Fables of the reconstruction

Things to Do On Facebook When You're Dead

Here:

We understand how difficult it can be for people to be reminded of those who are no longer with them, which is why it's important when someone passes away that their friends or family contact Facebook to request that a profile be memorialized.

Age Ranges

Mobile phone usage types by age, from youngest to oldest:

1. Not permitted to own a mobile by their parents (<13).
2. Use mobile phones for internet and to text and talk but don't leave voicemail messages (13-21).
3. Use mobile phones for internet, to text and talk and use voicemail (21-35).
4. Use mobiles to talk and use voicemail (36-55).
5. Use mobiles to talk (55-65).
6. Own a mobile phone but rarely uses it (65-70).
7. Own a mobile phone because a family member gave it to them but don't know how to use it (70-75).
8. Don't own a mobile phone (75+).

Categories overlap at the margins.

Source: Me.

Pickin' and a Grinnin'

It's not that I mind, really. But someone explain to me how I got a hit from the HeeHaw website today in my referrer log. Please.

Today, Asurion Kicks Ass

My Treo 700 - which itself was a replacement phone I got from Asurion last April - developed a keyboard problem and they are shipping me a brand new Centro overnight.

While the Centro is hardly a cutting-edge phone, the point is that the call only took a few minutes and the issue is going to get totally resolved in less than 24 hours. (Similarly, if I had once again dropped and broken a phone I would have received the same service, although I would have had to pay a $50 deductible.) One reason I can never own an iPhone is that AT&T does not offer insurance with it. If you break it, you have to replace it yourself - at around $500.

Facebook Relents on TOS Change - For Now

Terms of Use Update

A couple of weeks ago, we posted an update to our Terms of Use that we hoped would clarify some parts of it for our users. Over the past couple of days, we have received a lot of questions and comments about these updated terms and what they mean for people and their information. Because of the feedback we received, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.

The last sentence was there until just a second ago - now the blog itself is missing. Whatever, they gave up, temporarily.

Update: The ever-changing non-denial denial, er, clarification:

Over the past few days, we have received a lot of good feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

Almost there, dudes. Try to get someone involved in drafting your response who isn't pissed off at your members for, like, noticing shit.

Update on Facebook TOS: "Go Ahead and Be Outraged."

Amanda French:

With today’s outrage over Facebook’s newly altered Terms of Service at its peak, I figured I’d do a quick comparison of their terms of service as regards user-uploaded content to the terms specified by other social networking sites, just to see if said outrage is fully justified. It looks as though the finger-pointing at the Bush robots.txt file wasn’t justified, for instance, and I was guilty of spreading that story.

Conclusion? Go ahead and be outraged. Facebook’s claims to your content are extraordinarily grabby and arrogant.

She then breaks down the ways Facebook's TOS is way beyond what other sites use. Her objections come down to these two:

• No one else besides Facebook keeps the license to your stuff permanently, even after you have deleted your account.
• Facebook claims it has a license to any content on your other websites if you post a "Share this on Facebook" link on it.

The way I read the FB TOS, it's worse than that: I think they're claiming a license to any material you link to from FB. But whatever; it's incredibly overreaching.

Update 2/18/09: FB reverts to the old TOS, for now.

Bloglines in Death Spiral

Bloglines, a web-based feed reader that I started using in 2003, experienced significant problems with in 2006, and abandoned early this year, is apparently heading down the intertubes:

Users who hadn’t already left Bloglines for Google Reader and other functional RSS readers are doing so now, largely because Bloglines has stopped working and the company has done absolutely nothing to communicate to users what is going on or when it might be fixed.

Even Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher, who sold the company to Ask.com in 2005, is ready to jump ship. In a Twitter message yesterday he said “Bloglines, please stop sucking. It’s been a couple weeks now. I don’t want to have to move to Google Reader. Sigh.”

Google Reader's current status: Awesome.

My First Real Comcast Internet Outage

They are the stuff of legend, though. Until now I really have had nothing to complain about.

Jury duty tomorrow. Then minor surgery Friday. Shaping up to be a great week.

Amenities

Denver International Airport has free wi-fi supported by a tolerable advertising banner. See, now is that so hard? I expect Philadelphia to catch up sometime next decade.

Ghost Surrendered

My laptop hard drive has died again, I think for the final time.

Blogging from the Treo.

The Democratic Congress Takes a Stand - Against Cell Phones on Planes

Trivial, but it's got my support:

Cell phone calls on airplanes in flight are not only unsafe, they're obnoxious and they should be permanently banned, according to some members of Congress.

House members, most of whom board airplanes almost every week, traded horror stories Thursday about their worst experiences with annoying fellow passengers who talk loudly on cell phones before takeoff and after landing. One lawmaker said his wife sat next to a woman who loudly discussed her sex life on the phone.

His wife was jealous, the Congressman did not say.

