It also does prove that in some corners of HP, there is interesting stuff going on, my personal experience notwithstanding.

Today was a new threshold – Twitter gave me information that no one else could.  

Over the weekend, my iPhone dropped off the net.  No text messages, no emails, no voicemail, no phone calls.  (Note the order there.  My “phone” is rarely used for phone calls.)  I was pretty sure the phone was fine, and confirmed that by traveling around.  I know my house wasn’t the problem because I’d been using it lots at home.  AT&T’s support was unavailable.  I entered a support request on an awful form, one that had a required field for “problems with your phone” even though my phone had no problems.  Still no response on that, 48 hours later.  At times I marvel that I willingly give a company $500/year for such crappy service.

I also tweeted: “Having all sorts of problems with my cell signal. AT&T appears to be having equipment problems in Arlington/Lexington.”  It was a message in a bottle.  I didn’t expect an answer.  Really, I was just posting to a few hundred friends in case they were wondering why I wasn’t returning their call.

Lo and behold, I got a reply.  I have no idea who this guy is.  Apparently he lives less than a mile away from me.  But he knew my problem, and he knew  why I was having the problem: “@dunster I saw your Arlington/AT&T related Tweet. The tower on Route 2 near Dow Ave is fuct. They’ve been working on it all weekend.”  Here’s this guy I don’t know, but he can see my problem and see the cause of the solution – and he can share the information in a meaningful way, and the world can see the answer.

This is a powerful network effect. 

This post is written and published in my iPhone. It looks like I can’t do links. I presume that is because the iPhone lacks cut and paste. But I can put up pictures, like this one from Thursday’s Sox game.

I now have one less excuse for not posting.

First, a review of recent events: Three MIT students study the MBTA’s security and prepare a presentation to DEFCON 16. (Their advisor is Professor Ron Rivest, the “R” in RSA.) Dr. Rivest contacts the MBTA about the research. The students, the professor, and the MBTA have a meeting. Later that week the MBTA seeks an injunction in federal court to prevent them from delivering the presentation. The injunction is granted and the presentation is canceled. The presentation is filed as a part of the request for injunction, making it a public record. The presentation had also already been distributed on a disc to all of the DEFCON attendees. The article is readily available on MIT’s student newspaper website, The Tech.

Did you click the article? You should. It’s a big file, almost 5 megs, but it’s chock full of great pictures and clear explanations.

So, let’s review option 1, that the MBTA is in denial that there are security problems:

• Do you think MBTA General Manager Dan Grabauskas believes his own words when he says that he’s “confident” that the claims will be “dismissed or dealt with.”? I’m assuming he looked at the same presentation I just did. He really thinks the claims can be dismissed? It seems to me that he’s spouting a line of bull, and the people who can contradict him have an injunction preventing them from proving him wrong.
• Did he see the same pictures that I did of open locks, exposed fiber cables, empty surveillance rooms, and unprotected keys?
• Maybe the MBTA is confused by that presentation. Maybe they just don’t understand how data is encoded in magnetic stripes.

And option two, that the MBTA thought they could simply hide the problems?

• They sought the injunction, right?  That argues that they thought they could hide the information. But if they’re trying to hide information, why did they file the information themselves as a public document? (ABC News: “But, not only had the presentation already been distributed at the Defcon convention, it was entered into public record when the MBTA filed its complaint.”)  It doesn’t add up.
• Maybe they thought that the injunction wouldn’t get any attention.  It’s possible, I guess.  But is the MBTA’s PR department that clueless?  That’s a reach, even for Lydia Rivera.

I guess there is always option three, which is just incompetence. There’s an argument to be made here.

• MBTA couldn’t even get the timeline right in its press release.
• Past history: Two items just from my blog.
• The aforementioned open locks, exposed fiber cables, empty surveillance rooms, and unprotected keys.

It doesn’t really matter which explanation is the right one.  The presentation speaks for itself.  The MBTA is a security disaster.

A final note: As a former editor of The Tech, I’m proud of their role in this.  Good for them for publishing the research.

RSS rocks.

Then I saw this YouTube video from CITP at Princeton. You don’t have to be a crypto-geek or a math major to understand this; the video explains it in plain English.

You know that when you turn your computer off, the RAM (memory) is wiped, right? Think again.

A significant portion of my job is dredging pools of data for insights that we can use to change our business. After I dredge it, it’s equally important that I share it. It’s one of those no-brainer points: if I can’t tell other people what I know, my knowledge is useless. I find data visualization to be interesting and challenging.  How can I quickly and effectively show other people what I’ve learned from the data?

The Globe graphic is more advanced than anything I do – I never try for an interactive display. I admire it’s richness. The more time you spend with it, the more you learn from it.

Commonwealth hits some key points about UH.  It’s not just the big stories; it’s about the small things that aren’t necessarily newsworthy, but are the events that define our daily lives.  None of us experiences everything that the Boston area has to offer.  UH lets us see into other people’s lives, and gives us a new perspective on our own lives.

Look what I read on UH today.  A story that at least starts with pictures of flowers, but ends up somewhere else entirely (Read it to the end. You have to.)  A story for my friend Mike about his Red Line commute and fellow Quincy residents – be sure to notice the drive-by-but-totally-accurate critique of the Herald reportage.  And last but not least, a story about a guy being terrorized by a green dot.  Do you begin to see what UH does for us?  How many people have seen a random milk crate in the Fens and not given it a second thought?  How many people were delayed on the Red Line and wondered why?  How many thousands have driven past the sign in the lawn and wondered what the heck was going on?  The UH lets us see more, dive deeper, understand more about where we live.

On a more personal level, I think UH has linked to me once.  I saw the traffic spike and wondered what the heck happened.  And then there was the time I saw a link to a colleague’s wife’s blog.  When I mentioned it to him, Ned said “Oh, yeah, Adam links to her sometimes.”  I realized that I needed to be a better blogger, and work on my connections more.  And then there was the time that UH linked to the blog of a woman in Somerville.  Imagine my surprise and delight when I found that Margaret was blogging, and I didn’t even know it.  My point: UH isn’t about reading just a few websites.  UH manages to find the crannies of the community, and shares them for us all to enjoy.

If you don’t have UH in your RSS feed (or bookmarks, or whatever), I highly recommend you start.  And Adam, they say that flattery gets you everywhere; feel free to link here more often

I particularly notice that they use scooters to get around the office, while HP forbids me to use them. REWS, are you listening?

I haven’t heard Eran play the clarinet in a decade. It was good to hear him again, but funny that it took this piece for me to hear it.

The long version: Like many post-college types, I had problems keeping track of my finances. I found that Quicken really helped. I think I started in 1998. I’ve tracked everything since then – cash, checking, credit cards, investments, stock options, everything. It helped me see where I was spending. I used that information to get out of debt and save money. A few years ago I bought a new computer and MS Money came free, so I gave it a try instead of Quicken. MS Money wasn’t as good. I struggled sometimes to get transactions recorded the way I wanted, the reports weren’t as good, reconciling monthly statements was harder. I was lazy and didn’t bother buying Quicken; I struggled along with MS Money for a few years.

Last month I bought a new computer and was ready to switch back. I bought Quicken at the same time as the computer. Before I bought Quicken, I made sure I could convert my files. Quicken’s FAQ assured me that I could. It got to be bill time, so I copied my MS Money data to the new computer, opened Quicken up, and told Quicken to open my files. It turned out to be not that easy. Quicken can’t actually read the MS Money files. When you search the help, you find a utility that needs to be installed. And, the computer has to have both Quicken and MS Money on the same computer. I crossed my fingers and hoped that it didn’t really need MS Money, only Quicken. I installed the converter utility and ran it. After a couple seconds, it threw an error – “CreateQWPAManager could not be found in qwutil.dll”. I sighed.

So, I installed Quicken on the old computer (Windows XP, the new one is Vista). I downloaded and installed the converter. I carefully followed every step in the instructions. I ran the converter. Same problem – “CreateQWPAManager could not be found in qwutil.dll”.

I did a google search. I found other people with the same problem, but no solution.

I opened a chat with Intuit chat. I typed in all of the error codes and information and opened the ticket. 30 seconds later, the guy disconnected without saying anything other than “Hi dan.”

I opened a second chat. I typed in all of the error codes and information and opened the ticket. I walked through the problem with the support person. The support guy gave such gems as “The issue is because of the critical configuration related,” whatever that means. The end result is that Intuit wants me to export each of my accounts, one by one, and import them into Quicken. I have 55 account! (Yeah, I know I told the support person 60. I’m a dirty person. I still don’t want to do 55 exports, 55 imports, and the manual clean up of each account, 55 times.)

I know this problem exists on multiple operating systems; I can prove it to you. I know that other people are seeing the problem. I guess I’m idly curious whether this converter works at all – I’ve got at least 6 data points that it doesn’t, and no sucessful data points outside of the Intuit site. (I even found this post – but note that the person admits they haven’t tried it themselves!). Quicken’s marketing team is way out in front of what it’s tech and support teams can deliver.

Bottom line? I’m unhappy. MS Money doesn’t do what I want. Quicken doesn’t do what I want. My bank keeps sending me those paper ledger books with my checks – maybe I should use them?