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Archives for Observations
The Waiting Is the Hardest Part
During yesterday’s iPhone launch I found it particularly irritating that AT&T and Apple employees were actually barred from disclosing the quantity of available iPhones to those standing in the long lines that formed early in the morning outside stores.
From a business standpoint, I can understand the intention of the policy. AT&T and Apple wanted people at the back of the lines to continue to wait so they could eventually be cajoled into placing a direct fulfillment order after the store ran out of inventory. But I still think AT&T and Apple should have let customers make informed decisions about whether they wanted to wait to place an order. As a corporate policy, barring this type of disclosure demonstrated a complete lack of respect for the time of some of their most-loyal customers.
The In-Store Activation Blues
The in-store activation for my wife’s iPhone took over two hours this morning, despite the fact that we were both completely “iReady” for the ordeal.
The phone migration process was complicated by a computer error at the point-of-sale, which landed us in a bizarre and somewhat Kafkaesque Catch-22. Because of a hiccup during credit card processing, AT&T had already associated the new iPhone with our service plan before they were able to charge us for it. Unfortunately, they were then unable to charge us for it because their system indicated the phone was already associated with our service plan.
In a rational world, a sales rep would just ring up a $299 charge on a register and straighten out the resulting inventory issue without keeping the customer waiting. Unfortunately, the iPhone 3G roll-out was engineered to remove the element of personal discretion from all AT&T store employees. There was an air of fear in the store, as the employees seemed to believe that any deviation from a strict set of procedures would result in immediate and merciless termination. Even the store manager was afraid to do anything to resolve the situation expediently.
Instead, he had to place a call to a conference-line they referred to as the “war room” to await instructions. When they told me about this “war room” I immediately conjured a mental image of a group of mid-level AT&T executives sitting around a large table in a dark room smoking cigars and wearing fake military uniforms (much like the type worn by high-level “officers” in the Church of Scientology).
Eventually, the manager was able to thoroughly cover his own ass, which allowed us to leave the store with our shiny electronic bounty in tow.
The lesson from all this is that rigid procedures only make difficult operations more difficult. Things will go wrong with any sufficiently large operation. You can either (1) anticipate every possible problem and have adequate provisions for “error-handling” well in advance, or (2) you can give actual people the authority to use discretion to make intelligent decisions on the ground.
Today, AT&T seems to have done neither.
My Kingdom for an SSH Client
I’ve scoured every inch of the iTunes App Store and I still can’t find an SSH client. I can however find:
- Three different guitar tuners.
- Six different “to-do” list applications with eerily formulaic icons.
- At least eight Bible and Bible-study related apps.
- Multiple apps to help you use your iPhone as a flashlight.
- Absurdly expensive ($4.99 to $14.99) subway maps for New York, San Francisco, and Washington DC.
Wasn’t an SSH client one of the first priorities of the jail-breaking community? Why does it seem to be such a low-priority for developers now.
Does Numbers Make Charts Like This?
I’m in the process of upgrading my first-generation Core Duo Macbook, which is getting a little long-in-the-tooth. So this afternoon I visited Apple.com and I took a little time to review the specs of the newly released models.
I eventually came across the following bar chart, which is accessible as a pop-up from this page. It compares my current notebook (coincidentally) with the one I intend to purchase.
At first glance, it was obvious that something wasn’t quite right. The percentages listed inside the blue bars don’t even remotely correspond to the visual length of those bars relative to the baseline bar at the bottom. It isn’t even close.
I took a screenshot and did some measuring in Photoshop with the ruler tool. The baseline bar is 216 pixels wide. The bars above it are 357, 362, 382, and 417 pixels wide, respectively. That would yield rounded percentages of 65%, 68%, 77%, and 93%.
I assume the numbers are correct and Apple is just being deceptive to make the performance gains look more impressive. In any case, who wants to join a class-action suit?
Annoying Crime Drama Cliché #218
Erin and I watched the premiere of New Amsterdam last night. Apparently the suits in development at FOX figured they needed their own immortal undead detective to compete with Moonlight. The pilot was entertaining enough to merit a season pass on the TiVo, despite the writers’ willingness to slip into the same tired clichés employed by most network crime dramas.
