BitLizard’s Blog

This week we switched from Comcast 7mb Internet and DirecTV satellite TV over to AT&T’s new U-verse service – a bundle that includes TV, Internet and VOIP phone. This change should save us around $50 a month and give us a faster connection. In general, I am happy with the way things have gone thus far. We were sold the new service by a door-to-door salesman (first one I’ve seen in decades). The ordering process was lengthy but reasonably easy to understand. Installation happened a week later (I postponed on them for a few days) and went off without a hitch. In fact, the installer went beyond the call of duty and took it upon himself to clear away and tidy up the side of the building previously occupied by my hodgepodge DirecTV rat’s nest. Setup took about 3.5 hours.

The new U-Verse service does not exactly duplicate my previous service. The largest difference is in the availability of HD streaming. We have 4 HD television sets on the property and previously we could watch HD programming on all 4 simultaneously. U-verse, on the other hand, can only manage 2 HD streams at one time plus 2 SD streams. But I am discovering that stated limitation is actually just the “guaranteed service level”. It appears, at least so far, that I can have 3 HD streams without any untoward effects. I haven’t tried 4 yet. Beyond this slight drawback there are many advantages. No satellite rain-outs disrupting our TV programs. The single DVR can record 4 programs simultaneously that can be played back on any TV in the house. The Internet access (at 12 megabit) is just dazzlingly fast. I’m a very happy camper so far.

I hear that Verizon has a similar service named FioS in their telephone network territory. Unlike AT&T, they actually string fiber directly to your home. So fat pipe Internet speeds should be at least theoretically possible with that service. Unfortunately I don’t live in their service area so I will have to wait for Ma Bell to upgrade the network.

Given my experience thus far, I can heartily recommend switching to U-Verse if its available in your area. Cheaper and better, what’s not to love?

Life in General

Its an inevitable part of life’s journey, I suppose, that when you’ve accumulated about 50+ years you start to see friends, family and co-workers pass permanently from your life with an ever increasing frequency. For me, it started with a high school friend who died far too prematurely in his 20′s – beaten to death in a drug deal gone bad. Then more recently with one of my closest friends during the teenage years, Mark Swenson, who died in a motorcycle accident a decade ago after a difficult life. More recently still was Dan Duerr who graciously helped us through the dual hurricanes of 2004 and was an inspiration to many.

Now its time to say farewell to my friend and boss Mark Miller – or officially Melvin C. Miller of the M. C. Miller Company. Mark’s dream was to grow the business to a point where he could throttle back a little and indulge his passion for sailboats and sailing. But as many business people know, you may own 100% of the shares of a business but the business also ends up owning you to a point also. There was always one more big project that would require his direct involvement. One more decision he felt that he couldn’t ask anyone else to make. One more employee he had to protect from the wrath of his brash, hothead VP! Without seeming to have a “driven” personality, he was a driven man and his passion was first and foremost the M. C. Miller Company. His reputation was both his sword and shield. He was “old school” — a cash flow guy rather than an investor guy.

Mark died in his sleep on June 21st. The period since has been a difficult time for me personally. Though we did not socialize outside the business to any great degree, Mark was a close friend and we worked together on many different projects. He always sought my opinion on just about any topic, business or personal. And he taught me some very important lessons about people and business over the 14 years we knew each other. Mark especially enjoyed pushing me out of my comfort zone and loved the shock and awe he could evoke in me by his sometimes anarchical behavior. Thanks, Mark… I needed that.

In his last will and testament, Mark left control of the company in a trust to the benefit of his employees.  The business is going to continue forward in the directions Mark has established. Eventually each of us will be adding to this legacy in our own way and I think the company has a glorious future. Thanks Mark for trusting us with your business. We will not let you down!

At the office we are having a memorial for Mark on August 1st to mourn the passing of our friend. We seek closure but I am not sure if we can close this wound so easily. He will be missed by a great many people.

