• How does talking about bra color raise awareness of breast cancer? Is it an attempt to outsmart cancer by figuring out which color it doesn’t like? (Thanks, Eric!)

• How does a failed terrorist attack by a Nigerian, screened and boarding his plane in Amsterdam, demonstrate a systemic failure of the US TSA system?
• Why are baristas in bikinis still a source of headline news and community outrage? I know, it must be the inhumane, winter cold working conditions for the exploited women.
• How long before we won’t be able to buy groceries at all without bringing our own bags or other containers at some politically correct stores?
• Washington state has been debating the parameters of allowing convicted felons to vote. The latest ruling supports voting from prison, based upon civil rights concerns. If I recall my long-ago civics class, didn’t a felony conviction once cost a citizen the privilege of voting?
• Why do teen boys never manage to pack toothbrushes when they travel? And does this change with maturity?
• Does this headline annoy the snot out of anyone else? “Day One For Obama’s Transgender Technologist” How about “Day One for Highly Qualified Test Pilot/Technologist”, instead?
• Speaking of technology, do you care about the upcoming Mac tablet computer? Personally, I’m ambivalent – Apple does shiny well, but is about as closed source as a vendor can get.
• Why do Joan Osborne’s blues make me happy, not sad?
• What would it take to make Sarah Palin go away? And don’t you think we could raise the price of her silence, whatever the total?

Are there any other random things you think about in the oh-dark-thirty hours of the night? Share them, please!

Really, though, I use social media as an augment to my real world social life. I have some 150+ Facebook friends, slightly more than the average but nowhere near the numbers of some of the true online socialites out there. Every one of those friends is a real life friend. They are all folks I know, would have lunch with, can call, email or talk professional questions through with.

I simply don’t accept friend requests from people I don’t know. It doesn’t matter that they’re a friend of a friend – I’m not using it to network broadly and make new friends. It’s not that I share a lot of really personal information on Facebook – but I don’t have time to wade through updates, app requests and quiz results from folks that are not friends. (And *ugh* on the stupid quizzes, can’t we demote them to a separate feed or something already?)

Anyway, I saw a news article today about a service, uSocial, that enables you to *buy* new friends on Facebook. (Because, yeah, that’s what true relationships are made of!)

Not surprisingly, Facebook itself doesn’t like it and considers it a violation of the terms of service. Conceptually, it “detracts from Facebook’s efforts to create a culture of authenticity.” You think?

I can’t imagine being so caught up in the world of online popularity that you would think that buying friends (or fans) would be a worthwhile investment. It’s a sad world out there where that type of service can be a viable business model.

Today, during a particularly bad patch of connectivity when I was trying to participate in a conference call & webcast, I got annoyed and managed to send a note out via twitter:

Nasty internet connection latency plus repeated digital phone service crashes means yet another call to Comcast. Isn’t telecom fun?

Much to my surprise, a Comcast technician replied to my tweet within 15 minutes with an offer to help.

This could have seemed a “big brother” type response, but the technician made both a non-intrusive open-ended offer to help and her twitter account was set up with obvious care – her name, a picture and a profile that indicated she was a real person.

Through @replies and DMs, she did proceed to help, rather successfully. It appears she provides support through this model all day long and is rather pretty darn effective at it.

By the end of the day, I had a call from a Tier 4 local plant technician who looked at my stats and records and agreed that there was indeed a problem with my Comcast connection. (Darn it, I wasn’t taping…) I will be getting a call from a field supervisor to set up an onsite trouble call early next week.

What Comcast didn’t know is that I work in call center technology for a similar Alaskan company, and am always interested in effective use of alternate support channels.

This is a nice model, a positive application of Twitter and the near-real time capabilities of the Internet, and I’d love to see our company adopt something similar in its technical support center.

Nicely done, Comcast!

Now for the technical details:

My ping times to various resources (Comcast, GCI, etc) were quite often in the 1.0 – 1.3 sec range with 10% to 50% packet loss. A traceroute indicated the problem was in the hop between my wireless router and the local Comcast router.

I’ve had Comcast out twice to work on the issue. The first tech indicated some neighborhood node issues; the second tech found nothing, but I persuaded her to replace my VOIP cable modem.

I also tried replacing my wireless router, thinking that might be the problem. I now have a lovely a dual band Airport Extreme N router. It’s connected by Cat5 cable to my cable modem.

Resetting the cable modem temporarily resolves the problem, but all too toon thereafter it’s back. There’s no pattern in time of day or association with machines on the network.

Today I decided to work direct connected to the cable modem to see if the problem continued in that configuration. (This was after trying and failing to buy tickets from Ticketmaster because of the latency.)

