WHOIS: Private Eye

LunarPages emailed me yesterday to remind me that domain registration and hosting renewal time is shortly at hand. Sure, the account's set for auto-billing, but it's good form to give your customers the heads-up that you're going to ding their credit card, even when you're pre-authorized to do so.

But I kind of took a step back at this sentence in the reminder:

When renewing your domain(s), consider this: Did you know that you can increase your Search Engine Rankings by registering your domain name for 5 or more years at a time? Although a 5 year registration may seem excessive, search engines such as Google and Alexa appreciate and heavily weigh the longevity and stability of websites. Extending the length of your domain registration will help improve your search engine rank and to allow others to find you more easily!

Now, I haven't bothered to corroborate the SEO claim, but it tripped the switch for a small light bulb in my brain. A case could definitely be made for using the WHOIS record for the company's web domain(s) (e.g. acme.com) for trying to get a better sense of a company. Maybe you're about to do business with it; maybe you just want to. Maybe you're a competitor or are trying to become one. Maybe you have a job interview with it. In any case, domain information is just another tool in your belt. Given that much of the information is "free," I think you'd be a fool not to take advantage of it.

It may be a matter of chance in timing, but if the renewal date's waaaay out there, you can make an intelligent guess as to whether the company prefers to invest up front to save money in the long run, or whether it prefers to live in the present. Did the company register the domain under its own name? Or did it register it anonymously? Or was the name registered by a third party, most likely the web designers?

If you have any sense of the various domain registration companies (a.k.a. registrars), it can also help fill in some of the pieces. Is registrar fly-by-night? Or a venus flytrap for the un-savvy? Bargain basement or boutique? Similar questions apply to the company that actually hosts the company's website, with the additional possibility that the company owns the server that hosts the website, which says something else entirely.

If you use a thorough tool like http://whois.domaintools.com (the free version of which rawks, by the bye), you can find out other interesting things about the history of the domain. Has it jumped around or stayed in one place? If the information's worth your coin, you can also find out where and when those changes happened.

Of course, if you're primarily interested in aspects of the company that don't have anything to do with their web strategy, the above will likely be a complete waste of time. But for anyone else, it's a peep through the keyhole at where I/T (particularly the webby bits) fit into their vision of the company. For me, that's very valuable information.

Frivolous Friday, 11.06.2009: Freaky Factoids

Prior to Halloween, I'd been hoping that the Weird Wisconsin website would return after being boarded up since sometime in 2007.  Mostly because I've been a sucker for quote-unquote "true" ghost stories since grade school.  (This despite certain..."incidents," such as the cat extruding herself from her hiding-place right next to where I was engrossed in a book of such stories. D'oh!). In addition to hauntings and other "unexplained" phenomena, Weird Wisconsin also featured the bizarre side of the state's history, in keeping with their motto:  "When you go looking for the weird, the weird comes looking for you."

For instance:  In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt was on campaign stop in Milwaukee while running for President under the Bull Moose (Progressive) Party ticket when he was shot to "avenge" the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley.  The would-be assassin of (McKinley's) then-Vice President Roosevelt believed that the McKinley's ghost had asked him to settle the score.

Roosevelt went down from the shot, and the surrounding crowd tackled the shooter (John Shrank). Then Roosevelt--always larger than life--jumped up, shouting, "Don't hurt the poor man!" Although the bullet had entered his chest (where it was later deemed too dangerously lodged to remove), its force had been blunted by Roosevelt's eyeglass case and the fifty page text of the speech he was about to deliver.  And deliver it he did, judging that because he was not coughing blood, the bullet could not have entered the lung.  Only after his 90-minute spiel was he admitted to the hospital, where he greatly annoyed his neighbors with his snores.

