Justin Duewel-Zahniser

In the time it takes me to boot up Windows and check my Outlook mail, I can: Boot Ubuntu Launch...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:12:57 -0400

In the time it takes me to boot up Windows and check my Outlook mail, I can:

Boot Ubuntu Launch chrome and check my personal email Close chrome Play two rounds of Tetravex Shut down the computer

This is just on average, mind you. Sometimes I can only play one round of Tetravex and sometimes I can make breakfast instead.

The Future of Chapbook

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:46:31 -0400

Jotting down some quick thoughts between work meetings, here.

I’m thinking about next steps for Chapbook. It is still running on Herokugarden, as the instructions to port to the new platform were not successful. I may try again after this upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 (super, super beta) because I believe it’s primarily a security certificate issue.

Following that, I think I’ve made up my mind that I will remove OpenID authentication and go to traditional user accounts. Even with the marvelousness that is Clickpass, my analytics show that basically no one follows through with the completion of the process. This is a known issue: OpenID is great for uber-nerds, but not for actual humans. Or, for that matter, even some uber-nerds.

Beyond that, I may actually try to write more often there in lieu of blogging. I don’t have enough blogging time and energy to do this and my work blog, and there’s often channel conflict that results in less blogging in either place as I’m paralyzed by indecision. Also, I think that if I want to be known for something personally, not professionally, I’d rather it be for my poetry than my blogging. Most of my thoughts can also be compacted enough for Twitter.

If you have specific reasons why you disagree with anything above, please chime in. If you have specific thoughts or desires re: Chapbook, let me know. Also, if you would have used it, but for OpenID, please definitely let me know.

Note to Gary: I will take very good care of our accounts and make sure they link up to the existing content! I promise!

Email. [Insert Swearing Here].

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:21:06 -0400

I don’t like email.

You may have heard of ambitions like “Inbox Zero” and seen books like Inbox Detox floating around. You may be used to seeing this:

Inbox (627)

You may go to work every other day with the primary goal (stated or not) of simply surviving your inbox. A curious state of affairs.

Noise

Corporate email in particular is full of noise. Customer satisfaction issues, more often than you might think, can be traced to the technically proper but disastrous use of email. For example, picture yourself in a serious email chain with like 23 people included. Often, little breakout discussions from the main thread occur by replying to a subset. Someone might change a subject line, starting a whole new sub-thread. Tracking all this and rolling it back up is time-consuming, not easy to do, and sometimes requires editing inappropriate comments out of sub-threads. So it usually just doesn’t happen.

Now, let’s assume that one of these sub-threads involved a decision about how to handle a customer requirement. That thread comes to a conclusion and everyone likes the approach, so that’s that. But everyone else in the main thread (or other sub-threads) may have their own conclusion or be unaware of the conclusion. Any number of these situations can lead to conflicting messages to customers or conflicting expectations about what will occur next, when it will occur and who will follow-up.

All because of a subject-line change. Should the specific characters used in the subject line really have this much impact? No. As my boss would say, “eh, not so much.”

Outlook

Many business use Outlook for their employee email at a certain scale. Many run Windows, the IT guys use Active Directory to manage that, and therefore it fits right in. And then it becomes the primary communication vehicle for the entire company.

Outlook stores things in these cool little .pst files. You may have found them. This is a stretch, but you may have actually backed them up once or twice. This is really a stretch, but your IT guys may auto-back them up for you to the network.

If you’ve used Outlook for a long time and you’re a busy person, your .pst files are probably approaching a terabyte in size. This probably means that Outlook takes 3 days to launch, 3 days to shut down and sometimes it fails to shut down correctly as well. It also spins your disk a lot, even though you need to move threads around and handle messages at near warp speed to keep up with the influx of new items.

So you are paying a productivity price for local disk storage of an immense wealth of company IP, historical discussions of note and records of important decisions. And that’s very, very risky.

Microsoft has recognized that Outlook has started to become a distributed corporate database. I think advances in the file system and the new search approach are at least a response in part to this phenomena. The big question is whether Outlook Pro (not Express) will start to move more and more towards a communication platform than a ‘roid-raging email client.

Xobni

These guys turned down a huge buyout from Microsoft. So, clearly they are swinging for the fence. Or insane. Or both. I’m leaning towards the fence thing.

Xobni attempts to improve the utility of Outlook by adding analytics and incorporating other outside channels of communication (like Facebook and Twitter) in to Outlook based on your contact’s identity.

