Why You Should Care About Net Neutrality

I recently posted an article about Net Neutrality on my Facebook page and was shocked that nobody seemed to care. Then I realized many people still don't know much about Net Neutrality. Certainly, the name is confusing. What does it all mean? When I write, I try to skew towards the simple way of explaining what I am talking about. This is because I have discovered that even when people claim they understand what I mean, I find out later they don't. So what follows is the 'plain speech' version of what Net Neutrality is and why you should care.

What is Net Neutrality? Basically, it's about your ISP (Internet Service Provider) treating all data (for our purposes here, let's just think, every website) on the internet the same. For instance, just imagine a big street full of stores. If you are cruising down this street (the internet) you can enter any store (website) you wish without hinderance. Now introduce tiers of speed - extra fees for websites to have faster speed so customers can get in faster. The result is that when you enter a big store, you get whisked in, ultra fast. But mom and pop stores, who can't afford the extra fees, are stuck with large heavy doors where customers get frustrated trying to tap into their websites.

So you can see what will happen. If you are a start-up with a great idea for a website, you are going to have a tougher time establishing your website because people will not be patient enough to wait for the site to load. Big websites such as Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter will pay the fees for the fast lanes and continue with business as usual. But guess who eventually pays for those fees anyway?

Point a finger to yourself. Yup.

If you think charging websites extra fees for fast lanes is unfair, it is time to speak up!! The FCC is going to vote on this issue May 15 and you should tell them you want to keep the internet fair, equal and open. Send an email to openinternet@fcc.gov. You can also contact all of the FCC commissioners at www.fcc.gov/leadership where you can click underneath each one to send an email. Even easier, go here and sign the petition: www.petitions.moveon.org

Let's support the little guys, the small businesses, the dreamers of the world. You could be the next one.

Travel Tips

I don't consider myself a travel expert but I might have picked up a few things. This year I've had the opportunity to rent cars and travel to several cities in the US and thought I could spew some tips your way.

First off, getting there. "Book early" should be your mantra. In booking airline flights, try to hit the internet on a Tuesday. Monday night is when fares change and other airlines try to match them the next day. Hence, fares are generally at their lowest on Tuesdays. On the flip side, beware of booking during the weekend when everyone and their uncle searches for flights. It's true sometimes you can get a break a month before you depart on a long distance flight, but in my experience, give yourself a good lead time before your trip. I've booked flights as much as 6 months before the trip for best rates. But I've heard people say six weeks prior is the best time to buy. It all depends on how heavy the traffic is at the time of travel. Naturally you can expect holiday flights to fill up quite early. If you only book two weeks before you travel, you will probably end up paying premium as the airlines will think you are a business traveler.

Always do internet comparison searches. At times, I've found Expedia.com to be cheaper than Orbitz.com and vice versa, but other times, CheapTickets.com will blow them all away. So there is no one website consistent in lowest prices, as they know they are all competing against each other. It's all variable. So try a website like Kayak where you can do comparison shopping.

My website of choice for hotels is Hotels.com. This is because if you book 10 nights thru their website, you are rewarded with a free hotel night. And you still pretty much get a good deal on the hotel prices.

When renting cars, I'm fond of CarRentals.com. There are two options they ask when you rent. One is to pre-buy the gas and two, is whether or not you want insurance (extra charge per day) for the car. I usually don't pre-buy the tank of gas. Here's my argument. Sure, pre-purchasing a tank of gas is convenient, especially if you are in a hurry and don't want to waste time looking for a gas station, then that option is for you. However, note that most people don't really wait until the last minute to fill up their tank. I always get nervous about the amount of gas left in the tank in a rental when the meter shows 1/4 full. If you pre-buy a tank and give them back the car when you are 1/4 full, you've just given them that 1/4 tank, plus the extra reserve gallon for when the gaslight goes on. Best bet in terms of cost saving on a rental car is to ask the rental car clerk where the nearest gas station is before you take off with the rental, in order to expedite the time you need to fill-up before you give the car back. This will save you time driving around looking for the closest gas station to get that topper.

And regarding insurance, I always decline getting insurance on a car rental. People don't realize you can use your regular car insurance to cover the rental (or least most policies will cover a rental, check before you drive off). Of course, if you are nervous about driving a rental and don't mind paying the extra ten bucks a day for insurance, go for it. There's nothing like peace of mind.

As I said, I am no expert, so please post any additional travel tips you might want to add. I'll read them all. Thanks!

Even Dogs Like Getting Toys

I have to admit being on the radio has its perks. For instance, people like to send me stuff. Mostly, people send me music, whether it's their latest demo, album, or homemade cassette recordings of their kid bellowing at a talent show. I've lost count of how many recordings I've received.

