First Impressions with Presto Preview

Well... it's been a week on the Presto Preview - aka the HP Printing Mailbox powered by Presto. I have good news and bad news.

Bad news first: I don't have any juicy dirt to sling about the product. Darn!

Here are my takes so far concerning the service:

- The product is too hard for their target market to setup. They're targeting Baby Boomers - or anyone in the 60 to 75 year range for that matter. No way could my grandmother have set up the unit by herself without someone helping. She read the setup poster, looked at me with a blank face and said "Do what?" I proceeded to setup the unit without any instructions. It's the same problem we had with VCRs... if it's not intuitive to someone with no technology experience, it won't be used.

- The technology is great and does exactly what was promised. But not enough work has gone into turning the actual equipment into something that doesn't require a big, six way folding, double sided poster to setup. I'm going to lay the blame for the hardware itself not being made "idiot proof" squarely on HP's shoulders. Over the years they have - in my professional opinion - tried to simplify printer setup but have yet to break through the intelligence barrier yet. I'm betting it's because they have too many engineers working in the product teams and not enough normal people.

- Instructions for the unit read like an engineer is trying really hard to explain something to a normal person. They need another level of abstraction so things come out like a normal person is explaining it to another normal person. Most technology companies suffer from this same problem. More time is needed to get the important things up to the surface and the technology related stuff hidden under the surface.

- My generation takes a lot of technology things for granted. Even simple stuff. For example, the instructions said to purchase "printer paper from your local discount store". My grandmother had never heard of "printer paper" or "copy paper" for that matter. I fished around with a few other explanations and the one she finally understood was "typing paper".

- The back-end of the service is still a work in progress. This was experienced firsthand when one day last week I sent an email that got rejected. Later in the day, the Preview support staff sent an acknowledgment that I had emailed during a transition to a new server.

- Along the same lines, a few things are still missing from the back-end. There are only 2 email templates (and 1 for Halloween) to chose from and only 2 "subscriptions" (think of them as electronically delivered newspaper or magazine clippings). According to the documentation, eventually there will be templates for most holidays and special occasions.

- Scheduled checks for new emails work as promised. Although I have had a few occasions where emails I sent near the check time weren't delivered until the following check. I'm not sure how long it takes there servers to process incoming emails into the format the Mailbox uses but in once case I emailed 20 minutes prior to the scheduled check and the email didn't make it on that check.

- Speaking of scheduled checks, there's a glaring feature omission - no button to initiate a check at that specific moment. As a regular email user, I would have expected the equivalent of a Send/Receive button so that a check could be made in case you were expecting something to be sent right then. There is no such button. So you just have to wait for the next scheduled check. If you have all 3 daily checks set up it's not an issue... but if you're using the default single daily check that might be a problem. (Yep, the default is for the unit to check for new messages once a day.)

- The biggest surprise for me was that HTML emails actually retain their formatting and picture placement. I've copied and pasted a few web pages into emails for my grandmother. They come out the other side with formatting and web page images in place as I would expect. That's a welcome feature since it means no one has to print web pages off for her anymore when she sees things on TV.

}Davoice

Problem w/ IE7 - Windows has detected a significant change in your machine configuration.

File this under capital A for annoying.

I took the plunge last night - after backing up of course - into IE7. I hadn't bothered with any of the betas because I've grown averse to being on the bleeding edge of Microsoft technology. Cutting edge will do for me, thanks.

Well, I got cut. After installing IE7 it wanted to reboot. Which I let it do. Upon reboot, I got the dreaded Windows has detected "a significant change in your machine configuration" message. Whoopie. Now I have 3 days to reactivate.

And oh fun... the internet reactivation declares I have exceeded my permitted number of activations for my license. Of course I have b/c Windows insisted I reactivate every time I added more RAM, upgraded the hard drive or swapped out the DVD burner for a faster one in this machine. So here goes a call to Microsoft's 866-Call-India activation help line. After reading off my series of digits to the gal, she quizzed me on about 10 different things. Finally she gave me an activation code... at the excruciating pace of 3 digits at a time - and she waited for me to acknowledge the receipt of each 3 before giving me any more.

So the question still remains... WHY did IE7 trigger the Windows hardware change reactivation? The world may never know.

Getting ready for Presto Preview

On Tuesday of this coming week, a new test will begin in our family... a test that will mark a new era for a certain grandmother. Thanks to HP, our family will be testing one of the HP Printing Mailbox units for Presto!

For those who haven't heard of what Presto! is about, here are a couple links:
- Presto puts digital photos in the hands of your grandma
- New printer delights the tech inept

The short version is... The Presto! service combines a dedicated HP printer, modem and the Presto! service to make a hands-off unit that someone who is unfamiliar with technology can use to receive emails and photos. The unit looks like a slightly overgrown HP printer and has a place to plug it into a phone line on the back. Just install an ink cartridge, insert some paper and plug it into a phone line. When the little blue light blinks, you've got mail. That's it. Their target market is the Baby Boomer generation... specifically the 50+ year old folks who don't already have an internet connected PC or are timid about getting online with what they already have.

