Coyote Blog

I really hate voice mail.  It's like reverting back to the bad old days when data was stored on tapes and you had to spool through the whole thing to get what you want.  If you have 8 or 10 voice mails, there is no way to scan them to find the most important, you have to listen to them in order.  And how many times have you listened for five minutes to someone rambling on, waiting forever for them to get to the point or just give you their freaking phone number so you can call back.

So I am excited to try this service called SimulScribe.  Right now, it appears set up mostly for mobile phones, but I have an email into them about land lines.  Basically, you forward you phone to them when you don't pick up, and they record the message from the caller and then transcribe the message and send it to you by email or text messaging.  According to PC Magazine, it works pretty well.

At the risk of being way to geeky here, I would like to ask the computer world if they could find some way for me to have a RAID disk drive array on my custom built PC's without having to also buy and install a floppy disk drive that I only use once.  For those who don't know, a RAID is an array of multiple, usually identical, hard drives that can be combined together for redundancy.  For example, two 250GB hard drives can be combined in a RAID such that they appear to be one 250GB drive to the system, but all data is mirrored on both drives, so if one fails, you still have everything, even without making backups.  I usually build RAIDs into my computers, either for redundancy or, if that is not needed, at least to combine multiple drives into one drive letter.  You can even build a raid where all files are split between the two drives, which is a reliability problem but makes for wicked fast drive access (kind of like splitting calculations between two CPUs)

Unfortunately, on most motherboards, the only way to install the RAID drivers if I want to install Windows onto the RAID is to load them with an old 3-1/2 inch floppy.  Which means I usually install a floppy drive on every build -- OK, its only $20 or so, but it still seems like a waste.   On my own computers, I just have one redundant floppy I pass around, but when I build for others, I don't want to leave them hanging if they have to reinstall the OS. 

I would think that this should be doable via a USB key, but I have never tried it.  Anyone out there know a better way?

</geekiness>  OK, I will now return to economics and business.

TJIC has a great link to a new law blog called CopyOwner focused no free speech issues.  CopyOwner observes that Culver City, California appears to be emulating the Chinese Internet model, providing access for free, but only if you accept state censoring:

First, they offer Internet access, but you must agree to "limited"
Internet access. And they don't mean limited hours of the day, limited
locations, or a limited amount of time you can be on. No, when they say
"limited," they mean that they will censor access to parts of the
Internet. ("By using this free wireless network you are agreeing and
acknowledging you have read and accepted these terms and conditions of
use, and this wireless network provides only limited access to the
Internet.") In other words, they do not offer Internet access at all....

Second, in order to gain the right to enjoy
this free, public, non-Internet access, no matter what you read in the
Bill of Rights (and the First Amendment, in particular) you must agree
that the government may abridge your freedom of speech and you further
agree that when it does so (as it promises to do), you will not
exercise your right to sue for the violation of your First Amendment
rights!

I'm not making this up. Here's the fine print:
"Further, [by using it] you are agreeing to waive any claims,
including, but not limited to First Amendment claims, that may arise
from the City and Agency's decision to block access to "¦ matter and
websites [of its choosing] through this free wireless network "¦."

From
a legal standpoint, it is the same as if the Culver City public library
were offering you free access to newspapers, but was first clipping out
the articles it didn't like and making you agree not to sue for
censorship if you wanted to read what was left.

My thought at first was that this was a liability response, but my sense is that the courts have been pretty consistent in protecting ISPs when plaintiff lawyers try to drag them in as deep pockets into lawsuits  (e.g. trying to sue Earthlink because it was the medium for delivering a MySpace page which in turn allegedly facilitated some action someone is suing over).  I am left with the sense that this is just politicians trying to protect themselves from criticism.  I am almost tempted to see how this thing plays out - censorship really gets ugly in a democratic environment.  You end up with a million interest groups all lobbying that they know best what should be censored.  You would have people in the town office arguing for censorship of pornography, religion (both pro and con), evolution (pro and con), nazis, Israel, global warming skepticism.  Whatever.  (By the way, I have seen people arguing in some context for censoring every item in the preceding list)

I am really reluctant to post stuff like this without some independent vetting, because so many groups out there will distort reality into pretzels.  That being said, anyone know if this is accurate?  Or maybe point us all to a better source and/or debunking in the comments?

