by Brendon J. Wilson

National ID Me Up!

I recently went to a discussion of US visas presented by the Pearl Law Group and the Digital Moose Lounge. Sandwiched in between details of labour-sponsored green cards and H1B quotas, the presenting lawyer digressed into a number of points on avoiding problems with the Department of Homeland Security. In particular, he pointed out the importance of maintaining your current address with the authorities.

It sounds simple, right? I should just fill out a form and they’ll know where I am. And of course this form has an appropriately cryptic name: an AR-11. So, one form and I’m done right? Uh, not exactly.

You see, one form to update your current address would be too easy. No, no, we also need you to fill out a form with the Social Security Agency to update your address with them. And then there’s also the Department of Motor vehicles.

On the one hand, it makes sense: only certain agencies should have access to certain personal information. But then again, if all that information is the same, do we actually gain any real protection of our “privacy”? Consider how many pieces of identification you have in your wallet or purse right now – and then figure out how many of them exist only to match your name, address, and birth date against some random agency’s identification number. Go ahead, take your time to figure out the answer.

I’ll give you a hint: all of them, right?

Just how secret is my address anyway? It’s posted on my contact page. It’s in the phone book. I’m all for privacy, but only up to the point that it doesn’t require me to spend my evenings filling out change of address forms in googlipicate. I don’t want Big Brother any more than anyone else, but I also don’t want a real-life incarnation of Brazil either. If a big, bad national ID database needs to exist to match my face (in the public domain) with my name (in the public domain), and address (in the public domain), then damn the Orwellian consequences as long as I don’t have to fill out any more damn forms. The path forward is clear: National ID me up!

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 by Brendon J. Wilson

A Spam Solution

I’ve long tried to solve the problem of spam in my email inbox. There have been numerous tricks I’ve employed to this end – using disposable email addresses, not publishing my email address on the web, etc. And yet despite all these attempts to thwart spammers, a few screw-ups (such as posting on a mail list and forgetting to change my return email address) have sunk the ship – I’m getting about 200 pieces of spam a day. Until now – because I, Brendon J. Wilson, have found the solution to spam.

Delete all my email.

Well, not all. It’s not like I’m going Donald Knuth on email (Dr. Knuth has given up email, stating “15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime”). I’m just being very picky about what email I bother to let into my inbox.

Send HTML email? You’re deleted. Send multipart/alternative MIME type content in an email? You’re deleted! Mention pharmaceuticals, refinancing, or mortgages? You’re DELETED! Send to one of my known disposable email addresses? Oh, you better believe you’re deleted.

Why go to these lengths? Well, for one thing, it avoids web bugs (images in HTML emails) signaling to spammers that your email address is alive and suitable for additional spamming. Plus, it eliminates the step of deleting email – why go through your inbox and delete a bunch of emails, when it makes more sense to undelete the few erroneously deleted emails that you care about?

in Opinion / Technology 1 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Mile High Club

The other day, somewhere between Silicon Valley and Sin City, I was thinking about the paradox of the failing airline industry. How is it possible that the lynchpin of international business is constantly on the verge of financial collapse? I think the airline industry needs to take drastic action, and leverage some of the unique assets of its industry to pull itself out of its financial nosedive.

For example: movie theaters have long taken advantage of its captive audience. And they’ve only got you for two hours! Imagine what you could do with a captive audience for a trans-Pacific flight to Australia? I’m thinking four hours of in-flight ads, and people who are only too willing to watch them because they’re the only entertainment available. And what about all that free advertising space? I’m envisioning print ads on the overhead luggage compartments, the backs of seats, tray tables (both sides), the floor, and the ceiling.

And I hate advertising – how is it that people in the airline industry haven’t figured this out?

But why stop there? Branson announced plans to add beds and cabins to Virgin airlines flights – I say he didn’t go far enough. Hey, if you’re flying over international waters, why not use the absence of legal jurisdiction to your advantage? Where are the sky call-girls? Where are the in-air monkey knife fights? And hasn’t military aviation refueling technology progressed to the point that a Columbian provisioning plane could supply international flights with all the cocaine they could inhale prior to landing?

Honestly, someone just isn’t trying.

