Hit Coffee was moved to a new server. Due to that, some posts temporarily disappeared. They’re back now. I also had to re-insert a comment that went missing in the transfer.

Yahoo’s CEO apparently lied on his resume:

In a “bizarre crisis” for Yahoo, CEO Scott Thompson has been forced to admit that he did not receive a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Stonehill College — despite long claiming on his resume that he had. (He actually studied accounting and business administration.) Thompson was hired only four months ago to revive the ailing search engine, but now the hedge fund Third Point — an activist shareholder that is trying to gain control of Yahoo’s board of directors — says it will hit the company with a lawsuit if Thompson isn’t fired. The controversy comes at the worst time for Yahoo, which recently fired 2,000 workers as part of a massive overhaul designed to help it better compete with Google and Facebook.

People lying on their resumes probably happens more often than we realize, even when it comes to concrete and checkable things like this. Which to me is the most bizarre thing: this was concrete and checkable. Was there no background check when he was hired to run the company? I understand not checking up on everybody, but I’ve gotten a better lookover when applying for peon jobs.

I find this a lot more interesting than the fact that he lied. The group that uncovered the lie is wondering the same thing:

The fund, Third Point LLC, issued a legal demand to review internal Yahoo documents that may explain how much research the company’s board did about Thompson’s background before hiring him in January. Third Point contends it’s entitled to the records under the laws of Delaware, where Yahoo is incorporated.

Yahoo didn’t respond to requests for comments about Third Point’s demand.

After initially brushing off the misinformation as an “inadvertent error,” Yahoo’s board opened an investigation into the circumstances that led to the computer science degree being including on Thompson’s bio. Thompson told employees that he “respects the process” and will provide whatever information the board requests.

I guess it’s possible that he never claimed the computer science degree during the interview process and came up with it later (or it just magically appeared). I don’t find this revelation as troubling as I do simply baffling.

I understand resume-lying when it comes to people who haven’t accomplished anything yet. I… exaggerated… the nature of my employment at a company early on (it couldn’t be checked because the company was defunct). But it didn’t take long before I scaled it back into oblivion (now it’s just there as part of the timeline). Thompson is the former head of PayPal, which strikes me as a better job than Yahoo, to be honest.

Several years ago, Notre Dame hired a guy named George O’Leary to be their head football coach and it came to light that he had lied on his resume. Another rather stupid thing. UND dumped O’Leary and he actually went on to be a successful coach at Central Florida (Notre Dame went on to hire Ty Willingham.) O’Leary explained it as having lied early on to get that first job and then not being able to “scale it back” later on. Which I guess makes sense and applies to Thompson as well. Maybe. But it still seems to me that anyone who is going to check up on past claims (”Hey, three years ago you said you X, now you don’t, what gives?”) is going to check up on the veracity of the actual claims.

The baggage carousel went around and around and our back was nowhere to be found. I couldn’t tell you why, exactly, but I knew pretty immediately that it wasn’t actually coming and sent Clancy (who was busy getting the rental car) a text to that effect.

Everyone who was left over had started or gone through Deseret as a part of their flight. Obviously, something had gone wrong between the Deseret-to-Colosse and Colosse-to-Ephesus transfer.

The person at the counter wasn’t remarkably helpful. He couldn’t tell us where our baggage was (whether they’d failed to make the transfer in Colosse or whether they were still sitting in Deseret somehow.

I had thought, up to that point, that those things would be scanned just about everywhere they go.

United has a 100 number where you can call and get “updates” on where your luggage is, but they never had any new information. When I asked to speak to an agent, it always seemed like they could tell me more or do more for me. If they want us to use the automated system, they really need to make it better.

We arrived down there on Thursday and left on Sunday. The wedding was on Saturday, so we had to have a shopping detour on Friday because who knew when exactly our luggage was getting there (not the automated system, that’s not who). In all, it cost us $200 to get the clothes we needed to replace the clothes that were missing.

Out clothes actually got there on Saturday afternoon, so I was able to wear the clothes I had packed rather than the miss-sized clothes I had just bought. We’ll see what I will be able to return of the clothes we just bought.

There actually came a point where we were hoping that the luggage simply wouldn’t arrive in time for them to be sent to us. As it stands, we got our clothes in time for the wedding, but we got the luggage in time to have to lug it all back to the airport.

Which brings me to my last thing: We paid $25 per suitcase per way for a total of $100. For clothes we didn’t even have for a majority of the trip. The baggage fees actually never bothered me all that much, but I will definitely say that it smarted a bit to pay the baggage fees for the way home.

Half Sigma has a post up about watches, wherein I typically break every rule in the book except the one about buying extremely expensive watches.

I commented thusly:

It takes less time to look at my watch than to fish my smartphone out of its holster. It would take even longer out of a pocket. We’re talking about seconds, but seconds every time I look at my watch, which I do a lot.

Yeah, I wear a smartphone holster. And cheap watches. Some of which have big faces. I’m already married and don’t live in the northeast. So I can’t imagine for the life of me why it matters.

It came across as more defensive-sounding than I had intended. The first part is in response to a bunch of people saying that watches are essentially jewelry and serve no purpose. Obviously, I disagree.

