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And I hate it that the front door to the house isn't private property.  Daily, people leave fliers and business cards and unsolicited junk on the door!

This week's big news story:  the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has decided that the government can, without a warrant, sneak onto your property, your driveway, and place a GPS tracking device on your car that tracks everywhere you go.  We no longer have a reasonable expectation of privacy for our driveways, which even delivery people can use.

Shockingly, this ruling is actually getting some media coverage.

Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most passionately. "1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last," he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell's totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: "Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania."

Source:  Time

Some have pointed out that if you are wealthy, you probably live in a gated community or have gates around your property that would extend your zone of reasonable expectation of privacy.  So only the poor people have less privacy.  But that's OK, isn't it?  I mean, wealthy people don't commit crimes.  Wealthy people don't bilk billions, even trillions out of the unsuspecting.  Enron never happened.  No Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme.  No Wall Street bail out while the captains of capitalism lived off the slaughtered fatted cow.

Besides, privacy died long ago in this country — during the George W. Bush administration, I do believe.  His cronies called it The Patriot Act.  Just the name says "Run!  Don't walk!"  During his administration and the Republican rein of terror, not only were hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras installed all over this nation, but warrantless wiretaps, "enhanced interrogations," and god knows what else were made the order of the day.

And who are we kidding?  I'd bet my last dollar that the US government routinely snags the GPS satellite data from specific cars at will.  There really is no need to place anything on the cars of serious criminals.  That's so last century.  Only puny local police departments have to actually walk onto someone's driveway to plant a GPS under their car.  The big time crooks already have GPS as part of the most fashionable bling package.

The totalitarian state is here.  Is now.  We live it.  The Constitution and Bill of Rights are just window dressing from a time gone by.

Related articles

• Court allows agents to secretly put GPS trackers on cars (cnn.com)
• Warrentless GPS Tracking Of Your Car Is Legal If You're Not Wealthy Enough To Protect It (dvorak.org)
• The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves (time.com)
• The Government's New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS (time.com)
• Judge Kozinski Doesn't Track with the Ninth Circuit on GPS and the Fourth AmendmentCalls his fellow judges 'cultural elitists' when it comes to privacy. (abovethelaw.com)

of an iPhone 4!

It arrived at 9:30am at the front door via the stork (FedEx guy).

I unboxed it ceremoniously. It is beautiful, and smart — just like it's father (me, course)!

I turned it on. It asked to be connected to the mother ship. I plugged it into my Macbook Pro. iTunes then displayed my phone number and requested my billing zip code and the last 4 numbers of my social security number. It then said my activation session session had expired. Retry.

After three failed retries, I called Apple support. They told me to reboot my computer. I did. It activated after requiring 3 DNA samples —well, not really, but you are forced to agree to god knows what*. The moment it activated, my call to Apple support on my old iPhone was disconnected.

I then unplugged the new phone from iTunes and replugged it in as directed. iTunes is now installing all of my old iPhone's content onto the new phone.

I must say, and this is really actually very important to me, this is the best product delivery and activation process Apple and AT&T have ever had. I all but went on a safari camping out when I purchased my first iPhone from the Apple store at Lennox Mall. Activating it took hours (almost a whole day)! And each subsequent purchase was fraught with stupendously long lines but better activation times. This one they almost got completely right!

Amazing how long it takes to transfer about 24gb of data to the new phone via USB 2. It's now finished transferring all of my applications and is now working on sending over the video and audio content.

*Apparently iOS 4 users are now sending Apple retina scans, urine samples, blood and stool samples, along with our current location at every breath we take. The mother ship will use this information benevolently, of course. They will ply us with iAds tailored specifically to our personal DNA profile so as to extract as much money from our bank accounts as possible. The power of the tethered device is not to be underestimated!

Oooooooh!  Loooook!!  It's teething already!!

Related articles:

• Preparing for iPhone 4 Launch Day (cbsnews.com)
• Christmas Coming One Day Early? iPhone 4 on 6/23 For Some? (geardiary.com)

The banks were too big to fail.  Google is too big to be anything but evil.

I'm sure everyone has heard by now that the little Google street car that has mapping our world (while very cool, it takes away our privacy) was also snooping around everyone's wireless networks.  If your network was unprotected when the Google street car came by your home or office, Google took your email and password information as well.

Don't tell me the very bright people at Google haven't been doing analysis on the human cognition of password creation.  To the nefarious among us, we are nothing more than data.  I'll never forget overhearing a restaurant dinner conversation here in LA, "Yeah, I like so-and-so, but that's just one data point!"

As far as I am concerned, Google can never be trusted.

Wi-Fi traffic intercepted by Google’s Street View cars included passwords and e-mail, according to the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL)."

[Source: Google Street View Wi-Fi data included passwords and e-mail | Security | Macworld.]

