Month: November 2007

Google’s phone play

The biggest let down of Google’s announcement is not in the substance of their offering. Opening an API to developers and handset manufacturers in the hope of establishing a better phone OS and application environment is correct and proper for a company of Google’s ubiquity and technical prowess … but where the world got a little underwhelmed is in the false hope that Google would release some advertising subsidized “free-phone” and chop the legs out from underneath the dickhead carriers with their indentured servitude calling plans, onerous SMS charges, and locked phones.

Not happening in this round. Just an effort to undo the WAP, Symbian, DoCoMo, PocketPC, Palm mess and rally the little screen around something appropriately Googlish.

A mighty wind: “Hurricane” Noel swipes Cape Cod

Technically hurricane season ends on October 31, but last weekend saw one sneak up the coast and brush the Cape and Islands with an afternoon and evening of good weather drama. Two days without electricity wasn’t a ton of fun, but we were lucky and spared any significant house or tree damage.

On Saturday Cousin Pete, me, my wife and my son, piled into his burly 4-WD Landcruiser and bombed up Route 6 to Wellfleet for a quick lunch (dozen Wellfleet oysters and the fried clams at the Bookstore Café), and a peek at the surf at Cahoon Hollow.

First rule of storm viewing: do it in somebody else’s vehicle. A few minutes parked in a beachside parking lot in a 50 mph wind will frost the windshield with microscopic sand scratches as thoroughly as an incandescent lightbulb and scour the paint job down to the sheet metal. I stepped out of the car at Cahoon Hollow, supposedly armed against the elements in a Grunden pullover and cheesy Sou’wester hat. Instant mistake – mouth filled up with grit, face was exfoliated in seconds. Back into the car, covered with sand. So much for storm viewing.

We checked out the fish pier in Chatham. There were at least six big satellite trucks from the Weather Channel and the local news stations parked in the lee, their storm watchers doing stand-ups on the pier with the heaving fishing boats behind them. Too much rain to see much further than 200 yards out, so we finished the storm tour with a trip to Chatham light, where there was a full traffic jam of gawkers like us trying to get a view of the maelstrom. I’ve never seen this before, but there it was: two red flags with black squares flapping furiously from the flagpole, the Coast Guard signal for hurricane warning, an ominous indicator I don’t hope to see again.

The ride back to Cotuit was very dangerous as the winds started to gust into the 60s and traffic on Route 6 became more stupid than usual (storms make people look at the storm and not the road). We rolled into Cotuit and immediately realized a) the electricity was out and b) Cousin Pete had some tree damage. I helped him haul his generator out of the basement, brought over some food, and whiled away the dark evening in one of the few lit houses in the village. Sunday dawned beautiful – brisk autumn skies – but as the day wore on and evening approached with daylight savings time, it looked like another dark evening at home. We grabbed dinner in Hyannis, thought of a movie, but in the end returned to read by candlelight until 9 when we retired like a family of 19th century farmers.

Lights returned at 9 am, laptops recharged, internet connectivity was restored by three. All is well with the world and the air is filled with the sound of chainsaws.

Good storm on its way

The remains of hurricane Noel are going to pass offshore tomorrow, and with the counter-clockwise spin of a northern hemisphere tropical storm, Cape Cod will be on the western side of the cyclone and see some strong winds out of the northeast — making this a veritable “nor’easter”

From the National Weather Service:

"A HIGH WIND WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM SATURDAY MORNING THROUGH SATURDAY EVENING.

DAMAGING NORTH TO NORTHEAST WINDS ARE POSSIBLE SATURDAY...ESPECIALLY
DURING THE LATE MORNING AND AFTERNOON HOURS. THE HIGH WINDS WILL
SUBSIDE DURING EARLY SATURDAY EVENING.

THE GREATEST THREAT FOR DAMAGING WINDS WILL BE ON CAPE COD AND THE
ISLANDS. SUSTAINED WINDS OF 40 TO 50 MPH ARE POSSIBLE WITH GUSTS UP"TO 75 MPH THERE."

The place to be tomorrow will be on the Outer Cape where the Atlantic Beaches are going to be smacked hard. There could be some interesting beach modifications. Cousin Pete and I may make the sojourn to see the show. My boat is in the lee of a northeast blow, so no cause for nervousness.

update: took some hooky time at lunch to yank my boat and help Marta get her skiff out of the water. Cousin Pete is decommissioning his boat now and the launch ramp is getting a bit more busy as the townies take the safe route and pull their boats. 75 mph gusts are the real deal.

Do-not-target lists — The Federal Trade Commission and Behavioral Targeting

The New York Times has a piece today on the FTC hearings over online advertising and behavioral targeting practices. This sounds lot like 1995 all over again, when the revelation that cookies were getting slipped onto browser’s hard drives set the loony-tune elements loose with cries of invasion and privacy rights being trampled on.

“When you’re surfing the Internet, you never know who is peering over your shoulder or how many marketers are watching,” Mr. Leibowitz said.

Mwah-ha-ha.

Does any remember the stink over CallerID? When privacy nuts argued that transmitting a caller’s phone number was a violation of the caller’s privacy? I remember fighting with Bill Baldwin at Forbes over that issue, when in the throes of reporting a story in the late 80s on electronic privacy. My argument was simple: I have every right to ask a person knocking on my door to identify themselves before I open that door. Indeed, think of CallerID as the little fish-eye peephole for the telephone.

But I digress, to the matter at hand: Does Behavioral Targeting impinge on privacy?

The scary story cited by the Times has all the drama and handwringing one needs to make behavioral targeting seem appropriately Orwellian and sinister (if we called it Relevant Advertising it might have better PR) A young woman, discussing a recently deceased grandmother in email, sees Google AdSense ads for healthcare. Whoa. The Google-borg did some keyword analysis, the algorithm dipped into the AdSense pool, and lo and behold, the 26-year old was freaked out to see health care ads and who knows what else: maybe ads for coffins, adult diapers, nursing homes and Dr. Kevorkian.

People. Listen up. Machine matched tagging and ad serving is not the same as the National Security Agency listening to your phone calls and emails for mentions of “al qaeda” and “tax evasion tips.” Look, forget E Pluribus Unum, the new motto is One Nation, Under Surveillance ….With Strip Searches and Pat-Downs For All

As Scott “Scooter” McNealy put it nearly a decade ago, “You have zero privacy. Get over it.”
Well, tell that to an identity theft victim

Web browsing and targeted ads are not going to put your privacy at risk. Getting phished or signing over your 401K to that lawyer in Lagos will be a problem. But web ads? We’re done with Gator (right?), intrusion ads are dead, pop-ups are crushed by browsers … so what’s left?

Make My Logo Bigger Cream

Make My Logo Bigger Cream

Thanks to David Lamborn and Kelly Skaggs at the Lenovo Design and Usability team for this nice link. Anyone who has spent months on a beautiful ad or web page, only to see the accelerators, swooshes, starbursts, and calls for “a bigger logo” and “less white space” is going to feel the pain of this.