Recently in Leveraging Connectivity Category

You may have noticed that I haven't posted at this blog since before Christmas.  I have posted at the duplicate site.

For about 1 year now I've been toying with WordPress to replace my MovableType blog—this blog that you're reading now.  I've been running two versions of my blog, duplicates:  one of each.  I've decided that the WordPress version is vastly superior to MovableType.

Effective January 15, 2011, this version of my blog will be replaced entirely.  From that date on, my blog will have a slightly different web address.  If you go to the old address, you will be seamlessly redirected to the new address.

The only action that will be required:

• If you visit my blog through an RSS feed reader, you will need to go to http://timtyson.us on or after January 15, 2011, and subscribe to one or more of the new feeds.  These will be completely different.
• If you have bookmarked this blog address, you will probably want to bookmark the new address when it goes live on January 15, 2011.

Changing blogging systems has been a massive undertaking behind the scenes.  I've learned a lot!  At some point, I'll probably blog about this whole process.

The clean up work will continue for months (mostly) behind the scenes.  And while I will miss my flash-based banner image rotation in the old blog version, the new design will take some big steps toward being more compatible with the iPhone, iPad, and other mobile devices that do not support flash.  (At this time I have no plans to make my blog backwards compatible.  Doing so would require too much time.)

So stay tuned!  January 15th is just around the corner.

Elisson was right.  I knew he was.  But I knew tackling it would be a whole lot of work.  Brain work.  Doing geeky things I really don't know much about.

But I did it!

A complete overhaul of the Wordpress version of my blog.

[Yes. For those of you who did not know, a complete duplicate of the timtyson.us blog has been running now for about a year over at blog.timtyson.us.  Check it out.  It's cool.  It uses a completely different blogging system that I like much, much better than MovableType. Eventually, this version will be completely replaced with that version. The content is identical.]

• Fixed:  Elisson said white text on a black background looked sexy but was just too hard for tired eyes to read.  I totally agreed.
• Fixed:  Intermittent odd behaviors when loading single blog posts.
• Enhanced:  I get a fairly interesting collection of hits from around the world.  The Google Translate feature has been extended.
• New:  Fresh, lighter theme
• New:  An image "slider" on the Home page that features clickable images that take you to picture-laden posts about my journeys.
• New:  The Home page shows you a nice overview of the whole site with Featured posts, Travel-related posts, Most Popular posts, and more.
• New:  Archived files are available in a much easier to find (under the Filed tab) and navigate.  In fact, site navigation is generally simplified.
• New:  The Blog tab now only presents a short teaser from each post—just enough to see if you want to click on "Read more  ››" to see the entire post.
• New:  Google's new font technology is incorporated in the banner title.  The font will change from time to time.
• New:  My Facebook status will now appear "live" on my blog.

Other new features are in the works.

Many quirks still are being corrected.  For example:  my previous theme has a main body area that was a good bit wider.  Now, many of the pictures need to be resized.  What a pain!  I've toyed with the idea of tweaking the css files to widen the body and shorten the sidebar in the individual posts, but I've decided not to do that.  I like the white space in the current layout.  Clean.  Open.  Not visually distracting.

The Google Translation code looks horrid.  I've got that one on the list.

If you find any other weirdness, aside from what I write about, let me know so I can fix it!

I've blogged about my recent encounters with @Verizon when upgrading the TiVo with the Fios service here at the house.  In addition to the Twitter replies to me from Verizon following up, today I got a followup phone call from Ralph, the technician who installed the M-CableCard and got everything working wonderfully.  He wanted to be sure everything was satisfactory.

Since I groused about my really, really bad customer service experience, I feel equally compelled to rave about my current really, really good customer service follow up experiences.   OK, so Verizon and I have kissed and made up.  This was really pretty easy for me to do because I do so love their Fios* service and my MiFi card that I use all over the country.

Also of note:  loving the new high capacity TiVo Premiere XL in HD!

*According to an independent report that has nothing to do with Verizon, here in Manhattan Beach we're in the top 1% of household internet access speeds.  It just rocks my world since I do so much work on the internet!!  And I'm reading that Verizon just announced a whopping 150 megabit up and 35 megabit down upgrade from our supposedly current 15 up and 10 down!  (Our actual speed just clocked in at 30.54 Mb/s up and 22.51 Mb/s down.) My God, that's fast!  This makes cloud computing a bit more realistic.  Their goal:  10 gigabits per household in a few years!  That's just insane.

Related articles

• Verizon FiOS Readies Super Fast 10GB Per House Connection (beet.tv)
• @Verizon Customer Service Is Horrendously Wretched! (timtyson.us)
• Corporate Offloading (timtyson.us)

Mother will hate this post.

Note:  The code on this page is a vastly improved reading experience at this link.

