Santorum Google screenshot

When you Google for "Santorum," this is the top search result. (Click to enlarge - but only if you're not too squeamish.) You can help keep this brilliant effort working.

It’s time to use my power for good.

Yesterday NPR reported on how the batshit crazy social conservative former US senator Rick Santorum is pulling ahead in Republican polls for the presidential race.

Santorum has always annoyed and amused me. But with this, he’s officially scaring me.

Today, Marketplace Tech Report reminded me about Rick Santorum’s Google problem — so I decided to take action.

So here I am linking to SpreadingSantorum.com, a Google bombing page that writer Dan Savage set up in 2003.

Furthermore I encourage everyone else to do likewise.  Especially if you’ve had your own web site or blog under its own domain name for several years. But even if your only online presence is via a third-party service like Facebook, WordPress.com, or Tumblr (where you don’t have your own domain), I still encourage you to post a link to SpreadingSantorum.com.

Talk about a long-term investment in search visibility that is REALLY paying off! Here’s how it works…

When a website or page has been on the web and attracting links for several years, Google promotes it in search results so it ends up near or at the top of the first results page for relevant Google searches. This ultimately raises the destination site’s Google PageRank — especially when it’s linked to by sites with PageRank that exceed its own.

So far, SpreadingSantorum.com has a PageRank of 5 — but it’s already showing up at the top of Google searches for the term Santorum. (See screenshot at the top of this post.)

My site, Contentious.com, has been online and publishing fairly continuously since 1997. I currently have a PageRank of 6 (out of a possible 10 points). Not to be self-congratulatory, but that’s pretty good for a blog run by one person. That’s the power of a site being online under the same domain for nearly 15 years.

This also means that when I link to other sites with a lower PageRank, my inbound link helps their search visibility in Google. Right now, SpreadingSantorum.com has a PageRank of 5. So in fact, my inbound link helps this site maintain its search visibility.

Why link to SpreadingSantorum.com now? 

Now that Santorum is pulling ahead (however moderately) in Republican polls, it’s likely that Republicans and social conservatives — who have a pretty good track record for unified action — will try to undermine SpreadingSantorum.com‘s search visibility by linking like crazy to the official Santorum campaign site. (Yes, I am deliberately NOT linking to that site here.)

Also, mainstream news sites, political bloggers, and others are especially likely to link more often to the official Santorum campaign site, now that his viability as a candidate is increasing. (I’m gonna go wash my hands, now that I’ve typed that sentence, ick…)

All of this means that this brilliant social/political/search hack is currently under threat and needs your support. So link now, and keep linking! The more links on more days from more sites, the better!

What kind of power do your links wield?

Here’s how to check PageRank for your site or any site:

• Google Chrome users: I use this Chrome Pagerank addon. It displays the PageRank of any page displayed in my browser.
• Google toolbar users: If you use Internet Explorer or Firefox, here’s how to view PageRank in the toolbar. (Install Google toolbar)
• Safari users: There’s a Safari PageRank addon.
• Everyone else: You can check PageRank by pasting the URL for any site or page at CheckPageRank.net.

GO FORTH AND LINK TO SPREADINGSANTORUM.COM! And do your part to undermine an increasingly powerful politician who denies evolution (and thinks scientists are amoral), wants to eliminate birth control and opposes abortion rights (thus indicating he thinks women’s most important role is as an ambulatory incubator for male sperm), and who has compared homosexual sex to bestiality and child rape.

Yeah. Really. No kidding. Batshit crazy has no business in government — especially in the White House.

I realize this perspective flies in the face of reality, but I have a dream… of sanity…

root

This morning I finally rooted my Droid Incredible! One-handed, even! (Dislocated finger hidden by massive splint.)

This morning, before I even had my tea, I finally jumped off a cliff I’d been avoiding: I rooted my Android phone (Droid Incredible).

I’ve had this phone for a year. Generally I like it, but the things I don’t like about it mostly seemed to be fixable if I rooted my phone.

Rooting means undoing the controls that the carrier and manufacturer place on how my phone operates…

Some of that is done to reduce the risk that I might accidentally damage my phone — but much of this is so they can make more money by loading my phone with bloatware (some of which I couldn’t uninstall or even turn off!) or charging me for tethering. Both of which, IMHO, are bullshit unethical business practices.

Why was this scary?  And why did I do it?

I rely heavily on my cell phone. It’s my only phone, and it’s a pretty sophisticated and potentially fragile device.

If you root your Android phone and it breaks or bricks (I had a traumatic bricking experience in 2008 with a Nokia N95), you may violate its warranty — which means the carrier or manufacturer may not replace it. Which means I’d have to shell out big bucks for a new smartphone, since I need to have a phone.

But I’d finally had enough…

Four about the fourth time in a year, my phone malfunctioned due to being “low on space” — despite that I’d purchased a much larger SD storage card and used Apps2SD to move everything possible onto it, freeing up the phone’s built-in memory. The culprit is a known bug in many HTC phones that inflates my phone’s Contacts Storage to gargantuan proportions (over 53 MB for me yesterday).

Every HTC phone forum is filled with people complaining about this bug. It can be fixed — for a while — by exporting your contacts to the SD card as a backup, deleting your Contacts Storage data, and then reimporting. That process takes me over an hour, during which I can’t use my phone for anything else or it halts the restore and I have to start over.

Annoying. And after a year, it seems HTC doesn’t care to get around to fixing it.