As the account manager, I get to pick and chose who can email the Presto Printing Mailbox. Each Mailbox unit gets a personal email address that can be given to anyone who has regular email. The trick is those folks can only send email to the Mailbox user if the account manager has added them to the allowed senders list or the Mailbox user has called an 800# and had the person added to their list manually.

During the preview, emails will be limited to email/html (the HTML being semi-unknown at the moment b/c I haven't seen how well they render it yet), JPGs and GIFs. That's enough functionality to allow photos to be easily emailed to the Mailbox user as well as family update emails and general cheer type messages.

I'm hoping they will expand the service to support PDF attachments and maybe Word docs. But for me PDFs would be perfect.

If this works well, it will revolutionize the way our family keeps in touch with the grandmother in question. Right now we all share photos and stuff via email with each other but she never gets to see them. This is the grandmother who swore she would never type after leaving a career as a librarian.

One of the coolest features of the service I'm waiting to validate is their auto-sensing of the account and hardware ID based on the caller ID of the phone line into which the Printing Mailbox gets connected. Supposedly, if I have setup the account before the Mailbox is plugged in and connects to the Presto! service the first time, everything will automatically configure itself and email from the Presto! account will just start flowing in w/o any further interaction from me.

Should this little piece of technological mash-up work as promised, I know what I'll be buying a few other 50+ year old family members over the next months.

Listen up AT&T: Protect the BellSouth Engineers!

Most people don't know it... but Bellsouth is home to the most experienced hurricane response team in the world. Bar none. Bellsouth - and pretty much any utility company in the south - has almost yearly experience recovering from some sort of natural disaster. They have successfully recovered from hurricane after hurricane, tornados, flooding, ice, etc.

After Katrina, it’s amazing that Bill Smith, Chief Technology Officer for BellSouth Corporation, and his team have yet to be guaranteed their positions once the SBC(ATT)/BellSouth merger completes. While Bill would be the first to tell you they have procedures that need improvement, the BellSouth response to Katrina and Rita's large scale crisis was professional and (relatively) effective.

Keep in mind that disaster preparedness is not revenue generating! And even in the best cases recovering from a distaster costs the company millions to billions of unbudgeted dollars. So we all need to remind the folks planning ATT/SBC/Bellsouth's 10,000 layoffs how crucial protecting these skills are.

The FCC Commissioners recently introduced a new Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau. The new bureau will presumably continue the often complimented job (yeah, it's ok to laugh) of the FCC getting regulations out of the way during Katrina crisis. Regardless, D.C. bureaus and committees are not enough. Real public safety requires the most skilled professionals at the companies involved.

Hopefully part of the merger approval negotiations that are ongoing will include a quiet conversation between the FCC Chairman, Randall and Ed. A simple comment that the commission will continue to watch the staffing and level of investment in disaster preparedness should do the trick. AT&T has plenty of good reasons to take advantage of the BellSouth engineering talent. Let's hope they actually do the right thing.

CircuitCity.com coupon: 10% off $199 or more

Get a jump on Christmas electronics shopping! CircuitCity.com offers dealnews readers 10% off most orders of $199 or more via the link in this post. The discount shows on the page where you enter your credit card information. It matches the best percent-off discount we've seen from CircuitCity.com this year. Excludes all Apple items and iPods, all PCs, and several name brands. Coupon ends October 14.

The true cost of residential fiber deployment

Fios Spending: $9,650 for Each Home?

Light Reading editor Phil Harvey e-mailed BroadbandReports to let them know he's crunched some numbers based on Verizon's Fios statements (discussed in full this morning), and has come to some interesting conclusions. According to Harvey, it's costing Verizon over $9,000 to wire each home (at least at first), with his math worked out as such:

"Verizon also says it will cost only about $650 to connect a "passed" home to its network by 2010. So what does it cost to hook up a neighborhood? These aren't absolute figures, mind you, but let's assume that Verizon passes each home in a 400-home neighborhood, then nabs 10 percent of the homes (40 homes) as customers. Take $950 and multiply it by 400 homes. That's $360,000.

Now let's hook up those 40 homes. That's 40 multiplied by $650. That's $26,000 added back to the cost to pass the homes, which was $360,000. So now we have a figure of $386,000 spent in just one neighborhood. But what has Verizon spent per customer? Take $386,000 and divide it by the 40 homes and you get $9,650."

He notes that Millennium Marketing analyst Kermit Ross came to some similar figures last week. Despite this, Verizon this morning stated they should see profitability by sometime in 2009.

Three month's til Christmas

Yep... Today is September 25th... that means it's offically 3 months til Christmas. Consider this your 90 day warning!

White & Nerdy

Only in California can they be so intolerant in their tolerance

There's a little PBS station in Orange County, California --KOCE. For years it has been run by the Orange Coast Community College District, but the expenses became too great, and the Trustees of the District resolved to sell it. Bids arrived, and a religious broadcaster, Daystar, bid far and away the most money.

The Trustees chose to accept a significantly smaller bid (*millions* smaller), and that one mostly paper, not cash. Daystar was offering all CASH. But the bid that was accepted was Seller Financing for 30 years w/ NO INTEREST! Not surprisingly, the California courts overturned the ridiculous deal - not once, but twice.