I have frequently posted vituperant remarks about AT&T. The company generally is loathsome. Their 3G network service here in Manhattan Beach is horrid. I can barely get a signal at the house. I frequently drop calls. Incoming calls frequently just go straight to voicemail without my phone ever ringing. LAX rarely even gets 3G service, just the horribly slower Edge network.

But I now have something good to say about AT&T, sort of...

I read a tweet about a microcell for AT&T. I googled it to find out what it was. Apparently, if you have bad 3G reception, you can purchase this microcell that, if I understand it correctly, basically offloads your cell phone calls and data to the Internet.

So now I get a full AT&T cell signal in the house, most of which didn't get a signal at all. And now my cell phone calls and my cell phone data access is offloaded to Verizon's FIOS network. Up to 10 people can place calls simultaneously through my MicroCell "tower" here in the house.

It seems to work well, but I haven't had any incoming calls yet. At least AT&T had a good idea of allowing customers in areas with poor service to set up their own mini cell tower in their homes or businesses.

Well, Wordpress 3.0 has been available for download as a beta product until today.  It went alpha.  So I downloaded it having heard good things about its stability and usability.  I'm especially interested in exploring the merging of MU into the base installation.

My upgrade was not without issues though:  immediately after the upgrade the Wordpress version of my site was dead and the Admin login area was as well.  What to do?!  After a quick hustle or at wordpress.org's forums, I went in and disabled my plugins folder by using my FTP client to rename it and create an empty plugins folder.

Poof!

Everything worked again.  I added plugins one by one until I found the offending one:  Lifestream.  When I have a bit more time, I'll check for an upgraded version of the plugin.

[P.S.  It occurs to me that many of my readers at this rendition of my site may be completely unaware of the fact that I have been running a parallel site, testing it for compatibility and such.  This has been going on now for some time.  If you want to check out the Wordpress version of timtyson.us, just click here.

Related articles:

• Download WordPress 3.0 (earnblogger.com)
• Wordpress 3.0 release video (sciencetext.com)
• WordPress 3.0 Released, Download And Upgrade Now (ghacks.net)
• WordPress 3.0 "Thelonius" Is Now Available (steffanantonas.com)
• Wordpress 3.0 arrives, with multi-blog support and new default theme (downloadsquad.com)
• What's New in WordPress 3.0 (tipsblogger.com)

I have been asked numerous times why I do not have a Facebook page.  Originally, I had three main reasons:

1. I thought Facebook would be another digital fad like AOL, MySpace, etc.  It would go away—and indeed probably will in time .  Something else would replace it.  Would I then have to jump on that social tool-du-jour?
2. I have two blogs that I enjoy using to share my professional and my personal "online me."  I don't need another online presence.
3. I became concerned that Facebook was an enormously successful marketing tool that, like almost any other American business, would, in the blink of an eye, sell its soul and all of the marketing data it accrued for profit and then to the devil called greed.

Then along came the huge issue of privacy concerns that is now plaguing Facebook.  The foolhardiness of this quotation, from Facebook's founder dropped my jaw!

You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” – Mark Zuckerberg, 2009

Source:  Why Mark Zuckerberg Needs to Come Clean about His Views on Privacy by:  Kim-Mai Cutler

Is he serious?!  There is one me—the me, me. And I have numerous "identities," as does every other human being on this planet. Identity is the product of relationship or association. People have a work or professional identity, their identity as a spouse, their identity as a parent, their identity as a friend, their identity as a neighbor, their identity as a member of community, etc. To insinuate, let alone state, that all of these identities living in each of us somehow lacks integrity is to demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding about humanity and the definition of integrity.  But there are additional layers of complexity here.

The notion of “radical transparency,” a term being brandished about lately, is, I think, based in a naïve and simplistic world view.  I recall as a young school administrator listening to adults confide to me the complexities of their life situations.  At the time I was too young to actually even believe them as they recounted the circumstances of their lives.  I couldn't imagine that so many people lived in such incredulous circumstances.  At the time, I didn't have enough life experience to understand how fragile the easy life of even simple privilege I had always been lucky enough to enjoy was.  I had little, if any, experience with the complexity of a broader scope of life.

A significant percentage of people would not live life better if they lived in complete, radical transparency.  And a significant percentage of twenty-somethings, like Zuckerberg, might think they can now but later find that life brings things into their lives they may wish to leave forgotten, not plastered all over the Internet.

And what of context?  Without context to clarify meaning, to provide an illuminating perspective, many things could be so misunderstood as to be immensely damaging both today and at some unexpected time in an unforeseeable future, especially when people only know the "virtual you" before getting to know the actual you living within the context of your life.  Moments in time that are the tiniest reflections of the whole of a person can supplant the essence, the potential, the intent and focus of a future life better lived.  If being an administrator taught me anything, it was that people need a dignified option to find a better way forward that provides them with the hope of a good future.

