Punderings

.. when room temperature is everywhere. Some may wonder, when I so much love the extra sunlight and the pleasant weather, why I still insist on living in New England. I think it’s the very fact that perfect summer days are rare here. Living in X – where it’s beautiful every day – feels like you wouldn’t actually appreciate the beautiful days as much. Here, you work for them, and you get the most out of the precious perfection as you can.

Or, as Charles Bandes, a local photog questions:

Who watches the watchmen?

He’s walking down the street with his camera, he spots a car driving slowly along – with a wide-angle multi-camera rig on the roof, filming everything as it drives on.  Ah-ha!  Modern mapping technology has come so far, that not only can we get a satellite picture of you in your backyard (admittedly still grainy for the civillian uses), but we also have immersive photo maps of your front yard from drive-by internet companies.  Where can you go for privacy these days?

The interesting thing I found was in the comments to the posting – Kasia claims it was her in the car, and she’s not working for Google, but another immersive photo mapping vendor called EveryScape.com!  I suppose it’s a fairly obvious idea, and technology has been ready for this kind of image processing for a while now.  The key was always the business model, and the logistics of having humans (robot cars not being legal in most populated areas yet) actually drive around everywhere to capture the data close-up.

What’s my point?  Several fold:

• Where’s the privacy policy?  Sure, legally public streets and all that, but still, they’re running a business that relies on eyeballs on their site; how do they update rights management and complaints processing?
• Who the heck ever thought of a privacy policy on a map?  (Actually, I’m sure some people have besides the gov’t's blurring of satellite data, but still.)
• Excellent post title, Charles, although I admit I haven’t read that graphic novel in far too long.

Now for some self-promotion (or self-delusion): let’s start a new meme.  EveryScape – howabout EveryScrape?  Makes sense to most geeks: you’re screen-scraping my neighborhood, dude!  CityScrape?  All of the other obvious spelling mistakes like EvryScape?  Who’s going to be the first to steal some of these other great domain names to make some parasitic profit off of this newcomer? 
Please tell me it’s going to be someone fun, who does a worthwhile parody site and/or community driven site, and not one of those evil domain master owners who just pump their AdSense income from their automated spelling-mistake-catching domain registry tools.  Ugh.

This is just a preview of a much longer posting that I’ve meant to write for a while, but haven’t gotten it rolling just yet.  Get it – rolling - about a commuting post?

I’ve come to realize that the path taken in my semi-regular commute is starting to look like a fractal.  I drive to work – yes, in Boston there is public transport, but it’s awkwardly suited for my home and office – and since rush hour is quite long, I use a wide variety of tricks to improve my time.

One of my annoyances is stoplights.  I don’t mind them most of the time, and firmly believe they are a useful at keeping society safer and more civilized.  I just don’t like waiting at one for more than a single cycle, which often happens during rush hour.  So I optimize my commute to avoid stoplights.

Now just avoiding stoplights isn’t going to turn a commute – even a Boston one, where some roads were laid down by cows – into a fractal.  But it’s a start, and a number of other factors, including maximum speed and interestingness, really do push my commute into a number of strange directions.

So this posting is partly to whet your appetite, but mostly to prompt me to write up a proper essay on the topic, including pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back …, oh, sorry got carried away.  But I will have a few jaggedy graphics to show, and true map geeks can see if they can backsolve where I work by overlaying on the local road grid.  (Note: all roads are paved; 17in wheels don’t like rocks.)

Just upgraded, it looks quite nice.  I know, there are a ton of blogging packages out there, but I already like this one, and many of the folks who work on it seem pretty nice.  Plus, it’s full featured, and while it offers easy administration, it has enough extensibility built in that if I really want to I can mess around with the internals.  Although I find that mostly I just want something that works well, so I can spend my messing around time with some new software, not stuff I want to work all the time.  Color me wimpy with my main website.

I am interested in living a more secure lifestyle, so if folks have suggestions, especially about getting things like haris.tv’s SSL secure admin plugin and the like, let me know.  I still haven’t sprung for a decent SSL cert yet, I’m still just using the one that 1and1 provides for you by default.  Partly out of laziness, and partly because I’m still deciding what things to put on this site, like an eventual family picture gallery.  Yes, there’s flicrk, and I have cat pictures up there, but home and family pictures are going to say on my own server for now.  Color me – privacy minded, sometimes.

Apologies for the boring post, mostly just wanted to see how the new 2.2 version works.  Oh, drat, must remember to re-configure my ATOM feed…  Bah to RSS!

Good news for flamingoes today in the Boston Globe:

The original pink flamingo lawn ornament, the symbol of kitsch whose obituary was nearly written after its Central Massachusetts manufacturer went out of business, is rising phoenix-like from the ashes and taking wing to New York.

Where can I preorder some?