Jimmy

Remember the mid 1990s, when the World Wide Web was first hitting it big and we were all learning how it worked?

Apparently Craig skipped the section on search engines and how they work. Similarly, Connie seems to have missed the memo going around over the last few years that bloggers are not, in fact, out to get her and her job. (Although I think the New Media movement needs new terms for web publishers, because the term “blogger” can apply to everyone from emo kids with Live Journals to tmz.com writers to extremely knowledgeable college-dropouts to credited journalists writing online at newspapers or even on selfhosted sites. I fully admit that a large percentage of that group can not be taken seriously to report fact-based news. I also know for a fact that there are many people who proudly describe themselves as bloggers who do original research and news-gathering. To imply that that isn’t true is to admit a profound misunderstanding of Web 2.0 and New Media in general.)

Check out this interview from Monday night’s Late Late Show (the good stuff lasts no more than 2 minutes and starts about 1:15 in):

So much happens in those short minutes that Connie and Craig take to disparage bloggers and search engines that my head nearly exploded when I first saw it.

The thing that grates at me most is Craig’s bold and unilateral pronouncement that search engines are publishers and as such should be held accountable for any illegal activity on the pages they index and link to. While I suppose this is not an entirely unreasonable assumption for someone who’s never used the internet to make, it is very surprising coming from the likes of Craig Ferguson, someone who, while professing to not understand “The Tweety,” seems to know at least what the Internet and WWW is and also seems to have fairly good judgment about when to back off on a subject. This was obviously not one of those times. News flash, Mr. Ferguson: Google or Yahoo or Bing are not publishers by any stretch of the imagination. They are catalogs, analogous to a library card catalog: they simply tell the user where to find what he or she seeks, having no power over what that information is or who wrote it. The farthest (farthest) you could take your argument is that search engines should de-index a website that is illegal in some way. But to say that Google or Yahoo should be held accountable for the content of the pages they link to (content that can change at any time by no knowledge of the search engine until the search bot passes through the page again) shows such a stunning lack of understanding of the basic workings of the Web that I’m actually kinda sick.

And Ms. Schultz. “Bloggers…tend to take our work for free…” Let’s focus on that one quote for a moment. Could you be a little more specific? Who? What? When? The aforementioned emo kids are mostly blogging about their own lives, (something that could be considered original reporting, btw); the aforementioned tmz.com bloggers, well again, the paparazzi might be annoying to celebrates, but I’d have to go with “original reporting” for tmz-type blogs, too; college (or highschool, for that matter) dropouts, OK, that might be your crowd. But still, I’ve seen many an insightful post from such folks and rarely have I run across something that looks like stolen journalism to me.

OK. I should back up, admit that I’m being highly cynical here and admit that I understand (I think) what Ms. Schultz is saying: bloggers often “break” news stories on their blogs that newspaper journalists have already written and published, but to my mind, unless the blogger doesn’t cite/link to the original source (e.g. plagiarizes the article, such as it seems the company that Ms. Schultz references being in a court battle with the AP was doing) that is not “taking for free” it is simply spreading the news with proper citation. Further, my understanding of how most news bloggers operate (including myself) is that we pull in information from several different sources and present it in a (hopefully) unique way. If journalists want to take up the mantle of doing what unpaid (for a lot of us) people with laptops are doing, then be our guests. But I’m guessing there will never be enough journalists to do that, and there shouldn’t be. Journalists hold a certain place in our society, and I don’t for one moment wish less journalists in the world. What I do wish for is an understanding of the new ways of news gathering, analyzing and reporting. We still absolutely need news and information quality control, and that’s the next challenge of Web development, but especially in the new ways of news processing. Twitter, YouTube, Blogs. All are changing the way that we see and think of news, but a lot of it is not checked, and we absolutely need to find a model where all the news (or even most of the news) flowing around the web can be channeled through credible people, be it respected and trusted high-school dropout bloggers, or PhD’ed journalists. The old centralized news model of all reporters being AP certified and all news coming through the TV and newspapers is dying. Rather than lumping all bloggers with a company that was plagiarizing from the AP, journalists should be working with the blogging community to find the best way to help the news that is flowing around the new, seriously decentralized news model that is the Web, pass through credibly filters (the AP, trusted bloggers, etc.). But I think you will find, Ms. Schultz, that just lashing out at “bloggers” and talking gleefully about count wins over us is no way to win friends in the model that is the future. The way to change the way news is processed is not through court battles. It’s through cooperation and forward-looking thinking. Otherwish, the old journalist community is gonna be left in the dust, and the world will be a little worse off.

I’ve ranted for 1000 words now. I’ll quit now and go to bed. I hope my 6am post-Harry Potter watching rambles make sense.

