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Tonight there was a house fire very close to my own, just around the block. I can best explain the location by describing it as a (chess piece) knight’s move away: one house to the left, and two houses up. I could not (and did not want to) get very close, but I believe there were at least 5, and as many as 8, fire trucks as well as police cars and a few other emergency vehicles. This included a “Salvation Army Rescue Unit” vehicle (shaped like an ambulance) parked in front of my next door neighbors’ house.

It was pretty scary because it was the first time I’ve ever experienced a building fire so close to my own home. When I was a kid there was a huge car fire just across the street from my suburban house, but a car fire is much more limited. Only a month or two ago there was a fatal house fire about a mile, mile and a half, from my house (happened to drive past while the fire trucks were still there). That house is still black and charred and not really boarded up on the 2nd floor.

Right now there is some kind of cleanup going on in the house around the block, but at last all the fire trucks and police have gone. The smoky odor is still lingering in my own house; I was coughing for a while especially after walking the long way around the block to find out what was happening. I wasn’t able to find out if anyone was inside or home; I’m assuming (hoping) that no one was hurt.

I was checking my newly-set-up Google Reader for new RSS feeds and news stories today, when I saw the headline “Couple Engaged on Zero-Gravity Flight“. I certainly didn’t expect to see another entry so soon, but perhaps many more are to follow, based on the following story (clipped for length):

Commercial Zero-Gravity Flights Begin in Las Vegas
By Leonard David
Special to Space News
LAS VEGAS — Zero Gravity Corp. inaugurated service to Las Vegas April 21, the latest step in the company’s quest to give the average citizen the opportunity to experience weightlessness the same way astronauts in training and in spaceflight do. …Zero-G’s specially modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft — G-Force One — offers paying customers a largely empty fuselage that becomes a padded playground as the plane runs through its routine — climbing and diving maneuvers that simulate the microgravity that astronauts experience. Flight operations are being conducted from Signature Air Terminal here at McCarran International Airport. …While NASA has flown microgravity research flights for about 50 years, very few civilians have been exposed to the experience, McMahon said.

Consumer marketing

The gradations of gravity help participants gradually adapt to the experience. That gradual conditioning and the positioning of clients during the plane’s maneuvers help minimize a person’s susceptibility of motion sickness. A very light dosage of medication also is available to participants. “We’ve knocked motion sickness down to a point where it’s not a concern,” Diamandis said. Within three designated zones inside the aircraft, flight groups are broken into teams and assigned coaches to help maximize a customer’s microgravity experience.

Last month, Zero-G established a relationship with the Sharper Image Corp. to exclusively market and sell seats on its public flights. Starting May 15, reservations for seats on the Zero-G Experience will be made available through Sharper Image’s specialty retail stores and via the company’s monthly consumer catalog.

Offered at a price of $3,500 per seat plus tax, those taking part in a 90-minute period experience 15 parabolas, as well as take home items like their flight suit, photographs and a DVD of their encounter with microgravity. Charter flights cost $115,000 and fly up to 35 people. Zero-G also has regularly scheduled flights from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Entree into the next frontier

The first official public flight from Las Vegas was April 21, followed by an April 23 VIP/media day. To celebrate the start of Zero-G operations from Las Vegas, the private VIP flight carried such notables as Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, as well as key Las Vegas casino executives, including entertainer Raymond Teller [he goes only by his last name on stage] of the magic and comedy team, Penn and Teller.

Currently, future Zero-G flights out of Las Vegas are slated for the following dates: May 26; June 16, 17 and 30; August 4; September 1 and 2; October 6; November 10; and December 30 and 31.

I expect to see many more headlines and sightings of floating celebs and others in the near future. Anyone wanna spot me $3,500?

Over the course of a single week, I saw not one, but three separate instances of people in zero-gravity situations on television. No, I don’t watch the NASA channel.

The first instance is probably the best-known: Dr. Stephen Hawking, the brilliant theoretical physicist, who also is afflicted with ALS, fulfilled his dream of experiencing weightless flight. A company called Zero Gravity runs these flights where riders can experience 25 seconds of weightlessness eight times. Sure, it was not yet the space travel he surely craves, but it must have been an absolutely amazing experience for this man who is nearly imprisoned in his own body. This story was well-reported in the media; I saw several video clips aired around April 26-27.

