Previously: Exploring SeaWorld

After our full day at SeaWorld, we went out to meet Prairie’s cousin Dayna for dinner. She’d given us directions to a nice little Japanese restaurant not too far away from SeaWorld, so we all met there. After dinner we wanted to find a good place to get a picture of the three of us, since Dayna wouldn’t be making it to the planned family gathering later in the week, so we drove up to Balboa Park. As it turns out, since we weren’t exactly sure where we were going, and as Balboa Park is huge, we didn’t find the entrance that got us to where Prairie was aiming, but we still found a nice section of the park to take the picture. By this point, as the sun was down and Prairie and I were exhausted after our day at SeaWorld, Dayna headed home and we went back to Prairie’s grandpa’s to crash out for the night.

The next day had been left slightly up in the air as to our final plan. We only had this last full day for exploration, and had been debating between exploring Balboa Park and going out to continue our zoo explorations at the San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park. As tempting as the Wild Animal Park was, though, after spending all day out in the sun the day before, we ended up deciding that a day of poking around shady, air-conditioned museums at Balboa Park sounded much more bearable. We drove down to Balboa Park nice and early in the morning, got there right as the offices opened, and picked up Stay-for-the-day passes, which gave us admission to four museums for one discounted price.

Our choices for museums were…

1. The Museum of Man, a museum of anthropology, which had some neat exhibits of Aztec/Mayan (and related) artifacts and imagery and of Egyptian mummies.

   

2. The Museum of Photographic Arts. Small, only three exhibits, but this one ended up being our favorite. One exhibit was a retrospective of photographic portraiture; one was of insects in intricately staged scenes that ended up looking almost painterly, and the major exhibit was a retrospective of Ansel Adams’ work. Though I knew of Adams, I’d never really explored his work before, and having my first real exposure be the actual prints in a museum setting was incredible. Beautiful stuff.

3. The Museum of Art. Nice, with some neat exhibitions (including a bit of Picasso and related artists). The two neatest sections were one of jewelry by sculptor Alexander Calder (whom I’d only previously known of by his big public sculptures), and one of photographic portraits by Richard Avedon covering his entire career.

4. The Museum of Natural History, with some neat dinosaur and other prehistoric animal exhibits. Once again, photography ended up being the star attraction, with the top levels of the museum hosting a showing of arial photos of geographical features and the top entrants from a juried competition of nature photos. The only downside to this museum was how many of the exhibits wanted to eat me.

    

Between museums, we wandered around and explored some of the park’s gardens, a pretty botanical garden building, and cooled our feet in a big fountain. When we decided we’d done all that we could do for the day, we headed back to Prairie’s grandpa’s, stopping off at one of the many local Mexican chains for some good southern California grub.

Here’s the slideshow of photos from the day, or you can see the day’s photos on Flickr.

• The FCC Wants You to Test Your Broadband Speeds: "The FCC is asking the nation's broadband and smartphone users to use their broadband testing tools to help the feds and consumers know what speeds are actually available, not just promised by the nations' telecoms."
• Zip Code Boundary Map: Useful Google Maps mashup with zip code boundaries for the entire U.S.
• Better PDF File Size Reduction in OS X: "I discovered that anyone can create their own Quartz filters, which was the key I needed. Thus armed with knowledge, I set about creating a filter that struck, in my estimation, a reasonable balance between image quality and file size reduction. And I think I've found it. That 175MB PDF gets taken down to 34MB with what I created. If you'd like to experience this size reduction for yourself (and how's that for an inversion of common spam tropes?) it's pretty simple."
• Hummer Brand to Be Wound Down After Sale Fails: Awesome. "It has achieved notoriety as the mother of all petrol-guzzlers, first developed for the US military, then taken up by celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger before he renounced it on environmental grounds. But the Hummer has run out of road. General Motors, the struggling car company, announced that it will wind down production of its Hummer SUV line after a deal to sell the brand to China's Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery fell through."
• Stryde Hax: The Spy at Harriton High: "This investigation into the remote spying allegedly being conducted against students at Lower Merion represents an attempt to find proof of spying and a look into the toolchain used to accomplish spying."

Last Saturday, American Gothique magazine hosted a fashion show at The Vogue, with Amazing Race contestants Kynt and Vyxsin as featured models. I was able to join the crowd of photographers crouched at the foot of the catwalk, and here are a few shots from the show. As is usually the case, there are many more shots posted on Flickr!

