I’ve had my current mobile phone (a Samsung Blackjack) for nearly three years, and while it has served me reasonably well, I’m overdue for an upgrade.

Here are some of the things I want in my next phone that would improve upon my current experience:

1. Not taking two or more minutes from the time I turn the phone on until it’s actually useful.
2. Not freezing on startup (occasionally more than once per day), requiring me to remove the battery and restart.
3. Not being unable to connect to the network after startup (also occasionally more than once per day and usually associated with a stuck ATU_NITZ and/or clocknot process), requiring me to turn the phone off and turn it on again.
4. A battery that lasts long enough that I’m not always carrying around a spare battery.
5. The ability to be charged via its USB connection even if the battery is completely drained.
6. A Bluetooth stack that is compatible with Microsoft Voice Command.
7. A web browser whose default home page is accessible.
8. A web browser that can view rich web pages reasonably well.
9. A higher quality camera.
10. Built-in GPS.

Having recently read David Kessler’s book The End of Overeating and Michael Pollan’s essay Big Food vs. Big Insurance, I have a proposal for how to address a major health care issue.  Create a “Calorie added tax” that applies to prepared food served in restaurants.  Whether it’s based on the number of calories in the food served or is truly analogous to a Value added tax, it seems like it would be a relatively straightforward way to address the issues that Kessler and Pollan raise.

It appears that the biggest issue with our public health in the United States today is that we are consuming too much unhealthy food – for which calorie count is a useful proxy – and this is leading to a whole series of obesity-related problems.  In addition to Kessler’s observations about the food-production industry’s role in engineering food for maximum palatability, leading to overconsumption, I’ve heard Adam Drewnowski observe that while historically less healthy food had a higher cost per calorie, today the reverse is increasingly true (as Pollan notes about government corn subsidies leading to the increased use of high fructose corn syrup).  Generally speaking, healthier food now costs more per calorie, so people acting in their economic self-interest have a less healthy diet.

If a calorie tax rewards both producers and consumers for fewer calories being served and eaten, or the tax on those increased calories is used to offset the associated health costs of our societal overconsumption, then perhaps we can reverse in some measure the current cost per calorie relationship.

In practice there would be many details to work out:  What’s the definition of “prepared food”?  Is it just restaurants, or does prepared food purchased in a supermarket count?  Does cola purchased in a restaurant get the tax and cola purchased for consumption at home not?  How do you prevent it from being a regressive tax for low-income people who don’t have convenient access to healthier food?  While these may sound hard, states deal with these issues today on a regular basis when assessing sales tax.  It’s not perfect, but it can be made to work.

Is this likely to happen?  I doubt it.  I imagine that Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and many other industrial powerhouses would fight it vigorously.  But if the predictions of the experts are true, we could be on track for a major health-care crisis in the United States and other developed nations.

If you read this and are inclined to be judgmental about people who are overweight or eat too much unhealthy food, I encourage you to read Kessler’s book.  He makes a compelling case that overeating is a by-product of our food industry’s exploitation of humans’ evolutionary history, and that blaming people for this is not much more sensible than blaming people for the color of their hair.

"... and so, my advice to you students is to be born rich, white, and male.  And it doesn't really matter how hard you work in school or how many times you screw up, as long as you can rely on your family connections to keep getting you out of jams."

From Sotomayor Defends Ruling in Firefighters’ Bias Case - NYTimes.com (emphasis mine):

In his opening remarks to the nominee, [Oklahoma Senator Tom] Coburn apologized for the several outbursts by anti-abortion protesters since the hearings began. “Anybody who values life like I do and is pro-life recognizes that the way you change minds is not yell at people,” the senator said. “You love them.”

As has been widely reported, e.g. in On Nixon Tapes, Ambivalence Over Abortion, Not Watergate, recently released Oval Office tapes from January 1973 (after the Roe v. Wade decision was announced) record President Nixon saying the following:

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white, or a rape.”

I’m sorry, but even in 1973 those were, shall we say, outdated views.  Or perhaps he was pandering to all those pro-choice racist voters?

Apparently one of the big criticisms of a government-run health insurance plan by its opponents is that it will drive private insurance companies out of business.  But given the presumption that a government-run plan is by nature more bureaucratic and less efficient and that a government-run plan won’t be able to cherry-pick its patients based on criteria like pre-existing conditions, what does this say about the cost structure of a private sector health insurance company if it can’t successfully compete with a government plan?

