About 10 years ago, I was in Chicago to deliver a Vignette StoryServer training class. It was cold. And I was standing in line, outside, waiting to get a bag of Garrett cheese popcorn.  The guy in front of me turned back a few times, then introduced himself.  He was with the Trib and had recognized me.  We spent a cold walk to the L talking about the impact of the web, the news, and the future.

I never got his name.  And time proved most of our speculations (and stock options) worthless.  But I do remember the impact that the Chicago Tribune’s web operations had on my own career.  They were Vignette’s first marquee customer for the old StoryServer product (which had its detractors).  Acquired from CNET – where it was called PRISM – it ran on Sun and was powered by Tcl and Sybase (or Oracle if you REALLY wanted to IPO well).  And after a time I actually managed a pale imitation of MVC using it.  While I had some exposure to data bases prior to coming to Vignette, I spent many a long night in 1997 with the Trib schema on the screen and “Database Design For Mere Mortals” on my desk.  By the time I was back getting popcorn in the winter of  ‘98 I was able to give the Trib guy an idea or two from our first forays into XML services.   I will always be grateful to those Trib folks that answered my first dumb questions and helped convince me to leave Detroit for Austin.

Several bubble-bursts later, I hate to see the Tribune  fall, although it looks like it was financial engineering, not the technical or business models.  I hope 2009 is kinder to us all.

When I was a kid (and Nixon was President), the only things we had to fear in our Halloween candy haul were urban legends.  No razor blades, poison, or LSD appeared during my mom’s careful inspection – although I did get some stale cookies and the occasional religious tract from people too religious and stingy to part with some M&Ms.

Now, a good Samhain sugar binge may have gone the way of riding in dad’s lap while he drove, making ashtrays at summer camp for gift-giving, and just about every piece of baby furniture I touched growing up.  But even candy can be safely enjoyed in moderation – chocolate has even become health food. But outside of avoiding White Rabbit melamine and formaldehyde sweets, we are finally in the clear, right?

Nope.  There are tiny little tooth bombs hiding in that bag, ready to suck the last sweet drops of fun out.  Seems those “sour” candies are even more dangerous than the old-fashioned gum drops and Milk Duds:

Halloween Horror: California Dental Hygienists Issue Warning About the Dangers of Sour Candy

Popular New Generation of Candy Almost Like Eating Battery Acid

Great.  Battery acid.  And I thought the biggest danger these days was the stupid candy corn song on  Noggin!  So read the whole press release and then sit on your hands when you see that third box of Sour Patch Kids go down junior’s gullet.

And for those without small children and digital cable:

So glad my advice was taken – lol!  But pop over the Newsvine discussion and catch a whiff or two of the rants.  Oh well.  Tomorrow, lots of people will complain, many will pontificate, and a few smart ones will move on and carefully invest.  A little Washington Mutual (WM @2.36 on 9/26) anyone?  Or better yet, produce a little earned profit!

PS – socializing risk is pretty stupid, but we need a managed withdrawal, not a cold-turkey spasm.  On the other hand, if you come home one evening and John Galt is on the radio, you have no one to blame but all of us.

This has been primarily a personal and technical blog – but this morning I simply have to vent at the idiotic statement from Republican John McCain concerning AIG.

From Bloomberg:

Republican presidential nominee John McCain said the U.S. government should let American International Group Inc. fail to prevent the financial burden from being placed on taxpayers.

“I think you have to, but I also know that there are great efforts being made to try to raise sufficient capital to keep AIG in business,”‘ McCain said in an interview with CNBC from Miami.

Taxpayers shouldn’t be held responsible for the bad performance of U.S. institutions, and “the moral-hazard issue is something that we have to take head-on,’” he told the cable news channel.

Okay, this is just pandering to populist anger.  Unlike the failures at investment banking houses, a collapse of AIG would hurt the “average joe taxpayer” harder than any other demographic.  I’ve been a fan of Jim Cramer since working with thestreet.com in its earliest days, and Jim, among many others, emphasizes that AIG must not fail.

You see, AIG may be a huge firm, but it touches all of us.  AIG insures the cars, homes, and retirement for an incredibly huge number of American taxpayers.  AIG provides life insurance for a lot of those taxpayers.  AIG has been a powerful player in small business and professional liability insurance.  Their aggresive marketing and pricing has made personal and business insurance much more affordable.

The collapse of AIG will devastate small business, professional groups, and individuals concerned enough about their future that they invest in AIG products.

