Further, after the young bush debacle, I thought I would never like them less. Let’s face it, this population was one that, having experienced what the latest mass murderer in the bush dinasty was about, helped him steal the Presidency nonetheless. Talk about the only animal that hits the same stone twice… in this particular case, hitting it with the head.

But never say never…  The latest developments at the Texas Board of Education/Lack-thereof are now saying that Texas is so proud to be ignorant, retrograde and superstitious that it is now trying to make sure that ignorance is passed down to future generations, and if possible, that it wants to be surrounded by an ignorant, arrogant and superstitious nation as well.

That should teach me to believe that human stupidity has limits. Can’t wait to never go there again…

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Don’t mess with Texas’ ignorance

I usually upgrade to first class, which means I get a meal. And there, neatly in the most visible spot of the tray, I always get a well printed card, with the image of skies, the Alaska logo, and … a fragment from a PSALM. Something like “I will be glad an rejoice in you… O most high”, or some other like it.All of them taken from the bible, all of them equally insulting to my intelligence.

I have asked the stewardesses to remove it from my tray. Some of them try. Others look at me like something is wrong with me. I feel insulted by the shuffling of somebody’s belief of what is “common sense” and “normal” up my nose. I could be a muslim. I could be a Buddhist. I could be atheist, or agnostic, or believe in Spaghetti Deities, or whatever the poison choice. Whatever the case, I would not push my personal opinions, superstitions or kinks unnecessarily on people. I wouldn’t do it even to somebody I do not respect, much less to a customer, who is choosing to spend her/his money with me.

First, I would think that my customer may feel invaded. I know that at least one out of twenty will. Am I saying that I don’t care about them?

Second, why do it? If I am in the airline business, my business is not to spread, support or in any way act on religion. My business is to fly people securely and comfortably, not to enter their privacy with such an intrusive, unnecessary gesture.

Then there is that “assumption of no big thing”. Like… “Aren’t you too picky? After all, it’s OK to be religious, America is a religious country”.

Mmmm…

NO

For me it’s NOT OK. For me religion is the excuse that has justified more killings than any other reason in history. It’s also the excuse used to censor, lie, torture, exclude, persecute, and much more. I don’t care if Alaska Airlines management feels secure and cozy in a homogeneous (bland?), mostly caucasian, judaic-christian group of decision makers. It’s still not OK for me, and for a lot of people like me. For us, America is great not because it is of ANY religion, but rather because it protects my right not to have your religion pushed on me. That’s why I am an American (in my case, it’s by choice, not accident of birth). And this later argument is the most precious of all: it really doesn’t matter what (if any) religion I consume (notice that I don’t even tell you that detail). What matters is that nobody should intrude into anybody else’s personal choice.

Luckily, you and I have a way to act on this. We can fly another airline. In my case, based on the average so far, more than $12,000 a year that can go to whomever cares about this. If you care about it too, think why would you spend thousands of dollars to anybody who thought “This may be offensive to some of my customers… Nah! There are just a few of them!”  This time, you may not be in the minority they are over-running (you may be a catholic, or variations thereof). But next time you may.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Alaska Airlines superstitious blunder

I am an Apple fan, and as a consumer probably in the 97 percentil when measured by reliance and expenditure on Apple for personal AND business computing devices. But I have started to be alarmed too, and despite all previous proclamations, have decided NOT to buy the iPad, and to seriously look at switching away from the iPhone.

When Apple decides to keep OUT of the iPad technology that has become ubiquitous, just to REDUCE and without arbitration curtail what I can do with the device, it goes too far.

It goes even further, waaaaaay too far, when it decides in a non-transparent way which apps I can buy or not. No, not apps that could drain batteries (miserable excuse to keep Adobe out of their devices). The decision is taken on CONTENT; in other words, a megalomaniac decides what I can see.

Not that I would use the iPhone to buy porn: the device screen is too small to enjoy it. But who the hell is Jobs to decide what I can do with a device I paid good money for, and which has as competitors wonderfully open devices? Fuck, I left my country of birth to leave authoritarian despots behind, I am not going to take it from Apple. It’s not a matter of motivation: whether the decision is taken to make more money on me or to control my thinking or whatever: it still SUCKS.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Apple becoming Big Brother, censoring you and I as well

Neat idea, eh? It truly is. And an invaluable service if you have a small business, a cash-strapped non-for-profit, or a spreadout family that would love to chat as a group every so often.

Neat, that is, unless you use COX Cable Phone in Santa Barbara. There, COX Cable censors your calls, so that if you call a number provided by FreeConference.com, you get an ambiguous message that says “All circuits are busy. Call later”. Which is, of course, a lie. How do I know? All other participants, calling from any other town, or even from Santa Barbara but not on COX, get through without a problem. Go to another house with COX service, call any of those numbers and guess what… you get the same message.

I am, of course, looking for ways out of COX. In my case, because there is no previous phone line coming into my house, it may take a more expensive service to replace them. But even so, I will. These troglodytes that turned “customer service” into an oxymoron need to disappear, once and for all. Right now they play the monopoly (or oligopoly) games: you don’t bug me and my dirty practices, I won’t bug you and yours. But with increasingly social efficiencies brought about by the Social Internet, we can all help each other identify crooks like COX Cable, and get rid of them.

I may not be worth anything to them, but I have service with them in two properties (one of them in Santa Barbara). The way I see it, I can hurt them at the tune of approximately $6,000 a year, $60,000 in ten years. That’s really sweet.

Don;t take more abuse from COX: cancel your cable and phone. Yes, there will be other options. And by the way, next time somebody mentions net neutrality, remember it means that these crooks will not be able to select which numbers you call, which IP services you use, or which bytes are worth more to you than others. Companies like COX want to be in the extortion business.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

COX Cable censors the numbers you can call

You may have noticed that bombing is so common on Office Mac 2008 (running on G5 Quad-core, all versions up to 10.5.8 OS X) that the latest Mac version of Office enters into bomb-recovery-auto-save every 30-60 seconds? Well, if you know you will bomb, I guess wasting your users’ time is marginally better than actually bombing, isn’t it?

Well, the latest installment of the bombing masters is this virus Microsoft calls “Silverlight”… Take the latest version of the G5 (possibly the best debugged OS ever to run on a known platform); take Safari, one of the most robust browser available (not perfect, but robust).  Now, go to any Silverlight-heavy site (you can find them by searching for SharePoint Web Sites – every consultant in the SharePoint ecology is busy using Silverlight for everything that would be well served by CSS and basic JS).

In any case, let’s say that you still need to see what the stupid Silverlight control contains (you may be doing research for work), you’ll need to install the “plug-in”. Otherwise, when you get there you will find that there are blank boxes all over the place (put mildly, Silverlight doesn’t degrade too well, as other types of compost). The white boxes have that “Get Silverlight or f**k off” messages… Now, you will go through the installation (only version 1 of Silverf**k supports the G5 architecture). But don’t even think it will work… So far, trying it in three out of three G5-based Macs, when you find one of those sites plastered with Silverf**k, Safari will bomb in one of the nastiest ways it can (be ready to press that On/Off button).

While the machine bombs, and you are waiting for the reboot, it may be a good moment to meditate on why, considering that we have a well debugged, proven, multi-platform media delivery vehicle (called Flash), already installed in 98% of all personal computers worldwide, why do we need a buggy, surely bloated (just give it two months or so), almost certainly privacy insensitive and platform-paranoid piece of junk software… Um…

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

If you run Safari on a G5 Mac, avoid Silverlight

In a conversation about Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) for Enterprise Collaboration, Gil Yehuda answered a comment I made about the chilling auto-censorship effect that AUPs can have on collaboration. In his response he says:

As a security professional once told me “Anything you say can be used against you, so why speak when you can nod?”

Couldn’t help but think about my posting yesterday in this same blog: this is another example of the limitations of 2.0-anything. We are all nice people, we all like each other, and we have really good intentions. But Big Brother doesn’t sleep. Or, in other words (Porter’s, in Technopoly), the transformational powers of technology can be grossly over-estimated, specially when that technology is brought about by those that would be most impacted by it.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

About auto-censorship

Google’s “do no evil” was just a stretcher, a smart tactic to make us think the other way while the company helped the Chinese government censor its people (and probably helping ours censor us as well). But let’s admit it, the romance is gone; Google crossed “to the other side” long ago.

Lately, however, something is starting to happen more and more frequently, which would suggest that the corruption of principle is getting deeper and deeper into the architecture of this money-making machine: search SPAM. Check the search below: can anybody suggest that the Google engine does NOT know the difference between this SPAM result (offering cheap cash) and the technical results I was expecting from an OBVIOUSLY technical search? How many people would you expect to Google for specifications on a software integration and come out saying “Hey, that was cool, getting cheap cash was exactly was I needed for my integration needs!”?

