Michael Lissner

My girlfriend and I got back from Japan a few weeks ago, and we've finally gotten the pictures posted. If you're interested, let me know and I'll send you a link to the whole collection.

For now though, here are some samples of some of the good ideas, bad ideas, and funny signs we saw.

Starting with the funny signs...

Like the title says, every now and again, I have to rant about how annoying iPods (and by extension, Apple) are. This is one of those times.

The picture below represents the folder hierarchy of my 20GB iPod, as displayed in the Ubuntu Disk Analyzer:

Right now, this iPod is nearly full. I filled it with a very normal hodge-podge of songs. Naturally, I like some artists better than others, and so, I have more of their songs. The Beatles and Zeppelin, for example, I have a lot of. A-Ha, and Four Non Blondes, not so much. When this is the case, I'll have a folder filled with lots of songs - a big folder. If you look at the image above though, you'll see that my iPod is organized into 50 equal directories, named r1 to r50.

Now, why would Apple do this? Why would they take perfectly organized songs in neat and tidy folders and then split them into 50 folders with meaningless names? Because that makes it more of a pain in the butt to figure out what music is on the iPod, and in theory makes it harder to share the songs. For the copyright violators, this should slow them down.

For the rest of the world, it's a pain, because rather than browsing our iPod like we would a normal music player, instead we must use iTunes, or, if we use Linux, reverse engineer the thing, which invariably doesn't work that well.

Apple could have made a device that worked normally on all computers, like everybody else did, but instead they have locked us into iTunes, a weird directory structure, and a system designed to be as obscure as possible. Not cool.

Well, one more paper down, one more to go! Today I completed the final paper for my class on information law and policy, which was one of my best classes this semester. It was a pretty tough one that required a lot of reading and a lot of extra work for the assignments, but I found it quite rewarding in the end.

The attached assignment is in a similar vein to the one I posted on Tuesday, but approaches the topic from a slightly different angle. The assignment in this case was to present an analysis of some of the policy problems that are raised by a project of our choice. Since I had already done a lot of thinking about the policy implications of how we handle online assets after a death, I decided to analyze some of the problems that are raised, and to postulate some solutions of my own.

Yesterday I had an epic writing session, and finished my final paper for my class on the social and organizational issues of information.

The topic of my paper was a bit on the morbid side, but somehow that's what I'm doing a lot of work on this semester. The concept for the paper is that as more and more people create and have online profiles on social networking sites, a system is created where more and more people have an online memorial when they die, whether they intend to or not.

This topic became interesting to me about a year ago when my friend Blake Bigler died of a sudden heart attack (at the age of 25). Immediately afterwards, his Facebook page became a memorial to him where friends posted messages, pictures and the like. To this day, friends still wish him a happy birthday, and post notes on his page.

I thought that this was a dramatic change to the way that deaths occur and are memorialized, and that it needed to be analyzed more carefully, and so my paper was born. If you're interested, please feel free to read the attached.

The other day, I was cooking some food in my microwave, and I thought to myself, can't my microwave figure out when my food is hot itself? I mean really. We can see how hot things are using infrared cameras. We can put infrared cameras in microwaves. Why must we always type in a length of time that we want things to cook for, when really, all we want is to press a button labeled "Make my food hot."

Well, I finally looked into this idea today. It's been patented by LG since 1997. So, there goes that idea.

I wish they would make one. Imagine a microwave where you dial the power level, then press go. When the food is hot, it stops. Ah, the future...err...the 1997 patent that never went anywhere. Maybe we can free this patent because it's not non-obvious anymore. Doubtful.

I had my last day of actual class today, and the semester is really beginning to wind down. I still have at least 60 pages of writing to do in the next two weeks, but somehow it will get done. One class that I have finished my final project work for is Interface Aesthetics, which was a survey class covering typography, color, layout, web design, and a handful of other topics.

For the final project, we each made presentations of our work from the semester (mine's linked below), and on Monday from 4:10 to 6pm we will be holding an open house to share our work at the iSchool. A lot of it is really quite good, though this presentation is what I will be showing, so this is one cat that's out of the bag.

