Goodbye, AdSense

There are some things in life that are really, truly, just plain inexplicable. I'm not talking about philosophical ponderables ("Why do bad things happen to good people, and vice-versa?") or manifestations of chaos theory ("How did Ron Paul raise that much money?") . What I'm referring to is something that is just so plain weird that you find yourself scratching your head.

Such as Google advertisements appearing on this blog for, shall we say, alternative lifestyle products and blogs.

Whether or not you've noticed them, I've had two little Google ads quietly sitting on the page since I started the blog earlier this year. I don't think I've ever had anyone click on them, nor was this the point. I was curious to see some of the mystical process of internet advertising at work, based on the blather I slap up here from time to time. Over the past few months I've seen ads on the blog for lots of electronic gear, a cheap tickets to Vietnam, statistical analysis tools, and more electronic gear. And, as of this afternoon, other topics which have no bearing whatsoever on anything written here.

Perhaps there has been a glitch in the Adwords logic, or maybe some clever juvenile delinquent figured out how to game the system for fun (if not for profit). Whatever the cause, the result was the instantaneous banishment of AdSense from the blog. I've decided I rather like having absolute control over every pixel here, at least for the time being.

Swift Kids

I usually don't link to Karla's blog because most of you came here by way of there, or at least you read them both. But on the off chance that you haven't seen it, I invite you to check out the Swift Kids video linked in her recent post; it is by far the most clever political ad we've seen this season (it certainly beats Rudy trying to be funny). Enjoy.

I've seen the future, and it's solid

Solid State, that is. Wired gives us a blurb about a new a 100 GB solid state disk drive recently released by a company called Buffalo. No moving parts for much greater durability and reliability, like one hundred of those little 1GB USB thumb drives all packed into a box the size of a deck of cards. Of course, for $950, you could probably buy a hundred thumb drives, but that, as Al Sharpton would say, is only a temporary situation; prices will fall, and when they do, these puppies will replace the crummy laptop drives that have been giving me so much grief lately. Not to mention replacing the SATA drive in our home computer, which sounds vaguely like a little sewing machine when accessed. Ah, to have the blessed silence of electrons doing their thing, no spinning platters required.

Time-waster for a good purpose

We all have our favorite time-wasting websites. The guy who sat the next row over from me throughout two years of business school was a regular patron of mlb.tv, and more than one member of that same class sneaked a quick visit to addictinggames.com when a lecture got particularly bad. (I admit nothing, but I will say that Managerial Accounting in the Winter of 2004 was particularly awful, so who could have blamed me?)

My wife knows of my long-standing relationship with Desktop Tower Defense (still can't get to level 100 on the challenge mode!) but I don't get a chance to indulge the little critters at work; you can't have them breaching your defenses, sending you clicking madly, while simultaneously running a conference call and three instant message sessions with team members in Atlanta. So it was that I was pleased to see a time-waster that you can feel good about: freerice.com. It's a vocabulary builder; each time you select the correct definition, 20 grains of rice are sent by the sponsor to the UN's hunger-alleviation efforts. That's a lot of clicking to donate enough rice for even one meal, but I imagine it scales to quite a bit of rice being donated when you factor in everyone taking part. Plus, the vocabulary exercises are interesting. Certainly yet another example of new and innovative ways that ad-supported websites are changing the world. Long live new media. Now, if they can get that Facebook travel quiz applet to do the same thing, I'd be hooked.

2007 International Adoptions

The New York Times has a piece up on the United States finally ratifying the Hague Convention on International Adoption. The result should be more regulation and less corruption, though the short-term affect may be longer waits to adopt. The regulations of the convention will be in effect after April 2008, though of course we are already seeing the effects with the new US regulations that have delayed our own adoption process. I thought the graph was very interesting.

Testing the Content Filter Workaround

Blogger has been blocked by my employer's web filters.  Instead of my blog control panel, I am now greeted with a cheerful screen, decked out in company colors, informing me that the requested site is a threat to my security, productivity, and way of life.  (Blogs hosted on Blogger are still available for viewing, at least for now; only the editing function is blocked.) 

I am in favor of Internet filters; there is nothing quite as nasty as an email or web worm shutting down thousands of an organization's computers.  But this seems kind of extreme, and also pointless, since I am still typing this message from the office and sending it to the blog via email. 