Family and Friends business, M. C. Miller Co., Mark Miller, MCM

The Internet is such an interesting little place. I ran across this little blog entry ruminating on how to communicate with aliens upon first contact. Embedded in this piece is the factual golden nugget that the TV show I Love Lucy whose broadcast signals have been traveling outbound from Earth at the speed of light since they were broadcast, have reached the potential ears of 105 G-type star systems like our own. I am not sure whether I consider this a good thing or a bad thing. Hopefully they have a sense of humor. If not, they may be headed this way with advanced weapons to keep that sort of humor contained.

Childhood, Future, Science aliens, sci-fi, Science

After my recent trip to Denver on Frontier Airlines, I’ve been reflecting on how much a difference it makes to have an extra inch of legroom in front of your airline seat. Typically I fly Delta or Continental whose jets are far less comfortable. Especially those small Brazilian jets that Continental flies to Houston from West Palm Beach. Those seats actually caused me physical injury which I would rather not describe.

There appears to be an inverse relationship with the size of the airline and the comfort of the seat. Check this article out. Midwest Airlines essentially gives you a business class seat in coach. Its a wonderful thing… and I wish I flew to Kansas City and Chicago more often. But Frontier Airlines is good, as is JetBlue. I can even say nice things about TAM, the Brazilian airline whose long haul planes are very comfortable indeed and the service is a cut well above our domestic airlines – and less expensive to boot. You will also see on the table in that article that Delta and Continental are among the worst for legroom and seat size. And recent news suggests they are both going to squeeze us further.

So if you have a choice, check out the little guys for more seat at the same price or less. And while I’m on the subject of the airlines, I just had to pay Continental a freakin $200 in addition to 60,000 frequent flier miles for the privilege of upgrading two passenger’s round trip tickets. Its seems odd that Continental thinks its a good idea to shore up their finances by draining much of the value away from the frequent flier miles their best customers have accumulated. I can’t think of anything they could have possibly done to make me feel more disgusted with them. Suffice it to say, if I’m not flying to Houston, I will not be flying Continental. Cramped seats, poor service and now thievery have put me off permanently.

Life in General Airline, Continental Airlines, Frequent flyer program, Frontier Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Midwest Airlines

What a great pleasure it was to meet with some of my very old and special friends this past week. We are talking “long acquaintance” here …  high school and garage band days. My friend Jim – I think its been something like 26 years since I’ve seen him. His brother Ken, bass player for the band, and one of my favorite people of all time. Why has it been 15 years since I’ve talked to Ken? Steve is my life insurance agent (and brother to our drummer). So we manage to keep in touch. And Paul … who I’ve known since back far enough that our first meeting is lost in that grey misty area of the deep past … Paul is in my MSN Live Messenger chat list! But I bet prior to our little reunion last week it had been several years since we traded messages.

Where does the time go? Why don’t I devote real time to keeping in touch with the people who mean the most to me… those where the emotional ties run bone deep. Its definitely perverse in a way. Its that “Important, but not Urgent” category of life’s task list that is so hard to get right. Obviously, this is the reason that sites like Facebook and MySpace are the social phenomenon that they are, providing us an easy way to maintain a connection that your busy life my not otherwise offer much time for.

So Ken, still the most extraordinary cook out this collection of Village Inn Pancake House alumni, broke out the Rib Eye’s and the NY Strips, organized a baked potato bar, threw together a delicious green salad and fed us a great meal on the back porch of his house in the foothills. It was one of the most happy and interesting evenings I’ve had in many years. Thanks, guys. It was great catching up with everyone.

It was with a deep melancholy and, let’s face it, just plain ol’ Rocky Mountain home sickness, that I trudged back at the Denver airport for the trip home. And I confess that when it was looking like Frontier Airlines was going to bump me from their only flight of the day to Orlando, I wasn’t all that upset. One more day in big sky country, granite and pine… there are a lot worse places to be stranded.

Childhood, Family and Friends, My Life Denver, friends

When the conversation turns to talking about Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook and Twitter, I am amazed at how different their perception of what the Twitter service is all about is to my experience with it. So my idea for this blog entry is to relate a few experiences I have had and describe the benefits I see in using the service.

