Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Plenty of people have tried XX things in XX days schemes, such as the The Blog Herald’s wildly successful and interesting 100 blogs in 100 days, but where these ideas fail is in the content they provide. Typically a blogger asks his readers for contributions and then posts them over the course of some period of time. This allows for, on a popular blog, a distribution of new ideas, but it contains nothing of the blogger himself.

What I want to do is different than blogging pro bono. I believe that a blogger needs to put some of his own skill into a post, to remix and rehash the content provided by his readers. It’s more interesting when there’s an application of your skills to reader-submitted content.

Let me introduce the idea: blogging ars pro bono. What I will offer over the course of the next month is a case study in a cycle that takes user-submitted content, remixes it with special skill, and then releases it back onto the web. “Technique for the good,” an elevation of the interaction between blog and reader.

In my case, the skill I offer for the next 30 days is digital retouching. Everyday I will retouch a user-submitted portrait and post it on the blog, along with a short text description of the author, subject, details, website, anything. If you are interested in submitting a photo to be digitally retouched, please send an email to ecb29@cornell.edu with “Digital Retouching” in the subject line, a brief textual summary including attribution, title, and a link, as well as a high-resolution photograph. The first 30 submissions will be queued and released over the next 1 month.

Ars photoshop is my gift to you, blog readers, pro bono.

The idea of gravatars is nice … but only if you can get something out of it. Simply acting as a dictionary to lookup URLs for images doesn’t let you insert arbitrary evil advertising and javascript! So, you then get things like:

%%ping gravatar.com

Pinging gravatar.com [64.124.231.223] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 64.124.231.223:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss)

What does this mean? Visitors in IE will choke because for some reason IE hangs while those images are timing out…

Here’s why:

But FEMA and the affected states are reimbursing the Red Cross under preexisting contracts for emergency shelter and other disaster services. The existence of these contracts is no secret to anyone but the American public. The Red Cross carefully says it functions only by the grace of the American people — but “people” includes government, national and local. What we’ve now come to expect from a major disaster is a Red Cross media blitz.

When New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer asked for documentation of 9/11 expenditures, the Red Cross’ response was that it is federally chartered and not answerable to state government regulators. The clamor rose, however, when the media began dissecting Red Cross activities in the 9/11 aftermath. This resulted in the resignation of the organization’s president and chief executive, Dr. Bernadine Healy…

The Red Cross expects to raise more than $2 billion before Hurricane Katrina-related giving subsides. If it takes care of 300,000 people, that’s $7,000 per victim. I doubt each victim under Red Cross care will see more than a doughnut, an interview with a social worker and a short-term voucher for a cheap motel, with a few miscellaneous items such as clothes and cooking pots thrown in.

Emphasis mine. Facts? Ask them yourself where the money goes.

If you check out Microsoft’s Windows Vista hype page, you’ll come across a snippet on startup time:

A Windows Vista computer starts and shuts down as quickly and reliably as a television, typically within 2 to 3 seconds. Windows Vista processes login scripts and startup programs and services in the background so you can start working right away. You’ll also shut down and restart your computer less often by using the New Sleep state, a simple one-click on and off experience which not only reduces power consumption, but also delivers and protects user dat. [sic]

When they say typically, though, do they mean for a user with quad-3-Gz-processors and 6 GB of RAM? Or do they mean for 95% of home consumers? Microsoft also lets us know that they’ve optimized Windows Vista for common use patterns:

With superior memory management, Windows Vista is responsive—often more responsive than Windows XP on the same computer. In particular, it’s faster doing the tasks that are most noticeable—opening the Start menu, for example, or right-clicking a file in Windows Explorer to display a shortcut menu.

What I don’t like is how vague this all is:

Windows Vista includes fixes for known hangs and crashes, and new technology that will prevent many common causes of hangs and crashes.

What are “known hangs and crashes” that you’ve fixed? What is this new anti-crash techology? Did you invent and patent it, or are you simply implementing commonly known education ideas that haven’t been used in operating system design yet?

Nevertheless, if any of these are true, I’ll be Vista’s first customer. I’ll loudly proclaim its virtues and beauty, and convince all my friends, family, teachers, loves ones, hated ones, and random acquantainces to buy it. But only if it lives up to these bold but inspiring claims!

Incidently, the Vista site also has an RSS feed.

This is so cool: