Internet and customer service update

I tested the download speed just now and recorded 10.19Mbps. That’s with Qwest broadband with optic fiber to the neighborhood. I’m paying for the 12Mbps tier, but I’m reasonably happy.

Apple has extended subscriptions to MobileMe another two months due to the problems we’ve had. Better that there weren’t any hassles, but I admire them for giving their customers an adjustment up front. I have a free 60-day trial that has turned into 150 days and my problems have been minor.

AAA insurance customer service on the other hand sucks. When I called to cancel the policy for my dad’s townhouse, they told me there would be a $40 charge — this on a $200 annual premium. When I grumbled that we’ve sold the property, not just cancelled the policy, I’m told that she (the customer service rep) will waive the charge. So if you don’t complain, you pay $40. Nice.

Then yesterday, after nearly two weeks, I called to ask about the refund. She’ll send out the check today this customer rep tells me. How long do you wait if you don’t ask?

And don’t even get me started on Tucson Electric Power.

To send or not to send, that is the question

James Fallows fears email.

I make my living writing things down, but even I have reached the point where I am not willing to put any sentiment whatsoever into reproducible form — in an email that could be forwarded, in a document that could be cut-and-pasted — without thinking about how it would look if it got into unintended hands.

Brad DeLong does not.

Second, for most of us the big problem has never been that people will repeat what we say, but rather that they will repeat what we did not say–or take what we say out of context.
. . .

In such a world as this one in which we live in, email and other means of communication that automatically create a record that can be used to push back against distortions is a blessing.

NewMexiKen has had to testify in federal court about what I meant in emails I had written, so I know what can happen. The written word is very powerful. It demands thoughtfulness, which is sadly lacking in so many email messages. (And, indeed, some of the informality of email has bled over into more formal documents too.)

Say what you mean, be polite, and don’t write what you don’t want repeated. Read, revise and proofread.

That said, I go along with DeLong.

And you?

Spying on other people’s computer

An interesting article at Slate about Spying on other people’s computers. I was amused by this guy’s solution to inappropriate use of the internets at work:

I stopped “special” surfing at the office when I put a linux box on a hub between the network internet router and the switches. I simply sniffed all traffic for image files and displayed it on a 42″ LCD out in the sales area. Images were displayed of what people were surfing. I also attached the ip address of the user to the image. It stopped inappropriate internet surfing in that office in 3 days. When everyone can see what you are doing, you get back to real work.

Frankly inappropriate internet usage at work is a problem unrelated to the internet. It’s a sign of an office of people without enough to do, or — more likely — without enough of the right things to do.

And, that is an age old problem.

iPhone

NewMexiKen has a new iPhone today. I’m not getting many bars from AT&T here at Casa NewMexiKen and I find the phone volume inadequate. It’s a strain to hear even at top volume.

Any ideas?

It is, of course, otherwise awesome, but those are pretty big issues.

IE be damned

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of web sites are crashing in Internet Explorer due to something the statistics counter SiteMeter did. I have removed SiteMeter from NewMexiKen, at least for now.

But my question to you is, why are you using Internet Explorer? It’s a non-compliant, crappy piece of software — and unsafe to boot. There are better choices for FREE.

Try Firefox or Safari (including Safari for Windows).

Cuil

Cuil, the new internet search tool.

It sure looks cool, and it’s blazing fast.

Google me no more?

The Kindle

Writer/reader James Fallows reflects on the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic book reader.

“Spent six or seven hours of the flight [to Beijing] reading on the Kindle. Perfectly pleasant and legible. Only one inconvenience relative to ” real” books — harder to flip ahead or back several pages at a time.”

Fallows has more about the Kindle.

It seems to me

It seems to me that utilities have the most confusing and often faulty websites. Things that do not lead where they say they will, pages that throw you out so you have to log-in all over again, and just generally annoying, user-unfriendly or unclear features.

Anyone else have this sense? Do you think it’s on purpose — something in the DNA of utility companies that causes them to baffle their customers — or is it just a general inability on their part to get it right?

I include, just for conversation, Comcast, Verizon Wireless and Qwest.

(Over the phone, Qwest tells me today that my monthly bill will be about 10% more than the amount on the order confirmation they sent me. Trying to find a place to deal with this online is what lead me to the above confusion. I got cut off trying to handle it on the phone. Imagine that.)

Blogging from my iPod

NewMexiKen isn’t altogether that good on the iPhone/iPod touch keyboard, but I thought I’d try out the new WordPress app. In other words, this post was written with the “computer” in the palm of my hand.

Free at last

No more Comcast at Casa NewMexiKen. I have installed Qwest high-speed internet (fiber optic) and it seems at least as fast, even much faster. (How does one tell for sure? And how much does it matter anyway?)

It’s definitely cheaper!

DirecTV delayed until Wednesday due to installation limitations. (That pesky HOA.) Guess I can continue to blog, as potatoing on the couch not much fun with only 10 channels.

Must be nice to have a product this popular

Of course, you know who found this because I wondered if they had any here in town.

Term-of-the-day

Today’s term-of-the-day is “cloud computing.”

In the geek world, “cloud computing” is a white-hot buzzword these days. It basically means working with files and programs that reside on the Internet, beyond your company’s walls — out there in the “cloud.”

Everyday consumers are doing cloud computing, too, maybe without even realizing it. When you use an Internet-based backup service, or Google’s online word processor or spreadsheet, or a Gmail or Yahoo mail account, you’re working with data on a secure Internet server somewhere — not on your hard drive.

Or so says David Pogue in a review of Apple’s new “cloud” service MobileMe.

NewMexiKen has been experimenting with MobileMe. It’s an improvement over dot Mac despite rough beginnings late last week. The sync function between computers is the biggest benefit — keeping your email, bookmarks, contacts and calendars the same on Macs, PCs and iPhones (and in my case an iPod touch). MobileMe is $100 a year; a 60-day free trial is available. For the $100, you get no ads, and a much cleaner web interface — to my taste Yahoo! is too cluttered, iGoogle too plain-jane.

MobileMe, of course, keeps the master copy in the — all together now class — “cloud.”

Metaphorically phoning it in from my metaphoric break

A federal judge has ordered the invasion of your privacy. This is from washingtonpost.com:

That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. Google will also be required to hand over copies of every video removed from Youtube for any reason (DMCA notices or user-initiated deletions). [Judge] Stanton dismissed Google’s argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely “speculative.”

Speculative. It’s terabytes of data about us.

Andrew Tobias has a nice posting about Clay Felker, who died earlier this week.

Walt Mossberg provides Some General Tips For Switch to Mac From Windows. I would have found this handy during the first few weeks; not so much later.

Obama leads McCain by 5 points in — wait for it — Montana.

[Not having to blog because I'm taking a break makes it a lot easier to blog. Does that make any sense — other than as a description of insanity I mean?]

Bill Gates e-mail rant

At Microsoft Bill Gates is “next” as the expression goes (next to leave). Tomorrow is his last day.

Every Windows user for the past 15 years will appreciate this epic Bill Gates e-mail rant.

Hmmm

A fascinating article in The New Yorker this week — not online — about programming computers to converse. The article begins by discussing interactive-voice-response systems — the automated “service” you get when you call a large company.

You know these systems monitor the calls. Did you know they still monitor you when you are on hold?

Interesting too that one of the programming difficulties for these systems was all the ways people say yes or no. It was particularly a problem for southerners. They tend say “Yes, ma’am” or “Yes, sir” depending on the gender of the voice of the system, and the ma’am or sir threw off the computer

Firefox 3

Firefox 3 is out for all platforms. According to reports there have been more than 7 million downloads in 24 hours.

I’ve been using the Mac version of Firefox 3 for a couple of weeks — rather than Safari. I like it.

Firefox web browser | Faster, more secure, & customizable

How Much Radiation Does Your Phone Emit?

[T]he data on cellphone safety is mixed, although a few recent international studies have suggested a link with three types of brain tumors. The Food and Drug Administration also says there’s not enough information to determine conclusively whether cellphones are safe or unsafe.

New York Times Blog

CNET has some facts:

Ten highest-radiation cell phones

Ten lowest-radiation cell phones

The sidebar at the CNET cites lists all manufacturers. 1.6 is the U.S. maximum allowed.

Thanks to Bob Ormond for the links.

Factoid line of the day

“Our tests found that leaving a Playstation 3 on while not in use would cost almost… five times more than it would take to run a refrigerator for the same yearly period”.

NYTimes.com

Meep Meep

“[I]f all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.”

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M.

NYTimes.com

Uh oh, I think I’ve lost it

My cell phone that is. I think I’ve lost my cell phone. I guess I’ll just have to get a new one. In that case it might as well be an iPhone. As soon as the new model reaches the store.¹

Yup, that’s when I’m going to lose my cell phone — just as soon as the new iPhones reach the store.

