Some practical advice from Africa as reported by the BBC – when faced with slow broadband speeds and a large file to transfer… try a carrier pigeon!

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles – in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

The experiment is a bit contrived. If I want to transfer 4 TB worth of photos from one computer upstairs to a photo printing store I shouldn’t try to upload them online and should instead just take a portable hard drive to the store. The moral of the story is a good one: if you need to transfer a lot of data, instead of just firing up your FTP client, think about some alternative methods for transferring the data. We could all save ourselves some grief if we learned this lesson from Winston.

The list of companies that use their software to gather and subsequently sell marketing data grows every day. Do you think it is mere coincidence that Google ads seem to frequently follow your recent on-line searches? Have you ever wondered why Google offers you all of their services (search, e-mail, on-line documents, 411 service) for free? Well, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they are using all of the data you provide for profit and to further refine their technologies. Tim O’Reilly has a (now fairly dated) blog on why he believes Google started offering their 411 service that I am inclined to agree with: Google is using the “millions of voices, millions of accents to train speech recognition systems”. Why not, right? Well, it turns out Google isn’t alone (*gasp*!!!1!!)

“Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids’ online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children’s chat messages — and sell the marketing data gathered.” Today, Michael Masnick of TechDirt, turned me onto a story that “one of the top providers in the space doesn’t just monitor what kids do for parents, but collects all the data — including the text of chat room discussions — and resells it to marketers.”

Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids.

A reminder to parents and non-parents alike… learn about software before installing and using it. Apparently there is an option available for parents to opt out of this information “sharing”, but it is only available via the company’s website. You know those annoying “Terms of Service” agreements that we all scroll and click through without reading? Well, maybe it’s time we starting paying a little more attention, eh?

I read an article, “Back-to-school advice for safe & ethical social networking“, that picqued my curiosity as a new parent. Even though I really don’t have to worry about Dwight Jr. participating in social networking for at least a few more years, I’m trying to start thinking about those kinds of situations now.

Try to become familiar with the technology your kids use. That doesn’t mean you necessarily have to be their friend on Facebook or MySpace, but before you start trying to control how they use social-networking technology, make sure you understand it.

I think this is great advice, not just for social networking, but for everything kids (or your spouse, for that matter) are into – especially technology. I definitely have fond memories of my parents wanting to be involved in things I was excited about… especially when they would sit down for a game of Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., Star Wars Battlefront or Axis & Allies. Having a common frame of reference for talking about my hobbies with my parents? Priceless. (Yeah, yeah, I didn’t include a list of things you can buy for $13 on debit Mastercard. Meh.)

Larry Magid, the author of the article quotes some great guidelines from Hemanshu Nigam, the Chief Security Officer at MySpace, for social networking behavior. It’s geared towards kids, but we all need to be reminded of these rules.

• Post with respect: photos are a great way to share wonderful experiences. If you’re posting a photo of you and your friends, put yourself in your friends’ shoes and ask would your friends want that photo to be public to everyone. If yes, then you’re uploading photos with respect.
• Comment with kindness: compliments are like smiles, they’re contagious. When you comment on a profile, share a kind word, others will too. [Note from Dwight: Speaking of Comments... I love to see them on my blog... *hint, hint*]
• Update with empathy: sharing updates lets us tell people what we think. When you give an opinion on your status updates, show empathy towards your friends and help them see the world with understanding eyes.

not bad, eh?

Has your external hard drive or USB drive changed “letters” in Windows XP?

Follow these steps to change the Drive letter:

1. Log on as Administrator or as a member of the Administrators group.
2. Click Start, click Control Panel, and then click Performance and Maintenance.
3. Click Administrative Tools, double-click Computer Management, and then click Disk Management in the left pane.
4. Right-click the drive, the partition, the logical drive, or the volume that you want to assign a drive letter to, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.
5. Click Change.
6. Click Assign the following drive letter if it is not already selected, click the drive letter that you want to use, and then click OK.
7. Click Yes when you are prompted to confirm the drive letter change.

I posted earlier about the police charging a 14-year-old girl with a misdemeanor for using her cell phone in school.

Look at those punks texting...

It turns out that Texting is Good for Kids!

According to NewScientist

“Phonological awareness has long been associated with good reading skills.” Exposure to the written word in any form is also linked to improved literacy. “These kids are engaging with more written language and they’re doing it for fun.”

Tech that Matters – You (or your kids) could be arrested for texting in a text-free zone!!!? (snark)

Mind your manners, people – a 14-year-old girl was reportedly charged with disorderly conduct for refusing to cease texting in class and then hiding the phone down her pants.

The real question here: will they forcibly collect her DNA for this misdemeanor?

Today, 641 (mostly) small-market TV stations will no longer broadcast analog signals, while many others delay until the new deadline (June 12) set by President Obama.

For those of you who still view “over-the-air” Television and do not have an HDTV, now would be a good time to get your hands on a set-top box to act as a digital tuner.

P.S. My apologies for any “regular” readers out there who missed my regular Monday blog. “Things” have been crazy while Gwen and I ramp up our efforts to buy a home.

“Tech that Matters” – if you can make a Mii on the Nintendo Wii, you can get job as a sketch artist for the police department in Kanagawa, Japan.

Mii Police Sketch

Sure, sketch artists might be able to create a more accurate likeness, but a Mii should be close enough for an arrest, right?

Apparently the Police have denied responsibilty for this poster, but… well… meh.

I blogged earlier about our tendency, as humans, to reveal more than we ought in on-line communication through portals like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Yet, these are but a few of the ways in which we often fail to safeguard the rights to privacy that we defend and claim to cherish. A NY Times article says that researchers refer to this as the “privacy paradox”.

normally sane people have inconsistent and contradictory impulses and opinions when it comes to their safeguarding their own private information.

Today, Google announced a new service called Google Latitude – a new service for mobile devices and “iGoogle” that allows users to views the location of their friends and loved ones (who have opted to share the information). It’s a pretty cool idea – basically you (the user) can opt to other specified users to see your geographic location and vice-versa. Purportedly, this information can be adjusted per “friend” to show the best approximation of your location, a city-level view, hide your location entirely or even to provide intentional false information. “No honey, I’m not out boozing it up with the guys… I’m… at work… <typetypetype> … check Latitude.”

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Too much Facebook makes all teenage girls depressed.

Chris Matyszczyk wrote a CNET article, disagreeing with a study done by Stony Brook University, which claims that:

excessive co-rumination–perhaps you would refer to it as “chatting with your friends about your problems”–by text, e-mail and on social-networking sites leaves impressionable teenage girls more prone to anxiety and depression.

He claims that if it wasn’t Facebook it would be “bathroom gossip”, text messages, phone calls, slumber parties… you get the picture. Having never been a teenage girl myself, I can’t really attest to this (hopefully Chris cannot either?), but it seems to me that the persistent and “open” nature of Facebook goes beyond text messaging and slumber parties and is asking for trouble. Not just for teenage girls or even the female gender – I think it can be a problem for anyone.

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