Andrew : January 2008 Archives

Finally finishing up the rather massive project I've been working on for the past two weeks, it should be interesting to see the result, at which point I can talk about it. Starting my next project is turning out to be easier than I thought.

First they approve them. Then they say it'll cause problems. Now they're in phase II testing...

In the fall of 2006, the FCC approved the use of TV white space for fixed broadband deployments. At that time, however, the FCC declined to approve the use of TV white space for low-power fixed and mobile personal devices pending an investigation of the potential for “harmful interference” from WSDs. Following initial evaluations last fall, Phase II WSD testing by the FCC began on Jan. 18, 2008. The purpose of this test program is to “[assess] the interference potential of such devices and establishing appropriate requirements,” the Commission says. In the current round of tests, prototype WSDs submitted by Adaptrum, Microsoft, Motorola, and Philips, will be field-tested to evaluate their performance under real world conditions. This phase of the tests is expected to last between two and three months. After WSD prototype tests have been completed to the FCC’s satisfaction, the Commission will set about defining a set of WSD operating rules. Once that happens, consumer electronics companies will begin moving forward in developing WSDs and bringing them to market.

A few years too late, but par for the course for the FCC if it ever gets approved and rolled out.

So, the House just passed a massive, incredible economic "stimulus package" that amounts to handing out free money to people in return for them continuing to breathe. Sounds fair, right? Oh, I forgot. Congress hasn't actually passed a real budget in three years, we're already running a deficit because most Iraq war funding comes in "Emergency" supplemental Appropriations bills debated under special rules, and to top it off borrowing most of the money to fund the from China. Anyone remember the Family Guy where Peter is told by a loanshark:

The difference between us and other banks, Mr. Griffin, is that we're not a real bank!

Now, imagine Yao Ming holding Henry Paulson upside down by his ankles and shaking the change out of his pockets. Seriously. The Chinese hold so much American debt they have to be happier than a bookmaker on Super Bowl Sunday, or something like that. Does anyone else wonder when we're gonna get our collective legs broke? We might be getting nice fresh $600 checks from our senile Uncle Sam this spring, which I assume is a seperate process from this, but remember where it really comes from. Maybe I should learn to speak Mandarin.

The True Cost of SMS Messages Ah, the beauty of cyclical history. Once upon a time, there was Ma Bell, AT&T. The Phone Company. They owned the wires, they even owned your equipment. That's right, they owned and serviced the telephones in your home. Then, little by little, the Courts began telling AT&T "No." Then, AT&T was suddenly broken up, which gave birth to the Baby Bells, Cellular Phones, modems, the Internet as we know it, etc. Meanwhile, the Baby Bells have been buying each other. The Wireless telcos have been buying each other. Notice when AT&T became AT&T again, the price of an SMS message went up? They're the largest carrier. Sprint has bought Nextel, and their service is worse than it was before. The FCC recently started a new spectrum auction. Let's see who wins.

Ok, so the big news yesterday (bigger than Bush's last SOTU?) was that Ted "Mayor Quimby" Kennedy would endorse Barack Obama in this year's Democratic primary. Coming on the heels of his neice, Caroline, writing a glowing op-ed in the NYT comparing Senator Obama to her late father (President John F. Kennedy, for those of you who are complete non-DC-insiders), this was no surprise. What surpised, annoyed, and kind of frightened me, though, was the reaction from the head of New York's NOW (National Organization for Women) chapter. In an interview with the Huffington Post, NY-NOW head Marcia Pappas

said that Kennedy's decision to back Sen. Barack Obama reflected a long-standing tradition of the "old guard" turning its back on gender equality. "What goes on has been going on from the beginning of time," said Pappas. "Woman have been very supportive of male politicians who have not been so easy to convince of woman's rights. You sometime have to twist their arm to go along on something. We think that Ted Kennedy, who claims to be a supporter of women's rights, who now has come out and joined the [Obama] bandwagon, is basically saying that a qualified woman, Hillary Clinton, is not qualified enough for him."