Last year, for the first time, I created a Season's Greetings banner that popped up (using MediaboxAdv) when you first hit my blog.  This year, when I went to operationalize that same code, things were not very straight forward.  This post is to remind me next year how to do this—sort of a note to me in the future.

WordPress Site
Under the wordpress —> wp-content —> themes folder on the server, select the current theme and modify the header.php file within that folder.  Immediately after the HTML header tag closes, this code should appear:

<!-- Mandate that the #mb-announcement mediabox open when this page is first hit or refreshed by the user -->
<!-- <body onload="Mediabox.open('URL_GOES_HERE', 'TITLE_GOES_HERE', 'WIDTH HEIGHT')"> -->
<!-- When NOT mandating the #mb-announcement, comment out the next line of code. -->
<body onload="Mediabox.open('http://blog.timtyson.us/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/HolidayGreeting.jpg', 'Happy Holidays', '480 520')">
<!-- When NOT mandating the #mb-announcement, uncomment out the next line of code. -->
<!-- <body> -->

Normally, without the forced load of the mediabox announcement, the code would read like this:

<!-- Mandate that the #mb-announcement mediabox open when this page is first hit or refreshed by the user -->
<!-- <body onload="Mediabox.open('URL_GOES_HERE', 'TITLE_GOES_HERE', 'WIDTH HEIGHT')"> -->
<!-- When mandating the #mb-announcement, uncomment out the next line of code. -->
<!-- body onload="Mediabox.open('http://blog.timtyson.us/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/HolidayGreeting.jpg', 'Happy Holidays', '480 520')">
< !-- When mandating the #mb-announcement, comment out the next line of code. -->
<body>

This single change in code will impact the loading of both the main index page as well as individual page archives.

MovableType Site
To accomplish the same thing, MovableType requires two file alterations: one for the index page and one for individual page archives.

For the main index page:
Under the template-link-files —> my-template-link-files on the server, modify the Index.html file within that folder.  Immediately after the HTML header tag closes, this code should appear:

<!-- Mandate that the #mb-announcement mediabox open when this page is first hit or refreshed by the user -->
<!-- <body id="mt-blog" class="mt-main-index layout-wm" onload="Mediabox.open('URL_GOES_HERE', 'TITLE_GOES_HERE', 'WIDTH HEIGHT')"> -->
< !-- the body id above is the result of using the <$mt:BlogTemplateSetID$> variable for the boy id as shown below. When NOT mandating the #mb-announcement, comment out the next line of code. -->
<body id="<$mt:BlogTemplateSetID$>" class="mt-entry-archive <$mt:Var name="page_layout"$>" onload="Mediabox.open('http://blog.timtyson.us/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/HolidayGreeting.jpg', 'Happy Holidays', '480 520')">
<!-- When NOT mandating the #mb-announcement, uncomment out the next line of code. -->
<!-- <body id="<$mt:BlogTemplateSetID$>" class="mt-entry-archive < $mt:Var name="page_layout"$>"> -->

All of the index files would then have to be rebuilt for the change to take place.

Normally, without the forced load of the mediabox announcement, the code would read like this:

<!-- Mandate that the #mb-announcement mediabox open when this page is first hit or refreshed by the user -->
<!--  <body id="mt-blog" class="mt-main-index layout-wm" onload="Mediabox.open('URL_GOES_HERE', 'TITLE_GOES_HERE', 'WIDTH HEIGHT')"> -->
<!--  the body id above is the result of using the <$mt:BlogTemplateSetID$> variable  for the boy id as shown below. When NOT mandating the #mb-announcement, comment out the next line of code.  -->
<!-- body id="<$mt:BlogTemplateSetID$>" class="mt-entry-archive < $mt:Var name="page_layout"$>" onload="Mediabox.open('http://blog.timtyson.us/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/HolidayGreeting.jpg', 'Happy Holidays', '480 520')">
< !  When NOT mandating the #mb-announcement, uncomment out the next line of code. -->
<body id="<$mt:BlogTemplateSetID$>" class="mt-entry-archive <$mt:Var name="page_layout"$>">

For the individual page archives:
Under the template-link-files —> my-template-link-files on the server, modify the Entry.html file within that folder.  Immediately after the HTML header tag closes, this code should appear:

<!-- Mandate that the #mb-announcement mediabox open when this page is first hit or refreshed by the user -->
<!--  <body id="mt-blog" class="mt-main-index layout-wm" onload="Mediabox.open('URL_GOES_HERE', 'TITLE_GOES_HERE', 'WIDTH HEIGHT')"> -->
<!--  the body id above is the result of using the <$mt:BlogTemplateSetID$> variable  for the boy id as shown below. When NOT mandating the #mb-announcement, comment out the next line of code.  -->
<body id="<$mt:BlogTemplateSetID$>" class="mt-entry-archive <$mt:Var name="page_layout"$>" onload="Mediabox.open('http://blog.timtyson.us/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/HolidayGreeting.jpg', 'Happy Holidays', '480 520')">
<!-- When NOT mandating the #mb-announcement, uncomment out the next line of code. -->
<!-- <body id="<$mt:BlogTemplateSetID$>" class="mt-entry-archive < $mt:Var name="page_layout"$>"> -->

Get it right the first time, because "Only Entry Archives" files then have to be rebuilt for the change to take place—that's over 2,500 files and takes forever!

