Menno E
Aartsen© May 2012. Disclaimer, Fair Use and Copyright
statement at the bottom of this page. Product links Amazon Associates. The time machine from January, 2012, with linkbacks through August, 2008, is here. Photography is clickable.
If you have a resume at Careerbuilder.com, check your privacy
settings. I noticed last month that the "intermediate" setting, which
allowed the job seeker to post a resume without providing personal
details, had been eliminated. Sure enough, on Thursday May 17 I received
both an email and a telephone call
from ING - a call to my unlisted number - ING is recruiting
salespeople. I am not in the financial industry, I am not a salesperson,
I have never applied to any position at ING, and what is worse, these
aren't "jobs" ING has, they are most likely commission agents they're
looking for. ING clearly does not care what the person's credentials
are, freely available to them, as they pay Careerbuilder. So it probably
is not a bad idea to either remove your listing from Careerbuilder, or
at least make it invisible to "employers". I have noticed for some time
that Careerbuilder is now posting tens of thousands of what they call
"non-traditional jobs", which aren't paying jobs, but unremunerated
telesales "opportunities". The probably reason behind all this? I would
wager a bet Careerbuilder is in financial trouble, and is trying to
solve that by selling job seeker private information to corporate customers. I hope the FTC is looking over my shoulder...
If Facebook's IPO serves any purpose, it is the realization that consumer internet access is
shifting from the PC to mobile devices,
worldwide, and the industry,
including the advertising industry, has sat on its backside making nice
with large screens when consumers can do much of what they like to do on
small screens. Kids I know barely watch anything on their 50 inch home
screens, 20% of their life takes place on a small laptop, the rest on an
even smaller handset. IOW, Facebook spent the past few years developing
what you see to your right, it advertises credit cards to me - I cut
mine up last Summer, how come they don't know that? - in a way that
can't work on any of the handheld devices that are today the primary
access device for the internet. Other ads in this example are either
completely irrelevant to me, or have, due to the postage stamp
dimensions, not enough information for me to see what they are about.
Clicking on random ads because they say something intriguing, in my
view, isn't something most people have time to do, at least those of us
who have jobs and busy lives. What I see on my Facebook page, when I
look at what my friends and family use Facebook for, is half games, half
communicating with other people. Occasionally, someone I know will
"like" a product or service, but as I generally don't know why, I tend
to ignore that. One of my buddies is really happy with his new Verizon
Wireless phone, but I happen to know that his employer pays for that, so
it is kinda irrelevant to me - if nothing else, Verizon's cellphones
generally don't work overseas, something I have always found ridiculous,
in the Age of Miracles. Tell me again why you're going to give
Facebook one hundred billion dollars this week?
I do know
that I've moved much of my own Twitter interaction, my Facebook
posting, Google Talk, even some of my LinkedIn to mobile devices.
Twitter I always ran mostly on my Blackberry,
but Facebook I've now moved 50% to my tablet, a Blackberry Playbook. I
did
occasionally look at Facebook on my Nokia C7, but never posted there,
the (touch) screen is just too small for me. I never ran Facebook on my
Blackberry, as, from a privacy
perspective, I don't want Facebook to look over my shoulder to see where
I am, and I have GPS always turned on in my Blackberrys. In the Nokia,
less frugal with power, I control GPS by using an external Bluetooth GPS
antenna that I turn off
when I am not using navigation. My primary reason for using that
antenna is that I can put it on top of the dashboard, where it can "see"
satellites, so I can have the screen up close, and that it has its own
battery, which lasts more than a
week. The GPS chipset inside a phone uses a lot of power otherwise. This
privacy stuff may not be much of an issue for teens and students, but
beyond that, depending on what you end up doing in life, you may well
allow Facebook and others to hand out information that can be used to
hurt you or steal from you or stalk you. Seriously, if you lock your
front door when you leave, if you have lights on timers to give your
house a "someone-is-at-home" look, you shouldn't have GPS turned on when
you
Facebook. Facebook actually goes so far that on the Playbook
application, if I want to comment or like a posting from somebody who
has checked in from a locale, I am disabled from commenting unless I
turn my GPS on first. That, to me, is way beyond acceptable.
I've also got the feeling that handing over this personal stuff doesn't actually sell anything, that this whole idea about the internet knowing it is lunchtime where you are, and letting you know about the nearest Pizza Hut deal, is a pipe dream. My team looked at this some fifteen years ago, but by now everybody is doing it, and that means only information overload for the consumer, nothing else. Or, let me rephrase that, Wall Street is about to give $100 billion (if the prognostication is correct) to a company that says they know so much about the consumer they can predict and maybe influence how and where and what the consumer buys - this after the industry has already spent several billions of dollars developing technologies that I very much doubt sell anything.
Look
at the sheer numbers of SEO jobs - Search Engine Optimization -
this at a time when most consumers spend their internet hours on
Facebook, where search engines can't reach.. These jobs command salaries
of
$150,000 a year, and ask yourself if this isn't a pipe dream.
Impulse buying works in Wal-Mart because you went there to shop in the
first place, but just because a million teens "like"
Burger King doesn't mean they don't go to McDonalds. I had an American
teen in my car in Spain, many years ago, who wanted a Happy Meal, not
one of those delicious jambon baguette sandwiches you can buy by the
roadside in Catalonia - I actually once selected a Europe-to-U.S. flight
routed through Madrid Airport just so I could have lunch there. They're
not going to want Happy Meals because of Facebook, but because many
American kids aren't brought up with real food, so they think that's
what these
burger+fry+toy deals are. What the industry doesn't get is that the kids
go back because of the taste and the toys, not because of Facebook. If
all their friends were to decide that McDonalds fries were blah,
tomorrow, they'd all go to Wendy's. Try to put that in your search
engine. The idea that you can get somebody to buy a new car because you
send them a car ad when they drive into the repair shop may be valid,
except if you've just spent 20 million dollars rolling out that
technology and it sells 800 extra cars a year, you're kind of deceiving
yourself, and you don't know this because you have no way of tracking
the expenditure to the individual revenue action.
Am I right or am I right?
Anyway, webservers have huge amounts of fancy technology to push
advertising out to browsers, to push sponsored content, again to
browsers, all this aimed at those countries that have wired broadband
technology in place. In the rest of the world (which is most of the
world), a majority of consumers
access the internet on mobile devices, at mostly lower speeds. I checked this out at my cousin's
house in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 2010, when I was able to install 3G
wireless broadband he could use to Skype, a connection that was several
times faster than the DSL connection he had at his home, running over
the old copper wire that is all there is, if it is there at all, in most
emerging economies. They have leapfrogged, and we've known this
for a long time, from nothing to 3G/4G wireless speeds. And they use
small
screens, and we haven't built any technologies to push advertising to
those small screens - web pages are made for 1024x768 or higher
resolutions, and your average smartphone probably has 320x200, if that.
In other words, they're running at a resolution we never used - we
started at 640x480, way back when, and that was mostly text. We never
did the lab work we now need to do, and as far as I am aware we're still
not doing it.
Interesting conundrum, don't you think? And no, I have nothing
against Facebook, I use it, it is a brilliant way of keeping in touch,
but like so many other "products", it can't bill its users. I've seen
this continuously, throughout my career in the networking industry: The Source, CIS / CompuServe, Tapcis, Minitel, Viditel, Hotmail, AOL, then GroupOn seems to be on the way down, MySpace deceased, Overstock seems to have lost it, Amazon is doing fine but never managed to become a social network, and that not for want of trying, Google does well but not because it is "social", and I don't see how Facebook
will fare any better than any of the above. I just don't see it.
Social networks aren't new, people. They've been around for more than
twenty years, they just had different names and weren't accessible to
your nieces, your plumber and Gramma. And the big question does not get
answered: you can advertise, targeted
if you like, as much as you like, but that is not going to sell more of
anything - we're in a recession, both in Europe and the US, and people
buy less. Advertising more is
not going to change that - advertising we never had a problem doing, as
far as I know. Helping Facebook cannibalize the rest of the World Wide
Web - how does that help anyone? We have Apple as a good example,
already - its profits go two places: China, where the jobs are, and the
USA, where many of its investors are. Investors. Not workers. Think
about it. Same for Facebook. Investors. Not workers, it is automated.
And its equipment and network elements and servers and, umm, stuff, come
from..... you guessed it, China.
For those of you who have been following the Mayan calendar
drivel about how the Mayans predicted our world will come to an end in
December - I don't think they had leap years, so we probably should be
thinking about March, maybe even April. Add Summer Time corrections, who
knows when we'll be.
Seriously, it is beyond me how anybody who works in the press can
not report it in the following manner: 1) Even if you believe the
Mayans could predict the future, they would have predicted their own
future. They didn't know about you, they did not have mobile phones and
satellite television - in fact, they didn't even have black & white
television! They probably didn't yet have steam locomotives, even! They
didn't know nothing about Iranians and Kim Yong Ill, didn't even have
Amtrak tickets, either, because they didn't have Visa cards or internet.
Yes, they might have predicted their own future - that's
what most populations do, in a religion related sort of way. There's
nothing in anything they published that has any end-of-the-earth
scenario. They had calendars, and figured out a way to calculate
e-nor-mous numbers. Maybe they just ran out of those.
The other thing I haven't seen anybody write is that the find
described above is "early Mayan". All this other stuff leading up to the
December 2012 date dates to much later in the Mayan civilization. So
you could just as easily postulate, and perhaps find another Swiss hotel
manager to write it, that the Mayans, during their ascent and descent,
discovered something they didn't know when the above calendar was made,
and then revamped the calendar to end at an earlier date.
Or maybe they just used a calculator whose battery drained, and they
couldn't get a replacement battery, because nobody had discovered
Shenzen and container ships. The Mayans, by the way, still exist, they
live in South America and Middle America, still have their language,
religion and traditions, and if you ask them when the world will end
they'll reward you with a blank stare. Nobody told them about their sell by date, you see..
I find myself at a real disadvantage reviewing the T-Mobile
Blackberry Torch 9810 (picture below - to the right are my older
Blackberrys),
because I can't really give you a comparison with other smartphones. Or,
perhaps, more correctly: I can't give you a comparison with smartphones.
I think we're looking more and more at a division between handphones
that have "normal" screen sizes, like this Blackberry, and my Nokia C7
(a.k.a. "Astound"), and what I like to call "handheld computing devices"
like the iPhone, and Samsung's Galaxy. Perhaps those larger devices
with a design concentration on running "apps" are the smartphones,
although we then don't have a name for the devices that fit in between
"feature phones and "smartphones". I don't have any of the large
screen devices, have never owned any, and so am not the right person to
comment. For all I know, they're just totally magical and I don't know
it. But I see four and five-plus inch screens cropping up on handphones,
and if I compare that it isn't all that far from the 7 inch screen on
my Blackberry Playbook. I use the term "handphone" advisedly - it is the
name normally used for mobile phones in much of Asia, and not for
nothing.
I like the size of the Torch, see it in my average hand below, though some of the time I, admittedly, use mine with a Bluetooth headset, when I am in the car, or when I have a call I expect to be longer than a few minutes. Then, of course, size does not matter. And here is where I get lost, because there are two entire generations behind me that may think it is perfectly OK to handhold a larger phone. Statistics have it that adolescent communications are shifting to Facebook, Twitter, and SMS all the time - although, when I look around me on the street and in the mall I see plenty of people talking on the phone. All I am saying is that the generational thing may be more important than any design- and usage features, when, indeed, for Facebook and Twitter and in email (not something teens use at all any more), the larger screen is absolutely better. At which point design may be driven by the "instant gratification" generation - the generation that does not want to boot a laptop and log into this, that and the other, but wants to have a single device they can use for whatever. There is, of course, one large issue here - kids, who for the most part can't afford multiple devices, will go for a device that can "do it all" - and a laptop they can't carry everywhere, nor can they make voice calls on it.
That is, by the way, a completely different reason for
choice-of-phone that the majority of reviewers and analysts use - but I
see two main determining factors, and they both have to do with cost,
but not with "cheap".
I've noticed in "growth economies" like Indonesia and Thailand, but
even Hungary, Poland and Romania, that folks can afford to spend money
on handsets, but not on the handset - laptop - desktop combo. On top of
that, in many former Third World countries there isn't the finely mazed
fiber network we're used to, and so folks have little choice but to go
for wireless broadband. And if you're doing that anyway, what's better
than a smartphone, in both cases?
Friend E. asked me, the other day, why "we" - me and another couple
Facebookies, all of us happening to be engineers - like Blackberrys so
much - E. being a graphics artist by training, thus an Apple aficionado,
and an IPhone freak. The initial answer was kind of too easy - her
iPhone works in Jo'burg, where she lives, but not in the countryside
where her farm is, for use there she has a cheap Blackberry. So I
launched into a long diatribe about Blackberry and Nokia Symbian devices
being advanced technology telecommunications tools, not handheld computing devices with
telecom added, like iPhone and Android thingies with their huge screens.
I am sure I am heavily tainted by many years of mandatory 24/7
availability in my telecoms career - you just can't then rely on a piece
of gear that may run out of battery, or crash, when you most need it.
But I must, of course, be realistic, and understand that for most
consumers, that isn't the primary consideration. I was asked, the other
day, while consulting at Nuance, to "think like a consumer" - and had to
explain that I hadn't been an ordinary consumer since before I went to
work at Bell Labs, but that especially 9/11 changed my outlook on the
difference between "tools" and "toys" forever. My Blackberry, by now - I
am talking about my brand new Torch 9810 - and my
Nokia C7 are both pretty solid small devices, good phones, with
functionality added, but they're certainly not mini-PCs, and I don't
want them to be. In fact, Nokia's C7 is advanced enough, as a "smart
device", to suffer the
same issues iPhones and Androids do - it does fancy stuff, it'll hang,
crash,
all this unlike the Blackberry, even the high end Torch, now with touch
screen, still with the hallmark Blackberry keyboard, but this now can be
slid under the screen - see to the right how well this fits in my hand,
see it below with its trademark Blackberry keyboard slid out.
The C7 is actually my backup phone as well as my
backup GPS unit, and as such, I am perfectly happy with it, but I
wouldn't have it as my primary. The T-Mobile Torch supports AT&T
Wireless 3G, T-Mobile 3G and 4G, 3G in Tokyo, and 3G and 4G in lots of
places in between here and there, and believe me, there are few handsets
that can do all that. It isn't what the competition is about, you see,
and you get to where friend E. is - oops, nice iPhone, but it doesn't
work in the South African countryside, so she needs another phone that
does. Not for me, that, and it is amazing someone sells limitations for
extra money, today, and makes consumers think that's OK. Now as before, the Blackberry is
bulletproof, reliable, and its battery lasts until next week, what more
does one need?
So it is sad to see RIM taking a nosedive, expertly helped by the carriers, which like selling you gear you don't need at inflated subsidized prices so you will use more data - the Blackberry uses less data, as some of its data requirements are met, for free, by RIM, using its own network, keeping things affordable for those who know what they're doing.
Now I do see the thousands of apps others say they're using, and I
admittedly use very little, in the way of apps, on a daily basis.
