With that said, I seem to be in the minority of people who are happy about this.

First, some background if you’re not familiar with the story. Rahm served as an advisor to President Clinton from 1993 to 1998 and was a Representative for one of Chicago’s districts in the House of Representatives since 2003 through 2008. He left that position to move up to serve as Obama’s Chief of Staff until October, when Richard Daley announced that he won’t be running for reelection. Clearly, this guy is a career politician… and I subscribe to the belief that anyone who has what it takes to rise to the ranks of power at the federal level, they have to compromise their integrity many times along the way. I believe in a smaller and simpler government and vastly prefer those running our government to not be beholden to those that helped them get elected or those that will abuse their power to try to force people to live in a certain way. I truly believe in freedom, but with that comes the responsibility that nobody is there to look out for you or take care of you when things don’t go well.

Now, I don’t know Rahm all that well… he might be a great guy… but the point of the residency requirement is to make sure that you’re aware of local issues. Yes, Rahm grew up around here, but he was clearly busy with federal issues and all of the politics that goes on in Washington D.C., and the most damning thing against him is that he turned his home in Illinois into a rental property. This means that he didn’t live there anymore. Congress isn’t a year-round job, and when they aren’t in session… those Senators and Representatives return home so that they can meet with their constituents and be aware of what’s going on in the area. As Chief of Staff, Rahm likely had a home in the Washington D.C. area and either remained in D.C. or traveled the world on White House business. The point is.. he didn’t have his ear to the ground here in Chicago.

So, after enduring Mayor Daley’s tyranny… the last thing I want to see is another big government guy from Washington D.C. come in and try his hand at running the Machine that Daley left behind. If I was able to vote for someone, I’d look for a local candidate who wants to dismantle much of that machine and return the City to focusing on eliminating waste and improving efficiencies. There are MANY issues I’d like to see the City focus on.. but I won’t get into them here. In my opinion, any fair minded individual should be able to hold the office and do a very good job.

I’m saying.. let’s give someone a chance.. and Rahm… if you are really dedicated to run this city… there’s another election in 4 years… take two years off.. then come back here and buy a house and you’ll be just fine for the next election. The last thing I’d want to see is a special exception made because he appears to be the most qualified person for the job (or is liked by the people or has raised the most money). Sure, its great… but we have rules for a reason. If you don’t like those rules.. change them (and they only apply to the NEXT election cycle… you can’t change the rules of the game during the game!). I mean… its like when California was in good shape a few years ago and the rumor was that Arnold wanted to run for President, but since he is not a natural born citizen, he’s not allowed to. At least he was talking about amending the constitution to change that requirement. But in hindsight… seeing what’s happened to California under his watch… It would be frightening to find out what would have happened to the country under his leadership.

Of course… this is going to go to the Illinois Supreme Court… knowing Illinois politics, I wouldn’t be surprised if they just push him through and put him on the ballot and right into the Mayor’s office. I at least will be watching this!

Today, I had at least one email sent from my gmail account to 50 of my contacts. Below is the email that I’ve sent out to them. Perhaps it will help remind us how to react to these sorts of things. The short version… Check what has access to your account and change your password!

And now… the email that I sent (which amusingly, bounced to about 20 of those 50 contacts):

Earlier today at least one mass email went out from my gmail account to a random sampling of 50 of my gmail contacts, containing a link to readytoview.co.cc. My apologies… I’ve been at home sick today and was asleep at the time, and many have emailed me letting me know my account has been compromised.

However, today I got an email from Amazon, warning me about this new Internet Sales Tax that has passed the Illinois Legislature and may be signed by the Governor within the next 90 days.

On the surface, it looks like a sure money maker for the State, however I think if its signed into law it will do far more harm then good!

First of all, a Supreme Court decision from 1992 establishes a precedent that State’s don’t have the authority to collect sales taxes from entities from outside the state unless they have a business presence within the state. That single case has been one of the few things protecting us from having to pay additional taxes to buy things online. Thank you Quill! (and they are headquarted less then 10 miles from my home!)

So, being an Amazon affiliate, I received notice that if this were to go into effect, Amazon will be forced to terminate their affiliate agreements with me. That Supreme Court decision states that affiliates acting on behalf of the company represents a business presence. So, the first problem with this bill is the fact that the single largest Internet retailer that would no doubt makes up a large portion of the estimated $153 million in new tax revenues (PDF). That report states that the “missing” $153M represents merely 2.2% of the Illinois General Fund Sales Tax collections. The fact is, the State of Illinois won’t collect a dime in taxes from Amazon as all they have to do is terminate their affiliate agreements with those that live in Illinois and they are no longer compelled to collect state income taxes.

