accendi's posterous

Stop CISPA

Guess what? It's time to save the Internet again. This time around the government is calling it CISPA (aka H.R. 3523), but it's the same idea as SOPA/PIPA: the government wants to eradicate citizens' rights to privacy and take complete control over the Internet. The sweeping language around "cybersecurity purposes" is so over broad and vague that it:
  • Would allow companies to monitor and collect any kind of data, no matter how sensitive it was, even private emails and text messages. 
  • Would let companies share your data with anyone at all, including other companies and the federal government.
  • Gives companies total immunity from all liability for their actions, no matter how many peoples’ privacy is violated.
  • Hands the keys to this data to intelligence agencies, which lack transparency and public accountability.
Please join me and the EFF in urging our representatives to vote against CISPA:

→ Don’t Let Congress Use "Cybersecurity" Fears to Trample on Civil Liberties - Electronic Frontier Foundation

This Post Is Not Sponsored By EllisLab

While looking at EllisLab's ExpressionEngine as a possible solution for an upcoming project, I came across this little gem: EllisLab's MojoMotor, billed as "the publishing engine that does less". There are no advanced content management features, but it provides a very easy, very slick on-site page editing/management experience ideal for non-technical people who just need a very basic web presence, such as busy small business owners, club organizers, and your mom.

I haven't tried actually installing it anywhere, so I have no idea what this thing looks like under the hood (though it's undoubtedly built on top of EllisLab's popular CodeIgniter framework), but I liked what I saw in 15 minutes messing around with the demo (which, oddly, is not linked from their main site; I had to Google it). It is a commercial product, but at $50/license, it's priced pretty affordably. If you're a freelancer looking for a simple, easy to use solution for your clients, it's definitely worth a look.

Cloverfield for Kids - Super 8 Review (Very Minor Spoilers)

The first half of this movie is a compelling drama about children investigating strange events in the wake of a tragedy in small town America in the early 80's; the second half is a toothless horror/disaster movie where children save the day through the power of forgiveness. The movie works well when it keeps its focus tightly on the children and their families, and if it had been willing to be a smaller, more personal film, it could have been very good. Unfortunately, it was instead made to be a big budget Hollywood blockbuster. As the scope of the film widens, there's soon too much happening to leave room for the small moments and interpersonal relationships that made the early parts of the film so watchable, and yet, clearly aiming for its PG-13 rating, the action never produces a real sense of peril, which prevents the build-up of suspense that would have been necessary for the latter half of the movie to really work. In the end, there's an attempt to thematically tie together these two halves and make it feel like one cohesive plot, and enjoyment of this movie largely hinges on that final, pivotal scene: if it works for you, you'll likely leave the theater happy. For me, the connection it strains to make is just too big of a stretch, so I left unsatisfied.

Avoid Mad Area Driving School

Mad Area Driving School completely failed to provide me with any service whatsoever.

First, I tried to contact them by email, but all they would reply is that I needed to call them. If they won't help customers by email, why do they publish an email address on their website?

So I took the extra time out of my day to call them, and we scheduled an appointment for an instructor to pick me up for a driving lesson. When the time came around for the lesson, I was standing at my living room window looking out over the street, waiting. Twenty minutes later, when there was still no sign of them, I called for an ETA, thinking maybe they were running late. No one answered their office phone, so I had to leave a message. 

They never showed up, nor called for directions, nor made any attempt to contact me. I didn't hear anything back at all until the end of the following day, after normal business hours. By this point I had given up on them and already scheduled lessons through another company, so I didn't want to waste my time talking to them. But they called three times in less than an hour, so I finally answered just so they would stop interrupting my evening.

The representative on the phone identified himself as Jim from Madison Area Driving School (who I believe is the owner), then simply said, "You called?" He didn't seem to have a clue who I was or what he was supposed to be calling me about, even though I had left a pretty clear message. I tried to tell him I was going with another company and no longer needed his assistance, but he pushed so I gave him the time and address of my appointment and explained that they had stood me up. He immediately insisted that they were there, I assured him that they hadn't been, and he again insisted that they were. I said that I was there, so I KNEW they hadn't been, and that I didn't want to waste my time discussing it further; his only response was to hang up on me.

