Moving As Fast As I Can

Unlocking your cell phone makes it work with any carrier. Getting ready for a trip overseas, I wanted to unlock mine. I went to unlockcellphonecode.com which seemed to be a legit site. On the home page it promises 100% money back if it doesn’t work. I plunked down my $29.95 and they sent me an 8-digit number with some instructions. I followed the instructions with no result.

This site is absolutely crooked! I attempted to get a refund and they refused. A bit more investigation discovered that the guy who owns this site has an email address of discountcheese@gmail.com (listed with PayPal). Not a very phone-oriented email. In the past I have used such sites to unlock phones and they were honest and their methods worked.  I did try to make it right.

The owner, Josh, attempted to string me along with promises of help that never arrived. Apparently he does this all the time. I may have lost my money, but maybe I can help you save yours. Avoid this crook at all costs.

Note: He also gives commissions to other web sites that link to his. Before you spend your money make sure you are not redirected to unlockcellphonecode.com.

For years I watched NBC’s Today show while getting ready to go to work. Over the last few years, the content moved away from news and featured supermarket tabloid stories of shootings, celebrity hijinks, and other matters of no serious interest. I longed for real news; you know, what is happening in our various wars, politics, things that could affect my life. But no, I got the same junk that the tabloid evening shows (like 48 hours on CBS, Discovery’s ID channel) showed.

Turning the dial to ABC was even worse. There, Good Morning America is a two-hour commercial for ABC and Disney, who owns ABC. CBS was also a train wreck. Erica Hill and Chris Wragge, the Ken and Barbie of morning infotainment took the show so far from news that its audience truly tanked. This time slot for CBS has always been problematic. For many years, Harry Smith co-hosted. Smith featured simpering interviews with arch-conservatives. He made his affiliations so obvious that there was not even a hint of impartiality. I stayed with the Today show.

November 2011 was the debut of the latest try at morning supremacy. This time the anchor is hard news veteran Charlie Rose. Erica Hill remains as his eye candy co-host. For reasons that completely escape me, Gayle King, Oprah’s buddy, handles the soft news between 8 and 9 am.

Something of a morning miracle has occured. At 7am CBS presents competent, unbiased, interesting news. What a concept! Charlie Rose with a small assist from Erica Hill  present 19 minutes of really great stuff. CBS News correspondents  — yes, real news people –provide insightful reporting. Gone are the 48 Hours fluffmeisters! If you haven’t seen it, give it a shot. It’s great!

Unfortunately, with the good comes some bad. At 7:19 the show pretends to cut away for local weather. In fact it is an 11 minute commercial pod punctuated with a couple of short bursts in information, like a 60 second “health” report. Save the aggrevation. Turn off your set after you see the local weather. What follows is a massive waste of time.

At 7:30 the network show resumes. Charlie Rose and Erica Hill present another five minutes of news, then a 4 minute commercial break; another short burst of news, and another break. At 7:49, back to the commercials and a little local news. The eight-O’clock hour is a total waste of time. Gayle King has the interview skills of a slow eight year old. For example, she was interviewing an Oscar winner shortly after receiving his award; most of her interview was King bragging about how she was on the red carpet. Every attempt she makes at interviewing ends up as a very dull personal commentary. Gayle, face it, we don’t care about your life!

The eight O’clock hour does have some material contributed by people who can deliver news and do good interviews. Unfortunately, the ultra-frequent and long commerical breaks makes staying tuned impossible. For me, the solution to morning information craving is a two-step process. I watch the first 19 minutes of the CBS News Morning Show when I am getting dressed, turn off the TV at 7:19, finish dressing, and then on my drive to work listen to NPR.

Start your journey through time with ChronoZoom

A new way to look at the history of everything is now available. ChronoZoom offers a way to “zoom” in on time. Your journey starts with a view of all of time; 13.7 billion years that stretches from the Big Bang to today. Timelines represent logical groupings of events. With a click of the mouse, or with the mouse wheel, you can zoom into a single day in time. For those technically inclined this is a zoom rate of 3 trillion to 1! Timelines (the rectangles) and exhibits (the circles) organize information.  ChronoZoom provides a framework for examining historical events, trends and themes.

