problems

One of the worst effects of the Reagan Revolution was a near-complete loss of conscious caring about public infrastructure in the U.S. Most capital-intensive essentially public projects with no Wall Street box office were neglected. For decades.

I’m reminded of this by On the pot-holed highway to hell, by John Gapper in the Financial Times. It begins,

Will this be an issue in the upcoming election? Barack Obama lists 21 issues in a pull-down menu. One of those is “additional issues“. There are six of those. Last on the list is “transportation“. Its entire text says “As our society becomes more mobile and interconnected, the need for 21st-century transportation networks has never been greater. However, too many of our nation’s railways, highways, bridges, airports, and neighborhood streets are slowly decaying due to lack of investment and strategic long-term planning. Barack Obama believes that America’s long-term competitiveness depends on the stability of our critical infrastructure. As president, Obama will make strengthening our transportation systems, including our roads and bridges, a top priority.” But there is a .pdf of the full plan. Argue with it if you like, but at least he has one.

John McCain lists 13 issues in his pull-down Issues menu. None of them cover this stuff, near as I can tell.

This morning I got a request from a friend to connect through Reunion.com. Seemed innocent enough, and I fell for it. Which is to say, they got one of my email addresses. Nothing more. Far as I know. But somehow they put X and N together and began spamming people I know.

Now I have five emails from friends, so far, plus one each from my wife and my sister, each with copies of spams from Reunion.com. The reunion.com emailings go like this:

I left out the links.

Oh, I also got one like the above, from myself. Another other notified me that “You’ve just been added to Doc Searls’s Reunion.com Address Book.”

What address book? And how exactly did they get that list of contacts?

Fortunately all those friends and relatives who wrote back were smarter than I was and saw the email from reunion.com as the scam it is. Others? I dunno. Live and re-learn, I guess.

Here’s the Google lookup of Reunion.com and spam. Plenty there.

I am among the least litigious people on Earth. But I can’t help but wonder … Could I (or we) sue these bastards for false representation? Invasion of privacy?

Scott Bradner writes,

Where I live, not far from where Scott works (also where I work, for what it’s worth), we have more than three wires going into the house, and past us on the street. We have Comcast cable, Verizon DSL (phone wire), RCN fiber and Verizon FiOS (also fiber). Since Verizon offers the best Internet deal — 20Mb symmetrical service — we go with them. (And yes, it rocks. Worse, it spoils. I only upload large numbers of photos when I’m home. And they all go up in seconds or minutes.)

What Scott has me wondering is if Verizon is only offering its symmetrical service where there are also two or more competitors. Anybody know?*

It would be interesting data, if true, and an argument on behalf of a robust marketplace.

* CZ does, and notes in the comments below (also on his blog) that Verizon offers symmetrical service to all its FiOS customers. When I ordered the service, and got on the horn with a technician to shake down the setup, he told me it was only being offered in certain areas. Maybe that was wrong information, or right only at that point in time, which was several months ago.

Rush Limbaugh drives me nuts, because he’s sometimes at least a little bit right about some things. Of course he’s a shameless partisan hack — yet with just enough humor and warmth that you can’t help but stay tuned.

Anyway, here’s a transcript of Rush’s show yesterday. It’s one in which he’s feeding on Rev. Wright’s exposed flesh, no less than — as Dave correctly points out here — the rest of Washington’s shark tank. Stories like this (with character and struggle out the wazoo) are too juicy to ignore.

Of course Rush’s teeth are all over Obama as well. Though mostly he’s working to submerge and drown the best of Obama under the worst of Wright.

Andrew Sullivan finds some stuff to agree with, in the midst of Rush’s several-hour chew-fest on Obama. But Andrew also points back toward the high road that Barack needs to find again, if the candidate doesn’t want to hand the game over to Hillary, for her to hand over to John McCain (which is the way to bet now in any case, if you’re just following the odds). Sez Andrew:

Good luck with that. He’ll need a lot of it.

So I decided to cave in and say yes to patients waiting in the accumulating pile of friend requests at my Facebook account. Haven’t been to Facebook in awhile, so I was also curious to see if “friending” has improved since the last time I slogged my way through the process.

First, l lost count of how many seconds passed during login. As usual, I clicked “remember me”, but I have no faith that it will next time. It never has before.

Second, I now have 190 friend requests. I know a few dozen of these folks. I would like to say yes to them as a group. While this would be handy and useful, and must be something that users have wanted for a long time, it’s still not there — though it’s nice to see that the silly intermediate checkbox thing (about how you know this person) is gone. Still, it takes another 10 18 25 seconds or so between clicking “confirm” and actual confirmation. With nothing happening in the browser’s status bar. So you have no idea if clicking even worked.

Makes me wonder if there is a cure for silos that isn’t yet another silo.

There has to be. Eventually. Somehow.

[Later…] I just “friended” a few people. They took, 30, 15, 8, 14, 33, 5, 34, 15, 5 and 5 seconds. I won’t bother to average those, because they don’t include the last two I tried. Both took more than a minute before I gave up because nothing happened. Awful.

When a blog comment to an ancient post comes into moderation and it has no relevance to that post, and the English is awful, I’m figuring it’s a splog (spam blog) comment. So I kill it.

The latest one killed went, question: How many guys ( MARRIED) feel that all they do is for not? eg… work around the house/ work for a living eg… bring home the bacon. / try to do all they can with their kids and then some. If you feel the same way i do tell my wife. That’s in response to this post from last September.

