It's that time of year again. The time of the year when I try to find a pirated copy of the latest album from Les Enfoirés, the French musical group that raises money for the folks at Les Restaurants du Coeur. Not that I want to pirate the music. I'd be more than happy to pay $10 or even 10€ for the album. That is, if I could find a channel to purchase a legitimate digital copy of the album outside of France without a French credit card. And, as I've blogged before, it's not exactly easy to find a pirated copy of the album, given that the proceeds from album sales go to help the impoverished. It's absurd to think I can read newspapers from around the world without a hitch and browse the Web on my iPhone, but I can only obtain this music, which was probably created using digital tools, by physically importing a jewel case and plastic disc from France.

On a related note, I just obtained a copy of Ellie Goulding's new album "Lights," which has just gone on sale in the UK to great success. It's actually not bad, and it's also very difficult to obtain through legitimate channels in the United States without paying $50 for an imported copy. I also recently downloaded an interesting album of world music titled "Un cri dans l'ébène" from a group called Titom, which can be found in the iTunes Store and at Amazon.com. It reminds me vaguely of the soundtrack to the British drama-comedy television series, Monarch of the Glen, though nowhere near as cliché or cloying.

(Addendum: Apparently "Un cri dans l'ébène" is a collection of traditional music from the French region of Bretagne, princiapally that played at the Fest Noz. Remarkable how similar it is to traditional Scottish music.)

Many people have heralded Tom's Shoes, the company that donates a pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair they sell to "normal" consumers, as a good example of a business with both a social and profit goal. Certainly, the philanthropic nature of Tom's Shoes is laudable. But I feel like the company focuses on its social mission to the detriment of actually making high-quality shoes. Or at least it appears that way. For, even after spending a good twenty minutes perusing their website, I couldn't find a single page that took the time to explain why their product is something I might actually want to buy for my own enjoyment and utility, not just the utility of others.

Who would buy a pair of shoes for him or herself exclusively to help the impoverished? It makes no sense. The fact that a potential Tom's Shoes customer expects to receive a pair of shoes for herself implies that she intends to gain something from the transaction other than the "warm glow" of having given an impoverished Argentinian a pair of shoes. If all she cared about were the social good created, she ought simply donate her money to a charity.

It seems exceedingly idiotic for me to spend $70 on a pair of Tom's Shoes that are uncomfortable, not especially durable or likely to have manufacturing defects. If I never wear the shoes, I've wasted the labor and human capital inputs of the designers, marketers and managers, and the materials inputs that go into making what amounts to a pound of refuse. Not to mention I would probably go buy another pair of high-quality shoes, since I'm not a member of the barefoot movement. (Perhaps from Tod's, whose name differs by one letter, but whose ethos is perhaps the antithesis of Tom's. It's a coincidence I find amusing.)

Contrast the Tom's Shoes model to the Whole Foods model. I don't shop at Whole Foods purely because they have a philanthropic bent. I shop there because they provide superior quality foodstuffs for my various culinary concoctions, and because they staff their stores with people who don't look nonplussed and scowl when asked for directions to the lemongrass. Yet they do manage to effect quite a bit of social good — certainly more than any ineptly managed, naïve, idealistic nonprofit ever could.

I don't particularly mind companies that sacrifice some profit for social good. But I do have a problem with companies that don't produce products worth buying.

I really should go to bed, but I'm so incensed that I doubt I'll fall asleep if I don't put this out now.

But first a little background. I'm not a big fan of "scented" products. I don't want my clothes to smell like "clean breeze" (whatever that is), or my disinfectant wipes to smell like "lemon." At the same time, most products billed as unscented, while not perfumed, still have a scent, usually something I like to call "industrial solvent." Which is why I keep a dispenser of lavender-scented liquid hand soap from the folks at L'Occitane en Provence on hand. It's just scented enough to trick the mind into believing it's not some kind of horrible industrial cleaning agent, but not so scented that I feel my throat constrict when I wash my hands. (Forgive me for not choosing a more "macho" scent or product, but I have a difficult time believing anyone, let alone superficial attractive women, could possibly like — much less tolerate — a product like Axe. Frankly, I'm a little embarrassed I even know what that product is.)

Which brings me back to the story. As I entered the bathroom on my floor to brush my teeth just moments ago, I noticed that I had left my pretentious French soap on one of the bathroom sinks earlier in the day. So I walked over to the sink in question, thinking I would bring the soap back to my room after ridding my mouth of plaque. To my annoyance, however, someone had defiled my soap dispenser by spitting into the dispenser! Needless to say, that perfectly good container of soap is now in a trash can.

On what planet is it acceptable for people to spit into containers of soap? Surely not this one.

As I exited the library yesterday, I noticed a placard on the checkout desk that announced the Bates College library had acquired a Kindle. I'm going to be blunt: I can hardly think of something more idiotic a library could do, save perhaps for burning its collection or committing its binding supplies to the aid of terrorists in a glue stick-powered takeover of the government.

First of all, there's the cost of the Kindle hardware itself, about $260, or enough to buy about 10 "real" books, even at publishers' list prices. So, right of the bat, the library has sacrificed the ability to grow its collection by at least 10 volumes. And any savings associated with the fact that the Kindle can access public domain works, like Pride and Prejudice or Othello, is offset by the fact that the library probably owns at least two copies of such famous public domain works.

Second, there's the huge opportunity cost of buying a book for the Kindle. The nature of Amazon.com's DRM on Kindle books means that only one person at a time will be able to read whatever collection of books the library purchases for the Kindle. Contrast this to the conventional arrangement, in which different books can be lent to different people at the same time. It's as if one particular shelf or stack of the library's collection had to be checked out at all at once, and only one person could check out that stack or shelf at a time.

It would make far more sense, assuming Amazon makes the technology and licensing available, for the library to purchase copies of electronic copies of books and magazines that students who happened to own a Kindle could access, much as Sony does today with many public libraries.

And all this is not to say I don't like my Kindle. It's a great device for linear reading, where one starts on page one and moves sequentially to page n. But the Kindle is a device to read content, not a piece of content itself. People don't go to their local libraries to check out televisions; they go to check out DVDs.

Earlier this week, I dropped a box of crackers, spilling a mess of crumbs onto my floor. As someone who cares, perhaps too much, about tidiness, I immediately sought out a vacuum cleaner to remove the noxious foodstuffs. The first vacuum cleaner I found failed to clean up anything at all. In fact, I'm convinced that particular device made my floor dirtier. And I haven't been able to find another vacuum cleaner in my dormitory to even try. So I've now had a variety of crumbs laying on my floor for more than a few days, something that makes me quite uncomfortable.

As such, I began exploring the idea of buying my own vacuum cleaner. But because I like to buy quality, I have a hard time justifying such a purchase. Even a low-end Miele vacuum runs at least $300 or $400, which seems to me an excessive amount to spend given the size of my dorm room and the infrequency with which I need to vacuum. By my own rough estimates, I would spend less money by paying a cleaning service $20 a week to vacuum for me until I graduate, as opposed to investing in my own vacuum cleaner. Yes, I suppose such a device would probably prove useful for many years to come — the Miele Polaris I looked at comes with a seven year warranty — especially as I transition to a slightly less austere living arrangement.

But this really comes back to a more fundamental question: why doesn't the college provide the residents of its residence halls with proper, working vacuum cleaners? Do they want to encourage students to become slobs? The college has no problem providing all-you-can-eat printing on high-speed laser printers in the library and labs. I can't help but wonder why the College doesn't just provide or tack an extra $2 onto our already absurd "comprehensive fee" to give me the ability to clean my floor.

Newsweek has a story this week about the blurry line separating true climate scientists — the sorts of people with doctorates who build huge models to run on supercomputers — and the activists, so-called climate change "deniers" and advocates for change alike. The story mentions James Hensen, a pioneering climate researcher at NASA, who has become so impassioned about the issue to resort to civil disobedience tactics to convince politicians and other officials to take action. But I'm beginning to think these advocates are allocating their efforts inefficiently. Europe's cap-and-trade scheme has done little to curb carbon dioxide emissions. The Copenhagen climate talks accomplished virtually nothing. And the public has little appetite for even weak climate change mitigation policies, such as President Obama's proposed cap-and-trade system. This leads me to believe climate change activists would see more success by channeling their energy toward making carbon-free energy cheaper, instead of seeking a policy-driven solution.

As Bill Gates put it in his TED talk last week, if we can make carbon-free sources of energy cheaper than carbon-emmiting sources of energy, climate change skeptics will make no difference in our ability to protect the environment. Instead, when people go to buy a car or an HVAC system, they'll buy the cheaper, non-polluting option, and the planet will move closer to a climate change solution as people naturally reduce their consumption of carbon-emitting goods and services.

Admittedly, this kind of market-driven solution would be more effective with government involvement. Carbon dioxide emissions due to the consumption of goods and services are what economists call an externality; that is, the cost of carbon dioxide emitted by a gallon of gasoline or a flight from London to Madrid is not included in the cost of the carbon-emitting good. As such, economic theory tells us that we would be better off by internalizing that eternality by, for instance, imposing a "carbon tax" on goods like gasoline. This has the fairly obvious effect of accelerating the market-driven switch to carbon-free goods and services.

But, despite the best efforts of activists, I see little chance of the US government providing this sort of policy jumpstart to a market-driven solution to the climate change problem.

Which makes me think climate change advocates should be channeling their efforts toward driving down the cost of carbon-free goods and services relative to their polluting counterparts, rather than trying in vain to reach a policy-driven solution. I realize that support of business is anathema to the beliefs of many people advocating for climate change legislation. But unless the political climate changes, I honestly believe advocates would be more effective in staving off global warming by helping startups and researchers gain funding to develop and bring to market their ideas for cheaper, cleaner goods and services.

This will be short. There's still more liquidity analysis to do.

At any rate, as I skimmed my Twitter feed and various news blogs, I couldn't help but notice a huge volume of people whining, moaning and groaning about the new Facebook redesign. So I visited my Facebook account — something I try to avoid — to see what everyone was complaining about.

It looks almost exactly the same. Sure, Mark and his pals have made a few adjustments to the placement of controls and to the application's design. But nothing looks so completely different that I can even begin to imagine why people feel obliged to rant and rave about the new look.

If anything, this supports my thesis that most normal computer users would prefer a computing appliance, such as the iPad, to a full-blown general purpose computer.

I'm in the middle of a horribly boring and incredibly tedious homework assignment. If I never have to compute another liquidity ratio in my life, I shall be a happy man. So, to interrupt the tedium, I'm going to put up another tirade about NBC's coverage of the Olympic games.

As I've written before, I really only watch three sporting events with any real interest: the soccer World Cup, the Tour de France, and the Olympics, summer and winter alike. But yet again NBC, the official broadcaster of the Olympic games here in the United States, has decided to air almost none of the events live. According to one article I read, only curling and ice hockey will be streamed live online. Only curling and ice hockey! It's like living in 1999, albeit with higher fidelity video and audio. And on top of that, much of the content shown on NBC and its sister networks will be tape-delayed and packaged with all manner of stupid interstitial videos about the number of times some snowboarder cut open her thumb while tuning her equipment.

The tape delays aren't quite as objectionable when the games take place in a distant time zone. But there's no excuse for tape delaying events on the West Coast when cities like San Francisco and Portland are in the same time zone as Vancouver.

At the very least, the folks at NBC should put live streams of the events online for people like me who prefer to watch sports live. For that matter, I would even pay — though admittedly not all that much — to watch the games online. It's the 21st century Jeff Zucker. Wake up!

In the wake of my previous post about the iPad and the inaneness of the Bates IT security policy, I've done some additional research and talked the matter over with more than a few of my peers who are likewise frustrated.

Unsurprisingly, many security experts agree that trying to do client-side authentication makes for an ineffective network security policy. In particular, the Cisco NAC that Bates uses is vulnerable to numerous exploits. At a recent Black Hat conference, for instance, some researchers demonstrated that the Cisco product could be spoofed by simply having the computer assert to the NAC that it had the right antivirus and firewall settings and gain access without a hitch, despite having no anti-virus or firewall software installed. (There are many, many more exploits, which interested parties could easily track down via a simple Google search.)

To me, this means that the client-side network authentication layer is utterly superfluous.

Given that the device effectively does nothing to keep really determined hackers off the network, it essentially just serves to inconvenience and annoy normal people. If Swedish intelligence officials decide they want to join the Bates network to wreak havoc on our course database, they'll have no problem. But Ellen T. Student will panic when she can't connect her laptop to the network to print an important paper due to an authentication malfunction, and John T. Student won't be able to share the latest video of his dog surfing in Nantucket with his cousin from his iPhone.

Not to mention, the college likely spends more than a few dollars to keep this ineffective layer in place. Of course, there's the huge cost associated with the purchase of the hardware and software. But there's also the labor cost of maintaining that hardware and software over time. Further, the college has to hire lots of employees for its technology "Help Desk," largely because no one can figure out how to install the parasitic client-side authentication software and the mandated (and equally impotent) Sophos anti-virus software.

It's almost comical. In the midst budgetary problems, the college continues to spend thousands of dollars to inconvenience people to no benefit, while my professors feel compelled to make fewer photocopies.

This doesn't really strike me as the kind of policy consistent with the very liberal values of the college, nor, as I've written in the past, does foster an open, generative computing environment. Yuck.

