A friend from New Zealand celebrated her first 4th of July as a new US Citizen by throwing a big "white trash" themed 4th of July barbecue. Having completed 10 years of US residence in January, I’d been considering throwing a red, white and blue stars-and-stripes overkill party, but events had conspired against it. So when the invite to the barbecue arrived, we said "Hell yeah!" Continue reading »
Yeah, I’ve edited last year’s just in time for this year’s. I had a sudden outbreak of weddings to deal with.
The mainstream media coverage of the US subprime mortgage meltdown has mostly been about all the folk who have lost their homes, and various plans the government has come up with to try and ease the problem. Thinking about it more carefully, though, doesn’t it seem a little odd for the US government to interfere in the sacred free market merely in order to save a bunch of poor people from ruin?
Well, the SF Chronicle has an interesting article that explains this curious situation. It’s not about saving people from losing their houses, it’s about saving the banks.
During the housing bubble which was fueled by the subprime lending, banks sold mortgage-backed securities. For those who don’t know, mortgage-backed securities are basically in-place mortgage agreements, packaged for resell between financial organizations, or between financial organizations and investors.
The key is to view a mortgage in the abstract, as a promise by person A to pay an amount X for N years. That promise has a value, and can be sold.
For example, we arranged our mortgage through a small financial firm in the Austin area. Once all the paperwork was done, they packaged us up as an asset and sold us to GMAC. GMAC took on the business of extracting money from us over the course of years, and paid the small financial firm a lesser amount in compensation for the value of us as a customer.
This is generally a good thing. Because GMAC does administration for millions of mortgages, they can provide convenient billing and payment services, and reduce per-customer overheads. For the small firm, the benefit was immediate cashflow and no ongoing overheads.
A similar process can be used to package a mortgage and sell it to investors as a bond. The bank gets to remove the liability from their balance sheet; they can then use the cash to provide mortgage funds to more homebuyers. Hence, allowing the transfer of mortgages as mortgage-backed bonds should allow more people to buy their own houses.
For example, suppose John Smith owes the bank $1000 a month for the next 20 years. That’s a total of $1,040,000. The bank could sell that mortgage to an investor as a bond for (say) $750,000. The bank would get the $750,000 immediately, reducing their liabilities. They could use the money to finance some new homebuyer’s mortgage. Meanwhile, the investor would get $1,040,000 over the course of the next 20 years, making a nice profit. And the whole thing could be treated like a regular bond or stock market investment–the bank could continue to process the collection of the actual mortgage payments, just like it would process dividends on a mutual fund investment.
The problem is that since the banks expected to sell off the mortgages to eager investors hoping to cash in on the property boom, they didn’t really care too much about checking that the mortgages were sound; and the investors didn’t really have any way to check on the actual person paying the mortgage.
However, there’s language written into these mortgage transfer securities stating that if there’s fraud, the bank which sold the mortgage is legally obligated to offer to buy it back at the original price–which is now often ten times the actual value likely to be extractable from the homeowner. Fraud like, say, people lying on their mortgage applications, or inflated property appraisals, or e-mails on bank computers suggesting that they knew the market was a bubble that couldn’t last. Then there’s the issue of companies like S&P, who helped the banks to structure the subprime mortgage securities to look as good as possible on paper.
So if too many mortgages fail, and investors start demanding that their junk bonds be repurchased by the selling banks, those banks will go under. At that point, the FDIC and the government will have to step in, and we’ll basically have a taxpayer-funded bailout of a bunch of big corporate banks who defrauded investors. It’ll be the Savings and Loan crisis all over again.
How about pressuring the investors not to call in the cops? Well, unfortunately a lot of the investors are in foreign countries. Some of them are foreign countries. With the current state of US diplomacy, a conversation that starts with “Hey, we were wondering if you could eat a few billion dollars in losses to fraud so that we don’t have to bail out our rich corporate buddies in full public view” might not go too well.
But never mind, it may not come to that. A crack team of financial experts are trying to come up with a way to salvage the situation. We know they’re experts because, as the Chronicle points out, they’re exactly the people who got us into the mess in the first place…
When I moved to the USA, one of the first things I did was get a cell phone. I was going to be living in a big city, rothko was working in a different part of town, we needed to coordinate things–it seemed to make sense. We went to Omnipoint, got a couple of phones, everything was good.
A few years later, Omnipoint were purchased by Voicestream. We got a phone upgrade. Still no trouble. Later still, Voicestream were purchased by T-Mobile. Another phone upgrade came and went.
Finally, we moved to Austin. I started looking for new phones, as ours were a couple of years old. The requirements were simple enough–quad band, Bluetooth for the car and for sync with the Mac, iSync support.
