I was considering some ideas for the required final paper and I thought it might be interesting to look into single serving sites, a phenomenon that I read about on Kottke earlier this year. We discussed our potential topics in class, and my idea had a lukewarm reception, so I opted for a safety topic I had about how the format of sites like Reddit and Digg affect their treatment of news. A couple weeks later a classmate confronted me in the hall and convinced me that the paper on single serving sites was worth writing.

I finished my paper a couple days ago, created a domain for it, isthisyourpaperonsingleservingsites.com, and shot an email to my professor with the URL. I told some friends about the paper via Twitter, and a dozen or so visited to take a look. I also sent a short note to Jason Kottke, since I got the idea by reading his site.

Long story short, I came home this evening to find my site mentioned on Kottke’s site. I checked Google Analytics to find that over 2,000 people had visited the paper. To add perspective, that’s about 25% of all the visits to this site this year.

My thanks to everyone who has emailed me with comments and suggestions. I wasn’t able to devote as much time to this project as I would have liked (it’s only one credit of many), but I hope to revisit my analysis over Christmas break. Which is coming soon: check isitchristmas.com.

Update (Dec. 18): My site was mentioned on BuzzFeed, MetaFilter, and Hacker News. Also, Michael Sippey wrote an imagined one-paragraph conversation that I might have with my parents explaining my project. It’s funny, but I think it overestimates my parents’ interest by about a paragraph.

Update (Dec. 26): my 15 minutes are up. This is what a meme looks like:

The best thing I can say about the magazine is this: reading the New Yorker I learn fascinating things about subjects I had no idea were interesting. Anything can be interesting if it’s presented the right way and well written, and that’s what I get in my mailbox week after week. For example: a 10-pager on elevators, the way companies use Muzak to control atmosphere, a shoot-out over radio station turf wars, and how a woman was itching so badly that she scratched through her skull.

This week’s issue has a gem on “the secret lives of knives.” The first paragraph was enough to hook me. It introduces Bob Kramer, a Master Bladesmith, and describes how he received that title from the American Bladesmith Society:

“Kramer underwent five years of study, culminating in the manufacture, through hand-forging, of six knives. One of those was a roughly finished, fifteen-inch bowie knife, which Kramer had to use to accomplish four tasks, in this order: cut through an inch-thick piece of Manila rope in a single swipe; chop through a two-by-four, twice; place the blade on his forearm and, with the belly of the blade that had done all the chopping, shave a swath of arm hair; and, finally, lock the knife in a vise and permanently bend it ninety degrees.”

How could you stop reading after that? I can’t.

I spent the evening in South Hall on the UC Berkeley campus watching election results come up with classmates. When I left to go home I ran into an impromptu gathering of hundreds of students in the street celebrating.

After hanging around for a bit I decided to ride my bike home. As I rode down Bancroft Way I passed wave after wave of people marching up the hill. I happened to have my camera handy and I was able to get this nifty video clip. The shakiness is because it’s hard to ride a bicycle and hold a camera at the same time.

On a side note: voting in California is hard. By the time we get to the polls we all know which presidential candidate we’re voting for. But how are you voting on Proposition 63? Or Measure HH? I ended up casting 35 separate votes, and people in San Francisco had even more (including some completely ridiculous measures).

I decided to give it a whirl, but with my entire website. I used my blogging software to create a text file with everything I have written here—140,000 words—and I uploaded it for Wordle to process. Here are the major themes in all that text:

Word chart of my site produced by Wordle.

Once you start making wordles it can be addicting. I kept looking for things that I have written to put into the system. I uploaded my senior philosophy thesis, emails, source code for computer programs. Get some text and try it out for yourself.

I played around with new designs and techniques for awhile. Around 2003 I realized that I wasn’t actually creating much content on my website because it was such a laborious process: write something, format it using HTML, figure out where to put it, and upload the file. I had heard about blogs, so I started using Blogger (later I switched to MovableType). The slogan I created for myself was “Less fluff. More stuff.” I put together a design for the front page that I thought was adequate and went to work writing. Version 2.

A progression of my site’s homepage from 2000 to the present.

I have made exactly 400 posts since I started blogging. That has pushed my site word count over 136,000—not tremendous output over five years by blogger standard, but still substantial. Having fulfilled my “stuff” requirement, I felt like I was able to turn my attention to redesigning my website, which I have wanted to do for a long time. My front page is still mostly static, an homage to the splash-screens popular circa 2000. I am still using the original MovableType template I adopted years ago, which is too narrow to accommodate photos I post from Flickr. I’ve made minor additions and tweaks to the site over the years, but the look hasn’t changed in the last 5 years. Plus the HTML behind the scenes is a complete mess.

I started working on this redesign ten months ago and I have been so busy with real projects and school that I kept putting off the final steps. I tried to jump-start my blog writing a month ago, but I was less enthusiastic knowing that my words would appear on my old fuddy-duddy site when I had some new hotness waiting around the corner. This past weekend I put all the parts together and installed my new design on the latest version of MovableType. Some areas of my site are broken, but if I wait until I have everything finished, I’ll never be done.

I know every paragraph in this post has started with “I.” That’s more narcissism than I like to engage in, but—hey—I got a new look and it feels good.

Dear AT&T:

At AT&T’s store I contracted service for $30 a month. Later operators told me to go back to the store to figure out why they gave me the wrong price.

On August 20 I walked to the AT&T store near my house (located at 2180 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley, Calif. 94704) to get pricing information for standalone DSL service. After talking with James (not his real name*), the sales representative who helped me, I signed up for AT&T DSL Direct Pro service at $30 per month. I received a printed confirmation and then email confirmation of this order (see enclosure). My activation date for my order () was set for Aug. 27, one week later.

On Aug. 27 my DSL modem could not detect a DSL signal by the end of the day. The next morning I made the first of many phone calls to AT&T support. The first person I spoke with told me that my service had been activated. I checked the phone line in my house, searching for obvious problems. When I turned up nothing, I called AT&T again, at which point I was told my service had not been activated. Getting these two short but conflicting messages consumed near an hour on the phone, so I decided to take the problem to the source and return to the AT&T store.

Over the next several days I called several times. During one call I spoke with Grace (14 minutes), John (16 minutes), Mike (36 minutes), and Danny (42 minutes) in an unsuccessful attempt to talk with someone in provisioning. At some point after Danny transferred me to another department my call was dropped.

Friday evening, Aug. 29, I spoke with Ann (14 minutes) who informed me that, “Your order is supposed to complete by 9:55 pm Pacific time tonight.” There was no change by that time, so I called AT&T where I spoke with Nicholas (12 minutes), who told me to call the “due date no-sync” department in provisioning. He gave me the number 888-722-3755, saying that it would connect me with provisioning. Since it was the beginning of Labor Day weekend, I waited until Tuesday.

On Tuesday, Sept. 2, I called the number and was informed that it was not the number for provisioning. I spoke with Angie, who waited for 57 minutes on hold with me to speak with provisioning, at which point she suggested that they were not going to be available to take my call. She transferred me to technical support where I spoke with Gonzalo. He told me that the problem was that I was not registered. He had me set up an account and password over the phone and enter the information in my 2Wire router. When this did not work, he assured me that, “this is a typical problem with dry-loop lines. We’ll have to wait for a few minutes. If it doesn’t work, we’ll open a ticket with maintenance.” After doing that, Gonzalo told me that my service would be working by 10:00 am the following morning. If it was not, maintenance would give me a call. My total time talking with Gonzalo was 25 minutes.

The next day my DSL was not connected and maintenance did not call. I called maintenance at 888-322-5274 and waited on hold only to be told that I needed to talk to provisioning, “because the order is still open in provisioning.” I was again told to call 877-722-3755 to speak with provisioning. I stated that I had used that number before and it was not the provisioning number, he simply reaffirmed that it was.

On Sept. 3 I tried calling the number and after waiting on hold, I spoke with a representative who told me I could not receive DSL service unless I also contracted AT&T phone service. When I explained that was why I selected “Direct” DSL service, which does not require additional AT&T services, she told me that meant that I didn’t need phone service from AT&T, but that I needed to get a phone line from someone else. When I expressed complete incredulity that I could progress so far in this process without having been informed of this significant caveat, she put me on hold to check with technical support, and subsequently my call was disconnected.

I called again and the next representative told me that I did not need phone service in addition. My case was transferred to Minnie in second tier support. She confirmed that I had “absolutely no signal” and assigned me the case number which she said I could reference when talking to maintenance if necessary.

