August 19, 2010

Avoiding Responsibility

Recently, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he thought, "Young people may one day have to change their names in order to escape their previous online activity." (BBC link)

Honestly, this is the most asinine comment to come out of Schmidt's mouth yet.

First, legally changing your name to avoid your past does NOT fricking work. Most employers for anything better than a minimum wage job run a background check. This will automatically bring up any previous names. And, quite frankly, I can see where if this did become a trend, many companies just noting a name change and assuming the person had something to hide, or had been irresponsible and was therefore a risk to hire - without doing the research to determine if this was true or not.

In essence, it could easily become the second line of tossing out resumes - the first being errors in the resume or cover letter.

Secondly, what does this teach people about personal responsibility? Oh, okay, what you do as a juvenile doesn't matter at all. You are free of any consequences ....

STUPID! That kind of bullshit thinking has been leading us down a very nasty little path for quite some time now. Now, I'm not saying that everything you do as a child should haunt you for the rest of your life, because it shouldn't. You have to make mistakes to learn and you really do need to do some stupid shit to learn sometimes. Often, that can make you a better person. But it brings about change in someone because there are consequences, sometimes quite long-reaching ones.

If we were to ever put a system in place upon which you became a "new" person without researchable history at 18 or 21, I think the consequences on society would be alarming.

Why not be proactive? Why not TEACH children and young people today what is and isn't good to share with the world? Why shouldn't adults be teaching younger people this now?

Lame, Mr. Schmidt. Short-sighted and LAME.

But any more, I don't expect much from the CEO of Google. It seems once a company reaches a certain "tipping point" in size, estimated worth and popularity (of use, not how much people "like" it) ... it becomes short-sighted, somewhat stupid ... and generally speaking, somewhere between evil and short on concern for the people they claim to serve/service.

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:46 AM | Comments (2) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Stumble

July 13, 2010

Snacks

So, someone who'd once worked at the company where I am now moved to Korea. I believe it was supposed to be a one or two year deal (maybe a teaching gig), but they've decided they like it there. Anyhow, this guy came to visit and brought a slew of funny Korean foods.

Now by funny, I don't mean, "Oh look what weird shit they eat," instead I mean the packaging. There were dick sticks, for instance. Also, nude balls. Then there was fun stuff like coffee gum.

I tried one of the sticks. They weren't bad and most everyone was munching on them, but I'd expected savory, not sweet - and nothing trips my Asperger's-like tendencies faster than tasting something sweet when I expect savory. Then my co-worker said there were cheese sticks. I was excited - that would get the sweet taste out of my mouth!

So, I happily went over and snagged a cheese stick. I thought maybe it would be kind of spicy, but was preparing myself for mild and perhaps sweet. It looked like the small version of one of those Kraft cheese tube things - or Hickory Farms makes them too. It seemed a little soft, but the Kraft squeeze cheese I remember from when I was little was actually squirted out of one of those tubes, so I wasn't too surprised. I squished a little bit out, seemed okay ... and then I tried it.

Mistake.

That was the nastiest, vilest - UGH. I couldn't quite place the taste and decided there was soy in it. Well, there was soy, true. It was fish cheese.

FISH CHEESE

Lest you think I am joking, another co-worker found this:

FISH CHEESE

I'm gagging just thinking about it again.

Apparently some people in Korea use these on their iPhones instead of a stylus since many of them wear gloves all the time.

Remind me to NEVER EVER use someone's touch screen in Korea ... blergh!

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:44 PM | Comments (0) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Stumble

June 10, 2010

hOily Whale - desktops

By popular request, I have two sizes of computer desktop version of the poor beleaguered Fail Whale for those who are interested.

Some have asked, and there are various discussions about t-shirts as well. If you are interested in a t-shirt, please leave a comment below.