So did the Trustees do the right thing and gain the most cash for the district? No, they tromped off to the Sacramento based legislature to get special legislation allowing them to sell the station for far less than it was worth to their pals. Read More.

Now I'm a self-acknowledged rabid Dem... but a charismatic conservative liberal instead of a faithless radical liberal. In this case I thank God that not a single Republican voted for the legislation. It was carried solely by the Democrats.

Can someone PLEASE buy them a clue about religious intolerance? And remind them about the principles of separation of church and state. That principle cuts both ways... the state can't promote a certain religion... it also can't demote/stand against a certain one either! It will come back to bite them in the butt when they need ministers to perform civil union ceremonies! Would they have made the same choice if a Muslim Emon had been the highest bidder?

Rosie was historically accurate

ABC,

Since the American Family Association is being trite with their campaign and apparently didn't study history, let me fill you in on some history. Radical Christianity WAS responsible for more murders than all the non-Christian, Muslim, etc. groups we have today put together. Here are 3 examples:

Remember that thing called the "crusades"? The Christian church from 1095 AD to 1300 AD killed anyone they could get their hands on who didn't bow down the Pope.

Remember that guy named Hitler? He wanted to wipe out anyone who didn't fit his particular mold of radical Christianity called "Positive Christianity" which included a Jesus who was recast as a killer of the Jews.

Remember that guy named Moses? During the trip out of Egypt into the promised land (in Exodus), after the incident with the Golden Calf, he told the men in the group who were Levites "27 Then he said to them, "This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: 'Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.' " 28 The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. Exodus 27-28. 3000 of Moses own brothers and sisters died that day!

Take a little time to learn history before you reprimand someone for their comments. Lessons not learned are repeated until comprehension - including the lesson of following the uninformed leader of some right wing conservative group off the face of cliff like a lemming b/c you didn't bother to educate yourself.

Even though I don't like Rosie's personal life choices and her severe liberalism, she IS historically correct in her statement. To complain about it indicates not only historical ignorance but also a lack of American pride. America is a place where we ALL are supposed to be able to express ourselves - whether the person sitting beside you - in your opinion - is right or wrong.

--
Blessings,
DP

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Charles Schwab, the dyslexic who parlayed his discount
brokerage firm into a personal net worth of over
$3 billion, gives this advice to those who share his
disability: "Find out what you can do well, focus on
it and work double hard." Smart words for anyone in
the workplace -- dyslexic or not.

Dyslexia in the Workplace

Get the Tools and Support You Need
by Dan Woog, Monster Contributing Writer

As youngsters, Thomas Edison, Ted Turner and Charles Schwab felt frustrated. They had difficulty deciphering letters and numbers, and were labeled "stupid." Of course, they were bright enough to invent the light bulb, revolutionize television news and found a groundbreaking brokerage firm. Today, we know their problem was dyslexia, not stupidity.

Today's Edisons, Turners and Schwabs are being identified early with the disorder, which includes problems reading and writing, and poor short-term memory for sequences. Specialists provide coping mechanisms, and dyslexics -- whose learning differences vary from slight to severe -- receive support throughout the educational process. But what happens when they move into the workplace?

"For anyone who wants to be successful, dyslexia is definitely an obstacle," says Debra Brooks, a dyslexic who graduated from Columbia University and now works as a consultant on dyslexia in the workplace. "You have to find ways to do what successful people do."

The first step is "accepting that you'll work differently than most people," says Brooks. She recently fielded a call from an engineer who, despite hours of study, had failed a test to advance in his company three times. He wanted to learn how to pass the test, but Brooks told him not to take it the same way again. Instead, she advised him to ask to take it orally or write a paper on the subject. Both accommodations are valid under the Americans with Disabilities Act, she says.

Similarly, the Dyslexic Reader suggests requesting that instructions for tasks be provided orally, either in person, on tape, via voicemail or through a computerized voice synthesizer. Alternatively, because many dyslexics read a computer screen more easily than paper, instructions can be emailed, rather than written down.

Dyslexics often find it difficult to fill out forms. The Reader's answer: Dyslexics can answer questions orally or dictate their responses to a colleague who can fill out the form for them.

Dyslexia-Adults.com offers other suggestions. Dyslexics should break large tasks into small, manageable chunks. The verbal and aural reinforcement of a small tape recorder or dictating machine can help you remember what needs to be done. Additionally, dyslexics should keep a "jobs to-do list" close at hand. They should cross off each task as it's accomplished, and check the list often.

Voice recognition software is improving rapidly. Speaking into a computer is a great boon for dyslexics, whose fear of writing may become paralyzing.

Spell-checkers also help. Programs like Texthelp can help with recalling words that dyslexics frequently misspell and add them to lists for auto-correction. A reading pen (available from dyslexic.com) can be run over a word that's difficult to decipher. The pen "says" the word out loud or through a small earpiece -- it does not speak entire sentences, however.

Low-tech solutions work too. Examples include highlighters for keywords or rulers to separate lines of figures.

Dyslexia-Adults.com suggests tackling paperwork early in the day. Fatigue adversely affects dyslexics' ability to read, spell and work with numbers. Also helpful: Take short breaks throughout the workday to refresh concentration.

