That thing in the news
More details and/or original material about stories you've heard about.
I know that right now there's a stampede of media to Joe the Plumber's house so you won't need any links to see what that was all about in tonight's debate but until the satellite trucks arrive on his lawn, here are two links I found useful.
Video and transcript of the original exchange between Joe the Plumber and Obama on the Political Punch blog.
And here is a follow-up interview he did with a site called FamilySecurityMatters.org about his exchange with Obama.
With regard to my post earlier today, if Joe the Plumber didn't have a blog, the blog came to Joe.
I have installed Twhirl and it makes a world of difference in using Twitter. Essentially it turns your Twitter account into an instant messenger. Different people feel comfortable with different interfaces but for me, perhaps because of my chat background, I like IM so this suits me well.
Twhirl isn't new but Dropbox is and though I haven't tried it I plan to install it on both my home and work machines. I've mentioned before the problems I have with doing work on my home machine and then coming in to work and having to figure out how to get the previous nights work back in front of me. (You'll recall Instapaper was one solution I was liking for a while.) Dropbox is for more than just links, you can drag photos and whole folders into the thing and it synchs up with your other machines. Actually, it's probably less about synchronization and more about Dropbox being a middle man, but the demo video looks like what I want to be able to do: on the way out to work, drag whatever I'm in the middle of into a folder, get to work, open that folder and there I am. No e-mailing stuff to myself, no plugging in flash drives. I'm going to set it up Monday so I'll let you know if how it works.
I didn't hate the Seinfeld Microsoft commericials but I agree the point of them was a little difficult to discern. I do, however, really like these new ones that are apparently going to replace the Seinfeld ones.
I just added this as an update to yesterday's post but since it looks like it could be a new story on it's own I wanted to surface it here. Someone claiming to be the person who hacked Sarah Palin's e-mails posted a confession/explanation of sorts on a message board. The message was deleted but not before there were grabs taken and the username and the associated e-mail address were noted. At the time (long, long ago, yesterday afternoon) the thinking was that it would surely be a dead end because how could the guy be so stupid as to post that long confession and use something that could be so easily traced? I should add a note of caution here that as far as I know, no one has been charged and of course the person who owns that address is being investigated because it's an obvious lead. But at the same time, it appears that the hacker may actually have been that stupid. I'm sure there are a lot of people blogging it but I clicked Gateway Pundit .
Something that didn't occur to me that of course makes sense is that Internet justice in a case of invasion of privacy will be a complete and thorough invasion of privacy. I expect this will not be pretty.
In the Light Bot game you program the robot to make it move. A nice level of challenge without being too discouraging.
Am I crazy or does the alligator in photo number 6 look kind of happy? I actually tried to use the Bird's Eye View in Live Maps over Gilchrist, Texas to see if I could find the house in photo #11 but I can't make it out. I did learn from a colleague where Jeff Ranieri was standing when he shot this video . If you've got two monitors you can pan Google street view at the same time he pans his camera for a before/after perspective.
Speaking of using Google Street View to explore the real world, Google Street View goes mobile
Speaking of new stuff from Google, they launched audio indexing . The software can translate the audio in YouTube clips and offer that translation to search. That's cool in itself but if the thing can understand audio, why am I still typing into it? Is it time for the audio revolution?
Speaking of audio, I was watching the Bandcamp video here when I saw the adjacent link to this cool Droste effect video . From the Flickr category I saw the mention on this photo of GIMP plugin MathMap . (Reminder: GIMP is a free open source photo editor.)
Mr. and Mrs. Vader computer generated art . Each photo links back to a gallery of the artist on computer generated art site called CG Hub .
If Wikipedia was a college professor...
How to switch back to the old Facebook layout if you hate the new design.
The Bike Of The Future: Vetrix Electric Super Bike - Yes! All this talk of electric cars is making me crazy. Why not put a battery in a motorcycle to introduce the technology in a much lighter form? Vetrix already produces a "maxi-scooter" so how far away can a proper motorcycle be?
The anti-theft lunch bag is a brilliant idea. I bet you could do something similar with food coloring on the bread itself.
YouKnowster lets you make your own "You know you're ... when/if..." lists.
Ninja cat comes closer while not moving!
Ze Frank has updated his memory game . Funny how the basics are so satisfying.
The new Sticky Note Experiment video from the Diet Coke & Mentos guys.
