Month: August 2005

Categories
Weather Weblogging

We are not the Red Cross

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

DailyKos is running a board for folks needing shelter. There’s also something over at LiveJournal and a hurricane blog (links via Rogers Cadenhead).

This is all cool and I love seeing people helping each other.

Having said that…

What the hell do you people think you’re doing? How do you know if that person contacting you is a true refuge or someone wanting to rob you blind? And are you ready to take a person in for possibly weeks? Months?

Come to think of it, we know what you own, how many kids you got, and that you at least have a computer since you’re weblogging. What a great way to do one’s early Christmas shopping if one was of a mind in this direction.

And for those of you who are thinking of getting caravans of stuff together to take down, what the hell do you think the well trained, and highly prepared Red Cross, not to mention FEMA, is for?

You want to open your home to a weblogger? Great. Make sure it’s someone you know and can live with for some time.

Trying to arrange a ride in New Orleans? It’s too damn late. Get to one of the ten shelters.

Going to stick it out and blog it, like a good little journalist soldier? Don’t want to miss the adventure? Not worried about it because your kitty cats are sitting calmly in the window and everyone knows animals can predict weather? Thanks for adding to the burden on the infrastructure put into place to provide support for those who have no option but to ride it out.

It’s frustrating to see people suffer, and we want to help, and that’s a goodness, and you should be admired for that. If you truly want to help, then donate to the Red Cross. They’ll need money, and not your old clothes and expired cans of food. They are the first line of a civilian help force, and should be the focus for early contributions. You might also consider donating to the Salvation Army, because they’re also experienced at giving help in times like this. Later, there will be other, sanctioned organizations that will provide effective, and targeted help, to which you can donate time, money, and goods. You might also consider donating blood. Even if it’s not needed for Katrina, it’s still needed.

As for those who have no choice but to ride it out, you’re in my heart, and that’s about all I can do for you right now.

There’s a fine line between providing effective help, and being a busybody nuisance. If you want to insert your butts into the emergency process, fine. Just make sure you don’t make more of a mess of it than it already is.

Categories
Weblogging

No such thing as a quiet marketer

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I don’t know what it is, but I’m really tired today. And since I don’t want to post variations of “Oh, No!” every hour for the next 24, I think now is a good time to focus on finishing some work for folks, and the new code for this site.

I’ve decided to package the photo code up in such a way that it can be used by people regardless of weblogging system they use and whether images are stored at Flickr or not. By doing so, and making it both fun and easy to use, I’m hoping I can encourage more people to use it. A by-product of this use, then, is that it provides easily accessible rich, structured, metadata that can benefit all of us.

This is just going to revolutionize our lives. I am not joking — the next generation of the web is here, and I’m just so excited! It is going to be big, babies! Big! I am so going to punk the web.

And it started here, first! With me!

I need to call Dave Winer. I know he’ll want to be in on this.

Whoa. Deep breath now.

No, I haven’t been bitten by one too many tics. I’m trying find a way to inspire you all with my enthusiasm, without me being there to grab you by the shoulders and look you intently in the eye. I’ve used some of the same words you may have read elsewhere in the last month or so, for some new innovation or other. But where the words can fall naturally off of some folks tongues, like hail in a storm, the don’t feel like me.

I was inspired in this momentary exercise, in part, by Kathy Sierra’s latest humorous and well written post where she says we’re all marketers:

The late (and brilliant) comedian Bill Hicks was an early adopter of the “all marketing is evil” meme:

“By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. No, this is not a joke: kill yourself . . . I know what the marketing people are thinking now too: ‘Oh. He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market.’ Oh man, I am not doing that, you f***ing evil scumbags.” (asterisks are mine)

I was about to protest, “Dammit Jim, I’m a programmer, not a marketer!”

But that would be a lie. In this new open-source/cluetrain world, I am a marketer. And so are you. If you’re interested in creating passionate users, or keeping your job, or breathing life into a startup, or getting others to contribute to your open source project, or getting your significant other to agree to the vacation you want to go on… congratulations. You’re in marketing. Now go kill yourself.

Kathy has a valid point, and one that isn’t lost on me. I’ve not been a particularly good marketer: of my skills, my projects, or the technology I use (RDF comes to mind). I mean, look how I started the post: “Hey, kinda tired lately”. What kind of marketing is that? It may be true, but it doesn’t sell people on an idea or a person.

It wasn’t as if leaving these words off would be a lie. We can choose not to say something, and doing so turn a quiet post into one that has zim and zingle. My problem, sorry, challenge, though, is that I’m not a zim and zingle type of person. Oh, I can get angry, and I can get passionate, but when I’m creating something important to me–be it software, writing, photos, or even a relationship–the more important it is, the closer it is to me, the quieter I get.

