stuffthought.com

This blog will live on at a new location:

stuffthought.com/blog/

Pretty intuitive. Be sure to update your homepages and bookmarks and RSS feeds! (I am your homepage, right?)

I just changed my blog’s license from a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license to a Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

What this means?
Originally, if you wanted to use content from this blog (non-fairly), you (a) had to attribute your use of my work to me, (b) couldn’t use it for commercial purposes without my permission, and (c) had to license your work with the same license. Now, all you have to do is give me attribution.

Why did I do this?
Noncommercial and copyleft seemed too restricting. I’ve been bombarded with millions of arguments against ‘noncommercial,’ and I’m not trying to make money off this blog anyways. Also, if I want my stuff to be spread, I don’t want to force people into licensing in a certain scheme that doesn’t work with their blog or work or business.

If this is a bad idea, let me know. If this is a good idea, let me know.

“At Google, we make privacy a priority in everything we do.” Except when it comes to rushing to launch a new product.

Not too long ago, Google launched a new product called Buzz, as I’m sure you all know. If Twitter and Flickr and WordPress and maybe even Facebook had a lovechild that was raised by Google (custody issues…), you’d have Buzz. As of now, Buzz is kind of a mess. People have the typical knee-jerk “I’m-going-to-hate-this-because-it’s-new” reaction. Most people who use it are simply having their Twitter posts feed directly into it. People are using it as kind of a public-pseudo-Facebook wall, amassing people who don’t know each other into conversations that are not related to the original post (or the original poster). Eh hem. Case in point. (There are potential privacy issues in that too, although many are brought upon oneself—exposing email addresses, sensitive information in a public setting, etc.)

When Google unveiled this new feature (on everybody at once), they overlooked a pressing privacy issue. Essentially, the service made you automatically follow your most frequent contacts, and vice versa. People had access to your feed and information without your consent. This leads to instances like this one (via Techcrunch):

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.

There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?

My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

This privacy breach led to folks being able to determine who their friends, employees, spouses, and more were contacting frequently. As Nicholas Carson of Business Insider discovered, Buzz could expose marital infidelity, anonymous sources, private emails in the workplace, and more. The defaults guessed at who you wanted to expose your information to; Google assumed it knew your friend circle. It was even difficult/impossible to opt out.

Even though Google has fixed most of these issues, it was still a case of awful foresight on their part. Computers are getting smarter and are perhaps decent at choosing who your friends are or who you’re most interested in, but even if this technology is flawless, making these lists public and available to those around you is just stupid. Gmail, which Buzz is loosely connected to, is often what people use for private communication. By tacking on this very public feature, without allowing people to opt in, Google crossed some lines that should not have been crossed.

And now for a loose but related connection:

James Grimmelmann, professor at New York Law School and all-out smart guy, posted an awesome recap/analysis of the Google Books Settlement fairness hearing today, where a bunch of parties presented their cases to the judge either supporting or opposing the settlement. Many of the arguments raised against the settlement (from the EFF and EPIC and other digital rights groups) dealt with privacy. Google Books would in essence have access to a large corpus of data—”It can track not just what books you read, but which pages, and what you scribble in the margins”—that would perhaps allow them to tailor ads or sales to an unheard of degree. This would also bring up questions of law enforcement and how this data would be handled by a single entity.

Privacy issues will always be a concern, especially when it comes to Google, but there is perhaps good reason why it should be a top concern. Hadrian Katz, who spoke for the Internet Archive against the settlement, ended his argument with this: Google claims to have taken privacy into account, but perhaps the recent Buzz fiasco is a good example of how seriously Google actually takes the issue.

Funny idea:
ShadyURL. Change URLs to make them suspicious/creepy/inappropriate. It’s like bit.ly, but racist.

Bad idea:
Man doesn’t understand permanence. He tattoos ‘football’ players’ names to his body. Nobody told him that players get traded. And people die.

Needs its own category:
Selleck Waterfall Sandwich. Tom Selleck, Waterfalls, and Sandwiches.

Sometimes I’m thankful to mailing lists and twitter for exposing me to great stuff on the internet. Sometimes, however, I can’t help but wonder what the hell certain people are on.