1680x1050 Desktop
1280x1024 Desktop

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:34 PM | Comments (5) | Design | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Sketches | Stumble

April 27, 2010

California, Gizmodo, Bloggers ... and Theft

The story goes like this: dude leaves his cell phone in a bar. Guy on the next seat over sees it laying there. Whacks the dude on the stool next to it and says, "Hey, your buddy left his phone." Second dude wasn't there with the guy who left the phone, but he picks it up anyway and begins fiddling with it. He doesn't turn it in to the bartender, which, to be honest, would have been my first thought. It's a so-called smartphone, so he starts messing with it. Takes it home with him. Laughs at the guy's Facebook page, etc, etc, etc.

Now the deal is, in California, it's illegal to just make off with found items. You are supposed to hand things you find over to the cops. If, within three years the owner hasn't claimed it, then maybe you have a claim. In a state heavy with small and expensive prototypes ... this seems quite reasonable to me. Honestly, most places could do with a law like that, but of course, the cops are crazy-overburdened most places and don't have time with every Dick and Jane who can't keep track of their damn Crackberries.

Actually, to be even more honest, such a law shouldn't even be freaking necessary because if it's not yours and you find it ... it's still not yours.

So anyhow, little Mr. Second Dude takes this nifty new phone home with him. Maybe he's always wanted one and he just assumes he'll be able to register it with another cell provider and use it even though this phone is pretty famously locked into one provider. Maybe he's mostly good intentioned and he just wants to play with it before contacting the guy and returning it. You know, keep it a couple of days, rack up some calls and some games, have a little fun ... teach the guy a lesson.

But when he gets up the next morning, it's bricked. Huh. Weird. It's been remotely disabled. Gee, that's what my partner did when she lost her cell phone on the ski slopes - called the provider and had it disabled and then registered as lost/stolen so that no one could re-activate it.

Dude does more investigation. Decides that he has a prototype phone. Worth some bucks. So he starts contacting ... well, we know he contacted two tech blogs. One turned him down. This, to me, seems the ethical response. Having possession of this phone is not the same as a few surreptitious photos. There are legal considerations in California ... and certainly paying the mysterious dude who "found" the prototype could be construed as illegal even if your ethics are shaky.

The other blog bought it for $5000. Bragged about buying it. Took the phone apart, filmed everything and then, knowing at this point that they had a genuine prototype (unless someone was punking them), they published everything in a rather flamboyant, gloating ... and completely unprofessional manner.

Apple requested their item back. Gizmodo gave it back. They'd published the name of the dude who lost the phone. They made fun of him. They "defended" him and asked Apple not to fire him ... but they did it in a way to put the guy in the worst possible light.

There have been claims that they tried to return the phone ... but the beer garden where it was found was never contacted. Instead, they supposedly called the Apple switchboard. Smallest amount of ass-covering they could do that would buy them the time they needed to tear the toy apart.

The deal is, this is not journalism no matter what Gizmodo thinks. Perhaps if they'd stuck to the pertinent facts: the tech details only ... maybe. There's still some sticking points of California law, but maybe they'd be able to play the journalism card.

No, instead they acted like a gloating junior high bully - "Well, lookit what we found. And you can't do nothing about it because we took it apart and photographed it and where's your secrecy now, dork?" And to further add to their gloating bully routine, they then made fun of the guy who lost it. They published his name, they used pictures from his Flickr stream and talked about his Facebook account.

They pulled a Nelson and gleefully shouted, "HA, HA," at Apple, at Gray Powell ... and at California law. Because they thought they qualified as journalists and could do such things.

Now, the police have gone into the blogger's home, removed computers, servers, USB disks, etc, etc, etc, because they suspect a felony has occurred. Gizmodo bragging they paid $5000 for the device made this a felony since it's over $990 in value.

There are complaints that Apple is behind this. That somehow Apple is picking on a poor journalistic blogger.

I call bullshit on that.

