May 26, 2004
caltrain + snowcrash
| My caltrain 10-ride ticket no longer is accepted by the little machine that validates it when you get on the train. The machine works by chomping off a portion of the edge of your ticket (the black region in the graphic), gradually eating away at the column numbered 1-10. Except now in my case, where the machine just sits there like nothing's happening, even though I'm like "yo dude, let's get to work. let's make this happen." nothing.
I think the problem is that my 10-ride hasn't been getting chomped very cleanly, leaving different amounts of black paper on the ticket (I think it's supposed to chomp off the black square entierly). So I just cleaned things up with a pair of scissors and gave it a nice clean vertical line down all of my spent rides. We'll see if that works better... Image wholeheartedly stolen from caltrain.org But this little caltrain ticket snippet got me thinking about the book Snowcrash. In the book, Hiro Protaganist is a stringer, someone who gathers information (text, video, audio, data), enters it into this global database (run by the monolithic government entity/corporation the CIC), and then gets paid a little bit every time that information is accessed. And that's basically where the internet is today. Millions of bloggers post little snippets like this, google indexes it, people who need information find it. The only difference with today's www&blogs&google is that it's all more distributed, lacking the CIC central body. And also there's no payment infrastructure for small-fry info like this.
|  |
update:ack! forgot to close my table tag for half an hour... Posted by Ethan at May 26, 2004 12:00 PM
I had that problem once and I think it was the result of keping my ticket in my wallet, the repeated folding made it to soft in the middle so it was not rigid enough to insert it hard enough to validate it.
Posted by: Amul on May 26, 2004 02:27 PMOh also, there is a project at Berkeley that is developing an application for camera phones to send a photo, a description, the local time and the id of the cell tower being used to a server. The server looks for a similar sounding known object in that area, asks if that is what you are photographing and stores it accordingly. The result is a catalog of photos and their subjects.
Posted by: Amul on May 26, 2004 02:37 PMI've actually had a Caltrain conductor take out a little pair of scissors and clean up my ticket for me. That was nice of him. After that, I went out to Target and bought myself a pair of scissors for my office so that I can regularly clean up my ticket. Seems to be helping. However, the recent Caltrain 10-ride pass I bought seems to be slightly wider, which, on the one hand, makes it a little tighter of a fit in the validator slot, but on the other hand, seems to make the machine happier and punch more evenly.
Posted by: Tina on May 26, 2004 08:02 PMThere are even camphones on the market that are able to tag photos with GPS information before storing / sending them. The JPEG image format has something called EXIF-headers that can be used for extra data, like meta data about the image (compression, camera used, size, colors, geographic information...). My Nokia 7650 is unable to do that though.
Posted by: Manne on May 26, 2004 11:33 PM