Brilliant architecture

From Sunshine+Design. When…

…Architects Martín Fernández de Lema and Nicolás F. Moreno Deutsch weren’t allowed to remove any trees on the grounds of this Buenos Aires spot [they went aboutw with a] design of the house was built around the landscape using poured concrete and slabs of wood.

Here’s one great example of the result:

Sunshine+Design has more great shots of the house.

On Facebook’s privacy bamboozlement

Check this out: Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options – Graphic – NYTimes.com. It also says that “Facebook says it wants to offer precise controls for sharing on the Internet.”. Frankly, that is nonsense. Facebook no doubt has many highly competent developers on staff. And any good developer would tell you that rather than have to make those settings at a lower level – as depicted in the diagram – you could be provided with the ability to set things at a higher level. For example, you should be able to have a “Friends Only” for each and every setting and have that set all at once. Facebook could then go through and make all those privacy settings to “Friends Only” all at once.

Instead, my belief is that Facebook sets those things to be public, and then makes YOU go through each and every one of those settings. Most people will not bother or give up.

That’s just one example of the bamboozlement. The fact that it’s privacy statement is so long is another.

Sad.

“Privacy is dead” is dead

Or at least, there is an Oversharing Backlash based on this post on The Daily Dish  By Andrew Sullivan. His post has a rundown on how younger people are reining in the amount of sharing they are doing via the Internet. Some of this could be attributed to sharing fatigue (i.e. maybe people are tired of blogging). Some could also be attributed to younger people growing up and feeling that with more responsibility, the need to act more responsible on the ‘Net is greater. But I also think some of that is a growing awareness that the need to protect one’s privacy is important.

I expect to see more on this meme in the upcoming months. If someone is smart, they will come up with better privacy in the social networks they create. If they do, they could turn Facebook into the next MySpace / Friendster / AOL.

Music for the Midweek: Finley Quaye and Melanie Fiona

Wednesday music should not be too up tempo, but it shouldn’t be too quiet. To me, it should be something like…well, these two pieces:

First up is Finley Quaye and Your Love Gets Sweeter Everyday. It reminds me in parts of Sam Cooke, Van Morrison and Fine Young Cannibals. How can you not listen?

Second to no one is Melanie Fiona doing Cupid on Billboard.com’s Mashup Mondays (Melanie is great, but those video overlays are so annoying…look away)

Both songs have good vocals and good acoustic guitar work.

Hey, there’s a few more hours of work until Friday: these tunes will help you get there.

Where are the best Greasy Spoons in Toronto?

BlogTO.com has a run down of the Best Greasy Spoons in Toronto, and I have to say that, having eaten in many of them, they have a really good list. If anything, it is a bit of a disservice to call them “greasy” spoons, since many of them have tastier food than you will find in alot of fast food joints or pubs. Plus these diners have plenty of charm and are often in great locations. As the article says, these types of establishments are fading fast. Get out a grab a club or an open faced sandwich while you still can.

I would also add Sunset Grill: it does mainly breakfast, but the cooking style is in line with these other places. And if you are ever in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, you have to go to Mike’s, my all time favourite restaurant service just this style of food. Delicious!

Banksy in Toronto?

It certainly looks like it, based on this recent work in T.O.

I’ve seen his work referenced on a few sites, but I wanted to point to Show & Tell Gallery because they are also a site you want to see for more than just Banksy. Check ’em out. They have more Banksy images, as well as more on the work of the artists they represent.

If you are thinking of leaving Facebook, but can’t thinking of alternatives, then consider

This post on rocket.ly,  Why You Should Still Quit Facebook, and in particular, these alternatives:

I am not aware of any good solutions for privacy in social media. Facebook has expressly moved away from providing one. But there are plenty of good opt-out solutions. Twitter works fine for status updates. For photos, we’ve had Flickr for years. For video, YouTube. For link sharing, Digg. I’ve picked these because they are all independent companies, but there are dozens of solutions for sharing social media.