The argument of lost productivity is a valid one, but I'm sure they lose far more productivity to espn.com and other sites that remain open.  Not that I'm rationalizing; I average less than two posts per week on this blog, and I usually make them while I'm sitting on massive, stultifying conference calls ("Thank you for joining the call.  You are the… 34^th … participant") or viewing vendor presentations over WebEx.  My recent change from selling technology back to buying it has reminded me how little the customer really cares about 99% of what the IT sales team is saying.

So this is the latest post, brought to you via email, right out the company's front door.  I'm curious to see how it works.

Computer Counsel

An inevitable side effect of working in the technology industry is the stream of requests for advice or assistance from non-techie friends and family. I don’t mind this at all; few of my family members or friends ask for anything terribly complex, and I am happy to help should a big problem arise. One topic that frequently comes up is my preferred brands for desktops and laptops. My long-standing recommendation is to buy an Apple Mac (either iMac or Powerbook). I know this doesn’t work for some people, and so I have previously recommended IBM Thinkpads as the most reliable laptops for those who must run Windows. For desktop users who need Windows, I have recommended the PC with the best warranty and support options, typically Dell and (more recently) HP.

The past few months have caused me to revise some of these recommendations, due to recent developments at Microsoft, Apple and Lenovo.

Microsoft’s release of Windows Vista has been a debacle. Not only does the product run more slowly, less secure, and less reliably than XP, but it is also not backward-compatible in many cases. The new camcorder we purchased three weeks ago is not compatible with Vista, nor are many other products people expect to use with their computers. If you must buy a Windows PC, make sure you get XP. (Dell, Lenovo and others now offer XP as alternative to Vista on many of their new computers.)

Meanwhile, Apple continues to churn out beautiful desktop and laptop computers. Ironically, folks at PC World that have tested Vista on Apple’s latest Powerbook laptop found that it runs Vista better than any competing laptop designed specifically for Vista. The fact that Apple pulled this off on a machine designed to run a completely different operating system is a testament to their engineering acumen. The same holds true for their software folks, as the Apple operating system, OS X, is rock solid and easy to use; it also works with my camcorder and just about every other peripheral out there.

But the fun doesn’t stop there for Apple. You can purchase a software product that enables you to run Windows applications on your Apple desktop, seamlessly and without disrupting the Apple operating system in any way. Sure, you have to pay for the Windows software, but there is no reason to purchase a separate Windows PC (or reboot your Mac to run in full Windows mode, which is still supported) if you have a Windows PC primarily for one or two applications that are not available in Windows.

The final development that affects my advice is IBM’s sale of their laptop business to Lenovo. I use a new Lenovo laptop at work, and I assumed it would function like the previous T-series Thinkpads used by me and several members of my family for years. This is not the case. In just six months I have had a complete hard drive failure as well as numerous blue-screens related to the wireless and other issues. This regrettably puts Lenovo Thinkpads in the same bin with Dell and HP, whereas previously they had been exceptional. Too bad.

So how does this affect the advice I give to friends and family? If you can possibly afford it, buy an Apple Mac (either desktop or laptop) – prices are still high (over $1000) but much better than the price you’d pay to run a new PC capable of running Vista. If your budget is still south of $1000, make sure you get an HP or Dell machine with Windows XP.

Gadget Post: Sennheiser HD570 Headphones

This is not a review of new technology, but rather a comment on how impressed I am with an older product. I purchased these headphones in 2001, for about $70, if memory serves. I don’t think you can find them new anymore, but Sennheiser should offer a comparable product today. I used them rather heavily when I was living with roommates. When I got married (and around the same time, switched to my own office at work), they languished and were mostly used during travel until I broke down and purchased Bose noise-canceling headphones in 2005.

Anyway, the Sennheisers have made a comeback since I switched to a cubicle environment at work. They have very comfortable pads that allow hours of use without fatigue. And of course, they sound truly excellent. Recently, though, I noticed the right channel would occasionally fade out when I repositioned the headphones. Not good. I thought I’d crack it open and just see what I could do… Best case, I thought, would be borrowing a soldering iron from the lab and doing a quick repair, if the wire was frayed near the contact with the driver. Worst case was a kink that was too far away from the driver to spot-fix.