*RMTB = Riddle me this, Batman

From NY Times: Smartphone Rises Fast From Gadget to Necessity (emphasis mine):

“Basically, I’m walking around with a minicomputer in my pocket,” he said. “And it’s a part of me now, an appendage.”

I guess “minicomputer” doesn’t mean what it used to.  Or those are some big-ass pants.

After years of resisting, I finally broke down and bought a TiVo.

I started with ReplayTV in late 2000 and added Windows Media Center in 2006.  Early on I preferred ReplayTV to TiVo because, as my friend Paul put it, “TiVo makes it easier to find what you want to watch but ReplayTV makes it easier to watch it once you’ve found it.”  Moving to Windows Media Center was about being able to have a DVR solution where a noisy fan wasn’t running 24x7 in a room where people sleep (a mistake I made briefly with an early Comcast HD DVR) plus other advanced features like music and photo sharing.  I much preferred the feature set of Windows Media Center; unfortunately, I experienced repeated flaky behavior, probably due in part to running it on my main desktop PC.

What ultimately forced the issue was Comcast’s plan to stop transmitting their Expanded Basic lineup (including CNN, ESPN, MSNBC, Cartoon Network, and Comedy Central) in analog signals, thus requiring a digital adapter to view these channels.  Their solution for legacy DVRs – use IR blasters and pray – didn’t seem satisfactory.

Short of cancelling Comcast service and moving to a different provider – not a better option at the moment – I was left with the choice of getting a new DVR that supported digital cable natively.  I could buy a new Digital Cable Ready Media Center PC or get a TiVo HD.  I explored the former option but found that the major PC manufacturers have made it extremely difficult to find such models on their web sites, and buying a Media Center with two digital tuners is significantly more expensive than TiVo even considering the cost of TiVo service.

There were two issues with getting a TiVo:  The aforementioned noise concern and the fact that doing multi-room streaming requires multiple TiVo boxes (vs. Media Center Extenders).  The latter issue concerned me in theory, but in practice my DVR use has effectively been limited to a single TV for the past year, even with DVRs on two different TVs.  For the noise issue, I would just have to try it and see.  So I did.

After an initial hiccough with getting the CableCard working, requiring a Comcast service call to replace what turned out to be a defective card, I now have dual-tuner digital HD service on the TiVo.  Incidentally, all of the Comcast personnel with whom I dealt where highly service-oriented and helpful, which makes me slightly less angry at the company for making me go to considerable time and expense to replace DVRs that were working perfectly fine in order to preserve features that I’ve had for years.

So what are my initial impressions of TiVo after years using the competition?  The initial setup menus were very easy and nicely done; clearly they have invested a lot of effort here.  The TiVo remote control is fine but I don’t know what the big fuss is about.  Overall, the TiVo user interface seems frozen in time, a circa 2004 UI; the Windows Media Center UI is far better, even on Vista, and I hear that Windows 7 is an even bigger improvement.  Most significantly, the TiVo is pretty quiet, so noise is not an issue; I hope that this will not change as the unit ages.

I was not expecting to like the automatic suggestions feature, but it has turned out to be handy; through it I learned that Top Gear (and BBC America in general) is now available to me.  I appreciate that TiVo supports streaming for Netflix customers and I find the YouTube support interesting and clever.  I am pretty unhappy with TiVo’s support for recurring programs, however, most notably The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  Even though I told TiVo to record only first-run programs, it insists on recording each of the four daily occurrences that Comedy Central broadcasts.  The suggested workaround is to set a manual recurring program for 11 PM nightly, but TiVo doesn’t give me the option to record only Monday through Thursday (The Daily Show is not broadcast on Friday) so I get a spurious recording every Friday for it (and The Colbert Report as well).  I suppose I could set up four recurring weekly programs for each of Monday through Thursday, but why the hassle for something that TiVo’s competitors have always handled better?

My medium-term plan is still to return to Windows Media Center, but now I’m going to wait to see if they integrate it with Windows Home Server, which will enable me to have one dedicated, high-storage, high-availability server at home.  In the meantime TiVo appears to fit the bill nicely, though I wouldn’t mind a software upgrade that modernizes the UI and fixes the recurring program issues.  I’m still looking forward to the day when everything I want to watch is available via IP streaming and I can drop my separate cable TV subscription; I suspect Comcast will work hard to prevent this from happening.

From the New York Times review of the Nissan Cube, May 31, 2009:

The Cube is cheerfully bizarre, and I appreciate that. It’s not a riot to drive, but in this case, the driving experience is really beside the point. The kids don’t care about that noise, pops. They want connectivity. They want a car that’s a rolling Tweet about a new iPhone app from the Jonas Brothers.

