In the US, Obama is dogged by rumors that he's a Muslim, which to many Americans is a compelling reason not to vote for him. (Colin Powell regains a tiny shred of self-respect with his comment: "Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim," Powell said. "He's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no. That's not America.")

In the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed is challenging the quasi-dictator Maumon Abdul Gayoom in what seems to be a relatively free and fair election. However, Gayoom has responded to the threat by spreading unfounded rumors about his opponent's religion:

"I do believe he (Nasheed) could spread Christianity," said Aishath Sulthana, a 32-year-old mother of five who planned to vote for Gayoom.

Surely this speaks for itself?

Flexcar was acquired by Zipcar while I was away; last weekend I had my first zipcar experience and also my first Prius experience. Related posts: Review of the Hybrid Flexcar, from 2003, and Hybrid cars, from 2008.

Zipcar

The nearest Zipcar location to Half Moon Bay is 25 miles away, near Stanford. It's in an industrial park, not close to any transit or commercial centers. I forgot to write down the exact address, so we spent ten minutes driving through parking lot after parking lot looking for the car. Finally I called the number on the zipcard. It went something like this:

Zipcar voicemail: please enter your user number and pin
Me: uh, what?  0#
Z: please try again
Me: 0# 0#
Z: please try again
Me: 0# 0#
Z: Please enter your user number and birthday
Me: xxxxxx# xxxx19xx#
Z: please enter your user number and birthday
Me: 0# 0#
Z: please enter your user number and birthday
Me: 0# 0#
Z: please wait for customer service ...
Z Human: how can I help you?
Me: Hi, I have a reservation for the zipcar in Stanford but 
I didn't write down the exact address.  Can you tell me where the car is?
[10-minute hold]
Z: Okay, Mr Aufrecht, I can move you to a new car
Me, gritted teeth: Can you give me the street address of the car that I have reserved?
Z: Yes, just a moment ... [ten seconds] it's 3145 Porter.
Me, gritted teeth: That was all I needed.  Thank you.

The car was filthy: some kind of white powder spilled across the back seat, thoroughly stained floormats in back, and a general tinge of dinge in front. Also, it had less than a quarter tank of gas, which is a big no-no. When I stopped at a gas station, the gas pump wouldn't take my member number for the gas card, so I had to use my own credit card. Aside from those problems (all of which Zipcar either addressed or apologized for after I reported them), it was fine. I rented the car for a full 24 hours for $60, inclusive of insurance and gas, and I paid an extra $0.30 per mile after the first 180 miles, so it was comparable in price to a rental car, and much less hassle. The only other Zipcar-specific problem was that Zipcar wants you to leave the key in the "ignition" slot, which means that the car is beeping at you whenever the driver's door is open.

Prius

The Prius has a TV screen in the middle of the dashboard for controlling the radio, CD player, and air conditioning. The Zipcar model didn't have GPS or mapping. The interface is one percent good, 99 percent bad. It's good in that some parts of the UI have been well-thought out, such as how to unobtrusively show a new CD track while the screen is in the energy mode. It's bad in that it's a touch screen in a car.

A touch screen is modal. The defining feature of a modal interface is that it behaves differently in different modes. But this requires attention. When driving a car, you don't want your attention diverted from your surroundings to figure out why touching something doesn't do what it's supposed to do. An ATM can have a touch screen because you are staring at the ATM screen. A car should have lots of knobs and dials, with distinctive tactile properties, that your fingers can memorize so your eyes and brain don't need to bother.

The energy flow picture that is supposed to show you the gasoline vs electricity balance at any given moment is way too complicated.

The Honda design is much better; in the picture below, it's the thing to the left of the speedometer; the bars go up from halfway if you are using up battery and go down from halfway if you are charging the battery.

The scrolling graph of mileage, in five-minute chunks, is reasonably cool, and certainly what I left the screen on most of the time. But it takes an extra step to get to it. First, you push a button (a real button) to see a screen with three choices. Two of the choices are settings, which you will use rarely. Each time you finish changing the temperature a degree up or down, you need a button push, look at the screen, and then push a virtual button just to get back to what you were doing before your toes got cold.

Despite the high technology guts, the Prius is lacking some other small refinements in the cabin. The CD player won't eject CDs with the engine off. The digital clock looks cheap. It doesn't have daytime running lights. My normal catalyst to turn on headlights has always been when I can't see the instrument console clearly, but that was thrown off by the touch screen and I accidentally drove deep into twilight without turning on the headlights. The far side of the dashboard displays the printed text "Passenger", and below that it lights up with "airbag". This is to tell you that the airbag is off. I figured this out when a passenger got it and, next to "airbag", it lit up "On". So that's bad design, since you don't know what it means until after you've seen all the possible states. Why not "passenger airbag off" and "passenger airbag on"?

The gearshift is simplified, in a bad way. Reverse is up and Forwards is down. There's a button for "park" mode, but the car automatically goes into park when you turn it off. I guess you might want that if you are stopped and want to leave the engine on (so you can eject CDs) while taking your foot off the brake, but since Park has been a part of every automatic gear sequence that I've ever seen, why move it from the gear to a button? There was also a gear for "B", which I did not try because I didn't know what it was.

When you put the car in reverse the touchscreen turns into a rear view camera, which probably helps not run over children, but its distorted perspective is useless for parking. And the annoying beep the car makes while backing up is annoying.

The car drives fine; it was adequately powerful for city and freeway driving. I went over 200 miles, mostly freeway, and got just over 50 mpg. Visibility was adequate, even out the funky rear window, and it was as spacious as any other compact car. It's just a shame that the experience is marred by such trivial, easily avoidable mistakes in the cabin user interface.

Some things come easier than others. I've always had a hard time with simple arithmetic than goes between single and double digits. I'm probably better at estimated square roots of numbers under 100 than I am adding two numbers between six and nine quickly and confidently. Don't ask me why, just a hole in the brain. For calculating any time zones outside of the US, I've learned to absolutely, no matter what, re-check my calculations with a special tool like the World Clock Meeting Planner. And analog clocks with hands always slow me down just a bit. It almost always takes me a few seconds to sort out which is the big hand and which is the little hand, and while I know the hours, I usually end up working out the minutes under my breath just to be sure.

Fortunately, linux offers a plethora of clocks. Here are just a few:

To change subjects for a moment, let's talk about desktop environments. A desktop environment is the code that provides the borders around all of your programs, the maximize and minimize buttons, the system menus and settings, the glue for all of the other things you look at and poke with. It's like The Force for your computer screen. It is part of the "operating system", but technically distinct from the inner guts of the operating system. If your computer were a car, the file system and kernel and such would be under the hood; the desktop environment would be the upholstery and dashboard and indeed the hood; and your programs would be the places you drove to, I guess.

If you use Windows, then all of this is smushed together; Windows XP is your kernel and your desktop and your catechism and everything else. This used to be true of Macs as well. But with OS X, Apple brought in industrial-strength Unix guts, and put a glossy desktop environment on top, and proved that you can put lipstick on a pig. Actually that's unfair to the Unix guts (BSD); it's more like proving that you can make safe and friendly consumer products with nuclear turbine engines carefully hidden inside. Neal Stephenson's 1999 essay In the Beginning was the Command Line, by the way, remains required reading if you are interested in the subject of user interfaces and operating systems.

