I’m sure everyone who uses Netflix is already painfully aware of Netflix’s price change debacle and the ensuing shitstorm of media coverage. They didn’t explain the price changes to customers, and didn’t give customers very long to decide on how they’d like to react.

But two days ago, CEO Reed Hastings took some ownership and decided to set things right with this blog post and this video.

Both are insincere and far from transparent about why Netflix is actually making its changes. Saying “we think the businesses are going in different ways, so we needed to separate them” is the same thing as saying nothing at all. The core question of “Why the hell is Netflix doing this?” remains completely unanswered.

So we all get to speculate, and I love that game, so here’s my speculation.

If Hastings could speak his mind the real answer would go something like this:

“Our content partners are assholes, and they are effectively forcing this change. But we are completely at their mercy because we need their content to stay relevant.”

Lets break this down

DVDs:
Movie and TV studios get DVD rentals. It’s an existing model that’s been around for a long time, with established players. Everyone knows the drill. Release schedules, prices, terms, all that stuff has been worked a long time ago. Netflix does the same dance that every other DVD rental outfit does and everything has natural physical limits, i.e. number of DVDs sold to the rental outfit. Netflix introduced massive disruptive change into the market, but it was change that didn’t mess up the content producers. In fact, the content producers liked it because Blockbuster and Hollywood were nearing monopoly status on rentals and had a lot of leverage to use against the content providers.

The great thing about DVDs and having a physical product is that it doesn’t matter if the content provider doesn’t like you. Copyright law in the US says you can buy those DVDs from whoever you want and rent them out. Netflix can truck right on over to Walmart and buy all the latest releases. So the content providers can’t really play favorites and starve Netflix out of business. Even if they wanted to. If it’s for sale, it’s for rent.

So the DVD business is about a nice website, distribution and operational efficiency. Netflix has already won this war. But it’s a Pyrrhic victory because Netflix has spent a ton of time and energy fighting to be the best at something customers increasingly don’t want.

So if Hastings could speak his mind about DVDs it would go something like this:

“We know there will always be a DVD rental business, but it’s a commodity market that we pretty much own. We’re so confident that our competitors are incompetent that we feel comfortable spinning off the whole brand, and letting the B team run the show. But we also know this market is only going to get smaller and smaller.”

Streaming
Streaming media, to steal a phrase from Steve Jobs, is a just a bag of hurt. Content providers aren’t just partners in the value chain anymore, they’re potential (or actual) competitors. Like almost every other business in the world, the internet is removing middle men, especially if they aren’t clearly providing value. Content owners can increasingly build their own streaming infrastructure and bypass outlets like Netflix.

And there are none of the protections that exist for the sales and rental of DVDs. Content companies can license their content to whoever they want, for whatever price they want. If they want to punish Apple with high prices, and reward Amazon for playing ball, there are no obstacles in place. And since so much of the content we want to watch is produced by only a handful of major players, content providers essentially get to set the terms by which streaming video providers get to continue to exist. Hulu learned this lesson the hard way, and they’ve now more or less caved into every demand; delayed content, extremely limited time availability, a paid package that still includes ads, etc.

Netflix has no position of strength here, and the price increases are just the first of a long list of concessions that the major studios will demand of Netflix if they want to continue to exist.

I imagine Hastings would say this about streaming:

“Netflix now has two main jobs: build a reliable and available streaming infrastructure backed by a great recommendation engine and create a first class negotiation and legal team to handle the never ending licensing negotiations with our content partners”

If I was personally running Netflix I would also add to that list creating a significant lobbying presence in Washington to start tackling the nasty world of copyright law around digital content, and the very real threat of bandwidth shaping by major residential internet providers, many of whom are owned by the same companies as the content providers.

Bring it home

So you can see why it actually makes some sense to separate the two companies. They are both facing separate and distinct challenges that are pulling them in separate directions.

But it’s very clear where they’re placing their bets. Streaming gets the Netflix brand. Streaming gets the A-list talent. Streaming is the future, even if it’s a very uncertain one. They need the big guns to play in the cut-throat world of content licensing, and they need to segregate the DVD part of the business from the possible blowback.

But part of playing this game is lying to your customers while wearing a shit-faced grin and pretending this was all your idea. You can’t bad mouth the studios without paying for it big time in your next round at the negotiating table.

That’s why Hastings looks like this: While reiterating how very very sorry he is about how poorly Netflix communicated around the price increases. This is clearly a man consumed by remorse. He actually looks like he’s on the verge of laughing for the last 3rd of the video.