Company to help content owners "monetize" illegal content - Assuming the "monetizing" isn't completely obnoxious, this could be a great idea. Instead of yanking illegal clips from YouTube, the clip automatically pulls in an appropriate ad. Everyone wins.
Differences between liberals and conservatives and the foundations of moral psychology . Nearly 20 minute video but contains interesting ideas. The temptation to personalize or politicize what he's saying may undermine its value but it's good food for thought as a context.
More than 20 million homes have cut the cord on landline phones - Wow, that is way more than I would have guessed. We hear about this more often lately because every time a poll comes out someone points out people with cell phones instead of landlines can't be reached by pollsters. I'd always dismissed that as an academic argument but wow, 20 million.
You may have heard about the scandal that an Mtv reality show taping left the natural setting of the show in shambles but did you know there is such a thing as the Tree Climber's Coalition ?a new kind of something that they cannot make any sense of ." According to Femia's Law of Schlocky Science Reporting, whenever scientists admit they can't explain something we are free to speculate not only about the explanation but also the implications of any imaginable hypotheticals. And so it's my duty to report that the mystery object has been speculated by some to be an alien race of life farmers, returning to seed-planet Earth to restock supplies before heading back out into space to spread life through the galaxy. Should this possibility prove correct, they're going to be pissed when they find out we're all out of Tasmanian Tigers.
The Internet has blessed us with the original recording of that John McCain interview in which he appears not to know the leader of Spain. Sorry, but I'm giving this one the "non-scandal" stamp. That lady is wicked hard to understand. Maybe he should have asked her to repeat herself but I could barely make out what she was asking and I had the notes in front of me.
At this point the Palin e-mail hack story is probably mainstream enough that I don't have much to add. It's interesting to note that, as Bob Sullivan warned about a few weeks ago, the common suspicion is that the password was obtained through research, not decryption or other kind of technical hacking.
I also notice Bob's report from earlier this month about some of Palin's SS# being revealed . That's not really a big crime but it makes me think back to when she was first announced as McCain's running mate and everyone was fighting about whether she'd been vetted. Almost immediately someone had copied photos from her kids' MySpace pages and I remember thinking that she must not have known the announcement was coming because her family didn't have time to set their accounts to "private." But maybe living our lives online is too new for there to be such a thing as a "digital lockdown" performed on a person suddenly entering government life.
It's funny to see Gawker bearing the brunt of so much pro-Palin rage for posting the contents of the hacked mail account. They were hardly the only place to find that material. NOTE: If you click that voicemail link, put on your headphones, it's curse-laden.
More compelling will be whether there's any follow-up with Ctunnel on who actually did the initial hack and whether they can be caught.
UPDATE: Gateway Pundit is blogging the heck out of the tracking of the hacker.
Also, Obama's G-mail was hacked.
The first clip of the
ABC News Sarah Palin interviews is spreading like wildfire and has to do with what she said in a video at the graduation ceremony of something called the Masters Commission.
The actual full clip is here and comes from this
list of Webcasts from the Wasilla Assembly of God . I haven't been able to check the source video (see the June 8, 2008 entry) because I get an error that the server is maxed out but I have no reason to doubt its authenticity.
This isn't really about Web culture but since I have the links handy and I know some folks are like me and like to have a mental map of locations in the news, I'll share. With all this "Bridge to Nowhere" talk I finally bothered to look up just how nowhere the place is . The idea was to connect the town of Ketchikan to the airport across the Tongass Narrows. As I understand it, part of why the price tag was so big was because the bridge had to be high enough to allow ship traffic to pass under it.
What I can't quite make out on the map is the "Road to the Beach" which is the name describing the road that would have led to the bridge had it been built but instead just leads to the water's edge and stops. I don't know the date of Google's last pass over Alaska so it's hard to say if there's anything to see of the road project even if I knew where it was exactly. UPDATE: Found it. Here's a very useful pdf map of proposals and alternatives to "the Bridge." (Via )
The Knik Bridge , what they're calling "the other bridge to nowhere," at least has Anchorage at one end, so while it may appear to go nowhere, at least it comes from somewhere. (I've never been to Anchorage but on the map it looks like somewhere.) Poking around the Knik Arm we get a sense of Anchorage's proximity to Palin's home town of Wasilla .
Alaska also has a "Road to Nowhere" (not even to the beach?) project which is a little harder to get a sense of, but basically the idea seems to be to connect Juneau to one or two towns to the north, Haines and/or Skagway . I'm using the "terrain" view on Google Maps because part of the difficulty of the project is dealing with some steep cliffs and other awkward ground.
