Je pense, donc je suis un nerd

I saw this begin­ning to CBS’s sit­com ‘Big Bang The­ory’ the other evening and absolutely cracked up in a fit of self-recognition. I’ve been mess­ing around with X10 con­trollers and the Inter­net for years.

Yes, when­ever any­one asks me why, ‘Because I can’ was the answer I gave as well. I never did any of the radio-controlled car/webcam cre­ations, but that would be cool, too. Because I could.

Fireworks and Fiscal Ruin

This past Sat­ur­day we enjoyed the sec­ond night of the Fire­works com­pe­ti­tion from yet a new van­tage point, my friend and fel­low blog­ger MJ’s condo in Yale­town. With our view from the 30^th floor, it had to be the high­est ele­va­tion from which we’ve ever seen the show. (Pam and I have been lucky enough to have seen it from 4 dif­fer­ent loca­tions over the last 3 years). This year was marked by plenty of talk and munchies, as well as Tanya (NetChick) and I both try­ing to snap pic­tures of the plumes with our iPhones. Best of all, we man­aged to post them on Face­Book just about as fast as we snapped them. Nerd paradise.

The fire­works this evening of the com­pe­ti­tion the USA’s entry (last Wednes­day had been Canada’s). Nor­mally, the phrase ‘Amer­i­cans shoot­ing rock­ets over Vancouver’s Eng­lish Bay’ is not what any­one here wants to hear, but in this case, I guess it was OK.

Were We Rats Flee­ing a Sink­ing Ship?

While we’ve been observ­ing the third anniver­sary of hav­ing moved here, at the party, appro­pri­ately enough, I got to speak to an Amer­i­can cou­ple who had just made the move here. In fact, they had just arrived a week or so ago, roughly in the same state of con­fu­sion and excite­ment as we had in 2005 (MJ is help­ing them to find a per­ma­nent place to live). The main dif­fer­ences between them and us is that they are mov­ing from San Fran­cisco (vs. our Boston), and our tim­ing was, we all agreed, a lot bet­ter. In the last 3 years, the US Real Estate mar­ket, the US Stock Mar­ket and the US Dol­lar have all fallen markedly in value, leav­ing Pam and me in much bet­ter shape than the cou­ple who unfor­tu­nately didn’t have the nerve to move ear­lier. They even had a place picked out, and just didn’t move on it.

As we com­pared notes, the topic of why we left came up. While it was true that in 2005, we couldn’t stand the direc­tion the coun­try was going (and note that we felt that way before the Tor­ture, Ille­gal Wire­tap­ping and other scan­dals became pub­lic knowl­edge). Despite all that roman­tic stuff about vot­ing with your feet,  the most con­crete dis­as­ter that loomed on the hori­zon for us was the US Pub­lic Debt. Dur­ing the Clin­ton era (our 8-year night­mare of peace and pros­per­ity), the US Gov­ern­ment actu­ally ran a bud­get sur­plus, eras­ing the deficits cre­ated by the Reagan/Bush I years, open­ing up the pos­si­bil­ity of pay­ing down the National Debt. Then along came WPIUSH, and an all-too-brief period of fis­cal respon­si­bil­ity was quickly reversed. So, the real rea­son that we decided to leave the US was that we were con­cerned that the coun­try was going down the drain fiscally.

Yes, it’s easy to see where most of it went (the war in Iraq, for one thing, along with the tax cuts for the top 2% rich­est Amer­i­cans, as well as a mul­ti­tude of fund­ing and over­sight deba­cles, some that have yet to see the light of day). Today, the sit­u­a­tion isn’t get­ting any bet­ter. In fact, it’s get­ting even worse now than it was 14 years ago, when the Fed­eral Deficit (and Debt) first appeared on our radar, accord­ing to Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The Bush admin­is­tra­tion on Mon­day pro­jected the U.S. bud­get deficit will soar to a record of nearly half a tril­lion dol­lars in fis­cal 2009 as a housing-led eco­nomic slow­down cuts into gov­ern­ment revenues.

The eco­nomic and fis­cal dete­ri­o­ra­tion will com­pli­cate efforts to bring the bud­get to bal­ance and pose chal­lenges for who­ever takes over the White House in Jan­u­ary, either Repub­li­can Sen. John McCain or Demo­c­ra­tic Sen. Barack Obama.

