Book: Black Jack Justice

Image of the cover of the book, an overhead view of a pistol and some bullets laying on a deskIf you’re a fan of old time radio, film noir, or pulp detective novels, and you don’t already know about Decoder Ring Theatre and the Black Jack Justice podcast, well shame on you. Gregg Taylor’s audio drama about the adventures of Jack Justice and Trixie Dixon, Girl Detective, is as entertaining as they come, full of smart, funny dialog and all the usual murder, intrigue, and action you’d expect from a hard-boiled detective series.

Taylor’s new paperback, Black Jack Justice, is the story of how Jack and Trixie first met, and the book won’t disappoint either fans of the podcast or the uninitiated reader looking for some good old-fashioned escapist entertainment. Justice is a cracking read; the characters are well-defined, the banter is witty, and the tension ebbs and flows at a pace that keeps the reader engaged throughout. Taylor’s writing isn’t just an homage to pulp fiction, it shows him as a true peer of the masters of the genre.

➤  Google’s data vacuum

The New York Times writes about the FCC’s investigation of Google Street View. Street View is the nifty technology that lets you see a ground-level photo of a specific place in Google Maps that you might see if you were actually there. The photos are gathered by a fleet of vehicles equipped with roof-mounted cameras. Unfortunately, Google gathered more than just pictures; they also sucked in as much wi-fi data as they could capture in their drive-bys, enough to pick up personally-identifying information from people blithely going about their personal business inside their own homes and workplaces.

“So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake,” a Google executive wrote on a company blog in 2010. “The project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.”

But according to the report, the engineer suggested in his proposal that it was entirely intentional: “We are logging user traffic along with sufficient data to precisely triangulate their position at a given time, along with information about what they were doing.”

Attending to paperwork did not seem to be a high priority, however. Managers of the Street View project told F.C.C. investigators that they never read the engineer’s proposal, called a design document. A senior manager of Street View said he “preapproved” the document before it was written.

A general (and self-serving) disregard for personal privacy, a flat management structure that results in poor oversight, a lax internal review process, and little to no industry regulation results in one of the biggest companies in the world spying on US citizens.

But, you know… at least they have that “Don’t be evil” motto. So that’s something.

Google Engineer Told Others of Data Collection, F.C.C. Report Reveals – NYTimes.com

(Via. John Moltz)

➤  Advances in blogging engines

Svbtle admin

I like Dustin Curtis’s approach to his blogging engine, Svbtle. While the interface is too simplified currently for my needs, I love that he’s taking a fresh approach to personal publishing. The concept of building an Ideas file into the admin interface is brilliant. I currently use Evernote to develop posts; I love the thought of being able to work on these bits inside the blogging interface. (Yes, I know I could do the same thing using draft posts in WordPress, but it’s not the same as having a purpose-built feature for developing ideas.)

(via Shawn Blanc)

➤  Bruce Schneier’s Big Idea

Bruce Schneier’s new book, Liars and Outliars looks great. I’ve downloaded a sample to my iBooks library, which is my way of stacking up books to read next. I can’t wait to get to it. Looks like just the kind of wide-ranging big-picture stuff I love:

In the book, I wander through a dizzying array of academic disciplines: experimental psychology, evolutionary psychology, sociology, economics, behavioral economics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, game theory, systems dynamics, anthropology, archeology, history, political science, law, philosophy, theology, cognitive science, and computer security. It sometimes felt as if I were blundering through a university, kicking down doors and demanding answers. “You anthropologists: what can you tell me about early human transgressions and punishments?” “Okay neuroscientists, what’s the brain chemistry of cooperation? And you evolutionary psychologists, how can you explain that?” “Hey philosophers, what have you got?”

➤  We’re more than just eyeballs

Dave Winer:

The tech industry has been absorbed by the ad industry, and vice versa.

However, there is, imho, still room for a tech industry that is not merged with the ad industry.

Dear god, I hope he’s right. I can’t believe that advertising is the only viable business model for the web. Why can’t I pay for Twitter without ads (or “promoted tweets“)? Why can’t I pay for Gmail or Google Reader without ads? It’s not a question of whether I want to pay for them or not; paying for these services is simply not offered as an option.

I don’t believe we were put here on this earth to be bought and sold and leered at by advertisers. There must be an actual market for worthwhile technologies.

It’s certainly interesting that app stores are taking off now. Those environments at least make it a viable option to pay a fair price for content and services. While there are plenty of ad-supported apps, it’s possible to avoid them by finding paid versions that are ad-free.

Could the web eventually become a low-rent backwater filled with pop-ups and animated gifs, while all the high-quality content moves to tablets and smartphones? I hope that doesn’t happen, but I could see how people would get used to consuming content on portable devices free from the constant marketing and feel less and less value from consuming content on the web.

Movie: Sherlock Holmes (2009)

This movie is a curious beast. There’s much to like: It’s beautiful, a gorgeous and gritty recreation of London of the late 1800s. The script is clever. It’s got plenty of action. It’s got Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes, and the script retains enough of the character and qualities of the Sherlock Holmes stories to satisfy the casual fan of the legendary detective.

On the other hand… it’s Sherlock Holmes as an action movie. Which is just… odd. It’s a little bit Batman and Robin meets James Bond with some Indiana Jones supernatural sorcery plot lines thrown in for good measure.

The movie suffers from detachment. Having knocked the stodgy and clichéd vision of Holmes off its pedestal, the film never firmly roots him in a new milieu. We know we’re supposed to be affected by the fact that Dr. Watson (Jude Law) is moving out of 221B Baker Street to get married (and presumably won’t be accompanying Holmes on his adventures any more), but that tension is treated almost casually; Holmes doesn’t seem truly moved by that upheaval in his life (nor does Watson), so why should we care? The chemistry between Law and Downey Jr. never quite gels. Some of the situations stretch credulity, such as when we see Holmes improvise his way into a disguise and manufacture a “chance encounter” with Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) and her mysterious employer.

Yet, for all that, Sherlock Holmes is enjoyable and engaging, and I’ve certainly seen movies worse than this. It’s a comic book movie (literally… based on a comic book treatment of Holmes), and that cuts both ways: the comic book sensibility carried out well (as it is here by director Guy Ritchie) makes for great escapism. But it also feels a bit hollow and superficial. We want more for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective than to see him reduced to being just another action-adventure hero.

➤  Trendspotting: Publishers Perish?

From Mathew Ingram at GigaOm:

While his former publisher released one of his books in several countries, Konrath says they passed on two subsequent titles: the one that they promoted has made about $60,000 in three years, while the two that the publisher decided not to release have brought in four times that amount in just two years.

Ingram’s article is titled “Memo to publishers: Remind us why you exist again?” And given the way things are going, I’d hate to be a big publishing house these days. If I were to place bets, though, I’d say it’s the big boys that are in the most trouble. There’s still a market for someone to do the tough work of promotion, editing, development, market analysis, and so on. But individual contractors doing that work for successful independent authors seems like a much more sustainable business model in the new economy.