Later in her post, Kathy writes:

Remember — when people are passionate about something, and in a state of flow–and you have contributed to that by helping users/members learn and grow and kick ass–these are some of the happiest moments in their lives.

I agree with this, too–it is wonderful when you’ve helped someone, or someone likes your application (or photo or book or you). The thing is, you can be passionate about something, but quietly so and that’s what separates out the true marketers from all the people who love what they do.

Loren Webster writes on flashy flowers and one’s own garden in a post full of subtle innuendo–but how does that translate into RSS and hold up under an aggregator? You know, bright lights and lots of noise make it hard to hear a lover’s whisper; and if you’ve sandpapered your fingertips, it’s going to be hard to feel the veins of a leaf.

So where is the middle ground between the quiet corner and the jumping up and down we see so much in certain unnamed-weblogs-but-you-know-who-they-are? Is being passionate, enough? Or must we exaggerate that passion–emphasize it so it can be seen at a distance: paint with bigger brushes, more gadgets in the code, zoom in with larger lenses, use more exclamation points when we write, and scream more during sex?

More, brighter, louder. No wonder I feel tired.

Categories
Weather

Category 5?

If Katrina makes it to a Category 5, as big as she is, and then hits Louisiana and the New Orleans area, well, puts things in perspective about some guy with a bomb in a subway. I cannot believe how poorly managed the preparations for this hurricane have been.

If you read the comment thread at Dr. Master’s weblog, well, some of it just breaks your heart. Some of it makes you angry.

We need to refocus our emergency services back on the events we know we’ll be hit with, year after year after year. And we had better stop being so damn arrogant about weather. And about the science that allows us to understand weather better.

Not unless you all want to put your faith in a big hand of God coming down and scooping you all up to safety. But as one person says in Dr. Master’s comments: Oh my God…. this thing is like the hand of God.

Time to break out my five year old, primitive DHTML demonstration of how hurricanes work.

From Weather Underground’s Steve Gregory:

AUGUST 28 – 12:05 AM CDT – SPECIAL STORM UPDATE

CATASTROPHIC HURRICANE APPROACHING NEW ORLEANS REGION

CURRENT POSITION / NOTEWORTHY REPORTS PAST HOUR

KATRINA LOCATED 26.1N / 88.1W or 290 miles SSE of Gulfport, MS. – 275 miles SSE of downtown
New Orleans – and 240 miles SSE of Port Eads at the southern tip of the Mississippi Delta.
Katrina is heading just north of DUE Northwest at 9Kts (10 MPH) over the past 2 hours

RECON Reports:

Pressure 907mb ( DOWN 42MB IN 24 HRS)
MAX Flight Level wind 166KTS – SUSTAINED SURFACE WINDS 175MPH – GUSTS TO 200MPH. EYEWALL DIAMETER IS STEADY AT 22NM
CREW REPORTS ‘PERFECT STADIUM EFFECT’

Major storm, yes. Possibly the worst to hit this county? Yes. Thousands and tens of thousands dead? Unlikely. For those riding out the storm, don’t let the heavy predictions immobilize you with fear. We’re a remarkably resilient species, as long as we practice common sense.

Categories
Culture

Demographics

I agree with Karl Martino in his disgust with both Pat Robertson and that pathetic minister from Kansas, Fred Phelps. Don’t need atheists to say anything bad about Christianity when you have men like this out witnessing for the faithful–usually by recommending that someone be killed.

I winced, though, when reading his condemnation of Ann Coulter. Oh, not because he condemned her. It was his reference to her audience:

And speaking of Ann Coulter […] did you know she actually suggested New Yorkers are cowards? I know many New Yorkers. They are the ONLY folks I know that compare to Philadelphians in terms of being tough.
…
She’s one of a growing chorus of opportunists that seek to divide the country for their own gain. She knows her fan base – Southerners – and plays to it very well.

Missouri is considered on the border between north and south, east and west in this country, but culturally, the St. Louis area aligns more southern than midwestern. And this is reflected in some of the votes that have happened the last few years, including those for President, Governor, and the overwhelming vote against gay marriage.

At the same time, though, even in the hot of summer a good crowd showed up at the Gay Pride parade in St. Louis, and most of the people were not gay. It made me feel pretty good.

During the trip this last week, I talked with a lot of people, and heard stories about mills, and whisky running, and the great flood of 1993, and I found the people to be both charming and friendly–especially in the Branson area, where everyone had a smile. But then, these people saw a straight, older, white woman. A straight, older, white, woman who they assumed was Christian. It was lucky that religion was never mentioned, because I was right at the buckle of the bible belt: the heart of the fundamentalist faith in this country.

