Update: Why isn't the White House web site and blog able to keep up with reality?

Yesterday morning I complained that the White House Web site still did not have any mention of a supposed "national emergency" statement that Pres. Obama had supposedly issued Friday night. Here's an update...

The White House did finally put up a blog post at 1:48 p.m. on Sunday afternoon. This still supports my claim that the White House is quite a laggard with using all of the whiz-bang Internet technologies, but at least something is there now.

But there is still no sign of the signed statement itself on the White House Web site, not in the "Statements and Releases" section and not in the "Presidential Actions" sections.

The HHS Web site also still seems silent on the matter.

The White House blog post ("President Obama Signs Emergency Declaration for H1N1 Flu") does in fact link to a news release on Flu.gov entitled "October 24, 2009 - President Obama Signs Emergency Declaration for H1N1 Flu". But still no hint of the an actual "Stafford Act Declaration or National Emergencies act Declaration" as required by "Section 1135 of the Social Security Act."

Hmmm... that news release on Flu.gov is dated October, 24, 2009, which was Saturday. But I checked Flu.gov Sunday morning. How did I miss that? Whether it was actually there on Sunday morning I cannot say with any certainty, but I will note that the site has separate "Blog" and "News Room" sections on the main Web page and the latter is "below the fold" so that you have to manually page down to see it. It is quite possible, and I would say likely, that the "news" story was actually there and that with all of the noise on that main Web page I failed to page down far enough to see it. Still, if this really was such a big deal "national emergency declaration", why was it buried so far down on the Web page.

If anything, this tends to confirm my conjecture that the so-called "emergency declaration" was much more a formality, required by law to waive certain annoying health regulations, rather than the actual "emergency" claimed by the media at the time.

In any case, the lack of a posting of the actual "declaration" that was "signed" by the president is still somewhat disturbing. And the tardiness in a posting on the general topic by the White House is still rather disconcerting.

In my view, anything important for the president to "sign" should be posted and noted (subject to the usual national security and secrecy concerns.)

I won't go so far as to suggest that the president use Twitter every time he signs a document ("Signed the blah blah blah <link>"), but... maybe I should and maybe he should?

-- Jack Krupansky

Why isn't the White House web site and blog able to keep up with reality?

Gee, I thought the Internet and Web were supposed to be mainstream technologies, especially with government, and that the Obama administration was supposed to "get it" about all of the new Internet and Web technologies. If so, then why isn't the latest "statement" about the so-called "H1N1 swine flu national emergency" on the White House Web site?

Maybe somebody "forgot" that the Internet and Web are open "24x7".

Maybe one of my readers knows somebody at the White House and can alert them to that... obvious... fact.

According to a Reuters article, "Obama signed the statement on Friday night." That was Friday. It is now Sunday. Why the big delay? And the statement is still not on the Web site.

The White House Web site does have a dedicated section for "Statements and Releases". Why an emergency statement would not be posted there is rather baffling.

Oh, and by the way, the CDC Web site does not have the statement either.

An article on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site says that "The declaration" was "announced Saturday" and "allows U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to waive certain regulations or speed up the regulatory process if health providers are inundated with swine flu patients."

Well, I just checked, and the HHS Web Site has no notice of this "declaration" either.

I even checked the "government flu Web site", flu.gov. No sign of any "declaration" or hint of an "emergency."

Helloooo... wake up somebody.

Or... maybe this so-called "emergency" is not really an... emergency.

Remember the good old days when an emergency was was an... emergency?

And if this is not really an emergency, why is the media reporting it as an... emergency?

What is wrong with this picture?

As I write this, the headline "Obama declares swine flu emergency" is the top headline on Google News.

Obviously there is a major disconnect somewhere along the line here.

-- Jack Krupansky

The crumpled sidewalk shed is all patched up

When I went out for my usual lunch-time walk today the workmen had already patched up the sidewalk shed across the street from my apartment building. This morning it got "crumpled" by an errant delivery truck and they had to close my street. Now it is all fixed up. Not quite as good as new, but "good enough" for the sidewalk to be opened again. Life goes on as if nothing had happened.

-- Jack Krupansky

Why is there a fireman with an ax outside my apartment building?

As I approached the front door of my apartment building to go out for my morning walk today I noticed a NYFD fireman standing outside our door with an ax in his hand. A bit out of the usual, even for my neighborhood. I peered out the door and saw a couple of fire trucks and police cars and saw that my street was closed to vehicular traffic. There were a couple other firemen standing nearby with big prybars in their hands. Attention was focused directly across the street from my apartment building, but I could see no evidence of any fire, not even any fire hoses or water. Mostly everybody was just standing around looking at a truck parked across the street. And it did not appear to be on fire.

Everybody seemed rather relaxed.

I saw a few other pedestrians on the sidewalk, so I ventured out. I walked down the sidewalk (eastward) a short distance to get a better angle on the truck. It was your typical large box delivery truck that is so common in NYC. From an angle I could see that it's right front wheel was a foot or two up on the curb, there was some broken glass on the sidewalk, and... one of the scaffolding supports for the sidewalk "shed" in front of that building had been pushed out of vertical by at least a foot or two and the "shed" above it was sagging down. There was no actual collapse or debris (other than the broken glass that was probably from the truck) or any apparent injuries. There were no ambulances around.

In NYC a "sidewalk shed" is bascially a temporary roof above the sidewalk in front of a building to protect pedestrians from any falling debris while workers work on the facade of a building. This temporary roof is supported by scaffolding that rests on the sidewalk. In this case workers are chiseling and grinding out old mortar between the brickwork and re-mortaring the brick. Workers are on a platform daggling from ropes suspended from the roof, so there is no additional scaffolding above the "shed" that could collapse. There is usually some amount of tools and building materials and debris resting on top of the shed, so a collapse could be a moderate danger to pedestrians, but not life-threatening to workers as with a typical scaffolding that goes higher up the facade of a building.

Just yesterday morning I walked under that exact location of the shed where the support is now damaged.

No clue as to how or why the delivery truck was up on the sidewalk. It is not uncommon for vehicles to ride up on the curb a little bit to simplify parking.

My building is at 135 E 50TH ST, just east of Lexington Avenue.

The incident is just outside the service entrance for the W hotel, but I am not sure whether that portion of the building is actually part of the hotel. It could be, but maybe not.

Sorry that I don't have any juicy pictures, but I do not have a camera or even a cellphone with a camera.

-- Jack Krupansky

Why is there a firman with an ax outside my apartment building?

As I approached the front door of my apartment building to go out for my morning walk today I noticed a NYFD fireman standing outside our door with an ax in his hand. A bit out of the usual, even for my neighborhood. I peered out the door and saw a couple of fire trucks and police cars and saw that my street was closed to vehicular traffic. Attention was focused directly across the street from my apartment building, but I could see no evidence of any fire, not even any fire hoses or water. Mostly everybody was just standing around looking at a truck parked across the street. And it did not appear to be on fire.

Everybody seemed rather relaxed.

I saw a few other pedestrians on the sidewalk, so I ventured out. I walked down the sidewalk (eastward) a short distance to get a better angle on the truck. It was your typical large box delivery truck that is so common in NYC. From an angle I could see that it's right front wheel was a foot or two up on the curb, there was some broken glass on the sidewalk, and... one of the scaffolding supports for the sidewalk "shed" in front of that building had been pushed out of vertical by at least a foot or two and the "shed" above it was sagging down. There was no actual collapse or debris (other than the broken glass that was probably from the truck) or any apparent injuries. There were no ambulances around.

In NYC a "sidewalk shed" is bascially a temporary roof above the sidewalk in front of a building to protect pedestrians from any falling debris while workers work on the facade of a building. This temporary roof is supported by scaffolding that rests on the sidewalk. In this case workers are chiseling and grinding out old mortar between the brickwork and re-mortaring the brick. Workers are on a platform daggling from ropes suspended from the roof, so there is no additional scaffolding above the "shed" that could collapse. There is usually some amount of tools and building materials and debris resting on top of the shed, so a collapse could be a moderate danger to pedestrians, but not life-threatening to workers as with a typical scaffolding that goes higher up the facade of a building.

Just yesterday morning I walked under that exact location of the shed where the support is now damaged.

No clue as to how or why the delivery truck was up on the sidewalk. It is not uncommon for vehicles to ride up on the curb a little bit to simplify parking.

My building is at 135 E 50TH ST, just east of Lexington Avenue.

The incident is just outside the service entrance for the W hotel, but I am not sure whether that portion of the building is actually part of the hotel. It could be, but maybe not.

Sorry that I don't have any juicy pictures, but I do not have a camera or even a cellphone with a camera.

-- Jack Krupansky

Google Chrome bug: Not always able to properly display FedEx web site

I continue to use Google Chrome as my main browser, but not as my default browser since there are still too many sites that it cannot display properly. The latest I have ancountered is that FedEx.com is not always displayed properly. It seems to have the same problem as GoogleFinance where the first time is fine, but if I visit the site again in a new browser tab the map of the world is not shown and you cannot select a country. In addition to the world map being absolutely blank (white), the dropdown list of countries is simply not there to select from.

As a workaround, I can close Chrome, restart Chrome, browse to FedEx.com and the world map and dropdown list are once again properly displayed.

Sometimes I actually can re-visit the web site and it displays properly. I am not sure what condition controls whether display of some web sites is always messed up the second time around versus only sometimes being messed up.

Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE 8) and Firefox display this page properly.

I am running Google Chrome version 2.0.172.43. Should be the latest.

Overall, I remain reasonably content with Chrome.

-- Jack Krupansky

The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine

There is an interesting article from Wired by Robert Capps entitled "The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine" which expresses a concept that I have believed in... forever. Actually, I haven't finished reading the article yet, but just the first page was "good enough" for me to judge that the author was talking about one of my core philosophies about technology, products, and services.

My own philosophy of "good enough" explains why I remain a diehard PC owner and user. Is the Mac better? Maybe, in some ways. Is the Mac superior enough to justify its price tag? To me: No way. To put it simply: To me, the PC is good enough.

To me, good enough is... good enough. Why pay extra for what you do not really need?

-- Jack Krupansky

Full text of H.R. 3200 Energy/Commerce health care reform bill

Just in case you cannot access the "official" text of the H.R. 3200 House Energy and Commerce Committee health care reform bill at the Library of Congress Thomas web site, you can find it here:

• House Energy and Commerce Committee web site
• Government Printing Office web site
• Open Congress web site

The official name of the bill ("Act") is "America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009."

-- Jack Krupansky

Twitter status - Twitter still back, at least at the moment

Twitter seems to still be back, at least at this moment.

BTW, here is my personal tweetstream for JackKrupansky.

Twitter's status blog (at Status.Twitter.com) still says:

Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend and recover from this attack.

Anyway, as I said in my previous posts... time for my usual midday walk up to Central Park. Really!

-- Jack Krupansky

Twitter status - Twitter is back... oops now it's not

Twitter is still down... sort of... mostly.

I hit refresh a minute ago and Twitter came up just fine!

I tried to tweet but something happened.

Another refresh and... nothing.

Twitter's status blog (at Status.Twitter.com) still says:

Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend and recover from this attack.

Anyway... time for my usual midday walk up to Central Park.

-- Jack Krupansky

Twitter status - still down but making progress

I am still unable to access Twitter and Twitter's status blog (at Status.Twitter.com) still says:

Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend and recover from this attack.

But at least IsTwitterDown.com is now saying "No" in black letters in the middle of the page.

That's a tiny bit of progress.

-- Jack Krupansky

Tweet: Unemployment insurance claims modestly improved, an ongoing green shoot

If Twitter was up, here is what I would have Tweeted:

Posted on "Unemployment insurance claims modestly improved, an ongoing green shoot". http://bit.ly/P1VY3

-- Jack Krupansky

Twitter status - back but not really

Twitter's status blog (at Status.Twitter.com) has an update that says:

Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend and recover from this attack.

But as far as I can tell, Twitter is still down.

-- Jack Krupansky

Twitter status - DOS

Even if Twitter itself is down, you can still check status at Status.Twitter.com.

I just checked and this is what I found:

Site is down
1 hour ago

We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.

One hour ago? Shortly? Hmmm... this is a major outage. And they still do not know the real cause. Good grief.

Hey, at least Google Blogger is super reliable these days. Interesting... the Twitter guys are the guys who originally developed Blogger. Maybe that is the solution to these outages: Sell out to Google.

Stop the presses... I just hit Refresh one last time and now Twitter Status is saying:

Ongoing denial-of-service attack
3 minutes ago

We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.

Wow, a heavy duty DOS. Could it be the Eye-ranians or the North Koreans?

They also updated the previous notice to include an update:

Update: we are defending against a denial-of-service attack.

-- Jack Krupansky

How I know that Twitter is down

I begin to suspect that Twitter is down when the Update button fails to post a new tweet promptly.

I become more suspicious when browser Refresh/Reload fails to load the Twitter web page.

My suspicion is mostly confirmed when Bit.ly has a notification at the top of the page:

Twitter is currently experiencing some API issues. Posting may be unavailable.

Finally I go to IsTwitterDown.com and it says "yes" in red letters in the middle of the page.

Twitter is still down.

How long has it been down? Answer: Too long.

How long is that? Long enough for me to complete three old-fashioned blog posts!

-- Jack Krupansky

New definition of Blogging: What you do when Twitter is down

Coming up with a precise, accurate, flexible and understandable definition of Blogging has been problematic, but I think I now have the answer:

Blogging: What you do when Twitter is down.

-- Jack Krupansky

Why is Twitter down again?

Why on earth is Twitter down again? They have experienced outages before, so shouldn't they have learned from them and fixed the problems that are causing outages? Or is the problem the fact that they are so dependent on Amazon, Google, and other flaky "service" companies? Maybe it is time that they build their own infrastructure. Maybe being in the infamous San Francisco Bay Area is an infrastructure negative rather than a plus. If they want to have offices in the Bay Area, fine, but locate all infrastructure where service providers are more reliable and they have more control. They have plenty of money, so is this a sign of negligent management, or what?

-- Jack Krupansky

Google Chrome bug: unable to properly display News Corp home page

I continue to use Google Chrome as my main browser, but not as my default browser since there are still too many sites that it cannot display properly. The latest I have ancountered is the News Corp. web site home page, where it displays the News Corp. press releases and business unit news columns way off to the right side and off the screen, rather than in the main news box where they belong.

Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE 8) and Firefox display this page properly.

I am running Google Chrome version 2.0.172.39. Should be the latest.

Overall, I remain reasonably content with Chrome.

-- Jack Krupansky

Air cooler blasts out ice cooled air and uses 96% less electricity than a window air conditioner!

Sometimes I actually like to read email spam because the claims are so hilarious. Today was the first time I had ever gotten a pitch for the "The Cool Surge eco-friendly air cooler":

The Cool Surge(R) eco-friendly air cooler blasts out ice cooled air, but uses about 96% less electricity than a typical window air conditioner. That way, you can stay cool for just pennies a day.

Sounds great! Of course, 96% less electricity seems a bit too good to be true.

So, I cut and pasted the first part of the sentence and googled it and quickly spotted a blog post that points out:

So essentially what the machine does is blow air over an icepack that you freeze in your freezer. This is nothing but an attempt to bilk poor people and people on fixed incomes out of money. They hope to take advantage of the ever rising energy prices to blind people to the laughable nature of any sort of cooling claims. You can buy a cheap window fan (that at least partial vents the heat from the fan) for 30 $$$ at a hardware store  and a freeze pack or 2 at your local grocery store for under 5 $$$. They want 300 $$$ PLUS shipping for their unit. What a joke. If you have ever taken your lunch to work with an ice pack in it, you know how well your cooler has to be insulated to make it work well. Try that in a house.

That's great. They were so careful to say "ice cooled air", expecting (correctly) that most people (including me) would read that as "ice cold air." Of course, no sane person would want to feel 32-degree air anyway.

Here is the description from the Cool Surge web site:

The Cool Surge portable air cooler is a work of engineering genius from the China coast so advanced that no windows, vents or freon are required. It's as easy to use as a baby's vaporizer and even includes two sets of the reusable glacier ice blocks. That gives you a total of eight hours of extra cooling power. It uses the same electricity as a light bulb, yet it blasts out ice cooled air. The hi-efficiency motor cools the air around the unit so you'll instantly feel cool and refreshed. The 3 cooling levels and auto shut off timer put all the comfort controls at your fingertips. It's so impressive that all transactions less shipping are backed by a full year limited warranty and a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.

It does sound so "eco-friendly" with its "reusable glacier ice blocks."

Now, be careful to read the fine print... "gives you a total of eight hours of extra cooling power." But what if it is hot more than eight hours? Hmmm... 24 divided by eight is three, meaning you would need three of these units or six sets of those "reusable glacier ice blocks" if you live in a climate where you need A/C 24/7 to survive all day, plus the freezer capacity for all of those "reusable glacier ice blocks."

The FAQ is "useful":

HOW DOES THE COOL SURGE WORK?

It is a work of engineering genius that blasts out ice cooled air but only uses the same electricity as a 60 watt light bulb on the standard setting.

It's as easy to use as a baby's vaporizer and even includes the extra cooling power of 4 reusable glacier ice blocks. The glacier packs last 4-6 hours and are freezable and reusable.

Gee, that's a very helpful answer!

Here's another very important question and the "useful" answer:

HOW MUCH WILL THE COOL SURGE COOL A ROOM?

It depends on several factors including the size of the room, the humidity level, the room temperature on any given day, what type of windows, is the sun shining right into the room, how high the ceilings are...

Those are their ellipses. Actually, honestly, they did given the technically correct engineer's answer (and we know their engineer(s) was a "genius"): It all depends. No sane engineer would ever claim otherwise. If they had marketing answer this question they would say "A lot!". And the sales team would helpfully and cheerfully respond "All of it!"

Here's the real catch... At a cost of $356, that is $176 more than I paid for my window air conditioner. $176 will buy me a lot of electricity. And of course they do not alert you to the fact that you have to pay the cost of electricity for your freezer to "reuse" those "reusable glacier ice blocks." Unless... if you live in a place where the winters are very cold and you have an ice house, you could buy and freeze a zillion of those "reusable glacier ice blocks" and not pay a dime for freezing them.

