I'm spouting
Recently online is a new podcast interview with me from a Podcast called "Get Yourself Optimized"
We went over a lot of different topics that are interesting:
I recently did an episode of the Breaking Banks/Futurist Podcast. We go over many topics, and I hope you will like it all, but in particular I delve into two topics I have yet to complete my writings on. The first is my model of the great tribal war between the Keens (future-loving, more secular, liberal) and the Stewards (Past defending, less secular) which the Keens will win but are being dicks about.
I've ranted a few times about the flood of customer satisfaction surveys we get. It seems you can't buy a tube of toothpaste without being pushed to fill out a survey on it.
As a customer, the pricing plans of the car rental companies baffle me. I mean I understand about the goals for differential pricing -- finding ways to charge richer customers more money -- but still, I find it very frustrating, and I am curious why one of the majors doesn't have the courage to break out of the current pricing models and win over customers.
I'm sure, like me, you have lots of electronic gadgets that have status LEDs on them. Some of these just show the thing is on, some blink when it's doing things. Of late, as blue LEDs have gotten cheap, it has been very common to put disturbingly bright blue LEDs on items.
Five years ago, I posted a rant about the excess of customer service surveys we're all being exposed to. You can't do any transaction these days, it seems, without being asked to do a survey on how you liked it. We get so many surveys that we now just reject these requests unless we have some particular problem we want to complain about -- in other words, we're back to what we had with self-selected complaints.
For some time, the US Postal Service has allowed people to generate barcoded postage. You can do that on the expensive forms of mail such as priority mail and express mail, but if you want to do it on ordinary mail, like 1st class mail or parcel post, you need an account with a postage meter style provider, and these accounts typically include a monthly charge of $10/month or more. For an office, that's no big deal, and cheaper than the postage meters that most offices used to buy -- and the pricing model is based on them to some extent, even though now there is no hardware needed.
Two recent flight booking experiences on United Airlines:
a) I booked a round trip to Toronto with miles. Due to new plans, I ended up getting a different flight to Toronto but wanted to take the same flight back. I had booked return tickets for 2 passengers, but you can book one-way tickets for the same miles price, and you can book passengers together or independently (later joining the reservations to sit together.) It doesn't cost any more to get 4 single legs, it's just a lot more work for you and the airline.
Frequently these days I will see some shocking statistic reported:
Like many, I go to a lot of conferences and events. And many of those events have decided that they should give everybody a bag. Most commonly it's a canvas laptop sized bag, though sometimes it's a backpack and at cheaper events just a tote. Some of the bags are cheap, some are quite nice. Some come with just the logo of the event on them, and others come festooned with many logos from sponsors who bought a space on the bag.
As many expected would happen, Mark Zuckerberg did an op-ed column with a mild about face on Facebook's privacy changes. Coming soon, you will be able to opt out of having your basic information defined as "public" and exposed to outside web sites. Facebook has a long pattern of introducing a new feature with major privacy issues, being surprised by a storm of protest, and then offering a fix which helps somewhat, but often leaves things more exposed than they were before.
For a long time, the standard "solution" to privacy exposure problems has been to allow users to "opt out" and keep their data more private. Companies like to offer it, because the reality is that most people have never been exposed to a bad privacy invasion, and don't bother to opt out. Privacy advocates ask for it because compared to the alternative -- information exposure with no way around it -- it seems like a win. The companies get what they want and keep the privacy crowd from getting too upset.
Sometimes privacy advocates will say that disclosure should be "opt in" -- that systems should keep information private by default, and only let it out with the explicit approval of the user. Companies resist that for the same reason they like opt-out. Most people are lazy and stick with the defaults. They fear if they make something opt-in, they might as well not make it, unless they can make it so important that everybody will opt in. As indeed is the case with their service as a whole.
Neither option seems to work. If there were some way to have an actual negotiation between the users and a service, something better in the middle would be found. But we have no way to make that negotiation happen. Even if companies were willing to have negotiation of their "I Agree" click contracts, there is no way they would have the time to do it.
On a recent trip on a plane equipped with personal inflight video screens for each seat, I decided to watch a movie quickly and then have a nap. So I started watching the movie right after settling into the seat, about 20 minutes before takeoff. I figured with that I would watch the 1:30 minute movie through the meal service and be ready for the nap about an hour into the flight. What I learned instead was a greater awareness of just how many announcements there are on a typical flight these days. That's because the in-flight system paused the video with each announcement and put it through my noise cancelling headphones.
The many announcements included:
The cacophony is getting worse, almost as bad as when you're sitting in the terminal with the endless announcements. They know people hate that in the terminals and offer the paid lounge with no announcements, but I've said they should just use cell phones instead and give us peace. On Japanese Shinkansen, they also offer a "quiet car" with no announcements -- it is up to you to set your own alarm to make sure you don't miss your stop if you want to sleep or relax. The trains are so on-time you can do this.
How about doing something like this, at least on a modern airplane where you have a personal screen for each seat?
It seems that with more and more of the online transactions I engage in -- and sometimes even when I don't buy anything -- I will get a request to participate in a customer satisfaction survey. Not just some of the time in some cases, but with every purchase. I'm also seeing it on web sites -- sometimes just for visiting a web site I will get a request to do a survey, either while reading, or upon clicking on a link away from the site.
Yes, any system which is going to engage in some long activity which will freeze up the system for more than a few seconds should offer a way to cancel, abort or undo it. You would think designers would know that by now.
The news of the past few days has been full of anger that AIG is paying $165 million in bonuses out to managers who drove the company into insolvency, using federal bailout money to do it. The excuse -- these bonuses were guaranteed in contracts.
There are many opinions about whether the bailout and stimulus package are a good idea or not. But one thing that I hope everybody agrees is bad is that it teaches the lesson that if you screw up so badly that you hurt the global economy, we're not going to let you fall. Take huge risks because in the event of catastrophe, the government has no choice but to make it better.
Is there a way to do a bailout that doesn't end up rewarding, or even saving, the people responsible?
It seems that half the programs I try and install under Windows want to have a "daemon" process with them, which is to say a portion of the program that is always running and which gets a little task-tray icon from which it can be controlled. Usually they want to also be run at boot time. In Windows parlance this is called a service.
Most programs that ask for a password will put in a delay if you get it wrong. They do this to stop password crackers from quickly trying lots of passwords. The delay makes brute force attacks impossible, in theory.
I may be on the extreme, but I use hundreds of different E-mail addresses. Since I have whole domains where every address forwards to me (or to my spam filters) I actually have an uncountable number of addresses, but I also have a very large number of real ones I use. That's because I generate a new address for every web site I enter an E-mail address on. It lets me know who sells or loses my address, and lets me cut off or add filtering to mail from any party. (By the way, most companies are very good, and really don't sell your E-mail.)