The Richter Scale^®

I’m in Washington DC at the present, and as I was wandering back to my hotel about 30 minutes ago, a motorcade with about a half dozen motorcycle cops, a couple of limos, and several Suburbans with lots of antennae and a bullet-proof-vested military guy in one open window, drive by. One of the limos looks like it has the Presidential Seal flying on one of its flags (the other being an American flag). All vehicles that had flashing lights and sirens had them going.

Here’s the odd thing - second to last in the entourage was an ambulance, also with lights flashing.

Anyone know if this is normal?

On a footnote to the previous blog entry, my camera was tucked away too deep in my backpack, and I couldn’t get it out in time to snap pictures - but I did get intensly stared at by the military-type person looking out of one of the giant SUVs. I fear he might have yelled at me that photos were not allowed due to heightened security concerns, although I doubt they would have stopped the motorcade just for that.

So here I was today, at the McPherson Square Metro station (the Metro being the Washington, DC subway system), awed by the cavernous hall of the station.

I pull out my camera with wide angle lens, intent on capturing the scene for posterity, planning a long exposure to capture all the subtle lighting, when a uniformed official comes up to me and (politely) explains that as the Metro is under heightened security, no photography
is permitted.

I grumbled a bit and put my camera away, and as I stewed about not being able to take my picture, the situation struck me as more and more ludicrous. I realized I was only approached because I had a real camera in hand.

After all, with multi-megapixel cell phone cameras now on sale everywhere, it would be very easy for a determined doer of no good to take all the detailed pictures they wanted.

Heck, if they wanted to be truly thorough, a pocket video recorder with a tiny low lux security camera would do the trick. You could even have one person carry the tiny recorder and another handle the small camera transmitting the image wirelessly. Anyone remember the annoying pop-up advertisements for the X-10 cameras? Those thing were wireless and
worked okay at short range.

And what about those darned sketch artists? You don’t need a camera to capture imagery - a notebook and pencil work just fine and add the ability to annotate in real time.

So, as with much of the “official security” I see during my travels, this enforcement in the Metro stations is feel-good from a PR and self-congratulatory perspective, but truly shallow and ineffective when it comes to protecting against truly determined people.

I wonder if anyone will get incensed enough by all this false security and the related ill-conceived and executed policies to start creating photo flash mobs as a form of mass civil disobedience, with all images posted to Flickr for widest distribution.

Imagine a single security guard dealing with hundreds of people simultaneously whipping out their photo cell phones, camcorders, and digital cameras and taking pictures in public places where someone has bizarrely determined photography could be a security risk.

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Update 1 - July 31, 2005 - 17:29 EDT

My experience above reminded me of a similar experience related on BoingBoing a couple of months ago about a photographer in Pittsburgh who was asked to stop taking pictures of a building (non-governement at that) for security reasons. Here’s the link to the blog entry.

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Update 2 - July 31, 2005 - 19:18 EDT

Okay. There must have been some sort of vibe in the air today.

As I read through the last couple of days of BoingBoing postings a few minutes ago, lo and behold, there’s a report of a photography flashmob in San Francisco yesterday, as the result of a photographer harrassed by a security guard for taking pictures in a public place a few days ago.

Photos of the event have even been posted to Flickr here and also here too.

Weird coincidence (mind you I submitted the initial commentary in this entry via my Sidekick II cellphone (moblog) completely unaware of the event in San Francisco - I would have also included a pic from the Sidekick to prove my point but the camera is the Sidekick is pretty crappy and doesn’t deal well at all with low light conditions such as those in man made caverns).

Yay for the concept of photography flashmobs and the first successful implementation! Photographers everwhere should rejoice that their First Amendment rights are being defended.

Okay - I know it’s been a while since my last blog entry. I’ve been traveling and on vacation, and then just overwhelmed with work. But I think I’m back for now. Expect to see some entries on some of the vacation things I did.

In the meantime, I’ve been catching up on some of the blogs I haven’t read in a month, and found the following at the Business2 Blog.

It’s a faucet with LEDs which shows blue for when cold water is running and red for hot water.

Boy, I need one of those. My wife always runs hot water in our master bath at night to wash her face, and if I’m not paying attention, I end up scalding my gums with the hot water I have used to dampen my toothbrush.