From the time of diagnosis, dyslexics should "learn what you can and can't do," says Brooks. "Be honest and upfront with the people you work with. Let them know you work differently -- but you work hard." In fact, she adds, employers and colleagues soon learn that dyslexics are intensely loyal. "We work like dogs."

"These are not ways of hiding behind dyslexia, or making life hard for coworkers," Brooks notes. "The work standards are the same. Dyslexics are just changing the way they meet them."

Schwab, the dyslexic who parlayed his discount brokerage firm into a personal net worth of over $3 billion, gives this advice to those who share his disability: "Find out what you can do well, focus on it and work double hard." Smart words for anyone in the workplace -- dyslexic or not.

The Best Time to Buy Everything

By Kelli B. Grant
September 5, 2006

AT 50 CENTS a roll — instead of the regular retail price of $4 — buying wrapping paper after New Year's is an easy way to save. The same holds true for buying half-price inflatable pool loungers and patio furniture after Labor Day weekend.

In fact, bargain lovers know that there's a smart time to buy just about anything. For example, those looking for a great deal on a car should shop on weekday mornings in September. Groceries are cheapest on Sunday evenings.

We talked to the experts, and found the best time to buy everything from wine to wedding dresses.

Airplane Tickets

When to buy: On a Wednesday, 21 days (or a couple of days earlier) before your flight.

Why: Airlines make major pricing changes (and run fare sales) every week, typically on Tuesday evenings and Wednesday mornings. About 21 days out from your flight, you'll see plenty of deals out there as airlines scramble to fill seats. Don't wait much longer, she cautions; prices jump significantly from 14 to seven days ahead of departure.

Appliances

When to buy: During a holiday weekend.

Why: You'll find sales on select models all year long, but retailers bring out the big guns for holiday weekends, says Carolyn Forte, homecare director for the Good Housekeeping Institute. But don't worry about spending your Fourth of July and Labor Day weekends shopping for a new fridge — smaller holidays like Columbus Day and President's Day have their share of sales, too.

Baby Clothes

When to buy: During your pregnancy.

Why: Once you know your due date, keep an eye out for end-of-season clearances, recommends Alan Fields, co-author of "Baby Bargains." "If you're [newly] pregnant now, you know you'll be having a baby next summer," he says. "Well, right now, stores are closing out all the summer clothes." You can pick up newborn essentials like onesies for less than half price. (For more ways to save, see our column Oh Baby!¹)

Broadway Tickets

When to buy: Hours before the curtain rises.

Why: How does a $25 front-row seat to the smash musical "Wicked" sound? Several musicals offer same-day ticket lotteries that offer up orchestra seats at inexpensive prices. If you'd rather not gamble on getting a seat, wait in line at the famous TKTS booth² in Times Square. There, you can get tickets for hit musicals for up to 50% off. On a recent night, prime seats were available for "Hairspray," "Rent," "Sweeney Todd" and "Beauty & the Beast." (For the right times to drop by TKTS, and other ways to save, see our column A Midsummer Night's Dream³.)

Cars

When to buy: Weekday mornings in September.

Why: By September, all the next year's models have arrived at the lot, and dealers are desperate to get rid of the current year's leftovers, says Phil Reed, consumer advice editor for Edmunds.com. It's the prime time of year for incentives and sales, not to mention bargaining. "Any car that's been on the lot for a long time loses its value in the eyes of the car salesman," he says.

Heading to the dealership on a weekday morning also helps because there's low foot traffic, meaning you'll have ample time to negotiate and fewer people trying to buy the same car. The more demand, the less willing a salesman is to go down on price, says Reed. (For more, see our column Summer Car Savings⁴.)

Champagne

When to buy: December

Why: Most people assume that because everyone wants a good bottle of Champagne for New Year's Eve that prices go up during the holidays, says Sharon Castillo, director of the Office of Champagne, USA, which represents the trade association of growers in the Champagne region. But due to fierce competition among the Champagne houses, prices are actually lower during the holidays than they are at any other time of year. (For more on picking the right bottle, see our column Break Out the Bubbly⁵.)

Clothing

When to buy: Thursday evenings, six to eight weeks after an item arrives in stores.

Why: After an item lingers in stores a month or more, retailers start dropping its price to get it out the door, says Kathryn Finney, author of "How to Be a Budget Fashionista." These season-end clearances tend to be the same month that designers host fashion weeks (February and September) to preview the next fall or spring collections. So smart buyers can check the catwalk to see if any of this season's trends — say, leggings or military-style jackets — will still be hot next year, and then scoop them up on clearance.

Hitting the mall on a weekday ensures you'll get a good selection. "On the weekend, you'll only get picked-over stuff because the stores don't have time to restock," she says. By Thursday, most of the weekend sales have begun, but everything available is on the floor.

Computers and electronics

When to buy: Just after a new model is launched.

