More on Groupon

OK, Groupon has me flummoxed.
I didn't understand how they could walk away from a $6B payday from Google, a bumbled deal that led to the ouster of their CEO.
You might think that, with fresh leadership and a renewed direction, they' might have a clue about revitalizing their once mighty revenue stream.
Here, instead, is what they think might interest me, starting with a mysterious burn on their nephew, Steve

Which was preceded by a skull massage:

Which was preceded by, well, this:

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One of an occasional series.
A bunch of years ago, I worked for a software company. It was hard work for long hours. At one point, senior management made the pronouncement that the development team needed to focus more on a particular aspect of the product. The QA manager and I agreed that we'd be Focused More-ons.

More on WiFi passwords

Last week, I wrote a piece for The Mobility Hub about the challenges of managing WiFi passwords on various mobile devices. In brief, because of arcane guest WiFi policies, users must learn how to change the WiFi password on their devices. Setting aside the problem of entering passwords in the first place, most devices don't have a direct way to change the password on a saved network connection. Generally, you must tell your gadget to forget about the connection, connect anew, and enter the new password. It is one of the most unfriendly aspect of mobile computing.
We've found a new variant of this exquisite defliction. At Hilton hotels, you can get free WiFi if you are a) staying at the hotel or b) visiting the lobby, provided that you ask for the password at the desk. The lobby password is a 14-alphanumeric-character string. The hotel guest password is your room number and last name; it's only enabled when you are registered at the hotel.
This means that if you log in with the lobby password while you're waiting to check in and/or waiting to have your in-room account to come alive, you have to change the password when you get to your room (which is beyond the range of the lobby connection).
It's good to know that, Mordac, Preventer of Information Services from the Dilbert comic strip, has found regular employment with Hilton.

April 6, 1998

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One of an occasional series.
A bunch of years ago, I worked for a software company. It was hard work for long hours. At one point, senior management made the pronouncement that the development team needed to focus more on a particular aspect of the product. The QA manager and I agreed that we'd be Focused More-ons.

More on language, good times, and wishing the best for others

When you have a good time at a gathering of family and/or friends, it's not unusual to say, "I hope that you had as good as time as I did."
Courtesy suggests that we wish for better things for others than we do for ourselves. Saying "I hope that you had a better time than I did," however, doesn't have quite the effect that we're after.

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One of an occasional series.
A bunch of years ago, I worked for a software company. It was hard work for long hours. At one point, senior management made the pronouncement that the development team needed to focus more on a particular aspect of the product. The QA manager and I agreed that we'd be Focused More-ons.

More on passwords

When I went to BJ's  to create an online account, I dutifully created a password with at least eight characters, including at least one letter and one number. As standard practice, I also include a punctuation mark, making password cracking that much more difficult.

99.wharlG

BJ's took exception to my choice. but did so only with a suggestion.

If a password should only contain alphabets (sic) and numerics, (sic+1) etc., then I would still be permitted to use punctuation characters against their advice. Grumble, grumble.

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One of an occasional series.
A bunch of years ago, I worked for a software company. It was hard work for long hours. At one point, senior management made the pronouncement that the development team needed to focus more on a particular aspect of the product. The QA manager and I agreed that we'd be Focused More-ons.

More on copyright, Canadian edition

Using small amounts of text as a part of a commentary is a long-standing exception to U.S. copyright law. The particulars of each instance are always subject to court review. The copyright holder doesn't surrender rights by allowing these excerpts.
A few years ago, the Associated Press created a real problem for itself when it contracted with a company to charge $12.50 for using five words of text. The company eventually sued AP for bungling the contract.
Now it's Canada's turn, National Post, specifically. Michael Geist noted that merely selecting text to use a quote for another piece triggers a new content licensing scheme.
For example, let's look at a story about the priciest house on Prince Edward Island. It's a nice place on the north shore for $12M CAD.

If select a paragraph of text that I'd like to include in my review, I am presented with this pop-up .

Following through the options, I learn two things. It's going to cost me up to $100 to quote 100 words and 50¢ for each additional word.

