WWdN: In Exile

Geek in Review: On the Benefits of Going Off The Grid

This week's Geek in Review was inspired by my technology-free vacation last week, where I learned the benefits of going off the grid:

This ultra-connected world we live in is really cool, isn’t it? Any information we could possibly want is literally at our fingertips: we get directions from Google Maps sent straight to our cell phones, our GPS devices ensure that we’re never lost (despite our best efforts) and the days of wondering what that actor’s name is, or what the lyric to that song actually was (Alex the Seal? What the hell does that mean?) are gone forever, replaced by just a few keystrokes at Google or Wikipedia.

Do you know the actual phone numbers of the people you call regularly? Or is that just saved in your cell phone? When you’re online, do you actually know your passwords, or are they auto-saved as well? Do you have a roadmap in your car, or a Thomas Guide? What would you do if you got lost without a cell phone or a GPS device? Have you ever stopped to think about how dependent we actually are on technology, and what we’d do if we suddenly lost it one day?

I think about it all the time, and I have considered trying my hand at writing a short SF story about what happens when all the technology we rely upon goes kaput one day. Because whenever anything bad happens to technology, the most correct way to describe it is “kaput.” I’m serious. Go look it up at Google, or go to the library and use the card catalog if you really want to see what I’m talking about.

If you don't have time to go to the library at the moment, keep reading: I unintentionally got to experience how it felt to be entirely “off the grid” and live a technology-free life for five days beginning last Thursday.

It turns out that it's very similar to the benefits of not being seen, without as many exploding larches.

About that blogger's choice thing? Turns out it's not so good. - UPDATED

I didn't realize that the Blogger's Choice Awards is sponsored by PayPerPost, which is at best deeply unethical, and at worst damn close to evil.

In essence, PayPerPost pays bloggers to post about companies, products, or services, without any disclosure at the top of the post which indicates the blogger is being paid to shill whatever they're shilling. It sure seems like the sketchy world of SEO to me, and undermines the legitimacy and hard work of a lot of bloggers who write about things they genuinely love and care about.

As a longtime blogger, I care a lot about this little chunk of the Intertubes we've sort of carved out for ourselves, and I believe that companies like this do us all much more harm than good. With that in mind, I wish I'd done my homework a little better before I posted earlier today. I can not, in good conscience, encourage anyone to sign up for or participate in anything they sponsor.

All of that said, I don't have any personal vendetta or whatever against Rosie O'Donnell. Other than the whacky Truther Conspiracy garbage, I actually agree with her damn close to 100% of the time politically, even if I find the way she posts in her blog rather off-putting. But one of the greatest strengths of the blog-o-sphere (a word I still hate) is that everyone get to express themselves and have their voice heard, in whatever way they choose to do it. This latest thing on The View? Yeah, I try to avoid that kind of celebrity drama, but where in the world was she going to get to tell her side of the story if not on her blog? How many times have I cheered the fact that I can tell my side of a story on my blog? One of the things that makes blogging so awesome -- and, in fact, the reason blogging gave me a second act in my life -- is that we can be as unedited or as edited as we all want to be. I regret that the dry humor I intended to convey earlier didn't come across. I keep forgetting that the Internets aren't the best venue for subtlety.

What's important, and what the point of this post is, is this: Everything I've read about PayPerPost, and every discussion I've had with my friends and people whom I trust leads me to believe it is an incredibly unethical company that is going to do more longterm harm to us as bloggers than good. I'm not going to promote anything they're involved in, and I hope everyone who reads this will join me. Don't vote for me; don't vote for anyone. In fact, read xkcd instead.

I'll leave my earlier post up for posterity, and because outright deleting something like this when new information comes to mind and comments have been left is pretty lame.

Afterthought: Some people associated with PayPerPost have posted comments, and tell me I have my facts wrong. I encourage everyone to read their side of things and make up your own mind.