It seems one way to fix it, for good, is to root the phone and then install a custom ROM (modified version of the Android OS, which would replace the “HTC Sense” flavor of Android that came with my phone) such as CyanogenMod. I’ve now made substantial progress down that path.

How I rooted my Droid Incredible using Unrevoked3

Following guidance from Lifehacker, I learned yesterday that there’s a simple and now well-established way to root the Droid Incredible and several other popular HTC phones: Unrevoked3. It’s a free download. I Googled around and saw many people singing its praises, so it seemed reputable and about as safe as a rooting tool can be.

So I slept on this decision, and I followed the steps suggested by Stever Robbins in his recent podcast, How to face your fears. (Really, it’s good. Give it a listen.)

First thing this morning I went for it: I used Unrevoked3 to root my Droid Incredible.

The phone process took about 15 minutes, and I didn’t have to do much — just hook up my phone to my laptop in charge-only mode with USB debugging turned on, and let it do its thing.

The process quit partway on first try, which concerned me. But I carefully disconnected and then reconnected my phone, relaunched Unrevoked3, and started over. It worked seamlessly on the second try. Whew!

What I did after rooting my phone

Safety first! Immediately after my phone was rooted, I downloaded Titanium backup, widely considered to be a must-have’ for every rooted Android user. I also sprang for the $6.88 to get my Pro Key for it. I used Titanium to back up absolutely everything on my phone, so if through further monkeying I broke my phone, I could restore it to a condition that worked.

Titanium also lets you delete, uninstall, or freeze any app or service on your phone. One really annoying thing about much HTC/Verizon bloatware is that these programs not only can’t be uninstalled, but some of them (like Stocks, CityID, and Skype Mobile) keep auto-launching even if I turn them off! How obnoxious is that????

Generally I think it’s safer to uninstall programs rather than delete them, because you never know how they really interact with other stuff, and finding and downloading the right stuff to reinstall if necessary can be a hassle.

I uninstalled these bloatware apps:

• Car panel 1.0
• City ID 1.0.23
• Facebook for htc sense 1.0
• Flashlight 1.0
• Friend stream 1.0
• Friend stream 1.0 widget
• HTC Sense live wallpapers 1.00
• live wallpaper picker 2.2
• Magic smoke wallpapers 2.2
• Mail widget 1.00
• Music visualization wallpapers 2.2
• News 1.0
• Peep 2.0
• Slacker 2.1.14
• Stocks 2.00
• Stocks widget 1.00
• Teeter 1.00
• V cast apps 1.0.14
• Visual VM 1.13
• 3G mobile hotspot 1.0

In addition I “froze” these apps and widgets, so they can’t be launched:

• Mail 2.00
• Skype mobile 1.0.0.17
• Footprints 1.10
• Footprints widget 1.00
• FM radio 1.00
• FM radio widget 1.00

When I got this far, for good measure I powered down and restarted my phone, just to make sure everything was working — and to see which apps and services would automatically launch. I was pleased to see that no more bloatware was auto-launching!

I can haz tethering, too! (so far)

“Tethering” is when you use your phone as a wireless modem to supply a data connection for a laptop or other device using your wireless carrier’s data network. Google includes this function with the plain vanilla (“stock”) version of Android.

Unfortunately U.S. carriers disable tethering, so they can force you to pay them a monthly fee ($20 or more) for tethering as if it’s some kind of “extra” service — not something they crippled.

This is unreasonable, rapacious bullshit. If I’m paying for a data plan, why should they care which device is the end user of that data?

There have been several Android apps to supply wireless tethering on unrooted phones, but recently carriers have started cracking down on wireless tethering apps.

So I downloaded and installed the free Wifi Tether app for rooted Android phones, and enabled access control in the settings (so I could control which devices connect to my phone).

Then I shut down my home wifi router and looked under the Airport wifi modem menu on my Macbook Pro. There was my phone! I connected to my phone’s wifi from my laptop, then approved that device on the app on my phone, and ta-da! There my laptop was connected to the internet! I repeated the process with my Macbook Air.

In neither case did my phone pop up a warning from Verizon that they wanted to charge me for tethering — something that did happen to ReadWriteWeb. So, as far as I can tell at this point, I can do free tethering from my phone.

I don’t expect to need tethering very often, but I think it’s an important option to have. I have to do a lot of work when I’m traveling, or running around town, and free or reliable wifi isn’t always available. Also, my VPN service Witopia sometimes doesn’t work on soe wifi connections, and connecting via my carrier’s data network is more secure than being on open wifi.

What’s next

I’m still investigating which custom ROM would be best for my phone. I’ll probably do that at some point, since that will probably fix that Contact Storage bug once and for all.

But so far, for now, I’m a much happier Android user now that I’ve gone root.

He just did a blog post that addresses one of the banes of my existence: e-mail overload. I hate e-mail for the purpose of sharing links, collaboration, coordination, or keeping up with tasks and project. But I can’t seem to wean from e-mail the people I need to connect with on that stuff. Everyone uses different tools and services to manage their own processes, and too often the lowest common denominator is e-mail.

In Inbox Zero and the Critical Mistake That Saps Productivity, Stever writes:

“I believe that an empty inbox just means you’ve ceded control of your thinking and priorities to everyone who emails you. They control the volume, order, and substance of your attention for the time you’re processing your email. It *feels good* to have an empty inbox, but it also feels good to gorge on Oreo ice cream cake. That doesn’t mean that Oreo ice cream cake is good for you, only that it feels good. Inbox Zero has the extra sugary bonus that since *some* email is an essential part of our job, it’s easy to believe (with no evidence at all) that therefore it’s useful to spend some time on *all* email.

