The roofers finally finished our new roof last week. They started on February 28th and finished on April 2nd – five weeks. I’m pretty certain they only expected it to take about three weeks, but between the rain and the level of detail on the roof, it didn’t quite work out that way. Everything seemed to take longer than expected. On the bright side, all of you in central North Carolina owe us for the rain. I’m convinced that March would not have been so rainy except for our roof. For example, the first major rains came right after they pulled off the old shingles; and the rains last Monday and Tuesday postponed the completion. Coincidence? I don’t think so. You might say I’m falling victim to the logical fallacy, post hoc, ergo propter hoc. I say, screw that, I’m still taking credit for the rain. ...

A few years ago, I was accused of using the word “interesting in subtle ways. Sometimes it means a truly novel idea that I would like to learn more about, other times, it’s a novel idea of which I’m more than a little skeptical. In both cases, I stand by the description, to me, both are interesting – but it can make it a little hard to know what I’m really thinking. So take it with a grain of salt that I just read an interesting article in the February 2008 issue of IEEE Computer on how to turn music lovers (particularly teenagers) into music distributors. ...

It’s apparently “beat up the economists week and no one thought to tell me in advance. Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies posts about Greg Mankiw’s recent NY Times editorial and suggests that the reason economists are so patronizing is bitterness over being stuck in a low paying academic job whose sole purpose is to justify the inequities in a capitalist system. In Scientific American, we have Rober Nadeau’s editorial on the problems with the views of economists. Nadeau notes that economics is a social science that tried to pattern itself after physics. Unfortunately, a) it used 19th century physics and never updated itself as the physics changed; and b) economists never realized that they can’t treat people as elemental particles. Nadeau goes on to note some of the basic assumptions made in economics that don’t stand up. ...

We’ve got voice over IP phones at the office. For the most part, they are a very smart way to handle our communications. We’re too large to want to use individual analog lines through the local telephone company – their rates would be prohibitively expensive. We’re too small to make a private branch exchange (PBX) worthwhile. So sending our voice data over the internet is a good approach. When the phones work, the sound quality is excellent, the cost is relatively inexpensive and the system is fairly reliable. Unfortunately, when the phones don’t work the challenges begin. ...

As mentioned last month, the North Carolina Utilities Commission has banned the expansion of Progress Energy’s Balanced Billing Plan and Duke Power’s Fixed Payment Plan. These are the plans that charge you roughly 11% in order to have a guaranteed power bill. Unfortunately, it’s not a full ban, it’s just a prohibition against enrolling any new participants. The reason for the ban? [drum roll please] The plans encourage participants to increase their power consumption.

Last week I was having lunch with a colleague (of sorts) and we were on the topic of the economy, outsourcing of jobs, etc. I mentioned that we were living in, what I’ve taken to calling, a crappy low-rent future *. He pointed out, and I agree, that this is largely because corporations have broken the social contract. It turns out he had been reading Robert Reich’s “Super Capitalism while I had been reading “The Global Class War. In their own ways, each of these books tells the story of how corporations from the end of the WWII with the New Deal until the late 1970s were bound by something of a social contract. Corporations recognized that their customer base was their employee base and that while you might not want to pay your employees, not doing so would spiral out of control so that your own customers couldn’t afford your products. Corporations began to slip the social contract in the late 70s with the Regan Revolution. The trend continued in the 80s and 90s as companies began to achieve transnational status: i.e., their customer base and their employee base were no longer the same. NAFTA and the follow-up “free trade agreements accelerated this trend by allowing companies to shift labor and production to the places where it was cheapest without actually requiring labor or environmental standards that would level the playing field. ...

Gee, nobody could have predicted this I suppose: The FBI improperly used national security letters in 2006 to obtain personal data on Americans during terror and spy investigations, Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday. Admittedly, Mueller goes on to say that the reports were prior to new policies being put into place, but somehow that doesn’t make me feel much better. It’s things like this that have always made me very nervous about partnerships between law enforcement and industry. I’ll try to post something about InfraGard one of these days. It’s a little scary in its own right.

For the most part, the old roof has been ripped off and we’re looking to start laying down the new roofing on Thursday. Several lessons learned so far in getting the roof replaced: all contractors have different prices, shop around drought is bad for roofers (and for that matter gravel driveway repair folks) having your roof torn off is LOUD. Between the guys tearing shingles off to the dogs barking like crazy, I had a splitting headache when I stayed home metal ridge vent covers from 20 years ago suck the leak we had in the den actually had its own pool of standing water under the ridge vent cover Looks like it’s going to rain tonight. Hopefully we won’t be learning the lesson about the maximum wind speed that roofing underlayment can take before blowing off.

We moved into our current house a little over four years ago (already?!). Over the past few years, we’ve found that the people who built it made some interesting choices. Some things were done very nicely and they cheaped out on other things. One of the places they cheaped out was the roof. It wasn’t bad enough to force them to replace it when we moved in, but we did have to get them to do some minor work. Since then I’ve had to go up there a few times a year and add some roofing tar or replace a vent boot. We’ve known that we’ll have to replace it some day for a couple of years now. ...

Few people have been on top of the extension of FISA like Glenn Greenwald. As a quick overview for folks that haven’t been paying attention to the issue: Late last year a real potential problem with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (as written in the 70s and amended after Sept 11) was recognized. Namely, communication between two foreign entities that was routed through the US was subject to the law’s requirements for a court order. This was never the intent of the law and largely crept in due to the routing of Internet traffic through major US networking hubs In addition to correcting this, the Whitehouse and the Republican congress pushed for a change to FISA that went beyond correcting the oversight and significantly extended the ability of the government to spy on citizens. Congress couldn’t pass this permanently, but did pass a six month bill before the August recess, in large part because of scare tactics used by the FBI (releasing warnings of predicted attacks in DC) Six months was up last week and the Whitehouse was pushing to: a) correct the known oversight, b) extend its ability to spy on US citizens without court order, and now they’ve added c) grant retro-active immunity to the telecommunications companies for illegally helping the government spy both before and after Sept 11th. And of course, if they don’t get all of this, we’ll die in our sleep, murdered by terrorists. The Senate caved and gave the Whitehouse everything it asked for. Surprisingly, the House didn’t and we’re now seeing extra pressure claiming that we’ll all die and it’ll be their fault. This is of course BS, but that’s the state of discourse in the country. I don’t have much to add on the spying per se, but I will admit to being particularly offended and disturbed by the telecom immunity issue. Essentially, these companies started helping law enforcement to monitor calls, read emails, etc. well before September 11th. Their actions were not scared or patriotic, they were largely motivated by greed. ...