At the very least, Zuckerberg is brilliant (attending Exeter and Harvard) and exceedingly wealthy (Forbes estimates his 2010 net worth at $4 billion.)  He is a young man of wealth and privilege.  What he lacks is a sensible world view for the masses of people who lack the resources to ever control their own destiny.  He's foolhardy enough to think he can manage that for the 400,000,000+ Facebook users.

As things are now, Zuckerberg stands to profit most when you naïvely live his vision of radical transparency, of one identity—your Facebook identity.  He can then continue to mine and aggregate every bit of information about you shared on his platform.  You will be powerless to do much about it.  He can monetize and redistribute that information in ways oblivious to you, and oblivious he wants you to remain.

May 31st is set to be "Quit Facebook Day."  I think it's time for millions of people to send Mr. Zuckerberg a "It's time to get real!" wake up call.  Or, you can continue to let him control the future of your privacy.  It's your choice—for now!

Graphic Above Source: MoveOn.org

Related articles:

• Facebook CEO Allegedly Mocked Users For Sharing Personal Data With Him At Harvard (huffingtonpost.com)
• Change Facebook or Change Ourselves? (jilliancyork.com)
• On Facebook's Selective Transparency (allfacebook.com)

Americans need to stand up and say, "Hell No!  We will not live out SciFi!"

Hollywood claims that, in the future, they will allow you to see movies that are currently in the theater at home on your TV set while the movie is in the theater.

Horse Manure!  Here's what Tim predicts: DVD's as we know them today will go away.  The price of movies will go up.

To see any movie, you will be forced to stream it over the Internet to your TV.  To keep you from ripping a copy of the movie by sending the audio and video feed out of your TV and into a DVR or other recording device, Hollywood will reach into your home, into your TV set, and shut off these outputs.

[Apple has already quietly pulled off shutting off your external computer monitor jack when playing HD content.  Did you know this Apple users???  Go ahead and try it on one of the newer Mac laptops.  Try plugging in a projector to your laptop (with the new MiniDisplay port) and playing an HD movie you purchased from the iTunes Store.  It doesn't work now, does it.  It will only play through the AppleTV or on a specific Apple monitor.  Isn't this just the most clever thing.  Guess what Apple is up to!]

What else will they want to do in 10 years?

Hollywood will soon have the power to remotely disable the analog outputs on your set-top box, under a decision by federal regulators on Friday intended to prevent home recording of new movie releases.

The move by the Federal Communications Commission grants cable and satellite providers the power to block consumers from viewing just-released movies in an analog format through a process known as Selectable Output Control. Hollywood requested SOC powers as a condition of allowing providers for the first time to release movies to their in-home customers while the film is in theaters.

The Motion Picture Association of America said its member studios would not authorize the early movie releases unless it won the ability to deploy Selectable Output Control. The reason: Analog video signals can easily be recorded, while dig"

[Source: FCC Lets Hollywood Turn Off Your Output Jacks | Threat Level | Wired.com.]

Boys and girls:  This is not a good thing.

Related articles

• Here Is How The FCC Gave The Keys To The Kingdom To Hollywood (lockergnome.com)
• FCC Lets Hollywood Turn Off Your Output Jacks (wired.com)
• FCC gives Hollywood control over your home theater (arstechnica.com)
• Silicon Alley Insider: OUTRAGE OF THE DAY: FCC Says Hollywood Can Turn Off Parts Of Your Home Theater While You're Watching Movies (businessinsider.com)
• FCC Gives Hollywood The Right To Break Your TV/DVR... Just 'Cause (techdirt.com)

Well, it's about time something like this appeared.  I, ever the cynic, wonder who owns this company.

It’s easier on the web to use reviews to choose the best noise-canceling headphones or a good Indian restaurant than it is to find even the most basic information on which doctor you should go to.

But a new service called Doctor Finder created by Insider Pages hopes to change that by fielding comprehensive online reviews of doctors.

The site covers nearly a million doctors in the United States, combining patient reviews with board certification and official malpractice and sanction records to help patients find a new doctor. Users can sort potential doctors by specialty, insurance carrier, gender, locality, ratings and years of experience.

That’s a big upgrade from how most people choose a doctor now, according to Insider Pages general manager Eric Peacock. Most people simply go to their insurance provider’s website to see a list of doctors nearby, and then decide on one blindly."

[Source: New Service Lets You Check Out Your Doctor Online, Before You Get Checkup | Epicenter | Wired.com.]

Just spreading the AT&T love...

AT&T promised to spend $2 billion upgrading its wireless network this year. Whatever it has spent on the upgrades so far isn't helping.

 

A new report from ChangeWave Research (via Philip Elmer DeWitt) shows consumer dissatisfaction growing with AT&T, while it's decreasing with Verizon. ChangeWave surveyed 4,040 smartphone owners about dropped calls over the last three months.

In the chart below, you can see dropped calls for AT&T customers growing, despite the investment to improve its wireless network.