Furthermore, while I don’t fare all that well as an Amazon affiliate, I’m sure that there are some people that derive a large portion of their income from affiliate programs. A quick search found that there are certainly people who do quite well with Internet Marketing. Also, there’s bound to be many people who rely on that income to make ends meet. But even if that income isn’t vital to their survival, any extra income for residents is a Good Thing™, not only for them, but also for local businesses and even the State!

Yes, that’s right, even the State benefits from Amazon affiliates earning money. Not only are the payments from Amazon considered taxable as regular Income, but when they spend that money within the state of Illinois, those transactions are also subject to sales taxes. Take away the amazon affiliate program, and there’s less money coming into the state to be taxed.

So, how is it that this tax bill was able to sail through the legislature, passing the House today with a 88-29-0 vote? You’re talking away income streams from Illinois residents (losing State Income Tax revenues as well as Sale Tax receipts when that money is spent) and causing additional hardships for Illinois residents that are likely already struggling. And for what? I only hope that our faithful public servants in Springfield have simply bought into the idea that they will be able to collect 6.25% on every Amazon sale to Illinois, but Amazon has shown their hand (and has done the same in many other states as well) in that they will merely terminate their affiliate program in Illinois and sidestep the tax completely.

Where does that leave Illinois? Still in serious financial trouble, with reduced income and sales tax receipts, and potentially pushing more Illinois residents to needing aid from the State as at least a portion of their income is being removed by this legislation.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that this is a net loss to the state. Am I missing something? If you agree with me that is really a silly idea, it can’t hurt to contact the Governor’s office and express your opinion!

I’d love to get some of the data they used to make these claims because they really seem outrageous and some cursory searching around on Comcast’s site to “learn more about xfinity” didn’t even mention any of these points.

More HD

Xfinity has over 3,000 HD choices. U-verse has only 254

First off.. 254 HD channels on U-Verse seems very high. Checked my channel lineup (easily accessible, not so much for comcast’s), went to the largest package and Chrome tells me that there are 289 “HD”‘s on the page. And there’s generally an HD in the channel abbreviation and in the description so each channel gets counted twice. So rough guess is 145 HD channels are available. I have a hard time believing that comcast even can offer 3000 channels.. let alone all of them in High Definition. Something definately isn’t right there.

Better HD^*

Xfinity has better HD picture quality than U-verse.

That sounds very subjective… but somehow it sounds fishy. Notice that “*” in the heading. Here’s the fine print from that page:

^*HD picture quality rating based on September though December 2008 study of the top HD channels by Frank N. Magid Associates.

A quick google search turns up magid.com with a suspicious sounding mission statement:

Our Mission

Frank N. Magid Associates, Inc. helps our clients become more profitable by solving their business problems and helping them take advantage of opportunities.

And their page on what they can offer the Cable and Satellite Distribution Industry is also fluffy and reeks of astroturf. I’d love to review how they reviewed and analysed HD picture quality.

Much faster Internet^**

Xfinity’s fastest Internet speeds are more than twice as fast as those of U-verse (50 Mbps vs. 24 Mbps).
And if you’re watching two HD shows at the same time and try to go online, U-verse’s fastest Internet speeds will not be reached.

Again with the asterisks… this refers to “Sand Cherry Associates” equally fluffy. Can’t argue with the 50Mbps to 24Mbps caps, but I wonder how often you actually get the full 50Mbps since you’re sharing your bandwidth with your neighbors. Also, the asterisks admit that the reduction in speed only applies to U-Verse speeds above 18Mbps, and that’s only when you need the bandwidth for HDTV or Phone. Personally, I’d rather see my internet slow down a bit then see my TV picture break up or phone calls interrupted.

More On Demand entertainment

Xfinity has 13,000 more On Demand choices than U-verse.

This one may not surprise me that much. AT&T’s On Demand offering always seems limited.. but I am not a big consumer of On Demand content… When I had Comcast, they had a better selection, but 13,000 more seems very outlandish to me.

The ability to stream multiple HD channels

With U-verse, only two HD channels can be streamed to one household at the same time.

Last I checked, two HD streams is multiple… as in.. more then one. But yeah, one DVR can record two HD shows at once, and two additional non-HD shows. Its never been an issue for me since I don’t record THAT much TV… and if I ever had to make a choice, chances are one of the shows is something like Seinfeld that I wouldn’t mind recording in Standard Definition because it wasn’t even recorded in HD!

The ability to pause any TV with a DVR box

With U-verse, only one TV showing live content can be paused at any time.

And finally… I only have one DVR box, but I find this limitation hard to believe. If I had 2 DVR boxes why can’t both pause live TV? I’ve never heard anyone complain of this.. is this really a problem for anyone?

In the 3-4 years I’ve had Comcast’s premiere offering.. I’ve never been impressed. Their systems are slow.. menus are cumbersome… and the service was unreliable. I’ve been a U-Verse customer for well over a year now and I’ve been happy with it!