“Rather than striving for inbox zero, I advocate learning to identify the truly relevant emails very, very quickly, with an absolute minimum of cognitive load or context switching.

Whew! I don’t feel so bad now about the nearly 1000 items in my Gmail inbox…

I actually do a pretty good job of using gmail labels, filters, and other tools to identify my high-priority e-mails as they come in and handle them. I also do a good job of killing the messages that I just don’t need to deal with.

That leaves a vast pile of messages that either don’t need to be dealt with quickly, or that couldn’t be quickly parsed into tasks or other actionable items of useful buckets.

Some of these are lower-priority messages that I might need or want to review, and some may be higher priority but the sender just forwarded me stuff with little/no thought of how to make the content easy for me to parse.

And frankly, if it lands in my inbox, MY needs and priorities are what matters.

With very few exceptions, I take the approach of just letting hard-to-parse e-mails fall through the cracks. And if people get annoyed that I didn’t respond or do what they wanted, tough. They need to learn to communicate more effectively through e-mail. I can’t keep taking up the slack.

What works:

1. Craft a clear, intuitive, action/purpose-oriented subject line. Don’t just forward something to me without changing the subject line. If I’m not expecting it and I don’t know why I should care, I probably won’t open it.
2. Get to the point. Explain in a sentence or two up front why you’re sending it *to me*, what you expect me to do with it, and whether it relates to an existing project or topic we’ve been discussing or something new.
3. Set the time frame. If you want me to do something in response, indicate by when you want me to take action.
4. Send ONE e-mail per topic/project, ideally only once per day. If we’re talking about several different projects, topics, etc., don’t make huge switches of topic midway through an e-mail and expect me to read the whole thing. Break it up into one e-mail per project or topic. Similarly, if you have several things to tell me about a project or topic, don’t pelt me with 50 separate e-mails about it – especially if they’re forwarded. Gather all those loose ends together into one e-mail and send me that. If we need to be talking about this project or topic more than once/day, e-mail is probably not the best way to handle that communication. Chat, social media, or phone might work better.

I get anywhere from 100-500 e-mails daily, not counting spam. I have to be a hardass about this. I know it pisses off some people. I’m sorry. It’s the only way I can keep my head above water with e-mail. If I can’t wean you off e-mal,

I work at home and depend on broadband internet to make my living. This week I lost about two full working days because my broadband went out. My internet service provider (ISP), Comcast, was unable to get it working or even steer me in a useful direction, despite keeping me on the phone for hours and running lots of tests of the connection between their equipment and my equipment.

Were I not lucky enough to know a programmer with lots of networking experience who could spend time helping me investigate other possible points of failure, I’d be out of luck for home wifi right now — which would severely hinder my business and life.

Here’s what happened with my home wifi, and how I fixed it. Also here’s why ISPs need to do a much better job of helping residential customers diagnose possible network problems that lie beyond the narrow scope of the wires and modems they sell…

WHY ISP TECH SUPPORT IS HELPFUL ONLY TO A POINT

Unless there is a local internet outage in your neighborhood, or there’s an apparent problem with your line connection or cable/DSL modem, your ISP probably will be no help on diagnosing and fixing your problem. They won’t help you investigate other avenues beyond the narrow scope of what they’re selling you.

Unfortunately, wifi has many potential points of failure — most of which are unfamiliar territory to the typical consumer. Your home wifi also depends on internet equipment like domain name servers, and on local conditions like wifi interference. It takes some knowledge and skill to diagnose and fix these conditions.

Ever since I moved into an apartment building in Oakland, CA last summer and signed up for Comcast’s cable modem broadband service (now Xfinity), my connection has been a bit flaky. My Mac laptop would suddenly either lose its connection to the wifi router, or my home wifi network would be working but I wouldn’t be able to access any web sites or online services.

Sometimes resetting the router and modem would fix this. Other times the service would just as mysteriously reappear a half hour or so later. And sometimes, I’d call Comcast and learn that they were having an outage that affected my area.

This week, the problem was different: The service never came back on. I called Comcast, and they verified that there was no local outage. I then spent nearly two hours on the phone with their tech support running through various fixes that basically reset my home equipment (my Mac laptop and its built-in Airport wireless modem, the Comcast cable modem, and my Apple Airport Express wifi router) in various combinations.

Nothing worked. Especially odd was that my laptop was repeatedly unable to show a valid IP address.

So I packed up my laptop and headed off to a local coffee shop with free wifi to get some work done. My laptop accessed that network immediately and with no problems, so I knew the problem was not my computer.

Even though the Comcast tech saw no problems with my modem, he suggested that if my computer worked fine elsewhere, it wouldn’t hurt to go to the local Comcast service center to exchange my modem for a new one. Comcast exchanged my modem at no charge.

When I got home later that night, I connected and activated the new modem — and boom, I was online just fine. No problem. I went to bed relieved, thinking I’d fixed the problem.

PROBLEM SOLVED? NOT!!!

The next day I was online just fine until about the middle of the afternoon. Then, suddenly, I lost my internet connection again: first I was unable to hit any sites, and then my laptop stopped being able to connect to my home wifi at all.

I was on the phone to Comcast again, and again they ran me through the same diagnostics. The problem was weird: everything seemed to be working, but I was still failing to obtain a valid IP address.

