Hello to John Hodgman....

... whose book I'm enjoying these days.

Iraq / U.S. Civil War Countdown Clock

The congressional vote on the surge may have come and gone (or did it?) but it's still worth linking to this. The deadline is coming soon....

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Ad Nauseam

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Remind you of somebody?

This was part of a report prepared by the Office of Strategic Services (proto-CIA) during WWII as a personality / psychological profile of Adolf Hitler.

Barack Obama | NYC March 9 '07 fundraiser

I went to the March 9 fund raising event for Barack Obama in New York.

I had made some laser-printer signs to hold up in case there was an opportunity to have my picture taken with Mr. Obama. I actually had this idea where he and I would hold up one of the signs together -- his choice of which one. As it turned out the cattle call of $100 donors was more akin to a Led Zeppelin concert ca. '72 than something even as impersonal as a royal receiving line.

Still, the sentiments endure. We're open to an over/under for when the back of this idealism will be broken.

Today? Today was a good day.

Letter to US Postal Servicere: Douglas Adams Stamp

I had a great idea for a US Mail stamp, so I wrote a letter to the USPS to let them know. Appropriately, they don't let you send them email; you have to send them a letter (link goes to the how-to-not-to page). Their response is below my letter.

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Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee c/o Stamp Development U.S. Postal Service 1735 North Lynn St., Suite 5013 Arlington, VA 22209-6432

To whom it may concern,

I read today about the proposed cost increase of first-class postage to 42c per unit. (This is not a complaint; please read on).

It immediately occurred to me that this would be a terrific opportunity to honor with a stamp an author known and respected by all lovers of satirical and science fiction – Douglas Adams.

Among other respected works (including some non-fiction environmentalist research and reportage), Mr. Adams wrote several books in his series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In the style of Lewis Carroll, his intricate parodies of modern life were simultaneously timely and timeless and have touched millions of lives in the English-speaking world and beyond.

While not a native-born American, like Vladimir Nabokov and Ayn Rand he very much chose to live in the U.S., and wrote several passages in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish that attest to his love of the California surfside lifestyle. He loved it to death, in fact (Santa Barbara, in 2001 at age 49, of a heart attack).

The reason an opportunity presents itself related to the price of a 42c stamp is that “42” was his favorite number. In any case, he decided to use it as the absurd answer given by a mythical, colossal computer when asked for the Answer to “life, the universe and everything” (in his book of that name). All of his fans – and many who have not even read his books, as this is now part of the general popular culture -- are aware of this in-joke and share it freely.

I think it would be a fantastic opportunity for the US Postal Service and for fans of literature everywhere to take advantage of this. Has there ever been a subject of a stamp intimately related to the price of the stamp..? I certainly can’t think of anything that would be a funny joke related to a 47c stamp, the next likely increase price.

Sincerely and honestly hoping this will pan out,

Juan Molinari

ps, I realize that the general deadline for idea submissions is three years prior to the expected date of release/publication, but as Douglas himself once wrote:

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."

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Their response:

The War on Error

(link goes to Slate article by William Saletan)

"If the most important thing to any of you is
choosing someone who did not cast that vote
or has said his vote was a mistake,
then there are others to choose from."

Ms. Clinton,

Your disingenuous, dishonest, calculated, transparent attitude towards whether voting for the war was or was not a mistake leaves a bad taste in the mouth of every New Yorker who voted for you on your bid for the Senate. We have just had six years (and "look forward" to two more) of this intellectual dishonesty at the very top of our government; now you are threatening us with the permanent acceptance of this low standard.

This is not what we are paying you for.

The dissolution of the integrity of one of New York's two Senate votes for the sake of a presidential campaign is a disservice to all those who voted for you, including myself.

Please do some soul-searching. Whether you win or lose the presidency is secondary (to everybody but yourself). A qualified person will be elected (or not; in either case your manipulations and evasions won't make any difference). What is at stake is whether you will continue to serve in your current capacity beyond '12.

If this continues I will personally support any opponent you may run against, for any office, at any point in the future.

Sincerely,

Juan M.
[address withheld from blog]

for new yorkers who want to play along and write to her

(full disclosure; I'm posting this on 4/13 but I wrote and sent it to her via the above contact link on Feb 20. i thought it belonged here since it was probably the main reason I started the blog. for the record, as you can see, I have been campaigning actively for Barack Obama since, fortunately something I'm very happy to do).

