Just for reference for anyone who may have been considering getting an Amazon.com Visa card — everything was great until my card went from FirstUSA to Chase, and ever since everything about it sucked — the card was constantly being deactivated for “security fraud” purposes, the phone support system sucked, and the web interface was flaky. When I tried to login today I found all my account details and history missing and a cryptic message on the bottom of the page telling me to call Chase. After much bouncing around, it turned out that my address change, which I did through the online interface, caused a fraud alert to be tripped. They don’t even trust the security of *their own online banking system*. The only thing Chase was able to do *right* was cancel the card — from the second I said “I want to cancel” to the action occuring was about 45 seconds.

On Friday, if all goes well, I’ll be taking posession of the property that will be my new domicile for the forseeable future. The property in question is a condo in 205 Richdale Ave., so junk mailers and mail bombers should note that somewhere in their databases (note: the stuff in those pictures belongs to the previous owners, not me).

This is all very exciting and complicated and expensive, and among other things I’m now saddled with a hefty mortgage, although that will be offset slightly by rent from a roommate (hmm, no more fancy computer purchases for the next 30 years…). The other fun things I’ve been doing to support this purchase include signing lots of paperwork, negotiating details, getting insurance, working on a color scheme and finding art, looking for furniture, and buying my first TV (ooh, shiny LCD).

Its all quite exciting, and Carol and I will have to plan some sort of open house thing once stuff is a bit more settled, so save the non-existent date!

A few things I’m meaning to write about: Public media’s future, Marketplace, Wicked.

Meanwhile, my symptoms:
* Sore throat
* Muscle pain
* Stiff neck (possibly swollen lymph nodes, not sure)
* Clogged synuses
* Constant fatigue
* Dizziness when moving head or standing
* Upset stomach after eating any quantity of food

So lazyweb, what’ve I got? I’d say mono, but I’ve already had that, and it sounds like recurrence is very rare. Possibly something I picked up through travel. Whatever it is, it sorta sucks to have it while on vacation and after traveling all this way.

*Addendum:* In a feat of good timing, Ze Frank explains the Illness Communication Exaggeration Curve. Now someone get me a burrito!

It isn’t often that the SciFi channel impresses me with their selection of shows, but their decision to order and air up to 11 episodes of the new show Eureka is encouraging. The show debuted to very strong ratings and with any luck will keep it up and avoid cancellation, because I’m finding it very enjoyable. The pilot and second episode were a bit awkward at times and in some places lacking, but the third episode set just the right tone. It even saw the annoying teenage daughter character get a bit less annoying, always a good thing.

In brief, the premise of the show is that after World War II Albert Einstein convinced Truman and others to establish a secret town in which the most brilliant Americans and their families could live in safety and secrety and create great new scientific works. The town, Eureka, is controlled by the Department of Defense and is also home to a huge secret government research facility the purpose of which is to take the scientific genius of the town and turn it into useful machines, weapons, and the like. The high concentration of brain power brings a high concentration of other things, including quirkiness, dangerous experiments, paranormal activity, and nefarious double agents.

The show is told through the eyes of the more “normal” people who keep the town running, focusing mostly on the new town Sheriff, a divorced US marshall whose teenage daughter decided to come along for the ride.

If you get a chance, check out Eureka, the fourth episode airs on Tuesday at 9pm, and I have the first three if anyone wants ’em. For my UK friends, it is airing on Sky One under the name _A Town Called Eureka_ on Wedsnedays at 9pm.

For various and sundry reasons that are boring and not worth blogging about, I’m without my computer for the next week or two, and, along with it, all of my email. If you’ve sent me anything deserving of reply and I haven’t gotten to it, please resend it, because I don’t have access to any of my last five years of mail.

Sitting home, feeling crappy, can’t really blame me for blowing a hundred bucks on a dozen DVDs from Amazon’s summer sale. All movies I remember fondly from my childhood. I’ve often wondered if I was actually supposed to have been born in the 70s (and that’s why I missed the dot-com boom), and my love of these early-eighties movies perhaps bears that out. Or maybe it was just that the little video rental store in Lake Arrowhead that we frequented had an odd selection.

