If Not Now--When?

I'm going to keep this short, but this has been floating in my head for months and I'm tired of thinking about it.

I sympathize with the tea-party people, at least the original ones who were interested in deficit reduction (the social-conservatives who are trying to take it over can get bent). Namely I'm interested in eliminating the deficit and the debt.

I keep reading and hearing how this is the wrong time to do it; we should follow FDR's New Deal and spend spend spend. So the deficit goes up and the debt goes up. We can repay it later when times are flush.

Really? Well, no. We won't. Except for that short term during the 2nd Clinton administration, there's a deficit every year and there's always some reason to keep the taps open regardless of feast or famine, regardless of which party controls Congress (because it was under W. Bush's united government that started deficit spending again).

What will happen is this: the economy will improve and the government will be flush with tax revenue again. But instead of ending the deficit, they'll just ramp up spending. All those lean years leads to pent-up demand. Every department and group that had a budget cut or a freeze or slow-down is coming to come up and say, "we suffered during the lean times, so now it's time to repay us." They have a point. If not now--when?

But the same will happen for projects, improvements, new construction, research and grants, and pork projects of all types. They'll all want to be funded and this will be the time to do it--while the money is flowing.

So Congress and the deficit deniers say, "we'll grow our way out of it," which is fine except that we never seem to grow faster than we spend. There's always a need to spend more money to encourage growth.

Or another favorite--we'll simply devalue the dollar, but that has all kinds of repercussions; plus you can only do it sustainably in small doses; the governments who do it on a large scale end up bankrupt and with disasterous credit ratings, which drives up borrowing costs, aggravates inflation, and ultimately screws over their own people, who they are allegedly trying to help and protect.

This is the time to cut the deficit.

How I Work

I recently discovered Lifehacker's How I Work series. Since they're never going to ask, I'll just have to do it myself.

It also helps that they rely heavily on an out-of-the-box questionaire.

Occupation: One of the carbon blobs in Sector 7G
Location:By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea...
Current computer:an HP Pavillion Elite HPE alphabet soup desktop
Current mobile devices: a crappy Siemens cellphone
One word that best describes how I work: recalcitrant

What's your best time-saving trick?
Seriously overestimate the amount of time it takes to do anything.

What's apps/software/tools can't you live without?
I love Microsoft Acess and Excel, though I think they peaked at 2000 and it's been downhill ever since. That said, even Excel 2010 is still better than any other spreadsheet that I've tried; It'll take MS another couple iterations at least to ruin it completely.

For radio/electronics stuff, I've got a nice middle-tier Harbor Freight DMM that works surprisingly well for its relatively low cost; a couple of old test instruments that work well considering they're older than I am; and I've got a big 1/2-inch drive socket driver that makes as a beat-down tool for anything that needs to be seriously whapped. Oh yeah, and my Swiss Army knife.

What's your workspace setup like?
I have three. At my joe-job I've got the usual, or at least what was usual before cubes really took over: an old steelcase desk, a steel file cabinet, a small table and a bookcase. At home I've got the computer area (where I am right now) which is a big table with the computer stuff, and the rest of the house as support. In the garage I've got the classic technican's workbench: a normal wood bench top with a shelf above it where the electronic gear sits.

What do you listen to while you work?
The photo above really rings true for me. If I'm just cruising I'll listen to talk/news radio or a spoken-word podcast; if I really have to buckle down and concentrate, I pick a song that I know will work from past experience, set it on an endless loop, and go into almost a zen state with it. The music blurs into something like white-noise and allows me to close out the rest of the world.

What everyday thing are you better at than everyone else?
Avoiding dreary smalltalk. I hate it, and I know many people who do it, also loathe it, but feel like they have to do it to be polite. I disagree—I think I can be polite without it. But it could also be why I don't have many friends.

What's the best advice you've ever received?
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs. (Henry Ford)

An $800 Value, Now Yours for Only $19.95 plus S/H

I would have put this up for Xmas if I'd thought of it.

I'm not much of a gadget person.  I like them if they're truly useful but most aren't.  They seem like they either solve problems that don't exist or they do something that's done just as easily by something more convenient, like a pocket knife.

That said, here are some things that I want.  If they already exist, I haven't seen them.

• A Post-it Note pad with a magnet glued on the back that I can stick on the refrigerator door. I've got several note pads scattered about the house and I can never find one when I want it. Even keeping one in a kitchen drawer doesn't work. They move and hide faster than cockroaches.

• A remote garage door lock. When I was a kid, I lived in a neighborhood where most people didn't have automatic openers, so garage doors were locked (usually with a padlock). These days I doubt anyone can even imagine a door without a Genie. But that also means the locks have disappeared.

  The only thing keeping people out of garages now is trying to lift the door that's being held down by the automatic door opener (assuming that another garage access door, if there is one, is properly secured). If you can overcome the door opener, or better yet, trick the door opener into opening the door for you, then you're golden. Since many of us have keypads located mounted outside where anybody can walk up and try their hand at codebreaker, this makes me nervous.

  When I'm gone overnight or longer, I can lock the door in place so it physically can't move. But it's too inconvenient to use for shorter trips away (like to work or the store) or even overnight.

  What I want is a remotely controlled lock, something a burglar wouldn't know about, that would have to unlock first before the door opener would run. It would run independently of the regular remote so that even if someone stole my remote or broke my keypad code, he still couldn't get in.

• Stick-on wireless cameras. Make magazine ran an article or two about people who would take an LED, solder it on onto a calculator battery and a small magnet and make these little lights that could be tossed and stick on various thing (i.e. anything that a magnet would stick to). LEDs and batteries are cheap, so once they die, no big deal.

  I want a wireless camera that works the same way. It's very small, runs for a reasonable amount of time on a battery, and has a magnet. You stick it on something, "tune" to its channel, and you have wireless surveilance. I'd love to stick these on various parts of my house.

