Air Travel Security Update

I read fairly widely, and I find thata book is a great commute companion, escpecially with the NYC subway.  Tuning out the MTA with an iPod is often a close second.  I'm almost done with Assasin by Ted Bell, part of the Alex Hawke series, featuring an impossibly rich British-American commando-gentleman who saves the day.

The book features a fiendishly wide-reaching terrorist plot, and I  have just reached a description of an airliner attack over the pacific, with the explosive force  generated by a binary liquid explosive triggered by an MP3 player.  The book was written in 2004-thank you, TSA, for being on top of "the literature." 

Bitacle Blog Search Archive - The Madden Curse

Several of my friends are hooked on Madden.  For the uninitiated, "Madden" is a video game called "Madden NFL XX", with XX being the annual re-incarnation of this franchise (pun intended).  I recall attempting to play this game at my friend Dave's house and losing by approximately 50 points by the third quarter.  The word complicated is re-defined by this game. 

I borrowed a friend's copy of "last year's Madden," Madden '06, and tried playing it last night with my roommate.  I can see it's going to be a long road ahead. 

I'm not a hardcore gamer- I am rarely interested in spending countless hours on something which only frustrates me.   The only exception to this rule is Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (not counting the three straight days I spent playing A-Train when I was 9), which was such a great game that I had no choice but to power past my frustration. 

Gaming enthusiasts write about the dividing line between enjoyably difficult and impossibly difficult, and I hope that my own experience helps me to understand that line.    I'll let you know when I master Madden 06.

Why call this the Madden Curse, then?  Well, when I drafted Shaun Alexander for my fantasy team, "Requiem for Denver," I apparently ignored the conventional wisdom: the player on the cover of the Madden video game will have a horrible year, or get injured, or something otherwise terrible.  That player this year is Shaun Alexander, who has been good fort a whopping (sarcasm)  140 Rushing yds, 10 receiving yds, 1 TD,  1 fumble, and I daresay, 1 Madden Curse. 

And yes, I am a Broncos fan, have been since 1984.  Go Broncos, and take the Nuggets with you!

UPDATE 9/20 3:00PM
I just saw an Advertising Age article describing the NFL Network's 14-team fantasy football league, with each team representing one of the 14 major media agencies.  They had a live draft, and somebody used a high pick on guess who:


OMD led off the draft, picking Kansas City's Larry Johnson. Universal McCann took San Diego's LaDainian Tomlinson with the second pick. Horizon Media, defying the legendary "Madden curse," chose Seattle's Shaun Alexander third. (Since 2000, players that have appeared on the cover of the box for Madden NFL video games have tanked.)

How's that for timing?   

Sports!

Most of my friends use a free service run by TellMe to get sports scores when they are not at a computer.  I'm inclined to agree with Bruce McVarish, that voice is the mouse of mobile, but disinclined to think 800-555-TELL  is anything but a novelty at this point.

What's good about the service?
Perhaps let's start with that.  You can get scores for almost any sporting event you might be interested in.  I've used it successfully (see below for definition of success) for football, baseball, and basketball.  The scores are pretty recent, and often include a little quip based on the score and whether the team you asked for was the winner of loser. 

For example if the Jets played the Broncos last night on MNF, and you called during the third quarter and asked for "Sports" then "Football" then "Denver," you might hear, "Currently, the Broncos are trouncing the Jets, 77-3, in the third quarter."  The system adds words like "trouncing" all by itself.  If you had asked for New York Jets, you might hear, "Currently, the Jets are being demolished by the Broncos, 77-3, in the third quarter."

The utility of the service exceeds its drawbacks.  While my friends seem to use it exclusively for sports scores, the system can also deliver weather, traffic, or financial news; I have not used the financial news feature.  The traffic report feature is quite cumbersome and finding out the traffic conditions on a major route, like the George Washington Bridge, was very difficult.

It's free.

What's bad?
Using the service in any crowded or noisy place is out- though perhaps this should be blamed on poor microphone technology- it works infrequently at best.  The system constantly mis-hears you.  A nice confirmation of what it did hear is famous.  One often says "Sports" as the category one wants and hears, inexplicably,  "Ok, traffic."  Few calls are without errors as one says "stop" "Main Menu" and "Sports" over and over to try to get the right section of the service.  It can be highly frustrating, especially when one successfully navigates to the promised land of "sports" and is repeatedly told either "I'm sorry, I didn't get that" or "Golf" instead of "football."

