Thinking aloud

I’ve been way too busy to blog.

But today, while my kid was drilling analogies in preparation for the SSAT, the blog muse struck.

It’s Sunday, and I’ve just reviewed my retirement account statements from September 30. That was bad enough. But with the miracle of Quicken, I was able to see specifically the carnage wrought by the market meltdown of the last two weeks since 9/30. Going from bad to cataclysmic has wiped out years of parsimony, leaving my personal financial situation questionable. We’ve often heard the stories of people “wiped out” in the Depression of the 1930’s. Could that be happening here?

Then, on a happier note I searched on “UMA” because I’d just gotten a BlackBerry that switches from the cell network to Wi-Fi. I think this is amazing because seamlessly switching from one protocol to another is no mean trick.

Clicking around, I found this story on college students preferring Wi-Fi to beer.

Sorry, but no. I remember college without Wi-Fi. The only thing we preferred to beer was women. And since I founded a failed Wi-Fi hotspot company in early 2002, I know how popular beer remains with respect to being…uh…”online.”

Now the only question is, if you can’t afford beer or the college loans it takes to get that free dorm-room Wi-Fi, does this absolutely guarantee an Obama victory next month, just as Roosevelt was swept in after the Hoover administration’s market-based dogma ruined the economy? (Sounds just like the current Bush administration, doesn’t it?)

And, if it’s Obama (oh yeah, it’s gonna be Obama), does he drink beer? Hillary did…that’s why I liked her.

Now you get the SSAT-level analogy that politics is to beer as poverty is to Wi-Fi, right?

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.

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.

Mid-April! So metaphor rich: the Boston Marathon…tax season in the US…EMI and Apple Corps have settled their disputes.

What’s a blogger to do with all this? Easy: cram it all into a rant about Google.

You will advertise your product or service on Google. You will allow your competitors to bid against you for the sole purpose of increasing revenue for Google. You will take whatever Google believes is your rightful SEO position and you will never really know how it was determined (after all, they’ve read Kafka, too).

Finally, and most importantly, you will advertise like it was a marathon until you (or your budget) drops dead from exhaustion.

George said it best:

Let me tell you how it will be
There’s one for you, nineteen for me
‘Cause I’m the taxman
Yeah, I’m the taxman

So there, I’ve crammed it all into one more-or-less coherent rant about Google. What’d you think?

I am seriously bent out of shape by an editorial entitled “Franchise Freedom” that I read in the January 2, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

I can’t link to the editorial here, because even the Journal’s red-meat-Republican opinions are locked behind a subscription site. (How very web-centric…how very authentic it makes me think they are when they report on the Internet. See?…I’m so upset I am “side-ranting.”)

What’s got me so fired up are the unfounded, baseless accusations printed in the editorial to add emphasis to the Journal’s support of the smoke-filled-room FCC action to “deregulate” the cable TV franchising process.

Fortunately, nobody believes this FCC gift to the regional Bells will stand.

So, enter the WSJ…defender of mega-telcos against people like me. I am apparently “beholden” to the cable industry. (I may be infamous elsewhere, but I absolutely guarantee you nobody in Charter Communications in Worcester knows who I am.)

I and my hard-working colleagues on the Southborough Cable TV Committee have been, apparently, “shaking down” Verzion for things like service to our whole town, requests to interconnect their system with the existing system for public programming and a fair level of support for continuing that programming.

I’m incensed. (Duh!) I wrote the Journal a letter, which met with complete silence. I’ve copied it here, mostly for catharsis.

Last year, you may remember that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia got upset for being caught giving a gesture in public that conveys precisely how I feel about the Journal’s editorial. Since Justice Scalia is a favorite of the Journal’s opinion editors, I though I’d send them an “alito” of my own. Maybe they understand that better.

Here’s the letter I sent the Journal:

Dear Sir and/or Madame:

Usually, your more strident opinions roll off my back easily.

But reading Franchise Freedom (WSJ, January 2. 2007) felt more like being stabbed in the back. As a member of a “so-called” local franchising authority, I vehemently reject the accusation that anyone is “shaking down” the competitive cable applicant in my Town. Further, nobody I know working in the largely volunteer cable franchising authorities in Massachusetts cities and towns is doing anything “at the behest of the cable industry.” It’s wrong of you to assert that is the case and an insult to many of the good people working on these issues at the local level. Painting us with the brush of corruption is facile…and dead wrong.

On the contrary, the Bells have used their resources and power at the Federal and state regulatory and legislative levels to seek expedited entry to the cable business while simultaneously dragging their heels and bemoaning their fate at the lands of local officials. They simply placed multiple bets…and the FCC rolled their number. Meanwhile, they just sat pat. The irony is that with local authorities – like my Town — who have consistently expressed a desire for rapid negotiations and which want vigorous cable competition, the imperious Bells have slow-rolled us while seeking a better regulatory deal.

What the FCC’s decision has done is to introduce chaos to the franchising process, ultimately delaying cable competition by ensuring legal challenges and injecting uncertainty into the process. Disrupting 40 years of well-established process does not accelerate government. It paralyzes it, and for far longer than more comprehensively thought-out deregulation would have. This was bad public policy…and a not-so-subtle parting gift from the Republicans to the Bells.

You have reflexively sided with the Bells, impugning not just the entire cable industry (an easy target, I must admit) but also scores of well-intentioned and civic-minded people who have until now effectively managed local cable franchising. The system does need improvement – and both Democrat FCC Commissioners said as much during hearings – but that change cannot come by transferring public assets to the Bells.

Thank you.

Alex Neihaus

Sometimes, the combination of a new medium (podcasting, in this case the video version of it some people call vlogging) with politics and journalism produces something very, very special.

Alive in Baghdad is an impressive example. I won't go on here about what it means…or how it affected me. That's for you to discover for yourself. Please…click on the link right now…watch the videos, read the blog entries.

Then, please send Brian Conley a contribution and spread the world about this project. These guys are famous inside the podcasting world. But they deserve to be heard and seen by a much wider audience. 

Like Lady Macbeth, Germany once again is trying — mechanistically, naturally — to deal with its criminal past. This time it turns out that a famous author signed up for the Waffen-SS. And just like it ever was, Germany's celebrated Günter Grass turns out to have the same damn'd spot Lady Macbeth tried to hard to, but couldn't, wash away.

This review of Grass's autobiography by a UK author comes closest — at least for a while — to assessing the contradictions of an old man whose memory is claimed to be failing, who refers to the nasty, racist Grass as "he" and the kinder, gentler, purged-of-his-guilt older Grass as "I."

But to call the autobiography of a closet criminal "entertaining" and to ponder uncritically the impact of the new German cultural lie "we were victims, too" misses the fundamental point: this culture was and remains deeply disingenuous.

Europeans like to think they know all about Americans and American culture. I've had cabbies in Amsterdam describe Southern fundamentalists to me. I've had French from Corsica tell me everything I wanted to know about my home town, New York City. The rest of the world "knows" us because they purchase our popular culture.

But they don't know us. Ours is a society deeply divided over things like the war in Iraq and domestic social policies. But do our authors hide their war service? Do they spend a lifetime covering up their complicity, only to minimize it when it's revealed? Not a chance.

Only in Europe, in the heart of the beast, in Germany, could a cultural icon turn out to be so guilty.

This new demonstration of an old German flaw coincides with a book I am reading. As part of her summer's reading, my younger daughter read Dry Tears. She asked me to read it as well. Herr Grass and your fellow countrymen: the truth is right there in the words of an 11-year-old girl. Stop washing your hands till they bleed. The skin rubs off, but the guilt remains.

Sure, Mel. Send us roses, crank up the defensive PR and get a lot of sympathy for your "struggle" with alcoholism.

But we all know that the desperation to blame your disease is only a cover for the reality that you're a closet bigot.

Funny thing about alcohol: with vino comes veritas.

Please do get well. Treat the disease; then maybe you can attack that bigotry as a sober guy. Meanwhile, spare us the phony contrition.

People here in eastern Massachusetts are just plain revolted today with our government's inability to build public infrastructure that's safe. Note that I am not even asking for on-time or reasonably on budget. Just safe.

This isn't the first time in my lifetime that Massholes in government have taken the Commonwealth to the cleaners. Sharp local minds will remember the construction scandal of the 1970's constructing UMass buildings, of which the New York Times said, in part, 

Corruption in state and local government in Massachusetts was so pervasive in the 1960's and  1970's" that it became ''a way of life,'' a special state investigating commission concluded today after two and a half years of study. In one of the most sweeping indictments ever made of the conduct of a state government, the commission said that bribery, extortion, tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions and the laundering of money to disguise its origins were commonplace and that ''there is a tacit understanding between public servants and private professionals that this is how business is done in Massachusetts.'' The Special Commission Concerning State and County Buildings, set up in
1978 after the state's worst corruption scandal, said in its 2,500-page report that blame could not be narrowed down to a handful of individuals. 'Broad and Pervasive Pattern' ''It was not a matter of a few crooks, some bad apples which spoil the lot,'' the commission said. ''The pattern is too broad and pervasive for that easy excuse. At those crucial points where money and power came together the system has been rotten.''

What astonishes me now is that even after the largest public works project in US history, the astonishing cost overruns, the delays in the project (they redesigned "scheme Z" in the stinkin' middle of the project), the graft, the waste, the self-aggrandizing politicians, people are getting killed while fingers get pointed.

Tonight at dinner, my wife said she'd only go to an appointment in town next week if she could avoid the tunnels. That's what $14 billion buys in Crush-achusetts.