Then there are people who send me 'other' kinds of items. Every so often, I get a huge box of Gevina coffee from a very cool guy who will always be happy because he won Superbowl tickets. Since there's always more coffee than I can use, I make all the people I work with happy as well. One fellow used to send me a book of poetry he wrote every day and little knick knacks such as scarfs and paintings. His gifts caused concern from my colleagues tho' since he was locked up in San Quentin. You know, San Quentin. That place they send criminals who do really really bad things to other people? Yep.

One guy gave me a beautiful engraved metal plaque but I had a feeling he wanted a date. And one woman was so enamored of my work, she even sent me a used hair tie, which totally flattered me. Luckily, the used hair-tie turned out 'useful' after all. It seems this was so interesting to one of my friends, she actually requested I give her said hair-tie. Needless to say, I wore latex gloves when I handed it over. I guess maybe she has a hair-tie collection...or something. I didn't ask and not sure I want to know.

For the most part, when people send me stuff, I generally say 'thank-you' and take them home. Sometimes I give them to friends but sometimes I actually use them. The most recent box of swag was really cool. One of my friends had a friend who apparently just started a Dog toy/clothing company called "Wag More Bark Less." I had talked online about adopting my new dog Indy, a most rambunctious Min Pin (Miniature Pinscher) for 45 bucks at a dog fair, so she tipped them off about being a new dog owner.

Just days before receiving my goody box, though, I had gone to Costco and bought a box of dog toys for 15 bucks. I thought they were really cute, but here's what one of the toys looked like after Indy played with it after two days:

Needless to say, I was very disappointed with the Costco Dog Toys. Most of the time, I can count on Costco to give me good quality items. But they failed me this time. I admit that at 15 pounds, with Doberman Pinscher looks, (albeit on a toy scale), Indy can be quite ferocious in his cute way. But you'd think the toy would last more than two days without the stuffing being so easy to pull/tear out by 15 pounds of fierce canine teeth. So I was very impressed when I opened the box of Dog Toys from Wag More Bark Less. After two days of Indy tearing into it, here is a photo of the "Fetch Bone."

Impressive, eh? Judging by the solid rubber, this toy is hefty enough to withstand the Indy onslaught!

Click here to get your dog one!

Indy snoozing with his new toys.

The Story of Cognitive Code or Lessons Learned Part 1

When I'm not on the air, I work on a cool Tech Start-up called Cognitive Code. CogCode is a company which specializes in a technology called SILVIA. SILVIA stands for Symbolically Isolated Linquistically Variable Intelligence Algorithms. And what is SILVIA? The short answer is that SILVIA is Conversational Artificial Intelligence. The long one is that this is technology enabling you to talk to your computer using natural language (or the language you normally speak) any way you want. And your computer will talk back to you, in different ways, in a more conversational way than other types of speech interactive technology like SIRI.

Yes, I just said SILVIA is similar to SIRI. But there are differences. First of all, SILVIA can run natively on your phone. Why is this pretty cool? Just think - all your interactions with SIRI and Google Voice are sent back to Apple or Google in the CLOUD and you have no idea what they do with your data. Aren't you tired of having no privacy? With SILVIA, it's all kept private on your device. It's encrypted so heavily, even we can't get into it. We don't feel it's good policy to be so nosy about what people are doing. She is also what they call, "context sensitive." This means she actually understands the gist of what you are saying and can, therefore, respond with a more meaningful answer.

So as you can tell, I'm pretty excited about this technology. It was developed by a geeky guy named Leslie Spring. One day in 2006, Leslie came up to me and proclaimed he had had a Eureka moment in his exploration of AI. (A little background, Leslie has been trying to develop HAL 9000 ever since his mom took him to see the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey, so he's been thinking about HAL ever since he was 4). At that point in time, SILVIA was raw, but I had a small inkling about how the computer works insofar as chatbot technology and I knew that SILVIA, even in the infant stages, was no chatbot. My miniscule amount of knowledge about chatty tech came from spending a summer cracking into the mainframes at Bowdoin College when I was a kid and encountering the early one known as ELIZA. Back in those days as a 12 year old, I made friends with the son of one of Bowdoin's Math professors. He snuck me into the computer room full of mainframes and he taught me some aspects of simple computer languages such as BASIC and FORTRAN and also showed me ELIZA. I was pretty excited to 'talk' to ELIZA, but quickly learned that it was just pure GIGO (garbage in and garbage out). In other words, the programming was such that if you typed in a sentence, then it would respond to that sentence specifically with a pre-programmed response. But it didn't really understand what you wanted. After asking ELIZA a few questions, I quickly became frustrated and shut it off to tinker with other things.