Despite the fact that I can’t imagine why it matters, I probably put more thought into watch-wearing than most people. But it’s all internal. I don’t expect anyone to care. I’ve only had three watches that anyone has commented on. I have six watches, three brown-based and three black-based. I match them with the rest of what I am wearing. I have a thing about my shoes, belt, and watch all needing to match. I keep black and brown boots and belts around and always go one way or the other. If only I could find a brown smartphone holster, then I would be set. When I accidentally wearing my black watch with brown belts and shoes, I think to myself “Well, at least the watch matches my belt holster…” as a small comfort.

Two of the six watchesare of a casual/geeky variety. They’re my most expensive ones because they’re Casios with both a digital and an analog display ($30 a piece). One has a canvasy band with velcro and the other a rubber one. But I like them because they keep track of the date for me and don’t have to be reset five months of the year, and I never have to worry about whether it’s been reset, though I now have a ritual of resetting my watches anyway. (Speaking of which…) And they fit with my geeky sensibilities, I suppose. Two of them are US Polos ($20 a piece) with large faces (a no-no). Grade-schoolers love these, apparently. Two of them are the same sort of generic cheap watches that I used to wear all the time. Even though they’re the cheapest, they actually look best when I am dressed professionally.

But this is all my OCD self. Other than the grade schoolers with the US Polos, the only compliment I’ve ever gotten on a watch was a $15 metal-band latch watch that I am sure would horrify Siggy. Up until recently, all I wore was the generic cheap watches. All I cared about was whether it worked, whether I could tell the time in the dark, and whether it had the date on it. That last one isn’t a dealbreaker for me.

Anyhow, all of this is kind of funny when you consider how old-school I am with work attire and my belief that professionals should have to wear shirt-and-ties. And if I ever got my way and professionals were required to dress professionally again, I would probably favor discarding watches like the one I am wearing right now.

So this past week I have been in gadgetry heaven/purgatory, thus my limited Internet activity. It’s been a rather whirlwind experience, starting with the Samsung Galaxy Tab that Clancy got for me as a belated birthday present. I’d vaguely wanted an Amazon Kindle, but wanted a device where I could install stuff and more freely surf the web (and something with more punch than the Kindle Fire). So, after a year of asking what the point of a tablet is, I got one. It helped considerably that it was used and under $200, which was roughly my price point. I don’t have 3G access on it (it has the capability, and is Verizon-ready, I don’t want to spend the money). If the rumors about Verizon going to family data plans are true, I might give it a whirl.

Anyhow, toying around with this device demonstrated to me that Android was ready for me to make the plunge. If it doesn’t pass The Walkman Test, it comes relatively close. I can listen to audiobooks using the crude AVRCP controls on my earpieces. I’m going to have to wait on the video part. A number of players are close, but none quite do what I need them to do.

So where was I?

Oh yeah, so with Android ready for me, and my contract with Verizon about to expire, I started looking around for new smartphones. I thought it would take weeks, but impatience got the best of me (plus, if I’m going to sign a 2-year contract, I want it to piggy-back on the previous). So I’ve been learning about Android and learning some more. And we ordered a couple of Samsung Stratospheres. It sucks to let the 4G go to waste (rural Arapaho is not high on their list of priorities, I’m sure), but even absent that it is a much-needed upgrade. On top of everything else, my WinMo phone has been unusually flaky as of late. Even absent this, I was prepping for a time-consuming smartphone equivalent of format & restore. The sad thing is that I will probably do the F&R anyway because I want the devices use-ready, even if it’s likely I will never use it again.

The Strat, notably, has a nearly-identical form-factor to the HTC Touch Pro that it is replacing. This will help Clancy with her transition.

Back on the cell phone companies are evil thing, it drives me crazy that they won’t let me into the phone until I activate it. I wanted to get the devices completely ready while continuing to use the old phone. A lot of phones try to do this, but there is typically some workaround. There’s no good reason for this. Actually, that’s a lie. The second I activated the new phone, I was no longer Data Unlimited. Which was inevitable and honestly isn’t even that big of a deal. But this made the “no going back” point sooner than I had anticipated. But I don’t care about that. I care that I had to tell my wife that her existing phone wasn’t going to work anymore and that she couldn’t have her new phone until I was done with it.

Anyhow, between the two phones, the tablet, and the can’t-use-it-as-a-phone Droid 2 I got last year on the cheap that I will be using as my bedside audio player, I’m immersed in Androidia. So far, so good.

I have to sign for a package today and I don’t want to wait until Monday to get it, which means that I can’t really go anywhere until it gets here. Packages usually arrive in the afternoon, but it’s not consistent. It used to be that I feared package-arrival day when there wasn’t a signature required because the stuff could be stolen. I don’t really have to worry about that here. I’d prefer they simply leave it on the doorstep.

Our package delivery system is really out of step with modern needs. Our household is an exception, but the cases where you could count on someone to be home to sign for a package or rescue it from potential theft are limited. Back in Cascadia, I liked when I had to sign for it because it meant that I would be able to pick it up at UPS at the end of the day, which was the safer possibility. And really, the more convenient. I could plan when I would get the package.

It seems to me that as often as not, it would be easier if we just dispensed with the notion that packages have to be doorstep-to-doorstep. You can call them and ask them to hold the package, but as it stands right now they have to make at least one attempt at doorstep delivery (or at least that was the case when I last talked to them). That can cost you a day. Quite needlessly.

