Just a quick note to tell you that I’m going to be gone all day tomorrow. I am off to the Antiques Roadshow, where I am most definitely not looking forward to standing in line most of the day. But it is a good opportunity.

There will, of course, be a birthday post in the morning. I know that, because I’ve already written it. I don’t expect to be back until very late, given that the show tomorrow is a two hour drive away. So I wouldn’t expect anything other than the birthday post tomorrow.

Normally, I would write a few other articles for tomorrow, but I’m much too busy with other things and I have to get up way too early. But if you get really bored, you know there are almost 4,000 articles on this site. Over 300 just on film. Another 100 on music. Roughly 150 on books and such. Over 2,000 on politics. And much else! Even I don’t know what I’ve written about. So dig in while I stand in line at the Antiques Roadshow.

Update 6 June 2014 (8:23 pm)

Wow, I wish I had more time to write. There are some great stories that I’d love to talk about. I assume this is about our out of control Drug War, Ex-Brooklyn DA Accused of Funneling a Whole Lot of Money to Political Consultant. And this is delicious and I actually have a lot to say about it, Sarah Palin Advises Bowe Bergdahl to Buy Rosetta Stone, Learn to Speak “KickAss.” Briefly: Palin has this typical conservative view that the way to win wars is to simply kill every person. I’ve heard this statement so many times, “They wouldn’t let us win the Vietnam War.” Yeah, I know. We could have “won” the war by dropping a hundred nukes on the country. That’s not the purpose of war. It’s sickening that people like Palin (And many more) think that it is.

Among computer geeks, Webdriver Torso has been a big deal for the last week or so. You should feel good about yourself if you have no idea what I’m talking about. But let me explain, because it is rather interesting. Webdriver Torso is a YouTube Channel. It was started roughly six months ago. And in that time, it has uploaded over 77,000 videos. And other than two that I’ll discuss later, they are all of the same format.

Each video is 10 seconds long. The image displays a white background with a red and a blue rectangle. Along with the images are tones that sound like something that would come out of the old modems. The image and tone frequency changes once per second. Here is the most recent upload:

Thus far, no one knows who is behind Webdriver Torso and this is driving a lot of people crazy. In fact, some people have suggested it might be space aliens, although I don’t know how serious they are. So Stephen Beckett at the BBC decided to look into it, Webdriver Torso YouTube Mystery Clips’ French Connection. And he found out some interesting things.

Webdriver Torso History

The first video posted to the channel was a clip from the animated television series, Aqua Teen Hunger Force. And strangely, it is only accessible to French viewers and then only if you pay two euros for the privilege. This video sat on the channel all alone for a month before the standard videos started to appear. And then, after more than a thousand of these things, a six-second video of the Eiffel Tower at night was uploaded. So Beckett thinks whoever is doing it is French.

In the article, Beckett seems to have the solution to the riddle, but he just doesn’t want to accept it:

Perhaps it could it be a piece of stray automation software?

The channel shares part of its name with Selenium WebDriver, a tool used to test websites…

A related explanation was put forward by The Guardian, which spoke to software engineer Isaul Vargas. He said he’d seen a video of these patterns—created by set-top box provider YouView—filmed at a conference.

However, when the BBC spoke to Mr Vargas he acknowledged he had been mistaken: “I found the video and when I re-watched it I found that wasn’t the case, it had a different test pattern.”

However, he added that he still thought that the patterns could be the result of some sort of automated tests.

Mystery Solved?

Exactly. Clearly, some person or company has developed a new program for uploading videos onto YouTube. So they created a testing program that creates random videos and then uploads them. It may then download them and correlate them with the original image as well. It could also be someone doing a related test like looking at changes that YouTube makes to videos. Or any number of other things.

I think it is only mysterious for people who don’t have actual experience with how software is developed and tested. I remain slightly curious as to exactly what Webdriver Torso is doing. But that’s just the details. And I know the details won’t be that exciting. Unless, of course, space aliens are sending the coordinates of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Update

It turns out the channel belongs to Google and, as suspected, was used for testing.

Turbo Tax vs Tax Act
Which is Best?

OK. We are down to that yearly last minute crunch time… but people still want to know which they should trust with their taxes. The shortest easiest answer is, use the same service you used last year. Both of these and most of the services will import tons of data, automatically, from the previous tax filing. That saves a lot of time, makes for less mistakes AND can help you catch mistakes or omissions from the previous filing(s). So, especially if you have put off doing the deed til today, that is the best answer.

I did not wait ‘til THE last day, just the day before… so, this time, I had a little bit of time to play with both softwares. To me, Turbo tax is a hair less intuitive, but more like filling out the actual paperwork, by hand. I think Tax Act might be a little more clumsy of an interface and it tried harder to upsell me to other versions and services. It is, however, who I submitted my filing with. There were many more questions, esp of ones that relate to business operations, that in Turbo Tax. Plus, as noted, this was apparently who I filed with last year and at several key places in the Q&A Tax Act showed me a side by side comparison of 2012 and 2013, which was quite helpful.

I played with both last year as well. This year, when trying to log back in, I found TA had a harder time confirming who I was and getting everything up and running. I did, however, find it easier in TA to revise numbers on the fly as my wife was generating more accurate figures.
I believe, last year was the first time I completed the process with TA instead of Turbo Tax. Every year, there are little tweaks and differences in the interface and navigation tools. For some reason, I felt in 2012 that TA was out-performing TT. This year as well, it seems there were some things TT was not asking me, such as interest paid on a student loans. I found that deduction category, but never the specific place to input that figure.

TAX ACT you are the winner! (for this year, at least)

Jakob Nielsen is one of the great heroes of the internet. He’s a web usability expert. I have learned a great deal from him over the years. It probably helps that his base attitude is the same as mine: people come to your website for a reason; don’t waste their time. And the biggest aspect of this is the way in which people create frills on websites that don’t help. The oldest example of this is blinking text. The first time you see it, it’s interesting. But it never is again. One of my most hated website decorations are drop down menus. They always distract, rarely work well, and often confuse users.

Earlier today, I was looking at Nielsen’s article, Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes. So I thought that I would run through the list and see how I’m doing. Now, it is no surprise that I’m doing okay. I have a general outlook that is very similar to Nielsen’s. But more important, today wasn’t the first time I’ve seen the article. Although, in my defense, I was doing about as well when I first did.

1. No Author Biographies

This is one of my great complaints about blogs. This includes blogs of friends and colleagues of mine. A lot of people really want to remain anonymous. And I agree that arguments should stand on their own. But none of this means that there shouldn’t be an author biography. But even people who aren’t anonymous still provide nothing. I take this as contempt for the reader. As for me, I think my author page could be a whole lot better. But it is better than it used to be.

2. No Author Photo

I don’t think this is as important, but I certainly like it. What’s more, when I’ve written about someone, I like to have a photo of them that I can use in my article. But it is really as simple as what Nielsen says, “It offers a more personable impression of the author.” I also think it helps in gaining regular readers. It personalizes the readers experience.

3. Nondescript Posting Titles

This is one where I really fall down. But I’m trying to do a better job. The truth is that I prefer direct headlines. I hate the trend toward two and three sentence headlines. On this site, I try to make the headline fit on a single line on the page. That’s about 35 characters. As I look at the last ten articles I posted, the two best headlines did take up two lines, even though not by much. They are: “Why Conservatives Ignore Global Warming” and “Why You Can’t Argue With Christian Apologists.” (Nielsen also notes that one should not put headlines IN ALL CAPS. Yes! It is harder to read. It reduces reading speed. It is ugly.)

There is another issue that Nielsen doesn’t mention. Google puts a lot of emphasis on titles in its rankings. I see this all the time. So I really will continue to improve this. I think I’m a lot better than I have been.

4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go

I’m not entirely clear on this one because I think that Nielsen is kind of vague on the point. But he’s very clear on what he doesn’t like. And it is something I see all the time. Here’s an example from him, “There’s more here and here.” I personally hate that because it doesn’t make sense. The least a writer could do is, “There’s more at this link.” But even that’s terrible. When I link, I try to include the article title as I did at the start of this post. But sometimes, you don’t want to slow the pace down in that way.