The end result: Comcast said, “There’s nothing we can do here. We can send a technician to your house, but if the problem is not our equipment, you’d have to pay for that visit.”

I understand their perspective, but that is a really shitty approach to customer service. Comcast could have — and should have — offered further resources for self-diagnosis, but they didn’t.

At my wits’ end and not knowing what else to do, I scheduled a technician visit for the following day. I was pretty angry.

Then I called my friend Tom Vilot, an actor and software developer. He saved my butt.

REAL PROBLEM PART 1: FLAKY COMCAST DNS

Tom had me connect my laptop directly to my cable modem via ethernet, and turn off the built-in Airport modem in my laptop. He then walked me through opening a terminal window (under “utilities” in my Mac’s applications menu) and we ran several “ping” tests using UNIX commands to determine whether I was in fact communicating with the internet.

From this he determined that at least part of my problem was related to Comcast’s domain name servers (DNS) — a core part of the internet that translates human-readable domain names into computer-readable numeric IP addresses.

“I’ve seen this before, Comcast’s DNS is really flaky,” said Tom. “So Comcast is definitely part of the problem here, but not in a way that their tech support staff can do anything about. That’s why they didn’t mention it.”

Tom then directed me to go into my Mac’s system preferences. Under “network” he had me select the active ethernet connection and then click “advanced.” Then, under the DNS tab he had me enter the address for one of Google’s own domain name servers: 8.8.4.4

Once I applied that setting change, I was suddenly able to access web sites and other online services again. So the first part of my problem was solved.

“Google’s DNS is much, much more reliable than Comcast’s. It needs to be,” said Tom.

But Tom cautioned me that a direct ethernet connection to my cable modem is not a safe option. It’ll suffice in an emergency — but there are a lot of port sniffers out there looking for unprotected access to computers. I don’t want my computer to get hacked. Apple wifi routers provide a fair amount of security against such invasions, so I knew I needed a functioning home wifi network.

REAL PROBLEM PART 2: LOCAL WIFI INTERFERENCE

Next, Tom had me unplug the power from my cable modem, unplug my Airport Express wifi router, reconnect the ethernet cable from the modem to the router (what you normally need to do to have a local wifi network), and then plug both devices back in to power. For good measure, I also restarted my laptop. Then I turned my laptop’s Airport modem back on.

My laptop was unable to connect to my local wifi network. It would see the network on the list of available networks, but couldn’t connect.

At this point Tom speculated that I might be getting wifi interference from someone else’s router in my building. he explained that Apple’s Airport Express routers — and most other basic router models — operate only on a handful of common wifi “channels” in the 2.5 Ghz spectrum band. In a setting like an apartment building, where many occupants are likely to have their own wifi networks, wifi interference can become a problem.

Tom explained that the Airport Express modem automatically picks which wifi channel it will use to broadcast your home wifi network. This device only has one ethernet port, so it offers no easy access to diagnostics related to possible interference, and it’s difficult to get it to change channels.

Apple’s higher-end router, the Airport Extreme, has four Ethernet ports and access to a far wider range of wifi channels. It’s not cheap (almost $200 with tax), but it does give you more options to diagnose and circumvent wifi signal interference.

Since home wifi is a necessity, not a luxury, for me, I hopped on my bike and went to the nearest Apple Store, where I purchased an Airport Extreme.

When I got home, I called Tom again. (I am so grateful he was available to me that evening!) I hooked up the new router to my cable modem, recreated my home wifi network (password protected, of course), and boom! I was online again, no problem.

At that point I called Comcast and canceled the technician visit.

Tom then had me download the free application KISmac, which provides additional information about available local wifi networks.

I installed and launched KISmac. This program showed me which local networks were available and what channels they were using. I could see about 20 local networks, all on channels 2,4,6,7, and 9 (in the 2.5 GHz spectrum band). This indicates a situation where wifi interference is more likely to occur.

My network, with its new souped-up router, was the only network using channel 149 — in the 5 GHz spectrum band.

Tom notes: “It’s worth running KisMAC every once in a while to scan around and see what channels are being used. What I usually do is sort by signal ‘Avg.’ My wifi will, of course, show up at the top or near the top, since it’s got the strongest local signal as far as my computer is concerned.

“I then look at the other wifi stations that are near mine in signal strength (since they are obviously the ones most likely to interfere with mine). If they are on channels sufficiently far away from mine, I don’t need to change anything.

“But if I am on channel 7 and the neighbor with the nearest wifi is on 6, I will reconfigure the router to use channel 1 or 12. Similarly, if the next-strongest local network is on channel 11 and I’m on 7, I’m probably ok — but I might switch to channel 1 to be safer.”

LESSONS LEARNED

1. If you use home wifi, you need to learn a bit about how the internet works. It’s not like electricity, where you can mostly afford to not understand how the power grid works. Your ISP is only part of what gets you online.

Your ISP is responsible only for the cable/DSL “wired” connection to your home, and (usually) the modem device which receives that signal. What happens with your wifi router and computer(s) is your responsibility. These devices can fail as well, but your ISP can’t test them for you.

Be aware of other potential points of failure — especially DNS problems and wifi interference.

2. Know how to manually specify the DNS your computer uses. Two Google public DNS servers that I now have programmed into my network preferences panel are: 8.8.4.4 and 8.8.8.8. Here are Google’s instructions for accessing these servers from your computer.

