OneMind

A letter to the editor in today’s Monterey Herald set me thinking about the many ways in which the taxpayers of this nation subsidize big business, providing them with indirect funding that results in all of us paying more in taxes and fees regardless of whether we use or support those businesses or their products.

This letter discussed the new U.S. Postal Service fee hike in the context of the ability of businesses of all sizes to send bulk mail at hugely reduced rates. The writer suggested that the Postal Service consider turning this situation on its head, significantly increasing the fees for bulk-rate mail and reducing the cost of first class. This would, the writer opined, dramatically reduce the landfill pollution and other environmental impact of millions of tons of advertising mail, a huge percentage of which ends up in the trash unopened.

I like that idea. I’ve thought it before but not for a long time. There’s really no good social policy reason for the steep discounting of bulk mail and a lot of such reasons for not offering that subsidy.

What do you think? Am I off my rocker here? Or does this make the kind of sense only a government or government-subsidized business would fail to grasp?

Yahoo will offer its email users unlimited storage in an ante-upping ploy to combat Google’s gMail and its 2GB limit. While that limit may be a problem for some folks (there is a bit of discussion of that on the Net from time to time), the problem with Yahoo’s approach is that you can’t, as far as I can tell, use Yahoo mail conveniently with other POP addresses. That makes it pretty near useless, particularly given how many sites I’ve run across lately that won’t let you register with a yahoo or gmail or hotmail or other free email address.

I never publish or use my yahoo address but the mailbox manages to fill up with spam anyway. Using it for real work would be stupid.

The San Francisco 49ers continued their string of smart moves yesterday by extending superstar running back Frank Gore’s contract through 2013. This was Gore’s last season under his original pact, which would have paid him less than $500k this season. Gore set a team record last year and led the NFL with 1,695 yards rushing.

I was delighted to hear it. The Niners have made some great free-agent moves thanks to a large salary cap gap (which by itself is refreshing) and look to be planning to improve a good bit next season.

It appears from further investigation that I’ve done that these gMail outages are not usually universal. Rather, it appears that one server or perhaps cluster goes down and the rest of gMail stays available and online. My wife reported, e.g., that as far as she could tell, her gMail worked all day today (though she’s not quite as anal about checking email as I am and she’s not entirely sure that’s the case).

Whatever. Infrastructure is obviously the key to Google’s continuing ability to succeed and expand and if this is any indication at all of how its infrastructure is being maintained, then we may have a serious problem looming here.

Keeping an eye on it.

Still can’t use gMail from Firefox and nobody seems to have a clue how to fix that one.

Just after 3:45 p.m., I was finally able once again to access my gMail. I can get at it from Safari just fine and from IE7 on Windows. But I managed during this outage to break my access via Firefox on OS X. I deleted a cookie after reading another user’s experience and apparently I deleted the wrong one because now gMail thinks cookies are turned off in my browser (which they’re not). My guess is I’m probably hosed on gMail in Firefox for OS X now.

Update — I was able to get the cookies issue straightened out with Firefox, so things are back to what passes for normal in my life now.

Is it just me or is it starting to feel like this Net is beginning to unravel a bit around the edges?

Although I remain an advocate of Web-based technology for everything that it’s possible to use that technology to do, I’m not unaware of the fact that there are times when relying on the Internet can be problematic. Today is one of those days. For some reason, Google Mail is unreachable from here (and perhaps elsewhere for all I know).

Email is a lifeline for me, particularly in my business where I communicate with clients, vendors and team members almost exclusively via email. So when it doesn’t work, it’s really painful and disruptive.

Of course, email is the kind of thing that whether one uses a Web-based approach like gMail or an application like Outlook or Apple Mail, a network or server outage becomes problematic. Somehow, it seems more troublesome when it’s the Google server side of things that’s at fault. A company the size of Google should never have this kind of problem. And that’s just unreasonable.

Update — Well, gMail’s been down for about 2-1/2 hours now. Clearly not a Good Thing. As I recall, this is the second such outage in recent weeks.

Update — Strange, but nobody else in the blogosphere seems to be commenting on this outage right now. At least I can’t find any connections at Technorati.

Update – 3:45 p.m. and still no gMail. I cannot understand. There does not seem to me to be any reason for a multi-hour outage at a site as large and popular as this.