5. Classic Hits are Buried

Nielsen believes that blogs should highlight their most popular articles. I’ve got a greatest hits page, but it is perpetually out of date. It’s hard to keep up to date because the site continues to grow in readership. But every once in a while, I do a bunch of work on it. It’s about time.

6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation

This is a big problem with blogs. The diary nature of them is really not very good after you get a few articles written. Frankly Curious is currently headed toward 4,000 articles—a milestone we will hit in a couple of months. And we will likely hit 5,000 by the end of the year. I’ve done a lot to improve this aspect of the site. Instead of using the standard blog categories, I created my own PHP code to provide my own category pages. They provide titles and then the first few sentences of the article. You can check them out on the right. The same code is used in the site maps. In addition to this, the site now has two search features. There is the base one written in the blog. This one works great for single words, but it is useless for anything more. So there is also a Google search. Still searching kind of sucks in the world of blogs.

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency

There is no doubt that this used to be a problem around here. It isn’t anymore. In fact, the site is shockingly consistent. I try to do five articles per day. But when I’m doing a lot of technical work (which I have been the past couple of weeks), it tends to go down. I still usually get four articles up and never less than two. This is a point I stress to people starting blogs. It doesn’t matter if you only write one article a week. But write one article a week. In addition to everything else, it keeps you thinking about your blog. Krugman is good about this: even when he’s out of town, he posts little apologies and warnings. People like that.

8. Mixing Topics

Okay. I do this. It is the nature of the blog. The idea is to be mixed. And if anything, the blog doesn’t represent enough of my interests. But this is one of the reasons I’ve worked so hard to get the categories working. Even if I were focused, I’m not sure what I would focus on. I’m not a specialist.

9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss

I do forget about my future boss because I know that I will never have a boss again. People are willing to contract with me, but they aren’t willing to hire me. But my partner Will did point out that he avoided showing clients (many of whom are religious people and even churches) my site because of the coarse language. As a result, I’ve pretty much stopped using it. I find I can get the same kind of stuff across without those words. Of course, my writing on “spiritualism” would probably offend those people for different reasons.

10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

I still find it amazing that some very big blogs are hosted on BlogSpot. They always seem like relics from the past. But to each his own.

Well, that’s it. I think I would have to give myself a B+. But then, I’ve always been a pretty easy grader. I intend to continue to work to improve the user experience. But most of my time goes to creating content. I still think that is the most important thing.

This is literally the best fucking news I’ve heard all day. As you know, I recently got my very first smart phone. And it has been nice. There are a number of things I can do on the phone that I just couldn’t before. And now I can browse the web with a reasonable amount of ease. But by far, the biggest change has been that I can use the Android Voice-to-Text feature, which allows me to speak my text messages. It’s very nice.

There was just one problem. You all know what a foul mouthed motherfucker I am. And the Voice-to-Text features censors my language. It isn’t bad if it is a simple “fuck,” because every can figure out what “f***” means. But what about “m***********”? Any ideas? If you do have an idea, it’s because I used the word earlier in his paragraph: motherfucker. But okay, I suppose that I could deal with that kind of thing. But recently, I said to my phone, “I know you don’t like to be sexualized.” It was in reference to a tweet a friend of mine had received that I figured she would not appreciate. And the phone spit back, “I know you don’t like to be s*********.” Since when is “sexualized” a naughty word?

This led me to the extreme measure of picking up a copy of Android Phones for Dummies. In general, I have found the Dummies series to be rather good and at a decent amount of depth. I was pleased the book did deal with the issue, “Uttering f*** words.” But other than saying that the phone does it, there was nothing. Well, there was this:

Well, I wasn’t fucking interested in which words I couldn’t say. I was interesting in stopping the fucking phone from saying things that I clearly wanted to say. After all, I could use “mom” curse words or say “stupid” instead of “fucking.” If I say “fucking” it is because I fucking what the fucking phone to fucking text it that fucking way! Also Dan Gookin didn’t explain to me that it wasn’t just naughty words that were off limits but the entire discussion of sex, apparently. This is a book that was published in 2012. So it’s pretty recent. Remember that.