In the Linux universe, things are more wide-open. While the industrial-strength guts are more or less standard, a much broader range of choice remains at the desktop environment level. The two main options are KDE and Gnome. KDE has a reputation as the more flexible, configurable one, while Gnome has gone aggressively in the direction of simplicity. Since I'm not a new user and I'm stubborn about how I do things, I tend to prefer KDE—more on that later. I just want to mention a single feature that comes standard with the KDE bundle, a killer feature whose absences from Gnome is sufficient to guarantee I'll stick with KDE for the duration: the fuzzy clock. It's an option within the Panel Clock (Configure -> Appearance -> Clock Type: Fuzzy). It looks like this:

At minimum fuzz, it says "twenty five to eleven". If you turn up the fuzziness, it will say "twelve o'clock", and then "Night", and then, at High Fuzziness, "Weekend!" I keep it at minimum fuzz because I do want to know what time it is; I just don't want to know to the minute, or watch the seconds and minutes ticking away. I like my doses of mortality just a bit vague. And until Gnome offers the fuzzy clock, I'll never switch.

In The Red Queen, Matt Ridley popularized the theory that human intelligence is the byproduct of an evolutionary arms race of sexual selection. It goes something like this:

• fact: human brains are proportionately much larger than almost any other species, including any other primate
• fact: one proven catalyst for extreme evolutionary change is an arms race, where two sets of genes compete with all other things more or less equal. For example, a predator and its prey each get faster and faster, but relative to each other they stay competitive. This continues until all other things are no longer equal; e.g., the cost to be so fast can no longer be paid. For example, it is argued that humans and other primates pay for all of that metabolically expensive brain tissue with smaller digestive tracts, an tradeoff that clearly has limits.
• fact: sexual selection occurs, in which a trait which is not otherwise critical to fitness becomes attractive for purposes of attracting mates, leading to extreme exaggeration of that trait. Example: peacock tails.
• Theory: at some point displays of intelligence became important for proto-human males to attract females, and conversely female intelligence was required to select good male mates. This turned into an arms race, leading to dramatic increases in brain size, a byproduct of which was modern human intelligence.

This is not the only explanation for human brain size; social cooperation and language are also factors. Here's a more recent study which posits something similar: "... the balance of evidence now clearly favors the suggestion that it was the computational demands of living in large, complex societies that selected for large brains. However, recent analyses suggest that it may have been the particular demands of the more intense forms of pairbonding that was the critical factor."

Today's New York Times has an article about the search for genetic causes of schizophrenia, which is taking longer than expected because none of the big obvious causes pan out. Instead, it seems likely that "the genetic component of the disease is due to a large number of variants, each of which is very rare, rather than to a handful of common variants." What this means is that evolution has done a very good job of eliminating the big causes of (some kinds of) mental illness, leaving only lots of little things that aren't as simply selected for deletion. In other words, there is evolutionary pressure to have good brains. This is surprising to a lead researcher because "I would have thought the brain was a luxury organ when it comes to reproductive success."

I guess he's not current on the Red Queen and human sexual selection for brains. Chalk up a supporting point for Ridley's theory.

Although, an alternate explanation does occur to me. Perhaps we are being bred by brain-eating zombies for taste and flavor.

A friend working in the medical data analysis business explained to me that nobody every has diastolic blood pressure of 89, 90, or 91. This is because 90 (mmHg) is the threshold for high blood pressure, so when a doctor or nurse measures your blood pressure, if it's 89 or 90 or 91 but you are otherwise healthy, they squint and write down 88. That way they and you don't have to deal with all of the extra paperwork and hassle of having high blood pressure. It's only when your blood pressure is 92 or 93 or higher that they decide that it's in your best interest to be recognized as having high blood pressure. So if you look at aggregate blood pressure data, there's a gap between 88 and 92.

The Wall Street Journal reports on China's preparations for the Olympics, and includes Beijing's pollution index for the last year. The numeric rating corresponds to concentrations of various pollutants in the air. China considers a rating above 100 to be dangerous; assuming the scale is consistent with that used in other countries, that's two to three times the level that triggers a warning elsewhere. Even so, there's something peculiar about this data:

In exactly which counting system is it normal to round numbers between 51 and 70 down to 50, and 101 and 120 down to 100, but leave all other numbers apparently untouched?

The AP reports that

"There are a lot of people with new wealth looking for relaxation and enjoyment," said John Dane III, president of privately owned Trinity Yachts, the largest U.S. builder.

These days, the biggest problem at Trinity's shipbuilding yards is having enough workers to handle the 24 custom contracts the company currently is working for the luxury vessels.

Meanwhile the local paper reports that "sales for mass market cars may be sluggish but it's boom time for high-end marques" (Straits Times, Life p9, 5 Jul 2008).

The class war is going strong, and it's pretty clear who's winning.

I wrote in March about the Democratic candidates for president that "I can visualize any of them as an excellent president and I can visualize (and have seen) all three of them disappoint." I wish the future weren't so easy to predict. Obama disappointed in a big way this week with his FISA cave. Sigh.

Some excerpts of what H.R. 6304 does:

• ... permits the government to conduct mass, untargeted surveillance of all communications coming into and out of the United States ...
• ... explicitly permit[s] the government to continue surveillance programs even if the application is denied by the court. The government has the authority to wiretap through the entire appeals process, and then keep and use whatever it gathered in the meantime.
• ...ensures the dismissal of all cases pending against the telecommunication companies that facilitated the warrantless wiretapping programs over the last 7 years.

Jon Stewart interviewed Doug Feith, one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, and the Daily Show website has the full ~17 minute interview online. It almost goes without saying that Feith lies more or less continuously throughout the interview, and I won't attempt to catalog that. Instead I want to point out something damning that Jon Stewart says:

Feith (at about 3:40 in Part 1): "there was a serious consideration of the very great risks of war and I think that many of them were actually discussed with the public, but to tell you the truth one thing is absolutely clear: this administration made gross errors in the way it talked about the war, some of the them are very obvious, like the WMD—"

Stewart: "—That was all we had to go on."

Which citizen in their right mind would rely solely on their own government to inform their decision about whether or not to support war? And I don't mean that in a post-Watergate, cynical Generation X or Y kind of a way, or even in a democratic way. Governments start wars. There is, in the lingo I learned last semester, a principle-agent problem, in that we the people delegate the power of war-making on our behalf to a government, but the decision-makers in that government have incentives that do not reflect the desires and needs of the people. If I could make one structural reform to the United States, it would be to require a three-quarter majority of the Senate and House to declare war. Of course, as a necessary corollary we would also have to restore the norm that the president and the military don't actually wage war without a declaration from Congress, a norm which disintegrated during the Cold War.

Anyway, on occasion of Feith's book promotion appearance on the Daily Show, a book which he claims that "if the public doesn't have accurate information, it's impossible in a democracy like ours to have a serious proper discussion of these enormously important issues. My purpose in writing the book was to provide accurate information ...." Here are a few of what I take to be well-established historical facts about the Iraq War:

• Key decision-makers in the administration, most notably Cheney and Rumsfeld, wanted from before the election to wage war with Iraq.
  • The reasons varied with each person
  • Chief among the reasons was oil, directly and indirectly
  • Another key reason for many decision-makers was to benefit Israel
• Hussein and Iraq were not an imminent threat to the United States
  • Al-Queda was not working with or operating in Iraq
  • Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction
• The administration deliberately lied to and misled the US Congress, the people of the United States, American allies, and the United Nations in order to create support for an invasion.
• Bush decided to invade Iraq in 2001 or early 2002.

From the body of a Reuters article:

... the survey, conducted among 69 U.S. rock-formatted stations in markets as diverse as Los Angeles and Knoxville to Buffalo, found 84 percent of the respondents planned to vote in the November election.