I am a huge fan of this tool. It improves the utility of Outlook in important ways for me. But, it does not solve all the other problems I’m trying to outline here. It’s an improvement to email, but it’s still email. [Insert swearing here]. And it’s still Outlook, so it’s still kind of dangerous.

MOC

Eventually, people began to notice that they were using email to chat. That was really inefficient. So, projects like Jabber and Microsoft Office Communicator came about to try to provide business-friendly chat. A lot of large companies that run on Active Directory and Outlook use MOC. The result of this trend has been that people now use email and chat programs to chat. And since many of these chat services don’t auto-archive conversations, it has the effect of replicating many of the problems of email being used for non-repudiated records of business activity, but without the actual recording. And it’s not durable like email such that it’s very conducive to asynchronous responses.

Also, it frequently doesn’t work very well, dropping messages and entire conversations.

What’s also insidious, and subtle, is that now people have to think about whether they should email someone or try to chat with them based on things like “status” (very gameable) and what type of conversation they anticipate they might end up having.

Additionally, people receiving chat messages often feel like they must answer them, so their productivity decreases. But they feel like they can’t turn it off, because people will view them as unresponsive. Telecommuters often feel like it represents their physical presence in the workplace and that they will be forgotten if they are not visible—this can sometimes lead to excessive meetings and unnecessary email threads as a way to generate pseudo-face time.

So now the problem is in some ways much worse.

Enter Google Wave

I won’t duplicate all that has been written about Wave here, but this project is basically an attempt to evolve beyond the issues cited above and re-baseline personal and professional (but mostly professional) general internet-based communication. To which I say, even if it fails, bring it on. I will add my tears of laughter and joy as salty drops in the wave. It can’t get much worse.

If you want to take a peek, Ars Technica has a good rundown. Also, I’m sure micro-blogging could have been worked in to this post as well, but I didn’t have the time. If that offends you, tweet me. I’m just sitting here waiting for my invite to arrive.

One-Way Hash Arguments (FactCheck.org)

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:14:53 -0400

Check out this article on one-way hash arguments.

The skinny: talking points for an against healthcare (or anything else political) tend to be like a one-way hash. It’s easy to state the point, it sounds intuitive, but it’s not obvious enough in its implication that it’s easy to refute. Conversely, to effectively disprove the argument, which is usually simple to do, is actually impractical to do because the counter-evidence takes up much more space or air time to get across and is harder to follow, even though it’s often factual or at least more intellectually honest.

We all know that sound bites are often full of these types of claims, but it’s interesting to see FactCheck really talk about the approach and give great examples of how it plays out when you analyze the point-counterpoint involved.

I also like the fact that they claim most of their job consists of taking simple arguments and making them more complicated. It’s true.

Morning Radio Side Note (re: Birthers)

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:57:38 -0400

It seems a lot of Birthers are assuming that Obama is not releasing his documents now because he can’t. Perhaps, just maybe, it would be because:

1) He doesn’t have to. 2) Settling the debate would make the Birthers go away, despite the fact that their continued existence and noise level is a political advantage to the administration.

Read #2 again.

NRA Discussion on C-SPAN

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:48:12 -0400

One sort of obvious phenomenon that I heard about while taking the recycling out (OMG, liberal!) is the trend that NRA memberships surge whenever there’s a perceived threat to gun ownership and decline whenever gun ownership seems safe. For example, when the Republicans took the House in ‘94, membership decreased. When Bush took office, it decreased. When Obama won the election, it soared.

Likewise, gun purchases spike in a significant wave along the same lines. People tend to buy up guns whenever they are scared that there’s about to be a ban or restrictions. Again, Obama, as an example.

Which means, ironically, that periodic gun control activism, liberal presidency, etc. can be financially lucrative, along with ongoing scare tactics, for both the gun lobby and gun makers. Funny how these things work out.

WARNING

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 23:43:06 -0400

Gays are trying to force you to divorce. The government wants to weed you out of the population. Record income inequalities should help prevent class tension. Sugar tariffs and corn subsidies are the only thing standing between you and obesity.

"My family sawed down whole orchards of apple trees in the fifties,sixties,and seventies-trees that..."

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:12:22 -0400

“

My family sawed down whole orchards of apple trees in the fifties,sixties,and seventies-trees that produced damn good tasteing apples that were easy to store,easy to grow,and economical to produce.

We couldn’t sell them anymore,because all the women’s magazines were full of pictures of fairy tale apples.

So now we raise mostly the crappy kinds you refer too-and we have a hard time getting rid of the surplus from the few trees of the old time varieties we still raise for our own use.

