My new phone

It was determined that I need a phone that I would actually answer so the SO and I went down to the Verizon store. We have a family plan that actually spans the world from California to Boston to Grenada and Madagascar so that seemed sensible. Knowing very little about phones, I requested the model that the current hipsters demand, the iPhone 4S. And it's a beautiful money making machine for Apple.

First thing off the bat, I need to enter my email address and password. Bang! all my contacts sucked off to be analyzed for marketing opportunities, sorry guys. Now I'm presented with a screen full of useful apps, or more like Apple revenue opportunities.

• You tube - ads to view and demographics to collect
• Newsstand - subscriptions to sell for "news"
• iTunes - totally controlled music to sell and to store
• Stocks - who knows what this collects?
  
• Camera - an opportunity to sell some storage options
• Photos - another place to sell image storage
• Game center - another place to collect information and sell content
• Maps - only really useful if you enable the tracking feature for more collection
• App store - at least this tells what it is, a store.
• Weather - another way to get me to turn on location tracking

I did find out how to get most of these icons off the home page. Oh, I just remembered, I put in the password for my home network to get the maps working. I wonder where that will end up?

At 4.9 ounces it's a real money making heavyweight. Time to turn it off! Does it really?

Blogomotion

So let me get this straight. In order to login to Linkedin (where I got my current job) I need to give them my yahoo password so they can suck up all my contacts and go after their contacts. And in order to use my google account that already has my yahoo password I need to open it up to that they can get all the information too.

We've been suckered into the view that google and linkedin and yahoo are all amazing free services. In fact I'm writing this on a google platform known as blogger.com. And as you know my employer has paid a fee to get immediate notification if any of my postings contain certain key words, like the name of the company.

Time to get out. Maybe back to an old fashioned BBS? Like the original Well in Marin county. This needs investigating, the network must be free!

Urban Furniture, San Francisco

We finally got some good hard rain this afternoon here in the Bay Area (and continuing now too) so I had an opportunity to shelter under the Muni roof at the Ball Park platform. I think last year I always walked over to BART so I never noticed this but this year I guess I'm getting soft and waiting for the train. When you spend some time waiting for a mass transit conveyance you start to learn some things. Today I learned about the overhead shelters.

These have undulating wavelike roofs over some parts of the platform. Each dip in the wave dumps it's contents towards the tracks. When the train came up and I had to step out of the shelter, I found that this flood was directed straight towards the car door. And looking down the platform, the next car door also had a perfectly aligned roof dip as well.

Is this some kind of convergent evolution where the train designers and the platform architects had arrived on the same spacing to ensure dumping the rain into each car door? Only future paleo's can tell.

For now, I'm home, it's raining like hell outside and glad to hear it. Maybe push the button on the fireplace remote and snuggle inside. Regards.

Advertising

In my Internet email I get advertising for a lot of different things, like in these categories:

• Credit cards
• DUI defense
• Health Insurance
• Replacement windows
• Credit scores
• Free auto repairs
• Free movies, cheap Internet
• Printer ink and toner
• Cheap Tektronix parts and service (OK, that's maybe just me)

The most frequent is for the various Internet providers. And they really want me to sign up so they can sell me more advertising. Does this make any sense? It's like a perpetual motion machine. I get the internet and read the ads and buy another internet provider and read their ads and around and around. What we used to call "over unity". There are plenty of sites about that if you want to use a favorite search site.

But can we really run an economy this way? I have long suspected that advertising is the only industry that the U.S. is good at, but can I really eat it for dinner?

Foodies!

The paper today has a story about a cruise liner that hit a rock and capsized off of Tuscany. I don't need to tell you which country that is in because we all know it's about Italy and food. Certainly a scary experience and sad for the tourists that were killed but I can't get over that the story had to include the details of the food being eaten when the shudder and crash were felt by the diners.

Hammer, 65, told The Associated Press that she was eating her first course, an appetizer of cuttlefish, sauteed mushrooms and salad, on her first night aboard her first-ever cruise, which was a gift to her and her husband, Gert, from her local church where she volunteers.

As in: "Besides that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"

I'm glad the the locals on the small island opened up their homes and basically every building they had to take in the survivors. I would want to come back again in the daytime and thank my rescuers, maybe a year or so later. Perhaps with a bit more garlic this time.

Political Logos

I ran into this article regarding the logos used by Egyptian political parties for the recent voting. In many countries with less than literate populations logos are a common way to pick a candidate on the ballot. Or maybe I should say in countries with less TV manipulated political news. Can we in the U.S. even imagine politics without TV ads? I don't think so, maybe we would need to actually read something.

What's the fun of that? The way we do it is to watch 20 seconds of Rich somebody getting booed off the stage without ever hearing why. These are the guys we are choosing to launch the missiles?

If I was Egyptian I would vote for the party with the stove logo. I will always support dinner getting ready.

Netflix, 2 billion hours

This company, on the ropes a few weeks ago with incredibly bone headed marketing moves, like raising prices and spitting off a major part of it's business under another name, is back big time after announcing astounding sales of 2 billion hours of movies streamed in the last quarter.

A number like that just needs to get dissected. I'm no Marcus (mkaz.com) but let me give it a try.

2 billion hours/40 hours per standard work week = 50 million work weeks

if a quarter is 4 weeks per month times 3 months thats 12 weeks which leads to

50 million weeks/12 = 417,000 quarters of standard hours watching movies

According to the CIA factbook there are about 140 million employed workers in the U.S.A. So they would have had 140 million * 40 hours * 12 weeks gives 67.2 billion hours of work time for the quarter.

So (tah dah!) 67 billion/2 billion is about 3.3% of time wasted watching movies from just this one source. Which from my experience is the main source of movie watching in a typical office. These days when you walk around there are so many people hunched over their i/android phones that it's not even funny. And since it's not tracked on the corporate network it's all free game.

And we are wondering about productivity? Maybe the reason India/El Salvador/Vietnam etc are so productive is that they don't have any internet for most of the country. My new pack of underwear that I bought Saturday at Walmart for $7 was made in El Salvador and good quality too.