Global Nerdy

If you’re like most of our readers and live in the U.S. and Canada, it’s time to enjoy your last week of standard time. Come this Sunday, daylight saving time begins — a full three weeks earlier than usual.

The change to daylight saving time is deceptively simple in appearance. In 2005, the Energy Policy Act was signed into law. This act, whose purpose was “to help every American who drives to work, every family that pays a power bill, and every small business owner hoping to expand”, included among its measures a change to daylight saving time. Starting this year, daylight saving time would be extended by four weeks, starting three weeks earlier on the second Sunday in March and ending a week later on the first Sunday in November. The rationale for this change: if daylight saving time saves energy, then extending it will save even more.

If you’re looking for someone to blame, Ben “Buzzkill” Franklin is a good candidate. In 1784, riffing off his earlier “early to bed, early to rise” nonsense, he wrote a letter to The Journal of Paris titled Daylight Saving. Written in the excessively florid language used only by 18th century statesmen and aliens on Star Trek, Franklin suggested that by waking up earlier, Parisians would enjoy more daylight during their waking hours and as a result use fewer candles and economisez beaucoup francs.

In a move as telling of the stereotype as their coinage of the word schadenfreude, the Germans were the first to put the daylight saving concept into practice in 1916. Eager not to lose the stereotype war, Newfoundland implemented this silly idea a year later. The Americans implemented daylight saving time in 1918 along with the establishment of time zones, but it proved to be so unpopular that it was repealed a year later. Daylight saving time became something that was practiced at the discretion of several localities — a few states and cities — rather than at the national level. This was followed by a whole lot of governmental meddling starting with FDR and currently ending with GWB; you can read the rest of the sordid history over at the WebExhibits Daylight Saving Time site.

The concept of daylight saving originated in a world that predated not only the concept of time zones, but also a globalized economy, ubiquitous computing and a world that runs on timetables, so perhaps “Buzzkill” Franklin can be forgiven for his crime against humanity in light of such extenuating circumstances. However, the current U.S. administration, who live in the current world and who should recall all the work that went into averting the potential problems of Y2K, should know better.

In the New York Times article Time Change a ‘Mini-Y2K’ in Tech Terms, the problem with the change is put simply: Most internal clocks in computing devices are programmed for the old daylight-time calendar, which Congress set in 1986. The end result is that all sorts of tech companies and vendors are scrambling to patch systems programmed to the old spec and that extent of the effect of the change on uncorrected systems is unknown.

The article lists a number of systems that could be affected:

• Email applications
• Calendar applications
• Hotel wake-up call services (many hotel chains’ wake-up calls are centralized under one or two data centers)
• Smart electric meters, especially in systems where the charge for electricity varies on the time of day
• and, of course, the number of appointments and meetings that will be missed as a result of the change to the time change.

The upside is that for most of us, the change to daylight saving time will be an annoyance. As Rich Kaplan, Microsoft’s VP of Customer Service puts it, “It’s not as if you’re going to lose any data — your documents, e-mail, digital music or pictures.” (I quote Mr. Kaplan with the caveat that it is perfectly appropriate and even prudent to worry when a person high up on MS’s org chart tell you that there’s nothing to worry about.)

My advice: download the appropriate patches for your computer and other devices, confirm and re-confirm any appointments that take place during the first three weeks of daylight saving and don’t take the word of any electronic clock in the month of March without corroborating evidence.

Links

• Time Change a ‘Mini-Y2K’ in Tech Terms (New York Times)
• WebExhibits’ site on daylight saving time
• Wikipedia entry on daylight saving time
• Ben “Buzzkill” Franklin’s letter, Daylight Saving, to the Journal of Paris

Our wedding gets mentioned in an article in today’s Wall Street Journal Online titled The Minutes of Our Lives, which looks at the growing phenomenon of liveblogging — that is, blogging about an event while at that event. It’s no longer unusual to see people liveblogging at tech conferences or events on live television, but some people are liveblogging things like their Thanksgiving dinner or the birth of their child. Twitter.com, where you can post ultra-short entries typically no longer than a sentence, even had a post made from a mobile phone at a funeral.

Jennifer Saranow, WSJ staff reporter and author of the article, has been in touch with me and my wife Wendy for the past couple of weeks. She contacted us after finding this article on our wedding blog by Wendy:

If you would like to blog our wedding, you may do so! But after the fact. We really want all the fun things to be a surprise. And we really, really don’t want you to bring your laptops to the wedding (JKB). We want you to pay undivided attention (Ethan, hee) to the ceremony and then have face-to-face exciting interactions – like dancing! (Erica, I know you don’t need to be asked twice) – during the reception. But after you leave, we’d be more than happy to have you blog about it. There are a lot of bloggers and readers whom we weren’t able to invite, and the more of a taste we as a group can offer them…well, it’d make me happy. We hope to post some photos soon after ourselves.

Here’s the snippet from the Wall Street Journal article that mentions us:

Hosts who want to ensure that guests focus on the festivities are responding with countermeasures. Expecting about half a dozen bloggers at their wedding, Joey de Villa, 39, and Wendy Koslow, 32, posted “A Note To Other Bloggers” on their wedding Web site about two weeks before their September 2005 nuptials in Cambridge, Mass. The note asked guests not to bring their laptops to the event and to only blog about the wedding after the fact. “I wanted them to pay attention and enjoy themselves and participate,” says Ms. Koslow, who came up with the idea for the embargo. “I wanted them to be in the moment.”

Although the guests complied, the first attendee blog post was up by 11:16 that night, shortly after the reception ended. The culprit: Rev. A. K. M. Adam, a 49-year-old Episcopal priest from Evanston, Ill., who preached at the ceremony. From his hotel room, he wrote, “the ketubah is signed, the glass smashed, the champagne toasted, the disco medley played, and the guests exhausted. These guests, anyway.” Rev. Adam says, “It was the thing that happened that day, so I wrote about it.”

My thanks to Jennifer Saranow for including me and Wendy in the story.

(And yes, George was at the wedding — he was my best man!)

I just recently got around to listening to Tim Cook, Apple’s COO, speak at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium (a “symposium?” Faaaancy). A lot of people made note of his comment that Apple’s sold 90 million iPods like it was news. In fact, Apple first posted that number when discussing their most recent quarterly results (Q1 F2007) in January 2007. Since we’re going into the final month of Q2 of the current fiscal year, and estimates have Apple selling between 10 and 12 million more iPods, I think we’ll see Apple’s cumulative iPod sales cross 100 million by the end of this month.

That’s 1, followed by eight zeros.

So what does 100,000,000 iPods mean? Well, over the course of the iPod’s life, Apple has sold:

18,181,818 iPods per year
1,666,667 iPods per month
353,357 iPods per week
50,352 iPods per day
2,098 iPods per hour
35 iPods per minute
1 iPod roughly every 2 seconds

On average, of course.

When Apple Inc. wanted to bring its series of “Mac vs. PC” ads to international markets, it faced a difficult issue: What’s funny in one culture can seem ill-mannered in another.

Here’s the shorter version of the WSJ article on how Apple’s adapted their “I’m a Mac…” ads for other countries:

People in Britain and Japan are different than they are here in America. In America, the Mac Guy is called “smug,” while in Britain, he’s called a “tosser.”

On the other hand, people in Britain and Japan are the same as they are here in America; there’s always some loudmouth who thinks I care about the fact that he doesn’t like the Mac Guy in the commercials.

While you were reading the Journal article, Apple sold another 160 iPods.

Source: Mac and PC’s Overseas Adventures – WSJ.com

Annalee “Techsploitation” Newitz, whom I met at the first CodeCon back in 2002, has written an article for Wired News about her successful attempt to buy Digg votes:

I spent several days creating a blog intended to be as random and boring as possible. Built from templates, My Pictures of Crowds exhibits all the worst aspects of blogging. There’s an obsessive theme — photographs of crowds — but no originality and absolutely no analysis. Each entry is simply an illogical, badly punctuated appreciation of a CC-licensed picture taken from Flickr. Also, there are a lot of unnecessary exclamation points!Once I had created a blog destined to be least popular in the ‘sphere, I opened a Digg account under a pseudonym. Then, at 8 Monday morning, I posted a story linking to the blog. My brilliant headline was, “Why Are People Fascinated By Photographs of Crowds?”

Four and a half hours later, I was the only person who had dugg my story. That’s when I hired a Digg-gaming service called User/Submitter, or U/S. This enterprise, run by one or more zealously anonymous individuals, advertises that it can help “submitters” get Digg stories noticed by paying “users” to digg them. There’s a $20 sign-up fee and each digg costs $1, which gets split evenly between the service and the digger. U/S refunds money paid for any diggs the submitter doesn’t get in a 48-hour period. I put down $450 for 430 diggs, but wound up getting refunded all but roughly $100 of that. (Wired News is owned by CondéNet, which also owns Digg competitor reddit.)

User/Submitter has a pretty customer-friendly service. Shortly after paying them, Analee received an email telling her that her story was likely to get “buried”; they offered her a refund. She decided to go on, and amassed 40 diggs in about 10 hours. That was the tipping point: soon came the “organic” diggs and comments. “Overnight, I’d been hammered with so many hits that the diggers had to set up a mirror,” she wrote. It seems that to get a popular article, you have to have a popular article.

Links

• I Bought Votes on Digg (Wired News)
• User/Submitter

Can’t Buy Me Love

Twenty years before he would be known as “McDreamy” on the hit television series Grey’s Anatomy, Patrick Dempsey starred in a better-than-average teen movie called Can’t Buy Me Love (produced under the unfortunate working title Boy Rents Girl). You can probably guess the plot from the title and poster: geeky guy attempts to become popular by paying the head cheerleader to pretend to be his girlfriend; hilarity (and later, a relationship) ensues.

FakeYourSpace

FakeYourSpace takes the Can’t Buy Me Love approach and applies it to social networking sites. Their service, which is supposed to become available today, lets you pick from their roster to “friends” with head-cheerleader-good-looks to pretend to be your friends on your MySpace, Facebook or Friendster page. For a mere 99 cents a month, these fake friends come with good looks (they’re photos of models) and will post comments on your pages.

Here’s some copy that was on their site earlier this week:

FakeYourSpace is an exciting new service that enables normal everyday people like me and you to have Hot friends on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Not only will you be able to see these Gorgeous friends on your friends list, but FakeYourSpace enables you to create customized messages and comments for our Models to leave you on your comment wall.

They ran into a little trouble recently: iStockPhoto.com, the source of the “friends'” photos, objected to their use of their models photos. Apparently there’s an agreement in the iStockPhoto.com license that states that the photos cannot be used in such a way to make people “think that the model endorses” the product, Web site or person for which they are being used. This News.com report says that FakeYourSpace founder Brant Walker was looking for alternate sources of model photos.

As of this writing, FakeYourSpace isn’t up and running. Going to their URL currently takes you to a GoDaddy “coming soon” domain parking page.

Links

• FakeYourSpace.com
• FakeYourSpace.com Lets You Buy Hot-Looking Friends (TechShout)
• FakeYourSpace.com: The Web Gets More Like Real Life (InformationWeek Weblog)

I (briefly) installed a trial of Office 2007 on my work box, to get a glimpse of the future (since it appears that my business unit is in upgrade Siberia, it’ll be years before we see IT put it on our machines). While the wisdom of completely changing Office’s UI to the new “ribbon” device is debatable, I actually had no show stopping issues with Word, PowerPoint, or Excel.

Outlook, on the other hand, was a totally different issue.

I thought it might just be the poky Pentium M in my ThinkPad, but Outlook 2007 was significantly slower than its predecessor. So much so, I cracked about 30 days into the 90 day trial and uninstalled whole suite. It would appear I’m not alone in this experience:

The problem — which is absolutely inexcusable — is that Office 2007 (Outlook, specifically) crawls, even on this superfast machine. The hard-drive is also constantly in motion, slowing things down even more. I’m not alone in these observations. You can read other Office 2007 horror stories here and here. Despite a small .PST file — I reduced mine from close to a gig to less than 150 MB — my Intel Centrino Duo-driven notebook chugs along like a 386 trying to run an application originally written for a mainframe system. Even such tasks as composing a simple email are delayed by a few seconds before my typed words ultimately appear on the screen (and send / receives and related activities take an eternity).

The curious thing is that nothing very significant seems to have changed with Outlook 2007. Certainly nothing of the magnitude of the UI overhaul that the rest of the Office suite got, or the changes that Outlook 2003 delivered (such as the vertical right-hand reading pane). This makes the crummy performance particularly unacceptable.

I open Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to do specific things, but Outlook’s always open. Next to the browser and IM clients, it’s one of the indispensible tools of my workday. If Outlook 2007 really performs this badly for everyone else, Microsoft is going to have a big mess on their hands once customers start rolling this thing out in a big way.

Source: SpendMatters: Vista, Office and Outlook 2007 are a Nightmare