David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

We held a funeral for DRM by encasing an iPod and a Zune in concrete and dropping it into the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge. We ended up getting front page of Digg with the invite. I was invited to take photos and video. I still haven’t had a chance to edit the video and stupidly left it all on a hard drive at home. I took (what I consider) to be some great photos however. They are all posted to Flickr as CC (by-nc-sa). See some of the photos below.

ROFLCon Crew, dressed for the part. Christina, Tim, Diana, Dean

Burial at sea, view from the bridge

The Splash

Dean about to lower the Zune and iPod

The Brick resting peacefully

Everyone gathering at JFK Park

Evening prior from the 8th floor of the Harvard Science building roof

Tags: burial, charles, christina xu, diana, drm, entomb, fcs, free culture, Harvard, ipod, river, roflcon, tim, zune, zuneral

Why can’t cell phones mesh? Moreso, why can’t my $2000+ Macbook Pro mesh on wifi networks, yet a $200 child’s laptop can? By mesh, I mean why can’t mobile devices (laptops and cellphones) act to relay messages through to each other so keep service going in areas that a central points can’t reach.

Googling around doesn’t give many answers. The main one that I could imagine would be power consumption, but the OLPC has gotten around that so it can’t be that hard. Security could be another, but it would be no worse than logging on at your average coffee shop or being plugged into a wired network that have other people on the switch/subnet.

A perfect place for this would be the subway systems of major cities. There’s always some people near the entrances, and even a slight delay in relaying of things like SMS would be acceptable. SMS service should work nearly anywhere. What about if you’re out on the highway somewhere that’s not covered? If there were other cars on the road within a 1/2 mile or so they could surely repeat the signals to help extend service. Or apartment buildings that end up being like fallout shelters for their sheilding capability?

Of course, it would need a standard and companies would probably try to not work with each other. This is 2008. Again, why a $200 laptop can mesh, but a $2000 laptop can’t is still beyond me.

Tags: 802.11, cell phone, cellular, computer, laptop, mbp, mesh, OLPC, wireless

Everyone’s got their own general photo workflow. Mine is as follows

1. Prepare to take photos. This involves making sure all gear is charged, lenses and filters clean, cards cleared off, and cables/gear packed in my trusty backpack
2. Take photos. Not that hard
3. Transfer photos to external hard drive in an Aperture library
4. Split into various libraries if needed
5. Create two or more “Smart albums”. One has items rated above 4 called “to upload”, one is called “X” and contains only photos with a rating of -1 or X.
6. Rotate all photos upright. Aperture 2.x no longer gets this right, as in Aperture 1.5 they automatically rotated based on the metadata. Aperture 2.x sees the metadata but does nothing with it. I suppose I could write a script to make this right, but this doesn’t take long
7. I use two monitors, the one on my MBP and a 37″ 1080p LCD. I have a mirror of each photo sent to the 37″ screen which I use to gauge sharpness, focus, blur, details and DOF. The MBP screen is used for all color choices (matte screen).
8. I rate all photos in the first pass quickly looking for gross errors, poor composition, blurring, horrid exposure, etc. Those get an X. I roughly sort the other photos
9. In a second pass then I focus on sorting the photos in priorities, trying to figure out the ‘best’ ones. I keep not the best ones as rating of 1, 2, 3 stars. Photos I think suitable for printing get a 5. I don’t give many 5’s. Photos I want to put online get a 4.
10. Photos with a 4/5 get a pass of color correction, cropping, etc
11. I upload the 4/5 photos to Flickr, and choose if they are Creative Commons or not. I’ve been using CC more often than not recently.
12. Photos that get a 5 might be uploaded to Smugmug for printing capability
13. I delete the photos in the Smart Album “X” as they are worthless and not something I want to keep. Anything that I might want to ever see again (alternate shots, etc) I keep however.
14. Delete memory cards, promote photos, twitter about them, etc. Start over.

Tags: camera, my, personal, photography, workflow

It’s been all over Digg, CNet and Slashdot. Summize can let you see some of the chatter. In short, someone was harassing @arielwaldman on twitter via calling her names and using some anonymous services. She complained, and they removed the posts from the public timeline. They didn’t do enough so she blogged about it. Now there’s this big uproar. I have a few thoughts on it that seem to differ from the crowd.

