iPhone

The iPhone releases this Friday, June 29. I think it will not be as big a success as people estimate. The shortages will last at most three weeks, if there are shortages at all. It's way too pricey, and doesn't integrate with corporate systems (which could be one way to justify the high price).

It might even be a flop.

Riding the Bus

There are a few rules bus riders should know about. These rules benefit us all, so if you don't follow them, you earn the ire of your fellow passengers.

Getting On

- You're at a goddamn bus stop. Don't act all surprised when the bus shows up. Have your money ready before the bus gets there. Usually it's even within 15 minutes of you getting to the bus stop, unless the stupid bus runs late because of others who don't follow these rules. If you absolutely cannot have your money ready and feel you need to root through your purse, at least let the other passengers waiting at the stop with you get on first.

- Don't try and haul your two 24-packs of bottled beer for your 52nd birthday celebration onto the bus if you look like you're 85 and can't carry a gallon of milk. Sliding them on the floor doesn't count.

- Don't get on the bus before 9pm if you haven't showered in six months. People need to smell good for work. If they smell like they've been in the dumpster in the morning, their boss will think they don't spend money the right way. People also need to smell good for coming home. If they come home smelling like they've been in the dumpster all day, their spouse will assume they are actually unemployed, or that they had the scent of another woman on them and needed to cover it up.

Riding The Bus

- I realize that was OMG THE CUTEST PUPPY DOGG!!!! Take a photo with your cell phone instead of calling up your mentally retarded deaf boyfriend and telling him. There are people who do know how to use the cell phone properly in public, but you don't notice them because they're not shouting.

- If your cell phone rings on the bus and you're a shouter who's following the rule above, I admire your restraint. However, your ring-tone is a shitty toneless version of J.Lo loud enough to wake the dead. When it starts ringing, go ahead and turn the sound off. Or better yet, put in vibrate to begin with. Doubly so if the person calling you is likely to keep trying to reach you, assuming that you can't hear the ringer while you ignore them.

- Speaking of calling back, if you're talking to someone on the phone and you let them go, if they call you back something went wrong. I've been on the bus where you answered, hung up, answered, hung up, answered, hung up, -- the entire time I was on the bus. Clearly your "friend" wants to talk to you and you don't. Turn the phone off, or hand it to me and I'll throw it out the window and take care of the problem.

- Using your PSP to play 30-second clips of music videos is fine, if you want to watch 30 seconds of a video before moving to the next one. But guess what? Holding it up to your ear and turning the volume down slightly is not a good substitute for headphones.

- Speaking of headphones, if you're using some and I can hear your crappy gangsta rock five rows away, you're deaf and music is of no use to you. So turn it off.

Getting Off

- Say goodbye to your friend/neighbor/random-stranger-you-just-met-on-the-bus before the bus gets to your stop. When it comes to a stop and the doors open, you need to be standing at the door ready to hop off. When the bus stops, the absolute last thing for you to be doing is starting to say your 5-minute goodbye. You're holding up 45 other people who need to get to work. I realize that sometimes a conversation is really enthralling and it is possible to not notice when your stop is coming up, but you just pulled the stop request cord! Yes, you old asian lady. The stops are like 45 seconds apart. You certainly didn't pull the cord then get back into your enthralling conversation and forget your stop was coming up, did you? Pull the cord, say bye, walk to the door, and wait until it opens. It really is that simple.

Google Streetview

A lot of people are worried about the privacy ramifications of Google's new Streetview component of Google Maps. Basically they drive a car equipped with cameras through a bunch of streets in six major US cities, and now you can see these photos inside of Google Maps. No big deal, right? Except that the cameras show everything from girls sunbathing to a man scaling a fence (burglary? locked out?). Although it is legal to photograph anything visible from public streets, people are calling for some sort of censorship. But most articles I've read agree that there's no easy way to do this, even for Google.

I disagree.

The solution is simple -- take three pictures at different times (but with similar lighting conditions) of each street. Line them up as best as you can, then remove any element which is only in one of the three pictures. You'll get rid of all the people who're just walking by (and if you take the photos on different days, you'll get rid of any folks just sunbathing for a couple of hours), but you'll preserve the static elements (buildings, roads, infrastructure) which is the whole point of this project anyway.