ArsTechnica cautions that Google’s Public DNS is not the right solution for everyone. Fortunately, there are many other public DNS servers, and some commercial services like Open DNS.

3. If you live near lots of other wifi networks, get a higher-end wifi router. This costs more, but it’s more likely to keep you online since it gives you more options to diagnose and circumvent local wifi interference. This is especially true for apartment dwellers, but also can be the case in crowded neighborhoods.

4. Don’t expect your broadband provider’s tech support to help. It’s worth running through their diagnostics because their equipment and systems can — and do — fail. But when they reach the end of what they can help you check, you need to know what else to check and do.

That’s why I took the time to write this post. Comcast gave me no hints or indications of how I might continue to track down this problem. If I didn’t have an ubergeeky friend to call who happened to have the time to help me, I would be in serious trouble right now.

There is a lot of information available about these problems online, but it’s REALLY geeky and most people wouldn’t know how to begin to search for solutions.

HOW BROADBAND PROVIDERS COULD HELP

I wish broadband providers would teach their tech support staff how to explain to non-technical customers additional possible points of failure in home wifi networks — and then offer a resource guide for further diagnosis.

Such a guide would cover the kinds of topics I’ve covered in this post. It should be available with instructions for Mac and PC systems, and in multiple languages. Where possible it should recommend specific devices (such as routers) and tools (such as the KISmac application) that might help solve the problem.

Broadband providers could easily get this information to customers whose home networks aren’t working. Here’s how:

1. Provide a printed resource guide at installation. Cable and DSL providers have to send out a technician to activate service and install the customer’s modem. They should take that opportunity to explain that their equipment is only part of the broadband ecosystem, and offer a relevant guide for diagnosing problems that might fall outside their area of responsibility. They should encourage customers to keep this guide in a place where they don’t lose it.
2. If the customer has a smartphone, they could send a text message with a link to the appropriate version of the guide — or at least post this info in an obvious place on their mobile site (one that doesn’t require too much searching or clicking around, which is challenging even on a smartphone).
3. If the customer has an e-mail-enabled feature phone, they could e-mail the guide in text form to the customer’s phone-accessible e-mail address.
4. Fax or e-mail to a secondary contact. Most people know someone nearby who does have internet access, or a local copy shop or other place where they could receive a fax. This alternate contact could receive the document on behalf of the customer and print it out. Customers should be able to specify this alternate contact on the spot, during a problem, so they’re directing it to the most easily available contact at that moment.
5. Snail-mail a printed copy. This is a last-ditch solution since it would take the a day or two to arrive, but it would work.
6. Provide a call-in Q&A service. Some of this could be automated, and maybe make it available for a low fee. But give customers who have already determined that the problem is not the ISP someone they can talk to who can actually try to help them. Don’t just leave them stranded.

WHY THIS MATTERS: BROADBAND IS A UTILITY

Home broadband service is increasingly being recognized as crucial infrastructure, since it’s the best (and sometimes the only) way to access key services for work, education, government, social services, health, and more. In many ways it’s becoming as important to daily life as electricity.

Personally, I wish broadband internet service (both “wired”, like cable modems, and wireless, via smartphones) was regulated as a utility — because then providers would have a far greater responsibility to make sure customers have truly reliable service. They also would be more accountable for performance.

Under the current scheme, it’s too easy for non-tech-savvy customers to end up stranded without resources by their ISPs who can afford to neglect them.

This situation was stressful enough for me — and I’m tech-savvy enough to figure out at least part of the problem, and I also had an expert I could call for help. To someone who lacks these resources, this situation would look pretty hopeless.

This whole fiasco made me wonder: How many people end up giving up on home broadband, and the opportunities it affords, simply because their ISPs leave them stranded? Bridging the digital divide isn’t just about having computers — it’s also about having access to the internet that works and that keeps working.

Right now, ISPs should be willing to provide at least some basic education about connectivity needs beyond the products and services they sell — enough to help non-technical customers get started solving their own connectivity problems. The current situation (“Not our fault, sorry. Good luck. Bye!”) is callous and untenable.

COMMENTS WANTED

…I’m sure I’ve overlooked some issues, and that there must be some existing resources that would be useful to the typical consumer out there. I’d appreciate comments below that fill in some of those gaps, and I’ll update this post (or create new posts) to expand upon that information.

Note that I cannot solve other people’s connection problems, so I won’t publish comments seeking personal assistance for individual difficulties. I’d like to try to build a bit of a consumer-friendly resource here.

In general, this has been a pretty mixed experience…

Most news orgs are doing a great job of publishing the right amount of alerts (no more than 1-2 daily, unless there’s a major breaking local story), with the right kind and amount of information (not just headline shovelware

BUT: The links included in these text alerts are where these services fall short.

Yesterday, on the Knight Digital Media Center site, I wrote a list of tips about how to make links that work for all mobile users, especially keeping feature phone users in mind.

See: Engage your mobile audience with links that work for them

This is a followup to my Jan. 21 post: How missing links hurt online news

Got accessibility? Mobile-friendly sites also help disabled users

It was sparked by a new Pew report on problems that people with disabilities have with accessing the net. I found a couple of interesting twists.

1st: US DOJ has proposed new ADA regs for web sites, including “public accommodations” (hm, could include news sites?)

2nd: Making a site mobile-friendly goes a long way toward making it more accessible.

