Ho John Lee's Weblog

It’s the time of spring when all the flowering trees bloom. There are a lot of cherry and wisteria trees in our neighborhood, it looks nice and as the petals start falling in a few weeks off later it will look like every home held a wedding recently. Good weather for being out and about. Speaking of which…

The Wachovia Bank (formerly World Savings) branch over at the Stanford Shopping Center was robbed last Thursday. This is already a little unusual, but what caught my attention was that they were robbed by an elderly man in an electric wheelchair. And he got away! He apparently stopped by The Sharper Image and asked for a shopping bag on his way over to the bank.

Mike’s comment about Comcast and chickens wandering in Keith’s yard reminded me about my former neighbors. When we first moved into our current home, we soon discovered that the neighbors bordering our back yard owned several chickens. During the summer when we left the windows open overnight, we would hear their rooster crowing first thing in the morning. Their chickens never made it into our yard, although their cats came through regularly. They were an interesting couple, living kind of like they were homesteaders on a mountain farm, with a rickety greenhouse, garden, and a yard full of debris, on an oversized lot in the middle of Old Palo Alto. They sold a few years ago, at the moment there’s a brand new house going up, the chickens are long gone but we have had random construction work going on for a while.

We also have Comcast here.  I still use PacBell (now AT&T) DSL for the office network, but the house network uses the cable modem service. The download speeds are higher, but it does go offline sometimes, making me reluctant to run my office on Comcast’s internet service. This is a great fit for the rest of our family which mostly surfs the web, watching online video, web pages, or chatting. The DSL service is relatively clunky (I have one of the first lines rolled out in Palo Alto) and slow, but the continuous uptime is similar to my Linux servers in the back of the closet, running for years with uninterrupted service.

Looking at this heatmap, Palo Alto and Stanford are apparently a little blue oasis of solvency in the map of real estate foreclosures, surrounded by a sea of red.

BarCamp returns to Palo Alto next weekend, this time as BarCampBlock.

Almost two years ago, a group of 6 San Francisco geeks in 7 days, using blogs, wikis and IRC slapped together a weekend conference with wifi, food and amazing presentations in Palo Alto, California. This was a different kind of conference, though. There were no superstar keynote speakers. There were no pre-programmed agendas. There was a brilliant agenda filled with content by and for the attendees. Everyone, including the sponsors, the organizers, the speakers and the audience were involved in making the event happen equally and were often one and the same. Over the weekend, more than 200 people showed up and people watched remotely from all over the world. This event was BarCamp.

Who should be there? Anyone working on a new startup that wants to get some great feedback. Anyone looking for talent. Anyone talented looking for work. Anyone looking to invest in brilliant new ideas. Anyone looking to find partners for their brilliant new ideas. Anyone who wants to practice a presentation s/he is working on. Anyone who has a passion for blogging, wikis, design, coding and the web in general. Everyone is welcome. Everyone is encouraged to present. It’s totally free and an excellent source of what is hot, new and upcoming.

Highly recommended if you’re in the area and have any interest whatsoever. The price is right, too. (Free, donations welcome.)

See also: Notes from BarCamp (the original one in 2005)

Happy New Year 2007 from Palo Alto, California.

I hate being skeptical about charitable solicitors, but I am.

This evening there was a solicitor with a table display of children’s toys on the sidewalk in front of the Long’s Pharmacy on Middlefield Road, next to a barrel marked for donation to Toys for Tots. In general, I like to make planned donations, and usually only make unplanned donations to people and causes that I know or are reasonably likely to be who they say they are. (Girl Scout cookies come to mind…)

For some reason, this evening I actually took the time to stop at this woman’s display and hear her pitch. The basic idea was that you buy one of her “pre-approved” toys and put them in the donation barrel at the end of the booth. The suggested items were around $20, and at the moment I didn’t recall hearing of Toys for Tots before (it turns out they’re legitimate, and well rated at Charity Navigator), so I asked if she had any credentials or anything else to vouch for her. She had a letter in a plastic sheet protector describing Toys for Tots, but said she didn’t have any ID and no one there would know who she was.

I was starting to vaguely recall something about Toys for Tots (it’s the toy drive run by the Marine Corps), and it seemed they would be better organized than that. The woman offered to call her supervisor and proceeded to dial a number on her cell phone, but no one answered on the other end.