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 by Brendon J. Wilson

Phear And Something

The strangeness for our trip to Las Vegas started in SFO before we were even in the air. And all without a Hunter S. Thompson lookalike in sight.

While waiting for the flight, Ashley and I sat next what can only be described as The Busiest Salesman In The Universe. He had several cell phones. He was using two of them simultaneously. In different languages. Ashley counted Spanish, Hebrew, English, and something vaguely Arabic in the mix. And his phone calls came in rapid succession – “What? No….tell him no! It’s 100 or nothing.” followed by a switch in cell phones. This rapidfire conversation continued down the loading ramp and into the plane, until the stewardess told him to unceremoniously hang up.

Mr. Sales was soon surpassed on the weirdometer by the plane’s captain, who only seemed capable of speaking in one continuous stream of consciousness. It was like listening to someone read the French instructions for fastening the seatbelt, without either the benefit of a French accent or an inkling of comprehension. The words “fasten your seat belt and make sure your seat and tray table are in an upright and locked position” had obviously lost all meaning for the man. The least he could have done, if he was resigned to be incomprehensible, would have been to spice it up a little – you know, maybe a little tribute to Denis Leary:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome aboard! Your pilot today is Edward. He’s drunk and hooked on crack. The man sitting next to you has a nailclipper and the woman in front of you appears to be trying to light her shoes on fire. Good luck, folks!”

Vegas itself was pretty weird – I still haven’t decided whether I love it or hate it. On the one hand, it’s a very liberal city. Why, the guys on the street handing out “escorts to your door” literature are obviously big supporters of equal rights – they had no qualms attempting to hand pornographic flyers to both Ashley and I in equal measures. Yah for progress! On the other hand, it did have this sweaty, desperate, and slightly inebriated quality to everything – but that was to be expected, I guess.

On Friday, We caught Cirque du Soleil’s “O” at the Bellagio. The show features some pretty fantastic visuals, and the pool/stage was a feat of theatrical technology. My only complaint with the show was the technology overshadowed the performance – I found I spent the first half-hour of the show trying to figure out how the stage worked! What a geek.

The Phish show on Saturday (the main reason we were in Vegas to begin with) was mind-blowing. Phish was obviously having a good time – it was the third night of their three-night appearance and they were tight. Ironically, I crossed the arena to take a photo of some people wearing silver shirts, only to end up taking a photo of some guy we hung out with at the last Phish show – I didn’t recognize him until I downloaded the photos from my camera! I’ll have some photos up soon, including a pretty cool shot of the glow stick riot in the middle of “Piper”. Stay tuned for that in the next couple of days.

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 by Brendon J. Wilson

Kill Your TV

Bruce Springsteen had it partly right when he wrote “57 channels (and nothin’ on)” – I say “partly” because he was off by an order of magnitude. As I flip through the barren wasteland that is the 500-channel cable television universe, I have to wonder: how is it possible that, despite a factor of ten increase in the number of channels, the amount of TV content fit for human consumption has actually decreased?

Every genre or popular show from the past twenty or thirty years now seems worthy of its own channel – but just how long, medically speaking, can a person watch reruns of old shows? Watching Gilligan get smacked by the Skipper is fun and all, but at some point, doesn’t it cause renal failure or brain damage? I mean who was the rocket scientist at TVland that gave birth to their motto (“Life’s too short to watch crap”)? Life’s too short? Absolutely! <click>!

It only gets worse. In an effort to maximize the investment in new content, networks have taken to rescheduling shows on the fly. The logic behind this, apparently, is to avoid attempting to compete against other special events or shows that might draw the majority of the audience. It would seem that network executives think we’re all part of the same mooing herd – like our attention span is too short to actually follow an entire season of a show. Sorry, but if the American public can’t follow a season of the West Wing, then there need to be comprehensive IQ testing before anyone is allowed to vote.

I predict this type of disregard for the creation of quality television on a fixed schedule will only hasten the demise of network television. Technology solutions like Tivo and other personal video recorders are only the first step – BitTorrent is fast becoming a powerful way for people to get the content they want, when they want it. Why bother subscribing to cable when you can download high-definition rips of the shows you want, sans commercials? On the west coast, this is especially attractive, as rips for shows are usually available before they broadcast, due to the three hour time difference. If anyone gets decent broadband (and no, decent broadband is not available in the US, as far as I’m concerned), the networks are screwed.