It took me about ten minutes of fiddling with the casing to open it without damaging it, but my persistence was rewarded. There was no solder point at the driver. Instead, I was amazed to see that the wire was connected via jumper. For those who have never worked in electronics or inside a computer, a jumper is a plastic sleeve around the copper contact. Two copper prongs slide into the jumper, much like an electrical plug in a wall socket. In the case of my headphones, heavy use had caused the jumper to slip off the prongs over time. I just slid that puppy back down firmly, snapped the phones back together, and viola—he is clean: perfect sound once again.

This may seem like a rather archaic detail to you, but I was very impressed. A spot-soldered connection would be much cheaper to manufacture than a jumper, perhaps by several cents. A few pennies on every unit shipped is a big deal, more so because it is a detail unlikely to be noted by the customer. Gotta love that German engineering!

A Tale of Two Road Trips

Our Thanksgiving travel this year was memorable. In many ways, it was really two trips. Trip #1 was the journey to Flagstaff, and it could not have gone better. We were on the road early, hit great weather, and, as George Costanza would say, we made “incredible time,” arriving in Flag a mere 16 hours after pulling out of Austin. (That’s an average of 75 miles per hour, counting stops for gas and meals.) The only negative aspect of the whole trip was terrible service at a Denny’s in New Mexico, where, by all accounts, I channeled a grumpy old man when our food was late (and cold—though, despite my crabbiness, I did leave a tip).

As they say, that was then, this is now. We set out on our return journey on Friday evening. The first leg of the trip was uneventful, although I’m fairly certain the guys hanging around the gas station in Gallup were high on something. By the time we reached Grants (about an hour outside of Albuquerque), it was turning fairly foggy and icy. We took a quick survey of the motels in town (during which we momentarily lost power steering on our rental car—always a fine experience) and settled on the Travelodge.

The next morning we made it most of the way through New Mexico before we saw any bad weather, but it was again turning fairly nasty by the time we hit the Texas border. There was an inch or two of snow on the ground in El Paso and it was still coming down, but the weather report I’d read the previous night led us to believe that things would clear up east of town. This was not the case. We hit heavy snow within 50 miles of El Paso and spent the next three hours averaging 35 miles an hour in a caravan of about 40 cars. Every once in a while some foolish person would pass the caravan and throw heavy showers of slush on each of our windshields, blinding us for several seconds until the wipers could clear it.

Our next scheduled stop was the booming metropolis of Fort Stockton, TX (population: 2900), where we had intended to gas up and move on. By the time we saw the exit, we knew we were going to stay the night; one false move by anyone in the caravan could have resulted in a pile-up. And visibility was getting worse as the sun set. So, we pulled into town, only to find the entire town dark. Plenty of motels and gas stations, but all of them were without electricity. There was about 4 inches of snow on the ground and we didn’t have enough gas to get to the next town. Mercifully, a Chevron station at the east end of town did have the lights on, so I hurriedly put gas in the car while Karla went inside to see about the motels in town. All of them were booked, except for the Rodeway Inn at the far east end of town, and we got one of the last rooms there. It was pretty ugly and the heater didn’t work very well, but we were just happy to have a place to sleep.

The next morning we made the remaining five hours to Austin without incident, but this will definitely go down as one of the more memorable road trips we’ve taken.

Chuck Norris and Huckabee

OK, this one made me laugh out loud.



(In case you're wondering what in the world Huckabee is talking about, take a quick jump over to Wikipedia for an explanation of the Chuck Norris Facts.)

Amazon Prime Idiocy

In case you hadn’t noticed from my posts, I am a voracious reader. The nature of working for a large company is that you spend a lot of time on conference calls, most of it waiting. This is my time for reading blogs, news sites, editorials, etc—usually while babysitting some process or other that actually fits my job description. At home, a significant amount of my downtime is spent reading books, and most of those I buy at Amazon.com. Why Amazon? They have a huge selection and they are prompt and accurate in getting the product shipped.

Despite all the books I order, I have no interest in signing up for Amazon Prime, the service where you pay $80 a year for unlimited shipping. Most of the time I take advantage of “free super saver” shipping by ordering two or more titles at once, which means I never pay shipping anyway. So I tend to ignore the pitches from Amazon trying to get me to sign up.