Asides

While writing this post, an interesting thing occurred to me. One of the reasons that Amazon and Apple haven’t fallen into this same trap is DRM. For all intents and purposes, if you want to sell someone a book to read on the Kindle, you have to sell it through Amazon. If you want to sell a video to be watched on the iPad, you have to sell it through iTunes. If you want protection for your content and access to their customers, you’re just as locked in as the customers are.

The only way to get around that is to remove DRM and then you’re in the same place the music business is: competing with free. So if you want your cushy profit margins, you have to give some of that cut to Amazon or Apple. Netflix does not enjoy this same advantage.

Netflix is in a really bad place, and they’ve got a lot of work ahead of them. Bullshitting your customers is a terrible policy, but they will increasingly have no choice in the matter as the studios bully them into submission. I wish them luck, but I’m not sure how long I’ll keep my current streaming subscription.

The recent retirement of Steve Jobs was as emotional for me as I think it was for a lot of Apple fans. Steve wasn’t just the CEO of Apple. He was the figurehead for not just Apple, but for a sensibility about what role computers should play in our lives.

My early childhood was in many ways defined by computers, mostly Apple computers. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to work for Apple when I grew up.

By the time the Apple retail stores opened, I had been fixing Macs professionally for 3 years, and informally for many years before that. I was really good at fixing macs. I knew OS 9 inside and out, and I had worked on every Mac that had been made. I could fix most modern Macs of the time without manuals, and could in many cases could be handed a pile of different screws and tell you exactly were they went in a machine.

By the time Apple hired me as a Mac Genius, I had put in much more than Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours.

By that time I had already seen a lot of Apple’s uglier side. Apple had started beating up on Apple Authorized Resellers, and their service organizations well before the opening of the stores. Apple service became much more like a supply chain management operation than a customer service operation.

So when I took the dive into the Apple stores, I thought “this is going to be different. This is going to be Apple’s chance to do it right”. I already had friends working in the stores, and the reports I heard back were good. So I took the leap, and I was finally working for Apple Computer.

The first year or had its ups and downs, but by and large, it was really great. But it rapidly went downhill. I eventually came to the conclusion that Apple didn’t really care about repairing people’s computers. By the time I quit, I was extremely burned out, and angry at Apple.

Since then, I’ve always wondered by Apple cared so much about developing new products, but seemed to hate fixing them when they broke.

It wasn’t until Steve’s retirement that a lot of things clicked for me. Apple has always wanted to make things simpler, reduce complexity, and get things right the first time.

When you have to fix a computer, that means you didn’t get it right. It went out the door with a flaw or a bug, and you’ve created a bad experience. Yes you can try and recover from that experience, but it’s not the same as never having had it happen.

What I ultimately realized is that Apple didn’t want people like me, people who had figured out all the flaws, and knew how to fix them or work around them once a product was already in a customer’s hands. Apple wanted people who would make sure those problems never happened in the first place. Steve didn’t want people who could fix broken products, he wanted products that didn’t break.

But computers do break. Don’t you want people who can fix them available to your customers? Nope. Here’s why. People who can fix them are also people who can pull back the curtain on all the complexity that goes into making something simple. They are the people who remind customers that Apple’s products are computers, not tools for getting things done, or windows into the internet, or ways to connect with your friends and family.

Why doesn’t apple publish details on RAM amounts or processor specs on iPhones? Because it should never matter. The phone should be able to do the things you want to do flawlessly regardless of its hardware specs. Witness the HP touchpad, better specs than an iPad, but can’t scroll a webpage smoothly. The experience matters.

I was a genius of the old school. I exposed customers to how computers worked. What I didn’t figure out until much later was that nobody gives a shit about how computers work except for computer geeks. A service person who knows a lot about computers reminds people how much they don’t know. And they really shouldn’t have to know.

Steve’s vision far preceded Apple’s ability to deliver a computer that “just worked”. It needed people like me, but it didn’t want them. So I eventually quit. But now I understand why I felt like I didn’t fit at Apple, or at least at Apple Retail.

A recent post over at FiveThirtyEight pointed out the increasing popularity of Texas Governor Rick Perry, and how he may start being a concern to more mainstream candidate Mitt Romney.

It should be noted that Michelle Bachmann is making strong showings in all of these polls as well.

I’d first like to point out that these early polls are essentially meaningless, and I personally think they’re borderline unethical to conduct. They survey the wrong people, and they ask bad questions. They have a long history of being worthless, yet they keep being conducted, so you inevitably have to deal with the media fallout of their results.

The most common form this takes is “Hey this insane, borderline theocrat may actually become president!” For some people that’s a sign the country is headed in the right direction. For others, it’s a bleak indictment of our nation and how far we’ve strayed from the enlightenment principles on which we were founded.