I've more or less decided to buy an Apple iPad. On the one hand, I'm convinced it will be an excellent device for the consumption of media. The purported 140 hours of music playback time would be wonderful for the long haul flights I find myself on so often. And I love the idea of having an enormous multitouch web browsing experience. On the other, the iPad has a lot of productivity potential. I'm already in love with the idea of bringing an iPad to meetings for Keynote presentations rather than my comparatively bulky laptop. The folks at Omni Group also set my heart racing when they announced that they intend to port all of their major productivity applications to the iPad. OmniGraffle on the iPad will be sublime, I'm sure.

Bearing that in mind, I've now begun to ask myself whether I should buy one of the standard WiFi-only models or spring for an iPad with a cellular radio. Apple managed to strike a great deal with AT&T — no contracts, low prices — and the device is unlocked.

But as I began to consider the matter more closely, I realized I may need to buy the 3G-equipped model more out of necessity than an occasional desire for ubiquitous Internet access on a third portable device (see iPhone, Kindle).

As I initially considered it, I figured a 3G iPad might be worth buying just in case I ever wanted a month or two of service. I like the idea of popping in an Orange SIM card in Paris and killing time on the train to Lyon or Cannes on a trip to France. But then it occurred to me that the inane Bates network security scheme would prevent me from doing such routine tasks as checking my email on the iPad via WiFi, as is the case with my iPhone and the Bates network. As it stands now, I can only check my email on the iPhone thanks to the spotty coverage provided by the fine folks at AT&T.

Not that our charming IT people make it easy for me to connect to the Bates WiFi network on my phone in the first place. Regardless of the number of times I tell my phone to remember and automatically connect to the auxiliary BatesGuest SSID, it can't seem to pull it off. And when I manage to connect to the network, I'm forced to authenticate in the browser with my username and hard-to-type 15 character mixed-case alpha-numeric-symbolic password every single time. Not once every 24 hours, or even once every hour. If I were to authenticate right now, visit a website and put my phone to sleep, I would have to re-authenticate in five minutes if I decided to open Tweetie.

In case the previous two paragraphs didn't make it clear, I feel strongly that these policies are ridiculous and utterly absurd.

I already have a more or less unfettered Internet connection from the college on my laptop. If I wanted to break into a secure database or launch a cyberattack on the Defense Department, preventing my benign mobile phone from joining the WiFi network won't provide any defense at all.

Of course, the people in IT also like to argue that allowing just any device onto the network creates the possibility that I or someone else will spread some horrible virus to the rest of the campus. But I fail to see how locking devices out of the network does anything to stop this. First of all, as I already mentioned, my laptop, which poses a far greater risk in that regard, is already on the network. Banning my iPhone or iPad does zilch. More importantly, though, most viruses and malware are spread through the Internet! So if I were just to send people on campus a virus-laden email from a cellular modem, just as many computers would be infected. Beyond that, the tightly-controlled environments like iPhone OS are, to my knowledge, not even capable of launching some kind of sophisticated attack.

What rationale do these people have for keeping my iPhone off the proper WiFi network? I say none whatsoever.

I'm sick of being treated like a criminal. Give my iPhone unfettered Internet access!

I just started reading Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail, which chronicles the collapse of the financial industry in the fall of 2008. It's an excellent read. Unlike many of the professorial types who have written analyses or other accounts of the financial crisis, Sorkin can really write. Too Big to Fail reads more like a detective novel than a boring academic treatise, and, for those who do not speak financial-ese, Sorkin limits his use of confusing financial jargon.

The book is not illuminating solely because it does a good job of walking the reader through the events leading up to the big bank bailouts and breaking down the complicated chain of events that led to the bailouts. Too Big to Fail avoids the petty politics that have colored the debate over the bailouts and bank regulation. It also helps one form a more nuanced view of the government intervention and the role of banks. Rather than painting executives like Lehman's Richard Fuld or firms like Goldman Sachs, purely as incompetent or villainous, Sorkin more or less sticks to the facts.

Highly recommended.

For better of worse, Pachelbel's Canon in D has become a staple of wedding ceremonies. It's a nice, if somewhat overplayed, piece of music. Except that wedding planners have conspired to have the life sucked out of nearly every recording of the song I've ever listened to. The Canon in D is not a funeral march or the overture for a depressing operetta. It's meant to be played with life and energy at a moderate tempo. I shouldn't feel like the musicians playing it are still recovering from night of Ambien-induced sleep.

But I have recently come across two excellent recordings of the song played by musicians who do not take orders from the cabal of musically ignorant wedding planners. One is from Daniel Hope's excellent album "Air: A Baroque Journey." (For whatever reasons that album is only available in the US via the Deutsche Grammophon online store.) The other is from Reinhard Goebel's recording of Pachelbel, Bach, Handel and Vivaldi.

