Like everyone else, I’ve got accounts on all the social sites just to see what they’re like. I haven’t visited my MySpace account in months, I check my Facebook page every couple of weeks, and pay no attention to any of the others I’ve signed up for unless they ping me for some reason. This past year, a lot of our students and alums are signing up on Plaxo and friending me into their professional network. I always dutifully reply and occasionally scan the list of their latest activities.
One of Plaxo’s bits of viral genius is that it looks at who you’re connected to and who they connect to and suggests other people you should add to your network. Imagine my surprise when I logged in a few days ago and saw “Bernie Dodge” as someone I may know that I should consider connecting to. Apparently I have two Plaxo accounts going, one with 11 connections, the other with 20, and some people are connected to both of me.
So I suppose I need to kill off the less-connected me and I’m wondering about several things:
Will Plaxo let me delete myself? (Turns out that it did!)
Will anyone notice that I’ve disappeared off their list?
When people die, are their heirs supposed to close out all their accounts so that people will stop writing to them?
Should there be a special Plaxo subsection for people who’ve moved to Borneo or Hell and won’t be reachable any more? A place where they can be remembered but no longer begged for a reference letter?
Could I become a billionaire by setting up a social network of social networks, a directory of everyone’s social pages with an indication of the last time they checked it and how scanty their profile is? One stop shopping for finding the best way to connect with someone?
Clearly while thinking about these things I’m avoiding some committee work I should be doing.
Maybe it’s the roar of the ventilation in my office. Maybe I’ve recently acquired a thick accent. Maybe my queries collided in cyberspace with those from someone with very different interests. Whatever the case, my first try of the new iPhone Google Mobile App was a hoot.
Since the iPhone knows where I am, I chose as my first search: “Where’s the nearest Greek restaurant?”
Google heard: “blues singers Greek restaurant“. First restaurant on the list was in Vancouver, which I guess is nearby on a cosmic scale.
On my way to campus this blazing hot afternoon, I pulled up to the drive-thru at Jack in the Box to order a smoothie. “Hi! My name is Ryan! May I take your order?” said the box, in a tone that was over-the-top cheery. I recognized the practiced American accent with an Indian one suppressed way below it. In response I said, “Hi… how are things in Bangalore?”. Ryan’s voice dropped an octave, he became dead serious and tried again, “May I take your order?”. It was as though I had outed his secret identity and he didn’t like it much.
I don’t think it’s widely known that Jack in the Box is outsourcing its drive thru order taking on a trial basis. Googling around, I see reports of orders being taken in North Carolina and Odessa, Texas by kids sitting in El Paso. Perhaps because San Diego is the headquarters for Jack in the Box, we’re the first to go international. It’s not outsourced all the time at the one near SDSU, but late at night it seems to happen more often. One night, “Sally” forgot what time zone I was in and wished me a wonderful day.
For customers, it’s not a bad thing. The Indians on the other end always sound happier and are easier to understand than the sometimes tired local kids you’d get otherwise. Having one less person dealing with the drive thru means one more person to talk to the walk-in customers. Or does it?
Fast food service jobs are an easy way for kids with no other options to begin to make a living. It doesn’t pay well and they never stay long, but it’s a first step towards independence and responsibility. To the extent that the drive thru jobs are being outsourced, there are fewer openings for these kids. Memo to kids: get some skills. Now more than ever.
UPDATE: December 7, 2008. I drove through this morning to order a breakfast. Yet another chipper Indian-accented voice took my order. “Just for fun”, I said, “… where are you?”. El Paso, she said. Could it be that all these subcontinental order-takers are indeed in Texas? According to latest census data, Asians account for only 1.7% of El Paso’s population. Is the University a major source? The Indian Student Association has only 100 or so members, so it’s probably not a huge community. Are they instructed to say they’re in El Paso to avoid backlash against exporting this job (such as it is) abroad? These burning questions persist, though I really should be grading projects instead.
On one of the geospatial lists I read, this new game was just released into the wild. I was intrigued by the premise while at the same time troubled by it.
What’s cool about Turf Bombing is that it knows approximately where you are based on your IP address. No GPS needed. When you go to the site, you’re able to claim a rectangle near your location and plant a flag on it. You can plant time bombs on other people’s turf and they on yours, though I’m not yet sure how to do that. You’re automatically assigned to a team based on your zip code and a rank based on how much territory you’ve claimed. Since I’m the only player in 92120 so far, I’m a General. And in an homage to the second* most famous person to ever emerge from my home town, I took the handle “George Metesky”. It’s very appropriate. Look it up.