Even if the networks succeed in blocking these technologies, they’ve still got problems: books don’t have commercials, JK Rowling seems to have reminded kids and adults alike how to read, and the library is free. The next great step “forward” in entertainment might turn out to be a giant leap backwards.

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 by Brendon J. Wilson

RSS Newswhore

I’m embarrassed to say I only bothered to install an RSS aggregator last week, after I became painfully aware that the bookmarks folder in my browser is the web equivalent of a roach motel: web sites check in, but they don’t ever get checked out. Using RSS to do the heavy lifting seemed like a good idea to keep me informed – hey, if even the Canadian government is hip to RSS, what have I got to lose?

I’ll tell you what: a giant pile of my spare time, that’s what.

It’s not that RSS itself is a bad idea – serving out content in an XML format that can be easily parsed and aggregated is a great idea. I, like any self-respecting, cutting-edge geek, want the newest information and I want it milliseconds after it’s been captured by sensor-studded bloggers on the scene to capture the moment. The problem with RSS is you start drowning in information, and most of that information is essentially identical.

Everyone starts assembling their list of RSS feeds by hitting the big sites first – Slashdot, Wired, CNet, Scripting News, Boing Boing, and anyone else that appears in the top ten of Technorati. And then the updates come streaming in…and in…and in…and in. Who would have thought that 6 billion people could generate so much information? Suddenly I’m dealing with the problem of cleaning out my RSS aggregator in a computer-age equivalent of beat the clock.

But it gets worse.

With RSS, every one of those sites you valued for aggregating news suddenly looks remarkably similar. For example, last week every one of these sites broadcast the latest story about Gmail, or a variant thereof – and there I was, drowning in a mass of RSS posts from different sites on exactly the same topic.

Whoopee, isn’t this magical.

Someone needs to take RSS aggregators/readers to the next level. What I’d like to see is an RSS reader that examines the links in various RSS feeds and assembles a hierarchy of feeds on a particular topic. So instead of seeing a zillion posts, I should see one – the root post to which all the other RSS posts point either directly or indirectly through other intermediate posts. Of course, this would require some work on the part of bloggers to identify the source of their information to enable readers to create such a hierarchy of related posts. For all I know, the solution already exists, but I haven’t heard about it because I ceased to surf the web sometime last week to delete posts in my RSS reader instead.

Grouping related topics in RSS would be one simple way to help people triage the deluge of new information available each and every day. If RSS readers grouped related items, I could delete a “tree” of RSS posts on a topic if I decided I didn’t care about the topic. On the other hand, if I did care to see the commentary, I could “zoom in” to the related RSS posts to view related information and commentary. That way, I could not only get all the latest information using RSS, but also actually find the right information from sites that aggregate news.

We need to start finding smarter ways to present information – all our efforts to enable intelligent access to information still feel really ham-fisted. Clever, but ham-fisted. We have more access to data than ever, but I fear our access to knowledge remains either unchanged or increasingly impaired. Though RSS gives you access to all the information you can eat, our stomach for information is finite. Nobody needs every piece of available information – they need the ability to spot the high points on the sea of information and navigate towards the shores of those information landmarks they actually care about. To do otherwise is to leave the user treading water.

in News / Technology 4 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Now We Are 29

I was sitting at my desk yesterday, iTunes loaded, headphones cranked to eleven to drown out the hum of the fluorescent lighting in the office. Eardrum shredding distorted guitar riffs and non-sensical lyrical waxing by depressed British teenagers I can stand – imperceptible, monotonic, 60Hz electrical humming, on the other hand, drives me completely bonkers. Whoever invented fluorescent lights should be put on trial for crimes against every student who has valiantly struggled to get any work done at the college library, forgoing the giddy pleasures of alcohol abuse and casual sex that give “higher education” its name, only to be stymied by the low Lucasian drone of these cheap lightsaber impersonators. The students get first dibs on the guy – followed shortly by all the mothers who warned us against the dangers of reading under poor lighting conditions.

Wait…where was I going with this? Oh yes, I was talking about loud music.

After having the entire spectrum of the pentatonic scale rammed into my cerebral cortex by Eric Clapton’s tribute to blues legend Robert Johnson, I decided forego any further insult to Mr. Johnson and switched to listening to Radiohead instead. It’s funny how the mind works, because I happened upon this little gem in my collection:

In a city of the future
It is difficult to concentrate
Meet the boss, meet the wife
Everybody’s happy
Everyone is made for life

In a city of the future
It is difficult to find a space
I’m too busy to see you
You’re too busy to wait

But I’m okay, how are you?
Thanks for asking, thanks for asking
But I’m okay, how are you?
I hope you’re okay too

Everyone one of those days
When the sky’s California blue
With a beautiful bombshell
I throw myself into my work
I’m too lazy, I’ve been kidding myself for so long

I’m okay, how are you?
Thanks for asking, thanks for asking
But I’m okay, how are you?
I hope you’re okay too

And then I bothered to check the track name. Oh irony of ironies – this song is from the Airbag/How Am I Driving? EP, and has a most appropriate name: Palo Alto.

in Entertainment 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

“My” Folders?!?

Acrobat and a number of other software applications are really starting to annoy me with their behaviour. Every time I start these applications, they decide to create a “My” folder of their own under “My Documents”. Acrobat, for example, creates a “My eBooks” folder.

Worst. “Feature”. Ever.

For one thing, I don’t own any e-books and frankly, I never intend to – at least, not until someone creates an electronic book with flexible screens that recreate the look and feel of a paper book, and that stores in its spine a copy of every book ever created. And I don’t need a “My Received Files” directory – I know where to put files I receive over MSN Messenger.

While I understand that most people are disorganized and this feature may be a simple way of enabling the user to find their files, I am not most people. So listen up, developers: stop implementing automatic folder creation! If you need to satisfy your own demented need to see your application name in 10-point Arial font in Windows Explorer, do it on someone else’s dime. Or at least provide some way to turn this “feature” off.

in Opinion / Technology 2 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Boing Boing Kaboom!

As if on cue from my entry last week, famed community blog Boing Boing posted an item today discussing its explosive growth in popularity. Apparently the site’s popularity is reaching a point where, if the trend continues, the bandwidth costs will exceed the amount the site’s founders can afford to put into the site.

The ensuing discussion has been underwhelming, if that’s a word (I know it’s not ‘cuz I looked it up, it’s one of the skills I learned in my school). The responses have varied from the obvious “charge a subscription fee” or “show ads”, something that’s never well received by those used to getting their daily infoporn delivered free and unmolested, to the positively naïve “put up a tip jar” suggestions from people who have never actually had to sell something to someone. And of course, there have been the techno-centric solutions: use mod_gzip to compress data, redesign the site user interface to use less text/images/data, and limit the amount of old information presented on the front page. All very fine ideas, and all already used to some extent by the designers of Boing Boing.

The part that interests me: this is a longstanding and recognized problem for community web sites. These sites struggle in obscurity for ages, only to suffer a meteoric rise in popularity that is the ultimate undoing of both the site and those footing the bandwidth bill. Boing Boing is just the latest in a long list of community web sites to face this problem. Just ask Rusty.

Given that numerous readers (and writers) of Boing Boing are aboard the Creative Commons and EFF bandwagons, it seems that some thought should already have been directed at solving this problem: how to allow free content to flourish at the interface between those resources that are made freely available by their creators (content, in this example) and those that are not (bandwidth, in this case)? What’s even weirder is that this problem has remained unsolved for so long, especially given the nearly endless supply of software developers that usually comprise these sites’ readership.

One of my MBA professors was fond of pointing out the folly of believing we will move to a pure service-based economy: we can’t all make a living by giving each other haircuts and massages – someone has to make the scissors and massage tables. And, chances are, they want to be paid in cash, not hair clippings and “happy endings”. Well, not hair at least.

If Boing Boing really is a community, where the common currency is not money but something else (whuffie, for example, to use Cory‘s term), then the community membership needs to be willing (and able) to provide the currency required to keep the site running. Readers of Boing Boing already provide one half of the capital required by the site to keep it running, namely content in the form of submissions to the web site (and discussions, if they ever turn comments back on). What we need now is a mechanism that allows the community to step up and provide the other half of the currency Boing Boing must expend to serve the community: bandwidth and processing power.

