Just got back from 2 1/2 weeks in Fiji. Wow. What amazing, beautiful people we met there - the Fijian people are truly something special!

Internet service was pretty good where we were for the most part - so the email deluge isn’t too bad; though there are a bunch of deferred items for me to catch up on. The main things I didn’t read while I was away were all the gossip columns, Techcrunch and so on… and I didn’t really miss them that much to be honest. Got a lot to do now though - March month-end! Back to work!!

I do believe it was over 12 years ago that I first had the experience of paying for a shopping bag - in the Netherlands, buying groceries most people tended to take cloth bags with them. Because if you wanted a plastic bag to put your groceries in, you’d have to pay 10 cents or so… they also started doing this a couple of years ago in my native South Africa. But of course, I haven’t yet come across this market-based technique for encouraging people to use reusable bags or (what I now do sometimes) not take a bag at all if they can easily carry something, put it in a backpack or so on.

BUT, living of course in San Francisco we get to be at the cutting edge of consumer environmentalism: SF recently became the first US city to ban plastic shopping bags (though I’m not sure when that actually goes into effect — in March they said 6 months but I haven’t noticed it yet) and over the last few months many stores have been pushing their cloth bags quite heavily. This is great, but I thought to myself — if I weren’t a conscientious consumer as I am, and push came to shove and it was a question for me of really really remembering to bring those cloth bags with me, or of simply coughing up to carry my goods home in a non-recyclable non-reusable form, what would encourage me? Shouldn’t I (as someone who can afford more) have to pay more for a less-reusable, less-green resource than someone else who earns less?

In Finland, a variety of fines are progressive and linked to publicly-available earnings information on Finnish citizens from their tax records (as reported by the WSJ vis a vis the $71,400 speeding fine in 2001). Now what if that approach was taken to green violations? Surely if we want to change behavior, we have to modulate the market mechanism to truly take into account the individual situation? The bag example is a bit extreme for this (though it’s what got me thinking), but I bet we could come up with quite a few environmentally-evil things to differentially fine people for if they were caught doing them. Because there are certainly some externalities being imposed by offenders

There are two articles in the Economist discussing the name change of Bangalore to Bengalooru (just as have other Indian cities Mumbai (Bombay), Kolkata (Calcutta) and Chennai (Madras) changed their official names), one discussing teaching English in schools, the other an amusing story [sub] about the renaming of cities and places.

I grew up in Pretoria/Tshwane in South Africa, where the name change has been a confusing and drawn-out issue (see wikipedia entry). Despite the cost of changing the name (USD $250mm estimate by some accounts), I think it is probably a positive thing. Of course, to many it will always be “the Jacaranda City” named after the thousands of Jacaranda trees that line its streets — and Bengalooru-ites and all of the rest of us name-change-affected will just have to deal as we can with awkward-sounding “the-city-formerly-known-as” qualifiers when describing where we grew up!

Today’s Wall Street Journal [sub] carries the story about the CheckPoint-Sourcefire deal being blocked because of national security concerns. What seems really crazy is the following:

Sourcefire’s protection and monitoring technology builds on the popularity of Snort, which was created by its chief technology officer and is distributed free. Unlike Sourcefire’s commercial products, Snort’s blueprints are open for inspection to assure it works as advertised. This makes it popular inside the U.S. intelligence community, even alongside more mainstream security products from Cisco Systems Inc. or Juniper Networks Inc.

So the source code is available for anyone to see, the product is free, and it’s the reason that this deal is getting blocked? This seem ridiculous to anyone else?

According to this story, Viacom wants to get into the young-people-online-networking space. Guess they’ll either try to build something (hard) or buy someone (not too many good targets out there) so perhaps it would be FaceBook (if they can afford it, which might be a tall order!).

As petrol (gas) prices continue to soar in the US, it seems like we are yet to hear a lot in the media about the state of public transportation in this country. Public transportation in general is not great in the US compared to, say, Europe. The elevated petrol prices here still only put us at about half of where Europe is, but I’m pretty sure prices will hit $4.00 soon (BTW: with recent Katrina events, the traditional gap between California’s higher prices and the rest of the country seems to have shrunk a bit).

On my trips to several countries in Europe I have found many more public transportation options, and things were far more likely to run on time. To recall one case specifically, when I spent a month in the Netherlands in 1995 I was able to travel very quickly and efficiently by bus and train. The buses and trains were well coordinated, lots of people used the services, they were well kept-up, and there were great facilities in and around stations and transfer points (this is by no means a small point). Obviously there are some differences, in general with this comparison - most notably the longer distances between things here in the US especially as more housing subdivisions go up further and further from the central business districts of major American cities. Check out cities like Dallas, Phoenix or Denver to see exactly what I’m talking about.

