All posts by jasonian

Hands-free cell-phones

If you live in California, you’ve been slammed over the head with ad after ad reminding you that July 1 starts the new “hands-free cell-phones while driving” law. And if you’re like many Californians, you’re running out to Radio Shack or Best Buy to pick up your Bluetooth headset today, instead of sometime in the last six months since you first heard it was coming.

Will I be joining the mad rush? In a word, no.

I already have more Bluetooth headsets than I could possibly need, and none of them are perfect. You can see three my five headsets below (clockwise from left): the Aliph Jawbone, Plantronics Voyager 510 and the Motorola H700. Not shown are the Apple iPhone headset and Cardo Scala 700.

Three of my five Bluetooth headsets

Each of these has neat features and fatal flaws. The Jawbone has solid audio quality. I was easily heard on the other end while driving on the freeway with my windows down. It didn’t fit my ear very well, though, despite coming with a couple of different ear-hooks and in-ear pieces, and was hard to get on quickly (an important feature if you rather not look like a dork—ok, dorkier—all day). It’s also chunkier in person than I expected. Perhaps the new Jawbone II, which is half as thick, is better.

I like almost everything about the Plantronics Voyager 510: it fits well, I can get it on and off easily, and the sound quality was decent. Unfortunately, more than any other device, when wearing it I feel like I’ve been assimilated. 

The best thing about the H700 is its size. I just couldn’t get the darn thing to stay in place, though: it felt loose on my ear.

I love just about everything about the Apple headset: it’s thin, it fits in my ear well, it syncs with iPhone automatically (well, it’s supposed to; mine failed to do that and needed to be returned), and it doesn’t have a flashing light on it. The bad part: the sound quality was poor and the reception was weak: holding the phone in my left hand instead of my right was enough to lose the connection to the headset. “Up to 33 feet” really hinges on the “up to” part.

Finally, the Cardo Scala. As I wrote about the Scala before:

The best of the (many) Bluetooth headsets I’ve tried. Fits comfortably, is lightweight and, best feature of all, it can switch between two [bluetooth devices] with a button press. It’ll probably continue being my primary headset when I get my iPhone.

It also has a buzzer built in so you can locate it when it’s been misplaced. I’d still be using the Scala today, if it hadn’t broken apart on me. Just split in half, shamelessly exposing its circuit board to the world. I don’t remember sitting on it or anything.

Cardo S-640I may pick up another Scala, I liked it so much (maybe it’s a bit sturdier now). I may also pick up a Cardo S-640, which is not your typical bluetooth headset. It’s a semi-wired headset, with a clip-on microphone wired to an earpiece. It looks more like a lavalier microphone. I like the idea of this because the headset will be easy to get in my ear and the microphone easily clipped to my shirt.

In the mean time though, I’ll be using the headset that came with my iPhone: those white buds with the integrated microphone. It works, it fits, and it doesn’t require recharging.

Oh yeah, and it’s free.

DWP (Driving With Pizza)

K’s story about her run-in with the law reminded me of my own.

About two years ago, my buddy Ron and I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. Ron had gotten our company to sponsor a bunch of us from work, and bought several boxes of pizza for all the volunteers. By the end of the day, there were a lot of half-empty boxes, so Ron decided to take them home.

So we plop into the car for the drive home, me with my baseball cap turned backwards, Ron, many boxes of pizza on his lap. As we’re approaching our exit on the freeway, I notice a cop car behind us. My immediate thought was “I bet you he’s going to exit with us” and, sure enough, he does.

But then, he pulls ahead of us several cars and I think, hey, it was just a coincidence, no ulterior motives.

We turn onto Ron’s block and park, Ron is getting out and I notice, hey, there are flashing lights behind us. Ron looks back, his hands filled with pizza boxes and asks, somewhat incredulously, “did he just pull us over?”

Yep. He sure did.

The cop gets out of his car, strolls over to us and asks for license and registration, which I hand over. A well-trained question crosses my lips.

“What seems to be the problem, Officer?”

His explanation will go down in the annals of justification: “I noticed your front license plate was missing.”

“I know. Is that a problem?”

“There are people who steal the front license plates from cars, and put them onto similar vehicles. If you do a plate check, it seems to match.”

“So you wanted to warn me that my front plate was missing, in case it had been stolen and used on another stolen car?”

“That’s correct.”

“Well, I only have the one,” I lied with a smile, knowing full well the second one was on the back.

“Sometimes they come stuck together from the DMV, and you end up with both on the back.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that. I’ll have to check that when I get home!”

