Alsop's Small Thoughts

Maybe I Need More Than Luck WIth Comcast

Okay, the service tech showed up only an hour after the four hour window for my appointment ended. But he installed my voice service and briefed me on what to expect and was both friendly and competent. And now I have Comcast Voice, the third piece of the Triple Play. And, guess what: I'm wondering why I left Vonage!

It took me 20 minutes just to establish what my Secret and my Security questions are. Yes, you need one of each for some reason, even though they come from the same list of nonsensical questions. Can you remember which is your favorite movie, so that you can get into your account a year later after you forget your password? And when they ask for my honeymoon destination, do they mean from my first or second marriage? (Who the heck came up with these questions!? What was wrong with my mother's maiden name?)

I finally get all that squared away (after very carefully writing down all my passwords and secret and security questions so I can be sure to remember what they are, which is of course the very reason you don't want to make passwords too difficult to remember because we're human beings and can't remember them!). And then I leave myself a voice message, so I can hear what it sounds like. But I can't hear the message because the system is unavailable. So then I go to voice mail setup, which requires a different password with a different security and secret question pair than my login to Comcast.net. And once I figure out how to set that up and get into voice mail, it turns out the little application for listening to voice mails through my web browser doesn't work.

So why was it that I left Vonage? Did people say that it was unreliable or that the company was in trouble because of bigger and better funded competitors, like Comcast? Huh?

Hacker Dad, Slacker Dad

Michael is a friend of mine. He's also a total geek. And he has a 16 year old son, who is not really a geek. Friend. Geek. Father. What a combination.

After he decided to bond with his son by getting Guitar Hero for the Nintendo Wii, he discovered his son just beat his butt. So he got back by modifying the Guitar Hero and reprogramming it. On behalf of all the fathers around the world who have been beaten by their sons, I salute you, Michael!

Here's is Michael's summary at the end of the web site he created to commemorate his accomplishment: "Thanks to my son Alex for being a great kid. He's SO MUCH BETTER THAN I'LL EVER BE AT THIS AND SO MANY OTHER THINGS. By the way, when he found out what I was doing with his Wii, he commented that this was, by far, the stupidest project he'd ever heard of. He went on to comment that he had NO idea why I would waste my time on this. My answer: I did what I had to do to beat you (which is getting harder and harder as time goes by). Now I can beat you in my sleep. Take that!"

Why Do We Hate Meter Maids?

I got a parking ticket for "wheels straight". That's right; it cost me $35 for not "crimping my wheels to the curb". The meter maid watched me park, waited for me to walk away, then stopped, inspected my car, and wrote a ticket for not crimping my wheels to the curb. She claimed that the street, 14th Street between Dolores and Guerrero (so you can look and decide for yourself), is more than a 3% grade. There were no signs warning you to crimp your wheels and I didn't bring my GMT (grade measurement tool) with me.

When I approached the maid (and yes, she was a she), she was hostile, did not bother to be polite and acted like I was a fool for not knowing these things. On her citation: she is identified as E.Y. Hey, lady, if you're going to be a witch, at least have the courtesy to identify yourself. Otherwise, your customers (ie the people who make it possible for you to have your job) might end up thinking that you are a witch.

Reference: Citation #729486030, dated June 1, 2007 and time stamped 11:32am. I paid it because I don't want to have to fight city hall.

Proud To Be An Alsop

People who know me probably think I'm about to boast about my once-well-known father, Stewart, and uncle, Joseph. But that's not my topic: Instead, I've had a uniquely modern, Internet experience about my last name. I put on a daily Google Alert, mostly to keep track of what people are saying about my living relatives like my brother Joe (one of five Alsop brothers); my sister's name is Elizabeth Winthrop, a well known author but alas no longer an Alsop, so keeping track of her requires a separate Google alert). What I've discovered is that I share a last name with quite a gaggle of people, mainly in England, the United States and Australia. I get 6-12 items in each daily alert, including frequent references to various rugby and football (otherwise know as soccer) players. Nearly every day, though, there is one or more reference to three Alsops I'm particularly proud to share my last name with.

Ron Alsop: I've been aware of Ron for quite a while, since he's bylined regularly in the Wall Street Journal, where he's worked for as long as I can remember reading the paper. But he's exceeded the normal bounds of a reporter/journalist and has a reputation that leads him to be a frequent speaker and a published author.

Marin Alsop: I heard about Marin Alsop when she was appointed conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, since it made quite a stir: first woman appointed conductor of a major city symphony. A number of friends and acquaintances wanted to know if she was a relative. (I thought they might want to get good tickets. Turns out that, at the time, the president of the BSO actually was someone I knew; he worked in one of my portfolio companies.) But Marin shows up almost every day in my Google Alert as she tours the country and the world, guest conducting and presenting her ideas about symphony.

Will Alsop: I learned about Will entirely from my Google Alert. Along with the various English rugby and football players, he kept showing up as a somewhat eccentric and controversial architect in England. He is particularly noted for a concept that he calls the "Creative Prison", a prison designed to make the inmates want to run it themselves (as far as I can tell). This guy has made some really interesting buildings, as you can see from this Flikr collection. I particularly enjoy the building known as The Tabletop, which he designed for the Ontario College of Art & Design.

This leads to an Google Alert Story that can only happen in this day and age: I went to London (and Paris and Amsterdam) recently and decided to kill some time going to see an exhibit that I'd seen in my Google Alert about Will Alsop's Creative Prison.  I Googled the address and found my way via Tube and walking, only to discover that the exhibit had ended more than a month earlier. I learned a key lesson: Modern technology does not make up for operator error...

I'm Not Happy With Toyota

I already posted about my Prius. (I finally watched the entire South Park episode, "Smug Alert"; even better than I'd heard.) Now I'm feeling like a shmuck for buying one, mainly because Toyota can't seem to keep itself from over-reaching, now that the car is pretty successful.

I saw two billboards for the Prius on Friday. The first: Save 325 gallons a year. The second: 60mpg, city. Very simple, powerful messages. If true. But I would love to see the evidence of these truths.

The first one nailed me, sitting in stop and go traffic, because 325 gallons translate to saving 9/10 of a gallon every day. If the second claim is true as well, then you would have to drive 60 miles just to use a gallon, much less save one. But if a regular car (say my Mini) consumes 30 miles per gallon and a Prius really does use half as much gas, then -- to save 325 gallons -- you would need to drive something like 27 miles a day to save 9/10 of a gallon of gas every day. It's hard to drive 27 miles a day in the city, so you'll perforce need to drive your car A LOT to save that much gas. I thought the objective of responding to global warming was to drive your car less, not more.

But the second one just flipped me out. I own one of these cars and it does NOT get 60 miles per gallon. Ever. In the city or outside of it. And the car itself tells me that. Indeed, when I saw that second billboard, I looked at the results for my car, which reported that over the past 300 miles, it had gotten 40.6 miles per gallon! Maybe I wasn't paying sufficient attention to how I was driving. So I pulled into a gas station, refilled the tank, and reset the mpg counter to zero. Over the next 12 miles of driving, very carefully to optimize use of fuel over both highway and city driving (in San Francisco, with its hills), I managed to get 44 miles per gallon.

Toyota made a completely unsupportable claim, so now I feel like a schmuck for buying a car from a company that resorts to making false claims, even when it doesn't need to. The Prius is a very successful car. Why the heck does Toyota need to lie to sell more of them? (It turns out this is a reported controversy; what makes the billboard I saw even worse is that the EPA has backed off on the 60mpg rating for the Prius.)

Are All Toyotas This Controlling?

As I admitted in my last post, I've acquired a Toyota Prius and garaged the Mini to preserve its charming ways for posterity. The Prius is an interesting car because of its hybrid energy system as well as other features like the smart key, which I posted about on our firm site. But I'm beginning to have wishful, fond memories of my Mini because the Prius treats me like an idiot.

When I get in the car and turn it on, it immediately begins beeping to make me put on my seatbelt, not even giving me a few second to put it on before starting with the beep. Bad enough, but then the beeping accelerates and becomes more insistent if I don't buckle my seatbelt, regardless of whether I start driving. And if I release the seatbelt before turning the car off, it starts up again. In other words, you cannot be in this car without having your seatbelt buckled, regardless of whether  you are moving! Sort of feels like Toyota telling me that they are going to make damn certain that I don't do the wrong thing, since I'm such a dodo.

Same treatment for my briefcase, which must be heavier than whatever weight Toyota programmed into the passenger seat as the minimum. So I can't put my briefcase on the passenger seat. In order to put it in the backseat, I must open the front door and then release the lock on the back door before opening the back door. (I could, of course, open the car from the passenger side, which unlocks all the doors, but then the briefcase would be on the other side of the car.)

When you put the car in reverse, it has what sounds like an industrial strength beeping sound to remind you that you are in reverse. My model has a sort-of cool video camera that also comes on when you put it in reverse, although the parallax effect on this camera is so severe that you can't really use it for precision reversing. But no matter because the car beeps at you (not at people behind you, which was the point of putting beepers on commercial and industrial vehicles) madly, distracting you from the video anyway.

The thought crossed my mind that perhaps the Prius is a newer model and therefore hasn't gone through Toyota's famous quality and user testing, but the first models were introduced more than four years ago and I have a 2006 model. Toyota did a basic redesign on the vehicle in 2004 (which is why people say to avoid that model year). Indeed, it was with some surprise that I discovered (when I finally read the manual to figure out if I had to manually lock the car, even though it magically unlocks itself) that the manual is written in Japlish: English written by Japanese speakers and never reviewed by native English speakers.