At this point in the conversation I’m thinking I’ve already spent too much time on this and want to leave, but I get out a pen to write down the contact info on the letter in the sheet protector anyway. The woman I’ve been talking with doesn’t offer her name, but volunteers that she’s working for a company called Fifth Dimension Promotions, so I write that down as well, and departed without making a toy or cash donation. I told her I wasn’t comfortable making a $20 donation to someone I didn’t know with no plausible credentials, and suggested that she have Toys for Tots or her company provide her with something for future outings.

Later, digging around on Google, no such company turns up as “Fifth Dimension Promotions”, but “5th Dimension Promotionz” is apparently a multi-level marketer based in San Jose. They don’t appear to have their own web site, but show many listings on various job sites. They describe themselves:

5th Dimension Promotionz is the nation’s leading provider of promotional marketing and event marketing solutions. We work in conjunction with industry leaders in the fields of hospitality, sports, and charities. 5th Dimension Promotionz provides unique cross promotional strategies and product launch promotions. We provide staff to represent our clients at trade shows and sporting events for sampling and product demonstrations, as well as providing sales and marketing efforts throughout our communities.

So, in the worst case, we have a freelance charity promoter, selling toys at what appears to be a relatively high markup in the name of charity, and perhaps even reclaiming the items from the donation barrel at the end of the day so little to nothing ends up going to charity.

In the best case, we have a freelance charity promoter, selling somewhat overpriced toys and using most of the profit margin to pay for the booth staffer and downline MLM, with some additional toys going to Toys for Tots. The donors would have achieved more by giving directly to Toys for Tots, although the promoter is arguably providing a marketing and convenience service. I probably would have donated if I were confident that some of the money would end up in right hands.

Having looked up Toys for Tots on Charity Navigator, it looks like it’s well run, with 98% of funds going to programs rather than overhead. I’m not sure that they even have an affiliation with 5th Dimension Productionz, other than having some extra toys turn up at the end of the season.

I have mixed feelings about all this. In principle, I think most people would like to help others who ask. In practice, I’m reflexively distrustful of anyone claiming to work for a charity or political cause. I was puzzled by the woman and her booth this evening, and was curious enough to spend a few minutes checking it out. I started out feeling kind of bad that I didn’t trust her, and ended up feeling kind of bad that I was probably right. I suspect that 5th Dimension Productionz isn’t doing anything wrong, exactly. The woman staffing the booth is just doing her job, trying to work up the MLM ladder. But at best they’re misrepresenting or conflating their objectives and the Toys for Tots. At worst they’re preying on the goodwill and lack of curiosity of passers-by to separate them from their money in the name of a good cause.

This is why I usually stick with planned charitable donations, other than to people and causes I know.

If you would like to make a donation and be sure that it’s going to Toys for Tots, you can use their online form here.

If anyone knows more about 5th Dimension Promotionz and Toys for Tots or their other charity clients, feel free to comment below.

This week there was a guy from Comcast going door-to-door in our neighborhood, offering promotional rates on their triple play bundle (video, data, voice), and internet service in particular. In general, I’m enthusiastic about the future prospects for combined services from either the cable companies or the telcos, and the Comcast internet service is attractively priced at $19.99 for 6mbits down/384k up, so in theory we are a good prospect for this service.

Unfortunately, I’ve been on the verge of cancelling our Comcast service for months because of sporadic outages. I’m not totally thrilled with my relatively slow PacBell/SBC DSL service (1.5mbits down/384k up), but other than widespread outages due to flooding or power interruptions, it has been quite stable. In contrast, our cable TV service went out for a week last year, and I have observed outages lasting anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or more every month or so since then. I can live without CNBC or Disney Channel, but things can rapidly grind to a halt here without internet service.

The Palo Alto fiber loop passes just a block from here. I should see if it’s gotten any easier and cheaper to set up a connection. The Palo Alto Fiber-to-the-home project seems to be perpetually stalled, but the bandwidth business has been coming back over the past few years. There are enough wireless LANs visible from here, I could probably set up a mini-ISP or bandwidth co-op for the whole neighborhood.

At the end of the day, the main thing I want from an internet service provider is fast, stable performance at a reasonable price. $19.95 is a pretty good price, but Comcast hasn’t shown that it can keep basic video service running yet. Maybe later.

Update 01-21-2007: Ended up installing Comcast internet, but we’re still keeping the DSL service in place to run the office network. Internet video is a lot faster on the cable network, but it’s already been offline once.

Today is the first day of school in Palo Alto. It feels like we just started summer vacation, but it’s fun seeing everyone after the break. I’m always surprised by how much the kids grow in just a few weeks.