Normally, without the forced load of the mediabox announcement, the code would read like this:

<!-- Mandate that the #mb-announcement mediabox open when this page is first hit or refreshed by the user -->
<!--  <body id="mt-blog" class="mt-main-index layout-wm" onload="Mediabox.open('URL_GOES_HERE', 'TITLE_GOES_HERE', 'WIDTH HEIGHT')"> -->
<!--  the body id above is the result of using the <$mt:BlogTemplateSetID$> variable  for the boy id as shown below. When NOT mandating the #mb-announcement, comment out the next line of code.  -->
<!-- body id="<$mt:BlogTemplateSetID$>" class="mt-entry-archive < $mt:Var name="page_layout"$>" onload="Mediabox.open('http://blog.timtyson.us/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/HolidayGreeting.jpg', 'Happy Holidays', '480 520')">
< !  When NOT mandating the #mb-announcement, uncomment out the next line of code. -->
<body id="<$mt:BlogTemplateSetID$>" class="mt-entry-archive <$mt:Var name="page_layout"$>">

My browser of choice continues to be Safari. However, a few months ago Apple pushed an update out the door that is making Safari do weird things when building a page with Flash embeds. This, at times, significantly impacts page display and, I suspect, is a result of Apple pushing HTML5 implementation. I don't get those issues in Firefox. Hopefully Apple will correct this problem in the near future. I don't know what IE does with any of this code. I gave up on that browser a long time ago. (My apologies to all of those who still use it.)

[Another note to self:  the directions for using the awesome but non-intuitive SyntaxhHighlighter used on the WordPress version of this page are located at this link.

And that's about it.

 

My hosting service is MediaTemple. They have 24 hour phone support. They are awesome about helping the techno-illiterate, like me.

When I was in Budapest and Prague last week, I published 61 pictures, and my blog publishing platform on the MovableType side went berserk! Every time I would attempt to do anything, MT would log me out. I had never had this happen before and was clueless.

This morning, in my jet lag induced quasi-stupor, I decided I had to fix this problem. O horror!

Amazingly, I was able to determine that a specific table (mt_session) in my mySQL database for MT4 was corrupted and needed to be repaired. But I have no idea to repair a mySQL database table. In desperation I called MediaTemple.

As I feared, this was "outside the scope of support," but the guy did it anyway and walked me through what to do if (when) this happens again.

Awesome!  Now I can publish some of the pictures from Prague!

Related articles

• Hosting Company MediaTemple Gets an API (programmableweb.com)
• Web Hosting with Great Customer Support (bloggingtips.com)
• 22 New APIs: Personal Information Management, Web Hosting and IP Geolocation (programmableweb.com)

/div>

 

I know I've sworn for decades (ok, at least in internet years) that I would never have a Facebook account.  I blogged about it.  I've given good reason for why I would never do it.  But, well...

Damn!

I'm using it as a tool to keep in touch with people I would otherwise never have the opportunity to keep up with in this busy world.  And, hopefully, with a new WP plugin, (thanks to Dan for the idea) every time I publish to my blog, the plugin will also cross publish to my Facebook wall.  It will take me some time to work out the kinks and learn the flow of Facebook.  We'll just see how it goes...

Over the past 6 months or so, I have been getting more and more spam email at my main email address from Apple's MobileMe service.  At 6:00AM I already had 16!  Within 1 minute of deleting them, another arrived!  @Apple needs to get with the program here!  When the subject line has every pharmaceutical name in it, it should be too difficult to ID it as spam!  And I've forwarded as an attachment to spam@me.com enough of these things to fill up a server.  But the problem has gotten worse and worse.

I am so fed up with it I was ready to discontinue my main email address, which I've had for years and years and years!

Then, I had a bright idea.  Gmail has excellent filtering!  I have a Gmail address I have never made public.  Tah Dah!

I've set up a new email rule.  Now, until @Apple gets their act together with spam filtering, every time an email comes in to my main MobileMe email address, Mail automatically forwards it to Gmail and deletes the original from my Mail application.  I never even know the original arrived at my MobileMe email address.  Gmail filters out the spam, thank you Google!, and sends the real email back to my Mail application!  Now only the real, properly filtered email arrives in my inbox!

No more spam from the assholes that troll the interwebs!  The voices have stopped!

