Nashville / Griffin Video

March 20, 2009

OK so a buddy here at work was recently tasked with creating a video for a PR event that Griffin is hosting in Soho. The last couple weeks J has been roaming around the office and Nashville getting all this footage and no one was quite sure what it was. Or at least I wasn’t. There were mysterious tweets and filming of people in the cubes all around me (I can only assume he didn’t film me, because the goal is to help the brand, not hurt it). Over the last week J has been editing all these bits together into a video highlighting Griffin and some of the sights around Nashville, Tennessee. But wait! There’s more. Our warehouse manager, Tom Yarbrough, who will see his album released on iTunes in April, provides the musical accompaniment and the end result is fantastic. Great job Tom, J and everyone else that was involved. This place is really filled with a bunch of bright, creative, talented folks.

If you have any interest in Nashville, or an inside look at Griffin take a look at this video, it really is well done. Also, I highly recommend the HD version to avoid the stutters and audio sync problems. And, lastly, while you’re watching, keep an eye out for some Griffin / Nashville area Twitterers.

Twitter credits:
created by: @blatherskyte
music by: @tomyarbrough
cameos: @davedelaney / @griffintech, @keydesign, @rvalosik, @webslog, @jmrowland, @bradleyspitzer, @camerondaigle, and probably some others I missed.
sir not appearing in this film: @somegeekintn

Update: It looks like the video has been made private for some reason. I’ll update this if it is made public again.

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Good Blizzard / Bad Blizzard

March 8, 2009

If you are even remotely familiar with video games, and even if you’re not, you’ve probably heard of World of Warcraft (WoW) and the company that created it: Blizzard Entertainment. World of Warcraft is a legitimate phenomenon with as many as 11.5 million monthly subscribers playing the popular massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). WoW follows the Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft series and each was very well received. The reasons for this are many, but not least of these is Blizzard’s commitment to not releasing a game until they feel it is ready and meets their high standards. Whether of not this continues with after the merger with Activision remains to be seen, but that’s not really why I’m writing this post.

As good as Blizzard’s games are, their online account management leaves something to be desired. Like pretty much every online game, WoW requires a username and password to log into the game. This username and password are vulnerable to keylogging software which can be installed without your knowledge through your web browser. This software runs on your computer and relays back information to the bad guys, who can log into your account and clean out your bank and everything of value. If you don’t play the game, this may not seem like a big deal. It’s just polygons and pixels, right? Sure, polygons and pixels that can be sold for as much as $1000 or more. One thousand actual United States dollars. Have a look and see what a geared level 80 toon is going for these days. People have invested weeks or months of time in their World of Warcraft characters and you would hope that this account information could be made secure, but this keylogger vulnerability is apparently fairly common.

I know this because recently a friend’s account was stolen. Someone gained his account information, changed his password, transferred his character to another server, sold all his stuff, and took all his gold. Cleaned him out. Adding insult to injury, Blizzard charges $25 to transfer your character to another server. And since they have your payment info for the monthly fee, they will conveniently charge that $25 to your account so you don’t have to reenter any messy payment info. They took his fake money and some real money to boot. I’ve heard that several others in my current and former guild have had their account stolen as well over the years so this isn’t uncommon.

Blizzard does offer a device to combat this vulnerability, but that device will cost you an extra $6. Instead what Blizzard could do, without much effort at all, is to confirm a password change, account transfer, etc., by simply emailing a confirmation link to the email address associated with the account. Or alternatively, requiring the answer to a security question. Easy. Lots of other sites do this or something similar. This only prevents part of the problem, but it’s an easy fix and with 11.5 million people paying $15 a month to play, Blizzard can surely afford to spend a little to make a more secure system.

The next step would be a bit more trouble, but not any more than the work required to for the little USB device that they’ve created. Basically they just need to add an optional signed key solution. Login to the web site, generate a signed key which is stored on your computer and only allow a computer with a valid key file to login to the game. Keys, can only be activated through an email confirmation link. Problem solved. Instead, Blizzard is spending time and money chasing down these stolen accounts and trying to put everything back together for their customers. They’re spending untold amounts of time on a solution that is making no one happy, except possible the thieves.