Therefore, it was with tremendous dismay that I found myself enrolled in Amazon Prime after merely browsing through some titles on the Amazon.com website over the weekend. “Congratulations,” I was told, “You have completed your enrollment in Amazon Prime!”

Wha??

I did some poking around my account on the site, and found that I was indeed enrolled, although I was in a “trial” period for 30 days, after which they would happily charge $79.99 to my credit card on file. I have no idea exactly how this happened. When I queried customer service (very politely, I might add), I was told that this was due to a “combination of technical problems and human error.” The implication was the human error was mine, which I resent. But the important thing is that they were able to yank me from their gilded rolls of Prime Members from On High, and I am now once again a lowly bottom-feeder, super-saving my way to lower costs for me and lower margins for them.

Although they assured me this would not happen again, I am definitely re-thinking my book purchasing strategy. At the very least, I’m going to keep an eye on Amazon (and my credit card statement) to make sure no more of this hilarity ensues.

Thanksgiving Odyssey

Thanks to new requirements set by our dear friends at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, it is looking like our trip to Vietnam will not occur in November, so we are free make travel plans for the Thanksgiving get-together at my sister's place in Flagstaff. The only problem with this scenario is buying plane tickets from Austin to Phoenix three weeks before Thanksgiving, to the tune of $450 per ticket--far outside our budget. It looked like a no-go.

However, as we drove home last night, Karla suggested we look into driving instead of flying. A few minutes with Google Maps showed the route is fairly benign, even if it is over 1100 miles. We're not keen to put another 2200 miles on the Nissan, so we're looking into a rental car. So long as it has cruise control and a reasonable amount of legroom, I think we're good. We could do the entire trip for less than half of what we were originally budgeting for the plane trip. It will be great to see the parents/brothers/sisters/nephews/niece. Just can't wait for the West Texas part of the trip: so little to see, so much time...

Review: A Long Way Gone

This one was a quick read for me. It was only about 250 pages long, but I also read it quickly because, as the protagonist’s story became ever darker, I pushed on as fast as I could to see him make it out of the whale and back to some semblance of a life.

Ishmael Beah was a normal kid in rural Sierra Leone in the early 90s. This changed when civil war destroyed his village and sent him on a long, painful journey. I was acquainted with many African refugees during my time in Portugal, but these were mostly from former Portuguese colonies: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau. They had some war stories, but nothing quite like this one. I vaguely recall some news reports about civil war in Sierra Leone but I had no idea it was this bad. This kid was dragged into a maelstrom of violence. His stories of run-ins and involvement with the militias that ruled the countryside are not for the faint of heart: the account of the violence is almost clinical, like a medical examiner, so that you almost forget that he is an eyewitness and (sometimes) a participant.

Despite the horror of the conflict, I was cheered by Ishmael’s determination to survive, especially when he made it away from the front lines and began the road to rehabilitation. I read the second half of the book in one sitting because I was so anxious to see what happened to him in the end. Ultimately the tone of the book is more sobering and reflective than depressing, and it certainly made me conscious of (and grateful for) the blessings we have in the United States.

When your iPod doesn't know it's not Christmas

We're big fans of Christmas at our house. Each year, Karla bakes a bunch of delicious treats, and the place abounds in wreaths, lights, and nativity displays. We also like Christmas music. I ripped a few of our Christmas CD's and purchased a few more so we have a nice holiday mix on the iPod. Of the 3000 or so music tracks on the iPod, Christmas music accounts for fewer than a hundred. This ratio has me convinced that the iPod has a hankering for Christmas music.

I know I have a habit of anthropomorphizing technology devices; it's a coping mechanism for dealing with computers all day long. I rant, lecture, or cajole my way through the hundreds of core systems I might touch over the course of a year. (And of course, there is Fisher-Price TiVo—I know that device has it in for me.)