These guys have been shooting scenes for their movie at the house down the street for the past couple of days. I can see the lights from my home office on the second floor, and this evening we walked over to take a look.

Dan Engelhardt started making movies on his iMac as a seventh-grader in Menlo Park. Brad Leong put on a student film festival — which included his own work — when he was a junior at Palo Alto High.

This summer, these two precocious 20-year-olds are home from college to make their first full-length feature film, a coming-of-age movie they hope will be the next “American Graffiti.” It’s set in — where else? — Palo Alto.

A few days earlier they were around the corner over at a house on Bryant. Those scenes apparently involved hanging lots of toilet paper on the trees in the yard. They’ve gotten grants from Panavision, Kodak, and Apple, so they’re better equipped than the average videoblogging operation.

• SJ Mercury News 07-01-2006: Hometown filmmakers charm council
• Anchange Productions

Update 08-16-2006 20:09 PDT: They have a web site for the movie now, complete with blog. Here’s one of their photos of setting up at the house down the street earlier in the day the photo up top was taken.

I was out for dinner at Fukisushi in Palo Alto this evening, enjoying some excellent spider rolls and giant clam sushi. A few minutes after we were served, a young couple came in, perhaps meeting for a date after work. At first I noticed that the man had the same cell phone (a Nokia 6682) as my wife, as he took it out and set it on the table next to him. Then he took out a Motorola Razr, flipped it open, and set it on the table next to the Nokia. I’m thinking that this is somewhat geeky and he should be paying more attention to his attractive blonde companion, but he looks like an engineering or tech operations kind of guy, and this is Silicon Valley, so maybe he has a work phone for being on call and a personal phone. But then he pulls out yet another phone, flips it open and sets it down next to the other two, creating a sort of mini-console of cell phones on the table next to the sushi plates.

Now I’m confused. I can think of lots of reasons why someone might have two cell phones. I can’t think of any good reason to park three cell phones on the table while on a date, though.

I don’t think he actually used any of them, except to take a photo of his companion with the Nokia.

Personally, I’ve been cutting down on the hardware I carry for some time now. At one point a few years ago, I often carried two PDAs, two cell phones, and a pager. That didn’t last long. These days I try to stick with one phone, as small as practical.

This episode makes me laugh, because I’m more puzzled by this guy carting three phones around than him parking them on the table in the middle of his dinner date.

Busy day today. Went to the Palo Alto Chili Cookoff, the Redwood City Fair, and wrapped up by watching fireworks at Shoreline this evening.

In addition to a prize for Best Overall Chili, there is also an award for Best Decorated Booth, so there are usually some interesting ones.

Emily really liked the Starship 2000 ride which spins around and sticks everyone onto the walls, so we went on it twice.

Comcast just announced that they’re raising their monthly fee by around 7% starting in January:

The package price will rise by an average of $3.13 per month, or about $44.80 to $47.93. Prices vary depending on the community.

I already pay $49.61 per month (with tax) here in Palo Alto, so the new rate will be around $53 per month. The old rate seems too high for what little we watch in our household, and the new rate is worse.

“Comcast’s Bay Area market prices reflect increasing operating expenses,” said spokesman Andrew Johnson, “as well as investments that Comcast is making to improve the value of the service.” He cited improvements in customer service as well as more programming choices that have come through advances in technology and partnerships with new programming providers.

We haven’t noticed any service improvements, and had already been thinking about getting rid of the subscription. Last month our cable service went out for most of a week, and it didn’t really change our daily routine at all. Over the long weekend I also made some good progress on moving our DVDs and VHS videos onto the house server, so I had pretty much decided to reallocate something less than $600 per year to purchasing / buying video content and unplug the cable after December.

Another way to think of it is that for the same price, I can subscribe to Netflix, and also purchase 2 or 3 DVDs a month, and still end up ahead.

One sticking point is likely to be Emily’s cartoons on the weekends. Another is that nobody else in our household can get videos to play over the network reliably, which puts a big dent in the convenience factor.

In the meantime, the channel unbundling discussion seems to have come back to life at the FCC, although the a la carte services would probably be even more expensive.

Palo Alto AYSO Picture Day 2005.

This weekend was the Palo Alto Festival of the Arts.

Today was equipment pickup day for the Palo Alto girls AYSO soccer league. Big pile of soccer balls.

