cellio | Entries tagged with internet

My congregation has a writing group and we'd like to be able to share some of our work with each other and anyone else who cares. Our own web site doesn't yet support blogging; I'm told it's coming but not soon. So I want to set up a shared blog or journal somewhere, with posting access restricted to the members and commenting open to everyone. I'm looking for suggestions about where to do this.

Some factors to consider:

Most group members are minimally proficient with internet tools and concepts; I'm the outlier. So the interface needs to be pretty simple and resilient.
There will be 10-15 individuals posting to this and I'd like it to be clear who's posting. (I don't want to share one account.)
There's no money for this. I'm willing to chip in up to about $50 a year, but I can't fund individual accounts for each poster.
If the site is ad-supported it should be tasteful; I've seen LJ ads recently (when accidentally logged out) and that's just plain obnoxious.
For this application I don't think threaded comments are a requirement. (I consider them essential for my own journal, but not for this.)
Syndication (RSS or Atom) is a must, but I assume they all do that. (More specifically, I want to be able to read this blog via LJ.)
I have a personal aversion to Blogspot because it's very hard for me to post comments there. (OpenID seems to be broken and their captchas are extremely difficult for me.)

I find myself leaning toward Dreamwidth because of the ad-free familiar interface, but I don't know if asking people to create individual accounts would be too much of a burden. Can I have accounts set up there with just names and email addresses and an empty shell of a profile? (Can I do that and just hand out login ID/password pairs to the group members?) And there may well be something much better for this project; I didn't so much shop for a blogging platform as stumble into LJ because of friends. I haven't used the others to publish, only to comment.

Thoughts?

It's clean-out-the-browser-tabs day:

From gardenfey comes this fun video about what motivates us. The presentation is engaging; I didn't mind at all that it's ten minutes long.

shewhomust posted this item about spoilers and meta-spoilers. Heh.

Big numbers can be hard to understand without some localization. With that in mind, try this visualization of the gulf oil spill, linked by siderea.

And speaking of interesting visualizations, dagonell posted this depiction of Earth, from tallest mountain to deepest ocean trench.

Also from dagonell: every country is the best at something, though, as he points out, some fare better than others.

This visualization isn't about the planet; it's about the changes in Facebook privacy over time.

Not a visualization: How to keep someone with you forever through the power of sick systems. Linked by lots of people; I first saw it from metahacker. I have not lived that kind of abuse, for which I am very thankful, but this tracks with what I've heard.

And on the lighter (err) side: a light saber strong enough to burn flesh -- for sale for $200. Wow. And yikes. Link from astroprisoner.

When I started hearing about Google Buzz several days ago I mentally filed it under "could be interesting; look into it when you've got some time". Then in the last day or so I started hearing how they'd rolled it out. It sounds like the Buzz team made two decisions that were individually marginal and, in combination, terrible. The first decision was to automatically create links between you and your most frequent contacts. The second decision was to make links public by default. The privacy concerns here are pretty obvious, I trust.

A third decision was unambiguously (IMO) bad: they made it opt-out instead of opt-in. I am having trouble thinking of a single case where it would be a good idea to automatically, and without notification, make changes to existing accounts. [Edit: I meant good for the customer, and not counting things like "hey, we gave you more disk space". I mean new behaviors.] Auto-on for new accounts is quite defensible (with documentation); changing the behavior of accounts that people set up on the basis of a different implicit contract, no. Especially if you haven't previously sent out an update to your privacy policy.

There's one more problem with Buzz: opt-out doesn't really work. If you do the obvious thing and click on the "turn Buzz off" link, all that does is remove a shortcut. Your connections are still there. That's just bad engineering.

Google says they have heard the feedback and will fix things in a few days. And, while I can't verify this without a second account, some people believe that deleting your profile keeps Buzz at bay. [Edit: confirmed with the help of another gmail user, thanks.]

Buzz could, potentially, be a useful tool, though it remains to be seen whether the world really needed yet another attempt at a social-networking site. But their roll-out of it has left a bad taste in my mouth, so I'm likely to wait a while, until I hear positive reviews from people whose opinions I value, before I touch it. And I'll have to be certain that they aren't publishing information that (otherwise) exists only in my mailbox. Linking to my public Picasa album is fine; it's public (same as the vast majority of this journal). Telling the world who I correspond with and how often, however, is not.

Dear Pittsburgh CLO: I gave you my phone number so you could contact me if there were problems with my theatre tickets. You lost points by calling to ask for a charitable donation, and you lost lots of points when your agent argued with my labelling of the call as a solicitation. His claim: you're not selling anything but asking for a donation, so that's not a solicitation. I recommend you buy him a dictionary. Unfortunately, you'll be doing it with your own money, not mine.