Yet, the iPod’s preference for Christmas music is the clearest evidence thus far of some nascent ghost in the machine. Although I’ve put together some nice playlists, the shuffle feature is what gets me through the workday. I block out the cube-farm when I need to concentrate by slipping on my Sennheisers and setting the iPod to a reasonable level, as Milton Waddams would say. We have some pretty varied music, so a given hour might take me through U2, Johnny Cash, Coldplay, Diana Krall, Maire Brennan, Yo-Yo Ma, and Miles Davis. And, of course, a nice selection of Christmas favorites from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Elvis, Sinatra and/or John Rutter.

I haven’t taken a detailed account, but Christmas is definitely over-represented. There’s just no way a purely random process would select so many tracks from a group representing less than 3% of the total library. My only conclusion is that the iPod likes Christmas music, or at least following the lead of our big-box retailers: this morning as I made a quick stop at Wal-mart before work, I was serenaded by synthesized versions of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” and “Joy to the World.”

Review: The Omnivore's Dilemma

I just finished Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, and this rather lengthy review comes with a caveat: Reading this book will change the way you think about what you eat. Pollan pulls back the curtain on the way food is produced and consumed in America, and the level of detail is perhaps more than some people want to know. There is some gore and muck when the author delves into the Confined Animal Feed Operation (CAFO) facilities that provide a huge percentage of the meat sold and served in America. But Pollan is not Upton Sinclair, and his goal is not to expose the grisly so much as the unsustainable. The real head-scratching comes not because animals are suffering in cages—this is nothing new—but because the industrial food chain is so unnatural and unsustainable that it’s a wonder we got on this road at all.

The beginning of the road is the Iowa corn field, which seems innocuous enough until we learn that the relentless cultivation of a single crop is impossible without liberal application of synthetic fertilizer and pesticide. These elements stay with the corn as it wends its complex journey to beef cattle and literally hundreds of derived chemicals present in everything from carbonated soda to breakfast cereal. The animals fed on this corn are given their own chemical cocktails of growth hormones and antibiotics. The whole thing becomes a kind of agricultural Iron Triangle, with the genetic crop and fertilizer producers, pharmaceutical companies, and the USDA replacing the defense contractors and the Pentagon. What would Eisenhower think?

Okay, but this is all old news. Despite this unpleasantness, I’m not about to sign up with PETA or go vegan. The first shift for me in thinking about food occurred when Pollan described the results of a chemical analysis he had performed on a McDonalds combo-meal. Nearly all of the calories of the meal were derived from corn: Corn sweetener in the soda, corn-fed beef and cheese, and potatoes fried in corn oil. To me this was more like a Soylent Green nightmare than a fast-food meal—“Would you like a side of tasty corn with your corn? How ‘bout washing it all down with some refreshing corn?” Fast-food is not the exception, unfortunately: consulting the ingredients of virtually any processed food product in the grocery store reveals a depressing plurality of corn-based ingredients.

My mantra for food and dieting is “moderation in all good things” which comes from personal experience as well as religious teachings. The corn-based industrial food chain is the antithesis of this; what’s worse, this concentrated corn feast is swimming in a synthetic cocktail of industrial additives. I can see dipping my toe in, but when the majority of my meal is thus doused, I lose my appetite.

The second shift was when Pollan looked at the organic food industry. The problem with organics, he writes, is that the term is so loosely defined as to become almost meaningless. A hole cut in the wall of a massive chicken house leading to a narrow run constitutes “free range”; “organically fed” beef are still fed corn, and the controls on that corn are loose and undefined. Thus the consumer at Whole Foods is, in a way, duped into thinking the extra $2/pound he pays goes to a sustainable, humane industry.

Pollan’s solution to this is to investigate the small but growing culture of local “grass farmers” who utilize a heavily-managed, ever rotating cycle of cattle and chickens in their fields. These folks eschew the industrial corn complex, and so avoid the requisite fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics. Yet this approach has an inherent catch: while it is sustainable, it is not scalable. Until there is a major shift in the way Americans acquire their food, this kind of “grass farming” will remain a niche market.

Overall, Pollan’s book has caused me to hone my instinct for moderation. It’s easy for us to throw a couple of pounds of ground beef in the shopping cart and base three or four meals a week on it. It’s also easy to load up the cart with processed foods (on which I subsisted before I married a wonderful cook). It takes some real thought to form a more balanced diet that is light on processed food and meat. I suspect it will be an ongoing process, but well worth the effort.