  These things probably already exist and I don't know about it. Okay—put that on an infomercial that runs 25 times a day.

I Want More of This

You'll have to click the photo above to make it work and see what I'm talking about (warning: NSFW).

Better Off Forgotten

I was around 10 years old when The Invisible Man ran briefly on NBC. I saw them first-run and loved the show. And then it was cancelled and disappeared into the ether.

I remembered it all these years, hoping it would come back on the old Sci Fi channel or TVLand or something, the way obscure tv shows occasionally do. It hasn't. Then I recently saw that it came out on DVD. I was floored. Was it as good as I remembered, or was going to be Temperature's Rising?

Netflix didn't have it (not on my by-mail option) so I went ahead and bought it. It's the full series, eleven episodes (ten plus the pilot movie) and — ugh. It wasn't Temperature's Rising, but was a lot less than what I had expected.

The story line is this: Dr. Dan Weston and his wife Dr. Kate Weston work for a DARPA-like think-tank, and their project is invisibility. Dr. Weston is brilliant but of course this is entertainment, so Weston decides to skip all those pesky intermediate steps and ethics and tries it on himself, and of course, even though it worked fine on rats and bunnies, for some reason it's permament on him.

Long story short (i.e. most of the pilot), the think tank makes a deal with the Westons: they gets to continue to use the lab to research a reversal for Dan's invisibility, and they pay off the time by doing freelance jobs by people who need special services. Weston's invisiblity is secret, so the work falls under an aegis called The Klae Resource (Klae being the name of the think-tank). So people hire the use of The Klae Resource without really knowing what it is.

It's a decent-enough premise for an action/adventure show. But—damn, it's not what I remembered. Now I'm old enough to see the obvious plot holes; the razor-think characters; villians who desparately need a long handle-bar moustache to twirl.

I feel betrayed by my memory and I'm angry at the show for not being better. I don't think that's unreasonable: so many of the episodes just look lazy, as if they'd put all their energy into the special effects (which are often clever) and had nothing left for the scripts.

Worst of all are the three main characters. They're cyphers: they have no backstory outside what we see on the show; they have no real flaws or features that make them interesting. Dr. Weston is almost entirely humorless and colorless (pun not intended but I'll take it); Walter Carlson, except for a single episode when he's actually given something to do, could have been performed perfectly well by a garden gnome. Only Melinda Fee gets to show any real range of emotion and given interesting things to do, and yet her character is as unknown and malleable as any.

Cyphers worked fine for Mission: Impossible where the characters (except for Peter Lupus) played parts every week. But M:I made up for it with intricate plots. The Invisible Man's plots are typically weak, bordering on lame. A couple are decent but most are tiresome retreads of the spy genre: contact the prisoner, break the defector out, steal the McGuffin.

It's not dumb like color Lost in Spaces were dumb, but it was amazing the thought, or lack thereof, that went into some of the stories. The one that really made my jaw drop: a US senator visits a psychic for seances to contact his dead wife. A government agency hires The Klae Resource to put an end to it because the senator is possibly being manipulated by the psychic to vote against a particular bill. So basically, the government is hiring The Klae Resource because a Senator is voting the wrong way.

Nobody sees any problem with this. Carlson and the Westons both want the bill passed.

After the first or second episode, it appears everyone and his dog knows about The Klae Resource even if they don't know what it is, and even that little secret leaks out at an alarming rate. If they show had gone on another year, The Klae Resource might have been parodied on Saturday Night Live.

It could have been better; it should have been better. It couldn't have been that difficult.

So I can't relieve my childhood love of this show. I'm too old to enjoy the stories, but I'm old enough now to appreciate Melinda Fee.

E) Kiss My Ass

I used to like being surveyed. I figured almost anyone could benefit from my advice. Now I'm older and I figure other people care about my thoughts and opinions about as much as I do theirs (i.e. none).

One of the big business fads going around now is the idea of surveying customers to get actual feedback on satisfaction. Business fads are like almost any idea-set that crosses into the mainstream; a few facts are correct but the concepts behind them are usually lost. So many firms will poll their customers to gather data which will be

a) presented in such a way to produce a predetermined outcome
b) misinterpreted to produce a predetermined outcome
c) ignored
d) any of the above, depending on which level of management prepares the report

Lately I've been seeing these surveys pop up more and more on websites I visit. It started out at check-out with an invitation to take a follow-up survey. Now I see them showing up as soon as I hit the web page before I've done anything.

It wouldn't be so bad if they were unobtrusive, but many are now using the same annoying tactics as the advertising I hate the most: pop-ups, pop-unders, or the worst: the animated thing that rolls across the middle of what I'm trying to read.

Worst of all: some aren't even satisfaction surveys. I clicked on one I believe to be a thinly-disguised advertisement from my current favorite company, Microsoft.

For awhile I just ignored them, but now I'm actively embracing them. I'll click on any survey offered figuring it's my turn to pee in their Wheaties for a change. And I invite everyone else to do the same.

When I am offered an annoying survey to take, I now:

A) choose answers at random, as long as they aren't accurate

B) coordinate a set of answers that are consistant but completely inaccurate (for the Microsoft survey--yes, I'm the CIO of a firm that's excited about their latest product!!!)

C) choose a set of answers to explain how deeply dissatisfied I am with the product or service

One way to approach this, if it's an in-depth survey, is to create a persona for yourself and look at it as an acting job. Back when some on-line sites used to demand demographic information before they'd let you in, I was an elderly woman from Andorra (that's a tiny country between France and Spain). An alternative is simply to be your favorite celebrity. I use one for sites that want to know my birthday, location, and so forth.

What do you think of this plan?

A) don't care
B) disinterested
C) apathetic

I Am Done with Microsoft

I say this as I type this on a Win 7 computer using IE 9 (don't ask why I'm using IE 9; it's a tiresome story and there's no payoff).