What is Twitter?

If you are a lot younger that  am (and who isn’t?) then you probably already understand what Twitter is. For the geezers in the audience, imagine one giant worldwide chat room feed that is search-able. A chat room where the messages are somewhat temporary and brief (140 characters or less) and where you can filter out everybody except those few who you are specifically interested in.

A lot of messages on Twitter are simply personal status updates — what the twit is doing now, his opinion of some experience that just happened to him/her etc. However, with the people I’ve decided to follow, Twitter is much more like a bunch of super-talented, super-intelligent people pointing out items they find interesting or thought provoking. In general, I’ve tended to follow famous computer programmers and science fiction authors. But I also follow people I find that are in my business or live near Vero Beach. And then there are those who I just find really odd or bizarre — purely for the entertainment value.

For awhile I followed the user @cwalken who was impersonating Christopher Walken. You were never sure if it was him or not. The tweats were quite bizarre and if it wasn’t Walken you found yourself hoping that this was what he was really like in real life. Alas, he was finally revealed as a talented imposter. I still follow the @formerlycwalken and his flashes of brilliance now seem to be fewer are farther between somehow. But every once in awhile he can turn in a doozy.

I also was amused by the recent twitter war between CNN and Ashton Kutcher – a race to see who could assemble the greatest number of followers. It was a reasonably close contest but Ashton came out on top. I hear that @mrskutcher also has quite a following.

Use Twitter to announce product availability

I read a news story this morning about Korean Taco trucks in Los Angeles (no we don’t have those in Vero Beach yet :/) that announce their current location and menu specials via Twitter. Trucks that don’t tweat are losing out to those that do. Restaurant advertising is the most often cited example of using Twitter to attract more people to your business.

I have installed an extension in this WordPress-based blog that generates an automatic tweat each time I publish a blog article. So that’s another example of announcing product availability on Twitter. To do this successfully you must have either a very large following or you must imagine what people might be searching for and use those terms in your announcement. For example, if you are a local retail business you could include the words “vero beach” somehow in your announcement so that people searching will find it. Or many will use tags like “get 20% off any menu item at Happy Family #verobeach next 3 hours”.

Prostitutes kicked off Craigslist find Twitter

In the wake of the Boston serial killer who used Craigslist to find his prostitute victims, that site has now deleted its “erotic services” section. Is it any coincidence that I am now seeing my “Vero Beach” search feed featuring prostitutes alongside the real estate brokers normally lurking there? I think not.

This brings up a major point about Twitter… there are an awful lot of commercial messages on Twitter and this would tend to spoil a medium to some extent. But on Twitter things are a little different. You would normally never see such messages unless you are performing a search. So consumption of advertising is managed by the reader to a very large extent. Twitter advertising is much more highly targeted to the interests of the reader than, for example, the context driven ads on Google search results. This is a huge advantage.

Finding new friends and customers

TwitterHawk is a very interesting new service that is basically a bot that watches the entire Twitter feed looking for telltale words and phrases that you might want to respond to. The service is a little controversial in that it could be used to assist with the insertion of a blatant commercial message into what would otherwise be a somewhat private coversation (private in that it would be lost in the tremendous deluge of the public feed). Such a use of the service would be a violation of the terms of service, but still….

But you can use this sort of service to look for people who share your interests or your business focus. Its akin to having a friend at a party tell you that that guy over on the other side of the room is a computer programmer looking for work. You have an open position so you might want to go over and introduce yourself. This can be a great tool to finding new friends and expanding your horizons. And its free unless you use it to send automatic messages — something I don’t think is very useful anyway (unless you are a spammer, of course).

Twitter Clients

The twitter experience is much enhanced if you use a capable and feature-rich client. I use TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop, depending on my mood. With each of these programs you can set up a separate feed windows, each with its own search criteria. TweetDeck also has a window that suggests some search terms deemed significant from the public feed. Its seems that this should be a more useful capability than it actually is in practice. I don’t understand why or how it selects some things over others. But these two clients do add significantly to the Twitter experience over and above using the web interface.

