Ivory Terminal

This year, I gave in and got a Blu Ray player to complement my first TV, and other than the hilarious-if -not-waiting boot up times (JVM!) everything has been working perfectly. The discs look great, they are no more expensive to rent than DVD’s, etc.

All was well until I actually splurged and bought a disc. I decided to grad the Blu Ray version of HBO’s “Generation Kill”. An excellent derivative of the book, and the latest work by several people associated with “The Wire”, which I consider to be the greatest television show of all time with nothing in second place. I was willing to support the series in its own right, but I hoped that by purchasing it might somehow help “The Wire” to get to Blu Ray.

So, with a few friends over, after waiting for my Sharp BD-HP22U player to book up, we inserted the first disc and… Nothing. The player refused to do anything, showing a dead black screen. When I tried to access the menu I got nothing, and when I attempted to advance the scene, the player showed that it was already on scene 4 of 81 and would not move.

I am not entirely sure who is at fault, the Blu Ray consortium, Sharp, or HBO, but it hardly matters. In front of an audience of four, I think I accidentally sold three Apple TVs when we decided to watch a movie on that instead. Sharp certainly did not sell any BD players that night.

I am now a few weeks into waiting for answer from Sharp about what is going on, and getting increasingly aggravated at the unhelpful responses. At this point, every time I insert a disc, I wonder if it will work, not something that one should be thinking about a high-end product. To save myself from an unsuccessful trip to the video store, I have been getting HD movies on the Apple TV whenever possible, which actually ends up being slightly cheaper due to some weird tax/fee from Blockbuster.

I have not yet decided what to do with the player if I have more problems, but I am seriously starting to doubt the future of Blu Ray. The picture and sound are great, but I honestly do not feel that my experience is lesser when watching a good movie on the Apple TV or a DVD. I hope they get it together…

I have now gone three weeks without the visual voicemail “feature” on my iPhone working.  AT&T cannot tell me why, and the Apple team is as usual clueless. 

Being without visual voicemail alerted me to a couple of things to add to the growing complaints about the iPhone’s lack of security, such as the fact that an iPhone comes set up without a voicemail password.  I never had to think about this issue until I found that my visual voicemail had stopped working.  Like my other AT&T phone, a venerable Blackberry, I began to dial “1” to get my voicemail.  However, with the iPhone, there was no password set up as a default.  Thankfully, I have one set up now, but for all of you other iPhone owners out there, your voicemail box is just a single caller-ID spoof away from the rest of the world, no 10,000 attempts necessary.

I like my iPhone so much, and could not imagine switching full-time to another device after two years of seeing how good things can get, but it seems like at least in the US, the combination of Apple and AT&T cannot quite get things done.  I do not imagine for a second that the incompetents at any of the other three national carriers could do half as well, but it is disappointing to see at least one supposedly current  feature (3G, visual voicemail, tethering, etc) always on the wrong side of the horizon.

If Visual voicemail is down much longer, I am going to change my iPhone plan to a Blackberry one and at least have the access to the great e-mail options when I switch my SIM out.

                With the recent attention on the economy, it is difficult to go more than a couple of days without seeing articles giving tips to job seekers.  My favorite articles are always the ones with tips from recruiters talking about their pet peeves, like this one found on the front page of Yahoo! today (I consider Yahoo!’s front page to be a general barometer of what the “average” Internet user cares about).  After spending more time than I would have liked over a lifetime dealing with HR as both a candidate and as someone attempting to hire, I think it is high time that we start seeing some articles about how to make the process better from within.  Here are some of my suggestions:

1.  Stop lying about open positions:  In an attempt to prevent sub-optimal hiring from within (a valid concern), many firms have instituted policies that require openings to be advertised prior to promoting or moving an internal candidate.  This practice has so many problems that it deserves its own list:

a.  This practice floods the market with bogus job listings.  “Entry programmer, salary $12/hr.  Would prefer Ph.D. in Anthropology, fluency in dead languages, and ability to carry up to 250lbs.  Must provide own transportation and computer”.

b.  The process wastes everyone’s time.  The hiring manager wants a person right now, and knows who it is.  An interview process can take weeks.  The time of interviewees is also wasted.

c.  The practice makes it more difficult to be promoted from within, which is a huge problem for employees in an economy where they are not getting significant raises or bonuses otherwise.

