Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

If you spend enough time with hookers, apparently people will forget to ask whether or not you’re doing a good job. This New Yorker magazine article, “The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer”, from December 2007, suggests that he was not accomplishing much.  Foreigners and financial services firms were keeping New York City flush while the rest of the state continued its decline.

It is unclear what the new guy is going to do.  What would it take to create jobs in Buffalo or Rochester?  Why would a company subject itself and its workers to crushing taxes to pay for public employee union deals made in the 1970s when they could locate in South Carolina instead?

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My T-Mobile cell phone bill came today. The Bahamas trip cost $144 in roaming fees. The interesting thing about this is that the phone was turned off for nearly the entire time that it was in the Bahamas and I didn’t make or receive a single call. When I settled in at the first hotel, I noticed that no service was available. To save the battery, I turned off the phone. Once or twice at other islands, I turned the phone on to see if service was available, and once or twice it was, but I turned the phone off afterwards. So the T-Mobile system knew that I was in the Bahamas, but the phone never rang and no calls were ever connected. Nonetheless, they billed $3 for every incoming call that anyone attempted to make during that time and then another $3 as a “voicemail fee” for the person talking to their voicemail system. If the person leaving the message was longer-winded, and spoke for two minutes, the total charge for the call would be $12.00 total.

One interesting note is that when I checked my voicemail, there were only 5 messages, yet T-Mobile charged for 21 inbound interactions with their voicemail system (at either $3 or $6 per interaction).

I called T-Mobile customer service and asked that they remove these charges. They refused.

[One positive note:  The T-Mobile SMS system seems to bill a little more accurately.  The system did not charge me for any SMS messages during the time that the phone was powered off.]

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It is time to replace my hated Motorola KRAZR phone, whose virtues start and end with the fact that it is a flip design.

I’ve decided that I need to make my entire life Google-centric, storing all calendar events and contacts with Google and continuing to use Gmail. The ideal phone would therefore presumably be the new Google Android phone, but that won’t be available until the end of 2008?

So… what phone can sync reasonably well with the Google Web-based apps? And simultaneously run a good gmail client (is the Java one better for small screens than just trying to use a phone browser with the standard HTML Gmail?)?

I travel around a lot and am too busy to mess with trying to configure Wifi at every stop. That means the phone must have high-speed cell phone network data capability (i.e., the iPhone must be ruled out).

It would be nice to have a phone that is good for running Google Chat and/or AOL Instant Messenger, to keep in touch with my friends (though it may be sufficient to run Google Chat alone since that can connect to AIM).

A friend has a AT&T Tilt (made by HTC) that seems to have every possible feature: high-speed data, built-in GPS, real keyboard, music, video, etc. I played around with it a bit, however, and found that Web browsing, while not painfully slow as with the iPhone, was somewhat clumsy because it doesn’t appear to reformat pages for the small device. I think the interface would have worked great with a much larger display. The thing is Windows-based, which makes me believe that syncing it to Google apps will require piping everything through Microsoft Outlook (not ready for that much pain, I don’t think).

It would be nice to have a phone that works in foreign countries, so that rules out Verizon and Spring, correct? Or do they have some kind of scheme to let their customers talk in GSM countries?

It would be very nice to have a flip-phone design, so that the phone doesn’t make or answer calls from within my pocket, but I have a feeling that this is too much to ask and that I’m out of sync with American consumers.

I’m wondering if given the inherent cumbersomeness of smart phones if it isn’t worth sucking it up and getting a very small computer that can also make phone calls. If the thing can fit into a blue jeans pocket, it would be small enough.

What are the smart kids using for smart phones these days?

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Folks: In an effort to become the consummate condo-dwelling yuppie, I replaced my 10-year-old (mid-priced) Whirlpool dishwasher, whose cleaning power was beginning to fade, with a $1200 Bosch. The new Bosch leaves food on silverware and dishes and can’t clean pots or pans. The Whirlpool, at age 10, did a far better job. Compared to the Whirlpool when new (throw in any dirty dish, without scraping or rinsing, and pots with all kinds of stuck-on crud), the Bosch is a joke. (full story) Anyone else have a Bosch dishwasher? How does it compare to your old American-style dishwasher?