Source:  Business Insider:  CHART OF THE DAY: AT&T's Network Blows

Do the math:  That's three times more dropped calls!!  (But AT&T's advertisements tell me they have me covered.  Riiiiiight!)

Related articles:

• AT&T dropping more calls than ever (Philip Elmer-DeWitt/Fortune) (techmeme.com)
• CHART OF THE DAY: AT&T's Network Blows (T, VZ, AAPL) (businessinsider.com)
• New survey shows AT&T customers still get the short end of the stick (edibleapple.com)
• Verizon iPhone Could Attract More Than Half of Carrier's Customers [REPORT] (mashable.com)
• Survey: Despite network spending, AT&T dropping more calls (blogs.chron.com)

Yesterday was an interesting day for me—most days are, actually. But the planets seemed to be especially aligned, or maybe yesterday was a "rip, a hole in the time/space continuum" that "take us thru the event horizon." *

1. I got an email invitation to connect with another Tim Tyson on a social network site. What was particularly interesting is that I've been receiving emails for over a year, maybe two, intended for this guy. Apparently our email addresses at a particular email service provider are very similar, and people would type his incorrectly. Since we both have the same name, it's understandable.

At first I thought these were all some sort of junk mail. But they followed a pattern. Apparently he is a well respected videographer who travels the world filming special projects. Nice. (Maybe he's really me in another life?--hence my quotation above)

I'm not really sure how he figured out who I am or why he asked me to join his social network, but when I checked out his social network site (which talked about what he does for a living) along with his email address (which is almost identical to mine), I realized the connection. (You realize, of course, that this could only happen in a digital world with palm-sized, time-warping transporter devices, right?)

Even more amazingly, the "other" Tim Tyson recently finished projects with the British Council about Global Schools Partnerships. Amazingly, the last year I was a school principal, the Director of Bilateral Programmes from the British Council came to visit my school. She was interested in setting up partnerships between the UK and my school. And now the other Tim Tyson is shooting video about these projects?! What are the odds, I ask—even demand?!

The multi-year-long bizarre mystery of the Tim Tyson emails has been solved! But I save the best for last...

2. Imagine getting an unexpected email from a former student who writes this sentence: "I have come to realize that doing what is comfortable or popular tends to be far less rewarding than doing what is right." Now, this young man is only 18! He apparently has become somewhat of an activist for issues related to respect and social justice "for historically marginalized groups." His efforts have earned him national recognition, honors, and some significant opportunities.

My first encounter with younger students who felt a moral imperative to act on issues of social justice came during the Ronald Reagan years. (To cut big government spending, Reagan eliminated funding for homeless shelters thereby forcing the homeless to literally live on the streets.) Shortly thereafter, one of my 8th grade students first saw homeless people in downtown Atlanta. He was from an affluent home and had no idea such a thing could exist in our country. He was outraged, and, as an 8th grader, on his own, took it upon himself to launch a letter-writing campaign to the Georgia governor to have the issue addressed.

I've known many such young people since then—all with an inner calling directing their efforts to make the world a better place. I celebrate all of these young people who, at a very early age, feel compelled to act for positive change.

Their lives color the world with hope.

* Yes, I stole that line from a tweet by Miles Kahn, a producer for The Daily Show. That's actually part of what he said about tonight's show. I laughed out loud when I read his tweet.

Philip Bloom mentioned, in his master class yesterday, a file utility I had not heard of before, one that seems brilliant to me:  ShotPut Pro.  This program will copy your media files from their source (camera card) to up to 3 locations simultaneously.  Brilliant!

I think that always having an untouched copy of your original media files and a working copy of them is always a bright idea.  This practice not only gives you the option of having an emergency backup of your files in case of drive failure or theft, but provides you with some measure of future-proofing your media files for later use—perhaps in projects using CODECs we don't even have today.

I also use BackBlaze to automatically and continuously sync all of my data off site.  The three important parts of that last sentence are:  off site, continuously, and above all:  automatically!  BackBlaze is a steal of a deal at only $50 per machine per year for unlimited storage!  I just do my work using my machines, and BackBlaze is always keeping my offsite backup up to date.

If you were doing professional projects, where setting up the shoot required a significant investment or was time sensitive (can't be easily repeated, for example), using locally redundant copies of the original media and off site backups is essential!

Today Apple sold its 10,000,000,000th (that's billionth) song at the iTunes Store—all in less than 7 years. The music industry can gripe all it wants, but Apple has made them a lot of money they would otherwise have lost to file sharing!

Today's Business Insider has this headline: Blockbuster Collapses: Shutting Down 500 Stores In Desperate Bid To Save $200 Million. I'm actually shocked they survived as long as they did. They ended last year almost $1,000,000,000 in debt.

By closing 500 of their weakest stores, they hope to reduce operating expenses by $200 million. They are also exploring other ways to increase liquidity and find new emerging distribution channels.

Let me offer them a touch of advice. Liquidate now and save everyone the misery to come.

