Influences – Michael Herf
Posted on 13 March 2010 | 1 response
I’m not a very social person. I tend towards introspection, and I don’t have many friends. To a fault, I too easily lose contact with people, and I presume that it’s a measure of social anxiety which keeps me from assuming that people forgive the injustice I perform when I withdraw and fade.
In any event, I find in my life that I tend to build vocabularies with which to frame my ideas and my ideals. I find concepts that I like, and in order to give myself a shorthand, substitute a symbol for those concepts into this sort of imagery matrix upon which more complex concepts are built.
I wrote poetry from 1994 to 1999 or so. I stopped for several reasons. One was that I was in a relationship which stifled that spark, but I can’t blame her for that – I gave it up, she didn’t take it from me. Another fundamental reason, I think just as important, was that I had built my vocabulary. I wouldn’t say that my life made sense at the time, but when I had to work things out in my head, I didn’t feel big gaps in that matrix. I was busier, and less contemplative… and that may have been why I felt completeness in my vocabulary… I slowed the depth of my thinking and spent more time living. When there was a hurdle, I could build upon my prior poetry, and in particular in little snippets of imagery, upon which I could build my perception of the problem.
Just like the poetry, there are people who touched my life in ways that I still refer to often when I’m working things out in my head. Sometimes it’s helpful in framing experience, and sometimes it’s helpful in what someone has taught me about myself.
I think of many people and events often, and I feel like I need to begin to make tribute to them. I’ll largely cover people with whom I’ve not had contact for years, and I’m not particularly seeking them out, but hoping that perhaps the six degrees of separation in the world (or perhaps vanity, in the days of Google) will allow people to discover themselves how they’ve touched lives in ways they may never have known.
And to begin this experiment, I give tribute to Michael Herf.
In late summer of 1993 — on my 18th birthday, to be specific — I arrived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to study Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. My floor in the C-Wing of the Mudge Hall dorms had an interesting mix of folks, many of which left a lasting impression after my relatively brief stay. Some may appear later in this series, so I’ll leave them unnamed for now.
At the opposite end of the floor lived Michael Herf, of Evansville, Indiana. Mike was a gentle soul, contemplative, amazingly intelligent, with a dry sense of humor which made his eyes glow as his mind chewed playful thoughts. He was a Christian who attended a bible study group, but who I never felt judged my genuine but fairly incredulous questions. He composed beautiful songs on his keyboards and sample mixer thingies (I never really got into MIDI). Mike’s natural inquisitiveness led him to be incredibly well informed about the world in general, and he was certainly the type of person to sit around and talk to for hours.
He also was far ahead of me in computer skills, and when I got a 386 for Christmas, Mike helped me experiment with Linux, giving me just enough to get started and knowing when to answer my follow-up questions, and when to tell me to RTFM. Like an ideal teacher, Mike sensed that I was capable but undirected and helped me get some direction and let me figure the rest out myself. I got the pride of teaching myself, with the safety net to keep me from getting discouraged.
Today, as a manager, I try to pay it forward to my employees in this way. My patience isn’t the best, and I often fail inpractice, overstepping those limits between guidance and execution. But I know the ideal I’m trying to achieve because of what I was taught. Thank you, Mike.
I also found that when Mike played me his long instrumental songs, they evoked stories in my head. I didn’t hear just sounds, but like a good soundtrack, I knew what was happening while the music played. We experimented, with him playing things, me telling him the story I saw and felt, and discussing them. Sometimes we were in sync, other times not, but I look back to this day to that experience to understand how I experience the world. I drew upon that experience when I began writing poetry, and some of the things I wrote then haunt me to this day. After I left Carnegie Mellon, I continued to write poetry, and I believe that I really developed my craft by interpreting the art of others. In sharing my writings with artists, I found a way to communicate what their art conveyed, not so much commentary on the technique. I found that it was appreciated as feedback and a way to connect with their audience. In realizing that my mind works by processing symbols and not images, I’m continuing to develop my understanding of how I understand things, in hopes of finding ways to be more in a state of flow, which is where I find my happiness. Again, thank you Mike.
There are a number of other things that make me think of you as a routine part of my life, and while I’m sure you’ve touched many more, I sure as hell appreciate how you’ve touched mine.
Cablevision’s Business Model is the Problem
Posted on 7 March 2010 | 1 response
In watching the fight unfold between Cablevision and Disney/ABC, it’s plain to see that the largest problem the cable companies have is their adherence to their business model and not picking the right core competency.
Time Warner Cable is asking its customers to support their fight against content providers:
I’ve recently upgraded my home internet connection to Time Warner Cable’s “Wideband” Internet Service — using DOCSIS 3.0, I get 50Mbps down, 5Mbps up. And I actually get it. Since I’ve posted before about the negative experiences I had with Time Warner’s RoadRunner service at a previous apartment, I’ll update it with some information about how one individual turned around my customer experience and gives me some measure of hope.
In either case, I’ve tried streaming various HD video services, and while I’m fairly impressed as to how far full-screen HD video has come, it’s still not where it needs to be – full-screen on my 24″ LCD the video can resolve to fine detail, but has horribly visible problems with lots of motion. Whether Hulu, TNT, or the Olympics, there were issues, though I found the way the Olympics’ Silverlight video streams seemed to “resolve” to detail very well after motion slowed, and it appeared to in some ways mimic the eye varying focus organically. The Olympics player also didn’t full-screen the video, it full-screened the player, which maintained a photo-like frame with advertising.
In any event, in investigating the bitrates used by all three services, I found that it never exceeded 3.5Mbps, probably due to the tactical problems with distributing significantly higher bitrates over the internet.
Why isn’t Time Warner Cable reading the writing on the wall and recognizing itself for what it is?
The “television” cable company is a content distribution network.
They’ve figured out how to give me a 50/5 last-mile connection. Downloads from content distributed by CDNs is reasonably close to rated speed.
Time Warner should be focusing on making it easy for content providers to get higher bandwidth streaming content hosted (if on-demand) or replicated (if live streams) into their network, from which they could easily pass it along to me at 10 or 15Mbps, resulting in significantly higher quality video.
They could either charge content providers (like ABC/Disney) for their content distribution services which enable an unsurpassed customer experience (possibly even charged at variable rates subject to SLA as monitored by end-user equipment), charge customers to access this premium experience (charge one rate for internet access with “wish you the best” experience, and an additional fee for access to this premium CDN), or a mix of the two.
I’ve got an LG BD570 on the way, which is a Blu-Ray player which supports streaming of Netflix, VUDU, CinemaNow, Youtube, Pandora, and media from my home network over DLNA. It hasn’t been delivered yet, but I’m well on my way to being my own CDN. If they’d provide a highly-accessible CDN, and access to it through a set-top box open to whatever applications whether they use the CDN or not, they could offer a hell of an experience. And they could extend the CDN into my house using one of my set top boxes as a CDN node of sorts.
Did Comcast GetIt(tm) with its rebranding as xfinity? Might that be where they’re heading?
Cablevision’s Optimum Online services have always been a cut above the internet offerings from Comcast and Time Warner. Maybe they can “get it”, give in for now, and then change their business model to be someone whose services are actually in demand, wanted by both the content providers and end users. Rather than being a proxy for licensing battles, they can step out of the way of the content providers’ licensing models, offering infrastructure that seamlessly handles a feature set that supports the licensing models of choice of the content providers, and allow users to handle the battle over licensing.
Get out of being in the middle of the problem, and get into the middle of the solution. There’s something wonderfully empowering in the business model being focused specifically on the level of service provided — it ties business success with customer experience, a wonderful feedback loop.
Wouldn’t it be nice to want to do business with the cable company?
Were they also to establish an open licensing authorization platform, they could provide content providers a platform to authorize access to content based upon the licensor’s business model, and provide sublicensing to content aggregators targeting specific verticals. They’d sell services to content providers (licensors), curators (aggregators based upon value-add with a sublicensing business model), as well as to end users (aggregation of licensing into packages or a la carte bundles for retail sale).
If you make the rights management reasonable, CableCompany, you can open your own iTunes-like content licensing store on this platform. You can get revenue from transaction fees on the sublicensing, and be transparent about it. You’d be a “cloud service”, and could bill based upon usage, and drive usage through an exemplary customer experience.
