Quasi una fantasia (Mac's Blog)

I like to complain on this blog a lot. Mainly because when I see something wrong with something, I feel the urge to do something about it. If I can’t actually do something about it, I like to make a record of the problem, in the hope that somebody else will fix it or at least in the hope that other people can route around the problem.

Well, for once, I am going to say something positive about something I’ve previously complained about.

Although it was really hard for me to get an appointment at Campus Health Services, because they do not actually answer their phones for the entire time span they claim they do, when I finally did get an appointment, everything went really well. I’ve been twice recently and practically everybody has been very helpful and caring, including medical and non-medical personnel. I’ve been so satisfied that I’m not going to bother to get an off-campus doctor (at least for now), which is something I was planning on doing.

I waited on the phone for a receptionist for about 9 minutes; then the phone started ringing; it rang for maybe 5 minutes with nobody answering; I called back, and I just get an error sound when I choose the option to schedule an appointment (probably because 4:30 passed while I was waiting, which is when they stop making appointments).

This is really quite bad customer service!

I’ve long been subscribed to UNC’s INFORMATIONAL email listserv. When I entered as a freshman, everyone was subscribed by default. It was a useful means for student groups to communicate with the student body. There were frequently emails soliciting (usually paid) volunteers for medical studies, but they weren’t a big deal.

Sometimes I heard of fellow students unsubscribing from the INFORMATIONAL listserv, because they felt that the emails weren’t relevant and the medical study emails annoyed them. I considered unsubscribing to be in very poor taste indeed; I considered a student who unsubscribed to be shirking their responsibilities as a good community member, and to be disassociating themself with campus goings-on, at least to some degree.

Over time, the frequency of medical studies increased, and the frequency of relevant student group emails decreased. More and more people unsubscribed. Then, somebody decided to stop having all incoming freshman subscribed by default. There ceased to be an effective way for students to communicate directly with the entire campus and be sure that their messages were heard.

In student government, I advocated that the system be reformed. The volume of medical emails had become offensive and had gotten to the level of spam. Most of my advocacy was to others within student government who had close ties to Information Technology Servies leadership (the people who run listservs) and the Provost’s office (the people who screen the emails and either allow them through, or reject them). My concerns were very well-received within student government, and I thought for sure that not only would this nonsense be corrected; I thought that the situation would actually improve. I wanted to see more decidated listserv for various interest areas, such as student group activities, speakers on campus (that one by itself actually did sort of, kind of, pan out–it exists but people aren’t subscribed by default), and, yes, a listserv for paid medical studies, for those people who actually want to participate.

Unfortunately, after months, or years, of waiting, depending on how you measure, nothing has happened. I have gotten dozens upon dozens of emails about paid medical studies since the spam mill started churning near the end of Christmas break, and not one actually legitimate email, that I remember. Tonight, I did the deed. I just unsubscribed from INFORMATIONAL emails.

Reforming this system would be a boon to everyone involved. Even the people who run paid medical studies, because as things stand, they are quickly “killing off” potential test subjects, while AFAIK, new people aren’t being added to the list. And fixing the problem is simple. It just takes a bit of leadership. It’s a win-win for minimal effort. That it hasn’t happened, in my opinion, reflects badly on UNC. It reminds me of the recent study that showed that the cost of administration at UNC is rising out of proportion to the cost of teaching.

I’m sorry to see that the Chapel Hill voters selected the pro-environment candidate over the pro-business candidate (albeit by a slim margin) in the recent mayoral campaign. Yes, these really were the main issues in the campaign, and pretty much defined the candidates, IMHO. The pro-environment candidate advertised his endorsement by the Sierra Club, which I consider to be a pretty hard left/”strong” green group.

I think the direct result will be a noticeable decrease (or at least non-increase) in the quality of life for Chapel Hill residents. The “quality of life” of local flora and fauna may go up. Personally, I think that’s a really, really poor choice.

Homelessness and empty businesses are like a plague on Franklin Street, and the candidate who made fixing these problems his #1 priority was defeated in favor of a candidate whose ideology will not allow him to advocate  100% for fixing these issues, and who undoubtedly has other priorities.

NOTE: I’ve pretty heavily edited this post, because my earlier one-off post didn’t even begin to explain *why* I felt the way I did about the election, and probably just made me come across as whiny. This is at least an improvement.

Time Warner Cable incorrectly buried a cable in our yard (re: did not bury it, but left it sticking up in long grass), causing it to be cut by the lawnmower.

My housemate attempted to contact them to rectify the problem. Here is an excert of his summary of the experience:

So I tried calling their customer service department and it didn’t connect to anything but an automated message that said to press star to accept a text. They sent me a text message asking me to accept support for $9.99 a month plus texting fees and I was like fuck that.

No kidding! (We did eventually find a free way to alert them to the problem, though.)

I don’t believe that there is such a thing as a “natural monopoly” (such as over telecommunications infrastructure) or a monopoly that comes about through ethical and properly legal business practices (such as the alleged Microsoft monopoly). The only kind of monopoly there is is a government-granted one. But this blog is not the proper medium for communicating the full philosophical justification of this stance.

