For the last few days I’ve been reading the official “GM FastLane” blog, usually written by vice-chair Bob Lutz. The site, like other corporate blogs, is an interesting experiment in direct interaction with the public. Here, the best part of many posts is the comments, where GM backers and detractors fight it out.

I love that Lutz will take the time to respond to comments, and the man clearly has passion for his field. But I don’t know that his site will become a part of my bookmarks, because he also tends to fall back to marketing-speak. Take a recent post, Best in Class? Taste for Yourself.

He starts out by quite rightly noting that it’s silly to select a car based upon country of origin:

First of all, just as with cigars, wine and gin, you are making a potential mistake if you are basing your decision solely on country of origin. Sure, reputation plays a big role, but check it out carefully, and go drive, or sip, or puff, and then decide.

Then he complains that U.S. automakers have not been recognized for making major quality strides. OK, maybe. But who has failed to recognize this? Consumers? No, it’s the evil media:

It’s largely because the general press in this country has fallen into a depressing but easy pattern of “foreign good, U.S.-produced bad.” They perpetuate conventional wisdom and don’t report the latest state.

Anyone else tired of this straw man? The monolithic “media” serves as a target for just about everyone these days, but it seems particularly weak coming from a company with a $3B annual ad budget. Could it be that GM marketing isn’t telling the story? Nahh. Must be Newsweek‘s bias. (Of course, we’re totally ignoring the question of which manufacturers actually produce in the U.S.)

Worse, Bob then tries to have it both ways:

In short, we are all trying to live down a reputation that was probably at one time deserved, but is no longer justified.

So which is it: there was much improvement made, but the media doesn’t report it, or there was “probably” a problem once, but you can’t recall?

It’s interesting to read what Lutz has to say from time to time, but I wish he was a little less constrained. I remember my friend Pech sending me a CNN story in which an (unnamed) Ford executive admitted that the Camry was a better product than the Taurus. Now that person would have a blog I’d like to read.

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.

I’ve got these certain two pairs of heavy wool socks. They’re a sort of salt ‘n pepper combo of black and white. Nothing special. Even so, they make me smile almost every time I put them on, because I remember when I bought them.

I was in Oslo, Norway, and about to take a trip north to near the site of Lillehammer Olympics for some whitewater rafting. It was late Spring 2000, and I needed the socks to keep my feet warm on/after the rafting. (I also got a sweater, for after.) Sometimes I marvel at the young me who thought nothing of taking a detour in my European vacation and just jumping on a charter bus full of Norwegians, blissfully ignoring the fact that I had no clue what anyone was saying. (Though they were quite marvelous to me, and fortunately on my raft, the commands were in English.)

Socks are perhaps an odd way to commemorate an experience like that, but they fit into what I think is a pretty good philosophy: the only things you should keep are those that fall into the category of being beautiful, useful, or meaningful. If it’s more than one, all the better. (I’m counting these socks as two.)

Easier said than done? Perhaps. But as a guiding principle on what to keep and what to dump, I think it’s a damn good start.

Still maintaining pretty strict radio silence as far as political news goes, but had to tackle the whole drugs and tapes thing. First, let’s stipulate the secretly taping someone is truly despicable stuff, whomever does it (Mr. Wead or Ms. Tripp.) That said, what do we have here? Bush obliquely admitted he’s done pot, and probably more. Instantly, his allies fall in line around two themes:

1. He thought that guy (Doug Wead, who made the tapes) was a friend. Traitor!
2. How dignified of him not to answer the question during the campaign.

This is a classic double standard, executed in the usual Republican fashion. Does anyone believe that if Clinton had declined to answer the pot question, the Republicans would nod their heads, clucking in agreement whilst showering him with praise about his mature approach? No chance.

Everybody has heard of the Gillette model of business: give the razors away* and make your money on the blades. Of course, sellers of hygiene products are certainly not the only ones to love this model. Take printers, or specifically, Lexmark inkjets.

Lexmark thought they had a good thing going: they managed to engineer software that would interrogate a cartridge to determine if it was “genuine”, which in this case means “sold by Lexmark.” This procedure effectively killed the market for third-party cartridges, until somebody figured out how the system worked and created cheaper replacements.

So Lexmark sued the vendor, claiming the new cartridge infringed on their copyright. This, folks, is breathtaking audacity. Lexmark wants to sell you hardware and then electronically prevent you from using it unless you continue to pay them money.

