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When I go buy things, usually, I don’t go by other people’s testimonials – I go out, find something that meets the criteria I’m looking for, and then go and buy it; the entire transaction is pretty quick. In the last ten years, I’ve bought one or two things because people online say that it’s worth the extra money. That was the case with Zagg – a company that makes “high-end” screen covers. With a bunch of devices from here and there in need of covers and armed with a 50% off coupon, I hopped on over to their website and bought five covers for five devices that needed covers:

• My original Apple iPhone.
• My Blackberry 8830.
• A T-Mobile G1.
• A Nokia 5800.
• A Nokia N78.

They arrived about ten days later in a sturdy box with a cryptic mailing label. Before I opened the box, I spent a good ten minutes trying to figure out what was in the box – lest it be the latest anthrax delivery mechanism. I opened the box to find five battered, bruised, and outright crushed boxes, each containing ShieldSPRAY(TM), an Install Squeege and tucked away behind all the marketing, thin bags containing the MILITARY GRADE (O RLY?) screen covers. Well, normally, at least. Two of the boxes had no squeegees, one had no ShieldSPRAY(TM) and in three of the five boxes, the bags containing the screen protectors had fallen out and were sitting on the bottom of the shipping box. Not a promising start, but I thought, hey, what could go wrong? Much, as I was to learn.

• Apple iPhone cover: this was by far the easiest to install. You sprayed on the ShieldSPRAY(TM), a cleaning surfactant/distilled water combination to remove the grease, and stuck the thing on. Took about a minute. However, after I put it on, I discovered that not only was the touchscreen response significantly diminished, glare had increased. Well, I knew that would happen going in, but I had hoped it would be less pronounced an effect.
• Blackberry 8830 cover: try as I might, I couldn’t get the cover to neatly wrap around the top curve of the properly. Either there was a crinkle on the top, or the cover failed to adhere. It was also nigh impossible to remove the little cut-out for the headset speaker. I ended up pulling out an X-Acto knife and trimming the top and cleanly removing the cut-out. Okay, so these things happen.
• T-Mobile G1 cover: The protector adhered reasonably well, with the exception of the fact that it’s about 2-3mm too long and thus sticks out. Again, note the diminished response and glare issues. There’s also a weird… texture to the material and thus it looks like your screen is underwater.
• Nokia 5800 cover: This is where the disaster really began. It’s clear that Zagg did not just not bother to measure the screen size (or curvature!) correctly, they also didn’t consider the problem caused by trying to give a single piece for the screen; net result: the bottom area, around the buttons, simply doesn’t fit, with giant air bubbles. Part of the problem arises from Zagg’s screen cover material – it’s slightly stretchy, which means that when you follow their directions and attempt to squeeze the bubbles out, you end up stretching the material out. There’s also no appropriate tool provided for these narrow edges, and while installing, you live in perpetual fear of tearing the thing. Hey Zagg, how about measuring the things you’re selling fitted covers for?
• Nokia N78 cover: I don’t have a cover on it. Not because Zagg didn’t ship the item, but because the cover’s adhesive refused to adhere to anything – EXCEPT the tissue you are forced to use to clean off the excess liquid SpraySHIELD(TM) if you follow their directions. I ended up tossing it out after 15 minutes of trying to get the tissue material off the screen.

So, what’s the verdict? Let’s give the Apple iPhone full marks, the 8830 a half mark and the T-Mobile G1 a 3/4. The Nokia covers, both of them, were FAILs. The 5800 cover, I’ll generously give a zero to; the N78, though, is a -1. Total score? 1.25/5. I’d also deduct points for their environmental friendliness if I weren’t in a good mood – I have five four squeegees, five three bottles of ShieldSPRAY(TM) (of which, less than a third of one bottle was used),  and five paperback-book sized crushed boxes. Hey Zagg, if you’re shipping an order all together, send only ONE of the squeegees and ShieldSPRAY(TM) and all the screen covers together, in a CRUSH-RESISTANT box. Had I been shopping around in person and seen the crushed boxes, I would’ve skipped your company all together, figuring you’d rather make a couple of extra bucks than ship a decent product.

Verdict: Zagg – selling premium crap to suckers who shop at Sharper Image since 2005. Avoid.

A long, long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away…) I wrote up a summary of two events that I attended discussing the mathematical treatment of catastrophic climate change. The main take away in those sessions was that we’ve severely underestimated the effects of climate change and particularly catastrophic climate change.

Since I went to those sessions, a lot has happened and I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about it. My work has shifted to place where I do a lot more work with climate change directly as opposed to by happenstance. There are a lot of what-ifs and options, ranging from “do nothing” to a recent Discovery series that discusses the possibility of terraforming the earth (what a concept!). What I want to know – and I asked John Seo of Fermat Capital back at those sessions – is: where are the insurance companies?

Specifically, where are the big reinsurers, like Swiss Re and General Re? The practical take away of the session is that no matter how small the probability of a catastrophic change is, the expected cost of even a single meter rise in sea level would likely flood a large portion of the 500 largest coastal cities – and as a UN report estimated, the damage to infrastructure alone in the top 50 would be about US$ 500 trillion – that’s $500,000,000,000,000. A lot of that is essential to the functioning of the cities and is covered by flood insurance. It doesn’t matter how big Swiss Re, Hannover Re, Munich Re and General Re are – a pay out of that magnitude would wipe them out completely several hundred times over. Even a hundredth of one percent probability (0.0001%) of a one meter rise in sea levels would yield an expected cost of $50 billion, which frankly put, is a lot of money, even if your net income is $4 billion.