What would have happened if I had approved it? Well, in the past at least one of them turned my server into a spam slave. Or something. I just remember that the server was compromised and unscrewing it took a lot of work. The compromise came in through an old Wordpress install that hadn’t been updated. One blog was killed outright and another still isn’t back.

More about the risks here. Sad that the Web has turned into a city where everybody has to bolt their doors, but … it is.

At ROFLCON, this time for more than a few minutes. Observations…

I can’t post a question using the question tool.

I’m at a panel on fame, and I don’t know any of the panelists. (They are, in fact, moot of 4chan, Randall Munroe, and Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics. They are arranged according to size: moot, Randall, Ryan.)

I am >2x the age of 90% of the people here. I may be 2x the age of ANY of the people here. (Not true, but it seems that way.) Worse, I’m dressed to “go out” to some place nice later, so it’s like I’m in costume.

A sport here: being first finding the too-few power outlets. (That’s the headline reference, btw. Figger it out.)

Neo-Cantabrigian observation: MIT does wi-fi right, while Harvard does power outlets right. At MIT, it’s a snap to get out on the Net through the wi-fi cloud, but there are too few power outlets, and some of them have no power. At Harvard, there are power outlets for everybody in all the classrooms (at least at the Law School, to which most of my experience is so far confined), and getting out on the Net requires a blood sample. From your computer.)

Great question from the floor… “At what time have you been most afraid of what you’ve created?” Answer: “Right now.” At which point Anonymous Thinker — a guy dressed in a suit and a fedora with a black stocking pulled over his head — just made a bunch of noise from the back of the room. Near as I can tell. I’m in the mid-front, and can’t turn my head that far. Still, funny.

Best question on the Question Tool: “SUDO MAKE NEW QUESTION.” Top vote-getter: “What is your zombie defence plan?”

Unrelated but depressing: The lobby for US-style copyrights in Canada has gone into overdrive, recruiting a powerful Member of Parliament and turning public forums on copyright into one-sided love-fests for restrictive copyright regimes that criminalize everyday Canadians.

I don’t have the whole fotoset up yet, but it’ll be here.

Randall just called blogs a “four letter word”. Blogs are very outre here.

To get (and stay) in shape, I’ve been spending more time off-grid. Less blogging and twittering, more time communing with nature. Some of that time I’m not indulging my curiousities. Or at least I’m resisting them. No electronics, for example. It was on one of those walks that I became curious about the story of infrastructure, past and present. What were these metal plates doing in the ground? Why were they there? Why were there so many of them? What were their different purposes? Which ones were remnants of services or companies no longer in existence? Which ones had found new uses? Why do so many carry the signatures of companies and utilities long dead?

I started on the Minuteman Bikeway, which passes close to our home not far from Harvard, where I’m headquartered these days. With a minimal slope, it’s perfect for active but low-stress strolling or biking. And it connects a lot of interesting historic sites. At one end is the Alewife “T” stop on the Red Line subway. At the other is something in Belmont I haven’t reached yet, because I usually go only as far as Lexington. Most of the stretch runs through Arlington, which combines the former villages of West Cambridge and Menotony. This is roughly the path along which the British soldiers retreated from Lexington on April 19, 1775, losing men (mostly boys, actually) and killing colonials of many ages. Thus started the Revolutionary War.

The Middlesex Central Railroad was born in 1846 and died in 1982. Part of it was better known as the Lexington and West Cambridge Railroad. It began as a vein of commerce, carrying goods from mills and ponds along its path. The Earth was colder in the early days of the railroad, and the winters were longer. Ice cut from Spy Pond was shipped all over the world from docks in Boston. This past winter the pond was thick enough to support skating for about three days.

But I’ve become more interested in the infrastructure story. So, over the last couple weeks, as Spring breaks out along the trail, I’ve been shooting pictures, mostly of stuff on the ground, before it gets haired over with vegetation, in faith that patterns will start making sense to me. I’ve also shot a lot around Cambridge, Boston and other places, but haven’t put those up yet. Right now I’m adding descriptions to the photos in this set here.

This is part of a long-term project, methinks. We’ll see how it goes. If you’re interested in following the same threads, tell me in the comments below.

Used to be I could tell splog bait on sight. Of the thirteen blog comments in moderation a few minutes ago, ten were comments from splog sites specializing in sex, poker or some lawsuit-intensive disease.

Usually they say something like “nice post”, which works for anywhere. Sometimes they say “facebook is the best”, the source presumably being some Facebook-based scam — or so I’m guessing, because I don’t bother to check. Here’s one from somebody’s whose first name is “Join” that says “I love this. Thanks to sharing”. It’s from this site. It looks real enough, but again, I don’t have time to check. Short posts like this usually come from sploggers, so I either kill them as spam or “defer until later”, after which I kill them anyway. It seems cruel, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.

Now here’s one from somebody named Martin with an aol.com address. He says “Hello Doc! When we take it to the broader sense, it says obviously right. Though too small, but comprehensive and nice post.” That’s in response to this post here. It’s almost sensible, but … not quite right. The commenter gives this site as its URL. It looks like another digg-like thing. But when I look it up on Google, it doesn’t have much of a profile. When I see how many other pages link to it, only one result comes up. But is it a splog, or a brand new site that just doesn’t have much participation yet? This post suggests the latter. But does that mean it’s still not a scam?

