PIP is Verisign’s offer of OpenID, password vaulting, secure cloud storage, and web PIM.

OpenID is, at its core, the promise of one-click sign on. Yahoo, Google, ClaimID and others provide OpenID support for your accounts there, but Verisign’s PIP has the added benefit of the dual-factor authentication provided by the VIP application. More and more sites are beginning to support OpenID standards (recently Facebook provided the option). If you use PIP+VIP to secure your OpenID, the native account info for the site can be locked down tight. Once I got Facebook working with my PIP, I changed my native Facebook account password to a random 64-character password.

Besides OpenID, PIP also provides a single-signon interface to a bunch of popular sites (Netflix, Amazon, Google, etc.) by vaulting your passwords. Again, if you secure these native accounts, your PIP+VIP brings an extra layer of security to your online accounts, trivial or significant. You may already have desktop software for this (1Password, for instance). One-click signon works via a bookmarklet and seems convenient.

As a personal identity management site, PIP allows you to share as little or as much information about yourself, your interests, and your online presences as you wish at your PIP URL (the pip.verisignlabs.com address that is also your OpenID). Nothing groundbreaking here, but all the links you add appear in a CoverFlowesque interface.

Finally, PIP provides 2GB of cloud storage they call File Vault. Everyone’s handing out 2GB of cloud storage these days (my favorite: Dropbox). File Vault is the only PIP service that requires the use of a dual-factor credential (e.g., VIP). The FAQ doesn’t detail the security involved, but launching the applet involves a cool graphic of a giant vault door unlocking for you, so it must be secure. Verisign’s got a good track record, but that’s according to them. I don’t really believe that the Maytag repairman is that underemployed, and I’m not ready to store my birth certificate in an online vault just yet.

Verisign used to hand out marginally-useful personal email certificates so you could sign/encrypt your messages (provided you use an S/MIME email client like Outlook) that didn’t even have your real name on them, so this is a big step in the right direction. There’s a lot of useful services under this PIP umbrella, and it’s all free. Even if you end up just using the VIP application on the iPhone to sign into Paypal and Ebay, give it a look. You can find me at tcjennings.pip.verisignlabs.com. Or right here, if you prefer.

I use Disqus on my Tumblr site; Tumblr doesn’t include commenting on its own and adding Disqus is as simple as pasting in some code to the Tumblr customization widget. Google Friend Connect provides comments (seen here in lieu of the Wordpress commenting system) but requires a couple html pages added to the root of the site — not something one can easily do on Tumblr though Google’s own Blogger can use GFC.

I note that commenters can authenticate via Google or OpenID authentication, among a couple others. That’s handy.

Distraction

1. Reading it I pictured Nathan Patrelli from Heroes in the role of Oscar.

2. Throughout, when they referred to Oscar’s “personal background problem” it put me in mind of Michael Palin in Time Bandits, tied to a tree and fretting that “The Problem!” would manifest.

3. Whenever I hear reference to the Golden Age of science fiction when it was all about the ideas, not the writing, I think of this book.

Compiled a poetry book to give CreateSpace a look-see. Been curious about print-on-demand for a while now. For a long while; years ago when the first outfits were popping up. XLibris is one of the earliest ones I can remember, because Piers Anthony was an investor and he used it to get some of his older books back in print. But he’s Piers Anthony, so I’m not at all likely to read them anyway.

CreateSpace seemed to offer a great package: for no money at all you can set up a book, get an ISBN, perfect-binding, full-color cover, the works. It doesn’t get any better than that! Other joints have set-up fees or ISBN fees or whatever. With CreateSpace you upload your print-ready files and you’re ready to rock with $0 investment.

This assumes, of course, that you are capable of producing print-ready files. I used QuarkXPress 8 to do my poetry book, and they provide templates to use for designing the cover, which I did in Photoshop. Apple’s Pages is capable of some pretty heavy-duty layout tasks, too, and it could have worked. Really, Quark was the fastest and easiest tool for the job. I was amazed how intuitive the workflow was, and how useful my wife’s InDesign books were in filling in the gaps.

My only complaint is that when ordering a proof copy they charge you a ridiculous shipping fee. And if you make any corrections, that requires another proof order and another ridiculous fee. Once the book gets populated in the Amazon store, though, it’s eligible for their shipping programs like Super Saver or Prime. Unfortunately they take a larger commission when they sell your book through Amazon versus when they sell your book through the ugly CreateSpace e-store.

The proof copies I got were a little munched up, and I’m still waiting for the “real” copies I ordered to show up. Hopefully they won’t be as beat up.

And I spent a long time a few nights ago trying to figure out why I couldn’t hear the guitar solo during The Pixies’ “Hey”. I’m just that stupid. Today I was trying some pan effects that weren’t working, which led me under the desk to discover the problem.

Now I’m back from the purgatory of false mono and firmly back on terra stereo. That’s a really good guitar solo, Joey Santiago. Glad I can hear it now.

The scavenger hunt was a thick sheaf of stapled pages, each full of obscure trivia to uncover. These were not straightforward questions. Often the question itself would be hidden behind some puzzle, a pictogram or a cryptogram. Holcomb liked the telephone cipher, and I remember several of the scavenger hunt hints obfuscated that way. The telephone cipher is the replacement of letters by the telephone keypad number on which that letter appears, e.g., “the” becomes “783″ and “book” becomes “2665″. Finding the question was sometimes harder than finding the answer.

