Jeber’s

Not going postal

Last week I had several pieces of mail that I wanted to be picked up by the mailman. I did what I’ve done thousands of times before, what I’m sure many of you would have done. I put it in the mailbox in front of my house and put up the little red flag that indicates there’s mail in the box.

The next day my mail was still in the box and the flag was still up.

Since this was the third time this year that my outgoing mail was ignored by my postal carrier, I tried to call the local post office to complain. It seems they don’t answer their phone, and for obvious reasons they don’t have an email address. So I called the office of the San Diego postmaster and filed a complaint with him.

Today I had a message on my phone from the office of the postmaster. Finally I’d have an explanation, justice would be served. Well, maybe not.

I was told that mail pickup is a courtesy. All the mail carrier is required to do is deliver mail. The postmaster informed me that if I wanted to be sure my mail was indeed mailed, I needed to deposit it in an official USPS mailbox.

The United States Postal Service “Residential Mailbox Standards” state;

You need to contact your local Post Office before moving your mailbox or mailbox support, because your mailbox needs to be approved by the Postal Service. Your postmaster will approve custom-made mailboxes on a one-time basis as long as they generally meet USPS standards.

Image via Wikipedia

This is because legally your mailbox, the minute you plant it in the ground, belongs to the USPS. Doesn’t that make your mailbox an official USPS mailbox? As such, shouldn’t it have the same standing as the cookie-monster shaped boxes disappearing from neighborhoods all over America?

This is the same USPS that seems to need an increase in rates almost every year, the same USPS that wants to eliminate Saturday delivery, the same USPS that cries over the fact that email is killing its business.

Well, my dear USPS, email is killing your business because it works and you don’t.

I can send email for free. I can send an email instantly any time of day or night and any day of the week, weekends, too. I can send an email from anywhere I have an internet connection. I can send a card via email. I don’t have to buy stamps or find a mailbox. I don’t even have to own a computer to send email, I can use the computers at the library. I can send email from my computer without you being able to suddenly appropriate my computer as your property. I can move my computer anywhere I want without your approval. What I can’t send by email I can send via UPS or FED-EX far more easily than I can send it through the USPS.

The USPS is to the advent of email what the buggy industry was to the advent of the auto industry.  Its methods are outdated and its benefits overshadowed by modern technology. The long history of bailouts of the USPS by the government puts the GM bailout to shame. The days of hand-carried mail by a postal worker are over. It’s a service that has died but remains unaware of its own decaying corpse. It’s no more necessary today than the Pony Express.

Let’s bury this outdated and inefficient service now before its financial difficulties and poor service cause it to become even more irrelevant than it already is.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Stu Bykofsky: Franklin would be ashamed of the post office (philly.com)
• End mail delivery? (geneveith.com)
• How Postal Rate Hikes Foretell America’s Future (money.usnews.com)
• USPS Considering Stamp Price Increase (bargaineering.com)
• Rep. Edolphus Towns: The Postal Service’s Fiscal Crisis and Future Viability (huffingtonpost.com)
• Why a Monopoly on Mail Delivery? (lewrockwell.com)

Internet all a-Twitter

Poor Twitter.

Twitter gets raves when it proves to be useful and efficient but suffers predictions of its imminent demise when it’s used inappropriately. Reminds me of what Craigslist is going through. Read the headlines:

Swine flu creates controversy on Twitter

Some observers say Twitter — a micro-blogging site where users post 140-character messages — has become a hotbed of unnecessary hype and misinformation about the outbreak, which is thought to have claimed more than 100 lives in Mexico.

Swine Flu Misinformation Runs Rampant on Twitter

Still, mass hysteria and paranoia — with voices wailing over an ‘epidemic’ — continue to sweep the Net, especially Twitter.

It appears there’s confusion over the difference between a means of communication and the communications themselves.

Twitter is one medium among many that facilitate human communication. The internet is a free country, in a free country open communication is encouraged. While the methods used to communicate may differ in the degree of communications they permit, the means of communication do not dictate the substance of the communications. Twitter limits the conversation to less than 140 characters but it doesn’t guarantee the quality of the conversations one reads there. Perhaps there’s so much misinformation being spread around on Twitter because too many people are following those who spread it. If you walk too close behind the guy shoveling manure don’t complain when you get shit on your shoes.

Twitter has nothing to apologize for, has no reason to feel guilty or responsible for any hysteria about swine flu or any of the other thousands of inane and useless conversations going on at this very minute on its service.

There is a bit of a bright note to all this, though. The fact that the national media can casually toss off “Twitter” and “Craigslist” without feeling the need to go into much explanation shows just how common the knowledge of those two services has become to our society. It’s a sort of validation. They’ve joined the ranks of Google and AOL. There’s a difference, though. Increased awareness of Craigslist, eBay and Amazon means increased profits to someone, usually several someones. Increased awareness of Twitter doesn’t benefit anyone at the moment. In fact, increased awareness can also attract the lower lifeforms on the web. Spamming and spoofing are sure to increase on Twitter. The value of the experience will lessen for many users. “There goes the neighborhood” will be implied though not often explicitly stated.

Still, it would be nice if now and then the mass media and some bloggers would stop blaming the medium for the message.

Oh mighty ‘bama, where is thy transparency?

Politically and socially I’m moderate to liberal in my general outlook on life. I’m not so liberal as to have joined the Church of Saint Obama, though McCain was a poor alternative, I thought. Too much was being expected of Obama, and he didn’t do much to bring expectations back down to earth. He was aware of his cult status, his deification.

One of the promises made early and often by the president was transparency in government. That was perhaps the most dramatic and audacious guarantee he made us early on. After the last eight years many of us welcomed the idea of a more visible process. If we’re being asked to pay the bills, we ought to be able to know where the money’s going.

And Obama told us we would see his government working. He was going to make Washington a transparent town.

It appears he may have just broken that promise. How else are we to interpret the following but to conclude it’s business as usual, sadly.

How could this happen?

Image via Wikipedia

We were asked to give him a pass on two aspects of his life. To support Obama was to willingly ignore the fact that he was a lawyer and a politician. He may have sounded refreshing, but the substance of Obama is deeply influenced by his love for the law on the federal level. He is a politician and a lawyer, just like Bush was a politician and a lawyer and like Nixon was a politician and a lawyer. Just like Lincoln was a politician and a lawyer.

I can only conclude that the following is an indication of that reality.

There are number of outstanding Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for key documents, by groups like EFF, Public Knowledge, and KEI. In one of our FOIA requests, we asked for 7 specific documents, referenced by the exact title and date of the documents. These documents are the proposals for the text of the agreement.

The texts are available to the Japanese government. They are available to the 27 member states of the European Union. They are available to the governments of Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia. They are available to Morocco, and many other countries. They are available to “cleared” advisers (mostly well connected lobbyists) for the pharmaceutical, software, entertainment and publishing industries. But they are a secret from you, the public.

Today we received this letter from the White House, Office of the United States Trade Representative. Our FOIA request was denied on the grounds that the documents are “information that is properly classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958.”

Here is a link to a PDF of the denial of the FOIA request.  (Source: huffingtonpost.com)

Obama, day .5

It’s been a reality for half a day now, Obama is president. He wasn’t elevated to sainthood. He is not the chosen one of god to lead us into the promised land nor is he the anti-christ. He’s a guy. A smart (being learned is not a crime or sin), articulate, deliberate, former lawyer and educator, guy. We’ve also seen that he’s a professional politician. He knows how the game’s played. He’s no Jimmy Stewart, no Mr. Smith. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We expect a CEO to know how a company runs and what has to be done to accomplish the company’s goals.

At this point I’ll say he was a success if he just manages to keep things from getting any worse over the next 4 years. He cannot treat any problem before us as “business as usual”.

The economy isn’t just bad, we’ve seen how the system can be played and we will be far more hesitant to trust others with our money in the future. The weaknesses and potential for abuse of capitalism have been made clear. We are going to have to rebuild the economy while at the same time redesigning capitalism.

Not much different in foreign relations. We face an enemy both physical and economic. If we carelessly attempt to destroy terrorists at all costs, we risk not only destroying our economy but could destroy the country we’re trying to save. We need to not do the terrorist’s job for them.

Obama’s on a tightrope, and when you’re first learning to walk one, simply not falling off is a big accomplishment at the start.

When social networks are one-way streets

Social networks are the latest rage on the internet among the technorati. I’ve joined several; Plurk, identi.ca, Popego, nearly all in beta or early development. The two I enjoy and use the most are Friendfeed and Twitter. These services are used by the people I follow the most, technology insiders like Chris Pirillo, Robert Scoble, Louis Gray, Dave Winer and Leo Laporte, to name just a few. Every day they post comments I like and comment on. But this is primarily a one-way street. The posts I make are rarely liked or commented on by them, even though most of them subscribe to me.

The reason for this is that we inhabit two fundamentally different worlds of interest.

Most of these people are in their 20s and 30s and are employed in technology or closely related fields. As I said, they are techo-insiders; they either work for companies heavily invested in cutting-edge technology or they own a brand identified with that world.

My world is a bit different.

