Sunday February 17, 2013: Windows 8 Recap

 I have finally, after a fair amount of (quite manageable) trial and error, got everything I wanted running under Windows 8, on both my 2012 Lenovo laptop and my 2010 Sony Vaio desktop. It all runs, with the exception of my Vitamin D Video surveillance software. The bad news is that some of it needed tweaking the average user will not be able to do. I don't know how bad that is, to be honest, you could hire somebody like me to figure it out for you, or you could buy a new, Windows 8 compatible, dingdong, and put the old one on Ebay. Lots of possibilities. None that make Windows 8 bad. The Vitamin D Video software runs under Windows 8 on my Sony Vaio, but it frequently hangs, and then has to be "recovered", a useful function in Windows 8, except for the one time when Vitamin D hung while shutting down, and became completely unrecoverable. That state it crashed in even made it impossible to uninstall, which I then had to do by hand, after which I had to run a full error recovery on Windows 8, this to fully repair the registry and other "Windows innards". I have not tested it in my other Windows 8 machine, but considering the rather damaging effect, I don't even want to try. It wasn't a biggie, I have several other surveillance packages that will store pictures on a remote server, just had not bothered to bring them up.

If you think you may, in the future, progress to a Windows phone and/or a Windows tablet, get Windows 8 now (as I write this, Microsoft still sells the update for US$ - hold on.. the original cutoff date for the $14.99 Windows 8 upgrade was January 31st, but I now see the date has changed - February 28, 2013, is the latest). It gives you time to learn, and you will achieve something you cannot with Apple: a unified interface across multiple devices with freedom of vendors. Getting the Windows operating system does not tie you to a hardware vendor, or an online system you must give your personal information to to activate your device - Windows runs on PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and even some semi-smartphones. I am afraid I am allergic to vendors who force you to use their services to make your purchase actually work. Microsoft, too, tries very hard to get you to give them your data, but it does not make it mandatory. And the interface is fully touch screen compatible (Windows has had touch screen drivers for many years, going back to Vista, anyway, so that will not be buggy), but has the classic desktop readily available - and it runs faster and smoother than Windows 7 did, and Windows 7 was not bad to begin with.

So I do apologize it has taken me more than a month to do a proper assessment, but you really can't test an operating system faster than that. I had to solve quite a few small "niggly bits" that won't much matter to you, and won't impact your computer experience, but I like to see what does not work,  and why, so the second I finally discover some errors I am in second heaven. With the Lenovo laptop, the power management software would not find its driver, and just sat in the device manager with a question mark. That's a flaw in the way Windows 8 looks for drivers - I retrieved the Lenovo Windows 7 power management package, installed it, and the problem went away. Similarly, one out of the three Bluetooth dongles I tried did not work. I managed to install the other two, since I use a Bluetooth keyboard / track pad combo, and wanted that to work, because that way I can use two computers side-by-side with one keyboard (the keyboard can switch between devices with a keypress).

The Vaio was interesting too - the optical audio (Dolby) drivers would not load, so I had to install them by hand, the same thing applied to the power management drivers (but I use the Vaio with a managed UPS, so maybe that was OK - the All-in-One with a USB-attached UPS thinks it is a laptop). And there were some other drivers that installed fine, without hiccups, but only manually. The strangest was the power driver, that made a list of failed Bluetooth drivers go away. I am not complaining, it all works, but it probably is not for the faint of heart, who don't want to ignore error messages, that can indeed be lethal. My latest struggle, still ongoing, is the disk defragger, now called "disk optimization". You can set this to run automatically, which I always do, but on the Vaio it won't run automagically, while on the Lenovo it does. One of the reasons your system eventually runs slowly is that your hard disk may suffer from fragmented data, and the defragger built into Windows since XP does away with that - provided you set it to run when you are not using your system, say, at night, which for many people isn't an option because they turn their computers off. Disks, you see, do not defragment while you are using them. So, while the Scheduler settings on both systems are the same, on one it runs, on the other it doesn't. Go figure. Please be aware that disk fragmentation may cause you to crash your system, even lose files, and can put your entire harddisk at risk. I am very firmly convinced that many of the "virus problems" consumers think they experience are due to the lack of maintenance on their PCs. Turning them off will stop any maintenance in progress, creating risk, rather than reducing it, and I have noted consumers turn off laptops even more readily than they do PCs. All of my systems are on 24/7, and, at night, every night, automatically run full disk maintenance and a full, deep, virus scan. Neither of those can be done while you are using your system, whatever the manufacturer says - Windows uses the hard disk for virtual memory, and thus always writes to and reads from the disk, all it needs is one running program, or a couple of open files.

So anyway - Windows 8 is new, and some stuff needs to still get fixed, that isn't a problem. It runs well, is smooth, is fast, boots fast, and Media Center works well, which is good news for those of us who like to watch TV on our computers. Media Center allows that, because it has DRM (Digital Rights Management) built in, and I have to say that the HD screen image, under Windows 8, is superb, even on a 50 inch display. Most importantly, it doesn't just run well on new PCs and laptops, for the older systems, even if the manufacturer tells you they "are not supported", Windows 8 is a true improvement. My Vaio, which I bought with the manufacturer provided Windows Vista Professional, has been through Windows 7  Business, and now, under Windows 8 Pro, it runs at least twice as fast as it did under Vista, is more frugal with memory, and is not at all in need of replacing. This is partly due to the excellent Sony motherboard build, I must say.

Postscript: Forgot to mention something that is likely more my discovery than specific to Windows 8, but.... if you connect both your WiFi and a wired Ethernet connection, and bridge the two (select both, right click and select "bridge"), you actually end up with more bandwidth, and a bit more network speed, if your modem is capable of that. I actually have two routers hanging off the cable interface, and that seems to lift me well above the port speed, though it isn't a straight shot. As I said, I had never tried this before, so for all I know you could do this in XP, but I do know that bridging was finicky, and used for failover, and this is very easy and compounds as well as provides you with a potential failure recovery. I mean, you could hardwire into your router, and then use the neighbour's Wifi, and you'd never go down. Umm, I didn't say that :)

Before you read this and subsequent musings about Windows 8, here's Menno's Law: do not buy a computer with a new operating system until it has been on the market for a year (I will now go on to tell you why I am breaking my own rules ;) For Windows 8, that would be October 2013. Apart from the obvious reason - it needs to be debugged in the marketplace, and after a year Microsoft will have fixed 95% of whatever doesn't work right - it is clear that, for the moment at least, most computers are sold with Windows 8 Core, which is a crippled version of Windows 8 Pro without Windows Media Center. You'll have to pay to get upgraded to Pro, and then pay to add the Media Center software, which you can't even buy if you don't have Pro installed. I should imagine by October 2013 there will be lots of affordable computers with both Pro and Media Center off-the-shelf. By that time, Microsoft will have made the money it needs to support its share price.

If you're wondering, I managed standardization and rollout of two entire Verizon subsidiaries, one in the US and one in Indonesia, on the workstation/PC front, converting the standard from PC to laptop, and managing the vendors that provided equipment, imaging and support, down to the Help Desks. I helped the Indonesian Army combat PC viruses, as well, but that's a different, though somewhat related, story.

I've always had "Windows internals" as part of my personal knowledge base, and so I've ordered a new Windows 7 laptop, which I should be able to upgrade to Windows 8 Pro cheaply, while Windows Media Center can be downloaded for free from Microsoft until January 31, or thereabouts. Doing those installs will teach me more than buying a cheapie Windows 8 laptop, so there you go. I ran around from Bellevue to Everett to see what was available Thanksgiving night and Black Friday, and clearly, 99% of what was out there was limited in capabilities, had large screens (most folks buy laptops as their primary computer these days, and want 15.6 inch or larger screens) and the crippled Windows 8. Nothing was a really good deal, except for one single Toshiba Windows 7 model at one single Best Buy, and they had had run out of that by the time I got there.

Then, I'll start customizing equipment for my colleague in Asia Pacific, who I've been supplying with his computing environment since 2010, when I handed him a customized Acer in my hotel room in Beijing. We then couldn't find the Peking Duck restaurant we wanted to go to, using the Beijing subway, and ended up in a Finnish restaurant, where we had... Peking Duck.

It was, I suppose, high time a really new version of Windows was released - Windows was getting very long in the tooth, not having materially changed since the early versions, like Windows 286. By "changed" I mean the basic concept, user interface, of course there was significant advancement in Windows' internals. But if I look back to the Windows version I worked with in the late 1980s, at the First Boston Corporation in Manhattan, I can, if you like, "see" the line Windows development has taken. So with the advent of touch screens - like it or not, that is what tablet computing is really about - it was clear Microsoft had to do something to facilitate the integration of notebook, laptop, tablet and handphone. And it is clear that Windows Phone, Windows 8 and Windows RT, together, create a new way of computing. Over the past few days, after the initial influx of Windows 8 laptops in the Black Friday sales, I am seeing the Windows 7 laptop return to the shelves, while the user experience of many largely uninitiated buyers of Windows 8 laptops slowly ripples through the PC-verse. I am looking forward to see how many applications and user environments have Windows 8 versions available, and interested to see how much innovation Microsoft has put into the new user interface, which, if "old" Windows is a guide, may be around for decades, assuming there will not be new user interfaces beyond "touch" any time soon.

I am not in any danger of losing data in my transition to Windows 8 - I will continue to use my Windows 7 laptop, at least for the foreseeable future, until I am comfortable it works OK, and I have learned all there is to learn about "8". It is a professional need I have had throughout my career - always have a spare PC to fall back on, should your primary fail. For now, the Windows 8 laptop will be my learning machine - I have bad experiences in terms of losing data to new operating systems. While I have always advocated keeping a spare PC if that is a must-have item for business or work, that view has changed. The average consumer, today, has so much essential data on their PC, from tax returns to banking information to coursework and thesis-in-progress, that having just the one PC (laptop, for many) is really a risk you cannot afford to take. I currently use a Lenovo laptop as my primary system, which I back up on a daily basis, it is actually the very first thing I do, after checking my email, updating my finances, and having coffee. I have a Vaio All-in-One PC, equally running Windows 7, as a backup, all I would need to do is install my essential software and restore my backup up archives there should the Lenovo fail - the last time I did that was when my previous HP laptop failed, I moved my data onto the Vaio, then was able to take my time finding and installing the Lenovo I now use. To make sure the Vaio works when I would need it, I use it to watch TV when I am at my desk, and as a surveillance webcam when I am away. One thing I can tell you about spares is that if you don't use them on a daily basis (and maintain them, of course) they are quite likely not to work when you need them. You need to either use your spare for some trivial purpose, or swap between the two PCs every week or so - but that would mean transferring files all the time, which is, I think, too much work for the benefit you get.

So, you look at every App in "All Aps". Nothing there. Back to Control Panel. and check all the links. There is something called "Windows 7 File Recovery", which, since this is an upgrade from Windows 7 Home Premium, probably lets you somehow back out Windows 8. Let's take a look.

No, it isn't. Windows 7 File Recovery is actually the Windows 8 "Backup and Recovery". What the heck? Is this (apart from mentioning the wrong version of Windows) done to force you to use Skydrive??? What'sGoingOn? No Microsoftie noticed this "small" typo?

I don't have an answer, but it does look like it. Everything that comes natively with Windows 8 drives the user, unashamedly, to using the Microsoft Cloud. Everything - there is even the offer of free Microsoft Office Cloud service, complete with a change of your Hotmail or Live email address to an Outlook.com address, the successor to Live.com, which was the successor to Hotmail.com. Microsoft did this before, when they gave us Windows Vista Professional with a slew of Live environments, everything from storage and email to virus defense. Now, Live is dead, the entire sophisticated Live suite of utilities has been murdered, and the Outlook name is being recycled.

Windows 8, then, has become a dual purpose operating system. The stuff you used to use Windows for is still there, actually works well and has lost weight and gained pace, but the front end, no longer a Start button but a Start screen, is completely designed to make it unnecessary for you, but especially for the novice user, to never have to go anywhere than Microsoft for anything - well, beer and coffee maybe. Whether on a Windows tablet, Windows smartphone or Windows PC, you can now always be in the same look-and-feel, with the same tools. The Start screen comes up with tiles for everything you could ever need, from Search, Travel and Weather to Explorer and everywhere that can take you. And as it all want you to sign in with your Microsoft mail account, everything you do on any of these devices is automatically accessible from all your other Windows devices. This goes all the way down to Microsoft Office, which is now free and running in the Microsoft Cloud.

Ignore the commentary you may read about how Microsoft's phones aren't selling, how the Surface tablet is too expensive, Microsoft is in there for the long haul, building an ecosystem that aims to shackle Windows users completely to Microsoft. That isn't going to happen overnight, but Microsoft has very deep coffers, and needed to do something to not lose more custom to Apple and Google. Windows 8 is it, it does, in combination with its mammoth partners, like Intel and Nokia, soup-to-nuts communication-and-computing.

It took me a couple of days to do the basic install of Windows 8 Pro, much of which was spent figuring out what has gone where. You will likely not need to do that, anything that isn't in the tiles on the Start screen you can either find by right clicking in that screen, "All Aps" will come up bottom right, or click on the "Desktop" tile and you'll go to the conventional desktop you are used to. From there, you can slide your cursor to the bottom left to activate a Start screen representation you can click on (clever, that, it is where the Start button used to be), or go to the top right and slide down to the Start icon, or Search, or Settings, and some other choices. It is pretty simple and self explanatory - kudos to Microsoft for making major major changes without complete alienation. That's one of the hardest part of Human Factors design.

Because: this is smooth! It cold boots in something like five seconds, amazing (although there is a boot setting somewhere, but even the slow boot only takes twenty or so seconds), and it runs quite a bit (that's just shy of significantly) faster than Windows 7 did. It is in fact so smooth and usable that I am, after a week, considering upgrading my Vaio All-in-One, which runs Windows 7 Professional, as well, something I had not intended to do as I need to be sure I can access my files and applications, and I do not take risks with new operating systems. But it must be said: I do not like the marketing and personal data mining aspects, but I haven't had a single crash, not one hang, no blue screens, only a couple of installation mishaps that Windows recovered from by itself (!).

The Apps that get tiles on the left side of the Start screen clearly are Windows 8 specific, I am assuming they're ubiquitous in Windows Phone and Windows tablet as well. On the right side appear the "traditional" Windows applications you install - Windows Media Center, for instance, free to download from Microsoft until the end of January (it is not included with Windows, I expect because most consumers do not use it), becomes a right side tile, not a left side App, although it is fully Windows 8 aware. You can copy the shortcuts and put them on your "old style" desktop, if you like.

Beware of the Windows 8 Core that comes with the cheap laptops - I don't actually know what it lacks, but I do know that even Windows 8 Pro does not have "Media Center", so getting something that is intentionally "simpled" and can't be upgraded cheaply is never a good idea. You're better off, I think, buying a Windows 7 laptop, while they're cheap, and upgrading to Windows 8 Pro for $14.99, which you can do here until the end of February, at least if you're in the good old US of A. The Windows 8 Pro upgrade for Windows 8 Core costs (as I write this) $39.99, a price that seems to fluctuate by the day, and you cannot use the $14.99 upgrade to do that. Duh.

What I have seen in the cheap-and-cheerful Windows 8 section, then, seems to mostly consist of large screen laptops with underpowered processors, not enough (2GB) memory and smallish (250GB) hard disks. That may be enough for you, but to future proof yourself, I recommend getting a 64 bit motherboard, 8 GB of RAM, and a terabyte hard disk. If nothing else, the larger the disk, the faster Windows will run, provided you turn on write caching, and turn off buffer flushing, on the drive. That upgrade, and the free (for now) Windows Media Center, are here. I use it to watch cable on one of my systems, using the AverTV USB tuner for Windows, which works a treat, auto-installs under Windows 8 without a hitch, too.

Anyway, the last two things I managed were my Blu-ray drive and the Lenovo Power Driver. The latter was not supposed to run under "8", but did, and I managed to install and update the Nero 8 software that came with my Buffalo Blu-ray burner, and play back both Blu-ray movies and HD-DVD movies, I own a library of those, and I kept that drive around so I can still play them (I have a regular player for them as well). I am not suggesting this is important for you, it is one of the things I happen to think is important, that folks aren't convicted to replacing their gear, if they are willing to invest some effort, use the information on the internet, and make something work. With the exception of one of my three Bluetooth dongles, everything I threw at Windows 8 works, and I was able to install it on an older, unsupported, desktop, as well as my more recently acquired laptop. Pass, pass, pass, people.

Keywords: deceptive marketing, CFL, LED, cheap imported gas, netbooks, smartphones, GPS, T-Mobile, hydropower, hybrid power, Clover Wireless

What should be of concern is the proliferation of useless technology - but by "useless" I do not mean the resulting products have no purpose. I mean more that the technologies are being used to generate corporate profits but do not otherwise provide a benefit to anyone.

This morning, on CBS, one of the reporters demonstrated how you can call a credit agency, end up in a call center in Bangalore, and have an absolutely useless fifteen minute conversation that ends up directing you to the company's website to fill out a form - the website that sent you to Bangalore to talk to customer support in the first place. I recall Freeservers moving its paid service support to India, where, when I had a problem with my domain, the agents (after spending up to fourty minutes on hold) had no authority or capability to make any account changes - that had to be done by "technicians", who were still in Utah, but who they could not connect me to, they could only email them. The upshot of that was that after my diligently trying to get Freeservers to help me fix my database, I gave up and took my custom and $$s to another ISP. T-Mobile USA has done the same thing - their call center overseas (Philippines, I think) used to be able to escalate a problem to senior agents in the United States, but no more. Similarly, their rebates have been outsourced, and if there is an issue you have to call the outsourced company, Clover Wireless, which sends you to T-Mobile to get a correction approval. T-Mobile then connects you back to Clover Wireless, which then tells you they will follow up with T-Mobile. You then hear nothing, and if you re-connect, Clover Wireless tell you to contact T-Mobile. This is simply fraudulent behaviour, based on the behaviour of most consumers, who don't then resort to legal proceedings - after all, when Clover Wireless issues an actual document on which it is printed that you're getting $100, they should not then be able to tell you a story about how T-Mobile does not approve that refund, and only approves $70. The net result of all this is that I am no longer renewing my contracts with T-Mobile, while getting a new free phone - for one thing, I used to be able to do that without incurring another data plan, since I only need that on one line. So - the money they used to make on the phone they gave me, they no longer make.

Keywords: Paypal, Android, Windows 8 Pro, T-Mobile, Lenovo, Sony Vaio, Windows drivers

Keywords: Facebook, copyright, SEO, pay-for-clicks, trending, gun control, mental illnes

Keywords: CBS Morning News, Chinese Americans, guns, Newtown, mental illness

Keywords: Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, targeted marketing, Microsoft

Keywords: Windows 8, Leveson report, celebrity, wild Oz, shock jocks

Keywords: Windows 8, Toshiba, Windows 8 Pro, Peking Duck, redundancy

Keywords: Romney, Obama, Sandy, hurricanes, Delta Works, capitalism, socialism

Keywords: Savile, Armstrong, Wisconsin shooting, advertising, low margins, Blackberry, Nokia

Keywords: Mercedes Benz, social networks, Spotify, UNIX, tcp/ip , streaming video, IPTV

Perhaps that is how we will vote, in the future.... I see it among some Catholic friends, who, in many cases, will decide their vote on the basis of who favours abortion and contraception, which is hardly relevant in terms of doing what is best for the People and the Country. Then again we seem to be "filling" in the news - CBS' Jan Crawford, this morning, regaled us how she asked Mitt Romney on his airplane point blank (her emphasis) if he thought he could win this election. I'll spare you his response, but how is this journalism? How much are we paying this woman to dog Romney's footsteps and do irrelevance? It is, in my view, a general issue, especially in the American press - there are so many programs and articles and journalists end up with absolutely irrelevant and nonsensical contributions - you can't very well call the home office and say "this is a non-story", as I famously did to one newspaper after it sent me to cover a 'jewelry smuggler" who turned out to have a diplomatic passport.

CBS seems to have landed among the news media that say the American population "has woken up" and now understands there isn't an easy solution to the economic downturn, although I have not seen or heard anybody offer a solution. I've been saying for years that "renewable" energy is not renewable. Hybrid and electrical vehicles, for the most part, are more expensive than regular vehicles, if anything is on the positive side, it is that there is increasing realism among consumers. Although, I continue to be amazed to hear the Washington State energy folks say we do so well in generating so much cheap hydro-electricity, but then I see that just about everybody in the Seattle area heats and cooks.... on gas, 60% of which is imported from Canada. That's two entire energy infrastructures to achieve one service, and that does not in any way save anybody money. Two steps back, and look at the woods, not the trees.

We seem to generally be confused, and developing technology just for the heck of it. I am all for technology development, please don't get me wrong, but I just can't see the point of driverless cars. Any initiative that is likely to put more cars on the road, rather than fewer, won't help us economically or in terms of efficiency. Driverless taxis and trucks, maybe, but then we'll put even more people out of work. Driverless infrastructure will be very expensive, and will prevent even small changes to road signage and landmarks without some kind of feedback to the technology. It is absolutely great Google develops new technologies that do not yet exist, but they're not doing that, as I heard on Fox this morning, to "help the elderly". You can't drive any more, that's it, and you then won't be able to use a car you can't drive in case of failure, same as you need pilots on today's largely automated airplanes, which can even land automatically.

WiFi in airplanes? Great, but the whole idea between working on the internet is that you don't need to travel, can work remotely. This story completely misses the point, and the huge cost of putting WiFi in airplanes. Yes, the airlines need to make more money, and once they all have WiFi some will offer it for free, and then the ticket prices will go up. Same-o same-o. I can certainly understand why airlines want to make flying more attractive, providing "all the mod cons", but we have the technology that makes much business travel unnecessary, and pushing that technology, creating more facilities for remote working, might give us a new product for export. Apart from which, the skies are crowded to the point that the Fed is spending billiuons on new traffic management systems we should really no longer need... The secret: redesign enterprises to do away with the offices and centralized locations. Redesign schools to do away with classrooms, and soccer moms. Etc. We have the technology, but making so many systems and standards obsolete would not help the economy, on the contrary. Perhaps we need to rethink our ways, as parts of our economy are based on essentially useless activities - yes, Apple doing its own mapping service creates jobs, but all that work has been done before. The people who are now going to fix the iPhone's navigation could be employed creating more useful services - we do, after all, have at least three large and experienced mapping and navigation companies, and you could make an argument that Apple's incessant walling off its products prevents any form of useful standardization. It was bad enough when Google decided to "roll its own", but at least they added value, invented, in creating Streetview, which has become an indispensible tool for many, consumers as well as businesses, not to mention the tax office.

I am not, as you may think, knocking our technological efforts. Some of this stuff, like driverless cars and WiFi internet in airplanes, was hard to develop, and it is brilliant. The issue is that these aren't efforts that will help the economy "kick it up a notch". Nor will, as I hear candidates say, creating more small business help. Small business, largely, is local, and it can't thrive if people don't have money to spend. What with the downsizing of many businesses, and the automation of others (Amazon is a good example, the company is automating the picking process in its warehouses), there are few jobs that used to exist. Amazon is an excellent example in another respect, too - it employs far fewer people than does Walmart, and sells much of its stuff at much lower prices. To some extent, Amazon pioneered a business model that now has many products shipped, cheaper, with tracking, right from the manufacture - in China.  That, my friends, you need to take notice of - it is the new outsourcing. It is a very significant way in which the Chinese government supports its population, much more so than manufacturing solar panels. And nobody seems to notice.

Tuesday September 25; Religion or Computing, it is always down to Standards

Keywords: Pakistan, internet access, MS Windows, UNIX, Mandarin Chinese, routers, modems, insulting religion

If anything amazes, it is that the Pakistani minister who put a bounty on the head of controversial anti-islam filmmaker

W641R特别版, it is one of those products made for China only, and as I don't speak or read Chinese, I have to wrestle through the interface to figure out what does what. Last time I bought a router in China I could download English language firmware, but not this time. Having been able to set it up, originally, in my hotel room in Beijing (that is why I bought it, for $16), I eventually gave up trying to reprogram it. The way 802.11n was implemented is way beyond the stuff I know (this device being Chinese, it's got some stuff that is probably not approved in America, same as when you buy a wireless router in Europe it comes with 13 channels instead of 11), so I am pretty much out of my depth trying to figure out some of the features. Worst of all, with the support website in Chinese, and the interface, upgrading the firmware was a hit-and-miss affair, where you have to understand that if you do that wrong, you brick the router forever.

But I think I've finally managed to crack it, helped to some extent by Windows 7's capability to interactively set up a router, using, I believe, WPS. That doesn't work on my WinBoxes unless I do a full full reset on the router, which I don't like doing as it loses me my customization, and it can come up with the same IP address the core router uses, so everything goes down. Etc. But you see, you've got to figure this at some point, so that's what I've been doing the whole freaking week, until nothing worked any more, I had to go right back to scratch to get it working, no shortcuts and clever things. And to be honest, it says WPS was invented to make it easier for "civilians" to set up their stuff, but when I see how much jargin is involved, I am not seeing Grandma do this. It's a start, and it is nice that folks can use their Windows client to set it up, rather than having to log in to the esoteric router interface through an IP address, but it isn't anywhere near what I would think is user friendly. Worse, if WPS can be used by Windows for setup without authentication, it is really easy for hackers to hijack a router or router/PC pair. That's a huge concern.

As I go through my email and do some job hunting - a daily activity, though I don't spend as much time on it as I used to, and for "job" read mostly "consulting position' - I reflect on my complete lack of Windows server skills. I suppose I ought to rephrase that - I've kept my hand in with Windows internals for decades, just so I could integrate Windows boxes in the UNIX development environment I have always worked in.

Monday September 17, 2012; Beauty and Beast Week

Keywords: boobies, journalism, muslim innocence, publishing, tabloid press, Kate

At my Telegraph blog: my.telegraph.co.uk/aartsen

Tuesday September 11, 2012; Is the Cloud more like a Fog?

Keywords: Amazon, CAP theorem, fault tolerance, Google, high availability, redundancy, the Cloud

I came across a Wired article the other day, in which the CAP theorem is mentioned - see an excerpt in the following paragraph:

"When you spread data across hundreds of machines, the theorem explains, you can guarantee that the data is consistent, meaning every machine using the system has access to the same set of data at the same time. You can guarantee that the system is always available, meaning that each time a machine requests a piece of information, it receives a definitive response.

And you can guarantee partition tolerance, meaning the system can continue to operate when part of the system fails. But you can’t guarantee all three. You can guarantee two of the three, but not all. As an established bulder and designer of high availability systems, I had to reread the story a couple of times, as it didn't make sense to me that you could guarantee even two of the three, or, paradoxically, that you can actually positively guarantee all three."

How do I 'splain.

To the right, one of those redundancy examples - a WiFi broadband router with a 4G fallback facility, in a hotel room. Before I built my first fault tolerant box (click here for a picture and documentation), I had to learn how the phone company implements high availability. Based around a telephony switch, which is to all intents and purposes a fault tolerant computer with analog interfaces, the special requirements of operator services come into play here, operator services (call center) automation is what I was working on, at the time. Fascinating stuff, because you get (or got, in those days) full control of every aspect of the process, from software and human personnel (operators) on the one side, to the customer's equipment, and their wiring, on the other.

To make your reading a little more challenging, I will, at the same time, take a look at another article, that dealt with ex-Google Marissa Mayer, and her reviewing every new hire at Yahoo - the article has it that is how Google hires, too, although I don't know that any reporter knows "innner workings" that well.

But - woof. That's scary. I've worked for a couple of those micro-managing managers, but I have never myself adopted the methodology, because I think you lose more than you gain. And, to get back to the previous, this is the last thing you want to do building a high availability environment. I firmly believe that deciding all of your new staff yourself is a good way to prevent innovation, unless you think you know everything. You make yourself (and I am not saying I believe the article about Ms. Mayer) a single point of failure. Remember that whenever you look at a rocket scientist, you don't see the sidekick that keeps them in check.

Anyway, we'll get back to the human angle, let's tackle the premise first: guaranteeing system uptime, something we've been struggling with since networks were invented. However many times I reread the CAP theorem, I am not seeing definitions that make it really clear what the author means. When you say "each time a machine requests a piece of information, it receives a definitive response", it is clear that response can simply be an "I don't have it" or "I'm not here" statement, directing the requestor elsewhere. That would be valid, but doesn't get you what you need. But then in what I have learned in the phone company is that even a response that leads you to a "I cannot deliver this now" or "I cannot deliver this at all" would be valid. You'd then issue an alarm to a system or entity or human that/who can resolve the issue.

The problem is always at the back end, you see. Whether it is Marissa Mayer, who cannot vet resumes while she is giving birth, or a huge storm that takes down the infrastructure around Amazon's center in Northern Virginia, there is a cause-and-effect. I am assuming  Netflix went down, during that storm, because it does not have a fully triplicated infrastructure, although one of the articles seems to indicate the failure to fail over lay with Amazon's Elastic Load Balancing, which didn't do what it was supposed to do. How that could be related is not clear to me, because Load Balancing is a service that needs all of its component parts online, but should continue to function (read: cease to be active) if one of its resources fails.

I have seen that happen, and I've been at the business end of the design decisions, too. Running a fully duplicated infrastructure is incredibly expensive, you see, and leaving all of the failover and security in the hands of a vendor entails a significant risk. Having said that, if Amazon has a center go down, and Netflix can blame it on them, and the outage is only a few hours, that constitutes a fair tradeoff with cheap service. Not to mention folks like Pinterest and Twitter, which the consumer does not pay for at all.

There is an interesting phrase in this Forbes article by Kelly Clay: "Resiliency .... needs to be part of the way we design our companies to recover from outages".Actually, but I am nitpicking a bit, the resilience would prevent the outages from happening. Or, and that is the cheaper way of doing things, a failure would cause a deterioration in service, but not a complete outage. But the part about designing companies very much rings a bell with me. In many, if not most, cases, companies are set up regionalized, and then end up being "backfilled" as their active regions change or increase. Look at Facebook and Twitter, and you'll see a U.S. centric design, these are companies that began trading on the U.S. MAN (Metropolitan Area Network). Look at Microsoft and RIM, and you'll see an international design - these were companies trading all over the world when the cloud came into being. Google, to me, is the odd man out, a U.S. centric company that was internationalized successfully, though it unfortunately has not been able to get a good footing in China, something Yahoo did temporarily manage, and Amazon is trying. I am, as an aside, fascinated by how hard it seems to be to work with the Chinese - and I am saying that as someone who was involved with Chinese networks, years ago, I still keep my Chinese business card in my collection:

Be that as it may, a German Siemens R&D executive, many years ago, said exactly the same when, in Munich, he showed me a telephone his artsy colleagues in Milan had concocted: it had an interchangeable keypad that could be personalized to the owner - this in the days before cellular telephony took off. He had it that you couldn't introduce these advanced technologies unless you redesigned their work environment - effectively, redesigned the entire company the technology was supposed to work in. You must, in assessing that, realize German technical companies are, more often than not, run by engineers, rather than lawyers, and engineers think about efficiency and friction reduction and stuff, on a global scale, which is why the entire Chinese government drives Audis.

It is the one thing I had a hard time getting used to, when I came to the United States - in the words of a Canadian CEO I worked under, much later: "What we do is like building a 747 during takeoff". Back in Europe, in them days, we'd spend umpteen years designing, like GSM, which took almost eighteen years to roll out. I am still in two minds about that, because it was GSM that took over the world, after all that, not the American CDMA - but part of the reason for that may have been the FCC setting it up to fail (unwittingly and unintentionally). At any rate, in this day and age, we can no longer afford to spend many years building things in labs, I was lucky to be at the tail end of that, in the 1980s.

But back to the CAP theorem, and the article that says, in part, that "Amazon doesn’t guarantee consistency across multiple zones" in its AWS design. I looked at AWS, a while ago, since I was being interviewed by one of Amazon's AWS executives (who unfortunately had a fatal accident the weekend before my scheduled interview, but that's another story). Thinking about that statement, I think Amazon actually does let you guarantee consistency, but it is a framework, not a ready made service. The part where you can replicate data across multiple geographical zones is where the customer needs to do some work, and write some requirements. AWS, or anyone's cloud, for that matter, isn't as simple as that. Consistency across multiple zones would mean that information contained in one instance of a database is an exact mirror of the information in every other instance. That's easy enough to achieve, but it means that all instances must communicate with each other, and not release the latest update until there is some kind of confirmation that all data is synchronized. The problem isn't in the synchronization, the problem is in the amount of time it takes to do the verify, and how quickly you need your data available.

Let me explain. If you have a fully fault tolerant server solution, and you're working on a spreadsheet online, you will want to see a cell update immediately, within a millisecond or so. If one of your database instances is not just across the country, but the other side of the Pacific Ocean, in Singapore, and you're in New York, the verification of that instance is going to take more than a millisecond - that's mostly simply travel time for the bits to get from NYC to S'pore and back, and the verification software to do its job.

It reminds me of the way the Space Shuttle computer flight management systems were designed - I was told about this while researching flight management systems here at Boeing, and at British Airways at Heathrow. In the Shuttle, originally, there were two systems that would compare readings, to make sure they were consistent, and then, because this was designed for real time, a third system was available that would only "wake up" if there was a discrepancy between the primaries, and decide which of the systems was closest to its own data. I haven't done the calculation, but if you think about it you'll understand that the statistical chance that you still end up with wrong information is quite high. But it is the best you could do in the time available - and even though we have much faster and much more capable computers today, you can reduce the risk, but not eliminate it, and as you add complexity you add risk factors.

In other words, the CAP theorem really can't work, even in two instances out of three, because you can't get a guarantee in a timely fashion unless you introduce restrictions in the physical locations of your server parks. The question then becomes one of application - where does the data you need have to be available? A theorem, as such, can't have restrictions, after all. No wonder high speed trading companies have now begun working not on the redundancy, but on having very high speed data connections available - closer to the source, faster connection, more, fast fiber, fewer routers, avoidance of POP hotels (POP - Point of Presence), and so on. The problem here is that this flies in the face of the CAP theorem - in order to provide security and redundancy, you need time, and in order to do high speed trading, you must reduce time as much as possible. We've seen some spectacular trading losses, recently, that show we're sacrificing accuracy for speed, for the sake of profit, deliberately. And perhaps what that means is that CAP, postulated in 2000, is obsolete, killed by its own elegance. Because, after all, whether or not a system serves its purpose predominantly depends on its requirements, and those are, talk to any ISO auditor, the primary problem.

Look at what are arguably the best distributed systems today, Amazon's and Google's (I don't have experience with Microsoft's cloud, and my worldwide network experiences are too aged to use for comparison). Amazon built its system for e-commerce, while Google designed its network to do rapid lookup processing. The former is, then a combination of processing and databases, the latter a very fast distributed (I would almost say dispersed) database application. Google is particularly fascinating, because it had to build a system that could retrieve websites, information, from anywhere, something nobody had ever done before. What this means, effectively, is that neither network was originally designed for the cloud, but eventually adapted to it. Amazon, as I understand it, decided to start seling some of its excess capacity, and even though it began providing e-books and streaming video, this did not require a real time network. Similarly, Google did not need real time capabilities until after it acquired Youtube, and began to stream in real time.

When I first looked at "real time computing" I found the discrepancy between high availability and fault tolerance staggering - fault tolerance cost five times as much as high availability did. What, effectively, the cloud has done is institutionalize high availability, reducing its price by scaling up it infrastructure. To some extent, that works - if you compare the supporting infrastructure for banks, and then compare American "up" time with Europe, you can see that our experience with 24/7 operations, necessary because our economy is so much based on 24/7 commerce, has led to much better availability of services. I read worldwide newspapers, and notice the frequency of outages in online banking and ATM operations in Europe, at a much higher rate than what we're used to here. It is hardly surprising, then, that the cloud was invented here, and that price regulation in Europe has forced providers to invest less than what we're used to - 24/7 availability, after all, is a competitive aspect of society. If you read my 1994 HA talk, you'll note that Europeans, not that long ago, did not have access to their money in their banks, after hours. That was "normal". This at a time when I could retrieve money from my New York bank account in Jakarta, Indonesia - around the clock (admittedly, HSBC, with headquarters in both Europe and Asia, did have 'round the clock operations more or less from Day One).

Of course, when I began work on fault tolerant systems, the target became what we refer to as "5x9", or "five nines" - systems with a designed uptime of 0.99999%. That's a downtime of about 5 minutes 15 seconds or so per year. This is a failure rate not achievable in hardware, so the way you look at "five nines" (or even "three nines") is in terms of service. From a RAID array, capable of functioning when one of its drives fail, to a redundant bus, when signals in the system have multiple paths to choose from, you can combine hardware and firmware to provide failure protection. You can go quite far, as some of us do, with multiple terminals and network connections, using different methods of connecting. One terminal using a cable internet connection, for instance, with the other using (something we can finally do now) 4G data. And that shows you, forgive me the elaborate example, how finicky and not-quite-secure this methodology is - because, on 9/11, in downtown Manhattan, everything failed. The cellular antennnas were on top of the WTC, there wasn't enough capacity across the rivers, and the fibers quickly became unusable - all of them.

I could go on, but I don't want to terminally bore you, and there is "Songs of Praise" - oops, I mean the Monza Formula 1 Grand Prix waiting for me, now that I have access to the Beeb. Next stop Singapore, ah, when will I get to travel again? And yes, I know, I haven't finished this article, in my next installment I'll address the human angle a bit more, as there is much more human in the cloud than we give it credit for...

Monday September 4, 2012; Back door to the Beeb - there isn't a front door

Keywords: BBC, broadcast television, censure, cultural exchange, Democratic convention, iPlayer, IPTV, Republican convention

OK... Republican Convention, Hurricane Isaac.. and the BBC's iPlayer. And the Germans messing up an American WWII bomb disposal- right in the middle of Munich. And the Dutch successfully removing a German WWII bomb - right in the middle of Amsterdam Schiphol Airport.. and the BBC's iPlayer.

Can't quite figure out why they have this convention, or the Other One, for that matter. Don't Republicans have Skype? Don't we have too many carbons in the air? I mean, this Romney fellow is the candidate, so do these nice folks really have to get together to hear his wife tell them how great he is? What else is she going to say?

There are, perhaps, traditions that are a bit archaic, and not necessarily conducive to bringing the change we need. In a day and age where we are all interconnected, and we know who the candidates on both sides are, and we have, in the U.S., decided we still do not want more than two parties, like real democracies, why the show? Even England went to a multiparty system..

Just asking... and then a decidedly old Clint Eastwood steals the show, and the media don't go "Good show!" but "What was he thinking?". Sheesh. We need to lighten up, people. Yes, we're in a recession, but not laughing isn't going to help that one bit.

Back to the venerable BBC, older than Clint Eastwood, first in the world to broadcast television, in 1936, from Ally Pally, near where my partner's parents lived, when I was living in Norf London. Checking one of the applications installed on the Blackberry Playbook tablet I've been using since the beginning of the year, I noticed something I had seen and ignored a dozen or so times before - the help file has it there are ways of getting TV feeds from various overseas places. I don't know if you've ever tried that, but most foreign TV broadcast channels available on the internet are country restricted, and those few that aren't, usually come in various unintelligible tongues. But this time I checked what these folks were on about, and it turned out that one of their solutions, which gives you a network address in the country you'd like to watch, actually works reasonably well. So I am watching some of Britain's normally restricted broadcast channels on my US-based computers, especially gratifying since I lived in England for a long time, and for some weird reason that left me Anglophile.

There is, normally, a license fee a British TV viewer must pay, which, like in other European countries, subsidizes free TV broadcasts. Being a good boy, I went to the licensing site, to see if they had created a way for overseas folks to pay a license fee. I mean, I know we're not supposed to be able to watch, but why not make it possible to pay? No way, I am afraid, if you don't have a UK postal code, no dice. Perhaps I should use my old office address in Wood Green? Ah no, that would not be legal either...

Come to think of it, perhaps it wasn't living in England that made me Anglophile. Maybe I was Anglophile before, and that's why I moved there. I don't really know. All I know is that I've been watching science fiction and British TV since before I moved here, and still do, after 26 years. With exceptions, American TV does not appeal to me. And having gone to the trouble of connecting to British broadcasters, I really have to ask myself why. American television is watched the world over, by millions and millions of people. So that sort of does leave me the odd man out.

Scrolling through the program offerings (or, in English: programme offerings ;) I suddenly realize one of the reasons, as I come across Parade's End, with the superb Benedict Cumberbatch. Just his name has something undefinably Old World. (re)written by Tom Stoppard, it is just something incredibly soothing to have going in the background, or, as I do today, on the other screen.

One wonders, as an aside, whether it is "Parade's End" for the United States. Taking place in World War I, Parade's End chronicles the approaching end of the British Empire, and suddenly, having watched Mitt Romney announce new jobs without ever telling us what these people are going to be doing, building, making, I wonder whether our form of capitalism is at an end, now that everybody and their grandchild seems to do what we do better than us.

Hmm. I am not trying to say there's anything wrong with America or Americans. This is somewhat hard to explain. If you've grown up in Europe, and spent half your life in the old cultures (I moved to the U.S. at age 38), you just look at life, and zings, differently. And that is all it is, different. I recall conversations with my colleagues in New York, American engineers, who really hadn't come across an engineer who'd taken Latin and Greek in high school. I could go on about this, suffice it to say America is a segmented society, even more so than Britain is. Or perhaps I should say "was", as I haven't lived there for many years, and England has changed a great deal since the 1980s.

Anyway, so it is Culture I meant, I guess I got a bit wordy. I like watching television programmes that keep me thinking, lines of dialogue whose origins I can follow. I remember a COO walking into a conference room in Jakarta and starting off with a baseball joke. Which no Indonesians there got. A Brit would have said something colonial, like driving on the same side of the road, and that would have got a laugh. A Brit, or a Dutchman, would have spent some time understanding his audience. The people. And when I watch American television today I still don't see much of anything international that can educate the average American. The NBC even cut the bits they thought too "English" out of the Olympic's opening show, and the commentators had little understanding of what they were watching, replacing intelligent commentary with about 400 repeats of the words "industrial revolution". It is what I noticed when I moved here, American culture is a bit inward looking, in "House" the doctor has to be American, when American hospitals are littered with England educated physicians. Imagine what Hugh Laurie could have done with that part in British English! Fake, you see, is fake, however good you are - and you can be English and be American at the same time, just ask (or watch) Left Coast TV host Craig Ferguson, who technically harks from Scotland, of course.

On another occasion, I'll talk to you about the limited use we seem to make of all of these capabilities - yes, the BBC broadcasts ABC News, and some PBS stations broadcast some BBC World News (the BBC runs the largest news organization on the planet, I believe), but giving the populace everywhere live access to everybody else's television is not exactly happening. The carriers and ISPs, as well as the governments, aren't interested in giving you "the world at your fingertips", their only effort seems to be in the area of selling expensive services to those who can't get them anywhere else, like selling Zee to (East) Indians, and some international channels from other countries in premium cable or satellite packages. I have personally always found the level of attention to national and international evening news ridiculous - the main broadcasters give you just half an hour of news, squeezed in between hours and hours of local news, with the advertisers continually baying at their doors to broadcast Law & Order or Entertainment Tonight. It is high time we began thinking outside of the box, internationally, there must be ways beyond the conventional to begin providing international information that isn't preselected by broadcasters, that can help educate our youngsters. We talk about the Chinese and the Iranians censuring things, and what we don't realize is that we're doing the same thing, as - for instance - folks overseas can't watch NBC, because NBC sells Law & Order to carriers, and so you cannot watch American television broadcasts on the internet. How crazy and dysfunctional is that?

It is the end of summer, somehow, the Fourth of July holiday weekend, I am not used to this weather, but the temperatures here in the Pacific Northwest are on their way down already, but of a heatwave at the end of July, and that was it. I think I'll take a run out and see what goes on at the Washington shore, where I've never been...

Wednesday August 29, 2012; The World Wide Database

Keywords: careerbuilder.com, database engines, Google, job hunting, LinkedIn, Microsoft, monster.com

At my Telegraph blog: my.telegraph.co.uk/aartsen

Sunday August 25, 2012; Recession, or Misdirection?

Keywords: advertising, agriculture, development funding, fuel, internet, Romney

I don't know if you've been following Mitt Romney's rhetoric about energy self-sufficiency, I find much of that noisy election-speak, rather than that it has any basis in reality. Only the other day, I caught him on CBS Morning News beginning a sentence with "energy self sufficiency in Am...", then quickly swallowing his sentence, and turning "Am.." into "North America". And his noise about the infamous pipeline is noise about a pipeline from Canada to the United States, nothing whatsoever to do with American oil. No, Mitt, Canada is not the United States, and while they are a good neighbour, they have their own agenda. Rather than go to England and Poland and Israel, when you went walkabout, you should have gone to Canada and Mexico. The oil coming through this pipeline (which has not been canceled but simply needs to redo its permit application) is Canadian, and we will have to pay the Canadians for it. Makes no difference with Saudi or Kuwaiti or Iraqi oil, especially since we're paying for much of the pipeline, while the other guys pay for their own tankers. Thinkaboutit.

I've looked at what goes on here in Washington State, which technically should have the cheapest water-generated electricity in the United States, and I see that many people (I can't say "the majority" since I don't have the data) use gas to heat and cook. Gas that comes... from Canada. When I see that I wonder whether we're even close to looking at generating electricity and using heat pumps to reduce the cost of imported energy. Romney just wants to add more Canadian oil to the mix - as I understand it the majority of the oil in use on the West Coast comes from there anyway.

So if you're replacing "self sufficiency" with "North American self-sufficiency", sure, you can make lots of irrelevant comments about energy. But Romney, as a business person, should know this: you can't make money by spending less. You make money by selling more. And I am not seeing any plans on Mitt's part (or on Obama's, for that matter) to sell oil or energy to India and China, both countries desperate for the stuff. Using hydro-power to free up oil and gas for exportation, now that would impress me. But nobody is thinking or talking about that. We're talking about bringing gas prices down. Nice, but with a drought that cuts into ethanol production... Shell Oil advertising they are working with their Brazilian partners on ethanol production.. guess what, that's imported. Not only that, it's bullshit, as well - the Brazilians began producing ethanol to be less dependent on imported oil in.. 1975, and built the first car to run on 100% ethanol in 1979. They combined ethanol production with sugar production, so ended up with two products out of one - sugarcane. And Shell advertising Brazilian ethanol in the United States in 2012 - let me put it this way, Brazil is the second largest exporter on ethanol in the world, and has a population of only 190 million, and an enormous fertile landmass to grow this crap on.

All I am saying is that I would love to talk to some folks with good ideas, the election rhetoric, if they get anybody to believe some of it, is only going to make things worse. It's getting to be like a game show, this election.

In the meantime, the industrious Germans, in the middle of being hit by the Eurecession, have some terrific economic news (that link is in German!): in the first half of 2012, they have managed to increase their agricultural exports (these are people we think of as engineers and manufacturers) to non-Western countries by 13.3%, to some 7 billion Euros. Total agricultural exports were worth some 29.5 billion Euros, In other words: the Germans "saw it coming" and managed to increase exports to countries less affected by the recession, something they could only do by careful planning and preparation - the screen capture to the left shows you GEFA's Mandarin Chinese website, they have them in quite a few languages. I am using this example because I can see the Germans looking ahead, while our candidates are not. I would need Romney (and Obama, of course) to be talking about where we need to be ten years from now, and how we get there. And I'll give you a couple of clues: it's got nothing to do with Medicare (we need to make more money so we can afford healthcare, we're not going to be healthy by saving money) or with finding life on Mars (robots need to go out here and find and harvest the natural resources we need, screw the bacteria - if we want to find life we can just watch Obama v. Romney).

If you have followed Facebook's exploits, you'll have noticed the company is having a hard time monetizing its mobile users. As I've mentioned now and again, forcing Facebook members to pay for data services for advertising is likely not a brilliant idea. The screen capture to the left show you one way they might tie users to their service, financially - paying the carrier for the user's data. It looks like they are doing that with Claro, probably as a test - Claro is a brand that belongs to America Movil of Mexico, owned by multimegatrillionaire Carlos Slim. It is one of the largest telecommunications providers in the world, and of course South and Middle America, where Claro operates, is full of lower income folks who could not otherwise access data services on mobile phones. In many cases in those regions, though, mobile is the only way they could access data, as there isn't an advanced telecommunications infrastructure in much of its coverage area. So, please, Mr. Zuckerberg, can you tell us if you're paying Mr. Slim, with some of that lovely investor money, or is it the other way around?

With the ongoing collapse of Groupon, and the non-success of Facebook's IPO, it is increasingly clear that their formulas work to achieve a membership, but do not work as a method to achieve income. Groupon may be a completely different case, where possibly the recession is making it hard-to-impossible for sellers to maintain pricing that allows discounts. But Facebook joins a long line of social networks, from CompuServe via AOL to MySpace, that haven't worked, in the long run, and that probably because they don't charge a membership fee. The cause may simply be competition- CompuServe and AOL used to charge for access, then ended up having to lower their prices as the "free" competition came along, offering the same thing for no money. In the end, everybody went belly-up. Going back to where advertising paid its way, that was in magazines, which consumers pay for, newspapers, which consumers pay for, and television, fully financed by advertising (in the United States). There was, when all this came about, little television - just three channels, and I should imagine that now that we have the ability to publish everything electronically, and have as many TV channels as we want, the method simply no longer works. Surf channels on your cable box, and you'll find huge numbers of advertising-only channels, and I will bet you that their proliferation is because they no longer work. I can't imagine any internet connected teen ever watching infomercials again. If that is how you make your money, get out, before it bankrupts you.

Why listen to me? Like your teens, I have spent most of my life on the internet, I worked on internet's forerunners, began my career with IBM, and moved to the press just as electronic page makeup became a reality (we were a bit quicker with that in Europe than American publishers were, my publishers had fully electronic page makeup, including transmission to the remote printing factory, in the late 1970s). In other words, I have a twenty year head start on most of today's internet users. And, for what it is worth, I do not read paper papers, do not watch television advertising, do not watch infomercials, and ever since the World Wide Web and search engines became available to me (mid-90s, as I was in a development lab and could use UNIX tools on the nascent WWW, which is to all intents and purposes a giant UNIX box) have used those tools to find things. And what I see is that children growing up today do the same thing - they do searches and, as children do, use their peers for reference. The main variable are the parents - many still feel children should "read books", for whatever un-thought-through reason; others do not understand children need smartphone and laptop skills to advance in their studies and their careers, so buy crappy phones and cheap notebooks; and it goes on. Insofar as there are technologically deprived children, that is a class created by parents and, to some extent, governments. I remember talking to one parent, the daughter of a friend, who home schools her children, and does not feel the children need more than dialup internet for their homework. I feel sorry for them, and I think parents like that should be fined or jailed, but there it is, there will be another underclass.

Anyway, the telephone is virtually free, the internet is virtually free, so I don't know either how we're going to monetize the new media. One thing is for sure: we're going down the wrong track.

Monday August 20, 2012; Billionaire, Bodybuilder or Blonde?

Keywords: asylum, Assange, Bush, Obama, Romney

At my Telegraph blog: my.telegraph.co.uk/aartsen

Friday August 17, 2012; It isn't about jobs; it's about work

Keywords: internet, Deepak Chopra, Volkswagen, Beijing, employment, trade, Yahoo

Soon after I got my new Blackberry Torch, in May, I noticed that the "home portal" T-Mobile provides, web2go.com, changed. Where I'd had news headlines from CNN before, from the look of it the headlines now come from Yahoo. I'd seen the Yahoo headlines before, when logging into my Yahoo mail account, they're usually an eclectic mix of Britney Spears, the love life of Tom Cruise's son, and drivel about Olympic athletes' tax bills. Little or no news, in other words, at least not stuff I consider news. I have to be careful saying that, of course, plenty of people love this entertainment stuff, or there would be no TMZ.

At any rate, the question is how you present yourself, as what we used to call a "portal". The only company that cracked a formula was Google, which realized that there wasn't anything you could present that interested all people, so you should simply ask them what they wanted to know. Where, usually, anybody who thinks of a new concept gets pipped by number two, or three, or four, look at AOL getting upended by the World Wide Web, Google took off and got so far ahead its competitors can't even smell its exhaust any more.

As Deepak Chopra said on CBS News, the other day: "My five and six year old grandchildren don't even watch TV any more, they get up,  they go to Youtube". Youtube, a,k.a. Google video. Or Google TV. Or whatever you want to call it. And the Google folks just keep going, they have an idea, get it started, if it doesn't work they move on to the next idea.

So now we have one of the head Googles, Marissa Mayer, stepping up to fix Yahoo. A Yahoo that, famously, went and bought some 40% of then fledgling Chinese internet company Alibaba seven years ago, and so should have had the ability to make a good entry into the Chinese market - Alibaba is a profitable behemoth today. Except the story has it Alibaba is planning to buy out Yahoo's share.

China is a really hard nut to crack. Google pulled out - voluntarily, but even so, Facebook didn't even try, Twitter hasn't managed, I am not seeing Blackberry there, Apple manufactures there, so is a different animal,  and then Skype is in China, Microsoft is in China, Nokia is in China, but they are among the few. My company, back when, NYNEX/Bell Atlantic, pulled out, you couldn't do telecommunications in China without participation of the People's Army, which was an issue. Much has been written about how to crack the Chinese market, but I don't know that anybody has the Golden Grail. I found a dichotomy in China - yes, the Chinese want to play in the world market, but then you turn around and see they really don't.

All I am saying is that I would hope Marissa Mayer can find another way of dealing with them - Yahoo's connection with China goes back a long way, and is likely related to one of its founders, Jerry Yang, who is of Taiwan Chinese ancestry. Ditching that chunk of Alibaba would be a bad move,  from the development perspective, in my opinion. The press has it Ross Levinson, the interim CEO at Yahoo, is the architect of the Alibaba buyout - is his departure related to that not being considered a good move? This is just me conjecturing, please understand I am totally besotted with China, where the general atmosphere reminds me of New York in the 1980s, when I got here, and I keep thinking (or maybe hoping...) there has to be a way to "do this together". If there is anything that is totally stupid, in my world, is that 1.5  billion Chinese can't get on Facebook. There has to be a batter way of "doing the internet" - we may have invented it, it really is high time to separate a computer network from human rights. This is what you do with customers: you find out their needs, their limitations, and then you build what it is they're looking for. You do not send Hillary Clinton to lecture them on politics. Or try to hide "dissidents' from their police.

As I am sure Marissa Mayer knows well, the American and European markets are stagnant. Yes, there is an uptick at places like Google, but the cause of that is an increase in advertising, companies think advertising more will increase sales, hence the interest in new advertising technologies like SEO and Targeted Marketing. Not so, in a bad recession, but these aren't folks that can think out of the box. When Costco sees an increase in memberships, and the only item they make money on is those memberships, there's something else going on altogether.

Growth is in Asia, that's actually been the case for a long time. I vividly remember the first time I went shopping in Singapore, from my Jakarta, Indonesia posting - this was 1995, and the local airlines were flying shuttles between Jakarta and Singapore. Except, those weren't small Airbuses or Boeings, they were Jumbo jets, 747s. And they were full, every hour. It is in Singapore, see the picture to the left, where they put airconditioning in outdoor terraces... think about this, we have never had 747s as airline shuttles, we, unlike Beijing, do not have live TV in the subway, and I've never seen an airconditioned outdoor seating area in any restaurant in the United States. So anyone trying to turn a large corporation around, in the capitalist West, today, and doesn't have functional subsidiaries in India and China, hasn't really gotten the message.

All you need to do, if you're a business person, is walk around Beijing, and see that practically every taxicab, police car, is a Volkswagen, and every government car is an Audi. Then do some research on how the Germans market and produce - it impresses the heck out of me, it isn't like they learn Mandarin in school. The only reason the Germans aren't more successful than they are is because they don't speak English - like the French, the British, the Americans and other large countries, Germans don't grow up with the sound of other languages, they dub their movies and television series into their native language, it is a shock to me every time I am in Germany, and hear Captain Kirk speaking German. For Germany, it got worse at unification, because East Germans spoke even less English than West Germans did.

I know I am getting a bit off base here, but the reason why small Western countries do so well, in trade and IT, is that we're brought up speaking English. The difference seems marginal, but we learn languages in school, and then, when we get home, we get movies and television series broadcast in those languages, with subtitles. We learn as we grow up, we absorb the sound, we learn the sound we develop better reading skills.

Language is at the core - India, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, do well in outsourcing and IT because they all have English as a native language. China has not decided that's a good idea, learning English isn't encouraged, go into a Beijing computer store and you'll have a hard time finding an English speaking sales person. It is India's main advantage, despite its economic problems - at independence, they made English an official native language.

I don't really have a lesson out of all this, except we're in a recession, and the only way for your company to do well is to either export, or trade overseas, or set up subsidiaries, or do all of the above. With today's transportation, and the internet, setting up shop in Chennai is no harder than setting up shop in Renton, WA. Of course, you need to hire some people who speak the lingo, but being an immigrant nation, we have plenty of those. All I am saying, Ms. Mayer, is: don't sell that chunk of Alibaba - Yahoo will just burn through the money if you do, and outGoogling Google - I don't think so.

Monday August 13, 2012; Two eyes is not redundant vision

At my Telegraph blog: my.telegraph.co.uk/aartsen

Sunday, August 5, 2012; "New" Internet? Where's the Old?

Keywords: Tivo, advertising, Youtube, TV news, NBC, Olympics coverage

Well, says the Wall Street Journal, "Social-Media Stock Frenzy Fizzles". Sure enough, but it isn't because the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs "can't monetize" their products. It is because Wall Street, way back when, decided that you could take a product consumers liked, and give it to them without charging for it, as if it was 1941, and adding advertising to TV was opening up a whole new market. Never mind that there were only three broadcast networks in the United States then, and that Western Europe thought about it and decided that was not a good model to finance television, advertising is now the way we're going to finance the internet, the subscription model today is used only by a few hallmark publishers.

Internet, an interactive computer interconnection methodology, isn't even slightly related to television. Apart from anything else, internet is diverse and dispersed, it makes television fully obsolete, something carriers are fighting desperately. In other countries, there are time delays due to the need to translate and edit, but nowhere does a government allow a commercial company to censor a world event (NBC completely replaced parts of the opening ceremony, and didn't stream it live on one of its gazillion cable channels, which would not have interfered with the "main" broadcast). If you want to know why I don't believe in all of this noise about "internet freedom", it is what I've just described to you - yes, the Chinese and the Iranians censor the internet, but Comcast actively preventing live access to Olympic broadcasts amounts to the same thing - censoring. An NBC spokesman, when asked, admitted as much - "the broadcast needs to be put in context" - that's exactly how the Chinese and the Iranians justify their management of the internet, and of television.

"The foundation of a new internet era" the New York Times calls it. Why would there be a new internet era? What was wrong with the old one? What we did was use the existing concept of advertising funded service, then finding out that advertisers aren't paying enough to support all of the media, and invent a mirage called "targeted marketing", forgetting that computers, websites and "handheld devices" cannot read minds. It does not matter how many algorithms you embed in your Android device, there will never be any way it can tell Papa John's when I feel like having pizza. On all of my devices, Facebook tries to force me to turn on my GPS antenna, even if I am accessing Facebook using a mobile browser. If it can do this, it can send you local advertising. Facebook, and its clients, believe that this will help them sell things to you. Left and right, the evidence is that more and more consumers are displeased when social networks track their movements and activities, but this does not in any way alter their methodologies. It is amazing to see Facebook's technique - they began with two of those thumbnail ads in your news feed, then three, now they are up to seven or so, and since that didn't do what they were looking for, the ads now refresh while you are in your news feed. If that isn't desperation, I don't know what is.

Personally, as the broadcast wasn't live anyway, I Tivo'd the whole thing, began watching later, and skipped all of the commercials. What is with these people, broadcasting programs on delay, but pretending they are live, as Comcast does with the Today Show every day, here on the West Coast? I don't know what makes them think this sells more advertising - the deterioration of journalism into "How did it make you feel to become a princess?" and "What did you think when you died?" has to, at some point, begin to become known as "unreality television". I even saw Matt Lauer and his cohorts discuss Daniel Craig's mission to Buckingham Palace to fetch Her Majesty as if that happened in real time. Not to mention their hearing that Paul McCartney's voice cracked, for emotional reasons, when he saw the vast arena full of people in front of him - what they heard, in fact, was Paul McCartney's singing voice succumbing to old age.

Writing about technology, I do, of course, attempt to predict the future as much as the next writer does, I have more experience than most, and I am a patent holding developer and technology integrator. In the case of Facebook and its cohorts, it goes even beyond educated guesswork, as I am a user, a customer, and I've seen and participated in more social media than most. I had my own user group on CompuServe in the early 1980s, leased a server from ITT Dialcom (later BT Dialcom) soon after, was an early Dialogic user, and by the time I made it to NYNEX' research labs in White Plains, NY, in 1990, left AOL by the wayside. I was, by then, able to set up and run my own servers, which I decided was rather more fun than mingling with citizens, who by then were able to subscribe to the nascent internet, and effectively invade and take over our elitist little club.

At any rate, the way I look at Facebook is the same way I looked at AOL - where you had to log in and use "keywords" to get to where you wanted to be. AOL, that compressed webpages before sending them to you, to save money. AOL, then Yahoo, and then came Microsoft, that tried to get on the bandwagon by buying Hotmail, the first time I can remember a technology company spent a huge amount of money on a company that had no revenues. All in the same vein - every single one of these corporations don't sell a product, they took over carrying advertising from the printed press, and have between them fragmented the market to the point that advertising has become vastly more expensive than it used to be. Instead of advertising in fifteen publications, you now have to advertise on five hundred websites, so bad that the "share" buttons on a website have to come up in a separate window. When Hotmail was acquired, in 1997, it had some 9.5 million subscribers, for the day that's pretty much Facebook size, and that was going to be the core of Microsoft's online presence. In various ways, Microsoft has, since then, attempted to force Windows users to use their Hotmail address to register, pretty much the same way some publishers, today, won't let you register unless you do so with your Facebook account. Dunno, kids, I get the feeling some of those marketing folks aren't learning from history, because it was the consumer, hand in hand with some governments, that stopped Microsoft from doing what it was doing, something that brought them some very large antitrust fines.

So, as the press would have it, is this the end of Wall Street's love affair with "social networks"? I've been waiting for the penny to drop - there is no such thing as Search Engine Optimization, and no such thing as Targeted Marketing - that is, these are technologies that do exist, but they don't produce any sales. The idea behind all this is that when you go to a search engine looking for something, it'll take you to General Motors - this despite the fact that all car manufacturers are using the same tools. The screen capture to the left shows you a typical example of "the new internet" - Forbes thinks that providing four menu areas - left, right, top, bottom - to the point where it really is no longer possible to see even a small portion of the article you were wanting to read, is an effective way of marketing and selling advertising. I find it hard to believe "specialists" are making $250,000 a year thinking up this kind of lunacy, if anybody bothered to equate their efforts with actual $ale$ they'd be on the way to the labour exchange.

Think about it this way (and if you're a CEO, pay close attention): you get up, crank up your laptop so you can watch the news, and go to the kitchen to make coffee. In the kitchen, you're met by someone you don't know, who positions themselves between you and the coffeemaker, and is going to ask you questions about some supermarket products, instead of your making coffee. Not while, instead. It is a survey. It arbitrarily collects information someone sticks in a spreadsheet, and someone else the uses algorithms or software or both to predict the future using this information. This methodology delivers data on which Vice Presidents of Marketing base recommendations that go to their CEOs, Presidents, Boards of Directors, and Government departments. If you do not want to take part in the survey, you have to push the person taking it out of the way.

"If you want to make money, sell something people need, food, asswipe", a Vice President once said to me. Facebook and Pinterest and Twitter are nice tools to communicate with, but, the same as it was with my first consumer product, voice dialing, back in the early 1990s, consumers will not pay for products that do things they can do themselves. Consumers do not buy a car because it has a touch screen.

We are, in many ways, our own worst enemy. We had a perfectly good product, the telephone, which we needed to buy service for, so we could speak with one another. That service kept quite a few people in bread and butter, for many decades - it had, if you will, an access fee. Then, someone in Joisey invented a way of doing this without a wire. That made it even more expensive - my first handheld, a Radio Shack phone made by Nokia, cost some $1,200, and the service easily another $200 - per month. Then, someone invented data transmission (part of the original European GSM specification), and next, the portable computer (another Radio Shack first, made by Kyocera in Japan). Eventually, Apple came in with a handheld computing device called the iPhone - and now, we all have handheld computers, with the phone, the only thing we really need, built in - for free.

Saturday August 4, 2012; Nobody out-Googles Google

At my Telegraph blog: my.telegraph.co.uk/aartsen

Wednesday August 2, 2012; If it isn't free, is it still Social?

At my Telegraph blog: my.telegraph.co.uk/aartsen

Monday July 30, 2012; Obama Cares

Keywords: Colorado shooting, universal health care, remote working, distance learning

I haven't written about health care for a while, but the Colorado shooting reminds me of one of my hobby horses: socialized medicine. Health care, here in the United States, isn't available to many millions of people, something that Hillary Clinton, and now Barack Obama, are trying to provide solutions to.

Something that legislators and voters need to think of, when we look at these deranged killers, is that socialized medicine includes mental health care, and that generally available mental health care can prevent some of these folks running off the rails. In most Western countries, socialized health care includes ways for mentally ill or deranged folk to get some kind of care. It is one of the things that struck me as incongruous, when I came to live in the United States, moving here from England, and before that, The Netherlands - how can you label your country as "the richest country in the world" and not provide medical care to all your people, as we do in Europe? When I moved to New York City, with just a thousand dollars in my pocket, I was able to get incidental care at St. Vincent's hospital, but a kindly pharmacist at Charing Cross Hospital in London, where I had received NHS specialist care during my years there, sent me the arthritis medication I could not have afforded in the United States, until I eventually got insurance through my new employer.

I have no way of knowing whether the Aurora shooting might have been prevented had the shooter received psych care earlier in life, I don't know that he did not, all I am saying is that mental health care would certainly "intercept" some of the deranged killers we see, certainly the Virginia Tech shooter had psychological and social issues. Anything that makes people's lives better, and helps them when they have need, we should be able to do. I don't know what's wrong with those who label these efforts "Obamacare" and vow to take medical care away from people who need it, but please think about this when you go to vote. Some of what we do must help those who can't help themselves, or we might as well forget about going to church on Sunday. Or Saturday. Or Friday, Or whenever your religion wants you to.

Rarely discussed is the cost, both to insurers and society, of taking care of adults who have not had appropriate health care growing up. Children and adolescents who grow up in bad health will have significant health issues later in life, health issues that get progressively more expensive. Even if they do get health insurance, as they grow up, they will be "costly to maintain", requiring the fixing of ailments that could have been avoided. There is a cause-and-effect issue here, one that rarely gets addressed if you govern your country election-to-election. Europe has, with its many-party system that requires extensive negotiation, been better able to put in place measures that have long term societal impact, and is less prone to what we see Governor Romney propose - rolling back a law that has cost billions to put into effect, and adding additional billions in public and private expenditure undoing it. These types of change rarely benefit anybody, we're much better off leaving everything in place, and working with what's there to make things better.

Thinking about where it all begins, education, what I would really be interested in is an organization with the temerity to begin a completely new process of dissemination - from education and work to home entertainment, we have new technologies we're not really using in any significant way. Twenty-odd years ago, after I had moved into telecommunications R&D, we had this new thing, the internet, and the Mosaic browser that gave rise to the World Wide Web. We've been coasting on that ever since, and mostly are today trying to put square plugs into round holes, making phones with screens that get progressively larger (this is the most stupid thing on Earth), "tablets" that try to do what only computers can do (looks like Microsoft got that message), and computers that can't do what they're supposed to do, because they generate too much heat, which is hidden from you because of their automated output management we've been told is an advance in technology.

Laptops are either too large, or not fast enough, and I probably don't need to remind you of all of the cellphones that have been catching fire, over the years. Today, the advanced smartphones run out of battery halfway down the day, if we use them at full capacity - I have at least one smartphone that has a "power saving" setting - the fact that it is there means we're not able to manage our technologies. Putting "the internet" into huge TV sets when kids no longer watch conventional television means simply that we have the wrong people in the lab, today. Seriously.

But this isn't about overheating computers. This is about why we still have children learning in schools and classrooms, why we have workers going into offices, and why we have government employees and politicians physically attending conferences. We have, for some years now, had the technology to make all of that unnecessary, and I am beginning to believe that until we begin to push hard to make the use of that technology mandatory, we're not going to get to the next stage of the industrial revolution. If nothing else, we're not going to solve global warming until we get those commuters out of their cars.

Think about it, the majority of those, and they are the majority of car buyers and -users, don't need to actually go anywhere to work. Same for the kids, the soccer moms and the school buses - mostly completely unnecessary, at least in the Western world. Yet, we continue building roads, solving traffic problems, and preparing our cars to deal with the rigours of long commutes - you can message from many cars, using speech recognition, even though we now know that any kind of conversation can fatally distract a driver's attention. It is as if we are addicted to this way of living our lives, moving to a good school district as the kids grow up, even though we can use a combination of home schooling and online education, and make that better than any school class could ever have to be. And there are other ways of tackling education - we could combine kids in a neighbourhood class, taught by parents who rotatingly get time off, we could have traveling, visiting teachers, there are so many different ways we can use that really need trying and creative thinking.

It is out-of-the-box thinking that we are most in need of, today. Look at China, and India, we can see that large proportions of the population are moving into cities - but that is a trend that began in England during the Industrial Revolution, when factory workers needed to be living close to the factories they worked in, in a day when mass transit was not yet available. That Industrial Revolution is the only reason why we have lots of kids in those enormous amorphous schools, something we have built an educational system around. We've built an educational system around something invented in 1750, when the mechanized loom came into being, then re-invented in 1850, when the steam engine became portable. The true interconnectedness of the world didn't happen until the 1980s, when the internet began to connect individual countries and regions, and the 1990s, when Communism took a nosedive that has led to the globalization of various forms of capitalism, which, in turn, connected the rest of the world to the global internet. You could say, then, that the Third Industrial Revolution began in 1980, and as before, had an enormous impact on the world's population. Now is perhaps the time to start making the changes new technologies enable, and begin abandoning the ways we deceive ourselves. After all, when you no longer commute, you don't need that hybrid fuel efficient vehicle, as you're not using much of the gasoline you used to, right? You won't even need that new vehicle, and can just get by using a recycled one, saving energy there, too.

Sunday July 22, 2012; Advertising that does not sell

Keywords: Tivo, advertising, Youtube, TV news

I think we may have a larger problem than "jobs", when I look at the advertising flying around - just on my Tivo (see pic to the right) they sell some of the sparse screen real estate so they can put things in front of consumers. These are folks who access their Tivo in order to watch television - and just because advertising was a big thing on TV in 1954, why does anybody think that is still the case today? We have some new and some old advertising technologies, nobody has any idea which leads where, and we are - in my view - stupidly adding more advertising without there being any reason to think any of it works.

Why do telecommunications companies, or insurance companies, think that using the same language across all vendors sells anything? All carriers advertise unlimited data plans that are limited, we've seen the carriers try to change the meaning of the word "unlimited" on several occasions, Chevrolet had the Federal Government change terminology to "distinguish" the Chevy Volt, insurance companies tell you their plans have everything "in network" so you find out it isn't after you sign up, and on top of all that we now have a presidential candidate who says that withdrawing insurance from poor people is "good for America". I am glad to be reminded they can buy their own insurance, which is why they were uninsured in the first place. Have we gone crazy?

The thing is, of course, what do we replace those useless activities with? The advertising is for companies that compete, so even if it worked wouldn't help the economy - the economy does not care whether you buy your service from Aflac or United Healthcare, and as the economy is in a downward spiral there aren't enough consumers who can afford coverage. Worse, we have now entered the realm of deceiving consumers into thinking we give them more than we actually do, thereby hurting the consumer, but actually creating a situation where they have to pay more for less, and that, in turn, has an additional detrimental effect on the economy. As advertisers and the creators of products and services now seriously believe that you can sell something to someone by putting an advert of that thing in front of the consumer instead of the information that consumer wanted, it seriously is high time we asked ourselves why we spend real money on completely crazy activities. Did you ever buy a pair of shoes because they were shown to you instead of the nine o'clock news you pushed the button for?

Here is Deepak Chopra on CBS about his 5- and 6 year old grandchildren: "They don't watch television at all any more, they get up, they go to Youtube". Advertisers must begin to pay attention - and, in my book, should be working on abandoning the traditional media altogether, tomorrow, preferably, I'll help. Free up the talent and the money to create new ways of selling things - you'll sell just as much crap with traditional advertising as without. Promise. Forget Facebook, too - that's for boomers. And boomers are the past. Even just looking at news functionality, the Pew Institute concludes Youtube "is it" as far as news is concerned.

The only way you can get a new, happy customer, is by providing more service for less money, something the Chinese know how to do, and we don't. They won't be able to do this forever, but they prepared, and paid down. We did not.The parcel in the picture left contains a webcam, mail ordered from Hong Kong, for the princely sum of US$4.99 including shipping. Somehow, the Chinese manage to sustain this "onslaught", and all you need to do is go into the store on a Saturday and look at the price of a box of cereal, and you can see we're not sustaining this - even though disposable incomes have shrunk... And I don't believe there are enough consumers that buy games that all of those magical start-ups can "make a difference". Remember that all of that good-for-you green stuff, like solar panels and wind energy, have so far only managed to make energy more expensive, and shortages continue, while there isn't any pollution control that has made a dent anywhere that I can see. Look at the statistics and it will be clear to you nobody is doing anything that has any downward impact on the carbons. Looked at simplistically, if we don't reduce our energy consumption, and make fewer babies, we're not going to bring anything down. Making the Dutch believe that it helps if you unplug your TV when you're not watching is impressive, but doesn't help, as they install solar panels on their roofs in a country where the sun only shines three days a year....

This being the Royal Jubilee year, we're fairly overrun with PBS programming about Queen Elizabeth II, and that brought to my Vaio the well known voice of Sir Trevor McDonald, a voice I had not partaken of since the 1990s. It sort of propelled me straight back to the News at Ten, thankfully one can now go to Youtube and key up bits of history, which had, for me, the unwanted but appreciated effect of the proverbial pang of incongruous homesickness.

I suppose it is partially because there's been such a long gap in my hearing Sir Trevor's voice, I left for America permanently in 1985, but felt very much at home in Britain - paradoxically (and I can't really explain that without writing a book) probably more so than in The Netherlands, where I was born, though it is only partly my country of ancestry.

On the subject of Britain, the BBC reports that publicly funded research will be available to the taxpayer, in the future, as is the case here in the United States (Google publishes most research as well as all U.S. patents for free). It is a pity the BBC gives it a negative slant - this initiative gives "armchair scientists" an opportunity to work from behind their terminal, and will bring more and better science and development into the marketplace. There are lots of very brilliant people that don't make it to Oxbridge or JPL, but have the ability to benefit society with what they do, and this will certainly help, in that respect. No idea why it took so long, but it is a good move - and as I said, we did that long ago, in the United States. Combined with global search engines, it brings science to all. Good show.

By the way, I mentioned recently that many British news websites have loads and lots of American content when they "see" an American IP address - this morning I notice that of the ten or so news stories mentioned on the CBS Morning News, fully half come from British papers. I am not the only one who gets his news from the U.K., then, apart from Randy Rupert's moronic outlets there is really some excellent press coverage going on, as opposed to copying stories others publish, which I see an awful lot of. There's something to be said for journalists whose native language is English (sorry) and who aren't solely driven by selling advertising pages. I just hope it stays this way - I see the Beeb sliding into commercial space on a regular basis, which isn't why it was invented. Keep up the good work, folks, this is one British export that works. One unfortunate side effect of America's insular qualities is that much of the country thinks that "international news" is a report about Mrs. Clinton visiting Egypt, and important news that happens in Thailand or Botswana is relegated to Youtube moments. CBS is at least trying to be different...

Saturday July 14, 2012; Airplanes, computers, everything breaks

Keywords: Hewlett Packard, Windows Media Center, Airbus, Sullenburger, Concorde

Bleh. The HP Pavilion I thought I had cleverly saved, by disabling its built-in screen and hanging an HDMI panel off it, died. Days of work down the tubes, and that was a really nice little laptop, multimedia-capable with some of the clever stuff HP puts in its "entertainment devices". Thankfully, I had not yet put my Sony Vaio All-in-One on Ebay, so was able to put that back in service, but I guess I am out the $450 or so I had hoped to recoup, which would have paid for the new laptop. Now I need to decide whether or not to have it repaired, although I replaced it with a Lenovo that was on sale, that is actually a brilliant laptop, but a bit bigger than I like to carry around with me (meaning it does not fit in my backpack). But I can work. I go paranoid when I do not have two working systems, many years in the phone company, and especially being "in charge" on 9/11, have made it a phobia to be able to get online and work at all times. My internet is backed up up worldwide by T-Mobile and a tetherable Blackberry Torch, and I normally have a spare laptop sitting around - so there is my current compromise, one laptop and a Sony Vaio All-in-One (although, sneakily, with a UPS that will behave like a laptop, though I have not tested how long the UPS will last). Why worry about the Pavilion? It has some nice extras, like a remote, it has (with the dock I bought) optical Dolby, it has eSata, handles HDCP and digital HDMI, and it is actually good looking.

Owell. Lot of time wasted, but I do know all there is to know about Microsoft Windows Media Center by now, which works like a dream using a digital cable / antenna TV USB adapter, cheapest DVR you'll ever have, if you have a Win7 PC lying around you don't really need. Of course, if you are a privacy nut and you don't like your cable or satellite provider mining your converter box or DVR for marketing information, the PC/cable adapter solution works well, too. That's why I have liked my Tivo, and why I like my "AverTV Hybrid Volar Max TV Tuner Kit for Windows", which works directly with Microsoft's Windows Media Center - I guess that means you're just providing Microsoft with data, although you can turn that off. Here in the US, cable companies aren't going to tell you whether or not you can use this device on your cable connection, I just tried, and it works (don't expect premium channels, though). I note that a similar unit is available in the UK as well, I have no way testing it with DVB-T and DVB-T2, though, the US has ATSC.

Curiously, this morning, CBS anchor Rebecca Jarvis gave a good example of how little anybody understands about what to do with all of that data, this on the subject of targeted marketing. She quoted department store Macy's as an example, which, according to her, after you had accessed its website four times in the course of a working day, would send you an email with a special offer towards the beginning of the evening, to get you to buy something online.

And that is a perfect example of the simplistic, brainless and useless way we're using the vast masses of data we now collect. To begin with, if someone accesses your website four times during a day, they have likely decided what, or if, they want to buy something, and you don't need to risk upsetting them by letting them know you're watching them. The up and coming generation knows it is being spied on, and how to send you packing. Secondly, you don't know why they accessed your site. They're likely comparing prices for their 87 year old Auntie who has been buying at Macy's since 1933 - not someone you have to market to any more. We must understand we have no clue why somebody does something, and guessing this from their behaviour leads to lots of misunderstanding, go talk to a divorce lawyer if you don't believe me. Last but not least, what corporations do not understand is that impulse buying works only if you spend billions of dollars and decades building thousands of Wal-Mart stores, and then once everybody gets into big box stores and has all of the flat screen TVs you put by the door at half price, and everybody has copied your formula, it dies. Even so, this isn't something you can conveniently do via email, because everybody and his great-grandmother is emailing everybody, and even if you manage to stand out it is only for three minutes. No, you can't predict when somebody gets hungry, even if you can see them through their webcam, something Facebook is trying to build into its business model, until the EU figures it out, and puts a stop to it. The bottom line is that collecting data without knowing what it means is very much a waste of time.

Ann Curry's departure at the Today Show may not be the solution Comcast is looking for. It may well be that the Today Show's loss of ratings is due not to Good Morning America, but to the young people demographic, which is turning towards the internet, has been for a long time. Long in the tooth and populated by plastic people with one hairdresser, the Today Show has morphed to where their interviews consist mostly of "How did that make you feel" and other tearjerkers, and they get to interview people because they're the largest. Anybody who is anybody stubs a toe, you can count on them to be on the Today Show the next morning. If they're legally blind, so much the better. I've seen Savannah Guthrie, who is a D.C. lawyer on heels, dispense tearful legal advice on air, in the news - that isn't television, and she is no Charlie Rose, who has a personality. I abandoned Today a while ago, when CBS, in hiring Charlie Rose for their morning program, turned that into a real news program, with lots of stuff that interests me. An endless parade of high end New York City chefs telling housewives what to cook, when they haven't seen the inside of a Gristedes on a budget, having to bring home dinner between work and home on Friday afternoon, may be cute, but it does not help anybody, in the middle of a recession. One celebrity chef has diabetes, another is twice the size he used to be, and all that barely anybody talks about, on air, especially not Emeril's ballooning. I am not your average American, whatever that is, but Today is propped up by populist drivel, which doesn't make the cut in the internet era. And no, you can't make television by doing bits of coverage and ending them with "see the rest at our website", or by having doctor Nancy pushing iPads to help you lose weight. An iPad costs a month's worth of dinners, for many. It is a problem, when you get to be mammoth size, and your mantra is "it's OK, as long as it doesn't lose viewers".

What with the demise of "unlimited data " plans on mobile devices, teens and tweens aren't going to watch "Today" on their iDevice anyway, reserving their wireless internet for important things, and a friend recently told me that her iPhone, and her Android phone before that, doesn't have enough battery capacity to watch TV anyway, not if she wants to use them for work, the rest of the day. My Blackberry Torch / Blackberry Playbook combo does better on that score, and together don't cost more than your latest generation iPhone, but that's not something you can sell the American public, or so the manufacturers seem to think.

CBS News had an item on aircraft accidents, and how those are, these days, always due to human (pilot) error - and by now, we have the official verdict from the French authorities. CBS cites, amongst others, the Airbus crash between Brazil and France, and the Queens American Airlines crash. Human error? I don't think so. In the case of the American Airlines flight, the pilot overdid it on the rudder control, and snapped off some of his tail controls. In the Air France crash, a pilot did not compensate properly when the instruments provided faulty readings. In both cases, we have had the technology for many years to deal with these issues - a pilot should not be able to make excessive use of the rudder to the point where something breaks, while the Airbus reported an incorrect airspeed, and the computer disengaged the autopilot. Yes, in both cases the pilots could have saved the flight, but that does not mean the crashes can be blamed on them. What we do is make larger airplanes, heap additional responsibility on air crew, have increasing amounts of air traffic, and create increasingly complicated computer systems that pilots have to manage on top of their other responsibilities. You can't then expect the human computer to take the right decision in a situation it has not been in before. "Adding training" is not going to create better pilots, and the comment I heard, that pilots still need to maintain their flying skills - I don't know, maybe it is time for pilot specialization, with a fly pilot and a computer pilot on the flight deck, as well as an all rounder. Something. But no, I do not accept that this is magically now all "human error". In both these examples, the cause is a system that either failed, or worse, did not exist. Elevating the pilot to a computer repairman is ridiculous, especially with neither the time nor the phone to call a helpdesk. There is a simple rule I apply - beyond a certain amount of automation, you introduce more variables than you take away, and need to do more real world (as opposed to lab) testing, and do limited introduction. Perhaps it is time to re-introduce the flight mechanic.

Captain Sullenburger, the Hudson River miracle pilot, demonstrated to CBS news on air how Airbus and Boeing flight decks differ, with Airbus having a much more "fly by wire" implementation, and how traditional controls might have helped the French pilots realize the co-pilot was flying "stick back" for several minutes. Sully certainly has a point, but that is only in terms of talking about how this accident might have been avoided. The issue, or maybe "my issue", is that we have sufficient intelligence in aircraft to make it technically impossible to stall an aircraft. It is the step beyond today's autopilot, perhaps, but it is a logical step - still, today, pilots control aircraft, this because we don't trust our automation enough to let it take over. I understand that well - I cringe every time I reboot a computer with un-duplicated files, as I know what can go wrong with the disk, and that, most of the time, disks fail during startup.

Interestingly, the more traditional design isn't really Boeing design - it is pilot design. American airline companies, when this level of automation became available, were pressured by American pilots' unions not to go to what was then called the "dark, quiet" cockpit. It was the one compromise they made so they could get the union to drop flight engineer (three man cockpit) requirements for transatlantic flights using twin engined aircraft, saving fuel and labour cost (two crews had to be on those aircraft anyway). Boeing, being an American manufacturer, had little option but to listen to American pilots, Airbus, being a new technology European enterprise not overloaded with former military "stick" pilots, managed to talk European and some Asian airlines into accepting the Brave New World.

Unions traditionally are wary of automation - all that does is shift employment, not reduce it, but we often pay lip service to the labour requirement. In this case, there is a new generation of pilots, who don't come out of traditional military aircraft, and if, in this particular case, one pilot had an instinctive response to the autopilot warning, that is not a bad thing. The bad thing was that the aircraft didn't realize what was going on. All that means is that we are in a transitional phase. I recall a KLM captain showing me how the backup and primary destination of his Flight Management System were in different countries, and the FMS refused to set a backup in the same country - so, he used the same destination for primary and backup. These were early Airbus days, but it was a good demonstration of how stupid the systems are - an FMS doesn't know about borders, and will happily land in East Germany, if left to its own devices. By contrast, a British Airways pilot, demonstrating the FMS of a Boeing aircraft to me over London in an approach to Heathrow Airport (I was a member of the British press by then, loved that day - the KLM approach was interesting as well, especially since the captain shouldn't have let me be on the flight deck at all during landing), showed me how the Boeing FMS let him do what he wanted - though I must add that Britain is an island, quite a bit larger than The Netherlands, and an FMS "knows" not to land in the water.

All this may go away, over time, as there is a new generation of military pilots on the way who know nothing but fly-by-wire - drone pilots. Flying drones thousands of miles away from their actual location will force aircraft manufacturers to solve urgent problems in software, as in some situations the satellite lag time does not allow pilot response in real time - that French Airbus might as well have been flown remotely from Paris for all the good three pilots on the flight deck did. My boss at NYNEX' research lab used to call it "reasonable time". But I repeat, we have to get to where some of these conditions have to be trusted to automation pilots cannot override. Again, I don't think this situation can be blamed on pilots, or on their training. It is having partial automation, and three "operators", on the flight deck that is the problem. Speed sensors have been freezing for a hundred years, that should not have made any difference. Especially, if what Boeing thinks will come true: 34,000 new airliners in the next twenty years, we're going to run out of third world countries to sell the old ones to....

Concorde was the first passenger airliner to have fly-by-wire controls. The picture shows an Air France Concorde at Orly Airport in 1978, having diverted from Charles de Gaulle due to a thunderstorm - it did not carry enough fuel to be able to circle, and had to go to a backup airport straight away (the other backup was London's Heathrow, of course ;). I had just returned from New York on that aircraft on one of Air France's promotional flights, champers and caviar from seven in the morning. We ended up having to be bused back to Charles de Gaulle airport - but after a week in the Waldorf Astoria, and four hours having a positively Gallic dinner, we were way too pissed to mind the ride.

Saturday July 7, 2012; ..but not in Pakistan

Keywords: Pakistan, Islam, ideology

Well, Jeez. The Wall Street Journal has it the reopening of the American supply route across the Pakistan - Afghanistan border "Offers Pakistan, U.S. a New Path". No such thing, I am afraid. A week or so before Secretary Clinton told the Pakistanis the United States government is really sorry about their loss of military life, the Pentagon sent an appropriation request to the Congress, if memory serves me, stating a need for some $8.1 billion, to defray the increased cost of transportation. Much of that would have gone to the folks that transport Armed Forces supplies into Afghanistan, a path that runs from, I think, Estonia through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and, of course, Russia, with its rivers of military rolling stock, and ready made railways into Afghanistan. I think $8.1 billion would have secured that route forever, and the Pakistanis understood we had given up on them.

Pakistan is, or, maybe, was, with Iran and North Korea, one of those countries you cannot negotiate with, one of those places that have no rulebook. So expect this whole thing to happen all over again, because they're in their own dichotomy, one that began when India fell apart, way back when. A country whose existence is based solely on a religion, one that declares other religions invalid, is bound to be supremely paranoid, a democracy based on a religious vote isn't something very manageable. Even the Indonesians, nominally secular, are finding out that religious zealots can prevent Lady Gaga from performing in their country, costing their economy millions of dollars. They're paying the price already - RIM has decided to set up their regional centre in Malaysia, rather than Indonesia, and I expect (and so, seemingly, do many Indonesians all over the blogs) the Islamic upsurge could be partly to blame. In all fairness - Indonesia is a destination, not a waystation, so there may well be a valid technical reason, as well, and besides, Malysia's business ownership in Indonesia is growing significantly, and they are all over Africa in terms of technology investment. Malaysia probably got lucky in another respect - it adjoins Singapore, and as far as I can see the oldest and most reliable phone- and data connections into Asia were made by Cable & Wireless, the British company that used Britain's colonial legacy to run high speed and fiber networks across the globe. When I began interconnecting our (NYNEX') new GSM joint venture in Indonesia, in the 1990s, the best internet connections I could get to bring us back to the interbilling centre in Rome, and intercarrier nodes in London, were C&W's. So if you're anywhere near Hong Kong, Singapore, India and Australia and Japan, you'll find it easier to connect to the world, because those countries have had those high speed in-and-out connections since the 1980s.

We should, probably, pay more attention to the rising importance of the "three blocs" - communism, now the core element of the largest country on Earth, China, then Islam, a core religion in a number of countries, and, in many, the "primary" religion, with its own laws, and, dare one say it, capitalism, which, by now, is beginning to look like it is an offshoot of Christianity. What happened to socialism, once very important in Europe, is not quite clear to me, but I suppose the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union and the "acquisition" of the German Democratic Republic were the beginning of the end - for Western socialism, for unions, for the idea that there is such a thing as  "greater good" managed by benevolent statesmen. Instead, billionaire businessmen now manage those countries, except, paradoxically, in the United States, where the American equivalent of a socialist is in the White House, propelled there on the backs of billionaire businessmen who flew the jumbo right into the ground, and in France, where an avowed socialist has just taken the helm. The upcoming American elections will likely tell us in which direction the Western world is swinging.

In my book, those capitalists have done a very good job of crashing the collective economies, and as of now, don't appear to have a clue what to do to get things going again. I used to stay at a cheap hotel in downtown Beijing, close to everywhere and the subway, and just checked what the nightly rate is - remember Beijing is a massive modern metropolis, with all mod cons and some 20 million inhabitants - the last rate I paid, in 2010, was $35/night, with free breakfast and room internet... Guess what, that rate, for July, is down to $24.41. With the supermarket, people's department store, MacDonalds and the laundromat all within three blocks, you can go stay in Beijing for a month for $800. Something is definitely not as it should be - the Chinese, too, are hurting. But since they did not all move to the suburbs and buy a $250,000 house, they're probably a bit better off than we are...

Sunday July 1, 2012; And always those Chinese, Take Two

Keywords: Lenovo, IBM, Thinkpad, Intel

When I get or buy new equipment I will be using for a longer period of time, I try to start a review I then post on Amazon.com, and my new Lenovo, bought because the display on my HP Pavilion laptop is failing (it has since passed away completely...) , should be no exception. But checking where to post the review, it soon became clear the particular model I purchased at Best Buy wasn't in Amazon's lineup. I eventually found a comparable model, but it is now clearly harder for consumers to comparison shop, as what I think happens is that manufacturers create model designations for specific resellers, and so you are, umm, "discouraged" from comparing a particular model, as it exists elsewhere only under a different designation, and if you're not an expert you're not going to figure that out. This Lenovo, the B570 1068-ASU, is quite fast, has some really nice features, but I really don't know under which model to post it, so if you're looking for comparable equipment I can only hope you can find this review

Lenovo is an interesting company - once known as IBM's PC division, IBM being the company that invented the personal computer architecture that is ubiquitous today (yes, including that of the Apple PCs), Lenovo has taken IBM's technology based concepts, and grown the division even larger than it was. profitable and with a turnover of some $22 billion. While HP is larger, it isn't doing well, of late. What, to me, is interesting about Lenovo is how the Chinese took some really clever American technology developments, many emanating from IBM's T.J. Watson research labs in New York State, and redesigned the manufacturing and marketing engines around them. But the good bits - for instance the hard disk encryption - were retained, as Lenovo understands that finding new customers does not mean dumping the existing aficionados. We buy computers for their technology, not for their toy aspects. Staple, for instance, need to be HDMI and eSata ports - Lenovo offers them both, even on cheap units, they've become part of the laptop architecture, rather than "add ons".

There isn't much point in telling you about this laptop in and of itself, otherwise, I am sure you've read a gazillion descriptions of laptops already. I bought this particular laptop because it was cheap. The sale price was $360, after a Best Buy discount for discontinuation, all I needed to do was add a 4GB RAM module - that in itself was a nice surprise, as every laptop I had bought, until now, needed its two 2 GB DIMMs replacing - and has a fast processor, Intel's i3-2330M dual core processor. This distinguishes itself by its Sandy Bridge architecture, which lets it handle four computing threads at once. It depends on your operating system and software whether or not that can be used, to be sure. I was not disappointed, after I did my usual tuning of Windows 64, this architecture flies, and is so much more energy efficient than previous processors that this laptop, unusually, doesn't make intermittent blow dryer sounds keeping its innards cool. I am not helping my computers by maxing out their memory, a 64 bit motherboard can generally handle 8 Gb of RAM, and using fast peripherals, like a 2 terabyte 7200 RPM eSATA drive, and its HDMI display port.

While the older chipsets allow the hybrid eSata/USB ports I first found on an HP laptop a few years ago, they often won't let you boot from the eSATA device, or mount and unmount it. The chipset in the Lenovo, much to my delight, does, so I am now able to use my backup drives on the fast bus without having to reboot the laptop every time I change external drives, and I can probably set up a fast eSata recovery drive. As far as the internals are concerned, remember you need to turn on the cache on your internal drive, and especially if you upgrade the RAM, the larger the hard disk (this one has half a terabyte), the faster Windows will run, this due to the way it handles virtual memory. An 8 or 16 Gb SD card providing Readyboost cache memory helps too, but as I said, all that taxes the processors, uses more power and generates more heat. I've managed to coax some 6 hours of continuous use out of the battery, which is rated at 4 hours of "full steam". A spare will set you back around $35. The limited battery duration is due to the relatively small size of the battery, the laptop itself is quite frugal with power, considering

Other nice discoveries on this particular unit hark back to the halcyon days of its predecessor, the IBM Thinkpad: a fingerprint reader for security, as well as facial recognition software that not only protects system logins, but can also be associated with secure encrypted segments of the hard disk. Lenovo still, as it always has, offers a disk access password in the BIOS that encrypts the disk, thereby making retrieval of data from a disk with that password set almost impossible. You've been told this about other systems, I am sure, but I have been subject to the unfortunate proof that IBM/Lenovo's system works, when a disgruntled worker scrambled his password as he was being let go, and thousands of dollars spent at an upstate disk recovery specialist had no result. I am not suggesting you emulate that, but use of the secure login capabilities and the BIOS level encryption can certainly make your information, or your employer's information, quite safe.

Other than the above, the laptop is far from ugly, but with a 15.6 inch (40 cm) diagonal HD screen it is a bit large. I would have preferred one that fit in my small backpack, but those were, alas, at least $200 more expensive, and so out of my reach - for professional reasons, I make sure I have two functioning systems, so my work can proceed unimpeded should my primary machine fail. It does come with an HDMI port as well as VGA, and as its Microsoft Windows Home Premium 64 comes with the Windows Media Center, the unit is completely ready to display HD cable television as well as Blu-Ray disks in full HD, and so you can use it as a DVR. For the price it is brilliant - though Lenovo stopped making the unit, I've seen it on Amazon for $400 and up, and I must tell you I have had good experiences with the IBM Thinkpad and Lenovo lines, having owned six or so myself, over the years, and once having bought 1,400 of them for my department, without one single failed unit. Again, with this Intel processor and its big hard disk, this unit is unbeatable at the price.

The picture to the left I took inside a local Safeway, as they were preparing the shelves for the deregulation of alcohol sales in Washington State - like a number of states, Washington is finally getting out of the business of selling hard liquor. The big box stores have jumped into this market with all of their very large feet.. But I have to say I think selling whipped cream flavoured vodka is a bit over the top. Kudos to the State of Washington, it has managed to make more money from the taxes and excise now, than it ever did when it still sold this stuff. Do I think hard liquor should be in supermarkets? I sometimes see it in Europe, but, as I recall, only relatively specialized or "own brand" products, not aisle after aisle of liquor. A bit strange, and I don't know that bringing alcohol into big box stores is going to do much curbing alcoholism. But then that isn't the function of capitalism, is it..

Thursday June 28, 2012; You remember?

Keywords: memory, aging, brain

Thinking about memory and aging, there was a an interesting article at the U.S. National Institutes of Health referenced the other day, although I should add I don't support researchers jumping to conclusions about what causes which symptom, without some kind of evidence, which is thin in that report.

I have more than a passing interest in the matter as my own brain ages, and I find my analytical and retention methods change - all by themselves. It occurs to me that advancing technology may not be any help in maintaining the brain's agility. I thought the reverse, and then I realized I was neither taking a note, nor bookmarking a page, for the above reference, as I  have 24/7 access to search engines, on, count 'em, five devices, at least two of which I carry, one of which is glued to my hip, or in a pocket of my dressing gown. I am privileged, I suppose, in having worked with computers and in the computer industry since 1968, and having spent a significant portion of my career in telecommunications research. Something I wasn't quite prepared for, though, is that so many people in my age group are only semi-literate in the computing world, and have lost a portion of the reference media they used to use.

So while the computer lets us find information, especially older folk have not had training as to how to use search engines, how to use databases, and the PC does not provide a convenient and transparent way to store and organize information - this isn't a criticism of Microsoft, none of us anticipated how this "Windows thing" would become ubiquitous. Having programmed myself, having managed the very large database engines the phone company uses - my first research position involved directory assistance, which uses an enormous online database - and having had dozens of programmers for database development in my reporting structure, I know a lot about how databases work. We had no tools to manage very large amounts of data - we didn't even have very large amounts of data until countries and companies began merging. But, disturbingly, I find myself make less and less of an effort to remember things, because I have the tools to find information instantaneously - why remember information I have at my fingertips? I inadvertently tested my memory skills over the past few weeks, as I had to set up two work computers in a short period of time, one new, and one I have been using, that needed to be "revamped" back to its original state. At that time, I was relieved to notice that my recollection of Windows internals and management consoles hadn't in any way diminished, not a skill I use on a daily basis any more.

So what we're looking at is a double whammy: the amount of information unleashed on the unsuspecting public has increased greatly, while the ways to find information have been reduced, and now require a skill set that three or four generations have not been trained in. I can, at least, not recall a single employer I've worked for, excepting my first, IBM, that provided general "information management" training. I was aghast when getting to Indonesia on a network build, back in 1994, when I found the secretaries in Jakarta, barely out of the stone age, had much better software and computer training than the secretaries back in New York. Bit of a shock, that. If you want to know part of the reasons why Asians are doing so well, BTW, it is right there. This stuff was all new to them and they had to master it to compete - we've grown complacent, I was writing on, and programming, my first laptop computer in 1984, and that machine had internet access - although, most of you wouldn't recognize a PDP-11 on Dialcom as internet, but those boxes were compartmentalized, programmable by the user, and talking to all the other Dialcom boxes in the world. In 1984.

But I digress. I've been reading up on memory and brain aging and brain function for a while, and I keep running into contentions (because they're not based on proven research) that do not make sense. First and foremost, I keep reading that "we are nowhere near our brain's capacity" - this in terms of storage and computation capability. And then, out come the examples, of savants that calculate the value of pi to the nth degree, other savants can store impossible amounts of visual data, etc. But that isn't what it is about. I am not at all convinced that the human brain has that much capacity, and I am not aware that anyone has even managed to calculate its capability.

Why would evolution over-engineer an organ? All of our other organs are engineered to capacity - a good example is the heart, my ballerina ex-wife had a heart five times the size of mine, due to the six-or-seven times a week training regime dancers and professional athletes go through. So much so that her heart had moved to the middle of her chest, for lack of space where it began. Why do you think athletes need to train so much? Surely not because their organisms are engineered for over-capacity.... And one of my cousins is so much overweight that he has had to have both of his knees reconstructed, not an unusual occurrence in overweight people, but it does mean his knees were not designed to carry that much weight. So to me that empirically proves that the human body is "designed to capacity", and from simple logic that means the brain would be, as well. And that, in turn, in an era where we are bombarded with information due to new technologies, vastly more (a factor of a thousand or so) than ever before, means we may be overloading our brain's capacities. Which makes perfectly good sense. So it would make good sense to research how much mental deterioration may be related to simple capacity failure - assume we have reached capacity, now start researching what the consequences might be. And by "capacity" I don't necessarily mean "full", it may be some folks do not have the ability to organize and store their information, due to the speed with which it arrives, inherent in increased volume, and that that has a deteriorative effect on the brain. Kind of like "memory fragmentation" or "disk fragmentation" in a computer. After all, Windows is now set up to automatically defragment disks, after decades of millions of users losing their computers because they never maintained (didn't know they had to) their hard drives, which eventually ran out of table space. From an engineering perspective, it makes perfectly good sense the same thing happens to the brain, which, in my book, can't have been designed to hold and process unlimited data. I do not expect the Good Lord ever conceived one of Her Creations would start collecting, storing and processing vastly more data than they would ever need or could use.

Saturday June 23, 2012; A Bit of British

Keywords: Daily Telegraph, journalism

The shot to the right shows the scene behind a local Texaco, where tow truck drivers hang out while they are on call. There are so many cars and trucks idling all over Washington State, I was especially amazed to see car lines at drive through espresso bars, that it looks to me the "green" effort is a bit half hearted. It isn't like this is Alaska, where you'd freeze if you got out of your car, much of the year.

It has been frustrating to see traffic to my blog dwindle, over the past few years, and I really don't know why that would be the case. I may have become incredibly boooooring, that's certainly possible, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the vast majority of "internet consumers" now spend so much of their available surfing time on Facebook, it cannibalizes the rest of the internet. So, beginning a couple of days ago. I am writing blog entries for the British Telegraph newspaper blogs section, and reproducing them here, as always, under my own copyright. Find my Telegraph blog at:

http://my.telegraph.co.uk/aartsen

Here is a rendition of how I introduced myself there:

I am a more or less accidental Telegraph reader - like many expats in London, where I lived from 1978, I took the Times and the Evening Standard. I came to the U.K. as a journalist, and while I was a correspondent for a number of Dutch magazines in the VNU stable, I soon began working for the British press, after being accepted into the NUJ. After Design, the monthly published by the Design Council, I soon added some of VNU's British titles to my outlets, helped by the nascent computer industry, and my work with IBM in The Netherlands and in London's Chiswick.

I kept reading the Times after moving to the USA in 1985. Until, that is, Rupert the Conqueror decided to start charging for his newspapers, and the old journalist in me found I could only respond by withdrawing my support, as I have for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and all those others. Yes, I understand papers need to make money, but somehow the internet must be a place where we develop new communication methods, and that must include new ways of funding the press.

So I now read the Telegraph, which is free to the internet denizen, the Washington Post, and otherwise have Google bring me the (free) headlines, avoiding the duplicitous titles that let you read "five articles a month". I don't know about you, but having to mandatorily register, cookies, and popovers, are yet more ways of collecting personal data "the Facebook way". And that brings me to where I decided to copy my blog, which I have been publishing since the late 1980s, to the Telegraph, since Facebook is cannibalizing the internet to the point that I see fewer and fewer hits at my own site, something I assume due to the shift in where consumers spend their available internet time, which I believe we can now see has reached a limit.

I began blogging, well before that word was invented, as an outlet for my creative juices, after I transitioned from the media world to the IT universe. I had made the reverse move some ten years earlier, when I left IBM and was offered a position in theatre and artist management in Amsterdam, an occupation to which I soon added journalism and photography, for no other reason than that I liked those activities. When I "rerouted" from editorial into the nascent internet (leasing space on a PDP-11 owned by what became BT Dialcom, discovering MCI and X.400 and Vint Cerf, who would eventually become a colleague), I became re-engaged with the other great love of my life, cybernetics, which previously had meant IBM and mainframe computers and "big iron".

Still writing today, I love the ability to self-publish, although the universe has become very crowded, and I don't know there are enough tools for the consumer to always find what they are looking for. Perhaps there is another field for regulators to get stuck into, making Google a government department, and teaching children from when they are little how to find information. I know they are very capable of this today, but some management in what they find might, if I see the news about bullying and youth crime, not be a bad idea. Parents must understand that unless they have their children teach them their internet, they will not ever have even a tiny clue about that universe... Perhaps a nice subject for an upcoming blog entry - but in the interim, I will begin writing frequent contributions to the Telegraph blog I just set up, and then every few days lump 'em together here - see how that works. It will be more work than my blog is now, but perhaps I can drive some more traffic than I have been, of late, and who knows, somebody might like my musings enough to employ me in some way. Journalism continues to be an important hobby, and opinions I have in abundance....

Thursday June 21, 2012; And always those Chinese

Keywords:Enfield, China Space, death, Greece, air disasters

Noticing a "Royal Enfield" motorcycle at a local dealership, see the picture to the right, I checked the internet, as I thought that British company had long since passed, but as it turns out their erstwhile Indian (Madras, now Chennai) subsidiary is now doing the Enfield thing on its own. Rather handsome, don't you think? It so reminded me of the British WWII Army bikes, I suppose I just dated myself there..

Frustratingly, I see friend L's mother still being kept alive, surgery, IC, the works, when from what I read in her blog Mum should have been transferred to a hospice some time ago, and receive help to prepare for a peaceful and painless departure. The other day, she suffered some kind of heart failure, but "her heart magically restarted, since she does have a do-not-resuscitate order". Sweetheart, she should not be in the hospital. In a hospital, what they do is keep someone alive, that's their function, that is their training. When someone has an embolism and their heart stops, the alarm goes off, the crash cart and resuscitation staff are called, because you have seconds when the heart stops pumping oxygen, seconds. So they go into automatic mode, as they are trained to do. They don't check stickers and they don't stand around having a quick meeting, that isn't what they do. So yes, your mother is still around, but she was resuscitated, and that may happen again, depending on when the heart stops again, and who is on duty. Hospitals have mostly nobody trained in palliative care, and even if they did, their base cost is way to high for life ending services.

I stopped myself from writing this in her blog, or calling her, because she has to go through this her way, and not have some idiot like me tell her to pull the plug on her Mum. But there isn't a point to this - her mother will die, and being in that bed on tubes and leads and lights isn't going to make any difference. But it pains me, and makes me feel powerless to stop the poor woman's torture. That's why the nurse asked your mother if she remembered what happened - every time the brain is deprived of oxygen, it dies a little, I think the accepted value is two million cells per second, and you check how bad it is by checking short term memory. The do not resuscitate order isn't an order, you see - it is an advisory, and the hospital doesn't have to follow it.

Urgh.

Greece? Many of us "old style" Europeans never understood why the original European Economic Community countries, rich and in a working community relationship, felt compelled to create something like a "Eurozone", inviting marginal countries like Ireland, Greece, Italy to join, because these were countries that came out of WWII impoverished, and were never able to crank themselves up and out of that situation. "We", the rich Western European nations, France, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, were doing just fine, but then I started looking at it from afar, as I moved to the U.K., and then to the USA, and I didn't have the benefit of the "inside view" any  more. It did not make sense to me that islands of cheapness, like Spain and Italy, would adopt the Euro and end up having the same expense base we did. These countries didn't magically get rich overnight, was my simplistic thinking. So after everything the "core EU" went through to get the marginal economies into the Union, they're not going to let them walk off again. Nor do I think the Greeks, Italians, Spaniards are going to let their rich cousins walk away. I recall when the Greeks, Italians and Spaniards came to work in Northern Europe, cleaning our streets and doing other menial work, as "guest workers". I have the expectation they don't want to get back to that era, when the Dutch had coastal tourist hotels in Spain that Spaniards that did not work there, the local peasants, were not allowed to enter.

What impresses me most about the Chinese space program is that they only flew the first manned mission in 2003 - and here we are, nine years later, and they're docking with their own first space station component. By comparison, the United States took some twelve years from first flight to Spacelab docking. The Chinese did, of course, have the ability to use some Soyuz technology bought from the Russians - and the good news is that their docking mechanism comes from the Russians, too, so they would be able to dock with the Russian module on the ISS, which is how we get crews in and out of the ISS, these days. From what we can see - the Chinese aren't exactly secretive any more about their space stuff - this program  has a string of hits without failures, which is pretty amazing. We're kind of used to American and Russian space developers trying something new out, and it failing the first time around, and what we say is "that is how you learn", nothing wrong with that. But I would love to know what it is the Chinese are doing differently to have this string of successes, if it is reasonable to assume they're not "just lucky".

Seriously, inasmuch as I have spent a large part of my career in risk management and high availability design, this is very impressive, especially in that it is taking them less time in between steps than we are used to. They appear not to be huge risk takers, like the Russians are, nor over burdened by a top heavy administrative organization,  as we have always been - but that is what goes with democracy, a problem the Chinese do not have. Still, you've got to ask yourself how much "benevolent dictatorship" is actually "better for the people".  I look at India, and its fascinating, but painful and laborious progress, and wonder whether there is a "critical size" beyond which democracy becomes a net hindrance.

On the subject of China, that box of frozen sole, in the picture at the left, comes from China, too. Five pounds, at a discount price of $14.90, that would be @2.98 per pound. That is not a lot of money. Found this in a restaurant supply store where practically all of the cheaper fish and shellfish in the frozen section were Chinese. So no, it isn't just the Bluetooth dongles...

CBS News had an item on aircraft accidents, and how those are, these days, always due to human (pilot) error. They cite, amongst others, the Airbus crash between Brazil and France, and the Queens American Airlines crash. Human error? I don't think so. In the case of the American Airlines flight, the pilot overdid it on the rudder control, and snapped off some of his tail controls. In the Air France crash, a pilot did not compensate properly when the instruments provided faulty readings. In both cases, we have had the technology for many years to deal with these issues - a pilot should not be able to make excessive use of the rudder to the point where something breaks, while the Airbus reported an incorrect airspeed, and the computer disengaged the autopilot. Yes, in both cases the pilots could have saved the flight, but that does not mean the crashes can be blamed on them. What we do is make larger airplanes, heap additional responsibility on air crew, have increasing amounts of air traffic, and create increasingly complicated computer systems that pilots have to manage on top of their other responsibilities. You can't then expect the human computer to take the right decision in a situation it has not been in before. "Adding training" is not going to create better pilots, and the comment I heard, that pilots still need to maintain their flying skills - I don't know, maybe it is time for pilot specialization, with a fly pilot and a computer pilot on the flight deck, as well as an all rounder. Something. But no, I do not accept that this is magically now all "human error". In both these examples, the cause is a system that failed. Elevating the pilot to a computer repairman is ridiculous, especially with neither the time nor the phone to call the helpdesk. There is a simple rule I apply - beyond a certain amount of automation, you introduce more variables than you take away, and need to do more real world (as opposed to lab) testing, and do limited introduction. Perhaps it is time to re-introduce the flight mechanic.

Saturday June 16, 2012; Dollar, Euro, RMB, it is the basics that change

Keywords:Romney, China Post, EMS, Sony Vaio, Orencia, backup

Umm, Governor Romney, I keep hearing you all over TV with that buzzphrase: "Talk is cheap". You appear to not quite have caught on to the implication of that: yours is, too. You have never had to handle anything like a recession, or anything like an economy the size of the world. Yes, Massachusetts was nice, I am sure, but there are cities in the world with a larger economy, and it is a state without manufacturing. Get real, will you? If we want to size your mouth, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a GDP that is about 50% of the GDP of... Greater Los Angeles.

So why can I suddenly edit in SeaMonkey again? Not a clue. I did some reformatting, a few days ago, didn't work, gave up on that, and just now I opened up the index file and it comes up like before (on a different PC). Nothing changed, power setting, but that really can't have anything to do with it, especially since I lowered it a little. What with two laptops working side by side, the fan noise can get annoying - not necessarily that of the Lenovo, but the HP Pavilion, with its AMD processor and ATI GPU, can get pretty loud, and together they sound like an air conditioner on heat.

Anyway, the VAIO desktop is done, ready for Ebay, though my landlord is now threatening to buy it. He could do worse - it is a $1,000 PC, in excellent shape, and expertly upgraded to 64 bit Windows 7 Professional. For him (his wife, actually), that isn't an issue, but I tend to run so much crap side by side I need 8 Gb of RAM, and for some stupid reason Sony's motherboard won't support that. But he could do worse, especially with my expert setup.

Much to my amazement, E-Post and postal tracking is now available between China and the United States - door-to-door, see the picture to the right. I can't figure out how anybody makes a profit: Bluetooth dongle from Ningbo in Zhejiang province to Seattle, WA, $2.24 including shipping. Normally, just the postage from San Francisco to Seattle would cost as much, so how does this work? I mean, it isn't that I don't understand, but if we (collectively) continue this we are all going to end up in a recession from which there isn't a return. We're probably (globally) only being saved by the fact there isn't an unemployment benefit in China, but at some point something will have to implode - if it hasn't already. First time I have seen end-to-end tracking on an order with Amazon.com, going directly to a vendor in China, coming directly to me without the intermediary container. Amazing, and to me this is a major advancement, and a good example of how fast the Chinese are catching up. Before you make derogatory noises about that, China is one heck of a large country, we can fit in there, with Alaska, together with Canada, and have a whole lot of space left over. Fifteen years ago that place was a third world country with ox carts. Think about it.

What else is there? This week is a bit of a jumble - finishing revamping the VAIO took over a day more than intended, as its DVD drive didn't properly format disks, and didn't generate an error message, possibly a Sony driver that isn't in Windows 7. Poof, a whole day and evening gone. But thankfully, I have an external Buffalo drive, a BD burner, that always gets it right, I don't sell a computer unless it is properly set up and comes with a full - double - backup. I found that if you do not have a duplicate backup - of any backup, that is - you run a serious risk. I did it myself, the other day, told my backup software to delete an entry - not the backup itself, just the database entry in the backup software, clicked "OK" - and poof, the entire backup was gone. No recovery, the backup came from my setup in the VAIO under Windows Vista, since re-installed, and had, in particular, about a year's worth of email in Outlook format that is now forever lost. This is me, I have, for years, always used a double backup, I have one huge archival drive and four 750 Gb backup drives, so there wasn't any excuse not to have a duplicate. I just didn't do it, this time, and sure enough, the software did something I had not expected, didn't double check, and isn't recoverable. I think it is the second time in thirty years I've irretrievably lost data, and no man overboard, but still, I know better.

So I am back to double backups, now, of course, swapping drives every other day. Let that be a lesson to ya, even the Master fucks up.

I am continuing to see this futile political conversation about "jobs", with even the Speaker this morning going on about things that create jobs - construction, roads, health care - when in fact none of the things she lists create anything, unless we find the money for them first. I see the desperate way Bristol-Meyers Squibb pushes its expensive Orencia drug, an arthritis biologic medication more expensive than its predecessors, and wonder where the money is supposed to come from when more and more people lose their health care coverage. Obama has tried to turn that around with his health care expansion, but when I see Bristol-Meyers Squibb doesn't even do an income verification to see if someone is eligible for their copay assistance, I have to wonder why they are so desperate to push this drug when they know the patient has adequate insurance coverage. Beyond that, the biologics don't sell that well overseas - in most countries with universal healthcare they are available to selected patients only, after a regime of more traditional treatments has been tried and proven not to work. That means that, effectively, the very expensive very advanced new drug regimes, outside the United States, is available only to the rich, and to a few insured patients, And that, in turn, means that the bulks of their sales have to be to well insured American patients, like myself. And that means these drugs, and expensive specialized medical equipment, and what have you, aren't going to contribute to the jobs market either, even though the pharmaceutical companies say they will. A quick comparison: a three months' supply of Enbrel, an "old" new technology drug: $2,623.91, and three months of a "new" new technology drug, Orencia: $6,255.2. No wonder the drug companies have a "copay assistance plan" for these drugs. Part of the problem may well be that new drugs are now being developed at such a rate that they probably cannibalize sales of the older ones. It circles back, a bit like buying a webcam for $4.99 out of Hong Kong via Amazon. These things used to be available cheaply at Wal-Mart - no more, they've given up, they can't compete.

The picture to the left? Live TV, from the Associated Press, on my new Blackberry Torch. Just a bit of testing, I am not sure I have a great need for live TV on the phone. More about that, about the need for "a TV", as opposed to "TV", later in the week.

Monday June 11, 2012; Facts, not Fiction

Keywords:Nancy Snyderman, HP Pavilion, Windows 8, HDMI, Obama Europe

To your right, an HP laptop displaying on an HD flat screen - I wonder how many consumers actually know you can take an average laptop, and have it display on a cheap HD flat panel display. As long as it has an HDMI port, any laptop will do it. Good idea to have a 64bit Windows, and some extra memory, though - 8 Gb will help. And to your left, below, an amazing red rainbow I caught at dusk in Snohomish County, the other day. Never seen that before, it was only there for 20 seconds or so.

After a full reinstall of the HP Pavilion laptop connected to an HDMI flat panel it looks there's nothing wrong with it, except for a connection somewhere in the display hinge. I am not going to screw with that, when I have money I can try and have it repaired, but in the interim I'll get another display (50 inches doesn't fit on my desk) and use it as a desktop. It's got everything you could want, plenty of RAM, digital Dolby, you name it, and once I have that set up I will sell the Vaio. That is in fine shape, all upgraded, but I think the Pavilion with an HDMI display will let me do Blu-Ray, and the Vaio does not, although it does have an optical Dolby out. Finding the Pavilion on Amazon to post the link showed me they even sell the laptop screen, but I really don't have that type of expertise, and I think it may be the connector, rather than the screen, so I guess I'll eventually get it fixed, when I am in need of another laptop.

You're probably thinking "busywork", and you be right, but I am keeping my hand in in terms of working with the new motherboard / chipset combos, and making sure I understand what needs to be done to anticipate the rollout of Windows 8. When I ran diagnostics on my new Lenovo dual core Intel Core i3 Sandy Bridge gizmo, it showed with four processors, not two! Much though "8" is aimed at touch screen and tablet computing, if we have to believe the scuttlebutt, Windows 7 had all that built in already, and when I went to Beijing, a couple of years ago, to get myself a touch screen Lenovo laptop I could not find one (with English language operating system, that is). And Lenovo, couple of years ago, was the only company that made a serious contender in this field, which more or less died on arrival. It is nice to see someone on Law & Order Skyping to his wife in Afghanistan on an iPad, but that is not exactly the majority of the buyers - the majority of consumers, worldwide is what I mean, don't even have access to the fast networks needed for that sort of thing. Honest. It's mostly advertising - and I do have Skype on my Nokia phone, and video-calling applications on my Blackberry Torch and Playbook.

Awright, so that's cool, at least I can roll into summer being busy revamping my business tools, while my doctors change over my medication. That has turned out to be a longer process than I anticipated, the new medication taking some three months to achieve proper effectiveness. It isn't all that strange, and I had been on the old "stuff" some fifteen years, but it is frustrating, and I suppose the specialists had a point "forgetting" to tell me this in advance. Still on steroids and other crap, today I managed completely normal walking for the first time in a couple of months, inflammation increasingly under control. So, I guess, so far, so good. This isn't a place I hadn't been before, but as I get older, it gets harder, and not being in my normal career does not help. To some extent I am floundering a bit, without the clear target corporate America has always provided me with, and it is hard to think back to the 1970s, when I set my own goals and aims and "went for them". I suppose I never expected to have to do that again, which is, perhaps, a bit silly of me, others have been here before me. Targeting next year to move abroad, if corporate America does not want my skillset, is a good place to go. As I do my research, I find that quite a few countries, near and far, have "retirement visa" deals I could make use of. That's kinda cool to discover, although I wasn't planning to retire just yet, but it would be a good idea to be in one of those places for when I do.

I am quite amazed to see that President Obama has waded into the European monetary problems. I am not sure the Treasury folks this side of the pond understand what is going on in Europe. I can't even say I've seen many commentators the other side of the pond making a lot of sense, either. I wonder whether the problems occurring in the "problem" countries aren't related to their post war development. Is it coincidence that the economies facing issues are all in former dictatorships? Greece, Italy, Spain, all came out of World War II under the control of a dictator, and took many decades to enter the democratic fold. Perhaps (I am not an expert on economy, but I was there to see it all happen) the economic changeover after the dictators died or relinquished power was never handled properly, after all, the rest of Western Europe came out of WWII as democracies, and began rebuilding capitalism based economies virtually from liberation day. We need to understand how "they" got to this place, and I am not convinced that we do.

It is, to my simple mind, clear the European Union admitted too many, too fast, all you need to do is compare the amount of time European nations spent building the EC, to see how much faster the EU was put together. Add to that the Eastern European nations that weren't, by many folks' reckoning, anywhere near ready to join an advanced Western community, and you're ready for problems, if not disaster. Rich Western European countries being flooded with Eastern European criminal gangs that arrive on buses - I rented a car in Amsterdam, to take to Germany, and received very specific instructions I couldn't take it into Poland. Gangs of Romanians operate skimmer credit card schemes all over Europe - and actually, being part of the EU they're able to travel more easily, they're even operating here in Washington State. It is a direct consequence of the EU organization, and I am not seeing how some of these countries beneficially add to, say, the recovery of Greece. As is Europe's wont, they talk about it. That hasn't really helped much, if I am to believe Mrs. LaGarde... I can tell you that if youth unemployment (under 25s) in both Greece and Spain is 50% - umm, yes, five-zero -, there is something going on there we have no clue about. It has even me, an American European with a reasonable understanding of the employment system in Europe, stumped. This entire thing went South a while ago, and nobody did anything, I'll tell you that for free.

The Today Show, on Sunday, had the most awful segment on "how to treat your doctor" I have ever seen, by the very knowledgeable, but clearly abrasive, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, NBC's medical correspondent. Just to single out one of her comments - she admonishes patients "don't lie to me", because she can tell when they do. Well, Dr. Nancy, patients do, and if you did less journalism and more science, that might give you perhaps some new ideas about the reasons why patients do things. Yes, a patient may say "I think I stopped smoking" - her example - and it will be clear to all (including the patient) they're fibbing. Similarly, there are patients who are habitually late for appointments, indeed, Dr. Nancy. "Be on time" on the Today Show is so not going to solve that.

What the physician needs to understand - certainly if you're a physician with a national audience - is that those behaviours are part of a behavioural pattern, and likely part of a medical or psychological condition. If a patient wants to stop smoking and can't, and lies about it, you can go to the books and find out what kind of behaviour that is, and what it indicates. That finding then becomes part of the patient profile, of their disease, if you like - and it is linked - and becomes part of what you, Dr. Nancy, need to treat. Clear is that NBC needs a new medical correspondent, not one that goes off on her patients on Sunday morning on national television. Inappropriate, and insofar as her patients were watching, damaging. Get some retraining, Dr. Nancy, some doctor schools teach this stuff now.

Thursday June 7, 2012; Governance, both sides of the pond

Keywords: SpaceX, Myanmar, Facebook, Pakistan, Queen Elizabeth Center, ISS

The picture to your right has a 1970s Alfa Romeo 1750 I came across the other day, looking like it just came out of the showroom, vintage. And below the only picture I ever took of Her Majesty up close, at the Royal Tournament in London's Earls Court, when she was presented with cheeses by two girls from the Dutch Dairy Bureau. I got Charles as well, see if I can find that shot. I moved to England in 1979, and to the US a few years later, just to put you in the timeframe.

The return of SpaceX' Dragon capsule to Earth, and the return of Aung San Suu Kyi to Myanmar, certainly fit in the "good news" category. Elon Musk has completed an incredible feat, one that indicates we've got to the point we can do orbital vehicles at lower cost and sufficient durability. I expect their next step would be an actual automated docking, assuming this whole Canadarm process was just to make sure the SpaceX vehicle didn't bump a dent in our ISS.

And it is wonderful to see Aung San Suu Kyi was able to do a trip abroad, and come back home. I don't know that I understand how Myanmar turned the corner (I don't know that they need me to know, either), but it very much looks like the country has, and hopefully the dialogue can be continued.

But ouch. Every time I see aid workers and tourists being kidnapped and having to be rescued, or not, as the case may be, I wonder why we're letting these folks put themselves in harm's way and having to be bailed out at the taxpayer's expense. If the local charities don't seem fit to provide assistance to their own, isn't us doing it a bit like this whole military exercise in Iraq and Afghanistan, at enormous expense, to no measurable benefit? I must admit I like the direction Obama seems to be taking, leaving Pakistan to its own devices, we have long since solved the transportation problem, they need to figure out which team they're on, and I think so far they've decided to be on the bad guys' team. Taking out Osama bin Laden in the way it was done was a powerful statement, it is unfortunate to see a former ally fall off the wagon, but it is what it is, so to speak. Afghanistan will end up being a bit of a buffer zone, not very much in our camp either. It is sad to see the division play out, but it does, and that will not change until we pull back and stop meddling in their affairs - which includes "charities" and "NGOs". Don't help people that don't ask for help. We're way past the crusades. And if the current drone attacks in Pakistan indicate a policy - my way or the highway - I am all for it. We're being jerked around by Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, Syria even, and once they get the message - jerk all you want, we will hurt you whenever you do - the jerking will stop. Talking don't do nuttin', look at Cuba, and Lybia.

Somehow, reformatting this web code by using different creation tools has screwed it up to the point that it interferes with the web server output. I am not quite sure what to call the problem, as I have not figured out what causes it, but I think something or other inserted hard returns in the HTML, and now I need to figure out how to get those out. That used to be real simple in the 7 bit world, but today I don't even know what to look for any more. This is uncle Microsoft and its tools, not that it is their fault, their tools work the way they're supposed to, I am just switching tools - and not even because I wanted to, just because - dig this - I was helping someone else, someone who then simply abandoned the project she asked me to help with. $^%%#, kinda.

But the internet is squirrelly, just at the moment. Facebook has had huge slowdowns, these past few days - this morning, it won't accept my comments and likes, coming back with an undefined error each time. With the recent reported outage - which I did not experience - one wonders whether Facebook is under hack attack, wouldn't surprise me. The only other reasonable explanation would be that they are doing a system wide update, and screwed that up. As they're working on new privacy stuff, that would not suprise me either. But I see my own domain misbehaving, in terms of pushing out multiple streams, and I have not seen that before - then again, I am new to GoDaddy, I am sure they suffer from mishaps the same as the next guy does. Still, recent media coverage makes it very clear that Facebook isn't a good advertising platform, in terms of driving sales, but then again the technology industry now has created so many advertising platforms and advertising methodologies that I do not believe any of them particularly drive sales.

Advertising is beginning to become a major, and under-addressed, issue. There are now so many advertising vehicles that few producers and retailers have any idea which advertising medium or methodology sells. There isn't any connection between the AARP insurance sales pitch and the number of policies sold. It is lumped into a bucket, without correlation. Disney, perhaps, has this figured out, what I hope happened here is that they understand banning junk food from their kids networks will not cost them a dime - it may actually help them gain additional revenues, now that responsible food vendors have an outlet with room, which may increase their sales. It'll take time to see the effect, and I hope Disney will give it that time. That circled me back to Facebook - hopefully some of these advertisers, like GM did, will begin to understand that Facebook is cannibalizing internet time, by tying so many consumers into a platform that prevents them from going other places on the internet, where they might have effective advertising pitches and product information. GM figured out Facebook is not a good advertising medium, and Facebook has not figured out how to get itself there. I have, so, Zuck, you want the answer, give me a call. I'll take you out of your ivory tower, you need to understand how the world works, and you can't do that from Silicon Valley.

Sort of got drawn into watching the Jubilee over in Britain, partly, of course, because I lived there for many years.. Love London - funny, last time I went to London it was to visit friends who are now back here in the Seattle area, and for me it was a bit of a homecoming. Much like New York, London is so large it really doesn't change all that much, over time, even if you have to figure out the Oyster card, and which roaming carrier to use. I guess for those less in the picture it is incongruous - London is massive, a single city that needs three airports, all that because it is so much out of proportion with the size of Britain itself. The industrial revolution began here, and that created the sprawl from which it never really recovered, and I guess it keeps on growing - the town of Richmond, Surrey, where I used to live, now is just another London postal district, my old house on the Mortlake Road I can't even find on Google, and the heavily Jewish and somewhat run down district of Stoke Newington is completely gentrified.

Curious how much awesome talent comes out of Britain, augmented these days by busloads of Aussies, even a few New Zealanders, I remember the English language was the primary reason I moved to Britain, in 1979. The Dutch language area felt small and insignificant, after being in journalism there for a number of years, and I realized I had pretty much the rest of the world on my doorstep, IBM had taught me pretty good business English, so I lost the girlfriend, and drove a rented van across the Channel, where I still needed a work permit. A buddy drove the empty van back to The Netherlands, the girlfriend later met me at Schiphol Airport to ask me to come to dinner, told me she had changed her mind, but this was something I had wanted to do together, as a couple, and that spoiled her for me. Just as well, my later move to the United States would have taken her even farther away from her family, which was the issue, them and the cats.

Gosh, that light show on the front of Buck House was something else, hope you caught some of "Our House", lovely, and so very Brit... And there is the Archbishop of Canterbury, of course. You'd never catch the Pope swinging to "All my loving" with a Union Jack in his hands, now, would you?

Saturday June 2, 2012; The Many Ways of Deception

Keywords: maanisch.com, Facebook, Obama Center, ISS

Ouch. As I check a long time blogger friend's blog - she was one of the very first bloggers in the Netherlands - I see her mother is ill, very ill, if I read in between the lines. Sure enough, the parents tell her it'll be OK, go on vacation, not to worry, and I remember how my mother fell ill, I was living in London, my sister was in Greece, on vacation, not at the time a country with good telecommunications, and she hadn't left a number and the Netherlands Embassy in Athens tried and couldn't find her. I flew into Amsterdam and Schiphol Airport kindly let me meet her flight at the gate with a police escort and whisk her away in a hurry. Same thing with my dad, neither of us made it to the hospital in time to be with him - I hadn't even had time to get to New York airport. So I comment in Luna's blog to ignore what her folks said, and go and be with her, do what you feel you need to. I've been there before with parents, a father-in-law who didn't want us to visit before his open heart surgery, a mother who wanted me to remember her "the way I was", you name it. I don't know if it has anything to do with my comments, that's not really important, but her latest blog entry indicates she is with her mum now, and I am sure she'll be there until it is done. Veel sterkte Luun. You have the best blog-mum ever - I remember the first time she appeared in her daughter's rather racy blog, having made herself a comment alias as "Luna's Mum" - unheard of at the time. I'll miss her banter.

The picture to the right illustrates the faded colours so common to the Pacific Northwest, nestled in between the (ever) green of the Evergreen State. Quite pretty, methinks. And below left is what we call a "meatball hero" in New York, from Subway. It just looks like a sandwich with copious sick and cholesterol - I often wonder why we don't try and advertise things looking the way they actually do, rather than pretty them up. All that leads to is the awful "Today Show" helmet hairdo look of most American TV women, and things that generally don't look anything like what they do when they wake up or when you unwrap them. I bought this sandwich, something I do very occasionally so my doctor doesn't kill me, and I know it tastes great and gives me that naughty feeling. So why would it have to look like anything other than what it is?

I am in many ways gratified to see I've not completely lost it, as far as Facebook is concerned - it is brilliant, in the Hotmail kind of way, not so brilliant in the SpaceX kind of way. Facebook's IPO does, worryingly, show we aren't out of the woods. We're still labouring under the pre-recession misconceptions - that we still are the best thing since internet-sliced-bread, that cars with speech recognition that can read emails to you are a technological advancement, that the economy is "doing better"....

I am sorry, but I think we're still in self-deception mode, we're still not getting the message. I remember so very well that in the late 1970s I wanted to buy an American car with anti-lock brakes, and that I ended up with an Alfa Romeo, since no American manufacturer made one. What if Facebook does introduce a smartphone, and buys a browser company? Run, don't walk, away. Elon Musk is a genius in a lot of proven ways, Zuck is a half played symphony. Beautious first movements, yes, but....

Add to all of the turmoil the election - will we choose stability, or end up changing leadership and going completely topsy-turvy in terms of policy and direction? That would, in my book, be the last thing we need, and to be honest, "let's get rid of this president" isn't exactly a goal for the future. I have not heard a single proposal from Romney in terms of how he wants to get our mojo back - yes, we do need it back, but I think leaving Obama to do his thing is probably the lesser of two evils. This recession is worldwide, and Romney knows no more about combating that than Obama does. For me to be comfortable with Romney I would have had to see him put a "recovery team" together months ago, and have presented the country with a business plan by now. Never mind giving press conferences outside a failed subsidized company - all that means, Governor, is that Obama tries. That is what we need, people doing stuff. Obama said he wanted private enterprise in space, Musk delivered. Besides with, I feel we should give the first Black president another run. We owe this to African America. I know that's not politically correct thinking, but I just believe this should be a consideration, FWIW.

I am still struggling with my computers - it is always the same thing, you make major system changes, little things break. It turns out one of my two Bluetooth dongles - one I bought in Singapore, that is very fast - doesn't "hold" a signal all day, something I did not know, because I had only ever used it intermittently to tether my laptop. Now that I have this great Iogear Bluetooth keyboard, which lets me switch between computers, I find it doesn't always work with one system, and as it turns out, that is related to one of the dongles. the keyboard itself is fine. So I'll try a new dongle, mail ordered for the massive price of $3.31 with shipping - I just can't get over these prices.

Monday May 28, 2012; Memorial Day became Space Day

Keywords: SpaceX, Mars Rover, disk recovery, Windows Media Center, ISS

This be one of those holiday weekends you'd wish you'd taken a holiday.... I mean, I broke yet more stuff - on the bright side, I fixed what I broke, but still, it worries me when a computer does something I can't explain, like making a hard drive inaccessible to a user.

Saturday evening, out of nowhere, after a reboot of my new Lenovo laptop, I could not access files on my hard disk. It booted, so the disk was there and operational, but in File Manager I could not see its name or the disk size - the latter, by the way, the largest disk I've even had installed in a laptop, 500 Gb. This does not necessarily mean anything in terms of its functioning, but it isn't all that long ago that drive sizes on PCs were very limited, so that is something I always have in the back of my mind, I remember when you had to install boot drivers so you could access large drives, and those could fail, and then you'd lose all of your data. More importantly, I was asking for trouble as I have a massive archival subdirectory on my primary backup drive, itself 2 Tb in size, and I had copied that entire archive to the Lenovo because I could.

So on Saturday, still in install-and-test mode, I hooked up the Lenovo via HDMI to a flat panel display, basically to test that port and make sure it all worked OK. HDMI is a very demanding interface, outputting higher resolution video than anything else on a PC, as well as digital Dolby 7.1 signals. Just because a PC has an HDMI port does not necessarily mean it has the oomph to handle all that, and important to understand is that the HDMI port requires Windows to recognize it as such for copy protected HD TV and Blu-Ray disks to be able to be played. IOW, a lot of integration that has to work properly, and not something that is well documented. If you buy a laptop or PC with HDMI, if do not hook it up, set up the flat panel as an extended screen, then run Windows Media Center, and then run Windows Update, you don't know that everything will work when you want it. Besides, the resolution is stunning - if you've never done it, hit Amazon for a cheap HDMI Cable, and feast your eyes.

Anyway, I digress - what I think happened is that I set Media Center to index all the videos in my archive, and it basically choked. I have always wondered if Media Center actually copies files when you create a "Library" - I think the answer is "yes", and when you take the system down while it is doing that weird things can happen. It is a bug in Windows, I am sure, but it was, at the same time, a bit much to do. You set a process running, best don't do much else until that process finishes - I knew that media center can take hours to index large numbers of large files. It is the problem with multitasking software and background processes - you don't know that the programmers tested absolutely everything an idiot like me could try and do. In Media Center, since Microsoft has built some kind of digital rights scanner into Windows, the way the Federal Government originally wanted it (eventually canning the technology as cheap PCs just did not have the horsepower to do this), the library build process can be very slow, I just remembered this was not the first time I've had issues with digital rights management under Windows. Microsoft wants to be able to do all this locally, on the PC, it already has the ability to recognize and reproduce copy protected HD content, but as I said, cheap PCs do not have the horsepower, reason why Media Center is only available on Windows Home Premium and higher. So I think that's what got me.,..

Thankfully, I had made the disks with the original image Lenovo lets you make (as do most other manufacturers) and as I am a compulsive backup-upper, I had a Saturday morning full incremental backup, and so lost no data to speak of, just a few hours. The reason I did not use just the backup is that the disk failure spooked me. Hard drives tend to fail catastrophically when they are new, or when they experience a "hard failure", like a power failure, power spike, or a fall or bump, later in life. Because this machine is brand new, re-imaging the drive, then re-installing it, gave me the best guarantee that there wasn't a physical failure in the drive system itself - the Lenovo being under warranty still, I could have had it replaced. I run disk defrag and a full virus scan on all of my systems every night, so if there is anything else wrong with the drive system it'll experience another failure sooner rather than later. But it installed (twice, for safety's sake) without hiccups, and did a full file system scan Sunday morning, so I think it is unlikely the fault is mechanical or magnetical. I am working on the Lenovo as we speak.. Phew.

Space milestones this week - you'll have noted the arrival of the SpaceX capsule at the ISS, a momentous occasion in that space, now, is no longer exclusively the province of governments. You could technically hire a bunch of NASA retirees and do this in Namibia, if you had enough money. Of course, the spaceport is still Federal, much like international airports are, and I am dying to get my hands on some numbers, on the cost of Dragon and its flight, by comparison with the Russian and European space vehicles. I still think Elon Musk should have sold the rights to the capsule to UPS, it would have been a gas to see a UPS ship pull up to the ISS, don't you think?

It does bring me to wonder if we'll ever move away from our current space policy. I can't say I see a benefit to going into space to "look for life", past or present, our obsession with (re)visiting the moon and Mars, Venus, is anathema to me. What I think, especially when I see we can deliver things to the ISS using Dragon, modules using Ariane, and people using Soyouz, is that we can start building another ISS, one designed to travel into space, bring up and train young astronaut families, a commune, if you will, and send them into space in the new, self sustaining, ISS, knowing they'll die in space and only their children will return. That's new, that could be the next frontier. Looking for more rocks on outlying planets, taking soil samples, building more rovers, isn't where it is at. We have - look at the picture to the left, the picture at top right is the moment Dragon docked with the ISS - proven we can build technology capable of surviving in hostile environments, and we should use the designer's brains before they retire, that thing has been out there for eight years, without a single service.

This picture, taken in March by the only Rover still in operation, Opportunity, after landing in January of 2004, show the dust covered rover overlooking the crater it is currently investigating. One out of two is very good, considering they had a design life of less than a year, and we must retain the services of the thinkers that were capable of designing such a foolproof device for circumstances they could not go and measure. That's a skill, and one we need to design an ISS that can survive and be repaired in space.

Friday May 25, 2012; All The Fixen's

Say, this Musk fella really goofed... he sends a space capsule up to the ISS and he doesn't have the darn thing sponsored by Staples or Wal-Mart, with their logo plastered all over it? I mean, these are "non-essential supplies", which these companies sell, right? Here he can establish the first Interplanetary Super Store (ISS) and he misses it, the Afrikaner bum...

Seriously, here is someone who starts Paypal (which people pay to use, unlike Facebook, just to name an example), then starts Tesla (which makes real electric rickshaws) and a real life space company that actually puts a payload in orbit, don't you love the guy? This is pretty amazing stuff, especially the bit where the engines shut down, they fix the valve (which, in the Shuttle era, would take ten months) and then kick the thing up into orbit a couple days later. Hooray Elon Musk. Elon for president!

To your right, another techie's toy, a 1937 Fieseler Storch owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, parked at the Snohomish County airport. For its time, the Storch was an unbelievable piece of technology, able to take off and land seemingly vertically, specially developed to "go where no man had gone before". In terms of aircraft development, the Storch ("Stork") was well ahead of its time, almost more so than the Messerschmitt ME 163 rocket aircraft, there at Snohomish as well.

Now I really am wasting time, I am spending the entire week computer set-up-ping. Having installed this Lenovo, I end up with one extra Windows 7 Home Premium license, since one came with it. So I decided to not use the Windows 7 Professional license I have an upgrade kit for, since the old HP no longer needs that, I am going back to the original load I had on that machine. Instead, as soon as Windows 8 is out, which should be Any Day Now, I'll buy an upgrade for the Lenovo, rumoured to be only $15, and the Windows 7 Professional license can now go to the Vaio, which was still running Windows Vista (I have the Ultimate upgrade, though).

Still with me? Vista is, today, a fine and mature operating system, but it will lose factory support next year, and besides, it is a bit top heavy and slow, long in the tooth, I suppose is an adequate description. The Vaio has a completely state of the art 64 bit motherboard and a dual Core Intel processor, although it does not support more than 4Gb of RAM, which is a bit stupid on Sony's part. Anyway, with Windows 7, it can easily last another couple years, maybe a little while as a server, for as long as I keep vacuuming the vents, this thing "Hoovers up the dust", as they say in the old country. Nice big screen, too, although HD drivers don't recognize it properly, those all look for an HDMI connected display now. It does have a Dolby optical outlet, if I ever get my own house again.

Couple days on, I finished up reinstalling the Vaio, we're on Thursday now, and I must say it was worth the day's extra work, with Windows 7 it runs at least twice (!) as fast as it did with Vista. And Windows Media TV, which I ran patched under Vista, runs like a dream under 7, the plug-in cable decoder is magical.

As I am sitting here installing two Windows 7 PCs, including all of the software I need, I have an opportunity to think about brains and aging and learning, a subject I have been analyzing for a while now, and am beginning to think I may have an idea how dementia and Alzheimers may get triggered. Well, understanding is a big word, it is just one of those brainwaves you get when things clunk-click into place. I've been thinking about this for a while, particularly trying to figure out how brain functioning seems to change as a person ages, without necessarily the cognitive bits being affected negatively.

Anyway, I need to do some research, see where the official science stands, I'll come back on this, promise. For now, I am watching Coronation Street on my Vaio, and writing this on the Lenovo, updating my website as I go along. This means getting used to yet another keyboard, but as I have recently extolled to you the benefits of constantly learning to the brain, I guess I don't have much of a choice.


 

Tuesday May 22, 2012; I love it when things break

Seriously. One of the aspects of the work I used to do in the lab, way back in New York, was systems integration, but I put together the Windows network we used for documentation development and file tracking as well, and spent many moons configuring Windows environments to work with our UNIX development systems, and our eventual WWW backbone (I have worked on the internet since before it was called "internet"). So whenever I need to configure a new computer (or re-configure an old computer) into my personal network as well as what we scathingly refer to as "the world", and on the rare occasions I do this for a good friend, it is a bit like being back in the lab. It is real work - between setting up the server aspects of my systems, security and firewalls, and configuring Windows so it doesn't run all of the Windows nonsense you don't need so it runs much faster, defragging and running scans, and installing software, I easily spend four days on a new PC. This is day four.... even a Blackberry takes a day or so.

