2004
Tread lightly and fly under the radar
Yesterday, I paid my property taxes. Close to $7000, and rising. I can’t afford this.
Yesterday, I also ran across the Fab Prefab website, which carries news about avant-garde prefab housing.
Growing up in Chicago–and then leaving–gave me an appreciation for good architecture. There’s so much good architecture in Chicago, and so little around Austin, that it became conspicuous by its absence. I’ve always loved the traditional townhouses around Chicago, but Buckminster Fuller’s Wichita House, which I first learned of back in college, has always struck me as something special, and the stuff featured at Fab Prefab is in that same spirit.
Another interesting aspect of many of the projects featured there is that they qualify as mobile homes. The way property tax works, some of the tax is on the land itself, but in most cases, more than half is on the “improvements” (ie, fixed structures). A mobile home doesn’t count as an improvement–I’m not sure what the make-or-break criterion is, but my guess is that it would be a fixed foundation.
I’m very attracted to the idea of a futuristic pod-home that lets me avoid perhaps two-thirds of my property taxes. Obviously there’s an ethics question here. I will let Socrates and Achilles debate this for me:
Socrates Is it ethical to work the system this way when most schmucks are paying their fair share?
Achilles When you put it that way, no. Then again, there’s nothing stopping other people from doing the same.
Socrates If everybody did that, then the school system would go bankrupt. After all, it’s property taxes that pay for the schools.
Achilles And why is that, anyhow? I always thought that was unfair, as the level of taxation is not tied to one’s ability to pay. People of modest means get priced out of their homes. (And about those schools–I gotta tell ya, we’re not getting our money’s worth out of them.)
Socrates Well, that’s not very fair either, I guess. But they knew the way the system worked when they bought, so they’ve got nothing to complain about.
Achilles What about renters? Landlords just pass through their property-tax increases, so unless you are a bum, there’s no way to completely escape property taxes.
Socrates I concede the point. Still, where’s the money going to come from if everybody lives in mobile dwellings, even if they’re only nominally mobile?
Achilles Well, the state could pass a state income tax.
Socrates You know that’s not going to happen anytime soon.
Achilles Yeah…
Socrates So in the meantime, do you think you can ethically avoid your tax burden this way?
Achilles Well, yes. If the taxing authorities decide they don’t like it, they can close the loophole. In the meantime, it’s there, and I’m under no obligation to pay as much in taxes as possible.
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
bin Laden caught?
My mother, not known for her tinfoil millinery, mentioned to me that someone official had predicted that the U.S. would nab Osama bin Laden within the year.
She speculates that if this is being publicly predicted, then the government already has him in the bag and is waiting to unveil him at the moment when it will do GW’s poll results the most good (say, November). On the one hand, I don’t put anything past the current administration. On the other, I pointed out to her that a number of people speculated that the U.S. military captured Saddam long before it was made public. This apparently was not the case, but what’s interesting is the number of stories (mostly outside the USA) indicating that the Kurds caught him and then handed him off.
So who knows what the hell is going on. The source of the ObL prediction is a Lt Colonel. I have no idea how I should read that. What to make of the fact that it’s not a senior officer or senior administration official? Clearly senior administration officials are quite happy to stick their feet in their mouths to score political points. So I wouldn’t put it past them to leak this if it were true. Then again, intentionally leaking it via a Lt. Col. would be smart, as it keeps the higher-ups out of the mess, makes it easier to bury the story, and may give it more credibility because the leaker is close to the action. Then again, this may just be an officer being cocky. The military may have some useful intel on him, but his mouth is writing checks that his troops may not be able to cash. Certainly, this is the most plausible scenario. Or perhaps this is an officer being sloppy. ObL really is in the bag, and this guy can’t keep a secret.
You just can’t tell with these guys.
The Cooler
Saw The Cooler with Gwen yesterday. Good movie. William H. Macy has made a good career out of playing the nice-guy schnook, and he does so here in a role that has a little more meat than those roles usually do. Alec Baldwin is perfect as the tough-guy casino operator who is, in his own way, more pathetic than his schnook employee.
