DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I don’t know where they got my name, but the Seybold Seminars people have been sending me junk mail for about five years. The mail pieces are big, colorful, high-production-quality designs.. which means they took a lot of toxic chemicals to produce and lots of gas to deliver, and they take up too much space in my mailbox. It’s all a waste — I never asked for the stuff and don’t plan to attend the seminars.

The mailers never show opt-out information. This is the only reason Seybold has been able to send me stuff for five years. That is, if they’d made it easy for me to “unsubscribe,”, I would have done so a long time ago. (I quote “unsubscribe” because it implies that I requested this junk. In fact, Seybold most likely bought my name from a DTP software vendor or maybe the MacWorld Expo people.)

Finally I ferreted out the opt-out procedure. It is this: send an email detailing your request to remove@medialiveintl.com. If that fails, look for the Contact Us page at Seybold365.com to see if they’ve come up with a new method for sending these requests.

If your Windows machine crashed today, you have lots of company. As reported by Macintouch, John Dvorak writes, we can estimate that there are a minimum of 30 billion Windows system crashes a year.

Dvorak did the math based on estimates from Bill Gates. It’s an astounding level of non-productivity, all that rebooting and recovery. I guess people don’t know that it’s just not necessary. to put up with that ridiculously poor level of stability.

Most geeks cite the stability of Linux as a server platform. And it’s true — I’ve personally had Linux servers run for over a year, and even then they didn’t crash, but got powered down safely for one reason or another. But servers aren’t an equal comparison because they run a limited number of very stable apps.

Workstations crash more because users run lots of whacked-out, unstable, untested applications. Like web browsers. Like Java “crapplets”. Like rushed-to-market file-sharing apps with piggybacking spyware, or home-brewed Photoshop plugins. The list goes on.

But still, to crash three times a month? That’s the average figure Dvorak calculated from Gates’ numbers. It’s sad that computer users have come to accept this, as if they had no choice.

Here’s the choice: OS X.

My (Apple) Powerbook endures daily use, running all manner of applications, including the typical complement of beta-ware. It has crashed twice since I’ve owned it — say, about once every seven months. That is, my laptop has crashed one-twentieth as often as the average Windows machine.

Dvorak writes something else that ought to inspire about twenty million Windows users to switch: “the jury is still out on whether XP dies more often or less often than Windows 2000. From my experience, the number of crashes for each operating system is about equal.” If that’s really true, what the heck is the point of upgrading? To have a bunch of new features that don’t work well? If Microsoft isn’t trying to improve system stability, then who is?

Besides Apple, I mean.

Undeniable Forensic Proof that Paul McCartney really was replaced with a Look-Alike in 1966.

(Seen at the headline archive of The Morning News, a really great site.)

I consider myself a skeptic, but Andrew Spooner Jr. offers compelling photographic evidence. He presents a strong argument that Sir Paul is not the original Paul McCartney.

I’m less convinced by Spooner’s analyses of vocal recordings, as there have been controversies about who actually performed all those songs for years. I would not be surprised to learn that the original recordings were “augmented” by studio musicians and stand-in vocalists. In any recording session, performing sonic surgery to improve on reality is standard procedure.

(We even did some of that on the JAR album. Although, ahem, all those drum tracks really were mine.)

But performing plastic surgery to make an imposter look like the deceased original… that’s something else.

The idea that the person we’ve all called Paul McCartney for 40 years is an imposter makes McCartney impersonators even more ridiculous.

In related news, I never posted the resolution to the story of the Mike Portnoy imposter. The phony was arrested in April. He told the police, “I’m Mike Portnoy,” not knowing that Portnoy was waiting for them at the precinct house. Ha!

Here’s an entertaining and amusing novel, a mystery, on the subject of faking a celebrity death: The Suspense is Killing Me, by Thomas Maxwell. Buy it at half.com; it’s the best two bucks you’ll spend this week.

Earlier this year I became a fan of Amazon’s Gold Box. I hit Amazon.com nearly every day, rabidly clicking through the 10 offers. I remember buying at least two items I wouldn’t have bought had they not appeared there: a high-end rice cooker, for example, and a Calphalon griddle (75% off!). I didn’t purchase, but I appreciated, the steady parade of MP3 players and NetGear products and Leatherman tools in my daily offer set.

But last week, my Gold Box became infected with toys. Gone are my sleek, charcoal gray metallic audio components, my hardened steel drill bits, my eternally-warrantied kitchen appliances. In their place: “Pose Me Pets Environment: Bedroom”, which I can’t even parse much less fathom… Fisher Price Screwy Looey… some kind of Home Depot action figure… Seven of my 10 offers are for toys today. Never has any single product category so monopolized my Gold Box.