Back in the early days of the Web, when I was the first Webmaster at Salon.com, the online magazine made a valiant effort to create a partnership with Borders bookstores. There were, as I recall, quite a number of meetings before Borders ultimately decided it lacked the technical savvy to do the job themselves and a deal of sorts was fashioned. It didn’t last long. Borders then teamed up with Amazon.com, which was probably a pretty smart short-term idea.

Six years later, Borders has apparently decided to sever its ties with Amazon and go its own way at long last. The only surprise is that it took this long. For a company like Borders not to have its own dedicated Web presence at this stage of the Internet’s growth — particularly given the great job its primary competitors do — is a sign that someone at Borders has just flat been asleep at the switch.

For one thing, there’s no connection between Borders’ Amazon presence and the brick-and-mortar stores like Barnes & Noble enjoys. This has to interfere with the ability to create real tie-ins between the online presence and physical sales. I’ve come to expect a tight tie-in there because in Monterey we don’t have a B&N, just a Borders.

There’s a raging battle going on in Monterey County over which of two competing comprehensive general plans should be adopted for the next many years. One proposal was prepared by the elected County Board of Supervisors after years of study, environmental impact reports, and 18 public hearings and workshops. It’s called GPU4. The other plan, CGPI (Community General Plan Initiative) was put together by a collection of citizens’ groups who felt the county board’s process was flawed because of the influence of a small number of developers and land-owners. I would characterize the CGPI as slow-growth and the GPU4 as moderate-growth, though I’m sure I will be criticized by both sides for mischaracterizing their approach.

That’s OK because an essay about the plans isn’t my objective today. Today, I’m writing to express my grave concerns about the local chapters of the venerable League of Women Voters (LWV). The League recently released a five-page chart analyzing the two plans (a Good Thing) and then publicly endorsed the CGPI (which I deem a Bad Thing even though their endorsement happens to coincide with my probable final position on the issue).

Read more if you want to know why I see this endorsement as a mistake.

Over a couple of decades as a newspaper reporter-editor, I grew to love LWV. I could always count on them to provide the most objective analysis of issues and candidates that could be found anywhere. They never endorsed anyone; they simply strove mightily to present factual data so voters could make up their own minds. This was a service the mass media ought to provide, but even 35 or more years ago, it wasn’t always the case that they would fulfill that solemn duty. Today, they don’t even pretend to do so.

By endorsing either position on this highly charged issue, I believe LWV has damaged its reputation as an objective source of information. I said as much in an email exchange with the President of the local LWV chapter, who was good enough to answer me and engage in a dialog.

My position is simply this: by endorsing CGPI, the LWV has branded itself in my mind (and in the minds of other like-minded citizens) as a slow-growth organization. That this is a non-partisan election may qualify it for LWV recommendation, but future LWV election materials involving analysis of local candidates for office and local issues will require me to take a closer look to determine whether the League’s slow-growth position here has influenced those thoughts and analyses.

I don’t deny the LWV the right to take a stand. I just bemoan the fact that in doing so, it has abdicated at least part of what made it the great cornerstone of socio-political debate I’ve come to know and love over the years.

Thanks to my good friend Teiwaz, check out this intriguing video which is a fictionalized series about a man who left his real life to reside exclusively in Second Life. Creative and quite well done.

Adobe has released the alpha version of its Apollo technology and after spending about 3 hours with it, I must say I’m as impressed as I expected I’d be. The alpha is, as you’d expect, not feature-complete, but there’s enough here to get a real feel for what it’s going to be like using the new technology to build desktop apps with Web technologies. And that is the unique and important promise of Apollo.

Until now, Web developers were effectively cut out of the desktop except for smallish applications made with things like Apple’s Dashboard widgets, which of course run only on OS X. Vista Gadgets are a nearly identical idea that run on the new Windows release.

Apollo takes this basic idea and twists it in two crucial new ways.

First, it enables developers to create applications that will run on both OS X and Windows (with Linux to come at some point as well).

Second, Apollo provides full support for all of the great stuff in Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash which means you can create some really, really slick user interfaces.

Apollo apps can also be intelligent in ways that Widgets and Gadgets cannot, at least not easily. They can be self-updating and they can run disconnected from the Internet and then do the right thing when an Internet connection is avaialble.

Very, very cool stuff. This will make people like me who have spent a lot of time and effort learning DHTML, XML, Flash, ActionScript and other similar technologies able to create great-looking interactive desktop applications that run across platforms.