1,700 requests per day--that means I'm sending over 12 megabytes of data every day. I don't think that's too bad for a personal blog.

As text constitutes so little data, that means the photo albums are a real hit. They receive a significant number of hits and constitute the bulk of the data transfer.

I've been getting a lot hits from an IP address in New York, New York this month. Last month the largest number of hits were from an IP address in Australia. Who knows. I also get a lot of referrals from bloglines and Google, especially Google.uk.

I had planned to make a quick stop by the house on the way back to work...

O dear god! A significant amount of water was dripping rapidly from the ceiling in the living room. The large leather chair is probably ruined. One of the framed pictures I took of Notre Dame in Paris will have to be replaced.

I thought a water pipe upstairs had burst--maybe to the laundry room or one of the bathrooms. No. I could find no sign of any leaks. I am guessing the fire sprinkler system may have sprung a leak.

Oddly, after a couple of hours of leaking, it stopped as strangely as it started! I hope the plumber can figure out what caused it and fix it so it doesn't happen again. The ceiling will definitely need to be repaired.

I don't know my dermatologist on a personal level at all. In fact, this is really only the 3rd or 4th time I've ever been to his office. I had a skin cancer removed several months back, and his assistant told me to come back in about 6 months to have it checked. Apparently skin cancers can return.

It checked out just fine, but this is what I found interesting...

I asked the doctor what the odds were that the basil cell carcinoma would return. He stated rather matter-of-factly, "It would be far more likely that George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld would all three make a responsible decision than that the skin cancer would return." He then spent a good 10 minutes foaming at the mouth. This guy is nothing short of angry about the damage these extremists are doing to our nation. He believes very strongly that the Republican party is in for a huge shock in November.

I was actually caught off guard but hope he's correct! We will see.