Liz: March 2008 Archives

The other night, I went to the opening of 21, with some local MIT alumni. My girl Charisse organized a get together of MIT folks to see a 21+ showing at the Arclight in Hollywood. No, there were no extra 'adult' scenes in the film, or anything. Arclight 21+ showings just have a bar outside the theater, and you can take your drinks inside with you, if you like.

Trust me, we needed the drinks.

The film was....laughable. Then again, maybe we were looking for some good laughs, the film being about an MIT student counting cards at casinos (based on a true story).

As a group we opened the film with a requisite "LSC.......Sucks!" cheer. Snickering ensued from then on. Some things I remember being funny:

• The mythical 'MIT 4.0' GPA being impressive. MIT grades on a 5.0 scale, with a 5.0 being the A average. A 4.0 from MIT means you're sittin' in B-ville. Not like that's a bad thing. Just sayin. It's like graduating from MIT 'with honors.' That's impossible.
  
• The constant use of the term '2.090' (said: "the Two-Ninety") for our robot competition. It's actually 2.009 (said: two double-oh nine). Not sure why they chose to use a different, but similar and confusing name for the class. 
  
• Random scene on Memorial Drive in front of Killian Court, where lead was talking to his nerdy friends. There was mad foot traffic in the scene, as if anybody walks down this sidewalk at all during school.

Overall, the film was average. I nodded off a few times, to be honest. I agree with the protests, the film was racist to not include more Asian actors because in real life, the team consisted of more Asian students. Now that I think about it, the lone Asian actor in the film had few lines, and a minimal role of importance on the team.

Hollywood never fails to disappoint.

I just found this performance piece via Baratunde. It's almost a year old, but it's awesome and still applies today. Performed by Darian Dauchan. I laughed, I cried.



This pretty much sums up how I feel about Obama. I forgot how much I enjoy slam poetry. I need to hit up some spots here in LA and see some live shows.

I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook.

The Backstory
I joined Facebook in the Spring of 2004, which means I am coming up on my 4th year as a dedicated active member. I got in early like most of the Ivy League/Top Tier students because Facebook only catered to this audience at the time. Being an MIT student, I was familiar with the paper Face Book issued to Freshmen every year at our school. Back then, TheFacebook.com literally was an e-version of that, give or take a few more fields of information. I could view everybody's business, so long as they were on the MIT network. I was a little frustrated that I couldn't easily connect to my friends at Harvard because there were serious walled gardens in place. Over the years things opened up, and now I barely recognize the Facebook I used to know.

Forcing Powerusers to Power....Use
These days, I find myself wondering who is Facebook catering to whenever they release a new feature. For example, the granular Privacy Options released last week are almost useless to me. This feature is great....if you have only 20 friends on Facebook. Why would I want to sift through my hundreds of Facebook friends and put them all on different lists so I can then control my privacy levels?

I have a couple friends who literally have over 1500 friends on Facebook, and unlike the Scoble's of the world, they actually know these people. What are my friends going to do with this new feature? Sit around sorting their 1500+ friends into lists? Seriously? If we truly wanted to manage our privacy our options are: categorize hundreds of friends (not good for user, will take forever),  pare down our information and proactivity on the site (not good for Facebook), or delete our accounts (not good for Facebook). 

Years ago, I listed my dorm, room number, address, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, on top of other generic meta information on my facebook profile.  Today?  The juiciest information is my work history.  For various reasons, I don't trust putting all my information on Facebook. I have personally discovered security breaches (I still do, as do others) so I don't trust the site to hold my info under lock and key. Even if I trusted Facebook's security, the controversial release of Beacon and NewsFeed has me wondering how much does Facebook actually care about its users? Does Facebook understand their userbase, and the diverse needs and expectations among them?
 
Feeling The Love
I don't feel the love, Facebook. I feel like you've sold my user experience out, just to get a quick high off of a new user account. Newsflash: new booties are having a hard time figuring you out. People don't 'get' why you are useful, the granular privacy levels are only awesome if you understand what should be hidden and why. While extended privacy levels are great, they will not keep new users if users don't understand the importance and threat to privacy established on your site.

Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch
Facebook is silently rolling out the People You May Know feature. I wondered why they hadn't announced it on their blog yet, but I think I know why: they're tweaking the feature. I've noticed a significant change in the pool  of people being pulled, as well as the display on my homepage within the last 24 hours, so I'll wait until it looks as though they're done before I attack.

The Boondocks, one of the more controversial animated series of the past few years has produced two episodes attacking your favorite TV network: BET. Both episodes appear in full below. Please beware of harsh language.

"The Huey Freeman Hunger Strike"

"The Ruckus Reality Show"


Comments:

• I like Dr. Leevil, even if I am not supposed to.
• I am amused by Tavis Smiley's cameo. Highly amused.
  