We are entering a new age of cool! Apple's iPhone is a game changer!

The bike wheel contains all you need so that no sensors or additional electronics need to be added to the frame and an existing bike can be retrofitted with the blink of an eye. ...

By using a series of sensors and a Bluetooth connection to the user's iPhone, which can be mounted on the handlebars, the wheel can monitor the bicycle's speed, direction and distance traveled, as well as collect data on air pollution and even the proximity of the rider's friends. ...

The Copenhagen Wheel is part of a more general trend: that of inserting intelligence in our everyday objects and of creating a smart support infrastructure around ourselves for everyday life... The Wheel has a smart lock: if somebody tries to steal it, it goes into a mode where the brake regenerates the maximum amount of power, and sends you a text message. So in the worst case scenario the thief will have charged your batteries before you get back your bike."

(Via MIT’s big wheel in Copenhagen.)

Yesterday I listened to a presenter at Emory who reminded me of something I read years ago when he said it, "The opposite of love isn't hate. It's fear."

We live in such fearful times. And I don't think all fear is unhealthy at all. But this free hugs movement, started by Juan Mann a few years back, points us in a positive direction marked by kindness and acceptance. Check out pictures of huggers from around the world.

He started a movement that has spread around the world. I'm including this clip from Scotland, though there are many videos on YouTube about Free Hugs.

When it gives people the opportunity to create and share (over 1.5 million views of this video) beyond the grip of corporate ownership.

A tag or word cloud is a collection of tags or words (or both) that are most commonly used in a speech, on a blog, in an article, etc. Below is a current word cloud for my blog. It refreshes automatically twice a day; so, it will change as the content of my blog changes. If you click on an word in the cloud, you should be taken to the Google search results for that word.

The tag cloud in my sidebar is different. It is restricted to tags only and not all of the words on my blog. Clicking on a word in the tag cloud in the sidebar of my blog will take you to all of the posts that use that tag.

The larger the word, the more often it appears on my blog at that moment.

This tag cloud is provided by Tagul.

My dislike of AT&T has been no secret on my blog. Others have shared similar disgust both in my blog's comments section and in personal email.

To recap just a single reason AT&T has earned my ire: Because AT&T will not offer me the tethered wireless internet connection* my iPhone supports, I have a Verizon wireless card that allows me to surf the internet on my laptop. (AT&T didn't even offer this service for Mac users when I purchased the Verizon card!!!!!) I have yet to be in a location where my Verizon card does not get a robust signal. It always works flawlessly!

However, I can't begin to recall all of the places where my iPhone's AT&T signal did not exist at all or was so unspeakably sporadic (full signal one second and no signal the next, resulting in a dropped call and no internet connection) as to make it useless, or it connected to AT&T's slower, creeping, crawling Edge network.

From my vantage point as an end user, Verizon's network is vastly superior and more expansive when compared to my experiences with the AT&T network. My only gripe with Verizon is that they have been rumored to have turned down Apple's proposed iPhone deal when it was first offered to them. Foolish, foolish choice! They could have all but killed the monolithic AT&T!

Cingular then accepted Apple's offer only to then get bought by the giant AT&T that had previous been dismantled as a violation of anti-trust law.

Whatever did happen to those laws?!!!!

This week, Verizon filed a sarcastic and defiant response to the lawsuit earlier this month alleging that Verizon's "There's a Map for That" ads falsely assert that AT&T has major gaps in its wireless coverage. In Verizon's response filed with the U.S. District Court for Northern Georgia, the company eschewed standard legalese and instead launched into a bombastic broadside against its rival.

"AT&T did not file this lawsuit because Verizon's 'There's A Map For That' advertisements are untrue," said the introduction. "AT&T sued because Verizon's ads are true and the truth hurts."

The response then went on to taunt AT&T for the small size of its 3G wireless coverage.

"Verizon Wireless has invested billions of dollars since 2004 upgrading nearly its entire network across the continental United States... and today covers five times more of the United States than AT&T's 3G network," it said. "Despite the far smaller size of its 3G network, AT&T has spent tens of millions of dollars making its 3G network... the centerpiece of its national advertising."

Verizon's "There's a Map for That" ads typically show AT&T users struggling to use applications on their mobile devices while Verizon customers happily watch live streaming videos. The ads then display maps that show the total geographical reach of 3G coverage for each carrier, with Verizon's map showing a far larger area of the country covered by its 3G service.

AT&T has not disputed that the maps used by Verizon in its ads are accurate. Rather, it has accused Verizon of misleading consumers by implying that AT&T has no wireless coverage in large parts of the country, when in reality parts not covered by AT&T's 3G HSPA network are still covered by its 2G EDGE network. However, in Verizon's ads the company clearly marks the maps as "AT&T 3G Coverage" and "Verizon Wireless 3G Coverage."

link: Verizon ups the smarm, mocks AT&T | Phones | iPhone Central | Macworld

Live streaming video???!!! Where's that AT&T?!! Why are you not providing iPhone users with that service AT&T?!!

