Ready, Fire, Aim! - Mihail's Public Blog

What is it with California? We have electricity shortages. We have ridiculously high priced gas. We have unbelievable house prices. Here's the reason why gas prices have shot up in the last month to $2.16 per gallon of regular gas according to this San Francisco Chronicle story:

First, a pipeline that supplied Arizona with gasoline from Texas was shut down in July and then again in early August. As a result, many service stations in Phoenix ran out of gas.

To fill the gap, Arizona turned to California for extra supplies. The diversion caused an imbalance in California's gas market that led to higher prices.

Hmm, didn't realize the Bush government was doing anything useful domestically since it is so busy playing cowboy elsewhere in the world, but according to this San Francisco Chroncile story, Fannie Mae is putting in some $35B into the San Francisco Bay Area and counties such as Santa Cruz via affordable housing programs.

At the heart of the nationwide initiative is the Bush administration's goal of shrinking the homeownership gap for minorities. Nationally, the homeownership rate among white households is 74.2 percent, compared with 48.5 percent for minority households, according to census data.

In the San Francisco metropolitan area, which includes San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo counties, the homeownership rate among whites is 51.4 percent. It is 33.5 percent for blacks, 52.6 percent for Asians, 34.1 percent for Latinos, 28.8 percent for American Indians/Alaska natives and 35.8 percent for native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders.

Former extra conservative Republican candidate Bill Simon has released his budget hoping to continue to play a role in the California governor recall election circus that is unfolding according to this San Francisco Chronicle story. The budget appeals to the anti-tax Republican voters who were his core supporters...that is, anyone who's well-off and doesn't need lifesavers such as Medi-Cal or ADAP (AIDS Drugs Assistance Plan):

Under Simon's plan, the state would sell $800,000 worth of surplus land and buildings and save $3 billion by rooting out fraud in government programs, $4. 6 billion by forcing every state department to cut costs by 6.5 percent and $4. 9 million by slashing 19 government programs, many of them serving the poor and the elderly.

Specific cuts include eliminating cost-of-living increases for many people receiving state benefits, cutting grants to the disabled, slashing scholarship aid at state colleges and universities, requiring co-payments for Medi-Cal and AIDS Drug Assistance Plan recipients and eliminating all optional Medi-Cal services, such as artificial limbs, diabetes testing supplies, wheelchairs and oxygen tanks.

The Arnold circus continues according to this San Francisco Chronicle story:

GOP gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger told a conservative talk radio host Monday that he would be "going to Sacramento as an independent, " a statement certain to enrage Republican loyalists who have been reluctant to endorse a moderate.

...The actor's campaign staff immediately scrambled to put a different spin on the potentially controversial comments.

An amusing SF Chronicle column on the current controversy in Alabama where the Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court is digging his heels in, maybe all the way to the US Supreme Court: 

You've got your Jewish Ten Commandments, your Catholic Ten Commandments, your Lutheran Ten Commandments, your Charlton Heston Ten Commandments, your King James Bible Ten Commandments, your New Revised Standard Version Ten Commandments, and they don't all agree as to which commandment is which -- or what they really mean.

Even the Bible contains two versions, one in Exodus 20:1-17 and a slightly different one in Deuteronomy 5:6-21.

According to this New York Times story reprinted in the SF Chronicle the hacker or groups of hackers have time and a budget to create a series of attacks on computers.

The malicious program known as SoBig, which is transmitted as an e-mail attachment and then resends itself widely via the Internet, is actually the sixth variant in an experiment by an unknown attacker. During the past eight months the author or authors have persistently tried to implant a range of secret tools for stealing information and sending unsolicited commercial e- mail messages, or spam, according to security experts.

One possibility now being discussed is that the program is an attempt to create software engines for sending spam by using unprotected computers that have been surreptitiously commandeered by the virus. Access to such computers could then be sold to e-mail marketing companies.