Not only did my access intermittently slow way down, and latency jump way up, but I also saw my cable modem reset itself multiple times over the course of a couple of hours, making land line calls and web conferences impossible.

The Comcast tech I originally spoke with had several excellent suggestions about my local network, but after she looked at the node, escalated the issue to her local plant technicians.

The tier 4 local technician looked at my traceroute data and correlated times of day with me and were convinced that there was indeed a node problem.

I’m looking forward to seeing Comcast onsite early next week.

3M™ Performance Plus Nuclear Duct Tape 8979N Slate Blue, 96 mm x 54.8 m

8979N provides clean removal with little or no sticky adhesive residue for up to 6 months. Sunlight/UV and Water Resistant. Lasts 1 year without degrading. Tape construction consists of high tensile cloth and aggressive adhesive. Designed for permanent and temporary applications. Certified for low leachable halogens and sulfur.

8979N provides clean removal with little or no sticky adhesive residue from most opaque surfaces up to 6 months after application. It offers sunlight UV resistance for up to 1-Year without the backing deteriorating or delaminating. 8979N is designed for both permanent and temporary applications both indoors and outdoors. Typical physical and performance characteristics include; thickness: 13 mils, adhesion to steel: 55 oz. in. width, tensile strength: 36 lbs. in. width, elongation at break: 21%, clean removal indoors and outdoors for 6 months; temperature use range: Up to 200° F (93 deg) C Color: Slate Blue; 60 yard Roll Meets Nuclear Specifications ASME NQA-1. Certified for low leachable halogens and sulfur.

What would you use your nuclear duct tape for?

H/T to Bill (who really needs to start a blog) for the product heads up.

I acquired the new BlackBerry Storm 9530, and have been slowly learning to navigate the new interface.

The Storm has gotten mixed reviews as a brand new device playing on the Apple iPhone’s playing field. It does have its strengths and weaknesses, but so far (three days) I’ve been happy with mine.

The main reason for my choice (Storm vs. iPhone) is that the Blackberry is primarily a messaging device and phone, and does those two things very, very well, and the media capabilities are adequate but not spectacular. The iPhone is primary a media device, and the phone and messaging are secondary functions.

I also went and played with both for a good period of time, messing around with the user interface and using their touch keyboards to enter text. The Storm’s interface was a bit easier for me to use. I did like the click technology better than I thought I would.

I’m looking forward to finishing its configuration, setting up Outlook and learning to really use it.

Pros so far:
Crisp, clear display screen
Much improved web browser
Physical lock/unlock button

Cons so far:
Battery life isn’t the greatest – about 28 hours
Verizon provided me with *no* activation instructions – I had to google it

Jury’s still out:
Ease of outlook setup
Ease of text entry/interface use
Camera quality (not that it’s a primary camera, but useful in a pinch)

If I have anything substantive to add, I may write a 30-day review.

This is the first time Smug Puppies’ header hasn’t included any dog images, although the paw prints are certainly related. That’s not really a bad thing since this blog isn’t really *about* dogs, just named for them.

Input is always welcome.

H/T to colleague Greg S.

I made a stab at using social networking media a year or two ago, and it just didn’t click for me – partially because I didn’t really use it, and maybe because the media itself hadn’t reached the tipping point among my peer group. I was on Pownce, Facebook, LinkedIn, BlogCatalog, etc, but did nothing with them.

This time, though, it’s been a fun – and I’d say successful – experiment.

What is Twitter? It’s a microblogging platform, allowing users to post short, 140 character posts via web or cell phone text message to their own user-ID branded page. Users can follow, reply to and direct message each other, giving Twitter feeds the feel of a public instant messaging forum.

Why use a microblogging platform like Twitter? For me, the reasoning was simple – it’s an augment to my blog, a way to say short, snarky, stupid things to the universe and my circle of friends that wouldn’t really merit a blog post of their own.

Others use Twitter to market their blog, to connect with their customers and readers, to solicit relatively timely think-tank feedback from a broad follower base, and to network with a larger circle of acquaintances than they’d typically encounter online.

Why was this try successful?

First, and most importantly, I jumped on the platform at the same time as several other friends, which gave me a built-in conversational group. Twitter is most enjoyable as an interactive medium. I don’t follow everyone indiscriminately, only friends, colleagues and a few highly entertaining authors – the fabulous (and evil) Kate has a superb post on that subject.

Second, I downloaded a third party Twitter application to my desktop that behaves like an IM client. I chose Twhirl – but others use different applications they’re equally happy with. I wouldn’t remember to go check the website nearly as frequently, but checking an application that’s open on my desktop is pretty easy. I also added a Twitter-Facebook connector so my updates flow to Facebook, and a Twitter feed sidebar on my blog.