The story is a little disjointed–the interlude with the long-lost son is just sort of plunked down without really fitting in, and some of the backstory is never filled in–but it mixes the fantastic and hard-bitten reality in a way that I like, and kept me guessing how it would turn out until the end (which you might say is more because of my suspension of disbelief than anything else).
The movie is about gambling and luck: Macy’s character Bernie Lootz has such impossibly bad luck that any table in a casino he walks past instantly starts losing, making him an asset to the casino that employs him.
After the movie we threw some trout and veggies on the grill. I’ve never been much of a gambler in the customary sense, but I think barbecuing is where I give vent to my gambling urge: there’s always an element of chance with a grill, and every time a meal turns out well, I feel like I’ve beaten the odds.
Museum of Ephemerata
Acting on a tip from Prentiss, Gwen and I saw the amazing and mysterious Museum of Ephemerata.
The Museum is only open to the public rarely, but is chock full of curiosities, many of which are (dare I say) entirely invented and false, such as the “yeti toy.” This itself has a long history dating back to P.T. Barnum’s Dime Museum, as they informed us on the tour. But it is presented with such panache that you enjoy going along for the ride. If the curators were more pretentious, I’d have to call what they’re doing “performance art.” But they aren’t, so I won’t.
Tokyo Godfathers
Catching up on some belated blogging here, I saw Tokyo Godfathers with Jenny a few days ago. Enjoyable, good animation that mixed traditional flat drawing with rotoscoped backgrounds. Very schmaltzy story with an overload of astonishing coincidences (“….Dad??”) that (as Jenny points out) seems to be a sendup of coincidence-laden Japanese dramas.
Pseudo-consensual link-farming
This, I think, is a new one.
I have received a piece of spam (sent via an insecure host in Ukraine) that appears to be an innocuous request by one blogger to exchange links with other blogs. The problem is that the sender is nobody I’ve ever heard of, and the blogs aren’t particularly on the same subject as stuff I write about (if anyone figures out what subject I’m writing about, please let me know).
The blogs in question appear to be legit blogspot-hosted blogs–and they have on-topic content–except that the sidebars are obvious link-farms, as is the website associated with the sender’s e-mail domain.
So what we have here is an attempt to get people to act as part of an unpaid link-farm. More polite than comment-spamming, I guess.
Nastygram to T-Mobile
Following is the text of a letter I’m sending to T-Mobile
I recently signed up as a customer of T-Mobile, and was annoyed to discover that every time I receive voicemail, I also receive a text message from the network notifying me that I have voicemail (that is, I was annoyed after I overcame my initial confusion). A customer-service rep told me this is just the way it works, and there’s no way to turn it off. This isn’t a feature, it’s a bug. You should turn it off.
I was doubly annoyed when I received my first bill and learned that I am being billed 5¢ for each of those messages—which I don’t want in the first place.
My annoyance all the more acute because a neighborhood I visit regularly is so poorly covered by T-Mobile that phone calls often roll over to voice mail automatically. So we have a situation where I’m often out of reach because of shortcomings in your network, and I am paying extra for poor coverage.
You guys have me on the hook for one year, but so far, I’ve been less than impressed and will eagerly explore my options when my contract is ended.
Beat the spread
I had dinner last night with some friends, Drew and Farooq, and rather than watch George II deliver a pack of lies, platitudes, and empty promises, I insisted that we talk.
Inevitably, talk turned to politics. Now, neither of these guys has any love for our current Dear Leader, but I was surprised at their antipathy towards Dean, which was not so much because of any of Dean’s policies, or even his personal style, but what the mainstream media has told us his style is: angry.
This surprised me on a couple of levels. Both of these guys are much smarter than me, and generally very well-informed. But in this case, they were making a judgment A) based not on platforms and policy, but on personality, and B) based not so much on the person’s actual personality as the conventional-wisdom story of that person’s personality.
Now, I’ve been impressed by Dean–I haven’t decided for certain that I’ll vote for him, but it is looking that way. So I have my own biases. But when Farooq showed us how Dean is depicted on the Drudge Report, of all sources, to back up his point, I was a bit appalled.