Thoughts on the Republican Presidential Debate

We watched the Republicans duke it out last night in Michigan. The debate focused on economic issues, which left some of the second-tier, single-issue candidates with little to say. This one was moderated by Chris Matthews and Maria Bartiromo. I don't watch CNBC, so this was my introduction to Ms. Bartiromo, and I was not impressed by her moderating skills. Perhaps it was the generally poor acoustics of the auditorium, but none of the candidates seemed to understand her staccato-delivered questions the first time she asked them. Matthews was his usual shrill self, though I prefer his moderation style immensely to the poor attempts of Wolf Blitzer in the earlier debate sponsored by CNN.

The most interesting exchange was between Romney and Giuliani: The Press suggests they were battling about which was more of a tax cutter, but my following of the exchange had Romney attacking Giuliani on the line item veto, while suggesting their positions on taxes are similar.

To us, the biggest non-story of the debate was Fred Thompson. We're used to the Arthur Branch pontifications that made him somewhat endearing on L&O, and none of that spirit was evident in the debate. To me he appeared tired and off-balance as he rambled in and out of focus on the issues. At least he knew who the PM of Canada was.

In relation to my previous post: Perhaps Fisher-Price TiVo reads this blog and is unhappy with my slamming it: Several times when we paused or rewound the debate to catch a missed phrase (the acoustics and microphones really were awful), the screen would go black for a few seconds, then gray, as though FPT was toying with us, before returning the somber political visages to the screen. This is a new thing, so stay tuned.

Attack of the Fisher-Price TiVo

I purchased my first TiVo digital video recorder in 2001, while I was in the Bay Area living a hedonistic, 20-something-working-for-a-dot-com lifestyle. The job didn't last, but the TiVo did. I was immediately charmed not only by the basic premise of timeshifting, but also the great user interface and intelligence behind the concept. When I moved back to Utah, TiVo moved with me.

When we set up shop in Herriman, we ended up replacing the brand-name TiVo with a Dish Network DVR, mostly because Dish gave us all the channels we needed for less money each month. The DVR did not have all the gee-whiz of TiVo, but it was reliable and easy to use (think Chevrolet instead of Cadillac).

Fast-forward and we are now apartment-dwellers in Texas, waiting for our home in Utah to sell. Because we're in an apartment, we opted against Satellite TV. This meant we couldn't use the TiVo (my original TiVo is a Satellite receiver and does not work with cable). Dish's DVR was also out. We signed up with Time Warner Cable and added the DVR option, reasoning it would provide an approximation of the function of TiVo or, at least, the Dish DVR unit.

We could not have been more wrong. Within seconds of firing the sucker up, it received (and still holds) the title "Fisher Price TiVo" in our household. (In the car analogy above, this wouldn't even make GM's lineup. Maybe a Yugo?) Everything in the user interface, from the colors and fonts to the resolution, remote control and menu scheme, seems dumbed down to the point of absurdity. The manufacturer threw out all the accumulated DVR wisdom since TiVo's inception at the dawn of the decade, and attempted to make the product as similar to a VCR as possible. Because, you know, going back 30 years for user interface and functionality is all the rage now.

Case in point: to access recorded programs, you actually "tune" this DVR to the "DVR channel" on the unit. Nevermind that it's accessing a recorded program on the unit's disk drive; we must maintain the pretense of snagging pixels from the ether. I still haven't figured out how to get back to live TV when a recorded program ends, without fumbling through at least 3-4 buttons; the sucker just says "DVR Channel" until you do something.

Second case in point: Selecting a program to record involves searching a channel guide grid and pressing the record button when you finally find the program. I suppose this maintains the analog paradigm of sifting through grids in TV Guide or the newspaper, except that 1) you only get to see four channels and two hours at a time, and 2) you can only look a day or so ahead. Trying to see programming three days hence results in the cryptic "No Data Found" message, implying to the analog user that all TV broadcasting ceases at that point.

I could go on, but given that our stay in this apartment is temporary, we figured that we could live with Fisher-Price TiVo for a few months (one of the few virtues of the arrangement is that there is no contract).