The trivia ranged from finding the name of a biker gang in an obscure old movie to deciphering the latin phrase that appears in the MGM logo. In 1993, the days before Yahoo or Google, we didn’t have the Internet to turn to. Today Holcomb’s Scavenger Hunt would be no better than a short course in search engines.

Had to drive an hour away to find a video store that rented the 1954 film “The Wild One” but today it takes only seconds on IMDB to find that the name of the rival gang in that picture was “The Beetles”.

Since only one pair — one team — could win the Hunt, collusion was nearly nonexistent. I engaged in some disinformation when other teams would ask for an answer they knew I had. The winning team would be decided by a raw tally of correct answers, found clues, solved puzzles. Some were so easy everyone got them, others fiendishly difficult. It was these tough ones you’d hold onto. I fed lies to rivals; incorrect answers. There was a lot at stake: for some students a full letter grade bump in English could mean the difference between graduation and summer school. Not me, but my partner was in that boat. I couldn’t let her down. Even so, Binoy Patel managed to steal my notes at least once, probably scored himself a few good answers, but in the end it didn’t help him win. (Binoy was a smart guy; I have no doubt that he’s excelled regardless of the outcome of Holcomb’s exercise.)

As much as I love the ready information the net provides — Google and Askville and Mahalo and Yahoo — I’m glad I was able to enjoy an analog offline information search like Holcomb’s scavenger hunt.

Holcomb was a hard teacher. Not in the sense that he challenged his students, but in the sense that he actively put up roadblocks to stop them from excelling. He was the guy who’d draw a line in ink down the left margin of your term paper and subtract points if any line of type didn’t adhere to his one-inch-margin style guide. I don’t think anyone was lining up margins by hand with a typewriter; even as early as 1993 we had an inkjet printer on the 386 and I think all the kids in AP English had access to similar stuff. Holcomb’s pedantic alignment test was just a holdover from tougher times.

The nearby Salinas River flooded Holcomb’s house that year and our term papers were destroyed. The yearbook features pictures of students who hated the man hauling mud out of his family room. My yearbook also features half-angry notes from students I’d screwed over in order to secure the winning position in the scavenger hunt. We either won or tied for first place, but whatever the case we got the grade bump.

The “Theatre District” in San Francisco isn’t really called that except with irony. The truth is that it’s nestled uncomfortably between the posh Union Square and the seedy Tenderloin. Outside the theater, tickets in hand, you could walk down Geary street in either direction: one leads to galleries and light and retail, the other to what most guidebooks call the worst neighborhood in San Francisco.

Guess which direction I went?

It was me and Robert Krufal. We found a record store and I bought a copy of Faith No More’s The Real Thing on cassette tape. Dressed in theater finery, at least what passed for theater finery. Black slacks, Docker-type. Button-up shirt. Not t-shirt, not jeans. Must have taken a wrong turn on the way out, because it was quickly clear that we weren’t going where everyone else was heading.

It wasn’t dark yet, but getting there. Got hassled walking past a local kid, asked us for change or money. Ignored him, kept going, but decided we’d be better off going in the other direction. Had to walk by again, and again he asked, commented on our clothes. Ignored him again, walked by. Kid started following us, a friend of his, maybe an older brother, comes out of nowhere to join him. Taunts. “Why can’t you give me no money? Dressed like that, got no money? Bullshit.”

The Tenderloin is where noir goes when it wants to get good and scared after dark. Nah, that’s probably overstating it a little bit. But it is a working-class neighborhood dropped in the middle of San Francisco, between the stately civic center and the inspiring financial district, between the bustling Market street and the eccentric Chinatown. It’s just there, and people get mugged there and shot there and people buy sex and drugs there, and nobody wants to be there. Lower Nob Hill is a euphemism for the Tenderloin because otherwise it doesn’t look good in real estate ads. No-one wants to be there, but some people have to.

Robert and I don’t, and we’re doing our best to fix the problem. The kids don’t follow far. But for two kids from shitsplat farming towns in the Salinas Valley, big-city hoodlums are a different beast. Union Square is a bright shining comfortable place, and we laugh it off as though we’ve had an adventure.

That kid, though. He had to go home at some point. And it wasn’t an adventure. I bet it wasn’t at all.

I played with it in low light, and most of me must look a lot like the couch and the wall. Even the pupils of my eyes were knocked out, and through them you could see beyond to the roller coaster track. Most of my face was a Paris mask; a Phantom with an Eiffel Tower on his cheek.

memory bandwidth 2094/2093

dvd-rom index 2578

cpu arithmetic dry 4288 wet 1153/2696

cpu multimedia int 8782 fp 10686

61 db

Global warming contrarians, goaded by the puckish jockeys of the media slapping the sweaty flanks of Rush Limbaugh, are on cloud nine reading the recent study in Nature that suggests that global warming is going to “take a break” for a couple of decades. But these people also think global warming stopped in 1998 and that an insignificant adjustment of US temperature data means 1934 is the warmest year on record and that, thus, global warming is hooey. Which is to say contrarians are not very good at reading past their own biases.

But a study in Nature could be the real deal. The guys at RealClimate (nor William Connolley at Stoat) don’t think the forecast holds water and are actually putting money on it — thousands of pounds sterling. That’s a lot of money in 1970s dollars — and today’s.

Regardless, nothing here suggests that long-term anthropogenic global warming is not occurring or will not occur. A brief respite might be statistically expected, but as with brief amplifications like 1998’s ENSO, it will come, if it comes, and go, leaving us with a slow ramp up to the top, and from what I can tell, the view’s not going to be something to write home about.

To commemorate, I’ve posted an article I wrote last year and never published. You can find it over on the left under “Articles.”