I’m impressed by Budget Hero, a game from the American Marketplace radio show. It lets you see the effects of the various spending possibilities (bring the troops back home, raise the social security eligibility age, etc.) and see the long-term wealth of the nation. I played it once or twice, but I struggled to find it satisfying.

I think what we need is a SimCity-esque program for the nation. Want to pump money into healthcare? Fund private schools? Cut taxes? Allow private roads? Shut off immigration? Provide free tertiary education? Institute tougher prison sentences? Let’s see what those actions would do to not just the economy but also the wealth distribution, health, and general happiness of the nation. I note that SimCity has been open sourced and that Treasury publishes a lot of its research. Just add software developer!

I had a thought on Saturday that wouldn’t let go. Here’s the brief pitch: let me know what you think.

Paul Graham, the creator of Y! Combinator, recently wrote an essay in which he said “Maybe in the long term the right answer for dealing with Internet distractions will be software that watches and controls them”. The link on “software” was to Rescue Time, a web site that gathers your per-app time usage and compares it to others (a Y! Combinator company; Paul is shameless).

My fellow O’Reilly Radar blogger Brady forwarded a comment from a mailing list that said “Software can’t keep people focused/productive, it has to come either from within or through external forces (deadlines, time limits, etc.)”. I was moved to respond.

Last year, Kiwi Foo Camp acted as a fundraiser for my kids’ local primary school. Around 60 kids, 3.5 teachers, and at the time they had around six old Windows 2000 and Windows XP boxes in various stages of decay. They’d planned to buy new computers but were making the “Macs are too expensive” noises. I gave them the Foo money and said, “use this to buy Macs”. They were able to buy nine bright shiny new Macbooks.

I was editor for the first edition of Programming PHP and, like all O’Reilly books, there was a vigorous discussion with the authors about which animal should be on the cover. All the recognizable megafauna have gone and we’re left with different types of birds, bugs, and fish, so conversations about covers inevitably start from a “hey, I was expecting to choose between elephant and tiger, and you gave me a friggin bird!” handicap. Programming PHP was no different.

I see in Rod Drury’s blog that National have released their first real economic policy and it’s to do with funding fibre-to-the-home in NZ. It’s good! Anyone who travels knows how dire the bandwidth situation is here, and it’s worse on the ground.

For me, bandwidth = productivity. I don’t buy Rod Drury’s productivity maths; productivity is the increase in value added by a process, e.g. for manufacturing the value of outputs over the cost of inputs, labour, and land. I could add more value (earn more) if I have faster Internet access to the rest of the world. I’d be able to read more, write more, and create more billable outputs if I wasn’t constantly waiting for web pages to load or Ajax apps to update.

A client made the decision to use Telecom as their web site host. I argued against it because the price differential was so great between Telecom and, well, anyone else. The client’s management decided to go with solid blue chip Telecom. The service we’ve had from them has been such unmitigated shit that I’m astonished Telecom is still in business.

You’d think the premium would get you better customer service or at least efficiency, but it doesn’t. I’ve been on hold for, let’s see, 18 minutes so far (listening to “come together … right now … over me” every 3 minutes) with nary a human in sight. If your choice is between Mad Ken’s Shonky Web Hosting and Telecom’s business packages, turn to Mad Ken every day–you’ll get the same shitty service but at least you won’t be paying through the nose for it.

I took a trip to ETech earlier this month. I initially attempted to book the trip using Travelocity but it turned into a massive clusterfuck of their making. I’ve documented it below in case you, my lovely reader, need any reason to avoid this dribbling shit trickle of a company running down the thighs of modern travel. If you hate people whining about (incredibly incredibly bad) customer service, skip this message now. You have been warned ….

Read this ABC news story on digital frames coming with viruses installed if you want a glimpse at an unpleasant future. Ubicomp ("ubiquitous computing", aka spimes aka real world objects with computation and network capability) promises wonderful things: fridges and pantries that network to produce your shopping list, art that knows who’s looking at it, etc. But where there’s a networked CPU there’s a botnet-in-waiting.

Reading this ComputerWorld article I see that the frames only infected the PC if you plugged it into the USB port to load with pictures. How long before a networked photo frame sniffs packets, portscans, and mails passwords back to the mothership? It’s a shame that infected PCs are so cheap (that link is to a PDF on the malware industry by Kiwi Foo attendee Peter Gutmann) that there’s not a business model in having the botnet creators subsidize the manufacture of trojan frames.

Now that Silicon Valley is slowly returning trickling back from Austin, I’d like to post something I wrote during The Zuckerberg Interview Soap Opera …

This is an example of the intellectuanal Ouroboros that hits Silicon Valley in waves. Let’s see what’s wrong with this intarwebs blow up, shall we?

1. Who in their right mind goes to a keynote with Mark Zuckerberg and is DISAPPOINTED when it goes wrong? What the fuck did you EXPECT? I mean, come on, he runs a bloody SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE. That’s like running a “web mall” in 1997! What did you think you were going to learn? The secret of getting a hundred million users? Hint: Zuckerberg would pay to go to a keynote to learn that–Facebook barely has 60M. MySpace passed 100M in 2006.
2. It happened at SxSW, a conference with no discernable purpose other than to meet Texas’s annual quota for bloated pointless panels in two weeks. The only thing worse than hearing people toss off “South by” in person is the flood of tweets from those there: “queueing for Zuckerberg”, “queueing for Google party”, “this blows, anything better happening?”, “I got to touch (some designer you’ve never heard of)!”, …. Please don’t confuse SxSW for real life.
3. Valleywag “broke” it. Jesus Christ, people, have I taught you nothing? If there’s a blog post and it links to Valleywag, you can immediately skip the entire post. This should be built into Google Reader. The only thing worse than reading Valleywag is being ejected into the depths of space, naked, covered in honey and angry fire ants, wearing your kidneys as ear muffs, and with a ticking bomb shoved up your ass. But even then I think most people’s last words would be “thank the sweet merciful Lord that I don’t have to hear about Valleywag again”.

SxSW? Social networking? Valleywag? It’s the trifecta of “for fuck’s sake”. The US economy’s heading down the shitter faster than a Superfund chicken tikka marsala, the web industry is in the clutches of an intellectual stagnation that reeks of death, and you have a government hellbent on burning every last civil liberty in front of a crowd of “WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS”-chanting pantypatriots. That interview has the approximate news value of an ant chipping a fingernail during Hiroshima.