I'm used to size variation in women's clothing. (Why oh why can't women's jeans use waist and inseam like men's?) And I'm used to minor variations in shoes in US sizes (I seem to wear a size 7.75, which doesn't exist). I had not realized that there is significant variation in sizes on the (tighter) European scale. The size-38 Naot sandals I just tried are nearly half an inch shorter than the size-38 Birkies that fit (and that I bought). They're both the same style, your basic two-strap slip-in sandal.

Dani's company watched searching for evil recently. It's an overview of Internet security issues -- probably nothing new, but he spoke well of it so I want to bookmark it for when I've got a spare hour.

IANA considerations for TLAs was making the rounds at my company this week.

Via goldsquare comes this bizarre story: a man lost parental rights to his younger child, appealed, and was then killed in a car accident. Now state child-welfare agents want to support the appeal, so the child can share in his estate. The court says this is uncharted territory.

Specialized seasonal question: can anyone tell me, in the next 8 hours, if I use high-holy-day melodies in Hallel for Rosh Chodesh tomorrow morning? It's the last day of Av, not the first day of Elul (so we don't blow shofar yet).

( funny image and video behind the cut )

What happens to your digital life -- your email, your online games, your social-networking sites, your online banking, etc -- when you die? Some companies are selling services akin to safe-deposit boxes, so your heirs will be able to get your passwords and stuff. It's an interesting idea, but I think it has some (human-engineering) flaws.

The article raises privacy concerns, but that's the least of the practical issues to my mind. I don't know how I would blend encryption and the ability for a non-tech-savvy recipient to use it, but I think that problem could be solved. (Aside: the non-technical user is going to need a lot more than just a list of username/password pairs.) The much bigger problem I see is maintenance. How many passwords do you have? How often do you change them? Are you going to remember to update the records in your digital safe-deposit box every single time? Only for the important ones, you say? So when you created that throwaway account on eBay to buy one item you didn't bother, and then later you started selling there and didn't think to add it? Until the stored copy is as easy to use as clicking "remember password" in your web browser, it's going to be hard for people to use such a service properly. (And even "remember password" doesn't always do the right thing when you change a password.)

There's also a behavior issue on the other end: the service, of necessity, relies on someone asking for the stored contents. How does the heir know to do that? Can he do it via a phone call? I'm picturing my mother trying to deal with something like this for my father's accounts -- my mother who has never so much as used a web browser or sent email. It's a foreign world to her. Would she realize that it could be important for her to access my father's email? (Would she know if his email provider is auto-billing his credit card until he says to stop?) Or would she assume there's nothing there that matters, if she even thought about it at all?

All that said, the article does make me realize that this sort of thing is important. If something were to happen to Dani, I wouldn't know where all his digital homes are and which ones matter. Having this information available -- if we can also remember to keep it up to date, of course -- would be valuable. But we don't need a service with unproven security and high subscription fees for that. I think it's time to buy a pair of $5 thumb drives to keep in the drawers with the passports and insurance papers.

Having completed the first pass at digitizing or replacing our folk music on old media (we still need to do some proof-listening), Dani and I are merging our iTunes libraries so this might be easier going forward. Oof. We're up to "S" so far. "T" is big because it includes all the "The"s. Tracking changes (e.g. to tagging) going forward is still going to be a bit of a challenge.

Was Joe Biden president of the US for about 5 minutes today? (We were watching in a conference room at work, and it was several minutes past noon before they got to Obama's swearing-in. So I'm curious.)

In English we say "it's all Greek to me". What do speakers of other languages say? Whom do they implicate? Wonder no more; Language Log has a nice graph of some of these. I admit to being surprised by China's designee.

What if the stop sign were designed by corporations? (link from

filkerdave)

As

dsrtao said, an airline charging a cancellation fee when they rebooked you on a downed flight is near-canonical chutzpah. (Yes, I saw the note that they recanted.)

This story of a mailing list gone wrong (from Microsoft) made me laugh. And sigh, because while I haven't had to deal with quite that level of mess, even 20ish years after mailing lists started to become broadly accessible, there are still an awful lot of people out there who don't behave appropriately.

There's an interesting discussion of filtering and politeness on social networks over on CommYou.

Note to self: if Shalom Hartman Institute is too expensive this summer, the Aleph kallah might be an alternative. It could be good or it could be too esoteric for me; I can't tell from the available information. When they post class descriptions I'll have a better idea. I had a similar concern about NHC but it turned out to be good, so I'm keeping an open mind. Has anyone reading this gone to one of these?