T-Mobile had zero quad band Bluetooth phones. None at all. On the other hand, IBM had a discount deal with Cingular, who offered some good phones. So, we were seduced to switch providers after 7 years with T-Mobile and its ancestors. This time a contract was involved. And before long, Cingular was purchased by AT&T.
Our contract finally expired last week, and we decided that on balance, we preferred T-Mobile. For starters, AT&T’s bills are utterly incomprehensible. You’ve probably read stories about iPhone users getting 200 page bills. Well, ours aren’t quite that long, but they’re just as impossible to decipher.
Then there’s the pricing. With discount, AT&T isn’t ludicrously expensive; but they really, really overcharge for SMS, web and e-mail. Plus, rothko has perpetual problems with dropped calls.
I saw a good deal at Amazon.com on the BlackBerry Curve. It meant a 2 year contract with T-Mobile, but I was willing to take that risk to get a good deal. I ordered two phones, 2 years of family plan service, 2 years of unlimited e-mail and web. I wasn’t expecting any problems.
A while later, I got an e-mail from Amazon saying that I needed to call T-Mobile to confirm my information. I did so, and was told that I needed to fax them a copy of my Social Security card, driver’s license, and a recent utility bill.
Fax? In 2007? Apparently, yes, a company that sells e-mail and Internet access doesn’t actually have e-mail itself. I scanned the requested documents, found an online fax service, and sent everything off.
A few hours later, I got another call. The woman on the other end of the line explained that I had been misinformed. What I actually needed to do was travel to the nearest T-Mobile store and have them fax in the information.
Annoying, but no big deal. I figured they were just being extra careful. So that evening, I drove to the nearest store and had them fax everything in. I took the transmission receipt home with me. The next day, I called back to check the status of my order. After a few minutes on hold, I was told that I had been misinformed yet again. A fax wasn’t enough; I actually had to go to the store and have them confirm the information in person.
By now, I was starting to get annoyed, but I decided to humor them. I drove to the store again, and explained the situation. The store called T-Mobile, who told them to fax the information. So they faxed it again, and confirmed that the fax had been sent.
An hour later I called to check on my order. After a few minutes on hold, I was told no. They were refusing my order. If I wanted service with T-Mobile I would have to pay full retail price up front for the phones, and then pre-pay for service.
So basically, all that jumping through hoops had been a total waste of my time, as they had never been going to give me contract service in the first place.
I explained that I had been a T-Mobile customer for 7 years, and could prove it. (I still have copies of old paid bills, because I’m that kind of person.) No dice.
So, I’m still with AT&T, and I’m wondering what to do next. Part of me still wants to switch, but part of me wonders if I should, given the amount of dicking around I’ve received trying to become a T-Mobile customer again.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a third option. Thanks to industry consolidation, the US only has two GSM providers. So I can’t say “Screw you, I’ll go with the good guys”, as there aren’t any good guys.
I wrote a letter to T-Mobile customer service, but I haven’t sent it yet. I don’t honestly know if I want a 2 year contract at this point. Maybe the best thing to do is to buy a couple of unlocked phones from somewhere else entirely, then go to T-Mobile and just get a couple of SIMs and sign up for service with no contract.
When I moved in with rothko, we bought a vacuum cleaner. At the time we were living in a fully carpeted apartment in Malden, MA. Money was tight, so I did some research via Consumer Reports and bought a Sharp vacuum cleaner.
Unfortunately, I overlooked one detail. While excellent on carpets, the vacuum cleaner was entirely unsuitable for hard wood floors. After a couple of years we moved into an apartment with wood floors, and the Sharp took up residency in the basement. But I was loathe to part with it, because it was a perfectly good vacuum cleaner, and vacuum cleaners are expensive.
Then we moved to Texas. The faithful vacuum came with us. It’s still in fine working order, and we now have carpet again, which it does a good job of cleaning. But the problem is, we also have stairs. The trusty Sharp is about as suited to vacuuming stairs as a Dalek. And downstairs is wood floors again.
So for a while now, I’ve had plans to get a vacuum that actually does a good job of hard floors, stairs, and carpet.
Obviously the Dyson range appealed as soon as I saw it. But I heard that the early Dysons were heavy and awkward, and often unreliable. So I waited.
After a couple more years, the Dyson ball was launched, which was more maneuverable. Then this year, the Slim was launched in the USA. It has a smaller version of the ball mechanism in a vacuum that’s light enough to pick up and carry up and down stairs without my back hurting. It also seems as though the reliability issues have been dealt with.