Related articles

• 11 Tips To Effective Email Management (celestinechua.com)
• Top 4 Freeware Spam Blockers That Actually Work (makeuseof.com)
• Gmail Filters Email Beyond Spam (webpronews.com)
• When did you last see SPAM in your inbox? [MakeUseOf Poll] (makeuseof.com)

I just came across Eirc Whitacre's Virtual Choir, 2010.  His idea is brilliant.  His composition and conducting are glorious.  The finished product is sheer transcendence:  people all over the globe bringing voice to beauty.  This is spectacular:  technology in the service of beautiful, united though individual, human emotive expression—a true global collaborative effort at its finest.  You easily see both the honesty and purity of the gift of self expression dedicated to the craft of human beauty in the faces and posture of the participants the editor chose to highlight.  (I'm just glad I didn't have to create the video compilation or mix the audio!)

Brilliantly conceived from start to finish, this virtual choir has already been viewed over a million times on YouTube. Most, though not all, of the singers are younger people from the United States, Canada, Singapore, Germany, and Sweden. If you wish to learn more about how the Virtual Choir began, check out this video.  I would love to know the back story on how the participants came to be involved in this collaboration.

Want to participate in the Virtual Choir 2011? You can! Eric wants it to be the largest Virtual Choir ever recorded. At this link Eric discusses how to interpret the score, Sleep, for the Virtual Choir 2011 recording. You can learn more about how to record and upload your part, sign up and download the score at Eric's web site.  The text and translation can be found at this link.

This is awesome!  Be sure to watch it in full screen.  (Also, the audio doesn't begin until the curtain opens.)

Here is a link to the Westminster Chorus singing this piece in TTBB, and this link to the Westminster Cathedral Choir.  Eric uses the gift of delicate dissonance so carefully crafted as to become sonorous and expansive. Just no words to describe it...

Related articles:

• Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir Tour (theworld.org)
• How Digital Media is Attracting New Arts Audiences (readwriteweb.com)

This tragic, yet true tweet has been circulating:

The Tea Party - thousands of hard-working middle-class FOX viewers fighting to make sure the rich pay less in taxes.

What's with people that watch FOX?  Rupert Murdock, whose company owns FOX, isn't even an American, and he's getting filthy rich (current net worth is $6.3 billion--with a "b") on the backs of hard-working Americans by scaring and lying to them.  He has way too much power and influence.  Why would anyone trust him at all?!

And I hate it that the front door to the house isn't private property.  Daily, people leave fliers and business cards and unsolicited junk on the door!

This week's big news story:  the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has decided that the government can, without a warrant, sneak onto your property, your driveway, and place a GPS tracking device on your car that tracks everywhere you go.  We no longer have a reasonable expectation of privacy for our driveways, which even delivery people can use.

Shockingly, this ruling is actually getting some media coverage.

Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most passionately. "1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last," he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell's totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: "Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania."

Source:  Time

Some have pointed out that if you are wealthy, you probably live in a gated community or have gates around your property that would extend your zone of reasonable expectation of privacy.  So only the poor people have less privacy.  But that's OK, isn't it?  I mean, wealthy people don't commit crimes.  Wealthy people don't bilk billions, even trillions out of the unsuspecting.  Enron never happened.  No Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme.  No Wall Street bail out while the captains of capitalism lived off the slaughtered fatted cow.

Besides, privacy died long ago in this country — during the George W. Bush administration, I do believe.  His cronies called it The Patriot Act.  Just the name says "Run!  Don't walk!"  During his administration and the Republican rein of terror, not only were hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras installed all over this nation, but warrantless wiretaps, "enhanced interrogations," and god knows what else were made the order of the day.

And who are we kidding?  I'd bet my last dollar that the US government routinely snags the GPS satellite data from specific cars at will.  There really is no need to place anything on the cars of serious criminals.  That's so last century.  Only puny local police departments have to actually walk onto someone's driveway to plant a GPS under their car.  The big time crooks already have GPS as part of the most fashionable bling package.

The totalitarian state is here.  Is now.  We live it.  The Constitution and Bill of Rights are just window dressing from a time gone by.

Related articles

• Court allows agents to secretly put GPS trackers on cars (cnn.com)
• Warrentless GPS Tracking Of Your Car Is Legal If You're Not Wealthy Enough To Protect It (dvorak.org)
• The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves (time.com)
• The Government's New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS (time.com)
• Judge Kozinski Doesn't Track with the Ninth Circuit on GPS and the Fourth AmendmentCalls his fellow judges 'cultural elitists' when it comes to privacy. (abovethelaw.com)

of an iPhone 4!

It arrived at 9:30am at the front door via the stork (FedEx guy).

I unboxed it ceremoniously. It is beautiful, and smart — just like it's father (me, course)!

