If you’ve been following my blog on the Charles Schwab auction rate security (ARS) fraud case in New York State Civil Supreme Count (just click the “Thieves” menu at the top of the page to read my previous posts on this subject), you know I’ve been watching the court case closely.
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.
Tricia and I are pictured here (click the thumbnail for a larger image) with Sarah, our newly minted cum laude graduate of Simmons College with a BS in Nursing. Sarah graduated last Friday, after four years of intense work in a highly competitive, demanding academic and clinical program. We are bursting with pride, as you can well imagine.
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.
Well, another frustrating problem bites the dust. And my solution is documented here for others who have suffered trying to explain to T-Mobile customer support drones that, no, it’s not my phone — I have four of them that do exactly the same thing. And no, our Internet connection is up. And, no, I won’t reset the phone to factory defaults because it didn’t work when it came out of the box.
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.
I love Kursoawa films. And Netflix on the Roku box makes it easy to dive deeply in this master’s work. Among his less well-known films (and one of the few to be set in modern times) is Ikiru (“to live”) which I watched for the first time this weekend. IMDB has a good synopsis of the movie and plot here.
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
My colleague Chris developed the first iteration of www.vuuch.com in Drupal. Among all the many brilliant things he’s done, that decision doesn’t count among them. 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.
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