2.  Recognize job hunters who are and are not fishing with dynamite:  After returning to school and looking for an internship for the summer, I applied for four positions after doing a ton of research.  One was a position at a huge company that several of my peers applied for, and the others were positions at small or unconventional companies that were not even specifically looking for interns.  Because I did my homework, knew about the companies, and knew that I could fill true gaps in their workflows, I was able to physically interview for all four positions.   After meeting them, thanking them, and being told that I would be updated on their hiring process, I only received further uninitiated contact from the firms where I was given an offer.  I view the remaining firms as unorganized and unprofessional not because I was not chosen as the best candidate, but because a verbal agreement was broken by their HR representatives who inconvenienced me by not letting me know that they found a better fit.

Many of my peers applied for dozens or even hundreds of positions, and were hardly able to keep track of them.  Admittedly, this is a turn off described in almost every article, but the important difference is that many of the most qualified candidates do not attempt this type of application.  I feel that if you take the time to apply for a position that you are qualified for (and there cannot be that many), then it is the responsibility of the searching firm to acknowledge your application.  A non-response should only be used as a clear indication that you are not qualified for a position.  This practice could discourage candidates from fishing with dynamite.

3.  Recognize that job applications are time-sensitive:  In one case, I applied for a position, and received a call close to a year later from a hiring manager who was then upset that I was no longer interested in the position.  Qualified candidates are not applying for positions for fun, and there needs to be a relatively short statute of limitations for contact.  Once I left the corporate world for school, I received calls asking if I was looking for full-time work because I was no longer listed at my old company.  Ironically, this was well after I had begun looking for an internship.

4.  People that left a promising career to go to a full-time competitive graduate program likely did not get laid-off:  I am asked if I was laid-off at almost every interview.  Many people do not seem to understand the 9-12 month process of applying to a physical graduate program.  I cannot help but blame the uncompetitive for-profit online degrees for cheapening my academic pursuit.  If you are a recruiter, take five minutes to browse the website of the graduate school on an application.  This can tell you a lot very quickly.

  5.  You are not a detective:  Until you catch a candidate being dishonest, drop the ridiculous attitude.  Odds are, you are not going to break someone talented at lying to you, and you are guaranteed to turn off genuine candidates.  The ones in the middle that are bad at lying will reveal themselves long before the end of the hiring process, so the combative demeanor is not needed.  More than once, I have had to ask HR screeners if I am wasting my time applying based on their attitude when questioning me.  Based on my experience, lying employees will reveal themselves.  When in doubt, give them a simple computer skills test, regardless of the position.  I have been asked extensively about computer skills in almost every interview, regardless of the position.  I have only been on one interview where I was asked to demonstrate them.

 I am not an experienced television viewer. I got my first “very large computer monitor” in 2009. Being an audio freak, I attached my panel to a fairly high-end audio system. Watching the occasional program, I have noticed that many of the commercials omit a very high pitch tone. Thinking that I was just trying to find information in noise, I wrote the frequency off as an artifact of the compression used to make commercials sound louder than the regular programming.

This evening, when I was watching some programming with a couple of friends, I found myself bothered by the frequency, thinking that I had some equipment malfunctioning when the frequency first appeared. No one else seemed to hear any other noise, but I found the signal to be more perceptible than normal.

I decided to take a couple of minutes and use my DAW to compress a couple of signals until they sounded like television commercials to see if I could replicate the results, and I came up empty toned. I created some of the most obnoxious soundscapes in the world and still did not come up with any sustained high frequency tones.

