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Christmas

Christmas for us started on the 23rd as we joined our good friends Gloria, Jerry, and Kristy for our traditional Christmas together. It was a bit different this year because of Gloria’s cancer but it was a fun night of exchanging gifts and hanging out. We gave some books (as is our tradition) but I gave Gloria a Sound Spa which should help her sleep while the boys gave her a plush blanket.

Because I like to make fun of Kristy, we gave her an Edmonton Oilers Snuggie. Because most of Kristy’s life is dedicated to a) staying warm and b) the Edmonton Oilers, she liked it.

Christmas Eve had Wendy working all day. This is the worst schedule she has ever had over a Christmas season and it hasn’t been a lot of fun for us as a family but that is the life of people working retail. I worked part of the day and then headed home to spend the rest of the day with the boys. We gave the boys two early gifts of some NHLPA hockey sticks so they could play some road hockey during the day. Of course it was freezing outside so instead of playing hockey, we just taped them up. While she worked, we packed up the Mazda and headed out to Warman where we spent the evening at Lee and Brittany’s place for a traditional Christmas supper of lasagna and fighting over who got the lasagna leftovers before opening gifts.

Lee is known to master such phrases as “less talking, more chewing” on Christmas Eve. While he loves lasagna, he loves presents more. In the past when Wendy was working, he would spend most of the day badmouthing Wendy and trying to convince Mark to open Christmas presents without his mom. He takes this whole Christmas gift opening seriously.

Of the delay in eating turned costly when Oliver was playing with Tika (Lee and Brittany’s dog) and fell nose first into the edge of the carpet. There was crying, rug burn, and blood all over the place. While Oliver’s new shirt paid a steep cost, all was okay. It wasn’t as if I didn’t expect blood, I just expected it over the lasagna.

Mark

Santa gave Mark a new HTC Desire C Android Smart phonewhile I got him a Fuji AV150 camera (and tripod). I had created a Instagram, Foursquare, and upgraded his Flickr to a pro account on Sunday. We made sure we had batteries, SD (and Micro SD) cards all ready to go. Now we have to download some apps which will mean some quality time on Google Play today. I gave him a 1932 Chevrolet Truck scale model to build, Oliver gave him some adventure and Star Wars blueprint books (and some Daytona 500 cologne). He also got a graphic novel story of Canadians in WWII as well as a book on how to create his own graphic novel

In his stocking he found a new watch, a big bottle of the worst cologne known to man, Brut 33 (Wendy wept tears of pain when I showed her the bottle) Mark also got some high quality headphones; both on the ear and in ear ones. The less I have to listen to 90s rock, the better.

Lee and Brittany gave him a Denver Broncos jersey with his name and number on it. Thank goodness Tim Tebow was traded before the season started. He was pretty excited with that. Almost as excited as Tim Tebow gets about everything.

He also got a Starbucks travel mug and gift card from myself. It’s a bit self-serving as he wanders down to The Lighthouse and takes me out for coffee. To keep all of his special memories safe, we gave him a small chest to keep some of life’s momentos.

Oliver

All Oliver wanted was a pogo stick and I found him one from Santa on Amazon.com. I gave him a toy F-22 Raptor jet. I would have gotten his a F-35 toy but the price kept increasing until Stephen Harper told me not to get it for him. Mark gave him a rescue play set, a puzzle from the dogs, an Obi-Wan Kenobi lightsaber, and an Optimus Prime Transformer that talks. He is getting into hockey to I got him some mini hockey sticks and nets.

Lee and Brittany gave him a tricked out big wheel for Christmas. I immediately thought of this.

Stewie Griffin's tricked out

What’s scary is that I think Oliver would think that was a good idea.

His favourite gift by far was a Power Ranger that transforms into something else. He was quite jacked about it.

Wendy

With the new iPod I gave Wendy for her birthday, I gave her a set of iHome speakers and some perfume. We got her an electric griddle and skillet (she asked for them), a new popcorn maker (which she was really excited about). Mark gave her a pink Zepco fishing rod which she was horrified of. Lucky for Wendy, the fishing is horrible in our part of Last Mountain Lake. We also got her some high quality over the ear and in-ear headphones. If nothing else she will be able to tune us out for Christmas. The dogs gave her some new knives and a kitchen scale. Not sure where they got the money to get those.

Lee and Brittany gave her a gift card for Dutch Growers which made her day. She’s out right now waiting for spring to hit.

Lee

I bought Lee a Leatherman Skeletool multitool and case. Mark got him Red Dead Redemption for the PS3, while Oliver got him a George Reed collector’s edition figurine. Lee and Mark got into an argument a couple of weeks ago where Mark called his uncle, “Uncle Glitter” which has kind of stuck. Mark got him some glitter stickers for his new iPhone 5. ”Uncle Glitter” didn’t seem to appreciate his nephew’s gift that much.

He tried to pull his knife on the Skeletool on Mark for bugging him but he couldn’t get it open. Once he got it open, he cut himself.

Wendy put together a great beer can chicken gift set of a roasting pan, rubs from Cabela’s, and a grilling recipe book. I expect some good beer can chicken this summer.

Because Lee was so insistent on lasagna for supper, we gave him a MRE lasagna and a spork as well. He can now have lasagna while camping. I think that was his favourite gift.