I’ve had tons and tons of trouble with Time Warner Cable, and their one competitor (AT&T) isn’t a viable option because until very lately, they didn’t seem to sell a package that didn’t include lots of stuff we don’t need (for extra price). The local government (not sure if it’s a Chapel Hill thing or an Orange County thing or a North Carolina thing) should revoke the cable monopoly so that other companies can provide cable TV/Internet service to the area. This would delight local residents.

The DTH site could be a wonderful place for community dialog. But it’s a terrible place for community dialog. On the old website, practically every story was full of malicious or just purely inane commentary. Looks like the trend continues (or even reaches new lows) on the new site:

We’ve also decided to not allow comments on our stories about Courtland after beginning to receive hateful and malicious messages. While we want interaction between our readers and the newsroom, allowing this type of comments would be irresponsible and damaging to the community.

The solution? Make people verify themselves. Make all comments be under real names. Not only will this raise the level of dialog to a level that’s civilized and meaningful and useful; it will allow people who actually have credibility on a certain issue to make their voices heard.

Would it be a technical challenge? Well, not really. I have a number of ideas about how to make this work. Would it be novel? Most definitely. Groundbreaking? Possibly. It could be a means to a whole new form of community building and collaboration.

There is a very important role for anonymity on the Internet, but not in a community, and not on a community newspaper website.

Update: Please don’t construe this as a negative comment about the DTH itself – I love the DTH! (Apparently, I actually care too much.) And as far as I can tell, everybody there is doing an amazing job this year, esp. re: the website.

Until just now, I haven’t been able to enjoy the new Daily Tar Heel website, because on my machine, the boxes that are supposed to be in the right hand column have been popping up on top of the content in the middle column.

After personally confirming that the site works with the latest version of Firefox in Windows, I went to the #archlinux IRC channel for some consultation.

Several people with identical or near-identical setups to me (all the way down to window managers, even) reported either that the site did or did not work. The only significant difference we found was in screen resolution. People with non-huge screen resolutions were not able to render the site correctly; those with huge screen resolutions were able to render it.

Solution: Zoom in. Zooming in just a few notches makes those boxes jump back to where they’re supposed to be.

Finally I can bug the DTH people with comments/criticism of their new website…

Update: Now, looking forward to whenever they fix their RSS feed…

Update 2: I forgot to mention, I can reproduce this behavior in Windows if I zoom way out, but it’s normally just not an issue.

I thought about what kind of features a local crime map would need, and did some Googling to see if it’s been done already. I came across some solutions that look pretty nice, at first glance.

CrimeMapping.com allows you to see all crimes for an area, on a map, within a specified date range. That’s exactly what I think is needed. On top of that, it automatically pulls data from the police department, given that the police department pays a $100 to $300 monthly fee and sets everything up. If you want to see what the map actually looks like, Winston Salem is a good example.

One really nice additional feature of this site is that you can give it your address and a radius, and be emailed when any crime occurs within the specified area. Man, I really wish CHPD was using this!

CrimeReports.com looks like it’s a pretty similar service. You can use Kinston, NC (among others) as an example for this site.

I found both of these through this excellent WSJ article. There are probably other good options, too.

Perhaps UNC Student Government could convince the Chapel Hill and Carrboro PDs to subscribe to a service like this, and then publicize its existence to students?

(Of course, something more generally useful to students would be a map showing lighting corridors, blue lights, and areas of generally high or moderate crime, perhaps color-coded somehow. Ashley Klein and Amos Espeland of the student government Safety and Security committee tell me they’re already working on lighting and crime maps, so that’s great news!)

Recently I was talking to a friend who just moved into a new house in Carrboro. Her question: Is it really safe for me to walk alone at night? My answer: I don’t know; I remember there being a sort of crime wave last summer, but I don’t know where those incidents were occuring, and I don’t know if that trend has continued.

It would be really nice to have a map of crime in/around UNC (including type of crime), as well as temporal data/analysis (so we can tell if crime in an area is trending in a certain way). This could be a really nice web app / Google Maps mashup. Ideally, the map/data would be updated on a very frequent basis (e.g. daily or weekly).

I would love to see the DTH set something like this up. If the DTH doesn’t bite, it could be taken up by any number of interested parties, individually or in collaboration (e.g. DPS, local PDs, even the Rape Crisis Center or Student Government).

On the other hand, maybe something like this already exists? If so, let me know.

P.S. What would be really nice would be to develop an open source (or even proprietary) web application to serve this purpose for any locality, if people in that locality are willing to set it up and/or pay for it. Once again, if anybody knows about such a thing (and I bet something like this exists somewhere), let me know! Maybe I can add it to my long list of potential open source and/or startup projects.

Update: The DTH already has plans to make something like this. I’m sceptical that it will be done well, though (no offense), because it’s not a simple problem to solve. I still think a general software solution that could be used by any locality would be a good thing, and I’m still interested in hearing about any already-existing “solutions”.