Anything fancy I run on my Playbook tablet, and beyond that, most of the
stuff I use on a daily basis, like photography and picture processing
software, lives on my laptop and desktop. So does my financial software -
I don't want anything to do with my finances on my phone, I want it
somewhere it is secure, and I can easily back it up and secure access to it. The most I have
acceded to, over the years, is that I now transfer funds between my bank
accounts on my phone, and I will occasionally read the news on my
Blackberry, although mostly, I prefer doing that over a cup of coffee on
my Playbook, at Starbucks, where T-Mobile makes my data usage-over-Wifi
(using UMA) free. Here again, the carriers don't tell you what you have
- UMA isn't just "WiFi Calling", it is actually GPRS/EDGE data service,
over WiFi, at WiFi speeds. You can tether over it, and use it over a
secure, encrypted, Bluetooth-to-WiFi network connection - which is why I can
Facebook in China.
Speaking of Facebook, with
its size and importance, it is totally beyond me how a large internet
enterprise like Facebook has managed to not be in China. If anybody
should have an incentive, and anyone should have the clout, it would be
Zuck, wouldn't you think? How can you go to IPO without the largest
social networking market on the planet? Why is it
so hard to put something together the Chinese can live with, that will
let us all be one planet wide family? Yeah, we'd have to compromise, but
being politically correct in China isn't any different from being
politically correct in Saudi, why are we not learning to do these
things? If Facebook can spend a cool billion to acquire a startup,
wouldn't you think a similar amount spent in Shenzen wouldn't get
something going "over there", even if the Chinese are less impressed
with the colour of money than they used to be.. How can we, with our
marketing clout and advanced technologies,
not make the Chinese an offer they can't refuse? How will you, the
investor, take seriously a CEO who can't crack the largest market on
Earth? Isn't that what commerce is about? And what do you think will
happen when someone else cracks that problem? When we already have tens
of thousands of children in schools all over learning Mandarin, all of
whom can't communicate with the kids in China because they cannot get on
Facebook...
The
keyboard on my Blackberry Bold had been giving signs of failure for a
couple of months - keys coming up, pushed them back down and tried to
ignore, then the chrome rails in between the keys dislodged themselves -
I suppose, having used the thing every day since December, 2009, this
is a reasonable MTBF. It wasn't your most expensive Blackberry. So on
Friday, I got on the horn to T-Mobile customer support, spoke with an
immaculately spoken guy by the name of Jeremy, who eventually turned out
to be not as fluent as T-Mobile hopes he is, because he kept insisting
there was a discount coupon at the website that (I've used those before,
and I had noticed a discount earlier in the week) simply did not exist.
So he was overseas after all, and not able to provide adequate customer
service - once you end up in an Indian overflow office and you go "off
script" they're lost. They've never personally dealth with this type of
situation, probably have only rudimentary internet on their handphone,
and nobody trained them for "system shows different screen from what you
have".
The
Prez "unfairly" using Osama bin Laden's killing for political ends?
"Exploit" away, Mr. President. You did it, your guys and gals went out
there and got him, take all the credit you want. I did not watch 9/11 on
TV, I was there, I lost colleagues and friends, spent eight months rebuilding, and I don't need to
talk about who might have done what. I know you did it, and that, my
friends, is hard, hard, evidence of your courage, because going into
Pakistan wasn't an easy decision to take, I remember Jimmy Carter's
disastrous Iran raid, and that majorly backfired. You did good, and use
it as much as you need, you own that achievement, the title "CIC" is one
you earned.
. Never much on my map, I knew little about the
country, thought it was a nice tourist destination, I have at least one
ex-wife who likes its beaches, but as it turns out I know little about
it because it isn't anybody's former colony. Turns out it is one of
Asia's tiger economies, technologically pretty advanced, ancient
Buddhist culture, that in itself is attractive to me, and a friend of
mine moved there from Oz last year, and tells me even just my pensions
would let me live there like God in France, and tax free, and he'll give
me a leg up settling in.
not so much, but liked what I saw on my
one road trip there, and now some business folk I met here, but came
from there, are trying to convince me it would be a good place for me to
wield my experience and expertise. I've even been offered a house
there. I speak fluent German, since childhood, so there is no issue
there, the picture to the right shows you one of Germany's indigenous
specialties, matjes herring, something you can wake me up for in the
middle of the night, I swear. I have a few "Ossie" friends, am perfectly
comfortable with the place and its people, in many ways fascinated by
the East's uphill battle to "become", despite the vast rivers of money
West Germany has poured into it.
One of the problems with all of the diversity legislation around is that
sometimes identifying factors are important to make a choice, and some
of those aren't politically correct. Whether picking a doctor or an
employee, really makes no difference. Race - you don't need me to
explain. You may have reasons why you want the doctor / staffer to have
children. You may have reasons why you want the doctor / staffer not
to have children. You may have reasons why you'd like the doctor /
staffer to be Asian. I almost wrote the politically correct phrase, "of
Asian extraction". Then thought that did not make my point. Apart from
which, if you've ever flown across Asia, from the Hindu Kush to
Kamchatka, you will know that it isn't exactly "a region", or "an
ethnicity". With what I know today, I would go so far as to say it is
actually the larger proportion of the known world.
Although I am
working on some overseas opportunities - there seems to be
little point in hanging on in the United States when there isn't much
for me here - none of those are scheduled to begin until 2013, so I
am available for assignments and consulting spots throughout the
Summer. I am not one for sitting still, and as I have an existing
benefits package, gainful employment, for me, does not have to be a
permanent position. I would have thought that to be a selling argument
in terms of getting a consulting position, but I guess matters are
desperate enough, out there, that job seekers will take anything they
come across, beneficial to them or not. That's pretty grim - and again, I
am not seeing how we're going to get out from under. Barely have we
received the upbeat economic reports, or the whole thing ticks down
again. Well, kids, they can't both be true - if so many corporations are
doing so well, where's the beef? Why are we not seeing the economic
uptick reflected in housing, employment, how come foreclosures are still
in an upward swing - by rights, all of the people slated to lose their
homes, like myself, should have done so ages ago. I am tempted to think
someone is writing the statistics rulebooks as we are measuring, because
the conflicting reports are just too conflicting. Yes, Mitt, Obama has
not, as of yet, fixed the economy, but if you think a corporate guy with
State level experience can do better, one of Obama's own people shoulda
have pulled a couple rabbits out of his hat. There isn't anything that
you know, or
do, that they don't. And taking health care away from poor people, and
from those becoming poor, is not really likely to jump start an economy
that has no products to sell, is it? This is your solution, taking money
away from the people? Younuts?
front (see my last blog entry) there
really isn't much to report. I use it every day, all day, it is
still running on the batteries that came with it, and the one glitch I
have experienced was likely due to the USB ports in my VAIO desktop
malfunctioning, I use a Bluetooth dongle, and the ports see pretty heavy
use, between a 2 terabyte external drive and an HD cable tuner that is
on more or less all day. The keyboard is working perfectly - if
anything, the occasional slowness in typing input I used to see in my RF
keyboard is completely absent in this model, and I am just about
getting used to its side mounted trackpad.
I do have to sort out what to do next. I thought maybe the
Pacific Northwest was going to give me an opportunity to use my skills
and experience, but this isn't working any more than the other coast
was. That Washington has gone paranoid, over its foreigners, is
something I can understand, I was there on 9/11, I mean, smack in the
middle of it, recovery worker, the works. These days, companies around
D.C. ask for U.S. citizens even if it isn't legally required. But it
isn't much better up here - not so much the citizenship issue, but there
is a huge issue with "software based HR" - parsing resumes, and rules
for hiring that are simply set in such a way that my expertise doesn't
impact. It is a known issue with "software intelligence" - it is, at
best, a broad brush approach, and once it is installed and running,
there isn't anybody meaningfully monitoring it, especially not if no
errors are generated, or low level functional errors only. Yes, it is
monitored by
the folks that are responsible for IT activities, but not by HR people
with IT expertise - there are few, and they probably mostly sit on the
creation side of things, that's where the money is. They certainly don't
look at what falls out, and why.
To
the right, just a pretty fir tree I came across on a walk in the
neighbourhood - it looked like somebody had waxed it. And the Iogear
Bluetooth keyboard I mention below is to your left. Surprisingly compact
and well constructed, I need to get used to the side mounted trackpad,
but that's a matter of time and perseverance. Should you adopt something
like this, make sure you keep a regular keyboard around, this won't let
you log into your BIOS, should you need to. Having said that, in a
public space, if you can't, nobody else can, unless they are carrying a
keyboard.
Say that three times fast in a broad Geordie accent... never mind,
that's what you get from watching too much Coronation Street - I can't
get East Enders up here, so "Corrie" on Canadian TV is wot I am
relegated to. It is sort of growing on me, though, as a former Londoner,
I miss Albert Square. What ya gonna do...
This is one of those times when everything is changing
- everything. It begins with a one day gig assessing the Dutch
translation of Swype, bought last year by Nuance, the company whose
dictation product Dragon Naturally Speaking I've been using - Swype,
a very clever way to enter text into a smartphone keyboard by
connecting charcters on the screen, is expanding all over the globe, and
I've spent a (paid) day at their downtown Seattle offices checking out
the Dutch language database and predictive algorithm. I am blown away by
its accuracy and speed, I don't recall every seen a release version of
anything this smooth. In the interim, a friend in Thailand
invites me to move there next year, I am eligible, as it turns out, for
a Thai retirement visa, under certain conditions. That means I can't
work, but I don't have to pay income tax there either, although, as A.
and I discuss, should I find a position or start up a business, the Thai
government, welcoming to Western expertise, will happily convert said
residence visa. It does mean getting in and bringing one's property tax
free, so..
's passing - at the
same time I have a feeling the era of "grand journalism" is drawing to a
close, without a new generation, and the world of new media
technologies producing journobots, automated news grabbing headlines
that are increasingly published without bylines, and without real
information. No longer do reporters have to go places and report, a
local hack writes a couple of lines, and three seconds later the world
knows, growing the story nonsensically as it hobbles along on crippled
"smartphones". So, head for CBS' 60minutesovertime.com,
and see
for yourself some of the legacy one of the grand old men of journalism
left behind, and don't forget to watch the Kinshasa orchestra perform.
That's the kind of stuff that barely makes it to the news any more, and
we're the poorer for it. I feel blessed to have been able to watch Mike
in action.
It isn't the acquisition so much, although Instagram's functionality is
another good example of something people use without any intention to
spend money, like Facebook and Pinterest. It is the staggering amount of
money Facebook paid for Instagram. Think about it. This is Facebook - a
company that has been unable to get access to the Chinese market, which
should have been really easy, considering its popularity. A company
whose return per user is measly, by comparison with Google.
A
footnote to the pictures, as often is the case unrelated to this
article, the restaurant to the right another illustration of how all
pervasive Asia, Asians and Asian food are in this area - later in this
piece, my thoughts on maybe heading out there, Asia, leaving America, after
all, and a picture to show you how the colourful bus shelters blossom,
in spring. We're headed for summer and warmer weather, though it'll be
only a pale shadow of Virginia, where I was until last year. Owell,
taxes first...
All the same, I have kind of had it with the job search - still looking,
but between
the "you're too senior" bunch, and the employers that use automated
prescreening, the ones that never get to look at your resume because
there are some all American standards I do not conform to, it is not
looking like I am getting anywhere. Especially the all American
standards are a bit silly - not having been born here, and having grown
up in Europe, neither my educational pattern nor half of my career
conform to what the software looks for. I completely understand this,
but the problem is that once you adopt this type of screening as a
pattern, you cannot then deviate from it, as your own lawyers would
start
screaming "discrimination!". So, you use software that has the brilliant
side effect of screening out half the real talent you could have used to
grow your business - talent software does not know about, software only
does conformance. At the same time, and this is the more
negative aspect of the methodology, the prescreening software allow
legal discrimination. You cannot, as a hiring manager, in the United
States, legally look for indications of age, and exclude older
candidates that way, unless there are age related factors to the
position, clearly defined in the job description. But you can tell a
piece of software to look for applicants with "between 5 and 10 years of
experience" and so exclude both school leavers and the older worker,
and I am sure the corporate legal eagles have made that conform to the
rules.
That, to the right, is the, umm, "staff cafeteria", out back at my local
Trader Joe's. It is quite possible they have an indoor one, this may be
the smoking zone, it just looked a bit bleak to me, wedged between the gas
meters and the forklift.
I do apologize for being out of sync with my usual updates - I had a flare and kind of got knocked down
for a couple of days by a massive amount of medication. I am still on
that, while my doctors change the rest of my drugs - "plan B", if you
like - but the flare was controlled very effectively, so I am back to my
old noisy self.
Although I really don't get to
sample medical care in other parts of the world much, these days, here
in the US, knock on wood, what with my Verizon health insurance - the
only problem is, at times, managing it. There is so much of
it that I ran around for two days last week, making sure every doctor
had all of the information the other doctors did. This despite the fact
they're all in the same organization - they have the data at their
fingertips, but no time to catch up until the next appointment, so when
you see one doctor and then the next one does a test the other one
didn't, you now need to circle back. So, I
call in, and ask stupid questions. I like the system we have in Northern
Virginia better, where I could call my doctors every weekday between
8am and 8:30am, and speak to them directly. Perhaps I should introduce
such a
system here - there are more than twice as many staffers in the clinics
here than there are on the other coast. In fact, there are more than
twice as many clinics - there is an area of Seattle that the locals
refer to as "Pill Hill", and that is not for nothing, I have never seen
anything like it. It would be one explanation why my doctors order more
tests per month than I normally get in a quarter, and why, while there
are MRI machines coming out their ears, I could only find one single
open MRI machine in an affiliated facility in the Seattle area - by
comparison, there were five in 50 miles from my home in Fredericksburg,
VA, this even though the majority of patients there are on Federal
Government plans, which don't pay as well as mine.
Anyway, it all got sorted, and
they enrolled me in some kind of charity deal where the huge copay they
stuck me with (see posting on February 28) gets taken care of (out of
Federal funds, no real magic, sorry, but at least it is there). For
that,
Virginia Mason, my unadulterated thanks. It wasn't like I am a
hypochondriac and actually like having a gigantic fiber optic probe
stuck up my penis - as I quipped at the time: "I know I am from
Amsterdam, but
even I am not that kinky" . Phew. It looked like a freakin' garden hose.
And then the doctor smiles, turns the monitor towards me, and goes:
"Here, look". This while I am lying there going: "Nonono! Don't push! Enough!
You don't need to be in my nose!".
An Australian barmaid I worked
with in the King's Head in Earls Court in London in the 1970s soon
accused me of "not
being true to my identity" for trying to speak received near-perfect
English, and while I certainly
understood what she meant, being an Anglo-Saxon with a broad Aussie
accent in another Anglo-Saxon country honestly isn't the same thing as
being a Dutch immigrant to the UK. "Fosters to you", I thought. Besides,
I had enough of a job understanding the BEA bus drivers, East Enders
all, coming in from the Cromwell Road air terminal after their shift,
and ordering a "Light and Bitter", which was typically pronounced as "la nn
bi'ir". Had to have a Rhodesian colleague translate on my first day
behind the bar. When Design Editor-in-Chief James
Woodhuysen, whose father had rowed across the Channel to get away from
the German Army (he had killed some of them, I believe, as a resistance
fighter, and they weren't sporting about that) told me "Don't change
your name, people will remember you by
it" (I was a journalist at the time) I listened to him, but the other
thing... You go and live in work in another language, you need to
understand it, because language and culture are inseparably interwoven.