Originally, Mobile access to the web was not as ubiquitous as it is today. Twitter existed as a website to be accessed from your computer, or you could link your cell phone number and use SMS to send text messages to Twitter. There were not many people on Twitter so you tended to follow your real life friends and would have device updates on. This feature is still available today, but with the exception of an important person that’s very low volume… most people will find the device update feature to be disruptive and find that mobile clients are far more effective at getting these notifications. There’s also an option to get your direct messages sent directly to your phone as well. I find that to be useful as I rarely get or send DMs and sometimes my phone won’t have data service but can receive SMS.

My Main Twitter Stream

With the onset and widespread adoption of Android (and I suppose I can give some credit to the iPhone as well), the SMS interface to twitter has largely faded away and has been replaced with mobile applications and desktop clients but I’ll save that for a later discussion on the Twitter API. Twitter’s major defining characteristic is the 140 character limit since SMS was designed to be the main interface. SMS messages are limited to 160 characters… leaving 20 characters for Twitter to include the username in the Tweet. I wonder how many people are not aware that and perceive it as an artificial limit.

Originally, you saw every single tweet from the people you follow. Originally where twitter currently asks “What’s happening?” was “What are you doing now?” and tweets were supposed to answer that question. Most people are confused at what you’re supposed to tweet and the original question led people to initially share what they were eating, bodily functions, or other minutia of our daily lives. Eventually the novelty wears off or they realize that people just don’t care about the details of their lives, but twitter is most useful when you share interesting things in your tweets.

Twitter’s first big splash was at South By Southwest, a technology oriented conference in Austin, Texas, when people could keep in touch with their friends and find out where friends were meeting for food or drinks… or sharing key points from an interesting talk. And that’s when the lightbulb turned on for people and Twitter began to take off. You can’t really explain to people the magic of Twitter; they need to experience for themselves.

Me being mentioned in a Tweet

As Twitter grew in popularity, the open ended nature of twitter allowed the community to innovate and establish standards. The first idea was a way to refer to another user on Twitter. Some clever person decided to use an “@” before a username to indicate that the following text was another user on Twitter. Soon after, it seemed natural to direct a tweet “at” someone by starting your message by mentioning their username (@username).

Eventually, the Twitter team realized this was a good convention and it became a de facto standard. They began linking these mentions to the users twitter page where you could read their tweets and decide to follow them. This was the primary way that people found interesting and influential people on twitter. And its also when people began using Twitter as an ubiquitous messaging platform. And was the first feature twitter implemented to allow you to control your twitter stream. At first, this was an optional feature you can change in the settings, but now… its on for everyone.

Since social circles never completely overlap, Twitter streams were becoming increasingly polluted with tweets that were directed at other users. You were offered three settings to limit tweets from entering your stream: View all tweets from your followers (original behavior), Filter out all tweets that are directed at another user (restrictive, but you won’t be distracted by conversations), or a balanced approach that filters out tweets directed at people you don’t follow (today’s behavior). This lead to a new way to use twitter as a communication platform. You could direct tweets at people without worrying about annoying people who aren’t already friends with that person, but still get the benefits of being able to see that a group of your friends are communicating.

The Fail Whale as seen on Twitter

Oh, and the initial design of twitter and the computing power required to processing the growing load and increasing complexity lead to the birth of the Fail Whale. Of course, back then… twitter just stopped responding rather then providing the well known image of failure. Twitter wasn’t designed to grow as quickly. Twitter’s in much better shape now, but there’s still hashtags, search and retweets to cover, but those will wait until the next installation of this blog series.

First off, I’ve been around Twitter for a while. Since 1/25/2007, to be exact. To put that in context, Twitter opened to the public on 6/15/2006 and the first big wave of attention was at South by Southwest around 3/12/2007. I don’t think of myself as elitist (my 320ish followers will attest to that), but I’ve been around long enough to see some major changes in Twitter. Also, Klout seems to think I know what I’m talking about. Sadly, I’m not aware of a good Guide to Twitter that explains how some things work and share some annoying habits I often see on Twitter. Hopefully, I’ll be able to collect enough of my thoughts here in one place in a coherent way that is actually interesting to some people

I’m hopeful that some people will find some of these posts useful and that it may help them to become more interesting Twitter Users and maybe avoid inadvertently annoying your followers and perhaps some real life friends. If any of my complaining describes what you do on Twitter… take it as constructive criticism, rather then an insult.

My Main Twitter Stream

With all that said, it may shock to know that I read every single tweet that shows up in my main timeline. That’s right, every single tweet. This means that on the rare occasion that I’m away from my phone for more then 8 hours or so… I actually spend upwards of 30 minutes reading and looking at pictures or links that may appear to interest me.

