NYT reports that the stone wall is coming down. After years of vowing never to allow music downloads with no copying restrictions, the major record labels are finally waking up to the digital age. Looks like there will be some major developments during the next few months and over the next couple years.
Pilgrim Notes
Reflections along the way.
Category: Uncategorized (page 6 of 22)
NYT today provided a master opt list to get your name away from all those pesky solicitors. Here are the highlights:
PHONE SOLICITATIONS To stop them, go to donotcall.gov. Or call toll free, (888)382-1222, from the number you are going to restrict. (home and cell phones; you need to register every five years).
JUNK MAIL Host by the DMA (Direct Marketing Association). Not a guarantee but maybe a help. Online form – www.the-dma.org/consumers/offmailinglist.html or mailing address – Mail Preference Service at P.O. Box 643, Carmel, N.Y. 10512. There is an online form at If you want to get more mail, there is also a place to sign up to get on the lists.
E-MAIL. No real good solution. You can try to make it harder for spammers to get your address in the first place by never posting your address in public forums. Spammers employ software to scrape the sites of anything with that @ symbol. Instead spell it out in a unique way like “the nameofthiscolumn at nytimes.com.”
CREDIT CARD OFFERS. Call (888) 567-8688, but be ready to give out some personal information like your Social Security number. Als0 www.optoutprescreen.com. You can do it for a period of five years or permanently.
OTHER OPT-OUTS Your personal information is accessible in less obvious ways. For instance, your computer tracks where you have visited online. DoubleClick, a company that collects data for online advertisers, offers a way to prevent your computer from giving it information at http://www.doubleclick.com/us/about-doubleclick/privacy/dart-adserving.asp.
But again, it is only a piecemeal solution. Other online advertising companies will still put “cookies” on your computer to collect the same data. So the next-best solution is to frequently run software that cleans out cookies. You can get Spyware Blaster, Spybot, or Ad-Aware at www.download.com free.
Your personal information, including parts of your Social security number, are available in publicly available data bases that you may never see. The most common ones offer a way to opt out of a listing. Nexis, one of the biggest, says you can opt out of its people-finding lists by going to www.lexisnexis.com/terms/privacy/data/remove.asp. Nexis does not make it easy because it requires that you prove you are a victim of identity theft before it will consider your application.
The Center for Democracy and Technology provides addresses and forms for other companies, like ChoicePoint, that do not let you opt out online (http://opt-out.cdt.org).
I’ve messed around with a few different online OS and most disappoint, but this YouOS looks pretty cool.
Take a few moments this weekend to reflect on the embodied ideas revealed through Martin Luther King Jr.’s life. I got an email from the Teaching Company for this free MP3 download about MLK’s life and ideas. For those who are perptually wanting to learn and and relearn the things we should have learned years ago, the Teaching Company is a pretty cool resource.
Here’s a littl excerpt from the site about the lecture:
Join Professor Dalton on this intriguing examination of Dr. King’s personal quest for freedom. You’ll explore how this courageous Baptist minister interpreted Christ’s concern for spiritual freedom and applied the nonviolent teachings of Christ and Mahatma Gandhi to race relations in the United States in the 1960s. Hear how Dr. King also developed the connection between freedom and justice that ultimately inspired history-making events such as the Montgomery bus boycott and Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on a public, segregated bus. These events, and others that Dr. King inspired, paved the way for the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision declaring Alabama’s—and thus the nation’s—segregation laws unconstitutional. (download here)
Apple and Yahoo are both making big announcments about mobile phone. NYT reports that Yahoo is partnering with Motorola to introduce Go for Mobile 2.0, making it easier to search weather, news, stock, and sports scores. And Apple is set to make an announcement later today that supposedly will set off a “nuclear war” in the 4th screen world.
This is the end of TV as we know it…and I feel fine. Jeremy set up his HDTV flat screen last weekend, running the cable through Windows Media Server. His television, music, internet, photos and movies are all managed by the same source. On the digital screen the switch between television stations and the internet was virtually unnoticeable. It apears simply as flipping channels. (And this was without the Venice Project!)
