BillSaysThis

Stories abound of people who are hounded by agents of the IRS on seemingly inconsequential grounds. This is not one of them. This is about incompetence and lack of accountability. I am due a nice refund this year, a few thousand dollars, from the Feds. As opposed to last year when I unexpectedly had to pay tens of thousands of dollars to them. So as soon as my return came back from the accountant, I went down to the USPO and sent it in. Checked my bank account balance almost daily starting about two weeks later (this is the time frame my accountant said to expect) hoping to see those extra dollars. Not there. Not there. My paper state refund shows up in the mail yesterday (thanks, Gray Davis and Kathleen Connell) and I think that the Feds must have had enough time as well.

Sure enough, the IRS website gives me a number to call to find the status of my return. The computer states that the money was deposited into my account on March 22. Sufficient time has passed that the money should be showing up, so I call CalFed’s customer support line. The nice woman there searched and found no transfer of the specific amount into their system from any source to any account in the last 30 days. Uh oh.

The IRS system had given me a follow-up number to call in case of any problems. Doesn’t this make you think they get more problems than they ought to if they give out the number automatically? Perhaps the system has some embedded logic, though, which says if A (say a refund was made) and B (the refund is a direct deposit) and C (the deposit was made more than one week ago) then the person calling probably hasn’t received the refund in which case there is a problem and gives out the follow-up phone number. Don’t think so, do you? As Dennis Miller says, “Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.”

Anyway, I call up this morning and speak to agent 1600xxx. This obviously bored and uninterested woman tells me, after looking into the database, that the money could not be deposited into my account due to either a mistake in entering the account information or a bug in their software which does not accept a leading zero in the account number. Yes the deposit attempt was made on March 22; somehow it took until today for the system to recognize that the deposit did not go through–what a coincidence, eh?–and so a paper check will be mailed. Today. No wait a sec. Next Friday. Yes, a check will go out in one week. Um no, no way to speed it up, this is how the system works. Yes, you do have to wait an extra four weeks to see that money. No, the government does not pay a penalty or interest in this situation. Yes, if you did this to us you would have to pay penalty and interest. Sorry.

Or at least some of the employees. Check out Rob Fahrni’s latest amusement: The picture and the explanation. It is to laugh! And works as a Mirror project submission too if he wants.

[Note: this is not about some great new way to get porn over the Internet.] [Erased cliched introduction before publishing] Services are appearing to take Web communication to the next level: syndication. Using one form or another of a standard called RSS (Rich Site Summary), websites–even those as simple as BillSaysThis–can make content available through distributors automatically with little more effort than a few minutes to sign up. Some content publishing tools automate this process (some tools promise it’s coming real soon), some sites use scripts to generate this dynamically, and others have fans/audience members who write something site-specific.

One of the prime movers behind this effort is Jeff Barr’s Syndic8.com. This site has available over 7200 individual feeds written in at least 18 languages and is now experimenting with web services through an XML-RPC API. This API allows other sites and applications to interact with the Syndic8 database, not only to discover or manage individual feeds but to look at aggregations–categories, locations, activity. For example, the weblog you are reading now is in there.

One of the current Syndic8 efforts, driven by Bill Kearney, is to add geographic information to the feeds through the API. In fact, he wrote a script that looks up the domain to get the IP address and the location of that address (which is in the Whois database) and then uses the API to feed it to Syndic8. Of course for the most part the location determined by this brute force methodology is incorrect, for example there is no correlation between this website and the city of Davie, Florida. But Kearney has taken the first step and now the creators of the feeds can see what is happening and put in the correct data. This would mean adding the location information as metadata in their RSS; my pages have it but due to the way the RSS and underlying weblog pages are generated, it is not yet in the RSS. There are complications caused by differing versions of RSS and the toolkits used to produce the files but what else is new in Webland?

Here is one result of the aggregated information:

I asked Bill for the details on how he did the work so far:

“I did most of the work using perl, PHP, Radio, MySQL and XML-RPC calls.

I extracted the feeds from the Syndic8 server database using GetFeedInfo calls. I then locally extracted the hostname and looked up it’s IP address. Once I had the IP address I used the Geo-IP and NetGeo database to cross-reference it. This info was then sent back up to the Syndic8 database using the SetLocationInfo call.

So the latitude/longitude pair info is based solely on the server IP address info as can be determined from thet NetGeo database. That’s largely based on the whois databases. This means it’s only as accurate as the info contained in that database.”

The Reds made it through the Champions League second round a few weeks ago for a quarterfinal matchup against German club Bayern Leverkusen, currently the top-ranked club in the world. Today LFC hosted the Germans and came out on top 1-0 on a goal by captain Sami Hyypia in the 44th minute. A major victory indeed, even with the goal coming from a surprise source, a defender who put in only his second ball in 26 European matches. Next Tuesday will see the return match in Germany and the Reds need only a tie to advance for what looks like a semi-final against rival Manchester United. The boys are doing well in the Premiership as well, sitting in second a point behind Arsenal with four matches to go (Arsenal has five left), and are in a good position to pull off a double given their recent mastery over ManU.

In general I believe the entertainment companies are going too far in their war to prevent piracy, hence the BST homepage links to Stop the CBDTPA and Stop Policeware. But in specific cases, though, I’m all for it. The Hollywood Reporter says that Celine Dion’s new CD will crash PCs and Macs it is played on due to the use of Key2Audio copy protection in Germany and several other European countries. Hey, this is Celine Dion! As far as I’m concerned, the CD ought to crash any machine it is played on anywhere in the world. Then I would never hear it.

It make them yummy filet mignon! Oh and the bacon, bbrrrrrrr!!!! That was so good last night. Crunchy asparagus. Salad. Blue cheese dressing. <drool><drool><drool>

Or just total morons? Check out Get ready for advertisers to take over your Web browser. If this ridiculous product becomes available, the web will take another step towards the sad and useless. This is what I wrote to the vendor’s CEO today:

I hope what I’ve read this morning regarding your new product with the strange name is not true and just some April Fools prank. If this browser hijacking is what you expect to sell, I hope you are prepared for a huge negative backlash. Personally, I would not knowingly visit any site that implements this, I would write any sites I currently read that do implement your product to alert them as to why I no longer visit, and I would recommend to my friends and online communities that they do the same. There are enough tools including JavaScript, Flash, and so forth to implement desirable functions inside a web page that redesigning my (and I emphasize MY) browser is excessive and unnecessary.

I hope you are getting many emails and communications similar to mine, enough that you will rethink this folly and refocus your company’s efforts on a more useful product.

In today’s SF Chronicle, Tom Abate writes that VaxGen is hedging its bets with a new venture. Abate is referring to Celltrion, the recently announced joint venture with some Korean firms to build biotech manufacturing plants. The primary purpose of these plants will be to produce AIDSVax, the vaccine that Vaxgen currently has in Phase III human clinical trials, but will be used for contract production for other biotech firms should the vaccine not receive FDA approval after the trials end later this year. In one of the more important bits of information, which abate treats as almost a throwaway line, Sharon Seiler of Punk Zeigel & Company is quoted as saying that VaxGen could be a $38 stock. As opposed to $11.60 as of this writing. Let’s just say $38 would make Bill a yummy profit.

Congress is now calling for public comments on the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA). You can post yours here. Also, follow the links over on the right and see why, if you don’t already know. The following is what I wrote:

Have we reached a time when there is no difference between the surreal and the real? Does Congress exist to serve the People, as our lovely yet increasingly honored in name only Constitution says, or to serve the Corporate Interests?

This bill is pitiful and I say this as a creator of original works. My own website has material for which I claim copyright, including poetry, fiction, and commentary. But I fail to see how Senator Hollings’ legislation protects any of my rights. The way it protects the interests of Disney, Fox, and Vivendi are quite clear though, and I would point out that two of those three entities are not even American corporations.

Please remember that phrases like limited term and fair use are important and meaningful to many Americans, more important than enslaving our technology to the interests of business giants.

Thanks.

Enterprise – Great show, re-inventing the Star Trek universe while respecting tradition and what’s gone before. Knowing they have seven years to fill, 175 episodes, Braga and the writing crew have spent time developing the characters and the backstory, while remembering they need to entertain every week. Bakula turned out to be a good choice for captain and most of the regulars are growing into their roles.

