I feel better now. Larry Page has issued a patch for the privacy bugs in Google Streetview: simply erect a large gate in front of your property, which will block the Streetview 11-lens panoramic camera from capturing images of your garden parties.
Note: this patch may not work on poorer residences. If you can’t get it to install, earn billions of dollars and try again.
Tonight while making dinner Yuki discovered a strange yellow wrinkly garlic clove nestled among the other normal white garlic cloves. I of course turned to the Internet for answers as to the origins of this bizarre mutation, but was surprised when my searches turned up nothing. So I’m posting a photo here in the hope that someday a garlic expert will find this page and enlighten us. This clove smelled far more strongly of garlic than the other normal cloves, so my theory is that it somehow became supersaturated with garlic oil. We didn’t eat it.
Just downloaded and installed Picasa 2. Good lord is it sweet. It’s been awhile since a piece of software blew me away like this. Probably the last time was when I stopped using GNUStep and found Enlightenment, back in 1999 when I was a novice Linux user. Like the Enlightenment folks, I assume they must be taking advantage of 3D hardware or something to speed up rendering–the interface just flies, it is so responsive. I immediately uninstalled Photoshop Album and its annoying upgrade offers.
Yuki doesn’t like it though, I was showing her some pictures and she made me switch to the Windows XP built-in image viewer. She said the photos as displayed in Picasa “hurt her eyes.” So your mileage may vary. But I’m a sucker for eye candy like the Picasa timeline, which makes a stylized black & white background from one of your images, and the way the photos fly up the screen as you roll through with the slider…
Kenyatta believes that the democratization of media will result in better content. I myself am less optimistic. Case in point: the “Most Popular Photos” page on Yahoo! News. Yahoo! keeps records of how often its news photos are emailed to others, and collects the most popular photos of the day there. This is photojournalism as selected and edited by your peers, freed from the shackles of Big Media. And this is how they’ve chosen to cover (or uncover) the Olympic Games. Now you might object that traditional photojournalists took these pictures, that Big Media is still behind the curtains, pandering to the masses. Fair enough, but keep in mind what one of the first applications of moblogging was. Don’t expect disintermediation to raise the level of discourse. What it will do is increase the sheer amount of stuff out there, so along with more ass, we’ll have more weird stuff, more edgy stuff, more brave stuff, more really really good stuff. It’ll be the long tail at the end of the power law curve in terms of audience, but it will be there, if we can find it.
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