I’m a generous guy, but I’m also busy. I don’t have time to waste trying to figure this crap out.

But I guess that’s the idea, huh?

The short of it is that I’m in a hospital with a blood clot in my right lung.

The long of it is that I don’t have other blood clots, that I’m on blood thinners for awhile, and I’ll be fine. I might make it out by this afternoon, and I’ll even be able to get back to work by tomorrow and make VRM2008 and EIC2008 in Munich two weeks from now.

Meanwhile I’m having an educational tour of the health care system at Harvard and Cambridge. Very impressive, and reassuring.

This thing started with pain under my left shoulder blade on Saturday night that I assumed was a stretched muscle or something skeleto-muscular. It was uncomfortable but not debilitating. The next couple of days it spread to various places around my chest, so that breathing became a bit difficult at times, just because it was painful. Still, I felt otherwise okay. I didn’t suspect heart problems because just a few months ago I had a bunch of heart tests and came off looking quite good.

Then yesterday I had trouble finding a comfortable sitting position, because the pain, especially at the bottom back left of my rib cage, became too intense every time I breathed in.

So I called the health care center at Harvard Law School. The folks there were concerned just because “You’re sixty and have chest pains. That’s warning enough. Can you get in here, or should we send an ambulance?” I got in there, accompanied by the good Dr. Weinberger. The doctor there listened to my lungs, said things weren’t quite right — one of my lungs wasn’t moving air as well as the other — and ordered an ambulance.

Long story short, a CAT scan showed a “mid-size” blood clot in my right lung, plus the other stuff I said in the first two paragraphs. The only remaining mystery is the source of the blood clot, which additional tests they hope will eventually show. (Though they might not find out. If it came from a leg, there’s no remaining sign of one there now. Meanwhile, they need to eliminate other possibilities, including cancer somewhere, though they say the chance of that is low.)

Anyway, the warning sign I should have observed was the presence of chest pain that was clearly not the result of minor injury (such as stretching). When I pressed on pain locations, nothing happened, yet breathing normally was painful at those locations. Shoulda been a give-away that it was deeper than muscle or skeleton, meaning lungs.

Interesting discovery: pain from blood clots in lungs does not necessarily occur at the location of the clot. It can show up anywhere around the chest. That’s why it hurts in the lower left back side of my ribcage even thought he clot is in the upper part of my right lung.

I feel good enough to work here, though it’s not easy with tubes hooked up to one or both of my arms, at different times. So far this post has been interrupted more times than I can count, mostly with tests and other visits from medical folk. (Since this is a teaching hospital, I am a subject of sustained curiosity.) That’s why, even though I started writing this post around 6:30am, it’s now 9:43.

So I think I’ll just read some of the stuff that Nicco brought over (along with much more…the man is an ace), and hope that all this testing & stuff gets done enough for me to get out of here soon.

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop, headlines the New York Times. “They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop”, it begins. It’s about blogging for bucks. Marc Orchant and Russell Shaw, both of whom died recently, and Om Malik, who recently survived a heart attack, serve as instructive examples of “toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment”.

Mike Arrington “says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. ‘At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen…This is not sustainable’.”

The piece goes on:

One of the most competitive categories is blogs about technology developments and news. They are in a vicious 24-hour competition to break company news, reveal new products and expose corporate gaffes.

To the victor go the ego points, and, potentially, the advertising. Bloggers for such sites are often paid for each post, though some are paid based on how many people read their material. They build that audience through scoops or volume or both.

Since this system does not feature the ‘chinese wall’ between editorial and advertising that has long been a fixture of principled mainstream journalism — or rather because writing, publishing and advertising are much more intimately mashed up in this new system than it was in the old one — I suggest a distinction here: one between blogging and flogging.

I brought that up on The Gang on Friday and got as nowhere as I did when I put up the post at the last link. So far it has no comments at all.

Still, I think distinctions matter. There is a difference in kind between writing to produce understanding and writing to produce money, even when they overlap. There are matters of purpose to consider, and how one drives (or even corrupts) the other.

Two additional points.

One is about chilling out. Blogging doesn’t need to be a race. Really.

The other is about scoops. They’re overrated. Winning in too many cases is a badge of self-satisfaction one pins on oneself. I submit that’s true even if Memeorandum or Digg pins it on you first. In the larger scheme of things, even if the larger scheme is making money, it doesn’t matter as much as it might seem at the time.

What really matters is … Well, you decide.

Blog here says Skybus, which for awhile had $10 fares, has cratered.

After a delayed plane that got to Dulles around midnight, a car rental agency that took most of an hour to get me a car that worked, a long drive to D.C., and three tries at getting a hotel room with a door that would open (with an equal number os schleps up and down the elevator with all three of my bags), I’m finally in my room. Now jacked in to the hotel ethernet, I’m watching Flickr upload photos at a rate of one every few seconds. The measured bandwidth is 7.05Mbps down and 1.53Mbps up. The hotel, a Ramada Limited, is beat to crap and in a scary neighborhood. (The reception counter is behind bulletproof glass, and business is transacted through one of those bowls under the botttom edge.) But the Internet is free. And it works real well.

Which, once again, makes my case.

The only reason to close state geography data is to protect a few existing monopoly businesses.

Making that data available to the public is a good idea in any case. But the big pro-business reason is that it makes countless businesses possible. Remember the world without GPS? The world with it is better. For countless businesses, as well as ordinary citizens. Geodata should be a rising tide that lifts all boats.

