Papers like How and Why People Use Camera Phones can be very amusing. Be sure you take on picture of each kind today!

Ten years on this essay is surprisingly topical today as it was then.

… Bill Gates, who has already made Mitch Kapor-style money, many times over, and posesses something much more offensive — the power of FUD.

In the software business, FUD is the power to set the agenda, to keep anyone else from moving, to make everyone wait for you. It isn’t entirely negative. FUD makes it possible for there to actually *be* an agenda. If the industry is run by random idiots, then this is preferrable.

… my Dad had a Rainbow; it had more steel in it than a small car.

A decade later, today that msn.com is the #2 traffic site, bested only by Yahoo.

Virtual world gaming isn’t something I pay much attention to, but this posting from James Davidson caught my interest.

It seems as if the Xbox Live system underwent a big Ctrl-Alt-Delete style reset with the coming of the New Year. My first hint was when I logged into to play a bit of Halo 2 online. Instead of being a level 4 player, I was back to being a level 1. That’s not so bad, since I really do suck. But, everyone else was a level 1 as well. This means that the auto-matchup system was pitting people who were really level 16 against real level 1 players. That part sucked-especially since the auto-matchup system that keeps players of roughly the same level playing together is one of the highlights of using Xbox Live.

The second hint was when I tried to look up information about my gamertag online. The system said that there was no information available. Oops.

So, after re-signing into Xbox Live Online and relinking my gamertag, I dived into the forums and found lots of people grumbling. But since it’s New Years and a holiday, it’ll probably take a bit of time to sort out. Microsoft and mission-critical. Once again, two words that don’t go together well. At least it is only gaming.

— here

The way I understand it some of these virtual gaming worlds have proven gross national products larger than most nations. Which leads me to ponder what liability Microsoft has incurred if they really did wipe clean the books of this one. I smell class action law suit.

Things I learned today.

If you need to have your front loading GE washer repaired because it’s not draining nobody in town wants to work on a front loading washing machine.

You can slip aquarium tubing past the drum to siphon much of the water out. Later you discover this isn’t necessary; the drain pipe takes a route that assures it can be used to drain the entire tank. (update:  Do not try to route a tube past the front door gasket, you’ll pop it off and then you’ll be sorry!)

There are a few hundred screws to be removed to get the back off the washing machine. That’s a hint. Don’t remove the back. The problem is in the front.

The hose claps are cleverly designed to require very large pliers to remove them. Happy day, I have large pliers. Better yet, I can find them.

The pump motor assembly is held together with torx screws. I’m a geek, I have a torx wrench; wrong size. Wait! I bet this is a hint. Remove entire assembly instead.

If your hard up for cash there is two or three dollars in change in the trap of your washing machine’s drain.

The pump doesn’t work if you inject a large paper clip into it’s works. Removing paperclip and all is good.

Did I mention that you shouldn’t remove the back panel of the washing machine. If you do the entire sheet metal box goes very very slightly a-kilter; none of the screws line up. It takes a few hours and various bits of lumber to convince box to return to approximately the right shape. Then you force the screws in one at a time.

Clean clothes for Christmas, and an education, and $2 dollars and 43 cents!

Oh, I also learned that the first thing they ask when you go to the Macalester interview is what your SAT scores are. There is a lot of market failure in the college admissions process.

Getting the customer to buy some additional stuff late in the transaction is called “up selling.” Candy in the checkout line at the grocery store. Extended warranties at the electronics’ store. Rust proofing at the car dealer. These are high margin sales. Some vendors probably make most of their income on the upsell.

So my wife was amused when the term “upsell” appeared in the title bar at eBay’s half.com.

I’m proud to see that she started from somebody’s Amazon wish list and ending up at a much lower cost vendor.

I wanting to discuss “Culture of Asynchronous Communication” with my wife, and that lead me to opine that ‘asynchronous’ seems to lack an equivalent term in colloquial speech. The word synchronous is rare too. Synchronized swimming? Then there is that classic moment when the star of the movie instructs his commando squad to synchronize their watches.

