Happy Consember 34th!
What? You don't know what Consember is? It's a new month I've added to the calendar.
Consember ends on December 31st. It's the start of the month that's a bit tricky to pin down. Technically, Consember starts on the day that Wal-Mart, KMart and all the giant retailers start putting Christmas items in their "Seasonal" departments. In decades long gone, America at least had the common sense to kick off Consember on "Black Friday," the Friday following Thanksgiving. That would keep the holidays from encroaching on Thanksgiving and would let us enjoy our turkey and canned cranberry sauce. Regrettably, however, Consember has grown in duration and now not only eclipses Thanksgiving completely, but has successfully overshadowed Halloween as well.
This year, Consember started earlier than usual - the weekend before Halloween. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which means that Black Friday will fall on Consember 36th. This means we won't celebrate Christmas until Consember 65th and New Year's Eve until Consember 71st.
On Thanksgiving tomorrow (Consember 35th), Santa will ride the last float in the Thanksgiving Day Parade, formally ringing in what used to be the first shopping day of the holiday season. Won't he be surprised to find that consumers have a 35-day head start on his elf workshop?
From the DailyKos Diaries...
It's three weeks after the election. And a number of issues have literally disappeared off the face of the map. When I created the first post of this series, I listed what I thought were pressing issues that still needed addressing, election or not. As a whole these issues still have not been adequately addressed. We're still looking for answers. Especially now that the Bush administration thinks they've gotten a "mandate" and therefore will be immune to questioning, we need to turn the heat up. So, in the interest of keeping things top of mind, I'm doing a periodic recap at election plus x days (E+x). Let's take a little survey of the landscape at E+21.
The post goes on to list eight issues that seem to have been swept under the rug. The first three are the ones I'm really keyed up about:
Perhaps it's because we've put so much heart and soul into the election and we're running low on energy and enthusiasm as a result, but the voice of dissent in this country has quieted a bit. We can't forget about this stuff and let the administration and the mainstream press sweep it under the carpet.
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Among the recent developments concerning the "shield my eyes" crowd...
Jeffrey Satinover, a psychiatrist and advisor to the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality echoed Layden's concern about the internet and the somatic effects of pornography."Pornography really does, unlike other addictions, biologically cause direct release of the most perfect addictive substance," Satinover said. "That is, it causes masturbation, which causes release of the naturally occurring opioids. It does what heroin can't do, in effect."
Last I checked, one didn't require Internet porn in order to masturbate. If these "naturally occurring opioids" were as addictive as heroin, none of our male population would have made it out of their teens alive.
Gee, I was starting to worry that the hairy palms and blindness folks had gone extinct.
Shanice's old machine at the office blew up - hard drive problems. Since I was the one who "donated" the machine initially, I got it back. I figured I'd put it in my bedroom, throw Linux on it and have a second machine for websurfing, e-mail and such. But that introduced a problem - I had wireless upstairs and didn't want to risk trying to get a Linux desktop to connect to my wireless network. (Plus, connecting via Wi-Fi on my Windows desktop was seriously detrimental to my ping times in Star Wars: Battlefront.)
So I decided to run a cable from the basement to my bedroom. I went to Best Buy and bought a new hard drive for the Linux machine, a KVM switch so that I'd only need one keyboard and one mouse, a 50' cat6 cable and some shorter cat6 cables to connect the machines, plus a Linksys 4-port router.
Wouldn't you know it? When I got home, the sales guy from Best Buy forgot to put the KVM switch in the bag, so I had to call them and tell them to put it aside for me so I could pick it up in the morning. And that's only the start of the trouble...
On Saturday, I spent the morning helping Rob out with taking up the kitchen floor. We pried several hundred vinyl tiles off the subfloor, leaving the entire kitchen floor sticky like a glue trap. I helped Rob lay down the first few planks of the engineered hardwood floor we bought, but I left most of the work to him.
Saturday afternoon, I went to Ace Hardware and got a nice, long drill bit and a snake so that I could snake the wire. But my cordless drill had some problems turning the bit (not powerful enough), and the bit wasn't wide enough, so I went back to Ace and bought a Makita corded drill and a Speedbor bit, plus some foam to seal up the hole once I ran the wire.