• I think Aaron McGruder is getting close to Dave Chappelle dangerousness, in terms of content. Not like that's a bad thing.
  
• I love to hate Uncle Ruckus.
  
• Word on the street is that BET asked Turner Cable (Cartoon Network owner) not to air the episodes because it reflects poorly on the network. Turner Cable denies this, and I can't find anything substantial to refute their claim.  Sounds like a rumor to me.
  

Questions:

• What happened? I'm not quick to believe this 'BET shutdown' rumor. That would give too much credit to BET. BET can shut down the Cartoon Network but they can't shut down Canada? Somebody else had a change of heart somewhere.
  
• Why is Reggie Hudlin (President of Entertainment at BET) credited as Executive Producer of the show if he is depicted poorly in the episodes? Is he not an EP anymore? If he is still EP, did he sign off on this?
• The network produces not one but two episodes making fun of BET and nobody says anything about it until it's time to air? The second episode is dirty with lower thirds, which seems like it went pretty far down the chain before somebody pulled the plug. I don't know, I just don't see The Boondocks spending money to produce two episodes knowing they wouldn't make it to air. Controversial content isn't supposed to make it to final production, it  gets stopped earlier in the process. I know these are the same people who had MLK saying the N-word last season, but still.
• Speaking of that MLK episode, what is with this protection of BET? We can't save Martin Luther King from The Boondocks, but doggone it if BET is sacred. Perhaps we need to look at Turner Cable a little sideways, hmm?
  

Stuff isn't adding up here. *rubs chin*

A quick post over at Web Worker Daily asks are we entering a Post-Reader era?

I think for me, the answer is yes. Since September of last year, I've been struggling with my Google Reader. Every time I look up, my unread count is over 1000 posts. I just can't keep up. I subscribe to something like 250 feeds, and some of them are inactive, but the active ones are too much for me. Lately, as I go through my feeds, I've been  discarding the ones I now find annoying. Cutting back.

My Twitter use supplanted my lack of feed reading, because I figured if it were that groundbreaking, one or a few of the people I follow would tweet about it, with links. For the most part, that's been helping me stay somewhat aware of  what's been going on in the e-streets. The new problem is I am trying to cut back on my Twitter use. I have reached a plateau. I don't want to follow anymore people. I feel detached from people on twitter I felt more attached to. I keep my Twhirl on, but I don't say much, just watch the tweets go by.

Along the same lines: I can't stand all this aggregated information of all my friends!  Friendfeed is cool and all, if you have 4 friends. Anything over  4 people is just out of control. Or perhaps, my actual real life friends need to join the service for me to care. I know there are filters. I know there is additional commentary. Whatever. All these  sites are beginning to drive me insane.

A year ago I would have sworn by RSS and activity aggregation, because it felt like it made things so simple and saved me *so* much time. Today, I can't stand this mess. I am overloaded with information, now I don't care. Now I visit sites manually again. Now I need something to help me save time on my saving time.

Maybe I'm just grumpy because I'm in the middle of reading my feeds right now.

Hmph.

We are one step closer to Social Media Kind here at my job. Today we officially launched the Tavis Smiley Video Blog!

This is a pretty cool project I have had my ear on here at work. As many social media projects go, this is a work in progress, and we have many things lined up for Tavis' video blog. In the future, he'll be taking questions from his Twitter followers, and submissions from the blog itself. You'll also get an idea of what Tavis is like behind the scenes here on the lot on his show tape days.

Check out the first installment below. If you have any constructive feedback to offer, drop a comment, or shoot me an e-mail. 

This weekend, my friend (and fellow MIT Engineer '89) Bill Cammack twittered about broadcasting live on his website. I moseyed on over, and found myself in a UStream/Skype/iChat audio/video experience with Bill, Tyme, JennTaFur and DarrenKeith. A few other folks came through as well.

We initially started chatting with Bill via the Meebo chat widget, when Bill got the idea to add some audio to the mix.  The Mac users were easily integrated with the iChat audio feature, while the PC users got themselves together via Skype. Bill recorded some of our 2-hour session (it went by quickly), and a few minutes are in the clip below.



Yes that's me laughing and coughing up a storm in the background. I'm actually an avid laugher (will laugh at anything), and Bill always exacerbates my laughing problem.  I couldn't control myself because I had no idea where this recording was going. Bill did and said everything on the fly, not cluing any of us in on what was about to go down in front of the camera.

Either way, it was a good exercise in testing out how all of these services would work together to create a media rich communication environment. I think we concluded that it was a good technical experience, but that those who call in should be on the same service because there was a slight lag between iChat and Skype audio users. Once I listened to some audio playback from Tyme's end, I could hear the flaws in the experience.

When talking to someone IRL, they decide to cut short the line of conversation with, "let's talk about this offline."