The spoils:
* The Last Starfighter (1984)
* Explorers (1985)
* Ghostbusters 1&2 (1989)
* WarGames (1986)
* Space Camp (1986)
* D.A.R.Y.L. (1985)
* Clue (1985)

The rest of the things I got were newer, and include The Bourne Identity, Gattaca, Starship Troopers, and Minority Report. Like I said, I was sick, so I can’t be blamed for what I might do. And this is my last chance to spend a bit before I’m saddled with a mortgage. 😉

From the article on Zingerman’s Family of Businesses referenced in the previous entry:

There’s a concept taught in ZingTrain’s seminars concerning the mastery of a skill. When you know absolutely nothing about a skill, you are unconsciously incompetent — that is, you don’t know what you don’t know. As you learn more, you become consciously incompetent: you know what you don’t know. With training and practice you can become consciously competent, while total mastery makes you unconsciously competent, meaning that you use the skill so effortlessly that you’re not even aware you’re doing it.

Makes sense to me. Easy to apply to life. At Berkman I started off unconsciously incompetent, over a bit of time I realized how much I needed to learn about systems administration (conciously incomptent), and lately I’ve reached conscious competence — I have a fairly good idea of how to do things and know which weaknesses I still need to address. If I continue down this path I might eventually reach unconcious competence, but I’m not there yet by a ways.

The guy from the FiOS booth at the Burlington Mall liked my shirt, which bears the tagline “the only winning move is not to play.” It’s from the movie WarGames, I told him. “I know,” he said, “if only the people in charge now would follow that advice.” Right on, FiOS dude.

Sun Microsystems just released their newest server systems, and they once again look totally kick-ass. In particlar, the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System sorta rocks my world. I’m just thinking — Harvard Law School has seven racks of servers. I’ll bet using this system you could easily fit it into one. One 19u Blade 8000, fully loaded, gives you something like 40 processors and 80GB of RAM with six redundant power supplies, gobs of expansion bays thanks to the really unique design, and tons of gigabit ethernet ports. Fill the rest of the rack with Sun’s storage servers and we’re talking terabytes, we’re talking as many virtualized servers as you could possibly need and storaged sliced however you want it with the ZFS file system and ultimate flexibility with power usage that is pretty darn reasonable. Why spend all this money buildling out a new data center and buying more cooling and bringing in new machines and racks when you can take your whole operation and boil it down to 42u?

Cut your UPS load and apply that $50k previously budgeted to HVAC and consolidate to one rack and throw out sixty machines? The economics are changing.

Placing an online transaction today, I was unexpectedly transferred to a shady-looking page titled “Verified by Visa” that asked for personal details in order to setup some sort of password that I could use to verify my identity when using my Visa card online.

First off, the page was ugly and badly designed, leading me to believe that it was itself fraudulent. Secondly, the linked information about why the system would be beneficial to me was in legalese and very confusing, I was unable to ascertain why I would want to participate in such a system, except that I was apparently being forced to. I tried a few ways to back out the transaction to complete it without the Verified By Visa screen, but was unsuccessful. I ended up just using my MasterCard to make the purchase.

Then a few hours later I received a call from Visa’s fraud department, concerned about fraudulent activity on my account. I had to verify several bits of personal info, answer multiple choice questions, and wait on hold, all for the privilege of being read my transaction and asked to verify that it was, in fact, mine. After that, the card was “unblocked” and the transaction — which I no longer wanted, seeing as I had already used my MasterCard — was put through.

Thanks Visa. Lesson learned? Use MasterCard for online purchases. And don’t trust the Visa card for anything important.

Tim O’Reilly is the latest to pick up on the migration of a few prominent geeks from Mac OS X to Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a really marvelous Linux distribution that I just adore and use on all my servers at work, and used to use on my desktop as well. However, a few months back I spent some time mulling over all the options and made the decision that the best choice for me was to go with a Mac. There are tradeoffs, to be sure, but on the whole the Mac better serves my needs.

Now, however, we have a few prominent geeks very publicly choosing Ubuntu over the Mac, and one has to wonder how this will influence others in the community. Jason Kottke (linked in the O’Reilly post) calls these switchers canaries in the coal mine, and suggests Apple should be worried about the trend. While I find it unlikely that Apple will pay this much mind, I would be thrilled if Mac OS X was improved to respond to some of the criticism being leveled.