I found out about Clancy’s pregnancy as I was packing for our trip down to Colosse. I was leaving a coupe days before she was. I was actually getting frustrated with her wondering what the hell was taking her so long in the bathroom, where I needed to retrieve my toiletries. She came out, almost stumbling a bit as though she were inebriated. It took my mind a few moments to shift gears when she shoved the test in my face.

It was the fourth month since we’d started keeping track. That was, as far as we were concerned, ahead of schedule. Though we were trying, it was nonetheless a surprise because we’d missed the ovulation period due to circumstance. It was a case where it was very fortunate that Clancy is who she is, because she noticed after the first month and confirmed after the second that there was a problem with her cycle that would preclude pregnancy. Her background instantly told her what the problem likely was, and her profession likey helped us get an appointment rather quickly. It was only the second attempt after that when she came up positive.

We were gearing up for it taking a while. She is of advance maternal age and I have a slew of things to be concerned about ranging from laptops to diets to a particular health issue. We’re quite aware that we are not out of the woods yet. But with the rapidity that it occurred here, we have reason to believe that if this one doesn’t take, we’ll have a shot again. The ongoing fear was that it would take eight months and then there’d be a miscarriage and we were looking at another year and so on.

The house is in extraordinarily good shape to take in a baby. We have a room that is easily transferable into a nursery. There’s also room in the computer room where I can put a crib if need-be for one reason or another. We still haven’t been able to stuff this house with stuff. That’s to our advantage, for now.

Financially, the time is far from ideal. But hoping for the ideal time has proven to be a fool’s quest, thus far. If anything, I wish we’d gotten started sooner. We just didn’t realize that it would take forever for us to find a stable situation, which itself is a couple years away. Maybe in time for the second…

I recently wrote about the lawsuits involving the MPAA, DGA, ClearPlay, and CleanFlicks. Now I am going to write why the whole thing was eye-opening to me.

In the late 90’s and early aughts, some friends and I (the core group being Clint, Kyle, Hubert, and me, for those who keep track of such things) were a part of an amateur production company. We took Japanese animation, spliced it, and changed the story into something funny. As it happens, three of the four productions we took the initial animation from came from a single studio (in the US). And as it happens, they knew what we were doing and could not have cared less. If they had objected, though, we would have objected to their objection. We weren’t selling them. We weren’t impeding the sale of the original item. Our only compensation was having fun and some comp passes to area anime conventions.

Beyond all that, we were also of our generation and had rather… liberal… views of fair use and copyright. I was a Republican, Hugh was a Democrat, Kyle was a Libertarian, and Clint was rather apolitical, but we all agreed on that.

When the ClearPlay thing came up, I looked at it very much the same way that I looked at our productions. There were some key differences, to be sure: ClearPlay was a business and we were not. People using ClearPlay had purchased the original productions, people who got copies of our work did not. Though we never asked for permission, the content-owners were okay with what we were doing. With them, they were not. On the balance, I thought that if anything, ClearPlay had a stronger case than we would if the producers of the fourth production we used ever came after us.

So I was a bit shocked when almost uniformly, everyone else took the opposite perspective. Not just the other three, but non-core contributors as well. Everyone but me agreed: ClearPlay was wrong here. I tried to liken it to what we were doing, but they argued that it was different. Interestingly, they didn’t argue on the profit side, but on the creative side. It was their view that we were creating something new while they were watering down something existing. I asked about The Phantom Edit. They thought that was fine because they weren’t selling it. Okay, but what if they essentially did what ClearPlay was doing and offered a way to skip past Jar-Jar. This stammered them a bit, but they rebounded by arguing that what The Phantom Editors were doing was art while ClearPlay was destroying art.

Destroying art. Those were the words that one of them used. That, apparently, was what it came down to for them. I asked “What about the person that wants to skip past the scene” and the response I got was that people shouldn’t want to skip past violent or sex-filled scenes and there was something wrong with parents that wanted to shield entertainment from their kids like that. They weren’t exactly advocating showing Nightmare on Elm Street to grade-schoolers, but they did not think it was right to get to choose what to show from a particular movie and what not to. They should either show them the movie, or not show them the movie.

As an aside, we did a lot of our editing in the town of a very conservative university, Southern Cross University, that one of our core members attended. They had “movie night” and mercilessly edited movies, replacing words with rather silly stand-ins. We attended one of the features and heard about a lot of the others. They cut The Matrix down to 90 minutes for content. At that point… what’s the point, exactly? I’d actually suggested, for one of our productions, we should do the a Ridiculous Edit version.

Anyhow, it occurred to me that what a lot of this came down to wasn’t the issues at stake. It wasn’t copyright or fair use. It was the sheer animosity towards the people that showed the sorts of movies that they showed at SCU. It was, in a way, a desire to deprive them of the ability to easily massacre movies the way that they did. It wasn’t about the law, it was about culture. And to an extent, it was about us-and-them. Siding with the likes of Utahns and SCU was simply out of the question.

Which brings me, momentarily, back to the Ridiculous Edit version I proposed. I had suggested that we should do it because we could make it funny. I stand by that. But I did have another motive. I wanted the ability to introduce the movie to people who would be offended by the coarse language of the original. A lot of the cursing was unnecessary. Popular with the fans we had, but likely irritating to potential fans.