Brittany

Brittany was given a nice fountain pen, two journals (one lined and one unlined), and an Indigo gift card. Because both Lee and Brittany are getting new iPhones, we tossed in some iTunes cards as well. Holding her Indigo gift card was Cooper the Bear which apparently has been a Sears mascot for years (a fact that I did not know). It just seemed to work well for us. Brittany is an english teacher and I just think an English teacher with a fountain pen is more intimidating. It was either that or do what the NRA is suggesting and that is to give her a firearm.

Wendy gave Brittany a soapstone statue of a couple from Ten Thousand Villages which I really liked. As much fun as it is to bug Lee, him and Brittany are a wonderful couple.

My Haul

I wasn’t expecting too much but Wendy and the boys did a lot of planning and looking for good deals. Wendy gave me a trail GPS and a George Reed limited edition action figure, Oliver gave me a Toronto Blue Jays hat, Mark gave me Assasin’s Creed II and Red Dead Redemption. I also got a Leatherman Skeletool. To balance out my Tim Tebow action figure from last year, Wendy gave me a Peyton Manning action figure. Lee and Brittany gave me a remote control helicopter. It flies and crashes quite well around the house. Also because I don’t smell enough like David Beckham, I was given some of his cologne. Not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. To replace my old barbecue tools (that are showing some age), Wendy also got me a simple set of three barbecue tools which is all we really use.

The advantage to only periodically playing PS3 games is that I never own the new ones which means that Wendy can find me games for $10-$15 at Wal-Mart and it doesn’t matter since I haven’t played them.

Perhaps the purchase the surprised me the most is that the boys gave me Neptune’s Inferno which is a book about the naval battles at Guadalcanal.

I really had no more success than Lee in using my Leatherman today although no blood was spilled.

The photos can all be found here.

Today is being spent around the house setting up things, doing some reading, and then having a more traditional Christmas dinner. I had hoped to get get down to work but for the second day in a row, someone has swiped our power cords to the car which is frozen solid in this cold. We had planned to take a long walk downtown today with Mark’s new camera but as the song says, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”. Hopefully your Christmas is a good one and you are enjoying the time with family and friends as well.

The web we’ve lost

Dec 16th, 2012

by Jordon Cooper.

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Anil Dash has a great essay on the web that we have a decade ago versus the one we have today.

When you see interesting data mash-ups today, they are often still using Flickr photos because Instagram’s meager metadata sucks, and the app is only reluctantly on the web at all. We get excuses about why we can’t search for old tweets or our own relevant Facebook content, though we got more comprehensive results from a Technorati search that was cobbled together on the feeble software platforms of its era. We get bullshit turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.

While the mobile web has been great, I miss the open web which seems to get a little smaller each day.

How Yahoo! killed Flickr and Lost the Internet

May 21st, 2012

by Jordon Cooper.

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Fantastic piece by Gizmodo

Flickr’s mobile and social failures are ultimately both symptoms of the same problem: a big company trying to reinvent itself by gobbling up smaller ones, and then wasting what it has. The story of Flickr is not that dissimilar to the story of Google’s buyout of Dodgeball, or Aol’s purchase of Brizzly. Beloved Internet services with dedicated communities, dashed upon the rocks of unwieldy companies overrun with vice presidents.

As a result, Flickr today is a very different site than it was five years ago. It’s an Internet backwater. It’s not socially appealing.

Recently, Flickr rolled out a "Justified" view, a way to scan your friends’ recent photos where they are all placed together like puzzle pieces. It’s similar to the way Pinterest lays out images. It’s a dramatic, gorgeous way to look at photos—that mostly highlights how rarely many people update now.

As I scroll down I note that friend after friend has quit posting. At the bottom of the page I am already back in mid 2010. So many of my friends have vanished. It feels like MySpace, circa 2009.

This is anecdotal, sure, but I follow many of these same people on other networks (Path, Facebook, Instagram) where they tend to be very active. I see photos of the same people, with their same children and their same dogs—all looking a year or two older than on Flickr.

This justified view also serves to highlight just how many of my friends’ photos are formatted in perfect squares—the tell-tale sign of an Instagram snap that’s been exported. Many of my contacts’ entire photostreams are made up of Instagram photos. In other words they are mere duplicate streams—with fewer comments and activity—of content that exists in primary form elsewhere. The only reason they are active on Flickr at all is because they automatically export there.

There are other signals as well. On Stellar.io, a favorites aggregator that tracks what people are linking on Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr, the latter’s links fail to show up even daily in my stream. And of course, there is that damning Quantcast traffic chart.

I still love and use Flickr a lot but like a lot of people, enjoy using Instagram a fair bit as well. My iPhone shots go to Instagram first (where they are sent to Flickr, Twitter, and occasionally Foursquare) but anything shot with a camera goes right to Flickr. Sadly that isn’t as easy as it should. The Flickr Uploadr is slow and often times out and I have had a horrible time setting up a Flickr acct for The Lighthouse. After having problems with the login, Yahoo!/Flickr have totally ignored my help requests and despite it being a Pro acct, no one will answer my emails. I keep hoping that Flickr will survive but more and more it feels like Dopplr 2.0.

I no longer care what you think.

Apr 1st, 2012

by Jordon Cooper.

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Derek Powazek wrote this last year

Life on the net can be hard. It’s human nature to want to be liked, and to feel bad when someone says something negative to you. And if it’s one thing we all know about the internet, it’s that at any moment, someone, somewhere, is saying something negative.

An easy solution would be to withdraw, to not participate at all. But the world is getting more digital, not less. Eventually we won’t have a choice: if we want any kind of social life, we’ll have to participate in the social web.

Another solution would be to develop a thicker skin. And while I’ve certainly done that over the years, I never want to become so callous that I just don’t care about anything. I want to be able to be myself in the world.

So the solution I’ve come to is this: I care a lot about a very small group of people. I maintain a hierarchy of who I need to be okay with. It starts with my wife Heather, my parents and my sister, and includes my clients and a very short list of friends. You know who’s not on that list? Anonymous internet commenters. For them and everyone else not on the list, I just try to remember a saying I heard once: “Your opinion of me is none of my business.”

If you’re reading this, chances are, you’re not on that list, and I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings. But the truth is, I’m probably not on your list, either. It’s okay if our hearts are not yet big enough to include everyone they deserve.

He manages it this way

If you use Twitter, you pay attention to your mentions – the tweets that include @yourusername – because that’s how you have conversations. And therein lies the problem, because anyone can tweet at you that way. Some of those people are batshit crazy like the Haight Street Guy, while others are just merely rude like the Conference Talker Guy.

The difference is, on Haight Street, you have to walk briskly away and hope you’re not followed. And at the conference, you have to de-escalate the conversation politely, in front of a crowd. But on Twitter, there is a magic button, and in one click, poof, the crazy is gone.

It’s a wonderful thing. A thing so lovely I often find myself wishing it existed in real life.So why is blocking such a taboo?

I think the Block function on sites like Twitter and Flickr is unfortunately named. There’s something about the word – Block! – that comes across as a personal insult. And that’s too bad, because it’s basically the only tool we have to effectively manage our social experience in those communities.

I propose that blocking people on sites like Twitter or Flickr should not be interpreted as an insult. I propose that it’s simply taking yourself out of someone else’s attention stream.

If I block you on Twitter, my tweets no longer show up in your timeline. If I block you on Flickr, my photos no longer show up on your contacts page. In these settings, this is the only way for me to remove myself from your attention.

I don’t know what Derek defines as his breaking point. Over the years I have left a couple of comments on both his and Heather’s Flickr and Twitter streams that have been sometimes ignored and sometimes replied to but I haven’t been blocked. I tend to do the same thing although I fall more on the ignore side of the things which doesn’t mean I don’t care but it often means I have nothing to say back. It’s how Twitter works. I hadn’t thought of it that much until someone that I know unknowingly posted something fairly offensive on my Twitter stream and I was going to reply when I realized that I didn’t care what this person thought of my views so I hit “block”. I used to do it quite a bit on my blog but a combination of blocking those that just want to argue and not posting very much eliminated the need.

I get a lot of criticism and feedback at work. I work with the hard to house and many have significant anger issues along with a variety of social disorders. When they don’t get their way, they generally comment on my weight, my intelligence, my faith, being bald, and being ugly. It happens day in and day out but at the end of the day I can go home and relax. To log in and get it day in and day out when all I want to do is a little reading and writing is absurd. By blocking you, I remove my offensive views from your attention and we are both happier. My piece of the internet is free from inane comments, your net is free of my views that bother you so much. There is such a thing as win/win and it’s found by clicking block.

Powazek talks of the need to stay reconciled with some people but I find that those people don’t take stupid potshots online. The other thing is that there is a difference between being close to someone and having to interact with them online. Facebook and myself don’t get along that well. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like people who choose to interact there, it just means that I choose not to interact with them there. Same with online. On Twitter I choose who I follow but I can also choose who I want to follow me and I am realizing more and more, I don’t want all people interacting with me there. I realize that some people that are normal in person are jerks online. If you don’t like it, I think I just said, I don’t really care.

Life in the cloud

Feb 12th, 2012

by Jordon Cooper.

2 comments

As SaskTel winds down CDMA coverage in Saskatchewan, I need to upgrade Mark’s cell phone (a LG Rumor 2) that he loves. He is on a cheap pre-paid plan with Virgin that I don’t want to upgrade or add data so I will keep with a feature phone, probably a LG Rumor Plus or a Samsung Gravity 3. It’s talk, text, and email which is really all Mark needs right now.

I have been thinking about what I need ever since RIM’s network when down last summer. This is how I am thinking. I had a Blackberry Curve 8530 and like a lot of smartphone users, I have everything flowing through that phone.

Two email accounts
Blackberry Messenger
Text
Twitter
Flickr (which never worked on the phone)
Dropbox so I could send and receive files
The Score Mobile App (I have a problem okay)
MySask411 which replaced my phone book

I got a fair amount of work done and even wrote a couple of columns with it. It worked really well for me until that outage. When Blackberry went down, so did my phone. I couldn’t get calls, I couldn’t even connect to a Wifi network. My phone was essentially a brick that I carried around and hoped would return. While it wasn’t the reason I switched a Samsung Galaxy Ace over Christmas (the cost of the new Curve’s were high on Koodo and didn’t seem to offer a lot more capability as well as my general lack of faith in the Blackberry platform) I essentially swapped out RIM for being totally dependent on Google and this week I had an uncomfortable realization about how totally dependent I am on Google.