Wii

Why is the Wii crushing the competition? Why are shortages expected to last through 2008, more than a year after the release of the console, and through two holiday shopping periods?

The naive answer is that the Wii is a simple machine with fun games and an nice innovative controller. The naive answer isn't wrong.

If we dig a little deeper, however, we realize that back when it was still called the Revolution, we kept hearing little tidbits here and there of how the game machine would be awesome. At E3 we discovered that there was motion-sensitive control and that the controller was wireless. Then we found out that the controller would have built-in rumble. And finally a speaker. These are impressive features, and the reason the Wii sells so well is that not only does it have these features, but they are done well and correctly.

Comparing with another "revolutionary" product, Windows Longhorn ("Vista") which was supposed to revolutionize storage with WinFS, UI with Avalon, and countless other features. It sounded great, but as time dragged on and on, these features turned out to be poorly implemented, and soon removed from the final release. When a company does amazing things well, the result is good. When a company promises amazing things, doesn't do them well, and ultimately doesn't deliver on its promises, the result is not good.

Prince Harry and Iraq

Contrary to all previous reports, Prince Harry will not be allowed to go to Iraq, because of specific threats against him.

Umm... aren't there specific threats against everyone in the coalition armies in Iraq? Why is Prince Harry's life any more valuable than any other private? And if he can't go with his squad, then he shouldn't be a commanding officer.

Woman Veteran

So I was driving this evening and stopped behind this SUV at a red light:




The first thing that caught my eye was the SemperFi and Marines bumper stickers, but I soon realized that this person was proud to be a woman veteran.

My next thought was that I was also a woman veteran, as is anyone who's ever survived a relationship with a woman. The problem here, ultimately, is that this proclamation is entirely incorrect as both "woman" and "veteran" are nouns, and what they really want is an adjective to modify "veteran". That adjective is "female", as in "proud to be a female veteran."

Perhaps it's no coincidence that this person with her poor grammar was a Bush supporter.

RSS

I've finally figured out why people use RSS and a reader instead of going to individual blogs -- most blogs don't post on a daily basis, so when I go and check your blog every day and it isn't updated, I get discouraged. With a nice RSS reader, I check that daily, and if your blog was updated, I read your post.

For blogs which are updated daily, however, a reader is mostly useless.

Finally, a disclaimer: I hate it when the RSS feed for a blog doesn't include the entire blog entries, and makes you click through to the actual blog. Then you're increasing the amount of work I need to do when I read your blog. I honestly have no idea about the behavior of my own blog. If anyone reads this, then feel free to drop me a note and let me know.

Flickr & Stock

A lot of rumors lately about Flickr monetizing photos by allowing users to sell them (and grabbing a piece of the payment, a la traditional microstock companies). Here's why it won't work.

Quality. Sure, there are great photos on Flickr. Stop browsing by "interestingness". Start browsing random people's entire portfolios. Most photos are of poor quality, either technically, compositionally, or something else. There certainly is a small demand for poor quality photographs, but the majority of stock purchasers (ie, designers) demand quality, and they don't have the time nor inclination to browse through a bunch of coal to find the one diamond.

Quantity. Again, there's just too much to sort through that's irrelevant.

Tags. I personally don't like the "controlled vocabulary" that iStockphoto.com uses, but Flickr's users tag their photos poorly. Some photos are just tagged "unclebob", other photos of a lake are tagged "industrial". This mis-tagging and inconsistency makes it hard for designers to find the photos they want.

LinkedIn

I've had a LinkedIn profile for a while now -- perhaps 3 years or so. I never really did much with it, but clearly I've underestimated its importance. If you haven't searched for your coworkers on it, and you work in a technology company, you'll be surprised just how many of your colleagues have a profile.

I certainly was astounded.

Ferries Redux

As I mentioned before, Seattle is prime territory for more ferries, especially ones across Lake Washington. The Seattle-PI reports this morning that a new ferry district has been created and is considering a route between UW and Kirkland. Woo!