Anyways, a few press-y updates. (This is the more narcissistic part of this post.) I was just interviewed by BBC Radio 5 Live about Yale’s pending transition to Google Apps for Education and Gmail. Essentially, there was an article in the Yale Daily News “announcing” the switch. Christian Csar, eloquent speaker and overall brilliant guy, offered for me to contribute to an op-ed about the issue, and I agreed to help. This was our response. I guess someone at the BBC caught wind of this and messaged me ON FACEBOOK (hooray social networking?) about setting up an interview, so I called, things were planned, and I spoke on “Up All Night” with Rhod Sharp. This was about 9:45pm Eastern time… which means it was about 2:45am in the UK, so for all of you night-owls in London, I’m hoping my voice was steady and that I made a point. (If I didn’t, read the op-ed!)

UPDATE: The clip is available (for a week?) on the Up All Night website. Luckily, thanks to a nice thing known as the analog hole, I was able to (crappily) record an mp3 of the clip:

Adi talks Gmail on ‘Up All Night’ .mp3

UPDATE 2: The almighty Brad Rosen uploaded a much cleaner mp3 of the interview. Check it out by clicking on these words dot mp3.

Also, last weekend was Free Culture X, the conference for the larger Students for Free Culture group. Yale had relatively solid representation down there—Paul Ramirez, who is the reason Yale Students for Free Culture is running so smoothly this year, and I travelled together; Daniel Ayele and Andrew Gu headed down too. Overall, the conference was awesome—great people, great speakers, great workshops, great bowling, etc. (Hopefully I blog about it sometime in the future.) While down there, though, Marc Parry of the Chronicle of Higher Education joined my buddy Parker and me to lunch and asked us a few questions for an article he was writing. Lo and behold. Overall, the article’s pretty good—though I’m hoping that first quote of mine isn’t taken out of context

Anyways, since my mother told me she reads my blog (and since I always have trouble finding time to call home), I’ll hopefully be updating this more often. Be sure to check out our Yale Students for Free Culture blog too—It’s still in the works, but once we start posting to it, it should be great!

At Last Mix .mp3

Featuring appearances by…
Etta James “At Last”
Boys Noize “& Down”
Lady Gaga vs Eurythmics “Dance Dreams (Divide & Kreate mix)”
Will Smith “Fresh Prince of Bel Air (Mustard Pimp remix)”
(cameo: Barack Obama)
Tupac “California Love (Deadmau5 edit)”
(cameo: Phantom Planet “California”)
Fatboy Slim “Kalifornia”
Radiohead “Everything in its Right Place (Gigamesh / DiscoTech remix)
Britney Spears “Circus (Villains remix)”
David Guetta “Memories (ft. Kid Cudi)”
Deadmau5 “Ghosts N Stuff (ft. Rob Swire)”
Ke$ha “Tik Tok (Skeet Skeet remix VIP)”
Justice vs Simian “We Are Your Friends (The Disco Villains remix)”
David Guetta “When Love Takes Over (ft. Kelly Rowland)”
Akon “So Damn Beautiful (VIKING remix)”
CSS “Music Is My Hot Hot Sex (KILL THE NOISE remix)”
Major Lazer “Pon De Floor (Chewy Chocolate Cookies remix)”
The Bloody Beetroots “Warp 1.9 (ft. Steve Aoki)”
Passion Pit “The Reeling (Calvin Harris remix)”
Junior Senior “Move Your Feet”
Pitbull “I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)”
David Guetta vs The Egg “Love Don’t Let Me Go (Walking Away)”
Etta James “At Last”

That’s all.

Photo by eston on flickr

Unless you’ve been living in my household, you’ve probably heard of a game called Apples to Apples. It’s quite popular, and everybody I know seems to play it and adore it and love it. I, however, had never played it before a few weeks ago.

It’s common for “the group” mind to overhype things—”like” turn into “love,” and “eh” turn into “blech”. It confused me how this game could be hyped up so much, though.

It’s fun… ish. The premise of the game is that each person gets some “noun” cards—cards with things, places, ideas, names, common and proper nouns. You go around a circle, and when someone is up, they pick out an “adjective” card. This card is any generic adjective. Everybody else then picks one of their nouns that “works” with the adjective, and the person who chose the adjective card chooses which noun he or she “likes” best. It can be funny, it can be silly, it can be true, it can be random.

This is where the game falls apart in my head.

The game is silly. The cards have funny sayings on them, and the odd pairings are enjoyable. But that’s about it. Other than that, there’s no rhyme nor reason in this game. People can choose whatever card they like, there’s no strategy, no skill, and what I like to call “self-realized” cleverness—the pairing you submit may be genius in your mind, yet absolutely not to the other person.

