Colinizer - tech geek inside your mind

… to all those celebrating it today.

Well, wow… new secure US passports are being made by European contractors using Far East facilities.

You want free market capitalism; you have it.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/03/27/verjee.passport.outsourcing.cnn

There are questions going around about whether this foreign manufacture is a security compromise to the whole US security mission.

The foreign companies manufacturer blank passports and chips (vaguely equivalent to having blank CDs made abroad).  Given suitable PKI this should not represent a security problem.

The real joke is that the apparent reason for this happening is that the US does not have the facilities domestically, to do this production - slight loss of pride.

Well that’s a good thing, because the alternative would be that the US government is chosen to outsource jobs to another country - a loss to the US economy.

In some locations electricity meters are being replaced with new models that record and transmit data about how much electricity you use at intervals over the day.

The meters communication use RF in small groups to a lead meter that is connected to a phone line in the lead meter’s residence.  I wonder if that user gets anything for that?

I was given such a meter recently.  The time-of-use (TOU) data should be available to consumers at some point in the future.

Also at some unpublished time in the future, the electricity company will switch to TOU billing like this (note the proposed pricing):

Current price is (5c per kWh up to first 2000kWh, and 5.9c thereafter)

Off-peak (3c per kWh)

• Mon-Fri 22:00 to 07:00 summer/winter
• All Weekends/Holidays

Mid-Peak (7c per kWh)

• Mon-Fri 07:00 to 11:00 and 17:00 to 22:00 in the summer
• Mon-Fri 11:00 to 17:00 and 20:00 to 22:00 in the winter

On-Peak (8.7c per kWh)

• Mon-Fri 11:00 to 17:00 in the summer
• Mon-Fri 07:00 to 11:00 and 17:00 to 22:00 in the winter

The accompanying leaflet says I should be “shifting activities that are energy-intensive to the less expensive mid-peak and off-peak hours”.

Given the current rate (5 or 5.9c) the only “less expensive” period will be Off-peak and look when that is!  The “energy-intensive” activities they include are “air conditioning, clothes dryers, clothes washers, electric ovens, electric heating and electric water heaters.”  Only the first 4 apply to me.

So - to summarise so far.  My bill will go up because I cannot effectively use air conditioning after 10pm!!!#$!#$!#$ and I will have to do my laundry after 10pm or on weekends otherwise my bill will go up (and the insurance companies can plan on more claims for flooding as washers overflow while people are sleeping).  It is unlikely that the saving of doing laundry for a couple of hours on the weekend will offset the huge increase of needing air-conditioning during the day (even if it’s set to a higher temperature).  We are about to get ripped off on 3 activities at least and/or be sleep deprived!

So about that electric stove activity (or microwave to some extent).  I will now pay more money to cook lunch and dinner.  In fact I will now have to start cooking dinner after 5pm in the summer or after 10pm in the winter (noting that before 5pm is not feasible for many dual-working-adult families), in order to keep my costs down - or just eat uncooked food.  This leads to 2 realistic choices (excluding extremes like starving during the week):

• Pay more money.
• Put on weight due to either buying more take-out (and also spending more money) or cooking/eating later, both because you are trying to save money.

So when the booklet says “What are the best strategies for smart metering?”, that section should be re-titled as “What are the best strategies for choosing how much extra weight you will put on vs. how much your bill will go up”

Solar panels are sounding like such a great investment these days!

UPDATE:

I said most of this to the electricity company and they sent me a link to an official report.  The report was conducted by the energy board and local electricity company.

A sample of 124 people were tested on a TOU plan (of mostly new single-family homes with well educated and above poverty-line income) against 125 control group - that’s a horrible sample demographic and size for an official test!!.  Note that 125 & 124 others tried two other plans that are not in my meter literature.

In the best case under TOU someone saved $9 a month; in the worst someone paid $6 more.  The average was a saving of $0.78 per month (wooo), i.e. over the 124 people trying TOU pricing, there was little change and some people did pay more. 

However, since there was a 6.0% reduction of overall use and people were shifting their use (a figure the report hides as not significant for this price plan), on average I still believe people would be spending more.