The next day I woke up at 5:15 am PST to make it more likely that I could speak with someone in provisioning shortly after the office opened at 7:00 am CST. After a short time I spoke with Lucy who explained that there was a glitch in the system that accounted for the problem. It was a common issue with some new equipment, “the circuits are not picking them up.” She said that they had about 10,000 orders with this problem and that she could cancel my order and reissue it, which seemed to be solving the problem. She told me that she “put the order back through to them,” and it should be up in 3 to 4 days. I was told to call back on Monday to check the status.

When I had no signal by Monday, I called back Tuesday, Sept. 9 at 888-443-2430. I spoke with George (52 minutes) who told me that my original order had been cancelled, but that there was no new order. “There’s no pending orders under your address—the only one is your cancelled order.” When I explained what Lucy had told me, he said that no one in his department, provisioning, had the ability to put orders into the system. I needed to call the business office to put this order in.

I called the business office at 800-288-2020 and was told that I could sign up for AT&T Direct DSL Pro for $40 a month, $10 more than I was told at the AT&T store. I said that I was offered Direct DSL Pro for $30 a month. The woman I spoke with told me that wasn’t the right price, despite my official order sheet from AT&T and my email confirmation which stated the terms clearly. She told me that the people in the AT&T store should not have offered me this particular AT&T service because they work on mobile service. I explained that it was irrelevant to me how AT&T set up its stores. A service was offered to me at a given price, I signed up based on that knowledge, and this was nothing more than a classic bait-and-switch. She said that I could pay less by contracting phone service as well, but I was not inclined to sign up for additional services. I finished obtaining a new order from her, order number , associated with . My new activation date would be Sept. 16, another week later.

When I spoke with George in provisioning he suggested that I might be able to expedite the process by calling provisioning once I had my new order number. I tried to do so without success. After waiting on hold for 58 minutes, I had other matters to attend to and I ended my call.

Friday morning, Sept. 12, at 10:00 am I heard someone knocking on my door. An AT&T technician, Larry, arrived unannounced to work on my DSL installation. He told me that they had been unable to contact me regarding the visit despite me having provided several support representatives with my phone number to store with my record. After 30 minutes made some adjustments and my 2Wire modem indicated that I had a DSL signal for the first time since the beginning of the process. Before he left Arthur gave me an account number, , a third and distinct number to the two I had received previously. I assumed that was sufficient to finish my installation and I could talk to technical support to finish the process.

When I called technical support I provided the new account number (). The tech sounded confused and transferred me to DSL status where Becky told me that order had been cancelled as well. My call was dropped and I called back to speak with Michael who transferred me to Jose. Jose said that the order had not been cancelled. His system showed that it was scheduled to be activated Sept. 13. He called tech support to confirm this and returned to report that the order had been cancelled. The third order was still pending and would be activated on Sept. 16.

On Sept. 16 I could not connect, and the DSL signal that had been established when the technician visited my home was gone. I called AT&T where I spoke with Daniel, James in the dry-loop department, and another representative in technical support. After some perfunctory testing—unplug the modem, check the phone line, log into the router—I was given a trouble ticket () and I was told that maintenance would definitely call me tomorrow to resolve the problem. Fortunately, they won’t have to.

Twenty-seven days after I ordered my service and 20 days after I was told my service would be activated, I still have no Internet access. During this time I spent over 580 minutes—nearly 10 hours—on the phone with AT&T and I spoke with 26 people at AT&T, most of whom asked me for the same information repeatedly before determining they could not help me and sending me to hold for another department. During this time I collected several AT&T phone numbers including 877-722-3755, 800-288-2020, 888-722-9337, 888-443-2430, 888-322-5274, 866-593-0724, 866-274-4357. Many times the phone numbers I was given were useless. Each time I called the primary DSL number, 800-722-3235, I traversed the phone tree, and spoke with a representative who informed me that he or she was an Illinois representative and that I would need to speak with a California representative.

When my original order was cancelled and replaced with two others I was told that my service would cost $40/month, $10 more than I was told at the AT&T store, $10 more than appears on my store receipt, and $10 more than appears on the email confirmation sent to me. When I told a phone representative that I was offered service at $30 a month, she told me that I had my facts wrong and that I misunderstood.