• Tommy Westphall’s Mind: A Multiverse Explored: "'Tommy Westphall was an austistic child on the TV series St Elsewhere who, it was revealed in the closing moments of the final episode of that series, had dreamt the entire run of the show.' According to These Guys, many of the shows we love only exist in Tommy's mind. They have compiled a list of the intertwining series, but the resulting excel spreadsheet just didn't do it justice, so I designed a brain map to illustrate the theory."
• Turkey: Archeological Dig Reshaping Human History: "The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed."
• Typography for Lawyers: Don't let the "for lawyers" title fool you — though originally written for the legal profession, this is an excellent collection of typography tips, hints, and guidelines that every professional (and anyone who wants to create a well-presented printed document) would do well to read and keep handy. Much of this I knew and already used regularly (especially the 'single-space between sentences' rule), but there were some good new bits as well.
• 500 Internal Server Error: 500 Internal Server Error
• PeteSearch: How to Split Up the US by Facebook Interactions: "Pacifica: The most boring of the clusters, the area around Seattle is disappointingly average. Tightly connected to each other, it doesn't look like Washingtonians are big travelers compared to the rest of the West, even though a lot of them claim to need a vacation!"

Note: I’ve had to remove the survey, as in about 36 hours I’ve received over 120 responses, roughly six times what my instructor expected us to collect, and I don’t want to bury myself in the data collation and analysis stage. Thanks for your interest and assistance, everyone!

This quarter, I’m taking a Research Methods class for the Law and Justice program at Central Washington University (Des Moines campus). As part of the class, every student has to do a small research project, and I have chosen to focus on exploring differences in self-identification as a member of the Seagoth community. To that end, I’ve assembled a short, fourteen item questionnaire. Please take a moment to complete this survey. In addition, if you could forward a link to the questionnaire itself or to this blog post to other members of the Seagoth community, I’d greatly appreciate it!

All responses to this questionnaire are entirely voluntary and completely anonymous: Other than demographic information, there is no personally identifying data being collected in the questionnaire. Participation is entirely voluntary (and greatly appreciated), but please — due to CWU requirements, all respondents must be 18 or over.

Thank you very much!

Complete the survey

We just tried to watch some of this afternoon’s coverage. In the roughly fifteen minutes before we couldn’t take it any longer, we saw three commercial breaks, four talking heads (with audio lagging about a second behind the video feed), a bit of an interview with the first medalist from this year’s games, and eight-year-old footage from that same athlete’s first win in 2002. We listened to Bob Costas tell us that he was in Vancouver and that there were sports going on. We heard — again — about the accidental death on the luge track. We heard an interviewer ask an athlete “how he did it” after winning (um, he practiced his ass off, you idiot — why are sports interviewers always at the very bottom of the “stupid interview question” scale?).

What we didn’t see was any actual sports footage.

Oh, how I miss watching the last Summer Olympics on CBC, the Canadian network that Comcast carries locally. Their coverage was leagues better than anything NBC had: fewer inane talking heads (which can be interpreted as fewer talking heads overall or less inanity from the talking heads they had, either of which is an acceptable and correct reading); less “we’re the only country that matters” mentality; comprehensive coverage of all sorts of sports, even those that are less massively popular; and coverage that wasn’t constantly cut into with edits, updates, promises of what’s to come, and commercials (we spent one afternoon watching an entire marathon nearly commercial free, in part because we could, and in part because it was far more interesting than we’d ever realized, simply by virtue of actually being able to watch it). The realization that CBC wouldn’t be broadcasting the Olympics this year — and, further, that the Canadian network that got the contract isn’t viewable locally — was a sad one indeed.

Lately, we’ve been enjoying my new computer’s ability to watch streaming video sites like Hulu and Netflix, so I went to the NBC Olympics site to see what was available there. They’re posting a number of videos of stuff that has already happened, but prominently displayed on the main page is a live video stream (only active at particular times and for particular events, however). I click that, and am asked to tell NBC who my cable or Internet provider is. Apparently, NBC will only serve the live video to customers of certain other companies that they have contracts with. Annoying, but hey, Comcast is right near the top of the list, and we have Comcast cable, so we should be good.

After choosing Comcast, I get directed to a Comcast login page. I log in to Comcast, and they direct me back to the video stream…which tells me I’m not eligible. What? I go through the process again, and this time, work my way through until I discover that even though NBC has a contract with Comcast, and even though I’m a Comcast cable subscriber, I’m not the right kind of Comcast cable subscriber.

See, Prairie and I don’t watch a ton of TV, don’t see the need to pay ridiculous amounts of money for hundreds of channels we’ll never watch, and don’t even have a digital TV — both of our TVs are old, square, analog sets. So, there’s no reason for us to subscribe to digital cable, and we’re quite happy with our $15/month bare bones, completely basic, plug-the-cable-into-the-back-of-the-TV-set package (and honestly, we wouldn’t even bother with that if we got decent over-the-air reception with a digital receiver box, but OTA digital TV is essentially nonexistent in the Kent Valley). However, it appears that Comcast has decided that people like us don’t count, and is only sending the video streams to customers who subscribe to a digital cable package.

Crappy.

Out of curiosity, I took a look at Comcast’s website — and after poking around there, I think that digital cable prices might be one of the biggest arguments against upgrading our TVs until we absolutely have to (when they die, that is). Right now, we’re paying $15/month for a bare-bones package that serves us more than adequately — in fact, we only pay attention to about 7 of the 30-some channels that are part of the package, so there’s an argument to be made that even now, we’re over paying. If we were to upgrade to a digital cable package, the least expensive package available is $60 a month! Of course, what the website says is $30/month, but that’s only for the first six months. I can’t think of any reason why I’d want to quadruple what I’m currently paying so that I can have more crap that I’m not interested in piped into my home, no matter how pretty it is or how much of it has surround sound.

Further down the page, they mention a “Digital Economy Package,” apparently aimed at people like us, that actually is $30/month — but, of course, you can only get that if you also get your phone and/or internet through Comcast, which we don’t. So, once again, that’s not an option.

(Heading off counter-arguments: satellite TV isn’t an option, our apartment faces the wrong direction; and outlying the money for a HTPC/Media Center of some sort isn’t a realistic option for both budgetary reasons and that nagging little fact that we’re still using “old school” TV sets. I’ve got a very nice Sony TV set that’s only eight years old, and my parents have a Sony TV set that’s in its 30s and still working, so we may well not be upgrading our hardware for a long time to come.)

The end result of all of this? NBC can bite me, Comcast can bite me, and the Olympics — well, it’s not really their fault, but come on.

• Now You Can Facebook Chat Through iChat: "The set-up is pretty easy. All you do is go to the iChat's 'Preferences', menu, click 'Accounts' add a new account, select 'Jabber' from the pull-down menu and then type in your screen name (username@chat.facebook.com) and password. You then edit your 'Server Options' to point to chat.facebook.com at port 5222, unticking SSL as you go. Click OK and you're all set to harass and be harassed by Facebook friends through iChat at any time."
• How to Create a Google Buzz Desktop App: "If you've used Buzz in its two current versions, inside Gmail and on the iPhone, you've probably noticed (like me) that the iPhone web app version is much better. Here's a quick little howto to take advantage of the much less clunky mobile UI for Buzz — assuming you're on a Mac." I'm actually not sure if I'm going to run this much, but I'm experimenting with it.
• Deckle Edge in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: "The deckle edge dates back to a time when you used to need a knife to read a book. Those rough edges simulate the look of pages that have been sliced open by the reader. The printing happened on large sheets of paper which were then folded into rectangles the size of the finished pages and bound. The reader then sliced open the folds. Paper knives, variants of letter openers, were used for this purpose."
• Pepsi Skips Super Bowl TV Advertising for Social Media: "Instead of pouring millions of dollars into a Super Bowl commercial, Pepsi has started a social-media campaign to promote its 'Pepsi Refresh' initiative. Pepsi plans to give away $20 million in grant money to fund projects in six categories: health, arts and culture, food and shelter, the planet, neighborhoods and education. People can go to the Pepsi website refresheverything.com — which can also be accessed through Facebook and Twitter — to both submit ideas and vote on others they find appealing. Among those on the site now: 'Help free healthcare clinic expand services to uninsured in rural TN' and 'Build a fitness center for all students in Hays, Kansas community.' Every month, the company will offer up to 32 grants to worthy projects."
• Confused by the ‘Lost’ Premiere? Never Fear! Damon and Carlton Explain a Few Things About the Start of Season 6 (SPOILERS AHEAD): "Warning, SPOILERS ahead. If you haven't seen the season premiere of Lost yet, you might not want to continue past the jump yet. Lost fans who have now seen the premiere can read ahead for some explanation from Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof. (Comments are likely to be full of spoilers also, you've been warned again.)"

The guards, however, did nothing — even when the group arrived and one of the teens was attacked, shoved off the platform (thankfully, no buses or trains were present), followed back onto the platform, knocked to the ground, and then repeatedly kicked in the head until she was left unconscious.

Here’s a local news report with security footage of the attack. This is not pleasant to watch.

There are so many things to be outraged at.

Apparently, the ‘security’ people are contract workers, authorized only to “observe and report” suspicious activity and attacks. This has been the standard party line from Olympic Security and from a number of other officials commenting on the incident, and their protestations of being “extremely disappointed” in the security guards just doesn’t compensate.

The girl approached the guards and requested assistance. Instead, they turned away from her. She tried to keep one of the guards between her and her attacker, and neither that guard nor either of his partners made any attempt to intervene or do anything except the contractually required radio call to the police. One guard actually walks away during the attack. Ten blows to the head and six kicks to the head later, they continue to watch as the attacker comes back for a final kick to the head.