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Project 365: 1-60

March 3, 2009
Evolution (34 / 365) No Photos Allowed (20 / 365)
#1. Evolution
(36 / 365)		 #2. No Photos Allowed
(20 / 365)
Moonlight (35 / 365) Video Game Violence (55 / 365)
#3. Moonlight
(35 / 365)		 #4. Video Game Violence
(55 / 365)
No Way Out (43 / 365) Night Settles on LP Field (10 / 365)
#5. No Way Out
(43 / 365)		 #6. Settles on LP Field
(10 / 365)
Fillin' Station (60 / 365) Assimilation (57 / 365)
#7. Fillin’ Station
(60 / 365)		 #8. Assimilation
(57 / 365)
Uppercut (59 / 365) End of Line (38 / 365)
#9. Uppercut
(59 / 365)		 #10. End of Line
(38 / 365)

I’ve managed (somehow) to keep taking a picture a day, every day this year. Just 303 more days to go. Sigh. Anyway, I think I’m getting a little better. And I’ve made the switch from JPEG to RAW. Although using RAW means that I spend a little extra time fiddling with my photos before uploading them to flickr. I made almost no adjustments to my first 40 images and now, at a minimum, I crop, straighten, and check the white balance. And sometimes quite a bit more. Those that require almost no adjustment in Aperture make me happiest, so hopefully Aperture won’t make me lazy.

I’ve also started adding a small watermark to the bottom right of each image. Aperture makes this stupid easy. I don’t mind people using my images, but I would like credit. This hasn’t been a problem with my flickr images, but I noticed that someone took a bunch of scans that I posted on my genealogy site and uploaded them to Ancestry without acknowledging the source. Not sure what I’m going to do about that, if anything. But it is aggravating and thus the watermark from this point forward.

Anyway, I was going through my most “interesting” (as determined by flickr) pictures to see if the newer images were more likely to be more interesting than the older ones. In other words: Am I taking better pictures? My top ten most interesting Project 365 pictures are displayed to the right. I have two pictures from the first 30 days among my top ten and eight from the last 30. That’s encouraging. Also six of the top ten were processed in Aperture. So, even more incentive to continue using Aperture after the trial expires.

I’m not sure this has been interesting to anyone but me, but I wanted to make note of my progress regularly so I can see how my photography evolves (or devolves) over the course of the year.

Oh! And before I forget, thank you so much to everyone who views, comments, or favorites my pictures. I really appreciate the encouragement.

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Facebook Privacy PSA

February 23, 2009

I’ve noticed a lot of friends and family on Facebook seem to take an all or nothing approach to sharing some of their more personal information. Some people, even the most casual friends, have their address, telephone number, birthday, visible while others that I’m close to provide none of this information. And it occurs to me that maybe both groups of people are unaware of the amount of control Facebook provides in determining who can and can not see this information. Facebook doesn’t exactly make this obvious, so I thought I might share some of my ideas on Facebook privacy settings.

The first step is to organize your friends into several groups based on how well you know them. To do this open the friends tab.

Next click the “Make a New List” button which will let you give the list a name and then add your friends to it. You can see that I’ve made a few lists. My “Casual Friends” are acquaintances that I may have met but don’t know very well, or perhaps online friends. Basically friends that I’m not sure I want to share every single personal detail with. All nice people I’m sure, but still. Next I have a list called “Do I Know You?”. Sometimes I get friend requests from people that I think I may know but I’m not certain. Also, there are friends that I only know from certain Facebook games like Mob Wars. “Do I Know You” is for these people and I want personal information limited a bit further for this group.

Now that we’ve organized our friends into these lists, open the Privacy Settings under the Settings tab.

Clicking Privacy settings will open a page that contains the following:

Click the Profile link and you’ll be greeted with a page that lets you control how your Basic information is presented on Facebook. Basic information includes your Profile, Basic Info, Personal Info, Status Updates, Photos Tagged of You, Videos Tagged of You, Friends, Wall Posts, Education Info, and Work Info. The little “?” next to each item explains exactly what each items contains.