“I believe who­ever becomes the next pres­i­dent will have a very, very sober­ing first week in office,” pre­dicted Sen­ate Bud­get Com­mit­tee Chair­man Kent Con­rad, a North Dakota Democrat.

React­ing to the White House’s new pre­dic­tion that the bud­get deficit will hit $482 bil­lion in the fis­cal year that starts Octo­ber 1, Con­rad said that num­ber eas­ily could rise by an addi­tional $80 bil­lion when the full costs of the Iraq war are tal­lied next year.

The econ­omy has been hob­bled by the hous­ing mar­ket col­lapse and soar­ing food and energy prices. In Feb­ru­ary, the Democratic-controlled Con­gress and Pres­i­dent George W. Bush approved a $168 bil­lion, two-year stim­u­lus plan to ward off recession.

With the slow­ing econ­omy and the cost of the eco­nomic stim­u­lus plan, the White House said it thinks the deficit will hit a record $482 bil­lion in fis­cal 2009. How­ever, it cut its fore­cast for the cur­rent fis­cal year to $389 billion.

Even if we ignore where the money went or is even going now, the prob­lem (the Debt) is still out there, like a tick­ing time bomb. Just as there were fore­clo­sures on bad mort­gage loans through­out the US, there will come a day when some­one has to come up with a way of pay­ing that debt. When will that day come? I’m not sure, but I can pretty much count on it being within the next 20 years, and the fur­ther out the US Gov­ern­ment can push it out, the bet­ter for who­ever is in power. Whether the Pres­i­dent in that era is Barack Obama, Chelsea Clin­ton or per­haps one of the Bush Twins, there will come a day when the US Debt reaches some sort of a break­ing point. What effect this will have is also hard to guess, but I can’t imag­ine a sce­nario where it will be a good thing. More than likely, the qual­ity of life in the US will suf­fer, as it has suf­fered dur­ing the past eight years. Peo­ple will work harder with less time for them­selves for less pay, and under poorer work­ing con­di­tions. Decent Med­ical care will be harder to get and also be more expen­sive (again), Aver­age Life Expectancy will get shorter (again), and daily life in gen­eral will get more bru­tal, vio­lent, unfair and unpleas­ant, par­tic­u­larly if you are not very rich. There’s a good pos­si­bil­ity that this event (call it a crash, a cor­rec­tion, a default, or what­ever you like) will come at a time when Pam and I might wish to be retired and liv­ing on a fixed income, per­haps includ­ing some sort of a Gov­ern­ment Pen­sion. You can bet that those will get hit. Rather than end up poor and liv­ing in a coun­try fil­ing for bank­ruptcy (or some­thing worse), we opted for a coun­try that looked to be more sol­vent in the com­ing 20 years, at least.

So, once again, if this lat­est news (which came as lit­tle sur­prise) my instincts about where we went, and when we went have remained on track. I hope my good sense (and per­haps luck) holds. After all, part of ‘good for­tune’ is being in the right place at the right time

Rogers About to Get Something they Didn't Want: Competition

I got a news-flash email from the CBC today (I’m no one spe­cial; I’ve signed up for alerts like this):

The fed­eral gov­ern­ment is $4.2 bil­lion richer with the con­clu­sion of the cell­phone spec­trum auc­tion on Mon­day, while cus­tomers stand to win as five new com­pa­nies are now well posi­tioned to launch ser­vices over the next few years. The wind­fall is con­sid­er­ably larger than the orig­i­nal $1.5 bil­lion many indus­try ana­lysts had pre­dicted before the auc­tion began on May 27.

I linked to the related story on the CBC web site, and 3 pas­sages caught my eye. (in all cases, bold and ital­ics are mine) First:

The big win­ner — and biggest spender — among poten­tial new entrants was Toronto-based Glob­alive Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc., which cur­rently sells home phone and inter­net ser­vice under the Yak brand. The com­pany has emerged from the auc­tion posi­tioned to launch a national cell­phone ser­vice with 30 licenses broadly dis­trib­uted across the country.