I think the problem is that I searched for a toy at Amazon’s site recently. Two friends have recently given birth, so I’m following the traditional American response pattern of sending some molded plastic crap with a happy face stamped on the outside. Amazon’s opportunistic profiler instantly branded me as a parent. It’s bad AI, and it has cost them a customer. It’s just too depressing to see my 10 Gold Box offers wasted on day-glow plastic baubles that don’t even plug in.

This idea is not original; I’ve seen it suggested before: Amazon ought to have a widget on their site so that users can indicate “I’m just researching — don’t construe the following action as any statement of my actual interests.” It could be as simple as a “gift mode” button. It would allow me to browse items from a category I find distasteful without being subjected to more of the same for months to come.

I emailed a complaint to Amazon’s customer service group. Here is their response:

We select your personalized offers based on a variety of factors. I’m sorry, but it is currently not possible to request or exclude Gold Box offers in specific product categories.

But even though they don’t offer overt control, I ought to be able to influence the profiler. I’m going to try searching for anti-toys for a few days, in hopes that that will skew my profile back from the realm of “things that get sucked on.” I’m not real sure what constitutes an anti-toy, though… wrestling videos, maybe? The cure could be worse than the disease.

I just discovered a tool on the account page called “Improve Your Recommendations.” Maybe this is the overt control I’ve been hoping for? I’ve tried to check all the aggressive and unfriendly categories, the genres of entertainment media that imply impatience and close-mindedness and callousness, in hopes that Amazon determines I could not possibly be a parent.

Is it worth it to me to have Amazon’s profiler conclude that I’m a mean-spirited, selfish prick? If that’s what it takes to get Playskool out of my Gold Box, yes.

We’ve achieved a milestone here at debris.com: last week I received a demand letter (via email) from a lawyer regarding a piece I wrote in February. It begins,

This office represents Scott Mc______. This letter is intended to be a formal demand for retraction and notice that further publication of defamatory statements regarding Mr. Mc______ exposes debris.com to substantial liability.

Accompanying the hot flash that developed while reading the letter was a desperate question: who is Scott Mc________? The name wasn’t even vaguely familiar. I had to search my own website for it.

Turns out he’s the concierge at the Marriott in San Francisco. I wrote a reaction to a wonderfully revealing cover article in the SF Chronicle Magazine called Power Brokers, in which Mc______ said some things that I found cocky, and a few I found offensive. My article’s title was a play on the French origins of the word concierge; I called it “that’s French for ‘$20, please’.”

But if you’re looking for defamatory language, you won’t find it. Mc______’s attorney specified an allegedly libelous sentence in my article and demanded that I remove it. So I did.

I hear about this sort of thing all the time: someone receives a letter from a lawyer and, seeing no recourse but an expensive battle, complies without a fight. Would I give in so easily? The answer is yes. I folded like an origami crane.

I consulted my attorney first, of course. In her opinion, the sarcastic comment in my piece was not likely to be considered libelous by a judge. But the bigger issue for me was the cost of the battle, and my desire to prove a point. What was it worth to me to fight for my text? In this case, not a lot, for reasons implied in the demand letter: apparently Mr. Mc______ is no longer an employee of the SF Marriott.

How could he go from “power broker” to unemployed in six months? The implication didn’t make sense; a top hotel wouldn’t fire its chief concierge, who just last December had earned the hotel a Silver Plume from WHERE Magazine as “Concierge of the Year”. A moment’s research exposed the story. According to Bruce Bellingham of the SF Examiner,

Scott Mc______, former chief concierge at the downtown Marriott, was laid off by the hotel and was suspended by the Clefs d’Or, the dignified concierge clan, for one year. Scott was apparently a victim of hotel budget cutbacks. But the Clefs d’Or people are more outspoken. “Scott should not have been so indiscreet in his remarks to a Chronicle reporter about how gratuities might be handled,” said one vet of the service industry.

The news changed my opinion. I realized that Mc______’s comments in the “Power Brokers” article had cost him enough grief. I didn’t need to add to his problems. That’s why I rewrote my article without argument. I even toned down some of the comments not identified by Mc______’s attorney, in a good-faith effort to appease Mc______.

As you probably know, I’ve said some dumb things in my time; it’s one of the peculiar joys of being me. I’ve been fortunate that none of my really poorly-considered statements have ended up in the newspaper… which is not to say they don’t get printed, for I write ‘em here all the time. But at least I can change my articles later. In contrast, there’s no reprinting hundreds of thousands of copies of the Chronicle Magazine.

I decided that I didn’t want to cause Scott Mc______ any harm. Per the demand letter, I immediately removed any and all [allegedly] defamatory language from my original article, and this piece is my retraction.

(That said, I’m not sure what the point of writing a retraction is. In print, I can see the value of “setting the record straight.” But online, it seems to me that writing yet another article just reminds everyone of the first one, which might have been better left in the past. But I am not a lawyer, as the saying goes, so I’ll just assume there is some value to them for me to write this.)