• “‘Take Back the Beep’ Campaign”
• “Verizon: How Much Do You Charge Now?”

The short version: your cellphone carrier is probably tacking on several dollars worth of unnecessary fees to your bill each month. Do that for millions of customers and watch the money roll in. They have no incentive to stop these practices unless they begin to feel the heat from their customers. Here’s how:

For those who don’t have/use a data plan (i.e., no web browsing, app downloading, etc.)

1. Call their customer service line and setup a data block. Be persistent and stick to your guns should they suggest alternatives.
2. Examine your bills for extraneous data charges. After you get that data block, ask about a refund for those charges. Once again, be persistent (but polite).

Anyone with a cellphone can participate in David’s “Take Back the Beep” campaign:

1. Read through some of David’s “Take Back the Beep” blog posts (just so you know what you’re talking about).
2. Submit a polite complaint with your carrier via the channels listed below.

Here’s where to send your complaint (Sprint already lets you remove the message):

• Verizon: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/FJncH.
• AT&T: Send e-mail to: customerissues@attnews.us.
• T-Mobile: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/2rKy0u.

After watching the movie, I flipped over to a “Behind the Scenes” video that highlighted the differences in footage between a traditional (though high-end and expensive) video camera and the EOS.  Unfortunately they don’t explicitly mark which scenes were shot with which camera, but with a little observation, the differences should become apparent.  A typical setup is to show a scene as shot from the traditional video camera (a Canon XH A1); it is apparent because the shot is typically a wider angle of the entire set, including the EOS.  They then cut to the same scene as shot by the EOS for the movie.  The differences in color saturation, detail, and exposure range (in addition to actually controlling depth of field) are remarkable.

If I get motivated, I may post screenshots from the “Behind the Scenes” video comparing the same scene in both cameras.

Updated: here are those screenshots; I apologize for the low res required to fit into the site’s layout.  If you click, it’ll take you to the high res version.

The Bridge

The black blob in XH-A1′s lower left corner is the head of a crew member.

The Actress

This compares video shot with the XH-A1 to a closeup of the same scene shot by the EOS.  The colors seem less washed-out in comparison.  For kicks, I threw in a third screenshot which shows a still photo of the same scene, though with different lighting (a spotlight on the actress instead of available light).

Top 10 things likely to be overheard from a Klingon Programmer

10. Specifications are for the weak and timid!
9. You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!
8. Indentation?! – I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!
7. What is this talk of ‘release’? Klingons do not make software ‘releases’ Our software ‘escapes’ leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.
6. Klingon function calls do not have ‘parameters’ – they have ‘arguments’ – and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.
5. Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.
4. A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment on his code!
3. Klingon software does NOT have BUGS. It has FEATURES, and those features are too sophisticated for a Romulan pig like you to understand.
2. You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert unless you’ve read it in the original Klingon.
1. Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!

John Maeda is the author of the The Laws of Simplicity, which discusses thirteen rules for simple living and working. He recently gave a TED Talk in which he further simplified those thirteen rules down into one principle. Enjoy!

It occurred to me that we were essentially doing enterprise application integration (EAI), an area that has been synonymous with overly complicated and outrageously expensive software. Could RSS be a viable alternative to the setup overhead, language specificity, and clustering complexities of technologies like JMS? Here’s an example of what I’m imagining: when a business adds a new item to its inventory, that item needs to have pricing assigned to it. If item system generates an RSS feed of all new, unpriced items, the pricing system could subscribe to that feed and check it on a regular basis. New items in the feed would be pulled off an assigned a price. Other systems (e.g., inventory management) could subscribe to a feed of the newly priced items from the pricing system, allowing them to know when an item was ready for sale.

Throw in a tool like Yahoo Pipes that 1) would make it easy for developers to control those application integrations and 2) make it possible for advanced business users to create their own mashups of corporate data, and you’ve got some really awesome power for controlling corporate data flow. For that to happen, Yahoo would need to make Pipes available for hosting on a company’s own servers, safely ensconced behind firewalls. While I’d love to see Yahoo open source Pipes, I’d even be content with a commercial package, perhaps something like the Google Search Appliance.

Open issues: error handling and monitoring (how would you “re-queue” an RSS feed item?), transactions and rollback handling… any others I’m forgetting?

The event is free and extremely dependent on volunteers and their contributions; a big thanks to everyone who pitched in and helped out. The two-day conference went well and I really enjoyed talking geek with fellow nerds. We started on Friday night with dinner and an opening session. Unfortunately I had to take off shortly thereafter to care for Baby O.

I was back at the conference on Saturday morning and hard at work on my own presentation, “Design Eye for the IT Guy”. Unfortunately I was only able to sporadically attend sessions in the morning. I teamed up with Calvin Janes for our 2:00 presentation; he talked about YUI CSS (the tools) and I talked about the techniques.

My goal was to make web site design more approachable to logical, left-brained types. It seems like a lot of people regard design as a very subjective, touchy-feely activity, which is just not true. Once you start digging into stuff like color theory, grid layout, and typography, there’s plenty of hard science there. If nothing else, it was an enjoyable talk to give, since it really delved into the things I’m passionate about. I was also fortunate to have an abundance of source material to work from.

Even though I had to leave for Baby O duty right after our presentation, I was still able to meet a number of really neat people at mealtime or just hanging out between sessions. I’m looking forward to meeting more new people, as well as catching up with BarCamp veterans, at next year’s event.

PicLens enables full-screen slideshows and photo browsing and supports integration with a number of popular photo sites:

• Flickr
• Facebook
• Google Images
• Yahoo Images
• Friendster
• Picasa Web Albums

AppleInsider has learned that Apple’s popular line of iMac personal computers are about to undergo a substantial facelift that will showcase striking new industrial designs aimed at leaving both competitors and onlookers smitten.

And that’s news… how?

“Apple’s new design is aimed at mediocrity and blending in.” “Apple’s design goals included being as ugly as possible.” Now that would have been news.