Florida Power & what?

    In October of 2005 hurricane Wilma ravaged South Florida with 120 mph winds, caused more then 20 billion dollars in damage and left 3.2 million FP&L customers without electricity.

    In February 2008 an overheating switch in a power substation near Miami, costing a few hundred dollars, left 4 million people without electricity, under a light 5 mph breeze.

 

        On being a sprig.

    At last count the Technorati.com website was tracking more then 112 million blogs. Again, one hundred and twelve million blogs, written by a hundred million people all around the world from every culture and all walks of life. Some people maintain multiple blogs; other blogs are maintained by several people. And more blogs are added to the World Wide Web each day, although some are abandoned as well. 

    Gartner analysts have stated that the number of active blogs reached its peak in 2007. They expect the number of new blogs to equal the number of abandoned blogs. And all those abandoned blogs will just add to the websam (web flotsam). If a blog falls over in the blogosphere forest while a hundred million other bloggers are screaming for attention, does anybody notice? Does anybody care?

    There are many types of blogs, with pictures, videos, pod casts and writings in every style imaginable. Some blogs are the original web log diaries, where people describe their own daily lives; others are political, artful, environmental, sentimental, mental, anything goes. Some of these bloggers are serious journalists reporting serious issues. Others are pretend journalists that can not possibly be taken seriously.

    The quality of all those blogs is just as diverse as the subjects. Some blogs are the equivalent of an evening at the Joneses, being forced to watch a slideshow of their vacation snapshots (shiver) while wondering what time it will be socially acceptable to leave. Some blogs are informative, others are educational or entertaining. There are even a select few jewels that are all those at the same time. Some bloggers don’t even take the time to run their drivel through a spellchecker (you know who you are!), while others post works of remarkable compositions, elegant style and wonderful prose (no, I didn’t mean you!) (no, I didn’t mean myself either).

    Many blogs have advertising on their sites. And indeed many bloggers are desperately trying to increase traffic to their site, so they may glean some income from those adverts. Although in reality few even make enough to offset their costs. To this purpose the only real winners are those sites catering to the bloggers by offering advertising services, or schemes to increase traffic, such as the projectwonderful.com website. Some sites are nothing more then a thinly veiled form of click fraud. Many link exchange sites are little more then an I-click-on-yours-if-you-click-on-mine scheme. Sure, it increases traffic, but it remains to be seen if it increases actual readers.

    So, why are we doing this? Why am I doing this? Honestly, I am not all that sure. But I will admit I get a kick out of people who are actually reading my posts. Some don’t like it, some do. But just one visitor reading my work and appreciating it, makes me feel like I accomplished something, however small it may be.

    Maybe that’s all blogging is about. Rambling about whatever you feel like rambling about and perhaps some day, you actually hit on something that somebody finds valuable. And maybe that’s enough, just being a little sprig in this giant blogosphere forest.

 

    Don’t call me, I’ll call you.

    Not so long ago, in the house I lived in as a kid, we had a telephone. It was simple phone, with a rotary dial, if you remember what that is. If you wanted to talk to me, you could come over to my house, or call me on the phone, or write me a letter. Those were happy times, back in my long lost merrily squandered youth. Aaah…memories, light the corners of my mind… Uh, where was I? Oh yeah…

    I remember how excited the whole family got when my father brought home a second phone for the upstairs. It was an old phone he had pilfered from the company where they had just replaced all phones with newer models. Now we could transfer calls between the downstairs and upstairs. We kids just loved playing with this marvel of modern technology. I remember calling a friend from the downstairs phone, just so I could transfer the call upstairs and impress him. He was not impressed.

    Now, just half a generation later, I have a home address and a postbox address. I have a cordless home phone with four handsets, business phone with wireless headset, and a brand new Nokia cell phone, all with follow-mode, caller-id, call-waiting, voice mail and numerous other features I haven’t figured out yet and probably never will. I have a two-way pager with over 800 pager numbers programmed into it. I can receive faxes at home and at work. I have high-speed internet, over a dozen different email addresses, three instant messaging ids, and four Bluetooth devices. Voice-Over-IP, and inter-continental video conferencing are nothing new to me. Oh…and I have a blog. And I am not nearly as connected as many other people in this high-tech day and age.

    The costs of long distance calls nowadays are significantly less then when I played with that upstairs phone. Can you imagine paying $7 (with inflation that would be over 25 current day dollars) per minute for an overseas call with several seconds lag time, and a sound quality so bad that most of the call consists of “What? Can you repeat that? Hello, can you hear me?”