My introduction to bits and bytes was in the 1970s, when I enlisted in the Army and was privileged to be assigned to the National Security Agency as a member of the Army Security Agency. There are two primary types of people employed by the Agency, cryptographers and analysts. Cryptographers write and break codes. They are mathematical wizards, comparable to programmers in the software industry. I was an analyst. We took the decrypted intelligence and studied it for patterns and created estimates based on the data we collected. We didn’t break the codes. We tried to make the intelligence useful to our customers. I used a Cray supercomputer for my work and was trained in Fortran and Cobol even though neither was necessary for analysis.

Shortly after I left the Army I moved to Idaho and was uninvolved with technology for the next 13 years. Those years saw the birth of the internet and the development of the personal computer. I was only vaguely aware of all this. I still loved technology but I was totally out of the loop.

It was around 1997 that I once again found myself in San Diego and around those who were fascinated by this fairly new World Wide Web. I was quickly hooked and it wasn’t long before I bought a shiny new Gateway computer with a massive 500Mhz processor and a membership in AOL. I learned as much as I could about computers and in a couple of years I felt I knew enough to want to share what I’d picked up. I found Chris Pirillo’s newsletter and shortly after that his forum. At the same time I joined Scot Finnie’s forum, also based on technology. There I met people whose interests mirrored mine. They were building their own computers and sharing websites they found interesting and informative. While I had accumulated a reasonable amount of knowledge about hardware and computer security that I could pass along to those in the forum, I realized at heart I was still an analyst. My primary interest was in making sense of the various opinions I encountered. I would read and listen to those with more knowledge than I possessed then try to distill that wisdom into something comprehensible to those just getting started. I truly enjoyed being able to pass along esoteric knowledge to those in need, in a form they could easily grasp. In a way I was performing the same function in the world of technology that a priest plays in the world of theology. I was taking obscure wisdom and attempting to make it intelligible to the common man. But where a priest is deeply involved in the world of theology, in the world of technology I was still an outsider. I had an opportunity to listen to those on the inside, but I was not a member of the club.

Primarily through my association with Chris and Scot I’ve been allowed to eavesdrop on conversations I might otherwise have never been privy to. I’ve learned who the influential are. They are those who have worked at Microsoft since the early days, they own start-ups, they write software, they often determine what will become popular among the rest of us users and what will fail to attract attention. They write for industry magazines or have websites that constantly rank in the top 100 of influential sites.

I’m not one of them.

I’m an analyst, a writer. I enjoy writing humorous commentary. My primary focus is social, not technological. I want to make technology understandable to others less out of a love of technology than a deep concern for people. Where once I had wanted to become a priest to bring god to the masses, now I’m a priest of the internet. I want others to get as much out of this medium as I have. My websites are concerned with the social issues I believe are important to humanity. I espouse social reform and technology plays a major role in that.

As a result, my contributions to social networking sites are seldom noticed and rarely commented on. The movers and shakers are focused on technology, I’m focused on humanity. We live in two different worlds that occasionally overlap. Social networks, for me, are one-way streets. I try to make my voice heard above the chatter about the latest service, the newest shiny gadget. But my input is of little value. They know I’m not one of them. I’m an interested voyeur, a watcher, a listener. I’m a simple techno-priest among the internet gods. My understanding is far below theirs.

Still, I love the networks I inhabit. I enjoy my role, even when I post an insight that’s overlooked but widely commented on when repeated by one of the insiders. I’ve learned to accept my position as a guest in the technorati society. I hope others who often feel left out of the conversational flow in their favorite network take my tale as encouragement to stay involved, keep connected. What you learn is as important as what others might learn from you if they would only listen. We can all drive on this one-way street. Some of us just have to accept that this particular road isn’t leading toward our destination. It’s still a fun ride, though.

AIG execs, clueless or criminal?

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., described what investigators found during a hearing this morning on Capitol Hill:

After the bailout of AIG last month, the United States government effectively bought an 80% share in the company. That should have caused a fundamental change, you would think, in how the company was spending funds on compensation, bonuses and benefits.

But it doesn’t look like that’s what happened. The committee learned that shortly after the bailout went through, executives from AIG’s major U.S. life insurance subsidiary, AIG American General, held a week-long conference at an exclusive resort in California.

The resort is called the St. Regis Monarch Beach. … It’s very impressive. This is an exclusive resort. The rooms start, gentlemen, at $425 a night. Some are more than $1,200 a night.

… We contacted the resort where AIG held this week-long event, and we requested copies of AIG’s bills. We learned that AIG spent nearly $500,000 in a single week at the — at this hotel. Now, this was right after the bailout.