1) I don't care if Apple did ask the police (or request the special agency) to investigate. Their prototype went missing. By California law, it is still theirs for three years. There is no finders, keepers playground rule here. No one had the right to sell the prototype. At the very least, a crime was committed when the phone was sold.
2) Gizmodo bought a device from someone whom they knew had no right to sell it - if it was legitimately an Apple prototype.
3) Gizmodo bought a device from someone whom they knew had no right to sell it - based on the story they were told. Either it was an iPhone that didn't belong to "Mr. Second Dude" or it was a prototype. Either way, it as not his to sell. Or Gizmodo's to purchase. It comes dangerously close to buying stolen property.
4) After having bought the phone, they took it apart in order to verify that it was, in fact, Apple's prototype and then publish all the proprietary information.

This is not a journalist protecting a source. This is purchasing something they had no right to purchase. This is not purchasing information. This is purchasing a lost/stolen item.

If this had happened to Microsoft, whom I cannot stand, I would probably not be as ticked, I'll be honest. But I would also hope that Gizmodo would be still be under investigation. That the police would be looking for the dishonest and greedy jerk who walked off with the prototype.

Look, if the phone was on the floor and in pieces and no one remembered who sat there, I might be sympathetic to Gizmodo publishing pictures. It's still illegal. It's still wrong, but it's a little more understandable.

But knowing who owned the phone (the Apple engineer's name even) ... and NOT returning it ... and then paying five grand for it and STILL not returning it.

That's not journalism. Gizmodo has done nothing but prove that bloggers aren't necessarily journalists. And in this case, Gizmodo has proven they are unethical, amoral bullies. To now cry because the police have "broken down their doors" - what did you expect when you broke the law and gloated about it? It's time to man up and admit what you did was wrong. Take responsibility for your shady shenanigans and then shut up.

.

(Disclaimer: there are plenty of bloggers with the ethics and practices of good journalists ... I am NOT painting all bloggers with Gizmodo's brush. But I think this does show that as a category bloggers does not automatically equal journalist.)

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:37 AM | Comments (0) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Stumble

April 19, 2010

4/19/1995

I lived most of my life in Texas and spent summers visiting my grandparents in Oklahoma. For a short while, we lived in Oklahoma City near my grandparents. As a Texan, I am bound by law to make fun of Okies - particularly my sister since she was born in Oklahoma City.

I was fascinated by Founders Tower downtown and often begged Grandma to take me there just because I thought the building was so interesting. I don't recall the Murrah Building, although it was built in 1977, before my grandparents moved out to the Talequah area.

In 1995, I was walking through the student union. I'd moved to a state "up north" for graduate school and I'd been there - and regretting it - for 8 months.

I never felt so out of place as looking at the familiar landscape of Oklahoma City as I did walking by that big screen in the student union fifteen years ago today. That was one of my cities. A place where I had lived. The place my grandparents had lived. The place my little sister was born. And some dirtbag had blown a building up.

This was the city where I took a magic class. Where I learned about Zotz candies and where I got to be in the audience for a TV show and was shown the engineers' booth.

WTF just happened?

I remember a moment of wanting to rush forward to help.

And then remembering that I was some 800 miles away. I could only watch. Feel helpless.

9:02 a.m.

Posted by Red Monkey at 3:17 AM | Comments (0) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

April 12, 2010

iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and Flash

I've really grown sick of the constant whinging about Apple's iPhone OS not supporting Flash. There are actual real reasons that don't have to do with some spat with Adobe (who now makes the Flash program) or making cold, hard cash.

Think about the websites which are currently built in Flash. Many of them rely on a programming event "mouseover." On a touchscreen, where is your mouse? Can you hover over something with your mouse on a touchscreen? How sensitive does the touchscreen have to be in order to differentiate between hovering your finger lightly over something and pressing down for a button action?

Touchscreens are an awesome thing to me, but they are still a fairly young technology and simply don't have all the capability that we have via a computer. It's not so much a fundamental flaw of the modern touchscreen as it is a developing tech - we're just not there yet. (And should we be or should we be searching out new paradigms?)