I don't mean that I'm throwing it all out right now. But I won't be replacing things with MS products (*knock wood*). In some cases I have alternatives in mind. For others I'll just have to wait and see.

I'm not one of those people who always hated MS. I didn't hate it when it was fashionable. Americans almost always hate Goliath and root for the underdog, and there's always a Goliath and always some scrappy youth trying to take him on. Before MS it was IBM, and before IBM it was Bell Telephone, and before that it was General Motors and before that it was RCA (yes, people forget RCA used to be big and scary) and so on. At the turn of the century it was The Railroads. And on and on.

My beef with MS now is that I feel like they're definitely on the downhill slide; that all their products peaked about a decade ago. I was never a huge fan of Windows but for a long time I felt like it trended better; then it peaked with Windows XP. I started with Excel 95, felt that it peaked at 2000, and hit a major skid with the 2007 downgrade. It's as if they never got over the fact that MS Works was a piece of shit, so they put the Works people in charge of Office and Works'd it.

You win. I quit.

The straw, and that's what this literally is, the final straw was a wireless keyboard. Bought it because I'd liked some MS keyboards in the past and I don't like Logitech. But the MS keyboard lacks a capslock LED. Sound niggling? It is until you're typing in case-sensitive passwords and can't figure out why they're not being accepted, until you finally think that maybe you hit the Caps lock by mistake and your cases are backward. But you can't just glance to see if the caps-lock light is on; it's an MS keyboard, you have to click on another field or open another window to type something and determine whether caps lock is on or off.

I'm fed up.

But I'm not really angry (except for ruining Excel; I still have to use that at work), I'm really looking at this as a key to freedom. It's like expatriating yourself; yes, you lose the familiarity of your home country, but there are a lot of other countries to choose from. Some are unpalatable (I never liked Apple), some are scary (Linux), some are mostly unknown (Android). But they're out there. They're different, and they have their ups and downs. Just like MS. Except hopefully I'll like their Ups more and dislike their Downs less.

A couple years ago, I couldn't imagine myself thinking this way.

Christmas Lists

Favorite Christmas Songs

• 2000 Miles - the Pretenders
• Calling On Mary - Aimee Mann
• Carol of the Bells - anybody
• Christmastime is Here - Richard Cheese
• Greensleeves - anybody
• O Come Emmanuel - Sixpence None the Richer
• Old Toy Trains - Roger Miller
• This Christmas - Jill Scott

Stuff I Miss from Being a Kid

• Advent Calendars
• Lying on my back under the tree, and looking up at the lights
• Christmas lights
• Homemade christmas candy

Stuff I Absolutely DO NOT Miss from Being a Kid

• Going to relatives' Xmas parties
• Decorating and undecorating the tree
• Going on drives to see the Christmas lights
• Egg nog

Favorites Movies that Involve Christmas Somehow

• A Christmas Story
• Die Hard
• It's a Wonderful Life (if I let several years pass between viewings)
• On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Worst Movies that Involve Christmas Somehow

• Anything with Tim Allen

Favorite Scrooge from A Christmas Carol

• George C. Scott

Best Christmas TV Special

• Charlie Brown Christmas

Worst Christmas TV Specials

• Kathy Lee Gifford's
• The King Family (a staple of the 1970s)

Christmas Season

I should do this. I keep being disappointed by finding blogs that I start to read, enjoy, and then find out sooner or later that they haven't been updated in months or years.

I got derailed by a serious post that I tried several times to write and just couldn't make work. I don't mean serious as in some big personal thing, I just meant serious as in Thought.

So frivolity is the rule for the day. Which fits the time of year.

For me Christmas starts on Pearl Harbor Day (December 7th). I picked that as a date because a) I can remember it, and b) it gives me a good 2-1/2 weeks (three if you go through New Year's) of Christmastime, which seems like plenty to me. I like Christmas, but it's like maple syrup; there's enough and there's too much.

So that's when the decorations come out, if I feel like doing anything, and when I load the music on the MP3 player, and so forth. It's when I get ready to send out Christmas cards, if it's a year that I'll be doing it. Some years when I feel poor I just send emails. This year I think I still have a lot left over from last year so I'll just be sending those, if I can find them.

In my obituary, my life will be boiled down to the catch-phrase, "it's around here somewhere."

The other day I took an online poll, since I'm with a service that pays me a pittance every time I take one (enough that I can get an Amazon gift card about once a year). It asked me about my attitudes about Christmas. Mostly I'm pleased with it. I do growl when I see Xmas stuff up before Thanksgiving. The Xmas-season-starts-the-day-after-Thanksgiving concept goes back to my childhood; I don't agree with it but I'll compromise over it (I think it should start on Pearl Harbor Day, or the day after). But before Thanksgiving is unconscienable.

I said my pet peeve was listening to people bitch about it, particularly the ones who lament the loss of the True Meaning of Christmas. Most of people I know who do that are the most material; it's a "you made me hit you" mentality. Eat me; if you don't like it, don't do it. Do you resent giving too many gifts? Stop giving gifts, at least to the people who shouldn't get gifts.

I've got a no-gift-exchange treaty going with most of my friends so it works out nicely. A couple people think I'm Scrooge, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

All Paths Lead to Door Number 1

For a moment there I thought they were on to something great. I was on Hulu to watch an old TV show episode and they make you watch commercials. They began by giving me three thumbnails and asked me which commercial I wanted to see.

My first thought was that it was stupid—like asking me whether I wanted hemlock, arsenic or cyanide. Then I thought, at least this is a chance to pick something that could be worthwhile.

Because if you think about it, there are three major problems with TV commercials (and to an increasing extent, internet video ads). The first is that they break into whatever you're watching. But if you do it intelligently (there are obvious places where you can place a commercial break and not ruin the flow of the story), that problem can be overcome.