Why is it that whenever a female detective or police officer is introduced as a character, it’s somehow important to mention that her father was also a cop? Worse still, this fact is always brought to our attention with the same clumsy dialog:
Crusty Old Male Officer: I knew your dad in the (INSERT PRECINCT NUMBER HERE). He was a great cop.
Female Detective: Thanks.
Good thing that writers’ strike ended, so we can get more of this.
And You Thought Dog Sweaters Were Bad
If robots ever achieve sentience, it’s this kind of shit that’s going to cause them to rise up and kill us all.
Lose/Lose Situation
A friend of my wife recently ordered a new license plate for her vehicle.
I imagine there was a three-hour meeting at the offices of the Virginia DMV to decide whether they should issue this plate. Debate was probably an attempt to reconcile the two possible obvious outcomes:
- If we approve this personalized plate, we’ll get complaints from prudish members of the public.
- If we don’t approve this personalized plate, somebody with the breast cancer lobby will make a public stink.
Sometimes you just can’t win.
They Go There for the Wings
When they’re not giving tens of billions of dollars away to promote global health, the world’s two richest men are just regular guys.
Well, not really.
Blind African-American Blues Musician or Pseudonym Used by Sighted White Blues Musician?
- Blind Lemon Jefferson
- Blind Willie Dunn
- Blind Willie Johnson
- Blind Willie McTell
- Blind Joe Death
- Blind Boy Fuller
- Blind Thomas
- Blind Roosevelt Graves
Black & Blind: 1, 3, 4, 6, 8. White & Sighted: 2, 5, 7
Research in Motion Crapping Themselves
Right now Research in Motion is down 6.5% on Apple’s announcement of their new iPhone.
I wonder how they’re feeling about this ad they took out on Time.com right now:
Yes, THAT James Watson
In an interview for this January’s issue of Esquire, James Watson made several interesting remarks.
These remarks can easily be separated into two distinct groups. The first group consists of statements that are interesting because they are fresh and insightful. The second group, by contrast, consists of statements seemingly crafted to convey Mel Gibson batshit-craziness.
From the first group:
I’m basically a libertarian, I don’t want to restrict anyone from doing anything unless it’s going to harm me. I don’t want to pass a law stopping someone from smoking. It’s just too dangerous. You lose the concept of a free society. Since we are genetically so diverse and our brains are so different, we’re going to have different aspirations. The things that will satisfy me won’t satisfy you. On the other hand, if global warming is in any way preventable and it’s likely to come, not doing something would be irresponsible to the future of our society.
From the second group:
Should you be allowed to make an anti-Semitic remark? Yes, because some anti-Semitism is justified. Just like some anti-irish feeling is justified.
Now just to be clear, I would agree that you should be allowed to make anti-Semitic remarks. I just wouldn’t defend a right to free speech by arguing the validity of such statements. Don’t worry though–Watson also has some kind words for the Jews:
I’ve wondered why people aren’t more intelligent. Why isn’t everyone as intelligent as Ashkenazi Jews?
Note his need to exclude Sephardi Jews. Always the geneticist.
Achilles and the Hare
Today is August 24, 1995. In Redmond, corks are popping out of champagne bottles to herald the product launch of Windows 95.
The media coverage is making you feel uneasy about all the Apple stock in your portfolio, so you pull your brick-sized cell phone out of your briefcase and you call your coke-addict broker. You tell him to dump all your Apple stock and put the money in Microsoft.
Today is March 23, 2006. Your investments have done well over the last decade. Your Microsoft stock has beaten the S&P 500 by a factor of three. You’ve been watching Apple’s share price slide for the last couple of weeks and it has made you wonder how much less your portfolio would be worth if you had lacked the vision to move your money to Microsoft a decade ago.
So you visit Bigcharts.com and you create an interactive chart to satisfy your curiosity.
You feel a lump in your throat as you come to terms with your mistake. As a long-term investment vehicle, Apple has outpaced Microsoft.
Lucky He Didn’t End Up Like Spider
When Joe Pesci tells you not to take his picture, you listen to him.
Anybody capable of pulling off the kind of performance he gave as Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas is obviously a sociopath.
Get Your Helmets Ready
One of my New Year’s resolutions from last year was to finally do something about my hunt-and-peck keyboard technique. To meet that objective, I enlisted the help of a computer program that employs a friendly animated viking to help children learn to type.