Exhibit celebrating the release of the ChronoZoom beta. Note that there are 7 different content items in this exhibit including two videos and a link to the site's survey.

Right now, ChronoZoom is in its beta release and content is sparse (several hundred exhibits). Here is an exhibit from ChronoZoom. In this case, the exhibit about the beta release.  This exhibit has seven different items in it. Two of them are videos and one links to the ChronoZoom user survey.

Eventually ChronoZoom will contain millions of content items.

What is unique about this website is that information is organized by date, not topic. Scientific achievements live side-by-side with events in human history. The unique ability to zoom allows you to find something of interest, say the US internment of Japanese citizens during World War Two, zoom in on it and discover original source data.

Another cool feature is the ChronoZoom tours. By clicking on the filmstrip on the upper left, a window slides out with a selection of tours. Click one, and you will be swept through time. At each stop on the tour, you will hear narration, and if you want, you can click pause (the || symbol on the top-center of the screen) and explore on your own. When you are ready to continue, just click the “play” button and the tour will continue.

When ChronoZoom operates, you get a real feeling of flying through time. My suggestion is to take the Welcome to ChronoZoom tour when you first get on the site. It will give you a sense of the power of this amazing tool.

ChronoZoom is a collaboration between University of California, Berkeley; Microsoft Research Connections; and Moscow State University. The result is an open-source project (http://chronozoom.codeplex.com). Content for the initial release was provided by Berkeley. Design and development were handled by Microsoft and Moscow State University. All three groups collaborated at every step. You can read the ChronoZoom Story at Behind the Scenes on the website.

In this age of social media there is an amazing array of places to drop our pearls of wisdom. Of course, the droppings may not all be pearls. Most likely they are something else that you don’t want to get on your shoes. I have a Facebook account. The postings I read there range from banal to painfully dull. The vast majority of posts I see are excerpts from things posted somewhere else. This is the social media equivalent of the garbage emails that my mother-in-law keeps forwarding. Have you noticed that the more right wing the email is, the more likely it will get forwarded?

This is the Rush Limbaugh syndrome. Rush’s daily broadcasts reduce news to jingoistic slogans that are easily learned and repeated by his followers. He has to get some credit for figuring out how to turn everyone’s evil thoughts into platitudes that trip off otherwise ignorant tongues. The tea party is the latest exponent of this syndrome. It’s a movement, not unlike the droppings mentioned earlier, that lives on simplification of issues. That’s Rush’s trick. Pick an issue, oh, say welfare and then simplify the discussion to the point that even Archie Bunker (for you younger readers, he was the first sitcom hero for the bigots) would be embarassed to repeat. According to the tea party/Rush crowd, welfare is a government giveaway for people who don’t want to work. It’s easy to be against giving money to other people. As the tea party/Limbaugh crowd see it, welfare takes money out of my pocket to give it to a bunch of freeloaders. They feel pretty much the same about Social Security and Medicare.

What’s wrong with that? Who wants to give their money to freeloaders? Not me, no sir. I earned it; I should keep it. Right? If you say “Right” then you are one of the tea party/Rush crowd. When things are reduced to black-and-white they are very simple and clear. But unfortunately things aren’t black and white. We have colors.

In the case of welfare, do we want people to starve. What about a fifteen-year-old mother who never got through high school and now has a kid to support? Should we ignore her and let the baby and mother live on the streets as beggers? Sure! She didn’t have to have the baby. Oh wait! She did. We don’t believe in abortion. You can see where this is going.

It’s an old trick to reduce things to such a simple level that no thought is required to form an opinion. That’s what Limbaugh and the tea party do. They talk in abstractions and don’t consider the human impact of their positions. When was the last time Rush put himself in the shoes of that unfortunate girl? Never! That would spoil the argument and hurt his ratings.

It’s no wonder that right wing talk radio gets ratings. The rant is easy-to-understand simplifications of important issues. The theme is, “I never got that. Why should anyone else?” Those two sentences summarize the thousands of hours of Limbaugh’s broadcasts. Rail against the government that takes my money and gives it to strangers. Outrageous!