I consider this about as far from coincidental as possible: Looking back, I had far more animosity towards the MPAA than SCU. They were raised on good on southern religion while I was an Episcopalian. They (at the time, today they run the spectrum of Born Again to staunch atheism) have a history that I don’t. And for my own part, I had been shifting to the right politically and trying to make peace with the same people. I didn’t then, and don’t now agree with them in regard to movie censorship (nor would they have exactly signed on to the MPAA’s agenda), but at least a part of me was trying to find common ground.

As much as we liked to dress it up as arguments for and against - and there are letigimate arguments for and against - a lot of it came down to that visceral reaction and our deeper minds shifting gears mostly to support the original reaction (it took me years to realize that the MPAA did actually sort of have a point here).

Which is something I can’t help but notice occurring… everywhere else. Here at The League, we take pride in our thoughtfulness and some here take pride in their independence. But we’re human, and I think it is rather impossible to separate what is being said from who is saying it.

I will, at some point, write a more complete post on this. The origins of our ideology. My views aren’t actually this reductive. But I think this is an under-investigated phenomenon. Especially among those of us that pride ourselves on such things. It goes beyond enrolling with a team and taking their views wholesale. It’s something that pervades, I think, our response to virtually everything. Not just Republican or Democrat, but the positions we take and values we adopt that push us in one direction or the other.

All over Redstone, there have been references to something I’ll call Fight With Rachel. For the longest time, I had no idea what it was. But all over the schools, on flashing signs, and so on, were references to it. I vaguely thought that it was some sort of diet thing. Like the Rachel was Rachel Ray or something and the fight was with obesity (which is kind of a problem in Redstone). I’m not sure why I thought this, other than that it seemed to be positioned towards food-related stuff? At some point, I saw a picture of “Rachel” and saw that no, it wasn’t Rachel Ray. It was a woman that looked like she might be pushing 40 but had taken care to make herself look a lot younger and attractive.

“Okay,” I thought, “so this isn’t a national thing. She’s some sort of local figure.”

She was, it turned out, until she was killed by a drunk driver. And the girl who looked like she was a young-looking 40 year old was actually a rather mature looking 14 year old. The fight is against drunk driving.

Now, I’m not going to come out in defense of drunk driving. It gets people killed, and not just Rachel Rainer. But it’s all rather… overwhelming. I mean, her face is plastered all over the place at elementary schools. I don’t think we’re in any danger of them drinking and driving. I was a little taken aback at the universality of a… particular cause.

I was raised in the era of Nancy Reagan and Just Say No. And I guess that’s the model they’re following: start young. As young as possible, so that by the time they reach the age that it matters, it has been absolutely hammered into their brains. I’m not sure of the efficacy of this approach because by the time I was of age, Just Say No had kind of gotten boring. Not that I was anxious to do drugs, but it lost its sense of… urgency. I knew the “facts” of CHICKEN and later DARE like I knew names from social studies. They were words to be recited, the importance of which I had long since forgotten.

I think the stale factor is particularly salient when it comes to drunk driving. I mean, they started young with us on that, too, even if there wasn’t the overwhelming sense of urgency until right about the time it started to matter. When you start that young, you learn that drunk driving is bad but without a sense of why anyone does it. Then, you discover why people do it: You have to get home, and no you’re not going to call a cab every time you need to do so. And once this realization hits you - the utility of drunk driving, all of those social studies names can lose their resonance.

The most effective thing they did in drunk driving had nothing to do with “starting young.” Rather, it was what they did in high school. One horrific picture after another of somebody’s body being scraped off the cement. The sort of images that, if they were in any other context, we would be able to see. They show us the first Yearbook photo, then they show her mangled corpse. You’re tempted to think “Woah! Cool!” because they’re showing you this stuff in school. By the time they get to the 12th, though, you’re seeing yet another attractive individual and you’re cringing at what they will look like “after.”

Not that it stopped us from drunk driving, but it at least gave us the sense - far more than grade school chants - of the possible horrific consequences of it. Leaving it to our own devices that, if you do this, be friggin’ careful.

It’s in this sense that I remain concerned about equating everything else with drunk driving. Driving tired is drunk driving. Talking on the cell phone is drunk driving. Listening to sports on the radio is drunk driving. And so on. I do think it’s diluting the message. Drunk driving is drunk driving - and with the BAC requirements so low drunk driving often isn’t actually drunk driving - and chatting on a cell phone is not drunk driving.

Back when I lived in Cascadia, it was always a guess as to what would happen at the (two) dollar theater I frequently. There was the fight, of course. More typically, during the winter, homeless people thought that $2 was a small price to pay to get out of the cold for a little while and would nod off in the back of the theater. Homeless people snore loudly.

Here in Callie, everything is more civilized. And tickets are $7 a pop even though you’re often seeing second-run flicks. Tonight, though, I went to see The Hunger Games, which is new. There was a woman - that I assume was not homeless - who fell asleep right as the movie started. And snored. We were on different sides of the theater, but I could hear hear her all the same. She would periodically wake herself up with a coughing fit. CoughcoughcoughCOUGHCOUGHCOUGHcoughcough… silence…. snore….