Firefox 3.0

My verdict is that Firefox 3.0 is the best Web browser out there right now, and that it tops the current versions of both IE and Safari in features, speed and security. It is easy to install and easy to use, even for a mainstream, non-technical user. It can be downloaded, free, at mozilla.com by clicking on “Firefox 3 Sneak Peek.”

This situation may change. Microsoft is working on a new version of IE, scheduled to be unveiled later this year, with some impressive new features. And Apple is always working on new iterations of Safari, though it is secretive and hasn’t disclosed its plans. But for now, in my view, Firefox 3.0 rules on both Windows and Mac.

I couldn’t find any significant downsides to Firefox 3.0.

From a review by Walt Mossberg.

NewMexiKen generally relies on Safari on my two Macs, but I have been playing around with the new Firefox and it looks pretty good. (I use IE7 when I run Windows on the Macs.)

Google Now Maps Real Estate Listings

“Google Maps now makes it easy to check out real estate listings in a certain area: click on the “Show search options” link next to the Search Maps button, and choose “Real Estate” from the drop down. Your search will map homes for sale, with photos and prices.”

Lifehacker

Fun

New Mac ads. I like this one best, but watch them all.

Oh, BTW, some HBO shows are now available from iTunes.

Wireless security

If you have a wireless network at home, it is imperative that you encrypt it. (While recently in Virginia I was able to see the files on an iMac on the next street over.)

NewMexiKen isn’t knowledgeable enough to tell you how to go about this, but I can explain some of the basics.

• Wireless encryption and a firewall are both essential — they do different things
• The first standard was WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy)
• WEP is better than no protection at all
• WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) was introduced in 2003
• WPA2 was an update to WPA in 2004
• WPA (and WPA2) are far superior to WEP
• If your wireless router, computer wireless card(s) or the associated software is older than 2003, you probably won’t be able to use WPA
• Newer products — and the Wii, PlayStation 3, PSP, XBox 360, iPhone — can use WPA, but not all of them can use WPA2
• WPA and WPA2 have two configurations: Personal and Enterprise
• If you use a good network password, WPA or WPA2 Personal is sufficient for a home network

Bottom line: Use WPA (or WPA2 if you can) and use a good password for the network. Use WEP if that’s all you’ve got.

A desert hike through Joshua Tree with high tech

Dan Neil takes a hike — with gadgets. He begins:

“Whoso walketh in solitude, and inhabiteth the wood . . . into that forester shall pass . . . power and grace.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

But what if I snap my ankle? Or blow a cardiac gasket? Or fall or get stuck on a mountain where I can’t go up or down, what climbers call getting “cliffed out”? What then, Ralph Waldo? I won’t give a tinker’s damn about power and grace then. I’m going to be looking for that orange-and-white rescue whirligig in the sky. Swing low, sweet Stokes litter.

Going solo into the backcountry — or on a sailboat around Catalina, or on a mountain bike in Moab, Utah, for that matter — always implies a trade-off, the exchange of safety for reverie. Nearly always, the risk is worth it, and for all the reasons Emerson made a career of. To be alone in big-N nature is to challenge yourself, to calibrate yourself, to fully inhabit the body you were born with, to feel the chill of the absolute run up your spine.

But things can go very wrong.

Google maps street view

I thought that whole Google Maps street view thing was pretty cool until I looked at photos of Casa NewMexiKen today.

Yikes!

Mac Tip

Have a Mac? Need info? Right click on any word in Mail, Safari, iWork or most other Mac OS X applications and the Dictionary pops up — giving you instant information from a dictionary, thesaurus and/or Wikipedia (somewhat slow).

Gravatars

If you’d like a little image to show up next to your comments (very small in the Latest Comments section in the sidebar, not so small next to the actual comment), you will need to sign up for a Gravatar — a Globally Recognized Avatar.

Sign up requires an email address and a password, uploading the image you want to use (and cropping it), a few other minor tweaks, and voila wherever you comment using that email address the image (the gravatar) will appear — well, it will appear if the particular website or blog is configured for gravatars, as NewMexiKen now is.

The hardest part for me was choosing an image — something I still haven’t settled on.

Protecting what’s important

Charlie Rose Saves His MacBook Air

Thanks to Avelino for the link.

BTW, check out Avelino’s New York Recap. Awesome photos.

Why Gmail?