Now, I'm pretty nonchalant on the stance of Women's rights. That is to say, I don't care what's between your legs, unless of course I'm trying to sleep with you (no surprises, please). I believe that women are equally qualified as men to hold offices and perform most any job. I'm a lukewarm supporter of some women's professional sports because I believe that someday the level of play will be equal and the best women will be able to play professionally with the men (yes, John McEnroe, you heard me). For instance, in my favorite obscure sport, rowing, Ekaterina Karsten, who has won many, many Olympic and World Championship medals in the Women's single scull, would have placed 6th among men's scullers last year. Personally, I would like to see the women and men's singles mixed together and medals awarded based on overall finish, but I'm probably insane. I have voted for both women (Barbara Mikulski, Connie Morella, Tammy Baldwin) and men (Russ Feingold, Herb Kohl, Ben Cardin, Paul Sarbanes, Chris Van Hollen, Al Gore, John Kerry, etc). I really don't care what you are, I care about who you are and what you believe. Maybe it would be good for Ms. Pappas to actually read what Senator Kennedy said yesterday, about getting past the "old guard" style politics of personal destruction and moving beyond racial and gender identity politics to elect leaders who can represent everyone. Barack Obama is the son of a Kenyan farmer and a white woman from Kansas who was raised in Indonesia and attended school in Hawaii. He is Ivy League educated, and spent years as an organizer on the South Side of Chicago. He is a post-racial, post-gender political figure that has managed to get Americans of all colors, genders, and faiths excited about politics for the first time in a long time. To say that Senator Kennedy's endorsement is

just another example of "good old boys," who have "decided that they will support anybody but a woman... He knows in his heart that Clinton is the best person for the job, and for whatever reasons he seems he's not willing to support her."

is to defy logic and plain english. To quote President Bill Clinton, how dare you? How dare you encourage us to step back into the idea that supporting a man means not supporting women? How dare you cast aspersions on the pro-choice leanings of a man who has long defied the Catholic faith with which his family has been identified and cast vote after vote in the Senate to support the Right to Choose? How dare you call an Irish Catholic machine politician endorsing a biracial candidate who has united so many diverse groups of Americans an example of the "good old boy network?" When Senator Clinton was heckled with a stupid, childish taunt before the New Hampshire primary, I had to shake off a wave of disgust for the idiots who thought it would be funny to say stupid, misogynistic things to the first serious Female candidate for a major party nomination. Now, I can't help but feel like you, Ms. Pappas need to be put in your place. Not in your place as a woman, but in your place in history, as a relic of an era of politics that my generation is trying to put behind us. We are sick of refighting our parents' social battles of the 60's and 70's. The Vietnam protests and the sit-ins and the riots and Stop ERA are over. For the most part, the good guys won. It's time to build on those victories by erasing the lines of race, gender, and faith that the "old guard" used to divide us, and you, Ms. Pappas, are simply trying to recast a mold that has long been broken. Please, please, please. Go away. Iron. My. Shirt.

I've been neck deep in an issue that I can't really discuss these days since it's still ongoing, but it deals heavily with a problem of people devoting years to a goal, only to have their future decided by bureaucracy and politics rather than results.  I know how Washington works. I've lived my entire life here, save for four years as an undergrad and a brief stint training out of a boat club in Philadelphia. I've seen Congress up close and personal, and I've seen how capricious regulatory agencies can be. People's hard work and effort can be destroyed by a single person's choice instead of being rewarded in a fair an open process. It doesn't matter if it's a liquor license, an election, a promotion, etc. Politics drives everything, especially when the people making the choices aren't affected by the result.  And people wonder why I'm so cynical.

I find that I see more and more in myself in Gregory House, Hugh Laurie's character on that TV show on Fox. I don't see this as a good thing. Trust me. Meanwhile I am procrastinating on a time-sensitive project and will write about something tech/hill related once I am done. I promise. 

So, this past summer construction started in the building I work at. Of course, this requires the installation of drywall. Now, I am sure the building owners chose the best contractor for the job. I don't care who puts up the wall, so long as it isn't a cube and doesn't crush me in a horrific building collapse like that episode of House where they spent the entire hour treating the wrong patient and at the end you realized that the woman they thought they were treating was dead and her husband had been holding the hand of a coworker the entire time.