The second instance came when KFC (or, as it is once again known, Kentucky Fried Chicken) kicked off its transition to zero grams trans-fat cooking. Okay, so I didn’t see it on TV, per se, but there is a commercial with a man dressed like the Colonel, and he is floating by himself in zero gravity (again, probably run by the same company). I saw it on the web, but since it was a commercial I assumed that it was mainly aired on television. I saw this on April 30.

The third instance was on the Fox network show Bones. Two of the characters, Brennan and Booth, wanted to interview an astronaut who was busy training, so they accompanied him where? oh yes, on a zero gravity flight! Saw the show on May 1.

So, why am I mentioning these sightings? I wish I had some actual information to back the idea up, but if it wasn’t simply several coincidences, perhaps Zero Gravity has special times of the year reserved for film crews.

I’m waiting for the fourth sighting. It would be really fun to watch little kids in zero g (and that would remind me of Ender’s Game), but they probably don’t let anyone under 18 go on these trips.

My adventure into the minutiae of market research:

Two days ago, I realized that my Verizon Wireless bill was nearly due, so I logged into my account to make the payment. I should mention that I’ve had some significant problems with the VZW login process in the past.

Previous problem: I used to try to log in only to be told that ’several unsuccessful attempts’ at logging in required me to reset my PIN. At first I thought I was just being forgetful since I don’t tend to write down PINs or passwords and I usually only log into the site once month, so I dutifully filled in my SSN, zip code, and mobile number, and a new PIN was generated and sent as a text message to my mobile handset. However, when I would go to log in the next time, and I was SURE that I had the right PIN, I would get the same message. Many phone calls to 611, and eventually VZW security informed me that someone (or something?) indeed was trying to access my account, and they advised me to create an account password. I still had trouble with the log in sometimes, but at least I felt assured that a stranger couldn’t access my information.

Fast forward to two days ago (5/1). Tried to log in, no go. Found my password in Gmail, logged in, no problems. Whoo! Made sure that the bill was only as much as I was expecting. Paid said bill.

SAW THAT MY EMAIL ADDRESS WAS DIFFERENT.

!!!!!

No, not a previous address, or a permutation of the address I was using, but something entirely different. I won’t post the actual address, but it was in the form of XLastname789@charter.net. This freaked me out. Called VZW, found out that someone had either tried to access my account or change my email address on many consecutive days in March. I wasn’t clear if she meant 10 days, if it was ongoing, etc. I was rather disturbed to hear this. Long story short, I was passed over to their e-Services department (takes care of website issues), and the rep told me that the problem had happened internally - that a data migration had accidentally changed my email address. I pressed her further and she agreed to have it looked into and said she’d call me back. Still waiting on that call.

The only other thing I thought I could do while I was waiting was to find out if the charter.net address was valid, and if possible, alert charter to the possibility that their customer was infiltrating my account. This was quite late in the evening, so I was grateful to speak to a very helpful person at the Charter National Operations Center (Charter e-security was closed for the day). I very briefly told her what my concern was, and merely wanted to know if the email address was tied to a valid account. On hold, etc, said she had to call somewhere else and called me back. It was a valid address but I could go no further until Charter e-security was open the next day. I haven’t called them for reasons that should become clear below.
In the meantime, I changed everything on my online VZW account - my username and password, deleted the saved payment accounts, and called up to have my account password changed (different than regular password, which eventually replaced the 4-digit PIN they used to use). I signed into my account the next day, mostly to make sure that my email address was still what I had it set to. For some reason the account info was not available, but it was after midnight and I think they just had it temporarily offline. No worries, because today I was able to see all my info and everything was fine.

Then I get the mail, and there’s an envelope from VZW. I know it’s not my bill, and I didn’t miss a payment, so I was puzzled as to what it was. Two pages are enclosed, with a letter dated 4/30 (the day before my call) telling me that a data research firm, Telephia, had accessed my account by an automated process. “Telephia may have mistakenly changed the primary e-mail address associated with your account sometime between March 2, 2007 and March 20, 2007. This change may have prevented you from receiving emails sent by VZW…We have attempted to correct your e-mail address, but have been unable to do so. As a result…we have changed your e-mail address to pleaseupdate@verizonwireless.com.” Uh, no, they didn’t. There was a “note” on my account telling the first rep I spoke to that there was an issue with my email address, but nothing so specific.