I like to think of them as barbie doll apples-impossibly good looking,totally worthless eccept as eye candy.

”

- oldfarmermac

Healthscare

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:56:58 -0400

According to BusinessWeek, the health insurance companies have already defeated meaningful health reform. Their strategy? Wow or buy the “Blue Dogs” and use them against the other Democrats. I’m not sure whether there’s any quality behind this article, but it claims that the insurance companies stand to actually increase profits (and with them, costs). I guess the overall strategy is to allow proponents to pass something neutered and bad, then show that it didn’t work, then claim that any reform is worse for you.

I hate to sound like a partisan hack, but our healthcare really is going to crush the country if we don’t figure out something meaningful. One particular issue I have is with this public option debate. I keep hearing this argument that if there’s no level playing field, the government will put the private industry out of business. That’s supposed to be an argument not to have a public option? Sounds to me like it’s just an argument to ensure a level playing field. Surely we can figure that out? If not, we’re just plain old screwed either way.

Bottom line is that congress is some combination of corrupt and inept. We need to elect more people who promise not to run for re-election (at least until we get citizen-funded elections) so they can spend the whole time they are there actually producing quality legislation and reading what other people produce. And we should probably do that within the next few cycles.

Man, that was fun.

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:41:58 -0400

Man, that was fun.

You can tell when politicians don’t like something because they intentionally misrepresent...

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:41:41 -0400

You can tell when politicians don’t like something because they intentionally misrepresent that thing. That is why I am convinced that many conservative Senators dislike the English language.

You might say that these Senators are not intentionally misrepresenting the English language. I disagree. They tend to be well-educated. They all have access to dictionaries and well educated staff. And, they spend all day parsing words and crafting laser-precise legislative language. Okay, I went a little overboard on the legislative language. But you get the point.

Let’s take a look at dictionary.com:

em⋅pa⋅thy

–noun 1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. 2. the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.

sym⋅pa⋅thy

harmony of or agreement in feeling, as between persons or on the part of one person with respect to another.
the harmony of feeling naturally existing between persons of like tastes or opinion or of congenial dispositions.
the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, esp. in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration.

Do you see the difference between the two? Empathy: intellectual identification or vicarious experience. That is to say, the ability to understand someone else’s position. Sympathy: agreement in feeling, sharing of feeling between individuals. NOT THE SAME THING. I may be intellectually capable of understanding your bizarre fixation on and professed aversion to homosexuality, for example, without having it in any way affect my judgment of you and without in any way having it sway my own feelings.

And, yet, these yahoos continue to suggest that the “empathy” standard for judges (read: the ability for a judge to intellectually understand all arguments, NOT the prerequisite for a judge to agree with all of them or allow them to bias her decision) will rape the Constitution, permit legal racisim and eat our babies. Let me say this in plain English. WTF d00dz?

These unpatriotic ingrates should be run out of office. Don’t they know that English is our one and only national language?

Post-GOP American Politics?

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:08:19 -0400

There’s a lot of talk (particularly within liberal camps, shockingly) that the GOP is getting closer and closer to a slippery slope into third party status. I’m no pundit, so forgive the sweeping generalities here, but philosophically, there are a few things going on:

Their appeal to minorities is dropping.
The staunch social conservatives maybe dying faster than they can reproduce.
Independents appear to have moved away from them.
Blue dogs are “in the game,” playing some of their principles where they can’t or won’t.

Fun thought experiment. Imagine that for all the reasons above, the GOP becomes a statistical third party. What would happen? One possibility would be that the “blue dogs” split from the rest of the Democratic party and we end up with something that looks like this:

Democrats
Blue Dogs
Independents (a lot of these might actually go Blue Dog, at least vote-wise)
Republicans

Every debate might be less about religious wedge issues and more about fiscal policy and constitutional concerns as driven by the Republicans and Independents up into the debate between the Blue Dogs and the… Blue Birds?

That would be an interesting world. At least it’s consistent with my long running belief that every generation’s major social issues are the next generation’s awkward national embarrassments. As one of my friends said over the California gay marriage ban this cycle, eh, ten years from now our kids will look at us and say, “Who cares. You guys were retarded.” Or, they will use whatever un-PC slang is popular ten years from now. Maybe they’ll say, “You guys were soooo Limbaugh, dad.”

From Jabe. Lolworthy.

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 13:34:27 -0400

From Jabe. Lolworthy.

I don’t know what these three people had against Walter...

