Waaah: Beard Papa in Redwood City closed!

Chrysler, Schmysler: the real impact of the global economic meltdown has visited Redwood City in the form of our beloved Beard Papa shutting down.

Waaaah! Now we have to go all the way to the city or Berkeley or Cupertino to get some of these delectable cream puffs.

Beard Papa lovers of the Bay Area: it's time for the Beard Papa bailout plan. Go to one of the remaining stores and buy your cream puffs. Eat some in the stores, then buy some for home. Get some for deserving friends (like me). Then buy some for your undeserving friends (okay, maybe like me).

We can't allow Beard Papa to go under. They are too delicious to fail.

Easter Retreat 2009

Although attendance was down this year, the folks who made it out to our church's annual Easter Retreat enjoyed a relaxing weekend, fabulous weather, and a great time of fellowship (that's church codeword for "hanging out").



Since I lugged the Nikon along, I took a ton of pics. You can see as many (or as few) of the 488 on Smugmug.

If you want just a few, here they are:









And a few pictures since I finally worked out that "take lots of shots when I leave the trigger down" feature on my camera:

Mind-blowing visulization of population data

I've been watching TED Talks and Hulu while treadmilling (wireless video inside the house seems more reliable now that we're on Comcast's super-fast Internet service) and randomly chose this talk from the Top 10 list by doctor and researcher Hans Rosling. Bottom line? It's must see TV.

If you are a fan of data visualizations, population trends, government policy, comparisons between countries, or just even mildly curious about changes to our world in the last 30-40 years, prepare to be blown away by this video.

The TEDTalks site blurb has it right: 

You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world."

After you've watched the video and are hungry for more, visit Gapminder.org, Dr. Rosling's nonprofit venture to help people create visualizations like the ones you saw in the video.

First week with Comcast Digital Voice: it just works

We've been on Comcast Digital Voice for about a week after nearly 5 years with Vonage. Verdict? I'm pleasantly surprised: just like Google, the service (so far) has the "it works" feature.

I must say it is a relief that I don't think about my phone service anymore: people can hear me and I can hear them (I actually had to turn down the volume on my handsets because the VOIP box must be pumping out a stronger signal to my phone). Things with Vonage had gotten so bad, I'd have to do phone calls with two phones -- listening to my regular phone (Vonage) with speaking into my cellphone (AT&T). Not a pretty picture.

Anyway, a few other feature advantages to Comcast Digital Voice vs. Vonage for people thinking about taking the plunge:

• Again, it just works. I've read calls get routed over a private Comcast-managed network as opposed to the public Internet. Apparently this is how they are delivering the "it just works" feature. To me, it feels like the phone and Internet service are totally separate. Not sure if this is technically accurate, but I've had (shhh, don't tell anyone) moment where I'm on the phone, watching YouTube, doing a Webex, and doing a broadband speed test all at once. Phone call quality didn't glitch once.
• Local dialing is local dialing again. Just like the old phone company but unlike Vonage, I can dial 7 digits for local calls. Kinda refreshing actually. (OTOH, long distance calls actually need to prefaced by 1, unlike Vonage).
• Better voicemail on the Web GUI. Comcast's voicemail-on-the-Web feature lets you forward the voicemails to other people, a nice feature. Also the UI for listening to messages is friendlier since it doesn't pop up a separate external media player for every message you listen to.
• Easier voicemail from the phone. There's an option to skip the password check if you're fetching voicemail from your home phone. Nice.
• Automatic E911 service. You don't have to explicitly register for E911 service. For some reason, even though Vonage knew exactly where I lived by virtue of having sent me their VOIP box, I still had to manually sign up for E911. Go figure.
• Phone calls without power. The integrated cable modem and VOIP box has a battery backup. In theory I can talk for 8 hours even without power from the mighty PG&E.