Vulnerablilities

The media is abuzz today with discussions about the tanker truck which caught fire and destroyed a bridge in the San Fransisco area. I've seen all sorts of comments ranging the whole gamut, from those that express shock that concrete and steel can collapse under intense heat, to how absolutely vulnerable the entire transporation system is. It's this latter comment which bothers me.

First, a missing overpass isn't a catastrophic failure of the transportation system. It's inconvenient that the commute might take a bit longer (this morning's did not), but hardly a problem. If you take any highway in any major city and close it due to a wreck, and you'll have a nasty traffic problem. That's not a catastrophic failure -- trains (both freight and passenger) can keep running just fine; detours are found for those who drive.

Second, having a network of highways isn't a vulnerability. You either need an overpass, a tunnel (underpass), or an intersection. All of these can be destroyed just as easily I imagine -- the burning truck would have caused a tunnel collapse and likely melted the pavement of an intersection. Though an intersection could be more readily repaired than the other two options, the point is all of them are vulnerable.

Third, heaven forbid people telecommute, carpool, or pay for the bus. Of course, Arnold made today a ride-free day on all public transport, which I personally don't understand. If you encourage everyone to take public transit today, what will they do tomorrow? I see the following options:
1. They take public transport again, paying for it. The question is, why wouldn't they have paid for it today?
2. They don't take public transport because it's not free on Tuesday. They drive to work, causing traffic jams. The question is, what's the use of delaying the traffic jam from Monday to Tuesday?

Violence

32 die in multiple attacks.

170 die in multiple attacks.

One of these happens almost every single day. The other happens once every few years, if that often. Yet it is the infrequent which shocks. Why? There is no difference. In both innocent people are killed. Both are despicable. We should do something to prevent both in the future, yet I fear we're only going to take steps to try and prevent the event in which 32 died.

Art

Have you ever found yourself in an art museum looking at some very famous artist's work, thinking to yourself, "Hey, that looks just like the crayon-on-construction-paper my 3-year-old made that's taped to the refrigerator!"? Turns out that art isn't art unless you're told it is. At least that's the moral of an experiment done by the Washington Post wherein Joshua Bell, one of the world's greatest violinists, played his $3.5 million Stradivarius violin in a Washington subway station. Out of the thousand commuters who passed by, it was thought 75-100 would actually stop and listen. Only 7 did, and only two of them thought anything particularly special about the performance. But if you took these same thousand people, placed them in a concert hall with $100 admission tickets, they'd surely think the music was absolutely phenomenal.

Similarly, if you take a million-dollar painting out of its frame, walk it two blocks down the street from the museum it resides in, and place it in a cafe's collection of $100 paintings for sale, it's unlikely anyone would buy it. Clearly, we are trained to admire art, but only if we know, from someone else, that we should be admiring the art.

So the question is who gets to decide what's worth admiring?

Avalanche Beacons

Having recently aquired an avalanche beacon at a princely sum, I figured I was well on my way towards backcountry skiing and exploration. I had always assumed that all the people I'd seen leaving the Alpental backcountry gates had all the necessary equipment -- after all, the requirements seem to be the pretty standard "forecast, beacon, probe, shovel, and partner" deal that you see at every backcountry gate at every ski area.

Snowshoeing a few weeks ago I had run into a few groups of skiers. While they had passed my, I briefly switched my beacon to search to play with it. To my utter surprise, not one was transmitting.

Standing at the backcountry gate at Alpental yesterday, I did the same test -- this time rather than to play with the beacon, I wanted to see how many of the large group of 10-15 people currently heading out had a beacon. It should have been no surprise, even given their backbacks and shovels, that not one had a beacon.

In Which "Do No Evil" Buys "Evil"

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google, of "Do No Evil" fame has bought Doubleclick, the absolutely evil track-you-everywhere pop-under pop-up advertising company.

Is this sort of like matter and anti-matter -- very shocking when it happens, but in the end it all just cancels out? Or maybe it's more like a proton and an electron -- no charge left?

Microstock Photography

If you look at any online forum where professional stock photographers congregate, you'll notice a lot of hateful attitudes towards "microstock", or stock photography sold for pennies as compared to the typical $250. These pros argue that their livelihoods are going to go away. They argue that any picture worth buying is worth more money. They argue that my time spent shooting, uploading, and keywording, and of course post-processing, is worth much more than the pennies I get.