Either reaction is the product of bad information. Information delivered by a sensationalist, self-obsessed press who long ago learned to sell drama and conflict over substantive analysis.

But it also serves to mask the true nature of presidential elections in the US. It creates the illusion of a diverse pool of candidates, each of whom could potentially take the US into the future that most appeals to each of us. But that diversity is largely illusory. Those candidates who actually win their national party nominations are usually not very far apart ideologically speaking, and the final campaign months are typically spent fighting over those minor differences, which only serves to exaggerate them.

The extreme right wing represented by Bachmann and Perry do have genuine ideological differences not only with the left, but with their own party.

When most republican politicians say they want a smaller government, what they mean is that they want an ineffective regulatory body which is powerful but corruptible and controllable. While democratic politicians can’t really call for small government, they have essentially wanted the same thing (at least since Bill Clinton).

Perry and Bachmann (and Ron Paul for that matter) actually want a dismantled and diminished federal government which forces power and money down to the state level where it is more easily funneled to local special interests.

This is a major divide. And in many ways a larger divide than exists between democrats and republicans.

Largely speaking, politicians of both parties agree on the single largest point of policy in modern politics – the role of the federal government. Now I can hear you having an aneurysm from here, so just take some deep breaths while I explain this.

The debate you will hear in the constant drum beat of election coverage, and the current struggles between the president and congress is all about the role of federal government! And it’s completely divisive! It’s what has our whole government ground to a halt. How could I possibly say they agree?

Because they do agree. The role of the federal government in modern america is to protect corporate interests from international competition. While the different parties may differ on their justifications for this, and some of those reasons may even be morally defendable, there is no genuine disagreement. America is all-in on globalized capitalism, and this was a choice we made a long time ago. The captains of industry hold the US captive just as surely as they do most 3rd world countries. We are now a plutocracy.

Don’t believe me? Read the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks. Here’s a few examples. I’ve read about a hundred of them and the picture they paint is not pretty. The State Department now spends a great deal of its diplomatic capital as the lobbying arm of large corporations.

But this should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention. Large scale and widespread corporate crimes simply go unpunished. Wholesale illegal market manipulations by international banks are met with small fines, or completely ignored. The supreme court has spent much of its current session actively protecting corporations, against standing precedent.

But I think ideologues like Perry and Bachmann legitimately either don’t know, or don’t understand the shifts that government has made over the last 30 years. They don’t understand that by wanting to diminish the power of the federal government, you diminish its power to serve corporate interests in the global economy. That effectively means the US ceases to be a world power. No one currently in power is going to let that happen.

Which is why Perry and Bachmann will never be serious contenders for the presidency. No one who honestly wants a smaller government will ever be allowed a serious shot at the presidency from either party. But it definitely serves a purpose to let Perry and Bachmann get out there and squawk. They get to be the voice of middle class white frustration, the republicans’ populist play in the face of a still strong hatred for being screwed by global capitalism.

Just to hedge my bets here a little: I can see Perry getting the republican nomination in one circumstance; the republicans are certain they won’t win 2012. If they feel that way (which we’ll probably know by early next year), it doesn’t make sense to run a credible candidate and have them lose. It will make it harder to sell that candidate in 2016. It’s much better to throw someone to the wolves cough McCain cough, and let your real pick build up credibility for when there’s not an incumbent in office.

Update 1/19/2012:

Bachmann dropped out of the presidential race on January 4th and Perry gave it up Today. Our disgraceful media organizations cynically pumped 5 months of juicy fundamentalist insanity from them and now they’re onto the Gingrich/Santorum crazy train. Gingrich, despite being one of the most corrupt politicians in recent memory, may in fact have a shot at the nomination, but I think it’s a long one.

Rick Santorum however holds no shot. Don’t get me wrong, he brings the best of both conservative worlds, he’s right up there with the best of them on christian insanity, but unlike Perry and Bachmann, he’s a huge fan of big government and whoring himself out to corporate lobbying interests. He loves war, and thinks it’s just peachy that iranian nuclear scientists are showing up dead all over the place. This could make him an appealing candidate to his party, if he wasn’t quite so goody goody.

See, Santorum isn’t just a prayers in schools, bring Jesus back to the government kind of guy. He’s prudish moralist. He wants to outlaw contraceptives. He wants to make pornography illegal. He wants a total ban on abortion, even when it’s necessary to save the mother. He’s said that he wants civil law to reflect christian religious law.

The republican party is still in a shambles from Bush’s administration. How long do you think it would take the republican party to recover from a poor Bush impersonator with a heaping helping of ultra conservative Catholicism?

