Thinking aloud

One of my favorite New Wave tunes was New Toy by Lene Lovich which contained the memorable chorus “I want a new toy, Oh ay oh!” OK, so poetry it ain’t. But we loved dancing to it at Spit on Lansdowne Street.

Anyway, that chorus comes to mind tonight because I have just (finally!) upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.3.1 and installed a cool, new widget-capable theme. I love WordPress. Oh ay oh.

Oh, and by the way, I got an iPod touch, too.

“I’ve got to have it all until I’m complete…
I want a new toy (oh ay oh), to keep my head expanding…
I want a new toy (oh ay oh), nothing too demanding…”

Here, in case you need an 80s flashback, is a link to a YouTube recording of this memorable song.

Whew…what a relief!

After reading this piece about being “Googley” in The Atlantic, I wondered if in fact the nakedly aggressive technology company was a thing of the past. I disagree with Joshua Green’s unsubstantiated assertions that we’re totally transitioning to the cloud and that Google doesn’t intend to do evil, but he does make a point that the tactics Microsoft used to crush everyone else aren’t as apparent as they used to be. What a shame, eh? It was a lot more fun in the 1990’s. I sure as hell learned a lot about how to be crushed when Microsoft destroyed us at Lotus.

I believe that if you are a start-up or small company and you aren’t dripping with testosterone in the marketplace, you lose. You lose because you cannot compete with the 600-pound gorillas in your space who can afford to be the nice guy. You need to get your message out, loud and hard. Otherwise, your secret sauce will go down the drain.

I was searching recently for a hosting company to host a vBulletin forum I am creating for a client, and came across Bluehost, which was mentioned favorably in some forums. 1and1, which I’ve been using for several years is just a disaster. Big, German, slow, rigid, German, insecure, German, ossified, German, I’d grown tired of never getting an answer to any question and being blamed 100% of the time there was a problem.

Come to discover that the CEO of Bluehost, Matt Heaton, has got the exact take-no-prisoners attitude I have been missing lately. Here, on winning, and even better (and more sneeringly) here on Microsoft, Matt has got the exact “stuff” going on in his company to win in a very competitive market.

And, by the way, his company backs up the bluster with good service and pricing.

OK, I am not sure if it’s a scam or not, but I am totally blown away by the Perfect Woman Project.

It certainly looks real…but of course it might be a huge scam of one kind or another. Whatever it is, it’s a fascinating idea. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of "submissions" yet. But all submissions are apparently reviewed by whomever is behind this and posted into categories like "sincere", "mean" and "dirty."

Some posters have tried faux erudite and are posting "poetry." I guess they think the site’s offer to "make a total transformation" into the winner’s "perfect woman" is real enough (or they are horny enough) to try blog-post-romance to win this thing.

Whatever…it’s a lot more clever than anything I’ve seen elsewhere lately, and I’d love to know who’s behind it.

I’m in the middle of an exhausting business trip to France. As anyone who’s been on these slogs knows, the hotel is your haven…a necessary place to be able to kick back and sleep off the long days and stress.

And wouldn’t you think that a Hilton next to the Eiffel Tower in downtown Paris that costs €450 a night would provide that?

Ah…wrong. I’m sitting here baking waiting for the tech to come turn off the heat and while I was hot, I wrote this nastygram to Hilton on its website. Now, I am going to post it here without further comment in hopes that unlike the travel websites, this review will get more search engine exposure from being a stand-alone blog post.

Take my advice: save your company’s money and stay elsewhere.

I am shocked at the condition and facilities at this property.

At €450 a night one would expect to be able to turn the heat on or off in your room. Instead, you are either baking or freezing because the heat cannot be controlled by the guest. A tech has to be called to do it.

There is no gym. The bathroom smells. The furniture is dinged. There is no voicemail for guests. The Wi-Fi charges are outrageous. Reception doesn’t answer the phone. The public areas are worn and shoddy.

Old style energy-saving CFL lamps that warm up — like oil lamps from the 1900s — are used in the room. This place is too cheap to even update to instant-on CFL lamps. The Honors lounge was freezing cold for three days in a row. There are no snacks in it after 9pm but it doesn’t close until 10:30pm. The breakfast in the lounge is poor quality.

I might be traveling to Paris often. I will never, ever stay here again. What a complete rip-off.

Last Friday, I attended a conference sponsored by BU on the legal implications of new media.

What a snore.

Distinguished bloviating attorneys showed how smart they are by (choose one or all):

• Creating long-winded "hypotheticals" about topics from liberty to copyright
• Convincing the audience none of them had ever read a blog, much less written one, or
• Proposing incremental approaches (this largely from an attorney linked to the EFF!) to fixing a completely broken IP legal framework.

Even the keynote speaker, Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos, failed to break any ground with his oh-so-predictable this-generation-will-crash-the-barricades rhetoric. I guess I am getting old when I somewhat agree with the supercilious comments at my lunch table that Mr. Moulitsas will mellow with age. (BTW, Kos, I agree with your politics, but not the drama you wrap it up in.)

On the one hand, the fact that the establishment is talking about new media is interesting, but it reminds me of party scenes in TV sitcoms where the young kids do those nasty dances. All the kids in the audience snicker at the lack of authenticity…how tragically unhip the writers were.

Nice try, BU, but next time, just send everyone over to PodCamp Boston.

Remember the Star Trek episode entitled “The Trouble with Tribbles“? Remember how the furry creatures ingratiate themselves with the crew, then multiply so rapidly they nearly overtake the ship?

FiOS TV is like a tribble. With apologies to Dr. McCoy, FiOS TV is born pregnant with problems.

I spent most of 2006 and part of 2007 negotiating with Verizon to bring their cable service to Southborough, MA. I’ve never blogged about their negotiating tactics, which defined mendacity, because I believed strongly that competition would be good for the residents of the Town and if I went public, it would piss them off and we’d end up with no agreement.

Finally, in May of 2007, after a public hearing in which VZ execs promised great service and technology, we agreed on a franchise and VZ began offering FiOS TV in town.

I had high hopes for the system. I had been an early FiOS customer for voice and Internet and both had been rock solid. In particular, the Internet connection was fast and extraordinarily reliable (if a little too nanny-fied; VZ blocks port 80 on dynamic IPs and in the early days of FiOS VZ insisted on pretending it was DSL by requiring routers to support PPPoE to connect).

But TV has been an unrelenting disaster. There are three intersecting areas that combine to make FiOS TV unremittingly infuriating.

First, billing. The bills are really from three separate companies: voice, data and TV. Errors compound each other and take months to resolve. Representatives misrepresent available options and pricing (resulting in VZ insisting that I am their prisoner now for two years when I am certain I only agreed to a one-year package deal).

How’s this for a nightmare? To get back the Internet speed I was promised on the one-year-deal-that-morphed-into-a-two-year-deal generated a $139 disconnection charge. If you can make sense of a VZ bundled bill, please let me know. I think you’re a genius.

Next, technology. During the licensing process, we specifically asked VZ about their technology (see this “issuing authority report” and a memo from me to the committee complaining about their non-answers).

Now, I know why they obfuscated. They have the most fiendishly complex system imaginable. It could have only been designed by a former monopoly. You could only love this system if you think Soviet design and engineering was underrated.

They use several different “optical network interfaces” or ONTs to connect the network to your home. Older ones, like mine, bring 802.3 Ethernet into your home along with coax cable and twisted-pair voice. Newer ones bring only coax into the home along with voice.

In either case, you MUST bridge the cable and Ethernet networks using a bridge called a network interface module because their set-top boxes speak coax for programming and IPTV for on-demand using a protocol called MoCA. And the set-top boxes use plain old IP for the interactive guide.

(Lost yet? Stay tuned for when we talk about service.)

How do they ever get this mess installed? They give their installers a multi-function router containing so many functions I can’t remember them all. But for fun, let’s see what I can remember off the top of my head.

This thing is an Ethernet switch, a router with a DHCP server, a firewall, a wireless access point using 801.11g set to default to insecure WEP connections, a NIM to bridge the coax and Ethernet networks, among other things. It tries to connect to the VZ network as a DHCP client or as a PPPoE client. And, best of all, it has an back-door open port to allow VZ to completely mess it up for you with updates you don’t expect. You cannot use your own equipment, precluding the possibility of putting a VPN or more effective firewall on your network.

Oh, and when you are watching on-demand movies, getting blasted with 20Mbits of IPTV content while you simultaneously surf your 5M/20M Internet connection, you can watch this consumer-grade device almost smoke.

VZ network designers tried to hide their network technology mashup by cramming so many functions into a single box that you almost pity the electrons consumed in this overmatched device.

But the real prize for Rube Goldberg-ness goes to the Motorola HD DVRs and the interactive program guide. VZ had the time and money to send customers beautiful marketing brochures touting the new features of a IPG they downloaded over the summer. But apparently, they didn’t have the time to test the software. The Internet is alive with people suffering problems with this software, and I’ve been bitten worst than most.

That brings me to the last issue: service. No human being can service a system this complex. That means that everyone at VZ involved in servicing this mess is simply guessing. Nobody, apparently, has a clue. Through bitter experience (and some serious reading of the dslreports.com forums), I have a better picture in my head of what’s going on than the poor shlumps who have to deal with customers.

Once VZ upgraded the guide, my DVR starting hanging. I called about this, and was told they’d ship me a replacement. It never arrived. Then I called again. They sent a guy out. He threw rocks at the people who said they’d ship one, replaced mine and left.

Thing still hangs, refuses to record, deletes recordings, etc. etc. Called on a Friday night. Service guy — obviously hacking the problem — factory resets the device remotely. Now, it can’t even tune a channel. Dead HDTV on NFL opening weekend.

Third guy comes Monday to replace the box for a third time and tells me it’s the “levels”. (Old phone guys miss copper with its certainty of volts and ohms.) Box promptly hangs.

Guy calls me today to tell me they think it’s the IMG software (Really?) and a fix will be out “soon”.

On the positive side, VZ techs speak English well and are polite. These guys (and the one hot-looking woman they sent) are not grease-monkeys. They’ve just not been trained. Who could be?

VZ is birthing tribbles at a Malthusian rate.

I was in the new Natick Collection Apple store tonight. (Yes, the “Natick Collection” is just a mall — but to be tragically hip it had to become a “collection”.)

The place was mobbed and we finally got a chance to try the new iPods.  I immediately went for an 80GB iPod Classic to compare it to the 5th gen 80GB model I currently have.

My first impression was that Cover Flow made the thing very slow. Yes’s Owner of a Lonely Heart was loaded on this unit and while I listened to it, I rapidly pressed the center button. As any iPod owner knows, pressing the center button while you play a song takes you through a loop of additional play functions, like skipping back and forth or changing the rating of the song. I was doing this to see if Apple added any new functions to the loop. They did — the ability to shift in and out of shuffle mode.

But what blew me away is that if you press the button rapidly while the song is playing, the music stutters. I couldn’t believe it…I tried every iPod Classic in the store and they all did it.

Apple is now in its baroque period: constantly guilding the lilly with pretty stuff while the basic technological content slips. The fact they shipped the device like this is proof positive that Apple is cruising on design and brand, and that the technological core of brilliant innovation they used to combine with imagination has begun to wane.

As Porky Pig says,  ”Th-th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks, for the iPod.”

You know how sometimes an institution comes so close to getting it, but then stops short? If it’s the US government, you kinda wanna scream a little, don’t you?

Case in point: the Securities and Exchange Commission. There’s a credit meltdown going on these days, and I was using EDGAR to check up on my broker’s claims of safety in certain bonds. Somehow — I don’t quite remember how — I stumbled across the SEC’s podcast.

Guess what? sec.gov has been at it for a while (the feed has episodes from May, 2005), the content is great and the production vales ain’t bad. You might be thinking, “Hey, they get it.” (Actually, I was thinking, “The SEC gets it better than some of my clients, for whom podcasting is still like motorized vehicles are to Amish folks.)

They got so tantalizingly close: they make a podcast, they put up an RSS feed (I have clients today for whom podcasting means, “Record something and post it on the website”) and they’ve stuck with it. I can even forgive Uncle Sam for burying it somewhere obscure on their website.

But, at the end of the day, they ran outta steam: they failed to list the podcast in iTunes. They’ve guaranteed themselves obscurity.

I’ll bet the iTunes selection staff would’ve been happy to feature it. (I dream of having a podcast featured in the iTunes store!) Putting the sec.gov podcast into every (free!) podcasting directory was a no-brainer.., an easy, logical end-step they clearly could’ve done. After all, they clearly understand most of the rest of what makes a podcast a podcast.

So, no cigar for Uncle SEC. Too bad, I would’ve digged a geek government.

I’ve written here before about the almost religious feelings I have about WordPress (here and here)…and about the amazing community it has spawned. It was a big disappointment for me that I wasn’t able to attend WordCamp last month. As a consolation, PodCamp Boston 2 is coming up and I can’t wait.

One of the most famous voices in the WordPress world is Lorelle VanFossen. Ms. VanFossen is gaining the kind of well-deserved fame that an original in a new medium deserves. Lately, she’s been getting attention from the mainstream press for her stand on content theft (and more recently on nytimes.com, registration required).

Lorelle, I couldn’t agree more. It pisses me off, too. Especially since you are a working author, I completely agree that it’s like stealing food from your mouth.

But, I have to say one thing about Lorelle on Wordpress: sometimes I find it incomprehensible. There’s so much content, I am overwhelmed. And for some reason, I can’t grok the organization of this blog. It all seems like one long stream of text. I have trouble telling one post from another. Sometimes, it’s such a sea of links (all admittedly useful) that I lose all context about the actual post. And it may be picky, but since we read English left to right, I think it adds cognitive dissonance to have a left-hand column in the way of the post content.

However, I sure do appreciate the presbyoia-friendly font on Lorelle’s blog.

I expect to be told I’m an idiot and worse. But, at least my idiot mind will make it impossible for me to steal content from Lorelle.

Though I am not a native Bostonian, I have some experience with authentic Boston accents.

My lovely wife can occasionally be unintelligible (”Alex, have you seen the sizzzahs?”). To wile away traffic-jam time, I sit in the car and mimic Tom Finneran. Finneran, a WRKO talk-show radio host, former Massachusetts legislative big-wig and (unsurprisingly) a plea-bargained felon, has an amazingly real Boston accent, one you can hear in every word.

You know that you can hear the real thing, even if you can’t imitate it, when your ears bleed listening to Matt Damon in The Departed. This actor’s attempt is among the worst fake Boston accents I’ve ever heard, and a complete embarrassment to everyone in Chelsea, Malden and Lynn, not to mention Southie itself.

Anyway, when I first heard about CAPTCHAs, I thought it was a killer pun: someone from CMU must have had a Boston background. Maybe so, but really it means something else entirely, and only sounds like it was invented in a drunken episode at the Black Rose.

I manage a bunch of blogs that have been increasingly become the victim of comment spam, usually from China and always complimentary. I now realize that dude in Guangdong who reads my posts mutliple times and always says, “Good post” isn’t really into my content. Naivety mixed with ego had me manually marking these as spam just in case there was a real gem from somewhere in the Middle Kingdom.

The volume has gotten so large that it’s been driving me crazier than Matt Damon’s inability to banish the letter “R” from his spoken English.

Enter reCAPTCHA. An easy way (there’s a simple WordPress plug-in) to stop the comment spam and build a digital library. Can’t beat it. Took five minutes to implement on all the blogs I manage.

Now, it’s off to the Cape and them lobstah rolls.