The Next Step

I’ve been using Gmail Notifier for years to tell me when I have new mail. It’s nice and lightweight, and stays out of my way. A few months ago, it just stopped working and I couldn’t figure out why. I tried updating, read through a bunch of Google Support pages, and saw a couple of useless forum threads on the subject, to no avail. So I left it alone, hoping the problem would solve itself. It didn’t.

Just today, though, I stumbled on this little gem: A patch that allows the Notifier to work if you’ve checked the “Always use https” setting in Gmail (which, incidentally, you absolutely should). Just install the patch and your Gmail Notifier will work again. I don’t know why Google doesn’t mention this on the download page for Notifier or why they don’t just build this functionality into a new release. Anyway, I know I wasn’t the only one to have this problem so I thought I’d share my knowledge.

The recent release of the iPhone 3G, combined with my now having a job and regular income, is making it increasingly difficult to accept the shortcomings of my lowly Samsung T209. I find myself noticing situations in everyday life when I really wish I was connected to the Internet. The iPhone would be a big jump for me for a number of reasons, not the least of which is an incompatibility with my pocket organization system. Let me explain: I have three items that I carry with me just about everywhere I go:

• Wallet
• Keys
• Phone

These things cover the basics, and this system has been running without major errors for about, say, 6 years. Not too bad. I keep my wallet in my right pocket, and keys and phone in the left. I find that this keeps me reasonably balanced, and keeps either pocket from being too full. The three things I need to access most often are within easy reach. As things stand now, I have a flip phone, which works very nicely in my pocket system due to its small physical size and built-in screen protection. Not that I would really care what happened to such a screen anyway: so long as I can read phone numbers and names off of it, all is well.

The iPhone, alas, is not a flip phone. Not only that, but it boasts a gloriously unprotected 3.5 inch screen. Such a screen could not peacefully coexist in a pocket with my surely-jealous keys. And so we see the breakdown of the two-pocket system: is there any way to rearrange things to accommodate an iPhone?

As you can clearly see, the only way to bring an iPhone into my life is to disrupt this delicate system somehow. So what can be done? First and simplest, is there any way to live without one of these items? Can I live without keys? Much as it should be possible to live a keyless existence in the year 2008, there are certain factors that are simply beyond my control and absolutely require traditional keys. They must stay. Can I live without a wallet? Absolutely not. I could probably slim it down to the absolute bare minimum, but even then the space savings would not be substantial enough to make room for an iPhone. So if these three things must remain, what are my options?

1. External phone clip – Functional and effective, but do I really want to walk around the city advertising the fact that I have an iPhone? And do I want to be that guy who wears a phone clip? No and no.
2. Only wear cargo pants – This wouldn’t be hard for me because I love cargo pants. There are two reasons why this wouldn’t work even for me though. First and foremost, there are some situations when you just can’t get away with cargos. Second, cargo pockets are located just a little bit too low to be truly useful. I wouldn’t want to store something in the full-time, since it would hit off the side of my leg frequently, impairing mobility and potentially causing injury.
3. Carabiner keychain – Effective at isolating the iPhone, and exceptionally good for balance. Wearing keys on my belt is more palatable than wearing a phone on my belt. Still, I prefer keeping my possessions where they are not advertised to the world. Also, keys dangling from a belt could potentially swing around, causing injury or imbalance.
4. Man purse – Having experimented with a man purse on a recent vacation, I was pleasantly surprised at its versatility. Not nearly as heavy and unwieldy as a backpack, but able to carry a good deal more than pockets alone. Unfortunately, it would mean having to dig around in a man purse every time I needed something out of it. It would also mean having to carry something around just about everywhere I go. It would also mean having to endure the ridicule that comes with using a man purse.

Not an easy problem, as you can see. Hopefully I can get these integration problems ironed out so that I’ll be able to introduce an iPhone into my life someday soon.

A while back, I used ForecastFox in my browser so that I wouldn’t have to click a bookmark every time I wanted to know what the weather was going to be like tomorrow or what it was like outside at the time. And it was good. But then one day, ForecastFox switched to using Accuweather for its weather data instead of The Weather Channel. I can’t quite put a finger on it, but something about Accuweather just bugs me. Maybe it’s their hideous radar maps? In any case, I uninstalled it and have been living with a *shudder* bookmark to NOAA ever since. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that the folks over at The Weather Channel apparently released a Firefox plugin of their own three years ago or so. Why didn’t anyone tell me? It’s got all the options of ForecastFox, detailed point forecasts, and pretty radar maps. My browser is happy to finally know the weather again.

Well, they’re here. They aren’t as bad as I had feared in my original post. They are targeted advertising, yes, but Facebook isn’t opening your information to anyone new. Instead, they ask advertisers what kind of people they would like to advertise to, and place the ads within Facebook. Annoying, but not invasive and, more importantly, not breaking the trust Facebook has cultivated by protecting its users’ privacy so diligently. No, the social ads as they exist now don’t worry me (though that is not to say that they don’t open up some scary possibilities). What worries me is where Facebook is going with a couple of other new features.