Yet, last week we discovered another irritation, one that seems to expand the design goal of this product to include not only the interface and functionality of 1977, but the reliability as well. We're following a few new shows this season (which is often the kiss of death for a new show, since about the time I decide I really like it, the network cancels it). We dutifully scrolled through the grids, thumb blisters developing as we pumped the "next" button on the remote, for each program we wanted to record. Then, a couple of days ago, the unit inexplicably dropped all its scheduled recording plans, reminiscent of a 1970's VCR's flashing 12:00. Why, I do not know, since the product allegedly has the afore-mentioned disk drive, which should immunize it from power outages. Yet, for some reason, it chose to lose the schedule.

When I moved from California to Utah, my TiVo not only remembered the programs I had on order, but automatically found them in the new time zone and new local channels, without any input from me. That was in 2001. Why is Time Warner stuck in 1977?

So what's all the fuss about? Lots of people don't even have a DVR.

If you've never used a DVR before, let me explain the paradigm shift. When you are accustomed to watching your chosen programming anytime you want, commercial free, your viewing habits change. You see or hear about a program you would normally not have dedicated any time to, just to see if it's any good. (Our threshold has been anywhere from five minutes to three episodes.) If it doesn't work, you just delete it from your queue. But this depends on having reliable tools that are easy to use. Otherwise you're stuck with the TV Guide way of doing things. And having loved and lost (like Frank has), you are definitely worse off than having never gone down the TiVo rabbit hole.

In sum, Fisher-Price TiVo will not be following us to our new abode. I hear TiVo calling...

How Not to Turn Down a Job Offer

The IT industry may be slow and cranky when it comes to hiring, but apparently we don't hold a candle to the hiring quirkiness of the legal community. As a couple of family member lawyers have recently changed jobs, I thought this story might be interesting. Note to self: Calling into question your erstwhile future employer's professional credentials is a bad idea. As is doing so in an email message that is then broadcast all over the net. (As an aside, I've been in the same situation as the young lady in the story, of having an employer "revise" the offered salary. My approach was to negotiate, ultimately resulting in my employer meeting me halfway. I have to say, "bla, bla, bla" is a more creative response, however unrewarding.)

Typhoon Hits Vietnam

The AP reports that Typhoon Lekima came ashore in North-Central Vietnam last night, causing at least two fatalities and destroying hundreds of homes. The provinces affected are north of where our boy is, but I bet the orphanage still got soaked. With our move to Texas, the weather activities in the Gulf of Mexico have been foremost, but we'll have our eyes on another coastal region as well--at least for the next couple of months.

Where the Techies Work

Apparently, it's map day. This one shows the percentage of the workforce in each metro area working in the information technology field. Of course Silicon Valley wins, but Washington is #2 (and, surprising to me, has a higher number of tech workers total than in the Bay Area). Austin makes the top ten.

Housing Data: Interactive Map

From the posts I've made so far, you might think the only thing I read online is the Wall Street Journal. I do read other sites (mostly during long conference calls I've been dragged into as an after-thought), but I have to confess the folks at WSJ are always putting up the coolest stuff. Case in point: this interactive map tracking the housing market across the nation. I'm pleased to see the Utah numbers still look pretty good, although this data is only though Q2. Let's hope things stay strong (at least until our place sells)!

Isotopes and the Polynesian Expansion

Robin Moroney writes in the WSJ's Informed Reader blog of new evidence that confirms Polynesian oral traditions of Hawaii-Tahiti migrations: isotope analysis places prehistoric Hawaiian tools on an atoll near Tahiti. (To those of us accustomed thinking of them as merely islands in the same ocean, we're talking about 2500 mile distances.) The prospect of crossing that stretch of the Pacific in an open, stone-age vessel kind of makes my rant about air travel... pathetic.

The Dreaded "Mechanical Problem"

[Warning: Long-winded rant ahead]

My sister-in-law got married last weekend in Salt Lake. My wife flew on standby tickets because her work can be done from any location; no big deal if she gets bumped a day or two. I don't have the same luxury, so we bought tickets for my trip to ensure my timely return to work on Monday. Normally we fly Delta, but I had some American frequent flyer miles set to expire at the end of the year. Even though this meant traveling through Dallas, it was worth saving a few bucks by cashing in the miles, or so I thought.

