A Better Freelancer - Dave Caolo: A Freelancer's Schedule →

patrickrhone: If you are a freelancer, or thinking about being one, this is a must read: Dave Caolo: A Freelancer’s Schedule: http://bit.ly/cIIDmA

(via Instapaper)

Leonard Pitts on Glenn Beck's 'movement' →

From Leonard Pitts’ latest column:

We’re in an odd moment. Having opposed the freedom movement of the 20th century, some social conservatives seek, now that that movement stands vindicated and venerated, to arrogate unto themselves its language and heroes, to remake it in their image.

Thus, you get claims that “racism” is now what Shirley Sherrod said in a speech to the NAACP. And people calling Sarah Palin the new face of feminism. And conservatives touting the likelihood that King voted Republican — as if the party in 1957 bore any resemblance to the party now.

But even by those standards, Glenn Beck’s effrontery is monumental. Even by those standards, he goes too far. Beck was part of the “we” who founded the civil rights movement!? No. Here’s who “we” is.

“We” is Emmett Till, tied to a cotton gin fan in the murky waters of the Tallahatchie River. “We” is Rosa Parks telling the bus driver no. “We” is Diane Nash on a sleepless night waiting for missing Freedom Riders to check in. “We” is Charles Sherrod, husband of Shirley, gingerly testing desegregation compliance in an Albany, Ga., bus station. “We” is a sharecropper making his X on a form held by a white college student from the North. “We” is celebrities like Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando and Pernell Roberts of Bonanza, lending their names, their wealth and their labor to the cause of freedom.

This is why I love Leonard Pitts — and why Glenn Beck is an entertainer, not the leader of a serious movement.

Ian P. Hines: A Modern Do-Gooder →

I’m not sure exactly when I started reading Ian’s work, but he’s become one of my must-reads. One reason is that we share similar interest, in particularly politics and technology.

Another reason is because he is a good writer with great ideas.

That he is a self-proclaimed “Modern Do-Gooder” shows you a bit of the personality that comes through in his writing. Brilliantly done, Mr. Hines.

Update on Nettleton Schools

Here’s an update about the Nettleton Middle School situation I posted about earlier. Via NEMS360.com:

The school board met this afternoon and voted 5-0 to end the racial qualification. In a statement, district officials said that “beginning immediately, student elections at Nettleton School District will no longer have a classification of ethnicity.”

On the surface, that sounds like a good thing. Of course, the unintended consequence could be that minority students will be completely shut out of class offices. Hopefully that won’t be the case, but that would be a sad outcome if so.

Also, there was an interesting comment on the story, which claims knowledge of why the district dictated certain races for certain offices:

The designation of eligible race for a position is done to ensure that one year a certain grade will have a white president and in the following year, a black president is required. This policy was set after many complaints that all class positions were held by whites, the majority by attendance. It was an agreement created to ensure that blacks, the minority by attendance, have a voice in class government.

If this is the case, then it should have been better explained in the memo that went out to parents. Too, if such safeguards are needed to ensure racial balance, then the school district might should have spent a little more time reviewing new proposals instead of just scrapping any conditions of ethnicity governing class officer elections.

What’s In My Simplenote?

Simplenote is one of those apps that garnered a huge following quickly because it offers three essential items for a notetaking application:

1. Powerful search
2. Universal access
3. Elegant Simplicity
4. BONUS: It’s free!

It’s the last part that really has made it a “cult app” for many users in the Mac/iPhone/iPad communities. It’s also why Patrick Rhone garnered so much response to his What’s In Your Simplenote? post.

Here’s what’s in my Simplenote:

• Scratch Pad. Notes I’ll need for a day or two before they are deleted or transferred to their proper home.
• Wishlists. Books, TV shows, movies, etc. that I want to get consume one day.
• Blog post drafts. I wrote this post in Simplenote. (In fact, Simplenote is starting to replace MarsEdit, unfortunately. A post for another day.)
• Letter drafts.
• Meeting notes.
• Quotes, tidbits of wisdom, Bible verses. Any little short-form piece of wisdom that I happen across ends up in Simplenote.
• Brain dumps. When I start a new project, I go to Simplenote and start a freewrite and brain dump. From there, I take the ideas and organize them where they need to be, but Simplenote gets that first crucial step done.
• Article/Website copy drafts. I do a good bit of copywriting, and I start off in Simplenote before moving to Scrivener. The main reason is because I have the draft on my iPad, which I use out of my office a lot.

That’s what’s in my Simplenote. Go visit Patrick Rhone’s original post to see a long list of other folks and what they have in their’s.

Class President and Race

A disturbing story regarding school children, running for class president and racial exclusion has gained interest this morning via Gawker and The Smoking Gun.

The school in question is Nettleton Middle School in Northeast Mississippi. Here’s the gist of what’s going on, via Gawker:

Thinking about running for eighth grade class president at Nettleton Middle School in Nettleton, Mississippi? Well… are you white? Because only white kids are allowed to run for president. Black kids can be vice-president, though! But only black kids.

A few days ago, according to blogger Suzy Richardson, Nettleton Middle School students brought home the following memo, which spells out the requirements for students who want to run for class office.

The school system has been quick to respond with this statement:

“Student elections have not yet been held at Nettleton Middle School for the 2010-2011 school term. The processes and procedures for student elections are under review. We are reviewing the origin of these processes, historical applications, compliance issues, as well as current implications and ramifications. A statement will be released when review of these processes is complete.”

First, that the school district is only now thinking it wise to “review” this policy is absurd. The memo they sent home clearly does not pass any measure of commonsense. This should have never become policy, and the person responsible for such poorly thought out “policy” should not be allowed near another school policy for some time.

Second, let’s hope that this memo indicates the good intention of trying to ensure racial diversity among class officers and not an attempt at segregating officers and limiting the ability of minority students from being elected to certain offices — such as president.

If the former is indeed the case, then a better policy would have been to require the office of Vice President to be of a different race than the President and the Reporter to be of a different race than the Secretary-Treasurer. (This is a fairly common means of affirmative action among several boards, including some with which I have served.)

The problem with Nettleton’s approach — beyond the obvious racial segregation — is that it completely ignores other ethnic groups such as Hispanic, Native American and Asian. These groups are completely ignored.

So is another important — and quickly emerging — ethnic group: that of mixed-race. At HappyAndMixed.com, where the story seems to have originated, the mother of daughter of Native American and Italian background — asked where her daughter fit into the class elections. According to her report, this is what happened:

Brandy wrote a letter to the School Board. And this was the reply:

“They told me that they “Go by the mother’s race b/c with minorities the father isn’t generally in the home.” They also told me that ” a city court order is the reason why it is this way.”

If the mother was told this, then that is inexcusable. Such broad stereotyping is what reinforces in our children a sad cycle of irresponsibility. Past that, it completely ignores the greater concern for what the school memo did: completely ignore students of various ethnic backgrounds.

Hopefully this will be a good lesson learned for everyone involved. Policies designed to ensure racial diversity should be well-thought out, even in something as “trivial” as class officer elections. After all, they are so “trivial” that the only thing they are doing is teaching our young people how to deftly and appropriately handle race relations.

We should also be mindful that we no longer live in a world where black and white dominate the racial landscape. That’s particularly difficult in the South, where so much of our history has been dominated in some way by race relations between black and white communities.

In addition to other ethnic groups — Native America, Hispanic, Asian, etc. — we must also consider a growing population of people who are of mixed-race.

When designing policies around race, we should strive to speak in general terms and not pigeon-hole certain races into certain quantities, such as Nettleton did. Everyone — regardless of race — should have equal opportunity to rise to the top of whatever ladder they seek to climb.

(And I guess we’ll leave the obvious exclusion of gender equality in this discussion to another day…)

View high resolution

The TARDIS at MIT (by Melanie McCue)

The Doctor visits MIT

H/T: @fijiwriter

Google and Privacy

In the past few months concerns over Google’s privacy issues have continually nagged at me.

I’m not a conspiracy nut, but at the same time I am protective of my privacy and personal data. It’s no secret that Google scans information that passes through their servers in an attempt to serve their clients with better ads and opportunities. It certainly started as a noble way of doing business — to better serve their clients and the people who advertise via Google. Their goal was to create an open, free Internet company that provided the most powerful tools available.

For me, Google is a vital part of my work and personal life on my Mac, iPad and iPhone. I use:

1. Google Search
2. Gmail
3. Google Docs
4. Google Reader
5. Google Apps
6. Feedburner
7. Chrome

But more than once over the past few months I’ve started to look at ways I could replace Google, leaving to it only my search and RSS reading needs. (I don’t stay logged in to my Google account, so my search and browsing history is not monitored save by ISP, I’m sure.)

John Gruber at DaringFireball.net expressed what I’ve been thinking lately:

More and more, I get the feeling that if there’s a rift between the old “Don’t be evil” Google and the new “Let’s do whatever we want” Google, that it’s a rift between Schmidt and Larry/Sergey — if not personally, then at least culturally within the company. On the one side, the Larry/Sergey Google that makes amazing cool things — the search engine, Gmail, Android. On the other, the Schmidt Google that, in its efforts to serve ads as efficiently as possible, no longer seems concerned with the traditional Western concept of personal privacy.

A lot of people seem surprised by Google’s alliance with Verizon on mobile network neutrality. That stance doesn’t fit with my view of the Larry/Sergey Google. But it fits my idea of the Schmidt Google like a glove.

The deal with Verizon is what really has me reconsidering my reliance on Google. That, and statements Google CEO Eric Schmidt made during a recent Wall Street Journal interview:

I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next. […] The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating — that serendipity — can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically.

Gruber, earlier in his post, says this about Schmidt:

Here’s my theory: the problem with Google is that Eric Schmidt is creepy. I think he’s a really weird dude. Recall, for example, this comment of Schmidt’s from 2009, regarding Google and privacy: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Right there, at the end, is what scares me most about Schmidt’s mindset: That we shouldn’t be doing anything we don’t want anyone to know about. If that’s the case, then Google should open up their search algorithm for the entire world to have. That, obviously, will never happen. Nor should it. Google built something fascinating, and they own it.

Just as Google most certainly values the privacy surrounding their work, we should value ours, which is why most companies seek to own their communications infrastructure. They know it is secure.

Individuals should be allowed that same assurance, an assurance that Google offered at their inception and for years to follow. It is, sadly, an assurance that has weakened in the last year.

The question now becomes: Are we too ingrained in Google to step back from their monopoly? Will the emerging business model (supported and encouraged by Schmidt) lead us down a path where we lose not our actual individualism but our desire for individualism? (I’m not talking about just Google, but other companies who will adopt similar practices. i.e. Facebook).

Kyle Baxter at Tight Wings tackles this question with great aplomb:

Once we are expected to share everything with the world—things as meaningful as our goals, hopes, fears and our health, the banal, such as what clothes we’re wearing or what we’re doing at any given moment—who we are as individuals would become a part of the public. They would no longer be factors of our own personal selves, our own to consider, but rather characteristics—data—to be judged by the public. Once those factors become a part of the public, the individual will look at themselves from the public’s perspective, to be judged not by their own standards, but by the public’s, since they now consider themselves the public. Their love for science fiction won’t be a unique characteristic, but an oddity, an abnormality, wrong, because no one else has it.

…

That’s one of my fears—that complete openness will erode not just our privacy, but our conception of the individual, and so also erode our ability to think critically about the world. Once we identify with the public, and do not see it from an outside perspective, we will be less able to find its faults.

Little in the way of Internet regulations currently exists to protect against companies like Google from abusing the information they collect. Sadly, as Ian Hines writes, their is also little hope of any meaningful regulations being passed anytime soon:

It would be possible to nullify some of the concern through artfully drafted federal privacy regulation, but that seems like a pipe dream given that most members of Congress have very little, if any, firsthand experience with these highly technical issues.

And so we wait for someone to stand up and protect our privacy for us, and in the meantime Eric Schmidt is left to decide for himself how much privacy we’re entitled to (which seems to be very, very little).

There has to be a solution to this problem, but it doesn’t seem to me that enough people who are in a position to find it are doing their best to. We’re all just hoping that some abstract governmental force will step up and guarantee it rather than taking concrete, actionable steps towards ensuring it. I find that disconcerting.

What we can do, those of us who trusted Google initially and now feel too entangled with their services, is to be particularly careful about what information we’re willing to share. David Chartier, a tech blogger and columnist at Macworld, shares the steps he has taken:

I’ve deleted my Google Apps account and one Google account, switched to Fever for reading news, and Skype for my work proxy phone number (it works great now that Skype can accept calls in the background on iOS 4 and doesn’t require minutes for phone calls, unlike Google Voice). I just need to drop Feedburner from 1FPS and Finer Things, and I can delete my personal Google account altogether.

That’s a pretty massive cutting of the cord. I admire him for doing it, and I continue to look for ways to do the same.

For my personal domain email, I’ve already done it. It points to my MobileMe address, and MobileMe manages everything. I’ve considered doing this with my consulting firm, but that gets trickier because of other users.

The biggest question for me is what to do with clients whose websites and email I set up, especially campaigns. I’ve been using Google Apps for them for several years. It’s the best system out there, and I hate to switch.

But at some point, I must seriously weigh my desire for privacy against the ease with which I and my clients can use Google Apps.

With that thought, consider this one last quote from Schmidt:

Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.

My humanity leads me to believe that we would never allow ourselves to get to that point, so I don’t fear a drone-like society anytime soon. But that the leader of one of the world’s richest, most powerful, most influential companies views such a dystopian future as something to which we should aspire truly frightens me. And it makes me more carefully consider my use of their technology with each passing day.

Two Big App Updates

Two big app updates arrived for me today, both to apps that I use repeatedly each day.

1. SimpleNote. This is a tremendous note-taking app that I have on my iPhone and iPad. I use Notational Velocity on my MacBook, but I may soon switch to a Fluid installation of the web interface, because of the upgrades.

The upgrade includes tags (which I won’t use), the ability to pin certain entries to the top, versioning, a new logo (sweetness!), sharing and full screen writing (iPhone and iPad only). The last upgrade is huge for the iPad.

SimpleNote is free, which makes it a no-brainer to try. (As is Notational Velocity, if you want to give that integration a go, which I recommend.)

1. Insight. This is my iPhone app of choice for Basecamp, which I use to manage all of my projects. The upgrade is phenomenal, bringing the iPhone app to a level that makes it essentially a full-on version of my most used features of Basecamp.

If you don’t use Basecamp, you’ll have no need for Insight. But if you manage large projects or are wanting better project management tools, I certainly recommend giving Basecamp a thorough look. (I’m an evangelist for all of 37Signals apps. Check them out.)

Irony →

The 3 Most Common Uses of Irony — in cartoon form.