Zeigen

A few months ago, some government economists blamed the rising price per barrel of oil on short sellers and speculators. I thought that was absurd (and this Slate article makes a good summary of the arguments).

This week, the SEC enacted a ban on short selling on shares of 799 financial companies. The SEC admits that the list was hastily generated, and many companies left off have lobbied to be included.

The company where I work, TiVo, has always had a large short interest. The same is true of many start-ups and tech companies. When there’s good news, and a short squeeze is applied and a gain becomes a giant gain, I’m elated. When the news isn’t so great, and the short interest widens and a loss becomes a bigger loss, that obviously affects me the other way. (”Sorry kids, no Disneyland trip this year. Damn those short sellers!”)

I do agree that short sellers can create an incentive to manipulate a market, and having negative energy out there does seem to lead to some bad behavior on an individual basis (where investors with an axe to grind and a short position may even manufacture falsehoods to convince others to sell). But that’s hardly widespread, and hardly makes a big difference in the long run. At worst it adds volatility.

If short sellers damage oil futures and create turmoil in the financial sector, why isn’t it equally true that they act against the best interests of the entire stock market? Why ban in just one or two sectors, and let short sellers run rampant everywhere else?

But I’m not actually arguing that short selling should be banned. I find the current ban absurd — and not just because it’s limited to one or two sectors.

The fact is, free market works. if a significant chunk of investors argued that a particular company would fail — and more importantly, backed that up with money betting the stock would fall, maybe instead of “speculation,” it’s because they’ve done their due diligence and actually believe the company is making mistakes?

We have a long tradition of letting people bet on the loser. What if Vegas suddenly said you couldn’t bet on the Don’t Come line in craps?

The current administration has so little faith in our economy and the financial sector that they have to change the rules in order to prop it up. That’s what’s terrifying: It’s a startling vote of no confidence.

Best would be to leave the free market alone. Next best (but not smart at all) would be to ban short selling, permanently, for all sectors. What actually happened is a far, far more unfortunate alternative.

1. Cell phone on silent.
2. Disable instant messaging programs, and exit Outlook so that no popups appear.
3. Test the projector, adjust screen resolution if necessary.
4. Practice your presentation, give it a final run-through in PowerPoint, rehearse.
5. Don’t read every bullet point.
6. Make sure that your fly is not open.

Not that I speak from personal experience or anything.

“Web 2.0,” if it means anything at all, is a term usually used to reflect the modern trend of interactive web sites that encourage users to create and share content. Blogs, wikis such as Wikipedia, forums, social networks, podcasts, comment streams, RSS feeds — all these approaches and technologies form the backbone of the web 2.0 universe. (The term also reflects the second decade of the web’s existence, and the transition of web users from dialup speeds to broadband speeds.)

Web 2.0 today is in a state similar to the state of the web in 1998. Back then, four years into its rapid growth period, the “World Wide Web” (as we still called it then) had proven itself to be much more than a passing fad, and the vast majority of major organizations had created a presence. URLs had become a common sight on billboards. While mainstream and popular, there were still many people who had not really used the web extensively.

Today, almost everyone has heard of blogs, and most have used one or more of the vanguard web 2.0 sites such as Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, etc. But even the most popular of these sites sign up only a small fraction of their visitors as users.

The central dilemma I see as a barrier to future growth is an adoption paradox: Coming up with incentives for users to create accounts and to start generating the content that in turn attracts more users to sign up. Peer pressure is an effective motivator, but many potential users don’t sign up because they don’t get what their role is, what the site is about, or how it would benefit them. In the meantime, they either avoid the site or lurk there.

(The lurker phenomenon is prevalent: A popular Flickr photo will have tens of thousands of views, but very few comments or links. A popular Twitter user’s page might be read by 100 times more people than actually sign up to follow that person. YouTube has hundreds of millions of viewers, millions of registered users, but less than a million users who have uploaded a video. For zeigen.com, according to my server logs, more than 5,000 unique visitors came to this site last month, and an unknown number more viewed the content via an RSS reader — but only 20 unique users left a comment.)

A user’s role at a web 2.0 site falls along a continuum between what I’ll call “public” versus “personal” personas.

