Twitter Map

You’re about to go on vacation.  Finally, no more work.  No more responsibilities.  You’re excited to get away and you want to rub your friend’s noses in it.  Without a thought, you pick up your phone and send out a Tweet.  “Kiss off, suckers.  I’m on my way to the beach!”  You probably didn’t even pay attention to the fact that Twitter now includes location data.  You didn’t think twice about accepting when it asked if it could include this information in your messages.  You probably didn’t think that there’s a map like this one – something that shows where you live when you sent the note telling the world you wouldn’t be home for the next week.

After a great vacation, you come home to find the place robbed.  I’ll bet you probably never put that together with the fact that you broadcast to the world that you’d be away from your home, and by the way, here’s exactly where to find it.

Location data is really useful stuff.  When I take photographs, I like to embed geotagging information to display the photos on a map.  It’s useful for me at home and it may help other photographers to know where to get a similar shot, if they want to visit the same place.  Check-in tools like FourSquare and Gowalla link to your Twitter account to show where you are.  It’s cute.  It tells people that you aren’t at home, but at least it doesn’t point them to your home.  It’s not the same when you wake up on Monday morning and send a note from your house that you’re “On my way to work.”  For the next eight hours or so, it lets folks know there’s probably an empty house waiting.  All they have to do is look at the map associated with your message.  All they have to do is build a filter that looks for key words to identify people going to “work, vacation, road trip, etc.”  You get the idea.

You’re not being tracked by something insidious.  You’re just telling the world where you are, or aren’t.

My spam filters work fairly well, but sometimes a bit gets through.  This is one of the recent and odd pieces of spam I received.  Oddly enough, it’s spoofed to come from a Hennepin County,Minnesota address.  I guess some government worker was surfing the wrong sites one day.

Personally, I don’t expect that the woman in this photo is actually Oksana.  It’s got to be a phishing scam and she’s probably some unknown woman who posted on Facebook or Photobucket.  The dude who is behind this e-mail chose a lovely image to go with his bait, though.  However, she does look like one of my ex-girlfriend’s in a blonde wig.

The problem is that it’s really too vague.  This letter could be written to any dude on the Internet.  It makes me wonder who falls for this stuff.  Seriously, there must be a market full of idiots who think some hot blonde chick with poor English grammar is writing to find her true love and make babies.  It sort of makes me sad to think that’s true.

Hi, I found your profile on the internet and I wanted write to you.
I am looking for a serious relationship and I want to meet nice man like  you for friendship and love.
If you single now and like a girl for long  relationship and family formation.
Then you would be interested. I am  lonely pretty girl with blonde hair and blue eyes.
Now I am 30 year old. I send my photo and I will be pleased to see your new photos.
In man I find qualities such as responsibility and dedication, kindness  and concern.
I want meet man who wants a family and once ready to be  husband.

Please reply only to my personal e-mail:  [removed]

Answer me when you can. I am waiting. My name is Oksana.

A week ago, I had an unsettling encounter with Disney Security at Downtown Disney.  After thinking about it for a day, I decided to share the story on my photography blog. The story gathered a lot of attention, at least in comparison to most of my  posts.  As a result, I received a lot of comments on the blog, in comments on other blogs that carried the story, and on various message boards where the discussion seemed pertinent.

Thus began a series of Monday Morning Quarterbacks.  Don’t misunderstand me, I think a majority of the people who reached out to leave a comment on my blog were very supportive or interested in details of the incident.  The same is mostly true of comments on the other blogs.  It’s the discussion boards where the majority of interesting opinions came about.

One of the first things I noticed is that the people who were most vocal in their opposition to the route I took seemed to be the ones who had done the least bit of research of thinking about the issue.  I doubt many of them even read my whole post, because the answer to their questions was contained right there.

I found it amusing to look at the photographs of one person who said my pictures suck.  I could understand his position; art is subjective.  Then I looked at his photos – mostly tourist snapshots with little thought about composition or light.  I had plenty of shots like that, too.  It’s just that I don’t go telling other people they suck when I don’t have something better to hold up as an example.

Another group of people blamed me for shaming Disney.  In their opinion, I shouldn’t have written about the harassment I received by a Disney Security Manager.  I should have just complained to Disney and they would send me an autographed picture of Mickey Mouse.  I replied that Don was the one who shamed Disney, not me.  It didn’t take.  The guy just responded with a note that Don didn’t put it on the Internet.  No, he didn’t (as far as I know).  Instead, he just harassed a guest and humiliated him in public.  He’s as accountable for his own actions as any of us.  Had he given me some great support while I was there, the blog post may have been very different.  It’s not the post on the Internet that reflects poorly on Disney.  It’s the castmember’s actions that are to blame.

I understand that many people would have done things differently.  That’s fine.  When they get hassled by an overzealous security guard, let them act as they wish.  They can hand over their ID to someone who is going to use it to their detriment.  They can let a bully walk on them like a doormat.  They may also get indignant and start ranting.  Many people told me, “I would have done it another way.”  Good for them. I made my own choice and have no regrets.

You can tell it’s Spring when the flowers bloom and the sidewalk is crammed full of two-wheel vehicles.

