Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

For your enjoyment, a 360° immersive panorama I took of the Louvre courtyard in 1998. Java-enabled browser required (I tested this with Mozilla 1.1 and IE 6 with the Sun JRE 1.4.0 plug-in).

San Francisco was hit by a violent storm yesterday night (November 7). It shattered the windows in my living room and turned it into a mini swimming pool. Fortunately, I wasn’t hit by flying glass and most of my stuff survived (almost) unscathed.

I have put up some pictures of the aftermath (the first two were actually during the storm about half an hour after the window shattered).

For your enjoyment, a 360° immersive panorama I took of the Louvre courtyard in 1998. As a Java-enabled browser required, I moved it to a page of its own so as not to slow down the loading of this page too much:

Louvre Panorama

The Chinese government sends executed men’s families invoices for the cost of the bullet. Not to be outdone, the German secret service bills the people it is tapping…

I moved in August 2001. My entry in the white pages still points to my old address, both in the paper and online version. When I called Pac Bell’s customer service, it took 3 transfers and 45 minutes for them just to figure out what happened.

Apparently, it takes two or three billing cycles before the change of address percolates to the white pages database, and the online database is a mirror of the paper directory, i.e. updated only once a year in November.

In France, France Telecom guarantees three days between a change of address and its update in the online directory service. Apparently, in California, even 15 months is too much to ask for.

This leads to an average time of 9.7 months before updates (the seasonality of moves from US Bureau of the Census report SIPP P70-66 does not change this figure much). About 15.9% of the US population moves each year (source: Census report P20-531), and thus we can expect about 13% the addresses in the phone book to be incorrect.

Conclusion 1: batch processing is bad. Just say No.

Conclusion 2: don’t expect big, fat, happy, dumb and technologically challenged Baby Bells to lead the way into the broadband future…

Update (2002-12-19):

I learned yesterday that over half of California households have unlisted numbers. That figures…