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But how good a phone will it be?

June 11, 2008 in News, problems | 7 comments

I’ve seen a waterfall of iPhone 3g coverage, but nobody yet has answered the question that actually matters most to a lot of people: How good a phone is it? The original was adequate as a phone, but that’s it. Basically it was very average as a phone. Looked great, worked okay.

My guess is that one reason was the metal back. The celluar signal hasn’t been made that isn’t hurt by metal surronding the antenna. The new phone has plastic in the back. Much better idea, signal-wise.

Be interesting to see how it goes.

Whether report

June 11, 2008 in News, problems | 3 comments

Says here at Weather.com,

Severe Thunderstorm Warning
SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TAUNTON MA 1157 PM EDT TUE JUN 10 2008
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN TAUNTON HAS ISSUED A
* SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING FOR… EXTREME EAST CENTRAL WORCESTER COUNTY IN CENTRAL MASSACHUSETTS… WESTERN ESSEX COUNTY IN EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS… THIS INCLUDES THE CITY OF LAWRENCE… EASTERN MIDDLESEX COUNTY IN EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS… THIS INCLUDES THE CITIES OF…WALTHAM…NEWTON… LOWELL… FRAMINGHAM… NORTH CENTRAL NORFOLK COUNTY IN EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS… EXTREME SOUTHEASTERN HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY IN SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE…
* UNTIL 1230 AM EDT
* AT 1152 PM EDT…NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED A LINE OF SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING PENNY SIZE HAIL…AND DAMAGING WINDS IN EXCESS OF 60 MPH. THESE STORMS WERE LOCATED ALONG A LINE EXTENDING FROM TYNGSBORO TO ASHLAND…OR ALONG A LINE EXTENDING FROM LOWELL TO FRAMINGHAM…AND MOVING EAST AT 55 MPH.

… with this picture:

It’s 1212am now, and the breeze just turned into a wind. Lightning in the distance. Ominous sounds.

… And now it’s 1231 and nothing has happened. The story at Weather Underground is very different:

I like the little arrows, which are much more revealing than the moving-blob motion of the Weather.com map. It also contradicts the warning, with motion to the east-northeast rather than the east.

Anyway, it’s still hot as hell here. Even late at night. Relief was in sight, then… gone.

Behind the ate ball

June 10, 2008 in problems, Travel | 5 comments

Sooner or later we all have to face the proctologist. My turn is tomorrow. So I’m fasting, sort of. In preparation. Drinking nothing but clear fluids, chased this evening with half a gallon of magnesium citrate. That’s the cocktail I’m having right now at a Starbucks. On ice. Fun.

It’s fairly routine stuff. By coincidence my lower digestive performance has been sub-par since last Wednesday evening, when I got back from Amsterdam. In that time I’ve eaten so little, and so carefully, that I’m sure I’ve knocked off seven pounds already. At least that part’s good.

White and Blue Land

June 8, 2008 in Art, Fun, Geology, Photography, Places, problems, Science, Travel | 6 comments

You fly enough and they bump you up to Business Class whether you want it or not. That’s how United Airlines works, and for most passengers that’s not a bad thing. In my case I often don’t want it because it means giving up a window seat I’ve carefully chosen back in what we used to call Coach.

But that’s what happened last Wednesday, when I flew from Amsterdam to Chicago. I got bumped to an aisle seat in the Business Section. Worse, nearly everybody with a window seat closed their shades. For viewing we might as well have been in the cargo hold.

The “air show” system that displays flight progress on a map was also down, although a couple times I was able to tell where I was with my GPS, which (amazingly) was able to pick up the 4+ satellites required to to quadrangulate our location 38,000 feet over the Earth.

So I knew when we got to Greenland — my favorite place to shoot from on high . I asked my seatmate, who had the window, if she’d mind if I took some pictures of the land below. She said okay, we opened her shade, and that’s how I got these shots here.