I was one of the first bunch of Gmail users way back in 2004, back in the days where invites were limited to five per person and where actually being sold for money. I got one, used my five invites on Wendy and some friends. Gmail was so new and fresh it had that new email smell to it. It served me well until this year when I got a notice that my email had been accessed by someone using an IP address from Serbia. It was really unsettling because as I had a decent password and changed it periodically. Having not travelled to Serbia recently (or ever) the idea that I had been hacked was a horrible one.

As for my ID, you have your drivers license, your passport, your Saskatchewan Health Card, your Social Insurance Number but my email is just as big of a part of my ID as anything. I have used it to sign up for Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, PayPal, even my bank and credit card uses it to communicate with me. While I am careful, having everything exposed was not that pleasant and it resulted in new credit cards being issues, new passwords, and really all new everything.

Shortly after that I had a huge problem with email. Emails were missing and there was about a 1500 email hole from about a year before that I discovered. I wasn’t the only one that has had this happen to me. The Gmail help forums are full of users that have lost thousands of emails and no one really knows why.

Since then there is someone that I will email periodically at The StarPhoenix that occasionally doesn’t acknowledge the email. I am the same way so I never thought of it until Friday when I got a call from my editor to see why I never filed my column except I did on Wednesday. I resent the column and it appeared. It’s the second time it happened but I have long had these sneaking suspicions that it was a problem with the @thestarphoenix.com domain. I checked the Gmail help forum and it tells me that I need to check with the domain name that wasn’t getting my email as they are of course faultless. Of course the email was never received.

This isn’t the first time this happened. A friend used to work at USA Today. An email I sent him took a full year one time to show up. I was working somewhere else and using their email (which was served up on Dreamhost) was the only server they ever had a problem with and then only sometimes. It has happened to me before from SaskTel where an email just hung out for month before being delivered. It happens but how do you know it happens. I never got a bounce message in any of those situations so I assumed (incorrectly) that it had gone through. Maybe we need to downgrade to Eudora 3 and start sending read receipts again.

So on Friday, my email was down, my cell phone was acting erratic (I think the problem was Koodo) and I realize that when things go down, they really go down. What can you do about it?

Gmail

Leaving Gmail is really hard because I think we underestimate how much spam and email that we get and I really don’t want that to make it to my phone. I know SaskTel has web access but so many friends of mine have had their email account become totally full after a couple of days that it is pointless if you are a heavy email user. I can set up a 500mb account for myself on Dreamhost but I get thousands of spam a day and Gmail handles it better than anyone else. I am in the process of putting coop AT jordoncooper.com to rest which will cut back on some of the spam but it’s a big problem when you are have old email accounts. There are a lot of things that still use it, including some that I am sure I don’t remember but will need someday.

As Wired Magazine published yesterday, Gmail has a pretty big security hole in it.

But since Gmail added OAuth support in March 2010, an increasing number of startups are asking for a perpetual, silent window into your inbox.

I’m concerned OAuth, while hugely convenient for both developers and users, may be paving the way for an inevitable privacy meltdown.

For most of the last decade, alpha geeks railed against “the password anti-pattern,” the common practice for web apps to prompt for your password to a third-party, usually to scrape your e-mail address book to find friends on a social network. It was insecure and dangerous, effectively training users how to be phished.

The solution was OAuth, an open standard that lets you grant permission for one service to connect to another without ever exposing your username or password. Instead of passwords getting passed around, services are issued a token they can use to connect on your behalf.

If you’ve ever granted permission for a service to use your Twitter, Facebook, or Google account, you’ve used OAuth.

This was a radical improvement. It’s easier for users, taking a couple of clicks to authorize accounts, and passwords are never sent insecurely or stored by services who shouldn’t have them. And developers never have to worry about storing or transmitting private passwords.

But this convenience creates a new risk. It’s training people not to care.

It’s so simple and pervasive that even savvy users have no issue letting dozens of new services access their various accounts.

I’m as guilty as anyone, with 49 apps connected to my Google account, 80 to Twitter, and over 120 connected to Facebook. Others are more extreme. Samuel Cole, a developer at Kickstarter, authorized 148 apps to use his Twitter account. NYC entrepreneur Anil Dash counted 88 apps using his Google account, with nine granted access to Gmail.

This is where it gets nerve wracking.

You may trust Google to keep your email safe, but do you trust a three-month-old Y Combinator-funded startup created by three college kids? Or a side project from an engineer working in his 20 percent time? How about a disgruntled or curious employee of one of these third-party services?

Any of these services becomes the weakest link to access the e-mail for thousands of users. If one’s hacked or the list of tokens leaked, everyone who ever used that service risks exposing his complete Gmail archive.

The scariest thing? If the third-party service doesn’t discover the hack or chooses not to invalidate its tokens, you may never know you’re exposed.

The reliability isn’t just a Gmail issue but most of us switched to Gmail because it was run by Google and we never thought that we would have these issues.