So, where is the mouse heading?  Would people really continue to use their mice with PCs if they constantly had to re-click and  even this frequentrly returned the wrong results?  The mouse would have been doomed.  So, I'm not sure voice navigation is there yet. Don't get me started on T-Mobile's voice-navigated customer service...

A comment on Air Travel "Secuirty Theatre"

Dave Farber's IP list  had an interesting post about the list of prohibited items now appearing on the TSA web site.  KY Jelly is explicitly authorized. 

I wondered what was on the list, and surfed to the TSA's page for "Law Enforcement Officials Traveling Armed."

Excerpt:

Our Office of Law Enforcement / Federal Air Marshal Service would like to remind officers and agents not to transport prohibited items through security checkpoints or onboard aircraft while traveling armed.  Regulations surrounding prohibited carry-on items such as lighters, stun gun devices, replicas of firearms and knives are covered in the training material, as well as information regarding security checkpoint procedures. Particular attention should be given to the prohibition against carrying hazardous materials, such as pepper spray or mace, in carry-on bags.  For more information read our prohibited items section.

So, a gun, but no liquids, lighters, or lip gloss?  Does the TSA worry that a <bad guy> will overpower an Air Marshall, steal the aerosol deodorant from his carry-on, and take over the plane?

Fedex Monster Vanquished

Someone finally called me and made all my dreams come true...well, my FedEx dreams, anyhow.  I learned a  tremendous amount about customer relationship management.  My office may not do $100k of business a year with FedEx, but I expect a certain level of service from a global corporation.  It is a bit disgraceful that I spent so long on the phone.

Escalation is a key concept in most kinds of customer service.  A pyramid of people reach out to the customer, and try to solve the problem.  Effectively passing the customer from one level to another keeps costs down.  Some searching for such a pyramid approach on Google leads me to believe that most of the innovation around this idea is in IT services. 

A lot of the guidelines for IT organizations (from corporate internal tech support to Oracle's customer support process) focus on delivering a promised level of service to  the customer, and also on guaging ther severity of the problem the customer faces.  Other call center and general CRM approaches seek to apply the most resources to the customers with the highest lifetime value- and making data about the customer's contacts witht he firm available to representatives in multiple areas.

But where was I fitting in to FedEx's list?  The Gestalt hypothesis suggests that if they had reached out to me more, i might have been satisfied even if they had been unable to solve the problem.   My expereicne was that this only went so far.  At a certain point, after several CSRs called to try to "fix" the problem, or left an idiotic message with an invitation to wade through 85 layers of other robots with southern drawls (no offense, actually they are all nioce people, but even the Second Death Star had plumbing contractors ) by calling 800.go.fedex. 

I'm still thhinkoing about this and when I find the right way to capture how FedEx should be operating, I'll post it for sure.

What's in My Media Wallet

Some things I've watched or listened to lately:

Showtime's Weeds (all of season 1 and what's out there of Season 2)- Really great and sharp comedy series.  Kevin Nealon is excellent.

Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral - Very interesting- incredibly passionate guy

Stealth- boy did this suck.  Sexual tension thicker than an aircraft carrier's hull, would have been intolerable except for occasional explosions.  Sort of like Iron Eagle meets Short Circuit.  But not as good as either of them by a long shot.

Mashup of Deep Purple's "Perfect Strangers" and the Beastie Boys "Shake Your Rump" courtesy of Mashuptown's Mashup of the Week Podcast [subscribe]

Flightplan- You don't miss anything if you fast forward through this one.

Me and You and Everyone We Know- weird independent film.  Plenty of teenage girl weirdness though the film is focused on the young sons of an up and coming loser and his artist girlfriend. 

The Octagon- Delta Force is clearly a much better Chuck Norris movie.  This movie's plot is thinner than Kate Moss on a  hunger strike.  Bad, bad dialogue.

Arena - I love this movie.   I have loved this movie since I saw it long ago on cable.  I loved it so much I created the wikipedia article on it and added it to the list of movies referencing "Swordfish" as a password. Spaceborne fighting arena with electronic handicapper system pits human unknown against evil looking alien champion.  Gambler/Don King analogue tries to fix the fight but human wins the day.  It's sort of The Last Starfigher meets Rocky.