So - just as I am more or less pennyless, one after the other, my "things" break down. And these are things I need to work, I've had nightmares thinking about finally getting that juicy assignment I've been waiting a year for, and my lovely HP laptop breaking down on the spot. Which it has been doing since late December, when its display started behaving in an odd discoloured manner. I switched to my spare (a Sony VAIO VGC-JS110J/S , which is, unfortunately, a desktop), in the hope the HP would magically repair itself. Failing that, I would open it up and, umm, j-j-jiggle it a bit, to quote Mr. Arkwright , and that would fix it. You wish. I did splatter all of its screws across the corridor, haven't yet bolted it back together, but it ain't working any better than before. I got that HP at Best Buy in Fredericksburg, VA for a reasonable $525, including tax, back in 2010, coming back from a China trip, so I suppose I've had my mileage out of it. Although, between replacing the memory to get from 4Gb to 8Gb, and a Windows 7 Professional upgrade, the thing wasn't in the end cheap, exactly.

Since it is still working fine, provided I use it with an external screen, and I have lots of peripherals and batteries and crap for it, I'll hang on to that HP (the HP Pavilion dv4-2145dx, if you want the gory detail), but in the meantime, selling my backside as a contractor with a dodgy laptop and a Blackberry Playbook is probably not going to fly, so I've been scouring the stores for another laptop.

While I prefer a smaller computer (11.6 or 12 inch screen, those are out of my price range, so I eventually ended up (again!) at Best Buy, but this time in Everett, WA, where I found a Lenovo on clearance sale, for $360.99 (without tax and extra memory). With a dual core Intel i3 Sandy Bridge processor and a 500Gb hard disk, and fitted with an HDMI port, a combined SATA/USB port and Lenovo's fingerprint authentication gizmo, it seemed a good deal, especially when it turned out it had a single 4Gb memory chip, so I was able to just add another, rather than replace all of the memory. Long story short, it is quite fast, has everything I need, even if it is a bit larger than I find convenient, and I ended up only $426.95 out of pocket, with tax. Phew. It is the Lenovo B570-1068B9U, if you want to look it up - I kind of doubt they'll have many left, by now. It is, much to my amazement, as far as the Windows Performance Diagnostics are concerned the fastest PC I have ever owned (PC, I said, not server). This isn't by itself earth shattering - I tend to buy cheapo laptops, far preferring to buy two budget machines versus one top-of-the-line item. Apart from anything else, if you get one of those super-duper fast game style laptops, you have little in the way of battery life, and what are you going to do for a backup? I am paranoid about having the ability to seamlessly jump from one PC to my backup - which is why I was able to switch to the Vaio when the HP Pavillion began to experience colour Alzheimer's. Read below how I do the same for cellphones, which are the other tool without which I can't work.

Anyway, still setting up the Lenovo, I'll tell you more about it once I have it all done, and have switched over to it. All I can say is "so far, so good". And look at the performance numbers to the right, and you will hopefully agree those are pretty impressive.

Highly confusing, to me, is that T-Mobile is pushing the expensive Blackberry Bold 9900, when they have the Blackberry Torch 9810 still available. Both support 4G and have a touch screen as well as the ubiquitous Blackberry keyboard, but the Torch, which is cheaper, has a slide-under keyboard and a larger touch screen than does the Bold. Other specifications, down to Blackberry's "new" 7.1 operating system, appear to be the same for both. I can only imagine that the 9810, sold by AT&T Wireless under the same type designation, was manufactured specifically to support the AT&T Wireless / TMO merger, killed in November of last year by the Federal Communications Commission. That means the phone would be able to work on both the AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile GSM networks, which share frequencies for GSM and EDGE connectivity, but use different frequencies for 3G and 4G high speed data connections. I know T-Mobile introduced phones that have the capability, my Nokia C7, which TMO calls the "Astound", is capable of running 3G on both networks, so I'll test whether the Torch does that too - I haven't yet tested that, although T-Mobile did make a carrier unlock available to me.

I love my new Torch, beginning with the slide-under keyboard - the keyboard in my Bold 9700 eventually wore out because I slid it in and out of its belt holster a dozen or more times a day, from December 2009 through April 2012, it was my primary phone all that time. It traveled around the world with me several times in that period, when I discovered that Blackberry handsets even let you roam in Japan - not something any other handset commonly available from an American carrier could do, in 2010, when I first turned it on at Tokyo Narita Airport. But with that, the slide-under keyboard, and the larger touch screen, I am very happy with my Torch. It is very sturdy, too, due to its metal casing and sliding mechanism. Because the sliding keyboard will never rub up against anything, this Blackberry is the best thing since sliced bread, for Blackberry aficionados. If you've never used a Blackberry before, perhaps this is one you should try, since it has the touch screen keyboard as well, so you never need to use the slide if you don't want to. Most carriers will let you exchange the handset for another if you do that within the week, should you decide you don't like it. And there really is not a huge difference between the AT&T Wireless 9810 and the T-Mobile 9810, except for T-Mobile's "WiFi Calling", known to us techies as "UMA", which lets you make calls and use data over a WiFi connection, when you're inside a building where service is blocked, or at home, or in locales where there is no cellular service, if you subscribe to this it gives you free minutes and data. Not new, UMA has been available here since 2007, only a few carriers worldwide support it, in the USA that's T-Mobile, and I think Rogers in Canada has it too. I use it all over the world, free WiFi is everywhere these days, from any Starbucks in Beijing to your one star hotel in Patagonia.

As I've said, reviewing phones, in terms of comparing them, is increasingly impossible. They simply have too much functionality, too many capabilities, for a comparison by a reviewer who has played with the thing for a week to be meaningful. In that respect, the user reviews at carrier and vendor sites are more useful. Even there, though, there is a lot of reading between the lines to be done, and as is the case with most phones and computers, weeding out the "reviews" from many users that don't run the basic setup and update routines prior to use is a necessity. Reading up on reviews of the Torch 9810 at the AT&T Wireless site, here, it looks to me at least half the reviewers are in the "self inflicted" category.

So all I am doing here is tell you about my experiences with the Torch, with perhaps some comparison with my old Blackberry Bold, and my Nokia C7. Why do I have multiple phones? In a nutshell, I need my "old" East Coast mobile number to continue, but needed a local Seattle number as well. It isn't a luxury, and in fact, I tend to think that much as we have progressed to one number per person from one number per home, technology allows us to progress to one number per purpose per person - work, home, Ebay, Gramps, you name it. Dual SIM phones are available, and we can even have numbers (see Google Voice) that don't need their own handset. Something that impressed the heck out of me was the restoration of my Blackberry backup - while available for other brands of handsets, the Blackberry recovery was seamless, a Bold 9700 backup restored to a Torch 9810, without so much as a hiccup, this after the Blackberry Desktop I was using already updated the Torch OS. Some other stuff I really like: Blackberry Protect, which will let me locate and wipe the handset remotely, and I just connected the Blackberry Bluetooth modem to my Sony Vaio desktop, and found, much to my surprise, that the modem settings I have always had to manually set for T-Mobile aren't necessary, on the Torch. Why, I don't yet know, but all this with non-custom drivers is quite astonishing, although I may be in nerd territory with this, I don't really know.

It is, of course, perfectly possible I've lost some of my zest-for-the-new, never even experimenting with Apple's iOS or Android. OTOH, I like Nokia's Symbian OS and Blackberry OS, have done for years, same as I am wedded to Microsoft Windows, and it isn't because i've not used other operating systems. Any operating system that connects me directly to the main purpose of the device, voice communications and email, has my vote, it is very simple. As a test, I just synchronized recorded TV under Windows Media with my Nokia - something I only accidentally discovered it will do - while I think the capability is magical, and it means I basically have TV capabilities on both the Blackberry and the Nokia, I have little purpose for the ability to watch movies on a screen the size of two matchboxes. The only time I recall I thanked the Gods for mobile TV was during the broadcast of the last episode of Seinfeld, when the limo company had, with a lot of foresight, sent a car with TV to LaGuardia, when I arrived on a delayed flight from somewhere, and would have missed most of the show while driving from the airport to my home in Westchester County. But even with Windows Media, these days it all gets recorded, and unbeknownst to me it is portable. I could fall asleep drunk and miss a show and watch it in the morning on the way to work, then, except I don't drink any more.

Friday May 18, 2012; Careerbuilder has your number

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...

Wednesday May 16, 2012; IPO or manipulatipo?

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.

Sunday May 13, 2012; More Blackberry musings

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?

Thursday May 10, 2012; Why have investoriadors at all?

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...

I suppose, seeing headlines like "Facebook Kicks Off Roadshow With Zuckerberg in Hoodie", it is slowly safe to say that Mark Zuckerberg wants to be Steve Jobs 2.0, and Facebook wants to be World Wide Web 2.0. I had been looking for some easy to understand comparative expressions for a while, and just now, as Summer warmth envelopes the Puget Sound, it hit me. The problem is, then, the difference between the two - Jobs was a marketing genius, and Jobs opened up a market that I had no idea existed - luxury gadgets. Sony had done it before, with the Walkman, showing that consumers will pay over the top to buy gadgets that serve absolutely no purpose, Jobs did a do-over with the digital equivalent, the iPod, then conceived the iPhone, neither a good telecommunications device nor a good computer, but something in between with a lot of glitz and glamour and "the right stuff". He created an over-the-top ecosphere where consumers felt compelled to pay three times what the thing was worth for the hype of "belonging", and the rest is history. I've followed Apple from its very first computers, running the very first Apple licensee in the Benelux, via the Macintosh, which I was "in on" (as an accredited technical journalist) both in London and New York, to where we decided, at the First Boston Corporation on 49th Street, that we could not use the Macintosh as a brokerage workstation as it did not have protected memory, and thus went (we and the rest of Wall Street as well as Bell Labs) with the IBM PC-AT and a nascent, creaking Windows/286 - which did. It was a magic moment, when we saw those four Windows, each with a live stream from the Chicago, NYC, London and Tokyo stock exchanges - in real time, something my NYNEX S&T supervisor Craig Reding would eventually rename, to "reasonable time", when we noticed lag differences of several milliseconds between different feeds from the same place.

The thing is, I believe Facebook, like AOL before it, is hanging by a thread. Facebook, by virtue of its requiring you to log in from an IP address, can (and does) look up, collect your personal information, and sell this to advertisers. That's what it does - that is its product, its only product. Currently, if you want to advertise on Facebook, you're paying way over the top to get access to potential customers, without any evidence that those customers buy anything as a consequence of your advertising - especially since its postage stamp ads don't exactly provide room for a lot of information. Most of what I see are teasers.. The amount of "social media" advertising available to companies today is such that there isn't a measurable correlation, over time, of the effectiveness, in terms of sales.

Thing is, I think Zuck isn't Jobs. Jobs created and sold a product, something you had to buy and had to pay hard dollars for. He then had to deliver on the expectation - in the case of the iPod, music-on-the-go. That required an ecosystem - without iTunes, Jobs still wouldn't have had a product, and iTunes is a very different animal from a music player. Besides - Jobs, originally, was part of a team, a small group of visionaries, who created something together, they learned a whole bunch of stuff doing that. Jobs, ego notwithstanding, needed an industrial design genius, and he needed to listen to that genius. To his credit, he did, because without the design embedded in Apple I doubt its success would have been what it is today.

Not Zuck. Facebook reminds me mostly of Hotmail, sold to Microsoft as the world's largest mailing list without ever making a dime - and in the end, I doubt Microsoft ever got a benefit out of its Hotmail acquisition. You don't pay Zuck, and he therefore is under no obligation to deliver anything to you, all he needs to do is make sure you come back and log in and somehow hand over your personal information. Because without the login, Zuck's gone. Toast. He must know it is you on his line, must tie you down in his ecosystem, or track you across the internet, which he can do because you do not log out when you leave, so he stalks you electronically, anathema in my internet generation, when zone transfers were frowned upon (I noticed recently Facebook now downloads all content in my webserver directories, ignoring robot statements), and can tell his advertiser to let fly. It has gotten to the point already where on many news websites, you can't comment on articles and participate in discussions unless you log in with your Facebook ID. When I want to comment on someone's post made from a location, the Facebook app for the Playbook won't let me because I am not logged in with my GPS location. And you have to ask yourself about the bottom line - does it sell? Because our problem is not that we don't have enough advertising, we don't have enough products to sell, and those we do sell leave much of their income in China, not in Wisconsin.

Monday May 7, 2012; It always happens all at once

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".

On Saturday, I went to the store in Edmond, and there wasn't a discount there either. I should have known better - the discounts, these days, not only with T-Mobile, but at Safeway, too, are mid-week. By the weekend, when the folks that work all week go shopping, the discounts are gone, and they get to pay full whack, even if the label says something else. Been like that for a while. It is how you can tell we are in a deep recession, you're manipulated into spending more money if the retail trade can assume you have some. You see, us unemployed folk, that don't have money, mostly shop midweek, all week, looking for bargains. So, my bad, I knew all this.

In the end - long story as short as I can manage - I ended up with a Blackberry 9810 Torch - about the last thing I had in mind getting, especially since T-Mobile took these units out of its offerings shortly after they were introduced (the latest: after I bought one, yesterday, the Torch magically reappeared in the "upgrade" listings, though not in the "new phones" listings, where it only appears as a "refurb"). So I seem to be in an elite class of existing TMO customers eligible for this high end device, which even in the stores isn't on display. I am assuming that has something to do with the merger failure TMO and AT&T Wireless experienced, when the FCC decided to take them to court. I can't shed much light on that, but I do know TMO was introducing phones, last year, that covered both their own and AT&T's 3G frequency spectra - the Nokia C7 I got around that time actually roams on both 3G networks. It would have been necessary to introduce these types of handsets to be used on both networks - the Torch, designated "9810" by both AT&T Wireless and TMO, I assume is one of those specialized handsets - the companies never even got to advertising these "joint" handsets, which, with the merger now abandoned, are pretty much useless.

The Torch otherwise boasts everything TMO has, HSPA+, UMA, HSDPA and HSUPA in Europe and Asia, and has both the Blackberry keyboard, this time in a slide, as well as a full touch screen - it is the handset to the left in the picture. I should get a $50 mail-in rebate, and $100 back for my Bold 9700 (middle), leaving my outlay a somewhat manageable $150 - more than I had planned to spend, but I did get extra capabilities for that money, some of which may come in handy if I move overseas. Between UMA and its plethora of supported international 3G frequencies, this Torch is a powerful communications tool, and "plays nice" with my $199 Blackberry Playbook, a tablet I use daily now, that works well with Blackberry handsets, as it can use the handset data plan "invisibly" to the carrier - i.e., no tethering involved (though available, not all applications can use the Blackberry Bridge).

Every ten or fifteen years or so, some of my medication stops working. These being the medically extremely advanced United States, by the time this happens - either because my body no longer tolerates the drug I have been taking, or  my body learned how to ignore it - help is normally at hand: there is always a new super duper latest greatest designer drug that one of my doctors kindly arranges for me to have. Every time also, the new drug is more than twice as expensive as the old one, and it is so hugely effective the FDA waived half the testing they'd normally insist on so we will together find the other 111 side effects five years from now, when the CDC updates its bulletins, and I am the guinea pig.

I am going through one of those periods right now, and while I really should be majorly grateful I have insurance that pays for all this stuff, at the same time I am a bit offended at how hard the pharmaceutical industry pushes things that are really really expensive. I mean, if you want to know why our medical expenditure is soaring, this is it. It wasn't until I was well into my Verizon career that I began to realize that if it weren't for my health insurance, I would long have been back in The Netherlands, where the State would take care of me. In fact, they offered to, many years ago, after I had revalidated from my car accident, and the City of Amsterdam cheerfully  suggested I would never have to work again, nor worry about my medical treatment, and I told them where to get off, left for England, and eventually for the United States. They promptly stopped my sick pay...

On that cultural note, I have only really recently realized how Americanized I have become. If that sounds stupid, after twenty-seven years, it probably is. The thing is, I've never tried to "become American", I do not believe in the chameleon life, and I've seen some bad examples, over the years, of people who put on what I like to call "an American veneer", but culturally weren't well adjusted underneath. It is, in my book, better to be who you are, even if that makes you "a foreigner", and find where you, in your own personality, belong. I've been lucky in that I was a published journalist and writer when I moved to England, so in order for me to "do my thing" I spent close to a decade perfecting my English language skills, without which I couldn't exercise my skill set in the Anglo-Saxon world. I was the first Dutch translator who certified, in London, as a non native English speaker, in Dutch-to-English translation.

But I have, over the past few years, come across a number of non-Americans resident here, who all seem to share one trait: they don't assimilate - as in: don't bother. I mean that as I write it, I shy away from the word "integrate", because I think that is generally a misnomer, and I have my doubts if it even applies when you come to live in another country as an adult. But I see many foreigners make huge attempts to stay in touch with their home front, and their own culture, at the expense of learning to understand their new culture - which, thereby, doesn't become "theirs". Assimilation is hard work - I enjoy understanding other cultures, for many, that is an uphill battle, even impossible.

By now I've kicked quite a few shins, I am sure, but bear with me. I don't, as I said, advocate "becoming American", or German, or French, or Indonesian. I don't know that such a thing exists, and even if it does, you'd have to get here as a child in order to go through the formative experiences, school, college, that sort of thing. Some of my relatives did, growing up and going to school in Northern Virginia, because their Dad, my uncle, was a Dutch diplomat in Washington, D.C. Cousin H. married an American, had kids, and stayed, the others all moved abroad, I think they're all "back" in The Netherlands now. I say "back" in quotes because they weren't born there, but in the colonies, and grew up all over. But largely, if you look at cultures - if you see that Indonesians refer to a group that immigrated into Indonesia 400 years ago as "Chinese", even though you and I couldn't distinguish them from Malay Indonesians, what chance do you think any more recent arrivals have of "becoming Indonesian"? Exactly, none. It is no different here.

But this rant really isn't about whether-or-not, but about the hard time I see some have assimilating. Those with the job overseas, or career - and I am no yardstick, because my European spouse in New York had her own career - has it, comparatively speaking, easy, because when you have the office, the colleagues, the American  environment you hack around in, every day, the assimilation happens largely automatically. Kids - I never had any - get "it" easily too, at least if they are in American schools, but beyond that, life becomes complicated. You have to go out and "get acquainted" and "blend in" and do stuff, and that is not easy, and, these being the United States, there isn't a welcoming committee or a lot of help. So many end up isolated, spending large amounts of time keeping in touch with the folks back home, which isn't where their future is, and never finding their feet.

In many cases, these are folks that eventually go back home - but often, they leave it too late, and can't "ground" there any more, either. If you've lived abroad for fifteen years or more, the country you came from no longer exists the way it was - all cultures change, and if you lose the connection with your own culture, and don't connect with your new culture, you put yourself in a permanent limbo. A lonely limbo.

No, I have no solution either, it just is something I've noticed, both on the internet and IRL, and thought I'd mention it. I've been spared, mostly by design, I've always had a goal, an aim, some reason why I went overseas, from country to country, or from city to city, I had one coming here, and I will have one leaving here. FWIW...

Tuesday May 1, 2012; Let's get a move on

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.

Right. Sure. A blind Chinese civil rights lawyer escapes his heavily guarded rural compound and gets into the heavily guarded U.S. embassy compound in Beijing to request sanctuary. Just shy of Hillary getting there to hobnob with the Politburo. I do so not believe any of this. I think somebody is manipulating something, and who that may be, Lord knows. My responses vary from "if he really is a civil rights activist, doing this at a point where the United States / China relationship may be negatively impacted is selfish, bordering on the megalomaniac" to "was he driven there in a black Audi with tinted windows?". You pick, or make up something else, a Honda with Taiwan license plates, maybe, or a North Korean train, I just don't buy this bull any more, and the "blind father and husband with beaten wife and parents" tearjerker is honestly beyond anything I can take seriously. OK, maybe it happened, I can't prove it didn't, but I do not know the Chinese as stupid people. Clumsy, conflicted, whatever, but stupid, nah.

Pictures, today, relate to two of the countries I am contemplating moving to, next year - in fact, if nothing major transpires here in Seattle, career wise, over the Summer, I am out of here, and my primary choice has been Thailand. 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.

The other picture, to the right, depicts East Germany - I know Germany and Austria well, the former DDR 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.

So it is an option I seriously will consider - a native born EU citizen, I have right of abode in Germany, so that by itself is the easy part, it is why I hung onto my Dutch citizenship - not that happy a marriage, the Netherlands does not allow dual citizenship, and I've found that, post-9/11, many jobs in the United States became unavailable to me, they won't even let me drive a truck in Afghanistan now.

I gotta pick a new doctor, since the last one, Laine Gawthrop, M.D., who I was very happy with, got away from the clinic where I get much of my medical care, and they sent me a few options. But the cards with the doctor's descriptions give me little information, and I would go so far as to say that the combinations of their portraits and names are an invitation to discriminate. Do I want the kindly New York Jew, having been treated by Jewish primary care providers in New York and Washington for some 25 years? The Korean with the Duke degree? The mid-country doctor who looks like an escaped former Marine? The non-doctor, a nurse practitioner? I need to do some homework, but I am so inclined to do the obvious, the New York Jew, well inside my comfort zone, or, second choice, the probably academically hotshot Korean. The former may listen better, the latter diagnose better, how do you pick when the doctor is so important to keep me alive and functioning? Or do I figure out where Dr. Gawthrop escaped to, and ask her why she left? And if she takes patients? I don't know. I do know that Virginia Mason is bleeding doctors, I have "lost" four, in eight months. That is a troubling statistic.

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.

If you've got to the end of my last rant, on Sunday, and you are wondering where I get this wisdom, I worked with a team of human factors scientists, under the expert guidance of IBM's eminence grise John Thomas, on figuring out what constitutes the best and fastest keyboard designs. They spent years analyzing the data, including video, my team collected from hundreds of telephone operators on Long Island and in Boston, every single call, screen, keystroke they did, 24/7, for several years, and then designing keyboards on the basis of that data, we then updated our software and put that and new keyboards into the operator environments, then collecting more data, then going back to have yet more keyboards built, etc. It was fascinating, and the research was as valid today as it was then, how do you reduce all aspects of the time an operator spends doing their thing, from listening to looking up something in a database the other side of the country (literally), etc.

So, if you have some dedicated keys for most used functions, an otherwise standard keyboard, and anything else you need located on the physical  keyboard - in this case, the trackpad - you have the most efficient design possible, based on the human physiognomy. Add to that my own experience learning new things, and you have the basis for my advice.

I saw a translator, the other day, who had to have his setup "just so" - keyboard propped up, extra screen positioned "just there", I spent three hours figuring out why his Bluetooth mouse would work, and his Bluetooth keyboard wouldn't (they weren't Bluetooth, but RF, and he had brought the wrong expansion unit), and I can tell you that spending a week getting used to new equipment, a new layout, is better for you and your brain than trying to "create the right circumstance". That isn't really possible, as there are too many factors influencing the circumstance - years ago, a team of scientists at MIT's Media Lab showed me the research they did, everything including ambient lighting, seating, entrance, exit, tactile, you name it. Change any of it and all you have is an approximation - and while that may be enough, adjusting to changed circumstances is easier, and more beneficial, to the human being than the other thing. It is something we must do every day, it can be tiring, it takes time, but ultimately, we learn from it, and we "learn to learn" from it. And that latter aspect, natural when we're young, apparently not so natural as we grow older, is important, and may be instrumental in helping to stave off the ravages of time on our brain, much as walking every day helps stave off the ravages of time on our legs, hips and some of our circulatory system. The brain is just another organ, and needs exercise, and its best exercise is coping with the unknown. And that you can get by doing stuff you really instinctively don't want to do, telling that long time friend you love her, or using that keyboard you really don't like. Both, if you must.

Sunday April 29, 2012; Save Money by Spending Money?

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?

The "Costco effect", Brian Williams called it in a recent Rock Center - I have always called it the "Wal-Mart effect". Get people to "save money by spending money" - larger or bulk packages of products, making the individual items cheaper. Two tubes of toothpaste are $1.29 a piece, so say Costco sells you a box of 135 for 15 cents a piece. A nice piece of reporting, we know, subliminally, we have been informed by whatsisface that Costco makes most of its profits on the membership  fee, so we think their products must be rock bottom cheap -and they are, after a fashion, but hold up a minute, one piece is missing from Brian's and NBC's reporting.

Yes, 135 tubes of toothpaste may be individually cheaper than 2, but if you don't have 11 kids at home, Gramma and Gramps still living there, and a couple cousins who stop by every day to brush their teeth, you may actually not need 135 tubes. You maybe only need two per month. You've just "saved" money by subsidizing Costco and Colgate to the tune of $25.25-$2.58=$22.67. You have saved money by.... so why is that part not reported by NBC? That most consumers, having been carefully groomed into this mindset, aren't saving money at all? That for that $25.25 they could have bought 20 regular tubes of toothpaste over time, and that those 20 tubes would still last them 18 months or whatever? The mind boggles - you call this reporting, Brian? I don't think so.

Around the area, see the picture to the right, you see the homeless setting up every day, mostly during fair weather, but some come out in the pouring rain. Mostly well groomed and with fresh signs, I swear I wonder whether these folks are what they say they are - why do the folks in Snohomish need to go to a Seattle shelter? There are quite a few shelters closer, and I see them outside Trader Joe's on a regular basis. Dunno. I have no right to be skeptical, I suppose, maybe I am just too much of a Londoner or New Yorker, life used to be so simple when you could just treat your local vagrants as a nuisance. Perhaps, one is inclined to think, perhaps they were always homeless people in need of understanding and assistance. It is just that when I see a pregnant woman begging in the rain, I remember my driver in Chennai, India, who used to shoo beggars away from my car, and once gruffly commented "they rent those babies". In Jakarta, they were arrested, and run out of town if they did not have a residence permit. I just don't know.

On the Iogear Bluetooth keyboard 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.

By the way, I've heard so many people say they don't like trackpads, or they prefer one type of mouse over another, in my experience it is just a matter of using one type of input device, not switching, and giving it a week, or maybe two, every day, all day, and you completely don't notice any difference. Don't be lazy. If you need an incentive: It is very good for your brain and your eye/hand coordination to change devices, regularly, and learn new dexterity. It is brain training, it is good for you, it is better than fish oil, and as good as multi-vitamins. Honest. And if you happen to have built in Bluetooth, it is even better, because you free up a keyboard / PS2 / USB / serial port, and probably an interrupt.

Thursday April 26, 2012 – Tenterhooks

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.

The above is not a whine, don't get me wrong, but I have seen this before in IT security - that security is an afterthought, or becomes an afterthought, because the effectors think "it works", in the absence of alarm bells and disasters. I found, one time, that a government department was sending sensitive order information, which should have been encrypted, via a clear text channel, and that nobody knew, or was even inclined to do anything about it. It wasn't so much that somebody did this, using regular email, it was that the procedures should have been in place for this to not be possible at all. The government employee in question, when at work, shouldn't even have had access to unencrypted facilities, they should have sat behind a firewall without any kind of access to regular email and other internet facilities. But that is why I am saying, security there was, and is, an afterthought, and the only time anybody looks at it is when something goes wrong. Even then, they revert back to high risk behaviour when the bosses stop looking - if nothing else, you can't get the budget, even today, to "make things safe". In HR, hiring methods wouldn't get tackled for as long as there is an ongoing stream of incoming talent. Whether that's the best talent for the company will never be known, because automation means you don't get to see what falls by the wayside, and the path between the annual report and hiring of regular employees is too long for that connection ever to be made. See the recent dismissal of Disney Studios' Rich Ross - are his failures due to him, or has Disney been adding not-brilliant-enough computer hires for too long a time at the bottom end, and now their product suffers? We have no way of knowing... This country has a vast reservoir of talent - but listen, folks, when CBS needs a weather person, or a new Broadway show needs actors, do you have a software program assess their suitability? Are models screened by HR software? CFOs? Are we dumbing down our workforce? Do our corporations really think you get the best foremen and -women on the shop floor based on their GPA average?

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.

On another note, having recently spent some time in the translation industry, I've seen an alarming trend in recruiting translators who do not have basic American English skills. Most of those I asked did not know who Dick Clark was, and, famously, when I pointed out a common American English phrase and said "That's in everyday use on TV", one European translator said "I don't watch television". Huh? A translator? So where do you get your American vernacular, if your spouse is European, and you speak European with your children? I would expect a professional at a minimum to watch CNN or another news program, I am not seeing how you can be current on language otherwise.

I have often observed, back in Europe, how German, French, Italian and other major language users have a limited command of English and other foreign languages. Little is realized, apparently, that these countries all dub their foreign movies and TV shows over, thus depriving their children from hearing foreign languages, with, as is customary in the smaller countries, subtitles in the national language. That is how we Dutch begin our language education, we hear the sounds of other languages from when we are little children, often every day. And we learn to read this way too.

Why? Dubbing, voice synchronization, is complicated and extremely expensive. We can't, with our small populations, afford it. And as there is a perfectly good alternative, subtitles, we use that. And so the Germans grow up not even knowing what John Glenn said, or Captain Kirk, or even what John Wayne's or Ronald Reagan's voice sounds like. Somebody, at EU level, should perhaps pick this up and do something about it. This isn't about convenience, people, entertainment with subtitles is an educational tool. If you want to know why the British, Germans, French, have huge accents, and the Dutch, Belgians, Swedish, Danish,  don't, by and large - that's your answer. We learn the sounds from when we can barely walk, at home. It's the sound - we learn this stuff when we're learning our own language, at the same time. To us, it is another language, but not a foreign language.

Capice?

I mentioned to you I had ordered the Iogear Bluetooth keyboard - primarily to use it at the consulting assignment that now is no more, but also to have a spare keyboard, and to have a keyboard to use with the Blackberry Playbook tablet I am testing, which has no USB ports to hook stuff up to. Testing, not so much technically, but just to see how much I can do with it while I do not use my laptop. User interface research, I suppose. The Bluetooth keyboard is supposed to be switchable between devices, and has the standard keyboard size and layout, and a trackpad in the same enclosure, something I am very much in favour of, as that is supposed to be faster than a separate rodent.

I can tell you that the Iogear keyboard installed on my Sony Vaio with Microsoft Windows Vista Professional and a third party Bluetooth dongle seamlessly - I was amazed. It needed two boots to get both the keyboard and the mouse driver to work, and while that did not surprise me, I wish these idiots out there would tell their customers how that driver collection and loading works, and what to expect. Your average consumer will think "nothing is happening" - while there's just a bunch of stuff going on and you need to have patience, which nobody stocks any more. Having said that, full, automagic, hands off, installation, works like a dream, including the function keys that are supposed to work with Windows Media Center, which is what I use to watch cable. Magic. Purrfection. Well done. Impressed. And all that for under $50, which was the reason I bought it, I didn't want to shell out $80 or more for an otherwise beatified Logitech product.

So there you go, kids. I'll tell you when I get to use it with the tablet, but with the PC, it's a gas, and if it does Vista well, it'll do 7, and 8, and stuff. Sight unseen. Windows is becoming nice!

Thursday February 2, 2012 – TV Everywhere

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. I am doing that to some extent so there is "something going on" in my blog, which is, after all, a rather public showcase, should prospective employers and agents decide to visit - contrary to belief, BTW, most employers don't bother, in the interview phase. I believe there are still relatively few people who have learned how to do "internet sleuthing", which requires a fair amount of knowledge, and tools most managers don't have, and wouldn't know how to use anyway. Below my review of the TV tuner for Windows, as posted at my Amazon reviews page.

The Avertv TV Tuner is intended for use with the Windows Media Center that is packaged with some versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 - check before you buy - if "Windows Media Center" is not an option in your start menu, your Windows doesn't have it, although you can upgrade the operating system to get it. Under Windows Vista and Windows 7, a TV tuner is recognized by the operating system (that is part of the reason Microsoft has integrated the Windows Media Center in some versions of Windows), and handled as an integral part of your computer, it isn't an "alien" device, so to speak. Be aware that some versions of the Media Center under Windows Vista won't recognize digital (Clear QAM) channels - there is a workaround, but that generally requires a Microsoft update pack that is very hard to find, and no longer distributed by Microsoft. Even then, it is finicky, and I would recommend against it if you don't have what we call "Windows internals". The "other" Avermedia adapter, the Avertv Hybrid Volar Max, is more expensive, but has its own software for this, and should work right out of the box in this instance.

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.

Sunday January 29, 2012 – Year of Our Dragons

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, as those are, today, the cheapest HVAC units one can think of, especially in lowlands like the Seattle area, where the temperature generally doesn't get below freezing (except, apparently, when I move here). Buy one online, call Sears to install it in place of what you have, job done. I know you don't see the Sears vans a lot any more, but that is because they provide service for Home Depot, which didn't think it was a good idea if you called them and then got a guy from Sears in front of your house. I've noticed another couple of anomalous and puzzling features of HVAC installation in the Seattle area - next blog entry, I promise. For one thing, if hydropower electricity is abundant, why does everybody seem to cook and heat with natural gas? Eh? No, I am not criticizing anyone, but I love electricity, and the many ways of transporting and storing it, and so one wonders.. Never liked gas, even though it more or less bubbled up out of the ground not ten miles from where I grew up, in The Netherlands.

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?

Thursday January 26, 2012 – So stop sharing already

The picture to the left has a food product I found in Seattle - an Indonesian dish, aimed at the Dutch market, made in... Italy, and dumped out to the American market cheap, why I don't know. It actually makes a nice base for real Nasi Goreng, and when you see this type of pouch, it usually contains freeze dried or prepared food. The (European) technology was developed to replace cans, as it is not only lighter, but due to its form factor takes far less space when shipped. The packaging allows for preserved or sterilized wet foods to be packaged safely as well, I've seen imported German Kartoffelsalat (potato salad) packaged this way on American store shelves, and the fruit product to the right is another example.

I am completely delighted Megaupload has been taken down, and Schmitz and cohorts arrested, but then I am a published author, I have written software, collaborated on patented inventions, so I have a vested interested in intellectual property that I do not want others to take and use without my being able to decide whether or not they must pay for it. I think the problem is that the distribution of IP is now so easy that it isn't possible to properly police it. Obviously, paying people to share files, as Megaupload and others do, is an invitation to rip off other people's stuff - not for nothing we "rip" a song or movie. And it isn't just an internet problem - we have mega-airplanes that fly people and freight around the world at ridiculously low prices. The days that it cost $10,000 to fly from Paris to New York on Concorde, and the days when it cost $150 to talk to your relatives in New Zealand for three minutes, are long gone.

But taking down sharing sites is only going to lead to more sharing sites - there is demand, for Megaupload to have 690 servers just in Amsterdam, there is a mega-market. I occasionally share stuff here at my webserver, leased from Network Solutions - except, the stuff I make available to others is stuff I own, and I password protect the share, so only those I authorize can access it. That's is how I distributed copyrighted NYNEX promotional videos, a couple of years ago, after a reunion - to former colleagues, folks who already had had access to it, all former employees.

As I said, it is too easy to share things you don't own, today, so perhaps we need to reinvent the way rights are handled - perhaps a movie producer will be paid once, once a movie is completed, and the movie is then released into all distribution systems, and you just pay for carriage. That means all those who might want to view it must pay a small amount, regardless of whether they are viewing or not. It would stop counterfeiters and movie rippers and sharers, as you can't charge someone for getting content that's free, and it would "encourage" countries like Greece, South Africa, and many many others that aren't very good at collecting money from their citizens. Surely, Republicans are going to yell "socialism" reading this, but having the FBI run around the globe taking down webservers really isn't going to solve the problem, right? In the interim, those who are "Anonymous", and other hacktivists that think they need to "retaliate" - as if we do not have a right to own our stuff - please keep attacking the FBI, DOJ, White House and industry websites. The more you attack, the easier you make it for us to find you. It may take a while, but since you can't do what you do unless you're connected to the internet, we will find you. What you do is an addiction, and you won't be able to go back to being an auto mechanic or accountant, or studying anthropology, and eventually, you'll make that small mistake that people make who do one thing for too long, and.. Gotcha! You need convincing, go talk to Schmitz, who is likely getting out of jail in time for his 60th birthday.

Speaking of "things you don't own", Facebook claims credit for supporting 35,200 UK jobs and adding £2.2bn in the British economy. That's actually not that much for an alleged behemoth, British Airways employs some 30,000 folks in Britain, and generates some £8bn in revenues - this apart from any revenue related to its activities, like travel agencies and jet fuel. Even more importantly, those jobs and pounds Sterling are generated, largely, by internet enterprises and entrepreneurs, not by Facebook, which acts merely as a service provider. If Facebook weren't around, that would read "MySpace" or "AOL" or "Ceefax" or whatever, there is little that makes Facebook unique, other than its size. One could even be nassty, and allege that if Facebook weren't so big, and doing so much work in the United States, there could be more jobs and pounds generated by the internet inside the UK. It is like claiming car tire manufacture and sales for Jaguar, instead of for the Britons who buy and drive cars..

So should Meryl Streep or Rooney Mara get the Oscar? My vote is (Ms. Streep's stupendous effort notwithstanding) for Ms. Mara - she created a persona, from scratch, rather than re-creating it. That's gotta come out tops. And Kathy Lee and Hoda should not be drinking alcohol, on live television, at 10am. Not. Tell Today. I am not a tee-totaler, but I've observed this before, on the rest of the Today show, and it is not clear to me why anchors have to drink alcohol while a celebrity chef who has not been to Stop & Shop in twenty years shows off their cooking skills in the studio, early in the morning. Why? Because you can? And while we're at it, let's elect a president who can sing. Curious to me, by the way, is that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has become so popular - I thought it was awful, put the book down after ten pages. But perhaps ogling Ms. Mara makes it palatable..

Sunday January 22, 2012 – That was winter; let's go!

This is, for me, not unusual winter weather, but for Washington State natives it is a natural disaster. There are wide spread power outages - since it rarely snows or freezes, there are lots and lots of weak tree branches that break off - in NY and VA, I know those are trimmed every summer, but not here, by the looks of it. I discovered that quite a few Safeways have emergency generators, so they remain open when everything else is closed. I've noticed as well that saplings and young trees are watered, in summer - that's really a bad idea, as they develop shallow root systems when you do that, and trees with shallow root systems topple easily. Trees are very capable of "drilling down" deep, for water - if they're not, don't plant them... About the very first thing I noticed, after arriving here, is how close to houses trees are allowed to stand - much closer than we would deem advisable in New York and Virginia. I actually spent a couple of years cutting back the treeline, around my rural Virginia home, something the elderly couple I had bought it from weren't able to do any more. It may well be, being mercenary, that cutting back the treeline is more trouble than it is worth, considering the rare incidences of bad winter storms, but on the other hand, I spoke to someone today whose company spent the better part of a 24 hour day restarting its servers and networks after their emergency generator failed to take over from the battery backups. This happened in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, where an entire town lost power. That's a bit steep, in my book - having dealt with phone company emergency power in my work, not being able to keep your systems up is a firing offence, in my bailywick. Anyway, the temperature is back up to the fourties, I got properly "winterized", and it is now a mess of melt out there.

Part of life, I suppose, is setting yourself realistic targets, so you don't end up frustrated over unmet goals. Insofar as the attainment is under one's control, of course. Feedback, I suppose, is one of the important facets, and that sometimes seems hard to come by. I wouldn't mind connecting with the Seattle developer community, there is a vibrant incubation environment here, but I don't really know how to. That's probably caused by my never being in an incubator, even though there was plenty of development going on in the runup to the dotcom era in New York City, way back when. I am likely too much of a sceptic, forever going: Remember AOL! Seriously, both in terms of AOL and the European Minitel / Viditel systems, they were closed shops, the open internet came along, and the rest is history. Will Facebook meet the same fate? It is a closed shop, has just launched huge numbers of new utilities to try and tie its users down inside their logins, and, like AOL, is widening its need for bandwidth to the point that most of its users, tied to handphones and relatively slow internet connections, won't be able to comfortably use it in the way Facebook wants them to. Heading, possibly, in the same direction so many American companies go - sell to millions of American users and Wall Street won't notice for a while that overseas advertisers defect.

What totally amazes me is that the morning television programs are largely produced back East, and large segments are broadcast on tape delay, cleverly juggled to look as if they are live on the West Coast. "Live EDT" I take to mean it is not "live anywhere else". I hadn't given it much thought, but there not being a mainstream program that is made here, by which I mean: "on this coast", what with much of Hollywood being here, is really truly astonishing. Why those presenters crews aren't split between coasts, and why they don't rotate across the country, given the amount of money involved, and the state of the technology, isn't really clear to me. I had been wondering for some time, living back East, why the programming is as New York centric as it is, but now that I am on the other coast it is even more of a question. For the kind of money we pay these anchors, they ought to be on airplanes all the time, couple days Chicago, a week in Atlanta, hopscotching across Minnesota, involve the rest of America. What do you think? Mail me via the "Contact" link above, I'll be glad to share your thoughts with the nation. Or my 11 readers.

Bad luck of the year, for me personally, was the interview that didn't happen, late last year, because the executive who (one assumes) had taken a liking to my resume died the weekend before in a plane crash. I swear to God I am not making this up. While I have no idea whether he would have hired me, and the company did end up interviewing me despite all that, I can safely say this is by far the weirdest job hunt occurrence I've ever had happen. I recall seeing an NBC report about the crash, and thinking how hard it is for a company when one of their gurus suddenly dies, little did I realize, at the time, this was the same guy who'd taken a shine to me. May he rest in peace, what can I say, I did express my condolences to family and colleagues, when I spoke with the folks who broke the news to me.

Can barely get over discovering new command line tools in Windows - well, new, hardly. I had been using Xcopy forever, but recently, when swapping files to an external harddisk between Windows Vista and Windows 7, it wouldn't work under Vista, writing to a file structure set up under Win7. I don't know that the operating system version is the issue, by the way, because on one machine the drive is connected using ESATA, while on the other it uses USB, one of those things that I have no patience to test. At any rate, somehow I ended up reading a piece on a Microsoft tool called "robocopy", advertised on Microsoft's Technet as a Windows 7 tool, but as it turns out my copy of Windows Vista Ultimate has it loaded too. And it does work, where Xcopy won't. Teehee. Except it scares me there are bits in Windows I've never heard of, I thought I was pretty familiar with most command line tools. If you've not set eyes on robocopy, there is information on it here (an MS Support document going all the way back to Windows NT, where robocopy appears to have made its first appearance). Provides a pretty good report file, too, if you output that to disk or mount point.

Thursday January 19, 2012 – Your PC slow? Or your advisor?

A strange week. I was hoping we'd have a snow free winter, which sometimes happens, but this weekend it decided to come down buckets. Then a friend is suddenly, for no reason I can figure, not talking to me any more (did you get Unfriended? Watch Oprah!), while some other friends I didn't know I had connected out of nowhere, my job search grinds on, I've managed to put some recorded TV onto DVD, this coming off the AverTV adapter, even though it was supposedly copy protected, I've made my first sojourn from Snohomish County down into Seattle, across into Bellevue and back up, bypassing the bridge that is now suddenly a toll road my GPS does not know about, I am scared something will break I can't replace but nothing has, although I dropped my Blackberry and screen and keys ended up sticking out, I managed to push everything back into place, but... in short, it is just hellishly confusing, but I am surviving somewhow. Gervais is mildly funny but the Globes are too long and boooooring.. Phew. (I don't blame Gervais, you can only do what he did last year once, truly. Being invited back, good for you, Ricky, and good for the Foreign Press Association of Tinseltown and Disneyland).

MLK Day, last Monday, is one of those non-holidays that makes you want to take the day off, since some do, and some don't, if you think about it it does not make sense to keep on adding holidays over the decades, then to eventually realize that isn't the way it works and you have to consolidate some. I suppose it is a sad state of affairs when there have been too many wars to commemorate, and they all get to be rolled into one Memorial Day. Good and bad at the same time.

BTW, I mentioned recording TV - I've only got a week or so of recordings, but if you're going to follow my example - cool, a $50 adapter will simply piggyback on your cable connection - you better reserve some serious disk space, I am up to over 50 Gb in just a few days. I have plenty of storage space, just be aware that your hard disk will fill up in no time at all, and that can cause serious system crashes. The friend who had a fatal disk crash, the other day, had little space left on their boot partition, C: drive for many people, and while Windows is supposed to warn you, it doesn't always, and it is easy to miss that warning - most dialogs time out, and an inadvertent press of the "Enter" key can make a dialog go away unobserved. When the disk is very fragmented and almost full, Windows has difficulty building and maintaining its "virtual memory" file, which can be very large, depending on the kind of software you use, and that can lead to what we call "unexpected behaviour". I've noticed that my favourite (free) virus software, AVG, now monitors some systems conditions, and will warn you when, for instance, your browser is using too much memory, something that can happen depending on the types of sites you access. Video, Flickr, stuff like that is very "resource intensive" - geek speak for using lots of memory and disk space, but almost every piece of software you use saves temporary files on your disk, and those don't always get cleaned up nicely.

In general, as I have been extolling, a PC with a Windows operating system needs a fair amount of TLC. You remember those annoying commercials that try to sell you antivirus software because your computer slows down, and you have "blue screens of death"? Most of those things are caused by lack of maintenance, fragmented overfilled hard drives, unnecessary software - that's one of my pet peeves. Many devices you can connect to your computer come with software, but what nobody tells you is that for half of these things you really don't need software. External disk drives, cameras, CD drives, you name it, you're best off making sure your computer is connected to the internet, Windows is set up to automatically look for and load drivers (you do that in "System" in your Control Panel), and then simply connect the device to the computer, and wait to see what happens - another pet peeve, it can take Windows a minute or two to react to a connected device or service, if you're impatient, like me, do your connect or install, and if you think nothing is happening, don't click anything, go get a cuppa instead. You'll eventually see dialogs, there is an icon on the bottom right you can click to see what's going on, and in many cases the PC will go and find and install the correct drivers, and then you can see what, if anything, you need. If it fails to find and load drivers, turn the thing off, unplug the device, boot the system up again, and follow the instructions that came with the device. Then, run a Windows update - your device probably came with software packaged in 1997, another reason why so many computers don't work well. Something I do frequently is go to the manufacturer's website when I get a new device, download the latest software from there, and forget about whatever came packaged with the thing. Update, update, update. And most laptops bought a while ago do not have the maximum 4 MB of memory they can have (if you're running a 64 bit version of Windows some computers will let you install 8 MB), installing more memory, not an expensive exercise, can improve matters a great deal. Last but not least: if your computer "grinds to a halt" immediately pushing the on/off button until the system shuts down completely, then restarting it, may be a good idea, any virus install activity in progress would be stopped in its tracks, that way, and the restart should clean up any oversize spill files. Should.

I don't know if you've watched the new Rock Center with Brian Williams - pretty good program, and I am saying this as an observer who thinks the way Comcast - NBC - Jiffylube (Steve Colbert's words) is taking over the world with mostly Today Show drivel and alcoholic beverages at 7am is little short of horrible - but that's the view from the Rainbow Room you see around Brian, not a clever screen assembly - "Rock Center" - Rockefeller Center, get it? Makes me homesick, at times, that view. And Brian is providing some real reporting instead of cooking shows, lawyers tottering on high heels and homecoming uniforms. And, of course, Paula Deen combating her Type 2 Diabetes on the Today Show by announcing she "may only eat half a sandwich" and "use fresh whipping cream with a sugar substitute". Suuuuure.. This makes as much sense as touting the Cadillac SRX with 308 horsepower as a "crossover" with good fuel economy (17/24) at a time when oil is at $111 a barrel. The Fiat 500 gets 30/38. Although I should add the issue isn't the cars, but the commute. People who really could work remotely are still spending hours a day in their cars, something we really do have the technology to get away from, if we wanted to.

The picture to the left was taken with the Blackberry Playbook, using the rear camera (click on it to see it at full resolution), it has a front (you) facing camera too. Nothing spectacular, it works, I have to confess I like the camera in my Nokia C7 best, short of grabbing my Nikon D90. My Amazon review of the Blackberry Playbook is here.

Sunday January 15, 2012 – Computer or Reader?

Truly annoying, when you switch from the notebook to the desktop, then add a tablet to the menagerie, and then find that the notebook's display is beginning to act up... I am hoping for some kind of miracle, but if that does not happen I may have to be bold and take the darn thing apart. Wish me luck. And yes, the picture below shows the first snow of the season, here in Seattle. I had hoped I'd be spared, this winter, but... Owell, that's where the four wheel drive comes in handy, it was actually the reason I bought this thing, though not intending it to be my only vehicle.

So, after moderate use of the Blackberry Playbook for two full days without charging, I found this morning that it had 64% battery left, which is pretty amazing - again, I have this thing on 24/7, and it is online to and via my Blackberry 9700 phone continuously. In other words, it is internet-and-Bluetooth connected all the time, no waiting when I pick it up to read mail or books, no booting, and it does not "lose its place". I don't charge it overnight, because I want to be able to read in bed, and fall asleep without having to worry about putting things in chargers, or where they are. One nice thing about this tablet is that it is a solid little black slab, nothing protrudes, no moving parts, it should essentially be able to slip my grasp, as books often do when I fall asleep, fall on the carpet, and suffer no harm. I mean, it's an e-thing, right? So - I don't charge the Playbook until morning, the idea being I want to charge it while I do email, ablutions, coffee, stuff. The late night reading is what I used to do with books, and want to be able to do with a tablet. So, interim verdict: this thing is better than expected. By a wide margin, even, and it sharing the 9700's internet is a total Godsend. Not so nice: it needs more charging power than the Blackberry phones do, and so has its own more powerful charger. I like being able to use one charger for different devices, and charge from PC or laptop USB ports, but while the Playbook will run on the "regular" charger, it won't actually top up its battery that way - it will on the Blackberry car adapter, BTW.

As Blackberry handset users know, the Blackberry specific plans most carriers offer include unlimited data via the Blackberry network, even overseas, which isn't called "data" on the carrier bill, and permit tethering. What's special about the Playbook is that it piggybacks on this, and you access the internet via the handset's existing data plan, transparent to the carrier. This data access uses the Bluetooth connection - "Blackberry Bridge" - and can tether that way, too (natively!), and at least my Bold 9700 is capable of taking and making calls and sending and receiving messages and email at the same time as the Playbook uses its internet. This combines with the Bold using a Bluetooth headset - all at the same time. I'll elaborate in my review, but to me this is a tablet with free internet (apart from its separate WiFi connection) provided you had the Blackberry phone with Blackberry plan already. For $199.99, that's pretty amazing - and you don't need to buy stuff from Amazon or Apple.

While there is an ereader included with the Playbook, I was particularly interested in reading free "epub" format books and publication - the Kobo Reader software that comes with the Playbook does not allow this - and as it turns out the online service bookworm.oreilly.com enables reading .epub freeware. Because the Playbook can be online all the time, either via WiFi or via the Blackberry handset, there isn't an issue with having to have an ebook downloaded on your tablet - I have to yet test how well or badly this works when on the road, but so far I am pleasurably reading a Philip K. Dick (lucky me, I am a scifi aficionado) novel using the Oreilly service, which is free.

The hard part in reviewing tablet computers and smartphones is that what really interests me isn't what I can do with them, I am more interested in "The Next Generation". Why? Well, that has always had my interest, ever since I discovered that the next generation does stuff with the things we invent that we never thought of. Putting technology in kids' reach is awesome, and I saw during a sabbatical at MIT's Media Lab what inquisitive minds do when you let them roam free. So I am looking at what I do with the tablet that it is really good at, but I am not "re-inventing the wheel", downloading and installing apps, and doing all that other good stuff that annoys the crap out of me when my staff does it, because it is such a waste of time. Twenty years ago, you could say it was a useful learning curve - but today, the average geek, or knowledgeable user, does this on various devices six times a year, and since there is little or no commonality between devices and people there is no increase in efficiency, it is largely a waste of time. Recent observations of the use teens make of laptops and smartphones have taught me we need to completely rethink the way we architect these things, as their priorities differ significantly from those of adults, and they have the simple philosophy that these things "just need to work". That means to that the geek factor is not a factor in the next generation of adults, and that the next generation of adults will end up using those devices that have endurance and auto-maintenance, it is a generation that isn't interested in maintaining anything. If you think about it, we're presenting them with all of this amazing technology, so they see no reason why that technology can't look after itself, and you know what? They're right. There is no technical reason why the devices cannot do the maintenance I do on them by themselves. There just isn't anybody willing to pay for developing that "missing bit".

Speaking of time wasting, have you noticed how many posters on Facebook and other places vacillate between copy-and-paste postings, and posting riddles? Why do some folks post completely cryptic pointers about something happening in their lives, but do not then explain what they are on about? That's gotta be Annoy One, closely followed by Annoy Two: people posting links without explaining why, or what they point to. The latter is a security issue, if nothing else, you can't count on the person having link detector software installed - part of most antivirus packages today, link detection software examines a browser posted link before you click it, and shuts down your browser window if the link is known malicious. I don't quite understand why someone assumes that their friends like the same things they do, anyway. I try to explain what I post and why I post it, but then I am a trained writer, and perhaps that is too much to expect of the average citizen.. can't be, can it? Perhaps riddles are a way of communicating, though not for me, I'll tell you.

Thursday January 12, 2012 – So what is (in) a review?

Before I continue to ramble on about my first experiences with a tablet - again, for those who hold me a gadget freak, I too have to move along with the times - I should point out part of the reason I am concentrating on my computing and communications environments is that I think this may well help my job hunt more than looking at anything else I could write about. I am not seeing anybody getting an exciting new job - with the possible exception of a colleague who was relocated from London to Hong Kong, and another who went from Thailand to Dubai - and for those who think it all happens in Asia, a very capable friend just moved his backside from Australia to Thailand, in search of gainful employ and lower bills. It is probably better in Europe and Asia than it is here, but that is predominantly because "their" governments aren't being impeded in pumping money into their economies, whereas ours seems to continually be "discouraged" from doing that. The politicians continually referring to job creation without ever telling us what exactly it is these workers are supposed to produce, should perhaps be taken out back and, uhm... but I had better not finish that sentence, I've had my fill of Feds to talk to in my years in D.C.

I see, at any rate, that folks on this coast, like Amazon and Google and Microsoft, are providing significant economic growth, unfortunately many of the jobs they create are overseas, because that is where many of their customers are, and to some extent where their experts live. The classical "export" model is no longer valid - just look at China, which basically told German Audi they could have part of the market, but they had to build in China to do it. They do, so everybody happy. The Indians, well aware of the value of their market, pretty much do the same thing, while they're buying up England. So, we are going to have to think of something else, especially since we spent so many years educating the people who are now, back in their home countries, outcompeting us.

I am getting on this rant because I see the Blackberry Playbook work very well, admittedly as an adjunct to the Blackberry handset, even though it is being rubbished by "reviewers" all over. It works how it - I assume - was intended to work, and if you consider there are millions and millions of Blackberrys around the globe - Blackberry Messenger, which runs solely on Blackberry hardware, is estimated to have more than fifty million active users - the concept of creating a tablet that will let the Blackberry tablet user access the internet using the data plan on their existing Blackberry handset - most Blackberry plans include data - is pretty ingenious. I tested that today, both over 3G and using UMA, and I must say it's pretty smooth. At the time of this writing, I am in my first endurance test of the Playbook - it's been going for 40 hours, and still have some battery left. For a multitasking colour device with both WiFi and Bluetooth, that's impressive. Oops - it just went: 40 hours and 45 minutes, continuously online through my BlackBerry Bold 9700.

Amazon fixed that with its monochrome Kindle, and for years had the only real solution at that price point, it really is that simple. And now, I see the Playbook approximate this, with good enough battery life, considering it has high end colour - but, of course, the Playbook really was never intended to cost $199, and I would not have bought it at $500, which I think is where Blackberry originally put it. Having said that, if Blackberry can manufacture these things for less, and sell them through carriers as an adjunct to Blackberry phones (that's where I bought mine for $199, Sprint), they may have a formula that works. It is, begging your pardon, the KISS formula: Keep It Simple, Stupid!. Seriously. If Apple is covering the top end of the market, followed by a few other high end tablets competing for shelf space, all of the rest will have to compete at the bottom end, at a spot long since occupied by Amazon.

The core issue with tablets, then, is the network, and that has really only been solved by Amazon and Blackberry in a way that does not make you pay extra for a data plan. The Kindles, for the most part, have a built-in networking capability in that the higher end kindles all can use WiFi, as well as a wireless GSM network at a flat rate price point that is built into the purchase price. Blackberry achieves the same result by pairing the Playbook with Blackberry handsets via Bluetooth (while being able to use WiFi as well). That effectively means that if you have a Blackberry smartphone with a Blackberry plan, which most carriers offer, you've essentially got free internet for the Playbook. Because that's the issue with the tablets - for those that can use wireless telephony networks, you end up paying out the nose for wireless data. With the exception, that is, of the aforementioned Kindles, and the Playbook.

Now I have to take you back to my original gripe, that about the way reviewers review new products, and the endless litany of reviewers who appear to know why a consumer would want a tablet computer, what they would need or want it for. Then to go off at an angle endlessly talking about apps and chat and video, as if those are the pre-ordained uses for tablets. I, dear reader, beg to differ, there really are only two or three things I can't do with a smartphone or a laptop, and if a tablet can give me those, it would serve a real ($199, mind) purpose for me. Come on back in a few days, and I'll tell you more.

Sunday January 8, 2012 – Tablets and What Not

I've ranted, previously, about standardization, and it occurred to me - again - this morning that that is the primary driver between my use of both services and gadgets - umm, tools ;). I am mentioning this not because "I know better", but because I look at tools with some 30 years of experience, and then try to establish where they fit best in my life. I used to be known as a gadget guy, but find that, today, there are huge numbers of gadgets that serve little real purpose, or worse, that waste huge amounts of your time for very little benefit. To give you an example, from what I see in both the US and overseas the vast majority of smartphone users just use three facilities of their devices: messaging/email, talk, and Facebook. I keep emphasizing to users their smartphones really are handheld computing devices, frustrated by the user's lack of desire to keep their systems up-to-date, but that isn't because I want the consumers to use all those other facilities the smartphone offers. I don't believe in the "one size fits all" philosophy, you see, and I very much doubt you're going to take calls on your phone at the same time as you're using it to guide you from A to B in your car. Call me simple.

For example, I like using the mapping and GPS functionality in my Nokia C7 smartphone, because Nokia offers downloadable maps (it owns one of the largest mapping companies on the planet) and so can provide GPS routing without my having to use data services. But: I have to turn off the GPS facility when I don't use it, because Facebook, without asking permission, collects my location from the GPS chipset in the phone. Most users may not care, or even know, but I am totally allergic to service providers collecting data for which there is no purpose that serves me - it is nice to see all those posts that state where the user was when they posted, but I prefer letting folks know myself where I am, or use that as a facility I can turn on when I am meeting someone, or a group of people. So, this multi-functionality is continually being used by providers in ways you never signed up for. And in my case, using different devices and services for different purposes lets me control that better. It is important to understand that we are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of invisible cyberthieves, and that if your Facebook persona says it was in Yakima, WA, five minutes ago, it is likely you weren't at home. And that if you "like" the Chase credit card app, it is likely you have one or more accounts with Chase. And by the time you find out Nigerian scammers got hold of your social security number - they're moving - a Nigerian scam team was arrested in Chennai, India, the other day, moved there since they've found out there is far less effective internet monitoring in India, this after many of them were arrested and jailed in Amsterdam and London over the past couple of years - you're already in a world of trouble.

While I felt I really did not have a need for a tablet, I belatedly realized the Blackberry Playbook was on sale (the 16 Gb version, that is) for $199.99, and because my mainstay smartphone is a Blackberry, I could get significant benefits from the Playbook that others can't give me. You see, the Playbook uses something called the Blackberry Bridge to interconnect the two devices, and to let the tablet use the handset's wireless internet capability - additionally, T-Mobile's UMA service lets me run the pair over a shared WiFi link, only reverting to 3G where no WiFi is available, meaning I am good at Barnes & Noble, Starbucks, McDonalds, and many airports. Better still, the Blackberry handset is capable of serving the Playbook (or another computer) while still usable as a phone and messaging device, fully multitasking capable. So for the money, I end up with a very capable tablet I can write about, a better understanding of the tablet phenomenon, and a possible part-time replacement for my laptop, which I still lug about with me every day. As I write this, I read Blackberry will provide a stunning update to the Playbook operating system in a few days, that's cool, and I am running my first tests - installation, where the device failed miserably due to a complete lack of instructions, and battery life, of the connected devices, that'll take two or three days to establish. Pretty it is, it feels good, I'll let you know how I get on - it lives by my bedside, or in my backpack, no point in not having it up and running 24/7. So far, at the time of this writing, after its initial charge, it has been running for 40(!) hours, online (Bluetooth) to my Blackberry Bold. That would take it to almost two days, and though it is reaching the end of its battery life, that is a lot better than what I've read in the reviews.

At this point in my tale, I have to sidetrack you a bit, by asking: what's important to you? I've recently seen two teens struggle with smartphones whose batteries don't last a full day, in their case defeating the primary objective: keeping in touch with your parents when they or you are out. Apart from the other nice stuff a teen can do with a smartphone, much of which eats battery power. I see huge numbers of reviews where the battery life is kind of a side concern, real, but the Android version or the app availability are generally mentioned first, by the reviewers. I know it is boring, but I have to take you back to 9/11: if you're stuck in Manhattan, or Arlington, on that very long day, you want your cellphone to work. To put it in different terms: fuck Facebook, it isn't that important. Sure, you can reach other people using Facebook - but: they can't reach you. I was able to reach my staff, stuck in New York City from D.C., where I got stuck, that day, and that day, that was what mattered.

So: never mind the fancy stuff, prioritize your needs first - what is it in a mobile phone or tablet or laptop you can't afford to have break? That, by the way, is risk management 101 - if they drop a 110 story building on your switching center, what do you need first? And what second? And, apart from the obvious, I pointed out to the teen's Dad, a few months ago, that getting them a smartphone early on in life is an educational necessity - learning to operate a handheld computing device / communicator is, today, a necessary life skill, and in many jobs and professions is a must-have skill, even if only to be able to keep up with your students, interns, or staff. This isn't a luxury, it isn't a fad - I see job openings, out there, that require iOS or Android hands-on experience. Rupert Murdoch doesn't handle his own devices and computers - now you know how he screwed up MySpace - he had no idea what he was doing. You can't manage things you do not use and understand. Hence, in a roundabout way, my buying a tablet, something I can't really afford, at the moment, but the deal is good and I have to sit there and use one and understand what it is and what it does. Hands On.

Thursday January 5, 2012 – Recycle, Waste, and "Tablets"

I've been looking at bamboo for a while now - it is an extremely hard wood, it is one of the fastest growing woods on Earth, that makes it cheap, and it is extremely strong - in both India and China, scaffolding for quite tall buildings is made of bamboo, whose tensile strength exceeds that of steel. In the picture you see a bamboo cutting board, made of laminated bamboo, one I picked up at Carrefour in Beijing for $2.38, and bamboo chopsticks, from a Costco Business Center, 100 pairs of disposable chopsticks for $2.59. It occurs to me that one way of "being green" is to make sure you get all of your wood needs out of bamboo - flooring, furniture, you name it, it's available in bamboo. Think about it.

Back in the computer world, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) protects particularly your desktop from all kinds of mischief - if done well, the UPS turns your desktop PC into a good approximation of a laptop with battery, one that shuts down properly when the power fails, saving your files. I tend to, unapologetically, advocate for APC UPS devices because their drivers are integrated in Microsoft Windows - connect one to your Windows Vista or 7 PC or laptop, and the operating system will recognize the device, load drivers and enable you to set the battery parameters you want - time to shutdown, types of alarms you want, all conveniently grouped under the power icon in your taskbar. For most other UPS's you have to load software, APC's devices are automatically integrated - and before you comment, APC pays Microsoft for that privilege, as any manufacturer can do.

One of the other important issues that go with PCs is cooling. I've noticed, over the years, that vast rivers of users will park their laptops in their lap, on a bed, settee, lots of surfaces that prevent cooling air from being sucked into the devices. We have not, so far, been able to manufacture chips and chipsets that do not produce significant amounts of heat, and between the aforementioned impeded cooling, and the dust that eventually accumulates inside the PC, a percentage of computer failures are caused by overheating, often without the owner or user realizing it. I would go so far as to suggest cooling is a major flaw in the design of, specifically, laptops, which ought to have the ability to switch their entire forced air cooling system to different vents, it can't be that hard to design a system that will detect a blocked vent, and activate one that isn't. Be aware, as well, that an overheating PC or laptop will slow itself down - that's not wrong, that's how modern computers are designed, slow down the processor and bus speed and the machine will generate less heat. But most importantly, try not to use your laptop on a soft surface, and vacuum all of its vents, once a month or so.

Although I haven't owned or used a tablet computer, I've been consistently negative about them, similar to when I rubbished netbooks, a couple of years ago. In the netbook environment, I was correct - mostly outfitted with cheap Intel Atom processors, netbooks weren't able to be used for "serious" computing. I bought one cheaply in Beijing, and found that running multiple video and audio heavy applications, like Skype on standby while processing my high resolution Nikon D90 video and doing processor intensive Microsoft Office "stuff", just does not work on a netbook. My niece is happy with the thing, but her requirements aren't that high, and in her case the netbook was a cheap replacement for her old laptop, whose older version of Micorosft Windows couldn't run everything she wanted it to.

So I ended up having to run to the store and buying a usable replacement, having sold my original splendid ASUS to a friend in Asia who couldn't get this model over there, HP's Pavilion dv4-2145dx laptop, which has a 64 bit motherboard, the ability to run Microsoft Windows 64, and be expanded to make optimal use of that operating system ($524.99 at Best Buy in June of 2010). 32 bit Windows can only use a little under 4Gb of memory, the "old" Windows standard, and that is, today, not really sufficient memory for what we do with our PCs. The HP (and many others) will take 8 Gb of memory, and between that and the Windows 7 Professional 64 bit operating system upgrade I installed (8 Gb of RAM: $138.96, the anytime upgrade to Windows 7 Professional: $89.99, my time and expertise: priceless ;), this notebook flies, and I have had some pleasant responses to it being white, when most of my colleagues run around with boring grey and black laptops.

But I digress. I wanted to tell you that tablet computers are, like netbooks, nice "adjuncts" to either notebooks or desktop PCs, but they do not replace anything. They're workable for people who have limited computing requirements, say a high school student who has no computing needs beyond Facebooking and watching cartoons. Then I noticed that Blackberry has put its Playbook tablet on sale, and while that wouldn't normally have set my juices flowing, as I own a BlackBerry Bold 9780 smartphone, with which the Playbook allegedly seamlessly integrates, I decided that a $199 price point was too good to pass up. I've looked at Amazon's Kindle with desire, I must admit, and that costs the same money, but the Kindle is intended to buy ebooks from Amazon, and I am not, at this point, in a place where I can afford to buy books - besides, Kindle has plenty of apps for platforms I already own. So I ordered a $199 Blackberry Playbook, and will be reporting on my experiences, and particularly, on what I find it is I can do with this gadget (sorry, but that is how I look at it) that I can't do with other gear. One thing that does excite me is that I'll have high speed internet on the Playbook wherever I go, as it does WiFi, but can use the 9700's internet as well. I do that today, using a Bluetooth connection from my laptop, but that is finicky and not every consumer will know how to set that up, it doesn't "come in the box", so to speak. With the Playbook, it does, and that is always cool.

Sunday January 1, 2012 – And here is your First Wish of the Year ;)

You will agree that more and more of the everyday information you deal with is in your PC, be that a personal laptop or a "family PC". First of all, the concept of a personal computer did eventually come to pass, but it is high time that the concept of the "family PC", usually something shared by husband and wife, but sometimes even by Mum, Dad and the kids, is retired. For one thing, it is vital that children learn to set up, maintain and configure their own PCs. "Daddy knows best" and "let me help you with that" are no longer reasonable approximations of teaching life skills, and Daddy fixing Mummy's computer is, in 2011, a joke, obsolete roleplay from a bygone era. But then I have always insisted my wives hung on to their maiden name and changed their own oil, we no longer live in a society where one partner is serf to the other. It is pervasive, and I find myself doing it, telling someone "let me take care of that for you" when I should say "let me talk you through doing that", it is so much faster to do it yourself when you're the "expert" - but that isn't how you teach, and teaching is what we are supposed to be doing, not "helping". What I am saying is this: if you promote that all members of the family accept responsibility for maintaining their own gear, half the mishaps you see today simply wouldn't happen. I've noticed, as well, that in many old style relationships the "family PC" is part of a "command and control" behavioural pattern - if that's not a "negotiated position" in your house, you can register your disagreement by moving your software and your data to your own laptop. Simple as that. I don't mean to go morbid on you, but having been through 9/11 "close up", as it were, through a potentially deadly car accident, and two bouts of cancer, I can only emphasize that you can't take your partner's presence for granted, and should make sure you can "take over" when you least expect it, and have the family files on a centrally accessible server.

As I said: much of what you need to live is in your PC, email, tax receipts, coursework, you name it, and so you need to make sure you have access to that at all times. That is relatively easy, if you simply make sure you have a separate disk drive, powered from the PC, that is dedicated solely to backing up your computer, and you set that to run before you go to bed, as a matter of routine, you can really never lose files or information. For $60 or $70, you can have that complete peace of mind, just remember that the lower end versions of Microsoft Windows do not include backup software, so you should buy that, needn't cost the Earth. AISBackup, the English package I have used for some twenty years, costs $37.50 for two PCs, gets updated and upgraded for free, and will back up from anything to anything - it even handles Blu-Ray writable disks now. AIS has been around for yonks, has good and quick customer support, and what I particularly like is that it stores the backup as ZIP archives - in an emergency you can find the file you need without installing the software or restoring a backup, under practically any operating system. There are other things a computer should be doing overnight, when you are not using it, night time is maintenance time, I'll get to those in another posting. Yes, the computer uses power when it runs overnight, but you can set it up so that is minimal. Yes, it's easy, well documented, and you can make the effort and learn how to do that. The bonus is that you can now do it for Grandma, as well, and bedazzle her, so she will forever listen to you.

That "centrally accessible server" seems to most people related to business computing, but it isn't. I've always had a file server in my network, think of it as your central filing cabinet, and that can simply be an older PC one of you used in the past, outfitted with a larger disk, a new or upgraded operating system, with a copy of the software you most use (think Quicken for finances, Open Office as a free Microsoft Office equivalent, free XNView for graphics and video, etc.). Updating an old PC, which needn't cost more than a couple hundred dollars, can be a valuable training exercise, everything you could possible need in terms of how-to is out on the internet, you get to vacuum the insides of your PC, the installation of a new hard disk takes maybe twenty minutes, a Windows upgrade is generally cheap on Amazon, if you want to get fancy you can add more memory, and before you know it you have a whole new system. After all, we learn all our lives, and this is a useful skill for you and your kids. Once it is re-set up, you can copy those files you all need to it, whenever you've updated, all you need to do is set up a directory on the server, then "share" that in the file manager, that's always an option when you right-click on its name. Once shared, you can see and "mount" it on your personal system, laptop, or whatever, get used to it and copy those files you need to share to it with a simple drag-and-drop.

Remember, as well, that your Smartphone is a handheld computer, that it comes with a cable and software, and that you can back it up to your PC, and that it comes with an operating system that needs to be maintained, and updated, on a regular basis. My Nokia C7 has had three rounds of bug fixes and updates since I got it, in May, and now runs better, smoother, handles WiFi more reliably, and has three times the battery life it did when I first received it from T-Mobile.

Yep, that is Microsoft's venerable Flight Simulator, up there in the picture, I bought that years ago and it sat on the shelf. Finally decided to install it, and I use it to rekindle my love for flying, and to help me familiarize myself with the West Coast - it's got the most extensive database of the USA you can imagine, short of Google Maps.. Again, readers, my best wishes for 2012, and spare a thought for those unemployed, let's find a way to start making things the Chinese need.

Thursday December 29, 2011 - Broken PCs

I tend to not pay much attention to failing computers, these days, as experience dictates that most of the time, they fail early on, and if they don't, they're fine for years, with a bit of maintenance. Even with disks, I've really only had one significant failure, these past few years, with an Iomega RAID device, where one drive in the array failed right out of the box. Hard to diagnose, that, but that's another story. But recently, friend P. had a drive failure, in the middle of ordinary use of her Dell Latitude, and while her husband and I managed to recover most of her files, some were lost forever, and an attempt to put a new copy of Windows 7 on the disk, after a reformat, failed with a "bad media" flag. That meant the drive truly had developed what we call a "hard fault", something went wrong with the hardware or the electronics, most likely the former.

And that brings me to a long list of do's and dont's, and to the recommendation you do what I do, every day: back up. Incremental backups take minutes, but you have to do the full backup, which takes hours, when that is hardest, when the PC is new, you've installed it, and instead of playing with it, you now get to wait until it has backed up. I did that on the Vaio, just now, as it has been completely reinstalled - 70 gigabytes onto an external USB disk, it took from 4pm until the next morning 8am. But it is vital - this time, the backup sits on a bootable hard disk, from which the Vaio can be restarted, and fully recovered, in one operation. Teehee.

I'll try and give some pointers to "safe computing", over the next few blog entries here, but most importantly, whatever you do or don't do, BACK UP. It is just as important as virus protection. I've just set up a backup for the Vaio VGC-JS110J desktop PC I have begun using again, a desktop flat panel PC I bought at BJ's back in 2005 for $733.26, a couple hundred bucks off. These days, you can buy an external 320 GB USBdrive for $70, and using the AIS backup software I bought (some fifteen years ago!), you can set a backup routine that will turn your external drive into a bootable device that can back up and recover your entire PC in one operation. If you can set up your computer so it will boot from an external device, you can do this. I have plenty of experience with people not listening to me, so much so that I tend to not dispense too much "wisdom", as folks think it won't happen to them. The only reason I am writing about it today is that I actually watched the person's laptop bomb, and worked on trying to recover her data (which, admittedly, was at least partially backed up).

It is like the thumb drives and memory cards - they have limited retention capability, and if you knew how much crap is done to your information in a disk drive, I swear to God you'd never use one again. I've lost three or four drives over my career, the latest a Crucial 64Mb solid state drive which went South, end of story, one of those springs a leak there is no recovery you can do, like with elektro-mechanical devices. Scary.

As if the Grinch is looking over my shoulder I am presented with two of the best examples of file loss you can imagine. In one, an older Western Digital 2.5 inch 150 Gb hard drive that lives in a Kingston caddy - that came with the drive copy kit a solid state drive came with - fails to mount on the system it was created with, and I have no idea why. It had just received the full backup of my Sony Vaio desktop, so I had to dive into my stores, get another disk (this time a 750 Gb Seagate external, see the picture top right) to redo the backup. I'll try a bit later if I can get the Kingston device talking again, on another computer, I don't necessarily know the drive is bad, it could be Windows Vista "lost" the drive marker, something that does happen. And then, my Quicken financial file will no longer accept an online update. Here, too, that's something that very rarely happens, but often enough that I remembered that just restoring the latest backup of that file might fix the problem. Tried that, and it worked, didn't even have to use the database recovery tool that comes with Quicken.

Even though I still have not found employment, I've rented a place in the Seattle suburbs, and continue to be amazed at the support I get from the most unlikely of friends, which, I suppose, goes to show how little I understand those around me. Setting up my digs, I have canned the applications for a few days, moving my gear over Christmas, and now setting up a second PC so I can make sure I can work and have television - I left the Tivo and my large flat panel with my friends, as I have little use for them at the present, and the Vaio with an external tuner with Microsoft Windows' Medica Center gives me the same DVR capabilities the Tivo has. Forgot about the TV recording Windows can do, rather special, and the program information Microsoft garners lets me pre-program this device. The picture to the left shows you where we are - now that most of us have CFL lighting, and many have LED bulbs, still expensive @ $15 and up per fitting, here is where we should have been years ago: Wal-Mart sells a 3-pack of 10 watt CFLs (that's 40 watts in normal-speak) for a buck twenty-eight - yes, you heard it here first, US$ 1.28 for three. Now poor people can save money, too.

Sunday December 25, 2011 - Merry Christmas

Of course, I wish all of you the best for the holidays, especially D., who is in hospital, very unexpectedly, with something serious, Godspeed, here's thinking of you. Late Breaking News: they stuffed him full of antibiotics, and he came home Chistmas morning. Phew.

The recent articles in the Telegraph and other media about the “uptake” difference between the iPhone and Android devices is interesting, in that it looks like the iPhone is an “Anglo” device – doing the best in America, England and Australia, but lagging behind Android in other markets – which, for the most part, aren't native English speaking countries. That makes perfectly good sense to me, and would be an important phenomenon to study, if there indeed is a cultural factor in the interface design. I've always felt there was a cultural factor, but this would be overwhelming proof, and we'd then have to try and figure out how that works, I don't know that anybody knows that for certain – the computer industry, as far as hand held devices are concerned, is simply too young for anybody to have done statistically valid research. Fascinating.

So, Christmas has just about been and gone – as I spent the holiday moving, once again, it kind of passed me by, other than that I've seen how much of an effort those around me make of it. Some of it did include me, must say, P. and M. had a special pre-Christmas Christmas, something M. told me they traditionally do, but I like to think they moved it up a day so I could participate. 't Was fun and sweet, thank you guys, you're very special to me, you and your soon-to-be-adults children. Lord, does growing up go fast – although, if you're the parents I should think it's slower than it is in my perception. It seems like only yesterday the toddlers rolled off the plane..

So I spent much of today setting up my new home office, had to “rekindle” my Sony Vaio desktop, reinstalled with an “Ultimate” version of Windows Vista in June, before I moved coasts, then a month later tried to set it up as a Windows 2008 server, which failed, and then went back to the Vista stuff. That meant my software and customization were all gone, so that's what I spent the past couple of days doing, that and the installation of the Avertv TV Tuner Kit for Windows, which lets me watch cable on the Vaio while I work, since I currently don't have enough room to use my 50" Samsung plasma screen.

All in all, thanks to help from friends and some fortuitous circumstances (the Totem Lake storage unit rental place lent me a truck for four hours, which let me move my stuff up in one load), the move was fairly painless, but then I did not have to come 3,000 miles this time. I am getting pretty well acquainted with the Seattle area, too, and its suburbia, plastered all over the Cascades foothills, mountain passes galore, and many cars are driving around on spiked tires already, while everybody else has the snow chains ready (or, like me, a four wheel drive SUV).

Strange Christmas, on a Sunday of all things, slightly discombobulated as there are a few things I need and can't get until tomorrow. I've decided to make that a shopping day, not because of the sales, but simply because I need groceries now that I have to prepare my own food - although my Thai landlady, having discovered I've lived in Asia, and love Asian food, is showering me with Thai goodies. Can't complain there.. as I mentioned before now, the Seattle area has a huge Asian population, I sometimes think I am walking through Beijing suburbs, rather than America, despite what goes on in the rest of the country, this may well be, together with LA, the most diverse area in the nation.

Tuesday December 20, 2011 - Toys R America

I mostly read my news from news.google.com, which does not clutter up and slow down my computer with huge advertising blocks, that pop over, pop under and pop through the articles, and push unsolicited video - how about making them pay for the bandwidth they use? CNN has, of late, become virtually unusable, I now see CNN front pages that have two headlines in their initial view, the rest is advertising, and a banner proclaiming I am accessing from abroad - which is completely impossible for their server to conclude, as it can see I am on a U.S. network. By the way, the button to the right of this text leads to the Federal Government, not to an insurance scam - although some Republicans do think it is.

Now when you use the Google news, you can change locale - I read the U.S. version, the U.K. version, then switch to The Netherlands - but here isn't an immediate choice for the news subjects you want to read about. By that I mean that the American, English and Dutch version (or the Zimbabwean, for that matter) all have international news, the choice is one of language. I am wondering if there shouldn't be a choice for just news from as well as about England, or Germany, in the local language, and then a World version in English, German, French, Dutch, what have you. The way it is currently set up you get to the same new item in many languages or localizations, which isn't really effective. I know I can set up Google to give me what I want, but I refuse to provide Google with marketing information, so I do not log in for reading news pages, and I religiously log out of everything I log into, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, whatever, when I am done with that page.

My other favourite news sources, as far as the English language is concerned: news.bbc.co.uk, telegraph.co.uk, smh.com.au - good reporting, no popover or other weird ad mechanisms, and no subscription format. The Times, Financial Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal are mostly subscription now, and thus best avoided. I am not under the impression any of them, with the possible exception of the Wall Street Journal, are doing very well out of their subscription adoption, and the subsequent drop in readership, and thus advertising sales.

Take a look at recent research about the use of LED lighting in public housing - that really is excellent news, especially for the more Northern locales with short winter days. We've known for a long time good lighting promotes safety and security, but the new technology appears to be on track to provide a better quality of life as well as savings. For the moment, LED is still pretty expensive, even if the cost is coming down bit-by-bit, the article does not provide cost/benefit examples, and I just have a hard time believing LEDs will last "up to 100,000 hours". 100,000 hours is 12 years, running 24/7, they have not been around that long. LEDs for normal light fixtures run pretty hot, and I would really like to see a fitting that can take that heat for 12 years, 24/7, this is currently carefully not being talked about. There are, and this is important to noisily point out to the manufacturers, few commercial fittings that are rated for 100,000 hours continuous use, so..

Do you get the same feeling about the "Xmas Do-Goodery" I do? Yes, it is nice, toys for the kids for Christmas, but the number of displaced and homeless people has grown to the point it is, frankly, a bit obscene to worry about gifts. But then, what do I know, the longer term solutions just aren't exactly around the corner. I don't know, it is easy to criticize, some folks are doing something, even if only in the short term. It just bothers me that 80% or more of the dollars they spend on toys go to China and places. May they should get Groupon vouchers so they can eat at Denny's for free for three months, or sumtin', benefit the local economy. In our capitalist environment, companies and employers will need to start taking risks and expanding their product lines and create growth and a future for all these folks.

Last August, my two year old fancy Braun shaver, which I bought in Europe, suddenly wouldn't charge. I ran out and bought the Remington F4790, needing a quick cheap replacement. I have since managed to bring the Braun back to life - it turns out the thing isn't waterproof any more, and for as long as I don't wet clean it, it works fine - but much to my surprise, the Remington is a much better shaver than the Braun ever was, and with some time spent shaving, I get my face "smooth as a gravy sandwich", as they'd say Down Under.

The F4790 is large, not to say ugly, but fits in the hand well, and as it has nickel-cadmium (the old technology) rechargeable batteries, it has more power available than a smaller shaver with lithium-ion batteries would do, I have recharged it only once since buying it at a local WalMart! Nickel-cadmium technology does suffer from the memory effect, so you're best off running the shaver down until it dies, and then fully recharging it overnight, at least periodically. But I am well pleased, and haven't used the Braun since, except for when the Remington is charging. Note that I have light beard and moustache growth, I am not in the lawnmower/weedwacker category.

Friday December 16, 2011 - Diaspora

It has become a routine for me, over the years, going to Starbucks, using T-Mobile UMA on their internet (I have an account subscription to Hotspot services), then using Bluetooth with my laptop to use the internet. It is slower than using their WiFi direct, but encrypted and secure, I don't have to worry about anybody hacking into my laptop, which is, on an open WiFi connection, the easiest thing to do. WiFi off.. Windows 7 does have some kind of "secure" mode, on the wireless interface, but I don't think an awful lot of people use that, or even understand what the various options are. Even setting up the Windows 7 dialer so it'll go to the Blackberry via Bluetooth, bypassing the Blackberry Desktop Manager, isn't that simple. All of these things need to be addressed and resolved before we can have a secure internet, and as nobody wants to pay for security - well, nobody, but few people see it as worth their money -, same as with voice dialing and other "fancy stuff", there aren't any real solutions that do not involve government stepping in.

Dutch KPN stated it a couple of days ago - currently, cellular subscription revenues must exceed 40 Euros a month to be profitable. That likely is a good number - it'll be slightly lower in larger markets, Holland only has 16 million inhabitants, but the ballpark, which takes into account the massive investments necessary to accomodate, particularly, smartphones, is likely right. I've said it before - we've created a monster, competing on advanced capabilities, using a price point that has killed most smaller carriers, and may end up even killing large ones. AT&T Wireless may well see a real need to merge with T-Mobile USA, it isn't just a marriage of convenience, it may be the only way they can compete with Verizon Wireless on price. And that, from an investment perspective, may not be a good business model.

To some extent, it is a model that Apple created, at least in the computer industry - but while many companies try and compete with Apple on the equipment front, you really can't outdo a manufacturer that maintains a large profit margin and "guru" status. I would not try to "out-Apple" Apple. Perhaps it is possible, after all, diamonds sell like hotcakes, and Tiffany's is doing very well, but I doubt many have the expertise to operate at that high end. I certainly do not (but don't let that stop you from hiring me, though, always happy to learn new tricks).

It remains very much a question to me how much of this advanced technology serves a real purpose. While live TV broadcasts have made their way into the mobile environment, the cable has 3D channels and 3D broadcasts, even though "true" 3D screens aren't out in the real world yet. So we've spent untold sums of money creating both wireless and wired bandwidth for which no real purpose, other than entertainment, exists. In the past, the internet facilitated education, consumer information access, and functionalities such as online banking and communication services for families. We've progressed from there to have high resolution video conferencing with your aunties, online banking with interactive video advertising, online gaming with thousands of participants, and remote learning with high resolution graphics.

None of those last few examples serve a useful purpose, if you use the model of "useful" in which a consumer will pay for a service - gaming, probably, the odd man out, gamers will pay for things, much like cable viewers pay for premium channels.

So, Google released its 2011 rankings, read about it in the Daily Mail - I have just one question: why do people do searches on "iPhone" and "Justin Bieber" and "Casey Anthony"? I can see how you would do a search on the iPhone if you're planning on buying one - maybe even a search on Bieber if you want to buy his music, but that does not, methinks, explain the very large volume of searches. I tend to go to (amongst others) news.google.com, and read the news, and at that point stuff about Bieber and the Apple gear will come up if there is something being reported. But I guess others watch Bieber on the Today Show, and then go to the Internet? I just don't know, and I also don't know why anybody would do their Googly and then read about this, or watch it, for any length of time. But, I suppose I am a news hound, I want to know what's happening, but not necessarily what Amanda Knox was wearing in Court. For the heck of it, I'll do some of these searches, see what that throws up. Never do otherwise, swear to G*d..

Why am I asking this? The mechanism of wanting huge amounts of information about my idol or my favourite toy is completely alien to me - I'll happily accept I am the odd man out on that score - and so what drives people to do these searches isn't something I can "feel". Understanding, empirically, theoretically, sure, but it isn't something I do. I suppose I am not helped by being a database expert - I was using databases in the lab before the internet and Google were invented, worked on building them for "the phone company". So, when Google came around, I used it just as I would have done any database, and I guess I still do that today. I find, anyway, that the best way to find out about something is to try it out, buy it if you can - arguably, of course, you can't try out or buy the Bieber boy, or, more appropriately in my case, Doutzen Kroes. But then I like Friesians, even have some in the family, I discovered in 2009. I mean, if I wanted Doutzen's picture, I'd take one myself. But then, her mum visits my cousin's shop, now and again, so...

Sunday December 11, 2011 - Jobs and Robbers

Behind me, as I sip a coffee at Starbucks, I can hear what sounds like a jazz band setting up, better go and check that out. Quite a bit of community stuff going on at this shopping center, not used to that - of course, I don't spend much "time at the mall", so there may well be things going on, here and there, I just don't know about. The music turns out to come from the Interlake High School Jazz Ensemble I, quite good, especially for a high school band. The Battle Hymn of the Republic they're performing will forever remind me of the post-9/11 service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., when it was the first music to be performed, and I remember looking at George W. Bush and thinking "Uh-oh, we're going to war..". We were, indeed, are still, amazingly, out there.

Going to a Wipro Technologies "open house" on Saturday, I found some 100 or so folks (mostly programmers) already there, and even though I had done an RSVP, as requested, many clearly had not, so the works got cluttered up to the point where the recruiters couldn't possibly spend more than minimum time with anyone. Wipro, a mammoth Indian outsourcer, is new to the Seattle area, as I understand it, they've been advertising all over for a few months now. Is it a trend - are the outsourcers now expanding into their original markets? They're still talking about "fresher's" in their mailings, Indian English for recent graduates, and not terminology an American job applicant will understand, so they probably need some back office resources to be fully successful. OTOH, Indian and Pakistani software developers will probably flock to their doors - 70% of applicants were South Asian, this morning - as they're well acquainted with Wipro.

So, I had the 30 second face-to-face, they said they'd like to call me back in, I left my card. Probably need to follow up on that one....

I noticed this morning, as I am wading through Amazon's cloud application, how Wired Magazine declares on its front cover that "Amazon Owns the Internet".. While that is a bit loud, I am certainly discovering that e-WalMart Amazon is branching out places I would not have expected it to go - certainly important as I am preparing to interview with them. You'll find some more on the subject below, in my November 28 blog entry, check out their cloud here. It is especially important as so many web information providers - Twitter the latest - attempt to capitalize on their "ubiquity", and to a large extent find that they can't, or, at least, how hard it is. Google seems to be the odd man out, they have a clear strategy where folks happily pay them for advertising, because you and I come to Google to find things, and Google gives us choices. But Facebook, Twitter, none of those vehicles is where people naturally come to find information - people are, if you will, purpose driven, it is extraordinarily difficult to make them do things they did not come to you to do. Try as they might, that little search box at the top of your browser, while giving access to many search engines, is used with Google much of the time. Even Bing - the latest I saw was that Bing, on the Xbox, will let you find, and run, movies. That's a far cry from being a search engine, more of a functionality thing. Nothing wrong with that, quite possible that voice commanding Bing to show you a show or movie is a valid and successful function, but not a "natural" search engine function. We're all looking for that gap in the market, but few find it..

What are Amazon's strokes of genius? The Kindle, which is not only cheap, but in various forms can pull down its content using both 3G and WiFi, without your having to worry about a network or mobile subscription, worldwide, and the huge cloud network Amazon built so it could run its own webservers, again, worldwide, and serve its books to the owners of Kindles and the users of Kindle software. Beyond that came Amazon's streaming video, you pick the platform, and then it built out the cloud network it needed anyway, and started marketing that. IOW - Amazon sells technological solutions, and sells whatever it builds to serve the solutions customers to yet other users. But I can equally, using my American Amazon account, buy DVDs from Amazon UK or Amazon Germany, and they get here for little money in three or four days. That is end-to-end spectacular.

In an interesting development, British Vodafone (mobile telephony mammoth, half owner of Verizon Wireless) have hired Michael Joseph, on the basis of the M-Pesa mobile payments system he pioneered in Africa - by itself, that system is responsible for payments to the value of 20 percent of Kenya's gross domestic product. The link above goes to Western Union's M-Pesa page, where you can transfer money to M-Pesa users - links at that page go to the three (at the time of this writing) carriers that offer the service, in Kenya and the Philippines. Nice to see this is a bandwagen that Western Union jumped on.. What's special about M-Pesa? It uses a network of local shops to "charge" phones with payment values, stimulating the local economy with "new technology" revenues, and it uses cheap, regular, non-smart handsets, no need for smartphones, which most cellphone users do not have, even in the West, I can't point that out often enough. As far as I am aware, any old GSM phone will work, and M-Pesa has grown to the point that it is a proven concept, and is easily transplantable into other third world countries - that's "emerging economies" to you. Where will they take it? Rural India, rural China would be fantastic places to go with this. Vodafone, of course, has a worldwide presence, something our American carriers decided not to get involved with - I remember, I was out there, my employers eventually sold all they owned in Asia, as did other carriers. Yes, in the growth markets.

If you read up on the wireless world, the Western markets have largely matured, there's only the push to get replacement handsets to the consumers, replacing "feature phones" with smartphones, and that, to me, is not a hugely successful business model, as it drives the prices of smartphones down, and thus the revenues of the manufacturers, as we can see with RIM and Nokia. Yet, Nokia has it right, in my book, it is pumping cheap phones into emerging markets, and that has to be where the remaining revenues are. If it can reclaim some high end profitable territory in its tie-up with Microsoft remains to be seen, but Nokia certainly have the expertise and technological prowess to make Windows Phone work better than before. That's still going to be an "Apple" model, though - expensive, niche.

Wednesday December 7, 2011 - Hiring isn't easy - even a Prez or PM

A recruiter told me that one of the carriers put out a consulting requirement, the other day, that was met with 294 agency applications within four hours, when they closed it. A senior executive told me that for a posted sales manager position, he got applications from plumbers on the other coast.

It occurs to me this may not be just the recession at work. In the days before public facing HR systems, there were tiers of recruiters and managers that weeded out applicants, as their resumes, which themselves took more work to create, wended their way up to the decision makers. But today, you can create your applicant login, make stuff up, and just apply wherever you want. And I get the impression a lot of people, both applicants and recruiters, are doing exactly that. Doing nobody any favours, of course, but I sense there is a strong tendency to do "I-don't-qualify-but-what-the-heck" applications - many folks who have never been hiring managers don't really understand the amount of work and expertise involved in selecting candidates for your company.

I know jobsite software attempts to weed out the pretenders, but from what I hear I get the impression that does not work very well. It depends a bit on how much people are willing to "gild the lily", something I don't really have a clear view on. My hiring processes, the past fifteen years, have always been shielded by Human Resources folks, who did the heavy lifting. And I never second guessed them, as my work was in a very regulated part of the business, where the primary concern was 24/7 operations, which comes first in regulated customer facing networks, some folks don't - can't - fit into that. On top of that, there are clearly so many people applying that in the end, when a human needs to assess the applications, the job becomes impossible. And from my own experience, it is very hard to assess from what folks write what they're like, even if the process is computerized and well structured.

But even if you get it right - I once hired a very capable programmer, and then the person ended up setting up a hidden porn server inside my Operations Center, something accidentally discovered by a very capable system administrator and an equally astute "tight ship" webmaster. These are things you cannot "prescreen" or predict - and, stupidly, his skills were such he was more than able to hide things in plain sight. That is very very useful if you can find ways to make it benefit your employer, right? People can be weird. And I benefited from my staff reporting this to me - that does not always happen either. All I am saying is that I had no tools to perceive his risk, and even if I had been able to "look into his brain", how would I have established this was a real risk? I don't think that way, don't conjecture, but one is then dependent on one's other staff to "do the right thing". Those, I had hand picked too, so I guess, on balance, I had things under good control - and, of course, I had correctly assessed the miscreant's technical skills.

Reading up, again, on search engine optimization, or SEO, after my previous entry on Facebook's attempts at selling advertising, the world seems to be trending away from search engine reliance for online sales. A large part of the problem, one I have never seen addressed, is that the consumer isn't trained to use search engines, and all too often uses a personal vernacular, or a foreign based type of English, to find information. Typos are common too. Search engine algorithms, meanwhile seem to be mostly created by native American English speakers - go to google.com and try this out for yourself. Search on "coming into season" and you'll find English English sources (which may stretch as far as India, Australia and New Zealand), while "coming into heat" will land you with American English sources. It's got better, searchwise - the British idiom might have not yielded any results, a decade ago, but now think about how a Jamaican or a Ghanaian, both native English speakers, might express this... We have a long way to go, still.

Here is a question for you: if you were to run for president, and win, would you change "everything"? I am watching the prognostication on CNN of what Newt Gingrich would do to make things better, and I really ask myself why exactly people think you can improve an economic situation by making massive changes. I just do not think it works like that. I recall the few times I took over someone else's job, or department, or staff, and I've always made sure I didn't make major changes, until I had a good understanding of how things were working, and had analyzed what wasn't working, and why, and most importantly, communicated. In my small universe, what you do when you "come into power" and make major changes is alienating your staff - the people who do the work. You're much better off not making those changes, even though maybe you know they'll work, and finding out first what changes your managers and staff are looking for. Get buy-in, communicate, listen. It is, after all, they who do the work, not you, or your predecessor. And people tend to have a good feeling for what should change in their job, and their manager's job, to make it better, if you can get them to express that. Analyze, find the stress points, lubricate the machine, replace what's broken. Then, you can start looking at "the bigger picture". After all, from the inside, things always turn out to be different than you thought, looking from the outside. It is not the direction you need to worry about, when leadership changes - not breaking things, should be Priority One.

All I am saying is: don't put someone in the White House who is going to "change everything". Remember it is your money they're going to use for this, what's left of it. We've gotta make money, sell stuff, and I don't mean cups of coffee made with Brazilian beans and French vanilla, or computer software written onto Malaysian DVDs packed in boxes made in Honduras. Identify what we can make here, soup-to-nuts, that people overseas need. I don't care what it is, toilet paper, software, just make sure it is made right here. Forget about Black Friday sales increases - all that stuff was made in China, and they're just not getting that, these politicos. Revenues are not profits, they're not money-in-your-pocket. And Chrysler is no longer an American company, it is Italian. It really is simple, and it isn't going to come from "shrinking" or "growing" government - whatever that means.

It is very nice for the principals in the Eurozone to speak of a tougher treaty, but among member states there really isn't any way that I can see one could police compliance with pan-European financial rules. You can't fine people who are financially unsound, and I can't see there is anything else that would work. If an entire country, Greece, Italy, whatever, isn't behaving fiscally responsibly - which ought to not be rocket science - all you can do is boot 'em out. And that would reduce the power of the Europe, which is based on this very large conglomerate of countries. Those of us old enough to remember the "old" EU have always wondered why the Western European governments were so desperate to add countries whose finances have always been marginal, and I guess there now is fairly solid proof that wasn't the smart thing to do. Greece was always poor, so was Spain, so was Italy, Yugoslavia, Ireland, and by "always" I mean the knowledge I grew up with, post WWII. And by "poor" I mean by comparison with ourselves, the Dutch, and the Germans, the Scandinavians, Belgians, perhaps not surprisingly mostly post-colonial countries. Even when I moved to the UK I found its wealth marginal, by comparison with my home country - there was extra small food packaging for pensioners, for instance, and electricity meters you had to put coins in, something I had never seen in my life before.

Friday December 2, 2011 - Marketing Schmarketing

Seen outside the Microsoft store in Bellevue - a custom Mustang with an Xbox in the trunk, and a Zune in the dash... no, didn't have Kinect steering.

It is, in my mind, perfectly valid that the worst thing in management is not to take a decision. It really isn't vital whether the decision one takes is right or wrong (deliberacy excepted), if one does not take a decision at a juncture, things grind to a halt, nothing moves, no progress, no regress, and that in itself is regress. Most things short of death are reversible and fixable, provided, of course, you "get there in time".

It is important to understand where the need for a decision comes from. It is a point at which the "flow of things" encounters a juncture, and the choices presented by the juncture, be they two, three, or one hundred eleven, are usually all in some way valid. You're offered an apartment. You need a new place to live to begin with, the person offering it to you knows this, but what basis do you now use to decide whether to accept the offer? What analysis, what steps, lead to the decision? How much time can you take? Do you negotiate, and if so, exactly why do you negotiate? To get a concession? To establish the flexibility of the other party? To establish a working relationship?

It is curious to see, in the avalanche of information that comes to use due to the internet, how much information there is that purports to be "boilerplate". All that does is fire masses of varied opinions at the consumer, who lacks not only the tools to process the information, but now, due to the amount of data, the time as well. It is not at all unusual, today, to gather information on a subject, and find totally contrary advice, all based on perfectly valid opinions, statistics and research. Go figure.

One of the more interesting discussions is that surrounding Facebook's presumably forthcoming IPO. I can't help it, but I am getting a distinct "deja vu" feeling, remembering the dot-com collapse we all went through. After years of development and innovation research, suddenly everybody started asking: "Best thing since sliced bread, but who is paying?". It turned out the consumer was not, and poof!, half the internet went bankrupt on the spot. AOL, Yahoo, Myspace, once the darlings of the nascent internet, are an excellent example, I don't quite know how they both survived, but they did not go where they were supposed to, and ended up as commodities, very large mailing lists, like Hotmail was when Microsoft bought it. So - how will Facebook fare? It is a brilliant product, by now it is the internet-within-the-internet, but again, the consumer won't pay for it. Advertising? I don't know, we're bombarded with advertising, that has not prevented the recession, and I am not seeing manufacturers and stores paying huge sums of money getting those little postage stamps on Facebook user's news pages. We're up to six ads at a time, with, I think, Walmart paying extra to sit there by itself in the runup to Christmas. Not, to me, a way to run a reliable business. Not when people fast forward through most commercials on their DVRs. You've got to understand this means they do not like advertising.

And as I am writing this I notice that, suddenly, Facebook has truncated my news feed. At the bottom, there now is a dialog (to your left) that tells you to "bring your friends". Duh - Facebook forcing me to divulge more of my personal relationships? Why? It isn't to make things better for me, these are relationships I already have - and while social networking began as a way to connect with old friends, and find new "like minded" people, it is now morphing to enterprises mining your information to sell stuff to you, and to find, through you, others to sell to. Through you - and not voluntarily. And it is using an inelegant and blatantly manipulative way to do it. Which emphasizes, once again, that Facebook isn't your friend. You don't have to pay Facebook money, but you must give Facebook personal information about other people, which is what you do when you make your relationship with them known to Facebook. Not a nice way of doing business, Zuck. Note that advertisers think that "targeted" advertising is more effective - but these friends and others all are being advertised to anyway, something that is not going away, so the net effect is likely more advertising, and that may not have the desired effect. This "more advertising" trend may well be a recession feature - but if people don't have money they're not going to buy your stuff, not unless you make it cheaper, which you can't do by spending more money on advertising.

Like popping ads over things consumers want to watch or read - do we really believe this sells things? I cannot conceive of people buying products or services that annoy them - friend of mine complained, loudly, that Google Maps put an irremovable pushpin in his map, pointing to a local OB/GYN doctor. I mean, my friend is male.... and I have a hard time conceiving of anyone finding an OB/GYN doctor in the Yellow Pages, that isn't how that is usually done.

I am not being critical of the new technologies, far from it, I helped invent some of this stuff.. But it is important to understand that the only way we can sell more to folks is reading their minds, and that every time an organization attempts to do that, there is a privacy backlash. Not only that, I do not believe we have the algorithms and software that can predict human behaviour, no matter how much data we collect. Apart from anything else, unless you take competition out of the equation, Walmart is going to try to get you into their store, while Macy's does the same thing. And since you normally only buy something once, or at least once at a time, there will be a winner and a loser. And the loser will have spent millions of dollars on tools that haven't worked, or that haven't worked well. Looked at like that, advertising doesn't make a huge amount of sense, right? It isn't "informative", it is "manipulative". And apart from anything else, that is a dangerous practice, because people really do not like to be manipulated. The geo-locational advertising I worked on, back in the '90s, needed the customer to dial in to a call center, and ask for information. A deliberate act on the part of the consumer. Not this stupid stuff - you stop in front of a Chinese restaurant, so you get their menu on your cellphone - unsolicited. And the poor deluded marketeer thinks that that will now entice you to go there and eat their food - not just once, but repeatedly. Never mind you were only stopped because you had to pick up your dog's poo - that's not part of the "intelligence". Which really isn't intelligence at all... Think about it. How many restaurants you go to on a regular basis (or stores for that matter) did you first go to because of advertising?

Monday November 28, 2011 - It is always Cyber Monday

An interesting aspect of the Seattle area is that it is wildly diverse - so much so that I am able to simply Google for Asian supermarkets, and find plenty that sell everything indigenous to the Pacific Rim, from the Philippines and Japan to Cambodian, Thai, and everything in between. I am writing this half choked by an instant noodle dish that is as spicy as can be, I love things that bring tears to my eyes. Even the Nescafe and Indofood coffee sachets I used to get in Indonesia and China are available here. Bit the long way around, Nescafe instant coffee by way of Singapore, but it gets here. I am noticing this as it is a very defining difference between the coasts - reading about it is one thing, but up close it is amazing. The picture up top shows one of the many APAC stores in the Seattle area - down below, nighttime traffic down 8th Street, a main artery in Bellevue, overlooked by a full moon.

So did Black Friday do something for the economy? Will the "Holiday Shopping Season"? Is hype a good way to bring back prosperity?

I honestly don't think so. That's all stuff that works when things are going well, but we should know that what works "normally" is probably not going to work when things aren't "normal". When consumers are under an avalanche of bad news, and millions of consumers have no jobs, or no money, or both, expecting things to be "normal" really isn't all that smart. Right now we need to do better than companies with problems selling stuff to consumers with problems. That's left hand / right hand, and more money leaving the country. We do see the "amazing" numbers in the news, but what the cost is of these numbers, and how they affect "normal" spending... We must not forget that the holidays aren't what supports the economy. We may be overhyping ourselves again...

A CNN commentary on shopping I saw had it that stores, particularly supermarkets, have loads of tricks to get you to buy stuff, from making you slow down in certain sections, to directing you into impulse shopping areas first and last. Perhaps. I continue to wonder what the real correlation is, if you consider the name of the game is to part consumers from their money. Few stores have a true "cheap as can be" policy, and I have to wonder if consistently providing savings isn't a policy that will work best, over time. Walmart long ago fell to the "impulse shopping" syndrome, fine for people who have too much money, but in the long run, you really do not need more TVs, and if there were a store that could save you money and did something different, like put money into your 401K at the same time, who knows how that might work? The problem is, forever, the shareholders - Apple is the industry darling because it takes the money you pay for your iPhone, and gives a good chunk of it to the stockholder. That's nice for the stock market, but not so nice for the many that can't afford this stuff - because Nokia and RIM, champions of the cheap gear, deserve to do better - we should champion enterprises that make cheap gear available to Indian cabbies and African farmers, because that is where future economies are created...

AWS. Amazon Web Services. They've scheduled an interview for me, or rather, are threatening to, so I have set myself up an account with AWS, and now I am trying to get some time in figuring out how what works. Much to my delight, new customers get a bunch of services for naught, so they can get acquainted with the systems and the services, and learn to build environments and applications under AWS. In The Cloud, as it were. Something I found a buzzword, but don't take that to mean I don't think it exists - I know it does, and I guess all it needed was an Amazon recruiter's email for me to take it really seriously. First URL:

http://meneef.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

which I now need to point my domain at, using some other tool in the huge array AWS has available. Sheesh. I don't think I'll distribute it worldwide, just yet, that might blow up my charge card.

If you're interested in AWS, you can get more information here and here - the second URL outlining the services that are free for you to try out and build (I am sure they hope) a use model and/or an application using Linux. Cool stuff, and the cloud is expanding worldwide, though I am not (yet) seeing an African node on their map. Would love to work on that ;)

I am trying to maintain my 2 terabyte backup drive, the disk I schlep around with me to back my laptop up to. It's a habit originally necessitated by phone company requirements - some data has to be retained for a very long time, some up to 30 years, and as a consequence I made sure, throughout my career, to back up the large volumes of data especially our human factors folks created. It stood me in good stead when the tax auditors came to verify the code my developer boss had written - I had implemented a huge (at the time) storage device in our network, and since the folks in my team had actually used it, I was able to give the auditors access to almost ten years of code. That was enough to prove we absolutely deserved our tax-exempt status...

Anyway, as it turns out Windows has a hard time defragmenting said drive - if it were connected to a permanent desktop installation it might not be an issue, but as I normally only hook the thing up to my laptop to make a quick backup, once a day, it never gets enough time. What with the Thanksgiving holiday, I am trying to give it one full run-through, so wish me luck... It is an issue, it'll eventually fragment to the point it may run out of table space - even Windows 7 has limitations, although I must say I've never actually seen that happen - previous versions of Windows, sure, but not Win7. Fingers crossed.

Thursday November 24, 2011 - Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving, of course... a special thought for my friends, who so kindly, and unselfishly, have invited me into their home to weather my storm... I really don't have the words to thank you, not least for teaching me a lesson about being human, and the "soft" side of the coin. "Home for the holidays" has an entirely new meaning to me.

Honestly, all I think you can get out of this Solyndra story is that we might talk about the government and its capacity to invest in risky projects. Is government out there to kick start new technologies, as it did successfully with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, or should government just sit on its hands and step in when an economic disaster happens, and it needs to rescue the banks and the automobile industry. Off the cuff, I would think that the tax environment favours angel investors kickstarting new technologies, and that the government is there to take care of "we the people", and be somewhat conservative. Rules that favour the Solyndras of this world is one thing, but if those solar panels really are the cat's meow there should be funds to be found outside the taxpayer's savings account.

The LA Times article blaming this on having a brainiac in charge of energy - I am sorry, just because somebody got a Nobel prize does not mean he can't think straight. The Department of Energy has a very large number of chiefs and indians - having said that, the Chinese government invests in alternative energy, so does the German, and so our competing in that space is not strange, though perhaps not really useful.

Facebook, if you hadn't noticed, is now up to six advertisement buttons on a news page. The Dilution Has Begun.

Commentator and analyst Fareed Zakaria, in a recent article, has it that China "is expected to play by the rules - indeed, it is expected to help maintain the rules". I am not so sure that that's relevant.

The comparison between the United States and China isn't invalid, but Zakaria has perhaps Americanized to the point he no longer sees that China is pretty much doing what the United States has done for many years - making the rules. You can do that when you're the 800 lb gorilla in the room. So, while the Chinese keep up a dialogue with us, they certainly make very clear what they need and want, and make it very clear that Asia, in their book, is their hemisphere - not strictly speaking true, in a "global economy". Never mind we're just on the other side of the Pacific, we're kinda "not close", as far as they are concerned. And they foster better ties with the EU than they do with the US, even though millions of Chinese and Chinese born people live here, all over, but especially on the West Coast. I was never as amazed as when I discovered that all Chinese officials that rate a government car drive, or are driven, in an.... Audi. Made in China. The Chinese have no problem with doing things differently - having foreign cars for officials, here, would be anathema. We need to learn what their philosophy is, though, and respond to it appropriately, rather than in our usual xenophobic manner. I personally was surprised to see the Aussies agree to Marines based on their soil - they are, after all, regionally considered White Asians, and trusted. Then again, with a population as small as theirs, perhaps they're not feeling quite secure, wedged between large Indonesia, and larger China. Click the link and get the local's view on what China does, it is different.

Another day in the trenches - hours wading through job advertisements - there is some duplication between sites, but worse is that some employers post hundreds of jobs a week now, and that the best way of dealing with them is going trough each invididual description, as they aren't categorized well, if at all. For instance, Microsoft has something called "Trustworthy Computing" - you and I would call that "IT Risk Management", and I had no idea to even look for it until a Microsoft executive mentioned it to me. Thanks, though, Steve... ;)

Then, on to updating the resume - in about 14 places, the way I have set it up. It turns out the various websites push your resume each time you refresh it, but you do have to make changes, and some websites then require you to redo all sorts of forms. Then, you get the inevitable avalanche from phishing scammers, which try and get you to divulge your personal information by promising a job writing cookery books for an Alaska fisheries company, or sumtin' else contrived. where they get it from.. They are easy to recognize, as the perps never provide the recruiter's telephone number, which any recruiter needing you would do, right?

Next, the apartment hunt - which is mostly taken up by identifying buildings, getting their restrictions and requirements, finding out about waiting lists, and getting the application forms - which, in most cases, are not on the internet, but will be sent to you when the manager thinks you're A Real Candidate.

Today's highlight was an astute consulting agency recruiter on the other coast, who sent me a very cryptic job requirement I was able to decipher for him. You know you're doing well if you end up chatting on the phone, it is nice to have somebody pick your brain, as that means your skillset is being taken seriously. In a day and age when a consulting position, four hours after posting, is closed because agencies submitted 294 applicants, this isn't a luxury. And in this case, better still, he put me in for the position, something that requires trust. As he said, there are so many desperate folks who write buzzword resumes, which, in the end, hurt the recruiter, who isn't going to be happy when his phone rings and he finds out from his client he just submitted a fake....

The pictures - top right, the Microsoft store in Bellevue Square, more of a showcase than a shop - with the tablet to the left, I like it having an accessory keyboard, one of the Windows 7 showcase devices. Didn't even check who the manufacturer is... That may be the future of notebooks - tablet-cum-keyboard-tethered-smartphone, makes sense, that's how I am writing this, on a laptop with an external, larger, wireless keyboard-and-mouse combo, and Bluetoothered Blackberry.

Saturday November 19, 2011 - London, Seattle, a shrinking world

I greatly enjoy (if that is the right word) the new BBC series "24 hours in the ER", broadcast on BBC America. It may well be this is partly because I lived in London for so long, it is almost a real world "East Enders", but their use of some 70 remotely controlled cameras, and the way in which patients and relatives are interviewed once back home, make this a very well executed type of reality television. If you're not familiar with colloquial London English, though, some of it may be hard to follow, or you might miss some understanding. The series takes me straight back to living in London, among Londoners, and the for me strange experience of living in a huge metropolis, something very different from the life in The Netherlands I had been used to. Once there, the term "big city" acquired an entirely new meaning to me, and in many ways prepared me for New York City, where I would move next.

Bollocks. It seems once a week or so I get closer to finding work, and then it evaporates again. One assignment got canceled the day before I would start. An interview with a senior manager didn't go the way a director wanted. The entrepreneur I got connected to, thanks to a friend, is himself on hold. And that's just what I know. A job I was shortlisted for last year never got started, and never closed, either. It is infuriating. And I do believe, when I look at the positions that are advertised, that the majority of enterprises have put their growth on hold, I wish they would listen to Jeff Bezos and his business philosophy. An interesting read, and the beauty is that you can take his words and derive your own conclusion. Think what you like, after all this time, having built an empire, he has launched the Kindle Fire for a mere $199 - and that is the top end of his line. IOW, he understands a tablet is one of the things you need, it doesn't replace anything. At least, that is my view of it, I said the same about Netbooks, a view I tested after picking one up in China , and tallying what all you couldn't run on it comfortably, like Skype on a broadband connection in high definition. Fantastic battery life, though, and I gather my niece is quite happy with it, small, cute and versatile as it is.

Google, please enlighten me how the search "engineer searching women in arab@yahoo.com.ir, @hotmail com" ends up with my archive as a result? When executed from Senegal? If that even has anything to do with it...

The picture at the top of this piece was taken in Seattle, not far from the Space Needle, - I did not even know there is a streetcar line here, a "tram", as we say in The Netherlands. It was kind of strange, I was in town for a Microsoft meeting, and walked across the tracks, and then realized I was checking to see if the tram was approaching, as I was used to doing in The Hague and Amsterdam, when seeing railcar tracks embedded in the pavement. Streetcars are heavy and don't stop easily or quickly, so one gives them a wide berth, you see. Later, I did see the actual tram, proof, therefore, and shot that picture. To the right is a garden in my neighbourhood, I just liked the design, and hope you see how heavily Asian influenced this part of the world is. It had some of that 20 years ago, but, walking around, or shopping, today, I sometimes think I am in Beijing or Singapore. Swear to God.

Monday November 14, 2011 - Marketing is not Sales

Have I gone bonkers, or are there really rather unusually massive changes going on in the world around us? The United States is on its economic knees, unable to translate business success into citizen prosperity, in Europe some of the mediterranean countries have combined political and ecnomic problems, the Middle East and North Africa have a somewhat baffling Arab uprising going on, and it seems in much of Asia prosperity continues unabated, almost as if they're on a different planet from us.

Here in the US, it is going on wherever you look - yet another church in my neighbourhood is starting up a soup kitchen, and that is not something you do unless there is a need. In the meantime, funding for public works is being reduced all over the country - and that, my friends, will have significant repercussions, because you cannot create prosperity without a well maintained infrastructure, and once you have to start closing libraries, laying off police officers, stop subsidizing housing for the indigent, and turning empty storefronts into charity outlets, you're on the slippery slope. I was at the Factoria Mall in Bellevue, the other day, where I noticed that the 2008 closing of Mervyn's department store, one of the anchor stores, completely killed foot traffic in that side of the mall, and that mall management, apparently, have not been able to get any other large store to move into the property. It is a good indicator for where we are, today - ten years ago, the space would have been occupied in months, and I am sure you can get a good deal if you wanted it today. One wonders if Global Warming is perhaps the least of our problems..

An interesting clip from BBC News talks about the future of gadgets, considering that mobile phones can do much of what individual "gadgets" - cellphones, digital cameras, navigation units, laptops - are capable of doing. If you watch the clip, there is a bit of a giggle towards the end - the reporter puts a sizable zoom lens on a mount on the mobile phone that has that capability, and then the phone rings. I personally don't use one cellphone for all of these purposes, but three - I like my venerable Blackberry because it has a tactile keyboard for messaging, it is my primary voice device, and I have a charging stand so I can use it as a clock / alarm clock; then I have one older Nokia Navigator that I use as my primary GPS - it has my Asian travel SIM card in it just in case anybody over there sends me a text message - and then there is my new Nokia C7, which backs up all of the above, has my local number at my new home, and lets me use a very good mobile browser. It may sound weird for someone to have a backup phone, but the cellular companies make it very cheap to get a smartphone, and because I was facing a 3,000 mile drive through unknown territory, back in July, with just the Navigator to guide me. I figured it was worth it getting a spare phone with navigation capability. Nokia, after all, owns venerable digital mapping company Navtech, and provides free downloadable maps of the entire world with its smartphones.

Especially with Facebook, I like the browser on the C7 - I won't use a Facebook application, since that passes on all kinds of information from your mobile phone to Facebook, and I really don't need Facebook to tell all of its "members" and advertisers where I am, and who my "friends" are. Facebook's latest trick is that it can look for the navigation chipset in your cellphone from your mobile browser, access it, and find out where you are - whether you want it to or not. If you have your GPS turned on, you won't even know it is doing that, and Facebook never told you about it. Apart from which, let's say you're using your phone for navigation, and now three applications - the camera, Facebook and Twitter - are accessing the GPS chipset for location information. What happens? Errors? Crashes? And then the phone rings? As a computer expert, I can tell you those are aspects that really have not been tested well, and they can get very messy in your smart-thing. I recall driving cross country, in July, and having my navigation phone crash as I left the interstate and got onto local roads. Not knowing where I was or where to go, I had to park and reboot the phone, and reset the destination, once it "knew" where it was. It happens, but you really don't want to do anything with your phone you don't have to, when you need it for one function, be that talking to your boss, or finding your client.

Is it important to block Facebook off? Or Twitter, or Google? I think it is, to some extent. While basically innocuous, the amount of data that all of these services collect on you could be used maliciously, and is available to others - like potential employers - to misinterpret. That's a bigger issue than you might think - one thing you can't control is the impression someone gets from connecting the wrong types of information. Just look at the screen capture to the left - that may be me, except the "Spoke" service seems to have connected part of one of my past titles from a colleagues' website, one former employer's partial company name, and somehow decided the word "wireless" was nice to stick in there. Rochester? The mind boggles, and there is only one of me in the USA, so it has to be me. How do these people put this together? What purpose does it serve, except to deceive you into thinking they have information they don't?

After all, a researcher may know nothing about you, and all they have is the tidbits of information that live on forever, in the internet. Just think about the strange things you've seen friends or colleagues do, on social networks, the opinions that surprised you, their friends and family, their political views, things that, before Facebook, you did not know about them, and things that made you re-evaluate your relationship with them. Now if some of their antics surprised you, think how you might surprise them. And think how easy it is for someone else to come to a completely different conclusion about you than you'd like them to have...

Eventually, governments will succeed in mandating that privacy maintenance from the social networks, but it will take time. And in the interim, the Facebooks and Googles of this world will continue "pushing the envelope" - in their quest for advertiser money. It is a quest doomed to fail, because at some point the advertisers will understand that Facebook's new practice of putting five or six advertiser buttons on your News page simply dilutes their chances of anybody ever clicking on them. It's already gotten to the point where Facebook lets you block future postings by advertisers - which it then doesn't block. Apart from which, in my opinion, vendors and manufacturers that think social networks advertising, and SEO - search engine optimization - is going to help them sell more, and weather the recession, are sadly mistaken. If the economy is as much in the doldrums as it seems - toppling dictators and prime ministers alike - we've got to come to ways to increase income and reduce expenditure - see my November 7 posting for an example, where I discuss the introduction of RFID technology, which to me appears a totally wasted investment, since it did not replace anything, and didn't add value (as in, monetary, revenue) to an existing methodology. If anything, it probably increased data theft risks, considering new cellphones have RFID chipsets, so do passports, and consumers will carry or turn them on for no reason. I need to repeat it here: you are paying for all this. With the consumer always having had problems with the security of their PC, we have no hope in hell of securing their smartphones, which, after all, do not come with a keyboard, a mouse, or decent screen real estate that lets you see what you're doing.

Friday November 11, 2011 - Do Developers Develop?

In a way, this resume stuff is a bit annoying. I try to avoid endless rewrites, as I think, or like to think, that I am who I am, and if I apply for a job in telecommunications I am not really a different person than when I apply for an editing job. I happen to have both skills - if you're old enough to have had two or three careers, you may have two or three skillsets. Perhaps less common in the United States than in Europe, but people have many interests, and some try to pursue more than the one society thinks they're best at. I've always thought doing the same thing for 30 years could be indescribably boring, but then one's field is supposed to evolve, so perhaps there are two sides to that argument. It is very scary to see that 99% of employers won't look at Project Managers that do not have a recent certification. Project management needs to take changing parameters into account, like a recession, and "going with the flow" isn't something you can certify for. It matters not what you teach your gunner, beyond the basics, you won't know how she really functions until she has to perform under fire. You've heard the argument. But we are now at the point where an applicant has to have certifications as well as endless references, all of which to me means the employers have reached a record (overkill) level of insecurity - HR is a people skill, it is not painting by numbers. We need innovation, they say, to put America back on its feet - I have news for you: employing only "certified" people prevents innovation from happening, because we don't teach or employ people to think outside the box. In other words: Steve Jobs "made" it because he started a company, had he been employed by someone else he'd have likely taken his talents to do woodworking in his garage on Saturday afternoons. I had an interesting conversation with a Managing Director, the other day, who emphasized that the name of the game, in the current economic climate, is "risk avoidance". He is right, for the majority of enterprises - but the problem with not taking risks is that you don't grow, and the old rule is that if you do not grow, you shrink, because the world, and the world's population, do grow, and someone will step into that vacuum, and if that is not you, etc.

Let me put it differently - the middle of a recession, with no end in sight, is THE time to jump into market openings that aren't being exploited. There isn't an easier kill in the world than the insecure manager / director / businessman.

Funny to see Hoda Kotb on the Today Show, yesterday, demonstrating how Apple's Siri doesn't work. It wasn't a valid test, in my book, but it demonstrated very aptly that speech recognition in an environment with just normal background noise is't capable of understanding a human. If you've spent part of your career developing the technology, as I have, you know that speech cognition is heavily dependent on visual cues, environmental cues, motion, facial attributes, all sorts of things that have nothing to do with pure audio. Speech recognition is to do with cognition and understanding, not with recognizing words and sentences - it is about meaning. No cellphone can understand meaning, not unless it can read your face and get environmental clues at the same time, and that requires a data stream much more capable than "4G", whatever that is, this week.

In many ways, this story highlights the fact that we develop technologies that are good at a single pupose, but are never tested extensively in the real world. Sony's Asimo robot, seen here in a recent demonstration, shows well how hard it is to get a device to do what comes naturally to humans, even after an astonishing 12 years of development - not to mention the 20 or so years of research that preceded Asimo's rollout. But yes, the nerds at Sony are ecstatic at their creation's new capability to hop on one foot. As I would be, to be honest.

Much to my pleasant surprise Microsoft invited me to join a developer meeting here in Seattle - one for and by Xbox/Kinect developers. This is where today's pictures come from - the one on the left is the Seattle Space Needle, seen from the terrace at Microsoft's 320 Westlake facility. It has been so long that I hung around lab environments, back in New York and Westchester, I'd forgotten how nice that informal, single purpose, talk-and-mingle environment is. And the guys (few women on the team, as is often the case in system development) are passionate about their box. Never having paid much attention to the Xbox, it was interesting to see how this is morphing into an advanced broadband social network, with software "offshoots" that facilitate all sorts of things, from the cloud, up to and including TV, cable networks, and the unavoidable Netflix. Of course, that's an attempt at an "all things to all people" product, which may work, considering gaming pays (one hopes...) for the direct development of the platform, so then living room capabilities are a perk, rather than a primary target. Like most gaming consoles, the Xbox is a full fledged home entertainment console-with-everything-that-does-everything, and Kinect, as a user interface, was very impressive to watch and use, especially since a version for Windows is on the way. To me, the more an interface is non-device specific, the better it is - I am, after all, one of the people who worked on technologies to put speech recognition in the telephone network, where you could pick up any telephone in downstate New York, dial 411, and have a recognizer on the line, should you want to use it. Imagine having Kinect on your Blackberry... I shall have to talk to my Microsoft friend about some of this.

Monday November 7, 2011 - Runaway Technology

The BBC's Mark Mardell has been broadcasting a series of retrospectives about Obama's presidency, presumably in light of the upcoming elections. While I understand the criticisms of Obama he mentions, it is kind of hard to figure out what the Prez could have done differently to improve the American economic situation. Much of what ails us today has its roots in previous administrations, and I believe especially in the ill advised Iraq war, while our very long and costly sojourn in Afghanistan will not have helped much either. Yes, going after Bin Laden and his cohorts, after 9/11, was a good thing, but the "re-countrifying" that happened there since, I don't know that that has helped anybody, in any way. Paying the bills for those two "adventures" will take many years, and the only reason we didn't get run out of Dodge, like the Russians, is allies, and an endless supply of money from both the US and the EU. Money that provides no benefits to anyone that I can see.

In the meantime, my job search nearly yielded a consulting gig, but one that was postponed the day before I was supposed to start. I do have some interesting conversations going, but nothing that I think will result in some advancement by tomorrow. Yes, it would be great to eventually get a new career move going, at the same time, I really would like to be back in the workforce, and able to kind of restart my life, which has more or less been on hold since I left Virginia, and gave my house back to the bank. There are, indeed, huge employment opportunities here in the Pacific Northwest, specifically with the computer companies that seem to sprout here every weekend, the other day I noticed Microsoft posting over 1,000 local jobs on LinkedIn, and that trend is followed at a slight distance by Amazon and T-Mobile, to name just a few technology companies local to Seattle.

Speaking of jobs, I walked past a gas station, and was reminded of the RFID readers that practically all gas pumps in the nation have, these days. As you can see in the picture, the pump has both a card reader and an RFID reader, so that set me to wonder what the point of introducing this new technology is. We've created a technology that is capable of being read remotely - on my EZPass, I can see the point, especially now that you can roar through the toll at 50 miles per hour, but for as long as I have magnetic stripe cards, why did the gas pump, and my new Nokia phone, get RFID capabilities? Don't get me wrong, I think the technology is nice, but I am not seeing how RFID solves any existing problems (it isn't replacing anything), or save money, and I wonder how much RFID has cost to develop en deploy, additional to the existing stripe technology. Note how RFID is called "Fastpay" in my example - but that principle, one swipe with the chip, hasn't worked for a long time, as security precautions now require you to go through the same steps as you would with a swipe card.

What's the issue? We seem, in the USA, to have gotten fixated on creating new technologies, in the hope we can repeat the heady days of the 1980s and 1990s, when new internet technologies spawned new industries, and generated vast income for the country and the industry. Judging by what I see, we're not being successful. RFID isn't needed, so it's not generating income. Same for Facebook, Twitter, GroupOn - it reminds me of Voice Dialing in the phone network, great technology, the consumer liked it, but the consumer did not want to pay for it. Today, these technologies are used to sell smartphones - hey, kiddo, your Smartphone comes with RFID, Facebook, and Twitter!! Sure, but "kiddo" isn't going to pay for all that, nor are Facebook and Twitter - the phone provider, and the phone manufacturer are. And the advertisers? They pay Facebook and Twitter millions, in the faint hope that their logo on a two inch screen held by someone texting their boyfriend is going to sell snow tires.

Dream on.

Not going to happen.

Look around in the business world and you see that many providers of advanced consumer services get into trouble. I can't prove it off the cuff, but don't you think it is strange that mobile telephony stalwarts, like Nokia and RIM, who are among the producers of bread-and-butter mobile telephones, seem to no longer be able to hack it, financially? The smartphone, which carriers are encouraging us to use, may be replacing the "regular" phone, but I think both carriers and information providers are hoping to increase revenues through these devices, and to be honest, I am not at all sure that's possible. If you look at what companies spend money on, it is not on advertising, but on the capabilities to track the consumer, and predict and influence their buying behaviour. What nobody seems to want to think about is that even if you can successfully predict that Joey is going to buy asswipe at Walmart in Hicksville, Joey still isn't going to shit more than he did before, so the amount of asswipe he needs is completely stagnant. But: you've subsidized Joey's tool to find cheaper asswipe, so you now make less money, and it costs you more to sell it to him. This makes sense? How?

I know somebody who made a fortune selling snowtires, but he did it by figuring out where there wasn't a handy supplier, and set up shop there. He knew it would snow there, with a level of guarantee - he did it in Alaska. The idea that you can do the same thing in places where it doesn't always snow, then somehow (on the internet) convince people to change their tires in November, then somehow (on the internet) convince people to come to your shop - when you don't know which interweb these folks use, and you don't know if it's going to snow or not, is - umm, a gamble? Not, I am afraid, a business model. The guy who did the snow tire fortune, an avid activist on the early internet, and a great friend of mine, ran into something he could not control - he got skin cancer, and died three months after being diagnosed. Neither here nor there, I know, but it is important to understand there are many things you simply cannot control or calculate, and that is almost "first base" - don't try, go for what you know, and what and who you can rely on. Again, I said it before - incubators are a great way to get new technology ventures off the ground, but what happens with them after that is a very large unknown, whatever the Pivot Table Guru tells you. Hotmail, my favourite example, in the end was never more than a very large people database, that was acquired as such by Microsoft. From there, it went nowhere, and it and Yahoo Mail became mostly spammer paradise, both are today virtually unusable due to the amount of advertising Microsoft and Yahoo try to insert into the interfaces, and the resultant need to access them using a broadband connection - reason why Google's GMail is the unequivocal winner. 90% of the Earth's population, if not more, after all, does not have broadband - apart from which, only a couple of years ago a 64 kbit ISDN link was called broadband, in India.

Thursday November 3, 2011 - Brainimation

The pictures, today, have absolutely nothing to do with anything - they show some of the amazing fall colours and skies I am discovering, my first autumn in the Pacific Northwest. Enjoy....

Apparently, Apple and Microsoft have both taken out patents on "touchless" control technology - the computer-human interface that involves gestures and motion, rather than keys, buttons and touch surfaces. This is a much more involved issue than it appears at first glance, because keys, buttons and touch surfaces are all based on ways of manual control that humans have used for tens of thousands of years, but "touchless" technologies are not. They're fully in the realm of science fiction, and nobody knows what in all that comes natural to humans. Or even if anything in all that can be natural. Perhaps we should teach all children sign language in schools, and create an app that can read that.

You may not have noticed this, but when you look at the displays that are used in aircraft cockpits, they are for the most part representations of analog instruments. That's not accidental, and has nothing to do with wanting to emulate "old style" aircraft for aging pilots - years of research yielded the result that those circular displays with coloration can be read much faster, by humans, than numeric displays. While the only way to tell that it is exactly 08:22hrs is some kind of numeric display, in most cases that level of accuracy isn't necessary. What is, in this example, is that it is morning, and that it is after 8, but before 9 - you have no idea how much work the brain has to do to determine the math for that, if the information is numerical rather than segmental. And as it turned out when Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, IBM, Raytheon, and probably half a dozen other aircraft and computer manufacturers did their research, is that the human brain is an analog device. It "knows" the locations of noon, six o'clock, nine o'clock and three o'clock, referenced to shadows, light and dark, and sun and moon phases, that's our natural universe. We don't think in terms of accurate readings, we don't need those unles we're engineering, we think in approximations. That doesn't mean "inaccurate", analog can be very accurate, but much of the time the exact numerical reading isn't really relevant. With a threshold set at 180 degrees, the issue isn't when a temperature is 181, but the fact that the threshold is exceeded, and in which direction. The human brain is very good at discerning thresholds (for "good", you may read "fast"), but less "acute" in terms of gauging the exact state or amount of a reading. You have to, after all, realize that we are asking our brains to measure and determine things for which it was never designed.

The human brain was designed to deal with the consequences of human locomotion, at 3 miles (walking) to 6 miles (running) an hour. The aforementioned airliner - take the Boeing 757 I looked at in my research - moves at 530 miles per hour, or at least 88 times faster than a running human. And that means that the response time necessary to deal with unexpected events, in the airplane, is far smaller, something like 1.1 percent, way beyond our physical capabilities. Let me put it another way - you may, like I do, know somebody with the dexterity to grab a flying insect from the air. Now create an insect that moves at 88 times that speed, from 4.5 miles per hour to 396 miles an hour, and see if your flycatcher can still catch the fly. To be honest, in all likelihood the flycatcher won't even see the fly - it will be covering 176 meters every second, almost two football fields. If you've ever driven on the German Autobahn, looked in your rearview mirror, seen the headlights shining far in the distance behind you, looked again two seconds later, and noticed that Porsche 911 Carrera now right on your tail, you'll know what I am banging on about.

So: there are things we know about. They include circular displays, levers, buttons, keys, lights, things that have been around for millenia. And there are things we do not know about - how to control things by thought, or touch, or viewing, things we are beginning to technologically understand, but have no "built in" way of controlling or using.

Antilock brakes are probably the best example - the majority of people don't use them, because the impulsive human response in an emergency on a wet road is NOT to brake as hard as you can. I have taken to exercising this, taking my car out to an icy or snowy or sopping wet parking lot (one that is empty, or largely empty) at the beginning of the rainy season, accelerating hard, then stomping on the brakes and letting the car do what it wants. Then repeat. And repeat a bit more. The only way to teach your brain that this is OK is doing it, over and over again, year after year, and doing it with your loved ones, as well. Otherwise, by the time you think to use your anti lock brakes, it will be too late, and all you have to look forward to is your insurance bill going up. Think, too, that these brakes work on paved smooth roads, on sandy roads, on gravel roads, anywhere your tires can lose grip. But as I said, all of that is completely counter to what your brain, with its limited motional capability, will want to do, given that it wasn't even designed to deal with 40 mile an hour speeds. We have cleverly gone beyond our design limit, and leaving the solution to manufacturers really is not where it is at. I've seen several studies that have it the installation of antilock brakes on modern cars has had no discernible statistical effect on accident and death rates. It is something I am willing to accept, since using ABS brakes isn't part of driver training, but I do not know how you would prove something like that.

And here is one for you: the country of Australia is running tourist ads on American television. As it is November, and getting cold in much of the United States, don't you folks down under think that explaining to Americans it is late Spring in Oz, about to change to Summer, is something you may want to emphasize? Christmas on the Beach? Americans who've never been anywhere near the equator don't necessarily know this...

Sunday October 30, 2011 - Bezos is no Jobs, and that's a good thing

Happy Halloween!! ---->

Jeff Bezos the next Steve Jobs? I don't think so. I'll grant you the man is technologically savvy - likely more so than Jobs. I can't help but repeat that Jobs took existing concepts and repackaged them - the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, were all "revamps", variations on what was there before. Done very well, but Jobs' genius is that of a marketeer, not a technologist. Sticking a tiny hard disk in a music player, instead of the tape player that was there before, is innovation, not invention.

Bezos is an entirely different kettle of fish. He has built an empire based on narrow profit margins in a technologized delivery pattern - you could be nasty and say that Jobs had it easy, because he only made expensive gear with high profit margins - Apple is for its shareholders, not its customers. Bezos used technology to build his mail order company in such a way that he was able to kill the brick-and-mortar bookstore, making use of the absence of sales tax on out-of-state orders, and his ability to store-and-forward cheaply. Then the Kindle came - the article may say Amazon doesn't have a band of followers, like Apple does, but you'll see folks reading things on Kindles wherever in the world you go, millions and millions of them, with its amazing battery life, and no need for WiFi and iTunes, as you get a lifetime subscription with the thing, if you buy the 3G version. No frills, no nonsense, no "apps". Just a simple monochrome electronic book - in the world of Apple, nothing is simple. The primary reason you don't hear a lot of the Kindle evangelists is that their devices always work, night and day, wherever in the world they are. If you want to know how impressive that is, look at the recent Blackberry outage...

In many ways (and this is pure conjecture on my part) it seems to me Jobs was a prima donna, and Bezos is more of an engineering type with a business bent. Jobs saw someone else's idea, and improved on it - it is Bezos who is, of the two, the real ideas man. I do keep reading that Apple is the technology company with the largest valuation - I honestly don't know what that means, by the way, other than American journalists trying to "write up" American enterprise better than it is. GE is larger and makes more money, HP is larger and makes more money, and if I dig around enough you'll end up wondering what "technology" really means.

A teen told me, the other day, that using GPS when driving around is too much technology. Umm, yes, but then maps are technology, too, especially since maps, today, area created using satellite technology, the day of the surveyor (which I suppose you could call a "craftsperson") are long gone. Maps, for a very long time, have been pure databases you can output in a variety of ways - one is a printing press, another is a small computer.

Going back to the Kindle and the iPad, consumers buy Kindles so they can read books. That's a very simple purpose, and not one you can "re-define" or talk about as "what it could do" - it is the ultimate niche device - key factor one was battery life, nobody is going to buy an e-book from Amazon if they have to recharge their reader three times to be able read the whole thing. The iPad is a handheld computer, as is an iPhone, and as such tries to be all things to all people, at a huge markup. The Kindle is an affordable vehicle for Bezos to make more money. iPad and iPhone try to make more money for Apple, too, using iTunes, but not by being affordable. Economically, at least in my book, it is the choice between being a supermarket, and a designer store. Bezos does the supermarket, Jobs the designer store. That, my friends, is about the largest difference between business models you can have, and that makes Jeff Bezos a latter day Sam Walton, not a latter day Steve Jobs - what ties the three together is that they sell to the consumer.

While both business models require a great deal of skill, I have always felt that being Dior - or Lady GaGa - is a lot easier than being Walmart. I may be wrong at that - I spent much of my early career in Europe in the upmarket world, then came to America and learned the excitement of being in the phone company, in an era when competition in the world of the telephone started. I felt the mass market to be more exciting than the niche market, but that is very personal, of course. You have to remember that I come from the Netherlands, paradoxically a country small enough that the size of its mass market is equivalent to an American niche market.

The Wikipedia entry for amazon.com has it that its business plan was unusual, in that the company did not expect to turn a profit for four or five years. Anybody who has ever started a business will tell you not to expect profits in the first few years, and Hotmail began the trend of selling things on the basis of content - when Microsoft bought Hotmail, in 1997, the company had never made a penny profit. By extension, if you decide it will take you five years to build to critical mass, that's fine - the key factor is that there is a business plan.

All of this, of course, leads me to a discussion that is bigger than a blog entry: the need for standardization. Manufacturers continually try to hijack both the world of the internet and the world of the mobile phone. Microsoft tried for many years to impose its own operating system extensions on the browser. Google is trying to do the same thing today, if it can get Chrome to become the browsing standard, especially supported by Android, it can take over the world. I guess Google does not remember Microsoft tried that already, with Windows and Internet Explorer, and failed. Condemning consumers to a world where they cannot get some information because they use one particular browser isn't really user friendly. It is a wonder that American consumers have accepted for so long that if you had a cellphone from AT&T you couldn't use the Verizon network - if you tried that in Europe, Asia or Africa you'd be out on your backside real quick.

I'll get into that a bit more in my next blog entry. Because: this one started with Jobs versus Bezos, and that, too, is in the end a story of standardization. If Apple knew how to work with the co-opetition, I'd have owned an i-Device a long time ago. As it is, I just won't pay extra money for a device I can only use the way the maker wants me to. That's kinda ludicrous.

Wednesday October 26, 2011 - Much information is mis-information

I am seeing some amazing news items around, can't help it. Muammar Kadhafi was shot in the head? What did you think they were going to do? Retire him to Sharm El Sheik? Send him to Venezuela to give Chavez (cured? with a moonface? I don't think so) his cortisone? I am all for criticizing wrong-doers, but I am not sure this sad ending to a crazy era warrants "investigations". Bury them and be done with it, methinks. And Amy Winehouse did drink herself to death. I recall her father and boyfriend saying she'd "gone clean" recently. Yah. Stop interviewing relatives, I say.

No matter where you look, there's upheaval. The American presidential race is getting crazier by the day, with candidates united in not knowing how to "fix the economy", while the Europeans have their own economic problems, punctuated by countries that need bailing out. That latter bit, Greece, Italy and the like being in financial trouble, kind of reminds me of the times before the European Union, when those countries were known to be impoverished, their currencies worth little, but great, and cheap, holiday destinations, in many cases run by dictators - Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal. Wonder if there is a correlation with where they are today.

Research published in the Dutch medical press has it that the flu shot (I got mine yesterday) has no provable effect on the incidence and severity of influenza. I apologize for this being in Dutch, the article does not seem to have been translated into English.

The article compiles statistics published elsewhere, much of that is in English, and I'll assume the results have been properly corrected for population growth and particular strains of influenza and the like. My issue with this is that, unless you have a real control group, one that is demographically similar and geographically and socially "in the same ballpark" you can never prove conclusively that something does or does not work, you can only conjecture. I think there is a good chance they have a point, but by comparing statistics whose baseline isn't stable - population growth, some due to immigration from less developed countries, for instance - you can't possibly arrive at scientifically valid conclusions. It is especially problematical when you take into consideration that other researchers come to completely different conclusions, again based on existing scientific research. It gets pretty close to "you can find what you want to believe" in terms of information available to the public. "No effect" in one article, and "preventing 59% of hospitalizations" in another simply cannot both be true.

I am mentioning this because I see the overuse of statistics in the presidential campaigns - look at the Perry proposal, where Americans will be able to choose between their existing tax rate and a 20% flat rate for income tax. How would you predict the effect of this? There isn't any way known to man that lets you figure out beforehand what choice the tax payer will make, so the only effect of this proposal, if it were to become reality, is that the Treasury will not in any way be able to predict what the national income is going to be. At the very least, there will be a lot of people who will be trying to pay less taxes. In a time where Section 8 Housing finance for low income renters has already dried up, you really have to ask yourself whether experimenting with the tax base and possibly reducing it without an emergency brake (which I think that proposal does) is a good idea. I think not. I think this is a huge risk.

Let me put it this way - the entire discussion about Steve Jobs, and about his biography, is useless. If Mr. Jobs had had surgery, as his doctors wanted, he could have still died when he did. The man had cancer, not a cold. Second guessing is not an option here. Medicine, or politics, are not an exact science.

Wednesday October 19, 2011 - Incubators are a Gamble

A BBC News article article entitled "Searching for the next Google" seems to address the issue of job growth in the United States - even the White House now talks of solving the economic crisis through employment. But that is not the way it works, this time - employment went to Asia, where the labour intensive manufacturing is done, and going to a technology incubator to create employment - well, as the BBC puts it: most new companies created are those that only employ one person: so called "jobless entrepreneurship". You cannot open up an incubator at MIT, and then expect an Apple Computer to roll out the other side - incubators are a gamble, not an economic model. Sorry, by the way, for reusing this picture, which I had on October 7 - couldn't think of a better illustration for computer manufacturing, at least not without spending hours and hours searching my two terabyte storage disk.

Let's look at the statistics again (these are from Wikipedia): Apple Computer, which has 50,000-ish employees, turns over US$ 108.249 billion (FY 2011), while its competitor Samsung turns over US$ 220.1 billion (2010) - with 344,000 (2010) employees - I'll leave the math to you. So, you could be nasty, and say Apple makes proportionally vastly more money, or look at it another way - Samsung, unlike Apple, manufactures its own gear, and so contributes much more to the South Korean economy than Apple does to the American economy - because the contract employees that make Apple's stuff aren't in their annual report. Apple does not manufacture itself, and the money it pays its contract manufacturers goes overseas. The economic impact of an enterprise should be in their annual report.

