Signage wars

An article in yesterday’s Globe triggered one of my fortunately rare moments of anger at the greater Boston metropolitan area where I live. The anger came toward the end of an article about poor, confusing, and absent road signs throughout the area:

Since 2001, state Senator Patricia D. Jehlen has been sponsoring legislation that would force communities to post signs at intersections, but the bill has gone nowhere. The Massachusetts Municipal Association opposes it as a costly burden that takes the decision away from communities.

Um. Excuse me? What decision are you taking away from communities? Is it the decision to do their jobs? Because really, if you build the roads but don’t put up the signs, why did you bother?

Clue for you, folks. Massachusetts has a high per capita income ($44,289) and a high rate of taxation (5.3%), while Washington State is lower on both fronts ($35,409 and no state income tax). But Washington State manages to actually post signs on all its streets! So does Virginia ($38,390/2% to 5.75%); so does North Carolina ($30,553/6%-8%). What is the state doing with the money it takes in income tax that it can’t afford to put up the damned signs itself, or grant money to the local communities?

Actually, this puts another question to my mind. If a local community can’t afford to put up street signs, and can’t keep residential streets paved or maintain storm sewers, then the system is broken. Either the towns need to build up their tax bases or small towns need to combine and consolidate services so they aren’t trying to each maintain their own systems. Or the state could get off its ass and make sure the municipalities have what they need to serve their people.

Beverage news: Ardbeg, Dixie Beer

Two unrelated beverage news items in my browser this morning. I was just thinking the other day about how you never see Dixie Blackened Voodoo anymore, when I saw this article about the devastation at the original Dixie plant as a result of Katrina. The brand is being brewed in Wisconsin on a contract basis, but I hope they can bring the original brewery back around. Blackened Voodoo and the original Dixie are too good with Cajun food to continue to be brewed that far north.

And Ardbeg, which I enjoy as a fallback when I am drinking Scotch away from home if Laphroaig is unavailable, has been crowned the World Whiskey of the Year and the best Scotch Single Malt. I like Ardbeg for combining the peatiness of Laphroaig and other Islay malts with the smoothness of a blend.

Comics roundup: Sikoryak, xkcd, ARBBH

Item: BoingBoing pointed to an R Sikoryak adaptation of Crime and Punishment a la a Dick Sprang Batman comic book. In turn, the Again with the Comics blog post that reprinted the adaption linked to the Masterpiece Comics on R Sikoryak’s site, including a tiny reproduction of my favorite comics adaptation of a literary masterpiece: “Good Ol’ Gregor Brown.” One morning Charlie Brown awoke to find himself transformed into an enormous insect… I actually own that issue of Raw and shared the strip with my English professor in a class on modernity where we were reading the original “Metamorphosis.” Good stuff.

Item: Wired’s profile of xkcd creator Randall Munroe contains exactly one item about Munroe that hasn’t already been linked on BoingBoing: that he used to be a roboticist for NASA.

Item: So Penny and Aggie has been hawking free downloadable reprints in PDF form for a while now. I checked them out, and I was pretty impressed—Wowio’s a nice service and the quality is good, even if it limits you to three downloads per day. But it got me thinking: how much money is in the business model? And who else is on the service? So I started poking around, and all these indie comic books that I remember from when I was in middle school are in there. Like, stuff that was trying to cash in on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, before TMNT was a movie or even a TV show. Like Dragon (terrible, and terribly I owned the first few issues of it!). And, of course, like Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters. And there’s better stuff too: Steve Canyon, Flash Gordon, the Star Trek Key Comics from the late 1960s; and more. Of course they also do ebooks; I just added Civil Disobedience to my queue.

RIP Joe Ferrante

The Old House My House blog on the This Old House site broke the news of lead tile contractor Joe Ferrante’s death. Obviously any death from heart failure is tragic, but this one hits me for a variety of reasons. The tile work always seemed to me to be closest to a black art of any of the trades on the show, and I always enjoyed watching Joe demystify the work while still making clear how much effort and intelligence was really needed to do it right. My heart goes out to his family and the TOH crew.

Rag & Bone class of 1992-1993

Thinking about John reminded me to look up some of my other authors from the first three issues.

G$, author

My good college friend John “G-Money” McLaughlin has finally published his award winning novel, Run in the Fam’ly, and it’s available for purchase. I’ll be stopping by the Harvard Bookstore to pick up my copy.

I wish I could say that I published him first, in Rag & Bone, a long time ago. But John was my fiction editor at the magazine, and we had a rule (after a fairly disastrous first issue) that we didn’t sh*t where we eat—in other words, there would be no submissions from editors published in the magazine.

Surviving the Billy Goat Trail

billy goat trail

As mentioned last week, I survived a hike down the Billy Goat Trail (not a surprise given the difficulty of the trail, which was moderate, but more given my general state of fitness).

It was a great hike, made better by the brisk fall air. My calves were really sore by the end thanks to the rocky terrain—even in the “flat” sections, we were walking on the edges of boulders. But there were also points of concern, primarily with the very low level of the river. If there was any question that water is a universal concern this fall, they were erased by my stroll up the Potomac that Saturday morning.

The group as a whole was much more fit than myself, including Jim’s high school friend John Hollinger. (Of Jim’s fitness no doubt is possible.)

I also got a lot of good photos at Jim’s wedding party itself. And by “good” I mean: everyone was presentable, only a few were blurred beyond recognition, and you can’t really tell how much fun we were actually having.

NBC “download” “service” “launches”

Thanks to Pete Cashmore from Mashable, who alerts me to the “launch” of NBC’s “download” “service.” The “service” will “allow” “you” to “download” and “watch” NBC’s “content.”