I turned it on. It asked to be connected to the mother ship. I plugged it into my Macbook Pro. iTunes then displayed my phone number and requested my billing zip code and the last 4 numbers of my social security number. It then said my activation session session had expired. Retry.

After three failed retries, I called Apple support. They told me to reboot my computer. I did. It activated after requiring 3 DNA samples —well, not really, but you are forced to agree to god knows what*. The moment it activated, my call to Apple support on my old iPhone was disconnected.

I then unplugged the new phone from iTunes and replugged it in as directed. iTunes is now installing all of my old iPhone's content onto the new phone.

I must say, and this is really actually very important to me, this is the best product delivery and activation process Apple and AT&T have ever had. I all but went on a safari camping out when I purchased my first iPhone from the Apple store at Lennox Mall. Activating it took hours (almost a whole day)! And each subsequent purchase was fraught with stupendously long lines but better activation times. This one they almost got completely right!

Amazing how long it takes to transfer about 24gb of data to the new phone via USB 2. It's now finished transferring all of my applications and is now working on sending over the video and audio content.

*Apparently iOS 4 users are now sending Apple retina scans, urine samples, blood and stool samples, along with our current location at every breath we take. The mother ship will use this information benevolently, of course. They will ply us with iAds tailored specifically to our personal DNA profile so as to extract as much money from our bank accounts as possible. The power of the tethered device is not to be underestimated!

Oooooooh!  Loooook!!  It's teething already!!

Related articles:

• Preparing for iPhone 4 Launch Day (cbsnews.com)
• Christmas Coming One Day Early? iPhone 4 on 6/23 For Some? (geardiary.com)

The banks were too big to fail.  Google is too big to be anything but evil.

I'm sure everyone has heard by now that the little Google street car that has mapping our world (while very cool, it takes away our privacy) was also snooping around everyone's wireless networks.  If your network was unprotected when the Google street car came by your home or office, Google took your email and password information as well.

Don't tell me the very bright people at Google haven't been doing analysis on the human cognition of password creation.  To the nefarious among us, we are nothing more than data.  I'll never forget overhearing a restaurant dinner conversation here in LA, "Yeah, I like so-and-so, but that's just one data point!"

As far as I am concerned, Google can never be trusted.

Wi-Fi traffic intercepted by Google’s Street View cars included passwords and e-mail, according to the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL)."

[Source: Google Street View Wi-Fi data included passwords and e-mail | Security | Macworld.]

I have frequently posted vituperant remarks about AT&T. The company generally is loathsome. Their 3G network service here in Manhattan Beach is horrid. I can barely get a signal at the house. I frequently drop calls. Incoming calls frequently just go straight to voicemail without my phone ever ringing. LAX rarely even gets 3G service, just the horribly slower Edge network.

But I now have something good to say about AT&T, sort of...

I read a tweet about a microcell for AT&T. I googled it to find out what it was. Apparently, if you have bad 3G reception, you can purchase this microcell that, if I understand it correctly, basically offloads your cell phone calls and data to the Internet.

So now I get a full AT&T cell signal in the house, most of which didn't get a signal at all. And now my cell phone calls and my cell phone data access is offloaded to Verizon's FIOS network. Up to 10 people can place calls simultaneously through my MicroCell "tower" here in the house.

It seems to work well, but I haven't had any incoming calls yet. At least AT&T had a good idea of allowing customers in areas with poor service to set up their own mini cell tower in their homes or businesses.

Well, Wordpress 3.0 has been available for download as a beta product until today.  It went alpha.  So I downloaded it having heard good things about its stability and usability.  I'm especially interested in exploring the merging of MU into the base installation.

My upgrade was not without issues though:  immediately after the upgrade the Wordpress version of my site was dead and the Admin login area was as well.  What to do?!  After a quick hustle or at wordpress.org's forums, I went in and disabled my plugins folder by using my FTP client to rename it and create an empty plugins folder.

Poof!

Everything worked again.  I added plugins one by one until I found the offending one:  Lifestream.  When I have a bit more time, I'll check for an upgraded version of the plugin.

[P.S.  It occurs to me that many of my readers at this rendition of my site may be completely unaware of the fact that I have been running a parallel site, testing it for compatibility and such.  This has been going on now for some time.  If you want to check out the Wordpress version of timtyson.us, just click here.

Related articles:

• Download WordPress 3.0 (earnblogger.com)
• Wordpress 3.0 release video (sciencetext.com)
• WordPress 3.0 Released, Download And Upgrade Now (ghacks.net)
• WordPress 3.0 "Thelonius" Is Now Available (steffanantonas.com)
• Wordpress 3.0 arrives, with multi-blog support and new default theme (downloadsquad.com)
• What's New in WordPress 3.0 (tipsblogger.com)

I have been asked numerous times why I do not have a Facebook page.  Originally, I had three main reasons:

1. I thought Facebook would be another digital fad like AOL, MySpace, etc.  It would go away—and indeed probably will in time .  Something else would replace it.  Would I then have to jump on that social tool-du-jour?
2. I have two blogs that I enjoy using to share my professional and my personal "online me."  I don't need another online presence.
3. I became concerned that Facebook was an enormously successful marketing tool that, like almost any other American business, would, in the blink of an eye, sell its soul and all of the marketing data it accrued for profit and then to the devil called greed.