Just the sort of thoughts we need for this holiday season. Not!

Fireworks were plentiful this year, but broadcast quality was spotty

July 4th this year offered a good deal of fireworks viewing via TV. I was able to see the Macy’s New York, Seattle, and Boston fireworks. The quality of the fireworks were better than ever, but the quality of the broadcasts varied a great deal.

Let’s start with the worst. That has to be the NBC network presentation of the Macy’s New York show. First off, throughout the fireworks display, a very bright “Live” with a “sparkler” underline provided endless distraction from the display. To make things worse, the NBC director, probably some exec’s brother-in-law, couldn’t understand that fireworks are designed to be viewed from below. The NBC genius spent most of our time with blimp shots looking down. Sadly, Macy’s millions were wasted on the national audience. How difficult is it to understand that a “fireworks show” means that the fireworks are what people want to see? As a result of NBC’s pathetic effort, the New York Fourth was unexciting.

Next up for me was the Seattle show. This annual event offers fireworks shot above Lake Union. The local NBC affiliate covers it. Most years the Seattle show is an embarassment. The city that is called home for Microsoft, Starbucks, Amazon, and T-Mobile can surely find the money to build a show equal to, oh say, Boston? This year the show was actually better than I have ever seen. Microsoft and Starbucks kicked in to buy 2,500 fireworks (New York had over 40,000). A small, non-profit group in Seattle orchestrates the annual show. Generally, the best description of their effort is lame. This year, the light bulb came on. While the music was still unprofessionally chosen, the actual fireworks display was tasteful, and absolutely beautiful. The modest collection of fireworks was shown to great advantage and the overall effect was wonderful. The local TV station, fortunately for us, without the funds for a blimp, kept their cameras blissfully on the ground aimed at the display. Good work!

Next up was Boston. The annual Boston Pops event had a wonderful fireworks show. Now Boston ranks 22 in the U.S. by population, Seattle 23. The Boston show had well over 5,000 fireworks. As you may recall, Seattle 2,500. Clearly Boston is doing something right. CBS covered the Boston show. The direction was much better than NBC, but once again blimp shots of the fireworks prevailed. Just because you can get a blimp doesn’t mean that everything looks better when shot from one.

The clear winner this year is Boston and CBS. The biggest question this year is why Seattle can muster such a pitiful display when Boston with only 9,000 more people can present a a world-class Fourth presentation. The loser is NBC. This, lowest-rated network managed to turn the world’s largest and best produced fireworks display into an annoying waste of time. It’s a sad day when the worst network can tarnish the world’s best Fourth of July celebration.

After owning two Toyota Priuses, a 2006 and a 2010, the  green cars finally got to me. As I have written before, the Prius is a cool, reliable form of transportation. My 2010 with adaptive cruise control and steering assits made the car the closest thing to public transportation that lets you steer. It got me from place to place, delivered great gas mileage, and bored me to the point that I stopped wanting to drive.

Like depression, Pruiusitis, comes on slowly. It starts with thoughts like, “Do I really need to go there?” and ends with “Honey, can you drive this time?” “This time” became every time. At that point I realized that driving stopped being fun to me. I fully understand that many people will not understand what I am talking about. If you have never driven a really fast car or a true sports car, you won’t understand how driving can be the most fun you can have with your clothes on; though I do know some people drive without clothes as well.

If a car represents transportation and nothing more, then you just don’t understand how it feels to me. That’s fine. Anyway, while I loved the fact that I was saving the planet and that I was spending only $20 every two weeks on gas, I was also getting massively tired of driving the Toyota. My mind kept drifting to cars I owned in the past: a Pontiac GTO, a Porsche C, a Triumph Spitfire, a Datsun (Nissan) 240 Z, a Toyota MR2, a Mitsubishi Eclipse (well that one isn’t really a sports car, but it went like hell and was fun to drive). All of those cars were pure fun to drive. Most were two-seaters.