I bought a new calendar today and, to my surprise, among the candle-lighting times on each page it lists Pittsburgh. (Usually we don't make the cut.) While looking at this I noticed that sunset in September is moving by about 12 minutes per week, but that in March it only moves by about 8 minutes a week. Shouldn't it be symmetrical? (The delta for sunrise and sunset changes over the course of the year, with the widest swings being at equnoxes and the smallest ones at solstices. I grok that; I don't grok that they don't match.)

Friday night I saw something unusual at services: a man lit candles and a woman made kiddush and there was no special occasion dictating that. For all that egalitarianism is a core principle in my movement, I don't think I have ever seen a woman make kiddush in our sanctuary before, unless there were special circumstances (sisterhood service, a bat mitzvah, etc). Gee, maybe there's hope that someday I will be offered that honor after all. (There's still another barrier: there is a strong meme of giving that pair of honors to a couple. This was violated this week, too.)

Yesterday morning after services our newest rabbi (hmm, I need a shorthand notation for him -- the others are "senior rabbi" and "associate rabbi") talked with the group about adult education. He wanted to know what we want to learn, when we want to learn it, and how we want to learn it. It was a good discussion; I wish im luck in distilling down feedback that, in aggregate, meant "all of it". :-) He seemed a little surprised by the idea that, actually, we'd love to learn on Shabbat -- ideally right after services, but late afternoon leading into havdalah would be acceptable to some. I hope that idea bears fruit. (Of course, he was asking the group of people who self-selected to stay around after services for the discussion... but every option doesn't need to appeal to every congregant, only to a critical mass. And we also discussed the idea of giving the same class multiple times, in different kinds of timeslots -- a teacher's dream, but for some reason we don't tend to do it.)

At the end of the discussion he said something interesting, so after it broke up I asked him "did you just imply that you're available for individual study?" and he said yes. Heh. I'll be in touch.

Short takes:

I assume that everyone has by now seen Jon Stewart on election hypocrisy. You might not have seen Language Log's discourse analysis on Karl Rove.

(I have not posted about the election; it's not because I don't care, but because there's so much as to overwhelm and lots of other people are already posting good, thoughtful pieces.)

I recently found myself in a discussion about internet discussions and used the phrase on the internet nobody knows you're a dog. I later went looking for the cartoon; it shouldn't surprise me that it has a Wikipedia entry, but it did surprise me a little that Google suggested the phrase after I'd typed only "on the internet". That real-time search-guessing thing is good sometimes. (I also went looking for a recipe for a dish I ate last night at Ali Baba's, and when I'd typed only "mujdara" it offered two completions, "recipe" and "calories".)

Speaking (sort of) of internet discoveries, this article from Real Live Preacher taught me about the Caganer, a figure we don't often see in nativity scenes these days but apparently quite normal in times past.

This article on using the internet for identity theft (link from Raven) didn't have anything new for me, but it's a good summary to give to people just getting started. It did remind me how annoying I find the canned security questions used by most banks -- things like "mother's maiden name" and "city of your birth" were way too easy to crack even before the net was ubiquitious. (And the ones that aren't tend to be non-deterministic, like "favorite color".) Fortunately, in most cases your bank doesn't really care about the answer; it's just a password. So lying adds security at little cost, assuming you can remember the lie. (What do you mean my first pet wasn't named "as375m~@z"? :-) )

With some trepidation (I'm never sure which upgraders are recoverable if they turn out to be bad ideas), I installed Firefox 3.0 at work. I haven't really put it through its paces yet, but so far it seems to be less of a resource hog, and it seems to build in some features that previously required add-ons (accessibility stuff, better tab/session management, etc).

One problem: the new "smart locater bar" is bloated out the wazoo. I'm used to being able to see the last dozen URLs I typed in by hand; now they've cluttered that up. Fortunately, on day one of the release someone has already published the OldBar extension to fix it. I love open interfaces and large user communities. Hey, it's already up to version 1.2. :-)

I haven't figured out how to disable the star icon that, on single click, bookmarks the current page. I prefer to be a little more intentional about my bookmarking, and that icon is too close to other things I want to click on.

I expected that some add-ons might not be compatable with the new version; that always happens. IE Tab and the PDF viewer were fixed while I was typing this. But Firefox 3 is also picky now; Convo is compatable but Firefox won't install it because it does not provide for secure updates. Bah -- let that be my decision, Mozilla, not yours. Ask me; don't lock me out. I won't be upgrading my home machine or laptop until this is addressed.

