Watching this Supernanny show, because it’s what’s on in between our finishing Monk from last Friday and turning the TV off, and she’s instructing a couple on the triumph of the will, or, how to win a night’s sleep. Remember, you are more stubborn than the kids; don’t cave. This isn’t obvious? Ignore them and they will go to sleep.
I suppose they might drive to Blockbuster for a movie.
A fair amount of a priori knowledge is needed to execute this, including knowledge of which PSTN end-point you are using to exit the IP network, so it may not be possible in practice. Besides, I’d have to use fwdout to confirm, and that’s just too much work. fwdout is only an enabler in this scenario. It increases an existing risk because it invalidates an assumption about telephone numbers.
Businesses use a customer’s telephone number as identifying information, and customer service desks often tie Caller ID information to the customer database. For most businesses this is not an issue; they do not need to have verifiably reliable knowledge of their calling customer: it’s merely a convenience. Banks, on the other hand, do. Most are aware enough that Caller ID is not sufficient proof that the person on the other end of the line is the person who pays the bills, nor may it be the person in their account records, and so they ask for further identifying information.
If I call from a number not in their records as mine, I’m asked for two or more pieces of information. If I call from home, they only ask for one. If I speak to a customer service representative, they’ll accept mother’s maiden name alone.
This is entirely understandable. They are trying to be helpful. I may be forgetful and still need to transfer my money over the phone to an undisclosed location in Barbados, so they’ll bend over backwards to help me.
Here’s the problem. They presume that I am the only one who knows certain information. And yet that information has been shared widely enough that their presumption is false. They may have consciously accepted the risk, and covered my assets through the purchase of insurance; but then again, they may not have.
D took the draft plans in to the assessor to see what our grandiose ideas might cost us in property taxes. He estimated an additional $3,300 on top of what we’re paying now. That pushes us far too close to $10,000 for comfort.
But New York State has this STAR program that adjusts that down by about $1,100. Maybe this will be doable. But maybe we’ll have to move anyway, just because of the fookin taxes.
Oh, and did I mention that construction costs are still going up?
Phoneboy notes that T-Mobile has a map that will show you how well they cover your location. This way you can confirm that, yes, they do know that you live in a dead zone. This is most unlike Verizon, who hint with their all-red coverage map that you’ll get a signal inside DisneyWorld. As I found out last September when Larry tried to call me, this just ain’t so.
Phil Windley pointed to this Baseline magazine article on “in-sourced” their information technology operations: “Why JP Morgan Chase Really Dropped IBM“. After the merger of BankOne and Chase, Chase brought IT functions back in-house. BankOne’s cost savings boil down to salaries.
For further comparison, the average compensation of a Bank One employee in 2003 was $66,928; a JP Morgan Chase employee took home $125,147. Returns on shareholder equity also were materially higher for Bank One.
Chemical’s Chase’s operations are in the New York metropolitan area; BankOne’s aren’t. Though if Chase’s current operations are anything like they were when I was there in 1993, it wouldn’t be too hard to improve on them.
David Fletcher points out the Government Performance Project‘s report card. New York got a B-! That’s some curve!
Jenny mentioned a class experiment documented in The New Yorker, 1992 House. (As an aside, how do you tell which New Yorker pieces are fiction? This one isn’t by Seymour M. Hersh. Do kids these days call Old Phones “landlines”? Do they really know how to use a semi-colon? It’s lacking a certain verisimilitude we expect from our ignorant youth.)
Anyway, this graf does contain a telling difference between then and now.
I learned that one of the biggest hardships endured by people back in 1992 was not being able to use cell phones. At first, I had thought that maybe I could just cut back on the number of calls I made, thinking that usage plans were more limited. However, my research (at the library!) unearthed the fact that cell phones really were not in widespread use back then; there were only humongous car-phone versions, prevalent among early executives in the hip-hop industry.
Which would you give up: your phone, or your Internet access?