Next, I find that I cannot comply. When I selected the text, the pop-up prevented me from copying the words that I need to paste into this box to calculate how much I must finally pay.

Oh, the company that National Post is using to stand on guard for thee, iCopyright, is the same company that the AP used and was sued by. 

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One of an occasional series.
A bunch of years ago, I worked for a software company. It was hard work for long hours. At one point, senior management made the pronouncement that the development team needed to focus more on a particular aspect of the product. The QA manager and I agreed that we'd be Focused More-ons.

More on cycling

We recently discussed the effect of bicycle helmet laws on cycling safety. Now we learn that cycling itself is a hazard to the environment. According to Washington state Rep. Ed Orcutt (R-Kalama), cyclists are exhaling so much carbon dioxide that they are contributing to global warming. The representative sees a tax on cyclists as a reasonable response to generate needed revenue for road maintenance and to offset the environmental damage.

Rep. Orcutt later backpedaled on his comment after saying cyclists pollute by breathing.

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One of an occasional series.
A bunch of years ago, I worked for a software company. It was hard work for long hours. At one point, senior management made the pronouncement that the development team needed to focus more on a particular aspect of the product. The QA manager and I agreed that we'd be Focused More-ons.

More on sacred texts

Sandra's father's family hails from a red-clayed corner of the Great White North. To the folks of  Prince Edward Island, Anne of Green Gables is a sacred text. To many Japanese girls, the Anne stories are an inspiration beyond words. These stories tell of an orphan girl who is a adopted by an aging brother and sister and who thrives by wit, pluck, and imagination. There was a mix-up in the request to the Halifax orphanage. The couple was looking for a boy to help around the farm while the person arranging the adoption thought that they were looking for a girl about 11.
At the core of the story is the girl's determination to survive life as a red-head. On first meeting,  Matthew Cuthbert remarks that her hair is red.

"Yes, it's red," she said resignedly. "Now you see why I can't be perfectly happy. Nobody could who has red hair. I don't mind the other things so much--the freckles and the green eyes and my skinniness. I can imagine them away. I can imagine that I have a beautiful rose-leaf complexion and lovely starry violet eyes. But I cannot imagine that red hair away. I do my best. I think to myself, `Now my hair is a glorious black, black as the raven's wing.' But all the time I know it is just plain red and it breaks my heart. It will be my lifelong sorrow. I read of a girl once in a novel who had a lifelong sorrow but it wasn't red hair. Her hair was pure gold rippling back from her alabaster brow. What is an alabaster brow? I never could find out. Can you tell me?

Because the Anne books are in the public domain, anyone can publish a new edition and publish they do. There are innumerable print and electronic editions as well as movie, television, and cartoon remixes. What's newsworthy about another edition of a book about an 11-year-old, red-haired girl?
Here's what:

Cover photo via Techdirt

As you'd expect, this edition, its cover since removed from the Amazon listing, unleashed a torrent of vitriol comparable to what might happen if a favorite sports hero appeared in a porn flick.
One takeaway message from all this is that, through our copyright laws and freedoms of press and speech, we can bring to market pretty much any full-tilt bozo idea of our choosing.

More on science

Three quick notes on the ways that science making our lives, um, interesting.

• We've often heard that printer ink is more expensive than human blood. Well, here's a twist: UK scientists have used 3D printers to print human stem cells. It's within the realm of imagination that we could eventually use human blood in printers to make something beyond our imaginations.
• Humans have had a problematic relationship with insects. Some, such as honey bees, do great things for us. Mosquitoes are frog food and carry deadly diseases. We've done battle with chemicals and bazookas.
  Well, insects are fighting back and they've got robots.
• Fish are in schools but, until science showed up, they could never raise their hands when the have an answer to the teacher's question. The Register reports that Fish grow ‘hands’ in genetic experiment.
  
  

  

  Fish testing at Alden Research Lab

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One of a occasional series. A bunch of years ago, I worked for a software company. It was hard work for long hours. At one point, senior management made the pronouncement that the development team needed to focus more on a particular aspect of the product. The QA manager and I agreed that we'd Focused More-ons.