Anyway, I got the holes drilled and ran the cat6 cable by Sunday. So I tried setting up the router. Turns out I had destroyed the cat6 cable running it through the wall (must've tugged too hard). The router couldn't get an IP address. So back to Best Buy I went. This time, I got a 50' cat5e cable. I went back home, re-ran the wire and re-sealed the holes with the foam.
But then there was another problem. The router was getting an IP address, but wasn't routing packets to either machine. So back to Best Buy I went. I got a Linksys 5-port switch instead. Wouldn't ya know it? Both machines got IP addresses right away. So I hooked up my KVM switch, which works great, BTW, and something that should have taken me a couple hours ended up taking me the entire weekend.
It's never simple, is it?
Looks like the FCC isn't getting enough jollies censoring content on network TV and radio alone. Now they want to start censoring cable, satellite and the Internet.
Too bad their mandate doesn't extend that far. If Powell's crew wants to sail into those waters, it will be faced with opposition that understands the difference between the limited-bandwidth "public airwaves" that carry TV signals and private signals like those that enable cable TV , satellite and the Internet.
And no, we haven't seen any reason to wrest the Invisible Conceptual Idiot Baton away from Michael Powell and re-gift it to someone else.
I've been following the trials and tribulations of Bev Harris and the folks at Black Box Voting both on the web and on the Randi Rhodes Show on Air America. Folks, there is definitely some goofy shit going on.
I'd recommend you read the 11/16 story on Black Box Voting's home page at a minimum. And dig further if it interests you (it should). There is some serious shit going down in Florida.
Bev Harris and her crew are doing some serious work to determine if there is, in fact, evidence of fraud. If you dig what she's doing, do what I did and send them a donation. I sent 'em $50.
Might be a bit tough to see, but someone cut the heads off pictures from one ad and pasted them onto this ad for The O.C.. The heads are those of Dr. Phil and Oprah. Couldn't tell who the other folks were. (One looks like Olympia Dukakis.)
You simply can't do this on the train in full view of the passengers. And unless you take a train that runs at 3 AM or something, one would never run into a situation where one could pull this off without having somebody see something, which makes me think it's probably one of the cleaning folks.
Rick Bruner e-mailed me this morning to call my attention to a new proposed law that would require licenses for all New York City cyclists over the age of 16.
Failing to get a license would mean that anyone caught without one would be subject to fines of $100-$300, imprisonment (up to 15 days in jail), plus police can impound the bike.
I've written in the past about how New York City is incredibly unfriendly to alternate forms of transportation. Anything gasoline- or electric-powered that isn't an automobile or motorcycle is illegal, by virtue of the fact that these vehicles need to be registered as motor vehicles, but the DMV will do no such thing. So you can't legally ride electric or gas scooters. Now some crazy councilwoman, Madeline Provenzano, wants to further discourage alternative transportation by requiring $25 registration fees and license tags for all bicycles ridden in the city.
If you're as pissed as I am, you can send a fax to Provenzano. Please do so.
"It's too Big Brother for me," said Kenneth Haines, a 15-year-old ninth grader who is on the football and debate teams. "Something about the school wanting to know the exact place and time makes me feel kind of like an animal."
Young Mr. Haines is describing his participation in a pilot program at his school in Texas to test RFID's ability to track the movements of schoolchildren.
The lazier we are about safeguarding our children's safety, the more parents are going to sacrifice privacy, trust and responsibility. While I'm not usually a fan of "slippery slope" arguments, how long before the government points to this program to justify some other use of RFID?
I wonder how long it will be before it becomes mandatory to accept an RFID-enabled pass to get on a city bus? Or to enter a government building? I wonder how long it will be before the technology becomes ubiquitous and corporations and the government start using the data for more nefarious purposes. Shouldn't be too long now...
Advocates of the technology said they did not plan to go that far. But, they said, they do see broader possibilities, such as implanting RFID tags under the skin of children to avoid problems with lost or forgotten tags.