Complaint Letter to Yahoo

To whom it may concern,

This is in regards to trouble ticket # 4607540 | Yahoo ID: juanolator.

Today I am canceling my Yahoo Mail Plus service.

I am going to take the time to tell you exactly why. This is something I rarely do, as I have little faith that it makes any difference -- if a company really wants to provide good service and / or a product of value to their customers it seldom requires that letters like this be written in order for it to happen from the outset.

On Tuesday, December 12th I noticed that emails I sent through the Web interface were taking an unusual amount of time to be delivered to their recipients. "Unusually", at that time, meant 1-2 hours. We are talking about short, plain-text emails with no attachments, each sent to different recipients with accounts on different mail systems (thus strongly suggesting the problem was not on the receiving end)

I have been using the Internet for over 15 years. I have never heard of a lightweight email taking more than 3 minutes to be delivered. Still, the Yahoo technician I spoke to insisted that it was "normal" for an email to take up to 24 hours to be delivered. I told her how insultingly incorrect that was. Furthermore I told her that the problem only manifested itself when using the Web interface; that using the Yahoo SMTP server from Outlook did not result in any delays, and that thus the problem seemed to be localized not only to the Yahoo network but specifically the Web interface.

So much for trying to be helpful in solving my vendor's problems. She then directed me to submit my concern to reportabuse@yahoo-inc.com which I thought was unusual since (a) this was not an abuse situation, and (b) she could have done it for me (she gave me a trouble ticket number -- it was already in her system, she wouldn't even have had to re-type a description, as I had to do). She also said they would get back to me within 24 hours. In my experience with ISPs and other online service providers, a mission-critical problem such as this is dealt with (or at least the customer is reassured that a human being is working on it) within 24 MINUTES, not hours.

24+ hours later (about 6:30pm Wednesday), I called in again as I had yet to receive anything beyond an automated reply and the problem had become exacerbated to the point where emails were taking 4-5 hours to be received. The person I spoke to gave me the same milquetoast, scripted responses I had received on Tuesday, except now said that I would receive a response within *48* hours of my having submitted it.

It is now over 48 hours since I first submitted a report of this system failure. Emails are simply not being received at all. The Yahoo customer service person I just spoke with not only asked me the same questions I had already answered twice in each of the preceding two days (she claimed the ticket record didn’t have much salient information), but then went on to say

Y: "Well, we need to report this to our engineers."
JM: "I reported it two days ago -- I sent email to reportabuse@yahoo-inc.com as I was told."
Y: "No.. we need to do it internally, through our system here."
JM: "Why wasn't that done two days ago? Why wasn't that done yesterday? Why do you wait until the third time I call in with a showstopper of a problem to do that?"
Y: (unintelligible)
JM: "OK, when can I expect somebody to address this?"
Y: "Within 3-5 business days."

And so we must part ways. I like your interface; I think it is vastly superior to Gmail's (although I imagine they will leap-frog you soon enough). The Gmail service, however, allows me to send email. If it ever came to fail, the worst I could say is that I got what I was paying for.

Your service doesn't cost too much money ($25/yr I think it is). A user like me, who appreciates a useful tool, would probably gladly pay 2 or 3 times that if they got a service THAT ACTUALLY WORKED. Please try to remember that when you are selling your customer service operators’ headsets secondhand in order to pay your bankruptcy lawyers’ fees.

Sincerely,

Juan Molinari

Letter to Richard Dreyfuss

I wrote a letter to Richard Dreyfuss to thank him for his comments spoken as a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher. (please click here for the video; it's a must-watch).

Letter to Roger Rosenblatt

I recently wrote a letter to PBS NewsHour columnist Roger Rosenblatt. I wanted to tell him how much I enjoyed his novel Lapham Rising. Here is the text of the letter:

Dear Mr. Rosenblatt, I recently read your book Lapham Rising. I want you to know I found it very pleasant. I especially enjoyed how Mr. Lapham’s assistant’s name is an anagram for “A random tele ink”. My only concern is that I enjoyed your book to an extent slightly beyond that which is justified by the purchase price. In order to resolve this, I have enclosed $5. You may enjoy this without sharing it with your publisher. If you would rather not receive cash, perhaps for tax purposes, feel free to drop by my home in Brooklyn any time and I will feed you a hamburger and a coke. In that case, please don’t forget to bring the $5 with you. Sincerely, Juan Molinari

This is what he wrote me back: