Good Ol’ Days
Painters and Their Masterpieces
Don’t Tread on Me
Lip
Victoria Kolakowski, Candidate for Alameda Superior Court Judge, Censors Comments Questioning Her Illegal Activity
A little over a week ago I blogged a post about Victoria Kolakowski, a candidate for Alameda County Superior Court Judge here where I live. I was annoyed after having received an unwanted robodial from her campaign on a Sunday afternoon on my cell phone in the middle of my son’s baseball game. I hate robocalls in general and thought I’d use my free speech rights on my blog, Twitter account, Facebook account, etc. to express my dissatisfaction at having received this impersonal and unwanted solicitation from her.
Nobody likes getting robocalls. It’s annoying to pick up your phone to be blasted by some recording trying to get you to buy something or vote for someone, or whatever impersonal thing they are trying to get you to do. I’m not sure why politicians use them. They turn people off, make them angry and provide no value.
While researching robodialing in general I learned that in California at least that robodialing is actually illegal. So I posted another blog post about the illegality of Kolakowski’s calls and posted my concern about this illegality on her Facebook campaign page.
So how does Kolakowski respond? Rather than addressing the illegality of her campaign’s actions she blocks me on her facebook campaign page and censors my comments asking her to explain her illegal actions. What’s more, she not only blocked and censored me, she also killed other comments by other people as well who were also questioning her ethics and illegal campaigning.
So rather than address why she as a sitting law judge, sworn to uphold the law, knowingly breaks the law — and interestingly enough, she is presently a law judge at the California PUC, the *exact* same agency that issued this bulletin about robodials being illegal in California — she instead chooses to try to simply censor the allegations to make them go away. This is not right. Kolakowski should provide an explanation as to why she feels her robodials are not illegal if this is in fact how she feels, or she should apologize for using illegal robodials and pledge not to use them in the future. But trying to censor those who are trying to hold her accountable for her shady campaign tactics will only backfire.
I also contacted Oakland City Attorney John Russo’s office. Russo was the person whose voice and name were used on the robodial asking for a response from him. In Russo’s case, I at least received a reply back from his communications director telling me that they were looking into the matter and would get back to me. That’s certainly better than the censorship and no response that I got back from Kolakowski.
So Which is More Offensive A Painting From The Art Institute of Chicago or Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz Telling Mike Arrington to Fuck Off At a Public Tech Conference in New York City
See that photo above?
It’s by a famous artist Jules-Joseph Lefebvre and hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. It was painted in 1874. I took it last year when I visited the museum. It’s also a photo of mine that is presently being censored by Flickr. Apparently showing full frontal cock on Michelangelo’s David on Flickr’s ok, but showing the backside of a woman from a 1874 painting is not. After they censored it I sent them an email saying, “c’mon guys, really?” trying to have the censorship decision appealed. But after getting my email they told me that it needed to remain censored.
So let me ask you this. Which is more offensive, a photograph from a painting in a public all ages gallery in one of the finest cultural institutions in the world, or Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz very publicly telling Mike Arrington to “Fuck Off” at a crowded technology conference?
Another friend of mine had over 25,000 photographs of mannequins online. Flickr didn’t like that some of his mannequins apparently showed a little nipple so they just censored all 25,000 photos in his stream. Wouldn’t want anyone being offended now by seeing a little nipple on a mannequin that sits on a public street seen by thousands of people a day.
So I guess it’s ok for a CEO to say “Fuck Off,” a phrase that surely is offensive to some. But it’s not ok for users of her site to do things like say publish photographs of paintings or plastic mannequins. Personally I don’t give a fcuk if Carol says fkuc as much as she f*cking wants. But I think it’s a bit hypocritical for her to allow the censors at her Flickr site to censor things that are far less offensive. And it might be kinda nice to have the fukcin picture above uncensored, thanks.
You can watch Carol tell Mike to “fuck off” below yourself if you’d like:
Google Goes Transparent with AdSense
Back in 2005, I considered using Google’s Adsense product on my blog. I never did use it. The thing that bothered me the most about it was that it wasn’t transparent — that Google would not share with you as a content publisher what the split was. If I am going to go into business with someone, it seems crazy to be in the dark about revenue share. The “trust us, we’re being fair with you,” argument that Google seemed to represent never sat well with me.
Instead I later ended up working with John Battelle and his wonderful team over at Federated Media, a relationship that I still have today and am very happy with. They really do a first rate job managing the advertisements for my blog and they seem to get very high CPM rates at that.