This subject is near and dear to my heart since one of my best friends, who is mostly blind, has faced significant struggles in getting access to services, information, education, and opportunities online and elsewhere. That has definitely hurt not only his quality of life, but his health. And he’s fairly tech-savvy! This is a problem that needs to be solved, and going mobile-friendly is one main way to start.

As a polyamorous person, I was rather tickled that this topic got such prominent play. I figured: Cool! There goes a chunk of the vocabulary gap!

If you haven’t heard the term, polyamory means being open to having more than one intimate relationship at a time, with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved.

Yes, I realize any new term sounds awkward until you get used to it. So: Get used to it. Because here’s what the vocabulary gap looks like to a poly person…

WHEN WORDS FAIL

Whenever the subject of relationships comes up, if I mention something that indicates I’m not monogamous, usually I see raised eyebrows. If I clarify that I’m poly, usually I get blank stares. Most people haven’t heard that word.

…Yes, moving to the Bay Area has helped ease that social awkwardness — but it’s still surprisingly common, even here.

Usually when people first hear the word polyamory, they immediately conflate it with infidelity, patriarchal polygamy, sex-focused swinging, or dysfunction. Occasionally they may already have some grasp of some aspects of polyamory — but rarely do they possess a vocabulary for it that’s not either exclusionary (“non-monogamous”), derisive (“promiscuous,” “cheating with permission,” or “can’t really commit”), or deliberately vague (“open”).

That’s not their fault. I don’t feel personally insulted by this vocabulary gap. But it is a problem.

Imagine if our language had no word for “female.” What if our only words for someone with a vagina were (at best) “not male” — or (at worst) “bitch,” “whore,” and “second-class citizen.”

That’s kinda what many poly people deal with. Prejudicial semi-invisibility gets old fast.

So whenever polyamory gets significant mainstream media coverage (such as this July 2009 Newsweek feature), I think it’s a good thing. Even if the coverage is poorly done, or flat-out negative.

Whenever the mainstream media mention polyamory, the vocabulary gap shrinks a little. That makes it just a bit easier for poly folk to participate in conversations that monogamous folk take for granted.

THE P-WORD AND THE EVIL EYE

There’s something else I’ve noticed when polyamory gets mentioned in conversations or publications: the immediate, reflexive, superstitious “evil-eye” reaction it commonly evokes.

Here’s what I mean. Often, when the P-word gets mentioned and explained — and even when people understand that it’s a valid and not inherently unstable or inferior option — it’s typical for them to immediately distance themselves verbally from polyamory.

It’s as if the very concept of polyamory has cooties. “It’s not something I would ever do!” and “Well, I guess that might work for some people, but not me!” are the most common evil-eye lines I hear.

And in writing, the P-word typically gets packaged in quotation marks, as if to insulate acceptable language from its contagion.

Then there are more blatant mock-shock evil eye reactions that blend panic and prurience, like this from today’s Toledo Blade’s Thin Slices blog:

“This week from the Boston Globe, a look at something called polyamory, which we find incredibly confusing and scary in the category of ‘That might be OK for other people, but not us.’ Interesting, though.”

This puzzles me. When you meet or hear about someone who’s gay, do you feel any pressing need to distance yourself from the concept? Must you reflexively blurt, “Well I’d certainly never be attracted to someone of the same sex, but…”

Or when Jews meet (or discuss) Christians, must they promptly declare, “Well, worshiping Jesus isn’t something I’d ever do, but…”

Seriously: Wouldn’t you consider that rude?

I’m just barely old enough to recall hearing some men say, “Well, having a career may be fine for some women, but my wife doesn’t need to work.” I’m also old enough to recall when such remarks became embarrassing, and stopped.

Generally I just chalk the evil eye reaction up to normal human instincts: fear of the unfamiliar, and fear of ostracism (via guilt-by-association). And I can understand that revealing and questioning any societal assumption is disorienting. You just want to get your feet back under you.

Adopting this mindset helps me to not snark back: “What, YOU can only have ONE intimate relationship at a time? Well, I guess that might work for SOME people… Sounds terribly limited and unrealistic to me, though. But to each their own, I guess…”

I hope the P-word evil eye is just a temporary linguistic quirk. Because it’s hard to talk with people who keep throwing up verbal fences.

…In the meantime, this old Jerry Seinfeld bit, “Not that there’s anything wrong with it,” helps me keep my sense of humor about the poly evil eye:

It makes my brain hurt.

This video from EpipheoStudios.com nails exactly why I hate e-mail, and how Google Wave is trying to solve the problems of e-mail.

YouTube – What is Google Wave?.

I don’t know whether Google Wave will actually solve these problems. But dammit, at least they’re trying to tackle the problem. And they have the development power and user base to stand a chance of pulling it off.

A friend has sent me an invite. I haven’t received it yet. But when I do, I’ll give it a try. UPDATE: I just got my Google Wave invitation today! I’ll get a chance to play with it over the weekend. I expect it to be rough. (OK, everyone who’s whining about it: rough is what “alpha testing” is all about!) And hopefully I’ll start to glimpse an end to the e-mail madness.

distraction hierarchy

Hierarchy of Digital Distractions: Top of a brilliant, too-accurate pyramid infographic by InformationIsBeautiful.net

Productivity and task management seem like strictly practical issues, but in fact they’re deeply emotional. That’s what David Allen describes at in the first chapter of Getting Things Done, when he talks about the sense of calmness instilled by having a mind like water.

