Over the Edge

The estimable Glenn Fleishman complains about mass transit to the Javits Center. Sez I:

As a New Yorker who both drives and takes mass transit, I feel your pain about the Javits Center. Some comments:

Your fond reminiscences of taking the T to the Boston MacWorld are, well, mis-remembered. The World Trade Center is nowhere near a T stop, and Bayside is a long lemming-like walk from JFK. Maybe putting the show at least partly in Hynes (is that what it's called?) is one answer, but it would still be a pain to get from a Green Line stop to a distant Red Line one.

OK, Javits. First of all, you're dead right about transit access to it. For what it's worth, there's a plan on the board to extend the 7 train, which runs east-west from Queens to Times Square, to Javits. The Mayor likes the idea, but the funny thing about transit in New York City is that the Mayor has no say; the MTA is the Governor's thing. Take into account that even underground, Manhattan is built incredibly densely, that there are Important Things in the way between 7th Ave and 42nd Street and 11th Ave and 36th Street, and that the bedrock that makes skyscrapers possible make digging a major pain -- well, it'll be a while.

But wait, there's more. For the last eight years, Mayor Giuliani wanted a baseball stadium to the south of Javits. The Mayor controls the rail yards that are there. But the Governor, who controls Javits, wanted to extend Javits over the rail yards. Standoff. There's some land to the *north* of Javits that was for sale, but some developer's bought it. It's not entirely clear what the next step is.

The latest thing is that the City wants to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. To do so, it would be nice to have a stadium south of Javits after all -- and to extend the subway there, since this is envisioned as a Mass Transit Olympics. So it may happen. But not by next year.

It's been a particularly interesting weekend for the redevelopment of the Ground Zero site, with all relevant parties cautiously approaching a deal.

The WTC site is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is controlled by the governors of the two states. There's never-ending tension within the PA over which state is getting more of its resources. Given that each state's politics is Byzantine all by itself, it's a miracle that the PA gets anything at all done.

I'm not certain who owned the WTC buildings themselves, but a guy named Larry Silverstein owned the lease for the towers. Silverstein has an insurance policy with Swiss Re, under which he's to be paid $3.5 billion in the event of a terrorist attack on the towers. Silverstein says the September 11 attack was two events, so he's owed $7 billion Swiss Re says it was one attack, and since the buildings weren't new anyway, it was willing to pay $2.2 billion. So Silverstein is suing Swiss Re.

Silverstein is really the reason that the six rebuilding proposals look like they do. He's got a contractual right to a 11 million square feet of office and retail space; if he doesn't get it, someone -- probably the Port Authority -- owes him money. Hence the density of the site proposals.

Late last week, someone floated an interesting proposal. It turns out that the PA doesn't own the land under LaGuardia and Kennedy airports; it only owns the facilities. The land belongs to New York City. This causes the occasional friction. How about trading Ground Zero for the land beneath the airports? That way, the Port Authority and its bureaucracy would be out of the way of an emotional rebuilding process.

The Port Authority liked the idea. It pays the city $3 million a year to rent the land, an amount that may increase to $60 million when the lease comes up in 13 years. Swiss Re, which saw some possible daylight in its suit with Silverstein (and who in their right mind would want that particular bag of cats to go to trial?) loved the idea, but pointed out that someone needed to talk to Silverstein -- and that whoever it was should probably come equipped with a checkbook.

Today, Silverstein's spokesman said he "has an open mind" about the proposal, but would like to hear something more formal and fleshed-out. Seems reasonable. It's interesting, too, that the spokesman is Howard Rubenstein, who is the go-to guy for people who want to keep their names in -- and, more important, out of -- the newspapers. Check out his client list if you want to see where the power is in New York.

It's like I said a few weeks ago: this weblog thing is neat, but if it's going to be a real business tool, some authorization/password tools have to be invented.

Casual readers won't know this, but there are some pretty sophisticated technologies behind his weblog. For one thing, every item I write here is automatically sent to any other weblog reader who's asked to be kept up to date. Those bloggers can then pick up and reprint (for lack of a better word) my items.

But what if I only want some of my items to be syndicated, or if I want some items to be syndicated to one group of people but not another? As one poster pointed out, it's possible to use the web's built-in authentication tools, but that's god-awful hack. Finally, someone else is picking up the banner.

