Open Letter #46: I don't think that's going to help

Dear Kayak:

Earlier this morning, I asked you for some help finding flights between Kailua-Kona and Honolulu at the end of January. Now, I’ll admit — I wasn’t trying to use you to buy the tickets, merely to get an idea of what was out there and what the price ranges were. And, to be fair, you showed me about 240 options, most of them in the same price brackets. But I got kind of curious about the flight that was listed for $1,400, and so I was floored to discover that your route-finding engine’s idea of a reasonable way to get from Kailua-Kona to Honolulu is to connect through… Los Angeles.

Okay. I’ll concede that somewhere, a user might think, “hey, that might be a good choice,” but I’m hard-pressed to think of a situation where that would occur on a regular basis. And, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not quite as bad as stupid as the time the RAC told a woman driving from Nottingham to Bideford to go through Ireland and France (which has been fixed; I just tried it). But really, would it be so hard to insert a sanity check in the engine that said, basically, “if the proposed route is longer than the average length/time of these other routes, maybe we should hide it from the user unless specifically asked”?

Konichiwa! Pasocon desu!



It finally happened: An Apple commercial made me laugh. It may have something to do with the fact that it’s in another language, and that Mac doesn’t come off like quite the annoying prick he does elsewhere. But I give them credit — this is a funny ad.

The whole Japanese campaign works better for me than the obnoxious North American/UKnian one. Mac isn’t held out to be some ultra-hip asshole, and PC isn’t such a shocking loser. The problem is that you can’t brag about your accomplishments and your strengths in Japan, so you have to be more subtle about it; basically, what the campaign is saying is that Mac is a much calmer, more relaxed, more enjoyable person, while PC is a bit like your excitable younger brother. Mac isn’t the condescending jackass he is in North America; PC isn’t portrayed as such a fucking loser. (I could also talk about the different ways the two refer to themselves (the Japanese language has a lot of different ways to say “I,” most of which come into play through the various ads), but that’s a bit out of my depth — I don’t speak Japanese that well.) The subtleties of the interaction will be lost on a lot of non-Japanese speakers, but it’s very clear that the spirit behind this series of ads is one of harmony rather than superiority.

I still think the ads themselves are bogus. The premise is essentially flawed — it’s a technology choice, not a moral question. But this is a much less irritating way of making the case. I like it.

(As if that opinion carried any weight whatsoever…)

The creepiest parallels

Jack Hitt wrote a fabulous article in Rolling Stone last month about missile defense, made all the more fabulous because it contained information relating to a defense or aerospace project that was new to me. As they say, read the whole thing. If you’re like me, though, and have spent a significant portion of your life around computers and the open source movement, the most striking this about this article is the horror you’ll feel when you realize that the United States Department of Defense has adopted the CADT model of weapons system development.

I’m not joking. Hitt might as well have been writing about any large scale OSS project:

This kind of thinking does wonders for the speed with which you can deploy weapons. Take the shield’s interceptor missiles. In the old way of building things, a few missiles would have been built and tested repeatedly until it was clear they could reliably launch, sync up with central command, interact with radar, intercept a test missile that shrouded itself in decoys, make the necessary discriminations and blow the proper target from the sky. But under the new way of building things, all you have to do is have the whole thing worked out on paper, in simulated computer run-throughs and a few limited real-world tests. That’s why fields of interceptor missiles are already up and, in a capability-based way, running in both Alaska and California.

Of course, the “deploy now, test later” approach has its drawbacks. During a 2005 run, the interceptor couldn’t get out of the silo because the retraction arm — which hadn’t been tested properly in real-world conditions — didn’t fully retract, causing the entire system to shut down. In the old knowledge-based world, that probably would have been worked out before deployment. But in the capability-based world, each interceptor had to be removed, a new retractor system designed and installed, and the interceptors put back into the silos. …

If the old question was whether or not the technology worked — and it still has not been satisfactorily answered — there now appears to be a new question: Even if the technology is found to work, given the current schedule, will missile defense be fully operational anytime in the next half-century? …

That’s not the best part, though:

Last year, three weeks of heavy rain did what no invading army could pull off: It penetrated Fort Greely’s defenses and took out a quarter of the missiles. The silos and the electronics vaults adjacent to them were flooded — one silo was filled with sixty-three feet of water. Boeing blames the military, the military blames Boeing. According to the Missile Defense Agency, it is not cost-effective to repair the damage. Moreover, it is now considered too dangerous to work near missiles in the undamaged silos. The latest budget has a line in it to start from scratch: The government plans to build a completely new field of twenty missiles.