The spam I got offered to sell me the Cool Surge for a $119 discount or $297 discount for two units that are "nearly perfect." The email says:

These units have minor, hard-to-find imperfections that keep us from selling them at regular prices, but they function perfectly saving you a ton compared to A.C. costs.

One other little nit to pick... a of the primary function and value of A/C is to remove humidity so that you feel cooler than if the humidty were higher. The Cool Surge has no such capability, other than the small amount of condensation that might form on the "reusable glacier ice blocks". After all, if it did remove humidity to the extent that a window A/C does you would end up with a large puddle of water on the floor or have to frequently drain a pan to accumulate the water.

-- Jack Krupansky

Must IE6 die?

One of the top Trending Topics in Twitter is "IE6 Must Die". Superficially, the arguments in favor of retiring this old browser are quite reasonable, but in a deeper sense the arguments are really a pile of crap.

I believe in natural evolution. IE6 will eventually die off of its own accord as users abandon it over time. The very idea that developers and vendors seek to force IE 6 users to upgrade merely to primarily benefit developers and venders is simply morally indefensible.

The very first and most important principal that everyone should keep in mind is that users want simpler applications and web sites, not more complicated applications and web sites. Developers and vendors may certainly have a vested interest in producing ever-more sophisticated and complicated applications and web sites, but that is not an indicator of the interests or needs of users. Any IE6 user can easily and freely use Windows Update to upgrade to IE 7 or even IE 8, if they really want to gain access to more sophisticated features. The very fact that many users are choosing not to update is a good indicator that they are not interested in more complicated applications and web sites.

Developers and vendors may think (fantasize) that users really need all of this extra sophistication and complication, but a neutral observer will likely find that they are mistaken. Users want simplicity!

I'm not opposed to innovation, but if developers and vendors really feel that they can produce a dramatically superior user experience with more modern browsers, then they should go for it, provided that they also continue to provide a decent experience for more average and normal users. If developers and vendors find that the extra expense of maintaining two distinct user experiences is too high, then guess what... a neutral observer is likely to find that the "perceived" benefits in the minds of the developers and vendors are probably not there in the real world of real users.

There will come a time, maybe two or three years down the road, especially after the economic recovery becomes much stronger and users choose to upgrade to Windows 7 and IE 8 (or beyond) when IE6 will effectively have died off. Until then, developers should behave themselves and treat users with a lot more respect than they are doing today with this irresponsible "IE6 Must Die" campaign.

Even simple-minded Twitter has a web site that is already way too complicated for its nominally simple purpose. Message to all developers and vendors: Keep it simple!!!

To be clear, users are not the property of developers and vendors to abuse as they see fit. Even "evil" Microsoft knows that! It is certainly in Microsoft's interests to upgrade users to IE 7 or 8, but even Microsoft knows that they have to have at least some sensitivity to the needs of their markets.

There is a simple way to characterize the mentaility behind this whole "IE6 Must Die" "movement": unbridled arrogance.

Let me assure everyone that IE6 Will Die (eventually), but that day is still a distance off into the future. Let's wait for Windows 7 general deployment and for IE 8 to become the common version of IE, and maybe then IE6 will be a lot closer to falling (naturally, of its own accord) off the radar screens of developers and vendors.

-- Jack Krupansky

I changed my name (in Facebook)

I had not been doing much with Facebook, but since I was pondering issues with names, I decided to go in and see what I had used for my name when I had claimed my Facebook profile (whenever that was, maybe a couple of years ago.)

I had in fact claimed Jack Krupansky as my name in Facebook. No surprise there. That is how most people know me.

But the more I thought about it, I decided that I needed some way to also be findable as John W. Krupansky.

I browsed through all of the options and settings and found where Jack Krupansky was set as my "real name." Hmmm... real name. I hadn't paid attention before.

While I was thinking about whether to change my "real" name in Facebook to John William Krupansky, I browsed some more and notice that Facebook also had an optional "Full Alternate Name." I went ahead and entered John William Krupansky as my full alternate name. Done.

Oops... I thought about it for a few more seconds and realized that I had my names backwards. I should have used John William Krupansky as my real name and Jack Krupansky as my full alternate name. That actually makes more sense. Done.

I would be more comfortable with just my middle initial when my name is used in general and then show the full spelling if someone looks at my profile, but Facebook does not give my any such option.

Unfortunately, the entire Facebook UI refers to me as John rather than Jack. Too bad they don't recognize formal and nick names and let you pick whether to default to formal or nick names. Actually, I'd rather have Facebook refer to me as Mr. Krupansky, just to make it clear what a subservient role the software real has. Facebook serves me. Facebook is not my friend.

Now that I have done all of this I realize another issue... findability in Google. My primary interest is professional in nature, so I would prefer that other professionals be able to find me as they know me, which is Jack Krupansky. But, by using John William Krupansky as my Facebook "real" name, my professional name on Facebook is not directly findable. Now I am thinking that I should set my "real" name to Jack Krupansky and my "alternate" name to John William Krupansky. But I'll think about this for more than a few seconds before changing it. Thinking... Done thinking. Changed. So, now my Facebook "real" name is back to Jack Krupansky and my "alternate" name is John William Krupansky. Logically that is backwards, but practically it should work better.

My Facebook profile is here: http://www.facebook.com/jack.krupansky.

Now, I need to go in and make sure I have LinkedIn set in a similar manner, if possible.

Twitter? Now there's a lost cause. Maybe they'll let me set my name properly when they figure out what they want to do in life.

Oh, and while I was at it, I found an Ivan Krupansky over in Slovakia to add as a friend. And he has a friend Jakub Krupansky (with an acute accent over the "y", which I do not know how to enter in an emailed blog post) who I also added as a friend. Whether either of them is even a distant relative is unknown. Do we really have the same last name if one uses a diacritical mark?

Now, I need to think some more about a sensible model for formal and informal names in the Semantic Web. It will be awhile before I get to the stage of addressing cultural difference in how names are used. That is all the more reason to strip the textual representations of names out of Semantic Web data and use a URI to reference the person rather than a culturally-dependent textual representation.

I need to take a look at the FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) vocabulary specification to at least use that as a starting reference point for name handling in the Semantic Web. Ditto for the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. I do not think either will get me very far, but I at least need to cover those bases.

-- Jack Krupansky

What the ttttttttttttttttttttt?? - runaway phantom T key on Toshiba notebook

I was sitting in front of my Toshiba notebook PC about a month ago and then suddenly, out of the blue, with no activity on my part:

tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

WTF?! Where are all of those extra "T" keystrokes coming from?

First, I blew into the keyboard and ran a card between and under the keys to clean out any dust or debris. That worked! For a while.

But the problem kept popping up on occasion and eventually that did not fix it.

I popped the "T" key cap and made sure everything was clean there. That usually worked.

Sometimes I simply power cycled the machine. That usually fixed the problem, at least for a while.

[I know, I know... the right solution is to get a Mac!!]

On occasion the "T" key would actually die. A reboot seemed to fix that as well.

I started to wonder if maybe the phantom "T" key strokes were due to a virus. Hard to say.

Odd, but only the "T" key has this problem.

I am not sure why, but just the other day the thought occurred to me that heating may be the problem. Sure enough, every time I see the problem and then fan and blow on the keyboard for about ten to fifteen seconds and within a minute the problem stops, at least for a while. This is my current "best practice" workaround for the problem. I do in fact believe it is a heating problem.

I also tried putting something under the side edges of the notebook to leave more space underneath for air flow, but that does not cure the problem.

I have A/C on sometimes, but my apartment is not unusually warm right now in any case.

One possibility is that there are simply four years of dirt and grime accumulated inside the machine (there is a fan) and around the keys that causes the overheating. Maybe I'll look into a professional cleaning.

Or maybe some component has simply aged and is more heat sensitive now.

Or maybe four years of typing has simply beaten the keyboard (and some component) to a pulp.

Another possible cause is that with many Google Chrome tabs open I occasionally run into a low memory condition and this has a side effect that the processor and disk start working overtime, like solid, always on, and maybe that is causing extra heating. I do notice that the fan is running at high speed more often.

One possible solution might simply be to buy a new keyboard. That may in fact "fix" the problem for the short-term.

My machine will be four years old in just under a month, so I am due for an upgrade anyway. I might just use this runaway phantom "T" key problem as my excuse. Alas, I had been hoping to wait for Windows 7 to be pre-installed on a new machine. I will still shoot for that, maybe in the fall or the holiday season or next January.

I just checked my old blog posts and curiously my previous Toshiba notebook PC also started getting "finicky" just short of its fourth birthday. Probably a coincidence. Hmmm...

I have the Toshiba Satellite M55-S325.

Other than the "T" key problem, it works great, although I could definitely use a faster machine and more memory. I am still running Windows XP, but upgraded to SP3.

-- Jack Krupansky

Google Chrome issue: AARP membership renewal page doesn't work

I use the Google Chrome web browser for most of my web browsing, but still not as my default browser since I continue to run into web pages that it cannot handle. The latest is that just this morning I found that Chrome cannot handle the AARP membership renewal web page. Chrome displays the form to enter data, but fails to display the button to process the form. This page works fine in both Microsoft Internet Explorer and in Firefox.

I am running Google Chrome version 1.0.154.65.

I suppose it should not surprise me that the "kids" at Google never noticed this!

-- Jack Krupansky

If Twitter were up...

Hello, Twitter, where are you?? Twitter currently reminds me of a small bird I found yesterday in front of the 45th Street entrance to the MetLife building: lying on the ground, semi-lifeless, twitching, neither dead nor alive. Sad.

Anyway, if Twitter were alive right now (and when it eventually does come back to life), here is what I would be tweeting:

ECRI Weekly Leading Index rises sharply suggesting that an end to the U.S. recession is now in clear sight. http://tinyurl.com/pgot9p

As far as the bird, I crouched down to examine it and a security guard came by and gently picked it up and moved it off to the side so nobody would step on it. He suggested that it flew into the glass.

-- Jack Krupansky

Google Chrome having trouble loading Bloomberg web site

All of a sudden today I was unable to properly view the Bloomberg web site in Google Chrome, but it would display properly in Microsoft Internet Explorer. I hit reload a few times and closed and restarted the browser, but nothing worked.

Then I remembered that I had seen this problem before and "fixed" it by disabling Chrome's DNS pre-fetching. I had disabled that feature quite some time ago, so I was baffled as to what was wrong now.

Just to be sure, I went into the "Under the Hood" tab of Google Chrome Options and sure enough the DNS pre-fetching feature was once again enabled! I turned it off (again!) and now the Bloomberg web site works fine.

I know that I did not turn that feature back on, so maybe an automated update automatically turned it back on as a "service" to us "dumb" users. Maybe Google thought that they had fixed the problem and forced the feature back on. Maybe. Who knows.

I am running Chrome version 1.0.154.53 on Windows XP SP3.

-- Jack Krupansky

Software agents for virtual browsing and virtual presence

With so many places to go and so many things to see and do on the Web, it is getting almost impossible to keep up with the proliferation of interesting information out there. We need some help. A hefty productivity boost is simply not good enough. We need a lot of help. Browser add-ons, better search engines, and filtering tools are simply not enough. Unfortunately, the next few years holds more of the same.

But, longer term we should finally start to see credible advances in software agent technology which help to extend our own minds so that we can engage in virtual browsing and have a virtual presence on the Web so that we can effectively reach and touch a far broader, deeper, and richer lode of information than we can with personal browsing and our personal presence.

Twitter asks us what we are doing right now, but our online activity and presence with the aid of software agents will be a thousand or ten thousand or even a million or ten million times greater than we can personally achieve today. What are each of us interested in? How about everything?! Why not?

The gradual evolution of the W3C conception of the Semantic Web will eventually reach a critical mass where even relatively dumb software agents can finally appear to behave in a relatively intelligent manner that begins to approximate our own personal activity and personal presence on the Web.

It may take another five to ten years, but the long march in that direction is well underway.

The biggest obstacle right now is not the intelligence of an individual software agent per se, but the need to encode a rich enough density of information in the Semantic Web so that we can realistically develop intelligent software agents that can work with that data. We will also need an infrastructure that mediates between the actual data and the agents.

-- Jack Krupansky

Google Chrome issue: unable to view DOJ torture memos

I discovered that I cannot use Google Chrome to view the DOJ "torture" memos that were released a few days ago. I get a "109" error for each of them and then the browser tab is simply an empty white document and inactive. But... I can view them successfully in Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, so there is no problem with the PDF viewer per se. This suggests that Google has some issue with how they integrated the Adobe PDF reader/viewer.

The exact error message:

Adobe Reader

There was an error processing a page. There was a problem reading this document (109).

I am using Google Chrome version 1.0.154.53, running under Windows XP SP3 on a Toshiba notebook PC.

Now, (unfortunately) back to IE. Talk about torture!

-- Jack Krupansky

I wasn't blown away by Joel Comm's Twitter Power book

I was doing my usual Sunday afternoon browsing of the "New Arrivals" table at Barnes & Noble near Lincoln Center here in New York City and spent a few minutes leafing though Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time by Joel Comm "with" Ken Burge. Alas, although I am by no means an expert in Twitter (only 425 "tweet" updates to date), I did not notice anything that I did not already know. Maybe if I read the book carefully I would stumble upon a few tips that would be of value to me, but I don't have the patience to read books that carefully these days.

My attitude is that if page one does not blow me away, then the book is not for me. I also scan the table of contents and skip to at least half a dozen or more random pages to see if anything does leap out at me. After all of that, either the book made an impression or not. For me, Twitter Power did not. I am willing to concede that it may be a great intro for the uninformed, but for a book with "Power" in the title, I expect more, much more.

As far as giving the insight to "dominate your market", I would have to classify myself as a skeptic on that score.

If any readers out that did glean valuable insight from the book, please let me know what I may have missed!

My apologies for not providing a better summary of the book, but by all means browse through it and decide for yourself whether it offers you any advice of value.

Note: I do get a tiny commission from Amazon if you buy a book after clicking on the cover images or link above that redirect to Amazon. Thanks!

-- Jack Krupansky

Using Data Unions as repositories of personal data

In order to facilitate the development of open garden social networks it is necessary to have a safe place for consumers to place their personal data, not just where it can be stored and accessed, but also to control access and to provide a reliable digital identity. Many years ago I thought up a scheme I called a data union, kind of a cross between a data bank and a credit union, which would provide exactly that form of reliable and safe storage for a consumer's personal data. I finally wrote up a rough, summary description back in 2005, but I have not yet pursued the concept any further.

The intention is not so much to store a consumer's bulk data such as documents, photos, media, etc., but simply to store and control the attribute information that might be needed for online transactions and promotion of products and services, such as name, address, phone numbers, social security number, age and birth date, gender, interests, and whatever. The intention was to give the consumer great control over exactly what personal information is available to whomever.

It would be a natural extension to have a data union safety deposit box, which would be a modest amount of digital storage, maybe in the megabytes or a "few" gigabytes, sufficient for documents, valuable images, etc., but not intended for full-blown personal storage.

A data union would be an ideal repository for online digital identity credentials, or at least as a digital identity validation service. For example, the consumer could approve an entity with which they are willing to transact and then the consumer could provide a transaction code to that entity which the data union could verify.

A data union would enable the consumer to be as open and visible and transparent or as closed and hidden and secretive as they wish.

-- Jack Krupansky

Spam slowing down again

I am noticing that my spam traffic has slowed down, again. I have my email accounts set to simply tag all spam and then I manually delete it. I wonder if "the authorities" are being increasingly successful at cracking down on spammers, or whether the economy is getting them down, or whether they realize that I am a useless target for their pleas for clicks. Whatever. Or maybe they just took off the Easter weekend. In any case, I am enjoying the sight of a relatively clean email in-box in the morning. I had only 7 spam email messages from 11:00 p.m. until 8:00 a.m. That is a very poor showing by the spammers.

-- Jack Krupansky

Open garden social networking vs. walled gardens

I am truly tired of social networking sites that are walled gardens, requiring some form of registration and holding my personal data hostage by maintaining it behind the walls of the "walled garden." What is the alternative? Is there an alternative? No, there is no alternative currently, but in the longer term we can hope that developers and entrepreneurs will recognize that open garden networks have distinct advantages over walled gardens.

The esence of an open garden social network is that users maintain their data wherever they want as long as it can be crawled by whatever sites wish to aggregate that data. Since the data is maintained publicly, it can easily be shared by more than one social networking aggregator.

The immediate technical obstacles are that: 1) the average consumer has no obvious public location to store their data and 2) we do not have a technology and public infrastructure in place for consumers to "sign" their personal data to associate it with their digital identity.

Who knows, maybe open garden social networking will take off in another five or ten years.

One of the key benefits of open garden personal data is that it will open up vast new opportunities for innovation in open garden social media since each innovator can piggyback on the existing (in the future) public open garden infrastructure rather than need to go through the time and expense of reinventing the wheel unnecessarily for each new social networking aggregator site.

-- Jack Krupansky

My Twitter boycott ends in a few hours

My one-week boycott of Twitter due to data mis-management will be coming to an end later this evening. The good news is that Twitter at least acknowledges the problem of "lost tweets". The bad news is that as of Friday Twitter was still seeing the problem. The okay-but-not-great news is that the tweets are only lost temporarily, but eventually are restored. Whatever. My boycott is nominally over (in a few hours) and I am willing to give Twitter the benefit of the doubt over these... "growing pains" and see what the future brings.

-- Jack Krupansky

Free Skype from eBay!

I never was able to comprehend the "wisdom" of eBay buying Skype, other than for the founders and investors to cash out of Skype, so now I am excited to hear that there is an effort underway to separate Skype from eBay. That should re-energize Skype to innovate much more rapidly. An article in The New York Times by Brad Stone entitled "European Duo Seeks to Buy Skype Back From EBay" summarizes current efforts to "free" Skype from eBay.

Who knows, Skype might even be a much more organic partner for Twitter than even Google.

-- Jack Krupansky

Twitter spectrum analyzer

I have not played with it very much, but check out the Twitter Spectrum visual analyzer from Neoformix, which visually shows you term ranking relative to two topics referenced in Twitter tweets. Read the Twitter Spectrum blog post as well.

-- Jack Krupansky

The comment from hell

I just made an innocuous blog post about an upcoming philosophy discussion and it quickly got a comment that I am calling "the comment from hell", which is a very long rant that starts with:

The vast majority of website operators don't have the guts to allow this post, anything like it, any searchable lines, or links. They have been deleted more than 90% of the time. The vast majority of syndicated talk radio hosts are screening their calls and won't allow this topic. The vast majority of callers don't have a clue. We are in big trouble. The truth is so Earth shattering, that no public figure has the guts to acknowledge it. Very few have the guts to allow a statement anything like this in their forum. The truth is being suppressed. We are in much more serious trouble than we have been told by any public figure. Don't be fooled by fluctuating economic indicators or short term market stability. The entire foundation of our economy is crumbling. Get ready people. Get your affairs in order. Get your households in order. Get your communities in order. Be prepared. This is no 'correction'. This is no ordinary recession. This won't be just another Great Depression. This will be much worse. Save this post now before it gets deleted.

And it ends with:

1% CLUB PIGS: My right to remain anonymous is protected by federal law. If this right is violated, I will sue everyone involved and give 99% of the reward directly to my less fortunate fellow citizens. The rest, I will use to print up more copies of this document. DEAL WITH IT.

When pasted into a Word document it is 30 pages long! With a good number of spelling errors

Sure I could easily delete it, but I find it amusing.

I did a Google search for "The vast majority of website operators don't have the guts" and get 132 hits, so I am not the first and only target for this rant.

I am curious what the motive is for posting such a long rant as a comment. After all, most people will simply ignore it.

Anybody have any clues as to what "the comment from hell" is really all about? It certainly did not relate to my post that it appeared on.

-- Jack Krupansky

Forget Twitter, Flutter is the future with nanoblogging!

Are you overwhelmed by Twitter and tweeting? Maybe microblogging is too much for you. If so, give nanoblogging a shot and check out Flutter. "Flaps" are limited to 26 characters (vs. 140-character tweets in Twitter.)

Warning: This is supposed to be a joke!

-- Jack Krupansky

Hey Twitter, where did my avatar go?!

Earlier today I noticed that somebody I was following on Twitter had their avatar picture changed back to the default brown square with "o_O" in it. I wondered why "they" did that. Just now, I noticed that my avatar is now the same brown square with "o_O" in it. WTF?!?!

Hey Twitter, what is going on?

I also noticed that one of the Twitter developers had the same problem.

Now, can somebody tell me what the "proper" term for this is, is it a "TwitFU"?

Feel free to follow me on Twitter: Jack Krupansky on Twitter.

But, please note that my week-long boycott of Twitter is still underway.

-- Jack Krupansky

Twitter acknowledges their lost tweet problem

Just a few hours ago Twitter finally acknowledged that they have a problem with lost tweets. As per the Twitter Status blog:

Working through some errors this morning 4 hours ago

We're contending with an elevated number of error pages this morning. Site latency has also been a problem. We're working through both issues now.

Update: Some users may notice tweets missing in their timelines.  These tweets have NOT been lost. We are working to correct the problem.

Note: You can sign up to receive Twitter status by email.

My boycott of Twitter (no new tweets of any substance) continues, for the rest of the week.

-- Jack Krupansky

Twitter restored my lost tweets!

I just checked and Twittered appears to have restored my seven tweets that disappeared last night. No clue what happened. I suppose I do need to reconsider my boycott of Twitter, but I am not completely inclined to trust Twitter again with my "work" so soon after a screw-up on this nature and nature on their part. We'll see. Besides, I had decided to invest more of my Twitter-related time in doing higher-quality blogging. At least that does raise the question of what exactly constitutes high-value in Twitter.

Oops... almost forgot (again) to point you to my Twitter "channel": Jack Krupansky on Twitter.

Actually, you can always find my Twitter URL on the right side of this blog where it shows as:

Feel free to "follow" me on Twitter... regardless of whether I decide to re-invest significant time "tweeting" after my boycott.

-- Jack Krupansky

Twitter withdrawal

For the record, I am suffering from a little bit of "Twitter withdrawal" as I get started with my week-long boycott of Twitter for their data mis-management which lost a bunch of my recent tweets. Maybe this is actually a good thing since it indicates that there is some value to micro-blogging.

Also, I do have to figure out whether my boycott is strictly limited to refraining from new tweets or from viewing the tweets of others. I definitely have a "hard" boycott of the former, but more of a "soft" boycott for the latter.

And then there is the issue of whether experimentation with alternative front-end clients for Twitter would violate my boycott. Hmmm... who knows... we'll see.

-- Jack Krupansky

Is Twitter down?

No sooner had I tweeted on Twitter that I was "officially" boycotting Twitter for a week (in terms of no new tweets), when I tried to go to Twitter.com to see if I could figure out what was broken and I was suddenly unable to go to the main web site. Just like that. I am able to get to the Twitter blog, but not to the main web site.

WTF?!

Oops... I just checked and the main Twitter.com web site is once more accessible. Still, there seemed to be some sort of outage there for a spell.

-- Jack Krupansky

Twitter lost some of my tweets... again!

I made five high-quality tweets with Twitter over the past few hours and now suddenly they are all GONE! Disappeared! Poof! Simply vanished. WTF?! This is simply unacceptable.

In truth, I have been concerned for some time about how to preserve my "investment" in usage of Twitter. This includes tweets whose primary purpose is to capture links with relevant summary descriptions. I need a Twitter front-end client that logs my tweets in a non-Twitter form so that my work is not subject to the vagaries of Twitter's data "management."

Maybe all I need is a non-Twitter "blog" that consists simply of tweets and the front-end client would send new tweets to both the blog and to Twitter itself. The client could also read my Twitter feed and simply re-tweet any lost tweets.

Such a client may already exist.

For the record, this is the third or fourth time I have successfully posted tweets and then refreshed and seen them vanish.

This is so frustrating that I am thinking about boycotting Twitter for awhile to protest the data mis-management.

I would note that Blogger was equally inept, if not more so, even three years ago. Maybe we need to be a bit more patient of (and less dependent on) Twitter while it is still in its "youth." Meanwhile, I'll focus on doing any "real" work in my blogs and Twitter will simply an after-thought until I sense that they are getting their act together.

I will tweet this post and than go off the Twitter "grid" for a week -- that's how frustrating this loss (coupled with prior losses) is!

I will endeavor to blog more about my recent Twitter experiences and thoughts for the future of micro-blogging in this blog.

-- Jack Krupansky

Privacy policy for blogs and email?

As part of their new interest-based advertising program, Google is reminding us AdSense publishers to update our privacy policies, telling us that "Visitation information from publisher sites will be used to create user interest categories, delivering more relevant ads and improving monetization for publishers over time." Privacy policy? I have never had any formal, published privacy policy for any of my web sites, primarily since my sites are static and do not actively collect any data. But, technically, some data is gathered behind the scenes, primarily logging of page views. Also, I do have some pages with a Google search box to search my web sites and Google may or may not "collect" user usage data for those searches unbeknownst to me. I suppose I need a policy for any email that people might send me, but that is more of an email policy rather than a policy of the web site. I probably should have a policy for blog comments as well.

My overall personal policy is that I never do anything with any user data (including email), other than to respond directly to the user.

Out of curiosity, what is the "default" policy under controlling law if no policy is displayed? Is it maximal respect for user privacy (what I do) or is it maximal use of user data?

Simple question: If one has a blog on Google Blogger, where it is Google that is controlling most user data, what privacy policy is needed to cover user page views and comments, especially where we bloggers cannot even know exactly what Google may be doing behind the scenes? Given that it is superficially absolutely clear that user comments on blogs are visible and accessible to the world, what privacy does the user retain? Maybe reuse and copying, but there is probably some controlling law there as well.

Hmmm... what if the user types in their own copyright notice in their comment text? And then what if Google ignores it -- who is violating what then??

As far as email, if a user sends an unsolicited email to me, what privacy obligations do I have to obey or even disclose? My personal email policy is that any email is a private communication and requires explicit permission to be forwarded or published elsewhere.

I do have to admit that on occasion I will excerpt from an email message or comment anonymously, but I do so in a way that does not violate privacy.

All of this said, I suppose I should formalize a privacy policy, maybe roughly what I have written in this blog post and just put links to it on my blogs and home pages of my web sites.

Or, maybe there is a generic privacy policy analogous to my personal policy so that I do not need to personalize it.

Please comment on the privacy policies that you use or would prefer. And... be sure to explicitly state whether I have permission to "steal" your policy!

-- Jack Krupansky

Death of my mother

My mother passed away suddenly Thursday evening. That puts me in the "club" of those who have lost both parents.

My blogging (and Twittering) will probably be rather light or even non-existent over the next week or so as I deal with a variety of arrangements.

-- Jack Krupansky

Using Twitter for SEO and SEM

The thought of using Twitter to give you an SEO and SEM boost is appealing, but not so clear cut. Yes, you can place links in Twitter tweets, but since Twitter using the "nofollow" attribute, Google will not count such "tweet links" as inbound links to your own web pages.

That is the bad news.

The good news is that Twitter tweets are a good way to drive traffic to your web pages. After all, the whole point of achieving a high placement in Google search results is to get users to click and navigate to your web pages.

Twitter has a search feature where people can enter keywords to search for tweets, so be sure that your tweets are rich with the keywords that are likely to be used by your target market. As far as I know, the search results are strictly chronologically ordered, so there is no Google-style SEO to do other than to use lots of keywords.

As far as the issue of Twitter using TinyURL links, that is a non-issue due to Twitter using "nofollow".

I do not have any great clarity as to whether the existence of any of your URLs at TinyURL.com actually gives your URLs some SEO boost. I suspect it might, but it is hard to say for sure. I suppose it can't hurt to enter your important web page URLs into TinyURL.com, treating it as if it were another form of web directory.

-- Jack Krupansky

Turn off DNS pre-fetching in Google Chrome to fix page loading problems

I have occasionally experienced a problem in Google Chrome where it would simply not load some web pages, leaving them blank, white. Hitting Reload would not help. You needed to shutdown Chrome, run Microsoft Internet Explorer, and then restart Chrome to make the problem go away. That is too much of a pain.

The problem seems to be some bug in Chrome's network I/O stack.

There is another workaround... simply disable the DNS pre-fetching feature in Chrome.

I had refrained from doing that because the DNS pre-fetching feature is there explicitly to speed up loading of web pages, part of the main reason I was using Chrome.

But, today, I ran into the blank page problem so many times that I finally bit the bullet and turned the DNS pre-fetching feature off. That made the problem go away.

But guess what that did to page load performance?

No... it actually made it FASTER!!! Go figure.

In any case, here is what you do:

1. Bring up the Chrome "Tools" menu by clicking on the little wrench icon.
2. Click on the "Options" menu item.
3. Click on the "Under the Hood" Chrome Options tab.
4. Click on the "Use DNS pre-fetching to improve page load performance" check box. Make sure there is no little green checkmark in the box -- if there is, click it again to make the checkmark go away.
5. Click on the Close Button.
6. Click on the Reload icon (circular arrow), and PRESTO! the page should load promptly.

-- Jack Krupansky

My suggestion for the White House economic recovery web site: blog and Twitter

The White House has an "okay" web site for the stimulus package, www.recovery.gov, but it needs a blog and they need to exploit Twitter. I sent them the following suggestion:

The web site needs a blog and Twitter feeds to provide us with more timely information.

See the NY Fed site for Twitter examples:
http://www.newyorkfed.org/
http://twitter.com/NYFed_news
http://twitter.com/NYFed_data

Thanks.

-- Jack Krupansky

They do have a blog on the main White House web site, so it is not an unnatural request.

Somehow, I find it amusing that the New York Federal Reserve Bank is on Twitter!

In any case, I at least gave them some useful feedback. Have you??

-- Jack Krupansky

Check out tipjoy for online contributions and payments

This is mostly a note to myself to look further into something called tipjoy, a new web site for online contributions and payments. As the web site says:

simple social payments for great people, causes & content

Their About us page says:

Tipjoy is a simple, social payments service which makes it easy for people to earn money from and give money to great people, causes and content. Our office is in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Tipjoy's Series A funding is lead by Betaworks. We were a part of Y Combinator's Winter 2008 funding cycle.

Have suggestions for us? Please send us feedback or email us directly at founders@tipjoy.com

Keep track of our progress on our blog and by following us on http://twitter.com/tipjoy

They have some form of integration with Twitter as well as being easy to use from a blog or web site.

Looks interesting. Maybe an alternative to mediocre AdSense.

-- Jack Krupansky

My AdSense click-through rate (CTR) for the month of February 2009 was...

My AdSense click-through rate (CTR) for the month of February 2009 was... OOPS! Sorry, but Google has forbidden me from disclosing my click-through rate. As per the AdSense Terms and Conditions:

7.  Confidentiality. You agree not to disclose Google Confidential Information without Google's prior written consent. "Google Confidential Information" includes without limitation: (a) all Google software, technology, programming, specifications, materials, guidelines and documentation relating to the Program; (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Property performance in the Program provided to You by Google; and (c) any other information designated in writing by Google as "Confidential" or an equivalent designation. However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google's gross payments to You pursuant to the Program. Google Confidential Information does not include information that has become publicly known through no breach by You or Google, or information that has been (i) independently developed without access to Google Confidential Information, as evidenced in writing; (ii) rightfully received by You from a third party; or (iii) required to be disclosed by law or by a governmental authority.

I can tell you that my net income from Google AdSense for the five months from September 2008 through January 2009 were a whopping $100.27, a whole $20 per month (simple average.) The T&C permit this disclosure (from above):

However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google's gross payments to You pursuant to the Program.

Technically, I probably cannot tell you my earnings for the month of February 2009 or any other individual month since Google granted the right to disclose only "gross payments to You" and there was no "payment" for February. But, you would be able to disclose payment for each month provided that your net earnings for the month were not less than $100, the minimum payment. Also, technically, you would not be permitted to even disclose that monthly earnings until the day when the payment is actually made and legally constitutes "a payment to You."

The T&C also proscribe me from disclosing my total page impressions and number of clicks.

In theory, I would be permitted to give you page impressions if I had independent analytics to determine that number, but since all of my blogs are on Blogger, I do not have any analytics available to me. I suppose I could put a "site counter" on my blogs.

-- Jack Krupansky

My AdSense clickthrough rate (CTR) for the month of February 2009 was...

My AdSense click-through rate (CTR) for the month of February 2009 was... OOPS! Sorry, but Google has forbidden me from disclosing my click-through rate. As per the AdSense Terms and Conditions:

7.  Confidentiality. You agree not to disclose Google Confidential Information without Google's prior written consent. "Google Confidential Information" includes without limitation: (a) all Google software, technology, programming, specifications, materials, guidelines and documentation relating to the Program; (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Property performance in the Program provided to You by Google; and (c) any other information designated in writing by Google as "Confidential" or an equivalent designation. However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google's gross payments to You pursuant to the Program. Google Confidential Information does not include information that has become publicly known through no breach by You or Google, or information that has been (i) independently developed without access to Google Confidential Information, as evidenced in writing; (ii) rightfully received by You from a third party; or (iii) required to be disclosed by law or by a governmental authority.

I can tell you that my net income from Google AdSense for the five months from September 2008 through January 2009 were a whopping $100.27, a whole $20 per month (simple average.) The T&C permit this disclosure (from above):

However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google's gross payments to You pursuant to the Program.

Technically, I probably cannot tell you my earnings for the month of February 2009 or any other individual month since Google granted the right to disclose only "gross payments to You" and there was no "payment" for February. But, you would be able to disclose payment for each month provided that your net earnings for the month were not less than $100, the minimum payment. Also, technically, you would not be permitted to even disclose that monthly earnings until the day when the payment is actually made and legally constitutes "a payment to You."

The T&C also proscribe me from disclosing my total page impressions and number of clicks.

In theory, I would be permitted to give you page impressions if I had independent analytics to determine that number, but since all of my blogs are on Blogger, I do not have any analytics available to me. I suppose I could put a "site counter" on my blogs.

-- Jack Krupansky

Should Twitter have an app store (ala Apple)?

The fact that Apple seems to be doing quite well with its App Store makes me wonder whether, say, Twitter could also do well with a comparable store for add-ons for use with Twitter.

In other words, which is the cart and which is the horse (or chicken and egg if you wish), the iPhone as a "platform" or Twitter as a platform?

-- Jack Krupansky

Amazon Kindle - if a software agent reads a book aloud is that a performance or the creation of a derivative work?

The recent uproar over the read-aloud feature of the new Amazon Kindle book reading device has raised some fascinating questions related to the definition and interpretation of the concepts of a performance and a derivative work, as well as the concept of licensed use. I would add that this dispute also raises the issue of the role and status of software agents.

An article in Ars Technica by Julian Sanchez entitled "Kindles and "creative machines" blur boundaries of copyright" does a decent jobs of covering both the pros and cons and legal nuances of the "rights" for electronically reading a book aloud.

I have read a lot of the pro and con arguments, but I am not prepared to utter a definitive position at this time.

I would note that there is a "special" context for the entire debate: the ongoing "culture war" between the traditional world view of people, places, and things and the so-called "digital" world view, whether it be online with the Web or interactive within a computer system. Clearly there are parallels between the real and "virtual" worlds, but also there are differences. Rational people will recognize and respect the parallels even as they recognize and respect the differences. Alas, there is a point of view that insists that the virtual worlds (online and interactive) should not be constrained in any way by the real-world world view.

The simple truth is that the real and virtual worlds can in fact coexist separately, but the problem comes when we try to blend the two worlds and pass artifacts between them. Then, the separateness breaks down. The Kindle is a great example, with real-world books being "passed" into the digital world and then the act of electronically reading them aloud passing back from the digital world to the real world.