Andrew...you're rambling...

Ok, ok. Back to the drywall. So, in the DC Metro Area there is a union, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters. They're none too pleased that we may or may not have hired a non-union contractor to put up drywall. These guys are so Tom Cruise Batshit Crazy(tm) that they want to unionize the entire drywall industry in DC. They actually broke off from the AFL-CIO because they didn't think the AFL-CIO was aggressive enough. Yes, you read that right. This union is a splinter group from the AFL-CIO, which they believe is not liberal enough for their interests. Plus, they're pissed that their union members are losing work to non-union contractors, so I have a picket line of unemployed drywall workers outside banging on drums, chanting incoherently, and walking in a circle...

...or do I?

I knew something was off. These aren't union members, they're homeless people hired by the union to work the picket line.

They've OUTSOURCED THEIR PICKET LINES!!!

So, where are all the union members?

They're working.

On the other hand, the homeless protester rythym section gets better every day. They even have a bucket drum kit now. I guess that's how you get to protest at Carnegie Hall. Practice, practice, practice.

I can't really start a new post with a "remember that time when..." or "when I wrote about XXX" because despite having played around with Blogger since Al3x and I took Web Design together back in high school, I haven't been writing consistantly and therefore I have no archive that I really wish to show anyone. That isn't to say, however, that I didn't ever write about stuff. * did anyone notice that I differentiated Al3x and Alex? I did that without even thinking. I mean, totally autopilot. Weird. Something however that I thought I had gotten over during my four years in the arctic frozen tundra Brett Favre land is time zone differences. My first semester I wrote some kind of screed for a class I can barely remember on daylight savings time, why it is stupid, and time zones, or more accurately why I can't stand them. They vex me so. Oh, how they vex me. 

 See, one of my recent side projects has been working on a collaborative written product with someone who exists in Mountain Time, two hours back. Meanwhile, there is the extremely strange saga of me doing an incalculable amount of unnervingly timely and easy catching up with Alex, a subject which I really should write about at some point since it's really starting to enlighten me on the true nature of people and life in general, but I will save that for another time when I can actually process rational thoughts and put them into words * wait a second, isn't that what I'm doing here? I guess not. that require a bit more contemplation than me just bitching about how tired I am. Oh, back to Time Zones. So, I live in Eastern Time. I went to school in Central (-1) and many of my friends still live there. Not too bad. Now, add in trying to coordinate calls and drafts on a rather important piece of writing with someone in Mountain (-2). Stir in having to do massive amounts of laundry and cleaning, and an uncanny ability to get caught up in conversations with someone in Pacific (-3) that revolve around the obscurest of movie references and a still-slightly-disconcerting firehose of life that bears a strange resemblance to another person who you know in Eastern quite well, only far less depressing since the person in (-3) has managed to not be a total fuckup under considerably more trying circumstances, at least to the best of my knowledge. Ok anyway, TZ's are an entirely fictional creation based on the sun. Ships at sea keep their own time, either Greenwich time (GMT) or whatever is mandated by their function. Some large countries don't even have time zones (Soviet Russia and China come to mind). Maybe this isn't a bad idea. Dealing with such large swaths of time difference in an information-based society when our concepts of time zones go back to an industrial past (think DST) can be a problem. I'll tell you this much. Working on the MT project is going to take me through tonight into tomorrow, and if I actually write about what I want to write about once Congress gets back into the usual swing of things, I'll be writing for a Pacific TZ audience, living and working on an Eastern TZ schedule. I'm fucking exhausted. I'd better get used to it. Oh, yeah. And I still haven't done Registered Traveler yet. I might not. More on that later, maybe. * Stay tuned for why I hate Brett Favre.

I'll do it tomorrow and report. Or maybe just wait until I have $100 to spend next week. Meanwhile, Alex is reviewing BlackBerry software. Good for him.