I spent the whole day this past Saturday at Barcamp, arriving at 10am and not making it all the way out the door until almost 1:30am. I didn’t know any of the organizers beforehand, so it was nice to be met by someone (who turned out to be Andy Smith) keeping an eye out for new arrivals.

I’ve been working with so many either geographically dispersed or very buttoned down corporate teams lately that it’s been a long time since I’d spent this much time in non-stop, face-to-face, somewhat random yet unpredictably creative conversations with a bunch of just-do-it tech hackers. Spent the entire time there going from one interesting presentation to another, with several interesting discussions thrown in along the way.

All the talks were informal and held in very close quarters, scheduled by signing up on the scheduling wall. In many ways, the strength and weakness of the Barcamp presentations was the short lead time for the event and the relative intimacy of the discussion spaces. This format put an emphasis on less structured presentations, by people who were comfortable enough with their topic that the slides weren’t the primary content. At the same time, having everyone literally elbow-to-elbow, sitting on the floor, an armslength or two away from the speakers, tends to eliminate random anonymous verbal potshots, and encourages actual conversational questions. Some of the presentations rapidly turned into something like topical roundtable discussions, which would have been hard to set up as such. (The Industry Darlings talk is a good example.)

Among my notes:

• Tom Conrad’s demo of the Pandora (formerly Savage Beast) music discovery and streaming service, which is based on the Music Genome Project. I’ve signed up for a trial account, which I’m listening to right now. It’s coming up with pretty good selections so far. More on this at TechCrunch. Looks like Scoble likes it too.
• Chris Messina gave a demo of the Flock browser, which extends the Mozilla platform to provide a lot of blogger- and social-software-friendly hooks. (review by Roland Tanglao here)
• Demo of Mobido, by Mike Prince. It’s a social photo sharing service for mobile camera phones, as well as e-mailed images. Among other things, it’s could be used for people to other people who attended an event during or after the fact if they’re using the service. The service also includes provisions for anonymizing contact info.
• Demo of a personal phone management system (forgot the name) by Brad Templeton. The general idea is to allow people to advertise their availability for making or receiving calls, and having the system set up calls when both parties are actually available, rather than having them play phone tag. The system is built on Asterisk, and uses Caller ID to invoke its rules, which may have some future problems based on…
• Jake Appelbaum’s demo of phone insecurity and other security hacking, in which he walked us through the social engineering and general weaknesses in most cell phone systems, Paris Hilton’s Sidekick, and US airline security, and also demonstrated the Asterisk hack for Caller ID spoofing, which makes your calls appear to come from anyone you choose.
• Nicholas Chim demoed The Personal Bee, an aggregator for building your own version of something like Google News. It appears to scan a collection of feeds to assign weights to “interesting” keywords, which it uses to build the page. More on this at TechCrunch.
• Riana Pfeffercorn’s on buying and writing ads for search engine, and Google Adsense specifically, with a few bonus tips on Yahoo Paid Inclusion by Beau Lebens
• Caught pieces of discussions on making AJAX-y applications faster, KaPing Yee’s presentation on improving web security (anti-phishing), a discussion on how to visualize the effects of social behavior to help save the world (resource consumption)
• Other conversations with Bill Lazar, Ross Mayfield, Kevin Burton, Brendon Wilson, Rashmi Sinha, Wolfgang Zeglovitz, and many others.
• Ran into a couple of other Koreans there: Eugene Eric Kim, and Min Jung Kim. Pleased to meet you.

Although there’s a constant background question of “how do you make money doing this”, the basic feel of the weekend was about sharing interesting ideas and work in progress with other people interested in making something new and better. These days, that attitude may be a bit old school, but it could be the cure for what ails Silicon Valley. And there’s apparently interest in organizing similar events elsewhere.

Lots of appreciation goes to Andy, Chris, Eris, Ryan, Ross, and all the Barcamp organizers, sponsors, and other contributors!

Update 08-27-2005 00:05 – Barcamp – The Video

It’s been a month or so since I filled up the tank, and we seem to be on our way toward European gas prices. A completely dry tank is a little more than 24 gallons, so the price of gasoline will have to hit $4.17 or so before cracking the $100 mark for a full tank. This week’s price at the local Arco is $2.92, so there’s still another 43% increase before that happens.

Our household is relatively insensitive to the changes in fuel prices, since we drive so little, but people who commute from places like Pleasanton, Modesto, or Los Banos into the Bay Area have got to be feeling like there’s a hole in their wallet.

On the positive side, if fuel prices stay high, it’s going to help alternative transportation and energy systems become economically viable.