The second problem is that they're often moronic; but it's been that way since advertising began. There are some very bright, very clever people in advertising. Unfortunately, there are a hell of a lot of dumbasses in it, too.

But the killer, the worst one of all, is the irrelevent ad, the one you have to sit through knowing full your time is being completely wasted. That one drives me crazy because now something can be done about it; I could choose my commercial.

Example: during the show I watched, the regular commercials included these products: a) tampons (I'm a man, I don't use them); b) cat food (I don't have a cat); c) an insurance company that already has my business; and d) various kids' back-to-school stuff (I don't have kids).

There are plenty of businesses I wouldn't mind hearing from, and products I'd be interested to know more about.

Anyway, it turned out to be a false alarm. My three choices all turned out to be Chevy ads, even pitching the same thing. It would be like getting a choice of three Progressive Insurance commercials, all pushing their multiple-coverage discounts. Do I want to see Flo talking to the fat guy, or Flo talking to the bald guy, or Flo talking to the tattooed woman?

And then they wonder why sales are down.

Pulling It Out of Your Ass

Interesting article about the movie The Watch. They're not complimentary about the improv elements.

I can't blame them. Even though a lot of scripted comedy blows and ad libs are often far funnier than the script, that tends to happen most often for crap tv shows, particularly awards shows where the patter has been dumbed down so even the family dog can gets the joke.

But improv often doesn't work well in the long form. Theoretically anyway, when you write a script you actually structure the story; you can shape it, forge it, hone and sharpen it over time until it's at its most effective. With improve you're just winging it and there's no going back. So if the pacing is off, too bad; if someone says something that turns the plot in a different (not necessarily better) direction, so be it. The result isn't electricity, it's often just a meandering.

The Buzz Around Indycar

This article, IndyCar Could Benefit by Will Power Not Winning Championship turns out to be just another thing about how under-rated Indycar racing is, and what needs to be done to correct it.

You can read the article yourself; needless to say I disagree on some points. Here are my main thoughts on the subject.

1. Nobody cares about the series championship. There are two: one for ovals and one for road courses. Nobody gives a frig about either. Nobody gave a frig about the overall drivers' championship before that. Unlike Formula 1 and NASCAR, the Indycar series has always been the Indianapolis 500 and "there are more races?"

Given an hour or so, I can name nearly all of the Indianapolis 500 winners from 1960 to date. I can hardly name any of the series champions. I know Franchitti won the last three mostly because I'm a Franchitti fan, and because it's been fun watching Will Power lose every year. I know Will Power has won none for the same reason. I keep forgetting that Franchitti won a fourth championship and that Helio has won none, even though I'm a fan of both. Without looking at a cheat sheet (I've got one open in another window) I can't tell you who won what how many times. And I'm an Indycar series fan.

The only thing interesting about the series championship is watching Will Power become the sport's version of Jim Kelly and the Buffalo Bills.

As I type this, the Baltimore race just ended. I'm generally not a conspiracy theorist but I definitely veer toward it when it comes to the "championships" in Indycar, because every year it seems like things just miraculously tighten up going into the last race. Ryan Hunter-Reay just won, and Will Power finished 5th, so the points standings tightened up between them. Nobody at Indycar wanted Power to mathematically eliminate RHR before the next (final) race in Fontana: that would mean the race itself would have to be interesting on its own, and a lot of Indycar races are like watching paint dry; at the end of the race the only noteworthy thing that comes out of it is the championship points standings.

What they need to do is: 2. Make each race more interesting on its own. You can compare Indycar to other sports, like baseball, in this respect: the best races are dynamic and the worst ones are static. You watch a football game and one team goes ahead 10-0 on the first two possessions, and the game ultimately ends 27-3. Even if you're a huge fan of the winning team, it's a snooze of a game. A lot of Indycar run that way.

They could do something about this by reworking the worst of their road courses to have more passing areas so that faster cars can get by the slower ones. As it is, far too many races end with fast cars being stuck behind slower ones because there are few places to pass and the acceleration difference between fast and slow isn't enough for to allow a fast overtake. The result is what Indycar fans derisively call a parade.

Instead, they come up with gimmicks like "Push-to-pass," which makes no sense when it's explained, is invisible to see on television, and doesn't really appear to do anything other than give the announcers another statistic to spout. "Briscoe has six more push-to-passes; Viso only has two!"

3. Make the thing available so more people can see it. There's a double-whammy on this one, as Indycar's TV package is split between two different companies: Disney (ABC and ESPN) and Comcast (NBC). If you don't have cable (that would be me) then you're limited only to the ABC broadcasts—and only those which ABC actually airs; if there's a problem like a rain-delay which makes the race go long and interfere with, say, the high-school water polo game that's already scheduled, they'll throw the Indycar race onto one of the many ESPN channels on cable. NBC only has the one venue, NBC Sports (formerly Versus), so things are less liquid when they have it.

The result is a mess of never really knowing when and where you can find the race, and God help you if there's some sort of problem (like a rain delay). DVRs would help, but all broadcasters seem to think we still live in 1970 and if they just wish it hard enough, it will be that way, so DVRs are frequently fooled. I don't know anyone who has a DVR and manages to get all of the races.

The Buzz Is that more people are watching online, but not if it's Indycar. Can you get it on your iPod or your iPad or your iPhone or even your iMac? No. Comcast pulled the plug on the online stream at Indycar.com without even offering a pay-per-view fee. Stupid? Not if it's 1970.

Of course there's radio, if you have XM/Sirius satellite radio. I know someone who does but there's no way I'm going to sit in their car for 3 hours to hear it. It appears that they've cut the audio streaming feed on Indycar.com, which now means there's no reason to go to Indycar.com for anything. How about the Indycar radio network? That appears to have gone with Sid Collins.