Much of the criticism deals with proprietary file formats, which I find disingenuous. The Mac does use proprietary formats for many of their applications, such as how Address Book records are stored, how emails are catalogued, iTunes libraries, calendars, and photos in iPhoto. But all of these apps give the user the ability to export their data into a more standard format (such as vCards for Address Book and iCalendar files for iCal), and most of them also provide an XML representation of their data as well. I’m not terribly afraid of “lock in” with most of these apps, but I would be very happy if Apple were to better document its formats, make them more open, and, most importantly, allow third party developers to interface with them without having to hack other parts of the operating system.

And the reason I stick with the Mac really has to do with all of those apps, and that’s why I decided to stay away from Ubuntu. The way that Address Book is integrated into all the apps that deal with addresses, and iCal takes invitations out of Mail, and the global spell check lets me use the same dictionary for every app, and the way that third-party tools like Quicksilver and Growl work so wonderfully and feel so integrated and are so slick, and the power that Spotlight is slowly bringing to organizing information, these are the reasons I’m sticking with the Mac — for now.

I don’t consider myself a crazy Apple loyalist. I stick with the Mac because in general it works better, it is more innovative, more useful, more friendly, more polished, and makes me more productive. Yes, many of the Mac apps I use are open source or non-Apple, but that’s fine, because they work well and integrate well into the environment. On Linux there is still a mess of competing way to do things, different apps that use different frameworks and look different and have different keyboard shortcuts and use different dictionaries and behave in different ways. There are apps that are only half finished, ideas only half realized, functionality only half implemented.

I use my Mac because it gives me the power to do Unixy things and use the command line but it also gives me the power of the integration of base level stuff in ways that other OSes don’t give me. It provides the glue that links things together and then gets out of the way. And when Ubuntu surpasses the Mac, I’ll gladly switch. I don’t expect that to happen soon.

Today my sister Shaina came into town to start her orientation at Northeastern University. At the dorm she’s staying in, which, like much of the campus, is very nice and modern and in good condition, the prefrosh are given key cards. They swipe the card with the proctor when they enter the building and then, to get into their rooms, they put the card in the door slot and type “9999” on the keypad. Genius! Three factor authentication! Here is how I presume it works during the actual school year (assuming everyone and everything is doing its job):

# *Something you are* – You have to be a resident to get into the building (verified by proctor, with a photo that pops up on the screen when you scan your student ID card)
# *Something you have* – You need to have your unique key card (student ID) to put in your door
# *Something you know* – You need to enter your unique (or semi-unique, if it is shared with your roommate) four-digit authorization code

In theory this setup is very, very good as far as security goes, because in order to break into your room an attacker would need to gain entrance to the building (or already live there), steal, find, or clone your key card, and also know your secret code. I suppose there were probably also security cameras around, although I didn’t look too closely, and in fact if they made the decision to *not* put cameras in residential buildings, I’d think that was an excellent move on their part.

Two-factor authentication is considered much more secure than traditional single-factor methods like an ID card or a password. Three-factor is better still. And at NEU it is being done is an intelligent, straight-forward way that serves to increase security while minimizing inconvenience. Very cool.

On the “something stupid” side, on my drive home I was going down route 16, a well-trafficed, badly-lit road, and I saw two kids riding some strange sort of miniture bicycles that were low to the ground, lacked reflectors, and were not outfitted with lights. The kids themselves were wearing dark clothing which was completely unreflective. I only saw them because I passed them as we were both near the end of a parking lot that was lit, and I saw their vague outlines next to me. To add to the complete idiocy of all this, they were riding the *wrong way* down an unlit road with no bike lanes. Into oncoming traffic. At midnight. On mini-bikes. Morons. If they got hit, I’d call it Darwin at work, and wouldn’t shed any tears.

On Tuesday, the parents arrive!

