Andrew Boyd reviews life, design, and Shiraz
I’ve been involved with beta testing for Tangler - a social networking site - for several months now. While it is not perfect, it is getting better - worth a look if you are interested in a social networking application for a project, a social or cultural organisation, or keeping track of discussion within a distributed business.
If this sounds like you, check out the Explore Tangler page.
The US Government has indicted online payment exchange E-Gold for money laundering. This has been coming for a good long time - some privacy advocates have been saying for years that the War on Terror was really just an excuse to crack down on international currency transactions.
I never had an E-Gold account, but I knew people that did, and none of them ever seemed to be working to undermine anybody. They weren’t child pornographers, or credit card fraudsters, or working to scam people out of investment funds. Just people running or using cottage online businesses.
It has been said that societies progress to the stage where everything that is not proscribed is prescribed - that everything not prohibited becomes compulsory. For me, I think that absolute control is an illusion, and the tighter the fist, the more that slips through the fingers.
Guy Kawasaki has a transcript of an interview with Dr Philip Zimbardo about the Stanford Prison Experiment, where ordinary people became helpless prisoners and control-free guards. Reading this, and the comparisons to the treatment of people in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, gives a perfectly rational (and utterly chilling) explanation for the ordinary people performing horrible acts of mental and physical torture.
Granny Weatherwax said that evil was what came of treating people like things - and while I am not a Psychology graduate, I can see that this is true. We can pretend that this is not happening now - but it is, in both traditional settings such as prisons and “Guantanamo on the Gold Coast”… Big Brother’s White Room.
Speaking of which - I am going off the idea of watching people slowly lose their sanity - I think that anyone who watches Big Brother has to question their own conscience (and I did watch the first episode myself).
Someone asked me yesterday how people make money from blogs. There are a lot of people that would tell you that they know - to get you to their blogs or to buy their books :).
Here are a few ways that look probable:
That said, the only really useful advice I could offer is to listen to the people who do make money from their blogs - like Darren Rowse.
When you have a minute, go see The UCD Game. It is a great idea - that user-centred design principles can be taught by example to software professionals everywhere. It will be interesting to see how it works out once some real-life use stories come out.
I received this joke via email the other day:
Two patients limp into two different medical clinics with the same complaint. Both have trouble walking and
appear to require a hip replacement.The FIRST patient is examined within the hour, is x-rayed the same day and has a time booked for surgery
the following week.The SECOND sees his family doctor after waiting 3 weeks for an appointment, then waits 8 weeks to see a
specialist, then gets an x-ray, which isn’t reviewed for another week and finally has his surgery scheduled
for a month from then. Why the different treatment for the two patients?The FIRST is a Golden Retriever.
The SECOND is a Senior Citizen.Next time take me to a vet.
I laughed, then thought about it. While here in Australia we might say “old-age pensioner” or “a person in receipt of the Age Pension”, there is basically nothing different. Except here the waiting list for a hip replacement would be much longer than a month - it was
Hip replacements aside, on the day that I read that joke, my partner Helen tried to find a known GP that would see her anytime that day - to no avail. She could have gone to a MacClinic bulk-billing franchise and waited on the off chance that her number came up, or gone to casualty and be told that she was wasting their time and should see a GP. But she didn’t have all day, because our cat needed to be taken to the vet… can you guess how many vets could have made time to see the cat that day? He was in and treated within a couple of hours of her making the appointment. For myself, when I was suffering from a cold through the week, I didn’t bother even trying to see a doctor, based on the premise that I couldn’t see myself getting to one in time for it to make any difference.
On the available evidence, as a society we care more for animals than people when it comes to health care access. While I am a big fan of animals being treated fairly, I believe that it is important for creatures of all species to get the medical attention that they need when they need it - including us humans.
Consumerist.com is currently running a contest on call centre flaws.
The site has published a roundup list of previous bad call centre experiences. If you are interested, it is well worth a look. On one level they are funny - on another, they show a lot of contempt and process failures. Probably the most obviously funny is escaping pharma telemarketing hell.
Celluloid is a movie review site that my friend Maria has just started. She is passionate about good cinema, and mutual friend Matt talked her into sharing her ideas with the world.
So far today she’s reviewed Primer, Casino Royale, and Mr Bean vs TMNT.
Good luck Maria, you are on my favourites list already.
Today, I bought a Nintendo Wii. It is all Matt’s fault.
I have played with it for an hour. All I can say is that the Wii is:
Helen is working late tonight - when she gets home, I’ll introduce her to the Wii.
Every other game simulates the reality of gameplay - moving a mouse to move then clicking to shoot or wield a sword has not appealed to me for several years now. I used to be a fair hand at first person shooters (DooM, Hexen, Quake, Quake ][) but they grew past me by asking for too many simultaneous control movements. The Wii has given me the fun back.
The natural way to wield a tennis racquet or a weapon is in the hands - and the Wii gives us this natural interface. It is not the same as the real thing - I am no golfer, but I have studied classical Japanese swordsmanship, and it is definately not the same… but it is closer than anything I have seen before.
I can’t say if you would enjoy the Wii experience as I do (and it is definitely early days for me), but it is worth having a play with at a game shop.
UPDATE: My Wii has its own blog now over at Wiild Life. More about my blog diversification plans at Facibus On Blogging.
UPDATE 2: My Wii blog is now over at WiiForMii.com.
From the “what the?” file, a cool stab at Microsoft:
I wonder how they still keep the site up without some severe attention from Microsoft’s lawyers? 
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