...

About 30 percent of the respondents called themselves Democrats, while nearly 22 percent described their politics as Republican and 21 percent declared they were independents.

...

Asked about their overall presidential preference, Democrat Barack Obama led the pack with 26 percent support among those planning on voting in the November election. McCain ranked second with 22 percent and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton drew 18 percent.

The survey found women and fans of alternative radio, featuring '80s and '90s rock, tend to be Democratic, while men and classic rockers lean Republican.

So Democrats are a plurality of respondents and Obama is the leading candidate. What's the headline? "Male rock fans likely to vote Republican: survey"

Nicholson Baker uses a review of a book about Wikipedia to rhapsodize about it and discuss his own role as a defender of articles facing deletion. The discussion of the dynamics of Wikipedia is very interesting. What's even more interesting is that the entire article goes by without a hint that the "2.2 million articles" Baker talks about are only the English-language articles. These make up less than half of the total. Some obvious questions: When there is discussion to delete an article in one language, what does this mean for the versions of the article in other languages? Which leads to, what are the relationships and communications between the Wikipedia communities in different languages? Are most languages just shadows of the English? How many articles have no English version? Most interestingly, I think: do the bodies of contributors in various languages each comprise distinct communities, and if so, how do they differ amongst themselves and what, if anything, do those differences tell us?

For the first two cents, see here.

Here are a few more beliefs to provide context for what I want to say today.

• The media is, on average, terrible. Certainly the English-language media I have ready access to, probably all of the rest of it. Nor was it likely much better in the past. Nor should this be surprising; we depend for basic information about reality on an institution whose primary mission is profit, not education. Public media are somewhat better, but have plenty of other problems. I hope nothing in this paragraph is in way news to you.
• The blogosphere is amazing but not a panacea. Many blogs repackage commercial reporting. The term blog is misleading; it might be better to call it "the public". It's pretty amazing that technology has given the public a voice^*; from blogs I get reporting both large-scale and small, commentary, and analysis, and most importantly I get a much wider variety of biases. Blogs plus mass-market media together are imperfect but much better than either alone. Losing blogs and going back to only newspaper and magazines, I would feel blind and ignorant. (Going back to TV only I would feel blind, ignorant, and neurologically impaired.)
• Media coverage of the 2008 US presidential election is awful.

That said, the specific analysis I would like to see, and have provided to my fellow American citizens in the channels they frequent, would be a more realistic analysis of the types of political/personal compromises the candidates have made. For a specific example, consider the Obama/Pritzker issue. Obama's "Finance Chair, Penny Pritzker, owned a failed Chicago thrift that helped pioneer sub-prime financial instruments and faced accusations of abuse."

What I want is realistic perspective. Any politician at any level of success will have made some compromises that make them, and their supporters, uncomfortable—I don't think it's possible for a democracy to function without this happening. But how big of a deal is this? Presumably if Obama's team presented him with two choices for Finance Chair, both of equal stature and capability and rolodex size etc etc, he probably would have picked the one without the sub-prime skeletons. But things probably didn't happen like that. I don't have any more information on this issue, nor the inclination to see it as significant enough to dig deeper. Should I? Just as the candidate probably had to make a snap decision to offer someone with a fat stack of checks in hand his Finance Chair, so we have to look at all of these things and decide what might be more or less important than it seems and how much, if any, research we're going to do.

I happen to believe that most very wealthy people probably got that way by taking advantage of other people to some extent or another. I haven't seen anything in life to suggest that having a really good idea or being a really good person (either good as in nice or good as in capable) is exceptionally lucrative in and of itself. So the odds are that any candidate for Finance Chair is going to have some bloody dirt under their fingernails, while the US political system simply requires candidates to spend hundreds of millions of dollars. In the grand scheme of things, this is less troubling than the fact that McCain is running on a "pure from lobbyists" platform while his chief political advisor is a major lobbyist who has admitted to making lobbying phone calls from McCain's campaign bus. Or that Obama's chief economic advisor, a position for which Obama probably had the pick of the litter, comes with baggage and probably screwed up big-time with the Canada/NAFTA thing.

My point is that, if I could suggest a single, modest, plausible change in mass-market media reporting on the campaign, I'd like each potentially scandalous gotcha to come with context, and I'd like to see the reporter's professional opinion on if the gotcha is the real deal, or something everybody does that inevitably comes with the territory and ought to be ignored, or something that everybody does that inevitably comes with the territory with none-the-less ought to be exposed and shunned every single time it happens. I'm sure all three types abound.

And when I read something, I want to know which type it probably is so I can decide how much I care.

Addendum: It's true that taller candidates tend to win more often, though apparently not to the extreme that urban legend suggests. Still. Let me tell you a story. Two days ago, Kona and I were jumped by a feral kitten, which I fought off while Kona ran away screaming. This morning, Kona was running ahead of me and looking over her shoulder when she took a spectacular header into a drainage hole. Between the two of us, we accumulated six bloody scrapes in two days. All of these inquiries occurred at roughly the same distance from the ground. However, for one of us the cuts are distributed around the shins and ankles; for the other, around the face. Obviously, there is a substantial advantage to height, and we should not be so quick to dismiss the evolutionary benefits of this bias in presidential selection.

---

* if you are literate in one of the global languages and have internet access, and some level of freedom or bravery, and the wealth (or gender) to have spare time

This shockingly bad BBC article is better than most of the US-based articles: although it introduces the purpose of the missile shot as protecting human life from the deadly hydrazine in the satellite, it at least mentions that one possible alternative motive for the satellite shoot-down was to test the anti-satellite weapon. But it presents the flimsy hydrazine excuse as fact and the alternate motive as merely a "Russian claim". And the graphic at the bottom is so misleading as to disqualify any person involved in its publication, from the graphic artist to the editor, from ever doing any fact-based journalism again and, in a just world, have them banished to Sports or Style or Royalty or other content-free sections.

When a missile hits something in orbit, you get a lot of smaller things in (depending on the relative masses and speeds) roughly the same orbit. Some higher, some lower. But still in orbit. They don't fall out of the sky as if their wings broke off, the way the picture might lead you to believe. They'll come down as their slightly varying orbits bring them through thicker bits of the upper atmosphere, which slows down the pieces which puts them in lower and lower orbits until they orbit into the dirt. The Australian dirt, by preference.

That stupidity aside, the plausible reasons for the shoot-down that I've heard:

1. To make sure some secret bit of spy technology is kept secret
2. To saber-rattle, especially in response to the (even more stupid and destructive, because it was done to a satellite that wasn't in a decaying orbit and so the debris drastically and semi-permanently increased the space-junk count in Earth orbit) Chinese test last year
3. To help justify the budget for an unnecessary, expensive, and destabilizing military program

Kudos to the BBC for mentioning even one of these reasons, which is one more than any US-based MSM reporting I've seen.

Update: the Washington Post story isn't bad, actually.

It's hard to give a good presentation, especially if you have little experience speaking in front of groups, or if you are speaking in a foreign language. I would like to tell you some things that I have learned as a presenter and an audience member. There are three important ideas: practice, practice enough to give a relaxed and comfortable conversation, and practice enough that you don't need Powerpoint slides. There is one most important idea: practice.

Now that I've mentioned the importance of practicing, I have a question for you. Why are you giving a presentation? Aside from the fact that your boss or your teacher told you to, I mean. Why are you doing this, and how will you know if you succeed?