In an office discussion of Pixar’s latest, _Cars_, Jason and I professed our mutual live for _The Incredibles_, which I’d count as Pixar’s finest and most complex work to date. But Christina had a different take, coming away from the movie with the message that some people are more “super” than others, we must accept our lot in life, and personal growth, struggle, and achievement are not meaningful substitutes for innate abilities. The villain of the piece, Syndrome, was entirely self-made, and obviously incredibly brilliant, but of course along with such brilliance inevitably came insanity, as it does for all of our villains, who have psychological illnesses or physical deformities and are getting back at society and super heros for casting them down or for some other harm, real or perceived, done to them, rather than ever being in the position to use their cunning and intelligence towards *good* ends. In contrast there are the Incredibles, among others, superheroes who spread destruction and chaos on their quests to right the world’s wrongs. Were the actions of society in _The Incredibles_ of banishing super heroes to live out their lives as normal members of society an embracing of mediocraty and spurning of innate talents, or was it rather the dismantling of a fundemntally out of control institution?

These questions echo the _X-Men_ movies: there society fears super-powered freaks who may or may not be well meaning but who certainly have the ability to inflict far more destruction than any “normal” human, and who are very difficult to predict and contain. In _The Incredibles_ the supers are well-meaning but bumbling and annoying and destructive. They serve to bring evil master-minds to the fore rather than pushing them to more productive and socially beneficial pursuits. They cause untold property damage, they disrupt lives, they add unpredictibility and choas to an already chaotic world. In _The Incredibles_ society doesn’t fear the super heroes — it loathes them.

But in the end, the super heroes, who, we musn’t forget, are fallible, are forced back out of hiding to save the day once again, and, as the film ends, are again, at least for the time being, thoroughly embraced by society. And of course, within minutes, another super villain has appeared to wreak additional chaos, and the heroes must once again spring into action. What is the message here? What is the theme Brad Bird and the other creators of the movie are trying to convey? Certainly the message is not a simple one, and I must confess that as of now I cannot decipher it. This deserves some more thought. And also another watch of the movie — this time with the DVD’s director’s commentary track turned on.

Unless you’re interested in the field or have had need for specific information, it has been easy to miss the incredible changes that have occured at the FDA, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services — basically every government organization that touches on women’s health issues — in the past six years.

_Glamour_ provides an excellent and in-depth rundown of what has been going on. Over the past few years my opinions on this matter have changed, and it has had almost everything to do with HPV.

The Bush administration engages in a whole lot of practices that I find highly morally objectionable, and one of the most long-lasting harms the administration and its allies in Congress are causing is the complete implosion of some of the most effective and important science-based arms of the government. In the past, though, I’ve stated that while I find concerted efforts to outlaw abortion, withhold contraception, and spread misinformation about STDs and other diseases to be morally reprehensible, at least it is a practice that, while highly detrimental to the people of today, can be quickly corrected within a few years of the next administration coming into office. This in contrast with the accellerating pace of global warming, which has the potential to affect generations of human beings throughout the entire world.

But my view has shifted, and while I still agree to the fundamental principle I’ve espoused, I now also believe the the religiously motivated shenanigans at the FDA and elsewhere are incredibly harmful and bordering on criminal, for one simple reason: *they are trying to kill people*. Inaccurate information about treatable STDs is one thing, inaccurate information and lack of contraception ahd lack of abortions is strange and self-defeating and wrong, but *withholding the cure to a life-threatening disease on moral grounds is unthinkable.* Yet that is exactly what is happening with a new HPV vaccine that Merck is trying to bring ot market.

HPV, a sexually-transmitted disease, is the major cause of cervical cancer among women. This simple vaccine, incredibly effective, cheap to produce, easily administerd, should be included the vaccine cocktails given to all children in the early years of their lives. But some radical religious conservatives, always looking for ways to stop “immoral” premarital sex, have latched on to HPV as their latest weapon, and object strongly to any vaccine that might somehow “encourage” teenages to have premarital sex by lessening their risks of catching various diseases. Their goal, it seems, is to derail Merck’s drug application in much the same way that they have successfully derailed the over-the-counter version of the Plan B emergency contraceptive pill.

Now, admitted, cervical cancer is not in the top 10 or even top 20 cancers. And in many cases the immune system can itself stop HPV before it causes cancerous cells to develop. Additionally, cervical cancer can generally be detected in women who have regularily gynacological exams. But I find these points immaterial next to the moral absurdity of a political position, supposedly based in deeply held religious beliefs, that is saying, in effect, that *people who have premarital sex deserve to die.* I believe these people are completely morally bankrupt, and I don’t think anything anyone can say is going to convince me otherwise. I can’t even imagine how they might react if a cure to HIV/AIDS was found.

And so while I think global warming and other major environmental problems may be a larger problem than the corruption of science relating to sexual health, when people start getting *cancer* because some blowhard doesn’t like the concept of teenagers having sex, I really start to worry about what other sorts of science is being adversely affected, and what lasting consequences it will be having both to my generation and my children’s generation.

Despite the combined efforts of Air Canada, the Canadian authorities, and the US authorities, I seem to have (remarkably) made my connection to Boston. Which means that in just a few short minutes I’ll be taking off for the final leg of my journey home. Which reminds me of something that impressed me at Paris De Gaulle — you didn’t need to take your laptop out of your bag for their x-ray machine, because, I was told in superior terms, their technology is, indeed, superior. I’m not going to disagree with a Frenchman, especially when he’s right.

In fact, the whole experience at De Gaulle was fairly smooth, with the exception of a lack of automated check-in systems. In contrast, Canada send me through a highly confusing (and poorly marked) sequence of Canadian customs (“Why did you come through Montreal instead of flying directly to Boston from Paris?” “Um, because Air Canada was cheaper, I guess.” “Oh. Well. You’ll see why.”), Canadian ticket check, making me go back upstairs to re-check my luggage, not staffing the luggage check counters, giving me a second customs form to fill out (this time for USA), checking my ticket again, checking my passport again, USA customs, USA supplemental screening (which weirded me out completely), USA hand search of my checked bag, actually checking the bag, metal detector and X-ray, supplemental screening for my laptop, supplemental screening for my backpack, and finally sending me to the farthest away terminal in the place. Goodness, I sure do hope my checked bag made it onto this very tiny plane.

Its funny, because Montreal’s airport is pretty much just a very empty, very slow, very awful, but slightly nicer looking version of Paris’s. After all, everyone is still speaking (and everything is written in) French. I want to go home.

After the great London fire of 1666 destroyed 80% of that city, Sir Christopher Wren was given the monumental task of rebuilding. His influence can be seen everywhere, with some of the most beautiful and lasting buildings, including St. Paul’s Cathedral standing as a lasting tribute to his great works. Despite this, one thing Sir Christopher did not achieve was better transportation. Because many building basements survived, legal disputes arose over land ownership and the plan for a grid city with wide avenues was abandoned. The city was rebuilt along the lines of its existing street plan but with modern additions like a sewer system. Thus even today London consists primarily of many small, congested streets and small, congested sidewalks.

Paris, in contrast, was rebuilt under the direction of Napoleon by razing entire city blocks in order to create wide, modern boulevards and thoroughfares, dozens of bridges over the Seine, and massive parkways and sidewalks that, one would think, would serve to make the city a clean and pleasurable place in which to travel. Remarkably, the amount of congestion in Paris is similar to that of London. The main streets are massive, with a dozen lanes, their sidewalks wide enough to let two dozen people march side-by-side. Areas outside monuments and landmarks contain huge amounts of open space. Paris is simultaneously a dense urban center and a comfortable, spread-out, well-designed transportation conduit.

So why are the Paris streets and walkways just as packed as those of London? Why are the bridges just as crowded? I think that people have a remarkable ability to expand to eat up all available space. If two dozen people can walk side-by-side along the sidewalk, then three dozen will try to, jostling and passing and bumping and getting frustrated. Had London more room and the same number of buildings, shops, restaurants, and attractions, more people would come. In California every time a huge new road works project is finished and new freeway lanes come online, they are instantly filled and soon enough we have the same traffic jams. It isn’t going to ever end as long as resources and people are plentiful.

One of the best things about London, Paris, and other dense urban centers that were forward-thinking is that there is plenty of public transportation in the form of trains, subways, and busses. These transportation systems, of course, have the remarkable virtue of becoming *faster* the more they are used. Think about it: the more people you put on a train, the more cars they will add, the more trains they will put in service, the more people will get to their destinations more quickly. Up to a (very high) saturation point, trains and subways and monorails can continue to be expanded in a way that makes them *more* efficient, not less. For busses this is true to a lesser extent. The Paris Metro trains I’ve ridded have all been crowded. Same goes for their commuter rail. Same goes for the London Underground. These services *do* start to reach their saturation point, but the sidewalks and the roads serve as the necessary bottleneck that keeps all the other services functioning at their peak efficiency.