Back to SILVIA. Excitedly, I called my brother who I knew was already in the early stages of starting his own audio company. Our family has a long history in the audio industry, due to my dad having constructed the first language laboratory in the United States at Seton Hall University back in the '60's. On blind faith, without even seeing SILVIA, my brother agreed to help us and on that day, July 2006, the company was formed. At least verbally.

"They" will tell you, meanwhile, this is supposedly the first BIG mistake entrepreneurs make when starting up a company. Don't recruit friends and family. On the other hand, who else can you find who will work for nothing? Especially a new technology??

Take a look at an early demonstration of SILVIA here:

Early Version of SILVIA

My Dad on Father's Day

I was sitting with my Dad who started unveiling the secret portion of his life known as the 'early years that pre-dated his life as a dad.' He was a young super good looking guy. We all know I may be biased on that, but take a look at his photo here:

Anyway, my dad told me he was quite oblivious to the charms of women other than my mom. Case in point, he was telling me about how he took a flight on an American plane when he was a young 20 year old in China. This was around the year 1947, a year when airplane travel was exclusive and unobtainable for the average citizen, not to mention in China for an impoverish young guy like my dad. How did he manage to get on what would be considered inconceivable in the day and age?

The source, of course, was a young girl. Apparently she was the daughter of a man who was the Postmaster General or other high ranking official in China. They were flying from Chongqing‎ to Shanghai and instead of my dad taking the boat, she managed to squeeze him on the flight her family was taking. It was only later my dad realized she probably did it because she liked him. He then went on to tell me, had he taken the boat, he would have encountered cramped and squalid conditions as he had heard it was a horrible boat ride.

It was tough in those days. He told me how he had set up a school with a friend to teach. Even though he was poor, his dad made sure he obtained a fairly good education in typical Chinese fashion. Not everyone was able to get an education tho, so my dad had a fair amount of students and he told me how they would take the money they were given (which apparently was not worth much) in a wheelbarrel and use it to buy cotton fabric. As a commodity, the prices of cotton were variable, with much of it heading upwards and whereupon, selling the cotton, he and his friend were able to purchase much of what they needed to run the school as well as other essentials.

Even though the idea of studying in the US was unthinkable in that day and age for a guy who didn't have any money, he still dreamed. He made friends with an American GI who wrote to MIT, waxing on how my dad was a brilliant guy. Indeed, he had won what was considered to be the Math Olympics in China, no mere feat. As a result of that letter, MIT accepted him. It took a while for my dad to get to the US, finally getting a ride on a large boat which spent the better part of three months to get from China to the US. But by that time, MIT's invitation had lapsed, so he didn't really have anywhere to study. Still, he prevailed and won a three year full scholarship to St. Norbert in St. Louis, MO. It was tough and prejudiced in those days. My dad told me he suffered taunts from fellow students with someone slashing the tires on the broken down jalopy he managed to obtain. Finally, the Dean of the College wrote a letter that was posted throughout the campus, reminding people he was one of them and to stop persecuting him for the shadow of WWII and what the Japanese did to the Americans.

I'm hoping he'll be able to reveal other details of that secret era. I'm eager to find out more, he's 88 now and has quite alot to tell.

On being a Boor and Nightstalking

Sometimes I think about this blog and then I find myself in a quandry. What to write about now? Every time I read about something in the news and/or hear an item on the radio, I want to blab about it. Maybe it's because deep down, I'm secretly one of those people who like to hear themselves talk. We all know someone like that. A Boor. Don't confuse Boors with Bores, Boors are people who don't stop talking to listen to what other people have to say. I think in my life I can be that way if I wanted to, but I know how people feel about Boors, so I stop and edit myself. However, Boors can be Bores too. So here I am blogging and I wonder, has my inner Boor decided to manifest itself? And if I am, could it possibly be, I am also a Bore?

In the case of Talk Radio, being a Boor is a good thing. This is for those times when you are by yourself in the studio with a four hour show and the phone is NOT RINGING. The one time I worked Talk Radio at a brand new experiment in San Francisco, "FM Talk Radio," which in the early nineties, was a station called KDBK, I found that I had to switch on my inner Boor. Which was tough for four hours. When you work at any new station, you have to accept you won't have much in terms of listeners. It would also mean that people would pass by the station idly and wonder "what the heck IS this?" But idly wondering "what the heck IS this" is not the same as picking up the phone to argue. Especially when the listeners didn't even know what the phone number of the station was.

In most Talk Radio stations, shows are limited to two hours. You also have commercials, news and sometimes, you get to run little 2 or 3 minutes features. But because we were new, I had a four hour show with mostly NO commercials, NO news and No little features. Indeed, a Talk Radio show host's nightmare. But I had to deal with it. I'm sure I was both a Boor and a Bore. But it's all water under the bridge, I refuse to sweat and/or make apologies for it.