His point was that ultimately all the money made by corporations goes to people, so raising taxes on those corporations taxes all of the people who make money from them. And while he didn’t mention it, “tax corporations” is usually liberal code for “tax rich people”.

In some ways, Romney is right in saying corporations are people. They are granted human rights for some inexplicable reason. But that’s not the point he’s trying to make. And on that point he’s wrong.

There’s an easy way for companies to pay no federal taxes. Really. Don’t incorporate. Any income the business makes passes directly to owners and they pay taxes on that income like any other income. Problem solved. Companies are people!

So why don’t businesses just do that? Because in the terms that Romney is using, corporations are very much not people. By and large, companies incorporate because it gives the owners protection from liability. If the corporation goes bankrupt, and they owe you money, you can’t go after the money of the owner or owners. Only the assets of the company. Company kills someone? Owners protected. Company poisons a rain forest? Owners protected.

One of core reasons for corporations to exist is that they abstract the institution from the people who own it. It’s also one of the core reasons they are taxed separately. If the business itself is liable for debts, not the owners, the same must be true of taxes as they are essentially a form of debt.

In a manner of speaking, those separate (some would say double) taxes are the price you pay to be shielded from the liabilities of your company. And obviously the price is so low that pretty much every big company becomes a corporation.

So here’s the insidious heart of this so called “conservative” notion: owners of businesses should get all of the income of a business (and only pay capital gains tax on it), but none of the liabilities of the business (which should be spread out over all the people it harmed). In a term I’m sure you’re all familiar with from the collapse of 08, they want privatized profits, and socialized losses.

Corporations aren’t people. They are tools we provide the rich so they don’t bear the liability for the sociopathic actions of their creations. That tool is extremely valuable, and if anything, the public should be charging a lot more for it. Think about that. Corporations can effectively cause limitless damage with the only liability being the company’s assets.

If Romney or any other republicans want to do away with corporate taxes, I have a proposal.

No more corporate tax. But no more free limited liability for corporations. Limited liability becomes a cap and trade system. Only 250 companies are allowed limited liability. How much do you think those vouchers would sell for?

Now tell me that corporations pay too much in taxes.

I have been reluctant to do so, primarily because my vision of what the system will be, is much more compelling than what it currently is.

But in the spirit of continuous iteration, here we go.

My smart home setup allows for automation and remote operation of a handful of lights and my AC units. I also have a couple of cameras. That’s the very short version. The longer version requires precious precious context.

Context

I have a biggish house, and it’s a sort of frankenstein amalgamation of a 1950s track home, a sloppy 2000s addition and a nice helping of real-estate buy-and-flip McMansion renovation. In the process of becoming what it is today, a lot of very strange decisions were made that wouldn’t make sense in a modern large home built in one go.

So light switches are in very weird places, newer AC units are pushing lots of air into a ducting system designed in the 50s. Outside lighting and power is almost non-existent despite having an outdoor pool and grill, etc.

So the main goal of my smart home project was to compensate for some of the weirdness of this hodgepodge of choices, and as time has passed, to provide some nice conveniences that make houses more livable. I can also capture and analyze information about the system to my dorky heart’s content.

An auspicious origin

What kicked all this off was stupid school kids stealing a package off our porch. It was returned later, opened, with no explanation. Not long after, someone tried to open the front door to our house shortly after I left. Thankfully the door was locked, and once they noticed Kelli was home (through the door glass) they ran.

“Fuck that noise” I thought to myself. It’s time for cameras. Cameras that can be accessed remotely and can trigger alerts. My camera setup demands a post in and of itself, but suffice it to say, I Macgyvered up something that didn’t look terrible and roughly did what I wanted.

But the cameras needed light at night because they didn’t have IR, and IR cameras suck. Thankfully we have porch lights, so problem solved. But I always forgot to turn them on at night, or off in the morning. So for a long while I just left them on all the time. But eventually my very slight case of OCD would not stand for this solution. What is this? The dark ages? Technology shall come to my rescue. I’d been reading about smart homes for over a decade. Surely this stuff has been figured out.

To the internet!

You can buy timers out the wazoo. But most of them only work on plugin devices, not anything hard wired to power.

You can buy photocell gadgets that plug into the light socket and can tell if it’s daylight or not and switch the lights accordingly. They don’t work. Light comes on, “hey it’s daylight!, I’m going to switch off the light! Oh hey, it got dark, it’s nighttime. I’m going to turn on the light.” Repeat. They get a little dirty, they don’t work. They point the wrong direction by 2 degrees, they don’t work. People on the internet will say that you can make them work if you just figure out the magic juju that prevents the light from the fixture hitting the photocell. These people are liars.