It is also interesting to note that many books are now actually created in the virtual world (word processing, storage, transmission, digital printing) even if not intended specifically as so-called e-books, so that physical books themselves in fact typically originated in a virtual world. Clearly the conception of the book occurs in the mind of the author and the editors, but the actual "assembly" of all of the fragments from the minds of authors and editors into the image of the book occurs in the virtual world.

In any case, my interest is in the role of software agents. A software agent is a computer program which possesses the quality of agency or acting for another entity. The Kindle read-aloud feature is clearly a software agent. Now, the issue is whose agent is it. The consumer? Amazon? The book author? The publisher?

The superficially simple question is who "owns" the software agent.

We speak of "buying" books, even e-books, but although the consumer does in fact "buy" the physical manifestation, they are in fact only licensing the "use" of the intellectual property embodied in that physical representation. You do in fact "own" the ones and zeros of the e-book or the paper and ink of the meatspace book, but you do not own all uses except as covered by the license that you agreed to at the time of acquisition of the bits. Clearly not everyone likes or agrees with that model, but a license is a contract and there are laws related to contracts. Clearly there are also disputes about what the contract actually covers or what provisions are enforceable. That is why we have courts.

So, the consumer owns the bits of the read-aloud software agent, and the consumer may have some amount of control over the behavior of that software agent, but ownership and interaction are not the same thing.

I would suggest that the read-aloud software agent still belongs to Amazon since it remains a component of the Kindle product. A Kindle reading a book aloud is not the same as a parent reading a book to a child or a teacher reading to a class (or the reading in the movie The Reader), in particular because it is Amazon's agent that is doing the reading.

An interesting variation would be an open source or public domain version of Kindle as downloadable software for the PC, or software with features different from Kindle for that matter. Who "owns" any software agents embedded in that software? Whose agent is doing the performance? Whose agent is creating derivative works? To me, the immediate answer is who retains the intellectual property rights to the agent. In the Kindle case, Amazon is not attempting to transfer all rights. Even if they did, there is the same question as with file-sharing software, whether there is some lingering implied liability that goes along even when ownership is transferred.

Another open issue would be software agents which completely generate content from scratch dynamically, not from some input such as an e-book data stream. Who owns that content? I would suggest that the superficial answer is that the owner of the agent owns "created" (non-derivative) content, except as they may have licensed transfer of ownership of such content.

Another issue is whether a "stream" can be considered a representation. I would think so. One could also consider it a performance of an implied representation. Whether each increment of data in the stream is stored may not be particularly relevant. The stream has most of the "effect" of a full representation.

Another issue is trying to discover the intent or spirit of the law as opposed to the exact letter of the law. Sure, there are plenty of loopholes and gotchas that do in fact matter when in a courtroom, but ultimately I would think that it is the intentions that matter the most to society. Unless, you are a proponent of a "free" digital world that is unencumbered by any constraints of the real world and seeks to exploit loopholes simply because "they are there."

In any case, my point is not to settle the matter, but to raise the issues of performances and creation of derivative works in the realm of software agents, both for developers of software agent technology and those who seek to deploy it. And we have this issue of what lingering liability tail connects software agents and their creators.

-- Jack Krupansky

Judgment: hunches and suspicions

One of the qualities of being a professional is your judgment. Sometimes facts are precisely black and white, but frequently we have little choice but to deal with shades of gray. That is where our judgment comes into play. I try very hard to be very clear about whether I know something is a demonstrable fact or not. Sometimes I simply do not have facts sufficient to prove that a claim is definitively true or false, but I do have enough sense and experience to judge whether a claim is more likely to be true or more likely to be false. The question is how to indicate that I am making such a judgment call. In the past, I have commonly said that I "suspect" that a claim is true or false, but now I am wondering if "suspicion" has the right tone for professional judgment. Maybe the word "hunch" conveys essentially the same meaning, but with more of a professional tone. I suspect that to be the case. Oops! Make that I have a hunch that is the case. The dictionary definition of suspicion suggests doubt and "suspecting something wrong", with an implication of negativity, while hunch means "a strong intuitive meaning." The last thing I want to do to encourage people to read my writing is to come across with a negative tone.

So, I have a hunch that I should go with hunch.

We'll see how that sounds.

-- Jack Krupansky

How do I find the public timeline in Twitter?

Okay, you are using Twitter and everything is great. But, you keep hearing mention of the term "public timeline" (or, less properly, "public time line"), but where is it? How do you find it?

Easy: Click on "Everyone" on the menu on the right side of the Twitter page. Done. Now you are seeing all of the tweets made by every Twitter user, in real-time. Yeah, that is a lot, but it is a great way to get a feel for what is going on.

Then, once you are totally overloaded by the public timeline, get back to your own "personal timeline", click on "Home". It is all that simple.

Sometimes, people mistakenly refer to their personal timeline as being their public timeline, but there is only one public timeline and it is for everyone.

-- Jack Krupansky

Should you host your professional blog somewhere other than Blogger?

Everybody knows that only "amateur" bloggers use Blogger and host their blogs on Google's blogspot.com, or so I thought that everybody knew. But is it really true? Honestly, I have no idea. Nonetheless, Dharmesh Shah has a Hubspot blog post entitled "Why Your Business Blog Shouldn't Be On BlogSpot.com" which offers four top reasons why your business should not be on blogspot.com:

1. Google Doesn't Need The Help
2. Domain Lock-In
3. Transferring Data Is Unreasonably Hard
4. Mediocre Feature-Set

Read his post for the details.

Meanwhile, all of my blogs are hosted on Blogger, blogspot.com. Most of them are strictly "business" in terms of content and purpose, but with none of them getting more than 50 page views a day or 300 page views total across all of my blogs and Web sites, I cannot honestly say that they constitute a real, thriving business. So, there is no pressing need for me or anybody else in a similar position to contemplate a move to other than Blogger and blogspot.com.

-- Jack Krupansky

Bug in Google Maps - wrong location for Catherine Slip in NYC

How annoying. You expect Google Maps to be accurate, but then one of the few times where I know exactly what's where, Google has it wrong. I typed in "map 22 James St., New York, NY", the location of a fire in Chinatown. I was curious if it was anywhere near any place I had walked. It turns out it was. It was just two blocks from Catherine Street, which I tend to walk down on my Saturday walks around lower Manhattan. Catherine Street ends at South Street near the East River. Actually, where really happens is that Catherine Street technically ends at Cherry Street and the last two blocks are called Catherine Slip, because in "the old days" there was a slip for sailing ships to dock there. Yahoo Maps in fact has Catherine Slip labeled correctly. Google Maps does not, and instead labels the driveway through an adjacent housing complex as being Catherine Slip. I do not think that driveway has a name. I suppose I should not be surprised that the kids at Google are clueless as to why a street would be called a slip. There are a number of "slip" streets on the East River of Lower Manhattan, and Google does have a bunch of them properly labeled.

-- Jack Krupansky

Do tinyurl.com links frighten you?

TinyURL is nice because it shortens long, unreadable, untypeable URLs to short, readable, URLs that can easily be retyped (if necessary) or pasted into an application such as email or Twitter or blog posts. Twitter especially needs them since tweets are limited to 140 characters. The downside of  tiny URLs is that you, the user, cannot tell where they are going to take you and many people are hesitant to click on any link unless they know exactly where it will take them.

For example, how comfortable are you at clicking on the following link?

http://tinyurl.com/ba2h2z

It sure looks scary. In fact, that link merely goes directly to this blog, but you would never know it. That sucks.

Unless... you know about the preview mode feature of TinyURL.com which you can enable to automatically catch any attempt to open a tiny URL and displays the TinyURL preview Web page that shows the user exactly where the tiny URL wants to take them. The user can then opt to actually go to where the tiny URL wants to go or ignore it and go on to whatever else they wish to do.

Note, preview mode is a setting that the user will have to set. You, the author of the email, tweet, or blog post cannot force preview mode to be enabled for your reader, the user.

So, here is what your users (or you as a user) need to do...

To enable preview mode, go to the TinyURL.com Web site, click on the "Preview Feature" link in the menu on the left side of the page. This will display the Preview page which will tell you the current setting for the preview mode flag (which is stored as a browser cookie.) This page will initially say "You currently have the preview feature disabled." That means preview mode is turned off. There will be a link below that message that says "Click here to enable previews." Go ahead and click that link, either on the TinyURL.com Web site, or right here in this blog post. The Web page will refresh and display the message "You currently have the preview feature enabled." That means preview mode is now turned on.

Then, whenever you click on a tiny URL, in email or Twitter or a blog post or any other app that can follow a Web link, you will be taken to the TinyURL.com Preview page that will display the messages "Preview of TinyURL.com/..." and "This TinyURL redirects to:" followed by the full URL associated with the tiny URL. Below those messages you will see a link that says "Proceed to this site." Click on that link and then you will be taken directly to the Web page for that full-length URL. Or, you can go back to what you were doing or go on to something else.

TinyURL preview mode keeps you safe and worry-free about where tiny URLs might take you.

-- Jack Krupansky

LinkedIn bug - delay of connection updating

I just ran into a LinkedIn bug. I sent out a connection invitation this morning and soon received the email message that says "Congratulations! You and so-and-so are now connected. ... View so-and-so's profile to..." So, I clinked the link to view so-and-so's profile and I immediately notice that there is a "How you're connected to so-and-so" panel on the right side of the page that says that I have to go through other connections to get to so-and-so and that I am a 3rd-degree connection. In other words, the Web portion of LinkedIn does not know what the email side just told me. Obviously they have a database update synchronization problem. Sigh. Silly me, I thought we were in the 21st century. I wonder how I got that crazy idea!

Now, this could simply be some sort of operational "service" disruption, but even then it suggests a design flaw: the email should not have gone out or at least not said that you "are now connected" when that was not exactly true. Maybe they simply need to add some text to say that the connection will be made in "a few minutes." Or, beef up their computing "cloud" and fix the logic error.

I just refreshed the profile page for so-and-so and it still said that I was am only a 3rd-degree connection. I then went to my own page, clicked on connections, saw that so-and-so was now on my list, clicked on so-and-so's name and I still saw the same profile page suggesting I was still only a 3rd-degree connection. I hit refresh again, and now finally LinkedIn shows that we are connected.

That may have taken about five minutes or more. LinkedIn may be experiencing load issues, but that is no excuse for invalid logic (stating that something is a fact when it is not yet a fact.)

Another possibility is that Google Chrome was not refeshing the page properly when requested, but I would say that is much less likely.

-- Jack Krupansky

Me, quoted in The Christian Science Monitor??

Believe it or not, I was once quoted in The Christian Science Monitor. I was just doing a search (using Microsoft Live Search) for references to my name and "global warming" and one of the results was a 2002 article about the Microsoft antitrust trial in Washington, D.C., which I attended. Old memories. Nothing to do with global warming though. There was probably a link to an article on global warming in a sidebar of "Most Viewed" articles the last time that page was crawled by Microsoft's search engine.

Oddly, Google will not find that CSM page with a similar search. Yahoo finds in fine.

The problem may be that the CSM site does not have a valid robot.txt file. Microsoft and Yahoo probably continue to crawl, but maybe Google is being conservative and assuming that an invalid robot.txt file should be considered an exclusion. But, Google does index other pages on the CSM Web site. Interesting problem.

-- Jack Krupansky

What is a paradigm shift?

I was just doing a little reading and stumbled across a document that discussed paradigm shifts of technology. Not that the concept is new or mysterious, but I was curious what the technical definition really is. More importantly, I was interested in the application of the concept to technology, commerce, and society in the context of the Internet, Web, Web x.0/social-computing, and how people will earn a living in the future (or even next week) in the New Economy.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary does not define the term paradigm shift, but does offer a reasonable definition for paradigm:

a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated ; broadly : a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind

The Wikipedia was far less useful than it usually is. It does have a reasonable explanation for paradigm shifts in science or even social science, but was not so helpful regarding technology and money in the New Economy. The lead for Paradigm shift merely says:

Paradigm shift (sometimes known as extraordinary science or revolutionary science) is the term first used by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to describe a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science. It is in contrast to his idea of normal science.

It has since become widely applied to many other realms of human experience as well even though Kuhn himself restricted the use of the term to the hard sciences. According to Kuhn, "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share." (The Essential Tension, 1997). Unlike a normal scientist, Kuhn held, "a student in the humanities has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately examine for himself." (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Once a paradigm shift is complete, a scientist cannot, for example, posit the possibility that miasma causes disease or that ether carries light. In contrast, a critic in Humanities can choose to adopt a 19th century theory of poetics, for instance, or interpret economic behaviour from a Marxist perspective.

Thus, paradigms, in the sense that Kuhn used them, do not exist in Humanities or social sciences. Nonetheless, the term has been adopted since the 1960s and applied in non-scientific contexts.

There is very little mention of technology paradigms. The closest is an odd section entitled "As marketing speak":

In the later part of the 1990s, 'paradigm shift' emerged as a buzzword, popularized as marketing speak and appearing more frequently in print and publication. In his book, Mind The Gaffe, author Larry Trask advises readers to refrain from using it, and to use caution when reading anything that contains the phrase. It is referred to in several articles and books as abused and overused to the point of becoming meaningless.

Granted, I agree that the term is overused, but I find it is still applicable and in that original scientific sense.

I find it amusingly noteworthy that the Wikipedia article does not even mention the paradigm shift from books, encyclopedias, and libaries to the Wikipedia itself. Missed that one.

I will offer my own brief definition:

A paradigm is a combination of a worldview and a collection of rules for operating in the context of that worldview. Opportunities are available and success can be achieved when individuals and organizations acknowledge the worldview and follow its rules.

A paradigm shift is a relatively abrupt change that brings about a relatively radically new worldview with new rules, such that opportunities are accessible and success can be achieved only to the extent that individuals and organizations adapt their thinking to the new worldview and adapt their behavior to follow its new rules.

-- Jack Krupansky

Bored? Try Twitter search

It is not immediately obvious, but Twitter does have a search feature. It is hidden down at the bottom of the page:

(c) 2009 Twitter About Us Contact Blog Status Apps API Search Help Jobs Terms Privacy

You can also go directly to http://search.twitter.com/.

In addition to searching all Twitter messages for keywords, it also tells you what search keywords are currently most popular. For example, at this moment the hottest topic is the O'Reilly Tools of Change (for Publishing) conference, right here in New York City.

-- Jack Krupansky

Why does Google Chrome sometimes have trouble loading Web pages?

Every once in a while I notice that the Google Chrome Web browser is suddenly unable to load some, but not all, Web pages. The status line says "Waiting..." but never comes back. Hitting Refresh (repeatedly) does not resolve the problem.

Here is what fixes the problem (for me):

1. Start Microsoft Internet Explorer. I know, I know, this is very painful for some people!!
2. Visit (using IE) the Web site which was not loading in Chrome. This should work fine.
3. Close all Chrome browser windows. This is necessary. Hitting Refresh again, even after IE is able to view the Web site, will still not work in Chrome.
4. Restart Chrome.
5. Visit the Web site in Chrome. This should work fine now.

Another solution is to disable DNS prefetching in Chrome. I have not tried that, mostly since I suspect it will slow Chrome down and speed is one of my main reasons for using Chrome as my preferred browser.

The root of the problem is DNS caching. DNS is the Internet technology infrastructure that figures out where domain names (Web sites and email) are really located (so-called IP addresses.)

The real root of the problem is that the Internet has a rather dysfunctional infrastructure which works much of the time but has intermittent failures a fair percentage of the time, probably mostly due to fluctuations in traffic intensity. Usually, all the application has to do is simply retry a failed network access one or more times and eventually it will succeed after the intermittent traffic disruption passes.

A traditional problem is that DNS lookups are relatively expensive and can occur dozens of times even for what appears to be a single Web page (images located on other domains, advertising scripts, etc.), so the Web browser seeks to optimize and "cache" information about whether domain names are accessible.

IE has a dumb, and slower, approach to this issue, but it has the benefit of being more reliable.

Chrome has a fancy new feature, called DNS Prefetching (or Pre-Resolving), which results in fast loading of Web sites - most of the time, but which apparently has some bug which causes Chrome to improperly negatively cache domain names when one of this intermittent access problems occurs.

There are already two Google "chromium" (the open source project for Chrome) bugs filed on this issue:

1. Issue 3819: Errant "domain not found" cached when DNS Prefetching is enabled. Status: WontFix!
2. Issue 3041: DNS pre-fetching causes frequent internet loss. Status: Unconfirmed.

In terms of frequency, I have seen it at least half a dozen times over the past few months, but rarely more than once a week.

It may in fact be caused by some difficulty with a router (e.g., that prevents access to the DNS server), so that Googlers with great Internet access (as opposed to us consumers) may never see the problem at all.

-- Jack Krupansky

Oops... definition of social agent

The good news is that somehow, I have managed to be result #1 in Google for the term social agent. The bad news is that my Web page that purports to define that term simply said "A social agent is ... TBD." How lame! DOH! That page has gotten a fair number of hits, probably mostly by academic researchers in software agent technology and their students. One finally sent me an email sarcastically complimenting me for saving him so much effort and that my mother should be proud of me. Well, I fixed the problem. I did some research and derived my own definition for the term social agent. Actually, there are two somewhat distinct uses:

• (1) A social agent is a software agent which exhibits a significant degree of interdependence with other software agents which results in or from the formation of communities of software agents within the full population of software agents to which the social agents belong, where each community has rules for behavior within the community.

• (2) A social agent is a software agent or robot which is capable of social communication with human beings.

See: http://www.agtivity.com/def/social_agent.htm

What is frustrating about this is that by failing to have a reasonable definition on that Web page I have been losing out on opportunities to be cited as a source for definition of that term. There is not even a Wikipedia article for it.

-- Jack Krupansky

Why is Google having trouble counting to 10?

Several times recently I have gotten Google search results where the result count is completely absurd. I am not talking about the typical search where clearly Google is estimating the result count, but for simple cases where the entire result count is clearly known since all results fit on a single results page. Last week I saw a result page that said "Results 1 - 6 of about 3 for ..." Huh? If Google fetched and displayed all of the results, why not display the actual count rather than some clearly absurd estimate.