Another House member topped that with the passenger sitting him behind on one flight who got a "dear John" phone call from either his wife or sweetheart just before takeoff. The begging and pleading was just terrible to listen to, he said. Finally, with the plane ready to take off, a flight attendant had to threaten to have U.S. Marshals drag the man off the plane before he finally put his phone away.

I have never understood why people beg and plead when someone dumps them. It just strikes me as utterly stupid and pointless. If you reach that point, it's over. Especially when the person breaks up with over the phone right before your plane is about to take off.

On the other hand, I tentatively am in favor of wi-fi on planes, but only if it blocks VOIP, obviously.

You know what would come immediately after that? Entrepreneurs offering on-board tech support.

Voicemail Pushing Up Daisies

I was just ahead of my time:

Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it. ...

It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily. ...

How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?” ...

Oh, also, if you want me to pick up, don't block your number. Only telemarketers do that.

Google Earth Firefox Plugin

Very cool.

(Via.)

Aluminum Foil Technology

The aluminum foil box locking tab: One of those many little things that at certain points would have come in very handy if I had known it.

(Via Interesting Times.)

Exoskeleton

This is intriguing:

The company's site is here.

(Via Noah Shachtman at Danger Room.)

I Used One of These For My First Job Out of College

The Compaq "luggable" computer weighed 28 pounds and was the size of a sewing machine:

To transport it, you locked the keyboard in place over the front and carried it by the handle on the other side, like a suitcase.

The first time I ever had to get treated for a rotator cuff injury was after traveling with one of these.

It was state-of-the-art. Nice, bright monochrome screen, two 5.25" floppy drives, and 128K of RAM standard, whether you needed that much or not.

You put the MS-DOS floppy in one drive, then you put the application floppy in the other, say, Wordperfect for DOS or Lotus 1-2-3. That's right, there was no hard drive. Everything was saved to floppy. Which could easily melt if you left them out on your carseat on a warm day.

I wrote a Lotus macro for one assignment and the chief IT person at the company - who I think was also the benefits person - called me a "power user."

It cost $3,590, I just learned, which is $7,618 in today's dollars. Wow.

Here's the review of it from the January, 1983 issue of Byte Magazine.

(Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.)

The Smart Car: Not So Smart

So, Philly Carshare has a Smart Passion (it's $8.90 an hour), so I took it to the grocery store today:

Yeah, it's tiny. Check those wheels - crying out for rims, aren't they? Do they make rims that small?

More pics and my evaluation after the jump.

Present Future

Duncan asks, "What happened to the future?":

It's occurred to me recently that all the whiz-bang gadgets predicted either already exist in some form, or are unlikely to exist anytime soon. If one were to write a technology-centric non-dystopian novel about, say, the year 2040, what neato things would we imagine?

I can't come up with much.

All the recent (post-1975) technological innovations were outgrowths of trends and cultural desires that existed long before then. Using that as a framework, I think we can come up with a few ideas about where things might go. I don't know if my predictions are "non-dystopian", but here they are:

1. Medical innovation: Americans are health-obsessed and desire both more control over and information about their health. At the same time, there are some really exciting technical developments that could provide real benefits while responding to the public's demands. For example, gene therapy, stem cell treatments and nanotech drug delivery hold out the possibility of dramatic improvements in the care of certain ailments.  The layman has the impression that the key to making these seemingly-magical treatments work is early detection, so the demand for constant or frequent, inexpensive, consumer-administered monitoring will be high. Both home-based and wearable hardware for monitoring will be developed, as well as new over-the-counter tests. Also, consumers want drugs which will improve their lives, not just cure disease. Viagra is just the start. More and more effective drugs which make us healthier and enhance specific desirable characteristics will be developed in response to that demand. All of this requires more and better information about the possible choices, a need that will be filled both online by blogs and consumer forums, and by medical entrepreneurs like independent health coaches.
2. Entertainment and communication: Take the cell phone, the ipod, handheld gaming devices and broadband internet and make them more powerful, faster, cheaper, and more ubiquitous, and what do you get? Overload. Managing the data stream will be the story. That means more creative and intelligent ways of screening out unwanted contact and information, and automating the process of finding relevant data and contacts. Spam filters are the Model T. What the hell does that mean? I don't know. All I know is that people have been talking about how your toaster will have an IP address in the future, and I just don't see it happening. Geeks like to talk about capacities as if they were predestined realities, and that's not the case. What grew and shaped the internet, for example, was porn. Why? Because people wanted to look at it without buying it through the mail or at a shop. It's pretty simple: What do people want? They want to select the amount of information and electronic contact they are exposed to. Give them that ability.
3. Personal energy generation: Every list needs three items, so here's the third. High energy costs and energy-related environmental concerns are here to stay. People are working on new technologies like fuel cells, super-long-life batteries, home solar power, etc. Some of these are going to have real breakthroughs while others languish, we don't know which, but something radical will emerge. Maybe you'll be able to generate sufficient electricity to run your house by exploiting the heat gradient between your roof in summer and the dirt ten feet under your basement.  Maybe office buildings (currently the number one source of greenhouse gases) will be able to have their own fuel-cell power plants on the roof, every window will also be a solar panel and the building shell will have the ability to "breathe" or become super-insulating depending on the weather.