The conditions were less than ideal. It’s never good to shoot out the sunny side of a plane in any case, because the direct light illuminates all the scratches, debris depositions and other imperfections in the windows, which are optically awful to begin with. This window was average or worse in those respects, and on this day Greenland was also hazy, with lots of clouds amidst the mountains. Still, I got some decent shots — enough, at least, to slake my thirst for geographic and geological spectacle and knowledge-building.

I took more shots a bit later, after we crossed the white expanse of Greenland’s middle (at just above the 63rd parallel, which is just 3 degrees south of the Arctic Circle), but need to work instead. Meanwhile, if any Flickr freaks want to help me name some of the mountains, glaciers and other features I shot in that series (or any of the others), please do. I found a few details on Google Earth and filled them in.

The caption for the above reads,

The water body is a glacial bay called Norrivig. Behind it is an island in the midst of which is “Azimuthbjerg” lat=63.4333333, lon=-41.6666667. Here is NotSoGreen on the same area, which also points to this Jason Sloan photo on Flickr. This is all in the Tunu or East Greenland, one of four large Greenland counties, or administrative districts. East Greenland is known natively as Ostgrönland. The glacier or gletcher emptying into Norrivig Bay is Thrym. The mouintain beyond is Hvidbjørn Bjerg, at
N 63° 31′ 0” W 41° 49′ 0”, or 63.51667 / -41.81667, with GeoNameId : 3423410.

Hope that helps the curious find out more.

If you’re interested in Greenland — and I would highly recommend it, because it’s not only beautiful but melting — check out NotSoGreen. Wonderful service.

With Google we’ll get Bingo

June 6, 2008 in News, problems | Permalink

Twitter and Amazon are both down right now.

There’s gotta be a better way

June 1, 2008 in problems | 11 comments

In the long run paying for wi-fi in your hotel will be like paying to use the toilet or the heater. You won’t. Meanwhile, it would be nice if it were easy, cheap, good, or at least two out of those three.

Right now I’m 0-for-3 at my hotel in Amsterdamn. I just had to call for tech support. The front desk is no help. They punt it to Swisscom, the provider, to which I paid ¤22 ($34.23) for 24 hours, starting this afternoon. When I came back from a sojourn away from the hotel, Swisscom wanted a login and password, and told me the front desk would have it. The desk didn’t, so they got me Swisscom, which looked up my credit card payment and got me a login/pw that the service supposedly gave me on the website the first time around, but I missed it.

Anyway, we’re back up. With a download speed of 384Kbps and an upload speed is 179kbps, I haven’t paid more for less since the worst days of dial-up.

How to make customers hate you

June 1, 2008 in Places, problems | 5 comments

So my main credit card, a United Mileage Plus one, issued by Chase, got rejected on my last attempted purchase, just before I got on a plane at Logan headed for Frankfurt, where I am now, between flights.

Now here I sit, paying $.18 per minute to T-Mobile to “roam” on their system, to which I pay ~$30/month already for wi-fi access, trying to use the website to see what’s up with the card.

I type in my login and password, then get

  404: File Not Found. Could not find file

I try again and get,

  Your User ID is Locked
  You’ve exceeded the maximum number of logon attempts allowed. As a result, we’ve disabled your User ID and Password to protect your confidential financial information. Please click “Unlock User ID” to unlock your User ID and create a new Password. (Error Code AA398).

I’m not going to try. I know my old password. I probably won’t remember the new one.

Grrr.

Clues vs. Trains, cont’d

May 31, 2008 in Business, problems, VRM | 3 comments

For some reason this blog has failed to post the comment that I just wrote in response to Simon Edhouse‘s latest comment in response to the Clues vs. Trains post. It’s within a good dialog that involves Simon’s post here, which makes some subtle but important points about the degree to which the client-server nature of commercial activity on the Web contributes to normative acceptance of the many silos there. I’m trying to convince Simon that we’re on his side in opposition to that. Anyway, here’s what I just tried to post:

  Simon,
  We need the invention that mothers the necessity. One “bite” I hope will hold is the relbutton on iPhones and other mobile devices, giving listeners a way to interact with, and pay for, otherwise free online radio streams and podcasts. I haven’t said too much publicly about this yet because we have a lot of details to work out. But on the “sell” side we already have the interest of (and participation by) Forces That Be in public broadcasting, just for starters.
  Q: “It’s going to need vendor buy-in to actually work?”
  Not at first. But we have a data type escrowed on the buyer’s side called MLOTT, for Money Left On The Table. That should help.
  Q: “You can’t shame them into action”
  Not the plan.
  Q: “or count on enlightening them”
  Not the plan either. Some of “them” are among “us” to begin with anyway.
  Q: Vendors are not going to volunteer to be ‘managed’
  Carrot before stick. It has to be attractive. That’s the plan.
  Q: “… the name of the meme itself, almost jinxes it, for non-adoption by traditional product/service suppliers in the value-chain.”
  It’s a big world. There are lots of vendors, some more traditional than others. We don’t need to boil the ocean here. We just need to get a few lagoons heated up first. That’s why starting with public media will help.

By the way, after I failed to post that on this blog, I tried posting a comment on Simon’s blog, which is on Blogger. There I was given three choices for identifying myself: Google/Blogger, OpenID and URL. Sxipper, which is normally helpful, got in the way of the first and wouldn’t let me get it to work. I forgot all of my OpenID IDs, and Blogger told me I had “illegal characters” in http://doc.searls.com.

I’ll tell ya, if all we ever do with VRM is eliminate that kind of gauntlet, I’ll be happy. Oh, by the way, I don’t think any current identity system by itself will cut it — worthy as each may be. When an individual shows up at a site, or otherwise interacts with an entity or a service in the networked world (and not just on the Web), we need to know if a relationship is already in place, and then skip consciousness-required-identification (hell, let’s call that CRI) of ourselves. And no vendor alone is going to give that to us. We need to make the user the point of integration and origination. We have to make the individual the driver, and not just the center of vendor-side “attention” or whatever. Code has to be present on our side that says to the other side that a relationship already exists, or could exist (on our terms and not just theirs), and then let computation take care of the rest.

Blogging 4 Bux, cont’d

May 20, 2008 in Blogging, Places, problems | 2 comments

Dave points to Mark Evans’ post on the Blogging for Bux biz — which produces about as much income as a paper route. But I dunno, because I’ve never had advertising on my blog and never would.

Dave says “professional blogging” is oxymoronic. “It’s like calling someone a professional amateur.” Mark thinks it’s the beginning of the end of the field anyway.

I’m not so sure, but in any case I’ve never been fond of it. Early on I didn’t begrudge good bloggers picking up a few extra bucks by carrying advertising, since good bloggers wouldn’t be corrupted by the practice. That is, they weren’t being “pro bloggers”, just bloggers whose blogs had some ads. But in the last year I’ve seen a lot more real corruption. Here’s Mark:

  I’m starting to think that running a mass-consumption blog doesn’t lend itself to deep, insight writing unless you’re a Robert Cringely. Blogs that attract a lot of traffic are pumping out a lot of posts so they can appeal to a broad audience. And these posts – regardless of the subject – tend to be content snacks as opposed to be meals.

I wrote about the subject a couple times recently, in Blogging & Flogging and NY Times covers blogorrhea sufferers. Key point from the former:

  …blogging only to make money is actually flogging. So is jumping onto a topic only to goose it up on TechMeme. So is not being original.

My dream here is that blogging survive the flogging craze. But I’m not holding my breath.

An OLPC pre-mortem? Hope not.

May 14, 2008 in Blogroll, News, problems | 5 comments

Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi is a long and wrenching piece about the project by Ivan Krstic. Just one man’s take, but Ivan’s been a strong advocate for the OLPC’s highest purposes. Performer too.

Some pushback from Taran Rampersad. Also this from Tom Hoffman. (And privately from some people.)

For what it’s worth, I’ve loved the ambitions of the OLPC program from the beginning, even if I thought they were crazy to start in 5th gear by rolling a zillion laptops out to 3rd world countries, too many of which are run by dictatorships that could be bought by actual vendors.

Still. Ordinary laptops have been stale for a long time.

Even if they crater, they’ve blazed a worthy trail along the way.

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