A reaction I posted to a friend’s Facebook with regard to the present BART Strike:
I’m a pro-Union Liberal who thinks it is wrong to beat up on public-sector employees. I have heard that BART staff get 40 PTO days per year and there’s a scheme where you can take PTO, then take a shift, and get overtime for that. That’s something we can fix.
The train operators literally sit on their ass and watch the train drive itself. I talked to a guy who said that he did an important job of every once in a while mashing the buttons to fix something, and if he and his comrades weren’t there, BART would have to evacuate the passengers, shut the doors, and run the train empty to its terminal. Horrors!
In NYC, they’ve been laying off station agents where possible and using video cameras to aggregate agent services remotely.
I keep hoping that one of these days a labor action will be an excuse for BART to just fire the train operators and let the system run on automatic as it was designed to do. Spend the money on more frequent service so when a train occasionally has to be taken down, its replacement appears that much more quickly. Spread some of that money to the best station agents and start installing remote presence equipment to make the most of their labor.
. . . and if those train operators are even half as as good at mashing buttons in an emergency as they think they are, they can make the same salary as an entry-level SysAdmin.
Seriously, it is sad when your job is obsoleted by technology. It is even sadder when your job was obsoleted by technology before it even existed. Saddest when your skills are in extremely high demand at higher pay, but we keep paying you to do an obsolete job of extremely marginal public benefit.
I am hearing the following: 


– you want the option to see Flickr in a “classic” view

– textual information around your photos (and sets in particular) is too hidden in the new design

– user’s organizational choices are limited and not surfaced enough, particularly with the Collections, Set, Photo hierarchy
– you want more customizability of content and layout in your photostream and home page
[ . . . ]


To put an end to speculation, and to hopefully give some people closure, the old site is not coming back. However, we will continue to improve upon the new pages . . .
[ . . . ]
We are focusing on making Justified view better and more performant, instead of supporting multiple different views.
So, basically, the full-screen view of photos without explanatory text is here to stay, and anyone who wants to view their photos in a different format should find an alternative photo sharing service.
My Red State Relative Posted this to his Facebook Wall:
“Scalia Resigns Post as Scoutmaster”
Justice Scalia quit his post in a terse resignation letter that read, in part: “Some of the happiest memories of my adult life have been as a scoutmaster. Huddling under blankets around the campfire, and so forth. But now, all of that has been ruined. Ruined.”
I quipped that “if enough bigots quit they’ll have to start recruiting gay adult leaders.” To which my relative responded asking how I might feel about my son on a campout with the gays, or an alcoholic, and that safety, righteousness and common sense should prevail.
[Relative], I hope Tommy takes an interest in scouting, and I feel better to know that if he joins, he will not be denied the friendship of a fellow scout simply because one of them is gay. I hope they go camping together, and I know from first-hand experience that when Scouts exhibit a gross failure of ethical or moral conduct, their behavior is reported and disciplinary action is taken. (Like the boys who got expelled from the Scouts for shoplifting during a camping trip.)
And, for what it is worth, our Scoutmaster was a combat Veteran and a Recovering Alcoholic. He told some good stories that I think probably helped a few of us young men make smarter decisions in our adult lives. It was always hard to get a sufficient number of adults to join our outings, which is why I will be glad to see the eventual end of the exclusion of gay adult leaders.
You would think that turning a computer off would be a simple ask. But on my corporate laptop, Windows 7 is ever concerned that I am an idiot.
Me: Okay, we’re done. Shut down. Windows 7: Okay. Hey, wait, some programs are still running. Me: Kill them. Force shut down. Windows 7: Bu-bu-bu-bu-buuuut you could lose your work!! Are you sure you want to shut down? Me: Yes . . . I’m always sure . . . but thank you for your heartfelt concern.
So it goes.
(I do 98% of my work from Linux, which thinks shutting down is a grand idea.)
Earlier this week, Yahoo! unveiled a new and improved Flickr! !! A radical new redesign, which, while kind of slick to look at, totally steamrolls all the narrative features that many Flickr users like me love. Time will tell if Yahoo will backpedal enough to let us old-timers see our photos in the ways we like. Given that the new business model appears to be ditching the user subscription model for ads ads ads I am not optimistic.
Tommy smiles at his father photographer.
Enter Iperntity, a 7-person outfit in Cannes, FR which appears to have cloned the Flickr interface back in 2007 and have since moved in the direction of building it into a site where you not only manage and share your photos, but you can also write stories, and keep track of the friends you have on the site. Basically, a little outfit building something like Flickr into what Flickr might have become had Yahoo! not spent the past decade neglecting it. In a way, it is even giving us the core sharing features that people like about Facebook, without all the skeeviness. (Or … critical mass.)