Click one of the popup menus next to an item and select “Customize…” and a dialog box will appear.

In this box I allow only my friends to view this information, and in the box below “Except These People”, I’ve excluded the people in the list “Do I Know You”. You could exclude people individually, but that would be pretty tedious. That’s what the friend lists are for. When I accept a new Facebook friend, I also add them to the appropriate friend list and these personal info settings are automatically applied. You can also have multiple lists and/or people excluded for each item.

Once you have all of your Basic settings how you like them, you can then navigate to your Contact Information.

Personally I feel that the items in Contact Information are the most personal and I tend to be more restrictive with who I share this information with. The items that can be configured here are: IM Screen Name, Mobile Phone, Other Phone, Current Address, Website, and email.

Lastly, you have to make certain that as you add new friends, that they get added to the appropriate list. If you don’t add them to one of your lists, then they will be able to see all of the information that you allow friends to see. This is easy enough to do. When you add or accept a friend, you are given the opportunity to add that person to one of your friend lists as illustrated to the left.

I hope this post has been of some use. If there’s anything I’ve forgotten or if you have tips you’d like to share, please do in the comments.

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Of Cats and Cousins

February 17, 2009

Besides the obvious enjoyment I get from piecing together clues to discover my family history, one of the other benefits over publishing my genealogy online is “meeting” distant relatives.

Way back when I first started working on my genealogy, I came across a bit of a riddle. Fleser is a pretty uncommon last name and so anywhere I found them, be it in old Census forms, newspaper articles, and even Google searches, I knew there was a really good chance we were related. We (Flesers) are really concentrated in the Grand Rapids / Kalamazoo area of the United States. But there was this other little group clustered in the Montana / Oregon area, and for the longest time I could not figure out how we might be related.

Eventually I discovered my relation to, what I’ll call the Northwest Flesers. Let me explain. No, there is too much, let me sum up. My great-great grandfather, Adam Fleser, had a bit of an, um, adventurous streak it seems. He and his family left Michigan and traveled along the Bozeman Trail to Montana in 1864 after word of the gold strikes in Virginia City made its way east. He not only didn’t strike it rich, his wife left him, taking his four children with her and marrying William Bowe founder of Melrose, Montana. Bowe named Melrose after his step-daughter Melrose (Rose) Fleser. I’m not sure who named Fleecer Mountain after my great-great grandfather, but they spelled the name wrong. On the bright side, the pronunciation is correct. Adam returned to Michigan sometime after 1870. There he remarried and had six more children, the last being my great grandfather Adam G. Fleser.

A few years ago I was contacted by Chelsia Rice, who had stumbled across my site looking for an email address of a family member. It turned out Chelsia and I are related. She’s my 3rd cousin once removed, and ol’ Adam is our common ancestor. She was nice enough to fill large gaps in my knowledge about the Northwest Flesers, and it was through Chelsia that I came to know another cousin: Deirdre.

Cooper's First Photo
Cooper’s First Photo: Michael and Deirdre

Which brings me to Cooper. Deirdre and her husband Michael have a cat and his name is Cooper. Cooper is becoming something of a celebrity it seems. You see, Deirdre and Michael decided at some point that it would be cool to affix a tiny little camera to Cooper’s collar which takes a photo every two minutes. At the end of the day they download all these photos from the camera and have been doing this for a year. What they’ve ended up with is a year of images in the life of Cooper from his point of view. Images that are interesting and in many cases beautiful. And now Cooper has his very own photo exhibit at Urban Light Studios in Seattle through March the 13th. News of Cooper’s exhibit has spread from nationally from Seattle with appearances on Animal Planet and most recently Good Morning America.

Michael and Deirdre also have a filmmaking company called Cross Films and they’ve created a special page to track all of Cooper’s news appearances. Cooper also has his own blog: Cooper – Cat Photographer. He’s an extremely talented cat.

Now normally the story of a cat photographer would be pretty interesting, but because of the connections I’ve made through genealogy, Cooper’s story has a little extra significance, seeing as we’re family and all.

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