These are the thoughts that plague my head every so often. Of course, because I am so peripatetic, I think about it for one nanosecond and then shrug it off. It would drive me batsht if I started to debate whether I was a Boring Boor or a Booring Bore.

Anyway, yesterday I woke up with the news that Richard Ramirez had died. Why should I concern myself about The Nightstalker? When you work at any radio station in San Francisco, there is a 'captive' audience that lives at the maximum security arena known as San Quentin. And if you are a woman DJ, you get letters from that audience.

One time I had a listener who was so captivated by my work, he would write me poems and fill a notebook with those poems. And then he would send me that notebook. You'd think, gee, how sweet. However, in his case, he was a rather prolific poet. He was so prolific that I was receiving the average of one notebook a day. Yup. People would get worried about the fanaticism, but I would remind them that usually the people who were sent to San Quentin were usually the worst offenders and usually, they were the ones who would stay locked up. Usually.

Somehow it was not comforting to my friends.

Anyway, the only reason why I take note of Richard Ramirez, the infamous serial killer known as The Nightstalker, is because he sent me a letter. Take a look:

What creeps me out was how he was so proud of himself. And of course, requesting songs with creepy names. Rot in Hell Ramirez.

WTF Asian Moments

So I really dug this video created by a very funny guy with the name of Ken Tanaka. He's a white guy adopted and raised in Japan! Anyway, if you haven't seen the video, check it out here:

What Kind of Asian Are You?

I laughed. I was born in Chicago, raised in New Jersey, went to school in New Jersey and New York City and now work in California. So I'm what people call a solid ABC - "American Born Chinese." In my travels around the US, having driven twice across the country, people are generally pretty nice to my face. But once in a while, you do encounter eyebrow raising incidents which tend to make one do facepalms inside ones head. The following is a TRUE STORY. As I said in the premise of my blog, I DO NOT MAKE ANY OF THIS UP!

In one of my cross-country drives, I had to do a pitstop in Kansas. If you've ever driven thru Kansas, you would know it to be the most grueling state to drive thru. This is because you suffer from driving dejavu every five minutes because the landscape NEVER CHANGES. Kansas looks about the same from one part to another. It is a long flat state full of those long flat boring plains you see in tornado videos and it is the most tedious and longest mother-effing state to drive thru. IF you do make the attempt, plan to lose at least 10 fracking hours or more of your life. Kansas is about as central as you can get in the United States, so suffice it to say, the people of Kansas are not the most metropolitan. (read: they don't have as many minority people as other states)

I took the pitstop to help keep myself awake. Walking out of the ladies room, a mousy brown-haired white gal looks at me and says, "Gee, sorry to bother you, but can I ask you a question?"

Nodding my head in puzzlement, I stop and turned around. She says to me, "You see, I don't know anybody of your kind. So I'm just curious what it's like."

Having never encountered such a question, my brain slams shut on itself. I stutter, "well, I woke up this morning like most people, ate breakfast and got into my car to drive...like everyone else."

"Really?" she says, "I mean, how is it for you? Is it good?"

"uhhh, yeah, I guess. People are people, you see."

"Oh, that's interesting." (really? I say to myself. wtf?)"So," she continues, "you have a good life?"

"uhh, yeah. I have a good life." Then I start to walk out still thinking WTF? in my head.

Turning my head, I say to her, "Have a nice life."

WTF!

Another time I was driving around San Francisco (which if you don't know, in the main metropolitan areas, is about 80% Asian) Anyway, a guy drives past me yelling, "Go back to your own country!"

The guy was obviously Middle Eastern.

WTF!

Then another time I went into a movie theater and while in line to buy a hot dog, the lady in front of me turned and glared at me and said, "We'd be in better shape if it weren't for you gooks."

All the people around us froze.

I gave her the evil eye and said loudly, "WHAT DID YOU SAY?"

She calmly replied, "If it weren't for you gooks, we'd be in better shape."

People start to gather around.

Again, I said, "WHAT DID YOU SAY?

She said, "You heard what I said."

"What the hell gives you the right to say that to me?" I yell.

At that point I lunged at her and was blocked by some guy the size of an NFL linebacker, who turns to me and says, "It's not worth it."

I let her go inside. And then asked for the manager, who promptly took two bodyguards to find the woman. He asked me if I wanted her tossed out the building. Which I considered but then thought I should be the better (wo)man and said, "no, ask her if she would give me an apology in exchange for not being thrown out on her ass."

She apologized. I told her she needs to get the right race. For me, it should've been "We'd be in better shape if it weren't for you chinks."

So damnit, that old problem of we all look alike.

WTF?