Author: gulley

I have never seen the aurora borealis, but I want to.

I live in Boston, which is far enough north for this not to be a crazy goal, but still, you have to be looking in the right place at the right time (often at an outrageous time of night) to be rewarded with a view of the famous Northern Lights. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could arrange for someone to let me know exactly when to wake up and run outside?

One thing I know about auroras is that they’re associated with solar flares, and so when I read on Space.com that there was some massive solar flares activity, I knew I might have a chance to catch my aurora. Still, when exactly would necessary geomagnetic storm occur on Earth? When you want to know about space weather (like flares and solar wind proton flux density), the place to go is SpaceWeather.com, and these guys actually offer a phone service called SpaceWeatherPhone. They’ll call you and tell you when to wake up, but it’ll cost you.
I’m too cheap to pay someone to wake me up in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t hard to hunt down a free service called Aurora Chasers, which relies on email instead of the phone. I signed up right away.

Now I wait by my Gmail account, painting my fingernails, and waiting for a note from the Northern Lights. But I have my doubts about this free service. The storm is over now, and although I never heard from Aurora Chasers, the folks over at SpaceWeatherPhone have some beautiful pictures to show.

Maybe next time…

Several years ago I visited the website for a company called Experts Exchange, a company that brokers information exchange between computer system specialists. As I typed in the URL, I realized something that must have been plaguing their marketing department right about then: one look at the URL http://www.expertsexchange.com, and your brain fishes out the conspicuous “sex” in the middle and completes the sentence. Presto! ExpertSexChange.com. You can almost hear the ad jingle: “Put your gender in a blender at Expert Sex Change.” Not surprisingly, they changed their domain name to experts-exchange.com.

But it does show how surprisingly easy it is to make a big goof. A site called Domain Rookie just published a funny piece entitled Domain Name Mispronouncings. He leads with ExpertsExchange, but he’s got some other good ones too. Some are more credible than others. TherapistFinder (TheRapistFinder) seems real, but I don’t for one second believe there is a real pen company called Pen Island. The domain name for that last one will be left as an exercise for the reader.

When I lived in San Francisco, my car (a sleek white 1979 Chevette) got broken into twice. The second time it happened, all they really got was my overnight bag with all my clothes in it. I was lucky that’s all there was to it, but even so, aside from the nasty sense of violation at being robbed, I was intensely irritated that the thief stole something of no possible value to them (underwear, toothbrush, socks) but which was nevertheless lost to me forever. I remember thinking, as I shopped for new underwear, that I would have gladly paid money to see a video of the thief doing the deed, even if it wouldn’t have identified the criminal. I just wanted the sense of closure at seeing the bastard work. I suppose I would’ve thought to myself: so that’s what it looked like…

My friend Roy recently sent me a link along these lines about Johannesburg, a town that knows a thing or two about car-related theft. The link points to an interview with a former (so we are told) car thief/hijacker in which the interviewee reveals some of the secrets to his erstwhile trade. It provides some of the answers to questions that are generally so damnably difficult to uncover: How do you steal cars? What is your day like? How do you choose your victims? Here for example is a useful tip: “If I was having difficulty with a particular car, sometimes I’d dress up nicely and go to a dealer posing as a customer. I’d ask the salesman how good the anti-theft system was on that car and he would give me all the details.” Good to know. Here’s another moderately reassuring Q and A.

Q. In a hijacking did you normally go for soft targets like women?

A: No, I could take on anyone. I was a professional. I’d stick my gun right in their faces and they wouldn’t give me any trouble. That’s why I never shot or hurt anyone; I was against that. A friend of mine sometimes shot people he hijacked and he used to wake up with nightmares.

Like I said, it’s only moderately reassuring.

It’s certainly an overstatement to say Katrina is “our tsunami,” but there is a grim resemblance to the before and after satellite pictures of both scenes of devastation.

DigitalGlobe is the company that supplies the imagery for Google Earth and other products like it. They have accelerated their normal imaging process to create this Hurricane Katrina Media Gallery. It’s a well made package of information.

No sooner do people have the ability to put pictures on the web then they want to tell stories about them. To serve this need, there are a number of nifty make-your-own-comic-strip sites out there. Recently I came across the Flash-based Strip Generator from Third Frame Studios. The fun thing about Strip Generator is that it’s bilingual in English and Slovenian, so you can use it to learn words like smetnjak (trashcan), knjiga (something you might put in your kouček), and ključavnica (difficult to translate, but means roughly “help, I’ve jammed my fingers in the keyboard again!”). Inexplicably, I found a surprisingly good Garfield comic generator on the National Institutes of Health website. With this tool, it may actually be possible to make a funny Garfield comic. By contrast, I wasn’t very impressed with the UI for the more generic StripCreator. It’s a decidedly non-Flash non-sexy web-1.0 old-school dropdown-menu-spinnin’ form-heavy way to make comics.

But these are all iconic, cartoony comics. Suppose you want to make a comic-like page of your own pictures? That’s where ComicLife comes in, and although it’s only available on the Mac, it seems to be the pick of the litter. I heard about ComicLife while listening to a podcast of an
interview conducted using Skype between Australia and the US. It was a very 2005 kind of moment. ComicLife was created by the guys at plasq.com, and it lets you create story panels with your pictures. They host a gallery to give you an idea of what you can do. It looks pretty slick. It’s taken off as a meme, and like all modern memes, it has its own Flickr tag (comiclife). Someone has even published an entire ComicLife-based graphic novel on Flickr. Say what you like about the result, the rapid and unanticipated fusion of all these online media is pretty remarkable.

I need a new web host. My current one, Interland is not good. They are sloppy about a good many things, but the worst is that I am regularly unable to edit my blog because of some sort of CGI budget that I’m topping out. I get a message that says (effectively) “Can’t help you now. Try again in five minutes. :-)” When I complain about this, they don’t offer to help me understand or monitor the problem (Why is this happening? What can I do about it?), they just want to upgrade my plan to a more expensive one with a bigger CGI budget.

Upgrade this: I’m using your computers to advertise the fact that you stink.

My nephew Ben (I hosted his high school salutatory address on this site) has graduated college and moved to China for a while to teach English in Guangdong province. He has already been asked to be a model for commercials. Without being absolutely certain, I believe this is the first time Ben has been asked to be a model in his life. But even better than being asked to be a model in China, he has also taken a blog-pen in hand and will be posting to http://hairybarbarian.blogspot.com/ under the name Barbarian at the Gates. At the rate they’re going, the Chinese will soon be running everything, so I’m glad to have a family member who can help coach me through new New World Order.