If This Doesn’t Make You Smile…

… then you need to seriously consider lots of medication. With a tip of the hat to Ray. Enjoy!

The News About The News

This chart should concern you.

Lynchian Muzak

I brought my daughter to the Natick Mall Collection for a birthday party. As I walked around, I realized that the low-key music playing throughout the mall collection was a Muzak-i-fied version of the theme to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Two things immediately struck me like a brick. First, anybody familiar with Angelo Badalamenti’s compositions knows that Muzak-i-fying them is a truly amusing concept – I laughed out loud when I realized what I was listening to! Second, I think the programmers at Muzak (or whomever feeds the mall collection) must be under the age of 30 or they’d realize the bizarreness of running the Twin Peaks theme at a lux mall collection.

She’s dead!

Wrapped in plastic!

Oooh – I must have those cute black sling-backs!

Facebook IM – Useful!

With my conversion from Trillian to Pidgin, I have been using (quite a bit) the Facebook IM service, now that I have ultra-trivial access to it. When Facebook’s IM service originally launched, I was not terribly interested since I don’t live inside Facebook and my list of Facebook friends is a teensy microcosm of the folks I regularly IM with.

But having Facebook as “just another” IM protocol alongside AIM, Y!M, Skype, MSN, et. al. makes the process completely transparent. If I want to have a quick text with Brad, my multi-protocol IM client (Pidgin) let’s me talk to him wherever he happens to be online – and sometimes that’s Facebook and not Y!M or Skype.

Facebook’s touting of itself as a “Social Utility” is starting to ring truer with functionality like this.

There’s something profound to be said about this exercise. It has to do with the inevitable process we’re going through now and in the near future to detach message from medium and put the users in a ton more control of their communications. More on that later…

Pidgin Convert

After two concerted-but-aborted attempts to wean myself off of Trillian in the last year or so, I finally think I’ve done it. I’m a Pidgin user now. Pidgin doesn’t support audio and video like Trillian does, but I find that I use Skype almost exclusively for online audio and video conversations these days, so those features weren’t key. Otherwise, the apps are damn similar – including the once or twice per day crashes – but c’est la vie.

The Skype IM integration and Facebook IM integration are just great on Pidgin – I’m way impressed. Lots of other neat plugins too!

Do check it out if you’re looking for a multi-protocol IM client.

Will Nobody Pick Up the iPhone Gauntlet?

Clearly the iPhone is a great piece of engineering. You’d be hard-pressed (and then some) to argue that this objet d’art is not a stupendous product. However, as I and others have pointed out, it suffers from some material shortcomings that make it a stretch for some (though not a gigantic) set of users.

What I can’t figure out is why nobody has seriously picked up the gauntlet yet to seriously compete. What are you guys doing, exactly? Apple is a fucking music distribution company with a few engineers hanging around for good measure, folks. Y’all are handheld device design and distribution companies!!!! Are you going to let them eat your lunch like this? Gimme a break!

Some folks argue that Android (aka ‘gPhone’) will be magical. What I see thus far in terms of the UI and sample apps – never mind the complete lack of hardware support so far – is underwhelming. Android is a stupendous concept, but it makes the flawed (IMO) assumption that, like computers, handheld devices can (and should?) have their hardware and operating systems separated. Apple keeps winning battles because they refuse to let the OS and the hardware be rent asunder. By keeping the iPhone hardware intimately tied to the iPhone software, they can optimize both simultaneously and produce a device with both object-value and huge functional value. I think the jury is out on whether the great handset makers (HTC, Palm, Moto, Nokia, etc.) can out-Apple Apple with a divided setup.

And before you argue that Windows Mobile is all that and a bag of chips, suck down some valium. It isn’t. It’s ugly and cumbersome and not customizable enough. You can dress it up (I use SpB), but there are just too many hardware designs to get any piece of UI (for example) software to click perfectly. You learn to work around the problems, but, c’mon.

I was very very excited about the upcoming HTC Touch Diamond. Sexy hardware. Great form factor. Nearly every bell & whistle. And lots of custom software (it’s a WM phone) developed by HTC for the device to theoretically make it a stellar user experience. Early reviews suggest some problems though with device responsiveness et. al. Perhaps it’ll get sorted out by the time the US release hits later this year.

But beyond the Touch Diamond, which may be fatally flawed, nobody is even close, IMO. Where’s the innovation, guys? You defined and supposedly control this market! You’re playing pure defense now! Eek!

Skoold!

Friday was an auspicious day for the monsters. Alexis ‘graduated’ from pre-K and Stephen wrapped up first grade. In ten short weeks, Al is off to kindergarten and Stephen starts second grade. Egads, but time, she do fly.

I have many fond memories of both kindergarten (Apollo 14 captured my imagination in a big way) and second grade (when I realized that “math is cool!”).

CNN: “Sixth severed foot surfaces off Canadian coast”

I thought the Canadians used the metric system?

Officially Off the Coffee Deep End?