Useful in putting this together was this list of Alaska mega-projects . NOTE: It is not a neutral source. It's handy in that it describes the projects but it opposes all of them. My goal here was just to get a sense of "where" in my head when hearing about these things. Their value to Alaska is a much more complicated question than the political ping-pong ball of federal pork spending.
The funny thing about the story of Sarah Palin's daughter being pregnant is that the Web was full of Palin pregnancy rumors and that wasn't it. The actual rumor, sparked, as far as I can tell, by this now-deleted Daily Kos item had Sarah Palin faking her pregnancy to cover for her daughter's pregnancy. What's ironic is that the most objectionable part of the story - the bald accusation that a teen's belly is actually a baby bump - turned out to be nearly the only true thing about it.
To be clearer, the matter has been settled as false in the minds of everyone still paying attention.
Using the kind of reverse scientific method (a.k.a. utterly unscientific method) found often in Web conspiracies, the cover-up theorists were using photographic evidence to support their theory rather than looking at ALL of the photos and then drawing a conclusion. Ultimately the photos Palin actually looking pregnant did surface.
What's great about this story is that it's a case where using "how do you explain" as a reason to come up with your own explanation simply doesn't work. How do you explain that she's not showing in those pictures? How do you explain her taking an ill-advised plane flight when her water had broken? How do you explain that even her closest staff members didn't realize she was pregnant even at seven months?
It turns out the explanation for all of those is the simplest one: it happened.
What's more, not everyone was unable to notice her pregnant state, and said so at the time like the telephone kind ).MySpace photo captions suggest that Bristol Palin, Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter is already married to the father of her unborn son! Gasp!
I've seen a few people try out loud to remember who that guy was during Katrina who live streamed from downtown New Orleans, powered by a generator and defying calls for evacuation. The specifics are a little hazy in my memory but I'm pretty sure that was the Interdictor - and the live stream is back. Watching it now, it's basically two guys drinking and goofing around, occasionally remarking on changes in weather conditions. I think the idea is that we'll eventually start to see things get hairy. One of the guys, Greg Ledet is also updating a blog.
Speaking of remembering back to Katrina blogging, I was poking through the Clicked archives from then to see who else from those days might be blogging Gustav. GulfSails is sticking it out again. Eric Berger's SciGuy blog is storm tracking again with an eye for the folks in Houston.
And while I'm mentioning looking through the Katrina blogging greats, there was one single photoblog that stood out in my mind beyond the others: Operation Eden . I had to dig a while to find it in my post from September 28 but I'm glad I did because it lives up to my memory of it and frankly you'd be well advised to start with his September 2005 archive page and work your way through. The photographer is Clayton James Cubitt, and while his Operation Eden blog is pretty much idle (with the only recent new item being an anniversary post the other day), his Tumblr blog is rich with Gustav info and Twitter stream is rife with links and personal insights. Not as visually arresting as his photoblog but powerful in its immediacy none-the-less. NOTE: You may see other Cubitt links in his bio or elsewhere. Be aware that many of his professional and artistic photos are sexual in nature, or may contain some nudity. If you're a grown-up and can handle these things, his work is a valuable lesson in light and perspective.
During Katrina, so many people were displaced so quickly that finding anyone after the storm passed was sheer chaos. News sites, msnbc.com included, set up massive databases where people to log in and report there whereabouts or else post names of people they were looking for. I can tell you from experience it was a pain to police for bogus entries (if I had a nickel for every time I deleted George w. Bush from the missing persons list...) but so heavily trafficked that I'm confident it was a valuable resource to some people. So it's nice to see FEMA setting up an official such system on their own this time around, called the National Emergency Family Registry and Locator System.
The New Orleans Metblogs page has some reporting from hold-outs. It's funny to see how many media people are doing essentially the same thing I'm doing to score bookings for various talk shows:
" I’ll be doing Q-and-As this evening and early tomorrow morning with BBC-Ireland and with an Australian network (thanks Joe). I was also interviewed today by the Miami Herald and by Warren Levinson of the AP. Ari Shapiro of NPR also ate here (twice!) today."
Rick Sanchez over at CNN is feeling no shame about booking straight from his Twitter stream (nor should he feel any shame, that's the point of the thing.)
That link to Sanchez is him pitching to The Oil Drum blog, which is doing a fascinating job monitoring damage projections of the oil facilities in the Gulf . I imagine that'll transition to actual damage assessments once the storm passes.