I just did a search that comes back with "Results 1 - 8 of about 0 for ..." You would think that if a non-empty collection of results were found, the reported count should be anything but zero. Actually, when I do the initial search it reports "Results 1 - 5 of about 3 for ..." with five results displayed. Then I click on the "repeat the search with the omitted results included" link and I get the "Results 1 - 8 of about 0 for ..."

Oh, and if I hit Refresh a bunch of times, sometimes it actually does report the correct, actual result count, and sometimes it reports zero. Maybe a bug was introduced (or found) and the various Google mirror servers are not in sync in terms of code. The same results seems to be returned in either case, although there is some slight difference in display (no indentation for results from the same Web site.)

My latest test search:

"social agent" krupansky

I was attempting to find all of my own documents that refered to social agents.

-- Jack Krupansky

Samsung: Satisfying emotional desires

I noticed and actually read a display for Samsung in the Time-Warner building on Columbus Circle here in Manhattan that claimed that Samsung was "Satisfying emotional desires." Is that where we are at here in this society/economy, focusing on desires and emotion, rather than real needs and sensibility? Apparently, the answer is "Yes."

Given that "reality" (perspective, perception), what are the implications for how to fully exploit blogging and other forms of social media, other than the superficial tasks of identifying user desires and appealing to them emotionally or at an emotional level or in a way to appeals to emotion?

Catering to emotional whimsy is not exactly my strong suit.

-- Jack Krupansky

Removed AdSense display ads as an experiment

As an experiment I have disabled AdSense display ads. Besides being visually annoying, especially the ones that are dynamic and flash, the concern is that readers are less likely to click on display ads. I'll see if my click-through-rate (CTR) improves over the next month.

I am still reserving the option to have sponsored display ads, but they would have to meet criteria that I can define and control so as to assure that they add value and do not annoy readers. But, given my low readership, not to mention the crappy economy, it is not likely that I will be likely to attract much in the way of sponsors in the near future.

-- Jack Krupansky

Snark author about to launch into Maureen Dowd, but then...

It was good while it lasted, all of half an hour. David Denby, the author of Snark - It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation was finally ready to give us his snarky take on New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, but all he got to say was her name and then C-SPAN switched back to "live" Senate coverage of the stimulus debates. Grrr!!... They call it "live" coverage, but there are no Senators there and the clerk is not even doing the usual quorum call. Sigh. Even if they do debate anything tonight, all they are really going to do is "formally file" the big $780 billion compromise deal amendment, which they won't vote on until late Monday afternoon, and even then they won't vote on the final Senate bill until Tuesday. Right now, all C-SPAN2 is doing is playing classical music. Maybe somebody at C-SPAN simply did not want to hear Denby savage Saint Maureen. Some people have no sense of humor.

-- Jack Krupansky

Beware of little brother with a smart phone

David Denby, the author of Snark - It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation says that he is not worried so much about Big Brother but he is worried about "little brother with a smart phone" putting unexpected pictures and quotes on the Internet and that "they are there forever."

-- Jack Krupansky

Snark author on C-SPAN2 right now

I just noticed that David Denby, the author of Snark - It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation is speaking on C-SPAN2 right now.

Is his appearance an improvement or negative relative to C-SPAN coverage of the Senate stimulus debates?

-- Jack Krupansky

Is Reboubt the first volcano to be followed on Twitter?

You can follow the updates on the Redoubt volcano from the Alaska Volcano Observatory on Twitter.

Is this the first volcano to be "followed" on Twitter? Interesting.

There are plenty of reports, data, images, and even webcams for Redoubt and the other Alaska volcanoes (yes, there are more that are active) on the Alaska Volcano Observatory Web site.

Still no eruption. Kind of like the Obama stimulus plan in Washington. Lots of rumblings, a little smoke and steam. Which one will burst out first?

-- Jack Krupansky

Top Google searches

To be honest, I have no clue as to what users are really interested in these days. So, I went to Google Zeitgeist. I navigated to Insights for Search and requested the top searches of the past 7 days in the U.S. Those top searches were:

1. lyrics
2. yahoo
3. myspace
4. youtube
5. facebook
6. games
7. weather
8. news
9. my
10. google

How lame. Using Google to search for "google" or to find Yahoo?? Actually, I suspect that list is the initial term of the search, so that "lyrics" is probably followed by the name of a song or singer or band, and "google" is followed by the actual search. And obviously "my" is probably followed by "space".

That Google page also gives the fastest rising searches in the U.S. over that same 7 days:

1. octuplets
2. jessica simpson
3. superbowl
4. super bowl
5. superbowl 2009
6. super bowl 2009
7. ufc
8. australian open
9. weather channel
10. taken

At least that list is a little more interesting.

Then I went back to the main Zeitgeist page and navigated to Hot Trends which lists the top 100 fastest-rising search queries in the U.S., updated continuously. Here are the top 25:

1. turbo tax
2. cnn.com/ricksanchez
3. no stimulus
4. jay electronica
5. turbotax 2008
6. groundhog day 2009 results
7. maria elena holly
8. super bowl porn
9. the institute for human continuity
10. macy s layoffs
11. torn mcl
12. michael phelps bong hit
13. go daddy commercials
14. superbowl porn clip
15. turbo tax freedom edition
16. martha washington
17. lattie mcgee
18. did the groundhog see his shadow
19. turbotax 2009
20. macy s press release
21. video of punxsutawney phil
22. redbox codes
23. clint ritchie
24. turbotax online
25. watch super bowl commercials

Interesting list.

I am always curious about the stuff that is fairly popular, but not at the top, so here are the last 10 of that Top 100:

91. career builder commercial
92. punksatony phil
93. blackberry outage
94. national shopping service
95. groundhog video
96. erykah badu
97. punxsutawney pa
98. phelps photo
99. phoenix newspaper
100. enoki mushrooms

Nothing terribly interesting here, but maybe that's a statement about where consumers are at in the U.S. these days.

Actually, what I would really like to see is "new" searches, queries that have never been seen by Google before today.

-- Jack Krupansky

Is that snarky enough for you?

Are you suffering from snarkiness envy? Have you ever read a "snarky post" or a "snarky comment" and wondered how they did it? Are you curious to find out whether you have what it takes to be "snarky"? Well, guess what... there is actually an entire book on snarkiness, by David Denby entitled Snark - It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation.

To be honest, I am not so sure it is worth paying real money for this book, but at least it was fun to leaf through at the bookstore. OTOH, for only $11 (for a hardcover!), it may be worthwhile merely for entertainment -- it's actually cheaper than buying a ticket in a movie theater here in New York City. If you are suspicious about its amusement value, let me give you just one example: it has an entire chapter on... Maureen Dowd (NY Times columnist.) Not to be missed!

From the book description on Amazon:

What is snark? You recognize it when you see it -- a tone of teasing, snide, undermining abuse, nasty and knowing, that is spreading like pinkeye through the media and threatening to take over how Americans converse with each other and what they can count on as true. Snark attempts to steal someone's mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness.

...

In this highly entertaining essay, Denby traces the history of snark through the ages, starting with its invention as personal insult in the drinking clubs of ancient Athens, tracking its development all the way to the age of the Internet, where it has become the sole purpose and style of many media, political, and celebrity Web sites. Snark releases the anguish of the dispossessed, envious, and frightened; it flows when a dying class of the powerful struggles to keep the barbarians outside the gates, or, alternately, when those outsiders want to take over the halls of the powerful and expel the office-holders.

Disclaimer: I will (or at least should) receive a very modest commission if you buy this book after clicking on the Amazon link above.

Oh, and one other thing... I do not want to see even a single snarky comment on this blog post. Snarky comments will be deleted! Just kidding. Who in there right mind would be commenting on a post like this anyway!

-- Jack Krupansky

Test an Amazon book link

I suspect that my old Amazon book links may not be working properly, so I am testing a new one here.

I have no idea who the author, Robert Fulghum, is, or what the book Third Wish, is all about, but here is a link that will take the reader to Amazon to review the description for the book and possibly even purchase it, and maybe even provide me with a tiny commission:

The brief description of the book from Amazon is:

First published in the Czech Republic (where it quickly became a bestseller), Third Wish is a sweeping, lavishly plotted novel in five parts, bound together by a profound love story that spans the globe. It is at once a classic quest novel and a rich parable for our times, inspired by the works of Lewis Carroll, Milan Kundera, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, among others. Presented in a boxed set as two richly illustrated paperback volumes with an accompanying CD musical soundtrack, this is a true one-of-a-kind novel.

Let me know if you try that link and it does not take you to the description of that book on Amazon.

Amazon book links have gotten somewhat more complicated over the years. Sure, they are more functional, but that is not necessarily a free lunch.

-- Jack Krupansky

Mesothelioma

One amusing suggestion concerning my meager Google AdSense ad revenue is that I do not write about Mesothelioma enough. At least a few years ago, it was rumored that law firms were paying outrageous ad click rates for the keyword "Mesothelioma" since they are able to make outrageous amounts of money from suing companies for causing this form of lung cancer from asbestos in the workplace. Maybe so, but I have been trying to stay focused on topics that I am actually interested in or at least trying to pass along useful information that I have run across.

I used Google AdSense advance reports to figure out that in 2006 and 2007 my click through rates (CTR) were 1.32% and 1.28%, but my CTR plummeted by 50% to 0.64% in 2008, even though my page views had climbed by 49% in 2008. That makes very little sense to me.

Given that my page view were up, which is consistent with my higher blogging rate in 2008, I do not think that I have a content problem per se. On the other hand, maybe my content mix has shifted enough and maybe some topics are significantly less interesting to reduce the likelihood of readers clicking on ads.

Maybe my content is simply less interesting to advertisers, whoever they really are, this year.

Another suspicion I have is that the Google ads are getting stale and people are just not clicking on them as much.

Another possibility is that Google click-fraud detection is incorrectly and unfairly reducing my click counts. It would be very interesting for Google to report that as a separate statistic.

Or, maybe my readers are financially far worse off than in 2006 and 2007, and simply do not click on ads because they can not afford to buy. I would hope that isn't the case, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility.

I did verify that my average earnings per click were actually slightly higher in 2008 (but not as high as in 2006), so that is not the source of the decline in my overall AdSense earnings last year.

-- Jack Krupansky

AdSense falling off?

My Google AdSense ad revenue has fallen off dramatically over the past year even though my daily page views for my blogs and non-blog Web sites are roughly at the same level. My suspicion is that the dropoff is due to a combination of fewer new and interesting ads (fewer clicks) and lower bids for each ad.

Personally, whenever I do view any of my Web pages, the ads do not seem very compelling to me.

-- Jack Krupansky

New WhiteHouse.gov -- massive blunder, broken links

On its surface, the new WhiteHouse.gov, especially with a blog, is a great idea. Unfortunately, the implementation has scored a major blunder: all links to historical, archival content on the "old" White House web site from blogs and other web sites are now hopelessly broken!! Oops.

What they really need is to restore the old web site to a shadow "archive" location and then have a piece of proxy software that redirects valid old archival links to the shadow "archive" location.

The same goes for archival content for speeches of political appointees at the Department of State, for example.

I find this "purge" to be rather offensive, and wholly unnecessary. It is an example of partisan political chicanery at its worst.

-- Jack Krupansky

Poor message for WordPress database overload - "Error establishing a database connection"

I clicked on a story headline in Google News and after a pause got a white page with the following message:

WordPress

Error establishing a database connection

This either means that the username and password information in your wp-config.php file is incorrect or we can't contact the database server at localhost. This could mean your host's database server is down.

• Are you sure you have the correct username and password?
• Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname?
• Are you sure that the database server is running?

If you're unsure what these terms mean you should probably contact your host. If you still need help you can always visit the WordPress Support Forums.

None of that information was helpful in any way (user name, password, hostname) and did not clue me in as to the likely problem: the database server was probably simply overloaded due to the volume of traffic coming from Google News and that the best response is simply to keep hitting Refresh. Hitting Refresh eventually displayed the actual news story (sixth time?), but usually displayed the error message again.

The link to the story, Peanut Butter Salmonella Recalls Include Little Debbie Snacks, is http://www.newsinferno.com/archives/4572.

The displayed link in Google News was:

Peanut Butter Salmonella Recalls Include Little Debbie Snacks
Newsinferno.com - 45 minutes ago - all 4,333 articles »

In case you cannot access the story, here is the first paragraph:

Little Debbie snacks are the latest peanut butter-containing foods to be recalled  amid a nationwide salmonella outbreak.  The outbreak has been linked to a Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) facility in Georgia which supplies peanut paste and peanut butter to 85 other food firms.  Little Debbie joined a growing list of companies that recalled snacks over the weekend.  Meanwhile, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is warning consumers to avoid eating any foods that contain peanut butter.

Now, I'll get back to eating my Reese's Peanut Butter Cups before Homeland Security gets here and breaks down my door and confiscates them. I am assuming that Salmonella is already on the list of global terrorist organizations. To date, all attempts to negotiate with Salmonella have proven fruitless.

-- Jack Krupansky

Apple Media Advisory: Jobs to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June

Here is the link to the official Apple Media Advisory concerning Steve Jobs' medical leave of absence. You have probably already seen the text of the internal Apple email:

Apple Media Advisory

Apple CEO Steve Jobs today sent the following email to all Apple employees:

Team,

I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple's day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.

I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.

Steve

A wise decision by Steve. There was no need to martyr himself in pursuit of the insane ideal of performance and perfection that so many Apple zealots and followers had been promoting in such an idealistic and unrealistic manner.

Just last week I recommended that Jobs take a break. I am glad to see that his thinking is in line with mine.

Meanwhile, I am sure that Apple will survive just fine without him for the next six months.

-- Jack Krupansky

Google Chrome bug: old tab whiteout

I tend to keep a lot of tabs open when browsing the Web. Sometimes I may not return to a tab for quite some time, possibly even an hour or more, but with Google Chrome there is a lengthy delay repainting old tabs. This has never been a problem for me using Microsoft Internet Explorer, but with the Google Chrome Browser, clicking on a tab that I have not viewed in a half hour or more results in the tab displaying completely empty, a rectangle of whiteout, for a few seconds, before Chrome finally displays the previous image of that tab. This is not a matter of reloading the Web page, just repainting of the previous contents. In fact, if I go back to an old Google News tab after a long period without viewing that tab, it takes a few seconds to repaint the previous display of news and then quickly loads the refreshed page with updated content.

I have not found any fix or workaround.

-- Jack Krupansky

Google Chrome: Unable to display some Web page menus properly

I was looking up the retirement ages for Baby Boomers and ran into a government Web page that Google Chrome displays in a rather unusable manner. It has something to do with menus which do not display properly and end up overlaying the text and tables on the Web page.

See: Social Security Retirement Planner:
http://www.socialsecurity.gov/retire2/agereduction.htm

So, fo now, this is yet another reason I am holding off from using Chrome as my default Web browser.

I am using the up-to-date non-beta version of Chrome, 1.0.154.36.

The page does display properly in both IE 6 and Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14.

-- Jack Krupansky

Edge question for 2009: What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?

John Brockman's Edge question for 2009 is now out: What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?

There are 151 contributors, for a total of 107,000 words.

I have not even begun reading any of them yet, but this one sounded intriguing:

PAUL J. STEINHARDT
Physicist; Albert Einstein Professor of Science, Princeton University; Coauthor, Endless Universe

BLACK HOLES: THE ULTIMATE GAME-CHANGER?

And I definitely need to read this one:

Marti Hearst
Computer Scientist, UC Berkeley, School of Information; Author, Search User Interfaces

THE DECLINE OF TEXT

-- Jack Krupansky

Where did all the old spammers go?!?!

Overnight I received only one spam email message. Usually I would have two dozen or more. I did not receive a dozen all weekend. Also, I noticed that the spam messages I currently receive are newer formats and that I am not seeing any of the older formats. This suggests that something indeed happened to the older spammers. Maybe the recession killed them.

I have my email spam filters set to pass through all messages (so that I never lose any messages) but with "[SPAM]" tags on the subject lines so they can easily be deleted. I have not changed my settings recently.

Anybody else seeing a dramatic decline in incoming spam email messages?

-- Jack Krupansky

NYT: We're Sorry - An error occurred?!?!

I would have thought that The New York Times Web site of all places would have done a much better job of handling errors. I was doing a simple search and up pops a "Member Center" Web page that says only:

We're Sorry

An error has occurred. Please try again later or contact Customer Service for assistance.

What does that mean, "an error"?? What kind of error?

The Web page URL file name is "apperror.html", so I suspect that an "application error" occurred.

I tried again, but got the same error.

This appears to be a bug in The Times Web site software.

Here's what I did...

I wanted to search for "energy efficiency" and "thomas friedman". I entered the following search text on the Web site home page:

"energy efficiency"  "thamas friedman"

The Times Web site software found no results due to the typo (Thamas instead of Thomas) and offered me the following correction:

Did you mean: "energy efficiency" "thomas friedman"

Fair enough. So, I clicked on the corrected query and that's when I got the "We're Sorry" response.

The problem is that the corrected query URL uses "&quot;" to represent the quotes, but that notation is only for use within HTML Web page text and is not supported in URLs. The bad URL that the Times correction (above) uses is:

http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch?query=&quot;energy%20efficiency&quot;%20&quot;thomas%20friedman&quot;

A corrected URL (by me), which does work, would be:

http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch?query="energy%20efficiency"%20"thomas%20friedman"

Now, let's see how long it takes The Times to correct the bug in their correction to my typo.

-- Jack Krupansky

Where is all of my SPAM???

I have my email spam filters to send spam through but with the subject line tagged with "[SPAM]", but lately I have been getting much less spam. In fact, this morning I only got one spam message and it was Yahoo discussion spam, which is a different beast than your usual spam. So, what has happened to the spammers? Have "The Authorities" shut them down? Are they having server problems? Have they had a change of heart? Have they gotten real jobs? What's up?? Of course the big question is whether this is simply a temporary lull, and that maybe the spammers will be back in full force before you know it.

Has anybody else noticed a decline in spam in the past couple of days?