Let’s take Flickr as an example. When you sign up for Flickr and begin publishing photographs, you’ll be doing one of these things:

• Publishing artful or beautiful or technically proficient photographs intended to be appreciated by a general audience
• Publishing photographs of a particular subject matter (such as, say, model airplanes) intended to be appreciated by fans of that subject matter (such as model airplane enthusiasts)
• Publishing photos of your friends and family, intended to be appreciated by people who know you
• Some combination of the above

YouTube follows the same pattern: Many users are uploading family videos, others are uploading things they find generally amusing or interesting, or a series of videos on a particular topics, or anywhere in between.

Similarly, blogs can be personal and intended for friends/family (journal sites), or public but general (such as a celebrity’s blog), or public and focused on a particular topic.

With some sites, such as Digg, the expectation is that there is no “personal” content — everything is for public consumption. You’d never promote stories about your family, only stories of interest to just about everyone.

Other sites, such as Facebook, are the opposite: Other than corporate or celebrity profiles, everything a user puts there is personal, about you, so almost no Facebook profiles are for artistic purposes. It’s all about your personal life.

Some Twitter users highlight the personal even to point of banality (”Ate lunch at sandwich place again. Had Turkey. Was good.”) while others spread breaking news, one-liners, observations, or punditry in an effort to attract more followers and support their public persona as a blogger or artist.

I’ve written about FriendFeed previously. and it continues to be the web 2.0 site I’m most interested in. The dilemma for me (and therefore I presume for most users) is where to draw the line.

For example: A friend posts a picture of their new haircut or has a status of “sad.” Because it’s a friend of mine, I want to compliment the haircut or ask them why they’re sad. Sometimes I just want to post what I had for lunch.

BUT — I have a few different types of followers on FriendFeed (co-workers, friends, business acquaintances, online contacts, random strangers). The people who subscribe to me who don’t know the person involved won’t want to follow that conversation. Sure, it’s fairly easy for them to skip it, but if my goal is to acquire more followers, I need to do so by keeping my persona public. So part of me becomes reluctant to post “personal” comments or links on FriendFeed, because the role I’ve so far taken on there is more public than personal. (I’m usually interested in starting conversations with a wide variety of interesting people about topics that I care about, and the items I share there are generally not about me.)

One prolific FriendFeed user, the notorious Robet Scoble, discussed creating a second account that’s more private, just for personal items — but that’s far from an ideal solution. Fragmenting yourself into different accounts is difficult to manage (especially when you start getting into the weeds of managing duplicate feeds, remembering to unsubscribe or subscribe to different people and join certain rooms on both of your accounts), and the UI of the site presumes that you only have a single account.

Yesterday FriendFeed launched a beta test of their new interface, and it’s a great improvement. In addition to improved aesthetics, there are a plethora of new features. The most important is the ability to categorize the people you follow into whatever labels you assign (Personal, Coworkers, Interesting, Noisy — whatever). Two of the default labels are “Personal” and “Professional,” which supports the observation I’m trying to make here.

However, I think FriendFeed has it almost backwards: It’s not so much that I want to categorize my friends based on how I know them (although I do want that) — much more, I want to categorize what I publish. Let me label the things I share as “Personal” or “Public” (and use even more tags if I want to assign them). That way the people who subscribe to me can decide if they want the full feed (complete with my lunch plans and haircut comments) or to automatically excise those parts they won’t care about.

For all web 2.0 sites, the first job is to clearly explain what the site is about, show how it benefits the prospective user, and ease new users up the learning curve. Once that’s done, helping users understand and manage their role along the public/personal continuum is essential to making the site sticky and successful. Tagging and categorization is the answer for that. Smart tools and good design will be needed to make this task intuitive and easy.

With Flickr, you can subscribe to a user’s entire photostream, or just to an individual series (as tagged by the user). The next step for many other web 2.0 sites, including Twitter, Facebook, and most of all FriendFeed, is to catch up to that concept.

Yeah, I was just kidding about that “returning 8/25″ thing. That was just excuse-making. Please to excuse.

In the meantime, here’s the number of posts I’ve managed each month.

Seasonal variation appears to apply.

BOOM.

Saturday afternoon, there’s an explosion up the street (although we didn’t hear it), and the power goes out. A transformer has blown out a block away from us.

No harm done, or so I thought (other than interrupting the Olympics I was watching; now I’ll never see that handball match between Sweden and Denmark). I took the kids up to the tot lot to play in the sand, and later Kimi picked us up to go out for sushi boats. A power cut is certainly one way to get me out of the house.