A young woman explains why she wears the niqab, the all-covering veil

This article about a young woman who wears a niqab while in parts of Yemen (Los Angeles Times) is revealing in a way that the niqab is concealing. Reading about the …

“..20-year-old university student Layla Asda decided to wear the face-covering veil niqab, her father went ballistic. A relatively secular artist, he told her that the black cloak made her look like an old woman.

Still she continued to wear it, even though her family opposed it.”

..what I thought was how much wearing the niqab for this person is about protection and the negation of identity. I thought that was interesting. I also thought it was sad. I don’t think anyone should live in any society and be afraid for themselves, or to think that need to hide their identity. I had expected to hear she wears it more to promote an identity, a personal identity or an identification with a group. I had expected to hear more positive reasons to wear it. At least in this interview, those did not come across. I wonder if there are interviews with women who have a more positive outlook when it comes to wearing this.

A quick observation on how different generation use social technology differently

Me "Tweeting" to everyone in my studio. LLAP on Twitpic

This is Leonard Nimoy using Twitter. It’s from twitpic and they force this bad quality if you embed it on your blog. That said, I like this photo, but what I really like is how he and William Shatner and others of older generations tweet. For example, with this photo, he tweeted: Me “Tweeting” to everyone in my studio. LLAP. William Shatner does something similar, where they both make a tweet almost a letter or a note. (LLAP, live long and prosper, is his signoff). Leonard Nimoy has adopted the technology, but he still maintains conventions of communicating that is different than people of younger generations. You can see generation differences in how people communicate using social media, even though there is a degree of overlap forced on them by the constraints of the technology.

(This photo is property of Leonard Nimoy)

Why the news is failing

Frank Rich has a scathing column,  They Don’t Report. You Don’t Have to Decide on the NYTimes.com in which he criticizes the mainstream media for it’s poor coverage of the Times Square bomb scare, where they were yucking it up with the President  at the White House Correspondents Dinner instead of breaking to report on the breaking news event. There are a number of indirect criticisms in the column, but the overall impression is that Rich thinks today’s journalists are so busy celebrating themselves that they can’t be bothered to actually do their jobs. At first I thought it was a bit unfair, but then I came across this photo from the blog Sunshine + Design:

Then I thought: Frank Rich, as he always does, has a point. It reminded me of this photo from another great blog, Iconic Photos. It’s of nine European kings, taken in 1910, at the funeral of the English King, Edward VII:

Also at the funeral was an Emperor, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. By the end of the decade, most of these Kings were swept away. The same may be true with the Media Kings above, and the media empires they represent. Especially if they don’t smarten up and deal with the changes that are coming along and threaten to sweep them away as well.

This is why MIT is tough

Just look at the Qualifying Exams questions!

History: Describe the history of the papacy from its origins to the present day; concentrate especially but not exclusively on the social, political, economic, religious, and philosophical impact on Europe, Asia, America, and Africa. Be brief, concise, and specific.

Medicine: You have been provided with a razor blade, a piece of gauze, and a bottle of Scotch. Remove your own appendix. Do not suture until your work has been inspected.

The rest of the questions are just as Chuck Norris tough (and funny!).

Thanks to @eric_andersen on twitter for this.

Some creative ways to use Microsoft Project for Brainstorming

It seems odd to use Project for brainstorming, I admit. But there are advantages to it, as well. The one obvious one is this: when you are done, you (potentially) have a plan of what to do in front of you! But there are other advantages as well. But first, let’s start with how I do this.

Let’s take an easy example. Say I was planning on doing a major personal project (E.g. run a marathon, take 6 months off and travel, buy a new house). I would start by listing major activities. Write out as many as of them as I can, from start to finish. Then once I had my major activities down, I would start adding underneath them all the major tasks that I had to do.

  Now I have the outline of a plan, with the major activities and the major tasks associated with each activity.If this is going well for you, great. However, if you are getting stuck with coming up with activities, try this: start planning project X, execute project X plan, complete project X. For example, you might have: start planning to run my first marathon, train for the marathon, complete the marathon. It’s pretty sketchy, I know. Often times when you are planning to do something you have never done before, it is. If you have more activities, great: add ’em.