Why: When the latest and greatest of a product is released, you'll often see prices drop on what had previously been the best thing out there, says Tom Merritt, executive editor for CNET, an electronics review web site. Case in point: When Apple released the Nano last September, prices for the now-discontinued Mini dropped 12%, from $199 for a 4GB to about $175. So keep your eyes open for announcements from major manufacturers. Want a little less work? Time your purchases for after big annual technology show like MacWorld⁶ (next held Jan. 8-12, 2007) and the International Consumer Electronics Show⁷ (next held Jan. 8-11, 2007).

Gas

When to buy: Early morning or late evening on a weekday.

Why: Time your trip based on whether prices are rising or falling, advises Marshall Brain, founder of HowStuffWorks⁸, a consumer guide. Gas stations tend to change their prices between 10 a.m. and noon, so hit the pump in the early morning if gas prices are on the rise. Go later in the day if prices are falling. Tipsters on GasPriceWatch.com reported that on Sept. 3, a WaWa gas station in Lanoka Harbor, N.J., was offering regular gas for $2.85 a gallon. One day later the station's price had dropped to $2.65. In that case, going early would have cost you 20 cents more per gallon.

Try not to buy gas on the weekends, Brain says. Gas prices are often slightly elevated, as stations try to profit from leisure travelers. (For more ways to save, see our column Save on Gas⁹.)

Gift Cards

When to buy: A day or two before you give it.

Why: These days, gift cards carry a plethora of hidden pitfalls, from expiration dates to dormancy fees, says Dan Horne, a professor of marketing at Providence College known as the "Gift Card Guru." That countdown to fees starts as soon as you buy the card. "You don't want to short-change the recipient," he says.

Groceries

When to buy: Sunday evenings.

Why: Store sales tend to run Wednesday through Tuesday, says Teri Gault, founder of The Grocery Game¹⁰, a consumer savings program. On Sunday, you'll also have the latest round of manufacturer's coupons from your morning paper. "You can maximize your coupons available for that shopping week," she says. Heading to the store close to closing time means you'll have access to sales on fresh items that must be sold by the end of the day, such as meats and baked goods.

Of course, you'll also benefit from in-season items that can be frozen for use later in the year, says Gault. That means turkeys at Thanksgiving and hams at Christmas and Easter. During the spring and summer, buy fresh produce. Peaches bought at $1 per pound now can be kept frozen for smoothies and pies throughout the winter, she says.

Shrubs, Trees and Other Plants

When to buy: Fall

Why: Take a break from raking up leaves to purchase trees, shrubs and other perennials for your yard. Prices nosedive after midsummer, as garden supply stores and nurseries try to clear out their stock. You can also get great deals on bulbs during the fall. Just store them according to the package instructions for best planting results next spring. For more, see our column Cheap Landscaping Tricks¹¹.)

Televisions

When to buy: Six to 12 months after a particular model is launched.

Why: A new TV drops in price after a few months on the market, says CNET's Merritt. Although there will be newer models out there, it's unlikely they'll offer any significant improvements to justify that brand new price. "The technology is proceeding at such a pace that the models out there are not going to be obsolete anytime soon," he says. (For more, see our column The World Is Flat¹².)

Wedding Dresses

When to buy: Between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Why: Boutiques are stocked up on dresses for the post-Christmas rush (many people get engaged over the holidays), yet traffic is low, says Fields, who also co-authored "Bridal Bargains." "It's not a busy time to buy a wedding dress because people are thinking about the holidays," he says. You'll also have room to bargain.

Wine

When to buy: Early fall.

Why: For best selection, you can't beat the fall harvest season. That's when most vineyards release their latest vintages. Buying in August and September is also your best shot at snagging so-called "cult wines" — those with limited production and high demand, says Kathleen Schumacher-Hoertkorn, CEO of New Vine Logistics, an online interstate wine retailer. (For more, see our column Buying Wine Online¹³.)

10 Avoidable IT Interview Flubs

eWEEK rounds up some of the worst offenses, and while we're certain that none of you would ever make such obvious errors, it never hurts to review before your next interview.

Make sure you don't forget the Thank You note. I know I personally won't hire you if I don't get one!

}Davoice

Do aspects of Christianity violate the Law of Non-contradiction?

Does Christianity and its tenets violate the Law of Non-contradiction?

Use the link above to listen to the answer.

For the uninitiated, the Law of Non-contradiction states that no truth can exist when 2 central theses are in opposition to each other. How can we believe in 1 God when we are told there are "3 in 1", the Holy Trinity.

}Davoice

Dyslexia is very annoying when...

• You're trying to absorb a 700 page technical manual and your brain keeps getting full b/c it can't keep up with the pace of the alternative reading method you were taught.
  
  
• You flip the digits of a phone number and end up calling someone you just dumped instead of the person you dumped them for.
  
  
• Someone sends you a 700 page e-book to read and you have to pay to have it printed at Staples so you can read it.
  
  
• You go to look up a new word in the dictionary... only to find out it's not a new word at all.
  
  
• You keep misspelling your own name in letters and emails... and you consistently misspell it the same way every time. (Thank goodness for Word Auto-correct.)
  

The Banker's Sandwich

Heard of a new sandwich today... The BB&T. Hence the nickname "the banker's sandwich".

Ingredients: Bacon, Basil & Tomato.