But shuttered website aside, there's still plenty of weird...or at least lots of stuff that challenges our modern sensibilities and what we think we know about the past lurking in just about every nook of history.  In this case, I'm reading Nancy Unger's Fighting Bob LaFollette, and thought I'd share some of the nuggets I've found, merely 1/3 of the way in:

• Bob LaFollette's paternal grandparents were neighbors of Abraham Lincoln's Mom and Dad.
• In 1875, the University of Wisconsin boasted 345 students, and the number of four-year university students in the United States was 27,000.
• However, even in 1875, the UW was co-ed:  LaFollette met his wife as a fellow student.
• In 1860, the year the Civil War began, Wisconsin's African Americans could own property, attend public schools, sit on juries, and marry white spouses.  However, the popular referendum denied them the right to vote, which was ultimately given by fiat of the Wisconsin State Supreme Court a year after the close of the Civil War.
• Cranberries were at one time an experimental crop, intended to diversify agricultural output in the wake of war shortages and crop failures.
• Ditto for hops, which contributed to the hundreds of breweries that made up Milwaukee's leading industry (in the 1870s or so)...and a 30% spike in Wisconsin's overall alcohol consumption.  (And Oktoberfest begins!)
• In LaFollette's childhood, Wisconsin's sheep population outnumber its cows.  However, by the time he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, Wisconsin was sufficiently "the dairy state" for for the frosh Congresscritter to attempt to protect its interests by arguing for a tax on margarine.
• Railroad titans were the Wall Street bankers of LaFollette's youth and early career, most notably for helping themselves to public land, and for fixing prices to the detriment of farmers and the cities that relied on their produce.
• (And speaking of corruption...) The safeguards against politicians abusing their powers were pretty much nonexistent.  For instance: Philetus Sawyer, lumber baron and the senior Senator from Wisconsin during LaFollette's first term, ran through a law to sell himself timberlands belonging to the Menominee tribe.  And it was considered routine business by all but the reformers.

Apart from the chance to collect oddball trivia ('cuz my brain is like flypaper for that stuff), I like to think that going on "weirdness safari" (particularly in history) is an excellent stretch for the brain.  It counter-acts the too-easily and spuriously-used rationalization of "that's the way it's always been." I can't recommend the experience highly enough.

But for pete's sake, just make sure you know where the cat is.

A few thoughts on digital tree-houses

The concept of online communities" is by now definitely mainstream, which hopefully means that the hype will finally die off soon. More hopefully, it's because the metric of "How much does this group accomplish in the real world?" will be more rigorously applied. Sure, folks like Guy Kawasaki can snort at people with few followers/tweets when they unfollow him for his redundant posting of the same link. Personally, I would rather withhold judgment until I see how gelled that person and their contacts are and what they do with that network of relationships. (And even then, I certainly wouldn't snort.)

As an example of what I mean by "gelled," the guy who owns Orange Computer in La Crosse--I didn't think to ask permission to name names, so you'll just have to check out http://orangecomputerlax.com for that--is hosting a Linux (Ubuntu 9.10) installation-fest this weekend. He's already following and being followed by several "techie" types in the area, so Twitter makes a natural medium for getting the word out. If the online and offline worlds of @OrangeComputer didn't overlap, the installation shout-out would be a complete waste of 140 characters.

It doesn't just apply to social media. For instance, folks with a number of skill-sets (programming, testing, documenting, building, etc.) can all roll the next iteration of Linux without ever meeting each other (much less Linus Torvalds) in the physical world. But they all have the secret password that allows them into the tree-house, because of their contribution to the software that ultimately powers real-world hardware for the real-world benefit of people and organizations.

The dot-com crash again tied the viability of a business to (gasp!) actual profits, rather than eyeballs or its prospects of being flipped to Yahoo!, Microsoft, whatever. Similarly, the more egregious abuses of Facebook, Twitter, etc. for spamming, virus-propagation, time-wasting inanity, and superficial "networking" will--I believe--place a greater emphasis on the offline value of an online community.

But there's the rub: How is that value quantified? How do you put a dollar figure to the amount (or lack) of trust that the members of a network have their alpha, betas, or each other? If I had a crystal-clear set of answers to those questions, I'd probably already be a millionaire with a viable shot at billionaire-hood. But I think one possible metric is this: How much is the community interested in their own numbers? Because a focus on the numbers is, in my opinion, an indication that there's no substantive vision there. In essence, the message being communicated to the outside world (i.e., would-be members) is the Web 2.0 equivalent of a chain letter.