What worries me most is Facebook Beacon. Essentially, Beacon amounts to a JavaScript plugin for a web site, say google.com. The plugin keeps track of certain things you do on such a web page, completely configurable by the site developer. In this case, let’s consider searching the web for, say, “extra small condoms”. The Beacon plugin will pop up a tiny AJAX window (which popup blockers don’t kill yet) telling you this action has been logged to your Facebook profile. Now, there is a tiny link on the bottom right that says “No thanks” that will let you opt out of this, but it is far easier to just click the larger, colored “Hide” button that will in fact publish your actions to your profile.

It is that “no thanks” link that Facebook says gives users the ability to protect their privacy, but what if this Beacon thing catches on? This means that if you are logged into Facebook and doing things on other sites, you need to constantly be on guard, because you never know which action a site might try to log. Worse yet, it looks like even if you do opt out and your friends can’t see what you did, Facebook still knows:

The javascript on the Fandango site pops up a little screen which asks if you want to publish the information on Facebook. If you say no, your friends won’t see the information, but apparently Facebook still receives it. This means that if you are a Facebook member, Facebook will know what you are doing on each of their partner sites. And there is no way for you to opt out of that. Or is there? I asked Facebook to clarify and I am still waiting for them to write back.

What does this mean? It means that there is a very real possibility that even if I choose not to have my extra small condom search logged to my profile, I will still receive targeted advertising based on that information. Essentially, the Beacon feature allows Facebook to spy on you anywhere on the web so that it can better target ads to you later. Creepy, huh? Here are your only options, as far as I can see:

1. Stop using Facebook and lose touch with many of your friends as a result.
2. Disable javascript, thus rendering huge portions of the web unusable or hideous.
3. Only stay logged into Facebook when you are actively using it, and delete its cookie(s) every time you log out.

Easy, right?

There’s an article over at TechCrunch talking about Facebook’s upcoming announcement of “SocialAds”, which is likely to be just as evil as it sounds. It’s hard to decide exactly what is fact and what is speculation at this point, but here’s the key:

It will be how Facebook will actually start to make real money—both through ads on its own site and on other sites through a new ad network it is about to launch (presumably with its ad partner and new investor Microsoft). SocialAds will be an attempt to be like Google’s AdSense, except that it will allow ads to be targeted to Facebook members’ individual interests and profile data rather than the text on a given Web page. This targeting will be done by placing cookies on Facebook members’ browsers when they visit the social site, so that they can be identified later when they visit other sites hosting SocialAds.

Now, it’s one thing if Facebook decides to target advertising to me while I’m logged in to their own site, of my own free will. But to put a cookie on my computer for the purpose of licensing targeted ads to other sites based on information I entrusted only to Facebook is downright evil. What’s worse, you can’t even use Facebook if you don’t have cookies enabled, so if you’ve become dependent on it for any number of services it provides, you are going to be stuck with the fact that Facebook will be essentially selling your personal information to advertisers.

It’s still hard to know exactly what form these ads will take, but it’s hard to imagine a situation that isn’t frightening. If this indeed does happen, I would suggest that Facebook users stymie the ads by simply deleting all the information from their profiles. I’m sure that users will also form the standard We-hate-the-new-Facebook-feature protest groups, too. And if we’re really lucky, Facebook might listen.

I try to make a habit of Googling myself every so often to see where I rank in the vast expanse of the web. In the process of trying to find myself among the armies of Nathan Palmers out there, I noticed some eerie parallels between myself and the first few people with the same name as me. My curiosity piqued, I decided to check out, er, research the kind of people who have the name “Nathan Palmer.”

Nathan Palmer, Lecturer, Colorado School of Mines: This alter ego shares my poor design skills, and teaches Advanced Engineering Math in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. He has degrees in theoretical and engineering physics. I can’t say I am in this guy’s league (yet?), but I do have a fascination with physics and an aptitude for math.

Nathan Palmer, Software Engineer: He is 27 and, from reading his blog posts, is pretty much “future me.” He doesn’t offer a lot of personal information except what comes out of the blog posts.

Nathan Palmer, Ph.D. Student at MIT: He does research “focused on applying mathematical models to various problems in structural proteomics, transcriptomics, and experimental design” in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.

Nathan Palmer, Barrister:

Nathan has a particular expertise in cases causing death by dangerous driving, driving without due care and attention whilst over the prescribed limited resulting in death by death and related matters.

“Death by death”?

Nathan Palmer, Treasury Manager, Retirement Investments: Works at Intel and has experience managing what is likely to be vast quantities of money.

Nathan Palmer, Tree Climber: Do you know how depressing it is to have the Google Results for your entire site below a single picture of a guy climbing a tree? Yeah, me too.

Nathan Palmer, United States Army: This man’s son died trying to complete a Ranger training program. He is quoted several times in this article on the web site for the Arlington National Cemetary.

(My old Northeastern page actually appears after the Army Nathan)

Nathan Palmer, Realtor:  Okay, up until now I have been OK with being below everybody on this list (except maybe tree climber guy). But this realtor from New Hampshire clearly belongs to the “maximal animated GIF” school of web design. At least my old page found its way up above him. Hopefully my new one will reach those heights soon.

Nathan Palmer, Wide Receiver: The scouts give him two stars!

Nathan Palmer, UMass Lowell Master’s student: He is also a co-developer of The Virtual Cricket. Despite what the page says, The Virtual Cricket does not really emulate an actual cricket. Unless by “cricket” you mean some kind of robot board.

After this you start to get into repeats and random mentions of Nathan Palmers with no details. And if you go to the fourth page, beyond the clearly crappy results, you will find my one true site. With any luck I will be moving up that list.

I’m into my last month of co-op at Brontes (a 3m company), and putting some more work into my real website. Sure, there isn’t much there now and it’s tremendously ugly, but I do hope to eventually have as much of my web identity as possible contained there, giving you a “one-stop shop” for all your Nathan Palmer needs. You may notice that half of the menu doesn’t even do anything. Sorry about that.

I’ve also been looking into trying some integration with Flickr. Though I could take a crack at the API myself, there are quite a few Flickr API apps out there already and I’m not a big fan of repeating something that’s already been done. Anyone have any favorite Flickr applications or perhaps one they’d like to see written?

Also, I fear I am too weak to resist the new Macbook Pros. Honestly, I’m surprised that I’ve held out this long.

This is my new blog, powered by Wordpress, replacing the old Blogger. It’s superior in many ways, not the least of which is having my content directly under my control. I also get to have post categories and full control over the code, meaning I can (in theory) put whatever I want on these pages. Good stuff.

What’s the matter, winter? You getting soft in your old age? In case you didn’t notice, it was fifty-something degrees out today. You might want to look into that.

Got a lot going on. First off, I have finally admitted defeat at the hands of the evil cable companies and have gotten myself some real web hosting. Look for napalmer.com to appear in the near future, if they’ve gotten the DNS set up correctly. If that goes smoothly, we may even see artisene.com return.

I’ve been putting some time into a game lately, kind of an ambitious project (for me, at least). Lauren and Nora are helping out with the art since I’ve never been much for the art thing. Once I have the site up and running, you’ll find more details there.

Hi, my name is Nate. And I’m here today to warn you about something very dangerous. Something called Google.

Back in high school, I discovered a little site called Google. Nothing wrong with that. Google was a search engine, not unlike Yahoo and Excite (showing my age a bit, I think). A friend recommended it to me, so I gave it a shot. When I did, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Clicking the search button yielded *gasp* relevent results. Sites upon sites that really related to my query! It was a high that I had never experienced before.

It was a slow start, probably because of my dial-up internet connection at the time. But after going to college, it wasn’t long before I was hitting up the big G a few times a day, I started to have certain… expectations. I had a need for a thrill, and “I’m feeling lucky” just wasn’t cutting it anymore. And then, something happened.

I got a very exclusive, at the time, “invitation” to try out something new from Google. They called it “GMail”. This is The Next Step, they assured me. You want that feeling back? GMail can give it to you, if you just create an account. Google understands me, I thought. They know what I want, they really care, they know what I’m going through. And they’re giving me that feeling back. And sure enough, they did. From the moment I clicked on that compose button and realized that the page didn’t have to refresh, I was hooked. I told all my friends, sent them invitations, brought them all in. And life was great. They rolled out feature after orgasmic feature, increasing the rush slowly over time. And, for a time, that was enough. But they succeeded only in making me hungrier, expecting more and more. And profile photos were just not gonna cut it.

So I looked anywhere I could to get what I needed. I tried Google Calendar, but it just wasn’t new enough. It was too GMailish: different, but not stronger. I outgrew it in a matter of days. I was running out of services. Google Docs & Spreadsheets were just more GMail-style magic in a different context, I didn’t even bother with them. Instead, I went straight to the source: Google Labs.

The back alley, pre-beta wonderland of services in Google labs was exactly what I was looking for. Around every corner was another app, offering another service: Talk, Froogle, Notebook, Earth, Maps, Video, Checkout, Scholar, Reader, the list goes on. I was hopelessly addicted. Nothing could give me the rush I so desperately sought, but Google was perfectly willing to continue making promises they knew they couldn’t keep, so long as I kept the personal information coming.

Now, Google has all my email, my schedule, my to-do list, and my credit card number. They know where I live, where I go, and which blogs and news articles I read. They know who I chat with and what videos I watch. And I keep giving them more.

So, my friends, learn from my mistakes. Don’t be pulled in by the promises of flashy, user-friendly interfaces. Anytime you see a program that is just too good to be true, just think to yourself, who paid someone to make that so nice? Why did they pay so much just to get me to use this “free” service? Don’t end up like me, begging Google for another hit, wishing only that you had more information to give. Warn your children, tell your friends: it’s not worth it.