These photographers are all, every single last one of them, entirely and completely wrong.

When I shoot for iStockphoto.com, I don't do magic post-processing. I do spend some time editing to occasional photo, and I of course spend time keywording. And yes, it probably wouldn't be worth my time for $0.20. The fact is, however, that I never get just $0.20. The minimum I can earn is 25 cents, and that's just for a tiny photo not much bigger than the samples on the site. More often than not, I earn upwards of a dollar per sale. However, this is not my primary source of income. My photography just doesn't command thousands of dollars per photo, though someday I hope it might. The prices, ranging from $1 to $100+ (and I have earned commissions of $20/sale from time to time) encourage more people to license my photos than would choose to do so at higher prices. I make up a fair bit of the low price in volume.

This is the point where most professional photographers bring up the old joke about the businessman who sold his goods at a loss, but made it up in volume. But that doesn't apply to photography. In business, if you sell goods at a loss, then you take a loss each time you sell something. Photography is much more akin to the software industry -- building Windows Vista took 5 years and hundreds of millions of dollars, but every sale Microsoft makes simply brings in more money without increasing the development costs. Similarly, once I put in the time to make a photo available online, each subsequent sale doesn't cost me anything -- I gain each time the photo sells.

Another popular argument against Microstock is that the images are of lower quality. You can see counter-examples for yourself, or you can look at NPR's story about Mt. Everest and Mt. Chimborazo with a photograph of each mountain. Without looking at the captions, try and guess for yourself which one is the professional photograph sold through Corbis, and which is the "amateur" photograph licensed through iStockphoto. Go ahead, I'll wait.... There's no real quality difference now is there? In fact, I suspect the only reason NPR used the Corbis image was because iStock only has two photos of the mountain.

The professionals who are complaining about Microstock aren't idiots by any means -- they simply realize their old model of stock photography is going to lose. The problem with these pros is that they don't want to adjust to the new marketplace.

Secularization of Christmas

Christmas really is a religious holiday, that's why so many Jews leave the country in December. But to me it isn't -- it's simply an excuse to give gifts. We're currently in the process of secularization -- like the first day of winter, which stems from the winter solstice, which was a pagan holiday.

We get to currently witness something going from a religious sacred ritual, to a yearly occurrence with no religious connotations -- only we haven't yet shed the last of those.

Growing Sugar Crystals on a String

Fundamentally, the concept is simply. A supersaturated solution will crystalize spontaneously if it can. So what you do is dissolve sugar into boiling water (since boiling water can hold more dissolved solids than can cool water). Then you dip a string into the water, which provides a nice rough surface for sugar crystals to form, and you let the water cool, causing it to be supersaturated with sugar.

Yum!

Volunteers

I came across a very interesting idea recently about people who volunteer at work. That is not to say they contribute to the company's habitat for humanity crew or that they bring in canned foods to share in the bin next to the receptionist. Rather, they are volunteering at their jobs. Of course, they're getting paid, just like everyone else. However, these special people are so in demand because of their ability to do their job that they can get a job at any company, at any time, in any business climate. They're not concerned with a recession nor with hiring freezes. If they apply to work at a company, the company will make room for them. So in that sense, these people are volunteering their time to come into your particular office, as opposed to any other office at any other company. If they didn't want to come in, they wouldn't -- they'd simply get a job elsewhere.

Are you a volunteer?

Wartime Presidency

A lot of the news media keeps referring to the Iraq war, or to the "wartime president". This really bothers me. We're not at war in Iraq. Only congress can declare war. We're in Iraq bombing the crap out of some civilians who are fighting back. They're doing a remarkably effective job, which makes me wonder why no one thought they would.

An old college roommate majoring in political science once told me that the reason the US would never be taken over by a foreign government is because of the second ammendment. He said that an armed populace would fight any invaders if the military lost the battle for some reason. The foreign troops would be subject to attack at every small town, at every gas station, at every house they entered. We'd call it patriotic, this guerilla defense of the country. The invading government would call it rebel insurgency.