Sec­ond:

The new entrants are widely expected to build third-generation net­works based on global sys­tem for mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tions (GSM) tech­nol­ogy, which is what Rogers and its Fido sub­sidiary use, or its newer fourth-generation off­shoot, long-term evo­lu­tion (LTE).

and Third:

Iain Grant, pres­i­dent of the Seaboard Group telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions con­sul­tancy, said a national car­rier could be up and run­ning by Easter at a cost of $500 mil­lion, although other esti­mates say a launch could take a year or two. The trick­i­est part of start­ing up will be nego­ti­at­ing rights for trans­mis­sion sites, many of which will either be on top of tall build­ings or on tow­ers owned by Rogers, Bell and Telus.

So here we are, look­ing at a Spring of 2009 roll-out for at least one com­peti­tor to Rogers/Fido Wire­less, and did Rogers posi­tion them­selves well for such a sit­u­a­tion? In my hum­ble opin­ion, absolutely not. Any­one in Canada has seen this com­ing (any­one who was not in Rogers man­age­ment, that is). In the past years, months and weeks, Rogers has made so many Cana­dian con­sumers so angry that they can count on no cus­tomer loy­alty what­so­ever. Their brand may very well be dam­aged beyond repair. Any new cell­phone ven­dor who sup­ports a GSM 3G net­work will be able to grab a large pool of cus­tomers ready to switch imme­di­ately, or when their con­tract with Rogers is up (and you can bet that they’ll put that date on their calendar!)

How did Rogers screw this up so badly? The recent his­tory of Rogers, par­tic­u­larly with respect to pric­ing and mar­ket­ing tells some of the story. If you live in Canada and have had any deal­ings with Rogers, you’ll know much of this, so feel free to skip to the end…

First, over the past 3 or 4 years, Rogers charged some of the high­est data and call rates in the world. Then, in 2007, con­sumers and tech watch­ers crit­i­cized them for being slow to bring the iPhone to Canada after it was avail­able in the U.S. for a year.  In April of 2008, Rogers chief exec­u­tive Ted Rogers told investors the iPhone would arrive in Canada some time later in the year. In June, Rogers set the iPhone’s debut for July 11 (along with sev­eral other coun­tries through­out the world), but were quickly met with harsh crit­i­cism about the data pric­ing plan, which was per­haps the sec­ond high­est in the world (with Swe­den being the high­est) . Some high-profile tech per­son­al­i­ties in Canada went on tele­vi­sion to announce that they were going to jump ship (in some cases pay­ing a siz­able penalty). Only after thou­sands of cur­rent and prospec­tive cus­tomers signed online peti­tions protest­ing these rates,  encour­ag­ing Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs to put pres­sure on the com­pany, did Rogers relent with a drop of the high­est rate to a rea­son­able level ($30 per month with a usage limit of up to 6 GB per month), but this rate is avail­able only until the end of August. On the day of the roll-out, Rogers’ reg­istry net­works crashed simul­ta­ne­ously with Apple’s iTunes reg­is­ter­ing sys­tem after the new iPhone was unveiled. The Out­age lasted into the after­noon at some loca­tions and it wasn’t until the next week before some cus­tomers could acti­vate their phones. Rogers rep­re­sen­ta­tives said they expected record first-day sales, but declined to dis­close how many phones were shipped to stores or how many they had expected to sell. As I write this, Rogers (through­out Van­cou­ver, at least) is still sold out of the iPhone.

All in all it was a highly vis­i­ble fiasco. Rogers utterly botched the iPhone roll-out in just about every way it could be botched. They could have finally made many cur­rent cus­tomers happy with a new device and would be seen today as the sole provider of one of the most sought-after tech gad­gets. Instead, they gen­er­ated sev­eral days of bad PR, dis­played poor plan­ning, and missed immea­sur­able mar­ket­ing and sales oppor­tu­ni­ties. There have been numer­ous spec­u­la­tions that the rea­son they ran out stock is that Apple was so peeved at the high data rates that they actu­ally diverted iPhone ship­ments from Canada to more rea­son­able Euro­pean car­ri­ers. Whether or not this was true, Rogers’ lack of can­dor regard­ing avail­abil­ity, lack of under­stand­ing of the prod­uct, and com­plete screw-up of logis­tics and net­work vol­ume on the day of the roll-out is some­thing that will not fade quickly from the mem­ory of most Cana­di­ans (and prob­a­bly not by this com­ing Easter).

It will be inter­est­ing to see if the mass exo­dus from Rogers to what­ever new car­rier Glob­alive will fund will be as swift and mas­sive as I expect it will be. Rogers has run their busi­ness ‘like there’s no tomor­row’, but in the Spring of 2009, ‘tomor­row’ will arrive.

