communication. community. cognition.
Archive for January, 2009
History in Black and White
Jan 31st
I need help, and this is one of those occasions when both my memory and my search-engine gymnastics have failed me.
There was a movie that was shown in schools when I was growing up in the 1970s. I remember it being shown in the gymnateria at Sawtooth Elementary, in Twin Falls, Idaho. (The gymnateria was that all-purpose room that had just enough of a stage to make it not-a-cafeteria, and flooring that was just hard and dangerous enough so as not to be a true gymnasium.)
The movie was an animated short of unremembered length, done in the style of black and white pencil sketches. The little stick figures proceed to advance from Stone Age to Space Age, and the visual conceit is that of a tower of knowledge being built. Each layer of technology and civilization built upon the next, starting with agrarian advance to military technology, to medicine, you name it.
I can’t remember the name of the movie. I’ve been all over YouTube with a variety of keywords:
- animated
- animation
- short
- history
- civilization
- innovation
- invention
- black and white
- educational
- film
…and several others.
Any ideas? Any teachers out there know what I am talking about?
Early morning journalism
Jan 30th
I was up early, documenting the procession of Alabama Power crew vehicles headed north to restore service to those affected by the ice storm in Kentucky.
Instead of bringing in a video crew, I shot this from my phone’s camera.
Good enough for web-work.
Hangups
Jan 26th
For months, we were hounded by various telemarketing resellers who wanted us to switch from DirecTV to Dish Network. At one point, as many as four different outfits were competing for our business, which one might have won if Dish had a satellite visible from our property.
Currently, we average three calls a week from an automated recording to remind us that our automobile warranty is about to expire. Maybe I can get them to throw in the undercarriage protection?
The latest wave is a reprise from a previous one. I wrote previously about the Countrywide agent who stepped through our stats and humbly admitted there wasn’t a thing he could do to help us in the way of a mortgage refinance. Apparently, he didn’t share the notes with any of the other companies who are desperate to get us to borrow money from them. (I thought credit was tight, didn’t you?)
We’re getting four or five such calls every week now. Today some slick-talking “man of Northeastern persuasion” got my wife on the phone, and proceeded to barrel in Brooklynese right on through the bulk of his boiler-room script, not allowing her the opportunity to interrupt, just as he’d been trained, ya follow me?
Yeah, he said “ya follow me?” every time he got to a part that he assumed my dear, sweet wife didn’t understand. You know, because she’s all Southern and everything.
“But ya know, based on the data we’re seein’ in the areas around you, you’ll never find a better time than now to lock in the lowest rates in a lifetime, ya follow me?“
After the third “ya follow me,” my dear, sweet wife — who, by the way has a triple major, a master’s degree in accounting, and her C.P.A. — said “We’re not interested. Period. Ya follow me?”
And he hung up.
Card Blanche
Jan 22nd
A commenter noted on my “Phoxes in your Phonebill” piece:
And if you don’t qualify for a credit card, of what value is your identity to thieves?
Good point. Not so good for those victimized in what is being hailed as the biggest credit card security breach ever:
A data breach last year at Princeton, N.J., payment processor Heartland Payment Systems may have compromised tens of millions of credit and debit card transactions, the company said today.
If accurate, such figures may make the Heartland incident one of the largest data breaches ever reported.
Even better, because the breach was with the processor and not the merchant, individuals will just be guessing:
[Heartland president and CFO Robert] Baldwin said it would be unfair to mention any one of his company’s customers.
“No merchant of ours represents even [one-tenth of one percent] of our volume, and to put out any name associated with what is obviously an unfortunate incident is not fair,” he said. “Their customers might end up having their cards used fraudulently, but that fraud might turn out to have come from their store, or it might be from another Heartland store and no one will ever really know.”
Lovely.
But I still don’t recommend signing up for identity theft insurance through your phone bill.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, identity theft, credit cards, fraud[/tags]
Phoxes in your Phonebill?
Jan 21st
Remember that old adage about foxes and henhouses? A company in New Jersey appears poised to become the guardian of fraud for low-income Alabamians, for the low price of $180 a year.
Consumer Data Service has received approval from the Alabama Public Service Commission to perform “third-party billing” for various businesses and properties. Specifically for the following business websites:
- http://myvoicemaildirect.com/ (petition pdf)
- http://evoiceconnect.com/ (petition pdf)
- http://idprotectionplus.com/ (petition pdf)
- http://myidsafeguard.com/ (petition pdf)
- http://fraudwatchguard.com/ (petition pdf)
- http://fraudalertguard.com/ (petition pdf)
The first two appear to be voicemail/communication consolidation services. Â VERY overpriced for what they claim to do. The other four are all identity-theft protection subscriptions. 15-bucks a month? What the hell?
Notice the slick websites, that all hawk the same services and promises, but targeted to different demographics (father-led household, mother-prominent household, single female, single male.) Also note that 15-bucks a freakin’ month is way too much. Would it surprise me to find out that all are shell companies for the same ownership as CDS?
Now, look at the website for Consumer Data Service:
“Online merchants will be able to increase their customer demographics by providing our billing services to consumers that don’t have, can’t have, or don’t use credit cards. This method allows merchants to optimize their revenue through consumer expansion.”
In other words, they make a business out of targeting the phone bills of people who would have a hard time getting credit cards.
Identity theft is a huge and growing problem, but is $180/year a good wager? And will the people having this “easy service” pushed on them going to have the wherewithal to calculate that risk?
Political Prescriptions
Jan 20th
“Politicians ‘feel our pain’ much in the same way surgeons feel our scars: in a sterile, clinical manner, and always from the blunt end of the knife.”