Searching on Google, I saw ads for a company offering “Worst prices on Dyson”, asking “Don’t pick on us”. I wondered whether it was a mistake or a joke, clicked through, and discovered it was an independent retailer in Austin called ABC Vacuum Warehouse. It’s a store I must have driven past dozens of times without ever realizing it was there, partly because it’s in a nondescript shack-like building in front of a warehouse, and partly because the windows are all covered up with blinds so it looks like it has been abandoned. Inside is a small store filled with nothing but vacuum cleaners, accessories for vacuum cleaners, and spares for vacuum cleaners.
At the store’s suggestion we took a look at a Sebo vacuum cleaner as well as the Dyson range. Fine German engineering, but there were a few things I didn’t like. First up, it uses bags and filters. Secondly, the main upright piece detaches from the brush head for cleaning stairs, which sounds good, but I could see it would be annoying and require a lot of bending over to detach and re-attach it. I prefer the Dyson wand, which doesn’t require any bending over at all.
So, DC-18. I took it for a thorough trip around the house this afternoon. It does indeed do a good job on all floors; it’s great on the hard wood floor, will remove the gifts of the pube fairy from the tiled bathrooms, and does at least as good a job as the Sharp on carpet. Time will tell how reliable it is, but so far I’m satisfied: I ended up with a full cylinder of hairy filth.
While we were in England, we got the train from Bournemouth to visit London.
London was an important part of my life as soon as I was old enough to be allowed to travel there without adult supervision. Some people are naturally country folk, some people are city people; even though I grew up in small villages and quaint towns, that was never where I really wanted to be.
I was curious to see how London had changed since I last saw it, nearly 10 years ago. We arranged to stay overnight with Shimrit in Stoke Newington, which Sara amusingly misheard as “Stoat Newington”.
Memories fade, and my main reason for going to London was to take my new video camera and visit a bunch of familiar places and record them; the streets, the buildings, the traffic, the crowds.
We arrived at Waterloo Station, so we started off by wandering towards the Thames and taking a look at the London Eye. The Eye had been built some time after I left the country. I’d seen it on Doctor Who, but not in real life. We didn’t actually go up in it; there was a long queue, and the ride itself would have taken another half hour or so out of our busy schedule. There were more important places to see.
We crossed over to the Houses of Parliament. They were protest-free, thanks to the new “Serious Organized Crime and Police Act”, which bans such serious crimes as holding up a banner outside Parliament. We continued on to Parliament Square, where some Iraq war protesters were quietly camped out along the fence facing Parliament. Across the street, heavily armed police kept everyone away from their elected representatives.
We turned right and headed along Whitehall, past the Treasury and Cabinet Office. Some tourists were gawping at guardsmen outside Horse Guards; it’s good to see that the Queen is doing her duty and keeping the Colour regularly Trooped. We passed the old War Office; and defra, who were probably busy panicking over the latest outbreak of foot and mouth.
Trafalgar Square was disappointingly blemished by scaffolding, tarpaulins and wooden hoardings. It was also full of sky rats, of course, but they’re expected, so you can’t really call them a disappointment. We stopped at a small Italian restaurant nearby for a spot of lunch, then continued towards Leicester Square.
As we walked past the Odeon towards Piccadilly Circus, everything started to get very familiar, and I started to get tearful. The Swiss Centre is still as it was, and the Trocadero hasn’t changed much. Apparently the former is due to be modernized a bit, so I was probably lucky to get to experience it in its retro cuckoo clock glory.
We visited tate modern, of course. One thing we always missed in Boston was a decent modern art gallery, and Austin isn’t much better, though the Blanton does try.
By the evening, we were exhausted. We had some vegetarian curry at a restaurant near Shimrit’s pad, then crashed on the futon.
The next day we tried to take things a little easier, and started off at Oxford Circus for a day of shopping.
Now, I could be misremembering, but it seemed to me that the crowds were far worse than ten years ago. It was a rainy English summer day, but the herds of people reminded me more of the run-up to Christmas. We struggled towards Tottenham Court Road, ducking into stores here and there.
Given the current exchange rate, we tried to buy as little as possible; but inevitably, there were books, CDs and DVDs unavailable in the US which we were unable to resist. We went in to HMV, but tried to limit ourselves to stuff with a single digit price.
We had lunch at The Plaza, which had mysteriously moved the food court up to the second floor and made the basement vanish entirely. Baked potatoes. They’re not nearly as popular in the US. I used to buy one most Saturdays, from a guy with a cart in the Market Square in Cambridge.