Yahoo will soon compete with Google on many different fronts including Froogle, Google's quiet attempt to become the uber-lister of products by making it possible for you to search every ecommerce site out there. According to this News.com story quoting the Yahoo SVP of Search:

Weiner outlined Yahoo's other search innovations, including features to personalize and customize the search experience. That includes asking Web surfers for personal information to tailor their findings. The company also expects to widely introduce its new product search, which lets people compare prices and features on goods from multiple sellers and buy them on Yahoo.

Jim Clark, the man behind some of Silicon Valley's most hyped-up startups such as Netscape and Healtheon and myCFO (all now defunct/acquired/out of business depending on how you look at it) has this to say in a BusinessWeek interview:

 I have been out of Silicon Valley for five or six years. I go there for board meetings, then I split. I find the place depressing.

Q: Why do you find it depressing?
A: There's nothing going on that's of interest. There are only very few things. It used to be a vibrant, happening place. I'm speaking pre-1995. Once Netscape went out and the place turned into rocketland, everything got so insanely out of whack -- salaries, demand for people, commercial real estate. It became an insane place. And now it's an insanely depressing place. Now it's in such a funk.

I guess Clark had nothing to do with the madness and the aftermath...hmm.

The New New Thing is one of the most entertaining business books ever written...which talks about the Netscape IPO being pushed forward so Clark could pay for his gargantuan sailing boat which was also a technical marvel.

What's going on with technology today? First, my broadband Internet connection vaporizes on me this afternoon. One minute Comcast digital broadband is working just fine. The next it is unable to connect me to anything on the web. Thanks to some expert help I was able to get it working again.

Now eBay's website is down and there's nothing about it anywhere online. The only news about an eBay outage dates back to June of 1999 when Yahoo Auctions tried to take advantage of the 24-hour outage. Yes, the home page shows up just fine but there are error messages when you try and click on an item or do a search. But it doesn't seem to be news. Not on Google News. Not on News.com. Not anywhere.

What happened to the 24-hour-ness of the Internet? Where are the reporters covering this breaking story? Oh yeah, we're here on Blogging Network. We're the 21st century reporters in a very online world.

From HP to Microsoft, researches are looking at the people behind the computers i.e. the people using the computers since, as one researches puts it "People like computers because there are people in them." According to this San Francisco Chronicle story researches are looking at patterns and decisions made by those using email for instance or newsgroups, maybe even Blogging Network?

They do this without reading any of the words in the messages. It's all based on the pattern of activity. People who post multiple replies on every discussion thread tend to be the arguers, the nitpickers. Those who post just one reply -- especially if that reply ends the thread -- tend to be the expert problem solvers.

...Patterns of online interactivity -- from how many posts you make on a discussion group to how long you take to answer an e-mail -- say a lot about the people typing the messages, researchers are finding.

They're blaming it on the economy -- the dotcom bust and the reduction in travel -- but I'm not surprised the Clift Hotel has had to go into bankruptcy protection. Originally opened in 1915, Ian Schrager came into the picture recently by turning the SF landmark into a trendy new hotel on the edges of the Tenderloin only a few blocks from Union Square.

Schrager, thinking he could apply his 1970s Studio 54-style snob appeal to the hotel, made guests wait for hours outside the hotel. You had to even be on a guest list to get into to the Redwood Room bar. Of course, this was then -- when it opened -- and this is now -- the bankruptcy. Few San Franciscans forgot that attitude towards them those first few months, and I'm sure that has had something to do with its current financial mess. According to this San Francisco Chronicle story:

"It's a landmark property in a great location, but it's an older building, and it needed significant capital expenditures to reposition it," said Elgonemy, a San Francisco analyst with hotel consultants Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels. Schrager acquired the Clift, which is located at the corner of Geary and Taylor streets, in 1999 for $80 million.

Elgonemy estimates Schrager spent from $20 million to $40 million to upgrade the hotel in 2001, adding 44 rooms, opening the stylish Asia de Cuba restaurant and giving the Redwood Room a contemporary face-lift.

Steve Gough, a nudist, is walking the length of the UK to promote nudity amongst the Brits who're less likely to bare all than their cousins on the continent. According to this San Francisco Chronicle story:

Gough came to nudity in the past two years, while living near Vancouver, British Columbia, with his girlfriend and their two children. He experimented first at home (in front of his girlfriend's family, no less), then in his courtyard. In time, he grew bolder: "I went to Blockbuster to return a video."