Since you can only claim territory that you’re physically near, the game promotes the idea of getting out of the house and getting to know the area around you. Pretty laudable. But the idea of planting bombs in the park around the corner is, as one person on the list put it, “icky”. It’s easy to go wildly violent in World of Warcraft, but not so easy to marry that world with the one you see out the window every day.
I believe, though, that this technology could be the basis of a better game. One with some kind of fantasy overlay that would distinguish it from the real world while still goading us to walk a few blocks away, steal some wifi, and plant a virtual flag on the ground. Fun without ick.
Turf Bombing is still in its infancy. I look forward to seeing how it grows. And if any of you try to establish a beach head here in Del Cerro, just know that General George Metesky keeps a watchful eye.
I’m pretty excited about this week’s announcement about a newly released layer in Google Earth. Ancient Rome 3D contains hundreds of buildings, some with interiors, as they appeared on June 21, 320 A.D. Many of the buildings have notes attached with background information. It’s an amazing accomplishment!
As with many rich resources, it’s not really educational until someone devises something to DO with it. As Maria Muldaur once sang, it ain’t the meat, it’s the motion. Like Second Life, it’s a virtual world waiting for something purposeful to happen with it. Google is encouraging creative teachers to come up curriculum to bring their 3D Rome to life by sponsoring a contest with some pretty nice prizes. Next Spring when the winners are announced, we’re going to see some terrific lessons.
My head is buzzing with ideas for wrapping a WebQuest around this. What might the task be? Create a short play using the buildings as backdrop and put it into Comic Life? Write the diary of a Roman citizen and illustrate it with pictures and descriptions of the spaces that he would pass through? Form a commission for the reconstruction of lost buildings and make a recommendation for the single ruin to be brought back to life? Analyze the types of buildings and their locations and invent a taxonomy that relates the two?
I’m going to recommend this to my pre-service teacher class as a possible platform for the WebQuest they’re about to start work on. Could be fun!
Hats off to Google for investing in things like this.
When I was a kid in Connecticut I remember noticing a regular pattern in my daily routine. Each morning at 7:55am as I walked a couple of blocks to Croft High School, a jet airliner passed over heading north. It was pretty high up and I guessed that it had started in New York. There was no way to find out for sure where it came from and where it was going.
Now there is. One of the first iPhone applications I bought was Flight Tracker from fboweb. As with the web-based version, it’s a handy way to find out where a particular flight is. I’ve used it at airports during layovers and June has used it to see when to leave to pick me up. Just a few days ago, they released a new version for the iPhone that adds a new degree of coolness: it can show you all flights near you. In addition to looking for flights coming to or from a particular airport, you can also ask if for anything within a 20 mile radius of where you’re standing, thanks to the iPhone’s location-awareness.
Our house is under the approach path for Montgomery field, a small airport for general aviation. From the back yard we can see planes landing at Miramar, the military base where Top Gun was filmed and airliners coming in from the north before heading inland to come down at Lindbergh Field. All of those are included in Flight Tracker. So now, I can sit out in the back and no longer wonder where that bright light in the sky is coming from. A few pokes on the screen and I know.
Planes overhead are as much a part of the natural environment of city kids as birds and bugs are in the country. Planespotting won’t replace bird watching as a hobby, but it’s nicely doable from anywhere. I can imagine creative teachers making use of this tool as a way to teach about trig, algebra, and geography. Not bad for $0.99!
Ours can, but only sporadically when we watch a non-HD channel at normal (non-) zoom. We have to click on the zoom to get a watchable picture but it’s zoomed in so much that the top and bottom of the picture are clipped out. The Cox cable guy has been here and of course it didn’t happen then. Any idea what’s going on?
How many people do you know who are all three of those. Or even two out of three? That distinction belongs solely to Gary McKinnon who has exhausted all his appeals and may soon be extradited to the US. Why?
At the height of the 9-11 national trauma here, McKinnon found a way into a number of computers at the Pentagon and other sensitive sites. Convinced that the US Government was hiding something about the existence of alien life, he hacked into networks from his basement apartment using a dial-up modem. His methods weren’t particularly advanced, but he was persistent and says he began to find evidence that our military had knowledge of and maybe even a partnership with extraterrestrials.
He was tracked down in 2002 and has been dealing with lawyers ever since. His most recent defense is based on his being diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism. The UK government has been more than ready to hand him over to the US, where he may face 60 years in prison.
As his time runs out, protesters have been making their voices heard, asking that he be tried in Britain. It’s yet another sign of a lack of trust in American justice brought about by Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, secret renditions, and so on. Those days are behind us but the damage is done.