To clarify my position on this whole thing: I've stopped reading dozens of blogs because the bloggers began filling their blog with sponsored posts, and I felt like I was watching a lot of commercials instead of reading whatever drew me to their blog in the first place.

Paying for editorial content is advertising, and mixing advertising with other content is misleading to the reader. When I read a newspaper, I can clearly discriminate between advertising and actual content, and give each one the appropriate amount of attention and credulity. When advertising begins to mingle with the actual content without clear and obvious measures taken to clarify for the reader what it is, I believe an ethical line has been crossed. I believe that PayPerPost should force disclosure at the very top of each paid post, and maybe even in the title; hey, if it's not such a big deal to include posts that you've been pad for, why not make it perfectly, unambiguously clear right at the beginning?

To be absolutely crystal clear: When I post about a product or service in my blog, I do so because it's something I genuinely like or think my readers will like, not because someone paid me to post about it.

But, as I said, the people behind PayPerPost disagree with me, so hear them out and make up your own minds.

flickr loves me

Flickr has apparently upgraded from "gamma" to "loves you."

Now I have to tell Flickr that I just want to be friends. This is going to be awkward.

[UPDATED] AOL thinks I'm a spammer - can anyone help?

About two weeks ago, AOL started blocking me from sending e-mail to anyone with an @aol.com e-mail address. I'm getting the old, "users have reported you as spam" error, which actually leads me to believe that this is likely an abusive effort by some morons to fuck with me, which happens more frequently than you'd believe. I've spoken with my hosting providers at Logjamming, and AOL is apparently just giving them a big old runaround.

If anyone reading this knows someone at AOL, or can somehow help me get this resolved, I'd be most grateful.

This is like dealing with the DMV, except the DMV is in India.

UPDATE: Thanks for all the great advice, everyone. It turns out that my mailserver's IP is not on a single black hole list, and shows no signs of compromise, so this is entirely an AOL matter. I was contacted by a very helpful AOL employee . . . but when I attempted to reply, it was bounced. This really absurd and silly, and I've been able to keep a sense of humor about the whole thing. I mean, I can't even reply to the people who are trying to help me get off the blacklist, because I'm on the blacklist. The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if I'm asked to fill out at 27B(stroke)6 before it's all over.

closer to home

TypePad has this nifty new feature that lets users build stand alone pages using the TypePad interface that so many of us love, so building a more complex and complete website to go with our TypePad blogs just got a whole lot easier. This is really good news, because it means I'll be leaving Exile sooner than I thought.

To be honest, I'd actually kind of totally decided that I wasn't going to bother building WWdN 2.0, because it was too much work . . . but not any more! Now that I can easily compose page content without leaving TypePad, I no longer have to wonder about tracking down some CMS software, or paying someone to build it for me (because the days of me doing this stuff myself are long, long gone.) It should be trivial to take all the non-blog pages from WWdN and turn them into TypePad pages, so I can merge WWdN and WWdN:iX into WWdN: A Metric Assload of Awesome. I copied over the old WWdN (horribly out of date) FAQ as a proof of concept. Check it out.

In what I laughably call my free time, I'll be combining all the WWdN and WWdN:iX blog entries and importing them into one überblog. Then, I'll get domain mapping set up with TypePad, so I can continue to use this software I've come to love and enjoy the stability and scalability that TypePad offers . . . but as far as anyone is concerned, be living at wilwheaton dot net.

As I'm sure you can imagine, I'm pretty excited about this.

feature request for scribefire

I've been using ScribeFire (formerly Performancing) as a composer for most of my blog posts. It's easy to use, and I've been really happy with it.

But I discovered a missing feature just now, that I think is really, really important: when you hit the "delete post" button, there should really be a confirmation dialog, so fucking idiots like me don't think they're looking at the "notes" tab when they're looking at the "history" tab, and end up deleting a ton of posts from their blog.

Oh. Joy. This happens to me while Typepad is having massive posting
issues. That's not going to make me even more stabby than I already
was. Nope. Not at all.