At some point during this conversation, I’d gotten out the car and was standing with Ron. I don’t remember why, but somewhere in here I felt compelled to explain to the cop, in my best “I’m your worst nightmare: an educated black man” voice, that we’d just come from volunteering at Habitat for Humanity, that we’d bought a dozen pizzas for the crew and were taking the rest home.

I thanked him for his concern and assured him that my front license plate hadn’t been stolen, and that I’d be sure to check my rear plate for a second one stuck to the first. I asked if there’s anything else we can do for him, and bade him farewell, and watched as he returned to his vehicle and pulled away.

There we were, two intelligent, well-paid, well-spoken black men, in somewhat shabby clothes and several boxes of pizza, pulled over by a cop because my front license plate was missing.

If only we didn’t have those pizzas.

George Carlin, Euphemisms for Death

George CarlinGeorge Carlin died this weekend.

If you know me, it probably doesn’t surprise you to learn that George Carlin was a major influence on me. His acerbic and well-crafted wit, faculty with words and staunch outsider stance proved irresistible to a reserved, introverted foreigner just finding his way in the world.

One of my favorite bits is “Euphemisms”. It’s Carlin at his verbal, thoughtful and politically (in-) correct best. He describes the “softening” of the American english language, going from “shell shock” to “battle fatigue” to “operational exhaustion” to “post-traumatic stress disorder”, all describing the same condition.

This language softening is still going on today. “Used cars” became, as Carlin noted, “previously owned transportation” and are now “certified pre-owned vehicles” (“one less syllable, but we gained a hyphen!” he might proclaim). And our soldiers in Iraq aren’t being killed by “bombs” set by “terrorists”, they’re being killed by “improvised explosive devices” used by “insurgents”. 

You owe it to yourself to watch the YouTube video of “Euphemisms”.

This bit also contains some of his best-known observations, things I’ve heard myself repeat many times, like

Contra killers are called “freedom fighters”. Well if “crime fighters” fight crime and “firefighters” fight fires, what do “freedom fighters” fight?

or, the one that springs to mind every single time I fly:

Like on the airlines they say they want to “pre-board”? Well what the hell does “pre-board”… what does that mean? To get on before you get on?

“Euphemisms” comes at the end of Carlin’s “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics”. It’s totally worth the $10 at iTunes or Amazon.com. (I currently have five of his albums1, and they’re all worth it.)

Of course, not everything Carlin did was beautifully offensive, some of it was just well-crafted humor where the punch line is never obvious, but always satisfying, like his “Good ideas” piece, where he suggests, among other things, “a diet salad dressing called 500 islands”. As he says about himself in that bit, “I’m a visionary, I’m ahead of my time. Trouble is I’m only about an hour and a half ahead.”

Jerry Seinfeld wrote an article for the New York Times about Carlin’s death (he didn’t “pass away, or expire, like a magazine subscription”), and gave a perfect description of why I love Carlin:

He worked over an idea like a diamond cutter with facets and angles and refractions of light…. everything he did just had this gleaming wonderful precision and originality.

As a kid it seemed like the whole world was funny because of George Carlin. His performing voice, even laced with profanity, always sounded as if he were trying to amuse a child. It was like the naughtiest, most fun grown-up you ever met was reading you a bedtime story.

Thank you George Carlin, for making me laugh and think, and aspire to precision, originality and naughtiness.

 

  1. Back in Town; The Little David Years: 1971-1977 (a 7 disc retrospective including his classic albums FM & AM, Class Clown, Occupation: Foole, Toledo, An Evening with Wally Londo, On the Road, and a bonus disc; Napalm And Silly Putty (his audiobook); A Place For My Stuff; and of course Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics. I suppose that’s technically eleven albums.  ↩

Apple and Amazon get customer service

You know, we seldom write about our good experiences with companies, only the shitty ones. Whether it’s stupid “security” questions or being unwillingly opted-in to a mailing list, we read and write about the bad things a company does.

I’d like to switch things up today.

I had two great customer service experiences, with Apple and Amazon:

Apple

I lost a hard drive in my MacBook, as I wrote about recently. But I’ve also been having trouble with the MacBook itself.  I bought it just a month or so after it was released because my previous PowerBook 12″ died suddenly one day and I desperately needed a replacement.

The MacBook’s had just about every problem that has been reported: the screen flickered incessantly, the left side of the case was loose and the front right edge broke off, the battery stopped holding a charge leading to sudden shutdowns, and, of course, the drive died. Since I had the extended AppleCare warranty, it was all fixed at no charge, only to have the screen start flickering again and a second drive die.

