Saturday, 6 October 2007 by marstinson.

Michael Kanellos’ recent article about finally getting a cell phone promted me to stop and think for a moment about my own cell phone. I was not what you might call an “early adopter” of the technology. In fact, for many of Michael’s reasons, I actively resisted getting one. But I finally gave in several years ago for a very simple reason - I needed one at the time. As a sideline to my regular job, I work as an independent contractor and need to be available to my clients when they have problems. Since that might happen at any time, a mobile phone is something of a necessity.

Today, however, it’s another story. I find that the people who need to call me are generally able to do so either at my home number or at work and my cell phone has become less of a necessity and more of a convenience. While I do occasionally receive calls at odd hours and in odd places, I think most of my cell phone calls happen because that’s the number in the Rolodex or contact listand not because it’s the only number where I can be reached.

In fact, the more that I think about it, the more I am aware that the vast majority of the calls into my cell phone these days are from friends and family who could just as easily reach me on my home phone. So why do I continue to fork out for it? After all, as Michael pointed out, I’m spending well over $1000 per year (post-tax; it’s closer to $2000 in pre-tax dollars) for it. I think the short answer is two-fold.

First, I do use it for business and clients do need to reach me on a moment’s notice. That’s just the way it is and I don’t see it changing anytime in the near future. Granted, it’s only a couple of calls per week, but still…

Second, there is a lot of long-distance to and from my kids that would probably bankrupt me if I had to see it on a regular long-distance bill. In fact, the last time that I even had a long-distance bill was about the time that I got my first cell phone. So while the cell itself is probably a convenience, the savings on my long-distance (even at a couple of cents per minute) is substantial. Yep, those “free” cell-to-cell minutes really do work.

Where I am still a seriously late adopter is on the kind of cell phone. For example, I have absolutely no intention of jumping on the iPhone bandwagon anytime in the forseeable future. It doesn’t do anything that my PDA doesn’t do except video (which I don’t do, anyway) and telephony. And while my cheap-o Samsung phone won’t win any beauty contests, it’s certainly a more reliable phone that what I’m seeing in the product reviews for the iPhone. And Michael isn’t the only one with tuber-like fingers, so the new slim phones aren’t very high on my radar, either.

Posted in Communication, Whatever | No Comments »

Sunday, 9 September 2007 by marstinson.

Well, it’s finally official (and I don’t mean my non-abandonment of this blog). Fred Dalton Thompson finally stopped pussy-footing around and decided to officially run for President. Go get ‘em, Fred.

Personally, I don’t know enough about Fred to have much of an informed opinion one way or the other. I like his Arthur Branch character on “Law and Order” and I suspect that a good deal of the character’s believability comes from Fred, but I also keep in mind that what I’m seeing on TV isn’t Fred. It’s Fred’s interpretation of what the writers and directors have put in front of him.

The media hype seems to be trying to position Fred as being the next Reagan. Aside from both men having had modest success in Hollywood and both seeing themselves as being political conservatives, I don’t see much commonality. But what I do appreciate about Fred is that he really seems to “get” the whole idea of federalism. And that seems to be at the root of many of his more “controversial” stands. I don’t have an inside source, a psychic link or anything, so what follows is me spouting off on the issue. If we’re on the same sheet of music, great. If we’re not, I hope we get there some day.

One of the great fallacies that seems to come out of our public classrooms today is that states are somehow offspring of the national government. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The national government is the offspring of the original 13 states. Consider, for example, the Declaration of Independence (the actual declaration part - the rest is mostly propaganda for the masses with some nice ideas thrown in for spice).

That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.[emphasis mine]

Note the constant usage of the plural. After Britain’s agreement that the colonies were no longer subjects of the Crown, we have thirteen independent countries sitting on the Atlantic seaboard, not one. They are “states” only in the sense of being political entities, not in the sense of being subordinate units of a larger entity. This is probably where the confusion sets in: the same word is being used to mean two different things. These countries recognized that their common interests far outweighed their differences and that it would be in their best interest to form a political union of some sort rather than having to face the world on their own. Not that there weren’t a few hitches along the way. There was that argument between Connecticut and Pennsylvania over some land in what is now Ohio that had some folks talking war (which would have been really interesting for people in New York). It was eventually worked out, but the idea soon caught on that a functioning national government of some sort was required.

So, between May and September 1787, these thirteen countries managed to hammer out a framework for a national government that was more or less palatable to all of them and, following some really heated arguments over just how palatable, the Constitution was eventually ratified. In order to create that national government, the thirteen countries had to give up some of the political powers they had won through the Revolutionary War. The powers that those thirteen countries gave to the national government alone (called “delegated powers” for all you budding political scientists out there) were those powers that the framers believed were necessary for the national government to deal with national problems and issues. The remaining powers (called “reserved powers”), the thirteen countries (OK, “states” might be appropriate at this point) kept for themselves.

The idea was that the national government should deal with national problems and the states would deal with everything else. And that’s how it went, at least until someone started mucking around with the idea. Who did it, what they did, when they did it and why they did it is the stuff of which doctoral disserations are made. And since this isn’t one of those, we’ll just have to settle for the fact that it happened. “What happened?”, you might well ask. The answer is simple enough: somewhere along the line, someone got the idea that almost every problem was a national problem and the states, instead of being somewhat equal partners in this federal venture, were relegated to the position of being employees. Not even mid- or lower-management in a lot of cases.

I understand the rationale of the people who like this situtation. First, it provides at least a modicum of consistency throughout the country. This would generally be considered a “good thing” by those who like consistency; not so good from the individualistic side. Second, you only have to convince 270 people (218 Representatives, 51 Senators and 1 President) to solve a problem. That’s about twice what you would have to convince in Texas since our state government is significantly smaller, but you’d have to repeat the process for every state in order to achieve consistency. I guess from a more cynical standpoint, it’s cheaper to bribe (OK, “influence”) 270 people than a few thousand.

But you solve the problem at the expense of the liberties that are maintained by the constant bickering of the states and the national government. See, the Founding Fathers had the right idea. If you want to preserve liberties from the encroachments of a powerful government, you divide the power to abridge those liberties among competing groups. Since the groups compete, they’ll seldom agree and even then it will only be on important things (which is what you want in the first place).

So, Fred, I hope you’re remembering the second question: is it the national government’s problem? For those who may have missed it, the first question would have been “is it a problem in the first place?” If the answer is “no” to either question, that’s why they invented the veto. Go get ‘em!

Posted in News and Politics, History, Whatever | No Comments »

Friday, 19 January 2007 by marstinson.

As if it weren’t bad enough to be flooding my inboxes, now they’re trying to flood my blog-space. 60-odd comments in the past couple of days, each generating an email to me. I had figured that something like this might happen, which was why I turned on comment moderation. It’s not that I particulaly mind comments. If anyone wants to disagree with anything that I’ve posted here, they are more than welcome to do so. It’s supposedly a free country with a 1st Amendment, after all, but I would expect that a comment would at least be relevant rather than a plug for perky pecker pills.

I classify spammers as being slightly lower than pond scum, but blog-spammers have hit a new low - “lower’n whale shit on the bottom of the ocean” as a Marine DI used to say. So if you’re a spammer, you’ll have to post your crap manually and I still have to OK it before it will show up. Anyone else wanting to comment is still welcome to, but making life difficult for spammers is mean making yours slightly more difficult, too. Sorry about that, but it’s either that or be flooded with ads for online pharmacies.

Best advice? Don’t let spam pay. If a merchant spams you, refuse to do business with them. They’ll get the message eventually.

Posted in Whatever | No Comments »

Monday, 15 January 2007 by marstinson.

I was playing around with the Miranda instant messaging client (free download from sourceforge.net). It’s an interesting little utility because it works with several IM services (Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, ICQ, IRC, and Jabber). I haven’t really been into instant messaging for years, though I do use one occasionally. But a multi-protocol client seemed worth checking out, so I did.

My first impression was that it’s definitely plain. Absolutely no eye-candy. Since the version is still less than 1.0, I’m figuring that’s probably to be expected. But in any event, it’s always what’s under the hood that counts the most. First off, Miranda is everything it purports to be. It hooks into all of those services simultaneously, so it’s a kind of one-stop chat device. At least moderately cool, IMO.

