I’ve always considered anything I posted on Facebook or elsewhere on the internet as public…because eventually it will be, even if it is not today. Matt McKeon has a fantastic web page graphically illustrating the loss of privacy on Facebook over the years. Check it out.
Nothing Is Private On The Internet
Posted in technology, web link
Leave a comment
Digital Age Downsizing Update
May 9, 2010
Making money off old media
This is an update about my old media downsizing project.
Three months ago Steve Jobs promised me something “magical” when he announced the iPad. As I mentioned at the time, I was initially put off by its price and that it seemed little more than an enlarged iPod touch. But in the end, given my long-term desire for better couch surfing and my delight with both the iPhone and the Kindle, I decided to go whole hog and buy the top-of-the line unit with 64 GB of memory and both WiFi and 3G connections.
I was a bit nervous about spending $900 on the unit and its accessories when I had not even laid hands on a sample. But then I realized it was past time for me to dispose of many extra books, DVDs, and my entire CD collection. My house was filled with old media and in the modern wireless world I was reading books on the Kindle instead of on paper, listening to music on the iPhone and Apple TV instead of on CDs, and watching streaming video and renting discs from Netflix instead of my viewing my own DVDs. I’d already waited too long to dispose of my vinyl records and VHS tapes, which were now worth only pennies. I should sell off my old media while they were still worth something.
I first culled dozens of books from my collection, selling many of them online to Powell’s Books, a wonderful bookseller I’ve enjoyed visiting in Oregon. I would flip each book over and type in the ISBN number from the back cover and see if Powell’s would take it and how much it was worth to them. Then I’d box up a bunch of the books, print out a free shipping label, and send them off the next day at the post office. Later I ran the remaining books by several other online booksellers and managed to get bites on a few of them from abebooks, cash4books.net, and webuytextbooks.com. Some of them make you ship them off via USPS Media Mail on your own dime, promising to pay you a set shipping rate after your books are accepted. In the end I sold off 110 books for $260. Four audiobooks had no buyers, so I listed them on Amazon, pricing them to be competitive with the others on offer. Within a couple of weeks I’d sold and shipped off each of them to different buyers, netting another $45. I was already over 1/3 of the way to my goal.
Next went the DVDs. I was careful not to sell off ones I could not find available for rent on Netflix, and hung onto some of my favorites. But I did sell 33 of them to SecondSpin.com for $78. SecondSpin also makes you pay the Media Mail rate yourself and then promises to compensate you upon acceptance. Once my DVDs arrived, they processed my order quickly and told me the check was in the mail. Now I’d paid for 43% of the iPad, and it was time to tackle the big project: the collection of over 400 compact discs I’d built up over a quarter century.
Looking for buyers online revealed that many of the services, including SecondSpin, were really different faces of the same corporation, All Media Guide, which provides the useful allmusic website. Bit by bit (pun intended) I typed in the UPC codes of my discs into SecondSpin, breaking the collection into separate orders of two dozen discs each to ensure I could get adequate shipping reimbursements for them. I would need a bunch of boxes of the right size, so I found some cheap 14x6x6 ones from Mobe on iOffer.com. In the end I would ship off 15 of those boxes, selling over 350 CDs to SecondSpin and another 14 to The CD Exchange for $631.
Adding up my sales and subtracting the cost of the boxes, packing materials, and excess postage not covered by the online buyers, I had netted $942. That iPad was now fully paid for, and having the shelves cleared of unused media was in fact its own reward.
Posted in books, music, technology
6 Comments
Kerr, Tenkiller, and Greenleaf Trails
Click image for slideshow
A cool but sunny May day was perfect for some hiking along lakes in east central Oklahoma. I took the now-familiar route down the Muskogee Turnpike to Sallisaw, this time turning south there instead of heading east into Arkansas. I drove to the dam on the Robert S. Kerr Reservoir in quest of the Short Mountain Trail.
I’d read a review of this trail online, which mentioned that it offered some nice views of the reservoir below, although the trail became confused up top. The description reminded me of the maze of trails at Tulsa’s Turkey Mountain. It seemed the trail should ascend the mountain near the dam and cut across the top to descend on the far side to the Short Mountain Cove recreation area. But, as is too often the case with Corps of Engineers Lakes, this trail was neglected and lacked any blazes or signage.
I did manage to find the trailhead at the south end of the dam and made a steep climb up the mountainside to the top, where as promised I found a high open view of the reservoir with several turkey vultures wheeling overhead. The heavily eroded bluffs were interesting, resembling quarries. One large flat stone area with a good view of the reservoir and dam had several recent graffiti spray-painted on its surface professing young love. And some strategically placed rocks down below proclaimed this was a spot for youth to tarry, although I could only capture those sentiments on my iPhone’s lousy camera since I had left the SD memory card for my Lumix camera at home, and the pitiful built-in memory only let me take a few snaps before it was filled.
The overgrown and treacherous trail I had taken to the top was clearly not the route taken by those unseen youngsters, and it wasn’t long before I stumbled onto a service road that was their means of access. I followed it a short way, but with no more views in the offing, and having squashed a tick found crawling on my forearm, I decided it was time for lunch and a run by a store for some insect repellent and a memory card. So I clambered down, keeping my eyes open for snakes amidst the rocks and leaves. When I reached the more open trail at the base of the mountain, I let my guard down, so I was surprised by a large snake at the trailhead. I was sufficiently spooked that I just jumped over it and ran onward, not stopping for a photograph.
I drove into Sallisaw, notable for Blue Ribbon Downs, the oldest horse racing track in the state, which closed for good in November 2009. In its heyday it was the only game in the state, but today there are dozens of casinos in the area and horse racing is no longer profitable.
Sallisaw’s street system is quite cumbersome and I was unimpressed by the restaurants on offer. So I just grabbed a greasy meal at its Long John Silver’s and made a run to the Wal-Mart for my missing supplies. Then it was back down I-40 and then northward to Lake Tenkiller State Park. I’ve heard for years about how the clear waters of Tenkiller were prized by scuba divers, although poultry pollution has now clouded them. There was supposed to be a Gum Springs Nature Trail at one campground. But I arrived to find that campground abandoned for budgetary reasons…today was not my lucky day. Sure enough, the trail sign was still there but the trail itself was lost and overgrown. I managed to tease out some of it, but it was not a very rewarding bushwhack.
So I grumpily settled for the asphalt multi-purpose trail threading its way through the main park area, which was not even as scenic as Bartlesville’s own Pathfinder Parkway, what with bluff views blocked by foliage and strewn with warnings and no trespassing signs. I might have been better off heading northeast up the lake’s eastern shoreline to the Standing Rock area, which supposedly has a good trail. But having been burned twice in one day by abandoned trails, I decided to end my day trip with a visit to one I knew was kept in operation at nearby Greenleaf State Park.
One of the oldest parks in the state, Greenleaf has the very long Ankle Express Trail that was constructed in 1978 by an Oklahoma City hiking group and is still maintained. I decided to explore the first part of that trail to see if it would be worth a return trip for a lengthy hike on its south loop, which promises to last six hours or more. After wandering through the park proper and snapping shots of goslings and the lake, I decided to drive to a trailhead across the dam to save time.
The road to that trailhead was a long-abandoned and heavily eroded asphalt highway. Dodging road craters, I found the road becoming too unfriendly for my taste. So I wiggled around and drove back up a bit to a wide spot and parked. Then I walked back down the nasty road toward the lake, eventually finding the trail and some sturdy pickups which had braved what was left of the pavement. The sorry state of the access road had me worried, but happily this trail was in good shape, winding around the southern end of the lake away from the state park.
I had wondered why the trail from the state park was shown taking a long detour over the shoulderless highway bridge rather than crossing the dam. But when I found the dam that was explained. Part of it is a very narrow concrete wall with water spilling over the top – no trail could negotiate that!
I encountered several hikers, including one scout troop, as well as a mountain biker as I hiked to the head of a deep inlet. There I found a wooden swinging bridge across the inlet, and posed on it. The combination of a nice warm sun and weary feet led me to lie down on the warm wooden slats, taking a photo of my outstretched feet. It was time to head back to Tulsa for dinner with friends, so I reversed course, snapping photos of the eroded bluffs and admiring a few pretty flowers on the way with a macro shot or two. I concluded my photos with a dead tree lying atop the lush undergrowth, underexposing the shot for mood.
As I climbed the road back to my car, I noticed a small animal on the road ahead. It was too large for a house cat but did not move like a dog. Then I spotted its high pointed ears and realized I was seeing a bobcat in the wild. Unfortunately the sound of the velcro clasp on my camera case spooked it, so I didn’t get the wildlife shot I was hoping for.
I’ll be back to Greenleaf some day to hike the South Loop of the Ankle Express Trail, but I’m now quite leery of most so-called trails at the state’s lakes. Many have been abandoned and I hate driving for hours only to find an overgrown mess at the end of the road. I expect I’ll head down the Muskogee Turnpike some more this year, but will then head on eastward into Arkansas, where there are more better-maintained forest trails.
Posted in day hike, photos, travel
3 Comments
Docks, Syncs, and Clips
Some of my docks...