I forgot to bring my passport to work today, so I didn't get to register for my Registered Traveler card. Will report on the experience tomorrow. I promise. So on Sunday, as I was driving to a friends' house in Poolesville, I realized I had to stop for gas. So, I go to the gas station and I try and swipe my (VISA) debit card from my bank. Apparently out fear of gas theft, after hours (this is 8pm on a Sunday) I have to give my card to an attendant. So, I walk up to the little window and push the card into the sliding "don't rob me" drawer. Instead of swiping the card, he asks me for an ID and starts writing the number down. Um? No. I ask him why and he says "management policy, prevent stolen cards." This would make sense, if he was simply satisfied with me holding my license to the window, or perhaps my Federally-issued ID badge as a frequent visitor to the Federal Communications Commission, to verify that the picture, name on the credit card, and name next to the picture match. Instead, he wanted to write my information down. Why? Who knows, but I'll be a penguin in Saudi Arabia before I let someone write down all the information they'd need to charge my credit card. I gave him $25 cash and filled the tank halfway. This morning I called the same gas station and asked to speak to the manager. Turns out there is no such policy and the clerk turned off the pay-at-the-pump on his own, and he certainly didn't need to see my license. Poor guy is out of a job. That's what you get for being a stupid wannabe identity thief in a town where everyone has to show ID everywhere.

So on a lark I decided to sign up for the Registered Traveler program. Pay $128 (minus my discount code) and I get to waltz through an express security line. Why did I do this?

1. I'm sick of taking off my shoes and turning off my laptop
2. I wanted to see what all the "sky is falling" privacy activists were talking about

Now, I'm as big a privacy advocate as any, but as Bill Joy said, "you have no privacy anymore." Once I tried to Western Union a friend some cash, and WU knew my past 3 addresses and phone numbers. Why should I be paranoid about sharing information that credit bureaus already know? Hell, they remember more about me than I do, which can be useful when I forget my old college addresses and want to reminisce about my old roommates. The questionnaire was like when I got my new car insurance (ditching GEICO for State Farm saved be $100/month, btw). Where did I live, what is my drivers' license number, etc etc. How is this intrusive? I give that information out all the time to banks, phone companies, etc. If anything this gives me more privacy since now TSA weasels don't have me stripping in public or turning on my laptop to examine my raunchy start-up background.  The next step is I have to go to a American Express Travel Center (thankfully near my office) and show them my license and passport, and *boom* I can get my SmartCard and waltz through security like a human being. The system may not be perfect, in fact if you're a regular reader of Patrick Smith's Ask the Pilot you should be aware of all sorts of problems with Airport Security Theater, but $100/year is a small price to pay for getting some of my dignity back. Part 2 on Tuesday: Getting "vetted."

So, part of this whole thing is me wanting to write about the eccentricities of Washington and how many of these "Web 2.0" companies aren't doing enough to head off what will be an onslaught of regulation, from either Congress or the FCC. Let's face it. The Congressional Committees are chaired on the Senate side buy a one-armed WWII hero and a guy who invented the phrase Series of Tubes. The guys on the House side have some better brains over there [Rick Boucher, D-VA  and Ed Markey, D-MA come to mind] but you still have a bunch of people beholden to big media (did someone say Diane Feinstein or Orrin Hatch), and let's not forget the Mickey Mouse Protection act rammed through by the late Sonny Bono (R-CA) before he ran into a tree. The point is, Web 2.0 companies are letting the Microsofts and Googles of the world fight their battles for them, when these small startups should be banding together and fighting for their own interests. I plan on covering issues relating to Web 2.0, Privacy, Data Protection, etc in the coming weeks. Watch this space.

I can't sleep,so I figured I'd link to Alex's thoughtful start of a series of posts on the "prosumer" BlackBerry experience. Here you go. Hopefully he links back to my crap.