Most gadget blogs and reviews rave about first look reviews of new tech toys, but it’s rare that I’ve seen anyone look at the tech toys of yester-months after months of use (or non-use, as the case may be) to see how well they have fared.

So, over the next few days I will be reviewing some of the tech toys I have been using for the last few months, starting with the Creative Labs Zen Micro.

The Zen Micro is Creative’s effort to unseat the Apple iPod Mini. Based on market numbers they have not been particularly successful. Using man-on-the-street surveying and eavesdropping techniques I have counted exactly zero Zen Micros (or any other type of Creative MP3 player) on my travels since I acquired mine in the middle of January 2005. With one no-name exception every other MP3 player I have seen (and it’s well over a hundred at this point) it’s been Apple iPods of some flavor all the time.

My Zen Micro is a 5GB model, and while it comes in all sorts of colors, I chose white when I paid for it at the Consumer Electronics Show (along with a blue one for my wife). It plays MP3s just fine, has a built in radio (reception hasn’t been great in my experience though), records voice (haven’t had need to try that yet), and tells time (surprisingly useful when you don’t wear a wrist watch and when you’re in mid-flight and can’t check your cell phone for the current time).

The Zen Micro has two firmware choices as well - pure MP3/WMA playback, or DRM support in the form of Microsoft’s Plays For Sure. For those not familiar with DRM, it stands for Digital Rights Management and means that you are restricted in where you can play DRM-protected music - typically 3 to 5 systems, and a portable player, such as the Zen Micro.

The Plays For Sure thing works pretty well - a couple of weeks ago I signed up for a trial of Yahoo! Music Unlimited, and proceeded to download about 800 songs from artists Yahoo! Music recommended based on my music tastes to my notebook and then to my Zen Micro. Of course, I was on a high-speed U.S. DSL connection where I had a 2.5Mbps connection. Would have been impossible here on Bonaire.

In my nearly half year of using the Zen Micro, most of which has been on planes (and I have been on a lot of planes in that time!), I’m very pleased with the unit’s size, capacity, and battery life. My trips from Bonaire to the U.S. usually involve anywhere from 6 to 10 hours in flight, and the battery has lasted for the duration when I had charged it fully the night before. I’ve probably logged over 200 hours on my Zen Micro so far.

I paid $249 for it, and got as a show special, a set of Creative’s TravelSound 300 speakers (which sound tinny and flat to my ears). The same 5GB unit goes for $199.99 now. The Zen Micro also came with a belt clip - a flimsy clip which broke off about two months ago.

The controls take a bit to get used to - sliding one’s fingers up and down a non-moving control pad takes a bit of finesse when that same pad can be tapped quickly as well to perform a specific function (separate from the one from sliding one’s finger, that is).

Other than the belt clip, I have discovered only two real negatives with the Zen Micro.

First is that the 1/8” jack where I plug in my headphones in has started getting flaky. I have to position the headphone plug just right so that I don’t lose most of the sound. I’ve confirmed it’s not the connector on the head phones as those work fine on my notebook computer. And, not comfortingly, this problem appears to be getting worse, so I may have to send it in for service soon, and then who knows what will happen to my DRM’d music on the drive in the unit?

The second problem I have is that the Zen Micro seems to drain the battery even when I have turned it off. That means that if I don’t charge it right before I leave on a trip, I end up with drained batteries. It’s not a showstopper like the headphone jack problem, but it is annoying. I’d like to be able to have the thing shut off to a much lower power state (like off?) when I want, instead of being in this power-consuming, fast boot “sleep” mode that it seems to go into.

Would I recommend a Zen Micro to someone else? Probably, and only assuming that the head phone jack problem is a rarity instead of something common.

While I think all the various iPod accessories out there are cool, I don’t like the idea of being tied to a particular software program like iTunes for doing all my music synchronization. The Zen Micro looks just like a hard disk when I plug it in, making it very easy to copy music to it. I can also store data on it if I wish. The Zen Micro also comes with several applications, including a simple file manager which is not bound into a player that wants to take over my system.

So, after 5.5 months of use, I give the Creative Labs Zen Micro a 6.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.