A couple years back I came upon this magazine somewhere that was all poetry, prose, and black-and-white photographs. And the stuff inside was good. I love reading and I used to mostly keep up with The New Yorker. These days The Sun is one of two magazines I subscribe to. It is more enjoyable and less of a burden than The New Yorker.
Another thing about The Sun that I really appreciate is that there are no ads. Just me and the writer, mediated only by the editorial staff of The Sun and some pleasing typesetting. As the editor, Sy Safransky recently explained in his annual appeal for donations from Friends Of The Sun:
There’s nothing inherently wrong with some advertising, just as there’s nothing inherently wrong with a traveling salesman knocking on your door. But you probably wouldn’t invite the salesman in if you and a friend were having an intimate conversation. In a magazine that strives for emotional candor and a reader’s quiet respect, a sales pitch is an unwelcome distraction. I want to place one simple demand on a reader’s attention: the content. Nothing else.
I sent them some cash last year. This year I figured maybe I can send a couple subscribers? If you’re looking for good stuff to read on a monthly basis, I totally recommend a subscription to The Sun. And if you happen to be kinda poor, drop me a line with your home address because when I renew I have been known to throw in some gift subscriptions and you might could get lucky.
Haagen-Dazs responded to my feedback really darn quick. I’ve been slow in sharing. Too busy eating free ice cream . . .
Dear Mr. Howard,
Thank you for your email regarding the change to the size of our Häagen-Dazs cartons. We understand your concern and appreciate your giving us the opportunity to explain.
As you might imagine, the cost of continuing to offer the country’s finest all-natural superpremium ice cream has increased dramatically over the last several years. On average, we’re paying 25% more for raw ingredients today, and this is true despite what you may be hearing about a drop in some food costs.
By downsizing our cartons rather than increasing the price per carton, we’re balancing our need to cover our increased costs with the realization that our country is in an economic recession. We wanted to avoid a price increase that could put Häagen-Dazs out of reach for consumers.
From our choice of ingredients to the careful and deliberate way we craft our ice cream, we never skimp on quality. Nor will we compromise our commitment to 100% all-natural ingredients. We believe Häagen-Dazs ice cream lovers appreciate and rely on that commitment.
Please watch your mail for two gift certificates to arrive shortly, with our hope that you will continue to enjoy your favorite Häagen-Dazs flavors.
Some ways back I followed some advice somewhere and tried the Xoopit plugin for Gmail under the delusion that it would somehow make my life better. It was kind of cute but it also got in the way so I uninstalled the plugin. But I kept getting e-mails from them about all the crap it was indexing in my inbox. So, I finally deleted my account, at which point they sent me a message reminding me that I’ll have to kill the plugin, and also:
I’m not going to stick something in my mouth that is named “choke.” (CC: spychic)
Finally, please take one minute and reply to this email and let us know what you didn’t like about Xoopit. Your feedback is incredibly valuable to us!
Now, getting in to delete the account had been frustrating enough, because when you don’t remember your password and click on the password reset link they send you an e-mail that links to a web page where you can reset your password after you correctly enter your password. Yeah, that had me confused too, until I re-read the thing and it said “enter your Gmail password” which worked but then I was reminded that I’d given my Gmail password to something called Xoopit and I felt dirty all over again.
Anyway, here’s some of what I wrote. I think the name thing is important:
Also, and I mean, what’s in a name? I don’t eat artichokes. They may be delicious, but you know what? I’m not going to stick something in my mouth that is named “choke” . . . it just sounds like common sense. Xoopit? Okay? Like Arm pit? Tar pit? Snake pit? Is it pronounced Zoo Pit? Is that like where they dump all the animal feces to compost? Because I mean, they way you guys Hoover up all the multimedia crap in my Gmail it kinda feels that way. “Look! Look! I indexed all the crap you don’t care to look at, and I’m sending you more crap to delete!”
There is too much crap in my inbox. If you can make it better, you could be more useful to me. If you make it worse, I dump you. That’s it!
And, seriously, xoopit? You need to work on that name. Yes, Google is the best search engine, but it wouldn’t have caught on if it were named Dogpile.
“You know that Global Warming isn’t real, right?”
“Uh huh,” I said.
“No, really! Don’t just agree with me because you think I’m crazy!”
“Uh huh. Well . . .”
