Farm Winds

Had to travel for work yesteday and drove right through this very cool wind farm on the farms of Fond du Lac Country. I was surprised that there are farms, barns, homes and roads all through the farm. I did not take this shot but here is what it looked like. Seemed beautiful to me.

Chatroulette can be fun

I must admit that I have been wasting too much time on Chatroulette. It seems mostly like a stupid way to waste your time but I have had a few interesting fun chats with folks (feisty, dirty mouthed beer drinking future psychologist from New Orleans and the 2 East coast women with cool hats who liked the Beatles and fashion of the twenties) but mostly just watching guys who look like they are looking for girls. One thing I have noticed is the lack of creativity, artists, and fun on the site. Unless you are Brad Pitt, how would one get noticed on this site. Life is boring enough, this site has potential for a very creative medium. I heard one guy play guitar very funny song and a jazzy trio which were both very nice. Who would just see your ugly mug and want to become life long fiends?

I have made a few attempts at creative fun and it was more fun for me that looking like a creep. Last night I put my Tweetle Bug on camera with a note that said “Blow me a kiss” and got quite a few smiles and kisses from guys and girls.

Chatroulette Ideas

My first Chatroulette post was too long so I thought I would put up another with an idea of how this technology could be used for good and not exhibitionism. I tried it one more time and the current system is really flawed. Every solo dude looks creepy and like he is only intersted in "chatting with" women. So, even though a guy sitting alone may be cool and intersting, I have to assume he is Mr. Creep. Many of the users are young people who with friends who are pretty mean. They don't want to talk with an old guy like me and when the got me they were pretty rude, the site could be known as jerk roulette. That said, I really think there could be many variations of this which could be very interesting.

One simple approach would be to create a very similar simple site that requires you to register somehow with very limited information and then if you get 2 notices of inappropriate behavor, you would be kicked off. A clean nice chatroulette and another nasty anything goes chatroulette.

Another idea, combine the comments section of news websites and blogs, bloggerheads TV and Chatroulette. Currently many read or listen to interesting stories on NPR, NY Times, Huffington Post, etc. and want to discuss them or comment on them. You can comment on a website but how do you engage in any dialogue about what you read with 100 other people who read the comments at different times, etc. you don't. As I have said before, writing a comment on a popular article seems just as useful as writing a comment on a piece of paper and flushing it down the toliet. What if you finished listening to a great thought provoking NPR story, you click on "Want to Video Chat About this Story" and then you are brought into a chatroulette type screen where you and a stranger (or a few) can talk about the story (or anything else you want). This would be much more satisfying than typing a sentence into the black hole of the comment world and you could meet someone with a common interest. You could easily set up a system to kick out creeps, require registration, etc. which could keep people honest and polite.

What I am looking for and don't have as much of in my real life is a way to engage with people on topics that interest me. Between work and my kids I don't have much time for hanging at the bar with my buddies. I think many in the on-line world are looking for the same and the current medium to engage in dialogue about stuff is limited in many ways, I know there is a lot out there now that perhaps I should explore more. There are limitless ways to expand on this idea, include sports, movies, music, etc. You could record the chats, and other's could watch later, and much more.

Whatever ideas folks have on this front, it would be important to keep it simple because a system that is too complex would be difficult for many non tech people to use. It would also be good to keep the similar sites somewhat anonymous because of privacy concerns, part of the draw to chatroulette is that it is in someways totally anonymous because all folks see is your face and you don't even need to show that. While some people would not mind, I am not sure I would want to click "Want to Video Chat About this Story" if I knew the stranger on the other side could easily get my whole life story in a few clicks.

What an addictive stupid time waster – My first attempt at using chatroulette (and Tinychat and Omegle)

(the photo is not me - just some photo of folks using it)Yesterday I read about Chatroulette by reading the big piece in the New Yorker by Julia Ioffe “Roulette Russian- The teen-ager behind Chatroulette” (which I found via Althouse). The piece is a really an in-depth profile of the young man, Andrey Ternovskiy, who created this site and less about the site. I have to admit that the description of the program sounded titillating. I read a couple of other articles about the program as well including one on NY Times and ABC News so I think I knew what I was getting myself into. I am always a bit late to hear about new internet hot things but I had to try it.

So I put my kids, my wife and my mother-in-law to bed and went down to my basement lair and hooked it up. As I expected, lots of guys with their cocks out. boring. I kept clicking and was a bit excited and scared to actually talk with anyone. You feel a bit rejected because almost everyone will “next” you. It is a weird type of thing because it can be completely non-sexual like having a pen pall across the world but it is very much a sexual game for many of the users. It is hard to switch gears in your mind. Is the old dude on the couch a professor in England or a creep looking for teenage chicks?

I felt pretty discouraged because I had very few conversations for a while. It was weird that some people did not have cameras on or had only dim rooms and others were right there, bright as day. There were many guys who looked like creepy dudes looking for some action. There were some with masks or helmets on. There were a few groups of people, a few college kids sitting together over their computer. The hard part for me seemed to be how to have a conversation (I did it w/o a mic) with someone who you know nothing at all about. Where do you start, everyone obviously is somewhat protective of their privacy so you don’t want to get too personal. I had a short chat with two college guys from northern Quebec who liked to smoke weed. I talked to a white guy and black girl who are roommates in college in New York. Both of these were pretty boring.