Tell me there’s a difference between this mentality and:

This is, I think, the most common way for my bug reports to open source software projects to ever become closed. I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch — and the new maintainer can’t be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.

Let’s see. Obsession with new and shiny stuff? Check! Belief that technology will conquer all? Check! More interested in releasing product than actually having a product that works? Check! Complaints from other developers about fundamental flaws in methodology unsound ignored? Check! Poorly articulated design goals with no clear roadmap to achieve those goals? Check! Wow, that’s really disturbing — the new and improved Department of Defense really does look like a CADT software project.

I weep, but I don’t know why.

(We will, for the sake of politeness, ignore the geopolitical implications of missile defense. Gwynne Dyer had it right almost a generation ago: “Star Wars won’t help people survive, only missiles.” The issue isn’t — and has never been — one of defending friendly lives, but ensuring that American weapons can be delivered without fear of retaliation; back in the cold war this was more about preventing a counterforce first-strike, today it probably has more to do with having the ability to blow the shit out of Tehran or Pyongyang without worrying a hidden launch site might get overlooked.

On a totally unrelated note, Jack Hitt is a fantastic writer who desperately needs a frickin’ Web site or something so he can point to his latest articles and say, “hey, go read!”)

All right, that's IT.

The Internet is officially out of money. All you new-media punks and johnny-come-latelies (and by that I mean, “anyone who got on-line sometime after about 1995”) can go home right goddamn now.

I’ve been thinking this for a while. 15+ years into the mass-popularization of the Internet, we continually see the re-emergence of trends in on-line communities that we saw before. The problems and the dynamics are the same; the only thing that changes is the interface. We’ve always had trolls and agents provocateur; now, instead of infesting newsgroups, they infest blog comment sections and Web bboard fora. People are continually trying to solve the same problems we solved back in the Dark Ages, usually with less grace and less skill than we did. I won’t belabor the point, but the problem essentially boils down to a failure to correctly disseminate information, and a tendency to disregard prior art and experience as a guide to developing contemporary solutions. It isn’t uncommon to run into Internet software developers who are wholly ignorant of the history of their chosen medium, so it probably isn’t surprising that we see the same solutions to the same problems re-invented over and over (and frequently less elegantly than in the past).

It’s bad enough that the Web as a whole goes through these phases where we seem to be trying to solve the same problems we solved on Usenet in the 1980s, but we’ve now reached a point where the Web is dealing with the same phenomena we dealt with eight years ago. By which, of course, I mean the goddamn blahgs.

The current meme in the circles of blogs that I read is the New Media Mob: A collection of young writers who’ve managed to parlay their blogs into paying gigs at formerly respectable publications. Roy and Sadly, No — particularly directed at this post by Cool Kid Garance Franke-Ruta — sum it up quite nicely. It comes down to this: A group of people have, for reasons that are not fully explained by their literary or cognitive skills, been elevated to the status of superstars within a particular community, and everyone else wonders why that happened.

We’ve been here before in the blog world. Oh, my, how we’ve been here before.

If you flash back to 1999 or 2000, back when blogging was beginning to take the world by storm, you remember the A-List. You may even remember the prescient article by Joe Clark that described the phenomenon. At the time the blog was primarily personal and anecdotal, driven by technology, and its superstars were technology “pioneers” and developers; now, seven years later, the blog is primarily political, driven by people who seem to complain about the current crop of pundits while at the same time lusting after those gigs themselves.

I mean, Clark basically nails it (to use an old hoary blogging cliche):

The A-List: “Jason Kottke… is widely admired among bloggers as a thoughtful critic of Web culture…. Getting blogged by Kottke, or by Meg Hourihan or one of her colleagues at Pyra, is the blog equivalent of having your book featured on Oprah.”

  • Finally, independent confirmation of an obvious fact that is self-servingly denied by the Weblog aristocracy itself: Despite no appreciable difference in the “thoughtfulness” of their respective Web criticism, some Webloggers are superstars.
  • The myth, of course, holds that all bloggers are equal, because we all can set out our wares on the great egalitarian Internet, where the best ideas bubble to the surface. This free-market theory of information has superficial appeal, but reality is rather different.
  • Jason’s commentary is quite good (Meg’s less so), but so is the commentary written by literally a dozen other bloggers I read, none of whom can create a miniature Slashdot effect by mentioning you. (I’m not citing any other bloggers here, by the way, whatever their fame or acumen. I’m limiting the name-dropping to the bloggers Rebecca Mead introduced into the discourse.)
  • Jason’s fame cannot be attributed solely to his cuteness (mentioned explicitly by Mead). I can think of two other A-list bloggers who are better-looking, not to mention having a bit more meat on the bones, and I am aware that there are a lot of attractive bloggeuses. Moreover, one A-list blogger is spectacularly ugly, but that has not impeded his star status.
  • Web-design skills cannot account for everything, either. Jason’s site, in its various forms, offers a middling level of programming complexity. Yet I can name three other A-list bloggers, and a far greater number digging for coal with their bare hands in the caverns of the net, whose sites are more complex and better-looking.
  • A small number of A-list bloggers run Weblogs that are effectively undesigned, a positioning statement that aims to showcase their ideas more prominently, but their ideas aren’t markedly superior to other bloggers’ in the first place.
  • Any way you cut it, there is no rational or even pseudo-rational explanation for the distribution of fame in the blog biz. Fame is like that.

