Tim Oren's Due Diligence

A Graduation Ceremony of Sorts

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of the accident in which I shattered my right leg. I chose to celebrate and validate my recovery by spending the day hiking in Windy Hill preserve above Portola Valley. The unseasonably warm and dry California weather provided a great day for it, and I did 8 1/2 miles and about 1200 feet of climbing to Skyline and back. Maybe not much to the more athletic bloggers like Ole Eichhorn, but still pretty satisfying considering that a year ago today the orthopedist was telling my wife there was a 15% chance he wouldn't be able to repair the damage I'd done. I'll carry the scars and other reminders for the rest of my life, but I've got the hills and the trails back, and that's worth a celebration.

The Roving Eye: Best of the 'Bots, Flipping Newspapers, Dry California, Inaugural

Bots in review 2008: Here's a collection of vids of some of the most interesting robotic work of the past year. The Japanese are still on the humanoid path, but the diversity of forms from elsewhere is intriguing. If you haven't seen the Big Dog DARPA project, be sure to check it out - it's apparent mannerisms range from gigantic bug to strangely human. The USC reconfigurable components projects is also of interest; up to now robotics hasn't had much 'platformness' - they are all pretty much tailored to single functions.

How to become a newspaper millionaire. Start with a billion. (Rimshot.) The last week has brought us a Russian oligarch buying up the Evening Standard of London, for assumption of debts and one UK pound, and Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim putting $250m of senior debt into the New York Times, helping the Grey Lady keep the wolf from the door, and further diluting the Sulzbergers. Slim's track record when away from his telco and media monopolies is quite mixed. He managed to buy Prodigy just as the Internet was swamping the proprietary online services, and CompUSA as the computer specialty retail channel imploded. Update: More on Slim and the NYT.

It's official. La Niña is back. The reverse of the better-known El Niño Pacific Ocean climate pattern that brings floods to California, La Niña instead brings us drought. With last year already being short of rain, we could well be looking at water rationing and an even more intense fire season this year. This to go with California's economic woes, both micro and macro.

Good luck to President Obama. I didn't vote for him, but I wish him well. May he do better than I have feared. That doesn't mean the political bent here will change. I'll take my stand with Perry de Havilland:

So now is not the time for 'unity' and 'bipartisanship', which is just a genteel way of demanding surrender, it is the time for resistance and the renewal of purpose by those who see the liberty and prosperity that comes from constitutionally limited government as a prize worth any price to defend.

Hopefully, dissent is still patriotic post January 20th.

Boycotting GM and Chrysler

I've been back in the automotive market, involuntarily. The week before Christmas my wife's 'round-town' car was smacked in the front end by an errant elderly driver. Both drivers suffered nothing worse than bruises, the other party accepted responsibility, but our poor little Scion xA was totaled. So I started the New Year with a round of car research and shopping.

GM and Chrysler products weren't on the candidate list, and never will be again. The same week our Scion was wiped out, Chrysler and GM got into the Federal hog trough to the tune of $17b of loans of dubious legality. From William Durant to Wesley Mouch Rick Wagoner. What a come down.

And now Chrysler is back squealing for $3 billion more. Meanwhile GM and Cerberus Capital (owner of Chrysler) got the Feds to dump some taxpayers' money into GMAC, which they jointly own. That's another subsidy, since GM and Chrysler may not be able to make a profit without their financing arm. And now GMAC has dropped the credit score to qualify for a loan from 700 to 621. (Hmmm, we are in the current mess in part because the Feds coerced/enticed mortgage lenders to give loans to those who could not repay. Let's do the same for cars, that'll fix things!)

Any company that takes my money by force or fraud will never see a single cent of it voluntarily, ever again. If the government won't hold the domestic automotive industry accountable, then it's up to us as customers to do so. Honda and Toyota regularly show that you can make a quality product on American soil with American labor. It's the bozos in charge in Detroit - UAW, management and politicians - that are the problem. Let 'em go down. (Ford gets a pass for now. They had the guts to turn down the government cheese, at least for now, and settle their fate in the marketplace.)