But Sunday, when I called home, the phone just kept on ringing. Turned out our home phone system (a Uniden three-handset system I had picked up several years ago at Costco) got fried when the power came back on Saturday evening, and was stuck in a permanent reboot loop.

This morning when I called Uniden for support, they walked me through a hard reset, but no luck. They had no alternatives for me — they don’t even have a repair facility at all. It was out of warranty, so toss it and buy a new one. What a waste.

Time to go back to Costco and buy a new one, right?

Well, hold on a second. The nationwide trend is towards ditching home phone service. The National Center for Health Statistics has a very interesting article and graph showing the wireless-only trend (totally random federal agency research for the win): Wireless-only households went up from 12.6% during the first six months of 2007 to 14.5% in the last six months. So, about one out of seven U.S. homes no longer have a landline.

Meanwhile, AT&T lost a million landline subscribers in their last quarter (per gigaom).

I was all set to cancel my home phone number today (despite my geeky attachment to the phone number, which ends in 8486 — spelling out TIVO as a mnemonic).

There are certainly some advantages to a home phone:

• Unlimited local minutes. Unless you’re paying a huge amount for an unlimited cell phone plan, chances are you’re paying attention to how many minutes you spend on your cell. Families with gabby teenagers need the cost convenience of a home phone with unlimited usage.
• 911 ease of mind. Despite improvements, 911 calls from a cell are not as reliable: You’re usually calling a very remote emergency center, which has more limited ability to learn your location. Additionally, cell phones can more easily run out of battery or otherwise be unavailable for use.
• Disaster/power loss ease of mind. Assuming you have a handset that doesn’t require being plugged in, when there’s a local disaster such as an earthquake, the landline is more likely to work than the cell phone.
• Archaic requirements. Some companies that you do business with really want you to have a home phone, and don’t know how to deal with you if you don’t have one. I’ve heard that one contributor to your credit score is how long you’ve had the same landline phone number.
• Inconvenience of updating all your friends and database entries: What a pain to tell everyone you know that you no longer have a home phone.
• “Home” sense: My cell phone number is only for me, and it’s usually in my pocket. My wife’s cell phone number is hers, and it’s usually in her purse. But my kids don’t have cells (too young), and what if someone wants to reach any of us but only if we happen to be at home? (Not that my kids are old enough to answer the phone yet.) But that’s what a home phone number “means”: Anyone who’s home. A cell phone doesn’t mean the same thing — it’s for a specific person, and even today a cell phone call seems more “urgent” than a call to a home phone number.

The downside of a home phone is primarily the cost (and the cost of ownership of those power-spike-vulnerable handsets): I was paying over $30 a month for unlimited local and a certain amount of included long distance.

We certainly didn’t miss having a home phone during the four months of the remodel where we weren’t home anyway. So, like I said, I was all set to ditch the home phone number. But when I can called to cancel, not surprisingly, AT&T was very willing to make me a deal to keep me as a customer. So, sucker that I am, as an experiment, before ditching our home phone service completely, I have decided to give the home phone number an extension (hah!). I’ve reduced the cost to $6 a month (plus tax) by removing call waiting, switched to a measured rate, and removed long distance.

We can still receive unlimited calls, and we pay $0.02 per outgoing call. My estimate is we make very few outgoing calls, so that it’s not worth paying $4 a month more for unlimited local calling. If I’m wrong, I can switch back to unlimited, and still save $20 a month from what we were paying.

After several months, I’ll evaluate the bills and the usage. If we no longer need the home number, I’ll join those one out of seven households that have cut the cord.

In the meantime, I have three perfectly functioning Uniden handsets, but no base station and no answering machine. If I can find a cheap replacement for the busted base station, I may replace it. If not, well, now you know why our home phone number just rings and rings when we’re not home.

A few months ago, a friend of mine left his position at Google and went to join a startup called FriendFeed. He invited me to join while it was still in beta, and now that it’s open to the public, it’s quickly moved up to become my favorite web site.

So what is it? My submission for FriendFeed’s “describe FriendFeed in 2-8 words” discussion was, “Your friends make the news.” When you sign up for FriendFeed (which is free, and is currently without any advertising), you can choose which online services you use (such as Flickr, Netflix, Twitter, Amazon wishlists, shared blog posts on Google Reader, and much more). Once set up, FriendFeed automatically creates a news feed of your activity on those services. This feed can be public (i.e., anyone can see it), or private (only you approve who can read your feed). You can also submit items for your feed, by sharing URLs using FriendFeed, or just creating general comments, perhaps about what you’re doing or thinking.

Then, you choose which people on FriendFeed you want to follow (your friends, relatives, and/or people you find interesting). If your friends aren’t yet using FriendFeed, you can invite them to do so, or you can create an “imaginary friend” for them as if they had actually signed up.

FriendFeed turns out to be a great way to see in one consolidated place what’s going on with your friends, whenever they add an Amazon wishlist item, submit a photo, write a blog post, or whatever else.

The interesting part comes with the social aspect: your friends can “like” and comment on the different feed items. Discussions begin. And in your feed of news from your friends, you can also see the items that your friends have liked and commented on, even if that item didn’t come directly from your friend — so you start seeing interesting updates from your friends of your friends.

What’s striking about the site is both how simple it is to use as well as how much it changes the game. Before, to find out about different things your friends were doing, you may have visited dozens of different sites. Being able to instead view all of that news in one place means you feel more up-to-date and closer to different people, and learn more about what they’re interested in.

While the site works in different ways for different people, I find that it’s most effective when you’re following people you are actually friends with in real life. Interesting people share interesting things, but the level of meaning and the degree to which you care is enhanced a great deal when you care about the person. For example, if an interesting stranger shares an item about, say, cat grooming, you may or may not find that engaging. Probably you’d just skip past that item in your feed. But when your co-worker shares an item about cat grooming, even if you don’t care about the topic, now you know that they either have a cat or want to get a cat, and the next time you see that co-worker you now have something to talk about.

New features are being added at a rapid pace. It’s easy to hide items you don’t care about and control the experience to make it what you want. The web page is responsive and the service is reliable.

I say that last because, in contrast, I’ve also started using Twitter.

Long-time twitterers please forgive me as I explain the basics, since Twitter is very old news to many blog readers, having launched in late 2006. Twitter is a remarkably popular service in terms of its growth and its number of users (well over a million at this point). However, in real life, very few of my co-workers, none of my family, and a tiny fraction of my friends are using it and many have not even heard of it. And this is despite being in the heart of the Silicon Valley, working for a high-tech company full of early adopters, surrounded by tech friendlies. Part of that gap is because it’s a generational thing: Twitter seems to immediately appeal to college students, while those older seem to take longer to “get it.”

So, what is Twitter? Brief (140 characters or less) updates about whatever you want. These updates, or tweets, constitute micro-blogging. Instead of long-winded posts like this one, brevity is the soul of Twitter. Dashing off to a coffee house? Twit it, and now your friends know, and if they’re in the area, perhaps they’ll drop on by. Thought of a great one-liner? Share it on Twitter. Mad as hell about dropping your laptop and breaking it (like I did earlier this evening)? Just had the greatest ice cream cone ever? Can’t believe what McCain just said? Twitter, twitter, twitter.

The 140 character limit, instead of being a barrier, becomes liberating, since you’re freed from having to cite your source, defend your premise, or define your terms. You can write about the most trivial of things since it’s stream of consciousness, and the basic idea is to share with your friends what’s going on at the moment, as uninteresting as that may be.

Where Twitter excels is in the number of ways you can interact with it: You can submit updates from your cell phone via SMS, from an instant messenger application such as AIM, via a browser at twitter.com, or via other social networking sites. Conversely, you can set up the level of notification for updates from your friends. Biff in accounting might be your Twitter friend but you can set it up so that you only see what he’s up to if you go to twitter.com. Your spouse, on the other hand, can have updates sent directly to your IM or cell phone.

While Twitter really feels like a subset of FriendFeed, the bigger issue lately seems to be its lack of reliability, with numerous outages — growing pains for a site that’s exceeding user adoption expectations.

Neither site yet displays any hint of a business model. They’re free to join, with no ads. All those developers and servers are expensive, so somewhere along the line one or both of those things must change or else the service implodes. But in the meantime, they’re both interesting sites.

In contrast, Facebook is a well-known social networking site, and it’s full of ads — they clearly know what a business model is. Originally for college students only, Facebook is now open to everyone, and it’s a social networking site. Despite having a friend or two working there, I have to say that after I’ve been using it for a while, I don’t find any value offered that’s not better handled elsewhere. The semi-public communication in “Walls” is not a good way to converse (with most walls showing half of a conversation). The private messages are better handled with traditional e-mail. The countless applications are generally time-wasting (hunting zombies, answering easy trivia questions) without being deep, and many seem to actively trick you into adding them. (One promoted itself with the tagline saying that a co-worker called it “the best application on Facebook” when he’d really never said any such thing. Most require you to add the application in order to view whatever doodad or message your friend is trying to send you.) Is it better than Friendster and Orkut, the social networks that I tried out previously? Demonstrably so. It’s certainly more attractively presented than MySpace, which I’ve not used. But the main drawback is that there’s nothing compelling there, and the Facebook interface actively interferes with productivity, while Twitter is more streamlined and FriendFeed adds value and interest.

I’ve been using the web now for 14 years. So much has changed in that time (and not always for the better). These days, very little makes me excited about the web the way I felt in the early years, but FriendFeed certainly comes closest.

Follow me as zeigen on Twitter and zeigen on FriendFeed. Befriend me on Facebook if you like.

If you’re long-time users of these sites, I’m interested in what got you started using them, which you like best (or which other one you think blows these away), and what you like/dislike.

If you’ve never heard of these sites before, what’s your reaction? Is it, “Why? What’s the point?” as I suspect most people feel? (Especially if you’re over 40…) Well, people felt that about the web and blogging too. Both are here to stay.

I recognize the relationship between Taco Bell’s menu and actual Mexican food has always been something similar to the relationship between how computers work in Hollywood movies versus how they actually work in real life — a fiction loosely inspired by the source material, designed to look real to those who have never had much hands-on experience with the genuine article.

But as I drove by a Taco Bell this morning and saw an ad for their new “Bacon Club Chalupa,” I couldn’t help but feel that they’re not even trying any more.

I don’t eat bacon (heresy!) but I’ll bet 31 grams of fat and 970 milligrams of sodium never tasted so muy bueno.

I don’t have the highest opinion of Wal-Mart (in part from watching this Frontline episode), and I admit I associate Wal-Mart with “low brow” and “middle America.”

(Even setting aside any anti-competitiveness, gentrification, and globalization issues, I don’t really like shopping there, because the one near us is always very crowded, and the shelves don’t seem well maintained to me. It always seems to be in disarray.)

But there’s no denying Wal-Mart’s importance as a retailer, so for a while I’ve been reading their Check Out blog.

I was startled the other day when I read this entry, which starts with a reference to philosopher Thomas Kuhn and one of his groundbeaking works (a book which profoundly influenced my way of thinking after I studied it in college).

The juxtaposition of Wal-Mart and deep thinkers: Not what I expected. So boo on me for my stereotyped perception that a Wal-Mart blog would be written to appeal to the lowest comment denominator.

This guy’s career needs a twist. Can The Happening beat the trend?

(Click on the graph to see a larger version.)

It’s no secret traditional newspapers are having a hard time. The San Jose Mercury News, my local paper, has been sold twice in the last few years, and has announced several rounds of layoffs.

But I think they’re going about things the wrong way:

• Paper is losing money.
• Paper lays off personnel and cuts features.
• Subscribers complain about fewer features, and cancel their subscriptions.
• Rinse and repeat.

They’ve cut out the Perspective section from the Sunday paper, reduced the Sunday comics from six pages to four, and for months now the Monday paper has had about half the page count it would have had a few years ago. In particular, the last few days the paper has felt awfully skimpy.

It’s been a long time since I learned about a current event from the Merc, but I still enjoy reading the paper (those rare times when I have enough time to do more than scan the front page headlines and skim through the living and business sections). The Merc has won two Pulitzers and many other prestigious awards; some of their series are excellent (including their recent eye-opening coverage of the juvenile dependency court).

Offering depth of coverage, a variety of opinions, detailed analysis, and clear graphics, physical newspapers remain remarkably relevant during morning rituals like eating breakfast cereal and commuting — but the nationwide decline in subscribers and advertising revenue mark an industry in transition. The strategy so far is consolidation and cost-cutting — and that’s not working.

So how to break the vicious cycle and turn it virtuous? I don’t claim to have answers, but the current approach definitely ain’t it. You can rarely cut your way to success. Trimming features while raising the price only accelerates subscriber churn.

Reinventing the journalism business model (to garner payments from wire services and online news aggregators) is the top task, and it won’t happen overnight. It’s going to take bold strokes from the new owners pursuing new revenue sources. Good luck with that.

UPDATE, 3/7: Add one round of layoff, as reported here.

Warning: My geekiest blog post ever to follow. Involves arithmetic and computers.

A common industry metric for transfer rates (i.e., how quickly something downloads) is Mbps, which is defined as Megabits per second.

This measurement is confusing and outdated for several reasons.

1. Most people don’t understand what a “megabit” is. It’s very easy to confuse with a megabyte. (There are eight bits to a byte, so you can easily go from one to the other if you like dividing or multiplying by eight.)
2. When talking about megabytes per second, people use either “mbps” (with a lower-case m) or “MBps” (with an upper-case M and B). If you’re not paying attention, you can easily confuse “mbps” or “MBps” with “Mbps.”
3. There’s further confusion about whether the “mega” part means 1,000 or 1,024. Most people’s intuition is wrong.
4. Unless you’re used to these numbers, it’s difficult to understand them in practical, real-world terms. Suppose you have DSL and you’re downloading a movie. How long is it going to take? You’ll need to know the size of the movie in megabits, and you’ll need to know the speed of your DSL connection in Mbps. Then grab the calculator to get a number of seconds, then do more arithmetic to translate that into minutes.

It’s time for a change. Before I get to that, though, first some boring personal history.

The first modem I ever used was in 1980, on an Apple II+, and it was 300 baud. That meant (more or less) that it could handle 300 bits per second — about a sentence of text each second. In college, 10 years later, I used a 3200 baud modem (”Modem 28.8″) which could handle 28,800 bits per second — almost 100 times faster, about a page of text a second.

As modems got faster, instead of bits per second, we started talking about kilobits per second (”kbps”), and the confusion began. In the real world, “kilo” means 1,000 (e.g., a kilometer is 1,000 meters). Usually in computers, a kilo means 1,024 — a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, for example. Except for kbps, where the k now means 1,000 again. (I think marketing people are to blame.) So, that 300 baud modem was 0.3 kbps, and the 3200 baud modem was 28.8 kbps.

Now eighteen years later, I have a cable modem at home. It can usually handle around 40,000 kbps — more than 1,300 times faster than that modem from college — a big fat novel of text every second. Since things have got faster again, instead of talking about kbps, we divide by 1,000 (not 1,024) and that’s where Mbps came from. Instead of saying my cable modem is 40,000 kbps, we say it’s 40 Mbps.

If you have broadband at home, you have somewhere between 8 Mbps (low end DSL) and 622 Mbps (high end fiber optic service).

But Mbps is such a silly way to measure things. As I explained above, it’s quite difficult to take a number like 40 Mbps and know how that translates into how long it takes to download a movie. If you know the movie is 2.5 gigabytes, you first have to translate that into Megabits. Multiply 2.5 by 1,024 to get megabytes, then by 1,024 again to get kilobytes, then by 1,024 again to get bytes, then multiply by 8 to get bits. Your movie is 21,474,836,480 bits. Now divide by 1,000 to get kilobits and divide by 1,000 again to get Megabits. Now you know your movie is 21,474.8 Megabits. Now divide by 40 to learn how many seconds it’ll take to download on your connection. 536. Divide by 60 to learn how many minutes: About 9. Your movie’s done downloading in the time it took you to do the arithmetic.

A much more practical measurement for consumers is Gigabytes per minute. Most people know that a gigabyte is 1,024 megabytes, and that an online movie is about 2 gigs or so. If we started rating speed in terms of gigs per minute (and tell the marketing people who want to use round numbers to go jump in a lake), that should hold us for the next few years.

I do expect to update this post about 5 years from now to advocate for terabytes per minute instead…

If you agree, start using gpm as a measurement in your organization and push for a transition.

(As a rule of thumb, every 100 Mbps is about 0.7 gpm. My 40 Mbps cable model can handle a gig about every three-and-a-half minutes.)

Hello Kitty World apparently beta-launched today. Here’s how I imagine it.

What’s your name? Haildoggy
What type of animal are you? A doggy, silly!
What color are you? Hot pink

…character creation in process… Done! ^_^

…loading the world… Ready! :)

…automatically sending warm greetings to your friends… Sent! <3 <3 <3

Welcome, Haildoggy! You are in your house. Your house is cute. There is a mailbox here. The mailbox is cute. There is a phone here. The phone is cute. There is a door here. The door is cute! The door is also closed. Your bedroom is here. It's super-cute.

Haildoggy, what would you like to do?

> Go bedroom

You enter your bedroom. The carpet is pink. The bed is pink. The lamp is pink. The walls are pink. Pink! You have a bookshelf. It’s filled with fun books. Books are fun! Haildoggy, what would you like to do now? }@V@{

> Use bed

You’re not tired, silly! And we can’t imagine anything else you’d use the bed for. Oh, a pillow fight? That sounds like fun! Invite over some friends, and let’s play!

You have a new quest: Pillow Fight!

> Call friends

You don’t have any friends. Yet! That’s a little sad, but just smile and it’ll get better.

> Call someone

You open the phone book at random. Here are some people you can call: Hellokitty413 HelloKitty554 HelloKittie432 Badbatsmaroo117 HeloKitty1A HelloKityA HellloKittie1138 Kerope933 HellooooKitty644

Who would you like to call?

> Never mind. Go to Flower World
You leave your house and head to the train station.

HelloKitten212 is here!

H3ll0Kitt3h333 is here!

The train is not here. Using the train costs $1. Remember, get your parents’ permission before paying for items! Do you have their permission? Good. Please enter your credit card.

> Say hi

Why aren’t you entering your credit card?

> Smile at HelloKitten212

HelloKitten212 smiles at you. She says: “Ur cute but y r ur clothes r sooo plain??!”

> Examine HelloKitten212

She has red go-go boats decorated with sparklies and spaceships and moonbeams. Would you like a pair like that?

> YYES YES YES YES!

They cost just $6.95. Remember, we don’t charge you anything for this game, and Sanrio has to pay the rent for its giant factories. So won’t you please consider buying some red go-go boats? Your mom’s credit card is probably in her purse. We’ll wait.

> [credit card number entered]

Hello Kitty herself appears to thank you! Hello Kitty loves you! Did she mention how cute you look?

> This is the best game evah

Update: Back online after about 1pm. Glad to see 1.1.3 supports map auto-locate, multiple SMS delivery, customized home screen layout, web shortcut buttons, chapters in video playback, video rental, IMAP for GMail, and probably more.

Reading the Sunday paper, my completist nature usually compels me to also read through the “USA Weekend” section, which is basically a compilation of puerile nonsense, celebrity gossip, halfwit health advice, and a recipe or two.

In today’s USA Weekend, in addition to reading about “The ex-astronaut who wants to put YOU in space,” I happened to spot a legal notice on page 22 headlined thus: “If You Purchased Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Before July 20, 2005 You May Be Eligible for Benefits From A Class Action Settlement.”

I had read about this ridiculous class action lawsuit. The basis of the suit is a claim of deceptive advertising: Rockstar Games sold the game rated “M” (Mature) but then changed it to “AO” (Adults Only), because of the so-called “Hot Coffee” mod.

Two problems:

1. The grandmother bringing the suit had purchased the game for her 14-year-old grandson, and a rated “M” game shouldn’t be purchased for 14-year-olds anyway.
2. The reason Rockstar had to rerate the game was because of the assets of simulated sex enabled by the Hot Coffee mod, but anyone who purchased the game would have to download a mod or hacked saved game to enable that hidden scene.

With an unaltered copy of the game, the sex scenes are impossible to access. The original M rating was appropriate (or at least, shouldn’t have to change because of content NOT actually part of the gameplay).Anyway, back to the legal ad. The terms of the settlement are “cash payments ranging from $5 to $35, and/or to exchange the game for a copy without the content at issue.”

But then I saw this startling section: “Class Counsel will ask the Court for an award of attorneys’ fees and reimbursement of expenses in the amount of $1,000,000. This amount includes approximately $955,000 in attorney’s fees, and approximately $45,00 for reimbursement of expenses.”

So that’s 96% for the lawyers, 4% for the “aggrieved” consumers.

It’s very clear who the winners are, but in this case I think the losers include both the defendants AND the plaintiffs.

It’s my opinion that anyone who has grown up watching heist movies or reading mystery novels is capable of dreaming up two or three dozen methods of circumventing most security measures employed by the TSA at airports.

All of those hoops we jump through — removing shoes before tiptoeing through x-ray machines, powering up laptops to show they’re real, drinking a bit of your infant daughter’s formula to show it’s not a deadly poison — are, in my opinion, nothing more than so-called “security theater” — a well-choreographed show that is designed to make us feel safer, but bears little relationship to actual security.

An article in tomorrow’s British Medical Journal comes to the same conclusion, while highlighting the staggering costs.

At heart, airport safety agencies seem to rush to implement new screening tests based on publicity around a perceived threat, without any scientific rigor or analysis of if the screening method is effective. A skeptical approach is called for, one that examines the evidence of the threat and then designs the least intrusive and most cost effective method of controlling for that threat.

I imagine that if a terrorist organization manages to smuggle bombs in their underwear or invents an explosive substance made out of cotton, we’d all be required to travel naked.

Our family is next flying in March. If you’re flying this holiday season, enjoy the security show. It costs you $9 of each ticket you purchase. Why, that’s practically the cost of a heist movie.

Busy morning — Kimi’s exhausted and in pain (honestly, I think the baby’s going to arrive any day now), so I took Sammy out with me. Dry cleaning, bagel shop, Costco, Children’s Museum & Zoo, Stanford shopping center for lunch, and then the UMF bit. Shiny new 8g iPhone, at $200 less than what I’d thought about paying for it.

Only now to activate it:

38 hours? 38 HOURS OF MAINTENANCE? Nothing going until Monday at 5:30am? I first called the Apple Store at the Stanford mall to see if this was accurate, and someone named Joe there said this was news to him but activation was an AT&T issue. He could give me the AT&T phone number. Sure, I said. The number he gave me was for DIRECTV. Joe, Joe, Joe. Sorry Joe. You’re fired. In a few seconds online I found the AT&T phone number from their iPhone FAQs page — it’s 1-800-331-0500. I called and eventually the woman admitted that yeah it’s probably down until Monday morning. 38 hours? 38 HOURS? AT&T, you’re fired. This is gross incompetence of the most preposterous proportions. 38 hours?

The main reason I needed a phone is because my old one, a SLVR L7, has started to have a bad speaker — I can hardly hear. So don’t call me until Monday, because I can’t hear you.

I hate you, AT&T. So much hate. You’re fired.

“UMF” stands for the “unseen mystical force” which urges you to buy things. After yesterday’s $200 price reduction in the iPhone, I am suffering from some serious UMF.

This morning before I left for work, a machine called our home phone, and when I answered, a recorded voice talked about how it was “urgent” I contact my credit card company to reduce my rate. We had received this call before on my machine, and I was annoyed. What if they’d woken up Sammy? So I pressed 1 to talk to an agent, and when one eventually picked up, I tried to get them to tell me what company they worked for and where they were based. He muttered something about “Credit Reduction Company” and that they were in Jacksonville, Tennessee. But the agent quickly realized I wasn’t actually a prospect and offered to transfer me to their complaints department, and when I agreed he hung up on me. Nice!

If I had more time, I’d try to track these weasels down, since automated calls like this are against the law.

In the dark days before the “Do Not Call” list, I probably used to get a dozen telemarketing calls a week. These days it’s very rare, so this one stood out all the more.

So let’s hear it for the Do Not Call list! And, please, take a moment to register or renew your registration with the National Do Not Call Registry. The list was created in June of 2003, and each registration is valid for five years, so you don’t really need to renew just yet. But it takes 31 days for numbers to be removed, so make sure you renew before May of 2008. May as well do it now while you’re thinking about it, and then not worry about until August of 2012.

While you’re at it, you may want to reduce junk snail mail with the DMA Mail Preference Service, but the DMA now wants a dollar from you to let you tell their affiliates not to send you junk. Doesn’t seem consumer-friendly to me.

A tip of the hat to Junkbusters.

Jennie’s a good friend of mine, and it’s great to see this SFGate article about her new business.

In Hawaii, to deliver gasoline, tanker ships must sail from the mainland, some 2300 miles; there, gas trucks (which themselves are relatively rare and had to be shipped out as cargo) deliver to the various gas stations, some of which are situated on windy roads quite far from populous towns. The process can take weeks.

Yet gasoline in Hawaii is still some 20 cents cheaper than it is in California.

Yay us. Gas at $3.60.