Let's think a bit. What does a presentation offer that nothing else offers? People can read, they can watch a video, they can listen to a recording, or even a webcast of a presentation. Those are all more convenient, but none of these is the same as an in-person presentation. Why? What is unique and special about an in-person presentation?

The human connection. So if you give a presentation but don't make a human connection, you create a wasted and probably unpleasant experience for yourself and for your audience.

What else is special about a presentation? Two-way interaction. You can see them, and hear them. So you can adapt to your audience, which means that you can do a better job of teaching them something. Remember that it's impossible to teach: it's only possible to create a chance for someone to learn. With a book there is only one chance to learn, but with a presentation you can get feedback and make adjustments, and provide more, and more specific, chances to learn.

So, what are the goals of a good presentation? Make a human connection, help your audience learn something, and entertain. If you do all three, you will have a successful presentation.

How are you going to do this? Imagine that your friend has just asked you, "hey, you know a lot about (some topic), right? Tell me something about it." Now have a conversation with your audience. You are going to talk and move and point, and they are going to respond with body language from their seats, and you will have a dialog. Would you respond to your friend by reciting everything you know on the topic in alphabetical order as detailed on slides? I hope not.

Instead, think in terms of your goal. You want to create lots of chances for everyone in the audience to learn. You must provide many chances in many modes: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic are the classic modes, but also think about input versus output, reading versus writing, listening versus speaking, absorbing versus creating. You must touch as many modes as you can, without being a clown, and in particular you must make your audience do some work.

Each person will respond differently. Pick one or two most important ideas that you want everybody to learn, and repeat them; beyond that, don't worry whether everybody understands everything. In fact, don't even worry about covering 100% of your material. It's better to have a relaxed conversation with the audience in which each person retains two or three points, maybe even the important points, and has a nice time, than a presentation where everybody is asleep or thinking about lunch and retains nothing.

The tips:

1. Practice. Stand in front of a mirror. Start a timer. Go. When the timer goes off, stop. If you didn't cover what you needed to, cut stuff and start over, until you can say what you need to say in time and without rushing. If your talk is over ten or fifteen minutes, do this in sections.
2. Think about your audience. Who are they? How are they going to react? If they don't understand you, how will you know? How and when are you going to test for comprehension? for interest? How might you need to adapt in the middle of your presentation? Practice being interrupted with imaginary questions, and adjusting accordingly. Practice getting more detailed. Getting less detailed.
3. Present without Powerpoint slides. Your audience should have a conversation with you, not with some text on a projector screen.
4. Practice until you can do the whole thing without notes. At most, you can have one card to remind you of the basic topics. Reading a speech is not having a conversation.
5. Face your audience. Look at them. Make eye contact. Don't turn your back. Don't look down.
6. Speak comfortably. Vary your pace and volume and tone. Especially if you are not a native speaker, your audience will much prefer listening to your casual voice, which will be free and easy (because of all your practice), than your formal voice, which will be stilted and awkward.
7. Be bold. Lowering your voice or trailing off signal that you lost confidence and you should be ignored, so speak confidently and don't send that signal.
8. Move.
9. Stop when your time is over.
10. Make the audience think. Ask them a question, wait in silence for five seconds, and then answer your own question. Don't expect answers from the audience, and don't make everybody uncomfortable by waiting for them. Just pause enough for them to use their brains, then give them the answer. Do this with easy questions at the beginning, harder questions later on.
11. Don't set yourself up to fail. The best time to ask if there are questions is when you can see someone wants to ask a question. Don't ask "are there any questions?" because the answer could be no. Solicit questions in a way that makes the audience think and helps create more learning chances: "Imagine yourself trying this technique I've just showed you tomorrow morning. How will your colleagues react? Tell me some examples of how you imagine them reacting."
12. Before you decide to use text or pictures, ask yourself if you really need them. Would you use them while explaining to a friend? Maybe you would draw her a picture. I hope you wouldn't use bullet-point text. During your presentation, try to draw pictures on a board instead of showing slides. The audience watching you draw wants you to succeed; the audience receiving new slides is just consuming.
13. If you do need to use a computer to present pictures or data, do so in a way that your body and voice are still the focus. Does music, animation, clip art, or a zippy sound effect serve your goals of making a human connection and providing chances to learn? Are they likely to entertain your audience or distract or annoy them?
14. Test everything before you present. Give a complete dress rehearsal in the real space. If you have drawings, make the drawings. If you have a presentation, load it and use the computer. This reduces the chance of problems. And when the problems happen anyway, you will not be surprised and you will continue with your human conversation.

Resources

• Dick Hardt's OSCON 2005 presentation on Identity is a great example of polish, practice, and entertainment value. The content is irrelevant for our purposes: study and understand the style and technique.
• Hans Rosling at TED 2006; an entertaining presentation of global statistics. Notice how he keeps himself the focus despite the incredibly sexy visual display.
• Some very good, practical tips on presentation
• My own post from last semester, based on obversation of many presenters who did not practice. A bit more critical.
• The best powerpoint presentation of all time (that's not a compliment)
• Tufte on Powerpoint

Writing for the New York Times, Atul Gawande reports on

a program that instituted in nearly every intensive care unit in Michigan a simple five-step checklist designed to prevent certain hospital infections. It reminds doctors to make sure, for example, that before putting large intravenous lines into patients, they actually wash their hands and don a sterile gown and gloves.

... The results were stunning. ... the rate of bloodstream infections from these I.V. lines fell by two-thirds.

However, "the Office for Human Research Protections shut the program down" because the researchers had not followed the informed consent protocols required for experimenting on patients: changing a checklist may alter patient care as much as an experimental drug, and so should be subject to the same controls. Gawande concludes, "the authorities ... [are] in danger of putting ethics bureaucracy in the way of actual ethical medical care."

As a project manager and Master of Public Administration student, I'm sensitive to the accusation of bureaucracy. I went and looked it up, and it turns out that's it's always been pejorative. OED defines bureaucracy as "Government by bureaux; usually officialism", and defines bureau as

An office, esp. for the transaction of public business; a department of public administration. ... Hence bureauism, officialism, 'red-tape-ism'.

Gawande condemns the Office for Human Research Protections for following "a certain blinkered logic" to reach a "bizarre and dangerous" decision, which it then imposes broadly to the detriment of many. But it's basically just enforcing some rules about paperwork, albeit poorly. Isn't the checklist he lauds another set of rules about paperwork? It seems to me that either bureaucracy should be acknowledged as a neutral word, leading to good bureaucracy and bad bureaucracy, or, if bureaucracy is to maintain its pejorative status, a new word should be introduced for an office transacting public business in a positive fashion.

It seems like this article, in which a Christian writer explains why J.K. Rowling is wrong when she says that one of the characters in the series of books she wrote is gay, goes nicely with this article.

* and the editorial staff behind her.

A few ignorant gems from the New York Times' special baseball supplement today:

George Vecsey writes, "... baseball players come off as average people, although obviously their hand-eye coordination is anything but typical. (The bulked-up physiques seem to be returning toward normal dimensions, for some mysterious reason.)" That's the sort of cheap shot that I guess you can get away with when you aren't held to journalistic standards. If you look at a chart of player height/weight over the last hundred and thirty-plus years, you see a very clear trend of annual increases in height and weight, back to 1871 when ballplayers averaged about 155 pounds and five foot eight and a half. The 2006 average was about 200 pounds and almost six foot two. Not normal dimensions. Further, most of the steroid users caught in the last two years of testing have been using drugs to rehabilitate injuries, not grow to hulk-like proportions.

