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Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Truth in advertising 
| | Just ran across this ad by The Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express company, better known as the Pony Express: |
| | WANTED
Young, skinny, wiry fellows not
over eighteen. Must be expert
riders willing to risk death
daily. Orphans preferred. |
| | There was never a shortage of riders. |
| | Source: Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon. Great book. |
Handbasketweaving, cont'd
Like the title
Hello?
| | Yoz has created Zero Bars tracking and sharing dead cell spots. |
Eggman vs. Walrus.
| | Long ago, when he still had a blog, Ken Layne famously wrote, "We can fact-check your ass". We being bloggers and you (the ones with the asses) being professional journalists. But what about when I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together? Know what I mean? |
| | I mean that the distinctions are getting blurry around who checks who's ass for what. |
| | Right, facts. Turns out a good way to do that, as John Lennon sang, is together. More eyes make bugs shallower, the hackers say. Applies to journalism too. So, toward that end... |
| | There is a problem, though. Being the target of blogs is that it is "after the fact." That is, the blog will publish a negative post on you and spread it quickly. Then, the target must put out the fire. |
| | Believe me, this is not a fun process - especially when you find out about it late on Friday! |
| | He also includes the email exchange that includes stuff that was in dispute in the blogs that disputed him. So you can redraw your own conclusions. |
| | Lessons aplenty here, in a story I'm not sure is over. |
Awaiting bad news delivery
| | Last night in Goleta, the town next to Santa Barbara, a crazed postal worker killed six other people at a sorting facility, before killing herself. |
| | No word yet on the identities of the victims. This isn't a big metropolitain area, however. Most of us here aren't more than two degrees away from all this. |
Longings
| | My feeling is that Mr. Nisenholtz will likely lose his bet come 2007. Even though the nytimes.com fares very well in getting linked to by the blogosphere, it does very poorly in Google. This isn't exactly surprising given that most NY Times articles disappear behind a paywall after a week and some of their content (TimesSelect) isn't even publicly accessible at all |
| | My own thoughts on the matter are here and here, among other places. |
Getting real. Or some of it.
| | Critics don't agree and they don't have to, but the company's reasoning makes sense to me. Whether Google can escape additional complicity with a horrific regime remains to be seen. The slippery slope is, after all, damn slippery. In the meantime, there's ample opportunity to be outraged over additional legal business dealings in China and elsewhere, and Google bashers should get a grip. The idea of censored search results will hardly be a surprise to Chinese Web surfers, although it seems as though the company could do a much better job of flagging it. |
| | Chock full of quotable lines. Read the whole thing. |
How about "cell mess" instead of "long tail"?
| | How about a wiki-map mashup that lets people add cellular dead zones (not-spots) to a Google Map? This is data that the cellcos are keeping from us. |
| | The more common problem I run into is with hand-offs between cell sites. Here in California, on the Cingular system, there's a spot along Highway 101 in Camp Roberts where the phone signal gets weaker and weaker, while one is within sight of the next cell site. After it loses the signal, bam, it finds the next site and you're back to five bars. If I'm on the phone when I drive that route, I'll intentionally end the call when I start approaching that spot, then start a new call to make sure I'm on the next cell site. |
| | As for outright dead zones, one for Cingular in Santa Barbara is at the intersection of Cathedral Oaks Road and North Turnpike, at Tuckers Grove County Park. Map here. |
| | Bonus link: T-Mobile's coverage map page, which lets you zoom in and move around to see exactly where the dead (and dying) spots are. Unfortunately, you can't link directly to the local map pages. For what it's worth, T-Mobile shows the dead zone I mentioned in the last paragraph as somewhere between "good" and "fair". This little legend from the same page is interesting, too: |
| | Why why is "fair" next to "none"? Shouldn't that be "poor"? Instead "fair" shoud be in the middle, where "good" is, right? |
| | So, while it's nice that T-Mobile provides a service that (to my knowledge, so far) competitors don't, it's not as honest as it could be. I mean, right when they've almost got it, when the company is ready to talk straight to customers, when the honest folks inside the company have won a victory over the Forces of Resistance to truth-telling, the marketing BS artists get in there and start painting the turds. |
| | And ya wonder why geeks hate marketing. |
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