[Update: After four service visits, Bosch figured out that the circulation pump on this machine was defective. Service visits number 5, 6, and 7 were devoted to bringing out a replacement part, opening the box, discovering that the replacement part was also defective, and driving away. On service visit number 8, the Bosch guy showed up with a working replacement circulation pump and installed it.  The dishwasher seems to work better now.  It only took 25 phone calls, 8 days home from work waiting for the repair guy, and more than twice as much money to get a dishwasher that works as well as the 1996-vintage Whirlpool (which never required any service in 11 years).  Surely there is no better time to be a yuppie…]

[Update 2: I moved to a new house in October 2008. The house had a fancy stainless steel Bosch dishwasher already installed. Problems that occurred within the first 6 months: (1) the lower spray arm cracked and fell off; (2) the soap dispenser would not close reliably; the seal at the bottom of the dishwasher leaked. After those were fixed (don’t ask what it cost!), the dishwasher worked reasonably well (nowhere near as well as the ancient Whirlpool) for a few months then suffered a 100 percent failure whereby it refused to start (though all of the LEDs behaved sensibly).]

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… and now she wants a prenuptial agreement reading “In the event that husband (henceforth referred to as ‘The Slimy Weasel’) is caught with a hooker, intern, dominatrix, etc., the wife (henceforth referred to as ‘The Long Sufferer’), shall not be required to appear on any dais, adjacent to any lectern, or in frame when The Slimy Weasel is giving an interview explaining his conduct.”

[Why is it that whenever we see a politician speaking and a stoic wife standing adjacent we don’t have to read the story to figure out that he was caught with his hand in some cookie jar?]

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At the same time that I finished a book on my Amazon Kindle, which cost $400 and has a high speed Internet connection via the Sprint network (about 50 times faster data than an Apple iPhone), my Infiniti M35 had an all-systems meltdown. What happened? The AWD warning light comes on; car begins to apply brakes randomly, BRAKE warning light comes on; SLIP warning light comes on; “Service Engine Soon” light comes on; gauges go up and down crazily; managed to limp back to driveway. I called the Herb Chambers Infiniti service department and got voicemail (it was 10:15 am on a Friday). Eventually I got hold of Infiniti road service and they towed the car away. On Saturday, Herb Chambers called to say that they had no idea what the problem was and would be keeping the car indefinitely.

It had been one year and 8,000 miles since I purchased the car and it got me thinking about the ownership experience. Nearly everything that I don’t like about the car would be fixed if it had an Internet connection and a little bit of software intelligence (oxymoron?). The car doesn’t close its sunroof automatically, unlike my old Toyota minivan. The remote control has an unfortunate feature where it asks you to press and hold a button to release the trunk. Pressing and holding an adjacent button, however, will roll the windows down. If you lend the keys to someone else and ask them to fetch something from the trunk, you will invariably walk up to the car a day or two later and find the windows rolled partway down. Naturally this only happens when rain and snow storms are rolling through New England. If the car had Internet and a clock, it could email you to say “Do you really want to leave your windows and sunroof open?” If the car had a little more brains, it could check the weather itself and send you some more urgent messages.

With Internet, the car could get updates on traffic and road construction. The car could also update its navigation and points of interest database, especially if the Infiniti guys had been thoughtful enough to use a tiny flash card ($50 retail) instead of a huge DVD player and disk to store the database. The DVD player hogs most of the space in what would have been a nice glove box. A lot of the time the navigation system can’t boot up because of “disk read error”. So… with Amazon having shown that they can negotiate a deal with Sprint and get high-speed wireless to a cheap device, how come no car company has been able to do the same?

