flights

After using the WordPress default “kubrick” theme for months longer than I wanted to, I finally got around to redesigning this blog. I wanted a fluid layout, on the minimal side. What do you think?

Along with the usual flow of annual family newsletters and photographic Christmas cards, featuring matching cable-knit sweaters and first visits to Santa, this year I received a handful of emails with links to online photo albums. Lots and lots of pictures of babies and toddlers – many clearly taken within seconds of each other. Dozens from a single evening.

It occurred to me that this generation of kids will certainly be the most recorded one in human history.

A couple of hundred years ago, only the wealthiest people in only the most advanced civilizations could acquire portraits of their kids. Even so, such a family during that time might have one or two at most. The advent of photography democratized the portrait, but until just a generation ago, pictures were still special. For one thing, you had to pay for film. You had to go to a store, choose a film stock based on camera type, optimal ISO speed and number of frames per roll, and shell out real money before you captured your first shot. You had to load your camera – carefully – and because you’d paid for the film, you had to consider and reconsider each picture before, during and after you shot it. When you reached the end of the roll, you had to go back to a store and hand it over for processing, which often took a few days – unless you were willing to pay a premium for a 1-hour turnaround.

Fetching your pictures from the store was always kind of magical, because you had no way of knowing whether you’d aimed right or focused right, or whether your mom had blinked at the wrong moment or your friend’s face was hidden by an unforeseen shadow. Also, the photographed events themselves had already started their slide into memory and forgetting, so to see the pictures was to get to relive a little.

In the era of digital cameras, pictures have joined the growing list of things that have stopped being special. It’s a bit sad, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. I would never suggest we return to the medium of film, with its chemicals and waste, but I like the idea of reintroducing some restraint into the act of picture taking.

The other day, I learned about something called the 36 Exposures Challenge that aims to do just that:

…this ease of use and surfeit of images comes with a price. In the analog era, when we had to pay to see what we shot, we were more careful when we took photographs. This forced a discipline that is hard to imagine today. In the words of Stephen Shore, “[Today] there seems to be a greater freedom and lack of restraint…as one considers one’s pictures less, one produces fewer truly considered pictures.”

I upgraded my WordPress software, and I’m theoretically able to filter comment spam now. I got a handful of new blog posts in the works, so it’s a brand new year.

In the latest version of mail.app in Leopard, some of the fields have moved. I had some trouble sending mail because I was used to the older version, and I couldn’t find the field for setting the SMTP port and authentication. Anyway, I have it up and running now, so I figured I’d post some screenshots.

First, in your Gmail settings, make sure you have either POP or IMAP enabled, depending on which you want to use. Then, open the Preferences for mail.app.

Click on “Accounts” in the top menu, then Account Information. Enter whatever you want into the Description field. Then enter the address you would like to use as your reply-to address into the Email Address field (probably your Gmail address). For your username, enter your Gmail username (without “@gmail.com”).

In the “Advanced” area, enter port 993, 995 or possibly 465.

Back in “Account Information,” click the “Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)” dropdown and select “Edit Server List.”

Enter a description if you want, and enter “smtp.gmail.com” as the server name. In the Advanced area, enter port 587, select “Password” in the Authentication menu and enter your Gmail username (again without “@gmail.com”) and password.

That should do it.

The notion that consumer-generated content lacks authority is not a new one of course. Wikipedia has been in the middle of this storm for a while now, and then there was that recent report (I wish I could remember where I saw it) about the proportion of web content ranked highly in search results that is generated by teens.

This morning I found this collection of bad user-generated Amazon.com reviews of great books (that is, books commonly understood by scholars to belong in the canon of great literature).

Does authority matter outside the context of scholarship or government?

I started a new job recently. This came with the usual changes – new office, new policies, processes, people – but one of the peripheral changes is a new set of coffee and lunch options. Tully’s is the coffee spot on my new block. The other day, I stopped in for the first time and joined the queue. I was listening to my iPod and engrossed in a magazine article, so when my turn came, I hadn’t looked at the menu at all.