Bob Mould has become one of my favorite artists over the years. Needless to say, when his live DVD came out last year, I snapped it up. Giving into my pirate temptation after preordering a copy of his upcoming release District Line I downloaded a bittorrent. Bob now considers himself a DC artist, so the album art and title are evocative of our ever loving Metro system. That being forgiven, down to the music, which if you want you can go and find yourself. If not, preorder the damn thing and give the man his due. Sorry purists, there are some elements of technology in there, which he uses judiciously to enhance his guitar-driven (and it is a guitar-driven cd) and emphasize the Mouldian hooks which he's known for and delivers in droves. The lead single The Silence Between Us, available on iTunes, is Classic Mould. The rest simply expands on his multi-faceted sound which is loud as it is evocative of strong emotions that Bob is known for. I'd call this one Workbook on steroids. I won't link to any downloads because I don't want to make it easy for you to steal his music. I've already preordered my copy, and I won't be sharing. If you want it that badly, go and find it. It's worth enough that even if you do, you should pay him his $12 and get a hard copy. He also plays the 9:30 Club (with Morel, Canty, and Narducy, the lineup from his '05 tour) on March 15th. Pay him $25 for that too. He's earned it. In the mean time, here's a clip from his Circle of Friends: Live at the 9:30 Club DVD (recorded October '05)

For those of you who bitched to me during the last Interpol show about how half of them were smoking during the show, none other than the amazing David Bowie can pull it off....look at his hands during this sound check for a duet of Queen's "Under Pressure" with Annie Lennox from like, 1992?...

What am I doing here? Besides any crap I feel like talking about, I intend to have, starting very soon, timely coverage of events in Congress which affect the Technology community (net neutrality, data protection, patents, trademark, etc). This hopefully will include, subject to reader feedback:

1. Liveblogging of Commitee hearings, markups, the House and Senate floors, and any other event when interesting things happen. In other words, the dirty stuff that makes crappy laws exist.
2. Commentary on introduced legislation, including analysis of what the hell it really means.
3. Occasional reports on the technology lobbying community, including who is asking who for what, and what legislation is the result of it.
4. Coverage of the ever-dysfunctional FCC.

Any other ideas?

So my DVD copy of Nirvana MTV Unplugged in New York came today...I've had the CD since it came out but I never have seen the actual show itself on video. All I can really say is, wow.  The only DVDs I really buy these days are concerts, since Netflix and Dish Network provide most of my entertainment needs, and this one I'm going to have to watch a few times to really get the emotional weight out of it. I can actually remember where I was when I found out Kurt Cobain died (watching MTV News, in the basement of my parents' old house on Lenox Road in Bethesda, sitting in a green and white chair drinking a cherry coke out of a 20oz glass bottle). I was sort of into Nirvana, I had one or two of their CDs, but I didn't real grasp the significance of what I was watching until much, much later.  Now, whenever I ask people if they remember Nirvana, and they don't, I immediately feel, well, old. 

When I was applying to colleges in 2001, Syracuse went out of their way to try and get me to go there. I was offered a scholarship (small) and they even sent me a book by one of their professors, some collection of native american poetry or something. So, fast forward seven years to my law school application process. Again, I get in, and they send me a t-shirt with their acceptance letter. This is a tier 3 law school. You would think they have more pressing things to do with their money than send prospective students clothing. Accepted so far: Catholic Syracuse Baltimore

Growing up in the DC area, I have fond memories of watching the TV news at 6:00am waiting for them to announce whether or not Montgomery County Public Schools would be closed that day due to snow, the fear of snow, or the threat of snow. For those not from here, DC-area schools have a habit of closing at the drop of a single flake. Even the many Universities in the area cancel classes when the weather turns northern. When I moved to Wisconsin for college, this never happened. Now, with the area's first snow of the year forecasted for tomorrow, I am at my desk realizing that I need to go grocery shopping. This is not good. DC residents regularly freak out when the weatherman says the S-word, stocking up on toilet paper, bottled water, food, and other goods. Since I have no food in my apartment currently, I fear I am in for a disasterous shopping trip this evening as suburban housewives prepare for a week of impassable roads, despite the fact that every other household has an SUV. This should be fun.

