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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.
I’ve just been through a “process” of making my FiOS DVR accessible from Verizon’s website and their mobile apps for Android and iOS. You know what I mean about a “process” and a cable company: thousands of reboots of this thing or that — hours spent restoring my settings on this device or that after being forced to reset everything to factory default settings or “tech support” won’t support me. (It’s as if the tech support people live for finding out that you have changed the background from blue to red: “Ah ha! That’s the problem. Reset it and call us back.” Naturally, you never get the same person a second time.)
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.
Years ago when we were hunting for a condo to rent in Singapore, I noticed that the ceiling light fixtures hadn’t been installed in the kitchen of a newly constructed unit we looked at. When I asked the agent why, she said that the landlord was waiting to see if a Japanese or American expat rented the unit. If a Japanese family rented it, they would install fluorescent lighting; for Americans it would be incandescent lighting. It was the first time I’d realized that the type of lighting one prefers has a cultural dimension.
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?
Just yesterday, as my wife and I were going through the Sunday papers, I ran across an ad for HDMI cables from Best Buy. As you can see from the snippet from their weekly ad, they have a house-branded 6ft “high speed” HDMI cable for $60.
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.
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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.
Well, now that it’s over, I can finally talk about it.
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.
I realize that recent posts on this blog have veered wildly from maudlin to manic. But, hey that’s life, ain’t it?
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?
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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.
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