Think of me (and this article) as a canary in a coal mine. I only hope you’ll actually notice — and then do something about it.

In the world of our Founders, freedom was a precious commodity.  In retrospect, this is actually odd.

Our Founders, after all, lived in a largely unpopulated world.  Around the time the United States came into being, the population of New York was 25,000.  Philadelphia was huge at 40,000.  Today, small towns like Hanford, California have more than those numbers.  Where I maintain my criminal defense law office in Fresno, California, we have approximately half a million people.  In 1775, the combined populations of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston and Newport (all port cities) did not equal 100,000.

So you’d think freedom would be an easy thing to come by.  If things got too bad somewhere, I’d expect you could pick up with a few of your good friends and go look for somewhere else to start a town.  Of course, you might have to contend with “the locals,” by which I mean any Native Americans who may not wish to share space with you.

And yet our Founders became more and more irritated with what, today, would be really minor intrusions into their lives.  General warrants allowed the government to pop into a house at any time to search for such things as “contraband” — products you might have forgotten to pay taxes on when you imported them — and most people didn’t care much for that.  Thus, they passed a Constitution forbidding general warrants.

Today, if an officer wants to come into your house, there are certain requirements that must be met first:

1. He must make sure you’re from a group (e.g., gang members, poor people, non-whites) whose complaints will receive little sympathy from others for illegal governmental intrusions into your home.
2. He must be willing to “testi-lie” that you gave consent for him to enter your home, or that you became hostile and attacked him, forcing him to drag you into the house and subdue you, or some other such poppycock. (“Poppycock,” I think, is our Founders polite way of saying “b.s.”)

Notwithstanding the above, the majority of us really do enjoy a form of freedom from unlawful police intrusions.  Even me, if I would quit complaining about illegal intrusions into my privacy.

The problem is that I believe so long as I’m not killing someone, beating someone, stealing from someone, or breaking some other basic and important law, I should not even have to submit to minimal intrusions.  The nation I was born into mostly believed that, too.  It used to be that until someone committed a crime, the police pretty much ignored them.

My, how times have changed.

Maybe today’s police officers are more often pulled from the ranks of ADHD-afflicted persons (though I’m glad they missed me on that one!), because when things are slow, or they’re bored, or if they just decide they don’t like something about you, you’re going to find your freedom impacted.  It might be temporary, but you will be impacted.

And when that isn’t enough, they’re going to have new ways of getting at you, because our Leaders — who have none of the positive attributes of our Founders — are busily making sure that we are all tracked, all the time.  Every aspect of our lives will be available for inspection.

At the moment, the idea is to collect information about everything you do on the Internet, from whatever device you might use to do it and from any place at which you might do it.  And the logs must be kept for at least two years for the police to review when they feel the need.  Anyone who remembers the FBI’s Carnivore should be concerned about where this could lead.  As technology improves — particularly for predictions based on data-mining — we move farther and farther away from the freedom our Founders enjoyed.

As I said, freedom is like oxygen.  But like miners ignoring the canaries in the mineshaft, by the time enough people realize what’s wrong, it will be too late.

Next up?  RFIDs for everyone!

1. I had used up most of my morning writing time on that email, including doing some “mini” research for it.
2. Even though I’m no expert, what I said might be useful on the subject of how to find followers on Twitter.

For both the above reasons, I reproduce that email, with appropriate edits and some expansion, here on Unspun™.  For those interested in Twitter, but who don’t care what I have to say on it — why are you here? — there are links at the end of the article you may find more interesting.

You definitely want to try to get past your frustration with it and learn how to use it. It’s going mainstream.

The best way to get followers is to find people you want to follow, follow them, and to start posting “tweets” of interest. Don’t be too overzealous about self-promotion on that, either. Not that I have a ton of followers, but the following ideas have worked, so far, for me.

