Live from Austin!

I think the spoilsports at Animal Control have abducted Monsieur Mouffard. It’s weeks since I caught a whiff of his enchanting musk.

Work was pretty frustrating today. I was trying to do real work using beta versions of software not due for actual release for at least six more months. Windows needed rebooting four times, which is a lot of coffee breaks.

I was using beta code because Big Blue’s general policy is to have internal users run the betas full time, so that we’ll find the bugs rather than the customers. I wonder if they do the same in Redmond?

As a response to the (deliberately manufactured) energy crisis in California, some of the electricity distribution companies began offering special contracts to encourage corporate customers to be more efficient. The deal was: They’d get a cheaper electricity rate, if they agreed to cut their usage by 15% when asked to do so during peak time shortages. If they failed to do so, they’d have to pay extra-high premium prices.

This is, of course, rational market-based pricing of goods—as the theory goes, people who need lots of electricity when it’s in short supply should pay more, and the way to encourage efficiency and flexibility is to give it a financial incentive.

Well, as a result many big corporations are now deliberately consuming 15% more electricity than they need, so that if they’re asked to cut usage at peak times, it’ll be easy to do so. Bwahahaha, another victory for the free market.

It seems Kodak is the latest company to find out what happens when you get into bed with Microsoft. They worked with Redmond to improve Windows support for digital cameras—but they discovered that when you plugged a Kodak digital camera into Windows XP, it ignored the Kodak software and launched Microsoft’s software instead. Getting it to launch the Kodak software for your Kodak camera required a complicated nine-click crawl through system dialog boxes. That’s even if you’d explicitly installed the Kodak software.

Windows XP also tries to push users into using digital printing services which have signed licensing deals with Microsoft, by making sure Windows XP only offers those companies in the appropriate selection box. In other words, Microsoft wants to get a cut of whatever you pay for your photographic prints. If the processing company won’t pay a per-print fee to Redmond, the Windows digital photo software won’t upload your files there.