I, however, want a car that doesn’t look like a myopic washing machine, but I’m a lame old guy of 31 who remembers listening to CDs and saying things like, “My modem is taking forever to load this Kozmo.com order.”

From Automobile Magazine's Dyer Consequences column “The Kings of One-Upmanship: All-Stars of A Different Breed”, July 2009:

There are actually a lot of cars on the market whose sole reason for existence is to one-up some lesser model.  Porsche is the undisputed master of the craft, offering no fewer than fourteen variations on the 911.  Basically, 911 owners can never be satisfied until they have a GT2, at which point they will finally experience a feeling of fulfillment that lasts for the few minutes before they crash backward into a tree at 204 MPH.

I recently read two non-fiction books that read like extended blogs and have somewhat crankily come to the conclusion that bloggers shouldn’t write books.

The problem isn’t with the authors themselves; it’s with using the writing style of a blog in a book-length piece.  Most blogs are written in a casual, informal style (with plenty of attempts at cute, parenthetical asides) that work well when consumed in small amounts but become cloying and tiresome in a longer work.  I suspect that the author can get away with it when the book is a collection of independent essays anchored on a common theme, but as part of a single narrative it makes me want to stop and scream “Enough already!”  I’m tempted to blame the editors for not being sufficiently ruthless in looking at each word and deciding if it adds to the book’s thesis.

The first book – Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt – is a well-researched and interesting book that is undermined by its turgid style.  The second book – Do you matter? by Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery – is simply dreadful, and in so many ways that I feel compelled to catalog them as you might repeatedly brush your teeth in an attempt to remove a bad taste from your mouth.

With “Do You Matter?”, some of the trouble is simply bad editing, the most glaring example being misspelling John Sculley’s name inside the book when his name is correctly spelled in the blurb he provides on the book’s back cover.  And this in the book’s second printing!  There are also numerous examples of the type of parenthetical excess I describe above, and a repeated lack of understanding of the proper use of “capitalization” and Quotation Marks.

But even if you can get past the poor editing, there is so much more that is wrong.

You would not be mistaken in viewing the book as an extended advertisement for Apple; the book refers to the company so much as its icon (no pun intended) that by the end of the book even the authors are apologizing for it.  And they undermine their case for making design an intrinsic part of the corporate culture at Apple by stressing how important Steve Jobs’ role is in the design process there, causing you to question whether Apple’s success in this area could (or can) be sustained without this one individual at the top of the organization.

When discussing design, the book focuses on high-end brands; not just Apple, but BMW and W Hotels, and criticizes Wal-Mart, but doesn’t acknowledge its choice of brands that rely on exclusivity as part of their appeal.  There are logical flaws as well:  In holding BMW up as a design leader because the company pays attention to the sound its cars’ doors make when they close, it neglects to mention the critical drubbing the company has received for the design of its iDrive controller.

The book takes the risk of presenting anecdotes in second person, e.g. in describing the ownership experience of a Lexus RX 400h.  Writing stories in the second person is risky because the writer needs to connect quickly with the readers so that the readers buy into the premise and allow the writer to plant thoughts in their heads.  When done well, it is devastatingly effective, but here it simply feels manipulative, that one of the authors has had a bad experience and wants to force the readers to see it through his own eyes.  Had the anecdotes been presented in the first person, as in “here’s something that happened to me/us that illustrates this point,” or in the third person, as in “let me tell you about John Smith’s experience”, the readers could have accepted the premise gradually instead of being told how to think.

The only quantifiable data the book presents to support its case is the companies’ market capitalization, which seems like a dubious way to measure a company’s success in design.  It does mention various awards that products and companies have won, but doesn’t provide any way to determine if those awards are recognized as meaningful within their respective industries.

Ultimately the biggest failure of the book is that its central premise – emblazoned on the cover as “How great design will make people love your company” – is undermined by the contents of the book.  Because the book’s real (and excellent) point is that the way to make people love your company and succeed as a result is to create a customer-focused corporate culture.  Great design is an important part of doing this but is far from the only part.

Mrs. Obama, who said that she never had a vegetable garden before, said the idea for it came from her experiences as a working mother trying to feed her daughters, Malia and Sasha, a good diet. Eating out three times a week, ordering a pizza, having a sandwich for dinner took it’s toll. The children’s pediatrician told her she needed to be thinking about nutrition.

