aassholes

when i find a service or a vendor or a product that i like, i vote with my dollar.

american airlines sent me a lovely email today changing the agreement we have with each other for their customer loyalty program, aadvantage. now earned miles will expire if i do not accrue or spend any miles during an 18-month period. i don't fly often, but until now, i've usually chosen american airline when possible.

someone should explain to the good people at american airlines that customer retention is much cheaper than customer acquisition.

silly twits

twitter is dumb. for the same reason that myspace is stupid and amateur blogging to the entire universe is overrated (whoops, i do that last one). we are conditioning ourselves to put our lives on public display, while at the same time lowering our standards for privacy. on the surface, these effects merely put personal and professional reputations at risk, but prolonged behavior of this kind also puts civil liberties at risk. in a world in which at&t jumps when the nsa snaps its fingers, deliberately posting your every move constitutes tacit approval.

luckily, technology pushes boundaries and creates culture, but culture has a funny way of regulating technology. there are already signs that millenials are wising up to the perils of putting their lives on display, and social networking services are responding by implementing more ways to create circles of trust and levels of privacy. conveniently, they are also one of the best avenues for spreading information, such as the importance of privacy.

thanks to sharona for this article which scratches the surface more eloquently than i can.

ripcat

supposedly, the lolcat meme is finally dying. i propose a new meme, inspired by this photo that always makes me laugh (i would credit its creator, but i found it on the interweb somewhere).

i call it "ripcat".

hero for our time

From an interview with Trent Reznor:

Where does that extra $10 on your album go?

That money's not going into my pocket, I can promise you that. It's just these guys who have f---ed themselves out of a job essentially, that now take it out on ripping off the public. I've got a battle where I'm trying to put out quality material that matters and I've got fans that feel it's their right to steal it and I've got a company that's so bureaucratic and clumsy and ignorant and behind the times they don't know what to do, so they rip the people off.

Given all that, do you have any idea how to approach the release of your next album?

I've have one record left that I owe a major label, then I will never be seen in a situation like this again. If I could do what I want right now, I would put out my next album, you could download it from my site at as high a bit-rate as you want, pay $4 through PayPal. Come see the show and buy a T-shirt if you like it. I would put out a nicely packaged merchandise piece, if you want to own a physical thing. And it would come out the day that it's done in the studio, not this "Let's wait three months" bulls---.

spoiled

xkcd makes me laugh

elevator action

frequent earthquakes -> lack of tall buildings -> few elevators -> bay area natives that stand directly in front of the elevator doors when waiting to board.

for those of you out there that fall into this subset of cluetards, this behavior is both rude and counter-productive.

epistemic identity

two events during the last two days have reinforced my sense of belonging while reminding me that there's so much more to learn.

on saturday, i spent the day watching hopeful young motorcycle riders go from stalling and tipping over to moving around a track at a pretty good clip - but nowhere near ready for real roads. more interesting to me was that by the end of the day, they felt more comfortable calling themselves motorcyclists (as evidenced by their discussion of the next day's dress code - the guy who wore his nice kenneth cole boots wasn't going to repeat that mistake, and all of the ladies planned to bring ponytail-clips).

today, i'm sitting in the mediaX conference at stanford watching presenations on technology and people and collaboration. and i am once again reminded taht i already know so much more about these topics than the average citizen - but only on a practical, applied level.