    These days, many people suffer from what is called connectivity overload. We are all too easily reached at any time day or night. Often times we find people wanting our attention when we are knee deep in a task that requires serious focus. Taking a few moments to say “I am busy, can we talk later?” is enough to lose that focus. As a result our productivity declines. Our attention span gets shorter by the day. And hair loss reaches epic proportions (my bald spot is getting decidedly pronounced).

    In a 2007 survey by PEW Internet, almost half of all Americans who only occasionally use modern electronic gadgetry stated that the pervasive connectivity is burdensome and they feel hassled by it. It is estimated that the US economy in 2006 suffered 650 billion dollars in lost productivity because of connectivity overload. 

    In addition we are raising our children in this environment. From their early years on they have access to high speed internet, their own cell phones, mp3 players blaring music at all hours of the day and the TV showing mindless advertising blurbs while they are trying to do their homework. Multi-tasking is a way of life for our children, not an achievement reached at later age, such as for my generation. I can’t help but wonder how this new generation is going to turn out.

    While multi-tasking is supposed to improve our productivity, our brains aren’t really up to it. I am sure mine isn’t. Is it any wonder I screen calls on all my phones, employ spam filters on all email addresses, have a firewall on my internet connection, set myself ‘away’ on instant messaging, and purposefully let the battery on my pager drain so I can say “Oops, sorry you couldn’t reach me." 

    I saw a rotary phone on sale the other day, marked as Vintage and priced outrageously. Do you think they’ll accept cell phones as a trade-in?
 

Perhaps a Haiku would work better?

There once was a politician from Nantucket,
who went to Washington with a bucket.
He tried to clean up,
but quickly gave up,
and said "You know these politicians can't even write proper limericks."

 

Fighting Comcast’s duality brutality.

    A new piece of legislation, "The Internet Preservation Act of 2008", has been introduced to support Net Neutrality. Although the bill itself is rather general and narrow in scope, if passed, it will have severe repercussions to internet providers (read Comcast) which throttle or block certain types of traffic.

    As US Congressman Edward J. Markey stated: "Internet freedom generally embodies the notion that consumers and content providers should be free to send, receive, access and use the lawful applications, content, and services of their choice on broadband networks, possess the effective right to attach and use non-harmful devices to use in conjunction with their broadband services, and that content providers not be subjected to unreasonably discriminatory practices by broadband network providers.". Trying to translate it from politicospeak, he states “Comcast bugger off”.

    As you may have heard, Comcast is screwing with their customers internet use by throttling bit torrent traffic, starting some nine months ago. Of course Comcast denied doing this even after the entire world had already verified it to be true. But then again, big corporations don’t have to be truthful; they just have to make money. In the meantime Comcast is the target of a class action lawsuit as well as an investigation by the FCC. As a result, Comcast recently updated its terms of service to better correspond with how they were actually screwing their customer’s.

    In the meantime however, the internet community in itself is still unclear if Net Neutrality is a good thing or not. Some say that Net Neutered would stifle content providers abilities to innovate, upgrade and improve their services as well as slowing acceptance of new technologies by customers. The opposition says exactly the same; that ISP’s will be unable to innovate, upgrade and improve their networks.

    It seems to me the truth is, as usual, somewhere in the middle, and it is best to leave well enough alone. Except Comcast of course. 
 

Monkeys, all of them.

    I imagine corporate management to be like a gaggle of monkeys. And despite the ubiquity of bald spots, I imagine them like hairy monkeys. They are all sitting in this fruit tree, with the executives on top.

    The fruit in the tree gets sweeter the higher you go, and of course all monkeys are trying to get to the sweetest fruit. The monkeys on the lower branches are competing with each other to gain the upper hand and get on a higher branch. But the ones higher up aren’t stupid and are pushing the climbing monkeys down.

    Of course the monkeys on the higher branches are in danger, for if they fall, they fall far and hard. Occasionally a branch of the tree breaks off and a whole bunch of them fall. And sometimes a monkey thinks there may be sweeter fruit elsewhere and he jumps from one tree to another.

    The monkeys at the bottom are relatively safe, they don’t have far to fall. But they have to endure all the crap coming down from above.

    I feel like having a banana. 
 

Hackers got the Powah!

    Those guys work fast! Windows Vista Service Pack 1 has yet to be released to the public and it is hacked already.

    Yesterday I posted my personal view on why Windows Vista failed to live up to expectations. In that post, I may have let slip some minor personal reservations towards Vista, as well as to the upcoming Service Pack 1. I can be very subtle. Microsoft already distributed SP1 to manufacturers, and it "will start being available to customers in March".