Then along came the huge issue of privacy concerns that is now plaguing Facebook.  The foolhardiness of this quotation, from Facebook's founder dropped my jaw!

You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” – Mark Zuckerberg, 2009

Source:  Why Mark Zuckerberg Needs to Come Clean about His Views on Privacy by:  Kim-Mai Cutler

Is he serious?!  There is one me—the me, me. And I have numerous "identities," as does every other human being on this planet. Identity is the product of relationship or association. People have a work or professional identity, their identity as a spouse, their identity as a parent, their identity as a friend, their identity as a neighbor, their identity as a member of community, etc. To insinuate, let alone state, that all of these identities living in each of us somehow lacks integrity is to demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding about humanity and the definition of integrity.  But there are additional layers of complexity here.

The notion of “radical transparency,” a term being brandished about lately, is, I think, based in a naïve and simplistic world view.  I recall as a young school administrator listening to adults confide to me the complexities of their life situations.  At the time I was too young to actually even believe them as they recounted the circumstances of their lives.  I couldn't imagine that so many people lived in such incredulous circumstances.  At the time, I didn't have enough life experience to understand how fragile the easy life of even simple privilege I had always been lucky enough to enjoy was.  I had little, if any, experience with the complexity of a broader scope of life.

A significant percentage of people would not live life better if they lived in complete, radical transparency.  And a significant percentage of twenty-somethings, like Zuckerberg, might think they can now but later find that life brings things into their lives they may wish to leave forgotten, not plastered all over the Internet.

And what of context?  Without context to clarify meaning, to provide an illuminating perspective, many things could be so misunderstood as to be immensely damaging both today and at some unexpected time in an unforeseeable future, especially when people only know the "virtual you" before getting to know the actual you living within the context of your life.  Moments in time that are the tiniest reflections of the whole of a person can supplant the essence, the potential, the intent and focus of a future life better lived.  If being an administrator taught me anything, it was that people need a dignified option to find a better way forward that provides them with the hope of a good future.

At the very least, Zuckerberg is brilliant (attending Exeter and Harvard) and exceedingly wealthy (Forbes estimates his 2010 net worth at $4 billion.)  He is a young man of wealth and privilege.  What he lacks is a sensible world view for the masses of people who lack the resources to ever control their own destiny.  He's foolhardy enough to think he can manage that for the 400,000,000+ Facebook users.

As things are now, Zuckerberg stands to profit most when you naïvely live his vision of radical transparency, of one identity—your Facebook identity.  He can then continue to mine and aggregate every bit of information about you shared on his platform.  You will be powerless to do much about it.  He can monetize and redistribute that information in ways oblivious to you, and oblivious he wants you to remain.

May 31st is set to be "Quit Facebook Day."  I think it's time for millions of people to send Mr. Zuckerberg a "It's time to get real!" wake up call.  Or, you can continue to let him control the future of your privacy.  It's your choice—for now!

Graphic Above Source: MoveOn.org

Related articles:

• Facebook CEO Allegedly Mocked Users For Sharing Personal Data With Him At Harvard (huffingtonpost.com)
• Change Facebook or Change Ourselves? (jilliancyork.com)
• On Facebook's Selective Transparency (allfacebook.com)

Americans need to stand up and say, "Hell No!  We will not live out SciFi!"

Hollywood claims that, in the future, they will allow you to see movies that are currently in the theater at home on your TV set while the movie is in the theater.

Horse Manure!  Here's what Tim predicts: DVD's as we know them today will go away.  The price of movies will go up.

To see any movie, you will be forced to stream it over the Internet to your TV.  To keep you from ripping a copy of the movie by sending the audio and video feed out of your TV and into a DVR or other recording device, Hollywood will reach into your home, into your TV set, and shut off these outputs.

[Apple has already quietly pulled off shutting off your external computer monitor jack when playing HD content.  Did you know this Apple users???  Go ahead and try it on one of the newer Mac laptops.  Try plugging in a projector to your laptop (with the new MiniDisplay port) and playing an HD movie you purchased from the iTunes Store.  It doesn't work now, does it.  It will only play through the AppleTV or on a specific Apple monitor.  Isn't this just the most clever thing.  Guess what Apple is up to!]

What else will they want to do in 10 years?