“What can I get you?” the woman behind the counter repeated.
“Uh… just a coffee. Medium I guess.”
“You mean ‘grande?’”
“Uh,” I squint up at the menu, “yeah, grande I guess.”

I have a problem with this. What’s wrong with English? Small, medium, large? And doesn’t ‘grande’ mean large? So why is ‘grande’ the medium size? And what about ‘tall?’ Tall is small? Is ‘tall’ an Italian word too?

Today, I took my car to the nearest Shell station to get it smog checked – a bi-yearly(?) ritual for drivers in California. The friendly folks at the Shell station took one look at my registration renewal paperwork from the California DMV, however, and said, “oh, you’re test only.”

Me: “What does that mean?”

Shell guy: “It means they’re picking on you.”

[beat]

Shell guy: “Seriously, it means we can’t do your smog check. We’re not allowed to do ‘test only’ checks. I’ll call the guys across the street.”

Long story short, the banner on the Shell station said “Smog Check Center,” while the one across the street said, “Smog Check Center: Test Only.” The difference, apparently, is that the test-only center can’t fix your car if it doesn’t pass the test. Now follow along kids, because here’s where it gets stupid…

Based on data collected by the California DMV, cars most likely to fail the smog check are flagged for test-only checking. That’s right, cars most likely to NEED FIXING to pass the smog check must get their smog checks done at the places that CAN’T FIX THEM.

Sweet infant Jesus.

Anyway, mine passed (yay), so next I visited the California DMV website where I was greeted by this monstrosity (direct link in case it goes away from the DMV home page).

Rock on DMV!

Well, it’s not the Jetta. It’s two women in a Passat blindsided by an SUV as they discuss Volkswagen’s controversial Jetta commercials that depict… well… the same thing:

A commercial referencing a commercial to make real more real. Too meta for me.

YouTube got a lot of flack for making a recent deal with NBC, so perhaps it was not NBC’s prerogative to lampoon it. Still, you gotta respect the network’s moxie for going head on at the controversy with this video:

As long as the root cause isn’t killing anyone, this is exactly what a company should to address a sticky PR situation. Respond directly, with humility and a sense of humor. Props NBC. I see a must-see TV comeback in your near future.

You know you’ve created something good when your fans create a crop circle to honor your product. Yesterday, I read a nice piece from Business Week about how Mozilla is leveraging grassroots and guerilla tactics in its bid to become mainstream.

There are dotcoms, and there are dot orgs. Dot org means there’s a mission, a higher calling. It smells cleaner. It invites you in, treats you as family.

With Mozilla, the mission is to make the web – our experience of it anyway – better. A group of passionate people, united in this cause but lacking money, tapped the lurking talent of the hacker community at large. You know the story. They built a great product, and by virtue of its, well, virtues, it now claims 10% of the browser market share. We love it because it’s for the people, by the people. And, oh yeah, it’s great browser.

So what does a company like Mozilla do when they want to take it to the next level? What do you do when you have a great product, a small but devoted – even zealous – following, but lack the money for traditional marketing?

Actually having a great product is the first hurdle. Lots of fans who love you for your basic “goodness” (as in not evilness) helps too. People thought Internet search had been conquered in 1998, that it was an over-crowded space, a commodity, when Google appeared on the scene. Craigslist now dominates the classifieds business. Both of these companies owe some of their success to the “for-the-people” reputation they cultivated.

Mozilla’s answer is to try its open-source philosophy – and expertise – in the realm of marketing. In the spirit of influencing the influencers, they reached out to their highest profile fans and asked them to put “download Firefox” buttons on their websites. 85% said yes. And it’s spreading. From 100 popular websites, to 10,000 when Firefox finished its testing phase, to over 65,000 websites as of today.

As for the most passionate Firefox devotees, Mozilla hasn’t had to ask for help. In many cases – the recent crop circle incident, for example – they’ve learned about it after the fact.