Some of the work in the attached could still use some refinement, but I will point you towards the ones titled "Type I," "Type II," and "Icons," which I think came out pretty well.

OK, here's the scoop. I've given the site a major revamp and a new look.

Here's the old one:

And the new:

And here's a poll to make a vote and/or comment on the changes.

There were a number of reasons I wanted to make a change, and I think the new design accomplishes most of them. First, I wanted to change to a static width layout. It was a long time coming, and now people with big screens and/or high resolution won't have to deal with ridiculous line lengths. Second, the new design should do wonders for links, which didn't really stand out before. Third, I've dropped the login box at the right, since I was the only one that ever logged in. Actually, I've dropped the whole column, so we're down to two columns now, not three.

Something I wasn't really planning on doing was the color change. I liked the muted greens, but I think the topics I discuss have largely moved away from environmental ones, so perhaps the blue makes more sense and will better evoke what I'm going for.

Thoughts? Bugs? Comments?

Well, it's a quiet Friday afternoon here in America, so that can mean only one thing: it's time for organizations to release whatever news they've been trying to keep quiet for the week. This weeks' big news is that a number of memos authorizing, rationalizing and generally condoning torture and interrogation have been released to the ACLU.

There's a couple of interesting facts here. The first is that very few of the 3,000 or so news articles about this topic seem to link to the ACLU site where the memos are prominently featured.¹ I find this odd, and it gives me plenty of room for speculation. (Bad reporting? Laziness? Suppression? Something else?)

The second interesting thing is the quotes in the memos themselves. I haven't had a chance to read all the memos yet, but I didn't have any difficulty finding some good stuff. The memos begin with a classic "Top Secret" stamp, and go on to say things such as:

...You would like to employ ten techniques...These ten techniques are: (1) attention grasp, (2) Walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap (insult slap), (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress positions, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) insects placed in a confinement box, and (10) the waterboard

From a different memo:

Detainees subject to sleep deprivation who are also subject to nudity as a separate interrogation technique will at times be nude and wearing a diaper. If the detainee is wearing a diaper, it is checked regularly and changed as necessary...

They go on from there with great detail about how the interrogations go down, with the conclusion of course being that these things don't constitute torture.

¹ The math was done crudely. Here's a google search that turns up 2,890 hits on the topic, and here's one that searches for sites that link to aclu.org, and that have the words "interrogation memo". The method is crude, but the overlap is sparse.

I've been doing some research about how the Internet changes the way we handle and cope with real life death, and I found a good quote today. It's not exactly about the Internet and death, but it's interesting to think about ways the Internet may have made relationships more complex and how that has affected who is socially allowed to grieve.

From Memorializing Loved Ones on the World Wide Web:

There are unwritten but familiar rules, however, about who is entitled to grieve. Pine, for example, claimed that in “compartmentalized society, funerals tend to be limited primarily to the ‘proper’ bereaved people. This has helped to create an underclass of grievers whose legitimacy may not even be recognized and whose needs are not addressed.” Doka (1989) identified these individuals as disenfranchised grievers—those whose grief occurs in relationships with no recognizable kin ties; those whose loss is not socially defined as significant; and those who are perceived to be incapable of grief (e.g., young children, very old adults, mentally-disabled persons)...As relationships become more complex, the likelihood of disenfranchised grief and disenfranchised death increases.

As somebody who has lost a couple of friends over the years that I was fairly close to (but not best friends with), this definitely hits home.

I've mentioned secret questions on my site before, but I never quite realized how much of a problem they are until today, when I discovered uspublicrecords.com.

It's a simple site. You put in a name, and if it has that person in its database, it gives you their age, middle name, and family members. So far, I haven't found any names it doesn't have.

Using this information, I went and checked a friend's gmail secret question, which was, "What is your father's middle name?" I just happened to have that information from uspublicrecords.com, so I put it in, and changed their email password.*

It's pretty creepy how easy this is, and fixing this problem could take days as you check all your secret questions one by one. This might make a good mashup: a system for checking all your secret questions.

Anyway, now might be a good time to go change your secret questions, cause if it has anything to do with middle names, that site will hand them right out.

* With their OK, of course.