I actually started writing this
entry because I see many immigrants who
stop "working on it" sometime along the way - integration, language
skills, that sort of stuff. By that I do not mean I think they have to
"become American" - I don't know that one can, but I see them, as I have
always seen them, half rooted in their mother culture, never, in so
doing, adopting this culture, and I cringe when I hear a teen say "You
have to excuse my mother, she did not grow up here, her English isn't
perfect". Am I crazy when I say you can't do that to your kids? I did
not grow up here, but I have worked for many years, still do, every day,
to learn to understand the world around me, and rule number
one in that battle, in my opinion, is that you start speaking
English 24/7 the day you arrive.
You can learn basic English by watching subtitling in your native language in English language programming (order DVDs of English and American
movies from your home country, as I've done, and they'll have subtitles in
your native language). You can learn by studying, and then by taking notes,
asking questions, and speaking, speaking, speaking. You carry a
notebook, you stop someone you don't understand, you ask them to repeat,
if necessary to explain, you take notes, you com-mu-ni-cate.
There isn't an obligation to learn to speak perfect English,
but, guess what, your host country's citizens, the people who have to
make it happen for you, appreciate it. And you will understand your host
country's culture much mo' better, because language is culture. Don't
waste time teaching your kids Vietarmialano, have them teach you Ingris,
if you follow my drift, and speak that at home, 24/7. And for those who have a hard
time making the transition, stop trying to live in both timezones. One is "tuff enuff".
On CBS News Sunday Morning, 24
year old teen idol heart throb hunk Zac Efron, on changing acting
direction: "At the end of the day, the actors that I respect, the ones
that live on today, are the ones that always took the hard road".
Amen.
See the Wall Street Journal headline strip above, and perhaps you will understand why the venerable WSJ is losing it, with Rupert Murdoch at the helm. Same goes for the New York Times, which I stopped reading when it went to a pay format, but which has now reduced the number of articles you can read "for free" from 20 to 10. Yes, the same Rupert Murdoch who can't stay away from Twitter, and whose British newspapers bribe police officers. He has wrecked MySpace, the original Facebook, taken all of his mainstream newspapers to online payment plans - so nobody reads the Times of London or the New York Times any more, vastly reducing their advertising revenues, and let me just take you through the wisdom in this news banner:
- Groupon wasn't "forced to restate" its earnings. Groupon tried to represent future income as earnings. That's usually known as fraud.
- RIM doesn't "weigh bleak options". RIM has an enormous
customer base outside North America - see this excellent BBC article about
Blackberry Indonesia, at least they do their homework, I can vouch for this, and
for the proliferation of Blackberrys in Europe and Africa. You mess up, you change course, that's good business.
- And Apple? Apple isn't a huge force in China, that is all in the American press, it is just another mid
size customer. It does not have a labour pact, it doesn't employ people
in manufacturing in China or anywhere else. The Chinese are quite capable of taking care of matters, and
the primary issue is that of helping Apple save face, so Vice Premier Li Keqian met
with Tim Cook. That is what you do when you run China Incorporated, you
meet with your customers. The only thing that ripples across China is
the deep understanding of how stupid we really are. Especially with NPR
morons who publish invented stories. Read here why she should mind our own
business. Yes, Chinese labour processes are medieval - that is how they
want it, and they'll change them when they need to. Not, seriously, not
our business. If they stuck to Western labour laws there would not be
rich Apple shareholders, that company was built on the backs of the
Chinese workers. Do something useful, worry about 50 million uninsured Americans.
All I am saying is that if this is
the depth of the Wall Street Journal today, you can stop reading that,
too, in the internet age. These are rehashes of the comments everybody
else is publishing for free. Stick with the BBC, IMO.
We know there is significant talent in Britain - all you have to do is
look around the Pacific Coast Highway in California. So the discovery of
another Susan Boyle, Jonathan Antoine,
is kind of par for the course. Listen, if you haven't yet, to his
voice, in this audition of Cowell's Got Talent. It is hard to gauge
realistically, given the amount of background
noise in the theatre, but I thought his performance was stunning, and
when he got the audience response he let fly, hitting the notes, just
running out of air eventually, but that's training. He doesn't even have
to worry about losing weight much, that might destroy his timbre...
Check out the video and marvel with me. Godspeed, lad! I generally don't
like Simon Cowell, but this clip shows how nice it must be for him to
really discover a voice, that, after all, is what he does for a living.
You
have, of course, like me, been following the shooting of Trayvon Martin
in Florida.
I have to tell you the situation shows up the two main problems that
most analysts don't seem to get: the unregulated nature of the
Neighbourhood Watch, in few places supervised properly, and the
risks that come with carrying a firearm, a somewhat common occurrence in
the
United States. I've been a Watch member for over a decade - in my part
of Virginia, the patrolling members of the Neighbourhood Watch are
vetted by the Sheriff's Office, and then issued with magnetic Watch
vehicle decals only available from police, while the Sheriff's Office
has a monthly meeting for Watch Captains and interested citizens. I
never
really felt compelled to "pack heat", other than on a couple of
occasions when an alert had been issued by the Sheriff's Office or the
State Police. But I know others do, on a daily basis, when they make
their rounds, and they do have every right to do so. You don't even need
any
of the newer laws to do that, many States have "open carry" rules, and
a civilian patrol person visibly carrying a
gun can be an effective deterrent. An important question to ponder is
whether the confrontation would have taken place if the Watch Captain
had carried his gun visibly, under the open carry laws that I believe
exist in Florida. Mayor Bloomberg's comments on CBS about people
carrying guns show how hopelessly out of touch he is - most of America
isn't cities, Mr. Mayor, and certainly nothing like yours. NYC is
littered with people packing heat - as it is hard for folks to get a
carry permit, they simply get a private detective license in Hawthorne
or someplace.
A concealed carry permit lets you carry an invisible gun, but in the case of a patrol person I am not seeing how that would be an advantage. The only thing you can do with a gun is shoot people - in most states, threatening with a gun is against the law - you can have one, in many places, carried visibly, but you better have a very good reason to get it out of the holster.. And, apart from that, I really would like the lawyers to stop their stupid comments. As far as I know, for a police dispatcher to say "we don't need you to do that" does not constitute any kind of an order, assuming the dispatcher is not a sworn officer. In most cases, a 911 operator is a civilian, and doesn't issue police orders, they just follow their cheat sheet.
Watching Rick Steves' 2009 PBS travelogue Iran,
I cannot help but think with some
trepidation about the few options that exist to deal with this
"situation". Much like Turkey, Iran suffers from an identification with a
religion that, for many, has medieval overtones, but unlike
Christianity, still has strong connections to government and nation
building. As such, Turkey's post World War II development has propelled
it to modernization and a form of secularism, while Iran, once an
enlightened society, became a religious dictatorship. Similarly,
Indonesia has made great strides towards secularization, while Malaysia
is forever teetering on the brink of some religious abyss, with Islamic
law applying to non-Muslims. But one thing
that is abundantly clear even from watching this PBS special is that the
Iranian population has neither means nor motive to free itself, or
change its future, and with a "Persian Spring" clearly out of the
question, the only way Iran can be brought into line is by war. And war
with that large and affluent nation will have devastating consequences,
for the region, for the world's economy, and for this historically
important part of the world, that can only, if you'll pardon the
analogy, commit "suicide by cop". If the Israelis think they can stop
Iran from developing nuclear arms, we really should explain to them that
if the Iranians want nuclear arms they will build them. There aren't
any attacks a small country like Israel can carry out that will even
dent that capability. Iran has had many years to prepare for such
attacks, and the resulting war would cause real problems. Give it up,
work with the rest of the world in getting the Iranians to adopt HBO and
maybe an Islamic Tivo.
A country that will not negotiate reliably, is not willing to make
itself trustworthy because its religious view, does not allow respect for
others, a country that is fired onwards by a clergy that could not accept
Hillary Clinton or Madeleine Albright as a negotiator, that country could not sit at
the table with those whose political views include compromise. An
Iranian's view of compromise is for women to have their chador shifted
back an inch or two to show a little hair when the Basij-e Mostaz'afin
is not around? If that is how far women in Iran have emancipated in the
1,442 years since the birth of the prophet, I begin to have doubts about their
ability to effect change beyond the colour of the scarf. Under Islamic
mores other Islamic countries really have no way to withdraw support
from Iran, considering that this country is part of the core of their
religion - that area of the Middle East is where Islam originated. It
is, if you will, part of their Holy Land. It is easy to see from what
happened in North Africa and is happening in Syria, today, that the era
of the "Caliphates" is past - like Muammar Khadafi, Bashar Hafez
al-Assad of Syria will likely be killed by his own people, and like Muammar Khadafi, Bashar Hafez al-Assad
does not want to see it coming right at him. Guess you have to be
stubborn to be a dictator. But where the dictator is a religion, all
bets are off.
I must say I enjoy Rick Steves' travelogues, normally, but his Iran
narrative is a disaster. A comedian could have done a better job in a
country that is ostensibly opposed to most matters West. His commentary contains
gems such as "Many of these people could afford to live abroad, but
prefer to live as economic elites here in the ritziest corner of
Teheran". Well, sorry, Mr. Steves, but these people live where they do
because it is where they're from, it is their home,
and all those "Persians" that you and I know here in the US are
actually refugees. Mr. Steves might understand better that for
those rich Iranians to move abroad, and leaving their lives and their
families behind, might be a bit of an issue. It isn't all that long ago
that Indonesian citizens couldn't buy an airline ticket to an overseas
destination without a travel permit from their own government. And
to say on TV that "Americans want to understand Iranians" - dunno,
Rick, I am not so sure that's true. Judging by my own religious
Muslim friends, you can do Islam and respect at the same time, and not
run around assassinating your own people and Jews and sundry others just
to make your point. 9/11 was an attack by the Caliphate, Rick, and
Muslims understand that very well. Many think we are heathens, because
we have the morning after pill, and lawyers on heels with breast
implants on breakfast television. We live with it, they decide they need
it like they need a Hole in the Holy Book. Respect, Rick.
This morning CBS News
has it I am completely behind the times, as I am not using RFID as a
payment method. I am saying this sort of advisedly, as I have an RFID
equipped Nokia smartphone, and so would be able to use the capability - I
even downloaded the new drivers for it, the other day, as I was doing
my twice-a-month all-your-toys update routine. Watching the news item,
though, the reporter goes on and on about RFID replacing cash. And I
wonder: how many people use cash? I know I don't, haven't for many
years, practically everywhere in the United States you can use just
about any kind of payment card. Europe is still somewhat different, I
know, especially in those countries where they keep trying to roll their
own payment systems, when in Malaysia you can buy with your Visa- or
Mastercard in remote mountain villages. But that's another conversation.
The issue here is that if certain consumers didn't switch from cash to
card, in the past few decades, why would they now change from cash to
using their cellphone? One example brought up is that the merchant can
see the buyer's picture on the terminal, but then I remember Citicard's
attempt at introducing a credit card with a picture on it, I don't know
if those cards are still around, but it wasn't exactly a runaway
success, despite the extra security it offers. It's always a bit of a
problem - you're the clerk at 7/11, and you see someone's picture
doesn't match. What are you going to do? Get the cuffs out? And get
shot? Or do you warn the manager later, or not at all. I just don't
think it is as simple as all that. But I promise, I'll check if my bank
or Paypal have RFID for my phone, and if they do, try it out. For now,
people who use cash will use cash, and I am not seeing pictures on
terminals change that. It is an incentive for banks and merchants, not
for consumers. Marketeers, get your brains out of hock, instead of
rolling this stupidity out on national television.
Gosh. For
someone who isn't working, that is, not gainfully employed 9 to
5, I am pretty busy. Mostly self inflicted, I have to tell you,
but this morning I am getting up an hour early, as my head is
milling with things I need to do for the folks I am working
with, half of whom are in other timezones - other, as in six, or
even eleven hours away. There is the entrepreneur in Asia for
whom I am screening technology and investors for a massive
broadcast network - I do apologize for being cryptic, here and
in my resume,
but I can't risk confidences and business opportunities, my
trade has for many years had a large secrecy component. But,
there is the artist friend in South Africa who needed to move
her website, upgrade it, and seriously sell her art and solicit
commissions. Her I can name, she is Esther Prehn, and she went
from being a graphics designer, first in her native South
Africa, then in Germany, back to South Africa, where she has
changed direction, and is now a watercolour painter, as well as -
farmer. For real. Fascinating. For now, her website is http://estherpaintings.co.za/,
and I am moving her hosting to GoDaddy, now that I have some
experience with that vendor, as I moved this site there, and she
is adding her "international" domain, http://estherpaintings.com,
and personal domain, http://estherprehn.com,
then a blog, then a gallery, what have you, and I am helping her do that,
and helping her get to the point where she can "roll her own".
With that, I needed to find a webpage creation tool we could
both use, complicated by her being a Macintosh person, as a
graphics designer she has always worked in the Apple and Adobe
Suite environment, neither of which I use. It isn't that I am
not familiar with them, I actually bought, set up and installed
the Macbook-before-last she used, but I don't own a
Mac, today, so can't prototype stuff using her software that I
can't run. Not only that, the Adobe Suite is a professional graphics
design package, and that's not what the WWW is necessarily all about. So
- I am coming to you, this morning, from a Mozzilla webpage
creation package called "SeaMonkey", from
the makers of Firefox. It is free and available for all major
operating systems. Using this is a pain, as I normally write my
webpage HTML by hand, but if I don't start using the package, I
can hardly help Esther with hers. So, here we go - have to say, it doesn't
matter how well used you are to a process or procedure, the
learning process in itself is something worth cultivating.
This is the perfect excuse to learn a new trick or two - and
while I have, in the past, used this type of tool and have it
royally fuck up my existing webpage code, maybe this tool is
better. If you see weird crap in my homepage, from the March
24/25 weekend, will you please tweet me? I try and test really
thoroughly, in three browsers and on two portable devices, but I
can miss things like the next guy. The picture to the right is
Esther's old site, seen on my Blackberry.
Is that relevant, for
art, she asked, and you'll ask, making it work on a Blackberry?
Sure is, kids - there are
millions and millions of people who spend much of their lives
running around the countryside, or in third world countries, who
have nothing but smartphones with small screens, and you never
know who it is that looks at your work. The internet is a place
of lowest common denominators, someone with the $100 smartphone
at the left with free T-Mobile WiFi calling without data plan can surf at the library, Starbucks and MacDonalds,
at Mum and Dad's house on the Comcast, and I keep reminding people of
this. Nobody, but nobody, is going to actually buy a car because the
manufacturer makes amaaaaaaaazing
websites with video. I
extolled this to
Esther as well - yes, you're an accomplished graphics designer,
but that's not why people buy your paintings. Show them your
work, blog,
people who buy art want to connect to the artist, and sod the
rest. Keep it simple and show what you sell. Make sure that somebody in
India on an ISDN line - they call that broadband out there, and only
have EDGE on their 12 hour train journeys! - with Windows XP can see
your stuff too. That's what matters.