The buttons in the toolbar are, um, "special". I haven't yet figured out how to change them to something that's easier to see. The gray treatment might be trendy and all, but it doesn't work in a reverse-video environment, and I expect to see something in every button slot even if that button is not currently available/meaningful. Right now I've got a big expanse of black where my "stop" button should be. That works because I know that's the "stop" slot, but I shouldn't have to know that. I sure don't know all the various things that show up along the bottom of the frame, for instance.

Amazon's site has some problems in 3.0 -- the search dialogue isn't doing the right things with colors. Typing light text in a box with a white background is no good. This worked yesterday in Firefox 2; I didn't check right before upgrading, so I can't say for sure that it's not Amazon's bug, but I don't think so. (Hmm... on the other hand, I can't find my wish list on the main page either now, and that's probably not Firefox's doing. I was going there at all to test a library-lookup plugin; that'll have to wait.)

That's the quick look.

For the last several days there has been an increasingly-tedious discussion on the (SCA) kingdom mailing list about an incident involving another kingdom's monarchs and the corporation. Well, was until yesterday, when a tedious discussion of chocolate milk took over the mailing list. (The prompt for that is that the dairy farm that produced the chocolate milk sold at the Pennsic site has gone out of business.)

Lesson learned: you can't necessarily make tedious discussions go away, but you can displace them. I must remember this. Maybe I should choose a few likely topics to start discussions of, when needed.

It might be past time for me to just shut down the moderated version of the mailing list. (I run a mailing list that receives all the traffic from the open list, and I send along the subset I deem to be appropriate. Some days that's everything and some days, like today, it's 10%.) There aren't a lot of subscribers, so the moderation effort per subscriber is high, and don't most of us have procmail or gmail auto-sorting or Outlook rules or suchlike by now? The mailing list can overwhelm an inbox at times, but it doesn't need to go to the general inbox. I have a few lists that pile up until I clean them out every week or two. Is that approach common now? It takes more effort for me to moderate a message (either yea or nay) than to just delete it from a mail folder, and if most people don't care... (If I decide I'm inclined toward this I will of course bring it up with my subscribers; I'm just thinking out loud here.)

This Shabbat was my congregation's annual retreat. Another congregant put it well: this morning (parshat Emor) we read about the appointed times of the calendar (the festivals), and to many of us, this retreat is another such time. I haven't missed one of these retreats since joining the congregation, and it's hard to imagine something that would cause me to miss one now.

( Read more... )

Recently (to investigate something), I added a third-party tracker to some of my posts in order to see where the hits are coming from. This was meant to be temporary, but I've found it interesting to see just how big the internet community is, so I've continued to use it at times. So, I don't know who any of y'all are (and publishing on the internet means I might never know, and that's cool), but I'd like to say hello to my regular readers in Italy, Moldova, Switzerland, and Cambodia (!).

We are having weird modem luck. I thought all DSL modems were basically the same, but apparently not. Our old (bought in 1999) modem has started dropping signal -- it's eratic, but when it happens it lasts for a few hours. My DSL provider mailed me a new one (a level of service I did not expect) and it's reliable but universally slow. So our current mode of operation is to use the old one until it drops and then switch to the new one for a few hours. Weird. So I think we need to buy a new modem that is both reliable and fast, but since I thought they were all the same I now don't know what to look for. (We have basic DSL. Someday I hope they well run FIOS to our neighborhood and we'll switch.)

Recent conversation:
Dani: We're out of (book)shelf space in the library again.
Me: Maybe we should assemble that last bookcase we bought.
Dani: We're out of shelf space in the library again.
Me: You built it and filled it already? So we need to buy more?
Dani: We're out of wall space to put bookcases...

(I assert that he is incorrect on that last point, but it hinges on a dispute between practicality and purity. Or something like that.)

We bought some CFLs (in two different color-tones) to try again, and installed some in the ceiling fixture in the living room (the packaging contained no dire warnings about that, unlike the last one). Freaky white and bright, so some tuning is called for, but there might be a bigger problem: flicker. The switch is a dimmer, but we know CFLs don't dim so the switch is at max. (Truth to tell, we don't dim regular bulbs in that fixture, either.) Does the mere presence of a dimmer switch doom CFLs? That would be annoying.

A couple links:

A few nights ago I made these lamb chops, which I've made before and which are amazingly good.

The ten plagues, done in peeps (from someone on my subscription list, but I've lost track of who). Twisted! Funny!