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:20:03 -0400

I don’t know what these three people had against Walter Cronkite, but it seems harsh to take pleasure in someone’s death.

If I re-did my poetry app everytime the new OMG HOTNESS language came out, I might as well call it...

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:58:07 -0400

If I re-did my poetry app everytime the new OMG HOTNESS language came out, I might as well call it Duke Nukem Forever: Emo Edition.

Citizen-Funded Elections vs. Term Limits

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:34:04 -0400

Okay, so there’s a lot of debate on how to make congress useful. I mostly here people arguing in favor of citizen-funded elections (that is, public donations only with small caps) and term limits for people in office.

The Problem w/ Term Limits

The undue influence of special interests does not go away with term limits. Within the # of terms a candidate has available, they will still be subject to fundraising and therefore ineffective at their job if they desire to remain in the job.
The undue influence of special interests will not go away entirely at the end of the term, because under-principled people nearing the end of their term limit will have a strong incentive to designate a successor and fund-raise for that person. Meaning that you haven’t actually solved the problem of wasted time, corruption, etc. You’ve just freshened up the targets a bit.
Forced term limits does not provide an opportunity for a legitimately talented and useful individual to serve for a while. This is risky, so it’s a less important point than the above ones, but if you postulate that the current system would turn over more if less special money was involved anyway, it might be actually more less of a risk than it is now. But see above for the real problems.

Citizen-Funded Elections to the Rescue

The whole point here is to return our representatives to acting on behalf of the citizenry. There are a few benefits postulated to result from this:

More legislation - part of the reason congress is often the bottleneck is because they spend like 1/3-2/3 of their time in office raising money. Imagine how much work you’d get done if you spent, say, half of your time panhandling (assuming that’s not currently your job). Less? Yeah. It’d be easier to get important reforms through if people weren’t having dinners with SIGs while they are on payroll “working on your behalf.”
Better legislation - the time currently spent fundraising could instead be spent 1) reading the legislation, 2) thinking about the impact of the legislation and 3) conducting impact studies and trials. All of which, I think you’ll agree, works better than repeatedly arguing talking points provided by SIGs as a substitute for actual effort.

Both?

Yeah, that’d be fine, probably. Compromise for the sake of progress is awesome. Hence the problem we have today. Everyone’s stuck in this point-counterpoint situation in which [ed: sarcasm alert] no combination of both side’s ideas could ever possibly be a better solution than just a pure implementation on one side.

“New theory: stupid people reproduce more because the...

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:16:34 -0400

“New theory: stupid people reproduce more because the alternative is sleeping with you.”

Good old XKCD.

Anyone Wanna Buy a Representative?

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:42:22 -0400

Anyone wanna pitch in with me and buy a representative in Congress? I hear it’s expensive, so I’d have to get a lot of people to commit first. I don’t think the district matters. We should probably buy someone that ranks well on a committee, though. Are older members less expensive or more expensive?

"The Federal Trade Commission theoretically oversees this program but, to date, no company’s..."

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:35:54 -0400

“The Federal Trade Commission theoretically oversees this program but, to date, no company’s procedures have been challenged as failing to meet these guidelines.”

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_Harbor_Principles

Anarchist Alternative Institutions

Tue, 12 May 2009 21:11:46 -0400

I haven’t really thought about anarchy much lately. Perhaps it’s my deviation into the nerdcore sub-genre of hip hop and my current low level of access to old school British punk. But perhaps it’s also probably the fact that I don’t think anarchy is a natural resting state for human collectives and so I don’t tend to take it very seriously in political discussions.

Last week, C-SPAN had a call-in program on the radio while I was driving to work where callers could talk to two very erudite columnists and commentators on politics. I forget their names, but one was from Slate and the other was from… forgot that too. One was a liberal and the other was a conservative. But they were friendly and agreeable. Like sausage and mayonnaise—very different, but they went well together.

So, one guy called in to criticize government, period. He was an anarchist and was concerned that our system was not a Republic, but instead a Corporate Theocracy. That is, a company run by some guy named Theo. Anyway, he asked why more people didn’t consider alternatives to the two party system. So one of the commentators, probably the taller one, said something that I thought was very fresh, insightful and interesting:

If you want people to steer away from government, you have to provide alternatives. Anarchists like to whine, but they don’t often provide any alternative systems that address some of the needs leading to government.

Like, provide free, quality education in your neighborhood. Or something like that. I thought that was a new way of thinking about anarchy. What could anarchists, or just anti-government folk actually do, rather than just talk about, to convince people on the fringe that they should move in that political/philosophical direction.