Coyote Blog

My column this week at Forbes.com is on my business's experience with Facebook and what it might mean for Facebook's valuation.  An excerpt:

And woe be to he who actually develops for the platform, because he may soon find out that it all became wasted effort at the next over-caffeinated random user interface change.  I just did a tiny, minor bit of coding (less than a few hours) that takes my page administrators’ status updates and posts them as a news feed on our main web site.  I could do more interesting things, but I have absolutely no confidence that whatever hooks I take advantage of into the Facebook system will still be supported tomorrow.

Now, one could easily argue that this is all fixable.  And it is.  Some simple steps might include:

• Create an internal advocacy group for enterprise users.
• Stabilize the user interface.  Communicate a long-term plan and revision history to enterprise users.
• As in other publishing engines, allow multiple levels of editorial rights for pages (today there is just one choice: administrator)
• Allow more control of page layouts, perhaps in conjunction with a paid model, up to and including ability to eliminate ads and the patented Facebook clutter.

Over time, however, I have lost confidence that Facebook culturally is up to the task.  No, that’s not quite right.  I have lost confidence that Facebook evenwants to take on the task.  In Facebook, pages were meant for fans who wanted to create homages to their favorite band.  My gut feels is that the Facebook culture can’t get past the notion that corporations are “icky” and have hijacked the pages for crass commercial purposes.  Perhaps I am overly pessimistic, but all the Facebook changes I have observed over the last two years have actually taken the platform backwards as far as my business needs are concerned.

By an accident of both finances and previously hitting the technology sweet spot at just the right time, I have not built a computer in several years.  In anticipation of doing some upgrades on my home PC, I started by buying a new case.  Wow!  This is absolutely the best case I have ever had.  I am not sure this is so much the particular case I picked but the evolution of case design in the past few years.  Either way, its awesome.

Just the small step of turning hard drives 90 degrees so their wiring does not conflict with the graphic cards (and they are much easier to slide in and out without removing the expansion cards) makes a huge difference.   This is great, since I am constantly swapping drives in and out (for example I am trying to teach myself Linux/Ubuntu so I have added a dedicated drive and dual boot to the system for that purpose).  In addition, this case, as does many new cases, has a wiring management system the puts all the wiring in a back compartment accessible by a separate panel.  Look how neat everything is:

There is also a hole in the floor of the case, covered by the back door, that allows access to the back of the CPU.  This allows changing the CPU fan without taking out the motherboard, which I took advantage of after I somehow damaged the old CPU fan cleaning it in the case swap.  As you can see it has tons of space, including plenty of room for one of the mile-long graphics cards they are selling nowadays.  Other nice features are a hard drive hot dock and big huge quiet fans with a three-position fan speed control.  The only downside is that there are no front cutouts for 3-1/2 inch drives, but I don't have any so that was not a problem.

This case is expensive - $160 after rebate, but it's the first case I can say that this may be the last case I buy.  It's a Corsair Obsidian Series 650D and I highly recommend it.

I installed one of these beauties over the weekend.  It was easy to install, and has a beautiful user interface that blows every other programmable thermostat away.  And I can change it via a web interface, which is handy if I forgot to change it before I left town.

It remains to be seen if it actually saves money.   It is a very satisfying piece of gear, though.   It has that Apple kind of industrial design, which is unsurprising since it was designed by ex-Apple folks.  It is currently in its learning mode where it learns where we like to set it at different times and days of the week.   Maybe these guys can turn their attention to lawn sprinkler controls next, as that is another industrial design / user interface nightmare.

Here is my business problem:

On the positive side for Facebook, it is the only platform we have tried, from static web pages to blogs to Google to whatever, where we really get a good real-time interaction going with our campground customers.  Its an easy platform for them to ask questions, provide feedback, and upload useful content about the campground (from pictures to reviews to videos).  Many of my older employees are flummoxed by even the simplest computer tasks (I have had folks it has taken days of effort to teach how to get into their corporate Gmail account) but it is relatively easy to learn how to add an update or answer a query on a Facebook page  (and by "page" I mean the corporate or business pages like this one here:  http://www.facebook.com/RockCreekCanyon, not one's individual page).

But here is the problem:  The Facebook staff changes FB's layout and user interface faster than a sugar-overloaded ADD 7-year-old gets tired of a new toy.  I swear they have no reason for some of the changes other than "we're kind of bored with the user interface staying the same more than 3 months and some junior guy coded this timeline thing so let's make him feel good and put it up".