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Flush with property tax dollars harvested from the Great American Real Estate Bubble, Cambridge set aside $50 million to build a new library building for the town. The old library closed three years ago, in March 2005. A friend and I walked by the construction site the other day. A steel skeleton is visible and the building is taking shape, occupying what was once a lovely park where people sunbathed and dogs played. “Maybe it will be finished in time for the complete irrelevance of the paper book,” I noted. “People like to visit the library,” my friend said. “They can borrow DVDs.” I responded that the money spent on the project could probably buy every household in Cambridge a lifetime subscription to Netflix. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Cambridge had 42,615 households in 2000. Let’s figure that the ultimate cost of the project will be $80 million (typical overrun for government and non-profit org. construction). So that is $2,000 per household. The interest on $2,000 isn’t quite enough to pay for standard Netflix at retail rates, but if you assume that (1) you’d get a discount for a group order, (2) not every household would need or want a stream of DVDs, and (3) the new expanded building will consume a lot more in heating and electricity, I think the numbers would work out.

How could we have survived with the old building? It was perfectly functional. It was never crowded. Thanks to byzantine zoning laws, there is essentially no new residential construction in Cambridge and the population is not growing substantially (we had 120,000 residents in 1920; there are 100,000 residents today). Did the old building have enough space for tens of thousands of new books? No. Could some of the old books have been scanned and thrown out? Yes. Could tens of thousands of new books been made available to residents of Cambridge through electronic services? Yes.

[My friend is apparently a good Cambridge liberal because she said that maybe the money should have been spent to improve the adjacent high school, one of the worst performing in the state, albeit one of the most lavishly funded. We didn’t have any fiscal conservatives on our walk (do we have any in politics anywhere in the this country?) because nobody suggested that when nominal housing prices doubled the property tax rate be cut so that the total dollars paid for the city budget remained constant and too-exciting-not-to-spend surpluses of $50 million did not pile up.]

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In an effort to fight a local epidemic of obesity, and to hide from a pouring rain, I visited the MIT gym yesterday and ran into a guy wearing an “ailerons make the world go ’round” T-shirt.  He is a pilot at an airline that operates quite a few 37-passenger Embraer regional jets.  These have become uneconomic as airliners in a world of expensive fuel.  Thirty-seven average Americans simply can’t afford to pay enough to keep the thing in the air with oil at $100+/barrel.  The efficient way to run an airline when fuel prices are high is to operate fewer flights per day, each flight in a larger plane such as a Boeing 737.

How is the airline going to survive what seems to have been a very unlucky business decision, i.e., buying all of these 37-seat jets?  It turns out that the planes are in very high demand and they are selling them quite easily on the used market.  Who wants them?  Rich people who feel the need to spread out a little.  The planes get new interiors with just a handful of seats and gold-plated seatbelts, then get shipped overseas to wherever there is someone who wants to travel in comfort.  What about the pilots?  They are going overseas too.  One of this guy’s colleagues had worked only 8 months as a airline copilot on the Embraer.  He now works out of Kuwait at triple his old salary.  He pays no income tax or living expenses.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/nyregion/07charter.html is an interesting story on a new charter school in New York City.  Using only the standard per-pupil budget from the city, the school is going to be able to pay its teachers $125,000 per year.  How can they afford to pay more than the neighboring public schools?  The article explains that they have no assistant principals, no “attendance coordinators”, and no “discipline deans”.  The principal is paid $90,000 per year, less than the teachers, an idea that the head of the unionized public school principals said was “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

These are similar ideas to ones presented in the 1970s in the book A Pattern Language.  The architects and anthropologists behind the book said that the way to improve public education was to get rid of the physical school buildings.  They claimed that large schools ended up requiring a lot of bureaucrats to administer and it was better to have the money available to spend on teachers.

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Folks:  Pittsburgh is the last big city in the Northeast that I’ve never visited.  Looks as though Thursday evening, March 20 will be when that changes (driving in from the Frank Lloyd Wright Fallingwater house).  The current plan is to stay three nights and depart early in the morning on March 23 for Cincinnati (lunch in Columbus, Ohio, in case anyone has brilliant ideas for a restaurant there).

So… suggestions for what to see in Pittsburgh?  (beyond the obvious art and natural history museums)  What to do in the evenings?  The symphony seems not to be performing, unfortunately, during this visit.  What’s the best way to find out about good theater or other concerts?

Anything strange to photograph? 

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