My Favorite Twits

formerlyCwalken / Christopher Kutcher (so he says – but this is the original name of Ashton Kutcher)

pennjillette / Penn Jillette (genius magician)

ryancarson / Ryan Carson (web 2.0 expert)

garyvee / Gary Vaynerchuk (outrageous wine store owner 2.0 and motivational speaker)

jasonfried / Jason Fried (programmer)

textfiles / Jason Scott (archeologist of computer tech)

codinghorror / Jeff Atwood (programmer)

scalzi / John Scalzi (science fiction author)

neilhimself / Neil Gaiman (science fiction author)

zoblue / zo.blue (Zulema) (web site developer)

thesarahcoleman / Sarah Coleman (very talented artist)

foofighters / Foo Fighters (rock band)

newscientist / New Scientist (science news)

Oh, and don’t forget to follow @bitlizard if you get involved with Twitter! But be warned… it will be a bit boring when compared to those mentioned above.

Life Online Advertising, Online Communities, Seesmic, Social Networks, TweetDeck, twitter, web 2.0

Its just a perfect day in Vero Beach, a gentle breeze and uncharacteristically low humidity. Linda and I are kicking back on the pool deck, sipping pomegranate-tinis and contemplating our tropical garden swaying in the breeze. The swimming pool is ice-blue and totally algae-free. Just wear your goggles so that the chlorine doesn’t turn your eyeballs to jelly. (Who put me in charge of that anyway… heh heh).

Oh, and we are tag-team blogging, of course. Linda is on her Sony Vaio powerhouse. While I am tranquilly typing on my itsy bitsy pipsqueak G-Meso netbook.

Linda has a wonderful entry about a local house on the beach that, for a mere pittance of US$ 6.7 mil, will bring you a wonderful, additional gigantic tax bill every year. Oh, and its probably totally uninsurable. But never mind, it is totally to die (or go bankrupt) for. Check it out…

I, on the other hand, yes this is my blog entry. And its all about the economy, dammit.

First let me say that I am deeply thankful that my talents, such as they are, are deployed to the benefit of the Energy sector. There are a lot of things being devalued significantly at the moment, but Energy isn’t really one of them. Sure oil has declined from $140 to $50. But the $140 price was just lunacy and everybody knew that (or at least knows it now). Historically, $50 oil is about where is should be, possibly a wee bit higher. I’m glad I am not in banking or discretionary consumer retail. I talked to a few bankers today while negotiating at Sears for a new refrigerator. Total bureaucrats, all of them. If you are in banking presently, I suggest getting out of it pronto. Its no place for a thinking, feeling human being. And my consumer-retail salesman looked extremely anxious and hungry (and resentful of the bankers). I guess I see his point.

So the point of all this is, I am not a believer of the axiom that the recession/depression is all behind us. We still have plenty more to work through. And the so-called stimulus is nothing more than political payouts to the supporters of the current administration. There is precious little that is stimulative about it, unless you are a member of the parasitic class in the USA.

The current apparent recovery in the stock market is a head fake… there are more legs down to this stock market. For the unabashed truth about the state of our economy and the market you should definitely sign up for John Mauldin’s Frontline Thoughts weekly newsletter. He is the author of Bullseye Investing that warned long ago that future stock market returns were going to be (ahem) a bit below normal. After listening to all the rest, he is the only one I am listening to now. I expect that this rally will become weaker and weaker over the next few weeks and during that time I will be moving my current 50% cash position to about 75%. The remaining 25% will be invested in anticipation of a weakening dollar vis-a-vis real goods (i.e.inflation). Investing in inflation while the country is grappling with deflation seems stupid. But I expect these massive sums of money currently being created by the government will actually work as designed. They will inflate at full throttle until deflation is no longer a concern. Our national debt will balloon to gigantic proportions and our currency will suffer big time for it. Social Security surpluses will be a thing of the past this year or next, about a decade sooner than forecast. This is going to get ugly, folks – especially for debtors. Pay down what you can. Save, hedge… be smart.

