At last night’s Public Hearing on the Granby Planning and Zoning Commission’s proposed revisions to the town Zoning Regulations, I submitted a written critique of the proposal.
You can find the existing regulations and the proposed amendment on the Town’s web site—although the amendment text isn’t exactly the same as that before the Commission last night. The copy they had includes paragraph numbers.
Granby Community Television posted video of the hearing on YouTube, including the comments I made.
The written comments I submitted are now part of the public record, and should be available for inspection at the Office of Community Development. In my experience, it’s not always easy to get to those public records, especially electronically. Therefore, I’m posting a copy of my comments here.
In PDF format, you can read the cover letter enumerating my objections, some revisions I proposed to address the objections, with annotations, and a page of annotations that were too long for the margins that Word decided to spit out as a separate document entirely.
Unfortunately, the Commission closed the public hearing last night after receiving comments from me and my mother, so they aren’t likely to accept additional comment at this time. However, if they make substantial revisions to the proposal—as I hope they do—they would likely need to open a new public hearing.
Today’s a really bad day for WordPress spammers. My site is under a flood of bogus comments being sent in hopes that one will slip through and carry an advertising link someone will be dumb enough to click. As a result, it may take a while for pages to load.
On Saturday, May 10, 2014, a few heavy downpours made their way through North Granby. The result was a stream of sediment pouring down Peck Orchard Road from the Peck Orchard Knoll sand mining stockpile building site.
Not only did this wash across the road higher up, but water poured down to the foot of the road. When the drainage culvert further uphill got clogged with sand, it reached the lower culvert…
…which empties directly into Fox Brook.
The brook, which was running clear above the culvert, turned brown from the runoff coming through the culvert.
This picture is only a few hundred feet upstream from where Fox Brook discharges into Salmon Brook.
How did this happen? The evidence was there on Sunday. It all starts with the gigantic funnel created by the huge mounds of sand that have been bulldozed up and left exposed. These mountains were created weeks ago, and have stood untouched since then. Notice the pile on the right, which extends far above the original topography of the site. There’s another on the left, hidden behind a hill.
That part in the middle? That’s a “road” dug into the sand. Rain from these hills sheds down into this new artificial valley. Despite R. R. Hiltbrand’s presentation at the special permit hearing, wherein their engineer claimed that this sandy soil was incredibly quick-draining and it could absorb the runoff from a hundred-year storm, this summer thundershower obviously created damaging runoff.
Looking closer at that hillside, you can see the deep gullies created from erosion. It’s obvious that a lot of water ran down that hill, and that it wasn’t being absorbed by the sand.
When it hit the bottom of the sand ramp, it left a huge pile of silt on top of the traprock apron that Simscroft-Echo Farms installed.
That runoff was then funneled off to the side of the driveway… mostly. POK had a small pit in the sand here to catch sediment; it filled up in the previous storm. This time, it didn’t help.
The runoff went out and around the silt fence and hay bales that were supposed to contain it. It washed onto the “bituminous” driveway apron: chunks of loose asphalt material packed into a firm, but not solid surface. Why didn’t the silt fence work?
It was full. The design of this “erosion control measure” was laughably inadequate to cope with a spring thundershower; one can imagine how it would perform in a serious summer thunderstorm. It will take a lot more hay to stop a pile of naked sand this size from washing away.
Besides,a few wooden stakes pounded not very far into the ground are no match for hydraulic pressure. Once the stakes flop over, the fence does nothing to control runoff. However, it does present a serious hazard to traffic.
Past that silt fence, there’s evidence of a large, erosive water flow. Possibly it was enhanced by runoff from the hillside that has been stripped of trees but not yet stripped of topsoil.
The result was a veritable river delta stretching across Peck Orchard Road. On Saturday, this part of the road was a brown mass of silty runoff. On Sunday, it was a potentially deadly hazard to bicycle and motorcycle traffic.
Remember that bituminous driveway material? Here’s a whole bunch of it, several hundred feet down Peck Orchard Road. It may be more permeable than pavement, but it’s not permeable enough to stop this much water… and it doesn’t stay put.
Then we come to the first storm drain on the side of Peck Orchard Road.
If you’re looking for it, it’s right near the construction sign. (The one that isn’t reflective, and therefore can’t be seen well at night—which is why Connecticut DOT requires reflective signs for state contracts.)
You still can’t see it? That’s because it’s buried.
A few leaves and a whole lot of mud make for a clogged storm drain…
…but not before the whole pipe fills with sediment, and the outlet swale loses a few inches of depth.
Cleaning out that drainage pipe and runout is going to be a time-consuming, expensive job for Granby Public Works. I wonder if Granby taxpayers will be footing the bill?
Having filled up the first storm drain, the water kept flowing downhill, carrying silt with it.
Very little of this is from winter salt-and-sand spreading. Most of this is fresh silt.
Both sides of the road had torrents of water running down it. Here’s the erosion on the other side of the road. Fox Brook is about 25 feet to the right from this next shot.
By the time the water reached the second storm drain, it was still carrying substantial silt. It made a good start on clogging this drain, too.
You can still see the new layer of sediment in Fox Brook at the other end of that culvert.
But at least it’s not like there’s any environmental threat from this sand, is there?
I think that filling Salmon Brook’s tributaries with sand might have an effect on any juvenile salmon that might be present.
Since these photos were taken, Peck Orchard Knoll has dug out some, but not all, of the silt from behind their silt fence, and they’ve pounded those wooden stakes back into the ground. The road has been swept, but it still raises clouds of fine sand dust when people drive past. (The past few days haven’t been kind to the paint on cars traveling Peck Orchard Road!) Even so, if we get another fast-moving downpour like last Sunday, this will happen again. The same erosion controls are in place, and they are demonstrably inadequate.
And Granby still hasn’t gotten around to making it illegal to do this again.