On the flip side:

• Different Web interfaces. Switching between the many different Web front ends for managing your phone service, billing, and email is needlessly confusing. Because Comcast outsources billing (Convergys), email (Zimbra), voicemail, and basic account management to different companies, there are at least 4 completely different Web interfaces for reading email, managing your phone features, looking at your bill, and managing your Web features. They didn't even try to make them look like they are offered by the same company.
• Confusing Website navigation. The Comcast family of websites is disjointed. The product teams (e.g., phone, TV, billing, video-on-demand, Web) obviously don't talk with one another, and navigation is confusing. And don't even get me started on their completely retarded cable TV Web site. I dare you to go find out what the channel lineup is in your area. Even after you've logged in and they know enough to route your E911 call.
• No SimulRing. Comcast does not have Simultaneous Ring, only Call Forwarding. So if you had gotten addicted to that Vonage feature, Comcast flat out just doesn't have it. Call Forwarding places a "courtesy" ring on your main number and forwards it on to the number you pick. It's a courtesy ring because no matter how fast you pick up the phone, there's no way to answer it.
• Typically inaccurate and impossible to read bill. Naturally, the first bill from Comcast after the switchover was completely incomprehensible and nearly twice what I agreed to pay. At some point, I'll have to call and figure out what that's all about.
• Long time to port my number. It took them about 3 weeks to schedule the appointment for the technician to come out and swap my cable modem. Apparently negotiating the number port with Vonage is tricky, so not sure this is Comcast's fault.
• Took the better part of a day to get me running. It took a village to get me hooked up and to the point where I wasn't dropping phone calls and my Internet connection every 3 minutes: two technicians (one of which I had to call 4 times and summon back to my house twice), 4-5 phone reps, 2 cable modem/VOIP boxes, and 3 replaced physical network doohickeys. Total elapsed time: 6.5 hours. Percent of time I was on work conference calls during that stretch: 100%.

All in all, I'm glad we switched and I can stop thinking about whether people will be able to hear me when I call them. I completed the phone torture test last night: Webcast and phone call with Asia-Pacific for 1.5 hours -- and it just worked.

Microsoft Office launches in 1/2 second

So I've been running the Windows 7 Beta for a little over a month (on a 2-year old Dell laptop and an even older Dell desktop), and while I still think this is what Vista ought to have been, it's suffering from the dreaded Windows cruftification:

• Everything -- boot, standby, resume, hibernate, application launch -- is slowing down,
• My desktop refuses to shut down half the time, and
• I had to turn the new sharing feature called Homegroup off because it was breaking my Linksys wireless router (symptom: it would refuse to form wireless network connections with the Dell laptop without power cycling).
  

So it looks like Windows 7 has yet to solve one of the biggest problems with Windows: the distressing tendency for applications to dramatically slow down in all the everyday things that really matter to me.

So with that backdrop, enjoy this video about how some extreme hardware can come to the rescue of sloppy Microsoft coding. Skip the first few minutes about how they set up the extreme array of solid-state drives, and skip to about the 2:04 marker to see some jaw dropping performance. I definitely want one of those. Watch to the very end: the last speed race is genius. :-)

Disclosure: this is marketing from Samsung. But I happen to think it's awesome, out of the box thinking from a company you don't usually think of as a savvy social marketer.

So close...yet so far

So I have to talk to a person to cancel my Vonage service. I called the service number, and I was pleasantly surprised that:

• The up front computerized prompts were clear and easy to navigate by speaking
  
• The voice recognition was outstanding -- it correctly understood me when I said my phone number as well as the answer to my security question which I had typed in at registration time
• The automated responses were clear and struck the right tone ("I'm sorry to hear you want to cancel your account. I can help you with that.")

I was just about to record this (FTW, as they say on the Web) as a surprisingly pleasant customer service experience -- until it dropped me off to a recording that said their offices were only open on weekdays. Aaaarrgghh!

From FTW to FAIL in one easy step. They knew that I needed to talk to a real agent early in the interaction -- and rather than take me through more prompts, they should have just told me that immediately.

Comcast and VOIP

So we've been on Vonage for just about 5 years. Aside from some hiccups in the early months -- way back in spring of 2004 -- we've had no major complaints. (Though the simultaneous ringing feature takes some time for both you and your callers to get used to.)

Then just this year we started having serious voice quality problem. People would say I was breaking up on nearly every call. Calls would drop right in the middle of phone calls. People would say they called us but rolled right over to voicemail. Multiply all these small aggravations by my working from home more and routinely doing 6-9 hours a day on conference calls, and I knew we had to do something.

Vonage said it was Comcast's fault; Comcast said it was "congestion in my neighborhood" or my Linksys router's fault. Reading the press about Comcast's bandwidth caps and bandwidth shaping, I suspected Comcast was merrily dropping Vonage's VOIP packets.