Do you know of any innovative search provider that is still hungry enough to love me? If so, let me know… And if you see Google around, please ask them to come pick up their things or I’ll throw them out of the window  :)

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Time to look for another hungry startup search?

I use a quad-processor Mac G5, 2.5 Gb memory, Quadro 4500 Video Card driving two Cinema 30 inch monitors. The machine has 750 Gb internal disk, plus 4 Tb of external disks. Not a low end system, not one that can “barely run” the OS. Further, with OS X 10.4 the machine was a screamer, running Aperture with thousand of pictures of 20 Mb each, and at the same time flying through three or four other simultaneous heavy-load programs like Photoshop.

So, one day Safari breaks. Of course, it breaks at the precise wrong time: hours before I need to deliver a Web conference, already preset to be held on Microsoft’s web conferencing service. Unfortunately, from a Mac I could only run the conference on Safari, so I needed to solve the problem *really fast*…

The problem is, *there is no way to just re-install Safari on 10.4*. The “geniuses” (not my choice of title) at the local Newport Beach Apple store suggested that I (a) downloaded Safari from Apple — twenty minutes until I showed them that I had already tried but there is no such thing as Safari download, (b) fixed disk permissions — which I had already attempted and hadn’t worked, (b) re-installed the OS (???) or (b) upgraded to 10.5. (???)

First red alert – This is the company and OS that is supposed to be the easiest to use and best supported. After decades of using Mac, I could probably get a better answer from the likes of Fry’s “customer service” personnel.

Time ticking, decided to upgrade to 10.5; somehow, an “upgrade” looked like less intrusive a move than a “reinstall”. Notice that somehow the “fix” had disappeared from the option list

Second red alert — Don’t trust a doctor who immediately suggests open heart procedures to eliminate a whart.

Call me stupid, I decided to ignore both red alerts. Hell started…

10.5 installed to a semi-hanged state, where I had windows from “Time Machine” asking me which drive to use to back up the 3.4 GB of content I had in-line at the time (of course, I had no disk with that capacity), and a couploe of windows that I opened by clicking around the dock. But no Finder (that is, no drive icons on the screen). None of the menus in the Finder worked (amongst them, shut down, restart, log out, and all the biggies) and nothing I did in the screen (except a few clicks in the browser, invoked from the Dock) worked. OF COURSE, re-launchiing the Finder from the “Kill Apps” menu didn’t work either!

Red alert 3 — Why have a menu to kill apps that, if the Finder id broken, won’t work? Ask the geniuses, or the marketeers who trump the virtues of the OS

After waiting for two hours, I decided to shut down the power. ZFour or five iterations of this process, and somehow I managed to boot to a working Finder.

You may say: “Hey, you called the problem on yourself by dinging around with the power button”.  But no, not really: a “user friendly” OS is not supposed toleave me with a non-operational mouse, a frozen screen and a spinning wheel where the mouse arrow is supposed to be, WITHOUT A SINGLE MESSAGE or indication of what is going on. I was kind enough to wait for a couple hours before pressing it…

In any case, 10.5.1 seemed to be finally working. As soon as it did, multiple apps starting reporting upgrades available, and for the next day or so I installed a few of them. Then, I installed Aperture 10.2, which in turn proceeded to tell me that it refused to work unless I installed 10.5.2.

Mea Culpa 1 – By now, I should’ve just given up on the whole thing. Too many red alerts, too intense feelings of being abused by Jobs and Co., too many stupid answers collected from forums (who treated me like crap just because I was having problems and I am not a hacker). But I felt like I was in a one-way street with no choices to go back: Aperture is one of the apps I constantly use, if I can’t (and going back to a previous release probably would render my whole library unuseable) I much rather not use the Mac any more…

So I ran the upgrade to 10.5.2. Same as with 10.5 (NO Finder), except that now, no matter what I do, the finder is gone. Went back to 10.5… Same thing, no Finder.

I can’t get to disks, any dialog that opens a file selection dialog freezes, no cleaning the trash, no log out or restart, no system preferences… etc. I have lost exactly three days with this problem, and I feel abused, once again, by Apple, who just needed to put something out to cool down the Vista renassaince… Somehow, Apple and Microsoft have become the same company: closed, abusive of their power, unconcerned about the user, glossy only in commercials and advertisements.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Apple OS X 10.5 – Welcome to hell