He then went on to explain that we only know how much carbon is in the atmosphere for a few centuries, max. I then explained that scientists go to Antarctica and Greenland, drill deep holes in the ice, and can analyze the frozen atmosphere from tens of thousands of years ago. He explains that carbon has fluctuated a great deal over time, and it is no big deal, and I explain that our species has developed civilization during a period of climatic stability, and that the last time there was this much carbon in the atmosphere there were dinosaurs running around, so the Earth can totally handle global warming but we’re not sure if homo homo sapiens will survive it. He was like well its too late to stop it anyway, and I would have gone on to explain that when you’re driving your car into a tree, you hit the breaks instead of the gas, because then you’re more likely to live and have a better chance of reducing damage to and repairing your car . . . but we headed back to the office before things got too stupid.
And I watch it, and I’m like “yeah . . . glacier retreating.” Then I look at the caption:
This remarkable image sequence captures a series of massive calving events at Columbia Glacier near Valdez, Alaska. Composed of 436 frames taken between May and September of 2007, it shows the glacier rapidly retreating by about half a mile (1.6 kilometers), a volume loss of some 0.4 cubic miles (1.67 cubic kilometers) of ice or 400 billion gallons (1.5 trillion liters) of water.
And I’m like “a dramatic video of a glacier melting in Alaska over the course of five months . . . in the summer!”
And I’m like “Holy crap, Al, do you ever speak with a skeptic?! A dramatic video of a glacier melting in the summer makes you look like a tool!”
But, there’s no comments or feedback on his blog, so if I wish to sublimate my angst, I’ll do it here.
Recently someone obtained my social security number and home address and phoned in to various credit card companies claiming to be me, claiming they were traveling and needed a cash advance. They claimed they had left the credit card at home and otherwise failed to provide correct information. So, the credit card companies said no, and each in turn called me, and offered to send me new cards with new credit card numbers, just in case, and I put a fraud alert on my credit report, and aside from the idea that someone is running around with my social security number and will surely try to identity thieve one day in the future, life went on happily.
My Chase credit cards both appeared overnight, on my doorstep, courtesy of FedEx. I have double-checked now, and seen no fees for this courtesy. Capital One, on the other hand, appeared the next week via first class USPS. That’s good enough for me, but what also appeared the next week was a statement with a $16.00 “Fast Card Fee”.
So, instead of calling in to activate the card, I called customer support. Within a few minutes I got a nice lady on the line, and instead of activating I simply canceled the card. I explained that the Fast Card Fee was insulting and wrong. She processed the cancellation and asked if there was anything else to be done. I thought a moment and asked to speak to the manager and when she asked why I explained that I wanted the Fast Card Fee refunded since the fee was not disclosed to me when the service was offered and contrary to her understanding the card was not dispatched “express mail” rather USPS First Class and further more those cards that had bothered with the expense of overnight mail didn’t charge me anything.
She went away for two minutes and when she returned she explained that she had gotten the fee reversed on the grounds that it had not been disclosed, but that even though the fee was canceled I should go ahead and pay the minimum balance by the due date and it would subsequently be refunded to me. I explained that I would do no such thing because by canceling the fee my balance would be 0 by the due date and if they want to charge me a late fee for failing to pay a zero balance . . .
Anyway, we’ll see. I’m mailing the thing back to them with a note and if they want to dig a deeper hole I’ll give them what for. As it is it is just nice to vent a little testimonial on my web site.
If this were any other food, reducing the size a bit to keep costs in line and maybe keep us from getting fat is a reasonable thing. But Haagen Dazs isn’t food, it is Joy in the form of a delicious treat and I would much rather pay a little bit more for Joy than receive less.
Ben and Jerry’s is keeping their size and their comparable price, but their ice cream is overly-sweet glop. Haagen Dazs is a superior product for which I’d gladly pay a bit more!
It has been a pretty busy day at work. In between bouts of business I entertain myself with various baubles like mailing lists. Someone made a statement I found utterly hilarious, that in the context of current events:
“I think it would be politically possible to return to a gold standard.”
I responded that:
“I think a carbon tax would be more relevant to the concerns of the 21st Century.”
To which some else responded:
“Our currency and economy are broken, and the solution is to tax use of fossil fuels, biggest source of productivity the world has ever seen!”
And I though yeah . . . it is hard to advocate an idea like a new “tax” during a recession. Personally, I think calling it a “carbon ration” might be smarter: you get your allotment and if you make good lifestyle choices you can sell your excess at a profit. Anyway, I responded from the basis of an idea I heard at TED last week:
Over a century ago we swore up and down that without the cheap energy afforded by black slaves the national economy would collapse. So, instead of abolishing slavery we made compromise after compromise. Ultimately our nation was plunged into the catastrophe of civil war, and we abolished slavery for International PR reasons and in order to literally free up fresh soldiers for the war effort from among the newly-emancipated populations.