You can replace fixtures with motion detectors that randomly click your lights on and off every time they see a bug. Those are awesome. Those don’t piss of the neighbors. I wouldn’t know, because it’s not like my neighbor has one. One that randomly pumps 2000 lumens into my bedroom windows at all hours of the night for no reason. One that would mysteriously attract small high velocity rocks if it weren’t for the existence of blackout blinds and plantation shutters.

If you want a solution to this that doesn’t suck, you need to buy a wired light switch with a relatively smart timer like this. Or you can start wading into the world of remotely controlled switches and let a computer decide when to turn on the light.

The Great Divide

This is a pretty big line to cross. There’s a lot of crappy, twitchy, mostly-works solutions you can patch together on an ad hoc basis in your home. Per-device light sensors, motion detectors, timers, etc. Most are incredibly dumb, only trigger on one variable, and have pretty lousy reliability. They are also very close in price to smart home equivalents.

If you want anything beyond bare minimum functionality, you’re going to need to bring a computer into the mix. That can be anything from a micro-controller actually built into a switch, to a fully dedicated home control machine.

There are a lot of different kinds of solutions out there, and 3-4 really strong modern competitors in today’s market. All have strengths and weaknesses. I ended up choosing Insteon solutions controlled by Indigo 5. I’ll go into more detail about why in later posts, but the bottom line is – what modules are available, how often are products and software updated, how reliable are they, and what can I do with them?

What do I do with them?

So here’s what you’ve been waiting for. What does my smart home actually do that my dumb home didn’t?

1. Porch light comes on relative to actual sunup/sundown times at my location – i.e. it changes automatically throughout the year. Sconce lights on the exterior of the garage are soon to follow.
2. Laundry room lights come on when you open the door and turns off automatically. The lights witch was installed behind the door, so it’s hard to reach without closing the door. Now you can walk in with a basket of laundry and not have to fumble around in the dark.
3. A floor lamp in my office turns on when I enter and turns off automatically. The only switched light in the room is the ceiling fan. The fan and its light are independently controlled by an RF remote that is hard to find and operate in the dark. When the lights are turned on, the CFLs take a long time to warm up, so if you’re just running in to grab something off your desk, you’ll be doing it in the dark, or wandering over to the floor lamp in the dark to turn it on. No more.
4. Both AC units in the house are controlled by my computer. Expensive programmable thermostats only allow 4 temperature settings per day. Under computer control you can set as many as you want. You can also control the thermostats from any device with a web browser. You can also capture and report out what temps were in the house during the day, and how long the AC ran. You can turn on the AC automatically if you come home early. You can have your computer monitor outdoor temps, and adjust the AC accordingly, etc.
5. Lots of house lights are now under remote control. That means I can have a single button turn off every light in the house (that’s currently controlled) when I head to bed. One of the things we do very often is switch between the overhead lights in the living room, and a floor lamp. Because we use CFLs we can’t use a dimmer for our overhead lights. So switching is now a one button activity you can do from the couch. If that sounds lazy, ask yourself why you don’t get up to change channels on your TV/Cable box, or to adjust the volume on your stereo.
6. Security cams trigger on motion and capture footage remotely. I can tie these into the smart home system, but I haven’t yet. Dumb video motion detection is really really bad, so it’s fine to capture a lot of false positives for later review, but it’s not okay to turn on a bunch of lights and play an alert. There is a really fancy and expensive piece of software called VitaminD that does detection of people, but it’s not really a real time monitoring solution. OpenCV is now including a pedestrian detector, so I’m harassing the maker of my security cam software to include it.

What’s next?

1. A lot more light switches. Our bedroom is a prime choice as this is another place with light switches placed behind the door. But there are hallway lights, a few more patio light locations, fans, etc.
2. Pool pump. It’s currently on an old mechanical timer, and I’d really like to have automatic seasonal adjustment. I could also have my computer monitor the weather for storms and have it kick the pump on for a few extra hours to clean out the crap that’s inevitably deposited in the pool.
3. Garage door opener and door locks It would be nice to be able to remotely lock and unlock doors and open or close the garage. They can also trigger entry/exit scripts. i.e. when we’ve both left in the morning, make sure all the doors are locked and all the lights are out. When we come home, turn on hallway and living room lights and unlock the garage entry door to the house. The automated unlocking would of course have some more conditional logic to make sure it’s actually us coming home.
4. Occupancy detection weirdly enough, this remains a really hard thing to get right. You can detect people in the house pretty easily, but room occupancy is a lot harder. You can manage it if somewhat imperfectly through motion detectors and a counting script, but it gets hairy pretty quickly. Active RFID would be the real way to fly, but it’s really expensive and just not worth it at this point. I’m not sure I care enough about this to make it work with today’s technology, but this really can enable some really cool stuff. Things like music and video following you around the house automatically. Eventually I think the only viable solution will be something like a wireless, fisheye Kinect embedded in the ceiling of every room that’s watching both in visible and IR light.
5. AV integration. This isn’t on the immediate list, it’s more of a nice to have eventually thing. Apple’s remote.app along with airport expresses already does a pretty good job of getting audio where I want it. Harmony remotes also do a credible job of controlling multiple devices in rooms with TVs. But there’s a lot of allure to remote devices like the iPod touch controlling everything.