Next, a classic "back in my day..." story, "Of Rocks and Apples and the Disappearance of 20-Game Winners." Murray Chass investigates the mystery of the first-ever full-length baseball season without any twenty-game-winning pitchers, with penetrating analysis like, "Gone are the days, as recently as in the mid-1970s, when pitchers worked 300 innings a season, started every fourth day, and often finished what they started." Note the moral judgment implied in that wording—what kind of man doesn't finish what he starts?

Which expert does he quote in depth? Third-base coach Rich Donnelly, who relates, "I was raised in an alley. They would deliver coal for the furnaces, and waste would come out and there would be a clinker, a rock. We had rock fights all the time. These guys never had an apple fight or a rock fight in their life. I'll bet all the no-parking signs in their neighborhoods are clean." Chass adds, "And they don't win 20 games."

Donnelly also says, "It used to be if you're tired, you're coming out. Now you get around 100 [pitches], you're coming out ... I think everybody is overprotective." Sadly, Donnelly and his ignorance coach for the Dodgers. At least he's not a pitching coach, though. Yankee pitching coach and former star pitcher Ron Guidry: "I don't know if there are as many quality guys as you used to have ...." (Guidry was a very good pitcher, with one great season at age 27, and a sharp decline in his last three seasons, retiring at age 37 in 1988. I guess he ran out of quality.)

Stephen Jay Gould wrote the book on this argument, Full House. He convincingly argues that the decline of statistical high outliers in the major league baseball population proves that the quality of competition is increasing, not decreasing: as everybody gets better, it's harder and harder to stand out. In the book he talks about .400 hitters, of which there haven't been any since 1941, but the argument applies as well to 20-game winners. One more bit of actual data for you: a chart of the best baseball pitchers in history, with currently active pitchers in bold. You will notice that two of the four best pitchers in history are still pitching (probably).

On the bright side, the same article quotes Curt Schilling, who seems to be one of the smartest guys in baseball: "I think there's a lot more good pitching in the game now." And the same section does have a fact-based article, No Reason to Use a Designated Hitter Who Doesn't Hit, which includes quotes such as "Had [the Mariners] instead acquired Branyan ... they probably would have added enough offense to win two or three more games this season, and saved $6.5 million." If only the Times baseball writers would read their own paper. Or be expected to base their opinions in reality. (Of course, David Brooks and many other Times opinion writes fail that standard as well....)

On page B4, in a review of a book on Andrew Carnegie, John Steele Gordon writes:

Highly readable despite it's length...

This comes on the same day that they announce increases in home subscription costs. Obligatory: Let's hope they'll use the extra money to hire some copy editors.

Here is a short list of computer programs that think they are operating systems, but would better serve all concerned if they knocked it off:

• Oracle
• Java
• emacs

Several years ago, as I was coming up on ten years of experience in project management, I decided to obtain professional certification. My reasons included a desire for professional growth, to interact with peers, to receive and in turn transmit knowledge, building contacts, and of course the cynical potential of personal gain. A bit of research confirmed that the Project Management Institute, which I'd heard of before, remained the 800 pound gorilla of the field. They offer the "Project Management Professional" credential, or PMP, which requires a college degree, 4500 hours and 36 months of project management experience, 35 hours of classroom training, and passing an exam.

In a series of upcoming posts, I will describe my experience with the PMP in detail. I will try to answer questions such as, Is the PMP helpful for employers? Is the PMP helpful for project managers? How practical is the knowledge covered in the PMP exam? How hard is the PMP exam? How well does the PMP satisfy its goal to "advance the project management profession and to recognize the achievements of individuals"? How well does PMI "promote a unifying influence in the advancement of Project Management"?

To start things off here in part 1, I'll summarize the controversy I saw surrounding the new exam released in 2005 with the Third Edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge guide, or PMBOK.

---

I started thinking about getting a PMP in late 2004, but didn't do much research until early 2005. I discovered that a new version of the exam would be rolled out in September 2005. But before you can take the exam, you have to have 35 classroom hours. One option was to take a class at one of the local universities. San Diego State University and University of California San Diego both offer PMP programs, which are one or two-year affairs with a total cost in the range of $5,000 to $10,000. However, you can take a single class and pay in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars. But, it turns out that the San Diego Chapter of PMI offers specific Exam Prep classes that provide the required number of hours. And, because they are taught by volunteers who are themselves PMPs (seeking the 60 Professional Development Units, or PDUs, that PMPs must accumulate every three years to maintain certification), the classes cost only about $400.

The summer classes coincided with my annual July Vancouver vacation, which ended the chance of taking the old version of the exam. So I signed up for the fall class, six full-day Saturdays in a row, and after completing the classes registered to take the new exam in early 2006. During the class, many students were quite nervous about the new exam, and I found out why: The previous exam required 141 correct out of 200 questions, or 70%. The new exam still had 200 questions, and still required 141 correct, but 25 of the questions would be present solely for "testing the test", and would not count towards correct answers. So, on October 1, 2005, not only did all the questions change from "second edition" to "third edition", but the passing score rose from 70% to 81%.

Rumors passed around class included that the summer classes had forty or fifty people (we had about 12 regulars), that all available test slots in the San Diego area had been booked for months before the cutoff date, and that some students had flown to Nebraska and other underpopulated mid-West states solely to be able to take the old exam before the cutoff. The instructors said that this was part of an effort by PMI to "raise the bar" for new PMPs and make sure the credential didn't get diluted. As the class continued into OCtober, I heard more rumors, both from within class and without, that the percentage of test-takers passing the test on the first try was plummeting from 70%+ to 40% or even lower. (The test costs $405 (for members of PMI, itself a $119/yr cost, plus $10 for application and $30 for the local chapter), and $275 for re-takes.)

Eventually, I received an PMI email—not from PMI, but forwarded from an early test-taker:

...Before offering the new examination, PMI assembled a group of volunteers to help establish the passing score. Using a method known as the "Modified Angoff Technique" (a proven exam development method), a group of global PMPs in the summer of 2005 assessed each test question and independently evaluated the questions to determine their difficulty level. Their responses were then sent to PMI's psychometric (exam development) experts and averaged. From that information, PMI?s psychometricians recommended that PMI adopt a passing point of 81 percent (141 correct questions).

... After performing a statistical analysis of [actual test results], PMI and its independent psychometricians were able to make conclusions about the performance of questions as well as candidate performance ... PMI revised the passing score for the exam to 61 percent (106 correct questions). PMI then applied the new passing score to all examinations taken since 30 September 2005 by candidates who sat for the new exam. PMI is in the process of updating the candidates' records.

While we remain extremely sensitive to candidate and trainer concerns about such a change in the passing score, these considerations must be weighed in context of the overall purpose of the exam: to provide a consistent global standard that all practitioners must meet to ensure the credential is awarded to qualified individuals. ...

PMI understands that the changes to the exam and its passing score raise
numerous questions. ...

—forwarded email from Drew Ihlenfeld, PMI

It's hard to see such a drastic rescoring of the exam as anything other than a major failure of the exam development process. Of course, the retroactive rescoring effectively corrects the problem, but that's after-the-fact quality control, and it means that their before-the-fact quality assurance failed. And it doesn't address the wear and tear on PMP applicants, both those that were temporary failures and all of us in the months before and after the transition that had to make decisions in an atmosphere of uncertainty. For example, the email was dated 30 November, but it was weeks later before anything about it was posted on the website.