    "Section 220 of S. 1, the lobbying reform bill currently before the Senate, would require grassroots causes, even bloggers, who communicate to 500 or more members of the public on policy matters, to register and report quarterly to Congress the same as the big K Street lobbyists. Section 220 would amend existing lobbying reporting law by creating the most expansive intrusion on First Amendment rights ever. For the first time in history, critics of Congress will need to register and report with Congress itself.

    "The bill would require reporting of 'paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying,' but defines 'paid' merely as communications to 500 or more members of the public, with no other qualifiers.

    "On January 9, the Senate passed Amendment 7 to S. 1, to create criminal penalties, including up to one year in jail, if someone 'knowingly and willingly fails to file or report.'

Mark Tapscott covered this issue here, but I am still not sure I have an accurate read on all this.

Update:  See comments.  As I feared, the above may distort the issue.  Brandon Berg thinks the law kicks in when you communicate to 500 or more members of the public on policy matters and get them to contact Congress.  It is not at all clear why I should have to register to perform such an activity, but this is narrower than implied in the press release above.

Update #2:  I am becomming increasingly convinced that Lieberman and McCain are the same guy.  Even down to their desire to protect incumbent politicians from political speech.

Update #3:  Jacob Sullum is also skeptical that the law is really as broad as advertised above.

I am now past a saturation point on the number of feeds I have in my Google Reader account.  It has gotten to the point that managing the queue has become a chore rather than a pleasure.  Unfortunately, I seldom go more than a couple days before any one feed provides me with an article I would have been sorry to miss.

So, here is my request:  Some of you bloggers need to start sucking soon so I can pare down my reading list.

This is a cool site for flight tracking.  It is better than other sites I have tried because it also allows tracking of private tail numbers (follow your CEO's jet! -- not really, most private owners block their tail number from tracking) and it has a cool real-time view around airports.  Here is O'Hare.  Hat Tip:  Tom Kirkendall

Apparently, the French government is planning to sink a couple of Billion euros into a risky new technology called an "internet search engine." (via hit and run)

Germany and France had initially discussed plans to commit €1 billion
to €2 billion, or $1.3 billion to $2.6 billion, over five years to
Quaero. The project was to have been paid for by the French and German
governments, with contributions from technology companies like Thomson
and France Télécom on the west side of the Rhine, and Siemens and
Deutsche Telekom to the east.

In related news, the French government also announced a massive technology development effort to invent some kind of round thing for cars to roll around on.

Yes, I know that the blogosphere needs another award like Washington needs another lobbyist.  But for a while now I have wanted to create an award aimed solely at blog aesthetics.  What I am shooting for is an award that pays no attention to content, that has as much to do with the blog's reasoned arguments as the Miss Hawaiian Tropic Bikini competition has to do with mental agility.  In a world where 1,998,000 out of 2,000,000 blogs are butt-ugly Blogger template jobs with all the charm of a Wal-Mart at 3AM, I would like to reward real creativity. 

What I want to do is take your nominations in the comments of this post. Please post links to the blog websites you think have the nicest visual style.  I will choose six or eight I like the best, and put them up for a vote.  Just to give you an idea, here are a couple I have viewed in the last few hours that I think are attractive in some way.  This blog has a pleasing layout.  And this blog has a gorgeous header image, though the rest of the layout does not do much for me.  Ironically, this blog layout has never done much for me, either, and this site always makes me want to poke my eyeballs out.  But you may disagree.  Again, please ignore content -- the last thing I need here is some left-right flamefest.

As a second competition, because everyone seems to like the flameouts more than the successes (just look at the popularity of the American Idol episodes where they show the total losers) I will also accept nominations for the worst blog look and feel.  Is there a blog out there you think has a "face made for RSS"?  You can nominate it too!

I have removed some code from the site that was really slowing down load times.  Hopefully those of you who are not reading CB via RSS reader will find the site responds a lot faster.

No blogging, just lots of overstimulated children.  Be back soon.

Dear Hewlett-Packard:

I have a quick question.  Why is it you cannot design a paper handler on your printers that will reliably handle your own paper?  I am using HP photo paper, and about every sixth copy I will have two pages stick together in the paper feed, resulting in an off-center image and wasted paper and ink.  Oh.  I think I just answered by own question.

Coyote

I guess it's become de riguer to take a shot at Joseph Rago's editorial in the WSJ the other day, saying in part:

Some critics reproach the blogs
for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs,
they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren't much
rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem
with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful.
Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.