Also, the TOU pricing structure was officially designed so that someone on TOU would pay the same if they did nothing.  Remember that these people are trying hard to save money and change their habits.  People are lazy - after a few months (and not getting another $75 for participating in the survey!), most people will tend to revert back to old habits plus >64% can’t recall aspects of the pricing structure, so the average bill would go up! 

I don’t see any old houses, old people, socially/economically-challenged groups or stay-at-home workers in the samples. 

Many people who (worked their butts off and managed to save their $0.7 were expecting large savings, so many of those people will not bother now and just end up paying more.

While conversation efforts are observed with TOU pricing, “a main purpose of time-of-use and critical peak pricing is to reduce peak demand” - nice to know the energy company’s view of energy conservation and everyone’s efforts.  Admittedly, the point is to increase system reliability/availability, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to put this responsibility on the customer who will end up either doing it or paying more (and will that more pay for better service?)

And as for getting fat?

According to surveys with focus groups: “In response to a critical peak notification, customers might reset their thermostats by a few degrees [get hot]… plan on dining out [get fat or pay more money] or cook on an outdoor grill [abandon their electricity supply]…”

I support conservation but as clearly stated, smart meters are not about conservation.  Oh, and someone has to pay for the system…

Right now:

• I eat 5 times a day
• I do no specific exercise
• I buy regular food
• I can eat at restaurants or order take-out
• I’ve lost 5lbs each week in the first two weeks

This is entirely off-regular-topic unless you are amongst an apparently increasing number of western people including sedentary geeks that are overweight.

I have never personally bought anything after watching a TV commercial until I saw the commercial for this health program and I recognised the guy behind it.  That credibility point, the fact that this was a personalised program, the fact that it makes sense (and I’m a very logical person) and it doesn’t require special food - those things did it for me.  I had nothing to lose except pounds.  OK, that was extra corny.

The program does include exercise (walking!) and body shaping (18 minutes twice a week!) but it encourages you to get going first with the right food and then look at those other things later. 

I’ve lost 10lb already just changing my food.

I’m not going to say or acknowledge what the program is yet, because I want to see how well it works and it’s only been two weeks.  There’s a lot of solid rationale behind it.  I’m not going to suggest it to anyone yet until I think it really working for me. 

I’m betting that a significant portion of geeks are fat - let’s not mince words here.  I’m one of them.

I tried something based on the Atkins diet for a while and it did seem to work in conjunction with exercise, but it just didn’t seem right.

I walk around, I have a treadmill, I go snowboarding, biking, etc., but during the average week I’ll spend a significant amount of time sitting in front of a computer.

The one downsides of this program is the need to pre-prepare food or do a lot of cooking.  You also have to be regimented enough to eat every 2 or 3 hours.  If you have a good cook in the house and the right shopping list, you could be on to this with little or no effort on your part.

I’m a bloody picky eater.  I can’t stand fish (except tuna or some battered fish), nuts, grains or sour vegetables.  I thought this was going to be a pain, but now I’m actually used to it.  It does help that I don’t drink alcohol.

I’m about to have lunch consisting of pork, onions, mushrooms, potatoes, carrots - done with a frying pan and a microwave.  I’ll be eating out at a Subway this evening and eating again between the two!

There’s absolutely no incentive of any kind for me to promote this program, so I’m only doing so to the extent that I think it’s worth sharing, and you can probably find it online yourself anyway.  I just thought you may like to know of something that seems to be working for someone in a similar position to you.  I decide to mention it after I saw Robert Scoble’s post asking if Social Media is making us ill where he mentions that he’s going to the gym to get healthy.  This program gives some rationale about why the gym may not be the best idea. 

I wont be posting any before and after pictures :-), etc., just more details and loss statistics if it keeps working.

In a previous post I discussed how Engadget appears to be getting more verbose with its posts, making it slower to skim through, and less effecient for obtaining useful information.

This was an observational hunch, until now…

Today, Yuvi has posted a detailed analysis of Engadget from the beginning of Engadget’s existance, and guess what I found…

That’s growing as well. The average number of words per post is now 160, up from just a 100 in May 2004. More words, more posts, more people, more news.