As a result of this, I try to choose carefully whom I follow. I started with people I knew and have actually met in person. Then I included people who ran projects I used or wrote code I used. Once hashtags were adopted and Twitter Search evolved, I befriended other Twitter users who shared a similar interest. At some point, the decision to follow someone had to be weighed against the cost (in terms of my time) to read every message.  This meant that once my Follower count approached 100 people, I became selective when deciding whom to follow and much more likely to unfollow someone who’s tweets were getting on my nerves.

I’ve explored many twitter clients, but they really don’t offer me anything I really need. So, if I’m at a computer, I use twitter.com… and on my phone I use the official Twitter for Android app. I have a wishlist of features I’d like to see either implemented natively in twitter or what my ideal client would offer. I may even give in and just start writing my own… if that happens, expect more details here.

Next up, I’ll be talking about what the early days were like on Twitter… Hopefully, I’ve managed to whet your appetite that you’ll want to read that. (You do use Google Reader to keep track of interesting blogs and websites… right? leave a comment or ping me on Twitter if you’d want to hear me ramble on about that!)

I replayed the goal in slow motion and I was stunned at how quickly spotlights appeared on the goal scorer and the goal horn goes off followed shortly by “Chelsea Dagger”. Mix in scoreboard messages throughout the arena and a spinning red light… and you have a lot of moving parts!

Amazingly, all this happens with very few errors, (except of course for those crazy Canucks-Skip to about 13:40) and all in less then a second or so. Pretty amazing given the speed and unpredictability of Hockey. Compared to sports like Baseball, Football and Basketball… scoring is few and far between and can happen unexpectedly.

So, I contacted the Blackhawks… and long story short: I’m getting a behind the scenes tour of what goes into all the game day presentation at the United Center!

If you have any questions you would like asked, leave a comment and I’ll do what i can to get answers. My questions include things like… How big is the staff? How do they communicate? If its by radio, can anyone listen in if they find the frequency? Who decides that a goal is scored? Are the spotlights manually operated? How do they determine who scored? If it’s automated, who makes the software that tracks players on the ice and aims the spotlights? How is the music/organ/scoreboard videos orchestrated? What does it take to get a job working on game production? What sort of turnover is there? Do they also work Bulls games? What computers and networks are in use? And how secure are they?

I hope that this is the beginning of a series of blog posts or a new website that explores the technology behind things we take for granted. Yes, I’m a nerd… but I’m betting that there are many others like me out there!

Anyway, I went to Google her and this popped up…

Searching for Sarah Kustok on Google... dating?! really?!?

What a lame commentary on what lonely guys search for when they think nobody is looking. How long before she suffers the same fate as Erin Andrews? Especially with some of the comments I found while looking for her.

For those that aren’t aware, this isn’t the first year of a new decade, but rather the last year of one.

Yes, I understand the practicality of referring to decades as the 80′s or the 90′s and it seems natural that it would be from 1980 to 1989. And yes, I am aware that our numbering system for years is purely arbitrary.

BUT, consider this: There is no year zero. None. Well, unless you’re an astronomer.

So, this means that the first year was obviously year 1. So, it follows that the first decade is then from the beginning of year 1 to the end of year 10. Obviously, the next decade starts from year 11 until the year 20. Likewise, the first century is from 1 to 100, then 101 to 200. And likewise for millennia  (and there isn’t anything larger then that… unless you go to ages, epochs, eras, or eons… but most of us won’t even be around to see the next century, so meh).

Yes.. this is nitpicking.. but i just wanted to point this out once and for all. And no… I’m not the only person to have noticed this. But still, whenever I hear someone say that… I need to point out that they are wrong!

First, did you see tonights Thrashers/Panters game!? (That’s Atlanta and Florida, NHL Hockey for the uninitiated) I’ve never seen anything like the brutal hit Keith Ballard put on Tomas Volkun, his own goalkeeper! Brutal. Clearly he was intending to take his frustrations out on the goal post and didn’t even realize his reach would connect with his goalie, square in the head. Early word is that Vokoun is going to be fine and its “just a laceration”.

And second, I don’t think I ever heard someone get publicly torn to shreds like Charlie Weis was today when Jack Swarbrick, the Notre Dame Athletic Director, held a press conference to announce that he was firing his football coach. At least that’s what I thought when I heard part of the press conference on ESPN.  I wasn’t paying attention and only heard one part:

“I’ve said often in recent days that I’ve never met anyone for whom there was a bigger gulf between perception and reality, and I think that is true of our departing coach.”

Wow… normally you would expect a nice polite “things just were not working out” or a “we have decided to explore other options” sort of things. But after reading the whole story… Perhaps he’s really talking about the media’s perception of how the decision was made with Notre Dame. Either way, I have to remember that insult, even if it was unintended!

So yeah, between those and a vague understanding of the Tiger Woods soap opera… I was entertained enough to write that out… Glad I could waste a few minutes of your time as well!