paul schreiber

Please call today and oppose the FISA Amendments Act (HR 6304).

It is not acceptable to give away our civil liberties. Granting retroactive immunity to telecom companies is wrong.

This bill is not a “compromise.” It is a get-out-of-jail-free card bought by lobbyists for large phone companies. No matter how illegal, offensive or intrusive a company’s invasion of your privacy has been, it won’t make a difference if this legislation passes. If the president gave the company a note claiming their behavior was legal, they’re completely off the hook.

If we want to change Washington, it starts by telling Verizon, AT&T and Sprint that buying votes after they broke the law will not be tolerated:

All House Members (June 20th vote:)
Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint gave PAC contributions averaging:
$9,659 to each member of the House voting “YES” (105-Dem, 188-Rep)
$4,810 to each member of the House voting “NO” (128-Dem, 1-Rep)

Here’s what you can do:

1. Go to Stop The Spying and find your Senator’s contact information. Call them now.

   California people: Dianne Feinstein’s office numbers are:
   202-224-3841 (DC)
   310-914-7300 (LA)
   619-231-9712 (SD)
   415-393-0707 (SF)
   559-485-7430 (Fresno)

   Barbara Boxer’s office numbers are:
   202-224-3553 (DC)
   213-894-5000 (LA)
   619-239-3884 (SD)
   415-403-0100 (SF)
   559-497-5109 (Fresno)
   916-448-2787 (Sacramento)
   909-888-8525 (Inland Empire)

2. Call the Obama offices. Tell them not only must Senator Obama oppose this bill, but he needs to join in any filibuster.
   866-675-2008 (campaign headquarters)
   202-224-2854 (DC)
   312-886-3506 (IL)

3. Join the Senator Obama Please Vote Against FISA group on my.barackobama.com. It’s currently the #5 biggest group on barackobama.com. Let’s make it #1.

Schmap, an online city guide, has published several of my photos. In San Francisco:

• Peter Adams at the Great American Music Hall
• “>Aquagrill (NYC)
• Chez Nous (Austin)

FotoMagico is program that lets you create amazing slideshows. In FotoMagico, slides advance in one of two ways:

1. automatically, after a set time period
2. after a mouse click

If you’ve picked option (2), you see a “fast forward” overlay when you click the mouse:

I dislike this. Fortunately, there’s a preference to turn this off.

FotoMagico lets you export your slide shows as standalone player applications, and distribute them to anyone with a Mac.

I found one problem, however. Even when you turn off “Visualize Interactive Control,” the standalone player does not respect this preference. That means you always get the “fast forward” overlay. Yuck.

Fortunately, there is a workaround. If you peek inside the bundle for FotoMagico, you’ll notice it has a CFBundleIdentifier of com.boinx.fotomagico.

If you run defaults read com.boinx.fotomagico before and after setting the preference, you’ll see one line appear:
"PrefsKey_DisplayOverlays" = 0;

Now, look at the Info.plist inside the player. Its CFBundleIdentifier is com.boinx.fotomagico.player.

This means, the fix is simply:
defaults write com.bound.fotomagico.player PrefsKey_DisplayOverlays 0

This will prevent many of the annoying ads from showing up on Facebook:
sudo echo "127.0.0.1 ads.ak.facebook.com" >> /etc/hosts

One would think with all the demographic data they have about me, they could show me relevant ads. One would be wrong.

People are really bad at naming files on their computer. How many times have you walked up to someone’s desktop to see half a dozen “untitled folder”s, several “documents” and files with other generic names like “resume,” “proposal” and “draft”?

Are you really going to remember what’s in that file tomorrow? In two months? In two years. No. Naming your files is just like writing email: be clear, concise and remove redundancy.

When you’re creating files for distribution over the web, remember where this is going to end up — on someone’s desktop. Two quick tips:

• If you’re a job seeker, resume.pdf is a terrible name. Think of the hundreds of resume.pdfs the recruiter will have on his or her computer. PaulSchreiberResume.pdf is a much better name. No spaces, punctuation or accents makes the file URL easier to read and type (Paul%20Schreiber%20Resume.pdf just looks awful), and ensures it will be compatible with the Unicode-hostile mess that is corporate email.
• If you’re a musician, actor, comedian or other performer, avoid names like headshot.jpg, bio.pdf and onesheet.pdf. Make sure your name is part of the file name. (And don’t forget to credit the photographer!)

Now, on to Comcast. They helpfully let you download your monthly invoices as PDFs. However, they look like this:
67899012345_05-27-2008.pdf

So what’s wrong with the name? Aside from the fact that starting off with an account number impairs scanability, look what happens when you have a good number of bills saved up:
67899012345_05-27-2007.pdf
67899012345_05-27-2008.pdf
67899012345_05-27-2009.pdf
67899012345_06-27-2007.pdf
67899012345_06-27-2007.pdf

That’s right—the files appear totally out of order. A much better idea would be to use an ISO standard date format like 2008-05-27, which—in addition to being a standard—sorts more cleanly.

(Thanks, Rider.)