When Michael Girard presented his Peck Orchard Knoll excavation proposal to the Planning and Zoning Commission of Granby, CT, he and his engineer claimed that there was no realistic chance of environmental damage. The proposal called for removing about 100,000 cubic yards of sand and gravel from the site, a hilly residential lot.
The proposal was withdrawn after the Commission showed reluctance to give Peck Orchard Knoll carte blanche to excavate… and because it turns out that they didn’t need a special permit to create what is, in essence, a strip-mining operation on a residential lot in Granby. A simple building permit, issued after pro forma inspection, suffices under Granby’s regulations. However, the plans submitted with the building permit application were substantially the same as the special-excavation plans.
A warm weekend, causing almost two feet of snowpack to start melting, shows evidence that Peck Orchard Knoll’s claims that runoff wouldn’t be a problem were… inaccurate.
While the plans call for Phase One to be a driveway with various sediment controls, the actual first phase of the project is using an old wood road that was cut illegally close to the adjoining property line, according to the town’s previous building inspector. The wood road has been “improved” with crushed stone, but without any inherent runoff controls.
The “wood road” access road into Peck Orchard Knoll, Sunday, March 9, 2014.
The result, as seen here, is a river of muddy water, laden with sediment, running down Peck Orchard Road.
View of Peck Orchard Knoll access road facing uphill.
Runoff does run down Peck Orchard Road for quite a ways, and a fair amount of water comes down the hill from above Peck Orchard Knoll. However, much of it leaves the road in the swale just uphill from the access road. On this day, the runoff that did come from uphill was practically clear. All of the brown, muddy sediment in these photos is coming from Peck Orchard Knoll. There is a fair amount of sand on the side of the road; Granville plows Peck Orchard Road, and they use a sand/salt mix. However, the sand mix is clean, and doesn’t create mud, especially not this long after the last snowstorm. In the next picture, you can clearly see how clean the “upstream” water (on the right) is, and how muddy the runoff from Peck Orchard Knoll (left) is.
Clear runoff in the center/right is from uphill on Peck Orchard Road. Mud at the left is entirely from Peck Orchard Knoll’s access road. Water is flowing downhill, toward the top of the photo.
What about the sediment control? Well, to be fair, Peck Orchard Knoll did install some sediment controls for this wood road. There are hay bales:
POK’s access road. Note sediment-control hay bales (stacked, on left).
And there’s also landscaping cloth:
This bundle of landscaping cloth was, at one time, placed across POK’s access road when they weren’t working. On Sunday, it was carelessly discarded, near (or possibly over) the property line.
Obviously, the Simscroft-Echo Farms employees who are excavating the site didn’t think that it was critical to reinstall the erosion-control system before leaving the site the last time they were working. They aren’t working every day; they’re removing sand when they have a buyer for it. They certainly weren’t working this past weekend, when temperatures were as high as the mid-fifties.
The effect of this negligence is a new river delta in front of Linda Varcoe’s home on Peck Orchard Road:
The sediment on the left is mostly dirt, mud, and stone dust from the wood road. Some of it is road sand, but notice the muddy texture: road sand doesn’t look like that.
The entire width of Peck Orchard is coated with runoff here. At night, when the temperatures drop below freezing, this will be black ice.
You can also see here that the road is starting to break down from the runoff, perhaps enhanced by the additional heavy truck traffic. Unlike Hartland, Granby does not routinely seal cracks on Peck Orchard Road. However, historically the road has been lightly used and has held up pretty well. This year, it’s a different story.
It’s small now, but let’s see how it looks in a week after some freeze/thaw cycles.
This isn’t just a little extra runoff; it’s substantial sediment running the length of Peck Orchard Road.
Some of the runoff continues all the way down the road. However, much of it enters a culvert near this road sign.
No small amount of sediment is entering this culvert, hundreds of feet downhill from Peck Orchard Knoll’s driveway.
Peck Orchard Road also has a litter problem. Unusually, this drink container isn’t for an alcoholic beverage.
This grate enters a culvert under Peck Orchard Road. It drains on the other side.
The culvert’s drainage channel comes out just uphill of Fox Brook, currently frozen over and covered with snow.
Click the photo to see a larger version. Because of the cold winter, Fox Brook is a bit hard to see; it’s in the floor of the valley seen in the background, currently covered with ice and snow. While you can’t see the runoff from this culvert in this picture, it is there, underneath the snow.
That river of mud is heading straight for Fox Brook.
And Fox Brook, a few hundred feet later, empties into Salmon Brook.
These are the wetlands that Peck Orchard Knoll said would be unaffected by their work. During the public meetings, there were those who scoffed at the suggestion that silt and sediment would enter the Fox Brook watershed.
Yet here we are, barely into snowmelt season, and it’s already happening.
We’ve still got a foot of snow to melt.
We haven’t gotten any spring rains yet.
And there’s the potential for so much more runoff, because—let’s not forget—this is a strip mine:
This unprotected, raw topsoil is already washing down Peck Orchard Road just from snowmelt. What happens if we get a thunderstorm?
There’s nothing left to protect the land here. The topsoil has been scraped aside and piled uphill. There are raw cuts exposing feet of topsoil. A pit of sand is exposed to the elements. Notably absent from the work zone is any form of erosion control whatsoever. That pile of topsoil is wholly unprotected. The banks are unprotected, even as a thick pack of snow is exposed to direct sunlight thanks to the clear-cutting of the property. There’s nothing in place to keep it from washing down the road and into the creek.
Well, except those hay bales and that length of sediment fence.
You know, piled up where it won’t get dirty.
But even if it were in place, is it reasonable to think that such a rudimentary structure would suffice?
Would it hold up to an April thunderstorm?
Just a few months into this excavation—which Girard said could take years to complete—and already, these promises of environmental responsibility appear to have fallen by the wayside. I’m scared to imagine what damage will be wrought to the neighborhood by the fall.
In the meantime, the Town of Granby can’t even scrape up enough people to make a quorum to meet and discuss possible drafts of potential changes that might get enacted to change Granby’s zoning regulations to stop this sort of thing. From my point of view, it simply doesn’t seem to be a priority for Granby’s land-use-governance officials.