So I will set up ftp from within the package next, and see if I
can seamlessly publish right from here. If this tool works well
- and the Mozzilla people are good at what they do - I may
save myself time, not having to do eleven steps to get a website
update out there. For one thing, I am editing a copy of the
index page directly - that's risky, I normally don't do that,
but then again I have a backup drive connected 23/7, and a one
click Robocopy script. I'll keep you posted. If you can
read this sentence, and the rest of this page is kinda error free, it
works - bear in mind I edited my existing page, though, I didn't create
this page using SeaMonkey.
Now I am getting complaints from The Netherlands about being rude? And I am not aware - I may be brief and stuff, but certainly have no intention to be offensive. Is this cultural and linguistic? I have been thinking in English for decades, moved countries and languages permanently in 1979, at some point in your expatriate life, especially if you don't have a Dutch spouse or kids, you end up completely in the host country's language, you notice this when you start waking up in your "new" language. So when I write to someone in Dutch I am effectively translating back to that language. Perhaps that's what does it, English is a high efficiency language (when I had a translation agency, back in London, we calculated the expansion factor of Dutch, German, French, Russian, over English, as 40% and more). And of course, I don't do that embellishing any more - nothing wrong with it, I just lost the ability. Secondly, I notice I use Dutch words for things where the Dutch use English words, these days, I don't know which words have "crossed over", and I definitely have a shrinking, and older, Dutch vocabulary, there are lots of words in Dutch that were invented or adopted after I left there, in 1979, and those do not then come to you as part of the language. If you feel offended, tell me, like the young lady from a commercial company just did, that helps, especially since she said it just after my sister complained... Perhaps it is even related to the comment I got in an email from faraway friend E. this morning: "But you are the IT man and you made your own website and i suppose you understand Google better than you understand wimmin....".
The
sign in the picture to the right, on one of the two neigbourhood
mosques that are in immediate walking distance, I liked, until I
began writing this blog entry, and thought: "Why is it there?"
Why, indeed, do you need to post this on the front of your
center, unless there is a reason, it is a sentence of denial, in
many ways. Please don't get me wrong, I completely understand
the message, the Qu'ran, and the need for this - I spent years
living in the Muslim world - but if you feel you need to overtly
state this, we may continue to have a problem of extremist
Islamists on the one side, and ignorant Westerners on the other.
Back in January, I mentioned Robocopy as a built in Windows command line tool that works better than Xcopy - I have now checked that, unlike Xcopy, Robocopy will actually copy opened files, i.e., files that have the "locked" protection bit set. Way cool. I use it outside my normal AISBackup routine to copy recorded HDTV off to a separate storage disk. I am on the third disk, BTW, since January 1, and we're talking about 750Gb disks here, not puny.. Which reminds me, virus lovers, if you are on your computer and it slows down, and you are surfing the web, or have just surfed the web, shut down your browser window, shut down your other software, and shut down your computer. It is the best way to avoid malicious browser code, and other virus infections. I don't even allow Outlook to download mail automatically - always manually (it comes in on my Blackberry first, so I know when I have mail, but malicious code can't do any harm there). That way, too, I can delete unwanted emails without opening them, they never get to my PC. Then, I tell Outlook to get the remaining emails, the ones I want or need. If you can't shut down your browser, or you cannot shut down your computer, push the on/off button, and keep it depressed until the computer turns off, then bring your system back up in Safe Mode (works on most versions of Windows). Between those actions, you have a good chance of defeating malicious code that is in the process of installing itself, your virus scanner, when starting up, will try and detect and defeat anything it recognizes as malicious or virus laden. Most importantly, don't finish what you're doing, that is, more often than not, a fatal mistake. Somebody points a gun at you, do you finish unloading the groceries? Right...
By the way, and this is increasingly a problem with laptops, which spend much of their time turned off, Windows won't update drivers and software for equipment that isn't connected to your computer. Best thing is to set your laptop to update at night, automatically, every night, put it on the charger before you go to bed, and connect everything you normally use with it, and turn it on. Stuff you don't habitually use on the system, like cameras and phones and spare disks, you should periodically still connect, and run a Windows update then. It is vital, especially for the many people who think they save money by turning off their computers, and who will typically only turn on peripherals when they use them. The risk of not doing this is significant, I've seen PCs and laptops reduced to the point of being unusable by coming up and "getting confused" about what is supposed to be loaded. It is hard to impossible to track back for a help desk person, so you'd be among the many millions with unexplained errors, and the usual conversation about "it's a virus". Most of the time, it isn't - most of the time (sorry) it's you.
A large part of the enormous problem we have, today, with botnets and malicious code and viruses, is caused by the lack of maintenance consumers and business users do on their computers. It has always been an afterthought, and manufacturers and software writers don't believe they can make it mandatory for the very first user of a system to connect to the internet, and do the virus and security stuff before they can use their system. Yet that is the only way you could hope to make a dent in the way criminals use the internet, over time. I have been somewhat aghast at the casual way in which consumers, of all ages, are completely oblivious to the risks they are taking - this even though, in many cases, even non-professional users and kids are dependent on computers to do their finances, homework, talk to their parents, you name it. It used to be the helpdesk that would save the office user, but at home it is Dad, or Mum, or the neighbour, or uncle Joe. I am honestly astonished - and it is only going to get worse, I have noticed the majority of kids don't update their smartphones, that means they won't maintain their tablets, I guess we're in the process of creating our next nightmare. To me, we slowly need "IT maintenance" as a mandatory part of school curriculum. It is vital to our economy and future, if only because savvy users will save us billions and billions of dollars. Making computers simpler is something we have long lost the capability to do, so training is our only option. Training - everybody. Because everybody I don't train will be trained by a Nigerian, Romanian, or Chinese - hacker.
Any smartphone that you find has marginal battery life may suffer from this "problem". Not only games, but apps like Facebook and Google do a double whammy too - they activate your GPS chipset, which needs to see and continually track 8 satellites to function, then sends information on your data plan to its originator, who then pushes ads or other stuff to your phone, again using data transmission. This happens for as long as you're running the app or game. You can prevent some of it by turning off your GPS chipset when you don't need it for GPS.
There probably isn't anything wrong with using Pinterest, Tumblr, Flickr, Whateverr, but I wonder about the amount of time people spend on the aggregate sites. I mean, let's say I am hiring a manager, Google the person - you have to be careful doing that, because you have to do it for everybody once you start, talk to your Legal Eagle - and find out they're active on seventeen different networks. Apart from intellectual property and other considerations, how much time are they going to spend that I pay them for "webbing"? I'd have serious questions, and the only way to find that out is using surveillance, which I don't want to do - corporate security and HR roll their own - so... I'd probably recommend not hiring them. I've looked at my staff's surfing records in the past, when necessary, and I can tell you from experience the internet savvy do it wherever they are, and whenever they are. I've confined myself to Facebook, for friends and family, LinkedIn, to maintain my professional connections, I Tweet when I travel or when I need the tool (my Tweets, for something like 90%, post on LinkedIn, a twofer, anyway :), and I maintain my website. That's it, I can do all that completely outside of office hours, if need be, but beyond that, I don't think I'd be able to. My recommendation: be careful, because the amount of time you spend playing online is very visible. I've fired somebody for setting up a small personal server in the office, without my permission, even though he worked all hours, and that's a good skillset to maintain. Don't be next.
That's
the new Boeing 747-8I, to your right - living close to the
Boeing factory in Everett, it turns out that is the first
commercial 747-8 Intercontinental to be produced
being readied for delivery to Lufthansa. It seems (see February
28, below, as well) every time I look up I see an aircraft I had
not seen before. This particular model is the "enlarged,
improved" version of the venerable Jumbo, designed, I am sure,
to compete with Airbus' massive A-380, which nevertheless
continues to be the largest passenger aircraft on da planet,
with an average 525 seats in three class configuration, versus
467 for this new Boeing. See how shiny this aircraft is? This
particular aircraft is literally minutes off the assembly line,
which (I didn't know) is close to my home. Kind of unusual, when
you think of it, I was walking to the shops as I heard a noise,
and this massive airplane was right over my head. Note that I
did not hear it coming, which speaks volumes about the noise
abatement on the new General Electric GEnx turbofan engines
used on this aircraft, and on the new 787 Dreamliner, which
comes out of this "workshop" too. They're coming off the line,
people, good show.
So, just as a friend emails me this morning to say: "Menno, I know this waiting is frustrating but part of your augmentation, getting to the promised land. just kidding :)" to which I replied in a way I can't reproduce here, as you a) don't speak German and b) don't need to think I am having breast augmentation, I am just going over the major changes I made in my life before, and how hard that was, and how fruitful it turned out to be, in the end. From when I moved from Amsterdam to London, to when I moved from London to New York City - fresh out of hospital, after months of treatment, without health insurance and with just enough money to pay a couple months' rent on the Chelsea room one of my former writers had arranged for me, everybody back home thought I had finally lost it completely. That was back in 1989, and by the end of the next year I was a full Member of Technical Staff at a research and development lab in White Plains, NY. No, change is good, as I extoll below, shit happens when you move your backside, it is really that simple. If you feel stuck, it is because you are. Unshtuck!
I very much doubt we will see major change in Google, which announced a new upcoming semantic search. Semantic search technology has been available for years - I have worked on the capability at NYNEX, where we used it to parse operator service calls. The issue has so far mostly been that the vast amount of processing power to do tens of thousands of semantic searches per second, in combination with the expanded databases that would facilitate deep content searches, has not been sufficiently available. So all I read in between the lines is that Google has built and invested to the point that it can now handle more complex searches quickly, and in the process significantly outdo Facebook in terms of "relevance information." To be honest, search has been "fast and stupid" and it will be nice to see that change. I see no evidence Google will come up with a single "one answer" to a query - that would cripple its revenue stream, as the "one search" principle would exclude all sponsored results.
To be honest, when I read the New York Times Op-Ed letter written by the Kermit who recently publicly noisily left Goldman Sachs, all I can think is: "When was Wall Street ever a community of do-gooders?". At the beginning of my career, I left IBM after seven years or so, because I decided I did not like the corporate culture (part of this equation was that my cozy little Amsterdam DP-CE support office was growing into the behemoth IBM Nederland is today, which is what companies do - yes, again, change). But natural progression, and I went on to do theatre, media and music industry staff, until I eventually tired of that, too, and moved to England, after I decided that being recognized in the shops really wasn't my thing. When I eventually came to the United States, and got the word to slot back into that culture, I knew where I was going. No, it isn't a nice place - nobody ever told you it was summer camp. It is very tough, it is full of unpleasant people whose primary focus is not-you, there are lots of unsavoury things going on, and that is what you sign up for, nothing else. We refer to it as "career". You can tell me a whole lot, but not that you work on Wall Street, where I spent the first few years of my New York City career, and don't know what is going on. Like the Boy Scouts, you Bend Over.
All it took for me was to end up at a desk with a large bank, on a consulting contract, right on the corner of Wall street, by the river, I opened a drawer and found about half a million dollars' worth of uncanceled cheques. The week after, somebody stole the numbers of every single Visa card holder in an entire country - this was before the days of the internet, there really isn't much new about financial crime, you just don't have to come into town for it any more. I remember leaving the First Boston Corporation on 42nd Street, and instantly being investigated in the theft of two floors' worth of Macintoshes - no, not raincoats. Turned out that the weekend after the Friday I finished my consulting assignment, someone got into the building without breaking in, and obviously, the first thing they did was look at anybody who might have secured access. Of course, my name came up, though I had returned my access pass and ID before I left. I wasn't surprised, considering I had myself put in those Macs, as part of my assignment, over the previous six months... And I don't even want to start about my years in D.C., if you think the banks are bad you want to see some of the Federal bozos in action...
I am talking about things I have seen, reported, dealt with, myself, nothing here is hearsay. But the thing is, if you create very large organizations dealing with very large assets, be they monetary or Patriot batteries, you're going to get cooks and crooks and over-achievers, in with the mix. That isn't rocket science, and that is why you, Greg Smith, get paid well, get juicy all-expenses-paid (I hope, or you're an idiot) overseas assignments, and generally are expected to hold the fort in ways that, as an ex-staffer said this morning, "paeons can't". And you don't kiss-and-tell. If nothing else, if there truly is a problem, you've got the SEC or the FCC or any of the other policing institutions to go to, and in many places there are folks you can talk to and get whistleblower protection. But if none of the above are applicable, then the only thing that's wrong in this tale is - the Greg Smith hisself. Who shoulda moved out way sooner, to make place for someone who could better handle the pressure. 'cuz all you've done is, well, not to put too fine a point on it, declared yourself another paeon - you are not a mover-and-shaker because you get a letter in the New York Times, that's easy. Umm, maybe try the Peace Corps, there may be salvation for you there. Because, you see, getting out of the kitchen was a good thing to do, but the way you did it, you may be best off staying out.
To
your left - yes, that's Seattle Spring, taken a few days ago.
Still snow flurries and cold, what can I tell you.
Just briefly revisiting the Sara Blakely story below, at some point in her interview she mentions that she and her siblings were "taught to fail" by their father. This is an interesting concept, and makes a damn sight more sense to me than the endless unrelenting onslaught of successes we are presented with in the media every day. The idea that you have to be able to fail, get back up, and move along with the experience you garner from such a failure, learning as you go, makes for a very positive message. I am reminded of this as I see a notice that Virgin Money, the banking enterprise Sir Richard Branson is building in Britain on the framework of failed bank Northern Rock, is upping its credit card charges by a whopping 50%, as he unveils a US$ 150 million Virgin Atlantic lounge for his Upper Class passengers from and to London at New York's JFK Airport. Oops, I am sorry - not a lounge, a "Clubhouse", complete with "person sized round cavities" not to mention "Iconic New York hairstylist Bumble & Bumble". With his decidely dated hairstyle, and clearly no longer the hungry entrepreneur living on a houseboat in the River Thames, Sir Richard strikes me as one of those who has never failed, and don't get me wrong, good for him, but perhaps not somebody for you to emulate. He may have hit the "where do you go from here" stage of his life. I suppose one could realistically say he will be going into orbit, sometime in the future. Talk about boyhood dreams...
That certainly is not the case for Ms. Blakely, who is in the middle of the long hard slog to do something she really believes in. What she relates in her interview, her father asking his children "What did you fail at this week" at the dinner table, strikes a very strong chord with me. I have to say the endless avalanche of success and sob stories I see all over the media - and yes, I do realize Ms. Blakely's is another success story - I think it is the one that's different. I look for things and experiences to learn from, to do things with, and Ms. Blakely and her behind have a "realism" factor to me that Sir Richard Branson can never have. His, too, is a success story, and mine is only one voice in the wilderness, but I do like people telling me it is OK to fail, building your own spaceship is kind of not in the recession scheme of things.
Putting it differently, yes, Gloria Allred rose to the top of her profession, from nowhere, has her own television show, but we don't need that exalted career, nor the dizzying heights she achieves, most of us want a job, some of us want a career, a TV show I don't need. Apart from anything else, as I have seen demonstrated around me in New York City, once you're way up that ladder you can come down really really hard. From brokers doing lines of coke all day in Wall Street bathrooms and star programmers trying to walk out with $100,000 Sparc workstations in shopping bags, to a Senior Director I've been asked to escort out of a headquarters building, I've had quite an education on how people can and do lose their way.