Alias – Sure Jennifer Garner has a pretty face but a I don’t see her as the hottie everyone is screaming about. The show, though, really moves and the capers are dense, nary a wasted moment. The continuing thread of retrieving the writing and inventions of 15th century genius Marco Rambaldi is a strokeof originality that helps tie the weekly stories into a bigger whole. Plus the ongoing plot to unravel SD-6 and the Alliance, of course. Tingling!

The Agency – More spies, real ones this time, as we see how hands on the people who run the CIA really are. Okay, that’s got to be totally unrealistic, for the head of the agency and his direct reports to be directly involved in most operations. Daniel Benzali and Gil Bellows really drive this show but I like most of the cast and fortunately for the writers (but unfortunately for us) they have plenty of topical material and the have the brains to use it well.

Jeremiah – Showtime’s new science fiction series, Luke Perry and Malcolm Jamal Warner try and sort out life in a post-apocalyptic America with all six billion of the people over the age of 13 killed 15 years ago. J. Michael Straczynski has really done a good job thinking through the underlying story; this week’s episode was a good example in the way the Burners introduction was handled, since I expect them to play a much larger role down the line.

Greg the Bunny – Seth Green, Eugene Levy, and a bunch of fabricated Americans put on a whacky PBS children’s show. The Fox website, at least, sucks although the show doesn’t.

Andy Richter Saves the Universe – An officeworker and his office buddies stumble through life with the ability to stop time and fantasize about love and violence plus our semi-hero conjures up imaginary people to criticize him. Good thing Andy Richter is funny and Irene Molloy is a dream.

The Shield – Sopranos meet NYPD Blue in Los Angeles. Stretching the boundaries of what is acceptable on a basic cable network in terms of language, nudity, and violence. Michael Chiklis was mediocre as The Commish and totally out of place as Daddio but so far he’s totally coldhearted, scheming, and effective as Vic Mackey. His antagonist, the station’s captain (Benito Martinez), is a little weak so far but hopefully the writers will figure out how to strengthen him without losing focus on his ambition.

The Job – A disappointingly short yet artistically successful second season wherein Dennis Leary unleashes an alcoholic, pill popping, adulterous detective on Manhattan with a strong ensemble of actors backing him up.

Six Feet Under – After a slow start last year, this show picked up steam about halfway through and is now really tops, focusing on a family that owns a mortuary and their close friends. Doesn’t shy away from anything or any topic. Death, drugs, self-help quacks, prostitutes, gay sex, straight sex, underage sex, crime, and more death are all on the storyboard.

Having cried my eyes out over not being able to see Robin Williams in person, we decided to check out Death to Smoochy as a substitute. And what a grand substitute it is! Williams is blast-off superb here and Edward Norton shows why people are calling him a young DeNiro. As opposed to the piece of crap movie Norton was in last year with DeNiro, The Score. This film is as much about children’s television as it is about world politics, what we have is a smash up of a man crashing from the peak and another coming up from the pits, sort of a buddy-buddy, heterosexual version of A Star is Born. Lots of big charicature characters, a weasly Danny Devito, Catherine Keener freeswinging from slutty kiddie show host groupie to romantic, loving partner, Harvey Fierstein showing he’s taking advantage of all the cigarettes he’s smoked before they put him out of the game. Lots of laughs, lots of dark humor, and don’t forget the midgetslittle people.

Irvine Welsh is a highly-rated Scottish author who gave us the Trainspotting novel, from whence came the great yet disgusting Ewan MacGregor film, then wrote Filth. This is an absolutely Post Modern novel, completely with anti-hero and literary invention. Welsh attempts to climb a high mountain but in the end I think he never quite makes the summit even though the book is worth a read if you’re of such a mind. Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson is our boy, nasty, scheming, hateful, a cop in Edinburgh whose last month on Earth we live together as he investigates a strange murder, takes a sex and drugs vacation in Amsterdam, and plots to destroy his rivals for promotion.

As is popular in the British Isles these days, the dialog is written as it sounds rather than in the Queen’s English–doesna for does not, shite for shit, hoor for whore–which can make comprehension a little difficult for these American eyes. Further, the only two characters we hear from directly other than Robertson (or dialog for which he is present) are a tapeworm living in his gut, somehow not only self-aware but with access to Robertson’s deeply buried childhood memories, and a few interludes purporting to be from his wife Carol, though I have my doubts on who is really doing the speaking. Carol’s expositions are printed in bold for some unknown reason, as their own chapters more or less, and the tapeworm’s dialog is embedded in the flow of the novel, sort of overprinted on the text. Hard to describe, it’s very visual.