Every conceivable belief is on the
scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone
of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly
brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are
eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its
conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in
pronouncement than persuasion . . .

I haven't really posted on this editorial any more than I have posted on the commercials I hear every day for FM radio telling me how bad satellite radio is, and how much I should enjoy hearing 15 minutes of commercials an hour rather than paying $30 a month in fees.  There is a consistent human behavior which tends not just to be threatened but to be outraged by upstart competitors.  Remember this story on the milk cartel  -- entrenched interests are flabbergasted that anyone would even attempt to compete with them in a new way.  New competitors are not just bad and unworthy, they are portrayed as threatening all the good things that already exist.

Now that I am started, though, here are a few other random thoughts:

• It is inappropriate to compare single blogs to individual newspapers.  The WSJ has hundreds of reporters, while most blogs have one.  In making such a comparison, one is comparing a brain on one hand with a single brain cell on the other.  Blogs have much of their value as a network or swarm, in how the individual "cells" interact with each other and complement each other.  We might read one or two iterations of the daily fishwrap each day, but I read at least 30 blogs, all aggregated together for me in a convenient form by Google Reader.  And these thirty are augmented by links that I follow to as many as a hundred other blogs each week to learn more about individual issues.
• I don't particularly disagree with this statement:

The blogs are not as significant
as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism
requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital
age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead,
they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks,
picking at the scraps.

Few bloggers would disagree with this view that we depend on the reporting of the MSM for a starting point of much of what we do.  However, I would probably argue that some of the scraps we are picking up are larger than Rago would concede.  By the way, if you leave out a few papers like the NY Times, I could make the same accusation against 99% of the papers in this country, arguing that they are riding on the backs of the wire services, only doing a small percentage of their own reporting.  What's the difference?

• One of the reasons there are so many scraps left for us blogger-remoras is that newspapers load up on people whose education and entire professional career is in writing and journalism, rather than in economics or business or law or science whatever they are writing about.  You can just see the institutional hubris in Rago's complaint quoted above about the quality of the prose and the humor, longing for real journalists who can use logorrheic and solipsistic in the same sentence (not to mention four commas, five semi-colons, one colon, and one set of ellipses).   So while newspapers load up on journalism and English majors who write lovely and witty prose, blogs are written by leading economists, legal practitioners and professors, successful business people, technology experts of every stripe, etc. etc.  No newspaper, for example, has even one tenth the economic firepower the combination of Cafe Hayek, Marginal Revolution, the Knowledge Problem, and the Mises Blog, among many others, bring to my desktop.  Ditto for Volokh / Scotusblog / Instapundit / Overlawyered / Tom Kirkendall on legal issues. [Update:  Oh, and a lot of those other bloggers are, uh, journalists]
• One of the mistakes newspaper-types make in comparing newspapers to blogs is that they compare the reality of blogs with the ideals of newspapers, particularly on things like sourcing and fact-checking.  However, it's becoming clear that this comparison is increasingly unfair, because the reality of newspapers is diverging a fair amount from their ideals.  Of course, we all tend to fall short of our ideals.  But what is worrying about newspapers is that those who purport to be gaurdians and watchdogs of these ideals are increasingly becoming appologists for their violation.  How many times are we going to hear the "fake but accurate" response to blogger accusations of problems in MSM sourcing?
• I will concede that the Mr. Rago's employer the WSJ is one of the few newspapers that really understand how they create value, or at least are consistent in their value story and their pricing policy.  If, as Rago and others argue, it is the reportage that is of value and editorializing is just the remora, then shouldn't it be the reporting behind the firewall and the editorials out front?  This is how the WSJ does it, but for some odd reason the NY Times does it just the opposite:  They let everyone have access for free to the output of their uniquely large and talented reporter pool, but put the confused economic rantings of Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd behind a paid firewall.  Huh?

Note to readers:  This post is sticky through 12/15.  There are new posts just below this one!

