Bad Photoshopping and the demonstrations in Iran

Just back from a week-long Photoshop workshop at Santa Fe Workshops (which was great).  And, perfect timing, I found on Twitter and link to this image.  Someone showing how Photoshop was used to make a pro-government demonstration look bigger than it was by copying and pasting parts of the original image.  The blog is in Farsi, so I can’t read what the poster says about it.

Automatically Backed-Up Hard Drive Catches Computer Thief

From Officer Casimiro Pierantoni’s Berkeley Area 1 crime update:

Someone left  left a laptop bag on the back seat of a car parked near Hearst Avenue and Euclid Avenue.  A thief smashed the car window and stole the laptop.   The victim had a back-up program installed on his computer that automatically uploaded new data from the computer’s hard drive to an online virtual storage location. The thief, not knowing of the back-up program, proceeded to take photographs of himself with the computer’s built-in camera; those photographs were eventually up-loaded to the internet based storage location.  The victim discovered the photographs of the suspect and passed them along to the police, who recognized the suspect as Gerardo Vegas,  with a long history of auto burglary and theft who had just been released from jail at the start of the year.

The Detectives closely examined the photographs and noticed that Vega appeared to be sitting in a motel room when he snapped the pictures with the computer’s camera.  Theorizing that the victim’s computer had accessed the internet thorough the motel’s wireless internet system, they began work to identify the I.P. address utilized by the victim’s computer.  They also checked Berkeley and  Oakland motels.  At one of the motels, they spotted Vega getting into a car in a motel parking lot. The Detectives stopped Vega and arrested him for possession of the stolen laptop.  They located additional stolen property (from other auto burglaries) inside Vega’s car and in his motel room.

Comcast, cable box, and Tivo

My long cable box to Tivo nightmare is over.  I’m posting these instructions for those who may go through the same horrid mess. I didn’t find these anywhere.

Comcast in Berkeley — from who I have gotten truly terrible customer service throughout this –  is switching to new, digital equipment; independent of but, to confuse things, simultaneous with, the larger digital changeover.  I have talked with roughly two dozen people at Comcast (I’m not exaggerating) and gotten every possible story about whether I can, and if so how, still use my Tivo Series 2 and my analog TV with their new box.  I have a perfectly good TV and a Tivo box with lifetime service; I had no intention of buying new ones, not just now.  I find it annoying enough that I have to pay for cable, but the TV I watch is almost exclusively on cable channels.

Ta-da — here’s how you do it.

1. Get a Tivo IR Blaster. In theory, this came with your Tivo.  It enables the Tivo remote control to control your cable box.  If I did have one, I have no idea where it is now.  I got one at Weaknees.com – they sell other Tivo accessories.  I was told to be sure to get the kind where the sensors at the end turn at 90 degree angles, like this you see in this image from http://www.weaknees.com/tivo-cables.php

The purple end plugs into the back of the Tivo, into “channel change – IR”.

Use a flashlight to see the IR receiver behind the dark glass in front of your cable box. The two “boot” ends go over and under the box so that they both shine on the IR receiver, though another images from Tivo suggests you can get away with just one sensor:

2. Run the cables from wall to cable box to Tivo to TV.

3. Go into Tivo settings and have it run setup again. You have to tell it that you’re using a cable box (which I wasn’t before), and it has to figure out which one, which is what the setup process allows you to tell it to do.  (There’s probably a more direct route than running setup all over again, but I didn’t think of that in time.)

4. Make sure the Tivo and the Cable Box both require the same TV channel (slider on the back of the Tivo picks 3 or 4) and set the TV to the correct channel.

5. Finally!  You can control Tivo and the cable box simultaneously, using the Tivo remote control, and the Tivo can record from cable. Until I did all this, I could (1) set tivo and tv on ch 3 and see whatever channel the cable box was set to, but (2) could not record.

It has taken me approximately a month, two dozen calls, one visit to Comcast, and one visit from a Comcast service person.  The latter finally was able to tell me what to do (thanks, Keisha!) but couldn’t get things set up because I didn’t have an IR blaster. And she didn’t tell me that I had to rerun Tivo setup once I got it — I was stumped at why I had all the pieces connected but they weren’t working together.

Women Who Tech TeleSummit

Kaliya Hamlin sent the following message to the members of She’s Geeky.

Registration is now open for the 2009 Women Who Tech TeleSummit scheduled for May 12, 2009 from 11AM EST to 6PM EST. I’m so excited about this year’s line up and I know you will be too. Check it out! http://www.facebook.com/l/b2146; http://www.womenwhotech.com/2009-panels.html.

Women have really rocked the tech and social media world this past year and we are proud to be featuring Lisa Stone of BlogHer, Allison Fine of Personal Democracy Forum, Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare, Charelene Li, co-author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, Shireen Mitchell of Digital Sistas, Holly Ross of NTEN, Rebecca Moore of Google Earth Outreach and so much more.

