Live from Austin!

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.

Are you a concerned parent wondering where you can buy toys that aren’t made in China, and are guaranteed not to be tainted with lead?

Buy LEGO. It’s all still made in a factory in Denmark, not China. It will expand your child’s mind, not damage it.

If your child is too young for regular LEGO, there’s Duplo. For an older child, there are LEGO railways and LEGO Technik.

Also not made in China: Playmobil.

[NYT article]

Google press release:

We recognize the impact that our operations have on the Earth’s climate, and are taking steps to ensure that we are carbon neutral by the end of 2007.

Solving climate change won’t be simple, and there won’t be a single solution that addresses the entire problem at once. We all need to act together to meet the challenge – from the largest corporations and governments to individual households.

Meanwhile in the New York Times:

In the annals of perks enjoyed by America’s corporate executives, the founders of Google may have set a new standard: an uncrowded, federally managed runway for their private jet that is only a few minutes’ drive from their offices.

The Google founders, according to one of their own Google maps, will spend just 7 minutes to get from their offices to the NASA airport where their jet is parked. As the crow flies, the airfield is only 1.7 miles away.

For $1.3 million a year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin get to park their customized wide-body Boeing 767-200, as well as two other jets used by top Google executives, on Moffett Field, an airport run by NASA that is generally closed to private aircraft.

We all need to act together to meet the challenge, eh?

What’s the betting that Google don’t include Larry and Sergey’s burning 5 tons of jet fuel per hour in their “carbon neutral” calculations?

British Airways gave us the option of paying extra for carbon credits to make up for our air travel. We didn’t take them up on the offer.

There are a number of reasons why I feel carbon offsetting is a bad thing. The first is that by removing the guilt, it encourages people to continue a profligate lifestyle, rather than actually changing their behavior.

For example, if Al Gore genuinely gave a crap about the environment, he would stop flying by private jet so much. But no, he’s rich and can simply buy carbon credits to salve his conscience. Similarly, John Edwards will happily lecture to ordinary people that they should give up their SUVs, then get into his own SUV secure in the knowledge that he’s bought carbon credits to make up for his own indulgence.

(In fact, Edwards owns 3 SUVs — a Ford Escape, a Cadillac SRX, and a Chrysler Pacifica — plus a pickup.)

The second reason why I dislike carbon credits is that there are much more effective ways to reduce emissions. For instance, if British Airways really cared, they would stop painting their aircraft. A fully painted 747 weighs 443kg extra, compared to around 100kg for me plus my luggage. That’s before you factor in the increased wind resistance from cracked and peeling paint, the chemicals needed for stripping and repainting aircraft, and the disposal problem of the dissolved paint and chemicals. [Update: BA could also stop flying empty planes across the Atlantic.]

The third reason why carbon credits are a dubious idea is pointed out by spiked online. When you buy carbon credits for your flight from Climate Care, what you’re actually doing is paying a bunch of Indian families to dig in the dirt via back-breaking manual labor, and pump water manually, rather than using modern farm equipment. Now, it might not be a bad idea if I personally spent some time stomping on pedals to pump water, but I don’t see why Indians should be bribed to do it so I can feel less guilty about air travel.

But my favorite argument against carbon credits is the parody site cheatneutral. If the logic behind carbon credits is really valid, why not buy some infidelity credits and cheat on your partner with a clean conscience?

German company TrekStore make MP3 players. For several years, they’ve had a series called the i.Beat series. Which was fine, until they decided to name the new model “blaxx”. Resulting in:

The TrekStore i.Beat blaxx.

Guy Kawasaki has summarized a bunch of things he thinks everyone should learn about the world of work. One of them leaped out at me:

Whether [you are] young or old, the point is that the optimal length of an email message is five sentences. All you should do is explain who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by.

Clearly he is a man after my own heart. At work I often reply with e-mails consisting of the word “Done.”

Whenever you’re writing an e-mail, you should go through what I call W5 analysis. You imagine that you’re the person who is receiving the e-mail, and answer the 5 or more questions that will run through their mind:

• Who are you?
• What’s happening?
• When is it going to happen?
• Where is it going to happen?
• Why should I care?

Those are the 5 Ws. (Note that for the purposes of this exercise, “How” is spelled with a silent ‘W’, though ‘How’ questions tend to be more specialized and less important than the others.)

Sometimes there are more than 5 Ws. For instance, if you’re asking someone to do something, you’ll want to go on and answer

• What do I need to do?
• When do I need to do it by?
• How do I do it?

Similarly, if you’re announcing a problem, you might want to add

• Why did this happen?

If you’re really lucky, you may be able to skip a question and let the reader work it out for themselves. For instance, if they know you already, you can usually skip the “Who are you?” However, if you can’t come up with at least 5 obvious W questions that the reader will want answers to, you’re probably missing something important. Try going through “Who”, “What”, “When”, “Where”, “Why” and see if they prod you to think of a question.

Once you’ve answered the W questions, those answers become the content of the e-mail. So it’s probably no coincidence that Kawasaki picks 5 sentences, and my rule of thumb is to pick the answers to 5 questions.

W5 analysis is also useful for web pages. If you’re setting up a business web site, you should definitely use W5 to decide what goes on the home page. When I go to a web site, I always want to know:

• Why does this web site exist?
• What does it contain?
• Why should I explore further?

and often

• Who owns the site?
• Where can I contact them?

It’s surprising how many sites fail to answer those questions.

In fact, once you start thinking this way, you see W5 everywhere. For instance, consider software project release announcements on SourceForge. As a user, off the top of your head, what are the 5 Ws you’d want answers to about any piece of software?

• What does it do?
• What does it cost (or what’s the license)?
• What do I need to run it?
• Who wrote it?
• Where is the documentation?

Now go through the release announcements and project pages and see how often people leave those questions unanswered. D’ohh!

Mean annual wage of someone who looks after your children: $18,820.

Mean annual wage of someone who does your dry cleaning: $18,890.

Source: Forbes, via Consumerist.

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?

Another interesting survey was about socks. It was a really long survey. It asked about my preference for different kinds of sock, using phrases like “crew”, “low-cut”, “high-performance”, “quarter”, “ankle”, and so on. I was mostly mystified as to the distinctions being made. Even now, I couldn’t define a quarter sock or a crew sock.

I do have opinions about sock material: I like cotton, and don’t like anything else. Oh, all right, perhaps a little Spandex for stretchyness. Oh, and I have some Birkenstock socks made of recycled plastic bottles, as a kind of experiment.

And yes, I also have opinions about sock color. I have two colors of sock: light brown, for wearing with khakis, and black, for wearing with everything else. I think there may also still be some really old white socks at the back of the wardrobe from a previous life.

Other than that, I mostly look for a decent thickness, the right size, and the right shape. You know, sock shape.

The survey asked my opinion about what kind of sock goes best with what kind of outfit. Well, I try to make the colors appropriate, but generally I assume people aren’t going to be spending a lot of time looking at my socks.

Then the survey also asked how different kinds of socks make me feel. That was a particularly difficult section to answer, because on the whole, socks don’t make me feel anything. In fact, if I notice my socks, it’s probably because they’re defective in some way–too cold, too hot, otherwise uncomfortable, or they just fell apart after only a few washes.

Maybe I just haven’t found the right sock yet; maybe there really are socks that make you feel energetic, attractive, or like a go-getter.

So all in all, it was a bit of an ordeal wading through a 15-20 minute survey about socks. The fascinating part was thinking about the fact that there are probably lots of people who actually have detailed opinions about socks. People who care what brand of sock they are wearing.
And worse still, there must be people whose job it is to come up with 20 minute surveys about socks. The poor bastards at the sock company probably spent several days in meetings brainstorming for questions. After that it probably took them weeks of conference table meetings to hammer out agreement between the various stakeholders over what the final wording of each set of questions and answers would be. There are people in this world who live, eat and breathe socks. Not literally, of course, but that would almost be preferable.

One of my random Internet pastimes is answering surveys. Partly I do it because I suspect I’m an interesting edge case for their data set, the exception that will prove their rules. Also, at the end they offer some of the statistics they’ve gathered, which can be interesting. And sometimes, the act of answering trivial questions can lead me to odd insights about myself.

Like just now.

It was a survey about motor oil. Since I’ve only been driving for a little under 3 years, and since we’ve always taken the car to the dealer for its oil change, I’ve not had much occasion to learn about oil, or the oil changing process.

In fact, while answering the survey I realized that the sum total of my knowledge about oil changes is what I learned from the ubiquitous Castrol GTX ads on UK television in the early 80s.

Specifically, I know three things: I know that Castrol GTX is a brand of oil. I know that it is viscous and golden in color.  And I know that if you pour it gradually onto a sheet of metal on which a metal spanner is resting, it will cling to the edges of the spanner and flow around it.

And now that I pause to think about it, two of those things might be totally untrue.

But there’s something a little disturbing about the idea that if I had to go buy oil for the car right now, I’d probably buy Castrol GTX, simply because of a TV advert shown 25 years ago (and thousands of miles away); an ad that didn’t really work on any level beyond pure abstract brand awareness.

And even more amazing is that with less than a minute of effort I managed to locate the ad on YouTube.