I joined a group of friends last night to go photograph the last night launch of the space shuttle.  NASA being NASA, the launch got canceled due to changing weather.  We were left standing there on a freezing beach at 4:30 AM.  Some folks did some light painting.  I just turned the camera in the opposite direction and left the shutter open for five minutes.  Other people went home with no pictures at all.

Sometimes, what you get is what you make of it.

After months (or was it years) of bitching about Movable Type, I’ve finally switched to WordPress.  I really wanted Movable Type to step up with the same ease of configuration as WordPress.  Themes & plugins just work.  You can code if you want, but you don’t have to do it.

Both platforms have a thriving community of users, but the WordPress community seems to work the way I want to work.  I think it’s a much more artistic community, given the plethora of themes I’ve reviewed.  I settled on a theme called ArtSee from Elegant Themes.  $20 for a year and access to all the themes on the site.  Changing or customizing a theme is as simple changing configurations on a panel; turning options on or off.  Doing the same on Movable Type would require changes in HTML & CSS.  Oh, sure, they tried to make a Style Library.  Take a look.  Ugly colors, but the same theme.  It’s pathetic.

Importing the old posts was fairly easy, but there are new features available with the theme I’m using.  I may go back and make some modifications to use those features, or maybe I’ll just move forward from this point.  It’s something for me to ponder.  I’m happy with my new toy.  Now it’s time to see what else I can make it do.

Hello, world.

Dear Six Apart people,
Why do your themes for Movable Type still suck so much? Mostly, you have variations on a theme created years ago. Stylecatcher came out in 2005 as a potential solution and it quickly went nowhere.
I can’t speak for all of your users, but I’m guessing there’s a pretty significant contingent of folks like me; people who lack design skills or otherwise don’t want to spend time delving into code to tweak CSS settings. We want visual choices. WordPress has several, including some great options for purchase. They’re easy to implement, often requiring little more than clicking a link for automatic download and activation. Within seconds, you can re-skin your WordPress blog with some really cool themes.
Why the fuck can’t you do that with Movable Type? Take a look at a package I bought from Pro Photo Blogs. It’s awesome and reasonably priced. It offered configurable options that allowed me to create my photo blog on Word Press in a way that I could NEVER do using Movable Type, unless I spent thousands of dollars on a custom template.
As a non-profit hobbyist, the economics just don’t work for me to spend that kind of money on my blog. So am I, and other MT users, doomed to ugliness or time consuming code-wrenching, or are you going to do something about it? Will you create a configurable design tool that isn’t laughable?
There is a market opportunity for you to explore. It doesn’t matter to me if Six Apart addresses this market itself or successfully encourages third party designers to create visually stimulating themes for Movable Type without requiring coding. It’s time that Movable Type stepped up to the plate and met this challenge. WordPress has a community of blog themes that is far and away superior to Movable Type. It’s time that you closed the gap.

I recently created another blog specific to my interest in Photography. While I haven’t exactly been burning up the Internet with posts on this one, I think I’m about to make some changes. Part of the reason I’ve not written here quite so often is my frustration with Movable Type – just signing in pisses me off.
The new blog is under Word Press and I’m thinking it’s time to change everything to that platform. While MT is fine for corporate accounts & Britney Spears, who can hire developers to tinker around with it, it’s just a giant pain in the ass for a guy like me who only wants a decent configuration tool so he can get to the business of writing. MT’s online configuration tool is laughable.
Until I can make some changes here, please feel free to join me at http://williambeem.com if you have an interest in photography.

I’m taking a moment to brag. It’s not a huge thing, but this photo was selected as the Image of the Week at the NAPP Member Portfolio site. At least it was enough to make me smile.

http://www.photoshopuser.com/members/portfolios/

I’m not sure which of my three dogs is the dumbest. Today it’s the little one, Max. A few months ago he seemed to be at death’s door and could barely move. The vet wanted to operate on him, but his blood test revealed a liver problem. We figured he’d be dead in a month. I started giving him some wet food as a treat in the morning, and he recovered. It’s not like he was starving, he always ate his food the same as the other two dogs. It’s just that this food seems to excite him. What dog doesn’t like wet food over dry? Keep in mind this dog is about 17 years old, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if he were ready to pass away. He’s old, can’t see for cataracts, has cysts all around his body, and generally doesn’t have much of anything to do; except eat that wet food every morning. Now it’s something he demands. I get home from the gym about 9:00 am and let all the dogs inside. He immediately starts running into me, stepping on me, and doing everything he can to get his daily wet food treat. I can’t give it to him in front of the bigger dogs, since they’d just nudge him away and eat it. I have to get them back outside and then Max starts prancing. You’d almost think he was a 2 year-old dog again. He literally stands up on his hind legs, paddles his front paws, and then BOUNCES his way into the kitchen to eat. That’s what he was doing this morning, bouncing along and looking over his shoulder, when he bounced his furry ass into the water bowl for the big dogs. It’s almost big enough for him to sleep in it, but he doesn’t because, you know, it’s full of water.

Anyway, he hops full body into the bowl, jumps out, and splashes water all over my kitchen floor. It doesn’t matter to him, since he still wants that wet food, but you know he’s not going to clean up the mess he made. Max earns the award for Dumbest Dog of the Day.