Hidden Peanuts

As I write this, Digg.com is out of service. Slashdot has a bit of info on the situation.

Digg built its brand as a site where users get to pick the top tech news stories, vote, and the leaders get posted on the front page. It’s been very popular, with a user base growing by leaps and bounds.

Earlier today, someone released a string of hexadecimal code online that enables decryption of HD-DVDs. This opens the door for widespread piracy of the films, in the same way that CDs and DVDs are affected now. Naturally, a number of tech-focused sites posted about this, and many were served takedown notices from the MPAA on the grounds that this code violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Digg administrators complied, and removed a story or two about the code from their site.

Users instantly rioted, and the site descended into mob rule. New story submissions were spammed with links and jokes involving the code, reposting it as many times as possible. The site became unusable for casual readers like myself, with absolutely nothing else getting highlighted. Digg admins eventually gave in, saying they wouldn’t take down any more code references. But that didn’t placate the angry users, and now the whole site is down.

I’m not going to go into the right or wrong of Digg giving in to the takedown notice or the original release of the cracked code. That issue aside, I’m still very bothered by this whole scenario. Digg was built on radical trust of users, and today they tore the site apart. There is a fine line to walk when giving average people access to such power. At an earlier date I would have pointed to Digg as a pretty good (but admittedly not perfect) example of this trust in action. But suddenly the site serves equally well as an example of mob rule horribly exploiting this trust. Users could have handled the controversy in a much more civil fashion and had a fascinating discussion of the issues with admins. But instead of sitting down and figuring out where to go from here, the groupthink mob instinct kicked in.

I’m not yet sure what lesson can be taken from all this or what point I’m making, but I do know I certainly need to think about it a lot more.

I have a an odd fascination with pointless data that will never be of real use to me in daily life. Here’s a few links in that spirit:

Enter in a tracking number from any service - UPS, USPS, FedEX, or DHL - to PackageMapping.com and this site does a whole suite of processing on the tracking information. You can view the raw timestamps just like on each carrier’s official site, as well as view a map of progress, an RSS feed or email notifications, a grand total transit time, and a calculated average speed of your delivery. My recent order from Barnes & Noble made it here in 48 hours and 45 minutes, with an average speed of 61.52mph. A lot of these features (especially the RSS feed) really should be provided by the shippers themselves. But until they do, this works nicely.

I recently received a “bag of crap” from woot.com. Periodically they sell a random pile of items for $1 under that name. My package included a Thermohawk 200 no touch thermometer. It measures the infrared radiation coming off an object, instead of the more traditional air or interior temperature. So, for example, my microwaved pizza was 118 degrees. My laptop’s screen is running at 86 degrees. By and large it seems pretty accurate compared to my more traditional thermometer, but I’m a bit concerned that my forehead measures as 91.5F… Of course, I have no practical use for the thing, but for $1? Not too shabby.

360voice.com has a fun gimmick - it monitors the progress of your Xbox Live gamer profile, and automatically updates a blog as if it was written by your console. You can see what my Xbox thinks of me here.

That’s all for now!

Today I posted the first entry in my year long project of taking a photo every day:

I used the opportunity to play with my new Gorillapod tripod, which can be wrapped around anything (A pole lamp in this case).

New pictures will show up in this Flickr set. I may not upload them every day, but one will definitely be taken every day.

I’m especially excited because last time I did this project, I didn’t think of it in time to run an exact calendar year. Now I get to fix that mistake! Here’s the previous set if you’re interested.

I’ve been tagged!

Off the top of my head, and in no way do I promise they’re interesting:

1. Except for one visit to Hawaii, I’ve never been west of the Mississippi. I’m hoping to change that this year.
2. My favorite kareoke song is Monster Mash. But I prefer to handle the backup vocals.
3. I was one question short of making the second round of Jeopardy tryouts.
4. I share a few genes with Almanzo Wilder, husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
5. I’ve been in a few musicals, even somehow scamming my way into a role of ‘featured dancer’ once. When almost no males try out for roles, times get desperate

Four people who should fill this out too: Todd, Harley/Mr. J, Eli, and Libraryman. My world is quickly running out of those who are untagged.

By no means is this an all-inclusive list.

http://www.pat2pdf.org/ - This site lets you download a whole U.S. patent in one pdf file, as opposed to the official registry’s method of one page at a time. I made a couple of our researching faculty members really happy with this link.

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/scout.php - See which of your Flickr photos have been featured on the Explore page. Four of my year in photos project made the cut! (On a related note, I’m going to revive that project for 2007)

This primer/guide has been invaluable as I start to think about getting an HDTV. So many acronyms and numbers! Unlike a lot of more technical tv choice guides, this one is anchored with a dose of reality.

Beth of LibGaming invited me to iLike, a social recommendation engine for iTunes. It takes up a bit more of my screen real estate than I’d like, but otherwise seems pretty useful so far.

I got an iPod Nano! (Just the 2gb version, that’s still far more music than I can listen to while running.) Combined with the Nike pedometer sport kit and an armband, it has completely changed the way I exercise. The online stat tracking and comparisons with friends is really addicting. Plus, I run outdoors more now that I can keep reasonably accurate track of how far I’ve gone. I may write more about this at some point.

Lastly, I recently got to try the Nintendo Wii at a store. Now I’m going to have to buy one. Even a simple driving game is addictive!

A couple of people have asked me where I disappeared to since I last posted, and this summer in general. Nowhere exciting this month I’m afraid - I’ve just been extremely busy. My job turned one year old a few days ago, and I’m in the midst of experiencing my first start of the fall semester there. I wasn’t quite ready for the rush of professors wanting to bring their classes in. But I’m not complaining, it is definitely good to be useful. Oh, and I’m also officially Faculty now! The title change doesn’t affect what I do from day to day, but the recognition is very nice.

I also did a lot of traveling this summer. I visited:

-New Orleans
-Rochester
-Pittsburgh
-An unintended night in Atlanta
-Chicago
-Passed through Nashville

I feel like I’m leaving something off that list, hmm…

In what free time I’ve had, I’ve gotten a decent amount of reading done. I finally got to finishing the Chronicles of Narnia, I’m well into the Dresden Files series, and fit in a couple of random novels in between.

In gaming, I really didn’t get to it that much this summer. But I did play through Ultimate Spider-Man for the Xbox. It’s a very short game (I finished it in a total of about 6 hours), but also very well executed. The voice acting and plot are of a surprising caliber compared to most games, let alone comic book based ones. I paid $5 for it, which was more than fair. Oh, and of course my DS got a workout while traveling.

My Netflix subscription also atrophied a bit - just didn’t have time to watch much. But I’ve lately been catching up on HBO’s Entourage, and loving every episode. After I’m done with that, I plan on re-watching all the Star Trek movies. Today’s news that the original Kirk series will be re-released with updated special effects inspired me. It’s been years since I saw most of them. But my in-theater movie highlight of the summer? Snakes on a Plane. Great cheesy fun.

On the gadget front, I upgraded my phone to a Razr. The V3m specifically, and I absolutely love it. The 1.3 megapixel camera in it performs surprisingly well outside, although it has problems indoors.

One random highlight of the summer: A behind the scenes tour of the US Space & Rocket Center’s archives, as part of our work with them to digitize their collection. I’m more than a bit of a space geek at heart, so it was an especially amazing collection to me.

So yes, life is good. I’m mostly looking forward to this oppressive southern summer’s end. Maybe I’m a wimp, but I don’t know how anybody lived here before air conditioning arrived.

Next week my fall/winter travel set begins: Disney World (!), Buffalo for a wedding, Nashville for LITA Forum, various holiday travels, and who knows what else.

On a final technical note, I see that my category links aren’t working correctly. They miss all posts made since I switched from categories to tags. Whoops! I’ll try to get that fixed soon.

With today’s announcement of new travel restrictions, there has understandably been a lot of confusion.

This morning on the Today show I heard a brief mention that all electronics are now banned from carryon items. This information persisted throughout the day, and the local NBC station here even did an extensive piece on this fact during the evening news.

According to the TSA’s own FAQ about the new restrictions, this is not true.

I’ve also seen news coverage repeatedly state that travelers will be expected to taste the few liquids still allowed (baby bottles, for example) in front of security screeners. Again, the TSA’s FAQ says this isn’t true.

I’m inclined to cut the morning news some slack, as the information was new and everyone was still processing it. But by the evening, some basic fact checking really should have been accomplished.

I’m finally back from a whirlwind two weeks of travel, during which I visited: New Orleans, Nashville, Atlanta, Rochester, Pittsburgh, and the Thousand Islands area. Atlanta was not an intended destination, but thanks to Delta’s atrocious customer service I got to spend the night. That’s a horror story for another time. Needless to say I’m exhausted, but it was more than worth the craziness to see so many family members and friends.

I’m suffering from information overload now that I have time to sit down and see all that I missed. My list of RSS feeds has never been quite so intimidating.

I had an interesting experience at a gas station in rural Pennsylvania. There I got to use the RFID chip embedded in my new debit card for the first time. While seamless (just wave the card, no button pushing necessary at all), the process makes me a bit nervous. Something about removing the safeguard of a PIN feels wrong, and I’m placing a lot of faith in my bank’s ability to make my chip uncopyable. This wouldn’t bother me in, say, a library card. But in a card so closely tied to my financial identity, it’s another matter entirely.

An interesting note: The Wordpress plugin I use to display what I’m currently reading on my site (Now Reading) can’t handle books that aren’t published yet, so I’ve disabled it for the moment. If anyone is interested, I’m currently in the middle of Stephen King’s upcoming Lisey’s Story, which I grabbed a preprint of at ALA.

What an amazing day! I met Neil Gaiman! (Thanks for spotting his signing, Beth!) And oh yeah, other great stuff happened too

The trip here was relatively uneventful, thankfully! Some construction around Nashville’s airport had me worried, but I persevered. Kudos once again to Southwest.

Shared a taxi ride from the airport with a fellow attendee I met on the plane. Librarians are so very friendly!

So I checked in to the dorm I’m staying at, and caught a shuttle downtown. Picked up my conference materials (the gigantic book of events is the most intimidating thing ever), and hit the exhibit floor. Google had a much larger booth than last year’s table and a banner. And Elvis is there, too. Talked to a few vendors related to work, again everyone was really friendly. How does everybody have a connection to Huntsville? Completely randomly ran into Beth, after we both tried and failed to attend events that were overflowing out the door. We returned to the conference floor, where she noticed Neil Gaiman signing Anansi Boys! Not only that, but giving out free hardback copies to be signed.

Later, went to Membership Meeting I. It was… anticlimactic to say the least. Less than 75 people attended, which is less than the one half of one percent of membership necessary to vote on issues. Later more people showed up, but it didn’t matter anyway since nothing was even up for vote. But in the interest of public disclosure, here’s the notes I took:

-ALA 2006 official attendance: 20,843 attendees registered, and 4494 vendors. Less than 1000 fewer than attended the last event in Orlando, which isn’t bad considering the worries about New Orleans.

-The recent dues increase will be used for a number of projects as part of an overall grand plan for 2010. Some projects are more member input, a diversity web course, and the development of a full strategic/financial plan over the next four months will outline this in more detail.

-Amazingly, ALA has no demographic data on members for things like salary. This will be addressed soon and used to evaluate a potential tiered membership fee structure.

After that, I strolled over to the opening session. Madeline Albright was the keynote speaker, and did a pretty good job. She was interesting, but I question whether going as in depth on foreign policies as she did was relevant to the conference. Mayor Nagin also appeared, as did the lieutenant governor of the state and a videoed message from Winton Marsalis.

Next, I met up with Beth and her roommate Alyssa for dinner. Mmm po’boys! Got to see a bit of the French Quarter in the process.

And last but certainly not least, we attended the Bloggers’ Bash Leslie Berger threw in her Hilton suite. I put a ton of faces with blogs I read, and had some great conversations. Gulf Coast librarians were invited too, and they had some very moving stories to tell. One thing in particular they wanted passed on: Please do not donate any more books to them. They are simply out of storage space, and money is far more needed.

On that topic, it is very surreal to see the places featured in so much news coverage of Katrina last year. Most of the houses the shuttle bus and taxis took me by still have the spraypainted marks from search and rescue teams, and probably one in three houses has some sort of active repair going on (and many more need it). New Orleans has a long way to go. But even so, it is open for business. Everyone has been extremely welcoming, and my only real regret is that the St. Charles streetcar isn’t back in service yet. I would have loved to ride it from Loyola to the convention center.

For those I met tonight, I am horrible with names. Would you mind dropping me an e-mail to say hi and force my brain to make a connection? Haefele@gmail.com

All the pictures I took today are here.

I stayed out later than I intended, but it was worth it! Now: sleep.

Some friends and I have decided to take a trip to Disney World this fall. I haven’t been since I was about six years old, so I’m really excited. After picking a hotel, I was curious to see what it was like beyond the official site description.

One Flickr search later, I had 613 photos to look through.