Michael's shared items

This morning all of yesterday’s slush is frozen. So we’re home on this Sunday morning cuddling with Ella and staying warm inside.

Andy Gullahorn:

An excellent blog post here by C.J. Mahaney about Tiger Woods.

An excerpt:

Hunted by the Media

As expected, the allegations of adultery involving a public figure are attracting a media pile-on. This is a big story with a big audience and it’s a story that will not disappear soon. Tiger Woods is being hunted by the media.

But let us make sure we do not join the hunt. A Christian’s response to this story should be distinctly different. We should not be entertained by the news. We should not have a morbid interest in all the details. We should be saddened and sobered. We should pray for this man and even more for his wife.

And we can be sure that in the coming days we will be in conversations with friends and family where this topic will emerge. And when it does, we can avoid simply listening to the latest details and speculations, and avoid speaking self-righteously, but instead we can humbly draw attention to the grace of God in the gospel.

Hunted by Sin

But Tiger is being hunted by something more menacing than journalists. Tiger’s real enemy is his sin, and that’s an enemy much more difficult to discern and one that can’t be managed in our own strength. It’s an enemy that never sleeps.

Let me explain.

Read the whole thing.

We promised we’d start publishing some of the more entertaining emails we get in our inbox, in the probably ridiculous hope that publicly shaming people may actually lessen the flow of these absurd messages.

A couple of weeks ago we posted a harried email written by a reader looking for legal help (see No, Don’t Sue Facebook. Yes, Do Get A New Boyfriend).

Now we’ve got another one. Hachette Filipacchi Media, which publishes notable magazines like Elle, Car and Driver and Road & Track, wants a little help with their search engine rankings.

The company’s Digital Outreach Coordinator, Automotive Group sent us an email telling us how much they loved a recent CrunchGear post about Ford. They offered to “link to your site on our microblogs to improve your pagerank.”

Hey, great! We love links. But this link requires a little payback. They want us to link two pages on CarAndDriver.com to the anchor text “Ford Vehicle Buying Guide and/or Ford Flex Buying Guide.”

We get reciprocal link spam emails all the time (all sites do), but it’s rare for a large brand to engage in link farming so boldly. For that, we salute them (and we passed it on to Google’s Matt Cutts).

The full email is below, with the links as they suggest them. We’ve added nofollow tags, but since the email doesn’t specify that we can’t do this, we’ll expect our links back shortly.

From: [removed]@hfmus.com>
Date: November 18, 2009 4:18:11 PM EST
To: “‘tips@crunchgear.com’”
Subject: Question for Matt

Matt,

I read your article on Ford’s efforts to cut down on petroleum usage by using wheatgrass as an alternative in its third row storage container. This concept is extremely interesting and I would love to be able to either refer your post on one of my microblogs or link to your site on our microblogs to improve your pagerank.

What I would need from you is to place either in the article or really anywhere you think on your site that makes sense: Ford Vehicle Buying Guide and/or Ford Flex Buying Guide.

Let me know what you think!

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

In a couple of hours, Google is going to share more details about its upcoming operating system Chrome OS at an event in Mountain View that will most likely be covered from start to finish by TechCrunch writers (and then some) as well as a slew of other media outlets. Jolicloud, that other OS for netbooks that is completely built for people who live and work on the Web from the ground up, has in the meantime been running fine on my own netbook for the past couple of months.

So in light of the upcoming GOOG buzz, Jolicloud founder Tariq Krim got in touch with me to share some of the things he and his team have been working on. Since the subject lies rather close to the premise of John Gruber’s great The OS Opportunity blog post, it’s worth reading that before continuation.

Done? ok.

Krim realizes full well that he’s going to have to tell a pretty compelling story to get people to pay attention to what Jolicloud is building, considering the appeal Google has in terms of branding and its history of putting stuff out there that are impressive on a technological level. Even if Google’s OS proves to be ‘good enough’, it’ll be tough for Jolicloud to compete with. But it certainly helps a lot to have a great product that’s unique in its own regards, and the Jolicloud OS is definitely worth a look if you agree that the Web is “the most important software platform in the world today”, as Gruber puts it.

