Greg Boone

Category: Blog

  • Hacking as Protest?

    I posted this question to my Google+ contacts earlier this morning, but decided it was worth blogging about too.

    The recent protests against San Francisco’s BART system is raising all kinds of eyebrows over a government authority’s silencing of mobile networks in the interest of public safety. The bushiest of those eyebrows: didn’t Mubarak do exactly the same thing when he was trying to silence pro-democratic riots in Egypt, and isn’t that guy in a cage on trial right now, and doesn’t this remind anyone of a certain book titled with the year Reagan was reelected? While comparing BART’s suppression of cell networks underground to Mubarak’s silencing of all Internet and telephonic communication in the entire country of Egypt is a stretch, it does follow that if citizens are content to allow a small government agency to shut off our communication systems in the name of possible threats to public safety, it would be hard for those citizens to complain about a bigger agency doing the same thing. It sets a dangerous precedent.

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  • Why I’m (still) Excited about Google+

    It wasn’t until the Facebook/Skype marriage that I remembered Google were tackling a new social service. Eventually I got into the system to give it a spin and I have to say I’m impressed. I’m not quite ready to ditch Facebook, or say that anybody should or will ditch Zuck & Co.’s popular if addled monster, but I am impressed. Apparently the fifth try is the charm.

    To be sure, Google+ is still lacking one major feature: people. The trial period means that not every Snodgrass@gmail.com can sign up for an account. But bear in mind that when Facebook launched it also lacked people, almost pretentiously so, and people still used it. In Facebook’s early days anybody without an email address ending .edu and any school where Facebook “wasn’t yet available,” were sure out of luck until Zuckerberg opened things up. What Google lacks in population (though if it keeps up these growth rates, it could well have solved that problem soon) it more than makes up for in user experience by providing G+ users with a natural, easy, and safe way to connect with each other.

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  • Wherein a Northfield Game Inspired A Lesson Plan

    People who came of age in the State of Minnesota sometime in the last decade likely have heard of Tricadecathlonomania, particularly those of us who know someone Northfield. For anyone who hasn’t heard of it,  Trica, as it’s commonly known, is a scavenger hunt of epic proportion. It is not the scavenger hunt where you find a big list of things and bring them back to whomever gave you the list, nay it is far greater than that. With a whopping 288 items on the 2010 list, Trica is perhaps the most ambitious type of scavenger hunt there is; and here’s the catch: the list, whatever of it you can manage, must be completed in 24 hours. Thus was born “Tricadecathlonomania: The Lesson Plan.”

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