Once you are done with your activities, you need to have tasks. If nothing else, have two tasks per activity: start activity Y and complete activity Y. (If the activity is so small as to take little time, perhaps you can convert it to a task to stick under another activity).

If you don’t can’t come up with any tasks, then one could be: define tasks for this activity and list the tasks you need to do to accomplish this (talk to experts, do online research, etc). Some tasks are:         Research/Investigate X, Review findings with others, Plan next steps, Complete this activity, Document / record something, Present something,         Change something, Test something

I also try to use clear descriptions for your tasks, so they standalone on the Calendar view of Microsoft Project.

I recommend that you make your tasks imperative, specific, and measurable. (e.g. Do Something, Visit Someone, Go Somewhere)

Posted via email from Bernie Michalik’s posterous site

How Goldman Sachs is about to become the leverage for FinReq

Perhaps Lloyd Blankfein is a smart guy. It’s hard to tell. I wrote this awhile back, The Big Banks blow off Obama « Smart People I Know,  and commented how he and some others blew off Obama in the winter before HCR. Perhaps Blankfein and the rest of his team should study what happened during HCR. They may find that they are now going to play the role that Anthem did. Obama and his team used Anthem and their rate hikes as a concrete example of why Health Care Reform was needed. It was very effective. It helped pass Health Care Reform.

Now Obama wants Financial Reform legislation passed. He is now going to use Goldman Sachs the same way he used Anthem. Goldman Sachs may think this is about the law suit. But to me, it isn’t. It’s about getting the legislation passed and a good way to do that is to find a concrete example of why it should be done. And Sachs is going out of their way to provide that example. If they were smart, they would have shown some humility and contrition. Instead, they are going head to head with Obama. This will end up badly for them. And Obama and company will get the FinReg regulations they want.

Meanwhile, I expect to see Blankfein gone within a year, if not six months.

Holy Cow! Maybe they should call blippy leaky!

Wow! This is bad. Really bad. According to this, Blippy unwrapped users credit card numbers | White Hat News,  “it was found with a Google search, Blippy leaked a lot of users credit card numbers, the data actually can see the HTML source code directly, the current official has the problem and quickly fixed the same, at least there are four currently known to be affected customers”.

As in this!

If you are using blippy.com, find out if your card was leaked. And generally speaking, be reluctant to share too much personal or financial information on web sites.

Some thoughts on the importance of buying lottery tickets

I thought this yesterday when something promising happened at work and I thought: if this works out, it will be really good!! I left the day excited, happy, looking forward to the future. In short, I was hopeful. Now there is a good chance it won’t happen, but that, strangely, gives those feelings more power.I don’t buy lottery tickets often, save for the really big jackpots. But when I do, I find myself having the same feelings. Having the ticket inspires my thinking and bends them towards the positive. This feeling can last for days. I know I won’t win, likely. But I can suspend that disbelief in order to enjoy the positive feeling.

In many ways it is similar to buy a movie ticket or a theatre ticket to watch a performance. You suspend your belief in order (usually) to enjoy the feelings and ideas you take away from the performance. That ticket doesn’t enhance your life materially. But it does make your life better in a lot of ways.

A lottery ticket is the same. It is very unlikely to benefit you materially (though sometimes it will). But it can allow your imagination to soar, your spirits to be lifted, and your thinking to turn towards the positive. You can imagine taking trips to far away places, living in better surroundings, and helping people you love. If you pay attention, it can help you realize what is important to you and what you love (and what you do not). A lottery ticket can do many things, including providing a low cost insight into your own thinking (much cheaper than psychotherapy).

It has been said that lottery tickets are a tax on stupid people. I think that is short sighted and condescending. Most people who buy tickets know the odds. If anything, that makes it better. There is something transformative in hoping against great odds. What is religion and belief, if not the greatest of all hopes? The simple will to believe, to hope that our lives can be better, that will can uplift us and remove us from the ruts we are trapped in.