    SP1 contains a lot of bug fixes, tweaks, new drivers as well as some changes to the controversial Windows Genuine Advantage software, which checks registered software, and then automatically sends reports to Microsoft over the internet on what it has found. Previously WGA would shut down certain functions of Vista if it is found to be not “genuine”. After installation of SP1, it will be less drastic, but still show warning messages that are annoying enough to badger users into forking over money to Micro$oft for a real copy of Vista. In addition SP1 will disable two popular hacks that were used to circumvent WGA.

    It seems, at the same time I wrote my previous post, a hacker got his hands on SP1 and had some fun hobbying around with it. And before his pizza went cold, you guessed it; he found a new hack to turn a pirated copy of Vista with SP1 into a “genuine” copy.

    Microsoft still has several weeks before SP1 will be released to the general public. I suspect some people in Redmond will be putting in a lot of overtime.
 

Geeks got the powah!

    Many years ago I installed my mother’s first computer. Back then, computers were still running the Windows 95 operating system. Since then, my mother has owned several computers. Her most recent computer is a nice middle class, running Windows XP. With all those years of computing experience my mother is now quite capable of finding the Start button. And then she’ll call me for help.

    Of course, over the years she has had her share of computer problems. Who hasn’t? Some experiences were a bit daunting as she inadvertently wiped a disk, uninstalled whole software packages and downloaded lovely new screensavers with a complimentary virus, repeatedly. Fortunately for my mother she has a son who is a true geek and quite computer savvy.

    Recently she mentioned that it might be time for a new computer. These days all new computers come equipped with Windows Vista. It is unavoidable. And for a person such as my mother, what would be better then Windows Vista? It features better security then any other Windows operating system has ever had, and it is almost impossible to do something drastically stupid because you are asked a dozen times if that is really what you want to do. I think it would be enough to scare off my mother for sure!

    Indeed, Microsoft designed Windows Vista with users like my mother in mind. This new operating system protects you from bad things on the internet, shields you from things you don’t need to know about, and guides you along on anything that requires more then a single mouse click. It truly is a brave new world.

    So, do you think my mother will get a new computer with Windows Vista?
    Not if I have anything to say about it. And I do.

    My mother still has a son who is a true geek and quite computer savvy. And I don’t particularly care for Windows Vista, because Windows Vista is Microsoft newest piece of bloatware that is constantly harassing the user with pointless popup questions already answered a thousand times before. It repeatedly makes (wrong!) assumptions about what the user wants and how the user wants it. It even comes preinstalled with Microsoft spyware which will collect data on the use of Vista and send it over the internet to Microsoft every night. It can be disabled, but my mother would never find that option. And sure, the new Aero interface may look nice, but it doesn’t actually add to the usability of Vista. And it only runs well if you have the hardware to match.

    Because of all these issues, after a full year of being on the market, Windows Vista sales are nowhere near Microsoft's predicted outlook.  Microsoft claimed it would sell 400 million copies of Vista in the first 24 months (compare this to the 210 million copies of Windows XP sold in its first 36 months). The truth is harsher. Recent data from NDP indicates that Microsoft is shipping fewer copies of Vista in its first year then it did for XP in its first year, even though there are twice as many computers in the world now than when XP was released. And Gartner is reporting that many companies are postponing the introduction of Windows Vista to as late as 2009.

    A recent report by Pfeiffer Consulting focused on some of the user interface issues in Windows Vista. And their conclusion (page 7): “While the graphics of the new user interface are more sophisticated, Vista does not correct the User Interface Friction issues that plagued Windows XP. Windows Vista and particularly the new Aero user interface design, fared less well then in Windows XP.”

    So, what went wrong? The Windows Vista Aero interface is obviously ripped off from inspired by the Apple MacOS Aqua interface. Somebody at Microsoft decided to listen to the marketing department. Is that ever a good idea?

    As a result, Microsoft aimed Vista at the common user that makes up 99% of all Windows users. They made Vista look neat and slick and easy. Unfortunately, that last 1% of users is comprised of us: the geeks, the power users and the IT professionals. And we are the people who help and advise the other 99%. We are the people who do the installations for our mothers, do the software reviews, write the articles in the magazines, and decide on implementing Vista in the corporate environment. And this 1% does not like Vista.

    Next month Vista Service Pack 1 will be released. I believe I will sit back and wait and see what chaos that will bring. And if it's not too bad, then perhaps I may consider advising people to switch to Vista.  Eventually.  In another year or two. And my mother will just have to plod along with Windows XP until then.
 
Ps. Hi mom! Love you!