Am I missing something? If we're talking face-to-face or on the phone, aren't we already offline? Who are these people who do not know the difference between offline and online? Maybe they need to revisit Remedial Internets 101 down at the community college.

Like many viewers of The Wire I am an avid fan of the show. I didn't start watching the series until the middle of Season 4, when my boy Dame told me I had to stop and watch the season from the beginning so I could catch up and watch it with him. Wire fans love to talk about the show with each other. We will wake up in the middle of the night, talk to you cross-country for two hours about what just went down with Prop Joe.

I dated a Baltimore native for three years, had been to Baltimore many, many times, and never watched The Wire until Season 4. I am unsure how this happened, because now that I am an Official Fangirl, I can't wait to get to back to BMore and say hi. Anyway, it was love at first sight with Season 4, often crying at the TV after every episode (I'm a sap, do not leave me in front of the TV alone--I will cry). I was upset that Season 5 would take forever to arrive, but that gave me time to go back and watch Seasons 1 - 3.

Season 5 rounded out the series. The newsroom arc wasn't my favorite, but after some explanation from David Simon, it fits. The final episode warmed my heart. Dukie the junkie broke my heart though. I knew it was coming, but seeing it before my eyes just made me lose it. Life goes on Baltimore, no?

I miss the show. Not sure if I have ever loved a TV series as much as this one, and I could kick myself for not getting on it sooner than later. Backtracking is definitely worth it though, so if you have never seen the show, there's no day like today to get started.

You know what else I could kick myself over? David Simon coming to USC to speak at my school--Annenberg--and I missed it! I was making my RSS Reader rounds, when I noticed Undercover Black Man posted an entry about the YouTube clip of the Simon lecture. Sure enough, I make a visit to my inbox and see all kinds of (unread) e-mails about David Simon coming to speak on March 3rd. Oops. Inbox Zero is elusive, what can I say?

Check out the video of the lecture below, if you have some time. It's 90 minutes long, so make some tea and get comfy. I'll go ahead and spoil it for you right now and say: Simon says that Cheese was Randy's father! I knew Wagstaff was an unusual last name for not one, but two, characters to have. Gah! I hated Cheese, and I loved Randy. That would have been interesting to see how this played out. Find out why they didn't get to tell the story in the clip. Simon is speaking to a bunch of  journalists so he has some interesting commentary about the  Internet, and the bad situation newspapers endure online today. That's a whole 'nother talk show though.





Simon also posted on the HuffPo today, summarizing a lot of what he talked about at this lecture a few weeks ago. Check that out too.

One of my first medium-sized projects at work has launched:

WIRED SCIENCE: What Element Are You? Facebook application

The application is supposed to complement our series, WIRED SCIENCE. It's basically a personality quiz that tells you which element from the periodic table you are, and then based upon the results of you and your friends, it can predict how your relationships will play out. It's also all in fun, so don't take it too seriously.

I had a great team who helped put this thing together:

• I hired Pure, Inc. to do all the backend work. I'd never heard of them before, but found them on Facebook and they looked like a reliable company. The other apps in their portfolio looked solid, so that helped. They did awesome work, were a breeze to work with, and they are very professional. I would definitely hire them again because they know their Facebook apps.
  
• Design is always important to me, and I wanted to hire the best designer I could get my hands on. Luckily, Nick La was available and willing to put in some work. I have long admired Nick's design on the web for a few years now. His Web Designer Wall is one of my favorite blogs evar, for both its design and content. Nick is a rockstar to work with, by the way. Whatever I wanted, Nick was there with great feedback, work, and adjustments. He definitely goes the extra mile to  keep his clients happy and he provides quality graphic design and CSS work.
  
• As far as content development, I worked with series host Chris Hardwick for all the funny/geeky copy. Chris is one of the coolest, funniest people I've come across working here. I tried not to be too much of a fangirl around him, because Lord knows "Shipmates" double-headers got me through many an all-nighter in undergrad. He nailed the right balance of geeky and funny for the project.
  
• Believe it or not, there is actual science behind the logic on the app, and I worked with my friend Princess to help on science duty. Princess is probably the smartest person I know--and I know some really smart people. Having some degrees from MIT and Caltech helps too.
  

I guess with all these people doing the work, there wasn't much I actually did, haha. Being in charge of social media has its benefits! Just kidding. I did the concept development, wrote up the planning documents, did a little wireframing, etc. I also had to work with everybody invested, like the executive producer of the show, my superiors in my department, some folks from WIRED Magazine, etc. to make sure they were satisfied and excited about the idea. It's pretty cool to see my idea and product requirements document develop into a thing of beauty. Though, beauty is in the eye of the beholder I guess. Anyway, if you're on Facebook, check out the app!

I finally decided to take iMovie for a spin, after avoiding it for a few years. Here's my first video.


Prodigy from calinative on Vimeo.