Cheers,
-j

I love Google. I’m not one of those people that worries about privacy issues with my searches or emails as I believe that Google actually follows, for the most part, it’s motto of “Don’t Be Evil.”

So naturally I’m really happy this evening to hear that Google is entering the Operating System Wars with Google Chrome OS which seems, at first blush, like it might actually take a good-sized bite out of Microsoft’s OS market share and therefore make the world a better place. (Setting aside my personal thoughts about Windows for a second, I don’t think any company, be it Microsoft, Google, Apple or any number of Linux companies, should have a 90%+ market share in any market.) Google Chrome OS seems like an awesome step into the future of computing, and while I think that it will probably never achieve majority market share, I do think it will do reasonably well, especially if Google pulls it off, which seems likely given the company’s past successes.

But for the first time ever, tonight I am worried about Google becoming too large. I like everything the company does, but just like I don’t like Microsoft on the principle of Windows owning the OS market, I worry about Google owning over 80% of the search market and making inroads into so many other markets as well. If Google does manage to pull off getting Chrome OS onto millions of Netbooks over the next few years and the OS catches on and starts pulling market share from Windows, will anything be different? My hope is that Chrome OS (which is built on the Linux kernel) will help pull down Windows’ market share and open the door for Mac OS X and other flavors of Linux to rush in, as well as Chrome OS, but I fear what it would mean if Chrome OS pulling market share away from Windows is all that happens. So if Microsoft’s Bing takes off and pulls searchers away from Google and Chrome OS pulls users away from Windows, nothing will have changed: two huge companies will still control the vast majority of OSes and web searches. Big deal.

I’m not an expert on monopolies and antitrust issues, but I finally think it might be time for someone who is to take a hard look at Google, its products, projects and goals and to see if Google might just be getting a little too big for its britches. If not, I’ll be happy. If so, well, I won’t be surprised.

Here’s to Chrome OS taking Windows down a peg or two*, and lifting all the second-tier OSes up in its place.

Cheers,
-j

*Say, 20-40%? That’d give Windows a still very healthy 50%-70% share of the market.

I have a problem. It has to do with Microsoft’s ads for Bing, the rebranding/relaunch of Microsoft Live Search. This problem might just be bigger than my problem with the Laptop Hunter ads, which is saying quite a lot.

One of the Bing ads:

Here’s my issue: Bing is being billed as a “decision engine” and that it will reduce “search overload” (see video above), but I’m just not seeing it. I’ve done a few side-by-side searches on Bing and Google and I really see no difference between the results (doing a search for “huntington, in weather” turns up a weather forecast and current conditions from both search engines, but the current temperature is a degree higher from Bing, with Google’s closer to what my home weather station is reporting. (In Bing’s favor, it does return Huntington, Indiana as the first result, whereas Google returns Huntington Beach, California as the first result with my correct Indiana city as second)). I assume Bing is trying to cash in on the recent media about Wolfram|Alpha (the only “computational engine” currently in the Internet) with the “decision engine” definition, but in my opinion it just serves to confuse as the software doesn’t seem to “decide” any more than Google or Yahoo what the information that you’re looking for is, and to even imply that it’s relatively easy to build a “decision engine” (which I can only assume is a cross between a search engine like Google/Yahoo and a computational engine like Wolfram|Alpha) cheapens the concept and insults pretty much everyone in the field of Information Technology, whether they’re working on developing such technology or not.

And then there’s my even bigger beef: “search overload.” What the hell is that? The only way to get search overload is if you get the wrong information than what you were searching for, and no amount of software is going to change the fact that if you do a bad search, you don’t get the information you wanted and, I suppose, it could lead to information overload, but it’s really up to the end user to become a smart searcher and not try to rely on the computer to read their mind. Look, the user knows what the user is looking for, right? The computer is dumb. It’s dumber than dumb. It’s a freaking idiot. It does what it’s told. Google, Wolfram|Alpha, Yahoo and all the other engines on the web have a lot of programming going into them to try to return the results that are most likely to be what the user wants. But it’s still based on probability because the computer can’t read the users mind. It can’t. Maybe in the far future when we’re all dead computers will be able to read the user’s mind, but for now it’s not possible. So instead of trying to pretend the computer can do something it can’t (“decide”? A computer doesn’t decide, it does what it’s told. It gets a search query, it does what the search software tells it to do. There’s no room for deciding, because it’s a set software program. If search is “A” then do “B”. It’s all very logical and metal and binary. Deciding is an emotional process, obviously there’s logic involved as well, but it requires thought and prior knowledge and all the things that make human brains different from every other “brain” (animal or machine) on earth. Simply put, the search software can include a near infinite number of if statements and it will never really be “deciding” anything, it will simply be following the set software routine and it will return the same results to the user no matter if they wanted to know about the cloud type, the band, the movie or the tool when they typed in “anvil” and hit “Search”.

