onfocus

In an attempt to remove all traces of my email addresses from this site, I put together a new contact form anyone can use to get in touch with me. I went a little over-the-top with security. Not only is the form SSL-encrypted, on the back-end the message is sent PGP-encrypted. (Well, GPG-encrypted to be specific.) It's not a perfectly secure system, but it's pretty good. heh.

Even though it's sort of a hassle, I wish more of my email was PGP-encrypted. I think one day a month should be "encryption day"—where people could try sending/receiving encrypted emails for fun without the social stigma. With just a little more familiarity with encryption, I think non-geeks could start using it. It's like sealing an envelope, and being as sure as possible that the person you're sending the message to is the only one who can read it. In the age of total information awareness and spam, it just makes sense to strengthen our email practices and safeguard our privacy.

The only problem I've found is that PGP-encrypted emails are impossible to search in your email client. (My client doesn't automatically decrypt messages, anyway.) So if I want to go back and find some info someone sent to me in an encrypted message a month ago, I'm out of luck. Anyone know of (or have ideas about) solutions to this problem?

Shasta Sunset Assembled Panoramic (click for larger version)

Mt. Shasta and Truck Lights

Public Service Announcement: If you link to your Amazon Wish List on your site, you may need to change that link. I've noticed that standard Wish List links are not working lately—but you won't know whether or not it's working if you have the Amazon cookie. For example, when I click on this link in my browser on my computer:

http://amazon.com/o/wishlist/3FOF79BIVB2XX

I see my Wish List. But if I click on that link in another browser (with no Amazon cookie, or a different cookie), I see a generic Wish List page. And more importantly, so will anyone else clicking the link. To link directly to your Wish List so others can see it, change wishlist in the URL to registry, like so:

http://amazon.com/o/registry/3FOF79BIVB2XX

Now the URL will point to my Wish List no matter what, and everyone can buy me stuff! Test out your own Wish List link yourself with various browsers (especially one without an Amazon cookie) to make sure you have a good link. (Note: The o in the URLs above is a shortcut for exec/obidos—just one of the many hints you'll find in Amazon Hacks. ;) )

Rael kicked off the new MobileWhack weblog today. "MobileWhack is a repository of hacks, hints, tips, tools, stories, news, ideas, and wishes for and around the mobile device you're actually using. The raisons d'etre are to be useful, to inspire, and to delight." Clever hacks are Rael's department, so this should make good reading for people who want to do fun things with their gadgets (rather than just hear about the latest gadgets). [via raelity bytes] I'll be watching the Sony Ericsson category.

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman is the most discouraging book I've read in a while (and I read some depressing books). I think there's a general consensus that watching TV isn't necessarily the best use of time. Watching TV is a personal choice—no one is forced to do it. So if it's not the best use of time there's an easy fix: turn it off. (That's why people have started campaigns like TV Turnoff Week which is sort of the modern equivalent of religious asceticism. You do your penance for seven days then go back to your real life watching TV. People even call it TV fasting.)

What Postman says in this book is far more depressing and there's no easy fix. He argues that television as a medium is bad for society. His thesis is that Orwell had it wrong—people won't be controlled by a totalitarian state that rewrites history and imprisons people with a manufactured culture. Instead, the medium of TV makes all culture trivial entertainment, closer to Huxley's dystopian Brave New World. He points out the futility of trying to point out this problem with the question, "To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles?" Postman sees TV like a virus. It trivializes everything it touches while its main purpose is to reinforce the act of watching TV. He sees Sesame Street not as a fun, educational show for kids. He describes it as television-indoctrination for kids. He sees the nightly news not as necessary information for informed citizens, but as entertainment that isolates citizens from their community. It's not that television producers are trying to trivialize, he argues, it's just inherent in the medium. And because TV is our culture's primary medium, it displaces other forms of communication that don't trivialize the subject of their message.

I guess what I found so disturbing is that there's no clear answer to the problem. He argues in the last chapter that media education is part of a solution. He says, "...no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what the dangers are." And that's what this book is trying to do: help television users understand the dangers. Of course this statement also applies to a medium I care about much more than TV: weblogs.

Catching up...

• I spent four days offline and without touching a computer—it was good.
• Today is World AIDS Day. Check out the Link and Think participants to see what the weblog world is saying about the day.
• I watched the documentary on the Winged Migration DVD about how they filmed the birds. It was great to see, but I'm not sure "imprinting" birds so you can film them in flight is ethical. (Imprinting is raising birds to think a human is their parent/flight leader.)
• I observed Buy Nothing Day on Friday, but went shopping on Saturday and Sunday.
• It's not so much the Christmas songs that suck, it's the versions that stores play.
• In any case, Santa Baby should not be (or have been) recorded or played by anyone, ever.
• For Thanksgiving sk and I made chocolate carmel walnut things.
• Putting together a puzzle is like giving yourself a temporary obsessive-compulsive disorder.

"The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products...What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product, but what is wrong about the buyer." - Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. (A book that I am not consuming, but a book that is consuming me.)

There's a nice introduction to the Hacks Series in the latest issue of Wired: Google & Co. to Hackers: Come On In!

I recently read a great book called Moral Politics by George Lakoff that I've been hearing about for a while. I finally picked it up after reading this interview with him about framing political issues. Lakoff isn't a pundit—he's a professor of Linguistics—so it's not a typical political book. He blames the American political divide on competing metaphors for family. He explains that many of our "common sense" beliefs stem subconsciously from the way we categorize the world. Conservatives, he argues, have a "Strict Father" model of the family that they map onto the government and how it should act. Liberals have a "Nurturant Parent" model that they map onto the government. He lays out these two major metaphors (and variants) in detail, and shows how those metaphors can explain all of the positions held by prototypical liberals and conservatives. It's ambitious, and it made perfect sense to me as he described his theory in detail—then applied it to current events (well, current as of 1996 but still very relevant). This isn't a book for other linguistics professors—and there isn't much linguistics theory here. It's written with a general audience in mind, after Lakoff did the research. (In fact, I wish he would have described linguistic theory and his research in more detail.)

Liberals and conservatives are buying up books by Michael Moore or Ann Coulter that reinforce their beliefs. I've read the latest Al Franken book, and there's something cathartic about it. But these books don't explain why we have polarized political views in America, and Moral Politics has a very interesting "unified theory of American politics" that attempts to answer that question. I think understanding the competing metaphors and morals involved with politics will help people fight more effectively for what they believe.

The last time I was in CA I went to the Charles Schultz museum in Santa Rosa. They had a quote of his on the wall—"A cartoonist is someone who has to draw the same thing, day after day, without repeating himself."