Savvy shoppers and business owners checked the rating services prior to committing to AIG.  The rating services failed us.  The regulators failed us.  And yes, the AIG board failed us.  But the true moral hazard here is that the Republican party pushed deregulation for thirty years.  We certainly needed less regulation, but not the complete abandonment of responsible governance we have seen.

A few months ago, I read “The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism” by John Bogle (recommendation courtesy of Bill Moyers).  Certainly, the founder of the Vanguard Group is no liberal – so this book is no paean to the Democrats.  I hope that both candidates take some time to read it.  And so should you!  We – as in “We The People” – have a responsibility to help AIG get through the next few months.

The only group that will feel the collapse of AIG is the American taxpayer.  If the fat-cats at Bear Sterns can get a bail-out, surely a champion of small business, personal responsibility, and marketplace-driven insurance deserves no less.  The only ones who will profit from AIG’s collapse are the well-healed insurance and investment sharks that aren’t AIG’s customers.

UPDATE

I checked in at lunch with Bloomberg – an AIG failure will even negatively affect gas prices for us ‘taxpayers’:

AIG is the largest corporate insurer in the U.S., and sells protection against some of the biggest risks, insuring planes and commercial shipping and providing coverage against terrorist attacks.

The company gets more than 40 percent of its revenue from property and casualty customers. AIG provides coverage for offshore oil drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, warranties for televisions in Brazil, and insurance that complies with Islamic law in Bahrain.

Folks, an AIG collapse will shut down more US oil rigs than Ike . . . we HAVE to be smarter than McCain on this one!

The noise from our Samsung DLP was deafening – a high-pitched screetch that you usually hear coming from old cars with bad belts.  Or fingernails meeting chalkboard.  A quick Google search revealed two important things:

1. The likely culprit was a strange little device called a ‘color wheel.’
2. As one of only two moving parts in this tv, it was technically replaceable.

As a kid, I remember my dad fixing our old console TV.  He actually had a device to test vacuum tubes, and when one went bad I remember riding into town with him.  Returning with the new tube, I remember watching him carefully open the back, carefully remove a tube, and snap the new one in place.  When he turned the tv back on, it sprang to life – good as new.  Wow.  He changed oil in cars, rewired lamps, and now THIS. Well, they invented the word awesome just for my dad!

Now I had my chance, forty years later.  Possibly my last chance.  To fix a tv myself.

Its not like I had no electronics experience. I worked with electronics in the Air Force and with defense contractors.   I’ve built several PCs from scratch.   A tv should be easy.

Of course, a tv is different.  Its the portal, the icon, the center of most family’s social infrastructure.  Its mythic.  A tv is unlike any other appliance.  And unlike all my previous electronics work, my kids would see me fixing the tv.  The price of failure was enormous.

Luckily, I have something better than Dad’s tube tester.  I have the web!  And thanks to this great blog entry on how to replace a Samsung DLP Color Wheel, I had all the instructions I needed (although I recommend this YouTube video for anyone tackling this project).  I found the part I needed at Partstore.com.

Whats great about the web?   It isn’t the multimedia, the networks, the instant news . . . its the fact that are hundreds of tools available that allow people to share information at little or no cost.  And its folks that contribute content every day to the web – not for money or fame but out of simple altruism.

The wheel arrives, and I barely paused to read the warnings embossed onto the back of the console.  “REFER SERVICING TO QUALIFIED SERVICE PERSONNEL.” Hah!

The best part?  My four-year old sitting on the couch because she wants to watch her Dad “fixing the tv.”  When I replaced the last screw, powered up the tv, and saw everything working great, Maeson yelled “Yay, Dad fixed the tv!”

Hard.  Not really – thanks to the web references I found.  Rewarding?  You betcha!  Now if I can find something to watch besides Law and Order reruns . . .

A sneaky little piece of spam snuck through this morning:

Sarkozy Carla Bruni Sex Film Shocker at Windsor Castle

Definitely a European spammer.  One who rarely meets Americans.  I’m willing to bet there aren’t a whole lot of us Americans who can actually name the French president, let alone his wife.  Well, she did date Mick Jaggar, Eric Clapton, and Donald Trump so we may remember her.  No, wait, I don’t think she followed any of it up on Howard Stern, so no.

While Windsor Castle may ring a bell or two, it might be tricky trying to find an American who can name the country its in.  Most will guess New York

Eurospammers, if you want ANY penetration in the US market, please stick to Paris Hilton, Angelina Jolie, and our digestive system.

Wonderful post over at Texas Kaos.

Those who are coming to this story today have jumped into the middle of quite a tale. I put myself in a tough position last time by promising to link a British “garden of lust”, Benjamin Franklin, and 18th Century bloggers into a narrative that concludes with the nascent United States of America and its shiny new Fourth Amendment.