From Masukomi's site:

A username and password scheme could be built into the url of the feed but that's a really poor method. The most obvious solution is for RSS clients to start supporting two things: standard HTTP authentication and secure HTTP over SSL (https:// connections).

Until this happens RSS will not be able to evolve beyond the stage of a simple news distribution system... I know I don't want to give everyone access to my e-mail, or confidential company info, but I do want to transmit via an RSS feed. I think that this is especially important for products like Radio that generate RSS feeds and want to get companies to use it as a knowledge management tool.

I can't support this more strongly. If weblogs are going to be a legit business tool, there simply needs to be better security for syndication feeds.

When the Trade Center towers went down last year, they took with it a link between the city's Municpal Credit Union and the ATM network it uses. The bank's data apparently was safe, but there was no way to tell who had how much money in their account at any given time.

As a convenience to its 300,000 members, officers of the MCU made a good customer relations decision: Everyone was allowed pretty much unfettered access to cash. You know about how much you have in your accounts, they said. We trust you. Don't go nuts.

Fifteen million dollars later...

Sixty-six people who withdrew $7,500 or more beyond what was in their accounts have been arrested and face felony charges of grand larceny, and 35 are being sought for arrest, Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, said yesterday. In all, he said, roughly 4,000 people are being investigated....

All 4,000 credit union members being investigated overdrew their accounts by at least $1,000, said Dan Castleman, the chief of investigations in the district attorney's office. Those who were arrested did not take advantage of opportunities to pay the money back. If convicted, credit union members who overdrew their accounts could face up to seven years in prison....

Officials said that more than 540 Municipal Credit Union members made A.T.M. withdrawals that exceeded their account balances by at least $5,000 in the weeks after Sept. 11. More than 1,700 overdrew their accounts by at least $3,000, prosecutors said.

One man, an employee of the Housing Authority, never had an end-of-the-month balance that exceeded $130, prosecutors said. "Nevertheless, he made 53 A.T.M. withdrawals ranging from $20 to $300 each, and charged 101 Visa purchases using his M.C.U. A.T.M. card between September 19th and October 22nd," according to Mr. Morgenthau's press release. "The purchases were at stores including Foot Locker, Jimmy Jazz, Joy Joy Jewelry, Bronx BBQ, Hot Booz Liquor and the 216th Street motel."...

The man's account balance was a negative $10,378 by the end of October, prosecutors said.

A very good piece in Fast Company (and, hey -- when's the last time you heard anyone say that?) about what we at NetGuide used to call Revenge of the Empire. No one knew just when the free ride on the Net would end, but even in the earliest days, everyone knew there was going to be a tollbooth somewhere. We just didn't know where it would be, when it would be erected, or who'd be getting the cash.

The thing is, I don't mind paying for content one way or another. I read the NYTimes for free online, but I also have a paid sub to the print edition; if they wanted to impose some nominal charge for all of you who don't buy the paper version of the paper, I doubt that I'd squawk. Bandwidth and servers ain't free.

I hate the idea of being nickel and dimed, though, which makes me wonder about the various ways of paying for content.

Let's get rid of one idea right away: micropayments. I hate micropayments. Administering a large-scale micropayment system -- billing in increments of under $1 for nuggets of information -- is expensive and unwieldy, and only Visa wins. Micropayments just aren't worth the trouble, either from the user side or the vendor side. Hell, even the porn industry -- the first to use any successful business model or technology -- doesn't use micropayments.

The porn industry uses a two-tier payment system. You can get a lot of low-bandwidth and low-quality content for free, if you let them throw a lot of intrusive ads at you. Or, you can get high-bandwidth and high-quality content if you pay. Oddly enough, that's what broadcast news sites are starting to do: you can read CNN and ABCNews all you want, but if you want streaming content, that'll cost a few bucks a month.

But the adult industry does something even more interesting than that: they pay bounties for traffic. Here again, it's a two-tier system. They pay a much, much lower bounty for junk traffic that just looks at the low-bandwidth low-quality stuff. But they pay a higher bounty for traffic that converts into paid subscriptions. I don't know of any legit sites that do that kind of referrer business, but it seems like a good idea.

There's another wrinkle. It's not uncommon for adult sites to carry links to content on other adult sites -- syndicated content. If you pay on the originating site, you don't have to pay on the syndicated site. This is a lot like what Real Networks is doing with its Gold Pass: one monthly fee for a full menu of content.