There is no excuse, not even the “observe and report” language in the contract, that justifies the guards behavior in this instance.

They could have paid attention to the girl about to be attacked. They could have worked together to form a barrier between her and the group of teens. They could have surrounded her to keep her attacker away. They could have moved to block her attacker from coming back for that final kick. They could have made any number of non-aggressive attempts to intervene that would not have involved directly contacting any of the group of teens threatening the girl.

Futhermore, thanks to Washington’s “Good Samaritan” law, at the very least, they could have assisted her after the attack without fear of liability, instead of standing around her unconscious body. Even more importantly, according to this article, Washington has had a “Good Samaritan” law on the books since 2005 that “makes it a misdemeanor offense to fail to assist a person who has suffered substantial bodily harm, provided that the person could reasonably summon assistance without danger to himself or herself.” Unfortunately, I’m currently having trouble finding the exact language of the referenced statute.

Of course, that brings up a second point. The witness interviewed in the above video describes standing there, watching the attack, and wondering, “Why doesn’t anybody do something?” Well, lady? Why not? Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t anyone else do something? Why didn’t any of the other people on the platform do something? I’m not even talking about physically restraining the attacker or accosting any of the rest of the group, just get close, surround the victim, get some sort of barrier between her and her attacker.

Don’t wait for someone else to do something, because they’re all doing the same thing.

This whole thing is just disgusting.

Another troubling aspect to this that I’d thought a little about, but was brought up in a comment on the LiveJournal mirror of this post (which, unfortunately, appears to have been eaten when I updated this post with the news reports below):

A bigger problem, however, is that this incident has shown to everyone just how powerless the security guards are, so I would imagine that if people are inclined to commit violence against someone else at the bus stop, they know they an do it now without ANY fear of retribution.

Exactly. Given what we’ve seen, just what is the function of the “security” guards? And what’s to prevent more frequent and more severe attacks from happening, now that it’s been made abundantly clear just how little protection these guards actually provide?

More reports:

Tunnel assault on girl sparks security debate:

King County Metro Transit will change its security policy in the Downtown Transit Tunnel after a surveillance video showed a 15-year-old girl beaten in front of three security guards who didn’t intervene to help her, an agency official said Wednesday.

In the meantime, county officials have called for a full review of tunnel security practices.

Four charged in transit tunnel beating:

On Wednesday, prosecutors filed first-degree robbery charges in King County Superior Court against Latroy Demarcus Hayman, 20, Tyrone Jamez Watson, 18, and Dominique Lee Whitaker, 18. A 15-year-old girl was also charged in juvenile court.

Speaking with detectives, the girl said she’d expected the guards to come to her aid.

“I thought the security guards would defend me if (the 15-year-old) tried anything,” the girl said, according to court documents.

Following the attack, the girl said the same Seattle police officers who’d contacted her previously refused to take action.

Admittedly agitated, the girl said she tried to tell the officers she’d been assaulted, according to court documents. When they did not assist her, she called her mother.

Her mother arrived at the scene, the girl told detectives, and contacted the officers on her daughter’s behalf.

“They told my mom that they were tired of all these kids downtown causing trouble,” the girl told police.

“It seemed like (one) officer put us all in one category,” the girl continued. “We were fed up with Seattle police but we wanted to press charges. It didn’t seem like the officers were (ever) interested in hearing my side of what happened.”

Simple solution: set up a filter. Here’s the settings I used…

1. Click the “Create a filter” option just to the right of the search box and related buttons towards the top of the screen.

   

2. Enter “Buzz” in the “Subject” field of the filter options box, then run a test search. Unfortunately, this will catch any message that uses the word “buzz” in the subject line, and from my testing, neither adding a colon (“Buzz:”) or surrounding the word with quotation marks makes a difference. I can’t currently find a way to force the filter to grab only messages that begin with the word “Buzz” so caveat emptor. If your test search looks acceptable, click “Next Step”.

   As has been pointed out to me by a few people, and posted here: Enter “label:buzz” in the “Has the words:” field of the options box. Google will pop up a warning, but go ahead and ignore it.

   

3. In the next screen, activate “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” and “Apply the label:”, then create a new label titled “Buzzes” (or whatever you want, but you can’t use “Buzz”). If you want, click the checkbox to apply the filter retroactively to the messages caught by the filter’s test run. Then click “Create Filter”.

   

4. You’re done!

From now on, rather than getting flooded with inbox messages every time a new Buzz response pops up, you’ll have a little ‘Buzzes’ filter sitting to the left of your screen. If it’s bold, you’ve got a response waiting for you. And that’s it!