So instead of making “decision engines” we need to teach users better searching habits. I don’t care if the user wants to use Google, Bing, Yahoo, Woflram|Alpha or anything else. It’s nobodies business what engine the user uses, because if we all became a little less lazy and a little more savvy about how we search, the world would be a better place, because we could finally take these annoying “search overload” ads and shove them in a dark closet in Redmond.

And one last thing: Google doesn’t shove as much information at me as Bing does: Google has no annoying (albeit pretty) picture with hover boxes on the main search page and it pushes the “related searches” information to the bottom of the page, not right up top on the side. Little nitpicks, I know, but that extra clutter right at the beginning of my search experience just further justifies my “your ’search overload’ assertion thing is crap” argument.

Maybe if I tried Bing some more I’d like it. But I doubt it, as every time I see one of those ads I hate Bing I little bit more.

Cheers!

-j

You might’ve noticed that I haven’t posted in a while. The reasons are many, but there are two main ones:

1. I just haven’t had any stunning flashes of insight that I felt like blogging. There have been one or two, but those came at a time when I wasn’t able to blog and by the time I had time, the muse had passed.
2. Any small musings that in the past I might’ve flushed out into a blog post I’ve recently been squeezing into the 140-char limit of Twitter as I’ve found that to be easier and quicker.

I’m still planning on trying to work up some longer posts (hopefully things will slow down enough in my life for that to happen soon, but I’m not counting on it) but in the meantime I would love it if you’d click on over to my Twitter page and even “follow” me if you have a Twitter account.

Cheers!

-jbh

It’s 2am and sleep is not really in sight. Well, sort of, but iTunes e-mailed me and told me that my pre-order of Green Day’s new album 21st Century Breakdown was available for download and I just started listening to it and damn it’s good and who stops listening to such a good album in the middle? You’ve got to hear it through all at once to fully take it in, and so I’m left with needing to find something to do for the next 1.2 hours. (OK, since doing the math tells me that that takes me ’til 3:30am maybe I will have to cut it short mid-album. But we’ll decide that later.)

Anyway. Final exams are over and I’m pretty sure I failed at least two of them, and quite possibly both the classes that said finals were in. But I don’t really care. I got a much better grade than I was expecting in another class, so that’s awesome.

So I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with my summer. Because sleeping 12 hours well into the afternoon is awesome for only one or two days. So that was today, and now it’s time to move on to bigger and better things (hopefully things that don’t entail sleeping quite so much of the day away). I’ve been feeling for a while that I’d like to focus more on teaching myself more about filmmaking, from actual camera-work and stuff to editing (I loooove editing, but I don’t feel like I know Premiere Pro nearly as well as I could) and post-production stuff (After Effects, anyone?), so that’s something to do with the summer, but then the question becomes what kind of structure to put it in? E.g. what kind of raw video footage do I use for my editing adventures? old family vacation footage, or shoot new footage? If so, what?

Those are the questions.

Enter the awesome web video series that I found yesterday called The Guild created by the awesome Felicia Day (Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, anyone? She was in that). While watching all 24 6-8 minutes episodes of this little web video that won three awards at the Streamy Awards, I got to thinking: what about spending the summer creating little web video episodes? Obviously this brings up as many (or more) question than it answers, but at least we’re going in the direction of making progress on the question of what the shrack to do this summer. And to help answer some of those questions, we find that not only does Felicia have a blog, she’s currently posting on how to do a web series and make it work. One begins to wonder if this is some sort of sign.

(Click “read more” to read more of my middle-of-the-night rambles.)
Read the rest of this entry »

I posted a still image of my almost finished 3D puppet a few weeks ago, but here now is a short animation of the final puppet.

I’ll admit that I can’t take credit for modeling the fire; one of my classmates did that for me.

3D puppet from Jimmy Bouma-Holtrop on Vimeo.

This was my second and final project of this semester in 3D Character Design class. I’ve had a blast in this course this semester, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the few posts I’ve made on it. I’m continuing my 3D modeling/animation coursework in the fall, so look for more posts starting in September.

Meanwhile, as this semester is just about over (last week of classes just ended, now it’s just 4 days of finals next week) I hope to be able to devote a little more time to blogging again and hopefully post more often than once every 1 or 2 weeks. I’m not 100% sure I’ll have more blogging time, but I’m gonna try.

Cheers.

-j

I posted a still image of the model way back in February, but here finally is the actual animation. For some reason the sound didn’t convert, but if you just imagine the sound of a wind-up toy while you’re watching it’ll all be good.

3D Wind-Up Toy Animation from Jimmy Bouma-Holtrop on Vimeo.

Cheers.