No, the car is old enough and Toyota has made enough of them and had enough time to figure out how fix dumb design decisions in the original versions. I think that perhaps I should avoid buying Toyotas in the future, since the company seems to have the attitude that its customers are too stupid to protect themselves. Is that true? Are all Toyota cars as controlling as the Prius? Or does that just come with the smug attitude of designers who have made a car that is supposedly more earth-friendly? (Actually, on that last point, I'm beginning to realize that you don't get such good mileage in a Prius if you don't religiously try to optimize its energy system. If I drive it like I drive other cars -- fast and aggressive, I don't get much better mileage than I get in my Mini!)

Trashy Thoughts

If you lived in San Francisco, as I do, you might think the trash collectors were really pissed off and wanted everybody to know it. Certain streets in the city are organized to move traffic along more quickly by having timed lights on one way thoroughfares. Bush Street, for instance, is three lanes one way that will get you from the Laurel Heights area to downtown in about eight minutes if everything works fine. Broadway, similarly, will get you from Pacific Heights to Chinatown in about five minutes. But the trash trucks appear to do everything they can to get in the way and muck up the city's plan for smoothly running traffic.

This morning, as is often true, the trash trucks doubled up on Bush Street at 8:05am, height of the rush hour, so that they blocked the two outer lanes and forced all three lanes to funnel into one. And on Broadway, a trash truck parked in one of the two lanes headed downtown while the trash collector stood behind it and had a roaring good telephone conversation with someone, no trash in sight to be picked up.

This is what makes living in cities so much fun!

My very first smart card

I got my very first smart card today, with a real chip in it and everything! The card is a parking meter card that stores $50 of value in it. As you can see from the back side photo I took, the card has a chip you can see. I can use it, as instructed, to increment the parking meter by 25 cents a time. This is incredibly important in a city where the parking meters use 6-12 quarters an hour, depending on the neighborhood.

The funny thing is that the city of San Francisco seems fairly tentative about the whole project, even though it installed 23,000 new parking meters -- ones that can read these cards -- in 2003. The cards are issued under a pilot program; I don't know when the pilot started or what the reason for going slow is. But they're only are sold at a grand total of 31 places  in San Francisco, a mixture of city agencies, liquor and hardware stores and other retail locations. You can only pay cash. It almost feels like the city has decided to keep the existence of the cards a virtual secret for  three years.

I only heard about them by happenstance, when my lunch date on Friday mentioned that he had managed to buy one and was using it to keep his meter fed while we were eating. Anyway, I'm feeling pretty special -- I not only have a real smart card but I must be one of the first in the whole city to have found out how to get one! (And now I don't have to load up on quarters.)

I'm not mad at JetBlue

The Wall Street Journal reports today that JetBlue is in trouble because it didn't tell its passengers that it was testing longer work hours for its pilots. Odds on I was one or more of those passengers. I like flying JetBlue. I started flying JetBlue in early 2005, when they were running the experiment, to Boston and Washington and New York. And I'm not mad.

People seem to feel that you are bad if you take any risk whatsoever in an airplane. I wrote in my Fortune column once that I don't turn my iPod off on takeoff and landing. I got letters from people saying I was endangering the lives of hundreds of people. Uh-huh. I admit now right here that I don't turn my cell phone off until we get to about 10,000 feet and it loses the signal. Still here to tell the tale.

I applaud JetBlue for being creative in testing work schedules and trying to be more efficient. Thank you for letting me participate in the test!

Restaurant Funnies

Sometimes it feels like restaurants can't get out of their own way. I'm in New York and wanted to make a reservation at Tabla, apparently a hot new restaurant, for when I return in December. Not allowed! I can't make a reservation more than 30 days in advance, so I have to wait until midnight on Saturday night to make an online reservation or call at noon (New York time, of course) the next day. Tabla must be a very hot restaurant, if they need to make it more difficult for customers to make reservations in advance!

I just made another reservation for lunch today at Country, another trendy restaurant, and got this message: "ALL RESERVATIONS MADE ONLINE WILL BE SEATED IN THE CAFE." Like what, online reservations aren't as good as telephone reservations?

And the classic: When I called Tulips in Santa Fe to make a reservation, I got a message saying that because I had my caller ID blocked, the restaurant would not accept my phone call. I had to hang up, the message said, and call back from a phone with caller ID. Huh? First, I had actually called 411 and asked Sprint to dial the number for me, which is why my caller ID didn't show up (since I don't block caller ID). Second, the restaurant would prefer to have fewer reservations just because they can't see the caller's phone number? (When we did go to the restaurant, we were one of two parties having dinner, clearly not an overly popular restaurant.)

What is it about restaurants that leads to such an anti-customer kind of attitude?