AgPerson

Tomorrow the plumber is coming to replace my dummy water valves — *dummy water valves* — with real, working ones. This requires shutting off water to the entire building of 40 units, but so it goes. How is it legal to install non-functioning water valves as part of new construction? This building is less than 20 years old! Anyway, once that’s done, I’ll be able to unhook my old, broken washing machine and hook up my new, expensive but nearly identical and non-broken one. And then I can have clean clothes again! Three weeks is a long time to wait for clean clothes. I’ll note here that I wanted to use this opportunity to buy a fancy new stacked washer/dryer combo, but after looking at the prices (expensive!) I chose to just replace my washer with what is basically the same model. I imagine it’ll work just as well, except for the cost of it, the delivery, the warranty, and the plumbing work. Ick. Being a homeowner sucks sometimes.

I’ve had a long love-hate history with the Mac: love the elegance and innovation, hate the lock-in. It’d be very nice to be “pure” and run Linux, and with the newer Ubuntus that has become really easy. I may have finally even found a replacement for iTunes, my biggest stumbling block to moving! Plus its always nice to follow in the footsteps of Mark Pilgrim, if not Cory Doctorow.

I’m getting sick of being locked into Apple apps — I use Apple Mail because I want Spotlight (Linux alternative) and Keychain support (no alternative), Safari (+Saft) is more Mac-like but Firefox is more flexible, iPhoto is meh. I’m ambivalent about my feed reader and my terminal app (buggy) and my torrent client (crashy), and my desktop manager (unstable), I love Adium but Pidgin is fine, TextMate is really nice but esoteric, Vim can still serve all my needs. I love Quicksilver and Growl, and don’t really want to live without them…

I know its bad, but I’ve been relying on the imminent release of Leopard, the shiny new version of OS X, to keep my thoughts away from once again considering my Mac/Linux duality. But there is very little apparently new in the next version, and now its been delayed until October, meanwhile my box is increasingly slow and unstable, and I’m not sure another clean reinstall is really the solution. Meanwhile Ubuntu Feisty is right here, right now, and really darn tempting.

Drat.

In the meeting I was in today with public radio folks and technologists, no one liked the _This American Life_ TV show, strongly preferring the audio-only version with its depth and imagination. Seeing things visualized on screen greatly took away from enjoyment of the show, in their opinion. I don’t agree. I like them both. Not sure which I like better. I think the rich TAL TV imagery is artful and appealing, and the mental soundscapes of the radio show are captivating. I’m going to keep watching and listening.

Yeah, no one knows what I’m talking about. But as I try with little success to suck down Life on Mars from BitTorrent, I think back to when cable modems were new, music was heavily compressed, software was lightweight, bandwidth was plentiful, servers were private, and I started a little something called (∞) the infinity alliance. Good times.

I unpacked my Apple TV unit today. It works about how I expected. Wish the video quality was better. Wish I could get other video into it and didn’t have to sync everything through iTunes. Generally happy with the rest (audio playback and the like), and expect people will hack around some of those problems. Here are my predictions for the product:

* Within three months units will start to die from overheating or some other widespread problem, and lots of angry consumers will start various protest web sites and threaten class action lawsuits. Apple will eventually quietly setup a repair program.
* Within six months Apple will release a more powerful model that can play more types of content and will have the option of a larger hard drive for $50 more.
* By the end of the year there will be a decent amount of 720p content on the iTunes store, a bunch of movies and at least a few TV series.
* It will take Apple far longer than it should to incorporate proper chapter support, alternate language tracks, commentary tracks, and subtitles into their format, iTunes Store content, and on the Apple TV, but they will have made some measurable progress by 2008. Getting at these features will be at least slightly painful because the current remote doesn’t have enough buttons.
* Apple will stick with the stupid gumstick remote, much like they did with the hockey puck mouse, for far longer than it makes sense to do so — at least two years — before finally coming out with something better.

Now to go cancel my cable and put my TiVo Series 3 on Ebay. Man I hope my predictions are true.

Excuse me for being late to this game, in the past I’ve bought and sold software packages which include media, serial numbers, sometimes even USB dongles or other copy protection devices. But now I find myself in an interesting position — a couple months ago I bought a program (Airfoil) to send audio to my AirPort Express. I paid for it with a credit card, downloaded the program from a web site, and entered a serial number I received by email. No physical manifestation of the program to hold and transfer.

Today I got an AppleTV, and no longer need the functionality. The software is fresh and undamaged ;), and I have every intention of deleting it from my computer. I’d like to recover at least a portion of my $25 investment, and would do so by offering the license for sale on eBay. So my two questions would be, first, does the first sale doctrine apply to software licenses like this? And second, will eBay, regardless, yank my listing? Berkfolk?

I got my new Bank of American (ne MBNA) credit card a week ago and today tried to make my first online purchase — buying some Skype credit so that I can call home. After typing the card number Skype gave me a page saying that my card needed to be “verified” by Visa before it could be accepted, then transferred me to a “verifiedbyvisa.com” URL that, oddly enough, resulted in an error page rather than a verification page. Intrigued by what new ridiculous piece of so-called protection software Visa has decided to roll out, I read up on the program. It only works at a few participating sites, participation is determined by the card issuer, and it doesn’t seem to offer any benefits to the consumer *at all* that justify the annoyance. Visa talks about how it makes online transactions “more secure,” but since it only works on a few merchant sites and still requires that you type in your credit card information, it doesn’t protect you from fraudulent online sales, it only protects you, in a few specific instances, from someone trying to use your credit card to, say, by Skype points online. They can still use it by mail, in stores, or at most other web sites.

The best part about the Visa FAQ is the strange evasive non-answers to important questions, like the question about whether Visa’s “zero liability protection” still applies when using the “Verified by Visa” program. This is important because in Europe, where Chip & PIN is becoming the norm, credit card companies are now putting the onus of proof on the cardholder and the merchant, claiming that their two-factor protection (already proven to be flawed by Cambridge University researchers) means that they should no longer be responsible for fraudulent purchases.

Here is what Visa has to say about consumer protection, see if you can make more sense of it than I can:

Will Visa’s Zero Liability policy cover me if someone uses my password to make a purchase using Verified by Visa?
The Zero Liability policy** protects you against the unauthorized use of your Visa card. For further details about the Zero Liability policy and Verified by Visa contact the financial institution that issued your Visa card.

So did I go through the Verified by Visa process and get my card setup to buy Skype minutes? No, I cancelled the transaction. And if I do decide in the future that the hassle of getting some Skype credits is worth it, I’ll use my MasterCard.