Oddly enough the two most interesting chats I had both related to Islam in very different ways. I don’t know any Muslims and don’t really have strong feelings about issues on that front but the first one was with a guy who had a hand drawn sign of a stick figure with an arrow that pointed to the figure and said “Muhammad”. I started talking with this guy by saying “bad” and then we got into a pretty in-depth chat about the whole South Park thing, I was not aware that the time square attempted bombing may have been targeting Viacom. I give the guy credit for taking on something more interesting than taking down his pants. The guy was in the dark shadow but then showed me his face when I asked him to. One comment this guy said was something like, I doubt very many Muslims use this website. Then a few minutes later I clicked onto a 25-35 year old Asian looking woman wearing a partial hijab. It showed her whole face but still. I was going to “next” her but was struck by the noise on her side. We had a long chat and as it turned out she was a teacher in the teachers lounge at high school in Indonesia. The noise was the kids and other teachers. She was very nice and seemed concerned that I seemed very tired and should go to bed. We talked about the US role abroad among other topics. I was surprised she would use this site given the NSFW content that she must have had to go through to find a normal person.

Despite all the crap, I see there is a real positive thing going on here and I agree with Ashton Kusher that they need to cleanup their act somehow. I actually think that a program like this for kids could be very fun. There must be a way to use a system like this with different groups of people somehow to seperate those who want to chat and those who want to strip. I also tried Omegle which is very similar, worked faster but made you click more to get rid of people. Also, Tinychat seemed interesting and I still don’t understand it very well but has potential because you can have chat with several people at one time. Some of the chat room discussions seemed stupid but a bit more fun that finding uncle Leo laying on the couch. I will probably try again but must resist the urge to keep clicking and go to bed.

I like the way that Shannon Donnelly from The Daily Beast sums up the prospects for this site:

"All Things Digital recently caught up with Andrey Ternovskiy, Chatroulette’s 17-year-old computer-whiz creator, while he was standing in line to buy an iPad. He said he was working on “changes to the ‘reporting people’ function designed to cut down on the male genitalia.”
If Ternovskiy does indeed manage to clean up Chatroulette, he’ll either transform an already intriguing site into a full-fledged social-networking hub with the potential to explode like Facebook and Twitter—or decimate his userbase."

A Taste of Heaven Past on Rye.

Just had a big fresh made to order hummus sandwich from new Eclectic Earth café cart on the square. Pretty good and the rye bread and the large sandwich reminded me very much of a much loved long closed Madison institution, Radical Rye.

It is weird but eating the sandwich and thinking about it reminded me of the great times my wife and I had eating in the Radical Rye (pre kids).

The Ambiguously Gay Justice

This may sound terrible but I wonder if Elena Kagen’s ambiguous sexuality is part of why she was selected. As you may have read, CBS put out a blog story by Ben Domenech, that said she was gay and then retracted the story. From the little I could find she is not married, has no children and is not openly gay. I wonder if the White House thought this personal story was appealing because it puts her critics in a tough position because they can’t really say anything without sounding anti-gay, sexist and mean. I am sure there will be comments about her appearance but those who say that will have no serious credibility and come off looking like bullies. Anyone who tries to dig into her personal life will come off like a jerk because this process is supposed to focus on her legal views and how she will act as a judge. An openly gay person would be another story because the far right family values crowd could directly attach that one.

EXTRA: After I posted the above, I read (via Althouse) Andrew Sullivan's piece on whether or not Kagen is gay. To some extent he kind of said what I wanted to write but was too chicken to put down here. I liked Sullivan's points but yikes, the Althouse readers are really really nasty when ever she mentions Sullivan and the comments on this article are no exception. No one seems to comment at all in support of Sullivan's point which is that it is somewhat problematic that this person may be a closeted homosexual and that it is not out of bounds or inappropriate to ask if she is gay or not.

I am going to tread here where I should not but I would rather have an openly gay or straight person on the Supreme Court and not a person who is either a closeted gay person, asexual or what ever she is. I am friends with gay people and very pro-gay and I know it is not easy to be a gay in this country and you could say she would not be where she is if she was openly gay but something about this bothers me. It seems that sexuality and family is a big part of who we are and if someone had to hide their sexual preference it seems like they would have some latent underlying stress. Just like we want to know about a President or Congressional candidate and their family life, we want to know about someone who is being nominated for the SCOTUS. These people are role models and young men and woman may aspire to be on the SCOTUS some day and it is hard to talk about these people without any discussion of their family life. I would be OK with her saying, I am not gay and I dated a few men but prefer to be alone and never found someone, blah blah blah. We shall see if this question keeps coming up and if she is forced to respond somehow.

Orbitz is Smart and a bit Creepy

Got an email today from Orbitz telling me that the fare for plane trip that I had searched for a few days ago went down! If you searcheded a lot for trips this could get annoying but this is a trip we really plan to take to San Francisco. Thanks!

Betty White is Great!

Check her out on Jimmy Fallon.