Umm... If anybody needs me, I'll be in an undisclosed location outside of the country. Bye.
Plenty of folks stopped by the Spin Board to roast my last column (login required). Funny how people seem to see only what they want to see. It appears no one read the last half of the column about the risks that an increasingly-censored broadcast media puts on advertisers.
What if you're the advertiser who wanted to support the airing of Saving Private Ryan on Veteran's Day and you found out that half the stations refused to air it? Moreover, what if TV is a cornerstone of your marketing plan and network TV ratings continue to decline over time, partly because of increasing government control over content makes TV uninteresting to certain audiences?
But instead of talking about that, folks wanted to complain about my description of the situation. Some of the more interesting quotes follow...
I think the fine for the sexually suggestive material shown on the program "Married By America" is heavy but if that's what it takes to get the content of our TV's cleaned up then so be it!!
I, for one, and sick and tired of the garbage that passes for TV entertainment these days. You cheapen the First Amendment by mentioning it in the same breath as this trash. Get a life!
I love how conservatives, who want the rest of the world to think that they believe in small government that stays out of our lives, would rather look to a regulatory body to control the content they consume in broadcast instead of doing the reasonable thing - voting with one's eyeballs. If no one watched Married By America, would the networks run it? If the network itself received complaint letters, might they reconsider? Evidently, there are plenty of folks who would rather have the government perform the function of content control than let the free market decide.
Have little kids? Try protecting them.
I don't have little kids. But if I did, any protection I might give them would involve something called parenting. Parenting involves knowing what your kids consume through the media so you can determine what's appropriate for them and what's not. The answer is NOT to sanitize the world to make it safe for kids at all places and all times. After all, some of us like a little excitement in our lives, thankyouverymuch. The answer is to watch your kids, give them some guidance and not simply plop them in front of the television every time you don't feel like interacting with them. Oh, and here's another thought for the "won't somebody think of the children?" crowd. If you're so concerned about TV's effect on the values of your children, what are your kids doing up at 9 PM on a school night watching a program about folks who let people they don't know determine who they'll marry?
So thanks to many of the Spin Board commentors who want the government to control their content, want the mass media to babysit their kids, and completely missed the main point of my last column.
There are so many things wrong about this bill, my head is spinning and I'm wondering if maybe I should just go home, crawl back into bed and hide under the covers. If this passes, then the recording and movie industries have successfully lobbied Congress to employ the U.S. Government as their law firm and ultimate protector of their hopelessly outdated business model.
The president's cabinet, much like toilet seat covers, are apparently self-flushing. We've heard about the resignations of Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, Education Secretary Rod Paige, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Now it looks like Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge is gone.
Not a big surprise, we've known about most of these for a while. My big question is where Rudy Giuliani fits into all of this.
I've heard a lot about how the new cabinet appointees will be expected not to help shape Bush's policies, but instead to enforce them. If Rudy takes a cabinet post, I'll lose all respect for him. He's worked too hard and accomplished too much to simply become a Bush yes man.
Last week, I put up a post about how the online advertising industry needs another herd-thinning. It begged the question - "How do I know if I'm part of the problem?" Fear not, faithful Hespos.com reader. If you answer "yes" to any of the following questions, the issue should be more than clarified.
Who are these people who write letters to the FCC about sexually suggestive programming that's aired after their children are supposed to be in bed? Read this now.
Put all First Amendment issues to the side for a minute. If broadcasting over the public airwaves is going to be held hostage by a vocal microcommunity of people who are offended by the mere suggestion of sex, add this one to the top of the pile of reasons why terrestrial television and radio are DEAD, DEAD, DEAD.
Okay, now let's talk about the First Amendment issues...
One of my biggest fears is that, under the guise of "protecting" us from offensive or indecent material, the federal government turns the public airwaves into a "substance-free zone," in which broadcasters are afraid to disseminate information of any sort of value, or host any sort of debate about public affairs. Clearly, the government has exercised no prior restraint of content, but this scenario can easily become reality even in the absence of prior restraint. Levying huge and unreasonable fines will suffice.