Perhaps all this is wrong, and the future is dystopian: personal body armor and anti-pollution full-body suits. Wait and see.

Apropos of nothing: It just occurred to me that wikipedia links are not true permalinks, because the content is by definition constantly changing. Should you have the ability to link to a specific snapshot of a page (hosted by wikipedia, of course) that existed at any given time? That would create a huge multiplier for the number of pages hosted there, which may be impossible. Also, it requires the creation of a tool that compares two snapshots and highlights the differences automatically, which is a relatively trivial task.

Spam Turns 30

This message was followed by someone emailing around a nude picture of a model:

It was 30 years ago this Saturday that users of Arpanet, a U.S. government-designed precursor to the Internet, logged onto their accounts to find what is considered the first piece of unsolicited commercial e-mail ever sent.

It was a pitch for a new computer. "We invite you to come see the 2020 and hear about the DECSYSTEM-20 family at the two product presentations we will be giving in California this month," read the missive, sent by a salesman named Gary Thuerk on May 3, 1978.

Thuerk's e-mail prompted an aggravated discussion among the service's users, the relatively small number of high-level academics with access to computers that then cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"This is a clear and flagrant abuse of the directory!" one of the hundreds of users [ed: future Sen. Al Gore] on Thuerk's recipient list complained in a public reply.

Funny how spam and porn are now the biggest revenue generators on the web.

Google Maps Presentation of Primary Election Results

Google maps has been displaying the primary results.  Up until recently, the way they showed the results nationally was by coloring each state to show who won the popular vote there, yellow for Hillary, blue for Obama. When you selected a particular state, the data got a little more granular: It showed how each Congressional district had gone, again by coloring it yellow or blue.

Within the last few days, they changed it to provide more data visually. Instead of simply coloring the state one way or the other, each state is marked by a pointer of that color, and the size of the pointer is proportional to the number of votes cast in that state. When you click on the pointer, it gives you the date of the contest and actual vote totals for each candidate. And now when you click on an individual state, the vote results in every county are shown, again with a color-coded and size-adjusted marker.

For example, here's Texas (click to embiggen):

Pretty cool. Each of the markers is clickable, and it gives you the actual vote total for each candidate in each county.

Bloglines is Down; Google Reader is Not

I used bloglines as my feed reader for the past couple of years, but I have noticed in the past that it takes a while to update feeds. And today it's not updating at all. And so I also discovered how easy it is to export your subscriptions to google reader. Which is not down, and which seems to update very quickly. So, just like that, I think I've abandoned one web app for another.

Comcast Internet Update

So, at the conclusion of my tech travails in mid-December, I said:

[I]n the first I am sure of many installments regarding customer service, Comcast scheduled installation for this morning between 8 and 10. At 11, I called, and the computer told me that my appointment was for 10:30 to 12:30. Okay. At 12:35 I called and got a person - to their credit - who spoke something very much like my language and she told me the install guy was running late. Once he did show up (only 10 minutes later), he was pretty quick and thorough, despite having what appeared to be prison tattoos.

So, a week ago I come home and the internet connection is not working. Here we go, I thought, and called Comcast. Here's the timeline:

4:18 p.m. Placed first call to internet tech support.

4:20 p.m. Call disconnected.

4:22 p.m. Placed second call to internet tech support. Reached James, who tells me my account is not active because my installation was canceled. I tell him installation took place on December 15th and I had been happily using the service until that very day. He is nonplussed, then offers to transfer me to billing.

4:30 p.m. Am placed on hold as I am transferred to billing. I emerge in billing's voicemail system, but eventually reach Tiffany. Tiffany also says my installation had been canceled, and I explain that is not true, the install guy came out, he installed it, and I paid him $33.  That's when she stopped me.

"He asked for money?"
"Yes, he said I had to pay $33; I gave it to him in cash."
"Oh, no," Tiffany said.

You know, other than the prison tattoos, the install guy did set off my alarm bells. First of all, he looked like an opiates guy; maybe heroin, more likely oxy. Second, he said he had been doing this for 15 years, but he didn't look a day over 30. Third, he was very concerned I secure my password "because there were a lot of people out there who would rip you off." Fourth, I hadn't expected to have to pay, so I had only $32 in my wallet, and he started to say "Oh, that's alright" while reaching for it, when I produced the last dollar in change. Now, what bill collector accepts a payment that's a buck short? So should I have known? Yep. Did I care? Nope, because the internet was working, and that's all I wanted. What apparently happened is this guy got a job with Comcast, then did a sort of bust-out operation where he installed people's cable and collected cash, but didn't turn in the paperwork on the installation.