More on job searches

A while ago, I signed up with the job search site, Glassdoor. Since then, they've been sending me a list of  suggested jobs in the Worcester area. The jobs, however,  always a great match.

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One of a occasional series. A bunch of years ago, I worked for a software company. It was hard work for long hours. At one point, senior management made the pronouncement that the development team needed to focus more on a particular aspect of the product. The QA manager and I agreed that we'd Focused More-ons.

More on the Great White Elephant of Social Media

I've long said that if someone presents themselves as a social media expert[1], run away.
This is not that, but I'm not sure what it is:

The video link explains something.

[1]alternate titles include the following, by themselves or in combination: ninja, guru, black belt, rockstar.

More on 4G wireless

The advent of 4G wireless for our mobile phones is changing the ways we work and play. There are many times when the 4G speed is faster than what I'd typically get in a coffee shop or other public WiFi location. That's goodness.

Availability of 4G is, however, quite uneven.

The other day, I pulled over to the side of the road on Route I-190 in Sterling, Mass, a place devoid of houses or businesses. Here's what I got on my phone:

Here's what it looks like on Google Earth:

I later stopped at an intersection in our part of town.

Here's the view from up top.

More on Digital Nomads: Panera Bread

Panera Bread was one of the first restaurants to offer free Wi-Fi. It was a good thing. People would use the restaurant as adjunct office, holding meetings or just working for an hour or two. The restaurant would shorten the amount of time you could be connected during the busy lunch period, a condition that seems reasonable.
Of late, however, the Wi-Fi service has deteriorated to the point of dial-up quality.

Even in Leominster, where cell phone coverage is thin, my phone was getting better results on two-bar 4G service (921kbps) than on the store's Wi-Fi (896).
Add to that their use of Flash on the Wi-Fi login page and you have an unfriendly, unworkable setup.
Granted, we're supposed to go to restaurants to eat, not necessarily to work. If your business is offering an additional service as an attraction, it's a good idea to make it something you'd want to use. If you advertise air-conditioning, and can only keep the summertime temps at 80F, you're not delighting your customers.
Dunno where I'll try next, but I'm out of here.
By the way, the mall where the Leominster store is located is called the Mall at Whitney Fields, not the Searstown Mall. The mall was known as Searstown when it opened 45 years ago. It was renamed in 2004 when other anchor stores didn't want to be subservient to Sears.

More on answers

Picking up on Nicole's Answers thread.

More on Charter

You bring your laptop from home to work in a coffee shop. You connect to the Wi-Fi service, start the web browser to check the news, and then go to Outlook to check email. You read what's arrived and write a quick note to a friend to make plans for lunch next week.

Up pops this message:



A normal, English-speaking adult would see a block of more than 700 undifferentiated ASCII characters.

If you happen to guess that that it might be related to your Charter email account and stumble over to the Charter online help, you may find a message such as this:



Do you feel helped?

The short explanation is that Charter has a stupid policy that doesn't allow people to send mail through Charter email servers when they are not connected to the Internet through Charter.

If you go to one place around Worcester, you might be lucky and find that they use Charter for business, in which case you can send your message. Most places, though, have their own national ISP configurations and so block connections to Port 25 used to send email.

The workaround is to use Charter's webmail service, the one that welcomes you with email that includes the following message about the message:



If you have a VPN back to your home and can make a connection through a service there, you might be able to connect.

The other alternative is to use the mobile device settings (mobile.charter.net) and SSL for the IMAP and SMTP servers.. These settings are intended for smartphones, but appear to work with Outlook.

Notes from a three-toed sloth

Dictum est in tres partes.

1. I went to two Barnes and Noble stores on the foolish mission to buy a specific book. IN both cases, I saw many, many Dummies books throughout every business section. I found lots of books that seemed serious about making a career, finding happiness, and riding the latest wave of urgency. I did not find the book I sought.
   I now have a plan. I will not go to B&N unless I don't want to buy a book. My expectations are now in order.


2. We needed a small fire in the fireplace this morning. The temperature was 50^° and in no hurry to rise beyond that point.


3. Get Human helps you reach a human being on the phone. There's no guarantee that the person will be helpful, but you can hope.
   