And that's exactly what we have here. Network affiliates are afraid to broadcast "Saving Private Ryan" out of fear of the mere possibility of being fined. Everything's being tape-delayed in case someone says or does something offensive. Shows like Howard Stern's may be offensive to some, but the bigger offense, to me, is that such a show can't exist on the public airwaves because it might end up paying out more in FCC fines than it gets from advertisers. Our content is being sanitized.
Before we all get up in arms and declare democracy dead because of the usurping of the power of the press, let's put some thought into this. Yes, Michael Powell (last seen trying to remove the Invisible Conceptual Idiot Baton from his forehead) and the FCC enjoy too much influence over content carried on the public airwaves. But why?
It's because the concept of "public airwaves" is completely outdated. Let me say that again, because it's very important, with appropriate emphasis:
You see, back in the day, terrestrial radio and television stations had only a narrow strip of bandwidth on which to broadcast. So the federal government had to issue a limited number of licenses in each terrestrial market to ensure that the signals didn't interfere with one another. Since a limited number of broadcasters could exist at any given time in any given market, the feds took it upon themselves to ensure that each station was serving the public interest. In other words, give us the time and temperature, test out the Emergency Broadcast System every so often, and give us a holler if there's a tornado coming over the horizon.
From there, the concept evolved into this notion of "community standards" with respect to indecency and obscenity. But the FCC's mandate stems from a need to have only a limited number of broadcast outlets serve the public interest. That's where it comes from.
Does this apply in a world where bandwidth is limited to a much lesser extent? Hell no! Consumers have all sorts of other media choices available to them: Cable television, satellite television, satellite radio, the web, the Internet, video on demand, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum. The only thing the FCC's influence has succeeded at is placing stations that still occupy the "public" airwaves at a commercial disadvantage in comparison to all these other media.
So, really, it's time to put the FCC in its rightful place - issuing and maintaining broadcast licenses. If we don't do this, not only will we see continued erosion of First Amendment rights, but we'll also see broadcasters losing shitloads of money as more people opt to pay $5.95 a month to see boobies at the Bada Bing on HBO than watch Ted Koppel for free.
The FCC should be in the business of licensing, and that's about it. And if we can't solve the problem through exerting political pressure on Michael Powell and his crew, maybe we should take it to Congress.
We need an FCC. After all, if we were to completely privatize public bandwidth, we'd have so many crossed signals that nothing electronic would work. But the FCC needs to stay out of the content business. It should stay in the bandwidth licensing business where it belongs.
But sometimes, the ads are defaced in interesting ways. Here's a really blurry (my camera phone sucks) photo of a State Farm ad featuring a baby. As you can see, someone cut out a bottle of liquor from another ad on the train and stuck it on the State Farm ad, so it looks like the baby is chugging right from the bottle. Funny, yes. Confidence-instilling for advertisers, no.
Just a couple weeks after taking my car in for MAJOR service, I turned the key on Tuesday morning and was greeted by nothing but a series of electronic-sounding clicks. My battery was clearly dead.
I knew I hadn't left any lights on the night before, so that couldn't have been it. I didn't have time to deal with it, so I borrowed my Mom's car and came home early from work yesterday to deal with the problem.
Popping the hood last night, I found some interesting things. My car's battery had been replaced with some old crusty AC/Delco job that clearly wasn't the stock battery. A new battery terminal was sitting in the engine compartment, rattling around near my air vents. Something was rotten in Denmark.
I pulled the crusty battery and headed out to the auto parts place in Riverhead to get a new battery. Sure enough, I put the new battery in and everything started right up.
That is the absolute LAST time I take my car to Hustedt Chevrolet. Those guys can screw off as far as I'm concerned. Since some cybersquatter guy obviously had a bad experience with them, I'll link to the non-fan site: Hustedt Chevrolet.
Lots of folks at Ad Tech were completely surprised by the exceptional turnout. But when you cruised the exhibit hall floor and looked at the attendees at the after-hours events, it became clear that the booming interactive ad industry is once again attracting the sort of folks it attracted during the dot-com bubble.
