But I urge my fellow voters in Southborough to vote next Monday, May 14 (not Tuesday, as is often the case for elections) to re-elect Bill Boland as a selectman for Southborough.

Why break my reluctance to publicly endorse a candidate? There are many reasons. Here are just a few:

• This election matters to you if you live in Southborough. Unlike the more distant state and federal governments, the selectmen determine when your potholes get filled…when the transfer station is open and how much it costs…how much your property taxes will go up (or down).

• We have a contest. For the last several elections, there hasn’t been a contested election for Southborough selectman. I can see why. Being a selectman is a thankless, hard, demanding full-time job — with no pay. People do it because they are committed to serving the town. Leave whatever you think of politicians for an angry call to a talk-radio show. These people work their asses off for you — and you probably don’t know who they are. (And if you do know them you probably think nothing of calling a selectman in the middle of the night for stray cat noises.) The least you can do if you live in Southborough is drive to the polls and vote for someone willing to give up substantial time in an effort to serve.

• This contest pits two very different points of view — with two massively different probable outcomes for the town — against each other. Both Boland and his challenger are from the core of Southborough townies who are involved in government. If you, like me, only have time to be at the periphery of town committees, Town Meeting and the like, over time you become used to seeing the same people over and over and over again. This is not a contest between new and old blood. (The lack of new blood is why, IMO, crucial reforms of town government failed at Town Meeting this year. As diverse as the points of view are among this governing elite, they all seem to agree that the kind of reforms the larger community in town would think reasonable for a complex operation like Southborough shouldn’t be implemented.)

One side — the challenger’s side — has signs up all over town saying his is “for the future.” But from listening to that candidate at meetings and Town Meeting, I am convinced he represents the past.

A misty past in which Southborough was a quiet suburb with few commuters, a past in which the fiscal challenges were smaller, a past in which diversity of opinion meant little. On the other side, Boland represents a less stident, more moderate view of what Southborough is and needs to become. I’ve seen Bill at work in hearings. I’ve presented reports to Bill as a committee member and I’ve talked to Bill in the hallways. Boland is not angry about what Southborough has become. Instead, Boland is willing to continue to give up his time — indeed, a big part of his life — to help Southborough.

Everything you need to know is here. Don’t have time to read it? I’ll net it for you. Boland answered the questions. His challenger didn’t.

Take it from me, you really want Bill Boland to win this election. So, vote to re-elect Bill Boland for Southborough selectman next Monday, May 14.

And that stick-to-it-ness means that, despite a judge’s dismissal of its auction-rate securities fraud suit against the goniffs at Charles Scwhab in October, 2011, the New York State Attorney General’s office intends to appeal. This means there’s still hope for those of us who have our savings — college funds, retirement money, life savings — stuck in the dreck that Schwab sold us as liquid and safe.

I was at work the other day when an email arrived with an update in the case. (How to follow the case electronically.) Logging in, I found the document attached below: a notice of appeal. Actually, it looks like the attorney general’s office decided immediately to appeal, since the notice is dated November, 2011. However, I didn’t notice it until this week, when apparently as part of the appeal process, a final judgement was added to the case file.

Since the Securities and Exchange Commission, FINRA and the other lap-dogs of Wall Street miscreants like Schwab have let the company off the hook, the NY AG is the last remaining hope for those of us who have had big pieces of our savings wiped out or made illiquid by the one company that has, so far, refused to do the right thing by clients.

Schwab does have, believe it or not, an institutional memory. And they read these posts [see the whole history here]. They won’t have anything to do with me. And I can’t blame them — it’s easier to stonewall me, especially after the drubbing I’ve given them here. They’d rather not have my business than be reminded of the wrong they’ve done me and hundreds — if not thousands — of their clients.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t be more grateful to the NY AG for soldering on…for us, the little guys.

For some reason, that memory came to mind tonight when I, for the first time in at least two years, changed the theme here on my blog. This new theme, Ari 1.1.2 by Elmastudio, is, I hope you will agree, pleasant to look at and easy to use. I like it and really appreciate the author’s effort to make something so stylish and so easy to use.

Changing my theme also reaffirms my deep admiration of WordPress and my distaste for Durpal, even though I have just completed a Drupal website for a client. (I recommended Drupal. Same circus; same clowns.)

I really do have more to blog about than just the fact that I’ve changed the look of the blog. And I promise to get right back to more interesting posts. However, the ease with which I was able to transform my blog reminded me that every time I try to do something with WordPress, I succeed. Every time I try to do something — anything – with Drupal, I want to cut that freakin’ clown’s head off with a dull, rusty knife.

Well, the story is over. And I remain oddly unfulfilled. Here’s what happened.

The Monday after my post blasting Lenovo for a) refusing to fix a defect under warranty and b) ignoring a legal claim, I got a nice email from the social media dude. I guess this is both good and bad. Good that Lenovo cares about its reputation online and bad because they had failed to respond to “traditional channels” — a legal demand letter. (Could social media end up supplanting consumer protection in the legal system?) The social media guy put me in email contact with a problem resolution person.

If their website had a link to reach the problem resolution people — or some other way to contact them, I might never have had to initiate a small claims case. But that’s water under the bridge.

Tuesday, a box arrived. The return address wasn’t to Flextronics in Memphis, where regular depot repairs go. Instead, the address was to a “SWAT team” at Lenovo’s HQ in NC. I thought, “Whoa! People who really know ThinkPads are going to look at my machine. That’s going to be worth the trouble I’ve been put through.”

The day the machine arrived, I spoke to Lenovo who confirmed that I had not damaged the machine — the source of my dispute with them which they used that as an excuse to not fix the ThinkPad. The problem resolution rep asked for all the documents I had concerning my communication with Lenovo — I had everything, names, dates, unanswered emails to Lenovo executives, printouts of the problem record — and expressed “shock” that it was classified as user damage. He said that his tech was quite clear that this wasn’t a result of user damage.

The next day, I received a message that the repair was delayed due to parts. 48 hours later, on Friday, the ThinkPad was returned to me. I plugged it in and  noticed immediately that the fingerprint indicator light didn’t come on. This indicator tells you you can scan your finger to power on, boot and log into Windows. So I powered it up with the power switch, only to discover that the trackpad and Bluetooth were also dead.

Crestfallen that the SWAT team didn’t know enough about their own machines to realize that in repairing an Ethernet clip they had broken three other things, I emailed the problem res dude, who immediately sent me a FedEx label.

Lenovo got the ThinkPad back on the following Monday, told me parts were backordered but somehow got me a fixed machine by today, Friday.

In addition to the six weeks I couldn’t use the machine due to a flaky Ethernet connector, it took Lenovo two more tries and two more weeks to repair the connector and undo the damage they did to the machine while attempting to repair it.

I have client data on my hard disk, so I sent the ThinkPad in for repair without the disk. I’ve always kept the hard disk when I’ve sent in laptops for repair. Flextronics never once complained about not having a hard disk in all the years I have taken this precaution. But for some reason the SWAT team needed a hard disk. So they put in a 320GB disk and returned the machine to me with the new disk installed. I was told I could keep the disk for my trouble. Gee, thanks.

So, I am writing this post on my T410 — and glad to have it back. But my PC days might just be over. My MacBook Air is such a fantastic Windows machine that I just don’t think I’ll ever go back to a PC. (Even Linus Torvalds is gushing about the MacBook Air.)

On balance, Lenovo did the right thing. But they were graceless.

They were impossible to deal with until I made noise online. They ignored a legal process to the point that, if I had gone to court, I feel certain a judge would have awarded me treble damages to teach them a lesson. They finally fixed the machine, but screwed up the repair and had to do it again.

Contrast this experience (struggle? campaign? death march?)  to my first service experience with Apple. My MacBook Air developed an odd space key behavior about 20 days after I bought it. I took it in to the store — and left 40 minutes later with a brand new machine.

My question is simple: what happens to the people that aren’t persistent like your intrepid blogger? The ones who, when summarily transferred to the billing department for payment on what should be a free warranty repair, just pay up? The ones who don’t use blogs and social media to express their issues?

Bottom line from this experience? I believe Lenovo  has a policy somewhere that gives its service people incentive to “find” more billable repairs. Many people will just pay up, not knowing they have other options. Until you start SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF YOU LUNGS LIKE THIS, Lenovo folks don’t return your calls or emails. Worse, Lenovo seems to specialize in being unreachable. (You can probably tell that of all the things that  happened in this story, what most incensed me was the fact that “managers” were supposed to call me and just plain didn’t, even though they updated the problem record to say they did.) In short, Lenovo — in a garish quest for margin — is playing the percentages.

I’m saddened by all this. When IBM had this PC business, they were bureaucratic and process-bound. But they returned calls. And if IBM got a legal document, they knew what to do with it. Lenovo has clearly joined HP and Dell at the bottom of the PC customer service pile.

It’s only recently that I bought my first Mac laptop, which despite some limitations – most notably the keyboard – has turned out to be a great Windows machine. One reason I bought the Mac was I got a nice discount, courtesy of my broker.

The other reason was that Lenovo broke my heart. Or, less dramatically, they have lost their way when it comes to service.

The short version of the story is that one day I noticed that the wired Ethernet cable wouldn’t “click” securely into the female RJ-45 adapter on my workhorse ThinkPad T410 laptop. Loose connections can cause really flaky problems with networking. Having a socket on the laptop that wouldn’t securely mate with a network cable renders the wired connection on the laptop essentially useless.

This T410 is about 18 months old and when I bought it, I purchased the three-year “depot” warranty. I had always recommended the extended warranty to customers as a great value when I was an IBMer. And I was always proud — and amazed — at the service. Both customers and I were impressed with the depot service that used to be provided.

All you needed to do was call an 800 number (or, for ex-IBMers who remember the good old days, enter a problem report in ESC+). After describing the problem, the next morning a packing box arrived and if you rushed it to UPS that afternoon, you’d get your machine back most times about 48 hours later. It was fast, efficient and repairs were always well-done.

Well, enter Chinese ownership in 2005 and cost pressures. Suddenly, machines took longer to be returned. There was nobody to speak to when a machine came back with the original problem. (In 2009, I had to send a T60p out for repair three times for a failed Bluetooth indicator light. Apparently, there’s “no problem” with a failed indicator light when it’s not connected to a Bluetooth device. Get it?) One got the feeling that repair service, which had once been a strength of the ThinkPad line (it was consistently #2 to Apple in Consumer Reports’ ratings), was now being “milked” for its revenue potential (why do you think every $9 cellphone gel case at Best Buy can be had at checkout with a $30 “service agreement?”).

So, still among the Lenovo faithful, I sent off my T410 for a repair to the Ethernet connection in mid-February. Days later, it hadn’t been returned. The online problem report said I’d been called about something. Nobody called. Finally, days after it should have been repaired, I called and was summarily transferred to the billing department. “That’ll be $750, please. It’s not a warranty repair; you damaged it.” Lenovo wouldn’t discuss it — wouldn’t tell me how they’d concluded I’d damaged it — and wouldn’t provide anyone outside the billing department to speak to.

Anyone who has ever plugged a PC into a network cable knows these connectors are little plastic things that can easily fail in normal use. I didn’t damage the laptop; one day the socket just didn’t connect securely. It’s as reasonable to assume the plastic failed as to assert that I damaged it. But Lenovo — without any discussion or proof that I had done anything to the machine — decided that I was responsible because they needed to get off the hook to repair the machine. Why? Because it turns out the entire motherboard has to be replaced to repair the little plastic clips on the Ethernet adapter.

$750 to repair a loose Ethernet adapter on a machine that cost $1100 new? Who can I talk to about this? Apparently nobody. Lenovo didn’t return any of my phone calls, didn’t respond to emails — and didn’t respond to my initial legal moves.

But wait…the story isn’t over. In fact, it’s just beginning.

See, here in Massachusetts we have a strong consumer protection law, Chapter 93. Under Chapter 93, I sent Lenovo a “demand letter” (a copy of the 93A demand letter is attached to this post; if you want to write one yourself, here’s a good source of help.) They had 30 days to respond, which to nobody’s surprise, they didn’t. Now, I am taking the next step.

Next week, I am going to sue Lenovo in small claims court. (A scan of the filing form is below. You cannot file this form online in Massachusetts because it’s an antique: it’s a paper form with carbon copies. Talk about old-school.)

If anyone from Lenovo reads this post and wants to settle, now would be a good time. Because if you don’t, I will file this document next week in Massachusetts district court and we’ll see what a judge has to say about you arbitrarily deciding that I damaged my laptop, resulting in a convenient way for you to avoid delivering the warranty service I paid for — and used to recommend to others.

And even if the judge throws me out on my ear, you’ll have missed a chance to quash me making public the details of our disagreement and every twist of my nascent legal adventure suing the bejesus out of you in small claims court. If you want to go the route of Honda with the Civic Hybrid, so be it. OTOH, if you want to do the right thing, drop me an email.

Oh, and about that Consumer Reports computer service survey…this year I don’t think I can give you the effusive marks you used to get from me.

Recently, hell froze over and I bought a MacBook Air. As you might expect, between then and now, I’ve spent a lot of time learning about Mac OS X (not hard) and retraining my finger-muscle-memory for Mac keyboard shortcuts (very hard). Who decided that Ctrl-F3 is the keystroke to get to the Dock?

Or, who decided that Macs should ship with the F1-F12 keys subordinated to the consumer-oriented functions — like stopping and starting tracks on the non-existent disc drive? Oh well, soon I will have used the Mac enough so that even the obscurity of the shortcut key to restore a minimized window will stop making me homicidal. Yes, I know you can hide windows with Command-H and that they will re-appear in the Command-Tab sequence. But, unlike Windows, hiding a window on Mac OS X is not the same as minimizing it. There is, in fact, a keyboard shortcut to restore minimized windows. But it’s so clumsy that even after I tell you what it is, you won’t be able to do it the first 50 times you try it.

Ready? Here it is. The keyboard shortcut to restore a window minimized with Command-M (or with the mouse) is 1) use Command-Tab to switch to the minimized window, then 2) lift off the Tab key while continuing to hold the Command key, then 3) in a ballet of left-hand coordination hit the Option (Alt) key as you triumphantly release the Command key.

I kid you not. Try it 50 times. Repeat. A pox on on the fingers of the designer of that shortcut.

But what really has me stumped is a simple question: what does Apple have against certain parts of speech of the English language? All Apple fanpeople remember the famous Think Different campaign from the late 90′s. It started Apple’s assault on parts of speech with a full-frontal attack on adverbs.

These days, starting with the iTunes store and now, with the Mac app store, Apple wants us to know that we can get content “on” the store instead of “in” these stores. In short, they’ve decided that English prepositions are the next target.

Take a close look at the official logo above. One has to go “on” the store instead of “in” the store to browse, select and buy. I have an image in mind of being on top of the glass entrance to the Apple store across from the Park Plaza hotel in New York City.

Back to the logo: it confuses me. I think they are saying that you are “on” a place on your iPad or your Mac when you arrive at the store. OK, maybe.

But isn’t the thing I want when I’m “on” that store location on my device actually located in the iTunes or Mac store? Said another way, I am “on” the store on my Mac or iPad — but the thing I want is in the store that I’m on. I guess you just have to think different about it to see it Apple’s way.

OK, OK, so I’m being fussy about this. And we all know that Chomsky wouldn’t care: maybe a non-native English speaker or modestly grammar-literate designer or marketer at Apple came up with the unique utterance “on the App Store” as the icons were being created — and it probably stuck because of an uncharacteristic lack of branding consistency from Apple.

But Apple is all about branding. And while Think Different was deliberate, I suspect “on the store” is a mistake.

It’ll be interesting to see if we start hearing people use it in everyday speech. At least we’ll know where it came from.

One more reason to fear the marketers at One Infinite Loop.

Remember when Apple first shipped a iPod that ran with Windows? Their website read “Hell Freezes Over,” their way of alluding to the fact that they had until then largely ignored the Windows world.

I did the same thing to Apple Mac computers for decades, considering them mostly overpriced, consumer AOL-grade toys with no substance, pitched at the terminally chic and elementary school kids. The more my daughter and my cousin Marshall became Apple-droids, slavishly extolling Apple products, the less the computers appealed to me.

Finally, after decades in the Windows camp , I bought a MacBook Air last week. And my big revelation? It’s a pretty decent Windows 7 machine, thanks to desktop virtualization.

I have always wanted a very powerful, lightweight laptop. Windows-based ultrabooks are appearing to compete with the MacBook Air, promising speedy startup and performance in very thin form factors. Aside from the fact that ultrabooks are first-generation, their main problem today is that they are really fugly. I just didn’t want to blow $1000 on an ultrabook that felt more like an experiment than a complete machine.

So, courtesy of my broker who gave me an Apple gift card that made the MBA price competitive with an ultrabook, I took the plunge and bought an i5-equipped machine with a 256GB SSD.

Yes, the out-of-box experience is great. But what really worked for me is the fact that OS X found my HP wireless printer and the scanner, setting up both. If you’ve ever installed the HP Windows drivers, you know what a miracle this is. And, no, the reversed mouse/trackpad scrolling in OS X Lion is not natural and Apple is being just as arrogant and insensitive to users as any big company can be. The screen is nice — but the keyboard has very little travel and is a bit uncomfortable. All in all, I think Apple makes a nice machine. But at Apple’s price points, its margins must be very high — the machine feels extraordinarily over-priced.

But the reason I am keeping the machine is that SSD. It’s fast. I can boot to the OS X desktop in about 15 seconds. Windows 7 64-bit under Parallels boots in about 25 seconds. I wait less for Parallels to launch Windows 7 and bring up Outlook in a virtual machine that I do on my ThinkPad T410 (circa late 2010) with its first-gen i5 and 7200rpm mechanical disk drive. In a word, SSDs are a revelation. No more machines for me without SSDs.

The biggest problems for a Windows user using a Mac with desktop virtualization are the complexity of the setup and the keyboard interface. Parallels does a good job of picking defaults for when you allow it to set up the Windows vm “like a Mac.” But it still requires a lot of tricky work to set up Office apps to use (in my case) a Windows Live Mesh synced folder (which is then synced to the Mac desktop). I didn’t want shared drives between the two OSs — I wanted both to sync to the cloud.

For a Windows user coming from decades of using the OS, the biggest adjustment is returning to a TTY-era keyboard mapping, which is how OS X strikes me. Control, Option and Command key combos are complex — for example having to use Option+Command+spacebar to open a Finder window in OS X versus Windows+E for a new Windows Explorer window. I still can’t find a “show desktop” keystroke for Max OS X. I miss the Home and End keys in Windows — and can’t find equivalents to PgUp and PgDn in either the virtual machine or on native Mac OS X apps.

Bottom line: I am taking the machine to work tomorrow — to force myself to see if it can be my work machine. If I don’t come home ready to kill, then my love affair with ThinkPads may well be over.

Stay tuned.

I used the navigation system for the first time today because it was inoperable when we picked up the car in Sweden. (It comes pre-loaded with North American map data.) I input a destination, started it up and turned on the voice to hear it announce the route it had selected.

I put the car into gear and turned on the directional signal. While the system was announcing the route, I noticed that there was no turn signal clicking noise.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I gotta have my click. First, I thought it was some kind of manufacturing defect. The dash turn signal indicator was flashing and I assumed a brand-new car wouldn’t have burned out bulbs. Next, I thought, ugh, what a design miss. How could the engineers design out the clicking noise everyone relies on to know whether or not their turn signals are on?

In the time it took me to think it through, the voice announcement ended and voila! the clicking noise returned.

This astounded me even more. It means that the click must be digital…and it must be playing back through the sound system. As I considered this, I realized that the days of a fundamentally mechanical car are long gone. The old-school mechanical solenoid is obsolete. I remember when you used to have to fish up under the dash to find the turn signal solenoid when it failed. In the XC60, I’d need the source code for the infotainment system to find it.

This XC60 is a thoroughly digital device. It just happens to be an automobile. I suspect there’s more software is in this car than is in my DSLR or my iPad or my smartphone. Here’s a partial list of systems in the XC60 that are software-driven: radar and digital image processing to automatically brake the car if you get too close to a car in front, logic to permit the cruise control to automatically follow the car in front, ABS, DSTC, image processing to sense cars in blind spots and sensors in the shocks that can be set to deliver varying suspension rates. Clearly, the engine and transmission are digital, too (the car runs on regular or premium, so a knock sensor must be affecting the spark plug timing to prevent pre-detonation).

And I suspect my wife’s XC60 is to a Chevy Volt as an IBM PC XT of 1983 is to a Core i7 desktop of 2012. In short, as blown away as I am by this car, I’ll bet that hybrid and electric cars are even dependent on software.

So, bye-bye mechanical turns signals…hello, MP3 turn signal clicks.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been talking to people whose job it is to follow/report/blog about software. And more than one has told me that I once worked on a very original product that, despite my best efforts to explicate it, confused them. (Why they waited until now to tell me is fodder for another post. You’d think the more outspoken tastemakers would have been delighted to express their opinions at the time, not ex post facto.)

I love highly engineered products. I also love new ways of doing things. I believe software can and should make it possible for people to do new things, things they haven’t been able to do before. But it’s not that way in the real world.

There, people like incremental changes. They like the familiar (though that begs the question of how the conventional got that way). They want to “get it” right away. They want to be like everyone else (I can’t tell you the number of blonde housewives I see in white Land Rovers with Sudbury High School stickers on the car, typing away in traffic on their white iPhone 4Ss). They want to be conventional.

You’re thinking, “Uh…light dawns on Marblehead. That’s pretty obvious, ain’t it? And, Alex, who cares?”

It matters because many software types believe that to be successful, you need a completely new idea. You can’t fund a company to build a “slightly better” product. To get investor interest, you need to convince them that you can displace an incumbent in a very large category, preferably a category with sales in billions of dollars. But, in reality, I am coming to believe that that’s what the dumb money funds. It’s probably better to fund a replacement for something people already know and hate.

Consider these two (fictional) software products. Then tell me which one you’d spend money on. Be honest. Calculate how much one or the other would change your world, the way you work. Consider having to deal with all the people around you with whom you interact and what would be required to really change how they all work. Decide how much of your day you wish to devote to exploring something new, unknown, different.

Product A:

• Stretches your understanding of how you work
• Has the potential to revolutionize the way you collaborate with your colleagues
• Is less focused on user interface than on managing interaction

Product B:

• Is familiar
• Is an evolution of software you’ve used for decades
• Looks like your favorite website

Bottom line: successful software products today are like a Philip Glass symphony: modern, but repetitive.

Truly inventive software ends up being something only its creators can love — because users today don’t really want innovation. They want to think they’re daring, in the vanguard, forward-thinking…but, really, they don’t want to change a darn thing.

While that may seem like waterboarding to those of you who just buy one off the lot, and thank God that’s over!, I actually enjoy the elongated process because I learn so much more about the car that way. Plus, I can wait for the best price and, most importantly, making the process excruciatingly long means I’ll never become an impulse car buyer.

By the time we took delivery of Tricia’s new XC60, I’d learned that the car’s engine is made in a Ford plant in Wales, the transmission comes from Japan and the steel body parts are stamped at Torslanda, Sweden (pronounced in English, I think, like “tush-lander”). These and other useless bits of information plus a cover-to-cover reading of the online owner’s manual really do help cement the decision to buy a car.

For me, cars cost so much — and you keep them for so long — that it’s almost inexcusable to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a car that you haven’t become an expert on. After all, you can keep some cars almost as long as you keep your children. (I do realize how unfortunate that simile is, I really do. You try coming up with clever analogies. Post your alternatives as a comment and we’ll see which one(s) are more apt than the one I came up with.)

Anyway, Volvo has been doing overseas delivery for a long time. Long enough that in the distant fog of non-Internet time they felt it would be a good customer service idea to send a letter to a buyer letting him or her know when the car shipped from Europe and when it might arrive at the local dealer.

I received such a letter this morning. (Interesting, it came via email, so this customer service process has been updated somewhat for the Internet age.) You can see a redacted copy of the letter by clicking on the link at the end of this post.

Why is this old school? Well, for one thing Volvo generated a letter, not an email. That makes me think Volvo used to actually snail mail these out. I almost wish I’d gotten a letter postmarked Tushlander, Sweden. The footer is pretty interesting, too, eh? C’mon, how often have you gotten a letter from a car manufacturer with the bank wiring instructions for different currencies in the footer? Quaint.

But a letter like this is old school because it’s outdated. There are bazillion ways to track your car minute by minute as it crosses the ocean. For one, the shipper will give you a status update on its website, using your VIN as a tracking number. After all, if UPS can tell you where that package of gum is, why can’t a logistics company tell you where a freakin’ car is just as easily?

But the ne plus ultra of tracking is the many sites that combine cargo ship satellite transponders with Google Maps to give you the minute-by-minute location of a cargo ship. For example, the Platinum Ray, which has Tricia’s car on it, is in Southhampton in the UK at the moment. That’s its last stop in Europe on this voyage before it travels to Newark; Baltimore; Brunswick, GA and Charleston, SC on this side of the pond. By the time you read this, it may be on a completely different voyage. Still, you ought to check out this link, then click on “current vessel’s track” to see how precisely where this ship is. You may think me odd or impossibly geeky, but this is just too cool for words. I’m sorry; this is the balls.

But even though I can run technological rings around Volvo’s letter with up-to-the-minute news of where Tricia’s car is as it makes its way to her, I am even more impressed with the letter. It’s a nice touch, trying to keep the customer in the loop, not assuming the customer is technologically equipped to find the ship’s callsign and input it into a tracking site.

It may be old school, but it’s cool, too.

Well, it’s come to this: cheap, tawdry misappropriations of poetic metaphors.

Yesterday, something happened in my car that made it run rough and have no power. Come to find out today (thanks to an emergency visit to my pals at Village European) that the #4 ignition coil is dead. Prudence dictates that if one coil needs replacement, all should be replaced. And, since we’ve got the engine cover open, it’s advisable to replace all the spark plugs as well. (After all, who wants to spark a nearly dead plug? [And if you don't get that joke, I can't help you.])

Oh well…since you have the car, you might as well replace the front pads and rotors; there was only a few millimeters of surface left. All right…go ahead and change the oil, too, while you have it here. You know what? After the dealer aligned the car last spring, I couldn’t stand the way it drove, so do you mind also putting it on the rack?

To accurately describe the feeling one gets contemplating the cost of repairing a late-model BMW, I am forced to (mis)use the poetic term “mortal coil.” Usually, the term refers to the stress and frustrations of daily living.

Today, however, all I can think about is my BMW’s mortal ignition coils — they live fast and die young.

Well, I hit the jackpot this week. We were in Stockholm on December 6, 2011 to visit the Nobel Museum and its amazing Marie Curie exhibit. Behind the museum, I stumbled upon a mother lode of big, black BMW 750s with official decals and German (Munich) plates that were obviously being used to ferry Nobel  laureates to and fro in Stockholm. As you may know, the Nobel Prize ceremony is always on December 10 — the day Alfred Nobel died. So I imagine these limos were taking people to the ceremony prep. Imagine being a laureate and being treated to a tour of Stockholm in these babies! (And, with the prize money, being able to afford to buy one!)

Click on the play button to play the little slide show in your browser, or click on an image to open the slide show in Picasa  Web.

I’m writing this as Tricia catches a nap – she’s a little jet lagged. How jet-lagged? Well, she fell asleep in a tram while touring a car factory today. A very LOUD car factory. That, my friends, is jet-lag.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

It took us longer than we expected to get to Gothenburg. That’s because Tricia’s friendly travel agent (me) decided not to risk a short layover in Copenhagen. That added four hours sitting in an airport to the trip time. We arrived yesterday in a blinding, driven rain to discover that southern Sweden looks like (wait for it)…Portland, ME. Of course, we didn’t see much of the terrain because we arrived at about 1pm and it was already dark. OK, so I am exaggerating…but only a little.

In December, lights out is at about 3:30pm. And sunrise is about 8:15am. So, it’s a short day. However, today the rain ended and the sun came out. It was clear, brisk and cold – again, it was a lot like a nice winter day at home.

We got up early – for the first time in travel memory, I showered first so Tricia could sleep in another 30 minutes – had breakfast next to some Swedes complaining (in English, which everyone seems to speak) about their wives, their mothers-in-law, their teenage daughters– in fact just about everyone who’s female – and then were driven to the Volvo plant.

Before we get to the good stuff a word about Swedes: they’re tall (though not as tall as Finns, I think), many of them are blond and, among younger women, those that aren’t naturally blonde seem very much to want to be blonde, so there’s a plethora of platinum blondes walking around – something I suspect those practical Swedes think is useful. Is it that blonde hair reflecting more scarce light at night is desirable in a country with nearly perpetual darkness? Are blondes preferred so those guys from breakfast can find their women in the dark more easily? BTW, did I mention it gets dark early here?

[Update: Over dinner, Tricia mentioned that a woman sitting near us might be wearing a blonde wig. Later, we went for a walk, where, I kid you not, we saw these long, stringy blonde wigs for sale in the city's megamall. I can't believe the blonde envy thing going on here. Click the thumbnail to see these platinum fantasies full-size.]

Back to the narrative. Pelle from Volvo greeted us at precisely 8:15am and presented Tricia her car. The car is quite nice – and I breathed a sigh of relief after seeing the interior. We ordered, sight unseen, an interior that isn’t available on cars that dealers import into the US. I did it for two reasons. I couldn’t stand how monotone the US interiors are and it makes Tricia’s car a unique souvenir of this trip.

Tricia got to drive the car on the delivery center’s “test track,” which was a muddy stretch of earth about 700m in length. Volvo takes it history seriously — they claim one of the reasons the company was started in the 1920′s was to build cars that could take what were at the time poor paved roads in this country. So I suspect that even though highways here today are better than at home, this “test track” was built to demonstrate the spirit of the original Volvos.

After the test drive, we visited the Volvo Museum. There were some nice P1800′s in the collection. But what stood out is how the company’s history — and the depth of its collection — stops abruptly at about the year 2000. Why? It’s obvious — the company was nearly dead when Ford bought it in 1999 and today it’s the first major Western brand to be owned by a Chinese company nobody in the occident has ever heard of. As a monument to Swedish industrial prowess, the museum just couldn’t find a way to integrate its current history into the exhibition. I really looked hard for something that hinted at the company’s last 20 years; in fact I searched the entire museum. I found one reference to Ford (on a time line that stopped in 1999) and none — nothing at all — about Geely. The visit turned out to be a fascinating lesson in the power of museum curators.

Back to the delivery center for lunch — Swedish meatballs…surprised? — and then to the sleepy-time factory tour. I was disappointed because the stamping shop was idle. I wanted to Tricia to experience the earth-shaking pounding of floor-to-second-story metal presses stamping out car body parts. It’s my favorite part of a car factory tour because it’s the ultimate metaphor for a pounding headache — and the worst, I repeat worst, industrial job one could have. My heart goes out to people working in car stamping plants.

Anyway, Tricia must have known she got the quiet version of the tour and promptly fell asleep just as the Volvo tour guide got excited describing the marriage of body and powertrain. This was my second car factory tour and in the first one the tour guide was also hopped up over this “marriage” process.

I guess you just have to be there. But I don’t get why it’s so cool. It’s just another step in producing the car. In Volvo’s case, it’s done by robots; in the BMW plant I was in, it was being done by two mädchen who, at the time, looked marriageable. I assumed that in BMW plants, only young single women performed this task, so that’s why it is called ”marriage.” However, it appears to be an industry term — and those Swedes have ruined the metaphor for me by using (German) robots.

After the tour, we came back to the hotel, where I sat in Tricia’s car until it got too cold (and dark. Have I mentioned that it gets dark early in December in Sweden?) reading the 400-plus page owner’s manual.

Tricia went to our room for a nap…and I as write this, she’s happily catching up on her sleep, counting white Volvos in her sleep.

BTW, here’s a little video of stills from our day. Looks like we had fun, doesn’t it? We sure did.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Having done both BMW and Volvo deliveries in Europe, I gotta say that Volvo’s program is better, with two exceptions. First, they gotta replace their US travel agent. Second, I’d trade the two free map updates in the US for a pre-load of Scandinavian maps when the car is delivered. I brought an old GPS I’d loaded with Scandinavian maps (you really need it), but using an add-on GPSs in a new car cheapens the experience.

Biggest, most pleasant surprise? Volvo delivers the car with a full tank of gas, something that costs a small fortune with petrol costing about 14kr/liter.

Lately, the price of getting support from me has been a lecture about security and backup. Basically, I tell you that connecting your device to the Internet is so dangerous that unless you are (or want to become) a mega geek, with a deep technical understanding of things like TCP/IP and SSL, you should simply assume you are going to get killed online. Beaten…destroyed…instantly pwned.

I warn you with bone-chilling examples of how you, personally, have failed to be secure. It feels like an inquisition — my family hates it — but the process serves two purposes. First, family and friends don’t come to me unless they are truly stuck; they’d almost rather go off the grid completely than listen to my rant. As a result, I don’t have to actually do that much technical support. Second, I hope the shock value of it sinks in just a little and raises their security consciousness.

To be honest, the ‘net is too useful to give up. But I’ve observed most people are in such a rush to do whatever they want to do, no symphony of exhortations to “slow down, look at that URL in the address bar, make sure it’s a lock icon” or “take your time and read the message before you click OK” is ever going to make anyone more cautious about their online activities. So being absolutist — “There’s no way, none at all, for you to be safe online” — is the only message that has any effect. Once they hear from me that the Internet is an open, global security cesspool, they don’t forget the metaphor…it makes them more than just a little uncomfortable online. And that discomfort makes them act a little bit safer online.

But if you really wanna see someone break out in a cold sweat, remind them how much of their lives are in digital form today. Photos, music, tax returns, financial data: all of it increasingly lives on the hard disks of my family and friends. Many of them don’t even know what a hard drive is…how frail, how old-school mechanical it is. It’s amazing what behaviors this complete lack of understanding of the components inside a computer enables. People will steam vegetables next to a six-year old laptop sitting on the cooktop, then abruptly pick up the machine while it’s running and literally drop it onto a table or desk.

They just can’t understand why Windows won’t boot and they’ve lost everything — even their PhD dissertation – when their machines fail.

For a long time, I’ve included the topic of backup in the “digitally speaking, you’re naked from head to toe in a New England nor’easter” harangue. I ask them how it felt when a family member’s house burned to the ground with so many important mementos lost, including photos and heirlooms (true story). I tell them they must backup their machines on the cloud. And I tell them they have to do it religiously.

But the irony is that even I have been very, very lackadaisical about backing up my own stuff until very recently. I’d counted on a NAS in my basement for backup. Bad move, I know, but I’ve recently gotten religion about backup.

Shunning Carbonite and Mozy as being the equivalent of AOL dial-up, I defaulted to trying JungleDisk, now a product of Rackspace. I liked that I alone controlled the decryption keys and that it could use Amazon S3 storage. But using it was a disaster from the start. It was ungodly slow to upload. It doesn’t support (I don’t think) S3 server-side encryption. They charge, I think, for both upload and download from S3 even though if you upload something to an S3 bucket, the ingress transmission is free. I was willing to live with all that until a scheduled backup crashed and tech support simply stopped helping me after the usual bromides proved ineffective. This, from a company that has trademarked the term “fanatical support.” Bye, bye JungleDisk.

A quick Google search found CloudBerry. And, man is this thing cool. Yes, it requires you to set up your own Amazon account and find the access key and secret. But it’s fast, it’s attractive and best of all, Andy (who I suspect is the author) answers questions via email on Thanksgiving Day. It supports Windows volume snapshot services (VSS) so you can backup open files. A checkbox turns on both S3 reduced redundancy storage (which costs less) and server-side encryption. CloudBerry only charges you for the client; whatever costs you rack up on AWS are between Amazon and you. The only drawback I can see is that it stores your encrypted password locally to encrypt files on the way to S3 rather than allowing you to specify the public key to be used. But that seems minor to me, and compared the arrogance and lack of knowledge of Rackspace’s technical folks, I’d rather work with CloudBerry any day.

So, hello, CloudBerry. And, btw, if you are family or a friend and you want me to set CloudBerry up for you, sure thing. But the “Internet is a cesspool lecture” will continue.

Now, a week after dinner with Judson and Dana followed by drinks two days later with Judson and Nick (along with Nick’s lovely wife and Judson’s protégé), what I have to say is simple: letting us drift apart was a colossal mistake. (And what a mitzvah Judson performed to come all the way here from LA to pull us together.)

I learned a couple of things being with my old pals. First, we really don’t change. Nick, Judson and Dana are exactly what they were when we were buds in school. The same reasons I loved them then apply — in full measure — today. Gesticulations, ways of talking, the looks in their eyes — all precisely as I remember them. And, today they’re more of what they were then. These three guys have done what they’ve done, succeeded where they were successful and taken arrows where they weren’t, all of which has made them intensely more of what they were in college. Cognac comes to mind: as it ages, goop in the barrel evaporates (which causes a fungus that lives on the evaporate to form on the cellar ceiling. What a life, eh?) but the stuff left behind gains flavor all out of proportion to the original taste.

Second, age brings both wisdom and dimmed memories. I had completely forgotten that Dana and I had been both sophomore and senior year roommates. None of us seem to be able to remember the fifth roommate (Nick thinks his name was Ben, but who knows?). But we still remember the Third Annual Irish-Polish Lobotomy Picnic (though there were never any other picnics, before or after), singing in the stairwells and very specific professors and classmates. Collectively, our memories form the best history of our individual lives then — a reason in itself to stay connected to each other now.

Third, it’s too damn easy to let friendships go. This may be my particular failing. Sure, I am busy with a career, two kids, life in the ‘burbs. I used to travel all the time on business. I was gasping just to keep up with my job and my family. It’s been a 30-year marathon I suspect my pals are running, too. But I never lifted a finger to find these dudes, with the exception of a call or two to Judson five or six years ago. After you let friendship drift away, you convince yourself it doesn’t matter and then you just forget about it. But that’s like propofol, the black hole of memory, making you feel better about forgetting something central.

So, guys, I wanna work on it. Nick, Tricia and I definitely are coming there for hot dogs. Dana, you gotta come by on your way to Sunderland. Judson, we will come see you in LA one day soon.

Count on it.

Tonight, we lost power again. While we were out for only about an hour, the astonishingly unreliable National Grid distribution system has me thinking.

First, National Grid should be heavily fined and their management replaced. Tonight, when I called “customer service” to report our outage (it takes real effort to talk to a human — they’d rather not actually speak to customers), I got an earful of how heroic their response has been. Well, that may be the conventional wisdom inside that company. But here, in the real world, the consensus of everyone I talk with is that National Grid should be tarred, feathered and run out of town in one of their bucket trucks. National Grid is patting itself on its collective back while people continue to suffer and their repairs don’t hold. (It’s an interesting marketing problem — but that’s a topic for a different blog post.)

Second, the fury of the people — some 85K of whom are still lights out in the sixth day of this event — has reached our politicians. Governor Patrick has called for an investigation. Senator Brown has written a letter expressing the outrage of the common man. As National Grid owns the DPU (see regulatory capture), the former will accomplish nothing to improve National Grid’s mismanagement. And Senator Brown is burnishing his lunch-bucket, regular dude populist credentials in an effort to get ahead of the real populism of his apparent re-election challenger, Democrat Elizabeth Warren. A pox on all these politicos’ heads for their cynical (and ultimately ineffective) manipulation of these events for their own political objectives.

Third, I am reminded of the first time I went to India on business. It was 1995; I was working at Lotus Development. We were there to deliver a symposium for Notes application developers. I was just beginning the heavy international travel for business that dominated my career in the 1990s. I was naïve. In those early trips, I assumed that the world was like home: you could drink the water wherever you went and nobody ever thought about electricity supplies.

I remember visiting a Notes reseller on my first full day in Delhi, accompanied by our country marketing manager. We sat with the reseller’s managing director at the end of a long hall. Running down the spine of this hall snaked more than a dozen folding tables placed next to each other on their short sides like you might see set up for an event . On each side of the table were employees, working furiously on a variety of terminals — DEC VT101 compatibles, IBM 3270 compatibles and generic TTYs (all antiques today). This was the beginning of out-sourcing. I was told these people were doing contract programming for companies in the US.

All of a sudden, the power stopped. Nobody looked up. The fans stopped, the humming of the terminals stopped. It was silent. The programmers sat with their fingers curled at the ready over the keyboards of their terminals, eyes staring straight ahead at blank, dark terminal screens. Each programmer was in his or her own world, trying to remember where they were in the logic they were programming. They were at the ready, waiting for the power to come up in a few minutes — for just a couple of minutes. It was as if they, too, had been stopped dead by the power outage.

At our table, nobody missed a beat — except for me, the provincial dork. “Why,” I asked, “is everyone staring straight ahead, waiting to pounce on the keyboards? In a US office, when this happens, people push from their desk, laugh, talk sports and gossip until the power comes back on.”

“Not to worry,” I was told. “They are mentally paused at the last set of programming instructions just before they lost power and saved the items they were working on. They won’t remember as much if they relax and start talking. Plus, this happens several times a day. They’re used to it.”

And so it did happen, twice more in my hour meeting. I left astonished at the adaptation these programmers had to develop to keep their train of thought going during repeated, random power outages. They adapted by putting them minds into pause when power went out as a way of preventing re-work. It was my first taste of what happens to people who have to rely on third-world infrastructure.

Tonight, it’s a metaphor for what National Grid is doing to Southborough: they are pulling us backwards into the third-world, where we will all have to adapt, somehow, to an increasingly unreliable electricity supply. And that adaptation can only mean a step backwards for our living standards.

So, no, Governor Patrick, calling for an investigation won’t help. And, Senator Brown, you can save your franking privileges; it’s not going to do any good and it’s an utterly transparent political maneuver.

Instead, how about making DPU accountable for the third-world condition of our grid? Why not replace management there with new blood, people who have been explicitly charged with making sure National Grid is accountable for its failures? Why not put some teeth into this regulator to make sure that, one day, Southborough can once again rejoin the first world?

In case you need a refresher, in August, 2011, Hurricane Irene blew through central Massachusetts and 400,000 plus National Grid customers lost power, some for almost a week. (We were out 37 hours.) In October, 2011, a nor’easter blew though Massachusetts and, surprise!, 400,000 plus National Grid customers lost power.

National Grid can’t control the weather. I understand that. But apparently, they can’t control their grid either. The same areas, in approximately the same proportions, were affected in both storms. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

A post-storm driving tour I took in August matched up perfectly with the tour I took today: cross from Southborough into Framingham and you move from no power to power. Cross from Southborough into Hopkinton, you get power. The difference? Hopkinton and Framingham are not National Grid service areas. How could the weather be so significantly different in those two communities from the weather in Southborough twice in 90 days? Answer: it can’t.

Worse, National Grid is repeating its ham-handed handling of pr with this outage. In August, I tweeted two screenshots from their outage website. One showed that after about 32 hours of outage, National Grid was still “assessing” the situation. Here’s the screenshot from their website for today’s outage:

Click to enlarge

It’s now 22 hours after the start of the outage in Southborough. And nobody at National Grid has assessed the conditions in Southborough yet? I and most of the town were out early today, cleaning up downed tree limbs and assessing our properties. I live off of Route 85 (on which there were no operable traffic signals). Does National Grid expect us to believe they couldn’t get a truck through the the heart of Southborough to determine the problems and use that info to update their website?

In August, 92% of Southborough lost power.

Remarkably, today 91% of Southborough lost power:

Click to enlarge

This speaks volumes to me. National Grid did nothing to improve its distribution network after the major outage resulting from Irene.

In public communications, National Grid continues to prefer bromides (“We’re working as hard as we can”) to actual information. I called the Southborough Police in August and today, asked what they’d heard from National Grid and got the same answer both times: “We have no information from them.”

I think the picture is pretty clear: a broken-down UK utility has bought up US utilities from New York to New England and operates them with minimal investment and maintenance in order to maximize profits. Meanwhile, they rely on the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities to continue to suffer from a classic case of regulatory capture to avoid having to operate and invest in the system in a way that would minimize disruption from severe weather.

It’s shocking that a public utility can away with repeatedly exploiting its customers, manipulating its regulators and avoiding accountability in crisis situations.

Click to enlarge

I’ve been working with a new startup for the last few months (which explains my silence here).

This company is crammed into a single office. There are usually three people working in the office…and when I’m there, I make four. I work from on a small “piece” of an Ikea desk, kindly lent to me by my colleague (who also snapped this photo of us working today).

And this is among the most exciting and satisfying work environments I’ve ever had. Stuff gets done in this environment. Consensus is reached quickly, often with simple nods and clipped phrases. There are no secrets, no politicking. Just amazing productivity.

And even when we’re getting on each others’ nerves, it’s productive. In such a confined space, you have to get past whatever pissed you off fast, because that’s the only way you can continue to be just feet from three other people.

And, as you might imagine, the proximity makes lighter moments even more humorous. Jokes ripple ’round the room, acquiring layer on layer of humor.

This can’t last, of course, even though personally, I am in favor of cramming the next three hires into the same office with the four of us. But for as long as it does last, it’s the most intensely creative and productive office environment I’ve ever worked in.

Finally — finally — after exhausting me, after calling me and telling me I had other devices on my router network (no kidding; we have computers and mobile devices, just like everyone else), someone deep in the bowels of FiOS checked the check box and enabled access.

Now, I wonder why I bothered. FiOS’s websites and apps have been designed by the same people who think IRS forms are art: “Hey, how about that 2010 revision to the W-9! Let’s use that for the website. And geesh…did you see that new GSA schedule for applying to be a vendor of paper clips? Wow…what a beaut. Let’s use that for our iPad app.”

I kid you not…FiOS websites and apps are the worst designs I have ever seen. irs.gov itself is an island of organization and consistency compared to this mess.

Love government forms? verizon.com is for you.

Let’s take a little tour. Click on the “FiOS TV Central” screenshot nearby. Wanna login? Sure, the login link is right where it ought to be. But where are userid and password fields? Halfway down the page. Below the fold (even on a WXGA-res screen) On the left. Verizon is so desperate to upsell you to an on-demand movie that they can’t even wait until you login to stuff the page full of ads for content.

How To Make People Hate The iPad

Now, check out this screenshot from an iPad running “FiOS Mobile.” I’ve titled the screen shot “how to make people hate the iPad because after about three minutes of this thing, that’s what many people will end up feeling. First, it takes forever for the app to connect. Switching away makes you have to re-connect. If all you want to do is use the iPad to control the DVR, you have to first bring up a DVR listing, and then — if you are lucky — you get this truncated picture of a FiOS remote. Punch a button, say pause, so you can grab a snack or make a pit stop, and wait for 30 seconds before you get the action.

The Worst Android UI Ever Designed

But nothing — and I mean nothing — equals the depths of poor design demonstrated by the Android FiOS Mobile app. Take a look at this screenshot. See the similarity between the iOS app and the Android app? No, try closing your left eye, standing on your right foot only and squinting into the sun. There, see it now? Still no? Well, you and I must be the only ones because Verizon thinks it’s the Android equivalent of the iOS app.

You know, it’s one thing to not care about mobility for cable subscribers. But it’s another to be so completely lame — and to be so completely oblivious to it. Back in the day, I was a systems engineer for IBM on the NYNEX account. This was one of the predecessors to Verizon. I was responsible for application and database design using IBM technologies at that time — and I encountered what used to be called “Bell-shaped heads” in their application development. Having a Bell-shaped head meant you did things the phone-company way — you know, “We’re a monopoly and we couldn’t care less about usability.”

You’d think that after all this time, Verizon would have lost that myopic view of applications — but it looks like time has not healed those misshapen heads.

Even before then, in film school (and I mean old-school celluloid film), we were taught to distinguish the color temperature differences between dawn, dusk and midday despite the eye and brain conspiring to make all colors look the same.

So, having been brought up on incandescent lighting and being sensitized to the color temperature of the light around me, I dreaded the coming phase-out of incandescent lighting in the US. Sure, I think it’s a great way to save energy. But I hate fluorescent lighting. It’s greyish-blue light makes everything it illuminates really fugly.

And try as I might, I couldn’t find a CFL I thought came close to incandescent. I tried, I really did, to find a CFL I could live with. But after years of buying CFLs, I gave up. Now, in my home CFLs are relegated to the basement and the garage.

So, in anticipation of the law phasing out my favorite (100-watt power hog) bulbs first by the end of 2011, I did what anyone would do: I started hoarding them. If I had another reason to be in a Lowe’s or BJ’s or equivalent, I bought every 100-watt bulb I could find. By mid summer, I noticed that 100-watt bulbs were getting hard to find, leading me to conclude others were doing the same thing.

Then, I read an article about LED bulbs and the progress being made with them in Wired. The story talks about a start-up that’s making a bulb they hope to have on the market later this year. The article also mentions the Philips AmbientLED, noting that it was first on the market with a 60-watt equivalent bulb that was instant on, dimmable and was supposed to look like an incandescent.

Despite the $40 price tag, I had to try two. So, I ordered them and while they were being shipped to me I received the October, 2011 issue of Consumer Reports which rated the AmbientLED tops. I was psyched. It may seem odd to get excited about light bulbs, but have you thought about many bulbs there are in your life? And what’s so strange about wanting to be the first on my block to try out these expensive new gadgets?

Well, they arrived and, ahem, a light went on for me. Now I sit here, writing this blog post by the wonderful light of an LED. What a relief! I won’t be able to afford these in any quantity, but at least I am no longer condemned to a lifetime of seeing things by CFL light that casts the color of spoiled, uncooked McDonalds burger patties.

Mr. Edison, it was a long love affair. Good-bye and good luck.

P.S. Anyone interested in a wide variety of new 100-watt incandescent light bulbs?

I mentioned to my wife that I knew this was a complete rip-off because HDMI is a digital specification. If you plug two compatible components together and you get audio and video, the cable is working. I know how much big-box retailers need to find profitable items to sell, given the small margins on consumer electronics. Because phone cases, batteries, cables and other accessory items are often not included in a purchase of a consumer electronic items, the retailers have a business incentive to gouge people.

Click to englarge

And, boy, does Best Buy cut deep into your wallet for a generic HDMI cable. Take a look at this search from eBay for 6ft HDMI cables. Many cables are available for a tenth of the price of Best Buy’s cables.

Sure, you sometimes have to wait for something to arrive via air mail from Hong Kong and maybe the cable will be defective and you are stuck with a small loss.

Neither of those risks make up for, IMO, the cruelly efficient fleecing of Best Buy customers, cynically executed by their salespeople who are trained to push all sorts of “pack” (useless add-ons) from cables to warranty extensions on unsuspecting non-techie customers.

(I’m still upset with Best Buy over the way they treated us when I bought a Sonos system for my father-in-law. Long story short, the made us sign up for a store credit card with the most usurious terms I have ever seen, they had us wait next to the dumpster to pick up the equipment, then they tried to give me a receipt that contained the wording “This is not a receipt.” If they can’t treat a knowledgeable customer with any respect, what do you think their attitude is when Grandma comes in looking for a cellphone?)

Then today, in an episode of Jungian synchronicity I ran across this post from CNET, which describes in detail the signaling protocol in the HDMI standard, the differences in the standards and what can really go wrong. Suffice it to say, people buying HDMI cables — something you really want to take home with your new HDTV — are getting massively ripped off if you buy it on impulse at Best Buy.

While I do believe in buyer beware and all that, what frustrates me is how entities like Best Buy have convinced themselves it’s OK to do business like this. If I treated my consulting clients like “marks” from whom I needed to extract the maximum revenue, they’d know it in an instant. How does Best Buy get away with its warm and fuzzy image, which clearly covers up for a raging retail exploitation machine?

A Red Sox moment of agony

Do you know who this Red Sox first baseman is? Does this still image bring back unimaginable pain from the long lost 80s? Does Bill Buckner encapsulate for you the pre-21st century course for the Olde Towne Team?

What if you could laugh it off, courtesy of a brilliant crew of comedic writers and actors who combine this tragic tale with subplots of sexual performance anxiety, racial stereotypes and a (well-deserved) poke in the eye of psychiatry?

Well, that’s what’s happened in the most side-splitting 30 minutes of television ever produced. What deserves this Alex-is-now-a-TV-critic kudos? The “Mister Softee” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm that first aired on Sunday, September 4, 2011 on HBO. (Here’s a series description and episode list.)

While CYE has made me laugh hard before, “The Bare Midriff” (season 7) attack on religious icons being one of my favorites, nothing compares to this new episode. I always suspected that the show was missing something.

Now I know what was missing: NYC, my birth-town until my adoption by Boston. Until this season, CYE was set in LA. But David and his regulars (especially the volume-goes-to-11 harpie Susie Greene) are funnier when roaming their ancestral home. These guys — and their humor — come from being New York Jews.

I’m sorry, but the LA lifestyle of fun and sun was always a mismatch, IMO, for the comedy. Even Leon, David’s fast-talking, foul-mouthed sidekick (“My johnson gets a little willie knowin’ you gonna git some tonight,” he says to David in “Mister Softee”) connects better in NYC than he did in LA episodes.

Somehow, bringing the cast to NYC has brought them home, reunited them with their tribal essence and sharpened their wit to its ultimate point.

If you can watch “Mister Softee” and not need an oxygen mask to replenish what you just lost laughing, there’s no help for you. Yup, as the girl in the ice cream truck tells a pre-pubescent Larry David, “Mister Softee” was “pretty, pretty, pretty good.”  I’ve given it the ultimate mark of respect — I set the DVR to not delete “Mister Softee” until I say so.

The view of the beach from our undisclosed location. If I tell you where this beach is, I'd have to kill you.

I’m on vacation on the Cape. We’re having a blast.

But this isn’t about the fact that we walked along the beach at dusk and had it all to ourselves or the fact that it’s so quiet and peaceful at our undisclosed location that I never want to leave.

Instead this post is about WordPress for Android, which allows me to blog directly from my G2.

I know that blogging is purportedly on the decline and that I should express myself in 140 characters or less.

Sorry, I prefer throw-back tech when it comes to online personal communication and with Swype, a camera and the WordPress for Android app, I have everything one needs to stay stuck in mid-decade.

Was Charles Schwab a simpleton when it came to auction rate securities?

Tomorrow, July 21, 2011, yet another court appearance will take place in the long-running case People of the State of New York vs. Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. (WebCivil Supreme index 453388/2009).

Having convinced its lap-dog regulator FINRA to look the other way, the only thing left between getting away with auction rate securities fraud and having to make good on its misrepresentations to little guys like me is this case brought by the New York state attorney general.

As I have occasionally thundered about on this blog, Schwab has been hiding behind “principle” since the case was filed in late 2009, asserting it was just the victim of other players in the marketplace and that as a “downstream” seller of these toxic assets, it should not be held liable for selling them.

Coupled with its, ahem, principles, it has delayed and delayed and delayed the NY AG’s case. First, by trying to move it to Federal court — a move it lost — and then by slowing a determination on its own motion to dismiss the charges.

The motion to dismiss was filed in March, 2010. Between then and now, the motion was heard once. There have been 11 adjournments. Apparently, a change in judges is at least partly responsible for the delays. But it’s pretty clear that Schwab doesn’t intend to settle and that delay, despite the continuing pain of people with illiquid auction rate securities, works to Schwab’s advantage.

In reviewing the case documents available on eTrack, I ran across the NY AG’s response to the motion to dismiss. Originally filed in May, 2011, its introduction is a must-read for anyone who is interested in this case and its impact. Here is the entire document.

But you only have to read these short excerpts to understand in a New York minute how vapid Schwab’s stand on “principle” is.

…Schwab claims to have had a limited role in the ARS market, and that it somehow was a victim of the practices of the major underwriter broker-dealers whose ARS Schwab distributed to its customers. If Schwab truly was such a simpleton in the marketplace as it suggests, then it was reckless in selling products it did not understand. But the evidence alleged in the Complaint belies any claim by Schwab that it was unaware of the risks in selling ARS.

And…

At base, this motion is another attempt by Schwab to delay adjudicating the case on the merits, and, more importantly, doing something to alleviate the suffering of its customers who continue to experience illiquidity for twenty-eight months and counting since the failure of the ARS market.

On behalf of all of us who’ve been robbed by Charles Schwab, I want to thank the NY Attorney General for making such a logical and crystal-clear argument for the court to consider. I hope tomorrow the judge will agree, rule against Schwab’s ridiculous motion to dismiss and allow the case to proceed.

I got up Sunday morning, July 3rd, salivating over all the cholesterol-laden meats I was gonna burn…er…grill that day in celebration of the holiday. I was looking forward to my weekend breakfast of imported Nestle 2-in-1 coffee sachets (I prefer the Indonesian version) and peanut butter crackers (cheese-flavor orange crackers only).

But noooo…it wasn’t to be. An email alerted me to the fact that our corporate website, vuuch.com, was dead dead dead.

No problem, I thought. I’ll just reboot our EC2 instance and deal with it Tuesday.

No joy.

Panic sets in. The cracker crumbs mix with coffee drool and run down the side of my face. There’s no freakin’ website no matter how many times I restart the instance. It boots, it dies. It boots again, it dies harder.

“Calm down,” the inner voice says. “You’ll think of something.”

“Up yours, you optimistic fool. The damn thing is in rigor mortis. Start searching for the last database backup ’cause, baby, you are spending the day cooking up a new server, not burgers.”

“Just finish breakfast. Start defrosting the dogs. You’ll…wait a minute. What if…”

None of you really expect me to tell you exactly how I recovered the site do you? After all, if another bozo tries the same thing, I need something to give me an edge, don’t I?

Besides, the real purpose of writing this post is to try out the spankin’ new WordPress 3.2 before I upgrade all my other sites.

As the old saying goes, you can pwn some of the people some of the time, but you can’t help but love WordPress 3.2.

Today’s news is that Massachusetts has minted another new driver, who models her newly printed learner’s permit here.

Having thought through this process in detail in my mind, I realized she’d want to try the permit out as soon as possible — a scary thought for a driver who has never before been behind the wheel of 3000 lbs. of motorized metal. It’s even more frightening around here, where the appellation “masshole” applies to maybe three out of five drivers one encounters on the Commonwealth’s crumbling highways.

So, in a very effective bit of long-range planning, today was not the first time our new driver took the wheel. In fact, we’ve been practicing in parking lots for months. Simple stuff: getting set behind the wheel…where the controls are…turning left and right…stuff you shouldn’t have to learn the first time you are in traffic.

The results? This brand-spankin’-new driver was able to drive home from the Registry safely and almost perfectly.

It was with self-preservation in mind that I hit upon pre-permit practice sessions. But it worked perfectly. I recommend it to all parents with eager, inexperienced drivers.

BTW, am I alone in being shocked that the mandatory driver’s education class and road instruction costs $800?

Click to enlarge

It’s Memorial Day and a little rainy here, so I pulled out the iPad to catch up on tech news. And I stumbled on to a piece of proposed legislation that scared the bejesus out of me. The so-called PROTECT IP act (S.968), now fortunately placed on hold in the US Senate by the same senator who prevented the misbegotten COICA legislation from moving forward, is something every Internet user should know about.

First, you want to know about PROTECT IP in order to call your Congressmen and Congresswomen to tell them you believe this bill is dangerous and ill-advised. Second, you want to know about PROTECT IP because a collection of academics and DNS experts has written the most informative and compelling description of PROTECT IP and the DNS itself I’ve ever read. The document in opposition to PROTECT IP is written for legislators and staff, so it has a primer on DNS technology and makes this crucial — and vulnerable — component of the Internet accessible to even newbies.

If you use the Internet (how’d you get here?), you need to read the Ars Technica story on PROTECT IP and spend an hour with the experts’ whitepaper on DNS describing why PROTECT IP is such a mistake.

I’ve been hoping since the case was filed nearly two years ago that NY courts would do the right thing and force the gonifs at Charles Schwab to make restitution to the thousands of customers they lied to about the safety and liquidity of ARSs.

But frustration has begun to boil over due to the constant legal delaying tactics by Schwab in the case (click on the image to enlarge). Since at least April, 2010, Charles Schwab has used the courts to slow down justice by delaying a hearing on its own motion. It must be pretty obvious to its legal team that the motion to dismiss will be denied, so the next best thing is to never give the judge the chance to rule. (And think of the billable hours for Schwab’s laywers!)  The motion has been repeatedly rescheduled without a hearing (“adjourned” in legalese). If only normal people like me could afford to stave off judgement day like these thieves are able to.

In Schwab’s twisted logic,  its refusal to provide liquidity for its victims is an issue of “principle.” That is, it was only a transmitter of the toxic waste ARSs sold to trusting rubes like me. But it defies logic that any business can be “downstream” of offal and not smell it — or as in this case, bathe in it.

Schwab gladly sold me ARSs on Monday, February 18, 2008 — the day before the auctions collapsed completely — when it knew for certain the auctions had been in turmoil for weeks before. On that day, they were still telling me these ARSs were safe and liquid. They lied then; they are lying now. And there’s that smell in the air.

Now, they’ve not only retreated behind an alleged principle, they’re cynically preventing that principle from being tested in a court of law. My message to Schwab (I know you read this blog every time I post on this topic): stop hiding behind your lawyers’ skirts, man up and take the medicine. Your claim of “principle” is undone by your scorn and manipulation of the judicial process.

And we are mightily impressed with how she got to this point. She achieved academic honors with a GPA averaged over four years of classes, she worked part time to get experience starting in her first year, she spent an entire summer in an intensive externship and, in her last semester, she endured 168 hours of training by a preceptor.

When I was in college, I thought it was tough. But some programs today (especially nursing) are so competitive, students have no choice but to work their derrières off to be successful. Sarah exceeded even the most demanding requirements of her program.

She hopes to apply her skills in a major Boston teaching hospital, any one of which would be exceedingly lucky to have this smart, hard-working nurse on their staff.

Meanwhile, until her registration exams begin, she is decompressing at home, catching up on four years’ worth of movies, rediscovering waking up at noon and generally brightening the house. This is one of those moments when it’s great to be a parent…a time when the pride and joy of seeing your kid succeed is complete and total. Tricia and I don’t like to brag about our kids, but just this once, we can’t help ourselves.

Ok, I really need your help. You guys gotta help me figure out if I’m listening to the pop music equivalent of nearly extinct dinosaurs or if I am really hearing a vibrant revival of the music and bands of the 70′s and 80s. I need to know if it’s just me experiencing some kind of middle-aged regression to my adolescence or if there’s really a new vitality in the dinosaur bands of my youth.

In the last year, we’ve had astonishing releases from Devo, Hot Tuna, Paul Simon and as I write this, just today, the release of a new record from that most 80′s of Boston New Wave bands, The Cars. (It’s almost as if The Atlantics were playing Spit on a Saturday night and Tricia and I were getting decked out to dance off several liters of sweat.)

For the life of me, I can’t tell if I love this stuff because it’s really good or if I like it because it’s the sound of my youth. I’d like to think that I am a critical enough listener to know the difference. I’d like to think that I also listen to The Dandy Warhols, Alice in Chains, even Lady Gaga. That I am open to everything, including hip-hop (though I nearly fell out of my chair when Kanye sampled “21st Century Schizoid Man” for his track “Power”). I like bluegrass, country, even Tuvan throat-singing.

But I’ve been listening to Devo’s “Something for Everybody” for nearly a year. The music is superb, with the track “Human Rocket” among the most clever (and frightening) tracks they’ve ever written. If Devo was cool in the 80′s, why can’t they be in the 10′s? (I must admit that age has its price: I can’t stand watching Devo. Seeing 50-something guys like me with paunches doing robot dances in plastic clothes makes me feel sad and embarrassed for them.)

Yet as I listen to the The Cars’ “Blue Tip” I wonder if anyone else could wrap a commentary about media in a pop-synth beat with a final chorus you just gotta sing along with. Or if the guitar riff in “Free” could be done better by anybody in their 20′s.

I dunno — maybe I am rationalizing the whole thing — but these bands sound as vital to me 25 years on as they did when all I cared about was dancing myself into a stupor. In fact, I’d argue they are better than they were then…more mature, more cynical than they were in their earlier incarnations. Life’s knocks have only made their music even more interesting than it was when all we knew was pop narcissism.

But…still…it could be just a futile hope that these dinosaurs sound fresh and new to anyone but Boomers. Maybe it’s just the sound of an asteroid hitting Earth…the last blast before we all get blown away.

What really mystified me about the problem I am about to describe is the total lack of Google search results that describe this specific problem and potential solutions. There’s nary a hint of what I found, despite months of searching. My experience is that there’s always another heat-seeker out there who’s suffering the same issues I am and that guy has posted about it somewhere. This is the first time in years I wasn’t able to find a discussion or posting about my problem. Hopefully, Google will index this post for the rest of the world who seeks to use T-Mobile’s Android WiFi calling app with a Verizon FiOS Internet connection through Actiontec routers.

Last November, I upgraded the family to T-Mobile G2 smartphones. T-Mobile offers a WiFi calling app on these phones, I suppose as a tacit admission of their network’s failings. Our previous BlackBerrys had UMA calling which differs from the Android app only in the fact that UMA was supposed to automatically transfer calls from the cellular network to a WiFi hotspot. (It never worked.)

We have a Verizon FiOS 35Mbps symmetrical Internet connection. You’d imagine that would be fast enough for T-Mobile WiFi calling. But from the moment I tried to use WiFi calling on the G2 last fall, the sound quality was terrible, voice was choppy and calls would drop after a few seconds. It didn’t work well in other WiFi hotspots either.

Recently, I noticed that WiFi calling started working in public hotspots like those at McDonald’s. That made me wonder if T-Mobile had done something to their network in this area. So, I turned on the WiFi calling app on the FiOS connection and bam something different happened. Instead of connecting and not working, the app now returned a specific error: W006.15 ISP or T-Mobile network error. Now, instead of not working well, the WiFi calling app wouldn’t connect at all.

I actually welcomed this. The app was so useless and unreliable before and T-Mobile’s support was so lame, I was happy to have a hard error. At least that would give me plenty of Google searching to find the problem. But once again the searches were unsatisfying. Finally, I decided it had to be an issue with the Actiontec. I researched ports for UMA and VoIP and tried opening them on the Actiontec. No joy.

Then today, I came across this Wikipedia article on SIP ALG. Funny how a problem that persisted for months melted away in seconds when I finally found the right path. I dug into the advanced settings of the Actiontec and discovered its SIP ALG is disabled by default. Enabling it and restarting the router has resulted in crystal-clear WiFi calling on my T-Mobile G2 over Verizon FiOS. All this effort wouldn’t have been necessary had T-Mobile documented what the app requires. They ship the damn thing on the phone — they should at least post its technical and system requirements somewhere.

Here’s how to do it.

First, log into your Actiontec router. Then select the Advanced icon at the top and acknowledge the warning message. You should end up at a page similar to this one (click on the image to enlarge).

Then click on the SIP ALG link, highlighted in this screen shot.

Then, simply enable the SIP application-level gateway, as below. Reboot the router and enjoy WiFi calling from your T-Mobile Android phone over FiOS.

What I can’t get out of my head days after watching the film isn’t the somewhat maudlin triumph of Watanabe-san over his mortality. Rather, it’s how the film illuminates Japanese mores and a culture that — some 60 years later —  still reflexively sweeps issues under the rug and suppresses any individuality at all.

In the film, Watanabe-san is the ultimate bureaucrat, dispensing with the real concerns of people without looking up from his desk. His doctors lie to him about his cancer, despite his pleas for honesty. And, in the most astonishing scene of all — which consists of the last 30 minutes of the film — nobody speaks the truth at Watanabe-san’s wake until the big shots have left and they are all stinkin’ blind drunk on sake. Meanwhile, the family sits by stoically as increasingly drunken theory after theory finally gives way to the truth. In a collective stupor, everyone agrees to remember their epiphany tomorrow, only to immediate punish the one who holds on to that commitment.

If you want to know how it is possible that TEPCO wasn’t ready for the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, why the government at first didn’t tell more people to evacuate, why just today, finally, the government raised the level of the disaster to the maximum, why we will discover over time that much more radiation has been released than predicted, just watch this beautifully acted, stunningly photographed film.

Ikiru doesn’t look modern. The film has no special effects. It’s subtitled. It’s in black and white. But what it does do (in addition to being compelling on its face) is inadvertently and clearly explain the Japanese mindset to outsiders. That mindset is as powerful today as it was in post-war, occupied Japan. And it’s the reason that Japanese society is unable to face the reality of Fukushima Daiichi.

The message from 1952 is as cogent today as it must have been then: a society which systematically suppresses truth and individuality has only itself to blame for its inability to progress.

I hate Drupal

The first iteration of www.vuuch.com was in Drupal. That decision doesn’t count among the best we have made. Since last August, I’ve struggled to warm to Drupal. Today, I am coming out of the Drupal-hating closet to tell the world what a mess this system is. It’s impenetrable, unsupportable, slow, awkward, poorly architected and ugly. I’ve heard Acquia is doing well selling support — to paraphrase Homer, “Duh.”

Now, finally, we Drupal-bashers have the beginnings of a reaction. Check out this article by Tony Byrne titled “Don’t Get Run Over By Drupal.” It’s written from the perspective of an enterprise (for whom the Drupal mess can quickly become a festering cesspool) but it has the core element of truth that I needed to come clean. Byrne notes that Drupal is fashionable, like an iPhone. Lots of webmaster lemmings take their cues from fashion, but like a pair of too-high platform shoes from the 70′s, they are going to get hurt.

Me? I’m almost done with a new version of our website, a draft of which can be seen at wp.vuuch.com. “WP?” WordPress, baby. The bestest, coolest, fastest, easiest CMS of all.

If you, like me, have been sold auction rate securities by Charles Schwab, you know they have refused to buy them back or make good on them. You probably also know that in 2009, then New York Attorney General Cuomo filed suit against Charles Schwab for a long list of violations of securities laws. You might remember that Schwab tried (and failed) to get the case into Federal court where its arguments would have presumably found a more friendly hearing.

All of this information you would have had to piece together from the occasional news report (from a financial website or paper willing to risk the wrath of the principled financiers from San Francisco).

But I have recently discovered that the NY state Civil Supreme Court has made proceedings from this case available online and will automatically email you updates on the case. You can even read the filings in the case — which I strongly recommend.

These documents are tough sledding for non-lawyers, but buried in the filings is the logic Schwab is using to avoid doing the right thing (and what almost every other downstream seller of these toxic assets has done).

See for yourself the the real Schwab — the Charles Schwab disowning responsibility for ruining people and small businesses —  not the cuddly-talk-to-Chuck, we’re-your-pals Charles Schwab of the TV and newspaper commercials. Be sure not to miss the “memorandum of law” filed in August, 2010 by Schwab’s attorneys. This document lays out the arguments for Schwab’s motion (to be heard in February, 2011) for dismissing the case.

The NY courts website isn’t all that easy to use, but they get major props for putting everything online — giving important judicial proceedings like this light and air and making it possible for people like me to keep abreast of the case.

Here are some links and the all-important case number to enter into the eTrack system, once you have created a user id.

First, sign up for eTrack: http://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/webcivil/etrackLogin.

Next, go to Web Civil Supreme: http://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/webcivil/FCASMain

Select “index search” and enter case 453388/2009.

Then, click where indicated in this screenshot to open the case (click to see a larger image).

Finally, in the screen that pops up after selecting the case number, you can read documents filed in the case and, best of all, be notified by email of events (click for a larger image).

Let’s hope that the court in February is able to separate Schwab’s fallacious legal arguments from the overwhelming evidence of fraud contained in the original complaint and that the court will allow this case to proceed.

Oh, BTW, FINRA, where are YOU in all this? Still “investigating?”

I love gadgets. Just ask anyone who knows me. I’m the proverbial heat-seeker when it comes to electronics. And, as we close out 2010 and look forward to 2011, I got to thinking about all the gadgets I’ve used in 2010.

Just recently, the four of us in my family upgraded to Android smartphones (G2′s running Froyo). I have an iPad. I have last year’s hot toy, a netbook (with a “real” processor in it, a Core 2 Duo capable of running 64-bit Windows 7). I just got a Roku box. I have a simultaneous dual-band N-router connected to FiOS at 35Mbs symmetrical. I have a DSLR capable of 720p movies (though I did buy it a year too early as recent updates make it possible for DSLRs to autofocus in their video modes). In short,  I am blessed technologically.

But my favorite gadget this year is a throwback: my (relatively) new Lenovo T410 laptop. I know black laptops are oh-so-2005. I realize you can’t take the T410 out of your pocket and nonchalantly place it on the table at Starbucks to impress your friends. I understand how isolated the thing is without a GPS chip.

But all that pales in comparison to the sheer comfort of using a 14″ display and that ThinkPad keyboard. Every time I need to do something valuable — write a blog post or document, crunch numbers, read a PDF — I reach for the laptop. It’s fast and it makes creating and absorbing information a pleasure.

Sure, I use the iPad in bed to stream Netflix. Yes, I will use voice recognition on the G2 to look up a phone number. But Swype, as cool as it is, will never replace (at least for me) a real keyboard. Angry Birds is a blast — for about 10 minutes. Then, I long for a screen my aging eyes can see detail on.

The real difference between mobile devices and a sturdy laptop is the difference between being able to accomplish something more complex in “digital comfort”  versus straining to achieve it on a compromised, limited-function device. Smartphones captivate you — but they don’t really add to anyone’s digital literacy, if you ask me.

So, maybe I have become a technology Luddite, clinging to email and laptops, stuck forever in the mid-2000s.

Or maybe the same thing that pulls me back to the laptop when I need to do something that isn’t bite-sized or simple entertainment will overcome gadget lovers’ current infatuation with mobile devices.

2011: the year of the laptop?

We all have leisure activities, right? One of mine is to read the actual text of bills pending in Congress. Hey, I have an interest in the legislative process — and I submit you do, too.

The good news is the Library of Congress makes the full text and history of every Congressional action available online at www.thomas.gov. C-SPAN will occasionally refer viewers to the site as it broadcasts legislative debates. (And yes, I watch the debates, too.)

Think about this level of access. From the comfort of my home, I am able to watch legislators bloviate while perusing the actual text of the laws they are making. It’s live, instant, free — and free of journalistic “interpretation.” It’s source material for the body politic. It’s truly amazing.

The bad news? thomas.gov is impenetrable for the casual user. You need a degree in “Beltway” to be able to form a high-level understanding of a bill.

Consider H.R. 4853, the year-end tax bill that Congress is debating this week and which is center-stage at the moment in American politics. While everything is “there,” I defy you to gain an understanding of what the bill actually is from this link. thomas.gov gives you all the data — but in a disconnected, you-have-to-be-a-legislative-aide-to-use-the-website way.

We are so close with sites like thomas.gov to making the political process more accessible in ways that I believe fundamentally enhance our democracy. The Library of Congress needs to “bulk up” the website a little, Charles Atlas style, to get it over that last usability hump to make it accessible for the casual user.

Absolutely everyone in the media is talking about WikiLeaks.org’s publication of a stunning number of diplomatic cables from the far corners of the American diplomatic world.

There’s so much going on here, I don’t know where to begin. First, any student of American history has to be beside himself or herself with joy to have so much contemporaneous material available. No need to wait 30 years. History is here today. I’m reading and reading and reading…and learning and learning and learning.

The unauthorized distribution of these materials lays bare the conflict inside the government between the need to share information to make sure the left hand knows what the right is doing and the need for (at least some) secrecy. The Feds must have just put these things on a shared folder somewhere — it doesn’t sound to me like you needed to be a mega geek to download these files. Message to President Obama’s CIO: check out TrueCrypt.

Another thing going through my mind as I read the cables is, “Wow, we’re not as wimpy as I suspected we are.” I like it when I read we landed on the Chinese to pressure North Korea to behave or when we assert the Russian government is essentially a mafia state. Good for us!

But what worries me more than anything else is that the “embarrassment” of these cables being made public will create such a backlash inside the government that the First Amendment will be weakened. The obvious institutional response is to see the leaks as a “problem” and “criminal” rather than the First Amendment at work. That means Patriot Act-like legislation, rules and procedures to “tighten” access.

That will only have the perverse effect of further isolating the government from the body politic.

In today’s Boston Globe Magazine, Clifford Atiyeh’s “The Crusade Against Cars” tackles car lovers’ central dilemma today:

“Social responsibility” is the media topic du jour, the latest feel-good narcissism of those leading government, corporations, and other big-mouth organizations. Part of the idea is to give an appearance of top-down restraint – that it’s not OK for the CEO to upgrade his Gulfstream V while downsizing his company. In the auto world, social responsibility comes with good intentions – tougher federal fuel economy mandates, tighter emission controls – but for car lovers like me, it’s a sucker punch in the face.

In other words, it’s hard to be both “authentically” green and also love cars that aren’t.

Reading Atiyeh’s piece created a moment of synchronicity for me.

Just yesterday, I was at an undercarriage session of the Boston Chapter of the BMW Car Club. An “undercarriage session?”

Simple. You take your car to a BMW dealer who allows you into the shop to go over the car with one of their master mechanics. If, like me, you own a car that costs a fortune to maintain, the opportunity to have a master technician take a look at your car for free is like Prozac for budget anxiety.

The session was held in a newly reconstructed BMW dealership and, to put it mildly, the shop was beautiful. Brightly lit, spotless and odor-free, even with cars’ engines running.

I mentioned this to the tech who was giving my car the Nth degree and he said, “What don’t you see here?”

I was stumped. Turns out there were no exhaust hoses to connect to the tailpipes of running cars. None. Cars that are run in the shop empty emissions directly into the shop, which must have had 36 bays.

The tech explained that today’s cars are so clean that the building’s architects were able to design a single airflow system that moved enough fresh air through the shop to obviate the need for separate exhaust hoses. He also mentioned that OSHA and other government regulators had been there to verify the system was working and there wasn’t enough airborne pollution to harm anyone.

His explanation for how this was possible was simple. He told me that cars today — at least the new and late-model BMWs they work on there — just don’t produce enough pollution to necessitate a separate exhaust system.

Maybe instead of Atyieh’s defiant rejection of social responsibility all we need to do is lock a few greenies in a garage with 36 running BMWs.

OK, now that I’ve teed up a 50¢ word like “mendacity,” let me at least tell you what it means. Simply, someone is lying to you. And who hasn’t had the experience of being lied to persuasively?

Now, courtesy of researchers from Stanford and a story this morning on NPR that was so fascinating I almost ran into a tree, it seems that it’s possible just by listening to a CEO to tell when they are, uh, stretching the truth.

And while I knew what being mendacious meant, the story got me wondering how often I’ve been mislead by a CEO’s rosy outlook. Apparently, I — and many others — been suckered more than I ever thought possible.

I started work on a post two days ago that was tentatively titled “Hell Freezes Over: I Learn to Love Microsoft.” I didn’t get far because, as anyone who knows me knows, I have this thing against Microsoft: I am still smarting from the way they competed with Lotus in the 90′s. They were ruthless, cutthroat, aggressive, totally without ethics and, by universal acclaim, the least inventive technology company on the planet. Everything that was the basis of their success from the UI in Windows to their messaging technology they acquired or copied. Microsoft fanboys will argue differently, of course, but a careful listener will recognize a revisionist history in the making. I never got beyond the title of that post.

I was moved to consider such a blasphemy because, of late, MSFT is on a roll. Windows 7 is great. Office 2010 is great (though it’s been 10 years and Outlook’s bad copy of Lotus Notes 4.0′s views remains as impenetrable as ever…proof positive that when you slavishly copy design you don’t understand, you make a mess of it). Windows Live Essentials 2011 is great. IE 9 (buggy as it is — and as derivative of Chrome as it is) is going to be great.

These products are the best consumer software products you can get today because they have virtues found nowhere else today in consumer software technology: rigor in design, development and testing. MSFT has the resources to spend big on UI design. They have fleets of regression engineers to test every build. They have technical writers who make sure the products don’t ship until someone has written down what they do. A MSFT product today, no matter what you think of the origins of its technology, has superior “fit and finish.” Plus, Microsoft products today are arguably more secure than anything else simply because the company got tired of being the bad guy — and applied unimaginable levels of resources to improve.

And, I’ve been a fan of the Windows Weekly podcast with Paul Thurrott for a few years. Paul isn’t objective, but his advocacy of MSFT products is well-argued. And I respect someone who is an advocate but not a ho. If you listen, as I hope I do, with an open, but skeptical mind, Paul will rehabilitate your opinion of Microsoft. I don’t exactly forgive them for they way they got to where they are. But that was then…this is now. Today, the simple truth is non-techie people need reliable, well-designed and well-documented software that has been thoroughly tested. Google isn’t doing this. Have you ever tried the help system in Google Apps Premier? Apple products for Windows stink — and pointing out a flaw in them invites jihad.

So, I found myself trying to compose a paean to today’s MSFT, until I ran across this post from Thurrott’s blog about Windows Phone 7 ads. Microsoft is about to renter the smartphone business. Paul and Leo — and the rest of the MSFT-focused press community — have been banging the drum, hard. Thurrott has written a book about WP7. People are hot and heavy for any tidbit about Phone 7. So, when one of WP7′s biggest advocates wants to carry the new product’s marketing water by linking to leaked commercials for that product, what does MSFT do?

They get YouTube to take them down. Click on the image above to see how it looked on Thurott’s Phone 7 blog.

Let’s think it through: after spending big bucks producing what I presume are killer ads, some idiot in marketing — who doesn’t want to “spoil” their launch ad buys — decides that it just can’t happen that people could watch a commercial for their product before it officially launches.

This is woefully stupid — and classic Microsoft tone-deafness. If some shmoe like me wants to see a Windows Phone 7 commercial, why in God’s name wouldn’t they let me? Because they want to keep Windows Phone 7 a secret? This is going to help them build interest in the early adopter community? The free ad impressions will decrease the ultimate effectiveness of the ads? They will sell fewer phones because more people saw the ads?

This is the kind of marketing idiocy — slavishly adhering to some artificial schedule just because they have one — that reprises their fundamental lack of creativity.  Only MSFT could fail to see what a mistake it is to limit access to its own marketing messages. Only they could sap momentum for a new product before it launches. They’re probably sitting around the table talking about how to create Windows Phone 7 “mojo” without knowing they’ve killed it a little. Who wants to bet that marketing team will get a raise and some more restricted shares? (Full disclosure: like others stockholders in pain, it kills me to see MSFT stock stagnant. And yes, I’ve owned MSFT for years.)

So, after all these years, I get my cake and get to eat it, too. I get good products — and I can hold on to my grudge.

Thanks, Microsoft.

Geesh…it’s been a long time since I’ve written for my personal blog. The muse left me…for a bunch of reasons. But, she may be back as I felt a strong urge to write about a controversy that matters to…just about nobody.

I am a huge fan of hyper-local blogging. It’s everything local newspapers can’t be: opinionated, accidentally compelling and useful. Here in Southborough, we have two hyper-local blogs, the better of which (IMHO) is www.mysouthborough.com.

In a demonstration of the power of hyper-local blogs, mysouthbourough.com is covering St. Mark’s decision to allow a portion of its property to lie fallow, or as St. Mark’s has put it, become a “sustainable meadow.” And the comments on this blog post show that it’s as easy for whole communities to talk past each other as it is for us to do so one-on-one.

As a local who has one child who went to Southborough public schools and another currently at St. Mark’s, I’ve participated in both communities. And it’s always amazed me how completely tone deaf each side is to the other’s concerns.

For its part, St. Mark’s seems to be unaware that their “meadow” is at the exact center of town, making it highly visible to everyone. Bottom line: it’s fugly to have a partially-fallow athletic field at the intersection of the main north-south and east-west roads in town.

How could St. Mark’s slap this “meadow” right-up-side-the-head of the locals? Simple: from the perspective of St. Marks’, it’s in the “back.” It’s far away, relatively speaking, from the action on campus. St. Mark’s people don’t see the “meadow” on the way to and from classes…or to and from West…or to and from most of the other athletic fields. I am not sure how many Southborough residents have ever seen Southborough from inside St. Marks’, but I assure you, the view is very different. What’s right in the locals’ faces is on the periphery at St. Mark’s.

On the town side, the same old invective — “We pay for all their services…and they send their teachers’ kids to the public schools” — is equally tone deaf. There’s a long-standing resentment I’ve seen and heard from my experience on town committees and boards that is endemic. When we moved here in the early 1990′s, I distinctly remember the builder of my home telling me how his parents used to “wash the St. Mark’s kids’ clothes” as if Southborough was indentured to the private schools located here.

Well, we have to get over it. St. Mark’s staff pays their taxes like everyone else. And plenty of public school funding and town revenue comes from sources other than the property tax. I understand the importance of the property tax to town revenues. But it’s just red-meat propaganda to suggest that these families are getting a totally free ride for local services. The comments on mysouthborough.com would have you think that the town’s private schools are here specifically to freeload on the rest of us.

I am not calling for kumbaya. That ain’t gonna happen. Mostly, I am amused that there’s so much passion over an unmowed piece of lawn. And that it might become another excuse for us to talk past each other.

Have you ever had a problem with a huge company that tries to “make you go away” by stonewalling and ignoring you? That’s what Charles Schwab has been trying to do since it sold me auction rate securities in 2008 on the day before markets froze. They had to have known when they took the order that these things weren’t liquid and safe, the two reasons they sold them to me in the first place. They were happy to take the order then…but today they, alone among retail brokers, have refused to make good on the ARSs they sold to conservative investors like me.

I have been using this blog (see my previous posts) and the interest of reporters to make my displeasure public.

Beth Healy of the Boston Globe missed the irony of Massachusetts residents lending the state money for the Big Dig and not being able to get it back by pointing out that the state “saved” money by not calling the notes.  Healy asserts, “…regulators say they’ve done all they can to help.”

Uh, no, not quite. I’ve never received a single response to repeated inquires to the governor, the secretary of state, the attorney general, my local representative and, above all, the source of these ARSs, the treasurer’s office. Why the silence? Simple: it would be too embarrassing for the politically ambitious Treasurer Cahill to force Schwab to settle. And no state department is going to make another department look bad. AG Coakley can get headlines for pursing fraud from just about any company. Why expose the shady dealings the state itself engages in?

Still, Schwab hated that Globe story enough to send me a letter terminating my accounts. No problem, guys, I was happy to leave.

So, you might think, why not complain to the SEC and to Wall Street’s “self-regulator,” the Financial Industry Regulatory Agency (FINRA)? I have, of course. In 2008 I filed complaints with both agencies. How’d that work out?

Just as you might expect. We all know how well the SEC has done at protecting people from Madoff, Stanford and CDOs. With so many larger fish to pry off the hook, paying no attention at all to individual investors stuck in ARSs is a natch.

And FINRA, known as Wall Street’s favorite regulator, actually contributed its former boss, Mary Schapiro, to the helm of the SEC. Miraculously, after years of doing nothing to protect the little guy at FINRA, Ms. Schapiro apparently grew a pair just in time for her confirmation hearings. Just saying you are for strong consumer protection is, I guess, enough to assure congressional committees you should run an agency we now know was dysfunctional.

Still, FINRA — like Schwab — is listening to the political discourse and is maybe (finally) rubbed a little raw by the attention their abject failures have generated. When Jed Horowitz of Investment News wrote about the lack of action in New York’s suit against Schwab, something must have clicked at FINRA headquarters.

A week or so after Horowitz’s article, I got a call from FINRA. I assume the timing wasn’t accidental. They probably hoped to convince me to shut up, at least for another year or two until they find a way to exonerate Schwab or the whole thing blows over.

They wanted me to know they were “actively engaged” and they’d “made progress.” They couldn’t say what, if anything, they actually plan to do. Or when, if ever, they plan to do whatever they decide they are going to do.

While Congress debates partially re-regulating Wall Street, the simple fact is that the entire industry is morally bankrupt and the interests of the country have been repeatedly subjugated to the greed of the industry. Worse, regulators, such as they are, are victims of “regulatory capture.” Even if FINRA wasn’t designed as Schwab’s concubine, it has willingly become one. Schwab asks, FINRA dances.

Well, the political battle of the (still young) century is over. And, despite the ugly fear mongering of the Republicans — and the very sad racial and homophobic epithets tossed at members of Congress this weekend during the final debate by “Tea Party” activists — the country has shown some political spine and done the right thing.

You’d expect me to have been, like the crazies on the right, apoplectic about the proposed changes to health care. Simply, I am a winner in the current system. I actually have a choice of excellent, affordable group coverage for me and my family through either my wife’s employer or mine.

My taxes will go up: I will have to pay Medicare taxes on unearned income. We won’t get a dime in government subsidies to buy insurance. Because we live in Massachusetts, I suspect the Cadillac tax will eventually hit us as well.

So, why am I pleased at the prospect of real, fundamental, systemic change in health care? Two simple reasons. First, even as a winner in the current system, I can tell you it’s broken, busted, kaput and will bankrupt us. Check this out: I went to see a doctor in my network. Six weeks later, I was checking claims online for another reason and noticed the insurance company had paid thousands for an office surgical procedure I didn’t have on that date. I called the insurance company who wanted me to have to call the doctor’s office and get them to fix it. Sorry, but I took the time to try and fix it by calling the insurance company, who effectively admitted to me that there’s so much waste and confusion in the system that unless I personally undertook to fix it, it would cost them more than they could recover to do it themselves.

Second, anything can happen. Today, I am a winner. Tomorrow, I could be destitute. I am willing to pay more now to make sure that when and if the bottom of my life falls out, I could still get medical help. It just seems so basic, so fundamental to life in a civilized country that I am astonished it took 100 years and (probably) will destroy the Obama presidency. One thing I am certain of: without this reform, if the worst were to happen, it would easy to die indigent — a terrible way to go after a lifetime of work and taxes.

Bottom line, this was about fairness to people.

It’s no secret I’m angry at Charles Schwab (here and here). And they don’t like me back. In fact, they’ve “fired me,” sending me a letter terminating my accounts with them in February. (What was it, guys? The blog posts? The Boston Globe story? Did I offend you by insisting that you send me written terms for the “loan” you wanted me to take on these bonds? No matter…when the state of New York whoops your ass in court, you’re still gonna have to settle with me.)

Let’s review: Schwab sold me Massachusetts auction-rate securities underwritten by Goldman Sachs, promising safety and liquidity, but never sent me a single document that described the bonds as ARSs, much less described the auction process and the possibility of them becoming illiquid. Then it sat by while the auctions tanked in 2008 and instead of settling, blamed everyone else for their lies and deceptions.

Worse, when Goldman Sachs settled with its customers who bought these ARSs directly from them, Schwab — alone among downstream sellers — decided not to do the right thing for its customers. They were “not responsible.” They were “just the middle man.” Instead, Schwab decided to manufacture a pile of principles (or what’s really just a pile of you-know-what) that’s convenient for their bottom line.

So you can imagine I search for every bit of news about New York State Attorney General Mario Cuomo’s suit against Schwab and try to follow its progress closely.

And just a week or so ago, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York crushed Schwab’s legal hopes of moving the NY AG’s suit to a federal court. I’ll bet the legal team’s dreams that the judge would move the case to federal court went something like this: “Let’s go for a Bush-era appointee on the Federal bench. You know, a business-friendly Bushie who believes caveat emptor means ‘go ahead and steal from the rubes and we’ll cover for you.’ We gotta shop around, because that NY AG has got us by the you-know-whats with the Martin Act and those recordings of us lying to customers. Unless we can turn this into a case about something other than what we actually did, we’re gonna lose.”

Interestingly, the judge’s decision was based on a fascinating legal concept going back to the Constitution: “diversity of citizenship.” As the linked explanation notes, the framers were concerned about bias when a state court heard a case made up solely of its citizens who sued solely citizens of other states. IOW, if people in Massachusetts could sue in Mass. court those carpet-baggin’ brokers from California, what Mass. judge wouldn’t favor folks from his or her own state?

Well, my former friends at Charles Schwab, your arguments against remand to state court apparently didn’t cut too much mustard with the feds. You’re right back in state court, the AG’s home field. And there I hope you’ll get the shellacking you so richly deserve for treating me and other small-fry investors like lemons to be squeezed dry.

As the judge who remanded the case back to state court wrote in the decision (a full copy of which is attached below):

“[T]he purpose of seeking this wide-ranging relief is not merely to vindicate the interests of a few private parties. Rather, it is to take a step toward eliminating fraudulent and deceptive business practices in the marketplace…The State’s goal of securing an honest marketplace in which to transact business is a quasi-sovereign interest. It is completely understandable that a state should…seek to prevent the recurrence of harmful conduct in the future and to remedy the damage it has caused in the past.

Here’s the ad she’s running ad nauseum:

Each time I see it, it rings less and less true, based on my direct experience.

The claims about getting “$1B back from banks” conveniently leave out the fact that the Mass. AG’s office left thousands of small-fry holders of ARSs high and dry in the Commonwealth’s settlement with the banks. She got her press conference announcing a settlement…freeing the AG, the Treasurer’s Office and the banks to get back to business as usual. And the claims of accountability don’t match up with the fact that nobody from her office has ever returned my calls or a letter about this in nearly two years.

Madame Attorney General, isn’t it time, as you say in your ads, that you or someone in your office responds to retail customers’ frozen ARSs? (On the off chance you didn’t see my letter from December, 2008, I’ve attached it to this post.) Isn’t it time for you to stop claiming you’re for the little guy when your office cut deals with Goldman Sachs and UBS that left us out in the cold?

There’s at least one voter in the Commonwealth who knows what the AG’s brand of accountability will mean.

And, no, I am not a Republican.

How embarrassed must HP be with QA being done by a white person and a black person in front of a retail display of the product?

I love to eat. I can’t cook. Even microwaved Velveeta on Ritz is well beyond my gastronomic capabilities. I am quite content to sit at home all day Sunday, watch football all day and consume embarrassingly large quantities of things the FDA has no labeling standards for.

Still, I have a lot of respect for “foodie” culture, which prizes organic, sustainable and locally-produced food. So, I am very pleased to recommend a new blog, http://www.seasonalfeast.com, written by my colleague, Sonal Rajan (get it…”See Sonal feast?”) which is off to a great start with mouth-watering new recipes for things I could only dream of being able to make.

So, Sonal, any time you wanna freeze some of that stuff for me for the next Patriots home game…

Well, growing a business ethically continues to defy Bank of America. First, it duped shareholders by concealing girnormous losses at Merrill-Lynch last year — then it agreed to paying ML’s brokers astronomical bonuses, all apparently in exchange for an extra $50B in TARP funding.

Next, it pissed off a Federal judge who wouldn’t let BofA off the hook for the ML debacle. The judge simply refused to approve a sweetheart settlement.

Now, its CEO is leaving early…much to the relief of taxpayers, shareholders and John Thain (who’s looking for a new office to redecorate for millions of dollars). And, worst of all from BofA’s perspective, slamming credit card customers is going to be much harder next year because Congress passed new, long-overdue credit card regulations.

So, I guess it’s no surprise that BofA’s marketing is as ham-handed and tin-eared as the rest of the company. Consider this: the well-known WalletBlog has taken Bank of America to task for misleading customers and congressmen on credit card charges. First, Bank of America said it wouldn’t increase fees; then it announced it will. When WalletBlog pointed this out, they got a call from BofA corporate communications, trying to explain how a fee increase isn’t a fee increase by using Clintonesque parsing of words like “pricing.”

OK, so I don’t begrudge a PR type arguing strict meanings with bloggers; they have lawyers who can assure them that the plain meaning of their promise to not raise fees — what normal people understand — doesn’t count…that it’s OK to write a letter to legislators that sounds like a commitment, then decide to do what they really want to: fleece people.

But what shows how completely off the planet BofA is…how tin-eared they are…is their request to WalletBlog to lay off:

Naturally, at the end of our call, Bank of America asked that we stop circulating our blog post from last week. But we’re going to hold off on that until they provide the public with some clearer answers. The more digging we do, the more it seems like Bank of America should be taken to task. And it’s possible that we’ve just cracked the surface.

Anyone with half a day’s experience in press relations knows you never ask a writer, blogger or journalist to retract a story in the absence of factual errors. It’s guaranteed to produce exactly what this did: a mention of your arrogance along with an enhanced determination to keep the story going.

Would BofA have asked the Wall Street Journal to recall copies of the paper with a story it didn’t like? How about asking MSNBC to stop talking about a story like this? No…it’s only because the fool who called WalletBlog thinks less of new media — that it can be more easily controlled — that he or she asked WalletBlog to quash the story. It’s emblematic of problems not just in the risk management side of BofA, but throughout the entire bank.

My message to the WalletBlog: keep it up and don’t ever consider retracting something because some corp comm hack who thinks you’re unimportant asks you to leave them alone.

Dear Chairman Steele,

Last November, I made a $25 contribution to your party’s candidate. I also made a $25 contribution to the Obama campaign. Then, I wasn’t sure who would have been the better president.

Now, after months and months of non-stop invective from you and your party against President Obama, I am sure I did the right thing in voting for Obama.

Let me get something off my chest: when I gave you my contribution I asked you not to send me email…not to call me at home…not to keep sending me the vile propaganda and lies via snail mail that you are now sending at least twice a week. (We’ll get to the “survey” I’ve attached to this post in just a minute). I made the same request of the Obama campaign. They honored my request; you and your party of naysayers and obstructionists have not.

Instead, you keep sending me items like the “survey” I’ve scanned in and attached to this post. Maybe you thought that you could make wild claims like the one that the current administration is issuing “radical environmental regulations based on unproven theories and the demands of out of-touch left wing extremists.” Or maybe that some misguided Republicans might be pleased that your politicians “…have successfully blocked or amended many of their most radical proposals” while proposing and contributing nothing to the debate.

I get it…I really do. Negative works. Calling everyone names…calling their mothers nasty names…works better than actually governing…being a loyal opposition…contributing to the greater weal. Instead, for your party everything the other party does is wrong; only you can solve problems like Wall Street’s greed, a war based on lies and a sunken economy. Oh…I forgot. For those, we have Republicans to thank. As President Bush said, “Mission accomplished.”

I hope everyone reading this post takes a look at the “survey” you sent me. C’mon…do you think your voters are idiots? These questions are one-sided and are like waving the red flag at a bull. All you want is money…and if you piss people off at government…make them feel it’s working against them, so much the better for you and your power-hungry Senators (and so much the worst for us).

It’s too hard to pick the most egregious of the 19 questions on this “survey.” Clearly, you don’t give a damn about what people think…you just want them to read this, get angry and send you money. Still, what’s the point of a question like #16 (Are you in favor of the federal government taking a permanent ownership stake in the nation’s largest banks)? Aren’t Citibank and AIG dying to pay back TARP funds so they can get back to ripping off investors without government oversight? Didn’t the taxpayers line Goldman Sachs’s pockets with credit-default swap payments via AIG’s bailout? Isn’t it enough for you that Wall Street is too big to fail while the rest of us aren’t?

Seriously, Chairman Steele, if you want people to consider Republicans to be capable of running the country, start by working with the current administration to fix the problems we have. Next, admit to the failed policies of eight years of the Bush administration…including torture, warmongering and being asleep at the economic switch.

And please, please stop sending me twice-weekly appeals for money disguised as the worst kind of pandering direct mail.

Yup, I am back to some tried-and-true marketing tactics: poke the opponent in the eye using humor and rely on the power of community. What is new this time is how effective social media has been in helping create buzz about this stunt before we even pull it off.

If you are in SF next week, please do join us at the party. Remember to bring along photos and/or videos of the stunt for the competition.

Update October 21, 2009: It was a massive success. Check out the hi-jinks here

Well, this is one of those times when the government acts and you get to chose your reaction. On the one hand, the emergence of the ‘net as the definitive source of reviews for everything from software to celery has become a bonanza for the shills of the world who review products for filthy lucre and who pretend or obscure that they’ve been bought.

On the other hand, while advertising isn’t a protected form of free speech, it’s sad that we need government intervention limiting speech to prevent these people from preying on grandma’s Google search for cookie dough.

Into this fray steps the FTC with new rules to take effect in December, 2009. (I’ve attached a PDF of the new rules to this post for your convenience.)

You can see the rules struggling to keep up with new and social media. That, in itself, is an interesting commentary on how technological innovation always outstrips government’s ability to keep pace, much less anticipate the impact of technological change. Consider this heavily parsed defintiion from the rules:

An advertiser’s lack of control over the specific statement made via these new forms of consumer-generated media would not automatically disqualify that statement from being deemed an “endorsement” within the meaning of the Guides….Thus, a consumer who purchases a product with his or her own money and praises it on a personal blog or on an electronic message board will not be deemed to be providing an endorsement.

In contrast, postings by a blogger who is paid to speak about an advertiser’s product will be covered by the Guides, regardless of whether the blogger is paid directly by the marketer itself or by a third party on behalf of the marketer.

…For example, a blogger could receive merchandise from a marketer with a request to review it, but with no compensation paid other than the value of the product itself. In this situation, whether or not any positive statement the blogger posts would be deemed an “endorsement” within the meaning of the Guides would depend on, among other things, the value of that product, and on whether the blogger routinely receives such requests.

You all clear on that now?

Now it seems that the best the new chairman of General Telephone and Motors, Ed Whitacre, brings to the mix is a reprieve of the desperation move Lee Iococca made when Chrysler emerged from one of its routine trips through bankruptcy court. Let’s take a look at the embarrassing result of Whitacre’s reported directive to create a massive new taxpayer-funded marketing program to get back market share. If this represents the best marketing the “new” GM can muster, I want my $60 billion back.

The real question is, what if you really did want to take advantage of this “guarantee” to drive, say a new-generation Corsica…er…Malibu or you have forgotten that the F-platform Camaros competed with Yugos in the cellar of the quality ratings and you wanted a new one. What if a retread executive from, of all places, AT&T, convinced you that you really could get your money back if you didn’t like the bucket of bolts the polyester clad, red-faced liar at the local dealer sold you? What would that be like?

It would be something like this and this:

• You have to keep the thing at least 30 days — get this, called the “vesting period.” Amused yet? Yeah, they think they’re building equity with you during this period
• You don’t get back those noxious “fees” GM’s dealers charge you to process paperwork (hey…maybe restaurants will start charging separately for the water they wash dishes in and the paper they write the check on)
• Did you take a loan to buy your new lemon? The interest is — you got it — on your nickel
• No leases need apply
• What do you actually have to do to return the thing? Simple: return it to the dealer — who’s absolutely going to want to see you — and fill out a bunch of paperwork, including “any…documentation GM or the Administrator may reasonably request.”

Bottom line, GM is right back where it was…misleading people instead of building cars people want. As I once heard someone say, same circus, different clowns.

9/ 16 update: You gotta read…and I mean you gotta read TTAC’s post that details the dealers’ terms and conditions on this program. Check out #7. Dealers now have an incentive to sell you the car for close to MSRP…then buy it back at 67% (2009 models) or 74% of MSRP (2010 models), pocket the bogus fees they tacked on to the original sale, pocket another $1000 for their trouble, then resell the car your kid vomited on the carpet in and which you used to pull parking meters up and in which the upholstery was an ashtray to the next dupe for as much as the floor salesman can extract.

Geez…if this is GM insisting that its dealers treat customers better, I’d hate to see what’d happen if they declared open season on Grandma.

Drivers on the Pike have long been deserving of the appellation “Masshole” — you can’t believe what I’ve seen people doing.

They eat, they sing, they use bedpans, they trim their nails…heck, they even paint their nails, they throw things at you, they drive winter “beatahs” so they can dare you to slam into them when they cut you off at 90MPH to get onto 128.

But nothing has scared me more in the last few years than watching Betty in her Hummer SUT and Bob in his Escalade texting. They text with one hand…they text with both hands. They take cell phone photos of themselves cutting people off, then they text the pix to family members with a “woot.”  They text while they are painting their nails.

Now, finally, there’s a YouTube video for them, that should be required viewing before being issued a Fast Lane transponder:

It felt so good to unload two weeks ago on Charles Schwab for lying about the safety and liquidity of auction-rate securities they sold me. Blogging as catharsis is underrated, especially if you have as much tied up as I do in these now illiquid ARSs. As I pointed out in my previous post, just about every other firm else has settled, but not Schwab. No, they blame everyone else — the underwriters, the customers and, now, even the New York attorney general.

Today, the big news is that the New York State Attorney General is making good on the threat to file suit. This welcome but not-unexpected turn of events gives me not only another chance to vent against Schwab, but also for the first time to document that I wasn’t the only customer they lied to.

Today, the Wall Street Journal has published excerpts of what the lies the brokers told customers. Check out some of what they told people:

Customer from Massapequa, N.Y. Customer: “You know, I’m not trying to make a ton of money. I just want to play it safe.”
Broker: “Understood.” …
Broker: “When you go to get out of this, even though you tell the rep sell it that means you want to stop the auction. The hardest part of this auction is getting into it. That is the tough part. Getting out of it is easy as just selling.”

Customer from Seaford, N.Y. Customer: “I can just get out every 7 days?”
Broker: “That’s right.”
Customer: “I can just give you 7 days and don’t renew and you put the money back in my account?”
Broker: “That’s correct.”

Customer from Remsenburg, N.Y. Customer: “It is some kind of short term muni-based piece of paper used as an alternative to [a] money market.”.
Customer: “So that is better than what I am getting?”
Broker: “Yeah, yeah. It is better than saving in the money market at the moment.”
Broker: “You pick up about 50 to 60 basis points over what you would get in a money market, and what you are giving up is next day liquidity.
Customer: “OK. I can adjust it by $100k amounts every week?”
Broker: “In terms of if you wanna get out?”
Customer: “Yeah.”
Broker: “Yeah.”
Customer: “I’ll know a week ahead of time if I wanna make a big investment.”

Customer from New Hyde Park, N.Y.
Broker: “And it’ll roll over monthly unless you call me and say, ‘Hey [Broker], don’t roll it over anymore.’”
Customer: “Oh, I see. OK.”
Broker: “And then next month I’ll stop the auction and all the cash will come back to your account.”
Customer: “OK, [Broker], thank you.”

Customer — location unidentified Customer: “Well I need the liquidity because I may buy a house soon.
Broker: “I see.”
Customer: “I sold my house and this is money that’s just there temporarily.”
Broker: “instead of looking for the highest yield, I would personally look at the highest security. And that would be my second thing. And probably periodic auction rate securities. That would work better than any bond mutual funds for you. That’s my humble opinion.”
Customer: “OK. And it would be safer?”
Broker: “It would be much, much safer, for sure.”

Assurances like these are what lead me to invest money. Schwab brokers delivered these same lies to me.

What’s Schwab’s response to this news? Well, they issued a press release this morning, saying, in essence, “Not our fault…not our problem…all those customers we talked to about safety and liquidity can schove it. We ain’t schettleing.”

The short version of a long story is that Charles Schwab sold me auction-rate securities, promising liquidity, then stonewalled me when the market disappeared for the ARSs. Meanwhile, every other firm on the planet — and I mean every one – made their clients whole. Goldman Sachs, the auction agent for the ARSs I bought: settled. Fidelity: settled. BofA: settled. TD Ameritrade (late of zero-doc mortgage loan fame): settled.

You can only imagine the lengths I’ve gone to to try to bring this to the attention of regulators. I’ve spoken to regulators in Massachusetts (the issuer of the ARS I bought, the proceeds of which were used to finance the Big Dig), Illinois, and last summer, New York.

I’ve written letters…called representatives…filed complaints with FINRA (famous for being the securities industry’s favorite regulator and the former home of the new SEC chairman. Buy lots of empty mattresses as long as these people are protecting you).

I clearly remember the conversation I had with the NY AG’s office last year. They “got it” but when nothing happened for months, I assumed that office, like all the others I had implored, had moved on to more newsworthy pursuits. Like compensation at AIG and why Lehman Brothers’ collapse was good for the candle-making industry.

Then, finally — finally! – last week, the New York State Attorney General — from among all the attorneys general in the country who were beating their chests about protecting investors last year — sent Charles Schwab a demand letter (attached below).

Charles Schlemeil had convinced themselves they hadn’t lied…they hadn’t stolen my money…that it was those nasty Wall Street firms who were at fault when the ARS auctions tanked. “We’re not the bad guys,” they claimed. “We just sold these things ‘downstream.’ We don’t have anything at all to apologize for or make good on.” Schwab stood on principle! It was a victim, too!

Principle, shminsciple. Now that the NY AG is onto them, they’re talking about how much it’ll cost them to hold off the litigation and whether or not that’s a better deal for them than paying up. This was always a calculation of cost and until now it simply cost those bozos-in-$900-suits less to stonewall than to pay up. When nobody appeared to care, it was easy to argue principle.

Yes, I’m upset that I can’t get to my money…that Schwab lied to me…that talking to Chuck turned out to be talking to a wall. That Schwab is full of schit when it comes to doing the right thing — what everyone else did — for their clients.  But mostly, I was unhappy that in the face of such obvious avarice and fraud, none of the responsible regulators did anything about it. One nastygram like this was all I was looking for…and now that my home state AG has sent it, it’s only a matter of time until Charles Schwab capitulates.

But until then, I am anticipating the pound of flesh the NY AG will extract from Schwab and grateful to my fellow Noo Yawkers for stickin’ with it for us little guys.

Well, I’ve just read a blog post from zug.com called “The Verizon Prank” in which John Hargrave risks big dogs and angry neighbors to make a point I wish more people were concerned about: lax privacy controls. Maybe we have the beginning of a new meme: Hargrave standing outside Verizon’s CEO’s home with the amp on 11 yelling, “Can you hear me NOW??”

My kids often ask why I object to signing pin pads at checkout lines. Simple, I tell them. Would you like to have your signature digitized and placed on orders for everything from stocks to cellphones? Wouldn’t care for that, they say.

But that fuzzy “privacy stuff” is protected, they protest. We live in public on Facebook and Twitter (and I don’t?)…we don’t worry about privacy.

The upbrading from my kids helps the confused cashier who thinks I am a nut and who can’t restart the transaction…yes, the pimply dude will say, your kid is right. Trust [TJMaxx, Wal-Mart, Exxon, Sears, L.L. Bean, the corner spa, the library] to protect your information. Like your lovely daughter there (lascivious glances at my tender young kids!), I trust [Gulf Oil, Toyota, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Charles Schwab, the IRS] with anything they want to store about me.

Not me. I remain very skeptical. And, after you finish laughing your ass off at this video, you should become more skeptical, too.

On the off-chance you haven’t heard about amazon.com erasing Orwell novels from Kindle users’ devices, here’s the coverage from nytimes.com.

You really have to congratulate amazon.com for creating new levels of nested metaphor. My Room 101 isn’t rats: it’s DRM.

Coffee lovers often talk about the “blend” — a mystical combination of the beans, the roasting and the infusion of hot water that delivers whatever it is coffee addicts see in their poison. (I just see mud.)

In high tech marketing, the “blend” is everything. You gotta have creativity… you gotta have authenticity…and given that small tech startups are either a) a completely new idea and/or b) trying to unseat titans, you gotta have balls to make your point. Big ones.

And my friends at currensee.com have ‘em. Watch this video. In just 1:02, you get it all in the blend. The beans (what currensee.com is), the roasting (it’s a social network for currency traders) and the infusion of…well…tush into the blend. If you don’t smile — and then head right over to the site — it’s definitely your problem.

My hat’s off to Dave and Michelle for ignoring all the reasons marketers come up with not to stand out and delivering their message (make more money trading money with a group) with a liberal dose of authenticity and humor.

Now…don’t spend too long replaying the end of this video, even if nobody’s watching you.

This is going to be a short and badly written blog post. It’s devoid of content. It has no theme. It really won’t make that much sense.

I’m trying to expunge a serious case of writer’s block by — what else — writing about it. And I’ve been cursed at the worst possible moment.

I need to write several press releases and can’t. I need to edit collateral. I can’t. I want to update several web pages. I’d better not. I composed a PowerPoint for an analyst this morning. It stinks.

A colleague I was talking with said I needed a “rest.” I’m not sure if she means I’m over the hill or tired. No matter. I’m not fit to write about it.

But at least I know what caused this blockage (if not how long it’ll last). I was searching for images today and came across the most revolting blog post of all time. If this doesn’t “stop you up” then nothing will.

This is post is for all my colleagues in the marketing biz. I want to tell you that we collectively destroyed email.

What did we do that was truly stupid?

Simple: we have so overdone email that now it’s useless for all of us. Have you noticed that no matter what you do — text or HTML, links at the top or bottom, a great discount offer or the promise of everlasting life — your response rates have gone down? Have you noticed that no matter what “marketing automation” system you track email with that since 2005 your response rates have declined from whole percentage points to basis points today? (A basis point is 1/100th of a percentage point. They’re used to track minute changes in bond rates.)

Marketing programs that decline this precipitously this quickly do so only because we have completely overwhelmed consumers and they can’t take it any more. They’re the ultimate marketing failure: one hand clapping in an empty auditorium.

We don’t seem to remember how resistant we all were at first. We didn’t believe you could sell lumps of coal via email blasts. “Our audience doesn’t have email…and won’t ever get email.” Remember that? But, of course, that 55-year-old CFO and that aircraft mechanic and that Mom at home with stinky diapers all got email. So, what did we do?

First, those of us in big companies spent too much on email (because you can’t help yourself and you were afraid of missing the boat), driving CPMs out of reach. Next, we “institutionalized” email…added people whose only job is to generate email blasts. We linked it to our CRM systems…we became “email experts.”

Because we’d spent real money on people and systems, we needed to measure what we were doing. So, of course, we needed “infrastructure” like Eloqua, Vertical Response and Constant Contact to manage it all. And the (physical) direct mail industry needed a place to go because we had previously crapped up direct mail, so guess where they went…with all their “direct marketing science” and purportedly effective techniques.

Having built a hugely expensive house of cards around email, we forgot one thing: anyone can send email because the Internet made it essentially free. While we were adding cost to email and being profligate to boot, the spammers discovered that basis points of response can impact US dollar flows into Nigeria. We encouraged the spammers, actually gave them the idea, while they laughed at us for “systematizing” it and making it a “core marketing practice.” Any fool can write a good email and find 10K people to send it to. Between us and the spammers, there’s not an iota of tolerance left in anyone for more email pitches.

Worse, the customer service people decided email — along with out-sourcing call centers to India — would be the ideal way to reduce costs (and, incidentally, ensure that artificial measurements of responsiveness replace actually talking to customers).

Now, we have all the people, tools and expense…and it’s all worthless. Pay-per-click and search-engine-optimization are now nearly ruined as marketing programs as well. (Is anyone paying less per conversion?) And that same weak, lemming-herding instinct is all over social media (which already has enough corporate Twitter feeds to tempt a new generation of spammers).

Creativity still counts. Someone will think of something clever soon…and then have to stand back and watch the masses of marketing experts foul it up as well.

After over three years of blogging, I am officially nonplussed.

But I gotta say, this video has four minutes of the most spectacular drifting I have ever seen. “Oooo!,” you’ll say when you see Ken Block smash the fluorescent lights. “Whoa!,” you’ll shout when he slams the driver’s rear wheel into the water balloon in the hand of a dummy (which is seated comfortably in a folding chair). And you’ll be outta your seat when your see Block slam out of a doorway and drift clockwise to within inches of the edge of a dock.

(But what’s up with the paint-ball stuff? Does the shooter celebrate because he hit the car or because he just lives to shoot again?)

This might not rise to the level of an Internet meme, but it’s pretty close.

(Oh, and you can skip the last few minutes…unless, of course, you wanna see the clothes.)

My good friend Chris Williams, CEO of Vuuch, emailed me the other day and said that I really had to talk with Josh Mings of solidsmack.com. I just got off the phone with Josh, and I can say is, “Thanks, Chris, for connecting us up.”

See, Chris is a “true believer” in community — when he ran Seemage, we went to the community with a better idea about product documentation. And even though Seemage was a small little company with a big idea, the fact that we used community to start a discussion about those ideas simply blew competitors away. Right Hemisphere is still trying to figure out what happened to them, long after Seemage went onto greater glory in DS’s 3DVIA world. It was a complete demonstration of the power of community to give a good idea its due in the marketplace.

So, when Chris said Josh was doing some cool things on his blog, I took notice.

Lately, I’ve been worrying that the same thing is going to happen with the idea of community that happened with email, search and PPC: as less talented corporate marketing types get their hands on it, they’ll muck it up for the rest of us. If you think this hasn’t happened, take a look at your junk mail folder. It’s full of webinar invites three weeks in advance (because those idiots can’t get an email closer to the actual event) and Twitter feeds that read like data sheets.

But then, after a short conversation with Josh (who’s got a cold and still made time to talk with me), my confidence was restored. There will always be room for truly authentic voices and communities to coalesce around those voices. The ‘Net is big — and getting bigger — but great blogs like SolidSmack will still rise to the top of the heap.

That’s why I am so pumped that my buddy Chris and Josh have connected in the real world. Josh has reviewed Vuuch. Chris is talking with Josh to learn more about how to present another new idea to a new community…and these two guys really know how to put it together in a way that works for people…no crap…no slickness…just the real, authentic thing, amplified by the Internet’s ability to make time and distance disappear.

 

I just love The Consumerist blog. It’s snarky, fun and to-the-point. But it worried me no end when Consumer Reports bought it. You know, the people who have the temerity to “accept no advertising” but who continue to sell useless “car price information.” These are the people who hawk their magazine shamelessly while being among the very few magazines or newspapers left in the world that do not publish their editorial contacts’ email addresses. CR is happy to tell you what to do. Just don’t bother trying to contact them or, perish the thought, criticize them in any way. (Just ask Bose about that.)

So, when they bought a blog that actually understood the concept of community, I was scared that we’d start seeing the monthly preaching and supercilious editorial content (right next to ads for CR‘s overpriced “gift annuity”) that I’ve loved-hated  in the magazine since I was 12. After all, their blogs on consumerreports.org mirror perfectly the printed book’s preachy, holier-than-thou tone. If this was their idea of gettin’ jiggy with the ‘Net, I wasn’t buying it. I thought The Consumerist  would instantly become The Bloviatist.

But I was wrong.

Proof? You say you want proof? Just follow this link. The Consumerist is holding a public vote for the worst company in America. And the two contestants are Citibank and Ticketmaster.  No question for me there. Ticketmaster is the extortionist of the entertainment industry. Their business practices should be legal only in Tehran.

It’s not like it wasn’t close. Tomorrow — April 27, 2009 — is “Alex’s Freedom from Citibank Day.” It’s the day my last CD matures with these…uh…”bankers.” It’s the day that, if my 15 written and phoned requests, blood and DNA samples do the trick, Citibank will cut me a check for my money and mail it to me because that’s the only way they can get it to me. That, despite the fact they were able to transfer the money into the account to buy the CD. It’s the Bank of Kafka — your money goes in…government money goes in…and Gregor Samsa comes out.

But, given that Tickermaster charges a “convenience fee” for what can only be convenient for their bottom line, it’s nolo contendere for my vote. As I wrote this, it was Ticketmaster taking the “prize” 70% to 30%. Go vote…for Ticketmaster. Then, tomorrow, call Citibank and close your accounts there (if you can).

Good on, ya, Consumerist. I hope CR continues to let you live.

All right, so it’s been over a month since I last posted.

I’ve been busy at work and, well, I must say nothing has pissed me off enough to blog.

Still, I care about having a personal blog and keeping it active. The question then becomes: what to say when you are (temporarily) speechless. Writing blog posts takes practice. If you stop for too long, you lose it. I don’t wanna lose it. This blog is a useful way to keep the digital pencil sharp.

Then it struck me: write the kind of post people who really don’t have anything to say write as their best efforts. Just some blog drivel. The internal dialog began:

“Ah, ha! So nothing you’ve ever written on your blog has been dull, witless or banal, eh?”

“I didn’t mean that…how arrogant do you think I am? I just meant that it would be OK for once to write about something nobody could possibly give a shit about just to keep the blog alive and keep the blogging juices flowing.”

“Sure…what you really mean is what you label ‘ordinary’ is what you secretly hope readers of the blog will find humorous, or at least interesting. It’s a head-fake, ain’t it?

“Well, there was once this sitcom that was ostensibly about nothing in particular…”

“And you want to write the blog post equivalent, eh? All under the guise of ‘nothing to say’.”

“You betcha. Wait until all those comments come flowing in…you’ll see.”

So after all that…this blog post is about the fact that I’ve resumed drinking soda after swearing off it since January, 2007. I had a can of the elixir of modern life: Diet Dr. Pepper with my birthday cake yesterday.

Aren’t you thrilled for me? Stay tuned for the blog post wherein I describe what it’s like to drive a BMW M3.

When you get a credit card statement, do you ever read all the legalese on the back of the pages with the I-owe-a-fortune-amounts? I’ll bet many people don’t, despite the imploring of many consumer advocates.

Consumer Reports, in particular, practically harangues readers to be aware of the ability of credit card companies to change terms and conditions as they wish.

So, when I got a 12-page statement from American Express this month full of amendments to the credit card agreement, I decided to give it a read. One thing stuck out, in a section entitled “Telephone Communications.” Check out what I am agreeing to should I use the card after April 2, 2009 (all emphasis is mine):

You authorize us to call or send a text message to you at any number you give us or from which you call us, including mobile phones. You authorize us to make such calls using automatic telephone dialing systems for … offers of American Express products and services... You agree to pay any fees or charges you incur for incoming calls or text messages from us without reimbursement.

You can read the whole section in the PDF attached to this post. As I read it, American Express is saying:

• The heck with Federal and state do-not-call lists. If you call them for any reason — say you are checking a charge — they get to call you back at that number for anything they like, including marketing purposes
• If you make the mistake of calling them from your cell phone, you can expect them to call you back on the cell phone whenever they like. And you pay for the airtime. I know people have lots of minutes, but do you like burning them up while listening to a pitch for American Express’s latest high-cost credit product?

It’s pretty interesting how American Express has slipped the marketing permissions — a sort of default re-opt-in for people who have explicitly opted out — into the middle of a section ostensibly about security and account protection. While I don’t think anyone would object to getting a call about potential fraud, I, for one do not want American Express to feel free to call me on any number their ANI system sees me calling from. It’s bad enough that they use ANI to identify me when I call from home. (Did you realize that even if you have the phone company block outgoing Caller-ID for all your calls, an 800 number you dial still gets the number? After all, they’re paying for the call.)

What bothers me most about this is this is precisely the kind of thing that makes people really resent big companies. American Express wants to become a bank — get its piece of TARP. Then it wants to use loopholes to get around telemarking regulations and privacy opt-outs. Otherwise, how will they sell us checking accounts and CD’s?

No wonder there’s distrust of businesses…when you get your attorneys to slip something like this into an agreement, using “business logic” to rationalize it, you only put customers on the other side of a bright line…one they will pressure politicians to ensure business cannot cross.

Maybe it’s your health care insurer manipulating your out-of-network health care claim reimbursements to increase their profits.

Remember last fall when you signed up for the significantly more expensive plan that lets you choose a doctor out-of-network? You thought you were being smart.

Instead, it turns out you’re being screwed. Your extra premiums are finding their way into the pockets of the same insurer who buys TV ads with happy, young, healthy mothers and fathers in the park playing Upsie with their cute, giggling babies. Not a care in the world, presumably, because they’re covered…but it’s really a picture of ignorant bliss because when that baby needs a specialist, that couple’ll have to sell the Chevy and walk to appointments to pay the doctor’s bill.

Check out this report from the New York State Attorney General on how insurance companies are screwing their policyholders on out-of-network reimbursements. It’ll make you sick (just be damn sure you don’t go out-of-network to see a doctor).

For me, this is just another example of the unrestricted greed that nearly 30 years of Reaganism (“government is bad…unrestricted markets are good”) has generated and the incalculable damage it has done to our society. If a business can figure out a way to screw you — and better yet, legally do it in the dark like United Healthcare did with the cost database it uses to reimburse policyholders — well, that’s just normal, right?

Everywhere you look, we’ve been  cheated. Big Business is totally out-of-control. The financial system has collapsed — and taken our security with it. Even our ideals were trashed mercilessly by a government that lied to us all.

But, oh boy, watch out. This country has had mega-pendulum-political-swings in the past (the Progressive Era, the New Deal). If there are more people out there who think like me (and you bet there are), politicians had better get the message and get some stuff done (health care, re-regulation of the business and financial worlds, a sane foreign policy). And they better get it done now.

I was channel surfing recently (no mean feat on a Verizon FIOS system), and paused briefly on Animal Planet’s Whale Wars. I was instantly riveted…but not because of what the show is ostensibly about.

Briefly, it’s a cinema verité recounting of the struggle between environmental radicals and the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean. The self-styled “sea shepherds” aren’t letter-writing activists. They’re true amateur anarchists who favor “direct action,” placing themselves in danger to save whales from the Japanese whom they believe are illegally killing whales.

For their part, the Japanese are clearly hiding behind a combination of doubleplusgood international agreements (which allow a limited catch of whales for “research”) and lax enforcement of environmental policies by other governments. At $1M per whale and a permitted catch in the thousands, this is a big business and the research claim is patently bogus.

It makes for a great plot for a reality show. But while all the critical reviews of the show have focused on the action, the question of who’s right and who’s wrong in this struggle (the producers clearly favor the environmentalists) is less gripping for me than watching a cult leader in action.

The real centerpiece of the show is Captain Paul Watson (always referred to as “Captain”). This is a man who has pissed off his home country of Canada and lead them to criticize him individually like nobody I’ve ever seen (here and here). Imagine a national government calling you out like this! He co-founded Greenpeace (something he writes extensively about with apparent pride), yet was drummed out for being, apparently, uncontrollable.

But the real drama in Whale Wars — and something I think was unintentionally documented in the video — is how Watson creates, develops and promotes his cult of direct action. In short, we’re watching a Jim Jones or maybe a Hitler at work.

Watson clearly uses people as grist for his “mission.” A cook damages a propeller on the helicopter. Watson then publicly asks him to illegally board one of the Japanese vessels to “make up for the helicopter.” After 36 hours being held as a prisoner on the Japanese boat, the cook is returned to the welcome of the entire crew. The camera catches Watson at the moment the cook is back on board saying that he won’t go down on deck to welcome the cook back…instead one of the staff “priests” Watson has on board should bring the poor Aussie up to see him on the bridge. Upon being lead to see Watson, the cook is immediately placed on sat phone with the media in order to extract maximum press value from the incident. Not once do we hear Watson commend the cook for his foolish bravery.

To up the ante, later Watson proposes an all-female team to board a Japanese vessel. This goes awry, and in the process one woman shatters her pelvis. Ladies, how’d you like to have a shattered pelvis on a boat in Antarctica weeks from port with your only company being zealots on a mission? Not once do we see Watson demonstrating any concern for the woman. Only for the “mission.” We do, however, see him pissed off at the amateurs’ ineptness in carrying out his plans.

Watson, in true cult style, is also isolated from the volunteer crew — the raw meat — by a layer of officers on the boat who transmit both his orders and his message. They reveal themselves to be sycophants of the worst type, and when the original doctor on board raises questions about the dangers of boarding parties, he is quickly purged for a more pliant medic.

Are you fascinated yet? I am telling you, this TV show isn’t about whales. It’s Introduction to the Psychology of Cults 101. It demonstrates how in the crucible of a complex environmental issue a charismatic leader can, using classic techniques of isolation (what’s more isolated than a boat at sea for three months?) shape, implore, shame and motivate people into doing his bidding. Chat ‘em up, get ‘em to do what you want, no matter how dangerous, call the press, dock the boat, send ‘em home and do it again next year.

For me, the proof of all this is on the Sea Shepherd website. I noticed that on the show every time Watson was shown in his cabin, he was on a computer. After reading the website, I am convinced that he’s writing and posting much of the news on the site himself. And the site is really a paean to Watson, penned by Watson, who always refers to himself in the third person.

I am reading Ian Kershaw’s massive Hitler: A Biography, in which Kershaw documents exactly how Hitler — unable to have normal relationships with anyone save his mother — uses people in the most expedient, opportunistic way possible to achieve his ideological objectives. And, on a much smaller scale (but maybe just as dangerously?), that’s how Watson uses the people on his boat.

I’ve never seen a more fascinating television show…it isn’t about whales at all. It’s about a whale of a demagogue.

It is with great pleasure and pride that I turn over my blog, temporarily, to my daughter Rebecca so she can publish her humorous poem, The Germ Soldier. If you’ve ever seen a middle-schooler with a runny nose, you’ll relate to her art.

The Germ Soldier
By Becca Neihaus

They spread like throwing sand,
Since little boys don’t wash their hands.

They are invisible by my eye,
Some say they might be shy,
Though that’s a lie.

Armed with Purell I stand,
Ready to attack and distinguish germs where they land.

Desks and tables covered like bees in a hive,
When I am done, they will not be alive.
Thoroughly I spray,
To make all germs fade gray.

Once they disappear,
All is clear.

A passion for stopping germs,
Is never done out of term.
I do it everyday,
Making sure they all go away.

Really quickly:

• I’m eatin’ turkey — a lot of turkey
• I’ve updated to WP 2.6.5 and still can’t get the blog to work with podPress 8.8 despite all the posts about how to do so and the “no revisions” plugin. Damn, this is tiresome. When will Automattic realize they are killing bloggers with these incompatibilities. I heard Matt on the WordPress podcast just brush the whole thing off — these are developers with their heads in the wrong place.
• I’m writing this with Zoundry Raven — a Windows Live Writer competitor (if free software can be competitive in the real sense of that word). We’ll see. Setting up FTP for the images was, as always, the “trick.” But I am not so sure the UI is all that much difference from the WP editor. Lots of unlabeled icons in the toolbar that look just like the WP icons (a good thing since once you know one you know them all), but overall I am not sure what it adds to the mix — other than the ability to run off a thumb drive. That might be nice if you want to blog from, say, one of those open-sewer computers they offer at public libraries.
• Chris is makin’ might good progress over at his blog, but discovering it’s a lot of work.

This is one of those posts where I had so many metaphors going through my head as I wrote it that I’m gonna list the ’em for you before I write the post because even I can’t keep ‘em straight. And who wants to miss a good metaphor?

1. Vieux Boulogne is the world’s stinkiest cheese
2. Durian is the world’s stinkiest fruit
3. Both smell like shit
4. I need to demonstrate what trackbacks are to a friend
5. If you are a big, French software company, stop trying to pretend you understand social media

OK, now back to the post.

One of my colleagues is trying his hand at blogging. He’s also trying to harness the power of social media in the PLM (product line management) space. His blog is sort of a stealth thing, to see what the community thinks of his plan. In a recent post, (metaphor #4) he takes Dassault Systèmes to task for launching a blog with a license agreement — and credits me for encouraging them to blog. Chris also says that www.3dvia.com is “up and running” — though it looks like the same useless, ham-handed attempt at community it was in late 2007 (#5).

But the DS blog (#4 again) is, ahem, a stinker (metaphors #1 or #2, depending on your cultural linage, combined with #3.)

It’s the “standard” corporate blog (#5) — saying nothing, written by professional writers, devoid of personality, expectorating corporate propaganda without a point of view, destined for the dust-bin of the blogosphere….except that DS will assign 30 people to it and it will still be smelling like [pick one: durian or Vieux Boulogne] in five years (#1, #,2 and #3 — a trifecta — or for you, Chris, a hat trick).

I suspect that they got together in a big all-day meeting in Suresnes and decided that after www.3dmojo.com (#4 again, plus a little #5) , they needed a “real” blog. The Internet and PR people probably liked the idea; the brands probably said nothing in the room, while heaping derision on it among themselves.

What DS got on their blog is plenty of smell…and very little else.

This morning, I was searching for blog posts about Gartner research and came across this one from David Scott really tucking it to Gartner for their lack of authenticity in social networking.

It’s no big surprise that David thinks they’re inept. If there’s a firm on the planet that has fewer bona fides in social networking than Gartner, I haven’t found it. I wouldn’t be surprised if their analysts talking about social networking and social networking companies were last working on an update to the wave on MVS/TSO, the “social network” for mainframe COBOL programmers.

Gartner talking about social media is like me going to a 20-sumthin’ nightclub in a Speedo. (I’m middle-aged and need to lose a few pounds…so there’s your image.)

They have nothing to contribute — except to the social media software vendors who wait in vain for Garnter to bless them and their space (all the while charging them outrageous fees for “access” and conferences in which Gartner pontificates to the 50 sleepy clients they’ve attracted for a junket).

I can’t claim to be on top of every social media happening out there. But I can assure you that whatever self-possessed, supercilious prognostication that Gartner social media analysts make (.9 probability) will impress only their very-late-adopter client community who themselves will never, ever really get it.

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?

I’ve been a rabid Randy Newman fan since I was in college. When I was a student producer in the mid-1970′s at WBUR, I tried desperately (and unsuccessfully) to get Newman to interview on a show I produced called Around the Hub. It wasn’t so much that I thought Newman was of interest to the audience, it was more an attempt to fulfill a personal obsession. 

Newman is a musical genius the world seems to remember only for Short People, a song so unrepresentative of Newman’s work that its enduring popularity must be an unending annoyance for him. (Just today, the guys in the office were talking about loading up iPods…they talked about Led Zeppelin, Heart and Eric Clapton. Short People came up, too. What a shame.)

Anyway, Newman records albums so infrequently that it’s a major event in my life when a new one is released. If Newman is pissed off that the current justices on Supreme Court will outlive him (as he sings in the blistering A Few Words in Defense of Our Country), I am none too happy with Newman himself for not trying harder to satiate the few fans he has. He claims in a video documentary that he has 80,000 fans — down from 200,000 — and none of us are attractive looking.

I remain awestruck by Newman’s early work, especially 12 Songs, Sail Away and Good Old Boys. The recordings from the 80s and 90s, topped off by Bad Love didn’t seem as sharp or as even to me as the early albums. Now, the question I am thinking about is whether the new album finds Newman back in form. The short answer is, I don’t yet know.

But there’s no rush. Given that we might have as long as a decade to evaluate it, what’s the hurry? I mean, I’d love to have more Newman music to consider, so Randy, how about a new album in two or three years? After all, you said on your website that this only took eight to 10 weeks to write and another eight to 10 to record.

So, it’s not me I am worried about. It’s the rest of you who didn’t find Newman in your formative years. You guys, in your 30s and 40s, you’ve got several decades of savoring this music to catch up on. Unless you get started right away — savoring an album a decade — you’ll never get to Harps and Angels.

I’m more worried about your inability to catch up with the rest of us than about the fact that I’ll probably be dead before the next Newman album.

 

With all the news lately about the fundamental flaws in DNS and the fact that my digital life is on my laptop, I decided to take a few hours today to reconfigure my router to use OpenDNS and to encrypt the whole drive in my laptop using TrueCrypt.

After months of listening to Leo and Steve tell me how great these services were, I was feeling like someone who refuses to get the religion he’s supposed to if I didn’t try ‘em out.

Changing your router to use OpenDNS is plain, dead, dumb simple: you simply change two IP addresses in your router’s configuration. The OpenDNS IP addresses are on every page of their website. Can’t miss it. Total time to implement: 10 minutes.

The decision to use TrueCrypt was a little more involved: I run Vista Ultimate which offers BitLocker whole-disk encryption. So you’d naturally assume that the built-in encryption would be better. But after hearing that Steve Gibson’s Windows XP machine was actually faster after using TrueCrypt, I decided to try this amazing open source product. TrueCrypt doesn’t feel like open source…it’s exceptionally well documented and has the fit-and-finish of a commercial product.

Total time to setup for whole disk encryption on my ThinkPad T60p with an Hitachi Travelstar 200GB 7200rpm drive? 15 minutes, including the burning of a backup CD-ROM. Encryption itself took three hours.

I did have one problem, which was easily solved. I couldn’t hibernate the machine (which Vista isn’t really happy to do anymore anyway, but which is sort of the ultimate test for a whole-disk encryption program) until I deleted the previous hibernation file and allowed Vista to recreate it on the TrueCrypt-encrypted volume.

I didn’t see this in a couple of searches online, so hopefully if anyone searches for “TrueCrypt Vista hibernation file” they’ll find this post and give it a try.

Now, I can’t even “feel” the encryption…my laptop performs as before. My Vista performance base score was 4.3 before and after the whole disk was encrypted.

In short, for a computer user today, the tools to significantly increase your personal security are easy-to-use, free and astonishingly good.

I’ve been reading Consumer Reports since I was a teenager.  Without a doubt, they the most authoritative consumer product testers. And they know it.

I’ve always been amused by their combination of geeky testing regimens and their 1930′s-derived Socalist practices (purchasing a subscritption to the magazine makes you a “member” of Consumer’s Union and eligble to vote for their directors).

But they’ve always been both supercilious and self-righteous. For years, they claimed “no advertising” but gleefully pumped their (now-made-useless-by-the-Internet) car pricing “service.” Finally, after years of duplicity, they changed their claim to make an exception for their own ads without blinking an eye.

But when they decide they don’t like something, look out. They’ve tortured Suzuki (who deserved it) and Bose (who didn’t). CR was the earliest — and most smug — detractor of SUVs.

Unlike almost any major American news outlet today, their masthead contains zero, none, nada email addresses for readers’ responses. Alone among American journalists, CR doesn’t need to hear from anybody. Even the blog post I am about to blast doesn’t take trackbacks…their bubble is complete.

On now to a piece of advice I read tonight in CR’s auto blog. Tony Giorgianni’s mostly banal post on getting the most from a new car (offering wisdom like RTFM and “get winter mats”) also offers the surreal advice that new car owners should “Change a tire. It’s…a good idea to do a trial run with the jack and spare tire…”

Now I don’t know what planet Tony and CR’s editors are on, but I absolutely guarantee that nobody…and I mean no one…is going to test changing a tire. It’s so ridiculous that only CR could give this advice with a straight-laced face.

You betcha, Tony. When I get my next new car, I’ll suck down a large dose of fish oil and prune juice, then run right out and practice changing tires.

Update: As of the day after I posted a comment with a link to this post on Consumer Report’s original post, they haven’t approved my comment. Sure, they could argue I am trolling for traffic. But I’m not, and I don’t think they really believe that either. They’re just keeping the membrane impenetrable.

Last weekend, I attended PodCamp Boston. It was incredible. And there are two things I learned. First, my fellow vps of marketing in Boston, who at their networking event three days before Podcamp Boston indicated they’d never heard of this major event happening in their backyard, will remain with their heads totally stuck in the sand.

Second, even I haven’t gone all the way. This blog’s URL was www.alexneihaus.com, representing my old-style Internet persona.

Now, as the more observant of you will notice, we are at www.yobyot.com. (Toyboy spelled backwards.)

What’s the difference? At PodCamp, people signed their badges with their Twitter handles. I’d been dabbling in Twitter — not quite getting it — until PodCamp, when I met people who tweeted they’d met me while we were talking. The number of people I follow and those following me exploded (relatively…I am still building contacts there).

So, the only right thing to do is to lose the web 1.0 persona and become all I can be.

@I @am @now @yobyot

This is a post about product liability. Or, more accurately my fury at Whirlpool for making it nearly impossible to lift their refrigerators without slicing off your fingers.

Short version: we’re renovating the kitchen. Today, stainless steel appliances are all the rage. This despite the fact that they collect fingerprints, dent easily and cost more. Still, we do what we’re told by the kitchenistas and we dutifully bought a stainless steel fridge.

Through a series of mishaps, it turned out that the general contractor, the tile guy and I ended up having to lift this 600 pound beast up the three stairs to my front door and then into the kitchen to install it.

I was on the left side of this thing, trying to lift it up on the count of three. “One….two…three!” Bob shouted and we all heaved up and towards the door. I had my shoulder against the bottom and my left hand under the left side.

On step two, I looked down and was gushing blood. The damn stainless steel cabinet’s un-smoothed-off bottom edge had sliced deeply into three fingers of my left hand. It was painless (then) and so I was sorta detached from all the blood literally pouring from my left hand. (I am left handed by the way).

We finally got the behemoth into place, and as I was taking off the last of the shipping material, I considered whether or not to tilt the monster back and wipe the blood off the bottom edge that had so nearly severed my fingers. “Nah,” I thought. “Let the next owner mix his or her DNA with mine.” (Don’t anyone tell Tricia I left a souvenir on her now stained stainless steel cabinet. This is our secret.)

Today, as I sit at work and try my level best to type emails and collateral, I’ve considered calling a torts attorney (aka an ambulance chaser) and suing Whirlpool. It’s idle, but appealing, thinking (the cuts will heal). But one or two more steps, and I think the first use of the fridge would have been to chill my severed digits in preparation for surgical reattachment.

Had that happened, I’d have had a whole new career: torturing Whirlpool through the court system.

Years and years and years ago (OK, I’m feeling Boomer today), I was involved in the sale of a GUI-based application to the phone company. They resisted and resisted, despite our (and, unsurprisingly, Microsoft’s) ever-more-urgent importuning. We kept telling the executives that this was the future, it was the way they had to go and, damn it, you really need to get into the mid-1980s. They wanted to stay with character-based apps, but as the phone company used to regularly do (at least when I was with IBM), they did what we told them to do.

Such were the GUI wars.

But I didn’t realize that the war had ended…that we had “won”…until one Sunday in the early 1990s. I was, as I was wont to do, red-faced and furious on a Sunday afternoon at the amazing ineptness of the New England Patriots, who if I remember correctly, were losing 5000 to 0 to the Dolphins, when a Dodge Ram commercial interrupted the carnage. That commercial’s visual metaphor was a GUI. I realized that what was once “never going to happen” had now happened so completely, so permanently, that people didn’t even remember when they didn’t use and understand GUIs. It had crossed from a technological feature to a cultural idiom.

I’m not talking about Crossing the Chasm-style adoption. Instead, I am talking about how resistant everyone seems to be to something after which they are not only passive to it, they have amnesia about what life, or technology, or sports, or anything was like before they adopted whatever it is they’ve adopted en masse. It’s like we’re dogs: we live only in the moment.

So it is with podcasting. Nobody believes podcasting will ever be a mass medium. Nobody believes it can change the world. Pshaw! Phooey! Feh! All podcasting can be is a niche thing for techies.

Well, they didn’t spend Sunday afternoon with my college-age daughter and me. Returning from dropping my other kid off at summer camp, Sarah whipped out her iPod, plugged it into the car and said, “Dad, wanna hear my nursing podcasts?”

“Nursing podcasts? I didn’t know you were into podcasts!”

“Sure, Dad. [You helplessly out-of-tune old fart]. I listen to a bunch of ‘em.”

It was an instant replay of the Dodge Ram commercial. This new medium, which software company clients as recently as 2006 were insisting was irrelevant, to which nobody paid any attention, had reached its final destination: a fait accompli. And nobody remembers a time when they thought podcasting was a waste of electrons, spent for the enjoyment of social misfits.

Instead, podcasting, is, and always was, an excellent way to reach specific audiences. It’s part of every nutritionally well-balanced software company’s marketing strategy. Podcasts are the best way to reach your audiences….and they always have been.

The way people seem to be acting about this — without any connection to the previous reality — is gonna put a whole bunch of singing fat ladies out of business. After all, if nothing’s changed, who needs ‘em to signal a transition?

Let me say right off the bat that I know that I really should get over it. I should stop being so competitive that I am willing to blast former business competitors for things that no longer matter to me (or the descendants of the original competition).

But I can’t help it. It’s just part of me. I still like to throw an occasional lighted one at Microsoft (I’m still brooding over the 1990′s battle between Notes and Exchange) or Autodesk (we got a blessed divorce in 2002).

Today, it’s Right Hemisphere’s turn. These are the guys who took government money from New Zealand, then took money from SAP, undoubtedly turning their cap table into a cross between the Auckland and Walldorf phone books, then called themselves a startup and hired a marketing team whose first apparent deliverable to the marketplace in 2007 was an 18-page glossy brochure. (Now, I know some people love brochures, but they are both expensive and passe. Ask RH how many of those are sitting in boxes collecting dust in the marketing group’s area at HQ.)

When I was with Seemage, we never really considered RH much of a competitor, what with their message being….well, what exactly was their message? Can’t seem to remember it. Think it had something to do with Adobe, then SAP, then servers all over the place. OTOH, at Seemage it was simple: we were about CAD reuse on the desktop without the heavy costs of PLM.

OK, so what’s the proximate cause of this screed? After all, Seemage is gone…and I’m no longer consulting for Dassault. In a word, it’s RH’s new “blog.” After a couple of years, it looks like RH finally wants to try to grasp the power of community….by copying the old Seemage formula of an in-your-face blog.

At Seemage we had 3dmojo.com. And for a while, it was all we had. But we poured our hearts out. And it was an incredibly effective way for a great product (and a pretty damn good company, IMHO) to get noticed. No fancy stuff…just a direct conversation with the 3D CAD community, who listened intently (and who still do).

We said what we meant and we weren’t afraid to say practically anything (a representative sample is here), as long as we passionately believed in it. A sales rep crashed a competitive trade show using an iPod to show what was then called Seemage (now 3DVIA Composer). It was such a success that we started a podcast that goes on today. Traffic built because we had something to say that was intelligible and cogent.

So, now imagine you are RH. You’ve got questions: your brochure is gathering dust…people come to the seminars at the Capital Grille for the steak, not the software…and little ole Seemage went on to greater glory inside DS. What was the magic about them? Ah ha! It had to be their blog. Gotta git me one of them! Voila: deep3d.com.

A more banal corporate blog I don’t think I’ve ever seen. They have nothing to say. Rehashes of trade shows from the vp of marketing. An SE kowtowing to Adobe Flex (big surprise there). The CEO reprising their SAP deals. (I’m beginning to feel the warm excitement of SAP as a new target…check out the stunt we pulled at SAPPHIRE.)

In short, the reason people who are imitated don’t usually feel flattered by the imitator is that, by definition, imitations lack inspiration. Go ahead, RH: paint a happy face on your toy blog. The only thing apt about it is that the name is somewhat onomatopoeic: this blog is going deep6d very quickly.

 

When I first bought my 330i with the notorious iDrive (which, by the way, is very, very cool), I was stuck by the fact that the car seemed to be less a mechanical device than a digital one with wheels. That impression has only been confirmed over the last three years as the car has needed just three oils changes but half a dozen reprogrammings. When the car is reprogrammed, it takes the dealer more than a day and, if it crashes, not only does it have to be restarted, but the frakkin’ car (what am I going to do when Battlestar Galactica ends??) won’t even start until the entire image is properly downloaded. OK, I gotta admit I think that’s kinda cool, especially when the dealer does it on his nickel and you get a BMW loaner to drive for two days.

But that isn’t what’s pissed me off. What gets my goat is that for the last three years, each reprogramming has added new functionality. The dealer doesn’t know what’s in the new release of E90 software. BMW keeps it a secret. They seem to see this as service and not as a benefit to owners. We upgrade our computers, why doesn’t BMW encourage us to update our cars?

Want some examples? Here’s partial list of functionality that’s been added to my car over the several reprogrammings it has had:

• MP3 was added to the CD player
• Color schemes in the graphics display were changed
• iDrive performance was improved
• A new automatic ventilation program was added to the climate control
• New commands were added to the voice control system
• Mileage has improved by about 3%

So, what am I bitching about? Simple: if I didn’t have these things done under warranty repairs, I’d have never received them. Dealers won’t upgrade the car on request; you have to have a warranty problem. Plus, they have no idea what’s in these updates; they simply apply them when instructed to solve a problem — even a problem that has nothing to do with the lack of functionality provided in the updates. BMW never makes the list of enhancements public. My question is: why?

Think of the revenue stream from upgrades from people who own a 2006 model which, when produced, didn’t have a timer to start the ventilation system on hot days, but which through the magic of software can be made to have it. (This actually happened in my last update and I had to download a manual for a 2007 model to figure out how it works!)

I know why BMW is the best brand in the world. But nothing’s perfect…I suspect it’s more than a little German to keep adding functionality to older products but keep it a secret. Oracle, IBM and Microsoft people: sleep well tonight. BMW isn’t about to steal your maintenance agreements.

OK, so this isn’t going to be the most scintillating post I’ve written. Even I — (in)famous for the bitchin’, blastin’ blog post — need a little banality break now and then.

The motivation to blog this morning is that I’ve written this post and uploaded it from an Acela train stopped in New Haven on the way to a business meeting in NYC. I’ve got my ThinkPad plugged in and my Internet connection going over an incredibly slow (but serviceable) T-Mobile Internet sharing connection on my cell phone. (Why it’s taken T-Mobile until now to launch 3G is beyond me. And the 3G network they are launching uses trash spectrum nobody else in the world is using.)

Back to the post…I remember when a stop in New Haven on a Northeast Corridor train necessitated a switch from electricity to diesel. I remember when you couldn’t hold a cup of coffee on the train because the rails didn’t understand parallel. I also remember when “on time arrival” meant “sometime on the scheduled day.” And, the general condition of the car I am sitting in isn’t terrible, as far as public accommodations in the US go. So things are improved. And the Acela, for all its problems, really does beat an airplane ride for a Midtown meeting.

But does this train — after all the investment and tax money — compare to the Shinkansen or the Inter-City Express or even the TGV? In a word, nope. No matter how much train buffs (a subculture I brushed up against when I was technology manager for the now-defunct Boston & Maine RR) wish it could be, this train isn’t even close. The cars are a little too run down. The service is a little too infrequent (why not Acela trains every 30 minutes in the morning and evening?).

But the major problem? It’s a number: 3:16. That’s the published time from Route 128 to Penn Station. Even the Big Dig has been completed (at an astonishing cost and loss of life). But Amtrak’s promise of a 2:30 trip from Boston to New York hasn’t been realized…and I doubt it ever will.

It’s a metaphor for the decline of American technology and capability. If ever there was a train route in the continental US that could support high-speed traffic, this is it. What a shame.

After Revit was purchased by Autodesk in 2002, I spent a grand total of a few months there. I’ve not written much publicly about my experiences there because they have a reputation for long institutional memories. I am sure that this post isn’t going to make them love me any more than they already don’t.

Before Autodesk bought Revit, I always wondered about the apparent favorable bias among the CAD press towards them. In my time in the industry, they were pushing their boots into customers’ and partners’ heads (something I suspect they’re still pretty good at) but portions of the CAD press always seemed to give them a bye. Truth be told, there were some CAD journalists who hated them unreasonably, but by and large, they got a pass.

Still, the “professional” CAD press was careful to hide it. Very careful. But it was there. In an incident that blew up on Autodesk, a letter that Revit sent to ADT consultants ended up in the hands of a journalist who told me Autodesk’s PR department had faxed it to him. They were simply reprinting whatever they were sent by Autodesk.

But now, and for the first time, we got ‘em. Dead to rights. Check out this quote from Deelip Mendez, one of the arrivistes in the CAD press, a blogger who would have little traffic if not for the fact that Ralph and Roopinder have been promoting his blog:

But I know that Autodesk Marketing is the best there is and when they say something, I listen and wonder.

This comes in a long, unfocused post in which Deelip tries hard to make something out of nothing between Dassault and SolidWorks. But there it is: the slavish, unthinking bias that Autodesk is…wait for it…a thought leader. And that that leadership comes from…squeeze your eyes shut in case you are blinded by the revelation…the marketing department.

In being so overt, Deelip has blown everyone’s cover, the thin veneer of independence that has been carefully nurtured for a long time. The CAD world is a small place…there’re only so many vendors to bill. Between dissing startups as irrelevant (they said that about both Revit and Seemage) and kowtowing to ADSK’s marketing department, it must get monotonous drinking the same flavor of Kool-Aid all the time.

 

At work, we use Clicky web analytics to supplement our web statistics. It’s a great service, and Sean at Clicky has always answered my questions quickly and personally. In short, they’re exactly the kind of people you want to work with.

So, I can imagine how furious he must have been when he had to deal with Linksys "technical" support on a blown switch.

You can read the story here, but the real point is that Sean got smart: he used his blog and his knowledge of SEO to make damn sure Linksys will pay and pay. Just check out the searches Sean posts. If I were looking for a switch, I’d search for exactly these terms and walk, no make that run, away from this particular switch.

The moral: not only is blogging the ultimate version of Consumer Reports (minus the holier-than-thou-1930′s Socialist slant), but the sweet, sweet satisfaction of really stickin’ it to mega-roadblocks like Linksys delivers catharsis and helps others.

Right on, Sean. And thanks for the warning, though I wish you had some Netgear stuff to trash. I want them to suffer, too, but my blog isn’t as well trafficked.

You know all those commercials Verizon is running with a young boy talking about “30db hot” and in which, in open-mouth wonderment, he seems to be awash in light? Well, fudgedaboutit, at least when it comes to multiple HD video on demand streams and high-speed Internet.

Not many people realize that FiOS uses a hybrid system for video. It uses both QAM (what we think of as “normal” cable) for much of its programming. But for VOD, it’s IPTV. IPTV data streams are delivered via the Actiontec routers that Verizon requires customers to use because these routers have a network interface module, or NIM, that bridges IEEE 802.3 Ethernet as we know it to the set-top boxes. The set-top boxes are connected by coax cable, of course, and a standard called MoCA (multimedia over COAX) enables them to receive IPTV. It might surprise people to know that FiOS set-top boxes get an IP address from the router just like computers do. To try to make sure that the VOD video streams do not detract from subscribers’ Internet connections, the router implements QOS for the the IPTV video streams.

Complex? You bet. And it all worked great until VZ started offering HDTV VOD.

Tonight, for the first time, I had two HDTV streams going and it killed my Internet connection. I called VZ and the first thing the guy tried to make me do was factory-reset the router. When I objected, he told me that “hundreds of customers watch multiple HTDV VOD streams while getting full bandwidth from Internet connections.” Because I insisted, he agreed to consult with a video expert.

A few minutes later, he came back on the line and admitted that FiOS can’t support more than one simultaneous HDTV video on demand stream. He didn’t blame the router. Astonishingly, he blamed the ATM switches in the central office. (ATM is old, old, old, and I can’t believe VZ implemented it in FiOS…they can’t seem to help themselves. Billions to build a new network, but they’re still using protocols from the 70s in it.)

Bottom line: when you get FiOS you get fiber, all right. But you don’t get the ability to really use its capacity. In fact, it’s easy to overwhelm it.

I know I’ve been very lax about blogging here because launching a whole new category of enterprise application development software is taking up all my time.

Still, I am compelled to stop for a moment and give WordPress2.5 maximum love for being a killer upgrade. Installation was a snap, and the single problem I had with uploading images was taken care of with one Google search.

In a word, awesome. Those VCs funding Joomla and Drupal are going to wish they’d never written the check.

In one of the worst examples of misandry posing as journalism I’ve read in many, many moons, Lori Gottleib writes in The Atlantic that women should just “settle” for men they don’t necessarily love in order to get married.

Guys, you gotta read this article. Initially, you get the feeling that you are being given a peek inside the most mysterious organ on the planet: the romantic pathways of an American woman’s brain. Gottleib writes in a “let’s just dish” style that I imagine will resonate with women. That tone lets you feel like you are about to be enlightened about what’s really going on inside as women deal with the tough balances of marriage, family and work. You keep hoping that Gottleib will recognize the real value of marriage: the roles fathers can play in their children’s lives.

But it’s not to be. Turns out this all about Gottleib. Her penis-and-a-paycheck feminism turns out to be simple narcissism and personal regret at single motherhood posing as “don’t make the mistake I made” pseudo-advice. Check this out:

My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go.

Uh, “infrastructure??” Is that some kind of new term for a human male?

Using that all-important cultural touchstone, the sitcom, as a reference point, Gottleib declares, “So what if Will and Grace weren’t having sex with each other? How many long-married couples are having much sex anyway?” Uh, sorry, Lori. If you knew much about men, this wouldn’t be a question.

Gottleib goes on and on and on and on about…herself. Her son, someone that should’ve figured prominently in the logic for settling, gets short shrift:

Even women who settle but end up divorced might be in a better position than those of us who became mothers on our own, because many ex-wives get both child-support payments and a free night off when the kids go to Dad’s house for a sleepover. Never-married moms don’t get the night off. At the end of the evening, we rush home to pay the babysitter, make any houseguest tiptoe around and speak in a hushed voice, then wake up at 6 a.m. at the first cries of “Mommy!”

It’s all so disingenuous. At the end of the day, this article devalues men and objectifies them in ways no male writer could ever hope to get away with when discussing women. It’s a damn shame The Atlantic is so important a magazine. Someone might actually believe this tripe.

I’ve been busy working on my third totally new web site in less than a year — and that doesn’t count the sites I simply helped update.

The one thing I’ve learned: no matter what technology you use, whether you use a CMS or you code the thing by hand, it’s an astonishingly complex and costly thing to create a commercial web site.

Everything — and I mean everything — is like riding on blocks. If your site looks good in Internet Explorer, it doesn’t in Firefox. If you try to avoid JavaScript, you can’t do squat for the user. The best-intentioned UI conventions become mush as you shoe-horn the content into them. Just proofreading the site requires the patience of Job and the skill of a novelist.

Worse, you can’t please everyone. So knowing how to please most people becomes the standard, and figuring that out before you have weeks of analytics to look at is more black art than science.

I think the solution is radical simplification. Set an arbitrary limit on the number of pages. 10, 15, whatever. Make the content fit the bucket you’ve created. Use a blog (how’d you guess we’d come back to that?) for everything else. People want fresh…a blog is fresh. You want to change your message on a dime, focus visitors’ attention on something? A blog does it.

Doing a standard corporate web site is like being run over by square wheels. The only thing that’ll round those wheels off is a complete departure from what corporate web sites have become.  And even I am not crazy enough to try that yet.

So, crush me with those edges…

Well, check out this case study.

On Saturday, I blasted TIAA-CREF. Today, they’re all over this blog. And I’ve got the stats to prove it.

Here’s a a screen grab of activity from today (Monday, 2/4) from Clicky.  Almost an hour from a single IP address! (This may represent several users as I presume TIAA-CREF has routers and firewalls that share their public IPs.) And, there are multiple visits from multiple TIAA-CREF IPs that add up to more 90 minutes of time on this blog. That’s a long time for visitors to spend on a blog, even in aggregate.

Wonder who is at this IP address?

 

Yup, it’s proof positive of the power of blogging. Was it more forceful to blog about the Orwellian language in the price increase letter or should I have talked to a customer service representative by phone? Which do you think got more attention?

I hate obfuscation. This week, TIAA-CREF sent my wife the letter I’ve attached to this post as a PDF. It’s unsigned, unaddressed and clearly written by an attorney…but the marketing guys got into the act as well.

The letter is a notice of a price increase….but it never says TIAA-CREF is raising prices. It only says that “estimated expenses will increase by eight to ten basis points.”

Check out this copy:

The revised estimated expenses also reflect costs unanticipated at the time of the original estimate in the prospectuses, including expenses associated with operating two platforms to serve institutional retirement plans pending completion of plan conversions to the new platform and costs associated with processing delays and delays in realizing anticipated savings.

In other words, we have to raise prices because we have duplicate computer systems, neither of which serve you, the individual investor. We screwed up merging them, and not only didn’t we save the money we thought we would, we have to spend more. You get to pay for it. 

OK, I get it. This wealthy company, ostensibly dedicated to teachers, professors, nurses and other non-profit employees and hiding behind noble ideas like serving the ”greater good” and leveraging “the power of .org,” can’t simply say “we’re raising prices.”

Instead we get a long, apologetic argument about better service to “institutional clients,” (sales) visits to campuses, and a quote from Forbes backing up that when you call these people, they’re happy to sell you more overpriced investments. We also get some nice footnotes where the name should be of a human being taking responsibility for the price increase.

(I didn’t attach the expense ratios, but ranging from .48% to .905%, I hope many of the company’s customers will realize that there are far less expensive options available.)

A song that’s in high rotation on my iPod these days is the lovely duet Please Read the Letter from the unlikely pairing of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss (yes, I know: heavy metal and bluegrass…who’d have thunk it? Go ahead and blow 89 cents on the song. You’ll love it).

TIAA-CREF’s marketing and legal people should listen carefully to some of the song’s lyrics:

…A fool could read the signs
Maybe baby
You’d better check between the lines
Please read the letter,
I wrote it in my sleep
With help and consultation from
The angels of the deep…

After over a year of consulting, I’ve taken on a new role with Active Endpoints which returns me to my roots in application development. For many years before I went into marketing, I developed applications using what was then considered leading-edge technology.

What amazes me is that leading-edge developers today face the same problems as I did then: there’s too much “stuff” to conquer, too many technologies to integrate and too many piece parts to put together with duct tape.

Active Endpoints has created a new category of app dev software, what we call a visual orchestration system, or VOS. You can read more about it in a press release we issued today…there’s a lot more to come from us on this topic. (Those of you who know me aren’t surprised to hear that, I would assume.)

Anyway, I think this company can change — indeed revolutionize — the way applications are developed by helping the industry think large — as in programming in the large. This is in complete contrast to the way people think today, which is all about devolving problems to their smallest units to make them solvable, then trying after the fact to put them together in some coherent way. Any of you who have ever tried to build something from a kit knows how impossible this can be.

Given the size of the problem and the amazing technology Active Endpoints offers, once I got the chance to join I found it irresistible.

There’s a very entertaining series on one of my favorites blogs, TTAC, entitled “General Motors death watch“. I am sure they are much hated at GM, but, frankly, I think the bloggers there have been evenhanded. GM has been a mess so long, I can now officially be excused for buying a new, manual three-speed Chevy Vega in 1973. (I paid $2300 for it, courtesy of Nixon-era price controls.) Still, I think TTAC has been waiting for rigor mortis so long, it can’t see that GM is already a carcass.

Lately, the auto press has been falling all over itself to praise GM’s new cars, especially the interior fit and finish of models like the Enclave and the CTS. Interior fit and finish is especially important to me because, after all, you sit in the thing for three to five years and every flaw eventually becomes something you stare at and wonder, “How could they let that out of the factory?”

I checked out an Enclave in the showroom; the panels in the exact center of the dash under the analog clock were misaligned. I didn’t bother to test drive it, knowing that misaligned panel would drive me crazy. Now, I’ve taken to peeking through the windows of parked Enclaves to see if it was just a sample defect. Nope. They’re all like that.

This week, curiosity got the better of me and I test drove a $50K ’08 Cadillac CTS with four-wheel drive and the direct-injection engine. The showroom unit had a terribly misaligned panel where the front passenger’s knee rests against the transmission tunnel. Defect just on that one? Guess again. A different unit, the one I drove, had the same problem. Now I have another GM model to stare at in parking lots. The fit and finish in that car was no better than an 80′s Corsica, despite all the press fawning over stitched leather and the stupid Viagra-enhanced navigation screen. (The latter gives itself an erection every time you push a button on the dash. Reminds me of one of those pump-kits that promise…uh…lengthening).

I have no freakin’ idea at all what these press guys are smoking. If an average car nut like me can see this stuff in seconds, why don’t they?

Still, the promises of resurrection from GM management continue. Yesterday, GM told analysts it’s going to be profitable in a couple of years. That reminds me of the kind of wishful talk that accompanied Roger Smith’s attempt to “take on the Japanese” in the 90′s. At the end all he could offer was a “a used Buick.”

Please forgive my non sequitur in the title of this post. But I think it’ll make sense as you read on.

I’ve been raving lately about what a transformational device my new iPod touch is. And I’ve been struggling to put into words exactly what’s why that’s so. At first, I wasn’t convinced that it was so much different from my 5th generation iPod, which I still use daily.

Then I took the iPod touch on vacation with me and discovered that the Safari browser was compatible with Outlook Web Access 2007. And that I actually enjoyed watching videos on YouTube. And that the flicking and pinching stuff I thought was the equivalent of tofu — as in real men use mice to navigate — is the first significant UI innovation in at least a decade.

Then I started reading on the Internet about the upcoming 1.1.3 software update. Monday, Apple announced this was free for iPhone users, but would cost iPod touch users $20. Apparently, Apple has decided that the iPod touch is really a handheld — not just a music device. Ergo, bug fixes are free but enhancements are not. I know that lots of people will whine about this…and I gotta admit I wasn’t too happy having just spent $400 on the device.

But, man oh man, is it worth it! I suspect the iPhone people got this upgrade for free because they are AT&T’s prisoner for two years, and food is included in the jail stay. But for those of us who own our iPod touches outright and have to decide to pay or not, I must say I am not looking for $20 back.

The mail client is astonishing…Google Maps is amazing. This is the first device I have ever owned where a setup mode itself is entertaining (the icons wiggle when you are configuring dock pages).

But for all of the amazing new features and the value, there are two things that bother me: first, Apple really should have made this one free. The device has only been in the market since September, 2007. I’ll bet a lot of people got theirs over the holidays, like I did. It leaves a small aftertaste to have to pony up 5% of the price to get the thing to do what it should’ve at first customer ship.

Second, am I the only one who worries that the Google-masters-of-the-universe-who-control-all-our-searches-and-all-galactic-advertising have figured out a new way to extend their monopoly? This is, I think, the first time anyone is paying for a system with Google Maps. (I downloaded an excellent new version that uses cell towers for location onto my Windows Mobile 6 device last week for free.) Google Maps is a killer app…it’s one of the things that makes the iPod touch a transformational device. I wonder if all the “free” stuff people have become accustomed to was really nothing more than a very long term trial.

I am very late to the Chocolate Rain phenomenon. In case you are one of the remaining 50 people who don’t know about Tay Zonday’s famous (>13M views!) music video, I’ve embedded the YouTube video below. Be sure you also watch the related videos, including the Chad Vader spoof and Tay’s appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Back the to main purpose of this post: it’s time to bash the purported “weight loss” drug Alli again. Last summer, I both railed against and sympathized with the marketers of this “miracle drug.” I empathized with the plight of marketers who have to market a drug that, uh, “soils” your clothes with….here it comes…an ugly chocolate rain as it works. Then, I whined about those same marketers minimizing these effects on people.

Then, last week, I was in a Wal-Mart and was stopped dead in my tracks by the display captured in the cell phone photo above. Look at the bottom of the retail display. It says, “can you commit to this?” Cleanly designed and mostly white brochures that match the nice white packaging of the “starter kit” of Alli on the display explain that low-fat foods reduce, the…yes, I am going to say it again…”chocolate rain effects.”

The pun on commitment to achieving a diet goal strikes me as the most cynical marketing I’ve ever seen. It’s not about commitment to low-fat diets…it’s about commitment to a drug that makes you produce a nasty chocolate drizzle. After all, if you can commit to a low-fat diet, what the heck do you need Alli for?

And, yes, I find the minimalist, white graphic design of the packaging and the brochures offensive as well. This product, which in truth, makes you slightly ill by interfering with your ability to absorb fat, should be in a black box with big FDA warnings, or at least a very dark brown that matches the real value of Alli itself.

But on the iPod touch with that screen (there’s no other way to describe the quality of the iPod touch’s display) it’s as if the device, Wi-Fi and YouTube combine into a completely new medium.

I was searching for music videos, looking for alternate versions of classic music videos from Devo and Fatboy Slim, and came across this gem.

It doesn’t matter if you are a Fatboy Slim fan or not: this never-officially-released video is a spectacular combination of editing and timing. Check out the slow-motion at 2:10 and the Tommy-esque finale in which Angie leads hula-hooping acolytes, some of whom you almost expect to break out into a chorus of We’re Not Gonna Take It.

I emailed the star of the video,  Angie Mackman, and asked her for the back story about why this wasn’t released. Long story short, it seems a competition for the video had to go to a juggler for some reason. The official video for this song is also great, but there’s something about this version that is less contrived and, well, cooler than the very-strictly-cut-to-the-downbeat juggling video.

I wanted to make sure that readers of this blog check out an exciting new voice. My pals at Enigma have started blogging, and I think that their first post (at least the first post I didn’t write) is pretty compelling.

Clearly, I am involved in setting up their blogging efforts, but today when Joy and I were working on her post, I can tell you, I just sat back and watched it happen.

The blogging world is liberating for many software companies because it allows them to (finally!) express their raison d’etre directly, succinctly and forcefully. You can hear it in what Joy wrote today, and I hope there’s lots more to come from my new pals at Enigma.

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.

Tonight, after a long day at work, for fun, I turned to an issue of Auto Week that I’d been saving to read up on the new Aston-Martin DBS. The only Aston-Martin I’ll ever come close to is the silver DB9 that some show-off uses as a daily driver (in the freakin’ snow!) to drop his sixth-grader off at my daughter’s school.

Yes, I have lusted after another man’s car. But nevermore. Look carefully at this photo. The driver’s side of the grill is misaligned. In the printed magazine, this is even more noticeable than in this online photo.

Yes, the press can go on for thousands of words about whether this car is a GT or a sports car, how it compares with Ferraris and how cool it was in Casino Royale. But not me….$256,000 seems a little rich to spend on a car whose marketing people would let this photo into the wild.

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.

Those of you who know me well know that on one topic I have been completely consistent: for years I’ve considered Microsoft the ultimate market bully who simply assimilated (or copied) any technology or company it wanted to. To this day, the blood feud between IBM and Microsoft on the messaging and desktop application battle front continues. Why else would IBM revive the Lotus Symphony brand?

But today I discovered Windows Live Writer (in which I am composing this blog post), and I have to admit that it’s the most impressive application I’ve seen from Microsoft in ages. Even more, I have become a big fan of Vista and even have a warm spot for Office 2007 (even though the context sensitive help in Office is broken).

Microsoft seems to have entered a stage in its history which reminds me of IBM software in the 70s and 80s: exceptionally well-designed and documented software that has increasingly accepted (without “embracing and extending”) open standards. The one flaw both share is complexity.

Whether this happened as a result of its near-death brush with regulators (also an IBM parallel) or if it was inevitable isn’t important. Today, Microsoft is producing some seriously great stuff.

Who’s today’s new dominant bully? My vote goes to Google, which has all the attributes of Microsoft at its worst: a belief that everything in the world will go its way and an astonishing disregard for customers. (Just try getting Google support on the phone. It’s nearly impossible.)

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.

I am well-known to be car crazy. And BMW is well-known as one of the most desirable brands in the world. So, it’s no surprise I draw many lessons from them and try to apply them to high-technology marketing in general. Trust me, this brand has enthusiasts (“a community” in Web 2.0-speak) to die for.

What the marketing whizzes who will ”teach” you how to have a brand like BMW don’t get is the flawless head-fake BMW’s marketing machine routinely executes by producing the exact kind of propaganda their hard-core community wants to consume while at the same time officially ignoring that community.

Two examples. First, this document describes in numbing detail the innovations and design philosophy of the then-new 2006 BMW 3 Series. Ostensibly, it’s for internal use only. But this document “leaked” into the enthusiast community and how many times do you think I, for example, have read this document? (Answer: too many. Most obscure thing I learned? That the interior door pulls for the left and right front doors are different, a point BMW makes to stress that real design takes into account things like the location of the window switches. Now, go look in your car. Are the pulls mirror images of each other? Hmmmm?)

How many times do you think other enthusiasts have read it? Now think about how many times its target audience — salespeople in BMW dealerships — read it. Brilliant marketing: write something “exclusive” for an audience that could care less, but make sure it gets out — as a leak — to the people who really care.

Today, the BMW world community is all a-titter…just freakin’ shakin’…with excitement over the new M3 (pictured above from the BMW USA web site in “European trim”…another nod to the dreams and aspirations of hard-core BMWphiles).

How to keep the excitement at fever pitch? Simple: issue a 93-page press kit on the car. Make sure it leaks so the enthusiast sites can post it. Fill it with an rich mix of over-the-top hyperbole (“…the BMW M3 has ranked alone as the epitome of ultimate dynamism derived directly from motorsport, a car offering powerful and superior aesthetics, as well as a truly incomparable driving experience…”) and ennui-inducing technical detail (“…electronically controlled power screwdrivers [are used] on all critical bolted connections…”). Then, in the most brilliant move possible, delay introducing the product into your largest market until the propaganda has generated intense longing in the community. The link above is for the UK introduction. Convenient, ain’t it?, that the US and UK markets share a common (OK, nearly mutually-intelligible) language.

I don’t have the words to describe how astonishingly successful BMW is at managing (or is it ”manipulating”?) its community. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go re-read all 93-pages…

While everyone else was drooling over the iPhone, I knew to stay away. I suspected a consumer disaster of epic proportions when Apple, rightly famous for its brilliant products and exquisite marketing, collided in the marketplace with AT&T, one of the worst consumer vendors in the history of Earth.

Cellular One…no AT&T Wireless…no Cingular…no AT&T has been the target of repeated customer lawsuits (here and here) and has done just about everything it can do to customers from over-selling Digital One Rate in the late 1990′s to consistently scoring at the bottom of Consumer Reports subscriber surveys.

In fairness, none of the cell companies are very good. But the prize for being the worst for the longest and consistently treating customers like dirt goes to whatever-they-are-calling-themselves-today AT&T.

When Apple, the control freak of the consumer electronics biz, made the rounds of carriers to see which would allow it to control the user experience (this is from Wall Street Journal stories that you need a subscription to read), only AT&T signed up and in return got an exclusive for the iPhone.

I’ll bet you Steve Jobs and Apple are regretting that decision. It’s been a mess, with the ‘Net exploding with horror stories around activation and porting numbers from other carriers. AT&T and Apple are both minimizing the impact publicly, saying that it’s only a few customers.

I know how I’d feel if I’d just made a $2000 commitment to the iPhone — $600 plus 24 months of service at a minimum of $60 — and I was in the “2%” having problems. (Get this, even if you are an AT&T customer you must still activate for two more years. Talk about extending the sentence!)

C’mon…we all know when they’re saying “we had an unexpected surge” or “we’ll clear it up soon” it means it’s outta control. Can we really believe that AT&T didn’t know how many iPhones would be in the stores on June 29th? That they couldn’t have sized their systems to prepare for that number?

The thing is, this must be amazingly painful inside Apple. I feel for them. They tried to keep control of the experience, but they aren’t a cell phone operator…they just really don’t know how to screw customers.

AT&T has sure taught Apple something about control this week. It’s one lesson I hope Apple doesn’t take to heart.

(Photo courtesy of J. Star, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike)

OK, so I know that what you blog about is a more-or-less semi-permanent record of you. Plus, I have clients who read this blog. And I might be just a little more over the top than usual with this post, but there’s a real marketing problem with a new product and I think the marketer’s response to that problem is…uh…interesting.

Have you heard of Alli, the new over-the-counter medication for weight loss? It’s a low-dose version of orlistat, a drug that prevents the absorption of fat. That can lead to weight loss for those taking the drug.

The problem with orlistat is that fat that doesn’t get absorbed…it…uh…passes, if you know what I mean. This can potentially create an oily mess.

Imagine being the marketing people for Alli: you want to sell this thing in big, big numbers, but it has this indelicate side effect. And you have to disclose it.

What’s the solution? To them it must have seemed easy: make a helpful recommendation about how to deal with the heartbreak of panty-rear oily streaks.

On www.myalli.com, there’s a “treatment effects” page with this chirpy sounding suggestion for working people on Alli:

Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it’s probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work

Now, I have to tell you that any product that pretty much insures users will need to cover up the product’s nasty effects with dark clothes or even keep a supply of adult diapers nearby has a serious marketing problem. And this kind of copy makes it even worse.

Anybody who reads about Alli in the newspaper or looks at the packaging is sure to hear about this side-effect. Why make it worse with a “helpful” suggestion? Isn’t Alli targeted at adults, who presumably know what the implications of this side effect are?

To my ears, this over-the-top effort to be helpful backfires, and does so badly. Far from being useful, it just simply makes the product sound so revolting that I suspect millions will be put off.

This is a simple case of the marketing people just saying too much and overreaching to be “helpful”.

I apologize for the knowledge-base-like title of this post, but I did it in hopes the search engines will index it and save some other poor shlub the four months of effort it took me to get my iPod to synch with my HP Pavilion desktop.

In case you found this post after months and months of searching for others who have the problem that under Vista iTunes slows to a crawl and will say “syncing iPod” for three days or more without actually doing anything and can’t wait to read my more detailed tale of wow, here’s the link to what you need.

Now, back to my tech support catharsis. I upgraded to Vista from XP on my Pentium D 3Ghz machine right after Vista shipped. Everything worked but the iPod. When I connected it, it would hang. The rest of the system was fine.

OK, I figured, Apple wasn’t supporting iTunes on Vista. So, I’ll wait.

Then, both Apple and Microsoft started fixing the problems. Plus, this same iPod connected and synched flawlessly on my ThinkPad running Vista. If you can get a ThinkPad running Vista to synch with your iPod…well you get the idea.

So, I swapped cables on the HP. I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes and QuickTime dozens of times. Finally, I wiped the hard disk and reinstalled Vista cold on the theory that the XP upgrade left vestigial shmutz that messed up iTunes.

Nothing — and I mean nothing — worked. Calls to Apple had them scratching their heads as well. Search after search on every search engine with every combination of search terms I could think of produced nothing of use. One thing years of technical trouble-shooting has taught me is that you rarely discover a new problem yourself. Especially after four months, someone had to have had this problem. But just wasn’t yielding to my attempts to find even a small clue.

Finally, in an act of desperation, I connected an old 2G FireWire iPod to the HP and it worked perfectly.

Voila! It must be the USB ports, right? Right. But where do you get updated USB drivers for Vista? Actually, you don’t. You get updated .INF files for the chipset in your computer (if it’s an Intel chipset on the motherboard) that tell Windows Vista how to configure the USB ports. Apparently, the .INF files that ship with Vista aren’t compatible with this motherboard’s chipset and the Apple iPod. Imagine that: the installed configuration of the OS (remember, I installed from scratch) doesn’t have compatible configuration files for the USB drivers…at least for this motherboard and chipset combo.

Every other USB  device appeared to work perfectly, with the exception of the speaker mute button on my HP USB keyboard. That fact made this problem even more devilishly hard.

So, there’s my tale of woe for the Internet community in hopes it helps somebody. If you have an HP Pavilion with an Intel chipset and iTunes won’t synch with your USB iPod, update the .inf files.

Unlike many members of Red Sox Nation, I don’t wear it on my sleeve.

But my infatuation with the Olde Town Team goes back to my days as a BU student living in Kenmore Square, watching the ’75 World Series on TV with the sound turned down and the windows open in Myles Standish where we could hear the crowd a second or two before we saw the play on TV. With my eyes open, I can still see the ’86 series running away through Bill Buckner’s legs.

After college, I put up with the detritus of the Nation when I lived on Park Drive in the days before Fenway Park prohibited beer sales after the 7th inning. Lemme tell ya, if you can still love the Red Sox after what I put up with from the Nation — from vomit on my door step and on my car to guys from Southie terrorizing my girlfriend — you’ve got a lifetime, paid-up membership in the Nation.

So, there’s no need to explain how I felt in 2004.

But I couldn’t understand it…I just couldn’t grok it. C’mon, we all know the curse couldn’t just disappear like that. And what about 2007? As I write this, the Red Sox are 11 and a half ahead of the Orioles and are playing .700 baseball. The Yankees are in a last place tie in the AL East. Something had to have happend to the curse. It had to be lying in wait for what I feared would be a reappearance that would damn the team for all eternity.

But I couldn’t explain why the curse was dormant until today, when I read in the Wall Street Journal that John Henry’s investment business is on the rocks. Some of his investment funds are down as much as 38%. Merrill Lynch just pulled $600M from his firm.

I’ve always liked John Henry for what he’s done for the team. But I had no idea how selfless he really was: he’s absorbed the curse for all of us. He’s going to be penniless soon…well, not completely broke…courtesy of the curse, which has apparently left the team and infected the owner.

Hey, John! Thanks 600 million times over! BTW, if I were you, I’d get outta the investment biz right away. That curse is the real thing. 87 years is a long, long time to under perform the market. Still, the quicker you go broke, the faster Red Sox Nation will be celebrating the Red Sox replacing the Yankees as the new dynasty in the AL East.

If the title doesn’t make it clear that I’m upset, let me start by saying that an article I’ve just read on nytimes.com (registration required) has me neck-vein-throbbing apoplectic. (It’s my blog, and I’ll use 50¢ words if I want to, 50¢ words if I want to.)

In short, I don’t understand how the marketing people responsible for shaping the heads of psychiatrists to prescribe off-label uses of dangerous, highly-toxic drugs like Risperdal, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Abilify and Geodon for adolescents can freakin’ sleep at night.

Hey, I am a marketing guy, and I try everyday to get people to try to use the products I market in novel ways.

But nothing I market turns adolescents’ muscles into grotesque knots. What I market has been tested, in contrast to these drugs, none of which have
been tested on adolescents. And nothing I market is based on pure voodoo, camouflaged by 400 years of Western intellectual thought that has made psychiatry a “science” because we’re just too damn civilized to admit that the guy in the white coat is just the local shaman.

On the face of it, a doctor who prescribes an off-label use for a dangerous drug to kids is simply guessing. Hedge it anyway you want, but that’s what it is…a freakin’ guess. Sure, they can veneer it with plenty of pseudo-scientific talk, but the bottom line is they’re playing “20 questions” with your kids’ lives.

Why do they do it? It’s because the village diviners have no value unless they medicate (since they haven’t got a clue of what else to do). They do it because parents demand it (it makes them feel like they’re accomplishing something in the treatment of their children). They do it because the FDA lets them do it. (Consumer Reports says in its June 2007 issue that something like 21% of all drugs are prescribed for off-label uses.)

But mostly, they do it because the marketers at the pharmas tell them to.

Check out this quote from the article. This guy thinks it’s his “science” that convinces him to give kids prescription stimulants related to amphetamines. But we know it’s J&J’s marketing dollars, sent to him by marketing managers whose marketing logic is Mengele-esque:

Ten years ago, Dr. Realmuto [a University of Minnesota psychiatrist] helped conduct a study of Concerta, an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder drug marketed by Johnson & Johnson, which also makes Risperdal. When Concerta was approved, the company hired him to lecture about it.

He said he gives marketing lectures for several reasons.

“To the extent that a drug is useful, I want to be seen as a leader in my specialty and that I was involved in a scientific study,” he said.

The money is nice, too, he said. Dr. Realmuto’s university salary is $196,310.

“Academics don’t get paid very much,” he said. “If I was an entertainer, I think I would certainly do a lot better.”

Folks, save your kids from these very dangerous marketing people. Remember that your doctor has been bought and paid for. Snake-oil kills.

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?

To the surprising large number of people who’ve emailed, called, IM’ed and otherwise let me know that you’re wondering why I haven’t posted lately, I offer as a short interlude this post with its “a picture tells a 1000 words” explanation.”

This is like the overly-long intermissions in 1960′s film musicals like My Fair Lady and West Side Story. Go get some popcorn, take a constitutional and I’ll be back shortly, brimming with fire about something or other.

First, I hope this racy image won’t have the MPAA giving my blog an R rating…but it was such a cool graphic I couldn’t help myself.

Well…ahem…back to the post at hand.

I’ve been taking some…uh…commentary from both friends and business associates about my apparent infatuation with all things blog and podcast, but especially about all things WordPress. You know, comments like “It’s OK to stop ranting about this now” and “Here comes the blogger.”

Mostly I smile and take it in stride because I know what they don’t: there’s a subculture around WordPress that is worldwide, massive and far more rabid that I could ever be.

It’s simple. WordPress is just too cool to ignore. Consider: a multi-user content management system easy enough for non-techies to author in and which middling geeks can setup and maintain for…uh…zero dollars.

But it’s not just that the system is so rich. It’s that there’s this amazing community that supports and enhances it. It’s the whole subculture that makes it so engrossing.

And what’s always amazed me about technical subcultures is their binary nature. Once you stumble onto (or into) them, being involved is like driving a fast car on the track. It consumes you a little.

The other side is that if you aren’t “in it,” not only does the subculture not exist at all for you, but you are likely to swear the subculture can’t exist. If someone twists your arm and forces you to look, the binary off state makes you minimize the value of the subculture (“Who reads blogs? I don’t know anyone important who reads them.” “Nobody’s making any money from blogging.” “My customers are pizza delivery people.” “Blog, schmog.”).

Today, two things happened that made it clear to me I’m clearly in the on state with the WordPress subculture.

First, I found the WordPress podcast. No surprise here…I loved it. This is a high-quality, authentic podcast about the subculture. It’s proof positive this thing has gotten bigger than outsiders can see.

Then, tonight, I had a long email thread with a plugin developer whose plugin isn’t working for me. Lemme tell you, Microsoft and IBM can’t support a product better than this or at lower cost. This guy is doing it for the community…for the subculture…because he likes it and he knows how important it is.

So, all I can say is, it’s good enough for me.

I’ve been Turkmen-bashing Apple here a lot (just read the most hilarious obit for Saparmurat Niyazov) for not yet having released a Vista-compatible iTunes. I can’t decide if it’s out of what I suspect is pique at Microsoft having shipped an OS that’s so Mac-like or, more probably, if it’s being a big, slow and unresponsive conglomerate that’s cruising more on astonishing marketing than satisfying customers.

Lest it be said I never have a nice word for Apple (as is often said about me and Microsoft, to whom I will shortly return to bashing like Niyazov’s beloved melons dropped off a roof), I gotta say my new 80GB iPod’s audio quality simply blows me away.

I have two kids. A teenager and a tween. As you might imagine, they are hard on iPods, destroying an average of one every 18 months. That’s OK, because the stinkin’ batteries don’t last that long anyway.

(Roger Greene, for whom I used to work at Ipswitch, is apparently as inveterate a heat-seeker as I am. When he upgraded years ago to, I think, a 4G iPod, he asked me if I wanted his 20GB 1G unit. Even though I already had a 10GB 1G iPod, I was glad to have the spare unit – my kids had already started eating iPods. Today, neither his nor my 1G iPod can last the two minutes it takes to play The Doors’ Hello, I Love You. And the $15 Apple sent me to make up for the short battery life buys about 4% of the 5.5G 80GB iPod. Thanks so much, Apple. At least you could honestly assert every successive iPod had better battery life than the previous generation.)

In what is probably a self-serving justification for satisfying my toy habit, the way it works here is that the kids get my latest iPod as a hand-me-down when they kill one of theirs. I get the new one. (-:

This time, I was really worried about passing along my 60GB 5G black iPod video when Becca came home and said:

“Dad, the iPod broke.”

“You mean you dropped it? Treated it like a bookmark between your 500 page history and math books in your backpack?”

“C’mon, Dad! Do you have to be so annoying? It just broke.”

The audio quality of that 5G iPod was superior, delivering vastly better performance than Bill Machrone heard on the 4G iPod. If you are willing to make slightly larger MP3′s using LAME’s VBR mode (I use 320 kbps as the maximum bit rate) and something like EAC (troublesome as it is to use) to really get them bits off the disc cleanly, you can produce MP3′s I defy you to differentiate from the uncompressed WAV file. With my Sennheiser PX100 phones, the 60GB iPod sounded sublime. Sure…purists will complain about “artifacts” and other inventions normal people cannot hear. But with this unit, there were times I would be running and would have to stop dead just to listen to the music. It was just that sublime.

But I am happy to report that the 5.5G 80GB unit I bought to replace the 60GB unit I gave my kid sounds even better. I wonder if the improvement is due to better decoding. But increasingly, I have come to think that the 5.5G unit sounds so good because Apple reduced noise in the amplifier.

Unlike nearly every MP3 player I’ve heard, this 5.5G unit says completely silent as you crank up the volume in phones with no program material. No hiss, no pops. Just silence. When used with the Logic7 audio system (13 speakers, 450 watts) in my car, the sound is simply astonishing.

This thing is so good it’s almost worth the price Apple makes me pay for a scratch-seeking, astonishingly fragile, non Vista-compatible MP3 player.

</Turkmen-apple-bashi>

Hello…Apple? Could you please please pretty please ship the freakin’ update of iTunes for Windows Vista?

I know – I just know – you have the thing finished. After all, if nearly everybody else could have their products somewhat ready for Vista, couldn’t you? I mean you own the whole MP3 marketplace, right? Surely someone on the iTunes team had access to MSDN and copies of Vista since frikin’ November, when it shipped to businesses.

You’re just waiting to inflict suffering on Vista early adopters, right? I don’t care if it’s spite or callousness. You’ve had your fun. Now, you gotta get over it, move on and ship the damn thing.

Seriously, you’ve made the point: Vista is hard to upgrade to. But is it really necessary to make the point by killing my iPod? I can’t sync pictures (I left the darn computer on overnight), music and podcasts syncing is a mess and takes forever. My library is a disaster. If you can ship a fix to play iTunes store purchases, you can ship the whole thing.

C’mon now…you’ve made the point? How about acting like you like the customers who bought iPods to use with Windows.

Just when you think you’ve outgrown all sense of fashion, peer pressure and have resigned yourself to your own middle-aged individuality, along comes a jolting reminder than your cohort’s tastes may change, but the pressure to conform doesn’t.

I was scanning a newsletter for a client and ran across this amazing story: BMW owners love HDTV’s. Then I downloaded the entire report and discovered that I am doing precisely what I am being told to do by the marketing machines of several technology and automotive companies.

I took comfort in that. At least if I am not original, I am cooperative.

A cold that I brought back from Europe resulted this week in a cough nasty enough to remind me of the incessant hacking, phlegm-ing and general mucous-ness of a smoker I once had the misfortune to sit across from. Yech.

But in the “better living through chemistry” department: my doctor gave me a prescription to retard the near disgorging of my lungs through my throat: a codeine-laced “cough syrup.” Man, when you pick up this stuff at the pharmacy, they look at you like you’re some time-machined refugee from an 18^th century opium den. I couldn’t figure out why…until I took one tiny little teaspoon full.

Maybe I am just easily intoxicated. But this stuff not only stopped my urge to cough – it took me off the planet. To a planet where nobody coughs…nobody speaks…and nobody can hear the colors in your mind.

People who know me know I’m not a big drinker…and drugs never appealed to me. So maybe it’s just low tolerance, but as soon as I finish this post (delayed for hours by hacking my brains out)…there’s a spoonful calling me.

I know that in the torrent of comment, wailing and teeth-gnashing the blogosphere, podosphere and ipodo-universe will generate about Steve Job’s comments on digital-rights management, my little post here will live in obscurity. Still, I can’t help myself: I’m blue in the face with envy…Envy of Apple’s marketing brilliance. And the power they have to call the kettle black.

Face it, this diatribe is as self-serving, as blind to reality, as any piece of propaganda written during the Cultural Revolution. Apple doesn’t give a damn — not a freakin’ blob of spittle — about “openness” or “accessibility.”

But, by putting the onus on the record companies for the big, bad DRM Apple is “forced” to use (against its will!), they neatly avoid the real issue: they’d rather die than open iPod to anyone.

But the world will applaud Jobs for taking this stance. Apple has neatly deflected the fact that its near monopoly of digital music players and downloads gives it market power it refuses to use. And by smearing everyone from Microsoft to the big record companies, Apple brilliantly panders to the conventional wisdom while adding luster to its brand.

Man, these guys are good…really, really good. I only wish I could stop feeling like Winston Smith.

Every now and then, even the best of us does really stupid stuff. Thursday, February 1 was my day.

I was headed home from Paris after a good set of meetings…all I had to do was get to the airport on time.

We were booked on Air France 332, leaving CDG at 1:15pm. The instructions said the check-in deadline was 12:15pm. I’ve even got proof. Here’s a snippet from the itinerary:

1:15 PM Paris, Charles de Gaulle (CDG) – France – Terminal 2E
Deadline for check-in : 12:15 PM
3:00 PM Boston, Logan Intl (BOS) MA – Usa

So, when does stuff run on time in France? Apparently only when the taxi you ordered for 10am shows up at 11:05am when you have to get from the Eiffel Tower to CDG in 70 minutes. We saw the taxi arrive just as we were running to the Metro to take the train.

It took us exactly 73 minutes…we arrived breathless at the gate at 12:18pm and were denied boarding. Worse, we were told that the real deadline was 11am…that the reservation system was wrong. Who knew?

That 3 minute miss cost me another 24 hours in Paris…and the searing crticism of my client who pronounced the whole episode “bush league.”

Ouch. Frickin’ mega OUCH.

I pride myself on being a wizened world-traveler. Though this was the first time I’ve missed a plane in over 20 years, it still makes you feel stupid.

The next day the check-in agents appeared to have pity on us. The plane wasn’t full and they put us upstairs (AF has economy-class seats upstairs on its 747-400s. That quiet, spacious upper deck is usually business class on other airlines.) I had a whole row to myself…and 7 hours 45 minutes of time to consider how expensive three minutes can be.

If you even lightly press the “talk technology” button on Alex, you are more than likely going to get a lot of gushing from me about WordPress.

Since I first found WordPress 2.0 in the early summer, I’ve been amazed at what I, last a developer 15 years ago, could do with this industrial-strength, multi-user content management and publishing system.

It’s so astonishingly simple in concept…so amazingly easy to implement that I’ve had great success in getting people to use it. And, as a further testament to its ease of use, I’ve even seen what can charitably be described as low- to no-talent geeks convince themselves they’re the next Torvalds because of the instant feeling of success one gets using WordPress.

But now, even when I thought it couldn’t get any better, along comes WordPress 2.1. Following the instructions for upgrading took about an hour (much of that spent backing up files). After that, everything worked perfectly.

This is my first post in WordPress 2.1 and I’ve already fallen in love even though I’ve only been using it for about 10 minutes.

When you’ve been around software as long as I have there are a couple of ways that you can tell right away when something “has it.” In WordPress 2.1, those indications are all over the product. From the fact that it upgrades more easily than any complex publishing system has a right to, to the small stuff like a “last saved” indicator in the editor and subtle yet massive improvements in the UI that don’t make the user re-learn anything, WordPress 2.1 might be the most impressive and accessible achievement the open-source community has created.

Matt and the team: congratulations, and thank you very much.

Wow! Is this Internet thing powerful or what?

Over the Xmas holiday, a well-known security expert and professor in New Zealand named Peter Gutman wrote and posted on the ‘net a scathing critique of Windows Vista’s new DRM technology.

Now, it’s nearly impossible for you to go anywhere on the ‘Net without seeing people podcast and blog about it.

Wait…hold on…wait! Before you decide you would rather die than read an expose of Vista security, consider Gutman’s “Executive Executive summary”:

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

The entire paper is full of such pithy, outraged writing, and I highly recommend it to you.

But I am struck by two things…beyond my outrage at the allegations Gutman makes.

First, this is another example of the overriding importance of the ‘net. People from the CAD community, the security community and a bazillion other communities have begun fervent discussions of this paper. Normally, these communities are somewhat isolated from each other. But when something like this “breaks out” into general discussion among communities, it’s a beautiful thing to watch and so much more powerful.

Second…and here’s where I can’t help myself…I just love it when MSFT gets whacked. I know they’ve tried hard to reform themselves. I know they aren’t the overarching power broker they once were. And I know there are lots of hard-working and bright people in Microsoft. Still, they deserve it.

Microsoft is a leader in an industry where strong, undiluted ideas come right at them. They can’t plead innocence. But they have a consistent habit of being tone deaf.

I’m sorry that it makes me gleeful that they’re getting whacked. But it amuses me to watch a company that built a monopoly on the back of an open, ubiquitous platform clumsily close that platform and pay the price at the hands of multiple online communities.

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

Oooooh, Mama! There’s some serious fur flying in the blogosphere.

You all know I am a car junkie. And you all know I am a blog junkie. I satisfy both cravings with a healthy dose of car blogs and forums, with my favorite being The Truth About Cars.

This blog has it all: killer writing, a sense of humor and the balls to tell it like it is. In contrast to the rest of the pablum I consume about cars, these guys (apparently) could care less what the traditional car press thinks of them. These guys are nobody’s sycophants.

OTOH, I’ve admired GM for its early adoption of the blogosphere, if not for its pitiful products. For a company that just doesn’t get it on the product or marketing side, I’ve thought they’ve shown at least passing glimmers of “getting it” on their Fastlane blog.

GM had a podcast that, for a while, was cute. It featured this PR woman with the most nasal Midwestern twang I’ve ever heard who fawned over the GM execs she was able to get on the phone. When they got Corvette engineers to talk into their low-production-value podcasts (these podcasts are like GM interiors), you understood the meaning of unctuousness. But it was early corporate grokking of the blogosphere for 2005…and it was way inventive for GM.

Once, Lutz himself gave what I still think is a compelling description (about 2/3 of the way into this podcast) of why the blogosphere required authenticity and corporate involvement. I agree that the blogosphere is way to even the tables, even when across the table from you is Chubba Cheddar-cheese who’s never seen a press junket he didn’t like.

Still, GM management is responsible for destroying an American industrial icon through inexplicable and inexpressible hubris. And I’ve wondered why Lutz has never been culpable for this. He’s been there long enough. He’s delivered his own Aztek (or two).

But now…but now…it’s gotten really hot in the kitchen. The Truth About Cars is personally blasting Lutz, in its long-running (and sadly poignant) GM Death Watch over Lutz’s inchoate rant about CAFE.

If you like cars, you gotta read both posts, along with all the comments. If you don’t like cars, you still gotta read the posts and comments.

It’s all there: all the tragedy of GM’s arrogance, the unmasking of Lutz as just-another-cog-in-the-machine-of-GM-destruction, the astonishing balls of TTAC to write and post what it did, the car community going nutz over these posts.

I’m never going to need to watch another female mud-wrestling contest as long as these beeatches keep this up.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve never been a Microsoft fan. I’ve considered their products derivative and their business practices despicable. Office was a response to Lotus SmartSuite and Outlook has always been stuck at Notes Release 3 in terms of user interface. Meanwhile, Microsoft to this day is still trying to kill what remains of the Notes/Domino customer base despite the fact that the remaining base is simply IBM customers who will never ever convert to Exchange.

But, I am completely and totally blown away by the blogging support in Microsoft Word 2007. I’m writing this post in Word 2007…and the support for my blog – from uploading graphics to category support – is superior. Finally…finally…they’ve nailed something inventive. Now, you can comfortably write and edit posts in Word, the de facto standard word processor.

This ain’t just pigs flying for me…it’s freakin’ flying frogs. (If you’ve never had the opportunity to make a kid giggle while reading Tuesday by David Wiesner go out right now buy the book and find a three to five year old to read it to. )

A bit of background: I’ve been worried about Office 2007 for quite some time. I’m an expert user of Office and the idea of the ribbon bothers me. For example, I actually rely on customized toolbars. Except for Outlook 2007, that capability has been removed in Office 2007. Also, there’s a lot of eye candy in Office 2007. I’m no neo-Luddite, but I actually worried about losing my expertise or, worse, having to essentially re-learn all the tricks I rely on every day. From Shift-F7 in Word to open the thesaurus to Ctrl-1 in Excel to format a cell, I simply didn’t want to have to change.

So, just to see how bad it would be (after all, if Microsoft says you want to use their new suite, it’s less an invitation than a command. Eventually, you pretty much have to do as you’re told when it comes to what Microsoft wants from you.), I set up a WinXP virtual machine and downloaded the 60-day trial of Office 2007 Professional.

And though I expected to be truly pissed off at the ribbon, the loss of desktop real estate and what I suspected would be poor performance, I am actually blown away. For me, blogging support in Word means that my clients as well as I can write more “comfortably” than ever. RSS support in Outlook is my other I’ve-been-using-it-for-two-hours new feature.

Bottom line: Microsoft often gets criticism for not offering compelling features for upgrades of Office. That’s why I have a client still on Office 97. But this time, Microsoft is getting my (ouch!) $300 for a shiny new copy of Office 2007.

Many pundits who review software are saying that Microsoft has "caught up" with Firefox in Internet Explorer 7 (here and here, among others).

I beg to differ. Since the mid-1990s, what Microsoft has done — time after time — is deliver pale imitations of others' UI inventions. Have you ever used the View menu in Outlook? Of course not…because it's a bad imitation of Notes release 3's view menu, which Lotus dumped in about 1996.

Have you seen Office 2007? This is the first release in which Microsoft has done it all itself, having abandoned the "common user access" design metaphor it ripped off from IBM during the 1980s joint venture. (Historical note: the menu system and windows graphic controls descended from an IBM product called GDDM, which lead to OS/2 Presentation Manager. In fact, Microsoft used to actually distributed the IBM Common User Access manuals with Windows 3.1 SDK's.)

Office 2007 is a complete mess. The eye candy gets in the way of anything you want to do, reduces screen real estate for the actual work to near nothing and doesn't make life any easier for novices. That's what you get when Microsoft tries to "innovate." And as for Vista, well…I don't use a Mac, but even I can see they've copied Tiger.

Tonight a single difference between IE7 and Firefox 2.0 crystallized this for me.

You can almost hear the design discussion in Microsoft during the IE7 planning meetings: "We gotta get us some tabbed browsing. It's killing us to not have it. Put it in…now."

So, you end up with IE7's "interpretation" of tabbed browsing, which includes a close box (the red "x") on each tab. 

What happens if you accidentally hit that close button? I have, and I'll bet thousands of others have in a rush to get somewhere else on the screen in a hurry. In IE7, you've lost that tab. It's gone. You gotta open a new window and reload the page.

In Firefox — which admittedly didn't have the close box until Firefox 2.0 — the developers have really innovated. You can undo the close. Check out these two images from the context menu (right click menu) of each browser:

See the "undo close tab" selection? Click this, and a new tab is opened and the last page is reloaded. True innovation from the open-source Firefox folks.

Here's the equivalent context menu from IE7:

A pale imitation, to be sure. Just enough for Microsoft to obscure, once again, true innovation by delivering "just enough" to say they have the thing they couldn't invent themselves.

OK, you say, nobody uses context menus and nobody ever undoes an accidental close.

Maybe (though I found it and used it). But my point is about innovation.

Microsoft just doesn't have any. 

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. 

Pretty picture, ain't it?

Actually, it's what's happening to this blog, despite my good intentions. What we rail about over on the corporate blog and in our podcast — the orphaned blog — is beginning to happen here.

I've got a million excuses, some of them pretty darn good. I'm blogging like a maniac for clients, AgencyNext's blog is really getting traction and needs attention, my life is busy and full.

But it's bull. Like the kid above who needs to stop making excuses for all the candy, if I wanted to make this blog bigger, I would and I could.

I'm sad.

Lotus Notes — which played a huge role in my career — has been vanquished more or less completely by Microsoft (though they won't stop attacking until the carcass has dessicated into dust). And its (formerly) thought-provoking leadership has apparently come down with an early case of Alzheimer's, is lost and looks like those poor bastards sleeping on the grates in Copley Square next to the Boston Public Library.

What's set me off? This completely trite, pedestrian, and useless bromide of "etiquette" when using instant messaging. Was this supposed to be some kind of post-Foley joke? You know, here's all the stuff he should have done, like remembering to "introduce yourself." Or remembering to "act professionally."

C'mon, this stuff isn't fit for the unsold ad space in an in-flight magazine on Outer Zambian Airways. Or maybe the execs at IBM/Lotus are casting their eyes enviously on the Boston Globe's Sunday business etiquette column. You know…"Mr. Notes says flossing your teeth while emailing is tres rude."

What happened? Why have they given up even the appearance of having one competitive brain cell rubbing against the other?

It's simple: all the good minds have moved on. That's what's left…manners lessons from IBM execs for the collaboration challenged.

I remember reciting the Humpty-Dumpty rhyme for my kids. I know a lot of revisionist people think these nursery rhymes have a violent streak to them. But in this case, it's a pretty good message: break it, and you can't put it back together again.

I wonder if there's an equivalent message for non-English speaking kids. Maybe so…maybe not. But I would assume that whatever their background, people get the message somewhere along the way: at some point, you just can't say, "ooppsss…sorry about that" and pretend it never happened.

What's this got to do with anything? Simple…putting the eggshell pieces together only reminds people that you broke the egg.

If you make a promise — in business or in life — then renege on it, it doesn't matter what you do to try and make it up after the fact. The egg is done gone and broke.

I’m in love…with WordPress.

Since late July, I’ve been using this amazing system to produce blogs. What blows me away is that this system has all the features of industrial-strength commercial software.

Having been in the software biz since the 70s, I never thought I’d ever be able to say that about an open-source, GPL-licensed product. And trust me, WordPress is a real product in every sense of the word as I’ve heard it used in my software experience.

What’s so astonishing to me is that no matter what task I’ve needed it to do in the last 90 days, there’s been either a way to do it in the base product or a plug-in that did it and which we could install and use in minutes.

The plug-in that has just totally blown me away this week is Podpress. This is a simply astonish piece of functionality that turns WordPress into the most amazing podcast feed imaginable. Total time to install and customize: about 30 minutes.

Today, with zero training in PHP (and very little HTML background to boot), I was able to customize a template in WordPress. Though the finer points of CSS and browser incompatibility continue to drive me wild with frustration, for a curious hobbyist, there’s nothing else like it on the Internet. With WordPress and a run-of-the-mill ISP hosting account (1and1 has a great one for $3/month), you can achieve a level of muti-user content management and publishing unheard of for hundreds of thousands of dollars just a few years ago.

I style myself as a geek snob, knowing what’s good and what ain’t in tech. I haven’t got the words to describe how amazing WordPress is. 

My Google searching skills must be off…way off. I'd been trying for days to find an authoritative recommendation for when to switch from summer (actually All-Season) tires to snow tires.

I just couldn't find anything other than the usual forum drivel. But then Tire Rack sent me instructions with the new winter tires I ordered and voila! An answer!

Seems that once the air temperature stays consistently below 45F, it's time to switch the tires. Apparently — and I liked this logic — the compounds on winter tires stay softer at lower temperatures. Becoming more rigid is what makes summer and All-Season tires less effective in the snow. But, if you put winter tires on too early, they're so soft they just melt away.

Lest you think I have hit rock bottom on blogging ideas, I want to tell you that I actually find this scintillating. No excuses…I'm into tire tech. Far from being lowly pieces of rubber, my flirtations with track days have taught me that very little is more important than the tires.

So, now you know. And, admit it…just to yourself…don't you feel at least a little smarter?

Dear Mr. or Ms. Someone-who-knows-better,

I owe you an apology. I didn't approve your comment of August 27th in reply to my post of July 21 until today because it ended up in the spam bucket (imagine that!) and I didn't see it until today. Sorry about that.

It's my policy to allow all comments unless they are clearly spam or in poor taste. I don't want you to think that I deliberately censored your freedom of expression, even when you're using that freedom to trash me from behind the cover of a fake email address and spoofed Internet address.

I don't consider your rant in poor taste…honestly. I think you have some unresolved issues, but you have the right to say whatever you like about me. Even on my blog, on my nickel. It's clear we have met, or worked together, or maybe even shared a meal or two. Who knows? Who cares?

What's clear, though, is that you took personally something I said on July 21 …a full month later. How could that be? What makes you think it's addressed to you or anyone in particular? Are we cutting a little too close to the bone somehow? Did you recognize something in you that made you see red? Are you so sure it's about you?

Being just a little self-centered there, don't you think? I wouldn't want this to veer off into into something really pathological. So, calm down…we're all good, you and me (whoever you are).

Oh, by the way, if you have anything else you'd like to say, go ahead…this blog is open…I'll just spend more time looking in the trash folder. Promise.

Today, I learned a lot about complacency . Not mine (though I'll bet I'm guilty more than just occasionally). This time, it's the complacency of someone else, which makes it a lot easier to see.

In the business world, that "I've got it covered, don't worry" attitude sometimes goes along with being in an established company. You think you can squash the "bugs", the little guys…just flit them away simply because you are who you are, or because you work in the firm you do or because you have some money in the bank.

That's an underestimation organizations and individuals can live to regret. And, believe me, the penalty for being smug is usually directly proportional to the level of complacency. The more you are sure you don't have a problem, the more likely you are to be stunned.

I found this astonishing podcast the other day, and I have to tell you, it's may be the best podcast I've heard in a long time. Right, you say….a podcast on English grammar?

I run three miles every morning. Because I am not a natural athlete and at 6am my body is…shall we say…reluctant, my iPod is my motivator to do something I really don't like. I need the aural stimulation. Most days, it's Led Zeppelin or equivalent that does the trick.

So, how could a podcast about English grammar be a must-listen at dawn? Simple: it's fascinating. I write (a lot) and Grammar Girl gives me what I want to know about doing it better. She sounds young, but reminds me of Mrs. Kendall, my 5th grade English teacher (would you believe I was in 5th grade in 1965? Some readers of this blog believe that's too old to be useful).

That old lady (she was ancient in 1965) drilled us hard. And I know I wasn't the only kid to come out of that class in Jacksonville, Fla. able to make a subject and verb agree in number.

And, OK, I'll admit it: I find the odd rules and irregularities of English grammar as intricate and pleasurable as fans do who live in online virtual environments and who spend years in role-playing games. I love knowing what's correct, what isn't and how to string a sentence together. And Grammar Girl is helping me do it better.

There are very, very few podcasts like that. (My other must-listen is, of course, Security Now!.)

So, even though the guys in the office (that would be you, Sterling and Dave) were merciless and full of ridicule, I'm a big fan of Grammar Girl. You should be, too.

I take a lot of guff from people about my obsession with cars. In particular, I am currently getting no pity — none – for lusting after a new car. Not this one (it's a coupe)…but the one rumored to follow later in '07: a 335i sedan. 

I gotta have one in this color.

Why? It's not the twin-turbocharged 300hp engine. Nope, don't care about about the paddle shifters (though it does mean that I can even buy the car because we have to have an automatic).

Nah, what I want, what's gonna cost me — big time — are the real time traffic reports in the navigation system. Got a navi on my current 330i. But like a real geek, I gotta buy a whole new car just to get a software upgrade.

Isn't there something I can take to control this? 

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 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.

Sometimes the synchronicity of it all blows me away.

First, I was really excited to discover a completely new, wonderful word: susurrus, which means "a whispering or rustling sound". I saw it it, in of all places, in an editorial today in the Wall Street Journal decrying the public whipping Sir Paul McCartney and his wife are giving each other in their big-time divorce.

That got me to thinking about how corrosive divorce is, as several people and families close to me are dealing with the catastrophe of divorce right now, today. 

Then, I got to thinking about how sururrations of lies, deceit and misdirection were evident early on in a recent personal experience. But you can't hear susurrus when you're inside busting your butt and the waves of mendacity are rolling in on the tide.

Yeah, I know that's a long-winded, OED-over-maxed way of saying, "you can't hear a leaf falling in the forest when you're in downtown traffic." But I am certain some of you reading this know exactly what I mean and to whom it's directed.

And then I was looking for a graphic about gossip (which is usually susurrated). Came across this beauty on Wikipedia which was perfect in its early Soviet anger and matched the Russian theme of another blog post I wrote today over on www.agencynext.com.

It's all too synchronous. 

Good question, isn't it? This is the view from the place we rented for a family vacation this week on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire.

The weather has been a 10. The water is cold. (This is freakin' New England, for sure.)

And a lot happened. I'm not sure how to sum it all up. 

Daddy's Junkie Music ripped off my kid. She worked all summer to buy a used keyboard from them. They sold it to her with a power supply that would've fried the keyboard. We discovered it and fixed it with a trip to Radio Shack. (Doesn't it depress you when you shop in a rural mall on vacation?)

Growing old: my kid also worked on college essays. This might be the last (or next to last) family vacation.

My younger kid alternated between math drills, swimming (she's officially categorized as a "flying fish" after her earlier two weeks on the Lake at summer camp) and making sure we ate a lot of ice cream.

She also drove a motorized vehicle for the first time at a go-kart place. Crashing three times pissed off the staff, but, hey, it was a safe place to give a 10 year old the controls.

My wife spent the week looking ravishing in the summer sun and spending long hours with me on the deck you see above reading. (I finally got through The DaVinci Code. What bullshit. What pandering. The sacred feminine? C'mon, this was a book that mixed bad religion and homeopathic doses of sex for titillation.)

Finally, tonight as the sun set in downtown Wolfeboro and we sat on the dock eating dinner in the glorious late summer, I realized the difference between Disney and the real world.

At Disney, everything conspires to make the predictable happen. In the real world, when everything is absolutely, unimpeachablly perfect, nothing could conspire to make it so. It simply happens. You're there, you're in the moment, and you gotta make sure you see it when it happens.

I've been cartharisizing here lately about my own apparent naivete.

But today, I want to rant about something else: those who profess integrity but define it by their own standards. You know, the ones who think nothing of copping a little free music from the 'Net or making promises they have no intention of keeping.

They're hard to read at first because they really don't think they've done anything wrong. Only later, when they're exposed do you experience the full force of the contradiction: they're mendacious by most objective measures, in fact by any measure, except their own. 

But the reality is that when you're an lying asshole, you're simply a lying asshole. Protest all you want, get all the sycophants who need you to help nestle you in a cloud, but you're still a lying asshole.

Damn! I feel better.

So, I recently asked someone what my good qualities were, and he said loyalty was one of them.

Did believing that I was loyal make any difference in this relationship? Apparently not, as I think today's image aptly describes what happened.

It's gotten me to thinking that loyalty (apart from that you express to your family and bonded friends) is sorely misplaced in the larger world.

Yeah, yeah. I know I am freakin' naive.

If you are interested in marketing for technology companies, head on over to my colleague Sterling Hager's latest observations on what's real in the world of making your product famous. 

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.

Last Monday, my partner and I had to visit a client in NYC.

Can't take the shuttle; the tunnel will kill you before you get to the airport.

So, for the first time ever, I decided to take the Acela from Route 128 to Penn Station in NYC because Penn Station is just five minutes' walk from the clients' office.

So, what does one do today when you book tickets? You book online, right? And while you're booking the tickets, when you come to the "enter promotional code" entry, you open a new window and search Google for "amtrak and discount."

It takes about five seconds to find the best discount. Here I found a code for 25% off. Bam! In goes the code and off come the bucks. Round trip BOS-NYC for about $125. Can't beat it. I'm happy, and thinking that if the train is nice, this might be the new thing.

But — and this is what I just can't believe — when I got to the station to pick up the tickets, the clerk balked, saying "there's been some abuse of H570." (He gave me the tickets anyway.)

Now, Amtrak really has to be tone deaf to think that if it sends its frequent prisoners a discount coupon it isn't going to be widely discussed by the inmates. And that those forums will get crawled. And that I would find it in a heartbeat.

Where did Amtrak think the emails would go?

Worse, their idiot marketers not only tried to put the genie back in the bottle, they asked their poor clerks to do it for them.  What is the clerk going to do, except piss off customers who have already bought and paid for discounted tickets?

You end up getting on the train all bent out of shape after having been confronted by the clerk, who really could care less but who has been ordered to police something I suspect they really don't understand.

After all this, the ride wasn't too bad (except for the conductor wearing an Amtrak uniform who when asked a question said, "I don't know. Ask Amtrak. I just punch the tickets."). But it sure doesn't make me want to ride the train again. I'm seeing H570 in my nightmares now. 

Sorry, Shakespeare. But this phrase from Hamlet comes to mind as I've been reflecting on the nature of false modesty.

Actually, I've learned quite a lot about this particular affliction from up close, personal contact with it. And what I've finally realized (maybe a little late) is that someone that "doth protest too much" is really masking a naked, ugly, overwhelming arrogance.

False modesty is an especially effective mask for arrogance. In cultures where arrogance is both endemic and therefore taboo, false modesty is the cover up. With false modesty, a guilt-ridden society can appear reformed while endorsing culturally impermissible arrogance.

False modesty is the sedative for arrogance's cutting blade. False modesty trades on apparent sincerity, lulling victims into an early trust. Once sedated, the cutting can begin. Then, the sudden personality bait-and-switch reveals penetrating aggression. Like a snake that paralyzes the prey before eating it, false modesty transfixes people.

The unmasked lie only makes the aggression worse. You end up recoiling at two things. The lie of false modesty itself. And worse, you are repulsed with embarrassment at the arrogance laid bare.

Now, when I hear people deny expertise they clearly want, my guard will be up. Way up.

I was reading Scoble's post about Ford's attempts to use the blogosphere to help them overcome the fact that their cars just plain stink.

So, OK, it's all right with me if Scoble decides to hawk Ford PR's blog, and it's professionally-produced-to-look-verite documentary (which is too slick to be real, too manipulative to be credible and which defines sycophant, as all the "heavy discussion" in the room revolves around the senior exec).

But what's not OK is how Ford responds to the New York Times lambasting they took last weekend: 

"We here at FordBoldMoves.com understand exactly what social media is and how important the 'social' part of that phrase will be going forward."

You know, I love Led Zeppelin, and I do a mean air guitar on "Whole Lotta Love." But it doesn't make a single note come out of thin air.

And Ford — so dumb as to cancel the only cars they have high loyalty with, the somnolent Town Car — can wave its arms all it wants about understanding online communities, but they'll never, ever get it.

I've worked in these giant corporations. And they do sit around their desks trying to be hip, and cool, and blog-y. But they never really want to be other than what they were before: successful on their own terms. Understanding social media means not being corporate. It means having something really interesting to say. It means being able to "take it." Does anyone really believe Ford can take it? If so, why is their blog registration only?

IBM tried this with OS/2. First they had the "OS/2 Fiesta Bowl" in which college football players got tackled on OS/2 logos painted on the field. Then they tried "OS/2 Ambassadors" which was the early 1990's version of community.

IBM ultimately gave up on the attempt to grasp community and on a product nobody wanted. Ford will do the same thing when the coolsters on their marketing staff have had their fill of trying to follow the directions from the 64-pound box of Madison Ave. brand "Whipped Internet Community Mix."

Mr. Fields: build cars people want, build them well. Let your engineers talk, not your PR people who so very much want to make you feel good about Ford (and who, apparently, are succeeding despite the real downward spiral your company is in).

Stop trying pretending to know something about community; it only makes you look even more pitiful, like Grandma in a mini-skirt and knee-high boots.

Some people go to the beach on hot Saturdays in July. They pack the family in the minivan, load up on sunscreen and fight for a parking spot at Signing Beach or Horseneck Beach. Some give up and spend the day in Revere standing in line at Kelly's for too much roast beef and an order of fries large enough to add five pounds to people who normally have a tapeworm in their stomachs.

Not me. I prefer to spend my day Autocrossing with the Boston Chapter of the BMW Car Club of America. 

In case you aren't familiar with AutoX, it's a form of racing in which you navigate a devilish course of parking cones as fast as you can. It's your car — and your driving skills — against the clock. Believe me, it's not as easy as you might think.

What I love about it is that it allows you safely test the limits of your skill. All you can hit is a cone. Better still, you don't have to be hard core about it, though many people are. The hard core types range from those with an extra set of racing wheels and tires to people who trailer in non-street-legal AutoX cars.

Me? I just add air to my tires, make sure the lug nuts are tight and drive my daily driver — yeah, that one with the automatic transmission — right onto the course. Nobody cares. This is competitive within classes, but very friendly.

So, I've done this before with an S2000. But this is the first time I've AutoX'ed my E90.

More significantly, it was the first time my 17-year-old daughter had ever been to an AutoX.

And not only was it fun, but it illustrated a point to her that I could have never made as clear in words or other example: people who drive like fools on the street are, in fact, fools.

AutoX is about speed, of course, but it's more about control of speed. My daughter sat in the car during my runs and came away knowing two important things. First, there's never a chance, never ever, to drive like you do in an AutoX on public roads. Second, the skills you learn in AutoX are directly transferable to the street: you lean to quickly yield, avoid or detour around the pre-pubescent Massholes on the roads in their Mustangs and Camaros who obviously have a right foot but nothing connected to it.

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.

I think it's pretty darn cool that even with the explosion of the blogosphere a new blog, even one put up primarily for venting, can get some attention.

But, it's been two days since my last post, and I am now able to say why. I was in the hospital for a test. All's well, fortunately, but the "preparation" for this test is worse than the test itself. Sunday night I amused myself by setting up this blog. But Monday and Tuesday, I just felt too sick to do anything with it.

In fact, it wasn't until this afternoon (Wednesday), that I felt like my former self. And that feeling – of being back-  in and of itself made my day. My wife, my kids, even the wackos at Honda who won't fix a clear warranty issue were beautiful to me today. So, happiness really is a warm johnnie.

But…back to the main theme: how I left the bits uptown. (C'mon, surely some of you get it by now…it's as clear as White)
When you get to this point (does it have a name? Middle age? Wisdom? Reversion to adolescence?) you can feel stuck. Stuck big time. Family, bills, obligations…choices you made inadvertently decades ago that seemed so innocuous are now opening that johnnie to the ice cold wind of failure.

In short, you tend to keep doing what you were no matter what. Even if the world is telling you that you suck at it. "It's all I know." "It's part of me."

Since this is a G-rated blog, all I can say is "hooey."

I've already begun a new (really, ancillary) career. This time, it's something that I will be integral to. And that's the most important thing: if you aren't integral, you're disposable.And you can be disposed of by any other integral because, simply, you aren't.

I'm not whining about job security. Instead, in the kind of work I do — used to do — commitment wasn't enough. You have to cater to the whims and egos of integrals. Bottom line, I really suck at that.
Mea culpa.

OK, am I showing red, pouting lips in my first post because I really, really want people to read my blog?

Uh, no. Not quite.

It’s because you make the “whew” sound (a bilabial fricative) when you are about to jump off a cliff… or you are about to do what I’ve done: change careers late.

Very late.

After years and years of being a geek, after which I decided it was a young person’s game followed by years and years of being a tech marketing guy, I’ve decided that my true love is PR.

So, I’ve joined up with Sterling Hager (you know who he is) and after a summer vacation, we are going to make Think-Brain scream-loud for clients who want what I am calling “Agency Next.”

There will be more about Agency Next soon. But right now, the simple declaration of doing this — even though there’s nobody reading — has me thinking about the difference between American culture and some Asian, especially Chinese cultures.

In China, and especially in business there, age equals wisdom. In the US, age equals expense. In the former, older people like me are presumed to have much more to offer in business. Here, in many tech startups, guys like me as seen as pure expense.

So, the scary thing — the thing I that makes me say “whew” all the time as I contemplate this exciting new adventure — is will clients understand the value? Or, are they so overcompensating with puny, cryptic little Google ads that they can’t grasp the value of steady, experienced hands managing their presence in the world?

We’ll soon see.