Real is in a good position to succeed with the streaming media syndication business because it controls the player and server software. But there's no reason that there can't be other syndicators, too. What about, for instance, a Publisher's Clearing House kind of site, where you'd pick from a paid list of content providers and pay the syndicator once, letting the syndicator deal with payments to the providers. On the back end of the deal, the content provider could cut deals with the syndicator for better positioning on the subscription page and so forth. Not all content providers would get the same cut from the syndicator.

This seems to me to be a particularly good business for an ISP. When you're paying your $30 to Earthlink, maybe you could pay an extra $5 or $10 for access a list of paid content sites. And Presto! You've built a cable TV business model.

There's no question that paid content is the future of the online world. The question is only who will pay who for what and how.

More on the security/authorization piece from earlier today, below.

Jon Udell is one of the smartest technology writers out there, though you may never have heard of him or read his stuff, because he works the techier side of the street, at Byte Magazine and now Infoworld. He wrote a fine piece yesterday about why business weblogs need better security:

... when commercial interests rub elbows in blogspace, this much transparency might be too much. The names of referring URLs, and the numbers attached to them, represent a kind of information leakage. www.internalgroove.net is not accessible to outsiders, of course. But its existence, and its level of interest in Ray's blog experiment, are charted for all to see.

In other words, the very openness of the weblog infrastructure can argue against its use. We've got to be able to close the door.

After extending its "final" deadline no fewer than four times, Ziff Davis has gotten the requisite 95 percent (actually, it's 95.1 percent, at last count, thank you very much) of its bondholders to agree to swap their bonds for cash and equity in the company. The result gives Ziff an extra $30 million in breathing room a year -- no small matter, these days. With that $30 million, for instance, they could have afforded to keep Yahoo! Internet Life and Sm@rtPartner running, with enough extra to buy a couple of beers besides.

There's a hint about what held up the deal for two weeks. In its most recent press release, Ziff says it will pay one (unnamed) bondholder $720,000 for the stock he'll be getting in exchange for his bonds. In other words, someone's had enough and wanted to cash out.

From Mitch Wagner:

DOES THIS MEAN ALL JEWS ARE THEREFORE SUPERHEROS?. "A debate for the silly season." Teresa notes that all superheros, unless specifically stated otherwise, can be assumed to be Jewish. "This is an insight of Paul Krassner's. He explained once in an interview that when he was a kid, he figured all superheroes were Jewish, because where he was growing up, if your name ended in "-man", you probably were: Feldman, Feinman, Superman, Lieberman, Aquaman, Zuckerman, Iceman, Bergman, Sandman, Goldman, Silberman, Hawkman, Wolfman, Batman, Spiderman, Schneiderman--how much more obvious can you get?"

Interesting insight, but you're missing one even more profound. Every one of these Jewish superheros are deeply assimilated; they all have "secret identities" they put forward to the public. Spiderman? Peter Parker -- not a hint of Yiddishkeit there. Superman? Clark Kent. And it never works the other way, does it? The goyishe superheros -- The Flash, The Hulk, Green Lantern, Daredevil (who's even a lawyer, fer chrissakes) -- not a Cohen or Levin in those secret identities, are there?

From CNN:

BUTLER, Pennsylvania (AP) -- The sport utility vehicle that rolls out of the Ibis Tek shop looks just like those driven by millions of soccer moms.

But with a flip of the switch, out of the sunroof pops weaponry ranging from a .50-caliber M2 machine gun to an MK-19 40 mm grenade launcher.

On the other hand, you have to buy your own gun, gas mileage sucks, and it'd set you back $500,000 even if you could buy one in the U.S. But if you need one, you can probably afford one.

The NRDC is going to sue the U.S. Navy over a new kind of sonar. From Reuters via CNN:

Reynolds cited Navy estimates that the LFA system generates sounds capable of reaching 140 decibels more than 300 miles (483 kms) away....

But the fisheries service, a division of the U.S. Commerce Department, said it approved the Navy's use of the sonar after determining that marine mammals were "unlikely to be injured."

 

You are 38% geek

You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator. Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend. You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You'll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines! Geek [to You]: I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals! You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com (Thanks, Dawn!)

I'm part of a fascinating new experiment called blogcritics.com. It goes like this: there are tons of recording artists with no access to mass media to help promote their products. There are tons of good writers who love to write about music. How about using weblogs to bring them together?