Aside from cracking that Dean’s too unstable to be the man with his finger on the button, both of them seemed to believe strongly that we need a safe bet candidate like Kerry to have any hopes of defeating Bush in November. I’ve been thinking about this, and I don’t agree.
I suspect that if the election is anything but a blowout (which is very unlikely), it will be rigged. All it will take is a discreet call to Wally O’Dell and some voting machines “patched” in some close races.
Which is why we would need to gamble on a blowout. A safe candidate like Kerry might edge Bush in a fair fight, but without a blowout, and–in a rigged election–certain to lose. A riskier candidate like Dean might have a greater chance of losing a fair vote. In an election, though, where the opposition can rig the outcome a little but not a lot, we need someone who has some chance at beating the spread.
This tinfoil-hat logic isn’t the reason I’m tending towards Dean, but it is something I’m tossing around.
Restructuring
The front page hardly looks different, but I’ve completely reworked all my blog templates.
For one thing, I’m using individual entry archives. I’ve decided that makes the most sense. I’ve kept a calendar view (derived from Mark Pilgrim’s) for my monthly archives, along with the category view of the archives.
I’ve installed a couple of patches to thwart blogspam. And to deal with MT’s dodgy linebreak conversion, I’ve installed bloxpert, thanks to which the pages I’ve cursorily checked are now valid XHTML.
The downside to this is that all inbound links will break. Sorry. I may try some kind of mod-rewrite trick to divert inbound links to the correct calendar page.
MT Users: Install v2.66 now
The people bitch, Ben Trott listens. Movable Type has been updated to 2.66, mostly to add anti-blogspam controls.
- URLs are passed through a redirector, so as to negate any googlejuice that spammers might hope to gain. This just made things more complicated for David Sifry’s Technorati.
- You can add a ThrottleSeconds value to your mt.cfg file. Mine is ThrottleSeconds 60, for whatever it’s worth. I’d prefer for this to be progressive (ie, 30, then 60, then 120, etc) and to have an auto-ban feature, but this is a good start.
Disabling comments on old blog posts: questionable wisdom
There’s a lot of talk among hardcore bloggers on the subject of the best way to deal with spam in their blog comments. Some people advocate turning off comments entirely; others suggest turning them off after the post reaches a certain age. It seems that comment-spammers mostly focus on older entries–perhaps simply because statistically, most entries are old, but perhaps this is intentional, in the hopes that the blog owner won’t notice comments on posts that have scrolled off the front page.
There’s also been a lot of discussion of power laws and inequality.
How one runs one’s blog is one’s own business, of course, but it’s a shame to disable comments on old posts. Jason Kottke famously had a thousand-comment-long discussion following his review of Matrix Reloaded.
I’ve observed a vaguely similar phenomenon in a post I made after getting my wisdom teeth out. A google search on the phrase “wisdom teeth out” brings up the comments on that entry as the third result. People drop by to relate their own experiences getting their wisdom teeth out: it’s not a discussion, exactly, more a repository of anecdotes, mostly by people I don’t know and have no other contact with. Obviously this couldn’t happen with closed comments.
What’s also interesting is that this must be a self-reinforcing tendency. I have no way of tracking how the same comments page has been ranked in Google’s results over time, but I can’t imagine that it has always been #3. The more people that comment there, though, the more that page is likely to be ranked highly as a result for wisdom-tooth-related queries.
Incense beer
Drinking an Anchor Christmas Ale with my tom yum soup tonight, I made a bizarre discovery: it smells exactly like Nag Champa incense.
Can anyone explain this to me?
Squeezing the golden eggs out of the goose
South Congress is becoming a victim of its own success: fun stores like Terra Toys (which has been down there as long as I can remember) and Lone Star Illusions are losing their leases, presumably to make way for tenants that can pay usuriously high rents.
South Congress has, of course, become a happening area, especially with First Thursday. The landlords, no dummies they, see the high foot traffic, see storefronts being rented to trendy, expensive boutiques, and decide to cash in.