4:40 p.m. Tiffany corrects my account info and very apologetically explains she has to transfer me back to internet tech support to turn the connection back on. Places me on hold. Comes back a minute later to again apologize and say it would be just a little longer. Back on hold another minute, then returns to hand me off directly to a live internet tech support person, Tiu (or Tu, I didn't get a spelling).

4:48 p.m. Tiu walks me through setting up the modem and making sure my account has the right MAC address.

5:02 p.m. Internet connection working again.

I don't blame Comcast at all for the perfidy of the install guy; on the other hand, they corrected the problem in less than 45 minutes, and aren't charging me for the first month. Plus, the 6 Mb service has been awesome.

Grade for the incident: A.
Overall grade so far: A.

Gmail Hacked! Read This and Check Your Settings - Now

If you use Gmail, read this guy's story and check to make sure you haven't been hacked, too.

(Via Adam Pash at lifehacker.)

Technological Meltdown Epilogue

So after a few years of putting up with DSL, because I am a little slow on the uptake sometimes, I finally got cable internet today. The only reason I realized that my former ISP (a) had one-tenth the speed of cable and (b) cost twice as much was that it went out, then in, then out, then in .... so I said screw it and found an alternative.

But in the first I am sure of many installments regarding customer service, Comcast scheduled installation for this morning between 8 and 10. At 11, I called, and the computer told me that my appointment was for 10:30 to 12:30. Okay. At 12:35 I called and got a person - to their credit - who spoke something very much like my language and she told me the install guy was running late. Once he did show up (only 10 minutes later), he was pretty quick and thorough, despite having what appeared to be prison tattoos.

So, that fixes the desktop. My laptop was in the shop for a week, and for $40 they told me the hard drive had failed, although it can boot up and load the safe mode introduction screen. For a mere $355 more, they say they can fix it and retrieve my files. I sought a second opinion and will be attempting a life-saving procedure myself in the next few days. That porn on there was free to begin with and it's going to stay that way.

Technological Meltdown Part the Third

I am in full-on internet withdrawal. My laptop is probably dead, as is my DSL service for the desktop. I am scheduled to get cable internet on Saturday morning, but in the meantime can only post this from a friend's place, like some kind of web vagabond.

Technological Meltdown Part II

So Thursday, as I was heading out of town, my desktop's DSL connection went down, my laptop died, and my Treo started acting up. Today the phone is fixed, the laptop is in the shop, and the DSL - well, it's up sometimes, down others, and I am going to bite the bullet and switch to Comcast. Hell, Verizon's EVDO would probably be faster than my crappy DSL provider.

Technological Meltdown

So my home DSL went out, rendering my desktop useless, and then my laptop died, and then my web-enabled phone developed issues, just before I left town for the weekend. I am posting this from an internet cafe in the Chicago airport. Don't think I'll be around much for a few days/ But really is that all that different from the usual?

Google Sketchup

This is pretty amazing:

Google SketchUp 6 is a 3D modeling software tool that’s easy to learn, simple to use, and lets you place your models in Google Earth. Are you remodeling a kitchen, landscaping your back yard or adding a deck to your home? Google SketchUp makes it faster, easier and a lot more fun. From simple to complex, from conceptual to realistic, Google SketchUp helps you see your vision before you build it.

To get an idea of how powerful  and simple to use it is, someone has a bunch of demonstration videos up.

(Via Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing.)

TomTom One GPS $200 $160 at Toysrus

Back in mid-August, the TomTom One GPS was on sale at Toys R Us for $200, now it's at $160 (and possibly even less; read the link). In-store sales only.

How to Make a Hyperlink

I notice a lot of people in blog comments still paste whole URLs rather than trying to create a text hyperlink. Is it laziness? Against their religion? Lack of knowledge?

In case it's the last, here's the format for a hyperlink:

[a href="http://www.yourlinkhere.com"]Your text here.[/a]

Except use angle brackets <> instead of the square brackets [] .  It's very simple.

TomTom One GPS $200 at Toysrus

Until August 18, Toyrus has a printable 20% off coupon (in-store only), which gets you the TomTom One GPS for $200.  I bought the same unit last year and I love it. It paid for itself in the first month, when on two different occasions I was on the highway and heard about accidents ahead. I hit the "Avoid part of route" button on the TomTom and it detoured me around the traffic jam on the highway on surface streets I was otherwise totally unfamiliar with, saving me hours of being stuck. The other really cool feature is the unit is slim enough to fit in your pocket, so it works just as well when you're hiking in the country or navigating a city on foot as it does in a car.

(Via SlickDeals.)

You Know What Seriously Sucks?

Comedy Central's online video player.  It just never works right.

Spotting Online Scams

Ten out of ten. Pretty easy, really. I think my mom shouldn't do online banking, though.

(Via Gina Trapani at Lifehacker.)