It’s exactly the same thing, seven years later, and we’re all acting like it’s a brand-new phenomenon. Replace “Jason Kottke” and “Meg Hourihan” with “Matt Yglesias” and “Megan McArdle”, and “web design” with “commentary,” and Joe Clark has managed to preemptively capture the annoyance of a number of bloggers. That no one that I’ve found so far has managed to notice this is, frankly, shocking — and we should all be ashamed at how fast we collectively forget the history of our own medium.

This does not, however, detract from the fundamental irritation that most of us feel when we read this stuff. There isn’t a whole heap of difference between this:

Rio just came out with a new MP3 player shaped like a walnut – and about the same size. They say it’ll sync with my Palm, which is too damn new for me to have synced it with my old Palm, let alone the Cube or the PowerBook. Anyway, something to pick up on Saturday morning.

And this:

Brian is/was Ezra’s roommate. Sommer is Matt’s friend. Ezra is staying with Matt here in NYC while we are all up here for the Clinton Global Initiative. Alex and I are friends, as are Alex and Megan. Matt and Ezra and Megan went shooting together on Yom Kippur (bad Jews!), along with Dave, who is throwing a joint birthday party with Brian later this week. Also, Megan and Matt work together. And I used to work with Matt and still work with Ezra. And I think we are all Facebook friends.

Well, that’s not entirely true. We’ll come back to this idea in a second.

Once again, we see the development of an us/them dichotomy between the blog superstars and the common masses toiling away in relative obscurity, and, once again, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to differentiate the two groups in terms of quality of output — there is no clear reason why, for instance, Matt Yglesias should be given a prominent place at The Atlantic and someone like Amanda Marcotte or Jim Henley or Radley Balko isn’t, at least not on the basis of the quality of their commentary — just as there was no clear reason why Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan were elevated to the status of blogstars in their day. (I suspect that the real reason has to do with comfort levels: Radley and Jim and Amanda all suffer from fairly advanced cases of Stickittothemaniosis.) The qualifications Brian/Ezra/Sommer/Matt/Alex/Garance/Megan bring to the table — an Ivy League degree, connections, and an Establishment Media gig — seem to be more fungible and even less impressive than the qualifications the Original A-List possessed; at least Hourihan could, by working at Pyra, claim to have played some role in the development of the medium she would ultimately represent in the pages of the New Yorker. I’m not sure you could make the same argument for McArdle and her merry band.

Clark again, with his own emphasis:

I would be less inclined to complain if I were able to share in the Internet bounty in even the most trivial way. None of us Webloggers is particularly wealthy; few of us became dot-com millionaires. It’s just that everyone but me gets to make a living. It bugs me that the A-list kids are not really any smarter, or any better at Web design, or have anything particularly better to say than so many of the plebes. Their fame is inexplicable, but famous they are – and able to keep their heads above water. It’s the combination I resent.

Elizabeth Taylor was at least beautiful and could act, when not knocking back the sauce and buying diamonds by the barrel. What causes an anointed cadre of objectively undifferentiable Webloggers to be viewed as demigods escapes me. And it does in fact chafe against my egalitarian instincts. Many of us are as good as they are.

What’s worse this time around — and the big difference between this A-List and the last A-List — is the degree of incestuousness. It’s truly shocking. These kids all come from the same part of the world, have roughly the same educational background, have the same upbringing, have worked at the same places, and essentially think the same way on every given topic. Again, we’ve seen this before — Jason would link to Meg who would link to Robert who would link to Dave, and round and round we went, and it was rare to find one who disagreed with the others. Which was creepy enough, but ultimately harmless when the topic of discussion was blogging itself, or Web standards, or whatever. Now, however, we’re turning to blogs as an alternative to traditional media, to discuss issues of vital importance, and we’re still seeing mass agreement and bland traditionalism. Because the New Media Mob hang out together and work together — because, as Garance says, it’s a cocktail party with the same 50 people over and over again. This isn’t good. It suppresses minority and radical viewpoints, the same viewpoints that desperately need to be heard — the same ones that, paradoxically, the Internet and the blog revolution was supposed to promote. That bland conformity was bad enough when it was on the editorial pages of the major daily newspapers, but the blogosphere was supposed to be the antidote to that. Instead of competing with Maureen Dowd, we have a group of writers working hard to be the next Maureen Dowd. And they’re not even interesting Maureen Dowds.