This will backfire. Squeeze the goose that laid the golden egg and you will kill it. I’ve seen this happen before.
I grew up in Lincoln Park, Chicago. When I was born, it was not a great neighborhood–not even a good neighborhood. It supported three kinds of businesses: gyros palaces (which had mysterious fires with great regularity), resale shops, and prostitution. Gradually, thanks to people like my parents moving in, the neighborhood was rehabilitated. Rents on Clark Street (the main commercial street in the neighborhood) rose and rose. By the time that my parents opened a shop on Clark in the early 90s, much of Clark Street’s retail space was owned by a handful of landlords; my parents’ landlord, Marvin Winkler, was greedy to the point of madness. He would rather leave a storefront sit empty for a year than lower his rents. He may have been an extreme case, but ultimately, the greed of the landlords was self-defeating. The rate of business failure was very high. Stores that were useful to local residents, like copy shops and cobblers, got priced out of existence (not that the residents could afford to shop in their own neighborhood anymore, as housing prices had also skyrocketed to the point where people spent all their income on rent). A large number of new business openings were poorly conceived nicknack shops run by people with no business acumen and less chance for commercial success.
South Congress today is successful because of the shops that are there today. There’s no magic pixie dust in the air there that creates success, it’s a vibe that those shops create that will not last long beyond their absence. The landlords owning the storefronts on SoCo can raise their rents to the point where only national chains can rent from them, at which point SoCo becomes a strip mall. Or where nicknack shops with clueless operators spring up and vanish like mushrooms after a summer shower.
iPodlet redux
I wrote before that we’d see interesting things come of these matchbox-sized hard drives, now that they’ve got pretty serious storage capacity. And now we have. Apple doesn’t call it the iPodlet, though.
At the risk of sounding churlish, I’m a bit disappointed in how big it is. It’s the size of a business card. OK, that’s churlish. But I really thought they could get a microdrive-based iPod down to about half that size.
Later: There’s been a shitload of virtual ink spilled over this thing. My thoughts:
The iPod mini is probably using the Hitachi 4 GB Microdrive. Hitachi also makes 1 GB and 2 GB units. I am guessing that after Apple fleeces the early adopters, they’ll contemplate bringing out downmarket versions for a little less. Either that or the Microdrive capacities will ratchet up, and the 4 GB model will itself become the downmarket version. People condemn the mini for its capacity, but seem to forget that the original iPod had only 5 GB capacity.
People bitch about the price. Considering that a bare 4 GB Microdrive retails for about $500, I think it’s a steal.
People bitch about the capacity. I suppose that if I wanted to use my iPod as my primary storage for MP3s, I would too. But that’s what my desktop computer’s hard drive is for–I wouldn’t need to have all my music on my iPod, and Apple has done a lot of work to make it easy to move MP3s between the computer and iPod, to generate random playlists, and generally to keep the iPod full of whatever music you want. There are two limiting factors on how much music you can play on any portable player: the memory capacity (coupled with your tolerance for listening to the same thing repeatedly, I suppose) and the battery capacity. It’s a happy non-coincidence that the same device you use to charge the iPod is what you use to transfer music to it. Having 100 hours of music on a portable player is redundant if you’ve got 8 hours of playtime with the battery. I might want more than 8 hours of music so that I don’t need to pre-select exactly what I will want to hear, but I don’t think I’d need 12.5x more to satisfy my desire for variety. I get about 48 hours of music into 4 GB–or 36 hours plus my entire home directory, and I rip my music at a higher bitrate than the iTunes default. music time: battery time ratio of at least 3:1 and as much as 5:1 sounds about right.
People suggest that it’s foolish to buy a 4 GB unit when one can buy a 15 GB unit that’s $50 more. If I were getting an iPod, I’d get the mini. I don’t need a 15 GB player. I do need portability, and the original design of the iPod, clever though it is, just isn’t as small as I’d want.
