Make the Square even cooler

I recently ordered a Square credit card reader for my iPhone.  The Square plugs into my phone and allows me to swipe your credit card so you can use it to pay for my book at a reading or a race, items I sell you on Craigslist, or other things like that.

It’s a pretty good deal – the app and the reader are free, there are no fixed costs for the service, and Square takes a smaller percentage of my sales than Google Checkout or PayPal.

The downside is that it’s a stand-alone service.  Square is great for physical items, but it would be even greater if I could swipe your card and auto-magically send you a download link for a ebook, MP3, or other digital media.   They could do this by building their own e-store, or by partnering with Amazon, e-junkie.com or some other vendor with an online presence where I can post my own digital goods.

Maybe if we all contact Square and ask them to set up that service…

Overkill

Can you think of any situation that would be improved if someone were to shoot off automatic weapons in a crowded underground subway station?  I can’t either.

But last night, New Year’s Eve, as Ruth and I were passing through Park Street Station on the way to our train, we were surprised to see two men in fatigues standing at parade rest next to the westbound Green Line tracks with machine guns.

I’m no expert on personal weapons of mass destruction, so I can’t say exactly what they were carrying.  I might have stopped to take a picture, but I preferred to spend as little time as possible in a place where drunks mix with automatic weapons.  Also Massachusetts is one of the states where citizens can be arrested for taking pictures of public employees in public spaces.  So we passed through as quickly as possible and continued down to the Red Line platform, which was free of any military presence.

Ruth thought that the soldiers might have been deployed to counteract some “credible threat”, but I was pretty confident that this was just another case of security theater gone wild. A search this morning didn’t turn up anything in the news, and the authorities are usually not shy about giving vague pronouncements about how they successfully protected us from shadowy undefined  threats.

Boston had promised increased security for First Night.  There were cops and TSA agents loitering near the turnstiles when we got on the Red Line at Alewife.  But why send out soldiers with machine guns, weapons that are great for killing masses of people, but not so good at killing selected individuals in crowds of panicking drunks?  What were they thinking?

What do you think?

Hold Your Senators Responsible

After Monday’s vote to end debate on the tax bill, the Senate voted 81-19 today to approve a version that extends the 2001-2003 Bush tax cuts for all Americans, retains emergency unemployment benefits, and extends or implements a host of other tax cuts and credits.

Along the way, they voted on a number of amendments.  Two of those are particularly helpful in sorting out how senators think.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) proposed an amendment that would work toward reducing the deficit by eliminating the tax cuts for the wealthest Americans, restoring some of the estate tax cuts made in 2009, and making some other changes designed to protect middle- and low-income Americans.  It failed 43-57.

On the other side, an amendment that would help reduce the deficit by requiring cuts to offset the extension of emergency unemployment benefits, proposed by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), failed by a vote of 47-52.

These votes lend themselves to an analysis of senators’ voting patterns.  Decide for yourself who’s right and who’s wrong.  Just make sure you pay attention, and hold your senators responsible for their decisions.

Senators who are primarily concerned with reducing the deficit would have voted against the compromise.  5 Republicans and 1 Democrat also voted against the Sanders amendment and for the Coburn amendment: (Hagan (D-NC) Sessions (R-AL) Coburn (R-OK) DeMint (R-SC) Voinovich (R-OH)    Ensign (R-NV))

Senators who are serious about starting work towards balancing the budget, but would prefer to start by increasing the share paid by the wealthy, would vote against the compromise, but for the Sanders amendment.  How many voted that way? Eleven, ten Democrats and Bernie:  (Bingaman (D-NM) Lautenberg (D-NJ) Udall (D-NM) Dorgan (D-ND) Leahy (D-VT) Levin (D-MI) Wyden (D-OR) Feingold (D-WI) Merkley (D-OR) Gillibrand (D-NY) Sanders (I-VT))

No senators voted against the compromise bill and for both of the amendments.

Senators who think we can keep giving more away without ever paying for it, or that now is not the time to do any cutting back, would vote for the compromise and against both amendments.  There were eight of those,  7 Democrats and Joe Liberman: (Baucus (D-MT) Bennet (D-CO) Nelson (D-FL) Pryor (D-AR) Kohl (D-WI) Lieberman (I-CT) Webb (D-VA) Manchin (D-WV))