… Let me describe some of the — the charges that — that the shareholders who are now U.S. taxpayers had to pay. Check this out.

AIG spent $200,000 for hotel rooms, and almost $150,000 for catered banquets. AIG spent — listen to this one — $23,000 at the hotel spa and another $1,400 at the salon. They were getting their manicures, their facials, their pedicures and their massages while the American people were — were footing the bill.

And they spent another $10,000 for — I don’t know what this is — leisure dining. (”leisure dining” means they drank at a bar.)

If there was ever an apt illustration of the concept of unconscionable this is it. Unconscionable is variously defined as “brash, unprincipled, and conscienceless”, “greatly exceeding bounds of reason or moderation” and “unscrupulous and lacking principles or conscience; excessive, imprudent or unreasonable”. It’s all those things and borders on criminal.

My tax dollars were used in that bailout, as were yours. Our money was used, improperly and without our consent, by unauthorized personnel for personal gain. They partied on our dime. They exhibited contempt for those of us who have lost money due in part to their incompetence.

At the very least every person who enjoyed this vacation funded by us ought to never be employed in any capacity that doesn’t require them to ask, “would you like fries with that?” The best thing for them would be to spend a year or so in prison. If they think they are entitled to use the public’s money, let them use the part of my taxes that support the federal prison system.

On the web no one knows you’re …

In the July 5, 1993 issue of The New Yorker, a Peter Steiner cartoon revealed a truism.

The cartoon was funny, but the message it conveyed turned out to be one of the most valuable features of the internet.

Suddenly no one could judge you (with the implied and find you wanting) based on your age or gender or race. You could recreate yourself as an avatar of your mind. Everyone you ever met in cyberspace would only know the you that you allowed to be known, and nothing would be more the eYou than the words you used, the thoughts you typed out for us to read.

Those of us who for years have been humanists, believers in the basic decency of humanity, saw this next medium of communication as a real chance for people around the world to share their common humanity with anyone else with whom they could connect. It would no longer matter if you were a poor child in Vietnam or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The quality of your mind would be the leveler. Here was a means for people to get to know each other at a less superficial level than judging them by their age, gender or race. We were idealists.

“Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist” George Carlin

There’s talk around the internets about racism again. Many of us have spent years objecting to and rallying against racism. The internet gave us a reason to hope racism would quickly disappear from the mind-pool. Once race was no longer obvious or easily discerned, it would cease being of any importance. We further hoped this race-ignorant attitude would speedily spread throughout the real world. We may have been overly optimistic.

Louis Gray has written up the latest chapter in this sad saga on his blog, LouisGray.com. If you want to delve deeper into this situation, check out the conversations on Friendfeed.

It’s good that these conversations are taking place. Racism, like sexism, shouldn’t be allowed to avoid scrutiny. Those of us who find racism ignorant need to speak out against its infection of the internet. The racists should be held accountable for their attitudes.

Freedom of speech? I’m all for it. Being held responsible for the attitudes you espouse? I insist on it.

The internet still has the potential to help humanity evolve to the next level. We can leave behind our less-than-noble fears and superstitions (the breeding ground for racism) and let the internet guide our real lives. See others for who they are, not what they are.

The alternative isn’t good.

Why some early adopters adopt early

It appears that one of the cults within the church of technology is known as the early adopters. They’re like the scouts in the Wild West. “OK, pull the wagons around. We’re making camp here tonight.”  And another portion of untouched wilderness gets slashdotted.  But those in the lead are also those who find game first, get to eat first, survive.  They also get status and respect.  They probably got laid a lot.  OK, there are some differences between early adopters and scouts.

There’s another, practical reason to be an early adopter.  If you’ve put any effort into establishing your identity online, one sure way to “reserve” it is to register for any site that sounds even halfway interesting with your preferred username.  By joining a number of alpha sites and those new to the web, you sort of become an early adopter by default.  Of course, if you want to become an influential early adopter,  you’ll have to stick around the site after you’ve joined and provide feedback, commentary, invite others.  Those people seem to form an A-List; often it’s the same people at several sites.

I confess, I’m an early name reserver on a few sites.  In a textual environment, my name and pen name are a commodity, one that I want to be constant across the sites I enjoy visiting.

You know what it is?  It’s a flashback of my days with AOL.  One name, many sites.

Oh dear, now I feel so unclean.

Monitoring Sony

In the August 21st edition of InformationWeek, Sony resellers are reported as saying that Sony is dropping out of the desktop monitor market. The cause is given as “stiff price competition”.

Sony should reconsider. Their monitors are the least of their problems. At least I haven’t heard of a Sony monitor bursting into flames or installing a rootkit in the user’s computer.