Wireless Connectivity Problem Solved

In my apartment, I have a Belkin 802.11a/b/g router connecting me to my cable modem and (thanks to TiVo Desktop and my dual-boot MBP) my TiVo.  Despite a warning from my dad that it might not be the most reliable brand out there, it has performed rather well.  Occasionally it will have a fit and not let my computer or my roommate's (12" PBG4) connect- I usually solve this by waiting for it to pass, changing the WEP password, cycling the power, or hanging the router from the gallows pole (note to self- explore Led Zeppelin theme).

My previous machine, a 12" iBook G3 700Mhz, suffered through the above router problems, but what it did do was reliably connect to my preferred home network without assistance from me, as long as Airport was on.  When the computer turned on, or woke from sleep, it connected automatically.  I saved the password in the "NYC Apt" location in my Network preferences.

when I migrated to the MBP, the computer worked great except that, on system start, wake from sleep, and turning airport on and off, I had to manually select the network, but not re-enter the password.  I finally deleted the preferred network from the Network control panel, and now it connects fine.  The stored item in the control panel seemed to  have been conflicting with the stored password in the keychain.  Only time will tell whether I will have to enter my keychain password every time I want to connect to the wireless network...though Gmail Notifier has my Gmail password stored there as well.  But for now, success

Day 11 of the Fedex Monster

About a month ago, I discovered that a number of our invoices from dear ol' FedEx had shipments clearly not sent by anyopne ion my office.  Seems that Pape Diarra (near columbia University) sent Seneba Bone (Dakar Liberte, Senegal- on the western tip of Africa) 72.6 lbs of lord knows what.  There were  maybe a dozen shupments like this, to destinations in the US (viginaia, west virginia, Tennessee, Florida) all with shipper and recipient unknown to me. 

Our account number is in the wild somewhere.  Obviously, every day that goes by before our account is closed means that FedEX is performing a service for which it will never be paid.

Every customer service rep with whom I have spoken, and I bet there have been nearly 20 different ones, considering the number of phone calls, has been helpful and understood the seriousness of the situation.  However, seemingly as a result of our affiliation with a large research university, new acccounts must go through a specific account executive.  FedEX will not disclose his e-mail address or direct phone number, so all I can do is leave him two voice mails a day, which are unreturned.  I am at a loss.  I won't authorize payment on the airbills in question, but I can;t close the account until we have a new one.

Sigh.  What a shame for a company to treat us this way.

 


Note to self: fix categories in typepad interface.

Priorities...WiFi or Butter?

Last week, Morgan Spurlock's show 30 Days featured the story of an American IT worker whose job was outsourced to Bangalore.   (the show is on the same premise as Spurlock's Documentary, "Super Size Me" - what if you did <uncomfortable thing> for 30 days?)  The IT worker in question moved to Bangalore for 30 days to see what kind of job he could get.  He got a job not as a programmer but as an operator in a call center.

The show is, in general, very well done and also highly original and thought provoking. 

Today, GigaOm has an  interesting note about Bangalore wanting to be the next city with a wifi cloud.  Last week's episode of 30 Days showed that there are still many many extremely poor areas of Bangalore, that the city is prone to riots and violence- not every day, but if the city can be held hostage by violent mobs when a movie star dies, things are not swell and dandy...

It seems to me that Bangalore has two very different sets of issues requiring attention: creating a nexus of competitive advantage to serve the world's economies highly efficiently, and the jagged divide between its own middle class and the ultra-poor citizens living nearby. 

I'm not usually one to proselytize about poverty, but it used to be pollution that we were exporting.  Now it's jobs and the stratification of societies?

Area Man returns to Area

I'm back from a semi-vacation in California, where my dad had brain surgery (dad is ok and recovering nicely).  I found the time away from the office a mixed blessing.  Things family wise were stressful/hectic, and I had to live with the idea that things at the office might be a little helter-skelter without me, but I found the creative juices really flowing.

The lesson: there are plenty of funny things about hospitals.  My stand-up act inherited some new jokes, that is for sure.

It was also very interesting to be back in the Bay Area.  I was in San Francisco for the bulk of last week, and I was convinced that I would have Wi-Fi everywhere.  Not so.  The UCSF campus/hospital network was restricted, as were the wi-fi hotspots seemingly run by rogue departments and labs.  There were no open access points in the apartment building of a family friend.  I suppose that since I've been away, I expected that SF would have been blanketed in wireless access.  Maybe we all (er, SF and NYC) have a lot further to go than I thought before we have 100% coverage.

On Personal Relationships

The woman who owns the laundromat where I drop off my laundry just called.  She found my college ring in the laundry I just dropped off.  Thank you, M.