-j

Here’s a picture of an early/not quite finished version of my current project in 3D Animation: a self-portrait Muppet-style circus performer puppet.

Let nobody say that my professor is not creative in his assignments.

I should probably go back to my Visual Basic homework now.

Cheers.

-j

I was really excited to see the CNN headline “Obama unveils high-speed rail plan” this evening. Anybody who knows me or has read this blog can probably attest to my great interest in this topic, so I was very pleased to see that Obama would be coming through on his campaign promise to bring HSR to America.

Except that’s not at all what he’s suggesting. It is High Speed Rail in name only, and from what I can tell most of what he’s proposing would be slower than the “High Speed” Acela service that Amtrak currently runs between Washington D.C. and Boston.

Now I understand that definitions of what constitutes “high speed” rail differ from person to person and I know that my definition is up there, but CNN informs us that Obama “cited the success of high-speed rail in European countries such as France and Spain” while at the same time presenting a plan that would have “some trains traveling at top speeds of over 150 mph.”

Let me enlighten you, Mr. President: the trains you speak of in France and Spain cruise at speeds up to 186mph or even 199mph. And I believe even faster trains are in the works (can’t find the link right now, but I think France is planning a 220mph train to be launched sometime in the next few years).

And so, having gotten fairly familiar with the trains in Europe (the 186mph Eurostar is an amazing, fun and smooth ride from London to Paris) and the struggles to bring that type of train technology to American shores and seeing what went wrong I have this to say about your HSR plan, Mr. President: scrape it until you can go all out. The last thing we need is a “sort of” version HSR that nobody rides because it’s just not quite fast enough, but that cost enough to get every single taxpayer in America mad at the government, you AND (worst of all from my viewpoint) the idea of HSR. If we don’t do this correctly right out the gate, America might not give us another chance. Americans are going to be tough to sell on HSR already: we’re wary of it because it’s European, we’re wary of it because it’s really, really expensive.

But I’ve noticed something: America is not totally averse to the idea. California just passed the proposal to build a $40 billion+ 220mph High Speed Rail system from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and with gas prices creeping ever higher and Al Gore still on his global warming campaign Americans are seeming to slowly change our minds about HSR.

On the third hand I think that just means we have ONE chance now. Before we had no chance and quite a few HSR proposals have been killed in the past in various states and regions (Florida, Texas, etc.).

Mr. President, don’t be an idiot and dishonest. You promised us High Speed Rail last year, but your proposal of sub-150mph trains on outdated routes for $13 billion over 5 years is a joke and should be treated as such. Do you think we’re that stupid and gullible? If you and the Vice President are really so concerned about HSR for America you need to remember just two things:
1. lots and lots and lots of money. California is building a system that is currently budgeting in at $40-50 billion for 700 or so miles. That means that for national HSR we’re looking at an amount of money that can be measured in meaningful fractions of a trillion dollars. Sounds bad, but you’re giving Wall Street that much money unsupervised, can’t our nations failing transit infrastructure have some, too? (I mean, more than the laughable-in-comparison $13 billion you’ve proposed for HSR thus far?)
2. 200+ mph. Don’t try to pass off Acela-type trains on the whole country and call it HSR. It will fail. If done right, super-HSR (what France and Japan have crisscrossing their countries) won’t fail, but your brand of HSR-lite will fail. And it will bring billions of our dollars down with it. Don’t patronize us by pretending it will work.

Now I should really be working on my research paper, which is interestingly enough on this exact same topic.

Cheers.

-j

This is beautiful:

A few months ago NASA held a contest to name the new wing of the International Space Station. They allowed anybody to submit whatever name they wanted, but said that they wouldn’t absolutely commit to naming it the winning name if they didn’t like it. So, Stephen Colbert, in typical fashion, called on all his fans to vote for his name in the contest. And he won. (Let nobody say that Stephen doesn’t have a load of very loyal fans!) This, as is well imaginably, created a little bit of a problem for NASA: the name won and it would be…unpopular for them to just ignore that fact, but always talking about “the Stephen Colbert” wing of the ISS does present some odd issues (is NASA endorsing a sudo-politic figure? Etc. Etc.).

So what did NASA end up doing? Well, they didn’t name the new ISS wing after him…but they did name a treadmill after him. Win! Literally. Everybody wins. Stephen and all his fans who voted for him get something on the ISS named after him, but NASA gets to call the new ISS node “Tranquility,” which is more in line with the names they give other space-faring vehicles, anyway. (Although I’m sure every Firefly fan out there is very disappointed that the #2 winning name, Serenity, didn’t get chosen by NASA either.)

And that, folks, is the story of how Colbert (and the Colbert Nation) pwned NASA, and how NASA pwned him (and them) right back.

I hope this made your day a little bit better like it did mine.

Cheers.

-j