Cox Crow

Inconvenience them, then reduce their inconvenience.

Works wherever there’s a bottleneck.

I awoke this morning to a correspondent for NPR’s Morning Edition talking with Paul English about his guide to voice-mail jails. Not being easily able to reach a human is one of my biggest complaints about telephones these days; if convergence ever rolls around, I should just have my computer call the IVR system.

But when you call The Associated Press a real, live human answers the phone on the first or second ring.

NPR reports that Clear Channel is lobbying for subsidies to sustain “free” (that is, advertising-supported) broadcast radio. Why? Listenership is declining rapidly, because broadcast radio is boring. There is minimal demand for it: more, better substitutes are available for both listeners and advertisers.

GM is planning to lay off 30,000 employees and close nine factories. Why? Sales are down, because GM’s automobiles are not meeting market demand for specific features, and costs remain high. The missing features are small details like recessed power window switches, more cup-holders than you can shake a stick at, fold-away third row seats, plastic that doesn’t feel like it will break if you breathe on it, no beeping alarms, and comfortable chairs. The cup holder thing they could learn from the salesmen at Honda and Toyota dealers, as they are fond of pointing out that those companies realized that what Americans want in a car is a place to set their Slurpee.

When Apple introduced the Aqua look-and-feel with Mac OS X, one of the gratuitous changes was moving the minimize/maximize toggle box from the right side of the window to the left. Whose brilliant idea was this?

Most of the population is right-handed. And even for the left-handed among us, the scrollbar remains on the right. I have to zip the pointer across the screen to minimize the window, and accidentally close it because that UI element is right next to the one I meant to hit.

SAN ANTONIO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Nov. 18, 2005–Today marks the birth of AT&T Inc. and of a new standard-bearer in communications, entertainment and service for the 21st century.

The conflagration over in the Île-de-France reminded me of the fires in the South Bronx.

An article from The Economist on the troubles includes a nice map and unemployment chart. But this quote from The Christian Science Monitor expands on what The Economist called “bleak high-rise estates.”

Former President François Mitterrand once publicly sympathized with the inhabitants of the projects, wondering aloud in 1990, while he was still in office, “What can a young person hope for, born in a soulless neighborhood, living in an ugly building surrounded by ugliness, grey walls in grey surroundings for a grey life, surrounded by a society that prefers to avert its eyes and get involved only when it is time to get angry and to stop people from doing things?”

So, yes, you probably can blame this one on Charles Edouard Jeanneret.

(Oh, and the French word for riot is émeute.)

I am subscribed to a list run by LISTSERV. The other day I changed my subscription settings to have LISTSERV not mangle the message headers. After I did that, some folks complained that they were receiving return receipts from me.

That’s odd, I thought, I wasn’t asked to send a return receipt. So I dug around in the Microsoft Outlook preferences and found these tracking options.

One trick that spammers employ to verify whether or not a recipient address is valid is to request a return receipt. Most mail user agents do not return receipts without asking the user, but apparently Ouchlook has been quietly sending receipts for some time.

Yesterday I called Verizon Wireless 411. As the call the ended, the computer said,

To have this number sent to you as a text message please press one (1) now. Normal text messaging charges will apply.

I read the real estate section in the newspaper each weekend. An advertisement caught my eye. “A return to village life,” it read. The houses pictured are just the kind I like. But the development is for “active adults,” by which the advertiser means “AARP members without school-age children.” And it’s across the river in Warwick.

Conveniently located next to the advertisement for Duany Plater-Zyberk’s Warwick Grove, and just outside the village of Warwick, is Pelton Crossing. The advertisement for Pelton Crossing extols the planned luxury and the “million-dollar views.” The home pictured is too big and bland — and starting at $300,000 more than those in Warwick Grove. Pelton Crossing’s site plan is typical of most developments over the past several decades.

I wish more new old houses were being built.

The mechanical Turk was a hoax, the pretense being a machine which could play chess. Instead of a automaton playing chess, the Turk concealed a human chess master. The concept is simple: instead of building a machine to imitate human thought and behavior, use a human. Some have suggested that this might not be economically viable, but spammers have been using the lure of pornography to have anonymous donors decode hidden messages for some time now.

And now Amazon has introduced their Mechanical Turk to do the same.

At 09:00, “Good morning. How may I help you?”

At 16:30, “I’m sorry. I can’t do that, Dave.”

I don’t work these hours, so this is only my impression.

I should not be surprised, but I am.

On the one hand, Sony music CDs autoinstall a rootkit. Read the instructions to disable autorun if you insist on buying media from Sony. Better yet, don’t buy anything from Sony.

On the other, Nexenta has released a GNU system on top of the Solaris kernel.

Have you watched children draw houses or towns? What kind did you draw when you were a child? Did they look like this?

From what I’ve seen, children draw traditional buildings. They forget to leave room for the cars. They draw towns for people.

The people of the Gulf Coast, helped by some architects, have been drawing towns for people too. Did you know that a Wal*Mart could look like this?

John Massengale, one of the architects who participated in the Mississippi charrette notes that Dover Kohl & Partners had been working on a plan for Bay St. Louis before Katrina. I particularly like their rendering of a gas station. See how the car port and pumps are behind the building, while the convenience store rests conveniently on the sidewalk? David Sucher, author of City Comforts and a Seattle developer, has three rules for an urban site plan. This gas station uses those three simple design patterns.

I pointed out some incremental improvements in Google Maps to David Parmet, and he asked if I’d seen the Yahoo! Maps beta. I hadn’t, but now I have.

This Yahoo! Maps beta is vastly improved by the lack of advertisements, but is otherwise non-functional.

Meanwhile, Google Maps is centering the initial map on my last local search result. If I search for another address, I have the option of setting that as the starting point. And the map of results now fills the browser window.

The Big Sister had two very important questions this morning. First, why do we celebrate Thanksgiving? And the obvious follow-up: What were the beds like at Plimoth Plantation.

Adam Bosworth and I share something in common.

Unlike many of my peers in the computer industry, I was a history major in college and have loved and read history ever since.

Although, I loved history before I studied it formally. I chose to pursue it in college because it seemed the one field where I could study the full scope of human endeavor.

And, yes, it is always time to say that facts are what matter.

Looks like the local CATV franchise is about to change hands again. This has been in the works since April, when Susquehanna Pfaltzgraf, a privately-held company, announced that the younger generation was just a bunch of losers had other interests.

the passage of time has had a major impact on corporate and family circumstances, including the absence of a member of the younger generation inclined to assume a leading management role.

Then, back in the 1970’s, my little sister got her picture in the paper. My parents still have a copy somewhere in their house. Now, the Little Sister got her picture on-line. I wonder which will last longer.