Serve on toasted rye bread. And if you're one of those people who actually likes mayonnaise, add a good smear.

An even funnier named variation... The BB & TP. Bacon, Basil, Tomato & Provolone. Yummy.

}Davoice

Cheap dedicated servers

I went on a quest a few weeks ago to find the most reliable cheap dedicated servers in the market for higher end applications. In the process I came up with a big handful of possibilities. Of them, I narrowed the list down to these:

• EV1
• Rackspace
• 1&1
• Hostgator
• Pair
• ServerBeach
  

- EV1 was elminated as too expensive.
- Rackspace was eliminated b/c they don't publish their pricing and I didn't like the quote I got.
- Hostgator was reasonable, but just reselling a ThePlanet server. Not a bad option though since it was cheaper than buying direct from ThePlanet.
- Pair I liked but their bandwidth packages didn't fit what I was looking for.
- ServerBeach was out of stock of the one I wanted. But their prices weren't great regardless.

So... that left me with 1&1. Which had the lowest price, was the only one offering Plesk 8, and offered double the RAM for the same money.

I'll report back on how things go later in the year.

PS... If you're looking for a VAR to help with telephone systems, routers, and VoIP equipment, check out VARNetwork.

Telcos Lobby CA: $19.7 Million in 3 Months

The push for a statewide video franchise

As California prepares to vote on whether to give the baby bells a statewide video franchise, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that Verizon & AT&T have spent a whopping $19.7 million, or $200,000 per day to influence the vote. A statewide franchise would exclude telcos from localized laws that require cable operators to build out to broad portions of communities.

"AT&T led the way by spending nearly $18 million on lobbyists; television, radio and newspaper advertising; wining and dining lawmakers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium; and Lakers basketball tickets for the chairwoman of the Senate committee that held hearings on the legislation, records show."

Despite consumer group (and of course cable company) opposition to the measure, "the legislation has yet to receive a single "no" vote during committee and floor votes," the paper observes. Final votes are expected on the bill this week.

Joshua 1:9 (New Living Translation)

"I command you--be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid or discouraged. For the LORD your God is with you wherever you go."

Oil crisis: It's only just begun

By Paul Salopek

Chicago Tribune

Marathon station manager Michelle Vargo keeps an eye on customers in South Elgin, Ill. A single mother, she has worked long hours to turn a profit in a business that actually makes tiny profits from gasoline.

Burke Transport Service driver Howard Dunbar guides his load of 7,000 gallons of fuel from a terminal in Arlington Heights, Ill., through the dark streets toward the South Elgin Marathon station.

Last summer, a gasoline station opened in South Elgin, Ill., an old farming village that's now being swallowed by the westward sprawl of Chicago.

As service stations go, it's an alpha establishment. A $3 million Marathon outlet with 24 digital pumps, a computerized car wash and a convenience store lit up like an operating room, it sells everything from ultra-low-sulfur diesel to an herbal "memory enhancer" to Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

Howard Dunbar's Tanker Truck 6 rolled into the station one night last September and proceeded to unload 7,723 gallons of gasoline and diesel into underground tanks.

This bonanza would be sucked dry by customers in 24 hours, a small, stark example of the nation's awesome petroleum appetite at a time the planet appears to be lurching into an energy crunch of historic proportions.

By now, most Americans realize that something is profoundly awry in the global oil patch.

For most motorists, like the "swipe and go" customers at the South Elgin Marathon, the evidence is painfully obvious: record-high fuel costs that have surpassed last year's infamous price spikes after Hurricane Katrina. Prices are expected to go even higher, especially in the Pacific Northwest and California, after the shutdown of an oil pipeline on Alaska's northern slope.

Yet to fully grasp the scope of the crisis looming before them, Americans must trace their seemingly ordinary tankful of gasoline back to its shadowy sources. This is, in effect, a journey into the heart of America's vast and troubled oil dependency.

"I truly think we're at one of those turning points where the future's looking so ugly nobody wants to face it," said Matthew Simmons, a Houston energy investment banker who has advised the Bush administration on oil policy. "We're not talking some temporary Arab embargo anymore. We're not talking your father's energy crisis."

What Simmons and many other experts are talking about is a bleak new collision between geology and geopolitics.

Below ground, the biggest worry is "peak oil" — the notion that the world's total petroleum endowment is approaching the half-empty mark, a geological tipping point beyond which no amount of extra pumping will revive fading oil fields.

Peak-oil theory is controversial. Many think it alarmist. Yet even Big Oil is starting to gird itself for possible fuel shortages: Chevron, the nation's second-largest oil company, has bluntly declared that "the era of easy oil is over" and is warning energy-hungry Americans that "the world consumes two barrels of oil for every barrel discovered."

Aboveground, things look little better. Most petro states, aware that crude supplies are growing increasingly valuable, have limited drilling rights to their own oil companies.

Meanwhile, thirst for petroleum continues to run wild. Producing nations are pumping at maximum capacity. Yet the competing energy demands of America and rapidly industrializing China and India now threaten to outstrip global oil output. Chinese oil imports are projected to double to 14 million barrels a day over 20 years. Many credible analysts foresee a new "energy cold war" as the United States and China square off over the planet's last reserves.

