From the “I wish I’d thought of that,” and, more importantly, the “I wish I could buy that” categories, may I present the SplashPad:

This is a mousepad-sized device which allows you to charge phones, PDAs, and the like wirelessly. Just plop your device on the pad, and it starts charging. How cool is that?

Unfortunately, I first heard about it some time ago and there appears to be no progress since (note how this image, from Splashpower.com, features the rather old Palm V.) I also predict that even when the product is viable, all sorts of OEMs will balk at paying a licensing fee.

Which is where my idea comes in: I think Splashpower should provide the pads to hotels at cost. That way, when people come visit and ask “what’s this plugged-in mousepad thingy in my room?” The staff can respond: “that’s a Splashpad, and it means you don’t have to pack all the transformers for your phone, digital camera, PDA…” Bam, watch how fast people look for phones that support it. Since phones have a roughly 18 mos. refresh cycle, you could be in serious business.

But whatever. I want one!

The inimitable B-don is displeased. It vexes him to have a TV mos’ def and yet be forced, by nature of his location, to cope with some standard-definition programming. Why, he wonders, does the cable company provide duplicate (standard def) network feeds from two different cities, yet still fail to offer even one HD signal from either of those same stations? Why isn’t there a satellite network that provides all the broadcast nets?

Worse, he continues, why is it necessary to deal with “tiers” (such as Basic, Expanded Basic, Digital, HDTV) each of which require additional fees? When will it be possible to access just the programs he watches? I’ve often wondered the same thing (and not just for PitS shows.)

I also wonder: how much will these shows cost? How much should they cost? A recent study (quoted here) estimates that $1/episode is the magic number, and, indeed, you’ll find DVDs that charge you more: based on list price, an epsiode of “Buffy” is about $2.75, while “Friends” weighs in at $1.40.

Of course, that’s to own the shows. How many things that you watch would you want to own? For me, the answer is “all”, because I watch a total of perhaps 3 shows, which would set me back a whopping $12/mo. at the $1/ep rate. But most people watch a lot more TV than I do.

In fact, any household that watches more than two shows a day (on average) would have to pay more than $60/mo, so that gets expensive fast. Could they go cheaper?

Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope math. According to Nielsen Media Research, the highest-rated non-live show for 14-20 Mar 2005 was “Cold Case”. The CBS show came in at #3, with a 17.0 share of HUT for total of just over 12 million households.

“Cold Case” is an hour-long show, which means it has roughly 18 minutes of commercials. Now, keep in mind that some of that time will be used for network promos, some given over to affiliates, etc. But we’ll ignore that in our calculations, and assume it’s all sold at the highest rate. So if these figures, which purport to be lifted from Advertising Age, are correct, CBS charges about $153k per 30 sec. spot on this show. That means the most recent episode of “Cold Case” could have brought CBS as much as:
18 minutes * 2 spots/minute * $153,305 = $5,518,980

So the highest possible figure for that episode would be $5.5m. Not bad for an hour, eh? Let’s further suppose that B’s household contained at least one “Cold Case” fan. If they wanted to download an episode, and pay CBS what they would have earned, how much would that be? I’d say:
$5,518,980 per episode / 12,041,000 households = 46¢ per household

Well! Not bad at all, there. Of course, there’s no easy way to charge so small an amount, and without multicasting or a similar solution, the bandwidth costs would be extortionate. (I can hear Pech now: BitTorrent! BitTorrent!) But if we could solve those problems, we could all pay CBS our 50¢/show and go on our merry commercial-free way.

Except: why does CBS deserve a cut? CBS and the other networks are merely methods of delivery. It’s the production companies that make what we want to see: Sony brought us “Seinfeld”, Warner Bros. Television creates “ER” and “The West Wing”, and so on. The nets have been buying into these production companies as a way to control their costs, but according to my searches still only tend to pay in the $2-3 million/episode range (except for extremely expensive shows like “ER”).

At $3m, the production company needs just 25¢ a household to cover its nut, which even B-don would probably pay. And hey, if he didn’t, there’s always another solution: advertising companies that pay us to watch the ads…

For Further Discussion

• How fast a “pipe” would we need for HD downloads not to suck?
• If internet delivered TV, what would CableCos charge for broadband?
• If every TV show (ever) was available on demand, what would happen to ratings?
• How would we find good, new stuff?
• What would happen to the “water-cooler” effect if everyone’s watching TV-on-demand?