Unable to create the tones as artifacts, I let my paranoia run wild. I am curious if the high frequency tones are used for devices like Nielson boxes to communicate whether or not commercials are being watched. Obviously, there is big money invested in television advertising, and the model will be turned on its head if DVRs are truly impacting television viewing. Months ago, I heard someone talking about Nielson Soundscan, and I am curious is this technology is also being used to measure viewership of some commercials. Coupled with Nielson’s ability to track advanced demographics, a time-coded signal over commercials would give market researchers an amazing amount of information, which could be used to valuate commercial time in the digital world.

Television advertising is still functioning as an old-world industry, and there are many people with a lot to lose if it turns out that quantitative measures show that advertising is ignored or ineffective. With the demographic information and a time code, the data could show who watches which commercials on which shows. If it turns out that desired demographics are tuning out commercials, rates could plummet even though general viewership is good. My worry for the advertising industry is that it will turn out that the demos targeted for advertising ignore the commercials, especially when they embrace DVR technology (for which adoption would likely rise with income). Lower rates would lead to even crappier programming, and a revenue loss that would likely lead to an increasingly hostile stance towards technology and the Internet (which is often blamed for the decline of old-world media). Regardless of why my commercials sound like garbage, advanced tracking will eventually come to pass, likely leading to some serious rate adjustments.

I sure wish there was a way to short FB right now.  It seems to me like they are already on the decline.  Unless DST got a glimpse of a totally new platform to be offered in the future, the valuation and the size of the position seems way out there.  

Facebook is very likely going to have to start aggressively slinging customer information if they expect to keep their valuation so high.  As far as my own bias, my life without facebook is just fine.  It was odd for a couple of weeks as I missed a few invitations sent via the platform, but everyone learned quickly and I now have no need or desire to be connected to the service.

I am still surprised by the slow rate of twitter adoption among my peer group, as it seems like a natural choice because of phone integration.  

Anyway, congratulations facebook, now get moving on that IPO so I can short…

In a Threat Level post, Wired mentions a new media campaign and the associated backlash.  

This just seems like history repeating itself especially with the exposure of a new generation to Harvey Milk after the recent film.  Has anyone else noticed the uncanny resemblance between Anita Bryant and Sarah Palin?

Lately I have been involved in a lot of talks about encryption.  As laptops become more important, and people are literally storing their digital lives on them, some level of encryption is a good idea to protect data in the event of theft.

Most of the time when encryption comes up, breaches are the first thing mentioned.  ”I heard that by freezing the RAM you can take data off of a sleeping computer”, etc.  Most of these claims are likely true, but like anything else, data protection is a continuum.  For the purpose of this discussion, we will compare encryption to cars.  Triple AES-768 will be an Abrams Battle Tank (there is harder out there, but it is not going to move around much), and a system password will be a convertible.  An Abrams and a convertible both have measures to protect the interior of a vehicle.  Even though an Abrams is comparatively impenetrable, you see a lot more convertibles on the road.  Why is this when the smaller car does not do nearly as good of a job at protecting items in it?  To begin, an Abrams costs millions of dollars, weighs 70 tons, and is not normally accessible to the public.  To a novice computer user, the AES-standard is an impossible concept.  It is difficult to implement, requires a great deal of specialized knowledge, and is slow and bulky.  Since our hypothetical user would at least like some protection from unexpected bad weather, a convertible is in order.  It is cheap to run, accessible, and sporty.

You never hear people, even the Phil & Ted stroller-pushing new moms, mention that they want an A1 Battle Tank.  Many try with an Escalade or the like, but once again, there is a continuum.  They do not want the tank because they understand the costs and limitations of a 70-ton treaded vehicle (not to mention tearing up the subdivision).  They understand that depleted-uranium armor is not needed to get from home to day care and back.  

However, when we transfer the analogy back to the digital world, this understanding goes away.  Everyone all of a sudden wants the most hardened security in the world, regardless of their status as a target or their activities.  I manage to offend many people when I mention that the weakest link in any modern encryption platform is the user.  They may get tired of slow read times and turn off disk encryption, they may use the same key for encryption or computer protection as they use to log into Gmail.  They may write the key on a post it and leave it on their monitor, or tell a friend their password or e-mail it to themselves in case they forget.  Even if they do not do these things, passwords are incredibly uncreative, and the concept of a passphrase is not yet mainstream.  Knowing full well that most users will do things like this, it is hardly worth debating the relative merits and flaws of various encryption algorithms and standards.  Users also need to understand their status as a target.  Someone must be highly motivated to even attempt to guess a password, yet alone break disk encryption.  If they are sufficiently motivated, any casual protection standards will not be a significant deterrent, and it is always a good idea to have a backup plan if you lose your data or if someone else gets it.  Things like identity theft are a huge pain, but armoring yourself so heavily that you stand out from the pack will honestly just make people curious.  Like the tank, there is no point having the armor unless you are willing to go through the training to operate it, and spend a great deal of time with maintenance.  An Abrams with the keys left on a panel marked “car keys” in the garage is an awfully expensive front.

My personal data is protected to the highest standards that I can understand and maintain, and I am willing to accept performance slowdowns to compensate.  However, beyond a certain point, my data protection priority shifts from protection from theft to protection from loss.  If a dedicated team decides to devote tremendous resources, they will likely be able to obtain portions of my data.  However, it would take an incredible feat to remove my data in a way that I too would lose it.  Part of my redundancy involves offsite storage transfered online, and it is ironic that in choosing this redundancy, I expose my files to the wild land of the Internet.  Even if you hide yourself in an impenetrable cocoon, you then have to worry about redundancy, and if you are paranoid enough, multiple site redundancy.  At some point, one must bow to reason and realize that if someone wants your data badly enough, they will be able to obtain it, and the harder your security, the more likely it is that you will be the link in the chain that gives.  A tank is not necessary to protect your family photos, just make sure you have your top up when you go out in bad weather…

If you are worried about your protection standards, just make a better password, and read up about data protection.  As you understand a little more, you can switch to some home directory or full-disk options, and fall down the spiral of paranoia from there.  

Until recently, the mobile phone has been a quiet place in the world of telemarketing. As someone that uses mobile phones for all of my lines, I have greatly appreciated the lack of interruption. Considering that my lifetime score to positively responding to an unsolicited telemarketing call is zero, this has been a great relationship for both parties. Thanks to laws, lack of phonebooks, opt-outs, and so on, most of the calls that I receive are wanted, or at least not out of place.

Now that mobile phones are not only commonplace but even replacing landlines for mainstream consumers, the telemarketers must have needed a profit-saving change.

My blissful silence was halted by an e-mail this afternoon from GE’s capital arm announcing that the terms to my service were changing:

“You agree that GE Money Bank and any other owner or servicer of your account may contact you about your account using any contact information or cell phone numbers you provide (whether previously provided or provided in the future).

You expressly agree to the use of any automatic telephone dialing system and/or artificial or prerecorded voice when contacting you, even if you are charged for the call under your phone plan.

The above provision will become part of your account agreement if you consent to the provision by (i) using your account more than 15 days after this notice is delivered to you or (ii) keeping your account open after March 15, 2009. If you do either of these things, we will conclude that you have consented to being contacted on your cell phone in this way. If you do not want to be contacted on your cell phone in this way, you may call us at ***-***-**** at any time.”

I am left with two choices: Close my account ASAP, or agree to be bothered by all kinds of robot nonsense not stopped by conventional preventions because I have explicitly agreed to the contact.