So if you absolutely want to think jobs mean growth for the economy, look at the reasons why so many companies don't manufacture themselves. I am not getting into that, for the purpose of this blog entry, save for to say that if "they" can do it, so can "we", and we seem more motivated to make money via outsourcing than go through the hassle of setting up plants and do the necessary engineering.

Other than that, Apple didn't come from an incubator, and you could say that the folks that started Apple were motivated enough that they created what they needed to get going by themselves. Same thing with HP. And both companies were successful, and have a "culture". We need to ask ourselves whether incubators enable softies to succeed, only to have them collapse down the road, "when the going gets tough". It is a good question to ponder.

In many ways, we deal with the economic crisis the same way we do with cars - with our congested roads and sky high gasoline prices, our cars are engineered so we can spend more time on the road while we commute, get the baseball scores, access the internet on our WiFi equipped smartphones, and are where possible turned into "hybrids" so they can be more wasteful while appearing more efficient. Because, kids, WiFi in the car takes energy, and we would not need WiFi if we didn't have 70 mile commutes - one way. For most of us, going into the office every day is totally unnecessary, as we have the technological capability to do all we need to do from home or grandma's. We would do much better, economically, if we got all those commuters out of their cars, and their cars off the road, but as you can see around you, that is the one thing nobody is working on. And that's what we see in the incubators - nobody is incubating end-to-end production, including manufacturing, all we do is teach people to make money. And that, my friends, is why the railway stations and the railways in China, one of the largest investment programs on Earth, are being built with the hired help from German and French engineers, and not Americans.

Saturday October 15, 2011 - Blackberry Proves My Point

The picture to the right is just a random Seattle view, actually the first time I have been in Seattle proper in over 30 years. I was invited while working for the Dutch press, by Boeing, writing a series of articles about the (then) new Flight Management Systems, and Autoland 3B, something KLM and British Airways had adopted to cope with the frequently fogbound airports in Amsterdam and London.

To continue on the "lost data" track I started below, for years now I have been using Microsoft Outlook as my central repository, backed up using a couple of Google online applications, and I only buy phones that will synchronize with that package. Previously, that is, when I still worked for Verizon, I used Lotus Notes / Domino, our corporate standard, and that limited me to getting either Nokia phones, or Blackberrys, as both have a synchronization package that will talk to Lotus Notes as well as Microsoft Outlook. That made it easy to switch to Outlook when I left Verizon - I could have technically continued with Lotus software, but as my email, contact lists and databases were full of information I could not, from a regulatory perspective, continue to have access to, it was easier to ditch Lotus Notes altogether.

As if RIM reads my mind, the company that so many of us rely on for integrated messaging - it is what I like to call what the Blackberry does - springs a leak this week. First EMEA (a.k.a. "the rest of the world"), then Canada, then the US begin to lose Blackberry services. For those of you who don't use the device and its messaging, it was, for a long time, a smartphone whose data facilities you could use while traveling overseas, without having to pay those humongous data rates. A quick call to T-Mobile before a trip, a $19.99 transfer, and I am able to surf the web, tether my laptop, use my bill paying app, do whatever, in a Chinese restaurtant on the Polish border, or in a Finnish Restaurant in Beijing. There is such a thing, Take Five, a favourite expat hangout, though they do serve a mean Peking Duck. There is a subway stop very near there, on the corner of Jianguomenwai Avenue and Dongdaqiao Rd.

One thing you may want to pay attention to, in all this Blackberry mayhem - they are, apparently, from their wholly owned infrastructure, serving some seventy million customers worldwide. That is pretty impressive, even if they are, temporarily, not serving them. As I understand the reporting, they experienced some kind of switch failure, and now they're stopped down by the accumulated backlog of messages. That's painful. It makes good sense, as well, up to a point.

Something that should not happen is that a systems failure in one place cascades to other systems. If that is what happened. Blackberry says the failover did not fail over. That's possible. One problem with having 70 million users is that you cannot simulate what happens during a catastrophic failure. It isn't something you can try out on your Dell server at home. What especially worries me, in those types of scenarios, is the system's response when a large volume of failures occurs, and the users all start "retrying". You now have a system that is trying to get rid of its backlog, while an avalanche of new processes is hitting its "in tray". That can cascade very quickly, and very disastrously. It does not matter whether you tell users at that point to "lay off", they won't. They'll retry, they're human. And that isn't something you can engineer for - that is, you can, but the cost of providing non-blocking service is simply prohibitive.

Interesting in the article about Blackberry's systems problem are some of the numbers. Especially the 99.999 percent uptime ascribed to "the traditional telephone network (which) is considered to be the most reliable communications network". Sure. This is a good example of something that lacks definition. You see, if you look at the delivery - that is, the uptime of the telephone network from terminal to terminal, a.k.a. from handset to handset - you don't get anywhere near that number, commonly referred to as "five nines". If you consider the failures in handset, power delivery, and the distribution system, which is to a large extent dependent on poles, you can't get to "five nines". And that, end-to-end, is the only good way of measuring your reliability. 99.999% in the Central Office, sure, but not beyond that. Beyond that, the Blackberry calculation, 99.97, or "three nines", is probably more reasonable. As the article points out, that's 160 minutes downtime per year, on average - that is two hours and fourty minutes out of 8,760 hours.

I am saying this because that "five nines" stuff was part of the work I did in the phone company - work, by the way, that is done more by vendors than by the Bellheads themselves, who, these days, are relegated to writing the specifications, and testing they are adhered to. But the voice recognition system we designed and built was fully "five nines" - interestingly, for that to be guaranteed you need to include 24/7/365 service technicians, manuals, spare parts, delivery in a snow storm, and what have you, in your planning and calculations. It is, as I pointed out above, when I mentioned poles, an end-to-end calculation. It goes a bit like "when you pick up the handset, how high is your chance of not getting a dialtone". Once upon a time, when the emergency operator, and 911, were still under a government mandate, before cellular telephony took over the world, this is how we were required to guarantee that an ambulance or fire truck could get to a victim in record time - even the geographical distribution of public telephones, call boxes, once was part of that design - when your house is on fire, you may not be able to use your own phone.

I ought to add to this that we engineered operator services to be "high availability" - that is, if a failure occurred, we could continue to operate, but with half the capacity. This in contrast to "fault tolerance", which is engineered to continue operating through a failure, without any loss of capacity (and no, that's not just building redundancy, there's more at stake). I calculated, at the time, that the "HA" platform cost some $400,000 to build, and the "Fault Tolerant" system $ 1.4 million. You can see why Directory Assistance got the "cheaper" treatment, but Emergency (where there are lives to be saved) the more expensive one. After all, you, the subscriber, pays for all this.

Last but not least, people, please be aware of one thing: what happened to our Blackberrys is a perfect example of How The Cloud Works. Because RIM's worldwide network is an archetypal example of a very large cloud, with as much redudancy and failover built in as they can manage (BES can fall back on BIS, but not the other way around). So, since you have to access it in some way, and since you're accessing it from a device with only a single access point, this is what we refer to as a single point of failure. At some point, even in the most sophisticated version of The Cloud, there is a such a SPOF. Even if it is just the one guy trying to look at two screens at the same time.

Wednesday October 12 - In Memoriam Dennis Ritchie

For me, too, the adventure began on a PDP-11, one in a London suburb, running ITT Dialcom software, that I leased space on from British Telecom, and began learning UNIX. Within a few years, I lived in Manhattan, did an SVR3 stint at Bell Labs in New Jersey, then gravitated back across the Tappan Zee, to NYNEX Science & Technology. Without Dennis, I'd never have laughed as hard, when I saw a pickup truck with the license plate /dev/car in RTP. Just know that whenever you type a URL into your browser bar, or log into your router, you're touching Dennis' soul.

Tuesday October 11, 2011 - Cheap and - no, OR, Redundant

If you want to know where to get cheap stuff, all you need to do is look at the outlets that don't advertise. Umm, WalMart, Aldi, Trader Joe's, I am not seeing a lot of K-Mart advertising, Safeway, I am specifically looking at TV, cable TV and internet advertising here. It is beginning to look like merchants that do run advertising campaigns don't sell cheap goods.

I guess what I am saying is that the word of mouth stuff, as this recession worsens, works. Safeway sells a $1.99 breakfast sandwich, nobody else does. Outlets I thought were expensive, like Uwajimaya and Trader Joe's, increasingly sell cheaper wares (though Trader Joe's was acquired by Europe's cheapo champion, Aldi, before that happened). But I love Uwajimaya's sushi dishes, priced a dollar under those I have seen anywhere else. But then Uwajimaya has a full kitchen in the store, rather than a deli counter / butchery.

Speaking of "cheaper", CNN has an article entitled "10 ways mobile gadgets have changed our lives" - and conveniently forgets to define "us". The majority of people do not have smartphones, a.k.a. "handheld computing devices", and therefore can't surf the web or email or chat while they're on the road, or are still relegated to WAP phone browsing, a technology many Western media have long since forgotten to include. Doesn't mean these folks cannot communicate with others, but their universe is just a little more limited.

So what has changed? Being reachable isn't anything new, there were pagers back in the 1970s, and long distance walkie-talkies, and radio telephones, too. Yes, they're much more affordable, today, but back when I worked with a Gamma team to report on the coronation of Queen Beatrix - April 30, 1980 - we had all team members on one or the other electronic communicating device, same as we would now. And we increasingly restrict ourselves from using our new tools.

After somebody had a car crash while on a conference call on his mobile phone, we couldn't have work conversations while driving any more. Makes sense. And now adolescents can't use their phones while driving, we can't text in most jurisdictions, or use handheld phones, there are places that jam cellphones - and yet cars are equipped with Bluetooth and touch screens, both of which ought to probably be prohibited.

So I am not so sure the list is correct, or appropriate. I can tell you that thanks to the cellular telephone, I now carry a handheld navigation device, something I find infinitely useful, I maintain my address book and location database in one place (well, two, actually, I have a backup in case my primary goes belly-up). If you take into consideration that most people in Singapore, Hong Kong and Surinam have two cellular numbers, you can assume that, like me, those folks largely have two devices.

And that is what CNN, where the journalists appear to do research by walking around their Atlanta head office, doesn't get. Using one device for all those purposes makes no sense, and can be dangerous. You don't email or answer a call on your navigation device - when I use my Nokia C7 to navigate, I take calls and check mail on my Blackberry. It isn't any different from the PC - we now all have a laptop, but many have a laptop and a desktop, or two laptops, using different devices for different purposes. After all, you bake a pie in your main oven, but the kids will heat frozen fries in the microwave oven, right? It is one of those areas where Facebook got it right - kids want to do all their stuff on Facebook, because they do it on a mobile device. You just can't - conveniently - Youtube, email, text, Facebook, Twitter, game, what have you, on one single device - there aren't enough buttons and screen real estate. So, today, the kids do the laptop-and-iPhone combo, and tomorrow - well, who knows, one thing that is clear is that kids do not use their phones for voice communications - it is all text. If there is voice needed, they do that on a phone, while using their mobile device for something else.

Zuckerbaby is getting older, so he may lose touch with what kids do, and someone else - someone younger - will step in. It is kind of automatic - Facebook is getting complicated to the point that you won't be able to operate it from a smartphone, and the functionality Zuck is adding will slow it down. That'll kill it for kids, who do not have any measure of patience. Besides, not only kids use Facebook from phones, grownups in countries where there isn't a decent data network use Facebook in the same way, for similar reasons - on (mostly) Blackberrys - one stop communicatering. The only reason the kids sometimes still need me is because they cannot always figure out how to get a file from one place to the other. That's where an old fogie like myself comes in handy - I actually know the UNIX that lives underneath web servers, so I can use my web server as a file and database repository and transfer point. Once they have a way around that (Facebook would die, as in, stop working, if it allowed file transfer) I too will be on my way to the Old Fogie Farm. And maybe Zuck, too - nobody on Facebook needs Skype - kids do not use Skype, and we already have Skype, and those who do not have it, want it on their smartphone, not on their Facebook. So maybe Zuck is over the line, too, already...

Rather randomly going back to having backup devices, I just realized why I do that. Funny, all this time. You see, all the time I worked at NYNEX Science & Technology every platform I worked on had to be high availability and redundant. The service level mandated by Federal and State governments simply made that necessary. Everything had to be high availability, and 9-1-1 had to be no-fault. High availability, meaning you can lose the calls in progress, when a fault occurs, but the next call in has to be completed, and you must not lose more than 50% of your center capacity.. And then you talk to people on bulletin boards, and friends and acquaintances, and they lose information because they don't copy their information, and they do not have a backup device. It is like that for most of you, right? Your iPhone breaks, you lose your phone book and your email and half your pictures?

More about this... in my next installment.

Friday October 7, 2011 - Deception, and A Passing

I am assuming you have seen the deceptive lifestyle ads that have been plaguing the news media for a while now - saw another one at CNN today, shown here. I am just surprised that CNN and others are OK with these "ad services" - this one was particularly stupid, as they appear to have found men and women models with the same gianormous cup sizes. I can't help but think CNN and others should be able to make money from real advertisers, instead of these scam artists. Whenever the Fed takes down another Penis Enlargement site, fifteen others seem to crop up, could we get some real policing on the road here, please?

Steve Jobs and Apple Computer really enticed me back into the computer industry, after I left IBM around 1973. I'd had enough of mainframe computing, IBM and other things American weren't exactly popular in The Netherlands, and the world of media, press and theatre, always important in Amsterdam, soon sucked me in. When the Apple ][ was introduced, in 1977, a friend managed to cut an agreement with Cupertino to get representation of the computer in the Benelux, and after writing some advertising copy for the nascent company I became its engineering director. Then, I ended up managing director ad-interim, when my friend mistakenly was carted off to a French jail, when French customs didn't like his convoy - a convoy in which the 16th Karma-Pa, the Tibetan Buddhist leader, was traveling.

They did let my friend out of jail, but soon Apple began to realize the gold mine it was sitting on, the personal computer era had begun, and started up its own subsidiaries in most Western countries, cutting out the middle man. By that time, I had made my move across the little pond, and was living in England, we're in 1979 at this point.

I am not meaning to do yet another Jobs obituary, but it would seem to me Steve Jobs' career was sort of hacked into two: the invention of the original personal computer, which, from a commercial point of view, was certainly largely an Apple product, until IBM ran the Macintosh off the rails. This was and episode I saw up close on Wall Street, at the First Boston Corporation, where the Mac, by 1988, was relegated to "desktop publishing" on account of its lack of protected memory, while the latest brokerage workstation, with windows (yes, Windows) giving a simultaneous view of the stock markets of New York, London, Tokyo and Chicago was running on an IBM PC-AT with Windows 286. Bill had eclipsed Steve.

For Steve Jobs to come back with an avalanche of consumer electronics that ended up financing a completely new generation of Apple computers, running Unix and X-Windows, can only be called a stroke of genius, and that he certainly was. Pity he died young-ish, but, I suppose, he had a good innings, and he most certainly leaves a huge legacy, as he flies with the angels.

In my quest to answer interview questions, I've finally written up some of the stuff I have done, over the years, in a more coherent manner than before. A Microsoft executive mentioned it, the other day, I am multi-disciplinary, and my various skillsets aren't that easy to combine, for an HR person or hiring manager. Especially here in the United States, where often a manager will shy away from an applicant they can't follow, often because they're afraid the person will go off at a tangent, or has too many interests to stay focused. I wouldn't apply for a job I couldn't work up an interest in, but that isn't something you can make people believe. Similarly, loyalty is hard to prove, although you would think that is what references are for. Then again, you wouldn't come up with a reference who would badmouth you, so it is complicated.

I've written a few cover letters for various skillsets, and what I would like is for those of you who have critiqued my resume before to take a look, when you have time and feel like it, and let me know what you think. I put them, for your convenience, in one webpage document with three sections, here.

Anybody, really, you can use this link to comment if you don't have my email address or can't use LinkedIn. And should you, reading my cover letters, experience a desperate urge to have me come and work for you, don't hesitate... *grin*. Especially if you need a technologist who understands how to fit your new "thing" into the old guy's "widget", I can do you.

Sunday October 2, 2011 - Resumes and Broken Cars

(Cool, huh, that Kindle Fire!). This probably is not going to be much of a blog entry - I see my last update was on Monday, and it is Friday already, but in the interim I have had two - umm, "employer meetings", is the right word, I suppose, they're not application related, but one is an intake with a large consulting agency, and the other a second conversation with an executive with a Very Important Computing Company. I don't want to expose him unduly, but the name of the company begins with an "M", and they're, uh, headquartered around the corner from me.

That in itself is intimidating enough, but for him to spend this much time on me is gratifying and scary at the same time. Having said that, this is one of the companies that is forever looking for talent - a couple of weeks ago, they posted 1,083 local jobs at their careers site, in one day. That is a hell of a lot, I do not recall ever seeing any employer do that (but I don't see them all, to be honest). So - as one does after an interview, another resume revamp, and I am writing additional documentation about some of my expertise - we Europeans aren't that good at blowing our own trumpet, I am very much of the "read between the lines" generation, and that is something that does not work here in the United States. My career, after all, has more than a few "firsts"...

- I had my first internet account in London in 1980,
- my first laptop with built-in modem from Miami,FL, in 1984,
- in 1985 turned up my very own MCI Mail Link between MCI and British Telecom Gold, where I leased service, working with the Vint Cerf, who, as it turned out, worked from an office in Rye, New York, only a few miles from where I would, in 1990, join the NYNEX research lab in White Plains, New York,
- a former colleague at the First Boston Corp. reminded me I was the first person he ever saw with a mobile phone, in Manhattan in 1987, and
- my first website, in The Netherlands, in 1994;
- I turned up (myself) the first ever speech recognition in the public telephone system in New York in 1997, in the Bronx, New York, and
- had my first internet domain in 1999.
- In 2000, Verizon took the first call through its new Long Distance subsidiary, a company I was brought down from New York to help build in Arlington, VA, it was the first time a regulated "landline" phone company designed and built a deregulated carrier company with Federal approval.

NYNEX' nationwide expansion, 9/11 and Federal Stuff kind of got in the way of "new things" for a while, but I went and got into research off my own bat after my Verizon management buyout. Mostly, I have been working on cellular internet implementations overseas - in the United States, there is little incentive for this, as DSL, FIOS and cable internet have taken over our world. Curiously, in Western Europe, arguably more advanced than the United States in terms of its installed fiber base, cellular internet enjoys a higher uptake than it does here, possibly caused by the (regulated) interoperability of competing networks there.

- I found an HSDPA mobile telephone with full GPS based navigation in the Philippines in 2007, that wasn't something you could get in the United States. It did (and does) 3.5G; then in Singapore and Hong Kong, now virtually everywhere outside of North America. Tethered, too. Interestingly, HSDPA, what is called 3.5G "over there", has been available in many overseas places since 2006, and when the terminology "4G" is used in the United States, most of the time they're talking about 3.5G. The use of "4G" obfuscates the fact we're aeons behind Europe and Asia.
- I tested RIM's T-Mobile Blackberry 9700 on NTT Docomo's 3.5G Tokyo network, in 2008, until then not a network any Western mobile telephone could use,
- I got myself a Fory multistandard mobile telephone with touch screen and worldwide TV reception in 2008, in Beijing, where they still play with technology - and went back
- in 2010, when I got my first ZTE 3G wireless internet dongle on TD-SCDMA, using China Mobile's home grown Chinese high speed wireless standard - interesting because the Chinese government, nominally still owner of all telecommunications in the People's Republic, is trying to implement a high speed cellular standard that does not involve paying royalties to Qualcomm or Americans, or using their technologies.
- Equally in 2010, I put a member of my family on mobile internet in Indonesia, enabling them to keep up with the home front in Europe using Skype, a Chinese Dell laptop, and a 3.5G dongle. Special, because it has not been long since Indonesia was a telecommunications third world country. Today, in the middle of metropolitan Jakarta, you can Skype with video on their wireless XL network - I am not a little proud I am one of the team that started that company, and began the GSM network build, a bunch of New Yorkers competing with networks set up for the Indonesians by the Dutch PTT and German Deutsche Telekom. With no small thanks to our expertise, drive, and Indonesian future vision, today, Indonesia has the highest growth rate in the world in mobile internet. Teens to pensioners in Indonesia Facebook on millions and millions of Blackberrys...

All told, I am seeing my job hunt result in serious interviews, hopefully resultant to my "new and improved" resume - FWIW, you can find that here. But I am finding out I really have not put together a coherent story of my technical professional fortes - mobile telephony, 24/7 operations, risk management, disaster recovery, and high availability systems. Especially in the latter, I have experience like nobody's business.

Friend M., has a colleague who is a former auto mechanic, who saved my backside by replacing the A/C compressor in my Dodge Durango, teaching me how to do it in the process. It deteriorated during the 3,100 mile drive from Virginia to Washington State, presumably it was simply old age, but then when I got here a Dodge dealership diagnosed the noises and overheating as "clogged radiator", charged me $1,100 to replace it, the noise continued, and within the week, in the parking lot of a Walmart in Renton, WA, the car would not start at all. The A/C compressor, which sits on a common belt with the water pump, alternator, etc., had seized up. "Seized up", in the Durango, means the car no longer runs, as the seized compressor will stop the engine from turning over. Completely. No car.

I can't prove it, but I think the overhating problems and the noises were all caused by the compressor failing progressively, nothing to do with the radiator at all. The dealership, meanwhile, wanted another $1,100 to replace the compressor, but thankfully mechanic M. said he could do it for much less, and I set about finding the replacement compressor on the internet.

That was not the easiest thing in the world. I went to a web merchant I had used before, autopartswarehouse.com in California, and promptly got "done over". The compressor they sent me, allegedly the right model for my Durango, was not, and the refrigerant I ordered, according to the website "in stock", was suddenly on backorder - after they had charged me. Well, yes, they said, that happens because orders come in from multiple places, so the systems don't always get the latest update. This, of course, is bullshit - your inventory can only be in one system, so once the last item has been purchased, other systems can't put that order in, an order system can only pull one inventory number at a time. For that not to work means that they don't have their web system set up properly, and they hope you'll sit there and wait. I did not, and asked for my money back, which they did speedily, to their credit.

I found the correct compressor with acpartshouse.com, in Texas, and these folks provided much more detail in terms of not only getting the right part for my car, but making sure I had a compatible model number, something the other outfit didn't even ask for. It was a little (about $30) more expensive, and they charged shipping, which the Autopartswarehouse had not, but I now have a rebuilt, perfectly fitting, perfectly working, A/C compressor in the Durango.

Autopartswarehouse capped it all off by charging me a 10% "restocking fee", even though they had sent me the wrong model compressor. This was exacerbated by huge delays in their customer service. They use a call- and service centre that I assume is in the Philippines, and that works well, but is scaled so you end up spending an hour on hold before getting to an agent. Again to their credit, the center works well, excellent English, no communications problems, but between not being able to get hold of them swiftly, and them not returning calls via their message system, I was not able to get them to ship me the right model compressor. I pointed this out to them, and they did refund my "restocking fee". From my perspective, though, if they don't have their parts and inventory systems set up right, and you can't get to them on the phone in less than 15 minutes, I will not buy from them again. When something in my car is broken I need the right part, providing that is not rocket science.

Here is a bit of video, showing the A/C compressor cycling, as it should. By the way, the A/C in your car comes on when you start your car, even if you have it switched off, as it removes moisture from your ventilation system and windshield while the engine and car warm up. This isn't something you can bypass, as a clever but elderly neighbour insisted was possible on his Honda. It isn't.

Monday September 26, 2011 - Where's the Meat?

If there were an "endless" market for mobile telephones, I expect there would not be the kind of lawsuits we see occurring between Apple and Samsung today. The idea of pushing each other's products off the market is somewhat self defeating, I would suggest - you compete by making a better product, not by spending your clients' hard earned dollar$ in courts - every lawsuit either reduces your profits, or increases your prices. And when I see one of my nieces jumping up and down for joy after replacing her iPhone with a Galaxy "Samsung Galaxy S II Zwart", the Samsung being both cheaper and better than the iPhone, according to her, it would seem to me Apple needs to be careful. I've said that before - Samsung is a monster corporation, able to do lots of things Apple has never heard of, and with a much wider technological base than Apple, which continues to be in a couple of niche areas. Nice, yes, but niche. If you like, you can ask yourself if Apple is going the way of Nokia, which got humongous equally based on its own custom operating system, and now has found that left it wanting vis-a-vis the competition. And Nokia, unlike Apple, even makes sure it builds and sells the entire range of telephones, from very high end down to the $20.18 Nokia 1280 "handphone" cabdrivers in India use.

Add to this Verizon Wireless' sudden insistence that Samsung should not be impeded in handset sales by Apple, and I really have to wonder whether Apple knows what it is doing. Perhaps it is not sufficiently aware that Verizon Wireless is 50% owned by Vodafone, the largest wireless carrier on earth, which has a vested interest in an "uninterruptible" relationship with Samsung. This is not about my not liking Apple as a company - you really can't say much in the negative about an American company that delivers shareholder value the way Apple does - but about my amazement at Apple's actions, which could, in the long run, cost it dearly. You generally don't pick on those six times your size, unless you really have ammunition. I guess we'll see..

In an article in the Dutch Volkskrant, its "science editor" Maarten Keulemans (whose scientific credentials nor CV nor bio are posted anywhere for the great unwashed public to find) states that "eating meat in excess is bad for the environment and for public health". I am quoting Mr. Keulemans because his comment is a perfect example of pseudo-science, none of this is in any way proven. Eating anything in excess, and that would certainly include meat, isn't healthy, that is well documented.

Meat is not in any way an exception here, and the reason that eating meat in excess is "bad for the environment" is simply that large parts of "the environment", like Mr. Keulemans' home country of The Netherlands, are terribly overpopulated. It is the regionally concentrated production of pigs, cows, chickens and other meat producers, rather than doing this in a distributed fashion, that causes damage to the environment, not the over-eating. And that concentration is a consequence of price competition, of having to mass produce, something that could be remedied by distributing production, we have the refrigeration and other preservation technologies to facilitate long distance transport. The pollution, if you will, is caused by stacking people on top of each other, not by those people eating more than they should.

For as long as we insist on living in cities of six- or ten million inhabitants and more, we're going to have environmental problems caused by overpopulation. Reducing the population explosion in the Third World, and the resultant migration into the First World, is another way to "curb the over-eating" - China is managing its population growth, but India and many African countries are not, and that's a big issue. Growth needs more people? Maybe not.

Perhaps Mr. Keulemans wants to think a bit less "Dutch politically correct", and a bit more scientific. Yes, The Netherlands is most certainly very overcrowded, something almost nobody ever talks about. Because, you see, The Netherlands is an RWC - a Rich Western Country, one that can afford to stack its citizens and remove their poop in an environmentally responsible fashion. But some 350,000 people are born every day (just 500 of which, or 0.14%, are born in The Netherlands), and those 350,000 cause a lot more damage to the environment than do those eating trop steak frites. Most of those 350,000, actually, cannot afford steak frites. They can't even afford frites... or, indeed, environmentally responsible cooking fuel. Stand on a street corner in Bangalore, India, as I did taking the picture to the right, and you get the message: pollution caused by overproducing cows for fancy meat dishes may be A problem, but it is not THE problem. Go to India or China (just take a walk through the humongous new Beijing South Railway Station, and tell yourself the Chinese had a reason to supersize it), walk around during the rush hour, and you will soon get the message. Honest, do. Go see and learn. And if you're a self respecting science journalist, write about science. Not about what Westerners have for dinner. Save that for the Lifestyle section.

Friday September 23, 2011 - Philippines, anyone?

The other day I mentioned Cebu to friends, the town in the Philippines, as an ideal vacation destination, by comparison with Bali or Hawaii or that place on the left coast of India - it is cheaper, just as sunny, the people (this is a personal assessment) are even nicer, they're not after your money 24/7. As important: Mactan (the island next door to Cebu, which itself is sometimes not really nice, polluted, and very overcrowded large), where the Cebu International Airport is physically located, is gorgeous, invites to walk, eat, drink and relax, and is littered with hotels that accomodate every wallet. When I looked at March packages to Mactan from Seattle, I found one twelve day stay on Expedia for $1,025 per person - including the flights on Korean Air. The first slide in the presentation to the right is the Southern half of Mactan Island, from the balcony of the umpteenth floor of the Mactan Hilton Resort. My Nikon D90 says it was about 5am when I shot that, about an hour after we got off our late night flight from Singapore, and checked in.

Anyway, I loved the Philippines, and had I known in 2007 what I know now, I'd have pulled all of my money out of my brokerage account, and moved to Mactan. Of course, you never do things when you can - it is hard, some say impossible, to predict the future. The Philippines is a very nice place, is all I can say, and they officially speak English there. Officially, I said... 'nuff said. The Shutterfly slide show to the right shows you the various facets of Mactan, and I apologize for there being 193 slides, but I don't know what you're interested in, and that is all I took there, minus the duplicates and the out-of-focus stuff. So - enjoy. Or ignore, as you please.

Back to last Tuesday's blog entry, then, and Search Engine Optimization. From an email I received recently:"All SEO ranking signals revolve around content of some kind". Umm, duh. Of course they do. I have to tell you I don't even understand what "ranking signals" means, and more to the point, managing content to accomodate search engines is shooting at a moving target - search engines change continuously, and with that, your results, even if you don't do nuttin'. Ergo: don't do SEO. It is useless, and stupid. What if, rather than have a department or team work on Search Engine Optimization, what if your entire company spent one hour per day working on advertising and marketing, customer service and product improvement. Instead of their regular job? Everybody, the janitors, the lawyers, the sales morons, the gururus, Hans from the mailroom (you have a mail room?), everybody. Think about the engagement, about the information you would gain, the publicity you would garner.. Just a thought, people, is any major corporation doing that? And I am talking about mandatory, part of your job description, one of those tasks an employee gets in terms of improving the company.

Tuesday September 20, 2011 - The internet optimizes itself

Although I am doing better in terms of the interest my skillset is garnering in the job search, I am not getting the feeling I am close to a job. That's not necessarily "the way it is", stuff does happen, and it is eminently possible one or the other employer will be on the phone, one of these days. While searching in the Washington, D.C., area, the vast majority of jobs I qualified for were "U.S. citizen" or "Cleared" only, and it is clear that isn't the case here in the Seattle area, I get calls from recruiters and agents just about daily. So the search is a little more upbeat, though not at an end.

Part of my problem is that I have a huuuuge and very diverse (nice word for incongruous) skillset, and that routinely confuses hiring managers. I've been (successfully) employed as a journalist, editor, photographer, film producer, systems engineer, project manager, customs specifyer, and systems developer and -tester. I have a creative and a technical streak, and I write my own HTML and maintain my own website and do my own server administration. Since 1994. That means I am actually engaged in Search Engine Optimization, as well, as I follow my server statistics, and tweak my site and links and headers and know how to drive traffic to my site. As in, I have some seventeen years experience futzing (to use the technical term) with the world wide web.

Have I sold that skill? Not really. In Verizon, I was in charge of some of our web presence, but it was a sideline, and it meant I managed the folks that "did the internet", and understood what they were talking about. At the same time, I managed the underlying "actual" internet we used. The problem, then, is that you can't put all that, in between all the other crap, in a few words in your resume. Even though I can teach (from what I see, out there, just surfing) a few people how to "do" the web. What they do, out there, is often dismal, but it looks good when they access it from their own network, and the managers often have never done any web programming, and don't have skills beyond Facebook. They often don't have the comparison basis, either - 50,000 hits in a month looks great, but only because they do not know how many hits they could have. And then the ratio between hits and results (whatever those are) is rarely calculated. I'd rather have 500 orders out of 10,000 hits than 600 orders out of 100,000, but the problem is that results are often gauged in traffic, not in sales or orders or contacts, not in ratios, and not in understanding why - "please stay on the line to answer the survey". Look, moron, if you don't know what's wrong with your customer service there isn't a survey in the world that will tell you. Ask Gordon Ramsay, you gotta roll up your friggin' sleeves and muck in. Only way to learn. When I worked for the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority in New York City, all directors and managers had to do one day a year in a tollbooth as a BTO - a Bridge and Tunnel Officer. Selling toll tickets and breathing exhaust, in 20 or 90 degree weather, window open. Mucking in.

The primary tool, when building a "web presence", you see, is time. The secondary tool? Abhor change. Search engines get to know you because you are always there, and you always "look" the same. If your links change every week, if this week you use Flash, and next week you don't, you screw yourself up. My resume is visible because of a very simple reason: the URL is aartsen.net/resume. Inside that directory, there are other pointers for the search engines, but the primary is that when a search engine crawls my site, it sees a domain name, and then it sees a few directories. And it will then understand that the directory "resume" contains the resume. And the directory "curriculumvitae" does too, for the Europeans, Asians and Africans. Tomorrow, still there. Next month, still there. Next decade (and this is really really important!!) it will still be there. Never mind the new idiot who wants to use WotsitFoosion - it has to be there, always there, what you are after is all the searchers you can get,, not "ooooooooooh pretty". If it does not solve a problem you have, if the developer shows you screens, but not your bottom line dollar$, don't install it. The internet is old already, it is not the latest greatest newest any more, even if it is for you - I had my first real internet account in 1980, my first wired laptop in 1984, and it worked the same today's does, the screens just got a bit bigger. It is not about visitors, it is about those looking for you, or your stuff. If you do fancy stuff, it will take longer, and the next "manager" will change the structure, because (s)he has a better solution, and guess what? You lose your place. Simple as that. KISS really works!

But, enough of that, all I am saying is that the American recruitment process is such that everybody gets compartmentalized, something we did not use to do. The only reason we speak of "out-of-the-box thinking" is that everybody and their grandfather thinks in the box, which is one reason why we do not innovate. The other reason we don't innovate is that we've cut margins to the point there isn't any money for research and development - way back when, we spent millions of dollars we had inventing stuff that, for the most part, never went anywhere. While we were doing that, back in the '80s and '90s, there were tons of developments that came as "byproducts" of all this innovation, those did go out and make money for us, all over the world. I used speech dialing as an example, the other day, cost a fortune to develop, and nobody uses it, but the sidelines were a new way of analog-to-digital conversion, and a new way of moving data quickly from network to memory chip to permanent storage. Analphabetic people in Third World countries probably would love speech dialing, but where their $23 cellphone costs the equivalent of a quarter's salary, and their monthly cellphone subscription costs $3.21, there isn't the money for them to have a tool they could really use. Even though we invented and built the tool, we can roll it out there, it is paid for, and this is real dogooder stuff for people who can neither read nor write. You could even pop stuff on their screen as it is recognized, help them learn to read. Just sayin', you've got to be inventive, and out-of-the-box may mean you do things everybody else thinks are useless and/or a complete waste. After all, when you teach people to read they will buy books and newspapers and make more money and buy computers so they can send emails and things, right? It may take a while, but won't they? A big problem in Africa, after all, is that farmers can't read text messages about their crops...

So, perhaps one of the ways in which the United States can be a development leader again is for us to start spending money on inventions again - but then we will have to wean the consumer off off "cheap". Today, the Chinese have the money, and they are spending it on inventing new and improved products, because they know what we buy, and they know what we might want to have tomorrow, and they have the know-how, the factories and the resources, human as well as monetarily. What we have to do now is take the decision whether we will give them more money, or spend it on ourselves, and start thinking the way "they" do. We've got to do something - sitting here bickering about tea and coffee parties will only bankrupt us even more. What the Chinese do today is the reverse of what Obama is doing - they're not creating jobs, they're creating innovation, without a requirement for an immediate return - you can do that when you have the Communist Party looking over your shoulder, rather than the Wall Street Party. Their bullet trains are not designed to run at a profit, they facilitate a framework that (hopefully) will.

The pictures? The Subway poster, top right, made me wonder how far in terms of low prices Subway thinks it can go. There isn't any way you can make a profit on a $2.99 sandwich (actually, if you're ordering the deal with someone else, you get two halves of a 12 inch sub, and pay only $2.50...), so, clearly, Subway is trying to "draw crowd". What they are competing against is the supermarkets - breakfast sandwiches at Safeway for $1.99, and this Vietnamese lovely, spicy, sandwich (I'd almost forgotten the French were Vietnam's colonial masters, so the Vietnamese sandwich is made with a proper French baguette) for only $2.00 at Uwajimaya.

Friday September 16, 2011 - T-Mobile's Nokia C7

(I wrote this as a review posting - see my Amazon reviews here, and am posting it here so I can tell Amazon where to get off if they try to claim any rights to my writings).

I love this thing, the Nokia C7, which T-Mobile calls the Nokia Astound. I don't know that it is as efficient and easy to use as my T-Mobile BlackBerry Bold 9780, but it compares to that as a Camaro does to a Mercedes Turbo Diesel. 2002 Camaro, not one of those newfangled things, I should add.

There are two reasons why I "bought" this phone. First of all, I needed a backup for the Nokia 6110 Navigator I bought in the Philippines in 2007, long before any carrier in the United States thought of selling phones with GPS capability. Back in June, 2011, I was getting ready to drive 3,000 miles, clear across the country, and I wanted to make sure that I had a backup should my main GPS phone fail mid-trip (it didn't). Secondly, T-Mobile offered me this touch screen smartphone for free with a 2 year extension of the contract on one of my lines, and that, combined with the above motivation, clinched the deal for me.

You see, back in the same 2007, when I bought the Navigator, Nokia bought the Navteq mapping company - it is, today, called Nokia Maps. Navteq was the oldest, largest, and arguably most advanced purveyor of navigation tools - I visited them many years ago, when we (NYNEX Corp.) were contemplating offering navigation services (we decided against it, eventually). Drove a Hertz car outfitted with their navigation device, which promptly couldn't find the Marriott Hotel in San Jose I was staying at. I mean, I could kinda see it from the car, but the device couldn't get me to the entrance, it insisted the hotel was in the middle of a local park. So Nokia now has one of the largest mapping databases in the known universe, competing with Google (which rolls its own) and Dutch navigation devices manufacturer TomTom, which bought the other "biggie" in mapping, Dutch Teleatlas.

So if you buy a Nokia phone, it comes with a fully featured navigation application-with-everything, Nokia switched from Swiss provider Route66 to the existing Navteq algorithms, databases and software when it bought that company, and integrated them with its Symbian handset operating system. There are many other flavours of navigation, in many other mobile phones, but Nokia arguably has by far the most advanced, and the most experience in building "Navigators". In the C7, that shows.

I love this thing, but I do not know I'd have spent $500 on it (I do, on some, I do). And before you say "iPhone", never had one of those, either. I firmly believe that you can't do everything you do on a PC or laptop on something the size of a pocket calculator, and the C7 (and presumably the iPhone) only confirms that for me. Between the touch screen and the, count 'em, six buttons along the rim, and three keys, I am always touching something I shouldn't, and the handset goes off doing things I didn't mean for it to do. You can certainly get used to "ginger operations", but by (admittedly) comparison with my non touch screen Blackberry it is more of a pain to operate.

Having said that, it can do more, and comes with much more stuff preloaded that I happen to use and like on my PC. There's the aforementioned navigation, there's Skype (which I have not been able to get to work other than in very choppy speech mode), there's UMA, a.k.a. WiFi calling (more about that at the end of this piece, that's T-Mobile USA specific), and then there are PC Suite and Ovi Suite, which synchronize the C7 not only with Microsoft Outlook, but with Lotus Notes, the standard mail and database tool for many corporate and civil service types. The BBC News, a Facebook webapp, Slacker, Twitter, all come preloaded. Especially Facebook pleases me, I am allergic to the Facebook app you can load and install on your phone, as that continually reports all sorts of stuff back to Facebook. I don't mind them having that data, but only if I have pre-approved that and if they pay me for it - after all, Facebook uses that information to make money. Or tries to. There is a lot more, I just wanted to give you a flavour.

In short, backed by the unparallelled mobile phone expertise Nokia has - Nokia was only the second manufacturer that introduced a handheld mobile telephone, back in 1988, and has always built its phones soup-to-nuts, from the operating system to the circuit boards - the C7 is very usable, advanced, full of magic (an 8 megapixel camera, although 8 megapixels in a phone isn't the same thing as 8 megapixels in a Nikon), and the price is right.

T-Mobile offers, on a number of phones, including the C7, something called WiFi calling, known technically as UMA, which allows a GSM mobile phone to make calls over wireless internet as if it was connected to the regular mobile network. Great if you are in a dead zone, or underground, or in a hotel or office overseas that offers WiFi service (where your T-Mobile phone will behave as though it is in the United States!). UMA used to be offered on some cheap Samsung and Nokia phones, but today it is offered on business style smartphones, including some Android devices and all Blackberrys, as well as a few Nokias. UMA service does not count towards the minutes in your plan, and that, if you have WiFi at home and/or in the office, makes the C7 an ideal home phone replacement, too. The C7 supports, unusually, both T-Mobile's and AT&T Wireless' 3G network frequencies, by the way, and that means that this phone will roam on AT&T's network where T-Mobile does not have service available. I don't know how many handsets have this capability, clearly intended for use after the two companies merge, but it is great to have, between that and the WiFi calling, it gets you service where you previously might not have had any.

The picture? Bellevue, WA, contemporary mall architecture at Crossroads. 8 megapixels, taken with the C7, processed to TIF format using the excellent (free!) XNView, then downsized and compressed to a JPEG. Click on the pic top left to see a larger version, or click here to see the (17 massive megabytes, you have been warned!!!) original.

Thursday September 15, 2011 - Health care is not always wanted

I have been working on revamping my resume for a while now. Recently, my friend Raymond, who is a technical writer by profession, has reviewed my efforts. What he came up with, amongst others, was that the fonts I use are too small to read comfortably. This has me wondering. You see, way back, when I was working in the NYNEX laboratory in White Plains, NY, I came across similar issues. Mostly, these are caused by two human factors. One is that people do not have appropriate glasses to read screens, more often seen in women than men, and the other that people, as they age, adjust the size of the print they read, rather than their prescription.

I was, at the time, working on PC based operator workstations, and found that we could substantially improve operator response time (fancy words for the duration of a "directory" call) by using larger monitors for the operators. When I increased the screen size from 17 to 25 inches, some operators gained as many as two seconds in their call handling. Two seconds that can amount to several million dollars in cost reduction. When we initially saw the 1.4 second (average) improvement, we had no idea what was causing that - we were using new keyboards, new software, faster computers, what have you. But eventually, I found out many operators weren't wearing glasses when they should (men as well as women!), and that the larger screens made it easier (and thus faster) for them to read the caller and address information. Surprising, that, if you consider eyecare and glasses for these operators, all Union members, were entirely free. I saw the same with an aging developer colleague, and to this day do not have any idea why people would do this to themselves. I've been wearing extended wear contact lenses since 1980, and monovision contact lenses since 1992, just so I have vision that is as optimized as technology can make it, and it just had not occurred to me there were people who, I guess, "just don't bother".

As we're on health care anyway, the announcement that IBM will begin work with Wellpoint on using its Watson superdupercomputer for healthcare applications is exciting. This is, of course, a "superapp", and a fascinating approach, but you really have to ask yourself what the eventual cost will be, and how Watson will transfer its knowledge to hu-mans, which today don't do a stellar job of communicating with each other. I am specifically pointing this out as I recently had to transfer my own medical records from Virginia to Washington (state), as it appears there is no real mechanism to do this automagically. Over to you, Watson, crack that nut between your eyelashes.

The picture? My friend P. took it, her husband M. and I, sitting outside a restaurant, waiting for our table, Blackberrying (is that a verb?). She is such an accomplished photographer with true vision, I often think she should have made that her profession. Judge for yourself - this was shot "on the spur" using her brand new HTC phone.

Saturday September 10, 2011 - Compete and Die, or Standardize and Compete?

This (as I write this) is one of those days when the Dow is up because of conjecture:

Click Yahoo's Carol Bartz fired

Click Bank of America fires heads of Wealth Management and Retail.

A perfect example of how investors pay out on the basis of things that have not happened yet. I don't know that there is room for multiple search engines - Yahoo, Bing, Google. or multiple "portals", as they used to be called. You may have read my piece about standardization in the mobile telephony world, the other day - the same thing may apply in search engines. When is the last time you ran searches in Bing, Yahoo, and Google, to see which one would be best? Since you're searching for something, how would you even know which one was best, other than through one or the other not finding anything, which is unlikely? Google appears to be largest and have the most clout and widest expanse, so that's what I use. You get familiar with the way things work, warts and all. It would be interesting if there were a single "search portal", and all of the search engine providers would contribute results, accuracy would be dependent on how much time you're willing to give the search engines to parse, and they'd get paid on the basis of what you, the consumer, do next. That would be real competition.

Bank of America gives me the impression the place has grown too large, and is becoming hard to manage. I recall something similar happening with Verizon - merger, merger, merger, and then eventually the growth cost too much money, and separately, half of Verizon Wireless became the property of British Vodafone. Today, the stock is well below where it was when Verizon was created out of its predecessor companies, and the company, like many others, was mostly hurt by the technology development that is making both copper wire and fiber optics distribution cabling obsolete. With that, competition has driven down the profits of mobile telephony and mobile data to the point that it is becoming even hard to make a profit there.

So help me do some sums here - Facebook

Click ran a $500 million profit over $1.6 billion in revenues

in the first half of 2011, we're told. Then: "..a private offering to overseas investors conducted by Goldman Sachs, at a valuation of roughly $50 billion". So that is investment. That was used to run / build out Facebook? What we really would need to know how much Facebook cost to construct, and how much it costs to build out (rather than to maintain). That it "accounted for nearly one third of all Internet display advertisement impressions in the United States in June, more than the combined total of Yahoo, Microsoft Corp, Google and AOL Inc, according to analytics firm comScore" is nice, but what really matters is what, and how much in $$ terms, those advertisements sell. An ad in Google will often come up directly related to someone's search, an ad in Facebook gives me a Westchester County Golf Club when I live the other side of the country. IOW: who knows? Yes, its growth has been phenomenal, but I do not have a good track record of knowing when to get out - and, in my mind, like AOL, this bubble is going to burst, because we have "windows", so can be using Facebook and Google at the same time...

Seriously, the level of competition we are used to in the United States requires vast sums for investment. It occurs to me that what European, and, to some extent, Asian governments have done, limiting competition in the marketplace by tightly regulating products like cellular and cable TV services, very likely gets the same expenditure out of the consumer, with less waste. We have, in the United States, three competing incompatible mobile telephony standards, with as a consequence that the consumer has to ditch their equipment when they want to change carriers. To some extent, this will cause some consumers to not switch carriers, where in Europe the consumer can take their handset, go to a different carrier, use the same handset there, and - this is the crux - the original carrier still gets some revenues because the consumer may roam on their network. I do not believe that this service format is inherently less profitable than ours. It certainly is friendlier to the consumer, and who does not want a smiling customer? Is competing each other to death really a viable long term business model? Or is it part of the reason we're in such an economic mess - admittedly, the Europeans aren't doing that well either, but I personally think we are worse off.

Saturday September 3, 2011 - The Economy: Stupid is as Stupid does

Jobs? We must stop connecting the economy to jobs reports. This is almost a pre-programmed event - the Department of Labour gives a "bad" job report, and the stock market takes a nose dive. That is ridiculous. There aren't any new major products and services we can export, there is no money with the consumer, so there aren't any new jobs. It has been that way for a while, and I am not seeing anything out there that will change that. Jobs are not related to companies making money, only to the traditional distribution of that money. On top of that, Republicans are stopping Obama from pumping money into the economy, the Fed being the only place money can come from. We can take more taxes from wealthy individuals and corporations, if the money is there, and, as a nation, we need it. That's why we have Gummint. If we're not spending our tax dollars on the "wars", let's spend them in country. You don't want that, that's fine, then you go take some of our assets, like those hundreds of idled jets, to the international Pawn, and make money that way. But stop complaining, stop talking, and go do something. "Worst showing in 11 months" - if you stupidly keep concentrating on the wrong thing, you will trigger the self fulfilling prophecy.

Here is someone I had never heard of who says some very reasonable and clever things... Captivated me by beginning his interview with statements about startups being concentrated on consumers, and that that is generally not where growth is at. Or, as I said many years ago in the lab @ NYNEX: "Who is going to pay for it?". We were looking at voice dialing, had designed a great platform to do that with, got it working, patented the sucker, but I could not see how anybody was going to pay $3.95, or whatever, a month so they could say "Grandma" to their phone. Nobody listened to me, of course, just as well as I had no proof, we rolled it out, it worked beautifully, and it bombed, as nobody wanted to pay for it. For me personally, it was a dud as you tend to only program those folks you call a lot, and you already know their numbers in your fingers. Now, of course, we have displays on our phones and it is a moot point, even if most smartphones have voice recognition. The ones that should have, the regular cellphones we sell cheaply to people in the Third World who can't read or write, don't have voice recognition, which is kind of silly, considering the number of analphabetics out there. I wondered why several of my neighbours in Virginia never called, always stopped by, until I recognized they are analphabetic, dependent on their wives to pay the bills and read the correspondence. Quite amazing, in 21st century America, 60 miles from the nation's capital.

It is interesting though - the consumer products, Foursquare, Groupon, Google+, don't make money, Facebook probably only does because of its sheer size, and the advertising sales are a bubble, nobody knows how much their advertising really sells. They talk about "driving traffic", and pay per click - but I do not believe that all of this money HP spent to do popover ads in the New York Times, when everybody could still read the New York Times, resulted in anything, considering they're selling the farm. I mean, if there is truly very little money to be made in manufacturing consumer PCs, we've really got to a point where we need to wonder why we do things the way we do. If neither IBM nor HP can make money making PCs and laptops, the Chinese will in the end not be able to either. That is simple logic...

To finish up my reporting on Nokia's C7 smartphone (a.k.a. T-Mobile's Nokia Astound) ), it not only allows the use of both TMO and AT&T 3G freqencies, I've noticed UMA showing use of AT&T's network as well. AT&T does support Hotspots, a.k.a. femtocells, so perhaps it is not all that surprising, but I had not seen that happen before - and I have been using UMA every day since 2007, when it was introduced in the United States. The big question is now, what with AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile seemingly having entered into a new roaming agreement on at least some of the new handsets, what happens if indeed the Federal Government prevails? The Justice Department has made it clear they really don't want this merger - is that it, for them? Is there anything they can change? Or does the Fed want the carriers to adopt a European style roaming system, where the carriers are required to carry each other's traffic? That has not stopped Europe's carriers from consolidating though mergers and acquisitions, so one wonders...

Not much else to report. The C7 being my first smartphone with a touch screen that supports lots of "apps", I am simply spending time learning how it works, only to find that my favourite phone applications, Skype and GPS (Nokia Maps) both make the handset crash all over the place. Skype is particularly bad in that it locks the screen in blank mode, so you can only recover by pulling the battery. The handset is pretty much virgin, in that I have not futzed with it, so this isn't something that should happen. Additionally, I am unable to sync the calendar with Microsoft Outlook using the Ovi Suite, so am now doing that using Nokia's older PC Suite, which is not supposed to work with the C7, but does, once you have installed and activated Ovi Suite - even using Bluetooth - something a Blackberry only partially supports.

I have to tell you we are dying for standardization in the phone arena. Not having it only leads to millions and millions of discarded handphones in boxes in attics, and in landfills. Since consumers can't afford to buy new phones all the time, the carriers do it for us, cutting into their own profit margins, as well as those of the manufacturers. When you buy a computer, this will normally have a PC AT architecture, a standard QWERTY keyboard, and a Windows visual interface, and that means it really does not matter what you buy, it all works the same. That is to say, provided you do not buy a Linux machine or a Mac, because they may be very different, down to the MIT X Window System interface they both got for free from the taxpayer - stupid, that, you can't teach your kids the necessary life skills if they can't use a standard that will get them through their lives, right?.

But phones... the reason the iPhone is popular, here in the USA, is simply that it isn't standardized, so the only way for iPhone users to have access to the fancy stuff the iPhone does, is buy more iPhones, and try to make sure the family and the colleagues use iPhones. This does not help, as Apple won't even play ball with the GSM standardization, even though the iPhone is supposed to be a GSM phone. All it takes is one manufacturer not playing by the rules, and your interoperability goes to the dogs.

Wednesday August 31, 2011 - It's Captain Kirk's Communicator!

In my last blog entry, below, I accused my Braun Cruzer shaver of having given up the ghost - guess I have to correct that. After replacing it, I sent it binward, and decided before emptying the bin I'd give it one more try, why I don't know. Sure enough, it charged and I am back using it, anybody want a cheap Remington? My guess is that this waterproof Braun isn't - I was rinsing it after use, and noticed water dripping out of the bottom of it, occasionally, I am assuming it is no longer waterproof. So I don't know that I can recommend it, shouldn't go bad after a couple of years of use, I think. But there it is, now I have two shavers, this a few weeks after I threw two old but serviceable shavers out before I packed up the house.

And an update on the Nokia C7 - I hadn't gotten it to announce driving instructions in GPS mode, but that was entirely my fault. It looks like the volume on GPS is application dependent, all I had to do was crank it up while GPS was GPS'ing. The individual maps, free from Nokia's Ovi.com site (or Nokia.com, which will point you there), can be downloaded via laptop with Ovi Suite (download link from the Nokia support pages), or direct from the handset.

The latter will work fine over WiFi, the Washington State map took about six minutes to download, and as far as I know Ovi has maps for just about anywhere in the world (you may need a sizable memory card to store multiples). Ovi Suite is more or less a necessity if you want to synchronize the C7 with your laptop, the C7 won't work with Nokia's older PC Suite, but the Suite is free, easily accessible, and does give you access to Nokia's huuuge worldwide support structure. It provides a setup to Ovi's email system as well - again, free, it is actually provided by Yahoo these days. Much to my surprise, I found a fully functional mobile version of Skype pre-installed, as well.

The handset can be set to only data roam over a WiFi connection, something it can do for free thanks to its UMA, so the maps are truly free. I tested the voice guided navigation today - unlike my Nokia 6110, the C7 gives voice instructions even when you're walking. I am under the impression that GPS navigation (which isn't the same as looking something up on Google Maps) eats a lot of battery power - when I use my 6110 in the car I have it powered from the lighter socket, or it dies after four hours, and I think the C7 is not much different. I should emphasize that, while UMA lets you place calls over an internet connection, it is not VOIP. UMA "emulates" GSM and GPRS over a tcp/ip connection, at whatever speed the link is running at. So a UMA connectionj can handle, voice, data, and all of the signaling necessary in mobile telephony.

As most smartphones provide access to social networking, I view Facebook on the Nokia at times. It would be interesting to see how many consumers are not in the reach of those "social networks". I am seeing plenty of people who intensely participate in half a dozen or more "Facebooks", and I have to tell you I am not seeing how busy professionals have time for more than three or maybe four networks. Say (in my case) Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and I have just begun looking at Google+ (where the person who invited me in June hasn't posted since June, and I now don't need an invite any more anyway). LinkedIn I access once a day, except for the career sections, which I access whenever the system emails me, couple times a day or so. I've relegated Twitter mostly to travel - it works well on my Nokia with its fancy touchscreen, but I can for the life of me imagine I would be "following" dozens of people, organizations and companies in this way. Just sorting out what's interesting in Twitter would take an hour or more per day. Most of my Dutch friends and relatives have Facebook, but then most of them maintain a presence on the Dutch Hyves system, as well, effectively doing much stuff twice. I canned Hyves, when an unpleasant niece accused me of not responding to her there, since "you are on Hyves every day". Shows you how little people understand of how these systems work and interact: I had my Twitter feed coming into my Hyves pages, updating automatically, and she thought I posted that by hand. So - goodbye HYves, this is how social networks can play havoc with relationships - she got quite verbally offensive over it, not the first time she did that, so she's off my roster on all systems now.

I have noticed a lot of folks posting Tweets that have some kind of comment, combined with a link, without the comment having any understandable meaning, but once you click on the link, you'll go to the explanation. Or not, as the case may be - as I am writing this, I test one link to tell you where it goes, and it goes to the person's Facebook account with a copy of the same message I just read on Twitter. Twice. It is very sweet, I am sure, but quite pointless. Many folks don't use Facebook and Twitter to communicate, but to broadcast, I guess that is what I use my website for, where I have long since taken away the comment capability. The constant hack attempts and comment spam took too much of my time.

Last but not least, the picture at the top left, coming off my lovely Nikon D90 with a 300 mm digitally corrected zoom lens, is where I live now - a suburb of Seattle, King County is in the foothills of the Cascade mountains, and as you can see, lush, pretty, photogenic and built and laid out to a very human scale. I could be in a worse place... (the original is a 12 megabyte Nikon NEF file, this is a scaled down .jpg, click on it, twice if the cursor shows a "+" sign", to see a larger version with more detail).

Wednesday August 31, 2011 - It's Captain Kirk's Communicator!

In my last blog entry, below, I accused my Braun Cruzer shaver of having given up the ghost - guess I have to correct that. After replacing it, I sent it binward, and decided before emptying the bin I'd give it one more try, why I don't know. Sure enough, it charged and I am back using it, anybody want a cheap Remington? My guess is that this waterproof Braun isn't - I was rinsing it after use, and noticed water dripping out of the bottom of it, occasionally, I am assuming it is no longer waterproof. So I don't know that I can recommend it, shouldn't go bad after a couple of years of use, I think. But there it is, now I have two shavers, this a few weeks after I threw two old but serviceable shavers out before I packed up the house.

And an update on the Nokia C7 - I hadn't gotten it to announce driving instructions in GPS mode, but that was entirely my fault. It looks like the volume on GPS is application dependent, all I had to do was crank it up while GPS was GPS'ing. The individual maps, free from Nokia's Ovi.com site (or Nokia.com, which will point you there), can be downloaded via laptop with Ovi Suite (download link from the Nokia support pages), or direct from the handset.

The latter will work fine over WiFi, the Washington State map took about six minutes to download, and as far as I know Ovi has maps for just about anywhere in the world (you may need a sizable memory card to store multiples). Ovi Suite is more or less a necessity if you want to synchronize the C7 with your laptop, the C7 won't work with Nokia's older PC Suite, but the Suite is free, easily accessible, and does give you access to Nokia's huuuge worldwide support structure. It provides a setup to Ovi's email system as well - again, free, it is actually provided by Yahoo these days. Much to my surprise, I found a fully functional mobile version of Skype pre-installed, as well.

The handset can be set to only data roam over a WiFi connection, something it can do for free thanks to its UMA, so the maps are truly free. I tested the voice guided navigation today - unlike my Nokia 6110, the C7 gives voice instructions even when you're walking. I am under the impression that GPS navigation (which isn't the same as looking something up on Google Maps) eats a lot of battery power - when I use my 6110 in the car I have it powered from the lighter socket, or it dies after four hours, and I think the C7 is not much different. I should emphasize that, while UMA lets you place calls over an internet connection, it is not VOIP. UMA "emulates" GSM and GPRS over a tcp/ip connection, at whatever speed the link is running at. So a UMA connectionj can handle, voice, data, and all of the signaling necessary in mobile telephony.

As most smartphones provide access to social networking, I view Facebook on the Nokia at times. It would be interesting to see how many consumers are not in the reach of those "social networks". I am seeing plenty of people who intensely participate in half a dozen or more "Facebooks", and I have to tell you I am not seeing how busy professionals have time for more than three or maybe four networks. Say (in my case) Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and I have just begun looking at Google+ (where the person who invited me in June hasn't posted since June, and I now don't need an invite any more anyway). LinkedIn I access once a day, except for the career sections, which I access whenever the system emails me, couple times a day or so. I've relegated Twitter mostly to travel - it works well on my Nokia with its fancy touchscreen, but I can for the life of me imagine I would be "following" dozens of people, organizations and companies in this way. Just sorting out what's interesting in Twitter would take an hour or more per day. Most of my Dutch friends and relatives have Facebook, but then most of them maintain a presence on the Dutch Hyves system, as well, effectively doing much stuff twice. I canned Hyves, when an unpleasant niece accused me of not responding to her there, since "you are on Hyves every day". Shows you how little people understand of how these systems work and interact: I had my Twitter feed coming into my Hyves pages, updating automatically, and she thought I posted that by hand. So - goodbye HYves, this is how social networks can play havoc with relationships - she got quite verbally offensive over it, not the first time she did that, so she's off my roster on all systems now.

I have noticed a lot of folks posting Tweets that have some kind of comment, combined with a link, without the comment having any understandable meaning, but once you click on the link, you'll go to the explanation. Or not, as the case may be - as I am writing this, I test one link to tell you where it goes, and it goes to the person's Facebook account with a copy of the same message I just read on Twitter. Twice. It is very sweet, I am sure, but quite pointless. Many folks don't use Facebook and Twitter to communicate, but to broadcast, I guess that is what I use my website for, where I have long since taken away the comment capability. The constant hack attempts and comment spam took too much of my time.

Last but not least, the picture at the top left, coming off my lovely Nikon D90 with a 300 mm digitally corrected zoom lens, is where I live now - a suburb of Seattle, King County is in the foothills of the Cascade mountains, and as you can see, lush, pretty, photogenic and built and laid out to a very human scale. I could be in a worse place... (the original is a 12 megabyte Nikon NEF file, this is a scaled down .jpg, click on it, twice if the cursor shows a "+" sign", to see a larger version with more detail).

Saturday August 27, 2011 - Good is getting cheaper, but always at a price

I am seeing various manufacturers of cellphones add value to their product - the most recent would be RIM, which now lets small business manage groups of Blackberrys via an online system, nullifying the added expense of the Blackberry server system that was necessary for the corporate flavour of Blackberry so far. Nokia earlier bought mapping company Navteq, one of the two "original" mapping companies, but I have not so far seen a real marketing results of that acquisition, and Nokia's subsequent capability to provide free maps and navigation software on their smartphones. I am testing the Nokia product on my new Nokia C7 as we speak, having been asked how it performs by a friend who is thinking of getting C7's for his teenage kids. Having a smartphone that does not necessarily require a data plan (due to T-Mobile's UMA) seems an economically sound idea, and the GPS capability can help new drivers too. (UMA can provide GPRS data over WiFi at WiFi speeds without using a data plan, for the cognoscenti). I always use a separate cellphone for GPS - so far, the Nokia 6110 Navigator, which I got in 2007, in the Philippines, there were at the time no cellphones with navigation available in the United States. I still use that today, every day, but bought the C7 so I would have a backup GPS on my loooong 3,000 mile drive across the United States. Once you become reliant on GPS for everyday driving, you no longer carry maps, and not having a backup can be a real headache..

Of course, most Android phones offer Google's free mapping and navigation too, but I believe that does need a data plan when on the road, as it downloads maps on the fly. The C7 can preload maps, and so works fine on the road without racking up the data bucks. I'll keep you posted... And I am looking at RIM's new server facility, as this would let a neighbourhood association, say, or an apartment building, put together a sort of "closed user group" of Blackberry users, for as long as (I assume) the total number of users does not exceed 100. Interesting, I just wonder if there will be enough interest in the facility to crank up Blackberry sales.

I wish my friends and relatives on the East Coast the best of luck with hurricane Irene - having recently swapped that coast for the other one, I am watching from afar as they go through what I've been through a few times. Godspeed, folks.

My fancy Braun cruZer shaver, bought in Europe, packed up, won't charge any more, so I went to look for a cheap replacement, and found the Remington F4790 at Wal-Mart for $29. It isn't shown at their website, for unclear reasons. Anyway, I wanted to share with you, if you're of the male persuasion, that this cheapie Remington shaves better, faster, closer than the CruZer does.. You need to observe the charging instructions it comes with - I think, reading through them, that this unit is fitted with the older technology, and thus cheaper, nickel-cadmium rechargable batteries. That actually is not a bad thing - NiCads, as they're known, have a flatter power curve, store a bit more energy than the newer lithium-ion batteries do, but they take longer to charge, and suffer from the "memory-effect". So, the F4790 is for you if want to save money, don't mind ugly design, and you're willing to follow the charging instructions in the manual. I can tell you it's a lot cheaper and a lot better than the Braun CruZer. The "cheaper" is what I was after, so the "better" is icing on the cake.

Tuesday August 23, 2011 - HP, Khadafi, Motorola, nobody is safe..

Being an oldtimer in journalism, I think photography often conveys things better than video does, and besides, many of my readers come in "on the go" on handphones, and often don't have high speed internet available continuously. I know a lot of my friends use Blackberrys, on whatever kind of network connection they may have, as they go about their daily business. Much more impressive, that, by the way, than what is possible on a laptop or PC on a broadband home connection. I'd almost say that is getting a bit out of date....

Scant hours after I write my previous blog entry, the news breaks that HP has pulled its tablets and smartphones, and may move out of consumer PCs altogether, as IBM did a few years ago. And when you read the American press, this is all to do with Apple's iPhone and iPad.

I honestly don't think so. The vast majority of consumer computing equipment (smartphones are handheld computers) that is sold, worldwide, is made by folks like Asus and Acer, HTC is moving into that arena, so is China's Cisco Huawei, and there are literally hundreds of other brands in China that are all depending on a few massive Chinese/Taiwanese manufacturers. They make good equipment, state of the art, and most importantly, it is cheap. By cheap, I meean that you can get three decent laptops with Windows 7 for the same $$s that will get you one Apple MacBook Pro. HP and Dell both try to play in that space, and my wisdom says HP has decided the margins got to where they can no longer make a profit on this type of gear. Reason is simple - the same people that produce the Dell and HP computers "roll their own" - without having to support a worldwide sales- and support organization. It really, I believe, is that simple. The cheapest laptops I have purchased, in the past three years, were all in the United States, and they were an Acer and an HP. Both very much state of the art, with features and battery life no standard Macbook comes even close to. And much as you can now buy a Lenovo instead of an IBM Thinkpad (with Lenovo staff still being recruited by IBM!), you'll be able to buy an HP from - well, whoever gets the division. If I had the money, I'd team up with one of those great Chinese entrepreneurs, and buy the place. Which is, I admit, an easy thing to say if you've lost most of your money on you last venture. Which, I admit, would not have bought anything the size of HPPC anyway.

And so it goes, as on the TV behind me NBC's Richard Engel walks around Muammar Khadafi's compound - another dictator bites the dust...

Friday August 19, 2011 - T-Mobile won't have me, and Facebook may not, either ;)

Thinking about it, it is rather puzzling that Apple is attempting to prevent the sale of the Galaxy Tab in a number of markets. You'd think they understand taking on a large multinational like Samsung, especially in markets where Apple isn't "home", is unlikely to be a successful strategy. So is it a move of desperation? Can Apple no longer compete? It has gone from being a computer manufacturer to being a gadget manufacturer, with a customer base it can only tie to itself by tying its customers to iTunes, and those new gadgets that run Google's operating system and aren't tied to a delivery system may well evolve into the future.

That could serve as a warning for Facebook, too. Essentially a "closed shop", like Apple, Facebook operates by trying to keep subscribers within its boundaries, where it can predict their activities and sell that control to advertisers. But I never tire of quoting the example of AOL, which did exactly the same thing, only to get "overturned" when the World Wide Web was invented, an environment anybody could use. Perhaps that is where Google is heading, each of its modules fitted with an API that anybody can hook into. That, after all, was the original principle of the internet.

I am going to give up on applying for jobs at T-Mobile. I am an expert on their service offerings, on UMA, on GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/HSPA+, with a 20 year telecom track record, I even speak fluent Deutsch, but they keep turning me down. I may have done it to myself - I no longer participate in the T-Mobile forums, since I realized that providing a carrier with unpaid support from customer to customer is really not a viable business model. Customer support needs to be provided by paid professionals, not by an eclectic mix of do-gooder professionals and random pretender morons. Being who I am, I voiced that opionion rather loudly, before signing off. Honestly, I like forums, but they're not, as many companies have thankfully discovered, a replacement for paid customer support.

Having said that, I do hope that after they gobble up T-Mobile, AT&T will continue to offer UMA (a.k.a. WiFi Calling). It is a wonderful way of keeping your phone connected, on my new Nokia C7 (I still use my BlackBerry BOLD 9780 as primary though - the link points to the unlocked TMO version) I can do stuff that would normally require a data plan, over WiFi, and so don't need a data plan for the line the C7 sits on. I don't use, for reasons of privacy and security, a Facebook app, and the Nokia has a webapp via Ovi that goes to Facebook "just like a native". Facebook (and others') apps take personal information from your smartphone and bring it back to Facebook, and I honestly don't think they pay me enough to allow that. The TMO C7, by the way, supports both the TMO and AT&T Wireless 3G frequencies, so is completely ready for the post-merger network. Judging from what I see, if you want to get the benefit of the combined AT&T / T-Mobile network after they merge, you'll have to get a new phone with all the frequencies, like this "Nokia Astound". It has that, as well as UMA, I am in hog heaven....

Sunday August 14, 2011 - The Change

Plus ça change.. Being "up here", living with friends, in the Pacific Northwest, means wholesale change. I can't remember the last time I have spent significant time in a family with children, for instance. Then, the climate here is very reminiscent of Northwestern Europe, where I grew up, complete with grey skies and cool morning temperatures, although the proximity of the Cascade mountain range makes this a different kind of cool. And there are many other differences, from the friendliness of people - cars stop for pedestrians, even if they could comfortably pass you, unheard of, in my world - to the fact that few folks here seem to bother locking their front door when they're home. The picture top right is the snack stand outside the local Home Depot in Belleville. I've seen a few on th'other coast, but never as elaborate as this, and, of course, there is.... drum roll..... Espresso!!

Something that confuses the heck out of me is that the NBC Nightly News is broadcast here in the Seattle area at 6pm, not at 7pm. You would think that to be at the same time-of-day, but no. Assuming the basic premise is that one watches the news after coming home from work, does that mean that work hours on the East Coast are supposedly different than they are here? Does NBC keep the same hours in California? Wait - that one we can check. Yes - no - they broadcast the Nightly News at 6:30pm in LA. So it is really different all over. And curiously, since it is originally broadcast from New York at 7pm, why not broadcast it live on one of the abundantly available cable channels when it goes out? This "coastal" stuff dates back from before high speed fiber and satellite TV and cable boxes, right? But I guess, revamping a system for which no technical rationale exists any more will take time, if you can even find folks willing to do the experimenting, because TV is commercial, and the broadcasters are scared they will lose the revenues they (wrongly) associate with "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Broken? How do you know it is not broken unless you try something different? Think about it - you might hit the jackpot, and make three times the revenues you do now, if you change what has been around since 1953. Because the new generations do not watch conventional TV, nor do they watch TV the conventional way, and they never will. Not while they have a laptop or tablet, and a cellphone. The issue here is a lesson I learned in the lab in the 1990's - yes, you can reinvent the wheel, and make a better one. Yes, things can work, and still be broken. Life is shades of grey, not black and white.

The more I watch politicians of all ilk spew rhetoric to attack the Prez, and say nothing else, the more it is clear that those who do know how we're going to fix our financial problems aren't running for office - or, perhaps, there isn't anybody with a real answer. I can see some American companies do well overseas, but none that I know of export, they earn over there. Perhaps they understand there is no political support, anywhere, for doing what is necessary to increase our national revenues. Yes, we need to raise taxes, across the board, so we can pay for what we spend, should have done that beginning in 2002, but beyond that, we need things the world will buy - and right now, we have nothing. High Speed Rail comes from France, Japan, Germany and China. Spacecraft come from Russia. New airplane technology comes from Europe - fancy that somebody other than the US would build a very much larger aircraft than the 747. That would have been unthinkable. I could go on - there isn't anything we do, even medical technology, that the buyer can't get elsewhere, cheaper. We have to begin to understand that Apple is not a significant company, worldwide, it is just one that is very good at public relations, and politicians, too, appear not to read the overseas press. Apple makes stuff "over there" and sells stuff "over there", and even part of its American revenues go "over there". Unless some enlightened souls stand up and tackle these problems, we will keep on going down.

Jobs? Ask the politicians "doing what?". You have to have a product these jobs produce. Or a service. We've festooned the world with McDonalds and Starbucks already, and Americans clearly do not understand that the reason we have no viable high speed train technology is that our government has not pushed public transport. That is a political decision, it is what did it in Europe and China, the governments insisted on finely mazed public transport, and built it, and that made the finances available to develop high speed rail. Same for Japan. In France, the socialist government was the driver between a nationwide X.400 computer network. Including rural villages, where the connections were brought using the national water company's conduits. We? We subsidized airports, and hybrid cars, and now we don't have to label the Chevy Volt as a hybrid car (which is what it is) because of a law change. So: no high speed rail. No jobs that come with high speed rail. No hybrid cars. No space vehicles. No computers. Low energy lighting? Comes from Europe. We're not going to bridge the gap, so now we have to spend even more money buying stuff from others. Or, like Amtrak did, buy high speed rail without the high speed track, playing, as with the Chevy Volt, the game of pretense, and then getting the American public to fall for it by spending vast sums of money on advertising... trouble is, nobody else buys it - in both senses of the word. The Acela is still a mislabeled French train, and the Chevy Volt is still a mislabeled Japanese car. And we must get the politicos to understand this, and scream it from the Capitol.

Thursday August 11, 2011 - Reboot

Although I have not yet found a local job or consulting assignment, there appears to be a good need for people with my expertise, here in the Seattle area. What with a cluster of high technology enterprises around the Microsoft campus, which is itself more or less in the next town over from me, Redmond, there is a lot of demand, and with one exception, so far, none of the jobs have the "U.S. citizen only" restriction.

As I write this, I have in fact already had two interviews - one an exhaustive conversation with my friend's neighbour, who happens to be a Microsoft executive, who came to the house(!), then connected me with hiring managers and his HR folks, and one phone interview with a consulting reruiter. That recruiter, and three others, found me on either Careerbuilder.com or Monster.com. Of the six or seven positions they sent to me, I qualified (fully) for two - I have a habit of not applying for positions for which I don't have all of the qualifications - i.e., if "Intermediate Sharepoint" is specified, a product I have never used, I'll turn it down.

Being in Microsoft land, of course, I had better pay some attention to Sharepoint, and learn to use it, so I am currently trying to install a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 evaluation software on a spare PC I brought out of storage. I've only ever used the Lotuse Domino tools, and Sametime, none of which are much in evidence in the area.

Umm, or so I thought. Sharepoint needs Windows Server and an SQL Server and stuff, none of which I have, so that was a quick death to my experiment, I did not get beyond reading the installation manual. Friend M. offered to let me use his Sandbox, but he has administrator rights, and I ended up in his main Webpart in three keystrokes, thought that was a bit scary, so that, too is a no-go...

One amazing thing that friends M and P, who are putting me up and putting up with me, agree with is that, unlike many other countries, the United States is the land of the second chances. Americans have an unusual type of respect for the underdog, for the person who, for want of a better phrase, "takes a licking and keeps on ticking". We are all of decidedly foreign extraction, and have seen close up how, in other cultures, people who don't manage something are spit out and never looked at again. Not here.

It does not necessarily always work out, but the reason that former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer made it to CNN (and now has been "spit out" again, as his show didn't work) is that, once you're on your face, it is customary to be given a leg up, in American culture. It is OK to fail, pay the price, it does not mean you are incompetent, just that you hadn't learned all your lessons. In my case, I really did not fully realize that not being a U.S. citizen would become a major impediment, in Washington, after 9/11, and on Wall Street, after TARP. If you are wondering why I did not become a U.S. citizen, my home country, The Netherlands, prohibits dual citizenship for native born Dutch, and I, having thought about it, decided to hang on to my E.U. passport. Here in the Seattle area, where it is fairly littered with immigrants, green card holders, and work permit holders, my citizenship status should be less of a concern - I have, in fact, in a week of job hunting, only come across one "citizen only" position, at Microsoft. Better odds for me, here, I think, my friend M. was absolutely right when he suggested I should come "up and across". Thanks, buddy!

Monday August 8, 2011 - Bread and Games

It really can't get more Asian than this place. About 50% of the customers in the Starbucks I am writing in are Asian, to my left an Indian man is on the phone, at the next table over three Japanese women, one with a baby, are twittering away in Japanese, and I've never seen as many Asian products in a Safeway, like the one next door. I had not visited Washington State for at least a decade, and a decade before that - while I noticed the Japanese and Chinese signeage at Seatac Airport back then, this is a step or ten up from that. I am not being critical, just amazed at how strong the bond between this coast and Asia Pacific has become. As I said, I am besotted with Asian food, does not get better without actually moving there, I swear. Pretty soon I'll try some of those food court things for lunch. Teehee.

Much of my time has been taken up by changing my address and updating my resume with the various job sites I am already a member of, and adding some new ones. Notably, I have added Microsoft, which in the Washington, D.C., area had just U.S. citizen and Cleared positions. Better still, at the BBQ, the other day, I met a Microsoft executive, and he kindly offered to handwalk my resume into the company. Who knows, eh?.

But a recruiter, a few days ago, suggested I add my job for the period between 2007 and today. I was about to tell him I didn't have a job, when I suddenly (and rather shamefacedly) realized that the business development I had done in this period, mostly concentrating around getting a maintenance organization in Indonesia set up, but exploring, as well, the possibility of setting up a diving resort in the Philippines, really are work too. I am incorporated, I deducted some of the expense (although the Treasury really doesn;t like you doing that if there isn't a result at the end), and the travel, negotiating, and analysis, were real development work. So, I have now added a section detailing the "Sole Proprietor" activities. I guess I am so impressed by my Verizon stint I lost the view of reality. So: thank you, Sunil, if you ever read this, that was a valid comment, and as you can see I take advice...

Saturday August 6, 2011 - Popadom, anyone? Or tripe?

I am mightily impressed with the people and the quality of life in the suburbs of Seattle. Prices are kept in check, the economy is largely governed by computer industry behemoths like Microsoft, Amazon and many others, a neigbourhood barbeque I attended a few days ago was festooned with Microsoft and Amazon management, and folks are here because of the quality of life. That is less so in the New York and Washington areas, where there is a heavy career emphasis - that obviously works here too, but folks are very happy with the living conditions, and the towns are built on a very human scale - to my standards, at least. Never seen so many trees in an urban neighbourhood, this beats even green and leafy Westchester County, and these being the Cascade foothills, much of it is pine, green and fragrant all year 'round.

Asian influences are pretty much predominant in the Pacific Northwest - at the Crossroads Mall the establishments in the food court are 80% Asian, so I am, as an official lover of Asian food, in heaven. Even Indian foodstalls, which I really have not seen very much on the East Coast outside of Indian neigbourhoods, are represented here, while there is a Japanese chain of supermarkets, Uwajimaya, which caters to all Asian Pacific food cultures, from Filipino and Chinese to Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian. They even stock Dutch stroopwafels and German "Keks", don't ask me why.

It is unusual for me to be in a household with (teen) kids in summer, during vacation time, it's been a long time. Good fun, I don't mind at all, fascinating to see how two exceptionally bright kids get on. Other than that, I have been lucky three times over, with friends who help, with an unexpected party where I met some local executives who may help in my job hunt, and of course with landing in such a pretty area. For us Dutch (my hosts are Dutch too) the Pacific Northwest, a bit cooler in summer, with fair amounts of rain and lots of grey cloud, reminds us of home, on occasion, back in The Netherlands rain and grey skies are part of the staple weather diet as well. The only thing I find mildly discombobulating is that the NBC Nightly News is on at 6, not at 7, but I guess I'll have to get used to that. At the same time, I got my Washington State driver license, my Virginia license has a large hole punched through it, so I guess I am officially a West Coaster now...

Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - Starting Over

Towards the end of the weekend most everything is done, in terms of my initial move, and some of the enormous piles of paperwork that go with moving. So many rules have changed or intensified - Washington State won't give you a driver license unless you have already changed your address with the Social Security Administration - ostensibly to catch child support escapees, but I think to some extent that will be related to illegal immigrants, as well. Having said that, there appears to still be a way for those without SSN to get a license here - part and parcel, I guess, of the ongoing discussion about how folks without license can't get insurance and are then a hazard on the road. At any rate, on Monday I put in my driver license application, get that on the road so I can retitle my vehicle.

(Umm, maybe not, the Driver Licensing Center is closed on Mondays...!?).

Beyond that are many other changes - health insurance, vehicle insurance, retagging the car, prescription plan, immigration, I could go on for hours. Can't remember ever having to do this much paperwork, not even when I moved from New York State to the Commonwealth of Virginia, in 2001. No matter, although it gets hazardous, as you can unwittingly be breaking laws you didn't even knew existed. Most importantly, I managed to update the first jobs databases on Sunday, before the week started, buoyed a bit by the number of results from a reprogrammed search. I have to do many more, but Careerbuilder, Monster and consulting company Volt were a good start.

Kinda strikes me every time I am here - gorgeous scenery, very well managed living environment, clean air, little did I know (never having driven in) that my friends live barely half an hours' drive from the last (Snoqualmie) mountain pass, in the foothills, so to speak.. People are friendly and helpful, much more so than over on the other coast - I do not, by that, mean there's anything wrong with the folks on the other coast, they're just a lot more laid back, this side. That makes for a nice change, and probably will make for some getting used to, as well, speed limits of 30 mph are not something I am used to, but in all, it adds to the quality of life, and the massive malls and developments we're used to in the East, just aren't there, here in the Seattle suburbs.

Well, time to get my mail, and find the local Korean (I assume) laundry, see y'all later.

Friday, July 29, 2011 - Kirkland, WA

By July 28 I am running around the Seattle area trying to get some needs taken care of - in the morning, friend (and my host) P. has arranged for me to attend her doctor's office, as my heart appears to be misfiring a bit, possibly as a consequence of the thyroid hormone dosage I am on (it isn't something that ever happened to me before they took my thyroid gland out). While everybody was trying to get me to call 911, I know well enough that Synthroid can have a racing heart or palpitations as a side effect, so I decided to wait until I hit Kirkland, since there were no other symptoms or discomforts. After all, having moved, I need new doctors anyway, and coming in with a complaint relating to an existing condition is a decent introduction. My new internist, doctor G, concurred, checked me out, thought the whole thing was probably just stress related, what with a 2,800 mile drive in a heatwave, with light diversions in the form of reloading the truck in Montana, and after an EKG and a blood test sent me on my way. By morning, her Physician Assistant called me first thing, to tell me everything was just fine. Teehee.

By noon on Friday I have rented a storage unit, and finally unloaded the U-Haul truck, except for my whole house generator, which I have donated to my hosts in gratitude for them taking in this stray, and letting me get back on my feet. This comes back to the house, and once friend M. is back from China, later today, we'll drag the 650 lb. monster off the truck and into their garage. Then, Saturday morning, truck and dolly go back to U-Haul. In the picture, you see me waiting anxiously as a mechanic at Bellevue Jeep Dodge reconnects the driveshaft on my Durango (U-Haul in Montana had been happy to disconnect it, but wouldn't reconnect it in Bellevue!!), so I can drive it off the U-Haul dolly - it had been making funny noises, but he gave it a clean bill of health. Note the jacket - 60's in the morning and evening, up here, a nice and refreshing change after this massive heatwave that was everywhere.

Monday, July 25, 2011 - Billings, MT

By Monday, it was clear the 2003 Durango wasn't going to hack it, so I pulled into yet another motel, grabbed a beer from my cooler, and called U-Haul, where kind folks connected me to a service center in Indiana, where they found me a U-Haul service center in Billings, Montana, where I would be able to swap the trailer for a truck, and have the SUV put on a dolly to tow that to my destination. Manager Brad helped set it all up, and soon enough I was unloading the trailer and packing my stuff into a 17 foot truck, larger than I needed, but the smallest they had.

Four or so hours later, in the searing mid-afternoon heat, I finished and the staff put a dolly behind the truck, put the Durango on that and then disconnected the drivetrain, a necessity to be able to tow a 4WD. By about 6, I turned onto Interstate 90 West, only to get pulled off five miles later, when I discovered the left taillight of the dolly had come off. Two hours later, in a Rest Stop parking lot, the U-Haul emergency service finished bolting the light back on, and I drove until 11, in the dark, when I stopped in Big Timber, Montana, and spent the night at the Lazy J Motel, me 'n a couple dozen skeeters. By 7 in the morning, I hauled (we're on Tuesday July 26 now) ass outta there, to the Montana border, and my next stop, Wallace, Indiana, the last state before Washington. I'll spare you the horror, but you haven't lived until you do some really high mountain passes in a 17 foot U-Haul truck with a trailer with an SUV hanging off it, one you can't even see from the cab....

Sunday July 24, 2011 - Forsyth, MT

On the road early in North Dakota, the combination of the heatwave (this far North!), the mountains - Montana soon changed from "hill country" to "mountainous" - made the Durango's temperature gauge creep up alarmlingly, so around noontime I got off the road and into a roadside motel. Doing upslopes at 45 mph in 2nd gear barely managed the temperature, and I kind of assumed the heat and the sun were getting too much for my SUV. So, a rest, the temperatures are supposed to fall to the sixties, and I'll get on the road again around midnight. U-Haul kindly added a couple of days to my contract so I don't have to worry about getting there Tuesday.

Thursday July 21, 2011 - Hampshire, IL

I am generally getting used to the weight and heft of the trailer, which is kind of massive, and you tend to overload the thing. U-Haul gives you the load your vehicle can handle, as a proportion of your vehicles allowed total haulage capability, but there really isn't a way to figure how much your gear weighs, not without a weigbridge of some kind. Clear is that the speed restrictions U-Haul puts on these things - 55 mph - is there so the vehicle/trailer combination remains manageable, frustrating your truckers on the highway, none of which do anything close to 55, more like 75. Interesting, to be overtaken by dozens of huge tractor/trailers every hour, I must frustrate the heck out of some of them. I've done my level best to not overload the thing, though, throwing out much of my photographic archive at the last minute, since it weighed a ton. It is amazing how much stuff a human being schlepps around with them for decades, on the basis of what-if. Perhaps that is one lesson for me to come out of all this - how much history does one really need?

Tuesday July 19, 2011 - A loaded trailer

Done. Finished packing. I am quite worried the U-Haul trailer is loaded too heavily, but with the Air Springs pressurised I seem to be doing OK driving around the neighbourhood. Sure the thing is heavy, but then the Durango was heavy to begin with, I just got used to that, and this will be all highway driving. I should be on the road by 9 or so - earlier makes no sense due to the HOV hours in the Washington - Baltimore corridor. I only wish I could use my EZ-Pass, but I guess I should have gotten a different transponder for that, never thought of it.

Monday July 18, 2011 - Becoming a Pawn Expert

I've made my last trip to the pawn shop today - quite a few, since June 3rd, when I brought my first load of "stuff" over. In between, some things went to Arlington, notably my racong bikes, not much call for that sort of thing in redneck country, and much of my China went to an antique store in Fredericksburg. The "uncluttering", then, is coming along nicely, although I still seem to have much more gear than I had anticipated. Funny how that creeps up on you..

Losses? yes, but then they are paper losses. I put quite a few pieces of China out on Ebay, last year, and surprisingly little of it sold. You measure against an older appraisal, and as everybody keeps reminding me, there is a recession on. Even the guy in Spotsylvania Gold and Pawn was complaining about it, according to him, he is no longer getting the gold in he used to get, and he thought that was very unusual.

Sunday July 17, 2011 - Almost on the move

I was expecting to write about my impending relocation to the Pacific Northwest sooner, but had to take care of some legal issues so as to be able to do that writing, and that did not actually happen until last Friday, when it kind of all came together. And there was this morning, of course, when I went to pick up the U-Haul trailer bright and early.

Blogging is all very nice, but unless you take care of the legal issues and get permission to write from those impacted, you can do yourself a mischief. If, like me, you have not had complaints or. G*d forbid, lawsuits, for the 15 or so years you've been writing, you're doing good. So now I am in the middle of packing, and kind of uncluttering my life in ways I did not expect were possible. Then, a trip across the country, 2,800 miles or so, 41 hours, my trusty Nokia Navigator tells me - great device, goes where I go, walkies if need be, no unit in the car that can get seen (it uses a Bluetooth GPS antenna) or stolen, you get my drift. I'll try and fill you in more in a couple of days, first I have to finish packing and cleaning up. I beg your understanding.....

Sunday July 10, 2011 - Upheaval means Backwards

I worry we're heading the same place where we hit the last recession. We have cars with touch screens - screens that require you to take your eyes off the road, as you can't "feel for the button". Technology that has no place in a car, that will have cost a lot of money to develop, you'll pay for in the price of your car, and technology that will - since you can make phone calls with it - kill people. And then there is Onstar, which in its latest iteration allows you to start your car from your smartphone ten thousand miles away. Technology you will pay for that has absolutely no purpose. Not to mention that fact that if you leave your phone lying around someone else might start your car, and kill your family at home because of the exhaust generated.

Have we truly run out of ways to improve? Ways to make cars cheaper and more efficient, instead of fitted with expensive useless "features"? Isn't this how the car companies went bankrupt, and had to be bailed out? I am honestly staring at this stuff and wondering wheter I've gone crazy, or "them". The mind boggles.

I recently put some things on Ebay for local sale - things too heavy or bulky to ship, and immediately ran into one of those people who won't take "no" for an answer, and seem to think it is OK to try and bully other people into getting what they want. I stipulated that buyers had to pay when they ordered, Paypal offers buyer protection, after all, so this person did not, and began sending me emails with their cellular telephone number instead. Then, when they eventually paid, and I sent them pickup instructions, they did not answer their "cellular number", which had a voicemail spoken by somebody of a different gender. At that point, I did not feel they met my basic security requirements, so I canceled the sale and refunded their money. They then began harassing me via phone and email, since I "did not honour the contract" - I explained there was no contract, since that required them to pay up front, but that logic escaped them. I had to call in Ebay to get them to stop, eventually. I don't think I'll do another "local" sale, I don't like being hassled...

It does show, as I had previously experienced on Amazon, that many folks don't read, and don't work with you to resolve problems. Amazon then expects you to accept a return, even if you bought insurance for the shipment - thankfully, Ebay is a little more discerning.. One buyer I had received a projector, which after receipt showed a magenta background, so he wanted to return for refund, and I agreed to that. Once I had the projector, I discovered that the way he had tested it, the input had to be reset from RGB to VGA - once I did that there no longer was a coloured background. After that, I sold the otherwise pristine unit to someone else, who is really happy with it. I got wise, however, and tacked my losses onto the sale price, so this time came out on top.. You live and learn.

Fascinating. Ruthless news baron Rupert Murdoch, having pushed his "popular" tabloids to be ever more competitive, finally gets to see the real result - bribery and theft of information. So now the venerable News of the World has been sacrificed on the altar of cheapo journalism, with plenty of human shields who can take the fall for him. And will. Disgusting. I had some exposure to Mr. Murdoch's business practices back in the '80s, when he rolled into Britain, where I lived and worked as a journalist, so surprised I am not. Maybe we can shut that segment of the press down altogether, so celebrities can have some life again. I suppose it is not a nice note to end one's career on, but then I know few people who have made as many enemies as Murdoch has, I only have to remember his takeover of The Times of London, today no longer an authoritative (or even very visible) newspaper. Remember MySpace?

If anything totally amazes me it is the large groups of people that come to demonstrate, and speak out, about Casey Anthony. I have no idea whether she did or did not kill her child, I don't know that anybody else does, it was clear to me there wasn't sufficient evidence, but apparently "most Americans" (I don't know that anybody knows what that means) don't agree, if I am to believe the press. I wonder if this phenomenon is in any way related to the way many Americans seem to treat their government, these days - advertising, opinions and actions based on perceptions, not on facts, for instance the abject refusal to raise taxes when revenues, which would provide income we currently don't have, aren't increasing. The most amazing, to me, is this incessant talk about jobs - jobs you create when you increase production, and that happens when you sell more stuff. We do not sell more stuff, so there aren't any more jobs. They went to Asia, people, and they did not go to Asia yesterday, they began going to Asia in the 1990s, twenty years ago. And it is not a reversible trend, especially since we trained all of the movers and shakers, out there. Read back to the beginning of this piece, touch screens in cars aren't an "invention" anybody is waiting for. Same for the Space Shuttle - in order for us to have a replacement, we'd have had to start work on it in the mid-1980s. We did not, simple as that. And private industry may be able to build new space vehicles to deliver astronauts to the Space Station, that too is not anything we couldn't do before... Here is some wisdom President Clinton imparted on the subject: click.

Here is an interesting, but flawed, Facebook - Google comparison. Flawed, because "The Nielsen survey does not include mobile devices." Flawed, because Facebook is a "closed shop", while Google serves all internet users. A perfect example of not-good journalism: "Go ahead and publish, we'll deal with the flaws in the disclaimers". But the data is statistically meaningless. Ad on another note, the embedded Youtube video at the top of this piece is my first test of Nokia's C7 Symbian 3 smartphone, dubbed "Astound" by T-Mobile. I am still testing, but between its huge range of 3G/4G frequencies and UMA, it is for me a winner. The video will play back at 720p, if you'd like the full spectrum click on the "360" default, and "up" the resolution.

Sunday July 3, 2011 - My shoulder hurts

Driving up to Arlington on Friday to get a shot was a wee bit optimistic - although I was on my way back by 1pm, 4th of July traffic had "burst forth" in all its severity, and by the time I got to Dumfries I had to head over to Rte. 1, 95 was a parking lot. Owell, I should slowly have known better.

It did give me a chance to put the air springs I mentioned in my last posting through their paces for some 120 miles, albeit without load - they passed with flying colours, the car sits on the road a bit better than before, hope I am not imagining things. They won't necessarily help the suspension, the idea is that they level the vehicle (which is why you have to pressurize them after loading), so that a heavy load with a trailer does not push the rear end down. Should result in better handling and better aerodynamics, important especially in the mountains. The picture to the left shows you, hopefully, what the air springs do, pushing up the back just a bit so the vehicle's "attitude" is perfect for the highway. And yes - Alles selbstgebastelt...

So please forgive me for being a bit tardy with this update - it is generally a good idea to rest a joint when it has been given hydrocortisone treatment - the shot makes it hard to discern when you overdo the use of the joint, and this can as easily be when you're lifting boxes as when you're at your computer using keyboard and mouse. It is how I first realized I had a shoulder injury - when my "mouse arm" hurt my shoulder joint. It just meant I postponed writing and posting this update for a couple of days.

Besides, I am taking a runout, today, to Virginia's beautiful Shenandoah Valley, where a former colleague from New York is vacationing with his family. A couple of hours from where I live, it is one of the prettier places on Earth.

By the by, I just discovered that Nokia's "Astound" (the T-Mobile version of the C7) roams under 3G on both TMO's and AT&T Wireless' networks - a precursor of their merger, one assumes. As it has "WiFi calling" (UMA) too, it is incredibly versatile in terms of its capabilities, and if you want a smartphone but don't want to pay for a data package, you can set this thing up so it will only "do data" over WiFi, like at your house, or the free WiFi available at Starbucks and McDonalds. That's pretty cool...

Monday June 27, 2011 - Cleaning up, again

I have been too pre-occupied getting rid of stuff on Ebay and so neglected you, my reader. Well, up to a point. Between an expanded spring cleaning, taking stuff to the county dump or to the pawn shop, and other stuff to the Post Office to send off to buyers, it's been pretty busy. A bit of uncluttering was well in order. I bought a large four bedroom home so I would eventually be able to sell it to a growing family moving from Northern Virginia apartment-land to gentrification, and never realized that I would slowly but surely clutter the place up with things I would be unlikely to ever need again - but why throw it out when you have the space, eh?

So that is what I am doing now, I recall the last time I did this, ten years ago, after I moved here, I got rid of loads of ancient research, helped by a friend, the hard part always being that if you've worked in telecommunications research there is stuff you have to hang on to. Technically, I suppose, Verizon should have facilitated that - actually does, it has huge archives in various places - but I felt more comfortable making sure I could produce whatever was necessary should the need arise. That actually has happened twice, over the years - once when one of my former bosses was audited for revenue tax purposes, and we needed to cough up ten years of computer code, and once when someone took the company to court over a project that I had managed. The court case itself had nothing to do with me, but as the project manager you're actually personally responsible for laws that get broken on your watch, not that they did, but you have to be able to prove that.

Some of that is well and truly obsolete, by now, especially if you consider that the traditional "Bell company" barely exists any more, and besides, I've put much of it on DVD in the interim, and put that somewhere safe, off site. But what I am clearing up is a mix of that, of old electronics that clutter up the place, linen that is old, beds that are "one too many", emptying boxes so I can put other stuff in them, two out of three generators - I guess I fell prey to the "it's nice to have a spare" syndrome somewhere along the line. I even found a spare washing machine.... duh - not to mention wheels and tires for a car I sold...

I wanted to draw your attention again to a survey, this time one that determines what gender child parents would prefer on a "what if" proposition - this time, the poll condicted by Gallup, reported by the journal Live Science.

This is such useless "science".... if you're asked "What would you do", under completely fictitious circumstances, you'll answer whatever. A question like that has no bearing on anything to do with anybody's reality, it doesn't even provide any information as to people's opinion - since they weren't asked for it. All we know in terms of real data is that the survey has been done before. Well, duh. A survey like this presumes so much - what would you prefer, if you were able to choose - when compared to places like China and India, where this type of choice means killing the unwanted gender baby, illegal but done regardless... A minefield, not science.

I had never done maintenance on an SUV before, and find that the dealership that did this for me really messed up - well, I am assuming they did. When I changed the oil and let the oil pan of the V8 drain for a while, I found gunk bits in the bottom of the receptacle. That is certainly not supposed to be the case in a well maintained engine. Sure enough, I stick six quarts of fresh 5W-30 in, and suddenly the engine is less noisy than before, runs more smoothly. That's not good news... and now that I have rotated the tires the car is more stable? What was I paying the dealership for?

The last picture has a helper air spring, designed to level the Durango when it tows a heavy load, as I intend to do this summer. Installed yesterday, I've tested it today, by loading up the truck, loading up the cart, and taking a big load of stuff to the County dump. So far, so good, she sits about half an inch higher than before, even with only minimal air (15 psi) pressure in the inflatable springs, but sits on the road like a rock = good, that. We shall see.... it is all a bit new to me. I had never worked on such a huge heavy vehicle before, so that is an experience. And I had never driven something the size of a small tank across the country before - actually, I've never driven anything cross country. So that will be novel, big transport, huge distances, at least we'll have Motel 6 and McDonald's along the way... But having helper springs when you need to negotiate mountains is kind of a comforting thought. Uphill, anyway.

Saturday June 18, 2011 - "Telework necessitates The Cloud"??

Fascinating. The Republican contenders for the presidency all do non-stop Obama-bashing. I understand full well you're going to tell your voters how bad the current guy is, but I hear nothing else. Not a single politician has any kind of recipe for getting America out of its recession, putting us back on our feet, so to speak. The initiatives, the products that everybody wants, from high tech cars via oil to sophisticated electronics and phones, all come from somewhere else - if you're among those that think Apple is the major winner on all fronts, that's because you read the American press, and/or live in the United States. Apple is unable to make cheap products, which is what most consumers the world over buy.

So I am fine with whichever politico you want for a president. But don't elect one on promises, on claptrap. Pick a president who has proven to be able to turn around an economy. We cannot afford to gamble. And if you can't find one, Obama is doing as well as can be expected, he has even managed to get the industry to push the oil prices down. Don't take chances, we can't afford another disaster - and pleeeeeeeeze remember it was George Bush who messed it up, yes, electing the wrong guy is possible, and we've done it before.

I've been going on about the failure of internet information providers to predict the consumer's behaviour - Ebay (which I happen to think is a great site and a great service) gave me an excellent example of how badly we do. I am in process of selling some stuff, and so log in to see if I have bids or orders, and then notice that Ebay manages to put absolutely nothing - say that again, Sam, NOTHING - on my screen I am interested in.

My screen real estate Ebay uses for the following: there is a Father's Day section - I have no Father alive, and I don't have kids. Then there are a Roomba and a heart rate monitor - I have both. Then there are almost a dozen pictures and links of air conditioners - yesterday, I looked at the pricing for these, as I am selling one, no interest of any kind. Then there is more Father's Day stuff. And that is it. A link to the Oregon State Beavers, whatever that is, and one to Casey Anthony if I scroll down. More drivel. The commemorative Beijing 2008 Olympics set pictured to the left? Ebay really does not know what to do with that, so it is hard to find a reference.

But the bottom line is that Ebay has just managed to put absolutely nothing in front of me that interests me. And that Ebay has spent tens of millions of dollars developing the "intelligence" to read my mind. I truly wish one of these companies would let me take a crack at the computer/human interface, which I have worked on, in the past, in the lab, I've even got some good people to do that with. There has to be a better way of doing this, scoring absolutely zilch ought to be a firing offense, instead of something that gets spreadsheeted away.

Don't get me wrong. I am not griping. I am not saying I know everything better, or even that I have a solution. But when I key up Amazon, what I get is the freakin' Kindle. And a free XBOX, for students. Here, too, nothing of any interest to me. The Kindle does well because of what it is, not because Amazon has pushed everything else off its homepage for years now. At least here there hasn't been a behavioural scientist at work. But honestly, folks, if you can't track your consumers in the insidious way Facebook tries to (and fails), don't track them. Find an effective way to advertise your services, and your products. Once the consumer is at your website, offer them a way to find what they want. Not: a way to find what YOU want them to find. That does not work, never has, never will, and even if you manage to bamboozle people to buy stuff they don't really need, all that will do is piss 'em off. Honest.

I heard a CEO say on the radio in my car that "Telework necessitates The Cloud". Huh? Come again? Apart from my stupid insistence that "cloud" is a buzzword, how does the one have anything to do with the other? Most telework is done using an expanded communications / database package, such as Lotus Domino. That runs in a server park, cloudy or not really makes no difference to the user. The rest is secure networking, which really is the layer around the cloud, not the cloud itself (again: whatever a cloud is). None of this makes my life easier, inclined as I am to sit in an interview and explain to my interviewer that everybody who gives long speeches about their cloud programming should be sent back to school. And to be honest, when I look at the hacker exploits, which seem to be on the rise, they may to some extent be facilitated by the impact of "the cloud" on data security. We're getting more back doors, where we should have fewer....

A recent White Paper that, from what I could understand, was heavily underwritten by Cisco, spent its first few paragraphs outlining how The Cloud necessitates all sorts of new and additional security measures, as the old formula of a physical firewall with the standard router security measures is insufficient, now that the cloud goes where the user goes, and is no longer has a physical boundary. Followed by a long list of new security requirements. Between that, and the number of hacks that have taken place in recent weeks, I have a strong tendency to go back to what we do know how to secure. Having a bunch of marauders running amok in cyberspace, marauders that apparently find it very easy to carry out server attacks, to me simply means we have sacrificed our security to the fancy server-and-database stuff that everybody seems to think is necessary to keep the user and visitor happy. Have to say, folks, if said "stuff" puts us as this much extra risk, forget it. I have always worked on the premise that security is job one, and the rest comes after. All of the above only makes me feel I am right. Draconian? I don't know. I had my site hacked, terminally, once. The hack used a Wordpress exploit. I no longer use Wordpress. Job done. Technology that does not work cannot be fixed.

Monday June 13, 2011 - The Pecs on that Weiner...

Told you last week I was trying to scrub a drive I could no longer use, to make sure there wasn't any retrievable data on it - the reformatting process worked, but at least one drive wouldn't take a new file allocation table, so for safety's sake, I did do the sledgehammer treatment after all, the result to your left..

I cannot, for the life of me, understand why so much time and attention is lavished on Senator Weiner's sexting transgressions. Even if he used his office phone to have sex chats, isn't that just a personal call? All you need to do is look at the statistics for chat lines and the like, and the proliferation of interactive porn websites, and you know that millions of men, some of whom are probably married, do this stuff. I honestly couldn't care less, and care even less for the psychologists pressed inot service, and their explanation of how powerful important men are more prone to these transgressions. Pooh. This is not Dominique Strauss-Kahn, consenting adults, willing participants. It is especially the amount of coverage that bothers me - there is, honestly, nobody making CNN spend as much time as it does on the subject, and it makes a complete mockery of responsible journalism.

Interesting statistics out of The Netherlands: 5.4 million workdays a year are lost to migraine, which affects between 1.5 and 2 million Dutch (out of a 16 million population) at a cost of some 1.7 billion Euros. Interesting, as the Dutch with their Universal Healthcare face a lower hurdle taking their legally protected sick time, something we see less in the US, even among those who do have unlimited sick days. Migraine, severe headaches, consitute a very real disease, even for those sufferers who don't have a readily diagnosed physical / neurological pattern.

On that note - do you monitor your employer's and insurer's patient database? You should! I just noticed that WebMD adds each test as a discovered condition - IOW, if a doctor orders an ultrasound of your lymph nodes, the system logs that as "enlarged lymph nodes". Never mind that the test serves to check for a condition that may not exist (the physician does not report back to the insurer unless treatment is required), WebMD sees the test, and therefore registers the condition, even if none exists. That is not the best of news, you may end up getting bitten by this bug when you change employers or insurance plans. IOW, the attempts at creating centralized patient records result in the patient (you) being assigned illnesses you do not have, purely based on the test a doctor ordered. I recall (this happened to me a few years ago) webMD registering diabetes on my record. When I followed this up, it turned out Quest had reported a positive diabetes test where none existed, in fact, my doctor hadn't even ordered one, and neither the lab nor WebMD were willing to follow up. I ended up having to ask my doctor to write a letter, stating the error, which effectively means any hospital or lab can report a test, or test results, and there basically is little you can do about it, all this based on the record provider's (webMD sells their solution to Verizon for all employees) perceived need to communicate with the insurer, in an unchecked, unaudited process. I should really take this to the Fed - I am sure it helps drive up the cost of health care..

I am currently contemplating a change of coasts - since I can't seem to get gainfully employed in the D.C. area, I have to do something. Don't get me wrong, I have complete understanding most employers take no risks and hire only clearable U.S. citizens for any job to do with the Federal government, even if it is not strictly speaking necessary.. that's part and parcel of the American experience. Even TARP jobs, I was told by a Citi banker, have to go to citizens. All of the above does make a mockery of Equal Employment Opportunity - we are, after all, taxpayers too, but what really hobbles me is the fact that the Dutch don't allow dual citizenship. And is it reasonable that civilian contractors - even truck drivers, actually - in Afghanistan have to have Secret Clearance? Probably not, but there it is, not a lot you can do. It does not help (and is a bit silly in terms of doing one's bit for King and Country, if you follow my drift).

So I am contemplating winding up my affairs here, and going to stay with friends there, who have very very kindly offered to give me a place to kip while I try to get "back in circulation", so to speak. In hindsight, but that isn't something I could have predicted, I probably should have returned to New York after finishing my work at the Verizon Long Distance company, which was shortly after 9/11, but the thing was that NYC had lost much of its luster at that point, I really did not fancy going back to looking at that piece of sky where the Towers had been, every day, the air laden with the sweet smell of disinfectant used to mask the odor of decaying Wall Street worker corpses. So I stayed in a place where I really did not have a professional track record, and I guess I should have taken a closer look at how the market was developing. Not an easy place, D.C., at the best of times, and I think I can be forgiven for not realizing that nobody would hire me to do the work I was doing, I couldn't come in from the outside what I was able to do from the inside.

Change is what is required - that is always the case when one gets stuck, clear the cobwebs and do the new perspective. And change, my friends, is something you've got to do, to make happen. Thankfully I have some friends who are pushing me to - thanks guys, you know who you are.

Tuesday June 7, 2011 - Jeez. The iCloud. I Feel Safer Already.

There is, then, a vast amount of work to be done before the internet is accessible to the world's population - read my previous blog entry for the background to this. I know that, apart from Google, eminent scientists at Pitney Bowes and IBM are working on new and different ways of finding information, ways that will open up data access to the billions of people that are barely literate, and barely have access to networks and computers. Slower networks, like GPRS and EDGe, combined with voice interfaces and tactile interfaces, are going to unlock the world for those folks. We're otherwise - a process that is well under way! - dividing the world in haves and have nots, much worse than is the case already. If your kids cannot learn the internet, they're going to form the largest underclass the universe has ever seen. Read Sara's blog for a little background - she is one of those eminent IBM folk working on the problem - for the past year, in India, not at her New York home base.

Aw this is boring. I am reformatting a couple of drives in a RAID enclosure, because I am junking it and it has backups on it. So you do the low level format, but man, this is slow. I think I started it around noon, and it is, at 9pm, 58% done. That is, drive 1. Then we get to drive 2. At this rate, I'll be lucky if I am finished tomorrow evening. And that means I am not doing anything fancy on this laptop, because if I do it might run out of steam or resources, and then I can start all over again. Drat. Originally I thought I was going to have to go the sledgehammer route, because I could not even get it to power up, but then this morning I managed to get it running, and a couple of hours later I managed to separate the drives (they were spanned). So once this is done the data should be well and truly inaccessible, especially since a buyer won't know how it was formatted. No, I am not telling you, neither....

For the first time, earlier in the week, I came across an employment ad that actually stipulated the applicant "had to be employed the previous six months". I had read there were quite a few employers that won't hire the unemployed, this is the first time I've actually seen that. The issue is that in an "up" economy I could imagine employers want to be picky, because there wouldn't be huge numbers of people unemployed, but today, that is very different. There certainly isn't any kind of guarantee, today, that someone who is still employed has that status because they're "better", whatever that is. Or, for that matter, that the person laid off when a company closed isn't the most brilliant person. As I have always told my colleagues, during RIF rounds, people are laid off by corporations based on calculations, funding, departmental issues, not because they are or are not good at what they do. One former colleague would love to take a RIF and move on, but they're just not offering it to him - his department already has been shrunk to beyond reasonable, they simply cannot afford to lose more people.

That does not mean he is the best, although he is good at what he does. In general, more today than ever before, companies use software to assess the value of an applicant, which bothers me a bit, because there is no direct correlation between the software, the hiring manager, and the applicant. It is, after all, the hiring manager who writes the job specification, and in many cases, the hiring manager has no HR training. The guy or gal that does, the HR person, doesn't normally get involved at the stage where the job is defined, and so the disconnect, in my simple thinking, is just about complete. Worse, it has to fit in software whose value, to me, is completely unproven. There is no evidence that I am aware of that any of these software packages would be able to analyze a person - we tested it, many managers that do their jobs perfectly satisfactorily would not be hired if they applied for the jobs they hold. Including me - the job I did would require Secret Clearance today, and being a durn fahreigner that would not be possible to get for me. Something there just does not pass the smell test... No, I was OK doing the actual work, supervised by a Cleared manager, at a secure facility - around Washington, D.C., we don't play around with that, not in the least because the Fed is a Very Important Customer.

The pictures? Top left, a random vehicle during the Fredericksburg Vintage Vehicle rally, last weekend.. pretty... the other pic is just a random shot of my desk that I thought rather nice. Random. Although I do work on a (different) HP. They do nice gear, affordable and reliable. As usual, click on the pic and get a larger version - if the cursor then shows a "+" sign, you can do that again, if you like.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - How Large a Menu is SEO?

SEO - as in "Search Engine Optimization". The way in which webpage "designers" (and those quotes are very deliberate) try to cram as much information as possible into their sites is getting from crazy to ridiculous. Yes, a huge huge number of menus and submenus is appropriate when you do a news aggregation page - see here for a good example, just look at the number of menu options you have when the page opens up, and at how many menus you get when you click any menu option - but in the absence of standardization, designers take mostly only their bosses into account when they decide how many links and menus to put on a page. The net result is that the average user (somebody who does not get researched much, considering many people are capable of taking a wrong turn at the sign, do you really expect them to take the correct turn when the "sign" has 82 directions, rather than 2?) can't find the information they are looking for very easily.

As you can see, I don't use huge numbers of menus. That isn't because I can't, I have experimented with dropdowns and image maps and the like, but because I can see from tracking software (including the software used on some of the commercial NYNEX/Bell Atlantic/Verizon sites I have managed) that consumers have, for the most part, not a clue where to look for what they are looking for. It begins with the vast number of variants of the English language, where many words can have many different meanings, depending on the region the speaker is from. Even in the Southern United States and in Canada, there are variants of the Queen's English (and its predecessor, the King's English) in use that aren't in other parts of the United States. "This exit" as opposed to "next exit" is one of those gorgeous examples. Then, every website is different in design, and the average consumer only has a limited familiarity with sites they visit all the time. The rest - fuggedaboutit, they say on the Jersey Shore. I am serious. This is ignored by designers, and unknow by the development managers, who don't access the statistics packages they have, like Webtrends. Yes, you need to spend a huge amount of time looking at that, because it is bewildering. But if you don't, the "surveys" and "stats" in front of you have no meaning of any kind. None. Seriously. If your developers say their design "works", have them prove it. Not in clicks, but in sales. Clicks don't mean a thing. I appreciate what Google and Amazon and all those others are trying to do, but: a website cannot read minds. Yes, you can make assumptions about who does what why. But you can't know for sure.

You can't even know for sure when you do a "survey". I recall, just from my main employer, Verizon, that the company had to jump through hoops to make employees do their surveys. What does that mean? They're not interested. Most of 'em. Me either. They have (not just Verizon, I am convinced this is the case with 98% of the corporate world) no stake in answering contextual functioning questions. Some would say - I would say - answering stupid questions. Because the questionnaires are put together by experts who don't know any more than you why many questions are not asked. The average survey-filler sees no tangible result of those surveys - unlike, for instance, the national census, whose results and changes are, over time, well publicized. In order to create questions, you see, you already have to know what answer you are looking for. The big secret behind the surveys is that you have no answers to questions you don't ask, and that you don't know anything about the people who don't do the surveys. A survey would provide valid information if everybody involved would provide input. When they don't, the survey is only valid for those who participate, and in fact, since you can't include information about and from those who don't participate , the survey provides only useless information, as the group whose information is provided is self-selected - not in any way defined. That is the underlying reason why citizens are required by law to complete the census forms, and why so many census takers are paid and sent out to get in the face of people who don't. Some information you cannot do withhout, you can't "sort of approach" the truth.

One of the most amazing aspects of the information age is that commercial enterprise attempts to predict the buyer's behaviour by collecting and "parsing" as much data as possible. We try to - and I am not making this up - predict whether a smartphone user is going to want to get a pizza in the neighbourhood they are in. And we do this on the basis of the fact that this person got pizza on four previous occasions, in different neighbourhoods. Never mind that, on each occasion, the person had visitation with a child from a previous marriage, and that it was this child that wanted pizza, and that as this child is moving to Bulgaria with her mother next week, the pizza episode will never recur, so the phone programmer is going to annoy the phone user with pizza ads four times a week for the next decade. It is similar to the now solidly embedded idea that if you pop an ad over an article somebody wants to read, they're now going to buy your product instead of reading the article. How crazy are these people, really? Because on top of everything else, they can't prove these pop-overs work, they have no way of tracking sales down to the individual ad technology. That does not exist. I regularly see pop-over ads where the maker has made the "close" button hard to find, it just boggles the mind how advertisers think that that will sell anything. You just can't make me believe you can annoy people into buying from you. If somebody is hugely desperate to buy a printer he isn't going to do that from an HP ad in the New York Times, because he is not going to be reading the New York Times, he is going to go to Staples and then on to the internet to see if he can get that cute Epson cheaper in California or Canada. Answer: yes. And then there is a huge proliferation of deceptive advetising, and teaser links - the panel I saw on Yahoo, to the right, is a perfect example - if these are legitimate advertisements, which I assume, you get the additional problem for search engines - there is no such thing as a 1,000% gain, but if the site is paying for Yahoo to display this nonsense, what are you going to do? Similarly, there isn't a home remedy that erases wrinkles, and I know of no plastic surgeon who works for $7.

In many ways, the Google ad banner you always see below the very first posting in this blog is the perfect indicator of how little intelligence is actually available in these algorithms. (I have, today, for the sake of discovery, added a second banner, underneath the second posting, just to see what they manage to parse). I am, again, not singling out Google, they pretty much all work the same. Look at the search terms it presents, read my first two blog entries, and you will see little tying the two together. The algorithm just does not have the intelligence to understand what I am talking about, especially since I usually broach multiple different subjects in one piece. Take into consideration this is the world's most extensive, largest, smartest search engine. No, I don't have the solution, but I do know we're not heading in any direction that makes this tecjhnology better. Check the picture at the top right, and you will see the result, so far this year, of my Amazon links. With that (you'll see it is not making me rich, but it is having some re$ult) you will note there were 601 clicks, up until now. Try as I might, when I check where those clocks went, and what was bought, there is rhyme nor reason. Only rarely do people buy the things I post about, much of the time they go from the link I provide to another product (often similar though) and buy that. Of all the clicks to cellphones I have written about, only one Blackberry Bold 9700 was purchased. All of the other mobile phones people bought after clicking on one of my Amazon links aren't phones I wrote about, or own. Yes, they did buy cellphones, quite a few, actually, but why they bought what they bought, as I said, a web browser cannot read minds. QED.

Thursday, May 26, 2011 - Make China Nice

I am always amazed at the fines levied on corporate and other transgressions, as if that money comes out of the pockets of the perpetrators. It does not - here are hospitals in England being fined over mixed sex wards - am I confused, or is that money that comes from the taxpayer or the consumer? BP was fined some $17 billion - that money has to come from somewhere, and whether that is the consumer or the stockholder, all it does is take money away from those who get paid out of it, and reduce the amount of taxes a company pays. And I doubt it stops anybody from messing up in the future - nobody went to jail, did they? I honestly think we should find better ways of holding those who actually cause a problem, directly or indirectly, responsible. Fines I don't think work, in corporate environments. The Dutch papers just reported energy companies being fined over illegal telemarketing, something they have known for quite a while is illegal. The same things happen here, but many companies seem to do it anyway, as if the fine is the cost of doing business - I mean, you get prohibited telemarketing calls the same way I do, right? From these "charities" that give a massive 2% of their proceeds to charity, etc?

After the LinkedIn IPO, wildly successful, the big question is now whether profitable social networking is only that which has a true purpose, as opposed to just providing a form of entertainment, like Facebook. LinkedIn is a professional tool, clearly one some professionals are willing to pay for, augmented with advertising. Not so with Facebook and other social sites - they run on advertising, per se. That is a model many newspapers - New York Times, Times of London, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal - have clearly stated is not a good profit strategy, so those papers now require a paid subscription for their online presence. From what statistics I've seen, only the Wall Street Journal has managed that subscription model, none of the others have sold vast numbers of online subscriptions, and as I understand it they have lost millions upon millions of readers - folks who no longer can look at the advertising, as they cannot access the papers any more without paying. I have to say I get all the information I need via Google searches, and if the Daily Telegraph or the BBC doesn't have it, German Stern, the Dutch Financieel Dagblad, or Australia's Sydney Morning Herald will. As of yet, I (a former WSJ subscriber) don't see the need.

Henry Kissinger's new book on China led me back to looking at China myself, taking a few (though not 50) trips over, just so I could begin to understand China today, in the framework of my not insignificant knowledge of Asia in general. I have a 2008 China travelogue, here, and my latest trip is described in the main blog body, from. May 26, 2010, in my archives.

“The Chinese approach to policy is conceptual while ours is pragmatic. For the Chinese, history is part of current reality. For America, current reality usually begins with the perception of a problem we are trying to solve now.” And I suppose Europe is somewhere in between - because, at least in my memory, Europeans have a solid understanding of their long history. A member of my family traced back my blood line to something like 1634 - and apologized he could not go back further, because the church records were missing (before the invention of the Etat Civil (Registrars Office), church records, baptisms, marriages and deaths, served as such).

What struck me in China, though, is that China did away with almost all of its history, during the cultural revolution. Go to historical monuments that had been discovered before that revolution, and you will find - the Forbidden City comes to mind - that they have mostly been rebuilt and reconstructed, not preserved. Do your homework, and you will find many had been completely destroyed - the Great Wall around Beijing is a perfect example, it has been rebuilt after the authorities recovered the building blocks that had been removed and re-used by the population. I visited 20 or so historical sites around Beijing, including the Forbidden City, and could not help but notice that 90% of them had been rebuilt, sometimes on only a small remaining portion of the original site. So for Kissinger to say what he does, I think may have held long term validity in the past, but I am not at all convinced his view is valid today and tomorrow. The 2008 Olympics, with vast construction projects (seven subway lines!) and astonishing high-tech opening and closing ceremonies had little to do with China's past, and more with China's government and perhaps its people, and their desire to remake themselves in the eyes of the world.

The pictures belie Kissinger's observations - at the left, you can see the old neigbourhoods, the hutongs, have simply been razed - this particular one after the Olympics. They were part of China's rich cultural heritage - like the kampungs that dot Jakarta - but this appears not to bother anyone. To the right, the new China takes shape, where the old China once stood. It may look old-ish, but the cinderblock is brand new.

Saturday, May 21, 2011 - We're so green - and it isn't the environment

Here is another example of the limited understanding of search engines: - I am not necessarily saying they are wrong in the results, what I am saying is that their level of intelligence is very limited.

How does this search (click on it to run it):
http://www.google.com.hk/search?q=resume%20cv%20system%20engineer%20vas%20-sample&hl=zh-TW&prmd=ivns&tbas=0&source=lnt&sa=X&ei=rybSTZ-6IIfPiALlxuzsCg&ved=0CAkQpwUoAA&biw=1024&bih=660
come up with moi in the results?

The searcher, in Hong Kong, is looking for VAS systems engineers - in telecommunications, VAS stands for "Value Added Services". So, since I am a systems engineer, and in telecommunications, Google thinks that VA (my home state of Virginia) is related to VAS. Which, of course, isn't so. Note how the person puts both the word "resume" and the word "CV" in the query - CV, a.k.a. "curriculum vitae", is the Latin term used in Europe and other places for "resume". Having said that, in The Netherlands "CV" means "central heating" as well - centrale verwarming. Then, the person adds -sample. Why? We shall never know... I'd try for "example", myself, but then, there are many different flavours of English, and one thing you don't know is which one the searcher uses. (S)he may be in Hong Kong, but natively South African. Know what I mean?

The big question is if it is possible to embed my logic, and other bits of logic like it, in the search algorithm, without slowing down the search to the point it becomes unusable. For now, probably not, but you can discern from this we're really in the very initial development stages of search engines. And that is before we look at the other meanings for "VA" and "VAS". Like Veterans Administration. And the Latin word "vas". Etcetera.

And if you want a really weird search - this one from someone in San Diego, I have no idea what the searcher wants or is looking for, and I understand even less how Google brings this to my website - as search result #1! The mind truly boggles (click on it to run, it is perfectly safe):
http://www.google.com/search?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Faartsen.net%2F&rct=j&q=Osama%20shoes%20are%20filled%2C%20his%20introduction%20will%20cause%20fire%2C%20danger%20soon%2C%20north%20eastern%20state%2C%20fire%2C%20fuel....Canada%20trouble%2C%20fuel%20fuel%20fuel%2C%20need%20to%20travel%2C%20need%20large%20amount%20of%20money%20in%20account%20now&ei=BODWTcrDN4e6sAOTx_GwBw&usg=AFQjCNEgN_CZGjvJu1MTG-r5ajlK8FC89g

Keep an eye out for a particularly insidious bit of scareware, reported by Symantec. In general, when you see a system error, browser error, application error, anything weird that makes no sense at all, something pops up unexpectedly, don't try to figure out what it is. Don't close any windows, shut down applications, don't touch anything. If you think it might be a virus, stop what you are doing, hands off keyboard and mouse, push, IMMEDIATELY, your PC's on-off button CONTINUOUSLY, until your PC turns off, then restart via Safe Mode (Windows will offer that as a startup option). This will rebuild your registry if necessary, and stop scareware from running/saving. Then, run a full virus scan before doing anything else. If it is a real attack, all you have to save your system is a second, tops. You call for your friend to come look at it, it is too late already. And back up every day, of course.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand how anybody can continue to use the Sony Playstation product. They lost data for some 77 million accounts, and now invite you back? There is a huge difference between the cloud failure Amazon suffered, and being hacked to the point the perpetrators can make off with all of this data before you discover the breach, honestly. I've had my staff detect anomalous activity, identify it, and shut it down, but always while the hack is in progress - not afterwards. Including credit card data - sure, it was encrypted, but encryption can be broken, it is a secondary line of defense. Amazing. I honestly recommend not doing business with Sony until they at least track down (and prove) who the perpetrators were. Here is some proof that Sony really is not in control of its network environment - the quote is from Bloomberg: When Sony first learned of the breach, Sony's Kazuo Hirai informed Stringer before shutting down the system. "Kaz and I together worked out what we need to do," Stringer said. . Had Sony had its ducks and expertise in a row, Kazuo Hirai would have shut down the network immediately, before informing Stringer. He wasted valuable time - and should not have needed anybody's help to figure out what needed doing. (And that all was written before a couple more breaches, the latest on 5/24 - Sony has a people and management problem with this, and perhaps a network design issue or two.)

24/7 network operations, you see, require real expertise, not classroom knowledge or lots of back room hacking. It is a bit like flying an airplane - something occurs, you don't push the right button, and it is too late to "fix". You can only mop up. I've been blessed with some incredible staff who knew how to monitor vital network links - and by that I don't mean they knew what monitoring software to run, they knew (and know) what the initial signs of a problem are, and can see the train coming, way before the software knows there is something wrong. One - a part time farmer - sussed out an internal hacker who had set up a porn server in my NOC, just because there was network traffic when there should not be, he ran an analysis, and nailed the guy, without him ever seeing it coming. A programmer, he got cocky and thought he was untouchable. I walked him to his car within the hour, despite warnings from executives: "did I do the due diligence?" - nobody hacks my US-wide network, nobody, that is all the due diligence I need.

I recently read The Sigma Protocol, one of those pick-up-at-the-airport adventure tomes that Ludlum seems to churn out by the half dozen, and noticed how much these things are written like film scripts, dictating locale, describing the real world environment, which to most people who haven't been to that part of Switzerland or New York State really makes little sense. I followed that with First Meetings in Ender's Universe, an anthology by noted science fiction writer Orson Scott Card, which is a real story that sucks you in, makes the characters come to life, a story that flows, as good fiction should. I would suggest that the "scripting" of a story for film can always be done afterwards, especially since a writer isn't a producer or cinematographer, who would be much more adept at choosing a locale that'll work for him or her, and on film. The fact that the writer liked the view across Vienna really is kind of irrelevant, the cityscape is very rarely part of the story. Nor is the "blue-black" of the pistol the character uses - pistols aren't blue-black, except in pictures, never in the hand.

The picture? Jade ornaments from Beijing and Singapore (the necklace) Pretty, right?. Nikon D50 w/17mm and Polaroid filter. Make me an offer

Monday, May 16, 2011 - This is only a test

This is one of those months where you start a blog entry fifteen times, only then to decide that another subject is perhaps more important, there is so much going on. The poor people in the Mississippi watershed are having a terrible time, imagine losing your home for no good reason other than that you built it too close to the river - but then, is there a real map that tells you where you are safe? The Federal Government does have a flood risk database, I recall checking it before I bought this house, to see if I did or did not need flood insurance. Let's see - ah, here it is, FEMA, of course: click. But, of course, the majority of those affected by the floods can't afford flood insurance - that, at least, is what it sounds like on television. Checking the tables, in my low risk area I can get insurance for a few hundred dollars a year, but in a high risk area that soon balloons to $1,500 and can go as high as $6,000. Not hard to imagine people can't afford that. Having said that, why live in a high risk area? A lot of people do - one of my neighbours just rebuilt a home in the Northern Neck, which was basically wiped out in the last hurricane that came up the coast. But then, he lives right on the waterfront...

Now bin Laden was nice, but, Mr. President, I absolutely must compliment you on your handling of the Donald. For him to explain his hairdo on national television, you got to him, Sir, good for you. Keep doing that. On a different note, The picture top left is one I rather like, took it in Hong Kong in 2007, and if I recall lost the trip report I write then, as that was published using Wordpress on a Freeservers facility, which then got hacked. I do have a backup, but after that experience no longer use Wordpress. On a different note, does anybody know why the people standing around in Rockefeller Plaza during the Today Show are always screaming at the top of their lungs? Do/would you? Why?

I activated the email link at the top of the page, so you can talk back to me, if you like, and I will post your responses. That is the other nice thing about not using Wordpress, not having to deal with the endless hack- and spam attacks every day.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - Pakistan is not Monaco

If you have watched the analyses of the "home videos" retrieved from the Bin Laden compound, hopefully you will, like me, wonder how the press glean this much information from the few sound-less snippets of video released by the Pentagon. They really don't. There really is not much information there, Bin Laden being "an old man" raises one's eyebrows to begin with - he himself has said he was born in 1957, which would put him in his early fifties, and that is hardly old. I would doubt even that, at 54, he'd have a completely grey beard. So perhaps his beard was not dyed black - perhaps his beard was dyed gray - camo. Ever thought of that? Or perhaps he was not born in 1957 - all I am saying is that the possibilities are endless.

He lived, apparently, in Spartan surroundings. Devout religious men often do, and terrorists in hiding often do, too, they don't travel around with 55 inch LED displays in their backpacks. The idea he was living in a million dollar mansion is entirely a press construct - based on the location, Abbottabad, being "an affluent suburb" full of professional people. At the same time, this is said to be a garrison town, and military salaries are what they are, the world over. This is still Pakistan, a country with a per capita income of around $1,000 a year, people, with a life expectancy of 68 for men and women. It is not a democracy, so can only use the talents of its Muslim citizens in leading capacities. A Pakistani real estate agent said it in the British press, earlier in the week: "This house is not a mansion. It does not even have a pool". And you can see from its construction it may have been built as a factory courtyard or a secure compound - factory courtyards often have elaborate security, as they are prone to being burgled. Look at the picture I took from a Fox News report, at the right - four gas meters with separate gas lines for a family home without a pool? In a country where it gets very hot and not all that cold? Think about it, a walled fortress in a residential neighbourhood may not be the best place to hide if you're trying to hide "in plain sight" - you would build a large Pakistani middle class home, with kids and women and flowers and gates and what-have-you, and then you construct a hiding place inside that compound, invisible from the world, maybe. Not this. Look at this house carefully, and you'll see it was never finished, the rebar for the top floors sticking out of the bearer walls. Here is what Lonely Planet travel writer Lindsay Brown, who had visited Abbottabad, thinks about the compound in a BBC News article: Had I seen it, I would have walked straight past without looking twice. There are so many like this in the countryside of Pakistan, usually with armed guards standing outside. Some of their occupants have made a lot of money from farming.

From what bits of video have been released or leaked out of Pakistan, this was not a hugely affluent home, and some Pakistani sources have been quoted to say that Bin Laden did not have a huge amount of money. Apart from that, it is quite possible he may have needed to support multiple locations, to be able to move among them for security reasons. His captive wife saying he lived there for seven years - I honestly would have no reason of any kind to believe her, and as he wasn't in the phone book, it is not something that can be proven. That's important, because we're assessing Pakistani reliability on the basis of their "allowing" Bin Laden to be in hiding in one place for many years, and there is, at this point, no evidence of any kind that that was, or was not, the case. We simply don't know, all we know is that the CIA came up with this possible location sometime last year. And they were right - so he has lived there since August that we know, the rest is pure guesswork. Similarly, Bin Laden allegedly having lived in Chak Shah Mohammad - a village with 400 inhabitants all from the same Pakistani tribe, when the man is a Saudi Arab - it just makes no sense.

But let me make one very important point: keeping Pakistan as an ally because of the war on terror is somewhere between a joke and serious self-deception. A country or regime is an ally because they're friends, because you have stuff in common, all sorts of "soft" reasons. Having somebody for a friend because he is convenient to your struggle is not an effective long term strategy, and that will come back to bite us. Having an Islamic Republic for a "friend", with about as divergent a philosophy of life as you can get it, would be a nice skit for SNL, but not for the US of A. Honest.

On Foreign Oil

You've no doubt seen some of the many commercials about our "energy security", our dependence on foreign oil, and sundry other scaremongering discussions. Most countries in the world buy their oil on the open market, so from that perspective we're not doing worse or better than anybody else, and we do have a fair amount of oil we can exploit in-country - if only we built more refining capacity, and invest in oil fields and oil platforms. But ExxonMobil's advertising really takes the cake - oil sands will solve all our problems. Those oil sands - the exploitation of which is currently raising questions with regard to pollution and distruction of habitat - are "in North America". Sure they are - they're in Canada, and last time I looked, Canada is another country. How is that more secure? They can be invaded more cheaply? There is plenty of oil in Middle and South America, and we can pipeline there, too - don't kid yourselves, the oil sands are not, according to some, a panacea, with the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil needed to produce three barrels of heavy oil sand crude. Having said that, oil production uses energy and costs money, and as we continue to increase our oil consumption we're going to have to jump through bigger hoops. Criticizing oil companies trying to keep up with the world's demand is probably not the smartest thing.

Friday, May 6, 2011 - Let's dance

So we do have a pretty tough Prez - you can push him, but beyond some point he comes out swinging. Look at the way he dealt with The Trump - releasing his birth certificate when the publicity got out of hand, then ripping him completely to shreds at the White House Correspondent's Dinner... Then sending a SEAL team into Pakistan, which is a sovereign country, and an ally, with an order to kill. No BS, no waffling, done. I think few will want to mess with this man any more, and I haven't heard anybody criticise his performance, other than the customary dumb comment from Mrs. Palin - is she related to Dan Quayle?

The level of conjecture around the execution of Osama bin Laden is truly amazing - there is no evidence he lived in that compound for six years, nobody conveniently mentions the man was very rich, likely a billionaire, and it is not at all uncommon, in countries like Pakistan, for rich men to hide in secure compounds, off the radar, and doing it in the vicinity of a military academy isn't any more amazing than a rich criminal living on 150 secluded acres where I am, in between Fort A.P. Hills, the Quantico Marine Base, and a few other secure areas. It isn't unusual, and not every rich man or hidden criminal is Osama bin Laden. Pakistan isn't a country with a well functioning registrar's office - remember Muslim countries, until recently, allowed each other's citizens to cross without a passport on the strength of being a Muslim - and there are lots of other reasons why he could go undetected. I am not saying he didn't have collusion, but that collusion is more likely to be based on religion or bribery than on anti-American terrorism.

For anchors on TV to keep hammering away at "it is impossible they did not know" is disingenuous at best, possibly dangerous. These are, for the most part, anchors who report overseas from Hilton Hotels using stringers and translators, who have never lived abroad, don't have a first hand experience of these types of cultures, never even have to bribe anybody when they travel, because we employ locals to do that. Ask questions, don't jump to conclusions, hire some of the Pakistani reporters that work for BBC or ITV in England, and have them do proper reporting. Pushing at conjectures on the air without even a smattering of evidence what you're saying is grounded in reality is not journalism, it is Monopoly. Sorry to have to gripe, but broadcasting wild assumptions about the Pakistani intelligence service interspersed with Mother's Day gifts may sell advertising minutes, but it doesn't educate the public, which used to be y'all's job.

Here are a couple of good examples of how we're being fed sensationalized information that has little bearing on most people's reality: the mother who (says the Today Show) suffers from prosopagnosia, a condition also known as “face blindness". Except she does not - when you read the article, and her background, this woman had severe epilepsy, bad enough to require brain surgery to remove some of her brain, in surgery suffered a stroke, and that is how she ended up with this condition. In other words, this is a condition very few people will have or ever attract, and certainly not something the average person needs to watch out for. Why present it as a medical condition? Aren't there more relevant illnesses that the citizen needs to know about? Sure, "a new study found that as many as 2.5 percent of the population may have problems recognizing faces". I don't think 2.5 percent of the american population had epilepsy, brain surgery, and a stroke. Pleeze. Get real. Similarly, the woman who has a British accent after oral surgery - she doesn't. That's not British English of any kind - and that is a language I speak, I used to live there. She clearly has a speech impediment, and one wonders whether she had a stroke while she was under anaesthesia. It is ridiculous to present this as a special medical case, even Today's own doctor didn't believe in it.

Tucked in the middle of nowhere, news that is infinitely more important: asthma tablets can be as beneficial for long term asthma sufferers, of which the United States alone has some 20 million, as steroid inhalers. But: CNN will do a Sanjay Gupta special on the recovery of Representative Giffords, who has been shot in the head, providing "new" information we already have in vast abundance - recent stuff from the Iraq and Afghanistan battlefields, where plenty of soldiers suffer a variety of traumatic brain injuries. Go figure. This is not intended as a slight on Ms. Gifford's predicament, but not that many people get shot in the head, as the statistics stand, and even fewer are married to Space Shuttle pilots. We used to refer to this as "tabloid", or "Rupert Murdoch" journalism, but it seems to be a creepy weed.

Monday, May 2, 2011 - Game, Set and Match Obama

Good for you, Mr. President. This was textbook, it'll go down in the annals of the intelligence community and those of the Armed Forces as the one that worked. If you spend ten years chasing a guy, then get him, in a place that is harder to get to than the tribal lands, in a town that is closer to China and India than to anywhere else, I can't help but be very very impressed. America is often this great, big, slow and lumbering elephant, which has a really really long memory, and once it catches up with you, as the Germans and the Japanese found out in the last century, you are toast. For many of us that were "there", 9/11 was very close up and personal, and while I am under no illusion that many are ready to step into Bin Laden's shoes, they will know, once more, that we'll get them, however long it takes, however hard it is, however many dollars it costs. Good show.

Here, once more, are the names of the Verizon colleagues - one was in my organization - who perished that day, in the line of duty, as they say. Nothing can bring them back, but kill one, two three, or three thousand, we will all come after you, until the job is done.

Donna Bowen, 42, Waldorf, Md.Pentagon communications representative, VerizonConfirmed dead, Pentagon, at/in building
Derrick Washington, 33, Calverton, N.Y.technician, VerizonConfirmed dead, World Trade Center, at/in building
Leonard Anthony White, 57, New York, N.Y.technician, global communications division, VerizonConfirmed dead, World Trade Center, at/in building

And here is the full list.

But it isn't that important to predict the future, that is not something one can do. When I stepped off the US Air Shuttle at Washington National Airport, the morning of September 11, 2001, and saw what was happening, I knew what was wrong, as I come from Europe, and we'd had Islamic militants kill our citizens and blow up our infrastructure since sometime in the 1960s, and remembered the 1993 attack. It was all I could think: "They finally did it", before heading home to try and find out what had happened to my downtown New York office, and my colleagues. I guess that was kind of unavoidable, our consumerism, Home Box Office, CNN, four wheel drive Audis, MacDonalds and Starbucks, condoms and bikinis, to many on the face of the Earth is blasphemy, an affront to their religious values. And religion, if left unchecked, often leads to extremism. We must be vigilant, engage and support, help those in need of help, and support the efforts to get rid of dictators and potentates - Osama Bin Laden, after all, was a very rich Saudi who decided he'd use his resources to change the world, and did, until, a day or so ago, we stopped him.

There will be another, and another, that much we know, so please be vigilant, we are going to have to do this all over again.

Friday, April 29, 2011 - MOT? What MOT? Dad?

Kind of unusual to get a large daily dose of England in the news - I did live there for many years, after all, living and working in Central London, then eventually in suburbia and the stockbroker belt, before heading for Miami and New York. But: my best wishes to Kate and Wills, Diana's is not an easy legacy to bear, but they seem to have the strong shoulders required for that endeavour. As I've said, I think the crown should go to William, rather than Charles, but then he won't have the "grounded" chopper pilot life they enjoy today. Hard decision to take, and best of luck working that out.. again, congrats.

I have seen a lot of speculation about the reasons the Royal Wedding is such a hugely important subject in the United States, but I have not actually seen any proof that the general public is hugely interested beyond the customary "matters British", as evidenced by the BBC's American cable channel, PBS's incessant reruns of ancient British TV series, and other cultural connections with the "Age of Empire". Interestingly, the United States is not even part of the British Commonwealth, even though it probably could be, and our democratic system is still based on Magna Carta. Over time, I have realized that the combination of the colonial legacy, combined with the fact that the British speak English, probably are the main decisive factors in the way we look at our closest overseas neighbour (if you forget, for the moment, the couple Irish people that haven't moved to Queens and Boston). It is true that everybody, including the freakin' Weather Channel, is coming atcha from Buckingham Palace this week (people, that tail end is pronounced "hum", not "ham"!!), but I cannot subscribe to the notion that the Weather Channel viewers have en masse requested that the Weather is reported from London, this week. I just don't believe a word of that, I am sorry...

So to me it is just another huge blob of American media marketing - having said that, I am not suggesting folks should not enjoy the Pomp and Circumstance - I famously do not watch the X-Factor, Dancing With the Stars, Housewives, or any of this other "reality television" - odd, perhaps, if you consider the genre was invented by two of my peers in The Netherlands, folks I knew and worked with back when I was in the media back home, part of the same generation and peer group that spawned a small number of fine Hollywood actors and directors, like Rutger Hauer and Paul Verhoeven. I just do not subscribe to the notion that this is reality - to me, (and I lived in London when the last Big Wedding Royale went down, what we did was party, and then some) this is more like "unreality television". It'll be a great party, they'll be the future King and Queen (I cannot conceive of Charles and Camilla becoming K&Q, I am sorry), and then we'll just have to crack on shoring up our battered economies and figure out how to pay the bills.

Much of me reminds me of the initial introduction of the VCR in the United Kingdom. This happened smack in the middle of a recession, and we in the press had a hard time understanding why you would introduce expensive entertainment equipment when half the bloody country was unemployed. It was explained very simply, and along the same lines that the introduction of cable television happened, when the decision was made to bring the main feeds to blue collar areas with huge unemployment: the unemployed would spend money on entertainment, more so than the rest of the population, as they had little else to do, and nothing else to take their minds off their plight, which they were powerless to do much about anyway.

Sadly, astonishingly, amazingly, they were right. So you will see the greatest pomp and circumstance surrounding this Royal Wedding, because of the recession. The Romans figured it out first: Panem et Circenses, Bread and Games....

I wanted to share with you why search engines are often ineffective, and why so much more research needs to be done into how consumers find information... Here are two unclear searches that ended up at my website (for no reason I can see!) - the first from Australia, the second from the Fiji Islands. In both cases, a parser should have probably intercepted the query, and helped refine it, but we're not even close to that technology... (unless you want to buy a movie at Amazon or Netflix, but not, as they say, IRL):
running window 7 64 bit using skype 5.1 4 ram my sound goes robotic when i use dell buit in camera
Cannot add Lenovo N500 on domain gives timely fashion error
I can't really comment on what happens for these queries to yield my website, but just wanted to comment that what most consumers can't do is use search engines - they have not been trained. I assume that kids and adolescents, who have grown up with computers and search engines, do better, and of course those of us, like yours truly, who have been trained on database engines do well too. But the majority of the great unwashed public has not been trained on formulating queries, and unlike other hu-mans, search engines don't talk back, and do not, by and large, understand most local iterations of the English language, nor can a search engine read minds - what does "sound goes robotic" mean?. That, as you can see above, is a problem. If you are interested, you can click on the two queries above, and see what results they yield in Google. Note, for instance, that a searcher expects the search engine to understand that "skype 5.1 4 ram" means "I am using Skype version 5.1 with 4 megabytes of memory", and - umm, what the heck does "timely fashion error" mean? And I have to say that the number of typos I see in search queries is horrendous, truly.

Monday, April 25, 2011 - Bad gas and perfect PH

I have the gravest concerns for what I hear emanating from the White House, I really do. "President Barack Obama says one answer to high gasoline prices is to spend money developing renewable energy sources." is one quote I don't like, and the talk about "job creation" is another. There is not, I am sorry to say, any way in which "renewable energy" is going to provide an alternative to fossil fuel in vehicles, for a very long time - even if there actually was a form of energy you could "renew", which is not the case, once you use a form of energy, it is gone, history, badabing. We've been working on new fuels for something like fourty years, and so far, there are no alternative fuels for the ordinary motor car - ethanol production is driving up food prices, and ethanol, guess what, is fossil fuel too. As to jobs, Americans need to learn what we Western Europeans learned decades ago - what we need is money, revenues, products we export and sell. Whether those result in jobs or other ways of financing our country is immaterial - it is money we need. No, we're not going to rescue the economy by creating credit with which to create lots of new businesses. They are doing that elsewhere, at a cost base we cannot compete with, and service establishments do not translate to exports. Think again, and especially those Tea Party populists - if you're going to talk about job creation you must tell me what work these people do, and how they contribute to create export products. My American contact lenses are made in Indonesia, for crissakes, so what jobs are we talking about here?