As I said earlier, I haven’t really used IMs for years. But over the years, I’ve IM’d on almost all of those services. I was surprised to find that my Yahoo account was still active, even though I haven’t used it in years. And my AOL screen name was still active and working, even though I stopped using AOL more than eight years ago.

That’s a scary thought when you really stop to ponder it (which I did). How many services that you no longer use are still out there just waiting for you to log in again? How much of your personal information is still sitting on someone’s server just waiting for your friendly neighborhood hacker and you’d never know about it because you don’t use that service any more?

I don’t believe there is any legal requirement to do so, but shouldn’t a standard industry practice be to purge client information after a certain period of inactivity? I have no idea what a reasonable period might be, but it’s a sobering thought to know that an account that has been inactive for more than eight years was just sitting there waiting. I was fortunate that there was no major personal information associated with it because I had been very sparing in the information I provided (just an email address and my state and the email address died when I left AOL). But still, what if I HAD provided all of the information that AOL wanted? Scary.

Posted in Applications, Computers | No Comments »

Sunday, 31 December 2006 by marstinson.

Newsflash: Uproar in the blogosphere over Microsoft tactics.

Seems that the good folks at Redmond had an idea. What about sending Acer Ferrari laptops to some of the bloggers on The Hive? For those of you who might not know, The Hive is a web community more or less dedicated to talking about Microsoft products and technologies. Microsoft provides the servers, web access and some of the content and the community does the rest. Anyway, the selected bloggers can take the final version of Vista out for a test drive on some decent hardware and then tell the world what they think about it. Afterward, they can do whatever they want with the laptops: keep ‘em, hold a give-away contest, or send ‘em back. If you think of the cost in terms of a single 30-second spot during the Super Bowl, it’s negligible, and the target audience is the people who are most likely to want to know more about Vista anyway.

Sounds like a great marketing idea, doesn’t it? Microsoft is pretty confident that Vista is going to meet most of the hype, so they’re expecting that they will get good (or at least neutral) reviews. And for those few reviewers who might have major complaints, well, it’s something that Microsoft might be able to fix in SP1. After all, the general rule for a sizable chunk of the business environments is to not deploy a new Microsoft OS until SP1 is out. But, no! Sending laptops to bloggers sounds too much like bribery for some folks.

With a few caveats, I’m not one of them and I don’t see much of a problem. If there is a problem, it’s one of perception.

Bloggers are not journalists as we typically think of them. I do not mean to imply that they don’t report news because in many cases they do, nor do I believe that their opinions are not their opinions or are invalid simply because I might disagree. But journalists are supposed to operate within certain ethical boundaries. If they stray too far from those boundaries, they will find themselves looking for new employment, probably in a new career field. Some do stray, as evidenced by a few notable scandals over the past couple or three years, but the vast majority do not. Bloggers, however, are not bound by those ethics. Within certain legal considerations (copyright and libel, for example), they can write pretty much whatever they want about whoever or whatever they choose.

So what’s the big deal about sending out a few laptops? Perception, mostly. If a blogger who has received a laptop from Microsoft (these are $2000+ machines, by the way) writes a glowing review of Vista, was it because Vista is actually that good or because they got a freebie laptop out of the deal? How about if the blogger writes a glowing review of Vista on their own machine and with their own copy of the OS? That last is strictly hypothetical as Vista has not been released for public consumption yet. And how are you, the reader, supposed to be able to tell the difference unless the blogger tells you where he/she is coming from?

From Microsoft’s point of view, the issue is pretty simple. They want people to write about Vista. But Vista’s hardware requirements are pretty hefty if you want to get the full Vista experience. So to make sure that the reviewer gets the full experience, they are willing to provide the appropriate hardware along with the OS. If you go down and look at my comments on the Beta 2 build of Vista, you’ll note that I couldn’t get the Aero Glass effects because my laptop’s graphics card was not up to snuff. But I also told you where I got the OS and that it was a Beta release so you would know the basis of my comments. It seems to me that if Microsoft wants people to write good reviews of their new OS, then it would be in their best interest to make sure that the reviewer can get the full experience of the OS without forking out a wad of cash to upgrade their current system or buying a new one. Note that professional reviewers (like “PC World,” “PC Magazine,” “Comuter Shopper,” and the like) keep their test machines up to date so that they are able to evaluate the full potential of a piece of hardware or software. Bloggers probably don’t have the budget to be able to do that. So is it bribery or making sure that a reviewer can actually see what the OS can do?

