Archive for category Uncategorized

Do you have a pile of old photos tucked away in a box somewhere? Those photos can easily be organized and published into a book using online resources. It’s faster and easier than traditional scrapbooking!

At the technology workshop coming up in 2 weeks, you’ll learn just how to organize and arrange these photos for a photo book.

Here’s the rundown:

1) Ways to get your photos scanned to a digital format. (This can be time-consuming so I will offer a demonstration)

2) Basic photo editing.

3) Online resources for book layout and publishing.

RSVP at the Meetup site!

I’ve seen a lot of presentations in my days – some good, some bad and lots somewhere in between.

The better presentations have been able to support the presenter’s message simply and attractively without being a distraction. The worst have included dancing Jesus animations, poorly contrasted backgrounds and a messy conglomeration of words and colors.

Most people who make presentations use software like Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple’s Keynote or OpenOffice.org’s Impress to put together their presentations. Those who are dedicated to working online may even use Google Docs to create a presentation.

Through Lifehacker, I learned about Prezi, a presentation tool that makes it easy to create simple, animated presentations that are quite impressive. There’s a showcase of some of the better Prezi’s here.

A Prezi account is free for the basic account, but there are upgrade subscriptions available at a reasonable cost. The breakdown of their subscription levels is here.

The Prezi Tutorial is worth the 3 minutes it takes to watch, as making a presentation with Prezi is different from nearly any other presentation software. There are more advanced lessons available, too. This isn’t to say Prezi isn’t intuitive. After watching the video, I was able to create a basic presentation in about 5 minutes.

Go ahead, take a look at Prezi.com, sign up for a free account and watch the tutorial. There are few other tools out there that make it this easy to create such an impressive presentation.

Photo: Joe Pugliese

Shedding Your Identity in the Digital Age

Stories From the Hunt

Evan’s Daily Costume Change

Media, From TV to Mags to Blogs, Followed the Hunt

Social Networking Sites at Center of Coast-to-Coast Coordinated Search

Wired Tests Writer With a Series of Bold Challenges

1
August 13, 6:40 PM: I’m driving East out of San Francisco on I-80, fleeing my life under the cover of dusk. Having come to the interstate by a circuitous route, full of quick turns and double backs, I’m reasonably sure that no one is following me. I keep checking the rearview mirror anyway. From this point on, there’s no such thing as sure. Being too sure will get me caught.

I had intended to flee in broad daylight, but when you are going on the lam, there are a surprising number of last-minute errands to run. This morning, I picked up a set of professionally designed business cards for my fake company under my fake name, James Donald Gatz. I drove to a Best Buy, where I bought two prepaid cell phones with cash and then put a USB cord on my credit card — an arbitrary dollar amount I hoped would confuse investigators, who would scan my bill and wonder what gadgetry I had purchased. An oil change for my car was another head fake. Who would think that a guy about to sell his car would spend $60 at Oil Can Henry’s?

I already owned a couple of prepaid phones; I left one of the new ones with my girlfriend and mailed the other to my parents — giving them an untraceable way to contact me in emergencies. I bought some Just for Men beard-and-mustache dye at a drugstore. My final stop was the bank, to draw a $477 cashier’s check. It’s payment for rent on an anonymous office in Las Vegas, which is where I need to deliver the check by midday tomorrow.

Crossing the Bay Bridge, I glance back for a last nostalgic glimpse of the skyline. Then I reach over, slide the back cover off my cell phone, and pop out the battery. A cell phone with a battery inside is a cell phone that’s trackable.

Whiskey Pete’s in Primm, Nevada.

About 25 minutes later, as the California Department of Transportation database will record, my green 1999 Honda Civic, California plates 4MUN509, passes through the tollbooth on the far side of the Carquinez Bridge, setting off the FasTrak toll device, and continues east toward Lake Tahoe.