Tottenham Court Road is still just like it used to be. I even recognized several of the gadget stores. The infamous Centre Point is still there, and still unnavigable by foot. The Telecom Tower is still visible from Oxford Street, but sadly sanity has prevailed and its existence is no longer an official secret.
The biggest change to London is that there are now coffee shops everywhere. Back in the 90s I had to bring an espresso machine back with me from Italy; now, you can’t walk for more than a minute or two without finding somewhere offering Illy or some other variety of “Genuine Italian espresso”. And tasty snacks, too. I definitely approve.
One good English food item I had forgotten about until I saw them at Waterloo Station was the pasty. I wonder if there’s somewhere in Austin that will sell me a good pasty?
Anyhow, we finished up our day with a little book shopping at Foyle’s and Borders, then got the train back to Bournemouth.
Once upon a time, back in the ancient history of the Internet–before the 1990s–domain names were carefully controlled and regulated. A single organization controlled each top level domain. If you wanted a domain name, you had to meet their requirements.
Often the policies enforced were quite picky. If you wanted a .uk domain name, you were required to actually be in the UK, for example. If you wanted a .org domain, you were required to be a non-profit organization. To be in .net, you were expected to be a network access provider or ISP.
A lot of people disliked the bureaucracy involved in domain registration, and objected to the fees charged. And so it was decided that the domain name system would be opened up. There would be many domain registrars for each major top level domain, all competing to give the best price and service. Anyone would be able to register a domain, with minimal bureaucracy. Domains would be bought, sold and transferred in a perfect Free Market.
At first, things looked good. The cost of registering a domain dropped rapidly. Rather than having to fax paperwork around and get signed documents from company directors, you could just register online with a credit card for whatever domain you wanted.
However, it quickly became clear that domains could have value. A small proportion of Internet users (around 5-10%) don’t seem to understand search engines or bookmarks. They find things by guessing domain names and typing them in. As a result, people found that domain names an idiot would guess first ended up with traffic, purely by existing. Suddenly instead of having to advertise your web site, you could buy a domain name that people would randomly visit anyway, and get instant traffic with no work required.
Domains like “sex.com”, “computers.com” and “cars.com” suddenly became very valuable, changing hands for large amounts of money. Some people weren’t very happy about it, but still, there was nothing wrong with it really.
Unfortunately, there were headline stories of domain names changing hands for millions of dollars. And suddenly, there was a gold rush. Everyone with a modem hurriedly registered every domain name they could think about.
This was a major pain. If you wanted to set up a web site, it became almost impossible to find a simple domain name that hadn’t been registered already. Almost all of them were unused, just a whois entry and nothing more, but if you approached the owner their eyes would light up with dollar signs and they’d demand extortionate rates for their “valuable property”.
Still, the situation was somewhat self-correcting. It did still cost $50 or so to hold a domain for a year, so eventually when nobody turned up to offer $100,000 for it, the holder would let the registration lapse and you’d be able to pick it up for $50.
Then someone invented banner ads. Suddenly, those unused domains could be used to make money. Domain registrations were still dropping in price, and there were ad companies who would pay you $0.01 each time you served up an ad to someone. $10 a year for a domain, and all you needed to do was show ads to at least 1,000 idiots who typed your domain in at random, and you’d break even.
And so suddenly, the Internet filled with junk web pages filled with ads and nothing else. There are now multi-million-dollar companies whose primary business is hoarding domains and filling them with content-free crap. Domain spam is now so mainstream that companies like Google actively encourage it.
The next step was obvious. Sure, you could think of a domain name that other people would be likely to guess at random, but most of those were already registered. So the domain spammers began watching the lists of domains that people failed to renew. So now, if a widely used open source project fails to renew its domain name, the page will suddenly be replaced with a spam site full of affiliate ads.
Not everyone appreciates ending up on a domain spam page, however. Plus, if your page doesn’t look like total spam, you might get search engine traffic, and boost your profits further. Hence, the new trend is automatic content generation.
Some domain speculators take the unsubtle approach, and simply rip off content wholesale. If you have a web site with significant readership (as measured by, say, technorati), someone will likely set up a spam site which copies the text of each post you make, covers it with ads, and re-posts it to one of their hoarded domains. Sure, it’s copyright violation, but the chances of getting caught are slim, and so long as you pick on personal web sites the chances of anyone going after you with a lawsuit are slim too.
(I don’t think it has happened to me yet, but if I include a made-up word that doesn’t appear on the web, like spozquak, I should be able to do a Google search in a month or two and see if anyone’s copied it.)
However, again thanks to the free market, there’s now a market for software that can generate moderately convincing looking content. You’ve seen it in spam e-mails, and now it’s being used to fill the web too. The first generation used random text generation, but now more sophisticated “auto content generator” software uses web feeds to pull in text, chops the text into individual sentences, and then recombines them based on keywords.