Hollywood will soon have the power to remotely disable the analog outputs on your set-top box, under a decision by federal regulators on Friday intended to prevent home recording of new movie releases.

The move by the Federal Communications Commission grants cable and satellite providers the power to block consumers from viewing just-released movies in an analog format through a process known as Selectable Output Control. Hollywood requested SOC powers as a condition of allowing providers for the first time to release movies to their in-home customers while the film is in theaters.

The Motion Picture Association of America said its member studios would not authorize the early movie releases unless it won the ability to deploy Selectable Output Control. The reason: Analog video signals can easily be recorded, while dig"

[Source: FCC Lets Hollywood Turn Off Your Output Jacks | Threat Level | Wired.com.]

Boys and girls:  This is not a good thing.

Related articles

• Here Is How The FCC Gave The Keys To The Kingdom To Hollywood (lockergnome.com)
• FCC Lets Hollywood Turn Off Your Output Jacks (wired.com)
• FCC gives Hollywood control over your home theater (arstechnica.com)
• Silicon Alley Insider: OUTRAGE OF THE DAY: FCC Says Hollywood Can Turn Off Parts Of Your Home Theater While You're Watching Movies (businessinsider.com)
• FCC Gives Hollywood The Right To Break Your TV/DVR... Just 'Cause (techdirt.com)

Well, it's about time something like this appeared.  I, ever the cynic, wonder who owns this company.

It’s easier on the web to use reviews to choose the best noise-canceling headphones or a good Indian restaurant than it is to find even the most basic information on which doctor you should go to.

But a new service called Doctor Finder created by Insider Pages hopes to change that by fielding comprehensive online reviews of doctors.

The site covers nearly a million doctors in the United States, combining patient reviews with board certification and official malpractice and sanction records to help patients find a new doctor. Users can sort potential doctors by specialty, insurance carrier, gender, locality, ratings and years of experience.

That’s a big upgrade from how most people choose a doctor now, according to Insider Pages general manager Eric Peacock. Most people simply go to their insurance provider’s website to see a list of doctors nearby, and then decide on one blindly."

[Source: New Service Lets You Check Out Your Doctor Online, Before You Get Checkup | Epicenter | Wired.com.]

Just spreading the AT&T love...

AT&T promised to spend $2 billion upgrading its wireless network this year. Whatever it has spent on the upgrades so far isn't helping.

 

A new report from ChangeWave Research (via Philip Elmer DeWitt) shows consumer dissatisfaction growing with AT&T, while it's decreasing with Verizon. ChangeWave surveyed 4,040 smartphone owners about dropped calls over the last three months.

In the chart below, you can see dropped calls for AT&T customers growing, despite the investment to improve its wireless network.

Source:  Business Insider:  CHART OF THE DAY: AT&T's Network Blows

Do the math:  That's three times more dropped calls!!  (But AT&T's advertisements tell me they have me covered.  Riiiiiight!)

Related articles:

• AT&T dropping more calls than ever (Philip Elmer-DeWitt/Fortune) (techmeme.com)
• CHART OF THE DAY: AT&T's Network Blows (T, VZ, AAPL) (businessinsider.com)
• New survey shows AT&T customers still get the short end of the stick (edibleapple.com)
• Verizon iPhone Could Attract More Than Half of Carrier's Customers [REPORT] (mashable.com)
• Survey: Despite network spending, AT&T dropping more calls (blogs.chron.com)

Yesterday was an interesting day for me—most days are, actually. But the planets seemed to be especially aligned, or maybe yesterday was a "rip, a hole in the time/space continuum" that "take us thru the event horizon." *

1. I got an email invitation to connect with another Tim Tyson on a social network site. What was particularly interesting is that I've been receiving emails for over a year, maybe two, intended for this guy. Apparently our email addresses at a particular email service provider are very similar, and people would type his incorrectly. Since we both have the same name, it's understandable.

At first I thought these were all some sort of junk mail. But they followed a pattern. Apparently he is a well respected videographer who travels the world filming special projects. Nice. (Maybe he's really me in another life?--hence my quotation above)

I'm not really sure how he figured out who I am or why he asked me to join his social network, but when I checked out his social network site (which talked about what he does for a living) along with his email address (which is almost identical to mine), I realized the connection. (You realize, of course, that this could only happen in a digital world with palm-sized, time-warping transporter devices, right?)

Even more amazingly, the "other" Tim Tyson recently finished projects with the British Council about Global Schools Partnerships. Amazingly, the last year I was a school principal, the Director of Bilateral Programmes from the British Council came to visit my school. She was interested in setting up partnerships between the UK and my school. And now the other Tim Tyson is shooting video about these projects?! What are the odds, I ask—even demand?!

The multi-year-long bizarre mystery of the Tim Tyson emails has been solved! But I save the best for last...