Last week Dani got email from someone he knew in Toronto lo these many years ago. She and her family were driving to DC; did he want to visit with them on their way down? We said sure, and invited them for dinner Sunday. She and her husband are friendly people; their teenage sons were shy but pleasant, and they appreciated access to graphic novels and an internet connection while the rest of us were talking. :-) (One of them was excited to find Diablo installed on one of Dani's computers...)

The adults had obviously done some research. During dinner they said "please tell us about the SCA" and "so what about the house on the flatbed?". I googled both of us later and the page for the little house on the flatbed does not come up in the first half-dozen pages of results, so I'm not sure how they got there. (Of course, my home page does, from there you can get to my page of SCA links, and from there...) I, lacking information beyond her first name, had done no such research; I hope I was not socially deficient in these modern times.

Both Dani's and my desktop computers have been gradually getting sluggish over time. Dani went shopping and found that we could each triple our memory for $50. Ah, much better! Dani was kind enough to install mine for me. (We have a clean division of labor when it comes to household IT: he does hardware and I do system administration. Things go more smoothly when we do not try to switch.)

Dani did another hardware installation this weekend: late last week the water flow to the shower head was, suddenly, extremely diminished. Advice found on the internet suggested banging on the head and/or pipes to shake loose any gunk that might be in there; we decided not to do that without replacement hardware on hand, 'cause some water is better than none at all. (I should mention, in passing, that it took me a couple tries to find any useful information here. Who knew that some people try to deliberately reduce flow to their shower heads? Err, isn't that what the tub knobs are for? But I digress.) In the end, Dani bought a $5 head and simply replaced it; the new one is actually better than the old one. (Another in the "who knew?" department: you can spend $100 on a showerhead. It had better be gold-plated, water-softening, temperature-regulating, and massaging, for that price!)

A week ago Monday I took all the cats in for checkups, and two got blood drawn for tests. Tuesday night I got a message: um, err, we lost some of it. I had the last appointments of the night, and apparently one vial got left in the centrefuge... so I had to take Erik (I'm glad it was Erik! He's easy!) back to be stuck again on Wednesday. They were apologetic, but sigh. (Everyone's basically normal, locally scoped.)

Shabbat morning was a little more rabbi-heavy than usual. Both of our rabbis were there (until it was time to leave for the later service, anyway). We also had our incipient third rabbi (yes, now it can be told... we were looking for an educator and got one who's also a rabbi; mabfan, you know him). And our associate rabbi's aunt, who is also a rabbi, was visiting. I'm glad that day's lay torah reader isn't one to get spooked easily. :-) (Though he might not have known about the last; I was introduced to her Friday night, but I don't think she mentioned her background Saturday morning.)

The third rabbi will be focusing mostly on education (including adults). He's an excellent teacher, and I'm looking forward to having more chances to learn with him. I presume that our adult-ed program is going to get a boost; yay!

Words that are often misused #1: "periodic". To be meaningful, this word needs to be accompanied by some indication of the period. "Daily" is "periodic", but probably not what is meant in a recipe's direction to "stir periodically". :-)

Two facts that seem to be at odds with each other: (1) a lot of medieval Islamic recipes call for vinegar; and (2) Islam forbids the consumption of wine.

Our baron (who lives in a castle) shared one way to get your castle past the zoning board. I wonder how that's going to work out for the owners in the end, now that the neighbors have noticed. (Who would have thought you could build a castle on the sly in a populated area?)

Two interesting posts that showed up on my reading list within a few hours of each other, serendipitously: whom do you friend? (from

cahwyguy) and who owns the conversation? (from

jducoeur). Both have lots of comments that I haven't yet digested.

Words that are often misused #2: "rebate". A rebate is a refund of monies paid. If you give money to someone who didn't pay any (or as much as is being given out), the correct word is "gift" (or "grant", if you want to be more governmental about it). Just sayin'.

Query: can anyone reading this point me to a neutral high-level discussion of economics, that I can consume in an hour, that explains how merely pushing small amounts of money into the economy helps fend off a recession? What does the mere act of one-time spending accomplish, and does it matter whether it's splurge-buying or spending you would have done anyway? My knowledge of macro-economics is, as you can tell, a little on the spotty side. I don't care enough to read a tome, but I'd like to read something shorter, particularly if it doesn't come with an agenda. And yes, I realize that the rhetoric and the real reasons behind the stimulus package probably differ; I'm exploring the stated reason here.

Dear Company That Wants to Make Money Through a Web Site,

It's 2007. Not only have enough people to matter abandoned IE, but Firefox has been significant for years. Why is Firefox special? Because its extensions allow people to customize their browsing experience to their hearts' content. That, and tabs.