I’ve spent more money than I wish to admit on docks for my iPods and iPhone. Those portable media devices have to be plugged into a computer to sync them with iTunes and load them up with data, you have to charge them with the same cable via computer or a wall wart AC adapter, and if you want to send sound out to a stereo you have to plug in a mini audio jack. And I hate how the cords tend to fall off the top of the computer or desk to the floor when you have them unplugged. So I bought overly expensive docks, mostly from Apple but one third-party knockoff that sadly seems a tad unreliable, to keep all of the cables in place and hold the devices upright for easy viewing.
But this docking-to-sync business seems silly when we have home WiFi and Bluetooth – charging by cable is far more efficient than wireless inductive charging, but why in the world should I need a USB cable to sync my iPhone when it is a mobile internet access device? Microsoft’s Zune media players have had wireless sync for several years, but Apple has yet to catch up with its own far more popular devices.
Recently I purchased an iPad and, sure enough, it needs to plug into the computer to sync. And worse, its power needs are too large for most USB ports so it has to be regularly plugged into a wall jack. Now Apple has truly annoyed me – I have to plug the iPad into the computer via USB to sync, but then it can’t charge. And so I have to plug it into a wall charger, but then it can’t sync. And people say Apple’s products are easy to use!
So I bought an iPad dock for my living room where I also keep my iPhone charging dock. I have the wall wart chargers in there so I can leave the iPhone or iPad on top of my stereo cabinet for charging overnight and also send the iPhone or iPad’s audio and video signals into my entertainment system. I have a remote for the iPhone’s so-called “universal” dock which lets me control its playback from across the room – that’s handy since I listen to podcasts on it while exercising each morning.
The iPad dock lets it serve as digital photo frame
The iPad dock promised to also hold the iPad upright for use as a neat digital photo frame. Sadly, like the iPhone the iPad’s video out is restricted to certain video sources, so I can’t use it to surf the internet on my HDTV nor watch Netflix streaming movies that way. So I’ll use the iPad itself for surfing and continue to rely upon my Apple TV and my Tivo for online movies from Netflix, Amazon, and Apple.
And the iPad dock is a further disappointment since Apple’s vaunted industrial design has never extended to making its docks compatible with protective carrying cases. I keep my iPad in an Apple carrying case I purchased to protect it as it carry it around the house and out into the world. That case is necessarily a tight fit for the iPad – you don’t want it slipping out and crashing to the floor by accident. And while there are holes in the case so you can plug in the various cables, the dock is too tight a fit for the iPad to fit into it while inside Apple’s own case.
So I won’t be using that $30 iPad dock very much, which leaves the problem of those darn cables and how they tend to slip to the floor. The other day on Wired’s Gadget blog I stumbled across a simple, cheap, and effective solution. Just put a binder clip on the edge of your desk or stereo cabinet and it will keep the cables from slipping to the floor:
Using binder clips to hold those computer cables
One clever hacker even devised a full iPhone dock using binder clips:
So my advice is to only purchase an Apple iPad dock if you don’t plan to also use their carrying case, and only buy Apple’s “universal” dock for your iPhone or iPod if you plan to make use of its remote control capabilities. And let us hope that eventually they adopt wireless synchronization…if only Steve Jobs hated cables as much as he hates buttons and ports.
Posted in technology
Leave a comment
A Pink Martini in Fort Worth
Click image for a slideshow
This weekend I made a quick trip to Fort Worth, Texas to see my favorite group, Pink Martini, perform with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra at the Bass Performance Hall, repeating a trip I made for the same purpose a few years ago. I dislike most crowds, but I absolutely love seeing Pink Martini perform live.
I left Bartlesville early Saturday morning, but this time took the unanimous advice from Google Maps, my V7 GPS, and my iPhone TomTom GPS application to not follow US 75 all the way down to the Dallas area. Instead I stuck with the interstates, taking I-44 and I-35. I was hungry by 11 am and had reached Ardmore. There, as I’ve seen in other small towns, more hotels and restaurants have built up along the interstate frontage road. So I grabbed a burger at the local Interurban franchise and then, after zipping by the big WinStar casino on the Oklahoma side of the border, I dropped in at the Texas Travel Information Center at Gainesville to grab a new state map and with my iPhone take a snap of an Asian tourist at the state’s granite marker.
I was disappointed to see that Fort Worth still hasn’t dealt with its highway congestion, as I-35W was backed up as usual and it took awhile to navigate over to the Cultural District. This area of Fort Worth has some great architecture, including Philip Johnson’s Amon Carter Museum, Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum, Wyatt C. Hedrick’s Will Rogers Memorial Center in the Moderne style, and Tadeo Ando’s Modern Art Museum.