AT&T just needs to stop pocketing all of that cash from iPhone users' absurdly high billing plans, and start investing it in provided a vastly improved network. But no! Of course not!

The day Verizon kicks off full support for the iPhone will be the day this customer drops AT&T in less than a heartbeat, even though AT&T will extort its $200 cancelation fee--a small price to pay for no longer supporting AT&T's corporate interests over their customers' interests. AT&T probably knows I will only be the first of millions of iPhone customers to do so and therefore, I'm guessing, chooses to pocket the cash while they can rather than invest it in an improved user network experience. I'm guessing they've done the math, and it appears to be all about profit for AT&T.

And the PR firm that came up with Verizon's "There's a Map for That" advertising campaign is completely brilliant! It's so effective on so many levels it has AT&T crying foul. Hopefully it will also be a catalyst for forging a partnership between Apple and Verizon sooner rather than later. AT&T is indeed the weak link crippling the iPhone user experience!

*Tethered wireless internet connection: The iPhone has the ability to automatically connect to my laptop wirelessly when it is physically near (within 30 feet) the laptop and seamlessly, without the user having to do anything, allow my laptop to surf the internet through the iPhone's connection to the cell phone carrier's network. Astoundingly, considering how much money iPhone users pay for their service plans, AT&T currently refuses to support this feature! I suspect they refuse support because their network is, as Verizon has clearly pointed out, inadequate for the task.

Nicholas Carr's writing over at Rough Type often makes me think. He recently posted "Does My Tweet Look Fat?" I laughed.

I've grappled with Twitter for some time now. Yet I still don't know what I think of it.

I have no interest in knowing "What are [most people on this planet] doing?" at any particular moment in time. Most of what we do day to day is just not all of that interesting. It's routine. It's, as it must need be, mundane and perfunctory. And I personally find the narcissistic emphasis of the late 20th and early 21st centuries completely revolting. I guess, to be trite, I'm just not that into "you" when you think it's all about you.

Some have suggested to me that Twitter is more like tapping into the stream of consciousness for the world, or at least the Twitter-verse. Yikes, so much noise! My life is already filled with enough noise. Besides, managing my own stream of consciousness in real time is pretty much a full time job.

Now, when friends are traveling and tweeting pics and such: cool--I rather do find that interesting. And some virtual friends pique my interest when they tweet something fascinating or informative. But these seem to be the exception to the twitter-verse. And I suspect that almost everyone on this planet, except for my mother, has no interest in what I am doing at any particular moment in time.

So what does it say about us when our skinny little 140 character tweet is too fat? And from my vantage point, so many of the tweets that stream through this virtual spinal tap are all but anorexic--completely devoid of sustenance and meaning.

For me, tweets are too often like digital ADHD--disconnected flits of thought thereby rendered pretty meaningless. Yes, that's more like what it is to me: digital ADHD. (And don't get me wrong, I can ride that vibe for a while.)

I feel a need for deeper engagement with people than a flittering tweet here and there. And I don't really enjoy the tweet overload. I rather enjoy a good, realtime conversation--virtual or face to face. Yeah, whatever happened to the art of conversation? Surely we're not too busy for that, are we?

According to the Audit Bureau of Circultations:

average daily circulation dropped 10.6 percent in the April-September period from the same six-month span in 2008. That was greater than the 7.1 percent decline in the October 2008-March 2009 period and the 4.6 percent drop in the April-September period of 2008.

Newspaper circulation down 10.6 percent // Current

And for a detailed graph of the circulation statistics of major US newspapers over the past 20 years, click here. It's horrifying!

Well, allow me to tell you why...

• It costs a fortune to deliver a physical paper to your doorstep. Remember the milkman? Print newspaper is going to the same resting place.
  
• Just yesterday I was lamenting that the LA Times is easily only 20% news copy and 80% advertising. What a foolish strategy. Nearly everyone has trained their eye to not even see the annoying noise on the page as they search for content.
  
• From an ecological viewpoint, the print paper is a tremendous waist of natural resources. I frankly have no desire to receive the LA Time any more. I throw out (recycle) a huge amount of paper trash every week. What's the point? Why not save that entire workflow of waisted resources?!

The print paper is no longer a sustainable business model. Adding more advertising to make up for the lowered cost of advertising only increases my desire to see no advertising at all and makes me want to cease the print paper from arriving at my house entirely. I don't subscribe to the paper to see advertising. At 80% advertising, why do I subscribe to the paper at all?

Where's the phone!

Everyone knows I'm a technology addict. Therapy would be far less expensive.

So I have purchased a new Withings scale in the hopes it will motivate me to eat more healthfully and exercise more often. (Since I've added the insulin pump, my A1C is in the normal range, but I have gained 20 pounds over the past 3 years and just feel fat.)