What does this mean for you? Simply that you cannot make assumptions about the browser any more. We've been blocking pop-ups for close to a decade and selectively blocking Javascript (via NoScript) for at least a couple years. We use GreaseMonkey scripts to add content to your pages (we don't care if you like it), AdBlock to remove some of the annoyances, and Stylish to rewrite your CSS. Get used to it.

If you want to win, then -- short of being a monopoly, and good luck with that on the web -- you'll have to learn to cope with this. The users -- your potential customers -- are not going to switch browsers, disable security settings, or even just turn off things we like, just to use your site, unless you're really, really important to us. Do you really want to place that bet?

No, it's not fair; my problem in using your site could well be in one of my extensions. But you know what? That doesn't matter; if it only affects your site, to me that will not seem to be my problem. If I like you a lot I'll try to debug it; if I don't I'll move on. Your only recourse is to bullet-proof your web site. Use fewer bells and whistles, and make them optional. Stop with the gratuitious Javascript (and Flash, for good measure). Do at least some testing of your site with the common Firefox extensions. Heck, write your own monitoring extension (that tracks and reports problems with your site) and offer it to your customers; we might help you out.

You do not need to use every new-fangled browser-thwarting doodad that comes along. Every time you do, your site breaks for a few more users. Designing resilient sites is not rocket science.

If the phrase "IPv6" means anything to you, I direct you to this bit of found filk passed on by

osewalrus. If you don't know what "IPv6" means but you understand why running out of internet addresses is (1) a real concern and (2) bad, you might still enjoy it.

I know, of course, that things happen more quickly on the internet than they did in the Old Days (TM). Even so, this surprised me a little.

( watch this morph before your very eyes )

passionateusers has an interesting post about effects of Twitter. Twitter is ...a web site? an RSS feed? something else?... that encourages users to answer the question "what are you doing right now?". Gah. I can't imagine being interested in following that. It's got to be a hundred times worse than the LJ users who post one-liners a dozen times a day -- "now I'm leaving for work", "ugh, bad traffic", "eww, that sandwich has seen better days", and so on. Obviously, given its popularity, Twitter has something to offer, so maybe I'm just not seeing the good side, but I am not motivated to either read or supply that kind of content. As the Creating Passionate Users post says, I don't want to know that much about someone, even someone close.

Anyway, Creating Passionate Users talks about other down-sides, most notably creating the illusion of social interaction without, you know, that part about people. There are already many trackbacks and comments, which I haven't had time to peruse yet, but I recommend the article.

Twitter isn't a new concept, of course; it's just taking an older one and pushing on it. One thing that Twitter, blogs/LJ, web fora, newsgroups, and even email have in common is that they can create social divides. I see this with some of the LJ users I know: you'll be at a party or other social gathering and a subset of people will start talking about what so-and-so posted, or won't share news because it's already been posted to LJ. We saw this with mailing lists and newsgroups too, but the LJ case is more insidious because it's not all one big feed. If I'm on, say, the SCA kingdom mailing list, I might or might not have read the post you're talking about but I saw it go by. If we're both on LJ, however, that doesn't mean you and I read the same journals -- but the "on LJ so already knows this" bit gets flipped anyway.

I try not to let my online assumptions bleed into my real-life interactions too much. If I've read something interesting that I want to talk about, I'll describe it unless it's obvious that I don't need to. ("Hey, did you see that XKCD from last week about remembering names? Oh, it was funny -- [insert summary here]. It reminded me of...") And most of the people I spend time with are good about this too, but it requires conscious attention, which makes it somewhat vulnerable. We're bound to slip up sometimes even if we do pay attention; it's certain that the people who don't pay attention will.

Back when I first got online (ARPAnet and Usenet/UUCP), the email divide was between the haves and have-nots. Today the online divide is largely between the will and will-nots -- but we have to remember that there are will-nots, and that it's not one big switch -- you can be a user of email but not LJ, LJ but not IM, IM but not Twitter, (LJ but not that journal), and so on.

Creating Passionate Users talks about the effects of a particular tool (Twitter) on the individual. That's one dimension. We also need to pay attention to the effects we have on each other because of our tool use.

Now, to be fair, it's not really just about online content versus not, either. Fundamentally, this is an issue of manners; the people who dominate party conversations with talk of their particular hobby/community/etc and assume you know and care are committing the same transgression. But the net does seem to have an amplifying effect, and it's worth paying attention to that.