It seems to me that tuning into and recognizing your own feelings (especially hope, shame, relief, and fear) is THE crucial first step for figuring out what to do, getting stuff done, and letting stuff go. That’s what I’ve been working on today. Here is a little background, and some thoughts and lessons on this theme…

In the last eight months I made several major changes in my life: I ended my marriage (on the best of terms), sold my house, moved to a new state, eliminated my debt, stopped working on some projects I’d outgrown, began some intriguing new projects, had a brief painful relationship with a thoroughly incompatible partner, began a rewarding intimate relationship with a wonderful friend, and downsized my possessions to fit in a room plus small storage area. Plus, I got knee surgery to fix a torn ACL. Plus, a fair amount of business travel thrown in.

Yeah, it’s been a lot to manage — with a lot of mixed, deep feelings involved in every step. And a lot of stuff that needed to get done: projects, tasks, and priorities. Everything from figuring out where stuff goes in the kitchen to selling a house.

Through this process of major life-surgery I’ve had to face something I’ve avoided: I’ve spent most of my life in a near-constant sense of dread. I was scared that my life and work were spinning out of control, and that all sorts of disasters were waiting to pounce due to my inattention or ineptitude. I coped with it by keeping busy. If I just kept doing enough, surely I’d get ahead. Then I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a flat-out panic. And I’d work all day and feel like I’d accomplished nothing by evening, and feel terribly guilty and ashamed. I felt like I was failing at nearly everything.

In fact, I wasn’t failing — at least, not most of the time. Not any more than most people do. In fact, in a lot of ways I’m doing pretty damn well with my life. But because I was certain I was failing, and constantly braced for the next crash, I avoided looking too closely at what was happening, at what I needed to be doing.

It’s kind of like how you shut your eyes and cover your face before a car crash. It’s a reflex. You don’t really want to watch.

But when that kind of mental flinching becomes a permanent way of life, bad stuff happens. Namely, disorganization and procrastination — with all the bad stuff (tax penalties, pissed-off partners, missed opportunities, poor health) that go along with it.

It’s important to recognize that for all the pain that disorganization and procrastination cause, they do offer immediate, addictive emotional relief.

When you deliberately blur your mental vision and don’t look very far around you or ahead, and when you don’t habitually keep close track of information you need, then for short stretches of time you create the illusion that nothing needs to be done or figured out right now. It’s a false sense of security, but it does provide a sense of rest and it’s easy to do. Also, it works about as well as drinking salt water when you’re thirsty.

Since I’ve downsized and simplified my life and commitments, I’ve realized that I don’t want to keep living with that daily dread. I could keep it up — because I’ve done it my whole life. But at this point I’m making a conscious choice to change. Dread eats up too much of my energy. I’m 43 years old, and I’d like to use my remaining time and energy in ways that please me.

So I’ve been focusing on organizing my life, especially projects, tasks and priorities. Here’s what I’ve done so far, and what I’ve learned:

1. I CAN’T THINK AMIDST CLUTTER. Clutter distracts me, and provides a ceaseless nagging of all the things I might have forgotten. I cannot focus on a task when I’m around clutter — unless that task is decluttering.

So I’ve put a lot of effort into organizing my new room so that everything I need has an intuitive place, and that things I don’t need on a daily basis get stored or filed, and things I don’t ever need get tossed. This includes eliminating as much paper as possible from my life: I scan every paper I’ll need, shred most of them, file only a few original copies. I have redundant electronic backups (external hard drives AND offsite backup) for all my data.

The downside: Organizing feels so rewarding to me that sometimes I dive into that for emotional relief as a form of procrastination. I’m working on that.

2. MULTITASKING IS A MYTH. This was truly a devastating thing to admit to myself, since I always thought I was a consummate multitasker. But in fact, tons of scientific research and an honest look at my own experience indicates that human brains really can only do one conscious thing at a time. I cannot listen to two simultaneous voices and understand well what both are saying. I cannot run a quick Google search and track what a client is saying on a conference call. I cannot Twitter or instant message while trying to do another kind of writing. I cannot read an incoming text message while paying enough attention to driving.

Of course, I can TRY to do any combination of these things, or more. And I usually succeed to some level with all of them. But usually not as well as if I’d consciously taken a moment to set a priority and then waited to do tasks in priority order.

Focus is important to getting stuff done. But for me, focus can be another kind of trap. I can get so into doing something that I get obsessive or perfectionist about it, and and up spending way too much time on it. It becomes another type of procrastination.

I’m finding that for me, the skills I need to improve are time management and setting priorities. Not just “what are the things I need to do” but “what are the goals I wish to achieve?” Once I have in mind all my goals, I can set priorities among them, and then decide how much is really enough in terms of moving toward a particular goal for that day.

I’m realizing that my tendency to attempt multitasking often stems from a wish to distract myself (and thus procrastinate), or a wish to please (assuming that people expect me to do everything at once), or boredom.

3. ORGANIZE AT AN APPROPRIATE LEVEL OF DETAIL. I was discussing productivity systems today with a friend. She prefers to list out her to-dos in minute detail, including items such as “find Mr. X’s phone number” and “call Mr. X” in the overall task of “Ask Mr. X. to write me a letter of reference.” That works very well for her because it relieves her of the necessity to figure out the next step to take.

I’ve tried that approach, and I’ve found it does not work for me. The labor involved in listing and checking off so many minute steps feels overwhelming to me, and takes considerable time. In my task-management software OmniFocus I tend to list action items like “Ask Mr. X. to write me a letter of reference” unless I’m noticing that I’m procrastinating on a task. In that case, I may list sub-tasks in more minute detail.