Amazing what a bit of perspective can do, isn't it?

Dating

Something seems unbalanced here:

Problems With Blogs

Blogs are often mis-used. They're fine if you're just trying to share your thoughts at the moment, and don't really care if people can go back and see what you thought last week. They're also fine if you're a site like Gizmodo, where your reviews of gadgets are outdated by the end of the day. They're fine for link-of-the-day or picture-of-the-day stuff too.

Blogs are not fine when you're doing anything that has an order. All too many people blog about their trip to Swaziland. If you ever look at someone's completed blog, you start reading about how it is to come back home, then you read about the flight back, then about how the traveller has finally figured out the local customs, then about how confusing the customs are, then about the plane flight there, then about packing and last minute preparations. It's all backwards!

Anything where you're documenting a process, a blog is bad for. Not building a house. Not taking a vacation. Not the first year of your child's life.

The only reason I think blogs are so popular is they're easy to write, and you're provided with all the infrastructure. There's no page layout issues -- you have posts and you can display 1-999 posts per page. That's it. No linking, no navigation.

Someone should invent a reverse blog at the very least.

Digital Rights Management, Redux

What did I say?

Ferries

The west seattle blog has an article about the water taxi to west seattle. It discusses some issues regarding funding and the creation of a King County Ferry district, which apparently includes a possible UW-Kirkland route. Hell yeah!

When I was in Sydney, one of the best aspects of their public transportation system was that it was either on rails (trains) or on water (ferries). The ferries ran everywhere, because the water was everywhere. Seattle's very similar, but doesn't actually have all that many ferries. Plus none of the Sydney ferries carried cars.

Aggregation

Right now there are many services out there which aggregate votes for web pages, and place the highest-voted pages on a nice list. Digg originated this model (or at least made it popular) but Slashdot's firehose is the same thing, really. A lot of websites now place little icons you can click on to vote or share each of their articles, like this article about bad computers from PC World. Notice that PC World has icons for Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Newsvine. What about all the other social media sites out there? (Reddit, simpy, the list just goes on and on.) If they were to add an icon for all the competitors for these sites, they wouldn't have any room left for the article itself.

I think what is needed is an aggregation service, where you click a single icon on the article which posts your vote to the aggregation service, which in turn knows who you are and what social media sites you subscribe to, and relays your vote to them. This way content publishers do not have to keep up with the latest social media sites. The readers don't have to click six links to add or vote for the content on the six sites they use. The only losers are the established social media sites such as Digg who already have such a big market share that content publishers who want to link to only a few social media sites will link to Digg before they link to one of Digg's less popular competitors.

Digital Rights Management

Digital Rights Management, or DRM for short, is just a fancy way of limiting what you can do with media like music or movies in digital form. The general idea is that copyright law doesn't allow you to share music with your friends. So if I download a song, I can't give you a copy. It wasn't ever legal for me to give you a copy, but back in the days of cassette tapes, it was pretty easy for me to buy a blank tape and stick it in my dual-deck boombox, and make a copy. Some boomboxes even had a high-speed copy mode so that you could make copies faster. Even though this wasn't legal, it was really hard to enforce, so what the music industry did is it went to congress and got itself a tax placed on every blank media (think: cassette tape, vhs tape, blank CD) which went to the industry, to help "offset" the losses in music and media sales from copying.

Today, however, even though that tax still exists, with digital media DRM comes into play. Basically the content is encrypted, and when you buy a copy, your computer gets a license to play it, which is really a decryption key for the content. It's specific to your computer or your iPod, so if you share it with another person, their computer or iPod can't play it. There are many different types of encryption so there are many different types of DRM. Microsoft has one called Plays4Sure, which ironically doesn't work on the Zune. Apple calls theirs FairPlay and that's what iPod and iTunes use.

Of course, because your iPod knows how to decrypt the music, some smart people have broken pretty much every DRM scheme that there is. But to prevent this, the media industry went to congress in 2000 and passed the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) which says that if someone tries to put DRM on their content, it's illegal for you to try and break it (it's also illegal for you to break it). One of the many problems with the DMCA is that it doesn't have any sort of strength threshold for the DRM being used. So if I use an "encryption" scheme of flipping the first bit of each media file, unflipping that bit is just as illegal as cracking a state-of-the-art RSA encryption scheme. So just because some DRM is very weak and easy to break, it's still illegal to break it.