See also: $62.25 to fill the tank

This week is the start of the Palo Alto school year. It’s earlier than usual this year, which makes for an abrupt transition from summer mode into school schedules. I always enjoy seeing how much the kids have grown over the summer, the flag ceremony, and the parents’ welcome coffee.

I had an excellent weekend at Barcamp. I’ll write a proper summary later, but wanted to say congratulations and thanks to the organizers, sponsors, and volunteers for putting together an outstanding, fun, and friendly event.

Flickr photos for barcamp or barcamp05

Update 08-26-2005 23:56 – My notes from Barcamp, and a pointer to Dorian Porter’s excellent video.

This object turned up at the corner of Page Mill and El Camino this weekend. It’s in the empty lot which belongs to Stanford, but which is being turned into playing fields for soccer.

At first glance I thought they might be building a sundial, but it’s pointed roughly west, which wouldn’t make the most sense.

Update 2005-08-05 14:50:26 – Article in the Palo Alto Weekly – it’s a prototype of a sculpture being built by Fletcher Benton.

Benton, 74, starts with three simple design elements, such as a broken circle, a ball and a base plate. Then he plays with the small pieces like a kid playing with Legos — moving them around, adding new ones, taking ones away.

Benton is frequently trying to create a dynamic image, often placing the largest shape at a severe angle. But just as important to him is the “empty space” around the images.

“The hole in the donut,” he said, “is just as important as the donut.”

Despite getting most of my news through the internet these days, I still get daily paper editions of the San Jose Mercury and the Wall Street Journal, plus Barrons on the weekend. At a get-together this past weekend, one of my neighbors who works at the Mercury took an informal poll to see who was reading newspapers versus online news sources. As might be expected in Palo Alto, a lot of people have mostly moved to online news aggregators. A few thoughts:

Some reasons I still get a print subscription:

• Habit: I like to read the paper with my breakfast and coffee, and don’t like having the notebook on the kitchen table while I’m eating.
• Faster scanning: part of the survivable value-added of news organizations is to assemble items that are interesting and/or relevant (“here, look at this”). I can make a quick scan of current news in the Mercury and WSJ faster than going through selected Bloglines subscriptions or Google News.
• Editorial and opinion pages. No shortage of commentary and opinion online, but syndicated writers usually don’t turn up online right away if at all, and in the paper they’re conveniently assembled onto a couple of pages.
• Overview of local issues in the Bay Area. It’s hard (not impossible) to generate a quick view of local news and feature articles; services like topix.net can generate local feeds, but they’re not great.
• Longer analysis and context for recent and upcoming news and events.
• Calendar of local events and activities. This is good for when you don’t know what you want to do. Once you are looking for something specific, online is much better (e.g. movie times, concert tickets, etc).
• I like looking through the full-page Fry’s Electronics ads in the Mercury. The weekly real estate section in the WSJ is often entertaining as well.
• Comics are easier and faster to read in the paper. However, there are a lot more choices online.
• They’re portable and don’t require batteries for a quick look while travelling.
• We never need to buy rubber bands.

I rarely if ever look at these sections:

• Financial quotes. If I want to know right now, I look online. If I’m researching, I want more info, which is also online. I still look through the weekly and quarterly summaries in Barrons, though.
• Sports section. I subscribe to RSS feeds on the Red Sox and anything else I’m following.
• Classified ads. Have pretty much moved to Craigslist, eBay, and other online services.

The future role of news organizations:

• Citizen-journalists, and just bloggers on the ground, are churning out vast quantities of raw content, with a wide range in quality and veracity. Along with the traditional role of putting reporters on the ground, taking notes, and asking questions, news organizations could help filter and highlight “user-contributed” news items along with commercial and advocacy-oriented news feeds, placing them in context with “professional media” news items. For breaking large-scale news, such as the London bombings last week, they can scan the raw data and build a composite picture of what’s going on. They can also clarify what’s unknown, what hasn’t been asked, to help influence the actions of people on the scene.
• I find that as I’ve been introducing people to news aggregators, I usually set them up with a “starter” set so it makes some sense, sort of like building a custom mini-newspaper of feeds I think they might find interesting. It would probably make sense for newspapers to start publishing collections of feeds in OPML or something similar, along with the RSS feeds that they’re starting to provide. This would make it easier for people to “subscribe” to the newspaper, and get an overall view of what the newspaper’s editors think is interesting, which is probably a better starting point for the average person than what they get now (usually nothing).