Now, what would be more frustrating to you as a user? Seeing a little brick icon on a bunch of sites because they use Flash or attempting to interact with a site, but not being able to make it work - and having no idea WHY it wasn't working? Frankly, I like Apple's solution once I thought about it.

Maybe I get this because I'm a web designer who knows Flash. I'm no great ActionScript programmer, but I know the basics and have made my share of animated Flash banners using ActionScript rather than keyframes. But I've heard a lot of grousing from other web folk who really ought to know better.

All of the grousing that iPhone doesn't support Flash, the iPad's mere existence on the face of the planet, Adobe's premature development of a Flash to iPhone conversion ...

... it all sounds like sour grapes from people who couldn't tell the difference between a shriveled, sour grape and a plump, sweet grape if the good grape ran off the vine, onto the table and did a dance routine right in front of them.

Instead, they'd complain that now even grapes want their fifteen minutes on So You Think You Can Dance and begin naming all the reasons why the grape should be smashed and made to feel inferior instead of marveling at the fact that the grape is freaking dancing in front of them.

Thoughtful criticism is an important part of life.

Constant complaining because every little thing doesn't suit your every little need shouldn't be a part of our lives at all.

Criticizing the iPad for not being "as good as a netbook" is lame. It's not a netbook. It's an iPad. It's not really an e-book reader; it's not really a computer or laptop or netbook; it's kind of but not really an overgrown iPod touch. It's a new thing. There's not exactly a comparison for it just yet. Relax. What does it matter to you if this product fails or becomes the new big thing? Why the hatred?

Why snap to instant judgments?

That said, I'm also sick of Adobe's attitude. (For the non-designers, Adobe makes the Flash program)

When Apple first launched OS X, they did it in a way that really impressed me because it offered both users and developers time to get used to the OS before requiring upgrades to all of your programs. There were three ways to develop a program - but at first, this didn't impact users at all. You could load a program in "Classic" mode and continue to use all of your old programs you'd already bought and paid for. Developers could use an intermediate way of producing code that would make a program work in OS X without relying on Classic. And finally, developers could write a program "native" to the new operating system. The best choice would be a native program because those would run the most smoothly. Classic programs would have to be "translated" to run and like a kid's game of "Telephone," that usually leads to odd snags. The same with the intermediate solution.

But Adobe waited forever before finally writing their software native to OS X.

The iPhone OS / Flash debacle is honestly more of the same. Adobe seems to believe that "translation" is a good and acceptable way to code rather than writing programs in native languages. Personally, I feel that's a flawed way to code.

Let's put it this way - all computers speak machine language, a series of 0s and 1s indicating "on" and "off." A particular type of computer uses a language optimized to the hardware to translate from human coding to machine language. So, we have human thought to programming language to machine language to action. Plenty of room for translation mistakes already. But if you choose to write your program in a format not native to that machine and its hardware, you're introducing yet another translation to the equation and increasing the likelihood of mistranslations and errors ... or just slow-downs as the machine tries to translate so many levels.

So Adobe thinking that a Flash to iPhone export option was a good idea was, in my opinion, a fundamentally flawed thinking process. At best, it would create a flood of mostly-functional apps for the iPhone (and iPod touch and iPad). More likely, it would flood the marketplace with bug-laden, slow apps which did not please the customer, partly due to the translation issues and partly due to the number of additional non-programmers who would have access to a fairly easy way to slap some pieces of programming together and calling it an app.

Is Apple's move about the bottom line? Yeah, it's about money. Is it about some long-standing dispute with Adobe? I don't think it is, at least not in the way that some think. It might be a reaction to Adobe's perceived programming philosophy, but I think that's rooted in bringing about Apple's tag line ... "it just works."

And you can't say, "it just works" if the software is terribly buggy and mistranslated ....

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:37 AM | Comments (0) | Design | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Stumble