The shifting user interface is a training nightmare for my non-computer savvy managers.  What used to be tabs across the top are now text links on the left.  The Page admin panel changes almost every time I log on.  And don't even get me started on the simply stupid dueling column format of the new pages, or the fact that useless information like number of people who liked the site in a given month take up enormous amounts of the timeline's real estate now.  Just look at the page I linked above.  For the first 2-3 scrolls, the right hand column is different data than the left column, but then suddenly it becomes an alternating home for data that at the top only showed up on the left.    I am told that I can now pin a status update to the top, which will be nice, but at the cost of losing the custom landing page we used to have.

And woe be to he who actually develops for the platform, because he may soon find out that it all became wasted effort at the next over-caffeinated random user interface change.  I just did a tiny, minor bit of coding (less than a few hours) that takes my page administrators' status updates and posts them as a news feed on our web site  (ie here for the FB page above).  I could do more interesting things but I have absolutely no confidence that, for example, the FB page RSS feed I used will still be supported tomorrow.

Not sure how one ranks blogs by traffic any more in the age of RSS feed readers - I can't remember the last time I actually visited a blog rather than just read its feed.  Never-the-less, Coyote Blog was ranked #71 among libertarian blogs.  I am not sure if that is good or bad.  Traffic here is usually pretty proportional to posting volume, so splitting my time with other blogs, Forbes, and my actual day job of late has probably caused traffic to fall.  I am happy enough with my little niche in the world, tends to get me about the right amount of speaking gigs and media appearances for the time I have available.

My flu from last week seems to have migrated to my chest.  Lots of coughing, fever, and right now I can hardly talk.  Yuk.

Went away for a few days with my wife and came down with some kind of flu thing everyone we know in Phoenix seems to have.  Temperature, sore throat, coughing, achy joints, headache but fortunately no barfing.  Without the vomiting, I can power through what I have to get done, its just not fun.

I am wondering if the CDC uses social media data to track disease outbreaks.  I have seem Twitter data showing dynamically when such and such event happened by geotagged Twitter traffic.  Be interesting to do that with all tweets with the word "sick".

I found this picture, c. 1961, in some old photos my parents took.  From the photos around it, it looks to have been taken on a driving tour of ante-bellum mansions in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Update:   Readers identified it as Longwood, an old mansion in Mississippi, which appears to have been fixed up since this was take.n

Not really sure what is going on, but you may get intermittent server errors.  These may clear with a page refresh but something is definitely broken.

My feed reader today had a series of oddly-related articles stacked right in a row.

First, I watched bits from the 1903 Princeton-Yale football game, the oldest surviving college football film  (apparently it is just barely old enough not to have Keith Jackson doing the play-by-play).  It is amazing how much more this looked like rugby than modern football.  The formations look just like rugby scrums except that the players are not locked together.  Note there are no huddles, just power scrum after power scrum.  Sort of like a missing link between the two games, and oddly less interesting than either.

I then was met with this post from Zero Hedge, discussing the current Greek bailouts in terms of a Nash Equilibrium, the game-theory concept developed by Princeton grad / professor John Nash (who was famously profiled in A Beautiful Mind).

It's not often I run into John Nash even once in a month, but two articles later I found this really interesting early letter, recently de-classified, from John Nash to the NSA, wherein he apparently anticipated many of the foundation of modern cryptography 10-20 years ahead of his time.

And its only a short walk from John Nash and cryptography to Alan Turing, and from Princeton to tiger stripes, so the next article I ran into was this one discussing a group of scientists who apparently have proved a Turing hypothesis for how tiger stripes (and other recurring patterns in animals) are formed.

Last year at a charity auction I was able to win, at a substantially discounted price, passes for a weight-loss program I would not normally be able to afford.  My daughter and I will be attending this weekend in Las Vegas.  I will post a report next week.

I will be on Fox Business Channel's Follow the Money, which airs at 8PM EST.  Not sure which part of the program I will be in.

Update: finished taping. I suppose it is good practice, but this 2 minute TV interview thing is really a difficult format for me. Producer said it was on 10est so check your local listings, as they say. Dont blink or you will miss me. I think my forbes column this week may be "what I should have said in Friday night."

Looks like I will be on Fox & Friends at 8:15 EST tomorrow (Wed) to discuss the State of the Union, and specifically the Obama administration and public vs. private investment.  That will make four national TV appearances and 4 entirely different topics (parks, minimum wage, electric car efficiency, and infrastructure investments).  I'm really honing a razor-sharp personal brand.