I miss the nice drag-and-drop web uploader that flickr recently launched
The site feels a bit short of snappy … not dog slow, just not snappy … to be sure, they’re seeing a spike in load
The first thing that really makes me smile is that by default the photo lists the date taken, rather than date uploaded … that always frustrated me about Flickr
I of course opted for their 3-month paid service. Once the Collections feature comes online then I reckon there is a very good chance I’ll migrate my data from Flickr and sign up for their two year plan.
It is just nice to discover that there is new technology waiting in the wings when the big megacorp decides to shoot its product in the foot.
Back when I lived in Mountain View I was deeply saddened to read of the death of Gwen Araujo in 2002. She was a transgendered teen in the South Bay who was brutally murdered by classmates. Why? She had given a few blowjobs to the boys. The boys realized in horror that they had committed a “homosexual” act. They felt betrayed by Gwen, beat her to death, and buried her in the woods.
The tragedy bothered me because Gwen was apparently accepted by these friends enough to become somewhat intimate, but the homophobia that had been instilled in these kids was so strong that they went from lust to the worst sort of violence.
For me, “Gwen Araujo” is as a reminder that homophobia is a deadly poison that can turn even a lover into a brutal murderer. Gays aren’t murdering people: it is homophobia that is the dangerous sickness. The younger generations have proven increasingly tolerant, but Gwen’s friends were still held under its deadly influence . . .
I dream of a world in which people can be who they are as they are without fear of violence.
Last night as I dreamed, I was in London. I rode the tube out to some far-flung station and picked another route back. At a pub my phone got stolen. Various attempts to engage the police failed because they had more pressing concerns, like a dead body at the hotel. I called my phone and the girl who stole it answered. She wasn’t interested in giving it back and thought it was poor form on my part to have lost it. Eventually, I went back to the pub and saw my phone in her hands. The thief was a skinny blond taking a picture of her friends, and I recognized her voice, and my phone. I walked up to her and elbowed her in the face, and took my phone back. The girl had a bloody nose and one of her friends seemed very alarmed over the assault. I showed her the phone and explained the situation, and her friend nodded in understanding, and apologized. I removed the huge silly case she had put on it, and started digging through the phone itself wondering what manner of dross she had installed on it, then Tommy started to cry, so I woke up and took a very brief moment to try and remember the dream.
How can I contemplate moving everything to the cloud, especially Google’s cloud, if services are going to flicker in and out of existence at the whim of Google’s management? That’s a non-starter. Google has scrapped services in the past, and though I’ve been sympathetic with the people who complained about the cancellation, they’ve been services that haven’t reached critical mass. You can’t say that about Google Reader. And if they’re willing to scrap Google Reader, why not Google Docs?
An excellent point.
I recall the first time I adopted a “cloud” service for my technology. It was Flickr. I had managed my photos with my own scripts for years. Others had installed Gallery, which always struck me as limited and ugly. Flickr was new at the time, and I really liked the aesthetic. But, upload all my photos there? They had just been bought by Yahoo. How long is Yahoo going to support the service? I still keep local archives of my photos, but I have thousands of photos shared on Flickr, and how do I know that all those captions, comments, geotags, annotations, sets and collections, that all that data might not one day go down with the slowly sinking-ship that is Yahoo?
What reassured me was the Flickr API. Worst case, I should be able to write a script to pull all that data to a local place somewhere and later reconstruct my online photo archive. If Flickr were going down, someone else would probably write that script better than I could. It is a grim thought, but at least when Flickr dies, there is an exit strategy.
That is one reason why I can sort of trust Google. They’re pretty good about supporting APIs. They’re killing Reader? That’s dumb. But in an instant, Feedly was able to take over my subscriptions from Google for me, and I just had to spend a few minutes learning a somewhat different interface.
It would be nice, though, if, when software was retired, especially cloud software, that it could be open sourced and available for the die-hard users to keep it running on their own servers somewhere. Admittedly, cloud services especially are vulnerable to further external dependencies . . .
You would think, though, that it shouldn’t take much effort on Google’s part to announce that a service has been retired, but they’ll keep it running indefinitely, at least until some point where the vast majority of the users had wandered on to more compelling alternatives. They still keep the Usenet archive around.
And, yes, I rely on DocsDrive. This killing Reader fiasco sounds like an advertising ploy for Microsoft. I rely on DocsDrive, but maybe Excel is a more trustworthy option for the long term . . . ?
I have been excited to see what might come of Yahoo! with Marissa Meyers at the helm. I am really glad to see that, after years of stagnation, Flickr has been improving. Free food and smartphones for employees? Sounds swell. But the buzz now is that there shall be no more remote work. The only way to be productive is to come to the office and feel the buzz and bounce ideas off coworkers.