I called the customer retention department and an empathetic representative offered me a free month of service when it was finally activated.

During this trying support saga I never raised my voice, yelled at a representative, or treated a representative with disrespect. Do not construe this to mean that I am not furious about the way I have been treated as an AT&T customer. The AT&T store sales staff pleasantly signed me up for service and charged me for a DSL modem, but after that point not a single person took responsibility for resolving my problems without wasting my time. Some service representatives were pleasant and tried to be helpful, some waiting patiently on hold with me for an hour or more while we called the provisioning department. But no one from AT&T actively communicated with me during the entire process. Were it not for my persistence, I would still be waiting for some sign of service four weeks after I contracted AT&T to provide it for me without so much as an email or phone call from AT&T. For a company dedicated to communication, AT&T is downright awful at practicing it.

I called on Sept. 16 to inquire about my still inactive connection and I was told to wait until 8:00 pm when it would be activated. I had heard this routine now several times. I waited until 8:10, confirmed that service was still not working, and I made my last call to AT&T. I cancelled my DSL service. The call only took three minutes and ten seconds. It was the best service you provided me in weeks.

* I obfuscated the names of representatives to respect their privacy.

Probably the phrase we used most often, however, was “muchos toquis, pocos indios.” Toqui entered Spanish from the Mapuche language. The Mapuche were people indigenous to south and central Chile, and it refers to the chief or head of a group. Here indios best means tribesmen or workers. When we combine the elements, the saying is “too many chiefs, not enough workers,” a riff on too many cooks spoil the broth.

I was delighted the other day when my mom showed me a Chilean wine she found in Costco (of all places) called El Toqui. The symbol matches the meaning of the word I just described:

This El Toqui wine might introduce some confusion into the phrase, though: now having too much toqui could mean something completely different….

Most people hire a professional photographer for their weddings, but I thought you would see some great shots from guests simply because there are so many more of them. Besides, it often takes professionals weeks before you actually see their photos. Having immediate access to candid shots from the day would be nice for the couple.

But when everyone returned home, I found that there was no good way for all the guests to give Kate and Chris their photos. Email can’t accomodate such large files; posting them to Facebook or a free photos sharing site like Kodak doesn’t allow you access to the original files; and recording everything on a CD-R and dropping it in the mail is a hassle. What’s a solution?

As I reviewed the photos I noticed two things. First, the vast majority of pictures weren’t good. Most pictures suffered from technical problems, like red-eye, noise, blurriness, and improper focus. Camera makers still have plenty of areas for improvement. In low-end point-and-shoot cameras it seems like everything could be better. Here are a few typical shots:

A wedding is presents a difficult environment for good pictures—there’s low light, you may be far away—but it’s also prototypical example of when people want to use their cameras.

Spending more money on a better camera may help: one guest was using a Nikon D200, a high-end digital SLR (in consumer terms), and looking at her pictures was like a breath of fresh air. Nearly every photo was in focus and few were blurry.

The high frequency of poor shots might be discouraging, but the odds are on your side when you have a large quantity of photos. My second point is that almost every set of pictures had some excellent images. Not excellent as in publish-in-National-Geographic, but still meaningful pictures of an important day. A professional photographer can’t take pictures of all the guests all the time, and you get a wider spectrum of photos with crowd-sourcing.

From what I’ve seen, professional photographers don’t have to worry about being replaced at weddings by an army of amateurs; You want someone who is highly skilled to take the most important pictures at your wedding. It’s a nice addition, however, to have the extra pictures your guests take. Who knows—maybe downloading guest photos is a service some professionals will provide one day.

One final esoteric note: Most people have the date set correctly in their cameras; next to nobody has the time set correctly, even adjusting for time-zome differences.

The next time I would see the place would be when I arrived with all my belongings and furniture, so I wanted a way to size up the apartment to determine what would fit. I took a couple dozen measurements and made a rough sketch of the rooms in the house. The next day I turned these into a blueprint of the house using InDesign. Once I printed out this blueprint I could cut out paper rectangles to represent my furniture to see what would fit.

The end product was nifty enough that I think it’s worth sharing: feng shui my apartment. Take the place for a whirl. How can I set up the bed and nightstand together with that furnace in the way? Will I have room for a media center when I actually get one? And maybe you can let me know how the sofa looks over there.