Normally, I would instantly send them packing, but after reading an article on Wired.com about similar changes to American Express terms (discussing the security issue with the change which I did not even consider), I can only assume this change will quickly spread over the whole credit card community. Although this is an exceedingly aggravating change of terms, I am not sure that I am willing to give up credit cards as a whole. I have already called the opt-out number I was given, and opted out my mobile phone. Based on the wording of the message above, I will be interested to see if my account is closed.

I am not looking forward to having similar terms added to all kinds of phone-based (and unrelated) services. Everyone has been asking how Twitter and Facebook and the like are going to make money, and I am afraid that this is part of the answer.

My top reasons why Facebook is about to get paved over by easy-to-start more trendy competitors:

1.   The marginal facebook user knows less and less about computers. Once a social network expands beyond the college kids and the nerds this will always be true.  The people that originally made up the group to not necessarily want their every move broadcast to the linked world.  The feature allowing users to view albums of non-friends that friends are in was the end.

2.   Once social networks go public (shareholder public), they are required to (quickly) monetize a model with a very short halflife, made up of consumers who will revolt if you charge them a cent for the service.  Setting up the next twitter might take a couple of days and a couple of servers.  There are no barriers to entry and few paths to monetization.  This point is often expanded upon on this site when recommending that niche-market companies avoid growth-models that require them to abandon their enthusiast customer-base.

3.   The networking effect is not as pronounced as the economists think it is.  Having an extra 30 million users does not make the service more valuable to the people using social networks as semi-walled gardens, in fact, it makes it less so.  

4.  Facebook is making all of the same mistakes as myspace:

a.  Opening the doors to everyone (including 419 script-kiddies).  Hacked account-holders often do not come back, and requests for Western Union wires* piss off everyone. 

b.  Allowing increased customization (profiles are starting to look like old geocities flash sites and myspace pages [not flattering]). 

c.  Encouraging (paid and annoying) app development in an environment where everyone only wants to hear “free” or “easy”. 

d.  Allowing ever more intrusive ads to generate revenue, which turns off the desirable users.

e.  Datamining as a last resort to generate revenue, at which point the sophisticated users find the next social network where we are not getting annoyed by promoters.

The past few years, at many different venues, I have driven a car to a parking lot mostly populated by the same cars that arrive approximately the same time each day. The same group of people then populate one or more buildings.

What I find interesting is that those people park in vastly different locations every day, but end up in the identical workstation/office/class seat. In a conventional office, the interior seating is obviously regulated, but in a classroom, there are often no assigned seats.

Each day, in offices or classrooms, the population parks in a radically different fashion, and then heads to their destination to sit in what is likely the same place every day, mandated or not. It appears that many park in the closest available parking space, the “efficient” space. Because of that conventional behavior, I am curious why the same people do not find the “efficient” seat.

The only difference I have found is in graduate classes in economics, where after daily lectures about efficiency, the students occasionally switch seating arrangements.  Everyone notices this, and even comments on how out of the ordinary it is, supporting that a constant seating arrangement is almost assumed by our culture.

My hypothesis would be that cars are impersonal, and each person feels anonymous in the parking lot, comfortably taking the closest spot. However, in the public classroom environment, where anonymity is unavailable, a social order is unconsciously created.

Given a large budget, experimental group, and lack of more important research, it would be interesting to create a few twenty person classes, give everyone a car, and release them from a location different from the classroom in a random order. I would assume that the group would park differently every day, and sit in similar locations. Upgrading to a controlled release, where each group member was allowed to enter the parking lot in the same order every day, I predict the cars would tighten up.

The fun would begin with a second group, which would have cars with a facial photograph on the hood, each door, and the trunk. I would hope to see that a random order release would result in a parking lot like the unmarked controlled release, and the controlled release would result in a parking pattern as consistent as the classroom pattern.

The point? Something about how anonymity leads to a looser structure. This is why I did not specialize in psychology. I just wish I could park in the same parking lot (let alone parking space) going to the same place with the same people each day. There is nothing resembling a capacity problem. I would wrap my car if it would take care of it…