Senators who want to start balancing the budget, but only if the wealthy are protected, would vote for the compromise and for the Coburn amendment, but against the Sanders amendment. 41 senators voted that way, 37 Republicans and  4 Democrats: (Alexander (R-TN) Lugar (R-IN) Barrasso (R-WY) McCain (R-AZ) Bayh (D-IN) Enzi (R-WY) McCaskill (D-MO) Bennett (R-UT) Graham (R-SC) McConnell (R-KY) Bond (R-MO) Grassley (R-IA) Murkowski (R-AK) Brown (R-MA) Gregg (R-NH) Risch (R-ID) Brownback (R-KS) Roberts (R-KS) Bunning (R-KY) Hatch (R-UT) Burr (R-NC) Hutchison (R-TX) Shelby (R-AL) Chambliss (R-GA) Inhofe (R-OK) Snowe (R-ME) Isakson (R-GA) Tester (D-MT) Cochran (R-MS) Johanns (R-NE) Thune (R-SD) Collins (R-ME) Kirk (R-IL) Vitter (R-LA) Corker (R-TN) Kyl (R-AZ) Cornyn (R-TX) LeMieux (R-FL) Wicker (R-MS) Crapo (R-ID) Lincoln (D-AR))

Most of the remaining senators voted for the compromise, for the Sanders amendment, and against the Coburn amendment, placing economic stimulus ahead of deficit reduction.  That list is left as an exercise for the reader.

Only one senator, Jon Tester (D-MT) voted for the compromise and for both amendments.   (Begich (D-AK) voted for the compromise and the Sanders amendment, but skipped the Coburn vote.)

Of course, the reasoning behind each vote probably took other things into consideration, and it was easy to posture by voting for amendments that weren’t going to pass.

Those who don’t learn from history…

Since his election, some people have compared President Obama to Hitler.  That’s just crazy.

If you’re going to compare Obama to a World War II-era historical figure, there’s only one choice.  Obviously, the person President Obama is most similar to is British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

Coincidence? I think not.

Chamberlain is most famous for allowing Hitler’s troops to occupy the Sudetenland, then a part of Czechoslovakia, in 1938.  He claimed that the deal achieved ”peace for our time“.  The next year, Nazi tanks rolled into Poland.

It’s too early to say which of Obama’s concessions will be remembered as his Sudentenland, though I’m pretty sure the associated quote will include the phrase “bipartisan compromise“.  But as Bernie Sanders has noted, there’s already a war against the middle-class going on, and we’re losing it.

The one bright side to this?  If Obama is Chamberlain, then the Republican leadership is Hitler.

You make the call

Now we need to find our Churchill.

Money for schools, or for rightfielders?

For whatever reason, people seem to have difficulty understanding what it means if we keep the Bush tax cuts for the rich.  I could give you lots of boring numbers, but maybe this will drive the point home for you:

J.D. Drew takes another strike three

If the Bush tax cuts for the rich are retained, J.D. Drew, Boston Red Sox outfielder, will keep an extra $644,000 in 2011.

J.D. Drew hit .255 with 22 home runs and 68 RBI in 2010.  Not bad, but nothing exceptional.  He will make $14,000,000 in 2011, money that comes from the fans’ pockets via ticket sales, TV subscriptions, $8 beers, and the like.  Maybe, just maybe, he can afford to give some of that back.

Yet another running memoir

Lawrence Block is a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, probably most famous for his books about PI Matthew Scudder and burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr.

In the mid-2000′s, he entered the 24 Hour Around the Lake Ultramarathon, a race put on by my running club, the Somerville Road Runners.  As a fan of his work, I was excited to have him there.  Since he was there as a competitor and not as an author, I kept from bugging him for the most part, though I had a nice chat with his wife Lynne.  I did get a chance to talk with Block after the race, and he mentioned the possibility of writing an article about his experiences for a magazine or something.

In 2009, “something” turned out to be Step by Step: A Pedestrian Memoir.  All quality-related puns aside (he acknowledges that the book is somewhat self-indulgent), it’s the story of his travels on foot throughout his life, focusing in large part on his days as a racer in events ranging from 5Ks to ultramarathons.  The 24 Hour figures prominently in the book.

I wasn’t aware of Block’s book until I found it while poking around Amazon after publishing my own running memoir.  It’s not often that an accomplished writer delves into the field of running books.  Offhand, the only comparable example I can think of is What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami.  I’m glad I stumbled across it.

Politics Explained

I’ve figured out why so many people seem determined to vote against their own best interests.  Those people are so worried about the others, however they define “other”, coming in and taking over their country that they’re doing everything they can to make sure that the US is no longer a better place to live than wherever it is the others come from.

Book review: 99 Problems

I stumbled across Ben Tanzier’s new book, “99 Problems: essays about running and life“, while I was searching for websites that might be interested in my new book, “Chasing the Runner’s High”.  Ben’s book is a series of essays written after some of his daily runs during the winter of 2009.  The stories mix details of Ben’s runs with his thoughts on his writing projects and his life generated during those runs.

Ben and I are both runners and writers in our 40s.  I figured I’d relate to what he had to say, so I downloaded the book to my iPhone.  The ePub version was 199 pages long on my tiny iPhone screen (equivalent to maybe 50 pages when formatted for a typical paperback).  I was able to finish it in an afternoon of reading, but I read faster than I run.