I took it into a Genius Bar one evening recently to complain bitterly. I described my issues while the Genius listened patiently. When I finished, and I asked my options, the Genius did something remarkable:

He agreed things sucked and offered a brand-new MacBook.

So shocked was I by this offer, that I could only stand there, slack-jawed, and mutter “uh, OK”. Although I was secretly hoping to get a new MacBook after all those things went wrong, I expected I’d have to fight for it. I never even got the chance.

To top it off, the replacement is significantly better than the original:

  Original Replacement
Processor 2 GHz Core Duo 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo
L2 Cache 2 MB 3 MB
System Bus 667 MHz 800 MHz
Hard Drive 80 GB 5400 RPM 250 GB 5400 RPM
Graphics chip GMA 950 w/64MB shared memory GMA X3100 w/144 MB shared memory
Wireless 802.11g 802.11n

I should have gone in sooner, before I lost eight weeks of data. (And, with 802.11n on-board, I can finally buy a Time Capsule.)

Amazon

In May I bought Sex and The City (The Complete Series) for The Girl’s birthday. By some strange quirk, she never got around to watching any of the DVDs until this weekend, when she plucked a disc at random from the set and started watching through. After the third (or fourth, or was it fifth?) episode, the disc started to skip.

It was scratched, and pretty badly too.

We looked through the entire set, and of the 20 discs, 14 had scratches, ranging from minor to significant. Plus, two of the five discs in Season 6 were a completely different shade of pink from the other three.

I immediately emailed Amazon.

Ten hours later, they responded back:

I’m sorry for the problem you experienced with this shipment.

I’ve placed a new order for the item at no charge. 

And then they topped it by sending it out via one-day shipping. I sent the email on a Saturday night about 10 pm, and on Monday evening I had a new set, no questions asked, no “you already opened it”, no “how scratched are they”. Just “we’re sorry, here’s a new one”.

(I do need to ship the damaged ones back, of course.)

Amazon and Apple aren’t perfect, but they make up for their imperfections by providing the best customer service in their industries. An article in the New York Times earlier this year reflected on Amazon’s devotion to customer service. The author closed with a quote:

[Amazon CEO] Jeff [Bezos] used to say that if you did something good for one customer, they would tell 100 customers.

Customer service works again.

One hundred thousand miles

Six years ago, I didn’t have a driver’s license. Today, I hit 100,000 miles on my Nissan Altima.100,000 miles on my 2003 Nissan Altima

My friends in New York are probably thinking “you drove 100,000 miles? Where the hell did you go?!”

My friends in California are probably thinking “you didn’t have a license six years ago? How the hell did you get around?!”

What I find interesting about this milestone is how quickly it came. I bought my Altima in November, 2002. Two years later, I’d put on 30,000 miles (I complained about the cost of maintenance at the time). A linear progression should have me around 80K today.

Where do those additional 300-miles-a-month-on-average come from? Probably from my habit of weekend driving, where I hop in the car with Ying, and drive somewhere “interesting” (which might mean Danville as easily as Napa).

And considering I lived a dozen miles or less from work for 4 1/2 of those 5 1/2 years, that means I drove about a thousand miles a month that aren’t work related.

Six years ago, I could never have imagined driving that much. Now I can’t imagine not driving.

Sigh. I’ve become a suburbanite.

(In case you’re wondering how I managed to snap a photo at 100,000 miles, I went out with about 50 miles remaining, and drove 25 miles, and turned around. No way was I missing this milestone.)

 

How to lose your data in 20 easy minutes

Losing data from your hard drive is easier than you think. You can delete it, run a magnet over it, drop it from great heights or just have a bad drive from a manufacturer that won’t admit a problem.

Here’s how I lost eight weeks of un-backed up data in about 20 minutes:

1. Start a MacBook, with a Seagate drive with firmware 7.01

2. Ensure  your MacBook’s sleep indicator light is busted, so you can’t tell when your system is safely asleep

3. Work late one night, and be in a hurry to get home

4. Close your MacBook, wait about 15, 20 seconds, and slip it into your bag.

5. Toss it into your car’s trunk

6. Drive home, about twenty minutes away

7. Open MacBook, notice it’s not sleeping, in fact it’s shut down

8. Power it up, get flashing question mark folder, and a whining drive.

Sigh. Dead drive, lost data.