NOTE: All comments on this site are moderated, and will not appear until approved. This may take hours or days. This is because there are many, many spammers who think that posting blatant advertisements as blog comments is a good idea. Most legitimate comments will be approved and posted. However, I reserve the right to decline posting any comment, especially those that are defamatory or incendiary in nature.
Lowell C. McAdam
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Verizon Communications
140 West Street
New York, NY 10007
Dear Mr. McAdam,
I can’t understand your strategy behind pushing Voice Link as a replacement for landline wireless. It seems to be a major misstep, of the kind that should lead prudent investors to short Verizon.
I understand that your revenue from traditional landline services has declined. As you sell it today, copper landline service is mostly noncompetitive with the alternatives, and that has hurt its market share in your service area. But that’s not the whole story.
Yes, copper landlines come with many regulatory restrictions, require considerable maintenance, and do not support competitive broadband data speeds. From a consumer point of view, they only work in the home and they’re expensive.
But, from Verizon’s point of view, I think you’re missing something important: Copper landline technology has a substantial benefit that differentiates it from all of your competitors, a benefit Verizon has failed to market properly.
It’s reliable.
Or, at least, it used to be reliable; in your service areas, your failure to maintain copper plant and infrastructure has weakened that reputation considerably… but it can still be regained.
With a copper landline, properly implemented and maintained, service remains up until the line is severed, and that generally takes considerable damage. If commercial power is out, landlines generally remain up. If you need to call 911, it’s going to work best from a landline, which will have the capacity and power to complete the call, and will reliably connect you to the correct PSAP on the first try, with accurate location data even if you can’t speak. If you need a medical alert device, a landline is the most likely to work when you need it. It won’t turn out not to have a generator, or be overloaded by many calls, or fail due to radio interference. It doesn’t depend on having commercial power to the home to charge batteries or power base stations.
In short, the key differentiator of the venerable copper landline is that it’s suitable for life-critical communications.
Consider: Once you transition a customer to Voice Link, they are now on your wireless service. That’s a commodity product, and it lacks that key differentiator. For a consumer, Voice Link is not substantially different from AT&T’s fixed-wireless service available at Target, or similar offerings from Sprint, T-Mobile, or their MVNOs. It’s also not substantially different in terms of reliability or price from numerous VoIP providers.
By moving people to Voice Link, you’re inviting them to drop Verizon entirely and move to competitors that offer the same service with better features or a better price… because you can’t use your key advantage, the unmatched reliability of a regulated copper landline.
Investors should shy away from companies that willingly surrender a key market differentiator in the name of short-term profit.
Already, Verizon has surrendered the Internet market to its cable competitors by abandoning FiOS. Verizon’s DSL offerings are pathetic compared to cable’s low-cost, high-speed Internet; fixed wireless LTE is so expensive that it’s solely a last-choice alternative.
I am currently a Verizon landline customer. I pay for the service because I value the reliability, even though Verizon’s landline service costs more than a VoIP line even without services now seen as basic, free features on every competing technology: caller ID, call waiting, voicemail, unlimited long distance… If Verizon were to stop providing this landline service, I would not purchase Voice Link. I would move to one of your competitors, where I would get a better value for less money.
My advice to you: Abandon Voice Link as a replacement for copper landlines. Market it as a low-cost alternative for those who need seasonal service, or service where installation of the last mile would be prohibitively expensive to the customer… or as an additional-line alternative to VoIP. Reinvest in your copper landlines to restore their reliability. Market that reliability heavily. Bring the feature set of a basic $35 landline in line with that of a $20/month prepaid cellphone: caller ID, call waiting, and basic voicemail at no additional charge. You can then use affinity programs to sell landline consumers on your wireless offerings by providing a discount.
The alternative—eliminating your inherent competitive advantage, the last advantage of the old Bell monopoly you’ve been allowed to retain—makes no business or social sense.
Sincerely,
Robert A. Levandowski
I’m a big fan of the Lego video games… and of Legos in general. I was hooked by the fun gameplay and brilliant humor of the first game, Lego Star Wars. Unfortunately, as the series has made its way through Star Wars, DC Comics, Indiana Jones, and Harry Potter, it has lost some of its magic and a lot of its humor. It’s also revealed a number of fundamental bugs in the code that Traveller’s Tales, the division of Warner Bros. that produces the Lego video games, has failed to address for years. Some of the games contained game-ending bugs, especially on the original Nintendo Wii.
I had high hopes for the new game, Lego City Undercover, even though I wondered how they’d fare with a game that isn’t based on some other media property, but is made up from whole cloth. But playing it would mean investing in Nintendo’s new game system, the Wii U. It’s not available for any other platform.
The short version: Brilliant game, idiotic game system.
The Wii U hasn’t been selling. When the original Wii came out, it took almost a year for stores to have stock for more than a few hours after a new shipment arrived. They flew off the shelves at an unprecedented rate. The Wii U… not so much. From day one, you could have a Wii U by walking in and asking for one.
There are reasons for this.
The first reason, the most immediately obvious reason, is that there were very few Wii U games when the console came out, and none of them were “gotta have” games. Many of the release games were ports of games that were out for Xbox and PS3 for some time. There was a new (but not very innovative) Super Mario game. Nothing, though, in the way of a game that would drive fans to go buy the thing. Lego? Didn’t come out for four months. Zelda? Wait until 2014. (Well, to make the fans happier, Nintendo is porting the old GameCube Zelda game “Wind Waker” to Wii U for this Christmas… but it’s a game we’ve already played.)
I decided to take the plunge for my birthday because the Lego game finally came out, and because retailers have started selling the Wii U at a discount to get rid of stock. Best Buy ran a sale cutting $50 off the price of the basic model. That’s not a good harbinger for a game system that’s less than six months old.
Nintendo sells two models of Wii U: The “Basic” model is white and has 8GB of internal storage. The “Deluxe” model is black and has 32GB of internal storage, and comes with a charging cradle for the new Game Pad controller (available separately for $20 or less), and also includes the game “NintendoLand”. The calculus, then, is (a) Do you want NintendoLand? and (b) Do you want the extra memory?
What Nintendo doesn’t clearly tell you is that the difference in internal memory is essentially a moot point. Neither version has enough internal memory to be useful. The Wii U operating system consumes about 5GB of space on either console. After that deduction, there’s not enough memory left on the Deluxe edition to download “Lego City Undercover” if you wish to purchase it online. If you have any intention of using that internal memory for anything other than game-save files, you are going to have to purchase an external USB hard drive to give the Wii U a useful amount of storage. If all you need to do is save games, the 8GB console will probably do the job… and when it doesn’t, it’s hard drive time anyway.
Although the Wii U has an SD card slot, you can’t use it to store Wii U games or data. The slot is only usable when you reboot the Wii U into Wii emulation mode. However, you can’t just move your SD card from your old Wii to your Wii U. You have to first move anything you care about off that SD card back into the old Wii’s internal memory. Chances are that you bought an SD card for your Wii because all your stuff wouldn’t fit in the Wii’s internal memory in the first place. That’s okay, because you’re going to need to redownload most of your Wii games anyway. Just concentrate on the save data. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
When you buy your external hard drive, if you go to Nintendo’s web site you will find that they recommend a desktop hard drive with its own power cord. It seems that the USB ports on the Wii U do not put out enough power to properly drive a bus-powered hard drive, i.e., the most commonly available, least expensive, and smallest models. Nintendo doesn’t officially support it, but you can work around this by buying a bus-powered portable USB hard drive and a powered USB hub to plug it into. Nintendo’s web site also warns that you shouldn’t use USB flash drives or SD-card adapters with the Wii U as it may not have enough power to operate them properly. In other words, the Wii U’s USB ports are decidedly nonstandard. They’re also USB 2.0 only, so you’re stuck with relatively slow hard drives.
But then, the Wii U specializes in slow.
When you first start the Wii U, you will need to download a new firmware update before you can do much of anything. If you skip the update, you can play games that you bought on disc in a store, so long as you don’t want to play online, or receive patches to fix bugs. Without the update, many of the Wii U’s features don’t exist. The update is large and takes hours to download, even if you have an extremely fast Internet connection. It seems to me that the Wii U has a flawed WiFi system: in downloading the same program to both the original Wii and the Wii U in Wii emulation mode, the original Wii downloads the file almost twice as fast. Even over a 50Mbps connection, the Wii U needs about an hour and a half to download that first firmware update, and it struggles to hit 5Mbps doing so. This may be a combination of flawed hardware and overloaded servers on Nintendo’s end.
Unlike Xbox and PS3, you don’t have the option of using a wired Ethernet connection. Theoretically, you can use a Nintendo-licensed USB Ethernet adaptor made for the Wii with the Wii U. However, folks who have tried this have reported that it’s even slower than the WiFi connection.
That download speed problem doesn’t seem to get better as time goes on.
As for your home firewall, Nintendo recommends that you essentially disable it completely, forwarding every possible TCP port to the Wii U to prevent problems with online games. There’s no mention of whether or not the Wii U supports common protocols like UPnP or NAT-PMP to overcome firewall issues. The suggestion that the Wii U should sit essentially unprotected on the Internet is unforgivably naïve.
Once you have the firmware, you have to go through the process of creating a user account on the Wii U and creating a Nintendo Network account to link it to. This involves responding to a verification email. You can’t choose to have that email sent to your Wii’s email address, for some reason.
Then you get to stare at a “Please Wait” screen while the Wii U menu loads. This takes 20 to 30 seconds, possibly longer. It’s positively glacial, and it sets the tone for the Wii U experience. Nintendo promises a speed boost with an April firmware update, but the video they’ve released shows that menu loads are now merely measured in terms of historical eras instead of geologic epochs.
When you go to load a game for the first time, there’s a good chance you’ll be presented with a popup to download an update to the game. The good news is that, unlike the original Wii, game makers can issue patches to games you’ve purchased on a disc. The bad news is: slow download speeds. Sorry, kids, it’ll be another 15 minutes before that game we just brought home starts loading.
And once you get past that, wait some more while the game loads.
I’ve never, ever, played a Wii game that had anywhere near the amount of “Please Wait” that a Wii U game has.
Be careful about putting the controller down to go do other things. As a power-saving measure, by default the Wii U will turn itself off if you don’t use it for an hour. It doesn’t bother saving your game when it does so. If you get a call from Mom, remember to go unpause the thing periodically so it doesn’t kill your progress. You can turn this feature off, after more waiting for the settings app to load.
The new GamePad controller is interesting, but sort of gimmicky in usage. The use of the second screen is not yet mastered by the programmers. Technologically, it works fine. In terms of being useful instead of a hindrance in gameplay, that’s a tossup.
What the GamePad definitely is would be “uncomfortable”. For some insane reason, Nintendo designed it with a flared chamfer along the case join around the entire perimeter of the case. This means that there’s a sharp ridge biting into your palm as you hold it. Be prepared for a nice red mark after your first session. If, like me, you loved the Wiimote/Nunchuck combination because you could hold both hands in comfortable, supported positions… that’s gone for Player One. You get the GamePad, with its wide, square body. Aching wrists will join your sore palms after a few hours.
On the other hand, all you’ll get is a few hours. The GamePad’s rechargeable battery only lasts 2.5 to 3.5 hours, depending on usage. Once it’s depleted, it needs 3.5 to 4 hours to recharge. You can keep playing while you’re plugged in to recharge… if you unplug the charger from the charging cradle, of course. And if the game you’re playing expects you to wave the GamePad around, that cord will get in the way. The battery appears to be a cost-saving measure; there’s room for a larger battery in the GamePad’s bay, and at least one third-party vendor plans to introduce an aftermarket replacement with three times the capacity that fits into the existing battery bay.
So, you’ve got your external hard drive, you’ve banked up patience for the slow download, you’re thinking about buying a game online. You’re prepared for the idea that it may take all night, even if you have Google Fiber speeds. There’s still more gotchas there.
Unlike Xbox and PS3, your downloaded game is not tied to the account you used to purchase the game. It’s tied to the particular Wii U that you used to download it. If that Wii U breaks, you’re out of luck. You’ll need to buy a new copy.
You won’t get a discount for purchasing online. Downloads are priced at full retail, unless the game manufacturer is running a sale, which isn’t terribly common so far.
Even after downloading the game, you may still have to wait to run it as that patch download system kicks in. That’s right, the game you buy and download won’t be fully patched when you download it.
As for funds to buy the game, you can’t use leftover Wii Points from your old Wii. And don’t buy a Wii Points card in the store to charge up your Wii U unless you want to buy old Wii games with them. For Wii U games, you need to find a Nintendo Network prepaid card or use your credit card. Nintendo Network cards aren’t all that widespread yet. Oh, and you can apply Nintendo Network points to a Wii U or a Nintendo 3DS, but once redeemed on one or the other, you can only use them there.
In short, Nintendo has been paying absolutely no attention to its competitors’ online stores or to the App Store model that’s taken over the mobile world.
So what we have here is a fundamentally flawed console with few good games, limited future prospects, unforgivably slow operating software, flawed connectivity, a painful controller, and a brain-dead online store.
The sad thing is, it’s the only game in town when it comes to playing the wonderful new Lego City Undercover.
If you like the Lego video games, you’ll want LCU. The humor of the first Lego Star Wars, which has petered off and become stale and scarce in recent releases, is back in a big way. LCU is essentially a parody of every cop show and movie trope of any note, with a heavy emphasis on cheesy 1970s/80s cop show. The voice acting—a distraction in Lego Lord of the Rings, where it seemed forced and obviously recycled—is a huge asset to LCU. The dialogue is witty and often laugh-out-loud funny, with the occasional “did he really just say that?” double-entendre.
LCU is easily the most bug-free Lego videogame I’ve played. On very rare occasions, event triggers can get confused, but we’re talking once per four hours or so, instead of the constant negotiations involved in playing Lego Indiana Jones or Lego Harry Potter on Wii. Characters do a much better job of walking and jumping where you want them, too. Busted bricks and showers of studs don’t trigger massive slowdowns and don’t threaten to lock the system up. Given how frustrating the Traveller’s Tales engine has been on the Wii, this is a massively welcome improvement.
It’s also a huuuuge game, with a massive overworld that will take days, not hours, to explore. As another reviewer noted, think “Lego Grand Theft Auto, but as a cop.”
The only downside is that transitions to special events or story levels involve yet more “please wait”. At least the game’s theme music is catchy. You’ll hear it a lot during load screens.
LCU could have been the “gotta have it” game to drive sales of the Wii U. Ultimately, I think the console is too flawed for even a great game to propel sales. If you want LCU, and you know you’ll buy the next Zelda the day it comes out, whatever form it takes, you might think about a Wii U if you find a great discount.
On the other had, if Nintendo wants the Wii U to start selling, they need to:
- massively improve the operating system’s speed
- figure out how to speed up the optical drive
- fix the broken WiFi and their server farms
- add a wired Ethernet port
- add fully-standard-compliant USB ports that support bus-powered drives and flash drives, preferably with USB 3.0
- smooth out the sharp ridge on the GamePad
- put a better battery in the GamePad
- tie online purchases to a user account instead of the console
Parallels makes a popular program, Parallels Desktop, that lets Mac users run other operating systems in “virtual machines” on their Mac. One can run various flavors of Windows, as well as UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems such as FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris. It’s a useful program.
It’s also a program from a company that seems highly clueless.
Okay, I’m not happy that every time a new major version of Parallels comes out, it costs at least $40 to upgrade it… and a new version seems to be required for every new version of Windows and every new major version of OS X. But okay, these things cost money to make, and virtualization software is more complex than most. It’s still annoying when an OS upgrade breaks Parallels until you pony up for a new version.
But now they’ve gone too far. Parallels Desktop 7, which is required to run under OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, comes with advertisements. When you start the program, you get an ad for other Parallels products, or products from third parties that Parallels has deals with. Many of these products are Windows “bloatware”—software that takes up space, slows things down, and doesn’t provide much (if any) value to the user. You get these ads even though you’ve paid full retail for the software.
And you can’t turn them off.
Oh, there’s a “Don’t show me this again” button. But the thing is, Parallels has taken a unique interpretation of this phrase. Most people, seeing a dialog box when they start a program with some useless blather in it and a “Don’t show me this again” option, would assume that checking the box would prevent you from ever seeing that dialog on program startup again. Parallels’ interpretation, however, is “Don’t show me this particular advertisement again.”
So you check the box, expecting to be rid of it… and a few days or weeks later, it comes back, with a new dubious offer.
Ad infinitum.
If you ask Parallels on their public forums, they’ll tell you that you cannot disable the advertising entirely… and that they can’t remove it because it could affect Parallels’ performance.
Well, the second part is unmitigated bull excrement, certainly. They wrote the ads in; they can write the ads out. The only “performance” that will be hurt by removing the ads is the performance of Parallels’ balance sheet.
Besides, you can disable ads in Parallels Desktop, although you have to use commands in the UNIX command shell to do so. But don’t try to share this information with other Parallels users on their forum; your message will be swiftly deleted by Parallels staff, who continue to publicly state that it’s impossible. (However, if you complain loud enough, they may tell you the trick in private, out of public view.)
That’s just plain sleazy. It’s demeaning to the intelligence of their customers on many levels, and it’s a clear sign that the company has no respect for its customers.
It also raises the question: Parallels, of necessity, insinuates itself deep into the guts of your operating system. If they’re sleazy enough to do this, what else are they sleazy enough to do?
But that’s not the end of the clueless. Have a look at Parallels’ Facebook page. On the plus side, someone from the company is actually watching the page and responding to many posts there. However, the vast majority of those responses is some variation on “Thanks, please visit our website to open a support ticket for your [question|concern|criticism|widespread obvious PR disaster on our part].”
Guys, the key word in “social media” is social. Sending people to your support website to get a response to a question asked in public is anti-social.
The thing is, as much as you wish you could control the narrative on Facebook and avoid public conversations that air your dirty laundry… well… it’s just not possible. Better to avoid having dirty laundry, or at least be seen attacking it promptly and energetically with laundry soap in public.
What Parallels is doing is a naked attempt to control the narrative, one that’s obviously failing… and doing so in a public, insulting-your-customers sort of way. Someone needs to tell them about the Streisand Effect.
Here’s some unsolicited advice for Ron Johnson, the new CEO of J. C. Penney. Mr. Johnson has announced sweeping changes in the way Penney’s will do business, building on his previous successes at Target and Apple. I think his basic plan is not just sound, but laudable. If he really wants to reinvent department-store retail, here’s three specific things he could do:
Have a public e-mail address.
His former boss and mentor, Steve Jobs, had the public e-mail address steve@apple.com, and the address was well-known to the world. Apple even publicized it on their website. What’s more, Jobs personally monitored the e-mail sent there, and was known to occasionally reply to customer messages. Johnson should do the same: let us mail ron@jcp.com with our feedback. Yes, there will be a lot of noise to go through. On the other hand, CEOs often find themselves isolated from reality behind layers of middle management; having a direct channel to one’s customers helps prevent this. It worked for Steve… and no one else in this retail space is doing it.
Find out when customers are leaving the store because you don’t have their size.
When I shop at department stores, I’m often disappointed to find that they don’t have the size I need in some garment. Most stores don’t do a great job of arranging product to make it easy to find the right size. Even when they do, it seems like they stock sizes based on some inscrutable nationwide formula, not local demand; otherwise, it wouldn’t seem like the local stores are always out of the same sizes!
Look, department-store customers are used to lassez-faire customer service at department stores: We’ve got what we’ve got on the floor, we don’t know what’s coming in next week, we don’t know nothing. If the right size isn’t there, customers just leave. It’s a missed sale… and there’s nothing to tell the retailer “you would have made a sale if you had stocked more of size X.”
Penney’s will make more sales if they have the right sizes. They’ll get more customer traffic if they feel confident the store will have their sizes. You’ll gain customer trust and loyalty if they know you will have their sizes.
The store should figure out some easy way for customers to tell you “I would have bought this item if you had it in this size,” and promote the hell out of it.
Leverage logistics for the customer.
Look, we all know that retailers live and die by logistics and inventory. Penney’s has to know how many items they have in the store, of each type and size. In this day and age, it’s all computerized, and it should be easy to tell how many size-L red men’s cable-knit sweaters you have in the store… and in other stores. If they don’t already have this capability, I’d be astonished.
So, if I come up to a salesperson wishing that the store had that sweater in stock, I should never hear “I’m sorry, we don’t have any” as the sole response. Leverage your logistics; the salesperson should be able to whip out their iPod Touch with its barcode scanner, scan the shelf label, and tell me: “Oh, I’m sorry we’re out of that. I’ve noted that you were looking for it, so we can have more items like that in your size in the future. I see we’re expecting another shipment of this item on Thursday. I can hold one for you, if you’d like. I see our store in Poughkeepsie has two in stock today; I could also call down there and ask them to hold one for you.” (Bonus points: “Or I can have them put one on the truck tonight; it’ll be here tomorrow after noon.”)
This would delight customers, and it shouldn’t cost much—especially if Johnson has any plans to roll out portable-device checkout like he did at the Apple Store. Few stores go this far for the customer nowadays… but I know it used to be standard practice for Penney’s competitors, and that was back when it meant calling the other stores and waiting for someone to check the floor display.
Many years ago, I remember watching the PBS cooking show The Frugal Gourmet as a child, and being enlightened by the host’s explanation of the term “frugal.” Sadly, most people don’t seem to understand the difference, and confuse being frugal with being cheap.
A frugal person seeks to buy things with the most utility for the least cost of ownership. A cheap person seeks to buy things with the least initial cost possible.
Jeff Smith, the host of The Frugal Gourmet, illustrated the difference using meat pounders. One choice was a nice, stainless-steel pounder with an elegant design and some nice artistic flourishes. This pounder was by no means cheap, but was it frugal? No, because it cost more than equivalent tools that would do the job just as well. On the other end of the spectrum was a short length of two-by-four pine stud. This could also be used to pound out a cutlet, and it was undoubtedly inexpensive. However, it was clumsy to use. It was inefficient at the task; it tended to give both the user and the meal splinters, and it was difficult to clean properly. In short, it was cheap. The frugal option was a wooden mallet, of the type you could buy in any hardware store. It was inexpensive, it did the job well, and its finish allowed for easy cleaning. It cost more than the two-by-four, but the cost of using it was lower.
There was a time where being “fiscally conservative”, in the American political sense, meant that one was frugal. A frugal person doesn’t want the cheapest thing; they want the best value for their money. They want something that will last a reasonable time, that doesn’t incur additional costs in its use, yet has no unnecessary bits that run up the price. A frugal person understands that “costs” are not just monetary; wasted time and wasted effort are costs, as well, and need to be factored in. I believe that the term “fiscally conservative” has increasingly shifted away from “frugal” and towards “cheap.” That’s regrettable, because a cheap person usually winds up paying more over time than a frugal one.
I can walk into the local mall and buy a dress shirt at Macy’s for about $30, provided I make sure that the shirt is on sale. (It’s rare that they aren’t.) I can go further out of my way and buy a dress shirt from Brooks Brothers for about $78—less if I buy from their factory outlet, and use the discount card provided through my company’s associate-discount program. A cheap person would consider me crazy for buying the Brooks Brothers shirt. A frugal person would ask: How well are they made, and how long do they last?
My experience with the shirts Macy’s sells is that they are poorly made. It’s rare to buy one that doesn’t have ragged stitching. There are often visible flaws in the stitching. On patterned shirts, the alignment of the panels is haphazard at best. The fabric is often coarse and unpleasant to wear. The collar stays are cheap material that curls or breaks quickly. Most of all, the shirts wear out within a year to 18 months.
Brooks Brothers shirts, on the other hand, are very well made. Rarely, if ever, do I find a stitching error—even on their “factory second” shirts from their factory outlet stores. The material is high-quality, and properly aligned. The collar stays are sturdy and resilient. With proper care, I can get three years out of a Brooks Brothers shirt.
One year for $30, or three years for $78. I come out ahead with the more expensive shirt… and I feel better and look better doing it. That’s the frugal choice. By spending a little bit more, I get a better value for my money. It may mean that I have to plan my purchases more carefully to afford the initial expense, but because I get a better bargain in the long run by doing it, it’s worth it.
The opposite end of the spectrum, the truly cheap option, would be to buy a shirt at Walmart. While the Macy’s shirt is not particularly good, Walmart is well-known for squeezing their vendors to provide the cheapest possible product. The president of Snapper, the lawnmower company, famously told how Walmart’s purchasing agents tried to convince him to make a flimsy, cheap mower for the store (and tarnish his brand in so doing) because the Walmart shopper wanted a “disposable” mower that was cheap enough to discard instead of maintaining. Sometimes you can buy a product that appears identical to one sold elsewhere, including the model number, but the Walmart version is cheaper because it’s missing features that you would have gotten if you’d purchased elsewhere. Cheap, but perhaps the exact opposite of frugal. Much of what Walmart sells, in my opinion, is similarly disposable.
On some level, people realize this; there’s at least one academic paper showing that people perceive goods sold at Walmart as inferior. Yet, rather than save to buy what they perceive to be a superior product… they’ll go to Walmart. Does it really help that you can “afford” the GE microwave at Walmart when it breaks quickly and cannot be repaired because Walmart required GE to use inferior parts that aren’t available as replacement components?
Americans have bought into the cheap lifestyle. Yes, there is a place for cheap: many “consumable goods” are a place to economize by buying based on cheapest upfront cost. These are things that are inherently used up as you use them, like toothpaste or food. Unfortunately, this attitude has spread to “durable goods” as well: furniture, computers, appliances, clothing, cars, homes. We call them “durable” goods because they should last. They may occasionally need repairs, but they should be minor, as these are things that can be made durable—resistant to wearing out, long-lasting.
How does your company requisition durable goods? Do you evaluate suppliers to find the most frugal option, the one that will have the most benefit on your workers’ productivity given the combined cost of purchase and maintenance over the projected life of the item? Or do you just find the cheapest quote for something that meets the minimum requirements on the day it’s purchased? In my experience, most medium-to-large American companies choose cheap, not frugal.
Learn the ways of frugality and apply them to your own life. Spend a little more where it will give you better value; go without or spend less in other areas where you will lose less value to compensate. Encourage frugal thinking, at home and at work. Write to your legislators, and ask them to use your taxes frugally, not cheaply; you want value for that money!
Frugal should be a core American value. Let’s make it one.
Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs (1955–2011).
My first computer wasn’t an Apple. It was an Atari 800. As a young boy into videogames, the Atari was the natural step up from the Atari 2600 game console. It was videogames that got me fascinated in computers, and it was the Atari that helped me discover how much I liked making them run.
After a few years, though, I had outgrown the Atari. The system had limits, and the company was reaching its limits as well. As a loyal Atari owner, I disliked the Apple II, with its relatively crude graphics and very un-arcade-like analog joystick. In middle school, though, all the school computers were Apples, and I saw software that just wasn’t available for the Atari.
So, my Christmas wish one year was for an Apple //c. By then, Mom and Dad had learned the true meaning of the word “peripheral”—an education that started on the Christmas morning after I got the Atari when I didn’t want to shut it off lest I lose my programs, having no cassette drive or disk drive. I had an Apple with all the trimmings. It was a well-travelled computer, making weekend trips to the family cottage in New Hampshire and the occasional trip in to school to supplement the small computer lab there. I was an Apple owner, but I wasn’t truly an enthusiast yet.
That came in eighth grade. By then, I was the undisputed computer nerd of the town school system; the adults came to me for advice. That’s how it came that one day they asked me to come down to the computer room: I excelled in English, I lived and breathed computers… they wanted me to be an editor of the school newspaper, because they wanted to create it using a new thing they were testing: a Macintosh.
I had read about the Macintosh in Creative Computing and BYTE, and it had intrigued me… but that day in the computer lab, it was love at first sight. I took to MacWrite and MacPaint like a duck to water, and I started to learn the intricacies of ReadySetGo, one of the first of a heretofore-unknown type of software: desktop publishing.
Guess what was on the Christmas list the next year?
I had a Mac Plus back when they were still beige. I have oddly fond memories of the wub-wub-wub noise an Apple 800K disk drive made as it changed speeds, the ka-CHUNK a floppy made as you inserted it. I learned about INITs and CDEVS; I studied Inside Macintosh and learned Pascal. I took BASIC computer programming as a high-school freshman when the class was still being taught on Commodore PETs; being an old hand at BASIC, I breezed through the curriculum and started handing in programs written in Microsoft Macintosh BASIC, including GUIs.