Fortunately, I just finished the book two days ago, so I knew what was going on. There wasn’t much divergence. Oddly, the movie sort of outlined a couple plot… problems… from the book that I hadn’t appreciated before. Along the lines of “Why don’t they…” and “Why didn’t they…” On the whole, I was impressed at what they did given the lack of first-person narrative. Alas, my favorite character from the book - who even in the book didn’t get much facetime - was almost absent from the movie. Here. There. Dead. Boo.

I’m working through the second book now.

Oh, also, in a fit of irony, I was hungry throughout the entire film.

When I finish a substituting job in Redstone, I typically do not like to go straight home. It’s my chance to be in the big city, after all, which has a Walmart and everything. I used to go to the Copper Cafe, plug in my laptop, and surf for a bit, and unwind before getting whatever Redstone-based chores (shopping, haircut, etc) I had in mind accomplished. Unfortunately, the Copper Cafe took to closing at 4pm. I get out of school at 3:30 on most days. That doesn’t leave much time. Occasionally, when I’ve gotten out particularly early, I would bust my rear to get across town and settle in. Unfortunately, I’ve been having difficulty getting the connection working. I’ve tried multiple laptops, but it won’t connect. I think they changed the password and the girl behind the counter is telling me the wrong one.

There is another coffee place that closes at 2pm, and another at 6pm. The first closes too soon and the latter is really tough to find parking for. The only two options that are open late are Starbucks and Hardback’s. Hardback’s, if you are unaware, is the coffee shop that they have in Hastings music/book stores. I’ve had some difficulty with the WiFi there, but the coffee is cheap and there is always a good outlet around. What drives me crazy about the place, though, is their restroom policy. Basically, you need an escort to unlock it for you. Even if you don’t have a bladder as small as mine, we’re drinking coffee. And getting an escort sometimes isn’t easy. The people who work there are first rate, but they’re also overworked and very busy. It’s taken me 10 or 15 minutes to get someone before.

We have a Starbucks in Callie, and I try not to go places in Redstone that have places in Callie. Eventually, though, I may throw in the towel and just go to Starbucks.

Patrick Hruby argues that NCAA basketball players should go on strike. The argument for paying college football players is weak. The argument for basketball is even weaker. If they want to get paid, and they’re really good, they have a multitude of options. Also, Title IX. You can’t may men’s basketball without also paying women’s.

According to a new study, cursing at work can help you make friends and reduce stress.

Matt Yglesias points out that if we had more dense cities, we’d have less dense elsewheres. This would allow for more things like grass-fed cattle ranching. Though true, it still doesn’t explain how you get the rest of the country to agree to more dense living.

Derek Thompson investigates how spending has changed over the years.

Why are city centers growing more quickly when wealth becomes more suburbanized?

A World Without People: pictures of abandoned places.

Due to a labor dispute an entire Arena Football team was fired during a pregame meal. Stranger still? The on-the-spot replacement team went on to win.

I really hope that makeshift publishing becomes a thing. If we’re going to keep paper books around, the inventory problem has to be dealt with.

China has begun construction of a megacity, planned to be four times the population of New York and twice the size of Jersey. A part of me thinks this is just awesome. Except that I fear it will be disasterous.

I am going to start lightening up on our commenting policy. Going forward, racial issues and political issues can be discussed. The only limitation is that I do want a tone that does not completely lack disrespect. Criticizing our immigration policy is fine, or discussing the racial aspects of various items. I mostly want to avoid accusations of maliciousness or malicious intent. Such conversations tend to go nowhere and be distracting. Try to be respectful, but other than that I am moving away from declaring things off-limits. We’ll see how it goes.

Farhad Manjoo is optimistic on the latest in car-sharing ventures:

When Clark looked into personal car-sharing, he found that everyone who’d thought of the idea had hit the roadblock: No insurance company wanted to write a policy that covered strangers borrowing one another’s vehicles. Clark found financing, made connections in the car-sharing world, and spent a year and a half trying to find an insurer. Eventually, he arranged a $1 million collision and liability policy that covers drivers using other people’s cars (there’s a $500 deductible). RelayRides launched in Boston early in the summer of 2010, and it opened up a second market in San Francisco later that year. In that time, it’s been a modest success—Clark says the site has signed up 200 car owners and 6,000 drivers in the two cities.

But this week RelayRides is doing something that could alter the nature of car ownership in the United States: It’s making peer-to-peer sharing available everywhere in the country. Now anyone can list a car for a short-term loan, and anyone over 21 with a clean driving record can apply to become a renter. The company has also improved the logistics of the loan process. Until now, car owners were required to install an electronic keyless entry system to let borrowers access their vehicles. Soon*, through a partnership with General Motors, RelayRides will allow keyless entry into all vehicles that use the carmaker’s OnStar roadside support system. There are 6 million OnStar subscribers in the country, a huge pool of potential cars for RelayRides. If you don’t have OnStar, you can loan your vehicle the old-fashioned way—by meeting the driver and handing him your keys, or by installing a car-key combination lockbox.