In the event, my classmates and I were very relieved to learn of the change in scoring, and I finally took and passed the exam on April 1, 2006 with a score in the high 70s. Nonetheless, I was somewhat bemused to recently read PMI's version of the fiasco in the 2005 annual report:

As part of best practices for exam development, PMI proactively reviewed data collected on the revised Project Management Professional (PMP) certification examination.

Driven by a role delineation study identifying volunteer-credentialed practitioner recommendations on how the skill sets for a PMP had evolved, PMI conducted this evaluation and revision based on the Institute's desire to accurately provide a consistent global standard that ensures the credential is awarded to qualified individuals, and meets the needs of PMI's stakeholders. Specifically, the attributes to "lead" and "direct" were identified as key elements of a more mature PMP.

PMI utilized proven examination development methods in revising the PMP examination, and conducted all appropriate due diligence to assess the applicability and difficulty of each test question as determine the overall percentage passing point.

Quality control measures implemented prior to and following the exam launch data indicate the exam is functioning as designed, including the fact that no inaccuracies in scoring and no malfunctions in the test's administration or its translations have occurred.

—PMI 2005 Annual report, p 23-24

I've been a long-time holdout from cell phones. This is partly because I don't like phones in general. I don't like being bugged by other people, especially if they have been hired to sell me something, and doubly especially if they have been trained to lie about whether or not they are trying to sell me something, and therefore I don't see much benefit in greatly broadening the scope in which other people can bug me.

And the other part of my resistance is that cell phone companies are demonstrably evil. Certainly, this is only low-grade, petty larcency species of evil, more like a meth addict than a murderer, but I harbor a superstition that if I sign a contract and thereby enter into a "relationship" with a cell phone company, I'll probably wake up one day to find my stereo missing. (And in fact, in my last, abortive foray into cell phone territory, I paid $35 to learn that one carrier didn't work well where I lived, and over a hundred dollars for a few hours' call time on a phone that I returned within the grace period. I think I still have a balance of a few dollars with them, but without an open account I can't log in to pay it or dispute it.)

Cell phone companies, and the people who work at them, are evil in the banal way of Oracle salespeople, or Sony's Electronics division President Ken Kutaragi: they think that you should simply give them all of your money, and when you object, they honestly can't understand why.

So I tend to be incommunicado when I'm out and about, and that suits me well: when I'm not sitting at my desk, I generally don't want to call or be called anyway. And although I favor email over phones for many purposes and reasons, I also don't want a Blackberry; when I'm eating out, or riding my bicycle to the beach, or walking around the park, or seeing a movie, I just don't want to be in contact.

But I'm not so divorced from reality as to deny the utility of cell phones. When you're waiting for someone at the wrong restaurant, or contemplating a bent bicycle wheel on an isolated stretch of road, or wondering which movie theater to go to, a little remote contact isn't such a bad thing. And the other day, I had a conference call scheduled to begin at the same time I would be switching trains.

With several trips planned this summer, I decided to make a concession to convenience. I bought a "Virgin Mobile" prepaid cell phone. I picked it from three competing models because the service plans all seemed equally bad but Virgin had a cheaper phone ($30).

What I learned trying to activate the phone with the $20 prepaid card I also bought is that cell phone companies are pathologically averse to letting you use their precious networks without a close, personal relationship between their billing system and your bank account. When you activate the phone on their web site, you get a big, cluttered page about how to sign up with your credit card, and an itty bitty link to proceed if you have a prepaid minutes card. When the web site crashed and I had to call to finish activation, I had to twice decline to provide my credit card number, and the lady got fairly terse with me before we were done. And the terms of service are that you must add twenty dollars every three months (not maintain a $20 balance) or the phone goes inactive. Two months after that, all prepaid minutes expire and you must pay to reactivate it.

So I have a phone that costs twenty-five cents a minute (dropping to ten after ten minutes), presumably charges the same to receive phone calls, appears to round up seconds to the next minute, charges to access voicemail, and blackmails you to keep adding money. Great.

So my plan to use a cell phone without being infected by its evils:

1. Spend ten minutes to go through all of the menus (twice) and turn off every feature that may possibly make ring or otherwise make noise. Even so, it still chirps, loudly, if turned on or off while charging.
2. Pay an extra $2/mo to my regular phone company to redirect my home phone to the cell phone while I am travelling, so that I don't have to participate in cell phone culture to the extent of distributing a "mobile number."
3. When I'm not travelling, I'll remove the battery, throw the devil machine into a dark hole, and perform the appropriate cleansing rituals, such as waving a dead tofurky over my head and donating money to the EFF.

If my next entry is sent in from my phone, you'll know my plan failed and all is lost.

In my current project, I work with a lot of users who are very good at what they do (essentially social work on a hotline), but not especially technically inclined. To the extent that they can be trained to file high-quality bug reports that developers can act on directly, the project benefits. I often step in to rewrite the subject (for example, from "another big bug!" to "search in zip code 91101 returns fewer than expected results"), adjust the priority, or otherwise touch things up. But the users are doing a great job, and probably under five percent of bugs require conversations to clarify.

The key principle in a good bug report is that you have to provide all of the information necessary to reproduce the bug. Corollary to that, you have to have a good sense of what is germane and what is extraneous. Usually it doesn't matter that you encountered the bug on a Tuesday, but every now and then that might be the key to fixing the bug.

The third point I want to make is that one very exciting aspect of open-source projects is that the bug database is in full public view. Every piece of software has bugs, but in an open-source system you can often get the bugs that matter to you fixed sooner if you file good bug reports, make it easy to diagnose and fix the bug, and generally are nice and helpful to the developers. I've had paid Intel developers put in hours fixing a bug in the linux driver for my wireless card; I'm not a big corporate customer, but I was willing to jump through a few hoops for them as they diagnosed the problem. Sure, Intel gets my services as a tester for free, but I get personal bugfixing service that would cost hundreds of dollars otherwise.

With all that as context, check out this bug report from Firefox, an excellent example of how to use "Steps to Reproduce":

1. Create 2 unique user accounts (for steps sake, let's call 
   the two accounts Joe and Mary) in Windows XP Home.
2. Logout and sign-in under Joe.
3. Open Firefox and go to an e-mail site or to jdate.com or wherever.
4. Attempt to log-in to the site so that Firefox will ask 
   whether or not you want your password saved.
5. Choose not to save the password.
6. After successfully logging in and having selected the
   "never save password" option, logout.
7. Log-in as Mary and open Firefox.
8. Browse, browse, browse... but you don't really have to. 
   Just go to "View Saved Passwords," click on the tab that 
   will show you sites to never save passwords for, and you'll 
   see whatever painful site Joe denied to save a password for.
9. Break-up with fiancé.

In an uncharacteristic burst of non-stupidity, the Department of Homeland Security wants to allow small blades back on airplanes. Naturally, this causes consternation among people who don't understand what security means:

"It's not about scissors, it's about bombs," Mr. Hawley testified. "Sorting through thousands of bags a day at two or three minutes apiece to sort out small scissors and tools does not help security. It hurts it."

Weighing the risk of small scissors and tools against that of bombs, he said, "If you do the analysis, it is not even close."

But the committee chairman, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, said he found that logic "difficult to follow." Mr. Stevens proposed instead that the security agency reduce the number of bags that passengers may carry on board to one from two, giving the screeners fewer items to handle.

