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 30th 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.