Find People You Want to Follow

Find people you want to follow – mostly lawyers for me, which I took from this list at JDSupra. There are other lists on the Internet for photographers, artists, etc. Here’s someone you might want to follow, but he’s not following me (yet, anyway)  And another is my friend JoniMueller. She’s from Texas. Be nice to her. Both those people are pretty web-techie. I don’t know Pearson, but I’m following him because he created the Thesis theme for WordPress, which is a quite impressive theme. I’m not using it yet for any blog, but I’m considering it. Joni is great. She’s posted comments to my blog before, so you may have seen her here. She’s a legal secretary-type who blogs and builds blogs. I actually don’t know that much about what she does in the legal world, but as a blog-builder, she’s QUITE knowledgeable. She gets paid for it, too!

Follow Other Followers

Look at people who follow someone you’re already following. There’s probably a reason they’re following. Birds of a feather flock together. If you like following one person, you stand a good chance of wanting to follow the people they’re following, or who are following them. Check out the links on their pages that show who follows them/is followed by them.

Tweet Sweet

One thing I do is try to find articles not written by me that I think might interest people I want following me. Again, in my case, that’s usually legal types. So I post links to articles on or relating to law that seem interesting, at least to me. Most URLs are too long to post directly, so I first go to http://tinyurl.com/ and paste the URL into the appropriate box, get my tinyurl that way, and include that.

Retweet

I also do “retweets”. Short-code for this is “RT @someone on Something URL”. Look at samples of ones I’ve done on my twitter page. I like to spell out “Retweet” when I can, but I think “those in the know” have no problem with the short-code of “RT.”  Again, see samples.  For more on re-tweeting, just go here. Retweeting is a good thing. It shows you’re not “all about me” and it’s like praising someone — as you know, that’s always something that’s good when you want to add them to establish a relationship.

Self-Promotion

I do also announce when I’ve made a new blog post. There are people who will not follow you if this is the only kind of link you ever post, so be sure to post other articles than just the ones you write, as noted above.  Don’t forget to tinyurl when necessary.  If it won’t fit in the 140 limit without a tinyurl, then you need a tinyurl.  (And I’m not saying you should post links to my articles. But I am saying I won’t mind. )

That should be more than enough to get you started. And, as with anything, Google is your research friend. So are friends who already know, of course! But may be areas I didn’t discuss above which Google will have info on. So if you’re interested in something else, just try googling “twitter” plus whatever that something else is!

Twitter, by the way, isn’t the only thing like it out there. There are others. Although I haven’t tried any others, I did run across this video discussion of Twitter vs. Pownce.

I’m no expert, by far, on Twitter, but I hope this helps!

More on Finding Followers

• How to Get More Twitter Followers: Some Methods That Work (doshdosh.com)
• How to Gain Followers on Twitter (flyteblog.com)
• Social Media: Building Brand and Followers on Twitter (ezinearticles.com)
• Okay, this one is just funny: How To Get More Followers On Twitter If You’re A Girl And Aren’t All That Interesting (seo-chicks.com)

Benefits of Twitter

• Welcome to my Twitter page (blogforprofit.com).
• 9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers (problogger.net)
• Ten Must Have Twitter Tools for the Blogger (blogforprofit.com)
• Three Ways to Learn from Twitter (Anjuan Simmons at transmyth.com)

Twitter for Photographers

• Twitter for Photographers: Part 1 (The BUI Brothers)
• 20 Photography Tips from Our Twitter Followers (dPS digital Photography School)
• Twitter: The new media photographer’s scanner (New Media Photographer)

The Vaio I purchased is the VGN SZ460N. It’s a very pretty computer; even prettier than the VGN SZ140P I owned for just over a year prior to being forced into this purchase. And I really loved the SZ140P. So when it unexpected died one day last week, I was quite distressed.

My distress wasn’t helped by the fact that I was in the middle of several significant court cases. (I’m an attorney.) And I was approximately one week out from speaking as on gang defense to a large group of attorneys.

Once I realized there was no hope of resurrecting the old Vaio, I immediately turned to thinking of a replacement. Several people tried talking me into other models, such as HP. How I wish I’d listened!

Instead, I considered the fact that I had two power supplies for the SZ140P, two docking stations and that I’d just spent all this money on that system barely over a year previously.

Well, even though it was an emergency situation, I probably should have researched a little further. I bought the SZ460N even though it came with Windows Vista Business, thinking that if I didn’t like it, I’d just install Windows XP Professional.