4. Advertise it with relevant products. Decades ago, Indycars used to be sponsored by automotive products: oil and gas and chemical additives and auto parts of all kinds. Some of these companies are still around and still sponsoring: Lucas is this generation's racing icon of my generation's STP. Yet the series sponsor is Izod, a clothing manufacturer with no discenerable target market, making commercials that appeal to—I don't know whom. The "Buzz" is to sell ring-tones and "Apps" and Facebook Likes even though the people who buy ring-tones are watching x-treme skate-boarding, the Apps people should be watching that commercial on their iPhone, not on their television, and nobody's yet bothered to figure out what a Facebook Like really does for anyone or anything other than Facebook itself. Try selling something to the people who actually watch the race.

If they can find it.

If they can stay awake through it.

The Beauty of Cover Art

When I was a kid, I thought these were the coolest. I read the books over and over, but that's another thing entirely. The cover art just made me drool.

Some day I'll write a lament over Science Fiction, but right now I'm derailed again by looking at those books. That and the fact that 40 years later, those book covers still look vivid and fresh to me. I'm trying to think of the last time I walked into a bookstore and saw a cover that really captured my imagination like that. Probably not since I was a kid.

Tain't Funny, McGee

One of my favorite jokes goes like this. A scientist has a frog that he's trained to jump on command, and he uses it for an experiment. He says, "jump" and the frog jumps 8 feet. The scientist writes this down. Then he cuts one of the frog's legs off. He says, "jump" and the frog jumps 4 feet. The scientist writes this down. He cuts a second leg off. He says, "jump" and the frog jumps 1 foot. The scientist cuts a third leg off. "Jump" and the frog manages to bobble a few inches. The scientist now cuts off the last remaining leg. "Jump." Nothing. "Jump!" Nothing. "JUMP!!!" Nothing.

The scientist notes this down and then writes his conclusion: when all four legs are removed, the frog goes deaf.

That joke went through my mind as I read this article on USA Today about how Insurers' Funny Ads [are] Not Paying Off.

The article says that the discounters (Geico, etc.) aren't doing too bad, but other insurers' copycat ad strategies using humor are not converting into customers.

The Geico commercials vary but some are funny, as is the AFLAC commercials. But I'd argue that most of the others are not at all. The Progressive commercials are more quirky than funny. I don't recall any of the others being funny, intentionally or not, at all. I knew people who would quote "Lost another one to Ditech!!" but don't remember ever hearing a laugh, or a chuckle, or even seeing a smile.

The fundamental issue is (or ought to be): what are the commercials supposed to do? Are the supposed to generate actual sales, or just build brand awareness that may lead to sales? The former is direct, the latter is indirect.

I doubt many people watch a Geico commercial and say, "okay, I'll buy." What it does is make Geico look like a viable player, a credible business, and the message is "call us and see if we can help you." That doesn't necessarily generate sales, it just creates the opportunity. It's up to the company itself to make good.

If it's about building awareness, then Geico, Progressive, et. al are working very well. I'm aware of their companies. And unlike some of the companies that use other (non-entertaining) strategies, like The General, I'm not ill-disposed toward them.

On the other hand, I have zero interest in changing my insurance companies. Funny or not, hard-sell or soft-sell, I haven't been given a compelling reason to check any of them out. That's not the fault of the commercials per se. None of them are going to address my concerns about choosing a discount insurance company.

I think it really comes down to this: most advertisers, in their heart-of-hearts, believe that the hard-sell works best and anything else is a fad novelty to be used on occasion to break up the monotony of the hard-sell.

I disagree: I never liked the hard sell. My mute button was nearly broken during the Billy Mays reign of terror (and I made it a point to quit buying Oxy-Clean when he began endorsing it). But I'm not in advertising, and I'm not the one who has to approve an advertising campaign. So what do I know?

I just buy stuff...

Send Her Here

I'm behind in my reading. Sorry.

This is a recent obit from The Economist magazine.

Though he was probably the last surviving example of the giant Galápagos tortoise Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii, he too refused to perform. Scientists, tourists, journalists, conservationists and the government of Ecuador all waited for two decades for him to mate successfully or, indeed, get it on at all. He wasn't playing. In 1993 two females of a slightly different subspecies were put into his corral. He ignored them. When at last he decided to do his duty, in 2008 and occasionally later, the eggs failed to hatch. Clearly, he was a slow burner. . . . He refused to be turned on even when a female Swiss zoology graduate, smeared with tortoise hormones, gave him manual stimulation for four months.

That could be me! Where's my hot Swiss miss grad student?

Match Game

Some people hate hospitals, others hate retirement homes. You know what I think is the most depressing place on earth? The animal shelter—especially the ones where I know they're going to be killed if they're taken. But really, I even avoid the live animal section of Petsmart; I want to save them all.

But now that's been beaten. The most depressing place I've been lately is an online dating service.

I can offer several reasons, and will. One is that I'm surprised at how many of the profile bios, the part people will read so this is where you sell yourself, really make yourself shine, are pre-emptive strikes; the tone bordering on angry. Several people make a point that anyone who contacts them must submit photos. One lady offered a reason I never thought of: if you're willing to put a photo of yourself online, you're probably not sneaking around on your wife or girlfriend.

But there are other missives from people who've clearly been burned and want to avoid past disasters. I understand it, yet some of it seems like doing everything you can to prevent a recurrance of World War I and got World War II instead.

Another is irratation at a physical limitation over which I have absolutely no power to change: my height. I'm not short, but I'm not tall either. I'm statistically average. But I've seen a large number of ads, not just on this site but in classifieds in newspapers and Craigslist and any other place where people try to meet by making requests: I'm not over 6 feet tall.

For one, I don't know how much difference it really makes. I can reach the top shelves of my cabinets and anything I really can't get to, there's this thing I have called a step-stool. Other than that, height is mostly useful for seeing over shoulders in crowds. I haven't found other uses. The drawbacks are that clothes sizes are larger and more expensive, it's harder to sit in some cars comfortably, especially with people in the back seat; you're always folded up in theaters, stadium seats, even restaurants where your legs tend to tangle with others, almost never in a good way. If you're really tall, you have a collection of bumps and scars on your head from things that you've hit.

