dabitch.net

Atlanta - Little five point / The Vortex

dabitch — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:59:01 +0000

I've had a thing about Atlanta for quite a while now, surfing every site about the place to figure out how it might be to live there, and as luck has it I know Brandon one of the School of Humans founders, his missus Trudy and their adorable baby girl @carysbarr who treated me to lunch in little five point during my long Atlanta layover. The hood was exactly as I had pictured it, but with better vintage stores (I almost scored an Elvira-dress, the only thing that stopped me was my sensible side knowing that I seldom get to prance around all decked out in rhinestone-covered gala dresses), and now I'm totally sold on the place and want to live there. I even got to peek at Brandon's house which is adorable and has a pink flamingo in the garden, how awesome is that? Now that Perle has learned to eat american food (on our Boston trip she basically survived on fruit alone), even she agrees: "Lets move here, it's summer all the time!"

I wish I had stayed longer actually, the south has a special place in my heart and Georgia works for me.

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Femme Fatale

dabitch — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:17:39 +0000

I fell abruptly in love with Yelle yesterday and had this itch to make a playlist called Femme Fatale, filled with french accents and women, or preferably a combination of both. If you fancy some grr-gals with those sexy R's in your ears, go ahead and play.

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Ma Bell grooves.

dabitch — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 19:33:32 +0000

Because Sundays are for cleaning, and then watching the turtle enjoy a fresh tank.

Music we were playing (but the mike was incorrectly configured I realize now) turn it on.

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Gowalla-Flashmob - I just went around the world to propose to Terri Carlson.

dabitch — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:00:10 +0000

This lady on the left just received a digital proposal from me.

Wth? Yes, I'm straight, but Terri Carlson says she will marry for health insurance, which might seem like pretty drastic measures, but as she explains it's her only option. We got that over here in Sweden you know!

To draw a little attention to her, me and a few partners in GPS-crime dashed around the world in my superfast sonic boom airplane. *ahem* We checked in at Treriksröset - the border between Finland, Sweden and Norway declaring that we were on our way to Terri Carlson. A hop and a skip later, we checked into the San Diego Post Office and that's where I proposed.

A skip and a bop after that we all appeared at the Senate urging them to help. They are the ones in power after all.

Finally we ended our trip at Big Ben declaring it's time to help Terri Carlson.

All in all, a nice little tour.

See also Jonk the pirate boys notes on Gowalla Flashmob and Gowalla Flashmob posted by John Ankarström, and Flashmob i Gowalla posted by Nikkelin (if you read Swedish). See also Artoo "I'm a hacker" (Swedish)

Update! Terri likes us! also noted by Jonk the pirate boy

I just read your article. I LOVED it!! You guys are the best. My family was from Sweden. I am 100% Swed but was born and now stuck in hell in the US.
It warms my heart that all of you took time out of your lifes to think about me. I really cant thank you enough. The US send billions to Haiti to provide medical care to them while there own tax paying people suffer and die. Its shameful!
I needed to let you know how much your support means to me.
Blessings to you all! Terri

Aw. That was fun.
Terri has also posted this link on her In the news page.

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No, there are no proxies involved in "hacking" gowalla

dabitch — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:50:27 +0000

Why I'm pretty sure my little fly around the world stunt will get me banned is shown in the GetSatifaction forums here, where people are upset about folk who check in where they are not (some even dislike "drive-by check-ins) :Very VERY questionable check-ins and further down in the thread you'll find this:

Wrong. Proxies are not involved in this little hack, not at all. M-gowalla is. If anyone at Gowalla wants the step by step instructions (though I'm sure you already know since you seem well aware of the m-gowalla hole), just contact me via this form.

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Confessions of a Gowalla "hacker"

dabitch — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:04:07 +0000

As you know, it all started because of that "pleaserobme" page. I Dashed around 4square to prove a point, and then did the same excersize in Gowalla (which I play), to not play favorites with either service. Both have the same hole, and you might blame it on Android phones, or whatever phone is the reason the m.-versions of their pages exist. (Clue alert: that is the biggest and only clue I will give on how I did this. It's already mentioned numerous times around the getsatifaction gowalla topics, so it's not an unknown glitch, but I won't spell it out further.)

On a dare my gowallaing pal I normally swap rare items with, said "Found the oval office!", and I did, which will likely get the attention of Gowalla, or at least other users who will be miffed that someone founded a spot where they were not. I get that and if the spot is erased, well, that would just make sense. It's likely that I'll be banned as a Gowalla user as well.

I knew it would get out of hand when I started. When I first looked at what trips could be done in Gowalla, and what pins you earn, I saw these... And the Hacker pin which instanty became the only pin I ever wanted. That hacker pin has been an itch needing to be scratched ever since. Looking at the featured trips that one gets pins for completing, I saw "Honky tonk crawl" in Nashville and similar US-centric trips. These are great suggestions of course, and I'd be thrilled to do a Frank Lloyd Wright tour one of these days, but I couldn't understand why one didn't see featured trips based on ones geographical location, like: "Hey I'm in Amsterdam now, is there a museum crawl I should do?", and why would a bunch of pins that people collect only be reserved for those who are on the North American continent?
I've spoken about Gowallas possibilities with many friends, how one should be able to create (or rather buy as income for gowalla) special icons given when you check in at places. My friend suggests that cafe's should be able to drop discount-pins in your pack when you check in there, which you could trade for real food. How I would love to grant little rainbow-colored TV-sets to anyone who checks in more than 5 times in any given ad or digital agency around the world, for example. The possibilities are endless. Perhaps the Turning torso here in Malmö would become a featured spot one of these days, so us stuck in Öresund have a chance in getting one of those "featured" stamps, apart from at the central station.

I shrugged the suggested trips off as "Impossible pins", and I made statues, as soon as I saw one. I have a thing for statues and famous buildings and tried creating spots with as much information as possible about the ones that I have visited. Some became popular.

I figured that soon we would be able to make trips, and sure enough as soon as that feature rolled out, I made a statue trip in Malmö (that I even I haven't completed yet).

Of course, this trip only shows up to my friends, making it fairly useless as the tourist-reccomendation I meant it to be.

But that "hacker pin" itch was never satisfied. How does one get this? You check in at 25 tech startups for the hacker pin, that's the only information you'll get in getsatifactions forums. It's possible to do this in San Francisco alone. What startups count toward the pin isn't listed anywhere, so if I were to fly to San Fran for a week, I could not dash out to complete this quest while there because there is no list to follow.
So while I was flying around the world like Dakini, reshuffling items for fun (removing all the boring luggage tags and candy bars from the white house and throwing a slew of exotic formerly Swedish rare items in their place, then dropping "White House" marked candies all over the states... for example.), I figured I should get the hacker pin. The only pin I really cared about. Now I've been around San Fran, Palo Alto and Mountain view way too many times, and have not reached hacker status, though I have checked in to more than 50 startups, both the ones with special badges and the ones without. Now I'm bored, and will stop. My point about the Pleaserobme site is made, and I hope I've made a point about the silly of having special pins given for US-only type trips when you offer a worldwide toy.

p.s. I will admit faking being in the same café as @morpac was effing hilarious, I laughed for a good 20 minutes.

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Bored with geotagging now... Kinda.

dabitch — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:15:21 +0000

What should I found next?

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We have detected your speed as 1.5x the speed of light. Please contact your local physics department.

dabitch — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:55:32 +0000

Pretty much as soon as pleaserobme.com appeared it was tweeted around like wildfire (and blogged a lot) by everyone who saw it and, apparently, had never thought of this angle before. Announcing that you're not at home might be as effective of an invitation to house-robbery as having teenagers brag about their planned vacation in Thailand. That is if you leave your home announcing it by checking in at airports and presumably live alone, with your house unguarded.
The other worry about these "stalker helper" programs is of course that it announces where you are to anyone who might want to follow you around (I've been trying to freak people out by gowallastalking them, but so far only sofoe seemed to notice that I wasn't in the venue at the time. Well done sistah!)

So, just to show that these programs can give you equally false alibis of location as truthful ones, I decided to do a very quick world tour in 4square, each check-in appearing on "pleaserobme" and even prompting the pleaserobme tweeter to send a note of concern about me announcing my supposed whereabouts. I checked in at the university in Paris, the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, at Microsoft, Cape Town, on a wee road in Barrow, Alaska, at the Soup Stock in Tokyo, Japan, at 7-eleven in Bangkok, Thailand, a pub in Singapore, Radiotjänst, Kiruna, Noah's bagels in San Francisco, a couch in Portland, Oregon in quick succession. Boyah.

In 4square right now I'm in Ushuaia, Argentina. My cat knows this is not true.

Update, did a little country-hopping in Gowalla too, so that they don't feel left out. Images after the jump.

4Square tour

Gowalla tour

Created this spot when I got a little lost.

Further fun on the same topic

Bored with geotagging now... Kinda.
Confessions of a Gowalla "hacker"
No, there are no proxies involved in "hacking" gowalla

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Augmented Reality T-Shirt plays Rock Paper Scissors

dabitch — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:41:11 +0000

Wanna play "rock, paper scissors" with your own T-shirt? This idea from T-post, which I wrote about in Print magazines are dead, long live the T-shirt magazine T-post on adland last year now have an Augmented Reality T-shirt out. Nuts.

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Polis pallar inte att man tar bilder, skriker: OFREDANDE!

dabitch — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 11:08:39 +0000

Gå omedelbums till Tuggarna och läs hela posten. Lyssna sedan på videon:

Den första polisen förklarar att om bilderna kommer upp ut på Internet så är det ett brott mot PUL. Jag svarar med att de antagligen kommer publiceras i min nättidning som har en ansvarig utgivare och inte går under PUL. Och efter 5-10 minuter av tjafsande om huruvida jag är hög som ett hus, kommer ta bort bilderna ur kameramobilen och i framtiden borde passa mig för att inte fota "fel personer" så erbjuds jag två alternativ.
Antingen griper de mig och kör mig till häktet för drogtest och blir sedan anmäld för ofredande. Eller så tar jag bort bilderna ur mobilen och är plötsligt inte längre misstänkt för något brott alls. Eftersom jag misstänker att jag inte kommer få återförenas med en hel mobil efter en kväll i häktet och dessutom hellre spenderar kvällen hemma framför två stora högar med jobbpapper så går jag med på att radera bilderna. Under polisernas uppsikt raderar jag de tre bilderna en efter en och får sedan tillbaka alla mina tillhörigheter och är en fri man.
Här kunde historien vara slut. Om det inte var så att jag var en sådan där jobbig glasögonorm som aldrig ger sig...

Polis: Du uppträder lite nervöst, skall du följa med på ett litet urinprov. Är du inte lite muntorr?
Jesper: Lägg av, jag har druckit kaffe hela dan.

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The Great Writ | MetaFilter [del.icio.us]

dabitch — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 05:53:26 PDT

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