(So I guess I should clarify that spozquak is a great alternative to viagra, cures mesothelioma from asbestosis, and helps you make money at home.)
While the web was filling with crap, the domain name registrars kept competing in their free market. As the supply of new unregistered .com domains dried up, they had to think of new ways to pull in customers. The solution: trial periods. You can now register a domain name for a 5 day trial, see if it pulls in any suckers, and if not you don’t have to pay for it.
You can probably guess what happened next. Someone wrote software to repeatedly register domains for trial periods, automatically.
And so we arrive at today’s web, the ultimate result of applying unconstrained free market economics to the problem of naming web sites. It’s a world where every name you can think of is already registered and filled with spam, often by someone who isn’t even paying for the domain. A world where if you’re away on holiday when your domain name expires, it’s immediately filled with spam. A world where web searches return hundreds of pages filled with spam designed to look like content, ripped off from other people’s web sites.
Of course, there are a couple of things we could do that might help ameliorate the problem. They’re just utterly unacceptable to the free market faithful who make up the Internet’s core audience.
The first is this: Do not allow domain transfers between third parties.
You bought a domain? Great. You want to sell it? Can’t. I mean, you can’t sell your home address, your postal code or your telephone number, so why should you be able to sell a domain name? Your friend wants the domain? Fine, you cancel it, he registers it for the standard price.
If you could sell telephone numbers, you’d see rampant speculation there as well. If you moved to Austin and wanted a 512 phone number so friends could call you without paying long distance fees, you’d probably have to buy one at auction for a few hundred dollars. Or if you were in Massachusetts and wanted one of the old 617 numbers so you’d look like a long-established business, you could end up paying thousands of dollars. But the phone company doesn’t allow reselling of phone numbers, so the problem doesn’t occur.
(It’s worth noting that you can sell toll-free numbers. And sure enough, you get rampant speculation in that chunk of the phone number namespace, with most of the good ones already taken.)
The second way to help reduce the damage caused by the free market in domains is to resurrect an idea from the 80s: that your domain registration is voided if you don’t actively use the domain. And by “use”, I mean more than simply putting up a blank page of ads.
I can tell that people are already sharpening their pitchforks and lighting their torches, but which is worse: a domain name system that doesn’t support your religious belief that a free market is the best solution to everything, or a free market domain name system where you can’t actually buy any domains you want and everything is full of spam?
Apparently Sunday was a bit of a slow news day for the Dallas/Fort Worth Star-Telegram. I have to wonder how their graphic artist reacted when asked to draw the all-important inset map.
Monday was somewhat more exciting, for me at least. I went to put on the usual “I’m a responsible adult with a job” clothes, and discovered that the pair of khakis I had grabbed and stuffed into my case were too small. I don’t know when I bought them, but they were not only too tight around the waist, they were also a bit too short. While I could just about squeeze into them, the result looked uncomfortably close to comical, and didn’t really allow for breakfast. I had a long day ahead. This would not do.
I had the car direct me to the nearest strip mall, where I found a Kohl’s store. By a stroke of luck, they were having a massive sale on khakis. I soon found the perfect pair, at 30% off. (Cotton, pleated, easy fit, 34/34, permanent crease, anti-wrinkle, in case you care.)
Returning to the car, I ripped the tags off my new clothes and considered what to do next. I thought about the possible headlines: Pantsless IBM employee arrested in car, Early morning shopper shocked by hairy legs. No, not worth the risk. So I went to IHOP, ordered breakfast, snuck into the gents’ lavatory, and changed there. After breakfast I spent a little quality time at Fry’s Electronics before the first session at the IBM event. (Still haven’t managed to find a Wii.)
The rest of the day was pretty dull, as was Tuesday. The drive back was largely uneventful. There were the usual SUVs driving at 15-20 mph over the speed limit and weaving across lanes without signaling, but that’s just Texas. I stopped at a Starbucks in Waco, and eventually got home safe but tired.
Today I mostly caught up on e-mail, then for spouse night we went to Taste of Austin. My back is still sore from spending too much time sitting in bad hotel chairs, but I’m hoping it will be back to normal after another night in bed.
I now have a Wii…
…component video cable.
Now all I need is the actual console. I figured the cable would be the tougher piece to get, because they were only available by direct order from Nintendo, but it turns out the console is still near impossible to find in Austin.
A week ago, there was a protest march for Zombie Rights at the Austin city hall.
Some pirates turned up to protest, with signs saying things like “Walkin’ dead ought to walk the plank”.