Another problem is that copyright law allows you, once you have bought some content, to make a copy of it as long as you don't share it. The idea behind this is that you might lose your CD, but you already paid for it, so you should be allowed to have a backup copy. Copyright law also allows you to take an excerpt of that CD and play it on your talk show as part of a review of that CD -- as long as your excerpt is not a significant chunk of the CD. Most DRM doesn't let you do this (though some companies, like Apple, will allow you to copy your music on up to N devices. In apple's case, you can authorize 5 computers if I am not mistaken).

The biggest problem behind DRM isn't that my iPod can't play your Zune songs, and your Zune can't play mine. It's that my iPod can't play the songs I bought from Rhapsody, thus buying an mp3 player has locked me into one DRM scheme (so I have to buy from iTunes). Of course, the iPod can play DRM-free music (like just plain mp3s) but if my iPod breaks and I decide I want a Sansa music player instead, I'll have to re-purchase all the songs I already own from Rhapsody, since the Sansa music player doesn't play the iTunes songs.

I think eventually two things will happen. First, although it's illegal, utilities to remove various DRM schemes will become more common and user-friendly, which will allow more users to switch DRM schemes and music players without having to re-purchase all their music. Second, small-time iTunes competitors are already coming out and selling DRM-free songs. As soon as a major record label allows their music to be sold DRM free, the party's over and everyone else will follow suit. It's just too much of a competetive advantage for others not to do so.

Fundamentally DRM will eventually fade out because people want to watch their media on multiple devices, not just the one supported by the store you bought your media from.

Cost Of Living

Recently I took a weekend ski trip to Whitefish, Montana. Although the skiing was great fun, it's the nightlife I want to talk about. The first night we went to a bar where the drinks were $3 each -- except for fine scotch which was $4. I'm not just talking about cheap beers, but hard liquor too.

The last night we went to happy hour at a bar where you got a free pizza, enough for a meal for two or a good snack for four, when you bought a pitcher of beer for $8. We spent four hours in that bar while waiting for the train, having three or four pitchers of beer, four glasses of scotch, dinner, nachos, darts, foosball, pool and tator tots. All told, we spent $60. In Seattle you could get 6 drinks for that price.

Gas Prices

Summer is coming soon, and according to CNN, gas prices just spiked two weeks ago by 20 cents per gallon to an average of $2.55. The most expensive gas is $3.10/gallon in San Fransisco, and the cheapest can be found in Anchorage at $2.22/gallon.

I suspect we'll see gas in the $3.50 range in Seattle this summer (it's currently around $2.70), and the media will be full of articles covering how many hybrids are selling and how the big trucks (think: American cars) aren't selling well.

Chuck Norris of Photography

You have to be a really big photo geek:

- Ken Rockwell ordered an L-lens from Nikon, and got one.
- When Ken Rockwell brackets a shot, the three versions of the photo win first place in three different categories
- Ken Rockwell once designed a zoom lens. You know it as the Hubble SpaceTelescope.
- Ken Rockwell isn't the Chuck Norris of photography; Chuck Norris is the Ken Rockwell of martial arts.
- Sure, Ken Rockwell deletes a bad photo or two. Other people call these Pulitzers.

Last Chair

via BackcountryBlog.blogspot.com, I came across this short missive on riding the last chair. Admittedly, I am a patroller, and I can (and do) get last chair quite often, but the real joy is when I'm the closing leader and all the other patrollers head down the mountain to close it down and make sure everyone is off. (The closing leader stays on top where all the gear is, just in case someone injured is found). When the mountain is empty and all the other patrollers are standing around at the bottom waiting for me, having that last run with the entire mountain all to myself is just wonderful.

Fairness

Violent Acres has a very interesting article on lies, but inadvertantly comes across as one of the fairest viewpoints I've read:

The Democrats want me to believe that anyone who doesn’t support government sponsored programs that promote a victim mentality (such as welfare and social security) is a cruel, intolerant, selfish asshole.