Jump in at On The Weird Twists Of History, Part Two, Or, Why We Have A Fourth Amendment

Remember bragging how you played World of Warcraft on company time three jobs ago?  You posted instructions on how to do it on that backwater forum two years ago.  Yes, people do brag about not working at work.

And right now, your potential new job and huge salary jump is slipping away as the HR Director reads those instructions.  Fetch Technologies is opening up the deep web to companies interested in creating profiles and current workers and potential new hires.

Employers have been searching social network profiles for awhile now.  Employees have been fired for blogging, profiles, and even online Facebook comments.  Even a university got in the act and denied someone a teaching degree for their MySpace photo.

According to their press release, Fetch goes far beyond a simple Google Search.  They go

substantially deeper, says Jerry Thurber, President of Fetch Footprint, a division of Fetch Technologies’ Employee Data Services Group. Footprint automates what would take hundreds of man-hours to otherwise discover. For those involved with recruiting, contracting, screening or hiring decisions, the web provides a vast array of information  if you know what to look for. Footprint is designed to intelligently parse data relevant to hiring decisions

In addition to vetting corporate employment candidates, Fetch Footprint will serve a variety of industry verticals including risk management, background checking, tax credit services, recruiting, applicant tracking, tenant screening, job fit assessments, human resources management and benefit services. “If information about people is critical to your business, Fetch Footprint will find it and deliver it in a way you can use it,” adds Thurber.

Of course, you have no idea that Fetch Technologies is actually finding and reporting.  Careersthatdontsuck recommends “Stop writing dirty, silly things on the walls of your friends’ Facebook pages.  Stop posting half-naked photos of yourself on your trip to Greece on your MySpace pages.“  Unfortunately, Fetch will “scour public-data sources and lurk on social/professional networking sites to gather information” so its more than just keeping yourself squeaky clean.

Fetch could always including sites like Juicy Campus in their mix.  Unfortunately, services like Fetch make it impossible for individuals to fight back.

With Fetch there are serious issues.  Mistakes can be made – bad data is not a new problem.  Problems with confusing one person with another, of “poisoning the well” by pretending to be someone else when commenting, and even creating fake profiles and comments to ruin someone.  Since Fetch reports what they find to the company, not the individual, there is no individual protection from fraud, libel, or defamation.  On top of everything else, services like Fetch could make discrimination lawsuits practically impossible, since alternative reasons for any negative action can be planted and then “discovered” by Fetch and other tools.

And their isn’t much an individual can do right now.  Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects providers or users of interactive computer services from liability in order to encourage robust debate in online discussions.  Privacy rights like those proposed by Senator Clinton just a few years ago are a good start.  Donald Carrington Davis, in “MySpace Isn’t Your Space” suggests “the law must expand to ensure users of these websites adequate protection from unfair, illegal or arbitrary employment decisions.”

Anyone can be a victim – and Federal law must be updated to make reports such as those generated by Fetch Footprint available to their subjects, not simply their buyers.  Fetch says they are “on target to double in size over the next two years.” Support online privacy now- or you may be left with just a lousy t-shirt.

Sometimes I simply can’t resist a quick scan of my spam folder before deleting it.  I have always had a private theory that as long as the p*n!s spams outnumbered the payday loan spams, the economy was still doing okay.

One spam message caught my eye: “Your TRADEMARK domain name is now available.”

Dear Sir / Madam,

We are Mumbai based domain name registration service providers and we offer domain name registration services worldwide for over 250+ different domain name extensions.

We would like to inform you that one of the most important domain name extension .TM (also known as Trademark Domains) are now available for registration.

Registration charges for .tm domain are USD 192.00 per year.

Please do let us know if you would like to process the registration for your trademark domain name.

Thanks & best regards,

Network Computers

Okay, yes I wasn’t quick enough to get in the the Micronesia (FM), Tuvalu (TV), or Cameroon (CM) scams concepts.  Or at least too ethical (which sounds so much better).  I’m sure the people signing up for their very own Turkmenistan domain (not to be confused with Kazakhstan by those who didn’t see Borat) have no idea what they are buying.   At least they don’t need to worry that someone in Turkmenistan may challenge their domain name – they are ranked 167th out of 169 countries in the Reporters Without Borders world press freedom index.  Very few people in Turkmenistan surf the web, let alone have web sites.

If you want to protect your intellectual property – check out your country’s intellectual property office and retain competent legal counsel.  If you want to fall for internet scams – stick to the ones spelled p*n!s so at least dictators don’t profit from your gullibility.