The new Marathon station in South Elgin turned out to be an ideal laboratory to parse these sobering issues. Exclusive access to industry refining data made it possible, for the first time, to track oil consumed by this one gas station back to the dusty war zones, belligerent autocracies and tottering nation-states from where it came.

For years, oil companies have insisted that this could never be done. Conventional wisdom holds that America's colossal oil flows are mixed, swapped among companies and rebranded too many times to pinpoint the actual source of your $40 purchase of unleaded.

Yet, with a little research and proprietary data supplied by Marathon Petroleum, the Chicago Tribune could trace with unparalleled clarity virtually every bucketful of trucker Howard Dunbar's shipment to its distant origins.

On the hydrocarbon menu that September night, in round figures:

• Gulf of Mexico crudes: 31 percent

• Texas crudes: 28 percent

• Nigerian crudes: 17 percent

• Arab light from Saudi Arabia: 10 percent

• Louisiana sweet: 8 percent

• Illinois Basin light: 4 percent

• Cabinda crude from Angola: 3 percent

• N'Kossa crude from the Republic of Congo: .01 percent

Thus, $73.81 worth of unleaded pumped one Saturday by a Little League mom was traced not simply back to Africa, but to a particular set of Nigerian offshore fields through which Ibibio villagers canoed home to children dying of curable diseases.

Every day, the jaded tanker drivers brought human stories echoing in their trucks. They plunked their long wooden measuring sticks into the Marathon station's 40,000-gallon underground tanks, and the resulting subterranean gong evoked — depending on the changing oil vintage — an Iraqi ex-colonel's cavernous loneliness. Or the laments of a West African fisherman named Sunday, afloat on a fishless stretch of the Atlantic. Or the songs of Marxist Indians reveling in their newfound oil wealth atop a dusty South American plateau.

The voices of Chinese oil prospectors gurgled inside all of the fuel shipments. And diluted in the gas came a warning that many Americans seem unprepared to hear: Our nation's energy-intensive joy ride, powered by 150 years of cheap petroleum, may be coming to an end.

Journey to the pump

It was September. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita had delivered their one-two punch to the energy-rich Gulf Coast, swamping New Orleans and disabling the offshore wells and pipelines that yield one-third of America's domestic energy production. In South Elgin, population 20,000, gas prices at the Marathon had broken the $3-a-gallon barrier, and people were stealing Michelle Vargo's gasoline.

"You'd think it would only be the crummy cars, but people in nice cars are doing it, too," the frazzled station manager exclaimed. "I never seen anything like it."

Vargo, 36, is too young to recall that this had happened during the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979.

In typically murky industry fashion, the station is branded and supplied by Marathon but actually owned by an independent fuel retailer — in this case, Prairie State Enterprises of Barrington, Ill. Freelance shippers called "jobbers" haul the gas. And even though much of the station's petroleum does in fact bubble from Marathon's oil patches, the company as often purchases its oil from Exxon Mobil, Iraq's Southern Oil Co. or Venezuela's PDVSA, a swaggering national oil company with its own patriotic song.

A single mom with a hard-edged life, Vargo is one part in a ruthless business that earns a pittance from gasoline sales (oil companies and refiners snatch the bulk of the fuel's profits). Her station's income comes from the incidentals of frantic modern life: cigarettes, energy drinks, stay-awake pills, the Lotto, and sweet and salty snacks.

The clerks are a motley group. Many are the working poor. Some can't pay their bills. Several live with their parents.

Vargo drives to work in a car she can't afford — a white Chevrolet Suburban that churns out a ruinous 10 miles a gallon and rides so high that she has to boost herself into the driver's seat as if jumping into a saddle. Her two-hour daily commute, about 40 miles each way from Lockport, is roughly double the national average.

"I don't feel safe in small cars," Vargo said defensively.

The only perk for the station employees is free coffee. There are no discounts on gas.

From the ocean's floor

In 1940, the United States was the Saudi Arabia of the world. It produced 63 percent of the planet's oil. Today, it generates 8 percent.

About one-third of Vargo's fill-up on a recent day came from the last major pool of crude remaining in oil-starved America: the basement of the Gulf of Mexico. Trace it from seabed to suburbia, and you X-ray America's aging industrial innards.

It started 9,000 feet inside Earth's crust, in Miocene Epoch rocks that have the consistency of oil-soaked beach sand. The rocks simmer near the boiling point of water. This is known in the business as the "pay zone."

From that hellish place, the crude was sucked up into a 4-inch drill pipe that punctured the Atlantic floor near a submerged hillock called Viosca Knoll 786. It shot up 1,750 feet of pipe to an offshore production rig and was shunted ashore to a huge tank farm in St. James, La. There it began its long journey to the Midwest in a pipeline big enough for a person to walk in, albeit hunched over — a 632-mile-long artifact of our oil dependency that will doubtless astound future archeologists.

Arriving at the Robinson refinery in southern Illinois, it was cooked and cooled for five days inside 23-story towers. Then it gushed through 16- and 12-inch fuel pipelines for three days until it reached a 40-year-old tank farm near O'Hare International Airport. Finally, it traveled its last 12 miles to the South Elgin Marathon inside Howard Dunbar's truck.