Of course, this isn't actually going to change my behavior that much, just the motivation. In spite of coming from a GM family, I haven't bought one of their products or a Chrysler brand, or even considered it, in 25 years. The reason why illuminates the root causes of Detroit's debacle:

Once I decide on a class of vehicle to buy, my next stop is to pick up the latest versions of Consumer Report's Used and New Car Buying Guides. Then I go through the category of interest and strike out any vehicle that doesn't regularly make better than average reliability as a used car, and have the same forecast for the current year's model. That step has eliminated every Chrysler and GM vehicle without ever setting foot on a dealer's lot. Need more? The Used Car guide I just picked has a list of the 11 vehicles with least satisfied drivers for the 2005 model year. Every one of them is a GM or Chrysler product. This car blog's list of the 10 worst autos of 2008 includes nine GM and Chrysler products. The last is a VW, and now VW is whining to Washington about how they should have some bailout money. Coincidences?

There is justice in the market. GM and Chrysler are suffering the results of decades of milking their brands. There is no justice in handing over taxpayers' hard-earned dollars to incompetents. Boycott.

My wife is driving a cute new Honda Fit.

The Roving Eye: Signs of the Times, Web 2.0 Reality Check, Caja Redux, The Other Thing The Newspapers Missed

Toldyaso Dept.: The commentariat has noticed the financial pit that awaits the New York Times, leading to a curious role reversal. Michael Hirschorn of The Atlantic takes a post-apocalyptic view, while conservative Jules Crittenden bemoans the impended debacle. More typically, Steven Den Beste emerges from anime gazing to write an epitaph:

The big reason you aren't seeing the public shedding many tears over the demise of the NYT is that we all know that they've dug their own grave. The impending demise of the NYT isn't tragedy, it's justice.

What he said. Mind you, I don't think the NYT will actually fold up in one step, but at least the Sulzberger family's equity and control is going to be largely or completely washed out. Could the Times regain some part of its former position when Pinch is finally walked out the door? We'll see.

Buzzword Heat Death. Kudos to Jeff Nolan for calling BS on the viability of many so-called Web 2.0 startups. The steadily dropping capital costs of creating Web-based component software has meant that it's easy to get something of the sort started, resulting in an over-crowded marketplace and little differentiation. Many Web 2.0 startups built on underpants gnomes business models are running into unsurprising viability and exit problems in a hostile capital and credit environment. Jeff may be right in tagging Michael Arrington as one of the least critical promoters of the meme, but he shouldn't have the whole albatross hung round his neck: I seem to recall John Battelle, Tim O'Reilly and a few others ginning it up to create a trade show / conference sized aggregation of post dot-com innovations.

Somebody's Paying Attention. My article on the Caja safe Javascript dialect is getting an increasing number of hits, nine months after it was published, coming in from a combination of Wikipedia, Google's developer pages, and plain old searches. Something's going on out there. If you're seriously interested, you should also check out architect Mark Miller's note on performance implications, number 3 on this thread.

I Know, For I Was There. Jack Shafer has a worthwhile article at Slate on the newspapers' multiple tries at online presences that still left them missing the boat. He nails two core issues: The newspapers were reacting defensively to perceived technology threats, and stepped back each time the threat proved minimal, leaving them unprepared when it finally became mortal. Second, the content and platforms used were always "non-generative" in the sense that creation and provisioning was always centrally controlled. That's correct as far as it goes. When I was involved with CompuServe, putting up user interfaces and content involved writing code, and deploying it onto central servers one at a time. There were no such things as user-accessible markup or distributed data centers on a routed network. What he misses, though, is that content was never central to even early online services. The use of person-to-person communications functions - e-mail, chat, bulletin boards and file libraries - was the greatest predictor of customer loyalty and driver of revenue, even then. With their "Content is King" attitude, newspapers missed the fact that even the early online service business relied on what we'd now call "community". They still haven't learned it.

Update: See Jeff Jarvis' comments on both the Shafer and Hirschorn pieces. Worth a read.