Gore Pulls a JFK

While I’ve been watch­ing what’s look­ing more and more like a melt-down in my for­mer coun­try, a speech from Al Gore got my atten­tion. At first, it sounded like a rerun of the typ­i­cal ‘Things are Get­ting Worse’ speech that makes up much of “An Incon­ve­nient Truth”. How­ever, after a sur­vey of the most recent dam­age wrought by global warm­ing (includ­ing the loss of the Polar Ice Caps, the melt­ing of the glac­i­ers in Green­land, etc.), he sud­denly changed tack. Gore pointed out that the three major chal­lenges fac­ing the US right now; a bad econ­omy, national secu­rity in peril, and nat­ural dis­as­ters brought on by the chang­ing cli­mate, are all a result of the reliance of the coun­try on carbon-based fuels.

We’re bor­row­ing from money from China to buy oil from the Per­sian Gulf in order to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.

To address this, he makes an ambi­tious state­ment, a call to Americans:

…I’m propos­ing today a strate­gic ini­tia­tive designed to free us from the crises that are hold­ing us down and to regain con­trol of our own des­tiny. It’s not the only thing we need to do. But this strate­gic chal­lenge is the lynch­pin of a bold new strat­egy needed to re-power America.

Today I chal­lenge our nation to com­mit to pro­duc­ing 100 per­cent of our elec­tric­ity from renew­able energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.

Why 10 years? It’s here that Gore first directly invokes Kennedy’s call for putting a man on the moon, which in my mem­ory, is the proud­est moment of the US in the twen­ti­eth century:

What should we do dur­ing the next 10 years? Some of our great­est accom­plish­ments as a nation have resulted from com­mit­ments to reach a goal that fell well beyond the next elec­tion: the Mar­shall Plan, Social Secu­rity, the inter­state high­way sys­tem. But a polit­i­cal promise to do some­thing 40 years from now is uni­ver­sally ignored because every­one knows that it’s mean­ing­less. Ten years is about the max­i­mum time that we as a nation can hold a steady aim and hit our target.

When Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy chal­lenged our nation to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, many peo­ple doubted we could accom­plish that goal. But 8 years and 2 months later, Neil Arm­strong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the sur­face of the moon.

I believe that the biggest applause came with Gore’s indict­ment of Bush’s pathetic calls for end­ing the mora­to­rium on off­shore oil drilling:

It is only a truly dys­func­tional sys­tem that would buy into the per­verse logic that the short-term answer to high gaso­line prices is drilling for more oil ten years from now.

Am I the only one who finds it strange that our gov­ern­ment so often adopts a so-called solu­tion that has absolutely noth­ing to do with the prob­lem it is sup­posed to address? When peo­ple rightly com­plain about higher gaso­line prices, we pro­pose to give more money to the oil com­pa­nies and pre­tend that they’re going to bring gaso­line prices down? It will do noth­ing of the sort, and every­one knows it.

I have to admit that it’s easy to soar over Bush’s ridicu­lous sug­ges­tion. The only peo­ple truly in favour of poten­tial oil slicks on the beaches of Cal­i­for­nia and Florida, as well as fur­ther igno­rance of the stu­pid­ity of burn­ing more fos­sil fuels in the face of mount­ing evi­dence (and ris­ing tem­per­a­tures, hur­ri­canes, wild­fires and the like) are either Oil Com­pany exec­u­tives or oth­ers who would ben­e­fit from more drilling (as well as the will­fully igno­rant, who will blindly fol­low Bush into obliv­ion rather than admit that the man he cheated out of the Pres­i­dency was ever right about anything).

To seal the deal, Gore once more refers to the space pro­gram in a final dra­matic finish:

On July 16, 1969, the United States of Amer­ica was finally ready to meet Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s chal­lenge of land­ing Amer­i­cans on the moon. I will never for­get stand­ing beside my father a few miles from the launch site, wait­ing for the giant Sat­urn 5 rocket to lift Apollo 11 into the sky. I was a young man, 21 years old, who had grad­u­ated from col­lege a month before and was enlist­ing in the United States Army three weeks later.