T-Mobile Cell Phone That Automatically Switches to Any Free WiFi Connection

NYTimes.com:

It’s called T-Mobile HotSpot @Home, and it’s absolutely ingenious. It could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, and yet enrich T-Mobile at the same time. In the cellphone world, win-win plays like that are extremely rare.

Here’s the basic idea. If you’re willing to pay $10 a month on top of a regular T-Mobile voice plan, you get a special cellphone. When you’re out and about, it works like any other phone; calls eat up your monthly minutes as usual.

But when it’s in a Wi-Fi wireless Internet hot spot, this phone offers a huge bargain: all your calls are free. You use it and dial it the same as always — you still get call hold, caller ID, three-way calling and all the other features — but now your voice is carried by the Internet rather than the cellular airwaves.

These phones hand off your calls from Wi-Fi network to cell network seamlessly and automatically, without a single crackle or pop to punctuate the switch. As you walk out of a hot spot, fewer and fewer Wi-Fi signal bars appear on the screen, until — blink! — the T-Mobile network bars replace them. (The handoff as you move in the opposite direction, from the cell network into a hot spot, is also seamless, but takes slightly longer, about a minute.)

T-Mobile gives you a router for home for free, and the service works at the 8,500 T-Mobile hotspots in places like Starbucks and Borders. Now, as the article admits, T-Mobile's regular network is not exactly the best, and this move is a way for them to avoid the cost of upgrading that network. That undercuts the competitive pressure on Verizon Wireless and the other leading carriers to offer the same thing. Still, this is a good development.

(Via Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing.)

Street-Level Google Maps

I don't understand the mild freakout that people are having about street-level google maps. They've been perfectly happy with geotagging flickr photos for a while, so what's the difference if - eventually - there is a picture of every foot of every street in every city in the country?

More the Blog Petri Dish

It's based on Technorati links, so take this with a large grain of salt, but here is Discover Magazine's visual depiction of the blogosphere:

The white spots are "hubs" around which various communities revolve:

1. Daily Kos, in the liberal blog area, is the biggest blog in the world, bar none. Note that it's off to one side, which is consistent with the fact that Kossacks read (and link to) Kos pretty exclusively. I imagine the smaller white dot is Duncan.
2. BoingBoing at the center of a cloud of gadget/tech blogs.
3. Livejournal .
4. Michelle Malkin (not instahack?!) and right-wing blogs.
5. Porn blogs.
6. Sports blogs.

I was suprised that Kos was more popular than gadget blogs. These stats are based on links, so would still think a traffic-based map would show a different result. I was also surprised, as I said, that Reynolds is not the center of the right-wing world, and also surprised how many right-wing blogs there are. Intelligence is a normal distribution?

(Via Luke at The Blog Brief.)

Ain't Technology Wonderful

I just installed Typepad Mobile on my new Palm 700p, and am trying it out. It's okay. Makes it easy to enter text and pics, but not links. (Not that it would be easy to do so on a phone, but still.) There's no spellcheck.

Bottom line: A toy I'll play with occasionally, but unless I get a cameraphone pic of an airliner crash, not very useful.

Timothy Noah, Wikiwanker

Dear Mr. Noah:
I know your column was intended to be kind of cutesy and self-promoting ("Hey, look everyone, I have a Wikipedia entry, for now!"), but your effort to indict Wikipedia for having notability standards is just lame.

1. "Wikipedia commands what is, for all practical purposes, infinite space and infinite manpower." You do work for an online publication, right? Because I would expect this sort of thing from a total newbie. Wikipedia has editorial administration, oversight and management, because it does have standards for completeness and style, and there will always be disputes over editing. Someone needs to have final say. Adding untold millions of articles on any subject or person, no matter how minor, is guaranteed to break the system.
2. "If Wikipedia publishes a bio of my cleaning lady, that won't make it any harder to field experts to write and edit Wikipedia's bio of Albert Einstein. So why not let her in?" The internet is wonderful, but it's not magic. A huge database is difficult to manage, and expensive to host. A database run amok with useless entries is the shortest distance to bankruptcy. And yes, Mr. Noah, it costs money  to run a site like Wikipedia.
3. "Another limit is accuracy. The bio's assertions about my cleaning lady would have to be independently verifiable from trustworthy sources made available to readers. Otherwise Wikipedia's vast army of volunteer fact-checkers would be unable to find out whether the bio was truthful." The vast army of volunteer fact-checkers also has to care enough about a topic to check it. Having a notability requirement helps to ensure this.
4. "We know why other encyclopedias need to limit the topics they cover." Here's the basic problem: You don't understand why an encyclopedia is useful. You don't need to create an article when the information is readily available elsewhere. Googling your name tells one all they need to know about you because there isn't that much which needs explanation, unlike - for example, using "random article" - coronal loops.
5. "We limit entry to the club not because we need to, but because we want to." This ending is just wacky. You're protesting being removed from Wikipedia, not because your cleaning lady never got an entry in the first place. You are pissed because you want to be in the club, not because entry is limited. And using an internet resource - especially one like Wikipedia - as an example of an exclusionary social structure is ludicrous. Google exists, okay? If you feel the need to be known, put up a vanity page. Get a free blog and autobio yourself until you can't autobio anymore.