And there's a double-standard to it as well. Women have no problem specifying a height, and even petite women routinely want men 6' or over, as if those extra couple inches meant anything. But if a man put in a demand for a range of bra sizes, there would be outrage.

Enough about height. There's also an unwillingness to want to sell myself like used car. Like a lot of people, I grew up with the rule that you don't blow your own horn, you don't show off, you don't preen. That's a very, very difficult one to get past.

But finally, the big one, the elephant among the mice I've already mentioned, is guilt and my own double-standards.

I think the root problem, after a lot of soul-searching and analysis, is in the pictures. Most people don't look the same in a photo as they do in real life, and usually the photos aren't flattering. In real life we're typically hit with a flurry of impressions: the person's image—from all angles, not just one; there's the voice, the posture, movement, attitude and behavior from broad to minute.

But when you see a photo, you react just a photo. There could be 10,000 words in the profile that make the person sound like the mate of your dreams, but the photo says run away.

I do this is much as anyone, and I'm not proud of it because I'm much a victim of it as perpetrator. I'm not the male version of Anne Ramsey (pictured) but I'm far closer to Ernest Borgnine's Marty than the Roger Moore photo I use as my avatar. I know that I am judged on my looks. In person I can try and save things with personality, but just a photo would sink me before I even cast off.

But I feel guilty when I do the same thing. The dating company gave me a group of "matches" to sift through, and I immediately tossed out some based on nothing but the photo.

I have met women who are not, shall we say, fine physical specimens yet I found them attractive. But the difference was that I met them in person, where I could see them from all angles, hear them talk and interact and be a full-bodied individual rather than just a (usually poor) 2-D image on the screen.

All that makes me think that this is just a disaster of a system. Things were better when there were ice cream socials and local mixers, where you met other "available" people in the flesh instead of just pixels. Internet dating is the 21st century equivalent of 19th century mail-order brides. Look through the catalog, find one you like and write a letter...

And I suspect the long-term results are about the same.

I'm Turning Everything On Full Blast

I got this email from my local utility.

Treat Yourself With Savings

Ready to start saving? Tomorrow, Thursday 7/12/2012, is a Save Power Day, which means if you use less energy than you normally do between 2:00 pm and 6:00 pm, you can earn credits on your electricity bill - up to $100 a year.

Gee, thanks. I've already pared things down pretty close to the bone to minimize my bill already. What if my normal use is (to pick round numbers for comparison) 10KW/h per day, and even I unplugged all the non-essentials (i.e. not the refrigerator), I'd only drop to 9.5KW/h?

It's Not Ignorance, It's Hubris

Another day, another guy gets arrested at the airport for trying to bring a gun.

Another day, another celebrity arrested for DUI.

Another day, another couple's prayers go unanswered because the stick turned blue and the condom package is still sealed.

I was listening to an NPR piece one day (I'd link it if I could remember which) where the reporter was discussing some kind of health issue, I think it was unwanted pregnancies and condom use (and the lack thereof). The reporter began by asserting that was an issue of the lack of education, and then followed it up interview clips with private people who all said "I know I was running a risk, but we had sex without a condom anyway."

Then it's not about education (and the lack thereof), is it?

This is one of those things where I want to throw a boot through the tv screen or toss a radio off a tall building. I'm sick of the "it's a lack of education" excuse. In children that's applicable; in adults it damn well isn't.

It's predicated on the idea that if you present the facts to a person, he (or she) will make a sound (usually obvious) decision. Is that the case? A hell of a lot of the time: no!

How many times do people get arrested for DUI? How many of them really had no idea that drinking might deteriorate their driving skills, and that if only they had known...? Only the Forrest Gumps of the world. Most of the DUIs are from people who honestly thought they weren't drunk and were fit to drive, or they just didn't care and decided to chance it anyway. Education and ignorance wasn't a factor.

Same thing with condom use. If you're an adult and you're capable of functioning on your own in modern society (you can hold a job, pay the bills, etc.), you know what condoms can and cannot do. If you decide to have sex and not use it, you know what the risks are. You've just chosen to accept them. Maybe you want to procreate. Or likely you just don't like them for any number of reasons. Still, it's not a "I had no idea!" situation.

There are plenty of things in the world that go poorly or unexplained: how the government truly works; which laws apply; how tax, spending and lending policies affect the economy both at a macro and a personal level; why the annual global temperature is supposed to be rising yet last winter was especially severe. Education is a valuable tool and it needs to be used. But it needs to be expunged as an excuse for human hubris and poor decision making.

Another day, someone takes the cigarette out of his mouth and blows a huge plume of smoke at the tv during an anti-smoking commercial.

The Yin and Yan of Jack Dorsey

I thought this was interesting on multiple levels. By coincidence I read these two articles almost back-to-back, so even I couldn't miss the connections.

We start with a man named Jack Dorsey, the man who launched Twitter. I think Twitter is (like Facebook) overhyped and little understood, but I still found this story in Wired Magazine a compelling read. It's a personality profile of Dorsey; and of course because it's written by a leading-edge tech mag, there's a Cult of (Steve) Jobs undercurrent; much of the article compares him with Jobs and Apple.

As an illustration, there's a discussion of Dorsey's current project, a merchant payment service called Square. For the purposes of this blog post, I'm not interested in Apple, design, or other Revealed Truths. I'm interested in the company itself and what it does:

. . . Earlier this year, Square . . . released Square Register, an app that makes it easy to use an iPad as a full-featured cash register. Vendors can set up buttons for each item they sell, much as McDonald’s lets cashiers simply press Shake instead of entering the price. It can also connect wirelessly to a cash drawer.