You will note two problems with Stevens' response. One is that he finds fairly rudimentary logic—should airplane security spend limited resources on bombs or on scissors?—hard to follow. The second is a more subtle but very common mistake. For a resource to be secure, not only must unauthorized not be able to access it, but authorized people must be able to access it. If it's "secure" even from the person who's supposed to use it, it's not really secure. Denial of service is a security attack. Self-inflicted denial of service is probably the biggest security attack in the world: think about the times you've lost your keys or forgotten your passwords. Stevens' solution allows screeners to check for both scissors and bombs (one of those two checks is worthless), but prevents passengers from having two carryons. Carry-ons are part of the service; fewer carry-ons amounts to a denial of service. Thanks, Ted. Though I guess in his world we are all driving across his bridges rather than flying in planes.

The only other senator at the hearing, Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, said; "I could understand if some man or woman would want to bring on a knitting needle. I've seen a lot of ladies knitting. But I've yet to see someone cut paper dolls on the plane."

Perhaps Inouye stays in a private curtained booth, and is unfamiliar with the Swiss Army knife and Leatherman. And he probably hasn't seen this.

In other, similarly themed news:

[San Jose] officials said Thursday they were shocked to learn that Emerald Hills Golfland, a three-acre theme park with two miniature golf courses, had been placed on a Homeland Security watch list.

"The moment we realized it was on the list, it was taken off," said San Jose police officer Rubens Dalaison, who handles "critical infrastructure assessment" for the department. "I myself took it off."

But the list remains secret, and even San Jose Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, who is the ranking minority member of a House subcommittee on terrorism risk assessment, said she did not know whether it is still listed. —Associated Press

The story of Er and Onan, among others, with Lego illustrations. Warning: contains Lego nudity.

What if our fiscally clueless president really does keep spending at a rate that far exceeds what our government can take in at these low tax rates? What happens if the president's acolytes and the Pollyannas in Treasury keep believing that we can grow our way, fairy-tale-like, out of this jam? You can bet that when you cash out your nest egg of nice U.S.-based mutual funds and solid common stocks, your dollars will fit nicely into a wheelbarrow designed specifically to cart worthless currency to the bank.

Or you can take matters into your own hands and build a portfolio around these five imminent-Bush-disaster stocks. Be the first on your block to immunize yourself against what may turn out to be the most financially reckless president in history with these anti-inflation equities designed to profit from our president's unbelievably foolish Panglossian profligacy.

—New York magazine

I've been trying to take a Chinese class for a while. This spring I noticed a language school downtown, less than a mile from my apartment, so I called and found out that, while they don't usually have Mandarin classes (mostly they teach English), they had a recent burst of interest and I might be the necessary fourth person in a new class.

Three months of intermittently returned phone calls later, as fall classes loomed at the local schools, I started looking around. San Diego State University and UC San Diego offer Chinese classes daily. SDSU's runs from noon to 12:50. Either involves at least an hour of bicycling each way; neither route is especially appealing, nor is the idea of travelling over two hours a day for less than one hour of class. Mesa College, a community college, is only 7 miles away and offers twice-a-week classes from 6:30 pm to 8:50 pm.

I almost rejected the idea, not wanting to spend hours a week on my bicycle going to and from class. Then I realized that the concept of rejected the commuting and class time in order to keep my schedule clear was incompatible with my key goals for this year: learning Chinese and exercising more. So I rode over to the college to drop off a signed enrollment form and try out the ride. Mesa College, oddly enough, is on a mesa. The problem is that I live on a different mesa. So it's uphill both ways, but still only a 35 minute ride, reasonably free of nasty traffic.

I ended up having to do some faxing as part of my enrollment. I don't have a FAX machine, and I didn't feel like running over to Kinko's, so I signed up for an online fax program. I actually did this months ago; first I tried to get Yahoo's fax service, but after a deranged amount of trouble trying to recover my secure password I gave up and went with eFax because they were at the top of the search results. I never actually used it that time, and forgot to cancel, and so they made off with $13/month for two months of nothing.

This time I looked at a longer list, and tried Innoport. After signing up, I got an email saying that it would take between a few minutes and a day to verify my information and open my account. I waited half an hour and, when nothing happened, wrote an email back asking them to cancel the signup. Then I signed up with efax, which took about a minute, uploaded a document, and faxed it. No problem.

When I got a fax back the next day, problems started. After flailing around for a few minutes, I figured out how to download the fax. As a .efx file, which is apparently a proprietary format of eFax. Which requires a Windows-only program to decode. Not cool. I was in a rush, so I fired up the Windows partition on my laptop, installed the software, and managed to extract my fax.

The next day, I was done with my faxing needs for the time being, so I went to cancel my eFax account. This is when it got ugly. There are no links to cancel from the eFax pages; I had to search for "cancel" to discover that you have to have an online chat with a customer service drone in order to cancel. This is when I remembered going through this the first time and started hitting myself on the head. Excerpts from the chat:

jaufrec: Hello. I would like to cancel my eFax account ...
Dennis Godair: Thank you for the information. I am sorry to hear that you wish to cancel. May I ask why you are cancelling your fax account?
jaufrec: because you require a windows client to view faxes
jaufrec: and because your cancel process is unnecessarily difficult
Dennis Godair: we have an exclusive offer for you. If you wish to keep this account, then you can avail a one time offer on this account. You can keep this account at a nominal non refundable rate of $6.95 for the next 90 days instead of paying $12.95 every month, as such saving $31.89 over a period of 90 days.
jaufrec: please cancel my account
Dennis Godair: I surely understand your decision to cancel, but, this is a very good offer and you will be paying around only $2.31 per month as monthly fee during this period. You will need to contact us just once by the end of this period to let us know whether you wish to continue or not. There is certainly no obligation to stay back after this period if you do not wish to.
jaufrec: please cancel my account
jaufrec: is there actually a human being present?
Dennis Godair: Okay. I will cancel your account with immediate effect.
Dennis Godair: I'm sorry that you are leaving eFax. At eFax, we are continuously improving our products and services. Please do consider us if your faxing needs should change in the future.

So much for eFax. Meanwhile, a full eight days after I aborted my signup for Innoport, I got this email:

After further review, we have determined that we will have to decline activation for this innoport account with the billing information provided during the sign up process. Please be advised that the credit card entered has not been charged. [...]

So, obviously, a big thumbs down and avoid-at-all-costs warning for both eFax and Innoport. Innoport in particular was so bad and weird that I am keeping an eye on my bank statement in case they are just a front for identify theft or something. eFax I'm thinking is just maliciously greedy and stupid.

1. It's a criminal affair with no significant implications, and so it's none of our business
2. It's celebrity gossip and so it's none of our business

The San Diego Union-Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times all had Jackson headlines above the fold. Only the Wall Street Journal had a respectable front page.

I'm all for the EU constitution, because I'm all for the EU, because I'm all for mind-numbing bureaucracy instead of continuous warfare with industrial technology. But the charge that there's something fishy about any document which begins, "HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF THE BELGIANS" is hard to refute.

Skim past the preamble, though, and it only gets better.

Article I-1: Establishment of the Union

1. Reflecting the will of the citizens and States of Europe to build a common future, this Constitution establishes the European Union, on which the Member States confer competences to attain objectives they have in common. The Union shall coordinate the policies by which the Member States aim to achieve these objectives, and shall exercise in the Community way the competences they confer on it.

Still and all, I think the US constitution holds up pretty well:

Article. I. Section 1. All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Larry McVoy is a software developer who has had a mixed relationship with the open-source world. Here he's interviewed by Forbes magazine, and the fallacies are fast and furious. What's especially amusing is that it's hard to differentiate McVoy's fallacies from Forbes'. Which of these two statements is a quote from McVoy, and which is prose by journalist Daniel Lyons?