So we made the switch to Comcast Digital Voice today. As much as I dislike potentially rewarding the guilty party, I need a reliable phone service -- and a single throat to choke when I can't get that. The finger pointing was driving me crazy, and my phone just wasn't working. (In case you are wondering, the AT&T coverage near my house is not that great, and other VOIP services including both Skype and MagicJack weren't much better, quality-wise.)

So we'll see how the grand experiment goes. As is typical, I lost a bunch of hours today managing the 6 Comcast people (two on-site techs, 3 phone support folks, and 1 voice-chat person)
that it took to switch me over from Vonage. But after two new modems, two physical network doodad replacements, 8 cable modem and router resets, I think I'm back to normal now.

Call me if you want to hear that Comcast VOIP sounds like. :-)

The upside: this new package features super-fast Internet access. Check these two bandwidth speed test results from earlier today. Yup, that's 17 Mbps downstream and 8-9 Mbps upstream. Woot!

Bad Bank

If you haven't listened to This American Life's coverage of the banking meltdown appropriately called Bad Bank, run, don't walk to your nearest iTunes or Web browser and give it a listen. In less than an hour, you'll understand how we got into this situation and what the main possible treatments are -- and why the government has yet to decisively chose one over the over.

Like that? I thought you would.

If you liked that show, listen to This American Life's two other great episodes about the financial crisis:

• A Giant Pool of Money
• Another Frightening Show About the Economy

If you liked all three of those, subscribe to NPR's Planet Money audio podcast. And if you just can't get enough of this stuff and want more advanced reading, try the Baseline Scenario blog.

I firmly believe that financial literacy -- or illiteracy, as the case may be -- has a role to play in this all-too-frightening debacle.

A teaser: here is a graph mentioned in Bad Bank. In this century, there have been only two years when US personal household debt has exceed the GDP. Yup, you guessed it: 1929 and 2007.

Stem cell research

President Obama is moving to lift the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

Regardless of whether you consider the embryos we use to get these so-called pluripotent stem cells are human yet, I wanted to highlight a few things which the mainstream press is not covering much -- presumably because it's easier to tell this story as a "liberal Obama vs. conservative Bush" story. (I was reading the Wall Street Journal's coverage this morning, and it seems typical.)

• New technologies are turning adult stem cells into pluripotent stem cells. Scientists have had recent successes turning adult stem cells (the ones you and I have in abundance) into pluripotent stem cells -- that is, cells which can turn into other types of cells. Pluripotency is one of the main things which got scientists excited about embryonic stem cells in the first place. (If you the Wikipedia link is a bit too dry, try this article in Nature.)
• Stem-cell therapies working today. Stem cell-based therapies are working today to treat blood problems such as leukemia. Most the media attention is focused on embryonic stem cell research which will take years to develop into effective treatments (if ever), and I thought it worthwhile to remind people that therapies based on adult and umbilical cord stem cells -- neither of which require destroying embryos -- are working today.

US News and World Report has an article by Dr. Bernadine Headey which provides some more context than the typical mass media story.

Also, update on 3/9 -- here is a CBS news story on regrowing body parts, which I learned about, of all places on Twitter via @tonyrobbins. Yes, that Tony Robbins.

Close up of the cake

The older I get, the more I appreciate the more subtle nature of cakes made by Chinese bakeries. This was a mango cake, and everything: the cake, the mousse, the fruit, and even the chocolat shavings and petals (around the edge of the cake) are 1-2 steps tamer (less sweet, less buttery, less dense) than the similar cake turned out by your typical neighborhood bakery. Yum!

Katye turns 6

Our princess turned 6 this past week. The whole gang is into giving each other -- and cakes and so forth -- bunny ears in their photos, so this is how they wanted to remember the occassion.

Interestingly, only Colin (and mommy and me, of course) really enjoyed the cake, which I got at the Sheng Kee Bakery near work. Cameron would have have been just as happy with the fruit, and Katye liked the idea of a cake better than the cake itself. I wonder if that will change as they grow older.

Wonderful short film on YouTube

I subscribe to a video podcast called The Best of YouTube, and it faithfully deposits YouTube videos onto my iPod so I can watch them when I'm traveling.

Most of the videos are what you'd expect: clips of cats pretending to be Slinkys, people sandboarding in the Sahara Desert, the world's shortest escalator, and so forth.

But on my last trip to Texas, I saw a wonderfully made short film that I just had to share. I defy you not to smile at the irrepressible hero.