Abstractly, I think car-sharing is a fantastic idea. All of those wasted resources. The way that we do auto insurance (by car as well as by driver) does make this difficult. The bigger issue, however, is one of access. For it to work, you’d need a rather large army of cars so that one is where you need it when you need it. This is naturally conducive to dense cities… which most people don’t live in. Which is not to say that the idea can’t succeed (lots of people do live in dense areas), but that I don’t think it qualifies as a real game-changer outside of the margins. Even if we are buying fewer cars:

It’s not that these aren’t all plausible explanations, but I think both Joe and Matt are missing one big factor: the size of the U.S. vehicle fleet has been declining since 2009. You can add to that the age of the fleet, which is now at an all-time high of 11 years on average.

I’ve borrowed one of the charts from this discussion (above). It’s from this post by Doug Short. Weisenthal used it as the more extreme evidence that vehicles miles driven are falling off a cliff in the U.S. The country is at 1997 levels, if you adjust the data for the driving age population — people over 16. In terms of raw data, miles driven peaked in the 2006-2007 period.

This all makes sense if you know that in 2005, North American new vehicle sales topped out at 17.5 million. By 2009, that number had fallen to 10.6 million. In 2011, we almost hit 13 million.

Meanwhile, MIT put together a really need foldable car:

You think European cars are small now, wait till the Hiriko takes to the roads in Spain’s northern Basque country. The two-seater is about the size of a SmartCar, but when parked, it can actually fold. After folding the car takes up about a third of a normal parking space. This is the kind of car you need, I suppose, when the city roads have become too crowded for all those space-wasting Mini Coopers. Hence the Hiriko, Basque for “urban car,” folds as the rear of the car slides underneath its chassis. Every square foot counts.

The car is the brain child of MIT Media lab. They’re collaborating with seven firms in Spain’s Basque country part of Hiriko Driving Mobility. Its primary use will be along the line of ZipCars, owned by the city and hired out temporarily. But if you simply want to be the only guy on the block with a folding car, you can buy one for about €12,500.

These would solve the problem of the first share-a-car attempt because they double as autotaxis. They’re also rather city-centric, but it would have utility regardless. A lot of people would kill for the extra garage space! I found this by way of Declan McCollough, who pointed to the fact that the car won’t go faster than the speed limit. This would, of course, be a traffic cop’s nightmare.

Speaking of antcars, Volkswagen introduces its variation of the next step on the… errr… road there: Temporary Auto Pilot:

TAP’s “Pilot Mode” will drive at a speed specified by the driver. In addition to changing speeds to avoid fender-benders, TAP slows down before bends in the road and even pays attention to speed limits and passing rules. City slickers will be especially appreciative of the automated stop and start maneuvers during traffic jams. TAP’s sensor system is based on a platform that includes camera-, radar-, and ultrasonic-based sensors augmented with a laser scanner and an electronic horizon.

Volkswagen unveiled their TAP technology at the HAVEit (“Highly Automated Vehicles for Intelligent Transport”) Final Event last month at the Volvo Proving Ground in Hällered, Sweden. Dr. Jürgen Leohold, Executive Director of Volkswagen Group Research, presented the technology. Quoted in Volkswagen’s press release, Dr. Leohold stressed, “Above all, what we achieved today is an important milestone on the path towards accident-free car driving.” TAP isn’t meant to allow the driver to kick back, watch a movie or take a nap (we will have those cars someday, but TAP’s not it). It’s meant to prevent accidents caused by inattentive drivers. Of course, that guy who sends text messages while driving is going to be even more likely to do so once he gets behind the wheel of a TAP car. But for the rest of us responsible drivers, TAP will not only make driving safer but more energy-efficient as well.

This appears to be a little more than adaptive cruise control. This is actually a small step towards antcars, though. The major step is once we have enough confidence in such a car that we don’t care if there is a driver in it or not. Or if the driver is sleeping.

But man, would I have loved this during the Six Miles To New City days.

My parents, as they go to bed, turn on the TV and watch Leno. It’s part of their ritual. My ritual is slightly different: I turn on the DVR and watch some non-arching crime show. Law & Order got a lot of viewing this way. Since I’ve seen so many of those, though, I’ve drifted to Cold Case, Numb3rs, Flashpoint, and other shows of the sort. One crime show that I never got into as much was Criminal Minds, though I’ll watch it when I want a sure-fire haven’t-seen-this-before episode of something. I’ve always found something about the show off-putting. Some of it relates to Elliot Grant.

One day, somebody found a dead body on a huge plot of land on Grant’s body. They looked further, and they found more dead bodies (all women). The local PD decided that they had a serial killer and asked the FBI for a profile. The FBI sent one back. The type you would generally expect: loner, has trouble with women, possibly this, probably that. And from that point, nearly everything Grant did fit that profile. He was initially very cooperative, just as the killer would be. Then, once realizing that the police were looking at him, became very uncooperative, just as the killer would do. They found pornography on his computer, which the killer would have.

I am not entirely a fully impartial narrator. Though I don’t think I ever met Grant, he was an employee of my father’s. My father tends to be a very good judge of character, and my father found the notion that Grant was a serial killer to be absurd. And so I, too, am inclined towards disbelief. Not all that many people were. The newspapers ran his face, asking if Elliot Grant was getting away with murder. The father of one of the victims began terrorizing him, trespassing and leaving threatening phone calls (the police would tell him to stop and/or leave the property, but never prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law).