Amazingly, Gary McKinnon has some musical talent. His song Only a Fool is a smash hit on MySpace, and it’s surprisingly non-terrible. It sounds a bit like Morrisey, or maybe Lou Reed. Completely unexpected.
Is the Pentagon hellbent on getting him here because he knows too much about the X-Files? Is his autism a lawyerly ploy? Is he really just a kid in a 44 year old’s body who blundered into dangerous waters? I don’t know, though I’m inclined to let him face trial close to home.
In any case, it’s quite a story. You’ll see his name moving closer to Page 1 soon.
I hate writing. Or, more accurately, I hate to start writing. Once I get going, I actually enjoy myself but overcoming that initial inertia is the problem. To overcome this, I know, I just need to write more and that’s one reason I’ve started to blog again. But I think I’ve just found a more powerful cure: the Write or Die web site.
The interface starts like this. Then, once you’ve clicked on the Write! button, a text area opens up with a timer ticking down the seconds for the time you’ve selected. If you pause for more than a few seconds, the screen turns increasingly redder. In Kamikaze mode, it will actually erase words you’ve written if you pause too long. It’s a brilliant, simple design and it’s just what I need right now as I face the chore of writing letters as a member of the College Personnel Committee. Let’s see if I can crank out the next one in 20 minutes!
About 14 years ago when the web was young, I remember Alex looking over my shoulder as I cackled about some crazed new web page I’d come across. People were putting up weird collections of things, obscure obsessions that one would never have heard of before the web. Alex said something like, “Soon there will be a page of things you stick your head in”. What’s that, you may well ask?
You’ve seen them at zoos and amusement parks and other second-string attractions. Take a piece of plywood and paint some kind of human or animal on it and then cut a hole where the face would be. Prop it up and let people stand behind it, stick their heads in, and have their picture taken.
We laughed about it and resolved to put up a web site devoted to nothing but Things You Stick Your Head In. From that point on, we’d stop the car whenever we saw one and take a picture. But, as with a lot of our father-son projects, we never got around to registering tysyhi.com or setting up a site. Second best, I set up the Things You Stick Your Head In Flickr group a few years ago and uploaded some of the pictures we’d been gathering. A few other people contributed as well, so now we’ve got a great core of 27 pictures uploaded by 8 different people.
I was reminded of this because June just found some more examples among her files and I just added them to the pool. That reignited my curiosity. Over the years, I’ve asked several librarians and search gurus for an official name for these things and the closest anyone could come up with is photo cutout or carnival cutout. Google searches a few years ago didn’t turn up much. I decided to Google around again tonight and it turns out the question of what to call them has also come up on Metafilter. The links from there led me to the realization that the Dodges weren’t the only ones thinking about this important concept, and I’ve learned the following:
Another name for them is “comic foregrounds”, and they are said to have been invented by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, the same artist who gave the world the dogs playing poker genre.
“Find a comic foreground and take a photo” also been posted as a goal on the Waymarking site, and there’s a geotagged gallery of photos there.
There’s another photo set larger than mine in the Head Through the Hole Flickr group.
The tag “facesinholes” has become a standard on Flickr, and there are 162 photos there now.
And so, what we joked about in 1994 has come to pass. No matter how obscure and unimportant something is, someone else is thinking about it and there’s a place for it out there on the web. I’m not sure whether I should savor the fact that the web is preserving and reinforcing every single bit of wackiness and kitsch in the culture, or worry anew that the web is distracting us from important things.
Should I reduce the entropy a bit and fold the Things You Stick Your Head In group into Head Through the Hole? I’m not sure. I am sure that every time I see another carnival cutout/photo cutout/comic foreground, I’m going to grab the camera and capture it for the rest of the distracted world to see. It’s a family tradition.
One of Plaxo’s bits of viral genius is that it looks at who you’re connected to and who they connect to and suggests other people you should add to your network. Imagine my surprise when I logged in a few days ago and saw “Bernie Dodge” as someone I may know that I should consider connecting to. Apparently I have two Plaxo accounts going, one with 11 connections, the other with 20, and some people are connected to both of me.
On my way to campus this blazing hot afternoon, I pulled up to the drive-thru at Jack in the Box to order a smoothie. “Hi! My name is Ryan! May I take your order?” said the box, in a tone that was over-the-top cheery. I recognized the practiced American accent with an Indian one suppressed way below it. In response I said, “Hi… how are things in Bangalore?”. Ryan’s voice dropped an octave, he became dead serious and tried again, “May I take your order?”. It was as though I had outed his secret identity and he didn’t like it much.
Now there is. One of the first iPhone applications I bought was 