The Nissan Leaf will do somewhere between 62 and 138 miles on a charge, meaning that I could not use it for my commute, not even if I bought two, and had one either side. Gas, as in CNG or propane, would give a cleaner burn, but that would require a filling installation at my house, since there are too few commercial filling stations, and no government plans to build any. Yes, we can dream, but short of the government mandating people to stop commuting, and subsidizing fuel efficient vehicles (not hybrid or electric, but simply all fuel efficient vehicles, like some European countries do), and the government stepping in and causing a buffer oversupply of oil, we're going to continue seeing this nonsense. Hurricane? Gas prices go up. Revolution in Lybia? Gas prices go up. There is plenty of supply around the world, and these occurrences should have no impact. Of course, if you're going to use rhetoric like "eliminate our dependence on foreign oil" you're going to get punished, because you are announcing to the Canadians, the Saudis, the Venezuelans and the Nigerians you may reduce their income, in the future. You have, effectively, just invited them to clean you out now, instead of coming to a nice long duration contract, where you guarantee them long term income, and they guarantee you long term energy.

We should not give a damn where the oil comes from. Oil is a commodity - it costs a certain amount of money, wherever it comes from, and you need to make sure your supplier is reliable, pay your bills on time, and honour your contract. We can build some really big new refineries, import crude and export gasoline, make some money that way, without scaring the bejesus out of other governments. We can go help the Indonesians, who don't like the Chinese much, make their oil production more efficient, they could produce twice what they do now, and then we can buy the surplus from them at market prices. That's how WWII started in that part of the world, with the Japanese securing the Indonesian oil fields by invading.

But most importantly, Mr. Obama - the price of gasoline is out of hand for no good reason, "oil prices spooked" is not a business argument, and I heard you say on TV "there is no quick fix". Whoa - you have very much misunderstood what your job is all about, Mr. President. I am not saying it would be easy, or even that I know how to achieve it, but if you do not have a magic Presidential wand to cure this problem, forthwith, there isn't going to be a recovery. Let me put it this way, Mr. Obama: you are the Magician-in-Chief, this is when we need you to fix the problem, that is why we put you where you are. Get on with it, now, or forget your second term, simple as that.

On a completely different note, you may recall new rules outlawing phosphates in dishwashing detergents coming into force, last year, there was a spate of TV news items on what to do to tackle the white film that many consumers reported on their glassware and china. I encountered the same problem - not just white film, cleaning of coffee mugs was less than stellar, deposit on teaspoons, what have you. Then, see my December 2010 blog entry, I replaced my old Maytag dishwasher, which had been in the house when I bought it, this after replacing my hot water tank, hot water heating element, and completely revamping my well water treatment system. I had discovered that the previous owners of my house had bypassed the PH treatment tank on my well, and there was some other stuff wrong.

The picture top left shows you two glasses - same age, one that had not been in the new dishwasher, one that has been, they looked exactly the same until I ran the right glass through a couple of cycles in the new dishwasher, connected to the new water treatment plant and hot water tank, which went in between August 12 and September 18 of last year, if you want to read up on what I did. As you can see, it is not necessarily a matter of buying some kind of chemical, or running your dishwasher with vinegar or citrus juice. Manufacturers (detergent makers and those that do dishwashers) have redeveloped their equipment and detergent to work perfectly without phosphates, as you can see. I should add that the manufacturers state the water temperature should be 120° Fahrenheit (that's about 50° centigrade) or above. You may have noticed the green folk stating you can lower your hot water tank temperature to 120°, to save the environment and your gas or electric bill - what the above means is that you cannot. If your dishwasher needs 120° Fahrenheit water for the detergent to function correctly, you will want to set that hot water higher than that. If your thermostat is set at 120, the heating elements will not kick in until the temperature in the tank drops to 105 or 110 degrees, which means your applicances will not get 120 degree water most of the time. Especially if your tank is older, its anode has not been replaced, there will be crud in that tank that dissolves into the water, and ends up on your dishes. Put some filters in line, crank up your heater (I use a heat pump, which is vastly cheaper to run than the conventional water heating elements, which in my new clean tank are disconnected) to 140 or so degrees, and you can see the result in the picture to the left. I use Cascade, as before, a brand I switched to years ago when I discovered my off-brand powder didn't clean very well.

The stuff you don't learn when you research and experiment.... the other picture is the perfect PH level of my home water, as I understand it this is of major importance in the correct functioning of all those chemicals that are used in various detergents, and in avoiding lead, copper and mineral leaching, which is what happens if your water supply is too acidic (low PH, typically 7.0 or lower). At a guess, that PH is much more important than it was, now that we do not have those lovely phosphates... You don't need an expensive drinking water test kit to check this, pop into Wal-Mart and you can pick up this test kit with chemicals for a few dollars (in the pool/spa section). I now monitor and backwash my Acid Neutralizer Calcite tank religiously, and that helps in getting these "clean" results too. Check your water, and the deposits - even if you get your water from the city or the county (I have my own well), that does not mean it is perfect when it gets into your house, and you can treat and filter it, if necessary, wherever it comes from. A more expensive drinking water test kit lets you check for bacterial growth in your home water, while my favourite Brita pitcher filters, a German product I have been using since I first moved to London, in 1979, take most mineral and chemical contaminants out of your drinking / cooking / coffee / tea water (but NOT harmful bacteria, which should not be in your water to begin with, hence the need for testing).

Friday, April 22, 2011 - I can see the light, but where is the tunnel?

A blogger friend in The Netherlands bemoaned how much the response volume on her blog has gone down, over the past few years, blaming it on the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and the other usual suspects. Much though I sympathize with her, I am not sure those are the actual culprits. I think it is just that we've been blogging more or less since the idea came along, she in 2001, I around 1998, in the days when you needed a PC and an internet connection and some clever software, while today you can do "social networking" on a cellphone in a third world country. There is just much more out there, and the folks who used to visit us every day now have a hundred places they must visit every week. It's all changed tremendously - were the early days the province of the literati, I see a lot of folks with marginal language sills no longer inhibited by those, which I believe is a very good thing. In the olden days, they'd never have expressed themselves, today, they do so regardless. Technology as the big equalizer? I have managed to pretty much keep my blogging output steady, but that is mostly because I have not added huge amounts of other media - I Tweet a bit, mostly when I travel, or when something special is going on, but I have not adopted Flickr or any of the other instant-on communications media.

It is not that I don't want to, but I can see from what others do that the time it takes to maintain all of these social sites is huge. Many of my friends in Asia, where laptops and broadband internet outsiode of the office aren't ubiquitous, use a Blackberry or iPhone and Facebook to keep in touch with each other. There, the social media replace phone calls, to some extent meets, email and SMS, i.e., it is not necessarily a net task addition. This side of the globe, the investment required in maintaining all of this, and the endless wading through retweeting and reposting of links, requires major time. Yes, I would love to spend every evening in the pub with my friends, I suppose is an equivalent... Maybe it is me, but I just read a blog in which there is an embedded tweet linking to 4square... Apart from anything else, I took the embedded Facebook and Twitter links out of this page you're on, because there are quite a few countries where I have friends where Facebook, Twitter or both are blocked, and that really messes up the way people access your blog. In a worst case scenario, just one of those "politiwalls" can completely hang your site, as well, and that really isn't too functional, is it?

Speaking of life's myths, it occurs to me, the more I read research, that changing products does not change habits. Perhaps, actually, to the contrary, changing the products has an adverse effect. It is, for instance, becoming clearer that low energy lighting - CFL and LED - causes the consumer to worry less about "leaving the light on". And having all of these low calory and no-calory products will lead to your consuming more of those products - you have, I am sure, seen those huge soda buckets people carry around the office, buckets that did not exist in the day when diet drinks did not. Soda bottles have gotten larger, too, over time, I don't know when the 2 litre bottle was introduced, but I'll bet it was after diet soda was invented - yes, there you go, Diet Coke (there was Tab before that), 1983.

So I have decided to tackle at least some of that, consciously - although to some extent it is a generational thing, applies more to those who made the switch from "conventional" to "low", whereas current generations grew up with the stuff, so have a different relationship to it. The CFL came along around the same time Diet Coke did, Philips introduced the CFL in Europe in 1980. The issue is that, as is the case with hybrid vehicles, CFL bulbs do not reduce energy consumption, any more than that sweeteners reduce obesity. We are using technologies to try and bring about change, when in fact we need to find ways to change people's habits - if we don't need sugar in our coffee, let's train ourselves away from the sweet tooth, rather than fake our taste buds into thinking we've eaten sugar. We need to get commuters out of their cars, we need to get consumers to eat less, we can't keep making television sets larger, and we can't keep deceiving ourselves that we're using LED light fixtures, and that this means lower energy bills. All of the LEDs, for example, that I have in the house, are used in perimeter and security lighting, and replace regular bulbs that were running during dark hours anyway. For that purpose, they are ideal - but replacing bulbs that only run an hour a day with low energy bulbs does nothing for your pocketbook, it only helps their manufacturers, and the power companies, and the Federal folks that need to show lower consumption. Like expensive "hybrid" hot water tanks, they don't do anything for you.

I guess what I am saying is that the way all of these "solutions" are handled is to manipulate the statistics. Those then benefit politicians, power companies, the EPA, what have you. There just isn't any way that ceasing production of the 10 cent light bulb, and replacing a number of $10,000 gasoline powered cars with $40,000 gasoline powered cars the supposedly use less gas actually reduces anybody's carbon footprint. Toyota nor Honda have replaced some of their car models with hybrids - they've added models. Similarly, production of Tungsten lightbulbs has been moved to other countries, in large part to Asia and Africa. The idea that you can convict poor people to buy more expensive lightbulbs has got to be the joke of the century...

Thursday, April 21, 2011 - Trumpf

I strongly feel we should have the new Trump series, "Dictator Apprentice", taped in Tripoli, Lybia, with Colonel Khadafi being a frequent guest.

Saturday, April 16, 2011 - What Vision?

Where are we, Thursday, as I write this. If anything is infuriating it is a foot injury that gets bad enough that you don't even want to stand on it to cook or do bathroom ablutions. It isn't a huge deal, and I have the medication and treatment regime to combat an inflammation effectively, but I still wasn't comfortable working out until today, that is when it becomes kind of clear how addicted one gets to the "daily workout". I am not one of those who pushes himself right up to the injury, but it does sometimes get close. It has always fascinated me how many peope do not adjust to aging - in the case of injury, it takes a lot longer to heal when you're my age than when you are 23, and one simply has to make allowance for that, but I noticed it the other day when showing something to an acquaintance.

Said acquaintance had to scramble for a set of reading glasses to read what I was showing him on my Blackberry, and I realized that, driving around, he could not read emails on his own cellphone without the glasses. Nearsightedness and reading glasses and bi-focals and stuff hits most of us when we hit the other side of 50, so should not really be rocket science, but the episode reminded me of the colleague up in New York who simply wouldn't go to the eye doctor for an annual checkup - something that, in the phone company, was covered nine ways from Sunday. I, on the other hand, have had a multi-focal eye correction called "monovision" since the early 1980s, and have been wearing extended wear contact lenses pretty much the same amount of time. In Monovision, one eye is corrected for near vision and the other eye is corrected for distance vision. The brain figures out which eye to use and when, a learning process that takes a week or two, as I recall. While extended wear contacts aren't advertised for monthly wear any more, they can be kept in overnight without any problem. I am a little more cautious about them, after my eye doctor noticed some vein growth in the cornea. This is typically caused by a lack of oxygen, meaning that I was keeping the contacts in for too long, continuously, and I have since changed my wearing habits, giving my eyes a breather every other week or so. What you want to do is ask your optometrist if they have experience with monovision (available for Lasik, too!), and if they don't, find one that does.

You know it is time to change channels when Kathie Lee and Hoda come on at 10am and proceed to take their shoes off for the apparent benefit of the audience. Maybe it is a woman thing - are we seriously paying these women millions of dollars to take their expen$ive shoes off on national TV? Seriously? Chef Daniel Holzman (on the Today show) doing pasta sauce: "Canned tomatoes are delicious. They are awesome". The conversation moves on to the herbs - oregano. Ann Curry: "Yah, yah, yum". Whatever. Owell, let's switch to CNN, where a woman with an overdone English accent is... reading international newspaper headlines to the viewer, on live television. English language headlines only, that stands to reason. I guess that's handy if you don't have internet or a smartphone.

While I appreciate this entire budget-and-deficit debacle, I don't know that we spent enough time analyzing how we got here. Did having a technophobe president for eight years have anything to do with it? His predecessors, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, and even Ronald Reagan, were well acquainted users of technology - Reagan used to media technology as an actor, the elder Bush as a pilot and as CIA director, and the Clinton team was really the first true internet team. But Dubya thought Blackberry was a fruit... Just something to think about, people, when you try to work out how we lost our edge to the Chinese (after teaching them everything we knew). Not a prayer. Just a thought.

The picture to the right? A frog that lives in my front yard hunting a moth, they ended up on my window, and seemed frozen there for a while.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011 - Sheen, Gbagbo, Khadafi, Trump, it is Lunatic Night Live..

I have to grudgingly compliment Charlie Sheen - if you've self-immolated the way he has, but then book a nationwide tour of - yourself? - get good audiences, even if they boo you, and keep going from town to town, changing the act as you go along, you're doing something, and that is always excellent. No stagflation, he's got the money to do this, and I am willing to let him sweat it out and see what he comes back with, at the end of the road. He has not let the public boo him all the way back to Hollywood, and for that I think he deserves a small compliment. With that much money and notoriety, it is hard to get back to "normal", whatever that is. Don't get me wrong - Mr. Sheen is an idiot, and needs talking to, educatalin', and introducing to real women, but he is likely coping as best he can. And that, my friends, is all any of us can hope to do... I don't know about you, but I can't book Radio City Music Hall and sell tickets..

So Mr. Bagbo has been arrested (which is what happens when the French send in the Foreign Legion) and Mr. Khadafi has duped another bunch of do-gooders (which is what happens when you send in the South African President) and continues killing. In Japan, we are learning how to deal with a real natural disaster affecting an advanced Western civilization - let us be clear, the Earth's population will continue to grow, and a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami will cause major long term issues wherever it hits, even if there had not been a nuclear power plant in its path. In many ways, this plant survived the initial disaster rather well, we need to learn who should have done what, and what, if anything, could have been done differently, but, and I can't say this often enough, a 9.0 earthquake is a 9.0 earthquake. One thing you do not want to do is listen to the Greens and to FreakPeace - we need all power sources we have invented, from ethanol and deep mined coal to shale oil and nukular, unless we can stop everybody from having children, cooking food and lighting their homes. Simple as that.

I am wondering if Glenn Beck's demise, and Donald Trump's birther antics, signal an end to the craziness that has been pervading American socity. Does it mean we're heading back to more reasonable ways of arguing, and less vitriolic ways of dealing with things we don't like? Or did they always do this, and I just wasn't paying attention? I honestly don't know.. I do know that I find the large group of tea-partyers that are going to "reform Washington" scary, don't take me wrong though, Washington could certainly do with reform, I just don't know that newbies are the folks to do it. That's quite an organization to tackle if you have no experience of changing, say, all of Boeing Corporation. And when I see how other countries are tackling this economic downturn - in both the United Kingdom and The Netherlands, the Armed Forces are being gutted, that is what they start with. We could do that too, if we stopped sticking our noses in other people's business, and leave that to their neighbours. And then the Icelanders vetoed a resolution of the debt incurred by collapsed Icelandic banks, in terms of losing investments from Dutch and UK consumers and institutions, investments the Dutch and UK governments reimbursed under their bank guarantee programs. Does not bode well for Iceland's accession to the European Union... All I am saying is that the recession continues to reverberate through the Western world, and it does not look like there are a lot of solutions out there.

In many ways, it is perhaps to an extent comparable with the exodus of expatriate residents from Tokyo and Japan, because of the natural disasters there. I have experienced what living in the "ring of fire" is like, in that I have experienced several earthquakes while working in Indonesia, and it surprises me that, apparently, so many people who had been living in Japan for a long time have left. These are largely people who should be used to earthquakes, and their dangers, even tsunamis aren't exactly new either. Were they living with their head in the sand? Had they planned to get out of there if it ever happened to them? Typically, the rebuilding period after a disaster is when new money is pumped into the economy, because that is how we make money. I don't mind telling you that if somebody had offered me a job in Japan, in the past couple months, I'd have been there already - unfortunately, nobody (so far, hint hint) has..

Still, spring is just about here... Yesterday, I still cranked up the woodstove, in the evening, but judging from the mid-70's today, and a forecast into the 80's, I probably won't have to bother with that again. No quick heat with my high-efficiency woodstove - it warms up its chimney surround, and once warm and fully loaded (which by itself takes four to five hours) has another 8 hours of whole house heat and fire left in it. The picture top left shows you how "springy" my part of Virginia has gotten, green bits wherever I look... hurray!

If you use CVS for walk-in or drive-by prescriptions, be aware they have implemented an automated system to remind you when it is time to refill, and once they unleash that on your phone, they won't turn it off. More annoyingly, it does not leave messages until after it has called you on a particular prescription a number of times. And yet more annoyingly, eventually it will leave you a message that will have a tollfree number should you wish to turn off the reminders - in my case, I get my refills from a prescriptions-by-mail service, so normally don't refill with CVS - but that turning off does not work. It does not matter whether you tell a store clerk you do not want calls, or if you use their automated "no calls" system, their automation will keep calling you. I know there is a recession on, but this falls in the category "agressive marketing", i.e., annoying you into ordering as early as possible. Medco Pharmacy I have managed to stop calling (they do send emails, which is fine with me), but their specialty arm, Accredo, still does, and always tries to get you to order way early, and now tries to collect marketing data before it will ship your order.

Thursday, April 7, 2011 - Random, News or both?

I suppose the simple truth is that if they give you a choice, you may not watch the advertising - it is the basic, and in my mind stupid, equation of how to make the web pay. I can't say this often enough, but there is no way in hell you are, over time, going to generate revenues by FORCING consumers to watch / read / view advertisements - and that is where the industy is headed, making you watch advertising. That may have worked in the United States when commercial television was invented, but popping an ad over an article you are fixin to read or watch is completely counter-productive, and, to me, counter-intuitive.

How crazy it gets is very clear from the way Comcast Cable superimposes local TV advertising over the advertising sold by the broadcasters and cable channels, something that makes me wonder what the point of broadcasters selling ad time is - if I were General Motors, and I paid CBS for ad minutes, and Comcast then puts an ad for an insurance company where my GM ad was, I'd be pretty upset. Unless GM, or whoever, gets reimbursed, but I very much doubt that happens. And it is not that different from the company that tells you on TV that "if your mail takes more than 3 minutes to download" you have a virus, and the government that tells you there is such a thing as "renewable energy" - tell me, show me the math and physics, how you're going to speed the air back up without using energy after you extract energy using wind turbines, and I will believe all of the above.

I can see how it works right here in my own website, with the Amazon links I put into my blog entries. They are not conventional advertising, I make sure they always relate to whatever it is I am writing about, and my guess is that that is the primary reason why they generate revenues for me. Not huge amounts of money, but they are unobtrusive, don't interfere with anything, and some people use them to buy stuff I write about. Not necessarily the exact items, but I've seen a couple of people go to Amazon and buy a cellphone right from an article I wrote. Different cellphones from the ones I describe, but still, a cellphone, not a case of Gatorade - although that happens too.

So - yes, you can have online advertising that functions, but you have to work for it - you can't automate the delivery process, and there is no clever software that can predict whither the human brain will go, no algorithm that can understand you just clicked on orange juice because you took medication and are getting dehydrated.

"When you're doing user experience testing, you're looking for patterns," Google researcher Lidia Oshlyansky says - read the excellent BBC News article on this search for the Holy Grail here. Pattern recognition is the name of the game, without anybody ever, in my opinion, having proven conclusively that human beings consistently operate in single patterns. We may have done, way back in our hunter gatherer days, but these days, our Wal-Mart days, we select a cereal for breakfast on taste - and the only predictable aspect of this is that the manufacturer will try to cram as much sugar into that as they can, so you will eat more of it, until some government agency tells it to stop giving consumers diabetes. While cheating consumers into consuming more is a pattern too, it masks other motivations, and you no longer have the predictability factor you need for pattern recognition. This is the reverse, you're manipulating, you are trying to establish a pattern, not discover one.

The problem with patterns is that when you start looking for one, you'll find one. That is why people have believed in astrology for hundreds of years, even though it is complete hogwash. That is (sorry to all those I am offending) why religion "works". I could go on - humans are clearly programmed to look for patterns, which they then use as guides to adjust their behaviour. Whether or not they work seems to be less important than the fact that it makes life more predictable, or at least one's behaviour. I have done years of this type of research during my tenure at the NYNEX R&D laboratories, and I would be very happy to tell Google, or whoever, what it is they are doing wrong, and how to fix it. Seriously, it is what I do.

Sunday, April 3, 2011 - Evolution, Revolution, Deception

Like Facebook has its "Like" button, Google now has a "1+" button, which supposedly links your search results with those of your friends - which begs the question who your Google friends are, as their process is not as transparent as the one Facebook uses, where you have to approve and add friends by hand. I can't say I "like" either facility, and in fact go to some length avoiding the use of the Facebook button, as the whole idea behind the "Like" button is that Facebook can follow you and your friends anywhere on the internet, since you have to be logged in to Facebook to be able to use said button. Any website that sports the Facebook "Like" button allows Facebook to run its own code, and to query your browser, knowing who you are. That, to me, is far too invasive, I don't need Facebook following me around and telling all the world what I have looked at, and using that information to do targeted advertising. The same, I think, applies to Google, and there, too, I log out manually every time I leave a Google page.

It is Sunday as I write this, another, rather late, snowstorm decided to come through, so the woodstove, which had been on-and-off all week, is cranking again, one of the important aspects of keeping the woodstove operational is that you have to run the thing as hot as you can, two or three times a week. At least I garner from the internet that that, in combination with cupric chloride, is a reasonably effective way of preventing the chimney from clogging too much. Ever since I installed the Barometric Damper I can at least look into a section of the pipe and see the amount of creosote that accumulates, so I have a sort of check. It is a fair amount, see the picture to the right, so between the firing and the chemical I hope I don't have to clean the chimney until after the heating season ends. Between the barometric damper and the heat exchanger, at least I can prevent the flue gases of getting hot enough to ignite the creosote and cause a chimney fire.

I am not usually stuck for words, but I can make heads nor tails of the goings-on in the Middle East. Middle East and North Africa, I suppose, one does not generally think of countries like Tunisia and Morocco as Middle Eastern countries. Having said that, the Midde East and the Arab countries are often confused. However that may be, it is astonishing to see populist movements arise in the majority of those countries, with a seemingly genuine desire to move the dictators out, and a form of democracy moved in. I don't like using the word "democracy", as it is so often misused by Europen and American officials. Yes, perhaps we did invent democracy - although you could say a kingdom, with a non-elected Head of State, can never be a true democracy - but that does not mean we have a right to define what it is, or force it upon others. I've watched, from relatively close up, how Indonesia transitioned into democracy, generally doing a good job, but severely hampered by Islamists whose Sharia belief often precludes what we would think democratic government is, as some of their rules are written in stone and can't be changed by anyone. Yet this is where the turmoil is, in predominantly Islamic countries - are Muslims tired of being governed by potentates, whether they are dictators or imams? Because the dictators and the imams appear to be holding back their folk, the way I look at it. Nevertheless, the "Reverend" Terry Jones has unmasked himself - having committed to not burn the Qu'ran, he went ahead and did just that. The man needs psychiatric treatment. Yes, we have a law (and this goes for Dutch politician Geert Wilders too, who has just announced he is doing "Fitna 2") that says it is OK to insult someone else's religion, if you are convinced that is what you need to do. It is permitted. It is not required.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - Risk Management is not a Black Art

The screen you see to the right is "organically" an HDTV, but I now have it hanging off my laptop as a monitor. One of its unexpected uses is that it lets me enjoy some of my photography in all its magic on the 47 inch LCD HDTV at a resolution of 1920x1080, full HDMI resolution. It is really nice, beats any other way of looking at your photography, and the set cost me, last year, just under $800 on sale... I ended up using a 720p 50 inch Samsung plasma screen to watch cable TV on, it is, for that purpose, nicer and richer in colour than the LCD.

As I am watching a completely riveting report on a dog in Washington State that has an 18 puppy litter, the news from Fukushima continues to be worrisome. I have to commend the workers that try to deal with the almost-out-of-control disaster, there isn't enough information to commend anybody else, while everybody around the world, including governments, are asking questions about their own nuclear plants.

Importantly, nobody should ever say "that can't happen here", because whether your plant sits on a fault line or not, it is always possible something catastrophic happens you had not planned for. The idea that we know exactly where ALL fault lines are, and can predict the movement of the earth's crust and the tectonic plates is completely ludicrous. I don't know that I had ever heard of a tsunami striking a modern, heavily populated area, until the Indonesian tsunami. And from the reporting I understand that when the Fukushima plant was built, in 1970, the population of North Eastern Japan was much smaller than it is today, and I doubt that urban planners took the plant into account when they allowed the area to grow. From the tsunami perspective alone, both in the Indonesia and Japan tsunamis countless people lost their lives because their homes and businesses were too close to the shore. At this point in the history of the planet, nobody is going to move entire populations inland - think about a tsunami hitting the West Coast, and think about the number of lives and the cost of the infrastructure that would be lost - one estimate has it that Hurricane Katrina, hitting New Orleans in 2005, cost some $150 billion, while it took 1,836 lives. That dollar number, interestingly, is less than half what the Japanese government currently estimates rebuilding North Eastern Japan will cost.

So when an American power plant in Browns Ferry, Ala, invites the media for a tour to show off their safety and security, what does that mean? Does it make you feel safer?

What that means is that they are really good at PR, nothing more, or less. The media are not experts at anything. They most certainly do not have the required expertise to do risk assessment, which requires large teams of experts, and very specialized software. What is very important for you, as a consumer, to understand, is that you can simulate and lab test and computer model disasters all you want, you can't test the real thing happening. I've always told my staff this, test, model, but do not rely on this alone. CNN just broadcast one of the plant managers saying how it has been engineered to withstand a 6.0 quake, and there could never be a 42 foot wall of water in the middle of Alabamy... I have news for you, people - 6.0 is the statistical maximum for that area. There is absolutely no reason why there could not be a 7.0 quake - "unlikely" does not mean it can't happen, it actually means it can. And to be honest (but you will have to pay for this), after Fukushima all power plants (nuclear and conventional) as well as oil refineries should be engineered to withstand a 9.0 quake, and a tsunami after the quake. No exceptions. That is completely my personal opinion, but I do need to remind you I have more experience of risk mitigation and disaster recovery than most. Real, boots-on-the-ground, front line, sleepless nights, being-picked-up-on-the-tarmac, kind of experience. You answer all my questions, I will tell you what you need, and you decide if it is worth it to you. And your kids. And your neighbours. And your shareholders.

Speaking of risk mitigation, my doctor, who watches over my health like a Yiddishe hawk, keeps wanting me to lose a little more weight. Now I am not exactly obese or fat, but like many do have a tendency to put on an extra pound or two, mostly because I snack, and when I hit 180 he started to whine at me. Recently, he berated me for not eating breakfast, as he says that is a habit that causes people to overeat later in the day, when they run out of fuel, and that is part of the reason one puts on extra pounds. He also said a disproportionate number of obese folks do not eat breakfast. I checked, and that is statistically true. Problem is, if I do eat breakfast I have to change my entire morning routine, and to be honest, if I start eating in the morning I tend to keep eating all day. So I am trying something simple: tea with milk and honey. Having lived in the U.K., the "cuppa" as the British like it is hardly alien to me, and it occurred to me honey is a natural form of sugar, with 60 calories of unadulterated fuel per serving. So that is what I am trying - the first cup of the day isn't joe, but tea, and has some calories. Let's see if that works, and how.

Friday, March 25, 2011 - Looking for something?

As I see former colleagues on Facebook and LinkedIn use all sorts of sideways confuscations to look for a job without saying they need to get back to work after "retirement", it is kind of the big thing, where what is different today is that all of those myriads of consulting positions that used to be there simply are not, any more. Unless you have Secret Clearance, I suppose, and even then, I wonder how many of those are real, and how many are posted by companies chasing Federal contracts. There simply aren't that many cleared people in the entire United States, and "able to be cleared" isn't something that exists - you're cleared or you're not, it is not something the Fed will let you "turn on" five years later. And, you know, if you have not been employed for five years, say so up front, that isn't stuff you can bamboozle your way past. I am a firm believer that, when all is said and done, honesty is what gets you furthest, considering anybody who is hiring is, first and foremost, on the lookout for lies and omissions. Right?

It has been hell week, anyway - I cleaned and sterilized my contact lenses, when you wear extended wear contacts, you need to periodically give your eyes a chance to breathe unimpeded, but when I put them back in my vision clouded. Turns out the neutralization tablets (the process uses hydrogen peroxide, you know what that does to hair) had "gone off", and so I had a chemical burn to both corneas. It's all fixed now, thanks to my eye doctor, but it was not fun. And then I cut a chicken with one of my really sharp kitchen knives, and my finger with it - again, nothing lasting, but I have to take it easy on that finger until the cut heals, it is just annoying, and I keep having to stop myself doing stuff - I wanted to cut wood, yesterday, but thought wielding a chainsaw or otherwise working out probably was not the right thing to do, it was still oozing a bit of the good red stuff this morning. Tip: if it bleeds, let it bleed for a bit, that cleans and sterilizes the wound. It is what the stuff and the mechanism are for...

One reason why I rarely watch the Today Show any more is that they have so much tearjerker journalism and so many New York centric recipes, which really is not what I am looking for, in the morning. The clip above right is a really good example - does Ann Curry really have to talk to people as if they are demented geriatric patients? Is "I know you do not understand this" the right thing to say to a 5 year old, after you've gone to some length discussing how the poor black mother lost her job? Can we not have normal conversations and a normal tone of voice? Play the clip and judge for yourself - hopefully you will think I am off my rocker, if not, write to the Today Show and tell 'em you want real TV. The unrelated pic to the left is a shot of Times Square, taken last month, I somehow got the feeling Times Square shrunk, can't quite figure why... It is a place I am very well familiar with, my office used to be one block over East, and before that, when I lived in Manhattan, I crossed it every day on my way to my 49th St. place of work. As always, click on the pic to see it in its own window, then click on that to get it full size. It is a verry nice picture, if I say so meself.

The way the Today Show do stuff has had me flee to Fox5DC, which actually provides an excellent, mature, news product in Washington, not the "working class wonk" stuff I see Fox do in other markets. I guess in Washington even Republican outlets feel they have to "get it right". I am excepting Lester Holt from the NBC equation, by the way, I think he is one of the finest journalists out there, and I watch the Today show at weekends, when he anchors it, with pleasure. If you've followed Lester from Egypt and Bahrain back to NYC and then to Tokyo, recently, you will know what I mean. He does not skip a beat. And they don't even put him in the anchor lineup for the Today show, at the top of the web page. In general, can we please get rid of the "I am sure this has shaken the residents of Jerusalem to the core" and "As an Israeli, how does this make you feel?" type of journalism? What is this, the "Dumbing Down Househusbands" squad? We have Sixty Minutes and other background reporting to deal with the indirect consequences, but as a journalist, I have always belonged in the "report facts" school of thought. Not that how someone feels is not important, but you do not "feel" on TV. Just a tear on a face, on camera, is much more significant than these "anchors", who, to some extent, probably have never been in the field. Just read this gem: "They realized the jet was in distress when they saw it crash". No shit.

Monday, March 21, 2011 - Tobruk or Tokyo, it is all Nukular

You will have read about the "supermoon", the unusually close distance between Earth and Moon, this week. Last night cloud cover prevented me from taking a few pictures using my telescope, perhaps tonight is better, at least there is no cloud and the wind has died down. Having checked where the darn thing is, I found it was still well below the treeline at 9pm, so it is going to be a late night. I know I shot some reasonably spectacular pics with my Nikon D50, so perhaps the D90 will do even better. By the time you read this, there should be at least one pic posted here, although that will be a compressed reduced version of the 12 MB NEF raw original, which, even if I did post it, your browser would not be able to display. You can click on the picture, then click again to see it full size, look at the visible mountain range on the top right hand edge of the moon, I had not seen that before in one of my own shots. Or, you can click here to download a 10MB TIFF version from my server.

I am all for blaming the Japanese government and GE for everything to do with the nuclear disaster, but let us please not forget this was a 9.0 earthquake, followed by a tsunami - by comparison, the earthquake that set off the Sumatra tsunami is generally viewed as having a 9.1 magnitude - and that killed around 230,000 people. This was, then, a massive earthquake, and the Japanese did comparatively well, considering the epicentre was only 109 miles from Fukushima. Today, I saw some assessments that had the reactor's tsunami walls designed for a 5 foot wave, while the actual tsunami was six feet high, and some of the electrical components for the pumping system being outside, unprotected.

All will be reviewed, I am sure, but the most important assessment you always make in these situations has to do with the cost of the level of protection, and the statistical chances of something going wrong. If you anchor your protections in the earth, and the entire earth moves, as was the case here, what can you do to protect yourself? You can - purely as an example - ask yourself if electricity is the right power source for backup cooling pumps - can you create one backup system that relies on different energy sources? But then, if you use LPG or propane or gasoline or diesel fuel, how much danger is there of that catching fire, in a calamity? Or using steam, how much of an explosion can that cause - a not uncommon occurrence in the municipal steam heat system in Manhattan. That is what happened with Rudi Giuliani's emergency generator at 7 WTC, which suffered a ruptured diesel tank, and the diesel fuel (unsurprisingly) caught fire. Ours, next door, was better protected, did not catch fire, but simply ran out, without any way of replenishing it after the Towers collapsed all over our switching center and the entire neighourhood had a massive underground fire, caused by the burning fuel from the jetliners used in the attack. I hate to say this, but you can't make that stuff up.

Clearly, the French have the lead in cleaning up the Libyan mess - understandable, considering Libya is France's backyard, and Khadaffi has been a pain in many governments' backsides for a long time. For the French, the British and the Canadians to be actively involved, the main Arab countries would have given their tacit permission, all three countries have large Arab populations. The big question now is what happens if Khadaffi does go away, something that technically (and legally, since he is a head of state) can only be accomplished by the Libyans themselves. The rebels have proved to be useless, militarily, already, so that leaves only Khadaffi's own military to do the job. It'll get interesting before anything happens - right now, I would rather deal with a runaway nuclear reactor than with Libyan politics. I mean it.

Friday, March 18, 2011 - Need me in Japan?

If anyone is looking for SME expat staffers to replace those that left Japan, or is expanding operations to assist in the recovery there, I am available and happy to go. I am not an ambulance chaser, but actual 9/11 recovery experience is not something you learn in school. Even radioactive exposure I am familiar with, and I am not worried about my thyroid - I don't have one any more, never thought I'd mention that as an asset *smile*. Check my resume and mail me via the resume link above.

Thursday, March 17, 2011 - Intermediate

Even more so than in previous uprisings and disasters, I am completely bowled over by the media access and the quality of coverage of the Japan "multi-disaster". I appreciate there are a few generations who have never watched the moon landings on a grainy little black-and-white TV set, but getting this whole thing thrown into your living room large enough to touch and smell, and for a large part in High Definition, is - well, I won't say "awesome", lest anybody thinks Gilbert Godfrey was funny, but who needs horror movies any more. A news junkie anyway, I am glued to the box.

Watching mostly CNN during the day, or, I suppose, having it as background radiation, I can't help but be annoyed at the amount of speculation the anchors try to get out of the experts they bring on. Experts, I suppose, but just because you're a nukular perfesser at MIT does not mean you can complain the Japanese government isn't providing "us" with enough information. I am, for now, assuming the U.S. Navy lies offshore from the stricken reactors, and has a pretty good bead on what goes on, and I honestly doubt that publicizing "what if" scenarios will in any way help those on the ground, the emergency coordinators, or the Japanese government. Apart from that, with 150 miles of coastline obliterated, 10,000 bodies to be looked for, and half a million mouths to feed when you don't even know where all of them are, must be a pretty tall order. That the reactor situation is dire was clear to me - those were real explosions, not a lot of explainng to do, and if the radiation level increases the 7th Fleet will tell us if the Japanese won't.

The AirTap heat pump hot water heater, see my August 12 blog entry, has now been running - that is, powered - for some seven months, running four to five hours a day, and I can only report it is working as advertised. It is, as you can see below, installed in the closet under the stairs where the hot water tank lived already, and the only update I have is that that closet needs no additional ventilation. I originally thought that because the heat pump needs reasonably warm air, and produces cold air, it might need extra ventilation, but that turns out to be unnecessary. The unit does cool the closet down, but not to the point the temperature lowers too much for it to function efficiently. Quite a cool moneysaver, tell ya.

Sunday, March 13, 2011 - The Rising Sun Glows Red

Judging from the numbers I hear from Japan, their earthquake preparedness probably saved huge numbers of lives, if you consider how big this quake was - although I don't for a second think that the toll will be limited to the 1,300 number we are hearing - it went up to 1,800 as I am writing this. The tsunami in particular will have taken a lot of lives - as in the previous tsunami, many will never be found, and only be identified via the registrar's and tax offices, which, in Japan, have at least very complete records. When I traveled the Chennai coastline in India, after the Sumatra tsunami, I encountered vast empty spaces where towns had been, with signs here and there commemorating the thousands, if not tend of thousands, who had perished here. With most of these folks not being in any kind of registry, nobody will ever know how many perished.

By comparison with death tolls from comparable earthquake disasters worldwide, the Japanese probably saved a lot of lives, even if that will cost hugely with respect to the rebuilding. But it is awful, absolutely awful. I will, with considerable interest, follow what happens with the nuclear plant that took a hit, just out of scientific interest. Beyond a certain point of managable damage, how do you make these plants safe? It is a risk the Japanese took knowingly, I am sure, if you have been involved with risk management you know you have to find a cutoff point beyond which you can only "retrench and retreat". I remember being laughed at when I suggested that if you put a network facility near an airport, smack underneath the standard flight path, you have to plan for a plane falling on your building. That wasn't, they felt, reasonable. Much to my amusement, they changed their minds after 9/11, even though that was an attack, and not an obvious target in terms of risk management (other than, of course, WTC and Pentagon being major landmarks).

My guess is that Martin Sheen does not do much in the way of change management. Change management has been mentioned so often in the job applications I see on the various boards, that I began to pay more attention to it. It is used extensively in the software development environments in Verizon I have been part of, and is, in many ways, an intrinsic part of project management. Not only that, change management should really be part and parcel of any corporate environment, not necessarily only areas that have something to do with IT.

I often hear the advertisements commissioned on WTOP by a company called "americaneagle.com". It is a web design and -hosting company, I drive past it on my way into D.C., whose defining feature - I think - is that its name has nothing to do with its product.

It is, of course, not unusual for companies to play the "patriotic" card, this close to the Pentagon and the White House. Nothing wrong with that. But at the same time, I do wonder how much money the Americaneagle folks spend on just making sure potential customers are aware they don't make hunting gear, which is what you would think of when you hear the name. There actually is an "American Eagle Outfitters", which from the name makes more sense to me. At any rate, that is how I get to think of change management. Had I been responsible for CM in this company, I'd have set up a separate subsidiary, with a different name and internet moniker, for the web stuff. That is not necessarily always right - but then again, how many people think of NBC Broadcasting when they think of General Electric - GE, for short? Or of train locomotives? Of course, if you are big enough you can afford to to brand advertising, which is then not necessarily an enormous expense, proportionally. But generally, you would probably not want to call your new company that makes electric bicycles "The Chopped Liver Firma". Right?

So, try to think of change management from Day Zero. Try to incorporate even that you may not be doing what you started out doing - Americaneagle.com began in software and hardware, GE as an electric product company, and I am sure you can think of 1,000 other examples. It isn't, as one says, a "dealbreaker", but I would guess that Americaneagle.com is spending huge amounts of money on the branding issue that could have gone to other acquisition efforts.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - Energy remains the popular topic

What is more, it provides these smart services only to people with smart meters and smart applicances - typically, those aren't the poor people, and if they are not in the industrialized world, those aren't the poor countries and poor cities. Yes, I use more energy than do the poor - I can afford air conditioning, and my own network and storage server at home, up 24/7. I can afford multiple refrigerators, multiple freezers, security lighting, rechargeable tools. But it is the low income folks who are relegated to the inefficient light bulbs, the old wasteful refrigerator, the 15 year old microwave, older TV sets, etc. One of those two way smart meters can't control appliances that don't have the smart innards, and very few do. And again: as I look at the "smarts" the net effect is that the smarts can throttle down or turn off your air condititioner, switch your hybrid water heater to heat pump cycle only, and none of that has anything to do with your comfort. Technically, it won't even lower your electricity bill, because what hasn't been cooled now will be cooled later, when the units are turned back to "normal" mode.

Let me take a simpler example. Had we gone to the light bulb manufacturers, and said: "We'd like you to make bulbs that consume 40% less power, generate 40% less heat for the same electrical consumption, can be plugged into any A/C current source (110 or 220V, regardless), they can cost 20% more than the ones you make today, your existing factories must be used, and all industrialized countries, will ban sale and importation of old style bulbs - what would have happened? We might not have ended up with high tech stuff like CFLs (miniaturized fluorescents after all) and LEDs, which essentially fall in the categories "expensive" and "more expensive" and "fashionable", but with regular lightbulbs that would have been affordable for folks with low incomes, bulbs that would have reduced power consumption worldwide. We may have stopped making Tungsten bulbs in the United States, but I am sure there are quite a few factories in places like Asia that have not, there are, after all, plenty of people all over the world who simply cannot afford to by fancy light bulbs. So, all we have achieved is to reduce our revenues.

So no, smart isn't smart. The smartness reduces some of my energy consumption, and it does so as a stopgap measure, because we barely produce enough electric energy for the peak consumption periods, typically midsummer, air conditioning time, and the only reason we talk about this is that electricity is not the only source of heat, and therefore we have no accumulated view of how much energy is really used during the heating season. It comes from multiple sources - "smart" would be if we bought "energy", as therms or sumtin', not electricity, gasoline, oil, town gas, propane, what have you. Just energy units. Bear in mind, as well, that there is still no such thing as "renewable energy" - if you convert solar or wind or water energy to electrical energy, you divert energy from the Earth's ecology, and we have no idea what that will do to the planet, and us, over the long term. Every kilowatt you use is gone, you can't put it back, you can't recycle it

I am not at all puzzled that MI5 and the CIA had no idea the Middle East was about to explode. It is on thing to identify social unrest, quite another to predict the future. But the proceedings do puzzle one - what is it that gave rise to an upheaval that ignited a series of societies, rather than just one or two? Did we miss how unhappy the Middle Eastern populace truly is? Is there a relationship? Is it the ongoing problems with Islam? Has perhaps the recession had unseen and uncalculated effects in the Middle East, effects we failed to see because we were concentrated on jobs and mortgages and our own failing businesses and governments? Did we discriminate, concentrating on the industrialized West, at the expense of some ill defined Third-World populace? What happens now - these folks in Egypt, Tunisia, Lybia, Iran, still do not have jobs and prospperity, even though two of those countries, Lybia and Iran, are rich in oil, or should be? What has happened is pretty amazing, but I must be honest and tell you it scares me a bit. There are too many unanswered questions - why put up with 30 or 40 years of repression, then revolt? With all of our intelligence, we simply have no clue why it happened.

Thursday, March 4, 2011 - Looks like you're famous or human

I just do not like mass marketing, although I must admit I see the majority of consumers do, and we have to be fair and accept that - I just don't believe in the "all things to all people concept", other than as a good way to make money. As long as we are all in agreement that Sheen needs a shrink - not rehab, a shrink - and we should accept that somebody with a very high publicity profile, making more money per week than most people make in their lifetime, probably ends up getting a very skewed view of life and the world, that isn't something he can help. Seriously, that isn't tongue in cheek, look at Sheen, Spears, Lohan, Galliano - some folks just don't have the fuses that can handle that kind of load. It is easy to laugh, but once you are on that road there really isn't a convenient way back, and there are only two licensed plumbers, Dr. Phil and Dr. Drew, and even there who exactly licensed Dr. Phil is not clear, I think it was probably Oprah - check the link, and see how that name is now a brand - not that I don't have respect for someone capable of doing that, easy it ain't, and you can't go to the supermarket to get your instant coffee after that any more.

While I very well understand the various rationales behind not putting your picture or a video out in or with your online resume, don't you think that concept is beginning to get a little bit outdated? Apart from anything else, since many have lots of information out on the internet, those pictures and video rants should be easy to find for a determined searcher, for another, I am not sure that I personally always want to conform to "the wisdom". We tend to present ourselves in the "grey blob" framework, in the United States, but in a time period where gazillions of people are looking for a job or a position, perhaps it isn't that bad to show a bit of skin - umm, pardon, a bit of personality.

I have always been relatively rebellious, and especially today, even though I fanatically keep my Facebook private, I should imagine it won't take you very long to find me ranting about something or other. So, I've put a picture on my resume, one that shows not only moi, but J, a now retired former staffer in Indonesia, one of those people I could not have done without, and who I keep in touch with. I have no compunction at all making clear I believe we are made by our staff, not the other way around. XL, his company, now boasts a little over 10 million customers, and that is not because of him, not because of me - but because of us. I think the pic says more about me than the one in the natty suit I made a few days ago. Honest. It was, after all, Sir Harold Evans - who I had the privilege of working with on World Press Photo in Amsterdam - who coined the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words". It is, but you do have to think before you click...

I have told myself to work out - important especially since I stopped smoking, cold turkey, now some 9 months ago, managed not to lapse into overeating, but I just have to make sure I work out several times a week, especially since my doctor is hounding me about losing weight - but I guess he does that with every reformed smoker, not so they lose weight, but so they don't put it on. I am good, so far..

My five acres of woods are a godsend, in that respect, I can keep working on the woodpile all year round, I actually don't even mind doing that in freezing weather or in the rain, and it is very good exercise. Wood is heavy, and you can cut your trees so the individual logs are close to the limit of what you can lift, which will give you better exercise (say Clinical Exercise Specialists) than does running or biking. Lifting weights, especially if you can combine that with moving and carrying heavy weights over short distances, adding some climbing and turning to the fray, lets you strengthen your muscles, joints, tendons, skeleton and bones, without the jarring impact effects that running and biking have. The effects you are concerned with are the ones that develop over the years, decades even, and to me "natural" strength training - involving, in my case, chain saws, axes, and tons and tons of wood - is the best there is, especially if you can do it outside. I've messed up a few joints, turning while carrying, though, you do have to be careful and controlled.

I tend to arrange my home days around outside work, however, and that sometimes finds me sitting here behind the laptop when I should be outside playing macho man. Or sharpening saw chains, one of the chores I am not fond of. And the only reason I am writing this up is that I have been double procrastinating - I should have worked on job applications, and instead, went and got a vacuum cleaner I really do not imminently need. The discontinued Dirt Devil Cyclone canister vac I have been using for many years is running out of bags, and they don't make those any more, so as it comes with a wet cleaning kit, I decided to relegate it to that task, and buy a cheapie upright bagless vacuum for normal use. That means, of course, unpacking and assembling the new Eureka, and now I need to empty the Cyclone and clean it, before I can use it for wet work. And all that while I should be working out (cutting wood) when I am not sending out applications. So I guess tomorrow is an outside day - clean the Cyclone, change the chains on the two saws I use, and sharpen some of the dull chains. Duh.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011 - Why we do, or don't

So, I went back to manual HTML, and dumped Freeservers (where I was a paying customer!). Fast forward to several years later - I thought to myself that my current ISP must have scripts hidden somewhere - I have a fully professional hosting account, and that comes with the works, a full UNIX webhosting environment, and U**X I know, I spent years being a lab rat developing in and under various flavours of *IX and *UX and *X and X*. Sure enough, there is a scripting engine, and so I finally put a response form on my resume page, so that anybody who wants to employ me can access me even more easily than via Skype and LinkedIn. I am a security freak, and so won't put email addresses and telephone numbers online, ever. I put the mail link on the page at 10am, and by 4:30pm I had someone mailing me about my writings. Sheesh. Sometimes I can be moronic. Although I do tend to fix my things....

Along the same lines, I can't quite figure out why I have not expanded my online resume with subpages. Sounds stupid, but I never thought of it. I've concerntrated on keeping my resume short and sweet, and the online version a mirror image of the MS Word master file. I don't know about you, but I hate the twelve page resumes that provide gory detail on what the applicant has used, to achieve their aims, down to Crosstalk in 1981, that they took a month off when their daughter was born, I find the information meaningless, and the invitation to talk to the applicant about their experience with Pseudo-Pascal rather a distraction from the subject. I even believe that programmers don't make good programmer's bosses - I have seen too many (that worked for me) have convictions about tools and methodologies that stopped their underlings from shining in their own right. That is counter-productive. If you're a real C++ guru, why would we make you a supervisor? I can make you a SME, pay you the same, and have you train your colleagues, but I don't know that being a good manager has anything to do with being a good programmer. Yet that is how it is normally done.

At any rate, now that I thought of this I need to expand my resume - I'll leave the thing as is, but replace the various activities with links to where I explain what I did, to whom, and why not. Hope this is not just busywork - I can't think why I did not do this before. I looked at a resume writing article where this suggestion was made. The writer felt one should have one's email address and telephone number on each page, too - sure, who is stupid? C'mon...

As I am sitting here doing a screen test to see what I would look like if I shot a narrative in HD to go with my online resume, the runup to the Oscars (I am writing this on February 27) is all over my plasma screen, and I suddenly wonder what would have happened if I had made it to the West Coast. By that I don't mean that I did not make it, I simply never tried, save for one abortive attempt, after I had been invited to join Cisco in Palo Alto, the weekend before their stock dropped out of the sky, and with it my job offer. I am referring more to my decade or so in the media, back in The Netherlands, where, in between my IBM career and my moving to London, I was a theatre manager (Shaffy Theater), movie production assistant (Max Havelaar), journalist (VNU), and sundry related "things".

I wasn't a nobody, exactly. I worked with the likes of (if you are international) Rutger Hauer and Jan de Bont, and (more on the Dutch side of things) Liesbeth List, Ramses Shaffy, and Focus & Thijs van Leer. Eventually, then a not uncommon occurrence, I got bored (I dropped out of college for the same reason, it was just too much to have to wait until they got to the interesting bits, I could get there by myself much faster) and took care of one of my other frustrations - I moved to the English speaking world, because as a writer and person, I wanted to be somewhere with access to the world, which I knew was not going to happen speaking Dutch. That was then, mind, in the days before the internet and satellite and cable television, you really couldn't generally reach folks unless you moved yourself to them. I know, strange concept, but then again Holland was a trading nation, and that is what we were brought up doing. You can't sell stuff to people unless you can talk to them.

Ah, my Youtube upload finished. Let's take a look - will the output of my Nikon D90 with a 17mm lens impress the professional viewer? Back in a bit. Or two bits. I want to do this for real at the airport with D.C. as the backdrop, but with today's storm, that's not going to happen, blah. Can you believe I bought this suit and never wore it? Or its tan twin. Sheesh.

Thursday, February 24, 2011 - Things to see, and ways to see them

I used to use Wordpress, see here what that looks like, but after I got hacked really badly and my domain partially hijacked, then not getting support from my then ISP, Freeservers, whose services I paid for, I even discontinued that, otherwise brilliant, tool. It gave me an archiving method that worked very well, but then I asked myself: "Who is going to visit Menno's blog to find out what Menno did on April 9, 2002?". Right, nobody. Or maybe just a divorce attourney. So I stopped worrying about that - I know how to use Wordpress to set up a fully professional communications site, and that is, for now, all that matters, you can read my words, I am not a graphics artist. A website is not necessarily a graphics showcase, if that isn't your profession or major hobby horse. Most people, to this day, don't know how to tell if they can click on a picture to pop up a larger version, it is as simple as that. And I would love to put up my Nikon's raw files full size for you to view, but guess what - most browsers do not know what to do with a NEF file - in fact, many ISPs do not allow that as a MIME file type. What's MIME? Never mind.... *smile* One thing you lose when you stop using a blogging tool is the capability for people to respond to your posts, but then again, there is Facebook, there is LinkedIn, there is Twitter, and I don't have to spend an hour or two a week cleaning up comment spam. It honestly is not worth it, as far as I am concerned.

Even NBC's national newscast paid attention to the demise of the "standard" light bulb, the other day. As I have mentioned frequently, lastly on February 10, below, the Tungsten bulb is not necessarily a bad thing, and as it converts something like 99(!!)% of the energy it consumes into heat, it is very likely a more efficient heater than the one you use to heat your house with. As all of the energy efficiency calculations I have seen completely ignore this, the environmental advantages you are supposed to get will not all be there, and during the heating season CFLs are simply more expensive than Tungsten bulbs.

That is not the whole story, though, but here I have to "draw in" other factors that play a role in human habitation. I am assuming that fire avoidance and injury are important to you too, not just energy savings and environmental advantages.

First of all, I've said it many times, the amount of energy that is used by a human being is dependent on that human being, not on the devices, implements and services that human being uses. Not for nothing do governments now run ads to remind people to turn off their high efficiency lights - when you switch to more efficient lighting, you do so to, in many cases, not have to worry about leaving that bulb on an extra twenty minutes. I know I do, I know many other folks do, I know I have more security lights in and around my home, fully converted to CFLs and LED bulbs, because they give the place that "lived in" look, without it costing me an electric fortune.

But if you have ever taken apart an old light fixture, you'll know that the fitting, the mount, often some of the wiring, are scorched. The temperature of the Tungsten bulb is high enough to create a fire hazard, is what that means. You'll note it in other types of lighting, too - halogen runs hot, and even (they like to tell you otherwise) the new LED bulbs do. Their light is cold, the current conversion process generates heat.

For LEDs, that means we're back where we were with Tungsten - they generate a lot of heat as well as light, I had a 7 watt LED bulb in my corridor, on 24/7, and the outside was too hot to touch. The reason these things are shaped the way they are, and have this intricate design, is that they generate so much heat they need special construction and special materials so they won't set your house on fire. And that, my friends, the fire hazard of light bulbs, something most CFLs are blissfully exempt of, is not ever discussed, although I am certain tens of thousands of people die every year as a consequence of fires ignited by overheating light fittings and fixtures. If you think about it logically, allowing the manufacture of light fittings that can be scorched by an ordinary bulb is really not such a good idea, right?

So I am not converting my light fixtures to LED. I bought a few, basically to get an idea of how well they do, and how they work, but the only ones I really replaced are the awning lights, as having LED spotlights there means nobody need to get up there for at least a decade to replace the bulbs, this combined with the power savings. But for the rest of the house, it is CFLs, which are now available in many more different wattages, which generate very little heat, and, if bought in bulk(!), are cheap. Our wiring is designed to carry multiples of 60 to 150 watts continuously, so three 5 watt CFLs, or one 13 watt CFL, does not tax the wiring, fitting, or fixture at all, it is the safest of all solutions. Elimination or reduction of fire hazards is one of the truly nice aspects of our quest for energy efficiency.

Sunday, February 20, 2011 - New York is playing catchup - we all are

I've found a small motel in Mahwah, in the far northern reaches of New Jersey - just off 287, part of the Wyndham chain - an ideal base for trips into New York - not only Manhattan, some of my friends and colleagues are based in New Jersey itself, and in Westchester and Rockland counties, just north of NYC, and conveniently close to north Joisey. My GPS found an A&P supermarket close by, just the other side of Route 17, a couple of restaurants, one issue with New York trips has always been the expense. Tomorrow (I am not publishing this is real time) I am going to check out the ferry across the Hudson River, serviced by NY Waterway, the first thing I am needing to do is figure out which landing has a convenient and affordable parking.

You may have read about Verizon Wireless' iPhone being unable to surf the web and making telephone whoopee at the same time, and dismissed it, as it isn't a hugely important feature for most people, but it is important for me. I am writing this on an internet connected laptop, which uses my T-Mobile Blackberry to connect, but that Blackberry is able to do a whole bunch of stuff simultaneously with hosting my laptop. It can make and receive calls, using Bluetooth if I so desire, even though said Bluetooth is connected to the laptop, as well, and it can do email and text messages at the same time. This is all pretty much standard for the Blackberry, and mine, being a T-Mobile Blackberry, is capable of making calls over a WiFi connection, as well, so even if I am out of reach of the cellular system I can still use the phone. Not only that, that capability, called UMA, is encrypted, like all Blackberry communications, so I can put my laptop on the internet via the Blackberry and have a secure connection even though I am using an open and public WiFi system. It is hard to explain to the average cellphone users, and even harder to market, but I find it soooooooo cool... To the best of my knowledge, the reason why CDMA phones don't multi-task well is simply due to the way their voice and data paths interact - GSM was developed as a digital service, CDMA (AMPS) was not. It should slowly become moot, as backwards compatibility with the analog system, which is how all that started, is no longer required by the FCC.

Times Square now looks like an overdone cacophony of video screens, the state of the art appears to be that the sides of the screens are screens themselves, and some wrap around buildings. The poor big screen (once the only one) overlooking Times Square is now distinguished by Rupert Murdoch ownership, and by being one of the smaller screens - it is dwarfed by most of the others in the square. Somehow Times Square seems smaller to me than it used to "feel", can't quite figure out why, it certainly is the most "advertising" place I've ever seen, you couldn't squeeze another screen in if you wanted to. Whether there is a real purpose to these technology showcases remains to be seen - my guess is that the screens are updated or replaced every year, and they really have impressive quality, even in direct sunlight, but they do not yet translate into an ability to transform entire walls into information bearing devices that don't require a huge amount of power to operate. We're nowhere near that point, being able to alter reflectivity, as is done in some E-readers, so that daylight can provide its own image, rather than necessitating ever brighter pixels.

The first picture, top left, is one of a British Airways Concorde sitting alongside the now revamped aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Intrepid - sailing alongside on a New York Waterway ferry, I could not help but wonder what it was doing there, it would have been better located alongside Saarinen's Pan American terminal at JFK. But who am I.. Concorde always strikes a "corde" with me, as I was flown to New York City from Paris on one of Air France's promotional Concorde flights, way back when, being a card carryying member of the Very Important (Dutch) Press, at the time.. the flight came complete with a one week stay at the Waldorf Astoria, courtesy of Agfa Gevaert. On the way back, the thing did not have enough fuel reserve to go into a holding pattern, and had to divert to Orly Airport from Air France's primary Paris hub, Charles de Gaulle. So no, there is no chance I ever flew on the aircraft you're looking at, as it is a British Airways version. This may be one of the Concordes that kept setting off my burglar alarm in Kew, as I lived right underneath Concorde's flight path. It would, in its early days, come into Heathrow with the afterburners wide open, and the tail down.

I've recently tried to help several people effectively use Social Networks to market their wares and skills, and find that many folks simply don't want to listen. That is fine with me, but marketing via social networks needs a business plan, a good view of what you are trying to achieve, and oodles of time. If you're not on Facebook every day, if you don't brush up on your communications skills, it is not a tool you're going to be able to use. You're going to end up wasting time - the internet - even a blog - is a place you can only get anything out of if you invest a significant effort. It is unfortunate so many media articles talk about these young web entrepreneurs who strike it rich, without ever mentioning how many nights and weekends it took them to build their dream. And then, for each success story there are likely 1,000 failures.

I am not trying to discourage anybody - but if you work up some text on a webpage and you call that a blog, you're not quite ready for the big time. Admittedly, nobody really has a full definition of "blog", but I think we generally think of blogs as kind of web diaries, even I call my website a blog these days. I will admit we have to be cautious with the definition - Ariana Huffington, now owned by AOL, started her online presence as a blogger, but as it turns out was a published author and accomplished writer before she started that, and she has always, umm, beeen married to celebrities. It is not a prerequisite, but reading her bio I think she might have got there in any of a number of ways.. Just saying, it is, in my opinion, not the internet that does it for people - it is a dream they have, a conviction, a belief, a circumstance, and the way in which they approach what will become their career.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011 - The internet is a good way to lose customers

Intuit sent this update to its existing customers, scaring the bejesus out of those of us who use its online payment system, something I have been doing for decades. Imagine losing your ability to download credit card transactions and making electronic payments! All the package has, on the front and the back, is that your existing paid-for registered version of Quicken will stop working: "On April 27, 2011, Quicken online services will be discontinued." Only when you open up the package and examine its insides does it become apparent that Intuit is pulling online support for an older version, Quicken 2008. I personally think that's asinine, I am sure there are plenty of people who use the current version of Quicken who will be scared into buying the upgrade - even though they don't have to. Is Quicken in trouble? Or are they just more obnoxious in their marketing than ususal? They still use a registration method for online updates that forces you to provide your address and other personal information - you can turn that off, but it is hard to find out how.

On the subject of cheating, one cannot help but wonder why geriatric strongmen like Egypt's Mubarak (82) and Zimbabwe's Mugabe (86) cling to power, even though your average 80 year old is physically normally well beyond running a country, which is a tough seven-day-a-week job, if you want to do it well. As with Mugabe, there has to be a power structure around Hosni Mubarak that uses him and his "powers" as a front and protective shield, so they can run their control apparatus, and enrich themselves, while the "president" takes the heat. There are some indications that Ronald Reagan, who won his first term when he turned 70, suffered from some of the effects of old age, and possibly an onset of dementia or Alzheimer's, in his second term in office. Note (and this isn't a lighhearted comment) how both Mubarak and Mugabe dye their hair, Berlusconi too, probably, even though there is no need for them to do so, their ages are well known, but curiously, it isn't something that anybody ever talks about. If you think about it, someone of their age and stature no longer has any personal need to climb career ladders, and one must really wonder when in their lives their control goes to their cronies, essentially, likely, without their noticing it.

I am, in my core, a very private person - "so what's with the blog?" you'll ask... I started blogging in 1997, I was an early adopter - and by that time I was a developer in an R&D laboratory in New York, we took to this new interface to the internet like a duck to water. In 1997, of course, there weren't vast numbers of people on the internet, which had been around for quite some time - I actually got my first internet account while living in England, 1984 I think it was. I had to fly to the United States to find a portable computer that had telecommunications capability, the ones Radio Shack sold in Europe had no modems, since the telephone companies deemed those illegal, at the time. My first use of these tools was professional, anyway, I realized very quickly I could get stories filed with my publisher (VNU, now The Nielsen Company) much faster, we had gone to electronic page makeup for our glossy magazines a couple of years before, and the layouts were actually uploaded to the printer's via acoustic couplers, kindly invented by the Australians, which used them for their Flying Doctor Service over two way radio. 75 (seven bit) characters per second, if you were lucky, but they worked.

At any rate, I tend to put a limited amount of private information "out there". It isn't that I am unwilling to share it, I am just too aware of who all are reading over one's shoulder. Being one of the core developers and managers of the internet backbone facilities, I know all too well how much information is out there, and how easy it is, relatively speaking, to find it, if you have basic network skills. Reminds me a bit of my friend, who works for the State Department, who got awards signed by Colin Powell, that didn't say anything about what the award was for (including not mentioning the department or activity). Makes sense, except if you stick that on your wall everybody is going to ask. We know better than to do that.

All I am saying is that it is a weird world, especially if you're looking for a job and there is so much you can't put on your resume, or tell prospective employers about. I am going on about this because it can be a royal pain - I don't think I have posted an overseas trip report when it happened for over 20 years - I do write it, but it does not go on the blog until I am back at home base. And I'll never mention who I bank with, lest somebody figure out where my safety deposit box is... Paranoid? No, not especially, there is just no point in taking even small risks, because, if nothing else, if somebody walks off with your data files and you then have to tell your boss as well as the FBI, your career is well and truly done.

How seriously I take this was brought home to me when I was having lunch with one of my former Washington staffers, the other day, hadn't seen him for years, LinkedIn is great. He walked into the Washington suburban restaurant where we had agreed to meet, slapped me on the shoulder, I cracked a joke about his "Federal hair" (he now works for a government department), he sat down, smiled, and said "So you are human, after all!"....

Friday, February 11, 2011 - Will the last Pharaoh please turn off the oil lamp?

Thursday, February 10, 2011 - Is it Ella, or is it Memorex?

It can be finicky - your low energy light bulbs, CFLs, dont save you anything during the heating season, because the old style incandescent lightbulb is a very efficient heater, it is almost as if that is what you're using it for, and the light gets thrown in for free. They're a lot cheaper than CFLs, as well, so you can actually save yourself money in winter by taking your CFLs out, and putting regular cheapo lightbulbs in.

But I discovered when putting in a new kitchen faucet (see my December 31 blog entry, below) that its water throughput is probably a quarter of what the old faucet's capacity was, and that means, in a kitchen setting, that you save on your hot water bill, water bill (if you pay for municipal services), filter medium (like the calcite I use, which costs $175 a load) or your well pump electric bill. Add that to the savings I describe below, and you are on the way to make a good dent in your energy bill.

It is important not to waste money, though. Replacing faucets that are used once a day for ten minutes is only going to cost money. Light bulbs that are rarely used can comfortably be left "old style". Those fancy LED lamps are expensive to the point that security lighting, especially in inaccessible places, are among the few rational applications I can find for them - I have one 4 watt LED spot in my hallway, one that is on 24/7, and the spotlights under the second floor awning now have 11 watt LED bulbs, see the pic to the left. They supposedly can stay up there for a minimum of ten years, and crank all night for a pittance. Having those $60 fancy spots indoors, not so much, sorry, I am too cheap for that, I'll stick with the $9 CFL floodlights.... A low flow shower head is of little use if you have no womenfolk in the house - women bathe and shower much longer and with much hotter water than do men. Yes, you'll save, even if you are a man, but I don't know that a few pennies a month are going to do it. Convert all men in the United States to low flow heads, and the power companies will save millions - but not you, and nobody ever talks about how that generates a reduction in tax income.

Heating I am not going to tell you much about, as I heat using a woodstove, although I must emphasize that using a woodstove 24/7, using wood you harvest in the woods yourself, gives you very very good physical exercise. Cut a deal with a farmer - you harvest their wood, you get to keep half, and build their winter wood pile for them.

Another important factor, as I describe below to some extent, is that existing and older technologies are not all bad, and they should be considered wherever you want trouble free operations. So there is room for simple heat pumps, old style light bulbs, and cheap simple compressor refrigerators. Your primary refrigerator, the one that sits in the kitchen and opens and closes all the time, should be a new, high tech "green" unit, but the one in the garage you use to store soda in, and that you freeze food in after cooking, can easily be an older model that got demoted from the kitchen or your dorm room. I have one old little "beer fridge" that's been around the world three times with the U.S. Marines, and now sits in a corner refrigerating medication. It gets opened maybe once a month, if that, and can run from a battery pack during a power failure. 30¢ a month - and it is "recycled", the Marine gave it to me.

What it boils down to is one's capability to analyze, and work out what solutions work best under which circumstances. The probably reads like a cheap shot, but we have, especially in the United States, a propensity to favour the "advanced" solution over the "established" solution. We will buy a hybrid vehicle, thinking it saves us money and is good for the environment, when the old and well established diesel technology not only delivers similar economies. On top of that, it is vastly simpler in construction than a drivetrain with a gas engine, electric motors, charge citcuits and batteries, there is much less that can break or go wrong, and has a lot of mechanical advantages, like more pulling power (kinda relevant in a country where you can't even drive at 65 miles an hour most of the time, due to congestion). We invent, we then get somebody in government all excited, they then do a tax break type of thing, and everybody except for you will be laughing all the way to the bank. I repeat: not you. Read this article about the latest Volkswagen hybrid experimental vehicle, compare it to the original Honda Insight, and see what you think about "true" hybrids - two seaters that attempt to fully reduce their energy consumption, rather than compromise vehicles.

A recent article about United States Navy Captain, and NASA Shuttle Commander, Mark Kelly has it he has that ability to compartmentalize his thinking, enabling him to concentrate on the task at hand without being unduly distracted by things going wrong in his life, like his wife, U.S. Representative Giffords, having been shot in the head. I have, through the years, pretty much learned how to do this - not always successfully, but you simply do not survive my type of career unless you can deliver, regardless of what your personal circumstances might be. It does mean you have to ensure you deal with your personal circumstances at some point, something you have to schedule, and only experience can tell you when you need to schedule what for you to have a good chance to deal completely with what you must deal with. From that perspective, officer trained folks like Kelly are good to have on space shuttles, as they can - in my book - avoid the pitfalls of multi-tasking. In the computer industry, we have a word - and a technology - for this: multi-threading, rather than multi-tasking. It means you keep track of the status if everything that goes on, but only work on one task at a time, in a defined "compartment", you know when to stop that task and move on to the next open activity. It sounds like word play, but is not: a mother, dealing with life, work, and the children, will multi-task, a pilot will (hopefully) multi-thread (that is why there are two or three crew members on the flight deck of a large aircraft - together, they do multi-task)..

The world's favourite Ozzie, Wikileaks' Julian Assange, is a perfect example of somebody who does not (perhaps cannot) compartmentalize. What he does is arguably politically important, and as such he might be someone's next prime minister, ombudsman, what have you. But: he does not control his life, he has sex with random folks he does not know and can't negotiate with. When you compartmentalize, successfully, you compartmentalize everything, because unless you control every facet of your life you can control, you don't have a way to deal with the bitches life deals you. He is, effectively, now locked up, reliant on others, he no longer has control of his life. It is not Wikileaks that will bring him down, it is Julian Assange - he did not take himself seriously enough. As I wrote at the time, anybody who responds to a perceived danger by making threats, is no longer in control. If I go outside and wave my 9mm CZ-75 at someone trespassing on my property, just to scare them, guess what - I'll get shot, at some point or other. Guns - and other threats - are only effective when you use them, and then only if "they" can't "see it coming".

Monday, February 7, 2011 - Cheap Hot Water And Other Broken Dreams

Otherwise, welcome to jinx week. Everything that can go wrong, is going wrong - well, maybe that's overstating it a little bit, but a lot of stuff either broke or doesn't work. I ended up selling one of my cars to reduce my outgoings - not in itself earth shattering, you have to have one you can sell, and I am long past where that would have caused loss of face. There is an economic downturn in force, after all. But then..... my coffee maker broke (but I have a spare), the dryer part of my washer/dryer broke (but I have a spare) and my log splitter malfunctioned (but I have a spare). What's with the spares? When I need something I try to find it on sale, and then I buy two - one of the really bad things that can happen with something you need is that you buy it cheaply, but then when it breaks you have to go out and get the first you can find, and that gets expensive. Like this, I can grab the spare, start using that, and then buy another spare, when I can find one dirt cheap. So this might have been a bad bad week if it had not been for that bit of foresight, a kind of planning I actually only started doing in 2005.

So I am good, I suppose, now all I need to do is cajole the log splitter back into life, I can get lucky, maybe, this evening, and try to resurrect the backup drive, which currently consistently hangs up the cheapo Everex PC I am using with it.. even though I replaced the main backup drive with a NAS device, which won't do (NFS, for the cognoscenti, but under Windows Vista, harum) what I want it to do.

Let's see - I owe you the diet story I promised you, and I guess it is just about time to update the Airtap experience, the heat pump driven water heater contractor Dan and I installed on August 12 of last year. Almost 6 months ago. On the diet front, I started out at 188.5 lbs, and am now at 177 - in 37 days. Working out I did already, so this is just a change in feeding habits. I'll come back to that.

Why update the Airtap story (See my blog entries for Tuesday, October 19 - Saturday, September 18, 2010 - Spotsy, August 12, 2010)? It works, right? Well, yes, but what you do when you install an Airtap, which is replacing the simple two wire heating elements or gas or oil burner in your hot water tank with a relatively complicated heat pump assembly, which has a compressor, and a fan driven heat exchanger. This electro-mechanical unit, depending on the size of your household, will run anywhere from four to ten hours a day, and so I wanted to try and make sure that technology, design and build quality are up to the task. When we built a High Availability platform in the phone company, we needed to take care of all contingencies, including who will get the spare parts where, in in middle of a snowstorm at 2am on Christmas Day...

All I found in the adverse is that you need to level and re-level it very carefully, since it is heavy, settles, and you want the condensation to drain down the provided drain tube, not onto your floor. There are several other modifications and installation tricks that can make the Airtap both more efficient, faster in recovery and more controllable, but I really don't want to give away my research. If the Airgenerate folks would like to hear about them, they should feel free to contact me and negotiate a price for the significant amount of research and engineering I have done on their product. One thing I can tell them for free: selling a new product that is essentially the same as the Rheem and GE "hybrids" is not going to make them rich, even if they did have GE's resources. You can find my Airtap A7 review at Amazon here.

Heat pumps use a tried and tested technology, which is essentially unchanged since 1902, when the first Carrier unit went into operation. The Airtap people have (for this unit) not jumped through hoops, and included no bells and whistles that might make the unit more prone to failure. So, the thing doesn't interface with the heating elements or the thermostat, there is no computer and other sophisticated switchover equipment, as others, notably GE, have done their implementation - you stick it on the tank, plug it into the regular (not 240) mains, set the thermostat, and four hours later you have a tank full of piping hot water for about 4¢. Done. Heaven. Good show.

But let's go back to what the big companies want you to buy - like the RHEEM 50G Heat Pump Water Heater. These aren't similar to the Airtap I bought - the Rheem (and others like it) is a conventional hot water tank, with heating elements, with a heat pump and a computer to manage changeover between the two added. In other words, Rheem and GE have solved the heat pump "problem" of slow recovery by incorporating the old wasteful technology we're supposed to get away from into their product.

While you can likely program the units to only use their heat pump (but, according to "This Old House", the GE can be remotely controlled by your power company!!), there are other ways of dealing with this "deficiency" - if the purpose of this exercise is to save money, or protect the environment, or do both, perhaps a little compromise is in order - apart from anything else, at a price between $1,900 and $2,500, installed, this is a very expensive way to save money - I spent $900.. and because it incorporates conventional technology, the GE tank is not, cannot be, mathematically, "The most energy efficient 50-gallon electricwater heater you can buy", as their website states.

The Airtap mounted on a 40 gallon tank gives me plenty of hot water for my morning shower, but then needs a two hour recovery for another full shower. That's an issue for a family, of course, but the solution to this isn't what Rheem and GE want it to be - have a computer kick in some 9 kilowatts of backup heating elements. Savings? What savings? That makes no sense. The correct solution is to get a larger tank. We are simply so used to buying 40 or 50 gallon hot water tanks we generally do not realize the only reason those are "good" is that they come with this massive 240 volt heating assembly. Of course the water is always hot!

How do I figure all this? Simple: the Airtap's heat pump makes noise, and I installed it where the hot water tank was before, under the stairs. So I know now when it kicks in, and how long it runs. This is enlightening - most folks don't or can't hear their tank, and so don't get that "direct connect". There isn't a little light to tell you when you're pushing greenbacks into the electric company's maw, either. And normally the consumer doesn't get the hot water broken out on the gas or electricity bill, so you really don't get exposed to the cost. Well, I can tell you, it is a lot, electric elements or propane gas are very expensive ways of heating your water, but if you want to remedy that with a heat pump you've got to get a larger tank. My calculation, then, is simple: one person, 40 gallons, a couple, 80 gallons, a couple with kids 120 or 150 gallons. Do that, and you will save yourself a lot of money, over the years, see my October 19 blog entry, the savings, just for me by myself, are some $373 a year. If you replace your older washer/dryer and dishwasher, both of which use a lot of hot water, with new high efficiency models, you'll save even more. Replace your washer/dryer with a washer/dryer combo with condensing dryer, yet more savings, you're no longer blowing hot air into the county.

Thursday, February 3, 2011 - Job hunts aren't what they used to be

I am not complaining - we've never had it so good, never had so much access to so many employers, jobs and companies. Phew. But after you've done this for a few weeks, let alone a few months, you have absolutely no idea whose job you've applied for when (yes, I do maintain a database, of course, I can look things up). I know I have seen a number of very interesting (professionally interesting) positions with, for instance, Ebay and Paypal (both part of the same company) - what will the HR people think if I apply for all of them? And that is the other problem - there is no feedback - in most cases, you don't even get a reject notice, and if you do, it is boilerplate. I understand that very well, having been an employer for many years, but it is still a bit soul destroying. I guess that's where the hardy drift to the top - after all, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling had her manuscript rejected by some 15 publishers in a two year period before she hit what, I suppose, is in her case best described as "the jackpot".

Having said that, we are bombarded, in the media, by the most spectacular miracle tales. This person survived bunches of cancer and then got a new voice box. That person won the lottery twice in two years. Another person won millions of dollars playing a penny machine. Lots of cancer patients are "in remission". And it goes on. What the tall tales don't give us is all those folks that lead normal lives, work hard, don't hit jackpots, have cancer treatment and continue with their lives, have cancer treatment but then cannot afford the medication they should be on, in short, normal, everyday life. Don't get me wrong, I am delighted some folks have all the luck, but for most, that isn't how life works - nor does it need to. I cringe when I channel surf by one of those lifestyle gurus on midnight television, because the way these folks wear the $1,000 suits is because you watch their show and then order their $29.95 book. Which, generally, is full of information you can get on the internet for free (or, technically, information you already paid for). Reading a book, in 99.99% of all cases, is not going to propel you to a full life with millions of dollars in the bank and three doting handsome boyfriends. Not. Honest.

But back to my job hunt, for a moment - after so many years not having to look for jobs, the changes in the way this works are significant. Most interesting is Skype, and the need to make sure you are presentable whenever someone might want to do a face-to-face interview. I am an old schooler, and over the years when I was a freelance journalist, you work from home a lot, you develop a habit to not worry about shaving for a few days, not look at your haircut, at least when you don't have a meeting or interview planned, and don't have to go into the office. Now, no frayed Tees! For my generation, it is all new and different, every other day. Which is a good thing.

Video conferencing is hardly new, of course, but the fact that you can use Skype even from cellphones and wireless connections is relatively new, at least from the perspective that wireless broadband is just about everywhere, these days. I Skyped with my friend in South Africa on her smartphone, the other day, Skyped with relatives in Europe while having lunch in a restaurant, using my Blackberry data service over Bluetooth, put a Dell laptop with Skype and a wireless dongle into my cousin's house in a village in Indonesia, there is virtually no end to this. And as a consequence, every day becomes a workday, and you're grooming just in case somebody wants to talk to you or interview you. I am not complaining, it is just curious how extensively the world has changed, because of the avalanche of new technology. I don't know if you remember the first picturephones, sometime in the 1960s... it took a while, but they are finally here, and not tied to particular equipment any more. 's Kool, eh?.

Saturday, January 29, 2011 - Even the iPhones don't work in Egypt

So I'll take a second run around midnight, then do that again in the morning, when (hopefully) the plows will appear. They do the through roads first, some overnight, and mine isn't one...

While I am certainly right behind President Obama in that we must "get competitive", my questions remain: How? What with? I am not seeing any of the amazing stuff we used to invent wholesale, in a garage somewhere, I see cars being advertised with how many phrases they can recognize, there are cellphones you apparently can only get when you're on Medicare, the Scooter Store is spending more money on advertising than it can possibly make selling invalid vehicles through insurance companies, and it goes on. We no longer even have a space vehicle to deliver stuff to the ISS with - the very minimum one would have expected would have at least been a sort of backup vehicle for the Shuttle, we do have the people that could have made that happen - even a second generation Shuttle, with, umm, skin that functions as a heat shield, maybe slingshot launching, stuff. Did we not use to build and try things? What happened with that?

I did find a use for the iPhone. I have a friend, overseas, who I have not been able to really entice onto the internet in a meaningful way - like using Skype and Facebook and the like. Guess what - she's got herself an iPhone 4 with 3G, and I have spent some time Skyping with her this afternoon. Miracles, miracles, I never thought I'd see the day. Worked quite well, too, complete with video. Of course, this is way overseas, I don't think you can Skype with your AT&T iPhone, can you? (scratch that, they changed that yesterday or sumtin').

Something I've been meaning to rail about is that everybody has the same news, these days. Whether you check the Reuters pages, CNN's cable feed, the NRC Handelsblad, or Kompas, they all have the same stuff going on. It is just a matter of who gets it first, and the others pick up whatever they have two seconds later. The internet has completely obliterated the old concept of "news", to the point that a scoop may last all of 30 seconds. Worse, in many cases the first report may have a couple of pieces of news, and three "conjectures", and the others then manufacture more conjectures, just so they're not copying the first report verbatim. Just now, CNN reported gunshots in Cairo, while we and the anchor could clearly see some young men banging pipes or poles on metal trash cans. This is not reporting, people. I understand the need for competition, but if all you can show is the view from your office window in Cairo, for hours on end, with a 10 second shot of armoured cars driving by endlessly repeated - "there are tanks in the streets" - your journalism is going to the dogs.

So what else is there? Egypt? What bugs me is what or who will replace Mubarak. Egypt is an important country in the Middle East. Nobody will "miss Tunisia", so to speak, but Egypt is a different matter. Not a lot of refugee Egyptians on my watch, so while it is maybe not the nicest country, the population isn't running away in hordes, either. So I don't know. Who will run the place, that has support from the entire population? Anybody? Didn't think so. And shutting down the entire Egyptian internet... waddamistakatomaka.

Monday, January 24, 2011 - Marketing jargon is not the same as commercial success

As I have mentioned before, over time the distinction between different "types" of phones, different "types" of computers, will to some extent disappear. Much of the marketing is done towards the "haves", the folks that can afford to buy multiple computers and multiple phones - smartphones, of course, aren't phones at all, they are handheld computers, something that should be painfully clear to their owners, computers crash fairly frequently, simple brand name cellphones - pardon, feature phones - do not. The same thing applies to computers - there is completely no purpose to buying an iPhone, iPad and one of the Mac portables if you're going to go out there and work in one of those really populous countries on projects that involve the population, menial workers, teaching, interworking with others, because in India and in China and in Indonesia these folks, 99% of them, don't use smart anything or expensive anything. And a $400 Acer laptop can absolutely do everything a $939.99 Macbook can. The difference between the two is the huge profit margin Apple maintains - a good company to own stock in, not a good company to buy equipment from, with its customized version of X-Windows nobody else uses (which is the point of their particular exercise - stop you from ever switching platforms again). Similarly, if your phone requires a named subscription to their online system to even function, their first purpose is not to make you happy, it is smiling stockholders (including their employees). Americans have always excelled at corporate marketing, you used to have to go to IBM to see that in action, now you can take your class at Apple.

All I am saying is that for somebody to need a certain functionality, then be required to use, say, a Blackberry on Verizon Wireless with an application only made by Lotus, makes no sense. Yes, it is OK for a custom application for an organization, as that would have the clout to negotiate on price, but inflicting that on the general public... In the end, you make a lot more money by making your magic available to everybody, than to a selected few. Those come, and go, they can afford to dump you if something else does your magic better. Feature phone users, however, may stay with your brand for years and years and years, for as lnog as everything on that phone works the way they are accustomed to, and for as long as they can get another one of your phones, perhaps a little updated but not too different, from their carrier, preferably for free.

It is blisteringly cold again this morning, 8 degrees Fahrenheit, -13 Celsius. My revamped heating system (see my January 13 blog entry, below) keeps it nice and warm, which is pleasing, I just hope my woodpile lasts another two months, which is how long it took last year for winter to be over - I have another oak tree down, but not cut up yet, so a disaster it won't be. Having been used to snowy New York winters, I really had not expected Virginia winters to be as cold as they are, less snow, more arctic air. I will not mind if I am living in the tropics by this time next year, I swear...

One thing I am doing differently is clearing the ashes from my woodstove. In years past, I would let it crank for three or four days, then leave the fire to die, and clear out the bottom of the stove (which needs a one inch layer of hot ashes and charcoal on the bottom firebrick to function really well). Now, I have discovered that running it 24/7 is more easily achieved (with less assistance needed from the heat pumps when the stove is turned down) when I stop feeding the stove around 10pm each day, throttle the air supply, and clear out the day's ashes first thing in the morning (when plenty of hot charcoal remains in the stove to rekindle the fire). After that, the stove will be back at operating temperature (400° Fahrenheit, a little over 200° Celsius, measured on the outside of the stove heat exchanger) in an hour or so after I clean the ashes out, and I don't lose the heat built up in the charcoal and the firebrick and the chimney surround.

Why do I try all this stuff out, rather than ask someone? I am a researcher, I like figuring out why things were designed the way they are. You would not believe the things workmen, contractors, builders and other "menial folk" figure out that nobody ever documents or commercializes. So I work on understanding all of this, same as I do with 3.5G, Blackberrys, laptops and contact lenses, in the hope that at some point I'll come across something "why didn't I think of that" I can put out there as a commercial service or product, and make a bundle on. Hasn't happened so far, I'll let you know, promise..

And for all those folks setting their house on fire with their woodburning fireplace or stove every year, 10,000 or so every single winter, when they dispose of hot ashes too close to their home - American homes are built in woodframe, for the most part, and plastic siding doesn't stop fire much, either - I use a large galvanized trash can to store my ashes, and that sits, about 20 feet clear of the structure and the deck, on a slab of concrete, by itself. A tight fitting lid on the trash can ensures any remaining fire in the ashes dies for lack of oxygen (charcoal can continue to combust for up to four days!). Eventually, the cold ashes end up in my woods, out back, they are great fertilizer, it is all part of the big recycle.

Awright, back to the grindstone. Anybody wants to offer me a job in the sun, say Miami? That would be funny, kind of full circle, that is (well, South Dade) where I lived when I first moved to the United States...

Friday, January 21, 2011 - What's with all the Brits?

Nice series, on the Discovery Science Channel, with Stephen Hawking explaining the universe - he will apparently be discussing why the universe is, as well... For me, this is less of an issue - the universe is, that'll do it for me. Beyond that, somebody ought to take the ISS design, and commission another one, and take that out to the stars. It is an ideal spacecraft, needs to accommodate families so they can keep going forever, but in general the basic concept is there. Enough spares and repair capacity and hydroponics bays and Bob's your uncle.

Stephen Hawking, of course, brings me to the British television onslaught - Hugh Laurie, a.k.a. House, M.D., whose need for an American accent I still do not understand. I was operated on last May in Arlington by a Brit, John Sandiford, M.D., hands down the best surgeon whose knife I've ever been under, and you will know from the television news there are thousands and thousands of British scientists and doctors in the USA, every other scientific interviewee seems to be English (the odd Ozzie and South African does sneak in, but that may be because American producers can't figure out the British accents), the camera just loves the accent.

But then there is Craig Ferguson, to the best of my knowledge the first Brit (well, Scot, he'll argue) to achieve a national late night show permanent position, and now Piers Morgan, claiming Larry King's slot... I'll skirt Simon Cowell for the purpose of this blog entry - I don't know that he knows what nationality he really is, perhaps he'll start his own country soon..

Ricky Gervais, of course, is the British queen of boorish humour, does not take prisoners, a trait he shares with Piers Morgan. The Globes would be enormously stoopid if they did not invite Gervais back for next year, because the entire United States including the ISS will be glued to the box. He has a new series on the Science Channel (...go figure...) that promises to be superbly boorish.

If you are puzzled why a Dutchman pays so much attention to matters Brit, I lived and worked in the UK from 1979 until I moved to the United States, and growing up in The Hague, had a somewhat Anglophile upbringing anyway. My Dad worked for the holding company for Shell Oil, one of those Anglo-Dutch conglomerates, so I read Shell annual reports before I could even walk, and it went from there. England, where I moved because of Kubrick's 2001, The Beatles and a Russian girl in Pimlico, was a great country, and if it had not been for Maggie Thatcher and the brain drain I'd probably still live in Blighty. She did a good job on the Falklands, though. Being Dutch, it became apparent to me that if I wanted to get out there and do anything of significance, I'd have to learn fluent English, and that began in London, tending bar in a pub by the name of The King's Head in Earls Court. There was a kind of English spoken there I had no knowledge of at all, and had a hard time understanding, in the beginning (these being the days before 150+ television channels and internet). I definitely learned some of my English from the BEA drivers that came in for a light 'n bitter before taking their buses out to Heathrow Airport from the Cromwell Road Air Terminal. And from Bruce, the Rhodesian owner of the King's Head. Even learned pounds, shillings and pence, and then England went decimal.

Monday, January 17, 2011 - Review, review, review

I don't know what you do when communications with someone break down, but I tend to take a look at their behaviour and my (mostly instinctive) responses, just to make sure I am not over-reacting, or taking things more heavily than I should. In one case, I got yelled at when I answered someone's questions line-by-line - it is what I always do, but this person is not the world's best communicator, and I was never sure what exactly they wanted me to do in response to their exquisitely brief emails. And then there is the other person, who couldn't keep 98% of all their appointments in a seven month timespan, and then when I sent (since he had not turned up when expected) him a note he owed me money got somewhat incensed, hung up on me, never called again, although he did send a cheque. It wasn't a rude note or anything, I don't do that, but it did express I could not give it to him when he did not stop by. Five times in a row, actually, over a two week period. And when you hang up on me, it is your turn to call, after that.

In the past, I have often thought I am too easygoing, for a long time, I tend to let people do their thing, and then eventually come down on them when things do not improve, after talking to them about the issues. That seems to confuse some folks, who expect I will pounce at the very first transgression. I don't know, that's just not my thing. One time it did backfire on me, though, when I extended a person who I felt had been treated unfairly, certainly not in accordance with the rules, and he thought I extended him to punish him. I had not seen that one coming, it was weird. Punishing is something I do not do, I think it would be rather immature.

It being January, I thought I would update you on the hardware and equipment I added or replaced last year, just to tell you what works, and how well (I tend to not waste time on things that don't work). Let's see - I actually don't even have all of 2010 in the current website, some of it got archived already. The archives are here

The Philips 47PFL7403D/27 47-inch 1080p 120Hz LCD HDTV (1-1-2010) got replaced with a plasma flat panel, much better image than the LCD, but the Philips now works very well as a secondary HDMI monitor on my laptop, both for regular work and for presentations. I only paid $800 for it, so that's not a bad price for a huuuuuge monitor I can use for other purposes, like TV, as well.

Then the BlackBerry 9700 Bold, which has been giving me, in the T-Mobile version, great joy since February, especially since it has UMA, so despite there being little cellular service where I live, I have perfect WiFi calling connectivity from home - as well as from hotel rooms in Beijing and Jakarta, all without roaming charges. Read about UMA at the T-Mobile website (in parts of Europe, it is offered by Orange).

In May, there was the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software, which is an amazing package - not only does it do a reasonable job of recognizing my speech (something I worked on with eminent MIT folk many years ago for operator services), it does so with some background noise going on, like a TV set. That is truly useful, I look forward to taking it into an office, one day, to see how it performs there.

Gosh - have to run, things to do, wheels on Camaros to change, chains to sharpen, more in my next musing. Promise. I'd rather do half an update than none at all. Pretty amazing, I've been writing this since '97. Shows stamina, dunnit?

Thursday, January 13, 2011 - Things That Come Together

Between te work done by myself, and by builder Dan, I've finally managed to fix all remaining plumbing problems, both on the supply side and on the sewage side, and save for one small crack all leaks have been fixed, any copper pipes affected by the high PH of my well water replaced, and the water itself is now perfectly filtered and conditioned, without losing too much of the flowthrough capacity - you do want to be able to take comfortably "wet" showers. There is plenty of piping hot water, too, although due to the energy saving heat pump water heater it takes two hours after a full shower before the hot water is 90% replenished. But the savings is significant, and that's good for the wallet, and for the environment, if not for the power company. The picture to the right shows how Lowe's saved the day - they actually have a doohicky that let me remove the shaft of a plug I broke on my PH treatment tank - and the replacement plug. Phew!

These are, of course, not hugely important things at a time when my friends in Australia are possibly under water, Rep. Giffords has been shot in the head by some deranged person, and Verizon is finally getting an old model iPhone, but it is all I can do to hang on to "normal life". Especially watching what went on in Tucson is harrowing - and no, it has nothing to do with gun laws. These assassinations seem to happen all over, including in countries where people can't go to the store and buy a gun, and in countries that have universal health care, where folks should be able to take their kids to the shrink. So, one wonders, do they? Or is this another instance of "it'll sort itself out"? Why is it so hard to identify people that are going off the rails, and why is it so hard to then do something about them? We test for infectious diseases, but not for mental diseases? I am assuming you will agree with me this man is a loonie - I know not everybody, and maybe not the courts, either, will second that, though - and here again, I am sure he knew right from wrong. But since that knowledge does not stop everybody from doing wrong, is that a valid, or even useful, assessment? I dunno.

Well, back to the soul-destroying job hunt. I say "soul destroying", because the way in which we now handle this, fully online, is certainly efficient and a good way to guarantee equal opportunity treatment, but it does leave the applicant working in a vacuum. No feedback, rarely anybody to talk to, I personally think we could come up with a better way to help people look for employment. And I am not at all sure that everybody has the level of computer- and webskill they need - the search engines are horrendous, especially as they use whatever programmer's jargon was approved by a company or agency, something I doubt ever gets checked with the great unwashed. And it is the great unwashed you need to reach, people who don't get to an understanding of the system simply drop off the radar, they have nowhere to go any more. All it takes is a typo for an application to get rejected or end up in the wrong bucket, and nobody will ever know. It is to some extent the same as I see with these surveys - since you don't get any kind of feedback from people who do not complete surveys, the results are completely meaningless. Apart from which, many of these surveys sit in front of what they are supposed to be surveying, you just can't collect data this way, you really can't.

What else - ah yes, diet. I discovered something this fall while on a mandatory medical diet I wanted to share with you all. But that's for my next blog entry. Keep on comin' back.....

Sunday, January 9, 2011 - Smart = Invisible

Lenovo introduced two netbooks with touchscreens last year, and if they had sold one with a fast processor and an English language Windows in Beijing I would have been able to tell you about it, but they did not, and I hear no more about them, there or here. Yet a convertible "net/Pad" would seem to be more useful than either device on its own. Perhaps RIM will give us such a device - they, after all, always design devices and then do a version with a sort of conventional keyboard. I guess all I am saying is that the "pads" are likely ancillary devices, which do some stuff well, but they are neither computers nor phones, fowl nor fish, so not a mainstream device. You can be less forgiving, too, and say that the introduction of the iPad means there are things the iPhone can't do, and expand that to say that smartphones have insufficient processing power and screen real estate to go beyond "certain" functionalities. Yada yada yada. If we now have people out there with a smartphone, laptop, iPad as well as a Kindle you've got major data management issues..

Says the New York Times "Obama Promises Full Recovery for Employment" - but then goes on to say "...suggests that Mr. Obama is likely to face relatively high unemployment rates for the rest of his term". Well, yes. But that can mean the recovery from the recession will be slow, or it can mean the New World Order means the lower employment rates are structural, as they have been in Europe for many years. And the Times doesn't address that question - I personally, with the Financial Times and a host of others, think the latter. Employment and earnings do not go hand in hand, especially not in "the world today". They don't have to, but you do have to have a mechanism to spread the wealth - something most Republicans apparently do not believe in. Seriously - the Telegraph writes that the job rate is "disappointing investors who in recent weeks have seen signs that the recovery is strengthening" - I would hope this is where our expensive Treasury experts step in and go "that's not how you measure recovery". This is not China, people.

In somewhat the same vein, the Wall Street Journal declares the PC and the laptop all but dead - read here. Well, maybe. I think this all revolves around the Computer- Human Interface, and I think the computer is still very limited in taking input. Whatever the device is, there still is nothing you can control by voice - that is, a device that can distinguish what you want from the ambient noise and other people. It does not matter whether it is a touch screen, speech recognition, motion or facial recognition, there is no interface that is smart enough to figure out what you wwant or intend without your interacting with it. You cannot take a smartphone out of your holster and look at it and it knows that you would like to read emails from Heather, and then pop an attached spreadsheet automagically onto a larger nearby screen so you can read it. And exactly that is what is needed for a phone to be truly smart and useful. And that is a long way off. Quite a long way off. We go right back to artificial intelligence, and why it failed. It is not that we lack the computing power or programming logic, there are simply at this point no real ways for a human brain to interact with a computer in any "smart" manner. My apologies to the WSJ, but by the time we have all this sorted out we will no longer speak of a "smartphone", "netbook", "laptop", "tablet" or "PC". Perhaps we need a contest to figure out what we'll call the device that combines all these functions - which may not be one device, but a pluggable / unwireable communications standard that will let you talk to Mom, and look at her pictures, using your fridge, if that is where you happen to be.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - Smart How?

Read the interview published in the Financial Times with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, and you'll come across the following gem: “We want to go on growing globally and make Twitter widely available on SMS,” Stone says, “There are 5bn phones in the world that can handle SMS, many of them in places that do not have the internet.”. It is, to me, a very significant comment when everybody and their great-grandfather is attempting to find growth markets, and in so doing rolls out product after smart product that aims predominantly at what is effectively a niche market. Nokia's folks said it too, a while ago: the majority of the potential users of cellphones neither need nor can afford a smartphone. But they do need some of the functionality we associate with the fancy interfaces our phones and "pads" have. It reminds me of the early Windows computers, which replaced the text terminal, only to provide windows with text in them. I worked on an early brokerage workstation in Manhattan, which replaced four terminals, connected to the markets in New York, London, Tokyo and Chicago, with a single PC running Windows 286, which showed four windows, connected to the markets in New York, London, Tokyo and Chicago. Duh. Technologically certainly an advance, but not really altering any of the information or data conduits.

Most importantly, my phone is primarily a communications device - voice, text and I receive all of my email on it, pre-sort them, and reply to what is truly urgent. Ah, Twitter and Twitpic, I suppose, are the exceptions, as a former photographer I find those very creative, although I have not found a way to incorporate Twitter in my blog (likely my own fault for abandoning Wordpress after a bad hack). And I am certainly not following any commercial Twitter accounts, from the Redskins to T-Mobile, I am not seeing how their Tweets are time sensitive, what exactly I would gain by getting a thousand Tweets a day. Niece Flore retweeting every freaking Amber Alert in The Netherlands, where I don't live, is bad enough. Some family, yes, but here goes what I describe below: most people open a Twitter account and then do not have the perseverance to keep it going for a few months, to see how it works and what it adds to their lives. "instant gratification" does not denote a generation, after all, it describes more or less "most everybody"..

The most important issue is, I think, that if an app runs on the iPhone and the iPad, but not on a Blackberry, a Symbian and an Android phone, as well as Windows 7, it is useless to me. So the brokerage application I occasionally use, and the Amazon Kindle application I recommend, because their makers try to ensure they can get their product to you regardless of the platform you use. Then there is Twitter, which will run on most platforms, and Skype..

There is, at any rate, a huge problem arising between the old and the new media - you can see this on television every day. Fox just showed new iPhone apps, including one that lets you order a cab in Washington, D.C., while CNN reviews "trending" Tweets every day. Neither of this constitutes "news" in my book - whatever happens on Twitter is completely irrelevant for those who don't use it, and even for many that do, like myself, I have better things to do than stare at my screen five times a minute to see what is "trending". If it is "trending" in the cafeteria at Fort Drum, is it news? Same for the cab application - iPhone users probably already know, and there are apps for every smartphone to do just about anything, it is not news. More importantly, these types of reports don't provide the impetus to the viewing population to adopt newer technologies, to use new media technologies to do what they couldn't do before, which doesn't include hailing a cab, if you never do that, or paying the cab using the app with your credit card, which you don't have. We're not "empowering", people, we're dumbing down. Once more, with feeling: We are -again- preaching to the converted. Think beyond your box, and help others to. We must understand that the news media aren't a sales conduit for Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Blackberry, they are - well, news organs. They must provide those who don't necessarily use all this fancy stuff with information too - the folks who do use Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Blackberry are increasingly abandoning traditional media, and a Twitter "reporter" reading Twitters on CNN is not going to make CNN more relevant, nor is Rupert Murdoch's insistence on our paying News Corp. for things we can get elsewhere for free. The Wall Street Journal is an exception, not a model - Facebook is the model, and we must now work on opening up that "closed shop". We have been there before - remember AOL, when everybody published their "AOL keyword" before their internet address, domain name and URL became ubquitous, and killed the closed shop that was AOL? Something similar happened to Minitel/Viditel/Videotext in Europe, where that even relied on special terminals, brilliant in its day, but quickly outmoded when the internet came to the PC.

Saturday, January 1, 2011 - It was a family year

Perhaps my view is U.S.-centric more than is reasonable, but 2010 was not a great year, as years go. Hopefully, now that the euphoria is long gone, Obama has the tools in place to propel the economy forward while keeping the right wingers with lots of "no's" and few "eureka's" in some sort of check. Because we need something to do, and something to sell, and it seems to me we are not working on getting that together, on getting our innovative streak back in swing. The iPad is a nice toy, but it isn't something that can sustain an economy, nor can a "privately enhanced $2 bill". I must plead guilty to being affected - I, the great innovator, am not seeing what we have, today, that is home grown and can be expanded into a new kinda of universe. I'll let you know if I think of something, but I have to be honest and tell you that for as long as we are concentrating on cars that take voice commands, and can't even get high speed rail together ten years after everybody else has, my view is dim. I am very tired of the "let's take back the country" rhetoric - sometime in January, I am going to have to go out and do my "where's the beef?" thing. I swear.

Nevertheless, people, let's keep at it, because it only happens when you keep pushing, keep trying, and keep believing in yourself. Have a good, nay, better 2011!

The highlight of 2010, for me, was the gratifying experience to be able to reconnect with cousin Teddy, see the pic to the right, Teddy, who I had not seen and completely lost sight of for over 40 years. Thanks to his son T, who got in touch with my sister. Teddy had a stroke in the summer, in Indonesia, his country of birth in Dutch colonial times, where he had moved from The Netherlands after his wife died, in 2005. He survived, and I was able to route myself into Indonesia from a China trip, and visit him in June. Soon after, he was discharged home, and we spent some quality time together, and I brought a laptop from Beijing that I put on 3G with the invaluable help from friends and former XL colleagues J. and N., who had the cellular stuff all ready by the time I got to Jakarta. Teddy was able to connect and Skype with his friends and relatives in Europe from that day on, I last spoke to him on November 10, and then on November 13 his home aide found him passed out in the bathroom. He died soon after, at 85. A navy pilot who fought the Japanese in the Pacific and then took part in the Normandy invasion, he was the proud bearer of the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Légion d'Honneur.

The moral of my story? Reconnect, if you can, I said this after 9/11, you never know....

Friday, December 31, 2010 - U2, or YouTube?

We active participants probably forget that most of those we don't "see" actually do not participate - something that can have a lot of unintended consequences, from simple disappointment to an increase in loneliness, a bit like sitting in a room full of people with nobody talking to you. What amazed me most is that folks are setting up businesses based on these technologies without the slightest idea of what it takes and what they do. Writing advertising texts and putting them on a website and then calling the result a blog may work with one or two clients, but my guess is that you would soon run out of people who don't know the difference between a blog and advertising copy. What I found most interesting is that the person pulled out a laptop, then to proceed to show me a presentation, without ever going online to show me the product. It was a bit like somebody showing me a video of a car being driven, and expecting me to buy the vehicle.

First and foremost: if you aren't an active blogger and Facebooker, don't even think about making that your business. For one thing, you have no idea how labour intensive this stuff is. If you've never made the calculation how many hours a week you spend on this stuff "just to keep up", and been surprised, you do not know what it is.

On a different note: builder Dan (see December 25, below) has finished the other repairs and maintenance that were due around the house and so I can now start cleaning all over again. I don't mean he made a mess - rather, I made a mess by ripping the sink area and one of the toilets apart so it would be easier for him to do the repairs, I like putting things back the way I want them. I am especially happy with the spiffy new white pull-out kitchen faucet - apparently, white does not go with stainless steel, but I quite like it, judge for yourself. I bought it because the old one was leaking and corroded, and because it was on sale, I know I am a cheapskate... With that, all the drips and leaks have been fixed - I can't believe how many corners the original builder cut, not helped by the previous owner, who did not do a lot of maintenance, and even bypassed the acid control tank in the well water system, something I did not discover until a year after I bought the place. With the exception of the well pump itself, I have now replaced just about all components of the water system, adding filters and other parts as necessary, replacing a lot of the plumbing in the crawlspace myself, and learning a lot about water treatment plants in the process. Love that, learning...

Tuesday, December 28, 2010 - After the Storm

There is not otherwise a huge amount of news. I am to a large extent still working on the house, even without the repairs Dan just did (see December 25, below) and he'll be back on Tuesday to help me do some of the stuff we had planned, that was pre-empted by the drain leak. Thankfully, though the joists and floor paneling were soaked, the leak did not last long enough for rot to set in, and with new insulation, fibreboard, and drying out the crawlspace using a heat pump I think I am pretty much OK. I do need to split some more wood, but looking at the radar map (I am at the white cross on the map) the snow has left us on its way to New York and I'll be able to go cut wood outside in the afternoon.

There is of course not a lot going on on the jobs front, although I was really pleased to get an email from ex E., whose company may need my skillset. But for the rest everybody is enjoying their Xmas holidays, and especially the folks in Europe really don't get back to work and things until the New Year. It is not an issue, but I am just very eager to get something on the road. For one, should I find a project or position outside of the Washington area I will need to make my house ready to close up, or even rent, that is part of the reason I am having Dan over. This, after all, is the worst time to sell a house, so I am much better off maintaining this residence - I need a U.S. residence for legal reasons, anyway.

One reason I so much liked watching Law & Order is that it plays out in New York City, once my stomping ground, and the producers took great care to make it a "local" show - shot in New York City and surrounding areas, there is much to see that I recognize from living and working for so many years in Manhattan and Westchester County. Law & Order UK should have the same effect on me, but it does not - I found it boring, and watching an episode today I note they don't use the magnificent backdrop that is London. Just now - a shot of a brief conversation with the Kensington High Street in the background - out of focus. It is a shame, imagine how many people, like me, have lived or worked in London, and would love the couleur locale... Shame. The opening scene of the episode I just saw did remind me of the German crime series Tatort, broadcast in the U.S. occasionally by PBS as "Scene of the Crime", but even there, the local environment (Cologne, in my case, but Tatort, too, has local versions all over Germany) features prominently.

Saturday, December 25, 2010 - Happy Holidays

My best wishes to all for the festive season and beyond, I hope you are able to spend some time with friends and family this Christmas season, with enough time off to recharge your batteries and have a prodigious 2011. Take care of the friendships and loved ones around you, often charity begins at home, although Lord Knows there are plenty of folks out there that can do with a bit of help, or a leg up, or some gentle lovin'.

My Christmas cheer, to a large extent, came from builder Dan McGuire - the one in the picture on the left - who came out on a freezing Christmas Eve and spent his entire day fixing a leak I had discovered at the back of my kitchen. The original builder had not done a very good job of installing the joint drain from the dishwasher and the kitchen sinks, and with the installation of a new water heater and a dishwasher, resulting in more and probably hotter waste water, the old drain line ruptured, and I discovered a flood at the back of the house, coming from underneath the siding, right by the heat pumps. Dan figured out what it was, though it was impossible to get at, fixed it, and managed to do that in time for me to get out to friend D's family Christmas party. Good show. There is much more for me to be thankful for, this year, and I will, unusually, private person that I am, write some of it up in my next posting.

Watching all this Christmas advertising going on, I can't help but wonder why anybody would add a Lexus to their shopping. Isn't Christmas, with its expenses, gifts, travel and other stuff expensive enough without having to go out to get a Honda whatchamacallit in an oversize box with ditto ribbon?

Here is a good example of a "hype" report: China is reported to be ready to buy portions of Portugal's national debt. Yah. There is nothing official to substantiate it - it hasn't happened yet, and the Chinese and Portuguese are not commenting - so if this report influences the value of the Euro it is pure gambling. I am not at all cefrtain why this phenomenon is as pronounced as it seems to be. My guess is that it is the proliferation of news - there are hundreds of cable and satellite channels, tens of thousands of internet sites, whereas in the past there was a much smaller number of news outlets. And they did not compete as much as is the case today. The danger in that is that news gets over-reported, and to some extent inflated or even invented. I think some of the regulatory authorities should begin to step in, and start doing research on these reports, in terms of whether what they prognosticate ever happens. Apart from anything else, in this example, you really would not determine its economic effects until the terms are know, it is a kind of a loan, after all. It is not a good trend. This being Reuters, it is "trusted", and probably should not be.

I am somewhere between confused and incredulous at the moment, since I just drove up to New York much faster than I recall doing it before. I used to drive the stretch between Manhattan and Arlington, VA on a fairly regular basis, and I recall that it would take me about five hours to get from Baltimore to a Manhattan entry point, like the Midtown Tunnel. But a few days ago, I drove from my home, which is about 70 miles south of Washington DC, to Mahwah, New Jersey, which is well north of New York City, and it took me only the sum total of six hours door-to-door, including bathroom and gasoline stops. I was not doing anything special, and I had taken my SUV - a Dodge Durango, comfortable to drive by comparison with the Camaro, although the gas bill will probably be horrendous - because of the chance of snow. As I said, I did not do anything special, didn't speed very much, although it is very close to Christmas so that probably has less traffic on the interstates in the lull before the storm. My Nokia/Route 66 GPS has the drive time at 9 hours and 17 minutes, Google Maps says 7 hours and 10 minutes "in traffic". OTOH, when I mentioned all this to friend R. he said "six hours", so maybe I just never checked with anybody. We will see tomorrow, when I drive back.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010 - Ur Cookin', one way or the other..

I don't know in how far you've been following the Julian Assange / Wikileaks saga, but I can tell you one thing: anybody who resorts to threats - as in "if I am extradited I will publish everything I have" - is out of control and not a straight shooter. I am all for civil disobedience if one feels passionately about one thing or another, provided there is sufficient proof of wrongdoing, but I personally don't know that cables sent by conjecturing intelligence or consular officers reporting back to the State Department present much of a smoking gun. I've read a few of the dispatches, this is probably the most boring stuff right after the Daily Telegraph recipes. And I can't say the Pentagon reports gave a lot of interesting stuff either - that the United States Army needs the equivalent of a mid sized city moved to the battlefield before it can fight we have known for a long time, it is what develops if you have no end of money.

So I like the principle of Wikileaks, but the way this is turning out is amateur night at the Apollo. I do have to say - again - that by the time we figure out how this information got out there, some heads must roll - in the intelligence community, at State, at Homeland Security. Assange has done us a great service in exposing our incompetence. The problem in D.C. is that security is always an afterthought, there isn't enough money for it, it never gets updated, and when something goes wrong the attention only lasts three months. The "no thumbdrives" directive is a joke - there isn't any way that can be enforced. Publishing that directive only achieves to pinpoint the incompentent. The fact that these directives are both useless and likely ignored is best illustrated by referring to the last "no thumbdrives" directive - dated 1998....

And I am certain that when you read through the "intelligence" you'll find plenty information that has in no way been substantiated, on which policy decisions were based nevertheless. That brings me right back to my hobby horse, the survey and the "what if" algorithms used in business and finance. Even the surveys that web companies present you with - you know, the ones that pop up when you first access a site, when they ask you questions about your experiences. That's right, the experiences you haven't had yet, you're going to answer questions about. And even if the survey gets presented upon exit - if you don't know who answered it, and why, and who didn't, and why, all you have is garbage, white noise. Me too - I see it every time I look at my own site statistics - even if you know what search parameters people used to get to you, the only valid observation can be that most internet users can't spell...

It is a lot of work, heating 24/7 using a woodstove - not that I am complaining, it is, as I have said, brilliant exercise, but if you're wondering why you are getting high bills in the heating season - it is labour intensive whichever way you do it. For this morning, I crank up the woodstove, which has been turned down overnight, as leaving it cranking is a huge risk. There are hundreds of house fires every year, two students in Maryland died a couple of weeks ago when the woodstove flue from the pizza shop underneath their apartment caught fire.

This afternoon, when the house has kind of regained its comfy temperature, I need to bring another load of firewood in from my stash outside - I am nowhere near running out inside, but you want to keep a good supply so you don't have to go outside to "replenish the fuel" in a snowstorm, or the middle of the night. Once 3000 square feet cool down, it is hard to impossible to get the temperature back up. So I'll carry probably 600 to 700 lbs. of seasoned firewood inside, where it can sit in the heat in the family room for a few days, to get up to room temperature, and shed the last of its moisture. Then, gallons of bug spray are of importance - one thing you need to understand about firewood is that is is dead, and therefore liable to harbour insects, from beetles to carpenter ants, and without a liberal application of poison you're likely to put your woodframe house at risk. Because that is where they nest and what they eat - wood. So think about whether you have pets, kids or pregnant persons you can expose to this. If you should not, forget about storing firewood indoors.

Saturday, December 18, 2010 - Jobs and Accolades

Technology soon overtook what we did, but for it to finally get a patent award, ten or so years later, really makes me verrrry happy. It was pretty brilliant stuff - if you like to get bored you can get the detail directly from the United States Patent Office - go here and look for patent number 7,606,359. Links to all of them are here. Craig is building an airplane now - you can follow him here.

If you have looked for a job last year or so, you probably have already come across this, but job searching and requires a fair amount of Internet savvy. Finding the URLs of corporations and institutions is not always easy, when I was looking for Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., I ended up with a bewildering array of choices, caused by the fact that Washington Hospital Center is part of MedSTAR Corporation, affiliated with Georgetown University, and there are of course two Washingtons in the United States, one of which is the State of Washington, which is kinda on the other side of the country.Then there is a plethora of different software packages that the career sites use. Most companies and institutions use the online services of only a few major providers of job searching software, like Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com, which lease customized access packages to corporate clients, but even so, they'll work slightly differently. And it doesn't matter how nice of a resume you built, once you process it through one of those software packages you basically have to redo your entire resume online all over again. It isn't that I don't have understanding for that, but it takes hours of work. What would be really helpful is if all these people got together, decided what information in what way they must have, and then all use one and the same software set, which would let you create a record that you could yourself take from one job site to the other. My primary beef at this point is that I've only found one single job site owned by multinational corporation that has the option to put in the European Union. All the others make you enter each European Union country you are eligible to work in individually, and some restrict the number of possible entries to fewer than there are countries in the European Union. Considering I have an EU passport, that's asinine.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - Hard Heat, and Easy Credit

I now have an RFID credit "sticky" that attaches to the back of my cellphone, that is new. I'd had one of those Paypass things for my keyring for a few years now, but I like this better - for one thing, I am less likely to misplace my Blackberry than my keys, thanks to the Blackberry's belt pouch. Check with your bank if they are providing them yet, and no, I can't tell you my bank, there are too many folks looking over our shoulders here. But a quick Google should do it for you - try looking for "payment tag".

I'll try and get a bit more creative in the next few days, I promise. I have some travel coming up, and I am just about done putting my resume and cover letters out at the career websites run by some corporations I'd like to work for. It being all online, creating one's profile, and fine tuning one's resume (which essentially is a duplicate of what you have just typed into the jobs site) is a lot of work. Although - I am not one of those who endlessly refines his resume - I mean, all it wants to do is get a recruiter or hiring manager to talk to me. I've never believed in 12 or 20 page resumes, and long lists of skills, I don't believe anybody goes through them with a fine toothcomb. Life does not work that way.

I hope.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - It's a rumour - no, it's a dishwasher

That has all gone by the wayside. How profitable a particular product is for a company is information that is very hard to come by, if at all, and the company's share price is to a large extent based completely on perception and conjecture. That doesn't mean that the analysts always get it wrong, but there are plenty of examples of corporations that were able to shore up their stock price for years by hiding losses and bloated investments. Apple, of course, is doing very well, and that is easily explained as the company maintains very healthy profit margins for all of its products. But that is an exception, rather than the rule.

While the media have been telling us that the "cloudy glasses" are a result of phosphates being withdrawn from dishwasher detergent, and a bit of vinegar will solve the problem, the contention that there is no point in replacing your dishwasher is, as far as I am aware, not quite correct. You see, if, like me, you have an old dishwasher, one that is designed to use phosphates, it won't work at all well with the new formulations. I know this because I just neglected to follow advice, replaced the old Maytag that was in the house when I bought it with a brand new GE, and now I have a dishwasher that uses half the detergent, half the water, and gets everything spotlessly clean without phosphates. So I would take a good look at the age of your appliance, and if it was doing fine until the summer, and not now, replace it. For now I am washing everything on pots & pans cycles, repeatedly, and it is cleaning up like magic.

It made no sense to me - machines are designed to produce an optimal result with a particular formulation, and if you change that formulation, and take something essential like phosphates out, you're going to have to change the way the machine works. Phosphates were in detergent for a reason, right? So if you have an older dishwasher, give the filters a good clean, check the acidity (PH) of your water, which should be around 7.2 to 7.4, and start using one higher cycle than you used to. If that does not work, buy a new dishwasher, that will be designed to clean perfectly using the phosphate free detergent. Doesn't have to cost a fortune, mine was under $300 (but I got the employer discount..), installed in half an hour, and everything is squeaky clean again. Sorry, NBC-Liz, but that was very incomplete advice.

Sunday, December 5, 2010 - Statistics without proof are useless

What is so stupid is that even though there are a lot of companies that make millions by capturing and selling this data, there is actually abolutely nothing useful anybody has ever done with it. The principle is that all of this tracking is supposed to enable vendors to put information in front of you that will influence your buying decisions, but nobody has ever come up with a piece of software that is actually able to predict that you have concerns about your heart health, that you're heading for a supermarket, and that you are going to buy probiotic foods. Sure, they can see what information you retrieve, they may even be able to see which supermarket you head for, but that you're buying yoghurt for Auntie Jeannie is not something anybody knows or can know. If the companies that do this type of research spent their billions of dollars simply getting their message out in as many places as possible, they would have a far greater sales success than when they attempt to manipulate people's buying behaviour.

There is so much that needs doing - I am currently buying some diving gear for a friend in Asia, as he wants to order it but there are no companies that sell this online that will ship to Asia Pacific. Imagine - the equipment he wants costs $260 here, an official importer in his home town sells the same equipment for $460, imagine how much money the online vendor could make if they shipped to all countries.... Between credit cards and Paypal payment assurance is pretty much a no-brainer.. but no, we're going to manipulate consumers, instead, which any expert can tell you just does not work. Ask to be shown evidence that the tracking results in sales, and insist you want to see the actual results, from the "capture" of the potential buyer to the sale to that identified buyer. You won't - it does not exist.

Not much else to report, life is a bit dreary at the moment. I can't find work, me and the rest of the nation, it is freezing cold, but I suppose we are lucky we're not getting the snow avalanches the Other Coast and Western Europe have been having, and generally, though I have nothing substantial to complain about, it is December again. It was never my favourite month, too many holidays and birthdays in the family - Santa Claus, December 5, is celebrated in Holland as well - from when I was a child it always was a hyped and over-pressurized month. Even today, this nonsens about Black Friday, and about "getting the holiday shopping done early" - I shop for the holidays and birthdays year 'round, whenever I run into nice gifts, wherever I am, so at the end of the year all I have to do is open the closet.

I noticed the other day that the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software I have kind of fell into disuse. The primary reason, I think, is that I usually have the television going while I am working on my website or writing other things, and I kind of assumed that that gives too much background noise for the recognition to be usable. I actually never tested that, which I suppose shows you how much of a techie I am, so today I decided to see what dictation would come out like if had CNN going in the background, and you're looking at the results of that. Turns out that with the Logitech headset I'm using, Dragon does a fine job, including capitalizing its own name. Something I kind of learned in the lab, and need to relearn: don't ever make assumptions, always try to reinvent the wheel, because that's how innovation is done.

I cannot find a decent picture to go with today's blog entry, usually I take the picture specifically for whatever it is I'm writing, occasionally I'll go back in my own archives and find something appropriate, but I can't come up with anything today, so I am leaving you without, just giving you a couple of Amazon products that I have discussed here. Better luck next time!

Thursday, December 2, 2010 - The North Koreans don't lie, but Chevrolet does

On that note, I keep reading the Chinese are keeping their currency, the yuan, artificially cheap so as to be able to continue their sales heavy economy. Not so, says I. I think a major reason why the yuan is "reasonably priced" is to ensure prices in the Chinese countryside and remote areas do not rise. We tend to forget that the majority of Chinese live at a subsistence minimum, and raising their prices could cause a massacre. The world is not as simple as the State Department wants it to be.

Yah. 40% of shoppers plan to shop online. Suuuure. And 16% will do so using their mobile devices. Yah. Where does this nonsensical information come from? Who creates these "forecasts"? You do a survey, and of the people that answer the survey, or answer the phone, you pass the prewritten answers on to the industry and the media.. This is commerce? Don't make me laugh, this is a joke, there is nothing in this information that in any way indicates what the reality is going be.

Seriously. Now more than ever, it is getting harder and harder to predict outcomes. Harry Potter is a good example - it was rejected by twelve publishers. 9/11 is another - we were going to go into Afghanistan and get rid of the terrorists there. That means we thought we could.

The list goes on. The Chevy Volt (the "then" vehicle, not the one coming up) was going to bring us into the alternative energy age. Blockbuster and Enron were going to bring internet movies to the consumer - in 2000. People get cancer or walk under a bus. I am most amazed by all these surveys and questionnaires proliferating on the internet, as if their data has any meaning. Think about it - these surveys are only filled out by people that feel they have a need to do so, people one knows absolutely nothing about, other than that they are willing to fill out a form. We think we sell things by superimposing advertisements over the picture, video or text the consumer wanted to access. I mean, have you ever bought a Hewlett Packard product because of an advertisement that made it impossible to read the Washington Post article you wanted to read? Have you taken Comcast service because Cal Ripken is making strange gestures on your TV?

On another note, B&H Photo have quickly replaced the Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 storage device that arrived here broken, see November 14. It was indeed broken, its replacement is functioning as advertised, I had it up and running in less than ten minutes, configured and tested 20 minutes later, and it is currently receiving a terabyte or so of backup data. It is an interesting device - it can provide just about any networking and file sharing protocol, which, in my case, means I use NFS, the UNIX network file system I have been using since my days as a UNIX developer. Windows has been able to "mount" an NFS device since Windows NT, so there is little to be concerned about there, for me it is a little strange to use an NFS service I cann't configure - until I bought this thing, I backed up to external drives on a PC I set up as an NFS server, as I have done for decades.

Why the NAS drive now? The thing costs a little over $400, provides two mirrored terabytes, and I cannot put together a server with 4 terabytes of disk space for that kind of money. Hardware, maybe, but not the operating system. Now that EMC owns Iomega - EMC is very well known to me as a provider of fault tolerant storage systems in my telco world - it appears they have gone to great pains making these devices as compatible as possible - this drive array will do Windows Media sharing, it can function as a standalone webserver, lots of stuff I have not yet experimented with, the restore is running but kind of slow. And I am not at all in favour of putting one's file system on the internet, although I want to see this work badly enough that I will try it. I've got a rather elaborate firewall assembly facing the ISP, so let's see what gives - watch this space. In the meantime, if you're looking for 2 or 4 terabytes of storage for a paltry $400 so you don't have to keep stuff on your laptop, this looks like it is a good device.

The picture? That's just me getting creative with a dead chicken - something I don't do often enough any more. I think from a diet perspective my doctors want me to do more chicken and steak, whose calories you can control and which provides packed nutrition. Yeeh.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - Frugal is for Sissies

So - sure, you can make woodstoves cleaner burning. You just have to redesign them so they burn hotter, so they can burn cleaner, which of course means they burn more wood. Is there real evidence this has worked, nationwide? I don't know. I do find that some other energy advances actually work - the GE dishwasher I just bought, top right, is more frugal with water, energy, and detergent, I notice. It cleans better, as well, this despite the United States (just now!) having outlawed the use of phosphates in dishwasher detergent. And there are now a significant number of low energy light bulbs that do better than the ubiquitous 14 watt bulb that was more or less staple - smaller CFLs that are intended for the multi-bulb light fixtures we have all over. I've replaced the 14 watt bulbs with smaller 9 watt bulbs, that give the equivalent of 40 watts "regular" light, so for the light fixtures that take two bulbs, those are ideal. Is there savings involved? Technically, sure, but considering you have to shell out money to save money (my old Maytag dishwasher was broken, and I decided a new one was better for the environment than a repair), the savings are marginal. There is some carbon advantage, I am sure, but only if you add up all of those people who "step up". Having said that, the manufacturers are manufacturing regardless of actual need, so I am not certain whether there actually is a net gain in terms of energy savings or energy efficiency.

And we tend to do this every time. I watch lovely HD stuff on the Discovery Channel, or "Sherlock" on PBS, much of it in the background as I sit here and do email or maintain my sites, on a 50 inch plasma TV. Granted, the newer ones are reasonably frugal with energy, but having said that, it is still a 50 inch plasma display, rated at 350 watts. Before that, I used a TV projector that gave me about a 40 inch image, which used around 200 watts. Before that, a 30 inch LCD TV, rated at 180 watts. Sure enough, the fuel consumption per square inch of viewing surface is less. But you get my drift - it doesn't matter how much more efficient we make these things, there is a bottom line, and we always make these things bigger. If I calculate the amount of time I have this plasma set on, it probably consumes about the same amount of energy my hot water heat pump does, around $8 per month. Mostly providing background noise and motion.

Long story short: "green" starts in the classroom, and in the way you bring up your children. And it will not work if you're going to teach your kids to be energy efficient, and then commute to work yourself in a hybrid vehicle. Commuting is not green, and cannot be made to be green. Having the Pentagon in Northern Virginia is not green. A hybrid vehicle is a vehicle that uses less energy than its regular combustion counterpart, but the real problem is that you still use energy for transportation - whether that energy is gasoline, diesel, electricity, or any combination thereof, you're still using carbons, and you're using those probably without a real need to be where you are going. We have technologies that can help you be anywhere you need to be, without any kind of travel.

Below is a quote from the Sydney Morning Herald (click on the quote to get to the article) about the new Honda Insight Hybrid - note how unfavourably it compares with the original Insight, which is what you would expect it to better. Instead, it is faster, bigger, everything you don't really need, and note how it has a continuously variable transmission - part of the increased efficiency is actually due to the CVT, which Honda used to offer in its original Civic. If you stick CVTs in conventional cars, they get more frugal too!

"The new Insight is powered by a 1.3-litre petrol engine supplemented by a small electric motor powered by nickel metal hydride batteries. It has a continuously variable automatic transmission. It uses 4.6 litres of fuel per 100km and emits 109g/km of CO2. It's still a far cry from the original Insight, which used just 2.8L/100km. And it's not as frugal as the Prius, which uses just 3.9 litres of fuel per 100km. But it remains significantly more efficient than Australia's top-selling small car, the Mazda3, which uses 8.2L/100km.The Insight's biggest advantage over rival conventional petrol cars is its fuel use in city driving, where it uses just 4.9L/100km, compared with 11.2L/100km for the Mazda3."

I recently bought a couple of 6VDC lead acid batteries, $10 a piece, free shipping, but because those can't be air shipped they sent them surface. They actually came on a tractor trailer, the guy dropped the trailer in the street and backed the tractor up to the house. I don't think they made much of a profit. The truck (picture top left) came from ... Richmond, 75 miles away.

Saturday, November 20, 2010 - New Is Not Here

The holidays are coming at us rather swiftly, I suppose I have partly lost sight because of the maintenance I am doing, and the work on the woodpile, which got kind of intense. I inadvertently got some kudos from a friend, today, who noticed how toasty the house was, despite the fact that I had last added wood to the stove at 7 in the morning, before I left for Northern Virgina - by the time I got back it was 3pm. So the work I did - baffle, heat exchanger, new insulation in the upstairs landing, chimney cleaning - seems to be paying off. My builder is coming in to help me with some additional stuff I haven't finished, plumbing, electrical, an attic ladder, all sorts of bits I never got around to over the summer.

So - there are a lot of disasters whose victims need help. Pakistan had its floods, something the country apparently does not have the capability to deal with. Haiti had an earthquake, and now is falling victim to cholera - it is a disease that spreads through a lack of hygiene, BTW, not through Peacekeepers, and the lack of hygiene is not caused by the earthquake, but by a lack of infrastucture, and the inability to repair the infrastructure. I compare this with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, where the countries involved needed huge amounts of aid - with one exception: India. I visited the tsunami hit area in India, up and down the East Coast from Chennai, not much was said about it, at the time, but the area got5 hit as badly as parts of Indonesia and Thailand, lost thousands of people, the coastline was wiped out, people, villages, everything, for hundreds of miles, and the Indian government sent in whatever was needed to recover and rebuild. India has the resources and the organization - like China, India has an infrastructure and the tools to deal with natural and other disasters.

We're not helping anyone by going into Haiti and Pakistan with our flying doctor services. These folks need to be able to take care of themselves - they have the money, but, seemingly, not the political wherewithall to put a supporting infrastructure in. Pakistan is a joke, even - they can do nuclear science and build missiles and reactors, but not take care of floods? Come again? One is reminded of New Orleans, still not rebuilt, five years after being hit by hurricane Katrina, a.k.a. "the worst engineering disaster in the history of the United States".

Owell. I am rambling a bit, I think. But the core of this is the way we're trying to crank up "the economy", whatever that is, without taking care of the bottom line. I am still not seeing how we're going to put America back on its feet without creating new products, concepts, inventions. I mean, look at it: we created two major money making world changing technologies, cellular telephony, and the internet, and they are out there, we, and a lot of other people, made tons of money on those technologies, "we" don't any more, but "they" do. But there isn't any followup, we have nothing waiting in the wings. No new fast food chain, no new coffee chain, no new distribution technology (which is what those are), UPS and FedEx already took over the world, Facebook would be the new McDonalds if it had the wherewithall to negotiate with the Chinese and the Iranians - this, by the way, is how we keep losing ground to the Europeans, All American kids like Zuckerberg are not able to look beyond the next election, they can sell in Wisconsin and Edinburgh, they're happy, they neither understand nor aspire to Fangxian, Hubei Province. This is how we lost cellular telephony - we invented it, rolled out CDMA, and then the Europeans created GSM, which was all digital from inception, and took over, literally, the entire world.

The Chevy Volt? It is not an electric vehicle, it is a hybrid, it has been put back in the lineup using your tax dollars, the "recovery funding", and the first hybrid was built and marketed by Toyota in... 1997. But people, we can't get out of this one using marketing gimmicks, not with the Chinese buying our technologies, and improving on them, since they can take financial decisions without having to consult their entire population. This week's Heartland America catalog has more lies than I have ever seen before in one place: a 1500 watt quartz heater using $1 a day, a 400 watt panel heater that heats an entire room, a gold half dollar that is gold plated, a handheld cellulite "vacuum", an alkaline battery recharger, a power conditioner that makes appliances use less electricity, a detoxifier patch, a waistband stretcher, a salt crystal air purifying stress relieving lamp, a 20% fuel efficiency improver for cars you plug into the lighter socket, all products that don't work and should be illegal to sell. We got into the realm of fiction - that started with the "refinance and get rich" mortgage dream, which, by the way, is still going strong, except now they are flogging governments bailouts they cannot deliver, in very many cases - and if you look at your catalogs and TV advertising, that is all we do now, wse take old obsolete technologies, give them a fancy name, and then deceive consumkers into thinking this is the latest greatest, using taxpayer money. Sorry to be negative, but "new" is my profession, my religion, and I can see where it is at, and that is not here.

Tuesday, November 14, 2010 - Another One Bites The Dust

"Opa Ted", as he was known locally, passed away yesterday, apparently went out like a light while tending to his morning ablutions, did not suffer. I am just so very happy I managed to visit and spend a few days with him, and put him on Skype so he was able to keep in touch with friends and family worldwide, in his remaining months - we last spoke less than a week ago. He had a good innings, I suppose, and ended up where he wanted to be.

Back in April, before I went to China, I sent my 2 TB Micronet drive for repair, since it had been failing. I reinstalled it sometime in May, after they had fixed it. but soon enough, it started acting up again. I had already bought another drive to have a backup, because I use these drives on a network device to back up my computers and information to, so at least my data was safe, but I've now had two spend more money than I really had intended. So I am expecting a brand new network drive to arrive via UPS today. It is one of those Iomega devices, with 4 TB of RAID data space, and all sorts of goodies I will tell you about once I haven't unpacked and running. I intend to use this device not as the primary backup unit, but as a RAID 1 formatted "backup to the backup", which means the only traffic it will ever see is the daily backup from the primary device.

I suppose this is a perfect example of the issues facing us in the computer industry. My new 4 terabyte Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 is delivered this afternoon - by the time I get around to unpacking it, it turns out the thing is stone cold, so I let it warm up at room temperature for a couple of hours. Then I hook it up to my network, and (it does not say to do this in the manual) I assign an IP address to the drive in my router. Once it had restarted I take the installation CD that comes with it, put it in a laptop that is connected to the same subnet and router, and install the "storage management" software. "No drive found" is the immediate result, this even though I have verified in the router the IP address was assigned. try again. Nothing.

When I go into the "Network" section in Windows 7 on my laptop, the drive is there, it has shown up as a Windows media device, and as an "Other" device, with an IP address. It shows up with a "go to device webpage" link, so I click on that, and sure enough, my browser goes to the device's IP address, and its built in webserver gives me the configuration pages the software was supposed to provide. Pretty comprehensive too - I did not know EMC had bought Iomega, but it shows - you name a network or file sharing technology, and the Storcenter supports it. This provided you know how to configure everything, which I do, but the majority of users won't, they won't even kn ow the difference between a Windows domain controller and an NFS server. Nevertheless - a SCSI network device is available too, and I am now waiting for that to finish setting up - it's done 13%, after 2 hours, but it shows in the Windows drive arrays already, cool. For 400 buck$, impressive, at 2x2 terabytes.

Or so I thought. The error message I kept getting, even after re-initializing the unit, meant that one of the two drives was not functioning, unfortunately very cryptic error messaging. Hopefully B&H will send me an RMA number on Sunday (they are closed on the sabbath, not even taking electronic orders, which means they're not hypocrite), and a replacement unit real quick.

I expect I'll have to resort to getting some mandrake juice, I understand the best cure for things petrified. And somebody better tell Macy's Veteran's Day was last week.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - Clean and Democratic?

It sounds a little silly, but look at any of the tests and surveys that have been done, and you see that the "germ load" is pretty bad in the home, especially in the kitchen, where the entire family, warts and all, tends to congregate, whether or not they have washed their hands. So anything you would touch you can "electrify" is good news, and faucets, garbage pails, door handles, and soap and paper dispensers certainly make the grade. Some of these things are getting more affordable, I purchased an electric soap dispenser for $30 a while ago, and yesterday came across the garbage pail with automatic lid, for $35. Not bad, and that helps not "overstuffing" the bin, as well. No, I don't have an electric door yet, nor do I have an electric faucet or towel dispenser, but I will keep an eye out. I suppose from the hygiene perspective, automated bathroom and kitchen doors, faucets, refrigerator and cupboard doors and the like would be best. Having said that, that would be a lot of money, especially as the lower income folk would not be able to afford any of it.

Hygiene is a big issue at the best of times, I have my doubts the correlation between well being and hygiene is really clear to most people. What the public refers to as a "tummy bug", or "stomach flu" is really food poisoning, and it is easy to get - a piece of cheese with a piece of mold you can easily cut off will do it - the rest is covered in mold too, but you can't see that. The flatmate who cleans the bath by filling it with water and bleach? He will spread germs wherever he goes, work, pub, school, family, wherever. I suppose it is relatively easy to become a Howard Hughes, if you just think about the biochemical assaults on the body for long enough. Read this, about the risks we are exposing ourselves to by reusing grocery bags, as supermarkets want us to do. It is interesting how bad that is for your health, we know that now that somebody is doing research - isn't that how we set out to improve public heallth, by using disposable things? Would you wash out and reuse your toilet paper? Are you aware the majority of the population in China, India, Indonesia, and Africa, has never used toilet paper, barely knows it exists?

Watching Obama address Indian Parliament, I am forever astonished at the difference between India and China. Amazed that a country the size of India manages to continue to be a democracy, while outsprinted and outsmarted by the PRC, which is not. Indonesia, another new democracy, has done incredibly well out of its new freedoms, with its economy firmly in the lift, although the foundations for all this were laid in the Suharto era. Muslim demonstrators have been protesting Obama's visit - before his arrival, I think if they tried that during his visit, they'd be in a pile of trouble. Obama, after all, is a son of Indonesia, he partly grew up in Jakarta.

And so it goes on. China is now everybody's manufacturer, with its neigbours eating from the same trough, provided they pay with their natural resources. Other than that, China has begun the process of alienating the rest of the world, as China needs nobody, and therefore need not negotiate. That, too, is the hallmark of the non-democrat - democracy is government by consensus, by negotation, and that is not something the Chinese know how to do. Marxism, it is probably good to remember, eventually failed in most places it was "enacted". Maybe that will be our salvation, the fact that the Chinese can't sit with a customer, listen to them, and ask them what they need. That's not in the program. We are learning their language, after all, not the other way around. And that may yet save India, a country that gave itself two official primary languages, one of which is the language of their former oppressor, now spoken the world over: English.

Ah well. Back to Sherlock Holmes, 2010 - or rather, a 21st century BBC rendition of Sherlock Holmes, look for just "Sherlock" on your local PBS station. Worth watching, especially if you used to live in London... I'll leave you with a picture of a German Stolle I found at Aldi, which seems to bring over a few items from its native German stores now and again. Can't say I ever saw Mozartkugeln from Salsburg in Austria before, or Pfeffernüsse, don't even know the translation for that, in a local supermarket in Virginia. I don't know if the death of one of the founders of Aldi has anything to do with it, but Aldi is advertising, and expanding. Pretty recession proof, I would say.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - The Heat is On

"It" is heating an entire 3000 square foot two level home, in the woods, using wood from those woods, using a 75,000 BTU - Quadra-Fire EPA approved woodstove. I use wood from the woods since I own some and am thus responsible for their husbandry, as of yet unregulated in this part of the United States, an interesting exercise then, to see whether or not five acres provides enough new growth to offset my use of firewood to heat.

As the first nights with low temperatures have happened already, it was time to clean woodstove and chimney, and do any other heating maintenance that needs doing before winter sets in. I have been working on the woodpile for a couple of months now, that is coming along nicely, and after removing a pile of creosote from the flue, I am, after an overnight burn, now burning a creosote log to turn the rest into ashes. Then I can start bringing seasoned wood into my family room, where the woodstove sits, and splitting more bits of tree to season outside. With a bit of luck (if we don't have a winter like the last) I should have a couple of years' worth of firewood in storage.

Since I have had a few almost-chimney fires, over the years, I decided I should take a look at ways of installing a damper on my stove, something you really are not supposed to do on an EPA woodstove. An "EPA woodstove" - as opposed to an EPA exempt woodstove - conforms to Environmental regulations for the output of particulate matter and poisonous gases, a standard usually achieved by building a sort of "afterburner" into the appliance, or by installing a catalytic converter, much like those installed in cars. My Quadra-Fire is an "afterburner" stove - once at working temperature, preheated air is sucked into the top of the firebox, where, at around 1200° Fahrenheit, a secondary combustion re-fires the exhaust gases from the primary burn.

That works really well, but it shows, at the same time, what the limitations are when you unleash scientific principles on the great unwashed. You see, an EPA stove only burns clean at the proper working temperature. That temperature is pretty high, and the stoves are therefore designed in such a way that you really can't "turn them down" or "fire them up". Firing up an EPA stove you only do, briefly, when you add wood, while EPA stoves lack baffles, which means you can't run them at temperatures too low for a clean burn. In principle, even at its lowest setting, an EPA stove will maintain that 1200° temperature in the firebox. And that is not what the average consumer wants, a stove that is "good" for the environment, but whose temperature you can barely regulate. At outside temperatures above freezing, my stove will overheat my 3000 square foot home regardless of its setting. That is how the EPA designed it....

Technically, then, you shouldn't use a baffle or a secondary heat exchanger with an EPA stove, because both can bring down the temperature of the exhaust gases so they will cause deposits and creosote. On the other hand, a baffle can prevent, or at least, slow down the heat buildup that gives rise to chimney fires, while a heat exchanger does a brilliant job of recovering waste heat from hot flue gases - and in so doing, can help prevent chimney fires as well. So, what do we need to be able to uses these contraptions on an EPA stove without polluting the world?

Having purchased a barometric damper - a device that can be set to open and allow atmospheric air into the flue of a stove when the draft in the chimney gets too high - I spent some time experimenting with it, helped by some stove thermometers placed on the flue piping below and above the baffle and heat exchanger. The latter is thermostatic, it has a fan that kicks in when the flue gases reach combustion temperature, around 250° Fahrenheit. Once I had the stove good and hot, I set the baffle to begin opening around 300° Fahrenheit, at which point the burn is optimal. When the flue gases reach 400 and more degrees, using well seasoned wood, it becomes hard to get the stove to cool down, I've had it roar up to 600 and 700° from that point, with all of the air vents closed, not to reduce its firing until it had consumed much of the wood.

Between the baffle and the Heat Reclaimer, then, you will be able to run your woodstove at higher temperatures without risk of a chimney fire, which is what this exercise was all about. Prerequisite is good draft in your chimney, but that is either there or not, there isn't a lot you can do except to build a new chimney. I would recommend not experimenting with this equipment unless you have the time to do so, the relevant fire dampening chemicals to hande, because, American homes being what they are, it does not take a lot to turn a wood frame dwelling into a smouldering pile of ashes. Main important thing is to be there while you test, watch the process the while time, and don't nip out for a pint of milk, or take a nap. An alarmed thermometer is good too. The thing is, as far as the EPA is concerned you're doing stuff you're not supposed to - depending on where you live, in the rural area I live in there is no requirement to use EPA stoves, as the population density here is low, and I have five acres of trees whose oxygen conversion offsets much of the carbons my stove produces. That's what it is all about, see, the particulate, and the carbon dioxide. And that is where the EPA goes wrong, thinking the average consumer understands how this works, and why.

Monday, October 29, 2010 - Do you know where your brain is?

In other words, the brain, presumably the center of intellect, not merely the cause of it, may well determine depending on circumstances what type of information processing is called for. Note, for instance, that as much as we know, none of the miners in Chile went bonkers - I would have put money on one or two of them going crazy, simply from knowing they are locked in the mine, without water, food or power, with no way of getting out. Yet that seems to not have happened, and that has to have something to do with the brain. So if the brain shrinks less in elderly people who walk 32 blocks - curious how this is translated to miles, even though it would seem these folks are city dwellers - we must try and figure out what meachanism is at work here - commentators stating this is to do with exercise may be completely wrong, there is no reason I can see why exercise has anything to do with this phenomenon. Yes, it may well be that the brain is a muscle that can atrophy - but there is no evidence for this, and there are a million other possible reasons for this behaviour, and probably half a million impossible reasons to add to that.

It is probably important to analyze what the brain is used for, or perhaps I should say: how the use of the brain changes, during its lifetime.

