Schmechnology

Entry #558
Monday, May 6, 2002

If you got to cityofseattle.net/elections you get the Ethics and Elections Commission. If you got to cityofseattle.net/elections/ (with a slash) you get a 404. I emailed Bob from Ethics and Elections and suggested he ask the city's web people to stick an "elections/" redirect before the "elections" redirect. Today Bob reported that the city's web people said it was not possible to set up a redirect with a trailing slash.

Because we just don't have the technology to do that sort of thing.

Robert and I got new pagers two weeks ago. The new paging system is much more efficient than the old system because your pager communicates with the closest tower so they know which tower you're near so they don't have to broadcast the message to every node in the network. Without some incentive, most people won't switch from a paging system that doesn't track your movements to a paging system that does. So they gave us these nifty "Talkabout" things with a mini keypad that we can send email using.

These "Talkabouts" receive messages people send you as well as news that some third-party company provides. I absolutely hate the news. No problem our "pager agent" told us, just go into "Preferences" and turn off "News Autopreview." But I did that already and the news is still coming, I told her. She wasn't sure what the deal was, and I didn't press the issue. Today Robert had a question about his service, so he call our pager agent. On top of his original question, he inquired whether they could stop sending the news, if they could turn it off on their end, because the prefererences thing wasn't working. They could do no such thing on their end, she said.

Because we just don't have the technology to allow you to not receive news on your pager.

In late March I emailed the fellow from Metro Transit that handles the public disclosure request. I wanted to get an update on the status of my request for video from the surveillance cameras they recently installed on some buses. He didn't respond so I emailed him again last week. Today he got back to me with his report.

The proprietary system a contractor built for them does not allow them to export unencrypted video. They can only export single frame bitmaps. I was told this before, so I requested 60 minutes of video in single-frame bitmaps. Today Craig reported that every frame takes about one minute to export. If I want to create a video at 15 frames per second, every second will take them fiften minutes. They have limited resources, so they can only provide me with ten seconds of video, not the sixty minutes I requested.

Because we just don't have the technology to export sixty minutes of video using less than 900 peoplehours.

Comment on this entry

God damn I HATE that kind of shit. People are so fucking ignorant it's absolutely mind boggling. Ugh.

i've learned that people will say anything to get you to quit asking questions.

Maybe with all your "I sue spammers" fame you can put some leverage on the bus people. "Maybe KOMO wants a piece of this story to" ya say...heh