Author Archives: Jeff Porten

Turns out, there’s a Porten-style sports injury

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Well, a poker injury, anyway, which is as close to organized sports as I get. Was playing at Ballys at 4 AM and suddenly a hand muscle I didn’t know I had went apeshit for a half-hour. Bent my index finger at an angle that I can’t reach by choice, and wouldn’t move back. It was kinda freaky.

In retrospect, I’ll chalk it up to four straight hours of chip-shuffling after a long break from the tables. Or maybe it’s because I’ve had insomnia for the last 69 hours, excepting a three-hour power nap.

Nah, couldn’t be. That’s barely over 80% of my lifetime record.

More stop-and-frisk foolishness

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Apropos to my Facebook retweet that the number of stop-and-frisks of black men in NYC exceeds the black male population of NYC, more news:

[Giancarlo] Esposito was stopped and frisked by New York police while walking out of a theater where he was rehearsing a play. After several frantic minutes – with him and officers screaming, and their guns drawn – they realized they had the wrong guy. Their suspect had a hoodie, and Esposito was wearing a suit.

Show of hands: how many people think that this could happen to Bryan Cranston?

I agree with Ezra Klein

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Shorter Ezra Klein:

[W]hen you read things like “some economists say Greece’s departure from the euro will not be as much of a shock as the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, which provoked a global financial crisis,” it’s a reminder that 2012 isn’t just about framing speeches, or a debate about the country’s future. The president and the Congress might be called on within a couple of weeks or months to protect the U.S. economy from a Lehman-like event, the aftermath of which will not wait for the next president to settle in.

Which is why the second scariest sentence I read today is “Senate Republicans will block all of President Barack Obama’s high-level judicial nominees until after the election.”

Whole article well worth reading. And reminds me that a) I’m still waiting for the It’s Even Worse Than It Looks meme to be treated with anything like seriousness in political discussion, and b) that the media is as much to blame as anyone else for the trivia that’s dominating the 2012 political cycle.

On the bright side, we all look better by comparison

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Truly freaky optical illusion.

If you ever create a slideshow of portraits, you might want to avoid showing them aligned side-by-side with a gap in between. The video above shows a crazy optical illusion that researchers have dubbed the “Flashed Face Distortion Effect”. By flashing ordinary portraits aligned at the eyes, the human brain begins to compare and exaggerate the differences, causing the faces to seem hideous and ogre-like.

Thoughts on Syria

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This just in on Google news:

Syrian Government Denies Blame for Houla Massacre

The Syrian government has denied its troops massacred at least 92 people, about one-third of them children, Friday in the town of Houla…. The Houla massacre marked the deadliest single attack since Syria’s anti-government uprising began about 15 months ago.

The single strongest argument I’ve heard in favor of military intervention came from an anti-Syrian government spokesman on the BBC: “We all know that NATO or the global community will intervene after another 20 or 30,000 people have been killed. So why wait when we all see what’s coming?”

I’m personally conflicted on the use of military intervention for humanitarian purposes. From where I sit, it was easy (and correct) to oppose the invasion of Iraq, and difficult (and correct) to oppose the invasion of Afghanistan without more clearly defined goals, methods, and exit strategies. It’s much more difficult to come up with a cogent foreign policy view that combines appropriate use of military force and political measures when considering Rwanda, Bosnia, Libya, and Syria. Points to the Obama administration for apparently getting it right in Libya, but in the absence of an Obama doctrine it’s not entirely clear whether the new Libya meets our long-term foreign policy goals, or what the difference is between Libya and Syria.

Two things, though, seem obvious:

  1. The absence of a clear humanitarian intervention strategy has a lot to do with how the global community should view both the U.S. and NATO, just as we’d be concerned about any nation that possessed a million-ton shithammer they could use against us without a clearly stated policy on its use. Based purely on numbers alone, the United States has a military designed to fight a world war single-handed, and the absence of its use can be just as telling as where we decide to use it.

  2. As they say, nature abhors a vacuum, but the political corollary is that a filled vacuum is resistant to creating effective measures. We’ve collectively delegated the enforcement of human rights law to the United Nations, which is also stripped of any enforcement capabilities. I’m not alone in glancing at some of the whack-jobs in the General Assembly and thinking that I’m glad that the United Nations doesn’t have a standing or allocated army… but after 70 years it’s also clear that human rights enforcement is toothless and ineffectual.

I can’t say that I can see a way out of this bind. But it does seem to me that if our foreign policy goal is to starve terrorist organizations of the will to hate Western nations, the use of money and power for clear humanitarian goals—and the absence of a policy of American hegemony promulgated by neoconservatives—would go a long way in that direction.

Jeff’s iPhone organizing strategy

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I’ve just finished reading Tonya’s TidBITS article with tips on how to find iOS apps on an iPhone or iPod touch, and it inspired me to write up my own strategy.

Voila, my home screen. Or to put it more accurately, my display of secondmost important apps (with a few exceptions). The most important apps are in the Dock at the bottom, where I’ve put folders to make up for the fact that the Dock only has four spaces.

How to make a folder in the Dock: you can’t. But you can make a folder on any homescreen and drag it to the Dock.

Right now I have two folders there: Desk and Social. Desk roughly corresponds to “apps that do stuff I’d do on my Mac”: Mail, Safari, time logging, etc. Social is Twitter, Facebook, and a half-dozen others, and gets marquee treatment on the iPod because it’s my primary way of checking into such things. Music and Settings get their own places because I’m in and out of there all the time—and Apple, please please please give us a brightness slider shortcut in iOS 6? Kthx.

Above the fold: the apps I want quickest access to, and/or the apps where I want to see their badge icons at all times—and OmniFocus, I’m looking at you, kid. Apps get moved on and off the homescreen regularly based on how often I’m using them. For example, I’m giving Evernote another kick in the tires, so it’ll probably replace Voice Memos on the homescreen for a while.

You may have noted from the number of dots that I have quite a few pages in my Springboard. So let’s see what those look like….

Hmmm. Those aren’t organized at all! It’s almost as if Jeff has…

Yup. Alphabetical order. iOS makes this a pain in the butt; on my Android, there’s a one-click “alphabetical ordering” feature. But if it’s not on the homescreen, I don’t file it, folder it, or move it. Alphabetical by name so it’s easy to find. Every few months I take off the apps I’ve stopped using.

Let’s look at the last screen.We come to the end of the alphabetized list (and thank you, Zynga, for making that so easy to notice). Then there’s a blank placeholder app…

A what? How the hell did you do that?

…one sec, I’ll come back to that. After that are all of the apps I’m currently “testing”. I.e., these were downloaded for an article I’m writing, or are on my “check this out someday” list. If I decide to keep it, I alphabetize it. If it might be really useful, I’ll give it a shot on my homescreen.

As for the “blank” app, it’s a Safari bookmark. Open Safari, go to the URL about:blank (yes, Virginia, that is a URL), then tap the bookmark icon and save it to your homescreen. Give it a name of “.” or something else small and unobtrusive. Voila, blank app. Accidentally tap it, and you’ll just get a blank webpage, useful as a flashlight.

Blank apps are also very useful for an iOS annoyance. Move or delete an app on a full screen, and you’ll get 15 apps and a blank space like the puzzle on System 7. Worse: install a new app, and it might be randomly slotted here instead of on the last screen. Fill in the gap with another blank icon, and you’re good to go.

I sometimes have two homescreens (i.e.: 16 spaces on the primary homescreen, then swipe left for the next 16 apps and folders) before I go to the alphabetical list, but the folders layout I’m using now seems to work better.