   FWIW, I spoke to a very helpful Verizon technical support rep last week. I was helping a friend with an Internet problem and we needed Verizon's assistance with the DSL account. We were on hold for about 10 minutes, but the call was worth it.
   

More on the cost of scientific and medical publications

In addition to all the other issues that keep prices artificially high and out of the reach of even professionals, scientific, technical, and medical manuals impose an additional bit of mocking formality.

The bibliography, the part of a book or article where you check the author's background information, has to be formatted differently according to standard style guides.

The Chicago Manual of Style sez (subscription required):

For a book with two authors, note that only the first-listed name is inverted in the bibliography entry.
2. Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, The War: An Intimate History, 1941–1945 (New York: Knopf, 2007), 52.
Ward, Geoffrey C., and Ken Burns. The War: An Intimate History, 1941–1945. New York: Knopf, 2007.
...
For a book with four or more authors, list all the authors in the bibliography entry.

The AMA Style Guide, meanwhile, sez something quite different  (subscription required):

Use the author's surname followed by initials without periods. In listed references, the names of all authors should be given 
unless there are more than 6, in which case the names of the first 3 authors are used, followed by “et al.”
 2 authors:
 Doe JF, Roe JP III.

There are other, even more insidious nuances in the style guides. So, if you want to publish your book in a medical journal, you have edit your bibliographic entries one way and use another for other journals. you get to spend hours changing names to or from initials, adding or removing et alii, all in the name of pseudoscientific writing.

More on education and marketing

Online course and textbook company Kno announced that it is offering a line of K-12 textbooks. The materials are available for the iPad and web browsers. Native Windows and Android apps are in the queue.

Kno has partnered with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, one of the major textbook publishers in the world. If you browse over to the HMH web site on your iPad (because you want to see how things look), you can find the catalog for each grade and subject area:

If you click Browse, you can see what they have to offer:

Flash doesn't run on an iPad. It also does not run on Android, so that you can't browse the catalog from your Android phone or tablet.

This is not an auspicious beginning for Kno.

More on warning labels

Ever helpful that they are, manufacturers are always trying to make sure that we use their products in the proper manner. Therefore, in the case of my Samsung Network Extender (aka a Femto cell), I've been cautioned to keep the gadget upright, cautioned by way of a warning printed on the bottom.

More on work

Making the rounds of hot topics this week is an article in the Atlantic by Anne-Marie Slaughter. Why Women Still Can’t Have It All tells the story of a woman who gives up her position as a aide to Secretary of State Clinton to, without euphemism, spend more time with her family.

Slaughter has worked in the rarefied levels of government with lots of hours and lots of travel. She decided that working like this wasn't working for her. It's easy to be skeptical of someone who truly has so many options available. After the first few paragraphs, I was ready to argue that point, but she brought in a number of threads that I thought were good.

Because we expect to live longer than previous generations, it's help to rethink the arc of our careers. We can plan, to the extent that we can plan, to peak later, perhaps in our 50s, rather than in our 40s. We can plan to have multiple, smaller career arcs. In short, we no longer have to calibrate our career against the end marker of at 65. (There are obvious exceptions for work that demands a lot of our bodies.)

This notion also leads to the idea that pushing the Social Security retirement age past 70 for most professions makes actuarial sense. We'll leave that for another day.

Dan Kennedy, in last night's Beat The Press, remarked that The Atlantic has a long, proud tradition of running 12,000 words when 3,000 words would have done just fine. Slaughter's article is much too long and so the most useful point, IMO, shows up somewhere beyond word 8,000. The discussion on BTP is also worth a listen.

More on mobile apps

I got an email this morning that informed me of the new Rite Aid app. The email had a QR code that let me easily install the app on my phone. Well, almost easily.

I couldn't remember my registration or if I'd even registered. So, I had to navigate the Rite-Aid web site on my phone to check a few things. The Rite Aid web site does not scale to the size of a phone's display.

[caption id="attachment_3447" align="aligncenter" width="168" caption="Click to enbiggen"][/caption]
I've uninstalled the app.