Note: Don’t take the “my” in “Feng shui my apartment” too literally. I wasn’t crazy about posting the actual layout of my home online, so this blueprint is actually that of a fictitious house with about the same amount of floorspace as mine.

One of the things I miss most about Chile is the ability to walk and take public transportation almost anywhere. People probably arranged the system from necessity. I didn’t have a car, and most of the people I knew didn’t either. I didn’t drive for over two years and as my return date approached, I was itching to get back into the driver’s seat. I realized quickly that I had to be in the driver’s seat, or at least in a car; the area where I live is in Utah is just built for driving. Sure, there’s a supermarket just two miles away, but you have to brave a four-lane road without a sidewalk to get there. In one of those ironic twists, I realized shortly after I got back to my car that I didn’t want it.

I should have taken this photo on the road instead of indoors, but I’m waiting for my helmet to arrive so this baby’s parked for now.

How much more walkable is my new home? You might have to content yourself with my qualitative description if it weren’t for Walk Score, a Google Maps mashup that uses a set of criteria to rank the walkability of your home. Here’s my score:

Using whatever metric Walk Score has in place, my home in Utah scored 15 of 100 on the scale, “Car Dependent.”

My new home scores near the top of the scale at 91 of 100, a “Walkers’ Paradise.” I’m not sure what I need to break into the 95th percentile, but I’m content with 91. What’s your home’s score?

I still have my car for weekend getaways, which is a nice luxury. The rest of the time, I’m taking a page from Frankie Valli’s playbook and walkin’ like a man.

Both schools are just a few blocks from the same highway, it’s just 2200 miles between them.

Fortunately I just drove the leg from Salt Lake City to Berkeley this time. My dad and I spent all day Wednesday and Thursday morning on the road. Now I’m unpacking and getting set up in my new home.

Seriously. This is as far as you should go.

When I went to see The Dark Knight—fantastic film, by the way—there was one part that stood out for me. Early in the movie Bruce Wayne and Alfred are planning an operation where Batman needs to board a flying plane from the ground. Alfred suggests a program that the CIA has been working on called Skyhook. After an action sequence, Batman uses this Skyhook apparatus, and given all the other far-fetched technology in the movie, you might think that Skyhook is imaginary too. It’s not. In fact, it’s old school.

My grandfather was a navigator aboard this MC-130E during the Vietnam War.

I know this through something of a coincidence. A few weeks ago I was visiting my grandfather in Massachusetts for his 80th birthday. We got to talking and he showed me some pictures from his days in the Air Force. During the Vietnam War, my grandfather served as a navigator aboard the MC-130, a modified version of the cargo plane. One of the pictures he showed me depicted the plane with a strange, Y-shaped protrusion from the front nose. When I asked about it, he explained the Fulton Recovery System, which sounded to me like something from a movie. Using this system, which is also called Skyhook, a person on the ground wears a harness which is connected by a nylon cable to a giant balloon hanging the in sky. The MC-130E flies into the cable, the V-shaped fork catches it, and the person on the ground shoots into the sky. The plane’s crew then opens the rear cargo bay door and retrieve the person dangling in the distance using a winch.

Although the maneuver sounds dangerous, it was actually quite safe. Robert Fulton invented the system in the 1950’s and in the dozens of years it was in use there were only 1 recorded fatality.

Time Magazine actually has an article in their archives from December 1964 describing the Fulton system.

This frame from The Dark Knight shows an aircraft about to pickup Batman with the same V-shaped fork as the MC-130E. © 2008 Warner Bros. Pictures

The Batmobile, Batman’s armor, and his other gadgets may be from a time in the future, but his Skyhook liftoff is over 40 years old.

This is my first step towards fixing that, or at least the writing portion. I’m making a commitment to write something for my site at least once a week for the foreseeable future. My goal is to make it more than just an account of what I’m doing; I’d like it to be about things that I think are interesting and that I’m thinking about. There’s no point in posting boring material just for the sake of meeting a deadline.

A new version of this site is also in the works. I have been tweaking a design for the last several months, one that eliminates my superfluous landing page and incorporates things I post at Twitter, Flickr, and Delicious.

So stay tuned. Hopefully as it gets easier for me to write, it will also be more enjoyable for you to visit and read.