When you close the MacBook, it writes out its memory to the drive. After it does that, it goes to sleep and flashes the sleep indicator. At this point, and not before, it’s safe to move the MacBook. What I think happened:

Since my sleep indicator was busted, I learned to either squeeze the case to try activating the light or, when that stopped working, waiting until the fans went quiet (about 30 to 45 seconds on average). That fateful evening, I must have not waited long enough, and the system was still awake when I slipped it into my bag, tossed it into my car, and drove home with it bouncing around in my trunk.

Add to that the apparent problems the Seagate firmware 7.01 drives seem to have and, well, dead drive.

Oh, I got a price quotes from two data recovery services. DriveSavers offered $500-$2,700, with an expected price closer to $2,000. Burgess Forensics offered $700-$1,750. I’ll be getting a quote from Seagate also. (I think it’s ironic that the drive manufacturer offers drive recovery services.)

This is the second Seagate firmware 7.01 drive I’ve lost. The first one was several months ago, when I first heard about these problems with this firmware. Being the paranoid type, I started backing up regularly, and sure enough, just a few days after a complete drive backup, the drive died.

Apple disclaims responsibility for data loss, and Seagate hasn’t shared its policy yet (their response to my inquiry was “we can try to recover your data” not “we know this is an issue and we’ll try to recover your data for free“).

I’m still deciding if I should go into debt to recover the data. While there is no single set of data that’s worth $1,800, I lost eight weeks of iChats, blog drafts, OmniFocus entries, music, photos, and, worst of all, the data I don’t even remember I had and lost.

If I knew what I lost, it would be easier. Not knowing makes it much, much harder.

I regret not paying better attention to my backup regime. Six years ago I wrote

[Y]ou might pay as much as $8,000 to get your data back. Far cheaper is a reliable backup. Start by deciding how much work you’re willing to re-create after a data loss, and back up at least that often (I backup twice a day). You don’t have to get elaborate; even copying to a CD-ROM or another hard drive manually will suffice in a pinch.

I take responsibility for not backing up as regularly as I used to. I plan to rectify that by adding a Time Capsule to my network. How protected is your valuable data?   

Security Through Stupidity, Part Four

Among other places, I host some of my domains with Hostcentric. I’ve been with them for, oh, six or seven years, and have had almost no problems (and those I have get resolved quickly). I wrote in for a technical incident for the first time in years and in responding to it, the support agent wrote:

I also noticed that you haven’t set the security question for your account.

[…]

Once you have set the security question for your account, you need to answer the question, when the question is asked by the Support Agents. If the answer provided by you is matches with records on the file, you will be authenticated as the owner of the account.

Here we go again.

hostcentric security questionsI consider these security questions to be an invasion of privacy, open me up to identity theft, and aren’t worthwhile for providing security, so I’ve generally chosen not to answer them. At the very least, it would be much better if I could choose my question and my answer rather than be limited to a set of questions that may lead to problems (or be unanswerable).

In particular, “mother’s maiden name” and “city you were born in” can be used outside Hostcentric for identity theft, while the “name of my high school” is a well-known piece of information for many who know me and therefore not really “secure”.

And of course, “pet’s name” is worthless if you don’t have a pet or have more than one. Beyond that, it’s only useful for security if no one ever hears you call out to your cat.

Kettle brand Death Valley ChipotleLikewise, “favorite food” is pretty damn worthless as the answer can change over time. Right now, I’m a big fan of Kettle brand Death Valley Chipotle chips.

I appreciate the desire to improve security, even though these questions are merely an illusion of security: they make everyone feel like “something’s being done”.

In case you’re thinking I’m nuts, I’ve lodged this complaint against all online services that ask for these answers, including Washington Mutual, Bank of America, INGDirect, and several others. Hostcentric is just one of many companies trying to be more secure without actually being more secure.

Is MovieTickets.com anti-abortion?

On the MovieTickets.com “Link to Us” page, where they set the terms for who can link to them (seriously), among the terms is the following:

Any individual that wishes to [show the MovieTicket.com logo and link to the site] represents and warrants that the website in which the MovieTickets.com creative resides does not and will not include any advertisements or other material regarding or containing (i) cigarettes, (ii) hard liquor, (iii) massage parlors, (iv) abortion clinics, (v) firearms and ammunition, (vi) head shops, (vii) illegal (under federal, state, local, and foreign laws) lotteries, (viii) gambling (other than legal lotteries under federal, state, local, and foreign laws), (ix) sexually explicit content, or (x) content that denigrates a particular group based on gender, race, creed, religion, sexual preference or handicap. In addition, sites that are anti-Hollywood or anti-movies in general, sites that are owned or operated by a movie studio, sites offering Internet movie ticketing, and sites with copyrighted materials distributed in violation of copyright are prohibited from posting MovieTickets.com creative. (Emphasis mine.)