Does anybody know how to write a subject line anymore? I’m talking about something tight, meaningful, and sortable that actually summarizes the message.

Now, before I get into this, let me just emphasize this doesn’t apply to you unless we work together, and even then it’s only for predominantly work-related messages. To people who send me personal messages: I love you, you’re perfect, don’t change.

But for those who actually expect me to do something, could I maybe get a little more than this:

To: [me]
Fr: [him]
Subj: [company name]

Yes I do.

I just got this a few minutes ago, in response to one of three messages I sent to this guy. To what is he responding? I have no clue. Am I supposed to do anything? You got me. Perhaps the subject line would have given me a hint, but the huge, huge majority of messages I get from this person simply have the company name as the subject. (As if he’d be e-mailing me about anything else.)

Let me contrast that with a few messages from my outbox. See if you can guess what each message contains:

• Changes to Shift Summaries Page
• leave requests report active
• i'll kill the bitch myself
• quote/invoice customer experience [was: [Fwd: Re: quote format & project display [edited]]]
• To-Do List: Phase II bugs / Phase II+ wish list

(I slipped a personal message in there, see if you can guess which one it is.)

Of course, I cherry-picked those; like everyone else, I certainly have written several that are not at all clear. Often it’s because we’re rushed, or it’s a one-off. But I think much of the blame also falls on the standard layout of the message composing window. Perhaps it would be better if the subject line and “send” button were along the bottom edge of the window, so that you got to them when you’d completed writing. At that point, you’d have a much better idea what the message actually was about, and could try to summarize it there.

While I’m on the, erm, subject, I like to sometimes use the subject line as the “body” and write a brief message with “[eom]” appended to signify there is no more. Some of my coworkers (Pinky, this means you!) have also adopted this approach and it’s just great to be able to quickly see a subject line such as “Server has been restarted, as requested [eom]” and know you don’t have to open it up. (This is especially good for slow webmail.)

Finally, I’d like to single out two more subject lines. One is from a client, and I received it yesterday. It’s too long by half, but I’d certainly take that over yet another subject that says nothing. The second is from Jesse, and I think he deserves the last word:

• Enquiry regarding sales agents display in drop down menu when creating a new lead
• you know I don't like subjects and you just use them for your archives anyway

Okay, yesterday I was able to confirm that at least 3 separate messages were never delivered to me. I put this down to an overzealous server-based spam filter, but now it seems my hosting company reports they have misconfigured a mail server. Rather than delivering mail, it’s been queuing it. As a result, things have gone from bad to worse overnight: Thunderbird now times out, and Pech has confirmed he got a message rejected.

So, if you’re sending to anything other than this domain (which, thanks to the fine folks at easyDNS, has redundant mail servers) I probably didn’t get it. My Gmail account is johnperk /a/ gmail just so you know.

Might be time to go TextDriving…

Update [7:00p]: E-mail is starting to trickle in, some of it two days old. Should be back to normal.

Back in the old days, when I was a grammar Nazi, there were a few phrases that really annoyed me. One was “giving 110%” (okay, that one still irks me) another, thanks to B, was “I’ll try and…” (hmm, ditto) and still another was “The score doesn’t reflect how close it was.”

On that last, I used to always have the same mental response: oh really? Then what does it reflect? That all changed once I started going to basketball games, where I had the chance to feel the wrenching agony and soaring joy that came with each minute of a hard-fought contest.

So that got me thinking: what would better encapsulate a close game? I reject box scores as not “scannable” enough. Ultimately I thought some sort of bar graph, with bars above and below the axis showing points scored. A tight grouping of high bars at the end could show a rally, a relatively consistent spacing and height of bars would show if one team was consistent.

A few days ago, I learned that these very things exist. They’re called “sparklines”, and they look something like this: (a baseball season.) Sparklines are “intense, simple, word-sized graphics” according to Edward R. Tufte in his book Beautiful Evidence. (I believe it’s still forthcoming, as it’s not in Amazon. I can recommend The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Visual Explanations though, if you’re a bit of a graphics/stats geek.) The goal here is to convey information in a tight little space, and the sample chapter linked above Tufte breaks out examples for everything from medical charts to how planets look.

I don’t expect sparklines to show up in the sports pages anytime soon, but I think it would be fun if they did.