Or you can wait, and die off when someone else does this. Look out for FiOS and Google. Verizon’s got everything to gain about getting high ARPU internet services rolled out, and don’t have the same legacy mindset about content licensing that you do. And Google’s gigabit-to-the-home is probably actually just an attempt to wake you up to get you to do this for their benefit as well.
Be the open and transparent good guys and innovate to the future, or be the hated bad guys and become irrelevant. Your choice.
Google optimizing its supply chain
Posted on 10 February 2010 | No responses
Google has announced it’s intention to provide gigabit connectivity to homes at competitive pricing.
What’s it about? Eric Schmidt appears to be taking his cue from none other than Andrew Carnegie, the 19th century steel tycoon. Carnegie Steel not only operated steel mills, it was its own supplier of the major raw materials used in steelmaking, iron ore, coal, and coke.
What are the biggest threats to Google? Their supply of eyeballs is subject to the behavior of network providers. Google’s been investing lately in ensuring their access to those eyeballs, and focused on increasing the speed of the delivery of their services to end users.
Google Chrome – speed up browsing, make access a non-issue with Gears and offline use
Google Wave – I suspect that this is the technology behind the recently announced Google Buzz
Google Buzz – you’re already using Gmail (aren’t you?) — why have to leave there to do status updates?
Google Public DNS – optimize your requests to their servers, speeding up the experience on Google properties while reducing reliance on CDNs like Akamai, and gather more user data by knowing what they’re looking up
Google’s purchase of On2 – to be reliant on h.264, subject to royalties payable to the MPEG Licensing Association, puts Google at risk of a supply of viable encoding for its huge video property, Youtube. Buying their own codecs including VP6 through VP8 gives them control over an alternative, and substantial bargaining power.
Google’s new gigabit broadband initiative – open the last mile pipe up wide
If their core competency is scaling, then it’s in Google’s interest to promote things that require astronomical scaling, making theirs the preferred platform. Opening up the last mile will drive the innovation required to make life-changing information applications for which Google is the most viable provider. Rather than supply the world, Google wants to enter just enough to change the game. They’re engineers, they love to solve the scaling problems. They’re frustrated to be hostage to the old guard of internet access providers whose entire organizations were founded on closed monopolies, whether telecom or cable television. “We have money. Can’t we do something about this?”
You’ll be able to use a Google device to access Google connectivity to access Google applications to replace the other things you use now, separately. From the data you actively put into their systems to your browsing habits as detected through Google Analytics on the web sites you visit, Google AdSense on the web sites you visit, and Google DNS queries even to sites where neither you nor the site intends to expose data to Google.
I’m not big on conspiracy theories, but I’m suspicious of any aggregation of that much data. Even if they intend to do no evil, mistakes and transgressions will happen.
Universal health maintenance a responsibility?
Posted on 11 December 2009 | No responses
I have to admit that I’ve fallen out of touch with the state of the healthcare debate going on in Congress, and the votes. I found it so difficult to get past rhetoric and to facts, that it feels like I’ve been left entirely out of the debate. I’d love to discuss the merits, but it seems that everyone’s so set on passage or failure that discussion is only to determine who you feel sorrier for.
Plenty of the people I’ve spoken to think that healthcare is a human right. None have been able to answer my question about the extent of the obligation. Edge cases usually open for debate might be abortion or cosmetic surgery, and things like growth hormone treatments for kids who are destined to be short.
If healthcare is a universal human right, and I’m leaning towards thinking that it’s not, to what extent? I’ll forego the cases I mentioned above, and consider them certainly subordinate in terms of influencing my beliefs. I’m open to discussing first-aid and community-clinic level healthcare. Fell off your bike and broke your arm? Got a cold? Have a more dire symptom which may be something eminently treatable? I could buy into treating those as something considered to be a right.
If you need a triple bypass, it’s probably the consequence of lifestyle choices. If it’s your right to get a $50,000 operation, wasn’t it your responsibility to society to make good lifestyle choices? You have a right to both eat Big Macs and get someone else to pay for your choices?
Calling them “death panels” is a great way to demonize people who decide where the limits are, but someone’s got to make the decision. Rights must be balanced in some ways with responsibilities. There are limited resources available for healthcare. Even if the limit is now humongous, there’s only so much to go around. We can only pay with the money we have, and if healthcare becomes 100% of the economy, then nobody’s doing anything else.