Over a three month period the viking whipped me into shape. I eventually learned to type with good technique at roughly 55 words per minute. Although the program was effective, I still believed it could have used improvement, so I contacted the software developers last year with a great idea for a fun typing exercise game they could include in their next release of the program.
I thought it would be cool if the viking could run through a village in a drunken mead-induced haze plundering and murdering villagers with varying degrees of bloodiness based on the user’s typing speed.
I haven’t heard back from them yet.
Maybe He Really Is the ‘King of All Media’
When I first heard about Howard Stern’s deal with Sirius Satellite Radio in October of 2004, the numbers involved made me think that the folks over at Sirius were smoking crack. How could the value of Stern’s audience possibly justify the “approximately $100 million per year” salary they had agreed to pay him?
It looks like I couldn’t have been more wrong.
According to this Wall Street Journal article, Sirius brought in 1.14 million new subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2005, earning Stern an additional $200 million bonus.
If you look at the following chart comparing Sirius’s stock growth to that of rival XM Satellite Radio, you’ll see that it’s not unreasonable to assert that Stern is responsible for doubling Sirius’s stock price and pushing their market capitalization well past that of their rival. (The chart begins the day before the deal was announced.)
In fact, the increase alone in the market capitalization of Sirius is more than four times the value of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.
What I Like
I saw an interesting thought exercise by one of the writers for Paste in the last issue. I’ve reproduced it below, with my own answers.
Stuff I’m not supposed To like, but do:
- The B-52’s
- Red Lobster
- The West Wing
Stuff I’m not supposed To like, and don’t:
- American Idol
- hot dogs outside of Chicago
- cheap American beer
Stuff I’m supposed to like and do:
- Tarkovsky Films
- The New Pornographers
- Johnny Cash
Stuff I’m supposed to like, and don’t:
- The Office (Both British and American Versions)
- Interpol (the band)
- FPS Video Games
Stuff I like the idea of, but don’t really like:
- theremin music
- Ruby on Rails
- ivy growing on the side of my house.
And Don’t Invade Russia in the Winter…
In the 1840s, a frustrated civil service exam flunkee from a villiage near Canton fell in with a crowd of Christian missionaries from the West. They obviously made quite an impression on the young slacker–he became convinced he was Christ’s little brother sent by God to vanquish demons here on Earth. This happened well before the advent of modern psychopharmacology, so our would-be messiah did the obvious thing. He assembled an army of followers and established his own government.
The rebellion that ensued lasted from 1850-1864.
Despite what you may have believed to the contrary, mass-slaughter is not an innovation of the 20th century. Historians disagree somewhat on the particulars of the total body count, but by the time Hong Xiuquan’s “Kingdom of Heavenly Peace” ended in 1864, an estimated twenty to thirty million people perished in what we now call the Taiping Rebellion. By comparison, the American Civil War, which occurred at about the same time, only claimed roughly 620,000 lives.
Unless you took a Chinese history course in college, the odds are pretty good that you’ve never even heard of the Taiping Rebellion.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and assert that any time over, say, 5 million people die as result of a single event, there is probably an inherent object lesson that, at bare minimum, warrants at least one, if not several, days of discussion in a high-school history classroom. Study of the Taiping Rebellion would yield several such lessons, the most obvious being that you should think twice before joining that religious cult because things often don’t end so well.
The Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918 killed far more people than World War I. Some estimates even place the death-toll as high as 100 million people worldwide. Yet the Spanish Flu usually only merits a few paragraphs in most high-school textbooks. The universal lesson of consequence is largely ignored. (In this case, “Wash your freakin’ hands. Yes, it really is a big deal.”)
As is too often the case, our education system fails to recognize that the scale of historical events often underscores the importance of the underlying lesson. Maybe we should be teaching history by death-toll instead of by region or chronology.
A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever
I want a 2006 Charger.
Is that cool or what?
Unintended Consequences
Radley linked to this article about a new law passed by the New York City Council that mandates a 2-1 women-to-men bathroom ratio in all new public venues.
I wonder how many of the affected venues will take advantage of the loophole:
Venue owners can circumvent the rule by making all their restrooms unisex.
An Infallible Auto Choice
I received this from Volkswagen today:
