His Father Must Be Proud

I saw this guy walking down SW 3rd outside of the Portland Outdoor Store last week. If you can believe it, this illustration only captures about a tenth of his smugness and conceitedness. It was really awful. Please make sure to click on the image for the full effect.

Things I Saw Today

This happened at Powell's Books:

(I wish I'd gotten a better look at the guy.)

And then I saw this at the Basement Pub:


I didn't see this last one, but I wish I had:

April 12th Sketches

Happy Easter everyone! (I know it's over, but I did them on Easter, so there.)





And here's the non-Easter themed one:

Here's John Barth on Wikipedia for the punchline. I wanted to do Richard Yates as the gag, but I couldn't remember his name at the time.

I'm Trying To Wrap My Head Around The iPhone

My mom used to tell me the story of how she went to Disneyland and they had a display of phones set-up and that you could use push buttons to call someone instead of using an old rotary handset. Her brother and her spent a good deal of time dialing the numbers for the next booth over so they could talk to each other on these amazing new devices. (This was probably between 1962 and 1964 when World's Fairs were happening in Seattle and then New York.) She was amazed by the potential and the functionality of the things, and to her it felt like a fundamental shift in technology, enough so that she would remember to tell me that story several times in the late 80s, when touch-tone phones were the norm. In late summer of 2007, I had my first experience of seeing the iPhone in use, and I immediately thought of that experience that my mom had: "Now we're living in the future!" I was completely mesmerized by it, in exactly the same way my mom was mesmerized by touch-tone phones.

I visited my parents a few months ago, and showed my mom a YouTube video of the iPhone after trying to explain to her the utility of Twitter. She didn't get Twitter, and only kind of got the iPhone video, but she was impressed and without understanding. I'm sure that I'll be the same way when I'm sixty and something completely "game-changing" comes along.

I have an iPhone now. I wouldn't have had it if my company didn't change carriers, but they did, and they issued a policy permitting personal use. If anyone is interested in contacting me in an old-school fashion, my number is 503.442.9703. I'm still getting used to the damned thing, probably like my mom did when she finally made the transition from old dial phones to touch-tone phones. "Dialing Opearator is different!"

Does anyone remember the old days of the early 90s when the new technology was spelling out things on your touch-tone phones? There used to be a section of the phonebook (remember those? Of course you do, because they still give you them, like it or not) where it was: "Are you thinking of killing yourself? "Dial 555-5555, then enter the code 7486". What an awkward time period we all live in.

A plea to Google Earth for full 4th Dimension ability

At some point within the past few months, Google Earth has added the option of "historical imagery". Its great: you can overlay historic maps on the area that you're looking at, adding the ability to compare the now versus then. It's fun to play with for a while and worth trying out, but it doesn't approach the scale that I'd been hoping for.

To any of my friends that would listen, I've been advocating for the past couple of years the idea of a fourth-dimension element to Google Earth. The idea hasn't been implemented with this latest update, but it can't be far from being realized: ideally a user can tag a location with a time frame, and subsequent users can see that tag when accessing a range that includes that time frame. For example, I can currently tag the location of the Portland Hotel, but if I tag it, it shows Pioneer Courthouse Square. There's already a ton of tags on Pioneer Courthouse Square, and it's difficult to parse through them. Ideally, I'd tag that site with the dates of its existence (1890 - 1951), and if someone used a slider bar between those dates, only then would my Portland Hotel tag would pop up.

I've got a ton of data that I would love to tag using Google Earth, but I hesitate to contribute, because I feel like I'm making noise. The program as it is exists is an amazing way to view a site unseen by you, but who needs all the extraneous data on the history? I'm only thinking of Portland here, as it's my focus, but what about more historically important sites? I'm thinking of places like Trafalgar Square in London, Tiananmen Square in Beijing, or Union Square in New York. Many things have happened at these points over the ages, but they might not be immediately important to the casual virtual tourist. Perhaps it's important to someone to know what was on exhibit on the Fourth Plinth in 2000 to a few people, but probably not to the casual internet tourist.

On the other hand, site-and-time specific data could be a huge boon to historical researchers. For example, I have a specific Google Maps set dedicated to Portlands buildings in 1908. Maybe someone else out there is interested in the city of Portland during 1908? What a boon it would be to the both of us to be able to set our slider bars to "1908", and only see, tag, and markup that year. Granted, this is is only useful to those interested in the past, but what if this was implemented globally? It would provide us with another tool of understanding the past that has brought us to the present.

With our technology becoming increasingly friendly to geotagging, this idea may be even more important. It might not matter now how many first kisses happened in Pioneer Courthouse Square and how they're tagged, but in a couple of years, there might be a critical mass. Tiananmen Square might be the site of hundreds of thousands of geotagged Facebook updates. It's all noise and unwanted distraction now, but by 2049 it might be the answer to how we lived our lives, one location at a time.

Al Gore

You can't roll back time, but shit, what would the world look like now if we'd had President Gore in office in 2001?



I don't want to think about it too much, because I'd probably start crying and call in sick to work tomorrow.

The Idea of the Semantic Web

I first read about the idea of the Semantic Web today, and it totally struck a nerve in me. I've got to admit that I'm not sure that I totally understand what Berners-Lee is going for, but I really like one idea that came up while I was reading about it, and that is the standardization of cross-platform (cross-discipline?) data.

From the perspective of an amateur historian like myself, I know that there's tons and tons (or, more appropriately, gigs and gigs) of data out there about Portland and the people that have lived in Portland, but there is no easy way of searching or aggregating that data. For example, there are genealogists that are contributing great information about people from Portland's past, but they have no regard for historians of the city (like me). I'm doing research about the city and people that have lived here, but my research is not likely to cross paths with the genealogists. We're referred to as two different "silos" of data accumulation. How awesome would it be if those two "silos" were to be somehow integrated? My posted research could benefit the genealogists, and their research could benefit mine. It'd allow people to do research without being redundant in regards to previous research.

Admittedly, I haven't read much on the idea of the technology, and wouldn't even understand how this might be implemented, but the idea is really exciting to me. I think that the idea of standardizing data across all possible spectrums of collectible data is nigh impossible, but I've got to admit that it's one of the fantasies I imagine in my head while I'm drifting off to sleep.