The scale measures your weight and your BMI. It tells me how many pounds of my weight are fat. (Dreadful) It sends my weight to my online profile and my iPhone so I can see a graph of how well I am proceeding to my goal. I could even share my graph here on timtyson.us, but... well, how to say this succinctly... not a chance in hell!

Actually, though I really want to lose 20 pounds, I'm just barely outside a normal weight (a mere 2 pounds) for my height, and my fat mass is within the normal for my height range. I suppose the reason I'm not happy with my weight is that my lean body mass is near the bottom of normal for my weight. So I need to have more of my weight be muscle mass instead of fat.

The new scale looks very sleek and works amazingly. I stand on it for about 10 seconds and get a digital readout of total weight, lean mass weight, fat mass weight, and BMI. Within a minute the data is on my iPhone and online profile. Very cool.

I must confess to being among the first to purchase the new scale in the United States. Withings has been selling them abroad for some time now and just opened up the US market.

Scale Rating: Tim Likes!

I have the basic news apps on my iPhone: AP, the New York Times, NPR, even the Wall Street Journal. I've had the CNN site bookmarked on my phone until today. I deleted it after purchasing CNN's new mobile app for the iPhone. It's the best news site application I've seen to date--complete awesomeness!

The app only costs $1.99. As a friend of mine pointed out, however, you still have to suffer with advertisements on the paid application. Sad. But at least I don't find it nearly as intrusive as CNN.com's video ads before every video. [By the way, I've found a way around that!] On the iPhone app you only get a still image ad while the video loads. And I'm delighted you can watch live newscasts and video over WiFi, 3G, and Edge! (It's about time, AT&T!)

Turning the phone horizontally gives a very nice coverflow slideshow for news events and videos all based on category. Touch the picture to flip the image and reveal the barebones basics of the story with a link to watch or read if you desire.

My CNN provides immediate access to news, weather, and traffic based on your physical location and on any locations you setup to monitor. The news stories link to local media.

iReport, shown at the bottom of this post, is probably my favorite, not because of the content, but because of the concept. In this section you can view featured iReport articles or video. But what is really impressive: Submit. The user can submit photos or video right from the iPhone. So if you find yourself in the middle of a news-worthy event, you can shoot it and upload it to iReport on the spot. Very slick! CNN even offers some suggested assignments for iReporters.

Other nifty little features remain undiscussed. I like the new CNN app, a lot. The designers did a great and thoughtful job.

Astounding!

In the last six months, we've seen uploads from mobile phones to YouTube jump 1700%; just since last Friday, when the iPhone 3GS came out, uploads increased by 400% a day.

This growth represents three things coming together: new video-enabled phones on the market, improvements to the upload flow when you post a video to YouTube from your phone, and a new feature on YouTube that allows your videos to be quickly and effortlessly shared through your social networks. It takes just a minute to connect your YouTube account to your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader accounts. Complete a simple, one-time connection on our upload page to allow all your friends and followers to get a real-time stream of your uploads to YouTube, which can be essential in this age of citizen reporting and ubiquitous sharing.

[From YouTube Blog]

The "DNS migration" is simply the association of a URL, a website address, in my case: timtyson.us, with its home on some server out on the world wide web. It's not a complicated thing really. You just have to tell the Domain Name Servers (DNS) on which server, of all the millions of them out there, to go to find a particular web address when a person types it in to their browser.

In brief, these are the steps I followed to migrate servers and upgrade my blogging system at the same time (in case I ever want to do this again):

• I copied all of my ancillary timtyson.us files (images, movies, my photo galleries) that are on my old server account, a server owned by DreamHost that they nicknamed "Ivan," on to a new account on a server owned by mediatemple.
• I uploaded the new MovableType 4.25 blog system onto the mediatemple server.
• I set up a new MySQL database on mediatemple for my timtyson.us blog. (The database contains all of the posts and other critical setup and publishing information that make the blog function properly.)
• I exported my blog's database content from the DreamHost database I had created 5 years ago.
• I installed MT4.25 by telling my new MovableType installation everything about timtyson.us including where to publish my blog on the new server location by using a temporary access domain given to me by mediatemple.
• I imported all of my old database content (which I had exported from the DreamHost database above) into my blog's new mediatemple database.
• I told MovableType 4.25 to rebuild my entire blog using the new server settings and the temporary access domain configurations. At this point I had two complete copies of timtyson.us, but the web only knew about the copy it had been using on the DreamHost server.
• Using the temporary access domain given to me by mediatemple, I conducted a number of tests on the new server installation to be sure it worked. The last step in that test was the previous post through the temporary access domain.
• Since it worked, I told the DNS that now, instead of going to the DreamHost server to find timtyson.us, go to the mediatemple server and use the new installation as my web presence. Since the new MovableType 4.25 installation has a completely different look with the very same content, I could tell when the new server address was beginning to propagate around the world.
• Since that worked, I then edited the MovableType installation to stop publishing on the temporary access domain and begin publishing on the timtyson.us domain name, since the DNS server would now send newly published information to the mediatemple server.
• If this post goes live on timtyson.us, the last step in this process worked!

