Verizon Wireless Opening Up

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I’m no expert on the wireless business but my instinct is that Verizon Wireless just made a shrewd move.  They are opening up their network to any third party hardware and are going to allow any application to work on said hardware.  Some folks think they’re doing it because of Google’s recent announcements about their plans for wireless, and others think it has to do with the upcoming FCC auction of the 700mhz spectrum which will require the winner to enable consumers to access their network with any device or software they wish.

What I think this means is that we’re moving closer to having wireless services similar to Korea’s and Japan’s.  In short order I think you’re going to see the other providers do the same thing in order to stay competitive, and then you’re going to see an explosion of innovation for your phone(s).

I’ve been a Verizon Wireless customer for years, not because I love going to their store and navigating their byzantine pricing plans, but because they provide more consistent coverage in my town.  Heck, they’re the only one that provides a decent signal in my house.  Now if I can get any phone or software I want to go along with that strong signal I might actually like being their customer.

The Dreaded Reading Response

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I’m sure most people have one teacher they remember as being tough yet are thankful for their efforts years later.  Mine was my 10th grade English teacher Mrs. Swanson who taught me what little I know (remember?) about grammar.  No matter what I did I couldn’t seem to ace her class, and I remember distinctly my mother telling me that Mrs. Swanson was the best teacher I could have wished for.  I didn’t believe her at the time, but now I’m thankful for every paper I got back that had more red ink than black.

Our youngest son Justin really liked both of his teachers last year, Mrs. Tarmey and Ms. Beavers, but he’s probably going to remember Mrs. Tarmey how I remember Mrs. Swanson.  Mrs. Tarmey required her students to write in a "reading response" log every day.  They were to read for approximately 1/2 hour and then immediately jot down their thoughts.  Justin loves to read, but he HATES sharing his thoughts about it whether it’s in writing or verbally.  Consequently it was like pulling teeth to get him to write his log.  On the other hand Ms. Beavers was responsible for running the multiplication game which Justin enjoyed thoroughly and enabled him to whip his siblings at our "who knows the answer" games over dinner.

Today I was going through some stuff and I came across his reading log.  The first thing that strikes me as I read it is the brilliance of the format that Mrs. Tarmey used.  Each day’s entry is written as a letter (Dear Mrs. Tarmey…) and she would write a reply to each one.  Some of her replies were one or two sentence questions while other days required more feedback and would begin with "Dear Justin." Poor Mrs. Tarmey had to exhort the boy on a daily basis to share more of his thoughts and feelings.  He tried to get away with regurgitating the plot of each book but she would have none of it.  Then he started sharing random thoughts that had little to do with what he was reading ("I hate war") and she’d reign him back in with a "Dear Justin" message.

My favorite entry is one that Celeste shares regularly when she talks about the log.  It’s dated 12/14/2006 and it begins this way:

Dear Mrs. Tarmey,
I’m writing very slowly so I have less time to clean my room.  Well, Bobby and Loor are underground.  The reason they’re underground is that the crowned prince was murdered and the chances of stopping a war with him…

In the margin next to the first sentence Mrs. Tarmey wrote "Sneaky!" 

The next entry was a perfect example of how Justin tried to fill space and Mrs. Tarmey had to redirect him.  Here’s how he ended his entry:

I only have one thought that’s even slightly related to the book.  The thought is: This was just thirty pages in the book!  A personal thought that I’m having is: I like the song I’m listening to right now.  I don’t like this song, I love it!
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Justin

Mrs. Tarmey replied with this in the margin:

Don’t listen to music while reading.  Our brains cannot focus on more than one thing.  Either read or listen to music.

Then she whipped up a "Dear Justin":

Dear Justin,
Please tell me your thoughts on what you have read. Are you enjoying the book? Would you want to live in a fantasy world? What would it look like?
Sincerely,
Mrs. Tarmey

Sure enough in the next few entries the boy started focusing on giving his thoughts about what he was reading, but of course within a week or two he’d ventured off into la-la-land and she’d have to reel him back in.  Throughout the year she managed to do so in such a manner that she wasn’t harsh, but she was just clear that she expected more.  And when he did well she made sure to write that too.

Looking back I’m sure Justin will remember how much he dreaded the reading log, but I’m also sure he’ll really appreciate what it did for him.  I know that he already views language arts this year as a walk in the park by comparison. If he becomes a writer he’ll probably also realize that Mrs. Tarmey was his first editor. (I’m going to sic my Mom on him next.  That’ll re-define the word "tough" for him and I have the hatchet jobs she did on my H.S. papers to prove it).  From my point of view I’m reading these logs and realizing that Mrs. Tarmey did this exercise with dozens of students.  That’s an incredible amount of work.

We’re definitely saving this for the family scrapbook because it is a
priceless look into the year that was 5th grade for Justin.  I just hope that there are more Mrs. Tarmeys in Justin’s future so we have more stuff like this to save.  He’ll definitely be the better for it.

links for 2007-11-27

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Avocado Green Oven and The Good Fork

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I got a great comment on yesterday’s post about North Carolina’s water conservation measures over the last couple of months.  The commenter, Laura Giovanelli, points out why Winston-Salem residents may not be slackers even though our water conservation measures didn’t match up to Greensboro’s.  In a nutshell we have more water available to us thanks to having a better watershed and thanks to some prudent governmental decisions in the past.  Definitely read the whole comment to get the full measure of the information.

As a result of her comment I checked out Laura’s blog Avocado Green Oven and I’m wondering why I didn’t visit it before, and if I did why I didn’t get it into my feed reader.  It’s great, especially if you’re looking for some good recipes and it’s now a part of my daily feeds (bad pun alert).

While reading Laura’s blog I discovered that she recently launched a personal chef business called The Good Fork.  Considering the Christmas holiday’s are fast approaching and time is getting crunchier by the day, I’d think that a gift of a personal chef’s service would be quite nice.  Think about it: home cooked meals that you simply have to slip in the oven when you get home.  No muss, no fuss.

The past couple of weeks Celeste and I have been experimenting with DreamDinners.  Well, I should say that Celeste has been experimenting since my involvement hasn’t extended past heating the food.  From what Celeste told me the way it works is you show up at the store, pick your menus and then package all the food items you need for your meals.  Then you package them (usually in plastic baggies) and you’re provided with labels that contain the instructions for preparation.  After that you bring them home and store them in the freezer or fridge until you’re ready to prepare them.

We’ve been happy with the meals but it still takes Celeste quite a bit of time to do the preparation at the store and you definitely spend more than you would if you bought everything at the grocery store.  The upside is that all the items are laid out for you and you don’t have to create the menu yourself.  Like I said, we’ve been happy with the meals so far but I don’t know how often we’ll use the service since I’m not sure the convenience gain is large enough that we (Celeste) will be continually motivated to return.

After checking out Laura’s site I can see a greater convenience gain, and since she prefers fine foods, a taste gain as well.  Of course that comes at greater expense than something like DreamDinners, but once you have your consultation with Laura and let her know what you want your job is pretty much just turning on the oven and eating.  Like I said before, it’s probably a great gift idea for anyone with a jam-packed life who doesn’t want to face another take-out or microwave meal but doesn’t have the energy at the end of the day to cook.

Rescue and Report: DHS Recruiting Firefighters to Spy on Us?

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If this was April 1 I’d think that the following story was a joke.  I even Snopesed it to be sure it wasn’t a known hoax.  Apparently the Department of Homeland Security has asked firefighters to snoop around in houses they’ve been called to help (source Fox News).  From BoingBoing’s post about it:

The DHS likes the idea because firefighters aren’t bound by pesky
warrants and probable cause and can therefore report on suspicious
material like blueprints, anti-American literature, and potential
bomb-making materials (e.g., the bedrooms of every friend I had, circa
1985). Firefighters are just the latest legion of potential snoops the
DHS is leaning on — they’ve also asked meter-readers to peer into our
windows and sheds to find evidence of bad-guy-ery. This stuff doesn’t
work and won’t work: amateur pecksniffs snitching on their neighbors
just flood cops with bad intel, and turn the country into East Germany,
a land where everyone is on alert lest they say the wrong thing and get
turned in to the secret police.

And then from a comment on their post:

As a volunteer firefighter, I will say that turning firefighters into spies is a bad idea.

If criminals have to worry that by calling the fire department they are
also calling the DHS, they may be less likely to call in the first
place, putting lives and property at further risk. If they do call,
they may treat firefighters as hostile parties, placing firefighters’
lives at risk beyond the normal hazards of the job.

If firefighters have to worry that each call may be a hostile
one, that will distract them from the job at hand–saving lives in
immediate peril–and could delay response time in a business where a
few seconds or minutes often does make the difference between life and
death.

The list of "suspicious" things that firefighters are supposed
to be on the lookout for includes cameras, photographs, maps, and
chemicals. In my professional life I am a photographer, so my house is
full of cameras, photographs, maps, and chemicals (not to mention
rubber gloves, an organic vapor mask, etc.)–all perfectly legal–that
might fit the DHS’s definition of "suspicious."

What I find most disturbing about our leaders is that they seem to see our civil liberties as something that needs to be subverted in the name of security rather than protected in the name of civility.  Fat chance that will change anytime soon.

links for 2007-11-26

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Lewisville Man Finds Muscadines Marvelous

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Lex Alexander reports for his day job that a Lewisville-based businessman is getting ready to make bank on muscadines.  From Lex’s article in the N&R:

Bob Dalton , who once blended tobaccos for R.J. Reynolds, is now
taking a nutritional supplement made of muscadine skins to market under
the brand name Vinetra . He believes it will help fight cancer,
rheumatoid arthritis and many other ailments.

He grows
muscadines on land in the Yadkin River valley that has been in his
family for generations, land on which muscadines still grow wild.

His
products — essentially, powdered muscadine skin that can be taken as
capsules or stirred into fruit smoothies or other drinks — have not
been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and make no health
claims.

But resveratrol, a chemical found in muscadine skins, has
been widely studied in cancer research. According to the National
Cancer Institute , research suggests it may inhibit the growth of or
cause the death of leukemia cells and cells of cancers of the head,
neck, breast, ovary, prostate and colon, among others. It also may be a
potent anti-inflammatory agent…

He had noticed that his wild muscadines were more resistant to
Japanese beetles than his cultivated varieties, such as merlot. A
doctor friend suggested he analyze the various types of grapes to see
what might be making the muscadines more resistant. Dalton was familiar
with such analyses from his work with tobacco.

At harvest time,
he gathered a gallon of each variety, and his friend sent them to a
researcher. The researcher, Dalton says, called to ask where he got the
muscadine grapes.

"I’ve been a research scientist for 40 years
almost, and I’ve never in all my life seen anything with the amount of
resveratrol this has got in it," Dalton recalls the researcher as
saying.

Dalton’s response? "Bill, what the hell is resveratrol?"

Dalton spent the next six weeks traveling the state, gathering muscadines from all over and sending them for analysis.

He
created a pin map with information on each batch of grapes. He found
that the farther west in the state grapes were picked, the higher the
levels of resveratrol they held — up to a point, about 1,400 or 1,500
feet above sea level, above which the grapes won’t grow well.

The
Yadkin Valley grapes, he found, had the highest levels of resveratrol
and other antioxidants. Antioxidants are believed to benefit the body
by attacking molecules called free radicals that are thought to
contribute to aging and disease.

Dalton also learned that he
could boost the levels of antioxidants in his grapes by subjecting them
to stress, such as by not irrigating them frequently. He also
discovered that grapes needed to be harvested sooner than wine grapes
normally would be if he wanted to maximize the resveratrol levels.

We’ve got some muscadines in our back yard, and I’m very good at introducing stress to all the vegetation on my land.  Looks like we might have the makings of a secondary income source.

Now that I think about it Esbee’s written before that she has the mighty muscadines in her yard.  I’ll need to clue her in on this new opportunity.

Scary Numbers

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An article in the New York Times titled Blame the Borrowers? has a few scary numbers embedded in it.  This paragraph knocked my socks off:

Figures from the Federal Reserve Board show that the share of subprime
mortgages in default is more than 14 percent. And researchers at the
Center for Responsible Lending say that 64 percent of foreclosures
filed during the 12 months ended June 30 involved subprime loans. A
September report from Banc of America Securities said that 93 percent
of completed foreclosures this year involved adjustable-rate loans that
were made in 2006, pooled and sold to investors.

Interesting item to note from that article is the study of the assumption that subprime borrowers are predisposed to default.  They compared the default rate of borrowers in the NeighborWorks America program, "a nonprofit organization created in 1978 by
Congress to deliver financial aid and training to troubled urban
communities" with those of the overall mortgage business and found the following (quoting directly from the article):

  • "As of June 30, the most recent figures available, 3.34 percent of
    NeighborWorks’ borrowers were at least 30 days’ delinquent on their
    loans, only slightly higher than the 2.63 percent delinquency rate on
    prime loans recorded in that period by the Mortgage Bankers Association."
  • "Compared with subprime loans over all, the NeighborWorks loans really
    outperform. Its 3.34 percent delinquency rate is well below the 14.54
    percent on subprime loans nationwide."
  • "The NeighborWorks loans that went into foreclosure during the second
    quarter of 2007 totaled 0.56 percent, while subprime loan foreclosures
    came in at 2.45 percent during that period. The foreclosure rate for
    NeighborWorks loans was a little over double the 0.25 percent rate for
    prime loans in the period."

The number that shook me the most is that 64% of foreclosures included
subprime loans.  That means that 36% didn’t, and since subprimes are a
minority of the market the fact that such a large chunk of foreclosures
come from supposedly prime borrowers is even scarier to me than the 64%
who are subprime.  According to this March 1, 2007 article in Fortune
subprime mortgages made up 13.5% of the mortgages originated in the US
in 2006 (that’s up from 2.6% in 2000).  The article also states that the
subprime market was $600 billion in 2006, out of an overall $3 trillion
mortgage market.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that
even if the prime market sees a default rate that "only" rises to say 5%, then you’re talking a really big number.  And considering what’s happening to US banks already, that really big number is truly threatening.

FortunenumbersHow threatening these mortgage defaults are is still being worked out. To the left is another set of scary numbers from Fortune’s special report on the meltdown in the financial sector (click on it to enlarge).  This ain’t looking good.

According to the Mortgage Bankers Association over 50% of mortgage applications last week were for refinancing.   Hopefully this means that lots of the ARM holders, particularly in the prime market, are locking in fixed rates and thus stemming an even greater tide of defaults next year.  But who knows how many people will be unable to secure fixed rate financing and thus face escalating mortgages next year?  Again, even if it’s a relatively small percentage it could turn into a huge number of dollars. 

You ask me the reason the ARMs, especially the sub-prime ARMs are so much trouble is the same reason that high interest credit cards absolutely slaughter most people.  No one sets out to be a bad debtor, but most people have no concept of how hard it is to pay down debt that lays on even 10% each year, much less 20%.  The author of the Times article rightly points out that a big part of NeighborWorks’ program is their 130 loan counselors providing extensive mortgate education to their borrowers.  I don’t think the banks spent much, if any time educating their borrowers since it would have diverted them from churning out even more loans and earning the requisite fees.  Now it’s time for all involved to pay the piper.

But what do I know?  I’m just an English major who has trouble balancing a checkbook.  A big part of my fear is that lots of the "experts" predicted this wouldn’t be a big deal and now they’re all sitting around looking at each other and saying "Who knew?" while the people they called Chicken Littles are sitting around saying "I told you so."  I don’t have a lot of confidence that the people guarding the financial hen house aren’t a bunch of wolves looking for the next meal and average folks like you and me aren’t the hens.  Cluck, cluck. 

Hat tip to Ed Cone for pointing to the Times article and the Fortune special report referenced above.

And You Thought the Traffic Rap Was Rough

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Those of us who live in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina have a lot of fun remembering WXII’s Jennie Stencel doing her traffic rap.  Heck, it was a YouTube sensation.  Well, the folks in San Antonio have a dude doing a Friday dance that makes Jennie’s rap seem, well, good by comparison.  For instance there’s his homage to Dolly Parton’s 9-to-5. And who could forget his "Don’t Tase Me" dance? You can see them all here. 

We here in the Triad need to learn to appreciate how good we have it.  Hat tip to Lenslinger for pointing to the lowlight in San Antone.

Blurkey Day 2007

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As we do almost every year Celeste, the kids and I spent Thanksgiving with my in-laws just outside Charleston, SC in Isle of Palms.  Various in-laws own condos down there so they stay in theirs and those of us who don’t own our own condos rent some others.  Every year we end up with 40-50 people there.

On Turkey Day we reserve the conference room on the first floor of one of the condo buildings.  It has a kitchen attached to it and at about 8:30 in the morning Celeste’s Uncle Johnny fires up the stove and starts fixing pancakes and bacon.  That’s also the time that two exterminated turkeys are shoved in the oven to begin cooking so that we can kick off the big meal at mid-afternoon.  After the pancakes are wolfed down all of us retire to our respective condos to fix the side dish we’ve been assigned.  The past couple of years Celeste and I have been assigned the sweet potatoes while her brother and sister-in-law have been tasked with the macaroni and cheese using their Grandmother’s heart-clogging recipe that includes prodigious amounts of both American and Velveeta cheeses.  Of course others bring the stuffing, some others bring a corn casserole and there’s the ever-present can-shaped cranberry sauce.

I mention all of this only because I want to fit in with my fellow Piedmont Triad bloggers who shared their Turkey Day culinary escapades. Esbee, recovering from a bout of pneumonia, convinced her husband to grill out on Thanksgiving.  Ed Cone writes about his contribution of wine to the fried turkey dinner his family enjoyed.  He’s questioned about his choice of wines in the comments and rightly ponders if there’s really a proper wine to pair with fried turkey.  Personally, I wonder how so many people actually know what a Meursault-Genevrières and a Margaux actually are.  Of course despite taking a couple of wine tasting classes at Salem College I still base my wine purchase decisions on whether I think the labels are cool and by utilizing my fine grasp of economic theory which states that any wine under $5 a bottle is probably gross and any over $10 is likely overpriced.  And then there’s swine-o-phile Fec who’s ideal woman would have a head made of ham.  As a group I think we had a splendid Blurkey Day.

Our kids were so busy traipsing around the beach and playing the Wii in one of Celeste’s cousin’s condo that I don’t think they gained a pound, but we adults certainly packed a few unneeded pounds on our waistlines.  Time for the guilt-trip to the Y.