-- Jack Krupansky

2009 - check

Success! I managed to write the current year properly ("2009" rather than "2008") on my very first attempt, my January rent check, this morning.

Hopefully, the rest of 2009 (did it correctly again!) will go as well.

-- Jack Krupansky

2009

Time to start getting mentally prepared to write "2009" rather than "2008" for the current year. Usually I do not bother until the new year is actually here, but then it takes me awhile before I stop mistakenly writing the old year. I do not have any (or at least not very much) trouble writing 2009 for dates in the future, but I am usually on auto-pilot when it comes to writing the current date. The good news is that most of my trouble in the past was related to writing checks, but these days I write very few checks. The moment of truth will come when I write my first rent check of the new year within the next few days.

It is hard to believe that we have already blown through most of the first decade of the 21st century. And what do we have to show for it? How many of us can say that we are much better off than ten years ago? For a lot of us, the keywords are "survival", "struggle", "hang in there", or even "bankruptcy" and "rebuild."

It will be interesting to see what "keywords" come to describe the next decade for most of us, as opposed to an elite few who can (or might endeaver to) claim that everything is wonderful.

The good news is that a lot of improvements are occurring incrementally in the background, so that we are not able to see them as major forces in our lives today, but they will incrementally become much more visible in the coming years. A lot of the pain many have experienced in recent years is simply the dying off of the old as the new (very) slowly takes hold.

I did not mean for this post to be about traditional new year's resolutions, so I will not make any claims as to what I will or will not do in the coming year, other than to be sure to refer to it as 2009 rather than 2008.

-- Jack Krupansky

Oh well, IE 8 Beta 2 is not compatible with McAfee AV

I updated IE to IE 8 Beta 2, but unfortunately it is not compatible with McAfee Anti-virus, so I had no choice but to revert to IE 7. Oh well.

The problem symptoms were that clicking on an email message subject line in Outlook Express took several seconds to repaint the OE window and left it blank for most of that time, plus the McAfee SecurityCenter window would always come up blank, so that you could not check status or change settings.

I found a message on a McAfee discussion forum which basically says that the problem is known but that no fix should be expected until IE 8 comes off of beta status.

So, I am back to using IE 7 as my system default browser, but I still use the new, non-beta version of Google Chrome for most of my browsing.

I will play with Chrome for another week or so and then decide whether to make it my system default browser.

-- Jack Krupansky

Google Chrome browser now out of beta

As noted in the media, the Google Chrome browser is now available in a non-beta release.

I just updated and it took less than five minutes. Go into Tools > About and you will see a message saying that a new release is available. Click the "Update Now" button, and wait. After the update is installed, you have to exit from Chrome and restart the browser.

I updated from release 0.4.154.29 to 1.0.154.36.

So far, I haven't seen any problems.

All of my bookmarks are intact, but I still do not see any option to sort them.

I am still not using Chrome as my default browser. I'll give it a week and then decide. I should see if IE 8 is available yet... yes, it is... downloading Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 now! It will be interesting to compare the two. I found Chrome to open tabs much faster than IE 7, so we will see how IE8b2 compares.

-- Jack Krupansky

Using Twitter

Just recently I have started using Twitter more frequently. I still do not have any handle on how to use it to create some real value and return on effort, but it at least feels like it is worth at least some minimal effort.

Me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/JackKrupansky

Feel free to "follow" me.

-- Jack Krupansky

Economic depression watch?

I am in the process of starting a new blog, Economic Depression Watch, which will focus on the factors that could determine whether the U.S. economic may or may not slip into a depression in the near future. My personal opinion is that a depression can be easily avoided and will most likely be avoided, but technically one is possible if the government behaves stupidly enough.

The new blog is at: http://economicdepressionwatch.blogspot.com/

I have also registered www.EconomicDepressionWatch.com with stealth redirection to the new blog, but it may take some time for the new domain name to become functional. The blog is already functional, although I have yet to start adding "real" content.

-- Jack Krupansky

Why can't I see charts and quotes in Google Finance using Google Chrome anymore??!!

Just a couple of days ago I noticed that Google Finance was not displaying charts or quote information for stocks when using the Google Chrome browser. I thought maybe it was some service outage on Google's end, but I just tried again and those features are still broken. Even worse, those features do work fine in Microsoft Internet Explorer. What happened?!?! I have no idea. It is amusing that Google Finance is working better with IE than Chrome. Sigh.

I did a little Googling, but found no mention of the problem.

Wait... I just found something:

I discovered that if I empty the cache then pages would display properly.

See: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=6ba0171cffa12713&hl=en

But first I simply tried to empty the cache from within Chrome by going to "Customize", "Clear browing data..." and selecting only the checkbox for "Cache" and clicking the "Clear Browsing Data" button, but this still did not fix the problem.

So, I navigated to C:\Documents and Settings\xxxxxxxx\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache and saw that there were five files there, "data_0" through "data_3" and "index". I suspected that maybe those cache files might be corrupted, so I deleted them (after closing Chrome first). Nope, that did not fix the problem.

Next, I cleared the browsing history from within Chrome. Still doesn't work!!!!

So, I bit the bullet and selected all of the check boxes to clear the download history, cookies, and passwords. Now... it works fine!!! Yeah!!!

My suspicion is that the cookies were the problem, so if you run into this problem, start by clearing the cookies. Unfortunately, my browsing history is now gone. Poof. Sigh. Maybe some cookie got corrupted. But, it is curious that Google Finance was still working fine with IE.

-- Jack Krupansky

Will Microsoft and Yahoo work out a deal?

Sooner or later, Microsoft and Yahoo will come to some sort of agreement on their common interests, even though they also have divergent interests, but the idea of a full acquisition of Yahoo is essentially a non-starter. Sure, Microsoft has a content business, but trying to outright merge it with MSN would not be worth the effort or the upfront or long-term costs. Maybe some form of blending or cross-promotion would benefit both parties. What Microsoft really should do is to become the search provider for Yahoo. Ultimately, Microsoft does not need to buy any assets at all, but simply should become the search service provider for Yahoo. But, since Yahoo has such a large investment in search, Microsoft may need to buyout some major chunk of that investment in order to convince Yahoo to make a deal happen. I suspect that what really needs to happen is for Microsoft to provide some form of preferential treatment for Yahoo content search results. And, maybe, Microsoft would abandon some, but not all, of its own content services in favor of associating with Yahoo content services.

One big unknown is the degree to which Yahoo would get out of the ad brokering business and rely on Microsoft to sell ad space on Yahoo content. I am sure Microsoft wants that, but Yahoo may not be willing to do that, at least in any initial search-provider deal. Longer term, this does seem the way that Yahoo should go, to limit and leverage its own resources.

This whole deal might be a multi-step process, a confidence-building process, with each step getting bigger until the final deal can be completed.

In any case, it is still likely that Yahoo would remain a separate corporation from Microsoft, even as Microsoft becomes a very significant service provider to Yahoo.

Ultimately, Yahoo needs to dramatically shrink its level of investment, effectively outsourcing that to Microsoft, who will be in a better position to leverage investment, so that Yahoo can focus on the content areas where it does best. And maybe then Microsoft can outsource some of its own content to Yahoo to leverage their investment as well. In essence, Microsoft is a platform company, with search and advertising being key platforms.

I suspect that Microsoft and Yahoo will in fact ultimately do some sort of deal. Maybe it will simply take some additional economic weakness to convince Yahoo to give up some of their overly idealistic fantasies of doing everything on their own.

Disclosure: I do own Microsoft stock.

-- Jack Krupansky

Still too much Old Economy deadwood holding the New Economy back

Although President-elect Barack Obama has ambitious plans for creating millions of "green" jobs, the sad fact is that the U.S. economy is still heavily overweighed with Old Economy jobs and way too light on New Economy jobs. Jobs to rebuild infrastructure and schools will still primarily focus on keeping the Old Economy on life support. We should be trying to accomplish much more of basic education online with modern communication and social networking tools rather than creating more or simply newer so-called "class" rooms that do more to stifle creativity and enthusiasm than leverage it.

I am not sure what the answer is, but it still seems so unfortunate that the New Economy has failed so miserably at supplanting the Old Economy in the U.S. economic order.

One would have thought that pumping money into the New Economy would be the way to go rather than propping up General Motors and our endless highways that seem geared more to wasting energy rather than leveraging it.

The really sad thing is how hopelessly dependent the New Economy is on the Old Economy.

For example, I have selected a 100% "green" power option for my electricity supplier here in New York City (Energetix, 60% low-impact hydro and 40% wind power.) But, even though my raw electricity cost for this "green" power was less than $5 last month, it cost $15 for Old Economy ConEdison to "deliver" that "green" power to my apartment.

Hopefully, that dependence will gradually begin to diminish, but it may be another five years or even ten years before we actually start to see some serious light at the end of the tunnel and can finally start to contemplate a truly New Economy U.S. economy.

But for now, it is quite frustrating that "fiscal stimulus" for the U.S. economy will mostly focus on the Old Economy, even if a small fraction of the money does get "targeted" for "green" investments.

-- Jack Krupansky

Is that the low for the stock markets?

Now that P-E Barack Obama has apparently selected Tim Geithner as the next Treasury Secretary to the approval of the financial markets, one might suspect that the stock market has set its low for this business cycle. Sure, it all depends on how well the rest of the new administration economic team comes together and hits the ground running after the inauguration with a robust fiscal stimulus plan, but it does look as if this is indeed likely to be the case. There is no guarantee any of this, but it does appear that the incoming Obama administration is coming together nicely and starting to set the stage for the beginnings of an economic renaissance in the Spring.

That said, it is possible if not very likely that short-term speculators will run the market up sharply and then back down sharply to "test" the low, and they may do that several more times before a solid bottom can be firmly established.

We will be getting a boatload of negative economic reports for months to come (e.g., the final report for Q4 GDP comes out in late March), but some of the leading economic indicators may start to show a little life sometime in January, particularly as retailers pursue post-holiday sales and euphoria over the new administration and the new fiscal stimulus plan take off. A GM, et al bailout "bridge" loan deal in December that gets the ball rolling for dramatic restructuring of Detroit could also provide the market with support. The FDIC and the Federal Reserve are both moving forward with additional support for the banks.

The most significant leading economic indicator of all is the stock market. People who sniff out a turnabout of economic activity place their early bets in the stock market. It may take weeks or even months before unemployment claims and mortgage applications begin to show a pickup in economic activity again, or at least start to show a slowing of the decline in activity.

The tentative intraday low for the Dow for this business cycle was 7,392.27. The closing low was 7,552.29, yesterday, Thursday, November 20, 2008.

The tentative intraday low for NASDAQ for this business cycle was 1,295.48. The closing low was 1,316.12, yesterday, Thursday, November 20, 2008.

The tentative intraday low for the S&P 500 for this business cycle was 741.02. The closing low was 752.44, yesterday, Thursday, November 20, 2008.

-- Jack Krupansky

PC Magazine - RIP

Wow... PC Magazine bites the dust. Mind-numbing. Actually, it is about time. I remember how satisfying it was to leaf through the magazine back in... the 1980's, but I actually cannot recall when I last looked at the magazine, and it certainly was not in the past ten years. The companion Web site, PCMag.com, will soldier on and probably do reasonably well, but it is still sad to finally see that flagship "book" go the way of the dodo bird (and BYTE Magazine.)

PC Magazine -- RIP!

Read the details.

It turns out that Ziff will continue producing PC Magazine Digital Edition, which you can continue to subscribe to, download, and print on your own. But with advertising on a downtrend, what is the point? Sure, some of the articles are worth reading, but it was always the ads that made the magazine interesting. Now, PC manufacturers such as Dell and Toshiba (and Apple) simply dump their ads in my email inbox.

-- Jack Krupansky

Oops... I missed daylight saving time

I use my vintage 2001 Sony Clie PDA as an alarm clock, causing me to miss the Fall transition from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time. I needed to manually toggle the DST indicator on my PDA and simply had not seen any mention of DST in the past week since I was spending so much time focused on work, financial news, and political news. I did not even notice the transition until I booted my PC and noticed the correct time. I am still running Windows XP, but Service Pack 3 has all of the goodies to automatically transition for DST.

I was getting rather depressed by it being dark at 7:00 a.m. anyway. I would prefer to wake up with the sun, but I also prefer to get up reasonably early.

I suppose I need to start thinking of upgrading from this old PDA that I also carry around as a watch replacement. I am one of those few people who do not have a cell phone (simply because I do not want or need one). But my budget for electronic "gizmos" is $0 until I recover from the expense of moving to New York City back in May, as well as not having much work from the middle of August until the last week of October.

I am still having trouble having trouble adjusting to the fact that it is November already.

-- Jack Krupansky

Google Chrome: excellent recall when typing Web site names

Now that I have been using Google's  Chrome Web browser for some time, it is able to do a much better job of suggesting Webs sites when I type a few letters of the Web site domain name. IE has this feature as well, but it does not give anywhere near as good suggestions. In fact, I frequently find that I only need to type only one or two letters to get precisely the Web page I want.

-- Jack Krupansky

AOL Journals transferring to Google Blogger

I just received this email message from AOL last night regarding the status of AOL Journals since AOL is shutting down that blogging service this month. They have decided to facilitate migration of AOL Journals over to Google's Blogger blogging service. The letter:

Dear AOL Journals user,

As we wrote in an e-mail on Sept. 30, AOL(R) Journals will permanently shut down on Oct. 31. It's never an easy decision to shut down a feature, especially one like AOL Journals that some of our members have used for a long time. But with a decline in Journals usage, we have to look carefully at all of AOL's features to make sure we're providing as much value to our members as possible.

Though we know this might be an inconvenience, the good news is that we've partnered with Blogger.com to provide a smooth transition for your journal. Blogger is a free service from Google that makes it easy to share your thoughts with friends and the world. Blogger supports most of the features you've come to expect from AOL Journals, and it's easy to get started. If you wish to transfer your journal to Blogger, they will move your posts, comments and photos to your new blog on their service. When you're ready, go to this link to get started.

Remember, it's very important to save your Journals content before Oct. 31. If you choose not to move to Blogger, you'll need to save your information manually (for example, by copying and pasting its contents into a word processor).

Again, we appreciate your patience and understanding as we make this transition, and we hope you enjoy using Blogger.com.

Sincerely,

The AOL Journals Team

I went ahead and moved my old Poli Ticks "journal" to Blogger using the link in the email. It was mostly painless since I already have a Google account and a number of Blogger blogs, but it took me awhile to remember my AOL password since I haven't used it in over two years and then it took me awhile to realize that my old posts were not showing up since I needed to manually re-publish them. I even set up an AdSense advertising block in the blog.

I do not intend to do any fresh blogging in the transferred blog since I already have a newer blog for political commentary, but I did want to keep the archival content since I did put a fair amount of effort into it.

The remaining question is how long the old "journal" content will remain online at AOL. It seems to me that if they simply disabled new content creation, it would be cheap enough to keep the old content online and since it is real content it could be a source of revenue since the content pages have an ad banner. In fact, it would seem to make sense for Google to offer to run two banners there, one for a normal ad and one for Google itself. It would then also make sense to have a link to the transferred "journal" on Blogger, if any.

-- Jack Krupansky

AOL Journals - RIP

A couple of years ago I experimented a little with AOL Journals blogging service, but I eventually decided to do all of my blogging with Blogger. My old AOL Journal, Poli Ticks, is still there, but now I blog about politics on one of my Blogger blogs, Political Desk. I just received this dispiriting email from AOL:

Dear AOL Journals user,

We're sorry to inform you that on Oct. 31, 2008, AOL(R) Journals will be shut down permanently. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

It's very important that you save your Journals content before the shutdown. We're working on a way to easily move your Journal to another blogging service -- you can expect an email within the next week with more details about how to do it. We want the transition to go as smoothly as possible for you, so you'll have two choices. You can either save your information manually and find another place to blog on your own, or choose to automatically transfer your Journal to a different blogging service we've selected.

In the meantime, please bookmark the People Connection Blog, where you can find out more about AOL Journals. You can also subscribe to the People Connection Blog RSS feed to stay informed about any changes. We'll be updating the People Connection Blog often, so please check it regularly.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we make this transition.

Sincerely,

The AOL Journals Team

It will be interesting to see what service they pick. I may keep my old blog when they move it, if only since I want to keep those old blog posts.

-- Jack Krupansky

Chrome: Gray window of death

On occasion the Web page display area in Google's new Chrome Web browser will go dark gray with a little frowning face with X's for eyes in the middle of the window and the caption "Aw, Snap!" and the sub-caption "Something went wrong while displaying this webpage. To continue, press Reload or go to another page." below it. Usually, just hitting F5 reloads the page without any further problems.

-- Jack Krupansky

Chrome: joke of the day - not properly recognizing Google's own web site

I wanted to check my Google AdSense account for the first time since I starting experimenting with the new Google Chrome Web browser. Certainly AdSense was in my old IE browser history, but I was not sure what Chrome would recognize. I typed "google.com/ads" but Chrome was still not able to suggest a URL. I finished typing "adsense" and hit Enter. Chrome showed "https://google.com/adsense" as the URL in the address box, but with the "https" crossed out with a red slash (I did not type "https") and the following message in the page display area:

This is probably not the site you are looking for!

You attempted to reach google.com, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as www.google.com. This may be caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of google.com. You should not proceed.

What a hoot! Google not being able to recognize its own web site!

Actually, the problem relates to a mismatch in the security certificate, google.com vs. www.google.com. If I try the same experiment in IE, I get a more useful message:

There is a problem with this website's security certificate.

The security certificate presented by this website was issued for a different website's address.

Security certificate problems may indicate an attempt to fool you or intercept any data you send to the server.

This is really a goof on Google's part. They should have http://google.com/adsense be a non-secure page that then redirects to https://www.google.com/adsense.

Still, Chrome was less than helpful and even less helpful than IE, although the message is correct when it suggested that the problem might be "caused by a misconfiguration on the server."

Just to rub it in, I would note that "misconfiguration" is not even a real word! Ask Google to define it by searching for "define" followed by the word and Google does not offer a dictionary definition. My suggestion is that the phrase be re-worded as "caused by an improper configuration of the server."