I am happy to point out that, while we don’t get free smartphones or free food, my employer does issue remote employees with a hardware VPN device that provides corporate wifi, and a videophone. And we are hiring.
In my experience as a non-management technical professional, there is some virtue both to working from home, and to working at the office. The office presents great opportunities for collaboration: working through ideas and solving problems. Working from home, for some people, provides an excellent space to focus on getting some work done without interruption. You can get more hours of productive work when your commute is shortened to a walk across the dining room, and when there’s no pressure to quit at a certain time to appease the demands of the train schedule or traffic.
For some people, there’s no place like the office . . . some people can do better work from home, some people do not. Managers and executives, the bulk of whose work is meeting with others to make collaborative decisions . . . it seems that they may take several meetings from home and when they get to the office they feel uncomfortable that the busy hum of productive creative energy isn’t located there. I believe that managers who can structure the working and communication practices of their teams to effectively collaborate and track work progress without requiring a physical presence have an advantage over those who can not.
I live near the office and frequently collaborate with my manager, so most days I make the trip in. Sometimes when I need to focus on a project, or work with a remote time zone, I’ll commute to the home office. I have been with Cisco for over five years, now. I spent one of those years in New York, and my tenure here would have been much shorter without the flexibility to telecommute.
Some weeks back I saw a poster for “Shen Yun: Reviving 5,000 Years of Civilization” at work and thought “Excellent! The wife digs artistic performance and bonus points for digging some traditional Chinese culture.” I grabbed some tickets and mentioned to a coworker. “Shen Yun? That’s Falun Gong.” I know very little about Falun Gong, except that the Chinese government views them as a threatening cult. Of course, the mainland government is easily wigged out over any perceived threat to stability, so I figured that doesn’t tell us much. We’re seeing a performance sponsored by an oppressed religious minority. That could mean anything, really.
The performance was pretty cool. Lots of dancers in colorful costumes evoking stories from Chinese history. I’d say it is like watching a Chinese version of the Nutcracker Suite. Lots of color, lots of movement, and good music. Although they’re telling mostly ancient stories they make effective use of a modern prop of a projected backstage. This saves not only on set design, but the characters at various points jump off the back stage and fly up into the screen as digital avatars. The first time I saw this I thought it was a bit gimmicky, but by the second instance I thought “hey, that is pretty neat, and I bet really magical for the kids.”
And then there’s the Falun Dafa bits. They have some solo singers come out and sing in Chinese, which is cool. They even put the lyrics on the back screen in Chinese and English. I am sure some of the poetic nuance is lost in translation, but the songs lament that we are … most of us, anyway … Gods from the Heavens who have come down to Earth for some reason, something about breaking the cycle of reincarnation and restoring the cycle of creation and destruction. To the disinterested observer it comes across as Buddhist Scientology, and the cycle of creation and destruction sounds like the sort of thing that would raise the ear of a mainland censor.
Two of the dance performances are set in modern China. In one, a tourist gets sent to jail when he unintentionally takes a picture of an innocuous Falun Dafa protest. The guy is tossed in a cell with the Falun Dafa kids, whom he wants nothing to do with, but after the guards treat him contemptibly, everyone in the cell identifies their common predicament. I thought “alright, the Chinese government overdoes it, and many social reform movements have found strength in the jails. Right on, brothers! Fight the power!” In the final dance, the Falun Dafa are having a great time protesting in Tienanmen Square. Right on, sisters! Let us see your “tank man” performance! As soon as the Chinese police come out to bust some heads, a massive earthquake starts to destroy Beijing. Huh? That kind of sucks! But, no worry, the Gods come down and restore Beijing … everything except the Great Hall of the People … ah!
Yeah, I can see how even a reasonable government might not be super enthusiastic about that sort of performance.
The show was overall entertaining. I would still hope that people can practice their religion freely. But whatever innate sympathy I might have had for the Falun folks is diminished, especially by their last performance. When it comes to resistance movements, I am most sympathetic to the non-violent, and to those who aren’t fantasizing that apocalypse is an element to their eventual success.
A MAN who was caught growing cannabis in his cellar months after being given a suspended sentence for the same offence has been sent to jail.
Daniel Howard’s second illegal enterprise was discovered by police when they went to his home in Harehills, Leeds, looking for another person who was wanted for arrest.
FREMONT, Calif.—A Fremont man is facing charges that he tried to hang his girlfriend from a backyard tree.
Thirty-one-year-old Daniel Howard is scheduled to be arraigned on attempted murder and criminal threat charges on Tuesday.
Police say they found Howard Sunday evening standing behind his girlfriend, who was tied to a tree with a rope fashioned as a noose around her neck. Her hands were tied behind her back.