The other issue with Google is that even though they post an Apps Dashboard to let you know how things are going, this is a multi-billion dollar company with no way to contact them unless you are a large customer. I have had Gmail down and nothing shows up on the Dashboard so it has to be a big outage to report it. That’s fine if you are affected with others but if you are not part of a giant collective of frustrated Gmail users losing control on Twitter, what recourse do you have. Google tells you to that they look at help forums but there are thousands of unresolved issues, some that go on for a long time. This isn’t unique to Google, a friend had a nightmare in getting locked out of his Twitter account because of a Twitter database error. It look a couple of months to resolve and that was even after it’s CEO got involved. At least you can contact Dick Costello, who do you contact anymore at Google?

Google Contacts

I download and backup periodically my contacts for a couple of reasons, I need to keep them sync’d across my two accounts (one for work, the other one is personal). They are also sync’d on my iPod Touch, iPad, and Android phone. Of course I just read on Kottke this week that stealing your address book among iPhone developers is quite common.

It’s not really a secret, per se, but there’s a quiet understanding among many iOS app developers that it is acceptable to send a user’s entire address book, without their permission, to remote servers and then store it for future reference. It’s common practice, and many companies likely have your address book stored in their database. Obviously, there are lots of awesome things apps can do with this data to vastly improve user experience. But it is also a breach of trust and an invasion of privacy.

I did a quick survey of 15 developers of popular iOS apps, and 13 of them told me they have a contacts database with millons of records. One company’s database has Mark Zuckerberg’s cell phone number, Larry Ellison’s home phone number and Bill Gates’ cell phone number. This data is not meant to be public, and people have an expectation of privacy with respect to their contacts.

So while I am giving all of my contact information to Google intentionally, I (and so are most of you) am un-intentionally giving up your contact information to developers (sorry about that) which is one of the reasons why there is so much spam in this world. Thanks Apple. So even if Google is protecting our private information, as soon as we sync it with our iPhone or iPad, it is compromised.

This brings up my next issue, which phone vendor can we trust? Apple allows people to download your most private of personal information, Google controls and ties it all together in an Android phone, with Blackberry you just have a crappy phone experience and does anyone expect Windows 7 Phone to be any better. RIM has better security but isn’t able to deliver on their phones.

I was talking to a businessman who has been tied to his phone since AGT came out with the Aurora (such old technology, Google doesn’t even know about it) and he said to me the other day that he was willing to ditch his smart phone and go back to a flip phone (or a feature phone so he could text his kids). His company email server was down and he couldn’t do “anything” and was frustrated in the same way we all get frustrated. He said with a regular cell phone, when it went down, all it did was affect his phone calls. Now when his smartphone isn’t working, it affects everything. He was actually in the process of heading to Midtown Mall and purchase a cheap phone so as he put it, at “least I can call someone”. In some ways as I looked at a Nokia C1 by Fido today I wondered if this may be what I really want, an update to the Nokia 1100 which is still the world’s most popular phone.

Koodo

Koodo’s cellular service is okay here in Saskatoon. They use Telus’ network and do a not bad job of staying active. I find that when SaskTel is having problems, so is Telus/Koodo which makes me feel somewhat better but not a lot. In other words when I get no service at my house, neither does anyone else using SaskTel, Telus, or Virgin. When Koodo’s network is acting up, I can tell by looking at my phone when something is wrong. My Foursquare check-in options revolve around Carlton University’s campus, my network says Telus or even SaskTel instead of Koodo, and my calls drop more than they should. Wireless is defined by it’s Ready, Shoot, Aim background and we shouldn’t be surprised with it’s technical difficulties considering the rate that technology is changing but more and more I keep wondering if a step back may be order and evaluate if I want all of my personal information being in a platform that is so easily exploited.

Even if you can trust them now, can you trust them in the future. Google’s recent privacy changes spooked millions and may have launched a competitor in Duck, Duck, Go. These aren’t new concerns as I remember AKMA struggling with how much he should trust Flickr years ago.

I could come off the cloud but that is a lot easier said than done. I could use Thunderbird for email and contacts and Lightning as a calendar. I could use Dreamhost’s IMAP server, keep my email off my phone, and ditch my iPad, or at least not sync up information with it. It can be done but it is a very different 1998 era web that I don’t think I want to go back to either.

When you think of the information you have in your Gmail account, address book, calendar, and other apps (think of Mint and your bank app on your phone), why aren’t we either demanding more security or at least taking steps to protect ourselves. I know RIM’s the most secure but their phones are terrible right now. I wonder if the next thing in wireless will not just be the cool apps but the cool apps that protect your data because right now my data isn’t feeling all that safe.

Here we go again

Jan 25th, 2012

by Jordon Cooper.

3 comments

The City of Saskatoon came out with their strategic plan and it reads and looks good. As I was looking through it (finally after saskatoon.ca was down all last night), I couldn’t help but notice three of the photos were taken from my Flickr account without my permission. Again.

It’s happened before and I was assured it would never happen again. Well it did. I was initially quite angry but more than anything it shows that copyright and the Creative Commons are not well understood by city employees. My photos can be used if I am given credit (I was told I was in the City of Saskatoon’s PowerPoint) but in the print/PDF version I was not. Also, it is not for commercial use. I was talking with city councillor today who wondered if because the city used it, if it was a bit of confusion. I replied, “You call yourselves a corporation” but I see his point and I think that may be the biggest problem. During my discussion on Twitter about it, I was told that some of my photos have been used in other publications, again without permission, attribution and by the corporation.