If not, and there are a million people with something for which there’s a million dollar cure, we’ve got to spend a trillion dollars. What money will be left over for antibiotics when someone gets the measles because his neighbor refused to have his kids vaccinated?
If money gets in the way of the discussion, let’s instead consider that a cure for breast cancer can be made from the bark of a particular tree found only in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez decides to seize control of these trees and holds them “hostage”. Are we obliged to go to war to kidnap the trees for humanity’s sake? Even if there’s only 1, it’s 10,000 years old, doesn’t seed, and might die if cuttings are taken, or if we might foolishly attempt to relocate the entire thing? If we do try, and the tree dies during its extraordinary rendition, has someone committed a crime against humanity? If so, what if it can only cure one person?
There are obviously limits.
All I’m asking for is a discussion about what reasonable limits might be, and we can at least find out if there’s a place to compromise. After all, nobody wants even the best healthcare to be free if the system will collapse upon itself.
Got any ideas for a reasonable starting point?
If a picture’s worth a thousand words…
Posted on 2 December 2009 | 1 response
…what’s a speculative simulation video worth?
This video from Youtube shows a Chinese television stations reports of the goings-on at Tiger Wood’s last week, including an animated simulation to illustrate what may have happened.
I haven’t gelled all of my thoughts on the matter. I have to assume that the people assembling speculation for a sensational news report will fail to entirely correct for or convey the existence of a bias in the facts and theories as reported. How much worse does it become when people feel like they’ve witnessed the event because they watched the simulation?
I don’t think that it matters much either way relative to this event, but maybe it’s time to consider the impact should this become commonplace.
I took the plunge, may the cloud be with me
Posted on 4 November 2009 | No responses
I finally decided to move my mail to Google.
The domain with my primary e-mail address has been using Dreamhost’s POP service for a few years now, and while I can’t really complain too much about availability / downtime, POP just hasn’t been cutting it for me for quite a while.
Occasionally, Outlook farts and redownloads my mail, causing me to have duplicate mails. Sometimes repeatedly in rapid succession. Sometimes I’ve cleaned it up, others not. This behavior led me to keep a minimal number of messages on the server. Not none, but I think I had outlook set to only keep a day or two’s worth. This made the horrible Squirrelmail UI even less useful, since webmail only had a few days of stuff to play with, and even that still contained quite a bit of spam.
Dreamhost will run mail through an anti-spam filter and quarantine it, sending a junk mail report on occasion — but to reclaim false positives, it’s a pain in the rear through a crappy web interface with a lot of checkboxes. If any Dreamhost employees happen upon this — get yourselves a Web 2.0 drag and drop UI with autosave. Nothing like diligently checking boxes then accidently navigating away from the page or something and losing everything…
Add to that recent issues I’ve had with connectivity back into my main desktop, with my wonderful PSTs… I’ve even named one of them mylife.pst — I’ve learned over the years that the most vital thing to get onto a new build as I upgrade is my PSTs. When a hard drive starts to go bad, it’s the PSTs I make sure I have backups of. But I digress… since my mail has lived primarily on a single Windows PC, when I want to get to the mail that “fell off” my iPhone and I’m not at my home office desk, RDP is the only real option. When that’s not possible for any of a host of reasons, my data’s dead to me.
I finally took the plunge and signed up for Google Apps Standard and used the Google Email Uploader to set my beloved email on angels’ wings and watched it flutter into the cloud.
It took a while to get everything set up — Dreamhost made it easy to switch to using Google Apps, having the right template in place to make the DNS changes in one easy step. I made the switch and scrambled to get myself to normal before the hour got too late (which it did a few nights this week, partly due to this switch), concerned with figuring out which e-mail addresses I’d had on the domain. Dreamhost made it so easy to switch to Google, I did it before copying and pasting the old config somewhere for safekeeping. With it being non-obvious how to set up forwarding-only addresses, I started to create an account for each address I’d used. Realizing that Google Apps lets you add a catch-all, I knew I had my insurance, and again went looking for how to have aliases.