Did everyone else notice the proliferation of search companies? Most attendees that I spoke to did. Many of these search companies seemed to have a great deal of difficulty explaining what they do and how they do it. And they really don't seem to want to talk to you if your company already knows what it's doing with respect to search. Tell them you use a bid management tool, that you track ROI, that you handle organic search optimization yourself and that you've got a handle on search strategy with respect to affiliate marketing and all of a sudden, they don't want to talk to you. Ask them how they do what they claim to do and you get the standard "It's proprietary" line.
A couple of us joked on the trade show floor about the notion of constructing a "Scuzzbucket Pavilion" next year. Booths at the Pavilion would be half-price, but we could put all the spammers and search optimization companies under 5 years old in the Pavilion. The real marketers could then avoid them and leave them to the task of shuttling money back and forth between one another's companies. Which is, of course, what they do best.
Steve Hall had a great observation when Jim Meskauskas, Jason Oates and I met up with him in the hotel bar. He said you could spot the bottom-feeders pretty easily because the first question out of their mouths when you approached their booths was "Got traffic?"
At the Tribal Fusion party on Monday night, I was hanging out with Joe Apprendi and Thomas Falk from Falk AdSolution, Eric Porres (from my company) Jason Baadsgaard from Claria and a bunch of other folks when a sea of people flooded into the party from the 212 event. Seems like everyone was really, really young, so I made a comment to Eric: "Since when did everyone in this industry turn, like, 24?" Of course, a young lady passing by heard me and corrected me - "22," she said.
Not that I'm biased against young people, mind you, but it seems like this huge influx of young, unexperienced companies with tons of style but little substance have shown up on the scene lately. Whereas two years ago, I was praising the notion that the interactive industry had shrugged off most of the get rich quick crowd when the market tanked, it seems those kinds of folks are now eager to get back in.
A thinning of the herd is in order.
Woo woooooo! The Ad Tech train is pulling into the station. And that means the following:
"Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue." - Atlas Shrugged
My college ethics professor once used the example of the earthworm to convey the notion of the creature incapable of moral thought. The earthworm merely acts in its own interests one hundred percent of the time without any moral reflection whatsoever. If it senses a predator, it heads underground. If it rains, it comes to the surface to avoid drowning. Whenever someone in his class answered a query without engaging in any serious moral thought, the professor referred to their response as "earthworm ethics."
As I read the commentary surrounding the summation of the results of the general election, one thing becomes abundantly clear - there are many voters out there who simply refused to think. And that is their biggest sin; the sin that delivers a slap across the face to everyone who used their ability to think rationally to arrive at decision regarding who should be our next commander in chief.
The biggest determining factor that blindsided the Democrats in this election cycle was this notion of "moral values" the news media have been talking about since the Bush victory. It blindsided the Democrats chiefly because they didn't think it was something they had to worry about. It wasn't John Kerry who ordered the first pre-emptive strike in the history of our country based on manufactured intelligence. John Kerry didn't send thousands of people to their deaths in Iraq to satisfy his personal bloodlust. Who would think that a comparison of the candidates' moral values would lead people to come to the conclusion that they prefer Bush's morals to Kerry's?
But that's exactly what happened. And ironically, many voters who chose to identify with the moral values of George Bush did so without an ounce of moral thought. What we've witnessed in the 2004 general election is the triumph of feelings over facts.
By casting a vote for George Bush's morality, a voter ignores the fact that George Bush succeeded in fingering Iraq for the September 11 terrorist attacks and that he had his mind made up to do so before he had seen any evidence. It ignores everything from the manufacturing of the intelligence through the present-day insistence that the Iraq war's ends justify its means. I was surprised to learn that three quarters of Bush supporters still believe that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Every major news outlet has been trumpeting the fact that the 9/11 Commission found no link between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks. There's no way to not be aware of this fact, unless you've spent the last year living in a cave. On Mars. With your fingers stuck in your ears.