All of this played out some time ago, and fortunately a District Court judge smacked them around in October of last year, vacating the injunction against the upstart, SCC. (The story is back in the news because Lexmark’s request for a re-hearing was denied.)

The fact remains, however, that we need to seriously re-examine copyright and other “intellectual property” legislation. And this time, let’s try to balance the public’s needs as well.

* I got a “Sensor” in the mail on my 18th birthday. Thanks, G.

Guess the networks were having a gay ol’ time this weekend: three characters coming out on “Simpsons” and “Housewives”. Uh, I mean that’s what I heard. Personally, after a long day at the soup kitchen, I prefer to close out my Sunday in my smoking jacket, perusing that dog-eared favorite copy of The Illiad, my faithful hound at my feet.

Riiiight. Anyway, throw in the lesbian kisses I didn’t see (on such shows as “The O.C.”, “One-Tree Hill”, “Wife Swap” (!)) and you’d almost think it was sweeps. Oh, hang on: it is.

Bummer the 3 characters I saw are all sort of jerks, though.

Dear Young Ones,

Greetings from 2005. And congratulations! You’ve lived through a time of impressive social and technological change, as evidenced by your very existence.

I know it’s hard to imagine that your Gramps Gompy Granddaddy Grandfather was ever as young as 27, but it’s true! I might even still bear a faint resemblance to that handsome devil (quantum leaps in medicine willing.)

Anyhoo, I’m writing to you today because a few hours ago I came across a Website comment that advised Web writers against ever using profanity because it might be possible, Google willing, for you lot to later read those very words. Well, your Grandfather got a little hot-headed and snapped back a response.

In fact, it would be fair to say that ol’ JSP told that dude to “fuck off.” Does that shock you? I certainly hope not. (If so, you might want to avoid the racy pictures Grandpa posted every once in awhile!)

I know you grew up in a post-Ashcroftian era, where you ventured out with the expectation that nearly everything you did in public could be recorded in some fashion. Maybe you even did the recording yourself. That’s fine, just as long as you remember that those images — like G-pa’s website here — don’t represent the sum total of your being. They’re just snapshots, moments in time, incomplete records of what you decided to do then based upon your whims.

As I hope you know, you have to decide how to live your life when you’re doing it. If later you look back and wince… well, shit happens. (Oops, there I go again!) You’re allowed to evolve.

So go ahead. Have a strong personality. Make daring decisions. Take some risks. Curse sometimes, even! Far from condemning you, your grandchildren might just see you as a real person. And hey, if they don’t, you can always cut the little bastards out of the will.

All my love,

J

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.

Those clever wordsmiths in Congress have unleashed another piece of legislation with a catchy name: H.R. 2929, the SPY ACT. Or, more correctly, the “S.P.Y. A.C.T. Act”. Do you think they have interns who come up with this?

Anyway, we’ll have to see if this does better than the CAN SPAM attempt.

The foks at SCO, arch-nemesis of open source advocates everywhere, are spinning their notoriety to their advantage:

SCO Ranked #1 Corporate Query Site by Google. Based on billions of searches conducted by Google users around the world, the 2004 Year-End Zeitgeist ranks SCO’s corporate Website as the most searched site for the year. [link modified, they pointed it to the wrong page]

Wow, “most searched”… in this case, sounds like being “the film everybody’s talking about”:

(Australian release; cover reads “The couple everyone wants to be.”/ “The film everybody’s talking about.”)

My friend Debbie is a big fan of Owen Wilson, so when I happened across a story about him, I sent her the link. She replied, saying she checks her e-mail at the YWCA where she likes to swim, and because they had “super limited access,” she couldn’t read the story. So I pasted the text and sent it back.

The fun came when she replied. My eye caught on what looked like some odd justifiying in the automatically quoted reply:

> unleashed on the LAT's Patrick Goldstein last week. Note especially
> Wilson's subtle invocation of the threat of         , and contrast
> with Schneider's near-promise of      shed.

Then I realized that was filtering at work. The proxy on the other end had blanked out the excerpt’s use of the words “violence” and “blood.” Now, I’ve had e-mail to certain domains bounce back entirely because I’ve used the word “fucking” (for emphasis, of course; juvenile work-around: fuc|<ing) but I’ve never had a message actually edited to remove words I put there. (Of course, to be fair, since Deb uses Hotmail, it would be essentially indistinguishable from any other Web page.)