A new fashion and style blog for women over 40 featured my wife in their December profile.  Definitely the better half.

Instapundit reminded me -- this Snap Circuits toy is fantastic.  Easily the best electronics lab for kids out there.

Computer monitor privacy

Done with a large bid (pictured below, 42 notebooks!).  Now I can stop pursuing trivial tasks like putting food on the table and get back to blogging.

I will be on the Fox and Friends morning show tomorrow morning at about 8:50ET  (though of course these things are always subject to change right up to the last minute).  I will be talking Fisker Karma.

This will make the third time I have been on national TV -- one talking about park management, one talking about the minimum wage and this one talking about MPG calculations for electric cars.  At least I am not in a rut, though I think my pundit brand identification is probably confusing.

As a reminder, I do not moderate comments.  This means that the comments section is entirely an open forum and its contents do not necessarily reflect my opinion on anything.  Just because I leave a comment up does not mean I accept it in any way, since, just to repeat myself, I don't moderate comments.

Cafe Hayek has a nice post that reflects feelings on the subject I mostly agree with,

I am on the road for a week long trip combining business (visits to some parks the government wants us to manage), college interviews, and baseball camps (the latter two for my son).  I will end up staying in or driving through Virginia, W. Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

Radley Balko wins journalist of the year award. I used to say he was the best reporter on the web but he is one of the to reporters in the country in any medium. His work on police and prosecutorial abuse has been critical in an era when the media is generally in the tank for tough on crime overreach (eg love affair of press with sheriff Joe).

I have been an Amazon Prime customer for years, and have been very satisfied to get the free two-day shipping.    And they have always done a good job with this, and in the past I have had literally hundreds of shipments in a row arrive on time.

However, two of my last three orders have been late, and the last order, which should have been here on Thursday, still, two days later, has not arrived despite the fact the system says it was delivered June 23 at 12:54.

But it is actually fairly easy to figure out why the service has deteriorated.  On both these late orders, Amazon used the USPS to deliver the package.  That explains a lot.  The USPS has awful, unreliable service and has absolutely no package tracking capability.  Not only is it my package missing, but neither Amazon, myself, or the USPS have any way to find out where it is.

This is awful service.  I am not only a pretty high-volume customer, but I have paid an annual fee to get premium shipping -- and I can tell you that there is likely no one on Earth who considers the USPS a premium shipping option.  If they keep sending my 2-day packages snail mail, there will no longer be any point to being a prime member.  Maybe they will offer a super-prime membership sometime in the future that guarantees they will not use USPS (though I suppose I can get this now by clicking the one-day shipping button and paying the $3 or whatever it is extra).

This is a crass request but could two of you hit the facebook like button on the right side of my home page so I can get a better URL (it takes 25). Thanks.

Blogging from the road with my ipad2, which is perhaps the greatest piece of gear ever, especially now with my portable Bluetooth keyboard. And I don't really even like apple OS that much, but this is one awesome device. As a better kindle replacement alone it Is worth the price.

Google is doing some sort of consolidation of Google apps accounts with other Google accounts.  Apparently, in the process I lost almost all of my Google accounts.  This means I lost all my feeds in Google Reader and I somehow have to rebuild the list, which likely will delay blogging for a while.

Update:  I got it transferred, but it was a Kluge and all my starred posts I was saving to blog on are gone.  I will try to see if those are recoverable, but my sense is that they are not.

Update #2: OK, I was wrong.  I got all my starred items.  What I did was go into the old Google Reader account (it exists with a special temp ID) and set up the sharing to make my starred items public.  I then sent myself a link to those items, which I could then add as a feed to my new feed reader account.  So now my old starred items show up as a feed in my new reader.  I am sure the temp account will go away at some point, but I figure a way to preserve them or else at least blog on them before they are lost.

I have been unbelievably skeptical about the whole Facebook thing, but a ton of my outdoors customers love it.  So we have been setting up Facebook pages for all of our major sites, and have had some good response already in terms of customers sharing questions and experiences.

But I have been incredibly unimpressed with the Facebook interface and the (it seems to me, but I am over 19) haphazard organization.  But Kudos to the Facebook team, which appear to have revamped the interface where one might manage a number of fan pages.  In particular, for each page it now has a notifications link which immediately lets me know if there are comments to moderate or questions to answer.