To be fair, misconfigured is in fairly common use, especially for networking, so it probably should be added to dictionaries, at least to the online dictionary of computing and other IT glossaries. And of course it should be added to Microsoft's dictionaries for Word, Outlook, and Outlook Express.

-- Jack Krupansky

Chrome annoyance: excessive HTML codes for text copied to the clipboard

I thing that I find really annoying about Google's new Chrome Web browser is that if I copy and paste some text from a Web page into an email message in Outlook Express, such as this one, it smothers the text in an excessive amount of HTML codes that make it very difficult to reformat the text in the email message. Normally, I can simply select the text after it has been pasted and press Ctrl+Space and the formatting will be ignored. But now, Chrome wraps a convoluted "SPAN" HTML code around even simple text copied to the clipboard. For example, I just copied the text "Dedicated to providing information to individual investors" from one of my own Web pages and I know that it has no formatting, but Chrome obfuscated it with:

<SPAN class=Apple-style-span
style="WORD-SPACING: 0px; FONT: 16px 'times new roman'; TEXT-TRANSFORM: none; COLOR: rgb(0,0,0); TEXT-INDENT: 0px; WHITE-SPACE: normal; LETTER-SPACING: normal; BORDER-COLLAPSE: separate; orphans: 2; widows: 2; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0">...</SPAN>

That is ridiculous, all of that formatting for default, unformatted text.

For now, I either click on the "Source" tab in Outlook Express and manually strip off the SPAN codes, or paste into NOTEPAD.EXE and then re-copy to the clipboard before pasting it into my email. At least I can count on Notepad not to clog up the clipboard.

-- Jack Krupansky

Chrome benefit: Visual access to frequently accessed Web pages

As you start to regularly use Chrome, it does a better and better job of remembering your frequently accessed Web pages ("Most Visited") and actually shows you visual thumbnail images of the top nine them on the New Tab page. This means that the quickest and easiest way to get to one of those top pages is to simply hit Ctrl+T to open a new tab and then simply click on the image of the desired Web page.

Alas, Chrome does not offer any features for explicitly customizing the New Tab page. For example, I would like to shrink the image size and show more rows and columns. My top 9 Web pages has some value, but top 50 would be really useful.

-- Jack Krupansky

Ban the automatic loaning of customer long positions to short sellers

I despise short selling as much as any bullish investor, but I think the optimal solution to short-selling abuses (e.g., naked short selling) is for the SEC to ban mutual funds and pension funds and insurance companies from loaning stock to short-sellers and to ban brokerage firms from automatically loaning customer long stock positions to short sellers without their explicit permission. How many mutual fund shareholders or employees represented by pension funds or customers keeping stock in their brokerage accounts are even aware that it is they who are the suppliers of stock that short sellers are selling short??!! Brokerage firms, mutual funds, and pension funds are supposed to be operating with a fiduciary duty to protect the interests of their customers but they are failing to do so. Fix this fiduciary duty problem and short sellers will instantly become a very minor force in the market rather than the tail wagging the dog that they currently are. It really is this simple.

One pragmatic logistical change which would help correct a lot of short selling abuses would be to go to T+0.0 settlement rather than the current T+3 settlement. Rather than giving short sellers a 3-day free ride to come up with borrowed shares, force them to cough up the borrowed shared up-front before the short-sale transaction can even be requested to be executed. T+3 is not needed these days and is a dog's age in today's computerized stock market. Even T+0 settlement (by the end of the trading day) is insufficient to deal with naked short-selling. T+0.0 settlement is needed and it is needed... yesterday.

These two changes would literally solve the current systemic problem with short-selling without preventing short-sellers or the beneficiary owners of long stock positions from engaging in stock loaning and short-selling if they so choose.

I find is horrifying and reprehensible that a brokerage firm is permitted to loan a customer's stock without the customer's explicit, up-front, opt-in permission to short sellers, and without any notice to the customer that it may or has been done. Opt-out would not be sufficient. It needs to be opt-in and without any onerous penalty for refusing to opt in.

Why the silly Democrats are not jumping up and down and loudly proclaiming this need  to get rid of this automatic opt-in and irresponsibly loaning by mutual funds and pension funds and insurance companies is rather baffling, other than simply that, as the saying goes, "they don't get it."

-- Jack Krupansky

Chrome issue: Sharebuilder web site does not yet support Chrome

One of the issues that will constrain me from fully switching to the new Google Chrome Web browser is that the Sharebuilder investment Web site does not support Chrome, yet. The Web site has a list of supported browsers and eventually I am sure they will support Chrome, but for now the site displays the message "Please note: you are using a browser that is not supported for use on the ShareBuilder site. Please upgrade now." Actually, I think the site does work fine with Chrome, but when money is involved you want to be especially careful.

-- Jack Krupansky

Chrome issue: The following plug-in has crashed : Shockwave Flash

Very frequently the new Google Chrome Web browser displays a beige message banner across the top of the page with the message "The following plug-in has crashed : Shockwave Flash." I also notice that there are solid black rectangles where various ads usually appear and they have a little frowning face superimposed on a jigsaw puzzle piece in the middle of those black holes. I sometimes (but not always) see the same message on the Google News Web page which does not have any ads. I did a Web search for this message and see that others have encountered it, but there is no clue as to the nature of the problem or how to fix it. There is actually a Chromium issue page for the problem (Issue 530), but it sheds no light and merely concludes "Status: WontFix." Hmmm... OTOH, if the "bug" simply causes embedded ads to "break", I suppose that is a "problem" that I can live with. I find it ironic that Google with its financial dependency on advertising would allow such a bug out in the wild. OTOH, these are not Google ads that are blocked (I think, since they are dynamic display ads), so maybe there is something more sinister going on.

I did just recently upgrade to Windows XP SP3 and Windows Media Player 11, but neither should have any impact on Shockwave Flash.

In any case, the Web pages seem to function properly otherwise, so for now this is only a minor issue and annoyance for me.

-- Jack Krupansky

Chrome annoyance: URL completion requires more typing than in IE

Even in IE where I have fast access to favorites, it is still faster to hit one control key to go to the address box and type in a partial URL to call up the URL from the browser history. For example, when I want to go to fidelity.com in IE, I press Ctrl+O to go to the Open dialog box and then type "fid" and the URL for Fidelity is right there and I simply press Enter. But in Chrome, since it is trying to do more in one address box, I actually have to type "fideli" before the Fidelity URL comes up. If I just type "fid", I see the Wikipedia page for Fidel Castro among other Web pages, which I am positive is not in my recent browsing history and certainly not used more frequently than Fidelity. Granted, now that I have selected the Fidelity URL, it does show in the URL completion list when I type "fid", but it is annoying that I have to "train" Chrome when the information is all there in my browsing history. And, even though Fidelity is now in the list, I have to press one or two down arrow keys to select it before pressing Enter, while in IE I can immediately press Enter after typing "fid". Oddly, I only have to press one down arrow if I used Ctrl+E to go to the address box with the intention of "searching the Web", but I have to press two down arrows if I use the basic Ctrl+L to go to the address box to enter a URL. Weird.

-- Jack Krupansky

Chrome annoyance: opening a link in a new tab does not make it the current tab

One of the most common operations I do in a browser is to open a link in a new tab. In IE I simply use Ctrl+Click on a link and presto I see the linked-to Web page in a new tab. It almost works that way in Chrome, but unfortunately the new tabbed page is hidden behind the current page and you have to manually select the new tab, either by moving the mouse to the tab and clicking on it or by pressing Ctrl+Tab (go to next tab). How annoying! IE is actually easier to use than Chrome! Ha-ha!!!

Alright, there is another way to open that link that is slightly easier, but undocumented and still not as easy as IE: mouse over the link (or Tab to it) and press Ctrl+Shift+Click, and now the new tab is automatically (yeah, but only after I pressed that extra key, duh!!) the current tab.

In truth, this is not much of an issue for the average idiot user (who is sticking with IE 6 anyway!) who just does a bare click on the link to open the linked-to page in the same tab, but I am a little more of a power browser and tend to keep a lot of tabs open and bounce between them. The really annoying thing about this is that I cannot effortlessly switch between browsers.

For reference, here are the official Google Chrome keyboard shortcuts:

http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=95743

I would add a new entry to the Window and tab shortcuts section:

Ctrl+Shift and click a link

Open a link in a new tab and go to that tab

And while we are at it, you can get back to the tab containing the link by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Tab. And then you can flip back to the new tab again using Ctrl+Tab as described in the first paragraph.

I have a suspicion that the development of the Chrome keyboard shortcuts was sponsored by the American Association of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Surgeons. Yeah, I am kidding, but it would explain things.

-- Jack Krupansky

Minor Chrome bug: improper tab title for Web pages without titles

I continue to try out Google's new Chrome browser. This morning I went to the AAA Daily Fuel Guage Report web site to see how gasoline prices have trended in the past couple of days. (Even though Hurricane Ike is approaching the Gulf, retail gasoline is still declining.) I key in "fuelg" and Chrome promptly displays the full URL, http://www.fuelgaugereport.com/, from my old IE favorities. I press Enter and the page loads fine and looks fine. Except... the browser tab still says "Loading..." I tried it a couple more times, but the same thing happens. Nothing appears to be busy, there is no spinning progress indicator, and the full Web page seems to have been loaded. I tried it in IE and then I notice that IE simply displays the URL in the window title bar. I examined the source for the Web page and notice that there is no <title> tag. Ah ha, that's the source of the problem. Chrome is simply updating the tab title when it sees the <title> tag in the Web page, and has no logic to handle the case of the Web page not having a <title> tag. Bug.

In this case, IE simply uses the URL for the tab title. Hopefully Chrome will eventually improve on that and simply use the core domain name, fuelgaugereport.com, rather than clutter the tab with the unnecessary "http:/www."

Note: I am using IE 7, which does have full support for multi-tabbed browsing. If you do not have tabs in your IE browser, it is probably because you have the older IE 6.

-- Jack Krupansky

Anybody know the Chrome shortcut to navigate to the bookmarks list?

I have been trying out Google's new Chrome browser. It has some interesting advantages, but the main obstacle preventing me from using it in my normal activities is that I cannot find the shortcut key to navigate to the bookmarks. Chrome did a great job of importing my IE favorites when I downloaded and installed it and they are all there in chrome to see, but you have to navigate to the list using the mouse rather than a keyboard shortcut. For example, in IE I can press Alt, "a", "w", right arrow, "n", "n", Enter and up comes the National Hurricane Center Web page, but in Chrome I have to drag the mouse way over to the upper right corner of the window and click on "Other bookmarks" before I can navigate using the keyboard. And, to add insult to injury, Chrome automatically sorted my bookmarks so the key sequences are now different. And, since it shifted my Weather folder down to the bottom of the list, it is off-screen and requires an extra keystroke to access it.

Overall, Chrome looks good, but I have not yet seen any compelling advantage for an average user.

I will certainly consider using Chrome more... if and when I figure out how to navigate to the bookmarks list with a single keystroke or two.

Ctrl+B does toggle the bookmarks bar, but that is not what I am talking about. I want the equivalent of alt, "a" in IE.

-- Jack Krupansky

Live TV for Hurricane Gustav from New Orleans

Three years ago, I watched a lot of coverage of Hurricane Katrina from Louisiana online from the WWLTV web site, http://www.wwltv.com. Unfortunately, for Hurricane Gustav all I see now on the WWLTV web site is a green rectangle instead of video. I can hear the audio track fine, but no video. Here is the web page that DOESN'T work for me:

http://www.wwltv.com/video/?nvid=57429&live=yes (This DOESN'T work, for me.)

But, I used right-mouse Properties to get a handle on the URL for the video and found that it works fine if I use it directly in Windows Media Player or Internet Explorer. Here is the direct URL for WWLTV live TV video:

http://www.wwltv.com/sharedcontent/video/makeASX.php?title=beloint_wwltv&live=1 (This DOES work, for me.)

-- Jack Krupansky

No time to blog

I have at least six or eight blog posts floating around in my head right now just from thoughts in the past two days, but I am simply unable to find the time to blog them. Other than trivial posts such as this one that take a minute, I find that a "serious" blog post takes me anywhere from ten to thirty minutes.

Of course, it is really simply a matter of priorities. Right now, I would rather go out for a long walk here in New York City (Fifth Avenue, Central Park, Upper West Side, Riverside Park, Broadway, Columbus Circle, etc.) than spend the next few hours blogging. Yesterday I walked around the lower portion of Manhattan, including South Street Seaport where you can see all four of the "Waterfalls."

-- Jack Krupansky

Cuil load problem

I have experimented a bit with this new search engine called Cuil. It has some interesting features, but on some relatively simple queries I get the following error messages:

No results because of high load...

Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again.

And if I click "Search" repeatedly, it just gives the same error.

But if I enter another query, I get results right away.

I suspect that cuil caches the queries, and that they have a load problem such that they presently do not have the resources to process or cache new queries that they have not seen before.

As the message says, I will try my search again... later.

-- Jack Krupansky

The alleged perception problem of Microsoft

There is an interesting PC World article by Nancy Gohring entitled "Microsoft: Stodgy or Innovative? It's All About Perception" which repeats the common belief that Microsoft has a "perception" problem. Overall it is a decent article and does highlight that Microsoft is doing a lot of good work, but it repeats the somewhat-untrue but common belief that:

... Microsoft needs to address the perception problem, which runs deep and could have repercussions on sales of future products if the company doesn't manage to fix it.

The article also claims that:

The perception problem stretches into the online services market, where Microsoft has struggled to attract users.

While it is true that Microsoft is working very hard to drive deeper into the online services market, have they really done that badly? If we consult the Alexa ranking for the Top 100 Web sites we find that Yahoo is #1, Google has #2 (Google.com) and #3 (YouTube.com), but then Microsoft has #4 (Live.com) and #5 (MSN.com) and #14 (Microsoft.com). That is actually not that bad at all, being the #3 player in the online space and having two of the Top 5 sites. Sure Microsoft wants to be better (witness their recent interest it acquiring Yahoo), but to label the #3 player as suffering from a perception problem is rather misleading and outright ingenuous.

The problem Microsoft has is twofold: 1) An army of naysayers and opponents of the company in Silicon Valley, and 2) An army of biased critics in the media and on Wall Street. These are hard-core bias issues, not "perception" per se. No amount of effort by the company is going to reduce the incessant naysaying of company opponents in Silicon Valley. Ditto for bias in the media and on Wall Street.

What is the source of all of this bias? Simple: Microsoft has been too successful and does not owe any of its success to the chattering classes in Silicon Valley, the media, or on Wall Street. Microsoft has focused on producing economical and "good enough" products for "the masses", bypassing the need to be "blessed" by "The Elite" in Silicon Valley, the media, and on Wall Street. Microsoft has been successful at commoditizing its image. Almost everybody, even those who shop at Wal-Mart out of economic necessity, can now afford to have a PC in their home and office. Sure, the PC hardware vendors and software developers and other members of the "PC ecosystem" have helped in that effort, but it is Microsoft that led the way on the operating system and office productivity software fronts. A lot of people in Silicon Valley and the media and Wall Street are intensely jealous of that success, and show it. That is the root cause of the so-called "perception" problem, the elephant standing in the middle of the room that the media and company critics refuse to acknowledge. That is an issue that Microsoft has to cope with on a daily basis, but it is certainly not the kind of "image" or "perception" problem that Microsoft can do anything about other than to quietly tolerate it and keep on pumping out economical and "good enough" products for "the masses."

Sure, Apple and Google and many other companies are very successful, and even more successful than Microsoft in some niches, but Microsoft is still wildly successful overall by any measure.

How successful? For the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2008, Microsoft recorded revenue of $60.4 billion and net income of $17.7 billion. Google? Net income of $4.2 billion. Apple? Net income of $3.5 billion. Nobody is even close to Microsoft.

And just how bad is the "perception" problem on "drag" from Vista and Microsoft's online investments? A year ago, revenue was $51.1 billion and net income was $14.1 billion. That is a revenue increase of 18% and a net income gain of 26% on the back of so-called "disasters" on the Vista and online services fronts. So much for "disasters." Given its size, Microsoft's growth is absolutely phenomenal.

For the record, the trailing P/E ratio for Microsoft is 14.0, well below the rate that net income grew over the past year even with the perceived "disasters" of Vista and Microsoft's online services efforts (with their #4 and #5 Web sites.)

The "facts" about Microsoft, as a company, as an organization, its products, its services, its financial results, and even many of its future plans are readily available in the Web and well-known to many people in Silicon Valley, the media, and Wall Street. These people know exactly what is going on with Microsoft and it is not an "image" or "perception" problem. It is called bias, and a lot of it is outright malicious in nature. Microsoft is doing the right thing and simply ignoring it and pushing on and focusing on developing and delivering products and services for its customers and not catering to the chattering "elite" of Silicon Valley, the media, and Wall Street.

I would just like to see people be a bit more honest and talk about their own bias problem rather than the so-called "perception" problem.

---

Disclosure: I do own Microsoft stock and continue to purchase it, most recently two weeks ago.

-- Jack Krupansky

Virus warning: Greetings, how are you doing? Give we shall meet!

There is a new virus going around via email that I had never seen before. My McAfee anti-virus software did manage to catch it, but not immediately. After viewing the innocuous-looking simple text email, McAfee automatically shutdown Outlook Express and  popped up a message saying that it had detected a buffer overflow, which is a favored way to load malicious code into your system for execution.

The message subject was "Give we shall meet!" and the message body wasy simply "Greetings, how are you doing? Give we shall meet!"

I examined the source text of the message and it clearly had JavaScript code that was trying to execute code.

So, if your see that subject line, "Give we shall meet!", DO NOT view the message. Simply delete it. But, hopefully your AV software will detect the attempted buffer overflow first.

-- Jack Krupansky

Microsoft to give online services equal billing with Windows in reorg

Although I have mixed feelings about Kevin Johnson leaving Microsoft, I am absolutely thrilled that the company will be splitting the Online Services business unit away from the Windows platform division to stand separately and report directly to Steve Ballmer. The press release did not explicitly say that Online Services would be a standalone division with its own president, but I am guessing that is where they are headed. In fact, I always assumed that Online Services would end up as a separate, top-level divsion if the Yahoo acquisition had ever come to fruition.

