Adventures in Egotism

The Smiley Award has been getting lots of press. 

Press Release from Friday
CMU noted it Friday and now has it in releases
On the blog of the CS department head
And just now I saw a write-up on Yahoo’s Messenger blog 

I am pleased to be a co-recipient of the Smiley Award.  Because of the history of the Smiley and the goal of the award to highlight "projects that are both useful and fun" I think it’s nicely fitting that the first recipients are from the Art School and the School of Computer Science. Of course, it is primarily an art project and thus Jennifer’s baby.

When Jennifer told me that One Cold Hand was winning the Smiley Award I was really happy, and glad to have been asked to help.  Back in November it just seemed like a cute idea and I thought it would be fun to handle the technical side of things.  Since then, it’s been a long interesting ride.

I remember our giddiness when it hit the New York Times, as an Associated Press article and the hockey stick we saw on Google Analytics.  And the subsequent waning of interest.  And then the occasional peaks as it hit the home page of a big news site in Hungary, or Italy, or Brazil.  I don’t remember them all. 

All along I was happy to see Jenn get her due recognition in the interviews with BBC radio, Pittsburgh television, NPR, CNN, etc.  It was her baby.  To extend a metaphor, I was the ob/gyn who helped bring it into the world.  People take pictures of the baby with the mom, not the ob/gyn.  She’s the one who nurtured it to greatness.

When I suggested she submit One Cold Hand for the Smiley Award, we thought it would be the project that won or lost.  Really, the project has required a battalion of volunteers collecting gloves from boxes and interning with Jenn in her studio.  Not to mention the countless people taking the time to pick up a glove and carry it to a box, based on a simple and statistically improbable hope that it be reunited with its mate.

So now that this Smiley Award press is bouncing around the internet, I wanted to publically (as if anyone reads this blog) thank Jenn and all the volunteers for the great experience I’ve had with the project.

Thanks.

White people like many things. One of the main things they like is to be confronted with their “whiteness”. They want to atone for the sin of being white. Note that “being white” does not include shopping at Wal-Mart or following evangelicalism. “Being white” means acting in the manner of those white people who have power and interest in exploring their role in society. All of their attempts to better themselves or society though are in order to feel moral superiority or “less white”. White people who care about the pain of animals may choose not to eat them, but ultimately this is so they can feel as though they are helping the environment AND it gives them a sweet way to feel superior to others. White people who are excited by learning about other cultures do it in order that you know how special and unique they are.

Remember that white people are not poor people. White people are those with the privileges of computers and free time that they can spend it on a web site mocking them and providing ad revenue to the person generating generalizations of them.

Remember also that people “of color” (white people do not have a color—really they are so empty as to be translucent) do not exhibit the attributes above. Black people do not like coffee, Apple products, to study abroad, bicycles, or recycling. Black, yellow, red, brown, and purple people who do like any of the aforementioned things are not acting their color or being true to their cultures.

If you see a non-white person at Whole Foods, they are probably trying to be white.

p.s. white people also love the socially pacifying power of conspicuous irony

I keep another blog called News Mirror where I write about what I read in the news. Today I got ticked off at bad science, maybe prompted by Saturday night entertainment at the iSLC conference this weekend.

On bad scientific reporting and bad quantitative methods.

I’ve been waiting for the Privacy Lusitania, an event when the infrastructure fails and public opinion galvanizes around solving it. I think it’s a pretty apt metaphor. In WWI people thought everything was OK in the US until the vaguely dangerous power hit the US infrastructure by sinking a commercial transport ship. (Of course that’s all arguable.) 9/11 fits the same logic, but is way more complex in the social psyche.

When I read about the MySpace private photos leak, I thought this could be the I Lusitania was waiting for. But the press has been pretty quiet, by what I’ve seen. Why aren’t people up in arms? Why aren’t they suing MySpace? Does MySpace have any liability at all?

These pictures are on hard drives around the world in a big BitTorrent cloud. They will never go away. Accessible face recognition is here. Riya has been doing it for years and startup Polar Rose is rolling out a web service next quarter. Someone with enough time to make a point could easily run all these photos through face recognition and start putting together some pieces. They could make a wiki or ESP Game app where volunteers name the people in the photos. In fact, since the photos are linked to MySpace account IDs, there’s a whole lot that can be found out with some simple data mining. Those users can delete their accounts, but those pictures will live on in the torrent, undeletable.

Boing Boing recently had a headline, “Database leaks are as immortal and toxic as nuclear spills — let’s start acting like it”. I think now that Chernobyl is a better, albeit slightly ragged, metaphor. When will the public confidence in our privacy infrastructure melt down? It looks like it may be happening in England with those DVDs of private records lost repeatedly in the post. (And the article quoted in BB was from The Guardian.)

The power of IT to destroy privacy been advancing rapidly. Yet over last 7 years while we should have been working to preserve it, we’ve been convinced not to, in order to be safe. Don’t believe it. Security is not at odds with privacy. Security requires privacy.

I have a whole lot of work to do, so to procrastinate clear my mind I’ve started a new blog, Practict. It’s where I’ll share practical knowledge that I’ve found or created. This will help me focus this blog on myself, in accord with its charter.

Tuesday I walked home and found my car up on the curb. I couldn’t possibly have parked that bad and forgotten it? Did it slide on the ice? Some damage on the driver side bumper showed it had been hit and pushed 2 ft onto the curb. No note on the windshield. Crap. Did I mention I don’t have collision insurance?

I go to my mailbox, and there is a note. The driver left their name, car make and year, their insurance company name and 800 number, and their own policy number. There are good people in the world.

And today Jack’s Towing came to tow it to Progressive’s repair facility. I don’t know if I got to speak with the Jack, but what a jolly Pittsburghy guy. And while I was standing next to the tow truck, hearing Jack’s story about a power tripping officer at the impound, a car pulled up with the window down.

“Is that your car?” “yeah, it got hit” “I saw her hit it! She was gonna write a note and I told her to call 911. What if that note fell off?” “Wow thanks! yeah, someone put it in my mailbox for me” “yeah I told her to call someone. what if it had fallen off!”

So I salut the good people of Pittsburgh.

Poor man’s Skitch, originally uploaded by TfUnQ.

You can approximate Skitch with the Quicksilver “Screen Capture” and “Upload to Flickr…” actions. Just capture part of the screen and choose the Run action. (More details in this Lifehacker article.) Then QS will capture the image and open it up to operate on. Then hit tab and type begin typing “Flickr” or “Upload” to get the upload action. If you want to tag it too, hit tab again and type them in. Then just hit return to send the picture up to Flickr.

I haven’t used Skitch yet, but this is what I understand it does. At least, that’s what I wanted it for. It’s in closed beta right now.

Wish I had thought of this. And I wish my phone camera recorded better videos.

To see behind the curtain, try passingby-looking-right.

If you ever receive messages with file attachments called "noname", here’s what’s up.

There’s a problem in Gmail in parsing messages sent with Apple’s Mail.app.  It seems it’s mostly Apple’s fault.  But since Gmail still hasn’t solved it, you can work around it with this web utility.

I just got a few e-mails from the neuroling mailing list. I was once an aspiring neurolinguist. Now I study open development of educational resources at CMU’s HCII.

So I’ve unsubscribed to the neuroling mailing list. It’s liberating to let go of dreams, to pursue new ones.