And, third, I think that this particular type of media has hit its tipping point. While it was popular with early adopters a year ago, it’s becoming fairly widespread; middle-of-the-road techies are now using it as well. Stats show that the user base has grown from 650,000 in Dec 2007 to over 4,000,000 in December of 2008 – that’s huge.

The sad downside of this equation is the growing view of the Twitter userbase as a potential advertising market. The question is out there, on the table – how do advertisers and top Tweeters monetize Twitter? I offer the revolutionary observation that just, maybe, you *don’t*. The conversations about snowpocalypses, grocery store lines, cats and cookies are of far more value in our overstressed, technologically adept society than one more ad-saturated media channel.

Don’t advertise on Twitter pages and feeds. Don’t spam via Twitter. In fact, as much as I value my friends, if they choose to use Twitter to send spam or ad media, I will unfollow them pretty darn promptly because I am not a volunteer ad subject.

In spite of the small spam issue, at the end of the day, I’d say my Twitter experiment has been successful, primarily because it’s been *fun*. I don’t have enough fun things in my life, so I think I’ll keep this one.

My apologies for the inconvenience!

OK, I’ll take the bait. I’m forty-something, I don’t really sit at the cool kids’ table, and I hadn’t a clue what body hacking is, so I looked it up. Norton, who has some pretty fascinating videos and slideshows online illuminating the subject, defines it as:

Acting on yourself, with or without assistance, to enhance the function of your body or your perceptions. Body hacking is, like all other forms of hacking, ultimately a form of violation: the freedom to enact your will upon a system.

Certainly, there are endless variations on visibly obvious body hacks, like piercing, tattooing, scarification and other more extreme physical modifications. While a few of these may serve a functional purpose, most are primarily cosmetic in nature.

I’m more interested in the concept of functional body hacking, primarily in the field of biomedicine, biotechnology, rather than pharmaceuticals which are an entirely different realm.

Remedial Care and Health Benefits
First, there are many biomedical changes that our current technology allows us to make to the human body that serve a remedial purpose. These are almost universally perceived to be beneficient. Advances like the pacemaker, the insulin pump, the cochlear implant for the hearing impaired, even laser eye surgery all provide improved longevity and quality of life for many patients.

There are also other biomedical advances that are not strictly remedial, but provide significant health benefits to those who can afford them. The IUD is an example of a physically implanted, long term birth control device. Weight loss surgery is another type of body modification, admittedly risky, that has improved health and quality of life for some patients.

Enhancements
A second class of body hack would include enhancements to look or physical function. This would include breast augmentation or reduction, hair implants or removal, bone lengthening or shaping, etc. Many legal and illegal pharmaceutical hacks fall into this category: ADHD medications for adult patients, steroids or HGH for muscle growth, etc.

Expanding the Frontier
The most intriguing area of body hacking, though, takes place in the new frontier, the blurry area between science fact and science fiction that has not been well mapped by humans. These frontiers are only intermittently being expanded because there are grave ethical issues surrounding experimentation on human subjects.

Quinn Norton, herself, set herself up as subject for one such hack. She had a rare earth magnet implanted in her fingertip. This seemed rather minor to me, but over time it gave her a sixth sense, a finger that felt electromagnetic fields along with the normal sense of touch, making her sensitive to electrical fields, computer hard drives, and other magnetic fields.

The Digital Tattoo Interface is a a subcutaneously implanted touch-screen, connected via bluetooth and powered by blood, that operates as a cell phone display. Can a working prototype of a dental implant cell phone, spoofed a few years ago as an April Fools’ joke, be far behind?

The FDA approved implantation of RFID chips in humans in 2004. RFID technology is amusing to write about, as it is fascinating bait for conspiracy theorists and privacy fanatics. These implants are currently being marketed as medical lifesaving devices, storing lifesaving emergency medical information, but the possibility for more widespread application is huge and more than a little scary.

What’s Next

Science fiction authors speculate about many near and far future possibilities, including but not limited to:

• Complete body transformations, including the ability to survive hostile environments.
• Removal of the need to sleep. Or eat.
• Mechanical organ replacement with re-engineered organs designed for increased longevity. Or efficiency.
• Ex utero fertilization and pregnancy. Parthenogenetic reproduction.
• Direct brain data uplinks with augmented brain storage space and retrieval.
• Data-link enabled telepathy.
• Human consciousness upload – to a cyborg body, or to a network.

The body hacking movement has adopted MakeZine’s owner’s manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Are there any body hacks you’d consider, or is your body a temple, something you’re not interested in altering or enhancing?