If you were the CEO of a major reinsurer and looking at an expected cost in the tens of billions of US dollars, I think you would go to your actuarial guys and ask, “Given the fact that the major polluters are increasing the risk of the pay out due to catastrophe, can we cost this as a premium?” As soon as one or two of the major reinsurers starts costing premiums for climate change risk, I suspect others would fall into line. Sure it may not make much a difference if on your $90 car insurance premium you’re paying an extra $5 for the risk you’re adding to the climate, but what if the math works out to requiring $300 extra on your $500 home insurance? Would that not give you a strong incentive to reduce the polluting impact of your house?

Ultimately, if governments want to seriously put a dent in climate change through this market method, I’d expect them to legislate this the way the German and Indian governments have approached highway insurance – if you’re travelling above the recommended speed, then your insurer has the right to turn down your claim – or the way the American government has legislated fire alarms – no fire alarm, no insurance coverage. In the meantime, however, it’s a method that allows the internalizing of the climate costs each individual has so far treated as an externality, at a relatively low cost to the environment.

I sat in on a class with Saskia Sassen for about two weeks in college – and disagreed with on almost every point and finally, got out of the class, since every class ended with me arguing with her. One of her points, though, resonated with me, and is still foremost on my mind: globalization has a profound impact on the people see themselves. I disagreed with her at the time, because I felt that in my experience, people often used their identity to show others how they were unique, and different from the globalized norm.

One of the more interesting things that I’ve noticed this year is the Americanization of the word. By which I mean others beginning to identify their experiences and themselves in terms of American events. This is true, most of all, for India. For example:

• The horrific attacks in Bombay at the end of November were called “India’s September 11″.
• The Satyam accounting scandal is being called “India’s Enron”.
• Watching ski-jumping, a decidedly non-American sport, several of the competitors called Vierschanzen their “Superbowl”.
• In explaining the deadly assault that killed Palestinian women and children seeking refuge in a UN School, an Israeli official called it “unfortunate collateral damage”, which are precisely the words used by an American military spokesman to describe the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999.
• One of the more interesting ones I recently heard is “Viet Nam was America’s Afghanistan”, though to be temporally correct, “Afghanistan was the Soviet’s Viet Nam”.

I am not sure why this has happened with increasing frequency lately. Saskia would probably say something having to dumb it down for American media boffins to understand, while Bobby Pape would probably argue it has something to do with explaining to Americans – the main audience for these sorts of things – why it matters. What I am sure about, though, is that in trying to compress these events in to American-centric soundbites, not only are the individual triumphs and tragedies minimized and missed, they also fail to account for the subtleties and nuances that result in vastly different end points from what appears to be a common beginning.

So call the Bombay attacks what they were: an attack on Bombay, not “India’s September 11″. Call the Satyam scandal what it is: a fraud perpetrated on Satyam investors and employees, not “India’s Enron”. It’s bordering on the insulting that the differences, the tragedies, the triumphs and the nuances are all shoveled under the carpet in the name of a soundbite.

UPDATE 2, shortly thereafter: Fixed. Let’s not look at the messy source code – and TWO CSS sheets, mmkay?

UPDATE, the next morning: I didn’t realize that the reCaptcha plug-in is using an iframe. Going to try and fix it, though it will mean assuming that everyone supports JavaScript. Damn. So close.

ORIGINAL POST below:

I’m pleased as punch to make one of my new year’s resolutions come true already.

A long standing goal of mine has been to make this site XHTML 1.0 Strict-compliant. The site has always been XHTML 1.0 Transitional-compliant, but given a good kick in the posterior by Kats, I went through and corrected all of the errors that were preventing this from becoming a Strict site. A few other/related changes of note:

• The Xbox Live Widget, which was Flash-based, has been temporarily removed, until I understand the intricacies of getting Flash to co-exist alongside XHTML 1.0 Strict-compliant websites. I’ve understood the general principle of how to get this to work, but it’s going to require tweaking. Also, it slowed the page down.
• Since no one (and I mean, no one) was using the Chat widget, I removed that. It also used Flash.
• After getting frustrated about not being able to access categories from an older phone browser (*cough*Blackberry browser*cough*) due to borked Javascript support, I’ve changed the categories list from a drop down to a list.
• I don’t get enough comments to need a recent comments box.
• Similarly, there are more posts on the front page than the recent posts box. The recent posts box has been removed.

Long and short of it is that you should be able to get this page to now appear in any standards compliant browser in standards mode, and it should load significantly faster than previously – to the tune of 5 seconds (or 45%) faster on a dial-up connection. I have not yet made up my mind whether I should join Kats in forcing XHTML+XML and locking out IE users, but I’m a pragmatist whose leanings lie closer to Joel Spolsky‘s views on standards than the zealots. I may simply add a server side redirection for IE users to encourage them to download a decent browser.

In the meantime, please let me know if anything breaks. Thanks, and happy new year.

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