We watched some excellent amateur programming that will give networks a run for their money. With the falling prices of HDTV, the inexpensive access to good digital camcorders, and the vast pool of creative minds on the Internet–television and entertainment as whole has permanently changed and the “davids” are now entering the arena en masse.
I bought the LG V last spring because I wanted to merge my Palm contacts onto a non-PDA phone. While I adapted to the PDA phones when they first came out, they didn’t really fit my usage. I use a PDA and phone in different ways and sometimes I use them at the same time, so convergence didn’t work as well for me as I had expected.
I looked for phone that could sync up with the Palm, and Verizon assured me this was the one. Well, not so simple. In fact, there is no direct sync. I bought some merge kit, which never worked. So for the past six months I haven’t taken time to mess with this and just let it slide. Yesterday, I thought I might do a little searching on the web to see who else had this problem.
Turns out the merge kit was a waste of money. I downloaded bitpim and eventually made contact with my phone (after following the instructions of a few other folks). I exported my Palm contacts to a text file. Then I imported that into Excel and created a csv file. Bitpim can import a csv file. It is supposed to import vCard files, but I was unsuccessful exporting my Palm stuff and importing via vCards.
Bitpim does seem a crash a lot (maybe I had too many contacts), but eventually I got it working. As I imported, it took me to a intermediary screen and I had to rename the columns using its pull-down menu. Until I notice that I kept clicking through that screen and getting an error. Anyway, I finally got the contacts on my phone and I am happy.
My wife sent me an interesting suggestion from Quint Studer about communicating with senior leaders. He suggests that when leader ask for updates, they are usually juggling multiple projects at once and are primarily interested in results and outcomes rather than process. If you overload them with process details at first, you may actually lost their attention before you deliver the key points. Here are three tips he gives,
- Open with results and outcomes. Make sure you can quantify what you achieved. Good effort is no excuse for lack of results.
- Be prepared to explain more. Once a listener has been provided the results, be ready to outline “the how” if asked. This helps the listener know the key steps for success. Great organizations always look for ways to replicate strong results in other departments or take them system wide.
- Show calculations if requested. For example, by lowering the left without being treated from 3% to 1%, 554 patients received care that otherwise would not. With an average collection of $276 (554 x $276 = $152,904) an additional revenue of $152, 904 is generated. (Be careful not to overstate results, however, as you risk your credibility.)
She probably sent this to me because I tend to be interested in “why” questions rather than “what” questions. So for example, when I first pushed social computing ideas at JTV, I approached it from why this trend is important and why people long for community while continuing to live in isolation. Needless to say, by the third or fourth sentence, my boss’s lost interest.
Last week all my flash applications suddenly quit working. I tried several times to update flash, but with no success. I would download the player, click install, and upon completing installation it would send me back to a page requesting that I update. A mad circle. Felt like I was stuck in some twisted online merry go round. Unfortunately, I’ve been working on so many side projects (like antiquing a nativity set) that I didn’t have time to track down a solution.
Last night while I was sitting up in the middle of the night, I thought hey this would be a good chance to solve this. After a fe searches, I landed on Versiontracker with better troubleshooting advice than the Adobe troubleshooting section. If you have this problem with an Intel-based mac, here’s the advice I picked uu from Jim Kessler:
I’ve been working on a client’s machine where “you don’t have the Flash plug-in installed” appeared after installation and redirection to:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/about/index.html
Uninstalling and reinstalling had no effect. The solution? Repairing permissions with Disk Utlility. Then I ran the uninstaller (look on the Flash Player Support Center), and reran the installer, and everything worked.
BTW, check out versiontracker either way. It provides daily updates on software/freeware suff with comments (and troubleshooting tips).
Spent a little time this morning tracking some of the new Web 2.0 sites, and I put a few posts of the one that sound interesting to me. First, MP3 Realm, a music search engine. You can search audio files and lyrics, create playlists, download files, save searches and more. It could be interesting. While it’s a different princicple than Pandora, ultimately the playlist stirs me to comparison. I think it would be interesting to mash the search capabilities with the music genome concept of Pandora.
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