It's things like this that lead me to the conclusion that we've finally witnessed the victory of feelings over facts. Feelings are what lead people to cast a vote for the morality of a president who has sent thousands of people to their deaths while lying to the country about why they've been sent to die. In effect, a decision concerning morality was made without any manner of moral thinking whatsoever. Isn't it ironic? Dontcha think?
I'm greatly insulted by this. After spending so much time following the issues, trading opinions and analyzing this choice in every way, there are those of us who would ignore all of that and vote without seriously thinking.
The election was won by George W. Bush because when the rainstorm hit, the earthworm predictably wriggled to the surface.
I'm speechless. I'm struggling with all of this and I don't quite know what to say yet.
Perhaps it's best for me to wait until I know I'll be able to speak rationally about the Kerry Edwards loss and not just emotionally. This is a huge letdown for me.
I've got Air America piped in through my laptop, Atrios and DailyKos refreshing on my browser every few minutes, and Rob is running the TV (flipping between CNN, MSNBC and Fox News).
I'm dying to see how NJ, PA, OH, FL and MI turn out.
I'm so keyed up over the states that were given to Bush without a second thought - some of them are closer than I would have thought. Some pundits are predicting a win for Kerry while Bush might take the popular vote. I think the popular vote might be closer than folks might otherwise think.
CBS just showed Florida running 55/43 Bush/Kerry. Time to split to the next room. More later...
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Regardless of how this election turns out, it is certainly the most emotionally charged one I've ever witnessed. I cannot remember the last time that voters were so passionate about their opinions and their likes/dislikes for the candidates. Many people I know who were not politically involved in the past couple elections are protesting, making signs, volunteering and more.
If nothing else, I think we will see the voter turnout trend reverse itself this time around.
Thanks for the photo, Eric.
I voted for John Kerry this morning.
It's time for change. The current administration has not only made mistakes, but they've taken steps to avoid taking responsibility for those mistakes. In many cases, they've tried to distort the truth. In others, they've obnoxiously and arrogantly refused to even consider that they've made a mistake, even in the face of irrefutable facts.
I could fill a dozen pages here with a post about the things I dislike most about the Bush administration. Instead, I'll try to boil it down to basic points:
We have a weak leader currently in office. I've voted to change that.
This lovely gem, quoted just about everywhere...
"We want people to think 'terrorism' for the last four days," said a Bush-Cheney campaign official. "And anything that raises the issue in people's minds is good for us."A senior GOP strategist added, "anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush."
He called it "a little gift," saying it helps the President but doesn't guarantee his reelection.
You have to be joking. Is the GOP so desperate to get its candidate elected that they're willing to give Bin Laden props for issuing another tape? If that's the case, any doubts you might have had about the promotion of a culture of fear by the Republicans should now be thoroughly dispelled.
The past several Halloweens have been, well, weird. I remember when my block was teeming with kids and Halloween meant trading shifts with my mom and my sister standing near the front door handing out treats. Invariably, we used to have to run out to the store for more peanut butter cups or Snickers bars, because they'd get glommed up pretty quickly.
This year, we didn't even manage to get rid of the jar full of Atomic Fireballs I got from a sales rep. Only half a dozen groups of kids came by.
I was beginning to think that maybe our house had turned into the house that kids skipped every year because we gave out lame treats. But I don't think that's it. I think there just aren't enough kids in the neighborhood.
You don't see kids on my block diverting cars so they can play street hockey. No backyard games of Wiffle Ball or touch football. I think that maybe the neighborhood is pretty much devoid of kids these days.
Most of the folks that live around the block are older couples whose children are grown and out of the house. Most of the rest are older DINKs (Dual Income, No Kids). The older couples who raised their kids here are fleeing at the rate of a few a year - they sell their houses to the DINKs and move down south to retire.
The DINKs are the only ones that can afford their houses. The folks next door have been trying to sell their house for at least nine months now and they're holding out for $560K - the house is smaller than ours, doesn't have a pool and probably needs about as much work as our place does. What young couple just getting started out can afford that?
There are hardly any trick or treaters. Until the housing bubble pops, there won't likely be many. Having been raised there, one day I'd like to see the streets teeming with kids playing street hockey again.