It’s clear from the book that Ben understands what it means to be a runner.  You’re a runner if you need to run, if running satisfies something inside you the way nothing else does.  Running faster or further is nice, but not necessary.

I really like when Ben’s writing about running.  He explains his obsession in a way that’s very personal, but easy for other runners to relate to.  “Why is running so important to me? The cliché response is, “Why is breathing important?” Because it simply is, and as soon as you get a taste of it you want more. Just like drugs or sex. Or Pringles. (…) And what I eventually learned was that when the drugs are no longer anything but another hurdle to getting real stuff done; when you don’t actually want to have sex all the time, or at least put in all that effort to have it all the time; when the Pringles, if you are honest, leave you sort of queasy, and laying on the couch breathing heavily; there is running.”

Even when they’re not competitive, all obsessive runners find some way to be elitest about what they do.  Running is so right, that it’s hard to understand why anyone chooses alternatives.  Ben lives in Chicago, where it is often cold and windy, but “I run, year-round and outdoors. I could tell you that I don’t look down on people hitting the treadmill this time of year, but I would be lying. That’s not running; that’s exercise. It’s healthy and beneficial, but it’s not running.”

Sometimes Ben goes a little overboard.  After flying home sick, he went out for a run, tired and achy, and then wrote, “This could be unbearable; but the thing is, just like sex, running under duress is still better than not running.”  I suspect he didn’t really mean to equate running with rape.  He also compares the lack of literary running books with the lack of positive gay role models in media.  These comparisons illustrate that running might mean a little too much to Ben.  I can relate.

The book isn’t as strong when Ben is tying his running to his writing.  Sometimes it works, like when Ben decides to push himself to extend his writing range on a project while pushing himself to run faster on his regular loop, or when he gets in an extra long run with no problems, in part because he’s distracted from worries by working out a plot.  Other times, the link to writing is forced, or almost non-existent.

The title of the book comes from a Jay-Z song, where Jay-Z has his problems, but not with women.  Running is Ben’s “bitch”.  If you agree with Ben that, “I can eat later. I can sleep later. I can drink coffee later. But there’s no guarantee that I will be able to run later. Shit happens. I’m gone,” then this book is for you.

The Merits of Not Pissing in the Wind

I’ve been spending some time lately (a lot of time) looking for web sites that might be willing to help promote my book, “Chasing the Runner’s High”.  Today I came across the site for Ben Tanzier’s new book, “99 Problems“. The book consists of a series of essays that combine the details of Ben’s daily run with whatever new insights the run might have jogged loose (blame me for that one, not Ben).

Ben’s eBook, like mine, is available at whatever price the purchaser chooses to pay, including zero.  (Unlike Ben, I also have a paper version, which is for sale at a fixed cost.)  We’re both looking for whatever help we can find to publicize our books, so we happily exchanged links to our book sites and mentioned each other in blog posts (like this one .

I posted a link to Ben’s book on Facebook, and that sparked a discussion of the merits of the “choose your own price” plan.

I was asked whether the plan was working for me.  In one sense it’s hard to tell, since I’ll never know what my sales would be if I tried to sell the eBook for a fixed price.  To know for sure, I’d have to run multiple simultaneous sales, offering a number of fixed prices along with the “choose your own” option to carefully managed groups. It’s not a do-able experiment, at least for me.

On the other hand, allowing readers to name their own price is already working for me.  I don’t have to try and win a fight against eBook piracy that’s already lost.

I look at it this way: there are essentially two possibilities, whether I like them or not. Either no one really cares about my book, in which case there are no potential sales for me to lose, or lots of people want to read my book, and the digital version gets pirated – whether or not it’s originally encumbered with copy-protection (aka Digital Rights Management, or DRM).

I chose to encourage people to find a reason to buy the book, rather than ignore the book or pirate it.  I believe that if you can pay what you think a book is worth, you’re more likely to buy. A sale for a little money is better than no sale at all.

eBooks should be significantly cheaper than paper books.  The production cost for each copy, once the book is finalized, is near zero. But just because a copy cost very little to produce, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth anything. If someone spends the time to read a book, they must think the book has some value.

If the book is read by thousands of people who got their copy from a friend, that’s a win. I’m better off than if they never read it.  Books have a long history of being shared freely, between friends and through libraries. I hope our society continues to honor that history, and I’m happy to do my part.

Some of the people who read the eBook for free will end up buying paper copies, buying copies for their local libraries, or visiting my site to pay what they think the eBook was worth.  I believe that enough people will be fair.  The ones who won’t be fair probably aren’t going to pay no matter how I package the book.

