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!

Queuing Previewed Movies: Use Case for Movies on Demand

I love previews. When renting a good movie, Beth and I often see previews for 3-4 movies we would like to see. Depending on our levels of motivation and energy, we will respond in one of the following ways: 1) Grab the laptop, and put them on the Blockbuster online queue; 2) Grap a scrap of paper, jot them down, and hope we remember to put them in the queue; 3) Look at each other and say "we've got to remember that" and go on to the next preview.

So it is not hard to imagine that a well-designed, movies-on-demand system could make this work much more seamlessly. See the preview, decide you like it, click a button or two, and it is on your queue.

Unintended Consequence Possiblity: Flex-Time

Flex-time is a very nice improvement in the work life of the busy professional. I'm not talking about any type of shift work, just the practice, more often than not informal, of knowledge-worker employees generally having leeway to adjust their work hours plus/minus 1 hour or so from the norm. There are many reasons for flexing ones schedule, avoiding peak rush hour being chief among them. Most people love flex-time.

I find myself idly wondering, though, if anyone has looked into the unintended consequences of flex-time on reducing commuter mileage. If flex time were not an option, mass transit, carpooling and living closer to work all would be incrementally more desirable.

Lifespan of an Exercise Bike

My exercise bike broke down for the second time in as many months. Last time involved replacing an idler pulley--the hardest part about that was tracking down the replacement part on the internet. This time involves a broken-off bolt. To make matters much worse, I broke off a drill bit trying to drill it out. So I'm not sure what my next move will be.

The bike is six years old. My son was suggesting that maybe it was time to replace it. My first reaction was "you've got to be kidding, Seth, we need to have a talk about the consumer disposable culture!" But then I got to thinking...first of all, it was cheap, an incredible bargain. Surprisingly good, but certainly not club-quality.

Then I thought about how much use it has gotten, and what the expected usage is for a consumer exercise bike. In my cynical opinion, the expected usage is "hardly at all". Bike purchased, used a few hours for the first few weeks, intermittently for the next year, collects dust, sold very cheap at garage sale.

I, on the other hand, have ridden it regularly, and quite hard (8-9 on its max scale of 10), for the past 6 years. So you might say that I have ridden it 50% harder than expected, and 3X as frequently as expected. So you could argue that my 6 years of ownership is like 25 years of the average owner. A lifetime and then some, in other words.

All that being said, I am not ready to give up on it.

Facebook Feature: Professional vs Social

As noted, I am a newbie to Facebook. In general, it seems to me like a dangerous time waster. But I let it harvest my Gmail account for addresses, and then proceeded to invite the people it found. As I think about it, though, it seems to me that mixing professional and personal is just not such a desirable thing. I wonder if Facebook should have some built-in notion of professional contact vs personal contact.

Otherwise, I might just stick to LinkedIn for professional social networking. (That is what a contact of mine suggested when I friended him, which is what got me thinking about it.)

Coffee Linked to Lower Dementia Risk

Yet another health benefit for coffee drinkers.

Review ALL Roughing the Kicker Calls

In the AFC championship game tonight, at the end of Q2 there was a roughing the kicker call against Baltimore. The instant replay showed that it was pure acting by the Pittsburgh punter. The roughing kicker penalty--15 yards and change of possession--is HUGE. It doesn't happen that often, but it seems like when it does, close to half the time it is acting on the part of the kicker.

I think that they should be an instant-replay review from the booth every time there is a roughing the kicker call.

Facebook Feature: Friend Filtering

I don't spend a lot of time on Facebook, so maybe this feature exists and I have missed it. But when I look at someone's wall, 99% of what is on it means nothing to me. It would be much better if I could restrict what is displayed to posts from mutual friends.

Usage of "Props"

"Props" is apparently slang for "accord proper respect". Based on my own personal observations, it is gaining currency in middle-age, middle-class circles. I do not like it.

Be Your Own Advisor

Per the below article on the distorted behavior created by commissioned salespeople...--I'm not sure up-selling and mis-representing does backfire enough. That is why, especially with ultra-high-ticket products, like insurance, cars, your retirement--you just can't trust the seller. Just like you don't go into the grocery store and ask the meat department supervisor for their advice on how much meat and what kind you need, you should not rely on the insurance salesman to figure that out for you.

It is crazy to use anything but a fee-only Financial Planner.

Financial Bubbles Explained

Good Virginia Postrel article on financial bubbles, and experimental economics on the subject.

For the price to track the fundamental value, “everybody has to know that everybody knows that everybody is rational.” That’s rarely the case. Rather, “if you put people in asset markets, the first thing they do is not try to figure out the fundamental value. They try to buy low and sell high.” That speculation creates a bubble.

Why Are Online Surveys So Bad?

Normally I would never take an online survey. But I got one from Vanguard on the subject of "Help Us Understand Your Cash Needs". I am very favorably disposed towards Vanguard, and I was interested to see what they were after. So I said yes.

This launched the usual one-question-at-a-time "wizard". First question: your country. Boring. Click next. Second question: Sex. Click next. Third: Date of Birth. At that point, I bailed.

Why can't they give me all the questions (or a big chunk of them) on a single page? It would be SOOO much faster, and give me a better sense of how long the dang thing will take.

Why Are the Search Functions on Newspaper Web Sites So Poor?

(This was drafted on 12/07/08) In this morning's Washington Post I saw an article on a book called "Buyology", by one Martin Lindstrom. I wanted to read the article at my leisure, so I went online to look it up and email it to myself. I searched for "Buyology", figuring that would be sufficient. And I thought it was when I saw the results, it looked like I had a direct hit--the only result included the same photo that had accompanied the article. But when I clicked on it, it turned out that the link was only for the photo.

So then I searched the Washington Post site for "Buyology" and "Martin Lindstrom". This time I got a couple more results, including a review of his book from back in October, but still not today's featured article. My next step was Google News search: "buyology + washington + post". Bingo, first result.

I seem to experience similar behavior when I search within my local paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Except, if anything, it is worse. I haven't ever bothered to analyze what is going on, but many, many times I search for an article I saw in the last few days, and either can't find it, or it is buried very, very deep within a lot of goofy results.

There is a lot of speculation in the air about how endangered print newspapers are, and that the ones which will surivive are those that will find a good transition to the web. Given the difficulty they have executing the basics on the web, I have my doubts. Read Dave Winer's article "A Plan B for News".

Playing Football with the Flu

The Giants played their center, Justin Tuck, even though he had the flu. All through the game, it looked like he was struggling, and at the very end, he had come out. Maybe there is a detail I am missing, like the Giants backup center just broke his leg or something, but barring that, I just don't agree with playing a guy who has the flu. No matter how tough and how medicated, I don't think an "A" player fighting the flu is going to be effective as a healthy "C" player.

Mini-USB Charging Jacks

Pogue: Hail to every BlackBerry, cellphone, Bluetooth headset, Palm organizer, e-book reader, music player, cordless mouse and G.P.S. receiver that recharges through a mini-U.S.B. jack! No more big black power transformers — recharge from your laptop. It's the dawn of the universal, fully interchangeable power cord.

This is a great development, long overdue.

Power Stick

Wow, this sounds very cool. And MUCH cheaper than a second battery! The shuts off power when charging complete part is significant, too--I think that spending too much time on chargers contributes to the poor battery performance of modern devices.

POWER STICK Speaking of those hideous black wall warts [chargers]: you don't need them if you have a PowerStick ($65, powerstick.com). It's a tiny universal gadget charger, the size of a stick of Wrigley's, that draws its power from your laptop's U.S.B. jack.

It comes with nine short cables for the opposite end, made to fit the power jacks of common cellphone brands (LG, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Nokia), the iPod or iPhone and anything that gets its power from a mini- or micro-U.S.B. jack (see above).

First, you travel very, very light. (I haven't packed my cellphone adapter in a year.)

Second, the PowerStick does more than charge your gadget; it also stores a second charge, so that you'll be able to do another recharge in the field, without the laptop. (A cool "fuel gauge" lets you know how full it is.) Finally, a processor shuts off the power when the charging is complete, which saves electricity and, according to the company, prolongs your gadget's life.

Cell Phone Feature: Power Reserve Mode

It's great that cell phones can do so many things, but for most of us, emergency/short-notice communications device is by far the most important one. It's nice to play MP3's from my phone, but I don't want to run the battery to nothing doing that, and have it fail me at a crucial moment. So I would like to have a "reserve mode" feature, in which a cell phone pauses non-critical features, to warn you that battery life has dropped below 20%.

Noted that this may be the kind of feature that sounds good on paper, but adds more complexity to the platform than the feature is worth, if it causes flaky or unreliable behavior (like Windows Power Management has been known to).

NWA Flight Status Consistently Not Working?

My wife's flight was supposed to leave Cincy at 10:00 CST. Since 9:30 CST I have been checking the status on the NWA site, and there is no update beyond "scheduled". It is not 10:23. I was fed up enough, I hunted down another flight-status tracker, flighttracker, to see if it could do better. Sure enough, it told me the plane left at 9:15, and gave me an updated ETA.

This is the second time very recently something like this has happened. On her originally scheduled departure date, her destination, Albany, was due for a severe ice storm. We were 95% sure the flight would be canceled. But as of 3 hours before the flight, the NWA site still showed it as scheduled. Beth wound up calling NWA, and then they told her "oh yeah, that flight has been canceled".

Maybe this is just bad luck, but I am not impressed.

Teaching Pay Structure: Discourages Mid-Career Switchers

Okay, we already know that teacher pay is not great, and nobody goes into the field to get rich. However, there is an additional problem, that would really penalize anybody from switching into the field mid-career. That is the fact that raises are pretty much 100% tied to time served. If you become a teacher at the age of 40, there is no way to make up for 18 years of lost ground.

Whereas in fields where employers are free to pay for performance, someone who switches professions mid-career, if they along the learning curve fairly quickly, may quickly find themselves making a wage comparable to someone who has been in the field much longer.

Comment Reader Needed for Blogger

Few people read my blog, and slightly fewer than that comment on it. So I don't read comments regularly, though I do make it a point to catch up on them. And when I do, I always find myself scrolling through lots of posts, finding the few that have comments. Every time I do this, I find myself thinking "there must be some kind of comment-reader utility in Blogger".

This time I took a little time to search. I think I found the closest thing, which is the Moderate Comments option in settings.

What I am thinking of is a kind of view that would make it very quick to see only my posts that have comments, and to read those comments. I think the ideal would include:

1. A running list of posts, with the comments below.
   
2. The post itself would be presented in outline form (first couple of lines, then the rest collapsed, uncollapsible via a quick "Ajax-architecture" plus button.
3. Something similar for the posts, though the unit for them might be 6-10 lines.
4. A way to "Mark As Read".
   

Swiss-Army Cell Phone?

I have been interested in the long list of gadgets that the cell phone has subsumed. Here's an idea for another function to add to the cell phone: an LED flashlight. No, definitely not a major "game changer", but it could be kind of convenient, from time to time. Perhaps not worth the space and expense, but who knows, there might be use cases for it.

3/18/2010 Postscript: I have found this feature on a phone in the wild. Ironically, it is on the cheapest phone in our household--a $20 pay-as-you-go phone that my son got when he broke his real phone.

Even NYT Gets "Black Friday" Etymology Wrong

The venerable NYT committed this error:

Black Friday is named for the day when, historically, retailers moved into
the black, or became profitable for the year.

Although, I suppose, from the standpoint of a descriptive dictionary, this usage is steadily gaining ground versus the original usage (from Wikipedia):

The earliest uses of "Black Friday" come from or reference Philadelphia and refer to
the heavy traffic on that day, an implicit comparison to the extremely stressful
and chaotic experience of Black Tuesday (the 1929 stock-market crash). The earliest known reference to "Black Friday" (in this sense), found by Bonnie Taylor-Blake of the American Dialect Society, refers to Black Friday 1965 and makes the Philadelphia origin explicit:

JANUARY 1966 -- "Black Friday" is the name which the Philadelphia
Police Department has given to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day. It is not
a term of endearment to them. "Black Friday" officially opens the Christmas
shopping season in center city, and it usually brings massive traffic jams and
over-crowded sidewalks as the downtown stores are mobbed from opening to
closing.[12]

Laptop Keyboards--No Two Alike

I am visiting my parents and using my mother's laptop. It is a full-sized machine, so the keyboard is not particularly cramped, but it is always a discomforting adjustment to use an unfamiliar laptop, since the layout of certain crucial keys always differs. Since I am a fairly aggressive user of standard Windows keyboard shortcuts (End, Home, Alt-Tab, Esc), this probably affects me a bit more than the average user.

Cranky Medical Residents

This article is on the general topic of how dangerous hospital physicians with bad tempers can be for the overall effectiveness of the system. However, the reference, quoted below, to a cranky, sleepy resident who couldn't be troubled, particularly interests me.

The American Medical Association frequently publishes articles calling attention to the health implications of people not getting enough sleep. But their industry is the absolutely, positively worst violator. What medical residents go through is insane.

It was the middle of the night, and Laura Silverthorn, a nurse at a hospital in Washington, knew her patient was in danger.

The boy had a shunt in his brain to drain fluid, but he vomiting and had an extreme headache, two signs that the shunt was blocked and fluid was building up. When she paged the on-call resident, who was asleep in the hospital, he told her not to worry.

After a second page, Ms. Silverthorn said, “he became arrogant and said, ‘You don’t know what to look for — you’re not a doctor.’ ”

He ignored her third page, and after another harrowing hour she called the attending physician at home. The child was rushed into surgery.

How much of a contributor is sleep deprivation?

When All Else Fails, Remember to Try Firmware Upgrade

I recently ordered a Jabra BT8010 wireless stereo bluetooth headset. I found my previous wireless headset, a Plantronics Voyager, to be slightly flaky in regard to establishing and maintaining its bluetooth connection. This one, however, has been terrible. The funny thing is, the music connection worked flawlessly, it was the phone connection that was hard to establish.

I got so frustrated, I put it in the drawer a couple of weeks ago. For some reason, I thought more about it today, and it occurred to me that I should consider a firmware upgrade. So I did the upgrade, and tried the phone again. Based on about 30 minutes worth of data, and holding my breath, but it seems to have cured the problem.

So that is a good reminder--when experiencing problems with electronics, don't forget to try the firmware upgrade. In fact, it is probably a good idea to try it sooner rather than later--you don't have to wait till all else fails!

Nokia xPress 5610--Failing on the Fundamentals

My new cell phone, a Nokia xPress 5610, looks pretty cool, since it is so small and slim.



Unfortunately, all the effort seems to have gone into cramming all the expected features of a contemporary phone, into this tiny package. What seems completely lost is useability as a phone! (Unless perhaps all Nokias work like this--this is my first Nokia in years--in which case it is solely the fault of bad design, and not attributable only to the super-small form factor).

The general theme is waaaay too many button presses to do anything. The best example is mute--a crucial feature in a cell phone. Should be 1 easy click to mute/un-mute, and it should be obvious, at a glance, whether the phone is muted. Not here--to activate mute you have to: 1) invoke the menu; 2) navigate to the Mute option; 3) click Mute.

There are many other examples. Another thing that should be very, very easy is putting the phone on vibrate. In my prior phones, you could do this by just holding the volume switch down. On the Nokia, it requires: 1) access the menu (or, if you set it up, the shortcut); 2) click the menu option for "profiles"; 3) that brings you to a choice of profiles, you have to navigate to the one you want; 4) click the one you want; 5) here is the worst part--after you click it, you have to select "activate".

The whole thing is bad, but even half-way software competent design would eliminate step #5--activate is what you access 99% of the time, so it is what you get when you do a full "click" on the profile. IF you want to do something else (that would be the obscure actions of Customize or Timed), well, that is what the soft buttons are for!

The phone is billed as a "music" phone, but it really doesn't do anything special in that regard, either. As far as I can tell, slapping 3 buttons--fast forward, pause, rewind--on the outside makes it a music phone. The only one of those that is particularly useful is the pause button, which could as easily just be replaced by the center click. And that seemingly uses up all available space for external buttons, so the other stuff that is usually activated by them--camera, voice recorder--is all buried within the standard menu. UPDATE: In fact, the buttons are more of a bug, because they are easily activated a la "butt calls"--an unforgivably, there is no option to lock the handset during music mode. That is just plain stupid.

This phone is like an uncomfortable, unreliable car that you buy just for its looks. I would not recommend it or pick it again (I knew I hadn't done enough research, but took a chance). It violates the basic commandment of design--above all else, do the essentials well.

Obama Appointees

Obama seems to have dispensed with the romantic and failed notion that you need inexperienced "fresh faces" to change things. After all, it was L.B.J. who passed the Civil Rights Act. Moreover, because he is so young, Obama is not bringing along an insular coterie of lifelong aides who depend upon him for their well-being.

Interesting point--my italics. Because the "fresh faces" concept doesn't seem to work so well, but then again, neither does the status quo.

Design Before Writing Requirements?

Not a bad article, I agree with a lot of it, this was the best part:

By nature domain understanding does not lead to specification. Understanding suggests design. A very important part of design is limits. When design is allowed to bubble up from understanding it’s easy to put the limit of the design into places that are logical for the domain. In contrast to design, requirement definition is limitless. The requirements gathering process typically goes on until someone says “I think we’ve got enough now”. That arbitrary stopping point becomes a design limit and hobbles further system development.
...
The solution is to write the requirements after the design is created so that the scope will be defined.

New Google Background

The Gmail sign-on page now has the sign-on dialog screen displayed translucently, with a pretty photo of a mountain scene in the background. It looks cool, but seems to me to go against the Google spirit of minimalist, sleek, clean, uncluttered, fast-loading pages. First impression--no value delivered.

Gadgets and Functions a Cell Phone Can Replace

These articles discuss the various gadgets that cell phones have replaced. I was thinking about that the other day. In fact, I was making a list of the things my next cell phone has to do.

Miscellaneous observations:

Better software is the way to accelerate this. Until the advent of the iPhone and Google Android, you get whatever is pre-installed. And that is usually very mediocre--the cell phone makers definitely have the checklist mentality for features: it just has to be adequate to get checked off as being present, there is no concept whatsoever of striving for excellence in design, a la Apple.

Key features I am looking for:
1. eReader platform. I think cell phones will kill off eReaders before they ever get going. A big-screen cell phone will be adequate for incidental reading. If you want more than that, why buy an eReader when you could have a Netbook, for the same or less money.
2. GPS. I may be hoping for too much--I'm not paying $10/month forever to have a cell phone GPS.
3. Good note-taking.
4. This is a far-off dream: universal remote control.

I think something that would increase useability would be a Launchy-style interface, to get a them quickly. Although maybe with the real-estate of a large-screen phone, you could have everything you use frequently on the desktop.

Note taking has got to get much better; I think the design goal would be that jotting a very short reminder note should not take more than 2x as long as on paper, including time to access the app. Also need good integration with voice notes. That would include develop a user-based voice to text profile that is persistent (doesn't have to be started anew with a new handset). Google would have a big advantage here, with its huge database from Goog 411.

A spin-off article I saw listed the gadgets that would not be replaced by cellphones, along with the reasoning, related to functional issues. Two of them listed were: 1) Calculator 2) Alarm Clock. Interestingly, one of my children uses her phone exclusively for each of these functions, even though she has recourse to the traditional, purpose-built alternatives.

So I think there are two main factors holding back wider usage of cell phones for some auxiliary functions, such as these. One is age, and the habits that accumulate with age. As Steve Jobs famously said, death will take care of that problem. The other is the design factor alluded to above.

I believe with thoughtful design, a modern cell phone can be made to work very well for almost any given function. For the design challenge of the snooze button on the alarm, for instance, the phone could automatically go into an "any key snooze" mode, similar to the any key answer feature. As a bonus, software applications running on a modern phone--which is very much a full-functioning hand-held cmputer--probably can offer features that don't exist on the old technology (such as switching between standard infix notation, and HP-style reverse Polish postfix notation for a calculator).

Neatness Counts at Kyocera and at Others in the 5S Club

I worked at Otis Elevator when 5S was religion. I am probably a hypocrite and short-sighted, but while I see its benefits in the factory, as an office worker, I say yuck, this seems like a joke that I am going to be more productive because I always put my stapler back in the same place.

Although the example of handling printer output does resonate with me. That is always a big problem. A simple, minimalist solution would be to have bins for each day. At the end of the day, the designated person puts all remaining output into the bin for that day. When the new week rolls around, anything still in the Monday bin gets tossed.

I note that the key difference is that example refers to a highly-shared area, not the personal space of a knowledge-worker.

Stupid Stuff: When Was that Picture Taken?

When looking at photo files in Windows File Manager, there are a slew of additional attributes (columns) that you can add, if you want to. Why in the world would M$ not have made "Date Picture Taken" (not the same as file Created date) one of those defaults??

SharePoint should work more like Google Docs

One big problem with SharePoint is that the permissions have to be provided at a macro level, in advance, by the SharePoint admin. In cross-functional projects at large companies, this makes it inconvenient to use SharePoint for the ad-hoc workgroups that often get pulled together in big companies. So what happens?--business as usual, i.e., passing around email versions, getting mixed up as to what is current, and generally clogging the Exchange server with large attachments.

Google docs works so much better. You create a document, and then invite people to collaborate. You can set rules that allow or disallow your invitees from inviting others.

Free Software

This article talks about the uptick in for-profit business using free software, instead of the entrenched, default option of MS-Office. I'm all for anything that breaks the M$ tax. I must say, though, that the way Excel is often used as a convenient, ad-hoc data-exchange format is going to be hard to replace with Google spreadsheets.

Online Advertising

Dave Winer says online advertising is soon to be dead (whatever dead means). I generally wish Google well, but I have long believed that oneline advertising is over-rated.

One Fell Swoop

A curious phrase. Nice explanation here.

Detroit

Thomas Friedman:

The blame for this travesty not only belongs to the auto executives, but must be shared equally with the entire Michigan delegation in the House and Senate, virtually all of whom, year after year, voted however the Detroit automakers and unions instructed them to vote. That shielded General Motors, Ford and Chrysler from environmental concerns, mileage concerns and the full impact of global competition that could have forced Detroit to adapt long ago.... Giving G.M. a blank check — which the company and the United Auto Workers union badly want, and which Washington will be tempted to grant — would be an enormous mistake.

Normally I am against "white-knight thinking", but I have to say, Robert X. Cringely's suggestion is intriguing:

Somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn't need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he'd like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I'd bet it wouldn't take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar.

Google Flu-Tracking

Wow, clever:

Google Uses Searches to Track Flu's Spread

By MIGUEL HELFT 46 minutes ago

Google is tracking the ebb and flow of Web queries like "flu symptoms" or "muscle aches" in an effort to identify outbreaks.

Sprint Hemorrhaging Customers

Sprint Nextel Lost 1.3 Million Customers in Quarter. My family of 5 was among them.

How Phonebooks treat SIM cards

I really don't understand. Having replaced a couple of phones under warranty, the SIM card is really the core of "your" phone, much more than the rest of the handset. So why the heck is the default to store contacts on the phone, not on the SIM card? You can move them, but as far as I can tell, only one at a time. Makes zero sense to me.

Postscript: this thread gives some clues. It seems that you need the contacts on the handset to have pictures or ringtones associated with the contact. Okay, that is presumably a hardware constraint, but it still strikes me as exposing WAAAYY too much implementation to the user. Why not just duplicate the contact in both places, if the user chooses to associate a ringtone to it? Why make them have to think about this stuff?

What Does the Recession Really Mean?

Here is what I wonder about...on a vast, global scale, what does a recession and economic crisis really mean? I think I have a decent grasp of capitalist economics 101. I understand that if a person, or demographic, or maybe even an entire country, has over-consumed and under-saved, they will have failed to accumulate the capital necessary to invest in a future. I get that, for the scope of an "open system".

But in scientific terms, the global economy is a closed system. There is no external creditor to borrow from. So I can't quite get my puny mind around what the implications are on a global scale. Why does there have to be a crash? Why can't we all just more or less keep doing what we have been doing?

I mean, I could understand a global economic crunch caused by a non-economic event, like war, or by a critical resource shortage. That I get. But I don't really, deep down, understand what is different, except that there is a crisis of confidence. Is it that simple? That could do it--if one day we all wake up, and decide to not spend a dime, that would cause the gears of commerce to grind to a halt. Paul Krugman alluded to that in his "Consumers Capitulate" column.

Or is the explanation more subtle? Have we felt flush for years, and been too willing to spend money on frivolities, such as meals out or manicures, for example? And now, as we come to realize that our net worth's aren't what we thought, and our incomes aren't going up like we thought they would, are we generating an economic dislocation, by suddenly shifting our consumption preferences? So we have too many restaurants and cosmetologists, and too few appliance repairmen (to keep our old appliances going, instead of buying new ones)?

Consumers Capitulate

Krugman: To appreciate the significance of these numbers, you need to know that American consumers almost never cut spending. ..So these data are basically telling us what happened before confidence collapsed after the fall of Lehman Brothers in mid-September, not to mention before the Dow plunged below 10,000. Nor do the data show the full effects of the sharp cutback in the availability of consumer credit, which is still under way. So this looks like the beginning of a very big change in consumer behavior. And it couldn't have come at a worse time.

It always does come at the worst time.

Tapping 401k for Mortgage Payments

There have been bills introduced to allow distressed homeowners to tap their 401k's, without penalty, for mortgage payments. I think this is generally a bad idea, from a social-policy standpoint. Although it is wrenching for a family to lose their house, they can recover. Displaced homeowners will find somewhere else to live--maybe an apartment, maybe renting a house in the same neighborhood, maybe even renting their own house. I don't want to minimize what a blow this would be, but from society's point of view, these are acceptable outcomes.

Whereas if people raid their 401k's in order to make mortgage payments, they are going to arrive at retirement, 20 or 30 years down the road, with nothing. And that is a social problem. So better to lose the house and downsize now, than be without a living in retirement.