Coming from the City of Saskatoon, it is the height of hypocrisy as back in the days before digital photography was widespread, the city offered up some high resolution stock images online and had a great many restrictions on use.

I don’t mind the City of Saskatoon using my photos, I just wish they would ask me first. It’s getting a bit old.

Early anniversary gift

Oct 1st, 2011

by Jordon Cooper.

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I had wanted to upgrade Wendy’s Samsung Link for a while now as Virgin Mobile has had some entry level Android smartphones out for a while. Every time I went out and looked, they were sold out. I finally tracked one down today at Best Buy and decided to pick up a Samsung Galaxy 550. It’s not cutting edge but it runs Foursquare, Twitter, Angry Birds, Flickr, and a bunch of other apps pretty well while being a lot cheaper than an iPhone. While I don’t think it will make me want to give up my Blackberry, it’s a pretty decent little phone. The bad part is now our competition on Foursquare is heating up.

While I am talking about Virgin Mobile, Visions Electronics is giving away free Virgin phones with no contracts. You can cancel a month into it if you want. They have the LG Rumor 2, the Samsung Gravity 3, and some others.

A quick proposal to make Saskatoon a better place to live

Jun 12th, 2011

by Jordon Cooper.

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This afternoon Wendy, Mark, and Oliver are at the 2011 Caswell Arts Festival. It’s a great event and a lot of fun. One problem, we almost missed out on it because we never heard of it until the last minute. I am not blaming the organizers or anyone else. They have always done a good job getting the word out but for some reason we were not in the places where the word was.

It brought back memories of some of the political campaigns from the spring where everyone was using Facebook to publicize their events and campaign. It’s great if you are are on Facebook and happen to be “friends” with the candidate, not so great if you are not logged in and don’t use the book with a face (like myself). So how do you publicize your events to the entire city?

To help get the word around, I am going to suggest that more of us use Yahoo!’s Upcoming service to publicize events in Saskatoon for the following reasons:

It’s free to signup (most of us have a Yahoo! username already)
You don’t need to be signed in to view events and get information.
It’s free to post events and add venues. Every couple of weeks I find some time to look around and post some things of interest to the site. Even if I don’t plan on or can attend, it lets others know about the event. Both Google and ~~Yahoo! Search~~ Bing spider the site which means that you are making it easier for anyone to find the event.
It links up with Flickr so any photos that you posted to an event can be linked back to it.
It’s neutral and user generated. You don’t have to worry about someone not liking your event and taking it down.
There is a place to add a link for the event and for tickets which means that the event organizer gets some Google love and people can go to the appropriate site for tickets.
A lot of people are using it already and you don’t have to be the organizer of the event to post it there. I tracked down a lot of events that Wendy and I are thinking of attending, found some graphics and created the listing from their website. If the event organizer wants to change it later, they can do that as well.
It shows what events you are attending as well as the events your friends are going to.
It offers the ability to create a group of friends, colleagues, or special interests that you can organize around.
It will feed other sites that publicize information like radio stations, television stations, the paper, community newspapers, school newsletters… you get the idea.
It’s open instead of closed like Facebook.

As for the kind of events. Everyone of Saskatoon’s festivals should be listed. Hilltops, Huskies, Saskatoon Blades, and Saskatoon Yellow Jackets games. Public events at the University of Saskatchewan and SIAST. Political AGMs, rallies and nomination meetings, events at the Mendel and the WDM, and even City of Saskatoon information and public meetings, church special events (just don’t post your regular service times), press conferences, and neighbourhood barbecues. You name it. If you want the city to know about it, post it online.

The end result would be a big online public square where we could come and discover what is happening in Saskatoon but also what our friends are doing. It would add a lot to city life in Saskatoon and be a great experiment in crowd sourcing everything that is great in our city.

I am not even that stuck on Upcoming, there is also Eventful but I am not fond of the ads everywhere and I prefer the Yahoo!/Upcoming interface. So if you are interested and agree, sign up, post an event (or let people know you are attending an event), and let your friends know. Then link to the Upcoming page for the event when you are talking about it. If you want to, add me as a friend.

In Focus

Feb 10th, 2011

by Jordon Cooper.

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Alan Taylor, who created The Big Picture as a side project at the Boston Globe has moved to The Atlantic Monthly where he is curating a new photoblog called In Focus for them. Regular readers of the site (and staff at work) know about my passion for The Big Picture and it’s nice to see Taylor getting rewarded for his efforts. I am not sure if the Boston Globe realized what they had with that site and I was surprised they let him get away and basically do the same thing with another paper.

While I am on the topic of media and photos, check out what the Oregonian has done with Flickr. The Oregonian is posting all the photos that go with stories in the paper to Flickr. Now one odd thing is that they don’t link their photos to the stories online but if they did, they could drive readers to their site and at the same time give a greater visual sense of the story with photos on Flickr that didn’t make the cut.

The Three Year Old Camera

Jan 21st, 2011

by Jordon Cooper.

1 comment

Jason Kottke has a great post on the results of giving his three year old a camera for Christmas.