I will never for­get the inspi­ra­tion of those min­utes. The power and the vibra­tion of the giant rocket’s engines shook my entire body. As I watched the rocket rise, slowly at first and then with great speed, the sound was deaf­en­ing. We craned our necks to fol­low its path until we were look­ing straight up into the air. And then four days later, I watched along with hun­dreds of mil­lions of oth­ers around the world as Neil Arm­strong took one small step to the sur­face of the moon and changed the his­tory of the human race.

We must now lift our nation to reach another goal that will change his­tory. Our entire civ­i­liza­tion depends upon us now embark­ing on a new jour­ney of explo­ration and dis­cov­ery. Our suc­cess depends on our will­ing­ness as a peo­ple to under­take this jour­ney and to com­plete it within 10 years. Once again, we have an oppor­tu­nity to take a giant leap for humankind.

Here’s the whole speech, a lit­tle less than a half hour in length. It’s worth hear­ing, if noth­ing else but as a piece of history:

Will the US rise to take on Gore’s chal­lenge? Will they even pay atten­tion? I have to admit that I’m not that opti­mistic. In a way, the achieve­ment of Kennedy’s call for a man on the moon was a bit­ter­sweet vic­tory, since he had been assas­si­nated early on in the effort; it was, in ret­ro­spect, a memo­r­ial of sorts. I hope that this is not the only way that you can get past the bick­er­ing in the Exec­u­tive and Leg­isla­tive branches of Amer­i­can Government.

As for the pub­lic, it’s a very dif­fer­ent Elec­torate in 2008 than it was in 1961. The major­ity of Amer­i­cans were bet­ter edu­cated back then, and the goal of putting a man on the moon was eas­ier to grasp than 100% carbon-free elec­tric power is (I’d even go as far as say­ing that a fright­en­ingly large num­ber of Amer­i­cans don’t have a clue what ‘carbon-based’ means. They just plug some­thing in and don’t care how it works).

Let’s hope that Gore’s clar­ion call hasn’t fallen upon deaf ears.

iPhone Hysteria Hits Vancouver

Despite the protests here that Rogers is charg­ing too much for data (even after drop­ping the high-end price by a third, it’s still not unlim­ited), and despite the fact that cur­rent cus­tomers must wait a week before they can get one, the lines to buy an iPhone are pre­dictably around the block down­town in Toronto and Van­cou­ver.

While I’m not thrilled that I have to wait yet another week, as the com­ing of higher speed 3G net­work­ing, and GPS is a big deal for us, but best of all is actu­ally being able to get soft­ware that will not make the phone buggy or suck bits from the net down to the phone while I’m unaware, which was what hap­pened with one of the pirate pro­grams I had got­ten a while back. I’m par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in how the new soft­ware (most of it free) take advan­tage of the syn­ergy between the phone know­ing where it is and being con­nected to the Inter­net at decent speed. Imagine:

• You could take a tour of a museum or gar­den and had access to not one but sev­eral mul­ti­me­dia tour guides all at the same time? Enter­ing an art work’s num­ber might show related works, or offer other bio­graph­i­cal information.
• In a book­store you might get all of the com­pet­ing prices for the same book after you take a pic­ture of its bar code with your cam­era. Your cur­rent store could offer to match that price if they can keep the sale.
• A spe­cial ‘Lunch 4–1-1′ program/network that would not only tell you which friends were near and avail­able for an impromptu lunch, but also a restau­rant that all of you had said was either good or they wanted to try out.

I expect a lot of those sorts of appli­ca­tions to show up soon. The best part is that this is entirely an open-ended sit­u­a­tion; the lim­i­ta­tion is now no longer on the hard­ware or the infra­struc­ture, but the imag­i­na­tion of devel­op­ers and entre­pre­neurs. For Van­cou­ver and its decid­edly extro­verted blend of tech and love of leisure, cui­sine and enter­tain­ment, today is sort of a start­ing gun for a race to the next big social appli­ca­tion, and it’s not just Face­book and Twit­ter this time.

Fol­low up: Accord­ing to Twit­ter and news sto­ries around the web, it was not a very, ahem, smooth launch of the iPhone or 2.0 soft­ware. Servers got over­loaded, phones got bricked, iTunes ver­sion 7.7 took for­ever to down­load, and in gen­eral the whole process slowed to a crawl. I haven’t heard a story yet that wasn’t full of drama, wait­ing and headache. I’m sure there are oth­ers who can pro­vide more detail. Suf­fice to say I’m glad that I decided to wait a day or two before dip­ping my toes in the iWater.