Slashdot just ran a story referring to “AIM‘s New Terms of Service” including a provision granting Time Warner rights to everything you post with it.

License excerpt:

Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses. [emphasis added]

This doesn’t even appear to be new (the opening clause references 5 Feb 04), which says something about how many people actually read those click-through licenses.

I know most of the stuff on AIM is ephemeral, but this really horks me off all the same. I don’t expect my friends and family to switch to Jabber en masse (though wouldn’t it be nice if ISPs ran Jabber servers like e-mail servers?) but I hope they will consider taking two steps:

• Uninstall the AIM official client and switch to Gaim. Gaim’s free, ad-free, open-source, with multiple network support and the ability to sign in as multiple users simultaneously, plus tabs and all that goodness. (You can even group friends’ accounts under one alias so you know that HotisK, WendysisA, IHateA, etc. are all one person.)
• After getting accustomed to Gaim, add in Gaim Encryption. That way you can talk about, say, your plot to overthrow the government (or even just your love for naked Matt Damon) with the knowledge that AOL won’t replay your conversation in their next asinine commercial. As one Slashdot commenter put it, “Folks, it is time to start putting your letters in an envelope. You can no longer trust the letter carrier to protect your privacy.”

In the long term, however, we need a solution that allows us to track “presence” (available, busy, away) without resorting to services that are little more than walled fiefdoms, subject to the latest corporate whim.

Despite being a big Firefox booster, I haven’t gotten too deeply into the extensions. I use Adblock, of course, but have only one or two others.

Well, now I’m adding another: SessionSaver. If you’re like me, and tend to have an absolute ton of browser windows open, each with gobs of tabs, you dread having to restart or shut down your PC. That’s just when SessionSaver comes in handy: you can set it to automatically keep all of your tabs. Just open a new browser when your computer powers up, and you’re back in business.

In fact, I think I might put it to the test right now. I’ve got a killer headache.

The P.C. business is dead — and Dell killed it. That seems to be the consensus in the business press these days, with the words “maturing” and “commodity” bandied about with ever-increasing frequency.

True, from a financial standpoint the picture looks grim indeed: margins at a paltry 1%, with all the profit sucked up by the Texas behemoth. IBM sold its PC division. HP cut R&D budgets and just dumped CEO Carly Fiorina for (in part) failing to make the Compaq acquisition succeed. The post-eMachines Gateway continues as an also-ran.

But look beyond the quarterly reports. In fact, look at your computer itself and ask: is this the best we can do? Today’s computers are truly awful: too bulky, too hot, too power-hungry, too slow, and too ugly (okay, on that last I’ll concede an exception.)

By bailing, IBM has signaled they have no solutions for these problems. Indeed, judging by the overwhelming majority of PCs on the market, you’d think there were no major improvements to be made, no possible differentiation that customers will pay for. Perhaps the PC has indeed peaked.

Bollocks. Where’s my instant-on? My holographic storage? My ultra wideband? Or even my computer that tolerates a brief power flicker? Where is the innovation?

One of my favorite college courses was Management 478: Strategy. I remember my professor mentioning that innovation is possible anywhere. “Consider salad in a bag,” she said. “By saving the customer time, the lettuce producers created a much more profitable product. And if lettuce growers can innovate, your industry can too.”

Here’s another great example: Dyson vacuums. James Dyson was frustrated with the loss of suction caused by bags. So he invented a bag-less “cyclonic” vacuum that maintained its power. (We have “the Animal“, it’s great — and check out that average rating of 390 reviews.) Within two years, Dyson vacs were the best-selling in the whole of the UK, and his competitors were openly lamenting that they didn’t buy — and shelve! — the technology.

Both of these innovations came long after their respective products had “matured” (the vac was invented in 1869, and lettuce is, well, lettuce.) But I won’t even concede that the P.C. is anywhere close to mature. Consider this great paragraph from David Gelernter’s WSJ editorial, “How to Build a Better PC“:

PCs are roughly a quarter-century old. People who think of them as mature commodities might have thought the same thing about television in the 1970s–when TV was in fact on the brink of all sorts of revolutions. The airplane was 25 years old in the late 1920s; luckily, airplane companies kept inventing, developing and selling new types. The automobile turned a quarter-century old in the early ’20s–and Henry Ford did consign it to Commodity Limbo. He figured that the Model T was grown-up, settled-down, fully-evolved. He almost wrecked his business, but finally got the message and produced the Model A and a long line of subsequent new designs. Obviously there are big differences between the PC and these other technologies. But there is also a big similarity: all were (or are) destined to take a lot longer than 25 years to reach maturity.