I’m still working with this to try to figure out the best balance for me. But anyone else attempting to use a task management system should tune in to how they feel about using the system. If the system ends up feeling like a chore or a burden, if it scares you, you won’t use it and you’ll feel frustrated or ashamed. Recognize all your emotions involved, and name them. They’re important indicators of what you really need.

4. MOST LIFE-MONSTERS CAN WAIT (AT LEAST A BIT) TO BE SLAIN. For the parts of my life that had become dangerously disorganized, I’ve found I couldn’t just sit down and said “I’m going to face Monster Z right now, and parse out how to vanquish it, and get started.” I tried. I really did. Every time, this effort turned into an emotional wreck, unable to sort out which part of the monster to strike first. I’d make lists of tasks and goals, but be unable to sort them into a doable sequence. I’d feel ashamed, frustrated, and like an even bigger failure than before.

I realized that, with most of these life-monsters, I needed to first build up my strength and skills prior to the attack. I needed to attain more of a sense of my life generally gaining order and purpose on a daily basis. After all, I’d put off wrestling the life-monsters so long that I could put it off a while longer.  In the meantime, I set up doable systems to capture enough incoming monster-related  information to spot flags that would require me to speed up my timeline.

So even though organizing my space or developing a new exercise routine may not objectively be a higher priority than, say, developing a retirement plan — giving myself faster, easier “wins” that directly support my ability to tackle longer-term, bigger goals is what allows me to move forward. Right now, if I try too hard to stare down monsters that loom ever-larger due to neglect, I freeze.

Right now I’m only tackling one life-monster at a time. I’ve learned from the last eight months that trying to do them all at once, or in too close sequence, leaves me overwhelmed, exhausted, depressed, and unproductive on other fronts. Getting through knee surgery and recovery (and dealing with insurance bureaucracy and medical bills) is my current life-monster battle. That’s enough.

Down the road, I’m considering working with a financial planner and maybe a life/career coach to figure out some longer-term monster-slaying strategy. I think getting that kind of support might help, when I’m ready for it. But I’m not ready for that now, so please don’t bombard me with pitches for these professionals just yet. When I’m ready, I’ll ask for it.

5. RECOGNIZE & APPRECIATE WHAT YOU CAN DO OR HAVE DONE. Many people love crossing items off their to-do lists. That gives them a sense of accomplishment. That visual symbol has never worked for me, however. It just feels negative, the act of crossing-off. Not creative, not productive.

I’ve realized that when I’ve been getting depressed because I think I’ve been unproductive, it helps to reality-check myself by taking a day to make a list of all the stuff I actually do in a given day. For this list, anything that takes my time/effort counts. It includes things like:

• Making my bed
• Doing my leg exercises (5X/day, to stick with my physical therapy program)
• Taking my vitamins
• Making breakfast
• Corresponding with clients
• Doing actual billable work
• Arranging to get a transit pass
• Hanging a few pictures
• Vacuuming
• Scanning, shredding, and filing
• Sorting out which jewelry needs repairs
• Reading a chapter of a book

…Most of this stuff would never make my to-do list or get crossed off. I don’t need to track that level of detail day to day. But each of these tasks, and many others, need to get done and take my time and effort. I should at least recognize them. They are not wasted time. So if once in a while I make a “done” list of all this stuff, that reassures me emotionally. In turn, that reduces my tendency to beat up on myself, and gives me more energy to get stuff done.

Those are my thoughts on emotions and productivity for now. I’ll be writing more about this, I’m sure. But what are your thoughts on this topic? How do your feelings — and your awareness of them — affect how you get accomplished in life and work? Please comment below.

Recently I wrote about how a Los Angeles Police Dept. geocoding data glitch yielded inaccurate crime maps at LAPDcrimemaps.org and the database-powered network of hyperlocal sites, Everyblock.

On Apr. 8, Everyblock founder Adrian Holovaty blogged about the two ways his company is addressing the problem of inaccurate geodata.

1. Latitude/longitude crosschecking. “From now on, rather than relying blindly on our data sources’ longitude/latitude points, we cross-check those points with our own geocoding of the address provided. If the LAPD’s geocoding for a particular crime is significantly off from our own geocoder’s results, then we won’t geocode that crime at all, and we publish a note on the crime page that explains why a map isn’t available. (If you’re curious, we’re using 375 meters as our threshold. That is, if our own geocoder comes up with a point more than 375 meters away from the point that LAPD provides, then we won’t place the crime on a map, or on block/neighborhood pages.)
2. Surfacing ungeocoded data. “Starting today, wherever we have aggregate charts by neighborhood, ZIP or other boundary, we include the number, and percentage, of records that couldn’t be geocoded. Each location chart has a new “Unknown” row that provides these figures. Note that technically this figure includes more than nongeocodable records — it also includes any records that were successfully geocoded but don’t lie in any neighborhood. For example, in our Philadelphia crime section, you can see that one percent of crime reports in the last 30 days are in an ‘unknown’ neighborhood; this means those 35 records either couldn’t be geocoded or lie outside any of the Philadelphia neighborhood boundaries that we’ve compiled.”

These strategies could — and probably should — be employed by any organization publishing online maps that rely on government or third-party geodata.

Holovaty’s post also includes a great plain-language explanation of what geodata really is and how it works in practical terms. This is the kind of information that constitutes journalism 101 in the online age.

(NOTE: I originally published this post in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)