March 2005 Archives

I've been using the Yahoo Desktop Search for a while now, enough to know that I am completely hooked on the desktop search idea. What I'm not hooked on however is the Yahoo application. So, just like Jeremy Zawodny (See: Hello GDS, Goodbye YDS (by Jeremy Zawodny)) I've installed and am using the Google Desktop Search. It hasn't even finished indexing my hard drive yet and I already can tell that I love it. What's even better, Google supports plugins. Seeing that I use Trillian for my IM needs this is a godsend. A quick note on both providers... I never would have imagined how fantastic the desktop search can be as a productivity tool. Just in terms of allowing me to search through my email instantaneously has saved me countless hours. If you haven't installed one of these tools, take my word for it, your gonna love it.

In this month's flying magazine there is an article that talks about the danger of the Herd mentality. Or namely, how after one person does something, others will follow. This is so true I cannot even tell you. Take a freeway example everyone should know...

During rush hour traffic on the freeway cars will sit and wait as they should. Out of nowhere a car will cross the double yellow into the carpool lane, or will drive down the shoulder. As soon as that first car does it what happens? People follow.

Individuals hate being told what to do. Groups crave a leader to follow.

Do you remember sitting arround in 1999-2000 talking about how the Stock market was going to crash? Do you feel like the same thing is going to happen with Real Estate? You betcha it is. Now granted, there is a supply and demand issue with housing. There is more demand than supply, this drives prices up. Also interest rates are exceedingly low, that allows someone to buy a more expensive house for the same monthly payment (and studies show that the average consumer doesn't care about the price, just their monthly expense). Tack on a buying frenzy were you have houses selling at $40K over asking price on the first day they are listed, and you have a receipt for disaster. What's going to happen?

1. Interest rates will start going back up to controll inflation.
2. Mortages will get more expensive.
3. People will have to sell their property because they can't afford it.
4. There will be excessive supply on the market, this will drive prices down.
5. Banks will start to forclose on property when people cannot afford the mortages and cannot sell their houses.

This will be really, really bad. Dan Gillmor has more to say and cites another article from the NY Times: Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.: Bubble, Bubble, Bubble...

This is a graph of Spam and Virus rejections for one 70 person company over the course of a week. That's 130 messages a day on average per mailbox for a company without a web page. Spam is amazing.

I am amazed at how fundamentally bad customer service has become. I have a trial account with Broadvoice to experiment with a VoIP based phone switch which has been working great. Last night I found an option on their web site to add additional numbers to my account, when I saw that I could get a much better I jumped at it (and paid a fee mind you). In the process of doing this my old number was de-provisioned (which I don't mind) but is still bound on my account as my primary account number. So now I am in limbo waiting for my system to work again. This morning I spoke to a great guy in the customer service department. He was really helpful and tried his best to help me. Unfortunately some of their tools were offline so there was only so much he could do. He created a ticket for their engineering group and told me that someone would be calling be back shortly. After a couple of hours had past (I've learned to call back often) I called customer service to inquire again on my ticket. Not only was this representative condescending and arrogant he told me that it would take 3-5 days for engineering to look at the ticket. Rather surprised I asked him to confirm the 3-5 days and ask what I am supposed to do for phone service for the next week. He suggested that I forward my calls to a different number. We live in a service economy. For most industries this means that consumers have multiple options available to them and the distinguishing factor boils down the service and treatment that the customer receives. Up to this point I have had fantastic service from Broadvoice. It's amazing, and should be remembered how quickly how one bad interaction can drive someone to rant on their blog.

DNS based geographic server load balancing (GSLB) just fundamentally does not work when you need to provide any sort of QOS on the service. Why? What happens when your customer is in Los Angeles, but their ISP's DNS server is in Texas? That's right, you think that your customer is in Texas and send them to a server in Atlanta even though your Los Angeles server is closer. If you are going to use DNS based GSLB for a service that is finicky (i.e. VoIP), give your customer the tools to select their own mirror.

See: Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.: Bubble, Bubble..

San Francisco Chronicle: Up, Up and Away. Another month, another real estate record. Median prices for existing homes in the Bay Area hit an all-time-high of $569,000 in February, rocketing 19.5 percent from $476,000 in February 2004 and up 2.3 percent from $556,000 in January.

I've been on the soapbox about this for quite some time now (See: Steady Increase in Interest Rates), what is just soo scarry is the amount of people totally maxed out with interest only loans. We currently have the luxury of a 20 year low in the interest rate, it's not going down, it can only go up. If you can't make your mortgage payment now, what are you going to do when we tack on another two plus percent? Dan summarizes this very well, in his own words:

"The most revealing statistics in the story: "Bay Area home buyers in February committed to a typical monthly mortgage payment of $2,549, a record. That payment is up 21.9 percent from $2,091 a year ago." In other words, more and more people are further and further extended financially. Most of them are on mortgages that will cause their interest rates to rise at some point. This is going to get so ugly."

See: The Hopeless Email Battle (by Jeremy Zawodny) I do the same things for Outlook and Thunderbird, and unfortunately there is no good way to manage the unread mess. I keep waiting for one of these email clients to come out and allow you to auto-age email, i.e. if I don't read something past x days, mark it as some status other than read that does not show up as unread.

I was interviewed last month for this article in response to a new study that has found Windows to be more secure than Linux. What I tried to stress to the reporter that running Windows vs. Linux is only one of many things that implicate the overall security of the system. See: Security Pipeline | Controversial Report Finds Windows More Secure than Linux

"A lot of people are under the impression that one platform has more advantages," said one of the critics, Max Clark, a network consultant with Intercore, a Los Angeles-based consulting firm that provides support for both Windows and Linux systems. "The expertise of the person deploying it is what matters. The default configurations are important, but once you start consolidating software on top of the system, the system is only as secure as what's running on it."

It Pays To Read License Agreements How many times have you installed software without reading the company's license agreement? This is a good article that points out some of the different pitfalls in modern EULAs, most imporantly what personal information of yours will be passed across the Internet, and what the company is allowed to do with your computer.

Court: Wife broke law with spyware | Tech News on ZDNet

A wife who installed spyware on her husband's computer to secretly record evidence of an extramarital affair violated state law, a Florida court ruled Friday.

If you ever listen to STAR radio in the morning you have no doubt heard Jamie. She likes to talk about the craziest things and among them, how she likes to install spyware on her boyfriend's computers so she can keep track of what they are doing.

THANK GOD

the courts saw some sense with this one. We live in the information age, it is time that we have some information privacy rights.

Carly's Way

An electronic engineer who worked as a Research Scientist at the Hewlett-Packard Imaging Systems Laboratory starting in 1975 until he resigned in 2003, G.S. thought HP represented the very best of American character -- "a spirit of adventure and a belief in unlimited possibilities." "To me, this rabid fixation on short-term profits is a bigger threat than outsourcing -- it is killing our ability to make astonishing things."

He's right. Everything in this Country revolves around "get rich quick", or I should say get get rich quick without doing anything. As you look out at the accounting fraud of all of these giant companies it all revolves around making sure the short term outlook and profits are good so that the analysts will be happy and the stock price will stay high. This comes up all of the time when Christina and I talk to our friends about property and interest rates. How many people have jumped on 4% adjustable interest rate loans? What do you think will happen interest rates over the next five years? Yes, that's right, the interest rate will continue to go up. We have the lowest 30 year fixed rate for the past 20 years, think ahead past this month and exploit it.