Since it was made available, NewMexiKen has used Google’s gmail for all my email. Here’s why:

1. It’s free.
2. I wanted an email service I could easily access on any computer, anywhere there was internet access.
3. I wanted an email provider that wouldn’t change. (Remember @home.com?) I figured Google was going to be around for a while.
4. I had tried Microsoft and Yahoo! and didn’t like the clutter of their web-based email.
5. I wanted to use my email with Outlook (now I use it with Apple Mail). Gmail permits that; HotMail did, but weirdly; Yahoo did but you had to upgrade ($).
6. Gmail’s spam filters are excellent, catching about 99% of all spam. The spam never gets to my computer. I never see it.
7. I am able to forward email from older email addresses (such as @comcast.net) through gmail, so I don’t have to worry about getting everybody to change their address book.
8. Now gmail has IMAP (rather than POP) mail. IMAP automatically syncs my gmail with any mail application — Apple Mail on two computers, my iPod touch and online. If I delete a message one place, it goes away and isn’t cluttering up my mailbox next time I open one of the other email programs.
9. If I delete a message inadvertently, it stays available in gmail’s trash — on the web — for 30 days.
10. It’s free.

Gmail

Your photos get home before you do

The $100 Eye-Fi Card by Eye-Fi Inc. (www.eye.fi) is a two-gigabyte SecureDigital memory card with a built-in wireless chip. It slips into any camera with an SD-card slot, and whenever the camera is turned on, looks for a familiar Wi-Fi network and uploads your photos to your Mac or PC and one of 17 photo-sharing sites. After a quick, one-time setup, the user does nothing more than turning on the digital camera.

Read more at The Mossberg Solution.

Into Thin Air

Thanks to Avelino, a funny story about a guy and his Macs: How I Spent $5,000 on Air and Made Fifty-Year-Old Women Swoon.

Mac aficionados (if you know any) will appreciate. Windows guys/gals will shake their head.

Insanely simple

Tutorials for the first time Macintosh user from OS X Help. Begins with the basics (the power switch) but there are things to learn for children of all ages.

Perhaps you thought I was kidding

Yesterday I mentioned the Lindsay Lohan photo spread in New York Magazine and my abbreviated plan to generate some bogus Google traffic. In the end, as I put it, I decided I’d “[j]ust rely on the old standbys … — you know, Omarosa.”

Here are the top searches at NewMexiKen this morning:

omarosa
omarosa nude
omarosa naked
omarosa nude pics

Product Launches

Apple stock is down 40% from its high at the end of December — aren’t you glad you don’t take your investment advice from a blogger? I am.

Nonetheless I still find the company fascinating. It has, like it or not, a 21st century approach to marketing that few have successfully copied. This article does a good job, I think, of explaining it. Stimulating reading for anyone who has to market products — or ideas — even on a much smaller scale. Here’s one brief excerpt:

When you walk into the Moscone Center for an Apple product launch, the posters outside tout current Apple products. The advertising on passing taxis and buses are familiar Apple themes. The nearby Apple store still promotes the current bestsellers. The Apple Web site is still business as usual.

But as soon as the keynote presentation ends and people file out of the building, everything is new: The advertising on the buses and cabs has miraculously changed to trumpet the new product. The Apple Stores are stocked and ready to sell the New Thing. Apple employees are wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the new message. The Apple Web site is ready with new information and images. New TV ads showing the just-introduced product are already spreading the news.

It’s called a web for a reason

After yesterday’s New York Times piece reporting rumors of an alleged affair between John McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman, her firm Alcalde & Fay, pulled her bio off their Web site.

Of course, the Web doesn’t work quite that way, so you can check out a cached version over at the Internet Archive.

Election Geek Blog

Not that Ms. Iseman’s bio is worth your time, but it’s still amazing what people don’t understand about the internets.

Is Your Printer Spying on You?

Imagine that every time you printed a document, it automatically included a secret code that could be used to identify the printer - and potentially, the person who used it. Sounds like something from an episode of “Alias,” right?

Unfortunately, the scenario isn’t fictional. In a purported effort to identify counterfeiters, the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode each page with identifying information.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots

One purpose web sites

Kottke has a list of Single Serving Sites — web sites that serve just one purpose. He’s got about 30. Here’s three examples.

abe vigoda status

Is it Christmas?

Yet Another Useless Web Site

Thanks to Ken for the pointer.

Merely a toddler

The domain youtube.com was registered just three years ago today.

MacBook Air

The Today Show crew does a loving testimonial for the new Apple laptop, the MacBook Air.