For some reason I can’t explain, I was drawn to my local The Container Store this evening to “fix the coffee storage problem” at Chez Broderick-Ruggieri. There was an insane selection of options, and I ended up with some very nice Klip It containers. Since we go through so much coffee, I had to pick up a reusable labeling system too!

I’ll save you the pity of the ‘before’ picture. Here’s the fridge ‘after’:

Each one liter container holds 12 ounces of beans. Those of you who think coffee is sold in one pound / 16 ounce increments, clearly don’t shop at Terroir where crazy coffee people pay the going one pound price for gourmet coffee and only expect to get 12 ounces.

For any of the folks out there doing math in their heads, I’ll save you the time: yes, that’s just over three pounds of coffee beans, and that’s just the stuff we have open. The unopened, still-vacuum-sealed parcels from Peet’s and Terroir are in one of the freezers. You can ask, but I won’t admit publicly how much coffee is in the deep-freeze. Suffice it to say that guys like Lula have our home phone on speed dial .

The labels can be erased and re-written on – they’re pretty cool!

This is 12oz of George Howell Terroir Sumatra Mandheling from the northern Sumatra region of Indonesia. It was roasted 04/17/08 in a southern-Italian espresso roast. It scored 92 points at Coffee Review (yes, it is stupendous!)!

Catastrophic Curves of Entitlement

The US Social Security system is a major joke and a major liability for our children and their children. It currently represents 40% of the mandatory spending programs (social security, medicare, medicaid, etc.) of the federal budget, and 21% of the total federal budget. For each dollar you pay in federal taxes, more than $0.21 goes straight to the Social Security system.

The system was NOT set up as a retirement system. It was created as a safety net for the aged and infirm who really needed help. Of course, today it has become an entitlement, and the government is now in the IRA business instead of the safety net business, which is the only business it should be in (in this regard).

Let’s talk about some nausea-inducing chart curves:

The X axis is years from 1935 through 2004. I’m sure I could dig up data for 2005-2008, but I’m also sure such an effort wouldn’t have any material impact on the net analysis. The Y axis indicates age. The big blue line indicates the expected average life span (Y axis) of an individual born in the year indicated (X axis). The big red line indicates the legal retirement age of an individual born in the year indicated. If you don’t want to do the math on the big red line, it starts at 65, then grows to 66, then grows to 67, and that’s it.

The Social Security system was signed into federal law in 1935. Like a septic system, it started failing the moment it started being used . The guys who created this legislation were basically all born in the 1800s. Think about that. There’s no way they could have foreseen the advancements of the 20th century. If you are so inclined (I do not have the time) you can actually read all of the congressional debate on, and analysis of, the Act from the 1930s here.

These legislators set the age to receive benefits – their definition of “old age” – above the average life expectancy for the time, as the graph clearly shows. 5% above, in fact. My guess is that these guys saw life expectancy improving, but at a very modest pace – perhaps something along the trend of the lower dotted blue line. Of course, the upper dotted blue line shows the actual general trend of life expectancy, which isn’t even close.

The yellow shaded area, between the big red and big blue lines is The Nightmare Zone. This is screwing the budget, and our children, and their children. These two lines are deviating at an entirely unsustainable rate.

The lower dotted red line projects forward (historically, if that makes sense) the very modest changes the government has undertaken to increase the age of benefit eligibility over the years. It seems clear that the government did not intend for the age to be stuck in one place forever. I don’t know the numbers, but I have to assume that even implementing this sort of an ultra-modest change would be fiscally beneficial, if not a per se solution. Now imagine what would happen if we used the index they used in 1935 of benefit eligibility at roughly 105% of the average lifespan? This is the upper dotted red line.

How do we fix this? That’s the N Trillion Dollar Question, no? The good news is that this is fixable. The bad news is that fixing it means scrapping the system as we understand it now, and choosing a generation that’s gonna have to “take it up the ass” as it were.

I volunteer my generation. Someone has to do it, it might as well be us. Anyone born on or after January 1 1965, is out of the current system. Those of us in our late 30s and early 40s have time to save for retirement, even if we haven’t already (or maybe even have a bunch more kids so they can take care of us!). We’ve all heard, and I imagine have gotten, the message of retirement savings that has been beaten incessantly into our heads via every mutual fund company that can buy television advertising. We’re well-educated (read: “well-scared”) on the general topic of retirement. We don’t as a group generally believe the system will be intact in 25 to 35 years anyway – so let’s stop playing ‘pretend’ and actually work to solve the problem.

Reform the whole system. Drastically increase the age of eligibility and structure an index for it based on projected life expectancy. I’ll propose the straw man of that upper dotted red line. Means-test for eligibility. Well-off folks don’t need social security. Anyone born prior to 01/01/1965 is in the current system (though wouldn’t it be nice of them to agree to means-testing and maybe even some upping of the age of eligibility – such as the lower dotted red line). Eventually we’ll be able to lower the OASI tax deduction rate.

So what do you think, folks? Can we get some grass roots action behind this – or something like this?