Now, even though I was frustrated, the owner could have salvaged the situation by simply apologizing for the mistake and trying to figure out how it happened -- in other words, by showing even a modicum of basic customer service skill. Instead, he all but called me a liar.

Despite that, I still want to extend the benefit of the doubt and assume that the owner was just going with what the paperwork said, not intentionally lying to me. But if the instructor had, say, made an honest mistake and went to the wrong address, why didn't they call me right then? They had my phone number. If he had just called, I could have given him directions and this whole issue would have been fixed before it even started. 

I also want to make it clear that, though I was getting pretty frustrated with the phone rep (justifiably, I think), I remained reasonably polite throughout the conversation; I was not shouting, swearing or insulting him in any way, even though he was all but calling me a liar. Hanging up on me was completely uncalled for.

I can't comment on their instruction technique, but their office staff seems to be completely incompetent, and their customer service couldn't get much worse. The only way they could possibly fail more than they already have is if they try to bill me for the lesson they skipped out on (they haven't so far, but I'm watching my mailbox). 

If you need driving lessons, I've had a mostly positive experience with my new instructor at 4 Lakes Driving School. But avoid Mad Area Driving School like the plague.

(Review cross-posted to Yelp and Google.)

How did Blade Runner ever come to be considered a science fiction classic?

How did Blade Runner ever come to be considered a science fiction classic?

I realize it was made in the early 80's, so I'm willing to look past the garish soundtrack and laughable attempts at futuristic technology and architecture. And I understand that showing seas of blinking lights and giant animated billboards likely had more impact before that kind of thing was commonplace.

But none of that excuses the film from being an aimless, lumbering morass of poorly shot scenes populated with dimensionless cut-outs in place of characters who give each other long, expressionless stares in place of exchanging lines of dialog (let alone actually acting). It repeatedly touches on ideas about identity and the nature of humanity that could be really interesting to explore, but unfortunately it only shoulders past them without so much as muttering "excuse me" as it plods inexorably towards nowhere in particular.

The romantic subplot that seems like it's probably supposed to be a key part of what's supposed to pass for the plot is awkwardly introduced, and never really gets developed beyond a sex scene that might actually be rape if you squint a little, and a sudden and baffling declaration of love in the end. Though the movie does actually spend some time on the two characters together, the utter lack of chemistry (which might relate to the utter lack of personalities) makes this the most wooden attempt at romance I've seen since Hayden Christianson deadpanned his way into Natalie Portman's pants in Attack of the Clones.

Seriously, I don't think I can come up with a single good thing to say about this movie. It wasn't even short. That was a full two hours of my life that I'll never get back.

Google+ is an Epic Fail

According to their initial marketing push, with Google+, Google set out to create the next generation of social network, one that would provide the nuance of real-life interaction that other social networks (i.e., Facebook) lack, in part by giving users better control over their privacy. However, the result, while intriguing in many ways, misses the mark so badly that one wonders if that was really even the target they were aiming for. To illustrate, let's contrast some key differences between Google+ and the biggest name in social networking, Facebook:

On Google+, "public" literally means public, and is visible to anyone on the Web whether they have a Google+ account or not, and can be found with search engines.
On Facebook, even "public" usually means limited to Facebook users who are logged in.

On Google+, much of your profile (which is required to include your full legal name) is forced to be completely public. This means even if you block someone, you can't make your on-line presence cease to exist to that particular person; simply by having a Google+ account, you're making your on-line presence public.
On Facebook, you can make your profile private, so no one can even tell your profile exists unless you choose to friend them.

Most importantly, on Google+, adding someone to your circles just means you want to read what they share with you. It is the same as bookmarking a website.
On Facebook, adding someone to your friends list is explicitly creating a mutually agreed upon relationship between two people.

That's the key difference between Facebook and Google+: Facebook maps social relationships. Google+ maps reading habits.

In other words, when Google set out to develop a new social network... they didn't develop a social network at all. They developed a publishing platform.

Talk about an epic fail.

Windows 8 Preview

I just watched a preview of Windows 8.

I've known for some time that phones and computers would eventually share an interface... But I thought it would be because phones advanced to be as powerful as computers; not because computers got dumbed down to be as primitive as phones.

If this steaming pile actually becomes the next Windows, I think it's going to be a very, very profitable move... for Apple.