pikemurdy

In the web of the black spider

Walking Roman Down the Hall

Those who know me know that I enjoy walking. I sometimes walk for stress relief, sometimes for a bit of exercise and sometimes because it helps me think. As a form of transportation, man has yet to improve upon it.

In ancient Rome, walking was a marker of culture and status. And there were apparently “correct” ways to walk.

Catching sight of his daughter walking too quickly, and her husband walking too “softly” (mollius), Cicero is said to have quipped to his daughter “Walk like your husband”, and to his son-in-law “Walk like your wife”. It’s still not a great laugh maybe, but we can begin to get the point.

Read: Walk Like a Roman

Ward Kimball’s John Carter

John Carter—a sci-fi action flick with the Disney logo atop—is now on the big screen. I’ve not seen it, but from the ads I believe it’s safe to assume the movie is chock-full of loud crashes and dizzying special effects. The movie, if you didn’t know, is based upon a character that appeared in several Edgar Rice Burroughs novels.

What you may not know is that Ward Kimball animated elements from the Carter novels way back in 1957.

The character designs here are terrific. Don’t miss the video at the bottom.

Walt Disney’s Ward Kimball’s John Carter of Mars and Beyond!

Bridge

As I Lay Dying Book Jacket

Although it’s a great exercise, many “fan designs” fall short of the mark, functioning merely as beautiful images without being true to the content of the message. This goes for fan-designed movie posters as well as book covers.

This is a different story. This jacket doesn’t simply illustrate an image from the book. This jacket manages to be modern, beautiful and it still convey the attitude of the book.

Tyler Adam Smith designs quite a nice book jacket for As I Lay Dying.

Image from Smith’s website.

Signing Out of Google

I have always treated the internet as essentially public. Despite the privacy policies of websites I use, I make assumptions that any tweet, any Facebook post or comment, any entry on my blog or the like is completely public. This is a policy based upon equal parts common sense, paranoia and seeing friends find out the hard way that their tweets were not as private as they’d thought.

Google recently announced the coming of an updated privacy policy. I was a bit upset, but I shrugged it off. A few days later the Wall Street Journal published a report that Google did a bit of technological trickery to track users even if the user had blocked such tracking. This seemed to be crossing an ethical line, and I couldn’t just shrug it off.

There is an old saying I heard somewhere: if you’re not paying for something, you’re being sold.

It should be made clear that Google’s search, Analytics software and email services are top-notch, and I believe they deserve to be compensated. I regret that no one at the company seems to have figured out how to make money, except through advertising. I currently pay cold, hard cash for my email service, hosting, even the content management system running this site. I (and probably many others like me) would certainly pay a yearly fee to Google to take ads and tracking off my search results, however that’s not an option. Or at least allow me to not tie what I see on YouTube to messages I’ve sent to my wife through Gmail.

Advertising companies have long made a lot of money from knowing who people are and what they like. For example, CBS knows certain things about the audience of Late Night with David Letterman. They know that it’s primarily male, with a median age of 54. What CBS does not know, is about the individuals watching. CBS doesn’t know about me.

Principles being principles, I decided to stop using Google where there is a suitable alternative.

The nagging feeling that I use Google for everything is all that held me back (building loyalty instead dependency is a subject for another article).  But the thought of becoming even more dependent certainly encouraged my leaving.

The first thing I did was get my personal email off Google. A few years ago, I started routing my pikemurdy email through Google’s servers. I did this for reliability and spam filtering. This was my hardest decision. But I backed up my email, and changed my mx records and now host it elsewhere.

Next came Google Docs. I’ve never been a heavy user of Docs, because Google Docs offers very little, except that it can be accessed through a web browser. Numbers, Excel and Pages work much better. I converted the few spreadsheets I had to files and placed them in my Dropbox folder. Yes, I know about iCloud syncing of Pages and Excel, but with Dropbox what’s the point?

I then visited google.com/history and deleted my browsing history, and my Google+ account. To double check everything, I visited (and I highly recommend you do the same thing) the dashboard.

For RSS reading, I decided to return with my old favorite, NetNewsWire. Unfortunately, the only way to sync the feeds between devices is to use Google, so I would have to make do without synchronization. But I can probably live with this.

I switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo.com, chosen because of their honest privacy policy. At this point I realized that Google was, in fact, not as essential to my life as I had thought.  This was easy.

No Google at all?

All that I have left that I use is Google Analytics, this is tied to a secondary Gmail account. This is not my pikemurdy account which I use as my primary email. I have a secondary account which I believe still has a Google+ profile, but I’ve only logged in once. I’ll eventually zero out that account as much as possible as well.

I still intend to use Google every once in a while. Google needs to make money, and deserves to. I don’t mind seeing ads when I search, use maps, or even when I use the developer tools that Google provides.

What makes me feel queazy is Google using my search history in concert with my email to track my “interests” and advertise and feed content to me based upon the results. The easiest way to prevent this is to simply sign out of Google and never sign back in.

What do I expect to happen?

Nothing. I don’t expect Google to change its privacy policy or even attempt to “keep my business”. I simply expect to not have to sign into Google very much.

A Former Slave’s Drawings at the High Museum of Art

There, the illiterate, often homeless former slave picked up a pencil. For the first time in his life and for inexplicable reasons, he began to draw.

He drew what he saw

Chipotle Compared to Apple

Nope. I’ve still not eaten at a Chipotle. But the more I read about their business, the more interesting they seem.

Cooking this way is slow, but extremely precise. A piece of meat held in a 155 degree water bath for long enough will cook uniformly to exactly 155 degrees worth of doneness. Sous-vide meat can then later be seared, sliced, chopped, or prepared any which way you like. Fancy chefs are the best-known practitioners of the technique, but in many ways it’s ideally suited to more casual dining.

Despite the cheesy (no pun intended) title of this article, there’s some real meat (pun intended) to it.

Chipotle is Apple

Churn it out