The only thing that the police lacked was proof. Any proof. They searched his house and his ranch and found not a thing (but they wouldn’t, said the profilers, because the killer would be meticulous). Eventually Grant went on television and took a lie detector test administered by a former FBI muckity-muck (the police had asked him to take one, but he had declined because he did not trust the police), which he passed on the question of whether he did it or had any knowledge of who did (he did lie about something less germane, however). This was enough for the FBI, who said that as far as they were concerned, Grant was cleared. The local PD disagreed.

For the next several years, any time a girl went missing, they would turn his ranch upside down and re-search his house. His name would be mentioned in the press again. Elliot Grant got another one. Unless they found the girl, in which case he didn’t.

About half a decade ago, for the first time in a few years, another girl went missing. Elliot Grant killed himself.

There are people that, to this day, believe that Grant was guilty. His death was only emblematic of the fact that he couldn’t live with the guilt. The detective in charge of the case conceded, who had been unmoved by Grant’s death, that Grant may have done it or may not have done it. The father that had terrorized him said the same (and that he regrets terrorizing him). To be sure, there is no proof that Grant didn’t do it. But the strength of the case against him relied partially that his land was where the bodies were found and largely on the profile.

And so… a show about profilers doesn’t excite me all that much. It’s not unlike how Law & Order SVU and Without a Trace are - to me - emblematic of our culture of paranoia surrounding sex and children and therefore less enjoyable to me.

I am typing this from Ataturk’s coffee, which is in Mayne, right down the street from Mayne High School, where I attended for four years. I didn’t care that much for Mayne High at the time, though since then I have grown to appreciate the good education I got there. And while it was a ridiculously snobby and pretentious place, there really are a lot of worse places I could have gone.

A few years ago, they redrew the maps and a kid that was raised in my neighborhood would no longer be allowed to attend Mayne. Rather, they’d go to Eastfield High School. It has long been a goal of the district to shift students that went to Larkhill Middle School (where I also went) from Mayne High School. Mainly for class reasons. My own little town, East Oak, is actually reasonably well-to-do, and it’s doubtful that anyone would have a problem with us attending Mayne, but the people from the city of Larkhill is rife with comparative undesirables. It’s not full of NAMs, if you’re curious, but rather blue collar whites, yards with cars sitting on cinder blocks, and so on.

Back in the 90’s during the school shootings, we’d get people coming to our house to sign a petition to shift those Larkhill kids to some other school because those Larkhill kids are totally the kind that will go start shooting up schools. The petitioners didn’t seem to realize that in all likelihood they were demanding that we be shifted, too. To be honest, my parents never had a real problem with it except for one thing. The likely alternative, Southfield High School, was a four-star school (Mayne is five, thus Southfield was considered “the bad school” in the district) where we would have gotten a good education. I think I would have preferred Southfield, judging by the attitudes of the people I knew that went there.

Anyhow, over the last few years they have built a couple of new schools, and they found a place to ship Larkhill kids off to. As I mentioned, I didn’t much care for Mayne when I went there, but goodwill has been building since. Now, that goodwill is less so. Now, in my mind, the school that was too rich for my blood back then is increasingly too rich again. Because now poor people like us can’t go there anymore. The loophole that allowed people who spent $150k on their house to go to school with the rich kids has been closed. I don’t know if it’s petty to be resentful of that.

The “one thing” that made my parents not want me to go to Southfield was that Southfield is across The Bridge. So is Eastfield. It’s only five minutes further away than Mayne, but because it’s across the bridge, it’s in an area that we never go to. I am writing this from a coffee shop in Mayne because I found it because I drive through Mayne. I almost never drive around across the bridge. A place like this might exist over there, but I’d never find it. Our doctor, our dentist, my father’s job - everything is on the north side of the bridge. Partially out of habit (The Bridge used to be an inconvenient drawbridge), but also because the geography of Southfield makes places to go there take longer. Cross the bridge, end up right by the bay, where they don’t like to open up strip malls and doctor’s offices and such. So you have to cross the bridge and then drive further inland to get anywhere.

Interestingly, while strip malls won’t build near the water, both of the new high schools are by the water. Surrounded by shrimp shacks and piers and swamps. Thus making Eastfield neither particularly East (it’s the second western-most school) nor much of a “field.”

I got my wife a Kindle for Christmas. She always wants something to read - when she has time - but little time to actually go out and find books. I was kind of nervous about it, since she doesn’t have my penchant for electronics. But she vaguely mentioned the possibility of buying one. The good news is that I had a winner. The bad news is that it wasn’t a surprise.

She hasn’t really used it yet. We’ve been stymied by what to do with our accounts and the DRM. Namely, which of our accounts to put it on. It’s her device, so it would make sense to put it on her account. But my account is an Amazon Prime account, which means that there was some free lending. But putting it on mine meant I wasn’t sure what would happen if I got my own device. We went ahead and used her account, but didn’t buy anything until we knew what we were going to do. Instead, I downloaded some free books from the Project Gutenberg.

For those of you who don’t know, Project Gutenberg is dedicated to taking works in the public domain, digitizing them, and making them available. Thanks to our copyright law, these books tend to be really, really old. On the upshot, here is my chance to actually read War & Peace. There’s a similar project called LibreVox, which is dedicated to taking works in the public domain and putting them to audio. That could be cool.

