Dyepot, Teapot

…feel like you’ve stumbled into the middle of some cultural phenomena you don’t really understand? (but maybe it’s funny anyhow?) This is like that.

At least it’s good distraction from the completely disgusting “State of the Union 2006″.

Edit: I found another good Numa video right after I posted. Probably my favorite so far.

Tags: Numa Numa, remixes, humor

I filled out a survey today for Heifer, one of the coolest charities, and at the end there was a password entry item that not only sent the password to the server in plaintext (sadly common) but didn’t even bother to obscure the password when you typed it in the form, which was completely weird and sloppy. So I sent them an email. From the response below, I don’t think they understood what I was concerned about. This isn’t particularly sensitive data, but to me it seems kind of rude to not be slightly more concerned about secure data transmission (and it gives a bad impression of the company’s standards).

The company listed as creating the survey site is called Vision Critical (http://www.visioncritical.com/).

I’m usually a little more polite when I email strangers, especially to complain. I was still waking up when I wrote the bit below or else I’d probably have managed to write something less abrupt. Sorry.

From: Audrey
Sent: January 31, 2006 9:02 AM
To: support@heifervoices.com
Subject: Password issue

The password box at the end of the Heifer Voices survey has absolutely no security measures applied. I realize that this isn’t a high security need site, but it seems pretty strange that the password appears in plain text in the box (not obscured in any way) and the page with the password entry is not encrypted. I really think you should fix this before more people start using your survey system.

Audrey

From: support@heifervoices.com
Subject: RE: Password issue
Date: January 31, 2006 6:14:02 PM PST
To: Audrey

Hi Audrey,

The data collected in this questionnaire is kept strictly confidential. The password you create is stored in a password protected database, and appears only as dots in this database.

Cordially,

The Heifer Voices Advisory Panel Team

Tags: data collection, security, surveys

I put a new version of the lunch cart map page at http://www.speakeasy.net/~aeschright/maps/. It now lets you select carts by food type. I also created a new stylesheet to make the page look like the main/status page on my site. IE dislikes my CSS layout for some reason, and I don’t use IE at home, so it’s kind of a pain to try to fix that. It’s just fine in Firefox on all platforms, though. So there’s a little Firefox link on the side of the page to encourage people to try that instead (it’s a way better browser to use for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is that it’s much closer to being web standards-compliant).

My next update for this project will include more informative pop-up balloons when you click on the map, but it may be a while before I get to it. I have some other things I want to work on first.

Let me know if you notice any problems with the cart positioning or know of one I ought to add.

Tags: Google Maps, lunch carts, cartography, Portland, PDX

I took down all of my old webpages a few months ago because there were at least three of them in different levels of updatedness and design quality, and it just seemed goofy to have things scattered all over the place. But today, I have a new page. I haven’t had a chance to test it on IE yet, so let me know if you see any problems. I’m thinking of adding an RSS feed so people can subscribe to the Status section if they want (but maybe that would be a little weird?).

Tags: new website

After much waffling, I have decided to join the Knitting Olympics with the goal of completing a cabled sweater in 16 days. This is a pretty ambitious project for me to attempt in that time, but I think I have a decent chance if I get everything ready in advance.

I have to admit, the thing that pushed my choice was discovering I could knit for Team Wales. They say I don’t actually have to be from Wales, but it is enough that: 1) I have some amount of British ancestry that may or may not include the Welsh (the results of my Google search were ambigious), 2) like sheep and leeks, 3) think their flag is neat, and 4) would like to visit someday.

I think I’d better get started on that sweater design.

Tags: knitting, Knitting Olympics, Team Wales

I decided it was time for a new template. I also fiddled with the widgets in the sidebar, and added one that lists all my Bloglines subscriptions. There are rather more of them than I had realized.

In addition, I signed up with Technorati in hopes of getting more people I don’t actually know in person reading this. It says my current rank is somewhere over a million. Me and thousands of anonymous teenage girls hiding in obscurity at the bottom of the list.

So here’s a couple of neat things I found yesterday: Knit Knit, which is a ‘zine about knitting and art, and Steal this Sweater, the site of one of the contributors. Very impressive use of knitting for political graphic art. My jaw dropped when I realized that the small motifs on one of the sweaters were machine guns.

Tags: blogs, Technorati, knitting, obscurity, art

I’m irritated with Tri-Met, our local bus service. Monday, in honor of Martin Luther King Day, they ran the busses on a holiday schedule, roughly the same as the regular Saturday service. The problem with this is that they didn’t adequately plan for all of the commuters who still needed to get to work, at least not on my bus route.

I wrote them an email Monday morning upon noticing that the bus that normally runs every 7 minutes during rush hour was only going to be every half an hour until at least 9 am (which seemed like a very poor choice for a high traffic line to and from downtown), and then a second time after it took me an hour and a half to make the 3 mile commute to work because every bus that passed (half an hour apart) was too full to take more passengers by the time it reached my stop. And I couldn’t call Tri-Met to complain or find out if they were even aware of the problem, because logically enough, the customer service people had the day off. For the holiday. That holiday that many downtown employers weren’t observing.

Here’s the response I received to my first email (nothing yet about the second one):

Thank you for contacting TriMet. A Rider Alert was issued explaining a
modified schedule for the Holiday, and the information was also on our web page. I can file a complaint for you if you feel this was not adequate, and also that you disagree with a special schedule for this Holiday.

I think someone has failed to inform them of the #1 rule of good customer service: When you have an angry customer, start by apologizing. Even if you think they’re being unreasonable. Otherwise, you get an even angrier customer.