The Republicans want me to believe that anyone who is an Atheist possesses no morals and will someday commit a crime.

Voter Turnout

The SeattlePI has this nice visual aid of voter turnout by area:


Compare with Zillow's heatmap:



Notice how the areas with the most money have the most turnout. Is it because of the demographics, or because the richer people have more in taxes at stake? Or because poorer areas don't care as much?

Viaduct Breakdown

Problems with Podcasting

Reading a written article is nice because you can pace yourself. The headline is what draws your interest, but you can quickly glance at random spots in the article to see if it is interesting to you. Skip the material if you don't care at all, skim it if you don't care much, or read carefully if you're really interested.

The problem is that podcasting (both audio and video) has such a nice cachet to it these days that everyone is trying it. I'm not saying it doesn't have its place -- I really enjoy Ze Frank's The Show (sadly over as of 3/17/2007). The problem comes in when a publication you expect to read in text form, say Slate.com, tries to do a podcast as a replacement for a column.

Specifically, I really like their idea of reader-submitted euphanisms for various topics which change monthly, but I don't like their podcast. It's too much of a discussion, and what I really want is a list of the top 25 euphanisms which I can skim through, pick out the gems for myself, and move on with my day.

Microsoft Live

What's wrong with Microsoft's Live initiative?

Hold that thought. Let's skip back a few years to the era of ".net". Do you remember how the next version of Windows (codenamed Longhorn, now officially Vista) was Windows.net? How the office.net website stated how all your documents would live "in the cloud" and be accessible from anywhere? Internally, hundreds of applications were renamed to "application.net".

.net, its annoying name aside, was simply Microsoft's common language runtime, supporting managed C++, C# and "VB.net", or better known as VB6 (maybe VB7?) Yet Microsoft took this name and tried to apply it to hundreds of different products; it became more of an amorphous brand than a concrete name for something. The end result? A lot of confusion.

Let's skip back to the present day. What's "live"? We have Windows Live Search. How is that different from msn search? We have Windows Hotmail Live. How is that different than Windows Hotmail, MSN mail, or just Hotmail? Microsoft has a branding problem.

They didn't have a branding problem when they released Word as a competitor to WordPerfect 5.2, which was the last commercial word processor I used other than Word. The secret? They called the program "Microsoft Word". Corel's name didn't appear anywhere. That's branding.

Unfortunately Microsoft is now so big they feel that branding things "Microsoft" doesn't provide enough differentiation. They want XBox to be their gaming brand. Everyone knows it's still made by Microsoft, but they like it a little better. I used to work in a ski shop, where everything we sold was separated by ski or snowboard. Goggles, sweaters, boots, you name it. Why? Because, supposedly, snowboarders felt more comfortable when they didn't have to look at ski stuff, and skiers could browse their $350 Dale of Norway sweaters without having to glance over $50 hoodies.

Personally, I can see the XBox brand, because it refers to the gaming system and its components. MSN was a fine brand too, for an internet provider. Now that Microsoft is branching out into the traditional "Web 2.0" things, they're looking for a different brand. Unfortunately "Live" is confusing because XBox Live already exists. Another problem is that MSN started morphing from the "ISP" brand into the "Internet" brand that Live is now trying to be with the release of "MSN Search". Finally, Live is being applied to Windows, as in "Windows Live". It's one thing to have a brand, but Microsoft is applying "Live" to everything left and right. Why not just leave it as "Microsoft"? It'll be a heck of a lot less confusing to customers, and a heck of a lot more effective.

Not surprisingly, I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Amazon Web Services

There's an open secret about Amazon Web Services (AWS). Everyone's using it, but not everyone admits it. You can see an official list on Amazon's website, but lots and lots of other companies, especially startups, are using the services.

What is it? A set of small, standalone services which can replace the need for a datacenter. Need some extra CPU cycles? EC2 is your answer. Need more disk space? S3 charges you $.10 to upload a gigabyte, and $.10 per month of storage. Amazon wins because people don't all need 100% CPU all the time, so one box can be shared among many different companies. Startups win because they can have datacenter quality uptime and easy scalability without actually renting a datacenter. That lowers their expenses, and makes them more likely to succeed.