Americans have continued to get themselves into debt to pay for new shiny SUVs and cars, but now also to pay for petrol even as prices rise (some estimates that the % of gasoline purchases made with credit cards has increased from around 50% in 2004 to over 70% now). Increasing home prices -> residences shifting further from where people work -> high debt capacity means that demand for things like petrol/gas is more inelastic and thus we go further into debt to pay for increased prices for this ‘essential’ item to get us to work and school…

So what about public transportation? Local governments are still hurting from the budget problems of the recessions of the past 4 years and so big new infrastructure projects are not top of the list; new homes, suburbs and shops are being built at a pace far more rapid than thoughts of these new projects anyway (recent trips to north of LA, or to just outside of Denver, have amazed me with several enormous shopping malls with dozens of chain restaurants and 20-screen movie theaters that have popped up like wildflowers in the last two years in places that were previously rural). Also, here in the Bay Area we seem to get stuck in the “not enough people using it, prices go up, so fewer people using it” trap - because most of the people who depend on public transportation are lower-income and more price-sensitive.

Most (more well-off) people don’t think clearly in terms of alternatives. Here in the Bay Area, public transportation costs are fairly high, the quality is better than average I would say (but still not great in terms of reliability, schedules and coverage: we’re fairly compressed in density compared to many other places in the US), but we don’t typically think through the ‘fully-burdened’ cost of using our cars instead of utilizing public transportation. Not only is petrol quite cheap, but it is hard for us to price in the costs of pollution to ourselves and others, wear and tear, monthly car insurance premiums etc. etc. So until some courageous officials start taking a stand and making public transportation a priority, we’ll be stuck with this chicken-and-egg situation that keeps public transportation a minor, weak player compared to the ‘drive yourself’ option.

However, when petrol in the US hits $4 and beyond, you might just start to see a few more people hopping on those trains and buses or sharing rides in the carpool lane, and hopefully, a few more of us demanding more of the public transportation systems we have and should have…

I have always liked the look and feel of an actual newspaper vs. the online version — according to the Scobleizer there is a new AJAX-powered website called PressDisplay that lets you see/read the actual pages of 225 newspapers (some of it) for free. Not quite “scanned”, and no newsprint left on your fingers - it’s really slick. Recently, The Economist (sub req) wrote about the BBC’s excellent online sites and the decline of newspaper readership.

New York Times has an article about Skype that offers some pretty glowing comments. I found the installation process very easy, and apart from having to do the currency conversion from Euro’s to Dollars in my head (they *could* add some simple help for non-European visitors) it was quite simple to set up an “outside calling” account so I could call from my computer to other phones. It’s a great service, and it’s obviously building a brand new network of userIDs and so on… But interesting that a lot of people I speak to with international relatives or coworkers use (free) MSN Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger video services (but typically eschew the crappy audio), how long is it until we see a big IM/messenger-skype deal out there. Or will Skype go it alone? Interesting to see.

Check out Gary Stein’s blog for this entry about the guy who’s going around trying to visit every Starbucks in the world. I had no idea there were so many stores in the Bay Area!!!

Economist article (sub required) about Niklas Zennstrom, founder of KaZaA and now Skype. Article asks whether Skype will face same problem as KaZaA because it is not embracing SIP:

Rival file-sharing networks, based on open standards, are now in the ascendant. The same criticism is being levelled at Skype, which is so far incompatible with a standard (called SIP) used by rival internet-telephony operators. As with KaZaA, it may be that Mr Zennstrom has correctly identified an important trend, but that the software he has written to exploit it will not ultimately prevail.

Dodgeball made Newsweek this week! Check it out.

I hate it when people use their blogs to tell you where they are and what the weather is like there, but I’ll do it anyway:

Fulham, London, UK (weather now as you’re reading this) - as I write it’s 12 degrees Celsius at the London Weather Centre and we’re expecting late showers. Seriously though, I do like to compare technology, people and things when I visit new places. Here are some examples:

Los Angeles: Staying with friends who have broadband, but (even better) neighbor has an open wireless network for me to use!
London: staying in friend’s flat - neighbour has wireless network but is encrypted and not open
London: Gloomy and overcast winter weather
San Francisco: Gloomy and overcast summer weather (sorry that’s an old one)

New York: Starbucks in Borders books, unemployed people lounging
London: Starbucks in Borders books, co-workers in suits chatting

London has a lot more McDonalds than New York, but not nearly as many Starbucks (check out Starbucksphotos.com - are there less here in London than before? my mind must be playing tricks on me but it seems so). It really is a global corporate village, isn’t it?

I find it’s often easy to get hyperfocused on the task at hand, work, or mundane everyday events and forget the larger world around us. It’s good to get a slightly different perspective on things. I also believe it’s important to keep in touch with our heritage, to reconnect with people and things that help define us. The Internet has an important role to play there - whether it’s reading the English language version of Pravda or listening to South African talk radio there are plenty of sources and resources out there to bring another point of view. But of course there also need to be people/guides who can help guide us through these various sources, and that is one of the points about blogs, what they can provide.

For example, returning to Pravda, a skeptical interviewer has trouble believing this “scientific observer” and his assertions that mysterious crop circles are not created by aliens but by “some corporation [that] will claim to have been contacted by aliens.” He continues:
It will be announced that they can communicate with them, and the new images on the fields will prove it. Such a corporation will financially benefit as the exchange rate of its shares will increased instantly ….

And yet, even in hogwash like this we can perceive themes more subtly hidden elsewhere -> in this observer’s case, a fear and distrust of major corporations and their desire to manipulate the public consciousness (now where would that ridiculous idea come from?).

A shorter, sharper path to both opinion and truth (whatever that is, wherever in the world it may be found) is what I hope for out of this new world order (no caps)…