I love XKCD as much as every other right-thinking guy who likes science and math and the internets, and this strip about free speech says something that I think is important: Namely, it’s inappropriate to frame all restrictions of expression as infringement on the right to free speech.

However, in a series of tweets, mcc makes a critically important point, that the narrow implication of the XKCD strip is that only government can act to restrict the right to free expression, which is clearly not true:

We live in a world with many systems of control. The government is one system of control. It isn't fundamentally different from the others. — mcc (@mcclure111) April 18, 2014

We — and XKCD — may sneer at CEOs and TV stars who defend themselves from criticism by invoking “free speech:” It’s hard to sympathize with the rich and powerful who stand on a national stage and complain that they have no ability to speak their minds. While the Bill of Rights expressly protects all from restrictions imposed by the government, access to free expression is not at all universal, and, like so many things, is a function of power and resources.

This write up by Buster Benson at Medium is a great, thoughtful piece on how he’s getting real return from the quality of life tracking he is doing with Reporter. He’s categorizing responses to Reporter surveys by whether what he’s doing at the time is “quality time” and then adding detail that at explains why or why not. It’s exactly the kind of thing I thought about recently, but much more fully realized than my current use of Reporter — and it motivates me to refine and improve my own use, to ask questions of the information I am collecting and then find ways to act on it.

Pixel And Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In The Gig Economy: Sarah Kessler really takes the wind out of the “monetize your passion in your free time” marketing of errand and odd-job marketplaces like TaskRabbit:

I spend the biggest chunk of my time, about two hours, labeling photo slideshows at a nickel each. Each of them has five photos, and each photo has 11 pages of labels to use on it. That means that it takes at least 55 clicks to earn $0.05. There are slideshows of cats on couches. Cats on beds. Dogs on beds. Cats in sinks. Dogs with cakes. Cats with cakes. Cats with pizza. Cats with windows. Dogs in car mirrors. Dogs with bananas.

No surprise, it takes an awful lot of small gigs to even begin to get by (she has one or two good days in four weeks of hustling), but Kessler’s story shows just how seriously atypical the social media success stories are.

Working on some stuff, keeping busy and watching green sprout up in the garden. Meanwhile, I made a couple of quick updates to my writeup of hooking Runkeeper to Slogger. Just in case you’re interested.

Man did I ever save a lot of stuff to Pinboard this week, though.

“That Bites!” is a documentary about food allergies and living with food allergies by a 12-year old kid in Chicago. Good for him. He’s funded, but I would love to see him get a ton of money and go big with this thing. Our son has a bunch of food allergies and it’s scary that he could be killed by a bit of peanut cross-contamination. Food is so central to so many activities, and his inability to casually participate — or, say, to get on a plane without our worrying — is profoundly saddening to me. Broader understanding of food allergies, their seriousness, and how to minimize risk to others in environments like restaurants is critical.

Originally posted March 8, 2014 / Updated 2014-03-29

Five days since all the text was removed from textdrive.com and this notice went up on the relatively out of the way community forum at discuss.textdrive.com:

It is disappointing to report that after a year and a half of uphill battles and unimagined setbacks, after several costly efforts to regroup and find another way, options to keep TextDrive growing have run out, and we will cease operations on the 14th of March, 2014.

Six days at the time I write this, March 8, until TXD turns off the lights, and customers have yet to receive notice via email or on the front page of the business.

Moving Tips

I’m moving to Kaizen Garden. There’s an active forum there where former TextDrive customers are helping each other out. So far my migration has gone perfectly smoothly. I’ve cribbed some sql and rsync commands from Joel Dueck’s set of helpful migration pointers.

Updates

The servers at Ubiquity stayed up a couple of weeks longer than expected, but finally went dark yesterday (March 28, 2014). Judging by the traffic at twitter an awful lot of customers were caught unaware. There was never a notification beyond the above-mentioned forum posting, and Jacques Marneweck, formerly of TextDrive and now running Kaizen Garden, has been working at all hours to field requests from stunned users and perform recovery from backup, where available, but not everyone is recoverable:

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings to a number of users. Writing a reply where there are no backups for a users data really truly sucks. — Jacques Marneweck (@txdjm) March 29, 2014

To be very clear about a couple of things: There was no notification sent directly to customers, and this is on Dean Allen. I wish I could be stunned by this, but I’m mostly disappointed. Dean’s lack of communication is inexcusable, but unfortunately not surprising, given his absence from the operation of TextDrive after he took it over from Joyent. When the Joyent-TextDrive transition took place I noted some of my own concerns about Dean’s capability to pull it off: “… But I concluded that we’re all more or less adults, that the key folks are smarter at this stuff than I am, and that I’d trust Dean not do jump back in through a fit of (merely) fury or loyalty.” Perhaps I should have listened more to that internal warning.