But Register’s real value is that it offers sophisticated analytics for free. Its users get data that allows them to identify which products are selling and when, and future versions will be even more powerful. “As a customer enters the vicinity of the establishment, a notification will spring open on the merchant’s screen,” says Megan Quinn, Square’s director of products (who has since left the company). “It will show the customer’s name and suggest their most likely order, based on an algorithm that knows past purchases and things that sell well at the store.”

Henderson, the engineering lead on Pay With Square, points out that the company collects all kinds of information about its users, data that might be invaluable to merchants and customers alike. “First of all, we know your location,” he says. “Second, we have a decent sense of your history. We know the kinds of places you’ve been and what you like. But we also know lots of other things—like if there’s a whole bunch of food trucks that pull up nearby, we’ll see the spike in activity and can point you to those trucks. I think you’ll see us get really good at this.”

Analytics and data-mining might provide Square’s real business model. So far, the company has charged a very small fee for each transaction, and merchants aren’t likely to pay much more. And while Square has been giving participating merchants access to analytics about their businesses for free, it is also aggregating that data, real-time information about what people are buying in every region of the country, complete with detailed demographics. It’s reasonable to think that might be very valuable in the near future.

Square is still focused on smaller merchants, but its executives believe that even tier-one retailers will use Square before long. “The Neiman Marcuses and the Walmarts will want to have an emotional attachment with their buyers, where anybody can walk in and pay with their name and have an electronic receipt,” Rabois says. “That’s what we’re going to deliver.”

In other words, Square aims to provide shoppers with an emotionally satisfying experience . . . .
—Wired, "The Many Sides of Jack Dorsey", paragraphs 40-45

I showed this article to a friend and he was thrilled at the prospect. Rooting through the wallet for money, making and handling loose change and such just slows everything down and can be an annoyance (e.g. almost nobody wants pennies anymore, let alone a pocketful).

He also made a point that in some places, like Europe (and probably many parts of the US), a lot of transactions are still in cash, such as cab fare. Cabbies don't take plastic, so you have to have and handle an often unfamiliar foreign currency, which leads to more bills and more coins, and receipts (if you're lucky) to keep for expense reports. Even when you are able to use credit cards, you're still limited to whichever brands or systems they accept; American Express (still a favorite for US corporate travel) is often non grata.

The no-swipe, no card, electronic-wallet-on-your-iPhone world that Square envisions may still not be adopted by cab drivers or small bistros in France, but it's still a welcome step toward it.

That aside, the portion of the Wired article that I quoted above discusses the use of analytics—the analysis of buying habits. Wired's example would be walking into a coffee house and the barristas would have your likely order on the cash register and ready to go as soon as you walked in the door. I used to frequent a chinese restaurant and always bought the same lunch, so they always knew what I wanted as soon as they saw me. That's not a bad thing.

So next I came across an article in The Economist magazine (June 30-July 6, 2012. London's skyscape on the cover). This article never discussed Square in particular, but the part about Square's analytics dovetails in nicely:

The internet was supposed to be the consumer’s friend. By making it easy to shop around, it would drive prices lower. But online sellers of all sorts of goods and services are taking a keen interest in new software that promises to help them spot customers who are well off, or whose money is burning a hole in their pockets, so as to charge them more).

Online shoppers let slip plenty of information about themselves that could be of use to crafty salesmen. Cookies reveal where else they have been browsing, allowing some guesses about their income bracket, age and sex. Their internet address can often be matched to their physical address: the richer the neighbourhood, the deeper the pockets, it may be assumed. Apple computer-owners are on average better-off than Windows PC users, and firms may offer them pricier options, as Orbitz, a travel website, is doing. Your mouse may also be squeaking on you: click too quickly from home-page to product page to checkout, and the seller can conclude that you have already decided to buy—so why offer you a discount?
—The Economist, "Caveat Emptor.com", paragraphs 2 and 3.

I know the Wired article wasn't about the dark side of technology, yet there's a little bit of me that thinks it's the "Apple is Good, Steve Jobs is God, this man is obviously the Chosen One so all he touches is good" philosophy springs forth. If Dorsey idolized Bill Gates, I would bet the implications of Square's analytics would have gotten a harder look.

And then finally this cherry on top. Flip the page after the Economist article and you see a full-page ad for SAS's analytic services (see image at top of this post). If I were SAS, I'd be pissed.

Powerpoint Pain

First, you know how people say there are secrets to great presentations (people title books like this all the time. The 7 Secrets of... horseshit). Well, in presentations there really is one. I say it's a secret only because I have yet to see anyone actually say it anywhere (most of my tips below, however, I've seen printed elsewhere).

Secret: it's all about authority. I don't mean power-authority— the ability to flick your fingers and have someone sent to the gulag (presentations would be a lot more interesting, though). I'm talking about credibility, as in the audience believing unequivocably that you know what you're talking about, that you're Revealing Truth. Anything that adds to your authority should be embraced and anything that detracts should be cut out like cancer.

Think about speakers who put on presentations. The best ones never leave you in any doubt that they know what they're doing and that their message is the word of God. Crappy speakers undermine their message, no matter how accurate or relevant, by casting doubt on their own veracity.

With that in mind, some tips:

1. Know what's in your Powerpoint presentation. You are responsible for it. Even if it's a group effort, it's still yours.

I saw presentations where the creator had obviously cut and pasted chunks of prose from the internet (probably Wikipedia) into a slide, and thought no more about it. When it came to present, that person then simply read aloud what was on the slide.

1A. Know what's on the slide. The creator/reader stumbled over sentences and mispronounced words (and I'm not talking about tongue-twisters like paraphenylenediamine or Zapatecas; I mean relatively common words like legume). This gives the impression that the presenter is reading this for the first time, or simply has no idea what he or she is reading. This completely undercuts the presenter's credibility as an authority. How do I really know any of this is true, valuable or applicable when the presenter obviously doesn't know what he or she is talking about? All he's doing is reading the screen.