I found the big parking lots at the Will Rogers Memorial Center were packed because of a Showstopper regional dance competition and a DeafNation Expo. So I parked south of Harley Street and trekked several blocks north, past the National Cowgirls Hall of Fame and its great wall mural, towards the Amon Carter Museum on Camp Bowie Boulevard. It was 80 degrees and full sun, so I was grateful for some air conditioning when I arrived.
For me the highlights at the Carter Museum were several watercolors by Edward Hopper and the beautiful bronze bookends Paul Manship cast in 1914, Indian Hunter and Pronghorn Antelope, in which he utilized the archaic Greek style. I also liked some of the 1930s-era photography on display and Edward Curtis’s photography of Native Americans. The museum also has some Remington and Russell western artworks, but I’ve seen oodles of them at Tulsa’s Gilcrease and Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum (still the Cowboy Hall of Fame to me).
Exiting the museum, I strode past the impressive tower of the Will Rogers Memorial Center along the shady sidewalk past the Kimbell Art Museum. I’ve seen great shows at the Kimbell before, including a memorable one of Egyptian art, but since they were between special exhibitions at the moment I strode onward to the Modern Art Museum. I’d already seen the museum’s permanent collection on a previous visit, and the Andy Warhol special exhibit left me cold, but the building’s exterior architecture and sculptures were delightful on this sunny afternoon.
The museum’s front is dominated by the immense steel Vortex by Richard Serra. I find many of his giant-steel-plate artworks cold and intimidating, but Vortex is fun. Its 2-inch-thick Cor-Ten steel slabs are each ten feet wide and sixty-seven feet tall, being twisted into a 230-ton sculpture with a 10-foot-wide oculis at the top. Adults and children delight in its sonic effects. I used my iPhone to record a pair of little girls who were having fun in there clapping their hands and howling. Thankfully the recording ended before one put her hands up to her mouth and made a farting sound that truly reverberated! Later, as I left the museum, I was photographing inside Vortex when a family with three youngsters quietly entered. So I stomped one of my cowboy boots (always wear your boots in Ft. Worth!) so they would hear the incredible echo and start their own sonic fun-and-games.
The last time I was at the Modern Art Museum the exterior pool across its north side was drained. So I was happy to find it filled this time, providing the striking illusion of a building floating on water. Looking out in the bright afternoon sun I spied a couple near Roxy Paine’s Conjoined, two stainless steel trees intertwining on the north edge of the grounds. That inspired me to troop over there later for shots from a distance and closer in, including an angle where the trees reminded me of two wizards engaged in a lightning battle.
By then it was getting late in the afternoon, so I strode over to the grassy shaded oasis west of the Kimbell to shoot one strolling sculpture and then hoofed it over to the Will Rogers Center where I found Electra Waggoner Bigg’s life-size sculpture of Will riding Soapsuds, Into the Sunset. She did a great job capturing them both.
I returned to my car and drove to the Microtel, impressed that my TomTom GPS app on the iPhone recognized a traffic jam on I-820 and automatically rerouted me on a frontage road detour that saved me a lot of time. (Later that night I travelled the same route and the TomTom app took me along the interstate since the traffic jam had evaporated.) That convinced me to rely solely on the TomTom app on the drive home the next day – I packed away the V7 GPS unit and probably won’t use it much on trips anymore. The TomTom app is far better at quickly locating points of interest, uses real-time traffic data, and has a nice lane guidance system. I just wish TomTom would let me flick the map around with my finger to explore off to the sides, rather than only allowing me to zoom or shrink the map while keeping my location locked in at the same point on the screen.
Downtown I parked near Bass Hall and followed a smartly dressed group to Ferré for dinner. I had a delicious halibut and tasty dessert, although the meal cost almost as much as my concert ticket! I killed some time reading a magazine at the nearby Barnes and Noble, which features a two-story bronco rider sculpture. Then I harked the heralds at the Bass Performing Hall and found my fourth-row seat offering a great view of the stage for another splendid Pink Martini performance.
They treated me to a live performance of my favorite new song of theirs, Splendor in the Grass, and I was delighted to hear their live rendition of The Flying Squirrel as well. The encore closed the show with Brazil and this time I was sure to join the conga line. We danced right out of the hall, so I was one of the first to make it to the parking garage, where I encountered members of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra I’d heard moments earlier, now rushing with their instruments to their cars before the parking garage jammed up.
It was a great short stay in Fort Worth and a welcome break from the stress of school budgets and the like for this teetotaler who loves his Pink Martini.
Posted in art, music, photos, technology, travel
Leave a comment
Meador Manor 