But often the camera is a tool for him. Yesterday morning we were trying to build a boat out of blocks…"the same as we built last week," Ollie said to me. I couldn’t remember how we’d built the boat last week and Ollie couldn’t really describe it or duplicate it by himself. "We should have taken a picture of it. Then we would remember," he said. And a couple of weeks ago, his toy computer (basically a glorified Speak N’ Spell) ran out of batteries and when he came running in to the kitchen to tell me, he held up his camera with a photo of the computer in question, "see Daddy, the screen’s not working"…as if I wasn’t going to take his word for it.

After I tweeted about the camera, a number of people asked what setup we were using. We had an old Powershot SD450 laying around, so we gave him that instead of buying a kids camera. Ollie’s three and a half now and pretty conscientious; he doesn’t throw stuff around or smash things so we figured we could trust him with an actual camera. And for the most part, he’s been really good with it. He puts the cord around his wrist so the camera won’t fall on the floor if it slips out of his hands. For the first few days, he was accidentally sticking his fingers in the lens area and that caused the little shutter that covers the lens when the camera is off to stick a little bit, but he stopped doing that and learned how to fix the sticky shutter himself. He sometimes gets stuck in a weird menu after pushing too many buttons, but mostly he knows how to get in and out of the menus. He knows how to use the zoom and can shoot videos. He also can tell when the battery is running out and knows how to remove the battery to recharge it. Giving an "adult" camera to a three-year-old may seem like a recipe for confusion and broken electronics, but I’m continually amazed at kids’ thirst for knowledge and empowered responsibility.

For the automatic uploading to Flickr, we put an Eye-Fi card in the camera. The Eye-Fi is a regular SD memory card with built-in wireless networking…the low-end 4GB card is only $45 on Amazon. And you can link the card to a Flickr account so that when the camera is on and in range of a trusted wifi network, the photos are automatically uploaded. Pretty simple once you get it set up.

About.Me

Jan 14th, 2011

by Jordon Cooper.

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I usually don’t get that excited about sites like this but about.me does a great job of creating personal website/contact pages that professionally pulls together weblogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Foursquare, YouTube, and other web services into one page with a user defined URL which makes it perfect for your Twitter bio, a business card, or an email signature. It’s free (although the pro option has more design options). For me, it combines both ease of use and the ability to easily personalize and express yourself online.

You can see mine, but check out Dick Costello, Chris Cunningham, Veronica Belmont, Leo Laporte, Wendy Cooper, Tony Conrad, Mark Cooper, Catherine Valdes, Om Malik, or Jamal Mashburn. I don’t think it is a game changer or anything like that but if you don’t have a personal website and don’t want to go through the fuss of setting one up or keeping a blog maintained, this is a great option.

An Ollie in the family room

Jan 9th, 2011

by Jordon Cooper.

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Oliver pulled out his skateboard today and spend some time ripping up the family room. Click here for the entire photoset.

Opening up Saskatoon’s Archives

Jan 4th, 2011

by Jordon Cooper.

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I wasn’t sure what I was looking for last night but I ended up at the Saskatoon Public Library’s database of archival images. I checked out some old historic collections from Saskatoon’s past but I have to admit that it wasn’t the easiest to use, it was slow, you can’t save any images, and it is obsolete technology when you compare it to many of the collections in Flickr’s Commons.

For those of you who have been out of the loop for a while, The Commons are a series of institutions that upload photos that they own the copyright to or are in the public domain to Flickr where users can take, describe, and fill out the history regarding. Since the photos are in the public domain (or licensed with some restrictions under Creative Commons), they can be easily viewed (or used by the masses). Many of the participating organizations upload 50-200 photos at a time and then allow people to tag, leave comments, and fill out historical details on all of them.

As Flickr says, the goals are to:

To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and
To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge. (Then watch what happens when they do!)

I am picking on the Saskatoon Public Library but the same could be said for the City of Saskatoon archives, University of Saskatchewan’s archives, the The StarPhoenix photo archives (they could also take down the paywall on their archives while they are at it), the Diefenbaker Centre photographic collection or even the Western Development Museum’s archives. They are all owners of vast amount of archival photos that would be best served being served up electronically, even if small increments.

I was noticing on the Saskatoon Public Library database that they own the copyright to quite a few images historical I was checking out. I am assuming that they took over the copyright when the original owner donated the originals to the archives but that can be released and licensed and released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License for non-profit or private use. There are some images that are still held by families or companies and of course those copyrights will need to be respected but for those images that are in the public domain, release them and make them easily available to the public. All of Saskatoon would benefit.

My 2011 Life List

Dec 31st, 2010

by Jordon Cooper.

2 comments

instead of a New Years Resolution, here is my list of things I want to get done in 2011.