No such luck. Sony states that they refuse to support Windows XP on the SZ460N, and from what I can tell searching the Internet, it’s quite difficult to install a working version of XP even if you decide “to hell with what the Sony support people say.” Well, I have a response for Sony.

This is my last Vaio. I love the form factor. I love the way it handled XP on my last one. I hate that Sony insists you can only use Vista on new laptops. I tried talking to their support and they said they will not support anything less than Vista. Period. End of story. I told them I’d probably never buy another Vaio and you probably know the response by now: “Well, that’s up to you, sir.” In other words, “Go fuck yourself. We don’t need your business.”

If Sony doesn’t want to satisfy the needs of its loyal customers anymore, then only a fool would remain a loyal customer of Sony.

According to a story on CNN, scientists have apparently been working on a new “tongue port” to the brain.

For those who don’t know, “port” is a fairly common computer term for a connection point whereby information can be passed into a computer. Laptops, for example, like the one I’m typing on right now, come with USB ports, Firewire ports and others.

The “brain port” was actually pioneered 30 years ago by a neuroscientist who discovered that the tongue was a great transmitter of messages to the brain. By connecting a device to the tongue, signals of various sorts, including sonar, apparently, can be “transmitted” to the brain. In reality, it sounds a lot to me like the information is simply transformed into some sort of electrical impulse that stimulates the tongue. One guinea pig described it as feeling like “Pop Rocks” candies.

Nevertheless, it’s an interesting development. It has already been used to help blind people better navigate their world — and even play catch!

On the downside, the device allows mothers to finally, really, have eyes in the back of their heads.

The obvious ones jumped out, but we were too distracted to note some of the more subtle contraventions to the American Bar Association Model Rules or California Rules of Professional Conduct.

You see, the movie starts out with Paul Newman playing a pinball machine…

…a real pinball machine.

The setting for this movie is somewhere around 25 years ago, approximately 1980. Newman is an attorney who appears to be very much on the skids. He’s a drunken ambulance chaser. One of the first ethical violations slaps you in the face as he goes through the obituaries, deciding which “cases” look best. He then goes to the funeral homes, going through the lines of those offering their condolences. He offers his condolences in the form of his business card and the words, “I was a friend of your father,” or whatever else seems — dare I say it? — “appropriate.”

Right now, I couldn’t catalog for you too many more of the transgressions because we were quickly caught up with other concerns.

For example, at one point in the movie, the phone starts ringing and my wife says, “The phone sounds funny!”

Why? “The ringer is a real bell,” I noted. That phone must’ve rung about 30 times, too, before the caller finally hung up. Why didn’t they just leave a voicemail?

As Homer would say — or I should say, “would say now,” since I’m fairly certain cartoon shows for adults were not standard fare in 1980, either — “D’oh!”

Notable also were such things as offices without computers. Not like today, where you still find an occasional office without a computer. In the movie, there are no offices with computers. Hmmm…come to think of it, there weren’t any computers anywhere in the movie….

D’oh!

And if I’d just trusted my gut, it never would have happened.

Late last night, when all I wanted to do was go to bed — but as I was also concerned about not having posted anything to the blog that day — I put up a picture I’d received via email. At the time, I thought the pic “looked funny” because there were tons of dials on the computer. “Why would a computer have dials?” I wondered. The printer didn’t seem to quite fit, either. And somewhere, in the back of my brain, was this other nagging thought: “Weren’t they predicting really amazing things for the year 2000 back in the 1950s and 1960s?”

Bob Marcotte came out of tendonitis-recovery-retirement to point out the hoax was a hoax.

The irony of this is that I’d spent about an hour or so yesterday morning (while looking for vegetarian cookbooks, actually) poring over a book called “When Pancakes Go Bad.” The book shows how to make realistic-appearing fake pictures of such things as cell phones with rotary dials and pancakes with evil fang-filled drooling mouths. Creating fakes is one of my (few) hobbies.

Well, I got bit. But it wasn’t by a pancake.

The caption of this photo, which was apparently published in the 1954 edition of Popular Mechanics, reads:

Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.

The sad part was the realization that if our science-loving President had been elected fifty years earlier, Popular Mechanics might not have gotten it wrong.