I keep trying to follow instructions about resume writing and formatting, even though I've read about a gazillion myself, and have been responsible for the hiring of rather large numbers of new staff. Having been told quite some time ago that hiring managers like one page resumes, I have kind of ignored that - with some thirty years' experience under my belt I didn't think there was any way I could get it all in one page.
Of course, the big thing is that you want to pique the recruiter's interest in the first paragraph, not that you want to "get it all in". Generally, if you don't, you can shake it, especially in a day and time when a single posting can garner 800 responses, and many of those aren't screened by recruiters, but by software - software that is dependent on the hiring manager telling the recruiter telling the coder telling the webmaster telling the vendor what they're looking for. I happen to think that that is a very effective way of hiring the wrong people, but that is another conversation. Umm, if you don't believe me, do this: since you think the software screens effectively, have the software do the hiring. Because if it works, you didn't not need the interviewer at all, right? If you think you do need the human, you don't need the software.
So
your other approach is to stand out from the crowd, and as I
recently saw a nice single page bulleted resume, I thought I'd
have a crack at that. While the resume I saw was a
professional's career and project overview in a consulting
company, there really isn't a reason why I can't use the the
same concept. After all, what you want is for somebody to go:
"Ah, that's interesting, let me talk to him, find out what he
did". That's about what you can hope for - not that you can't
have a full size resume behind it, but nobody is going to wade
through a hundred four or five page resumes and still have a
functioning brain afterwards. Just think about how you
read - or perhaps I should say "scan" - when you are looking for
something. Generally, the way LinkedIn presents its members'
career works well - see mine here
- and one nice aspect is that you can actually download your
LinkedIn entry as a PDF file, although I personally think that
ends up being too large.
To some extent, this whole effort is in support of "change". I tend to hunker down when things aren't going the way I want, and I know from experience that that really is not the right thing to do. If "A" isn't working, try "B". But that conflicts - you're not used to doing "B", so it is hard. And "A" may not be wrong, you just may not have given it enough time to work. Et-ce-te-ra. There really aren't easy answers. But change, I've said throughout my career, is always good. It sets you on the road to different destinations, it broadens the mind, and if you really think you find that "A" was brilliant after all, you can head back there. I don't know if you have the same experience I do, but I keep finding that things I thought I knew have changed - it is the bane of getting older, thinking you know it all, when in fact you should keep learning and discovering until the day you die. Tablet computers are a good example - I always thought they were useless, superfluous, but as it turns out the computing landscape has changed to the point that there now is a large user group for whom the tablet computer is a viable computing instrument. It may well be that this is a contingent of users who owned PCs, but never had real use for all of their capabilities in the first place - curious is that so many stayed with PCs, even though laptops have the same capabilities, but are much more manageable, both in terms of footprint and in terms of convenience.
It is, to a large extent, often a generational thing as well -
my favourite example is always "text speak" - invented by kids
who wanted to use their phones to communicate unobtrusively,
quickly, they simply invented and developed a new language, one
that let them transmit meaningful concepts in 140 characters.
Almost obscured by time, in many ways Twitter is their invention
- an invention that made use of a facility originally created by
European GSM telephony developers to send billing information to
customers... Here is Sergei Polunin
Still here? All I am saying is: connect the dots, and you'll see how you can never stop learning, stop discovering. Stuff comes, always, from where you're not looking, but it can't get in unless your door is open. Opportunity, in my experience, does not knock, you've gotta see it to use it. Honest.
Short story long: I've managed what I hope is a one-page, one-screen, one-glance resume, it is here. Comments welcome, let's see how this works. It'll be easier for you to comment once I have my mail script back up, but I have not yet figured out how that works, in GoDaddy. The Network Solutions version I used before worked fine, but I am not making my life easier by turning off most Perl and PHP stuff on my server. I began doing that a year or so ago, after I had been hacked badly at another provider, and then noticed from my web stats I had, and have, thousands of hits on my /bin/cgi subdirectories every month, basically from hackers trying to hijack my server. No, nothing wrong, that's normal, people, in our brave new world. So these good morons now probe for scripts and subdirectories I have taken off the server... Note in the screen capture to the right many of the code links are based in Russia (every one of the server names that end in .ru) - that used to be Russia, China and Romania, but the last two now seem to police their networks much more effectively. No, my site isn't visited from Russia, otherwise, I should be so popular... So much for internet security in the country run by the former head of the KGB, then. 'Cuz those are a lot of hits.
The story of Spanx
, or, to be
totally PC, the grrrrl's brain. I am totally convinced
(seriously) there was never anything really wrong with Ms.
Blakely's ass to begin with.. As a journalist, I would have to
chide Charlie Rose for not making her show her problem on live
nationwide television. Seriously, Charlie, how often do you have
the chance to show a tush that made a billion?
A demonstration of the global economy is pictured to the right
- Sambal Oelek
I like simple. I don't, can't, believe any of the statistics I see any more. Let me put it this way: if the Chevy Volt is really getting 94mpg, why is anybody buying other, less, fuel efficient hybrid cars? I know everybody's economy is contracting, we're seeing tens of millions of people that have lost their jobs, or their savings, or both, and all you have to do is drive down the street to see one empty home after another, and onto the next highway or through road, and see one closed business after another. So anybody who tells me they sold 40% more cars has to be off their rocker. And anybody who tells me the economy grew 0.2 percent has just mistakenly used a rounding error as a statistic. Read my lips: We Are Deceiving Ourselves. No, leased vehicles are future earnings and shouldn't be counted as "sales" - didn't we list refinancings as 'home sales"? Neither is a car loan vehicle a sale, unless you count Bank America as a consumer. I didn't make much noise about this while we're doing OK (there weren't any leases then anyway), but those days are behind us, for now, and I am still not seeing enough efforts to deal with that adequately.
I
have now received this $3.31 HDMI cable
I am certain the new iPad - would Steve Jobs have called this thing "the new iPad"? - is majorly technologically advanced, but the one thing it does not have is the type of battery life I would expect from a tablet. Fancy crowing about its capabilities, when its battery life, by comparison with the previous model, the iPad 2, is an hour less... Don't get me wrong, this is a great gadget, very nice the screen (and therefore the graphics chip) has good enough resolution for 3D, but one thing it can't do is get me through a working day. My Blackberry Playbook, which does up to HD (1920x1080) out to an external HDMI screen, is no match for it, except it goes for three days or so, before I really have to charge it. Even if it isn't for work, 9 hours with the network going just does not cut it with me. I can get a $400 netbook that does better. Again - this is probably a wonderful high end tablet, for the people that don't think twice about spending $2,200 for a camera lens, it just isn't in my field of interest. I want Ahmed the cabby to have a tablet he can afford to buy, and afford to use. Designing and building a 4G HD iPad is not exactly a technological challenge. Seriously, talking about something as having terrific battery life, saying it has ten hours, telling you in brackets it is nine hours on 4G, when a $400 Asus netbook has twelve.. It is simply deceptive advertising, and I hope this did not come about because Jobs is no longer around. If it did, Apple is toast.
If
you still believe in Search Engine Optimization, consider this:
I have been seeing a steady decline of hits on my website, over
the past couple of years. Nothing massive, but steady. This
after years of stability, or slight growth. I really have not
worked on it, but I have done this blog, and owned this domain,
for decades. With the exception of 9/11, where I had the "privilege" of being present, being a
responder, and being a recovery worker, I've never had really
large spikes in visitors. The stats image on the right doesn't
tell all of the story - hits here are in the main HTML, not at
server level, but the trend is the same. As I recently changed
hosting providers, I don't yet have a coherent statistic for the
new GoDaddy environment, where, interestingly, I see an uptick,
but as I only have a couple of months' worth of GoDaddy stats, I
am nowhere near even being able to look at what that means.
Generally, I use at a minimum year's worth of data to identify a trend - anything less isn't scientifically valid. I know, that's not going to endear me to anybody wanting to hire me to improve their web environment, I understand we're results driven - but variables are variables, and if you don't have all four seasons, the holiday periods, an election and some other stuff in your stats, you can't predict nuttin'. Take it from a pro who has spent twenty years looking at how the interweb works - as I like to quip: "I know Al Gore invented the internet, but I built it".
After looking at it for the past six or seven months, to see if I could find any underlying causes, other than my regular visitors all having died of boredom, I can really only find one explanation that makes sense: Facebook. I come up normally, even slightly high, in Google and Bing and MSN/Yahoo searches, basically because I have been around so long, and because I have made sure my website structure has not materially changed all that time (note that if you want to be found, never mind the fancy stuff, your underlying web architecture has to be simple and logical - to webnerd programmers, all too often it is forgotten that the World Wide Web is nothing more than one gianormous computer database). My site isn't commercial, so I am not pipped at the post by competitors, and the only other Menno Aartsen with a web presence does stuff only in Dutch.
So the only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that so many people are now spending so much time on Facebook that it cannibalizes the rest of the World Wide Web. Does this make sense? We know there is a limited amount of time per day that people have to surf and do stuff, while, more and more, Facebook is attempting to be all things to all people, emulating what the World Wide Web did before - and, interestingly, MySpace did before, AOL attempted before that, and before that were CompuServe and The Source. Yes, the internet existed then, we just didn't call it that, the word "internet" comes from the UNIX networking acronym tcp/ip, or transmission control protocol/internet protocol, a methodology to connect two UNIX workstations together.
Facebook was originally a social
network, but today, having issued its IPO planning, it has to
start making money, something it aims to (and is so far largely
failing to, compared with other internet companies) realize
through selling advertising. The Times and New York Times are
attempting to generate revenues from paying subscribers, losing
much of their advertising in the process, while Facebook, which
doesn't charge for access, isn't attracting the big leagues
either, as consumers do go to Facebook, but not to shop. I am
seeing far fewer hits from searches - and as we know that a
majority of internet users do not have a good understanding of
"where" they are - in their local PC, in a web browser with
associated search engine, or in a web application like Facebook
- they may well be performing searches they used to do in Yahoo,
Google or MSN inside Facebook, not aware that Facebook makes
every effort not to have them leave its universe. The majority
of internet surfers don't know to open another window
themselves, or set up their search field there to use Google,
especially Microsoft makes every effort to make that hard, or
convoluted enough that the non-initiated can't figure out how to
set things up. If what I think is true, though, Facebook has
certainly found the Holy Grail, in that being able to
meaningfully communicate attracts the computer user in untold
volumes. But if what I think is true, this may now be at the expense
of advertisers and sellers - time people spent surfing for fun
stuff is now spent in ways that generate no revenues. Facebook
may be cannibalizing the World Wide Web. And if the
picture to the right is trending, we may be looking at
MSNBCFacebookWindowsNookia, Inc., walling out
GoogleMotorolaAndroid, Inc..
Eventually, I am hoping manufacturers and resellers will begin to understand that advertising is a naturally limited tool to achieve sales, as WalMart and Amazon have been proving for years. Smart sales? Make a product people need or want, truck it to WalMart and Amazon, and let them take care of the rest. That's what they do - all of it, including returns. Maybe throw in some trays and shrink wrap to cover Costco, but other than that, just laugh all the way to the bank, keep your two or three customers happy, and go shopping for that little island off Luzon you always liked the beach of. It is very clear that a majority of consumers go to the big box store - real or virtual - where they can get everything, so if your doohicky is there, many people will see it, many people will touch it, many people will buy it. And that may, for you, well be the cheapest way of selling stuff. After that, you have to spend money to make money. You'll ask me why I worry about this, it is their money, after all - actually, it is not. It is yours, and mine. When you buy a product, part of your money goes to advertising. It goes into an industry that I think purports to be able to increase sales, and I do not believe that that industry is the best way to achieve sales. I believe much of the money that goes into bombarding you with advertising, leaving you the unenviable task to sort out what's what and who's who, is completely wasted. It is all based on the old tenet that advertising sells, and in our brave new interconnected world, that may no longer be true. Anybody can now find out there is a $3.31 HDMI cable available from Amazon, so that would have to cannibalize Best Buy's store bought $24.99 HDMI cable, yes?
“The president called her to make sure she's okay,” Limbaugh said. “What is she 30 years old? Thirty years old, a student at Georgetown Law, who admits to having so much sex that she can't afford it anymore.”
Yes, Rush. She's going to be a lawyer. A real one. She is already in Washington, D.C., has been taught at Georgetown by the likes of Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, and now her cellphone is in the President's Blackberry. I don't want to worry you, but has anybody ever explained to you about picking your enemies? I so dislike that man.... And honestly, the political discourse in this country is getting into "unpalatable" spheres. I would almost say "destructive". Note the trend? Rush has it in for blacks (Obama) and women (Fluke).
This episode tells you how disconnected Limbaugh is from the
real world. I have, admittedly, had the privilege of working
with some of the eminent Georgetown alumni, and spent a decade
living and working in the D.C. area, but I would refer to a
Masters student at Georgetown as "lawyer". Especially if she
already has a Cornell degree under her belt. These are the women
that come out of school, join the District's power
establishment, a couple of stops away on Metro, and make
$200,000 in their first year, with a million dollar bonus. I kid
you not, I have met a few socially, in D.C. .
A New York Times article muses about the potential demise of the PC, in favour of the iPad. I am not sure I could do everything I do on the PC on a tablet, certainly not on the Blackberry Playbook I use, but I can certainly see how young PC buyers, the ones that come from their adolescent smartphone-only life, and those in the up-and-coming in third world countries, could choose a tablet, rather than a PC, as their first computer. And then, as they're young and nobody told them that "you can't do that", they may well invent new ways of using a tablet computer, that would not be the first time, and they'll write their own software to do it. There are bunches of stuff you need larger screens for, but that is not impossible to do, with a larger screen, I will hopefully get my HDMI cable within the next few days, and will then talk to you on how well, or badly, a tablet with a 50" screen works. That, in turn, may increase the volumes of large flat panels sold - after all, a tablet will take Bluetooth mice and keyboards, which are available in abundance. But the above will hopefully help you understand it would be one or the other, driven, as always, by the next generation. Those who make tablets are basically able to make phones and laptops and PCs, especially if Windows 8 becomes a really ubiquitous environment, which I think is more likely than one of the "new" flavours of UNIX: iOS and Android.
Dunno,
Danica, you got knocked off the track in three consecutive
races, in Daytona, think they're trying to tell you something?
OK, this is good. Having recently had to renew my mobile account because of a screwup in their customer service, I thought T-Mobile (I'll report on my beef with them when I am done with the Virginia Mason thing below, one at a time) had turned off my Blackberry tethering. I was at my local Chinese takeaway and couldn't access Facebook on my Playbook, but it is working after all. Musta been a fluke, or maybe it took Sunday evening off. Phew.
I so much dislike not being able to resolve disputes through negotation, I always find it difficult to take the next step, and most of the time I don't. But you don't get anywhere that way, and I suppose it goes as much for the issues with other people, as the issues with organizations and companies. I should add, just in case a potential employer reads this, that that does not apply to my professional life, if I have an issue with a co-worker, a staffer, a vendor or another department head, I get in their face, on the spot, or as close as I can get to that. I know, especially from my Manhattan years, that if you do not resolve conflicts immediately, they may continue to haunt you until you need a root canal. But in my private life, I just detest people who put me in a bad situation - which, most of the time, is avoidable. T-Mobile is a point in fact - you go to an overflow office when you make a service change, that overflow office is overseas, the person there doesn't understand what you want - they're "linguistically proficient", but the hard part is the cultural thing. If someone isn't familiar with running a cellphone over WiFi, and an Indian call center girl couldn't be, not in a country where an average phone costs less than $20, and ISDN is still referred to as "broadband", they will have no idea what you are after, no matter how many episodes of "Friends" they've watched. Companies must learn that overseas call centers do not work - they can take calls, process orders, but your customer satisfaction goes out the window - and with that, if they experience problems often enough, and there is an alternative, they're gone. Not for nothing does Frontier already advertise with "All of our staff is in the United States". Getting it? Winning?