I sure hope that Google cache is as useful as people say it is.

Geek in Review: Sound Salvation

Remember the story I mentioned last week about Internet radio, and its destruction at the hands of the RIAA?

I wrote it this week, with significantly less rantacular rantaliciousness:

[F]or music nerds, technology has allowed anyone with a passion for music to share that passion with like-minded listeners. It's allowed them to effectively make endless mixtapes and play them for the world. For artists -- especially indie artists -- Internet radio is the best promotional outlet they have for their music this side of a friend handing you a CD and saying, "dude, you have to listen to this!"

So why the hell is the RIAA trying so hard to destroy that? Because the RIAA (which is essentially the major labels) has spent a lot of time and a lot of money building a monopoly with a few media conglomerates, and it's been very profitable for them all for decades.

This effort to wipe out independent online radio has nothing to do with protecting artists, and everything to do with protecting a status quo that supports a very few top 40 acts at the expense of everyone else. In their effort to protect their outdated business model and insanely corrupt relationship with a few broadcasters, the RIAA is happy to prevent their artists from having a magnificent way to reach potential customers who will buy albums, merchandise, and concert tickets.

For the audience, this is about choice: The airwaves are supposedly owned by the American people, and licensed out to broadcasters for use. (Stop laughing. It's true.) So if we, the people, own the airwaves, who told Clear Channel that they could dictate what got played on the radio all over the nation? Who told Clear Channel that they could fill the airwaves with lowest common denominator crap and empty-headed, passionless DJs who read from a script? Who told Clear Channel that they could force out everyone else and ensure that the radio really, really sucks? I know that I wasn't consulted, that's for sure.

Is there an online radio station you love? Are you a member of the WWdN last.fm group? Do you stream your own radio station? Tell us in the comments, and please consider joining the SaveNetRadio coalition.

InDigital Episode 15

There's a new episode of InDigital out, and this is probably the funniest one we've done so far.

Jessica takes a look at the ultimate ride and it's green too. Then she kicks back in the livingroom to check out the new Apple TV. Meanwhile, Wil wanders the streets with GPS navigation in hand. Hahn spends his time at home with a media server that stores your DVD's.

If you've been waiting to hear me make a lot of "vroom vroom" car driving noises, you really need to watch this episode.

Debian 4.0 (etch) released

The newest version of the outstanding Debian Linux distro has been released:

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB.

Using a now fully integrated installation process, Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 comes with out-of-the-box support for encrypted partitions. This release introduces a newly developed graphical frontend to the installation system supporting scripts using composed characters and complex languages; the installation system for Debian GNU/Linux has now been translated to 58 languages.

Though I use Kubuntu these days, Debian Linux was the first distro where I felt like I was in control of everything from my window manager to my kernel, so I have a certain sense of personal investment and excitement where it's concerned.

Congratulations and thank you to everyone who's worked on all the Debian projects, and who made this release possible.

There are several ways to get Debian, if you're interested.

there's nothing tricky about it, it's just a little trick!

So this is a pretty cool trick I picked up from Lifehacker:

Web site ImgRed lets you quickly embed an image from another web site and embed it elsewhere without leeching bandwidth from the source. Just grab the URL of the image and append it to http://imgred.com/. The site copies the image to their server the first time it's requested, then serves it up permanently.

I think this is neat-o, so I submitted it to Netscape. If you have a Netscape account, it would be awesome if you thought it was worthy of a vote.

In fact, if it gets enough votes to hit the homepage, I promise to make up and write a story all about Star Trek shit from my basement and online poker.

(Image from Courtney P.)

Update: Wow. I go away for two hours to watch Children of Men (a movie you need to see,) and find that it's made the homepage. That was damn fast, people. I'm impressed, and considering creating my own army, now. Next stop: The World! Mwahahahaha!

Okay, I'll get to work on that story and have it up in a couple of days (it would be sooner, but I plan to actually, you know, come up with something good.) I promise.