Caveats

While this is a topic worthy of its own blog post, it should be noted that this stuff isn’t exactly easy to set up. You have to have a basic, but working understanding of home electrical wiring, and relatively decent computer chops. It really really helps if you can program in python or applescript. You can go really far down the dork-well if you know how to design circuits and program ICs.

There’s a reason that installers charge a LOT of money to build and program smart homes. There’s a reason they get a lot of money to maintain and expand systems. Your choices in vendors can have a huge impact. The lifetimes of homes are much greater than the lifetimes of particular technologies. Also, making this stuff work right is sort of a weird combination of skills; part handyman, part electrician, part computer programmer. Its much more accessible than it was 10 years ago, but it’s still not something to be entered into casually.

Yesterday at roughly 3pm I posted a twoot about doing linear regressions and becoming a stats nerd.

This morning, I am informed via e-mail that I have a new follower.

Now one must note that I do not run a cult of personality. I do not get random followers who I don’t already know. So my first assumption is that these followers are always spam.

In the early days of twitter, you would get tons of followers simply because people believed it was like the early days of the web. The more outgoing and incoming links you have, the more relevant and plugged in you are.

But very shortly after, the spammers marched in to piss on everyone’s cornflakes. You started getting followers every day. Twitter was very sluggish to respond, so I took my account private because it was the only way to prevent these assholes from showing up in your followers list.

Recently I opened it up again, and things have changed.

Still spam, but definitely more interesting spam.

Like the SEO link-farmers that have fucked up your google search results, twitter spammers are now employing some tricks to fool spam algorithms. They are using keywords to populate their tweets, using a combination of retweets and simple copy and pasting.

They almost all employ a woman’s name along with a pretty, but not model-hot picture of a woman for the profile. Apparently because guys are stupid.

once every twenty or so tweets, you’ll get a link to the real thing they’re trying to advertise, which apparently is almost always —– wait for it —— software for spamming twitter.

Apparently they’re taking whatever keyword they’re using for aggregating content, and also using it to send follow requests to people who are using it in their tweets. In this case “stats”.

Twitter really needs to allow you the ability to have public tweets and let people “follow” them, while at the same time requiring your permission to have them actually show up as an official follower.

Or they need to introduce a google+ type feature where you have circles. One would be “People who actually care about what I’m typing here” and another would be “random fuckwads who are almost certainly spammers”.

But the block and report mechanism is a joke.

Can you no longer select any network speakers? You click on them and then they immediately deselect?

Yeah me too.

Go to network settings, whatever interface you’re using. Click on advanced. For the “Configure IPv6″ pulldown, select Off.

You’re back to streaming dubstep throughout your house. Mazel tov.

One of the most broken things about the modern computer desktop metaphor is its reliance on “files”. Files that go into folders. Ugh.

Files are broken. Largely because our brains don’t work as filing cabinets. Don’t think files don’t work? How many icons are on your desktop right now? How long have they been there? How many duplicates of one photo, one presentation, one song do you have? Different people have different tolerances, but once we get enough files, the metaphor breaks down for everyone.

Most folks working in computers these days know that files suck. This is why we have full text search in our finders or explorers. We have no idea where we stored that one thing from 2 years ago. let’s search for it. Ahhh pages and pages of .html files from some bullshit “legal” folder that Adobe insists on installing along with CS5. Fantastic.

I’ve literally been trying off and on for years to make Mac OS X’s spotlight search feature work for its intended purpose. I’ve excluded folders, and whole drives. I’ve created and saved searches. It sucks. I can search for a file I know the exact name of, and it won’t turn up in the results. No joke.

I’ve tried using folders. God knows I have. Created by year, by project, by photo shoot. But you either go to far into specificity, or too short. A folder with 1000 files, or 1 file buried 10 folders deep. There is no happy medium.

Almost anyone who professionally deals with large amounts of discrete chunks of data knows: you have to have a CMS. There are good ones, there are bad ones. But the desktop is the worst one.