When pro-business means pro-monopoly, something is wrong.

Thanks to Tara for the pointer.

I upload a lot of photos. It’s almost always an ordeal unless I’m at home or work. That’s because I get fast upload speeds in both places. At home I have a fiber connection to the Net with 20Mb symmetrical service — a rare and good thing. I don’t know the upstream speed at work, but it’s plenty fast enough and it always works.

When I hit the road, though, it’s aarg all the way.

Most hotels have crappy service. There are some exceptions among the expensive hotels. The Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles seemed pretty good a few days ago. But before that, neither the University of Redlands nor the Hilton in Loma Linda was worth a damn. The problem at Redlands was all kinds of blocked stuff: ping, ssh and IM protocols all seemed to be blocked, when anybody could get on at all. The Hilton was just slow and lame. Most of the low- to mid-price hotels in which I tend to stay are good for browsing, email and not much more.

Generally speaking, the cheap hotels with free connectivity are okay.

Anyway, I’m at Logan Airport in Boston now, waiting for a late plane, paying $4.95 for “roaming” on MassPort’s system as a t-Mobile customer, for which I’m already paying $29 or so per month. Last time I flew, a few days ago, T-Mobile’s system didn’t work at LAX. Since I’m also without my EvDO service right now, there’s no way to bypass MassPort here at Logan.

Right now I’m watching Flickr’s in-browser uploading system fail on photo after photo. Of the eight shots it has tried to upload so far, only two have made it. The rest turned red. A few seconds ago I gave up on them.

A speedtest now says my download speed is 4.4Mbps, and uploads are just 109kbps.

The problem here is that the Net is seen by too many hotels and airports as a way to make money rather than to keep customers happy. That’s because it’s seen as a private business rather than a public utility. It would be better for everybody if we admitted that it’s the latter, even when private businesses provide access to it.

Yes, it has costs. So do electricity, water, waste collection and road maintenance, and neither airports nor hotels charge for those — at least not Thing is, the Net is not a steady scarcity, such as parking. Nor is it simple. But making it gratis removes the billing complexities that are one of its main costs and a frequent cause of failure.

So here’s a message to the aviation and hospitality industries: You’re not in the pay toilet business. Quit trying to turn the Internet into one.

And here’s a plea to the marketplace: Somebody come up with a Net connection business for airports and hotels that’s all about installing a simple and symmetrical utility that’s easy to maintain and keeps users happy.

Take it from somebody who lost at least one whole blog entirely from the consequences not upgrading WordPress: Upgrading your installation or patch is essential. So read this from Ian Kallen.

Also what he added by IM yesterday:

I added the last link.

Here at the Westin in Los Angeles, connectivity is pretty good — about a megabit in each direction. (For a fee, of course.) But the last two days, at the Hilton in Loma Linda and the University of Redlands, were terrible. I’m not sure if it was just because they blocked stuff (as was the case with Redlands), or because the system was bad (as was the case with the Hilton), but I’ve come to the conclusion that two things cause these kinds of problems in general. One is charging for something that ought to be free. The other is subtracting value from something that doesn’t need it and only pisses off users.

In the long run it makes as much sense for hotels to charge for Internet as it does to charge for television. (Yes, they used to do that too. There were coin-operated TVs.) Or for using the toilet. But it’s a business because they know they need Internet service now, and because doing it themselves is too complicated. So they hire these outside outfits to do it for them. (In the case of the Hilton it was iBahn.) And too many of them just don’t do a good job.

Yet we saw in Loma Linda how easy it is to bring fiber to homes, and for anybody to hook by fiber to anybody. The cabling and conduit are progressing upwards in convenience and downward in price, to a point where it will be as easy to put in fiber as it is to install a drip irrigation system. What makes the Interent complicated is that it comes to most places as a secondary service to telephony and television. Yet it doesn’t have to be, and in the long run it won’t be.

More than a year ago I suggested to folks from Frontline that they put out their shows on BitTorrent, serving as the Alpha Seed. I’m pretty sure Dave Winer (at the same conference) said the same thing. Maybe I got the idea (like so many others) from Dave.

I also remember thinking, if not saying, that BitTorrent distro was inevitable. The economics of transmission map nicely to the sociology of the show. The market is a conversation among seeds. This is radically different from the transmitter-based system we have now.

So now comes news from Michael O’Connor Clarke that the CBC is quietly releasing one of their most popular shows on BitTorrent. And that it’s DRM free. As it ought to be.

Read the whole post. Follow the links. There lies the future.

Here in the U.S. the new challenge is for the entities we call stations to find roles and relevancies other than distribution of network shows.

The only answer, I believe, is the “One Fond Hope” I appended to the Ten Prophesies I uttered on a public media panel (and in this post at Linux Journal) exactly one year after delivering the BitTorrent distro advice to the Frontline folks (and to the rest of public media folks attending my closing talk there).

The idea is outlined here.

CBC can go with BitTorrent because they’re not defined as just a collection of stations. That is, they have stations, and they produce and distribute; but they are not tied to any one band or medium for distribution. When AM radio became too retro, they went about dumping it (including CBL/740, on which I used to listen to stories late at night when I was a kid growing up in New Jersey).

It’s different here in the U.S., where stations run the show. Literally. They still can, but they’ll have to become far more involved with their local and regional communities — which need no longer be defined by the reach of signals from transmitters. Because the new transmitters, in many cases, will be the listeners and viewers.