How is this helping, again?

Circumvention technology

I bought a Lexmark E210 printer a few years ago, before it became readily apparent what a bunch of bozos they are. It doesn’t really matter to me whether they won the case or not; the fact that they’d go to those lengths to stop consumers from using third-party products in their printers was pathetic in and of itself. Regardless of the dickheadedness of their behavior, I was still stuck with this printer which takes insanely expensive toner cartridges.

The E210 is basically a re-badged Samsung ML 1210 laser printer. It’s logical to assume that the ML 1210 toner cartridges would fit in the E210, right? Wrong! They don’t! Buying an approved Lexmark toner cartridge costs $128.95 at my local Staples; the Samsung cartridge is $78.95. Did I mention the Samsung cartridges are good for another 500 pages? Yeah, they are.

It turns out the reason they don’t fit is about a half-inch of plastic on the toner cartridge itself, and that fixing this problem is ridiculously simple. It took ten minutes, five of which were spent looking for a screwdriver. (I did a major cleaning around here recently, and as a result, I cannot find anything.) The instructions actually overstate things a bit; you don’t really need to remove the rear cover, though if you do the front cover probably goes on a bit more easily.

I mention all of this merely to wonder idly at the logic of some companies. Lexmark re-badged and re-branded a Samsung product, mostly by slapping a different plastic case over the insides, but in order to justify having a Lexmark label on the printer, they added about $0.03 of material (I figure $0.02 for the aluminum bracket and $0.01 for the screw), jacked the cost of the toner cartridge up by almost $50, and made it so it doesn’t last as long. Their entire revenue strategy seems to involve fleecing the consumer on the back end, though to be fair this isn’t something that’s restricted to Lexmark since most printer manufacturers do exactly the same thing. There seems to be something slightly awry here, something vaguely unethical or immoral, yet I can’t quite put my finger on it. I don’t know why companies have to behave like this — is fucking over your customers ever a good idea?

When I discovered this, I was all set to go on a self-righteous rant about it, but then I realized that by removing this tab and converting my printer to use the cheap cartridges, I’ve done something better than ranting: I’ve cost Lexmark money. Granted, it’s not very much money, and I doubt they really care that some people who bought E210s are opening them up and getting around their very crude technology, but as a method for sticking it to the man this is hard to beat, and it’s a lot more satisfying than merely complaining on the Internet — it puts money back in my pocket, and it’s an act of defiance. Yay!

Hey! iPhone fanboys! Over here!

This is a really good question:

I don’t understand why Apple made the iPhone deal with AT&T, since AT&T is – and I’m just going to say this [-] the company rightly most notorious for giving the worst people in the federal government an extra-legal spinal tap into our communications systems as part of project so massively unconstitutional and, almost certainly, abused, that lawsuits by the ACLU and EFF can’t even penetrate the protective layers of paranoia that protect it from disclosure. …

AT&T won’t see another dollar in my life unless it’s drawn involuntarily from me. But I’m obviously not in good company. How many people have contributed to EFF and bought an iPhone? How can the early adopters, the people how are most eager to see the future, see the beauty in the gadget and not the ugliness inherent in their purchase? How can people camp out, looking forward to a product that won’t happen, and not see what happens when privacy comes at only at the discretion of the least ethical credentialed federal agent? How can you spend money to be guaranteed that your every communication through that device is being monitored?

Yeah! (pumps fists)

The hummingbirds



Herewith, a collection of nine hummingbird photos, some of them more successful at capturing the feel of these really cool birds than others. This was mostly an experiment from start to finish — how well does my beloved 100/2.0 marry up with the EOS 10D’s small sensor? (Answer: Reasonably well; it turns into a 160/2.0-ish lens.) How much depth of field do you really have when wide open on that body? (Answer: Not much.) What kind of a workflow is going to be least irritating for moving 10D images onto the Web? (Answer: Not this one.) How does my idealistic new design template work for photo galleries? (Answer: Jury still out.)

I am, as the note says, still playing around with the best way to present these. Comments are, of course, welcome.

Love,
Dr. Hazmat

gg!

Mariners 7, Athletics 3

And so we head into the All-Star Break and baseball takes a three-day holiday. For reasons I can’t really articulate, it feels like the whole world is going on holidays for the next little while; I woke up thinking about how odd it was that CBC’s morning programming was exactly like any other weekday. But, of course, it is exactly like any other weekday because it is any other weekday.

This was a good game. No, scratch that. It was a great game. How much did I love it? I loved it very much. I don’t want to go so far as to say it was the best game I’ve seen all year, but it was pretty damn close. I was watching this one on KSTW and on Fangraphs at the same time, as well as continually hitting refresh at USSM, and for some reason I felt much more connected to the game than I usually do when the game’s on TV. (Three different information sources at once will probably do that to you.) The see-saw back and forth, then the bases loading, then Ibanez’s bases-clearing double, and the brawl that followed… it was great baseball. No, scratch that too: It was great entertainment, a fun, wild, crazy game and a perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon. The great performance by Ellison was just icing on the cake — I’ve hardly been one of Ellison’s bigger defenders, and frankly I doubt the club would miss him were he DFA’d, but it was a great day for him, and a pleasure to watch.

That’s not why I’m writing this, though, why I’m trying to record this so I remember it. This was the first game in a long time where I never really worried about the Mariners being able to win. Even after Seattle lost the lead, after Ellis singled and two guys scored on Beltre’s error, I somehow knew we were going to pull it out — because we’ve been pulling these out all season, and while we’ll always have screwed up plays and bad games, I felt somewhere inside of me that this wasn’t to be one of those bad games. And though I couldn’t have predicted how it was going to get pulled out of the fire, it was, and we won, and I was deliriously happy for the rest of the day.

It’s an interesting feeling. I haven’t felt that way about the Mariners since 2002, maybe 2003 if I’m feeling charitable. It is almost the exact opposite of what I felt on a regular basis last season — “we may be up by five runs in the bottom of the seventh, but don’t worry, they’ll find some way to fuck it up” — and the worst part was that feeling was confirmed more often than not. This season has been different. I went into it with the sense of impending doom, that it was going to be another losing season, another year of futility, another six months of watching the Mariners screw up and play bad baseball, and that hasn’t happened yet, in spite of the shitty trades and frankly awful performance from some players. Sure, there that pair of obnoxious six-game losing streaks, but the losing stopped, and there’s also been a couple of fairly long winning streaks, too. I no longer have this lingering fear that the bullpen will cough up a bunch of runs and turn a W into an L, though a lot of that has to do with Mateo being gone. I realize that I am now going into every game with the expectation that the Mariners will, if not win, then at least give the other team a very good run for their money, and that’s something I haven’t been able to say for at least four years, maybe five.

To be clear, there are still problems with this team. There are still 77 games left, and we have many questions about starting pitching and the vortex of suckitude they call Jose Vidro. But Adam Jones in Tacoma will help — this is a matter of when, not if, and sooner, rather than later — and probably help more than most think. And really, in spite of the problems that have, in all fairness, been there since the beginning of the season, they’re 13 games over .500, 2.5 back in the West, and unless the team collapses in some kind of dramatic and horrifying way… well, part of me thinks it may still be too early to think about that.

But we’re here, at the All-Star Break, and the team is still in contention. In no way are the Mariners out of it. After that last six-game losing streak I thought for sure we were toast, but then the Angles got swept by Kansas City (!) and we reeled off a host of wins, and suddenly we’re nipping at their heels with half a season left. The second half is going to matter, in a way that it hasn’t in a very long time, and I have a feeling it’s going to come down to those final weeks in September, and maybe particularly the double-header in Safeco… and when was the last time you could say that?

A second half that matters. A real penant race. Who’d have thought?

But that never happens!

<ring ring!>

Who the hell could that be? I know, like, four people and they’re all busy tonight.

C-F A X RADIO 1
250-386-1070

Bwuh?

“Hello?”

“Hi, this is Adam Stirling from CFAX radio. I have a jackpot here if you can tell me who the newsmaker of the hour is!”

“Huh? Um. Oh. Er. I have no idea.”

“Sorry to bother you!” <click!>

I always assumed the “we’ve randomly selected someone from the phone book and called them to see if they can answer our question on the off-chance they actively listen to us” was some kind of a cheap gimmick but, holy cats, it’s really not. Of course, me being me, I can think of about a half-dozen more witty ways to answer the question rather than sounding like the clueless dolt I am. Starting with, “Well, I have no idea, but I could guess depending on how much this is worth…”

Scooter Libby! Michael Jackson! Alan Lowe! VANOC! The dude with the pickaxe the cops picked up yesterday! I don’t know! Loser.