So we’re going to do better.

We’re going to use evernote. Evernote is your happy shiny friend.

Evernote is a data dump. But it’s a very very versatile data dump. I can dump in data, text, photos, pretty much any kind of file I have. It gets attached to a “note”. That note can then have a crapload of metadata attached to it to give it context and make it easily retrievable when you need it. Need to keep 7 years of Tax records? Evernote. Need to keep receipts for work travel? Evernote. Need to look up notes from that Meeting last week? You know the drill.

Evernote has multiple inputs and a lot of them are very useful. If you have an ipad or iphone, you can use the built in mic to record what’s being said in a meeting while you’re taking text notes. Once the meeting is done, you can use the built in camera to attach whiteboard notes, or pics of handouts. Got a business card, take a picture on your phone and throw it away.

But all that input doesn’t mean anything if you can’t pull that data back out when you need it.

If you like the idea of folders and hierarchy, you have notebooks which are simply collections of notes. If this is how you like to roll, this is within your power. You are sexy and everyone likes you.

But there are multiple ways to find and view your data and notebooks are arguably the least powerful. Tags are where it’s at. Each note can have a functionally unlimited amount tags; little descriptive bits of information. I can tag a note with “work” “boss” “meeting” and so on. I can then view notes with only those tags. I can choose one tag or a few. This gets very powerful very fast. If you have an upcoming meeting with the powerful higher ups, and you want to cover material in 5 different notes, tag each one with “reporttocorporateoverlords”. Once the meeting is done you can remove the tag and you’re back to five separate notes.

Jpegs and pdfs get scanned by evernote for text content and OCR’d. All the resulting text is searchable. Any text note is of course also searchable.

You have a choice for notebooks to be synchronized or not. Any notebook that is, is available to you both on the web or on any mobile device that supports an evernote client. If you have iOS or android you’re golden. If you chose, you can have all your files stored on your mobile device for offline access and editing.

Your data is available to you anywhere at any time. Everything is automatically backed up to evernote so there’s always at least 2 copies of your important documents.

Now, Evernote isn’t a file manager, and it isn’t meant to be, but in some critical ways, it does a better job of managing files than the finder does, and there are compelling reasons to use evernote on your important documents instead of the finder. And there may be a case to someday move all file storage to this model, at least with a few changes.

This really is the future.

Ultimately as bandwidth increases and storage costs diminish, I’m pretty confident this is where operating systems will head. As Apple merges iOS and Mac OS, I think you’ll find that how we handle discrete pieces of data will slowly drift away from the file metaphor, and into a central data store which each app uses to store and pull its data. This data store will be synched in real time back to a server which will in turn offer the data back out to other devices.

Along with my data will come my applications, settings, licenses and configuration data. Just like I can buy a new iPhone and in a few minutes have it restored to a clone of my old one, I’ll soon be able to do this with a new Mac.

We’re really not far off of this now. I’m actually pretty confident that if the US wasn’t so far behind the rest of the developed world in internet speeds, we’d already be doing this. Most of the parts and pieces already exist in one form or another.

I’m planning on a post or two describing how I use evernote on my Mac and iPad for both home and work stuff. So yeah. Get excited. Pumped even.

There’s a local Apple service provider here on Maui, MacNet computers, and I thought I would set up the dispatch with apple over the phone, and have the box shipped to them. They could babysit my laptop overnight, and just ship it out when they get the box. I’ve worked for 2 previous resellers, and the Apple Store. We did this for our customers at all three places.

So I wandered down there to see if they would do it.

Now there are a couple of ways a dispatch can happen. Apple can set it up over the phone and mail out a box to where ever you specify. Also, a reseller can set up the dispatch and have the box mailed to them. Like I mentioned, I had already set up the dispatch, and just had the box mailed to them. The extent what I was asking them to do was: Take the laptop today, hold it overnight until the box comes in, put it in the box, tear off a label, and hand it back to the DHL guy. Pretty simple.

Now I expected, this being a reseller that I’d have to throw $20 their way for the trouble of hanging on to it and boxing it up. I would have even thought $40 was reasonable.

When I talked to their tech and explained the situation, he immediately said it would be $80. He started explaining that they had to take it into their care, and call apple and get a box… so I stopped him, and reiterated that I already had created the dispatch, a box was on the way, and that all they had to do was box it up. He said it would still be $80. Okay, no harm no foul. I understand you need to make money, but that’s too rich for my blood. So I say okay, thanks, and start to wander looking for an FM transmitter for my iPod. He stops me trying to explain that it really is a lot of work for them. So I turn back and say… really a lot of work to put in a box and tear a label? He then starts explaining that when it comes back they have to check it out and make sure it’s fixed. At which point I explain that it’s being shipped back to me in Arizona, and they’ll never see it again after it gets mailed out. (I was thinking here that something would click and he’d say.. ohhh I get it now, sure we’ll take care of that for you). He then gave me a disbelieving look and told me that Apple doesn’t do that.