Bonus link.

Another.

Another.

So I have this new laptop that won’t take my old EvDO card, which I long been using to get on the Net over Verizon’s system. It has it’s own phone number and account, but it treats the cell system as a big wi-fi network, effectively. I use it anywhere in I can’t get on by wire or ‘fi here in the U.S. Which is a lot of places. Not cheap: $60 per month. But worth it.

So I need a new card.

To get one, I went to a Verizon store yesterday afternoon here in Loma Linda, CA. A new card, they told me, was $280. Too much, I said. So, after several calls to somebody over the phone, the young man behind the counter said he could “help me out” by discounting the price of a new card if I agreed to extend my cell phone contract another two years. (It’s due to run out in July.)

I didn’t want to do that. So I asked what it cost to cancel the account. The answer was $170. It runs to September.

So the choice is to pay $170 to cancel or pay $300 until the contract runs out. Pretty sucky.

Never mind that I’ve been a Verizon customer for many years, with a FiOS connection in Boston and a landline connection in Santa Barbara, in addition to the cell phone and the EvDO accounts.

I’m really looking forward to fixing this lopsided system.

Says here the Wall Street Journal, long a fee-to-see site, is now secretly free: …in many cases, the method is drop-dead simple; in some cases, it requires the Firefox browser and add-on software. But in all cases, it’s completely legal, and in fact it’s hard to see how the Journal could object to it at all.

I subscribe to the print Journal, and will continue to do that.

I’ve generally avoided going behind the Journal’s paywall, or even visiting the journal’s website, for several reasons:

So, Rupert, hurry up with the free version, but for real this time. Your paying subscribers will thank you.

Andrew Sullivan: What I Got Wrong About Iraq. A sample:

At its best, war is a lesser evil. I said that in 2002, and got quoted by Glenn Reynolds as well. It was all part of a larger discussion that involved Nick Denton, Dave Winer and others.

Still, I hesitate to say that ‘we’ were right and ‘they’ were wrong. There is too much we don’t know and can’t ever know. We can’t go back and conduct a controlled study of futures, one with and one without the Iraq war.

The side I still feel most comfortable taking is the one against war itself. That it’s a lesser evil doesn’t make it good.

Some times we have no choice. That clearly was the case for WWII. Most times we do have a choice. Iraq was one of those. And we made the wrong one.

But knowing that now doesn’t help show a path of right choices toward ending the war, ending terror, ending hatred and distrust of The Other.

Still, failure teaches. It gives lessons.

Andrew Sullivan again:

There is a generational battle of sorts going on here too. Andrew is post-boomer. So is Marc Andreessen, who gave this as one of his reasons for supporting Barack Obama:

Today we have a boomer president who is one of those who did not learn any lessons from America’s failure in Vietnam: how we entered the war on delusional and trumped-up premises, how our conventional means lost to the unconventional ones, how we failed to understand the culture and language of the war’s theater, how millions died for no good reason, how the nature of a vast and bureaucratized national security apparatus is too devoid of imagination to do anything on this scale without failing.

That void still exists. If General Petreus and his strategy succeed in Iraq (and we’re a long way from finding out), it will be due to imagination and resourcefulness that are devalued by practice in any large bureaucracy.

Recognizing this does not require having lived through the Sixties, or being obsessed with that time. It does require some perspective. In regards to Iraq, we finally have some of that.

Facebook thinks I’m fat:

In fact, I am. Not not a lot, but more than I would be if I weren’t a desk potato who ate what he wanted and doesn’t exercise enough. But how do they know that? And why would I want to be reminded of it?

Who is in charge of your privacy?

In my last post I quoted some Doors lyrics. Uncharacteristically, I did not do any linking.

I didn’t link to The Doors’ site because it’s full of Flash and other crap that is not only at stylistic variance from the spare and artful nature of The Doors’ work, but likely to either annoy you or crash something. (My Linux box can’t see or hear the Flash stuff, my Windows box wants to download all kinds of stuff and then fails with it anyway, and my Mac just flat-out crashes on it. I don’t recall any other site recently that actually brings down a computer. But that’s what The Doors site did in this case.)

I didn’t link to any lyrics pages because all of them, far as I can tell, bury what the reader wants — just the lyrics, please — inside walls of advertising. Go do a phrase/keyword search for “When the music’s over” and “doors”, on Google. Click on the top results and you’ll find that every one has a pop-up window, plus lots of other advertising jive. Of course, you can block those in your browser; but still, pop-up windows suck. They break the Web’s social contract, which says (among other things) that the publisher should not abuse the reader’s intentions. Nobody goes to a page saying “I want a pop-up window”.

These lyrics pages exist for a good (though bad) reason: most artists don’t publish their own lyrics. People want to see lyrics, however, so the advertising baiters publish the lyrics anyway. Copyright be damned.

So my advice to artists such as The Doors is to publish their own lyrics, in ways that respect the music and their own artistry — as well as the readers’ good will and good intentions.

And while they’re at it, quit making the sites so damn fancy and complicated. Quit burying text inside graphics (where the type can’t scale up and down). Make the pages into blogs that are live and written, rather than static and built. It’s cheaper, too.

I say this, by the way, as a fan of the Doors since the band was new. At one time or another I’ve bought every album, both in vinyl and CD form. I’d love it if the band (or whoever constitutes them now) would just give us a nice simple site that’s easy on readers and their browsers.

Yesterday we went to visit the De Cordova Museum in Concord Lincoln, where we were looking forward to seeing the museum’s iconic pink pig sculpture along with other exhibits in the museum and its Sculpture Park.

Rounding a curve on the road through the park heading into the museum, we were shocked and saddened to see that a tree from the center of a nearby grove had fallen squarely across the pig, smashing it right in the middle. No expert could have dropped the tree more squarely. It was amazing that, given 360 possible compass degrees that the tree might have fallen, it picked exactly this one.

Later we learned that the tree had fallen just that morning, no doubt because its rooting had been weakened by gound saturated with rain over the past few days.

Then this morning I was surprised to find no mention of the news in blog or the Boston Globe. So I just started uploading a bunch of pictures taken with my pocket camera. The lighting wasn’t good, but there are plenty of shots for anybody to use, should they like, up here at Flickr. If you’re a journalist of any kind, feel free to take and use them.

More about the pig. It is a work of Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades of Actual Size Artworks. Its title is Trojan Piggybank, and it is on loan from the artists. From the writeup two links back:

Originally exhibited in the 2004 Navy Pier Walk: The Chicago International Sculpture Exhibition, Trojan Piggybank comes to DeCordova Museum’s Sculpture Park with a playful warning from its collaborative team of artists, Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades, who caution, “Sometimes things are not what they appear to be.”

From a distance, the large pink wood piggybank appears friendly. A closer look reveals military camouflage colors painted around the snout, suggesting a recent wallow in filth, while imparting an additional and foreboding meaning. The artists intend this familiar military pattern to represent the greed associated with our ever-expanding military industrial complex. This visual stratagem is furthered by grates protecting Trojan Piggybank’s eyes, and a hatch door on the underbelly hinting at hidden invaders inside. A large silver coin waits at the ready in the piggybank’s slot. As Simpson and Georgiades observe, “The pleasures of consumer culture are accompanied by less desirable social consequences. When we impose one way of life onto another, the bad goes along with the good. The playful piggybank has a hidden agenda.”

No wonder our first thought was that the tree across the pig was itself a sculpture, or an improvisation on the original.

Well, in a way it was, no?

We’d hardly yearn for Net Neutrality laws if Comcast and other carriers truly understood that the Net is more than an interactive TV channel with troublesome users.

Unfortunately there are technical as well as busines and political reasons why they fail to grok the Net. A big one is DOCSIS, which is the standard framework inside which cable companies funnel Net traffic. DOCSIS all but requires that they think of the Net as just another TV channel. Because that’s how DOCSIS frames the Net. It’s something delivered over analog channels inside a coaxial cable. Carriers can “bond” channels to widen the bandwidth, but they’re still dealing with radio waves going down a coaxial pipe on one or more channels and back up on others. Asymmetry is built in, simply because the return upstream path is, by design, on lower frequency channels with less carrying capacity. It’s also useless to debate with a cable comapny the need (or lack of it) for QoS (Quality of Service), because QoS has been part of DOCSIS since 1999.

Fiber deployments have different capabilities and restrictions, although most of those are modeled on cable TV, for good business reasons. Verizon’s fiber (FiOS) system, for example, is not designed primarily for Internet users, but for couch potatoes. Those tubers are abundant and low-hanging (or ground-dwelling) fruit.

One can’t blame carriers for going after easy pickings; but one can blame them for wearing blinders toward the massive opportunities that appear when they deliver wide-open bandwidth on which nearly anything can run… and to discover their first-mover advantages there.

But, thanks to these ancient frames, the Net is seen by the carriers (and the FCC) as tertiary to their primary and secondary services: telephony and television, or vice versa. That’s why it’s still just gravy on your phone or cable bill.

Bonus link.

From Portfolio.com:

It was clear to many who attended that the carriers packed the room at yesterday’s FCC Hearing. How lame are employees who can’t show up early enough to get a seat? How lame is a company that pays people to warm seats for lame employees? About as lame as a company that can’t defend its methods of selectively subtracting value from its Internet service. Tag: fccboston08

I’ve never had laryngitis before, but I do now. I can hardly say a thing. I wanted to make some calls while driving from Santa Barbara to LAX, but ended up giving my voice a rest, which so far hasn’t worked. It was almost impossible to make myself undersood to the United and TSA personnel at the counter and security. Very strange for a talker to have one’s voice reduced to a choice of whisper or honk. Here’s hoping it works by the time I get to London tomorrow.

Not sure whether or not it’s a local thing, but Verizon’s cell service seems to be especially lame lately — at least for me. Riding home to Santa Barbara yesterday on the Pacific Coast Highway, there seemed to be more than the usual dropouts. Here in the Omni Hotel in downtown Los Angeles (on Olive), I’m getting one bar on the Treo 700p, and the service is marginal at best. (Now, in another meeting room, it’s none. “No service” it says.) I’d say it was my phone, except that my EvDO service, which uses a card working as a phone in the laptop, is outright dead. It was dead in West Covina yesterday too. Just a red light and no connection at all. The guy next to me saw me looking at my dead phone. “Verizon?” he said. “Yeah,” I replied. He shook his head.

Meanwhile, the hotel has no room Internet, because something went down and they’re waiting for something else to be “flown in” or something. Between flaky WiFi in the conference spaces, no Internet of any kind in the rooms, and EvDO that doesn’t work, I’m not getting much done online. So if you’re expecting something, bear with me.