I’m happy to say that I found them. Logged into the Google Apps control panel as an administrator, Manage This Domain -> Users and Groups [Users tab] -> click on the user account for which you’re adding the aliases. The feature is called Nicknames. You have to add them one at a time, but it’s just what I was looking for.
Everything’s finally uploaded. I added Google Sync, to add ActiveSync compatibility (it’s in the control panel under Service Settings-> Mobile) and configured my iPhone to use it for push mail, calendar sync, and contact sync. I’m still debating just using the webmail interface (with offline enabled) or Outlook as my primary access method to my mail on my main desktop — I thought I’d quit Outlook and re-examine if I see withdrawal symptoms.
Totally off-topic: My main PC is named Shaq – it’s big, black and powerful – full tower case, water cooling, 4 cores @ 3.2GHz, 8GB of RAM, about 8TB of storage. When I was a freshman at Carnegie Mellon, there was a guy across the hall named Martin with a NextCube he’d named clewis, short for Carl Lewis, since it was small, black, and fast. It’s funny how I’ve carried that with me and used it 16 years later. Props Martin!
Want Nick Arrojo’s Advice?
Posted on 3 May 2009 | 1 response
Sustaining the Unsustainable – Student Loan Debt
Posted on 3 May 2009 | 1 response
When you take some time to think about the mortgage crisis that’s helped turn our markets to mud, it seems to come down to overpaying for things without a well-reasoned calculation of risk.
Until about a month ago, I lived in Greenwich Village in New York, and walked by New York University’s buildings each day. According to the College Board, the costs for a student who lives on campus total $51,982 a year.
Assuming no increase in costs, that’s $207,928 for an undergraduate degree.
Somehow, they report that the average indebtedness at graduation is $33,637. I presume that they’re referring to the debt load that the student carries. What won’t show up in that figure is the amount of home equity borrowed against by parents to pay the expected family contribution.
In any event, someone’s coming up with $200k. There are many reasons why self-selection would dictate that the median household income of students at NYU would be higher than the $50,233 American average, but even if the average is twice that, after taxes and living expenses for the rest of the family, they’re not coming up with $52k out of pocket, unless they’ve been extraordinarily diligent in saving.
While undoubtedly there are a number of students who will work at high-paying jobs coming right out of school, most of their classmates won’t. Parents won’t always make rational decisions, putting something like the pride of having a child at Princeton above economic sense. If they’ve got the money, it’s none of my concern. If they don’t… who bears the consequences?
Imagine graduating college with $100,000 in debt, at 21 years of age. Assume that the graduate may have a child 10 years later. If a parent’s education isn’t paid off by the birth of his child, when will the cycle end? That’s $833 per month, every month, for 10 years, before considering interest. Twice that for a couple.
How do we get some sanity here?
Making more money available isn’t the answer. Maybe we shouldn’t be trying to send everyone to college. Maybe we should treat education loans more like standard unsecured credit, or make education loan decisions based upon likely ability to repay given not just credit history, but school transcripts and historical economic success of similar loan applicants.
Of course, that idea dies an early death at the hands of those who think it unfair to the economically disadvantaged. So… what do we do? And how do we not screw ourselves with subprime education lending?
Are the people losing their houses now paying their student loans? Are they going to be any time soon?
Just when you think you’re clever…
Posted on 1 April 2009 | 1 response
I thought I was clever coming up with the term paraffinalia for the stuff Amy bought to make candles, only to find that there’s already a company Paraffinalia Candles. *sigh*
Spelling does count.
Posted on 15 December 2008 | No responses
Spelling does count. If the sender, subject line, or your message is misspelled, I’m far more likely to think that it’s spam and bin it. I’m fine with the false positives which may make it into the bit bucket if you didn’t take the time to figure out how to spell what you wanted to tell me. *cough*joe*cough*
And I’m not buying from you if your math is horrible and it makes a difference to what I’m buying. A dimwitted marketer put this on thestreet.com below an article I was reading.
Hmm… while it’s true that if I’d bought and sold at the prices indicated, $18.37 and $37.82 respectively, I would indeed have made over 50% on the investment, as you advertised. But if you’re advertising what a financial genius you are, shouldn’t you be noting that buying something for $18.37 and selling it for $37.82 brings you a return of over 100%? I think on math alone, I’m far better with my bad guess strategies than with this genius guiding me.