I like Palladium, Natural Gas and Silver… in that order. I hate teen-focused retail, the banks and the autos.

But then again, I hear a couple of egret’s playing in the canal that runs next to our house. The sun is shining, the banana tree’s are swaying, and I can’t imagine life being any better. We will endure… we will endure…

Investing

The title “Rich functionality underlies Simple Presentation” is perhaps the highest compliment I can pay a piece of software. Achieving this should be the holy grail of software development. Sometimes the presentation is simple but the functionality is also very limited. Other times the functionality is very rich but the user interface is also extraordinarily complicated (and yes, I am guilty as charged here). Once in awhile you come across an application that manages to provide a simple presentation for a rich feature-set lying just below the surface. Its the type of application that is instantly recognizable to the user and can be put to good use without much if any instruction.

Remember the Milk is just such an application. Its a task list manager – an application that almost all of us have used at some time or another. Make a list, check off the tasks as you complete them, rinse and repeat. Simple… and RTM can be used in exactly this way. But for those desiring more, there’s plenty of horsepower under the hood here. Do you need to prioritize? Just select some tasks and press 1, 2 or 3. Do you want to keep track of a due date? Just select a task and enter “2 weeks from Friday” in its “Due” field. Do you want to establish tags for searching? No problem. Recurring tasks? Enter “20th of each month” into the “Repeat” field. Do you need reminders sent to your cell phone? Suffice it to say this is a task list on steriods.

But oh so simple and accessible. The thing I like the most is the natural language approach to the setting of due dates and establishing repetition. This is a sweet bit of code. In my pipeline integrity application “ProActive”, establishing these data items is much less convenient — i.e. a cumbersome calendar control or, for repetition, a combination or 3 or more controls. Take a lesson, Ron, sheesh.

RTM offers a free version to get you started. However, the “Pro” version is only $25 a year. Well worth the price if just to insure that these guys keep churning out the great software.

Programming and IT programming, remember the milk, rtm, web 2.0

One thing you have to give the British is they know how to craft a speech. Check out this gem from a Member of Parliment in the UK.

Uncategorized

I’ve checked the statistics and it doesn’t look like I’ve lead anyone astray, thank goodness. Over the last month I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that it was wrong to recommend the Sylvania G-Meso Netbook. This unit has some serious problems in some key features. You can find better value elsewhere. Here are the problems:

1. DEAL KILLER: wifi radio is implemented very, very badly. If you are going to ship Ubuntu Linux on a consumer netbook you would think you would go the extra mile to insure that the WIFI chipset you were using was well supported. But not at Sylvania, it appears. The driver for the radio is extremely flawed. It cannot connect to a network featuring modern (i.e. this century) encryption. Plus, for some reason, the driver causes the range of the radio is diminished to 10 feet or so. I hear that the Windows XP driver works just fine. But that is a dead-end OS and we don’t know how Windows 7 will run on this sort of computer. Deal killer, fer sure. With a lot of hyper-technical huffing and puffing I managed to get the netbook connecting about 50% of the time. But I wouldn’t expect Joe consumer to be able to get that done — even with step by step instructions.

2. The keyboard is too small. I guess I should have paid more attention to the comments before I bought this. My expectation was that it would have a keyboard on a par with the Acer Aspire One netbook (on which I can type with my usual 6 fingered style). Not so, the G-Meso. This keyboard is truly tiny. I find myself using my cell phone technique for it.

So I’m removing the G-Meso from the list of Bazaar products. Lesson learned… I’ll make sure that I check these things out more thoroughly.

I’m currently in negotiations with my daughter Olivia to trade her my G Meso for her Aspire One. The negotiations are not going well….

Bazaar products Acer Aspire, Netbook, Olivia, ubuntu