She suggested the wonderful term: “Parallel Play.”

That’s just too much fun! Metaphor loose in the hall. Tenure as parallel play? Does the creative work demand parallel play time? See also the delightful: Blogging as Parallel Play.

One scheme for addressing the problem of bad actors in open end-to-end networks is to guard the private/club spaces with gateways, firewalls, etc. If the bad actors are dumb then you can use simple puzzles to keep them our. A sort of child proof lock approach.

Over at telepocolypse Martin is wishing he could get one for his home phone.

“”Hello, this is not a voicemail system. You still have a chance of speaking to the owner of the house. Firstly, please press 5 star hash 4 to indicate you are human. Thank you. Now please speak the name of the person with whom you wish to speak. Your entry will be compared with our database. I’m sorry, large pepperoni with extra mushrooms is not in our directory. Please try again later.””

Maybe Mr. Gates owns the patent that is keeping that from appearing in home answering machines.

One thing I was reminded of at ApacheCon was the design pattern where in you leave everything till the last possible moment. Lazy evaluation. It came up three times.

My favorite reminding was web sites that defer creating their content until the user requests it. The error handler then thrashes around till it finds a product manager, who then hires somebody to fill the demand. I see out sourcing.

Then there Doc Searles (“That’s URL with and S on each end.”) who got on about Magazine v.s. Vernacular architecture. I seem to have become less and less enthusiastic about ‘thick architectures’ for software. Though there is something pleasing about remembering that “The job of the architect is to bankrupt the builder.” Frank Lloyd Wright also said “Form follows Funding.”

The usual counter point to lazy evaluation is eager evaluation. Of course those aren’t the only two solutions to the universe of getting things done. Why there is planning, and managers (aka executive directors).

I also found out about Nagios, which has now replaced Big Sister at my house. Big sister kept giving false negatives.

I got a threatening letter from my Voice over IP vendor the other day. It’s unusual to get a threatening letter from a vendor. He would like me to upgrade some software that I’m running; and apparently he felt the right tone to adopt was do this or we are cutting you off.

That behavior isn’t entirely unusual. For example a few vendors that I have relationships with force me to lie to them about what web browser I’m using. They aren’t willing to bear the QA cost of checking that their sites work with the browsers I use. Unlike my VOIP vendor some of those vendors would be very hard to switch away from.

My VOIP vendor doesn’t like something about the way that Asterisk is interacting with their servers. So it appears they hired somebody in that community to write a patch. They are emailing this patch, attached to their threat, to all their asterisk using customers. It appears that they didn’t wait for this patch to be accepted into the Asterisk source code repository. That’s amazingly stupid since it means they are forcing their installed base to fork from the main branch and thus helping to assure that their installed base won’t keep moving forward as asterisk improves.

I insist that only metric of a standard that counts if “transactions/second via the standard;” but one proxy for that is how large the installed base is folks that have adopted the standard. How far down the long tail the standard has actually spread is really important; so I may need to adjust my position. An installed base (or standard) that captures a huge portion of the long tail is good and bad. It’s very hard to upgrade, but it’s also very stable and durable.

This note from my VOIP vendor is kind of “upgrade or die;” or possibly it’s “switch or conform.” I know plenty of people who wouldn’t mind making some similar threats to large portions of the long tail of installed client software: operating systems, web browsers, mail servers. This is a interesting problem.

These little VOIP vendors are an unnatural. On the one hand attempting to displace “TPC” (aka The Phone Company”) which is probably the ultimate in durable, immovable, stable, standard, utility like operations. But they are really classic startups: rapid build out, turn on a dime, inconsistency is our tactical advantage.

It’s very hard to be both, but sending your early adopters threatening letters is kind of a bit too far over on the highly adaptable startup end of the spectrum.