These days we swear up and down that without access to unlimited cheap energy, our economy would collapse and we would be unable to enjoy the “quality” of life we do now. And as each decade passes we find greater and greater evidence that we are living on borrowed time, and that we are multiplying the problem of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, and that we are approaching various global tipping points which bring us closer to catastrophe.
In both cases, abolitionists and environmentalists are ridiculed and despised an know-it-all killjoys out to ruin everyone’s fun. Where the abolitionists had printing presses that would literally be burned down by their detractors, modern radicals warm themselves with flame wars on the Internet.
To go back to your glib response to a carbon tax, it is easier to make radical changes when it is clear that the status quo is broken. A big reason for the present crisis is that we were fueling growth on unsustainable credit models. Debt Debt Debt. Injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is a form of debt against the future, and if we go bankrupt with climate that’s really really not pretty. So, we have a good opportunity to look at how we structure the free market to take natural resources like the atmosphere into account, and price them appropriately so that we can realize economic benefit with the greatest efficiency.
Maybe one way to think of the idea of carbon rationing is that it is like Social Security for the environment: we each make a sacrifice now so as to secure against a future characterized by poverty. In this case the poverty would be a world wrecked by sudden catastrophic climate changes.
You remember Ken Starr? That guy who focused the nation’s attention and energy on Bill Clinton’s penis? Yeah, whatever.
“On December 19, 2008, Ken Starr and the Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund filed legal briefs defending the constitutionality of Prop 8 and seeking to nullify the marriages of 18,000 devoted same-sex couples solemnized before Prop 8 passed.”
I have nothing nice to say. but if you hit this page and sign your name before Valentine’s Day maybe you’ll feel slightly better for a moment. Not really.
Okay, why do I care about the gays? Because I grew up as a nerdy Atheist kid. So, I grew up learning that human beings have a bad habit of shitting on the weird people. Nowadays I live in the happy wealthy bubble of the Silicon Valley, where nerds are admired and showered with wealth. And every time Barack Obama mentions “and the non-believers” I feel a twinge of optimism that we are making progress toward inclusiveness.
And I have long observed that The Gay get shat upon far far worse than Atheists or nerds have ever had it in my lifetime. All sorta of awful name-calling and we still have the occasional grotesquely cruel murder of some queer folks. You wanna get married? Hell, you just want people to stop spitting in your face? I’m 100% behind you.
So, every time I hear things are going well for the homosexuals, my heart cheers that the meek are a step closer to inheriting the Earth. And every time the Kenneth Starrs of the world make progress in the opposite direction, I take it somewhat personally. I am tired of this shit.
Google Latitude was announced yesterday. I was annoyed as heck that when I tried it on my G1 it said “coming soon” even though Google claimed it was supported on the G1 . . . well, pending an update that would roll “soon” . . . and of course there’s no way to contact the Google Latitude team to say WTF?!
I found a link to a T-Mobile message forum that said the update was rolling out gradually: some people have been updated, and others will receive their updates over the next two weeks. Two weeks? I want it now!! And I am not the only one. Waiting is for suckers, so I borrowed a mini-USB cable from a co-worker and upgraded my phone manually, thanks to these awesome instructions:
After a campaign centered on the idea of “change” President Barack Obama mentioned in his inauguration speech that:
“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.”
Alas, Congress decided that giving our all to the difficult task of obtaining a digital converter box, even without a government coupon, so we can finally change over to digital television on February 17, was too great a character-building exercise for the American people. And I suppose the risk of impoverished and mentally challenged consumers losing access to a constant barrage of commercial advertising would be too great a blow to our weakened economy. Congress has therefor postponed the transition to digital television until June 12, “sending the fast-tracked legislation to President Obama, who has promised to sign it.”
Really, this legislation deserves a pocket veto. “Oh, you wanted me to exercise personal responsibility? Dang, it must have slipped my mind.”
To me, this is thoroughly symbolic. And when it comes to such a fairly trivial issue as to whether we will accept a bit of minor pain and inconvenience to get the job done versus hem and haw and make excuses and opt for business as usual, we have opted for the excuses. Frustrating! After all, we how can we face up to the challenge of Global Warming when we can’t even get the TVs switched over on time?
[CiscoSystems] would love to have technology that gives me NPR feed during KQED fund-drive when I’ve already given…feels like they fundraise every month.