(As any family member who has been within earshot when the letters "DFW" are uttered in my presence will tell you, I have a long and storied history with this airport, including an unplanned stay in what I call, with no exaggeration, a crack motel, courtesy of American when they refused to rebook me until the next day.) I thought this trip would be different.

Foolish person! [Darth Vader] You don't understand the power of American Airlines to ruin your weekend! [/Darth Vader]

The outgoing flight was merely annoying. AUS-DFW was flawless. We touched down a couple of minutes early and the connecting flight was already waiting at the gate for me. I wondered if my DFW woes were a thing of the past. This was short-lived, however. DFW reached out its scaled tentacle of mischief to inflict a "mechanical problem" on the plane, just as we were pulling back from the gate. Gotcha!

We sat on the plane, at the gate, for an hour while the ground crew fixed the problem, which was never really identified to the passengers. At least the door was open and they kept us tethered to the mother-ship, so we had air conditioning. A quick cell call to the family in Utah to inform them of the delay, and off we went. Overall the plane was only about 70 minutes late.

Fast-forward three days to the return trip. This time, we had actually made it a few yards from the gate before we were informed of the mechanical problem. We then sat (this time without A/C) for about 20 minutes while they figured out how serious the problem was before pulling back to the gate to de-plane; this one was being taken out of service. A replacement aircraft was en route to get us to Dallas. Once again, I had a momentary flash of optimism: my original itinerary called for a 3-hour layover at DFW before the connection to Austin. Perhaps they could get the replacement flight in by then?

No. My Austin flight departed from Dallas at 10:40. The replacement flight would arrive from SLC at 10:38. Not even my super-human, Marine-Corps-marathon-running brother-in-law could make that sprint.

Thirty minutes of wrangling with the American ticket folks produced no way of getting to Austin on Sunday night. Ultimately, having checked out every other possible option, I prevailed upon my lovely wife to drive the three hours from Austin to Dallas to pick me up. There was simply no other way to allow me to meet my commitments in Austin on Monday. Ironically enough, she flew standby and arrived in Austin with no hitches, where I, with the guaranteed seat, had the difficulty. She did suffer though, six hours in the car on a Sunday night on the horror that is the I-35 construction zone, because of American Airlines' incompetence. That's real love.

I got to bed at 3:00 AM. By the end of the next day, I realized I had caught one heck of a cold somewhere during the trek. That DFW-AA beast had a voodoo doll of me that they just kept pricking.

I am a lightweight by modern business traveler standards, especially after I got out of the consulting business and re-joined the cubed masses. But I have logged over 100,000 miles in the past two years, according to my frequent flyer account balances. Virtually all of the lousy experiences I've had during that time have involved American Airlines, most of them in Dallas. The media has covered the extensive problems with the entire air travel industry this summer. I'm not disputing that other carriers have problems. That being said, I believe I can improve my odds of avoiding problems by simply never flying on American Airlines again.

(Now, just wait and see... I'll be eating crow when AA has the only itinerary that will work for our Vietnam adoption trip.)

Props to the MSM

Browsing the WSJ this morning, and lo and behold! BYU's Marriott School is ranked as the top regional MBA program in the Journal's annual recruiter poll (I've landed the chart on our site for your viewing pleasure; the article is posted--temporarily, no doubt--on the WSJ free site here). Granted, Marriott does not have the cachet of, say, Yale or Duke... but it's a great program, if I do say so myself. Congratulations to the school and the program!

Collapse: It's not a foregone conclusion

Jared Diamond's Collapse continues the same excellent tradition I expected after reading his earlier work, Guns, Germs and Steel. A series of fascinating societal profiles, from Easter Island to Norse Greenland to modern-day Montana, guide us through Diamond's central issues: Why and how do societies collapse, and how can we apply this knowledge to the benefit of our own society today?

The descriptive first half the book was more interesting to me than the later, prescriptive sections. I found myself inferring much of the later chapters' content from the allusions in the historical sections of the book. This doesn't invalidate his conclusions nor his recommendations to deal with them, which I found to be realistic and in some cases intriguing. (Who knew that some of the best nature preserves on the planet are in the middle of oilfields owned by the likes of Chevron?)

Overall, it's a very enjoyable book, with the only caveat being that the data geek in me would have liked to have seen more charts and tables to explore some of the premises he makes.