So I threw the book aside and I turned to Google. I searched for, “stop voice input censoring android.” And the first thing that came up was an article from LifeHacker, Stop Android’s Voice-to-Text from Blocking Swear Words. That article was published in 2011, so clearly it was around for Mr Gookin to find, but I suspect that Mr Gookin is just fine with censoring. Computer books are usually written by people whose ethical complexity started and ended with learning not to cheat at four-square.

The procedure is laid out in the article, but it is trivial. Go to your base phone setup. Go to “Voice input and output.” Then go to “Voice regognition settings.” And there you will find “Block offensive words.” Touch it to turn the fucking thing off. And never go back!

Afterword

The book Android Phones for Dummies seems pretty good overall. I don’t want to put down the book generally. But it amazes me that the author would take all that time to learn about the feature but not learn how to shut it off.

Happy new year to all of you. It seems like a good idea to go back over the last year and look at what has happened to Frankly Curious. It would have been impossible for 2013 to have been as good a year for the website as 2012 was. During that year we went from almost nothing to a fairly widely read site. This was thanks to two other websites in particular: Crooks & Liars and then The Reaction with the other bloggers who write there. Readership went up by a factor of about five. It’s hard to beat that. But this last year, our readership has doubled. We now consistently get over 2,000 non-spam visitors per day.

What really impresses me is that the site has a loyal following. The average visitor drops by three times per month. And a shocking number come by every day. This really makes writing for the site a lot easier. I know when people first start writing a blog, the hardest thing is knowing that you don’t have an audience. But even when you do have an audience, the casual reader doesn’t mean nearly so much as the reader who is actively engaged with your work. So I’m really grateful that I have people who come back again and again. I know it doesn’t mean that these people are crazy in love with the site. But there is a lot of competition on the web and I’m touched that many of you think from time to time, “I wonder what Frank is ranting about today.” And I try not to disappoint. I try to constantly provide new ranting.

There have been a couple of changes on the site this last year too. One is that William Brown has started a blog, Will Fully. He’s still in that pre-addiction phase of blogging where he goes for long periods of time without writing anything. But I think he’s a natural. He understands the format and is always interesting. What I’d really like to see him do is write about consumer affairs. If I want to find out the best place to go to buy plastic wrap or a computer motherboard, Will is the guy I turn to. He is truly amazing. He’s also quite funny when he wants to be.

Sadly, Andrea English has gone onto better things. I helped her start her own new blog Nice Atheist Girl. We haven’t shut down Curiously Clever, but she’s reposted much of the material there and is not writing for it anymore. I do have some thoughts on how to keep her going with Curiously Clever, but I think for the time we have to assume that it is dead. On the positive side, her website is doing pretty well, and on Twitter, she’s got about ten times the number of followers I do. (In my defense, I’m not much of a 140 character kind of guy, as I think is clear.)

More experienced bloggers have cautioned me that I may burn out. I know what they mean. But I just can’t bring myself to become one of those bloggers who primarily quotes other writers. If I don’t have anything important to add to what someone has written, I’ll just tweet out the article and leave it at that. What’s more, I think people come here to hear my voice. So I think it is better to provide my own two paragraph overview of what someone else has written than to just quote them. I think it is more interesting for the reader, but I know it is more interesting for me. What’s more, in describing someone else’s thinking, I get to understand it better myself.

There is still the question of what will become of the birthday posts. I’m more and more inclined to change them into brief essays about a single person. As it is, the birthday posts are very personal. I skip people for my own reasons and even worse, I skip people because I don’t realize that it is their birthday. Two big examples of this are the theatrical director Joseph Hardy and and revolutionary Che Guevara. Both men weren’t even mentioned in last year’s birthday posts and I could easily get whole articles out of each.

Otherwise, what the future holds for Frankly Curious, I cannot say. Running the blog has been a great experience for me. It is often an ego boost. Recently, I was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, Walk on the Water Slide: Lou Reed played Marriott’s Great America in 1986. And it’s made me a better writer—at least of the kind of stuff I write here. But if it just fades away, that’s okay too. As I noted just two days ago, everything is ephemeral. The main thing is that it is fun while it lasts. And at least for me, Frankly Curious is still fun.