Our thought provoking panels (held by phone and web) will inspire you and give you the latest resources and tools that you can take back to the office and launch a successful and meaningful campaign or build your online personal brand, determine the ROI of your organizations social media outreach, get that big promotion or even launch your own startup. Check out these awesome panels: http://www.facebook.com/l/b2146; http://www.womenwhotech.com/2009-panels.html

* Launching Your Own Startup * Breaking Through the Digital Ceiling * Social Media ROI * Women and Open Source * Tools Galore in Online Communications * Democratizing Data and Watch-Dogging the Government * Video Activism * Tech Marketing in a Recession * Social Networks and Diversity Barriers * Innovation and Tech Career Reinvention * What Shirky Didn’t Tell Us * Feminine Mystique

Click the link below to view the full panel descriptions and register now! Like last year we expect the panels to fill up super fast. http://www.facebook.com/l/b2146; http://www.womenwhotech.com/2009-panels.html

Also we will be having fun after-parties after the TeleSummit on May 12th in Washington, DC, NYC, San Francisco, and London so save the date and come get your tech on with us. I will send a follow up email about the after-parties next week. I would also like to thank our amazing sponsors for their generous support of Women Who Tech. FreePress, Democracy In Action, Rad Campaign, Convio, Care2, NTEN, and Massey Media. Questions, comments? Email me anytime at Allyson@womenwhotech.com. You can also reach me on twitter @womenwhotech.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Berkeley

Photo by Peg Skorpinski for UC Berkeley.  (Not mine!)

The Death of the Traditional Media — and the Pulitzer Prizes

Pulitzer Prize Medal

I  read this list of this year’s Pulitzers and thought about those who are saying that journalism is dead.  This is clearly the kind of investigation and reporting that need to be done  [all the below quoted from the NYT artice]:

• The Las Vegas Sun for the exposure of the high death rate among construction workers on the Las Vegas Strip amid lax enforcement of regulations, leading to changes in policy and improved safety conditions;
• The Houston Chronicle Staff for becoming a lifeline to the city when Hurricane Ike struck;
• David Barstow of The New York Times for his reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended;
• Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart of the Los Angeles Times for their fexploration into the cost and effectiveness of attempts to combat the growing menace of wildfires across the western United States;
• The East Valley Tribune, Mesa, AZ, for adroit use of limited resources to reveal, in print and online, how a popular sheriff’s focus on immigration enforcement endangered investigation of violent crime and other aspects of public safety.

How are we going to support this kind of journalism?  We need fulltime journalists with resources behind them; but how?

Explanation and Dog Pictures

For about 18, hours, anyone trying to see my webpage got instead an album of dog photos. No one complained — maybe no one was looking, maybe they preferred the dogs.

Many of the pictures I took in the Santa Fe Photography Workshops cannot be posted, because we were working with individuals in their homes. But I took a bunch for the Santa Fe Animal Shelter and Humane Society with no people in them. The plan was to include people, but the complexities of model releases and a snowstorm when time was short made it easier to just go with the dogs. (The cats weren’t good subjects –the dogs adored having me pay attention to them.)

So for those who would like a dose of cute dog pictures — ahem, I meant artistic images of a companion species — here is a subset of them.

How to Mess Up a Site: Google Maps Hides Street View

Oh, good idea, Google people — hide one of Google Maps’ most valuable features. Tried street view lately?  Can’t find it? Of course not. It’s now effectively hidden.

Go ahead, try.  We’ll wait.

OK, you tried and can’t get it to work?

Drag the little orange guy to the street you want.  Sure, obvious, right?

You do remember street view of South Hall, right? Well, it’s gone.

Want to know which streets have street view? Well, once you’ve figured out the secret, if you drag the little orange guy around, those streets will light up while you hold the mouse button down.

Obvious, easy, sure. No problem.  We knew that.

Caring for Elderly Parents

As many people around me know, my father, who lives in another state, is failing.   I have everyone who needs to know alerted, in case I have to suddenly take off.  A few weeks ago, my sisters and I gathered and said our good-byes to him. And then he rallied.  His condition has been up and down, but the end is clearly near.

I’m writing about this because of three excellent resources I’ve recently run across.

The first is a NY Times blog called The New Old Age: A blog focusing on the elderly and the adult children who struggle to care for them, dealing with issues of aging, especially aging parents.  Wish I had looked at it sooner;  it has a lot of what I can say, as someone who has now been through a lot of what the site talk about, is excellent advice, and reassuring reflections.  It’s hard to be making decisions for another person, and caring for the people who cared for you.  I have been spared much of this because in their later years my parents moved to be near my younger sister, who has borne by far the greatest burden.

Another is a recent Fresh Air segment with author, doctor and bioethicist Robert Martense, author of  A Life Worth Living: A Doctor’s Reflections On Illness In A High-Tech Era. For me, the most useful aspect of this is that he had come to the interview directly from being with his dying mother.  He talks about both the emotional and the medical decision-making aspects of being in that situation, as both a son and an emergency room physician.  For example,  I learned that it’s not appropriate to put someone on a ventilator who is not going to be able to recover their lung function — and why not.  And how (and why), even with an advance directive, medical professionals are likely to recommend intrusive measures to extend the body’s physical functioning regardless of the quality of life.

The last is one I have no first- or second-hand experience with, but that looks useful, and is recommending on the NY blog: Compassion and Choices, “a nonprofit organization, improves care and expands choice at the end of life. We support, educate and advocate.”

Smithsonian’s New Site about Photography

The Smithsonian has launched a new site, click! photography changes everything.

….an online exhibit that explores how photography influences every aspect of our lives….a collection of essays and stories by invited contributors and visitors like you discussing how photography shapes our culture and our lives.

Explore how photography changes Who We Are, What We Do, What We See, Where We Go, What We Want and What We Remember.