Most of those limitations make sense: they want to associate themselves with family-friendly sites. But including abortion clinics takes the definition of “family-friendly” to an unhealthy extreme, don’t you think?

An email is on its way to the PR folks over at MovieTickets.com. I’d like to see their reasons for including abortion clinics.

Of course, this brings up the whole idea of trying to control how and who can link to your site (they allow you to link only to one specific page of their site). It’s against the very nature—and shows a fundamental misunderstanding—of the Internet. Anyone should be able to link to any page of a website without worry and trying to prevent that is fruitless.

And since MovieTickets.com doesn’t appear to do anything technically (like using http rewrites) to enforce these terms, and it’s mentioned only on one page that’s linked from the bottom of their site in small type, they certainly can’t be that serious.

Let’s see what they say.

iTunes Plus DRM-free music price drop, still can’t upgrade individual songs

Less than a year ago iTunes announced iTunes Plus, higher quality songs for $1.29 instead of the regular $0.99. I loved the idea of better sounding music, but I was ticked off that I couldn’t upgrade individual songs for the incremental cost ($0.30 per song). Instead I’d have to upgrade my entire library at once: not an inexpensive proposition.

Now iTunes is selling those iTunes Plus songs at the same price as regular songs. It’s great: I’d much rather buy DRM-free songs, and I’d certainly rather not pay a premium to do so. Now, there’s no reason not to buy a DRM-free song if it’s available, and one less reason to search Amazon’s MP3 store for a song (although Amazon does still sell many songs for $0.89 each, also DRM-free).

Alas, I still can’t upgrade individual songs to DRM-free versions. I don’t mind paying something for the benefit of owning a DRM-free copy, but the additional $0.30 isn’t an understandable price. Before, it was the incremental cost: a regular song cost $0.99, the DRM-free version cost $1.29, you pay the difference.

Now there is no difference, yet I still have to pay $0.30 per song, and I have to do it on all of my songs. I might really like Here I Am (Come and Take Me) by UB40, but not enough to pay a third of the price again.

iTunes, please let me upgrade individual songs to DRM-free!

Property tax reduction “scam” making the rounds

My 2008-2009 assessed value notice for my property tax arrived recently. Each year for the last two years my home’s assessed value was increased 2% to keep up with inflation, even though my home’s actual value hasn’t increased the last couple of years (and in fact may have decreased a bit).

The new assessed value is about 9.5% less than my purchase price. This is a “temporarily reduced” value, about 13% less than what it “should” be. That should translate to a decent savings in my property tax bill this year.

This reduction was automatic. I didn’t have to do anything to get it; many California counties are reassessing tens of thousands of homes, for free.

So imagine my surprise when I got an official-looking brown envelope from “Property Tax Adjusters, Inc.” guaranteeing a reduction in my property tax, for a mere $125.

Besides the official-looking envelope, the letter itself has lots of jargon explaining why I got this letter and what they’ll do, along with my “Assessor Parcel Number”; this number is public information, but not everyone knows that, thus lending an air of authenticity.

The Santa Clara Office of the County Assessor, the folks who decide how much property taxes I pay, put out an “Assessor Consumer Alert” for a similar service by Aim Best Appraisals. The Assessor, Larry Stone, said in that alert:

It’s disgraceful, there’s simply no reason at all for a property owner to pay a fee to a private company for a service taxpayers receive from the Assessor’s Office without charge.

He went on to call ABA “bottom dwellers who are feeding upon the increased fears of homeowners.” Ouch.

The website for Property Tax Adjusters (I won’t link to them; search for their name; they use “prop” in their URL) is nothing more than a series of questions and answers, with no information on costs or the company. The address they give is in Oceanside, CA; Google Maps places them in a seemingly undeveloped-part of Southern California. Searching for their telephone number brings up a Better Business Bureau entry that shows the company started in August 2007 and joined the BBB in May 2008. You’ll also find a different address for them, in Carlsbad, CA, about a 15 minute drive from Oceanside.

Property Tax Adjusters is reportedly under investigation by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office:

Deputy District Attorney David Lim said services like those offered by Connection Plus Inc. of Foster City and San Diego County-based Property Tax Adjusters Inc. could be illegal. “At first blush, it looks like it may not be illegal, but we need to investigate if there’s a crime there. We don’t know what they’re doing once they meet with people.”

Lim was also quoted as saying:

You should definitely be wary of this, especially when you realize the county is doing it for free. They are not going to provide you with anything you already get, so why pay them?

I couldn’t have said it better myself.