Alsop's Small Thoughts

What time is your area code?

My girlfriend complained about New Yorkers (which she loves doing since she grew up there) in an email this morning: "Some things never change, New Yorkers don't consider area codes to relate to time zones." My first thought was that New Yorkers might be ahead of the rest of us, a role Californians usually play.

My only phone number now is my cell phone. But I acquired that number when I was living in the 650 area code. I've since moved into the 415 area code. That's only a difference of 30 miles or so. I know other people with the 917 area code, a NY code, who have moved across the country or to other parts of the world. (I think Manhattan residents started getting cell phones with non-212 area codes before anyone else, because they had run out of 212 exchanges with wired phones.)

Two things have happened to virtualize phone numbers to such a degree that you will no longer be able to rely on knowing where someone is by looking at their phone number: 1) Local number portability. 2) Voice over IP. In the first instance, the rules changed to force operators to allow customers to keep their phone number regardless of where they get their service. This change was to allow for greater competition, since operators used to think THEY owned your phone number. In the second instance, the idea that phone calls travel over the internet means that location no longer matters. In fact, it is much more significant than that because it means the whole reason for having different phone numbers doesn't matter anymore. We used to have a phone number for work, a phone number for home, a phone number for our hotel, a phone number for our portable phone -- in other words, a phone number was a way to call a device, not a person.

Going forward, the technology and the social custom is going to shift so that a phone number is a way to reach a person. It's not far enough along yet that I'm willing to publish my phone number in this blog. But eventually I will, because the technology of the phones, the software in them and the software in the system will allow me to manage how I want to use that phone, including whether I want to answer it or have a call routed somewhere else, without having to be a programmer.

But that will be a few years off yet. And then my girlfriend will have to find another way to complain about New Yorkers.

Great question!

My friend, Dave Tommela, who always gets great stuff off the internet, forwarded this to me and I thought it was worth publishing in time for our Independence Day. I'm really tired of pressing #1 to indicate that I speak the official language of our country....

Mini Romance in The Presidio

I've been telling my friends that Minis flock. Most look at me a little weird, but what I mean is that since I moved into San Francisco and started using my Mini as my only car, I've noticed that it often ends up close to other Minis when I park or drive around town. Well, I can't tell you how surprised I was by the following experience:

My next door neighbor, Brianne (I might have the spelling wrong), got a green and black Mini Cooper S a month ago, so that every few days, she park hers in the driveway next to mine (which is yellow with a white top). Today, I came out to empty the trash from the house and noticed this: My Mini was making a move on her Mini!

I was kind of surprised, because I didn't remember parking mine that close to hers, so I ran to get my camera and take pictures. Look at this close-up to see how mine is really flirting hard, reach its right front tire out to touch Brianne's Mini's right rear haunch. I was blushing as I took the picture!

I turned around to finish emptying the trash and what I saw next made me think that perhaps I'd crashed on a remote island and joined the cast of Lost! It appears that Brianne's Mini rejected mine, which got its feelings hurt, since it pulled back and was sulking in this picture. I'm going to have to talk to Brianne about her Mini and ask her to teach it to be a little more sensitive, even though it is an S and three years younger than mine. I hope they can end up friends.

How can one landlord piss me off so much?

Regular readers know that I live in The Presidio. The Presidio Trust, my government (unelected and disliked by me), is on a roll. Someone in The Trust has decided that they are profligate in their services to renters (who, of couse, are currently supplying the vast majority of the income that is paying for their operations). So they have been whittling back their services in all kinds of ways, large and small. My most recent discovery: The Presidio Work Order Desk, which dispatches repairs and other housing related needs to the correct department (like The Department Of Carpentry, I imagine), received a memo recently stating that they are no longer to replace lights bulbs for residents, unless the aforementioned light bulbs are on a ceiling too high for a person to reach without a ladder or are fluorescent.

Previously, I hadn't expected to receive Light Bulb Replacing as a service, but was told last year that The Presidio was happy to provide this service! Now it is considered billable...

I wonder what goes next. I started paying for the gas service this month. Electricity next month? Are they going to charge me for mowing the lawn next year?

No More Rebates, Please!

Repeat after me: DO NOT THROW THE BOX OUT! I threw out the box that my new Linksys router came in, being an inherently neat person. Now I realize that the only way to get one of the four rebates that came with that product is to remove the MAC address label from the outside of the box and attach it to the rebate form. In the case of all four of the rebates, I have to collect the rebate form, the rebate receipt, and some number or other data, put them in an envelope and mail them somewhere and wait 4-6 weeks to get a check. The rebates are obviously offered on the basis that some percentage, probably small, of all customers will actually go through the painful process of claiming the rebate.

I hate rebates. They are an example of some cold, calculating process that calculates how to make the process of buying so painful that the customer will end up spending more money than they planned on the product. It is Machiavellian and makes me feel worse about the company I do business with. The four  rebates I have to file for come from a combination of Linksys and Vonage ($50, $30, $10 and a $25 gift card, for a total value of $115 on a product that cost $129). I have a rebate from Cingular for a new cell phone I bought ($100). I have a rebate from TiVo ($150). I have another rebate somewhere in my stack of paper, so I can get around $400 back. I probably won't do it. I'll feel terrible about myself for not doing it. I'll feel bad about the products I bought and the companies that sell those products. I hate rebates.

Chase Customer Disservice

Here's a good one! I logged into my credit card account tonight and, presto chango, the entire site had changed and would not accept my user name and password. Indeed, in the name of security, after three attempts to log in, it locked me out of my own account.

What happened? Chase must have bought FirstUSA, which was managing my credit card (and which had previously bought First Chicago). And some jerk (probably some arrogant IT jerk) decided to make my credit card access like their credit card access. So tonight my web browser didn't recognize the URL they switched me to -- without any warning whatsoever. And, having switched me to a new URL, they no longer accept my user name and password, forcing me to call the customer service line.

Of course, I got a very nice person who told me that she was sorry but I had to talk to an "Internet specialist" and that the wait time for this specialist was seven minutes. I got somewhat upset that I could no longer access my own account information. She said that she was sorry but she couldn't work magic and that she could either give me the direct phone number to call later or transfer me onto hold for seven minutes.

Now I'm on hold and the hold system told me that the wait time is more than 10 minutes. And, every few minutes, a very friendly message comes on to tell me that, for MY convenience, I can use the web site or call back and use the automated response system. Hold on a minute, someone answered....

There: I finally got to talk to the "internet specialist". Chase did a web-site merger, and obviously a lot of people were having a problem with the change, which is why the hold time (at 8:45pm PST!) was so long. I had to come up with a new password. The new password had to be more than seven characters, had to have at least one letter or number but couldn't use any special characters. It also couldn't be the same password as the last five passwords I had used on the same account. In essence: I have to come up with an entirely new password, one that doesn't look or sound anything like the five or six passwords that I'm already trying to remember that also can't be the same as this one. I got upset again and it's really hard to come up with a new password when you're pissed off at the customer service agent who's doing their darndest not to get pissed off back at you. So I came up with a brand-new password and wrote it down, which is exactly the worst thing to do with a new password. But it's the only way I'm going to be able to remember it!

You know what? I don't care how many miles I get from United Airlines for this credit card. It's not worth dealing with these arrogant, insensitive people. I will be getting a new credit card as soon as I can fit that into everything else I'm trying to do every day. And it certainly won't be a credit card managed by Chase!

The Downside of the Presidio

Regular readers know that I'm renting a duplex in The Presidio, the old Army base located in (sort of) San Francisco. It is a beautiful place to live, a national park in the middle of the most beautiful city in the country (IMHO). This is what I look at when I walk out my back door every day to get the newspaper. That's right: my house, built in 1917, backs onto a beautiful grove of cypress trees (as best as I can tell, given that I don't know much about trees). My house is the closest residential building to Crissey Field, which is a habitat for birds that's right on San Francisco Bay and where you can walk or ride your bike to Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. I could go on and on, but it is a remarkable place to live.

Except for one big problem. The Presidio Trust is both the best and the worst landlord you could imagine. Technically, The Presidio is now owned by the National Park Service (after being transferred from the Department of Defense in the mid-90s). But, except for the coastal parts of The Presidio, the entire property is managed by a not-for-profit organization called The Presidio Trust, which was chartered to figure out a way to manage the property without costing the US Government anything. In other words, the trust had to make the property self-sustaining without developing it or selling any of it off. Remarkably, it has already done that, primarly by renovating and renting the former officers quarters, like the one I live in. (I figure it was a captain's residence, so just call me Captain Alsop.)

The Presidio Trust can be a great landlord. It has an extensive staff that manages the operations of the property, one of which is called The Work Order office (for reasons I can't fathom); I can call this office and report any issue with my house, including that a light bulb has gone out, and someone will show up to fix the problem, usually the same day I call. Other staffs manage the public areas, which are beautiful and manage the roads and telecom infrastructure and even excavate old sites.

The problem is that The Presidio Trust appears to view the actual residents of The Presidio (people like me) as a liability that needs to be minimized, instead of as customers who pay the freight for the rest of the park. I moved into my house in November, 2004 under a sublet and then signed a new one-year lease last April. In that time, The Trust has decided to rewrite my lease twice (making one wonder what the point of having a lease is in the first place), removed most of the extra parking on the street I live on (making it much more difficult to invite people to visit me), engaged in constant construction on the street in front of my house (with the equipment getting going at 7:30am as though no one actually lives here), and then decided to renovate my basement regardless of whether I wanted it renovated. While renovating it last week, the contractor caused a power surge that blew out all of my consumer electronics gear (see last post).

The reason the Trust wanted to rewrite my lease is that they had experts review the state of the renovated residences and decided that some of them could create potential liability for the trust in the case of fire or gas leaks. The experts said the basements didn't have the right venting and egress for anyone sleeping in the basement (which my son was doing at the time). Then they wanted to rewrite it a second time because they decided that, if they renovated the basements, that would relieve the liability. In both cases, these decisions were made and then communicated as done deeds, with no recourse or negotiation. That, of course, is a landlord's right, I guess. (It's been a long time since I rented my residence.)

