2010 | write/geek

Impressed, perplexed by Howard Johnson

I’m presently at a hotel, and I’ve found myself impressed with the Wi-Fi here. The signal strength is okay and the speed is adequate, but that’s not what’s standing out. It’s the branding.

I’ve seen all manners of SSIDs since Wi-Fi became commonplace in hotels, from “Free Wifi” to “[hotel name here],” but in my experience, this Howard Johnson location is truly singular… and perplexing to me.

The hotel offers multiple wireless access points. I’m guessing this is for better coverage, but they decided to give each one a different name. The names aren’t anything predictable, like hojo1, hojo2, either.

I’m impressed that the management actually took the time to integrate feel-good corporate messages into each access point’s SSID. Using tech to communicate thoughts in nontraditional ways is certainly relevant to my interests. However, picking a different slogan for each AP not only seems technically sloppy, but makes for an awkward mish-mash of old and new company taglines. Also, how am I supposed to know the AP I’m connecting to isn’t an evil twin? It’d be pretty trivial for someone to throw together something like hojolovesyou and have its potential for malice be imperceptible next to the other goofy networks.

My concerns over the wireless amenities are mostly theoretical, since my tethered Android phone has me adequately covered when it comes to Internet access. My use of the free Wi-Fi is limited to consuming to high-bandwidth content that would make my currently-EDGE connection choke. (What’s more, as a Linux user — varoom! —much of what a theoretical attacker could do, outside of MITM, isn’t really a concern to me.)

The plugins behind the blog

I appreciate the slick publishing platform that WordPress provides for my writing. Perhaps even better is its plugin system, which lets me make it do just about anything I like.

Since you wont find me churning out PHP code of my own anytime soon (I’ve actually been meaning to take another stab at to wrapping my brain around Python now that version 3 is out), I rely on the WordPress community to do so for me. Fortunately, with nearly 10,000 plugins available, they seem up to the task!

When I set up my WordPress installation earlier this year, I promised myself that I wouldn’t go overboard the way I usually end up customizing and extending most of the other tech tools/toys in my life. Even while showing restraint, I’ve managed to accumulate just over 20 plugins at this point… whoops! ¹ That said, every plugin I’m using has helped make this blog what it is today… from one that mirrors comments that people post on Google Buzz, to one that gives me a per-post space to brainstorm as I compose.

Thus, I’ve created an ‘About Plugins‘ page that properly recognizes each one.

The plugins actually seem to be impacting the blog’s performance; I need to take a closer look into just where the inefficiencies lie.[↩]

Why I don’t worry about blog stats, not even a little bit

I don’t obsess over this blog’s traffic stats. Doing so would be an example of kicking my own ass.

So while I use both Google Analytics and the WordPress Stats plugin, I don’t care a whit about the numbers. I don’t even have to check them to know that they are meaningless; they’re close enough to zero that they might as well be. (Words I’ve never spoken: “I had 12 pageviews today, up from 10. High and to the right, baby!”)

I can’t separate bot traffic from human traffic, and for all I know, I’m probably responsible for some incidental pageviews… at least if I happen to load pages when not signed in to WordPress. And why should I care about pageviews, anyway? It’s not like I’m looking to sell ads.

So why do I continue to use not one, but two solutions to not give me numbers? For the qualitative data. I can’t get enough of those.

My two favorites are as follows: referrers and search terms (which are, themselves, referrers, anyway). Both of these give me information that is actually useful, right now. Search terms tell me about a case where someone was looking for something and found my post’s title and/or summary promising enough to actually click through. And referrers, clearly, show me who (if anyone) is driving people my way.

(Even in my past life on Multiply, I hooked my account up with Site Meter‘s free service to see if they could show me any insightful stats. I took a look through what they offered and found that all I really cared about were the referrers… which were, more often than not, hilarious. Web browser, OS and screen resolution can be interesting for seeing how my visitors stack up against Web users as a whole, but what am I going to do with that sort of insight? Fix IE6 CSS issues? Ha.)

The qualitative data that these services collect from my blog have shown me that people have found my post about the crappy Vivitar Clipshot, some even wondering if it’s OS X-compatible. (Hint: it isn’t.) A bunch of different search terms brought people to my logo/visual puns post. And one search that didn’t even logically match up with content I’ve posted, recently learned words reappearing, gives me a great idea for a future post!

Should I be worrying more about appealing to the masses, or about creating the sort of content that people who actually do visit are interested in? That’s easy. The searches and referrers have shown me that (please cue the schmaltzy music) I’ve touched people’s lives… even if I didn’t necessarily give them anything of value, and perhaps even wasted their time with content that wasn’t relevant to their interests. I made a difference!

Pocket paper perplexity

I don’t like shopping for clothing very much, and it shows: my wardrobe overwhelmingly consists of solid-color shirts, jeans and the same kind of sneakers in a few different colors. Sticking to basics keeps things simple. Hmm, does this plain t-shirt come in black? I’ll take it!

So yesterday, while at a local outlet mall, I did something I didn’t really enjoy: I bought a new pair of jeans. I had to dig through a few clearance racks before coming across a pair I didn’t dislike that much, one that actually fit me without suffering from the intentional distressing that the cool kids seem to favor these days. I would have initially liked my chosen pair even more if they didn’t suffer from this funky (that means “bad”) color pattern sewn into the back pockets. The pants are made by Mecca, and according to an attached tag, feature a “rocker fit.” (Oblig: \m/) I suppose this is to differentiate from most of their clothes, which feature a hip-hop fit.

