Cox Crow

I don’t read things as fast as I find things to read, so I end up with piles of magazines, and newspapers, and books, and print-outs on my desk, or fifty tabs open in each of four Firefox windows. This situation was aggravated recently after I was given subscriptions to The Atlantic and The Economist. The Atlantic is a faster read than The Economist, and it only comes once a month, so I’ve been well behind current events.

Then last week when I was putting out the recycling, I accidentally threw out four weeks of The Economist with a week of unread (except for the comics) newspapers. That was a relief.

Now I can concentrate, sort of, on The Tycoons.

I think I’ll throw out this week’s Economist when the new one arrives tomorrow.

And, y’know, I’m not keeping up with the paper. I think I’ll suspend my subscription — and read the comics online. I just cancelled my Science Fiction Book Club membership again. And those 3,000 unread items in the Newsgator? Gone.

If you need to get in touch, mail will work.

Why is my account inactive?

Yahoo! Mail deactivated your mail account because:

• You have not logged into your mail account during the past four months.

I never used Yahoo! Search regularly. I was an AltaVista user when it was still altavista.digital.com, until I found Google sometime in 1997 and no longer had to dig through pages of search results.

I never really used Y! mail. It was always too slow, and too annoying. It has these large advertisements, you see, which not only take up screen real-estate but network bandwidth. And until this company, POP3 and IMAP4 were not forbidden protocols, so I never used web-based mail at all. But that’s not true anymore

I used Y! Maps, because it wasn’t as annoying as MapQuest or Expedia. But I don’t anymore.

I used Y! Groups, because that’s where the people were, even though it has the same problems with advertising that all of the Yahoo! sites have. But I never read them anymore.

I used Y! Messenger, because some of my friends have Y! accounts, until gaim became good enough. The Y! product was just too annoying. My friends are still there, but I’m not anymore.

The Y! developers come up with some neat stuff, and their bosses buy some neat stuff, but their marketing team must think we have all day to download their advertisements.

Meanwhile, they have this Pipes thing. It looks interesting, if your data is exposed to the Web.

Joel Spolsky suggests seven steps to remarkable customer service. Along the way (in step one), he used the industry category containing a certain large employer of mine as a counter-example.

When we handle a tech support incident with a well-qualified person here in New York, chances are that’s the last time we’re ever going to see that particular incident. So with one $50 incident we’ve eliminated an entire class of problems.

Somehow, the phone companies and the cable companies and the ISPs just don’t understand this equation. They outsource their tech support to the cheapest possible provider and end up paying $10 again and again and again fixing the same problem again and again and again instead of fixing it once and for all in the source code. The cheap call centers have no mechanism for getting problems fixed; indeed, they have no incentive to get problems fixed because their income depends on repeat business, and there’s nothing they like better than being able to give the same answer to the same question again and again.

Ah, but there’s the cost of fixing the problem. We have processes for increasing those so that out-sourcing is still cheaper.

I’ve mostly switched instant messaging services. I still have AIM, and Y!M, and other accounts, but the only one which I use with any frequency is Google Talk. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the main one is that I spend most of my time on my work desk. I used to have two, but the other was left behind when I began working mostly from $HOME. For this desk, there are company policies which restrict the installation of third-party software, including instant messaging clients. While I had gaim installed for use with something I’d set up internally, some time ago, gaim broke, so it was no longer available for use during off-hours. But Google Talk works from the Google Mail page. So there you have it.

This has led the people with whom I keep in touch to wonder where I am. I’m still here, but disconnected.

Steve Jobs asks

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system?

Ernie the Attorney bemoans the abundance of laws in this country. Les Hancock has the solution. Rather than limiting the content of laws, such as is done with the Bill of Rights and other instruments, limit the number of laws. The legislature may enact any law they choose, as long as the total number of laws is not greater than a given number.

I’m sure there’d be a way around that limit by referencing sub-section 301(c) of article 64, so perhaps a word limit is also necessary.

Merck & Company, Inc., has a vaccine which may prevent certain diseases caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV). Out of the goodness of their hearts, and in the interest of $4 billion in estimated sales, Merck is asking the government to require that this vaccine be given to all girls between 11 and 26 years of age.

What passes for public debate in this country has settled on the trivia that HPV is transmitted sexually, and the question of whether mandating the vaccine would appear to constitute approval of sexual intercourse by minors. This is inconsequential, but does prevent the polity from discussing the more important question of whether the state should act at all.

I fail to see why the States should mandate this vaccine. HPV causes no immediate threat to the public health. It requires intimate contact to spread, something I doubt you’ll find often in public places.

My elder daughter is in first grade. She loves to read almost as much as she loves math. She’s just started the thirty-third book in The Magic Tree House series, Carnival at Candlelight. She was reading Misty of Chincoteague, but Carnival at Candlelight was more important.

The New York State Parent-Teacher Association has a reading program called Parents as Reading Partners, or, as everyone else calls it, PARP. This program encourages parents to read with their children, by making a game of it, for the simple reason that

Studies show that children who read at home are better prepared to succeed in formal education.

What they mean to say is that practice makes perfect.

The school system here, and the one in Mahopac, has trouble using English. Instead, they use a mish-mash of English and Bullshit. Blather among yourselves with your crapronyms if you’d like, but don’t inflict them on the children.