First band of Gustav arrives in New Orleans and wow that is a really literal band.Craigslist feeds for Gustav housing and support . I haven't mentioned Pipes in a while but it's a really great way to build little Web apps if you don't have the time or ability to code it yourself.
BlogOfNewOrleans.com currently has a lot of accounts of evacuation gone wrong but there's at least one contributor still in New Orleans so it'll be good to check back with the new day's light to see how things look.
Weather Underground has this pretty wicked map .
Gustav resources online
"Blackwater is compiling a list of qualified security personnel for possible deployment into areas affected by Hurricane Gustav. Applicants must meet all items listed under the respective Officer posting and be US citizens. Contract length is TBD."
(via this entry on the military/security support for the Gulf region)
I was trying to watch local video for a while but since I'm also surfing around I can't really watch so I switched to WWL radio which was listed as "news/talk" on this big list of New Orleans radio stations. (Note the lightning bolts mean they have online streams.)
Last one to leave, take the entire company with you :
Today, all of the company's approximately 50 PCs and servers are backed up to a main server, which is then backed up to a 1TB USB-connected drive that goes out the door with the last employee who is evacuating in the event of an emergency, he said. That employee also takes an "emergency box" that includes additional DVD backups.
Here's an amazing collection of Gustav tracking maps . Somewhere out there, someone whose job it is to design these just fell off his chair into a puddle of his own drool at the sight of such a thorough review.
On my "to read" list:
It turns out just a few days ago there was something called
The Rising Tide conference, a gathering of New Orleans bloggers.
Tangentially related, world-famous street artists Banksy recently visited New Orleans for the Katrina anniversary. Via this blog with its fascinating little story about the graffiti scene there . Meanwhile, Banksy is moving across the south I guess because it looks like he hit Birmingham, Alabama as well .
NOTE: Rather than change the headline here and get complicated with updates I wrote a second Gustav entry here .
When Katrina struck three years ago, the means of conveyance of choice for digital information was blogging and we used tools like Technorati to search for relevant material. With Gustav's arrival at hand, a new tool, Twitter, is helping spread important information and put people in touch. It'd be wrong to say that Twitter has replaced blogging - in fact I'm finding it's helping find relevant blogs - but it has certainly changed the online information landscape.TweetScan . Here we see that the small pieces of information that might be lost in the blogosphere fit in well with the stream to tid-bits. We can see everything from traffic tips to animal charities .gustav versus one for #gustav it looks like the #gustav takes some of the noise out of the channel and gives more useful results (by which I mean, there's less slogging through posts like "I hope Gustav doesn't do too much damage" that show up in a simple search for the storm name.Twitturls , a site that lists the most popular links being sent on Twitter is Katrina vet Andy Carvin 's Gustav Information Center . He's put together a feed of government alerts among other useful links.Brendan Loy should ring a bell if you spent a lot of time online through Katrina. He's weatherblogging Gustav as well. Don't miss that massive blogroll/linklist on the left.McCain's choice of VP drew discussion from Obama only to have Gustav take the discussion from McCain . Republican planners were probably right to think no one would be watching on Monday.Poynter has set up a site that is aggregating Gustav reports from the mainstream media and a variety of citizen sources.The GustavFeed is rounding up news coverage, citizen media (like YouTube clips and Flickr photos) and informational links . You could probably spend your whole time here and get all the coverage you need.liveblogging his experience . Lesser reports may come through his Twitter feed , which you can also see in the right margin of his blog.NOLA.com staff is staying. Their Katrina efforts were widely celebrated. It's hard to imagine them fleeing from Gustav.live video streams of five local TV stations in the New Orleans area . (I just saw one local weatherman point out the dangers of the post-hurricane tropical depression stalling slightly inland and dumping tons of rain, likely compounding any problems from the storm itself. See the 5-day track he's looking at on the National Hurricane Center site .)
I actually heard about this one at the water cooler before I saw it online - which sort of makes sense since it's not really a Web video, it's from a local Miami news station.
Here's the original but I don't see a way to make the player bigger. The latest update on the guy's condition is that he was able to leave the hospital today.
Contrary to the IOC's conclusions about the age of Chinese gymnast He Kexin and their belief that the matter will be "put to rest," the investigative work displayed on one blog and the magical "gotcha" authority that comes with the phrase "search engine cache" ensure that those who don't want to buy it don't have to.