And: My not entirely informed understanding is that Jacques carried the Ubiquity tab for an extra couple of weeks, on his own, in order to help with migrations, but could not perform a global notification because he never had access to the customer database itself. He has, without promise of compensation, taken on helping with recovery for users who aren’t really his customers. This after running TXD operations without pay for months.

I very much hope that Kaizen Garden succeeds profitably, both for my own self-interest of avoiding another migration, and to begin to repay Jacques for the tremendous work he has put in. To reiterate my note above about my migration, my experience there has been flawless: Hosting in an environment nearly identical to TextDrive, which means I had little to do on migration other than import a few databases, move files into place, and throw the DNS switches. It’s a highest-quality operation and has a smart, driven chief at the helm.

Joyent, Née TextDrive

For the sake of completeness, I also wrote about the original announcement of Joyent’s end of lifetime TXD hosting, back when.

Statistically, winters in Flagstaff average fifty inches of snow, and in practice we’re used to that meaning that some winters we really get dumped on, and other winters see rather little snow. The first winter we spent here brought us only a few storms, but since then we’ve had some pretty good seasons, including the whopper of a winter of 2010, when a four-day span dropped five feet of snow on us. That winter I was lucky enough to buy one of the last unsold snowblowers in town and just barely keep up with the storm.

This year we had the longest winter-time dry spell on record, ever: Over thirty days without so much as a whiff of precipitation. So the whole town was buzzing over the prospect of the storm that came through late this week and into the weekend. Reports are that it brought a couple of feet to the San Francisco Peaks, and we got wonderful rain here in town, where it stayed just too warm for it to fall as snow except for a brief period overnight.

I got out around town for an hour or so between storms, looking for good puddles, stormy light, and view of some of my favorite downtown scenes, as well as some new alleyway nooks and crannies.

The view toward the Monte Vista from the south side is one of the iconic pictures of this town, and it’s easy to see why. I can’t resist checking it out nearly every time I walk that direction. This night, the late sun poked through the clouds at just about the right time.

Downtown has a lot of streets at odd angles to one another, old gravel lots, and a mix of new and old construction — churches next door to motels next door to restaurants, and almost everywhere a view of the train tracks or buildings that once housed businesses related to the trains. The neighborhoods are home to small, old homes in different stages of repair, depending on how long they have served as rental housing for NAU students. I enjoy the mix of home construction, some of which shows a strong southwestern influence with Adobe and tile, while other homes are in the mountain town style of clapboard, shingles, corrugated metals. There’s one fascinating house downtown built out of converted shipping containers. Last night, there were some fun puddles to be found, shining up the late evening light.

I made it back to the car just as the storm really opened up again, cold hands flexing in the car after holding the camera in the wind and incipient rain — turning to slush and snow as the temperature dropped in the last block that I pulled up my hood, stuffed the camera back in the bag and made for the car.

A VSCO note

My photo walk was in part inspired by the need to get out of the house, and in part by Michael Laroque’s “Addicted” — VSCO Film 05 writeup. I really love Michael’s photography, and his discussion of Film 05 (I have Film 04 and Film 02, already) prompted me to pick it up after hedging for a few days — do I really need it?, I wondered. Michael knows that the point of these preset collections isn’t to make every photo look the same, but to find some inspiration in the looks they offer:

But it does mean I get to play with a new toolbox and with each and every release, some of the new emulations have triggered ideas, or found their way into my workflow in some shape or form. In many ways it’s like buying a great photography book… It inspires and shakes the status quo even if you don’t end up copying everything you’ve seen.