After all, the brain has a vastly different function during infancy and childhood, compared with middle age, and compared with old age. Learning and storage of new information gradually becomes less important, as we age, but this does not mean the brain loses these capabilities. What probably happens is that the brain interface becomes more adept at finding and correlating information, as we age, when originally the brain probably has more of a "sponge" function, soaking up as much information as it can, to deal with the vast areas of unknown a human (or, indeed, a mammal) has to deal with. For example, it is really easy for a child to lean a foreign language, as it is learning language anyway, during childhood. The question (which, in my mind, isn't really unanswered) is whether or not the brain is programmed for "a language", or whether in fact there isn't any distinction between languages until adults get involved. As a child I learned Austrian dialect words before I knew what the formal German words were, but as far as I recall my young brain did not make a distinction between Bavarian/Austrian and "high German", or Hochdeutsch. I related, initially, pronunciations to the farmers in Fuschl am See, then to relatives in Karlsruhe, and there was no distinction between the two except for the fact that they were different people in different places, who spoke German. I do remember being astonished that our landlord's budgerigar in Vienna spoke German - IOW, I thought it was perfectly normal that the people spoke German, but not that the animals did. The only difference is that (I assume) I had been told the Viennese people would speak German, but hadn't been told about the animals. Think about it - a child's correlation with language may not be what you think it is!

So what where the Pakistanis trying to prove? Without their "support" the Taleban would torch all NATO supplies, not just a few tankers? That they have little or no control in their "tribal areas"? That they are right behind our alliance, and that this alliance benefits us more than we are willing to admit? You can go a hundred ways with what just happened at the Torkham border. The solution would be for everybody to pull out of Afghanistan and let them mess each other up as much as they like. I mean, I was wholly behind President Bush when he decided to go in, but we should have simply nuked the place to smithereens and gone home. What we are doing now only serves to confirm we're about as vulnerable as it gets, between the Taleban and the anti-American tribes and the German Islamists training there, c'mon, let's go home, there is absolutely nothing generals with Ph. D.'s can achieve in this theatre, beyond spending more of my hard earned greenbacks. Let's get out there and keep the Chinese happy, that will work better for our future, and they don't bomb things, either.

So there is the question: is Pakistan a U.S. ally or not? Or, perhaps, this is the question: does the United States have allies, and friends? At all?

You can see, from a political perspective, that we have not developed sufficient skills to deal with those that won't negotiate. They're out there. Cuba is probably the best example, but China, now economically and in terms of size more important than the United States, does a fine job as well, as does Pakistan, politically incompatible with the United States as it is a wholly and officially islamic country, created as such by the British when India gained its independence. Similarly, Iran, another islamic republic which thanks its existence to pro-American rulers who sparked an islamic revolt, does not negotiate, at least not in any way recognizable to Westerners. For the United States, which, unlike the European Union, has no borders with any diverging cultures, this is especially hard, since America itself does not negotiate very well, and as traders can get what they need from other countries now, puts itself in the margin. After all.... the guys to the left? Staffers at the local karaoke bar near my Beijing hotel, during roll call. Umm, did I mention Turkey? Bullies, or bulls? Today, BBC America's news broadcast shows some of the flood devastation in Pakistan's Sindh. The American broadcasters do not. But then, they only have half an hour, and so have to show reports on things that are really important.

Monday, October 25, 2010 - Le socialisme? C'est quoi?

There is a new. modern, incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, with British Army doctor John Watson freshly returned from - where else? - the Khyber Pass, a.k.a. Afghanistan, what goes around, comes around, I suppose. More at WETA, or your local PBS station. I personally don't think Benedict Cumberbatch is a good name for an a actor, but then again, neither is Minnie Driver (she is not in it, but he is). Give it a shufti, you won't regret it. I never thought I'd say this in earnest, but if you like Dr. Who, you'll like "Holmes", and I think the Beeb has done a very good job of transplanting this story into the present.

If you talk about "socialism", France, in the news with its widespread civil disobedience, is a very good example of what "Western socialism" is. France has one of the most advanced nationwide consumer data networks, begun by a socialist government when we were all futzing with 300 baud dialup terminals, some 78% of all of France's electrical power is generated using nuclear power plants (18% of the output is exported), giving the French consumer the cheapest power in the Western world, France has truly universal health insurance, among the lowest drug prices in the Western world, and, as advertised a lot these days, France's official retirement age is 60 - unheard of, right? All in a very Western, very capitalist, country, where it is customary for businesses to close during the lunch hour, no 20 minute break for an unhealthy-burger in France. And McDo' serves beer with your burger...

So the flipside is the sense of entitlement that gives rise to the civil disobedience in France. Yes, it is a very nice country to live in. No, I don't think having to carry ID 24/7, and being required to register your every move and partner and change in jobs with the central government is a particularly good thing. I recall my French wife (we married in New York) being really upset when I told her not to register me at the French embassy as her spouse - at the time, the French still required all French citizens to carry a French ID card, even though such is illegal in the United States. But if you register every citizen, it becomes posssible to have universal health care, it is part of what makes that possible, in France, Germany, Spain, Scandinavia, The Netherlands, Belgium. And why it is hard to very difficult in the United States, where the Personalausweis does not exist.

Somehow I am almost ahead of myself in terms of preparing for winter. You know how you tend to procrastinate, especially when the preparations are related to unpleasant things like colder weather? This year, it does not seem to bother me, and I am pretty much on target where cold weather prep is concerned. The pool is done, sand filter, particle filters and pump housing cleaned and drained, it will all be bone dry by the time the first frost rolls around. I've got enough wood for the winter, although I have to yet split much of it, and I have at least one more entire large oak tree down, but uncut, and plenty of other dead wood that still needs cutting and collecting. I am doing all that in such a way that I get daily exercise out of it, rather than a couple of weeks of hard work, then nothing for months. Like this, I have moved from my daily swim to fetching, carrying and processing wood, from there will progress to splitting and cutting, and that will get me right through the heating season, in terms of working out. All one needs to do is make sure there is some heavy physical work every day, and as one is inclined to "do that little bit extra", the discipline to stop and leave work for the next day. That is harder than it sounds, even if it does sound like a bad excuse for doing nothing - I have neighbours staring at me like I am crazy when they offer me a hand and I turn them down, then leave my full (2,000 lbs) cart of wood for collection and stacking the next day. Yet that is what the pros recommend - daily exercise, every day, does not have to be the heart pumping major exercise schema that gives rise to injuries and stuff.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - Mind Your Carbons

I've more accurately measured performance and recovery rate of the AirTap heat pump hot water heater, see my August 12 blog entry, here is the down and dirty:

Hot water tank used: General Electric GE40M06AAG 40 gallon / heating elements disconnected

Water temperature setting (measured): 150° Fahrenheit (64° centigrade)
Well water temperature (constant): 50° Fahrenheit (10° centigrade)
40 gallon tank temperature after 1 shower: 105° Fahrenheit (40° centigrade)
40 gallon tank temperature after 1 hour recovery: 125° Fahrenheit (50° centigrade)
40 gallon tank temperature after 2 hour recovery: 135° Fahrenheit (60° centigrade)
full recovery under 3 hours.

Average fuel consumption equates to 1,269 Kwh/annum (by comparison: the Federal guideline for the same 40 gallon tank, using conventional electric heat, is 4,773 Kwh/annum, or 3.8 times as much). Using the same cost base, 10.65¢/kw, the annual cost to run the Airtap would be $135, a savings of $373. That means your payback on the Airtap is two years, and the cost of the Airtap and its installation may be tax deductible for you, which would reduce the payback to about one year. Mind, though, that if you do what I did - involve a contractor ($200) and replace the existing hot water tank ($300) - it is less rewarding. Ditto if you follow my advice and get a 70 or 90 gallon tank, which can set you back $800 to $1,000.

You are probably wondering (if you're not bored to bits already) why I am paying so much attention to the various uses of heat pumps, but I am, relatively speaking, new to heat pumps, my first real exposure came when I bought this house, which came with two, one for each floor. Since then, I've been wondering whether we are doing ourselves any favours by using four or five different technologies to heat and cool our food and living space. Seriously - some folks use heat pumps to heat, some use various types of gas, some use oil, some use electricity, and then there are the different ways of cooking food. My trips to China have demonstrated to me how efficient induction cooking is, and I just cannot help but wonder why we don't standardize on a few of these technologies. Standardize, as in, government mandate. I know that's heresy, probably "socialism", but I really don't see why we can't subsidize induction cooking, and geothermal heating and cooling, and make those technologies "preferred" - I mean, aren't we supposed to do something about the environment? Standardizing on electricity (which we seem to prefer for motor vehicles now) would be a smart move, and would mean a huge cost reduction in terms of the standardized volumes produced. No?

Typically, if you standardize on one particular type of generation, then throw all of your resources at it, you can come up with some pretty amazing technology, and some pretty impressive savings. To some extent, we're killing ourselves by using and developing too many technologies side-by-side, just look at the cellular marketplace, the Europeans spent the better part of a decade developing something that became GSM, then built it, and the whole world now uses GSM and its 3G/3.5G successor. Not rocket science, except when you look at it from the American battlefront, develop CDMA and then WiMax, and end up with multiple incompatible technologies that can't talk to each other. I know, I have said this 100 times, it is boring, but it remains true. And we remain unable to solve the problem, which only wastes money and resources, and has done for many years. If we really seriously believe that we must improve our efficiency, that global warming is caused by overconsumption of resources and inefficiency, we have no option but to begin to curb competition at the production level. Having ten vehicle manufacturers each use a different hybrid technology means you do the research and the development and the production ten times, when in fact you should be doing all that maybe once or twice. Sure, you can, as a manufacturer, invent what you like, but then your technology should be sold to somebody, maybe the government, and employed in all products that can use the technology. Think about it - the only reason the Chinese have been rendered rich is that we have them manufacture everything fifteen times, under fifteen diferent brand names, for fifteen different retail chains. Right?

Friday, October 15, 2010 - WiFi calling

I have managed to find some of these discontinued T-Mobile UMA handsets, the Samsung SGH-T739, new and unused, tested them, and am putting them on Amazon, find them here. You can get a non-contract T-Mobile plan for them, one of these (select one of the "Even More Plus" plans), and there are no ancillary charges at all for the use of UMA. If you want to use web access with these phones, that'll cost an extra $10 per month, but it is not necessary for using UMA, which uses your minutes just like normal. Especially if you travel overseas a lot, and need to make calls back to the US, or you work in a building that is shielded or remote, UMA is fantastic.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010 - Think upstream

Can't tell you how much I enjoy the maintenance chores that come with living out in the country. The picture on the left is my growing woodpile, I went through this much last winter, which was severe to the point I used twice as much wood as I had expected, but it is great exercise. And the picture on the right is the final backwash of the pool filter, the white stuff are the algae killed by the chlorine shock treatment I am giving the pool while closing it. Where in previous years I would simply put shock in the water, then close the pool and drain the filters, this time I am doing a chlorine pump cycle that lasts ten days. You can see the result, whatever was alive in the pool has died and been caught in the sand filter, one more cycle and I'll be done for the year. Teehee.

When I switched from DirecTV to Comcast cable, I gained quite a bit of HD, but lost BBC America. Only recently did I realize that moving my account one tier up would only cost me some $13 per month more, and give me back my Beeb, as well as some other nice stations, so I did. One programm(me ;) I particularly enjoy is the one hour news broadcast the BBC does specifically for the United States - I've always been very frustrated by the half hour of "World News" the main broadcasters here provide, but the BBC, which has the largest news organization in the world, really provides better news and more information, including U.S. centric stuff. when you have a chance, do watch or Tivo the BBC America news, it is worth it. They should webcast it for a couple of months, give everybody a taste.

On that note, you may have noticed the death of a British aid worker in Afghanistan, Linda Norgrove, who as it now turns out may have been killed by an American grenade during the firefight between the rescuers and her captors. Sad, but shit happens, thanks, Marines, for trying, but this leads me to ask why these "aid workers", who are killed and kidnapped on a regular basis, are even there? This is a war zone, where NATO troops are fighting battles with the locals, and Brits and Americans and Dutch and Germans go there to "do good", and in the process make themselves convenient targets for terrorists? Targets whose liberation or recovery we then have to pay millions of dollars for? Are these people insane? Whitefaces are not popular fror as long as we have the military occupying their countries. The military have medical and engineering boots on the ground, at least they can shoot back, but the concept that as a civilian you can go into a war zone, unarmed, unprotected, and "help", is asenine. It is crazy. We should have the military round all these people up, and ship them home, and give aid in the ghettos of Berlin and Newark, NJ. Do you have children or relatives who are aid workers in war zones? Would you please explain to them I really do not think they are at liberty to waste my tax dollars? Tell them war zones are off limits to do-gooders? Thanks.

I have to say that the reconstruction of my well water system has given me extraordinarily clean water. The last piece of the puzzle was the amount of calcite in the acid control tank - where I previously had the tank about half full (which required some 90 lbs of calcite, which sets you back around $170, partly because the stuff is heavy and incurs high shipping charges), adding another 45 lbs brought the tank to 70% full, at which point it began filtering much better. I guess you need a certain depth of calcite for the filter function to be optimal, this in combination with the 50 micron pre-filter, and the 5 micron post-filter, as well as a larger pressure tank, which helps give the well itself time to recover between pump cycles. As I said to my builder, Dan: "I can really do a good job on these installations now - unfortunately, the amount of work involved kind of precludes me from ever making a profit on this type of work". It is true - and one really wonders how many folks' health is affected by the bad quality of well water, and by the unnecessary chemicals unscrupulous contractors foist on their customers. One thing I did, experimentally, is move the pressure tank behind the pre-filter, so much of the crud the pump brings up from the well never gets to the tank. I found that the membrane in the original pressure tank was rotted through, and that tank had been installed directly behind the pump.

My well water repairs, and my hot water heat pump experiments, aren't so much domestic interests - they're scientific more than anything else. In the West, we tend to take hygiene and clean potable water for granted - go to the Unesco website, and to many others, and you find there are more places on Earth with "bad" water than there are clean water supplies. Most solutions tend to not work in the Third World, because the money is not there, nor is the basic understanding of hygiene. So one wonders how refrigeration of food and cleansing of water can be brought to what we think of as "backward" countries. Reading about the stomach problems athletes at the Commonwealth Games have - we travelers refer to it as "Delhi belly" or "Bali belly", it is simply cause by a lack of sufficient hygiene, improving in China and Indonesia, not improving in India, where national pride gets in the way - walk into the Bangalore railway station in the morning, smell the excrement of the people "living" there, and you know two things: India, as a country, is nowhere near "civilized" status, and the Indian government is ignoring even the basic tenets of national health.

Similarly, drive up the coast of the Philippine island of Cebu, and soon enough you pass a mountainside where thousands of migrants live in squalor, without running water or sewage systems, open your car window and the stench of excrement makes you retch. I can't say it any other way. Friends from New York ended up in hospital in India within a week of landing in their expat destination, and nobody there told them all they had was Delhi belly, something the medical staff at the hospital certainly knew.... but you get the idea, it would pass and their organism would adjust. That's stupid, and irresponsible, and not in the national interest of India, the Philippines, and other up-and-coming countries. These issues are not a matter of lack of resources, they signal an unwillingness to allocate funds and police what is, effectively, a risk to national health as well as international health, diseases can only be stopped at the source.

Friday, October 8, 2010 - So what is fame?

I haven't followed Fareed Zakaria for quite a while, every since he began to provide governments around the world with advice, as opposed to simply reporting, using his vast storehouse of knowledge. But today I had to make an exception - he interviewed Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, the only Western journalist to do so in many years. It was interesting, not so much because of what he said, but how Mr. Jiabao said it - no rhetoric. I hate the political rhetoric that so often emanates from politicians' mouths - George Bush was particularly bad, Barack Obama spews a fair amount, Zakaria is no stranger to it, but Jiabao is pretty much free of it, and just says it like it is, or how he feels it is. As I have said before, China is a bully boy, unnecessarily, but in the economic environment it does some stuff we could all learn from. If you can stomach Zakaria asking about Chinese internet restrictions - curiously, he says when he is in China, there is much information he cannot access, something that is not the case for me - Premier Jiabao has some interesting stuff to say. Click on the picture to get to the CNN interview.

Thinking about J. K. Rowling and the succcess of her Harry Potter stories, I realize I really can't comment, as I've never read the books. I've generally transferred my reading to the internet, relegating books to late-night-in-bed and airplanes - and even there, now that most international flights have individual displays with a choice of movies I don't get much reading done. At home, too, the advent of the Tivo and HD has made me use TV for entertainment almost exclusively.

Anyway, watching, with much pleasure, the Harry Potter movies (I even have them on HD-DVD, a lot cheaper than Blu-Ray) I find that wonderful mix of Tolkien and Monty Python, British Druidism and British humour. Especially in HD, they are a discovery trip, every time I watch them I see details I had missed in a previous viewing. Precious. And to think that an impoverished single minded single mom caused all that, having been told time and again she wouldn't get anywhere.

This is generically the hard part when you're trying something in life - how long do you go on, when do you change course, I've always told my students and interns to be single minded, bloody minded even, if you have a dream, go after it and don't for a moment deviate from your path, don't get insecure, put blinders on and see just that one goal. It is easy to say, of course, because you hear about the J.K. Rowlings that make it, not about the ones that don't, and you don't necessarily know that the story that remains isn't a bit embellished (I didn't watch Oprah, either, never have).

Sunday, October 3, 2010 - More China musings

If you need cheering up, here is People Magazine about J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books: 'Turned down by 12 publishers before one finally agreed to print the first book, Rowling was informed by an agent: "You'll never make money selling children's books."' Believe in yourself, and alles sal reg kom.

On that note, I was rather taken aback to hear that former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez felt he had to go off on Jon Stewart, with a clear reference to Stewart's Jewishness, I didn't know Stewart is Jewish, nor did I know Sanchez is Cuban. But to start complaining about discrimination when you've made it to CNN prime time anchor... the mind boggles. You get made fun of when you have a high profile, Rick. It is an accolade, it means you got somewhere.... Poquito chip on his shoulder, methinks.

I fumigate my house a couple of times a year, ever since I discovered there are dry foggers that generate insecticide smoke, as opposed to spray, which can leave a greasy residue. The smoke does not, but: the distribution uses a chemical reaction involving a small amount of water and high heat, so to be safe you should not put these canisters on anything flammable, I use ceramic saucers and the like. But they work very well, I basically saturate the house, including attics, crawlspaces, basements, what have you, before I go away for a week or more (you don't want to do this and come back 10 hours later, it is not good for your health, trust me on that). At any rate, the Raid foggers cost some $15 per box of three in the supermarket, so I decided to check Amazon, and found them in a carton of 6 for $60 (or whatever the price of the week is, check the Amazon box to the right). That is a nice savings, especially with free shipping, locally that would set me back 90 buck$ plus tax..

It is very - unusual, I suppose is the word, my strong emotional pull towards Beijing and China. I walked into my local Chinese restaurant, today, and the Chinese music that was playing reminded me almost painfully of Beijing, as though I had a pang of homesickness. As one can't very well be homesick for a place one's never lived in, that does not make an awful lot of sense. And it is not the first time, either, I wonder if I should make a concerted effort to find a job in China after all. Strange. Nay, weird.

I wonder about my China desire, trying to unravel, I suppose, what drives me. There is on the one hand a danger in my always "going for greener", for many years I've made my life and career by moving countries and sometimes continents, an entirely new living and human environment energizes me, and makes me perform to the peak of my capacity. So that could be one reason why I want to move halfway across the Earth. But, there are many more. I suppose I miss living in the city, after almost a decade in the country, but most of my life in urban areas, and a city Beijing most certainly is. As cities go, it is actually an extremely livable place - well provisioned, superb services, an unaparalleled public transport system, terrific food, low prices, nice people, a very friendly and supportive population, which is hard working to boot, all in all, one of the more attractive places to live. You would have to disregard the pollution for the moment, that is horrendous, though I am told, not as bad as it was before the Olympics. Then there is the energy, the place feels like New York did in the 1980s. I miss that, the electric feeling that "stuff happens here".

So no, I really do not have a clear idea why it is so attractive to me. If I think about it rationally, I should be able to find something nice right here in Washington, where my recent work history, home and my insurance and stuff are. I am getting a little old for this "haring around the world" stuff, or am I? Or is one never too old, which is what I would like to think? I like the excitement and the risk involved, I like to do things where it is not necessarily known whether "it's going to work" or not. That may sound strange, but it takes a particular type of personality to trigger a project and work to grow it, while adjusting to the myriad unknowns that go with a project. Some of us are better at that than others, it is a talent. And I am pretty good at this, proven, too, I've helped built two completely new telecommunications companies, and there was 9/11, of course, the best proof one could have of versatility-under-pressure - I saw quite a few people buckle around me, not for nothing did the company and the government send the counselors in, inside of a week. I guess the only way I would have to figure this one out is go there and do it, and analyze myself.

Strange though, how, with all of its might and prowess, and its demonstrable advances, China still behaves like an insecure bully, just look at the spat between Japan and China. While the Chinese hate the Japanese with a passion, they demonstrate this type of behaviour with others, as well, when in fact China is big and important enough to play the role of the wise old uncle, if it wants to. It is puzzling, this dichotomy - note how I observed, during my last trip (see xxxx), that the Chinese government really puts no effort in ensuring even its professional population learns to speak English, something we Dutch know you have to do, as a trading nation - you can't haggle with people whose language you do not speak. Curiously, Chinese computer technicians and engineers, at the mid-level, don't even speak English, something I have not encountered anywhere in the world.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010 - Enough complaining already!

If you watch the news intently, you'll see an amount of doom and gloom that is unparallelled, at least in my memory. I am not suggesting that anything is wrong with the reporting, but we need to urgently cheer up the population, and I don't think the long faces will do that. One wonders if our preoccupation with the economy - I don't mean now in particular, in America we always talk about money - is perhaps to blame. When the news is good, it is very good, etc. I seem to note that in other parts of the world folks are more laid back, and make more time for play, levity, and R&R, even with limited means.

Important? Sure. A large percentage of the reporting deals with people, like those that make up the Tea Party, who predict the future without any kind of proof that their predictions have any relationship to reality. Predicting is hard at the best of times, but marrying future occurrences to political developments makes no sense at all. There is no individual political party which has been consistently successful, or unsuccessful. My main worry is that we will not retain this president, and that a political sea change will bring a new president who will spend a large part of his or her administration undoing the Obama era changes, rather than progress with the tools in place. Four years is not enough - and there is ample proof of that - for major changes to have full effect, or even to gather enough data about their effect to adjust their functioning.

I mentioned the New York Philharmonic's 2010 opening concert on WETA, on September 25, below, it features a new symphony by Wynton Marsalis - the New York Times' well written and in-depth review is here.

Apart from putting some of my clutter on Ebay and Amazon, something I had not done before, going through my "assets" I discover a series of domain names I pay for, but have not used in literally years. So those will go on the block - all I need to do is find a domain name seller that gets results, there are lots of them, so that will need a bit of research. For the moment I think Sedo may be the top agency.

A quick update on the "fuel consumption" of my new AirTap heat pump water heater: I average (at a cost of about 10¢ per kilowatt hour) about $8 per month, since its installation, on August 11, just for my one person household. A regular electrical hot water heater is supposed to consume $488 worth of electricity a year, which equates to about $40/month, while a town gas water heater goes through $163 a year, or $14/month. Please add to this that the Airtap, while it does generate noise, removes a fire hazard from your home - the same argument I use when I point out to people that the low energy CFL bulb, which doesn't get warm enough to burn your hand, is far safer with respect to fire risk than regular light bulbs. It isn't easily calculable, but a major advantage to me.

To complete the stats: at a drain of about 600 watts @ 115 VAC, the AirTap mounted on a 40 gallon tank (with its original elements disconnected) takes about 4 hours to heat 40 gallons of well water from 50° to 140° Fahrenheit. Topping up the tank after a shower takes two hours. On the subject of heat, the fall has set in, so I have begun my annual firewood production run, and that is what you see in the picture top left. My neighbour and I have some four massive oak trees down from previous years, still, so it does not look like I will have to down any trees this year. The last time I did, I managed to nick my roof... not all wood heat is free...

Saturday, September 25, 2010 - Face the Music

Not much to report - I am job hunting in earnest now, I am putting some things on Ebay I didn't think of before, still working on the house, running back and forth between home and Washington, D.C. to do some medical tests and treatment, and it is time I started on the woodpile so I have the winter covered - last winter, if you recall, was so "winter" I went through what I had hoped would be two years' worth of firewood. Enough to get on with - I have plenty out there, but it needs cutting and splitting, my fall exercise when it gets too cold to swim.

Listening to/watching the New York Philharmonic's 2010 opening concert on WETA, focusing on jazz and Wynton Marsalis, two bars in I can hear how the American big band tradition lives on, in HD on a Dolby system it is even more impressive and spatial than I've really ever heard it before. I note I barely listen to CDs any more, it is somehow not complete if you dont have it in HD with Dolby 5.1 sound. Heaven. I just don't want to turn into a couch potato, even a culturally responsible one.

Seriously shopping around for a position, I find I am ill prepared. I have no references - that is, I haven't asked anyone to be - I have no really up to date resume, and it goes on. After talking to some friends, A. made me write a sort of mission statement - problem is, how do you do that if you are as multi-disciplinary as I am? I build things, but during my career I have built servers as well as entire telephone companies - how do you represent that without sounding too much as if you think of yourself as Superman? Not that I am not super, but I have learned humility as my career went along, and I am no longer as noisy as I was 25 years ago. Was fun though ;) and not untrue.

At any rate, I managed to do all that, and I have managed to whittle down my "hardcopy" resume to something I think is manageable and readable. I see so many resumes from people with my kind of work history that are ten pages long, and that just does not work, you can't expect a recruiter or hiring manager to wade through a freaking book. What I have also done is file one online job application - I promised myself I would do that, first time I have applied for any job since sometime in the 1980s, getting hobbled a couple of times when I was asked to provide information I just did not have to hand. So, now I do, and I was able to complete one end-to-end today. Teehee. There was no question: "Have you ever fired someone face-to-face and escorted them off the premise?"... I have, I believe that if people in your department need to be let go, you have to do that yourself, and not run it off on one of your managers. It is part of one's responsibility, I think. Managing people is not always easy, and sometimes it is a downright bitch, and you have to do it all, to do the learning curve. Right?

Saturday, September 18, 2010 - Whether it is a bank or a well

The more I look at the press, Wall Street, business reporting, and even politics, the more I see an inclination to base trends and decisions on forecasts. By forecasts, I mean: hogwash. Varying from forecasts based on historical data that shows little commonality with today's society, to commentators and "analysts" who use conveniently available data without doing adequate research.

General Motors has announced it is going to Facebook-enable Onstar - I don't know if you've read the press release, but this is the amazing new technology we are rolling out, and the market actually responded. Never mind that Onstar is not available in 95% of world markets, and never mind Facebook serves no purpose of any kind in a motor vehicle - isn't the idea that we solve some of the energy problems the world is facing by getting people out of their cars? Isn't Facebook something you'd make available for long commutes? So the Germans provide electronics that can steer your car around obstacles and traffic jams, and the Americans provide electronics that let you update your AOL - oops, sorry, Facebook - page?

So we find ourselves in the peculiar circumstance that stock value is based on predictions and preconceptions - neither of which have to have anything to do with reality. As an example, if you had predicted Sony Corp. would make a huge killing with the Walkman, beginning in 1979, to be followed by Apple, Inc., which copied the Walkman concept and translated it into a fully electronic device, you'd have been laughed out of the boardroom - twice in a row.

What it boils down to? For me, simply that you cannot predict the future. Not on the basis of "what the CEO says", not on the basis of what the gifted analyst (yours truly) says, and now that we have ultimate communications, not even on the basis of reality. It is, today, perfectly acceptable to have a blogger post a rumour, have that picked up and reported as a rumour by some mainstream media, and be completely accepted as a possible future truth on the internet, driving stocks up or down at will. I have seen dozens of articles essentially stating RIM (Blackberry) is finished, only to end up this week seeing a gain of $1.46 a share, and an increase in handset sales (as indeed I have observed overseas). To me it just means that you really can't have it both ways, and that we need to start figuring out how to get reality in our reporting. I've seen this day in, day out, on the T-Mobile forums, which I no longer participate in - people come in posting complete fiction tales, and the moderators let them. Depressing, and completely useless.

Are you impressed by the hundreds of BP commercials that provide absolutely no information? Is that my money they are spending? Did we appropriately blame BP for a drilling accident, or will accidents happen, occcasionally? Is "arthritis pain" you can treat with over-the-counter "painkillers" a real condition? Is beating someone as hard as you can using padded leather gloves a real sport?

How do I get institutionally grumpy? The picture on the left shows you some of the filters in my well water plant, something I blissfully had no knowledge of until I looked into the plumbing in my house. Being a city slicker, water comes out of the tap, not the ground, and is fit to drink as delivered. Yah.

Then I find that the pressure tank in the house I bought has a ruptured bladder, and the owners bypassed the acid control tank, most likely to save money on calcite. So I start looking into what's supposed to be there. I find the stains in my toilet tanks, and the green stuff in sinks, are due to, respectively, crap that gets pumped up from the well, and copper being leached out of my pipes by the acidic water that comes up. And I find there are lots of different water treatment and filter options that you can buy and install, and that builders often cut corners, and "water treatment specialists" install acid control that makes water so hard they need to sell you a water softener installation. And I find that the taps for the garage and the garden hose use treated water, as opposed to "raw" water from the well, depleting your expensive chemicals and filters every time you wash the car or water the roses, neither of which care a lot about PH.

So, I now have plastic rather than copper where the well comes up, I have a 50 micron filter that takes the worst crud out of the water before it gets to my (new, big, vertical) pressure tank, I have a nice acid control tank with a lot of expensive calcite in it (which, as it turns out, is crushed marble, that is how acid is controlled, it slowly dissolves the marble...), and a 5 micron filter behind that to catch anything that comes through the other filter and the tank, as well as any half dissolved calcite that gets into the house water system. My PH is a nice steady 7.2 (rather than the 4.4 water I measured coming out of the ground, which had actually eaten right through the 10 year old copper!), and I do not need a water softener, as there is little "hardness" (which would be the dissolved calcite) in the water, as I have not put any corosite in, which is what they experts want you to add to your calcite if your PH is low - and I don't find that I need the corosite, I did buy some but haven't used it. Part of the problem? My older hot water tank had a lot of deposit in it, there had been no effective filtration, and that slowly got dissolved and pushed into the water system. The new hot water tank sits behind all of the filters, and as it does not have electric heating elements, it doesn't solidify and clump particles that are in the water. Teehee. But just guess how much you pay for things that don't work, and how little expertise many of these "specialists" really have.

Thursday, September 14, 2010 - Home & Appliances

If, like me, you are on well water, you and yours don't get fluoride in your drinking water, an essential ingredient to help prevent tooth decay. A while ago I noticed a new type of Listerine, Listerine Total Care, in the shops, and when looking at the label, I found it to contain fluoride (as well as other goodies, most mouthwashes don't). I think it is a brilliant way to supplement your fluoride intake, especially since, unlike water, you don't have to drink it, and you don't have to get the very expensive prescription only topical fluoride solution you rinse with once a month (I never do, and don't like its strength). So you might want to give this a try, especially if you're a Listerine addict anyway. You do have to avoid food and drink after rinsing with it, for half an hour. If it is not in stock locally, you can bulk order it from Amazon.

Power consumption of my new AirTap heat pump water heater (see August 12) is $6 to $7 per month. That will put a crimp in your electricity bill. There is a caveat to this heat pump, though. Or rather, to the way conventional electric water heaters work. As it turns out, a conventional heater has a massive 4.5KW/240VAC heating element, which generates so much heat that it'll top up your 50 gallon tank even in the 20 minutes between one person showering and the next. This is why these tanks are so expensive to run (similarly, tanks that are gas heated have large burners, and are equally expensive in use). The Airtap heat pump generates about 13% of the heat the element in a conventional tank does, at less than 10% of the cost - conservatively, I think it is actually much less.

So in order to still have the comfort of abundant hot water, the ability to "process" a few people through the shower quickly, early in the morning, and a bit later do some quick laundry (American washing machines take hot water from your home supply, after all), you ought to replace your old 40 or 50 gallon tank with one that is much larger - 70, maybe even 90 gallons. If you do that, you do not need to have a tank with ancillary (electrical or gas) heating, as you'll have enough hot water for the entire family without fast recovery. As a guideline, the Airtap heats my 40 gallon tank to 140 degrees (Fahrenheit), from cold, in four hours. That won't cover even a two person household during the rush hour, let alone one with more "consumers" - and please take into consideration that women bathe using much hotter water than men do. You need to take into account the Airtap is noisy, as well, something that can be an issue if the hot water tank is installed in a closet on the main living floor of your house, something I have seen in several houses, recently. Additionally, it generates cold air and plenty of condensate, both of which you need to syphon off somewhere.

From an engineering perspective, energy savings using a heat pump to cool or heat anything are really easy to explain. Conventional heating elements and the type of flame you get when you burn gas or oil are only capable of creating relatively small amounts of very high heat, in the region of 1,000 and more degrees Fahrenheit. When you use that kind of heat to warm something up to 100 degrees, you can only do that by moving large amounts of cold substances past the medium you are using to transfer the heat, usually copper or brass or some other kind of metal. If you don't cool the medium effectively, it will melt or catch fire or do something else unpleasant. Basically, you have to "turn off the heat" way before the heating process has reached an efficient stage. The heat is high, the volume low.

Not so with the heat pump. One side of the heat pump uses decompression of a previously compressed gas or fluid to absorb heat from the environment, heat that is released again when the gas or fluid is allowed to cool down in a heat exchanger. There isn't a huge amount of heat involved here, but, depending on the size of the compressor, the heat pump can move large volumes of heat from one place to the other. And that means you're in heat ranges that are compatible with what humans need, fluids or gases that are warm (rather than converted to steam), or cool (rather than cold or frozen). The volume is high, the heat is low. And this process is far more efficient (a.k.a. cheaper) than the other one. You can visualize it by remembering that an electric heating element or gas or oil burner ususally is only four or six inches in length, while the heating element of the Airtap heat pump is some 12 feet (3.6 metres) long. It requires a much larger surface area to produce the same amount of heat, and partly because it is distributed throughout the medium you're heating (water in a tank) it can heat much more efficiently.

Thursday, September 6, 2010 - Amsterdam

Boarding a train at Leeuwarden, I discover my U.S. T-Mobile Blackberry has logged onto a Dutch T-Mobile WiFi network that turns out to be part of the train, rather than the station. I am not supposed to have access to the overseas TMO networks without paying extra, so I am not sure whether the rules have changed or whether the combination of my international Blackberry email account with the Hotspot subscription maybe caused this, at any rate, it is convenient, since this is 2+ hour train ride.

Having spent some time acquainting my nephew with some of the new technologies, both in the realm of photography and computing (he is a photographic artist), there is the forever discrepancy between the way the more "socialist" cultures introduce and manage new technologies, and the way in which "we capitalists" do it. If it helps: the socialists win every time. They have larger networks, their networks inter-operate, they introduce new technologies faster than we do, and their operators make more money. It doesn't matter whether you look at Western Europe or China, they do stuff we can't even ask our carriers about. Unless you can point me to Vermont or Alabama commuter trains that have 3G networks, I don't know that we have a prayer on these people, and we can't even use the "these are small countries" argument any more, what I see here in The Netherlands they do Europe wide.

Back in Amsterdam, it is a gorgeous balmy autumn afternoon, my sister and I walk her dog so I can test my new telephoto zoom lens a bit more - it does, considering the price, some pretty amazing stuff, to the left you can see the compressed result (click on the pic to see a larger version), on the edge of urban Amsterdam in a setting that I hope reminds you of 16th and 17th century Dutch and Flemish painters, these are the tints and colours that are so unique to our Dutch landscape.

Thursday, September 2, 2010 - Leeuwarden

I have kind of taken a break, and spent a few days with relatives in the Northern Netherlands, in the picture I am snarfing a raw herring at a market stall. I understand eating raw herring is something that horrifies most Americans - especially those who don't realize oysters on the shell are more than raw, they are actually alive when you eat them, and sushi contains raw fish, at least if it is good sushi - but it is totally delicious, albeit a bit high in fat and cholesterol. It is especially a treat for me since the premium herring they sell here is no longer exported, and really does not keep or freeze well, so this is the place.

Almost September, August in The Netherlands is chilly and wet, if I needed anything to remind me why I don't live here any more, but Leeuwarden is friendly and villagey, in ways I am no longer used to (and I never lived in smaller towns to begin with), it is fun and relaxing. I mostly relax people watching and realizing the enormous difference between small town Europe and anywhere else, ancient city centers - the weighing house in the marketplace here was built in 1590, after the one built in 1483 burnt down, and is still the core of the city center - around which the city grew for hundreds of years, layer by layer, like a thousand year onion. This kind of thing is probably special for your average American, but if you, like me, grew up among all this centuries old stuff, it isn't that special if you don't think about it.

This is a curious aspect of cultural understanding - Europeans, Asians, and Africans, have a homegrown realization they have been on their land for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, our ancestors are buried (more or less) where we live, it is all connected. It is all connected, the latest 3G service offering with the wooden ships that carried my ancestors to both the East Indies and to the Americas. Even when in the United States, living in Manhattan especially, I am all too aware it is a town my ancestors began (so to speak), and some of them may well be buried in the 17th century cemetery at the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow (Tarrytown, NY).

Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - Le$$ does not mean Lo$$, though - or does it?

Again, this isn't rampant anti-Americanism, but please don't tell me you're going to work on high speed trains, and then make $18 billion available nationwide - that won't even build one line, the 19 mile state of the art maglev line that connects Shanghai with its international airport cost some $1.8 billion to construct, and that train is based on existing German technology. More importantly, the two main profitable high speed rail networks - the Japanese Shinkanzen, and the French TGV - have been running since 1964 and 1981, respectively, they are profitable, and - most importantly - they come from countries that have a train manufacturing industry. Not only do we not have such an industry, I am seeling American "experts" opining high speed rail is "too expensive". I guess you've not been to the new Beijing and Shanghai stations and railway lines, built by - guess - French and German engineers. I guess they know how to do this, and we don't?

It was a strong realization I had when I first came to this country - in Europe, we spend years researching, planning, preparing and writing plans before we even build a prototype, in the United States we like to "build a 747 during takeoff" as a CEO I worked for put it, talking about a phone company we built. And he was right, and we do do that, successfully.

But that picture has changed. Europe has developed, through the European Union, additional ways of financing ventures, and there are plenty of examples of successful European products in use the world over. The predominant mobile telephpony technology, GSM, is European, somewhere between 80 and 90% of all mobile telephony systems worldwide are based on GSM, one of the two leading high speed train technologies, that of the TGV, is French - even Amtrak's Acela is based on this technology, although for some unfathomable reason the enabling aspect of the TGV, dedicated track, the United States did not buy, so the Acela is unable - dig that, unable - to run at high speeds (defined as the maximum achievable speed of the scheduled TGV trains in Europe, 250 mph, where the Acela can handle no more than 150 mph on Amtrak's existing track). In Europe, the train competes successfully with the plane - in the USA, it does not.

What bothers me most is that we in the United States don't seem to learn from "getting it wrong". Our last technological sucess story, that of Microsoft Windows, is likely to remain our only one. Yes, Android is doing well, but the majority of the world's phones, and the majority of the world's smartphones, are made by Nokia and RIM, neither is an American company, neither uses Android, and both have their own operating systems, finely integrated with their own hardware. Yes, Apple makes nice products. No, Apple does not have a commanding presence in the international marketplace - it does not compete on price.

And herein lies the secret - Apple satisfies its stockholders, its followers, it manages all of its operations in ways that maximize returns. From, a business perspective, that is completely wonderful - but if you need to ensure that governments and enterprises have secure, reliable communications, it is not so good. Then, you really only have the one choice - Blackberry, a company at least as singleminded as Apple is, with one difference - like BMW, it is driven and run by engineers, who do what they do best, innovate and create.

Spotsy, August 17, 2010 - Le$$ is better than nothing, though.

I hope you don't find this too much of a weird jump, but I am taking you from the just discussed hot water supply heat pump to the Russian space capsule. Why? Because they are both very good examples of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" technologies. Think about it - our vaunted high technology Space Shuttle is going the way of the Dodo and the Concorde, while the Soyuz is ferrying American "astronauts" to the International Space Station. Not because it is cheaper, no, we do this because the United States, today, does not have anything capable of flying into Earth orbit and back. Nothing. Nada. Not even a freakin' Ford Focus on steroids. Nothing. And nobody has gotten fired over this small oversight.

The thermal water heater I just installed (see my August 12 entry, below) is based on the air conditioner, first commercialized in 1902. That Soyuz capsule first flew in 1968. The very efficient clean burning EPA Wood Stove I found in my house when I bought it is based on a 1742 re-firing design by Benjamin Franklin (yes, the same). Curiously, pollution and environmental issues have come full circle to the point that my burning wood to heat my home is now considered environmentally friendly (using an EPA rules wood stove compliant with 1990 updates to the Clean Air Act).

I am saying is that in many cases, mature technologies offer reliable longer-term solutions and should not be ignored when we are looking for problem solutions. I have been amazed, recently, by the level of ignorance in the American mobile telephony forums, having had a close look at several of them with T-Mobile, the company whose cellular service I use. In particular with the advanced "smart" phones using the Google Android operating system, the level of misunderstanding and misinformation by its users beggars belief. The vast majority of people posting in these forums have absolutely no clue of what they are talking about, no expertise, no real understanding of the device they're using, and what is even more amazing, they have absolutely no desire to learn about that device, simply copy misunderstandings from one website to another, spearheaded by people that post on purportedly "expert" websites, whose experience generally ranges from little to none - unless you accept that using a handphone you've never seen before for 24 hours entitles you to "expertise". A handheld computing device running a crimped version of Linux designed by a database management company shouldn't really be that hard to understand, should it? Unless, of course, you know nothing about search engines, UNIX, spread spectrum radio or analog/digital conversion.

How far off base these folks really are you can see in this New York Times article, note the comments from Deborah Hopkins, Citigroup's "innovation officer", whatever that is. She moved from Citigroup's traditional base, New York City, where their development labs were packed in a tall green building in Brooklyn for many years, to Silicon Valley, the one place on Earth where innovation isn't done any more. Innovation, today, is done in China, India, Hong Kong, and Singapore. It is done by people in the remaining growth markets, which are for now all in Asia, Africa bringing up the next phase. Apart from anything else, Americans aren't particularly adoptive of new technologies, and apparently Ms. Hopkins is unaware that most manufacturers (American ones too!) introduce new products outside of the United States first - some never even make it here, as they're not always well suited for the American consumer.

So not only do we not have a spaceship that replaces the Shuttle, we haven't resurrected the manned capsules we used to send astronauts to the moon in, the only difference being that the Soviets kept them in service, and we put them in the Smithsonian (the Soviets did too, apparently they decided one does not exclude the other). I don't mean to create a long list of "American negatives", but these are things we used to be able to do, right? How is it that the Russians, who went through a recession much worse than we did, when they lost Communism, still are able to launch major booster rockets and put manned capsules in orbit - no, better, they have fully automated capsules, a technology spun off to deliver cargo to the space station, as well as a rescue capsule for the researchers that are on board of the ISS. The Chinese Shenzou capsule? Based on Soyuz, not on Apollo. Then I look at this AirTap thing, a half developed piece of American technology that would be capable of reducing America's energy consumption significantly, except: nobody has bothered to invest enough and turn it into a viable product. It works very well, mine has been running now for 117 hours - 5 days - from the look of it (but I will be reporting usage in more detail when I get statistically valid data) its efficiency equates to a usage of about $4 worth of electricity per month average to heat water with this contraption. That has to be cheaper than conventional electric, propane, town gas, or rubbing sticks together.

Why am I griping? I personally came to this country with a purpose, a goal, moving here from the UK in 1985, part of the British brain drain, when thousands of British entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists fled Thatcherite Britain for the United States. I came to a country where anything was possible, where "we make boyhood dreams come true", where there were endless possibilities and rivers of money to make "it" happen. And I participated, built, helped make some of that magic happen, helped dream. But now I am on the other side of that particular run (not my first run, not my last) and I find that America seems to have lost its way. It's bogged down in partisan bullshit, mudslinging, the worst racism I have seen in decades, multinationals losing rivers of money attempting to consolidate their positions - remember the '80s, the '90s, when we went "out there" to start new enterprises and spread our technologies? Guess what - we sold the enterprises, others are reaping the benefits, and we wasted the money back home expanding markets that had been stagnant for years, markets that would implode. Now, the latest technologies aren't introduced here any more, and the latest Buick is designed and built in Germany and sells very well - in China, while IBM is moving some of its American developers to work in its labs in ... India. Note my BlackBerry Bold 9700, top left - that is a Canadian GSM phone running on German cellular service roaming on Japanese WCDMA service - not an American phone using American service roaming in Japan.

Don't get me wrong - I appreciate what President Obama is trying to do, in boosting the economy. But in order to have an economy, you've got to have something to sell. So we sold education. Now, the students have all gone home, and they don't need us any more. They are rolling their own America.

Spotsy, August 12, 2010 - Le$$ is More (Hot Water)

As I mentioned recently, I ordered the AirTap heat pump for hot water tanks, which arrived a couple of weeks ago, only now did my contractor Dan and I have time to work on installing it. The good news: it works! - and the bad news: it isn't half as simple to install as the manufacturer's website wants you to think.... I still like it, just the idea of heating water using a 600 watt / 115 VAC heat pump, rather than a pair of heating elements that consume 4,500 watts / 240 VAC, which is fifteen times as much, puts a smile on my face.

The way a home tank water heater works is aimed primarily at producing a good amount of hot water for a family of four in a jiffy. There are, as you know, other ways of heating water - tankless water heaters (we call those "geysers" back in Europe), furnace water heaters, etc. But America is generally quite a wasteful place, not too concerned with the way it uses energy. By comparison, a 6,400 watt @ 240 VAC (30 amp) tankless electrical water heater would be equivalent in output to the 4,500 watt tank heater - the 1,900 watt discrepancy is the amount of extra power you need to have "instantaneous" hot water, but then you have no storage and water line losses with a tankless device.

Using a heat pump for this purpose does have a few drawbacks: the things are big, or, at least, not small, they are noisy, think refrigerator without insulation, and they produce a lot less heat than a heating element, so take much more time to heat an entire tank of water.

The cool aspect is that a heat pump will deliver some 1,200 watts of heat out of the 600 watts of electricity it consumes (just to use the simple comparison between heat pump and space heater / cooler), and that it runs more efficiently as it isn't trying to heat 40 or 50 gallons of water in five minutes. What that means is that for you (parents, two kids, all in the bathroom in the same half hour) to use the heat pump and save some money you have to buy the largest water heater you can find (gas or electrical doesn't matter, since you won't be using its built in heat source!). If I compare the 50 gallon tank with 4,500 watt heating elements I was using, that heated the entire 50 gallons to 100 degrees in an hour. By comparison, the 40 gallon tank I put in its place, with the 600 watt heat pump, heats 40 gallons of water to around 95 degrees in four hours. Umm, that is 2.4 kilowatts, instead of 7.2. Or 30%. A.K.A. 70% less. But not as quick as what you are used to. On the other hand, if you have this contraption installed in the house (as opposed to the attic or the basement), and you normally use air conditioning during the summer months, your hot water will be entirely free. That is not a joke, the waste product of the AirTap is cold air, it is a heat pump, after all, so for the A/C months all you are doing with it is helping to cool your house, by transferring some of the summer heat into the hot water tank.

Replacing the hot water tank was not planned, thankfully not as expensive as I had feared, and Dan figured the old one had been used without water filters by the previous owners, and, from its weight, felt like it was pretty full of sediment. Since I have installed a full set of filters and a new acid control tank, replacing the hot water tank probably was a good idea anyway. But again, people: a 40 or 50 gallon hot water tank with heat pump is not big enough for a family. Trust me. I've had wives a 50 gallon tank wasn't big enough for. I am still working on figuring out what the hottest setting is for this device, so come back and I'll tell you in a week or so - remember, it is a heat pump, it does not have the capacity nor the physical ability to get as hot as a heating element can.

What is does not do is work right out of the box, it is a true DIY-device. When I tried to install it on my existing tank (originally installed 3/15/2001) it would not "go", as the heat exchanger, at about 3/4 inch, is too thick to go into the hot water exhaust port on my 50 gallon Whirlpool tank. An hour, and a trip to Home Depot, and $248 later, we discovered the hot water nipple on a new 40 gallon GE tank was really hard to dislodge, and as the nipple on the cold water port was taller and therefore easier to grip and turn, I decided to install the heat exchanger on the cold water side, rather than the hot water side. After all, I reasoned, the heat exchanger coil sits inside the tank, on the bottom, so which way it gets there really doesn't matter - in fact, the temperature probe probably works better in the cold water inlet. If nothing else, the cold water inlet is more likely to get the 15 feet of heat exchanger tubing to the bottom of the tank than the hot water outlet tubing is.

Time will tell, but that is how we installed it, and it seems to be working fine (looking forward to my first shower with the new tank, in the morning). If you feel like emulating my installation, pleeeeze remember I have not connected the tank's heating elements to the mains, my installation is very unlikely to be up to code, but since there is no heavy duty 240VAC power line attached, I am safe. I put a power meter in the line, so I can see how much it uses, and for now the drain goes into a bucket, so I can verify how much condensation is produced. So it does work, but if you're expecting a smooth out-of-the-box install, don't bother, it isn't a mature product - probably will never be. It is officially "green", so tax deductible, it comes with an official lab certificate you have to have on file to take the deduction. You may not even need Dan, I did because my tank is under the stairs and there wasn't enough headroom for the entire assembly, so he needed to do some carpenter magic and move light fittings, and he helped with the water conduits and with replacing the tank.

While I have been quite slow dealing with my home improvement projects, they are sort of getting done. I can't quite figure out whether they are for my benefit, or aimed more at increasing the eventual resale value of the house, but it is clear that "green" improvements have both tax deduction and saleability benefits.

It is not that I think I will save huge amounts of electricity doing these improvements. Until I replace the heat exchangers with geothermal units, in particular the cost of summer cooling won't really change hugely. Winter is pretty much covered as my five acres gives me enough recovery that I can use my own trees as firewood.

For what it is worth, two 40 lb cylinders of propane gas have lasted me from 5/21/2009 to the weekend of 8/6/2010. Used with my 18kw standby generator, that is, just for those occasions when there have been power failures, like last Sunday, when a storm caused a five hour power failure. The cost, then, is kind of negligible, $56 worth of propane gas. I have not kept track of running hours over this 14 month period, but am firmly convinced the generator would have gone through a lot more money had I run it on gasoline. Propane, as I understand it, delivers less power but is much more efficient to burn, and with 18 kilowatts I have more power than I need, and therefore run, as I think is proven, much more efficiently. I am very impressed, and can only recommend that if you are thinking about buying an emergency power generator, get one that handles multiple fuels. Propane burns clean - little pollution, the engine stays cleaner and runs cooler, the fuel is much safer to store than gasoline, I could go on. The generators are a little more expensive, see here, but you get that back in lower fuel cost (the empty 40lb cylinders themselves were $65 a piece).

Spotsy, August 7, 2010 - Addicted to Statistics

It occurred to me, the other day, that we are far too reliant on statistics. We have more data available to us than ever before, and it is a very attractive idea in science to use that data to extrapolate trends, causes, and consequences. I got to thinking about this is because I stopped smoking in June, after 42 years, and every single person, including my own doctor, I spoke to about this absolutely insisted that I must remove anything that would remind me of smoking from my house. That includes anything that might smell of smoke, that includes my cigarettes, that includes my ashtrays, anything and everything. As a consequence I spent some time over the past few weeks trying to explain to everybody that that's not the way it works with me, and that led me to ask why everybody assumes it does work that way? Is there any scientific evidence that someone who gives up some kind of addiction and doesn't remove the tool for that addiction from their environment, will relapse? And is there any evidence that if they relapse, the reason for the relapse is the fact that they had this stuff available to them? I don't believe it, because I've had my cigarettes and my clean ashtrays sitting on the sideboard about 10 yards from where I write this, available to me since June 23, and I think it's very good discipline for my brain to know that they are there, to know that they are available to me, and that I continue not smoking by sheer willpower, which I think is the way you overcome addiction. I just don't believe that you overcome an addiction to taking the offending substance away from someone.

Make sense? Let me go to another example. Somebody is diagnosed with a form of cancer, and they are told it is a stage II cancer. What does that mean? For a doctor, the staging determines how far the cancer has spread from its original site. This presupposes that the doctor knows where the cancer started, which in itself is an issue, because we don't really know enough about cancer to be able to say with a hundred percent accuracy where a particular cancer started in the body. We can make an educated guess, or a good supposition, but you have no way of proving that a cancer that is diagnosed in the left elbow did not start in the right toe. This is just some information that you do not have, that you can only assume, and sometimes as a medical person you can even prove.

So for the medical scientist the statistic means they can classify the cancer, and that enables them to stick it somewhere in their database, and assign an urgency to it in terms of type of treatment and in terms of when they need to revisit whatever it is that went wrong with the patient, and which secondary physicians they need to involve. To the patient, the classification means that they think they have some way of assessing how "serious" their illness is. And I dare say that in most patients that number, assigned by a doctor for classification purposes, is used to predict the possibility of death. That's a problem. Because with exception of the very final stages of the cancer there isn't any way anybody can predict how long you are going to live, what is going to kill you, how severe this cancer is going to get, and once the medical profession gets involved and starts treating the patient the entire predictive pattern is skewed completely - there is no more reliable prediction because you've just screwed up the only method that you had of assessing progression.

In other words, what they'd like you to believe, is that since I keep cigarettes and ashtrays around, I have a greater chance of relapsing into my smoking addiction. And that means that as far as scientists are concerned, if I do not relapse, I am outside of the norm - if you set a norm and someone does not conform "they" are at fault, not your supposition. Next step, because we now use immensely powerful "connected computers", I may not end up being an exception to the norm, but my very own statistic, because in the past we could only make comparisons with other patients who had stopped smoking in Northern Virginia, but today's tools and telecommunications means smoking cessation patients in Outer Mongolia can now be included in the statistic - which means you can create three different norms out of one - one together, and two singles. And I am seriously beginning to wonder how valid these statistics really are - and what they are valid for...

Spotsy, August 2, 2010 - Phones and the City

Did you see the press about the United Arab Emirates as well as Saudi Arabia and India wanting access to the encryption algorithms RIM (Blackberry) uses to ensure your connections are safe? One reason I love the Blackberry is that it is a hugely secure platform. But if you want to monitor traffic in your country all you need to do is legislate that your carriers can't use BIS (which runs over RIM's servers) but BES (which means you buy server software from RIM and run it yourself on your own hardware) and now you're in charge. So what is the point? What problem are these folks trying to solve? Do their citizens perhaps not want to use BES? Do they use Blackberrys because they don't like their governments spying on them?

I miss the city. There, I've said it, I've been thinking about this for quite some time, it doesn't mean I don't like the countryside on my five wonderful Virginia acres, but I do miss the city. I had been thinking that was the case, and then when I was back to Beijing, recently, walked out of my hotel, got on the subway, and went about my business, that ended up being kind of undeniable. So I am thinking that maybe it is time to do something about it, although I don't know what. I have been both blessed and cursed them that I have lived in some of the largest cities in the world, and that I know the joys and the vagaries of living in London and living in New York City, and knowing all that really doesn't help, because it doesn't tell me what I should be doing next. The problem with me is that I have led a really spoiled life as far as my environment is concerned, and that I know how wonderful it is to live in some of these really big places, and I have known for quite some time that as I get older I certainly do not want to continue to live in the countryside. There is nothing wrong with the countryside, but I see the elderly (which I am not) people retiring to what is euphemistically known as "adult communities", and there's one thing I know for sure, there is no way in hell I'm going to eventually live in one.

Maybe it is simply because I have the experience that it is very pleasant and can be very sociable to live in an apartment in a large city, walk to the shops and have some ad hoc human interaction, I don't know....

On a completely different note, not too long ago a gentleman by the name of Theo Albrecht passed away in Germany. Not well known in the United States, the Albrecht brothers owned a supermarket chain specializing in discounted groceries that pretty much covers Europe, and I know about the this since I read Dutch and German newspapers, and I see their stores whenever I visit my family there. There were notices in the international newspapers when Mr. Albrecht passed away, because he was enormously rich, and the reason why American newspapers and other media paid attention to his death turned out to be the fact that the Aldi chain has stores in the United States as well, not only under its own name, but owns the Trader Joe's specialty stores as well (where I haven't shopped since I moved away from downstate New York). Since I remembered seeing an Aldi store not too far from my home somewhere along Route 1, a store that I never even knew was actually part of the same chain, I decided to go take a look and shop there for a change, and found that it is indeed the Aldi, and honest to god dirt cheap, even if you compare it with Wal-Mart, which has a branch not too far away. It isn't a small unit, either, it just isn't that well known - Aldi has over a 1,000 stores in the United States (that's the Aldi brand without Trader Joe's), compare that with Dutch retail giant Ahold, which owns Stop & Shop and Giant, amongst others, but has just a little over 700 stores in the US. No, Aldi is closely held, no stock, no annual report, nuttin'. Aldi imports some of its own products from Europe, and this leads to the best Muesli I have found anywhere, and 80% cocoa chocolate bars that are too good to be true, and dirt cheap to boot. Supposedly, 80% is hilariously heart healthy, too!

Spotsy, July 30, 2010 - Facebook And Other Deception

If you thought you were out of the woods with Facebook, I am afraid you have another surprise coming. After all of the noise that occurred when Facebook started implementing these "like" buttons at other websites, it hit on another way of doing things that it hasn't published, that third-party websites either condone or aren't even aware of. You can see this very easily for yourself, go ahead and log into Facebook, then move along to any other website that you want to go to. Now go to CNN.com, and scroll down until you see the Facebook login area on the right. What you see here is code from CNN, this is actually the code that CNN has allowed Facebook to embed in its pages, and what that code does is try to access your profile on Facebook. Whether that is possible depends on several factors, first of all if you are logged out this code cannot access anything, and if you did not log out (and most people don't) what the Facebook code embedded in this CNN page can do is dependent on your privacy settings. In the worst-case scenario, if you have set the platform settings in Facebook to "allow", you'll will now be logged into Facebook through the CNN page, and CNN and Facebook are exchanging information about you, and about your friends.

So the old situation that you knew about, where you have to actively click on something like the "like" link, is no longer relevant. Today, if you arrive at a website, like the particular U.K. Telegraph website to the left, Facebook's own code can start sharing information about you without you "having to do anything", or indeed without you being able to do anything about it. Test it for yourself, go back and forth between Facebook and CNN, once while you have left Facebook logged in, and once while you have manually logged out of Facebook. You do need to uncheck "log me in automatically" on the Facebook login page, because if you use that, it probably doesn't matter whether you log out or not, Facebook's code will just log you back in. As you can see to the left, you're admonished to "use Facebook platform", and I can't say it is very clear from this what that is, or does..

Although it is hard to create rules for these activities, rules that protect the consumer, it is clear that the trend is to introduce a simple expedient (click "like") and then sneak a much more invasive piece of code into the space thus created. Somebody ought to ask questions about that concept.

I have, in principle, a bunch of other technology projects under my wing, but really nothing I can bore you with. There are a few people at the T-Mobile forums griping about only being able to get UMA service if they buy smartphones - see my June 25 blog entry for an explanation of what UMA is and does - so I went and bought some pre-smart UMA phones, with the intention of testing them and then putting them on Amazon or Ebay, letting T-Mobile subscribers use UMA without having to shell out for a data plan, but I got kinda waylayed by the medical stuff, that plus the fact that some of these phones, though brand new, don't work right, so have to be exchanged. Then, I increasingly want to open a case with the Stock Exchange Commission about the huge number of "analysts" that assess and influence the stock market, even though they have no expertise in the areas they supposedly are expert in. Came across a prime example - Fortune columnist Philip Elmer-DeWitt quotes Shaw Wu, who is with Kaufman Bros., here, about the use of the 2100 MHz frequency in iPhones, and how that makes the iPhone suitable for T-Mobile. Guess what - Mr. Wu has absolutely no clue of what that frequency does in the iPhone, what it does with T-Mobile, and if this man is an "analyst", how do we allow people like him to influence the stock market? What is he doing directing strategies with an investment bank? I am serious - you can make allowances all you like, halfassed journalists are bad enough, but an analyst? It either means these analyses don't much matter, or that you should walk away from Kaufman Bros. very fast. I don't know which, don't get me wrong....

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming, which has the Doctor having it off with another hologram, with some lovely doo-wop in the background.... wouldn't mind a touch of the doo-wop meself, to be honest.

Spotsy, July 24, 2010 - Harry Potter on your HD?

I have some HD-DVD movies - the old high resolution format that was superseded by Blu-Ray - and noticed the other day there is actually quite a library of movies on Amazon, I have a Buffalo external drive for computer use that will play HD-DVD disks, as well as play and write Blu-Ray disks. Amazon is actually selling an older RCA HDV5000 HD DVD Player cheaply, so I got that (a Toshiba version is here), and ordered some more classics, like the Harry Potter Gift Set, which costs under $30 in HD-DVD, but a massive $170 in Blu-Ray - same movies, same resolution, same Dolby DTS 5.1, in my case the set with the HD-DVD drive came to less than the Blu-Ray set by itself... If you like HD classics in your library, to go with your 50" plasma display, movies like Blade Runner, A Clockwork Orange, concerts, what have you,, this is a cheap way of getting them. Don't forget to visit other Amazon countries as well - they have even more titles, and you can order from them with your Amazon US account, using your Amazon US login - check here for the UK. The French and German Amazon sites, if you speak the language, have even more HD-DVD movies, and if you are lucky enough to spend time in various places in Asia, go to the mall, to the floor where they sell CDs and DVDs, and you will find they have hundreds and hundreds of titles, and are still producing new HD-DVDs.

I have to apologize for being a bit erratic in my "blogkeeping" - life is being disrupted a bit by so many changing routines, too many unexpected happenigs, stuff. I mean, what else do you call two broken down cars that need towing in one week, followed by surgery? I am just tallying up the bills from my Asia trip, combined with the car repairs, flying in niece F. in the middle of summer, and then I just got the hospital bill... That was a surprise in itself, they had billed me ahead of time, but now I see they added stuff to the insurance coverage, I have to talk to Blue Cross to find out what that is, too much jargon by half. Real Estate tax, car insurance, home insurance, it does not seem to end.

Not really much else to report. Apart from the relentless heat (my weather alarm just went off to announce a heat alert for tomorrow, that is kind of unusual) the summer has been uneventful, even my surgery was more or less a blip on the event horizon. Stopping smoking is probably the real biggie - I have just taken off my last nicotine patch (I hope), after about a month, I do hope that's the end of it, it somehow seems uneventful, after 40+ years of smoking. Certainly can tell I am getting more air, when I work out, and thankfully the predictions about me coughing my lungs out as my breathing apparatus recovers have not so far come true. In the hospital, yes, but there was the added "stimulation" of a breathing tube that was in my windpipe for some 3+ hours. That hurt for a week or more, but for now, I am fine, on just gallons of coffee.

Spotsy, July 14, 2010 - So what laptop to pick in Beijing or Washington?

Before I lose track, there have been three noteworthy computers to write about, these past few months. One is the ASUS Eee PC 1005PE, a cute blue netbook I brought back from Beijing, and eventually sent on to niece A., as its 1024x600 LED(!) screen is very good, but just not sufficient for my use, primarily since the size does not let me run a brokerage application. Other than that, this thing handles Windows 7 Home Premium very well, even though it won't take more than 2 Gb of RAM (I tried). To the right you'll note it fits beautifully in a China Southern Air cattle class seat. Most amazingly, running at full tilt it will still deliver somewhere between 8 and 10 hours of use on a single charge, which is truly amazing - in my case, the battery easily lasted the nine hours it took me to get from Beijing via Guangzhou to Jakarta, Indonesia.

I have finally ordered the AirTap A7, a heat pump for heating water, intended to for the serious D-I-Y guy or gal, you mount it on top of your existing hot water tank, connect it to a regular power outlet, and then are able to provide home hot water without using the heating elements in the tank. As it is a heat pump using only 600 watts @ 110VAC (as opposed to the 4,500 watts @ 240VAC the built in elements use), it should be much (much, much) cheaper to use, although it will take more time to heat the same amount of water. That may or may not work when you heat water for a family, but then you can always turn the heating element back on if you're suddenly in need of a lot of hot water. For one or two people, or if you have a huge water tank, I expect it will save me money on my annual electricity consumption. That's the right way to calculate savings on heat pumps (v. air conditioners), low energy bulbs (CFLs, I doubt an LED bulb will save you any money, considering their cost), and the like, by the way, you look at it over a season (6 months) or, preferably, over an entire year. Shorter periods just have too many variables. I'll show you how it installs, and in a couple of months, I'll show you if it provides any calculable savings.

As I am writing this I am watching the Dutch national soccer team making its triumphal rentrée into Amsterdam. Even though they did not manage to win the World Cup, the Netherlands has morphed into a sea of orange, there are upwards of half a million celebrants in Amsterdam, considering the size of my home country, 3% of the entire population is not a bad turnout. Sheesh.

Back to the computing devices I was telling you about, I ended up buying cousin T. a Dell Inspiron i1545 laptop, which amazed me in terms of its computing power, ease of use and screen - a 15.6 inch very bright LCD screen, the laptop itself really a fully capable PC in a portable form factor. The Dell dealer in Beijing that sold it to me provided a full legal Chinese/English version of Windows 7 Ultimate, terrific deal, and by the time I got to Indonesia, picked up the 3G modem I had asked my friends in Jakarta to snarf for me, and got it running at my cousin's house, he got onto Skype to talk to his children in Europe in no time flat - amazing, considering he is 85 years old. See it and him with grand niece M. in action to the left, on an XL 3G Skype live video call between Jakarta, Indonesia, and Leeuwarden, The Netherlands. Of the laptops I have worked on in the past couple of months, the Dell is probably the best choice if you are looking for a fully capable desktop replacement you can travel with, and it comes with 4Gb of memory installed (and a 64 bit version of Windows!), so you really do not need to upgrade this at all.

Of course, having bought laptops for what seems half my family, I ended up not buying one for myself, a problem as in Beijing I had handed my superb Acer Aspire AS1410 off to colleague and friend A., who took it back to Vietnam, where he works, and from there to Australia, where he lives. That Acer is unarguably the best all around laptop I've come across in many years, provided you make sure it is running 64 bit Windows 7, and max it out to the 8 Gb of memory it can handle. So I had no choice but to run out to Best Buy right after I got home from Tokyo, and look for a new laptop for myself. I ended up compromising on the HP Pavilion dv4-2145dx at Best Buy. It is not quite as portable as the Acer, or quite as powerful as the Dell, but jampacked with multimedia features neither of those have, and capable of driving a 1080p High Definition display and a digital Dolby audio decoder (you will need the QuickDock Docking Stationto get Dolby output) at full tilt. Very impressed, especially considering the price, I payed less than $500 for it - as always, I upgraded the operating system to Windows 7 Ultimate (it came with 64bit Windows 7 Home Premium, which really is sufficient for non-networked use), and maxed out the memory, which added about $300. As with most laptops, this unit will take 8 Gb of RAM, and then it flies.

Spotsy, July 9, 2010 - Beijing Dichotomy

As I mentioned in my previous posting, I had a rather diverse past few weeks. From having to postpone my Beijing trip, because my passport only had five months left on it, to arranging for cousin T. in Jakarta to have a 3G data connection to replace his slow ADSL, I was in many places doing things related to other places. In Beijing, I blew up my Indonesian SIM card by trying it in a Chinese USB Modem, which, in hindsight, was a stupid thing to do, because China Mobile uses TDMA based 3G, very incompatible with the UMTS my Indonesian 3G provider uses.

China is a very different place, today, than it was even a couple of years ago. The overriding impression, today, is that it is bottoming out. Two years ago, any technology product you bought in China would be a Chinese version of something made for the export market. That's history. I bought a number of products made for the Chinese market, by Chinese for Chinese. Small changes, but nevertheless - a wireless router for which no English language firmware load exists, kitchenware made of bamboo, something the Chinese did not have processing machines for even a couple of years ago. Both cheap, as the Chinese do not have huge disposable incomes as of yet.

The dichotomy that struck me, though, is that the vast majority of young, educated Chinese in technical professions don't speak English. It is as if this is a deliberate policy on the part of the Chinese government, and it is puzzling. Everywhere you go, young people wanting to get ahead know you have to begin by learning English, because that is the language that ties professionals together. Doesn't matter if you are an actor, architect, call center employee, programmer or an accountant, learn English and you can trade, move countries, communicate with yor peers, what have you. Except if you are Chinese, because if you're Chinese chances are you can neither speak nor read English, and your universe is restricted to China. If you could Twitter or Facebook, or access Wikipedia, you could try and learn English, but those communications tools are largely blocked by the Chinese government, so you can't learn that way either.

I just can't figure out what the purpose is of these restrictions. It won't help China move forward, it won't help the rest of the world work with the Chinese, and with the upsurge of kids in the West learning Chinese the problem will get exacerbated. Pretty soon, our youngsters will be able to understand the Chinese, and the Chinese won't be able to understand our youngsters. How is that going to help China? It really struck me as unusual, this time around, to some extent because I spent days browsing through the huge technology warehouses that make up the Zhongguancun area in Beijing. Block after block with floor after floor of nothing but electronics, from computer systems to any electronics component you can imagine. Wedged in between two major universities, Zhongguancun has enough gear to supply much of the American East Coast. But: nobody speaks English, getting an English language version of Microsoft Windows is a battle, and here it becomes clear the Chinese have been producing for their own market for a while now.

Most importantly, and, for me, quite unexpectedly, I was able to quit smoking, thanks to an anaesthesiologist at Virginia Hospital Center. As she was going over the anaesthesia for my recent surgery (which entailed a tube down my throat for close to three hours) she warned me I'd be uncomfortable because of that, and said not smoking would make that even worse. She offered to give me a nicotine patch for the night, to help me sleep (which in the end the morphine took care of handsomely), something I didn't think I needed - I routinely survive 30 hour air connections without pining. Then I thought "why not?" and asked for a patch in the evening. One thing led to another, I was given an extra patch when I was discharged, and, long story short, I haven't smoked since June 23rd. It was one of those things - I knew I would have to at some point, and this was an opportune moment, with the medical support, niece F. with me for a few days, and having just come back from a long overseas trip. Teehee. After 40+ years. I am now officially a boring person. I don't smoke, I don't drink, but I will not give up sex.

Back home as I write this, much of it seems to be rapidly receding into the past, as a Harry Potter rerun unfolds across my HD screen. I am not sure why I am so fond of these movies, the inventiveness, the splendid combination of film and animation, and the consistency of the same team of actors, more so, perhaps, than in most other feature films made in the past couple of decades. The Queen's English, of course, will always be a homey thing to me, after so many years in the UK and in the colonies. I was just remembering waking up in the hospital, in English, even though niece F. is Dutch, and I had been speaking some Dutch with her. But my brain has gotten very firmly rewired, for me to come out of anesthesia in English. Cool, I suppose, at the same time proof one can really be reprogrammed.

Spotsy, July 1, 2010 - Home, home, and home again

I was, originally, going to do my China and Indonesia trips, as usual write my blog a couple of weeks ahead, do a travelogue, come home again, prepare for surgery, and hadn't much thought about the time after that. But as it turned out, the entire almost 2 month period became much more compressed and intense than I had anticipated, and I did different things from what I had planned. In Beijing, I ended up buying, converting and configuring two laptops, one of which had to be ready for the next leg of my trip, to Jakarta, Indonesia, while I had to get the other ready to use for myself, as the Acer I brought would be picked up by friend and former colleague A., who wanted a type of system and configuration he could not get in Asia.

Then, my canoe entered the rapids. Although I knew that my elderly cousin T. was in hospital in Jakarta, after a stroke, he was released home while I was in China, his son and granddaughter left for home, and then he ended up back in the hospital, where he was when I arrived there. We had not seen each other in some 45 years, so that was pretty intense. Thankfully, his second hospitalization was not related to the stroke, so my fear of losing him abated somewhat, and we were able to bring him home during my stay.

Two weeks later, I was on a drip myself - while my surgery was planned, and the delay caused by my Asia trip sanctioned by my doctors, I had kind of pushed it away in my mind, and once I arrived home realized my niece would be arriving within days, to provide support while I was in Virginia Hospital Center. The whole thing kind of put me into a speed warp - niece F. had never visited the United States before, so I had to make some time to acquaint her with my American life, get her used to my cars, take her up to Northern Virginia so she'd have an idea where she was going, and make sure she knew where everything was in my house for every occasion from hitting the fridge to the code to my safe so she could find my living will.

It seemed like I ended up in the hospital really quickly after that, and the surgery was so fast and professional, I was on my way home, after a night's stay, before I knew it. Niece F., part of a segment of the Aartsen family I was completely unacquainted with until last summer, turned out to be a godsend, if only because she works in elder care and so isn't particularly alarmed or cowed by a hospital environment, sedated uncles or surgical clamps. Virginia Hospital Center made arrangements for her to spend the night in my hospital room, greatly appreciated as I live some 70 miles away, and so it was all, umm, uneventful is probably not the right word, but it was as pleasant as having invasive surgery is going to get.

Regular visitors will know I don't go overboard documenting my private life - partly an outcrop of the need for security in my job, partly because I don't believe in plastering your undies all over the internet, but I will make a few exceptions in coming postings, as I have been very impressed with some of the recent experiences I have had - first and foremost, the quality of care in Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, which is incredible. But there are other interesting aspects too - cousin T., now living in Jakarta, Indonesia, still going strong at 85, his hospital experiences in what we've always considered a third world country, my and my family's efforts to get him on Skype, so that particularly his children and grandchildren in the Netherlands can more easily keep in touch with him, and with that, the state of the art in mobile telephony and mobile internet. The American press, focused as it is on the stagnant U.S. market, and gadgets like the iPhone, has completely lost track of where and how the real technological advances are happening, and that is not here, not even in Europe.

So it'll be a little helter skelter - some pictures I am posting here, meeting cousin Ted after 45 years, top right, and some technicians at putting my cousin's laptop together at a Dell reseller in Beijing. I have barely used my cameras this trip, just my new BlackBerry Bold 9700 and Twitter/Twitpic, a revelation in terms of documenting travel and life. Keep coming back :)

Arlington, June 25, 2010 - UMA / WiFi calling

I promised a while ago that I would report back on the T-Mobile USA data roaming issue the first time I took my new Blackberry Bold 9700 abroad. Apart from offering UMA, a.k.a WiFi calling, as well as 3G, T-Mobile offers a $19.99 "email roaming plan" for Blackberry users, which I had been told includes unlimited data roaming access abroad. I took the rep's declaration with a bit of salt, but as you will read in this report, she was absolutely right, I just needed to divorce "data" from "download".

Here is the down and dirty:
I have a grandfathered original UMA plan across my acount, so I am not putting minutes in here, since that wouldn't help y'all: UMA now incurs minutes out of your available pool. I was in Beijing, Huangzhou, Tokyo, and Jakarta, Indonesia. In Indonesia, my hotel had WiFi. In Beijing, my hotel had hardwired free internet - I knew this, so went to Zhongguancun (subway stop of the same name), where most of the electronics malls are, and scored an 802.11n WiFi router. Cost: $20. This is not for the faint of heart - 99% of the equipment sold in Zhongguancun is Chinese only, and I can't read Chinese to save my life. In Tokyo, I used my AT&T Global Network account, which I have as an internet backup, nodes all over the US, and all over the globe. This requires a login, but the Blackberry Bold 9700 lets you do that. Japan is end-to-end paid WiFi.

In Beijing, Huangzhou, and Jakarta, all Starbucks have free internet. Ask for the WEP code at the counter. Good place to go if you're pining for a bacon 'n egg sandwich, which aren't that ubiquitous out there. $3 (for the sandwich ;) )

Note that UMA is not a calling-only service. UMA emulates both GSM and GPRS, at WiFi speeds. That means you can tether your laptop to your Blackberry whem it is connected to WiFi, and access the internet via the TMO network - on the 9700, you can make calls and get email at the same time. You're effectively tunneling into Washington State.

Q: Why would you do such a thing, when you have WiFi available?
A: Because it is encrypted, and secure. Your laptop is not on a public hotel or lounge or Starbucks network. Not only that, but it is the only way to access Facebook, Twitter, and other stuff when you are behind the Great Mandarin Firewall.

The $19.99 Blackberry International email add-on works for all of the email (pop and imap) accounts you have set up. It also works for most data access, from the smartphone perspective. It works for Twitter. It works for LinkedIn. It works for Browser. I saw two (that was all) data roaming charges, which I assume had to do with the Blackberry OS update that was broadcast while I was there. This made me really unhappy, because when I opened the email, walking down the street, the link forced me to download, I could not tell it "we'll do it later". I was on EDGE, too. Had to sit and drink coffee, making sure not to lose my EDGE connection, for almost 40 minutes. All data use is covered, IOW, but not downloads - note on your usage overview, in "My T-Mobile", data and downloads are separate entries. You now know why. Cost:

$24.53

I had three voice calls, incoming, while out roaming (i.e., not on UMA) in China and Japan. Cost:

$12.27

One was American Airlines, telling me, in Tokyo, before boarding, what gate and baggage belt I'd arrive at in JFK. That was really cool.

Add to that the $19.99 cost of the International Email feature, which you can activate and deactivate per trip, and you can see that TMO offers, on the BlackBerry, an international data plan that is extremely affordable, and works very well. Especially in combination with UMA, and secure tethering, this is unbeatable for the traveler. You have to discipline those that call you on a regular basis to send you a text message or email when you are traveling and they want to talk to you, so you can call them when you're on UMA next, which can be as quick as the nearest hotel lobby or Starbucks. Sorry for the Starbucks advertising, but I gotta tell you that being able to head into one to make a couple calls back to the US while overseas is a pretty good way of getting your Java fix ;)

Caveat: I do not use GPS on my Blackberry, this because I have a Nokia Navigator, which has preloaded maps, and a built-in standalone GPS phone. I have a postpaid Asian SIM card in that phone, because I like to have a backup phone when I am abroad anyway, just in case, and because, in my case, it is cheaper for my Asian contacts to contact me on an Asian number - costs me $4 a month. GPS phones do data downloads on the fly, and are not real GPS devices, whatever anybody tells you, and that includes the Blackberrys. I am mentioning this because I use GPS worldwide, even China has extensive city maps you can buy now. You want to freak out Beijing and Jakarta cabbies, who don't speak English, bring your GPS.

In short, I have just had the lowest international roaming bill I have ever had.

Virginia Hospital Center, Arlington, VA, June 24, 2010 - Recovering from Surgery

Doing well, thanks, but it may be a few days before I am back in action. Kudos to doctors and staff in one of the best hospitals on my coast.

Beijing, June 13, 2010 - Beijing and the ladder

The hotel is exactly as I left it, a bit run down, all mod cons, spotlessly clean comfortable rooms with refrigerator and an electric kettle, good cheap food, a convenience store, free rental bicycles and a public internet PC in the lobby. The only difference is that some of the extra accoutrements that were available during the Olympics were clearly aimed at Western visitors, and have gone by the wayside. The business room still has free Internet, but the PC that was installed in business rooms is no longer part of the deal. Breakfast is not free, but now has to be paid for, not a real hardship at $1.30. But this hotel is impossible to beat, if you consider it is at a downtown location, inside the inner ring road, 10 minutes from a loop line subway station, 20 minutes from Tien An Men square, at $31 a night, which is less than many of us spend at home.

This trip is a little different from my previous one: since friend A. seems to have disappeared, I am on my own in terms of dealing with the Chinese language and getting around town. But you have to remember that I spent very large proportion of my life in very big cities, like London and New York, and I find that being in Beijing I pretty much go into automatic mode in terms of dealing with the cityscape. The city is the city is the city. And the Beijing city government has made life very easy for us. Just about everything they could, they have labeled in two languages, it could not be easier, if you take into account that the vast majority of Chinese do not speak one word of English. I very rarely go places where I don't even have a smattering of the language, but this is one, and even though I'm getting more familiar with the sounds, I don't have a clue what they mean. Having to learn this stuff is a scary thought, especially since I know that A. took two years of immersion just to get the point where she could make social conversation.

Apart from my love for Asia, which stems for the most part from my Dutch colonial background, I am particularly fascinated by China and other Asian countries because of the fact that the progression they have made from Third World countries to modern society is only just shy of miraculous. Nowhere is this more visible than in the way internet use has leapfrogged the high-speed wire straight into wireless broadband. Much of the time, half the passengers in a subway car are online on their handphones, chatting, reading, looking things up - mostly, I should add, on the relatively slow EDGE protocol. The difference with "us", however, is stark. There isn't a subway tunel, traffic tunnel, or underground office or store basement that does not have cellular service. You can stay online in a subway car for your entire journey. I don't know if this is a "food for the masses" scenario, but the Chinese government is doing something that will put China way over the top in terms of competition, and I guess those that govern us spend too much time watching biased reporting. The regulatory folks in China have speedily reacted to technology changes - China Mobile uses a home grown 3G solution, China Unicom has been told to switch to WCDMA under GSM, and hand off all (dying) CDMA and EVDO services to China Telecom. Smartphones, at every Chinese person's income level, are in enormous supply, while a prepaid SIM card costs 50 Yuan, or $7. A topup costs 100 Yuan, $16, enough for three hours of local calls, or up to an hour of international calls, and can be done online, from anywhere.

I am not necessarily painting China as paradise, but for the working man, it comes pretty close. Apart from the obvious political issues, the average Chinese have everything they need available to them cheaply, and those needs now include bank accounts, charge cards, mobile phones and broadband, and security. Yes, they're monitored, expected to toe the line - but again, I barely hear police sirens in the metropolis that Beijing is, and you will not get robbed, bothered or ripped off. Stop and look at your map, and a Chinese with even limited English will come over and ask if they can help you. Go to a store, and they will go out of their way to find somebody with five words of English so they can assist you. Friendly, helpful folk, in a metropolis of 16 million people. Try going walkies looking like a foreigner in Chicago in the middle of the night.

Beijing, June 13, 2010 - Beijing and the ladder

The hotel is exactly as I left it, a bit run down, all mod cons, spotlessly clean comfortable rooms with refrigerator and an electric kettle, good cheap food, a convenience store, free rental bicycles and a public internet PC in the lobby. The only difference is that some of the extra accoutrements that were available during the Olympics were clearly aimed at Western visitors, and have gone by the wayside. The business room still has free Internet, but the PC that was installed in business rooms is no longer part of the deal. Breakfast is not free, but now has to be paid for, not a real hardship at $1.30. But this hotel is impossible to beat, if you consider it is at a downtown location, inside the inner ring road, 10 minutes from the Andingmen loop line subway station, 20 minutes from Tien An Men square, at $31 a night, which is less than many of us spend at home.

This trip is a little different from my previous one: since friend A. seems to have disappeared, I am on my own in terms of dealing with the Chinese language and getting around town. But you have to remember that I spent very large proportion of my life in very big cities, like London and New York, and I find that being in Beijing I pretty much go into automatic mode in terms of dealing with the cityscape. The city is the city is the city. And the Beijing city government has made life very easy for us. Just about everything they could, they have labeled in two languages, it could not be easier, if you take into account that the vast majority of Chinese do not speak one word of English. I very rarely go places where I don't even have a smattering of the language, but this is one, and even though I'm getting more familiar with the sounds, I don't have a clue what they mean. Having to learn this stuff is a scary thought, especially since I know that A. took two years of immersion just to get the point where she could make social conversation.

Apart from my love for Asia, which stems for the most part from my Dutch colonial background, I am particularly fascinated by China and other Asian countries because of the fact that the progression they have made from Third World countries to modern society is only just shy of miraculous. Nowhere is this more visible than in the way internet use has leapfrogged the high-speed wire straight into wireless broadband. Much of the time, half the passengers in a subway car are online on their handphones, chatting, reading, looking things up - mostly, I should add, on the relatively slow EDGE protocol. The difference with "us", however, is stark. There isn't a subway tunel, traffic tunnel, or underground office or store basement that does not have cellular service. You can stay online in a subway car for your entire journey. I don't know if this is a "food for the masses" scenario, but the Chinese government is doing something that will put China way over the top in terms of competition, and I guess those that govern us spend too much time watching biased reporting. The regulatory folks in China have speedily reacted to technology changes - China Mobile uses a home grown 3G solution, China Unicom has been told to switch to WCDMA under GSM, and hand off all (dying) CDMA and EVDO services to China Telecom. Smartphones, at every Chinese person's income level, are in enormous supply, while a prepaid SIM card costs 50 Yuan, or $7. A topup costs 100 Yuan, $16, enough for three hours of local calls, or up to an hour of international calls, and can be done online, from anywhere.

I am not necessarily painting China as paradise, but for the working man, it comes pretty close. Apart from the obvious political issues, the average Chinese have everything they need available to them cheaply, and those needs now include bank accounts, charge cards, mobile phones and broadband, and security. Yes, they're monitored, expected to toe the line - but again, I barely hear police sirens in the metropolis that Beijing is, and you will not get robbed, bothered or ripped off. Stop and look at your map, and a Chinese with even limited English will come over and ask if they can help you. Go to a store, and they will go out of their way to find somebody with five words of English so they can assist you. Friendly, helpful folk, in a metropolis of 16 million people. Try going walkies looking like a foreigner in Chicago in the middle of the night.

Beijing, June 6, 2010 - Beijing is a great place to hang out.

After a fairly grueling 30 hour flight I am finally at my hotel in Beijing, I have stayed here before and am very happy to be back. The cab driver this time exactly the same thing the one before him did, he couldn't drive up to the hotel, because there is still construction going on around it, so while he was looking for a way to drive in, and not finding one, he clicked off the meter, which seems the standard thing among Beijing cabbie's, it happened to me on multiple occasions. I invariably have a hard time explaining to the cabbie to drop me off in the Avenue because I can walk the last 100 yards to the hotel.

This is the second time I am staying at the Zonghan Inn, in downtown Beijing. It's a perfect location, within walking distance of the Andingmen subway station, and it has all the stores and services you could ever want for right across the avenue from its location. It is a Chinese business hotel, which means it has most of the amenities a high end American hotel would have, but simpler and at a much lower price, which makes it possible for me to stay here for prolonged periods of time. At $31 a night, which includes room internet, the price is unbeatable. Breakfast and other meals you have to pay for, if you don't want to go out and take them elsewhere, but breakfast in the hotel costs $1.30, which is about as cheap as I've ever seen it anywhere.

Last time I was here I was helped significantly by a German friend who speaks fluent Mandarin, but this time I'm on my own. That will take some effort, I don't even have a tiny inkling of Mandarin Chinese, and one of the defining features of Beijing is that absolutely nobody speaks English. Having said that, somehow, with hands and feet, there is always somebody around who can make themselves understood with what few words of English they have, and I'm getting pretty adept at figuring out what's what, helped in no small measure by the free hotel internet. Just now I was able to research several malls that sell computer equipment, as well as the location of a nearby Wal-Mart superstore, where I might be able to get the computer components I'm looking for.

But first things first, soon after breakfast I went to buy some smokes which, at 46 yuan per carton, make Beijing a smoker's paradise. At roughly 7 yuan to the dollar, you're talking about seven dollars. Then to a small supermarket three minutes' walk from my hotel, for everything the hotel dweller needs, like instant coffee, milk, instant soup, instant noodles and cheap chopsticks and spoons. You can pay by credit or debit card just about everywhere, the China of old is well and truly gone. Along that same half mile stretch of avenue, all on one side, the Post Office, the laundry, a McDonald's, which has a free map of Beijing I use every day, a KFC (across from the Pizza Hut and a department store), a pharmacy where you can buy both Eastern and Western medicine, further up the road a Chinese bakery, and around the corner a wonderful coffee shop, owned by an immigrant Chinese gentleman from Germany, who has had to learn Mandarin Chinese the same as I may be doing.

And then into town. I still have my transportation fare card from last trip, and all I need to do is top that up, which you do at a window inside the subway station, where a friendly lady sells you a 500 yuan load for your "IC card", which is what they call RFID touch cards here. That amount of money, about $70, should last you forever, as the average subway fare is either two or four yuan per ride. Even though the new subway lines, put in for the Olympics, cost a fortune to build, the average Chinese does not make a huge amount of money, so the fares had to be kept low. And with that, and a McDonald's subway map, I set off looking for some computer equipment I need, including a gaggle of laptops, one for me, one for my cousin in Indonesia, another for his granddaughter in the Netherlands - while I'm here I might as well. See ya later...

NYC/Tokyo, May 30, 2010 - Flying

It is a long flight - let's see, I left at 10am, we crossed the date line, Polar route, arriving in Tokyo 1pm the next day, that makes it 14 or 15 hours non-stop. That is a long sit. Curiously, most Westerners, myself included, get seats on the spacious upper deck, with leg room and its own galley, sitting behind the crew sleeping quarters and the flight deck, it takes the space that on other 747's would be taken up by Business Class. I guess downstairs is a first class section up front, but mostly very high density seating for Japanese, it is JAL, after all, that runs 400 seat Boeing 747's. They don't want us in the high density seating, clearly, something I don't have a problem with. What do we call this, Whitespace? We have three hours to go and I have watched all of the available movies, including a disappointing Avatar, a sort of overanimated überDisney - and the nose mounted camera, kinda cool during takeoff, now shows nothing but the cloud cover. On the other hand, I have spent half the flight writing, and my Acer Aspire 1410 says it still has 42% of its juice left. Impressive, even if friend A. is coming up to Beijing next weekend to take it off my hands.

Service and quality of food are exemplary, I could get used to JAL. I have a maybe five hour layover at Narita, hopefully get a chance to charge the laptop, see if the famed BlackBerry Bold 9700 indeed roams in Japan, then on to Beijing, where I will arrive tonight.

I can tell you one thing about the iPhone noise - D.C. is Blackberry territory end-to-end, but that is not unexpected, what with the large Federal and corporate Blackberry contracts. Not an iPhone in sight, at Washington National Airport, my departure point, and one iPad. But even on the plane, many Japanese carry Blackberrys too, like my rownmate, a Japanese coffee trader from Brazil, and I hear from my family in The Netherlands and Indonesia that they, too, have switched to Blackberrys. My 9700 is pretty impressive - 3G, UMA, WCDMA in Japan and South Korea, digital modem use, and multitasking telecommunications. The iPhone can't do most of those things, especially not simultaneously. we have this constant barrage of iPhone users with hacked handsets on the T-Mobile forums, it's a fad more than anything else. Pogue, in the New York Times, opined that "they have better apps because there are a million of them". That does show a complete lack of brain - how would you find good software in a million applications? How many days would you have to search and test? As Betty White said in SNL about Facebook: "Sounds like a huge waste of time".

Spotsy, May 26, 2010 - Getting Ready

I've set up surveillance cameras as well - while I had an "old style" hunting camera, there is now a webcam that periodically takes and stores a picture on a local as well as a remote server, which ensures that if a miscreant enters the house, their picture will be taken and stored where they can not get at it. The problem was to get that working reliably, since to it should run 24/7/365, and we will see this time around if I have really cracked it. It is easy enough to spend $3,000 doing it, but this only cost a couple hundred, plus a $400 laptop, not counting my time, of course, and a tiny piece of a public webserver I use.

So on now to packing - hopefully I can lighten the load. Now that I've been able to book at my favourite Beijing hotel again, I really don't need to take a lot of clothes and underwear, I can buy everything I need cheaply in the department store down the block from my hotel, and if necessary go across town to WalMart or Carrefour, both of which have large stores near subway stations. My suitcase then is partially filled with an empty duffel bag - last time I had to find a suitcase big enough to take my other suitcase and my shopping, which is kinda inefficient. My shopping is usually a somewhat eclectic mix of things. Especially in China, I try to find some of the more unusual technologies that Chinese culture spawns, on the other hand I love looking around ordinary everyday things that folks in the Far East use, and that are different from what we are used to in the West.

I'm fascinated by the cultural differences between societies, and by the solutions that particular cultures find for the unique problems they face. China is unique, because of its vast population and the fact that it is a centrally administered society. One of the first things I habitually do when I arrive somewhere I have not been before is take a stroll around a supermarket, just to see how folks go about their everyday lives, and what the more important needs are they have. Second on my research list is the rush hour - how and when do people get to work, what is public transport like, and here Beijing is particularly fascinating, having built what amounts to a completely new transportation infrastructure for the 2008 Olympics. Seeing that alone is worth a visit to Beijing.

Spotsy, May 22, 2010 - Home and Away

When I looked around on the Internet a little bit, I found there are retrofit heat pumps you can build onto an existing water tank, which are about 50% cheaper than a complete tank, look like they are relatively easy to install, and will still provide significant savings. After looking through several sites that list the devices but don't provide any pricing, I found this unit, made by a company by the name of air generates, which is available at Amazon, as well, and this looks like a good candidate to spend some money to save some money. I have not ordered it yet, but will do as soon as I am back from my overseas trip, and I will let you know how I fare with this unit. I think it is ideal for a person living alone, like myself, as I really do not require gobs of hot water in a hurry, but this unit leaves the original water tank with its heating element in place, so you kind of end up with the best of both worlds. Bear in mind that this is an electromechanical device, so it will require maintenance, and will wear out. On the other hand, it can be plugged into a regular wall outlet, there are no special power requirements, like a regular heating element has.

At any rate, I had Dan, my builder, take a look at what it will take to create enough space above my water tank to insert one of these units, as I lack about 5 inches of clearance underneath the staircase. He seems to think it is not a major project, but it does mean making a cutout in one of the beams, and moving the other a couple of inches. Once I am back from China, I will order the unit and document the entire process for you, including putting some video on YouTube, and because the instruction videos I've seen on the Internet are promotional more than practical in nature, my guess is that in most homes the tank goes where there is extra space, which in my case means not in the basement, as I don't have one.

In the meantime I am busy getting ready for my trip to China and Indonesia, which this time involves getting ready to transfer the information and software on my computer to temporary storage, because this little Acer will go to my friend A., who is flying up from Vietnam to collect it, and that means I have to rush out soon after arrival in Beijing, and get a replacement laptop. I'm thinking about getting the new Lenovo touchscreen netbook, hoping that I will be able to pick one up in China cheaper than I can get it here. That is always a bit of a crapshoot, since I have noticed that laptops are in such abundant supply in the United States that prices are dropping out of the sky. I paid $399 for this Acer Aspire 1410, and when I look at pricing in Asia it is more expensive everywhere. We shall see.....

Other than that, I'm going to have to turn off some of the data using applications on my new BlackBerry Bold 9700, because I don't want to use data roaming at $15 per megabyte any more than I can help it. That also means I'm going to have to take all of the e-mail I installed on the Blackberry down, not a big deal, but I was just getting used to getting my e-mails live on the Blackberry, being able to sort them there, and then reading the ones I don't delete on my laptop in Outlook. Anyway, those are just some of the vagaries of the way I travel, and the technology I travel with.

Spotsy, May 18 2010 - Sometimes you just don't have the power

Today was a mess of a day anyway. Around noontime I began to experience brief power failures, which I assumed had to do with had to do with the Dominion power company being in the process of replacing the poles on nearby route 610. After about half an hour of that I began to worry about my equipment, my electronic equipment to be specific, but I needn't have worried: the power went out altogether and didn't come back on for hours. It turned out there was a bad storm, which I hadn't anticipated because it was 80° outside, and sunny with a clear blue sky. But as my weather alarm went off, I realized it was time to fire up the generator. I still don't have that wired into the mains, my electrician has made one attempt at doing that, at which time we figured out that the crossover between the two generator plants in the unit isn't actually a crossover, but a crossconnect. That means that for the time being, until I get that fixed, I run power cables all over the house to keep all of my gear going. Because I have all of my equipment running on uninterruptible power supplies, getting the generator wired in isn't actually that much of a headache, since the UPS's provide easily half an hour's worth of power to the computers, home theater equipment and networking gear. Since I never lost Internet service, at least the computers and my phones were able to keep running, and I was eventually able to figure out that Dominion power had suffered a multitude of power outages throughout the area, which means it was likely the power would not be back for a few hours.

The 18 kW generator I use I got for half price, as it was a showroom model, lucky because it produces enough wattage to power the entire house, including a couple of portable heat pumps. Still, it messes up your day, because you tend to sit around waiting for the car to come back so you can clear up the mess of cables in the house, and bring all of the refrigerators and heat pumps back online.

Then come Monday I need to take my SUV and have that looked at, as it had some kind of oil leak, which means I'm going to have to call AAA and get it towed to the garage. Once that's done I am expecting my builder to finally fix the ceiling in my kitchen, which I have had to partially rip out because of a water leak. In between all that I'm trying to do my spring cleaning, so that the house will be completely shipshape, clean and fumigated by the time I come back from Southeast Asia. In short, it will be a busy as well as expensive week, and that is before I start spending more money shopping for equipment in Beijing, since they have all sorts of gear there that has not yet made it to the west. Additionally, I want to try and find a cheap touchscreen laptop for my cousin in, since the family wants to be able to Skype with him, and he is no longer able to operate small keys on cellphones and laptops since his stroke.

On that note I shall leave you for today, to the real estate tax bill I just got, which needs to go into Quicken, before I forget. One thing about making a long trip is that I have to make sure all of my bills are entered so I can pay them electronically from wherever I am. I should think that 98% of all bills I get are electronic these days, but there are still a few, like local taxes, that arrive in paper format, although they can be paid electronically. From that perspective, having a business hotel room in downtown Beijing with free Internet for only $31 a night is a real boon, because on other trips I have had to use cell phone Internet, and while that works very well, T-Mobile charges the earth for it, along the lines of $15 per megabyte, which can mean you end up shelling out $30 just for reading a couple of e-mails at Heathrow airport.

Spotsy, May 13, 2010 - Calls over WiFi

WiFi calling, if you want the down and dirty, is a technology that allows a cellular phone to appear to the carrier network as if it were on a normal GSM connection, even though it is accessing via wireless Internet. It's been around in the United States since 2007, and works very well, provided that the wireless router you use is compatible; most are, some require some tweaking, and of course not everybody is able to do that. But I love UMA, especially since I have a so-called hotspot subscription, which lets me use the phone over WiFi at airports, Starbucks coffee shops, Borders, and McDonald's. UMA does not only allow you to make voice calls, it actually emulates the GPRS data connection protocol as well, but it does so at WiFi speeds. The advantage that gives you is that you can use WiFi from your handset without having to worry about data security. Normally, if you use a public WiFi connection, you open up your phone or your computer to everybody else using that connection, but you may isn't encrypted data stream and so you can sit there all day without anybody ever being able to figure out what language your device is speaking. I will put the phones up on Amazon as soon as I have received them and tested an upgraded their software, so keep an eye on my Amazon web store if you're interested.

How does this new Facebook thing work again? (Note, to the right, what Facebook thinks a middle aged professional male is interested in - this is all I get - no cars, no insurance policies, no vacations in the Bahamas, just EE+ cup tits). You can read an article at CNN or the New York Times that you like or that you are interested in, and then you click on the Facebook "like" button in that article, and that takes you back to Facebook, to your own login, and then your information and the information on your friends are transmitted to whatever site it was you came from. And for this apparently no money changes hands. A couple of things I find strange about the entire concept and the way in which it's being executed. First of all when I log into my Facebook page I don't see any of the normal regular advertising that I get when I access other sites like CNN, CNet, Newsweek, what have you. 90% of all ads that I see, and I have to remind you I have a reasonably disposable income, so I would expect people to try and sell me cars and shavers and vacations in Barbados, but all I see is dating sites. Why is that?

There can't be too many reasons. One may be that Facebook's terms and conditions are onerous to the point that advertisers don't want anything to do with them, another could be that advertisers don't want to get involved with the mining of potential customers' personal information. In a way, Facebook's antics remind me of AOL, which is another one of those companies that tried to take over the world, and after acquiring the Time Warner company eventually fell flat on its face. You may remember that at one time you could hardly see an advertisement without having AOL keywords in the ad, before the Internet became ubiquitous, and the URL killed the keyword.

Spotsy, May 8, 2010 - More Facebook antics

Facebook last week mandated that you have links for your employment, education and interests. This morning I discovered that hometown and current city have been added, so unless you accept links, that information is removed from your profile altogether. Those links are all , public - i.e., accessible to the entire internet, and you CANNOT restrict access. When one of your friends then clicks a "like" button on an external website, all of their data, along with yours (!!), is provided to wherever it is your friend went. And I think it is safe to assume that all of your 12 year old son's, or 14 year old daughter's information - hometown, current city, school - and that of all of their friends, parents, uncles, aunts, is published to the internet.

I suppose I first started using Facebook about a year ago, and it struck me then that so many folks were posting what I at the time thought was drivel, stuff out of their ordinary lives that I would not myself have thought was really important to share with the world. But my opinion, of course, is not what drives other people, so I've looked at it for the past year and recently came to the conclusion that much of the stuff I read completely bores me to death. That's okay, my boredom is mine, and I really don't think that anybody should be concerned about what does and does not interest me, but I have started to eliminate a number of contacts from my Facebook page, because I see no reason to read about their problems booking trips. I suppose what that means is that I'm not the type of person who sits around the coffee table making gossip. It's a highly personal thing, and I know that for many people, these types of conversations are an important part of communication within their peer group.

I think I have given it enough time, a year or so, I enjoy the conversations about technology, of course, conversations about politics, societal development, science, and helping others deal with things I am knowledgeable about, but beyond that, I just am not interested in spending hours communicating on Facebook, when there are so many other things to do. Again, this is not a value judgment about them, it's more of a value judgment about myself. I didn't grow up within a large peer group, and I expect that influences the way in which I interact with my surroundings and environment. I never had a very large group of "friends", more of a smaller group that I keep in touch with regardless of where they are, and where I am. That is why I am haring off to Beijing, why a friend I haven't seen in years is flying up from Ho Chi Minh city, and why I am rather looking forward to seeing another bunch of friends and relatives I haven't seen in a very long time in Jakarta, Indonesia. I value the depth of my friendships more than the volume.

I am, as you may have read in my previous posting, using the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software to dictate my blog entries now, and I must say that that is a very unusual experience. I start talking into the microphone on the headset I'm wearing and I don't see anything happen for seconds at a time, but that is because the software is processing, and storing up the output of its recognition, which it then blurbs out on the screen in a great big gob. In case you don't know how speech recognition works, Dragon looks like it uses a combination of speaker dependent and speaker independent recognition. It has a rather large vocabulary, but it also needs some training to understand your accent, the way in which you speak, and the equipment you use. I am not making things easy on the software, because I haven't read the manual, and I have a television set going at low volume elsewhere in the room. The fact that I am running this software on an Acer Aspire 1410, not the fastest computer in the world, as it is a small and cheap subnotebook, does not help matters either. But it does a remarkable job considering all that, and the dictation even including my correcting things is certainly faster than my typing.

I am not certain whether I can recommend this software to you, that depends on a lot of factors. Most importantly, I began my career with NYNEX, the then New York telephone company, working on speech recognition in the telephone network. I learned a lot about the technology from the brilliant MIT scientists we had hired for this project, I recall vividly that when I first audited one of our initial prototypes, at an operator services location in downtown Boston, I had a hard time understanding many of the callers, let alone that I expected a speech recognition device to understand what they were saying. But it did, and I began to learn about the algorithms they were using, and the way in which speech is actually built in the brain and in the vocal cords. That does not make me a good user of this Dragon software, because in order to use that effectively you're not really supposed to understand how this stuff works.

Long story short, this is my second session with the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software, and I am beginning to use my voice and my brain independently from what I see on the screen, which is the best way to operate it. I have turned off the capability to accept screen commands for Microsoft Windows, basically taking into account that that might be too taxing for this simple little computer. All I really need it to do is recognize my speech and accept some simple formatting commands, like line breaks, capitalization, and punctuation. David Pogue was not wrong when he wrote in the New York Times that this package works like magic, it really does. The piece you're reading now took me maybe 20 minutes to write, and all I need to do now is look at any mistakes it made. One of the things you do not want to do when dictating to a piece of software, is make corrections in the middle of your session. What you do is talk up the whole entire thing, and then go back in once you have spoken your piece. What does have me curious is whether or not young people, who have a large impatience factor, will be able to effectively use the software, because it probably takes the better part of three months before it actually builds up a good personalized database for the individual user. It does compare and store any corrections that you make, so it should eventually become relatively brilliant at understanding you, something you will have a proper appreciation for if you are married and have kids. If you have a fair amount of text to write on a regular basis, I would spend $40 and try it out. You can always put it on eBay for 30 bucks if you decide it doesn't work for you, or donate it to a particularly wordy cousin or colleague. It will make a brilliant Christmas gift, just don't crush the box :-)

Spotsy, May 4, 2010 - Gear

This is beginning to look like one of those weeks where everything breaks. First some power plugs in my den that I thought I had fixed stopped working again, and I have no idea at this point where the wire break is. That doesn't make me very happy because all this is on a 30 amp fuse, and that is a bit of a fire hazard. And with my luck it is probably behind the safe, which means I have to drag 250 pounds of steel away from the wall by myself.

As if that was not enough, this morning my main backup drive stopped working, just like that. One moment I was happily backing up a Quicken file to it, the next my laptop could no longer see the drive. It is a 2TB Fantom G-Force drive I only bought last June, so the failure is certainly premature. Although the drive is still under warranty, I have no idea how long it will take the manufacturer, Micronet, to replace the drive, so I immediately ordered a replacement. Then I filled out the warranty replacement form at Micronet's website, and much to my surprise, by 7 PM I had the RMA number. Once the replacement drive arrives, later today, I can check if it was a power supply failure or not, and ship off the blown drive. Once that is repaired, I guess I can put one or the other on Amazon.

I am nevertheless quite pleased with myself, because I did not lose any files (well, one website update, but I can recover that from my webserver). I have my backup server set up with dual disk arrays, one of which I use to store all my data on, and back up my laptops and other storage devices, and then the server automatically backs up that array to the secondary array once a day. So once I had grabbed a spare Seagate 750 GB drive I was able to restore my main archive and put it back online, the rest of the restore can wait until the full-size drive arrives, in two or three days' time. This is a perfect example of how risky it is to use large-scale storage devices, one can literally fail from one moment to the other, and make your data completely inaccessible. The drive I lost is a RAID array, so just taking the drive out of the enclosure and trying it in a PC is not possible. With the backup, I do not need to worry about the data, and can very simply instruct Micronet they need not make an effort to keep my data accessible. Yes, I am anal in backing up, but hopefully you'll get the message - I could have lost a lot of data just then.

Although I had speech recognition in my portable Apricot computer as far back as 1985, I have never used it other than as a toy until a couple of days ago. That is when I ran into a huge stack of boxes with Dragon NaturallySpeaking software on sale at BJ's. Especially David Pogue in the New York Times is forever raving about the software, its ease of use, and it its accuracy, I think that's how he writes all of his books. So, at $39.99 I could not stop myself from picking up a copy, and what you're reading right now I have dictated using the Dragon software.

The technology continues to amaze me. As I was trying out the Dragon software, I was Skyping with my buddy A., who I will be meeting up with in Beijing in a few weeks' time. Because he is getting the laptop I am installing the Dragon software on, I checked with him to see if maybe he wanted the package too, as it is probably hard to get in Vietnam, which is where he is currently stationed. He did want it, so I went back to BJ's to buy another copy, and you can see in the top left-hand picture that I was only just in time. Coming back from this I Skype him back to let him know to add the Dragon package to the shopping list we had been compiling, and at that point we discover that his return flight from Beijing to Ho Chi Minh City would take him back on a Sunday morning rather than the Sunday evening. At that point I decided to get onto Expedia to see if they perhaps had better flights available, so you're looking at the somewhat unusual situation that someone in Virginia is Skyping with someone else in Vietnam looking for flights into China. Amazingly, Expedia found a round-trip that let him stay the Sunday, taking an evening flight back to Saigon, and save $150 over his previous offer. A few mouse clicks and some data entry later he had his e-ticket in his mailbox in Hong Kong. I do love Expedia especially for that reason, they allow departures outside of the United States, and they will let you buy tickets for friends and family. You kind of get to be your own travel agent.

Spotsy, April 29, 2010 - Grooming

Like many, I tend to make the mistake to want to save on things I need that I don't buy very often. Think about it, and it does not make a huge amount of sense to save on a car, a shaver or the repair of storm damage (forget what I said about cars if you financed the thing, that makes it a monthly expense). So when my Oral B power toothbrush conked out (I must have bought that when I was living in New York, which means it was nine or so years old) I went to look for a replacement, although I have a couple of battery powered toothbrushes I take when I travel, and generally take into town, and they do quite well. With that in mind, the brush I ran into at BJ's was a Philips Sonicare (a set of two, actually), and I remembered reading about the Sonicare technology, and how well it does on plaque and stuff. It isn't cheap technology, but since I have the battery powered brushes there wasn't much point in buying a cheap rechargeable.

So I sprung for the Sonicare, now Philips branded, and I must say it is a very different experience, and I like having two brushes, and two power handles - one brush dries while I use the other, one handle is in the charger while I use the other, and there is even a travel container for each unit. I will check with my dental hygienist, in three months' time, if the Sonicare does as much better as it feels. Will let y'all know...

The other item in the picture is a Braun cruZer shaver - not the one linked in here, but one I purchased in Amsterdam, when my Remington shaver passed away during a visit to my sister. The reason I am showing it here is that the European version is available in multiple colour schemes, while the U.S. version (and this is not just the case with Braun, but with other shaver brands) is only available in some drab boring non-colour scheme. I quite liked this colour - the blander colours are available in Europe as well, I guess the brighter colours are primarily intended for young people. I've noticed this difference for man years, though - in Northern Europe, with less sun and many more grey overcast days than we have here, colours of clothing and accessories are more often much brighter and more cheerful, and as you can see this applies to shavers, as well. I just wonder what kind of market research was done here - would the American consumer really prefer those boring colours? I don't know - if you like what you see, let Procter & Gamble, owner of Gilette, which in turn owns Braun, know. Who knows we can all help brighten up American society a bit.

The shaver itself encompasses the latest technologies - like the Sonicare toothbrush, the cruZer runs at a much higher frequency than these devices did even a few years ago, while the shaver is water-resistant, and can be cleaned using running water. But I find there to be a huge performance difference between the older rotary and foil shavers, and today's versions. The cruZer really needs both the trimmer and the foil head - while the foil head shaves very closely indeed, if you haven't shaven for a couple of days you really need to trim longer hairs before you can get to a smooth foil shave. That takes more time than you would using a rotary shaver, but gives a much closer shave. I note from the manual you're advised to shave before cleaning your skin, that too is a departure from the older models. I guess the skin oils provide a natural lubrication that helps prevent you abrading your skin, while cleaning the shaver using hot water prevents the thing turning into a grease trap of sorts.

Note that I have removed the Facebook banner I had here - the way Facebook now employs tracking technologies to gather data it sells to its advertisers is too invasive for me, so no more linking for me. Check my April 21 rant, below, for the step you need to take to stop Facebook allwoing your friends to export your personal information. I am delighted to see some United States senators have begun proposing regulations to rein in Facebook's rampant commercialization of its user database. As I have noted before, any company that thinks the primary product I am interested in seeing is dating sites offering women with humongous breasts can not be trusted. I have replaced the Facebook banner with my Twitter feed.

Spotsy, April 21, 2010 - Facebook shares you

The bottom option in the picture, in your Facebook privacy settings, is what you need to uncheck if you want to attempt to prevent Facebook handing your personal "public" information to websites you connect to from FB, or that you link into FB. I think ANY link you post can potentially "read" your Facebook identity. After you log in to your Facebook account, use this link: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/settings/?tab=privacy§ion=applications to get to the settings. If you want to know what personal information related to you Facebook makes available to the entire internet, use this link: http://graph.facebook.com/xxxx, where you replace the "xxxx" with your login name.

Spotsy, April 16, 2010 - Semper Fi

Doing my school bus patrol, it hit me right in the stomach, today, at a neighbour's house, where one of the sons joined the Marines. We are still at war, people.

Spotsy, April 14, 2010 - Of travel woes (or not).

Life seems to be proceeding into the rapids, perhaps... this is how it always happens, one - two - five unrelated unexpected things, next thing you know everything changes. It doesn't take me by surprise like it once did, these days I recognize the signs and home in on them, but still, the surprise is it always happens, all you need is one trigger event, one decision. The rest is a runaway train. What is new, this time, is that it is Skype, Facebook, and now LinkedIn that are making it all happen, it wasn't until fairly recently that a lot of my old contacts showed up on Facebook, and as of last month, even overseas and U.S. relatives begin showing up. Brilliant, that is. I've just added the new Twitter app for Blackberry to my 9700, I will be curious to see what, if anything, I'll be doing with that, I certainly am not going to spend my days following other people's Tweets.

I think.

We're back to a normal spring, daytime temperatures in the sixties, droppping back to thirties at night. As it is sunny practically every day here, working outside is a delight. I am just sorry I can't spend all day in my glorious outdoors, that's why I moved here, after all. Besides, I am soon on my way to all of those big cities in Asia where most of what you get is pollution, like New York City in summer, but worse. What can you do.. I have been thinking about looking for opportunities in Jakarta, as well, given the chance I would not mind being in the tropics, Beijing gets awfully cold in winter. But I'll take what I can get, I just thought of that since I am going there anyway. We'll see.

I heard a sideways mention, in the news, of "banners" at the Masters, apparently aimed at Tiger Woods - but there was no reporting in the American press, not until I saw a picture at British Sky News. Weird, that, isn't that news? Are we now self-censoring? Why are we criticizing the Chinese again? Rumour has it Ms. Nordegren is divorcing the Tiger. Good for her. Until somebody teaches him there are things in his life he cannot control, he is going to continue to manipulate the American public by bringing his Mom to press conferences. What a disgraceful exhibition that was.

Biometrics have gotten to me, as well. While going through my China visa application, and the forever changing (for us Dutchfolk, the erstwhile colonial masters) rules for entry into Indonesia, I discovered that my passport expires in September, just short of the six months' validity most countries require to grant an entry visa. I hightailed it to the Embassy the next day, only to find out that they've changed the walk-in system - you now have to make an appointment to get a visa or renew your pasport. The duty officer was kind, and let me stay until all of the appointments had been processed, but today passports are made in The Hague, embassies and consulates can no longer make them because special machines are required to do the biometric stuff, including the RFID chip that is embedded in the passport. So where I used to be able to walk out with a new passport a couple of hours later, now takes weeks. And I can't fly to The Netherlands to get it renewed, because if you're not in the Dutch central register, you have to go to the... anyway, I am boring you, I am sure.

So I put the application in, paid my $80, and today went to the Chinese embassy to see if I could talk them into excusing me the one month, I'll be back long before the passport expires. The answer was no, of course, so now I have to move my entire trip back, which probably means paying American Airlines more money.

What with all the biometric stuff, I think we should give our passports a ten year validity, not a five year validity. Because, with the visa requirement for most places that your passport has to be valid six months beyond the start of a trip, my passport is effectively valid only 4 years and 5 months, at which point I have to renew it, or not travel. That is ridiculous.

The Blackberry Bold 9700, much though I love it, has a major deficit. Twice now, the 9700 has run down its battery to 30%, by early evening, after I spent a couple of hours (that is, two full hours) talking on it, using a Bluetooth headset. Yes, it has to do a lot - I am running UMA, it fetches email and runs Skype 24/7, stuff. But with it fully charged at 7am, it running down to where I have to recharge it by 7pm means it suffers from the typical smartphone problem - it tries to be all things to all people, and be small at the same time - and it can't. Imagine if I used it for GPS as well - it'd probably only last five hours, if that. So be wary, if you decide to get a smartphone, and use it to its full extent - have it charging on your desk, or in the car, or whatever - don't expect it to last the day - I just went on T-Mobile's website and ordered a $50 spare battery, can't travel and run out of juice... My travel kit, then, apart from chargers and stuff, has three cellphones - the BB, a Nokia Navigator (I use GPS worldwide), and a two line spare phone I picked up in Beijing a couple of years ago. It has something cool I've not seen other phones use - a built in rechargable battery, which lets you change its "regular" battery (it comes with two) without turning it off. It also has a TV receiver, but using that would of course seriously suck its juice...

Spotsy, April 9, 2010 - Of Distant Relatives

Then, of course, you get a message that a family member has been taken ill - cousin T, who I have not see in very many years, had a stroke, and is in hospital in Jakarta, Indonesia. His son got in touch with us last year, a branch of the family we didn't know we had. So rather than head straight for China, I am going to stop off in Jakarta, and visit the family there, and hopefully cousin T. is still with it enough that he will recognize me, or at least know who I am. I couldn't very well head for Asia Pacific and not stop there, thankfully American Airlines managed to get me the entire itinerary on frequent flyer miles, I was worried I'd have to shell out major dollars for the detour, I can honestly say AA always gets me where I want to be, thanks folks.

So I'll arrive in China a bit later than expected, I am staying in Jakarta for several days, because I can't very well go there and not see my friends and former colleagues at the same time, it isn't like I am there every other month. Despite the circumstances, I am rather looking forward to that. On the way back, I was going to stop in Hanoi, and see friend A., who is currently working in Vietnam, but because Indonesia tightens up my schedule so much, he very very kindly offered to come up to Beijing and get together there. We last worked together in Jakarta, for (then) NYNEX Corporation, he lives in the region so we don't get to see each other that much.

Now I need to get my skates on - get my China visa, figure out whether or not I need a visa for Indonesia, that seems to change by the week, and I realized that my Dutch passport will expire this year, so I need to get that sorted, hopefully they'll let me apply and then hang on to it until I get back. They used to make them at the embassy, but what with all of the biometric stuff they are now made in The Hague, so quickly renewing a passport isn't possible any more.

Picking this back up the day after writing the previous paragraph, I spent just about the entire freakin' day at the Netherlands Embassy - not knowing you have to make an appointment now, to get your passport renewed, I was lucky they let me hang out until all of the visa applicants for the day had been processed. Because of the new biometrics passport, they have to do fingerprints, and then the passport can only be made back in The Hague. Anyway, that was all I had time for, barely making it back to the HOV and a grueling two hour Friday afternoon drive back to Fredericksburg. I barely made it off the HOV on time.

Curiously, I find I enjoy re-watching movies I have seen before in HD. So I wondered what makes HDTV different from what essentially is the same resolution in the cinema, and my guess is that the realism is such HDTV becomes a real window on the world, more so than lower resolution ever was. When you see a closeup of an actress on HDTV, in 1080i or 1080p, the realism is so acute that it looks like a real person, not an electronic rendition. Does that make sense? I find it hard to explain, it is a feeling more than anything else, but it is directly related to having this in your living room. For me it is people more than landscape or fish, and some presenters do better with it than others. Letterman, wisely, won't let his crew do closeups of him, but in TV series the actors don't have a choice, and they get really up close and personal. I guess you can't act any more, with HDTV, you really have to have Method acting in your veins.

Anyway, all I am saying is that, in my view, a 50 inch plasma screen in a living room (and my living room is more than large enough for this) is not television as we knew it. It draws you in as a lower resolution TV never could. That was a picture, this is real life. And with the first small 3D screens that do not require special glasses announced already, I wonder how 3D will affect all this. It will be curious, because in real life, we don't see in 3D. In 3D you can see depth in a stationary position, but you cannot walk around it, which is what depth in natural optics is for. It is used to gauge distance, to see an object in all visual dimensions, and those aren't things 3D can do. So perhaps 3D is just a stepping stone on the way to true motion holography, with something like an infinitely variable laser, which can put photons in the space around itself at will.

Spotsy, April 4, 2010 - Nice Apps, Dude

Much along the lines of the Google argument about how badly one needs it (or not), professionals now network using Facebook and LinkedIn, to an extent I really had not fully realized until I made time to look at it, th'other day. LinkedIn is everything Facebook is not, it figures that for as long as it gives you what you need, it'll end up making money. Every setting is aimed at you marketing your skills, at employers and entrepreneurs being able to find the talent they need, and at keeping you and your connections appraised of professional development. Facebook, by contrast, is trying to be all things to all people, and running rings around itself trying to find ways to sell your personal information to advertisers without you noticing it. To the right yet another example of what Facebook thinks I, as a professional single male, connecting with friends, former colleagues and family on Facebook, need. The way I see scammers and phishers converge on other websites, I promise you this is going to majorly go wrong for Facebook, sooner rather than later, and if you happen to be in the database that will go astray, with your name, your girlfriend's name, your home town, place of birth and your date of birth, all of which you put in there, you can start saying goodbye to your credit rating now. It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when.

LinkedIn just released an app for Blackberry, up until now all it had was an iPhone and a PalmPre version - not the smartest move, considering those aren't the best sold smartphones on the planet, RIM has 50% of the United States smartphone market, 20% of the worldwide smartphone market. The iPhone and iPad hype is now so strong that developers create for those platforms first, instead of last, not understanding there are vastly more Blackberrys and netbooks in the world than there are iThings. If your clients are worldwide, you need worldwide hardware, and that means LG and Nokia first, followed by Blackberry and Motorola. And apps should run on standard phones, not just on smartphones - there are tens of millions of software developers and other professionals, the world over, that can't afford $500 phones - that's a week's wages in many places. Imagine getting all those on line, on LinkedIn, that would be a major coup. Once your app runs on those phones, expanding its capabilities to smartphones is maybe a couple of weeks of coding. Be the Wal-Mart of apps, rather than the Bloomingdale's.

TurboTax came through for me again, even squeezing a refund out of the Fed, when I really expected to get whacked with a bill again, this year. It will go straight to State Taxes, of course, but even so, I've done better than expected. Must say Turbotax (with its sister Quicken) has become a superb package - where, in past years, I couldn't always find a relevant narrative, this year the documentation was more than complete, even without the abundant links to the IRS tax code. You've seen the H&R Block ads - "They found something Turbotax missed" - I am sure, but the advantage of doing it yourself is that you learn about taxes, and learn what to look for in years to come, you find out what exactly the deductions are for, say, alternative energy, while with a tax accountant you are dependent on what the accountant thinks is relevant to you. Especially if you use Quicken with banks and credit card companies that allow Quicken downloads, entering your tax information as the year progresses is almost automatic, you get all of the transactions in front of you anyway, and all of the tax categories are there to begin with - Quicken and Turbotax are both made by Intuit.

Spotsy, March 31, 2010 - Money & Taxes

Although I am taking my brilliant new BlackBerry to China, I am not planning to use it as a GPS device, since I have a 3.5G Nokia Navigator. Although I bought it in the Philippines in 2007, it is as up-to-date as any new phone, it can function as a standalone GPS unit even with the phone off and the SIM card removed. The only problem was that I needed to unload the USA and EU maps from its memory card, because that could not take the China map as well. I was under the impression a 2 Gb micro-SD card was all it could handle, but then decided to check, and sure enough, it took a 4 Gb card without protesting. But that meant I had to unload all of the maps from the old card, and then install the new card, and re-download all of the maps from the Route 66 site. If you ever do this, remember you can't test an overseas GPS map until you get there, it won't come up unless the coordinates for your actual location are actually inside the map!

My dependency - or perhaps I should say "our dependency" - on gadgets is getting pretty pronounced, and these memory cards... I have something like twelve devices that are dependent on them. Let's see.. 1 still camera, 1 still/video camera, 2 video/still cameras, 1 surveillance camera, 2 laptops and 1 desktop computer, and three or four cellphones that need them, as opposed to cellphones that can take SD cards, but can function fine without them. SD cards are cheap but scary things, people, I see this on some of the technical forums I participate in on a regular basis. Those memory chips have a finite number of read/writes they can handle, and even then, they are made in such volumes that there are plenty of bad ones. You get no advance warning, one morning, poof!, your stuff is gone. All phones and cameras come with software that will let you back them up, use it, once a day, get into the habit, go to the website of the device manufacturer, click on "support", click on "downloads", see what is there. Tens of thousands of people lose their pictures, videos, address books, what have you, every day.

I have, at long last, finally managed to start my taxes - I had cleverly buried my W-2s and brokerage paperwork under a pile of printouts and unopened correspondence, kind of looked like Andy Rooney's desk. I was forced to stop shredding stuff when my shredder overheated, and stopped - that never happened before. Wait. Let me check. It should have been long enough. Yes. It is working again... Phew!

I have developed a habit of going through the house top to bottom, love it when I come back from a trip and the place is immaculate. That's never involved a ton of paperwork and writing a largish cheque to Uncle Sam though, I guess it is kind of a double whammy. But I've run my expenses through Quicken, whittled the report down from 30 to 13 pages, and uncovered the real estate and property tax paperwork - is the devaluation of real property a deductible? Probably not, but if you see how much the county I live in devalued our real estate.. There is a huge fight going on over that, the reduction in tax income is such that the county wants to crank up the property tax to where they come out even - get the same $$s out of us as they did last year. I understand that, of course, but at the same time, don't we deserve a break? Those of us who didn't foreclose, didn't bail out, just sat tight and paid our mortgages. Rock and a hard place, I suppose.

Last but not least, I have begun clearing the attic, putting "excess stock" on Ebay and Amazon. It has been kind of a mixed bag, technology stuff has generally sold well, but I have been somewhat flummoxed by the amount of work and money that goes into shipping. If you want to do it right, you need lots of fairly expensive packing materials, the shipping itself is not hugely expensive, and I find especially the online postage label printing with the United States Postal Service very useful - cheaper than UPS, and Priority Mail tends to get there in two or three days, faster than you would expect. If you have never used it before, click here to go to the "Click & Ship" pages. Out here, the postal carrier will even collect your shipment, which saves me a thirty mile drive every time I have a package. There really have only been two mishaps - some antique drinking glasses arrived at the recipient mostly broken, this even though I had packaged them rather carefully, and a DVD projector I had never used turned out to have a broken microswitch. Thankfully, I discovered this before shipping it, so I was able to void the sale and have it repaired. I'll never make a profit on it now, but I guess you can't win them all. This is when I discovered that APO (military) addresses can be really expensive to send to, the postage depends on the distance the parcel has to travel. That's really stupid, what with the military being funded by the taxpayer, the government should use a flat rate so friends and family can send stuff to their loved ones cheap, don't you think? A box containing one DVD recorder cost me $48 to ship - and I had promised to ship to the buyer, so couldn't very well backtrack on that. Owell, you live and learn. I have nothing on Ebay at the moment, but my Amazon stuff is here.

Spotsy, March 27, 2010 - Winter in Beijing?

If you feel like an outing, Washington's Cherry Blossom Festival began today, and runs through Sunday April 11 - it is worth visiting - there are lots of attractions in specially created pedestrian areas, the weather is supposed to be gooooorgeous, and "The District", as we refer to it, is a much more relaxed place than the political press would have you believe. When I first came here to visit a Dutch diplomat friend I knew from High School, years before I even moved to the United States, it reminded me very strongly of The Hague, the seat of government of The Netherlands, where I grew up, so much so that I didn't hesitate for a second when my employer asked me if I would take an assignment in D.C.. And that was before I discovered that my uncle W. was a diplomat here too, assigned to the World Bank. I am still here, nine years later..

For China to continue its growth as an innovator and maintain its momentum in technology development it needs free minds and independent thinkers - the bane of a Communist regime. You can't expect progress and then control and censure the flow of information. The key to forward development of the internet has been what we called the "Information Society", where Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo and Google are central to bringing people closer the world over. As I have pointed out before, Chinese who have experienced these communities while abroad can only react to their government's control in one way - resentment. Progressive societies need the exchange of information that has now become central to the wider world, an exchange from which China is wilfully excluding itself. Yes, the Chinese can now go on vacation abroad, but they cannot, on an hourly basis, participate in our culture, and share their own. The question is not whether the way the Chinese stifle dissent is effective, it is, clearly, the People's Republic has experienced a peaceful era of unbridled growth, making the transition from the Third to the First World at breakneck speed. The question is whether China can attain the leading position it so clearly covets without granting the civil liberties that bind the "developed nations" together.

To further the free flow of intellectual as well as economic property, the free exchange of currencies and ideas, the internet has become a necessary element, it binds cultures and peoples together. Facebook and Youtube are probably the first cross-cultural and cross-ethnic incubators in the history of mankind. And China, which seeks to be a leader in this evolutionary society, has opted out of the exchange. Governed, as it is, by men who are not part of the information culture, who probably see information technology as a vehicle for commerce and population control, there will be a huge backlash, somewhere down the road, when the next generation of communist leaders will begin to play catchup with the international community. Because the Chinese kids I have met aren't going to be restricted to Baidu, and the retiring overseas Chinese heading back home with their savings aren't going to be deprived of their Facebook accounts. When the Politburo switched from Zil limousines to natty black German Audis, they unleashed a beast they won't be able to control. Google did it all very handsomely - they have tried to comply with Chinese rules and regulations, found them unworkable, found the Chinese did not return the favour by allowing hack attacks, and withdrew. In so doing, they took with them the English language information flow, which, to all intents and purposes, Google controls, perhaps together with Facebook, which has shown no interest in going anywhere near China.

The pic on the left I made during one of my workouts, changing trees into firewood. It really is a brilliant workout, I just have to make sure I maintain this effort throughout the year. The oak logs you see weigh between 100 and 130 lbs, too heavy for me to carry around, but I am able to lift them up and put them on the bed of the log splitter. That's brilliant, because I can, over time, increase the weight as I strengthen my back muscles, simply by adjusting the size of the cuts. It is strange to think that I am suddenly ecologically responsible, by using a renewable resource for heating. Trees, after all, are truly renewable, unlike wind and solar energy. It isn't too long ago that burning wood was considered polluting, before mankind discovered that using some natural resources saves others. Strange world we live in.

Here are some green myths debunked, courtesy of Fortune Magazine.

Spotsy, March 21, 2010 - Beijing and Spring!

Coming back to my previous rant, here is a picture taken of a scene from a Harry Potter movie, on the screen of the Samsung 720p plasma TV I discussed on March 16 - again, click on the pic for a larger version. Just look at the skin tone... This shot isn't even 1080i or 1080p, for the simple reason that ABC Family HD does not broadcast in full HD, but in 720p. You can compare it with the 1080p Philips Dr. Who picture posted below. I am truly not seeing a difference between the two sets, for normal TV viewing. Or, perhaps I should say I am not seeing a difference in resolution and sharpness. Perhaps the LCD screen is slightly crisper, but you really would notice that only if you had them side-by-side. Having said that, colour rendition and blacks are far superior on the plasma screen. No comparison. I will spare you the technical explanation (unless you insist), it is perfectly logical, I have to say that the plasma technology has matured to the point that the picture quality is absolutely superb.

I know I was gushing about the Philips when I first got it (see November 7, 2009), and I still am, but that is sort of a clinical, engineering oriented, assessment. If you just watch a movie, or TV series, the plasma display is simply your best bet. Nobody watches television two feet from the screen, or counts pixels. Right?

I am downloading a €49.99 Route66 GPS map of the People's Republic of China to my Nokia 3G Navigator as I write this, the world is a very changed place. I recall flying into Beijing for the first time, my Air Canada 777 taking the Polar route, something that would have seen us shot down in a hurry for much of my life. The picture here I took in the People's Liberation Army museum in Beijing, it illustrates the old and the new China rather handsomely, the two girls are Beijing high school students on a school excursion. The one on the right, Sarah, insisted on giving me her mobile number, which I promptly discarded - you don't want to create the wrong impression in a country whose mores you don't know, but it hurt ;), she was real cute and had been chasing me halfway around the ten story museum, even introduced me to her teachers, who weren't the slightest bit interested or alarmed, and went straight back to sleep(!?). I am adding a stop in Hanoi to my itinerary, my mate A. is doing telecoms investment stuff there, I'll bring him his shiny new laptop and we'll have a bowl of real Vietnamese Pho noodle soup together, life is good :)

China preparations take up a good portion of my time, I am really happy I am staying at the same hotel - the Zhong An Inn on Andingmenwai Dajie - as I was on my last visit, it is extremely centrally located, four subway stops from Tien An Men, dirt cheap, serves Chinese breakfast - I am not going to China so I can eat bacon and eggs and jam botties, right? - and offers free internet, laundry across the street (yes, that is the laundry's website, check out their English pages!), and a ten minute walk to the subway. Note, on the picture to the left, where it says "N", for North? To give you an idea of how quickly China made ready for the Olympics, and how little of that is as yet "reasonable and customary", that entire map segment should be turned upside down, the arrow is actually pointing South, and the subway station is actually three blocks from the hotel, and the Ministry of Works is now a sports arena. I tell you, you haven't lived until you have tried to explain to a Beijing cabbie, who only speaks Putonghua, that your hotel is just down the avenue, and then see him get his knickers in a twist when you want to get out a block from the hotel, as the connecting road is under construction. What really turned me on to the difference of China is that one cabbie, when he couldn't find it, actually turned off his meter, and another insisted on leaving his cab parked illegally, and help me carry my luggage two hundred yards to the hotel entrance - this after refusing a tip. It is these things that make me head back to Beijing, underneath the surface of politics and technology development the people are the nicest of all places in Asia I've been, probably on a par with the Filipinos.

Of course with the sudden warm weather - yesterday, only a few days after it stopped freezing, the mercury hit 78, 26 degrees centigrade - I need to clear up the flower beds and grass, I tend to leave a covering of fall leaves over winter, which is better for the germnating plants, but now they'll want the light. Then there is the census form, I have to get my taxes done and paid before I leave, although, technically, I can do that online from anywhere, I need to move money around in my brokerage account where some mutual funds seem to have collapsed forever, and I try to keep the woodpile momentum going. Spending two or three hours, every other day, cutting and splitting wood is brilliant exercise, I just have to do it... And then I have to pre-write a month' worth of blog - I wil write from Beijing, but post that after I come back, I do not advertise I am away from home on the internet until after I have returned. I've always done that, but this year I seem to have a real problem "writing ahead" - I can churn out drivel copy with the best of them, but don't want to do that, and it just takes me too long to write some interesting stuff. This entry is a good example - I started it yesterday, and by the time I am done, I've spent five or six hours formatting the page, sizing and converting pictures - most are 6 or 12 megabytes in size, and not in JPEG format - and writing and correcting my text. If you have been a reporter for part of your life, you can't help being perfectionist about publishing. Wish me luck.

Spotsy, March 16, 2010 - More about toys

I ran into a Samsung 50 inch 720p plasma TV, a showroom model, for $619 today, and couldn't help myself. Having turned it up on full HDMI, and testing it with Blu-Ray, I can only recommend that if you haven't yet got yourself an HD television, these things are a lot cheaper than the "full tilt" 1080p LCD sets. Plasma has always had a colour rendition that is less harsh and more graduated than LCD, and having run it side-by-side with a Philips 47 inch 1080p LCD TV, I can't say there is a huge difference between the two - watching it from 20 feet away, none. It is crisp, very rich in colour, and the blacks are significantly better. While the 1080p has a full third more pixels than a 720p screen, the picture is not one third sharper - besides, the 1080p only comes into play when you play back Blu-Ray disks, there is no other video format capable of outputting "true" HD. Cable and satellite decoders max out at 1080i, which means the HD image is written to the screen in two passes - two 480p images, essentially. I should emphasize that the sets with HDMI input connectors all handle 1080p (a.k.a. "Full HD") input - what is important is that the set present itself to the tuner, receiver, decoder or player/recorder as a 1080p set - the Samsung does. CNET's tests bear out that the resolution difference between the two formats is visible only when looking at screens that are 55 inches in diameter and larger - from what I see on the screen, as I sit here writing this, I have to concur. You need to realize as well that the majority of TV programming is not broadcast in 1080i, but at 720p or even lower. So if you compare the two, and consider I paid $900 for the Philips, and $619 for the Samsung, you can buy two nice Blu-Ray players for what you save. Power consumption is pretty close, today - the 47 inch Philips is rated at 295 watts, the 50 inch Samsung at 350 watts - for both, that equates to around $6 per month, used 5 hours a day, 7 days a week. Double that if you've got kids or couch potatoes in the house.

Just to give you an idea of what real 1080p looks like, the picture on the right is a still photograph of a single frame of a Doctor Who Blu-Ray special, taken right off the screen of the Philips, using a Nikon semi-professional camera, but with the room lit normally, with the camera hand held, no tricks. You can click on the picture to see a larger version, the quality is truly stunning. But when you are watching television, looking at the image at more than a couple of feet from the screen, there really isn't any difference. You should realize, too, that the 1080p resolution (1920x1080 pixels @ 60 frames) is as high as we are going to get, for a long time. The networks do not have enough bandwidth to start delivering higher resolutions, any bandwidth increases are going to go to the internet, where only very few providers yet have 1080p, and for most consumers, that's unwatchable, I find that even on my 12 megabit Comcast feed it tends to "hiccup". The next advancement is, as you know, 3D, and I will be damned if I am going to watch TV with special glasses on - IOW, for as long as they haven't figured out how to do this holographically, HDTV is it. The veracity of my statements is probably proven best by the fact that I have replaced the 1080p Philips with the 720p Samsung for TV watching, I will use the Philips in my den as a computer monitor, something it is much better suited for than the Samsung. To think that it isn't too long ago that you had to pay $1,200 for a 21 inch NEC Multisync...

Spotsy, March 10, 2010 - Winter's End

If anything has amazed me, this month, it is the huge volumes of internet crime to come out of Nigeria - that, and the fact we seem to be doing little about it.

As soon as I began listing things on Amazon and Ebay, the scammers were right there. The same thing applies, as an ongoing concern, on dating sites. One day, out of fourty or so new profiles on one site, I counted twenty-eight that were scams (many of the others were women that had nicknames that begin with "little" or "sweet", weighing in at a hefty 200 lbs or more, or not listing their weight). The Amazon scammers had made an HTML page that closely resembled the Amazon sale confirmation page, with a request to ship the next morning - hoping that I would ship prior to receiving the confirmation in my Amazon listings. The destination address. each time, is actually in Nigeria. Same on Ebay - could I relax requirements, because they only had an Ebay account in Canada. And then the dating sites - girls that are ready to relocate - from Minnesota. And girls that look for a caring Christian husband - on a sex dating site. White girls from Nigeria, who had been "living in Austria", don't speak a word of German, and have a valid visa for the United States. Girls from Amsterdam, who don't speak Dutch. And girls from Ghana, who "really like your profile" - without ever accessing it. And each time, when you get them to send you email, the email is sent from an internet node in Nigeria, just about without fail.

What bothers me is that there are apparently thousands of people out there, whose sole, 24 hour, occupation is internet scamming. And that nothing is done about them. You would think that sites - Amazon, Ebay, the dating sites, have rules in place that identify the IP addresses that these people establish their accounts from. That they take these IP addresses back to the ISPs. And that these ISPs send a warning to the owner of the subnet, and that if the warning is not heeded, the subnets are locked out from access. It is easy enough to do that. It would certainly majorly inconvenience the legitimate users of those subnets, but that is exactly what I would want. If you do not police your commercial network, all your customers get locked out. It is easy to do - all you have to do is get them to send you one email, their originating IP is right there, and it will eventually lead to the internet cafes that these people operate from policing their customers. Which they will normally not do, because they are making huge sums of money on them. They are pretty brazen, so there clearly is no risk to them at all.

The last of the snow is finally melting away - I have been able to get the Camaro out of the garage, and take it for its State safety inspection. I should have done that in February, but with what became an ice dam in front of the garage there wasn't any way I could back it out. And the ice dam happened because I couldn't shovel the snow in December and January, after I slipped and fell and cracked some ribs. Which not only hurts like hell, but kind of disables you, because there is then so much you can't do, like sleep lying down. My doctor warned me to take painkillers, something I do not like to do, because the pain may lead to shallow breathing, and that can lead to pneumonia, and that can kill.

I leave you with a couple more snow pictures - the one up top of a construction crew working at a friend's house in Virginia's Northern Neck - a place where they occasionally see a dusting of snow. The friend told me he had not seen this much snow in the Neck since he was young - and that is some 60 years ago. Hard workers, those guys - dressed in ten layers, no snow days for them.

Next weekend we go to Daylight Savings Time - yes? OK? Is Summer coming?

Spotsy, March 5, 2010 - China

I have to apologize for not updating my musings as often as I should. I've been kind of busy with a myriad little things, from cutting firewood on an almost daily basis, looking for airfares and possible connections in Beijing for my upcoming trip there, finding friend E. an airfare so she can join me in China for a week, and finally putting all sorts of surplus stuff on Ebay.

First of all, in my relentless quest to expose the weird stuff Facebook, presumably driven by its young CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, gets up to, see the page cutout to the left, another example of how Facebook delivers targeted deceptive advertising - see my blog entry for February 16, below, for another example. Facebook needs to make money, and we've been told how it is profitable, but it does so by selling your private information to deceptive advertisers. I have checked out some of the dating sites you see to the left, and in my February 16 posting, and found they're completely fake - they have some real women, but then you come across the promised listings - young women looking for older men, local "real mature singles" with enormous breasts, and what you find is that those listings are fake - a copied posting, same text, repeated 15 times with different pictures, the same picture with different texts, etc. There isn't any way Facebook does not know about these practices - the company regularly dumps advertisers that do not comply with their rulebook, so apparently creating deception sites that make you pay if you want to write to these "women" is within Facebook's permitted scope. The ad at the bottom, invoking President Obama and a 70% insurance reduction for "residents" is another good example - there is no such plan, the companies that advertise this and other deceptions - a free Macbook for testing one - don't have any of that on offer, or to sell. I see other sites advertise online dating - with very pretty women, some clearly use models, but only on Facebook do I see "local women looking for men over 40" showing as much of their FF breasts as possible.

There is plenty of this type of advertising around, I will admit, but to have a social networking site with access to your personal information sell targeted deceptive advertising, using what it knows about you, is not the same as putting bad advertising on the CNN website, or generically on the internet. If Facebook is generating revenue by encouraging bad advertisers to link up with your personal information, it is making a mockery of its prior statements that it safeguards your privacy, and wants to be a social environment. Have you thought about what Facebook puts in front of your kids? You don't know, because as Facebook uses personal information it has on you it would never show you what a 13 year old gets to see. And they might not tell you, or see anything wrong with whatever it is Facebook thinks is appropriate. All I know is that a 25 year old without a family or children who appears to be interested in getting very rich very quickly is not very likely to worry about your kid's privacy any more than he is about mine, beyond what he is legally supposed to do. None of this stuff is accidental.

I am looking forward to my upcoming sojourn to China. What I am planning to do is look for opportunities, business as well as career, basically because I think that the invigorating exciting growth-and-build environment I found here in the US when I arrived in the 1980s, is there now, and that is a life I like so much I can't help myself - I am going to try and see if I can get a slice. Should I? I was a lot younger when I moved here from the U.K., I had set up a couple of ventures there, so was in the swing of things, and I am older and in a very different place today. But I keep telling myself that I have the same brain, the same drive, I have a lot more experience - when I first came here I had learned, in Holland and England, what not to do, but what America gave me a chance to do is learn to get it right, make a success of myself. And that is just so addictive, I would love to do it again, it is not happening here, but it is sure as hell happening in China, so why don't I just get my backside in an airplane, and get some of it?

Hence my choice of Beijing - I have looked around all of the places, from the Philippines and Singapore to Jakarta and Hong Kong, but then I realized why Beijing pulls me so much. I have previously made careers in London and New York City, I thrive in the navels of the world, in the big core cities, I watch Law and Order mostly because it is almost like living in Manhattan and Westchester County again - I even got married in the Centre Street State Supreme Court they're always standing in front of. And it is Beijing where it is happening today, where a majority of the startups are, the campuses, where the young and talented migrate, the money, I was there and it just feels right, the Olympics opened that place right up, it's got the vibes. So, I am just going to do it, what happens happens. Sitting here on my backside, getting exercise on my five acres of Virginia, helping neighbours out, working on web stuff, selling things on Ebay, is all very nice, but I got da itch, and I gots to scratch it. So, here I go, wish me luck. And if you have something you think I might fit into, go to my resume page, check the facts, and connect with me using Google Voice or Skype, the links are there. Thanks!