[Later…] On an upper floor of the Omni, facing Olive and the Disney Hall, I’m getting five bars and a green light on the EvDO card. Speed, 940kbps down, 118kbps up. Much better. Alas, I have to go to dinner and stuff, so I still won’t get anything done. But at least I’ll sleep tonight. Last night I drove to Santa Barbara and back this morning, and the total was about 5 hours on the road, flanking 3 hours of sleep.

I’ve been a Consumer Reports reader and subscriber since the 1960s. And things have always been good between us, until this past few months, after changing my delivery address from my home in California to my apartment near Boston.

So, a few minutes ago, I went on the ConsumerReports.org website, to check out my account info and see what’s up. Turns out the address change in September failed, and somehow got turned into an old-old Santa Barbara address. So I changed it to the Massachusetts address, and went on to try to get some back issues. Then the system told me there was a problem with my address and looped me back into the Account Setup form, where I discovered that the street address took, but the city did not, so I had a new street address and an old city address. There was no way to tell this unless I went back and looked. So, the system was a bit busted. Fortunately, they do provide a number for calling in. And, even though it’s a holiday, a human being answered the phone immediately after I punched a number on a promting menu — and just the first of those, instead of one after a long series. The human, a native speaker of English, found that indeed the system had a problem, and corrected it all, even getting me all the available back issues, and reporting the problem to the magazine’s technical folks.

Consumer reports also provides a way to report problems by email inside their site, including plenty of room to explain things. I did that too.

All this is good, and worthy of kudos. Others should take notice.

Here’s hoping they’ll be up for welcoming VRM to match their CRM. Sure hope so.

… or is the GOP just buying stuff from Google and bragging about it?

Marc Canter wondered the former with Is Google being played like a violin, which he wrote after reading this press release from GOPConvention2008.com. From the release:

This would be pure PR jive and nothing more if the release were restricted to the first paragraph. But when two high-level Google Execs, including its Chief Legal Officer, provide sales blurbs to just one side (so far) of a partisan political battlefield, expect Serious Questions to follow.

To help answer those questions, some context.

First, Nick Carr’s new book, The Big Switch, makes clear at least one strong trend in computing that is being led by Google (along with Amazon, Yahoo and others): Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did. No, personal computing won’t go away, but much of what we need, from storage to applications and raw compute power, will be available (and increasingly relied upon) as utility services. As utilities, these are going to be as free from prejudice about usage as are electricity, gas, water and waste treatment. (That is, not totally free, but sensibly so.) Looking at what the GOP says it will do with Google utilities, I’d say that’s the case here.

Second, it’s important to study how utility providers such as Google engage with large customers (and whole countries) that some find objectionable. For a view on that, check out the recent talk by the dissident Chinese journalist Michael Anti at the Berkman Center. Ethan Zuckerman has a long and helpful write-up. So does David Weinberger. From the latter:

Somewhere in there (not sure it got on the podcast) Michael said that Google had great leverage through a single simple fact: most people working for the Chinese government use Gmail. Leverage isn’t always something that is actively used. In fact, in many (perhaps most) cases it doesn’t need to be brought up at all. It’s simply a fact that must be recognized.

Whether one likes or dislikes Google’s engagement with China, or the GOP, at least it’s engaged. For some things it may be in a better position to make a positive difference than if it were not engaged.

As for Yahoo, Michael said that the company had completely lost face in China. Never mind that, as this TechCrunch post puts it, Yahoo owns only 40% of Yahoo China. And that Yahoo may have “been made a scapegoat for the flaws of US foreign policy”. The fact remains that Yahoo, according to the International Herald Tribune, “provided information that helped Chinese state security officials convict a Chinese journalist for leaking state secrets to a foreign Web site…”

There is no doubt that Google has been far more successful than Yahoo in dealing with China. Is it just because Google has a “don’t be evil” imperative and Yahoo does not? I don’t think so. Rather I think that Google has been smart and resourceful in ways that Yahoo has not. Specifically, Google has stayed true to its roots as a tech company with specific and easily understood guiding principles. Yahoo had those too, and for longer than Google. But Yahoo broke faith with those principles, and lost its integrity, when it decided to become an entertainment company and hired Terry Semel as its CEO. In doing so Yahoo ceased being a flagpole and instead became a flag — one that soon will be flying from somebody else’s pole.

I believe the unbroken web is the source of creativity, something that belongs to all of humankind…
I believe the arts belong to everyone and that artists should be revered in culture. They are not, especially in a world run by anti-creative, left-brained bean counters. I’m not sure it’ll ever be any different, and for me personally, that’s okay. For no bean counter will ever experience the rush that is touching the unbroken web. That, my friends, is a form of currency more costly than gold. — Terry Heaton

The cowards among us never started, and the weaklings died on the road. — Niles Searls, a forty-niner and later 14th Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court. Found via Hank Searls in his book Blood Song. Best quote from Hank: The adverb is the enemy of the verb.

Two days ago Jake McKee gave an amazing talk at There’s a New Conversation in New York. He came all the way from Dallas to share some of the great work he and his cohorts had done at the Lego Company, inspired in part by The Cluetrain Manifesto.

I didn’t get the whole backstory on the trip until I read this in his blog today.