First let’s be clear about a few things. Once you put yourself out there on the internet enough, people will talk shit about you. I think everyone understands that. I have some friends that are in social media that try to lay low for this very reason. If you have 3000+ followers on Twitter, you’re likely starting to edge on being semi well known on the internet, or at least on Twitter. If Ariel thinks that this is some shit, you should look at some of the comments that people make about iJustine on YouTube.

Maybe what should have been first, is that I don’t think anyone should be harassed. I’m not for insulting comments or personal attacks. Just if you’re out there enough it will happen. This is to be expected sadly.

What I simply don’t get however is that everyone is acting as if Twitter doesn’t ban anyone for any reason. They do. They have. They will do it again. @foulbastard (who is pretty awesome) was banned for his “Breasts of Twitter” collage/stunt. It took a while to reinstate him, but he’s back now and only slightly tamer than before.

I also have a hunch that she may have made such a big deal of this, not to have a topic to blog about, but rather to increase her social media presence. Her followers have nearly doubled now and she’s almost at 4,000 followers total. I think she was at 2,220 or so when she initially complained about this.

Twitter should remove things if someone posts stuff like, your social security number, home address, phone number, etc… Asides from that. It’s the internet. If someone calls you a “cunt” as was one of the insults apparently, then well… it’s the internet and you should get over it.

The great thing about twitter is that you can ignore people! You can not follow them!

As another matter alltogether is the censorship vs not censorship thing. Companies get trashed on all the time for stopping some communication, reasonable or not. I feel that this headline could have just as easily been, “Twitter censors users!” if @ev and others had taken greater action. For example Microsoft was getting slammed the other day for removing an Xbox Live player’s account that was named “Gaywood”, as it says clearly in their terms of service that anything seeming sexual, etc would be banned. It happens that it’s the guy’s last name. People flamed Microsoft for being so kneejerk and 1984ish. People- make up your minds what you want. Should the companies do any censorship, or leave everything open?

Tags: ariel, ariel waldman, digg, foulbastard, harassment, twitter, waldman

What do you make at your job? I actually don’t care, but you should perhaps realize that it’s worth less today than it was yesterday. Surely that’s only a few pennies you say? Let’s figure that out.

In the US, we work an average of 1777 hours per year. Let’s say you’re making $30,000 a year, a fairly average amount for someone in the US. So you’re at 16.88 or so per hour for ~222 days a year (8 hr days). Our average inflation is 3% a year on average. Sometimes this is higher. For example, thus for in 2008 we’ve seen right around 4% inflation if not higher. Some items increase far more in cost, such as oil and health care costs. The consumer price index can show us this. For simplicity’s sake let’s choose 3%, as I don’t think anyone will say that the number is too high on average.

Very simply put, you’ll have to have 30,900 in wages after a year to equal 30,000 of the prior year. So you got a raise to 32,000 maybe? Only really 1,100 of that was a ‘raise’ on your abilities, extra work, experience, etc.

Let’s say you didn’t get the raise however. That $900 difference in purchasing power is huge. You work 222 days a year. That is $4.05 less daily that you can purchase that you work. That latte in your hand? Tomorrow you’ve made that much less in purchasing power. That’s something you can tangibly see.

If you make a bit more, its really startling if you aren’t getting your yearly raises as you should. Make 100K? That’s $67.50 less per week in purchasing power. That nice dinner you were going to have? Forget about it now.

So what’s my point? My point is this, if you aren’t getting raises (which in today’s economy you likely aren’t) you are getting kicked in the balls. It’s not just that you are making the same money, you’re making less money.

My suggestion for responsible employeers is this: offer continous cost of living increase raises. If you pay 24 times a year, increase each paycheck by 0.125%. Then your “raises” that you make yearly can be based on merit, not on economic inflation and stress. When I worked at State Street, I actually put this as a small quote on my monitor, “You are worth $4.05 to your employeer than yesterday”. They didn’t like that much.

Tags: dollar, economy, inflation, money, paycheck, wages, weak