In which I state gross generalizations and simplifications of things I’ve discovered in the UK that differ from things in the US. See also: part the first.
# British TV seems to find it highly amusing that Hugh Laurie (a Brit) plays a grumpy American doctor on _House_. They especially like it when his accent slips.
# Construction crews, many police officers, some cyclists, and people from numerous other professions where it is appropriate wear jackets or vests with bring yellow or white reflective stripes. This “high vis” clothing is required on construction sites and is really darn useful in picking police out of the crowd. It is fairly prevalent here, but virtually unseen in the States.
# Street performers are called “buskers,” and Underground tunnels bear signs stating “no busking” and designating busking areas.
# The phrase “mind the gap” refers to the large gaps between trains and platforms in some tube stations. Newer or renovated stations have a minimal gap, and the announcement is not made at those stations.
# Much of the transportation (busses, trains, etc.) in the UK is privatised. All of the transportation in Glasgow is excellent.
# “TV Licensing: easier to pay, harder to avoid,” is the tagline of a BBC advert campaign. Brits can be fined up to £1000 ($1883) for failure to pay their TV license fee, which currently stand at approximately £130 ($245) per annum.
# Fries are called chips. Chips are called crisps. When you say fries, there is a 50/50 chance they’ll know what you mean. Thanks, American TV!
# Most of the non-fancy restaurants have crappy ketchup. This was explained to me by a native simply by, “we’re cheap.” Luckily, the fancy place we went to had Heinz, which is important when your steak comes with chips!
# Brits refer to GPS navigation systems as “sat nav,” which, in my opinion, is a way cooler name. *Added 5/28:* It occurs to me why this is the case. GPS is a “brand” that refers to a US military satellite system which provides global positioning information. Europe, which does not like the idea of relying on the US military for such a critical service, is constructing an alternative network of satellites called Galileo which will not bear the “GPS” moniker. Thus the naming “sat nav” is more appropriate in addition to sounding cooler.

In which I state gross generalizations and simplifications of things I’ve discovered in the UK that differ from things in the US. See also: part the second.
# Scotland has a major problem with knife crime (guns are very difficult to get ahold of around here) and so are upping the penalties for knife possession. If someone who has been previously convicted of a violent crime is found carrying a blade, the prosecutor will now take the remarkable step of asking the judge not to grant bail prior to trial. And they consider this to be a major enforcement step. And expect it to make a difference.
# In restaurants, they never, ever bring you your check. You have to ask for it. Two Scots who were behind me on the shuttle to Heathrow were complaining about the American behavior on this, to the effect of: “I was terribly insulted when they brought me the check before I asked for it. I asked the waitress if they have a problem with lots of people leaving with not paying, and she said no.” She thought that the reason we bring people checks when the meal is finished is because otherwise they might forget to pay?
# In restaurants, they don’t refill your drinks. They just don’t. Not even water. When I ask for more water, they always seem very confused, and bring me a new glass. Apparently the invention we call a “pitcher” does not exist here. (Edit: Actually, in fancy restaurants they do top up your glasses when you’ve purchased things by the bottle, but the point still stands.)
# In Scotland, and I suspect England as well, Chip and PIN has huge penetration. It is a system utilizing SmartCards(tm) and keypads for entering a PIN before a transaction can be validated. To support this, most restaurants now use portable wireless credit card readers that they bring to your table, use to process your transaction, and immediately give you an accurate receipt (including gratuity). This is awesome.
# London has moved entirely to a type of taxi cab that is advertised as the “most accessible in the world.” It includes a wheelchair ramp and restraints, two jump seats in addition to the regular seats, doors that automatically lock when the vehicle is in motion, bright yellow handles and seat covers for the visually impaired, and an induction loop audio system to communicate with the driver, which is especially useful for people with hearing aids. In order to fit all this sophistication, the vehicles have no boot (trunk), so luggage is placed in the passenger compartment.

More to come…

# Was the last 30 seconds of the season finale pre-planned, or tacked-on after they found out they were getting renewed?
# Will it be resolved within the first episode back, or will it be an ongoing plot thread (along with the requisite casting change)?