A perfect application of the Internet. You bet I'm in. So are about 100 other writers.

The brainstorm of producer Eric Olsen, blogcritics.com goes live Tuesday morning.

I'm starting with two reviews: "Elaine Stritch: At Liberty," and Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising." You'll be able to find them on my site and at blogcritics.com. But remember: the point isn't to review such major releases; it's to get at the good stuff that's under the radar. There'll be submission guidelines published soon. Right now, Eric has his hands full getting the site launched.

The man who perfected the Frisbee died recently. His ashes will be incorporated in a special edition of Frisbees distributed to friends and family. From Reuters via CNN.

How long before one shows up on eBay? The clock starts .... NOW!

A New York City Councilman wants to pass a law to force people to turn off their cell phones while they're in a performance space, like a theater.

From the NY Post:

Council staff cited reports of movie star Laurence Fishburne's profanity-laced admonition of a patron whose phone went off during his performance in "The Lion in Winter" and a similar incident involving Kevin Spacey during his turn in "The Iceman Cometh."

Maybe it's just me, but the prospect of being bitch-slapped in front of an audience by Laurence Fishburne or Kevin Spacey is a whole lot more of a deterrence than the prospect of some fine.

Bell-ringer of a piece by Todd Purdum in today's NYTimes. Nominally, it's about a master class given by Broadway legend Barbara Cook. More deeply, it's about what means to stand on stage and sing -- and it's a complete bullseye.

Best graf is the last, which I need to post on every surface that I ever look at:

"To be as authentic as we know how to be at the moment, so that we can be more and more present in what we do." she said in the interview. "The more we can do that, the safer we are. The problem is it feels most dangerous, because what I ask people to do is in effect undress emotionally, so that's very frightening and new. But this very thing that seems most dangerous is where safety lies."

 

 "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
                                         -- P. J. O'Rourke

This may be true, but it's pretty clear that legislators -- on the national level, anyway -- are being bought and sold anyway.

The other day, Olivia, the twins, and I were making an expedition to the marvelous Fairway up in Harlem. While she was attending to a call of nature, I was charged with keeping an eye on our two carts, each containing an 8-month-old boy strapped into a car seat.

Those of you who have met them are aware that the twins are adorable young men, even on their infrequent bad days. This particular day was not one of those bad ones, and they were being especially engaging and charming. As we waited, by the coffee kiosk at the west end of the Goya aisle, a procession of five extraordinarly attractive young women passed by, stopping to ogle and coo at the kids, who were more than happy to ogle and coo right back. (The women spared a smile for their dad, too -- who also was more than happy to ogle and coo right back.)

Observing this thoughtfully from a few feet away was a 30-ish Fairway employee, his white smock  covering his jeans to mid-calf. "Hmmm," he said, not quite to himself, after the crowd had moved on. "So that's what they're into these days..."

Journalists spend a ton of time bitching about PR reps; some of it is even justified. So it's always encouraging to find a successful attempt at PR cluefulness, like this dispatch from the Public Relations Society of America about how to pitch to weblogs and their authors.

I've been futzing with that question for months, and I think I finally got it down in one place.

Is weblogging journalism? The question confuses the technology with the act it supports -- not something that technologists have ever done before, oh no no no. Just as the equipment doesn't make me a musician or a programmer, blogging doesn't mean you're a journalist. But what makes today's blogging tools exciting is that they're building an infrastructure that allows the rapid and broad dissemination of information. It's an infrastructure that's a natural for building a journalistic enterprise around.

From Ernie the Attorney:

Law Firm pays $3,000/month for associates to not work - I'm not making this up.  Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison is offering to pay some first-year associates as much as $3,000 per month not to show up for work until January 2004.

I like it!

If law schools are turning out too many qualified students, maybe I could get someone to pay me to not go to law school in the first place. And lord knows journalism schools and music academies are turning out more students than there are jobs; maybe I can get some of their money to stay away, too...

NASA says it can't read minds after all, though I frankly find this denial less than fully convincing.

Rep. Bob Barr, the Republican congressman who led the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, lost his primary today. It wasn't even close. Because of redistricting, Barr was up against Rep. John Linder, whose style is somewhat more sedate. From a late Tuesday/early Wednesday NYTimes piece:

Mr. Linder, 59, a former dentist and business executive whose phlegmatic style was a sharp contrast to Mr. Barr's sizzle, had, at times, made his steady demeanor an issue in the campaign. During one debate, Mr. Linder said to his opponent, "I will remind you that I am the one who has been married for 39 years to the same woman," a subtle criticism of Mr. Barr, 53, who is in his third marriage.