I decided to try them on for size (a phrase nobody uses literally these days!) regardless, and perhaps having caught a look at them in the fitting room mirror, found myself… actually liking them, even sort of appreciating the funky (that means “good”) color pattern!

So I bought them. Arriving home, I put them on and noticed the familiar rustle of paper in the pockets… except I couldn’t imagine why that would happen, unless the receipt had somehow slipped in. I reached into the rear pocket to remove the paper and found that it didn’t easily slide out on its own. I pulled harder, heard a soft ‘tear’ sound and found myself holding something that looked like newsprint.

I kept pulling and, as you can see, produced a good amount of paper scraps from the pockets. Perhaps not surprising is that many of them include clothing-related information, but what of the “forklift pockets,” which seem to differ from pants pockets? Or the seemingly random phone number scrap?

I could still feel a little bit of paper in the pockets; I changed into another pair of pants so I could have a closer look at these. I turned the pockets inside-out, and this is what I found:

To state the obvious, it looks like the process used to create those colorful patterns on the pockets involves sewing newsprint onto the reverse side of the pants. Not being a big textile enthusiast, I can’t imagine what purpose that the paper serves, but I’m guessing it should have been removed before leaving the factory in Pakistan.

With English being the official language of Pakistan, and widely used in commerce, I suppose it’s not much of a surprise to find paper from there with English writing on it.

I just wasn’t expecting to find anything of the sort, you know, in my pants.

How to kick your own ass

So last night I was letting my mind wander while sitting around playing some Cave Story,¹ trying to decide whether I should blog the story of how I learned the word “residence” (yes, these are the things you think about when you are me), when I had a funny thought. Yes, a second one.

It went a bit like “Everett, you could share bits like that on your blog, but you do realize that in doing so, you’re cannibalizing content that you could be saving up for the memoir you may one day write, right?”

I chuckled at the thought and concluded that the story of how I learned the word “residence” may not, after all, make for that great a blog post. But in another moment of insight, I took my secondary thought to its logical conclusion: if I were serious about considering writing a memoir (and I wasn’t), perhaps at this point in my life I should worry more about who would even want to read such a book.

That’s not to put down my life and those who have played a role in shaping it, but… sorry you guys, I just don’t think it would make a compelling book. And a life spent sitting around wondering if I should write a book about my life seems even further away from a life worth writing about.

I wondered if maybe this principle (one worrying more about some potential future, at the expense of the present, which could be better used to get one to their desired future) is something that a lot of people do, something that has broader implications than some hypothetical, self-indulgent tome. Consider the example of relatively not-well-off people who oppose that which would be beneficial to them, by, say, having political leanings that do more for those who are much better off than they are. Why would they do this? Do they actually think they’re likely to be in that other class someday? Planning on winning the lottery, much?

It’s one thing to plan for the future. But it’s another to fetishize some outcome that, be real with yourself, is unlikely to happen… and is all the less likely, yet, if you sit around daydreaming about it.

Awesome, awesome game. Free download here for Windows/Mac/Linux/etc. or buy it for $12 on WiiWare.[↩]

“Real artists ship”

I’m by no means an Apple fan, and don’t own any Apple products (though I’ve always wanted to play with a Newton!), but to a geek, it’s pretty hard to ignore the effects that Apple has had on the world around us.

This probably wouldn’t make it to the average list of Apple’s contributions, but my personal favorite is a Steve Jobs saying:

“Real artists ship.”

I take this to mean that you can keep polishing the product until it’s perfect, but it doesn’t matter how great it is unless it makes it out the door while it’s still relevant. (No, it didn’t take a lot of reading deeply into the phrase for me to come up with that, Mr. Hypothetical Snarky Commenter. An alternate meaning could be an explanation for pushing a product out the door when it contains bugs that may give others pause.)

I sometimes find myself spending more time than I should on something, in pursuit of getting it unimpeachably perfect. It’s a flaw of mine. I need to do something about that, but I’m not sure what… and giving up on quality isn’t an option. Consider this bug #1 in my public bug tracker, powered by WordPress. ;-)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to ship this post so I can go ship that e-mail I’ve been crafting so I can finally ship myself some Zs.

http://www.ghostinthepixel.com/?p=24

New Orleans and the graffiticular stylings of Banksy

Now, I’m not here to argue graffiti as a legitimate art form (which it is), or say that its presence is a net positive for society (which it’s not). I’d rather simply point out that during our recent trip to New Orleans, my sister and I twice stumbled upon works of perhaps the best-known graffiti artist in the world: Banksy.

I remembered reading about Banksy’s pieces in New Orleans, but couldn’t remember at what point, post-Katrina, they appeared. It was nice to know that at least a couple of them are still intact today, even if more (relatively) talentless stuff has gone up nearby in the year-and-a-half since Lincoln. Nice, though, that the new additions respected Abe’s space!

The first time we saw one, we were exiting I-10 at Canal Street, on our way to the Algiers Ferry, when something caught my eye… something from the Internet! I knew right away that I needed a photo of it, but couldn’t find a place to park just then, so we found ourselves stuck in Claiborne Street traffic for a while until we could make it back to Tulane Ave, the first street pointing in the right direction (after two inward-facing one-ways!). We made it back and found a place to park so I could get out and took a few photos.

The second (and sadly, final) Banksy art sighting of our trip happened on our last night in town, on our way to an ill-fated trip to Yo Mama’s. We noticed the girl, missed the turn, and had to loop around a few blocks, but ultimately managed to capture the second piece you see above. It was right across Kerlerec Street from the Rampart Food Store.

Cool art, but what of the rights of the property owners? Yes, there is that… but Banksy can come ‘tag up’ on my car whenever s/he wants!