Mean and dangerous to any and all as Robertson is, in the end he turns out to only hate himself. This is mainly revealed by the tapeworm and a key reason for my previous statement that Welsh does not quite reach the summit in this effort. The story, the character, keeps one’s attention to the end, but the tapeworm just goes the easy and obvious route to explain the pain that drives our anti-hero. Plus, for a long time, the reader has no clue who or what is interrupting the story in this strange way, it just appears with a repetition of 0’s and the word eat interspersed in them. An ambitious effort, not to be dismissed lightly.

You can probably see the content on this site much better now. For IE or Opera users there should not really be any visible difference. I’m really not too clear on the changes I made in the CSS (a new-fangled presentation markup language for us web geeks) that had this effect though. One really big weirdness was that Navigator on pages other than the homepage was not correctly using the width attribute set on the style used for the left side site navigation menu, even though the same style is used on the homepage and all the others. The difference between the pages is that on the home page there is also a right side set of links in their own DIV (a CSS thing). So I added an invisible DIV on the other pages and now Navigator obeys the width attribute. Yes, you can have INVISIBLE content on web pages. Anyway, this is strange and someone like Eric Meyers could probably explain it, and also point out that the pages on this site do not validate, but as long as it looks good for now at least I am cool.

The Robin Williams Tour is not going to stop in San Francisco! And he freaking lives here! What’s up with that? I read a great review in the NY Times and thought, oh boy, this is one show I’d bust a gut to see. Only to find out no shows anywhere near here. What a bummer! Still, I’m looking forward to his new film, Death to Smoochy, and he will be playing the bad guy, a wacked out serial killer, in a movie with Al Pacino that will be out in the next few months called Insomnia.

A friend was good enough to share his pass to the exhibit floor at the biggest annual Java conference up at Moscone Center and so I drove up for a couple of hours of booth trolling. The most interesting product I saw was M7 Web Foundry from M7 Corporation, a Palo Alto startup, that aims to simplify the life of web app (J2EE) developers. The company was founded by some of the top managers and architects from Visual Cafe but unfortunately they aren’t doing any hiring now. CNet’s Tech News has a roundup of show highlights but somehow the articles listed are all about the big companies–Sun, SAP, IBM, Microsoft (who isn’t even there, of course)–and nothing about the useful new products from the small companies like M7. Wonder why that is, don’t you? <wink><wink>

I also had the pleasure of running into a few of the old team from iPlanet and Greg Doench from PTR Prentice Hall.

In Abe Lincoln and the internet pirates, Disney chairman Michael Eisner attempts to co-opt Abraham Lincoln and Czeck Republic president/poet/rights activist Vaclav Havel to justify the extreme measures embedded in the recently introduced Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act. He stoops to the level of informing us that his father, like his father’s father and so forth, taught him not to steal. And hey: “For me, theft of property, via the internet or any other way, is not only alarming because of the material loss but also disconcerting because it implies the loss of the moral compass on which our society is based.” Well that makes all the difference in the world, doesn’t it?

I think the CBDTP comes down to the fact that the entertainment industry executives want the laws not only to overwhelmingly favor their interests over those of us consumers but also to require enforcement. No longer will we be able to buy PCs or other recording devices to use as we will but only devices that force us to behave as Hollywood desires. This is a slippery slope, my friends, have no doubt; when will they move to ‘enhance’ the law to allow only professionally prepared content and thereby end the ability of me and other little people to even publish something as simple as this website? And not because they care about what I say here but because they won’t make money off of it and could even think they are losing money since time spent reading here is time not spent consuming their for-fee content.

In his sermon, Eisner quotes a Lincoln speech as praising IP protection but that quote specifically states the protection should be for a limited time. In the CBDPTA legislation, though, the media companies are essentially seeking no time limit to the protections. Recent legislation already gives copyrights a term of the author’s lifetime plus 70 years but even this is not enough. Eisner is desperate since copyright protection for Mickey Mouse apparently will expire in the next few years, soon followed by several other major Disney characters. Zimran has an excellent analysis of the value of extending protection timeframes.