So enough with this “mature” garbage. The real question: where are our innovators? Didn’t we all hear that the justification for outsourcing was that America was the land of ideas? Others could always assemble our products, the thinking went, because we’d come up with the blueprints, the plans, the value. Have we?

Surely if we can make vacuums suck more, we can make PCs suck less.

A bit of boring housekeeping: as you may notice, I’ve made a little change here on the site. I’ve finally dumped MovableType for WordPress (and only 8 months after I first mentioned it!) There were plenty of reasons to switch over — the far superior interface, the use of a programming language I can actually stand, and of course the strong open-source commitment of the project.

With a little bit of .htaccess and MySQL wrangling, I was able to ensure that any link to the hundreds of pages I created under MT still works. Also I tried to replicate the previous GUIDs, so hopefully anybody using a feedreader won’t get all the old posts again. However, you will get a bunch…

…because I also imported JSPJourneys.com. I got some flak for my decision to start up a second domain for my trip to Oz, and it was fair criticism. Still, I wanted an address I could give out to relatives and new friends that would be, ahhh, grandparent-friendly. That’s now served its purpose, so soon enough I’ll probably re-direct it back here to the flagship, in the new “Travel” category.

Speaking of categories, as you can tell I now have a handful. I never really used that feature in MT, so I’ve been going back and sorting some of my stuff for the first time (which of course requires dipping into the archives, a sometimes entertaining, sometimes cringe-worthy experience.)

Anyway, it all seems to be working so now back to our regular programming.

Until today, I used three methods to download BitTorrent files: the command-line client when I’m accessing my Linux machine remotely, the ABC client when I’m on Windows, and, recently, Azureus.

Today, for the first time, I used the official BitTorrent graphical client. It’s nice, but one particular quirk of the interface really stopped me short: when you click the ‘X’ next to a completed torrent, the dialogue asks “Are you sure you want to remove examplefile.avi?”

It’s a minor thing, but the language tripped me up. It didn’t say “remove from queue”, it said remove the file — and the file wasn’t the .torrent, it was the download itself. Logically, I didn’t expect the program to so easily delete what it had just created, but I paused all the same.

Now, this is open source software, so I can dive right in and fix it*. Since BitTorrent uses the MIT License, I could even re-distribute my new “JSP Approved” version of the program.

This is a small example, I know, but it’s refreshing to know that I can choose software that isn’t a one-way street. If I don’t like it, I can (try) to improve it. That’s the power of a little thing we nerds call Freedom 0.

* Changing line 1500 of btdownloadgui.py, if you’re wondering.

Google launched their Google Maps beta today, and it’s impressive. I’ve had a cursory look, and it seems they’ve done a good job of abstracting out clutter while still giving a good sense of major roads, rivers, trails, and rails.

But the thing that really grabs me is the ability to “fly” around the map without forcing the page to re-load. Google has been making some great strides in this area, first with GMail*, which quickly snaps through most of its functions without forcing you to wait for a reload, and now with this mapping ability that permits zooming and panning without a new page. I hope we see more and more of these types of Web applications. Reloading saps productivity, causing delays while the page reloads and jumps around.

Back to maps: Yahoo! Maps also does a good job. While they don’t have the same level of page responsiveness that Google offers, they do have very high-quality contextual information, including nearby restaurants and other businesses, plus they now have real-time traffic (but in a somewhat hard-to-read style, I have to say.) I love using Yahoo’s “get local” feature to find nearby restaurants when I’m in another city.

On the other hand, if you’re taking a drive, your priority is the quality of the directions. Since Google, Y!, and old standby MapQuest (which is looking fairly shabby and ad-choked in this company) all get their turns data from the same company, I doubt there’s much difference in that respect.

I wonder what Google will tackle next?

* On the bizarre off-chance that anyone reading this wants a GMail account but doesn’t yet have one, just send an e-mail to jsp@ (this site) and I’ll hook you up.