One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you are giving customers crap--because if you give them software that works, what is the point of service?

Open source products typically are distributed free, since it's pretty much impossible to charge money for something that anyone can copy.

The first fallacy in the first quote is that the only role of software service is to compensate for quality flaws in the original product. This ignores, primarily, customization, but also training, installation, upgrading, and other services. The second fallacy is to imply that good software should not require any service; in other words, it should be completely bug-free, not have any security errors, not rely on any other software that may in turn have bugs or security flaws, be automatically and risklessly upgradeable, be so usable as to not require any training, etc etc.

The first fallacy in the second quote is that open source software is distributed free because it's impossible to charge for it. In my experience in a number of OS projects, the software is open-sourced because the authors want to give it away for free. This is precisely opposite causality to the quote. The second fallacy is that it's impossible to charge money for open source. Even though you can get exactly the same code for free, Red Hat still sold US$151 million worth of free software in 2004. That's distinct from the $45 million in services revenue for the same year.

The first quote is McVoy, the second is the article's author. It surely doesn't reflect well on Forbes that I can read financial statements better than they can.

Wow. Cardinal Ratzinger becomes Pope Benedict XVI. I know he was spoken of frequently as a possible, even one of the most likely successors to John Paul II. But I'm still a bit stunned to see it.—Josh Marshall

"NOBODY expects the German Inquisition!"[1] [2]

[1]: "Ratzinger's stern leadership of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the modern successor to the Inquisition, delighted conservative Catholics ..." — Reuters

[2]: "NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again." — Monty Python

I received a flyer for the St. Patrick's Day parade. This is a downside of living across the street from the park: the parade goes right by, and streets are closed in a rectangle two blocks wide and fourteen blocks long. After the parade there is "a huge free festival" and a "children's ride and entertainment center." I plan to spend the day elsewhere. I mentioned the festivities to an Irishman, who said, "the coming of Christianity to Ireland should be a reason to mourn rather than celebrate."

After vehemently disagreeing with just about everything I've read on Instapundit, typically because it was disingenuous partisan material, I was very happily suprised to be pointed (from the leftist Talking Points Memo's Special Bankruptcy Bill Edition) to an Instapundit post I completely agree with:

I assume that the Bush Administration is supporting this legislation, but I really don't see it as consistent with "compassionate conservatism." I see it, in fact, as consistent with the worst stereotypes about corporate-friendly Republicanism.

—Instapundit

He further quotes approvingly:

"If the blogosphere could mount an effective campaign for people to write to their senators, it would mark its emergence as a genuinely independent force in US politics." — Jim Bennett (Instapundit)

So one force that can unite the left and the right in American online political commentary is the aggressively greedy credit card companies. Well, if it starts here, and continues through opposition to other un-partisan villains (let me propose cable companies, spammers, virus writers, and possibly insurance companies, HMOs, and pharmaceuticals), maybe we can narrow the partisan gap a bit. Too bad the bankruptcy bill already passed all substantive hurdles.

Don't put your iPod shuffle in shuffle mode when listening to murder mysteries.

Mar 2, 2005
11:50 P.M.: CN, BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED
10:14 P.M.: SHANGHAI, CN, DEPARTURE SCAN
2:54 P.M.: SHANGHAI, CN, EXPORT SCAN
12:37 P.M.: ANCHORAGE, AK, US, ARRIVAL SCAN
9:48 A.M.: SHANGHAI, CN, ORIGIN SCAN

I just ordered a new IBM laptop. I did this because my old IBM laptop is slow and heavy. It was a year old when I bought it used, two years ago. Actually, it's not even the same laptop. The screen on my Thinkpad A20m was glitchy, and it finally went almost full-time on the fritz last year in Copenhagen. I swapped its hard drive with Lars' unused Thinkpad A21m, so it's only the same laptop in spirit, not in fact. It works generally pretty well, but has a few problems: hibernate has never really worked; startup takes about 5 minutes, including KDE, and starting new applications can take quite a while. Once an application is running, however, it's perfectly responsive, so the irritation is intermittent, not constant. Battery life is poor, so it's more of a portable computer than a mobile computer. Continued dismay with this state of affairs, plus the realization that my travelling bicycle load (clothes, computer, a book, a lock) is 35 pounds, and an upcoming international trip, led me to finally promote the new laptop from the wishlist to the reality list.

I got a Thinkpad before because of the reputedly excellent linux support. In practice, it's not awful, but it's not excellent either. The quality of the machine was generally good, except for the video screen that went on the fritz, but I did buy used over eBay. IBM's eraserhead pointers are excellent, and I cannot stand the touchpads. So I settled on a new X40 fairly quickly, and it is at this point that our mini-saga begins.

Ordering over the internet on a Sunday went fine, but I didn't get an email receipt. I called Monday, was on hold for maybe five minutes, and then talked to a very nice person who explained that the machine was back-ordered 10 business days, and the wireless card I had specified 20. When I explained that I had only picked that wireless card out of the four choices (three, because two choices had identical text) because it was the only one with a model number, allowing me to verify linux compatibility. "Intel Wireless Card" is not helpful to a linux user. He got a nice technician on the line, who said that he had exactly what I wanted already in stock ("except - you sound like a savvy guy. Can you - " "yes, throw the extra memory in the box and I can install it myself."). I mentioned that I never got an email, and that the order number I had retrieved out of my browser cache didn't work. He set me up with a correct order number, and made sure I got an email.

And the next day, Tuesday, I got another email. With a shipping date of April 5, over a month in the future. So I called again, waited 5 minutes again, and talked to a very nice lady who said that I should ignore that date, and that my computer would ship in five to seven business days. I said, "I noticed an offer on the web site to ship a computer the same day, if I order by 3 pm. It includes exactly the computer I want. Can I cancel this order and do that instead?" "No, sir. The shipping label was printed yesterday, so you cannot cancel your order. And that would not ship for one to three days anyway." "So where it says 'ships same day,' that's simply not true?" "Correct."

Great. I did read the fine print, and it says that IBM will ship the same day the order is completed, and completing an order includes, in their definition, processing the credit card, which takes one to three business days.

Then I got a few more emails, and a UPS tracking number, with which I have been eagerly following the progress of my new hardware. (It's mine, I figure, because my credit card was charged Tuesday.) Today my RAM arrived, and some shipping information for the rest materialized on UPS's website. As you can see above, UPS isn't especially careful with time zones or date lines.

So this seems to be pretty much the inverse of Dell. The product is, I assume, excellent, but the ordering process is third-rate. Specifically:

• The order status page uses more warehouse language than user language. My order is for a "** EXP X40 INTEL PENTIUM M LV 1.4 12" XGA 256 40 802 BG" and "RECYCLE FEE FOR PRODUCT WITH 4 TO 14 INCH DISPLAY". There is no link to show any more information about the product I ordered; I would have to go back to the ordering screens and try to match the part number. I didn't even realize that the laptop doesn't have a DVD drive (it's only 2.9 pounds, so I guess they cut these things at that price range. Hopefully I'll be able to install linux from a USB device. And you know, I was just thinking yesterday that after putting a whole audiobook (The Little Yellow Dog, Walter Mosley), three CDs, and a bunch of Salon member-only downloads onto my new iPod Shuffle, I still had 100 mb or more to spare. Fortune smiles, I guess.
• Every date estimate I've gotten has been wrong one way or the other. Better that the reality is early instead of late, but accuracy would be nice.
• It was never clear when I would actually be charged.

Aside from that, it's going smoothly and I'm excited.