And even looking at it in the worst possible light, is it really bribery? Although I’m sure there are some people out there who will switch to a new OS simply because their favorite magazine or blogger said it was way cool, most of us will switch to Vista for a few very concrete reasons: it does something that we want/need to do and can’t in our current OS, it will come preloaded on a new machine, or we’ll upgrade just for the sake of running the latest and greatest. Reviewers have virtually zero influence with people who are going to switch for the first two reasons and people who are going to switch for the third are going to do it anyway. The only things that a review can influence in that regard are whether the switch takes place sooner rather than later and, perhaps, the version that the consumer decides upon.

Microsoft, I’m sure, is hoping for “sooner” (first quarter earnings and all that), but “later” is still money in the bank. If my understanding of Microsoft’s licensing terms to manufacturers is correct, you won’t be able to buy a box with XP on it after January 2008, so “later” is not that much later. As for the version, anyone want to take bets on the sales of ”Ultimate” versus “Home Basic” and “Home Premium”? Speaking from the gaming perspective (which is probably the better reason for going with “Ultimate”), there is currently only one graphics card out there that is built for DirectX 10 (the GeForce 8800 from nVidia, though I’m sure that ATI won’t be too far behind) and zero games that can actually take advantage of it. Even “Halo 2,” which is being tailored specifically for Vista and is not supposed to run on XP, is sticking with DirectX 9 so that players will not have to fork out $500-$700 for a new graphics card to play it.

So let’s see… If people are going to switch OSs because they need or want some new functionality, a reviewer isn’t going have much of an impact on the decision; the OS either does what they want/need or it doesn’t. If people are going to buy a new computer that comes with the new OS, a reviewer isn’t going to have much of an impact on the decision because the computer manufacturers are going to make that decision for the consumer. So that only leaves those who are going to voluntarily switch OSs either through a clean install or an upgrade of their existing OS (assuming, of course, that their hardware can handle it). And the odds are very good that these folks are going to do it anyway.

Frankly, I don’t see a major problem here. This is not a case of “here’s a new car, now say something good about it and you can keep it.” This appears to me as a case of “here’s a new OS and some hardware that will let you see what it can do. Kick the tires, take it out for a spin, and tell us what you think about it. And you can do whatever you want with the hardware when you’re done.” As for the ethics of doing it, I still don’t see a problem. I cannot count the copies of software that I have received from various vendors using a “try it; you’ll like it” approach. So it’s not like this is some new tactic fresh from the “dirty tricks” department at Redmond. The only difference that I see is that in this case the vendor made sure that the hardware was up to spec.

Get a grip, people.

Posted in News and Politics, Vista | No Comments »

Thursday, 21 December 2006 by marstinson.

The guitar relearning proceeds apace. Neither Eddie Van Halen nor the kid down the block have anything to fear from me. I am so sick of “Yankee Doodle” and “Skip to My Lou” that I could just about puke, but everyone has to start somewhere. At any rate, I’ve been perusing the forums at several dedicated guitar-playing sites in the hope of picking up a few tips to help me play better and have noticed an alarming trend - kids can’t write.

 I’m not talking about the occasional misspelling or grammar mistake. I’m talking about entire sentences, sometimes paragraphs, where the only word spelled correctly is “I” and even that is often spelled “i”. Some of it is understandable and comes out of the desire to conserve keystrokes. It’s much faster and shorter to use “U R” instead of “you are,” for example. I could even understand using that style of spelling in a chat session where speed of reply is an issue or in an SMS message where message space is limited. But to do it on a public forum where you want others to understand and answer you? Give me a break!

So here are a few thoughts to keep in mind when you post on public forums. First off, the way that you write is the first impression that the reader has of you. Make it a good one. If what you have to say is that important, then you should take the time to say it properly. And if you can’t spell, use a spell checker before you post. There’s one built into your Google toolbar if you don’t feel like firing up a word processor and writing it up beforehand.