That said, I was very pleased earlier today to see, in an act of transparency, that Google had finally chosen to disclose the Adsense split between publishers and Google with their primary Adsense products.
From the Google Inside Adsense Blog:
AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google’s costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.
68% seems like a very fair deal to me between publishers and Google, and so after learning this news, I’m going to add Google Adsense to my blog in addition to the ads also currently being run by Federated Media. Thanks to Google for opening up this split and making it easier for publishers like me to work with you going forward.
Now hurry up and get going with building a stock photography business for us to use with Google. The paltry 20% that we get paid out for our photos with Flickr/Getty is way too low.
So I Still Haven’t Purchased an iPad
Last night after dinner with the kids in Emeryville, we stopped by the Apple store to look at the iPads. I’ve been sort of bitter with the Apple store after a bad experience at one in Walnut Creek and hadn’t been back to one since, so I’d yet to actually touch an iPad and last night was my first time. I wrote a post a few months back on why I wasn’t so hot on the device, but actually got to hold one last night for the first time there at the store.
I only got to play with one for about five minutes because the store was closing and we were ushered out by Apple employees (the “good news” is that they are opening back up tomorrow, they told us). All of the kids and my wife got to play with one as well though, albeit briefly.
Touching one didn’t actually do much for me. I found typing on the onscreen keyboard crowded. It seemed like it would be lot more difficult for me to type on the device. I’d say after holding one I’m probably even less likely to buy one than I was before. My main reasons for not buying one would be:
1. I dont’ want to pay for another 3G account with AT&T whose super slow 3G network I’ve grown to detest. Who would win in a race between a turtle and AT&T’s 3G network? Well at least the turtle would show up to the race.
2. As a photographer, the device seems ill equipped for my photography needs. I like that I can transfer photos off my 64GB Sandisk CF card using a firewire 800 reader super fast like to my Mac Book Pro. Without a firewire 800 connection this is problematic. Also the unit doesn’t have very much storage or a powerful enough processor to run something like Adobe Lightroom. (Yes, I know that this is not what these devices are for, but photography’s a big part of my life personally speaking so it’s how I personally think, and I think a bit different than others sometimes).
3. I don’t like that I can’t get flash internet pages on the thing. I feel like I should be able to get the *entire* internet on any device I own and not be a causality in a personal pissing match between Apple and Adobe.
4. I read an article over the weekend that alleged Apple had rejected an app request for a political candidate. While I might be able to sort of look the other way as Apple censors porn on the device (not really, but just saying), reading that they’d actually censored an app over what felt like politics to me felt especially wrong. Yesterday’s TWIT episode was a good one. Cory Doctorow and Robert Scoble were on with Leo Laporte and censorship of the Apple app store was brought up on the show. Talking about the need to have apps approved by Apple individually, Cory made the statement that “”human evaluation of ‘stuff’ doesn’t scale very well.”
5. When I played with the iPad it sort of kept doing that back and forth thing between vertical and horizontal rotating of my screen that my iPhone does. It’s not that I don’t want that functionality, it’s just that I don’t want that to happen as much when I don’t mean it to happen. Not sure that makes any sense or that there is any way that Apple could design a device to do this less, but that’s just a feeling.
6. I didn’t like that it didn’t have a DVD player in it. Especially since I wouldn’t likely buy 3G service with one, I’d want to be able to watch my Netflix movies on it when I wasn’t connected to the internet and lot of my Netflix content still comes on DVD.
7. With entry level units priced at $499, I could get a full fledged MacBook for only $500 more. Seems like a better value to me and that I’d get a lot more than I do with the iPad.
8. If I bought one the kids would probably fight over it. My son Jack might also drop it from his bunk bed and break it (he dropped a laptop from his top bunk once). As it stands now they use computers mostly that are desktop units that can’t be taken into the bunk bed to drop, either that or they use our iPhones.
9. This is just a feeling, but it feels to me like Apple is innovating less. I haven’t been very impressed with the things I’ve read about the new upcoming version of the iPhone (and will probably be moving over to Android when my AT&T contract is up in July, and oh, AT&T, raising your early termination fees on your phones over the weekend doesn’t help people want to buy a new iPhone).