I’d like to recommend City Comforts, by David Sucher. While its emphasis is the built environment of cities, the patterns presented apply to developments on a village scale as well.
[Sent this morning to the planputnam mailing list.]
Aside from the oddity that Patterson will benefit while the project has the most impact on Kent, I think a mercantile development on that site has some promise. Unfortunately, I don’t think it does with the site plan as currently conceived.
Crossroads are natural places to conduct commerce. This is one such site. It is quite reasonable for Mr. Camarda to develop this as a commercial property. The problem here is that cars don’t shop; people do. The plan, like most developments since World War II, emphasizes use by cars rather than people. But, again, this is to be expected. His potential tenants don’t much care what kinds of buildings they inhabit, nor what impact they have on the local communities, only how fast they can transfer the goods from the warehouse to the shopping cart. Target, Lowe’s and CostCo, even Wal-Mart, have all adapted if asked to adapt, but why should they go out of their way if none suggest doing so?
The towns do not encourage development on a human scale. Their zoning codes are stuck trying to segregate uses, which may be fine for keeping the rendering plant from stinking up my bedroom, but is not good for life. Their traffic plans emphasize throughput, but forget that there are many ways to move between two points. Their parking requirements force us to bear the costs of “free parking” in higher costs to develop, higher rents, higher taxes, and higher property values. And while I love having more equity in my home, I’d like to at least have the option to walk to store.
The choices made by our elected officials, at all levels of government but particularly in town, dictate that this is the only shape a development at Patterson Crossing can take. We the electorate, failing to understand the effect of large lot sizes, of parking requirements, and of using single-use zoning to keep Those Uses out of our backyards, dictate that this is the only shape a development at Patterson Crossing can take.
Why would Mr. Camarda, or any other property owner, propose a mixed-use commercial and residential neighborhood between I-84 and Lake Carmel, connecting with the existing street network, and possibly improving the residents’ lot, when he knows that he’ll have to fight the residents and town hall to get it approved? It’s simpler just to follow the codes, do the things in the most cost-effective fashion, and wait.
So you don’t want Patterson Crossing? That’s great. I personally could give a rat’s ass about any of the big box retailers, but I would like to walk to a store every now and again — and sometimes do between Home Depot and Kohl’s, up a hill, pushing a stroller and wishing for a clue-by-four. I suggest that the site plan be redrawn, with thought given to multiple uses by people, not cars.
Jim McGee points out Martin Geddes‘s pointing out a paper from 2003 by Andrew Lippman and David Reed on “Viral Communications.” Mr. Geddes says,
It means the end game is already pre-determined. Centralised telecom won’t exist in its current form. Don’t hold long-dated bonds in network operators or their equipment suppliers.
There’s plenty of time to make money between now and when the game ends. The question is how long? And what do we do afterward? At least since Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 188 U.S. 394 (1886), if not since the dawn of commerce, corporations have not wanted to wrap up shop once they no longer have a purpose.
So, what are we to do? Become AT&T?
Stephen Dulaney points out PrimaryGames, a game site for children, and observes
They seem to be selling a range of banner ads, kind of cool to see a site that is so much fun being able to get revenue from web advertising.
I don’t approve of advertising to children. Jakob Nielsen observed that children click on advertisements more than adults, because they have not learned to distinguish them from the other things on the page. The Big Sister gets very upset when she clicks on something and it’s not part of the game at Playhouse Disney. They are clearly labeled as ads, and, to me, it’s apparent that they are, but to her they are confusing accidents. Disney is very lucky that she has not transferred her dislike from the accident to Disney products.
The advertisements on PrimaryGames are for the parents, not the children, include pop-ups, interstitials, slow the pages’ loading, and distract from the games. Are there any places on-line which are just for kids?
I think we can judge what attracts idiots by the contents of spam. However, I would appreciate it if the lowlife would cast their idiot nets elsewhere.
The rumor mill is working furiously. Isn’t leaky information fun?
Dan Gillmor worries about the impact on competition of an SBC purchase of AT&T. At this stage in the game, there’s little evidence for engaging in paranoid conspiracy theories. Does the phone company care who you talk to? Or only that you keep talking?
I noticed interesting behavior while observing the effect of a memory cache tweak on Firefox.
First, the tweak. Firefox caches data on disk, but it also caches data in memory. The memory cache has a leak; it doesn’t deallocate in certain situations where it should. (This is a Gecko problem, and has been fixed, but not yet integrated into the Firefox release.) Over a period of time, Firefox will increase its memory allocation to accomodate this cache, thus starving other applications of memory. However, you can set the cache’s maximum size.
In about:config, the setting browser.cache.memory.enable is set to true. This is a good thing. You’ll want to add browser.cache.memory.capacity, an integer, with a value in kilobytes, such as 16000 (or approximately 16MB). To do this, right click, and select new, then integer. Name the new preference, click OK, then enter the value, click OK, and restart Firefox.
Now the interesting thing that I observed was that on minimizing an application, it deallocates memory in the working set that it is using for window management. This can be a lot of RAM. In one case Firefox dropped its working set size from 75MB to 800K. In another, Ouchlook dropped from 45MB to 2MB. The Java runtime for Q went from 20MB to 2MB, then increased to 9MB, and again to 15MB. Note that this does not deallocate all committed pages, so while they’ll remain in memory since they’re not in the working set they will be in the virtual memory pagefile.
Using the “show desktop” icon on the taskbar appears to not deallocate pages from the working set in the same way that the minimize feature does, which is puzzling. However, by minimizing the applications which you do not use, rather than switching between them, you can slightly improve the responsiveness of your system. I say slightly because of the page faults and disk I/O associated with McAfee’s scanning the pages as they are allocated or moved from the pagefile into the working set. You’ll need to experiment somewhat to see how it works for you. The trick is to keep the committed bytes in use as low as possible, preferably less than the amount of real RAM you have in your system. To see how you’re faring, on the performance tab in Task Manager (taskmgr.exe), there are four blocks of statistics in the lower half of the window, compare the total physical memory with the total commit charge.
Of course, there’s no substitute for spending the 150 bucks and getting another 256MB of RAM.
Jeff Pulver has released his latest creation, Bellster. (Does *ster branding still have legs?) Anyhoo, this is a peer gateway service for interconnecting the public switched telephone network with the Internet. Members exchange their local calls for local calls elsewhere, and the service crosses the Internet to optimize the route between two points.
Last night I began watching the first episode of Town Haul. This should be interesting.
It’s not about doing over the living room of someone who has bad taste in color. This is about restoring historic buildings and instilling pride in a community, which can be done through designing new public spaces and social gathering spots. It makes people feel better about where they live, and that makes the people who work on this show feel amazing.
See also, Sullivan County, an interview with Genevieve Gorder, some before and after photographs, and these stories from Metropolis magazine.
Anybody can search. I search for things all the time, but, as my wife can tell you, I do not often find them. Searching, without finding, can turn up all sorts of interesting trinkets, but is not successful if you don’t find what you were looking for. The quality of the search is determined by what is found.
Which is why I switched to Google way back when. I could search all day on AltaVista and not find a damn thing. And then, just feeling lucky, found it on Google.
So now Google wants to help me find things in video. So do others. It will be interesting to see how this develops. In searches for “suburbia,” Yahoo found images of suburbia, while Google found references to suburbia.
Meanwhile, I’d still like someone to index the comics.
What use could Google have for the dark fiber they’re rumored to be buying? The (London) Times speculates that it has something to do with VoIP. Maybe. I’m more inclined to think that they just want cheap fiber as a fast interconnect between their clusters.
But let’s fall prey to speculation, and wonder what Google’s Voice would sound like.
I was just editing my feed configuration over at FeedBurner, and noticed this witticism.
Earn
some Floozreal money with your feed.
My former employer helped build Flooz. Unfortunately, we got paid in Flooz.