Which, IMO, should be mere common sense. But every time I see someone swaggering online purely on the strength of her/his avatar-collection, I just cringe. Bottom line: Could you trust each and every one of your peeps to water the plants and feed the cats while you're on vacation? Do you even know them well enough to know whether or not you could make that kind of judgment in the first place? Because if you can't, you're basically expecting to pay the bills with Monopoly money. And we all know how well that worked out for Web 1.0...

Taking a sick day

I sounded worse than I actually felt this morning, so I called in to say that I'd be working remotely. Which worked well enough for a few hours, but I should have known from my inability to concentrate (in a very quiet house) that there wasn't as much brain-juice in the tank as I'd originally thought. The red light isn't on yet, but the needle is bobbling around "E," so I will beg off for tonight.

Wandering onto an alien planet

It's one of those things that a programmer should know, but I've always managed to make excuses not to dive into. If you're not familiar with the term "regular expression," no worries--they merely provide a way to search for specific text patterns, something that comes up time and again in programming. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, and any number of programming languages are optimized to make them lightening-fast. And best of all, they don't require lines upon lines of code.

There's a price, though: The incredibly lean and flexible syntax is quite dense, and completely alien to someone raised on languages from the C and BASIC families. Also, the web tutorials I've encountered today don't seem to bridge that language barrier very convincingly. As in, "Wait! Pattern? Modifier? Just tell me which one's the needle and which one's the haystack." As usually happens, much of even the proverbial 30,000-foot understanding finally hinges on a web browser, a code editor, and the elusive uninterrupted half-hour, 15 minutes of which is typically wasted on just resisting the urge to punch just one more word combination into Google rather than settling in with the three or four open browser tabs.

Which makes me wonder what professions outside of I/T do their real learning like that. Not the required number of hours/year spent pretending to take notes on a PowerPoint given in a hotel ballroom. Not memorizing enough regulatory updates long enough to pass re-certification. The real deal. Picking their way through foreign terrain, on bivouac and quite often living off the land. Not the tour bus and a guide with a microphone. Or is the contrast just more apparent in I/T? I've spent too much time there too know anymore.

The best magic is sometimes simple

I spent several hours today doing HTML tricks that are probably cutting edge in the same sense as the original Hamster Dance website and The Blair Witch Project (and probably co-eval with both, come to think of it). I don't know as I'll ever be ahead of any technological curve, but the opening of William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" jumped into mind anyway:

I put the shotgun into an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can aspire to crudeness. I'd had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on a lathe, then load them myself; I'd had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand-loading cartridges; I'd had to build a lever-action press to seat the primer--all very tricky. But I knew they'd work.

As much as new and shiny appeals to the magpie that dwells within most programmers/techies I know (myself included), today's exercise was just plain fun. Getting HTML to do what you'd normally expect of blingier platforms like Flash, Silverlight, etc. also forced me to learn a few more things about a language I normally take for granted. Not a bad thing either.

But there were more than a few times when I could as easily have been sitting in front of a TRS-80 or Apple II, tinkering with snippets of code, poking here, prodding there--all to see what would happen. Regardless of how many error messages or unexpected behavior happened, learning occurred more often than not. Learning and the extra reward of coaxing "magic" out of the fractious contraption perched on the table in front of me.

I suppose the explosion of one-off languages and whole platforms is, in this light, a blessing rather than a discouraging thing. No one person will ever be able to grok them all, but the flip side is that tinkerers will never run short of magic.

A pointless, but necessary protest

First off, I want to apologize for two highly snarky posts in a row. Anyone who knows me offline knows that sarcasm is a hobby, not a lifestyle for me. But hoo boy, does Putnam Investments ever deserve it--I could clone myself ninety-nine times, and still not give them all the sarcasm they deserve.

Backstory: A previous employer went to the trouble of setting us (meaning the employees who opted in) with Simple IRAs, and given the employer matching, I would have been a fool to turn it down. The financial advisor from Putnam somehow couldn't be bothered to take my calls after our meeting, in which I asked for info. about socially responsible funds. But we were locked into a single vendor, so to minimize the blood on my hands, I took the option of small cap funds on the rationale that smaller companies would probably do lesser harm than large corporations who have been known to bribe (or outright buy) public officials and whose Third World union-busting and/or land acquisition techniques are indistinguishable from terrorism (which is not a word I use lightly, btw).