No we didn’t talk about religion or politics so I was able to pass and had a delightful time. I’d like to assume, because I like to believe the best of folk, that if they knew I wasn’t Christian, or Republican, they would still have been as friendly.

I wonder, though. A couple of months or so ago I had a lovely email from a lady who volunteered at one of the local historical societies. She’d really liked my Tyson Elk story–you know the one with the atom bomb?– and asked how I had conducted my research. I love history, and it was wonderful to talk with someone about it, because I swear “history bloggers” are the rarest of the rare breeds. Anyway, we had a great exchange of emails, and were even talking about getting together for lunch to talk about Tyson, when I mentioned that she could see some of my photos of the area at Flickr. What I had forgotten is that it was fairly soon after the Pride parade and my Flickr queue was full of pictures from the event. I never heard from her again.

Still, most of the webloggers from the south I read are tolerant, intelligent, and open minded and I’d like to think they’re representative of most of the folks in the area rather than online freaks who have been perverted by all you folks out there. As for the north, well, I grew up in a town in Washington State that wasn’t far from the spiritual center of the neo-nazi movement, only forty miles away in Idaho. Heck, I’ll take a southern redneck from the Ozarks over one of those guys in the back hills of Idaho.

Perhaps tolerance is a myth made up by big city folk in the north to descibe what doesn’t exist in the south. Still, as Mark Twain said, All the talk about tolerance, in anything or anywhere, is plainly a gentle lie. It does not exist. It is in no man’s heart; but it unconsciously, and by moss-grown inherited habit, drivels and slobbers from all men’s lips.. Mark Twain was from Missouri.

I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks. Harper Lee, author of “To Kill a Mockingbird”, and born in Alabama.

All I was doing was trying to get home from work. Alabama born Rosa Parks said.

Never drive a car that can handle more road than you can. Sorry, that one was me.

Bad, stupid, fearful people live everywhere. It’s just that most of the folk in the south are quiet and believe their ministers and not all of the “men of God” here are good people. Or at a minimum, tolerant. Nor do they have a whole lot of exposure to people who are different, and didn’t grow up in these parts; probably because people in the north don’t visit the south, and when they do, they treat the folks here like they’re inbred and stupid. Or they act like they’re inbred and stupid, themselves, and the southerners want no part of them.

Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt–distance does that.

Oh, and as an example of a typical southern person, Bush doesn’t count–he went to Yale.

Categories
Semantics

Photos, flickr, and back doors

By accident, I discovered that I was in violation of Flickr’s Terms of Use today. According to the TOS, Flickr is not a image hosting service. I’m not sure how it differs from an ‘image hosting’ service, other than I needed to include a link back to the photo flickr page for every photo embedded in a page here. Which explains why Flickr photo pages are starting to dominate search engine results, especially if people use meaningful photo titles.

The link back isn’t a problem within my weblog posts, but my the page generated by my photo metadata application, as well as Tinfoil, my photo album, have not been including a link back to the Flickr page. Unfortunately, this means that I’m going to have to change the code of the data collection element of my photo application. Which also means I’m going to have to re-run this for every page where I’ve included photos.

My fault for not checking the TOS more carefully. However, while I’m in the process of making this change, another one I’m making is to define a set for all photos that have been embedded in a weblog post, and add a tag linking the photo with that post. I also created a program that will use the Flickr API and download a local copy of each image. It will then update my post entries to point to the locally named copy, as compared to the one on Flickr. It’s my ‘backdoor’, just in case I decide I want to host my photos locally. No matter how much you like a centralized service–and I like Flickr–you should always have a backdoor.

I’m adding the metadata directly into the image itself, including the new longitude and latitude values, using the geotagging format. This way, this information follows the image no matter where I store it. I also add title, creator, description, keywords, and so on. When I do, Flickr pulls this data out and uses it to create the Flickr title, description, and tags.

(The geotagging format consists of three keywords or tags: “geotagged”, “geo:lon=value”,”geo:lat=value”. This is becoming standard format, and photos tagged with this are automatically pulled into other, external applications, such as my use with GoogleMaps.)

My photo application can pull this data out of the original image (whether stored locally, or found using the Flickr web services), utilizing a handy image metadata library for PHP.

I could keep the metadata stored in the image and just output this when the image metadata page is accessed. However, I store all of the data for each image as RDF, associated with the URL of the page itself, added to any other metadata I have for the page (much of this generated automatically using the same functionality used to drive the syndication feed in use for the site). The data is then available for my use, and accessible by any tool that can consume RDF/XML, such as Piggy-Bank.

I used to store this data in the database, but I’m now looking at trying something new. I figure if I have to re-do all the data, I might as well experiment.