I could go on in a litany of the small and sometimes larges injustices visited by The Presidio Trust on its residents. But the most interesting part of all this is the realization that The Presidio Trust is a government that does not need to answer to its residents. The Presidio is federal land, owned by the government of the United States. The City of San Francisco has no jurisdiction over the land; indeed, if you get a ticket from the Presidio Police, you have to go to the Federal Courthouse in downtown San Francisco to pay the ticket and deal with the federal district court if you want to contest it! So this isn't your typical landlord that's subject to regulation by the city; this is a non-profit organization chartered by the federal government to manage the property to make money. There are no elected officials, no representative form of government. It's effectively a totalitarian system allowed to exist inside a democratic political system.

I keep wondering if, by writing this post, I have put at risk my opportunity to sign a new lease on this house come April. Perhaps I'm getting paranoid in my old age....

Car Accessories

I own a used Mini Cooper, which now has 30,000 miles on it. And I face a difficult decision, all help and input welcome, please. Below is a picture of what I've had to do to use my devices (Treo 650 and Photo iPod) with my Mini. I already posted about how I can't stand listening to terresterial radio because of the ads and the DJs. And the Mini is a stick shift, so it's really hard to do phone calls without an earbud. My brother Andy turned me on to ProClip, a really cool way to match the holder for your device to a mount that is designed for your car. In the photo, you can see that I have the Treo holder mounted on the left of the middle column in the Mini dashbaord and the iPod holder mounted on the right. The factory radio and navigational system are in the dashboard in the middle.

Problem #1: Until today, I had to decide whether to have the iPod plugged into the cigarette lighter or the Treo. If the iPod isn't plugged in, it doesn't work because the wireless radio interface I have (made by Monster cable, if I remember correctly) uses the power to help tune the radio station better than most of the wireless radio transmitter for audio devices like the iPod. But I often forget to charge the Treo overnight and that means I have to have it plugged in when I'm driving around Silicon Valley and making phone calls and doing email. I finally decided to drop by BestBuy and discovered that they actually have a thingie that lets you turn one cigarette lighter into three power outlets in your car. But if you look at the photo carefully, you'll see that it doesn't fit in the Mini very well so I can only use two of the three outlets. And once I've got both Treo and iPod plugged in, it's a real mess of wires and I can't get at my cup holders anymore. At least everything works, mostly and kind of, so that I can use my iPod and Treo at the same time.

Problem #2: I hate the terrestrial radio that's installed into the dashboard and wired into the amplifier and speaker system in the car. The iPod goes through the radio so the car controls can't change songs or playlists but can control the volume. But my dashboard is wasted on a device I don't want and the device I want (iPod) isn't wired right into the speaker system and steering wheel controls for the audio system. The Mini has an iPod option to plug the device into the system, but I have to give up the navigational system which I like because it works and my Navigatrix (as I've come to call her) has a British accent and is very polite. I want to rip the terrestrial radio out, replace it with a satellite radio and wire the iPod into the back of it. How the heck can I do that? As I said above, all advice and counsel welcome.

Problem #3: Should I spend the money and time getting the Mini fixed with all this stuff (that I hope you'll tell me about) when it already has 30,000 miles on it? I've looked around (at the Pontiac Vibe and the Honda CR-V) and discovered that new cars actually have built-in satellite radio (and even iPod) options. The problem is that car manufacturers have such long product cycles and are generally so conservative about making it easy to integrate new technology that you can't be sure which car will support what and end up deciding on the car itself rather than how it accepts new technology. Question: Is it better to stick with a car like the Mini and just spend the money maintaining it and upgrading it and take the chance that it will provide great service (which it has already done) for the next 70,000 miles or so or to invest in a new car that has more modern interfaces, but take the chance that even newer cars next year or the year after will have better interfaces?

Count me confused and dazed, but enjoying my Mini and my devices in it!

Why I want satellite radio

Driving to the airport yesterday morning. Forgot my iPod at home. So I was listening to the radio. I have six preset radio stations. At 6:00am precisely (7am flight), I pushed each of the radio buttons and got either advertising or DJs chatting with themselves. No music. I really want satellite radio!

I Live In An E-Commerce Black Hole

That's right: In the world of e-commerce, there are times when I cannot get approval for credit card purchases because I live where I shouldn't. Most recently, Verizon smartly informed me that my “city/state/zip code” combination is not valid. Because of that, they refused to activate the EV-DO broadband wireless card built into my computer (which doesn’t work where I live anyway, but that’s a different post).

The U.S. Post Office, Amazon.com, and BankOne, which issued me the credit card, don’t agree that I live in an invalid place. I'm guessing that Verizon uses a database, probably compiled originally by the old Ma Bell telephone company, to do its credit checks and that database doesn’t know that what used to be a United States Army base is now actually a place where normal people with normal credit live. I live in The Presidio, which has been turned over during the past decade to a different branch of the U.S. Government, the Park Service, and managed by a trust to convert all of its old officers quarters into residences and some of its barracks and other buildings into a variety of not-for-profit and for-profit enterprises. 

Conclusion: I live in an e-commerce black hole. How the heck do you get something like that changed?