Shopping for a new computer? Considering a Dell? Pretend you’re a small business — they have the best prices and allow you to un-check crap such as AOL. It’s simple (just click “Small Business” on the home page) and nobody checks. I thought this approach was common, but B didn’t know it, and now Slashdot is running it as news:

Infoworld’s “Notes From The Field” column this week includes a comment from a reader who found that Dell listed several different prices for the same part. Intrigued, I grabbed the first part number I found (a 512MB memory module #A0193405) and found that the list price is $289.99 which the price offered to “large businesses”. Meanwhile, the GSA/DOD contract price is $266.21 while “home users” find the list-price discounted to $275.49 and “small businesses” fare even better with a $246.49 price. InfoWorld contacted Dell who responded, “Each segment sets its own pricing, and consumers are free to pick the one that�s cheapest.”

I also recommend you look at the Dell SMB unit’s “Outrageous Deals” section, where you can pick up a pretty good computer for under $500, including 2 year on-site service.

For what it’s worth, I have a real love-hate relationship with Dell. I’ve personally been involved in the purchase of at least 13 of them, including 3 which act as my personal machines. They’re a good value, but if I had real dough I’d still go upmarket.

I’m setting up a couple of Cisco 7960 IP Phones, and I’m amused to discover that the last page of the “Quick Reference Guide” includes instructions on how to place a call using the other party’s e-mail address.

My first impression: how cool is that? You don’t have to remember home, work, cell, FAX — just use e-mail for voice or text. It’s like instant messaging, but with an actual phone!

My second impression: oh sweet N.E.J., what kind of an unholy alliance between spammers and telemarketers could this enable? Head for the hills!

If you’re not using Firefox by now, you’re just being silly. As I mentioned nearly a year ago today, it’s a great way to view the Web, and you don’t have to be a nerd to appreciate that.

Firefox supports extensions, and one of my favorites is Adblock, which does exactly what you’d expect (and more — it can also provide certain Rochester residents with hours of entertainment as they probe for sites with banners to zap, much in the manner that a toddler is entertained by socks.)

A few days ago, PC Magazine ran reviews of 15 extensions for Firefox, includind Adblock. In a surprising move, they demonstrated how Adblock works on their own site. As shown in this screenshot, the authors were able to strip out at least 6 banners from the pcmag.com homepage.

Was the move incredibly gutsy or just pragmatic, borne out of fear that any other publisher would sue if used in such a manner? Your guess is as good as mine. In any event, the idea of a publication encouraging its readers to deprive it of revenue, well, it just brings a smile to my face.

Bonus geekery (since I seem to be doing that this week): The review says Adblock is good to prevent “displaying unwanted images.” True, but that’s not all: with the right rules, Adblock also stops Google text ads and those annoying green link hover ads as well.

Last year, Fox introduced a show called “Playing it Straight,” in which a “sweet, innocent Midwestern girl” appears on a “Bachelorette”-style show, only to learn that some of the 14 males vying for her affections are, in fact, gay. If, in the final episode, she picks one of these men, he walks away with $1 million. If she picks a breeder, they split the dough.

The show was even worse than it sounds (truly, truly bad — especially the woman), but in the manner of that old Woody Allen joke*, I got hooked after the first few episodes. What can I say: there were a few cuties in the cast, and I wanted to know if they played for my team or not.

So what does that have to do with the Internet? Well, I actually watched the show from Australia, a feat made possibly by BitTorrent. But that’s not such a big deal anymore. The twist is that Fox cancelled the show after 3 episodes. (At first it looked like they might “burn off” the rest sometime in the summer, but they never did, despite vague promises that they would “certainly provide any viewer that needs the information with the information of the conclusion.”)

BitTorrent to the rescue, again: a few months later, a viewer who saw the whole series when it aired in Israel created a package of the remaining episodes. I was able to snag it and learn who was who. It was a nice example of the “global economy” working for the little guy for a change.

Now Fox wants to see if it will work for the big guys: two weeks ago, they began offering all the episodes online for $2/pop. It’s interesting to see a broadcaster dip its toes into the pay-per-view market. I hope in a later post to take a look at some of the economics involved in going that route — from a broadcaster perspective. From an invididual perspective, let me save you the time: the series isn’t worth shelling out two bucks, much less per episode.

* “The food was terrible — and such small portions!”

Update [4 Feb 05]: NBC’s testing the download approach as well..