Could that be 60% more verbosity?  Along with an increase of about 25% in the average number of posts per day, that’s twice as much information to read through from when they started, with 37.5%+ of post content being potentially redundant.

Bullet points!

Over the weekend I’ll be talking about the news and gadgets that came out of Microsoft’s WinHEC conference this week including: UMPCs; Medical interfaces; Mobile-centric computing; 64-bit computing; Unified communications; the new Windows Server; and just how cool the kernel in Vista and Windows Server 2008 is.

Stay tuned…

Yes, I’m going to go there…

What does it say that every time I turn on CNN for 5 minutes, just in the hope of getting some unbiased update I see something, that makes me cringe.

I turned on and saw Paula Zahn NOW. I don’t watch CNN enough to know which shows are on when but I was sure to hear something on the tragedy eventually (as CNN has threatened intense coverage which ironically was convenient, if it had only been of any value…).

What I observed was the end of a debate betwen what I assume was a gun proponent, a professor, and a woman whose involvement I didn’t figure out.

The professor said that professors should not carry guns and that neither should students. The gun proponent basically said that the rule preventing the carrying of guns on campus contributed to the number of deaths this week. Let’s consider that for a second…

So if a class professor or student had had a gun, there’s a chance that not as many people would have died. Of course the gun fight may have potentially escalated if the ‘defender’ didn’t hit home with the first shot (remembering that you don’t need training to purchase a gun there). On the other hand, if shooter had not been able to buy a gun, no-one would have been shot. Of course you could argue that he could have got a gun in some underhanded way.

Take a look at the UK, the rest of Europe and Canada (on CNN’s handy but not very detailed world map of where not to live if you don’t want to get shot). In those areas, there are no rights to bear arms and less than 1 in 100,000 people are murdered with a gun - unfortunately it doesn’t say how much less.

Someone I know had a friend die in the UK this week. His friend was riding a bike and died as a result of a collision (that occured due to reasons subject to inquest) with a rubbish/garbage collection vehicle. There’s a rule that says you need a certain license to drive drucks/lorries. Would the gun proponent’s values suggest that such a rule was the reason the kid couldn’t have been driving his own truck, possibly preventing him being severly injured? In fact the gun proponent would not seem to care whose fault the collision was, but be more concerned that both parties could have at least had a truck each, no matter what the risk of untrained truck drivers would be on those who choose not to drive a truck…

I’m not saying there isn’t a valid defense with a gun or that rights should not be there, but enabling an increased risk of danger is moronic. In the UK you can own a shotgun for sport so long as the police come round to interview you periodically and ensure it’s locked away. I’m sure that someone subject to home invasion in the UK who had such a weapon, may consider its use to defend their lives, but home invasions are rare, possibly because no-one can easily tote a weapon to enter into such an endeavour feeling indestructible.

There is perhaps simply a distinct difference in culture between the USA and countries like the UK, largely driven by a belief system in the USA which is at the core of many divided opinions, none of which will be ‘resolved’ any time soon. And to some, that may be what makes the USA ‘great’ - they may be right, but personally I like to avoid potential exposure to crappy logic when it comes to risking the lives of those I care about.

I had spoken to someone in the electronics department at Walmart last week. They said they were expecting Nintendo Wiis this morning.

I woke up early this morning knowing that Walmart would open at 7am. So…

I pulled up at 6:55 and the store was already open.

On the way in, I saw other people of the ‘appropriate type’ strolling in. I wondered if it would be a foot race to the check out, though given the fact that the store was already open, I was kind of expecting them to have sold out.

As it turns out, the department was desserted and I was the only one there, well at least for 2 minutes, at which point a young asian couple and a teenage boy both showed up just as a staff member appears at the counter.

Undeterred by the make-shift ‘There is a shortage of Wii and DS - please call Nintendo for details on ….’ sign on the display case we all asked the guy what the deal was.

He kept on repeating that it was “Hard to say”. I resisted the urge to be pedantic and go with “But still possible then?”.