I remember getting my first hard drive, a Jasmine 80MB SCSI disk that sat underneath the Mac, and thinking I’d never find enough things to fill it. I remember playing Epix’ Winter Games on the Mac, sliding the mouse back and forth rhythmically to simulate cross-country skiing. I recall driving from my parents’ home in North Granby, CT to the suburbs of Springfield, MA, not long after getting my drivers’ license, to get my hands on a freshly-minted copy of System 7, and lusting after the Macintosh Portable in all its portable-typewriter/boat-anchor glory while I was there. I remember the magic of the ThunderScan, a device that replaced the ribbon cassette in the ImageWriter II printer with an image sensor, allowing you to use the printer as a crude drum scanner. I spent hours going through my favorite VHS movies with the VCR hooked up to a MacRecorder, creating sound clips of favorite lines to use as beep sounds.
That lead to a particularly favorite prank. The school system’s computer expert was named Dave, and he wasn’t yet comfortable with Macs. One week, he made it known that he’d be taking the school’s Mac for the weekend to learn more about it. I played a little joke on him (with the knowledge of the teacher in charge of the computer club): Before he left, I added a program to the Mac’s startup disk that let you tie sounds to certain system events. Upon ejecting a disk, the Mac played a sound clip from the 1980s revival of Mission: Impossible: “This disk will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jim!” He later related that he panicked at first, before realizing that he’d been had. (This was before computer viruses were on anyone’s radar.)
That Mac Plus was also well-travelled. The latter half of my high-school career was spent at a private school in Hartford; I was a fixture in the computer lab there, and an editor of the newspaper and the yearbook. When crunch time came for the yearbook, that Mac came to school with me daily in its big blue Cordura bag.
Somewhere in there was the summer I sent a resume to MacConnection hoping for a summer job, despite being a teen; they were headquartered in the next town over from our cottage. I managed an interview with the CEO, but I didn’t get a job.
I remember two treks from New Hampshire down to Boston for MacWorld Expo, back when it was a massive affair occupying two conference halls—and before the era of the Stevenote. I brought home bags of goodies, and a wonderful memory of spying Harry Anderson, star of Night Court, from afar as he negotiated a sizable purchase from one of the big Mac mail-order companies at the back of one of their booths. (Anderson was one of the most famous Mac enthusiasts of the era.)
Late in senior year, I hit Grandma up one more time, and made it count: I got the top-of-the-line Macintosh IIfx. (It’s often joked that the name expanded to “Macintosh Too F—ing Expensive”.) I got a stripped-down model and added my own hard drive, memory, and keyboard. I loved that thing.
Around that time, I was a beta-tester for a friend’s program, Wallpaper, which let you set color desktop patterns larger than the Apple-approved 8 square pixels. One of the background patterns I created featured in the advertisement for the program that appeared in MacUser magazine.
When I went to the University of Rochester, I remember setting it up in my dorm room on the Computer Interest Floor and having someone come in and exclaim “Woah! You’ve got a workstation!” (The E-Machines 16″ Trinitron monitor was physically imposing, and computer monitors bigger than 13″ were still uncommon then.)
That IIfx saw me through college, and through my first job and much of my second job. Then, I convinced my employer that I’d be more productive if I had a PowerBook, so I got a PowerBook 1400c. Sadly, when I left, they wanted it back… but I picked up a discarded Power Macintosh 7100/80AV to replace it. Meanwhile, the IIfx continued on as the girlfriend’s computer.
While at Global Crossing, I upgraded to my first personally purchased new Mac, a Power Macintosh G4 Dual 500MHz. For some time, that second processor sat idle, unused by virtually any software, until Mac OS X came out. I got that the day it came out, and lived with its shortcomings because it was cool, and it was UNIX. I also saved up for the original Cinema Display, the first of Apple’s awesomely huge displays. (That display was in nearly constant use until earlier this year, when the backlight started to flicker and I replaced it so Dad could keep using the G4.)
When I’d been at Bank of America for a while and replenished my funds, I bought a Power Macintosh G5 Dual 2.7GHz and a new Cinema Display. That served me well for years, and became another hand-me-down. It currently resides in my basement, awaiting rebirth as an Ubuntu system; the Cinema Display is my second monitor for my work laptop when I’m home.
The G5 gave way to a 24″ iMac Core 2 Duo 3.06GHz; that was my workhorse system until the girlfriend’s 20″ Core 2 Duo iMac flaked out and I found that 4GB of RAM wasn’t enough for a power user; I replaced it with a 27″ iMac Core i7 Quad, and gave the 24″ iMac to the girlfriend.
This spring, for graduation, my girlfriend’s daughter and her friend got MacBook Pros; I now have OS X Server and Remote Desktop to manage the household network.
I wasn’t the first person in line to get an iPod, but it didn’t take me too long to get one. I loved that first-generation device; I took many long walks with it. Sadly, it died after I handed it down to Mom and Dad, when they didn’t realize it wouldn’t take well to being left on the dashboard of their Jeep in the Florida sun. By then, my girlfriend had given me a fifth-generation iPod.
I was waiting at the door in my Apple t-shirt for the UPS driver on the day the iPad was released. I’ve used it every day since. I am a voracious reader, and five years ago I would’ve said that I would never stop buying paper books. I love books, and I love bookshelves. I have visited a bookstore once in the last six months; I now buy almost all my books for the iPad, because it’s so much more convenient. I have my iPad with me in places I’d never lug around a book, so I get to read more.
Last Christmas, I got an Apple TV. The household has three Apple wireless access points.
Prick me, and I bleed five colors, modern monochrome logos notwithstanding.
Back in the late 1990s, when Apple was struggling and the faithful engaged in guerrilla marketing to help the company, I managed to read about Apple offering the first set of “Think Different” posters in time to order a set. Dad built some fames for them; they have places of honor in my office. (Well, except for Picasso, because I’m short on room, and frankly, he’s creepy.)
While the Atari got me into computing, Apple products shaped and fed my interest throughout my life. If it weren’t for Steve Jobs’ company, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I wouldn’t have gotten half the jobs I did—my first job out of college, working tech support for Xerox printers, came about in part because of my computer knowledge, and in part because of my long experience with desktop publishing. I may never have met the man, but he had a profound impact on my life.
Recent Comments