Of course, most of these startups were doomed to failure since before the business plan was written, but for the few that succeed, Amazon is a core part of their infrastructure, and a company doesn't want to stop innovating during growth just to migrate their fully functioning infrastructure, and if a company isn't growing, it doesn't have the money to migrate. So essentially Amazon locks them into AWS.

Most people think Amazon is a store. It is, but there's a lot going on underneath the hood. The stock price, in my opinion, is far too low given what's coming, but I guess most analysts don't really see that yet, since most of the companies using AWS are small startups and don't drive a lot of revenue to Amazon's bottom line.

Of course, Dare Obasanjo writes a conflicted post on AWS. On one hand, he likes the idea of not having to re-invent hosting every time a new startup comes alive, but he expresses concerns about the SLA of AWS which, apparently, is not posted anywhere (and Smugmug has reported some problems, albeit small).

Viaduct Results

Sad as it may be, my predictions hold true with 100% of the precincts counted (with a total of 30% voter turnout):

70% of voters do not want a tunnel.
55% of voters do not want to rebuild the viaduct.

I had said more people don't want a tunnel, and that both options will lose. Woot.

The voters have spoken in this special nonbinding election. They'll speak again at the normal, binding election. Your move, idiot politicians, but tread lightly.

Seattle's Viaduct Election

Seattle's viaduct replacement election is coming up this Tuesday. I voted no and hell no, though I'm not sure that was entirely correct. The tunnel is definitely a bad idea. First, tunnels in general are expensive and often overrun the cost. Second, the way the mayor proposes to pay for the tunnel involves residents between Spokane St. and Denny. That's just too narrow. The people who are going to benefit most are the people in West Seattle and in Ballard. I'd be much less opposed to the tunnel if:

1. Finance the tunnel 100% by selling the land on top to developers. We all know that's what will happen eventually anyway, so at least make them pay for it. The land underneath the current viaduct is some of the most potentially expensive land in Seattle. Sell it.

2. Ditch the stupid "is-it-a-shoulder?" shoulders. It's either a lane, an exit ramp, or a shoulder. It shouldn't be all three at different times. That's just going to be a mess. We need a 6 lane tunnel, not a 4 lane tunnel. A four lane tunnel is going to be just like the 520 bridge is. Those of you who commute across it feel my pain.

So, like I said, definitely no on the tunnel. The viaduct proposed is going to be bigger than the existing viaduct. I like the existing one just fine. It has great views, but I worry those might go away if the new tunnel requires solid concrete barriers unlike the current visually light-weight barriers. The anti-viaduct campaign has scared me a little about the size (good for you guys!) but I really don't like the surface street option either.

Here's what wrong with the surface street option:














How is the surface street option any better than the proposed new viaduct, shown below?





It isn't. Sure, there are pretty flowers and all, but a 6-lane road isn't going to make things nice for pedestrians. It's still noisy and unpleasant to walk around. And it will be unpleasant to drive on due to the traffic lights. Maybe make it a surface highway, with a number of sky bridges for pedestrians to cross overhead?

Another problem is that the state is guaranteeing 2.8 billion dollars in funding for a new viaduct. If we get the same amount of money for public transportation if we don't build anything, then I'm all for it. But the surface street option means we'll see maybe $120 million, and Seattle will get screwed over so the state can send our viaduct money elsewhere. I hear Renton needs a new basketball arena, and Kitsap needs a new racetrack.

I love light rail. Let's use the $2.8 billion for more light rail, sooner. Or, here's a wild idea: replace the viaduct with one word: monorail.

Ultimately, I have some predictions about the results of the election:

1. The tunnel will have less support than the viaduct.
2. The viaduct and tunnel will have less than 50% support.
3. The mayor is going to ignore the election results, unless both options have less than 25% support.
4. If the mayor tries to build a tunnel, he won't get the funding.
5. If the governor tries to build a viaduct, she'll get wrapped up in red tape when the city refuses to issue permits.
6. The mayor will not be elected again.
7. The governor will struggle to get re-elected.