Along with that first impression comes the idea of what kind of language I’m going to need to use to answer your question in a way that you can understand. Do I tell you to click Start -> All Programs -> Games -> FreeCell? Or do I tell you something like “Move the mouse so that the arrow-thingy is in the lower left (left is the hand that makes an L when you hold out your thumb and first finger). Now put the arrow-thingy on the part that says “start” and push down one time on the mouse button under your pointer finger”? Or do I just ignore your question because you insult my intelligence and can’t possibly be serious if you write like that?

I’m not talking about people whose native language isn’t English. Those folks have more guts than me - I don’t even try to post in anything other than English in spite of being reasonably compentent in a couple of others. And I’m also not talking about people who intentionally misspell or use poor grammar for effect. There is a very noticable difference between someone who has problems with a second (or third or fourth) language or is intentionally violating rules of grammar and syntax and someone who can’t express a coherent thought in their first language.

The purpose of the Internet is communication. So learn to communicate coherently!

Posted in Whatever | No Comments »

Tuesday, 19 December 2006 by marstinson.

While I was verifying links in the previous post, I hit a link at Paul English’s blog (www.paulenglish.com) that linked elsewhere and eventually dumped me out at Violent Acres in an article about employees being subjected to verbal abuse from customers who believe that “the customer is always right” allows them to behave like morons.

While I believe that she makes some relevant points, it also brings to mind something that has been irking me for quite some time - courtesy or the lack thereof. There are a few things that I’ve noticed down here on the border that completely baffle me. Shopping carts in the parking lot are probably the most irksome. For some reason, a good chunk of the population seems to think that they can just leave a shopping cart when they finish emptying it. The fact that a cart drop-off point is only 20 feet away doesn’t even seem to matter. They just leave the cart. Perhaps they figure that it’s the store’s responsibility to retrieve the cart? Maybe they think that their time is so valuable that 30 seconds would bankrupt them? Maybe they think their cart is someone else’s problem? In any event, they just leave the blasted thing wherever, even if that means blocking a parking space or creating a situation that could damage a couple of other cars. C’mon people - 30 seconds won’t bankrupt you, it IS your shopping cart so it IS your problem, and the exercise won’t hurt you any, either.

Another annoyance - clerks who believe that their socializing is more important than dealing with the customers that they are paid to deal with. I can’t count the number of times that I have gone into a store, had a problem with something, searched out someone who might be able to point me in the right direction and then had to stand and wait while they finished a conversation with another clerk (the conversations never seem to have anything to do with work) before they would deign to notice me. And this is not just teenagers, although they are the most common offenders. Needless to say, I do not do business at those stores, but I’m also noticing that I’m running out of stores. Is this something peculiar to the border area or has the meaning of customer service changed that drastically in the past few years? I don’t run into this problem in other cities, but I’ll also concede that my out-of-town time is pretty much limited to those areas that are generally frequented by visiting business people.

At any rate, would it be too much to ask that people exercise a little courtesy?

Posted in Whatever | No Comments »

Tuesday, 19 December 2006 by marstinson.

Tought I’d put this out, mainly for my own reference when I suffer from blown memory buffers:

 A fellow named Paul English put together a list of company phone numbers that usually went direct to a human being. The response to his list was so overwhelming that he moved it off of his blogspace and into its own domain and database:

www.gethuman.com

 If you’re about ready to go postal over Interactive Voice (Non)Reponse phone systems, you should be able to find what you’re looking for there. Be advised that some of the direct-to-human lines are toll calls and there is no indication of how long you may be waiting to actually get a live person on the line.

Posted in Whatever | No Comments »

Sunday, 17 December 2006 by marstinson.

I recently decided to pick up the guitar again. I played for a while in high school, but pretty much dropped it about 30 years ago. So my Christmas present to myself this year was an electric guitar and I’m diligently trying to relearn the instrument. One thing that I’m doing differently this time is that I’m paying attention to what others have to say about playing (yep, when you’re 16, you know everything - it’s only later that you find out that you don’t know squat or are at least you’re willing to admit it). I came across a thread in the forums at ultimate-guitar.com where the poster was complaining about how learning to play had destroyed his appreciation of music.