Update: I had forgotten I had written this about Noah three years ago. He makes as little sense now as he did then.

Motorola Q versus Treo 700p

This is not a full-blown review, just a summary of my personal experience as a long-time user of Palm devices in comparing Verizon Wireless's Motorola Q and the Treo 700p.  My conclusion is that - for someone like me - there is ample reason to get the Treo over the Q. Even if you haven't used Palm devices before, you may find some factors - the battery life, especially - important.

I've used Palm devices since about 2000. First I owned a Kyocera 6035 Smartphone (and I think its bulky corpse still haunts my repository of discarded electronics). Dissatisfied, I replaced the flawed convergence device with a combination of a regular cell phone and a PDA - first, a Handspring, and when that broke, a Sony Clie SJ-20. Finally, in mid-2004 I got a Treo 600 from Verizon Wireless. Having overcome my resistance to using a headset to talk on, I finally was able to simultaneously talk on the phone and use the Calendar and Contacts. From my perspective, that's the only way a convergence device is useful - if it does different things at the same time. As a major bonus, there was a wonderful array of free applications created by Palm enthusiasts available online. 

When it came time to replace my old Treo, because of what I read about it in magazines like Wired and testimonials like Albert's, I first got the Motorola Q. I have been using Windows PCs since 1987, so I figured my learning curve for  Windows would be trivial. I fully expected to be blown away, but long story short, I took advantage of Verizon Wireless's policy that you can return any new device within two weeks. I then got the Treo 700p, and was thrilled with it from the moment I turned it on.

First, here's a (very bad) picture I grabbed off the web of the Q next to the 700, just for size comparison:

And here are my old Treo 600 and new Treo 700p:

Here are the factors that went into my comparison of the Treo and the Motorola, in descending order of importance:

• The Treo's battery life is significantly longer.  When I charge the Treo overnight, under normal usage conditions, it lasts me all day and all evening. If I neglect to charge it the next night, it will still have juice through the next morning. Doing the same thing with the Q gave it enough power to get through the day and part of the evening, and then it crapped out. That alone was very close to being a deciding factor for me. Worse, when you plug in a Q with a very low battery, the phone does not come on again for several minutes. If I push the Treo to its battery limit and then plug it in, it works.
• Treo's ergonomics are superior to the Motorola's. Long story short, the Palm is designed to fit in your palm, and the Q is not. This one completely caught me by surprise.  One of the reasons I wanted the Q was it was much thinner and lighter than the Treo. But it turns out the thicker, heavier Treo is much easier to hold and use one-handed, a key advantage. The difference is the result of a basic design decision: the edges of the Treo are curved, while the Q is a thin, rectangular box. When you hold the Treo, your hand and fingers are  actually touching the curved portions, resulting in you having a good quarter-inch of skin gripping each side of the device. This allows your thumb to reach all the buttons on the phone without worrying it will slip out of your hand. When you hold the Q, by contrast, your hand and fingers are trying to grip it on the sharp bottom edges. That means you have to grip it harder to make it feel secure in your hand, but a tighter grip makes your thumb unable to reach all the buttons.
  
• Programs run faster on the Treo. When I open an application or perform an operation inside an application on the Treo, it almost always happens instantly. (Occasionally, there will be some lag when scrolling through menus, but if that happens the worst that results is you overshoot the menu you wanted to get to.) The Q lagged a lot while opening new applications and, significantly, lagged while performing operations within an application. That second kind of lag is really undesirable, because if you're not sure if you just missed the right button, you end up hitting it twice, and when the Q finally catches up, you may have done something you didn't want.
• SMS conversations are in IM format on the Treo. This is a feature of the Treo I have always liked, and it mystifies me that Microsoft didn't steal it. If you're like me, you text with the same people all the time. When I open the SMS folder, all those conversations are grouped by the person's name, just like an IM chat log. You can't do that on the Q.
• You can search all the data on your Treo, but not the Q. The Treo has a search function that allows you to search all the application data on the phone. Since my phone holds a lot of data in different ways - contacts, appointments, SMS - it's helpful. You can't do that on the Q. In fact, I couldn't figure out how to search Contacts at all, which is really a drawback when you want to find a person based on some detail you entered in their profile.
• The Treo has a touch screen, the Q does not. Even if you don't enter data using the stylus, having push buttons in applications just makes life easier.
• One advantage for the Q: screen resolution.  The one thing I found more desirable about the Q was that its screen was sharper. That was the only thing I liked better about it.