So, no, I don’t need it, and as a hobbyist I’m not going to make any money or anything. But I like them, and as I’ve mentioned previously, the film packs don’t take me back to my golden days of shooting film (though they do make me think about how long I spent shooting 35mm film in an automatic camera without thinking a moment about it); they help me find moods or textures or ideas that I might not have otherwise. So as someone who just enjoys this, it’s easily worth the price.

There are some really lovely landscape photos in this Storehouse post about visiting Isle of Skye. What a beautiful place.

John Foreman is the data scientist at Mailchimp. His post about machine learning and the meaning of human agency is deep, in all ways — extremely knowledgable, expansive in scope, and intensely human. Recently I sketched some extremely un-refined thoughts about becoming part of the big data machine through passive data collection; John knows how to think through this right and sharp.

(Don’t miss the precursor piece, either: You don’t want your privacy: Disney and the Meat Space Data Race. Mickey Knows everything.)

Seth Clifford is on to something with his thoughts about Fitbit fatigue.

For a solid year it never left my side, unless I forgot it (rare), and then I was nearly inconsolable (all those lost steps!). Over time, something changed though; I was more concerned with collecting the data and having it than actually using it. It became a weird anxiety-provoking moment (pat pocket-ok it’s there-whew) that I experienced a few times a day.

I’ve had my own fitbit for a little over a year, too, and while I’ve done the pocket-pat once or twice a day myself, once the fitbit became a part of my routine it has not been much of a stressor. But I’ve never changed the default goal step number of 10,000; never tracked food or water, except at the very beginning; never built a big network of fellow social-steppers. I did, however, have a lovely fun time hooking its data into my Slogger feed and building a nicer sleep visualization than the built-in one. At the same time, however, I don’t know if it’s providing me a lot of value.

Like Seth, I listened to the recent couple of episodes of Back to Work on self-quantification and how it “can goose your mindfulness.” I really enjoy those kinds of discussions; like many data- and technology-oriented interneteers I get a little bit buzzed just thinking about the array of ways we have to gain insight into behavior and habits (As Seth says, “Numbers! Graphs! Yay!”). So in addition to Fitbit, I use Runkeeper to track my workouts, again using Slogger as the collection method to archive that data along with my App.net posts and last.fm listens, as well. All of this is partly just because, well, I can: I get a little bit of basic satisfaction doing these little integrations, tuning the tools and such.

But here’s the problem with collecting all of this stuff: Unless I’m asking questions of that data, it’s mostly just taking up space — cognitive and disk — instead of increasing my self-awareness or mindfulness. The ease of passively quantifying ourselves lets us accumulate data without setting goals or interrogating its meaning to us. At best, that means we get very little value from it; at worst, in the case of a service like Runkeeper or Fitbit we’re feeding information into a big data aggregator whose own monetization intentions are rather less ambiguous¹.

Yet the impulse to learn more about myself remains compelling; this is one reason why, despite a healthy sense of skepticism about the quantified self — or at least the un-analyzed quantified self — I’m really interested in Reporter. Made partly by Nicholas Felton, famous for his annual reports and creator of Daytum, Reporter pops up a notification on the iPhone at several random times during the day to ask a handful of questions: What are you doing, where are you, who are you with, etc. While it does produce some numeric data (how many coffees did you have today?) and other information that may be expressed categorically or on a scale (how well did you sleep?), it’s really excellent at qualitative recording, and has a great flexibility for creating new questions. It can ask additional questions when you go to sleep or wake up, too.

Reporter can ask as many or as few questions as you like. The first question I added to Reporter was “Are you engaged in what you’re doing?” This is a prompt for me to think about how well I spend my time in a very general way. Sure, later I could build cross-tabs of that response with where I was or what I was doing (working, not working, etc), but for now it’s just a way to remind me to be thoughtful. The Reporter: Unofficial Survey Question Repository is a great resource for interesting items that users are adding to their surveys, and I love that a lot of them are qualitative and seeking personal insight rather than numbers:

• What surprised you today?
• What would you have done differently today?
• What are you going to focus on today?
• What are you looking forward to today?

By default, everything you tell Reporter is entirely private, stored on your device. You can optionally export to Dropbox, but there’s no service rolling it all up. So far, I really am happy with the experience and am looking forward to continuing to use it to tell myself a little bit more about myself.