But how can I be offended at something this delightfully inept? Truly, does this sort of filtering work on anything but sites that use filenames like PornyPornPic1.JPG? How cute! On the other hand, bad luck for the YWCAers who are interested in preventing domestic       or attending     drives…

So Mr. Bush would like to renew the PATRIOT Act: “To protect the American people, Congress must promptly renew all provisions of the Patriot Act this year,” sayeth King George.

First, an aside: I love that “all provisions” part. For me it cuts right to the heart of what it means to be a modern Republican pol: concede nothing, ever. I remember some guests on Bill Maher’s show last year were firmly stonewalling when Maher observed that, after W. got word of the WTC attack, perhaps 12 minutes was a tad long to continue reading along with the children. Predictably, the guests thought there was not a jot wrong — or even questionable — with this decision. That’s the playbook: never admit, never allow that anything you or your guy has done could be anything but the wisest possible course. (With a few rare exceptions — I’m looking at you, Mr. McCain.)

Back to the topic at hand. We could take Mr. Bush’s statement, comb through a copy of the Act, and see if perhaps there were a few provisions that could use refinement (perhaps the ability to monitor library records?) Or we could go higher level and try a cost/benefit analysis, noting that the number of terrorists convicted as a result of this law is (last I checked) nil.

But why bother? For me, all we need to know about the Act is in its name. Anyone who would rush out a law called, officially, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, needs to be sent to the back of the class — in part for being a smarmy kiss-ass (like the authors of the RAVE Act), but mostly for authoring a nakedly manipulative attempt to shroud a law enforcement land-grab in the buzzwords of the day.

In short, people this worried about marketing surely have something to hide.

Ok, I am currently the #1 result on MSN for Josh Wald. And #2 for sexy-ass pictures. [Update: MSN is a fickle mistress.] So since the clock is running down, let’s just cop out tonight and see if we can’t make good on both.

Here’s Josh again, wearing more than last time:

And here’s French rugby player Frederic Michalak:

Apparently the French rugby team shoots this calendar every year in the nude, then they make a book (with a US version) and a movie (US versions: 2004, 2005) about it. What a fucking great tradition. In other news, I’m totally developing a thing for that sort of tattoo. (Remember Brad Pitt’s hand in Ocean’s 11? Niiice….)

I know, I know, I’m turning into some sort of weird amalgam of policy discussion/political rants, technology, and racy images. But what can I say? It’s Val’s Day. Humor me.

P.S. I still think MSN (in general) is poo.

I remember visiting a client’s house some time ago. As we worked in the downstairs office, the television sat in the background, blaring one of The Duke’s old movies. Nobody was watching it, so I asked why it was on. “Oh,” the woman said, “[her husband] loves John Wayne, and leaves it on so they know people watch it, and will keep showing it.”

This little encounter came to mind the other day when I was reading about IPTV, or television delivered using the Internet Protocol (like streaming, except it doesn’t suck.) Many people don’t know it, but the cable and telephone companies are expected to soon wage a massive war. As the CableCos have begun to offer phone service, the phone companies are investigating ways to deliver video over their own connection to the home. For a variety of technical reasons, IPTV is well suited to this.

While the tech is interesting, the implications for personal privacy are even more so. Consider for a moment how ratings are calculated presently: the A. C. Nielsen company picks families and (in most cases) asks them to keep a paper log of what the watch, or (in a few markets) installs “people meters” to do it automatically. Either way, these sample groups are then extrapolated to take a guess at what everyone is watching.

If that sounds sort of quaint, that’s because it is. In the traditional broadcast realm, my friend has no hope of getting his John Wayne preference recorded, unless he’s part of a Nielsen family. The IPTV approach, on the other hand, goes far beyond “viewing notebooks”: every time you select a channel, your cable box asks for that “stream” from the company server — at which point the service provider may record your request.

The privacy implications are stunning. From a technical standpoint, it would be trivial for your Internet/TV provider to read your e-mail, record your Internet searches, and even cross-reference it all with your TV viewing, then sell it all to, say, Acxiom (who are they?).

The ramifications are also strong on the production side. Imagine the implications for the news. Up-to-the-moment statistics, of the sort heretofore only enjoyed by QVC: “we killed with that Swift Boat thing, string it out!” or “people are tuning out when we cover Sudan, let’s shorten the international news block…”

Do I worry too much?