"Takes a bit of power to bring it up," hollered Ferrell Martin, 52, a senior mechanic aboard Petronius, a drilling platform that juts above the gulf's waves near Viosca Knoll. "Our generators could electrify a small town."

The platform, co-owned by Chevron and Marathon, came on line in 2000. It cost more than $500 million to build, nearly what the United States shells out every 24 hours to buy imported crude. A masterpiece of high technology, it pumps the energy equivalent of 60,000 barrels of oil and natural gas a day — a gusher that matches Pakistan's national output and is only slightly behind Italy's.

More than 100 such gargantuan structures dot the gulf. As do an estimated 6,500 other oil-related features such as wells, pumping stations and helipads, not to mention some 30,000 miles of submerged pipelines tangled like spaghetti across the gulf floor.

"A whole new game"

One man who keeps Michelle Vargo's gas-guzzling Suburban rolling doesn't have an oil worker's rough hands. He sits in a red granite skyscraper in Houston.

"No question, we're facing a whole new game," said Jeff Rutledge, a sandy-haired New Orleans native and the senior geophysicist for Marathon. "Sure, there's a lot of resources still out there, but they're getting riskier to invest in, much harder to find and more expensive to reach."

At Marathon's technology and exploration department, desks are piled with what look like old eight-track tapes: computer drives that contain volumes of exploration data that beggar belief. Seismic surveys, the industry's main tool for locating oil, involve setting off small shock waves at Earth's surface and recording millions of "echoes" from the rock below.

Progress reports from 10 to 20 of these fantastically pricey, high-tech quests from Africa, Russia and the North Atlantic land on Rutledge's desk every day.

According to industry optimists, such Herculean efforts to squeeze out Earth's last high-quality oil are the best retort to doomsayers who worry the world is running on empty.

In the gulf, for instance, Petronius' 19 wells do things engineers couldn't dream of a quarter-century ago. They snake downward through almost 1,800 feet of seawater, bore vertically through a mile and a half of rock, then veer off laterally under the stony seabed for distances of up to five miles.

Such whiz-bang technology has encouraged the U.S. Minerals Management Service to boost the Gulf of Mexico's potential oil reserves by 15 percent, to 86 billion barrels. That's enough, in theory, to meet U.S. demand for another decade. Much of that, however, lies in deep, environmentally sensitive waters near the Florida coast and is prohibitively expensive to extract using current technology.

Many oil executives say environmental restrictions and stingy foreign governments keep valuable reserves locked up.

The United States gulps one-quarter of the crude pumped on the planet, industry critics point out, yet it sits atop just 3 percent of the globe's reserves.

"You can drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, on every continental shelf and atop every hill in America for that matter, and you still won't reverse the fact that our oil production is in permanent decline," said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., a senior member of the House Science Committee. "We're just sopping up what's left, digging ourselves into a deeper hole."

Bartlett belongs to a small but suddenly influential band of pessimists who are ringing alarm bells over peak oil.

The perilous "peak"

The theory of peak oil is based on the studies of M. King Hubbert, a pioneering U.S. geologist who correctly predicted in the 1950s that America's huge crude output would "peak," or hit a ceiling, in 1970.

Nobody disputes that oil will peak; the debate is over when. The output of all reservoirs begins to decline after about half of their oil is extracted. Today, peakists cite anemic oil discoveries since the 1980s, plus ominous drop-offs in production in major fields in Kuwait, China and Mexico, among other places, as evidence that the world, too, is reaching its fateful peak.

Estimates of when we will hit this milestone vary from "we've passed it already" to the U.S. Geological Survey's latest calculation of 2044 — hardly a reassuring date, given that rocketing oil prices and their attendant social chaos would stagger the industrial world well before that reckoning.

Using available technology, Rutledge said, Petronius' bounty likely will shrivel in 12 to 15 years.

"Just sinking away"

Ferrell Martin's ancestors had fished and trapped the watery maze of Bayou Terrebonne, a fabled swamp about 60 miles southwest of New Orleans, for more than 200 years. But today, Louisiana's lush wetlands, the richest in America, are dying, crumbling into the sea.

Home from his usual two-week shift aboard Petronius, Martin knelt at the bow of a bass boat steered by one of his numberless bayou relatives, trying, again and again, to get the boat unstuck from hidden bars of mud.

"I can't even find the same fishing holes anymore," Martin said, fanning away mosquitoes. "The whole place is just sinking away."

The U.S. Geological Survey thinks land in and around Bayou Terrebonne is starting to sag like a deflating wineskin as fossil fuels are pumped out in massive quantities. In some places, it has settled 11 inches. For a landscape that is in many cases only a few feet above sea level, the implications are ominous. Erosion and subsidence have eaten away at least two miles of coastline near Ferrell Martin's modest house in Montegut, La.

He recognized the irony: Oil has yanked thousands of once-impoverished Cajuns into the middle class, but it is now helping swallow their ancestral homes.

"Everything's a trade-off, I guess," Martin said.

This, too, gets burned up by the cars in South Elgin: a clod of southern Louisiana.