People bitch about the design. That’s a matter of taste, and de gustibus, non disputandum est. I admit to being a little disappointed in the dimensions, and unthrilled by the styling myself. But I still look forward to playing with one.
Still later Now I read about Toshiba’s 0.85″ drive. Obviously Apple wouldn’t have had time to engineer the new mini around this, but it suggests we could see even smaller iPods, or that the mini in its current form will get a capacity boost sooner rather than later.
Also interesting is GarageBand. I watched The Keynote, and Jobs made a couple of wry references to file-sharing. In the back of my mind, I mused that with GarageBand, he might be taking the ultimate end-run around the MPAA. Surely this has nothing to do with Apple’s decision to develop and market this program. Surely not.
But it’s fun to contemplate.
Ten years on the web
Macworld San Francisco begins today. I am sure there will be some interesting announcements that send the Mac cognoscenti a-nattering. But for me, it’s an occasion to think back.
I attended Macworld SF in 1994, staying with a friend from my days in Japan, Robin Nakamura, who attended as well and was also a bit of a Mac geek. It was fun. The big thing was CD-based entertainment, like The Journeyman Project. The hottest Mac you could buy was a Quadra 840av, and I remember watching a demo of an amazing image-editing app called Live Picture, which looked set to beat the pants off of Photoshop at the time.
On the plane ride back, I was reading a copy of Macweek that had been handed out at the show, and got to talking with a guy in nearby seat, Greg Hiner. Turns out he worked at UT developing electronic course material; he invited me to drop by his office to check out this new thing on the Internet called the World Wide Web. I had an Internet account at that time, and was acquainted with FTP, Gopher, and WAIS, but hadn’t heard of this Web thing.
So a few days later, I stopped by his office, and we huddled around his screen as he launched Mosaic. It immediately took us to what was the default home page at the time, on a server at CERN, in Switzerland. I noticed the “.ch” address of the server in the status bar and said excitedly, “we’re going to Switzerland!” A gray page with formatted text and some pictures loaded. This was cool. This was not anonymous, monospaced text, like you get with Gopher. He clicked on some blue text that took us to Harvard, I think, and I commented “now Boston!” This was exciting. This was big, and I knew it was going to be really, really big.
I’ve still got a few of the earliest e-mails we exchanged, in which we traded links, and I am tickled to see that (at least through redirects) some of those sites are still live (see: mkzdk, John Jacobsen Artworks).
I quickly figured out how to write HTML and put up a web page to serve as a resource for my fellow Japanese-English translators, who I knew would want to latch onto this Web thing and just needed something to help them get started (ironically, the page is too old to be included at the Internet Archive).
And here we are today. I am writing this in a program that runs on my computer, and communicates over a (relatively) high-speed connection with a program that runs on my server to create and manage web pages. Many of my friends do the same, and I’ve made new friends just because of this simple activity. The boundary between one computer and another, between my hard drive and the Internet, is, if not blurry, at least somewhat arbitrary. I’m watching Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote in a window in the background as I type. Things have changed a lot. And I feel like we’ve barely gotten started.
Porting update
Well, gosh, that was quick. I put in the order to have my number ported on December 10. After making several calls to Tmobile’s number portability center, I tried again late last night (when the hold times are shorter) and got someone helpful. He said “it looks like we’ve got concurrence, so it’s just a matter of finishing up the procedure.” Since I was being a squeaky wheel, he jumped me to the top of the work queue for that night, and a few hours later, my phone spazzed out and indicated that yes, in fact, it now answered to my old number.
Foafster
We’ve got a slew of social-network websites, and they all make you go through the same song-and-dance. Each has some pros and cons. They’re fun, I suppose, but what do they really do? They provide certain opportunities:
- for bragging about the size of your personal network. This is on par with who sits with who in the high-school cafeteria;
- for hitting on friends of friends, so that you feel like you’ve got an “in” with someone that is more personal than using typical online-dating sites (Friendster);
- for business match-making (Linkedin);
- for seeing what your friends are up to and organizing group events (Tribe and Friendster).