I am serious, people. I love India,
I love the Philippines, I have managed quite large teams, out
there, excellent, very hard working people, but making people
work in the middle of their night is, to me, a huge risk factor
for my business. Not only that, the cultural chasm is just that,
a chasm. People who go home to flipflops, 100 degree heat and
100% humidity, and little sanitation or water, have a hard time
connecting to how their customers live, and go to the corner
store to get a bag of ice, while updating their Facebook page on
the iPhone over 4G. If saving money this year is going to cost
you over the decade, you really need to start thinking about how
to run a business. As I mentioned in my Facebook page, the other
day, if I can buy an HDMI cable on Amazon for US$ 3.31, including
shipping, we are not only not doing ourselves any favours,
the Chinese aren't helping themselves either (think about this hard,
my Treasury friends of the "Global Economy"). Doing this type of
stuff is only going to get everybody straight into the next
recession - and that includes putting touch screens and voice
recognition in cars and then selling that as "new technology".
It not only isn't new technology of any kind, it doesn't solve
anything, if you're still putting stuff in cars to facilitate
long commutes, you haven't really understood what our problems
are, and that does include the sky high gas prices.
Go look in Europe, where you have even higher sky high gas prices, but a finely mazed transportation system, they made alternatives, learn, learn, learn. We must get beyond where we were on 9/11, when we suddenly decided you couldn't get to the airplane without passing through security any more. That was 2001 - the Europeans had had their gates closed off from the street since the 1970s. Observe and learn. We are here to help. And if you're not "getting it", let me try it some other way.
Apple is doing very well - for its shareholders, its employees, its carriers - and OK, I am happy to accept that the Foxconn employees that commit suicide by jumping off their buildings are statistically in a lower risk bracket than the Chinese population as a whole. Fine. No problem. But that is a statistic - what it does not tell me is why the people that make iPads decided to end their lives. That may not be something we'll ever find out, but nets are not going to solve their mental state - and to be honest, maybe some of the other Chinese that kill themselves get despondent over other things we make them do, like making HDMI cables for tuppence. The only reason we are even talking about this is that Apple decided to maximize its profits by not manufacturing its products, but farming that out - a tried and tested methodology. The bottom line on all this may be that the relentless profit motive related to outsourcing and cheapest manufacturing, in the long run, may keep us on the same disaster track that creating wealth by driving up real estate prices and endlessly refinancing houses put us, not to mention making huge pickup trucks with 400 horsepower engines only 10% of their buyers need. You could say Apple transferred - cleverly - wealth from China, from Chinese labourers, to its shareholders and employees, and to some extent to the carriers that sell its phones (I know, they make tablets and PCs, let's keep it simple).
The net consequence of all this may be that this is wealth that does not benefit the bottom line - the people who need to eat, live, sleep etc., wherever they may be. Far fetched? Possible. I don't know. I can't prove I am right. But when I look at the aforementioned $3.31 HDMI cable - which I ordered - that includes manufacturing, shipping from China to the US, shipping from the US to me via the USPS, itself in dire straits, handling, and an Amazon markup. Something is not right. It is nice that a manufacturer of music players, handheld computers and PCs has a higher market value than any other company in America, including those that make asswipe, food and heating oil, but all that report does is kick my alarm up a notch. This is a company that only makes luxury goods, in the middle of a global recession. Am I missing something here? Is perhaps saving money by buying 200 bottles of shampoo at a time not really saving money? Costco, as I write this, reports increased revenues and profits, partly due to an increase in members, so if families aren't getting larger, is this because we're all desperately saving money by buying in bulk, and Costco is "better" than WalMart, in that respect, now?
If you recall, I wrote about the
Blackberry Playbook a while ago, lessee, Sunday January 15,
below, or the Amazon review I wrote: click
I pretty much have five times more capability than I have bandwidth. Yes, I know we can invent new ways of doing the same thing, but what was hip in the 1980s, is a bit old hat in the 2010s. OTOH, I just explained the whole thing to a friend, and he said: "That's nice, if that means I could replace the cable box and get the same service, yes, I'd buy that." Unclutter. See, what do I know.. really.
By the way, the airplane to the right is a custom 747, designed and built by Boeing, which ferries bits of 787 from remote factories, like Boeing Japan, to Everett, up the road from me, where the plane is built. I didn't know this contraption existed until it flew across my field of vision as I was walking to my local Safeway. Novel experience, didn't look like anything I'd seen before.
I've recently gotten into a nasty argument with Virginia Mason, the Greater Seattle facility I get most of my medical care from. Things are a bit different here in the Seattle area, by comparison with what I was used to, there are some very large decentralized clinics that provide most "matters medical" in house, and to some extent even have hospital care "built in". But recently, one of their doctors, Una Lee, M.D., a urologist, wanted to check out my bladder, and initiated a $2,000 diagnostic procedure that I ended up getting billed almost $1,000 for. This without any attempt on their part to let me know in advance there'd be a sizable copay - something they knew, when I complained they quoted me chapter and verse of the AMA coding practices. Guess what, people, if you have full time coding experts and clerks on staff, there is absolutely no reason for you not to have them talk to me when you tell me you want to do a procedure. Hospitals on the other coast do, so it is not like this would be a novel approach. In order to have me for a customer you have to work with me, which does not include the notion that you can reach into my wallet when you feel that is relevant, without my approval. I mean, when's the last time you went to WalMart, and were presented with a product that you could only buy, pot luck, without a price tag? The $15 copay for a doctor visit is listed on my insurance card, but this is not. I am in process of kicking up a stink about this with Virginia Mason, and querying the charges with Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, my insurer, who appear to be blameless in all of this. I understand part of the problem to be that an invasive diagnostic procedure is classed and coded as "surgery" - I will admit that shoving a fiber optic probe up my willy is emotionally invasive, but if no skin gets pierced I don't know about the technical accuracy of the word "invasive". Surgery, to me, means skin is breached. More to follow, I am sure. This story wouldn't be here if I had the money, I don't usually kick up a big fuss about these things, but you should not kick a man when he is down, and I feel it is especially heinous when this occurs under the guise of "medical care", when the situation is completely avoidable.
Dutch Prins Friso, as I expect most
know at this point, has now been announced to have suffered irrepairable brain damage in his
recent skiing accident, as I first reported on February 18. I
expected as much, as no information regarding his condition was
immediately forthcoming - that can mean only one thing,
especially where a celebrity is involved. Unresolved, and
un-discussed, remains why a Dutch Royal, de-throned though he
may have been, did not have around the clock security, being a
son to Queen Beatrix would have exposed him to all sorts of
public risk that would warrant protection. Only in 2009, the
Dutch Royal Family suffered a failed assassination attempt. A
protective detail may not have saved Prince Friso, but it is
likely a protection detail would have either prevented the
Prince from skiing where he did, or have been able to extricate
him from the snow drift much quicker than he was. For Austrian
security to state he did not warrant protection as he was "not a
successor to the throne" is, in my view, a joke, as is the fact
the Dutch protective service did not feel he should be watched.
Should we have sweetener loaded with vitamins? I suppose we have milk with vitamin, so perhaps... I don't know, though, isn't everybody able to buy vitamins, these days? Is the concept perhaps both archaic and fraught with danger?
Last but not least, the "inadvertent" burning of copies of the Qu'ran in Afghanistan can't be that. What with 9/11, years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, and tens of thousands of articles and programs about Islam, if we're still not recognizing a Qu'ran, our people on the ground in Muslim countries are still not trained appropriately, still do not have the right protocols. This isn't an error, this isn't a mistake, this is a Washington and Pentagon fuckup. By now, half a dozen policy makers and senior military personnel should have been fired. This way of dealing with it, with some general apologizing on live television, and Obama calling Karzai, is the wet noodle approach. Mr. President, do something. And fire the people who are supposed to make sure we don't screw up diversity. They've had long enough to learn. Way. And if you want, I can come back to D.C. to kick some ass. Because it looks like you need someone on your team who doesn't run a fanclub. Honestly, Sir, this is as bad as it looks, if not worse.
Of course the success of Downton
Abbey
As I key up my recording of the CBS Morning News, a wonderful formula program now that Charlie Rose heads it, I see the program has been pre-empted by local news - a Washington State Trooper has been shot and killed after making a routine traffic stop. This shows you how different the Seattle area is from other major conurbations I have lived in - a trooper's death will certainly merit a program interruption, be up front in the news, but not cause complete pre-emption of the national morning news show for an hour and a half. I am not being critical, this is what they do, here, and I guess I've gotten so used to the military-industrial complex where Wall Street comes before all else, it surprises me to see demonstrated there are quite large segments of our population that deem human and personal values more important. My local friends said it when I moved here last year - the Pacific North West is very different, and much more laid back, than the parts of the East Coast I've made my home in for twenty years. They are right. I have to reach back in my memory a long time to where I lived in London to get to any similar experiences. It may surprise you, but I found The Netherlands, my native country, less comparable, as I've eventually had to come to the conclusion the Dutch operate from a fairly shallow type of care, one example being that the elderly routinely end up in care homes where they become a large invisible group, visited by relatives a couple of times a year, cared for but not cared about. Not until I came to live in the New York suburbs did I begin to learn about care for an elderly neighbour, and have concern for the locals' welfare (and learn about the local busybodies, but that's a different conversation).
On another, brighter, note, my former editor in London, Design's Steve Braidwood, got in touch via LinkedIn a few days ago. I guess I have to say what a wonderful tool LinkedIn is for us professionals - the fact that it was easy for Steve to find me speaks volumes for the effectiveness of this tool. I know you can find people on Facebook, but I strictly segregate my people - Facebook is friends and family, LinkedIn has become my de facto online resume and "water cooler". Having said that, I have been keeping in touch with some of my former bosses in Europe, and colleagues in New York and Washington, on LinkedIn, and found old friends (not to mention a couple of old girlfriends) on Facebook. The only slightly frustrating factor is those family members and acquaintances who confuse Facebook with LinkedIn, and vice versa, but I guess there are always those who "don't get it". If nothing else, I suppose that tells you how disconnected some people are, but it is thanks to Facebook that I reconnected with a very dear friend, who I had not seen in something like 35 years, and was actually able to meet up with her as she was passing through Seatac. It was a wonderful scene - I was walking down the concourse between the belts and the gates, as she approached two Seatac cops right in front of me, to ask them where the meeting point was. The officers couldn't believe we recognized each other right off the bat, but we did, would have even without Facebook. I guess we behaved like we'd last seen each other days ago, which is indeed how we both felt. Rather unusual.
I
am almost inclined to apologize for saying this, but on the 50th
anniversary of John Glenn's first space trip, Russia and
the People's Republic of China are the only two countries that
have the ability to put people in orbit. From a technology
development perspective, if you wanted proof that fitting gas
guzzlers with engines developed in 1954 with touch screens and
speech synthesizers and calling that "technological advancement"
is maybe self deceiving, keep reading this paragraph. My
colleagues and I put speech recognition all over the telephone
network in 1998, but the consumer did not want to pay for it,
and the hottest thing today is... Siri? For free? After decades
of speech recognition development, all over the map, at a cost
of millions and millions of dollars? It became a "marketing
incentive"? People, we need to get our skates on.
The contraption to the right, Lockheed's F-35 fighter plane, on show in Singapore, as reported by NHK from Japan, may be a good example of Anglo-British cooperation (British being the BAE part), but more and more I see the technology involved not benefiting anybody or anything except our warriors. This at a time when I can't think of anyone we need to fight that we need this thing for, at a reputed cost of some $300 million per aircraft, this versus the Boeing 787 jetliner, at $200 million. Don't get me wrong, it is a great jetfighter, fantastic piece of gear, but we can't sell it to most countries, for security reasons, and so the development would have been rather self-fertilizing. It is strange to think that where we once worried about the mutually assured destruction that came with nuclear weapons, the destruction, and the period of destruction, that would follow a falling out between, say, the PRC and ourselves, might have a larger and longer devastation effect than nuclear weapons might have had. Just look at Iran - for as long as India and China will buy their oil, there isn't anything we can do to put them under pressure - the Israelis aren't a threat to them, just an annoyance, and the only thing we could do is pave over their country, because being shot at is something they're waiting for. Cuba all over again, but larger and more powerful.
Am I actually watching one of the "This Old House" presenters show a solution for the New England homeowner who doesn't want to wait 60 seconds for hot water to get to the upstairs bathroom? Energy conservation? Not in their Old House.. Jeez...
In an interesting article, Bloomberg reports that specialty online stores retailers open on Facebook are being closed again, as Facebook subscribers do not seem to be moving their shopping to Facebook (reread my bit about our speech recognition, in the first paragraph of this entry, ring a bell?). I have long suspected that neither the shopping nor the advertising on Facebook achieve their goals, as the drivers for all this, the "Like" buttons and the personal information consumers are required to provide to Facebook, simply do not happen. I'll go further and say that it is possible that those with the money and the inclination to buy online go to an online store, the same as they would have gone to a brick-and-mortar store in the past, rather than buy milk from the Fuller Brush Man. Additional to that, the postage stamp advertising Facebook uses, in an apparent attempt at letting its users use their screen real estate as much as possible, and still getting as many advertisers on the page as possible, provides very little information - in many cases, the postage stamp doesn't even tell you where a particular store or restaurant is located, while Facebook often has no clue where the user is located. Most of the ads I get in my newsfeed are for locales where my Facebook friends live, which to a large extent puts them thousands of miles from where I am. Other reports have put the revenue-per-user for Facebook at about a tenth of what Google makes, where Google provides a service that people use to find things and places - not something Facebook ever intended to provide. If nothing else, it shows you that it is really hard, if not impossible, to "reprogram" the way your users use your service. Similarly, GroupOn is now a lossmaking service, I suspect because the only reason people go to GroupOn is to pay less, not to look for things or places, or to do anything else. The über-discount scheme is, in other words, not a way to make money. That isn't proven yet, I know, just me thinking out loud.
The picture to the left is another
example of what I think is deceptive advertising, clipped from a
British Sky website, showing a bank refund in the form af a U.S.
Treasury cheque, and for some reason the name of the recipient,
a Kevin Hoeffer, is left legible. Curiously, that name belongs,
amongst others, to someone associated with an internet jobs
scam. The advertisement relates directly to a recent
announcement concerning a change in mortgage law, one that has
not been enacted nor put into action by any banks, and so could
never be legitimately advertised. We really need to stop these
people advertising like this - the internet is a big issue here,
because they can now set up a website, and put ads out, within
minutes of the White House or whoever issuing a press release.
Clearly, scammers are out there just sitting around waiting for
opportunities. Clearly also, fines aren't stopping them. And
clearly, these scammers get prime advertising space. Not nice
family oriented Italian companies like the Chrysler Corporation.