My son is 8. He likes Justin Bieber and he wanted to buy his CD because there was a golden ticket in one CD and the winner of the golden ticket gets a person visit from the Biebster himself. (This is devilishly good marketing taken right from Willy Wonka’s playbook). We had a great chat about this beforehand. I tried to balance his excitement about the idea of it with the fact that it would be very tough to win it. I also told him that even if he didn’t win, he would still have the CD and that would be good. For some adults, they might say: you shouldn’t let him get all
excited for nothing. But to me, the ability to be hopeful is like a muscle: if you don’t exercise it, it atrophies. I want him to have an awareness of the world and despite all its limitations and setbacks, I want him to be capable of being hopeful. The capability of being hopeful is the treasure left in Pandora’s box. It is a something we should treasure, among the many gifts that we, as human beings, possess.

Anyway, these are some things that I thought on a slow Saturday morning and that I hacked together on my Blackberry while lying on my couch. Thanks for reading it.

Posted via email from Bernie Michalik’s posterous site

How to build your own GSM cellular network and other things on my new IT blog at IBM developerWorks

I’ve started a new blog over at IBM’s developerWorks where I talk about topics related to my current professional life. You can find it and the information on how to build your own GSM cellular network here: Bernie Michalik.

I’ve been wanting to blog about technology for some time, but I wanted to seperate it from this blog, which is quite general and touches on any and all topics except for IT. For along time, I was concerned about blogging about what I work on. I have blogged in a group blog though, called The Orange Chair, on topics pertaining to Web 2.0 and emerging technology, and I think that has worked out well. This new blog on developerWorks will touch on IT generally.

It’s harder to blog about work. There is alot of things I can’t divulge publically. However, there are things of a general nature, either with regards to IT itself or working as an IT architect, that I thought were shareable, so to speak, and I plan to write about them. Let’s see! Maybe I have too much to blog about all ready, and this blog will fade away. I hope not. But like I said, let’s see. Besides, there is alot of interesting things happening in the world of IT: there is plenty of material to talk about! 🙂

How iPads may become the next big business thing…

…can be seen in this Mashable post  where a “hospital district in Visalia, California, has ordered 100 iPads to provide staff with access to rudimentary applications like e-mail, as well as X-ray images, EKG results and patient monitoring programs around its five sites.”

This makes great sense. The iPad has the benefits of printed material that a laptop does not, and it has the benefits of a computer that printed material does not. I can eventually see them preloaded with business specific applications. For example, new employees might get one preloaded with everything they need to know about their new company. Visitors could sign in on them. Couriers could use them for deliveries. The list goes on and on.

The Johnny Cash Project shows how to crowdsource art

What is The Johnny Cash project? The Contrarian blog explains:

“The Johnny Cash Project invites participants to use custom drawing tools to create the 1,368 frames in the 2 minute, 51 second, video. Since more than one artist will end up submitting artwork for each frame, the video will look different each time it’s played.”

The design of the site is really well done, and the resulting animation is striking. Check out The Johnny Cash project

More good economic news – GM pays back SOME OF ITS government loans from US, Canada

This headline is misleading: GM pays back government loans from US, Canada from AP/ Yahoo! News. GM still owes alot of money, and the $8.1 billion payback is a small portion of the $61.5 billion it borrowed from the people of the U.S. and Canada. The good news, besides the payback, is that the payback is ahead of schedule. GM’s management seems intent on paying it back as soon as it can. That’s a good thing in itself, but the fact it is doing it is far better.

Plus, GM still employs 40,000 workers, which is a signifigant number of people. That’s nothing to sniff at either. If GM had gone under, that would be alot more people unemployed in regions that would have a hard time dealing with that.

Facebook strips away more your privacy

According to this post on the eff.org site (Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information).
In a nutshell:

“Once upon a time, Facebook could be used simply to share your interests and information with a select small community of your own choosing. As Facebook’s privacy policy once promised, “No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.”

How times have changed.

Today, Facebook removed its users’ ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users’ profiles, “including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests” will now be transformed into “connections,” meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don’t want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them.

The example Facebook uses in its announcement is a page for “Cooking.” Previously, you could list “cooking” as an activity you liked on your profile, but your name would not be added to any formal “Cooking” page. (Under the old system, you could become a “fan” of cooking if you wanted). But now, the new Cooking page will publicly display all of the millions of people who list cooking as an activity.”