Google Maps Adds Subway Stops And Building Outlines

Via Lifehacker, I see Google Maps has added subway stops (although not routes) and the outlines (with shading to indicate height) of prominent buildings:

The building outlines are a huge improvement. When Google added the Satellite view, it was really fun to play with:

Hey look! I can see my roofdeck! Which is cool, but there was an obvious flaw: You couldn't print it, preventing you from using the topography made visible as a navigation aid. On the other hand, you might not actually want to print the full-photo view, both because it would use an enormous amount of ink and because often cluttered landscapes were confusing to interpert.  The new building outlines provide the useful details of the satellite view while avoiding its problems.

Send Cellphone Pics to 911

From Boing Boing, a good idea whose time has come:

New York City will be upgrading their 911 and 311 systems to accept digital photos and video from callers.

In philly, we're just happy if they answer 911.

National Security Spam Email

I don't know why. I don't know who. I am not sure at all what, except that a) it's spam and b) has the subject line "WMDs sponsoring":

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(Emphasis mine.)

Yahoo! Mail Leaves the Stone Age

Yahoo! Mail rolled out a beta with three innovations - tabbed views, drag and drop, and using Ctrl or Shift to select multiple messages.  These are things they should have done the moment Gmail was announced, but hey.

The ACLU Has a Blog. Who Knew?

Guess what? The American Civil Liberties Union - the leading civil liberties organization in the country, which makes headlines every day, is often controversial, and has over 500,000 members - has a blog.

I have been hoping they would start a blog for years.  So I should be overjoyed.

Yet, I am not. I am disgusted. Because they so do not get the concept:

• The blog is not listed in the Technorati directory, on the TTLB ecosystem, or any other blog directory that I can find.   
• As of right this second, there are 12,930 blog links to the front page of aclu.org. But just 46 links to the blog. Why? Maybe one reason is there is no link to the blog from the front page of the site.  In contrast, stoptheaclu.com has 25,939 links. (These are raw numbers of links, not uniques, and obviously by the time you click on them, the figures will have changed.  But I bet the proportions remain the same.)  I mean, come on, I have 284 links.
• There is no freaking blogroll.  There are nearly no links to any other blogs at all.
• They launched the blog in September, 2005, and I only stumbled upon it tonight by accident.  Was there an announcement made at all?  The first post wasn't even "Hey, We Have a Blog."
• In almost 13 months of operation, a grand total of 63 posts. Some months, no posts at all.  Unsurprisingly, almost all of the recent posts have no comments. 
• The most recent post is from September 8 and the title is - I kid you not - "Report from the September 7 Senate Judiciary Committee Mark-Up." 

This is horrible, in a word.  They clearly have no one in the shop who understands the basics of blogging, and the leadership clearly don't care, if they know it exists at all.  It's a magnificent opportunity squandered. 

The blog format is perfect for the ACLU given its membership size, the amazing talent that it has on staff and in volunteer lawyers, the importance of the issues involved, and the vitriol launched at the organization on a hourly basis. Imagine a crew of really good staff bloggers engaging the ACLU's supporters and critics as events occur instead of leaving the online debate to alleged friends ("I do feel that they've become overly partisan in recent years ...."), dishonest hacks, nutjobs, dimwits, and their sworn enemies.  Imagine guest posts by clients with heart-wrenching stories of having their civil liberties violated, by the lawyer who led the latest high-profile case to victory, by the lobbyist who sounds the alarm on yet another bill in Congress that threatens our constitutional rights.  It would be devastating. Imagine how many passionate, intelligent, informed bloggers - lawyers or not, ACLU members or not - who would link to such discussions.  Using blogs to spread the word and rally people to action would give the ACLU ten-fold more leverage than they get from just emailing their half a million members now.  And that's not even to mention how effective a membership recruitment and a fundraising tool it would be.

I am disgusted because I really wished they got it.  I have been a lifelong ACLU member and it pains me to see them not use this powerful tool that is lying right in front of them. 

Bloglines Freedbacking

Freedback they want, freedback they get:

1. Searches from the bloglines screen do not produce good results.  Specifically, they miss posts I know exist in the database.  This happens all the time. It makes search basically useless.
2. I have lots of posts from my favorite blogs checked as "keep new".  I can no longer access any that are more than a few weeks old.  Why? The count clearly shows I have them checked. (I know this may not be a great filing system, but it worked up until recently.)
3. I need to be able to edit my feed names and move them into folders from the main screen, not an "edit" one.

I used to recommend bloglines to people without hesitating.  I can't do that anymore.

Ask the Laziest Blogger in the World

You know what they need? They need to make my sporadic, half-assed writing easier:

1. Suggested Links. It takes too much goddamn effort to go out and find links to news articles and other blog posts that pertain to whatever subject I am writing about.  When I draft a post, it ought to come up with a list of such links (with an RSS feed so I can find out when new shit appears).

2. Predictions Tracker.  For a political blogger, predictions of future events are pretty common and more commonly forgotten.  If some asshole like me says, "Within 2 Friedmans, Iraqi troops will have Anbar pacified", then that prediction should be tracked automatically - either by the blogging software or by some technorati-type web app or both - so that when time is up, said asshole is publicly embarrassed.