1. Admit it – you have a man crush on Barack Obama
2. 1,000,000 Facebook members who think Hitler was a not a very nice chap
3. I rode the D train between 7:00 and 7:30 AM on April 26, 1979
4. I store chocolate in my navel for emergency snack purposes
5. Bernard Madoff for Mayor of Wasila, AK

Best: Alec Baldwin for hulu.

Worst: cars.com.

The football game was pretty good too, though I was disappointed it didn’t go into overtime.

As of yesterday, my family’s cars all are at least five years old and have at least 50,000 miles on them.  I’ve been paying close attention to this because until a couple of months ago, I had two cars that were in a race to hit this first:  One was approaching five years of age and had well over 50,000 miles, and the other was well over five years of age but approaching 50,000 miles.  As it turns out, time won out over distance; the younger, higher mileage car hit five years at the end of November but the older, lower mileage (and not snow-worthy) car didn’t cross 50,000 miles until last night.

This is mostly an opportunity to express self-satisfied virtue, as I feel better about having a garage of well-used cars.  I grew up in a family where we never had more than one car at a time and it was expected that you’d keep each car for at least 100,000 miles, a threshold I have yet to achieve as an adult.  I went through a period a number of years ago where we bought multiple vehicles over a relatively short span of time to address family “needs” and it’s nice to know that’s well in the past.  As much as I like car shopping and new-car smell, I’ve never enjoyed the process of stepping into a dealership and contemplating or executing an actual purchase.

At least for now I’m hopeful that this situation continues, as all of our vehicles are in relatively good condition and there are no cars on the market that I consider significantly better suited to our needs.  That said, I feel slightly unpatriotic for not going out and buying a new car just to help get the economy moving again.  If only the Escalade Hybrid had tail fins…

1. Danny Glasser thinks the airlines aren't doing themselves any favors by playing saccharine Christmas music while they have you on hold for 30 minutes after disrupting your travel plans.
2. Danny Glasser is contemplating liquidating his 401(k) account if he can avoid ever having to fly commercial again, in direct contradiction to his financial planner's recommendation.
3. Danny Glasser is repeating Samuel L. Jackson's signature line from Snakes On A Plane to himself, only substituting "snow" for "snakes" and "roads" for "plane."

A couple of months ago, the lever on my car’s front passenger seat that enables it to tip forward and give access to the rear seat stopped working.  After being told (incorrectly) that the seat frame was broken and that it would cost thousands of dollars to replace, I took the car to Eastside Bavarian.  They reported that a small rivet was broken and could be replaced relatively inexpensively – there’s no such thing as an inexpensive part on this car – albeit with significant labor costs due to the need to disassemble and reassemble the seat to perform the repair.

Because they had removed the seat from the car in order to work on it and we needed to wait for replacement parts to arrive in order to complete the repair, they asked if I’d be willing to drive the car with the front passenger seat removed.  I’d give up one person’s worth of seating capacity and have to ignore the airbag warning light, but I’d save the cost of reassembling and reinstalling the seat (and the cost of disassembling and removing it a second time once the parts arrived).  Sure, I said.

So for a couple of weeks I drove a three-seat automobile.  Sadly, it didn’t acquire the performance characteristics of the world’s most famous three-seat sports car (top left), though losing 80 pounds of curb weight didn’t hurt.  And the decision turned to be prescient because it was surprisingly difficult to locate the replacement part, complicated by the fact that the part does not have its own separate part number.  Twice BMW has shipped the part to Eastside Bavarian, only for them to discover that it’s the part for the driver seat, not the front passenger seat.  Eventually they concluded that the necessary part could not be located in the United States and there was no way to directly contact the people in Germany who would be able to supply it.  Their recourse was to repair the original part.

I ended up enjoying driving without the front passenger seat.  It made rear-seat access far easier and provided legroom for one passenger superior to anything smaller than a stretch limo.  I’m happy now that the seat is finally repaired but I had mixed feelings about putting it back in.

President-elect Obama has already weighed in more than once on his desire for a BCS playoff.  In that spirit, as part of approving any bailout for the U.S. auto industry, he should exact the follow concession:  The Detroit Lions need to give up hosting a football game on Thanksgiving.  It’s an old tradition, but come on, who really wants to waste a national football-viewing audience on the Lions?  This is a team that has won exactly one playoff game since the creation of the Super Bowl 40+ years ago.  A sad metaphor, perhaps, for what’s happened to the domestic auto manufacturers during the same era.