Web

On a more light hearted note than my last post (I really, really hope I’m not wasting my time with college…), I’d like to share a great service with those of you who don’t know about it: BookMooch. Here’s a snippet from their about page:

Give & receive: Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you’ve read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish.
No cost: there is no cost to join or use this web site: your only cost is mailing your books to others.

I only signed up a few weeks ago, but I’ve already done a bit of swapping. For a couple of chess books, two books on Wicca, The Tipping Point, and a book on the Lucasville prison uprising, I’ve received or am waiting on:

• Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
• Auschwitz: A New History
• Ethics for the New Millenium
• The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America
  
• Reflections on the Revolution in France
• Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
• A History of Russia

It’s a great service, at least if you have a few books you know you’ll never read again. For a long while I held onto all of my books, even if I knew deep down that I’d never read them again (or even once, for that matter). I finally saw the light though. If I’m not going to read one of my books, I might as well swap it for something I will read.

As an added bonus, BookMooch has a feature that is tied in with LibraryThing (you do use LibraryThing, right?) Whenever you receive a book, when you mark it as received at BookMooch, there’s an option to automatically add the book to your LibraryThing catalogue.

(Speaking of LibraryThing… WordPress.com chaps, are we ever going to see a LibraryThing widget? If you’re in need of a template for one, here you go.)

I noticed in my stats area yesterday that one of the incoming links was from a site called ourcathouse.com. When I clicked on the link, I discovered that the incoming link was from… me. Sort of. Check it out.

I’m not too happy about this. They did include my name, and a link to the original post, but I’m still not happy about them basically stealing my content to feed their blog. At least I’m not alone; it looks like they’ve stolen content from a huge number of people.

Of course, I was unable to find any contact information on their site (surprise, surprise), so I did a WHOIS on their domain name. I was able to get an email address to contact them, to ask that they take down my content from their site. Now, whether they check said email, who knows. It’s also up in the air as to whether they’ll comply with my wishes.

I guess it’s time for me to put up some form of copyright notice here…

As always, Google has some pretty nifty April Fools pranks this year. Previous pranks included the Google Gulp, Google hiring folks to go to the moon, the Google Mentalplex, and the hilarious PigeonRank.

For this year, I’ve seen two so far:

On the Gmail login page, they’ve announced a new feature: Gmail Paper. The concept is fairly cool sounding, actually: select any of your mail you would like in paper form, then click Paper Archive. After that, Google will print the mail out, box it up, and send it to you. Furthermore, they say that’s completely free, due to it being covered by ads printed on the pack of the mail. Truth be told, I almost thought it was legit, until I came across this:

But what about the environment?
Not a problem. Gmail Paper is made out of 96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum, and thus, actually helps the environment. For every Gmail Paper we produce, the environment gets incrementally healthier.

Post-consumer organic soybean sputum, huh? If my mail is going to be printed on that, I’ll stick to the digital form, thanks. Lastly, Google paid a little bit of homage to the Lord of the Rings movies:

Keep it secret, keep it safe? That sounds like a Gandalf phrase if I’ve ever heard one!

The other new feature they’re offering is Google TiSP. It’s free wireless internet access which is provided through… your toilet. You just have to read about it. Snippet, though:

Within sixty minutes — assuming proper data flow — the other end of your fiber-optic cable should have reached the nearest TiSP Access Node, where our Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers (PHDs) will remove the sinker and plug the line into our global data networking system.

Heh. Plumbing hardware dispatchers. I love Google.

Earlier today as I was going through my feeds, I came across this post by Nils. While it’s certainly not his fault, having read the post has darkened my day quite a bit.

What’s it about, then? It’s about threats of violence in the blogosphere. Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users has, for the past four weeks or so, been getting death threats in the comments on her blog. There have also been some violent images and nasty comments directed towards her on a few different blogs, like meankids.org (no longer in existence), as well as unclebobism.wordpress.com (also no longer in existence, due to breaking the terms of service at wordpress.com). You can read more about what’s been going on here.

When you get down to it, the title of her entry says, in short form, what I want to express here:

Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech”

Blogging has been heralded as a great tool in exercising one’s right to free speech. People across the world have turned to blogging to express themselves, particularly those who aren’t permitted to do so in their local areas.

However, regardless of how great blogging is when it comes to expressing yourself, that doesn’t mean you can go around threatening bloggers you don’t like. Blogosphere or “the real world”, threats of such a nature are still a federal offense here in the United States. As Scoble remarked, a lot of people just take such threats on the internet as part of the territory. The anonymity that the internet supplies makes some people lose sight of the fact (or perhaps, they just stop caring about the fact) that they’re dealing with human beings. The fact of the matter is, bloggers shouldn’t have to deal with such threats. I don’t know what the solution is, but “coping” with such sick shit isn’t the answer. As Kathy remarked in her post, she’s probably never going to be the same, and to be honest, if people were hurling death threats and sexual attacks at me over the internet, I’d probably be feeling pretty screwed up, too.

If you have a blog, it’d be great if you blogged about what’s going on, to get it out there for all to see. The first part of the solution to this issue is to get people to realize that it’s happening in the first place.

As a note, if I sound like a jerk in this post, my apologies. I’m just really upset about this, because it could just as easily be any of us bloggers going through what Kathy is going through. What those people have done to her is total bullshit, and to put it bluntly, it has got me extremely pissed off.

Update: Here’s another good post about this over at apophenia.

A little under a week ago, I ordered three books from amazon.com. Because it was available, I selected their free shipping option. They ended up sending my order in two packages, two books in one, and the other book in a package by itself. The package with two books was carried by the USPS. The second one was carried by UPS.

Both of them had tracking information available at amazon.com. However, neither of them proved to be overly useful. Both of the packages were mailed out on February 25th. On that day, the tracking information showed for both items, “Carrier notified to pick up package” and “In Transit.” From that point on the tracking information was never updated again, until after the packages were delivered. At that point, both tracking pages showed that the packages had delivered.

Please don’t misunderstand me. This isn’t a rant about how long it took my packages to get here - a few days isn’t bad at all, particularly when you use the free shipping method. This is more of a “Huh?” post. Namely, what’s up with the online tracking of packages? I would assume that the tracking systems for both the USPS and UPS would be similar:

1. Each package gets a unique code, which is entered into a database.
2. Whenever the package is scanned at a location, that location, along with the time, is entered into the database, corresponding to the unique code for said package.
3. If the tracking system is on a closed network, the carriers would need to then upload the information to make the tracking information available online.

Now, assuming the workers at USPS and UPS do their jobs correctly by scanning the packages at occasional checkpoints, one would think that, even when it only takes 2 or 3 days to deliver something, a person would see more than “Carrier notified to pick up package” and “Delivered.” If their databases work similarly to web databases, surely it wouldn’t take longer than a few minutes (ideally, a few seconds or so!) for the information to be entered into the database and thrown onto the web. And, if the databases are offline and the carriers “save up” a large number of updates before updating the online version of the information, surely they would do an update at least a couple of times a day?

Like I said, I’m not ranting. I got my books quite fast and they’re in fine condition, thus, I am a happy camper. It just seems to me that when one looks at instant messages, instant email, and websites that load in half a second, the online tracking systems are either broken, horrendously slow, or someone isn’t doing their job quite right. Can someone who has more of a clue than me explain this to me? Are my assumptions about how the systems work totally off?