3. Text Boxes. You know those chunks of text that appear in large bold font in the middle of a newspaper story? They're there to keep the reader's attention on a long, potentially boring story.  The parallel to blogging should be obvious. The virtue of this format is ease of reading, and even for someone like me whose average post is very short in length, you want to make it as simple as possible for the reader to determine if she is interested in reading the whole thing.  Making those boxes should be automated. As far as I can tell, right now it's impossible for me to do it at all in typepad.

4. Footnotes. Come on, I'm a geek who thinks historical references, cultural allusions and wacky connections are fun. It's better for everyone if I can drop a footnote automatically so as to get the tangents out of the main flow.

Of course, there may be ways to do all of those things automatically already, but of course, I am too lazy to even go check first. If I had that kind of energy, then I wouldn't be on typepad, now would I?  I would have just completed the latest update of wordpress on a server in my basement, whatever that means. And I think you know what it means. It means please dumb it down for me.

Sock Puppets for Republican U.S. Senate Candidate from N.J.!

Oops. Better get a new spokesperson.

Best Site for Finding Cheapest Gas Near You

Gina Trapani of Lifehacker reports that different gas-price sites were compared and the best is MSN Autos Gas Prices.

Wikipedia in the New Yorker

The July 31, 2006 issue of The New Yorker has a Stacy Schiff article on Wikipedia:

According to a page on the site, an avid interest in Wikipedia has been known to afflict “computer programmers, academics, graduate students, game-show contestants, news junkies, the unemployed, the soon-to-be unemployed and, in general, people with multiple interests and good memories.” You may travel in more exalted circles, but this covers pretty much everyone I know.

Clever. The rest of the article is a mess, however, best suited to someone "in more exalted circles" who has heard of Wikipedia but has never been to it, and who uses the internet rarely, if ever. It presents the topic as a conflict between stereotypical young, creepily enthusiastic internet nerds and stodgy greybearded print encyclopedia editors, between a million web monkeys typing at a million keyboards spewing out trash and treasure trying to overwhelm a fortress in which dusty old scholars are nodding off over dusty old books, between revolution and reaction.  Given that frame, of course the reader will side with the revolutionary, and the article ends on that note:

[Wikipedia Founder] Jimmy Wales may or may not be the new Henry Ford, yet he has sent us tooling down the interstate, with but a squint back at the railroad. We’re on the open road now, without conductors and timetables. We’re free to chart our own course, also free to get gloriously, recklessly lost. Your truth or mine?

This frame is shit. It's a lost opportunity to consider the subject seriously, instead of a contest of new versus old.  Whether the Model T was more reliable than a horse and buggy is not a very interesting question.  More interesting is to ask what the advent of the automobile heralded. It took less than 40 years to go from a 20 horsepower 4 cylinder engine to the jet fighter.  If Wikipedia is the Model T, how long before the moon landing, metaphorically speaking?  And actually, the Henry Ford analogy works better for the traditional encyclopedia: Top down control, a hierarchy of authority dedicated to ensuring sameness of output, and disregard for customer desires epitomized by the saying, "You can have it in any color you want, as long as it's black."  What Wikipedia does is totally different.  What is it about knowledge today that makes the wiki so appealing to people? Is it just that Wikipedia's free and online and the Encyclopedia Brittanica isn't?  Or is it that the fact that the users are also the authors mean that wiki content always automatically molds itself to the users' needs in a way a traditional encyclopedias cannot? It would have been nice to read an article about that.

Lifehacker's Weird Post About How Bush is Not Violating Your Rights

Lifehacker is the only Gawker blog I still read, and while I usually love it, today it has a bizarre post by some third-year law student named Stewart Rutledge entitled  "How the government (doesn't) read your email: or How Conspiracy Theorists Were Reborn as 'Privacy Advocates''".

The post begins sanely enough with the statement that Google's data collection practices don't make the government's job of invading your privacy any easier.  If the post had just laid out the evidence surrounding this issue - which is complex enough - and taken a view, it would have been fine. But then it goes on to raise questions it fails to answer, insult the very sane, very smart people working to preserve 4th Amendment rights in our personal information, and make the completely unsupported assertion that any privacy rights you haven't already contracted away are certainly being respected by the government.  What the fuck?

I won't waste a lot of time disassembling the post because it has the feel of a crank letter to the editor published just to get people angry enough to write in.  So rather than allowing myself to be manipulated further, let me just say: I am a lawyer. I have read the USA PATRIOT Act.  I have followed the news of the Bush Administration's surveillance programs.  And between PATRIOT's permanent, global gag orders surrounding the execution of searches, on one hand, and Bush's apparent conviction that he can do whatever he wants to whomever he wants in total secrecy, on the other, all that can be said for sure is that none of us has the slightest fucking clue whether and to what extent our rights have been violated.  Which is intolerable in a democracy, no matter what some law student who is trying to suck up to Google says.