Tri-Met needs to think more like a business. Not Wal-Mart, but a good business. The sort that likes to make money by doing what people need and doing it well. If they were thinking like a smart business, they’d realize that screwing over their regular customers (and I’m about as core a Tri-Met customer as you get, since I buy a monthly bus pass and I don’t drive) leads to fewer regular customers, which leads to less money to do the things that keep customers coming. Right now they’re acting more like the post office. [1]

I have a strong interest in seeing Tri-Met work well, because I think car-oriented landscapes are icky. If you want to avoid those, you have to have strong alternate modes of transport. Like a good bus system.

And this leads me to the general economic issue I’ve been thinking about lately. Money (well, let’s say generalized economic activity) flows like water down a valley. If you want money to pool in different places, you have to change the landscape. But it’s reciprocal, the water is shaping the land in return. So if you want a city that isn’t shaped by cars, there had better be another way to get around.

One of the big ways people try to reshape the landscape is legislatively, restricting what companies and other organizations are and aren’t allowed to do, but I’m not convinced this is the best way to get what you want. People respond to incentives, and I think a system that (metaphorically) gives you cookies instead of bashing you on the nose with a stick is going to be more robust. There’s bad ways to do that too, though, particularly if you’re going to convert major government activities into such a tangled mess of incentives that only people with lots of money or free time can actually sort it out (see the latest tax code). And you can’t only have incentives, there do need to be penalties for doing the complete wrong thing. Some organizations (WAL-MART) will choose to play dirty.

Anyhow, this is probably getting long and redundant, but I think the concept of reshaping a whole landscape is really important. If you want to solve social and economic problems in a robust manner, you have to reshape the whole environment. Anything less won’t hold up long enough to have a real impact.

And Tri-Met, at least pretend that you care about your customers’ complaints. I’m going to start calling Metro councilors if I don’t get a better response.

[1] Lest you think I’m being unreasonably hard on them, it’s because the only time I’ve gotten a good response from their customer service people was when everyone on the bus complained about the same driver for having a complete freak-out incident on our morning commute. Any concerns about the continually rising fares or bad scheduling tend to get the same indifferent answers. I have the bizarre notion that public agencies ought to actually be responsive to public comments, but last time I tried to find out if there was even an advisory board with meetings I could attend, they just shrugged.

Tags: Portland, PDX, TriMet, transportation, economics

One of the projects I’ve had in mind for a while now was to list or map the downtown lunch carts, because for some reason no one seems to have done so yet (at least, I can’t find anything on Google). So this weekend I learned how to work with the Google Maps API in order to create a map of Portland lunch carts. After entering 41 carts into an xml file, I can see why maybe no one bothered with this before. There are way more of these than I realized, and I’m sure my list is incomplete. Plus trying to get the dots in the right spots involved a lot of tweaking.

The page isn’t really finished yet, but with the main parts in place, I thought I’d show it off. I haven’t had a chance to test it on Windows or with IE yet, so if anyone notices funny display issues, would you send me a screenshot?

My plan is to add a feature to let you map only a single type of food at a time, which will both reduce clutter on the blocks that have 15 carts and make it easier to tell at a glance which ones have Thai food. So that’s why there’s an oddly empty section to the right of the map.

Tags: Portland, PDX, lunch carts, Google Maps, cartography

On the way home from work, I started thinking about the women’s clothing not coming in real women’s sizes issues, and how it’d be great if there were a way to bridge the gap between “someone ought to fix this problem but it would take more money than I have” to “real functioning company doing that thing I wanted”. Because it’s way easier to convince companies to change what they’re doing or address an ignored market by going out and creating a viable competitor for their business than by lobbying the company to see the errors of their ways. Everyone responds to incentives, and lost business is a huge one, the most direct kind.

I think I came up with a way to do it, at least for things like the clothing issue, where there are plenty of people who have an interest in this, but not the capital to change things. Set up a fund where people can contribute money in exchange for a stake in the eventual company. Keep the donations small enough that even people who aren’t normal investors can participate (ideally, as small as $20–but you could contribute more in exchange for more shares. I’d probably set a maximum so no one could buy out the whole project at the start). Make sure that everyone gets their money back if the project doesn’t hit a pre-determined fundraising goal in a set amount of time. This sort of model is already being used in politics and lobbying (well, aside from the refunds), so why couldn’t it work in a for-profit situation?

Lucas asked whether my bright idea was applicable to strippers (I came home and said I needed to write something down before I forgot it, but didn’t mention what it was). And it is, kind of. Want to open a strip club? I bet lots of people would give you $50 in exchange for a share of something like that.

It’s possible that there’s some law against this, since there are all sorts of complicated regulations surrounding businesses and investment, but I’d be very curious to see someone give this a shot.

Tags: investment, business, alternative economics

Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence,–too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.

Emma Goldman

Lucas likes to tease that I’m a commie (or alternately, a freedom-hating terrorist–HI NSA), but this week I’m reading anarchists. Anarchism and Other Essays (available in a convenient iPod format) is pretty interesting so far. I get the feeling this is going to be one of those things where I agree with a lot of the premise but a small part of the conclusion, though.

The idea that the things produced of drudgery, coercion, or slavery should be considered tainted by this use of labor makes a lot of sense, but it doesn’t seem to have much real weight in practice. Otherwise there would be no demand for diamonds, or cheap sweatshop clothing, or any number of things whose origins involve exploitation. I think almost everyone is so disconnected from where things come from that it’s hard to see this as sufficiently relevant unless it’s right in front of your face. So in most cases, only the workers and those in direct contact with them protest (and a few commies like me, of course).

The other thing I started thinking about when I read the quote at the top is how remarkable it is that people who endure bad work (on any level, from just jobs they dislike to really abusive situations) resist having the life squashed out of them. People resist drudgery any way they can. It’s how we cope and protest.

Tags: anarchism, labor, Emma Goldman