Spotsy, February 26, 2010 - Berries 'n Skype

I want to bore you a little more about this Blackberry, and its unexpected capabilities - this is purely personal, and centers around applications I already use on a daily basis. I read all this stuff people do on iPhones, and I am sure you have an app that can geo-tag all of your girlfriends, and sends you a text message when each one of them is ovulating, but that really is not something I buy or use a telephone for.

I've been using Skype to keep in touch with friends and family for a number of years now, and that includes former colleagues in Asia Pacific - it appears Skype is more popular among professionals and international users than it is in the US, probably because Ebay, which bought Skype a few years ago, and has now sold part of it, didn't know how to market it. Based in Europe, Skype has grown to the world's largest telephone company in terms of minutes used. Convenient to have voice or video conversations, Skype works well and is programmed in such a way that if finds its way around many firewalls, which, if I don't wear my network security hat, is pretty cool. But Skype has a subscription deal as well, Unlimited World, which for $100 a year lets me make unlimited calls to phones in 40+ countries - landlines in Western Europe, so I can call my bankers and my sister, and landlines as well as mobile phones in places like China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and so on. This is pretty handy, especially when I travel, because I have free callback to the US from WiFi networks, and that means I can call China from China without paying local hotel charges, or having to buy phone cards. Unlimited World comes with a localized (to you) access number, as well, that will connect you to wherever it is you're calling, so you aren't tied to a laptop or PC. The quality of Skype calls is very consistent, and as they develop their own audio, video and networking algorithms, the quality and persistence of their connections is second to none. Sitting in a hotel lounge with free WiFi in Hong Kong one time, I found myself surrounded by some 30 ship's crew from India and the Philippines, every single one of whom was on their laptop, Skyping with friends and family back home. I do not normally put screen shots with friend's names at this site, but in this case I am making an exception, as there isn't any other way I can show you my Skype on my Blackberry, and I like to show you things that don't come from catalog shots.

So I was really pleased to find there is an application, iSkoot, that uses a Skype module and runs on my BlackBerry Bold 9700. It is formally compatible with the Bold 9000, not the 9700, but I thought I would try anyway, and sure enough, it runs just fine. I just spent half an hour talking to my buddy Andy, who lives in Australia, but is currently working in Saigon, using Skype over 3G, and it was clean as a whistle, called from the car. Importantly, the Blackberry can handle internet access, accessing other apps, and Skyping or calling all at the same time, something that on most other phones is not possible. With a headset, being able to look something up during a conversation you are used to on your laptop, but you can now do it on the phone too.

This isn't just the Blackberry. While Apple and AT&T and Verizon Wireless limit the communications applications you can use, T-Mobile does not, and on the Blackberries you can use both 3G and UMA to make calls and connect to the internet, UMA being a way to use GSM telephony over WiFi. UMA lets me call back to the US over WiFi from abroad as well, for free (!), so for me, this is a totally gorgeous combo. It turns the Blackberry from a cellphone with internet into communications central. It isn't just Skype, either. I am one of the lucky owners of a Google Voice number, still an invite-only affair, and that works brilliantly too, on the BB 9700. Google has a native Blackberry application available, and so everything you can do in Google Voice on a PC using a browser can be done in the Google Voice app, including downloading and playing back Google voicemail. Works even over the slower EDGE network, Google Voice gives you all the follow-me-calling, caller screening and centralized voicemail functionality those of us who worked for large corporations are used to.

Why is this important? Unlike Apple and others, T-Mobile, Blackberry and Google do not restrict functionality. Blackberry does not censor what you can install on your phone, T-Mobile lets you make calls on your 3G handset using other carriers, like Google and Skype, and Google provides useful communications and professional tools, and none of these three worry about your wanting to have wiggling boobs on your handset. I laughed when I read that Apple had removed most sexually oriented apps from iTunes - it reads to me a bit like Chevrolet making you sign a contract forbidding the transportation of single women under 30 in the passenger seat of a Camaro. I do not own an iPhone because it would tie me lock, stock and barrel to Apple computer, which uses it as a money machine, a conveyance for the sale of advertising, music and software, and that is not what I buy a cellular telephone for. You cannot possibly make me believe that it is convenient to trade stock on the screen of an iPhone, or any handset, for that matter. I've done it, in emergencies, on the smaller screen of my Nokia 6110 Navigator, but I normally run my brokerage application on the 10 inch screen of my Acer laptop, not on a telephone, so I can view trends and comparisons while I trade.

Spotsy, February 23, 2010 - Berries 'n other low hanging fruit

There is something incongruous about this smartphone race. I see lots of grownups swoon over iPhones, others post Facebook updates 168 times a day from their Blackberry, but when I run around or travel, the majority of young people I see have more or less regular cellphones. I see them on the forums, they care about design, and they care about functionality, they use telecommunications devices. It is almost as if the older generation is adopting the smartphones, handheld computing devices, because they can play with them, like they played with PCs, when those happened, laptops, when those became available, and lately those useless netbooks, whose function I do to this day do not understand, unless it is purely to let the computer manufacturers make some money.

I do have a few apps on my new BlackBerry Bold 9700, but I can't say I use many of them, most of what I need to do I do on my wonderfully capable Acer Aspire 1410, which handles, with its 64 bit Windows 7, about 90% of what I need to do, in a form factor that disappears into a small backpack, and talks to the internet anywhere using the aforementioned Blackberry. What I find particularly spectacular about this Blackberry is that it is "layered",it has its various functionalities set in different function groups, all of which can operate at the same time. I am testing a Skype application, iSkoot, purely because I am a heavy Skype user, and that runs using the TCP network stack while the telephony portion of the phone is active independently (there is as yet no Skype for Blackberry, although one for Verizon has been announced). I was on Skype with my sister in Europe as a regular cellular call came in, and could have swapped between the two. Underneath all that, the internet browser is active too, or (and I use that more) the Blackberry can provide internet connectivity to my attached laptop. That is spectacular, the Blackberry is purely specialized on communications, and does that very well, fitted as it is with a regular physical qwerty keyboard.

Why do I bang on about this? Because I think that the press attention is focused in the completely opposite direction of where the industry either is, or should be. There are a fair amount of affluent people who can go and do cruises and use their iPhones on board ship for all sorts of things, but I doubt very much that those have any noticeable impact on revenue streams. For the most part, these are people who would have one or the other computing device on them, does anybody really believe that the IPhone has suddenly made these folks do things they otherwise could not do?

There is even more of a disconnect between what goes on in the United States and the rest of the world. There is much focus on Verizon Wireless and AT&T Wireless, both companies that have little impact on an international scale. Verizon Wireless is forever quoted as having a size it does not - 50% of it is foreign owned, and British Vodafone, which is the largest mobile telephone company on the planet, is infinitely more important than Verizon will ever be. We could have been out there, chose not to. T-Mobile is another good example - it is generally barely discussed, as the fourth ranking American mobile carrier, but it is not - it is a wholly owned subsidiary of the fourth or fifth largest telecommunications company in the world. Again, not something to sneeze at. And between Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom, there is a finger on the pulse of the cellphone user, all over the world, and the American press doesn't even talk to these folks. It is more important to analyze the problems with the iPhone's 3G coverage in LA - why is this even discussed? The only important conclusion you can draw from these issues is that if you need a reliable communications device in Los Angeles, you are probably best off with a Nokia, Samsung, LG or, if you must, a Blackberry, although that, too, is an overly convoluted piece of technology, that can only be used and activated by two companies working together, you can't take it out of the box and just turn it on.

I keep getting interrupted by the television, if you can call it that, first Fleetwood Mac, now Jeff Beck at Ronnie Scott's, both in HD on Palladia, in glorious Dolby 5.1. I suppose I should be grateful I have five acres of woods around the house, because I have this cranked up the whole way, on a 6 speaker assembly, 1,300 watts of pumping sound, umm, no, add to that a 1,000 watt subwoofer, I lied.. *grin*

I have just ordered a high resolution Epson PowerLite - the cabling on my previous projectors annoyed me, but this thing (cheap, because refurbished) is networkable, 802.11G. I am hoping I can pump HD TV to it from my Lenovo laptop, proof of the pudding is in trying that out. Would be really cool, ceiling mount with power directly to it through the ceiling, no wires, we'll see.

In the meantime I have decided to spend an entire month in China, I've gotten so energized by what goes on there, technologically, that I really would like to try and "get a piece of it". How, I don't know, but I have some time to prepare. No, won't tell you about it until I am back, I do not want to post here as an invite to burglars to please "do" my house. For all you know I am there as you read this, but then again it might be three months out. I cannot believe the risks people take by advertising loudly where they are, who is at their house, where their house is, where their daughter is going to be tomorrow and Friday, who with, etc., etc. Paranoid? Maybe, but I don't think so. There are now tens of thousands of people who have made it their business to trawl the internet and find crime opportunities, I see folks posting on forums about "strange emails from the bank" every day, which means none of the internet crime information in the papers, on radio, on television, is getting to them. They don't pay attention, don't care. It is amazing. Lots of folks will still not buy on the internet with a credit card, yet they open every single spam email they get..

Spotsy, February 20, 2010 - Top Ten Reasons why it is a good idea to date an older guy

1) Marry him, and your car insurance is free

2) He can cook and do laundry.

3) He will go long enough so you can orgasm, too.

4) He will appreciate your new underwear, and not peel you out of it immediately.

5) Your girlfriends will stop making fun of you when they see your new Porsche Boxster (see under 1).

6) Older guys can get Viagra on their medical insurance (see under 3).

7) He will interrupt a Very Important Meeting when you call.

8) You'll never have to justify another new outfit, as long as you finish your shopping in time for that Dinner with the Client and wear it (see under 4).

9) No more hailing cabs, you can use his limo (see under 8)

And the number one reason to date an older guy:

NO MOTHER-IN-LAW!

Spotsy, February 16, 2010 - A Plethora of Ripofss

According to Dutch Financial Regulator AFM, investment advisor London Mcfee Investment is a scam. They do not exist at the Dutch address they list, and taking a look at their website, I found there to be telling grammatical errors, and they are not the type of mistakes a Dutch writer, or even a Western European, would make, either, especially not text that would normally be vetted by attourneys before being posted. A dead giveaway? Their domain is listed as owned by a company in Brussels, Belgium, with a domain provider with a Dutch post office box address, and a telephone number in.. Romania..

Whatever Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg may have said about privacy, I noticed today that advertisers have my birthday, even though I have set my privacy controls as high as possible without disappearing myself entirely. What this means is that if a bad apple in the advertising bunch wants to, he or she can take folks' names, home towns and birth dates, and take a good run at uncovering their personal information, down to the SSN. I honestly find it hard to believe that anybody in their right mind would make this information publicly available - because that is what it is, public. Just because not everybody cannot access it, does not mean it is not public. Clear is that Zuckerberg is making himself rich by selling subscribers' private information.

The vast majority of people I see on Facebook are completely oblivious to privacy needs, everything is out there, birthdates, home towns, wives, husbands, kids, jobs, pictures of their cars with license plates visible, I could go on. What they are not aware of is what I see on most dating sites - in a three days period, last week, some 150 new profiles were created, fully half of which I could establish were fake. That's 70 or so profiles created for two reasons: to scam people out of money, or to steal their identity. The majority of these were created in Africa, followed by Mexico, and then Asia. Mexico nobody even talks about, as a scamming country.

What it all means is that tens of thousands of people are continually trawling the internet, looking for victims. That is their business, that is what they do for a living. And from what I see, they are getting pretty smart at it - although you can tell from their English who is not part of the culture they purport to be in. The mistakes are small, but they are there - it is easy to distinguish between an American's mistake and a foreigner's mistake. I just don't understand why we do not make foreign aid contingent on our being able to apprehend and convict these people. It just, despite the huge cost, does not have a high enough priority for our government. Guantanamo Bay would make an ideal hotel for these people, who could be put to work making license plates or whatever, flat ten year stint, no A/C.

I am personally delighted that President Obama has scrapped new moon landings. While I have every understanding for scientific curiousity, I don't know that people walking on other planets has any practical purpose. We have the ability to create space stations, so making it so that these space stations become space craft isn't that big a step. Developing the means of traveling significant distances in space, creating self sufficient and self maintaining technologies, that is where our priority should be. These technologies can be applied across the board, on earth as in space, think of buildings, cities that maintain and repair themselves, have the ability to create the staples for a habitat, energy, water, air, autonomously - isn't that what we're trying to do all the time anyway?

What with the storms and the cold, I've been pretty busy. It has been a battle to keep my driveway driveable, I've had to go out every four hours or so, during each storm, or the snow would pack high enough thay even my four wheel drive SUV would get stuck (it actually did, a couple of times). Like my neighbours, I pretty much went through all of my prepared firewood, so I've been out there almost every day, sawing and chopping more. It is good exercise, but up to your knees in the snow, splitting wood that is frozen solid, is also a lot of exercise. And while the woodstove does a brilliant job down to 25 degrees or so, it has been a lot colder than that, so my latest electricity bill is still sizable.

But it all works. The roof so far seems to be OK, despite the fact there probably is a lot more snow on there than it was designed to hold - Channel 4 had it the average roof, at this latitude, is designed to support 30 or so tonnes of ice and snow, and we've had lots morre - roofs have been collapsing all over, although more flat ones than the gable type. If they only built the flat roof at an angle, even slightly so, most of the problem would go away, methinks. You'll find a couple more of my seasonal pictures here - for those of you living in the Northern reaches these aren't earth shattering revelations, nut I promise you that for Virginia, this is pretty much unusual. It snowed again tosday, so the schools are once again closed tomorrow, as most of the snow has not melted, and won't, until it warms up. They can't even put it in the bay, because of the road salt that is mixed in with it, it is trucked to fields and unused parking lots for now.

Spotsy, February 8, 2010 - Got Snow?

Spotsy, February 5, 2010 - Future and Present

Watching Syfy's new series Caprica I see some interesting concepts, in terms of the human-machine interface, but nobody really seems to think forward adequately.

Take shopping, for instance. You don't see anybody shop, in Caprica, but if they were, they'd probably pay by credit or debit card. Nowhere is the shopping done by simply passing through a portal, which scans all RFID tags on the purchases, retrieves your ID from an implant, say, asks you which account you'd like to pay from, and sends you on your way. Similarly, the automated "Johnny Cab" in Blade Runner (stupendous on Blu-Ray, by the way) should eventually become an automated guidance module for your car - navigation equipment being almost ubiquitous (I have been carrying a GPS cellphone since 2007), a tie-in with your vehicle controls is inevitable. Why have accidents?

The problem may be that making these things visible on the TV screen is either hard, or it is easy, but very expensive. But we must start thinking four generations of automation ahead, like Isaac Asimov used to do, hop-skipping the intermediate inventions. The iPhone and the iPad are perfect examples of how Apple is marketing effectively, but not understanding the marketplace - without entry level devices, a company will never be more than a niche market producer, a "computer Prada". I am much more interested in Nokia's $23 entry phone that is available in Asia - without peasants with cellphones, the future customers for high end devices will not happen. Nokia, in just three of its factories, produces in just ten days the same number of cellphones that takes Apple an entire quarter to make - most of those for people whose access to telecommunications means economic growth for their societies.

I used to think Virginia didn't have much in the way of snowfall, but I certainly got cured this year. The next storm - the third - is on its way, and estimates range from 4 inches to a foot, or more. So bad I cleared out the other part of my garage, and put the SUV in, it was hard enough to dig it out after the first storm, in December, so now it sits once again in the garage.

The picture here was taken today, before the storm... I spent much of the day chopping wood - while I brought down enough to last me the winter, I had not anticipated needing this much, so ran out of ready firewood. I don't mind - it is excellent exercise (no, not by axe, chain saw and log splitter, you think I am crazy?). It is still a nice feeling to be self-sufficient, at least in terms of heating, although I do have the heat pumps going, to pick up when I throttle the stove overnight, and when I let it die to clean out the ashes.

Spotsy, January 27, 2010 - Organize, organize..

It was a truly massive mistake to use Port-au-Prince airport to stage international aid. You don't do that at a half destroyed facility - you stage in nearby South Florida, where you have all of the facilities in the world, this while the US military brings the necessary heavy equipment, vehicles and helicopters into Port-au-Prince, and then you start airlifting presorted goods into Haiti, where soldiers and Marines unload aircraft, load their contents on trucks and helicopters, and keep the airport clear of goods and people. You chopper the international rescue teams directly to their assigned targets, with their gear, then bring supplies in as they call for them. I can't fathom how there isn't a Federal management team that can get this together, in a matter of hours - this is not rocket science, utilities do this all the time, whenever there is a disaster anywhere, we know how to do this.

If you want to use a mobile 3G connection to put your laptop online, cellular carriers will happily sell you a card or USB "dongle" to do that with, for which you need an extra cellular line/number. Both Sprint and Verizon Wireless, apart from the usual dongles and PC cards, offer "MIFI" devices as well, allowing the user to connect multiple WiFi equipped computers or smartphones to their EV-DO networks. I personally am not sure these devices are hugely useful, if you have four users hanging off of your laptop, how are you going to go to lunch, or attend a meeting? They all go with you?

One thing the carriers do not want you to do is tether, use your cellphone to connect your laptop to the internet. I have been doing it for years, T-Mobile has an internet plan that allows tethering with phones capable of acting as a digital wireless modem, I understand that the other carriers discourage and disable it as much as they can. The net result of tethering is that a student in a dorm room needs no more than a single smartphone to have voice, voicemail, faxmail and internet, in places where 3G connectivity is available. Especially for wireline carriers, traditional telephone companies, this is unattractive. So their plans don't allow tethered phones, and on top of that, you get a ridiculous allocation of bandwidth, like 5 gigabytes per month or so, over and above which you have to pay extra.

Does this make sense? There are probably still millions of people who cannot afford internet - cable company, FIOS, or most of the wireless carriers, you'll pay upwards of $45 per month, which is a lot of money for poor families, whose children should be on the internet to learn, but aren't. Assuming you need a telephone, T-Mobile will sell you that internet, with unlimited usage, for $25 over and above their regular charges, which you can further reduce by adopting a family plan, so that you and your sisters, say, share an account. Perhaps we should start looking at how to get deals like these to families that aren't affluent - a phone they all need, and just replacing their landline could save them a bundle..

Spotsy, January 18, 2010 - Google v. China and other controversies

If you want to flip the Google v. China, Inc. argument - Google does not need China. It does very well without the People's Republic, and what is more, it controls the English language search world. Yes, Baidu has much of the Chinese market - in Chinese. That is brilliant if you are the Chinese government, because the majority of Chinese internet users search in Chinese. And that is controllable. But for foreign trade, commerce, international development, the whole world speaks English. And English is something Baidu doesn't do. It can't. And the runners-up, Yahoo and Bing? Theyre American, they're all here. And they don't like the Chinese regulations, and its rampant theft of intellectual property. The other, closer English language experts? In Singapore, and Hong Kong. And they don't like the PRC either, Chinese though they are. Taiwan, ditto. A lot of the advanced technological stuff in China is made by Taiwan Chinese companies, which, again, have good command of English, and a love of democracy.

So if Google pulls out of China, others may follow. The Chinese market is huge, but the world market is larger. And China needs the world market, which it can't have unless it plays by its rules. That compliance can be postponed, but not indefinitely. Yes, China is rising, but hasn't yet to the point that most Chinese citizens can afford cars and laptops and smartphones and internet. For that, they'll need more money. Ours. And if there are more internet attacks from China like the ones just reported by Google, it may have to be censored, at China's borders. By us.

The internet is, indeed, a massive threat to non-democratic societies. Even if you just forget about there being restrictions on speech and expression, in certain countries, the simple expedient of censorship is self defeating. Any society in which there is a massive organization dedicated to preventing the free exchange of ideas and opinions is essentially working on its own collapse. In China, the problems the Politbureau faces are even more serious. Much of China's technology elite is Western educated, you see, many have returned to China from senior positions in the United States.

These aren't people you can shut up. They're not Marxists or communists, will never be. They went to Harvard, Stanford, MIT, because schools of that caliber do not exist in totalitarian societies. They put up with the restrictions since they have the freedom to escape them, and China puts up with their ways because they are the only Chinese capable of bringing 21st century business and production methods to what was until recently a peasant society, with communal industries that produced mediocre products at huge cost. So the type of expertise Western Chinese, and there are plenty in Google, bring, is an expertise China needs to progress and move its peasant populations from the 19th into the 21st century.

I don't think China can afford to bite the hand that feeds it, which is what it does every day. Piracy is rampant, sophisticated cyberattacks, even if they are not carried out by government agents, are at least permitted - you can't tell me that if you're so good at rooting out dissent on the Chinese internet, you can't find and deal with the hackers in China. And China has not yet learned to deal with dissent in an intelligent way - something you learn of necessity in a democracy. You ignore the dissent, marginalize it, you leave the Tibetans and Falung Gong and the Uighurs be, leave them pursue their goals and given them a measure of autonomy, all the while encapsulating them in benevolence. There is no soceity I can think of that was not eventually brought down by the dissent it sought to suppress, a dissent that, by virtue of its repression, became much more important than it would hav otherwise been.

No, Google has little to lose, by putting pressure on an immature market. For that market to mature, China needs Google, not the other way around... How problematical the current position is for the Chinese government you can read here - Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, in which Yahoo owns a 40% stake, felt it necessary to criticize Yahoo for coming out in support of Google, this after Yahoo said it had been subjected to the same China-originated cyberattack Yahoo was. Slagging off your own shareholders is not something that is normally done, in the industry, for Alibaba to speak up on an issue it is not involved in, means simply - that Alibaba is involved. And therein lies the problem - companies don't have to support governments, at least not where I come from.

Spotsy, January 13, 2010 - 2010 advancement

I have finally started looking for projects - meant to for a long time, but it just took forever to begin following up on. My only real project, at this point, is putting together a complete wireless communications system, comprising internet access, an alarm system with proximity warning, and a combination of voice and mobile telephony. While experimenting with it cost me a bomb, the system itself isn't hugely expensive, and it leaves the users with only having to get some kind of TV feed, probably satellite television. I have felt for a long time that the wires we surround ourselves with are obsolete, but at the same time wireless communications, which to a large extent use unregulated spectrum, can be unreliable. You can have your WiFi (and thereby your VOIP or UMA voice communications) knocked out in a second when somebody nearby starts up a car with a wireless backup camera, and the bad thing about that is that you have no way of telling that is what caused it. I only found out because I equipped two of my cars with wireless cameras, and had laptops kicked off my network every time I took a car out, or put it back in the garage.

So putting the system together, a full mobile telephony based communications system, complete with wireless alarm and internet, based around four T-Mobile cellular lines, with all handsets and other equipment purchased separately, you'll be amazed at the monthly bill - just $80. With a $10 unlimited text messaging add-on, $90 per month. That includes UMA, WiFi calling, which lets compatible handsets use wireless internet to place calls, Hotspot@Home, which allows one line to simulate landline service using a special internet router, and unlimited 3G data service on one line. The other two are regular cellular phones, albeit with UMA capability.

In other words, this setup replaces home phone, internet, alarm line, and two cellphone lines. Even nicer, this is no-contract subscription service - month to month, since there is no equipment to amortize (I had all of the gear in stock, so to speak).

Looking at all of the development going on, and the battles between equipment manufacturers, we tend to forget that a cellphone is a telephone. You can add all of the "apps" you want, it is still a communications device. Don't get me wrong, I understand how people go bonkers over the iPhone, the Droid, the Blackberry and Google's new Android, but these aren't phones - they are handheld computers. I like being able to read my email on my Blackberry, I've been trading stock on my cellphone for years, but the majority of the things I can do on my Blackberry I would rather do on my laptop - which by now has shrunk to the point I've been able to downsize the backpack I normally carry. Kind of the best of both worlds, as the laptop uses the Blackberry to access the internet, and I can still get my calls.

Dropping by Home Depot today, I noticed good quality LED light bulbs have made it to the shelves in the US - they've been amply available in Europe for well over a year. A 40 watt equivalent spotlight from Philips (the R20 in the link page, pictured here) draws 7 watts, lasts (warranted!) up to 20 years, but - it costs $29.97, plus tax. Mind you, 7 watts - at their rated 4 hours per day, 7 days a week, the thing will cost you just 1.6 cents a month to run - that is 20 cents a year. In other words, nothing - there aren't electricity meters in the United States that can accurately measure that kind of draw - you buy the bulb, and the light is effectively free, 7 watts is less than the heat loss from an LCD television set. On top of that, this bulb is rated at 40,000 hours - Philips guarantees a 20 year lifetime with "normal use", defined as 4 hours per day, 7 days a week. That's right - guarantees, as in, they'll replace it if it conks out after 15 years, according to the packaging..

Jeremy Clarkson, of Top Gear fame, had an interesting observation in The Times of London, the other day. Assessing vehicle technologies, he expertly takes down the Toyota Prius as a "mongrel". I happen to agree with him - apart from adding electric motors and battery capacity to store energy the car temporarily does not need, for later use, the Prius is a normal car with a gasoline engine. If I am to believe the New York Times, the Chevy Volt, the car that is going to save the American automobile industry, is more of the same - it does 40 miles on batteries, which Chevy seems to think is the average round trip distance an American drives in a day. I don't know where they get their statistics from, but they certainly haven't talked to their wives about this...

Clarkson makes the point that the 1,000hp $2 million Bugatti Veyron is much more of a technological advancement than the Toyota Prius - and although I rarely agree with Clarkson, whose universe consists entirely of being a celebrity, he makes a good point here. To master 1,000hp for everyday road use is true magic. The Prius is simply more proof that we are not able to generate power for transportation other than through fossil fuel. The same thing applies to all those smartphones we're being bombarded with. Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo made good points at CES - bringing more mobile telephony and applications to the developing world is probably the most important factor in technology development today. The Third World cannot progress without telecommunications and internet, and what Nokia does goes a long way in catering for that need. The cheapest Nokia phone I found in Asia costs just $23, affordable for the cab driver, contractor, and rural police departments. That is where we have to be heading, using technologies to bring economic advancement to those living at the margins of society. If nothing else, connecting those dependent on their imams for information to the rest of the world can't be a bad thing.

Spotsy, January 7, 2010 - That hurt

It has not been an easy month. It all began just before Christmas, when a tree blew down and clipped the edge of my roof, and a window. I was still figuring out how to get it fixed, and talking to the insurance, when this huge mass of snow descended on us. To give you an idea of how unusual that is, I gave away my snowblower when I moved down here from New York. There is some snow, every few years, but nothing like this..

If it weren't for the SUV I bought last year, I would have had a hard time getting around - the Durango came with a very thirsty engine, but it has four wheel drive, high and low gearing, a self-locking differential, and - something I actually needed - skid plates underneath engine and transmission. I ended up with big ice ridges at the end of my driveway, caused by the snow removal trucks, and without the skid plates I wouldn't have been able to get over them - I literally skidded over the top, a strange experience. There was so much snow that both my neighbour's Toyota truck and my Durango actually got stuck, we had to dig them out.

But it got worse. In amid all this snow, I went to shop, and asked my elderly neighbours if they needed anything. It had been clear to me from my first year in the Arlington office that Virginians aren't used to snow, when somebody wanted to send staffers home early because of a "snowstorm" - 2 inches. My CEO and I had a hearty laugh - he is Canadian, and I am quite used to snow growing up in Europe, especially since my father retired to the Austrian alps. This was all in the days before four wheel drives became ubiquitous - you'd sling snowtires under the car in November, and that was it - the farmers in the mountains didn't even bother with those.

So, smartass got to the store and back, delivered the groceries, then slipped on what was by that time solid ice, and cracked some ribs. Boyohboy. That freakin' hurt. It made my doctor laugh: "No good deed goes unpunished" he said. "Four to five weeks" he said. I couldn't sleep in bed because it was excruciatingly painful to lie down, and even more painful to turn or get up - when I tried, it took me something like ten minutes to get back out of bed. So I slept sitting up.. Said neighbours kindly brought me food, although I was able to pour boiling water on soup, but my firewood ran out and I was unable to replenish it from my wood pile. I don't even want to think about my upcoming electric bill, and as it was bitterly cold the heat pumps didn't exactly get it toasty inside.

Anyway, I am a lot better now, firewood is once again in ample supply, although I still get my mail by car, I don't want to take the risk of traversing my icy driveway - due to the injury, I couldn't clear the snow from in front of the garage, or the driveway entrance, all that is now big solid blocks of ice. Owell. Ready for the next storm, supposed to hit tomorrow....

You have no doubt seen all the noise about Google's new phone - there is some stuff behind it that the press does not seem to have picked up on.

First of all, what with T-Mobile offering service for it, although the phone is unlocked and can be used with AT&T Wireless service, it appears that both Google and T-Mobile are moving to the European / Asian method: you can get SIM card only service, and buy an unlocked phone. In Europe, Asia and Africa there are as many stores selling unlocked phones, as there are selling carrier-tied phones. T-Mobile now gives you a discount if you don't need a phone - that's step one.

Secondly, beyond T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone will support the Google phone. Vodafone happens to be the largest mobile phone company on Earth, and co-owner of Verizon Wireless. My take? Vodafone will support and sell the phone in those markets it has presence (see the list here) and in the US, it will be the first "4G" phone for Verizon Wireless. IOW: a GSM phone with a SIM card, no more CDMA. That's what I think... Verizon Wireless has announced 4G for... 2010. The Google phone will run on Verizon Wireless' network "in the spring of 2010". And I just don't know that Google/HTC will want to build a CDMA version, since CDMA is dead. Verizon Wireless Customers? 89 million. Vodafone customers? 303 million. But that does not include half of the Verizon Wireless customers, which are technically Vodafone's, too. Adjusted, Verizon has 45 million mobile customers, while Vodafone has 348 million....

Spotsy, January 1, 2010 - Welcome back

May you find what you are looking for, in 2010, and if you aren't looking for anything, may beautiful surprises find you. I always hated the holidays, growing up, but then we had too many. in my family - Sinterklaas, Santa Claus day, celebrated in The Netherlands on December 5th, then my birthday, then my sister's birthday, then Christmas, then New Year's. Just too much. But, you enjoy. I see my friends really happy their kids are home for the holidays, and the festive atmosphere is certainly contageous.

The news is otherwise not that positive. President Obama is trying to jump start America's future, but unlike in previous decades, we don't have anything to sell. Our car manufacturers don't make cars the world wants, technology innovation is done in Taiwan and China, not in Silicon Valley, and nobody is helping the American public understand we are dependent on other countries, not the other way around. We increasingly lose out to European competition, Europeans internationally considered to be nicer people with a better grasp of starting from small, a lack of Predator drones, and increasingly that is where the major multi-nationals are headquartered and Americans go live for the quality of life. I know Obama is trying, but this will take more than four years, especially after eight years of swimming in the wrong direction. The most amazing occurrence this week? Nobody even wonders how come the Nigerian bomber is ignored even by the permanently staffed Homeland Security desk at.. Schiphol Airport.

And do not get me started on the war on terror - a war that cannot be fought by Westerners against Islamic extremists, but needs to be fought by Arabic speaking Muslim soldiers, who are the only ones that can command respect from Afghanis and Pakistanis and Yemenis. The more we are involved, the more it is a modern version of the crusades. Until we make the Saudis, Pakistanis, Malaysians, Indonesians, and countless other majority Muslim nations responsible for cleaning up their religious mess - and that is what it is, a religious mess - there will not be a lasting solution. They have to step up to the plate.

Alors

I have now received the Avertv Hybrid Nano Express TV tuner, see below (December 29) how I tried its USB cousin, and found it wanting, and I can tell you that the PC Express Card version is all I hoped it would be. Running in a decidedly mediocre Lenovo N500 laptop, it not only flawlessly receives HDTV, and sends it to a connected HD TV, the laptop actually flawlessly records the programming that is received from the Comcast cable connection I have it hooked up to.

That is not nothing, considering Windows records HDTV in its TV format to the tune of more than 4GB for a 45 minute movie - 92 MB per minute. And it does that while displaying the movie in 1080p resolution - 1920x1080 pixels at 60 Hz, although the cable signal is 1080i, 1920x1080 pixels at 30 Hz. I am honestly amazed. Yes, I upgraded the laptop - Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit, running in 8 GB of RAM, which the Lenovo can handle, but that still does not make it the fastest graphics machine in the world. It has to (and does) produce the accompanying Dolby 5.1 audio at the same time!.

The two pictures you see here show you how small this card is, it actually sits flush in the laptop (lower left in the other shot), and it shows you the quality of the display. Granted, partly that is due to the excellent quality of the Philips 47PFL7403D HDTV, combined with my excellent adjustment skills, but the signal still has to be there. You will agree that the image looks like it has been copied in (click on the pic to see a larger version), like they do for brochures, but it wasn't - not only is this the actual movie you see, I actually used flash to shoot this picture, or else the blacks of the equipment would have been too dark. Truly amazing.

Spotsy, December 28, 2009 - DVD

A recent question on CNET had to do with transferring HD video from a high end camcorder to DVD. Most respondents took the questioner at his word, providing several ways to store video on DVD. You can view the entire discussion here. Curiously, just about nobody thought that the loss of quality you incur by downscaling HD video to DVd was an issue. Because DVD is not capable of handling the resolution an HD camcorder provides, if you store your videos on DVD, you will lose that lovely HD quality forever. While it is true that the new AVCHD format will let you put HD video on a DVD disk, a DVD can contain some 4.7 GB of data, and a BD (Blu-Ray) disk can store 25 GB. You'll understand that if Blu-Ray was intended for 1080p HD, AVCHD on DVD can't possibly provide the same high resolution, or Dolby/DTS audio. You get what you pay for.

I have one comment on their mention of "preserving on DVD". It is very brief: DON'T. Writable DVDs are an unreliable storage method, they are easy to damage, there are compatibility issues between different brands of drives, in short - great for distribution, not great for storage. I recommend getting a multimedia server with gobs of disk space, if you have the wherewithall you can set up a simple cheap desktop with a large RAID drive, like a 2 terabyte Fantom, and make that accessible from your network, and use it to store all your "stuff" on. Periodically, as technology advances, you will have to move your files to larger disk arrays, in my case, every two years or so, when I begin to run out of space, but your "preserving" will last way beyond the life of a DVD. If you do not use this solution, or one like it, you won't be able to leave your videos and pictures to your grandkids - they'll be gone. Forever.

Although I am returning the Avertv Hybrid Volar Max HD tuner for USB I just got to Amazon, and am replacing it with the Avertv Hybrid Nano Express, which uses the PC Express Card bus rather than USB, this is simply because on the Lenovo laptop I tried to use it with it just doesn't perform well enough on the USB bus. There are (you can read the manual before you buy at Avermedia-usa.com) very specific performance requirements for this unit, and I would suggest that, if you are unsure of what your system can handle, you stick with those. HD TV with Dolby 5.1 audio needs a lot of horsepower.

Let me take the opportunity to laud Amazon for its terrific customer service - when my order did not arrive even though the USPS said it did, I emailed customer service, and within an hour I received an email stating Amazon had put another unit on order, with two day UPS shipping at no charge. A followup email provided a no-charge mail link so I could return the other unit should it arrive. The second unit shipped that day. Impressive customer service, people.

Having said that, I tried this tuner only under Windows 7, with the Windows Media Center that is packaged with that operating system. The software that comes with the unit works, I think it is intended for PCs that have no tuner software, but it does not work very well, and my suggestion is to use the Media Center, which, under Windows 7, runs this tuner like a native. You can find the drivers-only for the tuner as a separate download at the Avermedia website, and I would suggest you install those and try to run the Media Center first, you do not need to install the packaged software at all. Under Windows Vista and Windows 7, you see, a TV tuner is recognized by the operating system (that is part of the reason Microsoft has integrated the Windows Media Center in those versions of Windows), and handled as an integral part of your computer, it isn't an "alien" device, so to speak.

Once the drivers are loaded (do this before plugging it in for the first time!), the Avermedia device is recognized and the Media Center will offer to have it detect and program all available broadcast channels - analog TV, digital TV, digital radio and FM radio. 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 1920x1080 resolution at 30 or 60 Hz) you can watch and record HD TV "at full throttle", so to speak - please remember, most 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.

Other reviewers have tried this unit with antennas - my reason for buying it is that I wanted to put a recording device on my Comcast cable feed. I do have a Tivo with a Cable Card, but when connecting a new flat screen to my home theatre setup, I noticed that Comcast pumps a complete unencrypted TV feed down the cable wire, apart from what it sends to the Cable Card the Tivo needs to function. I discovered this accidentally, they don't tell you there is a "standard" cable feed as well. It is worth checking out, mine has 180 channels, partly digital, some of which do not appear on the Cable Card.

Doing specifically this, the Avermedia tuner picked up all available channels flawlessly, 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 (provided 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.

But it is there, and if you want to play with TV, or if you want a cheap DVR/PVR, this unit works very well, and gives you all the advantages of a cable company DVR.

Spotsy, December 25, 2009 - Merry Christmas, My Friends

Of course, my best wishes for the holidays, Christmas seems to have somehow morphed into an annual party, despite the opportunistic Egyptian cleric who has pronounced a fatwah over the Christian holiday. If it helps Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qaradawi, turkeys are not Christian, they are birds. As such, they are not particularly tasty, it was just that Americans felt they had to have a larger indigenous chicken - everything is bigger here, after all. If they good sheikh wanted to polarize a little more, he has been very successful.

Just watching the festivities at Walt Disney World, it seems a good opportunity for people to celebrate their family relationships - New Jersey father David Goldman certainly thinks so - he took his recovered son Sean straight from Brazil to Orlando, which I think is a good move. Good show, after all, Mr. Goldman - for the boy's Brazilian family to parade nine year old Sean needlessly through the street "as a protest" was all the proof I needed that these folks are not responsible adults, and should never have been given custody by a Brazilian court in the first place.

My wish for the New Year? I hope we can expediently put a new health insurance plan into place, one that allows everybody in the United States to receive the care they deserve. I can't get over the scare-mongerers and assorted other politically engaged negativists. You would torpedo new health care legislation for political reasons, on the back of those Americans who end up in wheelchairs, respirators and coffins every day because we don't take care of them? You don't want a "European situation"? Death panels? What do you think the current system is, benevolent dictatorship? What makes you think you know anything about Europe? Most of you think you've gone abroad when you're in Queens, NY...

As a former Western European, I can tell you nobody where I come from ever needs to worry about getting a prescription, or about seeing a doctor. The system is not perfect, all systems have flaws, but I can't understand how you can call yourself "a proud American" and "the richest country on Earth" while denying something as basic as medical care to your own citizens, let alone all those others. I got lucky - without the employer provided lifetime health plan I have, I would have to move back to Europe, after retirement. That's how bad the European system is. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.

Spotsy, December 21, 2009 - Speed

I had been wondering for a while why I don't like playing the endless news videos CNN and ABC and NBC (etc.) make available at their websites. Worried a little that I am becoming too much "old school", you know, being a former printed press journalist and all that.. Until, today, it hit me, when I went to read an article at the BBC News website. It is because videos waste my time!

You see, I am a speed reader - taught myself to speed read in my teens, when I found it took too long to read a whole entire book. Which eventually led to me, on occasion, reading two science fiction novels in a day. Which my wife always thought was an expensive exercise. So what was my revelation? It is this: reading is a "random access" activity. You can scan over an article, see if it interests you, you can read some of it, go do some research, come back to where you left it and continue, all that good stuff. With video, you can't do any of that. It takes endless clicking and pushing sliders to scan through bits of video, once it is loaded, you don't know what the video is about, save for what the creator or editor tells you, and none of that provides any information about how and why this video was made. So, to all intents and purposes, as a news distribution device, video is a huge waste of time.

If you look at the BBC News website, you can see how it is supposed to be done: there is an article, and that is accompanied by a video, which provides, usually, more detail or an example of what the article tells you about. Like in magazines, where photographs and diagrams illustrate an article. Journalists ought to be mandated to write up their story to be posted alongside their video story.

So anyway, that set my mind at rest - I am not "losing it", I just like to be in control of what information I take in, and how I take it in. With video, the medium is in control, not the consumer. Maybe that is how TV advertising should be done, on the Tivo, as well - during the commercial break you get choices of commercials - "Click here for a larger penis" - without having to watch what you're not interested in. Like car commercials, I am not in the market for another car, so why should I be made to watch them? I have never believed in forcing people to watch things, I believe you're deluded if you think that sells products. I can't think that anyone buys Enzyte because you're shown these actors talk about it ten times an hour, without ever showing you their "new and improved" huuuuge schlong.

In many ways, shareholders should show more concern about how much of revenue is spent - or should I say: wasted - on advertising and marketing. We have grown complacent about the way we advertise, and I doubt very much that corporations have a handle on what advertising actually sells product. You see the same ads on most of the different television networks, and as a consequence the advertiser has no idea whether a product advertised on BBC America has a potentially higher return than the same product advertised on ABC. Umm, no, those surveys don't work either - surveys only work when everybody fills them out, if not, they contain no useful information, except about the people who do fill them out, and you don't know who they are. The worst are the surveys that pop up and ask you questions about a site or a product - before you have even visited the site, or used the product. Yet thousands of managers get bonuses because they present "survey results". Go figure.

Similarly, the networks are now infested with infomercials, which typically run in the middle of the night. I don't know about you, but do we know how many consumers actually watch those things? Most consumers will be in bed at that time, and I really do wonder how effective marketing to insomniacs actually is. It is strange to me that the abundantly available programming isn't run instead - perhaps the local network affiliate, instead of running marketing, should market its available broadcast space to cable networks, to rerun some of their shows, including advertising, for a fee. NBC Washington could run BBC America programming at night, so folks who do not subscribe to that channel can still get some of its shows. BBC America runs 24/7, so for them it would just be additional cost and advertising revenues.

Now back, if I haven't bored you enough, to my new BlackBerry, or rather, the exploits of its parent company, RIM, Research in Motion. Within four days of my putting their 9700 in service two things happened: they had a massive mail service outage, and their quarterly report came back with some very good numbers.

Interestingly, RIM has managed to get the Blackberry in the hands of consumers, private users. Two years ago, according to the Associated Press, half of all new users were business and government customers; in the current quarter, those comprise less than 20%. With a 59% increase in revenues for that same quarter, it looks like they are continuing to sell well to enterprise customers, but there is a massive increase in sales to the private user. This is of interest when looking at the popularity of the iPhone, which I continue to think is a handheld Macintosh, and as such, a fad. I keep hearing of the iPhone's popularity in corporate America, but have really not seen evidence of this - corporations need messaging devices, and I have a hard time conceiving of multinationals hooking their corporate networks up to iTunes. Blackberry, on the other hand, provides separate corporate server applications, offers a really tight integration with Lotus Notes, and from what I see is working on achieving a similar integration with Google mail. Gmail installs on the Blackberry as an enterprise application, using imap to ensure all mail is duplicated, and cannot be lost.

I wonder whether my being persuaded to buy the latest Blackberry is indicative of how RIM achieves this new trend. I am not particularly fond of how Blackberry messaging works - I discontinued my old 6230 back in 2003, because I needed a phone that I could use as a modem for my laptop, something the Blackberry did not allow, and at that time handsets from Nokia reached the market that provided that feature, and had messaging and POP mail besides.

Today, tethering works on most, if not all, Blackberrys. Even my old 6230, via the latest Blackberry Desktop Manager software installed on the laptop, now can be used as a digital modem. More importantly for me, the new Bold 9700 has both UMA (WiFi voice calling) and a full 3G implementation, and has been engineered to work worldwide (even including Japan!). This combination of features outstrips other manufacturers - there are other 3G+UMA handsets, but none that work on US frequencies as well as the ones in use in Europe and Asia. On top of that, I noticed, driving around in my neighbourhood, where cell service is spotty, that the Bold 9700 gets signal where nothing else does. And that equates with my previous (2003) Blackberry, which does that too. I don't know how they do it, but they do it very well. I just hope that outage (3am to 2pm, they say; midnight to 5pm, I say) isn't a harbinger of things to come, considering they have so many consumers to service - a volume, I think, beyond what RIM expected. Most business and government customers run their own Blackberry mail servers, so the load has probably increased exponentially.

Spotsy, December 17, 2009 - Bolder

As I had not seen the magic "3G" indicator on the screen of one of my cellphones in the US, I drove out towards Fredericksburg after receiving and setting up my new BlackBerry Bold 9700. Much to my surprise, I got a good 3G signal on T-Mobile's network much closer to home than I expected - at the local Giant store, which sits in a nearby shopping center built only two years ago. That is actually on the edge of the semi-rural area I live in, where cellular service is spotty at best. When I checked coverage online (see the picture below) I noticed T-Mobile had gotten quite a bit closer to me in the month or so since I last checked - I live not too far from where it says "Elys Ford Road" on the map. To the right, near the intersection of Interstate 95 and Virginia State Route 3, is Fredericksburg, VA, 60+ miles to the North is Washington, D.C.

"Elys Ford" designates where the North's armies crossed the Rapahannock river, during the Civil War - I live smack in the middle of the old battlefields. The Elys still live here, around the corner from me, and their forebears are by the side of Spotswood Furnace Road, in the family burial plot on their property.

What is important about 3G? As many teenagers and students already know, you can have reasonable speed internet, voice and your primary life databases all in one device. There really is no longer a need (depending on where you live) to have anything "wired" any more. Especially a device like the Blackberry, coupled with a technologically savvy phone company like T-Mobile, gives you everything.

The device itself has 3G internet, WiFi internet, voice telephony (Skype is rumoured), GPS navigation, and it can, in T-Mobile's version, be used as a digital modem for your laptop or desktop computer - something called "tethering". Having a separate data card for your laptop is completely obsolete - using Google Voice, you can even have a secondary phone ring when the primary does, so you don't have to break your data connection when a call comes in. The cost of the second line is only $10 per month, good if you do a lot of talking as well as a lot of internetting at the same time. Having said that, with your laptop connected to the internet using a 3G connection on a 3G phone, you would be able to use Skype for voice communications, and need not bother with the phone in that respect. One caveat nobody talks about, though, is that if you use a mobile handset to connect to 3G networking, you are limited by what the USB port in your computer can handle. That is nowhere near the nominal speed 3G can attain - 3.6 megabits per second. If you want true 3G speed, you'll need to use a 3G modem, like the 3.5G PC Express Card Bandluxe device I use.

What surprised me is the convoluted way this thing is managed, T-Mobile having to send authorizations to Blackberry, which then sends updates to your phone, including a bunch of crap you don't want. I can seen why Blackberry wants to have so much control over the phone in corporate or government contracts, but I am not seeing the need for individual customers. And I certainly have no need for Blackberry to put games and trial software links on my phone, I own this device and they can't put crap on it I haven't authorized them to, especially since my contract is with T-Mobile, not with Blackberry.

Now, I gotta talk to you about GPS. You know the GPS units we've been getting for the car - standalone GPS, maps loaded on the device, etc. And then there is the GPS mobile phone companies are trying to sell us, which actually isn't GPS at all, but just a clever application that uses the GPS chip that has to, by law, built into a cellphone in the US, these days. Its sole purpose is to let the emergency services know where you are when you make a 911 call.

Unlike "true" GPS, this method relies on the phone using the chip to figure out your location, then downloading local maps, provided yours is a wireless broadband phone - 3G or EV-DO. That's fraught with problems - if you lose your network connection your GPS is dead, I've just experienced that with the LG phone I was trying out, whose GPS application spent most of its time not working, when it cannot get a data connection in the rural area that I live in. When I leave the house, where it uses my WiFi connection, it dies as soon as I am halfway down my driveway.

So: if you want a phone with GPS, you're best off getting one that can function as a standalone GPS unit. Like the Nokia 6110 Navigator I picked up in the Philippines in 2007 (they weren't sold in the US), which has a complete GPS unit, with Route 66 navigation software, and preloaded maps, those that are not included with the phone you can buy and download from Route 66. The Nokia (its successor is the Nokia 6120, which Nokia does sell in the US, but the 6120, too, uses instant download mapping) does the "on the fly" GPS as well, where you can access free maps from Nokia itself. Nokia does let you download maps to your PC using the Ovi Map downloader, but once you have them on your handset you have to buy a subscription if you want to use navigation with them.

I will be trying out RIM's own application, Blackberry Maps, which comes with the 9700, and which, from a quick peek, uses the on-the-fly download principle, but has a cache you can set the size of. I am hoping that cache will retain maps after they have been downloaded, obviating the need for 3G where there is none. At least this application comes with the phone for free, and can use WiFi as well as 3G and EDGE. With T-Mobile's Hotspot service, you could stop in at a Starbucks or MacDonalds, I suppose, and download local maps using their free WiFi. Something I had gotten used to with my Nokia, using an external Bluetooth GPS antenna, the 9700 can do too. Using a GPS antenna built into the handset in a car, where the metal prevents the GPS antenna from functioning properly, is a headache - the external antenna you can park on the dash, against the windshield, its rechargeable battery will easily last a day or so, and the phone does not have to power its built in antenna. I am using Nokia's LD-3W antenna, which set me back $100, a couple of years ago. Here is a cheaper version, that works in the same fashion, providing a Bluetooth serial port.

For the moment, that is really all I can tell you, not having used this unit extensively. I have moved all of my email addresses to the Blackberry, although final storage of my email happens on one of my laptops, but it is very convenient to have the mobile alert me to all emails, and being able to weed out the spam directly from the phone. I've tried to get rid of all of the links and applications I don't need, loaded a very few apps that are central to my life: Tivo, Maps, Google Voice, Google Maps (just because I like seeing a picture of my house from satellite ;), synchronization is now set to go to Yahoo rather than Outlook (which means you can sync your life even when you're nowhere near your laptop or PC) - Yahoo and Blackberry both use Intellisync to synchronize PDA data, if you want to know why it is Yahoo and not Microsoft's Live attempt at gathering even more marketing data from you.

I am genuinely not interested in running a million apps on my PDA. Its primary function is that of a phone (Blackberry's Bluetooth audio implementation is a cut above the rest, by the way), I run applications on my travel laptop, a tiny 10.5" Acer. Having GPS, calendar, address book and a secure document available is part of what I must have, even the Tivo app I do not need, I can log into my Tivo from my laptop using the Blackberry as a data modem. This is not a religion for me, it is a tool...

Spotsy, December 14, 2009 - Toyz

I can't say the BlackBerry Bold 9700 is pretty - it looks to me like a cheapie, bits of chrome and leather on a plastic casing, with a "keyboard" whose keys can only be operated by a kid. Blackberry used to make fashionable phones - see my old Blackberry side by side with the new one in the pic to the right.

But then, as they say in the world of motor vehicles, we get under the hood. This thing (in the version that T-Mobile sells) has: WiFi (a.k.a. wireless networking), 3G, GPS (free) and: UMA! This is too cool. I know I was going to tell you about the LG GT505, but that's such a bad piece of - admittedly pretty and fashionable - technology I retired it 10 days after buying it. For one thing, its GPS application, provided by Apello, a Swedish company that isn't too smart at writing software, isn't able to use addresses from your address book, for another, it cannot switch between networks - if you have an application using WiFi at your house, and you drive away, it does not switch to 3G or EDGE, it'll just sit there looking for the network it was on, and your application will be completely unusable.

I am going to assume you're well familiar with the jargon by now, except perhaps for UMA. UMA, or Unlicensed Mobile Access, is a technology that lets you use a wireless Ethernet (WiFi, in common parlance) network for voice calls, using an otherwise standard GSM cellphone. It's been around for a while, and I've used the service for several years, but what excited me so much is that the Blackberry is the first phone T-Mobile offers that has both 3G and UMA. The terms I am using - 3G, EDGE, GPRS, UMA, all belong in the European GSM technical cellular standard, the same system that is used by T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless, in this country, a system that is in use in over 90% of the world. Verizon and Sprint are using an American developed technology called CDMA, which is, to all intents and purposes, dead outside the USA. American wireline companies, back when, had no option but to use this technology when cellular telephony was introduced, for very valid legal and regulatory reasons, but Verizon, Sprint and Nextel did not switch to GSM when they could, while other North American carriers did, and so their CDMA phones are unusable on anybody else's networks (with exception of a few specially designed hybrid handsets, which are effectively two cellphones in one, using two different carriers). A GSM phone you can buy anywhere, and use anywhere, provided it is a modern quadband phone, and it is "unlocked" (or "no-line", as it is called in parts of Asia) - all GSM phones can be.

But back to Blackberry's new Bold 9700, which I just began using. There is a lot wrong with it - the keys are too small, the display is too small, Blackberry has been trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole. I understand they want to get as close to a "regular" cellular phone form factor as they can, while retaining Blackberry's PDA features, but they have gone too far, IMO. It is functional and usable, but a pain. The old Blackberry (my 2003 6230 you see pictured here) is the smallest form factor that is comfortable to use as a PDA.

But there is a lot more right with the Bold 9700 than there is wrong. For one thing, I live somewhere with little cell service, so UMA, for me, is the ideal solution - when I get home my UMA phones automagically switch to my wireless network, and then I receive and make my calls using that. Additionally, calls made over WiFi do not count toward your airtime minutes, all calls within the United States are effectively completely free of charge. I can't tell you how wonderful this is - T-Mobile (the only carrier in the United States that offers UMA) charges a flat rate across my account to put UMA on all lines - and "Hotspot service" is available at most MacDonalds and Starbucks outlets in the US, too. The only problem was that the choice of handsets was limited, and no handset was available that offered 3G as well as UMA. They do exist - the LG I mentioned has UMA, but that is enabled only when you buy the phone from Orange in the UK or France.

Enter the new Blackberry. It has 3G and UMA, and more besides, like WiFi and GPS, something I have gotten used to as I have been using the Nokia 6110 Navigator 3G phone for this purpose since 2007. GPS shouldn't be in cars, it should be right in your hand, and go where you go. We stopped buying carphones, too, nobody in their right mind would have a phone locked to their vehicle, right?

So the Blackberry has all of the stuff that made Blackberry famous, the stuff that ensured that when you are on an air shuttle between Washington and New York, every single Federal employee, and most other commuters on those flights, pull out a Blackberry as soon as the plane hits the ground.

When you look at the Blackberries side-by-side, not much has changed. RIM, the Canadian manufacturer, uses its own operating system, continues to provide a store-and-forward email system that comes with the phone, has standard applications that have always been there, like apps to view Microsoft Office documents, it has an amazing battery life (my 6230 stays up for over a week - in 2003, partly due to its monochrome display), gets a signal where nothing else does, and, most importantly, it has a full QWERTY keyboard, so you can write emails and notes and it is easy to put new entries in your address book - for most other phones, I use my laptop to do that.

I can't tell you how important that consistency is. Nokia does it too - it has its own OS, all phones they've ever made work the same, have the same features... I picked up the Bold 9700 and found that everything is where the 6230 had it. I have not used that phone in over four years, but it was pretty much like coming back to your old house, but with icons and colours and other fancy stuff now. Kewl.

More about the Blackberry Bold 9700, on GPS in handphones, and on mobile services in general, on Thursday.

Spotsy, December 11, 2009 - On Heat

One of the real discoveries of living out here is the woodstove - or rather, the way a woodstove can provide ample heat for a (to my standards) huge house, and be ecologically responsible, at the same time. I burn, you see, about 50% wood from trees that have come down during storms, or have died from disease, and a recent article pointed out that the carbon dioxide that releases would have been released anyway, as the trees decay. The other 50% consists of trees that are close to the house, and have grown too tall since the house was built, in the 1960's. The equation needs to take into account that this resource is actually renewed - I have almost five acres of trees, and take trees that free up room (nutrition and light) for the trees next to it to grow faster. I've been keeping an eye on this - the tree shown at the top left grew from the stump left after I took it down, in three seasons. They do not all grow that fast, of course, but it is an indication of the rate of renewal. It should be noted, too, that the CO² I release is to some extent re-absorbed by my trees, and my neighbour's trees, actually "feeding" their growth, if you like.

But most importantly, this woodstove, the modern EPA type woodstove that uses secondary combustion, releasing wood gas through the burning process that then gets ignited with preheated air at the top of the firebox, a kind of woodstove afterburner, is highly efficient, and produces an enormous amount of heat - something like 75,000 BTUs/hr, or 22 KW/hr - in other words, as much heat as 15 space heaters provide.

How does this get achieved? To begin with, the house was fitted with ducting from the family room to two bedrooms upstairs - the family room is on one side of the house, so a warm airflow is created that runs up on one side of the house, then down again via the centrally located staircase. I have aided the proceedings by taking the registers off the ducts, and replacing them with thermostatically controlled fans. And then there is the Vogelzang Heat Reclaimer, a thermostatically controlled fan driven heat exchanger that sits in the stove pipe just above the stove. It reclaims waste heat from the flue gases - the combined effect of the stove and the heat reclaimer is that gas that is at 425° Fahrenheit at the top of the stove, leaves the heat reclaimer at 150° Fahrenheit, having given up 65% of its energy. I have to add that according to the Vogelzang website, this device should not be used with an EPA-approved woodstove - the only reason I can think of is that the exhaust gases of an EPA stove are not as hot as those from a "regular" stove, so you might get more creosote deposits in the chimney, which can be dangerous. The rest of the energy is used to maintain the draw in the chimney, the result being a smokeless fire, and ashes fully retained within the stove. In some urban areas, a catalytic converter to add an extra burn stage is required, this for non-EPA stoves.

The first couple of years I lived here, I paid no attention to the woodstove, and heated like I had always done, by turning the heating on. You're a city slicker or you're not.. Then a neighbour asked me if I was OK for firewood for the winter, which is a sort of standard question around these parts, I learned, where most everybody lives on five acres or more, and has plenty of wood. Round about the same time, a hurricane roared through the area, and took quite a few trees down - the ones that come down are normally the oldest, tallest, heaviest trees. The connection was soon made, and now I am a fervent woodstove user. I've discovered that this firewood stuff is great exercise, that I save myself hundreds of dollars especially when it gets down to 20 degrees, and that properly firing a woodstove is a good amount of work, especially if you want to burn "clean", which requires quite a high temperature inside the firebox, around 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

But it is not for nothing that the Federal Government now provides a subsidy of up to $1,500 for the purchase of a "biomass burning stove or fireplace insert" that meets EPA standards, set currently at 75% efficiency. My Quadra-Fire 4300 just skirts by, at 79.8%. I like my measurement better, 65%, simply because the EPA number takes all sorts of stuff into account, type of wood, climate, you name it, and pragmatic as I am, I have more belief in simple measurements, things I can see and calculate in the real world. There are many factors that, in my opinion, are too variable to reasonably take into account - do you calculate the cost of the energy needed to bring firewood to a suburban area? I burn my own wood, which doesn't need transporting, and I regenerate myself, so I ought to get extra points. Note the picture here - this tree toppled during a storm, the other day, and mostly (thankfully) missed my house, but it will provide two or three weeks of heat. Here is a fuel calculator if you want to check whether wood might be an economical alternative for your house.

Spotsy, December 7, 2009 - They used to pay me for this

I bought two Blu-ray optical burners a while back, one a regular Blu-Ray drive, the other a drive that can play both the obsolete HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats. It was sheer curiousity, I wanted a drive that would let me write BD disks (that's what a writable Blu-Ray is called), and they both do, but the HD-DVD drive was half off, and you can get mainstream movies on HD-DVD, mail order, for as little as $2.99.

Depending on the type, one BD data disk takes 25 or 50 gigabytes of data, the latter are the double layer type. Not too long ago, 50GB would have been a good sized hard disk in a laptop, so I figured it wasn't wasted money. The stinker was that I couldn't get the HD-DVD playback to work. The laptop either hung, or the Nero 8 video player crashed, with a spurious Visual Basic error message. Bad coding on the part of Nero.

When I was in New York, at my NYNEX reunion, last month, I committed to put a promotional video made at NYNEX Science & Technology on the web, so my former colleagues could enjoy it, the ones that didn't make it to the reunion. And that meant finding and loading software to convert DVD to - well, something everybody can open in their browser, probably a Flash video or sumtin'. And that meant finding software to do the conversion with - I have half a dozen video processing packages, which I tend to take off my laptops after use, as they clutter up the hard disk, I rarely need them, and they don't cooperate very well.

So that brought me back to the HD-DVD issue, as the Nero software that came with that drive has a couple of nice utilities for video conversion. The other Buffalo drive came with a Cyberlink video suite, excellent for playing back Blu-Ray disks, and writing its data cousin, the BD, but it won't play HD-DVD. Which got me thinking again why Nero 8 was crashing, I saw nothing in the Nero forums, and as it turned out it did exactly the same thing on my new Acer, which comes with the HDMI port as well.

Long story short, that was the problem, the HDMI port. Cyberlink will happily play back Blu-Ray to non-HD displays, but without high resolution and without Dolby 5.1 or DTS 7.1. Nero will not - the Germans have interpreted copy protection rather literally, if their software does not "see" that the output device for both video and audio is an HDMI port with HDCP, fuggedaboutit. So when Nero catches you playing a Blu-Ray movie to an HD display, but you're routing the audio through another port, it will crash, rather than give you an orderly error message! This even though the HDMI and HDCP security stuff are all connected.. Cyberlink does not care, as long as the HDMI screen is there and connected. Same with my Tivo, the display has to be there, but it'll send it anywhere you want. And the Nero folks haven't quite figured out how to handle this, when Nerovision 8 finds an illegal setup, it simply hangs up.

So there. Video converted, and Nero sorted out, all at the same time. Hehe. Right now I've made an MPEG video out of the AVI file I made from the DVD, and now I am converting that to a Flash video, as well. Then it can go on my host server, and they can all watch it. And I am sorry, but you cannot, I have had to password protect the webspace as the video is copyrighted.

Spotsy, December 3, 2009 - Pixel-hated

This blog is technology-heavy for two reasons: one, it is how I have made my money, lucky enough to get to the United States as the internet boom was about to take off - not dumb luck, to be sure, I had worked on "connected computing" virtually from the day that made it to The Netherlands. By the time I moved to England, in 1979, I had been doing my journalistic work on portable connected computers for a while. My then publisher, VNU, at that point a staid Dutch magazine publisher, was transmitting ready pages to the printer's, which it owned, even though the way we produced magazines was still fully traditional - but by the time the art department finished with the magazine I worked for, it was computerized and turned into roto-gravure electronically before hitting the presses. By the time I got to London, and worked on a project to electronicize Forbes Magazine in Europe and the US, electronic page makeup began to be married to journalistic workstations - at VNU, we had progressed to portable computers (I still have my Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, what's more, it still works!) and filing stories (that's me in 1983, in the picture, connecting to the PDP-11 I leased from British Telecom, using an acoustic coupler) using the fledgling Packet Switched Networks that telephone companies had begun to make available.

The second reason is that communications technology has reshaped society in ways nobody had been able to predict - it doesn't matter who says what, Tiger Woods hung himself out to dry by having his car photographed by a neighbour with a cellphone, apparently have his wife go through his own cellphone, and having a voicemail message publicized, while the Salahis hung themselves out to dry via emails that fail to prove what they said. So I am least surprised at how technologically dependent we have become. It is just that we are not making a true effort to "untethering" ourselves - moving everything that was connected by wire over to the now fully available wireless technologies. If the manufacturers and vendors had wanted it to, that could have been America's next big technology and export product, financed in the stimulus package, but it is not - we lost out there just as much as we did in turning electric and hybrid propulsion into a household word. The Chevy Volt is probably nice, but it is 20 (that's right, not five, not ten, but twenty!) years too late. Read here when Toyota first began work, not just on electric propulsion, but on the actual Prius - read it and weep...

First of all, if the camera outputs in a compressed format, like .jpg, or .jpe, you usually have an interpolated image - a 5 megapixel CCD delivers a 10 megapixel image. That's not unlike the difference between a 1080i and a 1080p HDTV - there is a difference, but whether that matters to you depends on whether you are anal or not. Only when the manufacturer specifically mentions access to what is known as the "raw file", can you expect the real number. The Nikon D90, for instance, delivers 12.3 megapixels, and you can verify this because you can have the camera output images in raw format, Nikon's .NEF. Those cameras can output to compressed (JPEG) formats as well, but you should remember that any compressed image format is "lossy", and the advertised resolution is made up using software, smoke and mirrors, and while the image then has the number of megapixels they said it does, the resolution does not. To the left is a picture I took, just now, after clearing an oak tree that had fallen - this was taken with an LG 5 megapixel high end cameraphone, and I processed it down from 2592x1944 to 1024x768 for posting. Click on it, and you can see what you can do with just 5 megapixels. For reference: this picture takes up about 1 megabyte in its original format, goes to 14.4 megabytes when you convert it to an uncompressed TIFF file, and as you see it here it is 234 megabytes in size. The tree weighs maybe 6 or 7 tons... One thing I can tell you is that when I compare this with a 6.1 megapixel Nikon D50 SLR camera, this 5 megapixel phone does not deliver anywhere near 5 megapixels - click here to see a picture shot with the D50, resized and compressed the same way the LG picture was. The Nikon provides incredibly more detail in its pictures, and its raw output files (uncompressed, unprocessed) are about 6 megabytes in size. The LG's picture data says they are compressed 6 times - that fits in with the file size, but the issue for me is that you can't get raw files out of most digital cameras, so the megapixels are so much hogwash.

Then there is the memory issue. Solid state memory is inherently slower, the larger the memory element is, and so a camera with a lot of real pixels will be relatively slow getting ready for its first shot, you can't turn it on and immediately push the button. Cheaper cameras use cheaper memory, of course, and that is always slower.

In that same vein, the CCD needs to "unload" the image into storage memory, typically an SD card, after the picture has been taken, and you therefore cannot take the next picture immediately after taking one. The more expensive SLRs use fast buffer memory to achieve this relatively quickly, and this will allow you to take 10 or 20 or 30 "rapid fire" shots, until the buffer is full, when it needs to write its contents to slower card memory, which can take a while, and you wait.

Similarly, the more pixels, the longer it takes to load a picture into an application on your PC, and the longer it takes to process a picture, make changes to it, adjust the hue, crop it a litttle, and write a processed copy away to disk. If you're an avid photographer, looking through the 300 12.3 megapixel images you took on your last trip can be a time consuming exercise, and that's just opening them up, one by one, I am not even talking about processing here. And those 300 wonderful raw format pictures, you're a perfectionist and want to have your work in as much detail as possible, your 300 holiday snaps will take up 3.7 gigabytes of disk space. Better go out and get a terabyte RAID device, I have two sitting on a network server, because one little disk crash and years of work goes "poof". All I am saying is that the choice of resolution has consequences for the type and speed of PC, your electronic darkroom, you need to use, and the type and size of storage device you use as your electronic shoebox. If the only purposes you use your pictures for is to have prints made, or put them on an internet site for sharing, you really don't need more than 5 or so megapixels - considering that most consumers set their cameras to put more pictures on their memory card, they tend to use a resolution of 1 or 2 megapixels, and the rest of the capacity is totally wasted.

As a frame of reference - a decent slide scanner produces 64 megapixels out of a 35mm (24x36mm) old style slide. You're best off having two devices - I have a tiny 5 megapixel Wal-Mart cheapie on my belt, for quick snaps, and use a mix of Nikon SLRs (including a 35mm body, still, if I need truly high resolution!!) for the serious stuff. Oh, and by the way - those "digital camcorders" with flash memory all take pictures, video, do audio recording, they do everything, and I use mine as an external disk drive, as well - USB thumb drives are too easy to lose, and a digital camera can do exactly the same thing.

Spotsy, November 30, 2009 - Safety in numbers

Just now, on Bloomberg, Edmunds.com announced projected auto sales for December. Let me give you a warning: that's witchcraft. Nobody can predict, with any level of certainty, how many cars will be sold, what the stock price of Wal-Mart will be on December 31st, and how many people are going to be on the dole that work for companies that we don't even know will be bankrupt in two weeks. If you're a concerned citizen, or an investor like me, but especially if you are a CFO or CEO, don't do this devastatingly stupid stuff. There is nobody who can predict the future. And just because an actor who portrays a district attourney on TV exhorts you to open an account with a brokerage house - don't. If they can't find a real person to speak up for them, stay away from them. They got mush for brains. Don't look for anything that will tell you what will happen in fifteen minutes or fifteen days. It is not possible. Hogwash. Bullshit. I mean, you must have seen those annoying Enzyte and ExtenZe commercials - you must have wondered why they never show any of those magically increased, umm, members.

But back to technology, something I do have a good handle on - come to think of it, the number of times I have had to explain to my staff and my bosses that "Mean Time Between Failures" - MTBF - with respect to equipment means zilch. Nothing. It can't tell you when you need to buy backup gear, it can't tell you what risk factor to allocate to your installation - nuttin'. All it can tell you is how much money and time you need to allocate to dealing with failures, over a time period. But if you buy a disk drive, and your business depends on that disk drive, you shoulda bought three. One to use, one to back up the drive in use to, and one as a spare. Now you're covered, regardless of whatever the MTBF says. Because I know only one MTBF - tonight, at midnight, is when my equipment will fail. And that is what I make sure my clients are ready for. Capice, paysan?

On that score, here is more about the Level One WBR-3800 I told you about below - if you need a WiFi router, this is the one to get. It is a regular router, to begin with - WiFi, one WAN port to connect to your DSL or cable modem, one LAN port so you can hook up your laptop and manage it, otherwise a normal 802.11b/g wireless router. I would have liked it to be 802.11b/g/N, but then again, your internet connection, if you're lucky, runs at maybe 10 megabits per second, and 802.11b is 11 Mbps already, so necessary it is not. But now the fun starts.

This little router is able to act as both a wireless bridge and a wireless Access Point at the same time. This is unusual. What it means is that you can set up your network with one range of IP addresses, use a secondary router to extend your wireless network footprint, and have that router set up in bridge mode, effectively acting as a repeater on the Level One. It can actually handle multiple bridged routers, something I have not tried, but if you get ambitious, or if you want to use this thing to network your schoolhouse, you can. But we're not done.

The WBR-3800 can use a cellular modem as its internet provider, as well! That can be a GPRS modem (or phone!), an EDGE modem, a 3G modem, a 3.5G modem, or one of those EV-DO contraptions Sprint and Verizon provide. I found it can't just handle the modems and cellphones it has in its compatibility list, two phones that are not there it did not have a problem with, either (but one card and one new phone I just got did not work). You either use a PCMCIA 3G data card (they're available all over, I just bought two for $24) or a 3G modem or 3G cellphone that can connect via a USB cable. If you are clever, you use a phone that charges off the USB port, so you won't have to worry about your battery or a separate charger - Motorola's phones do, for instance, Nokia's generally do not.

Now, you can set up the cellular data call parameters (normally available at your mobile phone company's website), and use the router over a cellular connection. But we're not done.

The WBR-3800 is able to use that cellular connection not only as a primary, but it can be set up as a fallback, instead. So you can have your normal fast cable modem connection, say, and if that fails, and you have set up the modem for 3G as well, it will, if programmed properly, automatically switch over to your wireless broadband connection. Expect to take time getting all that to work - I am a wide area network engineer with over 25 years in the business, and it took me the better part of a night to get it all working properly. There isn't anything wrong with the documentation, this type of functionality is simply very involved, and somewhat arcane.

How cool is this? For $131.73, including shipping? Sheesh! Seriously, this kind of gear used to cost thousands, I am not overstating, this is fully redundant network gear. It uses a 5V DC power supply - you can get 5V DC out of a PC, if necessary. And if you want to free yourself of the tethers, your cable internet or your DSL, this thing is a gas, especially if you live in a 3G area. On top of that, you can just pick the whole thing up, take it to your office, your vacation home in the Bahamas, your uncle's house in Hong Kong, and use it there. The cool of cool. Although your uncle might not let you leave with it when you go home again....

Elmsford, NY, November 27, 2009 - Maalox Moments

So in my last entry I told you my just acquired 3G/WiFi router wouldn't talk to my Motorola V1100, but does use my Nokia 6110 cellphone. Shortly after writing that, I downloaded the firmware update I found at Level One's website - and now the V1100 works too! In fact, it works better than the Nokia did. It has 87% signal strength, where the Nokia didn't get beyond 47%, but even more importantly, it requires no dialing instructions or setup commands. That is surprising - I know that some 3G modems make a direct IP connection with GSM networks, there is a protocol in GSM that permits data-only connections, but I have not seen that in a cellphone.

I should add to that that the D-Link DIR-451 I mentioned below, that I could not get to work in the Northern Neck, is functioning too now, and it is in fact the D-Link that I installed at that house. However, before you get all excited: I had to hunt down the Asian version of the D-Link's firmware, the computer code that is permanently installed in the router - Europeans and Asians do not generally put up with intentionally vendor-crippled equipment - and load that, and that is always a hit-and-miss affair. If you have the wrong hardware, or the wrong processor version, you can ruin your equipment forever. So if you can afford to ruin your router, hunt for the firmware at one of D-Link's Asia Pacific websites, and you will end up with a 3G router that will accomodate any carrier, and dozens of 3G cards and cellphones.

Don't all run out to buy a V1100, either - it is made exclusively for British Vodafone, and as far as I can discern was only sold in the UK, Spain, and in some Asian locales. Vodafone discontinued it, even though it is fully state of the art, Motorola still updates its software. Motorola has a "Phone Tools" application you can buy online, that can sync its phones with Outlook and some other PIMs, and connect your laptop to wireless broadband. UNfortunately, the application costs a whopping $49.99 (a good way to alienate your customers - when I bought it, it was $24.99, which is reasonable - and Nokia's PC Suite is free, to all..). Not only that, here is Motorola's Verizon disclaimer: Verizon customers: all multimedia and Internet connection features are disabled due to carrier request. Please contact your service provider for further information. I am a GSM freak anyway, as I like my phones to work anywhere in the world, but if I needed a reason to not be a Verizon Wireless customer, this would be it. I have been able to tether my handsets since T-Mobile still was Voicestream, without any restrictions. Even if I thought a handheld Macintosh was a good idea - and I don't - I wouldn't want an iPhone, since I can't use it as a digital modem.

I don't know how anyone can accept that a carrier and a vendor decide what you can and cannot do with a cellphone. Think about it - digital cellular networks have been able to provide you with internet connectivity for decades, so what many carriers, especially in the United States, have done, is disable that facility and sell you a separate data device, with an additional subscription, to do what you could do with your handset, if they had not - in collusion between the manufacturer and the carrier - crippled it. I have bought most of my handsets overseas, but even the ones I have gotten here, from T-Mobile, are all capable of data modem functionality. It is probably the most important development in cellular technology - your cellphone is both a voice phone and your own personal broadband modem, that you can use by itself, or connected to your laptop or PC.

The CEOs of the companies that provide our wireless facilities do not, by and large, have the basic understanding that if you charge your customer what you say you will charge them, and make them find out that the stuff they thought they could do with their new device has in fact been deliberately disabled, and they have to spend more money to get this working, they're going to not be happy. Pretending you have a good deal, then basically lying and conniving your way into the customer's bank account, is something that does not do wonders for your company's reputation. The reason I am with T-Mobile (since before I went to work for Verizon) is that they provide me with the service, get me my SIM card, and I can buy equipment anywhere, and make it work. No hassles. You want to try that with Verizon, or Sprint. GSM is based on the SIM card, it is device-independent by design. Making money is something you do by providing good service - if you do it by ripping off your customers it will only work until those customers have an alternative. Ask Enron...

I got my new LG GT505 phone, by the way, an unlocked version of the phone Orange in the UK and France sells its customers. I have it working, GPS included, but not UMA yet, will tell you about it in a few.

Elmsford, NY, November 24, 2009 - I got another toy

This looks like an ordinary WiFi router, but it's not. The Level One WBR-3800 3G Wireless Broadband Router is a 3G router, with a twist - it can handle both "regular" WAN connections, hooking up to a cable or DSL modem via Ethernet, as well as WWAN connections, wireless broadband. The slot on top will take a PCMCIA cellular network card, there are plenty of 3G cards around, while there is a USB port as well, on the back of the device. It says that's for USB modems, but guess what - you're seeing it hooked up to my trusty old (2007) Nokia 6110 GPS international 3G phone. I had been playing with this box for a few days when I suddenly wondered whether it would talk to a 3G handset, tried my Motorola V1100, which it recognized but wouldn't put online, then connected the Nokia, and hey presto! the 3G light on the front came on, and I am sitting here updating my website on my little Acer, connected to the WBR-3800 via WiFi. I don't have much coverage at home, so I am trying this in a Marriott room in Westchester County, New York, where I am attending a reunion with folks of the AI Lab at the former NYNEX Science & Technology, where I worked for many years.

The purpose behind all this experimentation is that I am putting together a complete telecommunications-security package for the new house a friend of mine is building in the Northern Neck, here in Virginia. I didn't think it was necessary for him to take a cable internet subscription, like he has in his house here - he uses DirecTV satellite TV service, and so has no need for cable. As both he and his wife have mobile phones, I decided to convert him to "all wireless" - no wired phones, no cable or DSL internet, and no cable or Uverse TV.

He has no need for fast Internet, like the 10 megabits per second I have at home, and in most cases - all he does is read and write email - even EDGE, the service before 3G, is fast enough (EDGE and its predecessor GPRS are available on practically all GSM phones, and what is more important, on most GSM wireless networks in the world). For most purposes, like reading email, looking at ordinary webpages, and buying stuff online, an EDGE connection does fine. A 15 megabyte download might take twenty to thirty minutes, so you'd have to plan stuff like updating your Windows.

I had been playing with a different 3G router, the D-Link DIR-451, but could not get that to work in the Northern Neck, although it did work at my house. T-Mobile figured this might mean the local tower at the remote location might not have its permissions set right, but as I need to deliver this soon I decide to play safe and get a router that I new worked. The DIR-451 I can play with a bit more, I did discover that D-Link has crippled that router as it is delivered in the United States and Canada. If you load the firmware that is in use with this model in parts of Asia Pacific, you suddenly can use it with a lot more devices, including USB 3G modems, and on a lot more networks. It looks like AT&T, the only company that sold this router for use on their network, wouldn't let D-Link open the device up, but it is relatively easy to program it for other networks and devices once you get hold of the correct software.

Still, the Level One router is a lot more sophisticated - especially the ability to use it as an ordinary cable/DSL router, with 3G as an automatic fallback option, is great. But, where you have a fast 3G network, like London, or Singapore, you could have 3G as the primary, with a slow cable connection as a backup. We'll see. Great devices, both of them, as all laptops have WiFi these days, not to have to tether yours to a phone is chocolate ice cream, as far as I am concerned.

A caveat with the broadband speeds is when you have a need to run live HD (1080i) video, say, from Youtube. I can run that without hiccups, at 10 Mbps, on my cable connection. Any speed below that, even if we get 3.5G in the US, like they have in Singapore, Hong Kong and London - that runs at a maximum speed of 7.2 Mbps, and that may occasionally hiccup, especially since 3G internet is "bursty".

Spotsy, November 21, 2009 - All from "Over There"

Referring back to the Acer in Tuesday's musings, the dizzying speed with which technology evolves is fast becoming supersonic - the only way the industry can think of selling us more stuff is making the old stuff more advanced. Gadgets have a half life of maybe six months now, if you want to see where that will lead the only thing you need to do is look at the American car industry over the past year. Americans were never very good at building and then adopting the latest technologies - we invented a lot, but building and marketing it is quite a different kettle of fish. The iPhone is nice (although I continue to insist it is a handheld Macintosh, not a cellphone), but can you think of anything else we've produced, in recent years, that took over the world? Ford dropped an entire Japanese drivetrain into the Ford Escape, the first hybrid SUV on the market (although I've seen plenty of hybrid Toyota vans in Asia, which makes more sense than sticking a single commuter in a Prius), and I expect that the small fourbanger engine in the Escape is actually from Ford Germany, that's not a product we have the expertise to build.

We must learn to understand that in the age of cellphone, Onstar is a gadget, not a technological innovation. Similarly, GPS isn't something that should be built into a car. I carry mine, it is part of my Nokia 6110 cellphone (to the right), which I bought in the Philippines in 2007. It wasn't available in the United States, was never even marketed here. Don't be surprised that Google gives GPS away in some Android phones - GPS was developed in the same county Google lives in, and as they have worked away at Google Maps for more than a decade, the Googlers have everything they need right in house - for as long as they can have it built in China, and marketed by an international company, the American market is way too small to make such a venture profitable.

I am assuming, at any rate, that the Droid isn't confined to Verizon, but will soon be in the hands of Vodafone - it may well end up being a hybrid CDMA/GSM phone, if you look at the chipset. Why else would anyone build such an advanced piece of technology - surely not to put it only on Verizon's obsolete CDMA network... I've just ordered a high end GSM/3G/WiFi/GPS LG phone, another one of those not sold in the United States, the LG GT505, which has everything the Nokia does, but with WiFi added, and includes UMA (the ability to place calls over WiFi) and I'll let you know once I get it how it does. Although many phones are described as "GPS phones" by carriers and manufacturers, most are not. They have a GPs receiver built in, a Federal mandate that allows carriers to pinpoint the location of a cellphone, and you can use that technology to download maps and do directions. That is, I expect, how the LG functions. But the Nokia 6110 is a true GPS unit - the GPS, with maps preloaded on memory cards, can be used without activating the phone, mine came with the Route66 application, and some Asian and African maps (it is the Philippine version). All I had to do was buy U.S. and European maps, and load those using a PC. The nice thing about this approach is that you always have your GPS, you can use it walking, in rental cars, nothing extra to carry. It is still very much state of the art, with 3.5G networking, video conferencing, the works.

Windows 7 is new technology too, I suppose - this finds me trying to back up my new li'l Acer to BD disk (that is the Blu-Ray data format). Having installed everything I need on the Acer, which, with its 10.6 inch screen and diminutive size, replaces the Everex SA2053T I was using as my travel-subnotebook, there is some 46 gigabytes of operating system and software installed. That's right, that does not include any data or anything else. This is my base load.

So when using the backup application Microsoft (finally!) includes with the operating system - although, in Win7 Home Premium, it will not write to network devices, whereas Win7 Professional and Ultimate will - I am faced with having to back up to six or more DVDs. Not good, methinks, too risky, and as I have a Blu-Ray external writable drive, I decided to try and back up to BD, which can take up to 25 GB of stuff (50 if you buy the double layer di$k$).

So far, the backup is failing at verify stage, I think probably because Win7 does not understand the Blu-Ray write format. I may next have to format a disk using the Nero application that came with the drive (backup uses Windows' own format utility, which probably doesn't officially yet know about Blu-Ray), see if that works better. Seriously, if you know what is good for you it is time to get an external Blu-Ray drive, if your PC or laptop has an HDMI digital video/audio port you can even play Blu-Ray movies on your big flatscreen. Just make sure the kids don't get hold of your fancy laptop. Time was 4.7 gigabytes was a good amount of data, you could back up your laptop to one, maybe two of them. No more, people...

Spotsy, November 18, 2009 - Smaller? Faster?

I have studiously stayed away from netbooks, apart from the little Everex $299 Linux-model I tried - it lost its wireless network adapter after a couple of hours, and nothing I did could bring it back. I am a great believer in small laptops, but have stuck with my Everex SA2053T because I think even a subnotebook should have a normal processor, and a normal operating system.

It looks to me like Acer, once a messy Asian manufacturer of cheap crap, has figured it out, though. Their Aspire 1410 looks and feels like a netbook, but it is in fact a complete fully functional laptop, with a Celeron dual core processor, and - dig this - 64 bit architecture. Not only that, I actually comes with 64 bit Windows 7, and although Acer says it won't take more than 4 GB of memory, in the form of 2 2 GB modules, mine happily accepts 4 GB modules, and now has 8 GB of memory, all of which available to the 64 bit operating system. It delivers more video memory than Acer says, too - not 796, but a stunning 1695 MB. With that, it sports an HDMI output port for HD video and Dolby 5.1 audio, a hybrid audio port (analog as well as Dolby passthrough optical digital!) and 802.11N wireless networking. The mind boggles, and the thing positively flies. It is a stunning piece of technology - I would state that if it cost $899, but it doesn't - it costs, with 2 GB of RAM and a 160 GB hard disk, all of - $399!

Add a $25 wireless keyboard/mouse combo, and a $300 1080p LCD TV as a monitor, and you have the best of all three worlds - netbook, laptop and desktop. Acer has it it'll run for up to 6 hours on a charge, I've not tested that as yet, the battery needs to go through a couple of deep drain cycles before it will be at its max. It comes without internal optical drive, I have it hanging off a Buffalo external Blu-Ray drive, which is just about bigger than the entire Acer is.

The technologies coming out of China (although Acer is Taiwanese, officially) are slowly beginning to significantly outstrip anything anybody else creates. I wrote earlier about the all-electronic Haier small washer/dryer-in-one, running on regular 115VAC, with an evaporative drier that needs no vent, now this PC you can just about stick in your coat pocket - we cannot, now, hope to catch up with their development labs. Like, ever.

Spotsy, November 14, 2009 - They're out of hand

Google drives me up the wall. I (this site) dropped out of the search results, I am assuming, when the Freeservers hoster got hacked - or rather, its Wordpress implementation. I moved my domains, as well as all of my hosting, to Network Solutions, and abandoned Wordpress altogether, there are just too many hackers that know how to break Wordpress' security, which is easy, anyway. But I can't get the domain back into Google's search results, which is ridiculous. I've owned this domain since the late '80s, so it should be somewhere. But it is nowhere. And so I can only conclude Google's search engine has a hole in it.

It pays to occasionally Google yourself, by the way. Doing that, I found my name in Wikiname, and from there to something called Spock.com, a people search engine run by Naveen Jain of Intelius "fame". Infospace, its predecessor, used to run White Pages databases for some phone companies, but these people have gone beyond that - I found myself, complete with home town, facial portrait, religion, year of birth, astrological sign, and some ancillary information, out in the public domain, more than enough information for a determined hacker to break my identity. I personally don't think anybody should be publishing this information, especially not if they got their original information from commercial clients. So - if you find yourself on Spock.com, use their removal dialog. They must know they are doing something not quite kosher, because the listing had disappeared two hours after my complaint. That's gotta be a record. Especially the recognizable portrait gave me concerns - no software found that. An Intelius staffer took it from one of my websites, and did so deliberately, picking a shot that provided a full on recognizable face shot. If nothing else, that is a copyright breach. Watch them.

Watching a 1981 James Bond movie on Universal HD, I notice that even though it looks very crisp, it is not quite as sharp as the Late Late Show - Craig, you've got to do something about your makeup, get an HD makeup artist or sumtin' - which leads to the amazing conclusion that TV now has a higher resolution than whatever they used to call it - 70mm TODD-AO, if memory serves me, or whatever they used in the cinema. That means that we've finally reached the point where some digital media have a higher resolution than optical - although a 35mm slide still contains more data than even the highest resolution digital camera, something like 64 megapixels.

I've said goodbye to Stargate Universe, MGM's new science fiction series - though well made, the storyline seems to spend untold hours exploring the various warped (warp drive, get it?) personalities of the main characters, not helped by their ability to mentally traverse back and forth to Earth in the body of another person, and you then have to remember which person they're in, because you get to only see the person undergoing the transference. Watching the third or fourth episode on my Tivo I got so bored with this stuff I erased the recording after fifteen minutes. I don't mind personalities in my sci-fi stories, but this is more or less a lunatic asylum, with everybody needing treatment and counseling, this all justified because they have been stuck together on an alien spaceship completely by chance. I think I'll go back to the BBC's Dr. Who, in reruns on SciFi, too, at least a few interesting accents there from the British Isles.

Spotsy, November 10, 2009 - When a plan comes together

It is nice when things work. The rebuild I did on my well water plant - see October 26 - works really well - I need to replace one pressure coupling that leaks a little bit - it moved to right behind the pump, and I think it just can't handle the raw pressure. But water delivery is very smooth. I found out what the problem was when I took down the old pressure tank - checking the air pressure, I found water coming out of the nipple, meaning the air bladder had been punctured. The pressure was something like 50 PSI, so it must have resealed, but water does not compress, and so it won't have been working for some time, probably years.

The woodstove is cranking - I did not clean the chimney this year, a visual check in the spring did not show much in the way of creosote deposit, since this is a high efficiency stove, and running that at optimal heat does keep the chimney clean. Once there is a good buildup of hot charcoal on the stove bed the thing - one of the newer technology stoves that preheats combustion air - runs something like eight hours on a full load of wood, which is really amazing. I have to be more diligent and switch to the woodstove from the heat pumps quicker - it saves tons of money, although I have managed to reduce the cost of running the heat pumps a bit by adding a higher efficiency pump, which sits at the rear cold side of the house, and pumps a localized 18,000 BTUs of heat into the family room and the upstairs ducting. Whole floor pumps are nice, but they are controlled by a single thermostat, so are likely to create hot and cold spots, which is not a very efficient way of heating. The cost was not huge - this Soleus window/wall unit, with a 9 EER, only cost me around $600. Don't get confused by the mention of "electric heat" in the ad - once the outside temperature drops below 40° Fahrenheit the coil would freeze, so it switches to (expensive) electric heat. But at that point I have the woodstove cranking, so I can turn it off.

It took me a while, but I have finally gotten to the point I can begin putting some of the stuff I want to sell on Ebay. I decided to do it right and set up a small photography studio - not a stretch, since I had the equipment, strobes, cameras, filters etc. It was a matter of getting a room ready, putting in a backdrop, testing the lighting, and preparing a catalogue, so I can keep track of things - who knows, if I like the online selling, maybe I can do more of that. I've had an Ebay account for yonks, after all, just never did anything with it, and lord knows I have enough accumulated stuff sitting around this huge house.

When I look at cars being advertised with "72 month 0% financing", and incentives to buy humongous SUVs that could easily double as schoolbuses, I can't escape the impression that we have not learned from the past financial collapse. We're still selling things people don't need to people that can't afford them. That's what led to the past recession, the implosion of our economy.

There is no such thing as "0% financing". Borrowing money costs money, so the buyer pays for that. It is nothing but a slogan - one that is designed to be deceptive. I had been hoping that we would begin to tackle deceptive financial practices - remember the "interest only" mortgages, where the mortgage principal actually increased, as it was not paid down? In the European Union rules are being enacted that force lenders to actually prove their claims are true - if your company says they are giving you a 0% loan, your company has to prove that there actually is no interest or finance charge on the original price of the vehicle. Which means that if you buy the car cash, you pay exactly the same $$s as you do when you have the car financed. Because selling things to people who cannot afford them serves only one purpose - shoring up your stock price, as the spreadsheet shows your revenues to include those made on loans that will not be satisfied. Perhaps we should make that illegal - each loan amount (principal and interest!) that is defaulted on much be taken out of the revenue number - regardless of whether that is a third party loan, an asset package that has been sold, or a car paid for through a mortgage refinance. The information is out there - the credit bureaus have all that.

Don't you think?

Spotsy, November 7, 2009 - Another one bites the dust

The 47 inch Vizio LCD TV I bought a couple of weeks ago (see October 20, below) is no more. It began to develop green shimmer in the deep black screen areas, and after I found out from the Tiger Direct website that this is a common problem with this model, I took it back to BJ's, and swapped it for a more expensive Philips 47 inch model, which had been marked down $200, and so came out at the same $799 price. You're reading this right, that's another $200 off the discounted price their website shows - I have found that BJ's often has items marked way down in the store, and this is a good example. BJs tends to make sure of rock bottom prices for brand name merchandise, rather than an extended assortment.

I have to tell you this set is markedly better than the Vizio. For one thing, I like the screen display better than the Vizio's - the LCD is just a little bit "softer" in terms of skin tones and pastels, although it may well be that those of you who have HD to watch ballgames may may prefer the Vizio. I found particularly the scaled up older TV series to come out brilliantly on the Philips. But that isn't where the story ends - the Philips has a number of features that are important to me, features the Vizio does not have.

It is virtually impossible to research all this beforehand - some of it is not exactly documented. Take the HDMI audio, for instance - neither the Vizio nor the Philips have a Dolby decoder built in, not an issue, since I use a standalone Dolby amplifier system, but the Vizio doesn't pass the digital audio signal it receives on its HDMI input out to its digital output port. It only outputs digital audio from its own tuner, and as I use a TiVo HD to receive my Comcast cable signal, I had to run a separate digital audio TOSlink to my decoder.

The Philips, however, does pass through the HDMI digital audio, which requires some processing inside the box. Brilliant, that, it means I can really use the Philips as an HDMI hub, no more switching back and forth between audio inputs on the Atlona AT-HD41D external hub I have been using. The Philips has a couple of other features the Vizio does not have - it has wizards to guide you through the settings, so you don't have to wade through the arcane terminology HD television uses - this isn't a bad idea, considering the huge numbers of video settings possible with today's TV sets. And the Philips' screen swivels, something like 10 degrees, I like this, as I can easily angle it towards my dining room when I sit there computering, as I am doing right now.

Something the Vizio has, and the Philips does not, is PIP, picture-in-picture, so if you're wanting to watch Monk while you're keeping an eye on the Redskins game, better buy the Vizio. On that front, the Vizio has a PC (VGA) input port, as well, which the Philips does not have, so unless your PC has an HDMI-out port, you can't connect it to the Philips. Other than that, the Philips is considerably heavier than the Vizio, which makes it more of a pain to set up (or repackage it to take back to the store, as I had to do, on my own, with the Vizio) and means a greater risk if it gets knocked over - having said that, its stand is twice as large as the Vizio's. It has (compare the pictures here and on October 20) a much wider black bezel than the Vizio does, I personally don't like those black frames, they make the TV a rather prominent huge object in your living room. If you think a TV is furniture, you'll be happy, if you'd like the TV to be onobtrusive when it isn't turned on, not so good. Having said that, I don't know that anything that is more than 50 inches in diameter is ever onobtrusive...

The Philips auto-adjusts the brightness of its display according to the ambient light, a feature I love, since my set gets light from two windows. Note also that I have brightness scaled back on both sets, in my pictures, and that the shot I took of the Philips was taken straight-on with flash. This is impressive, kids. Honest. See how the picture gives the impression you are looking out the window overlooking Fenwick Park? That is what this display really looks like. Awesome.

Spotsy, November 3, 2009 - Those intrepid Microsofties

I am completely blown away by Windows 7. Today I installed its "Professional" version on my file server - way sooner than I had intended, but Windows 7 Ultimate 64 has been running extremely smoothly on my Lenovo laptop (the link goes to the G550 model, equivalent to the N500 I have) to the point that I felt it would be safe - only one issue so far, and that has to do with disk defragmentation, not a life-and-limb problem. This too was a "clean" install, the true Vista in-place upgrade I am leaving for last, as I want to see "7" run on several CPUs for a while before attempting that.

I run little software on this file server, so simply blew away the C: drive partitions, did a quick temporary XP install, necessary to be able to use the upgrade software, and then began a clean install of Win7. Once it had done its first install run, I changed the default settings to "find new drivers", and I'll be damned if it hadn't found and installed all of the drivers it had not had after the first run. Let me tell you how special this is: the PC I am running on is an older Everex desktop designed for Linux, and on top of that Everex as a company has since bitten the dust, so I have no access to any drivers for Windows, as I never had a Windows install for this machine, and their website went dead when they did.

Now it would have been unusual enough if Windows 7 had found all of the necessary device drivers for motherboard and attached storage devices, but it then went one better on me: not only did it find and recognize all devices, it then went and found the driver for my Sabrent SATARaid disk controller, then discovered the two Seagate 750 GB external hard drives attached to this controller, figured out that these had been configured to run as a RAID 0 pair, and mounted the pair in the right sequence without needing the SATARaid management software that normally does that job, or any input from me. I gotta tell you I just about fell off my chair when I saw that happen. I have in the past managed to manually mount an existing RAID pair through the Windows Vista Disk Manager, but to see a brand new "1.0" operating system do this all by itself, on an older desktop with an anemic 1500 mHz Via processor for which no drivers were available at all, is to me a major miracle. It is as if Microsoft, in one fell swoop, has suddenly understood what an operating system really ought to look like. "7" even recognized the definitely non-standard Uninterruptible Power Supply I have hooked up to this system, and manages that without needing the external software I needed before!

Vital in this process is that the "7" install can connect to the internet during the install - this goes for a new PC as much as it does for an upgrade. If you do not have the internet hookup ready and connected, the software you want to install handy, license keys at your elbow, don't start.

It looks to me that Microsoft has made a truly impressive effort to have network drivers included for most network cards known to man. You are best off connecting your PC or laptop to an Ethernet router, but I have to tell you that on my Lenovo laptop it found both the regular and the WiFi card, then presented me during the install with a choice of three wireless networks to connect to - I had never seen that happen before, swear to God. Windows 7 does something I had noticed in Vista on some occasions, but "7" does it consistently - it doesn't go out to look for drivers for the adapter, peripheral or other doodah it is installing, it goes into the device, figures out whose chipset it uses, then installs a driver for that. This makes very good sense - there are only a few manufacturers of graphics chipsets, for instance, and most manufacturers of graphics adapters use one of those OEM chipsets. Since Microsoft has working relationships with all of those chipset manufacturers, it has the information as well as the software to "drive" those chipsets. To give you an example, Windows 7 does not care whether you bought your drive array from Fantom or from Cavalier - it recognizes, "knows", there are Western Digital hard disks in the enclosure, and is able to drive those direct. Teehee, problem solved.

So the consequence - I have now installed "7", one Ultimate, one Professional, on two systems, neither of which I had drivers for - is that there is absolutely no reason for anyone to go out and buy a new system "with a free upgrade". Back up your stuff, clean up your existing install, and chances are you'll be running Windows 7 by the end of the afternoon (I tested this earlier with the 7 Beta on a positively ancient HP laptop, and it worked there too)! That was the other eye opener - it normally takes me anywhere from six to ten hours to fully install an operating system, much of the time taken by downloading and installing online upgrades, and online upgrades to the online upgrades - "7" took me exactly two hours and fourty-three minutes to install, including updates, down to and including making the network drives visible to the network, and mounting them on my other systems. That's gotta be a record, kids - for the first time, ever - and I am including Apple's Snow Leopard here! - I did not have to go and look for a single device or adapter driver to get Windows 7 to run properly. It even recognized my Samsung network laser printer across the network, and offered to install its drivers (I chose not to, so can't tell you it worked), which aren't exactly standard.

I have seen a few reviews of "7" that exhort you to be cautious, not to install Windows 7 as an upgrade on older computers that have not been certified by Microsoft, preferably buy a PC or laptop that either is preloaded, or certified and "upgradable", but I can't agree with any of that. I had tried the Windows 7 Beta Microsoft has made available on several CPUs, over the past six or so months, and had the experience that that ran on just about anything I wanted to throw it at, but the production release is even smoother than that, and I can tell you from experience that no previous version of Windows has been that compatible. With Windows XP, it would often take a lot of work and tweaking to get it to run on some machines - Windows Vista was better, but not problem free - I have to say that Vista was pretty smooth about a year after it was first introduced, when I began using it - but Windows 7 is a revelation. Apart from installing very smoothly, "7" seems faster than any previous version of Windows - I noticed this especially on the Everex desktop I am reporting on here, which has an anemic processor and can only handle 2 GB of RAM, and yet runs like a bat out of hell, where on Vista, previously, and even on the Windows 7 final Beta, the thing crawled. As I am only using it as a network file server, mostly for backups, that wasn't an issue, but I can now use it for other things as well, such as controlling my house lighting and alarm system.

What remains is for me to upgrade my little Everex laptop, which I will do with Vista and applications in place, provided Windows 7 will upgrade Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional "in place". Watch this space, but so far, so (very) good.

Spotsy, October 30, 2009 - Do I do Windows?

I've been somewhat incommunicado as I am installing Windows 7, released last week and delivered to me on Monday, on both my laptops, and this is, as always, a bit of an operation. The good news is that this operating system is much easier to install than any previous version of Windows - and I have worked on every single version of Microsoft Windows since the very first, way back when I was working on Wall Street. But I have made my life more difficult by loading a 64 bit version of Windows on my Lenovo laptop, which is 64 bit capable but came only with a very basic 32 bit Home Basic version of Vista, and my other (travel) laptop is an Everex SA2053T, and as Everex has closed shop drivers for this system are no longer available. Thankfully I have the original setup disk for the Everex, but as both versions of Windows I pre-ordered from Amazon are upgrades, both my laptops had to have the original OEM software installed - OEM is whatever the Original Equipment Manufacturer delivered with it.

While I can, according to Microsoft, technically upgrade the Everex without losing data or installed software, I thought I would make that process more foolproof by completely reinstalling the Vista Home Premium that came with it, and as the machine is several years old that meant running online updates on it for hours - Windows 7 Upgrade expects to find a fully patched version of Vista (you can upgrade from XP, but that means a clean new install, all of your software will need reinstalling afterwards, although it will retain your files). The Lenovo was more complicated - 64 bit Win7 won't upgrade 32 bit Vista in place, requiring a complete from-scratch install, although Vista must be installed for the upgrade software to work, and there aren't any device drivers for Windows 7 at Lenovo's website, as of yet.

Before most of that, however, you have to make sure (absolutely do this, kids!) you have a full recoverable backup of your original system load, just in case things go pearshaped and Windows 7 bombs. It is possible (unlikely, but possible) that some of the older software you use doesn't run under Windows 7, and if you absolutely need that software you don't have a choice. Secondarily, and this is more unique to me, 64 bit Windows won't necessarily run all 32 bit Windows software - there are even some 32 bit device drivers that will not work on anything 64 bit. 64 bit operating systems, by the way, on machines that are capable of running them, runs many times faster than 32 bit operating systems. Not only that, but where 32 bit Windows, on an Intel processor, cannot use more than 4 megabytes of RAM memory (and in fact only uses 3.2 megabytes for running programs), a 64 bit operating system can actually address a virtually unlimited amount of memory - in the case of my Lenovo, the largest memory chips it will take are 4 megabytes, so I have 8 usable megabytes of RAM available in the two slots the machine has. That, too, is a major boon for the heavy user - 4 megabytes isn't actually all that much, for today's memory intensive software.

So, for the moment, I can only tell you about the from-scratch install of Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit (both the Windows Ultimate and Windows Professional upgrades come with 32 and 64 bit DVDs). If you are contemplating an update, check back with the manufacturer of your laptop or PC, it may be 64 bit capable. Having said that, I believe that only those reasonably conversant with Microsoft Windows and its innards (or "Windows internals" as we call it in the trade) should attempt such an upgrade - you will almost certainly run into driver problems, and if you don't know how to resolve those (I am referring to internal drivers here, the drivers necessary to make your computer and its components, such as the graphics chip and the DVD drive, work) you shouldn't try this at all, or be prepared to spend a day or more trying to get it to work, then reinstalling the old operating system. That, in itself, if you have not ever done it before, you should learn first.

Spotsy, October 26, 2009 - Fall Cleaning, and more Eco-Crap

I seem to have worked up my second and third and fourth winds all at the same time, doing repairs all over the house, having a big spring, well, fall cleaning, revamping my home theatre setup for the sixth or tenth time, finally setting up my photographic and video studios, all things I bought the gear for at one time or another, and then left them sit, distracted by the next project.

So I am not displeased, at all. Preparing the house for winter, building a huge woodpile, and cut more trees (many dead already) that lie in the woods, seasoning, so I can get out there and maintain my physical exercise regime, over the fall and winter months. The funny thing is, I feel like I am more organized than I've been in a long time - for the period since I stopped working for a living, that is. And since my last overseas trip I am back to normal sleeping hours, as well - I had been sliding towards spending the night doing stuff on the internet, and sleeping into mid-morning, something I hate doing, as that is not the schedule the world keeps.

I've finally built my well water plant the way I wanted it - when I bought the house, the only thing installed was a acid treatment tank, and only later did I find out they had, probably in the distant past, bypassed it. The elderly couple I bought the house from had probably not had a great deal of money - I found out that filling the new tank I had installed with calcite to the prescribed level costs some $300.. the pool was disused to the point that I had to replace the liner, and one heat pump was DOA. But it's all been fixed, and as this house is an ideal family home (no point in buying a small house and then expecting to sell it to a military officer or executive with a family) all the replacement appliances I put in are big and industrial strength.

So the water plant now has as distribution point right behind the pump (no point treating water you're going to use for the lawn or the car), then a GE SmartWater Whole Housesediment filter, large (36 gallon) pressure tank, an acid reduction tank, and then a fine particulate filter. I am still testing to see if I need to add a water softener, as I understand the calcite that is used for acid control actually increases water hardness. I ordered a water test kit, realizing only now that treating your drinking water, and testing it, does not of course have to be confined to well owners. You're pretty much dependent on the local authority for the safety of your water - having lived in older cities, with water distribution systems that can be a hundred or more years old, testing your water and, where necessary, treating it, is maybe not such a bad idea. Having said that, I have used a Brita active carbon water filter for my drinking and cooking water since I moved from Amsterdam to London in 1978, and still do today, so pretty much anything short of bacterial contamination never made it to my lips.

Coming back to the 47" LCD television I just bought, I noticed an Energy Star sticker on the TV, and mention of it on the box. Cool, eh? Thing only uses 200 or so watts.

But hold on - a 47" Eco-TV? Does that make sense? Is it crap? Is "Eco" not about energy savings and global non-warming? How does a huuuge 47" TV set fit into that? Think about it - who needs 47 inches, 120 cm, of TV? Should we not slowly factor in that size and power are a function of wastefullness? Take hybrid vehicles: the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid has - hold on to your head - a 6 litre V-8 with 332 horses. Hybrid? We give people tax rebates for buying a freakin' tank? I personally think we need to rethink the CFLs and 50" TVs and hybrid school buses - if it's Eco, it should be Eco all the way, cap it somewhere, 35" TV, hybrids only with 4 cylinder gas engines, CFLs only if they consume 10 watts or less. Something like that, what do you think?

Amsterdam, October 20, 2009 - A field full of toys

If you'd like your laptop to run a whole lot faster (under Windows Vista, I have not tested this under any other operating system) get a Kingston solid state hard drive. I am not certain exactly how it does it, but installing the Kingston SSDNow V-Series SATA2 has made my Everex SA2053T laptop a whole lot faster. I am telling you this advisedly - the Crucial CT64GBFAA0 solid state drive I installed originally not only made the laptop a little slower, it spontaneously failed, as well, within a couple of months, becoming completely inaccessible in the process.

Some aspects of Microsoft Windows run significantly better when it is installed on a large hard disk, or a particularly fast one, I knew that, but I had never seen a computer gain significant overall speed as a result of installing a particular type of disk. I'll conjecture the speed gain is related to the way the memory and disk drivers interact - a solid state disk, after all, is memory too, but that's about as far as I can figure. The speed increase is significant - I estimate this laptop now runs twice as fast as when I got it.

One iffy issue is the bad experience I had with the Crucial disk - is this standard for solid state disks? Only time can tell, and I guess I will have to back up on a daily basis, and see if this type of failure is endemic or not, and back up like a crazyman.

For those of you who have followed my exploits with regard to HD television, HDMI interfaces, and Digital Dolby audio - I have always had an interest in home theatre, buying a Dolby capable Digital VHS recorder, the forerunner of the DVR, as far back as 2000 - I have finally caved and bought a full size HD LCD television set. The primary reason was that I was working with HDMI interfaces on computers, and found that the early flat panel TVs I was using, which are fitted with the DVI interface, do not have the HDCP chip, which is the digital watchdog that manages "protected content", and in one case did not have the horizontal frequence output by an HDMI converter.

This really is not a valid reason to go out and spend close to $1,000 on a television set, but I am both anal and a technology buff, so I took a laptop and the HDMI box into BJ's and tested it against the Vizio 47" LCD set they had on offer for $799. Sure enough, what would not work with the three DVI screens I own, which I assume top out at 60Hz, worked fine with the Vizio, which has a maximum horizontal frequency of 120Hz. So, sold, I said to the sales person, who stood there with his eyeballs hanging out" "I didn't know you could do that!". That, of course, left me wondering what he was doing selling advanced television sets.

But it is true - HDMI signals the convergence of video and computer equipment, to the Vizio VO47LFHDTV30A I just bought you can connect anything, from a cable box to a laptop, in any of five different ways (the link points to a refurbished Vizio, I can't find it listed new anywhere). This is, by the way, a good time to buy, well ahead of the holidays. I have a sneaking suspicion that prices will begin going up when we get closer to the holidays, and you won't have any choice but to go out and buy stuff. Not for nothing has Wal-Mart begun to stunt with toy prices already - not that that affects me, I buy gifts all year, when I come across nice things that are relatively cheap, and they go in the closet for birthdays and the holidays.

I don't have a small living room, but this 47" Vizio is huge - not helped by the black bezel, they all seem to have that, and it is butt-ugly. I suppose if you had a TV mounted on the wall on the narrow end of the living room or family room, you could go to 50" or higher (for my overseas readers, 47 inches is 120 centimetres), but I am not seeing how you can get a better image than what I am looking at, unless you live in a castel and are watching across a 4,000 square foot hall. And while I was plenty impressed with the 720p resolution I had before, 1080p is an order of magnitude better. Provided, of course, whatever it is you are watching was actually recorded in HD - most material is not. Even relatively recently digitized movies aren't up to full HD standard - being able to count the hairs on someone's arm was never the goal, in the cinema.

So I am pretty pleased with this $799 "thing" - bear in mind it does not have Dolby audio, but I had that separately, in my existing audio system. It is possible to take the digital audio signal (optical or coaxial) and splice that off from your cable box or (in my case) Tivo to an advanced Dolby decoder/amplifier. I am using an Atlona HDMI switch to consolidate inputs from the Tivo, my Philips DVR and a laptop - the Vizio does have four HDMI input ports, but can't pass on the dighital audio. Seriously, if you're going to go the HD route, you're missing a lot if you do not go Dolby as well - while many TV sets have some form of Dolby decoding, that is no comparision with a full Dolby 5.1 or 7.1 installation, with better than the usual small spakers.

Spotsy, October 15, 2009 - Home Alone

Back home, the grindstone awaits - more firewood preparation. While I have enough for this winter, it is good to maintain the momentum, there are plenty of trees down, although I have to figure out a different place to stack, the side of the house I have been using is full. And no sooner am I home or one of the few remaining copper water pipes in the crawlspace springs a leak - until I bought this house with its well water, I never knew that ground water can be acid enough to eat through metal. While I should have replaced all of the copper with plastic, I have used the opportunity to install a new pressure tank, a new acid control tank, and learn to use the chemicals used to condition the water.

I find this stuff fascinating, things I know nothing about, and engineering that is at the core of housing, urban development and home building. I intend to, over time, make this house as self-sufficient as I can, from a solar roof to wood fired hot water and central heating, and perhaps geothermal heating and A/C. I found I can probably get geothermal heat pumps for installation, replacing the air pumps I have, for something like $2,000 apiece - a good investment with regard to the resale value of the house. Not this year, though.

Looks like I'll be plenty busy the rest of the year - I just got an email about a New York lab reunion, I guess I will use the opportunity to spend a few days and see some friends I've been neglecting, while former colleagues seem to be cropping up all over Asia Pacific, so I probably ought to prepare for another trip - friend D. and I talked about this over lunch, earlier in the week, and he seems to be wanting to head in the same direction around the same time - we've made several of these trips together.

Turns out a member of my family has retired to Indonesia, so I will likely use that trip to pay him a visit, it is somebody I don't think I've seen in over fourty years. And there is still the stuff I need to ut on Ebay - at least I've set up my little studio now, strobes, backdrop an' all, so I can do some halfway decent photography.

With nighttime temperature in the fourties, I have fired up the woodstove, so I can do a creosote removal burn with one of those wonderful logs, something best done once the stove, flue and chimney are at operating temperature. Yep, plenty to get on with...

Amsterdam, October 11, 2009 - It's a tough life

Taking a stroll and some pictures near the Osdorpplein in Amsterdam, I was accosted by the Muslim woman on the left, who asked me if I was taking pictures of them. I told her no, I was taking pictures of the market - which was true, although I wasn't exactly avoiding them either... She was friendly enough, apologized, and we all went our separate ways. Walking back to my sister's apartment, though, I thought how completely nonsensical this was - Western Europe is festooned with security cameras, in the street, in the shops, in public transport, cellphones, everywhere. If, as a Muslim, you're really worried about having your picture taken, moving to a Bedouin village is probably your only option - if you can find one without internet, which I think is probably hard by now.

I generally find Amsterdam much changed - for the first time since I have been visiting my sister in the suburb where she lives, I notice a large group of noisy and aggressive youths on scooters congregating at the park across the street. The Dutch press has had increasing reports of violence among youngsters, but I am seeing this effect with my own eyes now, and this isn't a group comprised of Moroccan immigrant "hangjongeren", as they are called in Dutch. Perhaps this will die down as summer recedes - I am here when the late summer evening is still balmy, the weather has been exceptional.

I find today's Amsterdam somewhat incongruous, anyway - on the one hand I see complaints about the city losing its place in the international lineup of desirable business cities, on the other hand Amsterdam's unwieldly government structure is doing its level best to "socialize" the city as much as it can - leading to ludicrous results. A number of years ago Amsterdam decided to devolve local government - city districts got their own democratically elected local councils, empowered and all. This has led to different parking regulations in different parts of the city, proposals like banning older, more polluting vehicles from the city altogether, and other measures basically designed to ensure quality of life by impairing anything that doesn't revolve around bicycles and walking. The councils are trying to ban patio heaters at sidewalk cafes, and when I accompanied my sister to an operatic rehearsal, parking for two hours in a largely empty street nowhere near a traffic artery, cost me €19, some US$28 - in the evening! What is the problem with the local councils? They are composed mostly of novice politicians, folks with little experience but local affairs and running for office, and with no concept of balancing a revenue with control of the human environment. They are completely oblivious, for instance, that there is no such thing as "local" pollution - Amsterdam is far too small to have a local ecology, its locale is not bounded by natural features, and it has no industry to speak of.

I can tell you, this visit, that I am not surprised that Amsterdam is losing in popularity - let's say I am advising a corporation about where to put its European headquarters, would I recommend they do so in a city with a growing and increasingly aggressive Muslim population, an increasingly violent North African and Caribbean population, local ordinances that make it prohibitively expensive to own and drive a car, and random police blockades (I got caught in one during my last visit here - first time ever, in any city in the world I have ever lived in, or visited) where motorists are pulled out, ID'd, their tax status verified, and pedestrians frisked for weapons involuntarily? Umm, maybe not... To the visitor and observer, these factoids mean that Amsterdam has lost control of its safety and security.

As I am writing this, the Amsterdam daily Het Parool quotes a confidential note from an alderman who reports that "because of the increase in parking fees, parking revenues have plunged, in the first half of 2009" - instead of 136,7 Euros, the city only took 124.1 million Euros, a drop of almost 10%. And what is yet to be determined, is if fewer meter-parked cars means fewer people visit and spend money in Amsterdam. I suspect that is the case - drivers are used to taking the car to wherever they want to go, I do - I rented a car at Schiphol Airport. And with two exceptions, I did everything I wanted to do outside of Amsterdam, including dinner with a friend, and shopping. The big joke in this is that the funds not now available had been earmarked for... further elimination of the motor car from the inner city. Dig this: only a few days ago the government gave a number of Dutch cities permission to use different parking tariffs for "dirty" cars.

I can tell the Amsterdam council fathers what they're achieving: they'll push a large proportion of vehicles and truck traffic out of the city. And with that, the people and business that come with those cars and trucks. If Amsterdam had a decent subway, that wouldn't matter, but all the city has is a few lines that bring commuters into town from the suburbs. Go figure.

Amsterdam, October 7, 2009 - Flux, and more Flux

I managed to catch the current Star Trek movie, the prequel that was released in May, on the plane over. Very well made, some incongruous stuff that the post-Star Trek generation probably won't worry about, but up to date where production techniques and computer graphics are concerned. I tend to not go to the cinema a lot, preferring instead to wait until movies get to my home screens in some way, one advantage being I can re-run, and re-view, whatever it is I watch. It is a different Star Trek, that's for sure, and if I am to believe the publicity it was the highest grossing Star Trek ever - so, perhaps, the Star Trek franchise has been given a new lease on life? Just the elder Spock encountering his younger self is a gross violation of the laws of science fiction, of course - that invariably leads to changes in the timeline that can't be rolled back - mind you, it happens at the very end of the movie, so perhaps it was for a purpose.

I must say that the LCD screens installed on the Boeing 777 (I have encountered them on other airlines flying the "triple seven") are lousy, and the control units a complete joke. On two airlines, British Airways and twice on Air Canada, I have sat through a reboot of the entertainment system, when some passengers could get no service, when you find out that the entertainment system controls everything that is controlled from the passenger panel - including the overhead lighting and the attendant call buttons. On Air Canada, they couldn't show the safety video - at all.... Interestingly, Air Canada has opted to install a system that includes a 110VAC power point in the seatback, allowing all passengers to run their DVD players, video games and laptops using aircraft power. This is a smart move - nobody I know will upgrade their seat to get to business class, where you can plug in your laptop, but I can see why I would fly Air Canada, rather than United, as having the ability to power your laptop on a fourteen hour flight is a nice perk.

But I digress. I had to renew my Privium Dutch electronic passport - if you travel to Europe on a regular basis, and your nationality is one of those that Privium allows, being able to bypass the immigration line, and being able to use business class checkin, could be a reason to become a member (apart from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport being one of the nicer and better stocked places to shop - high on my list, together with Singapore's Changi Airport). Privium now ties in with Holand Security's Global Entry system, which allows you to enter the US using Global Entry machines, and from the Privium website it appears that even as a visitor, you can sign up for both by becoming a Privium member, then going to the EU/US Flux website. I am not exactly sure how it works, though - I have been a Privium member for years, and as I became a Global Entry member earlier this year I don't have to do the Flux stuff. Check the Privium website, there is a link from there to Homeland Security, if you hate standing in line and talking to often rude immigration officers, like I do, these systems are a godsend.

Because I did not know if I needed to sign up for Flux as well, I called Dulles Airport Immigration, and was surprised when the Officer told me "No, you don't need to, we get the Privium information automatically". I guess that's a bit of a shortcut, but as Privium is run and owned by Schiphol Airport, and not by the Dutch government, they probably can do that. I am not happy about the way the U.S. government is waltzing all over my privacy - I don't know that my visiting my family is any of the government's business, and I don't have to tell them when I am visiting my aunt in Mobile, either, do I? I have a good understanding why they think it is necessary - being "there" on 9/11, and being part of the recovery afterwards - but I am not sure it achieves anything beyond building databases too massive to do anything useful with. I have not seen any evidence of terrorism suspects being apprehended because of all this data collecting capability they are putting in place. More terrorism suspects are being found and apprehended, but that is, I think, a function of governments putting more money and personnel into national and international security. Owell. Best we can do is be vigilant, and try and cooperate as best we can.

Brasschaat, Belgium, October 3, 2009 - Family & Shopping

Visiting The Netherlands, my home country, this time was more of a catching up with the long lost - one cousin I didn't even know I had until a couple of years ago, and then yesterday I went down to Belgium to see an old friend I hadn't seen in years, although we do stay in touch. I love visiting Belgium because the food is out of this world, the Belgians share their food culture with the French. 6pm the tables are laid because that is dinner time, and the dinner folks stream in. We left a little after 9, nobody worries about how many sittings per table, you want to sit the rest of the evening on a cup of coffee (always espresso) or a pintje (not a pint, but a half pint of the local brew) that's fine too. We caught up, and my only regret is that I couldn't get a shot of a local police patrol car - blue-and-white Smarts, I kid you not.

The relative number of diesel cars on the roads here is huge, every other vehicle is diesel powered. I had never been given a diesel rental before, until this trip, they didn't even ask, nor is it really necessary, as there isn't any discernible difference between a gasoline Renault Clio and one with a diesel engine. The engine is a little more noisy when idling, but that it it, and the diesel definitely has more pulling power than the gas engine. I am averaging (not driving gently, exactly, and spending more than an hour in a traffic jam, on Sunday) an amazing 40 mpg, according to the dashboard dial. That's some 6 mpg over the average standard Obama wants to set for 2012 - which, unless he can force American car distributors to start selling small cheap cars in very large volumes, and make it more attractive for drivers in urban areas to choose small, ain't never gonna happen.

I've noticed in Europe as well as in Asia that vehicle manufacturers are experimenting a lot with new or different modes of transportation. There are hybrid vans in Asia, small (if not tiny) diesels in Europe, Tata is building the Nano, the cheapest car in the world, I could go on. And then I see there is, despite the collapse of the American car industry, nothing being done to innovate. Ford and GM are bringing a very few vehicles from their European operations over - something they could have done years ago, and could have done during the collapse, they could be on the streets now. But still, the expertise is simply not there. A recent article in the New York Times talks about the Ford Transit, and its sales since 2003 - it is unbelievable this article is written by someone who does not know that the Transit has been around for decades - I rented a Transit when I moved from the Netherlands to the UK, in 1979, but it has been in continuous production since.. 1965. And Ford is going to save the day by bringing the Transit to the US now?

It is the same syndrome I see in articles about GSM, 3G and other telecommunications technologies - nobody, proudly spearheaded by David Poque, has the slightest idea of what goes on in the more advanced markets, all of which are outside the US, and they're apparently unable to do the research, despite the internet, they go on and on about the iPhone and Verizon/Sprint/CDMA, completely oblivious to the presence of new and more advanced technologies in the overseas commercial marketplace. Take a look, if you will, at the Vodacom handset lineup for South Africa, not the most affluent nation, mostly phones that will work on any GSM network, anywhere in the world, including a good helping of 3G and 3.5G phones.

"No, doesn't surprise me" said my friends, hearing I dragged a Kärcher pressure washer back from The Netherlands "you're techno-crazy" (follow this link to get to the U.S. equivalent product). The reason was relatively simple - more powerful than the $118 1,300PSI Chinese pressure washer I have, the Kärcher came with a patio cleaner (the circular device in the picture) as well as the standard accessories, and at 99 Euros was not expensive, especially if you consider I get the 19% VAT back after export, making the price €83, or some US$121 - the patio cleaner accessory by itself costs $59 in the US. Good pressure too - 1,600PSI, and I do have a 240 volt feed at my house. I tried it out on my sister's patio, before packing it, and she was quite pleased with the results, the next morning. Why did I want it? It'll save a huge amount of time cleaning my deck, which with a regular wand is a lenghty procedure. And, unlike my Chinese contraption, the Kärcher is automatic - the pump only runs when the trigger is pulled. Magic. As soon as I am back I'll show you how well or badly the patio cleaner contraption does - this is all about my back deck, which hadn't been painted or cleaned for years when I bought this place - and that was in 2002.

Amsterdam, September 29, 2009 - The confusion of looking backwards

The recent repair of the Hubble Space Telescope, the launch of Kepler, and other important astronomical developments spawned television programming about the universe, its origins, and the science of observing where you can't go. I find this fascinating, astronomy was a hobby of mine when I was in my teens, and radio astronomy began to yield astonishing results, the first survey of the radio heavens having been completed at Cambridge University in the 1950s.

I was watching a program about Black Holes, which apparently now are deemed to be habitually at the core of galaxies, the other day, when it occurred to me that the fact that looking out into deep space actually provides a view of the history as well as the future of the universe - all at the same time. Let's see, how do I put this into words..

If we stick to the "Big Bang" concept, our universe came into being out of an infinitely small infinitely massive "object", which began to spontaneously expand (you could postulate that this is part of a cycle, after a previous contraction, so not a random event, but let's keep it simple), and is continuing to expand, at an increasing rate. We are able to use telescopes of various kinds to look into the far reaches of space, hundreds of light years away, where the objects we see sent the images we see of them as many years ago as they are light years away. Whichever direction we look in, we can see that everything we see is either moving away from us, or we are moving away from it, depending on the direction of the expansion.

My confusion stems from the fact that, the further away an object appears to be, the older it is, and therefore, the closer it must have been to everything else, and to the core of the universe - IOW, it is no longer where we observe it. The issue here is that we're looking at the past, in whichever direction we look, a past in which the universe appeared much smaller than it is today.

What I am trying to say is that everything we observe was far closer together, when we observed it, than it is today, and that a nebula that is to us a billion lightyears away, has to have been traveling (or, at least, its matter has) for much more than a billion years, if we assume its matter has not traveled at the speed of light.

But it gets worse. We "see" only forms of radiation that are traveling towards us. They do this at a particular speed, which we can measure. But the source of the radiation, if our universe is expanding in all directions, had a forward speed, away from us, so the velocity we see is the radiation velocity minus the forward speed of the object. That means lots of paradoxical things - anything that isn't radating on our direction we can see, anything that travels away from us at the speed of light we'll never see, so there is probably a lot out there we cannot observe. So between all of the paradoxes, the universe may have an age of 13.7 billion light years, but a size (diameter) of some 78 billion light years. Which would indicate that any radiation that came our way just after the Big Bang has to travel 78 billion light years to get to the other side of the universe (or is this: to get back to where it came from? You get my drift?), but as it could only have begun traveling 13.7 billion years ago, it'll probably never get there, as the bits at the Big Bang started out at just about the speed of light, and so are traveling forwards faster than they are traveling backwards.

Or something. You see what I mean? I think I have just produced the worst explanation of anything, ever, but there it is. Now I am in Amsterdam and watching Top Gear, which I haven't in ages, so I am distracted - Jeremy Clarkson, in his inimitable verbal gymnastics, may be the most irrelevant car reviewer on the planet, but the program - oops, programme - is amusing.

See ya later..

London Heathrow, September 26, 2009 - Falling behind

Arriving at Heathrow Airport on my way to Amsterdam, my data modem soon found not one, but three 3G networks, and I soon realized many of these are running at 3.5G - 7.2 megabits per second. The same is the case in Amsterdam, at my sister's apartment in the suburbs. What that means is that we are falling behind ever more, in the United States, where I hear complaints from iPhone users about the speed, or lack thereof, of AT&T Wireless' 3G network. No such issue here in Europe - reading some newspapers on one of my 3G phones, network performance is as good as I have it at home in the US on a 10 MBPS network from Comcast. This is pretty stunning, and we're all the while being told about the 4G networks coming to us "real soon now". It's a joke - this is wireless cellular networking at full broadband speeds, and it is all over Europe and Asia Pacific. Again, as I mentioned earlier, the carriers do a lot of talking, but not a lot of delivering.

It is rather amazing that we think of 3G as something special, in the US, when in most other parts of the world it has been rolled out and is in competitive use all over. The picture here I took in a small seaside town in the very North of the Netherlands, not in an urban corridor - I can hear you say "of course Heathrow has 3G, being a very large international airport". We are simply way behind in implementing these technologies, to begin with because we have multiple different standards that are incompatible, where elsewhere, they simply have GSM and 3G, the same as all neighbouring countries and those 10,000 miles away. Especially the American press isn't getting the really very simple fact that you can buy a phone in the Philippines (which is where I got this Nokia 6110 Navigator in 2007), run the online update Nokia makes available for all of its markets, and use it just about everywhere with anything up to 3.5G. I use this phone everywhere, all over the world, including the U.S.

And it is 3G roaming I am showing you - I am using my U.S. T-Mobile account. Yes, says Verizon, we're going to 4G - sure they are. It is simply that Vodafone, the British firm that is the largest mobile carrier in the world, is a GSM carrier, and half owner of Verizon wireless, is implementing 4G out of 3.5G on its home and overseas GSM networks, and has somehow helped Verizon understand that they have to agree to use this. Verizon 4G is not an evolution of Verizon EVDO, it is the same 4G the GSM world will be implementing, when 3.5G (which runs at 7,2 megabits per second!) becomes too slow for the market. I remind you that 3.5G has been rolled out, I've been using it in both England and the Netherlands, this trip. I used it in Singapore two years ago. It is out there, on commercial networks.

In The Netherlands and London, it did not really matter what device I used - my Bandluxe C100 Expresscard 3.5G laptop data modem, bought in the U.S., my Nokia 6110 Navigator, bought in the Philippines, or my Motorola V1100 3G handset, bought in the U.S. (but manufactured for a Vodafone subsidiary in South Korea), they all work fine, and both the Nokia and the Motorola allow tethering, at 3G. Tethering is where you can use your phone as a data modem for your laptop or PC, connected to a USB port, or Bluetooth - it is easiest if you use interface software to do this - Nokia's is free at their website, Motorola you need to pay for, $25, if I recall - and all of it works fine, while the 3G speeds approach those of a cable modem (I am comparing with the cable connection at my sister's apartment in Amsterdam).

Much of what you read in the American press - problems with the iPhone, networks that don't work, specialized equipment you need to buy - is complete b***s***. Outside of the US, 3G phones (the GSM variety) are a dime a dozen, and they work, insofar as they are quadband, and have both WCDMA (UMTS)(nothing to do with CDMA) and HSDPA, they'll work anywhere - now including the U.S., Japan and South Korea. Many of these devices can be mail ordered in the United States, too - go to the Tiger Direct website, look for unlocked GSM phones, sort the list by price, and scroll down to where you find "3G" mentioned - today, that starts with the Motorola Razr V3xx, at $114.99 - it'll do the lot, from synchronizing with Outlook, reading pop mail, accessing 3G internet, tether, all you do is stick your AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile or Rogers SIM card in it, and you're away. The Motorolas will even charge from your USB port (which solves the charger conundrum), I have mine sitting here next to my laptop, as you can see in the picture on the left. Sure, if you want a cellphone on steroids, a handheld Macintosh, get an iPhone - at this point in time the clever marketeers at Apple have managed to put that device in the picture in the press, when for each iPhone 500,000 other handheld devices are sold, worldwide, that are much more compatible with international networks, and don't have any limitations on use - I can run Skype on my Nokia Navigator - not that I need to, my other Nokia phone has UMA, which T-Mobile supports, so I can use it to make free calls over WiFi, right here in Amsterdam, at home in Virginia, and at just about every Starbucks and McDonalds in the US.

The secret to all this? In most countries, making your network exclusive, and making your equipment exclusive to your network, is against the law - and guess what? The largest wireless carriers in the world are all foreign, mostly European, Vodafone up front - even though this has been going on for decades, American carriers have not, to this day, discovered that if you standardize on one technology, and make your networks interoperable, you make much more money than if you do what we have done in the U.S., make our networks proprietary. Vodafone (English) and T-Mobile (German) not only own a sizable chunk of the world's cellular networks, they own a large chunk of the American cellular market as well. We used to lead in technologies, and we frittered away our advantage by not looking how "they" did it. How stupid is that?

Spotsylvania, September 22, 2009 - Too much, or not enough?

Before I get to my astronomy hobby horse, I used my recent disk failure as an excuse to do something I had't done before - back up to Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray isn't only a movie medium, you can buy BD disks that will work in the external BD drives that are made for this. I bought two from Buffalo Technologies - one can run the obsolete HD DVD format, something I was interested in, though I have not yet got that to work - that can play or write BD disks, just as you can write movie, music or data DVDs. Except - depending on the model, a Blu-Ray Disk will store either 25 or 50 - hold still - gigabytes of data. Massive, right?

I have to tell you years of experience with optical media have taught me one thing: never use them to back up essential data to. They are too iffy, unreliable, flaky, whatever you want to call it. Come back to a CD or DVD you wrote two years ago, and you have a reasonable chance of not being able to retrieve all of your data. I went to the trouble of doing double backups, a good idea at the best of times, but the write speeds of optical drives just eat too much precious time..

One problem is that you are likely to read an optical disk on a different drive, or even a different computer, and it is quite possible that the interface software is made by somebody different, too. So it is a crapshoot - yes, you can read your backup on the same drive, and the same PC, next week, but beyond that... So I set up a storage server, last year, and have been backing up over my network.

Trouble there is that the backups get massive - my Windows 64 laptop has 85 GB of software and data on it, and that is without any long term storage - that is on the server. Backing that up over WiFi takes a long time, and the AISBackup software I use creates ZIP archives, which in itself is a slow-ish process.

So, I decided to try a backup to Blu-Ray Disk - just two BD's should do it, 85 compressed GB will fit on two 25 GB BD's. From what I read, the Blu-Ray Disk is much more reliable than CD or DVD, hardier, in that it has a special coating that makes it difficult to scratch or otherwise damage, etc., and yada-yada. Not cheap - anywhere between between $4 and $10 a disk, depending on how many, and what quality, you buy. The only way to find that all out is to try - with apprehension, I must say, because if you lose one of the disks you've lost a huge amount of data - until now, the max you could lose was 9 GB, on a DL DVD data disk. But I need a quick backup, as I am traveling shortly, so..

So I will let you know. The first problem has occurred already - backing up to the HD-DVD/BD drive, which has only a USB port, the software did not know to let me change the disk when it was full, not in itself a huge problem, but then when I told it to finish and read all file checksums, the laptop treated me instantly to the Blue Screen of Death. So I have now switched to the other Buffalo drive, which can't do HD-DVDs, but has both a USB and an eSATA port. I am using the latter, it is a bit faster than the USB version - so far, so good... For vital functions, USB is not necessarily a good solution, as the vast majority of computer users use USB ports for various different functions, and the USB hub allocates shared bandwidth among all devices. When one of those devices tries to take precedence, strange stuff can happen.

Spotsylvania, September 19, 2009 - Invest if you must, but where?

Somewhat startlingly, the Chinese press reports that many of the laid off workers that repaired to their rural origins are once again moving to the industrial belts in the South. My main frustration is that I can't give you the link to the article, because it was published in the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's leading newspaper, which is a subscription journal. Buying newspapers is something I stopped doing a long time ago, I have even ditched the Wall Street Journal, but the SCMP is a goldmine of information about mainland China, information I am sure I could get elsewhere if only I could read Chinese...

Preparing for my overseas trip, I was updating the software and utilities on my little Everex laptop. Everex went belly-up this summer, but the SA2053T I have been using for a couple of years now has been cheap and cheerful, and with its 10.5" screen little larger than a netbook, happily running Windows Vista.

In order to get a few more battery hours out of the thing, I had this summer replaced the 100 GB hard Fujitsu inside with a solid state disk, the 64 GB Crucial CT64GBFAA0. Not expensive, a solid state disk would consume less power, and I'd be able to turn on hibernation by simply shutting the lid, and as the solid state disk has no moving parts, I could put it in my bag without having to wait for it to shut down.

Until 4pm today. I came back from my Neighbourhood Watch school bus escort run, and it was sitting there with a boot screen, and a "Master Disk Failure" error. Not intermittent, it won't boot or even see the disk. I've ordered another solid state disk, from Kingston, with a duplication kit, hoping that I may be able to install that and copy the failed disk, but it does not look promising. I've had disk failures before, but I can only remember one time in my entire career that I actually lost a complete hard disk. Normally, you can access the disk with diagnostics, and recover the data. For now, this one is dead, and whether or not it will run as a secondary... we'll see.

So now I have to prep my other laptop, the much larger Lenovo N500, to take with me. What are you complaining about, you'll say, you have another laptop, but I lost a bunch of emails that don't look like they're on my backup, and I need to make some changes to the Lenovo that'll interfere with what it normally does, play Blu-Ray disks. Owell. At least I have something to take with...

The problem was not so much that the disk failed, but that I had not backed it up completely. The little Everex had slowed down talking to the network, recently, and although I had been running backups, they had not completed overnight, and I kinda pushed the problem away - stupid, since this was my very first solid state drive. Well, that's not entirely true, I had had some made, for testing, in Taiwan, back in my lab days, but those were never intended for production - this one, I ran 24/7, as I do with all of my systems.

Now, I am a compulsive backer-upper, but this one caught me, and I lost three months of email - a drag, because I used email to track my life, mostly. I have decades of experience dealing with hard disks, and my experience has been that if you do maintenance on a hard disk, you'll have plenty of warning when it begins to fail. I have not ever, in my extensive career as a systems engineer, seen a disk fail just like that - boom, gone. That's scary - I can tell you now I would, after this experience, never recommend a solid state disk to a customer. Sure, the jury is still out, I may be able to access it using the cloning kit I've just ordered, but even so, this technology may not be ready for the big time, even though there are plenty of netbooks that come with SSD's today. As SSD's use marginally more power than electro-mechanical hard disks as well, I really can't recommend you getting an SSD. Honestly - in all the years I have been doing this work, I've had a few drives fail, but I've never been unable to access the disk at all, and I have always been able to retrieve much or all of the data, after a crash. Will keep you posted as to success, or the lack thereof, in cloning this thing.

Spotsylvania, September 15, 2009 - Computer=phone

One of the significant equipment problems we have to solve is the need to update the devices we use. I noticed it again when talking to a family member recently, who balked when I even mentioned the need to update her GPS device before setting out on a trip to somewhere new. I do that religiously, but then I know too much. The average consumer has no conception that electronic devices are now manufactured all at once, in huge batches, and then they go into storage until they're sold. And that can be three months, or three years later. And by that time, the firmware and the software and the databases have been updated half a dozen times, drivers may have been updated - famously, the included software may update the driver, only to have your Apple or Windows computer insist there is yet another update - in the worst case scenario, your new device may not even work properly until the updates have been downloaded and installed. So - many consumers don't run regular updates, not understanding that the update they did not download may enable just what they wanted to do this time around, like a ZIP code change in a GPS, some landmark that has just been added, any of a number of things.

The problem would be solved if high speed wireless broadband would be built into each device as a matter of course, without any worries about whether that is 3G, Wimax or WiFi, and devices and software would connect and update automatically, as a first order of business, when activated. This would solve not only some of the problems users experience, but save a good deal of money in helpdesk support. I've seen only a few attempts at improving this - Nokia is increasingly building it into its software, but this would need 3G networks, which aren't readily available everywhere. Come to think of it, if hu-mans came with software updates, life might be a lot easier - imagine, dating age kids with E-Harmony already built in...

In many ways, we are only at the beginning of the computer era. That will not truly start until the computer is no longer visible, embedded in everything, from beds and refrigerators to doorknobs. When walls can be viewscreens one moment, solar panels the next, and you can "think at" your built-in PDA - smartphone, I suppose I should say, the PDA is history already.

Speaking of PDAs and smartphone, Motorola's Cliq looks like an interesting device, - I intend to get one as soon as T-Mobile puts them up. If indeed it provides seamless access to Social Networking sites, email, and everything else a non-professional internet user accesses several times a day, this could prove interesting - especially as it is compatible with both 3G and 7.2 Mbps HSDPA, a.k.a. 3.5G. At $100... As far as I can see this thing should even work in Japan, where nothing else you can get here does..

To the left you can see some more firewood gathered, deadwood, in this case - this is indeed a great workout. If I manage to keep this up I should get through the winter with wood to spare - I estimate I have processed about 6 tons of wood altogether (I'll find some way to measure it in cords, once I am done, and then chart usage, once it gets cold enough), and I have another 20 or so lying around, waiting to be cut. Teehee. If you were curious why I needed an SUV, with four wheel drive and low gearing, this is a good example - and to get out of my driveway when it snows, of course. I can get the Camaro out of the garage, then, but that is as far as it goes. I can't even get it back in when there is snow on the ground...

Spotsylvania, September 11, 2009 - Is it drivel or balderdash?

Isn't Steve Jobs cute? Apple sold a massive thirty million iPhones, in the past two years, I hear him say, on Bloomberg. Umm... until you look at what Nokia sold in the second quarter of 2009 - in the middle of a recession, in three months. 105 million phones... lessee... over two years, that would make.. 840 million, that's 280 times Apple's phone sales. Or, to put it differently, 30 million phones is what Nokia sells in 26 days. Mr. Jobs, it is easy to crow when you are preaching to the converted...

Goodyear has a tire that uses less gas... It took how long to figure that out? Lower rolling resistance, I suppose, a technology that was actually developed years ago, for the first hybrid vehicles. Probably don't want them on the Camaro.

Ah, and there is the new Ford Ecoboost engine - a 3.5 litre V-6 with twin turbobochargers and direct fuel injection.. massive 355 horsepower, and a fuel consumption of "only" 22/18 and 19 average mpg. Sheesh. The massive 5.7 litre V-8 in my 2002 Camaro gets (measured by yours truly) 26/18 and 20.43 average mpg. Sheesh and double sheesh. Eco? Really? Where?

Seriously, kids, all of this piecemeal stuff is't going to save the planet. We need a couple of things. First, we've got to stop breeding, I don't know of any country that needs more people. Secondly, all of those that can work from home should stop going to the office - that's hundreds of millions of people. You want to do something useful, give all of these desk jockeys a computer with conferencing software and a broadband connection, and start emptying office buildings. Anything else, watch Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel, he's got plenty of ideas for recycling and stuff, he is easy on the eyes, for the ladies and the gay folk, and he is civilized and fun to watch for the rest of us, including the kids. No combover cockroaches or foulmouthed "chefs", wholesome, umm, family entertainment.

For the first time since I moved down here I have the old "workout" feeling I used to have in the gym in White Plains - and all it took was logging, three hours a day, every day. You may know exercise gets addictive, over time, the body starts pumping the chemicals required for physical exertion, and then when that exertion does not happen, you get a kind of withdrawal. I've known that for years, but really haven't targeted workouts since I moved here. Don't know why. Curiously, it took only ten days for the feeling to come back, now I want to cut short my morning admin to get "out there" already.

Took one dead tree down, today, prepped a really big oak, and split the wood of about a third of another downed tree. Now all I need to do is make sure I have enough work for each day, and my condition should improve. Wasn't bad, but it wasn't good enough. The only question mark is whether or not I am going to continue doing this when it gets cold. It shouldn't make a difference, with my metabolism cranking, perhaps last year wasn't a good example, as I had a problem with my spine. After some steroid epidurals at the end of the year, it does seem markedly improved, although my physician insists it was just the threat of spinal surgery that did it....

Spotsylvania, September 7, 2009 - GSM phones & a Workout

The bit of video to the left is the controversial anti-AIDS ad I think was commissioned for a German organization, in which Hitler's head is used to indicate that having unprotected sex can amount to murder. I don't know if this is effective, but I do not see anything wrong with it.

Every time I read an article about the iPhone I am amazed at how little the American press, and even the American consumer, knows about cellphones and cellular service. I don't have anything against the iPhone - it is basically a handheld Macintosh, I just have no use for it. I prefer using a laptop for computing (I still use an Everex SA2053T 12" subnotebook for travel), and my ideal telephony device is the Nokia Navigator, which is a full featured GPS unit as well as a 3G smartphone - mine I picked up in the Philippines in 2007 (its successor is here).

Between the complaints about Apple and the complaints about AT&T Wireless, forgotten is that problems with cellular service and cellular equipment are often related to the way we have chosen to implement our cellular systems, in the US: in full competition mode.

Most countries, worldwide, have standardized on GSM networks, and when those began to be implemented, they were implemented under roaming agreements, a method that had been built into the GSM standard in Europe. In short, in most countries, then as now, carriers were required to allow their competitor's customers to roam on their networks, this to ensure that, between them, carriers would be able to provide countrywide service without having to build duplicate networks. The internetworking system was planned from day one, with all networks formally adhering to the GSM standard being connected to a centralized inter-system billing service based in Rome, Italy. IOW - everybody won, carriers got their minutes used and the customers got much larger networks than individual carriers were able to build by themselves.

The consequence, today, is that if you take your AT&T Wireless or T-Mobile GSM phone (tri-band or quad-band) and get on an airplane, you can get off that airplane in Paris, Kuala Lumpur, Johannesburg, Cairo or Chattanooga, TN, and you can turn your phone on and receive and make calls on your own number. My ex-wife can take her Dutch cellphone and send me a text message from Thailand and it'll get to me, wherever I am in the world. And vice versa.