What the digital trail will not reflect is that a few miles past the bridge I pull off the road, detach the FasTrak, and stuff it into the duffle bag in my trunk, where its signal can’t be detected. Nor will it note that I then double back on rural roads to I-5 and drive south through the night, cutting east at Bakersfield. There will be no digital record that at 4 am I hit Primm, Nevada, a sad little gambling town about 40 minutes from Vegas, where $15 cash gets me a room with a view of a gravel pile.

2
“Author Evan Ratliff Is on the Lam. Locate Him and Win $5,000.”
— wired.com/vanish, August 14, 2009 5:38 pm

Officially it will be another 24 hours before the manhunt begins. That’s when Wired’s announcement of my disappearance will be posted online. It coincides with the arrival on newsstands of the September issue of the magazine, which contains a page of mugshot-like photos of me, eyes slightly vacant. The premise is simple: I will try to vanish for a month and start over under a new identity. Wired readers, or whoever else happens upon the chase, will try to find me.

The idea for the contest started with a series of questions, foremost among them: How hard is it to vanish in the digital age? Long fascinated by stories of faked deaths, sudden disappearances, and cat-and-mouse games between investigators and fugitives, I signed on to write a story for Wired about people who’ve tried to end one life and start another. People fret about privacy, but what are the consequences of giving it all up, I wondered. What can investigators glean from all the digital fingerprints we leave behind? You can be anybody you want online, sure, but can you reinvent yourself in real life?

It’s one thing to report on the phenomenon of people disappearing. But to really understand it, I figured that I had to try it myself. So I decided to vanish. I would leave behind my loved ones, my home, and my name. I wasn’t going off the grid, dropping out to live in a cabin. Rather, I would actually try to drop my life and pick up another.

Wired offered a $5,000 bounty — $3,000 of which would come out of my own pocket — to anyone who could locate me between August 15 and September 15, say the password “fluke,” and take my picture. Nicholas Thompson, my editor, would have complete access to information that a private investigator hired to find me might uncover: my real bank accounts, credit cards, phone records, social networking accounts, and email. I’d give Thompson my friends’ contact information so he could conduct interviews. He would parcel out my personal details online, available to whichever amateur or professional investigators chose to hunt for me. To add a layer of intrigue, Wired hired the puzzle creators at Lone Shark Games to help structure the contest.

Evan carried glasses and hats for his disguises, prepaid cell phones, and gift cards.

I began my planning months in advance. I let my hair and beard grow out, got a motorcycle license, and siphoned off extra cash whenever I visited an ATM, storing it in a hollowed-out book. One day over lunch, a friend from Google suggested software to hide my Internet address — “but all of these things can be broken,” he warned — and how best to employ prepaid phones. I learned how to use Visa and American Express gift cards, bought with cash, to make untraceable purchases online. I installed software to mask my Web searches and generated a small notebook’s worth of fake email addresses.

I shared my plans with no one, not my girlfriend, not my parents, not my closest friends. Nobody knew the route I was taking out of town, where I was going, or my new name. Not even a hint. If I got caught, it would be by my own mistakes.

Friday afternoon, August 14, I arrive in Vegas wearing a suit and sporting my normal brown hair, a beard, and a pair of rectangular tortoiseshell glasses. Carrying enough electronic equipment to stock a RadioShack, I drive straight to a dreary two-story office complex among the strip malls on South Pecos Road and hand over the cashier’s check, securing a tiny windowless office. There I set up two laptops, flip on a webcam to track any activity in the office, and leave.

Evan’s office on South Pecos Road in Las Vegas.

At CarMax, a used-auto outlet, I then sell my Civic for $3,000. The next day, the first official one of my disappearance, is spent dyeing my hair and goatee jet-black and locking down the security on my laptops — including a third one that I’ll carry with me.

At 5 am on Sunday morning, the graveyard shift clerk at the Tropicana hotel hands over my $100 cash deposit, barely looking up. If she had, she might have noticed that the man checking out of room 480 — wearing a pair of oversize Harry Potter-style glasses, hazel-colored contact lenses, slicked-back hair, and a belt with $2,000 cash hidden in an underside pocket — bears surprisingly little resemblance to the one who checked in two days before.

Photo: Joe Pugliese

3
wayale Found #vanish SF apt (http://bit .ly/6yvkR), talked to lady upstairs said he moved to NY. He can’t be in NY apt, according to @wired. 8:27 pm aug 17th
moshi77 #vanish Evan bought swim trunks for $78, + UPS of $12. 8/10/09 they had a sale on them at gilt.com 8:10 pm Aug 19th
Xov0x another address: 166 GERMANIA ST SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94117 middle name Donald? #vanish 8:27 pm Aug 19th

When Sarah Manello heard from a friend about the search for Ratliff, she couldn’t resist. A researcher based in Rochester, New York, Manello had long worked with private investigators, digging up information for defense attorneys and tracking down missing people. She quit a few years ago after growing increasingly dissatisfied with the industry’s tactics. But her skills remained intact. The initial question she posted on Twitter, under the handle @menacingpickle, was private investigation 101: What was Ratliff’s middle name?

The first trickle of discussion among Manello and other hunters appeared by the morning of August 16, 36 hours after news of the hunt was posted on Wired .com. The next day it had grown into a deluge. On Twitter, anonymous users dedicated to Ratliff’s pursuit sprouted by the hour: @VanishingAct01, @FindEvanRatliff, @EvanOffGrid, @FinderofEvan, @FindThatMan, among others. They organized around the Twitter tag #vanish, which, when placed in a post, allowed the growing horde of investigators to exchange theories, clues, and questions. They created Web sites and blogs and flyers and even a telephone tip line. A programmer in St. Louis, Michael Toecker, started a Facebook group called “The Search for Evan Ratliff.” A week later it would have nearly a thousand members. (A countergroup designed to help Ratliff, founded by a banker in Cincinnati named Rich Reder, garnered a few dozen.)

What drew all these people? Some of them were lured by the $5,000 bounty. Others were intrigued by the technical challenges of online tracking or the thrill of stakeouts. Some felt that a public dare needed to be answered. For many, Ratliff’s flight evoked their own fleeting thoughts of starting over. “It was an adventure,” says Matty Gilreath, a grant manager at UC San Francisco, referring to the dozens of hours he spent on the pursuit. “I’m grateful for my career. But there are other things I’d like to do, and this brought up a lot of issues about reinventing yourself.”

From the Wired offices, Thompson began doling out information from Ratliff’s accounts onto a blog — starting with the final credit card purchases and the FasTrak data. The would-be hunters dissected it as quickly as Thompson could post it. Using two FedEx tracking numbers from Ratliff’s credit card bill, Manello managed, in a few aboveboard telephone calls, to find out where the packages had gone and who had signed for them. Hunters scoured the pictures on Ratliff’s Flickr page, writing software code to extract information about the camera used and search for other photos it had taken. They combined the FasTrak data with other clues to build maps of possible routes.

Within days, they knew that Ratliff was a borderline-obsessive US national soccer team fan and a follower of the English team Fulham. That he had celiac disease, a condition under which he ate a diet entirely free of gluten, a protein found in wheat. That he and his girlfriend had bought an apartment in Brooklyn (in fact, the hunters posted a scan of Ratliff’s signature from the deed). That he had recently attended a wedding, sporting a beard, in Palo Alto. They knew of his purchases at Best Buy and Oil Can Henry’s and bombarded both businesses with calls.

What had started as an exercise in escape quickly became a cross between a massively multiplayer online game and a reality show. A staggeringly large community arose spontaneously, splintered into organized groups, and set to work turning over every rock in Ratliff’s life. It topped out at 600 Twitter posts a day. The hunters knew the names of his cat sitter and his mechanic, his favorite authors, his childhood nicknames. They found every article he’d ever written; they found recent videos of him. They discovered and published every address he’d ever had in the US, from Atlanta to Hawaii, together with the full name and age of every member of his family.

They discovered almost every available piece of data about Ratliff, in fact, except his current location.