(note: I'm posting this story here because I'm annoyed by all the happiness over yesterday's new iPhone "features" delivered by Steve.) Last January, I sat in a classroom at American University and ignored some boring speaker on lobbying in the EU while Steve Jobs held up the handheld device that would deliver us from evil, save the whales, end global warming, play music, read email, and iron my shirt. I immediately reached for my BlackBerry (then an 8700c) and thought "so what? No keyboard, no real email, could I ever use the damn thing and get work done?" I immediately was struck by how dumb Apple looked by partnering with Yahoo! (Yahoo???) to deliver "push" email capabilities "just like BlackBerry." Yeah, right. Ok, so fast forward to iDay. I had mothballed my 8700 for a work-issued Treo with GoodLink, letting me have real-time access to my office's exchange server, calendar, etc. For those of you who've never experienced real-time push and sync, it is the information equivilant of crack. I shit you not. In comparison to iPhone's email client, you simply cannot put the two side-by-side and expect to be satisfied unless you are willing to give up a whole featureset. Another series of events led me to switch to a different Treo, this one running Windows Mobile. Initially, I didn't hate it nearly as much as I thought I always would. The email client was good, it sync'd up with my exchange server, it didn't suck that bad at all. I spoke too soon. Never before had a phone turned me into a worse driver. Suddenly I was almost killing myself on a regular basis trying to answer calls. Not good, right? Back to the AT&T store I go. Ok, I gave up. I traded my Treo for a newly-reduced-in-price iPhone. I was actually excited. I even transfered all my music to it and stopped carrying my iPod. This was in September. Ok, so I hacked the shit out of the thing. Then the new firmware came. I held off until I could re-jailbreak it and upgraded, and hacked it again. But somewhere along the line, I realized I had the following problems with it, and hacking more just wouldn't solve them:

1. SMS has a really, really lame feature. No matter where you are, in a call, writing an email, etc, *BOOM* there it is. You can't escape it. You can't even end a call properly if you get an SMS in the middle of it. You have to hit "ignore" and then "end." It doesn't just go away.
2. The email blows. I mean really. Let's forget, for a moment, how I loathe HTML email for a second, and just look at the client itself. a) the formatting is all weird, with no way to tell how your mail will look on a normal screen. b) no push: this turned out to be a dealbreaker, people. Yahoo! just doesn't cut it, since honestly, 95% of people using Yahoo! mail are complete tools. Unprofessional to a T.
3. No GPS. Google maps is great, and driving directions are nice, but that doesn't do a damn thing for me when I don't know where I am. Yes, yes, I know there is a new location feature in the new firmware, but I had that as a hack from Navizon 4 months ago. It. Doesn't. Count.
4. No AIM. Why Apple dropped the ball on this I have no idea. Again, I had to install a jailbreak-hack to get this functionality. Why do I need to hack my phone to get a feature that every other phone I've ever owned has had? Come on, Steve.
5. I know this is stupid, but it's IMPOSSIBLE to use while driving. Yeah, I know how bad that is to complain about, but seriously folks, the less time I look away from the road, the better.
6. Battery life. I didn't think this would be an issue, but when I found myself needing the charge the phone before going to bed, I knew I was going to have problems. In contrast, my BlackBerry can go days without seeing an outlet.
7. The email really does blow. I'm one of those people who lives and dies my connectivity, and the bottom line is, iPhone 1.x doesn't make me feel connected to the world around me when I travel. It doesn't combine all my email into one inbox. It's too bad, really. I want to be in touch, not just have a cool web browser. I don't want to have to plug it into my laptop to sync the calendars. When I go away for a day or two, I want to leave my laptop at home. With the BlackBerry, I can do that. With iPhone, I felt like I had to take my laptop with me, just in case I needed to get something done.
8. Applications! Right now I have two web browsers, an AIM client, a Twitter client, Google Maps, TeleNav (awesome navigation software, talks to me like in-car navigation except I can take it with me), Google Sync (keeps my Google Calendar up to date with the BlackBerry, take THAT iCal), and a whole host of others. Apple hasn't released an SDK, and is only doing so grudgingly. I doubt they'll really embrace third-party apps like RIM has.

So, right now my iPhone is in mothballs, aka back in the box, awaiting the day when Apple offers me a software update that will let me do more than play with the damn thing. I'm sad. I like the concept, I just wish they had waited until they had a full featureset. I'm waiting for 2.0 now.