I just read a short comic that caught my eye. It's a story about a guy around my age and how he manages to change his situation. Apparently it's a bit old and had dissipated for a long while. He's got a license on his site that allows me to make a backup copy. So when you click on the image below and the link is broken, you use my copy of "The Guy I Almost Was".
Torrent Freak writes about a counter measure:
Yesterday we reported that a provision in the revamped French “3 strikes” bill will allow for the punishment of ISP account holders for the copyright infringing actions of others. Now a group of hackers has set out to compromise WiFi routers en masse, in order to create an environment of plausible deniability.
I very much like this idea. It goes to show they're missing the point. They can't stop people from downloading movies and in trying to they're creating toothless laws, who will disproportionately hurt a small segment of offenders and be ineffective at stopping the behavior.
It's similar to clients asking me to lock down their computers so their kids can't get to porno websites or so they can limit their Facebook usage. I can do it, and have, but I tell them the kids will find a way around it, it's much better handled though social rather then technological methods. Educating the kids about the net is a far better method for keeping them honest, but happens to be a tall order when their parents often don't quite understand it themselves.
Recently I've found a rather effective web monitoring method that instead of blocking sites it just reports to the user how much time they spend on the site. It's meant for offices and is called webspy, and works on the theory that people don't want to spend all day at work browsing the web, they want to be "good" but just need to be kept in check. It follows the principal that when you know people are watching you'll do a better job.
I'm not going to touch on the internet piracy 3 strike laws, but I'm glad in France they're making sure a judge makes the decision to cut someone off the net and not the accuser. The overhead in that is so immense it probably wont happen. Who wants to jail their own community anyway? If everyone's committing the crime is it a crime? If it's "considered harmful" like crystal meth for example, what do you do then?
There's a big meth problem in a lot of towns and cities in the united states, I'm wondering if "Jail" is the answer. If you have a large community doing something harmful to itself, (that may actually be a crime as well) how do you recover from that? Obviously there needs to be a group effort, and some level of amnesty. I'm curious what kind of effort would be effective.
Going back to something a lot less "harmful", what about file sharing and copyright infringement? I don't consider it to be harmful to society, people are making other business models work in regards to music and movies, and there's a lot of room for growth and discovery in those directions. But lets for the sake of argument say that our current/old business models were the only ones that could work and if we want art we need to stop infringing on copyrights so artists can afford to be artists. Do we jail all offenders? Do we punish them and keep them from being able to communicate with society? Or do we find a way to convince our consitiutents that they need to come together to fix the problem?
I say constituents because it's our elected officials that pass these laws to police how we act. These are questions they should be asking, and that we should be making them ask.
And with that I'm lost in my own rant, so I'm done. Feels good to write even if it is dribble.
I felt this was an appropriate rebuttal to my last post. I also love Pictures for Sad Children
(if that link ever breaks)
I took an arm off my chair today so I could use my mouse and keep my arm at a decent level. The left one is for appearences and so I have something to lean on. For a cheap $150 staples chair (*grumble*) the arm rests not lowering enough is my only major gripe. It does pretty good.
Found these from like 3 moves ago. Good times.
This is a talk from "America's Greenest CEO". He's transformed his petroleum intensive carpet tile company's business practices into a sustainable business practices. That's a fancy way to say he's shifted from taking from the earth to make carpet (which eventually ends up as trash) and started paying attention to the whole cycle of his goods. So there's less waste, carbon, and martrials. He tasked his company to figure out a way to use sustainable methods to sell, make and recycle carpet. The whole endeavor saved his company from the crash of 2000 and has proven to be quite profitable by design and not just on "green" marketing. (Although I'm sure it helps.)
He strives to be a model for a way to have an industry that doesn't strip the earth of its resources but keeps control of the entire cycle of it's goods and byproducts. Of course he does a much better job explaining it. My favorite axiom from the speech is a simple one.
If it exists then it is possible.
Download mp4 in Standard Def (54MB) or HD 480p (195MB)
I'm cleaning up some old draft posts that I never wrote out. This one is even more relevant today then when I planned to write it.
https://www124.americanexpress.com/cards/loyalty.do?page=expresspay
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/19/rfid-credit-cards-easily-hacked-with-8-reader/
I own a dirfwear wallet, and while it isn't perfect at blocking rfid tags at close range (3−4 inches) its a dam good walet and will stop distance and opportunistic sniffing. Like near a turnstyle or door frame. I met one of the creators at the last hope and played with a machine he had there setup for reading rfid cards at a distance.
Instead of writing up a nice post about the party and showing off my brothers awesome video he cut for the occasion I instead was playing with jQuery. Specificly testing out Ariel Flesler's ScrollTo plugin which I think is pretty cool.
I present to you for your viewing pleasure, my slider test! I couldn't help but use some of Sara's throwie pictures.
And let me tout the video anyway.
Two years ago I got a crazy idea. For my twenty third birthday instead of the usual drinking and debauchery we'd do something different. Most of my friends thought I was crazy and it was a stupid idea, but since I was footing the bill I was able to convince a bunch of people to give it a try. If anything, good people, good food and good music usually makes for good times. =)
It went over well. (Photo Credit Jeanette Hayes)
Now two years later I'm faced with my approaching 25th birthday. This year I'd like to do "throwies year two". My only problem is that this year I don't have the funds to buy throwies for everybody again. So after talking it over with my friends and going over what it takes to get the parts for hundreds of throwies, I've decided to put throwies up for sale at cost. I'm still looking at suppliers but it seems that I should be able to get you about 25 throwies for $20. I'll know exactly how many after I see how many people get involved (you save in bulk of course).
My party this year will be on Friday the 20th and will have a $20 dollar cover which will include around 25 throwies. I'll order some pizza and soda. We'll meet at my place at 6:30pm to eat and build the throwies and then around 8pm leave for the east village tagging the city as go. Later in the night we will be stopping at a to be determined location to warm up and get something tasty. If you were there last time you might find this familiar.
So either pay me in person (please let me know if there's a problem before the party!) or just use the paypal form below.
Occasionally people come to me and ask about websites.
"Francis, I need help on making website."
"Well.. what are you up to? "
"I have an idea of something I'd like to sell online."
Usually it's cookies, sometimes it's t-shirts, a lot of times it it's services they want to offer. Most of these people have zero programming or html experience. If I told them paypal had an api to allow your site to create invoices and process payments they wouldn't even understand the non technical part of that sentence. When you get into the advanced parts of how the web works, they glaze over. I usually end up telling them about Shopify which can have you up with professional looking storefront with very little time and effort and as you go you can learn how to make it very pretty and you don't have to worry about the perils of doing your own web hosting. Personally I'd rather use that $20 a month for my own server slice and spend a lot more time and money on it, but that's not actually very smart if I wanted to grow a different business that wasn't web hosting.
The real problem they want to solve isn't "I want to know how to do a website." it's "I want to know how to start a business on the web." and the core problem there is usually "I want to start a business." which is usually formed around "I want to have more money". And wanting more money is not a bad reason to start with, but because you like to do something or make something doesn't mean starting a business around it is a smart idea. Most of the time your business will take you away from doing those cool things you like and force you to spend all your time doing something else you wont, running the business.
There's a book I love that will either discourage you or encourage you to start a small business. Either way it will teach you a bit about what you actually have to do to start. I tend to give this book to people who I think it will encourage, as it usually doesn't take a book to discourage people who would be discouraged. It's called The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber, and it's like $5 off amazon used so it's worth the money, Its worth the read even if you hate the author's writing style (figure a pound of gold in ten pounds of fluff), and it's worth your time if you ever thing you might want to go into business. The E-Myth being the Entrepreneurial Myth that a technician can take their idea/product and just start a successful business around it. Most people do that without learning how the rest of the business works.
His book of course is not a blueprint of how to start a small business, grow it, operate it, and sell it, it just tells you that you'll need one, and what it might look like. I'm rather new at this so it blew me away. The amount of planning and the possibilities you can come up with to make a business work is breathtaking. Its the kind of thing I love. It's something I'm going to have to write more about. Not to give advice but to share experiences. I can only tell you there's more to it then you probably know, but in sharing experiences you pool what you learn. =)
–Francis
PS (It's been too long since I've been writing, feels good, but I'm also embarrassed at the writing style I presented above. It's a silly feeling.)