This is not the first time that I have heard this. One of my girlfriends (yes, we had girlfriends back in the dark ages) was a bassoonist who went on to study music in college. As I recall, she had finished two or three semesters of her music studies before she changed her major to business. I think the question that came to me at the time was something along the lines of “how can understanding music ruin your appreciation of it?” After all, I had been listening to music for as far back as I could remember, had learned several instruments, starting with piano in something like the 3rd grade, and my appreciation of music hadn’t changed. In fact, the only noticable change was that my taste in music had become more eclectic. I kind of shrugged off the question as one of those “mysteries of the universe” or “things that man was not meant to know” and went on with my life. Now that I have a few more years and a bit more experience under my belt, I think that I understand her point.

I think that most people who pick up an instrument, especially one like the guitar, start with the idea that they want to be able to play like so-and-so (Hendrix, Page, Santana, Van Halen, Billy Gibbons, Slash, etc. - obviously my brain has been fried by too much exposure to rock/R&B as I can’t think of any other styles of guitarist by name). Or perhaps they want to learn how to play certain songs or styles of music. But the common thread running through all of these is “how”. How does he/she do that?

So they set out to learn how to do that. Some find a teacher; others pick up any of a number of “how-to” books. Some do it the old-fashioned way: they listen to records (sorry - CDs) over and over again and then try to mimic on their own instrument. Those with the talent or sheer persistence eventually learn how to do that. Those without the talent or determination get frustrated and move on to other things. In my case, it was lack of determination more than anything else. My modicum of talent was enough to let me get started, but talent alone won’t do it for more than a handful of people and I wasn’t in that handful by any long stretch of the imagination.

At any rate, once the student has learned the “how” of a particular instrument, song or style, the problem comes. In many ways it is like a magician’s trick. Once you know how they trick is done and can do it yourself, the trick loses a lot of its wonder. The “wow” factor just isn’t there anymore. And I think that this is the point where people hit the crisis point. Now that they know what they set out to learn, what comes next?

Many musicians never hit this crisis point. They continue doing what they have been doing and are quite satisfied to play what they know. They may even put down their instruments and only occasionally pick it up again. This last group are the folks who rush home to pick up their acoustic instruments when there is a power failure at the local watering hole and stage an impromptu sing-along.

I think the potentially great musicians change their question, however. Now that they know how it was done, they want to know why it was done that way and why it wasn’t done some other way. And those questions lead them into the theory and structure of music rather than just the performance of someone else’s music.

Posted in Music | No Comments »

Sunday, 19 November 2006 by marstinson.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I use the Outlook Journal quite a bit. One item that has annoyed me about it is the number of Journal categories that I don’t use and the lack of any capability inside of Outlook to add/remove/change those categories. For example, there are several categories of Journal entries that are suitable for use in an office environment where you use Exchange, but nowhere else. All is not lost, however. You can change the categories (at least a bit) to suit your needs. This involves editing the registry, however, so it is best done with a great deal of caution.

Make a system restore point before proceeding and definitely back up the portion of the registry that you’re going to change before you make any changes. To do this, go to the registry key where you’re going to make changes, right-click on the parent folder and select “Export”. Save the resulting .reg file somewhere easy to locate (it’s only going to be a few kilobytes of data). You can reimport the old data by double-clicking it.

Unless you really feel like messing up everyone else who uses your computer, make the changes in the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Outlook\Journaling

The sub-keys are the categories for the Journal. You can rename them as you like, although you’ll may want to tinker a bit with the large and small icon entries to get the icon you want associated with it. I have not really messed with those, but as long as you have a good backup… Whatever you do, DO NOT CHANGE OR DELETE PHONE CALL. This is the default category and Outlook has hissy fits when it can’t find it. You can totally hoze yourself by messing with it, so just leave it alone.

Note that you are making changes in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive, so whatever changes you make will only affect the currently logged-on account. Which means, oh great guru, that you can create a dummy user account, log on with that account, mess with those entries all you want, get them looking and behaving the way you want them to, export the changes and then import them with the account that you really want to change. Afterward, you can just delete the dummy account and its profile.

Again, make sure that you create a system restore point before making ANY registry changes and create a backup of the registry keys that you’re going to change BEFORE you change them (after you change them would be a good idea, too, but only if they’re working correctly).

Posted in Applications, Computers | No Comments »