10. A better version of this will come out later (maybe by Apple, maybe by somebody else).
11. I don’t like seeing charges for apps show up in my emailbox that the kids buy. I don’t really think that they *need* them and the charges feel like they add up. Here was the first email that I woke up to this morning: iTunes receipt: “Item Number Description Unit Price 1 150 Awesome Sound Effects with Timer, v1.9, Seller: george hubka (4+) Write a Review Report a Problem $0.99” If we had an iPad I’m sure I’d only get more of these sorts of emails. Last night my daughter Holly asked me if she could download apps on my iPhone as long as they were free. I told her sure.
12. The little company (well not really) that used to tell people to “think differently” doesn’t quite feel like the same company these days. I remember the first time I saw the Apple “Rip, Mix, Burn” billboard back in the olden days. That somehow felt good. Apple telling me to sort of bypass Hollywood and make my own CDs. These days it feels like Steve Jobs has become “the man.” I was turned off by his “freedom from porn” comment (even if I felt it was bogus for the journalist who quoted that statement of his in a private email to do so).
Now that said, I’m just one member of my family, and the rest of the family had a completely different opinion than I did.
My nine year old son Jackson was especially *thrilled* with it. It’s like a *huge* iPad dad, he said. I “sooooooooo want one.” He spent the entire car ride home trying to get me to buy him one. Then he started strategizing about whether it was too much or not to ask his grandmother for it for Christmas (I told him it was) when he realized that I wasn’t going to cave in and buy one.
Playing (some game that he said that I don’t remember) on an iPad would be “awesome” apparently. I told Jack that it seemed a bit expensive for a device that couldn’t even play DVDs and that you for only $500 more you could get a full fledged MacBook that was a full computer, and he said, yeah, but dad, $500 more is a *lot* of money, my wife chimed in that $1,000 was way too much to pay for a laptop.
I mentioned that I didn’t like the keyboard and my wife said that she definitely did and then proceeded to complain about the sound that my typing makes in bed on my MacBook Pro at night. It’s so grating she said, it’s even worse than when you chew ice. The keyboard on the iPad would be so much quieter, she added.
So there you have it, an updated post on why I still haven’t purchased an iPad. I don’t plan on buying one anytime soon… but, the natives are definitely getting restless and my wife seeing her friend reading a book on one at my son’s baseball game on Saturday certainly doesn’t make things any easier for me.
Is Victoria Kolakowski, Candidate for Alameda County Superior Court Judge, Violating California State Law?
Last Sunday (as previously blogged) I was disappointed after having my son’s baseball game interrupted by an annoying impersonal robocall from Victoria Kolakowski’s Superior Court Judge campaign. I’ve sort of been going at it with Vicky on my blog and on her Facebook page over the past week on what I feel is unethical campaigning on her part.
Earlier today I was made aware that the robo calls that she has been making are very likely in fact illegal according to California State law (thanks to EndTheRoboCalls for the information on this illegality). Certainly someone who is currently a judge and running for another more serious judge position ought to obey California State law. Our judges are elected to know, enforce and most certainly abide by state law themselves.
To make matter worse, Kolakowski’s current position as a law judge is actually with the California PUC, the very agency that documents the illegality of the robo dials she is making.
I just fired off the following email to the three candidates currently running for Superior Court Judge in Alameda County.
Gentlemen and Vicky:
I was recently made aware that robocalls are illegal in the state of California per the California code.
Here is the relevant section of the code.
Here is a document by the California PUC documenting that robocalls by political candidates are in fact illegal according to California State law: http://goo.gl/hyWp
Here is also an article from the San Jose Mercury News discussing the illegality of these calls: http://goo.gl/Zuvi
In fact, just last week, the Santa Clara District Attorney settled for $900,000 with one such company who was illegally using robocalls.
Last Sunday I received one of these illegal calls from Victoria Kolakowski’s campaign, on a Sunday during the middle of my son’s baseball game on my cell phone at that. I have saved a recording of the call if any of you would like a copy. Vicky has acknowledged that such a call was made both on my blog as well as on her Facebook page.
Question. Why would someone running for judge violate California State law? Shouldn’t a judge, who is given tremendous legal responsibility in our society, know, abide and uphold the law?
Update: I sent off an email earlier this morning to Oakland City Attorney John Russo. City Attorney Russo was the person whose voice was used for the illegal robodial by Kolakowski’s campaign. Certainly someone who is City Attorney of Oakland and sworn to uphold the law should not be participating in this illegal activity by Kolakowski. If you’d like to hear his message you can hear it here: Illegal Robodial By Victoria Kolakowski’s Campaign
I will update this post with Russo’s position when I hear back from him.