I work for Cisco. I do not speak for Cisco. But, there is technology to capture the NPR feed and play it back. I even hacked up my own “Radio TiVo” a few years back. Alas, I shut the thing down since the personal convenience didn’t justify the carbon impact of running a PC 24/7.
Also, Cisco will announce Quarterly results today after the markets close. I am hoping they are favorable. Again, I do not speak for Cisco.
Update:
Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) — Cisco Systems Inc., the largest maker of networking equipment, posted second-quarter profit that topped analysts’ estimates after embarking on a plan to cut $1 billion in costs by July.
Well, I found a torrent and acquired the .iso file. How to verify that it is legitimate? Well, unlike free software projects, Microsoft doesn’t supply checksums, so I Googled the md5sum:
0-23:03 djh@noneedto Windows 7 Official Beta 1 build 7000 x64 EN$ md5sum Windows\ 7\ Official\ Beta\ 1\ build\ 7000\ x64\ EN.iso
773fc9cc60338c612af716a2a14f177d Windows 7 Official Beta 1 build 7000 x64 EN.iso
Well, no panics over a trojan. The install process was quite boring. It loaded files, then it presented, of all things, a blue screen! But not the blue screen of death, but the blue screen of light glowing from the top. The computer sat there a good five minutes showing me the blue screen of light as I wondered to myself whether the install had wedged. Eventually a button appeared that said like “Install Windows Now” and I chose my old Windows XP partition. You can’t “upgrade” from Windows XP: it just moves the old Windows out of the way and you get to dig around your hard drive to find all your old files and drag them to where Windows 7 can find them.
I also had to whip out the old Knoppix Live Boot CD to restore my bootblock, because unlike free software projects, Microsoft assumes that there is only one Operating System you care to run on your computer. I Googled up this reference page and ran the following:
sudo grub
> root (hd0,1)
> setup (hd0)
> quit
My details differ slightly because my Linux partition is on the second partition, whilst Windows is on the first.
The initial impression is that it is really zippy. I installed the free version of Avira AntiVir and Windows shut up about virus protection. I was pleased when Windows gave me a dialog asking if I really wanted Avira to edit the system settings so that it could start on boot: hopefully this will lead to less cruft in users’ systems as Windows 7 gets deployed.
The “Shutdown” item doesn’t actually present a menu to Shutdown or Reboot, it just shuts the thing down–fast!
My next adventure will be to figure out how to turn down the power supply fan speed. I accomplished this with lm-sensors and the like so now Linux runs very quietly–until Windows can run without aggravating my Tinnitus I’m not likely to use it much. I’m also not sure what I would do with Windows, besides occasionally play a PC game or possibly manage photos. I have gotten very much at home with Linux.
As someone who has wondered at the issues involving monastic vows of sexual abstinence, I found myself dog-earing the following passage from an interview with a Buddhist couple who gave up the monastic life for marriage, as interviewed by Leslee Goodman in the January, 2009 issue of The Sun. (more…)
Ever since I upgraded the guts in my computer my Windows XP partition has failed to boot. Even the Windows XP install / recovery disk blue screens! Oh well: I guess I’m stuck on Linux or whatever, which had flaky support for the Ethernet until one day Ubuntu updated its kernel and then my Ethernet device started working consistently. I guess I just can’t play games. Still, it would be nice to be able to boot into Windows, you know? I could watch Netflix-on-demand, and Windows XP is probably the nicest interface for uploading photos in to Flickr. Though, GNOME or whatever I’m using right now works okay . . .
I have heard that Windows 7 is Microsoft backing away from Vista, which I have never had occasion to use, and just kind of going back and fleshing out the utilitarian OS that is or was Windows XP. Hell, I loathe Microsoft but I like Windows XP! So, when I heard about the free Beta download I was eager to try it out.
But I can’t. I register and everything and get to the download screen which has a big “Download Now” button on it and I click and click and nothing happens. Why is that?
What web browsers support the Windows 7 Beta download experience?
Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 support the Windows 7 Beta download experience. Please note that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 users behind a proxy server should use the automatic configuration for their proxy server for the best download experience.
Windows Beta 7 Download Experience? OMFG you have got to be kidding me! In order to transfer a file to a remote computer you skip decades of open, portable, universally-supported protocols like FTP, HTTP, or even BitTorrent and opt instead for an experience? An “experience” that only works for those who are running the latest version of the Microsoft Web Browser on the Microsoft Operating System? Because, you know, I guess the geeky kids willing to try out weird new Operating Systems would all be running Windows on their desktop, right?
I’ll give them credit for trying to open up with a “public beta” but better luck next time, Microsoft!