This is how the Europeans implemented cellular telephony. Here in the US, we implemented cellular telephony by allowing carriers to build their own networks, using different incompatible technologies, and we specifically allowed them to exclude other carriers' customers from their networks. The consequence is spotty service in places, bandwidth restrictions (think about it - if you have three GSM networks in Berlin, and your phone can choose between all three, you're less likely to run out of bandwidth, right?), and phones that will only run on one or two networks, instead of all networks. So, today, Americans pay more for their cellular service than the consumers in most other countries, and have worse service. And AT&T and Apple can charge you extra to get an iPhone, because, even after all these years, neither company understands that you eventually make much more money if a device can be used on all networks, as is the case in many overseas markets, where restricting use of the iPhone to one network is against the law - and technically impossible.

Part of the reason I bought this bit of Virginia is that I figured I would have my own exercise yard, more fun than going to the gym, which is what I did for much of my career. But it is only really now that I have got myself organized, and spend two or three hours a day outdoors, harvesting trees and building a good stock of firewood. I do need the exercise, and it is quite an enjoyable activity. It was working up the motivation that took a good long while - funny how you have everything you need, including the trees, and can't get to make a go of it.

To set myself a target I checked the weight and volume of the wood I am shifting, see the load in the picture to the right, after all, when working out you have bike miles, or reps, or weight, and wasn't too displeased. As it turned out I cut, moved, split and stacked 1200 lbs of oak - that's just what is on the cart - before I ran out of steam, and I am trying to do that five or more days a week. There is, in principle, no reason why I cannot do this all year, summer and winter, I have an arctic boiler suit that is plenty warm even in freezing temperatures, and I have plenty of trees. Apart from clearing deadwood I am taking some live trees down to give nearby trees some more breathing space, this especially for trees that are relatively close to the house. While I have cut back the treeline considerably, I really do need to drop some of the really tall trees, that can still hit the house when they blow over - that is typically what happens in the storm season, it is the tallest trees that come down.

I don't know that I am significantly impacting the carbon conversion rate of my piece of Virginia - one tree I took down two years ago has regrown to a height of about 30 feet already, but this time with multiple stems, rather than two. The soil is very fertile here, I recall having to take down trees that grew in front of my satellite dish, from one season to the next. It is curious how it is now OK to take trees and use them as fuel - not in the fashionable fireplace manner, I can actually heat my entire house this way, in deep dark winter, when heat pumps get inefficient to use.

If you are surprised I bang on about wood and stoves and stuff, having spent just about my entire life in the cityscape, these factors are new to me, and as an engineer I find them fascinating. I had not been confronted by a situation where I could get my hands on a completely self contained "living machine" - the only external feed into the house is electrical, and even that I can technically provide myself.

Spotsylvania, September 3, 2009 - Brains and other mushrooms

I encountered this Beetle a few days ago in the Giant parking lot, and thought I'd share it with you. Large numbers of American VW drivers are women, and I don't think anybody knows why, but this is a very good example of how a VW Beetle seems to have inspired a young woman. I probably should have stuck around to find out what kind of creature owned this thing, but I had other stuff to do.

If you read my recent "space" musings, you'll know I like to step away from the "logical" stuff, from accepted practice. I am writing this, for instance, while Wired Science is running a report on attempts to mimic the human brain. "Why?", I ask. Why would you want to try and create an artificial form of the biological brain? I state "biological", because it is a biological organ, that grew and evolved in an organic, biological environment. It developed senses, it changed the instruments, such as the skin and eyes, that help the brain gather input, it changed in a continuous interaction with the environment through the body. It could not have evolved without the body, and so you cannot, in my opinion, create some kind of artificial brain unless you have some process for this brain to evolve by itself, for which it would need to have a fixed interactive environment. We humans aren't particularly good at doing that type of research, since we tend to rebuild whatever we are building every time some new or improved technology comes around.

That's not how evolution works. Evolution is based on building blocks, materials, organics, that evolve only slowly, and can grow into purposeful structures only because they use standardized building blocks. These materials change only slowly, and alter their functionality, rather than develop new tricks. And so the evolutionary path may not be the best for us to use to create "intelligence", wshatever that is. Prototyping by speeding up natural processes doesn't really work, because the pace at which evolution takes place is itself a function of that evolution.

It's a bit like politics, where a politician is looking for results that can be demonstrated before the next election. Planning a development to have results a decade from now is simply not something a politician will do, because a lack of speedy results will impair the politician's ability to get re-elected - and finish the project. Or, to put it to you differently - all parts of a whole are instrumental in making that whole. The human brain was engineered specifically for survival and procreation, for the creation of shortcuts to goals. Attempting to create an artificial brain, therefore, can only lead to the same result, and that isn't "problem solving" - it is making problems go away. Hence theft, fraud, murder, corruption, war. These are the things that come natural to us. Creating artificial intelligence, then, requires that you first specify the goal, and that has to be very well defined. If you don't know where you are going there isn't any way to figure out whether you need a train, boat or plane...

I was miffed to find out that it costs a lot of money to use British Airways frequent flyer miles - for my flight from Dulles to Amsterdam, they wanted 60,000 miles, as well as $310 for "charges". Mind you, booking a regular flight would have cost $837, so there is savings. American Airlines does not charge me half as much to get a frequent flyer ticket, but I am saving their miles for my upcoming Asia/Australia trip, so did not have much of a choice here. At least I get to eat a proper British Breakfast at Garfunkel's at Heathrow Airport, always enjoy that a whole lot.

The pic to the right is the largest mushroom, fungus, I have ever seen - easily a foot across. Right outside the house, too, at the edge of the woods. I am getting so used to my slice of nature, didn't even notice it at first... But I suppose I am looking down a bit more while I am harvesting some trees for the winter - last weekend I accientally weedwhacked a copperhead, a poisonous snake, who then played dead for a while, and when that did not make me go away, attacked me. He lives underneath my concrete porch, I knew that much, but as I have had a run-in with him before, I may have to kill him. He isn't ever going to think of me as his friendly landlord now.

I never realized this, but the animals that live on my property to an extent recognize me, and no longer treat me as a predator, as I don't own a dog, and don't shoot at them. Deer will happily continue to graze fifty yards from where I am using a chainsaw, passing turtles look at me as if to say "what's it to you", rather than withdraw into their shell.... So I am pretty sure the next time this copperhead sees me he is not going to hesitate.. Their bite isn't lethal, but destructive and disabling, and I understand that the anti-venom is $10,000 a pop, not including the cost of the helicopter needed to get it there fast - not kidding.

Spotsylvania, August 31, 2009 - Morning owl

I am not updating this as often as I'd like. It isn't so much that I have nothing to tell you about, but my writing time (these days, usually in the mornings) seriously conflicts with my outdoor time. I try to spend as much time as I can working outdoors, on my five acre property, which I sort of bought as my personal exercise yard. From regular maintenance to creating the winter woodpile, it is all excellent exercise, and the woodpile especially saves me a ton of money in heating, over the winter. Considered Eco-friendly now (imagine that!), wood in a modern woodstove burns reasonably clean, and my trees capture more carbon dioxide than my stove creates (viewed on an annual basis, to be completely fair, I only heat in winter, of course).

So there is the conflict - although I used to be a night writer, that creative wave has somehow shifted to the morning, over the past few years, why, I do not know.

I was going to write about "Defying Gravity", an ABC science fiction series I discovered the other day, but I don't think I will. It is, I suppose, copied on "ER" and like series, except its one hour format is crammed so full of personal traumas and operational disasters and completely unstable personalities, there is no normal action, just one thing going wrong after another, interspersed with more things going wrong in the past. Crammed. Fuggedaboutit.

So - NCIS I like, but that is because I know its locale, Washington, D.C., and environs, so well, having lived and worked there for many years. Law & Order I like, because I know New York City, and environs, so well, having lived and worked there for many years. Star Trek: Enterprise is nice, as it is set in the future, and interacts with other, earlier, Star Trek series. It is nice because it is populated by ordinary people, as well, not by the Barbies in "Defying Gravity", who have so much personality they become unreal. Can I put a fine point on what makes one bad, and the other good? No. I don't know that anybody could have forecast the success of Star Trek and its successors - one of those series that got taken off the schedule for lack of success, whatever that is. I continue to doubt that anybody really knows which commercial series successfully sells products, which is what the ratings are all about. I challenge any product marketer to prove to me that "Law and Order" sells more of their product than did "Joey". Nor, for that matter, does anybody know how many people really watch any given TV show. Nobody talks about this much, but Nielsen ratings make wild assumptions based on nothing. I can do better with a notebook and a scooter.

I've booked my mini vacation to the Netherlands, see the family, that sort of thing. Spent the night shopping for my sister - usually, she saves her gadget and photographic wish list for when I come over, so I can pick the items she wants up here, where they are often cheaper than in Europe, in many cases because of the exchange rate, of course. Exception, this time, is the portable GPS she was looking for, one she can take on bicycle trips. Amazon Germany sells a Blaupunkt unit that runs on a rechargeable battery, has all the bells and whistles, and comes with maps of all of Europe, for only €117.45, or US$169. Buying her a portable GPS here would be a little cheaper, but as that comes with the North American map base, adding the Europe map would make it more expensive. Blaupunkt is a well known quality brand in Europe, so she should be safe there - in the US Blaupunkt is best known for the stereos that come with some German cars. Nice design, too.

On thing I discovered while shopping is that Nikon's Nikkor 18-55mm wide angle zoom lens is now ridiculously cheap - cheaper, in fact, than third party brands like Sigma and Tamron. I've ordered it, will be able to show you some results next week - see how well it holds up against my Tamron 17-35mm wide angle zoom, which set me back some $500 only last year. I don't even see that being sold any more (in Germany, they're still just under US$500), replaced by a 17-50mm lens, although, the Nikkor lens has an f/3.5 aperture, the Tamron goes to f/2.8, almost twice as light sensitive. 18mm, in the digital camera era, is equivalent to 28mm in the old 35mm SLR format, just in case you're curious.

Spotsylvania, August 25, 2009 - Space, anyone?

Comment of the week: "Crap. School.". The son of friends of mine, on his Facebook page.

I don't know if you've noticed the avalanche of science types working on space exploration, the past year or so? It seems that wherever you turn, we're either going to discover life on other planets, or revisiting the moon. I wonder about both.. or rather, about the futility of these exploits.

We know enough about the origins of life, and the composition of the universe, that we can say with a statistical degree of certainty that there is life on other worlds - somewhere. It follows then, to me at least, that if we just go on exploring the universe, we'll eventually come across this life - assuming, of course, it isn't based on something we can't recognize (although it might then recognize us). It is complete anathema to me what the purpose would be of going out and looking for it, when we don't know where to look - especially since we are unable to go and land anywhere other than the moon and Mars, and both places we've been already. We lack the technology to land anywhere else, and we've not exactly been working on developing it.

Which brings me to the moon, and the announced intention of the United States to put men (as in, hu-mans, to stay with the Ferengi) on the moon again, by 2020. And on Mars by the middle of the century. I cannot help but wonder why? Sure, we could learn to construct bases for human habitation on these planets, but what would we gain by doing so? There isn't anything on the moon, or on Mars, worth having, and as we have the ability to put automated explorers pretty much when and where we want, why not use that capability?

If I were to look at it from a commercial point of view, we've developed two important capabilities. We are able to build a human habitat that can be put into space and be used for longer term occupation (all we lack at this time is a plumber to fix the space john), and we have the robotic technology to put roving explorers on other planets. We don't actually need anything else, as what is interesting, scientifically, is out in the Milky Way, out in space. Planning long term missions using a traveling habitat, pretty much like the ISS, is much more interesting - aim it at nearby solar systems, put fertile astronauts on it, and plan for a 150 year or 200 year mission, where the returning crew will be the offspring of the original crew. You don't need "spaceships", a space station with adequate on board repair-and-build facilities, and a good complement of landers, can be launched into space and become a very large, self sustaining, traveling space habitat. We have the ability and the technology to do this, and we are able to communicate remotely with the mission throughout. Put some extra dollars in, and we can create a superdrive based on a micro-black-hole that will let us approach lightspeed.

This would be fascinating, it would be new and discovery and pushing our boundaries. Similarly, we can continue to develop the landers and rovers and robots that will enable us to explore other planets, and perhaps begin to mine them using automation - even build habitats for future astronauts to visit, although I personally think we should get used to the idea that the human masters would be in space, and in orbit, running the robots by remote control, and making them more and more autonomous, something we have been working on for a long time. We honestly, just ask the Japanese, can do better with our robots than have them build cars nobody needs.

Think about it. It is more logical, we have the technology, and the eventual benefit is far greater... If we do assume there is life out there, these schemes are far more likely to help us discover it, statistically, than sending more Air Force majors with scoops and evidence bags to the moon.

I am getting itchy for travel, although I had promised myself I would stay put and work on my house this summer. It isn't like I need to go anywhere to find the sun, plenty of that right here, but there are plenty of friends I'd like to go see - everywhere, from New York to Australia. So I may take a drive up to my old stomping ground, Westchester County, NY, soonish, just to grab some lunch with former colleagues, see what is going on. The big travel will wait for next year, when I would like to find a teaching postion in Asia Pacific, and start spending part of the year out there. Hopefully, by then, buddy D. will have time to come out with me, we travel well together. If you're hoping to find out from this blog whether or not I am at home, so you can raid the place - a major problem with blogs - fuggedaboutit. For one thing, I prewrite my blog, and so by the time you read the pieces I wrote while traveling, I am back home. Secondly, this is rural redneck Virginia - everybody here has a shotgun or sidearm, and they're not afraid to use it. Lastly, my alarm and detection systems are not dependent on having mains power or a landline telephone, and I know you are on the property way before you get to the house... One advantage of having lived in some of the biggest cities on Earth is that I am more paranoid than most, and I have the equipment to protect myself.

Investment wise, I am seeing improvement across the board. Improvement, to be sure, by comparison with what went on in the markets I track in 2008. I lost a huge amount of money, something that certainly has me worried, but if I can just stop the rot, for now, I can figure out what to do next. Something I absolutely need to make a start with is selling a bunch of the stuff that I don't really need - from family heirlooms that have been sitting in boxes since I brought them back from Europe, to technology I have replaced and don't really need to hang on to, like the Nikon D50 (I have two) I replaced with a D90, in pristine state, but I do not need three SLR cameras.

One surplus laptop I sold already, set it up for a friend whose only laptop was his company provided computer, it was time he got his own, the time that you could use company equipment for personal use is long gone. For one thing, if you surf to a website and in so doing infect your employer's network with a virus, and it turns out you were doing some online shopping, or worse, you're likely to lose your job. What with a decent laptop available for $400 to $500, there isn't any reason not to have your own... My friend asked me something interesting that I had not looked at - he wanted encryption on his personal laptop. Now while I was aware of Microsoft's Bitlocker, an encryption tool built into Windows Vista Ultimate, I had never used it, so that meant learning how to set it up and use it. I did that on my own Lenovo laptop, the one I am talking to you on right now, and then on my friend's laptop, once I had it figured out.

While Bitlocker is intended to be used on computers that have a security chip installed, it works fine without that, too, although the security isn't quite as foolproof. On both Lenovos I have installed it on (I've had it running for six or so weeks) it runs flawlessly. Bitlocker requires you to put an encryption key on a USB device, which must be present in a port in order for you to be able to boot. It can then be removed. If you install on a machine without the security chip a small portion of your harddrive becomes an unencrypted boot device, this is where the software finds the driver that enables the operating system to read the encrypted drive - there is no file encryption here, the entire hard drive is encrypted.

I have found that the encryption/decryption process slows down the computer somewhat (logically), but there isn't a major impact on fuctioning. I notices some hiccups when playing back Blu-ray disks, which in my case taxes the laptop, as it needs to send high resolution video out the HDMI port, and Digital Dolby out a USB port, but that really is the only performance difference I have noticed. I have to be cautious here - some of the software I have been trying to run on this laptop has had problems, but I think that is more likely caused by my running 64 bit Windows Vista, rather than Bitlocker. I notice problems related to short timeouts (64 bit Windows Vista is very fast, especially with 8 Gb of RAM installed) and port handling, and I do think that some of the software out there just gets confused running in a 64 bit environment. As far as encryption is concerned, I've not seen any file corruption, spurious crashes, and the like.

So my friend was very right when he asked for encryption. Never having to worry about your private life being compromised when your laptop gets stolen or misplaced is wonderful. If you want to do it completely, setting a hard disk access password (most laptops allow that) in combination with Bitlocker will make it impossible for all but the hardiest hacker to get at your data - and the hacker would have to spend so much time (s)he could probably make $10,000 dollars just working... Bitlocker kicks in anytime the computer gets booted, even from hibernation or sleep, so you're very safe with this.

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Spotsylvania, August 21, 2009 - Getting ready for winter

Not a huge amount of stuff to report - if you've been following this, I had been working on getting Blu-ray on my home theatre, and had hoped to be able to tell you about the obsolete HD DVD format, but the online outfit I ordered films from, inetvideo.com, messed up - they listed a product they don't have in stock. They found this out days after confirming my order, having charged my credit card before shipping, so they are probably an unreliable vendor. If you run into this - the site says "in stock", but it is not - stay away from the vendor. Today's stock-and-cart software is interlinked, the cart knows exactly how much stock there is of a certain product, and if it sells you something stating it is in stock, and it is not, that is deliberate. Not only that: it is simply fraud on the part of the merchant, prohibited by law. Not surprisingly, in this case and the next one I describe, these merchants charge your credit card when you place your order, whereas most (and that is the agreed and approved method) don't charge your card until they ship. Doesn't matter how good the deal is - websites that use fraud aren't going to be around, in the future, so for that reason alone it is better not to buy from them.

Much like hardwareandtools.com, which bills itself as "the internet's largest hardware store". I know now why they say that - they list products they don't have. I found this out ordering a siding wash chemical, which their website said was in stock - except, after they charged my credit card (they're supposed to do this when they ship, not before) I emailed with them about the product designation - the picture said it was one compound, the text said it was another, and by this time I knew the product I wanted was no longer being sold by the manufacturer, W.M. Barr.

They then mailed me to say they would check when it got to them "from another warehouse" - IOW, they had no stock, and they don't have another warehouse. They were simply ordering this themselves, after charging me. That's illegal. So I pointed this out to them, and canceled the order, and called my credit card company to get the money credited. They then shipped, completely ignoring my order cancellation, and I refused delivery. So - if you want to go to the internet's largest hardware store, try northerntools.com, they have a huge product assortment, you can see whether or not something is in stock, or acehardware.com, which is very reliable as well. In the end, I went to Home Depot and found the siding wash there, in stock and not too expensive.

My main job, this week and next, is to work on my supply of firewood - I am in the happy circumstance that I own acres of woods, and with the big woodstove that was in my house when I bought it I can save a lot of money, over the winter. The woodstove is able to heat the entire house, there is actually ducting between downstairs and upstairs to convey heat from the stove to the second floor, the only problem being that it produces so much heat it overheats the place when the outside temperature is above freezing. But even below 20 degrees Fahrenheit (-7° C) the stove has no problem at all, although at that point you're going through about a tree every two weeks. What I mean by "tree" you can see in the pictures, not being an expert, I find it really scary to take these things down.

I do that myself - that is why I moved down here, to have more exercise, and do things I never got to do as a city slicker. For the past few years, I've been cutting back the treeline around the house, since the trees have grown since the house was built, and some of these trees will easily cut the house in two if they come down during a storm. This is when you learn that the slightest gust of wind when you are sawing the tree will make it fall wherever it wants, rather than you want it to go - not only that, it is easy to misjudge the path, and several people kill themselves this way every year - the latest famous example, couple of years back, is the baseball player who took down a tree on his property, then realized his dog was in the path of the falling tree. Trying to rescue the dog, he ended up underneath the tree, dead.

Otherwise, all you need to be really careful about is the health of the tree - ants and other insects are capable of hollowing a tree out, and when you saw into a hollowed out tree, it can go places you did not expect. That is the first thing I did, the first two seasons here, take down all of the dead and diseased trees near the house and the driveway, I only have one tree to go, a neighbour noticed that, the other day, and pointed it out to me.

To give you the numbers, I expect this tree weighs some 30 tons, 60.000 lbs or 30,000 kilograms, and is probably some 115 feet (35 metres) tall. You take down the tallest trees, because, as I discovered, those come down first during a storm - at the same time, the taller the tree, the more damage it will do when it falls in the wrong direction. For that reason, I always get one of my neighbours over when I do this, someone who has experience, just to supervise what I am doing. When you leave the surrounding trees standing, they will now take up the space you just cleared, and grow faster, using the nutrients the felled tree no longer needs. Woods have a maximum growth capacity - when they reach a certain density they become stable, as there is only so much nutrient and light for a given surface area, so all I am really doing is redistributing the growth pattern, I am, for my personal use, using less than mother nature grows - you don't want to do this with half an acre, of course.

Spotsylvania, August 12, 2009 - Blu-ray, DVD and, of course, Health

If there is anything that scares me, it is that there are people in this country that actually believe the Administration would implement a health plan that would withdraw care from dying patients. I mean, think about it, the first time this were to happen, under government guidelines, there would be a small avalanche of large lawsuits. And the vast majority of these commentators have absolutely no idea what a "socialized" form of care would look like. I do, having spent half my life in European countries with government administered health care. And America, being what it is, will end up with a kind of hybrid health plan - what flies in Europe wouldn't work here, that's clear. I can only repeat what I have been saying since I arrived in this country - without a health plan, and with an existing permanent condition: How a country that bills itself as the "richest nation on Earth" can justify leaving a sizable proportion of its population without any care at all (except for emergency care) is beyond me.

You simply can't call yourself a civilization when more than 40 million of your fellow countryfolk have no health care, and you aren't doing anything about it. And this is what I hear in these town halls: no change, we're fine. I guess all of the people that have to decide, at the beginning of the month, how much food they can afford, or whether or not Dad can get his blood pressure medication, aren't going to the town halls. Because: Dad not getting his blood pressure medication is a death sentence. And that's the case TODAY, Sarah Palin. Today. In your own state, and most other states. There seem to be a lot of very noisy people who have never driven through downtown Newark, NJ., or Overtown, Miami. Places the news cameras don't go. Areas the likes of which do not exist in the places with socialized health care that I come from. That's right - do not exist. As in, if you take care of your entire population ghetto's are unlikely to happen. As in, you get what you pay for.

On a very different note, the other day I was looking at available Blu-Ray drives. Attentive readers will know I own one already, but, like DVD's, Blu-Ray disks are regionalized, and drives will play only one region's disks. For me, this is an issue, because I like to get movies and TV programs from Europe, occasionally. The excellent German film "Das Boot" I absolutely wanted to have in the original German version, I've got some other German movies on DVD, there are a few Dutch classics, including "Max Havelaar", a film I worked on, that I wanted in my collection... And recently, I noticed some BBC series I used to watch, but since I switched from DirecTV to Comcast cable I no longer get BBC America. So I ordered the latest Torchwood series on Blu-Ray, and that meant I needed another drive, to dedicate to "Region 2" (Europe) disks.

With DVDs, this isn't much of an issue. I bought an all-region player in India, for only $40, and then I found a Philips DVR/DVD writer in Singapore, for which a no-region hack was available. Muy cool, because now I can master PAL (Europe) DVDs as well, to send to friends and family in Europe. But I have not found a region hack for Blu-ray drives, so had little option but to look for a second Blu-ray drive.

As luck would have it, there is an essentially obsolete Blu-ray external drive out there - obsolete, because the Buffalo Technology BRHC-6316U2drive plays HD DVDs as well as BD (Blu-ray) disks, HD DVD having been abandoned by its proponent, Toshiba, in favour of Blu-ray. I found one for only $195, a lot less than I paid for my other drive, the Buffalo Technology BR-816SU2. The latter does not play HD disks, only Blu-ray and DVD, but it has both USB and eSATA interfaces, while the BRHC-6316U2 has a single USB port.

I don't know how well a USB port, inherently slow, will work with Blu-ray, which sends massive amounts of data down the wire, but as I am expecting the Blu-ray/HD DVD drive tomorrow, I will soon find out - I do have a high speed USB port driver from Buffalo. Would be cool if it worked - and I discovered something else: there are massive amounts of movies on HD-DVD still available, as discount prices, like here! So I may well stock up on some I always wanted to have, since I'll have a drive for them.

You must have seen those lists of "most significant new products" and "products of the century" that like to include things like the iPhone and the WiFi router. They generally pay less attention to services, and even if they do, they usually miss the most significant. ne such is really mundane = shipping. In the United States, shipping, by catalog services, has been around for a very long time, dating back to 1888, when the Sears mail order catalogue was first published. But the internet gave new impetus to catalogue buying, when dialup connections gave way to ISDN and broadband, and customers were able to see pictures of products while browsing online catalogues. The best known proponent here is Amazon.com, now a $20 billion company, that in the internet era is what Sears was to the paper catalogue world.

Competing in the online world came to a short list of identifiable advantages. The website had to be fast, it had to collect usable marketing data from browsing visitors, it had to have a solid payment processing agent, and it had to provide real time inventory - you have to be able to see if a product is in stock. These issues went through lots of iterations - collecting data made websites slow, inventory was hard to gauge as multiple customers would buy the same item at the same time, so what had seemed available was't, and payment agents (credit card processors) took on too many customers, couldn't handle the data flow, and their pipelines got hacked and customer data stolen.

What went almost unnoticed is a service that was never considered of primary importance - shipping the purchases to the customer. Yet that was the last remaining piece of the puzzle - after all of the above website and administrative issues had been resolved through technological solutions, the only remaining area of competition was shipping - as cheap as possible, and as fast as possible.

I came to this because of two examples - one a Blu-ray disk I just bought from Amazon in the UK, another a Blu-ray drive I purchased from Newegg.com in California. The disk shipped from the UK, via the (Royal, of course) mail on Friday, August 7 - the drive shipped UPS from Edison, NJ on Sunday, August 9 (at 7:20pm, if you want the gory detail). The disk got here on Tuesday August 11, after four days - note there is a weekend in between shipping and delivery - the drive was delivered on Wednesday, August 12, after 3 (week)days. The cost? Amazon UK charged £3.08 postage, that's US$5.07, while Newegg shipped for free.

We think this is normal now, but if you just think back five years, it wasn't unusual for you to order something, and have to wait three weeks to get it, and pay $20 in shipping charges. And that's all gone. If you make the customer wait, today, if you don't let them know when you ship, if you charge them a fortune for "shipping and handling", you're out of business (unless you really truly have something people can't buy anywhere else).

Spotsylvania, August 9, 2009 - They All Look The Same To Me

If anybody needed confirmation that Indonesia is a democracy, we've just had the living proof - the siege of the house where terrorist Noordin M. Top was holed up, and the subsequent assault that killed him, were shown in Indonesia on live television, and streamed worldwide, I've just watched it live, the screen capture you see comes from TV One in Jakarta, the "Breaking News" flag is theirs. Indonesian security forces never liked doing their business under the eye of the camera, but I suppose they had been told Indonesia's economic prosperity, hardly affected by the recession, was sustaining significant damage, due to the recent hotel bombings. The mere fact that Top was located, smack in the middle of the main island of Java, is itself proof that Islam has turned the corner, in Indonesia, the extremism that was to some extent tolerated has done itself in. I have had significant concerns which way the country would go, since my last visit, and this day goes a long way to allay my fears.

It is more of a war now than it was. With the death of Mr. Top, and that of Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan, there can today be little doubt that anyone who aspires to be the head of a religious terrorist organization will be dealt with as an infidel.

I drove behind a car today that still had an election bumper sticker. It said: "Vote Obama 2008" and above that in smaller characters "If you want to help Al-Quaida". If indeed two senior terrorist leaders were killed this week, and an assassination attempt on Indonsia's president prevented, And a succession fight has broken out among Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, our Prez is not doing so badly. That isn't something the far right wing is going to accept, but what they are missing is that it isn't us that should be out there fighting the Islamic extremists, it is their own compatriots. And now that we are making nice to them, that is clearly happening - it looks like the Predator that attacked Mehsud did so in a cooperative venture between the US and the Pakistan military, while something has changed in Indonesia too. Never before have I seen an attack by Indonesian forces (which are very well trained and armed, and among the more ferocious) televised live on two local Jakarta TV stations, one of which streamed it all live to the world.

If you want a comparison - I doubt that President Bush, in all his international travels, ever spent a night abroad anywhere other than in Air Force One. He did not have a basic understanding what it takes to gain other's trust - the USA isn't a very trusted entity at the best of times, overseas, and so the Prez has that extra hurdle to take. Bush either didn't care or didn't know, Obama, who has traveled, has lived abroad, understands well what foreign soil feels like, and what you must do to connect with those whose support you need. I can't prove it, but I have a very secure feeling that what I saw on television, coming out of Jakarta, was a remote part of the world saying loudly "look, we are working with you, we have common cause". That will have put the Islamic extremists on notice - their safe havens, in Pakistan, in Indonesia, are shrinking, they're heading for lawless Somalia, and I for one am delighted that is so.

Because soon, they'll all be in that part of the world, and then we (that is, their neighbours with US and EU assistance) can just go in and mop them up. There isn't anywhere else for them to go, you see, they've outlived their welcome everywhere. So after we're done with Afghanistan, and the Pakistani have finally taken possession of their tribal areas (something they've never wanted to do), we can all go and clean up Somalia. Only this time we'll finish it. Maybe the Somali pirates want to help. Because if they're just going to let Al-Quaida waltz into their country, we'll have to clean it up, and we can't distinguish between an Al-Quaida terrorist with a gun and a headscarf, and a pirate with a gun and a headscarf. They all look the same to me.

You don't think so? What do you think Secretary Clinton is doing all over Africa, this week - talking about the weather?

Spotsylvania, August 5, 2009 - The Governor and the Camaro

I had to share with you this clip - Captain Kirk reading Sarah Palin's Tweets - or should she be dubbed Governor "Twit" Palin now? I'll leave it to you to decide - I just hope nobody ever has the bright idea to hire her for anything, we have lots of dim people in D.C., but they do normally finish their tours. Adding somebody who is inadequately educated as well as a quitter would be too much upheaval, don't you think?

Heat is nothing if not tiring, and today was hot. I had just spent a day cleaning up and fixing my 2002 Z28 Camaro, which needed a new battery. That was not a sinecure, as the positive connection bolt had corroded into the old battery, and as the mount is integral to the wiring harness, I had to get it out of the old battery somehow. Between a friend's help, lots of tools, a largely stripped bolt head, a night and some WD-40, it eventually came out, and I was able to replace it with the same model battery. I'd like to try and keep this car stock, at least until I decide whether or not I am going to hang on to it forever. Somebody ought to tell AC Delco that sealed batteries shouldn't be able to leak acid, don't you think?

I use the Camaro mostly to go into town, "town" being Washington, D.C., apart from the pleasure of blowing past people who think they have fast cars on I-95, the Camaro is a lot cheaper to drive than my Dodge Durango. The Durango averages 14 miles per gallon, admittedly in local driving, the Camaro gets 21mpg, mostly on the highway.. I calculate car cost differently, though, equating it to the actual dollar cost, with all of the vehicle expenses included, except for insurance, the (2003) Durango costs me $6.06 per day, while the Camaro does its thing for $2.75 per day. Factor in insurance, and the ratios change - Durango: $0.63/mile, $8.87/day, while the Camaro weighs in at $0.51/mile, and $5.85/day. All I am saying is that what you need to be concerned with, isn't mileage - it is cost. And factor in the loan you got - in the case of these two vehicles, they are free and clear, so what you see above is the real cost, averaged over a year.

Anyway, I took the T-tops off the Camaro, and went into town, first to the dentist, to get my new crown installed, then to my new rheumatologist's office to drop off some X-rays. While in town, radiology departments send reports and scans over to the doctors electronically, that hasn't yet reached the outer suburbs, so all the doctor gets is the written report. And this doctor, much to my delight, is able to read both X-ray films and MRI disks, so I make sure she has the films as well as the report. In the past few years, all hospitals seem to have replaced all of their old film technology with digital cassettes, which meant they did not have to replace their X-ray equipment.

I am beginning to enjoy NCIS - I had never watched it, but recently discovered most of NCIS takes place in my home area, Washington and Northern Virginia - one episode was filmed, I discovered from watching it, off Route 17, maybe ten miles from my home. And the chicks are worth ogling - at least not your average blonde TV babes. And then there is David McCallum, of course, if you're old enough to remember "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.".

Spotsylvania, July 29, 2009 - Keep it simple, keep it clean

British Airways, in financial dire straits, has announced it will discontinue meal service on flights under two hours. Or rather, if you want a meal, you'll have to pay for it. Supposedly, this will save some £22 million.

Or will it? I am certain nobody has calculated how many fliers will now choose competing airlines that do provide free meals. You see, British Airways does not have those short haul routes to itself, there are other airlines plying the same stretches of air. And they have not discontinued meal service. And then there is the other factor - preparation of the meals, galley loading, stuff. If you want to save money, sell only beverages and snacks, take out your expensive meal galleys, which consume energy and space and require labour to load, unload and clean, and put in snack galleys - which will let you put some more seats in, as well. This is how the budget airlines fly. So - this is a half-assed attempt that won't save half of what they say. If you're close to £400 million in the hole, just over the past year, you probably have to come up with something better than nickel-and-diming the traveler. Especially since BA will continue to serve breakfast - there'd be riots if they didn't...

Take a look at the picture here - that's the cooling fan of a Lenovo laptop, after about a year's worth of use, pretty much running non stop. Nothing unusual, this is the standard amount of crud the fan collects in a normal environment. Note the brass pipe at the top of the fan - that's the heat exchanger for the microprocessor underneath the four screws to the right. Click on the picture if you'd like to see it larger, and note how that, too, has collected dirt.

I took this picture as I was cleaning this laptop, before selling it to a friend. You see, laptops are wonderful, but they do get hot, and they need their cooling even more than desktops do. As I have mentioned before, the reason why you don't see laptops with those very fast processors in the stores is simply that those processors develop way too much heat (because they consume copious power) to put in a small casing. And this picture is worse if we're talking about your teen IM'ing with her friends, lying on her bed, or you putting down your laptop on the fabric of your couch. Then, the fan will suck in more dust, and due to the obstruction of the cooling slots, run really hot. If your laptop suffers intermittent mysterious failures, ten to one its cooling is clogged - I've had an Averatec laptop shut down simply from sitting in the sun, on the passenger seat of a rental car.

So - if you have some of those handy instrument screwdrivers (do make sure you have the right tools, they're cheap) remove the cover on the bottom of your laptop, now and again, and vacuum the fan and its surrounding area. I personally use compressed air, but then I know a lot about what is in a laptop, and can see whether that is safe or not. Important is that you look through the louvres that are attached to that bit of brass at the top, the heat exchanger, that is where most of the crud collects, and then your processor can no longer get rid of its heat. As you can see, once a year will do it, unless you've used the laptop in especially dusty circumstances, or sitting on fabric. Make sure the thing is off before you clean it, and remove the battery.

Similarly, open your desktop computer once a year, and vacuum it out. Pay particular attention to both sides of the power supply, which has its own fan, which is the one that sucks the hot air out of the casing, where the other fan(s) blow it in. PCs as well as laptops monitor the speed of their fans, and will slow down when the fans run slow, and the processor temperature, which is equally monitored, rises. You must have seen those commercials for registry cleaners that promise they'll speed up your computer, right? Well, those don't work - a slow computer is usually caused by one of three factors:

1. A full hard disk
2. An overheating processor
3. A virus

It won't have anything to do with the registry, and in fact, anything that messes with your registry can completely disable your computer. Trust me. Just clean the darn thing, and if you think you have a virus, buy Norton or McAfee, and follow the instructions. Remember that if you have a virus, you're giving it to others, too, and that's just a bit antisocial, it really is. Full hard disk? If you have a 40 Gb hard disk, and it's got 500 Mb of space left, Windows (or even Leopard) will get really unhappy, and begin slowing down. Operating systems need room on the disk to put temporary files in, and if that room is not there, they'll endlessly write back and forth to the disk, bogging down the entire system. Defragment your disk periodically, Vista and Windows 7 can be set up to do this automatically, and if there is too much "stuff" on your disk, buy an external drive, $100, and copy things you don't need "on call" there. Simple.

Spotsylvania, July 27, 2009 - Don't do this at home

Take note of what Google's Vic Gundotra says in this Fortune video... Pay particular attention to his comments about app stores.

What is the issue? There is a limited amount of application you can download to, and run on, a smartphone. It's been the same with the PC - there is only so much you can install and run, only so much you can do. I have, for the longest time, positioned the iPhone as a "handheld Macintosh" - it isn't a cellphone. I have a plethora of cellphones, but absolutely no interest in things like editing a video on a phone. I do that on a laptop - actually on a laptop that has a powerful graphics card, so I have HD quality video with stereo or digital Dolby sound, depending on which camera I use, stuff that I can even use for broadcast. A phone is a lifeline to me, in my work - it is a communications device, I need to use it to talk, send messages, check (but not answer!) my email, and check my stock positions. But that's it, I don't want anything else on that phone that will impact its battery life. It needs to be able to be used for 24 hours at a stretch, to be able to be charged reasonably well in half an hour, from my laptop, etc. I don't need it to last a week on standby - the fallacy of that is that I need to know when I must charge the phone,not how far I can stretch it - and have it die and lose that one trade that would have netted me $12,000... I sleep, the phone charges, it must still have enough juice left for me to check my mail when I get off the plane after a 14 hour flight, make calls, get to my hotel, unpack and then give it a quick charge to last the rest of the day.

This is about practicality, not about fancy crap. I do not need 3G everywhere - I must have GPRS/EDGE though, wherever I am, I must be able to access the sites that are important to me. I made a $24K profit by being able to sell Vonage stock on my cellphone from a hotel lounge in the Philippines - that is what is important, not the pics of the grandkids. And that applies to ordinary consumers - you need to be able to access your bank account, when you are on vacation, because you can no longer do things the old fashioned way. You have to be able to check that the duty free store in Bangkok hasn't just begun to raid your bank account back home.

You may have followed the sagas of Sarah Palin, and the "birthers", those who continue to insist that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and that somehow his Hawaii birth certificate is part of some elaborate left wing conspiracy.

What worries me is the craziness of it all, I have no other word for it. There is a real discussion about Mrs. Palin's running for president, in 2012. Pardon? Here is a woman who has run for elected office, been given a mandate by a majority of her voters, she walks - WALKS - halfway through her term, and you think she'll make a fine president? Have Republicans gone cuckoo? You want to put her in the White House, and then a couple years later hear how she has decided to become a hairdresser in Fort Lauderdale? You actually believe Barack Obama, an illegal alien from Africa, can become a United States senator? How is Lou Dobbs, once a respected journalist, suddenly giving credence to conspiracy theorists? Rush Limbaugh is an edge-crazy addict, but we knew that. The fact that so many listen to him, and take him seriously, most certainly is worrying, considering the complete lack of respect he has for the office of the President of the United States, and for the Constitution.

It is hard for me to fathom where the swing to craziness originated. Is it because the right wing's trophy president turned out to be such a disaster? Is it because a black man won the election, is it pure unadulterated racism? You want a woman from Alaska who doesn't read the Wall Street Journal, and thinks Twitter is a communications tool, to run the country? With another baby over her shoulder? Although - she'll need help lifting Rush...

I've done my bit for King and Country - from assisting my former employer in gaining a foothold in overseas telecommunications markets, to being a member of the post-911 network recovery teams, in both New York and D.C., and I've often wondered, through the Bush years, if it would get bad enough for me to decide I didn't want to live here any more. I was incredulous when George Bush was returned to office, when we already knew the premise on which he invaded Iraq was complete fiction (I know this from sources other than the press). But I can tell you that if I see the crazies that are all over the wires get anywhere near the White House, the next election, I am so out of here.. apart from anything else, an America that is even more marginalized, internationally, than it is today, will become completely isolated. That may be good news for Mr. Limbaugh, but then he thinks that the world ends at Vero Beach... I know better.

Spotsylvania, July 25, 2009 - More Toyz and Noyze

An unexpected side effect of having HD television (in my case, using a TiVo HD DVR fed by Comcast Cable using the Cablecard) is that I am enjoying music in ways that you can't if you use an iPod or MP3 player or CDs - in digital Dolby (Dolby 5.1). It is kind of generally available, now that all broadcast stations are broadcasting HD, by law, widely advertised by equipment manufacturers, but I do see that many vendors and consumers don't really know how to "make it happen". I have seen a cable installer putting a 5.1 capable DVR in place at a customer's home, then connect its audio outputs to a 5.1 amplifier using two analog RCA stereo connections..., he could not figure out what equipment he needed to get the digital audio where it needed to go, in the absence of an HDMI connector on the projection TV.

I have had Dolby 5.1 capable equipment for many years, every since satellite TV providers began providing movies with Dolby sound tracks, but it is really only now coming into its own, when I can tune into Palladia HD and have Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks and cohorts blast away in 5.1 in a live concert. Woof.

This is stuff that I stopped listening to years ago, and that has taken on a completely new life. Part of that is definitely due to my living on five acres of wooded land, where I can crank my 1,200 watt Kenwood multichannel amplifier up sky high - I have actually just revamped two speaker boxes, which I had retired with damaged woofers, now replaced by 15 inch 2,000 watt subwoofers, which I found going cheap in my local auto parts store. Umm, yes, well, they have a car audio corner, and 15 inch subwoofers tend to not sell very fast, so I got these two Lanzar VW154 Vibes for $80 a piece (yes, I just discovered that as I was writing this - click the link, I'd have paid less at Amazon..). Kewl. I had replaced these Radio Shack speaker boxes with SDAT multispeaker units, but after putting new insulation in the tuned port enclosures and installing the Lanzar subwoofers, jeez, kids, these old speakers sound like the Leslies on Thijs van Leer's Hammond organ, back in the '70s, when I hovered backstage as the Manager's Rep during concerts. I was testing them only to be able to say "they're good" when slinging them on Ebay, but the "new" sound soon changed my mind.

Whoa - and then some! I just cranked up the amplifier, way past the -9db where it used to cut out, all the way to -5db, its top, and it keeps on going. Those Lanzars were a good buy, tell ya, plus the SDATs (which have seven speakers each) now run the back channels. Mmmmmm. Keep it coming, Stevie...

I mentioned to you here I had ordered a digital watch/cellphone/stuff device, something from China that failed to take off, at over $300, and when that got to me it was DOA - just got its replacement today, and this one works. It is a really cool toy, but the manual is so sparse, and written in complete pidgin English, so unless you have a good understanding of how a GSM phone sticks together and works, and you're willing to spend the time to figure this thing out, don't bother. But if you do, this is an absolutely great toy, at $100 - oops, I guess I got the last one, they don't have them any more. Owell. I'll shoot some video with it and post it on Youtube, hang tight, people. The miniaturization of an entire cellphone in a good sized wristwatch is pretty amazing - by entire, I mean it has everything a regular cellphone does, down to digital modem functionality and an micro-SD memory card. I have not tested the modem function yet, but I did install the modem driver on one of my laptops - one thing I have to give the developers is that every functionality on this cell/watch uses drivers already built into Windows Vista, no need for software or downloads. Kewl. Click on the pic - that is not a simulated image, the thing is actually on and connected to the T-Mobile network, and has GPRS. It is one of those things - it arrives with an empty battery, and won't do anything until it charges for a few hours, including everything the manual says it is supposed to be doing when you plug it into your PC to charge.

Spotsylvania, July 20, 2009 - Baby steps

"Well, the wiring is back on the truck" said the electrician, with an undertone of insecurity. "I've never built a house without phone wiring" he added. "I've never even heard of it - well, maybe up in the city, but here...". He had just watched me crank up a 3G router, and connect a couple of laptops to it, so he wasn't in any doubt it could be done, not since he saw the equipment I had brought in to test, and watched over my shoulder as the network card in the router pulled an IP address from the T-Mobile network.. I am actually quite pleased neighbour D. decided to let me do it my way, you'd think that a young yup technologist would do this, but a retired builder in his seventies.. It is truly amazing that we continue to string wires all over the country, when this wireless technology is available, affordable, and entire untethered societies are springing up in what we normally think of as Third World countries.

The same electrician was complaining bitterly that he couldn't find a way to stop paying Verizon sixty-plus dollars a month for a landline he doesn't really need, but I had to tell him that if he has to have the ability to send and receive faxes, there wasn't any way to do that using cellphones. That is to say, cellular voicemail is capable of acting as faxmail, receiving and storing fax transmissions, but then you still need a landline with a fax machine to send the fax to and print it out.

So why does anybody still need a fax machine? In the case of this electrical contractor, he periodically needs to fax a signed purchase order to vendors that do not know him, since he is a small timer in a small town in rural Virginia. I suppose there are two reasons for this - one is "the way we've always done it", one of my Indonesian suppliers always insists on me faxing a copy of my credit card to them whenever I change or update the card. The second reason is that rural contractors have little "websavvy" - they don't go to the internet to find suppliers, and don't establish a credit card relationship with them, and so have to establish credit with each supplier. I had almost forgotten there are still folks who have little faith in credit cards and internet transactions. For them, it is only the next generation that will "get it right".

On another note, I did receive the wristwatch/cellphone I ordered last week, but it was DOA. I emailed vendor Brainydeal (a.k.a. www.imagestore.us (redirects), a.k.a. www.99store.us (defunct), Brooklyn, NY) and they quickly emailed me back with an RMA number. Buying through Amazon is a good way of dealing with vendors, as complaints from paying customers will lose them their accreditation - anyway, I am waiting for the replacement. I do know why this phone never made it into the big time, though - the manual is written completely in pidgin English, there isn't any way for an ordinary consumer to understand the instructions. I guess the Chinese need more English teachers, as the translation software many smaller Chinese manufacturers use won't provide meaningful results unless they are edited by somebody who speaks fluent English... It's a tool, not a replacement for expertise, especially for a product that is as jargonized as a cellphone.

Spotsylvania, July 17, 2009 - Gas at Giant, and more communication.

In the relatively new shopping center closest to my home, some kind of construction had been going on for quite a while, to which I paid no more attention than that I drove around the work trucks. But today, as I sat in my truck checking my stocks on my cellphone, I noticed that a new gas station was being readied. It had big red letters on the side, that spelled "Giant", and I figured the display wasn't quite finished yet. With that, I turned around and went into my local Giant supermarket, itself open only for a year or so, larger than any of the other Giants in the area, and simply the closest supermarket to my house. If you consider I used to have to drive fifteen miles to the nearest supermarket, this Giant was a gas saver, and due to its size, has a very good assortment. I buy things I can buy in bulk at BJ's, which is a few miles further down Route 3, but there's lots of stuff I don't need in bulk, and BJ only stocks volume goods, so I shop at Giant a fair bit. (For the Dutch among you, Giant is owned by Royal Ahold, so I shop at Albert Heijn, in a manner of speaking).

Not until I checked out did I get an explanation of what was going on. The gas station out front is actually a Giant gas station, like other supermarkets and big box stores like Wal-Mart, Giant is going to pull more shoppers in by giving their customers gas discounts. And the bagger at the self checkout stopped what she was doing, took the cash register receipt from my hand, and proceeded to explain, using a highlighter, what all these bonus points on my receipt mean, and how I can go about cashing them in. I found it mildly amusing - other than the gas discount points, I am not about to register at the Giant website for additional discounts, as I am completely allergic to letting anybody have my personal information. For my frequent shopper card I use an old telephone number in another town, and anything else I simply don't sign up for, none of these folks' business, as far as I am concerned.

I do make some exceptions, though. Amazon has all my data, but then I have this affiliate deal with them that will hopefully net me some money, and without my information, they can't pay me. And Paypal has my data, my corporate data, that is, as I do use Paypal to pay things with, and to get reimbursed by some folks. It is quite convenient, and can handle foreign currencies, which can come in handy.

But other than that, I buy cheap stuff, as much as I can, often discounted articles are more expensive than "store brand" goods, and if I have to sign up for discount schemes I am outta there.

Tomorrow I am off to D's house again, down in Lottsburg, on the Chesapeake Bay, to make sure I can give him the wireless internet and voice service I promised him. There is no longer a real need to have wired anything, from TV and phone to internet, and I am testing to see if I have a good enough 2G or 3G signal, down there, to hook him up via cellular service.

You know about Aircards and similar devices to connect a laptop to cellular broadband, but it is less well known that there are WiFi routers that you can use with these cards as well, effectively sharing the connection between the folks that you give access to the router. This works remarkably well - I bought a D-Link DIR-451 3G Router a while ago, and am using this with an older unlocked Sierra Wireless Aircard 860, which has a PCMCIA format and is able to handle GSM data formats from GPRS to HSDPA and WCDMA, maxing out at 3.6 megabits/sec. Combined with a family plan, like both T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless offer, cellular data service can be quite competitive, perhaps not for city slickers and adolescents that absolutely must have their 10 Mbps, but 2G and 3G are perfectly sufficient for an elderly couple with kids and grandkids that visit. It is relatively simple to set up (there are several of these units at Amazon, I have only tested the D-Link, which, with an unlocked datacard, can be used with T-Mobile or AT&T service - much to my surprise, an unlocked AT&T card has the settings for T-Mobile built in, probably because the two companies have roaming agreements) and its speed is perfectly adequate if you're not going to be wanting to watch real time movies on Netflix.

Spotsylvania, July 15, 2009 - Making things faster?

The reason I began hootin' and hollerin' about 64 bit Windows is directly related to the operating speed of laptop computers. It was quite by accident - I bought a discounted Sony Vaio PC (desktop) and discovered that came with 64 bit Windows, then tried to up its memory to 8 gigabytes, which its BIOS won't handle, then stuck the 8 gig of RAM in a Lenovo laptop I had, then discovered the Lenovo actually had a 64 bit architecture, and yada yada yada.

Laptop computers have been restricted in their operating speed by only one factor: heat. The reason you can't buy a laptop with a 3.2 GHz processor is that it would be brilliantly fast, but the fans would make enough noise that you'd think you were in an Airbus 319 during takeoff, and you couldn't have it in your lap unless you were really fond of fried thigh. So what I surmise manufacturers have figured out is that if you upgrade laptop designs to 64 bit, and put 64 bit Windows on them, they will run much faster than what went before

I can tell you this from experience, now that I've "64'd" this cheap Lenovo, which sports only a single core 2.0 GHz Celeron processor, nothing fancy, but which runs, I estimate, three to four times as fast as its 32 bit cousins with fancy new dual core processors. Part of the confusion is that you will likely think that 64 bits is two times 32 bits, but it is not. 32 bits comes to about 4 gigabytes of memory, 64 bits comes to a number so large I don't even want to try and compare it. It is an equation, not a duplication. And scouring the internet for laptops, I suddenly notice quite a few 64 bit machines out there - Sony VAIO, Lenovo IdeaPad, and that stands to reason - it is today the only way we have of speeding up our computers without making major changes, like inventing cold running electronices and hard drives. I seem to have noticed, by the way, that Sony doesn't support running more than 4 GB of RAM - Lenovo doesn't either, at least one customer support person said that, but, unlike the Vaio's, the Lenovos will accept more RAM, and run with it, at least mine does. It is not chickenshit, either - the Lenovo I am working on right now has gotten so fast Firefox frequently times out while waiting for a website to load. If that doesn't mean anything to you, don't worry about it, if it does, you'll understand this is more than just a bit of extra throughput - all this is is a very basic 3000 N500, which right now can be had for just under $400...

So do we need the speed? Actually, the answer is that we don't, but we will. Some of the more graphical elements of webpages do require processing power, but if you look at the laptops available today, you will find that many have a decent graphics co-processor, and can allocate a good amount of memory to that processor. It used to be 128 or 256 megabytes, I am now seeing numbers like 1,768 and 2,100 megabytes available just for the graphics. So that "offloads" some of the webpage requirements from the main processor, but that still gets taxed by all of the processing done in Java - unbeknownst to the consumer, webpages run lots of little programs, for many reasons - scrolling, tracking your surfing, following your mouse around, etc. The main reason some websites load slowly is that they load lots of information from other websites, like graphical advertising with video, and many other things that all have to be found, loaded, and executed.

On a completely different note, I know that many immigrant families have made arrangements to have 230 or 240 VAC power, the power that is standard in large parts of the world, in their home. I do too - rather than bring a 240 VAC feed up from the basement (basic power is delivered to an American home as a double 120 VAC circuit, and most washing machines, dishwashers, well pumps, water heaters and whole house air conditioners run on 240 VAC) I have an electronic contraption that combines the power from two 120 VAC circuits, and delivers stabilized clean 240 VC power to whatever I want to run on it. It is made by a company by the name of Quick 220 Systems, works well, and is perfectly safe, due to an ingenious electronic safety monitor built into the system. If you don't connect it correctly, it simply won't work. If you can put up with loose cables, it is very useful to run American 230 VAC products - I have a heavy duty 230 VAC 18,000 BTU window air conditioner running on one.

Now most electronic equipment, these days, can run on anything from 100 VAC to 240 VAC, and 50 as well as 60 Hz power. But I do get the occasional relative over from Europe, who doesn't discover until they're here that we have different power as well as different sockets, and that their alarm clock, shaver cord, hairdryer and iPod charger won't work here. So I was really pleased to find European APC uninterruptible power supplies at Amazon, not so much because I needed a UPS, but because they deliver clean power and have European sockets, and I've put one in the guest bedroom on a 120-240 transformer, and another in the kitchen, connected to the Quick 220 unit I have there. Because it was convenient, I've actually plugged my Vaio desktop and a couple of other gizmos into the APC, as those don't care what power they get. If you've got European or South American or Chinese or Philippine equipment sitting around you can't use, get a Quick 220, and then plug this APC into it so you have the right sockets. And if you run into something electrical you want to have, on your travels, you can now buy it and use it, in your American home. Cool, eh?

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Spotsylvania, July 13, 2009 - So you think you understand technology?

I read an article, recently, can't remember where, that listed the ten most significant technological development of the past century, that is, the period from 1900 to 2000. The problem with these assessments is that they mostly look at the user interface, the user functionality of devices and services, rather than the underlying capabilities.

Let's take the discussions about Microsoft's Bing search engine as an example. I've not looked at it, because I do not believe that Microsoft has the server- and network capacity to handle the number of queries Google handles. Searchengineland.com estimates that Google ended 2008 with something like 9 billion searches per month for the United States alone - I can tell you from experience that the type and reliability of search results are only relevant when they are offset against the speed and volume of searches. Bing can be much more fancy, and even more accurate, than Google is, but if users were to massively swing to Bing, that system would slow to a crawl. If they don't massively swing to Bing, advertising and targeted result revenues won't cover the cost of the Bing network, and it'll go away. Yes, once upon a time Google could have had competition, but today, building a competing search engine would cost many billions of dollars, many more billions than even Microsoft would be able to throw at it even if it could borrow that much dough.

So - it isn't just the concept of the internet search engine that is a major technological achievement, it is the worldwide infrastructure behind it, that should win the prize. Designing and managing the processors, the servers and the storage network Google uses is the feat of the century - I would have my doubts that even the NSA has the capacity and capability Google does. For one thing, Google has, effectively, billions of testers, where the NSA does not, that organization looks for the proverbial needle in the haystack, and will generally never know what it missed.

The cellphone is another very good example. You can look at technologically advanced contraptions, like the iPhone, but that is not where the innovation lies. The true innovation lies in the simple, cheap mobile phone, the phone that today is affordable for the average peasant (if there is such a person) in a third world country. Here is an excellent example, the base Nokia phone sold in India, for all of US$26, 1,300 rupees, probably a month's wages for a menial worker. The cellphone has done something quite unbelievable - it has connected peasants, menial workers, in third world countries to the world at large. I've sent a text message to a limo driver in Chennai, India, from London, to let him know that my plane was delayed. That's much more impressive than rich Western teenagers using smartphones - they have never lacked communication capabilities, access to publications, TV, etc. But virtually every worker I encountered in Chennai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Jakarta, now has a mobile phone - mostly cheap phones built in vast numbers, mostly by Nokia. In Beijing, a teenage female student who showed me around a museum berated me for buying a Chinese PDA - "You should have bought a Nokia, everybody else here does, Chinese phones are crap" she said. And she did not mean smartphones, but the affordable cellphones lower income folks can afford, and kids (like her) get. It is very nice for Dad to have an iPhone, but if there aren't any cheaper Apple phones for the rest of the family, Apple really has not understood how the cellphone market really works. Because the family wants phones that can talk to each other, exchange information, have compatible applications - all impossible between the iPhone and the rest of the universe.

On the phone front, I came across the watch you see in the Amazon box to the right today, and could not stop myself from ordering one. I'd seen it, last year, I think, but it was expensive, and to my mind, a toy - it is a quadband GSM phone, camera, watch, and MP3 player, all in one, on the wrist, tada. I guess more people thought it was a toy, it's now down to a hundred buck$, which I happen to think is a decent price for a functioning toy. I'll come back on this in a week or two, tell you all about whether and how it works, if you're inclined to get one too.

Along the same lines, it is not WiFi that makes the cut with me, it is GPRS/EDGE, a basic internet phone for $65, on GSM networks, being built out to 3G - the 3G example an affordable unlocked phone that will take any SIM card, be it AT&T's, T-Mobile's, or any other GSM carrier anywhere in the world, as this phone is "quadband". Here again, this technology is making the internet available to millions of people who can afford to buy a mobile phone with PDA capabilities, but can't afford a computer, and even for those who can buy a simple laptop, and can use their GSM phone to connect that to the internet. We do not sufficiently understand that those fine folk that build our televisions need to have their own access to technology to understand the world we live in, and for many millions, that is the cellphone with data capabilities.

In other fields there is less obvious advancement. Transportation is a clear example of where we can't get our heads straight. Europe and Japan have adopted high speed trains, which, at least in Europe, don't seem to have done a thing in terms of getting some of the airplanes out of the sky. The Jumbo Jet, Boeing's 747, turns out to have done more for moving holiday makers across the globe, than it has for business and commuter travel - much of the long distance transport is done using smaller planes, many twin engined, since those were certified for trans-oceanic travel.

One very interesting aspect of the new communications technologies is that, for the first time in human history, teenagers and adolescents are leading the way in technology adoption. Instant messaging, text messaging on cellphones, and social networking all gained their popularity because young people adopted them, and adapted them to their needs. Facebook and Twitter are probably the best examples of this trend, where adults only became late adopters once the systems had grown and become increasingly popular. More about this in a couple of days.. but as I was writing this, Morgan Stanley in London published a research note prepared in house, on the subject of teenage media consumption, written by... a 15 year old intern. Read it, it truly opens up the teenage world, where I must emphasize that these are the adults, the consumers, the movers-and-shakers of the future. Throughout my career, I have consistently listened to my interns, watched the kids, because only that way can you predict which way the market is going to go.

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Spotsylvania, July 12, 2009 - Mowing right along..

Having spent much of the week cooped up in the house doing computer stuff, I am dying to get outside, and work on the outdoorsy things that were the reason for me to buy this house, on its lovely five wooded acres. Apart from the maintenance, I need to work on my woodpile, one neigbour has offered me some of his wood, as it is sitting around his property cluttering the place up, and I have identified a couple of good sized trees I can bring down. It is very curious how I, from being a polluter, excuding carbon monoxide and wood ash into the atmosphere, unwittingly have become an eco-person, providing my own heating using renewable resources, all that thanks to Al Gore and his band of eco-freaks. I do estimate that I "outgrow" my fuel consumption, an interesting equation, how many acres of woods do you have to have before the annual use of wood is really sustainable? I know that this entire region was clearcut, during the civil war, to feed the iron smelters that fed the war machine's unquenchable thirst for cannon, rifles and ammunition, and that it has since grown back, although over the past decade homebuilding for the population expansion has caused the loss of a significant amount of woodlands. The recession has all but put a stop to that, and I am really wondering if the Federal Government shouldn't set up a scheme whereby landowners get a tax break for each acre they leave to nature's air cleaners - trees and shrubbery.

Around here, most homeowners use a wood stove to heat, although we all have alternate heat sources - some use propane central heating (no town gas in my area), others, like me, use heat pumps. And it isn't at all clear cutting, either - each storm brings down some really large, mature trees, from what I observe it is how many tall trees end their natural lives, cut down by a storm. You can see on the nearby Federal land how entire swathes of trees come down, in the hurricane season - parts of the old Civil War battlefields are National Parks, owned by the taxpayer and maintained by the United States Parks Service, which maintains the walking trails and roads, and polices the lands, but otherwise leaves the woods to Mother Nature.

I've delivered my surplus Lenovo 3000 N100 to friend D., who seems well pleased with it, and while I was at it, enhanced his data security by installing a second router, daisychained to the first, which was installed by the phone company, and moved the computers in his household to the new router. I do this to make life more difficult for hackers - although most routers run DHCP, in practice their IP address rarely changes, and it is all too easy for a hacker to find his way to your internet gateway. But with the home network one "hop" removed from that gateway, and a firewall active on the secondary router, as well as the first, and NAT (network address translation) active, it becomes harder for a hacker to find their way into your network, and your PCs. Phone and cable company network administrators cannot get into your network either, in a setup like this, I like it when nobody can access my network without asking me first.

I get to this security issue by simply looking at the literally dozens of WiFi networks I see when I access the wireless selector on my own laptop, while at my friend's house. From the network names you can see when you do that it is easy to see how many kids have their own networks, and those are the ones most likely to hack around in their neighbourhood, and see whose networks they can access. From the "women" on dating sites who get you to email them, so they can harvest your IP address, to the lonely kids who have nothing better to do than hack into your home network and turn your PCs into botnet zombies, your information, passwords, and your online bank account are at continuous risk. Where in the past there was a lively trade in email addresses so you could get spammed, today the trade is in IP addresses, so your computers can be accessed and used for illicit purposes.

Spotsylvania, July 10, 2009 - Hurrah! Fixed!!

So if you put the HTML version line at the top of your HTML document, like you're supposed to do, Windows Notepad and Windows Write immediately lose all of the line breaks that keep your document legible to you as you write it. Line breaks which are ignored by browsers, although it is, in the interest of space spacings, probably not a bad idea to not have them in the file, it helps the document load faster. See what happens when you try to be fancy? Or is it Microsoft's programmers that are doing the fancy?

Now I have to get back to preparing my friend's laptop, including some security enhancements to his home network, heading Dulles way in the morning. In the meantime, Infocus have sent me a refurbished TV projector, as my Infocus IN24 had given up the ghost, and turned out to be irrepairable. I'd have liked to buy an HD projector, but those are still well over $1,000, and that I can't afford right now. Thankfully, Infocus had a refurbished IN24+, for a very reasonable $368, so I need to get that running. They even waived the repair fee for the old projector, which was nice. I don't even want to think how much a 60-Inch LCD TV would cost, by comparison (60 inches diagonal is the screen size I can comfortably project with the Infocus in my living room, in daylight), and you certainly can't stick that in your overnight bag and take it with you.

Spotsylvania, July 9, 2009 - 'pollygize...

After making some changes to the operating systems of the two laptops I employ in everyday use - well, changes... While I made no major changes to the little Everex I travel with, work on the Lenovo laptop was a bit more substantial - that now runs Windows Ultimate in 64 bit mode, and I have yesterday added Bitlocker (part of Windows Vista Ultimate) to the fray, which encrypts the hard disk contents, and requires a security code on a thumb drive to boot (I picked the Sandisk device you see on the right, as it is sturdy, and neatly fits on a keyring). But neither explains why I lose the formatting in the HTML pages I write, formatting I need so I can figure out what's what - I write HTML, the world wide web page makeup language, by hand, rather than using a tool, which I possess in abundance. I kinda like having control of the way my pages look, and I enjoy understanding how HTML formatting works.

So when the on-screen formatting went south, I couldn't update these pages... and I still cannot, right now I am writing this paragraph online in Network Solutions' File Manager, which works, but I like working offline... besides, now that this cheap-and-cheerful Lenovo is running 8 GB of RAM at 64 bits, the thing flies. Considering the price - two 4GB DDR2 SO-DIMMs for the memory, $377.99, Windows Vista Ultimate upgrade, $209.99 - the performance is amazing.

I promise you I will catch up in the next couple of days, there are a few things I have to finish before the weekend, when I need to deliver a reconfigured laptop to a friend, and had promised to have his resume online as well. So back to that, and many thanks for your patience..

Spotsylvania, July 3, 2009 - Amazon

For the past few years, I have bought probably 60 to 70% of my gadgets at the Amazon.com website. In many cases, they simply have the best prices; in others, they sell things nobody else does; and I have bought European DVDs from Amazon UK and Amazon Germany, when I wanted the "unAmericanized" versions of movies, or versions not available here. Do not do that, buying European DVDs, if you don't have a multi-region player. Your Amazon.com login and stored credit card(s) work on all Amazon sites, by the way, I guess they have one single customer database.

I suppose Amazon has become to the online world what Wal-Mart is to the big box store - they stay on top, simply by combining tight pricing with a huge, available, product assortment. I say "simply", but in both cases this required a far sighted world view, and an uncompromising dedication. Wal-Marts stores in Beijing blew me away, their formula works, wherever they take it (except in Germany, and I understand why), and the fact that I got a German standard DVD of "Das Boot" in the mail, from Amazon Germany, in four days from order, for a $6 postage fee, equally made me an Amazon addict. And now Amazon can stream tons of movies to my TiVo, including all of these British TV series I am addicted to, Netflix may make a lot of noise, but Amazon wins this battle by a mile. I simply select, either on my laptop or on my Tivo, what I want to watch, and it gets streamed over the next few hours, ready for evening or next day viewing.

Since I review and discuss lots of the technology products I buy anyway, it is a small miracle I did not sign up for Amazon's Associates Program. I just never thought of it, especially since I don't like these programs, generally, as most are restrictive in where you can take them, and how you post their stuff.

But it seems that the Amazon program isn't too restrictive, they simply give you HTML to place, no complicated formatting like Google does. They do put sneaky "no show" links into their HTML, something I generally do not approve of, but I guess I will see how that works, what it nets me - this is about money, after all. One thing it will do is make me write more extensive reviews, there is little point in my posting links to products, and not tell you exactly why they're great.

Ethically, I won't review anything I haven't bought, and have not spent time familiarizing myself with. I've done product reviews in the past, when I worked as an editor in The Netherlands and the UK, but I find when I read others' reviews that they don't get to the essence of the products they review, since they don't use them on an everyday basis. So I will tell you about the Nikon D50, and the Nikon D90, but not the 5000 - I don't own that, and there is no comparison with telling you about my daily use of the D50 and D90.

Something else I have never done, and won't start now, is write negative reviews. If I don't like a product, I won't write about it. I am not the Consumer Association, but I can tell you about what I buy, why I bought it, how I use it, how happy it makes me, and what you need to watch out for. Hopefully, this may help drive traffic to my site, and perhaps will net me a buck or two, when y'all rush to Amazon to buy the gear I recommend. There is plenty of it....

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Spotsylvania, June 28, 2009 - Don't hardly got no time to breathe

No, I am not making fun of the locals, or of "southern speak". This is really how some of my blue collar neighbours speak English, and I love them for it. They are wonderful, supportive, helpful folk, especially once they figure out you don't look down on them, and after all the years I spent in and amongst what Virgin Airlines calls the "Upper Class" it is very refreshing to spend time amongst real people, who cope with their world in unique and very different ways. I love it here, even if they do all watch Fox.

It has been a bit of a messy week. A water pipe sprung a leak, somewhere in the wall upstairs, and I couldn't figure out where the leak was until neighbour D. came over and helped me rip some cabinets off the kitchen wall, and make a large hole in the ceiling, so we eventually figured out the defective water pipe was behind a vanity in the master bathroom. We ended up cutting the water pipe in the ceiling, I did not feel like ripping the vanity off just yet. The beams, soaked, are drying now, and then I have to figure out what to do for repairs in the kitchen.

Then I've been pressure washing the aluminium siding, or rather, one of the kids down the street is doing the work, and I supervise. But then yesterday, suddenly a fuse blew in the garage, and then I discovered one of my outside heat pumps is not getting power, even though it does not sit on the same circuit. I have enough A/C, the upstairs unit is fine, and I have some heat pumps on wheels, it is just annoying that everything seems to break, this month.

It isn't like I am not busy, I have finally decided to rework my Facebook page, as it looks like dozens of friends, former colleagues, some from way back, ex-girlfriends, and half my family are on Facebook. I absolutely refuse to maintain pages on half a dozen systems, that is ridiculous in terms of the amount of time it takes, between this website and Facebook it is a fair amount of work. Just setting permissions, so that Facebook doesn't use my information as though it were free, took hours, their system is so complicated.

And then friend D. is talking about possibly retiring, and we're talking about heading back to Asia. I was at the Oriental supermarket yesterday, and standing in an aisle, amid the Indonesian soups and Vietnamese herbs and woks and sauces, I almost shuddered with the strong desire to head back to Asia. It isn't that I am not happy where I am, I love this place, my woods, the turtles, the deer, and the sun and the heat, but I guess it is just a craving. And it is strong. I have promised D. I will talk, get on the horn, to colleges in Asia Pacific, so we could head out there and spend part of the year teaching, winters over there and summers over here...

Then I am putting together one of my laptops for him, I have too many, this one is barely a year old, and got replaced by one with an HDMI port, able to play Blu-ray to an HD TV set (using an external Buffalo Blu-ray Writer, you can only get HD with Dolby 5.1 audio output if you use HDMI, which has a protective circuit built in, to prevent copying of HD material. I even bought some Blu-ray movies, but haven't gotten beyond putting it all together, and making sure it works. I guess I am in it for the hunt, not for the BBQ... And once I was looking at operating systems, and it turned out my new Vaio desktop came with 64 bit Windows, I discovered that the HDMI laptop, unlike the older one, actually has a 64 bit motherboard, even though it has a single threading Celeron CPU, instead of the fancy dual core Pentium the other Lenovo has.

So curious is as curious gets, and I decided to try to turn the newer laptop into a 64 bit machine, with an upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate with 8 GB(!!) of RAM (the 32 bit version of Windows can only address about 3 GB of RAM). It took me the better part of a day, a night and a morning, while I was reinstalling and upgrading the older Lenovo for D., but I actually managed to get the 3000 N500 running in 64 bit mode. While it is capable of doing that, Lenovo only has a handful of drivers for 64 bit, by the time I finished the initial install, late yesterday, I had six or seven devices for which I had no 64 bit drivers.

Not only that - you'd think you can buy a 64 bit upgrade, and take your PC from 32 bit Windows Vista Business to 64 bit Windows Vista Ultimate, right? Hah! Fuhgedaboudit! What you have to do is scrounge up an old copy of Windows XP, install that on the machine, and then you can run an "upgrade". And getting an old copy of XP installing on a new Lenovo is fraught with pitfalls - for one thing, it won't talk to SATA drives, I spent something like 4 hours experimenting with different drives, and different install packages, until I (first light shone through the trees already) had that brainwave, put the C: drive in IDE mode in the BIOS, and suddenly my old HP version of Windows XP Home rolled right onto the disk. Then I switched back to SATA mode, and 64 bit Win Ultimate installed like a dream. Then, it took another six hours to find and install all of the drivers for things like the graphics chipset, the modem, the flash memory slot, the HD audio (which Intel kindly locks in with the HD video chipset through HDMI) and then program the drive controllers back to performance mode, Ultimate reset every single interface in the laptop to "safe and slow" - something Windows installs have always done, making sure that you can't use your fancy new PC at its rated speed, because God forbid it overclocks the operating system...

But hey, it works - my $500 Lenovo 3000 N500 now runs at 64 bits, and has 8 GB of usable RAM, another 4 GB of Readyboost flash memory, and 14 GB of virtual memory. It freakin' flies, people! Now the waiting is for Windows 7, I've ordered three copies, so come October I can do this all over again...

The turtle, above? Living, as I do, more or less in the woods, there is plenty of wildlife that occupies the same acreage I do. What I have noticed (as you can see) is that the animals have gotten used to me, these past few years, and no longer exhibit the fear response you'd expect. That goes for the deer, the turtles, the squirrels, even the wasps, which nest all around the house, the most they ever do, when I am working outside, is fly up to me, check me out, and then go back to whatever it is wasps do. Quite interesting - unlike most of my neighbours, I don't have a dog, or dogs, and as a consequence I get plenty of deer grazing, and squirrels foraging, looking at me with that doleful "leave me alone" stare. By rights, the turtle should have withdrawn into its shell, I took these pictures at maybe two yards from it, but as you can see, it wasn't going to stop crossing the lawn for nothing....

Tehran, June 21, 2009 - Neda Agha-Soltan

The neat thing is, we don't have to do any more Crusades. They do them in-house now.

Spotsylvania, June 17, 2009 - Summer

Usually, summer sets off irresistible urges to travel in me, but I have so much to do at home that I am, for now, quite content postponing my globetrotting for a while. "Foyle's War" is re-running on WETA, the sounds of British recreations of the WWII era are soothing, as I sit here waiting for the eggs to boil. I do realize, though, that that England no longer exists, as indeed does the one I went to live in, in 1979. The London Transport double decker bus up to Norwood Hill, and the Luncheon Vouchers that bought cucumber sandwiches, all quite novel to the newly minted Dutch emigrant I was. Ah, nostalgia.. the images of bus and the shops are burned into my mind, though, I suppose those were the days that the discovery of how different things were a mere hours' flight from home turned me into the globetrotter I became.

I am still in the throes of setting up my new file server - see below - after customizing the evaluation copy of Windows 7 I am using (fingers crossed that Microsoft will allow the final version to update this beta..), I have got the machine running like clockwork, although it took a bit of doing to get the AIS Backup software running on it. I eventually got it running smoothly in Windows 7's compatibility mode, for Windows XP Service Pack 2 in this case, it fails under all other modes I've tried. In order to ensure that it is fully reliable, I am running a full restore, followed by a full backup, this involving close to 1.2 terabytes of data, in 1.1 million (!) files. It looks like the entire process will take four days - necessary because I need to test not only the server's reliability, but that of the drives as well. While I had tested most of the drives I am using, the 2(!) terabyte Fantom G-force Raid Array is brand new, so I have no option but to put it through its paces. Hard drives normally fail either within days of being put into service, or much later, when they get a power spike or start wearing down. Running a complete battery of tests, followed by a full backup and restore, gives reasonable security that the assembly is reliable, if no errors occur, and the drive array doesn't heat up unduly.

As the test file transfers involve using the drive on a USB port, which isn't terribly fast, the testing takes a long time. The primary network drives sit on a duplicated 3 GB/sec eSATA interface, which is plenty fast, while the "backup of the backup" doesn't really need to be fast, just reliable, and actually running on a slower bus will put less strain on the array, and on the server ports. Six of one...

Spotsylvania, June 12, 2009 - More computer stuff

Over the past week, I have almost exclusively worked on my systems and my network. As you may have read below, May 19, I bought a discounted Sony Vaio desktop, then blew that up, and so a repair person turned up to replace the motherboard (free of charge!). That makes me a Sony convert - more about that later.

Then I took the latest test version of Windows 7 Ultimate, and put that on a simple, decidedly underpowered, not-designed-for-Windows, Everex ePC, a desktop that, preloaded with Linux, is sold by Wal-Mart for $199 (I cannot find Everex' PCs for sale anywhere any more, including at Everex..). Amazingly, people, it flies. I am writing this on it.

Last but not least, I have taken a good look at how you can have your address book and calendar and portably, easily, exchange and update them between cellphone and PC. You see, all of these dandy iPhones are very nice, but taking their data, bringing that to a different phone, synchronizing it across multiple phones, and having your calendar and schedule on multiple PCs, isn't something you can do in what we call a "device independent" manner. Which I happen to think is much more important than moving your fingers across a touch screen in fashionable ways. For me, it needs to be cheap, easy, and I have to be able to give my kids or my girlfriend or whatever the same information I use - preferably without my password- and login file, or the email addresses of my sex friends. Right?

I can be brief about the Sony VAIO VGC-JS230J/S desktop, which lives in my kitchen, so I can watch the news and answer Skypes when cooking. It disappointed me in that it comes with 64 bit Windows Vista, but can't take more than 4 gigabytes of RAM, the whole point of a 64 bit operating system being that it can handle massive amounts of memory and storage. It is great for Skype, though - the audio is superb, it will handle full duplex audio using its speakers and microphone, to the point that I was able to have a conversation with my buddy Andy in Australia while walking around the kitchen. That is unusual. Nicer, even is that the Vaio has face recognition software built in, and that it was able to track my face and torso around the kitchen as I walked around. "Yes" said Andy, "that's Sony". So between that and the fact that the motherboard replacement was warranty, and carried out by a technician at my house, it isn't bad if you have enough money to have a laptop, as well. Apart from that, it looks cool, and as all of its electronics are in the screen casing, does not need space, you just sit the screen on the sideboard, and because I replaced the keyboard and mouse with wireless equipment I already had, I can park that out of the way when I don't need it.

To my right, as I write this at my dining table, the Everex PC is restoring my main systems backup and file server, until now running on an old Dell PC. I built a 1.5 terabyte Seagate FreeAgent Pro RAID array that I can access and back up to on my home network, and that array is backed up a couple of times a day, automatically, to a 500 gigabyte Cavalry drive array. Even though my backup software does a good job compressing the data, the contents of the main drive array have grown to the point that I have less than 100 gigabytes of space left on the Cavalry when I do a completely new backup. Because the backups are incremental, they grow over time, and periodically, I need to create a completely new backup, when the Cavalry fills up.

Long story short, the Cavalry is going into retirement, and is being replaced by a new terabyte Fantom G-force Raid Array. Terabyte, meaning there are two 1 terabyte drives in the unit, and I use it in a RAID 1, mirrored, configuration, so it has 1 terabyte of usable drive space. I know, I am anal, but think about it - you have all of your backups sitting on one device, and if you knew how easy it is for a disk drive to fail, you would not be able to sleep. Imagine you get audited, and you turn up at the IRS office going "I lost all of my financial data from Quicken". Nah.. maybe not.. None of this stuff is very expensive, and honestly, if you feel it is relevant to have insurance, why not protect your electronic data? Especially if you are stupid enough to have multiple users on one PC, which is the primary reason viruses propagate the way they do.

Spotsylvania, June 3, 2009 - Only in California

You gotta read this.

Spotsylvania, June 2, 2009 - Myth Factories

I don't know if you have noticed, but this eco-stuff is fast becoming a religion, where simple calculations and logical thinking no longer matter. I do not, per se, mind that people have different ideas about what's best for mankind and its future, but some of the thinking is simply crazy

One person I know reuses cola bottles - the big plastic two litre ones. She stores larg amounts of herbal tea in them, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that this leaches chemicals out of the plastic, over time, which she then ingests. This is very likely to impair her immune system.

Another acquaintance got behind the wheel of my SUV, and declared she hates SUVs. Not mine (of course) but the ones that soccer moms use. Apparently, she is concerned with the environment, and that relieves her of the responsibility of thinking.

This is beginning to be one of my major hobby horses - it is being hammered into us that we're going to reduce our carbon output by driving small and/or hybrid vehicles, and using CFL bulbs. This is, in fact, complete hogwash. The environment is not materially affected by soccer moms or gas guzzlers. What causes our carbon output is a combination of people commuting to work, and goods transportation by trucks. Hundreds of millions of people get into their cars, every day, and drive to their offices to sit behind a computer with a telephone at their elbow. This isn't something they need to go anywhere for - between teleconferencing, email, IM and camchatting, most office workers can do from home what they do in the office. And long distance goods transportation can be done by trains, with only localized delivery and distribution done by trucks.

These two simple measures would take a large percentage of cars and trucks off the road, which means much less fuel is burned, and our road building and maintenance budgets can be significantly scaled back. It seems so simple it is stupid, but think about it - and steer clear of the effects it would have on the oil industry and car and truck manufacturers. All I am saying is that unless we take an analytic look at the problem, and come up with organized and enforced solutions, we're going to have more of the same. At the present time most vehicle manufacturers are putting hybrid vehicles on the market, leading to more cars being produced and sold - but the underlying issue, those cars getting on the road and being driven in our congested commutes, isn't being addressed. That is where the majority of pollution takes place, and the majority of our wasting fuel.

Soccer moms and one way bottles aren't the problem. Standards of hygiene have risen, in the Western world, because we have all manner of disposable articles, from sanitary napkins to the plastic bottles that water comes in, in Third World countries. We cannot simply roll these things back, because we would negatively affect hygienic standards and living expectations. Airplane travel, specifically for tourists, is an issue we could have another look at - if you can fly to Egypt to visit the pyramids, there is no reason why you can't take a cruise ship to Egypt, instead. I have spent many years doing my work from remote locations, all over the world, with a laptop and a cellphone. There is no reason why a manager can't work while on that cruise ship traveling to their vacation destination, just to think out loud. Lots of inventive solutions are in existence, today, as fully mature technologies, things we can start using tomorrow - think of it, the space shuttle crew can work from orbit, or from the ISS, and so can we.

On a different note, I've owned a small refractor telescope, the Meade ETX-80, for a while now, not so much because I want to gaze at the stars, but because Meade sells an SLR adapter for it, and I was curious how well this would work, with a digital camera. Nikon has software that will let you access the sensor element directly from a PC, so from an experimentation perspective the ETX-80 with one of my Nikon D bodies is a very nice combination to have.

As an interlude, the reason for me to have SLR cameras is that I spent part of my career as a professional photographer, both in the studio and as a photojournalist, and from the day I started, back in the 1970s, I have always worked with Nikon SLR cameras (beginning with the F2) and lenses. To the right is a shot taken in my yard using the Nikon D90, with the Meade telescope and a 2x converter in between the camera and the telescope. Not at all bad, considering the price.

Spotsylvania, May 22, 2009 - Turning a PC into a laptop

One of the big advantages of using a notebook or laptop computer is that you can set it up so it will "power down gracefully" - shutting down all applications, closing files, and shutting down the operating system, all by itself - when the battery runs low, for instance when you have a power failure, or have simply gotten distracted and left the machine on. Many consumers suffer damaged files and even damaged hard disks when their power fails - but what isn't so well known, they can do the same thing with their desktop computer you can with a laptop. The purpose here is not that you can finish your work, but that you can send your machine into hybernation without losing or damaging any data.

All you need to do is get what is known as an "Uninterruptible Power Supply", or UPS, which is generally available beginning at around $40. If you buy one that is fully compatible with Microsoft Windows - all those made by APC are, and I have recently discovered newer Belkin UPS devices are, too - you don't need to install any software, plug it in, connect the USB driver connector to your PC, and Windows will install a "Human Interface Device" driver that works directly with your power settings (if they're not on your task bar, find them in the Control Panel).

Your PC will, once all this is running, behave (set up properly) just like a laptop would - when the power fails, it will close files and programs, and shut down. If you are at your keyboard, you can finish what you were doing, and either shut down manually, or let the automation take care of it.

These devices aren't much more expensive than the surge suppressors many consumers think they should use (mostly unnecessary today), and they contain not only the UPS, but have built-in surge suppression as well, in many cases for the power, phone lines, and for cable or satellite TV and internet connections. The batteries will last something like four to five years, and in most cases you can replace the battery (which is generally of the lead-acid variety) yourself, from a third party supplier. At my house, all electronics run on UPS's during a power failure, which, when I am in, bridges the gap between the power fail event, and the time I have my emergency generator running and connected.

I am going to have to wait telling you more about the Vaio desktop I bought (see my May 19 rant), as I blew it up. I connected my airplane power supply to it, to see if that delivers enough power to run this thing, this is a power supply that runs off the 24 VDC an airplane seat connector delivers, as well as off a 12 VDC car jack, and even though I connected it following instructions it delivered -20 VDC, rather than + 20VDC. So it is waiting for the repair guy. What I did discover, though, is that Sony provides in-home warranty service. I guess that is why the Vaios are generally more expensive than other brands, which you have to take or send in to get fixed. I got an immediate callback from their service provider, after I opened the trouble ticket with Sony, and an hour later the local technician called to tell me when he expected to receive the new motherboard, and he'd call me to set up an appointment the second he had it. This is the level of service IBM delivered, when they still had a PC division, and I am pleasantly surprised to see Sony does this too. If you cannot have a system go down on you for any length of time, it seems Sony is a good choice. I'd say that especially with kids in college, they cannot by and large study and work without their laptop, this makes Sony an excellent choice.

Spotsylvania, May 19, 2009 - To Ebay or not to Ebay, that is the question

I am procrastinating bigtime. I keep on buying stuff I really do not need, keep promising myself that I will put on Ebay what it replaces (anybody for a Nikon D50 in pristine state? A Lenovo 3000?), and then don't get around to doing it. This despite my having a long established Ebay account, all I need to do is take some pictures and start the auction.

This is one of those strange periods - for months, not a sniff on any of the internet dating sites I have a stake out on, and then - bingo! - four on the same day. Maybe I should try polygamy. Mind you, in the Commonwealth of Virginia even cohabitation is officially against the law, so my guess is that living with more than one woman would be even more of a problem. I don't know that this law is actually ever used any more, but it is the reason that my medical plan, for instance, can't accept domestic partners, only spouses. I imagine the legislature does not want to get into changing the law, because that would open the door to same sex partners, and this is one of the most conservative states in the nation.

I shall not let it bother me. Other than that, I have mostly been busy with technology - I really ought to make an effort to find myself a teaching position somewhere - my vast storehouse of expertise and knowledge is going to waste, right now I am doing a few research projects whose results really aren't going to go anywhere, other than here in this blog.

If you are tempted to take a look at Windows 7, which is now in a kinda final pre-release state, I suggest you do. The last beta version, a few months ago, wasn't recognized as "windows" by many applications and drivers, but with this latest version that does not seem to be a problem. Prerequisite is that you are prepared to buy an official upgrade, when that becomes available, or that you have an unused PC or laptop sitting around you can experiment with. I do.

I have installed Windows 7 on an auld HP Compaq NX9008 Notebook PC, a somewhat oversized laptop with a 2.6 GHZ Celeron - quite a fast processor, but it generates so much heat the fans (3!) whine continuously, and you could use the thing for a hairdryer, if you wanted to. I bought this in early 2005, expanded it to 1 GB of memory and a 100 GB hard disk, and stopped using it altogether a couple of years ago, after it had sat in my garage for a while, managing my main UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply).

I tend to like testing operating systems on older computers, and on computers that don't have the latest greatest whatever. Of course a new operating system will run on a PC with the latest greatest whatever, but the thing is, that does not prove anything. You will recall the issues with peripheral drivers for Windows Vista - I don't understand why people are still bitching about Vista, I have it running on every PC I have, save for one I use as a file server, and it really runs well and is vastly superior over Windows XP Pro. Sure, you have to tweak it - turn off Defender, Aero, User Account Control, Index/Search, and a bunch of other crap the Microsoft wizards think will benefit the consumer - they have absolutely no clue how the average person uses their computer. None - I swear, I can prove it, too. I am the guy who gets to fix the PCs at the neighbour's, mostly elderly folk who just want to mail with the kids and look stuff up, now and then.

If you don't like the tweaking, you will like Windows 7 even less than Vista - the Microsoft nerds have actually managed to put even more crap into "7" that is even harder to defeat. Much of this stuff takes lots of memory and CPU cycles, and as 32 bit Windows, which is what most folks use, can only address a maximum of 4 gigabytes of memory, and many computers reserve some or a good chunk of that for graphics use. The net result is that if you leave everything the way Microsoft wants you to run most of your memory will be used by your operating system, instead of your software. This is asinine, because once your PC runs out of memory it starts "swapping" (putting bits of temporarily used code on the hard disk, fetching them again as needed), and whatever you were doing slows down to a crawl. Because the ordinary user does not know a thing about memory management, they will declare they have a virus (they don't know a name for anything else that can go wrong with a computer) and all hell breaks loose. Not that there can't be a virus..

My over the road neighbours were having problems with their PC, so I had them bring it over and looked at it - it didn't have one, two, or even three viruses on it - it had seventeen!! See, the only thing we need from Microsoft is built in virus protection, and that is the one thing Microsoft does not provide. How stupid is that? The Sony Vaio desktop PC I found discounted at my local BJ's, the other day, was even worse - it came with a "free" trial package of Microsoft Live OneCare, a security and maintenance package for Windows completely tied into all the other stuff Microsoft attempts to force you to install, like Live Mail, Live Chat, and new browsers that link all that together. These packages are hacker's paradise, as they are all tied in with each other and your internet, IP address, email address, and everything else, and once the hackers discover a flaw all of your personal information is open to them.

So I don't use any of it - I don't even use the standard chat engines, Yahoo, MSN, and AIM, as they all tie in with your browser, and pass on your email address and your IP address. I use Skype, which is better, and doesn't do any of that crap. Add the AVG Free virus package, and you're home dry.

Back to the latest Windows 7 beta, though, and my NX9008 notebook computer - it installed flawlessly, recognized every single device in the system, including the USB dongle plugged into a USB port, and came right up. It could not find drivers for two devices, the built-in modem and the built-in Ethernet port, but as I don't need either I did not worry about those. I know I have in the past managed to get the XP drivers for these devices working with Windows Vista, so I guess I could probably tweak "7" as well, but as I said, I don't need them. More importantly, it did recognize the older WiFi dongle, and once I had told the operating system which router to use, it recognized every single system, server and device on my network. Not only that, Windows 7, on that Celeron based system, runs at least as fast as Windows XP ever did, and that is impressive, considering Vista on that notebook was slow as molasses, although it did run. Windows 7 bases its loadable drivers not on the devices it sees, but on the chipset and/or processor inside the devices - it got the Zonet WiFi dongle going because it was able to "see" and recognize the processor inside the dongle.

More about all this magic in my next posting, folks, I promise, and I'll bend your ear about the Sony Vaio VGC-JS110J, a stunning looking PC with all of its innards built into the high resolution 20 inch screen (the link points to its replacement, the VGC-JS230J/S, which has a faster processor and a larger hard disk, not that mine is stingy). I would have never bought this ca. $1000 computer if there had not been a showroom model sitting at BJ's on Route 3, I noticed it marked down to $800 - 4 MB of RAM, 64 bit Windows Vista, 802.11n networking, a 320 MB 7200 RPM hard disk - and told myself I did not need it, and tore myself away, only to find it marked down again, to 629 baksheesh, the next day. I did the same thing I do when a gorgeous blonde makes eye contact with me from up close - I went weak at the knees, stuttered a bit, and pulled out my Platinum Visa. More about this later, when I receive the 8 MB of RAM the 64 bit OS will handle - hehe.

New York/Afghanistan, May 16, 2009 - Dude, it is "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", not "Don't Ask, Don't Show"!!

Spotsylvania, May 12, 2009 - There are Real Jewells

Don't you just love Youtube? The only reason why I rarely posted videos, in the past, is that I had to convert them to a reasonably common format, then put them on one of my webservers, then write the code to push them, and Youtube has solved all that. While my sister couldn't run the HD version of my little Nikon test video, below, as she is in Europe and doesn't have quite the bandwidth, she was able to run the "regular" version. That's not a compliment to Youtube, but to the folks at Google. They have standardized the interface, something they are masters in doing, and they have such a humongous server park that nobody ever runs out of space - those HD .AVI files are huge, in the case of the Nikon output, some 3 megabytes per second, due to the high resolution of the 10.9 megapixel image sensor, which wasn't designed to do video.

I just hope that Google and Amazon, if the internet providers make good on their threat to surcharge large volume consumers, will sue to get a portion of that surcharge - after all, if Google and Amazon weren't doing HD, there wouldn't be any reason for those surcharges. It is, paradoxically, not the consumer that uses the bandwidth, it is the provider of the programming, who determines what type of compression is used in the provisioning of their video products.

On the pageant front, I hope Donald Trump will tell Carrie Prejean "You're Fired!" tonight. I am not clear how a plastic Barbie on heels wiggling her ass across a stage with boobs paid for by the pageant is anyone's dream woman, or even an interesting human being. I completely don't understand how anybody even finds these women attractive, seriously.

My vote for Grrl of the Year goes to Welsh firefighter Rebecca Jewell, on the right, who does stuff the way G*d built her, and a fine job She did too. Excuse me for saying so in a family forum, but WOOF! And she has a real job to go back to. Maybe we can introduce "misslaunching" as a sport, and then Rebecca can introduce this to the general public by manually launching Prejean. She might struggle a bit, but I don't think in the capable hands of Ms. Jewell that will matter much. You all can vote on the cliff, and she can wear water wings - oh wait, she's already got inflatables.

Spotsylvania, May 10, 2009 - Rage Road

The story of George Zinkhan, who shot his wife and two other people, then committed suicide, keeps me wondering why it is so hard for some people to control their rage. At least, I cannot think of another reason why he did what he did - and then, in a final gesture, partly buried himself while taking his life. How does a university professor with a good life, a social life, and all the mod cons, fly off the rails like this? And all the others like him? (Unrelated, by the way, to the right a test video I shot with the Nikon D90 D-SLR, described on May 6, below - if you play it do not forget to click the "HD" button underneath the picture)

I was thinking about this as I met with a friend recently, who has the same problem - she is forever in a rage, ready to explode at the slightest provocation, and, what really puzzles me, doesn't think there is anything wrong with this. Wrong, as in "get therapy, girl" wrong. I've seen her in a fit of rage over not being able to find a restaurant, to the point that she was no longer able to speak intellegibly, while standing right in front of the restaurant she couldn't find, I have seen her cross a street right in front of a government limousine doing 50 kph in the metropolis she lives in, for the sole reason that she wanted to make the point that driver behaviour in her Asian country is atrocious, I could go on. I stare at this in amazement - why would someone be dysfunctional in this way and not know it? I am no angel, to be sure, but I taught myself to contain my anger, walk away from confrontation, although I occasionally use it, fully controlled, to make a point (with extra hot sauce), but I have learned that uncontrolled emotion is fine during sex, anywhere else it is incredibly destructive. And that is what professor Zinkhan proved once more - nobody wins...

In an interview with the Times of London Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah remarks that "57 nations of the United Nations do not recognise Israel, a third of the world". Indeed, Sir, that is true. But I believe that if you are now working to establish a peace process that is supported by the Arab League, you should take steps to ensure that Arab and Middle Eastern countries that not now recognize Israel take steps to change that. It can't be a reward at the back end, Israel is a de facto country, a trading nation, and I don't think you can get the Israelis to behave themselves, and get serious about their place in the world, if you do not recognize that Israel exists, and has a right to exist. Not doing so will only maintain the status quo, and make your words more toothless rhetoric. If you know it all so well, and since you're the potentate of Saudi Arabia, you can show the rest of the world how it's done.

Spotsylvania, May 9, 2009 - We need invention, not innovation

With the recession slowly receding, I wonder what our next "hot product" is going to be. There really is little new technology on the horizon that can have a major economic impact. Wireless digital connectivity is reasonably mature now - 3G has finally made it into the United States, airliners are getting WiFi, kind of the "last frontier", and handheld devices (like the iPhone) are now sophisticated and powerful enough that, with 3G service, they can function as a pocket computer.

The reason I am not listing any of the "green" initiatives here is that they don't embody new technologies, consumers aren't interested in them unless they are subsidized, and many are pie-in-the-sky. If you think we're going to make a dent in global warming by driving hybrid cars, or replacing light bulbs with other light bulbs, you are thinking simplistically, and have fallen prey to the "Al Gore" smokescreen, a set of measures and incentives that solve no problems at all.

We are not concentrating very well on the technologies that we need to future proof our society. Roof shingles you can buy from Home Depot that can generate electricity, without needing the installation of complicated wiring schemes, would be a good example of a useful technology, but they'd have to be paired up with a power company "black box" that could process the output of such shingles, run it back into the power station, deliver power to the home as usual, and deduct the power delivered to the grid from the home's energy bill. IOW, develop an integration that would seamlessly slot into the existing infrastructure. I am completely comfortable with telling you that any technologies that require design or construction changes to the way we build and live aren't going to make it - if it needs tax incentives, it is the wrong thing to sell.

Having untold numbers of car companies developing electric-only vehicles for consumer use is another one of those futile exercises. Nobody except for a couple of Hollywood types is going to buy an electric vehicle if it doesn't match the performance of a gasoline driven car, and if it can't be charged everywhere. So all car manufacturers should work together to build one type of battery pack, which will then be cheap, and make it chargeable from a standardized outlet. Nobody is going to buy a Toyota if the Toyota's charge point in their garage cannot be used to charge the wife's Honda, and the charge point in their office parking will only fuel Ford electric vehicles. It is ridiculous. You can fill the tank of a car with a gasoline engine, bought anywhere in the world, at any gas station, anywhere in the world. That "came about", but now we have to "make it happen".

So while there are plenty of opportunities to invent products that will "take over the world", there is not much being done that I can see will lead to any breakthroughs. Manufacturers are creating products that will be part-subsidized by governments - take hybrid vehicles and their tax rebates as an example. That's a singularly bad idea, as the taxpayer money spent on these incentives can be used far more effectively on other environmental initiatives. Think about it for a moment: we fund people buying certain cars, thereby creating a situation where folks that could pool or work from home don't do that, but continue to commute, since it continues to be affordable.

How does that protect the environment, and combat global warming? Not, right? How come nobody sees this?

It seems like an improbable mountain to conquer, turning the current, dead-end, initiatives into the change we really need. Forgetting about the fuel efficient vehicles, and the high tech lightbulbs, the solar panels and the windmills, understand they all come from Don Quichote, that we need to pull an engineer in, give him or her the task to reduce energy consumption, on all fronts, and make those changes at the bottom of the pyramid, with the people that live and work.

We need some rules, basic rules. We can't tell people on welfare they have to buy fancy expensive light bulbs, because "it saves them money". We can't put a commuter into a hybrid vehicle "because it is good for the environment". We can't have expensive "energy star" equipment - everything must be energy star. We have to understand that the energy consumption of a refrigerator isn't the amount of electricity it uses, but the number of times its door is opened, on an average day. We must start measuring these realities, instead of fancy lab research that has no bearing on the real world.

Spotsylvania, May 6, 2009 - Inhuman Factors

For those of you thinking I am blogging from a hospital room after getting my spine fixed, that didn't happen. I had a problem with one of my feet, that made me limp, and I did not want to convalesce after spinal surgery while not being able to walk normally. Now (I've seen the doctor to get the foot back to normal) I have to figure out whether to do reschedule this in the next 30 days, which is how long the insurance approval runs, or have it done later in the year.

I recently replaced one of my Nikon D50 digital SLR cameras with the D90 model, which is a couple of steps up, in terms of capabilities and resolution, with double the megapixels at 12.9, a larger sensor, and more programmability (which I really wasn't all that interested in - the D90 comes with various recognition modes, including face recognition, and has a database of possible scenes it might encounter). What really picqued my interest was the D90's capability to shoot video - HD video, at 720p, nothing to sneeze at. Having to constantly change cameras while you are shooting pictures is a pain, and you run the risk to lose just the one shot you should have gotten as a still, or the one clip you should have gotten as video, while you're putting one camera away, and grabbing the other.

With the Nikon D90, that's no longer an issue, you never have to move the camera from in front of your face (for video, you need to look at the display screen at the back of the camera body, while stills can be shot using either the screen or the "regular" viewfinder). You will probably think I have gone anal, and that's not a bad description of the way I work, but I am a former professional photographer, and I simply like to continue working as a Pro - and for that, ultimate control is what gets you your shots. There is nothing as frustrating as standing there, and just missing that winning picture.

The flipside is that the camera, which had so many features it could do with a training course to begin with, is now complicated beyond belief. I have a hard time believing that anybody, except for the most committed photgraphy nerds, and control freaks, will go through even half the capabilities the latest digital SLRs have. I see perfectly ordinary people having a hard time using standard Windows computers, even Mac aficionados have little control over everything the Macbook Pro has to offer, and I myself use maybe 10% of the functions.

To explain that a little - I am perfectly capable of learning all of the intricate menus, settings and sensors the Nikon D system has. The problem is, everything else electronical in my life is just as complicated as my Nikon cameras are, and I actually consider it a complete waste of time to learn everything every piece of equipment has to offer. I'll grab a manual (most of which are available online, and which I store on my main laptop) and check whatever it is I need to do that I don't know the command for.

The capabilities of an average piece of equipment are today complex to the point that even the manufacturer does not include all of the possible combinations and scenarios in the manual - in many cases, there aren't any combinations and use scenarios. My new Haier washing machine only has the primary controls explained; the Jazz digital camera has no manual at all, and only a rudimentary one on the CD that comes with it. The Nikon D90, on the contrary, comes with an extensive 278 page book, and you can download that book from their website, as well, but no matter how much work they did on it, it still doesn't cover all bases. Trying to connect an older Nikon flash unit, an SB-20, to the D90, I needed to go to four different places in the manual to get all of the instructions about what I can and cannot do with this particular model Speedlight - yes, it is all in there, but I just don't see someone do this for equipment they don't even own.

You may think I am being critical, but that isn't my aim. I just am beginning to wonder who all of these new features in our digital products are aimed at? I will wager that the vast majority of Nikon D90 buyers don't use most features, and then you need to realize that this isn't even a professional camera, although I have a hard time thinking of things that this camera doesn't have, and I would need, as a pro. Barring sports photography, I can't think of any type of professional photography that this camera would not be suited for.

Increasingly, then, you will need to read a professional review before selecting a camera type and model. And once you make the selection, your first decision needs to be about the capabilities you will want to use. But that, of course, would mean you know all about what you can do with the camera - and even though you can read the manual before you buy, I doubt you'll develop a full understanding until you get hands-on.

For me, the added video recording capability was what clinched the deal - but please note I own a number of camcorders, disk based as well as memory card based, I do not think the D90 is suitable as your only video camera. It isn't that that can't be done, but if you buy this not-cheap camera and then find out you still need a "proper" camcorder for what you want to do, you'll not be happy. I've not looked at the video output on an HD screen yet, but on my laptop it looks pretty spiffy, partly because of the large CMOS sensor - why only mono audio, though? It probably does not much matter for the maximum five minute clips you can shoot in HD mode, and I must say I've never heard much difference when checking the Digital Dolby out of my Samsung camcorder.

Getting an HD camcorder with picture taking capabilities is really not much of a problem, these days - I just bought one for my dentist, after we talked about the little Jazz I have on my belt 24/7. Rather than tell her what to get, I made the trip to Walmart (actually bought it from their website) and sent her the one that best fit her needs - currently, there is a high end Aiptek recorder for just over $100 (Aiptek has been around - I bought one of their earlier digital cameras at Singapore Changi Airport some ten years ago). It does everything you could want, takes decent pictures, too, and the video is excellent - here is an example I shot during the Obama inauguration (click on the HD button underneath the picture to see high resolution). If you're in for a new camera, get this first, get used to it, then figure out what else you need.

Spotsylvania, May 2, 2009 - Steeped in history

Only last week the nighttime temperature dropped to close to freezing, and I had the heating on - today the temperature in the shade came up to 95.7° Fahrenheit, a shade over 35° centigrade. After four hours of working in the yard, in the sun, I had no choice but to go inside, and cool off in the airconditioning, I was overheating seriously. But I love it once it gets hot, and buying this house in Virginia was one of the better things to do - no trips to the sun for me, I have it all right here. This area being "Virginia horse country" helps - beyond where I am it is Virginia vacation country, the rolling hills and abundant greenery that made the English think of home, when they colonized this part of the Eastern seaboard. The county I live in, Spotsylvania, is named after Alexander Spotswood, a lieutenant colonel in the British Army, who became Lieutentant Governor of the new British colony of Virginia in 1710.

Ever since I moved away from city life in the United States I find a country and people rich in traditions and history. Back in Westchester County, New York, there is a clear line all the way back to colonial times - at the Old Dutch church near Tarrytown I encountered worshipers that might be distant relatives, even if they had phonetically changed their surname from Aartsen to Orser, because of the British witch hunt for Dutch descendants, after the Dutch republic traded New Amsterdam for Surinam, a piece of northern South America. And the mid-state area of Virginia I now live in has roots going back to British colonial times, and to the American Civil War, which ended up being lost to the Confederacy after their armies tried and failed to stop the Union armies from moving south. In the immediate vicinity, including the very land I own, some 30,000 soldiers lost their lives, out of a total of more than 600,000 who perished in the American Civil War.

Steeped in history, then, and drenched in blood. How important it is to America and Americans I witness every time I drive past through the Chancellorsville battlefield, where I turn onto State Route 3 to go to Northern Virginia, to D.C., or to the local shops. It is rare that there aren't tourists doing the battlefield tour, "my" particular battlefield is even expanding, as the United States Parks Department is acquiring more land from retiring farmers, locally, and letting that return to its natural state. It amazed me that the remnants of the defensive earthworks laid down during the battles are still so prominent, after 146 years - they must have been enormous when they were first constructed. It is at Ely's Ford, not a mile from my house, that the Union armies crossed the Rapidan River, to engage the Confederates at Chancellorsville, a village long gone, only the foundations of the Inn that served the Confederates as a headquarters remain, right by where the Ely's Ford Road changes to the Old Plank Road, preserved Civil War guns still guarding the killing fields, to my right as I wait for the lights on Route 3 to change. The Ely family, once farming all of this land, still live around the corner from me, with a small family cemetery next to their home, right by the Spotswood Furnace Road.

Spotswood Furnace Road ran past the Spotswood Furnace, an iron smelter that was owned by the same Alexander Spotswood, who returned to England after he was replaced as Lieutenant Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, but then returned to America as a private citizen, wealthy landowner, exporter of pig iron to Britain, and eventually Deputy Postmaster General. Not until 1783 did the British cede Virginia to the newly minted United States of America,

Spotsylvania, April 24, 2009 - A late update, and bits of hypocrisy

I've been so busy I really haven't had the time to update this blog - partly procrastination, I intend to return it to Wordpress, which my new ISP offers, but that is a bit of a learning curve. Network Solutions offers a version of Wordpress which is much newer than the one I used in Freeservers - not only that, I need to figure out how to move the backup I have from Freeservers into the Network Solutions setup, which uses a different backup technology.

As if that weren't enough, I now have decided to have my spine fixed - one of the lower vertebrae is out of alignment, that caused pressure on a nerve bundle, that caused an inflammation, etc. My orthopaedic surgeon really only gave me one option, so for safety's sake I went and got a second opinion, but the second surgeon, a Chef de Clinique at Georgetown University Hospital, mostly confirmed what the first had said. He did mention that the condition is unlikely to get worse, so if "you can deal with the pain" there was no need to have the surgery, he said, but upon reflection the discomfort is such that having it go away, even if that means fusing two vertebrae, is preferable. So I am doing all the stuff you do when you have major surgery - updating the will, pre-op medical tests, flying in friend A. all the way from Beijing so I have moral support, and a chauffeured drive home afterwards (70 miles), and of course having a guest means cleaning the house from top to bottom... etc. I found myself unexpectedly anxious at the prospect of long lasting deep anaesthesia, I have only had small in-and-out surgical procedures, the past few decades, but more than one sleepless night it hasn't given me, I am quite used to doctors and hospitals.

I am a bit of a procrastinator - I've got a million jobs on hand, but I tend to add work before I finish the older jobs. Yesterday, with a neighbour's help, I brought my old washing machine and dryer to the recycling facility Spotsylvania County operates, and then installed a second new washer/dryer, which is basically a spare, but I still needed to make sure it works OK. As if the old ones weren't heavy enough, the new machines weigh 185 lbs apiece - I don't even know how I got the original one installed, I did that all by myself.

At any rate, I got all that done (not the Wordpress stuff yet) - at which point, playing around with operating systems, I inadvertently discovered that solid state disk drive emulators - hard disks made not of rotating magnetic platters, but memory chips - have become both affordable and big-gish. I found a Crucial 64 gigabyte solid state drive at Newegg.com for a paltry $189. Installing it in the Everex SA2053T subnotebook I had been using to travel with took only a few minutes, and installing the Everex version of Windows Vista Home Premium didn't pose a lot of problems, and, much to my surprise, took 17GB of space, leaving me plenty of storage space for a travel machine.

What I am hoping to achieve is that the Everex laptop will consume less power, and generate less heat, in the process helping the batteries last longer. A side effect of using solid state memory is that, in the absence of electro-mechanics, I don't need to worry about "bumps and bruises" any more. When you let a laptop go to hibernation, prior to traveling, it can take two or three minutes to store its memory image on disk, and power down. One of the worst things to do is to pick up the still running laptop while it is powering down - that is when your hard disk is at risk. Now, with the solid state disk, I can just shut the lid and immediately put the laptop in my backpack, and leave, without running the risk of a disk head crash.

The heat thing is interesting. It is little understood that the primary limitation of the processing power of any laptop isn't its processor speed, or installed memory, it is simply the maximum amount of heat that the laptop can dissipate. When I opened the Everex up to swap the disk unit, I found to my amazement that the small heat sink that formed part of the 2GB memory module I had upgraded when I bought the notebook had come apart, basically "steamed" off the SODIMM it was part of. Everex doesn't recommend upgrading the memory, the SA2053T comes with 1GB of RAM, and it was clear why when it turned out the 2GB package that fits the motherboard came with a heat sink, which barely fits in the casing. They don't put heat sinks on memory modules for nothing...

So far, I can't say the solid state disk makes the battery last longer - I've got just under 3 hours, but then the laptop came with two batteries. The processor is a first generation Intel Core duo, which isn't exactly frugal with power, but I do notice there is less heat coming from the cooling fan.

Let's see, what else is there. Ah! Sure, Mr. Cheney, your interrogation techniques may well have resulted in the acquisition of relevant information for the War on Terror. Kneecapping might have worked as well. You're not getting it, are you?

And then the hypocrisy. New York model Julissa Brisman was allegedly murdered at a Boston hotel by Boston student Philip Markoff, with whom she met up after she had advertised massage services on Craigslist. Except, from the placement of her ad, and the pictures that have now surfaced, professional model Julissa Brisman made a living from prostitution and erotic modeling. That is a risky business to be in as a woman alone - especially if you don't use a driver/minder, as many escort girls do. It just bothers me that the mainstream press maintains this "model" fiction - it looks like she made money with her looks and body, any way she could. That's a) illegal b) it has a name, and c) she probably did not pay income tax on those earnings. None of the above is a reason for her to die, but let's please not paint this girl as the latest angel to have an unfortunate "accident" at the hands of a callous criminal. I really think we should report honestly, and this ain't it, kids.

Spotsylvania, April 12, 2009 - Simon Cowell speechless

Shows you how you really never can judge a book by its cover - click on the pic for the vid. The appropriate subtitle, I suppose, is "The mouse that roared". And I don't think this Susan is looking for a job any more...

Washington, D.C., April 4, 2009 - The Proof is in between the lines.

Commentator Fareed Zakaria is probably a good example of how President Obama has his critics on the wrong foot. I recall an article only a few weeks ago, when Zakaria tried to prove that Obama had it wrong - now, suddenly, Zakaria feels that Obama is heading in the right direction.

Part of the problem is that Zakaria has a book out, in which he tries to outline the tenets of the "post-American world". Writing that before President Obama's policies are really hashed out an visible is a risk - and it is clear from what is reported out of the G20 summit that the United States still somehow has that leading role. As Obama is reaching the end of his trip, there is significant cheer in Europe - the leading German weekly Stern says that "Obama has returned the United States to its leading role" and ends its review of Obama's blitz by stating "The United States under Barack Obama are a Superpower, that listens, plays ball and wants to set the example. This is what Winners look like". This at a time when British Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling has to admit that his Treasury "got it wrong" when trying to predict the length and intensity of this recession. Tea leaves...

Zakaria, much like most of the other journalists that have been trying to predict where Barack Obama might be headed, has not understood who the man Obama is: he is a nerd, a detail oriented manager with an impossible grasp of the issues. Obama is driven, and he published his manifesto way before he was elected.

A video clip I saw yesterday spoke for itself: Mrs. Obama commented to an audience at one of her school visits that "on our first date, he took me to a community meeting. How romantic is that?". I was completely blown away by his acceptance speech - he was ready, had his talk completely memorized, and didn't crack a single joke, you know, the stupid jokes that politicians that won usually unleash on their followers. Everything he does is more of the same, he doesn't lose focus for even a second, and he comes at you directly. If you watched the televised press conference he gave last week, maybe you noticed it - he didn't communicate with the press, he didn't try to answer questions without giving away too much information, he addressed and treated the entire White House Press corps as if they were his staff, and he was their boss. No interruptions, he called people by name, he continually scanned the audience, and he answered every question in detail, even if he had to pause to think. That often gets referred to as inexperience in public speaking, supposedly it shows one is not prepared to speak on a certain subject, but I've always found that short pause the hallmark of somebody who has the information, but needs a moment to find it - pretty much like accessing information online to a computer server.

He paces, as well. I can see how he suffers from not having a flip chart next to the lectern, where he could draw diagrams and write talking points - you can see it during his town hall gatherings, when he uses the entire podium - I notice because I do the same thing, when speaking publicly, I speak from talking points, rather than a fully prepared text. You can't really do that on camera. But he lectures, he is there for a purpose, and don't you forget it.

If you are among the folks concerned that Obama "is squandering our money", you've got it wrong. The funds that are being pumped into the economy will, to a large extent, flow back to the government in the form of taxes. The rest will make its way back into the economy again, in terms of wages, spending money, and ultimately, expansion. This is not rocket science - when you give somebody money, they will for the most part spend it, and that is exactly what's missing, at the moment, there is no spending. The consumer doesn't spend, the industry doesn't spend, if you know that the pollution in Beijing, and other Chinese large cities, has significantly reduced, you know nobody is spending. And what we will spend, on the back of the bailout, isn't money for luxuries, this, for now, is just money we need to live, eat, survive.

I am delighted that President Obama isn't pumping more money into the auto industry - any enterprise that needs propping up, right now, needs to come out the other end making a profit, and Detroit has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt it can't do that. Hurriedly slinging hybrid cars onto the market is just show - the people that invented the gas/electric hybrid, Toyota and Honda, are doing well out of it, followed somewhere in the distance by Ford, which followed in their footsteps in a more timely fashion. But most importantly, we've still not learned our lesson, in the United States: hybrids are just cars. And we're buying hybrids for many reasons, in the United States, but not solely because of their fuel consumption. The Europeans and the Asians figured this out a long time ago - they produce small cars that use less fuel than hybrids do. Cars that do fine in commutes, because there is normally only a single person in a commuting vehicle, and they build small diesel engines, which pack plenty of torque and are miserly with fuel.

Just look, above, at the little Opel vehicle I rented during my last visit to The Netherlands - Opel is German General Motors, and Opel has a bunch of excellent cars that could have been introduced here aeons ago. Check out what they make at their German website. And note that the grapevine has it that GM wants to sell Opel - umm, run that by me again? A company run by German engineers, which make the types of cars that we import wholesale from other German companies, like BMW, Mercedes, Audi, and Porsche? Well integrated into the GM framework - and you're going to sell that?

Lastly, I wanted to show you one of the floral tributes to British TV queen Jade Goody, who was interred today, after losing her battle with cancer. She famously once didn't quite know what to make of the name "East Anglia", the Easternmost region of England, and she wondered, on camera, whether "East Angular" was abroad. Eventually, her blue collar gaffes came to endear her to the British public, as this floral tribute from her funeral cortège proves.

Washington, D.C., March 23, 2009 - Mrs. Bill Clinton gets into the act.

"The United States Government is behind nearly everybody, except in certain discrete areas, in terms of technology," Secretary Clinton told State Department employees at a town hall meeting in February. "We are, in my view, wasting time, wasting money, wasting opportunities, because we are not prepared to communicate effectively with what is out there in the business world and the private world."

In fact, it goes beyond that, way beyond. Think back to the Clinton administration, to the dotcom boom that occurred between 1996 and 2000, when computer and telecommunications technologies fueled significant money market growth, due to the expectations created by the super-imposition of the world wide web on the internet. This evolved out of Arpanet, getting its major boost from a bill introduced by Senator Albert Gore in 1991, followed by the 1993 release of the world's first generally available browser, Mosaic. Not surprisingly, in terms of timing, 1991 also saw the introduction of GSM, the digital cellular portable telephony system that would, in three short years, take over mobile telephony in much of the world outside of the United States, and eventually replace wireline telephony in the developing world. Beginning in 1995, it began making inroads into the United States as well, provided by Sprint in their Washington - Baltimore cellular network - eventually, AT&T Wireless converted its network to GSM, while German carrier T-Mobile bought the GSM networks in the United States AT&T did not already own.

It was during the Clinton administration, not least because of the active involvement of (by then) Vice President Gore, that development of applications and interfaces for the internet began taking shape. Both telecommunications providers and computer manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon, assisted by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which, amongst others, allowed traditional phone companies with their deep pockets to create advanced technology subsidiaries to exploit the potential of the new carriage medium, followed by permission for the cable TV companies to offer telephony services.

The dotcom boom came to a close in 2001, when manufacturers and providers finally realized that the general public was not prepared to pay for some 80% of the services and products they had developed. Soon, cellular telephony followed suit, realizing profits in the advanced core markets for services that could be provided using advanced cellular PDA devices, but requiring vast investments in third world markets, where the general population can only afford very minimal services and equipment.

Mrs. Clinton's argument is best illustrated by the limited use she and President Obama can make of their Blackberrys. Every CEO in the entire world, and most heads of state in the Western world, use PDAs or intelligent handsets, but the American security services have limited the use of these devices within the U.S. administration. Contrary to belief, this isn't because the devices cannot be made secure - secure PDA communications are used the world over - but because the U.S. government technology divisions do not have a good handle on the technology. Any senior technologist in the industry, yours truly included, can put together a team of engineers, developers and manufacturers tomorrow, capable of making wireless communications within the Administration fully secure, but this would mean that quite a few of the security divisions within the Federal government would have to be dismantled, and their staff retrained, and there is a civil service layer that actively prevents this.

Why is this important? It is simple: a government unit that would produce secure wireless communications could give rise to an industry, there is after all great demand for equipment and services that cannot be hacked, or used by the criminals that populate the internet today. To create that security, however, there would have to be cooperation among manufacturers, and between at least the governments in the Western hemisphere, and that cooperation can't happen today. The people and institutions involved simply are not eligible for the advanced security clearances they would need to have, clearances that at this point in time prevent the U.S. government from using the most advanced technologies available. Especially since 9/11, it is almost impossible to get the higest level of clearance unless you are American born, have been a member of the Armed Forces or one of the security services - basically, if you're not a white fourth generation American male from Wisconsin, who joined the U.S. Air Force out of college, then retired to McDonnell Douglas, you're going to have a hard time getting clearance to work on the stuff America needs. Similarly, if your company is headquartered in Paris, your technology isn't going to be adopted by the United States, as there is significant xenophobia in the industry here - again, if your company is American owned and headquarted in South Dakota, you have a good chance of getting mediocre technology into the Fed. If it isn't, it does not matter how advanced your technology is.

It is exactly what happened during the dotcom boom, new applications for the internet technology, itself not hugely novel, but a buildout of facilities that had existed in laboratories since the mid-1960s, were created and rolled out by the dozen. And even though the boom went bust when consumers were unwilling to pay for the new inventions, many of those were eventually introduced later "via the back door", when funds for development were found in economies of scale, automation, and the transfer of data entry from enterprises to the consumer. To some extent, today's recession is caused by inadequate adjustment of our economies to the new technologies - manufacturing of consumer products moving to the Far East, without our actively supporting this development, in-house information processing moving to the internet, without dismantling the relevant departments, and retraining their staff. Keeping a factory going, in the face of its Chinese competition demolishing its sales, could have been made unnecessary by selling that factory to the Chinese, in time, and taking the proceeds to create new employment for its workers, in a field where we have little competition.

Spotsylvania, March 21, 2009 - Big Sister

At the end, she had wanted her sons to visit her one last time, on Mother's Day. She did not quite make it there.

RIP Jade Goody - June 5, 1981 - March 21, 2009.

Spotsylvania, March 17, 2009 - And the rest.

It is perhaps part of the natural progression of things that TV has gone to a technological stage where High Definition imagery now forms the core of the experience. For some time now, "regular" television viewing has been migrating to the internet, and in some places even to wireless telephony. By "regular" I mean the kind of TV that provides information, news flashes, perhaps some popular shows like daytime soaps, cooking shows, and the like. This is rapidly becoming untethered television, in much the same way as telephony has become untethered, if you consider that even I have relinquished my landline in favour of a semi-portable wireless technology called UMA, which lets me use my cellular line at home as a landline, and on the road as a hybrid cellphone/wi-fi phone.

At home, then, television truly becomes the home theatre, where you can now watch shows, games, movies, informative programming in cinematic quality with cinematic surround sound. All other "family room" functions we associate with the home have been personalized, to the point where we all have our own wireless number, and IP address, which together allow us to access entertainment and information streams meant for us specifically. Society, facilitated by technology, is undergoing massive change - food technology has made it possible for the individual to get food at competitive prices without having to resort to the home kitchen.

Food technology in itself is interesting, in its development - fast food need not be unhealthy, but the big chains have built the "addiction factor" into the food more or less from day one. I find myself popping into MacDonalds occasionally, even though I am a good cook, with a fully equipped kitchen, who likes to cook. Even so, I eat frozen food on a regular basis - the quality of the frozen prepared "bulk" dinners you can get at outlets like Costco, Sam's Club and BJ's is excellent, and I can't cook for less that what it costs, it is significantly cheaper than the frozen dinners you get at the supermarket.

Communications technology lets us be in touch with others from our "nest" whenever we choose, and more importantly, wherever we choose. Skype, for instance, works seamlessly with my T-Mobile cellular service to connect me with family and friends across the world, at a flat rate I pay once a year. My laptop connects, again using the T-Mobile network, seamlessly with the internet, wherever I am in the world. An additional feature now found in many cellular phones, GPS, can localize my position in the world, and provide me with information about where I am - you can do the same thing with your laptop by buying a GPS antenna, which I think now costs around $50, and a mapping application. I actually drove around Germany with that, using my 11 inch Everex laptop, before I picked up the Nokia Navigator 6110 in the Philippines.

Gotta get on with my taxes, they're the reason I haven't been updating as often as I'd like. Back with you in a little while...

Spotsylvania, March 6, 2009 - HD - And Now: The Conclusion. Well, almost.

OK, I give up, I'm over. If you like watching television - series, or the odd movie - you've gotta get HD. I am just watching "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" - not fare I would normally spend a couple of hours on, unless it can't be helped, like in flight - and I have to tell you this is more home theatre than anything I had before. What I had before was pretty good, but getting every series, every movie, in movie quality video with Dolby 5.1 sound is totally something else. What I had before, DVD quality video, with Dolby when available, was beauteous, but getting Law & Order and Star Trek TNG in HD/Dolby (did you know they shot Star Trek TNG in Dolby 5.1?), not to mention Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek Enterprise, it blows me away. Woof.

I ended up getting more HDMI cables, of course, as each of my HD units has to have a direct connection to the display - I note that newer displays have multiple connectors - and an Atlona HDMI switcher solved that problem, dandy, because it comes with a remote. This switch (the Atlona AT-HD41D) solved one problem for me - my display has DVI, not HDMI, and that means I have to get the Dolby audio to my decoder/amplifier using optical or coax (SPDIF), and this particular Atlona box switches SPDIF and optical along with the HDMI.

I have to tell you that I still don't understand how somebody without an advanced degree is supposed to make all this stuff work, since there is no standardization of any kind among components of different manufacturers. And remember that if you start watching movies on Blu-Ray you may end up with a DTS 7+1 (eight audio channels, as opposed to the six Dolby 5.1 has) sound track - to be honest, I've set up my decoder for 5.1, and have foregone the additional three audio channels, even though I have the speakers for them, and my Kenwood 1200 (!!) watt decoder amplifier will handle 7+1.

You have no idea what 1200 watts of multi-channel surround sounds like, or should I say "feels like", it thunders, the 2 woofers and 1 subwoofer (with its own 350 watt amplifier) actually vibrate the floor - I actually had to replace all of my speakers after I upgraded my original JVC 5.1 decoder/amplifier to this Kenwood, the speakers I had just couldn't handle the sound pressure - when I cranked up the amplifier its protective circuitry would kick in at around 85%. Installing main front speakers with one woofer, one tweeter and five midrange speakers each solved the problem. I vaguely recall a 150 watt amplifier was huuuge, when I was in my teens, but 1200... I don't know that I could crank this baby up the way I do if I were still living in suburbia. I do know that if I put the speakers out on the deck you'd be able to hear the audio over a mile away.

I'll give you the lineup of equipment I use to get my HD from source to screen and speakers, but bear in mind that I went way past first base. I output HD from cable, HD (Blu-Ray) from disk, and output from a DVR you don't have, the Philips DVDR 9000H. This box has a tuner that can only be used in Europe, parts of Asia and parts of Africa, but it will accept S-Video quality input from other components, as well as (and this is special) Dolby 5.1 audio. It is the only consumer DVR that I know of that has a digital sound (SPDIF) input. I had to cart it back here from Singapore, but it was worth it, as once it has a program on its hard disk it can copy that to the built in DVD writer, which will handle DL DVD's, double layer, double length. Now while that is major cool, you don't need that component.

Another something I am doing is downloading or copying video clips, and stitching them together onto DVD. I do this not only with other people's clips I want to retain, but my own bits of video, as well. DVD is a nice archival medium, and makes it easy to watch things in one stream. The Corel Videostudio software I bought (I had an OEM version, so only needed a $50 upgrade) does a good job of seamlessly joining clips in the right order, none of the other software I have would recognize all of the file formats, recognize Blu-Ray disks (I am not yet using those, but will, in the near future, so it has to work), either software I received (Cyberlink, which came with the BD drive) or software I bought (Roxio Media Creator). Even when you go to the various websites the information about what a certain package cannot do isn't there. That is a pain.

In short, my favourite bits of HD equipment are the Tivo HD (and remember I tried both the DirecTV and the Dishnet offerings, earlier) and the Lenovo 3000 laptop. The Lenovo particularly pleases me. The time is long over that you were best off buying a powerful PC, and then try to do everything with it - especially if you were getting into the problem of having multiple family members use it. If you can buy a laptop for somewhere between $400 and $600 ($399, but add extra memory, an interface card, and a Dolby encoder) that handles the particular function of playing Blu-Ray disks, playing and writing movie DVDs and audio CDs, and writing and reading data disks in all those formats, you're much better off, and it doesn't have to have Microsoft Office or anything else that you don't need for that function. I have dedicated laptops for all sorts of purposes now - the aforementioned Lenovo for multimedia, another Lenovo for everyday stuff, webpage authoring, email, dating sites etc, and a small (11.5" screen) Everex laptop for travel. Like this, nothing breaks, if the Everex goes south while I am traveling I can jump straight on my home Lenovo (I actually blew up the Everex' forerunner, an Averatec, in London), and generally, if you know how to do such things you can configure Windows appropriately for the tasks the machine runs. And it is not actually that expensive, because I've been buying laptops cheaply, from $699 three years ago, to $399 now, you do not need the expensive units, two cheapies is better!

More later in the week, folks, gotta do laundry now...

Spotsylvania, March 3, 2009 - The Dow, or Another Tuesday.

Oh good, the Dow is up. At some point it has to reverse course - for a moment, I thought the election and installation of President Obama was turning the tide, but then I guess the investor realized that just him getting to where he wanted to go wasn't an immediate solution. That, combined with the negative noises Republicans are making - this won't work, that won't work.. Guys, your free market economy became a freefall economy, so please take a hike with the advice already. Partisan you may be, but anybody who does not understand that any political movement that thinks Rush Limbaugh is a poster boy for anything other than excess has a screw loose. He is feeding on you, not the other way around.

I am certainly no longer the bleedin' liberal that moved from Europe to America - you can't own guns and gas guzzling sportscars, take the rivers of money the American economy has to offer, live in the South, and say you're a socialist. Right? And we were all in this together, we went out on our fancy boards, and rode the waves until we smacked into the beach - hard. Those of us that made it in, that is, and didn't become a snack for a shark along the way.

Nice metaphor, that, if I say so myself.

I don't even want to think what the lives of folks who lost their jobs are like, right now. Most will have their savings linked to the stock market, so those are evaporating just as their income is, and living cheaply in this country is an anomaly. The heavy emphasis on home ownership has made most of us dependent on real estate for part of our savings, and the value of that has dwindled aling with everything else.

Perhaps more telling than anything else are the car dealerships, right now. In the past week I needed to have a State inspection done on my Camaro, and then my Durango sprung an emissions warning light on me, so I took that in. Both the Chevy and Dodge repair departments were empty - when is the last time you brought in your car at 11am, and had it seen to straight away? Or have an emissions inspection done, have that taken care of straight away, have the service manager escort you to your car afterwards - that's usually "she's parked out front, Sir" - and get a friendly smiley sendoff? These people have just about nothing to do, I've never seen them this empty on a weekday.

Something similar happened the other day at my dentist's, a dental office in downtown Washington, where I asked the assistant how they were doing, businesswise. She answered, much to my surprise: "You patients rock!", which took me aback a bit, but apparently even in D.C. the civil servants are cutting back, though I am not aware of any layoffs in the Federal Government. I would have thought that most of their patients have dental insurance, like I do, but I guess folks are being cautious even with the copays, and perhaps not having those expensive restoration jobs done. I am having several crowns replaced, but I am assuming my dentist was right, in that some are really old, I had one come off not too long ago, and another that needed a root canal. Owell. For as long as I have it, they're welcome to it. Wal-Mart still reports an increase in sales, I'll bet they never thought a recession would be good for them..

Spotsylvania, March 1, 2009 - HD - putting it all together.

I had not paid too much attention at the various HD implementations, as I don't watch enough programming available in HD to make it worth my while. That's what I thought, anyway.

The DirecTV DVR whose service I retired, recently, has an HDMI jack - the DVR is HD capable, but I did not subscribe to that service (DirecTV attempted several times to charge me for HD service "because you have an HD DVR"), the projector I use to do most of my TV viewing isn't HD capable. By the way, please note that if your equipment does not have HDMI connections, you won't be able to watch HD in its high resolution, and you may not be able to hear audio on broadcasts and disks at all! Then when I switched to cable and bought a TiVo, I got the basic HD model, as that has all sorts of bells and whistles the base model does not, and is still reasonably priced - besides, the lowest tier service Comcast offers includes HD channels.

One thing I do like is that the HD broadcast and cable standards include Dolby 5.1, multichannel surround sound. What I did find problematical is that you have to jump through hoops to connect a computer in the lineup of HD equipment, a device you need if you want to write HD disks in the Blu-Ray standard, as well as play them. If you read the specs, you would need to custom build such a machine. Needed, I should say, because that picture changed in the past few months.

Where a few weeks ago the cheapest laptop featuring an HDMI port showed up at around $650 (a Hewlett Packard I saw at the BJ's membership store chain), last week I discovered a Lenovo 3000 laptop at Tiger Direct, featuring the same at $399. Now I hardly need a new computer - I already have two more than I really need, plus the IBM Thinkpad laptop that will work fine once I replace the fan - but when looking at the specs for this unit I thought I could make this work with HD and Blu-Ray. If you are thinking about going full HD, or even if you will likely switch from DVD to Blu-Ray sometime in the future, read on. The solution I created will give you HD, Blu-Ray as well as a full implementation of the Microsoft Media Server software. You will be able to put together cable/satellite with Blu-Ray/DVD/CD and central online media (video, photography and audio) distribution to your own entertainment center, and you will be able to do so at a reasonable price.

To begin with, there is the Lenovo 3000 N500. As I found out, there are actually multiple models of this laptop, with different processors, different graphics chipsets, etc. The one you want is the 4233-52U - it comes with (to mention the important parts) an advanced Intel graphics chipset, the 45M(obile) Express, and an external HDMI port integrated with both graphics and audio chipsets. The one thing it does not have is an external eSATA disk port - the eSATA drive connection standard has superseded the IDE standard, and has a maxumum throughput of 3 gigabits/second (you should pay attention here - whenever throughput speeds are indicated, those are in kilobits, megabits, and gigabits. They're often quoted as BYTES - they're not, it takes 8 bits to make up one byte). If you are thinking of using a USB port to connect a Blu-Ray burner or drive, don't - it is not fast enough - you really need the minimum 1.5 gigabits/second only eSATA can give you. Even if you could get a USB port to run at that speed, USB ports share one bandwidth - the more devices you have hooked up to USB, the slower they all get.

What I discovered is that the 4233-52U has an expanded graphics capability - if you install 4 gigabytes of RAM (two modules) in the machine, you'll end up with about 3 megabytes of usable memory, and 1.3 megabytes of video ram. Here again, if you're thinking you're going to display Blu-ray movies with a standard graphics chipset, say with 256 megabytes of graphics memory, it won't run - the combination of Blu-ray's high resolution and the fact that it displays a moving picture, i.e., rewrites the screen 50 or 60 times a second, technically able to smoothly display 30 different high resolution frames per second, means that you have to have a fast graphics processor with a good amount of memory dedicated to it - that is a heck of a lot of data you are pumping out of the graphics port. HDMI (and its forerunner, DV, which does not transport audio) have the ability to use HDCP, a form of digital copy protection that ensures the video/audio output only go where they are supposed to, and can only be used if there is a DVI or HDMI connection between player and screen - neither a Blu-ray disk nor a Tivo DVR will output high definition video and Dolby or DTS audio if HDCP is not active in the link. The current Intel architecture, under Microsoft Windows, cannot support more than 3.2 megabytes of memory, but as it turns out this chipset can allocate the remainder to graphics use. For graphical applications, and HD video is one, that actually makes this machine fly - all of the graphical processing is "offloaded", done by the graphics processor, leaving your main CPU (a 2 megaherz Celeron) to do other stuff. My only gripe is that this 3000 has a large (160 GB) but slowish hard drive - 5400 rpm, rather than 7200. It is understandable, considering they made this thing cheap. Little is understood that Windows runs significantly faster when it has a large harddrive, and faster still when that drive is fast, as well. This has something to do with the way Windows handles memory - it uses a swapfile on the disk to offload bits of code it temporarily doesn't need, and there is a memory cache as well. These facilities are maintained whether they are in use or not, and so size and speed of the disk have more effect on machine speed than memory and processor.

But this 3000 is plenty fast - and what I discovered after fiddling endlessly with the Cyberlink PowerDVD playback software (when you run it for the first time, it will want to update itself online - don't do that, when I ran the update it stopped working altogether, wouldn't even start, and as it comes it works just fine!) that comes with the Buffalo drive, is that the combination of the Lenovo 3000 N500 4233-52U with the Buffalo BR-816SU2 Blu-Ray burner, connected using eSATA via an eSATA II Expresscard Raid made by SIIG. One reason to buy this particular Lenovo laptop is that it has a PC Express bus, the successor to the "PCMCIA slot" - it is faster and has more bandwidth, but more importantly, there are very few eSATA cards for the older bus, and those that do exist are slow. The SIIG card has a nominal throughput of 1.5 gigabits per second, which is actually more than the Lenovo's bus can handle. You don't need a RAID eSATA interface card, but I use it as a backup for the RAID card in my server - if that dies, I can still access the data on the disks.

Before I forget, the Lenovo comes with Windows Vista Home Basic - the most heavily crippled version of them all. In order to have Windows Media Center and full networking capabilities, you will need to get an upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate.

Long story short, the assembly as I outlined it here will play Blu-Ray disks at full resolution (1080p) with full digital (5.1) Dolby, at full speed, without hiccups. I should add that the the Dolby audio needs its own output processor - I have used the (obsolete, but I had it sitting around) 24 bit Creative Labs Soundblaster USB, which works well and outputs Dolby 5.1 up to 96 kHz digital audio via SPDIF to a Dolby decoder. Oops - it is still being sold, shows up in Amazon.com. That this cheap laptop has such powerful features is a boon if you're wanting to put an affordable media center together, to work with your cable or satellite receiver and your HD television.

I am saying affordable, because once you're done, you've spent a fair packet of money, what with HDMI and eSATA cables costing $30 or $40 a pop, and the Buffalo drive going for over $300. Whether you really need a burner I'll leave to you to decide, just be aware that a single writable Blu-Ray disk (BD) holds 25 gigabytes (there are 50 gigabyte versions as well), and will set you back $18. Having said that, a standalone Blu-Ray player costs the same kind of money, and won't write anything - the Buffalo drive is very fast writing CDs and DVDs, especially using the eSATA interface (a DVD in my setup writes out at 22 megabytes/second, or 45 seconds for a gigabyte - that is quick).

It is quite possibly a function of the recession that there are such tremendous deals around - if you think you may have a need for some of this cheap gear, and you can afford it, I would suggest you stock up. A couple of years from now the technology will not have changed tremendously, processor speeds for laptops are restricted by cooling capabilities, and I am not seeing other restrictions, such as memory constraints, or even Microsoft Windows, change a whole lot. Windows 7, which is now in beta, I have running on three machines - it is nice, sophisticated, but not hugely changed - for the new Lenovo I had to reinstall Vista, you can't back Windows 7 out, and some software does not recognize "7" as a form of Windows - don't install it on a production machine!.

In my next installment I'll bore you a little about the software you need, and some other issues you need to consider if you want to make good use of your new toys.

Spotsylvania, February 25, 2009 - Cybermoving, and another airliner - "it looks like we lost an aircraft".

I apologize for not posting updates, recently, I have finally taken the plunge and moved my website to a Network Solutions server. Last year, Freeservers, the hoster I used, "broke" my blog by initializing the SQL database - something that in a normal commercial business would be a firing offense. Worse, despite promises, they did not retrieve a backup of the server on which it ran.

Recently, I had an opportunity to look at the hosting offered by Network Solutions, and its implementation of Wordpress, the popular blog engine, and I was pleasantly surprised - a professional and trasnparent user interface, backup and maintenance capabilities that do not involve esoteric UNIX commands (I am really rusty) and arcane PERL and SQL stuff, but an easy to use programming environment. It isn't that I don't remember how to do programming, I feel that if you offer an environment to the user, it needs to be reasonably easy to use - learning curve is fine, having to get my PERL manuals out is - well, out.

I was particularly pleased to find that Network Solutions' support staff is US-based, and knowledgeable. I don't like saying what I am going to say, but the support people Freeservers uses, in India, speak good English, but have no basic training in American IT jargon, and they are not enabled to make changes - all they can do is email the programming staff in California. I see more and more companies come back from using Indian and Filipino call centres - yes, the staff speaks English, but the cultural understanding is missing to the point that this support is unworkable. I recall having to change a hotel booking in India, and getting a Filipino Expedia support person on the line, who then had to call Mumbai in India to effect the change. The call took half an hour, and was mostly comprised of misunderstandings between the three brands of English we all spoke.

Anyway, although you will at this point not notice a change, I have moved my files and pages over to a Network Solutions server. Network Solutions is one of the very early organizers of what you know today as the internet - I have, in the various positions I have held with Verizon and its predecessor companies Bell Atlantic and NYNEX, worked with these folks in the establishment of some of our nationwide networks and server parks. Moving to Network Solutions, for me, is then kind of a homecoming, and I have to say that what they offer today is professional, and at a competitive price, and has all the tools you might want included, from search engine submission to advanced HTML editors.

I will soon move my blog to the nice Wordpress implementation Network Solution offers - they especially have done a good job in implementing some of the administrative controls, and have excellent network and server security. Hopefully I'll have finished customizing the Wordpress format the way I'd like to run it, and will then return to my regular updates. Patience, please, and I thank you for your understanding.

As I sit here I am watching the coverage of the Turkish Airlines crash in Amsterdam, where a Boeing 737-800 apparently stalled just short of the runway it was trying to land on, possibly through loss of thrust. A senior investigator at the scene mentioned that there is virtually no crash track, that the aircraft cleared trees close to where it crashed, and that it looked like the aircraft "fell out of the sky like a brick" from minimal height. From what I hear on Dutch public television, the pilots managed to put the airliner down with substantial damage, but no fire, and minimal loss of life. Nine deceased, and that includes both pilots. They may well have sacrificed themselves to save their passengers - crashing in fallow agricultural land, with most of its fuel used up, they managed to avoid fire, this could have been a lot worse. What can I say.

Spotsylvania, February 18, 2009 - Tivo - the business

The top picture is HD, the bottom one regular (analog) cable SD. Ignore the moiré, that is a photographic artifact. If you have satellite service, your regular image quality is digital, and a bit better than cable SD.

I don't know if you've ever had an email from your DVR, but I just got one. When you program your Tivo to record a program, via the Tivo website, it sends you a message to your email address when it has scheduled recording of your program. That is cute.

What else - ah, yes: you can download the Sports Illustrated swimsuit video for free. This isn't something that would get me to buy something, but I understand a lot of men like that sort of stuff. Me, I have spent so many years in fashion and theatre photography, the theatre and film production, that if I wanted a swimsuit issue I'd find a couple nice girls, fly them to a beach somewhere hot, and shoot it myself.

Of course, cute is not what this contraption is all about, and there is a lot to like about the Tivo HD. There is HD - this is not something I was really dying to get, because to have HD truly stand out, you need one of those very large panel displays that can handle 1080p, and that I have (barely) managed to stay away from. I do have a 32" LED panel HD display, and the HD picture looks absolutely stunning on that, although you only really see the gory detail if you sit a foot or so from the screen. I do most of my viewing using a TV projector, and that has a native resolution of 800x600, which is DVD resolution, and throws a good 60" (152 cm) image at 10 feet (this is over the 16:9 diagonal, which is how HD is broadcast, natively). It handles up to 1280x800, and looks pretty good for as long as you don't watch it from really close up. An HD capable projector, with a native 720p capability, today, will set you back some $835 (you can get a refurbished model from about $600). A projector that has 1080p native - start thinking at $3K.

I don't know what the take rate of DVRs is, but I think it is safe to assume they're pretty close to getting ubiquitous. And what Tivo set out to do, build the settop box that would be compatible with all or most services, has not happened - although they now supply their DVR concept to DirecTV and several cable companies, for inclusion into their own settop boxes, and the advent of the cablecard allows wide use of the Tivo, though the satellite services don't (and probably can't) use it, as there are no analog channels on satellite systems. There is a drawback in the cablecard Tivo vs. the cable company DVRs, in that the cablecard handles only one way traffic, so you cannot use video on demand services. Having said that, I am not seeing the difference - you pay the cable company for a VOD movie, or Amazon - Amazon says it has new movie releases online for download the same day the DVD is released, so that may well be a moot point. Come to think of it, having the Netflix and Amazon online libraries, combined with the cable TV lineup, could be a very powerful argument to take cable with Tivo service, as opposed to satellite - Dishnet and DirecTV don't come close to this powerful package. And it may well be that Tivo has finally reached the right price point - their basic HD box now costs between $250 and $300, they have a lifetime service deal that costs $399 (if you subscribe on a monthly basis you're out $12.95), and (in my case) basic HD service from Comcast, with unscrambled analog, local channels and the cablecard included, costs $54.20 per month. If you look at the total of the services you get for that, and a one time outlay of around $698, the list is quite impressive - although much of the interactive and external stuff will only work if you have the Tivo connected up to a reasonably fast Internet connection.

Then, I always like to have a spare so I don't lose service if my primary piece of gear conks out - shit does happen. That can be done cheaply - Surplus Computers (there are others, get details from the user base at the Tivo-run Tivo community forum system) has refurbished "Series 1" DVRs, the first type ever sold, and I got a Philips HDR (no HD, despite its model name) with 120 hours of S(tandard) D(efinition) storage capacity for $67.93, including shipping. In general, if you want to keep it cheap and cheerful, that is probably not a bad choice, and you can still order Tivo service for it, if you want (as I write this, I notice all of the Philips refurbished Tivo boxes have been taken off the website. Well, at least mine is on the way).

Apart from SD and HD cable TV, you get access to the Netflix online movie library, the Amazon.com online movie library, and the substantial lineup of free Internet radio available from Live365.com. There is other stuff as well, but these are the main providers. Last but not least, the Tivo lets you convert and copy movies and other media to a PC or laptop, and to a portable device, such as an iPod.