The "Like" button in itself is an interesting phenomenon, if not invention. Advertisers and publications have taken to this like there was no tomorrow, apparently thinking that acquiring more ways of advertising to consumers will sell more. This isn't so - now that the average citizen has a hundred channels, advertising does not sell twenty-five times as much as it did when we had four channels, especially if you consider that some of those new channels show only infomercials, and those get paid for twice - once by the advertiser, to the cable company, and then by you, to the cable company. It is not unlike the popover and display ads - you get onto a website, like CNN's, and now an ad expands to shift the article you were reading, or video you were watching, off your screen or browser window, or it pops over whatever it was you were looking at. You now scroll down to get back to where you were, and the entire thing moves back again, again out of your view, or the popover won't close for a while. And the advertising agencies that sell this crap insist this sells things, and you, the manufacturer or retailer, believe them. And I can't figure out how stupid you must be to think you can sell things better by annoying consumers, than by figuring out how to develop new advertising technologies. I'd almost wonder if part of the reason that we're in a recession is that we got to where we think any new technology is a good technology, and - dig this - we don't even ask for proof this works! Trust me, please trust me, there isn't anybody who has bought an HP printer because it was superimposed on something they were interested in and reading. Not. And so it goes with the "Like" button. Umm, you're here looking for a new laptop. Are you now going to click on a Lenovo "Like" button in Facebook, if there happens to be one in your Newsfeed, so your friends know you think you may Like Lenovo, then go to their Facebook page, where you can't buy anything, then go to their Website, then..
I don't know about you, but if I need a new laptop I go to Amazon.com first, pick my poison, then look around the web where I can get that cheaper, and then I'll go wherever the deal is best and buy it. Last time that happened the best deal was actually at the Best Buy store in Fredericksburg, VA, which had a deal that wasn't even on their website. None of which takes me anywhere near Facebook to shop or buy anything. Right? I mean, the idea of this "Like" thing was that you'd get something really nice and then you'd say you like it and all your friends and your aunts and uncles would buy that too. As I understand it, some someones from Harvard said that works. And we're apparently spending billions of dollars betting those boffins understand everybody. They are so smart you don't even need to advertise on the cellphones that most people surf the internet with! Is that magic or what?
As
I am watching news from Austria, where Dutch prince Johan Friso
was hit by an avalanche while on his annual ski vacation with
the rest of the Dutch royals, I fear he is in bad shape -
spending more than 20 minutes under 40 centimetres of snow, and
then needing reanimation, tends not to be the harbinger of a
recovery. I could be wrong, of course, but the Austrian
authorities don't even mention him by name, and provide
pre-scripted press conferences, while the Austrian press reports
clearly that there was no security for the prince. No longer in
line for the throne, as he married a gangster's moll and was
sort of "excommunicated" and even moved to England, there was no
Dutch security for him either. To be honest, "wrong" marriage or
not, I find it inconceivable that an otherwise respectable
member of the royal family, married and father of two children,
wouldn't merit even a single minder with a walkie-talkie, just
ot be on the safe side. Whatever happens, I should imagine a few
civil service idiots in The Hague and Vienna are about to see
their pension plans altered. I am appalled. Had he had a
security detail, it is unlikely he would have been outside of
the slopes, and there would have been an air ambulance that much
quicker. The Austrians did do well, had him extracted and
breathing 23 minutes after the alarm, but that is a very long
time to be without air - he wasn't wearing an avalanche airbag,
either. The Dutch and Austrian public seem to blame all that on
him, I blame it on the security services, the folks we pay to
keep our leaders and royals safe. My past CEO Stu Verge once told me I was responsible
for everything that happened in my department, even if I wasn't.
"I am not a cop" I said to him, and he looked up at me, said
"Yes you are" and went back to work. He was right. No excuses,
you're a leader, you're responsible, even if something happens
they forgot to put in your job description. As far as the Dutch
and the Austrians are concerned who opine he shouldn't have been
outside the slope boundaries - perhaps, but avalanches do tend
to ignore sign posts and things. And the Dutch should stop
calling the prince an "experienced skier" - Dutchmen who live in
London and go on winter vacation in the Austrian mountains every
year aren't expert skiers, they're at best gifted amateurs.
Expert skiers grow up in the mountains, and langlauf to school
in winter. They know the mountain and old man winter,
intimately.
And straight on to Whitney Houston, and the level of conjecture I see across the airwaves - I am reminded how I once did a story on a Tibetan Buddhist leader for the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, where a good friend of mine was an editor. There was supposed to be smuggling going on, a van full of jewellery and other valuables being smuggled across the French border, and the Telegraaf was considered a scandal tabloid, at the time. I was told to bring back a story on how the Tibetan Buddhists were fleecing their acolytes in Western Europe, etc. I didn't, couldn't find a real scandal, interviewed the man, who had a diplomatic passport so could kind of carry whatever he wanted, and the stuff he and his followers and staff had with them were things gifted to them by their European followers. So, as I couldn't prove any wrongdoing (there could have been, but I had no evidence) I didn't write the story. Never worked for these folks again, much though I wanted their high column rates, making stuff up just is not my thing.
I get the same feeling when I see
and read the Whitney Houston reporting. What was and wasn't in
her bathroom and suite doesn't prove anything, there hasn't been
a pronouncement by Beverly Hills police that she was found
submerged, which is being reported all over, I estimate 90%, if
not more, of all reporting on Miss Houston's death is
conjecture. It is one of those unwanted side effects of the
(too?) many news sources the public has, today, but when I see
these news sources copying eah other's coverage, often
un-attributed, and then combining the un-combinable, and adding
little bits of conjecture for which there is no evidence, then
having that repeated as fact by other news media... The BBC
reported Whitney was found submerged, and that has simply never
been stated by Beverly Hills PD or FD, the only responding
agencies - she had been taken from the bath by the time first
responders got there, and I assume she was wet - I kinda would
have been wet too, if I'd been taking a bath. I don't know how
we can take control of this real life reality television - maybe
I am just an old hack, but I don't know that anybody needs this
nonsense, which conveys no real information of any kind to
anybody. All it does is lead to Murdoch's and other's staff
bribing cops and stealing information and hacking celebrities'
voicemail and lots of completely unwanted and uninteresting
stuff. I don't really care what killed Whitney Houston - if
there was no foul play, I am sorry she passed, she's home in
Jersey and will be buried with the appropriate pomp and
circumstance, and that will and should be that. Whatever killed
her, killed her, people die every day, and we'll go to the next
celebrity with issues. It is lonely at the top, what can I tell
you. And no, just because you buy her videos doesn't mean you
have a right to know when Britney has her period, and there
isn't a celebrity training course, although there probably
should be - unless your parents were celebrities, you probably
don't know what hit you. And yes, Rupert Murdoch, it turns out
you're not a nice man, and your empire is crumbling because you
went too far, too long. Hand the reigns to somebody with morals
(not one of your kids, they were brought up by you, which makes
them unsuitable) and retire. Your day is done. Clean up the
press.
To your left: the gaming area in the Crossroads Shopping Center in Bellevue, WA. They've done their utmost to turn the mall into a town square, and from what I've seen succeeded admirably, crowds all day, into the evening, when there are all manner of concerts. Quite unusual, especially for the United States.
Between a Haaretz piece on why Iran triggered its attacks just now, and a CNBC piece on Warren Buffet's changed holdings, I don't know that either satisfies me in terms of confirming trends. Especially when I see the companies buying and selling Apple, I can't say I understand the buyers or the sellers. Of course, very large holdings in any company, bought mid-range and owned by an entity that does not need the money, incur a lowish risk. This is the difference between you and me, on the one hand, and an institutional investor on the other, you and I have to eat, using that money, at some point, while the investor never needs those funds as anything other than a tool. In other words, money to them does not mean the same things as money does to you. If that's too esoteric, I am sorry, but the more I look at it, the more I get the idea that their money isn't money, not in my sense of the word and the value.
It is interesting - apart from the
press conjecturing news - to see how companies are completely in the dark about getting entertainment
(and advertising) into the home. This while an entire generation
is growing up that doesn't do the "home" stuff any more - they
connect with the world, and watch what's left of television, on
their personal devices. If I owned one of these companies I
would put all of my eggs in the "personal devices" bucket, just
making sure there is a large monitor in the market that devices
can connect to, and that that is in every room. There are quite
a few companies that try to produce the next "home entertainment
center" device, from Apple and Google to Tivo and Comcast, but I
just don't think the interest is there. Just go to any of these
folks' websites, and see how little their equipment sells for.
Satellite folks and Verizon try to sell you equipment that'll
let you start watching a movie in one room, then move to another
- how often does that happen in your house? At least, I am not
seeing the movie follow you to the bathroom, then to the
kitchen, not until we redesign our houses. And then we haven't
talked about the movie following us to the car - it isn't legal
to watch a movie while driving, and the self driving car isn't
quite there yet. Seriously, they seem to be all followers, no
leaders.
So we're back to a display - not that hard to sell, the über-display on the wall - every room in every new home, every room in every new office, must have one. The Chinese deliver every new public transport carriage with screens, why can't we? We're stuck with the stupid navigation screen in the dashboard of the car, where you neither need it nor want it (drivers operating touch screens in vehicles are a real danger - their installation in the dashboard of a vehicle should be illegal). Then, we figure out how to output any device to the screen in the room where we are, so you can key up the local news on your phone, and have it display on the screen in the bedroom, the office, the bathroom, the seatback, coming back to your handset when you leave, etc. Time for next steps, people - we have the technologies, let's work them. The picture to the right is a garden in the Seattle suburbs, during this surprisingly mild winter - so far..
In order to save money, I recently moved my hosting and internet domain from Network Solutions to GoDaddy. That was a big change for me, I had hosted with NSI since the 1990's, not only personally, but for the Verizon subsidiaries whose web presence I was responsible for as well. NSI kind of goes back to before the Web was the Web, if you follow my drift. Now that the changeover has been completed (the only discord is that the actual transfer of a domain takes "5 to 7 days", when it could be done in 11 minutes, but that is neither NSI's nor GoDaddy's fault, it does work) I can tell you that GoDaddy has excellent customer service, responds to emails quickly, actually has an onshore English speaking call center that follows up on new installations, and has an online interface I find easier to use than Network Solutions' - but of course, that's a very personal thing, and I am supposed to know how these things all work, so for me it is a matter of "finding the function", rather than figuring out how to do things.. The hosting package was activated overnight, I had ftp (File Transfer Protocol) access to it via an IP address before my domain "got there", so was able to set up my webserver before activation, and that meant my website never went down while the domain transfer was enacted, after the transfer I had to manually change the DNS (Domain Name Service) server names, supposedly an automatic process, but it is possible I was just being impatient. It was smooth, and where the help files didn't help me a customer service rep did, via email. I could have called, chose not to, GoDaddy uses a toll number for customer service, so doesn't spend gazillions of dollars on tollfree numbers, which in today's world are all but useless, except for data collection. Good show. Network Solutions has become increasingly cumbersome to deal with, sending you emails your services are "about to expire" months ahead of time, devoting large sections of its website trying to sell rather than provide service, and being unable to provide timely phone customer service - I finally decided to leave when the promised callback hadn't happened five hours later.
I
originally was a bit leery of GoDaddy, which advertises its
wares using Danica Patrick
On February 2nd, below, told you about the Avertv TV tuner
Anyway, it otherwise works a treat, I just wanted to let you know what you're up against. I can't tell you often enough: do not let your hard disk fill up, you're jeopardizing your data and your entire Windows-and-applications install. Not worth it.
One
thing I am adamant about, though - I can't see the smart grid
happening, at least not if it is dependent on the utilities
controlling appliances according to rules set by the government.
I've seen nighttime cheap electricity storage heaters
(hot water as well as heat) in use in The Netherlands, England,
and the United States, they didn't work then, most folks didn't
want them, and the consumer has not magically somehow changed
their mind. Because - the smart grid is not much more than
letting you use power when it is available, and "spreading the
load". Well, unless you're going to send the kids to school at
night, so they use the bathroom at 6pm rather than 6am, I am not
seeing that happen. Energy use is dicated by people needing that
energy, not by anything else, or we'd have stopped having
traffic jams in 1968. Let's think and talk and try to make sense
of this.
The Europeans want to sell Saab to the Chinese, but so far GM, which owns the technologies property, has said "no". I am not seeing GM on the negotiating team, trying to work this out and make money, why is that? Why can we not sell the intellectual property connect to a failed car? Could somebody please go ask GM what the issue is here? The Chinese will just go and buy something else, they've still got way too much money.
You have recently seen
winter weather disrupt travel and life in Europe, and I recall
some blizzards last year on the East Coast that were well
advertised in advance. In the Netherlands, questions in the
Commons were asked about train travel disruption - this even
though the snow storm was announced kind of to-the-minute, a day
in advance. This makes me wonder why people travel when they
know weather conditions will be adverse, while millions of
people now have navigation gear that can actually tell them
there are 30 mile tailbacks. It seems to be all the rage to
blame the government and the local authorities, but I remember
wanting to send my NOC folks home early, on a heavy snow day,
and being told I couldn't, because my CEO "didn't think it was
going to be that bad". Sending the non-essential personnel onto
bad roads outside the rush hour would seem sensible, even for
their own safety, my primary concern, so why? Why do so many
think weather does not have to be planned for, except for by the
salt trucks?. Another perfect argument to not have people come
into an office or an airport every day. The argument, in many
ways, parallels the conversation about the cold and the flu -
why do we allow people who have a contagious illness to come in
to work? The net result is the accelerated spread of whatever
they are carrying, which costs, worldwide, billions of dollars.
There is rhyme nor reason to this, any more than getting in the
car after hearing there will be a blizzard all afternoon makes
sense. It makes one wonder how intelligent we really are..
I've switched. Gone with CBS and Charlie Rose. No more
tearjerker stories with Ann Curry asking "How does that make you
feel?" in a gravelly voice, as if that has anything to do with
reporting or journalism, we have enough "reality" television as
is. If I've got to make do with an aging Charlie Rose, and Lara Logan
So if I understand it all correctly, Facebook has never made much money from handheld device advertising, as it doesn't do any. IOW: it is floating, and complacent already. I can tell you for free that if I were Facebook's COO, I would not go to IPO unless I had a presence in China, whatever it was I'd have to do, and I'd have found a way to make some money on the millions of people who access Facebook on mobile devices. Isn't Zuck's girlfriend Chinese? How about leveraging assets here? What is so hard about offering the Chinese a version of Facebook they can live with, if you're sitting on a mountain of money?
Unless I am very much mistaken, the majority of Facebook users are mobile, not PC-based. Think about this, people - what way is this of running a business? Navel staring, impressed with having the entire world accessing Facebook - my best friend is working in Shenzen right now, and can't even see his birthday wishes. That, good people, is a joke. Massively so. Trust me. Because I am not quite sure how Facebook on my Nokia C7, see picture to the left, is going to add visual advertising and still be usable. And while we're at it, the picture top right (don't you love those HD screen captures?) shows NBC's Tom Costello at Washington National Airport holding a phone from that company that supposedly is going belly-up - like most people in Washington do, if you think the Fed is going to let its employees run around with phones that need to connect to iTunes to function, you've got another one coming. Lots of misinformation, I believe, which is a shame.
