Or, where design meets politics, a quick note from William Drenttel of Design Observer:
A warning to all those readers who do not like politics mixed with design, because frankly, I’m not sure you can be a serious, working designer and separate the two. Writing as a designer, as a writer, as a husband and father, but most of all, as a human being — I believe we should draft Al Gore to run for the Presidency of the United States.
I’m not an American, and I have a very oblivious approach to US politics, but I love Drenttel’s focus on Al Gore’s uncompromising approach to the environment. Gore has reinvented himself after the 2000 election, and has recently become an enviable authority. (Go read Drenttel’s piece. It’s good!)
That’s how many secret security questions my bank, TD, wants me to answer. Five!
It’s unbelievable, I know. But, today, I logged in to my account online and I was forced to pick five questions and give five answers as a ’security’ measure. I couldn’t skip the step.
I’m really curious to find out what prompted this sudden change in policy, but I fail to see how it makes security better. After all, secret questions are security loops too. Because if someone somehow gets a hold of that information, I’m at a higher risk than before because they know more information about me.
P.S. For more odd online banking “security” practices, see Kottke’s notes on SiteKey, the “technology” used by Bank of America.
I’m an avid Gmail user. I go so far as to check productivity sites like Lifehacker on a regular basis, looking for little tips and tricks on how to manage daily tasks more efficiently.
Today, while the office cat was smooching all over my mouse and keyboard, I discovered something amazing: if you right-click on an email message in Gmail, you can read that message inline (faster than opening the message) and do things like Archive, Trash and Mark Unread very quickly with that message. This is an excellent new feature (I’ve tried right-clicking consciously before and it resulted in opening the message), especially for those of us who receive lots of notifications over email. Particularly good for those nagging (but necessary) Facebook “John-Doe-wrote-on-your-wall” emails.
The world is said to be small, but just as often it is also weird. Here’s some odd connections I’ve noticed in the past few days:
I heard somewhere that the Coen Brothers’ new movie is doing well at Cannes. Intrigued, I decided to enrich myself by watching a few of their most recent flickrs, including Intolerable Cruelty. Then I ran into an article in an Albanian newspaper on “How to Marry a Millionaire“, which might as well have been inspired by the movie. Weird.
I left work early on Tuesday, and walked around for a bit. There was an unusually high amount of people walking around. What do all they do? Why aren’t they at work? The next morning, this article popped up in a feed offering a semi-answer. Of course, many people who are at work are not actively working for 8 hours a day. They’re Facebook-ing, Twitter-ing, Flickr-ing and so on. Which made me think that I’m spending more and more time ‘crafting‘ my image on the Web (this site being part of that effort). And the interesting thing is not what I’m saying about myself, but rather that I am saying something about myself. (I thought of this while reading Ze Frank’s interesting comments on what he calls “the culture of authorship”) Who I am is no longer clear, not to me, and definitely not to you. But I feel good about this authorship thing. Especially when it comes to my identity. And, researchers seem to agree. One of the main functions of our brains is to selectively forget memories that are, somehow, sub-optimal, some of them argue. Crafting your own image is nothing more than choosing what to remember. (All these links I ran into, randomly, over the past few days.)
Ever since I subscribed to Grant McCracken’s excellent blog, I’ve been thinking about the idea that our “identity” is really one of multiple personalities. Enter LeBron James. Not only has his branding been characterized by this plurality, but also his game, says this commenter, who’s essentially just talking about a pass James made at crunch time (when the usual thing a superstar is supposed to do is shoot).
I had time to kill Saturday so I walked into a public library and picked up a book by Kurt Vonnegut, who recently passed away. The book is “Slaughterhouse-five” and it has a crafty way of moving across time to tell its story: the main character has been kidnapped by aliens who do not see time as a sequential thing, but rather like space, as something laid out that is already there, already settled. (The book is satirical, of course.) Yet, the timing of certain events in my life has been just remarkable. Including the re-start of this blog.
It’s a German word and it can be translated as past-beating. I’ll explain.
Tipped by a short blog entry in The Economist, I read this review of The Lives of Others, the Oscar-winning German movie on spying in 1980s East Germany. I saw the movie in Toronto a few weeks ago, and it left me delighted and perplexed. An excellent movie, but morally and politically full of paradoxes and conflicts. Timothy Garton Ash’s review helped me make sense of many of these issues I had with it.
To me, Garton Ash’s most interesting point is this paragraph on why the movie matters:
So why is it that the word “Stasi”—not “KGB,” “Red Guards,” or “Khmer Rouge”—is rapidly becoming a global synonym for communist terror? Because the enterprise in which the Germans truly are Weltmeister [world champions] is the cultural reproduction of their country’s versions of terror. No nation has been more brilliant, more persistent, and more innovative in the investigation, communication, and representation—the re-presentation, and re-re-presentation—of its own past evils.
Paul Wells is a columnist for Maclean’s, which is Canada’s most popular weekly magazine. For over 3 years, Paul has been running a very popular blog called “Inkless Wells“. Wonderful writing on Canadian politics and jazz. Alas, 3 years of blogging “got lost” after Macleans redesigned the website, as Paul writes in an entry from a few days ago:
SPECIAL GLIMPSE-INSIDE-MY-BLOGGING-LIFE UPDATE: We now have software that automatically turns a three-letter a-word familiar to my three-year-old nephew into hieroglyphics; and an IT department that lost the entire three-year archive of Inkless Wells last week. Progress!
The latest thing in Surrey right now is downloading high-pitched tones that only children can hear [the 17kHz “Mosquito”] on to their mobiles, Bluetoothing them around, and then starting up a cacophony in lessons - they can hear it and double up in agony, but their teacher can’t.
That’s how many secret security questions my bank, TD, wants me to answer. Five!
I’m an avid