In a sharp bit of reality that contrasts with the gloomy picture Eisner paints, the Mercury news this morning ran a big feature piece on teens and their spending. Of course with their messed-up site redesign I can’t find the article and even if I could the link would evaporate in seven days. Anyway! The article mentions that teens are spending over $100 per week, with entertainment (CDs, movies, concerts) being one of the two largest areas of spending. Where they get $100 per week, I’d like to know, cause I had maybe $10 or 15 back in the day. Anyway, clearly having access to music and movies over the Napster/Gnutella/whatever file sharing networks isn’t preventing them from dropping the dollars on Eisner’s products. As Dave W asks, when is enough enough?

Don’t forget to write your Senators about this abomination of legislation. In the case of our sadly misled Dianne Feinstein, who has co-sponsored this bill, write and mention that you won’t be voting for her again if she doesn’t take her name off it.

Analyze This was sort of funny. Meet the Parents, how that was successful, much less worthy of a sequel, is beyond me. (Okay, I know the only care about the grosses and that’s why there’ll be a sequel.) But in Showtime they’ve finally found a way to really bring out Robert DeNiro’s comic touch. And the answer is…DeNiro doesn’t act funny. He doesn’t try to make the audience laugh. He plays it completely straight. And walks into lots and lots of Eddie Murphy straight lines. Plus, no offense to Ben Stiller, who is funny once in awhile, or Billy Crystal, who has been funny far more regularly, but the producers also found an excellent foil in Murphy. I was sitting in the theater laughing out loud throughout this movie.

Lately, Murphy really seems to have found his way (Shrek, Doctor Dolittle) after some initial brilliance (48 Hrs., Trading Places) and then a period wandering in the desert (Distinguished Gentleman, Harlem Nights, Vampire in Brooklyn). Rene Russo is the dead-on stereotype of a modern news producer. William Shatner continues to use his reputation as a punching bag; the bit where he shows Murphy and DeNiro how to use an eyebrow as the coup de grace in interviewing a perp is just perfect. Lawyer Johnnie Cochran does the same for his own self. DeNiro’s adopted daughter, Drena De Niro, does a sweet job as eyecandy assistant to Russo’s producer; one line even has her father asking her if she’s into a “Daddy thing.” Looking at her IMDB listing, this isn’t her first movie but most of her opportunities come in Dad’s films. Pedro Damián plays the main baddie and he understands the comic book timing perfectly.

Director Tom Dey follows up his Jackie Chan hit Shanghai Noon here and clearly Dey is a director to watch: two times at bat, two very funny movies. I assumed he was directing the currently in production Chan sequel, Shanghai Knights, but according to IMDB he’s not; David Dobkin who gave us the utterly pedestrian Clay Pigeons is helming that one. Oh well. Kudos too to writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who also collaborated with Dey on Shanghai Noon. Key to their success is realizing that this is a perfect opportunity to make a cartoon, to bash all the conventions of cop movies. Think of Schwarzenneger’s Last Action Hero without the actual descent into fantasy. The main case our (of course) reluctant partners pursue is a brand new, amazingly deadly automatic chain gun. The gun is so big and so bad it can blow up police cars or level a small house with just a few rounds. Highly recommended!

Some will criticize the dresses, the makeup, or the jewelry. To me, there was only one really sad site last night at the Oscar’s and that was Jennifer Lopez’s hairdo. Where did she get on the talent train? I mean, her music is formulaic and lowest common denominator and her acting is just sad. Who thinks she has more than a pretty smile going for her and, of course, the world’s bootiest ass? And frankly, her ass doesn’t do much for me.

Props to my high school friend Harlan Coben for hitting the NY Times Paperback Fiction Bestseller List for his new in paper (I of course bought it when the hardcover came out last year) mystery novel Tell No One. This novel is a serious one, excellent and a big change of pace from Harlan’s first seven novels, which were all comic mysteries focused on college basketball superstar/lawyer/FBI agent/sports agent/detective Myron Bolitar. Who was also a fantasized alter ego for Coben but still good. His new novel, straighahead in the vein of Tell No One, is called Gone For Good and goes on sale late next month, look for it as I’m sure it will be worth the money.