Jolicloud is currently a bit of a drag to install because it involves putting the installer on a USB stick and try to get it up and running that way for every type of netbook out there. The release of Jolicloud Express, however, is going to change all that: you’ll be able to simply download the system from the startup’s website, install and run it alongside whatever else you have as OS on your netbook (usually Windows XP or 7). It will keep the Windows partition and data safe, so you can always switch back to Windows, but if you’re anything like me chances are you won’t. Jolicloud Express will be introduced at the Le Web conference in December.

Jolicloud’s Pre-Beta release, which is currently going out to testers and will be the new upgrade for all users next week, will support native resolution for Intel Atom z500-series netbooks (including the Dell Mini 10, Mini 12, the Acer Aspire One 751, Asus EeePC 1101 and many more) with the GMA500 chipset. I’d explain why that’s a rather big deal, but Jolicloud’s Adam McDaniel blogged about the how and why much more eloquently and in much more detail than I ever could. (McDaniel, by the way, is the guy who cooked up EeePC support for Ubuntu and built the Array Linux kernel.)

Biggest plus of Poulsbo (GMA 500 codename) support: compatibility with 720p HD video.

Jolicloud will be debuting something else at Le Web next month: their new HTML5 launcher that was built in collaboration with several key Mozilla developers. The main goal is to give people a way to synchronize as many netbooks as they want with their Jolicloud account, including preferences, installed apps, and so on.

The team is also constantly finetuning the user interface to give users the best possible user experience on a relatively small screen, something as a user I can only acknowledge and applaud. Among other things, Jolicloud is working on implementation of the Activity Streams standard, which essentially means social networking activity will become an integral part of the operating system rather than something bolted on top.

Also in the labs: the idea of providing a Jolicloud-powered netbook with a custom Twitter account, enabling users to converse and interact with their streams even if they’re not actually in front of their computers.

Evidently, Google Chrome OS is going to get all the buzz today, and however well-deserved it’s worth noting that there are startups already working on the next generation of operating systems that can already be installed and tested on netbooks today. Even if Jolicloud never achieves the success the Paris-based team – which is now 12 people strong – and its high-profile investors are hoping for, I think that’s admirable and worth highlighting.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Though I don't feel quite right about it, I just had to give it a try. It is an experiment of sorts, I guess. I just had to know what it was like to be one of the few, one of the proud, one of the obnoxious--one of the late mergers. You know these people. Most of you, when you are crawling along the highway in heavy traffic and see a sign telling you that the lane will end in one mile (or one kilometer if you're up here in Canada), quickly bump over into the lane that will not end, glad that you've immediately sorted out that problem. Now you can be assured that you won't find yourself squeezed onto the shoulder or parked endlessly with your light blinking, trying to squeeze your way out of that dying lane while everyone else tries to block your progress. Yet, as you sit there, content that you've done the right thing, you can't help but notice all those people speeding by to your right, driving their cars to the edge, to the brink, to the very last car-length of the lane that is about to end. You grouch, your grumble, you remark on their complete lack of care for the other people on the road. And yet you have to admit that they will get where they are going before you will. They seem unaffected by your plight, content to further their own goals even at your expense.

I've been there. And I just had to try life as a late merger. I now zip down that ending lane and merge at the very last second, finding a gap in traffic and squeezing my van into it. I get the dirty looks and angry stares. But I get where I'm going sooner than they do.

In his book Traffic Tom Vanderbilt discusses this same phenomenon. He, too, became a late merger, much to his wife's chagrin, and he found that life is better this way. "It is a question you have no doubt asked yourself while crawling down some choked highway, watching with mounting frustration as the adjacent cars glide ahead. You drum the wheel with your fingers. You change the radio station. You fixate on one car as a benchmark of your own lack of progress. You try to figure out what that weird button next to the rear-window defroster actually does. I used to think this was just part of the natural randomness of the highway. Sometimes fate would steer me into the faster lane, sometimes it would relinquish me to the slow lane." But he made a major lifestyle change when he became a late merger.

But the days after he first experimented with late merging were not easy. "In the days after, a creeping guilt and confusion took hold. Was I wrong to have done this? Or had I been doing it wrong all my life." Seeking answers, he headed to an online community and posed the question to the waiting masses. He was rather surprised at the response, not just in the volume of responses but also in the passion and conviction with which people spoke. Some argued that he was a goon, refusing to do the sort of random acts of kindness that benefit all of society. By refusing to merge early, he was contributing to the overall slowness of the highway and making accidents more likely. Others argued that he was simply a good steward, using the highway to its maximum capacity. After all, what is the purpose of all that asphalt if we are not really allowed to drive on it? By maximizing the use of the highway surface he was actually making life better for everyone. Politeness or fairness (real or perceived) were actually detrimental to everyone.