(Now, before I completely come off all goody-two-shoes and all, please humor me long enough to let me state that I strongly believe, in principle, that it is better than to be good than to be pure (because purity = dogma = evil). And, with equal strength, I also believe that there is no way to do business and keep 100% of the evil cooties off you. In the end, it boils down to a mentality not unlike Integrated Pest Management.)

But.

Then this year's shareholder proxy statement arrived in the mail and I came eyeball to eyeball with the mentality that should have had me dumping my shares a few years ago. Bad Doreen! Bad, BAD Doreen! (Although there's more than a pinch of penance baked in the fact that I'll have to drop them in this market.)

Let's take take the voting proposals point-by-point. But beforehand, just make a note that, at the head of the proposals was the following advisory (in all caps emphasized with boldfacing and underlining the word "FOR"):

THE TRUSTEES RECOMMEND A VOTE FOR ALL APPLICABLE PROPOSALS OTHER THAN PROPOSAL 5

Proposal 1 is merely a matter of voting for the 14 eligible trustees. My reaction after skimming the profiles: You're all white and the youngest of you is 58 years old. Yeah, that's going to promote a lot of diversification in thought in a global economy.

Proposals 2 and 2A - 2C are intended to approve a new management contract for funds, including breakpoints and performance fees. My reaction: Granted, the same-old-same-old is what drove the economic bus off the road. But the management fees for a fund are tied to the net value of the fund's assets, and in some cases, fees will be tied to a benchmark. Both of which I think could be bad because I view them as an abdication of judgement. We've already seen what "too big to fail" has done; the saving grace of the net aggregate asset-based fee is that the "performance period" is a Methuselah-esque three years. But benchmarks? Bad. As I read it, these are calculated monthly, which completely negates the long(er)-term thinking of the thirty-six month performance cycle. Now the idea of the breakpoint, which is based on the performance of a fund family as a whole, I like because it spreads the incentive.

Proposals 3 and 3A through 3E essentially remove self-imposed restrictions and enable things like investment in commodities, reducing diversifications in some funds, owning a higher percentage of securities, borrow a higher percentage of a fund's total asset value, and lend a higher percentage of a fund's total asset value. My reaction (in Sam Kinneson-esque decibels, minus the profanity): WERE YOU PEOPLE NOT PAYING ATTENTION LAST YEAR?!!?!! Because we all know how well de-regulation combined with (cough) innovation in "packaging" worked out. (Saving, of course, the die-hard Kool-Aid drinkers who still believe that spritzing the lawyer-ese equivalent of Lysol on bad debt and paying brokers/managers/"regulators" obscene amounts of money to pretend that it was good debt is part of a giant plot by ACORN.)

Proposals 4 and 4A through 4B remove the cap on the lifetime of a trust. Currently, a trust's value must be paid out to the surviving descendents of the person who set up the trust twenty-one years following the death of the last of his/her named children. The proposals allow the trust to continue indefinitely. I don't have an opinion on the basic principle; my reaction is to the proviso that gives Putnam the right to buy out the trustees' interest whenever they feel like it, based upon "thresholds" set--surprise!--by Putnam itself. The redefinition of both "trust" and "indefinitely" is breathtakingly Orwellian, no?

Proposal 5 is a shareholder-initiated resolution that would require Putnam's Board of Directors to implement policies designed to prevent investing in companies that "contribute to genocide or crimes against humanity." Should be a no-brainer, you'd think. Yet, recall that this proposal is the one that the Trustees "unanimously" recommend all shareholders vote against.

In fairness and balancedness, here is the collective Trustees' response in full, with my reactions spliced between paragraphs:

The Trustees condemn genocide, crimes against humanity and similar egregious violations of basic human rights. However, for the reason set forth below, the Trustees, recommend a vote against the shareholder proposals.

Why only "egregious violations" of human rights? Condemning only genocide and crimes against humanity puts you morally north of, say, the KKK, the CIA, the KGB, and The Mob. Good job, there.