Now, I should point out, that up to this point I wasn’t really annoyed. $80 is a little rich for what I was asking them to do, but I understand they need to make money. I just wasn’t willing to pay it, and wanted to get on to other stuff. This wasn’t what made me mad.

So, at this point I’m not confident that this guy was really understanding what I was saying, so I reiterated once more. I’ve already set up the dispatch, the box is coming here, you would sent it off, Apple would send it to me in Arizona. “Yeah, Apple doesn’t do that”. Okay dood. Now I’m a little miffed. “Yes apple does, I was an MG for over 2 years, I know Apple’s policies”, “Well the retail stores are different” “No they aren’t, you can do this from any store, I know because I’ve also worked at 3 different service providers” “Well we’ve tried it and Apple won’t let us”.

Now what he was probably thinking about was the second way of setting up a dispatch, where they actually set it up. It’s true that they can’t set a different return address in the system. But that wasn’t what I wanted them to do, and had told him so at least 3 times already by this point.

So I told him for the final time “Yes this can be done, I’ve already done it, the box is already on it’s way here, and it will come back to me in AZ when it ships back, it’s okay that you can’t or won’t do it, but I’m leaving now.”

This is something that I’ve seen at a lot of different resellers, including some that I’ve worked at. The tech immediately looked for a way to charge me, without listening to or understanding what I was saying. He then took my attempts to clarify as objections to the price he quoted me (which they weren’t), and tried to explain why he was charging what he was. Problem was, his justifications for the charges were for things I didn’t want or need them to do. Trying to clarify further again, only brought more justification, then denial that what I wanted to do was even possible. He had jumped to a conclusion before I had finished explaining the first time, then wouldn’t move from that conclusion even when I had shown it didn’t fit me. Instead he thought it would be good to just deny that Apple does what I was describing.

I understand the need for resellers and service providers to charge for their services. What made me angry here was not the price, but the immediate classification of what I wanted as a particular kind of service (which it wasn’t) which costs a particular amount, and a refusal to consider it as anything other than that. There was literally 5 minutes of work involved here. And this is BTW a service that the Apple stores do routinely, and don’t bat an eyelash at.

And while I understand that resellers need to make money, they shouldn’t try to nickel and dime people for every little thing they do. It’s okay to do some things for free to generate good will. If it takes less than 15 minutes, it’s probably okay to do for free. If you insist on charging for anything above talking to me, you’re going to come off as cheap and money grubbing, and you’re going to drive business away. Why would I buy from you when you’ve made it clear you’re going to try and extract every last penny from me?

In the age of Apple Stores, resellers have to provide service above and beyond the Apple Stores to compete. This is not what I’m seeing these days. Most resellers seem surly, customer hostile, and ungrateful for the business they get. There’s a reason Apple started the stores, and this is it.

(update) Try steps 3&4 first. They might fix the issue without the need for your original install disks.

I fixed it using my original install disks, 10.4.10 combo updater, keyboard update and Pacifist. Here’s how.

1. Insert Install disk for 10.4.x and open /System/Installation/Packages/Essentials.pkg/ with pacifist.

(update) for users of localizations there’s a sub step here. 1.1 On your original installation disk, open /System/Installation/Packages/language.pkg with Pacifist. Locate /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app. Click install and select update when asked.

2. Within Pacifist, navigate to /System/Library/Core Services. Click on Dock.app and click install. When it’s uncompressed, it will ask if you would like to update or replace. Click replace. 3. When that’s finished, open the 10.4.10 combo update package with pacifist and navigate to the dock.app again. Click install, and this time when it asks, make sure to click update.. not replace. 4. When that’s finished, open the keyboard software 1.1 mpackage, click the arrow to reveal the contents of AppleKeyboardSoftware_Cmn.pkg, navigate to dock.app one more time, click install and then update once again. Not replace.

Once this procedure is finished, you can force quit dock.app and the keys should work.

Now, you might be able to do this using only the 10.4.10 update and the keyboard software, but going back to your install disk is the only way to get a complete “clean” version of Dock.app as the update does not contain a full copy.

Also you could probably just grab a working Dock.app from a computer like yours (intel for intel, PPC for PPC) with all the software updates completed.

Update: For some reason, the Safari beta will also modify the dock. You may need to uninstall and reinstall the Safari Beta if you’re running it.