While we're certainly all dying to find out what RIM has in
store for us with the Blackberry Playbook operating
system update, I can tell you it's been quite useful to me. It
has been a month, and I have taken to carrying it instead
of my laptop, when I leave the house - to give you an idea of
how special that is, I began carrying a laptop on a daily basis
in the mid-1980s (the Radio Shack 100, which I used to write and
file stories as a journalist), and it is now 2012. Some 90% of
everything I do on my laptop on the road I can do on the
Playbook, not a little bit because, thanks to its mating with my
BlackBerry 9700
I am increasingly hearing opinions and seeing surveys and research indicating technology - and more specifically, anything to do with the internet - is the big saviour of our future, our employment, our economies, everything. And increasingly, that has me worried. The "connected universe" has so far gotten us into a major recession - I don't have evidence it caused the recession, but I have a suspicion there are too many people looking at this "panacea", and not asking themselves who will pay for what. I've seen that before - the last "dotcom bubble" burst around 2000, if memory serves me, when investors found out entrepreneurs were building things nobody needed. The Facebook IPO is a prime example - it has no real product its users buy, and so its revenues per customer - you - are some $4.39. Google, by comparison, which is a very large advertising agency, has over $30 per user. Another good example is navigation - people paid $400 for a vehicle unit, then $200 - now, most smartphones have full featured navigation and worldwide GPS maps for free. End of market, ask TomTom and Garmin how they are doing.
I am assuming these numbers are largely correct - Google has a real product, Facebook does not. At least, it does not have a product consumers are willing to pay for, it has all been paid for by investors - Wall Street. That takes me right back to Hotmail, acquired by Microsoft in 1998 for an enormous amount of money, then to go on living as the world's largest mailing list, but little else. And there are dozens of these examples, not least my own network voice dialing, which people love to use, but wouldn't, and won't, pay for. And to be honest with you, I am beginning to see this "deja vu all over again". The Smartgrid? Technology dating back to the last century, which lets energy companies turn your appliances on and off via their own network, when we already have three or four networks that span the world end-to-end. They are, pardon my negativity, reinventing the wheel, and doing it in such a way they'll only turn off the consumer, who isn't ever going to allow the government to turn its hot water on and off to benefit the neighbours.
Seeing car manufacturers going back to putting yet more features in the car that are useful mostly on those long commutes - speech recognition, Bluetooth coffeemakers (kidding), touch screens (so you can take your eyes off the road) makes a complete mockery of energy conservation - sure, you can buy a hybrid vehicle so you spend less on gas, but I am not seeing the gummint doing what it should be doing - outlawing commuting, moving the Pentagon to Montana, and the senate to Indiana. There is, for most workers, no need to be in the office every day, and we've had the facilitation technology for decades now, so why are they, still? All that has been done is that there are now fewer workers with larger territories, but they still physically go into work every day, and we continue to build even more roads so they can sit in traffic jams twice a day, polluting the universe, wasting perfectly livable hours. How crazy is that? Who thought of selling coffee at drive-through Starbuck$ so even more people can sit in idling vehicles waiting for their panna montata.. I mean, really!
I know, I am Mennopausal. But I wonder whether I worked for nothing, all these years. We gave you the technology, and now you're using it just to "friend" your long lost cousin Jillie in South Carolina? For free? And you file your taxes online, for free, into a computer system, so that has eliminated two commercial workers and three civil servants right there, and moved their income to Hewlett Packard in Singapore and Huawei in Shenzen? You know what I am getting at?
Some kind local folks have dragged me into the energy discussion - rather inadvertently, I might add, they're helping me find work - and sure enough, Washington State is very different from anywhere I have ever lived, but at the same time not so different that some basic rules do not apply. At the same time, I believe that if you can make everybody in the whole world 1% more efficient, you should do that, rather than make the people in your town 5% more efficient, which admittedly is easier to do. Giving poor people low energy bulbs they can't afford to buy doesn't solve the basic problem of making people more energy conscious, and their kids' exposure to trace mercury from broken CFLs isn't something we should do-gooder ignore. We live in a global economy, and for as long as we eat seafood from Taiwan, drink fruit juice from Ukraine, use coffee makers from Germany and put Japanese technology in our cars, we should not isolate our efforts. Apart from anything else, we could benefit our economy by creating universal solutions we can export, and, who knows, whose use we can even mandate and license - but that will only happen if we work with "them" in the development stage, and we don't have a good track record of working with - listening to - "them". Things can be pretty incongruous - I was told Washington State, through its abundant hydropower, has the cheapest electricity in the nation, and yet I see everybody using natural gas to heat their homes, and nobody using heat pumps. That, to me, makes little sense, we can do lots of other things with natural gas, and I have discovered there are huge advantages to using electricity for all sorts of purposes beyond lighting, especially since we have very efficient electric technologies available today. Ah yes, here it is: "About half of Washington’s natural-gas supplies come from Alberta and British Columbia provinces in Canada and the other half from Rocky Mountain production sites such as Wyoming." The heat pump discussion by itself is quite interesting - heat pumps are quite efficient, these days, so why aren't all air conditioners built as heat pumps? There is really little difference in manufacturing cost.
So, expect to read a few diatribes about things I've noticed, in the next few weeks. Often, you notice weird stuff, when you're new to an environment, that then makes perfectly good sense once it is explained to you. It is only now that I have a bit of an overview over the various projects that are being deployed. That's why there is a Twitter link at the top of the page, to facilitate a conversation.
I haven't really done a lot of computer work of late, but this
is nerd week, and the one thing I really have to
do - taking apart my HP laptop and verifying the screen
connectors - I've been trying to avoid, although it would not be
the first time I did that. I just don't want to terminally break
it, kind of hoping I will find a very well paid consulting gig
for a few months, work with it the way it is, buy a spare,
transfer my data, and then fix the screen. I have the Vaio
desktop, which is running just fine, but it is doubling as my
television right now, and I could not get Windows Media Center
(under Windows Vista 64 Ultimate) to talk to my Avermedia tuner
to give me the Clear QAM (digital) channels. So here I am, two
days down the road, I got the digital stuff working, but keep
losing some of the channels.... The picture is a screen grab
from full HD, the CBS Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson - and
his old pal Ringo Starr, on this occasion. The actual resolution
is higher than depicted here, but you'd have to sit here and
wait for a minute if I posted that - if it even loaded on your
PC. Click on it to see it larger and go "Wow!" ;)
Turns out Microsoft introduced a "fix" for this in 2008, then withdrew it after Windows 7, which has all that built in, became stable. So if your computer vendor did not put it "out there", as it was never part of the Windows Update program, the update is kind of inaccessible, at this point. Microsoft mentions it all over (it is called "Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008") but does not make a link available to it, and only released it to "licensed OEMs". Duh. However that may be, I've got the "Pack" now, not to mention the supporting software, managed to install it on the Vaio, and Windows then talked itself into loading the rest of the necessary updates, which, for some strange MSreason, are posted all over Technet. I am still trying to figure out whether I have all of the digital channels I am supposed to have, and on how to merge digital and analog channels, but it is working.
I suppose I could have found some other kind of solution, but from time to time I have an innate desire to prove to myself that I "have still got it". Windows is a complicated and often illogical environment, and then when you work on Vista, which was superseded by Windows 7 for some very good reasons, you really have to pull out all your stops to get something to "behave". While Vista can take long to load, and needs a lot of careful tweaking to behave, it is as powerful as Windows 7 is, and once you have things working there aren't many problems with it. That tweaking, maintenance and making sure the "crap" is unloaded and removed, is stuff you - well, I - have to do with Windows anyway. It is a client operating system with more code and functionality and "bells and whistles" than most server packages. Besides, it is made to run passably well without enough memory and enough CPU power, so there is bits of compromise all over. The reboots during an install can easily take ten or fifteen minutes - it'll work before that, but as it is then still loading new modules, you're much better off getting another cuppa.
At any rate, it is comforting to be able to sort something like
this out, and write about it, much as I did with the Blackberry
Playbook, the other day. Shortly the new Blackberry operating
system version should be out, and I can perhaps add some more
stuff to my writing page and Amazon
reviews
The Avertv TV Tuner
Once the drivers are loaded the Avermedia device is recognized and the Media Center will offer to have it detect and program all available broadcast channels - analog TV and digital TV. If your computer is set up to display HD TV (which normally requires an HDMI connector, and an HD flat panel TV set up to display at a 1920x1280 resolution at 60 Hz - 30 will work too) you can watch and record HD TV "at full throttle", so to speak - please remember, many PCs do NOT provide that resolution natively, but need an external HD display for it! If connected via an HDMI cable, and with a Dolby decoder built into the TV, or connected through the TV, this unit will provide full spec HD. Pretty amazing.
The Avermedia tuner picked up all available cable channels flawlessly (it is capable of receiving from an indoor or outdoor TV antenna, digital or analog, as well) and Windows Media Center downloaded the entire programming schedule for it, once I had told it my location and cable system. This is, to me, the only way to use this tuner - the TV schedule Windows pulls down from the internet is free, you can see what is on, program detail, and you can check the schedule a week ahead of time and program anything you want to record. It is important that your PC is fast enough - recording HD television with Dolby 5.1 audio, both of which the tuner receives and makes available, requires a LOT of horsepower. Even more if you want to use the PC for other things while you have the TV running, which is perfectly possible. A 64 bit version of Windows helps, as does extra memory. 64 bit Windows can handle 8 GB of RAM or more, provided your motherboard and BIOS are capable of addressing that. Several of my laptops were, but the VAIO desktop I am now using can only address 4 GB of RAM. For HD TV, that is fairly marginal, due to the memory requirements of the graphics chipset. Remember as well that the USB port the unit is plugged into shares its bandwidth among all USB ports, and if you have a lot of active USB devices, the port performance can degrade, and make TV watching a hit-or-miss proposition.
But it is there, and if you want to play with TV, or if you want a cheap DVR/PVR, this unit is cheap, works very well, and gives you all the advantages of a cable company DVR. For recording, you will need to make sure you have a huuuuge hard disk in your PC (one one hour HD program will take some 4GB of disk space), or better still, an external drive to store recorded TV on. Remember that the Windows Media Center works like a DVR, meaning you can pause and review what you're watching, but for that to work it needs a good amount of disk space, as it continually saves what you're watching to a temporary file structure that can get quite large, and that you cannot turn off.
We're into the Year
of the Dragon, and China watchers seem to think
that's China's cue for a rise to stardom. I personally think
they got there already, and it isn't so hard to see examples of
where China is mega-strong and mega-fast. Just look at Hong Kong
and Singapore, both overwhelmingly culturally and ethnically
Chinese, and shining examples of the innovation and adaptation
China is capable of. The rest of China, being somewhat large,
will just get there a little more slowly. My last China report
is here.
As always, I learn a lot about my new environment - in this
case, about the way utilities and public service are handled, in
Washington State. That's very different from what I am used to,
on the other coast - especially fascinating in the way energy is
handled, one of my new friends is an expert in the field, and he
is connecting me with others that work on the many initivatives
towards energy self sufficiency, here. Easier than where I came
from, Washington has abundant hydropower, being as
mountainous as it is, and thus, I am told, has the cheapest
electricity in the nation. That's made me wonder why I am not
seeing more heat pumps
An article in Thestreet.com names a few "American" products that aren't made in America - and it'll be easy to add more, considering Chrysler isn't an American company any more, Verizon Wireless is half owned by the British, I could go on.
My point is this: we need to stop moaning about jobs - they come when you make things you sell - and about who is going to be in the White House - as if figuring that out will solve anything. We need to look at what we're doing, specifically, who is making products and services we export, brainstorm about how we can make more of those things, and where possible engage the people that created those products - Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Wozniak - to help us set up more and better enterprises, create new ideas, new services, what have you. They've done this before, so presumably, they can tell us how that came about, and what they think about doing more of that. I am getting really tired of people talking about "job creation" and "the economy", I am not interested in jobs, but in money for the USA, and ways to then distribute this to those that need it. Call it jobs, call it civil service, I do not care. If we can't do jobs but we can do more government services - can afford that - let's do that. That's how Europeans, at least West Europeans, tend to tackle it, and their schemes have worked, in the past. But the most important thing, let's all talk together about how we can, as a country, make more money. Commerce is our foundation, and we're not doing too well in that quarter, if you look at Apple making money hand-over-fist - for the Chinese.
The rumoured Facebook IPO is another perfect example. Lots of hype, no hard facts - whether it is Facebook or Demi Moore, I think we should slowly fire all of those "journalists" who spend their days copying each other's conjectures - and if you do your sums, like the folks at The Guardian, you find some interesting statistics. Apart from anything else, what started with two postage stamp ads on your Facebook page, then morphed to six, is now up to seven. In my world, that is called inflation - remember that these advertisers pay for this, and they now have to share your attention with six others - in fact, seven of those ads no longer fit on one screen. Add to that that their success is based on localization - I know this because I refuse to tell Facebook where I live, so it is firing ads at me from the faraway locales of all of my friends, as if I am going to fly to Connecticut to have lunch, or St. Petersburg to buy a set of tires. Look at the mandatory timeline layout Facebook is now forcing people to adopt - since when is it a good idea to change, mandatorily, a user interface that has attracted tens of millions of users? No human factors engineers at Facebook? Or are they not listened to?
The recent excellent New York Times article on Apple product manufacturing that explosively made the headlines gave rise to large numbers of copycat articles - just watched a report on the CBS morning news that didn't mention the Times in any way. Be that as it may, nobody I've read mentions the underlying issue, which isn't so much related to Apple - our desire for advanced low priced products. Blackberry, Nokia, HP, HTC, and the list of manufacturers and "brand names" that compete on price goes on and on - has anyone been in a Samsung factory? That by itself needn't have led to slave labour like circumstances in China, but the next competition step did - new models and features, introduced as quickly as possible, making it impossible to automate the manufacture of a product. Take cars, produced in largely automated factories - a model lasts an entire year, and for the next model year the changes will normally be small enough so they can be programmed into the robots (although the same may not be said for the parts suppliers). Apple went everybody one better, competing not on price, but on design and feature, and its carefully built "cult factor", not passing savings on to its customers, but to its shareholders and staff, the latter not including the hundreds of thousands of workers who build their products. It may have been Steve Jobs who invented this particular concept, which would make him a bad boy, and not the nice technology entrepreneur he has been made out to be. But the overarching blame for the Foxconns of this world doesn't lie with Apple, that goes way back to the corporations that decided to head for "cheaper" countries to mass produce the gear we like. Who can solve this problem? If we feel strongly enough about this, our governments could levy large tariffs on mass produced stuff that is not made in our own country. Haven't heard any of the presidential candidates about this, have you? It would force Apple and Blackberry and Samsung to manufacture in the United States, or, at the least, in North America, which they can do. It would put money in the government's pockets, too, as you pay tariffs on things you must have that aren't built here. We might have to import workers from overseas, but at least they'd be paying income tax here. Just think about it, if you would. Other than that, let the Chinese deal with their own shit, we have more important fish to fry.
Whoa, the Reverend Al Sharpton (seen at Etta James' funeral) has lost weight.. what happened?
The time machine from January, 2012, with linkbacks to August, 2008, is archived here
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