Anyhow, I read up more on how the DRM and accounts work and determined that her device should be on my account. The problem is that once I changed the account, all of the books on the device disappeared. Even if they didn’t have DRM, they were all associated with her account. I copied them off and put them back on, but they wouldn’t reappear. I had to change the filenames.

My old Thinkpad R32 laptop, purchased in 2002, finally bit the dust. It had a long and winding life. Dropped repeatedly, a five-foot drop onto a hard surface at a coffee place spelled the beginning of the end. That was in 2006. It was a long end. Some pixels started blinkering out. The TSA mishandled it (despite my specifically telling them that it was fragile) and a bunch more did. Nonetheless, 70% of the screen was still visible. It was no longer a primary laptop by that point, but it still served its uses in various capacities when it served a couple years as the TV computer and then its final years manning the printer(s).

I don’t have the heart to throw it away. A part of me really wants to buy another used R32 and be able to take the upgrade parts and put them to use. It would cost less than $100, but, for the life of me, I cannot think of what I would do with another decade-old laptop. Upon its death, I already had a newer machine (T43, made in 2005) I could immediately put on printer duty. I have a newer-machine still (made in 2008) that is primarily on backup-emergency duty. Another 2008 that is packed and ready to go when I want to take a laptop somewhere without packing my primary one. Two other laptops, a 2008 and a 2009, that share TV duty (one waiting in the wings so that if I need to do something with one, I have another manning the television).

Not long ago, I threw out a motherboard that I bought in 2007. The motherboard was never right from the moment I got it. I celebrated a little when it died and made absolutely no effort to figure out what was wrong with it. I feared that if I discovered what was wrong with it, I would try to fix it and be stuck with the motherboard that never worked right to begin with. I still haven’t thrown it out, though. I look at it and think to myself, “You don’t work, and I never proved otherwise”… not that I tried. I have a couple older machines that I have kept in good working order, but have not turned on in more than twice since 2008.

The progress of technology is an absolutely amazing thing. As a computer geek, I love it. I have loved each smartphone more than the previous (though I am stuck on a 2009 model, they don’t make the kind I want anymore). The cell phone I adored when I got it now sits there completely unused, despite technically doing just about everything my current phone does. I could go on eBay and sell it, but nobody wants it. It’s several times faster than my first Windows PC with the same screen resolution and a lot more memory, but it’s probably never going to be used again.

The triumph of technology never ceases to amaze me, yet the obsolescence never stops saddening me.

I got called in for a half-day today. The thing is, the teacher who had to leave had a student teacher that was teaching anyway. My job was to sit there and “supervise”, which is what the teacher would have been doing. But the student teacher is tons more qualified than I am. I stopped by the office to ask if they had anything else for me to do. They said that I legally had to be in the room to supervise because the teacher was uncertified.

There is, of course, no level upon which this makes sense. But bureaucracy is, of course, its own reason.

I would say “at least I got paid for it,” but on half-days, once you take out 38% in taxes, $3 in union dues, and $15.50 for gas, I made $4.24.

Driving along the west, you see a fair number of windfarms. You can see them from rather far off. I am not a “green” enthusiasts, but I think they’re neat. Local residents disagree:

Throughout the UK — indeed, all over the world — fights against large-scale wind-energy projects are raging. The European Platform against Windfarms lists 518 signatory organizations from 23 countries. The UK alone now has about 285 anti-wind groups. Last May, some 1,500 protesters descended on the Welsh assembly, the Senedd, demanding that a massive wind project planned for central Wales be stopped.

Although environmental groups like Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace claim that wind energy is the answer when it comes to slowing the rate of growth in carbon dioxide emissions, policymakers from Ontario to Australia are responding to angry landowners who don’t want 100-meter-high wind turbines built near their homes.

On seeing the headline, I figured that the opposition was Kennedy-esque: aesthetically unpleasing and such. I am relatively unsympathetic to that argument because, well, I think they look awesome. The picture of the wind turbines visible from that guy’s backyard? Awesome.

My views on this matter are atypical, I suppose. Near my house, they built a condo skyscraper several years ago. It’s conspicuously visible from our backyard. The neighborhood hates it. They were opposing the building of more before the real estate collapse killed all future projects (the builders of the condo in question are taking a bath - I wouldn’t be surprised if they just cut their losses and tore it down soon).

Anyhow, whether you like the sight of a skyscraper or wind turbine is a matter of taste and - in my view - a relatively superificial concern. Their complaints about the noise and lights, on the other hand, are a bigger deal. This is especially true in areas where the lack of light pollution and noise pollution are one of the few things that they have going for them. There are a lot of downsides to living in ruralia, but even someone like myself who puts Works of Men in front of Works of God, I can appreciate seeing the stars and night. And everybody appreciates some peace and quiet.

Whether they should take it in the chin for The Greater Good is for people in greater positions of authority than me to decide. People have a high tolerance for unpleasantness when it is perceived to be good for the economy. Louisiana objected vociferously when offshore drilling was quashed. Wyoming’s air quality may be worse than Los Angeles’s, and fracking may be contaminating their water supply, but it’s the outsiders who are raising the alarm bells and Wyomingans (except the Dairy Towners from California) who want to keep moving forward.

So why not with Windfarms? Maybe it’s not profitable enough for them to get their cut? If you paid them off, would it still be economically feasible?