I spoke to a nice but nervous-sounding rep at Telephia who didn’t really have much information for me but told me that the data scrape process that they used to use would get information from 6-7 customers at a time and they changed the software so now it only does one at a time, and that something to do with caching was what had corrupted my data. She also said several times “you’re my first caller” about this problem, noting that she had just gotten a message (probably an in-house email) about this issue when she got to work today (3 timezones over, made sense). However, she also said that it only happened to a few customers, and laughed when I joked by saying “well, I guess I won the ‘bad’ lottery, then.” She couldn’t give me the assurances I was looking for but promised to have a supervisor call back today - waiting on that call.

Next I called the VZW number listed in the letter, explained the situation as briefly as possible since I knew I would be passed on to another rep. This rep confirmed the information in the letter. She also mentioned that ~3,000 VZW customers were affected by this. An article about Telephia noted they collect data from 35,000 wireless customers, so it’s on the right order of magnitude, but 3,000 is a whole lot more than the “handful” that the Telephia rep said.

Ok, the Telephia supervisor, Mark Douglas, just called me back. He was very helpful and open. He didn’t seem to want to give a specific number of affected people but seemed to agree with the 3,000 area versus the handful. I suspect it’s 3,000 panelists/VZW customers but only a handful actually experienced the problem that I did. He said they have suspended scraping VZW data (normally will be done daily) until they have worked some things out with VZW. The arrangement is supposed to be win-win-win; Telephia gets their data, which VZW wants, and the panelist (me) gets an incentive. Apparently I signed up for this on March 8. I don’t seem to have the survey email anymore so I don’t recall what the incentive was, but it must have been convincing enough to feel that the data harvesting was worth the incentive to me. The survey probably came from zoomerang or ztelligence since Mark said that I signed up through MarketTools. I told Mark that I needed to consider whether I would want to remain a panelist, but he felt fairly confident (not rudely so) that the error was fixed and that they are considering other methods of data gathering including having the panelist upload the PDF copy of the bill that is available to VZW customers online each month. He hoped that I would remain a panelist but said that I was free to unenroll whenever I chose. I will stay on for now but be more vigilant in the future.

I want to contact someone at VZW to suggest that they make the process of email address change more robust. Right now, all it takes is a one-field form where you type in the new address. It seems that it should require at least a second box to confirm the address, or requiring the account password, or (best?) using a captcha. That’s the little picture with hard-to-read letters and/or numbers that you see on many forms today - it prevents bots from pretending to be humans since programs cannot easily crack this type of security (yet?).

I find The Consumerist to be a really interesting source of news, and today one of the headlines that greeted me was “Digg Goes Ape$#@*!” [followed in time by “Liveblogging Digg’s $#@*!storm“].

The first story reports:

“A wide-scale user revolt is disrupting popular social news networking Digg. It’s a protest over Digg
acquiescing to MPAA pressure and deleting a 15,000+ dugg story about a crack for the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray DRM system.

Now, every single story on the front page contains the cracked number in some way.

The madness began after not only was the initial story deleted, but the user’s account was deleted as well. Other people who submitted stories linking to the number also got their accounts deleted and their sites received takedown notices. Even people who submitted stories about the deleting of other accounts, stories which did not contain the number, also got deleted. That’s when things really got bonkers.

Users are hiding the number in all sorts ways. One story claimed that a new Jules Verne manuscript was found, entitled, “09:F9:11:02:9D:74:E3:5B:D8:… Leagues Under the Sea.” Others link to pictures of the number. A new one says Jesus has “the secret key.” Others coyly ask, “anyone know what this number is?” Diggers are digging the stories like crazy, trying to keep the number on the front page and thumb their nose at Digg and the MPAA.”

Hilarious!!!

Digg/Kevin Rose pulled not only the original post but also deleted the posting user’s account, thus setting Diggers afire.

The original dugg story was published February 13, 2007 and can be found at the Wired Blog Gadget Lab:

The New HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Hack: What It Might Mean For Us

“09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

That’s the so-called “Processing Key” that unlocks the heart of every HD-DVD disk to date. Happy Valentine’s day, AACS.”

A statement from Kevin Rose of Digg, eventually acquiescing to this pressure from Diggers:

“But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.”

Another statement reads:

 

DiggThis: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

by Kevin Rose at 9pm, May 1st, 2007 in Digg Website

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

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