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People watching is one of the most entertaining activities in a casino. Some slot machine players go to extrodinary lengths to attempt to control the outcome of their play. Slot players in particular display behavior that is hard to believe. I enjoy some slot play at Snoqualmie Casino, a beautiful indian casino located a few miles east of Seattle. Featuring almost 3,000 slot machines, it offers the opportunity to see a wide variety of people trying to change their luck.

Many players believe that they can “control” the slot machine by fiddling with various controls. Slots offer very few opportunities for this. Most feature a slot to accept money or a casino “ticket”, another slot where a payout ticket is dispensed, buttons corresponding to the size of the bet you want to make, and a button to start the action. There may also be a “Max Bet” button that automatically bets the most the machine will accept.  So how do you make sure you will win?

That’s the fun part. A common and very strange move is Cleaning Your Money. This is done by requesting a pay out, then taking the casino receipt and shaking it in the air a few times to shake out the bad luck, then placing back into the currency slot. I have seen some people do this after nearly every spin. I guess this action provides the illusion of control of the outcome. Another common behavior is “button dancing”. People who do this will press a betting amount button, then press the spin button, followed by rapid pressing of all the other button in some kind of private sequence. Apparently the machine is supposed to respond to this. They don’t.

“Windshield wipers” are another breed of slot players. These people believe that wiping the video screen with their hands will draw out the winning combinations. They perform this ritual on every spin. A varient of this behavior is the “screen dotter”. Screen dotters use the tips of their fingers to tap the screen, apparently drawing winning symbols to those spots. Another common behavior is to “fool the machine into thinking you are someone else”.

Players will insert their players club card (a card that records your slot play and then provides rewards like free food or even money), insert money and play. If things aren’t going well, they will cash out, like the ticket wavers, remove their club card, the wait. Some will wait as long as five minutes. Then when they are convinced that the machine has forgotten them, they will reinsert their card, put money into the currency slot, and play again.

Another class of behaviors occur when a player earns free spins. Most video slots have symbol combinations that trigger bonus play, usually some free spins with better payouts. When one of these is earned, our players really get into action! By my count the most popular reaction to a bonus round is the “I am not here” move. The player moves back from the machine and folds his or her arms and pretends not to watch the screen. No matter how much they earn on each bonus spin, they sit stoically pretending to be someplace else.

I have no idea where this originated, but more than half of the players perform this ritual. Another, my particular favorite, is “frantic screen helping”. This activity consists of a combination of tapping and wiping the screen very rapidly during the bonus play. Casinos must spend a fortune cleaning off the screens.

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I admit it. Even though I work and think at the edges of computer science, the value of social media has not reached me. A few days ago I joined Facebook. I did this more out of curiosity than anything else. I invited my daughter as a friend. She turned me down saying that she and her friends post comments she wouldn’t want her father to see. Yup, same as in real life. Where are you going? Out. What did you do today? Nothing. Apparently the parent filter remains on long after our teens turn to adults.

My feelings weren’t hurt by this rejection. The invitation was more of an effort to create a network than to learn the scary details of my daughter’s life. I also invited my wife. Thankfully she accepted. I am not sure what the implications of her refusing me would be. Within hours I received an email asking me if I want my wife to be my “spouse” on Facebook. I have a choice? Is Facebook an alternate universe where I can be a carefree and single? Nah. But it was funny to be asked. Like a good boy I immediately admitted to Facebook that we are, in fact, married.

Next thing, my “wall” (homepage?) there had bunches of pictures of my wife, me, our pets, kids, etc. I assume she put them there. Was she sending a n0t-so-subtle message to potential Facebook husand stalkers that my life is full and they should just move on? It is nice to see something there when I log in.

Naturally I navigated to her page. She has lots of friends. Most of them appear to be from Target where she works. A couple are barely out of high school. Interesting. I suppose you are probably rolling your eyes and wonder where I have been all these years. I have been rigth here, connected via electronic media to my world. It just never occured to me that a semi-public version of myself was something I would want. All this time I have worried that too much of me was discoverable. Every intimate detail of my life is stored in at least one database. Maybe Facebook and similar web sites are a way to fight back. Yes, you can uncover my credit rating, my health details, income, preferences in everything from books to bedroom accessories. Ican’t control that information. Ah hah! On Facebook I can. Continue reading →