My family played a lot of board games, and I love most of them. My parents were never the biggest fans of games like Monopoly (it takes too long), but they—and I—love word games, like Boggle and Scrabble and the like. The thing about any of these games—strategy, word, and whatever else—is that they involve thought. Thought in the sense of planning or tactics or cleverness. And perhaps even more underlying is the fact that these games are competitive. You can win. You can lose. You can play a certain way to affect your outcome. It isn’t all random. And with this competitiveness comes a satisfaction that a game like Apples to Apples cannot come even close to matching. By winning Apples, what have you done? Well, not much. You’ve essentially been randomly selected as winner. Congratulations.

I guess you can argue that based on people’s personalities, some people like funnier pairings, some people relevant pairings, etc. But after playing this game, observing others, and attempting at some semblance of strategy, I’ve realized this isn’t true. So I went back to picking what I thought were the funniest pairings, playing for my own self-amusement. In terms of the group game, it worked sometimes; it didn’t others. So the game goes. Sure this game may not be about “winning” in the same sense that other games are, but after a while the game didn’t really seem to be about anything.

It comes down to this: It isn’t a competitive game, nor a game that requires skill, nor a game that requires strategy, nor a game that requires much thought or effort. It’s a game played for the sheer silliness and group enjoyment. And there’s nothing wrong with that, really. It’s a decently fun game, and I’d say I like it. But there’s nothing about it that would turn that “like” into “love.”

I realized that I don’t really know Los Angeles so well. My goal for the next month or so, because I don’t have a job, is to explore LA. Harder to do than NYC because LA is so ridiculously big, but I’m going to try. In fact, I’ve already started:

I went to the kickoff event of this thing called Trekking Los Angeles, which is a program that takes you around LA to experience the culture, street food, music, art, and more. The event I went to was sponsored by GOOD Magazine (where my friend Wesley works) and was held at Mercado La Paloma, a very nice community center with some stores and restaurants inside. The place used to be a sweatshop, until it was converted and remodeled; you can see it when driving on the 110 freeway—it’s a huge building with a large mural on the back.

The event was an awesome chance for me and my friends to chill, eat good food, listen to music, talk, and more. At one point, we were standing around when I noticed a girl that looked really familiar. I said to my friend, Cole, “That girl looks really familiar,” thinking it was either Natalie Portman or a girl from my elementary school. Well, Cole assured me it was Natalie Portman. And yes, it turns out, it was Natalie Portman. At this semi-small event (40 or so people at a time, 100 folks total, maybe?), it was crazy seeing her chilling there, eating with her friends.

A couple days ago, I went to the second day of the Electric Daisy Carnival. I made the decision to go around 6pm after debating for, oh, a month or so whether or not to go. It’s a pretty expensive concert (80 bucks for Saturday), and none of my high school friends in my grade/group were going that night. But the lineup was AMAZING, so I said, to hell with it, and I went alone.

Turns out Electric Daisy Carnival is the biggest dance party in North America, boasting record numbers this year (90,000 the night I went), and the experience was phenomenal. People were dressed in ridiculous costumes (and wearing ridiculously little), there were lights everywhere, and many of my favorite house/techno/electronica acts ever were there. I got to see, in order, Kaskade, Groove Armada, Benny Benassi, David Guetta, Simian Mobile Disco, and Infected Mushroom.

Kaskade and Groove Armada had great sets. Benny Benassi is a PHENOMENAL dj, spinning and mixing some awesome beats. A couple DJs did a classy thing and played some Michael Jackson. (The fireworks in the background were an awesome touch too ). David Guetta is fun—very poppy, very catchy. I stayed for about half an hour or so, then left to check out Simian Mobile Disco. I love their stuff, and their live set was awesome. They seemed to be hovering around a table with two laptops and two large boxes with a bunch of buttons and dials and wires. Who knows what they were doing. Whatever. As long as music came out. Infected Mushroom had a sick set too, performing their songs live. This may be what they do every time, but seeing it for the first time was amazing. They were drumming their own beats on an electronic drum set; they had a guitarist; a guy on some synth instrument; and a guy singing. Wow.

To put it lightly, it was epic. Imagine partying, dancing, and rocking out to the sickest beats ever for eight hours. I (luckily) was able to find a couple folks a year younger than me from high school, and later I found my friend Shivani from Yale. Honestly, it was an amazing, fun, beautiful experience, and I’d go again in a heartbeat.

Now what? Well, we’ll see. I’m still on the lookout for fun stuff to do, cool exhibits, concerts, places, restaurants, beaches, and whatever else.