So then it was time to leave the store empty handed with that… ‘perhaps I should not leave because I need to stalk the display case for any possible sign of Wiis surfacing and I can not have those other people getting one an not me’ mentality. OK, not really. In fact there’s actually a kind of instant fellowship between console hunters, though this can be quite interesting given that heavy duty gamer types can be awkward social geeks - this was evident at 7am on the PS3 launch day last year when we were all waiting outside EB Games in the cold engaging our social skills; probably to avoid de-evolving to cavemen and ripping each other’s head off for the primal prey kill.

On my way out I remembered that Walmart has begun mandating a large amount of RFID chipping on supplier palettes (not yet individual items). I don’t know how widespread the mandate is yet and I wondered if Nintendo was subject to this. With my IT head on I thought of all the smart but useless things I could have said like “This is the company that mandates RFID chips - surely you know exactly where the shipments are and when they sneeze”.

So really my point is that I am (of course…) somewhat appalled by the fact that ‘in this day and age’) Walmart did not know whether a shipment of Wiis was coming, and couldn’t show me GPS tracking of the truck in question (highway robbery anyone? OK that’s the PS3). Actually I was pretty sure that someone somewhere did now, but of course they wouldn’t dare tell the floor guy for fear that alien beings would extract his brain matter just for the chance to be able to play some human entertainment.

So Walmart may have RFID but they only still pass on a RFIDer to the customer. Yes, OK, it’s cheesy.

A handful of videos offensive to the Thai king have caused Thailand to ban YouTube access in the country. Apparently such acts in Thailand can lead to serious prison time.

Apparently the king is regarded as semi-divine - he is 79 and apparently the world’s longest-reigning monarch. I kinda think the hat could make him a comedy target, but then it never hurt the British Beefeater guards at Buckingham Palace.

The Thai communications minister claims that YouTube told him that there was “much worse ridicule of President Bush on the site” which is kept there. One of the offending clips replaced the monarch’s face with a monkey’s face - imagine that with Bush and decide for yourself how many people would bat an eyelid - good ol’ USian free-speech. These are clearly different cultures. While Thailand holds its monarch in high regard, it also has a quite public thriving hospitality industry which the US would frown upon for the most part even if it has a similar industry covertly operating too (as do um… most countries?).

This brings up the discussion of Internet culture borders and jurisdiction. Quite frankly I’m surprised that a more blunt stance is not taken in Thailand (compared to say China). If YouTube is under the jurisdiction of the US constitution, which would seem to allow rights that are most definately not in line with Thai national laws and morals (once you’ve figured out who is in charge after the 18 coups in 75 years), then why would Thailand condone access to it in the first place?

If you don’t like something on TV (allowing for the fact that in some countries like UK there are watershed times during the day before which mature content is not allowed), you can turn it off. If Thailand doesn’t like US morals, they can turn it off too - in fact why did they even allow it in the first place?

UPDATE:
These Turks know how to do it. But then again, it makes me wonder if the only really effective remaining democratic action one can take is moving country. It’s just a shame you can’t make your own with its own set of rules - ah well there’s always Second Life or um Weblo(?) but even the US Feds are starting to look into those.

So I was out driving along at 7am this morning when I hear an ad on the local radio station for a company that will do cosmetic surgey on babies. The ad mentions how babies and young children are still adaptable, etc. It even promotes the service as good for beauty pageant hopefuls.

I’m pretty sure it was an April Fool joke, or at least I hope it was and I couldn’t remember the web address they gave.

However I bet there are parents out there who do get elective cosmetic surgey for their children for the purpose of enhancing their beauty pageant chances.

Anyone who caught the pilot episode of “The Great American Dream Vote” (the cheesiest show on TV by far and hosted by Donny Osmond) on Mon March 26th 2007, can see the enthusiam some people have for getting their children in pageants, enough that a contestant mentioned twice that kids had died from cancer but were buried with pageant crowns on their heads that her daughter raised money to buy. The contestant’s dream was for her daughter to be Miss America. OK, the girl visits dying kids and keeps them company, but come on… I think people tend to have one of two extreme reactions to this story. The fact that Jimmy Kimmel was joking about it on Tuesday night gives you the general impression out there. Perhaps this is where the radio station got their idea for the joke from - I really hope it was a joke.

Life… Art… Life, etc.