Okay, enough sarcasm. Let’s expand a few of the quotes:

  • Launch: Don’t call it a launch if you only serve customers with an out of date browser (Internet Explorer), require the download of the .NET Framework, won’t run on Firefox, and can’t operate with a Mac.
  • Download: Why bother calling it a download? Once I’ve gone through all the hoops, I can’t copy the file to a portable player, including (especially) an iPod.
  • Service: A big BROWSER NOT COMPATIBLE banner is not service-oriented.
  • Allow: How very gracious of NBC to put up download content with so much barbed wire around it. How can they possibly imagine that this will draw a larger audience than iTunes did?
  • You: Who is the target customer for this? Even if my mother-in-law used a PC (she’s on a Mac), I don’t think she’d be cool with downloading a 170+ MB OS component to watch content that she can see in reruns later anyway.
  • Watch: Watch while you can. The downloads are timebombed and can only be viewed for seven days.
  • Content: Where is the killer show that will compel me to put up with all this nonsense? And why if you’re going to timebomb the content do you bother embedding unskippable ads?

Wake me up when NBC decides to stop hating on its customers.

ComScore on Radiohead: the unreliability of panels

Interesting debate going on between ComScore and Radiohead regarding the Comscore report that alleges that 62% of worldwide Radiohead downloaders paid nothing.

My thought: this is where selection bias potentially becomes a real problem for Comscore.

Comscore gets their metrics from a panel of Internet users who are recruited with a package of incentives—in the past, it was browsing acceleration and download monitoring. The user’s traffic is passed through a Comscore proxy server, monitored, and warehoused. Traffic is anonymized but indexed against demographic variables.

So the issue of how the data is collected is pretty unremarkable. If Comscore sees a transaction, it really happened. The larger question is: do people who volunteer to have their traffic sniffed represent the whole Internet? It seems pretty clear to me that they don’t, and in fact Comscore regularly adjusts the metrics they report from the panel to account for overall demographics (percentage of women, percentage of users from different geographic areas). But you can’t a priori adjust the numbers based on a worldwide count of Radiohead fans, or Radiohead fans who are comfortable downloading music. And that’s where I think there is a potential problem with the numbers. Comscore’s Andrew Lipsman says that their sample, 1000 people of whom several hundred downloaded the data, is representative. I say that’s true only if there was no selection bias in the sample to begin with, and Comscore hasn’t proven that.

Reported problems with Tiger on 800 MHz iMacs

Forget the hack that I posted earlier. A quick review of various threads about Tiger on the 800MHz iMac seems to indicate that the video card in that model has problems keeping up with demand, and that iChat in particular may have some real problems in the upgraded system. Since iChat is the main reason that my inlaws use their Mac (along with Mail), I think we’ll hold off.

Details: MacOSXHints on experiences with hacked Tiger installs; sleep problems; sleep problems 2.

Return of the Knee Plays

The Blogcritics new release roundup for yesterday reports that David Byrne’s Knee Plays recording has finally been released on CD (though not, surprisingly, on MP3 or iTunes). I found an LP copy of the album a few years back and fell in love with the music. With eight extra tracks, and with the Dixieland brass meets spacey spoken word vibe of the original now in pristine digital sound, this is going to be a pretty good release to check out.

My favorite track on the release is probably “In the Future,” the original album closer:

In the future everyone will have the same haircut and the same clothes.
In the future everyone will be very fat from the starchy diet.
In the future everyone will be very thin from not having enough to eat.
In the future it will be next to impossible to tell girls from boys, even in bed.
In the future men will be ‘super masculine’ and women will be ‘ultra-feminine’.
In the future half of us will be ‘mentally ill’.
In the future there will be no religion or spirtualism of any sort.
In the future the ‘psychic arts’ will be put to practical use.
In the future we will not think that ‘nature’ is beautiful.
In the future the weather will always be the same.
In the future no one will fight with anyone else.
In the future there will be an atomic war.
In the future water will be expensive.
In the future all material items will be free.
In the future everyone’s house will be like a little fortress.
In the future everyone’s house will be a total entertainment center.

And that’s just the beginning. It’s fun to listen to the track and check off the items that have come true, 22 years later: starchy diet, starvation, mental illness, water crisis, home security, entertainment center… of course, Byrne cleverly hedges his bets by including diametrically opposed predictions throughout, so it’s easy to point to all the things he got right, and ignore the ones that were misses.

Synchronicity II: HDI ITIM and Blogworld collide in Vegas

As always, I’m out in Las Vegas representing iET Solutions at the IT Infrastructure Management (HDI ITIM) conference. But this year, the timing is fortuitous, since not only ITIM but the Blog World Expo are in Vegas at exactly the same time. Looks like the last day of ITIM is the first day of the Blogworld conference, featuring back to back panels moderated by Blogcritics founder and publisher Eric Olsen.

Not only that, but Tony Pierce will be on the afternoon panel. Now that’s a cool conference.

I’ll be working the show floor at ITIM during the day, but maybe I can catch up with any Blogcritics or other bloggers who are in town for Blogworld. If you’re interested, drop me a line.

Like a well-oiled machine

I have been flying regularly—at least once or twice a month—since I took this job in early 2005. I have my security regimen down to reflex: on the way out of my car, my keys are already clipped inside my briefcase, my wallet is in my hand and I am tucking my parking pass inside and my license in my shirt pocket; by the time I am in reach of a bin in the security line, my laptop and one-quart bag are out and my jacket and shoes are off. I scoff at those occasional travelers who slow the line.

Well, I got my comeuppance. I waited about 20 minutes to show my boarding pass and photo ID to the bored worker at the head of the line so I could get in the stationary line to go through screening. He took a look at my boarding pass and said, “This is a JetBlue pass. This is the United line. Go back up the ramp and to the other side of the terminal.”

Thankfully, I left plenty of time this morning. But what a blow. My perfect system: busted.