Things that remain to be done that will follow in time:

• Complete this process for each of the website I manage. (I am well under way with downloading (from DreamHost) and uploading (to mediatemple) all of the files for my other sites.)
• Delete all of the files off of the DreamHost server once I have migrated all of my websites from DreamHost to mediatemple, and close that account. I have less than 2 weeks to get this done, hence the delay in completing the full migration for timtyson.us
• Complete the the timtyson.us migration which includes all of the following steps:
• Install SlideShowPro (SSP) on the mediatemple server. (SSP is the system that publishes my photo galleries, and, like MovableType, requires database creation and data population--no small task.) So right now no one can access the photo galleries at timtyson.us. Sorry.
• Create a database for the SSP installation.
• Turn on the existing photo galleries for timtyson.us
• Rewrite the CSS files that gave timtyson.us its previous look and feel. Since MT 4.25 is so significantly different from MT 3.36, this process will be such a significant reworking of those files (read: time consuming) that I will probably start them more or less from scratch. When this is finished though, timtyson.us should have the same (or improved) appearance and functionality it had before.

I've decided not to upgrade my blogging system for my other websites at this time as that would require a massive time commitment. I'll wait until timtyson.us has been restored to its former glorious self first. Then, I'll know the fastest and most efficient way to upgrade all of my remaining sites. I actually use timtyson.us as a proving ground, a beta test, for everything I do on my other sites. I don't want to run the risk of blowing up the professional sites; so, I run that risk on timtyson.us. :o)

[I have another reason the other sites will not be upgraded to MT4.25 yet... There's an unresolved problem with the new timtyson.us MovableType 4.25 installation: the comments template code (and/or any associated javascript) has a bug in it. As written, clicking on any comment link brings up a new page with banner, sidebar, and footer, but the entry data blinks onto the screen for a second and then goes completely blank in the entry area. Odd! I've found a temporary work around. If anyone knows what the problem is along with a solution, let me know!]

So, once again, fingers crossed as I click "Publish." I actually think this will work!

Well, the ole blog has now been around for 5 years! Seems rather amazing to me actually as life was so different 5 years ago!

Sometimes time passes slowly, other times it flies. I recall setting up my blog for the first time--seems like 20 years ago now! Lots of water under the bridge in the past five years. Lots os change. Many, many miles.

And all of it really has been wonderful actually--with the notable exception of the Republican party destroying America.

So I thought this first new post with timtyson.us hosted on the new mediatemple server account and using a new blogging system (from MovableType 2.x to MovableType 4.25 in those five years) was only fitting.

Now fingers crossed this will actually publish! :o)

Footnote: Not only did it actually post, but it posted in a fraction, a tiny, tiny fraction of the time the DreamHost server and MT 3.36 required for posting! Lovin' it!

In the next 12 - 24 hours some major changes will take place here at timtyson.us. We are talking heavy construction. I've decided to upgrade timtyson.us to MovableType 4.25. I've been using MovableType 3.36. In the past 24 hours I've had a crash lesson in the huge differences between the two.

Additionally, my hosting service contract needs to be renewed in less than two weeks. I've been using DreamHost for years. I've been relatively happy with them through the years. But lately their servers have been running slower and slower and frequently dropping my connections as they attempt to add every human on the planet to one of their server plans. And I must have received a dozen or more emails from them asking me to upgrade my account to a private virtual server (or something like that). The upgrade costs more but provides the user with more server resources. They tell me my websites demand a lot of server resources.

After doing a good bit of reading, I've decided to switch hosting services. I'm in the process of migrating all of the sites I manage to mediatemple. (If for no other reason, mediatemple has an awesome web design team!) So, in the next 12 - 24 hours (give or take a dozen or two), timtyson.us will be hosted on their grid service server farm. I'm hoping for better server response and greater reliability.

Interestingly, one of the mediatemple data centers is less than 5 miles from my house in El Segundo, California. With my fiber connection, transfers have been singeing the wires around here!

So why even bother tell you about this? Well, when I change the DNS setup for timtyson.us, my site may be unavailable for a short period of time as the new DNS information propagates across the world. Not to worry, my site will be back up. The little 4.4 earthquake that just rumbled the house didn't do me in.

And you may also find links that might not work or other unanticipated issues. Let me know when you find an anomaly. I hope to have anticipated most things, but doing two major changes like this at the same time is probably unwise if not completely crazy!

timtyson.us will initially have a completely new look and feel as I rework all of the style sheets that make it appear the way it looks now. The "Pick a Theme" style switcher will initially not work at all. Retooling that code will be the last step in the migration and upgrade process.

So fingers crossed! The transition has already been underway for over 24 hours! I'll start the DNS migration soon! Things will be rough around the edges for a while, I'm sure.