Free so far, the upstart Friendster which is more about social networking, expects to start charging about a third of what the big matchmaking sites charge (approx. $25/month) for allowing people to connect with other people according to this New York Times story (registration required). This is a hot market for sure. According to Jupiter Research, online dating sites are expected to generate revenues of $400M, up from the $300M they're expected to take in this year.

Match.com does not necessarily benefit if its users pair off for good. Tim Sullivan, Match.com's president, said in an interview last week that although his subscribers typically dropped off after about five months — having either found a promising mate or no luck at all — many return for another try. In fact, he said, about 40 percent of the site's current subscribers are returnees.

But competition is such that Match.com and its rivals are under pressure to improve their services so that people will find dates quickly, even if it means they will lose those customers more quickly. One new feature of Match.com's revamped site is video messages, a capability that Yahoo added early this year that allows users to post personal statements on the site.

...Still, many customers of the big online dating services could be lured by a cheaper and entirely different dating company that has amassed 1.5 million members in a little more than three months, without any marketing. Friendster, a start-up company based in Sunnyvale, Calif., helps users meet friends of friends, by encouraging social networking.

Is there any advantage to leading the way in Wi-Fi hotspots around the country asks this New York Times story (registration required) about Wayport ($100M in venture capital, looking for $10-$15M more) and the other players. Especially when every telecommunications company is jumping into it, too, and cellphone companies are expected to capture as much as 50% of the total Wi-Fi revenue by 2006.

I first used Wayport when they'd just launched Laptop Lane which was a welcome sight for many business travelers like myself. I loved it. My more recent experience with Wayport at the Four Seasons Hotel in Newport Beach was so so. It worked most of the time. And only after an initial struggle which ended in my calling the front desk and them connecting me to Wayport tech support.

But even with hundreds of locations, the numbers are small. Wayport's traffic, while growing 5 to 10 percent a month, amounted to just 30,000 connections at airports and 170,000 connections at about 500 hotels in a recent month. Wayport receives anywhere from 50 cents to $5 for each connection, analysts estimate, depending on its revenue-sharing arrangement with the location and whether the connection came from a reseller network.

...Wayport turned to reselling in part to cope with the one-two punch delivered to its core audience from the dot-com slump in early 2001 and the travel slowdown after Sept. 11, 2001. The company changed its model from paying for most of the capital costs of installation to requesting that locations share or provide upfront costs, with tradeoffs for later revenue sharing.

From CNN:

It appears the Niagara power grid overloaded in the face of high temperatures. Power went off as far north as Toronto and as far west as Cleveland. Hillary Clinton is on CNN as we speak telling the viewers where she was when the outages occurred. Seems like public transportation is down as our street lights in many areas causing gridlock during rush hour.

An amusing Maureen Dowd column in the New York Times on the adoption of the blog format by the candidates for Democratic nominee for President:

In a lame attempt to be hip, pols are posting soggy, foggy, bloggy musings on the Internet. Inspired by Howard Dean's success in fund-raising and mobilizing on the Web, candidates are crowding into the blogosphere — spewing out canned meanderings in a genre invented by unstructured exhibitionists.

It could be amusing if the pols posted unblushing, unedited diaries of what they were really thinking, as real bloggers do. John Kerry would mutter about that hot-dog Dean stealing his New England base, and Dr. Dean would growl about that wimp Kerry aping all his Internet gimmicks. But no such luck.

A new website launched Friday will track donations to George W.'s reelection campaign according to this Town Hall story:

Public Citizen, a liberal advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader, created WhiteHouseForSale.org to chronicle what Frank Clemente, director of the organization's Congress Watch division, called "the most sophisticated political fundraising machine that has ever existed in a U.S. presidential election."

..."The president obviously has a fundraising operation that makes the Clinton's Lincoln bedroom and donor coffee klatches look like a bake sale," he said. "The money being raised is largely coming from a few zip codes in a few states."