Data point: it took no more than 15 minutes from the time Dani dropped me off until the time I was at the air-side concourse. (No need to go to the gate just yet; I was thirsty so I'm taking advantage of QDoba's table space for a few minutes.)

My shell provider replaced my host machine a few weeks ago, which changed the SSH certificate. On my home machine, I simply had to acknowledge that this was ok the next time I tried to connect. Using the standard client that comes with Mac OS 10, I was denied access due to the security risk. A few quality RTFM moments told me what I had to do to re-authorize the site. I was initially a bit annoyed but quickly came to realize that this is probably the better approach. How many people blindly click "ok" to prompts they don't understand? I don't think I mind my laptop, which could find itself on who knows whose rogue network, being a little more aggressive.

( Read more... )

A few days ago I got a check-out coupon for Coke Zero (which I'd bought on that trip). The text on the coupon says "we noticed you like it (not that we track that or anything)". I appreciate the sense of humor on the coupon-writer's part. (Actually, I prefer Pepsi One, but not when the price is half-again. And Pepsi One didn't give me a coupon.)

On a whim I bought a few cans of the store-brand cat food, which was on sale. Erik loved the beef-flavored one I gave him last night. Must remember that.

How to wash a cat, from osewalrus. You've probably laughed at the text version; now laugh at the video. (Speaking of cat videos, I'm glad I don't have this problem.)

This comic (forwarded to me by Dani) has a lot of truth to it.

Yesterday we finally got up into double-digit temperatures. Sure, the first digit was a "1", but I'll take it. (Monday was symmetrical: the high was 5, and the low was -5.)

This morning the parkway was uncharacteristically slow, which I discovered only once I was well down the ramp. As I was crawling along I spotted a signboard ahead. Oh good, I thought; it might say what's going on. It said "congestion ahead". Well duh. Would it have been so difficult to say how much farther ahead? (Didn't affect me; I was getting off at the next exit anyway. It could have helped others, though.

I'd sure like to know why, semi-randomly, no browser installed on my home PC will render the ThinkGeek site. The only deterministic aspect so far is that once it fails, it apparently won't work until a reboot. I even tried clearing the cache, turning the firewall off, and trying the site -- zip. (Yes, of course I immediately turned the firewall back on.) Maybe I'll pull out the laptop later.

For what I assure you is a perfectly good reason, tonight I was trying to find DVDs of the Star Wars movies in the Italian language. Searching got a little more productive once I switched to the term "guerre stellari", but it's still bringing me no joy. Looks like even if I could find them, and find them in NTSC, they'd be region 2. Oh well. But it wasn't a completely wasted effort; back-translation supplied the following titles: "Vendetta of the Sith", "The Ghost Threat", "The Empire Still Hits", and "Stellar Wars YOU - The Return of the Jedi".

Last night I learned that my former boss (the most recent ex-boss) is going on the Israel trip. He doesn't live in this city any more, so I didn't expect that. Nifty! More people I actually know in the group. (I already know less than half the group, so far.)

From passionateusers: The zone of expendability: how management feels about you.

osewalrus has an excellent post about why "stealing" wireless isn't stealing but trespassing.

On a different subject, osewalrus also had an interesting entry recently looking at legal aspects of marriage, custody, and consent a little differently.

Scott Adams on Bill Gates for president. There are worse ideas.

I was recently involved in a conversation about posting to journals (or other internet fora) and how it's important to be careful out there. I don't know that I'll say anything here that's new to most of you, but I'm going to ramble anyway.

Posts to mailing lists, newsgroups (remember those?), journals, blogs, and so on are, potentially, forever. I feel bad for the high-school and college students (and sometimes beyond) who haven't learned that yet and are going to be appalled by what they find in archives in a decade. But, of course, the same thing could happen to me too -- I'm older and I hope somewhat wiser, but that doesn't mean I'll never make a mistake. Being mindful of it, though, is a big first step.

Some people use pseudonyms or try to be anonymous on the net. When I created this journal I very briefly considered using a pseudonym, but I decided to use my real name. One reason is that part of the point of a public journal is for friends to be able to identify me. That doesn't mean I advertise this journal widely, and I try to keep it out of search engines (which doesn't work so well with RSS feeds, so that's probably doomed now). But when people I know stumble across it, I'd usually like them to know it's me. And I don't want to keep a friends-locked journal, though I do have locked entries, because I want to be able to meet new people through this medium.

There's another reason I'm not anonymous. I do not want to be lulled into the false sense of complacency that might come with a pseudonym. It could lead me to believe that I really am anonymous. A pseudonym lets you be casually anonymous -- your identity is not apparent to the passerby -- but anyone who really wants to figure out who you are can probably do so, at least if you post as much and as deeply as I do. Better for me to admit it up front and be careful in what and how I post.