Welcome!  This year we are in the blogs ranked 1751-2500.  Please cast your vote for Coyote Blog here.  You can vote once per day!  For those new to the site, here is some of what I do here:

Real-life small business experiences:  Buying a company;  Working with the Department of Labor; Case Studies on the Minimum Wage;  What's on my Desk Today;  Getting an SBA Loan

Economics:  The myth of Zero-sum Economics; 60 second refutation of socialism; Business Relocation and the Prisoners Dilemma; Technocrats, government and disasters; Advice for the Reality-Based Community;  Roosevelt's NRA: America's Flirtation with Fascism; the Trade Deficit is not a Debt; A Challenge to Lou Dobbs;  In Praise of Robber Barons

Libertarian political commentary:  Respecting individual decision-making, The real implications of a Privacy Right, Technocrats get their comeuppance, A defense of Open Immigration, New Alien and Sedition laws, Conservatives, let your enemy speak, Liberals, let your enemy speak(and here), Iraq war, The Kelo decision,  

Climate Science:  The skeptical middle ground on warming; A skeptics guide to An Inconvenient Truth

Frustration with runaway torts:  Jackpot Litigation; Coyote vs. ACME

Camping (my business):  New American nomads;  This RV is just wrong

Attempts at humor: How to spot a dictatorship; Coyote's Law;  Making fun of the UN and the Internet;

Sports: The Baseball Closer Role is Nuts; I hate penalty kicks; Pre-season college football rankings are the most important

ACME Products:  Instant Girl; Ultimatum Gun; Earthquake Pills

How I Married Well:  My Wife, the Fashion Diva;  My Wife's Fashion Awards (and here)

Oh, and I promote my new novel, BMOC, a little bit.

Enjoy.

The 2006 Weblog Awards continue -- this year we are in the blogs ranked 1751-2500.  Please cast your vote for Coyote Blog here.  Remember that you can vote once per day! 

I saw this site described as the YouTube for Data.  It will be interesting over time to see if the data sets uploaded to this site are trustworthy, but its a cool idea.  I tried my hand at uploading some data.  I am not sure why the graph is showing those spikes - they don't exist in the data.

Update: I figured out my mistake and my better chart is here.

I still think the inline spell check is worth the price of admission, but there is a flaw I have found in the new Firefox 2.0.  The close tab icon is now on the tab itself, and it is very easy when changing tabs to hit this icon and actually close the tab by mistake.  This needs to be fixed.

Update:  OK, not a flaw, just a configuration setting to be changed.  See comments.  I really love Firefox.

Update #2:  I had horrible loading times in Google reader with the new Firefox.  I am pretty sure it is the browser pre-fetch function, which attempts to pre-load pages linked by the page you are calling up, in case you click on the links.  I recommend you turn it to false.  Once I did so, Reader popped right up.  By the way, I am very much happier with the tweaked version of the new Google reader -- they fixed many of my concerns.

Come and get it.

Update:  First impression, the inline spell checker alone is worth the upgrade.

I apologize to my feed subscribers - some of you got spammed with two or three copies of some of the same old posts.  Oops.  I had to fix up my XML to get it to work right with FeedBurner and every time I republished I think I was sending out new feeds of the same posts.

Anyway, I think we are done, though there still seems to be some oddball stuff happening with the old RDF feed.  If you are having problems, you may change your feed source to Coyote Blog to this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CoyoteBlog

You don't have to switch -- the old feed sources will still work if they are operating OK for you.  Also, I hopefully got the auto-detect code right on the page, so that just putting in www.coyoteblog.com in most modern feed readers will cause the reader to auto-detect the correct feed.  Again, though, don't hesitate to comment or email with issues.

Tonight, I decided to switch to Feedburner to manage the feeds from my site.  I did this for two reasons:  1) I would like better traffic information on the readership for my feeds and 2) I like some of the configuration options they have.

Both Feedburner and Typepad swear that they have everything set up so that all my existing feed subscribers will now get the feeds via Feedburner without changing their subscriptions (some sort of redirect, I guess).  We'll see.  Please comment if you are having problems.

If you are getting some duplication of posts or some read posts showing up as unread, I am pretty sure that this is a one-time effect of the changeover.  However, if the problem persists, let me know.

I have tried a bit of everything to grow my blog:  participating in carnivals, signing up for contests, spamming Glenn Reynolds for attention (sorry Glenn).  Here is the lesson I have learned:  You have just got to write a lot.  Other bloggers will notice you and start linking back to you when you write about them.  Walter Olson at Overlawyered has had me guest blog a couple of times, and I don't think I ever emailed him once.  I linked to a lot of his posts, adding my commentary, and he eventually noticed.  Ditto some of the folks at Cafe Hayek, at Reason, and at the Knowledge Problem.  In turn, I have discovered great blogs like Maggies Farm and Catallarchy from my traffic logs.  Write a lot on your blog, and comment on other people's blogs, if you really have energy to burn, and the traffic will show up.  Search engine traffic alone will bring new readers, and the more you post, the more different searches will find you (though some are a bit bizarre).