1B. Just put bullet points on the slide. This is common advice, yet it's common because it's so often needed. People cut and paste a sea of print onto a slide. Nobody in the audience wants to read a page of prose. Think of the Powerpoint text as being like note cards: they're meant to have a few words--just enough to summarize the concept or make a point. You supply the patter to fatten it out.

2. Get your facts right. Reading one source (e.g. Wikipedia) doesn't cut it. If you use the internet for your research, check multiple sites and make sure they don't all site-back to the same single source. If you got the library and read a book, check a couple of other books as well. In some cases there really is only a single source; but very often there are several and one offers insight where another is blind.

2A. Don't assume that because this was new to you, that your audience doesn't know it either.. I'm serious—this will put your head into a noose faster than mis-pronouncing words like noose. I was watching presentations that touched on subjects that I happened to know something about, and it immediately became clear that the presenters had only read a Wikipedia page or a corporate About-Us web page and nothing more; the result was that they would toss out "facts," simple things that didn't have much to do with the bulk of the presentation, that were either flat-out wrong or gossimer-fragile. Either way, it destroyed the authority of the presenter. I know xyz and this isn't even my project! This is your project, why didn't you?

2B. Try to do a little independent research. Some people think if you're assigned to do a story on, say, Apple, Inc., that everything necessary can be gathered from Apple.com or Wikipedia. Try doing some searches that take you farther afield. Do some searches on your own--don't just follow links from one person's bibliography; if only because you may stumble across something great that you would have found otherwise.

3. It's better to have two interesting facts than ten dull ones. I recently saw a presentation about Starbucks, and the presenter had the typical list of uninteresting trivia about the company; how many stores are open, how many employees they have, how many pounds of coffee beans they roast every day.

By coincidence, I had a book with Starbucks trivia, but it had "3 Things You Didn't Know About Starbucks." One was about using the foam on a latte as a way of keeping the coffee hot (it's not as efficient as a thermos but it does help), the second was that there really is a "short" size even though it's not on the menu, and the third is that there's a Starbucks barrista blog (actually there are many) which had the blogger's idea of the worst custom frappuccino ever (it included pomegranate).

Those three items were far more interesting than the dry facts. If he had tossed those out, it would have woken the audience up. People respond to the unusual and unexpected; it forces them to pay attention.

4. Care about how it looks.

4A. Powerpoint looks different when its projected on a wall than it does on your monitor. Typically the color is washed out and loses its vibrancy. At best it just looks drab, but you want to check that colors don't blend. I see this a lot—a colorful chart that looked great in Excel and even in Powerpoint on the computer becomes meaningless when it's presented because you can't tell the line colors apart. The fix for this is to use colors that contrast more strongly than you might otherwise use, and to use other visual indicators, like dash patterns, to differentiate lines.

4B. Simplify the Charts. A great chart can convey a lot of information, but again, what works on the computer or in a printout can quickly get confusing on the wall. It also goes back to the sea-of-print advice from 1B. Strip your charts down to the bare minimum of information. If there's too much info, consider making separate charts.

4C. Don't Be Lazy. I recently saw the single worst Powerpoint slide evar [sic]. The presenter wanted some info from a website but did not want to recreate the chart, so he just took a photo of it with his iPhone. The result was a blurry, ugly mess. The only message that slide conveyed was that the user was more interested in Tweeting complaints about making this presentation than in actually making the presentation.

5. Get away from the God-damned lecturn! People who are uncomfortable giving presentations, which is most of us, and even people who do it often, use the lecturn as a form of armor against the audience. Speakers will plant themselves squarely behind it and not budge for fear of being killed by stray gunfire if they step to either side.

If you have notes, put them on the lecturn and walk away. Stand to either side of it if you need to consult your notes, but walk away from it completely when you don't. If you're projecting your presentation onto the wall, stand on one side of it for a slide, then cross over to talk about the next slide. Don't be afraid to point to things on the screen directly.

Dynamic movement is visually interesting, even if it's just you traversing eight feet of floor. If you want to see this in action: turn on the local TV news and watch the weather and traffic casters--the people who have to stand in front of the local maps and point out things. They move back and forth from one side to the next. Same thing with good public speakers. If you ever see those motivational poeple that pollute PBS these days, they typically don't stand behind a lectern; they stand by themselves on the stage, and move back and forth across it.

6. Loosen up. This is easier said than done, and the hardest piece of advice I have. But it's also the most important if you don't want to bore your audience to death. Even if you're fundamentally shy (I am), you can fake it for the length of the presentation.

A few suggestions:

• If you have props, use them. A prop can be something interesting that's related to what you're talking about. Is your presentation about the history of Starbucks? Bring in a bag of coffee, and open it and show off the beans. Get green (unroasted) beans if you can. And quakers. Anything coffee related is fair game, it will add visual interest, and it will give you something to do with your hands.
• Give away stuff that's related to your presentation, like mini-bags of coffee beans. Or dixie cups of beans. You don't have to give something to everyone, just toss a few out among the spectators. Especially people you want to distract, because they'll be paying more attention to the freebie than what you're saying.
• If you have a sense of humor, use it. You don't need to tell jokes, but if you have a wry comment or a funny anecdote that fits, use it. If you can find a cartoon (preferably a one-panel) that fits your subject, stick into the presentation somewhere at the most opportune time. Humor wakes people up.

And a last bit of advice for those of you who got this far—another secret that never gets mentioned but it's absolutely true:

Nobody knows what you meant to do.

This means that you actually have more freedom of movement than you think; you can change the order of slides on the fly; you can ad lib; you can go off the presentation completely to make a point. Unless your audience has seen you do this before, they don't know what to expect and what not to. It also means that you don't have to get rattled if something doesn't work as planned; steamroll over it and keep going.