The personal goals first

Take a photo each day of 2011 and post it to my Project 365 set on Flickr. I’ll also post some to the Project 365 group. This is designed to force me to carry a camera every day. I went out and purchased some better camera cases which will make it easier for me to carry a point and shoot camera as well as my Fuji S2000HD along with me.
Get the front deck done at the cabin and build a back patio or replace the gazebo with another one.
Finish up my documentary this year. I have about 40 interviews but it’s not even close to being done.
Head to Calgary for an extended weekend this summer. Take the boys to ~~Calaway Park~~, Heritage Park, Banff via the old highway, Johnston Canyon, the ~~Husky~~ Calgary Tower, Calgary Zoo, have coffee with noted local photographer Dave King, Cave and Basin National Historic Site, the gondola, and visit Sawback picnic site (my favourite place on earth).
While at Johnston Canyon, take the hike all of the way to the ink pots (which I have never seen). Maybe I can get a ride in Oliver’s stroller.
Spend at least one uninterrupted week at the cabin with the family. All of us. Including the dogs. With a visit from Lee in there for a couple of days.
Walk or bike to work 100 days of the year. I am going to put a 1500 km goal on the bike this year. We’ll see how I do.
Create some online historical walking tours of Saskatoon’s historic sites. I have been waiting for the Saskatoon Historical Society to be doing it for ages and it never happens. Plus the best ones that I have seen are done by individuals and not organizations.
Put up at least three posts a month at The Hedge Society.
Hike with Mark to Grey Owl’s Cabin in Prince Albert National Park.
Learn Adobe Premiere Elements like the back of my hand. I know there are some seasoned video editors out there who scoff at the term elements but let’s keep in mind that I am a hack, not a professional.
Make Evernote a part of my daily life.

Now my work related goals

That documentary thing is kind of work related.
Finish up a comprehensive manual for front line homeless workers and post it online.
Finish up and launch a website for homeless individuals, front line workers, and the public on housing resources and homeless issues in Saskatoon.
Take John School on the road. John School is incredibly effective but it’s only for guys who have been picked up for solicitation. By that time a neighbourhood has been affected, marriages have been destroyed, and women have been hurt. The idea is to get the content and message from John School out there before lives have been ruined.
Put together a conference on human trafficking in the city during 2011. I realize that I am a libertarian deep down which makes me quite liberal minded but there are 600 known sex trade workers in Saskatoon and many of them are underage. No, not all of them are like Julia Roberts or Heidi Fleiss.
This may not happen this year but I would love to start the work on having some policy discussions on poverty and homelessness in Saskatoon with policy makers. I hate meetings and rallies that don’t take into practical and financial implications for homelessness, poverty, and housing. I can stand on the rooftops and scream for more money as well as the next one but the reality is that there is always going to be competing political and economic realities.
Move the $10,000 goal that we (hope to) raise online with the iKettle and increase it $25,000 for Christmas 2011.

The goals for the website

Become functionally literate. The spelling mistakes around here are killing me when I read old posts. I twice fired the writing staff this fall but unlike Conrad Black, I forgot to change the locks when I let people go and they keep sneaking back in. Stupid helper monkeys.
Incorporate some more video into the site. I really enjoyed Warren Kinsella’s W@AL segments and want to do some more fun stuff with video here.
I plan to do some long form writing on some more serious topics. Writing 10,000 word essays is not my idea of a fun job and as you can see, there isn’t a lot of revenue being generated through advertising these days (apparently I fired my advertising team as well).
I plan a lot more time doing some street level photography. I have long been a fan of what Jake Dobkin has done with BLUEJAKE and what Sam Javanrouh has done with Top Left Pixel and I would love to do more of that in Saskatoon. This will be related to #8 of my personal goals.

* for a better life list, check out Maggi Mason’s Life List.

Blackberry Curve Build Out

Dec 30th, 2010

by Jordon Cooper.

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On the 27th I went to Best Buy to take a look at DSLR’s on sale. I didn’t see any DSLRs but while I was there, I saw that Koodo had dropped their price on Blackberry Curves to $150 and no contract. I had thought about getting a LG Rumor 2 this year but after looking into it, we decided to get the Curve. I had been quite happy with Virgin but I have had technical problems with my account for two years and it was getting worse. While Virgin’s tech support and customer service staff have been really helpful, they still could not fix the problem so I finally decided to make the move.

I took the phone home and started to set it up. Here is how I put it together.

The first thing I did was get my Curve set up to our wifi connection in the house. That wasn’t working that well. Then I realized my router was about a billion years old (it was a 801b router) and it needed an upgrade. Since my new router was on my desk, it was pretty easy to upgrade. The Curve, my iPod Touch, and our notebook suddenly worked a lot faster. I upgraded my old router’s firmware and will give it Computers for Kids and if they don’t want it, it can go to SARCAN.

Here is are the apps that made their way onto it over the last couple of days.

Utilities

Blackberry App World | How does this not come preinstalled? Seriously. It’s like Apple not installing iTunes or an App Store on their iPhones.
Google Sync | It keeps my contact information and calendar current and sync’d with my Blackberry.
Google Mobile Apps | I probably don’t need them but they are there just in case.
Google Latitude | Does anyone use this? That being said I tend to favour Foursquare
Personal Assistant
The Weather Network App | It’s set up to find the weather in Saskatoon, Calgary, Regina, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Govan.
Urban Spoon | Wendy can never decide where to go and eat. This helps solve that. Well not really but I am wishful thinking.
Ping Chat | I can chat with Wendy and Mark on their iPod’s with this app.

Social Networks

Foursquare | It doesn’t yet use wifi but it allows you to check in and out all over the place. It’s one of those apps that doesn’t make sense until you use it and then you love it.
Twitter | Umm, it’s one of the main reasons why I upgraded to a Blackberry.
Facebook (one the off chance for some reason I need to actually log in sometime… maybe in 2012)
Flickr | It’s an uploader that uploads my camera phone shots to Flickr. It rather annoyingly resizes them but I’ll deal with that later.