As a sort of reverse proof of this, here is my traffic profile for the last year.  Nothing spectacular, I am just a small blog, but you can see what happened to traffic when my posting went way down over the summer.  I have in turn been burning up the keyboard in September, and I hit a new traffic high.

Update: Trackbacks used to be a great way to tell folks that you were commenting on a particular post.  Unfortunately, spam has pretty much killed them at most sites, including this one. 

I really don't understand the good reputation that Apple enjoys as the sort of anti-Microsoft.  iTunes and Quicktime are by far the most irritating and buggy programs that reside on my PC.  Quicktime spams my screen about 20 times a day with a request to check for updates, most of the time returning an error or "the server is down" when I click OK.  iTunes has just hung up yet again during an installation.  That makes something like three versions in a row that has done that.  When iTunes encounters a problem in installation, it leaves one's computer in this weird limbo where the installer refuses to run, saying that an installation is already in progress, but iTunes won't run either.  I remember being in this limbo before, but I can't remember how I got out of it.

Over the last several weeks, I have fallen in love with the Google feed reader.  It is simple to use, and perfectly matches the way I want to work.  It was as if someone smart at Google ignored all the competitive readers out there and said "how should a reader be built"

Today, Google introduced a new interface which I hate, and said it would soon discontinue the old user interface I loved.  Basically, they threw out the old, simple interface (which was so Google-ish) and replaced it with a Bloglines/FeedDemon/etc. clone.  This new version looks as if a new programmer never read a feed in his life but just went out and tried to copy existing products.  Those of you who like the way bloglines works but would rather a Google branded version will be happy.  Many of us who loved the old version are angry.

I may be reading too much into this, but it seems like a small but definite step in the Microsoftization of Google, replacing simple intuitive software with bloated feature-packed messes.

Update:  Here is how I would describe the difference between the interfaces:  For those who read feeds once and then never come back to them, like reading the paper in the morning then throwing it out, the old interface was perfect.  Those who read feeds more like email, where they read it once but then want to be able to find it again later, or who read non-sequentially, jumping to certain feeds they consider more important than others, will like the new interface much better.  That's why the new interface looks a lot more like the Google email client.  My only disapointment is that there are LOTS of products servicing this latter market, and the old interface was the only product I have found to service the former.

I begin by assuming the answer to the following is "no."  However, just in case, here is my question:  A number of spammers seem to be using my email address as their "reply-to" return address on the spams they are sending out.  Unfortunately, this is all-too-easy to do.  Note, they are not using my account, but just entering my address in the from and reply-to lines (something even I know how to do) on an email sent from one of their accounts.  My question is:  Is there anyway to keep a third party from using your email address in this way?

Fortunately, a couple of layers of filtering (google, then a bayesian
filter) seem to have at least halted the growth of spam in my box and
perhaps even rolled it back a little.  By the way, I still stand by my solution to spam, which is to charge 0.1 cents per email.  Normal eavy users who might send 30-100 emails a day would pay 3-10 cents a day, ie nothing.  Spammers who send 10 million emails would be charged $10,000 for each mass mailing.   

There is nothing bloggers enjoy more than ranking themselves. Brian Gongol issues the latest rankings, this time of Business and Economics blogs.  Coyote Blog actually makes the rankings, with between 8-9% of the traffic of the leader Marginal Revolution (which is a great site).  Gongol uses a newspaper analog to say that if Marginal Revolution is USA Today, I am the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.  Uh, OK. 

Maybe someone can set up trade futures on business blog rankings.  If that were to happen, you know what Marginal Revolution would title the post....

By the way, he leaves off two of my favorites, probably because they are not in the NZ Bear data base:  Cafe Hayek and Mises Blog.

I am playing around with the new Google feed reader, and it has its good and bad points, but its not bad and the price is right (free).  The coolest part is being able to star your favorite posts and have them show up in a box on your own blog -- you can see it on this site a ways down on the right.  I still can't get the colors and font right, but it is still a beta.