The U.S. Government maintains a comprehensive set of laws and regulations governing business relationships with countries that are believed to be responsible for egregious violations of basic human rights. These laws and regulations reflect consideration by experienced foreign policy experts of the nature of the particular problems in each country and often involve complex judgments whether certain types of business relationships might contribute to the problems in a particular country or, alternatively, might contribute to improving the conduct of the political regimes involved and the living conditions of the local populations. Putnam Management is commited to complying fully with all such laws and regulations currently in effect or that the U.S. Government might enact in the future with respect to investments in companies doing business with or in particular countries.

First off, doesn't that beg the question of what kinds of evil Putnam would bankroll were it not for government regulation? Btw, that would be the same government that apologists for unfettered capitalism insist is unilaterally baaaaad, because the market will eventually correct itself. Oh, and also the same government that has, shall we say, "selective" definitions of genocide, even under allegedly "liberal" watches (see also: Rwanda).

The proposed shareholder resolution calls upon the Board of Trustees to establish procedures and exercise its own judgment on these matters. The Trustees believe that this proposal would involve the Board in making judgments on matters that are beyond the range of its expertise and would inapproriately involve the Board in the process of making investment judgments for your fund's portfolio.

Question: Isn't the Board being handsomely compensated for its "judgment" when fund managers are supposed to be motivated purely by the numbers? Second question: How "beyond the range" of any thinking person's "expertise" is it to determine that people being killed for their ethnicity/religion/whatever is, technically "genocide"? Presumably Trustees are not only watching the same news as the rest of us, but also have the global contacts and the money-trail kind of information that most of us shamble along without. If knowledge is power and with great power comes great responsibility, refusing to exercise it in where and when it can do more immediate good than reams of U.N. resolutions is a direct act of collaboration. Period.

As a general matter, the Trustees also believe that imposing constraints on the range of investment opporutinities legally availble to your fund solely because of political or social considerations would not be in the best interests of shareholders. Under your your fund's management contract with Putnam Management, Putnam Management has a fidiciary duty to examine the entire universe of potential investments to identify attractive securities in its efforts to deliver superior long-term investment results for clients. The available investment universe for each fund is defined by its stated investment objective and policies, as limited by applicable laws as noted above. Putnam Management has advised the Trustees that the process of identifying attractive securities for a fund's portfolio includes an assessment of all relevant factors that could impact a security's future value, including, for example, the risks associated with doing business with or in countries that are accused of egregious human rights violations. The Trustees believe that shareholders have invested in a fund that would pursue the broad range of investment opprotunities described in its prospectus and that it would not be appropriate to begin imposing additional limitationsat this time based solely on political and social considerations. The Trustees believe that such limitations would be contrary to the interests of shareholders who are relying on Putnam Management to exercise its best investment judgment tohelp them meet important personal investment goas such as financing education, retirement and other critical personal needs.

So I take it you all skipped that day in Psychology 101 where they talked about projection? Call me naive, but I think you would be challenged to find one person of a hundred who would openly defend putting their child through college with blood money. Or themselves retiring on it, for that matter.

Moreover, "fidiciary responsibility" is a single ethic, which in turn is based on one or more purely subjective value-judgments. It is most certainly not a law of the universe. Which means that it has to compete with any number of other ethics in a given culture, purely on its own merits, with no special perks or precedence. Enough people will be made hungry, sick, illiterate, homeless, brutalized, and even dead by pure dint of dogma and lust for power. And that without bankrolling by rich white people. Don't we put people in jail and take away their money when they finance terrorism? (Because if genocide isn't terrorism on an industrial scale, what the heck is it?) Or does calling it "duty" absolve a person? Or is it okay as long as terrorism is merely the means and not the end of the financing?

Okay, enough ranting and sarcasm for one post. Suffice it to say that I logged onto Putnam's site and cast the most contrarian series of votes possible. Not that it will matter; I fortunately don't hold any shares of the two stocks affected by Proposal 5 (Putnam Asset Allocation: Growth Portfolio and Putnam Voyager Fund, in case it matters). Also, it's not like I will do any appreciable damage when I find another home for those dollars after November 18th (the date of the shareholder meeting). But I refuse to give my tacit consent to a mentality that considers it "duty" to bloody its hands, and mine in the process.