My UPS

I just got the following message from UPS:

Our records indicate that you have not taken advantage of My UPS recently. To keep your registration active, simply log in to My UPS before Tuesday, November 10, 2009. If you no longer have a need for My UPS, do nothing and your registration will expire on Tuesday, November 10, 2009.

Seems pretty clueless to me. I have used My UPS. I haven't had a reason to use it lately. I would use it again. Why try to force me to log in, just to keep my account alive? I just don't get the thinking behind it. I suppose that there is some marketing executive at UPS who would really like to get a sense of how many My UPS accounts are still being used. And getting all active users to log into their account sure would help her/him get better statistics for that. But that kind of inwardly-focused, UPS-centric thinking just doesn't work. Seems really dumb, unless I am missing something.

Another Entrant in the Texting-While-Driving Problem

iZup. Name is dumb ("eyes up", get it?), will be interesting to see if this category catches on. Others are ZoomSafer and TextEcution.

Key feature: Email with GPS

I have two GPS options. One is a stand-alone device that I keep in my car, the other is built into my Android phone. The stand-alone is better, and the only safe option when driving solo, but the phone option is nice in that it is always with me. I am not good with directions, so I originally thought I would rely on the GPS for finding any new destination. But I have found that they are just a bit tedious Both GPS options share that trait, even though the data-input strategy for each is quite different. So for very quick, simple new destinations, I still often it more expedient just to print the map, and navigate conventionally. But that is definitely a disappointment, especially when complications ensue, where a GPS would help--missed turns, detours, etc. So what I would like is an easy way to feed my destinaton to the GPS, one that doesn't involve typing on a tedious little device. I would like to email my destination to the GPS. Similar to how I can email a posting to my weblog. The difference is that a weblog is based on free-text, whereas the email-to-GPS would require a standardized schema, and encoding via XML. Along the lines of the "semantic web". Of course I don't actually want to type in an XML schema. So it would be nice if directions would include a "send to GPS option", which would generate the email with encoded address. And for free-text submissions, there could be simple, comma-based standards that would infer the schema.

01/15/22: That didn't age well.

Re: NYT planning to charge for web access

Interesting. They have been through this so many times. I do think it is probably the right business move. I agree with the hybrid part. Per article charges are a loser. I think they should offer an all-you-can-eat model for $50-100 / year, and a limited but reasonably high number of articles per month for $5/month or $35/year.

Pseudo-Cartestian Products

A Cartestian Product is what you get when you (accidentally) don't specify a where clause in the join between two tables in an RDBMS. It is the product of all rows in T1 times all rows in T2. You only get them if you completely forget to join two tables. It happens, but rarely. What is much more common is a flawed join, where you get a product between a subset of rows in each table, because you aren't using enough columns in the join.

We need a term for "imperfect join which results in a large number of rows, some of which are 'synthesized' and carry data which does not actually exist in the base tables".

T-Mobile Family Allowances

About a year ago, T-Mobile introduced this Family Allowances feature, for $2/month. It lets you control things like how many minutes and texts family members. It was a good start, but needs to be enhanced. In particular, there are only pre-set blocks of time that you can toggle on and off. That just doesn't work, they need an option for arbitrary time blocks (or at least the nearest 1/2 hour). Unfortunately, in 15 months of using it, I have not seen one single, solitary improvement made. I think it falls into the frustrating category of abandoned software, software that never gets improved. T-Mobile hasn't done much to market the feature.

DirecTV Football Features

Got DirecTV with the HD-DVR a couple of weeks ago. Great for football games. They really need a couple of football-friendly features:

First and foremost, the option to jump ahead in only 15 second increments, instead of the standard 30 (watch the first replay, skip the rest of the huddle).

It would be nice if there were a hack built into the guide/recording interaction, to identify sports events, and let you default to record an extra 30 minutes beyond the scheduled end time. We almost missed the last 4 minutes of a very exciting Monday Night Football game (Colts v Miami). The only thing that saved is that just about the time the recording gave out, we had caught up to real-time.

POSTSCRIPT: It seems like that second feature request exists. I was prompted to extend the recording by 30 minutes. Not sure why I didn't encounter that before.

Android Performance on myTouch - Could Be Better

The lagginess that has developed in my myTouch 3G Android phone is a real disappointment. Most disappointing of all is the fact that the virtual keyboard is often laggy--that is a killer. It seems to me that there are a few things that contribute to the lag that should be fixable:

1. The keyboard should be ultra-optimized

2. Ram Consumed by Installed Apps
The G1 and G2 phones don't have all that much RAM, and installed apps eat into it pretty quickly. I don't know why they can't be installed on the SD card. I do know that is one of the things that rooting your phone allows, so it can't be too much of a showstopper.

3. Multi-tasking
Everybody knows that a great advantage of Android over the iPhone is its ability to multi-task. That's great, I agree, but I think it is being taken too far. Android seems to try to keep open WAY too much stuff. I open the web browser quickly in the morning to check traffic, don't use it again all day, and it is still active 12 hours later. How about dialing back the attempt to keep so many things running, just a little, in favor of performance?

Most Americans Satisfied with Their Health Insurance?!

The claim is being made that most Americans (who have it) are satisfied with their health insurance. I don't buy it. Most people I know are, with each passing year, more unhappy with it. They may be grateful to have it at all, but that is really not the same thing as a collective sense of "my insurance ain't broke, so don't go fixin' it". It's a little bit like me saying that I am satisfied with Minneapolis rush-hour traffic...I really kind of dislike it, but it sure beats Los Angeles.

Slate: The disappearing boundaries of cigarette prohibition

"[If we are going to ban outdoor smoking because we don't want children to even see someone smoking], can we please ban public lotteries? Because I don't like my kids having to watch people gamble, particularly under the auspices of the state. Gambling is addictive and destructive. I want the tickets out of convenience stores and the results off television." Can you say "tyranny of the majority"?

How They Do It At Google, Per Cringely

Google isn’t organized like any tech company I’ve ever worked in, that’s for sure. Peer review seems to be at the heart of nearly everything. Yes, there are executives doing whatever it is that executives do up in the Eric/Larry/Sergeysphere, but down where the bits meet the bus most decisions seem to be reached through a combination of peer review-driven concensus and literal popularity polls.

Interesting.

USPS Scheduled Pick-Ups Are Free

It is a great convenience to be able to print postage online. It is also incredibly convenient to schedule a home pickup. And in this category, the US Post Office has a HUGE advantage over UPS. UPS charges something like $10 for a schedule pick-up. Although understandable, that's more than double the cost of my typical small-box shipment. Whereas the US Post Office charges NOTHING, zero, for a pick up. This obviously exploits the fact that they are going to be stopping at your door every day anyway.

If they were even a remotely entrepreneurial organization, they would be trumpeting this advantage all over their website, and probably in paid advertising.

Blu-Ray May Fail

All the reasons Cringely gives for Blu-Ray's potential failure make sense to me. To me,the bottom-line is that Blu-Ray delivers only incremental improvement. It's a nice increment, sure, but not enough to justify all the costs and headache of a format switch. In contrast, DVD vs. VHS offered improvement on multiple fronts:

• The primary one of quality--huge. Resolution, audio and, perhaps more importantly, aspect ratio.
• Functional improvements--random access, higher storage capacity.
• Physical improvements--much more convenient form-factor.
• Economic advantages--cheaper to produce, and bonus of backward-compatibility with CD form factor.

Resumes with "Lead" for "Led"

It seems like more resumes than not will include, somewhere, the word "lead" when they really mean "led". It's such a common, easy to make mistake that I don't really hold it against the candidate, but it does amaze me how frequently it occurs.

David Frum did it in this tweet.

Android Market

Interesting comments on this post about the lack of profitability in the Android Market. Even though there are several distinct points of view, they are all mostly correct. It does seem like Apple could have an almost unassailable position. It seems to me like their biggest vulnerability is their exclusive tie to AT&T--that is what gives everybody else motivation to fight them. It will be interesting to see when/if other carriers get the iPhone.

Of course, they might learn a lesson from the recording industry, and have a care about letting Apple become too powerful, and become too cozy with their customers.

Tried, Ditched Vonage

I absolutely hate paying $40/month for a landline. At this point, I could even do without Caller ID, but with a family of 5, I just can't risk not having free long distance. As with cell phone minutes, all it takes is one overrun to offset all the savings from a bare bones plan.

So I decided to try Vonage. A very respected geek friend had nothing but good things to say about it. Well that turned out to be a disaster. It was easy enough to set up, but after that, it was all downhill:

• My first 2 calls over 1 minute dropped 5-10 minutes into call
• It caused massive bandwidth interference--my cable connection dropped from 10-15 Mbps down to 3 Mbps with a phone off hook. I experienced similar, qualitative symptoms while using VPN and making calls.
  
• It also seemed to interfere horribly with VPN, even when not making calls. After losing VPN 5 times in an hour this morning, while working from home, I had to take time out of my workday to disconnect the Vonage box.
  
• On top of all that, call quality questionable--not awful, but seemed fairly crackly.
  
• Finally, I found it quite inconvenient having the cordless charger in the basement--which is where my inbound cable lives.

So, I am ditching Vonage and heading over to Qwest. I really wanted their $85 bundle, but I also wanted HD and an HD DVR, so they talked me into a $110 bundle (still cheaper than Comcast, though 7 Mbps instead of 15-20) that includes NFL Sunday Ticket. Normally I would never pay for that, but it will be really nice to have.

I will cancel Sunday Ticket after this season. Not sure what I will do about phone service in a year. Maybe by then we will really be ready to ditch landlines. Or maybe Comcast will be trying to lure me back and will treat me as a new customer. (I've been a Comcast customer for 7 years, and they really didn't try very hard to keep me from leaving, even when I told them/threatened them with my plans.

Feedback on the Texting While Driving Video

The NYT has an article about "Some Doubts About Scare Tactics on Drivers Who Text". Several key points stand out.

A violent ad must also instruct people on how to change their behavior, otherwise, “to erase the fear quickly, you say, ‘That’s not me,’ ” Professor Tay said. And just because an ad is popular does not mean that viewers will change their driving behavior, he said. One reason that violent ads may not work as well is that teenagers are already well aware that some activities are dangerous, said W. Kip Viscusi, who has studied risk for decades and is a professor at Vanderbilt University.

My son watched it. Although he did not take issue with the implications--texting could easily cause a fatal distraction--he also did not dwell on them. What immediately got his attention was the relatively poor production values--he said "that looks so fake". He was right of course. It was not bad, for a $20,000 budget, and was certainly gory enough, but by today's standards of special effects, it was quite unconvincing. The result, I think, was that a subtle equivalence was quickly set up in his mind--fake effects, so dismiss the whole message.

Cheryl Healton, chief executive of the American Legacy Foundation, a group that specializes in antismoking efforts, suggested that cellphones could show a prompt on their phones, reminding people not to text and drive.

A boring, boilerplate warning--really??. When does it display--every time you re-start your phone? Every time you start a text? I'm afraid this is a hoary chestnet from the classic school of good intentions, but poor results.

Kelly K. Browning, executive director of the advocacy group Impact Teen Drivers in California, has suggested an idea, Star 65 to Stay Alive, to AT&T, in which the company could set up a code of *65 to disable incoming calls and texts, and send automatic response messages like, “I’m driving right now. I’ll get back to you when I’m off the road.”

This has a little bit of merit. But just a little--it takes a lot of motivation and forethought for the user to use it. Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of the "Do Not Disturb" feature, and not just for drive-time. But as a major cure for driving while texting, I deem it unlikely to have any significant impact. (There is another product that does something like this, ZoomSafer.) However, if you combined this feature with GPS-based texting de-activation--now you would be talking!

Online Appointments - What If I Don't Want To Provide Choice #2

Tires Plus, where I generally get my oil changed, offers the ability to make online appointments. That's kind of convenient. The only problem is, they require you to specify at least 2 appointment requests. Well, that doesn't work for me. I want an appointment tomorrow around 5 pm. If that doesn't work--well, I have to go back to the drawing board. So I can understand that they might gently suggest providing a second choice, but why require it? All it does is force me to call them--something I assume they fine less desirable than a web appointment.

(I tried making 5:15 my second choice, and got a rejection saying the appoitment requests must be at least 2 hours apart.)

Texting While Driving

6/24/09
Texting while driving seems as dangerous as driving moderately drunk. Very scary. As the parent of soon-to-be teen drivers, that got me thinking about counter-measures. In some ideal world, the texting feature on the phone would be disabled while the key is in the ignition. That's not happening any time soon. So here is the best thing I can think of...I would like software to automatically correlate time-of-day texts are sent with the speed of the car at that time. If a text was sent at 14:42:07, and the car was going 32 mph at that time, and my child was driving at that time, then that is a problem.

This is a very reactive solution, but better than nothing.

8/30/09 Update
When I wrote the above, I was overlooking the fact that most phones have GPS built in. That would make it pretty simple, I think, to build this functionality all into the phone ( I was thinking it would require in-car software). So, searching around a little bit--here we go. For Android, we have Textecution. $9.95 though--rather pricey, and seemingly no trial or Lite option. What a great idea though. This company, and maybe the mobile carriers, need to find a way to partner with anti-texting-while-driving-advocates to get a regulatory push for this stuff.

(Google Market search note--no apps found when using the obvious search of "texting", "driving".)

Digital Dopamine

As John Ratey, the Harvard professor of psychiatry who specializes in the science of attention, told The Times's Matt Richtel for his chilling series, "Driven to Distraction," using digital devices gives you "a dopamine squirt."

Observing my children and texting--and probably, to be truthful, my own habits with email--I suspected there was a significant element of stimulation to the short-term reward system going on with receiving texts, email, etc. I think probably we should have a sabbath day from electronic communication.

Farmer's Market Broccoli

Is really good. Much less bitter than normal. Easy to eat raw.

Fell for a UL

As one who prides himself on being able to spot an urban legend at 50 paces, I feel like I should fess up on the rare occasion when I fall for one. So, here it is--I fell for this email claiming that "On August 27...Mars will be as big as and bright as our moon. It will be that close to the earth. Anyone alive to see it will not be alive when it happens again." I made a point of putting it in my calendar, and brought the kids out to see it that night. Not as big as the moon, but there sure was a bright evening star (aka, planet) in the sky. The next night, I told Beth about it, and took her out to see it. She started to put something about it in Facebook, then thought to check first and, sure enough, found it here in Snopes.

In hindsight, there is always at least one or two signal UL clues. In this case, the "as big as the moon" part is the giveaway. In rapidly reading the email, I did remark that, but semi-consciously dismissed it as modest hyperbole (like maybe as much area and brightness as the crescent moon).

Super-Cheap Toner Cartridges

I base my choice of home laser printer primarily on cost per page. I am on my second Brother printer, for that reason. But the prices I am seeing for TN350 cartridges on Amazon are setting new records for low-cost toner. I actually bought a couple 2 weeks ago for $10/cartrdige, from JR I think. I installed one yesterday, and have probably printed 50 pages. So far, so good.

Jet Blue Fly As Much As You Want for $599

Doesn't work for my situation, but good to see an airline experimenting radically with pricing.

I Thought This Kind of Mob Behavior Was the Specialty of the Left

Health Debate Turns Hostile at Town Hall Meetings

By IAN URBINA

Members of Congress have been shouted down, hanged in effigy and taunted by crowds at town hall meetings on health care.

$10 Month for TeleNav

As noted, I just acquired an Android-based smartphone. One goal is definitely to have an all-in-one, electronic swiss-army-knife device to carry. And it does include GPS capability, along with Google maps. But if you want turn-by-turn navigation, apparently you have to sign up for TeleNav, at the hefty cost of $10/month.

I just don't see the value proposition there. I bought a very nice, widescreen GPS unit for a mere $70. So I'm supposed to pay that much for half a year to get navigation on my phone? That's crazy--it is bad enough to have to pay $25/month for a data plan.

Now you might say that hardcore travelers will pony up for the cost. I don't think so--a smartphone navigation is definitely a make-do proposition, compared to a dedicated unit.

But people seem to be paying it, so I must be missing something.

Electical Outlets should have USB connections

...for charging only, I mean. USB chargers for cell phones are wonderful. If electrical outlets accomodated USB, that would even more cut down on the number of chargers one needs to carry. Definitely a feature for a place like Starbucks to implement. (Actually, the shorcut would just be to provision the newer power strips, that have USB hubs included.)

Outlook PTO Feature - Prevent Calendar-Blocking

People are constantly messing up, and sending out their Outlook calendar PTO notifications with "Show Time As = Busy". The result is many blocked calendars. While some might welcome this situation, it is nevertheless A Bad Thing. I think Outlook needs a switch to indicate "Allow Out of Office?" appointments...if you check No, then when someone schedules an appointment on your calendar as OOO, that gets converted into Free.

I don't know, maybe that is too much feature-itis, but it sure would address a problem. The nature of my calendar usage is such that nobody really ever needs to schedule something on my behalf that has me showing as OOO.

T-Mobile Android myTouch Review

I received my pre-order myTouch (aka, G2, or HTC Magic) 5 days ago, and have been putting it through its paces since then. The myTouch (stupid, cutesy name) is the second Android phone to hit the market in the U.S. It is definitely a geek phone. I didn't have the thing in my hands for an hour before I was feverishly downloading (mostly free) apps. I spent hours the first 3 days researching and downloading (mostly free) apps. I honestly don't think the vanilla phone would be very satisfying, either to a power user, or to a tech novice. So I definitely don't think it is in any danger of being an iPhone killer.

Rather than re-capitulate the basics that I have read in any number of other reviews, I will focus on the things I haven't seen mentioned.

Virtual keyboard. Every review talks about the ergonomic considerations of the virtual keyboard. What they gloss over is the loss of keyboard shortcuts--to me that is a very big deal. Maybe that is because most people never learn the G1 keyboard shortcuts, just as they never learn the PC keyboard shortcuts.

No PageDown Key. This is a subtle one, and probably bothers me more than most people...a signifcant use of a smartphone for me is as an eReader. Years ago, I used the PalmPilot for this same purpose. The Palm had a nice PageUp/PageDown rocker key. You could one-hand the device, with a thumb on the phone, and read pretty conveniently. With the myTouch, you can try to use the roller ball for the same purpose, but you have to twirl it a lot more, and it is still much slower. Most people will just reach up and swipe the page down, which is a real inconvenience on a tiny screen, because you have to do it about every 20 seconds.

Muting Phone Calls. I use my cell phone a lot for conference calls. I spend a lot of time on mute. So it is very important to me to be able to switch on/off mute quickly and easily. That was one of the things I hated about my previous phone--3-4 clicks to get to mute. So I had high hopes that ideally the phone itself, but if not, a third-party app would provide a super-convenient mute button. What I really wanted was a great, bug toggle button that would fill up half the screen, so you couldn't miss it. No such luck--it is still too many taps to mute a conference call. And the new 2-second timeout to lock the keypad on calls (a v1.5 feature) makes it worse.

The built-in speaker is several cuts above average. It is actually tolerable for listening to music, fine for audio, and loud enough to work okay to play podcasts in the car on the highway.

The trackball could be far more useful...it seems to scroll the cursor really slowly. As it is, I wouldn't miss it if they removed it. What I do wish they had was a "soft button", that could be configured per applcation. If nothing else, that would address my mute problem, albeit not as elegantly as I have envisioned in an app.

Okay, every review talks about two things. One, the lack of a 3.5 mm headphone jack. That is annoying, but to me, over-stated, since anyone cutting-edge enough to have an Android phone also is going to have bluetooth stereo. The other thing is the case the phone ships with. Instead of a cardboard box, you get a zippered, well-constructed case. Everybody makes a huge deal about this. To me, that is pure marketing attention-getting fluff. Nobody is going to carry their smartphone around in a case. But this small, inexpensive differentiator gets T-Mobile lots of attention.

Instead of a nice, but useless case, I would way rather have them include a second battery and battery charger! I suppose one downside with that, besides the cost, is the implication--our smartphone is such a battery hog that we had to include a second battery. Still, that would be a really nice touch (and it's something the iPhone can't do, with their sealed battery). (If they really had to economize, include the second battery and skip the stand-alone charger.)

The dedicated back key works very well--it's applications are intuitive (not just in the browser), and the IU responsiveness is very, very quick.

There are many obvious times the keyboard should pop up automatically, but doesn't. You have to do the long press on the menu key to raise it, when it is very obvious from the context of the app (composing a text for example), that you need it.

I found that some kind of Task Manager/Killer is vital. First I downloaded Taskiller, which worked very well, until it didn't. I wound up un-installing it, and it still left a residue of failed "widgets". I found another one, Task Manager, and it seems to work very well, with the added benefit of being a very easily-accessed Task Switcher.

Scrollling long lists is a real problem. One or two finger swipes is fine, but after that, it gets old. One app, PhoneBook, has a significant improvement--it pulls up a Windows-style scroll box. I don't for the life of me know why this isn't a standard part of ANdroid. Of course that is the beauty and the consumer buy-in of Android. Unlike with a traditional, carrier-captive phone--where an upgrade will only come when you get a new phone--we can hope maybe such an improvmenet will appear in a near-future release.

USB charger. Not that the myTouch is unique in this matter (I think all the new BlackBerrys have it), but this is a key item. Failure to provide a standard USB charger deserves as much criticism as failure to provide a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. Just think how simplified our lives would be if all hand-held electronics charged via USB (I am particularly thinking bluetooth headsets).

Note-Taking. I downloaded a nice, free Notes app, AK Notes. This one does have the right idea, it automatically pulls up the keyboard when you start a new note. But it defaults to the Note list, requiring another click to compose a note; it would be nice to control this via Settings. You still can't beat the Palm Pilot for jotting a very quick ink-as-a-datatype note.

Speed. Performance is adequate, but not zippy. If it were 3-4 times as fast, it would really rock.

All in all, I am impressed, and I will probably keep it (5 days into my 14-day grace period). But I am already looking forward to the next generation of hardware and software. Of course, that is part of the whole Android concept--the consumer can hope for pretty continuous improvement. Hopefully Android system updates will not overly tax older hardware, I'm looking at a 2-year contract.

Okay, that's it for the first rev of the phone review. I will add some updates in a week or so, along with a review of some Apps. That's another thing most reviews gloss over. They definitely mention that apps store, and maybe comment on a couple of apps, but I get the feeling that most reviewers haven't downloaded all that many non-game apps. I on the other hand have installed a good 40 apps. Some are true apps, many are phone customizations and enhancements, the things absolutely necessary to make the myTouch feel like an iPhone-competitive, first-class device!

App Store vs Web Apps

This article seems to be saying that, in the downloadable apps vs web apps battle, the marketing support provided by the App Store is indispensable, and inherently favors downloadable apps. I get the marketing support part, but can't you promote web apps through the app store, too? You could purchase and acquire your user id through the app store, but access the application via a web interface.

Actually, now that I think about it--I wonder if an "app store" might not be the solution to getting users to pay for ordinary web sites.

Cell Security: Thumbprint Reader

There is an Android app that uses iris-scanning for phone security. Very impressive, but what I really want is a thumbprint reader, since it would obviously be about 100x less intrusive.

Netbook Tablet PC Form Factor

Instead of making every netbook as mini-notebook, why not try a different form factor? I am thinking a tablet PC, with a capacitive touchscreen and virtual keyboard, like the iPhone and myTouch smartphones? Maybe the cost of the display would be excessive?

Lost LIbrary Card, Lost History

I lost my library card a few months ago. My library was happy to issue me a new one, for a reasonable cost of $3. But then I noticed that it had a different number, and when I logged into my oneline account, guess what? All my saved books were gone. Ouch!

Obese Americans Spend Far More on Health Care

A study found that obese Americans annually spend about 42 percent more on health care than normal-weight Americans...so I wonder how much of the 8%/year healthcare inflation is explained by this fact alone?

45 Consecutive Retired Batters

Jim Buehrle pitched 1-2/3 perfect games, very exciting, and set the major league record with 45 consecutive retired batters. Very impressive. What surprised me was that I learned the previous record was 41, and not held by Harvey Haddix. You see, for a long time, my favorite baseball trivia question to pose to other fans is "What is the significant major league record least likely to ever be broken?"

Of course, that is far to open-ended to lead anywhere conclusive, but it is a fun though-provoker. I eventually narrow the question to "major league pitching record", but still nobody ever gets the answer: most perfect innings in a single game. That record is held by Harvey Haddix, but what makes the story better is that his team lost the game!

Feature Idea: Delay on Library Waiting List

I like to add books to my library request list as soon as I hear about them, so I don't forget. I just did that today for the new book on Lance Armstrong. The only problem is that I am just a few pages into a long book that I am really looking forward to, Shadow of the Wind. And since my time budget for leisure reading in the summer is about 3 minutes a day, I make really slow progress. Since I am currently #2 on the wait list, I will probably get Lance about 2 months before I am ready!

So the feature I want is to be able to specify a target date that I want the book. If I could do that, I would put 9/1/09. Then, the wait list could keep letting people cut in front of me, until the target approached. How hard could that be?

Different Phones for Different Occasions

The latest smartphones--iPhone being the prime example--are very, very nice devices. As has been observed elsewhere, they handheld computers with voice calling grafted on. Which means they are too expensive and delicate to take just anywhere. Which is where the concept of SIM-switching comes to play.

Cell phones have been around long enough that many of us have old phones from previous contracts. And while those old phones may not be web-surfing, app-running wonders, they do tend to do voice calls perfectly well. In fact, I believe that my current, soon-to-be-replaced phone is probably the smallest phone I will ever have.

So if I am traveling somewhere rugged (biking, camping, canoeing, maybe even going to the local swimming pool), I might not want to expose my wondrous new smartphone to the elements. Why not press my old, backup phone into service? Well the way things stand now, switching the SIM card is just tedious enough that I probably wouldn't bother for anything less than a weekend trip. But if they could just make the SIM cards easy to pop in and out, like a well-placed microSD card, then it would be much more realistic to accessorize your mobile device to your activity.

Pineapple--Easier to Prepare Than You Think

I don't like many fruits and vegetables, but I try to eat reasonably healthfully, so the ones I like, I eat frequently. About a decade ago, I discovered I really like pineapple. Only fresh is worthy, of course. It is kind of pricey to buy it prepared, so I didn't have it that often. I assumed that preparing it was a huge hassle. I recently discovered--thanks to Beth--that I was wrong. It is really not that hard to prepare at all. So now we keep a fresh pineapple in the fridge all the time. They are a BARGAIN at Sam's, I want to say $1.99, but that seems too cheap, maybe $2.99, at the most. For 6-8 large portions of really good fruit, that is a great price.

Bad Design--Easy to Hit the Fail Switch

I spontaneously lost home broadband connectivity this afternoon. I spent 20 minutes troubleshooting on my end--re-setting cable modems, and Comcast boxes--before calling Comcast. Just as I was talking to the Comcast rep, I had the idea to press the little black button on top of my cable modem. Voila, all the lights went solid, and I had a connection.

I think the idea is that is the emergency disconnect button--you know, in case you are online, and Russian e-gangsters start attacking you. But it is SO ridiculously easy to tap by accident, that my cat could have nosed it, or more likely, my son with restless, teenager energy, kicking underneath the desk whilst using the computer. Really bad design, just like your typical telephone mute button.

Cell Phone UI Idea: Apps on the Desktop

One of the many nuisance of typical, poorly-designed cell-phone software is how far into the menu system you have to drill down to get different apps. For instance, part of the fun of having a camera phone is taking quick, impromptu pix. But if you have to go 5 clicks to get to the camera, the moment will be lost. So one idea I have is to have an immediately accessible "desktop" on the phone, where you can pick your currently-needed "top 5" apps to reside there.

My unloved Nokia 5610, for instance, has a place where you can permanently place shortcuts to key apps. That is okay. But often, your need for an app is time-and-place specific. For instance, at a track meet, I would want the Stopwatch to be readily accessible. The remaining 360 days of the year, I probably do not need such quick access to a stopwatch.

How To Tell If A Company Cares About Telephone Customer Service

Do they escort you when they transfer you to another department? If they stay on the line, introduce you and make sure there is a smooth handoff, it is a very good sign that they care.

Obama Gets Healthcare Industry to Promise Not to Raise Prices (Too Much)

I think this is a joke. It reminds me of the long-standing "voluntary import quotas" the Japanese automakers agreed to observe. Those saved Detroit, right?

Automaker Re-Invention Strategy: Eliminate the Dealers

It has already been established that I have a deep antipathy to auto dealers. You might say "but the poor dealers, everybody knows they are struggling, they hardly make anything from new vehicle sales, they rely on used cars and service to keep the doors open". To that I say true, just more proof that they are obsolete.

From a lean manufacturing, just-in-time manufacturing, and inventory management point of view, the large network of dealers, warehousing hundreds of cars each, represents a HUGE source of waste in the system. I think the network of local dealerships should be replaced with regional test-drive centers. You find the car you like, then you order it. Depending how standard your feature list, the wait could be longer or shorter.

Most people can wait to get their new car, rarely are they under the gun to have it TODAY. I know, the psychology of wanting to drive out with new wheels is part of what drives the existing dealer structure. I think that could change, though, if the savings (lean manufacturing = lower costs) and satisfaction (no annoying dealer experience, getting exactly the car you want) to the consumer were there. Anyway, for the rare consumer who just totaled their car, and doesn't have an operational vehicle to use during the 2-4 week wait, the dealers could provide highly subsidized rentals. I think the economics of that would work just fine, and could easily be built into the purchase price.

One of the big challenges to even thinking about implementing such a strategy is the contractual and regulatory challenes to ditching the dealers, along with the overall risk it would involve. Only a desperate company would be likely to take that kind of risk. Well, as they say, never waste the opportunity provided by a crisis. GM, now is the time.

SharePoint Is A Typical MS Product

Good enough (debateable) but no competition, so no improvements. The latest thing to annoy me is that Excel can't be opened, except read-only, if the total URL path exceeds 250 characters. Given how SharePoint generates LONG URL's, it doesn't take much of a folder structure to exceed 250 characters. The problem is intermittent, and generally prevents you from opening anything after the first 1 or 2 Excel files as anything but read-only. So it has work-arounds, and thus does not get escalated or fixed. Shameful--I would dump SharePoint in a heartbeat.

Everybody Wants to Make $ from Ads

I read that TiVo has plans to get revenue from ads. I also read that YouTube is struggling to pay the bills with ads. I still remain a skeptic that there is room for ads to pay the freight on much more internet functions and features. It seems to me that sooner or later most of the ad-supported schemes will collapse under their own weight.

Just like the housing market, or the general economic boom, kept going for a while, as more and more player piled on, figuring that if X could make money flipping real-estate or selling to high-end customers, then they could, too. I think the economy for ad-supported sites is mostly running on fumes.

Website Useability: Do not play audio on any entry page

My corporate Home Page is doing it!!!!

ZoomSafer Software for Cell Phones and Driving

Got a comment to my recent posts, musing on the scariness of teen texting-while-driving, and ideas for counter-measures. From ZoomSafer, promoting their forthcoming software aimed at this problem. It does look promising in several ways, including the text-to-speech feature. (But does not eliminate my desire to have the auditing via correlation mashup feature.)

A quick inventory and comment on ZoomSafer features:

1. Reminds you to drive safely. Seems likely to be innfective and annoying--like the now-osbsolete airline security questions, or the flight-attendant safety instructions.
2. Prevents inbound texts and emails--very good.
3. Manages inbound calls by preference--good.
4. Selectively notify friends you ARE DRIVING. Could be good, if implemented properly. I.e., if they get that message on the inbound call. This level of interactivity on the inbound call is something I have been after for a while, with the Do Not Disturb feature, and the "I'm coming, hold on 10 seconds" feature.
5. Voice-based access--good.

Having MSN, AOL or Yahoo As Your Default Browser Page...

...is like leaving an open bag of your favorite potato chips out on the counter at all times.

Monster Job Board Decline

Time had an article about how Monster is seeing declining share and revenues, being hit by several competitors, notably LinkedIn. I'm not surprised. Monster seems like the textbook case of a business that had a dominant market share and got comfy and arrogant. Their useability was always mediocre, at best. One thing that particularly disgusted me, as a user, was their insistence on repeatedly presenting me with those click-through ads for some online university. I got those like 100% of the time I logged on. Annoying, wasteful and TOTALLY ineffective. All signs of an out-of-touch company.

Cell Phone Carriers should give you tools to manage your minutes

For instance, text you warnings if you are exceeding "run rates". For instance, if you are 1/4 of the way through the billing cycle, and have used >= 1/4 of your total minutes, that would merit a warning. They could be configurable, to avoid annoying people who know what they are doing. Of course this goes against the company's own interests, to an extent, so is not something they have invested in. Another idea for an iPhone/Android app (but tough, because requires account data that could be hard for such an app to access, without the carrier's blessing).

Chip Keys--Another DIY Item

I started to write full blog post the programmable, "chip keys" that are used to start modern cars, but then I found that someone had already written most of it for me. So I will limit myself first to saying I don't like them. I don't know that they cut down all that much on car theft, and anyway, I am willing to take that chance. They are so bulky, you can't keep a spare in your wallet. I am now realizing that you could have a wallet-key cut for this purpose, which isn't 100% as good, but takes care of the 90% problem, which is locking your keys in the car.

As for the fully-functional spare, the dealer will typically want $40 for the key, and often, another $40 for a programming charge. I find that completely outrageous, especially as we approach having 4 drivers in the family. General consumer irritation on this topic has been stewing in the back of my mind for 5 years, since I first bought cars of recent enough vintage to have chip keys.

So when I noticed a sign at the local Ace Hardware saying "we cut chip keys", I got excited. I figured it would be quite a bit more than the $3 for a generic metal key, but a lot less than the dealer price. I was thinking $25. Imagine my shock when they quoted me $65! I said thanks but no thanks.

That got me thinking more, though, and I started poking around online. I quickly learned that this is a potential Do-It-Yourself item. So I bought a key for $15 online ($20 with shipping). While I was at it, I also ordered a key fob for our Dodge Grand Caravan.

Getting the key working was going to be a little more tedious than the fob, because first I had to go to Menard's to have the blank cut (which they nicely did for free), then I had to go through the programming instructions for the key.

So I went ahead and did the fob first, not feeling like making a special trip to Menard's. That seemed to go well, the special chimes occurred just as the instructions indicated. So I got the first fob done, tried it immediately, and it worked fine. But then I noticed that the original fob didn't work any longer! So I repeated the programming instructions, to re-program it. That worked, but then the new fob no longer worked. So then I read the instructions more carefully, and realized you have to re-program the new fob as well. I guess that sort of makes sense, though it is not entirely obvious. I think what it comes down to is that the transponder in the car only has 1 code--not a separate code for each fob.

So a few days later, I got around to programming my new key. And therein lay a painful glitch. The instructions were sensible enough, as with the fob, and I followed them carefully. However, the promised sequence of single chime, and security indicator light never occurred as promised. And no suprise, the new key would not start the car. I repeated the process 4 times, even resorting to closely timing myself (as opposed to estimating "wait at least 5 seconds but no more than 15 secs"). Still no luck.

So back online. I found the same and very similar instructions online. The very similar ones were interesting--the time intervals were slightly different. I figured, though, that the company I bought the key from and who sent the accompanying instructions had just tweaked them to be sure that people waited long enough. But the thing that stood out was the last, almost off-hand comment:

As a precautionary measure for all of the above procedures, you should wait at least one minute after you have performed this until you start your vehicle.

I had tried the new key immediately every time I had gone through the sequence. I went back out, and put the new, previously inoperative key in the ignition, and turned it. Voila, the car started! So my instructions seems doubly faulty--the confirmation chimes never occurred, and they never hinted to me that I should wait.

So at the end of the day, this was a typical DIY adventure. Success was achieved, but with unexpected difficulty and frustration. And while I am not an electronics and car geek, I am a bit more savvy than average, so I have a mental model of what can go wrong, and I am a particularly aggressive web researcher, so I was able to leverage the idea that I was close, but not quite there, with the ability and motivation to search out better instructions, to correct the problem. But that persist until you get it barrier is high enough to weed out at least 75% of potential DIYers, resulting in the dealers continuing to get their excessive profits on key copies!

Hmmm, I think I will recommend this topic to Consumer Reports magazine.

Coffee More Healthy Than Green Tea!

Green tea has gotten a lot of press for its healthy properties. But it turns out that coffee may be better for your colon, according to research reported in the International Journal of Cancer. Yes!!!

iPhone Find Me Feature

Looks like the new iPhone may have implemented a version of my Find Me! feature:

If you have a MobileMe account ($100 a year), you can also make your iPhone beep for two minutes — and display a plaintive message on the screen — when
you’ve misplaced it. How many times have you wished your cellphone had that
feature?

Pretty close to my version of the feature. But needs to be a stand-alone $5 app (max).

Iran Elections: "Landslide Ahmadinejad"--NOT

Very exciting events in Iran. What I wonder about though--what if instead of stealing a landslide, the Ahmadinejad government had settled for stealing a close victory? A win is still a win, after all. But a more plausible win would have let them claim, more plausibly, that they had not stolen the election. After all, it was good enough for Lyndon "Landslide" Johnson.

Facebook Parental Feature: Comment-Scraping

Our teens have Facebook pages. A requirement was that they let us be their friends. Of course I refrain from actually posting anything on their pages, but I check them every now and then. Here is the Facebook feature/add-in I would like. I would like a robot that scrapes their comments page every hour, aggregates it and emails it to me each day. I would particularly like it to highlight any comments that had been deleted!

Re-Factoring

Dave Winer: As I build layers of software, the simpler I make each layer, the higher I can build. If you don't design to hide complexity behind interfaces, you get overwhelmed by the complexity sooner, and your project can't do as much. Early in my career I often scrapped multiple levels and went down to the roots and rebuilt. Once I understood what the higher levels looked like, it exposed deficiencies in the lower levels. Reworking the lower levels allowed me to build higher.

This almost never happens with in-house corporate software development. Where I have seen large companies go wrong, repeatedly, is that they fail to find a way to start a large project by biting off a small chunk, learning from that, and using that hard-won knowledge to revise their approach. Instead, one way or another, sometimes in total ignorance, sometimes despite better intentions, they wind up making a huge, multi-year bet on a big-bang delivery. And in my experience, that typically leads to either total failure, in the form of outright cancellation, after several years and millions of dollars expended, or substantial failure, in the form of a stunted delivery accompanied by a pro-forma declaration of victory, after several years and millions of dollars expended[1].

Here are some reasons this happens:

1. The proof-of-concept is too small. This is probably the least common reason, but in this case, leadership is smart enough to realize that they need to test the waters. However, the test devised is much too small to provide the kind of reality check needed to provide insight into the much larger project.

2. Gross under-estimation of project scope. This is a common one. If you start out believing the project is medium-sized rather than jumbo, then you won't be thinking you need a significant trial-run. Two comments here. One, I personally feel like I have seen this happen enough to recognize the warning signs, so I would question whether this mistake could be avoided 80% of the time, if companies found a way to tap the experience of their senior people--including being open to bad news. Second comment--even if you accept that this will sometimes happen, despite best intentions, it is a problem that can be recognized before it is too late. The first time that 9-month project is extended to 15 months is a huge warning sign to take a big time-out, and ask--okay, what can we deliver in the original 9 months scope? Then we take stock and re-plan the project. And at this point, we face the facts--its not 9 months, its not 15 months, its going to be at least 24 months.

3. Insistence on business value. Several times I have seen companies that do want to break the delivery down into phases, but they are very insistent that even the very first phase must deliver business value (delvier ROI). This is a huge mistake. It just doesn't usually work this way, any more than the foundation to a house delivers significant value, without the rest of the house sitting on top of it. The tragic result of this approach is that the first pass winds up being way too big and high risk to start with, and more often than not gets expanded from there, as other stakeholders become involved in the project elaboration, and add more requirements.

Here is the right way to look at it. The only value that the pilot has to deliver is to give you the information you need to assess how big the full project really is (still guessing, but less wildly), whether it is worth doing, how much resources it might take to get done, and what different, creative approaches might be employed in planning the project. If you spend 10-30% of your estimated total budget on this phase, and the only result is that you conclude that the project should be scrapped, that is a HUGE win. Because in that case, you clearly were way off in your pre-project estimates, so the ultimate project budget would have been 3-5X that initial estimate--and you still probably wouldn't have gotten what you hoped for. Think of it like buying insurance--a relatively small and manageable outlay to provide a huge risk-mitigation.

4. Unwillingness to take the time to do it right. This is where the corporate reward system, as well as plain-old human impatience, take their toll. Experience tells us that major projects take years. Often, management is not willing to spend a year on a pilot, just to find out whether a larger multi-year project is feasible. Instead, they would rather pretend that the whole thing can be done in less than 2 years.

__________
NOTES

[1] Incidentally, the partial failure may be more expensive in the long run than the complete failure, because this is the kind of thing that leads to the old system remaining in place for certain functions that were cut from the new system. This contributes to the problem of an increasingly complex, rigid and expensive-to-maintain systems environment, which is also something that seems to burden many/most large companies.

HSA Plans

NYT Article:

The investment firm Fidelity recently surveyed employees at various companies who had opted for a high-deductible health plan linked to a health savings account. About half of those workers said they or a family member had chosen not to seek medical care for minor ailments as many as four times in the last year to avoid paying the out-of-pocket expenses.

And they call this "Consumer-Driven Healthcare"?! Now, I'm not saying this is all bad. I am definitely in favor of the concept, at least in theory, of exposing consumers to more of the costs of health care. In my own family, we have seen a number of times when we held off going to the doctor by a day or three, for some relatively minor thing, and it wound up clearing up on its own. So definitely some efficiency there. But please, let's be clear--consumers are not voluntarily "driving" this change. Calling HSA plans "consumer driven" is a classic example of corporate-speak.

Text-to-Speech Cell Phone Feature

I am surprised that text-to-speech has not emerged as a cell phone feature. So that a synthesized voice would read your text message aloud. I'm not sure if it would make texting-while-driving worse or better (worse, because some people will listen to their texts who would not read them; better, because some people who would otherwise read them will instead just listen, which is an improvement, if still problematic).

Either way, though, that would only address the less scary half of texting-while-driving, the reading part (which is still scary enough).

Corporate Mailbox Size

I am forever having to archive my corporate email because I am running out of space. What a ridiculous waste of my time, in this era of personal terabyte drives! Usually this is driven by a few large attachments. Why can Outlook/Exchange have some built-in features to help with this?

1. Automatically zip emails with total attachments larger than 500K (the threshold of course could be configurable).
2. Have a utility to have Outlook convert all attachments to zip files, post-hoc.
3. Provide a utility to store all attachments automcially, post-hoc, and provide a link in the original email to that post-hoc location.

My question was rhetorical. I know the answer. It is the usual answer with Microsoft--because there is no competition. Outlook/Exchange owns the corporate email client market, so there is no need to make improvements. Someday, that will be the death of you, GM Micro$osft.

Article: The Healthcare Cost Problem

Long, very interesting New Yorker article that pinpoints physician-driven over-utilization as the primary cost driver of our expensively broken national healthcare model. Almost everything in it makes sense to me.

Regarding "Single Payer"

Activists and policymakers spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about whether the solution to high medical costs is to have government or private insurance companies write the checks. Here’s how this whole debate goes. Advocates of a public option say government financing would save the most money by having leaner administrative costs and forcing doctors and hospitals to take lower payments than they get from private insurance. Opponents say doctors would skimp, quit, or game the system, and make us wait in line for our care; they maintain that private insurers are better at policing doctors. No, the skeptics say: all insurance companies do is reject applicants who need health care and stall on paying their bills. Then we have the economists who say that the people who should pay the doctors are the ones who use them. Have consumers pay with their own dollars, make sure that they have some “skin in the game,” and then they’ll get the care they deserve. These arguments miss the main issue. When it comes to making care better and cheaper, changing who pays the doctor will make no more difference than changing who pays the electrician. The lesson of the high-quality, low-cost communities is that someone has to be accountable for the totality of care. Otherwise, you get a system that has no brakes.

I might even take that point a step further. It can be hard for government to provide tough love and take a hard line on benefits (look how Social Security benefits have broadened over the years). So I think a national government single-payer might be less successful in focusing on "evidence-based" medicine than are private insurers. (Disclaimer: I work for a health insurer.)

HSA

The third class of health-cost proposals, I explained, would push people to use medical savings accounts and hold high-deductible insurance policies: “They’d have more of their own money on the line, and that’d drive them to bargain with you and other surgeons, right?”

He gave me a quizzical look. We tried to imagine the scenario. A cardiologist tells an elderly woman that she needs bypass surgery and has Dr. Dyke see her. They discuss the blockages in her heart, the operation, the risks. And now they’re supposed to haggle over the price as if he were selling a rug in a souk? “I’ll do three vessels for thirty thousand, but if you take four I’ll throw in an extra night in the I.C.U.”—that sort of thing? Dyke shook his head. “Who comes up with this stuff?” he asked. “Any plan that relies on the sheep to negotiate with the wolves is doomed to failure.”

So does this mean that Consumer-Driven Healthcare (aka, High Deductible / HSA plans) is just the latest fad, likely to go by the wayside just as HMOs did? Well, much of that quote rings true to me, but I think having consumers more directly feel the price signals from the market can at least help around the edges.

Systems

Congress has provided vital funding for research that compares the effectiveness of different treatments, and this should help reduce uncertainty about which treatments are best. But we also need to fund research that compares the effectiveness of different systems of care—to reduce our uncertainty about which systems work best for communities. These are empirical, not ideological, questions. And we would do well to form a national institute for health-care delivery, bringing together clinicians, hospitals, insurers, employers, and citizens to assess, regularly, the quality and the cost of our care, review the strategies that produce good results, and make clear recommendations for local systems.

This is a really interesting point, and provides the article's concluding thesis. It makes me think about the success of Japanese automakers such as Toyota and Honda. They established a dominating cost and quality advantage not by deploying more advanced technology, but rather by creating an entirely new system for manufacturing automobiles.

NYT Article: Credit Card Industry Aims to Profit From Sterling Payers

It is only rational for the industry to make the kinds of changes mentioned in this article, that will hit those who pay on time. Businesses should always seek to drop unprofitable customers, or turn them into profitable customers. But because the gross profit margins in credit cards currently are so great, the credit card issuers find it effective to cast a wide net. If a few unprofitable "dolphins" are caught up in the net, that is a tolerable inefficiency, so long as they can trap many more customers who will eventually be filleted by the high fees and usurious interest rates.

Now where all this leads is an interesting question. As a pay-in-full person, while I can tolerate trimming around the edges (maybe small annual fees, losing the 1% cash-back), if they make it so that it costs me to use a credit card (surcharge, zero grace period), then I will drop the card like a hot potato. So the ultimate question is where the credit card industry can find its profit. The fact is, there is absolutely no rational reason that anybody should be willing to pay 20-30% interest. None.

So from the standpoint of macroeconomic efficiency, I think it would be a good think for the credit card industry to contract substantially. Any product that has tremendous gross profitability--credit cards, pharmaceuticals--will expend large sums in aggressively marketing to seek new customers. While some amount of marketing is necessary economic lubrication, it does not follow that more is better. So in the end, even if I lose some of my credit card perks, the world will be a better and more rational place if the credit card industry is cut down to size.

Article: Bursting the Higher Ed Bubble

This is a great article.

"Will Higher Education be the Next Bubble to Burst?" So asks a recent op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The question is powerful. Data points:

• Over the past quarter-century, the average cost of higher education has risen at a rate four times faster than inflation—twice as fast as the cost of health care.
• Tuition, room, and board at private colleges can cost $50,000 per year or more.
• The market crash of 2008 inflicted terrible damage on college endowments. The Commonfund Institute reports that endowments dropped by an average of 23 percent in the five months ending Nov. 30, 2008.

I particularly like this idea:

Maybe tough high school exit exams would serve the needs of employers who currently insist on a BA not for its own sake but as proof that a student was not too lazy or aimless to get one. Indeed, it could be that when the job market attaches less value to a piece of parchment, universities will at last lay aside their often ugly political preoccupations and rediscover their true mission: the pursuit of knowledge as a good in itself.

Lance Armstrong Dis-Intermediating Journalists?

The idea of using your own printing press--weblog, twitter, etc--to communicate, and not allowing reporters to deliver your "message" is something Dave Winer writes about a lot.

Lance Armstrong, who stopped talking to the news media without explanation or comment nearly two weeks ago, is not the first star athlete to tire of answering questions from reporters, but he does seem to be the first to embark on a drive to put them out of business entirely, by simply reporting, in multimedia blog posts and tweets, on his own exploits.

As my colleague Juliet Macur reported earlier this week, Philippe Maertens, a spokesman for Mr. Armstrong’s cycling team, “said that Armstrong was at first upset with reports that he had been the instigator of a rider protest last week in Milan. Now, Maertens said, he was not sure why Armstrong continued his boycott of the news media.” According to the spokesman, the seven-time Tour de France champion told him simply, “I don’t need them.”

Validation on Dishwashers

I have always been a proponent of "let the dishwasher do the work"--don't pre-rinse your dishes. The dishwashwer manuals and Consumer Reports have always given that instruction, but this article takes it to a new level. It is amazing how ingrained and widespread certain habits become in a populace.

Google Maps Multiple Routes Feature

Google maps has a nice new feature, where they give you second and sometimes third choices for possible routes.

Microsoft Word Overtype *Finally* Fixed

MS Word has an overtype feature. You toggle it on and off via the Insert key. If you look very closely at the status bar at the bottom of the screen, it will say OVR when you in overtype mode. In overtype mode, each character you type causes the current character to be, well, overtyped.

As far as I know, this feature is not used by anybody. I'm not sure, but I think it probably harkens back to pre-PC, terminal days. I suppose there may be some niche uses, involving forms, but I have personally not encountered them--and I have been using Word for Windows since 1989.

This one gets people all the time, and if they don't have a rudimentary model of how Word works, it completely flummoxes them. It most recently happened to my 12-year old son, who is usually pretty sharp with software features. As soon as he ran upstairs, cursing about Word deleting his characters, I recognized the problem.

This feature bug has been around forever. It is just so easy to hit the INS key by accident, and there is only the very subtlest visual cue that it is turned on. It is really criminal that, for lo these 15 years, Micro$oft has stuffed feature upon bloated feature into Word, but has not corrected this small nuisance.

I just noticed, in Word 2007, they have finally done so. Overtype mode has an option setting, and it is OFF by default. It's about time!

Too Windy to Ride

Today is the first time I have canceled a bike ride solely due to wind. There have been times, early or late in the season, when it is chill, that wind has been a factor in talking myself out of riding. But this was the first time that I really, really wanted to ride, but had to call it for wind. The gusts were SO high, probably 45 mph, like in a strong thunderstorm (even though there was zero chance of storms). I've ridden plenty of times when the guests are into the 30s, but the 40s is just too much.

Consumer Resolution: Boycott Perpetrators of Pop-Ups

We all know that pop-up ads on the web are evil, and many of us have been blocking them successfully for years. Every now and then, a pop-up somehow evades the blocker. Usually these are for lesser-known companies, for whom there is nearly 0% chance I would ever even think of patronizing. However, NetFlix is among the offenders, which makes me not want to patronize them. Currently that is not a problem, I use BlockBuster online. But I have maintained a soft spot for NetFlix, and if I did not have young children at home, I would have considered switching back to them. But the evil pop-up evasion ads nix that.

Electric Bicycles

Really good article on electric bikes. Lots of potential here. I think one key element to crack is the security factor. If I could secure my bike as quickly as I can park and lock my car, that would greatly increase the appeal.

The folding electric bike could really be the ultimate! Also, for the car replacement, the three-wheel version with larger cargo capacity could be the right form factor.

LinkedIn Sleazy Dark UX Pattern for Contact Spamming

I just went through LinkedIn's process where is scans and harvests your webmail (e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, YahooMail, etc) to create a list of potential invitiess. I only invite existing LinkedIn members--I don't spam spam people who either aren't on LinkedIn, or (more likely) are on, but using a different email address. Of course, LinkedIn insists on compiling a list of everybody, encouraging you to spam all those email addresses.

I can live with that, it is self-serving, borderline sleazy, but totally expected, and it doesn't interfere with my process. What you have to do is Un-Select All, then scroll through the list, only checking off people with icons denoting that that email addresses matches a LinkedIn member. No big deal. When you are done, you click SEND INVITATION. Simple enough.

But what came next totally took my by surprise. Almost instaneously, and clearly chained to the prior SEND INVITATIONS action, the UI automatically populated the remainder of the list--that is, the very email addresses I deliberately un-checked!!!--into the Send Invitations box.

It happened so fast, it was hard to notice. In fact, if you weren't paying close attention, you might think the first SEND INVITATIONS did not work, so you would re-click. And in doing so, instantly, irreversibly (I assume irreversibly, I'm not going to try it and find out!), you would have spammed who knows how many email addresses with that invitation!

Very unacceptable, deceptive, downright sleazy corporate behavior. This is the same mentality that re-checks the "opt-in" checkboxes, every time you make a change to your account profile.

Helping People Find Jobs with "Soft Referrals"

15 months ago, I left a medium-sized company in the mortgage industry. It had been a great place to work, right up until it wasn't, and I really liked and admired many of the people I worked with.

I was one of the earlier people to jump--the writing on the wall seemed clear to me--but many others stayed, for various reasons. The company I moved to, in a very different industry, is a huge employer, and was doing a fair amount of hiring. But it was such a huge company, and I was so new, that there was almost zero chance that I would have any direct contact with the the area doing the hiring for any given posting.

So what I told my former colleagues (the 90% that I would put in the "good person to hire category") was "if you see a posting that you are interested in, send me the requisition number, and I will find out who the hiring manager is, and send them an unsolicited, but internal, reference. Also, while my primary motivation is not the referral bonus, all things being equal, I would like to be in a position to collect it, so give me 24 hours to submit you through the system, then go ahead and assume I have done that, and apply".

This has worked out pretty well for all concerned. This helped 3 job seekers find positions. It helped hiring managers hire good people. And as the referrer, in theory, I should be eligible for a referral bonus. (Well, I guess it only helped me in that it helped the other two ways--2 of the 3 positions were for contractors, so no referral bonus there, and the third was for someone who had already posted before contacting me, so no bonus there either.)

I think for some reason, people are hesitant to send this kind of unsolicited referral. I don't know why. Obviously, you only do it for good people. But even a "cold" internal referral, especially coming from someone obviously in a leadership position, is significant. If I were choosing between 2 hireable candidates that I had no prior knowledge of, and I estimated one was a "7", and the other an "8", and I got a solid internal referral on the 7, I would probably take that "7 in the hand", over an "8 in the bush". So, from the job-seeker's perspective, you may have to "lean on" your contacts to take this step. Feel free to link to this post to help make your case!

Acting as referrer has the added benefit of providing you, the referrer, with a chance to broaden your network within the company.

Tix Too Expensive

I have to say, I think this is a good thing. I am familiar with the economics, marketing, politics and even aesthetics around the topic of new stadiums and arenas, but I still think it is a colossal waste to replace a perfectly good, 25-year old stadium, just because the ashtrays are full and the upholstery is worn. So I celebrate the fact that they can't sell out these expensive new venues. That it is NYC teams is just the icing on the cake.

Is This Seat Taken? In Front Rows of New Ballparks, Not Yet

After spending $2.3 billion on new stadiums packed with suites, restaurants and the latest technology, the Mets and the Yankees expected fans to pay top dollar for prime seats.

Instead, as the Times's Ken Belson reports, the Mets and the Yankees face a public-relations nightmare and possibly millions of dollars in lost revenue after failing to sell about 5,000 tickets to each of their first few games after last week's openers.

Should Be Standard: Paste As Unformatted

MS Word and other Microsoft Office apps have a menu option "Paste Special". This lets you control how the contents of the clipboard are pasted into wherever you are pasting them into. This is very useful, because it allows you to paste text without pasting its format. More often than not, that is the default effect I want. In MS-Word, my fingers have become trained to press the key sequence ALT-E, S, U, ENTER--almost as fast as they do CTRL-V.

So my wish is that all text editors would implement this functionality (or at least all text editors that read HTML; very simple text editors, such as forms, that do not allow for the formatting of text effectively are hard-wired to do this).

GPS Review for NAV 740

I finally broke down and bought a GPS for the car. I hate getting list, and I figured they had finally gotten cheap enough. I have always heard good things about Garmin, but they seemed pricey, so I got the NAV 740, which was PC Magazine's Editor's Choice. The three key features, for the price were the 4.3" widescreen form factor, a good POI database, and text-to-speech.

I've only had it a couple of weeks, but so far so good. Parts of the UI are a little kludgy, but the main screen I find to be very, very nice. Everything you need, right where you need it and well laid-out. At $90 all-in (Amazon), a tremendous bargain.

As the user reviews I read before purchasing indicated, battery life is very weak. I have tested it, and it seems like 2 hours in standard GPS mode. That is with a new battery, I imagine in a year it will be almost worthless in battery mode. It's a shame it doesn't take standard AAA batteries--it certainly seems like the form factor is big enough to accomodate them.

A few states, MN being one of them, prohibit attaching anything to the windshield. So I had to buy a friction mount for the dashboard. It is pretty elegant in its simplicity (here is the Arkon mount I got, at a great price). The suction cup attaches to the surface. The mount is very heavy, and has a rubber bottom, so it inhibits sliding over the slick dash. You wouldn't think that would be enough, on a down-sloped dash like mine, but it really works fine. An advantage is that is makes it easier to remove and hide when parking.

Mexican Drug Cartel Violence Spills Over, Alarming U.S.

We need to wake up and discard ideology. Guns are instrumental in killing people; assault weapons are instrumental in killing lots of people, and law-enforcement people. The collective American conscience should be very, very disturbed by what is happening in Mexico. Maybe this is the wake-up call:

Tucson is coping with a wave of drug crime the police suspect is tied to the battles between Mexico's drug cartels.

Newsweek has an article noting the Obama administration's lack of willingness to tackle the issue right now: Obama Gets Gun-Shy. In terms of practical politics, I can see why that is their position.

Dying Midwestern Cities

I have been morbidly following the plummeting fortunes of Detroit. For years, since the end of the SUV boom, even before the current auto-industry crash, it has been evident that Detroit was on its way to becoming a giant Gary, Indiana. So I tend to read articles about other downtrodden midwestern cities. It is very depressing and sobering. In a single day, I came across articles on these 3 cities:
Anderson, Indiana

Pontiac, Michigan

Cleveland, Ohio

And this article pretty much sums up the topic

Meeting People You Have Only Spoken To

It is weird when you finally meet someone face-to-face that you have had a phone relationship with for months. You develop a mental picture of what they look like, and then you find they don't match it. Sort of like when you see a movie of your favorite book, and the characters don't look like what you had pictured.

Lagging Economic Indicators

WSJ article that says the recession is now hitting healthcare hard. It seems that various industries and specialties that thought they were recession-resistant are discovering that they are merely lagging indicators.

Cut Them Some Slack

Friedman: If you want to guarantee that America becomes a mediocre nation, then just keep vilifying every public figure struggling to find a way out of this crisis who stumbles once — like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner or A.I.G.’s $1-a-year fill-in C.E.O., Ed Liddy — and you’ll ensure that no capable person enlists in government. I totally agree with this sentiment.

Bailout v. 3

Krugman: Even more important, however, is the way Mr. Obama is squandering his credibility. If this plan fails — as it almost surely will — it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to persuade Congress to come up with more funds to do what he should have done in the first place.

I heard Krugman on NPR today, and he made 3 points I totally agree with:

• This is a re-hash of the Paulsen plan that was discarded months ago
• It probably won't work at all, and if it does anything, it will be because the government is so heavily subsidizing the investment
• The mindset behind this type of plan continues to be "the toxic assets have more value than the market is assigning to them"
• We should quit calling them "toxic assets"

This Will Become A Major Problem

Last week, a juror in a big federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet, directly violating the judge's instructions and centuries of legal rules. But when the judge questioned the rest of the jury, he got an even bigger shock.

Eight other jurors had been doing the same thing. The federal judge, William J. Zloch, had no choice but to declare a mistrial, wasting eight weeks of work by federal prosecutors and defense lawyers.

Don't Go to the Dealer for Service

Dave Winer's experience with BMW...

Idea for A Cleaner Way to Manage TSRs

It's ridiculous how Windows PCs suffer from the computer equivalent of COPD. Our home computer has reached the advanced stage, where it is still useable, but decidedly unpleasant. I will soon need to re-install the O/S.

One contributor to the degenerative "cruft" is all the stuff that wants to automatically load any time you boot up. This stuff can be divided into categories such as:
1. Enhanced drivers, like for printers.
2. Updaters--like Adobe, and various software. Those really seem like a waste.
3. Event handlers, like software for burning CDs.

It seems like Windows could have a unified model for registering these handlers. So for categories 1 and 3, the driver registers the events it wants to respond to. When those events occur, Windows either starts the utility, or gives the user a choice of selecting which utility to start and use. Similar to the way Windows responds when you insert a memory card with JPGs on it. For category 2, just set a frequency to run any given updater--there is absolutely no reason to have that updater sitting in memory at all times.

Advanced features

• Let the user specify which things really should load all the time, for truly important utilities. Needless to say, the user can opt out of that setting with a simple un-check.

Car Alarms Are USELESS

I wonder if, in the entire history of car alarms, they have even once led to the prevention of a theft? They are such a gigantic nuisance, they should be banned. I don't understand why Lojack has not taken off.

Fwd: Verizon Friends and Family

Finally someone is challenging T-Mobile's Faves. I've been wondering what has taken so long. Although I think I heard that the minimum minutes for Verizon is 1400, whereas T-Mobile offers Faves at lower minutes levels.

The other mobile carriers have left T-Mobile to have this differentiator for a good 3 years or more. It let me knock $20 off my monthly bill, by going from 2000 minutes per month down to 1000--and we still only use a fraction of those most months. Since I work from home often, and spend most of my day on conference calls, this feature was decisive in my selection of T-Mobile. (Hint: Faves won't accept 800 numbers, so you will need to find out the local version of your conference number.)

Why Are There So Many Wheel Types for Cars?

I had to buy steel rims for my 2005 Ford Focus, and nobody local had them. It seems like it should be possible for there to be half a dozen standardized rim configurations that could accomodate 90% of passenger vehicles.

The variations in price were shocking. Tires Plus was $92, the Ford dealer an outrageous $175, and Discount Tire was the low bidder at $55. All for the same hunk of steel.

Nike's Web Site is AWFUL!

Okay, I just went to Nike's website for the first, and probably last, time. In about 3 minutes, I was severely hampered by 4 major problems:

1. The front door requires you to select a language. However, something bizarre is going on in the interface, because try as I might, I could not get it to "take" my selection of English.
2. But I did succeed in selecting Czech. And once I selected Czech, that selection was cached in my browser, and I could not get back to the select language front door--it always took me right into the Czech-localized version of the Nike.com site.
3. I attempted to overcome that problem by using a different browser, and using a search to enter the U.S.-localized site via a deep link.
4. My first try at this brought me in the wrong door, and when I tried back up, I found that Nike had committed the unpardonable sin of re-directing the back button. Easily overcome, but highly irritating.
5. Finally, when I got to the right door, I was greeted by the "Download flash to use this site" message. Eventually, I found my way to the non-flash option (not easy to find, buried, in favor of requiring people to go install flash).
6. At this point, I was quite exhausted, and when my first search failed, I didn't have the energy to keep searching. Good-bye, Nike.

How Could Obama's Speechwriters Let This Slip?

"And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it."

First of all, a nation didn't invent the automobile, an individual, a small group or at most a company invented it. Not a nation. And second, the nation in which the inventors, Daimler and Maybach, lived, was Germany, not America.

I love my country, the United States, I subscribe to a significant extent in American Exceptionalism, and I fervently hope our best days are not behind us. But holding such beliefs does not, should not, require frequent, incorrect, un-supported assertions such as:

• Americans are the hardest-working people in the world (that title probably goes to subsistence farmers in any number of undeveloped locales). I don't want to be the hardest-working person. I would like to be the smartest-working person.
• Our [blank] system is the best in the world...clinging to that outdated belief might explain why we have tolerated decades of excessive inflation in healthcare costs.
• We invented the English language.
• Our companies and workers can out-compete anybody, if given a level playing field.

That kind of mindless semi-jingoism doesn't serve anybody well.

(Note: I can easily forgive this mistake on the part of a busy President, but the speechwriters are not excused.)

Shipping from Home

I don't know what rock I have hiding under, but I have just discovered self-service online shipping. Just create your UPS or USPS account, print your label, schedule your pickup, and you are done. You don't really even have to worry about weighing the package too closely, because if you are off, they will just charge you more or less accordingly.

Being a procrastinator about certain things--I hate special trips for just one thing, such as shipping--it tends to take me a long time to get things shipped. Why in the world I didn't catch on to this idea sooner, I don't quite know. I take it as an indictor of how strongly consumer habits can be, once formed.

I Wish Comcast Would Try Harder to Tell Me

...when their service is down. I'm sure there are all kinds of reasons they can't do it perfectly, but it would go a long way if they could even tell me "there may be problems in your area". I would think it would help them, too--fewer problem calls to answer.

There are so many ways to communicate now, even if the problem is that internet is down, it would be great to receive a text telling me that.

$40 MM Video Games

This article, which discusses how video game production budgets are going up faster than revenues, is another example of an economy that has grown dependent on doing things the expensive way.

Verizon Landline Alternative Will Fail

This is the wrong solution at the wrong time. At $30/month, and a big up-front cost, and no compelling features, the Verizon Hub is a loser. A winning proposition needs to conform to the spirt of the times, which would be--finding a cheaper way to deliver value. My exhibit in this category would be T-Mobile's @Home landline replacement, which gives you a feature rich, unlimited minutes and long distance solutions for a mere $10/month added to your cell bill.

Microsoft Retail Stores

Microsoft is copying Apple and opening up retail stores. My prediction: they will bomb. I just don't see what products MicroSoft has that are crying out for this distribution channel. (For the record, I didn't think retail stores for Apple would be successful, either.)

Japan's Banking Crisis

Only in 2003 did the government finally take the actions that helped lead to a recovery: forcing major banks to submit to merciless audits and declare bad debts; spending two trillion yen to effectively nationalize a major bank, wiping out its shareholders; and allowing weaker banks to fail.

Institutional Thinking

David Brooks: ...institutional thinking is eroding. Faith in all institutions, including charities, has declined precipitously over the past generation, not only in the U.S. but around the world. Lack of institutional awareness has bred cynicism and undermined habits of behavior. Bankers, for example, used to have a code that made them a bit stodgy and which held them up for ridicule in movies like "Mary Poppins." But the banker's code has eroded, and the result was not liberation but self-destruction.

SharePoint Checkout Model

In VSS, you check out to a folder. VSS remembers that folder. When you have a file checked out, you can manipulate it offline is as you see fit, all VSS knows is the filename. So as long as you check in a file with the same name, VSS is happy.

In SharePoint, the user is not involved in determining where the file is checked out to. Conceptually, it seems like you check the file out to an invisible "stream" (to use ClearCase terminology). One problem is that doesn't let you work offline. There are some good things about it, in that the user doesn't have to think about the check-out location of the doc. So it is less versatile, but simpler for the typical user.

But even that mental model seems broken. Because when you have a file checked out, a mere Save causes it to update the current copy with your work-in-process save. That seems very wrong. You should be able to save, but not have your updated version merged into the mainline stream until you are ready. At which time you would explicitly check it in. But that doesn't seem to be how SP works. As soon as you save, it seems to be checked in.

In fact, unless I am missing something (which seems probable) the only reason that SP needs a check out/check-in would seem to be to reserve the file for future use!

Thoughts on Health Care Reform

Although looking for government involvement/intervention/deep regulation to solve a problem is usually a last resort, the problem of ravenously increasing healthcare spending does not appear to be an ordinary problem. This has been considered a major problem for pretty much my entire adult life (20+ years). It only seems to have gotten worse. I am afraid, now, that Republicans/conservatives have completely ignored this situation too long, to their detriment.

However, I dearly hope we will not just dump more $ into system that we already agree consumes too much money and resources. Let's experiment with some kind of alternative, much leaner systems. Some ideas:

• Employ salaried doctors, not independent contractors, like the famous Mayo Clinic does
• Implement super, super aggressive management of prescriptions. It goes without saying that only generics should be used, where they are an option. In all cases, have a bias toward starting with the most cost-effective medicine, before escalating to the latest and greatest.
• Pass special tort reform, to eliminate defensive medicine.
• Consider aggressive, HMO-style gate-keeping. For instance, perhaps patients should always have to call the "nurse line" before coming to the doctor's office, to eliminate visits for routine colds, etc.
• Make aggressive use of the most cost-effective skill-set: don't use LPNs for stuff RNs can do, don't use Physician's Assistants where RNs can do, etc.
• Make aggressive use of wellness coaching--participation is not optional.
• Implement disciplined regionalization of procedures. Patients have to go to the approved, efficient facility in the region, not the one they might find most convenient.
• Keep some element of the first-dollar motivation that HSAs provide, even if it has to be on a sliding scale.
• Obviously we want to look at streamlined administrative options.
• Use expensive infrastructure 24x7.
• Take a very tough line on necessity of treatments. Just in my extended family, I know of a number of cases where prescribed treatment has been unnecessary or useless. This article that suggests most TMJ suffers might do best with no treatment is a good case study. Or back surgery!