2. Imagine getting an unexpected email from a former student who writes this sentence: "I have come to realize that doing what is comfortable or popular tends to be far less rewarding than doing what is right." Now, this young man is only 18! He apparently has become somewhat of an activist for issues related to respect and social justice "for historically marginalized groups." His efforts have earned him national recognition, honors, and some significant opportunities.

My first encounter with younger students who felt a moral imperative to act on issues of social justice came during the Ronald Reagan years. (To cut big government spending, Reagan eliminated funding for homeless shelters thereby forcing the homeless to literally live on the streets.) Shortly thereafter, one of my 8th grade students first saw homeless people in downtown Atlanta. He was from an affluent home and had no idea such a thing could exist in our country. He was outraged, and, as an 8th grader, on his own, took it upon himself to launch a letter-writing campaign to the Georgia governor to have the issue addressed.

I've known many such young people since then—all with an inner calling directing their efforts to make the world a better place. I celebrate all of these young people who, at a very early age, feel compelled to act for positive change.

Their lives color the world with hope.

* Yes, I stole that line from a tweet by Miles Kahn, a producer for The Daily Show. That's actually part of what he said about tonight's show. I laughed out loud when I read his tweet.

Philip Bloom mentioned, in his master class yesterday, a file utility I had not heard of before, one that seems brilliant to me:  ShotPut Pro.  This program will copy your media files from their source (camera card) to up to 3 locations simultaneously.  Brilliant!

I think that always having an untouched copy of your original media files and a working copy of them is always a bright idea.  This practice not only gives you the option of having an emergency backup of your files in case of drive failure or theft, but provides you with some measure of future-proofing your media files for later use—perhaps in projects using CODECs we don't even have today.

I also use BackBlaze to automatically and continuously sync all of my data off site.  The three important parts of that last sentence are:  off site, continuously, and above all:  automatically!  BackBlaze is a steal of a deal at only $50 per machine per year for unlimited storage!  I just do my work using my machines, and BackBlaze is always keeping my offsite backup up to date.

If you were doing professional projects, where setting up the shoot required a significant investment or was time sensitive (can't be easily repeated, for example), using locally redundant copies of the original media and off site backups is essential!

Today Apple sold its 10,000,000,000th (that's billionth) song at the iTunes Store—all in less than 7 years. The music industry can gripe all it wants, but Apple has made them a lot of money they would otherwise have lost to file sharing!

Today's Business Insider has this headline: Blockbuster Collapses: Shutting Down 500 Stores In Desperate Bid To Save $200 Million. I'm actually shocked they survived as long as they did. They ended last year almost $1,000,000,000 in debt.

By closing 500 of their weakest stores, they hope to reduce operating expenses by $200 million. They are also exploring other ways to increase liquidity and find new emerging distribution channels.

Let me offer them a touch of advice. Liquidate now and save everyone the misery to come.

We are entering a new age of cool! Apple's iPhone is a game changer!

The bike wheel contains all you need so that no sensors or additional electronics need to be added to the frame and an existing bike can be retrofitted with the blink of an eye. ...

By using a series of sensors and a Bluetooth connection to the user's iPhone, which can be mounted on the handlebars, the wheel can monitor the bicycle's speed, direction and distance traveled, as well as collect data on air pollution and even the proximity of the rider's friends. ...

The Copenhagen Wheel is part of a more general trend: that of inserting intelligence in our everyday objects and of creating a smart support infrastructure around ourselves for everyday life... The Wheel has a smart lock: if somebody tries to steal it, it goes into a mode where the brake regenerates the maximum amount of power, and sends you a text message. So in the worst case scenario the thief will have charged your batteries before you get back your bike."

(Via MIT’s big wheel in Copenhagen.)

Yesterday I listened to a presenter at Emory who reminded me of something I read years ago when he said it, "The opposite of love isn't hate. It's fear."

We live in such fearful times. And I don't think all fear is unhealthy at all. But this free hugs movement, started by Juan Mann a few years back, points us in a positive direction marked by kindness and acceptance. Check out pictures of huggers from around the world.

He started a movement that has spread around the world. I'm including this clip from Scotland, though there are many videos on YouTube about Free Hugs.

When it gives people the opportunity to create and share (over 1.5 million views of this video) beyond the grip of corporate ownership.

A tag or word cloud is a collection of tags or words (or both) that are most commonly used in a speech, on a blog, in an article, etc. Below is a current word cloud for my blog. It refreshes automatically twice a day; so, it will change as the content of my blog changes. If you click on an word in the cloud, you should be taken to the Google search results for that word.

The tag cloud in my sidebar is different. It is restricted to tags only and not all of the words on my blog. Clicking on a word in the tag cloud in the sidebar of my blog will take you to all of the posts that use that tag.

The larger the word, the more often it appears on my blog at that moment.

This tag cloud is provided by Tagul.