M seems to be the only one of the 4 or so employees of the laundromat who remembers my name or phone number-I should mention  that one laundry I used on the east side stopped asking me for my name or phone number on drop-off after about 3 weeks.  Of course I kept coming back to that laundromat- that is just good customer service.

I pride myself in establishing the kind of relationships in my personal and professional life which are 1) usually enjoyable in and of themselves and 2) very likely to help things get done better.  From the staff here at the Business School to the laundromat, I think it's clear this pays off, a lot.  I think about an office issue recently  which pitted my "inside contact" information against asking a favor of another department in the University, and I still think my solution was the better one.

The Oracle of Omaha

So by now everyone has heard that Warren Buffet is giving 31 gigabucks, or thereabouts, to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  That's a lot of money.  So, what if he hqad decided instead to give free wifi to everyone.  Would $31.5 billion / 6 billion people = $5/person be enough?

How does one choose a charity for that size of a gift?  This decision is not “guns or butter” but “the information superhighway or malaria pills”…I think it is fine to choose the world emissary to malaria…(the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation).

But actually the problem is harder.  How do you get rid of half a million shares of a stock that never splits and trades about 1,000 shares per day at $3k per share?  This has the potential to really muck up the market- so what is a foundation to do?  Probably, they will arrange, in advance, to sell the newly acquired shares to some institutional investor.  I bet they already figured that out. 

They'll have to execute the trades at the market rate, or risk both parties having to pay taxes on a sweetheart deal.

If you assume that the value of the stock goes up by say, 3% (I can;t live with modeling it as 6% growth (more or less historiecally maitained)  because I think this whole business will curtail the growth of the stock with some really weird jolts every year for -by my calculations- 34 YEARS).  Every year, the stock price goes up, the shares change hands, and Bill and Melinda have between $1.8bn and $475m.  Not bad.

Learning new stuff at GoogleNY

Last night I had the pleasure of going to Google's New York offices, as part of NextNY .  This event was productive for me in several ways.

  • Insight into sales/marketing and product management organizations and functions.  Now I know they need industry vertical researchers.  They might need me!
  • Added no fewer than three books to the e-bookshelf to be purchased: Influence, Wisdom of Crowds, Tipping Point (currently reading Blink.)
  • Found new cool thing and discovered yet another example of Execute to the best of your ability and then sell style entrepreneurship, dodgeball.com.  Also, a 5-digit SMS code costs $10k.  Apparently the genesis of the idea was a thesis project of Dennis Crowley, of NYU's ITP program, otherwise famous for Pac Manhattan (Dennis was Pac Man).
  • While writing this entry, a fellow NextNY attendee sent another link to Influence - the spirit of collaboration is really catching.
  • Solidified some thinking about Pitch Camp, which I am helping to organize.  Helping people to solidify their message should be fun. 
  • Now more than ever, I think Google is in a pretty decent place to help non-dominant content players distribute their content.  Props to uGather.com in this space also.  Apparently uGather's Jason Baptiste is going to be star of the next reality show.  If anyone hasn't seen the UK's The IT crowd yet, you should (head to a good bit Torrent site and pick it up)

And last, Why isn't Google evil?  In many media and otherwise corporate cases, the trend is either big->evil or big=evil or big != good.  I think Google is too concerned with making their products work and have users who are happy with the product.  If this is your big priority, and not "owning the desktop" or "getting a piece of the action" or "killing Linux"  I believe you end up with different messages- and very different results.  I bet lots of people also hate Google for merely delivering.  Sore losers?

Welcome!

This is the inaugural post.  In order to withstand the heavy Slashdotting I am sure this blog will receive, I have committed to posting only my original thoughts, and some links to what inspires them.  If you want to check out where I work (currently), hit up The Columbia Institute for Tele-Information. 

But if you just want a good laugh, make sure you check out the story about two Florida lawyers who were ordered to reslove a dispute and forced by a judge to resolve it using "one (1) game of rock, paper, scissors."  The funny thing about this, well ok, one of the many funny things about this, is that a resaercher at CITI told me that "rock, paper, scissors is a very efficient dispute resolution technique, because it produces a winner and a loser." A lawyer friend also remarked, "that decision is not reviewable." 

Yes, my blog is named after a Led Zeppelin song: I may not come from the Ice and Snow (actually, it is technically more correct that I come from the 'Western shore') but on I sweep, with thrashing oars, to go somewhere fun, exciting, and challenging.