The Facebook discussion took a sharp left turn, veering off to a discussion of whether software piracy was right or wrong, and whether aggressive DRM that causes problems for legitimate customers is a good idea.  I’m not terribly interested in that.  To me, a discussion of what is is a lot more productive than a discussion of what “should be”.  The fact is, there is no DRM that is effective against a determined pirate, and if your product is valuable enough, there will be determined pirates.

We’re in a time of rapid change.  The best model for selling digital products is still evolving.  We can let it happen to us, or we can try things and see what works.  I certainly don’t claim to know any answers.  My opinion is that trying to limit the options of your customers with DRM and proprietary formats is not the way to go.

The only way this turns into a disaster is if the hordes descend on my site, order my book, and all decide to pay more than zero but less than Google charges me to process each non-zero order.  If I avoid that, I should still be able to keep food on the table (mostly because my wife has a good job .

Oh, one last thing.  Buy my book.  And Ben’s.

(Some of you will note that a lot of this echoes what Cory Doctorow has written on the topic.  You’d be right.  So buy his books too.)

Scoring a race series

The Hocomock Swamp Rat just wrapped up the 7th bi-annual Grand Pricks series and Coach Guido has announced that this’ll be the last one (sadly, the HSR  is going away too).

Some people I know are thinking about starting their own series, and we were tossing around ideas on how such a series should be scored.  We’re talking about running, but the same thoughts can apply to biking or any other series of races.

First, you need to take a step back and think about what you want to reward. Totaling points up is the easy part – deciding on how to allocate points in an interesting way is the hard part.

In a race series, you want to reward runners in some fashion according to participation, speed, and if the races vary much, challange/difficulty.  I’d start by focusing on the balance between speed and participation. If the races are all on a track or all in a pool, difficulty doesn’t change much.  Otherwise, I’d use difficulty essentially as a tiebreaker. In a two race series, if two runners each win one race and finish last in the other, then the one who won the more difficult race should win out.

There are many ways to address the balance between participation and speed.  I’ll start with two.  Let’s call the first Plan A: You get “finishing points” according to where you finish in the race.  If there are 40 runners in the series, the winner in a race gets 40 finishing points, while the 40th (and last) runner gets 1.  Your “series score” is a percentage of the finishing points, based on the share of the races you finish. For example, with 40 runners in the series, runner A wins race 1 and gets 40 finishing points. He’s 1 of 1 in finishes, so he gets 100% of his points (40) for a score. Sadly, he misses race 2, so he still has 40 finishing points, but his series score drops to 20 (40 * 1/2). Now he wins race 3 (+40=80) and his score rises to 53.3 (80 * 2/3).

The other way (Plan B) is to add points for each race just for showing up. Suppose each racer starts with 10 attendance points. Then if 40 start, the winner gets 50 and the last runner gets 11.

The first is more complicated, but that might be fun. Essentially it means you lose points for not showing up, instead of staying where you were. More drama? Perhaps. Different, certainly.

I’d give finishing points based on the total of runners signed up for the series, not just the runners that show up for the race. In any race, the people that show up beat anyone who stays home sitting on the couch.  I’d give credit for that.  If 30 of forty show up for a race, first is still worth 40, not 30 (plus base attendance points, if any). 30th is worth 11, not one. Of course, you get 0 for not showing.

Personally, all else being equal, I’d like the person who shows up for all the races and finishes last every time to equal or just beat out the person who shows up only once and wins. Let’s assume 40 people and 5 races. Runner A wins one race and skips the rest. Runner B shows up for all races but finishes last every time.

With Plan A, Runner A ends up scoring 8 series points (40 * 1/5).  Runner B has 5 series points (1+1+1+1+1 * 5/5).

With Plan B, Runner A has 40 finishing points + (1*attendence points). Runner B has 5 finishing points + (5*attendance points). If you give everyone 9 points per race for showing up, Runner A scores 49 and Runner B scores 50, which is fine by me.

You can mix Plan A and B together and use both percents and attendance points to make things more fun!  Without any attendance points, Plan A weights attendance more than Plan B, so it takes fewer attendance points to even things out, if that’s what you want to do.

With Plan A, if you add in attendance points, you can add those attendance points in before or after you apply the attendance percentage.  Each attendance point counts more (and the numbers are simpler) if you add them in afterwards.

You can mix in difficulty by changing the number of attendance points or by assigning a difficulty multiplier to attendance points for each race. “Difficulty” is necessarily subjective, but that’s what makes this all fun.  This also lets you give bonuses for Rat traditions like nudity.

You can make all sorts of adjustments if you like.  For example, you can give extra finishing points to the winner to make first place worth proportionally more, if you think that everyone else is a loser of one degree or another.

Do you have any other thoughts or ideas?  Put them in the comments!