- for creating forums for affinity groups (Tribe and Ryze);
We’ve also got FOAF, which overlaps with what Friendster & Friends can do. There are a lot of drawbacks to FOAF, not the least of which is that it is damn complicated. Hand-coding a FOAF file is much more tedious than coding HTML, IMO. There are some rudimentary tools to help one generate the file, but these are barely a start.
Another problem with FOAF is that you need a place to store your FOAF file. I’d venture a guess that most Friendster users do not have their own websites, and do not have a burning desire to create one. But they obviously are interested in participating in social networking. Conversely, most people with their own websites–even people with a strong interest in social networks–don’t have FOAF files. So FOAF just hasn’t gotten much traction yet.
A third problem with FOAF is that FOAF files just sit there–they don’t do anything. You need specialized search engines to traverse these FOAF files and display interesting information about them.
A fourth problem is that, even with these search engines, you’re barely satisfying the first one point in the above list. But it wouldn’t take much extra to cover all those bases.
There is an opening here for a Friendster-like hosted service or user-installed tool (which I will refer to as FOAFster) to use FOAF and other standards to create an open system that helps people use FOAF more efficiently. As long as it is open, with a published API or plugin architecture, it doesn’t need to do all things for all people. This would be a specialized content-management tool that might be similar to a blogging tool in some ways (and might include rudimentary blogging tools). More important would be something like trackback for getting information from one FOAFster to another. This would be simplified by the existence of a central pingable resource like blo.gs but for FOAF, so that when Alice posts her FOAF file, her FOAFster tool can check the centralized site to see whether Bob has a FOAF file too, and if so, where it is. She could then ping Bob directly to let him know “I am marking you as a friend in my FOAF file.”
To cover point 1 properly, FOAF explorers need to show whether one person’s assertion of friendship is reciprocated. Exploring one-way links would be useful too, and could replicate the two-way checking that all the social-network services require: a good FOAFing tool would keep track of people claiming you to be a friend, and let you add them as friends to your FOAF file.
To cover points 2 and 3, the FOAF vocabulary would need to be extended a bit to include what kind of people you’re interested in meeting, and for what reason, eg, activity partners, hot monkey love, or professional contacts, and specifically in what context. I can imagine a new domain in FOAF that would look something like this:
<foaf:wanttomeet> <professional> <client>translation</client> <vendor>graphic design</vendor> <vendor>editing</vendor> <colleague>translation</colleague> </professional> <social> <partner>road cycling</partner> </social> </foaf:wanttomeet>
Obviously this gets into hairy problems of defined vocubularies, but these problems are not insurmountable.
Point 4 can be easily covered by tracking RSS feeds of friends. Looking at the nitty-gritty of implementing this, there are several possible paths to take, each of which have their merits:
- Include a simple blog-like tool for publishing announcements in FOAFster.
- Suck in the RSS feed from another blog for this purpose
- Accept trackbacks from another blog for this purpose
- Accept iCal files
- Acept Outlook schedules
If the tool could also push content from friends into one’s own iCal/Outlook, that could be very powerful.
FOAF already has several constructs for defining group membership that cover point 5. Again, the existence of a central pinged site that can keep track of what groups exist would be very helpful. Alternately, or additionally, there might be “group host” sites that would have pointers to group members, records of discussions, etc.
This doesn’t quite solve the problem of the group having a discussion forum, but this could also be managed similarly to the announcements in point 4, but with a little added complexity because the discussion thread would need to be maintained. This would probably be done by trackbacking to the previous post. The group host site would also need to be trackbacked or pinged on every group-related post to maintain a record. This gets a little hairy–I’m not aware of any discussion systems that are completely decentralized and distributed.
It’s not clear whether yet another social-network tool will solve the problem of proliferating social-network tools, but until existing ones are designed explicitly for interop, I don’t see any other way. I don’t have the programming chops to make this happen (not yet, anyhow), but I can picture it pretty clearly. I can imagine a tool that would sit alongside Movable Type or other blogging tools to help us manage our personal and professional lives.
LaterLooks like some blowhard has decided he invented this idea–see the bizarre “warning to copycats & clones”)