Wired: GM Killed the Wrong Brand #

June 28th, 2009

This has been burning me for a while. The El Camino was discontinued in 1987. In 2010, Pontiac were planning to reintroduce it with this:

2010 Holden Ute Pontiac G8 Sport Truck (Photo: General Motors)

But even before they killed Pontiac, GM nixed the return of the American ute. Some things are just too pure for this world. Chuck Squatriglia for Wired confirms the people’s choice:

General Motors is unloading three brands and tossing one overboard in a scramble to stay afloat, but the one it scuttled may be the one it should have kept.… It turns out Pontiac, which got the axe, is the brand people wanted to see saved.

Almost 10,000 responses to the article’s poll say the same:

Ding, ding, ding: we have a winner.

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Administrator, Please #

June 28th, 2009

John Strand on Verizon store customer terminals:

As you can see the system is logged in with an account that has Administrator Privileges. There is no “hacking” this box…. You just walk up to it.

When he returned, without the adapter I needed, he noticed that I had the command prompt up. He asked me the basic questions like, “What the hell are you doing?” Which I answered truthfully with the necessary mitigation steps. You see, I am a pathetic, hopeless white hat. I spent a few seconds re-explaining the problem to him while his eyes glassed over. When I was done he said that he would need to take my name and a copy of my drivers license so he could run this “incident” by the management and possibly the police. It was my turn for my eyes to glass over and quickly leave the store. The irate store clerk was shocked that I would just walk away without complying with a perfectly sound and logical request to hand over my PII to a store that cannot secure a simple terminal.

To my horror, all of the Verizon stores in my area were set up the exact same way.

The moral of this story is not to use public terminals wherever you may find them, as the people who set them up may not usually don’t know what they are doing. (Read back through this year’s Philosecurity posts for more examples.)

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Harvey’s Gaillardia #

June 23rd, 2009

In full flower, and stronger than ever this year. I wonder if Genie remembers him.

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Desire Lines #

June 23rd, 2009

Jim Griffioen on spontaneous pathways:

Desire lines are considered by many landscape architects to be proof of a flaw in the design of a physical space, or more gently, a sign that concrete cannot always impose its will on the human mind. But what about a physical space that no longer resembles its intended design, a city where tens of thousands of homes have been abandoned, burned, and buried in their own basements? While actual roads and sidewalks crumble with each season of freezing and thawing, Detroiters have taken it upon themselves to create new paths, in their own small way working to create a city that better suits their needs.

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A Time of Bad Debts #

June 21st, 2009

Barbara Ehrenreich, in the introduction to her book Nickel and Dimed (2001), wrote this of her research experience in the late-nineties:

With all the real-life assets I’ve built up in middle age—bank account, IRA, health insurance, multiroom home—waiting indulgently in the background, there was no way I was going to “experience poverty” or find out how it “really feels” to be a long-term low-wage worker. My aim here was much more straightforward and objective—just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day. Besides, I’ve had enough unchosen encounters with poverty in my lifetime to know it’s not a place you would want to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear.…

I make no claims for the relevance of my experiences to anyone else’s, because there is nothing typical about my story. Just bear in mind… that this is in fact the best-case scenario: a person with every advantage that ethnicity and education, health and motivation can confer attempting, in a time of exuberant prosperity, to survive in the economy’s lower depths.

That was back when things in America looked relatively rosy, viewed from the top down. She writes again, a week ago, in a New York Times op ed entitled “Too Poor to Make the News:”

The recession of the ’80s transformed the working class into the working poor, as manufacturing jobs fled to the third world, forcing American workers into the low-paying service and retail sector. The current recession is knocking the working poor down another notch—from low-wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all. Comfortable people have long imagined that American poverty is far more luxurious than the third world variety, but the difference is rapidly narrowing.

Maybe “the economy,” as depicted on CNBC, will revive again, restoring the kinds of jobs that sustained the working poor, however inadequately, before the recession. Chances are, though, that they still won’t pay enough to live on, at least not at any level of safety and dignity. In fact, hourly wage growth, which had been running at about 4 percent a year, has undergone what the Economic Policy Institute calls a “dramatic collapse” in the last six months alone. In good times and grim ones, the misery at the bottom just keeps piling up, like a bad debt that will eventually come due.

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Pandora’s Box #

June 20th, 2009

It’s been almost three weeks. Hold me…

Update: it was 417 new messages.

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Sayōnara #

June 19th, 2009

I read a long time ago that “sayōnara” means “if it must be so.”

Great George St., Paddington, Queensland

Until next time, then.

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Melbo #

June 19th, 2009

Elena calls it “Melbo.” It’s the traditional home of the Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung and Wathaurong.

Birrarung (also known as the Yarra River), viewed from Princess Bridge

We caught up with friends, looked at tons of art and a fair bit of graffiti, drank copious amounts of coffee and ate our way around the rainy city. It was hard to leave, and the loved ones are greatly missed already. Of course, there’s now a Melbourne photo set on Flickr.

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The China Project at GoMA #

June 19th, 2009

GoMA—Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art—took my breath away:

Guo Jian’s The day before I went away (2008), from The China Project photo set

Brisbanites and visitors, if you haven’t yet been to GoMA, I urge you to pay a visit. It truly is a world-class museum, and The China Project will knock your socks off. ’Tis also free. While I’m at it, not only is the new building amazing, but the renovations to the State Library and the Queensland Museum and Art Gallery have redefined the space into something at once very special and highly approachable. Awesome bookshops, too. Props to the Queensland Art Gallery for the remarkable transformation they’ve wrought at the cultural centre.

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A Beautiful Day in the River City #

June 18th, 2009

Elena on the Citycat, en route to the Queensland Art Gallery:

View the Brisbane Citycat set on Flickr

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