Later in the book Vanderbilt gives empirical evidence as to what works best--whether early merging or late merging is better in the end. And he offers up his take on how we can best keep traffic flowing.

But for now, by way of light-hearted fare, do tell me, are you a late merger or an early merger? And how do you feel about the people who do the opposite of what you do?

Sponsor:

Mike Huckabee talks to a former Planned Parenthood director who quit her position and became pro-life after assisting with an ultrasound abortion and watching the baby in the womb seeking to avoid death:

HT: Z

Pascal, to my mind, has written the most profound reflections on God, man, and “diversion.” I’d recommend getting Peter Kreeft’s edition, Christianity for Modern Pagans, Pascal’s Pensees Edited, Outlined, and Explained, where the relevant thoughts are all gathered in one section (pp. 167-187). Kreeft writes that when he teaches this material, his “students are always stunned and shamed to silence as Pascal shows them in these pensees their own lives in all their shallowness, cowardice and dishonesty.”

Here is one line from Pascal (from #136) that it worthy of a lot of meditation, especially in The Age of Internet:

I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that

he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

Kreeft’s restatements and commentary are also worth reading. For example, here is an excerpt from pp. 167-169:

We ought to have much more time, more leisure, than our ancestors did, because technology, which is the most obvious and radical difference between their lives and ours, is essentially a series of time-saving devices.

In ancient societies, if you were rich you had slaves to do the menial work so that you could be freed to enjoy your leisure time. Life was like a vacation for the rich because the poor slaves were their machines. . . .

[But] now that everyone has slave-substitutes (machines), why doesn’t everyone enjoy the leisurely, vacationy lifestyle of the ancient rich? Why have we killed time instead of saving it? . . .

We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hold in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.

So we run around like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, and making them our masters. We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us, like a dark and empty room without distractions where we would be forced to confront ourselves. . .

If you are typically modern, your life is like a mansion with a terrifying hole right in the middle of the living-room floor. So you paper over the hole with a very busy wallpaper pattern to distract yourself. You find a rhinoceros in the middle of your house. The rhinoceros is wretchedness and death. How in the world can you hide a rhinoceros? Easy: cover it with a million mice. Multiple diversions.

Google has just debuted a new form of advertising called AdWords Comparison Ads — a special kind of ad that will prompt users to view a list of sponsored products in a structured format. To get started, Google is running the ads for queries related to the mortgage market, though it has plans to eventually expand beyond that. The ads are in a limited rollout for now, with only some users in some states seeing them.

Here’s how Google describes the new ad type:

AdWords uses a host of targeting and relevancy signals to determine the best ads for each query. However, sometimes a user’s query doesn’t provide enough information for us to confidently predict what they want. Take, for example, users who search for “mortgage.” Do they want a new home loan or a refinance? Do they want a fixed rate or an adjustable rate loan? Comparison Ads improves the ad experience on Google.com by letting users specify exactly what they are looking for and helping them quickly compare relevant offers side by side.

Users searching for “mortgage” on Google.com may see a promotion from Comparison Ads prompting them to select the type of loan they are looking for and to compare various rates.

If they click the promotion, users are taken to a page with more detailed sponsored results. They can choose directly from the offers listed on that page, or they can further refine their search by providing additional information like income and home value…

Once users find an offer that matches their specific needs, they can either call you directly or request a quote. If a user requests a quote, Google automatically anonymizes the user’s phone number and sends you a unique code that you can use to contact the user. You only pay if a user calls the phone number on your offer or fills out a form to request a quote.

As Leadcritic points out, Google’s entry into this space is obviously going to be bad news to lead gen services like LendingTree, and they aren’t the only newcomers looking to get in on the action — we hear that Billshrink will soon be expanding its price-saving tools to include mortgage comparison shopping.

And, as noted before, Google will be expanding this ad type beyond mortgages. This may well be its answer to Bing’s decision engine model, which presents a number of structured options for the services and products you’re looking for that aren’t based exclusively on search rank.

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