In the case of community web sites, we can trick the bill collector to accept hair as a form of payment. Smart guys like Bram Cohen and Ian Clarke, creators of BitTorrent and Freenet respectively, have shown us that we can harness the collective bandwidth and CPU resources of Internet. And we can do it for “free” – if by “free” you mean the amortize cost of the maintaining the community over the user base, who will bear the burden, albeit willingly, as part of their monthly Internet bill or pilgrimage to Fry’s. It seems to me a distributed P2P content system that allows the community to be self-sufficient, rather than free-riding on the efforts of the community founders, is exactly the kind of solution Boing Boing needs.

All that remains is some smart guys like Bram and Ian to step up and make it happen – and aren’t these the kind of people that read Boing Boing regularly?

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 by Brendon J. Wilson

Pity The Children

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed since moving down here, it’s this: it would totally suck to be a teenager in the States. No, it’s not just raging hormones, illicit pot use and the odd swig off the old man’s Colt 45 that’s turning Johnny and Sally into brooding halfwits. It’s a society that lacks any faith in its youth, shows little respect for their ability to think for themselves, and takes protection of its children to absurd lengths.

Take the current “zero tolerance” policy being employed in the War Against Drugs being waged in the school system, a policy that’s turning US schools into prisons. There are numerous examples of kids being expelled for possessing little more than over-the-counter drugs, like Advil and Tylenol, as part of a single-minded application of policy designed to purge the schools of illegal drugs. Some are even going as far as requiring drug tests, despite all indications that teens are the only ones not doing drugs and getting away with it. Meanwhile, kids with legitimate needs for medication, such as an asthma inhaler, are being required to store their medication with the school nurse.

It’s funny – you would expect the threat of legal liability to work in the kids’ favour on this one, but then wham! You’re thrown a total curveball.

Meanwhile, so as not to be disturbed, the grownups have been having a separate grownup conversation about an imaginary guy that lives in the sky, and his relation to the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. For those not familiar with the topic, a father is seeking to have the Pledge banned from public schools on the basis that it violates the separation of church and state. The Pledge is recited in schools by children each day – yet it’s likely they don’t understand what’s they’re saying, and couldn’t care less.

What’s interesting is what isn’t being discussed. While funding in US schools is in a constant state of recession, nobody’s too concerned about the quality of the education. Nope, they’re shilling their kids’ futures by signing contracts with Coke and Pepsi, and suspending into the ground any wiseass who dares to point out the irony. Yet they can’t figure out for the life of them why the kids are getting so damn fat on all that sugar water, and outsourcing to India is threatening the US economy. It makes me wonder: has anyone ever sued a school for its liability in failing to educate its students? Why the hell not?

But sugar may not be thing rotting the minds and bodies of US teens.

Everywhere I look here, I see signs stating “No Skateboarding/No Biking/No Rollerblading” – we wouldn’t want you kids getting off your asses and going places, now would we? Has anyone bothered to look at the design of American suburbia? If you can’t drive, you might as well have lost your legs in a tragic screen door accident. Kids can’t drive, can’t skate, can’t blade, and then we wonder why they’re stuck at the mall. When teens say they’re nothing to do, it’s true – there’s literally nothing they can do. Even when they turn 16 and start to drive, they can only look forward to having their every move tracked by satellite.

Americans appear genuinely scared of teens – and I don’t blame them. If the kids figure out that not only are they getting the shaft, but also that the US economy is almost entirely based on exploiting their cheap labour, underdeveloped sense of self-esteem, and disposable income, we’re in serious trouble. Because after all, we may think we’ve figured out how to stop them doing drugs, exchanging bodily fluids, and doing all that other stuff that we enjoyed doing at their age, we sure as hell haven’t figured out how to stop them getting their hands on firearms.

I guess the real question to ask is: if we’re going to have the War on Drugs, when are we going to have the War on Bad Parents Who Blame Everyone Else Except Themselves For Their Kids’ Problems? How about the War on Gutless School Boards That Pass Useless Regulations Instead Of Using Their Heads? I can’t say we’ve seen an appropriations bill for either of those fine programs yet, now have we?

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