Howard was allegedly continuing to wrap the rope around her neck.
So, I really like Ubuntu. Its Linux and it just mostly works. Except when they try to force everyone into some experimental new desktop environment. That is pretty awful, but I’m happy again now that I switched to kubuntu-desktop. (apt-get install kubuntu-desktop)
Kubuntu is Ubuntu with a nicely set-up KDE environment. They try to get you to use their own home-grown web browser, and the file manager takes some getting used to, but you can pretty quickly get under the hood, set up all your little window manager preferences, and get back to jamming. (Focus Follows Mouse in my house!)
The only thing that was missing is the fonts were rendering . . . not as pretty as regular Ubuntu. Kubuntu is set up to use the Ubuntu font, but in KDE things render kind of pixelly looking, like I was still in the 90s. A bit of searching and they seem to look nicer:
System Settings > Application Appearance > Fonts
Use anti-aliasing: Enabled
Configure…
Use sub-pixel rendering: RGB
Hinting style: Slight
Via Facebook: “Guys, I finally wrote a letter to the Boy Scouts to resign my Eagle Scout rank, and sent it along with my badge. It was hard to do but I can’t continue to the associated with an organization that has become so discriminatory and bigoted toward gay youth & leadership.”
As a former Boy Scout who never made Eagle, I am impressed by those that had the dedication to put in the hard work to attain that rank. I am not surprised to hear that my college friend, Dan Wright, made Eagle, and I am proud that he did.
Two decades on, it takes some integrity to renounce the hard work and proud accomplishment of youth, in the name of those youthful values. Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Courteous, Kind, and Obedient to a code of Universal morality which affords equal respect to all people.
Dan did well in his younger days, and he’s doing right now. Sometimes the label which you have earned just doesn’t fit on the heart within.
First off, a couple years back, someone very close to me wanted to learn to ride a bicycle. I took her to a free workshop in Brooklyn where two dozen people learned how to ride a bicycle in a few hours. The process was surprisingly simple: you take the pedals off and learn to scoot around, then how to turn and brake. Once you are comfortable balancing on the bike, the pedals go back on and you learn the tricky part: how to shift your weight and pedal, with full confidence that you can manage everything else once you get the thing going. What took me weeks to learn as a kid is something adults can now pick up in a few hours.
On a not-unrelated note, I just enjoyed this article about European street design, where instead of designing every street for cars but also allowing pedestrians on the side, they design some residential streets for pedestrians, but also allow cars to crawl through slowly. Instead of designing for “speed” they design to make driving “tortuous” . . . cars are damned convenient and you’ll drive when it makes sense, but when you’re in a neighborhood it is good if you slow the heck down and pay attention to your environment. So, the Dutch will do things that sound absurd in America, like putting playground equipment in the roadway.
The thing is, if you are slowly driving through an obstacle course, you’re going to be a lot more careful, and if you do end up hitting something, you’re going to do less damage at 10 MPH than you would at 30 MPH. As someone whose commute is now primarily via bicycle, that kind of thinking makes me very happy.
I am an employee of Cisco Systems on Tasman Dr in San Jose. I commute to work via Scott Boulevard, the San Tomas Aquino Creek Trail, and finally via Tasman Drive into San Jose. The commute is mostly very pleasant, except for the section of Tasman Dr in Santa Clara.
For my own safety, I take the full right-most lane when bicycling on this road. I do this because there is no bicycle lane and because it is very scary to be passed by vehicles speeding above 40 MPH, and because the sight visibility is limited on the overpasses. I want to ensure that vehicles can see me and pass safely.
In each of the past two days I have been harassed by drivers on this roadway. Yesterday afternoon a woman was honking at me, and this morning a man pulled up next to me and yelled obscenities at me from his SUV. Tasman Dr is scary enough without the obscenities, and it makes Santa Clara feel like a more hostile and threatening place.
Please consider the following suggestions:
– Install a bicycle lane on Tasman Dr, at least between the San Tomas Aquino Creek trail and the bicycle lane in San Jose.
– Consider lowering the speed limit, to make the roadway feel more hospitable to mixed use.
– Short of these suggestions, post signs advising that bicycles may make full use of the lane.
The section of Tasman Dr near Great America Parkway has been very pleasant due to the speed restrictions and signage that accompanies stadium construction. In constructing the stadium you have inadvertently demonstrated what a pleasant and progressive bicycling experience Tasman Drive can be.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
-danny
For now, I have cooked up a less-threatening alternate route. I am skeptical that I can get Tasman Dr changed around, but the Bicycle Coalition guy was very encouraging and I look forward to providing some advice in civil planning! If in the next few years Tasman Dr becomes a nice way to bike I will be very happy about that.