Meg Hourihan has an excellent piece on the O'Reilly Network about another way to use weblogs to make money: use them as a promotional tool. Meg oughta know -- she's one of the founders of the company that came up with the popular Blogger software.

Practiced PR pros know, of course, that sponsored content is hardly new. But Meg expands on the concept in some valuable and interesting ways.

I found myself this evening standing in an around-the-block line at the New York debut of Jaguar, Mac OS X.2. Why? Just looking. And because I have a homebrew Wintel computer that I built to record music, but which I've spent two orders of magnitude more time fixing than doing music. That's time not doing music, not editing video, not duplicating discs. When I hit the power switch, I never know if the damn thing is going to boot. That's just unacceptable.

Today, it didn't. Again.

And boy, them Macs sure look purty.

The NYSun says there's a wacky e-mail going around suggesting that the first car of every subway train ... well, read for yourself:

Thousands of New Yorkers are now forwarding an anonymous e-mail to each other informing them that from now on, every first subway car has been declared ãthe singles car.ä

(Bonus points for naming the song and artist referenced in the title, above.)

Where do you get the world's best egg cream? They decided yesterday on the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall.
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Making a bearnaise sauce is a mysterious thing. I once was putting one together -- all the ingredients were blended in perfect proportion, gentle heat was being applied, and the sauce was thickening just as it should -- when it suddenly just separated out. Fell apart. I applied some quickly learned emergency measures, and the sauce came back together. Mostly. But I've always wondered what went wrong at the stove that evening.

Same thing applies to the current Broadway revival of Rogers and Hart's The Boys from Syracuse. There's tons of yummy ingredients to the show -- including a pretty good retooled book by Nicky Silver (replacing the George Abbott original) -- but only sometimes do all the parts smooth out.

The plot is set out in the opening number, "Hurrah! Hurroo!," a miracle of compact exposition. The action takes place in Ephesus. Two sets of identical twins -- one pair of aristocrats and one pair of slaves -- from Syracuse are lost at sea seven years ago. Residents from Syracuse are executed in Ephesus because of their origins unless they can come up with 1000 drachmas.  One of the aristocrat twins is established as an Ephesian war hero; the other comes to town to find his twin. Each twin has his respective identical slave with him.

Merriment ensues.

No, really. After the opening number, the show sags for most of the first act as the focus turns on the four romantic leads. But whenever it's time for the comic leads and supporting players to shine, the pace picks up and the show becomes tons more fun. The second act curtain-raiser, "You Took Advantage of Me," has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the show, but features four of what I think were once known as chorines. I've gotta say, I like the chorines. The audience didn't quite know what to do with them. Applause would have been good. Whistling would not have been out of order, either. One of them, Dierdre Goodwin, will apparently be in the upcoming movie of Chicago. I'll be there.

Another high point was the song "Come With Me," perhaps the merriest song about incarceration short of "Jailhouse Rock." Fred Inkley gets the credit here.

The female comic lead, Luce, is played by Toni Dibuono in a turn that's more than slightly reminiscent of a much shorter Bette Midler. The two slaves, both named Dromio, were well played by Lee Wilkog and Chip Zien (who counts among his many distinguished credits the voice of Howard the Duck). Erin Dilly played the engenue, Luciana, well enough, though it appeared that she only remembered to bring her energy on stage after intermission.

Jackee Harry (from TV's Sister Sister and 227) turns up in a small role as a madam and gets the 11 o'clock number, "Sing for Your Supper." She doesn't have great pipes, but carries the song off nicely anyway. And there's some surprise stunt casting in a very small part deep in the second act. I don't want to give it away -- and I don't know if it's the same casting every night -- but someone highly recognizable from a classic sitcom popped up on stage last night.

Lighting and staging were first-rate, as always with the Roundabout. Sound design and singing were a little problematic. Unison singing was strong, but levels sometimes dropped out unpredictably when unisons broke into harmony parts. Might have been the miking, might have been the singers. Whatever, it wasn't quite right.

The Boys from Syracuse runs about two hours plus intermission. This production is a second-acter dream. Show up at the break, and you'll catch most of what's great about the show.