I mostly don't use outsiders' names in my posts. Sure, given my name, my home page, Google, and a few minutes, you can learn the names of my employer, my synagogue, my rabbi, and probably my parents. These aren't secrets, but in posts I tend to refer to "my synagogue" or "my employer" and so on. (Same with my tags.) If my journal entries are Google fooder, at least that way searches on those entities won't tend to lead here. Someone trying to check up on me via Google will get here; someone trying to check up on my boss won't.

I sometimes face a balancing act between wanting to give credit where it's due and wanting to protect others' identities. If I have a private conversation with someone, that person hasn't generally given me permission to broadcast about it. On the other hand, if he said something nifty, I don't want to take the credit for that thought myself. That's why I sometimes write that I heard this interesting idea and here's my reaction to it. This journal is about me, my reactions, my opinions -- and only secondarily about other people's work that inspires me. I think I'm being fair to the other people in my life. I hope they would agree.

An interesting question (thought experiment) is how I would have to change the way I write on the net if I were in a position that was more publicly-accountable -- school teacher, politician, rabbi, etc.

Online, searchable bible, talmud, and others... as a Firefox extension (Hebrew only). Nifty! (And the keyboard for typing Hebrew can be used other ways, too, which solves another problem I sometimes have.) Thank you

jducoeur. (I have a CD library with search in English and Hebrew, but it never hurts to have more, especially if they do upgrade the extension to do morphological search, which the tool I have doesn't do. Besides, while it doesn't happen often, it's nice to be able to look something up from other than my home machine.)

A former congregant was just ordained as a Reconstructionist rabbi. She came back to visit this past Shabbat, but disappeared after the morning service within about five minutes (before I got a chance to talk with her). Sigh. So I don't know how long she's back in town, where she's staying, or what her future plans are. I last saw her in December and would love to know how she's doing now that she's finished the program.

My rabbi, the cantorial soloist, and I need to have a meeting to go over plans for the bar mitzvah in a few weeks. We've been trying to have this meeting for a few weeks, but things keep happening. Looks like later this week for sure. The soloist said in passing (Friday night) something like "it's ok; I can do that service cold", which misses the point -- even if she can and I can, that doesn't mean we can. I learned that rather thoroughly during the Sh'liach K'hilah program. If I were doing the service by myself everything would be fine; there are other people involved, however, so we need to make sure everyone knows who does what.

I got a bit of an insight Shabbat morning, when someone was talking about her child's (recent) bar mitzvah and how the rabbi had been really good to work with -- he knew how to give her son quiet reassurances during the service when he was getting nervous, but also knew when to just let him fix the problems he was having. I won't just be leading a service; I'll be facilitating a significant life-cycle event for someone, and for the kid it's probably the most nervousness-inducing thing he's ever done. There's a lot to being a rabbi that has nothing to do with liturgical fluency and scholarship. (Apropos of nothing, it sometimes seems that there's a fair bit of social work/counselling in the job, too.)

Noticed Shabbat morning during torah study: when Moshe is lecturing the people about the importance of keeping God's commandments, in Deut 5:3 he says "God did not make this covenant with our fathers but with us". I really expected to see an "only" there. God did make a covenent with their fathers (the ones who actually left Egypt; Moshe is now speaking to their children). But there is no "only" ("rak") there. Now if you believe that Deuteronomy was written later, or by men, you can just say that, well, Moshe is playing a little fast and loose with the facts for the sake of rhetoric. (It wouldn't be the only thing he says that doesn't track 100% with the earlier accounts.) If it's all divine writ, though, the problem is a little harder. I find myself wondering if the distinction is in fact important -- maybe that God attempted to make a covenant with their fathers, but a covenant requires two partners and they weren't up to the task, so maybe (in the end) it's saying that the first real covenant was with their children. I don't think that's a view that would have much support in tradition, because the image of standing at Sinai to recieve torah is so powerful and so infused in Jewish tradition, but it's what came to mind.

Monica

query to the brain trust

link round-up (including some nifty visualizations)

Google Buzz: bzzt!

random bits

digital estates

digital estates

random bits

weekend bits

Firefox 3.0: the first 15 minutes

use this power only for good

Shabbaton

trip to Toronto

random bits

last few days

short takes

bad web sites

found filk: IPv6

Internet time

staying (too?) connected

trip

random bits

short takes

random bits

leading a publicly-accessible life

random (Jewish) bits

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