Unlike any other service I have used, the Tivo effectively is an entertainment center, but one that only gets to its full potential if you complete it with some more "stuff": an external hard disk for the Tivo (I just bought one for $120), and in order to fully appreciate the programming you really need a large HD flat panel TV (by "large" I suggest you look at 47 inches and up, and one that handles 1080i natively), as well as a Dolby capable sound system, the type that is sold as "home theatre". You can go cheap, and pick one up at Wal-Mart or BestBuy, or online, for $300, or you can go the distance, and put your own high end Dolby 7.1 system together. That (and this is the problem) requires a fair amount of knowledge, you need to learn how to program the amplifier, which requires all manner of adjustments for each channel, and each speaker. Then, of course, you end up with audio that is totally devastating - one thing that is not understood that you need to make sure you can play DVDs, but music CDs as well, over the system. I read somewhere that the Tivo is great, amongst others, because you can listen to Internet radio on your TV with it, that was written by a reviewer who wasn't getting it.

But: it took me two months to get it right, aiming for perfection I replaced three of the seven loudspeakers as I was setting the system up, and I think I had no change from $10,000. No kidding, you read it right, 10 big ones. And you are spoiled for life, because you will never watch a movie in the cinema, or on a television set, again. On a Dolby system, with Prologic enabled, your CDs will sound awesome too, even music you really don't like becomes palatable, there is absolutely no comparison with stereo, due to the clever audio processing most surround sound systems can do.

Spotsylvania, February 15, 2009 - Tivo Rocks!

I am forever being accused of being the gadget man, and I tend to protest I really only buy the technologies that I actually need. So I never switched to Tivo, which most of my technology peers seem to own and rave about, although I had (actually, still have) what was probably the first DVR, a JVC digital tape recorder sold by Dish Network, able to tape up to six hours of programming on a single digital tape (D-VHS, althoug S-VHS worked fine, too), programmable from DishNet's onscreen TV guide.

For the past few years, I've had DVRs, first a DishNet PVR, then, when I switched to DirecTV, which my employer Verizon has a marketing deal with, DirecTV's own HD DVR, a serviceable piece of equipment, with a massive hard disk. Most importantly, being the bleedin' liberal that I am, I bought all three of these recorders, I don't permit providers to have their equipment in my home. Recently, I wanted to switch to cable (DirecTV messed me up bigtime) - not that much of a stretch, I have Comcast Internet service anyway, so I looked at their equipment offerings - and discovered that Comcast lease their DVRs, pretty much like everybody else does, and I did not want lease equipment. I think DishNet no longer sells any equipment, while DirecTV does have a couple of DVRs you can get through retailers, like BestBuy. Shopping around, however, I realized that there is a Tivo DVR compatible with a number of cable service providers, including Comcast, using something called a "cablecard" - a decoder / security device you insert in a slot in the Tivo. Same as the DirecTV HR20 I was using, the Tivo HD has an ATSC tuner built in as well, so it can receive and record off-air digital television.

So far so good, the Tivo is a little more expensive, and that is before you subscribe to the Tivo service, which you have to buy or the box doesn't work. It provides full TV scheduling, cable as well as off-air, which I understand from reviews is superior to other DVRs - I can't confirm that, because Larry the Cableguy doesn't get here until Monday. Pleasantly, and novel to me, Comcast quotes a price that includes everything - local channels (which the law allows them to charge $5 for) - and the cablecard. Like on the DirecTV DVR, you can access the Tivo TV schedules on the Internet, and, provided your DVR is connected to the Internet, will let you set programs to record right from their website - in Tivo's case, you go to the Tivo website, register your Tivo, and you can then send program recording commands to your box right from the TV schedule, which "knows" what is available from your cable company in your area. DirecTV has been offering this too, that I know of.

But that is where the comparison stops. The Tivo can do way more than any other DVR can. I had read about what they are working on, but only now that I am sitting here playing with it does it really hit me - it is here, and it works. I am so used to seeing features announced that, when you buy the equipment, are available "real soon now" or "any day now", but in the case of the Tivo HD, it looks like they are all there. The only thing I was unable to do is use the eSATA port to connect an external hard disk. From reading the extensive Tivo support forum, there are a few drives that will work on this port out of the box, but my Seagate did not, and would require removing the built in hard drive, connecting that and the external drive up to a PC, simultaneously, and running a Tivo utility on them. Surprising, because when I connected the Seagate, and ran disk tests, it came up with the device installed (/dev/whatever, the box uses Linux for its operating system), which means it had mounted it, and would even run tests on it, but would not recognize it as available space. So, I ended up going to Newegg and ordering the Western Digital "My DVR EXpander" 500GB external eSATA drive, which is certified for use with the Tivo. Expensive it is not, so we'll see how that works.

Anyway, back to the features. First of all, you can download a free Windows application that will let you store Tivo recordings on a PC - very dandy, if you have a massive 1.5 terabyte eSATA RAID server setup, like I do. The application, Tivo Desktop, has another capability: it lets you view and play media from your PC via your Tivo, like pictures, MP3 audio, and, if you shell out $25 for the "Plus" version of the software, all manner of video files. Much to my surprise Nikon's NEF format, a raw format used in Nikon's range of single lens reflex camera's, is supported. The main drawback of the Tivo HD, as opposed to its more expensive sister, the HD XL, is that it has limited hard disk space, and will only store 20 hours of HD programming. What I am hoping is that the Tivo Desktop will let me move programming off the box onto my storage server, if that is the case the 20 hour limitation is not that much of an issue. What I have discovered with my DirecTV DVR, which had 80 hours of storage space, is that you fill this space up quickly, and once your 80 hours is full you have to do a lot of sorting out to see what you will want to keep, and what can go. My storage server, in that respect, has more or less endless space - should the 1.5 terabytes fill up too far, I can simply add the two Seagate spares I have, for another 1.5 terabytes, the RAID software I use can actually span all four, and turn them into one volume (drive letter). If you want to know what equipment I used to put the server together, apart from an old Compaq Deskpro with Windows XP Pro, some of my product reviews at Amazon.com discuss this. Optical media turn out to be unreliable for long term storage, and data on a server can be moved to basically any other server in the future, on the web or at home.

But we're not done yet. I still occasionally buy DVDs, mostly programs that are rarely broadcast, or hard to get - the German version of Das Boot, for instance, or English comedy series that aren't sold here, but that I can pick up in Singapore or Hong Kong (I have multistandard DVR/DVD equipment, so I can handle all DVD regions) cheap. Arcane foreign stuff I often order from Amazon UK or Amazon Germany (totally cool, your American Amazon account will work with the overseas Amazon sites, as well, and DVDs mailed from England or Germany get to you within days). You've probably heard of DVD-via-mail renter Netflix, you maybe know they have a settop box too, now, that will download movies via the Internet, and I read somewhere that Amazon was working on something similar.

Well, long story short, there are thousands of movies and TV programs already available on Amazon.com that you can buy and have downloaded to your Tivo, I am thoroughly impressed. You go into your Amazon account, or your Tivo account, from either link the two accounts up, and then all you need to do is go into the Amazon movies section, select the program or movie you want to watch, pay for it (which is a one-click thing in Amazon - oops, actually, just selecting it rents or buys it, good thing it was a 99 cent episode), and a while later (I don't know yet how much later, but it is pretty quick if you have a "fast pipe") you can watch whatever you just bought. I noticed that some test things I downloaded began streaming to the Tivo within minutes. Amazon.com calls the service "video on demand", but that it is not. VOD generally is taken to be video you can begin watching immediately after you order it, and Amazon, who by the way sell online storage space, so have massive storage available for these products, does not push the videos out fast enough for you to be able to watch them as they come in. I don't find that a huge disadvantage - you can order a movie and go cook dinner, I'll test this for you over the next few days. The Tivo with the Tivo Desktop software is able to convert recorded programs to portable devices too, but as I am perfectly happy using a laptop, I have never felt tempted to watch a movie on the plane on my iPod - apart from which, I don't own an iPod. Granted, I have the capability to record stored movies during playback to a Philips DVR I picked up in Singapore. This records from S-Video ports as well as optical Dolby audio ports, and can then burn DVDs, so I can carry the movies or programs without "portable device".

I will let you know in a few days what the whole experience is like, how well it works, what the quality is like, but I am mightily impressed - and this is not in beta, it is a ready and working application. You can sit in your office, think you might want to watch a few episodes of "Battlestar Galactica" tonight, go online, order, and when you get home they are ready for you to watch.

Is this cool or what? And if you don't feel like shelling out $1.99 for an episode, or $6 for a movie, you can watch your own videos (and everybody else's), on Youtube, for free, on your big screen at home, 1080p. I mean, talk about a new toy.... woof!

Spotsylvania, February 12, 2009 - Another one bites the dust

Back in the Netherlands, right wing Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders will be banned from entering the UK, because, as the Home Office puts it, his "presence in the UK would pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society" - read the full text here.

Now I am not an ardent fan of Mr. Wilders, who is an outspoken opponent of Islam, to the point that he produced a film about radical Islam - I haven't actually seen the thing, but it is called "Fitna" and I am sure available on Youtube. It did not go down well in many Islamic countries. But at least one member of the British House of Lords (!), Lord Malcolm Pearson, saw fit to invite Mr. Wilders to show the film in Britain - where and who to I do not know.

I knew Britain as a country that valued the rights of the individual, and exercised free speech. But I guess that's all on its way out, now - the decision has been taken to make all Britons and residents of the UK carry a national ID, once anathema in Europe, because the Personalausweis was the tool the Nazis used in WWII to round up the Jews and the gypsies and the homosexuals and people with their hair parted on the left. And Wilders wasn't exactly invited by a group of football drooligans from Sheffield. Perhaps the British government has gotten a bit paranoid after the repeated bomb attacks by homegrown radical Islamists. I could understand that. I could understand that somebody from the Home Office might want to have a chat with Mr. Wilders, ask him to tone it down a bit, don't make waves, perhaps prescreen the movie.

But then I looked at the letter, and realized that it is actually rude. You see, it is common courtesy, especially between member countries of the European Union, to address each other's legislators properly. Mr. Wilders is, after all, an elected member of parliament, he represents a whole bunch of EU citizens. The Home Office, however, did not even find it necessary to address Mr. Wilders by his proper title - Geert Wilders, MP. The Home Office does have a little internal website that spells out those rules. One would assume the Secretary's secretary knows that. And sure, you may not like what somebody has to say, but if he is an elected motormouth from the country next door, should you not at least pretend to go through the motions? He does not like Islam - well, I have news for you, a lot of Britons don't, either. All I am saying is that I am surprised. That's not the Britain I used to live in. And with national IDs, enough CCTV cameras so you need curtains in your bathroom, even if it is on the tenth floor, and now barring people because of their expressed democratic views, I think the British need to slowly take a long hard look at the direction their government is taking them in.

Wilders may be an ass, but he says what he thinks publicly, and has made the effort to work on his society by becoming a legislator. Misguided he may be, a loose cannon he is not. And he is not preaching in a little mosque hidden somewhere on a fourth floor in an industrial estate, in a language nobody can understand. I really wonder what prompted the Home Secretary to be rude to a fellow European politician.. in Britain, these things do not happen accidentally. Part 2 of Fitna is here

The Land of Oz, February 11, 2009 - Thirsty koala down under

Amsterdam, February 9, 2009 - RIP Gary Christmas

Back in Amsterdam, my dear dear dear friend Gary Christmas has passed away (the announcement is in Dutch, sorry), at 78.

The flamboyant, vivacious, openly gay and inseparable "Christmas Twins", native American Indians, singers, dancers and actors, they were for many years shakin' booty at the core of the Amsterdam gay community. I will never forget that day when we were gathered for my sister's wedding, next door to the Twins' boutique, Backstage, and Gary and Gregory (Greg passed away 12 years ago) came up to give my sister her wedding dress, which Gary had crochet'd for her. Then, he turned around, and yelled right in front of our very conservative parents: "I'll be back in a minute, I have to go wash my pussy". We were mortified, but I don't think they got it, probably thought he was going to shampoo the cat.

Amsterdam won't be the same without you, Gary, and I am so sorry I heard this too late for me to be at your funeral, but there will be more people there than you knew you knew - and you knew a lot of people. I've sent my sister, a heart of flowers, and a pluche animal, to the crematorium, Gary, since you were an animal - that is why you lived in Amsterdam, where you could be you, that is why we loved you. I am glad you did not suffer, toots, but I am still sitting here bawling my eyes out. I always stop by the shop when I am in Amsterdam, so now I feel really bad I didn't in December.

The Youtube clip is in English, it is a slice of Amsterdam that I had to leave behind, when I came to America. The second half of the documentary is here.

Spotsylvania, VA, February 4, 2009 - More $aving$

Apart from the usage data I gave you on February 1 for the Haier washing machine, I owe you data on the NewAir portable heat pump I discussed on November 12, in my "Savings" rant. Measuring the unit I have in my living/dining area, installed there permanently in winter, over a 16 day period when nighttime temperatures routinely sank to 20° F (-6° C), with daytime temperatures normally around freezing, this 16 ton unit had a monthly averaged usage of $33.53.

To help you compare, the rated output of this model is 16,000 BTU, power consumption heating 9.5 amps, power consumption cooling 11 amps. You will note that this unit is "not in stock" - my assumption is that this is because it tends to overload a normal 15 amp household circuit. However, there is an AC-1400H, whose electrical specifications and physical design are exactly the same as mine, and I think it is safe to assume this will deliver what mine does.

Most Americans will not have a problem with heaters you can hear run - well insulated though they may be, there are two fans and a compressor in the unit - but if you like dead silence this isn't something you should get. I mentioned these are heat pumps, not electric heaters - they deliver far more calories per kilowatt hour than ordinary heaters do. Whether they will work for you is entirely a factor of how much you pay for electricity, oil, gas, or whatever fuel you use to heat your home - a kilowatt hour here in rural Virginia costs on average 8.06 cents.

Arlington, VA, February 1, 2009 - It is all in the mind

In a letter written to the British Daily Telegraph newspaper - which, by the way, is the only newspaper I know of that has a dedicated expatriate section - a British emigrant is complaining about the homesickness she feels in South Africa, the native country of her husband, who she followed there after living together in England for 20 years. And that made me think about what I actually did to not feel homesick, all these years on foreign shores.

I left the Netherlands for the UK in 1979, and, save for a return for medical care (the British NHS was well on its way to killing me with chemotherapy, and so I returned to the Netherlands for a second opinion, friend Carolyn, who lent me her apartment in Amsterdam, and my old doctors at the Rheumatism Centre saved my life)ave never been back. I moved to the United States, green card in hand, in 1985.

I have seen plenty of expatriates succumb to homesickness. And I can't say there is a clear pattern - a state of mind, or particular personality, but I did notice some pointers. You see, I believe that the majority of people who decide to go home, after a time abroad, are the folks who are inward looking. They're the ones forever comparing everything in their new environment with home, they're the ones who assume that the way they have always behaved is the right way, the people who did not make a conscious choice to go to a place, but whose choice made them move away from a place.

There is intrinsically nothing wrong with not wanting to be where you are. But if that is where you are at, it is important to know:

a: why you don't like where you are; and

b: what is better at the place you are going to.

Yes, you can go places in a search for a better place, but I don't classify that as migration, that is travel. In my case, I had already done much of the travel that helped me make up my mind about where to move to. And in my case, I had discovered that the Anglo-Saxon world had the privacy I so craved, a privacy that was a largely alien concept in The Netherlands and other continental European countries. And the closest Anglo-Saxon country was the United Kingdom - more of an island then than it is now, the U.K. had not joined the Common Market at the time, and British folks still referred to the continent as "Europe". The step from there to the United States, buy the way, wasn't a huge one - Americans would joke that when they flew to the U.K. via Ireland, when getting to Dublin they would be in Europe, then when arriving in London they'd be back in the USA.

So that, in my case, took care of the goal I had. It wasn't the only goal, though, I wanted a career, as well, and had not been successful in getting that going, in The Netherlands. But something that was abundantly clear to me, when I made my move, was that I had to discover my new home, embed in it, be wide open to it. In order to have that career, you need to compete with the natives, and you cannot compete with people you don't understand. And that is where I see many would-be expats fall flat on their ugly faces: they have no intrinsic interest in the culture and the society they're moving to. They think they can move somewhere and maintain their own culture. I was actually told, while working as a barman in the King's Head, a pub in Earl's Court, that I should not make so much of an effort to perfect my English, because it meant I was "losing my personality".

This is a much more interesting comment than may appear, at first glance. You see, I believe that language and culture are very much interwoven, they feed each other. Language doesn't develop in a vacuum, it is guided by the same principles that guide the development of the culture it is based in, and on. It isn't accidental that the Dutch language did not have a word for privacy, and eventually adopted the English word. It isn't accidental that English did have the word "privacy" - England had the concept, hence the word developed. Its first use in English was recorded in 1380 A.D., while its Latin root "privatus" already meant "belonging to oneself (not to the state)". And while the Dutch word "privé" (English: private (adj) - there is no Dutch translation for "privacy") is first recorded (as "priveye") even earlier, as far back as 1240 A.D., its meaning is that of "shithouse" or "bog" (English "privy").

I can happily sit here and give you a couple hundred more examples, but I hope I have made my point: language, culture, and to a large extent ethnicity are interwoven, they exist and evolve together. Having been brought up with the Queen's English, for instance, I treat, to this day, American English and British English as two separate languages. I went through the pain of moving here from England, and finding I had to change my use of the language, and change my vocabulary, to be understood. It is at first very strange to fall prey to what I like to call the "Monty Python Effect" - Americans totally love British English, they watch endless reruns of peculiarly British television series on PBS, English actors make it to the top in short order, in Hollywood, if you give a presentation and you speak British English the audience will be glued to your lips (I swear - I have used this effect on many occasions, in corporate America), but you will actually not be understood very well. You'll be the talk of the town if you liberally sprinkle "fortnight" and "aluminium" through your conversations - I am unable, to this day, to pronounce the word "laboratory" the way Americans do, by the time I remember how to say it the British version has already left my lips - but nobody will actually connect "fortnight" with its meaning - two weeks. And I don't even want to start on "next" and "this" - I will say "take this exit" while most Americans (but not all!) will say "take the next exit" - which, to me, is the second exit.

So I moved from a country with centralized registration - "registrar's office" - to a country that had no such thing. And I live today in a country that has no centralized registration of citizens. Europeans often make the mistake to think that our driver licenses amount to centralized registration, but that is a mistake. Individual states maintain registries of their citizens, and their right to drive motor vehicles, but there is no "burgerlijke stand" as we have it in The Netherlands, where all of your information (parents, their date and place of birth, your date and place of birth, spouse(s), children, past and present residences) is kept in one place, on one (virtual) index card - in the Netherlands, you can't even rent an apartment without such a card.. It is a punishable offence to not maintain that record - technically, I think I even have to report to the local "burgerlijke stand" if I spend more than three days in The Netherlands. I remember visiting my parents in Austria, where my father retired, and the local police dropping by the next day to remind my dad he had to register my visit with the Standesamt. Jawohl.

Things have changed a lot, since then, and this isn't a complaint, but you now hopefully understand that part of my reason for moving was my wanting to get away from Big Brother. Most Dutch thought this was perfectly normal and fine, but once I understood there were countries that did not do all this stuff - you did not even have to carry your driver license when driving, in England - I was hooked. The consequences of these types of people management are very visible in Eastern Germany, the former DDR. I was used, in the German Bundesrepublik, to filling out a police registration form, immediately upon arrival at a hotel - this is actually the practice in most European countries, and in China, where you even have to do this when staying at a friend's or relative's house. So, a couple of years ago, when I visited East Germany for the first time, I put my suitcases up into my hotel room, then went back downstairs to register. Sitting at the bar in the small village hotel, I ordered a beer, pulled out my passport and credit card, and asked the Gastwirt (owner/operator) for the registration form. He turned around, smiled, and said "Ah, don't worry about it".

Huh? In Germany? But as it turned out, the East Germans had had so much enough of the Big Brother state they had lived in, in the days of communism, they had skedaddled over completely to the other side, now that they were part of the free world. And in so doing, they are today showing a conviviality and hospitality largely lacking in the former West Germany. Service, too - in the East, at a motorway restaurant, a chef will come over to assist you while you are getting food from the self service bar - try that in the West. One time I was having a nightcap before the bar closed, chatting with the barman, and when I finished my drink and he didn't close up, I ordered another. What I am used to, in West Germany, is that the bar closes pünktlich at whatever the posted time is, right on the dot. And my assumption was that it would be the same here, Germany being Germany. But no such thing - when I had finished my second nightcap, I asked the barman what his closing time was, and he answered "When you leave". When I told the story to my East German friend in Beijing, at dinner during my last visit, she and her visiting brother fell off their chairs with laughter.

So, we make lots of cultural assumptions that aren't necessarily true, and culture is much more logical, and conforming to history, than one thinks. In French, when somebody thanks you, you'll say "de rien", which means "don't mention it" (literally "for nothing"). Not in Canada's Quebec province, however, whose citizens are fanatical about their French language and French culture. In Quebec, they say "vous êtes bienvenue", and that isn't French at all. It is the literal translation of the English "You're welcome"....

I think I will sew this argument up in a couple of days, time to get to some other stuff.

Here is the result of testing with the Haier HWD 1000 combination ventless washer/dryer, which I bought recently (see below, my January 9 blog entry).

Based on the current average cost of electricity in my region, $0.0806 (8 cents) per kilowatt hour, one wash in the Haier costs $0.1275 (13 cents). This is excluding the cost of hot water - for my European readers, American washing machines take hot as well as cold water, most of yours take just cold - which I find hard to calculate. If you assume that a front loading machine take a fifth (20%) of the water a top loader takes, you can calculate the energy savings there, simply as 80%. Take into account that the Haier is smaller than a "normal" front loader, it handles up to 11 lbs of laundry, where a "normal" front loader takes 20 lbs or more. Considering that this is a single unit combination washer/dryer, however, if you need that 20 lb capacity you can simply buy two HWD 1000's, and spend about the same that a full size washer/dryer combination (2 units) would cost you. And add there being no need for a vent, the HWD 1000 uses condensation technology to collect moisture from the laundry, and gets rid of the water and the heat down an ordinary drain.

Calculations for the above were made for five standard washes, a week's worth for me - 60% with full dry, 40% with partial dry, a mix of 70% coloured washes and 30% white, 70% washes with pre-wash, 30% without, 70% clothing, 30% linen.

There is one thing you need to take into account when viewing my calculations. Common wisdom (and EPA wisdom as well) has it that you need to set the temperature of your hot water to "middling", hot enough for a hot bath or shower, but no more. This is complete piflle and haberdashery.

You see, to begin with, heat loss from your hot water tank and hot water pipes is only existent in summer. Anytime you are using your heating, the lost heat of your hot water system ends up in your home, where it reduces the need for space heating - the same goes for light bulbs, which provide more heat than do CFL low energy bulbs. But more importantly, if you set your tank to deliver just enough hot water for the morning shower(s), you'll be heating water from cold after that. This is expensive, as heating elements are designed to deliver high temperatures, and are able to heat water from, say, 70 degrees to 100 degrees very quickly. They take much longer, proportionally, to heat water from cold (50 degrees) to warm (80 degrees). By all means test this out - run your tank at maximum temperature for a month, check the usage, then run it at "warm" for a month. This even goes for flow-through (tankless) water heaters, electric or gas driven - gas burners especially deliver several hundred degrees, and are inefficient when delivering moderate amounts of heat.

So there...

Arlington, VA, January 29, 2009 - Tammy's Flu

As you gets older, you make assumptions about what is state-of-the-art. Often, I will notice new developments while reading up on certain subjects, but it can happen that I miss something. Such was the case with influenza, the flu. I've closely followed research and discussions about this illness, especially since the common flu relates so closely to bird flu, the new(ish) version of influenza that appears to have crossed the animal/human border. I traveled to Asia Pacific not long after the major Chinese/Indonesian outbreak of bird flu, and so made sure that I knew what to look out for, and what to do if symptoms occurred.

A few days ago, I began to cough, spontaneously, and the next day I had some chills and developed muscle aches. I was not quite sure what to make of it, as I did not run a temperature, but called my doctor the next morning, anyway. My doctor's office, you see, has an early morning (8 to 8:45am) telephone surgery, during which time you can call in and ask for refills, make same day appointments for urgent matters, and talk to your doctor about concerns or complaints you have. These consultations are not covered by insurance - stupid, since they actually reduce the cost of care! - but, at $15, cost the same as my copay, so I still end up saving money (no 140 mile round trip, if I come from home).

I described my symptoms to the doctor, and he soon decided that it did not sound like the flu, but as I take immuno-suppressants, it would be prudent to make sure, and he asked me to come in that afternoon for a "flu swab". And that's the story: I did not know they actually have a flu test, used to ascertain with certainty whether an influenza virus is present. I would have thought not, going by grandma's wisdom that if you aren't running a temperature, you don't have the flu. And at a consistent 98.6 °F, I was not running a temperature.

The swap has to be taken in the nose within 48 hours of the onset of symptoms, after this period the presence of the virus is normally no longer detectable. And sure enough, a few minutes after a nurse had stuck an enormously ticklish cotton swab with a chemical in my nasal passages, my doctor stuck his head around the corner of the exam room I was in, and cheerfully announced "You are positive!". You don't think about this a lot, I suppose, but it is a measure of success for a doctor if he has prescribed the correct test, and figured out what is wrong. You may not get cheer out of the diagnosis, but he does.

So, another first, I am now taking Tamiflu - you recall, the medication that can incapacitate the influenza virus once it is in the body, and in so doing not only reduces the symptoms and reduces the duration of the illness, but more importantly, stops you spreading the virus. Here again, there was something I did not know: Tamiflu is only effective if taken within 48 hours of the onset of symptoms (I am assuming that equates to the 48 hours that the virus is active). So if the government is thinking about stockpiling Tamiflu to prevent a bird flu pandemic (this site is run by Hoffmann-La Roche, makers of Tamiflu) - humans being what they are, you don't stand a snowball's chance.

While in large parts of Asia it is common to see people wearing mouth masks, and Tamiflu is routinely prescribed in Japan to treat influenza, when is the last time you've seen a colleague or neighbour wearing one? Right, never. And there are plenty of people coughing all over the subway, Macy's, and the office. What that means is that the average flu sufferer won't see a doctor, or isolate themselves, until they are incapacitated - and as I now know, this year's influenza, at least in me, does not do that. So catching those who are infected within 48 hours would mean a huge amount of re-educating the public. And even then, those who have no health insurance won't call their doctor, because they mostly don't have one. And that means that a pandemic, in countries without a National Health Service, like the United States, is unavoidable. A sobering thought.

Spotsylvania, VA, January 26, 2009 - Another Windows?

Those of you who follow the market a bit will know Microsoft is readying a new version of Windows, now that Windows Vista is considered "mature". For those who are still believers in the reports that Vista is a disaster, it is not.

I should point out that, in my practice, I never use an operating system until it has been out at least a year. The first year (and that is valid for all flavours of Windows) there are just too many problems and issues, third party software not available, drivers not available, etc. This goes kind of across the board - Windows has never given vendors enough pre-release time, I understand, and vendors are complacent, as well.

But for the past few years, I have had no problem running Vista at all. I use it on all of my computers, save for one server, which runs Windows XP Pro, and it runs fine even on processors it was definitely not designed for, like the VIA 1.5 MHz Esther. The main problem with Vista has been that it has too many built-in security and safety features that the average user cannot turn off, making a new install of Vista almost unusable - it often won't allow you to install software, for instance. It is of course very safe to build the operating system in such a way that the consumer cannot use it, but kind of not quite what we got it for.

You may have noticed that Microsoft announced that a Beta Version of the successor to Windows Vista, Windows 7, will be made available to the public, and that is now indeed downloadable from a special website. Beta software, as opposed to Alpha software, is a release that is as good as complete, but needs to be tested, and Microsoft has finally seen the light, and understood that if you make it available to the end user, you will get the most useful feedback. So I downloaded it, and as my cheap-and-cheerful Everex PC with the VIA processor is not one that I really need (I can do what I do on there on any of my laptops), I upgraded the Windows Vista Ultimate version I had on there to Windows 7 Ultimate - this even though the Everex is, by Microsoft's admission, far from ideal for this pupose - it does not have a dual core processor, and no graphics chipset that can run the "new" graphics environment, Windows Aero. The Beta, by the way, can be downloaded unntil February 10, according to the latest update, and will run to August. By that time you either have to have a commercial version, or back out W7 (which will not be easy and I do not recommend). Downloading entails getting a 2.5 Gb file, which is an install image for DVD (i.e., if you do not have a DVD burner you're out of luck. If you do, most later versions of Windows will almost automatically create the disk, simply by highlighting the file and then clicking on "burn", DVD burner equipped PCs understand that a .iso file is a master image for a (bootable) data DVD.

I am happy to report it is running almost flawlessly (albeit that is an assessment after only four days). The only real problem I have had is that the W7 install does not install the printer driver, even though a networked Samsung CLX-3160FN had been installed under Vista. W7 would in fact not even detect the Samsung, which is not very good for a fully network aware operating system with access to UPNP - Universal Plug and Play, a protocol that lets networked devices recognize each other regardless of operating system, even across subnets and bridges.

But I was able to install the Samsung printer manually, by giving W7 its IP address, and it then worked flawlessly - Microsoft are going to have to work on this, though - its networking has never been stellar, in terms of ease of use and compatibility, and I would expect W7 to recognize anything from anyone, I will send them a report.

Don't do this at home, kids - don't install W7 on a computer that you need, and/or a computer with vital data. Instead, if you haven't yet, upgrade to Vista, because that works very much like W7, so it will let you get used to some things that are different. Once W7 is fully "exercised", say late in 2010, you can upgrade to it. One comment of note, for those who can dedicate an unvital PC to it: I ran the W7 upgrade - generally, running a clean install is the better way to go, because an upgrade of any operating system may cause it to inherit flaws, broken drivers, viruses, etc. But the upgrade ran beautifully, and I have so far, with the exception of the one printer driver, found nothing on that Everex that does not work. That includes convoluted graphics software, and a Java stock broker package, so that is good. Nice work, Mr. Ballmer, keep this up, open Microsoft up to the great unwashed, and keep listening to them, or they will all eventually move to Linux.

If you do download and install Windows 7, please make sure you get on the Microsoft W7 forums, and send copious feedback to Microsoft, make time for that, it isn't all that labour intensive. Gripe as we may about Microsoft, the company cannot fix flaws it is not aware of, and with thise Beta release "out there", we no longer have an excuse.

Arlington, VA, January 23, 2009 - Starbucks

"Have a great day!"

Door in hand already, she turns around, and walks back towards me, for no reason. "It is nice how relaxed it is here, so early".

The Starbucks on Lee Highway is unusual, in that it opens at five, and in the morning, there is a constant stream of law enforcement officers coming off shift, and on their way to work, in and out of uniform, as well as Federal security officers, this close to the Pentagon and Washington, D.C., they're the ones working the crazy hours.

Whenever I have early appointments in town, I always have breakfast here, coming off the HOV at 5:30am. There is a certain camaraderie among the early birds, everybody is civilized as though we are not in an urban area with six million inhabitants, and the largest agglomeration of military personnel on the face of the earth. Total strangers cheerfully say "Good morning!" in the parking lot outside the 24 hour Giant.

"I am only stopping in because I promised to get a friend to the airport" she says, pointing at the blue Toyota pickup with D.C. tags parked in the lot outside "they are open so early". My guess is she is on her way to Washington Dulles Airport, because National Airport is only a $10 cab ride away, hardly enough to see someone off. She is probably a local professional, although she does not come across as a Southern girl, early thirties, a mass of dark curly hair, the thick leather of her jacket unsuccessfully trying to hide her curves. "I have only started doing this since I moved here, and I have more time now that I don't work for the government any more". She isn't saying it, so I do, after 9/11 many of us moved away from New York, and began making a point of taking care of friends and family more. She nods consent.

She is standing right in front of me now, gabbing as if we have known each other for many years, she has to be coming on to me. I make the comparison with how I used to behave when I was still living up there, and then we suddenly both understand the connection, she is born and bred New York . "And I find it much more friendly here than elsewhere in the South", she says, "I lived and worked in Atlanta, Georgia, but that is horrible, that is just one enormous suburb, it has no soul to it". I agree with her, even the airport there is too large and sprawling "but here you have town and suburb all rolled into one".

We are completely in tune now, and she animatedly tells my story, more or less, coming to the D.C. area on assignment, finding the curious mix of metropolis and village, and liking it so much we stayed. I tell her how my boss in New York called me one day, after I had turned up the project he had sent me down here for, two years here, and said "You coming back?", and me saying "uh, maybe not".

I am beginning to think she is Jewish - rather than taking this as an anecdote, she actually connects with my story, except she probably told her parents she wouldn't be back to live. Bang went the matchmaking, the Jewish holidays, she is professional, has to be a lawyer, that fits, a professional Jewish gal that moved away from the mishpoche in Brooklyn after getting her degree. Casual, intellectual, easy gab, pickup truck (in D.C.!) - and then she talks about how she lives, buying houses, doing them up herself, divvying them up in apartments, then selling and starting all over again. "I do it myself, get a handyman for the professional stuff, sometimes my sister comes down to help me, the pickup is handy for Home Depot". "But I am more or less done with that now, it is beginning to be too much like work". Translation: I have made enough money, I am comfortable - she is a private practice lawyer, probably in a lobbyist's office, she has to be making a quarter million a year, before bonuses - but she is no WASP, doesn't have to advertise success, and we don't need to look the part here. There are four single women for every single man here in "WashMet".

She oozes "connection" now - that is what I miss most about Manhattan and London, the single Jewish professional girls. Easygoing, open, gift of the gab, one can converse without the sexual overtones, professional, intellectual, and if the connection is there the sex is easy, a recreational activity among friends, just like I was used to in Europe. I can imagine her up a ladder at her latest project, heavy boobs swaying, ass beckoning.

Problem is, I am not all that turned on at six in the morning, I am sitting there just wanting to go back to my paper and my coffee, maybe come back later. She is talking a mile, curvy chunky gesticulating body three feet from my eyes, open, bring it on. I am frequently amazed how many expatriate New Yorkers there are in Northern Virginia, urban living with a country twist - there, she says it "it is just too expensive to live up there, you get the feeling it goes as fast as it comes". "Yes", I smile "I don't miss the super at all". The connection is definitely there, not that I need the confirmation.

So I let her go, I am not even awake enough to find a pen and paper, jot down my email, it seems corny this morning. She is on the way to get her friend, we should have talked while we were both sitting here, we say goodbye, she walks out into the dark chill early morning air. I really should have business cards printed, I am not quite sure why I am doing this, because that is a perfectly good lay I am letting escape. Owell.

Outside, the orange morning is glimmering in the Washington sky.

Spotsylvania, January 21, 2009 - You da Man, Barack!

Rather than write a long piece about the inauguration, I will just share some of my pictures with you, shot on the way to Washington, and while there. I went to D.C., as we call the place locally, to watch the people, the vast mass of Americans who came to the capital to celebrate our new President, whose ascent to power, and arrival in Washington, will go down in the annals of American history as one of the most unlikely stories on Earth. Heavy is the weight on his shoulders, but what I saw around me, today, should give Barack Obama comfort, in that he has the support of the American people. I hate people using that phrase, but today is an exception, because they're here, I can see them all around me, there is no denying it. Even down here, in the South, some of my redneck neigbours, McCain voters and people who are not at all happy that a Democrat, and a black one at that, made it to the White House, have made a point of saying to me "Well, I don't like it, but he is my President, so I will support him".

That does not, of course, include Rush Limbaugh, who has publicly stated he wants the (his!) president to fail. Worse, Mr. Limbaugh tells the public what President Obama's methodology is going to be. And honestly, he does not have a clue (and I think no understanding) what that is about. Rush is in bed with Fidel Castro now, he does not support democracy and American values.

Keep taking the pills.

Anyway - perhaps, after all these years, "Give me your poor" is finally back, and we can be proud of our heritage again. I had been making plans to leave this country, which was no longer the America I was so excited to come to live and work in, in 1984, but now I think I will stay awhile, and see how this develops.

Alexandria is where in the 1990s many of the new Internet developers settled - the core of the American internet industry was based in Northern Virginia, and some 70% of all Internet traffic, worldwide, was handled here. Awash in venture capital, they pushed house prices in Old Town Alexandria up way beyond affordable. You know you are in Oldtown when you see cars like these in a public parking, at 6 in the morning.

At the Alexandria Marina, a group of inauguration attendees from Boston, elated and in party mood, wait for their ferry.

A Coast Guard cutter sits in front of the Marina, floodlights blazing, making sure nothing but the hourly ferry leaves. Local police forces along the river were not allowed to have patrol boats out, all security was handled by Federal forces, Coast Guard, U.S. Marines, and U.S. Army Military Police - not conincidentally, all forces who have air, water, and land expertise.

Oldtown at dawn can be pretty, peaceful, and quiet, and today was no exception. Because of the inauguration, the Marina food court opened six hours early, at 5, and these free trolly buses began plying their route from King Street Metro to the Waterfront at the same time.

Buses...

And more buses...

What is was all about, of course - the people, from all over America and all over the world, visitors had flown in just to attend, from as far away as Africa and South America. This is a feeder route into the National Mall, at a time when the Mall had already been closed.

And yet more buses.... while emergency vehicles, police patrols, and Secret Service cars could no longer get around town without sirens, and just parked among the thousands of buses, ready to move in. We are at L'Enfant Plaza, where hundreds of students and school kids had spent the night in the shopping mall, where the heating stayed on, security patrols made sure everybody was safe, restaurants served food and beverages throughout the night, and the drugstores ran out of bottled water.

Alexandria, VA, January 20, 2009 - Breakfast at the Marina

At the Alexandria, VA, Marina, folks dressed for the Arctic congregate at 6am, to take the 7 and 8am water taxis across the river. The ride was offered by the Potomac Riverboat Company, the only company that had managed to secure a permit to transport folks across the river, under the heavy supervision of the United States Coast Guard, which had officers on board, and a massive well armed cutter blocking the Marina, in between sailings. The gentleman to the right, in the zoomin at the end of this video, wearing a baseball cap, is Willem Polak, the owner and operator of the Boat Company. Once I knew that, I could figure how he'd thought of doing this, and had managed it - you see, I found out he is Dutch, and considering his last name, likely Jewish, too. That is a double whammy as far as being an entrepreneur is concerned....

Washington, D.C., January 20, 2009 - It Is Done

Crowded was not the word - Washington was a vast mass of humanity. In a radius of miles around the National Mall, tour buses from all over North America - not just the US, I saw buses from Canada and Mexico - filled every available street, often two or three rows on an avenue. And what you did not see on television, was that there were as many people again on the streets and avenues around the Mall, as there were on the Mall itself, which was unbelievably full of people, from end to end, not a square foot of grass left. Security forces, led by hundreds of United States Marines - everywhere the Federal government was in control, even on the cruise boat that took me across the river from Alexandria this morning, armed Coast Guard officers ran the show, with big Coast Guard cutters, not patrol boats, enforcing the river blockade - were so overwhelmed that they closed the Mall around 10am.

Somewhat belatedly, as I drove North at 4am, I realized that even getting to Alexandria, VA, would not be simple. All river crossings in and around Washington had been closed, even the main East Coast highway, I-95, which runs from the Canadian border to the Southern tip of the Florida Keys, had been closed, through trains did not run, and at Washington National Airport, which the boat took us past, I could only see East Coast corridor shuttles land and take off. The clatter of noisy twin engined military and police helicopters was deafening - at 6 am, as dawn broke, I could see them take off from the military facilities around Washington, in blocks of four. I eventually decided there was no point in risking to go to the I-95 split, where I-395 goes to Arlington and Washington, and I-495 to Baltimore and New York - I had intended to swing off at the split, and jump onto Route 1 North there. Route 1, the original post road that served the East Coast before the highways came, a road that equally runs from the Canadian border to the tip of Florida.

I made the quick decision to jump onto Route 1 much further South, as it runs right through Old Town Alexandria, and as there was not that much traffic this early, I had parked my car by 6, and found the Food Court at the Alexandria Marina surprisingly open, and serving breakfast and hot coffee to the folks who had shelled out $90 per head to be brought close to the Mall on river cruise boats. Four sailings, beginning at 6am, each brought some 800 people across - the Potomac Riverboat Company had, as the only company, received permission to sail across the river. Literally the only, no vessels other than Coast Guard cutters were permitted on the river, even local police forces along the river had parked their patrol boats.

I never thought I would be emotional about an American presidential election, let alone that I would trek to Washington to attend an inauguration - I hate crowds, I don't even go to the mall on Saturday, and some two million people you can definitely call a crowd. But there were no elbows, no jostling, just a river of people shuffling along in the biting cold, smiling, happy, waving flags, families, grandmas, children, more than anything people not like me, not from the East Coast, not part of the corporate machine that drives Wall Street, and very large contingents of Americans from the heartland, and very large contingents of black Americans. Obama may stand for much more than being African-American, but today was, first and foremost, Black America Day.

I have to plead guilty to helping to maintain the farce - yes, I do not discriminate, I even won an EEO lawsuit filed by a disgruntled black employee I had to fire. I hire on capability, not on colour or gender, I ensure I give the same deference to black and Asian bosses as I do to whites - but, I live in a white gentrified neighbourhood, and have always done, in Amsterdam, in London, in New York, and in Washington. It is the epitome of having made it, as an immigrant, when you can live in places where real estate agents are left to make the racial divisions that have been illegal for years, but that happen nevertheless.

Black America changed the day Obama won the election. It began by many African Americans being so much in shock that they wouldn't talk about it - I swear, I checked. But by now, they have gotten used to the idea, now they do talk, they are so proud, and proud American - today, no white can look down on a black American any more, because it is "one of them" that is the boss of the country, "one of them" is the Supreme Commander of the United States Armed Forces. Next time we go beat up some dictator, it won't be a WASP who gave the order - eat your heart out, Hugo Chavez. There are still plenty of dumb jokes floating around my neighbourhood. Collard greens - "leafy collard greens take a long, slow simmer in a ham hock bath" - melon patches, and the rest of it - but as the weeks progress, the conviction in the jokes has faded, they know that you can put any nigger down, but not the President of the United States of America. And then you get to be careful, because this black guy in your office could just be a relative.

So yes, Dr. King's dream has come to pass - and it took everybody, black, white, republican, democrat, German, American, completely by surprise. But more than that, we've reached the stage where the old guys are fading out, a true post-war generation has taken the reigns. And the same thing applies that I said about 9/11 - like everything American, this was bigger.

Spotsylvania, January 15, 2009 - Plane down

Kudos to the pilots of the US Air Airbus that just came down in the Hudson River off Manhattan. It isn't like you ever get to exercise putting an airliner down on a river... let alone managing to miss some of the busiest built up areas in the USA. They saved the lives of all their passengers, and G*d knows how many others in New York and New Jersey. Quite a feat. Well done folks.

Spotsylvania, January 15, 2009 - Up T-Mobile

I have described in glowing words T-Mobile's UMA service, which will let a dedicated cellphone switch to internet voice communications from GSM, so you can forego minutes and call charges within the USA, and at home or in the office use your WiFi - something that works in T-Mobile's Hotspot locations, as well.

Well, works - worked. Over the past few months the service has become more and more erratic, until, in my own experience as well as the blogs at Nokia, T-Mobile and Linksys, it is as good as unusable if you use UMA with Nokia cellphones. And it seems, from reading the same blogs, that T-Mobile is attempting to paper over the problems, and telling customers to change router settings and the like, none of which addresses the problem. They need to be careful - having an entire class of telecommunications service inoperable without alerting the Federal Communications Commission and suspending sales of that service is a serious breach of the rules. This isn't a three day outage - it continues, and there is apparently no solution in sight - when I get home with my UMA phone (I live in a "dead zone") I can't make calls.

Curiously, the service, using my Nokia phones, seems to work just fine when abroad. The automatic logon and automatic router switchover, and continuous service, work fine for me in Amsterdam and Beijing. I am wondering how come Nokia's (European) UMA phones work fine there, and not in North America - apparently, all other phones with UMA - Blackberry, Samsung - work fine. Blog contributors seem to correlate T-Mobile's introduction of 3G services in various locales with the UMA problems. I am not quite seeing how that would work, 3G is a cellular protocol, and UMA is not, I don't see the connection, technically.

You can find some discussion threads on the problem at Nokia's and other discussion boards, here and here. I hope they fix this soon.

Spotsylvania, January 12, 2009 - How Much? The myth of savings.

You probably, like many, follow the experts' advice, calculating savings on the basis of cost. For example, you decide to buy a Toyota Prius, having calculated the break even point on the basis of car value and mileage. But this is not the right way to calculate savings.

Think about it. When you buy durable consumer goods (I am assuming you're not filthy rich, same as me) you make those fit into your budget, or you borrow money - a car loan, whatever. So factually, the investment in durable goods comes out of what we in commerce call "a different bucket". Making the simple equation about when you will recover your investment - lower electricity bills because you buy an energy efficient refrigerator, lower gasoline outgoings with the Smart you will be commuting in, those equations don't work. Most things, you see, have a cost basis in time, they're not an arbitrary "value" number. I have had much more disposable cash since I began using this principle. It takes into account how much money you have today, how much you're making today, and how much you have to pay out today, and nothing else. By splitting off the cost of usage of an item, electricity with the refrigerator, gasoline and service with the Smart, you can work out what the true monthly cost of using something is - and that is the key, usage cost, not the cost of owning.

So the cost of those more expensive CFL bulbs isn't important - the only thing you look at is how much it brings down your electricity bill at the end of the month. If you can't see the difference, comparing it with last year's usage, check two months. If you still can't see a difference, there is no savings. Same with the car. If you haven't kept a log of your fuel consumption, you won't be able to tell. So, before you buy a more efficient car, put together a log of your car expenses - minus the lease or the purchase, but including everything else. Then do a little spreadsheet that calculates how much the car costs you to drive, per day. Then, if you still have your sights set on that hybrid, buy it. And keep logging expenses.

I find especially the use of financial management software a winner - I've been doing that since 1990, using Quicken, and I have made sure that all my accounts with all financial institutions allow downloading into your software. Keying in all your outgoings is not feasible - and there are a number of banks and financial institutions that let you download directly from the software. Look for Quicken's "Direct Connect" feature - it has the added advantage that you're not interfacing with a website, the software logs in for you, and so you run much less risk of identity theft. It isn't that they can't, but the pickings in stealing logins and passwords from online banking customers are so good, and so easy, there is little need to go to interfaces that are harder to break. Neither screen scrapers nor key loggers will work with an API, an automated software interface.

The other way I save, over time, is that I look for bargains, over a period of time, rather than buy a TV when mine is broken. When it is time to replace a washing machine, television set, coffeemaker (before it actually dies!) I look for bargains, then buy two, not one. This gives me the advantage that I can just "plug in" a replacement, and I won't need to buy an expensive replacement - Murphy's Law, you know, when your TV breaks there aren't any on sale, and you then cave and upgrade to a larger/better/more advanced one, right?

All I am saying is that only long term savings will have a benefit. And those savings come from a thorough examination of your expenses. You may decide to begin using a generic sweetener rather than a brand, but that is not a real solution - you won't enjoy it, be reminded all the time of your need to spend less, and the eventual savings are negligible. CFL bulbs are another good example of "how not to". Statistics in Europe have shown that people who replace their tungsten bulbs with CFLs don't necessarily save. They now worry less about leaving lights on, have more light fixtures - "it's cheap" - and anyway, they don't save a penny during the heating season.

Washington, D.C., January 9, 2009 - Human Factors

While in Human Factors research much attention is paid to the usability of products and services, technology integration is often relegated to the Human - Computer Interface. And that generally means that this research is based on the way computers work, and the way software is written, rather than on the methods humans commonly employ to interact with their environment, and with other humans. Apart from being a technology professional, I spent the better part of a decade in telecommunications research & development, working closely with a human factors team in my lab. They did terrific stuff, we particularly specialized in voice and speech recognition (the two are entirely different!), and in the way directory assistance folks interacted with computers, databases and customers.

I will forever be grateful for this experience, as it taught me a great deal about how people work and communicate (and, as a then new immigrant, it taught me a whole lot about Americans, and their peculiarities).

I am getting on to this subject because I am "breaking in" a bunch of new home equipment, and I find it is not at all easy to get it to work properly - or sometimes, work at all. Take the Haier HWD 1000 combination ventless washer/dryer, for instance. It comes with a reasonably well written manual, unusual for cheap Chinese products, which can produce gems like ", When induction cooker is in choos mode or other active status,press "stir-fry" key, "stir-fry light" ,the digital screen of firepoe shoows"5","... etc. followed by "Attention:According to the national standards corredlation security regelations request,"... etc..

Before you think I am going off on the Chinese again, Western and Japanese manuals aren't much better - while written in immaculate English (and 54 other languages) they often suffer from the "complication effect"- the equipment they provide guidelines for is capable of so many functions that used to reside in separate units, that it really should have been the developers, together with testers like a stay-at-home Mom and a workaholic stockbroker, that wrote the documentation.

I have been on the origination end of these problems - in my work, I have produced, within a team of developers, many products and services that we documented in such a way that only an expert could figure it out - telecommunications unions are a great help in this realm, as they will not allow equipment to be installed in the central office if it does not have standardized step-by-step manuals enclosed, manuals that enable a complete non-com to stupidly carry out certain steps on a certain alarm, and get the thing back to work. Doing that, however, is really expensive, and the vast majority of consumers, when faced with a no-brand Eastern microwave oven with a booklet in Chinglish for $100, or a fancy German microwave with an entire instruction book attached, for $250, will choose the cheaper product. You know, it is when you say "Ah, we'll figure it out".

And that is what I have been doing with the Haier washer/dryer, whose programming encompasses both functions. So, you've painstakingly programmed the entire laundry sequence, then want to change the dryer to dry only for 30 minutes, so you can hang your clothes still damp, and making that change wipes out all of your other settings. Duh. And when you want to shorten the wash cycle from the way it comes up, you have to go right up to 60 minutes, then begin from 1 minute. And the "heavy" and "delicate" settings won't let you dry. And... None of this is included in the 25 page manual, although this is written in decent English. But you get my drift. I love this thing, though. It is very efficient (in fact has an "Eco" rating from the Department of the Environment) and because you don't need a vent and a 230V outlet you can pretty much put it anywhere you can bring water to - the way it dries laundry is by heating wet laundry, then pulling the moist hot air through a condensor unit, which cools it down, and in so doing makes the moisture condensate. This is then pumped off into the drain, so you don't release hot damp air into the environment, and any lint is captured in a filter, then washed into the drain during the next wash cycle. Quite ingenious - not new, I recall my sister having a German Bosch ventless washer/dryer some twenty years ago, but that was huge, and had a voracious appetite for electricity. I should imagine the Haier is small enough that you can put it in an RV, and run it on a small standy generator, it uses 1,500 watts maximum. And as I said, if you're a couple or have a family, and you need more capacity, you could spend $1,500, which is what you would have paid for a cheap washer and a dryer, and get two, and have the flexibility of doing all manner of different washes, rinses, dry cycles, etc., at the same time.

Spotsylvania, January 3, 2009 - Change II

In my October 26 rant, below, I mention a number of money saving contraptions I've bought and tested, recently. They're all serving me well, nothing has broken down, the only discord is that the Soleus heat pump will switch from pump heating to electric heating somewhere around 40° Fahrenheit (5° Centigrade). Electric heating, in the Soleus, means a heating element consuming some 3,600 watts @ 230 volt AC, delivering 10,700 BTUs rather than the 17,000 BTUs the pump produces in heating mode. That means that in an area where the heat pump delivers adequate capacity, the electric heat will not. That, then, gets expensive - 45 cents an hour, or $5.40 per 12 hours (a typical winter overnight period). The heat pump uses only 22.5 cents of electricity per hour, $2.70 per hour - but if you equate this with the respective heat outputs, the heat pump delivers 60% more heat per watt, so the true cost, compared, of the electric heat is 72 cents per hour, or $8.64 per 12 hours - more than three times as much.

The issue is that you can't turn the heating element off, or let it run on a lower temperature setting. So, unless you watch over it, you're not going to have those wonderful savings I spoke about. But: I have replaced two more household implements with cheaper-to-run items - the washer/dryer, and I have ordered rechargeable 6VDC lantern batteries for my surveillance camera, which, even in warm weather, rarely runs more than three weeks on a battery, and in the deep freeze only a week or so.

Another jump into the unknown is that I have discontinued my home phone, and ported the number over to one of my cellphone lines.

Nothing spectacular, you will say, you maybe already use Vonage, or cable phone, or some other VOIP (voice over IP, IP standing for Internet Protocol) product. But bear with me for a second - just about everyone has a cellphone, or a mobile or handphone, as they are called overseas, and many people have family plans - multiple lines with a shared pool of "minutes". So do you even need a landline, or a VOIP line?

I too have a family plan, although I don't exactly have a family, I use one line for voice, one for data (3G) services (with a data card), and another for my alarm system (pity the burglar who breaks in after cutting the phone wire, only to find out that the wireless alarm still called the cops...). My landline, although partly reimbursed by my former employer, as part of my retirement benefits, still cost me money, and as I have that alarm system cellphone line whose number is really immaterial, I have finally decided to move my home number (it is called "porting") to the alarm line, but doing so using T-Mobile's latest router, a Linksys router with WiFi that can contain two SIM cards (SIM cards are the chips that tell a GSM phone what number they have, GSM being the system used by T-Mobile, AT&T Wireless, and Rogers, up North), and operate those via the Internet as a sort of VOIP solution. T-Mobile calls this "Hotspot@Home", the underlying technology is UMA. T-Mobile is the only provider of UMA in North America, although a couple of European carriers have now started offering it there, as well. Hotspot@Home and T-Mobile UMA (using specially designed cellphones that connect to the T-Mobile network via your wireless broadband router) are one and the same - one uses your home wiring, the other a cellphone. RJ-11 jacks on the back let you connect the device to your home telephone wires.

So how does this save money? Look at your phone bill, and then realize that if you already had a T-Mobile family plan, you'd pay only $10 per month for an extra line, over and above the contract cost. Basically, what it does is similar to what T-Mobile's UMA does, letting you connect to T-Mobile's telephone network over the Internet, and call for free. Within the United States, that is - UMA, a.k.a. Hotspot@Home, incurs no call charges, or use minutes. So if your kids are using up all your minutes, every month, and then some, get UMA, tell them they can only make long calls from home, and you'll be laughing all the way to the bank. Not only that, but if they want to stay out of trouble with their minute use, they have to make calls from home, and then, of course, you know where they are. It is the ultimate bribe - and they can even use their friends' Dad's router, if they know how to log onto that - they are then not at home, but you still know they're somewhere safe. Cool? I think T-Mobile charges $19.95 per month for UMA, for all of your lines together.

This, then is another "save money by spending money" scheme. It isn't too expensive to implement, the cheapest UMA phones cost $50, and the router $39.95. But: you need cellphones anyway, and you need that WiFi router for your home anyway. Should you move, you connect at your new house via broadband Internet there - even if you move to Berlin or Beijing! UMA works on any wireless Internet where you do not have to log in, and in US T-Mobile Hotspots, like Starbucks, MacDonalds and Borders establishments.

On now to laundry. There are a few all-in-one washer/dryers on the market. These are ventless units, which can dry the laundry after washing by heating the air and extracting the water using a condensor, which pumps it into the drain. They are by and large expensive, costing the same or more as a separate washer and dryer combo. Then I came across the Haier HWD 1000 ventless washer/dryer, which is on the market for prices ranging from $600 to around $800.

For me an ideal machine, it is small, does not take big loads, but that is not a problem for me, as I live alone, and so often have my big Amana family washer only a quarter full. For me, then, a smaller machine will save me money, and a front loader, which uses a quarter of the water a top loaders uses, will save me too (front loaders get your wash cleaner, as well). Thinking about solutions for larger families, it suddenly occurred to me that you can buy two of these Haiers for around $1,500, which is what a regular washer/dryer combo would set you back. And then you have the same capacity, but the ability to cheaply do small washes, and the convenience of putting the laundry in a machine, and taking it out clean and dry. The HWD 1000 plugs into a regular mains socket, and uses less than 1,500 watts in dryer mode, so no 230 VAC mains power required, as is the case with most dryers.

Unfortunately, the one I received was damaged in shipping (see the picture to the right), and the vendor, Rainbow in New Jersey, has no stock to replace it - in fact, they haven't even managed to pick the dead machine up. UPS ground parcel service won't take it, since it weighs more than 150 lbs, and they seem to be unable to send a truck for it. But: I was able to cancel the credit card payment, and found another supplier. The new machine will be here on Monday, so I will report later on how it does, and how much power it consumes - this was all about reducing household expenditures, right?

Spotsylvania, December 31, 2008 - Change

Barack Obama is certainly right to use "Change" as his mantra, and I am sure you all, like me, know how this country should be run - but having worked my way halfway through his manifesto, he is setting his sights somewhere up in the stratosphere.

This is certainly the American way - and many of us, in politics and in business, only know how to climb ladders, ever higher, ever taller. But driving around in Holland in an airport rental car, shown here, I wonder how come General Motors is in the doldrums, when they build, under the German Opel brand, excellent small cars they could sell tomorrow, in the United States. This thing is comfortable, spiffy, has low fuel consumption, and has all the bells and whistles (but no navigation equipment, which really is obsolete since you can get that built into your cellphone - I've been using the 3G Nokia 6110 Navigator for this purpose for over two years now, recently superseded by the 6120). For four days, driving all over, including to and from the airport, all it drank was €14 - that's amazingly little, considering gasoline, in Europe, is two to three times as expensive as it is in the US.

Ford, too, builds small cars in Europe. For the most part, these don't make it into the United States, and the Big Three have never tried to consistently offer small, fuel efficient cars into the U.S. market. It would have required a ten year "build" of that market, and they probably did not see a good enough profit margin, as the factories in Mexico, the U.S. and Canada are not tooled for these vehicles. Don't forget that the Toyota Prius was introduced in the United States in 2001, after first launch in Japan in 1997 - that too took a long time to get rolling, pardon the pun. The issue is mostly that the big three have not made a consistent long term effort to bring these vehicles to the American public - advertising, incentives, the works, and that for a number of years. Getting these cars into car rental agencies, in volume, traditionally has helped sales - I did not decide to buy an SUV until I had driven a rental Chevy Suburban, although I thought that was to much of a good thing, and ended up with a Dodge Durango.

All told, however, we must begin to eat humble pie, and start doing what our overseas competitors are very good at - think small. It applies directly to me - when I came over from Europe I was brilliant at thinking small, and I think that is part of the reason my systems designs and -builds were so successful. But after 20 years on Wall Street, working in, and with, the Fortune 50, and generally in American commerce, I wouldn't know how to think small any more - I think like the rest of them, big iron, throw money at it, bulldozer. That is not, for the moment, going to bail us out. Obama has his work cut out for him - Wall Street has been in a consistent upward curve since the election, we can speak here of cautious optimism on the part of the investor, but it must be unnerving to know that unless you do and say the right things, those first few weeks in office, it'll all come crashing down again. And we have a long way to go - the Dow closed at 8,776, on New Year's eve, and that is a long way from where we were, above 10,000.

Spotsylvania, December 28, 2008 - Money, or the lack thereof

(The pictures here have nothing to do with anything; they were taken at the gift giving in the Netherlands that my sister and my cousin arranged, at my request. I don't often have pictures taken; but my sister is as much of a photography buff as I am, and she converted from her trusty Olympus analog to a Nikon D50 digital camera, a couple of years back, and has not looked back, as you can see).

Strong comments on the financial market system that is our American mantra were made by Liu Mingkang, chairman of the Chinese Banking Regulatory Commission. And he has a point – American money markets did spin out of control. But Mr. Mingkang blames this on wrong decisions by regulators – from the inside of the system, but not having made the same mistakes other consumers made, I don't know that he is right.

He talks, amongst others, about the regulators allowing “0% down” mortgages and “reverse mortgages”. I don't think the 0% down mortgage was ever allowed, and I'll get to the reverse mortgage in a minute.

To the best of my knowledge, the only way one could get a 0% down mortage, in the past, was with the FHA guarantee that has been part and parcel of the first time buyer protection scheme the US government put in place in 1934(!). I used that mechanism myself – what the Chinese regulator forgets is that this scheme replaces the downpayment, for first time buyers only, with a Mortgage Insurance guaranteed by the Federal Government, an insurance the consumer has to pay for, and it isn't that cheap. Simply put, you default on your mortgage, the lender is guaranteed their funds by the government. What went wrong is not that the rules weren't clear, but that the administrators of the scheme, in the final analysis the banks and the real estate agents, in collusion, bent the rules way over what the Federal Government had intended.

It is certainly true that “everybody” knew this, and that the Fed didn't step in to reign in the money hungry folks on Wall Street. Everybody sat around growing fat, dumb, and happy, until the bubble burst. I certainly was able to buy a much larger house than I would otherwise have been able to afford, and I witnessed up close how “creative” the industry had gotten. But: I was able to buy a larger house than my credit rating would have allowed - that does not mean I bought something I could not afford. Many did, blinded by their sudden increase in credit.

I am reminded of 2001, when the markets finally realized that the dotcom boom was a mirage – valuing new technology enterprises based on an effusive “potential”, without taking into account that in the end, the consumer would have to pay for all this new stuff, and the consumer wouldn't. The market imploded spectacularly. And I guess that market then did what I did – flee into real estate, creating another hot air balloon, driving market prices up to where the consumer – again – wasn't going to pay for it.

So now we have neither dotcom nor real estate, there have been more Enron style spectacular failures, and the only place where there is growth is (as before) the Far East. I don't even know that India plays a part here – India doesn't manufacture for export, doesn't have enough agriculture to feed its own population, and this big outsourcing deal got quagmired in a lack of English linguistic and cultural skills. You can't really talk someone through a DSL installation if you have never used the Internet, and have never had a phone at home, no matter how well you're trained.

The question is now, with speculation no longer a good source of income, there will be a period of restricted spending, and what with North America being the largest market for consumer products, that will have a world wide effect. And the stupid thing is that the dollar has lost so much value that the things we buy are getting more expensive when we really need them to get cheaper.

What is worrisome is that it looks like the money that the Fed used to bail out Wall Street went directly to operations. One would assume that, for a while at least, the government will end up owning the properties that value against the mortgages. I am not seeing how what the government does is going to help those homeowners – I am writing this in September, I would think (and hope) that all those with “bad” mortgages have lost their homes by now, I can't imagine there is another wave of resetting ARMs coming.

In the meantime, it looks like the banks are doing business as usual. I am flooded with pre-approved money offers, credit cards, personal loans,. Refinancing deals, all things that should not be happening today. Apart from anything else, my credit record shows that I have tens of thousands of dollars of unused credit, so it is somewhat disturbing that banks have no way of seeing, from the information they have access to, that I am not in need of additional credit. They could save themselves a lot of the cost of marketing if they stopped marketing to people that aren't buying – and that is the American way, using mass market mailings that don't use any type of demographic information. I don't know why we're saying we have all these terrific analysis methods to determine what to market to whom – my mailbox shows very clearly that we're not using this intelligence, or (worse) that it doesn't work.

Getting my mail, just now, a perfect example: local electricity provider Dominion is providing a new service, the flyer says, a water line replacement program, a sort of maintenance and replacement program for the water conduit that connects my home to the municipal, except – in this part of Spotsylvania County, we don't have water lines. We have no municipal service. We are on wells, each home pumps it own water. Clever, Dominion – marketing to people who have no use for the service. Something that is easy to find out, all homes have a database entry with the county, that indicates how they get their water... It's not, I think, that Dominion doesn't know this – it doesn't care. This is America, fishing is done using a stick of dynamite, you keep what's edible.

It is clear, today, that the industry gut reaction to the economic downturn (I don't use the word "recession" - it has ceased to have a meaning) is to advertise more. If you think about it, that's asinine - as this is done using your dollars, and mine - when people spend less, especially when they spend less because they have less, there isn't any amount of advertising that is going to make them buy a product they don't need. The money that goes into advertising can be made more productive by making cheap versions of a product, to go into Wal-Mart and Dollar stores - places where you don't have to advertise, Wal-Mart does that for you. And you get totally immediate feedback - what sells best, and where, what demographic does that particular store have, etc. Piggyback on one of the most successful formulas of the past thirty years. Every dollar you put into a Wal-Mart presence (and they can put you in world wide!) that you take out of advertising will have a threefold return, or better. I promise.

Spotsylvania, December 25, 2008 - The Culture of Deception

I mean, think about it. Government sanctioned deception is so prevalent in our society that it does not seem to bother anybody. We are bringing up our children in the knowledge that if you can cheat someone into opening their mail, email, buying your useless product, that's OK, because marketing is a societal requirement.

Even though Enzyte does not "make a man larger", it is allowed to be sold and advertised as such. Where in the documentation for Viagra drug makers have to explain what it does and how it works, the makers of Enzyte don't have to do anything of the sort - it is a "nutritional supplement". Does it give better erections? Permanent size increase of the penis? What? How? Don't you think that if this stuff worked, 80% of all American males would have an outsize dong? And what about this free telephone dongle for your PC? If you can only get the discount if you call within four minutes of seeing the ad, how does the seller know you have just seen their ad? And what if you call after five minutes?

Why do we allow this nonsense? Why don't we, as they do in several European countries, have stickers we can put on our mailboxes to indicate we do not want junk mail? Postal workers would lose their jobs if they didn't have to process endless thousands of tons of advertising that will end up going straight to the landfill? Can't the advertisers pay the Post Office to throw that advertising material out without delivering it to us? If there is an employment issue, surely we can tackle that in some other way - I don't believe it is appropriate for junk mail to be delivered as a way to ensure employment. And no, adding HOT lanes to HOV lanes is not a good way to tackle traffic congestion in Northern Virginia. The only way to tackle that is for the Federal Government to take hundreds of their departments, which have no rational reason to be in Northern Virginia, and move them to places where there is ample space, and can do with the employment and extra money. Much of the Pentagon can be moved to Wisconsin, for instance, while NASA, the CIA, the FBI and USAID could find a well appointed and much more secure home in South Dakota and Tennessee. 9/11 was a terrorist strategy of brilliance - the attack was so successful because these major developments are sitting in the busiest traffic corridor on Earth, next door to some of the busiest and largest airports in the nation. It was a slam dunk, and the only conclusion we have drawn is that we have to better protect these facilities. Move them to the heartland, and nobody can get at them, it really is that simple.

We have the technology, video conferencing and desktop conferencing are here, and work well. There is absolutely no reason for all of these departments to be where they are, in an infrastructure that is expensive to maintain, with staff cluttering up the highways. Like Verizon did a while back, its working headquarters with the bulk of HQ staff is in semi-rural New Jersey, the "showcase HQ" with limited staff is in Manhattan. Staffers were simply told they had to relocate to New Jersey, with few choices - you wanted to keep your job, you moved to Jersey. It is possible. Even I was told to move, but got lucky as another staffer took my physical location, the Executive were using a quota system so as to not be accused of discrimination in the future.

Don't misunderstand me, I am not saying these are the be-all solutions. What I am saying is that we need real solutions, base solutions, solutions that will fully solve some of the problems we are facing. First and foremost, we need to examine all of these intractible separate "issues", and see how many actually are interlinked. Take global warming. Part of global warming is simply caused by over-urbanization, as we can clearly see up and down the American East coast. There is, if I just look at my own area, no particular reason for the Washington Metropolitan Area to have some six million inhabitants. It is an ingrained pattern, the civil service and many suppliers to the Federal government will congregate around the center of power. And it is easy to solve: there is no reason for the Pentagon to be where it is, all it does is cause congestion and present a handy target to terrorists. We live in a different era from when the Pentagon was conceived and built. So, with the exception of the senior core, the entire Department of Defense can be moved to whichever State wants to accomodate it, bring employment to underserved areas, allow staffers to live in a place where they don't have to shell out $450,000 for a single family home, where they don't have to share the roads with Canadians on their way to the sun. We need permanent solutions, spreading the wealth has to mean more than giving the citizen a tax rebate so they can clutter up the place more, and longer.

Right?

Spotsylvania, December 22, 2008 - The Wisdom of Gifts, and Prius

And Happy Holidays to you too. I shall be off to Amsterdam shortly, to gather some of the family around me, and have a nice get-together to celebrate life. You have to do that while you can, and I have been doing much more of that since 9/11. This year I thought I'd give everybody Christmas presents personally, so I am off to The Netherlands via Madrid (American Airlines did me a nice frequent flyer ticket using Spanish partner airline Iberia), with the huge suitcase I bought in Beijing crammed full of stuff.

Rather than buy gifts when there is a reason, for someone's birthday, say, or for Christmas, I have been buying gifts randomly, throughout the year, whenever I run into them. That may be at BJ's locally on Route 3, Wal-Mart in Beijing, a department store in the Philippines, a mall in Singapore, a museum in Hong Kong, or Amsterdam airport's Duty Free shop. I now invariably end up with very pretty things that don't generally cost very much, and in many cases they have that extra cachet of coming from way abroad. When I need a gift for someone, these days I just go into the gifts cupboard, and pull something suitable out.

Barack Obama's manifesto, "Change we can believe in", is a perfect example. If you're looking for a last minute buy, it is sitting in heaping stacks at Borders, for $13.95. It is an interesting book, I cannot recall any presidential candidate publishing a manifesto just before the elections in my lifetime, and the net proceeds of the book go to charity. I bought five, one to read, four to give away. Tax deductible, too...

I do not remember a single politico writing down his aims, goals, and methodology, ahead of an election, so clearly. We can now all sit back and track his results, and wave his book at him, positively or negatively. Remember, though, when you do that, he is going to ask you why you did not log onto Change.gov, and applied for a position. This isn't business as usual, if you think you know it all so well, Barack Obama basically invites you to come into the Administration and prove it. So nobody has any excuses this time around, and if we believe in him, we have to start work on his re-election now - there is much more work to be done than four years allow.

I am going through the book with a fine toothcomb, and will write to him (and share with you) everything I do not agree with. I think applying for a position, as I may then do, without reading this book, is not a good idea (apart from the fact that some 300,000 people already have..). Imagine sitting there during your interview, and having to confess you didn't read his brain map. Bad hair day...

But back to the gift giving, I intend to do a pre-Christmas gift round over the weekend, then take everybody to dinner, Dutch-Indonesian style, rijsttafel, I suppose the celebratory banquet meal on both sides of my family, my forebears on father's side owned a sugar plantation there, while my grandfather on mother's side was posted there while serving in the Koninklijke Marine, the Dutch Royal Navy. For us, the month of December is kind of heavy with celebrations - my sister and I were both born in December, Holland celebrates the original religious gift-giving festival of Sint Nikolaas (the nameday of St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, hence "Santa Claus") on December 5th, while our mother passed away on New Year's eve. So, what the heck, I said, let's add another party, and one of my cousins and her husband kindly made their home available.

On the theme of improving our financial climate, I came across the recent announcement by Toyota that the company would be suffering its first operating loss in 71 years. This in itself is less than surprising - while, for much of its existence, Toyota was a relatively small (on a global scale) company, it is now a true multinational, having experienced enormous growth, and the risk one takes when managing explosive growth are well known. It is clear as well that an operating loss is not, in and of itself, a disaster, it can be a blip in the revenue curve. Toyota should have built up enough capital reserve in those 71 years - at least, if they have not, you know the real cause of the loss.

More importantly, however, Toyota has experienced particularly explosive growth due to its hybrid vehicles, the Toyota Prius first among them. And that is where the deception seen all around the marketing industry shows. You see, Toyota's popularity is, in part due to its technological prowess, demonstrated very aptly by the early introduction of a hybrid drivetrain. It is so well constructed and researched that Toyota produces hybrid drivetrains for other manufacturers - Ford, I believe, puts the Toyota drivetrain in the hybrid versions of the Escape and the Mercury Mariner, and it seems to be extraordinarily reliable. In the process, Toyota proved that being first in the market isn't a step to success - Honda, with its Insight, was first with a hybrid vehicle, and I think it is reasonable to say that Honda got it wrong by introducing a car that wasn't "standard" - it was a two seater, while Toyota, with its Prius, produced, from day one, an ordinary four seater sedan, with power steering, air conditioning, all the normal goodies.

Those are fine observations, but they're not the reason why the Prius became a popular car. The Prius experienced explosive sales growth because of rules instigated by the Federal and by State Government. Because of environmental concerns, hybrid vehicles were allowed to drive in HOV lanes with a single occupant, virtually from the day they were introduced. On top of that, you got Federal and State tax rebates for buying one. All these rules apply to other "clean" vehicles as well, but the Prius and the Insight were "normal" gasoline fueled cars, you can take 'em to the pump you always go to.

The consequence? Everybody who commutes on HOV lanes, when they needed to replace their car, went and bought a Prius. Partly due to the peculiar way American society is growing, many commuters spend two or three hours a day traveling, and eventually, as gas prices soared, the Prius and other hybrid vehicles became an effective way to save money.

The point I am making is that none of the above reasons have anything to do with the environment, the big catch-all reason why hybrids received tax breaks and road use incentives. People bought hybrids so they could use the HOV's on their own, in the rush hour, no passengers, a trend that soon went nationwide. The consequence of this, if you want it represented in my usual forthright (some say stark) manner, is that each car that was replaced, or taken off the HOVs, made way for two or three new hybrid vehicles. If you do your math, that means that for each replaced or re-assigned "regular" motor car you now have multiple hybrids, which, together, pollute more than the original car did. IOW, manufacturers of hybrids cashed in on a trend that was not at all environment related. Most environmental buyers added a Prius or two to all the other cars they owned, which at least added the manufacturing pollution to the fray. Bill Clinton is a good example - he commutes from New York's Westchester County to his office in Harlem in a Prius, this despite the fact that an office in Manhattan creates a lot of extra pollution, for visitors, commuting staff and the like, that he can take Metro North from near his home to virtually the front door of his office, while he could easily do 99% of the work he does from home, using a laptop and Skype teleconferencing software.

It will then be no surprise to you that Toyota's success, in recent years, has been built on the hybrid house of car(d)s - everywhere, the HOV rules have been changed, you cannot get special tags to drive your hybrid on HOVs in the rush hour any more, and older rules are being phased out. With that, in the Washington Metropolitan area, sales of the Prius dropped, to the point that last year, for the first time in its existence, Toyota had stock of Priuses, and there were dealer incentives. Toyota built new factories and now cannot sell their output - no ROV. And now that gasoline sells for $1.56 per gallon, down here, down from $4.50, the need for fuel efficiency is a memory. My Durango SLT, which I bought in the middle of the fuel crisis (I don't commute with it) now costs less than $30 to fill up - down from $85. I think the price is back to where it was in 2001, if my recall is correct.

So, Toyota, if you want to know why your profit is gone, the answer is simple: you, too, built a house of car(d)s. A house of car(d)s created on a false premise - American consumers, by and large, will not pay extra for a commodity because it is good for the environment. Put more plainly, the American consumer won't pay for the greater good, when the benefits of that good are either way off, or undefinable. People are buying CFL bulbs, sure, but they do so because they think it will save them money, not because it is "good for the environment". Americans did not begin to buy these bulbs wholesale until the price dropped, two years ago, when ships full of them began to arrive in our ports, from China. The Wal-Mart effect set in!

Don't believe me? I have been using CFLs since 1979, they were available in Europe then, and began outfitting my home in Westchester County, New York, with them in 1988, when the power companies began introducing them here. That itself was some ten years after their European introduction (they were invented there), while they did not begin taking off until a couple of years ago, almost twenty years after they became generally available here.

Read the above as two examples why we are in the economic state we are in - we lie to ourselves about our motives, and then create incentives based on those lies, which we begin to believe ourselves.

That is what we need Obama to cure, that is what is at the bottom of our misfortunes. An instance: under pressure from the industry, through the Direct Marketing Association, companies have the legal right to send you junk mail - you, the citizen, are not yourself permitted to determine what mail you receive in your private home. This is based on the industry contention that direct mail sells products and services. The proof that this is a fallacy is all around us, 98% of all junk mail is never read, creating a huge amount of damage to the environment, but our government is unwilling to tackle this as a problem. For as long as it is, we will continue building houses of cards. Anyone can win a war in Iraq, but reigning in the Direct Marketing Association, now there is your real battle. The "global economy" means we're lying all the way into Shanghai and Tokyo, too, now.

Spotsylvania, Thursday, December 4, 2008 - A bit busy

I am sorry I've not been updating my blog, I've been busy catching up on postponed things, getting ready for an overseas trip, having car maintenance done, and getting myself fixed (a problem in my spine that needed treatment). Then there was a new dishwasher to unpack and install - Internet ordering is wonderful, but at times that means you have to take a 180 lb. package off the back of a UPS tractor-trailer, unpack it, get it up into the laundry room from the garage, and get it working. And there is the refurbished IBM Thinkpad laptop I am making ready for my sister, and installing Windows Vista on it, which it was not designed for.

I've been following the Mumbai events closely, of course, it is a sad reminiscence of where we are, today - now India, too, has its 9/11 - after the USA, England, Spain and Indonesia (just to mention the "big ones"). I just wish that the Pakistani government began to understand it has been forced to take the decisions it has been trying to avoid for so long - it is only in Pakistan terrorists now find a relatively safe haven, Aghanistan and Iraq are full of American and indigenous troops chasing them, and the Iranians, too, have gotten the message. Any more of these attacks, and Pakistan could be invaded by the USA in the West, and by India in the East, with both the American and the Indian population supporting that war. This is the flipside of being nuclear-armed - in a conflict, Pakistan's nuclear capabilities would have to be disabled fast, something that will cause huge devastation and loss of life in Pakistan, not something that will stop any of the bigger powers from attacking. Kind of "reverse security"...

Increasingly, Muslims everywhere are beginning to turn against the extremists, as they understand that harbouring and supporting them brings with it a significant risk of action against those who fail to report them. And who knows, Muslims may eventually come to understand it is them, and their religion, that create the alienated, violent and disgruntled youngsters that become suicide terrorists. Some abandon their religion, but others choose to persecute everybody they see as infidels - even other Muslims. It is scary, and we must continue to box them in, wherever we can, and forge open relationships with the countries that harbour them. When Secretary Rice visited Pakistan, today, the Al Jazeera camera lingered on the hand of a Muslim man shaking an infidel woman's hand. That must be the symbol, going forward, taking steps to emancipate to where we respect each other's customs.

I'll try and fill you in on some of the other energy savings steps I've been taking - replacing my old top loader washer and dryer, that were in this house when I bought it, with a cheap ($700) Haier washer/dryer ventless front loader combo, one that does it all in one machine, in one drum, needing much less water, detergent and electricity than older units do. And I can tell you about getting Vista running on a refurbished IBM Thinkpad, using the support website now run by Lenovo, which bought the entire PC production division from IBM a couple of years back. The sale included an agreement that Lenovo would support PCs the same way IBM has always done, which means they maintain, and stock parts for, and provide drivers for, any PC that IBM has ever built. I have experienced this in the commercial world, but it works for Joe Sixpack too, it is for me a major reason to buy refurbished IBM and new Lenovo products. It will be fun to see the Thinkpad work in Europe on 3G nets, using another obsolete product, the Sierra Wireless Aircard 860, like the Thinkpad available cheaply here and there.

Spotsylvania, Saturday, November 22, 2008 - UPS, where your entire shipping problem is made easy

United Parcel Service LTD (UPS)
Customer Service Department.
Officer-in-Charge:
Gamal Abdel Nasser
Liberia Roads
Accra, Ghana
Tel.: +233-206-872-056
E-mail: parcel@upscourier.co.cc

Dear Customer,
Welcome to UPS Courier Service, this is where your entire shipping problem is made easy.
I am Mr. Abraham Kabo the Customer Service agent who will be guiding you with the shipment procedures of your package and be rest assured of a customer friendly transaction process.
Arriving our cargo bay on the 28th of September 2008. 08:33 GMT, a sealed/classified package made out to you.
The Package was tendered to us by Officials of Shell Petroleum Company Ltd.
This is to inform you that delivery has been placed on standby temporarily till delivery requirements are met.
Your package will be dispatched via First Class Air Sure delivery channel once you meet up with our demurrage payment requirements of $138. If there is any change in your Shipping Address/Receiver's Name, please inform us immediately before making any payment to enable us update your profile before dispatch.

LIST OF PACKAGE CONTENT.

I. AN ATM CARD THAT WORTHS $650,000.00 USD
II. COPY OF INSURANCE BOND
III. VTI INVITATION PACKAGE
IV. SOURCE OF FUNDS CLEARANCE (Issued by Internal Revenue Board)

PACKAGE WEIGHT: 41.52g
PACKAGE COLOUR: Brown
REG NUMBER: CVL/TW/US/254.

Demurrage on parcel ID No: CPEL/OWN/MS12:

Also all payment for demurrage charges should be made via (Western Union Money Transfer Or Money Gram International Transfer) directly to our Accounts Officer.

You are adviced to fill the form below corectly and return back for proper confirmation of parcel.

ORDER NUMBER: 756-8857AG

1.CONTACT ADDRESS:
2.TELEPHONE NUMBER:
3.FAX:
4.COUNTRY:

On the receipt of your payment confirmation email your package will be set for delivery which you will receive within 72hours.,/P>

PAYMENT TERMS: We do not accept cash on delivery (COD) proposal for such package. Air sure charge for onward delivery must be paid through our choice of service to our office as instructed within a period of 48 Hours after the receipt of this mail, after this period a new bill will be issued to you.

Note: This means that the above stated charges cannot be deducted from the sales of any of your items or other wise stated and hence must be provided by you before we can commence shipment.

Note: you are to send a scan copy of any means of identification to this office to identify you at the point of delivery hope to hear from you soon.

We sincerely hope the above information is helpful to you. Should you have any further queries do no hesitate to write to us.

Yours in service,
Mr. Abraham Kabo
Customer Service Agent.

Spotsylvania, Monday, November 17, 2008 - Say Cheesecake!

At a dating site I subscribe to, someone who had recently moved from NYC to Long Island professed to not finding ways to "hook up" - I though that was funny, considering everybody who lives on Long Island comes from New York City (except Boy George, who is from The Village). Anyway, for the less initiated, I wrote the following primer - enjoy:

For those who don't live in New York, but in the United States, let me 'splain.

Career minded folk start out in Manhattan, where they rent someone's walk-in closet for $3,000 a month. It comes with toilet paper, which is called a "sublease".

After their first promotion, they move "up" to their own apartment, which is two walk-in closets, and a shelf for the microwave. They have to suck someone's d*** to gain entry to the building; this is known as "getting Board approval", or "finding the Super". In the Village, they have to perform other services, as well. This is known as "bending over". The Village is the area of Manhattan where Federal Express does not deliver elevators. Living there is known as "the walkup".

Eventually, they are given permission to move to more spacious accomodation - we are still looking at the two walk-in closets here, but the shelf can accomodate a microwave as well as a toaster oven, and there is a three foot approach road out front, parking for UPS trucks, and an 8 square foot backyard with wading pool. They are now allowed one child per closet. This is varyingly known as "crossing the Bridge & Tunnel" or "being sent to Queens" (compare the Londoner's "being sent to Coventry").

Moving Westward, to the area known as "Joisey", sometimes referred to as "Soprano", is discouraged; you would need a visa to enter the United States of America, anyway, which would take more "board approval", and you need a digital subscription to HBO.

Eventually, most parts of New York fill up, and every six months the excess is banned to a place known as "Lonk Island". This runs from the former Dutch colonial village of "Konijnen Eiland" (Coney Island) to Madonna's house in the Far East. Madonna is reputed to have come from a vegetable allotment in Manhattan; this is known as "Central Park West". You can find it by following the black stretch limousine with tinted windows that collects young boys every night, in a place known as "Alphabet City" where they learn to spell with their tongue out.

Once you are on the Island, you get an honorary membership to what is known as the "Long Island Rail Road" which you are required to occupy during working hours, clutching what is known as a "white and sweet". No, that does not refer to race - race is not legal in New York, and any mention of it causes you to be banned to a place called "Upstate", which is very close to the Polar Circle, a.k.a. "Canada". This is where, for instance, Bill Clinton was banned to, after his unfortunate encounter with that handbag.

The only place where outdoor sex is allowed, on Long Island, is a mooring for garbage barges on what is known as "the South Shore". This is a catchment area for hurricanes that overshoot Dade County, FL, which is on the South side of the Verazzano Narrows Bridge; people who have parking tickets outstanding in Manhattan flee here. After the sex, you can board a garbage barge to go to Virginia, which is next door to a place called "the Administration", where all the trash is kept.

There is one known case of a non-New Yorker (commonly referred to as a "weirdo") making it onto the Island. He was found in Babylon, at the intersection of the Sunrise Highway (East) and the Sunrise Highway (West), and is reputed to come from a farm in the Very Far West called "Wisconsin". He was not allowed to stay, and was put to work at the Dade County Retirement Home for Jewish Dogs.

Hic

Spotsylvania, Sunday, November 16, 2008 - And Green, too.

While the saving examples I am giving you all require spending money first, I have selected them so the outlay remains reasonable. Having said that, while many pundits offset the investment against the savings over a given period of time, there is another way of looking at savings.

You see, by, say, replacing conventional lightbulbs with CFL lightbulbs, you reduce your monthly outgoing. And that is basically at the base of it all, saving on those amounts that you habitually spend. Saving in the home isn't about "when do I break even, when do I start making a profit", but about "spending less out of my monthly budget". I maintain different budgets, one for utilities, one for household equipment, one for vehicles, etc. So when I use less electricity, my montly energy budget reduces, and that is what I am after. The calculation what bulb lasts longest, into which you have to count that all manufacturers of CFLs lie about their lifetime - nobody uses a lightbulb four hours a day, so that calculation is simply not valid, life is not a collection of averages - is completely irrelevant to how much money you lay out for electricity, every month.

So it is much simpler than the EPA wants to present it. If you save money, you'll eventually save more than you spent. It really is unimportant how long that takes - what matters is that you immediately start spending less on services, every month, and can reduce your household budget. Apart from which, the consistent use of CFLs reduces the fire hazard in a home - with most American homes still buit in woodframe, using bulbs whose socket temperature does not approach the iginition temperature of wood and fabric is a good thing - yet, no insurance company will give a policy discount for the use of CFLs, even though CFLs will save them tens of millions of dollars, every year. At the same time, it makes no difference which type of bulb you use during the heating season - so there is no budgetary savings with CFLs in the Fall and in Winter, the only time you save is when you do not have the heating on, and during the A/C season, when you save double. There probably is a case for using regular light bulbs in Winter, because they actually heat very efficiently, more so than many heaters! If you worry when the kids leave lights on in winter, then, don't - it makes no difference to your electric bill.

There is another silly trick I use. When I need something, I begin looking for a good deal, a sale, something that does what I need, and is cheap. When I find that, and I may take my time, I buy two of that item, not one. Why? It is all very well to buy a microwave oven on sale, but when that breaks down, and you've gotten used to buying microwavable food, you need to go out and buy another, and guess what - you will, more often than not, buy one that is a lot more expensive. So I then simply grab the second unit I have in stock, and start using that. As and when I run into another good deal, I can buy another spare, there is no rush on that. And over time, I save money.

It does help if you have a big house, of course, I've gotten just about half a room dedicated to storing all of this stuff. But it is very pleasant, when you blow up your coffee maker, as I did recently, to just grab the spare, know that you only paid $19.95 for this $50 item, and have one that works exactly the way the old one did. I just saved another $30, in my book.

So, to cooking. I have bored you below with tales of induction cooking, something I rediscovered in Beijing. It produces no heat, uses less energy for the same caloric value than electric rings or gas rings, is easy to clean, and easy to use. Induction senses what goes on in its coil field, and so can keep food just on the boil, compensates automatically for the amount of heat something needs, is endlessly programmable, and produces so much energy that you can boil a kettle in under five minutes, using less energy than you would using any other method.

Now the very nice cooktop I bought at Wal-Mart in Beijing for very little money needs 220 VAC at 50 Hz, which we don't have here in the US, and when I started shopping around here I only found equivalents that cost $200 or more, five times as much. I bought the Beijing item, in the picture on the left, not for its technology, but just becaused I love the design. It is a cooker that doesn't look like a cooker, due to the ceramic top, the graphics, and the Chinese characters, it is almost a decorative object.

Then I hit our Northern cousins, where an outfit by the name of Applesave looks as if it is run from China (at least I hope so, I wouldn't like to think that "original packaging nuclear component, multi-storey auto-protective function" means what it says), and has induction cooktops starting at $88, including shipping. And that's what you see here. I have ripped the two left rings out of my Jenn-Air (they're designed removable) and put a temporary board with the Apple cooker in their place. Works a treat, the exhaust fan is close enough, and I am cooking twice as fast, using much less electricity.

OK, I had to go out and buy new pots and pans, ones that conduct, you can check that with a fridge magnet, they're the only ones that work on induction. That was another $59 at Wal-Mart, but now I have brand new shiny metal pots, ones that will last a long time, because they are never used with heat sources that produce much more heat than is needed for cooking - heating something to 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 Celsius) using a gas flame producing 1,000 degrees is a remarkable waste of energy, and reduces the life of a metal pan. And yes, this being a good deal, I bought a spare, as well.

The energy savings described above all reduce carbon footprints, energy consumption, and fire hazard - but we should have a number for the energy consumed in manufacture of everything, and we don't. We must look much closer at what we do, and how we do it, and stop believing in myths - like the one that a Toyota Prius is an environmentally sound car. The only transportation that is environmentally sound is the absence of transportation. My favourite example is Bill Clinton, who commutes the 40 miles from his home in Chappaqua, NY, to Harlem in Manhattan in a Toyota Prius, and uses that as proof he is responsible. The only acceptable way of "greening" one's commute is not having one - I think some 95% of what Mr. Clinton does in Harlem he can do from home. I video-talk to my friends the other side of the Earth (literally) using Skype, and there is no reason why he can't do that with his staff and others.

And if you use the low voltage battery powered Roomba device made by iRobot to vacuum, you "clean green" - these things clean well, use a minuscule amount of power, whereas your average Dyson uses some 1,000 watts - on the 500 watts that consumes in half an hour of vacuuming you can probably run the Roomba 20 times, and recharge it 20 times. Yet nobody in the EPA has bothered to list the Roomba as an environmentally responsible vacuum, even though it probably saves proportionally more carbon exhaust than the Toyota Prius does. I could go on for hours. Even the stupid example above, my buying two of things I need, is environmentally responsible - you're using only one truck, and one car ride. to transport and deliver two items. By them separately, and you use two rides.

Trust me, we could be so responsible by simply changing our habits and tools, the mind boggles.

Spotsylvania, Wednesday, November 12, 2008 - Savings all around.

I expect there is little I can add to the myriads of opinions, rumours and speculation surrounding the actions of the President-Elect, but I think that on one score, they're all wrong.

Immediately after the election results became known, the Dow tanked - some 800 points in two days, if I recall. And the consensus was that this was due to the continued nervousness of investors about recession. Yeah, right. I can't help but think that the real reason was the fact that investors had hoped Sen. McCain would win, and that "business as usual" would somehow, magically, bring back the profits in the financial markets. It may sound amazing, but the finance types are so locked into the artifical ways in which we have inflated the markets, in the past decade, that they know they can bring that prosperity back for as long as they're dealing with the same guys in the Administration - and they've assumed McCain would retain the Bush strategists.

They have no idea what President Obama will do, they have no trust in the financial experts surrounding him, and what is worst: they have no basic understanding of the ways in which forms of socialism can create huge wealth. All they really have to do is look at the way France has managed, in the recent past - that is a traditionally left wing country, one that has created huge wealth for itself, and for its population, by careful management of its collective resources. Their oil companies have unfettered access to markets we're just about at war with, they went and bought Lucent Technologies, the equipment offspring of Ma Bell, and they were the first country to install a nationwide high speed X.400 network, using tax money to do it, and the nationwide water company, and its water mains and water lines, to install and maintain it, and they recently bought British Reuters, creating in one fell swoop the largest news agency in the world. And then I am not even talking about nuclear power - 80% of electricity in France is generated using state built and funded nuclear plants - or public transport - France's highly successful TGV very high speed trains now interconnect the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. We have a hard time looking past their cheese and wine exports, joking about "Freedom fries" while forgetting completely that french fries are probably the most eaten food in the world. The French have, in all of these projects, created useful and saleable technologies, that for a large part are both green and big providers of jobs. No "charity" involved.

All I am saying is that we're now looking at having to replace the Bush era financial advisers with those that understand world markets, and can work with the British, the Chinese, the Japanese. That would have been a good move anyway, but it is now vital to turning the financial markets around, we need to retire the Bushies at the same time as Bush.

They believe in rumour, you see - a press announcement out of the White House could stomp the market up 400 points. Just that - an announcement, a concept without anything to substantiate its working. This is not how high finance is supposed to work, but we've become dependent on guesswork and speculation. And so far, the Obama team isn't making the right noises for the investor to believe in future prosperity. So if you are wondering why the market is continuing to point downward, it isn't the Bush team, or the Obama team, and it is not "fear of recession". It is Wall Street. We need to fire more of the so called "experts". People who are basically incompetent, who can only think in terms of "virtual capital".

Back on October 28, I mentioned I was looking at some new, "old" technologies, and the money saving products they have spawned. Foremost among them are the induction coil - a product that was first built by N.J. Callan in 1836 - and the heat pump, first built in 1852 by Lord Kelvin. Cooking using induction coils became feasible after 1960, when the transistor made miniaturization of induction coil technology possible. The heat pump has always remained an electro-mechanical device, but it, too, is now small enough to be built into portable air conditioners. Electronic circuitry makes heat/cool reverse switching faster and automatic, and new insulation methods have reduced noise levels to the point that the fans make more noise than the compressor, even in products that incorporate compressor and heat exchangers in one indoor unit. In general, a heat pump will deliver two to two-and-a-half watts of cooling or heating power for each watt of electricity it consumes - it is hard to compare that with anything, but you can take that a space heater will deliver a one-to-one ratio. Since nobody heats their home with those, the measure is kind of useless, so all it is is a comparison value.

Apart from the two whole floor units that are installed at my house, I've added both a window/wall unit, and a few portable (a bit of a misnomer, at 60 lbs) units that vent to the outside. They have a better yield than the whole floor units do, but they're also significantly more efficient than regular portable air conditioners. A NewAir portable heat pump delivers 30% more BTUs, the Soleus window unit 60%, all of this based on a state of the art Pelonis A/C, which consumes 8 Amps of power to deliver 9,000 BTUs. Comparing the Soleus with the whole floor unit, at the same outside temperature the whole floor unit delivers air at a 90° temperature, while the (new) Soleus delivers 104°, a 16% higher yield. While one of my outdoor units was replaced only four years ago, they use 10 year old technology. Part of the savings is realized because the whole floor unit does not have to work as hard (apart from running less). In the above configuration, the whole floor unit never reaches its peak temperature, but cycles off early, at an air temperature of 80° Fahrenheit. The savings, then, is realized at both running time and energy consumption, and this really should be clearly visible in the electric bill.

The above measurements should enable you to calculate the rated efficiency of the A/C or heat pump equipment you have today. While I have not used gas for heating since 2001, I understand the prices of town gas and oil, not to mention propane, have risen so much that electric heating is competitive, today. Wood - well, you need an awful lot of wood to heat an entire house, in winter, and I expect that would only be interesting if you do not have to pay for it, as in "growing your own", as I do. Having said that, I had never thought of moving to the country as a cost saving move, but out here, I really do not need to spend one dollar on heating, it is just sweat equity. Think about it.

The reason for this exercise is that split unit heat pump heating output reduces as the outside temperature drops close to freezing, and below 32° Fahrenheit (0° Celsius) quickly drops to virtually nothing. The issue, I found, isn't so much that the pump no longer works, but that the amount of heat it produces is insufficient to neutralize the heat loss due to the low temperature. As I have found that the electric heat strips in the main system don't produce a lot of heat, adding auxiliary units that do work at low temperatures was a cheaper solution than replacing the entire system - that is something I will no doubt do, but not until I am preparing the house for sale.

So, the NewAir unit, which uses indoor room temperature air to heat, and the Soleus, which has a 4 kilowatt electric heat element built in that takes over when it is too cold for the pump to be meaningful, between them supplant the capacity loss in the split unit. The NewAir units cost $545 a piece, the Soleus $648, both including shipping (bear in mind that the Soleus is truck shipped, weighing some 180 lbs).

As the overnight temperature dropped to 30° yesterday, rather early in the season, I know that the new configuration keeps the house toasty when the main heat pump begins to struggle. I'll spare you the laborious explanation why, save to say that the different technologies supplant each other - at 45°, the main unit does all the work, below 38°, the what I will call "auxiliary" units kick in. I like electricity - it is easy to maintain, there is a reduced risk of fire, you can use it anywhere, without having to get oil tankers or propane tankers or what have you to the house, it is easier to tune than other heat sources. Plus: you use electricity anyway, for lighting etc., you can't do without it, for alarm clocks, television sets, hairdryers etc., so it makes sense to make everything electric, and use just the one energy technology, rather than two or three.

So, if you use window or wall air conditioners in summer, replacing those with heat pumps will provide a relatively quick payback, while you gain the advantage that they provide auxiliary heating in winter. If you use oil or gas heating, you will see their use reduced, during the heating season. Adding a couple of heat pumps to your existing, older, central air installation will do the same thing - the house I lived in in Arlington had central air, with a gas insert for winter; some extra capacity using fuel efficient heat pumps will reduce both your heating and cooling bills. Some over-capacity in general will reduce cost; heating or cooling equipment that has just enough capacity for the height of summer or the dead of winter will run inefficiently at peak; that alone is an argument to ad capacity to your system. We all know that most builders and home owners will install systems that have just enough capacity, not wanting to add more cost to a system. From a running cost perspective, this generally is not a good idea.

Washington, D.C., Thursday, November 6, 2008 - Blackberry Man

Andrew Young said it to Tom Brokaw, tonight: "I underestimated the white voter". So did I. So did most analysts. I sat here not even wanting to think that Obama would win - Americans, I have been saying for weeks, are fickle, they're conservative, they're predictable - Americans returned George Bush to office, when it was clear his Administration was a debacle for the United States.

And then this. A multicoloured man, like Tiger Woods bombarded to African American, with the unlikely middle name of Hussein, a man of "regular" background, high intellect, a man who climbed the ladder, and never stopped.

I couldn't see it happening. Unusually, I watched election coverage, something I never do, I'll see who won on the morning news. And then he just rolled in. A man without nerves, first term Senator, ran for president and never broke a sweat. A man who walks in the door and is your friend. And somehow in charge, too.

See, this is the spirit that brought me to America in the first place. This is the land where everything was possible, where you could aspire to everything, where we did the extraordinary every day, miracles took a bit longer. And I thought George Bush, a man who came into office and ran into 9/11 straight away, and from there proceeded to f**k up like nobody I have ever seen has f**cked up. A man who had the world behind him, and the nation behind him, and managed to turn everything and everybody against him - and against us, it is our dime, not George's. It's us who pay the piper, not George.

I listen to my friends, many of them republicans, and yes, they say, GWB didn't do very well, but he is the president, and I am a republican.

So no, I did not dare hope. And it is as if those same Americans that I did not trust to clean up their own backyard then suddenly woke up, and decided that enough is enough, and why don't we skip the next election, and go on to the one after that, the one where the country is colour blind. That's not supposed to happen until 2064, when blacks and whites are all on the way to having a similar cream colour - weak coffee, strong coffee.

A good illustration of the sea change brought about by Obama's win is the response of a friend of mine, a U.S. citizen who lives in Asia Pacific - when I forwarded him the URL for the Change.gov website, he immediately put in a job application. This is a man who has had no interest in returning to the United States for at least the 20 odd years I have known him! This is a truly momentous change in American thinking, no doubt brought about by Joe Sixpack's realization that we need truly innovative measures in order to get the country back to prosperity, and that those measures aren't going to come from the right. I can only hope that America has made this choice because it remembers how well we did in the previous Democrat era, with Bill Clinton at the helm.

There are a couple of overriding aspects to the Obama administration that President Bush and his cohorts could not aspire to, because they did not have the intellectual capital to understand. Take technology, for instance. In the dotcom era, America's growth was fueled, amongst others, by the invention, build and design of the Internet. Adopted enthusiastically by the Clinton administration, which itself became a "heavy user", internet development allowed the United States to be the world leader in the development of new consumer technologies. These technologies, on the one hand, created new revenue streams for services, at the same time as cost savings were realized in legacy industries.

Hardly was the Bush Administration in power, or this entire environment collapsed, taking the stock market with. I am very much convinced that the complete absence of an understanding of these technologies in the Bush Administration has something to do with the loss of our leading position in this arena. If your government excels in not using these homegrown technologies, not understanding them, not advocating them - have you ever seen a member of the Bush cabinet with a cellphone? - you're basically advertising that you don't believe in these tools. Hardly surprising, then, that the rest of the world took our technologies and usurped them, as it were. The largest inventors and producers in this arena, today - cellular telephones, wireless telephony, laptops, hybrid vehicles, green power generation - are all overseas. We've lost our edge, we are no longer in the lead.

I am very firmly convinced that when you have people at the helm whose understanding of technologies hasn't passed the level of the extended cab pickup truck, the incubator environment necessary for the development of new technologies (the primary reason I came here in 1984) is going to die off. Germany, China, Japan, Korea is where the hot stuff happens today - Germany is the largest producer and developer of solar and wind energy devices, subway cars in Beijing have live television, Japanese and Korean consumer cameras have face recognition technology - and all of the American companies that used to invent these things, and build them, are either out of business or relegated to reselling Chinese products. New successful financial products are invented in Shanghai and Hong Kong, not on Wall Street - the ones that originate on Wall Street lead to wholesale bank failures. Portable heat pumps, using a technology that will both heat and cool, and using a technology that is 50% cheaper to run than conventional air conditioning, were invented, designed and are built in the Far East, and sold here - in the country where the air conditioner was invented. I could go on for hours.

So, out of necessity, America is reinventing itself, yet again. A coloured American (in true American over-the-top fashion, Obama is called African-American, which he is not - even if you just look at his father, he was not a descendent of African slaves, but an African immigrant) has taken the reigns, traditional Americans - white conservatives, if you like - have run the ship aground. They have been exporting democracy, Humvees, and Kevlar, and nobody wants to buy. So let's go back to doing Palmpilots, Razrs, Cadillacs and 747s, or whatever their modern equivalent needs to be. We're better at that, and we now - finally - have a President again who carries a cellphone, one ordinary Americans as well as us coneheads can believe in.

Spotsylvania, October 31, 2008 - Where's the dog?

The resolution of publicly available satellite images is now truly staggering. This is a picture of my house in Google Maps, at maximum zoom. You really don't need to build a garage, or even add a skylight, and hope it doesn't get noticed by the County tax assessors... and forget about bopping your girlfriend on the lawn... A couple of interesting aspects - in the past, satellite images were usually owned by the company that operated the satellite - this is the first time I've seen that a state owns them - the Commonwealth of Virginia. And then I had not seen images on Google that were taken in the dead of winter, with the trees entirely bare. Look closely, and you can see the satellite can look right down to the ground - any structures or objects, from maybe two feet (60 cm.) on up, is visible. Curiously, this picture was taken roughly from the North, and that isn't where most satellites hang out, they're over the equator, which is South, so I am wondering how this was done. Ah:

"The 4,300-pound satellite ... while moving from the north pole to the south pole in a 423-mile-high orbit at 17,000 miles per hour, or 4.5 miles per second. The spacecraft can take photos at a resolution of up to 41 cm -- close enough to zoom in on the home plate of a baseball diamond, according to Mark Brender, GeoEye's vice president of communications and marketing." - from Wired.com.

The satellite is mostly used by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a U.S. government agency that analyzes imagery in support of national security. Well, at least we can see what they can see.

Spotsylvania, October 30, 2008 - Read or watch?

Curious, how the mind works. Although I have had the capability to create video for my blog for the longest time - I've had movie and video equipment for as long as I have been pro, I bought an Arriflex 16mm at the same time as my first Nikon F1 - I have never made the switch. I've kept on writing and doing photography, which is how, once upon a time, I made my living, and learned that it is not a good way to make real money. But it was fun, oodles.

It may be that I find that video does not allow you to "step out" and come back to where you were the next day. Books, and the written word in general, let you absorb information at your own pace, rather than at the pace the producer of the video sets for you. Even though I have the capability to use TV and video the way I read - I have two DVRs that continuously run off my satellite feed, one of which will write the recorded material to DVD - it's too cumbersome, and I find that I rarely, if ever, watch TV that way - other than to take another look at the way Miss Belfridge packages her boobs. I am otherwise not much of a sports fan.

So anyway. I am happy to report I have now received the U.S. version of the induction cooker I was after (well, it is not exactly the same device, but they all use the same circuitry, induction coil and controls), and it really is, at the price, an ideal implement to save energy while cooking, which is what we set out to do.

More in a few days, when I have completed my tests.

Spotsylvania, October 28, 2008 - Just the legs alone - you'll never want a old guy again.

Spotsylvania, October 26, 2008 - Video Review Prep

I used to review fair amounts of equipment and services, and provide technical advice, in my old blog. I am going to do that again, but now that I have tested and approved Youtube's embedding, I will add video to the written text. This shouldn't be a major deal, as I have professional video equipment, as well as the expertise that comes from spending years, professionally, in photography, theatre production, artist management, and multimedia and TV production. All I need to do is set up the equipment, and decide whether or not I want to use Klieg lights, and whether I want to do this indoors or out. Living where I do, there is gobs of light, and it is almost always sunny. And living in the woods, as I do, there is little traffic noise, and the light can be wonderfully soft and filtered.

I am currently looking at money saving - this at a time where so many have lost their jobs. For Americans, especially, this often means loss of face - there is, after all, always a selection process involved, and it is hard to find another position if you worked for an outfit that went belly-up. Americans tend to max out their credit cards and other credit before they ask for help, and by that time it is often too late. I am in the same boat. My nest egg is dwindling at an alarming rate, and so I am contemplating going back to work, not because I have run out of money, but to ensure that I don't.

I've not emphasized this, but I actually left New York City for Washington in 2001, when the dot-com era came to an end, and I knew there was still a lot of growth in telecom. And I signed up for a buyout package from Verizon at the end of 2006, when I could see around me that corporations were beginning to curb spending, and I saw clear signs that spending on the Iraq war was not sustainable. It isn't that we didn't have the money, but if so many billions of dollars, and this much energy, are spent on a venture that creates no return, those billions are not spent on growing the economy. Iraq didn't do anything for our oil, either - gasoline went up to $4.50 a gallon.. Most of our oil comes from Canada, anyway, which Americans don't really think of as a foreign country. How do you think the Canadians can afford universal health care, and we can't? That's right, those are your gas $$s, and mine.

There is much talk of the credit crunch, but conveniently forgotten is that that crunch would not have happened if growth had been sustained. Think about it.

So, shortly, I'll review some "stuff" I have bought recently, aiding the quest to save money, simply by looking at things one does or uses every day, to determine if there are easy savings to be had.

There is a pod maker, a device that lets you make your own coffee pods, this for those who use a pod coffee maker, which I have been doing for a couple of years. I generally find those machines too expensive, but when Mr. Coffee sold off some remaining inventory at $19.95 a piece, I jumped at it. I am a coffee maven, and having every cup pressed (rather than dripped) and fresh, without the hassle of having to clean the espresso maker, is great. Having said that, the pods are $0.31 and up, and that gets expensive when you drink 12 cups of coffee a day. So I'll show you how it works, I can tell you now that they make brilliant coffee, and I'll tell you what the comparative price point is.

Then I have ordered an electric filter cigarette maker, with tobacco and preformed tubes, I'll tell the smokers among you how well that works and tastes. When away from home I'll stick to the packs, but there really isn't a reason why I can't "roll my own" at home. Maybe it'll help me smoke less, too.

I've ordered an extra in-window heat pump, to use smaller, more efficient heat pumps (I already own several movable heat pumps) when it is not cold enough for the big whole-house unit. I'll show you there are many different window, wall and portable heat pumps, which cost much more than regular air conditioners, but use half the energy, have more capacity, and heat as well as cool. If you use airconditioning all summer, there really is no reason why you should change to a different fuel to heat. I'll tell you how much capacity you need, and how to figure out if live Southerly enough for a heat pump to be useful.

I told you below (Beijing Day 11) about induction cookers, which are both faster and more efficient than any other type of stove I am familiar with. But the one I brought back from Beijing is for 220 VAC 50 Hz, and that's not usable for most North Americans. Checking the Internet, I found a Chinese outfit in Canada that I think self-imports, and offers many brand name Chinese home products, like Joyoung and Haier, at very competitive prices. I've ordered a 120 VAC 60 Hz $88 (including shipping!) induction cooker from them, and will let you know my experience with them and with the equipment - I am especially curious if its use will affect my electricity bill. One thing I do not like is that they ask for your birthdate - I think that may be a type of credit check in Canada, I just filled out any old date.

Then there is the Half Time Oven, a combination microwave and convection (= hot air) oven. I've been using my big double GE oven/grill to do things like warming up food and finishing steamed veggies, and that is expensive. Recently, I blew up my microwave (wrong connection on a generator test), and so had to replace it. That is when I remembered my sister bought a combination microwave / convection oven, a few years ago, basically because it fit well in her new apartment, and she is very happy with it. So I shopped around, and found one at Wal-Mart for a great price, around $200 (my sister's is a lot more expensive than that, but then it is one of those German brand name things). Should save on the old electric bill.

Last but not least, I am figuring out a way to represent car expenses in a meaningful way. The heavy emphasis on fuel consumption is all well and good, but when it goes to the wire the important factor is how much you need to lay out to drive your car, or your cars. This is real outgoing dollars - I'll compare the Camaro Z28 and the Durango SLT, and show you that the Camaro can actually do as well as the Chrysler 300 or the Toyota Camry, something most people do not know. This is, of course, hardly a video subject, I do think you've got to have something to show, instead of just talking to the camera. Right?

Spotsylvania, October 19, 2008 - Technologies

The video to the right has little significance, other than that it is my first Youtube upload. I have shied away from video so far, because until fairly recently you'd have to do all sorts of conversions, large uploads would often bomb, or be restricted, and then the frame would hang your webpage while some of it loaded. Youtube has fixed all that, so I can now take a video file, regardless of format, upload it, and embed it without affecting my webpage. As you can see here, you can set the embedded frame wherever you want it to be, flow text around it, the works. I have, by the way, made this playback about 35% larger than Youtube's default of 425x350 - if your PC has a hard time keeping up, that may be the cause. I just wanted to see if it worked, and how much the quality deteriorated. It doesn't. In the future, I'll stick with the default, promise.

So for me, embedded video now is a doable thing, that doesn't take a day to get up there. This piece was shot in a mall in Beijing, in September, it was the lunchtime string band that played, and I taped it with my new HD camera - problem being that for 3 minutes, the file is about 90 megabytes in size - that's a lot. But Youtube copes with it without a problem, my WiFi setup transfers it in the background, via my Comcast broadband pipe, seamless. Online video, methinks, has come of age. Google's acquisition of Youtube has provided basically infinite storage space, nobody cramps your style any more. Very importantly, the way Flash is now used to show video, it can buffer ahead as it plays, and that means that 99% of the hiccups of the recent past don't need to happen any more. No more need for Windows Video and Real whatever, it's all got simple. Hurrah! (Well, OK, many high end phones do not yet support Flash, but I believe that is a matter of time. You couldn't run this video on a phone unless it had 3G, anyway).

Although you've not seen my videos in the past, I always carry a video/still camera, and when traveling at least two, as well as two still cameras. I have a complete studio at home, for years already, now with the latest hard disk editing equipment, DVD burners, converters, you name it - one of the many things I did in my career was film and TV production. So I have plenty of stuff, and will start doing more, including product reviews and travelogues.

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Just in case you think I only do high tech, I recently discovered that cooking in stainless steel is really nice. It came about more or less accidentally, I bought an induction cooker in Beijing, after I noticed them all over the shops there, and found out doing research they are much more efficient than any other type of cooker, and that they are all over Asia. Here is a website listing available equipment, from countertop cookers like the one I bought, to ranges - and here is a Wiki explaining the principle. Though available in the US, they've not been pushed, and are, I think, still fairly unknown. So I picked one up at a Wal-Mart in Beijing, they're not large and light, and brought it back (don't do this unless you have a 240 volt 50 cycle power supply in your kitchen!).

Induction cooking only works with metal pots and pans, the kind that a magnet will adhere to. Aluminium, glass, copper, whatever, won't work. I guess that is why these cookers, in China, come with a wok and a cooking pot, so you don't have to go and buy new implements. I wasn't going to cart pots and pans back to the United States, so left those with A. in Beijing, and stuck the cooker in the megasuitcase I had bought to contain the roll-on I came with, and my shopping. And that meant I had to find induction ready pots and pans here.

As it turns out, the majority of cooking sets have an icon on the box that tells you whether or not they're induction compatible. Macy's website lists it, so does Wal-Mart's, and they're not that expensive, I bought a decent set, like this one, except cheaper, at Wal-Mart here for $54 (the cooker itself was about $80). As you can see, they're marked for induction cooking.

I'd been reading that some nonstick cooking surfaces can contain carcinogens, and aluminium really does not take to dishwashers well, so I thought trying stainless steel for a change was a good thing, expecting there to be hard to remove brown crusts after frying, bits of rock hard pasta, mashed potato film, and so on, this was after all a cheapo set.

Nada. No sticky bits, discoloration, anything at all. I am amazed. This not only on the induction thing, but on my regular electric range. All I do is wipe the inside with olive oil, before cooking, don't use heat over regulo 6 (which is the highest setting before "H", on my Jenn-Air), and afterwards, the dishwasher does the rest (the heat setting and the olive oil trick I got off the 'net). No scrubbing, no scouring, no carcinogens, nuttin', look like new after two weeks of use, see the picture. Amazing.

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I am wondering, now, where to take my blog. Until a few months ago, I had it running in Wordpress, a good blogging tool, in Freeservers. But Freeservers messed up their CGI and PERL environments to the point that Wordpress would become inaccessible for weeks on end, and after a "support person", earlier this year, initialized my database, thereby wiping out two years of my work, I eventually decided to resurrect my blog here, and figure out how to put it back into a proper blogging environment next.

Of course, if it is this easy to wipe out a Wordpress blog, and Wordpress is user supported, and a commercial hosting provider like Freeservers (a.k.a.United Online) is unable to recover the site load from its backup (I don't use the "Free" services, but pay for my hosting space), I really need to look for something that is more reliable. Shame - I do like Wordpress, but managing the environment just is too much systems work, without a decent dose of UNIX knowledge it isn't really feasible. Yes, I do have (rusty, but you don't lose them) UNIX programming skills, but if I am using a hosting service with a programming environment it really ought to be easier than having to do, uh, work.

That led me to thinking about archiving. Wordpress archives by the month, while you can allocate keywords to each entry. That's all very nice, but archiving by the month is really useless - did you ever access anyone's blog to find out what they did in March, 2006? Why would you? And a list of keywords, which, unless you are extremely organized, ends up being three pages long, over time, isn't a panacea either.

So I am looking for something better, and while I do so I'll continue to do my own HTML pages. Can't do that for too long, because it will be impossible to transfer. The one nice thing about doing straight HTML is that it will reformat to the size of your browser, while Wordpress is set up to be 800 pixels wide - you can adjust that, but the display engine won't reformat to the size of your screen. Believe it or not, there still are people surfing the web at 800 x 600.

Something that always frustrated me in Wordpress was that I could not show pictures at a reasonable size, it would throw off the column formatting. The way I do it now, I can go as large as I like, although I tend to keep the width down below 800 pixels, this to accommodate the 800x600 folks. And 600 pixels is generally the largest you need to see detail, 500 is normally sufficient (you can click on each picture to pop up a larger version, anyway, but I fully realize the majority of web denizens have no clue what it means when that cursor changes when you "hover" - hovering, to them, is something the kids do).

I'll let you know once I have figured it out, I'll have to do something at the end of the month, before this page gets too huge, anyway. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy. Or, at least, aren't disgusted....

Spotsylvania, October 16, 2008 - Take your pick - Sarah Sixpack or the World

It is all very well to take care of "Joe Six-Pack America" (Gov. Palin) or Joe the Plumber (Sen. Obama), but what about me? I have been asking this question since my lab years in New York, where I made a lot of noise when it was apparently OK that colleagues with children couldn't work weekend days, or had to come in late, or leave early, because of stuff with said offspring. I have always felt that if you decide to have children, you gotta deal with the problems, and do so without inconveniencing me.

I have always said that this is b******t. Procreating is not a God-given right. It is a consequence of not using prophylactics. Family values are all well and good, but there are tens of thousands of professionals like myself, who have no children, pay proportionally the most taxes, and work day and night to keep the American infrastructure working, and the wheels of government and commerce grinding.

We get no consideration of any kind, and this is, at times, a joke. When I took money out of my retirement funds to pay off my remaining debt, after I took the retirement package, I found that I paid way over the top in income tax, and due to the money I withdrew I wasn't even eligible for the stimulus cheque - I had "earned too much" when in fact I hadn't earned at all. I pay so much tax I sometimes think I keep half the state in unemployment benefits - which I myself did not draw, even though I was entitled, just didn't feel right, with what I had in the bank.

Point is that Governor Palin has no idea who Joe Sixpack really is - I too am a plumber, although the plumbing I work on is rather more extensive and infrastructural than Joe's. I've been met by car at JFK coming back from abroad, to attend a network problem on Long Island that had me working 12 hours, after traveling for 20.

I don't have any problems with those requirements of my profession, and I have been well remunerated by my employers, one thing America does do for its essential workers is pay them well. I couldn't, and can't, complain. But listening to this drivel about Joe Sixpack and the Detroit autoworkers and the unemployed construction workers - not to mention the illegals - sometimes makes me want to throw up.

I am very sorry the American auto industry is on its ass, but I do not understand why the auto worker is getting laid off, rather than the entire management structure, from the Chairman on down. It seems that it is OK to invest too much while times are good, and not have a "Plan B" for the lean years. It seems OK to be completely out of tune with the market place - there still isn't an American counterpart to the Toyota Prius - even the lowly Smart, from German Daimler Benz, which isn't particularly frugal in fuel consumption, is selling like hotcakes. They are 30,000 orders behind, waiting time today is 9 to 12 months, they are in fact doing better than they ever did in Europe (!), and it was apparently too much for the American car industry to come up with a similar concept - the Smart has been on the market in Europe since 1998. Walking around Beijing, I saw lots and lots of Volkswagens - not just in the hands of the civilian, but as taxis and police cars. And it seems many of the official government cars are Audis - easy to recognize, because they are all black, fitted with deeply tinted windows, and they don't stop for pedestrians.

Porsche (which is buying the bits of Volkswagen it doesn't already own) seems to be doing very well, even in a recession, and I honestly cannot but ask myself how come General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler aren't in that lineup. Is it again because American manufacturers don't want to listen to foreigners? I remember well writing a memo suggesting that my employer convert their wireless network to the European GSM standard, this at the beginning of the spread of mobile telephony. I said that the majority of projects, internationally, that I was familiar with, were using the GSM standard, and gave a list of technological reasons why GSM was much better at interconnecting countries. I didn't expect anything to come from what I wrote, and it didn't - so, today, the American CDMA technology that for many years was the primary network standard in the United States is effectively DEAD - more than 80% of all users of cellular telephones, in the entire world, use GSM phones. If "they" had listened to me, we could have had our share of that market. Even AT&T Wireless, which converted its network to GSM, is an American company - it didn't go out and buy international markets, like T-Mobile (German, part of Deutsche Telekom, one of the largest telephone companies in the world) and Vodaphone (English, it owns half of Verizon Wireless, and is one of the largest cellular companies in the world). We were out in that market, and we are nowhere, today. Now that Americans don't have money for these services, we have no other markets to fall back on. RIM, the Blackberry manufacturer? Canadian. HTC, the manufacturer of the first Google phone, T-Mobile's G1? Taiwanese. The largest manufacturer of cellphones, Nokia, which introduced the second handheld phone, after Motorola? Finnish.

You follow my drift? Joe Sixpack, in the person of an obnoxious neighbour, once said to me "You people come over here and think you can do what you want". This after imbibing in said sixpack. "You people". You see, that is how, indeed, Joe Sixpack thinks of the world. If it isn't America, Joe doesn't want to know.

If Joe had been Polish, he would have worked abroad - in England, or Holland, or New York. He'd have traveled and got to know the world a little bit. That applies even to Joe from Mexico, it applies to Joe from the Philippines, Joe from Russia, Joe from China. They all go places, and learn. Our Joes do not. So if Joe Sixpack then stops buying Ford F150s, or GMC Tahoes, Ford and GM have nothing to fall back on. While Volkswagen, Audi, and even Landrover (Indian owned) do. It's very nice, all this rhetoric from Ms. Middle America Palin, but she didn't get a passport until last year, I understand. That means she has never shopped in Edeka in Berlin, Germany, or in Carrefour in Beijing, China, she has not a clue how to support the American economy. We need to start worrying about Sarah Sixpack, because she isn't going to get us to where we need to be - over the water. I can call China and Australia for free - but I do so using Skype, and that is a Luxembourg company. We need to get with the program, or be relegated permanently to the sidelines that we're already on.

And Joe the Plumber? He doesn't hold a business license, isn't a member of the Local he says he is, and there's a $1,200 state income tax lien against him. He says he "feels like Britney". Wrong, Joe. Britney pays her taxes.

Spotsylvania, October 13 - The other Student Sarah

The other Sarah, of course, we now need to worry about. She confuses "might" with "power".

Think about it this way: Senator McCain wins the election, has a coronary, passes on, and we end up with Mrs. President Palin. She now gives the first Husband, Mr. Todd Palin, an uncleared civilian, personnel files of people in the Administration, and he calls in the Secretary of Homeland Security to let him know someone has fallen out of favour with the wife.

First of all, giving an uncleared civilian access to personnel files is, in my book, against the law. And then there is what the New York Times said on October 11: "Still, the accusations undermined the campaign’s portrayal of Ms. Palin as a “maverick” and an ethics reformer who has taken on special interests and fought for average residents."

Not. That's wrong. This is exactly what a maverick would do, that is what maverick means, someone whose actions are unpredictable, and unusual, and maybe skirting the edge. And that is why we don't want a maverick, especially one with no experience of governing anything other than a small town, and a largely empty state, in or near the White House. Her behaviour is typical for inexperienced managers, who haven't yet learned that in regulatory and ethical matters, you err on the side of caution. Way. Especially if there are a hundred other things you can do, things that are legal, to disenfranchise a state employee giving you problems. I do not think that Ms. Palin needs to learn the ropes on our dime. And her husband is best off staying in Alaska, where he can't do much harm even if he does fire a dud, now an then. I don't want him anywhere near my government, the one I pay for. It is not someone's personal toyshop. Yes, presidential spouses are close to their partner's work, policies, strategies - but they do not chair Cabinet meetings.

"So no, not having done anything wrong, and again very much appreciating being cleared of any legal wrongdoing or unethical activity at all." - thus Governor Palin, quoted by CBS News, responding to officially being found guilty of ethics violations. Ah, wait! Of course! She is trying to prove that she is ready for Washington...

On another note, I don't know if you have seen the Jetblue commercial that has been doing the TV rounds, these past few weeks - if you haven't, check it out here. I just wanted to bring to your attention that it is a really effective commercial. It makes you buy! I went out and got ELO's Mr. Blue Sky yesterday....

Spotsylvania, Friday, October 10 - USB drives? Which century are we in?

There is a continuing onslaught of articles about flash drives, the little memory devices you plug into a USB port, and can hang off your keychain. You know, the devices you lose in the duvet cover, the settee, in your car, and on the train.

I've advocated for a long time that these devices are lethal to your data. Pentagon files have been found in Northern Virginia, Army files on the street in Iraq, FBI files in stolen cars, and that is just the U.S. government. All in all, with all the tools we have, today, it is easy enough to have the sensitive information on a network, behind a firewall, never carry it, and access it using a secure VPN, a Virtual Private Network. I do this with all my vital files today - apart from anything else, now that the Department of Homeland Security has announced it has the right to seize your laptop or digital camera at the boarder, without a reason, and keep it indefinitely, I have to make sure I can handle my email and have access to my accounts, should that happen. I am a compulsive backer-upper anyway, but this is an extra incentive to keep vital files backed up when I travel. I've fried my laptop while visiting friends in London, before - it doesn't need Homeland Security to mess one up.

But what I do not understand is that the emphasis has not shifted to the Secure Digital device - the SD drive, which comes in Mini-SD and Micro-SD formats, as well. Newer laptops have a card slot (which is faster than a USB connector), while cellphones and digital cameras take these cards as well. I now only buy micro-SD devices, which come with adapters for regular SD, and sometimes mini-SD as well, while the memory capacity is up to 8 Gb, last time I looked. In my laptops, the SD card can provide Readyboost fast swap memory to Windows Vista, and I can use them to transfer files from camcorder and digital camera to laptop. There are USB adapters for them, and they fit in multi-slot devices.

Of course, they are even easier to lose than the USB thumbdrives - although, since they are so tiny (the little protuberance sticking out of the SD adapter, top right in the picture, is the Micro-SD), I think they may actually be easier to secure than thumbdrives. You're not going to put a micro-SD card in your coat pocket, because you may never find it again, you won't leave it lying around on your desk, for the same reason, and you won't throw it into your briefcase, because you might spend an hour locating it.

Most importantly, though, these devices are the wave of the future - they can be used across different equipment, are coming down in price (I've bought 2Gb versions at Wal-Mart for under $13, and 4Gb versions in Beijing for $23), and allow for much better transfer speed. Try them, you'll like them. Lovely, too, is that they don't take up one of your precious USB slots - everything wants to use USB, these days, and as the throughput of the USB bus is shared by all plugged-in devices, it is not a panacea.... Having a separate slot for memory is a good thing.

Spotsylvania, Thursday, October 9 - I love Paris.

(Updated 1:39pm EST) No, I have not watched any of the presidential candidate debates. I tend to feel they are part of the way the American public is deceived - the equation seems so simple to me. We need to look at what the current administration did wrong, then at how the candidate will fix it, and then at how the candidate will improve our lives.

A written exam, with questions an answers culled from a voter survey, would probably be best. The candidates must know, by now, what they need to, and want to, do, and we can them simply rate their answers. Just look at what happens with George Bush' rescue package - his own party voted that down. That's important - does he have clout with his own party? How about the opposition? It is, to me, faintly ridiculous that he can send the military off to invade Iraq, but he can't get a financial package approved. That is topsy turvy, people - what do we do to turn that around?

The other important facet is the combination of the candidates' ages, and their succession. If Senator McCain walks under a bus, we get Governor Palin for president. I don't think she can handle that job - and we don't want another president snoozing in the driver's seat. I'd then sooner see Senator Obama in the White House, because Senator Biden I am confident would adequately handle the presidency.

I woulda actually gone for Howard Stern, but now that he has a wedding tattoo, he's out. Can't have a tattoed president, now, can we?

An interesting article in Wednesday's New York Times (you have to take out a membership to access it, but that is entirely free) discusses the need of the human animal to punish - retribution, as opposed to correction. It does that driven by the initial refusal of the U.S. Congress to pass the bailout package, which was widely viewed as rescuing the bankers and brokers who had caused the market collapse in the first place

Author Benedict Carey, who writes about social and psychological phenomena, makes a good case for something probably best described as "collective corrective action", activities designed to protect one's community from gthe harm inflicted by someone, or some group, regardless of whether that individual or group is part of the collective.

It gets kind of messy, though, when you look at what precipitated the market drop. And I would give you that, in this case, the culprits are often the same as the victims.

Take me as an example. I've been trading in my 401K for as long as my employer made that facility available - and trading stock, which since my early retirement I've been doing for a living, is pure speculation, it bears a close resemblance to gambling, as the movent of stock values is often not directly driven by the underlying value of the assets the stock represents.

Years ago, I reviewed the purchase of Hotmail by Microsoft. Hotmail, a company that had never made a penny profit, was bought for an unseemly amount, solely on the strength of it being the main email provider in the world, which meant, to Microsoft, that it bought basically an enormous database of people who accessed the Internet on a regular basis.

Up until that purchase, nobody had ever made such a large investment in an unprofitable commodity. Microsoft invested, as it were, in the future profitability potential of the asset. And taking that back to the stock market, a small investor like myself will buy stocks in the hopes of seeing their value go up. As we have just witnessed, the values of stocks have no bearing on their underlying asset values - my current IBM stock is down 28% since I bought it, even though IBM, as a company, is doing just fine, and keeping businesses computing just like it has always done. After I posted this blog entry, it almost looked as if IBM had read what I wrote, as the company provided an upbeat forecast (considering the circumstances) - read about it in Fortune, here. I can give you other examples, but I am sure you can see my point.

The only thing that saved me, and messed up a lot of other people, is that I did not take a risk with the value of my house. What I paid for it was, at the time, fair market value. Shortly after, because of the outflux of professionals from the Washington, D.C. area, house prices in my area, which the Washington Post refers to as the "remote suburbs", spiked. What many people were doing, all over America, was refinancing their homes for the increased value, thereby raking in profits that had yet to be paid for. I could have made a packet within about 18 months from buying this place, but then I'd have ended up with a half million dollar-plus mortgage.

I did not, and that's why I can still pay my mortgage today. I can even sell the place for a modest profit, should I need to.

The point I am making is simply that those same people that are hurting today are the people who worked together to drive up the market - "cashing in the equity" is really taking on more debt, and taking longer to pay it. And that includes me, even though I didn't go the real estate route. People will do this, because we are all greedy. And once all this is over, and the generation that is today too young to trade gets into the fray, it will happen all over again. Because it is only those that were hurt that learn by experience. And that excludes the youngsters.

So, rather than punish the transgressors - and I will tell you we have been punished enough - we should make a point of catching runaway reactions, and damping them down. It is pretty much like managing a nuclear reactor - the fuel rods are intended to provide a certain amount of energy over a given period of time, and if you like seeing their power, and push them into the reactor just that little bit more, you get a lot more energy - energy that you won't have available towards the end of the reactor's lifetime. Power corrupts.

Or rather, energy that would be available towards the end, because you never make it there, the thing will melt long before you get anywhere close, and probably kill a lot of innocent bystanders.

In many ways, then, this is an argument for more government -self regulating business works about as well as installing a fuel saving contraption in your car - the only people that get rich are those that sold you pie-in-the-sky. And those should be easy to stop.

So why can't we? Why does the protective instinct not work, once you get out of the neighbourhood? Or why does my friend D., to this day, believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? Even though he watches the same television I do. I sometimes wonder if all this is related to things we don't like to talk about. Like: he is deeply religious, and I am not. So he is used to believing things you can't see, and I am not. Maybe he becomes his own religion, after enough brainwashing.

Spotsylvania, Saturday, October 4, 2008 - Trying not to sell

Ever since the financial rot set in we have all seen our purchases getting more expensive, but I am seeing another trend as well - mistaken marketing.

During the entire boom period, lots of Internet vendors used a plethora of tools to rope in the customer - Overstock.com, for instance, and Sportsmansguide.com, both have a "Club" type customer group, where you get a discount when you pay for a membership. I have occasionally subscribed to these things, when there was a clear advantage, i.e., when I bought something expensive enough that the discount still would save me money after paying the membership fee. But never have I joined these things on the offchance, or just renewed because I alreay was a member.

What I discovered was that when you did not renew your membership, and stopped buying from them when the renewal came up, they would extend you a free membership, just to keep you coming back. And that is what has now changed. They've stopped doing that.

Why am I boring you with this? I wanted to attract your attention to the fact that these giveaways exist when the market is good, and everybody is spending money like crazy, but they stop when the vendors really need more customers and sales, like now.

This does not make any kind of sense. On the one hand we're seeing a huge increase in "blanket marketing" - vendors and manufacturers will send you advertising material whether or not you're buying, they are not doing any type of correlation with their databases to make sure they only market to those folks that are buying. They could save tons of money doing this, when they should be concerned with the bottom line, while the incentives they were using to increase sales they are no longer using. I've really only seen Macy's send lots of discount coupons, more than during the boom years, they appear to understand what others do not.

Just to give you an example, I am getting dozens of offers of credit every week, even though any financial institution can just get on their research system and see I have thousands of dollars in credit available that I do not use, and I pay all of my credit accounts off every month. There is then no point in spending money trying to sell me more credit, I am clearly not needing it, why don't these folks use the simple analysis programs that exist, and save themselves the cost of marketing to me? How moronic is it to market to people that aren't going to be your customer? Apart from anything else, I will never open an account with a bank or financial institution that does not support Quicken Direct Connect - many use Quicken Web, which forces the customer to log in via the institution's website, which lets them put advertising in front of your face (and is less secure!!) and I refuse to do that. One of the reasons I dumped HSBC is that they stopped supporting Quicken Direct. So if your company does not support Direct Connect, you never needs to send me any information at all, because I will never be your customer. Isa simply, no?

The issue, you see, is that it isn't the banks and the financial institutions and the manufacturers that are paying for all this marketing - it is you and me! These activities are paid for out of the money we pay for these services - cheque charges, ATM charges, credit card surcharges embedded in the price of things you buy, etc. Completely useless expenses, and proof that the banks and the shops and the vendors still are not getting the message, a large propertion of their advertising dollars is wasted - I'll wager some 80%.

The message has to be that people buy stuff because they want to, not because they see a flyer or an advertisement, or get a catalogue through the door. It has never been understood that the marketeers have absolutely no tools to correlate their advertising with sales - they have no way of establishing why you bought what you just bought. Did you happen to drive by the store? Did you always want that item and you just got a bonus cheque? Did you hear from a friend that this is so good? Did your husband suggest you might do better with this than with something else?

Because: no matter how many of these annoying surveys companies do, the only information they get out of them is from people that receive, have the time, and the willingness to fill out surveys. Which is: not most of us. And that means that the information they get out of these surveys, which are now so easy to distribute because of the Internet, is completely useless. There isn't any information in these surveys that has any data about the shopping behaviour of busy professionals, busy moms, and Me. And it is the busy professionals, busy moms, and Me, that spend the most money. They don't even have the basic understanding that unless you pay people for providing survey information, you get what you pay for: Nothing. Nada. Niente. Niks.

And guess what: these same tactics are at the root of the current financial debacle - attempting to rope people in to spend money, without any consideration for their actual circumstances an abilities. Look at it this way: if you sell to people who can't afford your stuff, and you give them the means to borrow to buy, they'll eventually end up not buying from anyone any more. Think about it: if credit ratings worked, we wouldn't have all of these folks in foreclosure and bankruptcy. That is what credit ratings are supposed to prevent, aren't they?

Just one example: my credit rating was quite depressed, for years, because of a lien the New York State tax office placed on my bank account in New York. Why? They had audited a prior year tax return, doing so after I had moved out of state, and as the New York State tax office is, by New York State law, under no obligation to find out where you live, and can send its correspondence to your last known address in New York State, I never knew of the audit, or of the additional tax demand.

Once I discovered that my bank account was blocked (HSBC, my bank of 16 years, never called me, and so I closed my accounts with them, forever) I paid the outstanding, which was only $4K, the same day, and that was the end of the matter, or so I thought. I happened to be in Manhattan that day, so it was as easy as walking over to my branch, and signing an order. But the lien showed up on my credit rating, and that was, as a consequence, quite depressed for a number of years - even though I had a six figure salary, and no debt! And at that point, when I was, for instance, even turned down opening a new bank account, I had no problem buying a house, though, but needed a subprime FHA loan. The bank (I came referenced, of course) had the ability to go into my credit report, and, as the bank guy said, "clean it up". And that in turn increased my credit rating, over a five year period - but again, nothing changed, my debt level and payoff capability are effectively the same today as they were five years ago.

All I am trying to demonstrate is that the system not only stinks, it doesn't work. It doesn't do what it was created for. It doesn't identify who is a good credit risk, and who isn't, it doesn't identify who is a high roller, and who isn't (even though the information needed for that is all there!), and worst of all - it doesn't identify who you can safely sell to. What is called risk management doesn't actually work, even though we have the software that can help us analyze credit recoords, and could have isolated those buyers that were marginal.

It would have been possible to create a separate category for high risk buyers - people who borrowed against future earnings. It would have been possible to create a separate mortgage insurance group for those buyers - if the financial industry, wanting to maintain growth, wants to lend to those buyers there are many ways to mitigate the risk. Because, that is what we need to know: who can we sell to, and keep selling to, tomorrow, next week, next year, and the next decade. NOT: who can we sell to, and then bankrupt. Not: who can we sell to once, and never again. I get hard cover bound catalogs from companies I already buy from... using the Internet...

People that understand this seem to be Wal-Mart, which has all the tools in place to sell affordable staples to people with low income. As there are now more people with a low income, Walmart sells more, not less. They're not worried about your credit rating, because they don't base their strategy on stupid numbers collected by people whose calculations derive from thin air. Similarly, Family Dollar is showing huge growth - interestingly, both in the case of Wal-Mart and Family Dollar, advertising and marketing have absolutely nothing to do with their sales increase. Their new customers go there simply because they know they can save money by shopping there - and that should teach all of those other companies that the consumer does not need to be told where to shop - in other words, advertising works perhaps for luxury goods, but not for staples, the consumer knows where to buy cheaply. Even in Beijing - when I needed a new suitcase to take my shopping back to the States, and couldn't find a large suitcase under $200, anywhere, I ended up at a Beijing Wal-Mart, where I found a good quality humongous suitcase for $76.... Advertising not needed.

Am I right or am I right?

Spotsylvania, Thursday, October 2, 2008

A radical Pakistani Muslim prayer leader said that Pakistani President Zardari has shamed the nation for "indecent gestures, filthy remarks, and repeated praise of a non-Muslim lady wearing a short skirt", and he has issued a Fatwa against the President. The comments pertain to Mr. Zardari's meeting with Alaska Governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Good on you, sport. We don't like your dress, either, and you better watch yourself - she's bigger than you, she has a 30.06, and Alaska is twice the size of Pakistan.

As far as Governor Palin is concerned, Calista Flockhart, interviewed on the Late Show with David Letterman, tonight, summed it all up. She spent a couple of weeks in Alaska, this summer, taking her 7 year old son, as well as Harrison Ford, and commented on Alaska that "It's so big! And completely empty!"

Spotsylvania, Wednesday, October 1, 2008

It has been a while since I have blogged, due primarily to the way in which Freeservers destroyed my old blog, when after months of CGI problems a support person decided, without permission, to reinitialize my database. That wiped out two years worth of work, and despite promises to retrieve the backup, nothing has happened. I haven't quite decided whether or not to write Mr. Mark R. Goldston – that's right, the one that is trying to sell you Juno dialup email on television, he is Chairman, President and CEO of United Online, the company that owns Freeservers, too. I still find it hard to believe that a commercial webhoster can do this type of stuff. Moving the helpdesk from Utah to Bangalore hasn't helped either – I had never dealt with a corporation where the customer cannot communicate with technical support. You call the helpdesk, they then email technical support, and if you're lucky you get mail from them at some future date. Most of the time, you don't, and the problem does not get solved. This isn't just a rant – I have the entire thing documented, should I decide to go the lawyer route. It is such a waste of time...

Owell. I thought that my trip to Beijing would be a good point to pick the blog back up. For now, I will use my AT&T server space, where nothing ever goes wrong, and my old handmade webpages, which can't get wiped out, as they always have an automatic copy on my backup server.Over the next few weeks, I'll share with you my impressions of Beijing and China, where I went out of sheer curiousity, having been completely bowled over by the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony, but also to see ex A., who I recently discovered has finished her bachelor's and has been living and working and learning Mandarin in Beijing. I really had, due to the state of the economy (read: my savings) not planned an international trip, other than a quick visit to my sister in Amsterdam, but the opportunity to have A. acquaint me with Beijing was irresistible. But it wasn't just that - on Skype, A. sounded like she was in the doldrums, and something I have started doing since 9/11 is jumping in the car or an airplane when a friend or relative needs cheering up. Especially if you're in China, which is a bit like being on Mars, and very far away from friends and family, not an easy thing. I know this from my own travels - when you live far away, generally people only visit you if they need a free hotel room, want to use your pool, or want something else from you.

So, I booked flight and hotel, took A. out to dinner, gave her a chance to spill the beans over a beer, and then we went shopping... Anyway, I've come away impressed. And as a footnote, the BBC has it that the traffic restrictions in force during the Beijing Olympics and Paralympics, restrictions that cleaned up the air and gave me a blue sky for most of my stay, will be reinstated, in modified form. The discussion was going on on the Internet and on Beijing television (China's English language channel CCTV 9 was indispensible) while I was there, an amazing 800,000 people responded to the city government's question what should be done. And the upshot is that they have listened to the populace, they have proven it can be done, and they've decided to do it again.

Perhaps that is more important even than the pomp and circumstance of the Olympics, and the grandeur of China's first spacewalk, because it will significantly improve the lives of some seventeen million inhabitants of Beijing – as a consequence of China's hosting of the 2008 Olympics, they've now had their underground fare lowered from 3 Yuan to 2 Yuan per trip, had seven(!) subway lines added to the four the city had, and cleaner air is to follow.

I remember from living in London in the late 'seventies and early 'eighties that the pollution was so bad that a Londoner, someone who lived in the inner city, would end up on the front page of the Evening Standard if they lived to be eighty. That's pretty much where Beijing was, and that is now set to change. Good show!

As I am writing this the Federal bailout package has just been accepted by the Senate, and will now go back to the House on Friday. What I'll say is that I certainly agree with the critics, it's not a good idea for the government to own the financial industry, but I am afraid that is still better than sitting back and doing nothing - I have lost some US$61,000 in the stock market, this year. The change will re-energize industry and the financial markets, and we'll then have to make sure we don't all get stupid again. Because: it isn't just the banks and the brokers and the insurers and the investors that went wrong, it is as much the voter and the consumer and the all American family that is to blame. It is quite simple, really – you just can't buy something you can't pay for, and hope you win the lottery before the bill arrives. Right? You know they say that when America sneezes, the world catches a cold – well, we just about have pneumonia, and you can die from that. 

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On September 11, 2001, at 8am, I was in the air between New York City and Washington, D.C., my regular commute for a number of years, on my way to a doctor's appointment - little did I know I would spend the next eight months working on the recovery of our networks and services, in Manhattan and Arlington. "9/11" became a determining factor in my life - I had offices in Manhattan and Arlington, VA, some of my customers, as well as my dentist, were in the Pentagon, and in the World Trade Center, where I would get my morning coffee and breakfast, when downtown. I make a point, now, of visiting, and communicating with, my friends and relatives as often as I can; and I finally left the cityscape, and now live in the country. I've written up some of my experiences of that day, and its aftermath, here. You can find a list of all killed and missing victims of the 9/11 attacks, some of whom I knew and worked with, at the Washington Post. An attempt at a listing of all casualties of the War on Terror can be found here.

 

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FAIR USE NOTICE: This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material available in an effort to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, environmental, social, justice and other societal issues. I believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the United States Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who express an interest in receiving the included information for research, educational and informational purposes.

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Some jurisdictions hold the creator/publisher of a website responsible for the content of links published at that website. All links available at this site were verified at the date/time of posting, posted to the public Internet, and deemed to be in the public domain, in the public interest, or are personal expressions or opinions of the owner/publisher of the linked site. I disavow responsibility for changes made to the linked pages after the date that I have published such links, and I disavow responsibility for content of linked pages that may be available through mirror, cache or other automated store-and-forward sites, whose owners/operators are solely responsible for appropriate synchronization of said material with its original(s).