This is a very positive move, and shows that Online Services has grown significantly in the past few years.

I do wish that Kevin could have continued at the company, but everybody needs to move on at some point.

Knowing a little bit about how the company works, I am guessing that there was probably an extreme level of internal tension over how sloppily the whole Yahoo deal was proceeding. It was Kevin's job to make it work, and... he really didn't pull it off in a way that anyone would say is "outstanding."

This is the time of year when performance reviews, promotions, raises, and bonuses are being finalized, and I cannot imagine that the handling of the Yahoo deal was much of a feather in Kevin's cap. Personally, I wouldn't have objected if Kevin were fired for the combination of the sloppy handling of Vista and Yahoo.

That said, I really am pleased that Online Services will be getting some standalone attention rather than being stuffed away under "Windows." That never really made any sense.

-- Jack Krupansky

Whiner Nation

Rats... I missed my chance. Some time ago (a year ago?) I made a note to myself to write a blog post called "Whiner Nation", to opine on the degree to which we have become a nation of whiners. I never followed through on that note. Now, Phil Gramm has "stolen" my (undisclosed) idea and achieved a level of infamy with it. Who knows, maybe he did me a favor.

Just as a matter of disclosure, I have to admit that I myself happen to be a whiner. And proud of it! There is nothing wrong with being a whiner, unless you are in denial and refuse to accept and publically acknowledge it.

To be clear, blogging is a symptom and strong indicator that someone is a whiner.

I have been known to whine about many things and many people, but there is one person who I have never whined about... Phil Gramm. The guy really makes me laugh. I have attended a number of congressional hearings when he has spoken and he invariably comes out of left field with some zinger. He is a true, all-American character. Maybe you find his brand of humor funny and maybe you do not, but we adults are supposed to be adult enough to see through superficial facades and style of personality and focus on real meaning rather than style of presentation. At least that is the theory. So much for theory.

All Phil was really saying is that people need to take more responsibility for their own lives and their own decisions and that the media and political opportunists do in fact tend to blow things up out of propertion to the reality. Phil is right on one point, that too many people are in a "mental recession" inspired by the media and opportunistic politicians. Sure, some percentage of people are in some level of trouble and some degree of pain, but all Phil is saying is that the percentage is small relative to the overall economy and that the overall economy still has not deteriorated to the level where even the experts agree that it is a true "recession."

Yes, we truly are a nation of whiners, but we do need to get over it and move on. Enough singing of "somebody done somebody wrong" songs.

As far as Phil Gramm, the reaction from McCain suggests that the Republicans are really running scared. Really scared. Personally, I though Gramm's commenary was rather innocuous and neither here nor there when it comes to the real "meat" and big picture of politics. Maybe the reaction simply hints at how thin-skinned politics has become this year.

Metal note to myself: Write a post to whine about people who whine about people who whine about whiners and bad-mough whining. Hmmm... I wonder if there is a market for "Whining for Dummies"? Or maybe a tome even more basic: "Whining for Bloggers"?

Please feel free to whine in my comment section.

-- Jack Krupansky

Microsoft and AOL?

I read a blog post on Fortune by Michal Lev-Ram entitled "Report: Talks between Microsoft and AOL heat up" that once again has me hoping that Microsoft will finally see the wisdom of spinning off its MSN online "content" business, possibly to be combined with other media "content" operations such as Yahoo and AOL. My ideal transaction would be a standalone company combining the content operations of MSN, Yahoo, and AOL, with Microsoft and others as significant "joint" owners and with the combined content business utilizing Microsoft's online platform infrastructure for data centers, "cloud" computing, Web services, support for mobile devices, and "search." Whether such a combination will ever come to fruition remains to be seen. I am not particularly interested in Microsoft becoming even more of a "content" business by acquiring the "content" operations of either Yahoo or AOL.

Microsoft  should focus on the platform and infrastructure aspects of the Internet. Of course, this is only my own opinion.

-- Jack Krupansky

Latest on Microsoft and Yahoo combination potential

An announcement on the Microsoft PressPass web site confirms that Microsoft is indeed open to the possibility of buying all of Yahoo or just "search", but only when and if a new board of directors is elected:

We confirm, however, that after the shareholder election Microsoft would be interested in discussing with a new board a major transaction with Yahoo!, such as either a transaction to purchase the "Search" function with large financial guarantees or, in the alternative, purchasing the whole company.

Personally, and as a Microsoft shareholder, I would rather see Microsoft pick up some pieces of Yahoo, especially "search", and then have the remains of Yahoo be combined with other media entities. In fact, my real preference would be for Microsoft to spin off MSN and have MSN merge with the Yahoo content business, with Microsoft as an investor in that business. This would allow Microsoft to re-focus on the platform aspects of the Internet. Of course, this is only my own opinion.

-- Jack Krupansky

Gates and Ballmer

I was actually an employee at Microsoft the day that Bill Gates announced that he would be shifting to part-time at Microsoft to work full-time at his foundation: "Starting two years from now, I will shift, work full-time at the Foundation, part-time at Microsoft as Chairman and as a senior technical adviser." That was just over two years ago, June 15, 2006. I actually attended the employee "town hall meeting" at which Bill and Steve Ballmer discussed the announcement. That was certainly an interesting experience, both from a business and corporate culture perspective. I had only been an employee for exactly one month at that point. You can read the press release and the transcript of the the press conference. It was certainly a surprise and somewhat of a shock, but as an investor and a technologist the decision really didn't bother me much at all. I have always had mixed feelings about Bill's technical role and whether he really was as "essential" to the technical development of products as a lot of people imagined or whether his real brilliance was in how to look at markets and figure out the right angle of attack to enter and dominate those markets. Even then, his "brilliance" was not always as dazzling as one might hope, as we have seen with Microsoft's forays into online services and even Vista. On the other hand, I have always been deeply impressed by Steve Ballmer's dogged persistence, his "we just keep coming and coming and coming" attitude and competitive spirit that has in fact helped Microsoft  achieve a higher level of success than any other company might have done with similar technical capabilities. I attended a bunch of company events at which he spoke and never once came away with an impression other than that he was really sharp, really on top of the market and customer needs, and a really great corporate leader.

Although it may appear to be "bad" news that Bill will be "gone", the truth is that Bill will still be working part-time at Microsoft and, as the press release stated, "after July 2008 Gates would continue to serve as the company's chairman and an advisor on key development projects." That is a key distinction from this misguided view that Gates is "leaving" Microsoft and will no longer be helping to shape the technical and product directions of the company. Bill will still be participating in helping to shape "key development projects."

I have great faith in the technical and product abilities of Craig Mundie and Ray Ozzie. In fact, the truth is that neither of these two technical leaders really needs Bill at all. But the two of them plus Bill part-time is a very awesome technical leadership team.

I really do have great faith in Steve Ballmer's ability to run the business and oversee the overall marketing direction of the company. Sure, there have been some stumbles, notably with Vista and Yahoo, but the truth is that you can't be as big and successful as Microsoft without taking big risks, and the nature of big risks is that sometimes they do not work out as well as planned. A Microsoft without risk-taking would not be a Microsoft.

I wish Bill luck on his charitable ventures and remain confident that Microsoft is in good hands with Steve Ballmer, Craig Mundie, and Ray Ozzie. We can all look forward to a Microsoft that "keeps coming and coming and coming."

-- Jack Krupansky

Life vs. blogging

There is so much that I would like to blog about now that I have finally moved back to New York City, but I am too busy enjoying "The City", as well as trying to put in enough billable hours of work, to have much spare time for blogging. I still have a long list of loose ends to tie up after the move (e.g., address changes), and do not seem to have even a single extra "moment" in any day. I suppose I could blog about all of the things that are preventing me from blogging, but then I would fall even further behind. Right now I am off to walk around midtown Manhattan and Central Park.

-- Jack Krupansky

Picking an electricity supplier for New York City

This morning I signed up with Energetix to supply my electricity that is delivered by ConEdison here in New York City. Energetix is what is known as an Energy Service Company (ESCO). They buy electricity on the wholesale market and resell it to consumers and businesses. The delivery and billing is still handled by Con Edison, but each ESCO has its own plans, policies, and energy sources. I signed up for their 100% Clean Energy Option which is based on 60% "low impact" hydro energy and 40% wind energy.

I selected them by simply starting at the top of the list of "green power" suppliers supplied by Con Edison and calling each one until I actually managed to get through to a "real person" in a reasonably short period of time. I had been thinking of going with 100% wind as I had when I lived in Colorado, but the combination of hydro and wind is good enough. I had a 100% renewable plan out in the state of Washington.

I have no idea how the price will work out compared to other options. I did pick the market rate as opposed to a fixed price contract, which could be a really bad deal in the summer months, but leaves me free to switch to another supplier at any time over the next year without a cancellation penalty. In theory, green power may be a penny higher per kilowatt hour or a couple of bucks a month. We'll see.

I also get a $25 reward check as a new customer. That check is supposed to arrive in 8 to 10 weeks.

One concern I have is that if electricity demand is high for traditional fossil-fuel electricity this summer, traders and speculators may artificially bid in the green market to resell to non-green customers. In other words, my cost will not necessarily be based on the costs of the ultimate producer of the electricity. Sure, that is how a "market" works, but it seems awfully unfair for non-consumers of electricity to be using the market strictly for financial profit rather than adding value to either consumers or producers.

-- Jack Krupansky

Getting settled in NYC

Wow, I am actually here and actually started to get settled in my new apartment in New York City. I flew in Wednesday evening, made a trip to Bed Bath & Beyond and Duane Reade to get enough stuff for my apartment that I could spend the night. Today I opened a local bank account (at Capital One Bank, which was North Fork Bank), got my phone and Internet cable modem installed, bought and installed a new air conditioner, read almost all of my accumulated email, did a little billable work, attended a bi-weekly meeting of the local Cafe Philo philosophy discussion group, and even found a spare minute to write this blog post. Friday I may get my New York State ID, and Monday I may go down to Atlantic City for the day on the casino bus.

So, I may be close to the end of hemhoragging cash. Maybe a couple hundred dollars of minor expenses, such as keeping my old phone number on voice mail for a couple of months, a final payment or two for MSN dial-up Internet access as I transition to RCN cable access, and a few other odd expenses I am simply forgetting or things I need to do to make the apartment more liveable. And my budget for RCN for unlimited phone and cable Internet access did not include the taxes. And I need to put New York City and State income taxes in my budget as well.

With everything going so smoothly, I went and incurred an unanticipated $15 charge by running one of my credit cards slightly over the credit limit. I caught my mistake in my spreadsheet even before the credit card company is aware of the overlimit problem. All it took was a restaurant tip does not yet show on the pending charge for the restaurant. I rsuhed and made an extra payment myself online, but it will not post until Tuesday (Monday is a holiday), possibly after the tip hits my account. I called up the credit card company and after unsuccessfully attempting to get a tiny $100 increase in my credit limit, I went ahead and agreed to pay them a $15 fee to make an "emergency" payment of $100 that would post today and maybe hit my account before that incoming restaurant tip posts to my account. What a pain. Later on Friday I will call them again and ask to speak to a superviser to request that the $15 fee be waived. They actually told me that if I had simply let the account go over-limit, they would likely be willing to waive the $35 over-limit fee since I already had a payment scheduled, but I do not want my account to show that I actually did go over-limit. What a pain. The main reason I was using this account even though it was near its limit is that it pays 2% cash-back. But, they won't let you credit any of your accumulated cash-back against your balance and pending charges. How silly is that.

One pleasant surprise today was that I received a USPS Priority Mail package that I had mailed to myself on Tuesday. It contained my swiss army knife and a couple of other items that I did not want to carry on the plane and neglected to pack in the last box I shipped via UPS. Maybe I was better off forgetting to pack my knife since otherwise it would still be in transit somewhere in some fly-over state.

-- Jack Krupansky

Budget for life in NYC

I am almost there. I am still hemorrhaging cash as I complete my move to NYC, but very soon that process will be over and then I will have to finalize and stick to a rather strict and limited budget. Most of my moving expenses are already "baked into the cake", with all of my possessions en route via UPS and my plane ticket ready for departure tomorrow morning. I have set aside cash in my brokerage account to cover all of the credit card payments. I'll spend $2.50 to take the bus to Sea-Tac airport, $7 to take the train from JFK to the city, spend some money at Bed Bath & Beyond and Duane Reade for some stuff for the apartment, spend a little on some new clothes and shoes, get my New York State ID, buy a new phone, and maybe have to buy a new air conditioner. At that point I should be "set" and ready to get back on a budget track. I also have to budget keeping my old voicemail for a month or two and paying final utilities for my old apartment.

I already did work out a budget a month ago, but I will have to revisit it and validate my assumptions.

The good news is that I will no longer have to struggle to budget two annual trips to New York City with sky-high hotel rates. There is plenty of stuff to do for free or cheaply in New York City, and Atlantic City is just a cheap casino bus ride away. I can even go to Washington, D.C. reasonably economically. I prefer the Amtak train, but the bus is fine with me as well. I look forward to being able to travel to Boston and Washington, D.C. without having to go near an airport.

-- Jack Krupansky

Microsoft and Yahoo now making some sense

The so-called "renewed" talks between Microsoft and Yahoo are a lot more sensible. Rather than pursuing a full-blown takeover, Microsoft is seeking some sort of arrangement that will provide Microsoft with access to Yahoo's customer base to display ads for Microsoft advertising customers. The terms and details are anybody's guess. Some sort of "partnership" between the two companies makes a lot more sense than the large-scale disruption of a full takeover. Although Microsoft says that it reserves the right to pursue a full takeover in the future, it also stated that in the near-term it does not intend to pursue a takeover. Overall, this announcement is very good news, especially for Microsoft shareholders, even if mindless traders initially gave a negative knee-jerk reaction.

From the chatter about a proposed or hypothetical deal, it sounds somewhat similar to the proposed deal between Yahoo and Google, but the question then becomes how Microsoft would make its proposal more attractive than that of Google, since Google can charge a premium for ads. Maybe... maybe Microsoft would be willing to shift some or all of its online content to Yahoo content and then split the resulting ad revenue with Yahoo. Microsoft might also "offer" to host content on its growing "cloud" infrastructure, an investment whose expense is straining Yahoo's limited finances but is a key investment for Microsoft and makes more sense at the scale envisioned by Microsoft. In other words, Yahoo could leverage off of Microsoft's data center investments. That is speculation on my part, but it would make sense and allow Yahoo to focus on content and services while Microsoft focuses on software and infrastructure and a larger-scale advertising business.

See: Microsoft Issues Statement Regarding Yahoo! - May 18, 2008 - Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business:

"In light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business.  Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo! an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo!  Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo! at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo! or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft or with other third parties. 

"There of course can be no assurance that any transaction will result from these discussions."

-- Jack Krupansky

Moving to NYC

My decision has been made and the deal is done. Yesterday I signed a lease for a studio apartment in New York City. Rent is $1695 and I only had to fork out one extra month of security (two months total) due to my bankruptcy on my credit report. Since it was before the middle of the month my lease starts on May 19th.

The place is somewhat "funky", but works for me. It does not have a kitchen sink (only in New York!), but it does have a door onto the rooftop terrace, so it is probably a net good deal for me. It also has plenty of natural lighting, with a window and door (to the roof) on one wall and another window on the opposite wall, so I can get a cross-flow of air as an alternative to using the air conditioning as much as I might need to for a "normal" city apartment. The building is mostly surrounded by taller buildings, so it gets decent shade for much of the day. And since it is facing the interior, street noise is somewhat muted. The floor is linoleum tile, which is fine with me. A lot of NYC apartments have hardwood floors.

It is on the 10th floor of an older building. It does have an elevator, but also has a really nice wide stairway and I like to walk a lot anyway. When I had my apartment in Tudor City I used to walk up eleven floors all of the time.

The manager has a full-time office in the building, which assures better service for issues that might arise. I dealt directly with the manager (with my broker), who makes all of the management and operating decisions, which is much better than a lot of situations, especially for the typical "walk-up" apartment building you find in the city.

I went through a broker, Century 21, so I had to pay a fee of 15% of the annual rent (typical in Manhattan). Ouch. Yeah, that is a lot of money, but it gave me access to an apartment that I might not otherwise have been able to find on my own or as quickly. Total time from initial meeting with the broker to walking away with a signed lease was just under seven hours. I did look at a couple other apartments and a lot of other listings, but I was able to focus my priorities and the initial listing was a great match to begin with. I did find this listing on Craigslist.

I think I was lucky to get this apartment. People were calling while I was sitting in the manager's office filing my application and still calling when I was signing the lease and the manager had the card for someone ready to file an application if I backed out. Finding an apartment in a doorman building in midtown east in Manhattan with a terrace for less than $1700 is quite a good deal.

Electricity is the only utility that I have to pay. The apartment has an electric range, but I don't cook. It has steam heat. It does have an air conditioning unit left by the last tenant which is in so-so condition, so the good news is that the apartment is wired and set up for A/C, but I may have to buy a new window A/C unit depending on what shape the old unit is in, especially in the middle of the summer.

Now I need to decide what to do about telephone and broadband Internet access. Since I need broadband for my work, I may go with cable-based phone service from either Time-Warner or RCN. I do not watch TV, so I do not need normal "cable" access, but the package price may still be a decent deal, especially since traditional phone service is so pricey these days.

I flew to NYC on a one-way ticket. I still haven't decided when to fly back to Bellevue, WA. I need to make some arrangements for window shades and whatever else I may need to do to make the apartment ready for occupancy. One of my priorities for an apartment was to get a "doorman building" so that a lot of services can be arranged even though I am not at the building.

The location is quite decent (for me), in midtown east, on 50th Street just east of Lexington Avenue. That is a block away from Ess-a-Bagel, the best bagel shop in the world.

The really good news is that the most anxiety-provoking part of the move is done. Sure, plenty of the remaining tasks will be annoying and distracting, but manageable and with minimal uncertainty.

-- Jack Krupansky