The short of it is that American Airlines not only decided not to waive the opportunity to soak Jake an extra $359 for moving his departure from New York one day ahead to make his grandma’s funeral, but gave him this peevish, passive-aggressive policy-über-alles response: “American reviewed the policy a few years back and decided that since funeral homes, doctors, and clothiers don’t discount their rates, we shouldn’t either.”

Wow. What a shitty thing to say to a bereaved customer. Not to mention dumb and irrelevant.

Jake concludes,

And a sincere Bravo to Jake as well.

I love Gmail for one thing: it launders spam out of mail going to my searls.com address. I have things set up so Gmail picks it up from my server, and I pick it up from Gmail. Last I checked, there were over 22,000 spams in Gmail’s spam box. And the last I went through ten pages (50 each) of those, there were no false finds.

But lately I haven’t been getting mail to Searls.com. Didn’t know what it was, but my wife just figured it out and provided helpful tech support. I needed to go into Settings in my Gmail account, then to Accounts, then down to Get mail from other accounts, and see when my mail was last picked up. Turns out it was 9 February. Here’s what the Fetch History said…

Now it says this:

So, some questions that maybe some of ya’ll can answer…

1. Why did Gmail choke on the “timed out” message from my mail server, and not go back again?
2. Why was it checking my server every several minutes before, and only every hour or so now?
3. Can I make it speed up somehow? If so, where are those controls?

Here’s hoping my own conundrum may be helpful to others as well. No idea.

It is one helluva spam filter, I gotta say.

Before I got pointed to this post by Steve Hodson, I hadn’t seen this post by Brian Solis, pointing to egos.alltop.com (”We’ve got egos covered”), which features my blog among others on the “egos” list. Alltop, a creation of Guy Kawasaki, describes its purpose this way:

In his headline Steve, who calls himself “a cranky old fart wandering the internet causing mayhem as he goes” (a self-characterization I can identify with, at least chronologically), calls Alltop’s egos page “yet another powder puff for the A-Listers”.

I’ve given up fighting the A-list label. But I’m glad to start fighting the egotist one. Even against a guy as I like and respect as much as I do Guy.

It’s a simple thing. I don’t blog for my ego, any more than I write emails or talk on the phone or do any of my daily work for the same reason. I blog to point at and comment on topics I think might be interesting, or that my readers might find interesting, and I’ve been doing pretty much exactly that, for roughly the same modest sum of readers (ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand a day), since 1999. There’s nothing sticky, commercial or especially self-serving about it — not even any advertising to distract or annoy the reader.

Writing about tech news is my day job. I do that mostly at Linux Journal. I don’t know any egotists over there, but they could use a little powdering just the same. The team there has worked hard over the last few months to make it a much better place to go for news and commentary on matters directly or peripherally related to the operating system that serves up most of what you see on the Web, plus a growing number of portable devices, movies, and much more.

So, Guy and Company: if you want to put my blog on one of your lists, I’m flattered. But if you insist on labeling me an ego, I’ll insist that you take me off.

New Operation to Put Heavily Armed Officers in Subways, the headline says. It begins,

Are these “federal transit grants” meant to scare the bejesus out of ordinary citizens? Or could the money be put to better use, such as improving the subway experience in ways other than fright?

Why garb New York’s finest with the favorite fashion accessory of terrorists themselves?

Via Bruce Schneier.

There’s a New Conversation is happening next week in New Yawk (my home skyline, though I’m from Jersey… you know, where New Yawk teams play). Wednesday, 1PM at the SAP Customer Center, 95 Morton Street. It costs money, but less than some cheap seats at professional ball games.

It’s a Cluetrain follow-up. Occasioned by the fact that it’s coming up on ten years since David Weinberger, Chris Locke, Rick Levine and I started the conversation that ended up as the website and a book that still sells well.

Odd that Cluetrain is now marketing canon in many circles — and that “conversation marketing” is hot stuff — yet so much of the execution is no less bullshit than what we ranted against back at the turn of the Millennium.

What will we talk about? As they say where I grew up, Hey, you tell me. And the rest of us. I have ideas, but let’s start with yours. Put ‘em in the comments below.

Robert Niles in OJR:

He goes on,

When we’re in Santa Barbara we get the LA Times, and I agree with Robert’s complaints. And I’ve been advising papers to get the clues for a long time too. This time, however, Robert offers a new clue that I really like:

Lots more there. Read the whole thing.

Via the Head Lemur.

We planned to leave this afternoon to go skiing in Vermont tomorrow. Here’s the current Winter Storm Watch for Smugglers Notch:

We really wanna go. And I’ll bet the skiing tomorrow will be good. But… durn. Guess I’m leaning against it.

Some assignments for Social Graph Foo Camp is my latest at Linux Jounal. The camp starts today. Some bottom lines…

In asking Are Journalism Conferences Worth It? Lisa Williams offers Bloggercon, Gnomedex and Blogher as examples of success. (I agree.) Of course she could have said “Are _________ Conferences Worth It?” without singling out journalism.

But since we’re there, lets.

I start, as is my occasional custom, with Tony Pierce, whose blog bears the legend nothing in here is true, and who is now in the employ of the Los Angeles Times. Tony’s latest investigates the vast cloud of growing nonsense and fun jive surrounding a video of the Rev. Thomas Cruise enthusing about his church. The first source in Tony’s post is I can has research papar?, which uses the adjective “epic” to describe its own mission. A sample paragraph:

Yes. So. Tony explains,