Readers with good memory may recall that last summer I spent some of my spare time working on a piece of software I tentatively named Notable Notebook. Such persons may also recall that I had ambitiously claimed a feature-complete version would go online for a small private beta sometime at the end of 2009. That, of course, never happened. So I thought I'd provide a status update of sorts on the project.

The primary difficultly facing further Notable development is the highly fragmented nature of my time, between classes, homework and other obligations. I find it difficult to solve "big" problems in disjointed 30 minute blocks of spare time. Hence, the project has not really advanced, at least in any easily perceptible way, since the end of August 2009.

Which is not to say I've abandoned the project. In fact, as a result of my school's somewhat peculiar schedule, I may well have a month and a half between mid-April and early June to sit down and make some real progress. Naturally, I'll post any news here.

While I rarely bother to actually sign in to or otherwise use Facebook, I do my best to create the illusion that I log in regularly: some clever software reposts my Twitter posts as Facebook status updates, and my blog posts as Facebook notes. But I just want to remind anyone who follows me on Facebook that, to read the entire blog post that corresponds to one of my Facebook notes, you have to click the small "View Original Post" link under the note on Facebook.

In an ideal world, the link would be inline with the entry excerpt. I've just not bothered to make the small change to the relevant template to make that happen. Perhaps I'll find time this weekend.

Of all the inconveniences I face living in a college dormitory, none rivals the absence of a well-equipped kitchen. I feel uncomfortably confined knowing that I cannot make a lasagna bolognese from scratch given a quick trip to the grocery store and ten or eleven hours of uninterrupted time with various kitchen gadgets. Not that I regularly make lasagna from scratch, even when I'm at home. (After going through the whole process last December, including the manufacture of the noodles, I've concluded it's something one ought to do about once a year, at the very most.) There's just something immensely comforting in knowing I could make profiteroles on a whim.

More pressingly, I find not having a kitchen at my disposal prevents me from following my desired food consumption path. Namely, I can't have a nice, relaxing mug of well-made hot chocolate on a whim. (Anyone who claims I can walk to the dining commons and have a mug of hot chocolate there must have desensitized taste buds. Their hot chocolate is better described as a hot chocolate-like beverage.) Principally, this inconvenience stems from my distaste for small refrigerators, which makes it difficult to keep the requisite milk on hand. But I have my reasons. First, storing something as large and bulky as a small refrigerator over the summer would be an inconvenience. Second, it seems really unnecessary for me to buy an appliance to chill milk, bottled water and the occasional bar of exotic chocolate. Third, for less than $2000, it's impossible to find an undercounter-style refrigerator with any kind of soundproofing. I would not welcome the drone of a dorm refrigerator's compressor humming all night.

A few minutes ago, however, it occurred to me that some companies sell aseptic single-serving containers of milk that don't require refrigeration. (Why it took two-and-a-half years for me to make this link, I don't know.) Though convenience does come at a steep price. From everything I've been able to glean online, this super-convenient milk runs about $30 a gallon, or at least ten times the price of a conventionally packaged gallon of milk. I would probably come out ahead in the long run if I bought a small, inexpensive refrigerator.

Yet another bizarre tradeoff only I will ever face.

A few minutes ago, I received yet another reminder of just how out of touch I am with the so-called "real Americans" who inhabit some other part of this great nation. It was a very jarring (and potentially embarrassing) wake-up call, but it's so absurd it merits sharing.

It all begins with a present value formula in my textbook for a course on banking and finance, Contemporary Financial Intermediation by Stuart Greenbaum and Anjan Thakor. Precisely the kind of present value formula that doubtlessly served as the basis of many financial derivative products the public now hates for irrational reasons. (Strike one.) Anyway, on page 134 of the second edition of their text, Greenbaum and Thakor present an equation to find the value of a zero-coupon bond at some time t, given a purchase price and years to maturity at time t. In other words, they present a present value formula. But Greenbaum and Thakor never bother to actually say to the reader, "This formula calculates the present value of a bond." At first I thought I had confused the present value formula with something else, but a query on Wolfram Mathworld confirmed my hunch. That the authors never actually mention that they've defined a present value formula struck me as odd, given: (a) people familiar with present value formulas would more easily follow their exposition if that key phrase were mentioned, and (b) people unfamiliar with present value formulas, but who are taking a course in finance, really should know that the formula is a present value formula. (I suppose in the context of my scorekeeping, this deep and highly nerdy thinking might be construed as strike two.)

But enough about economics and mathematics. My hunch confirmed, I zipped over to The New York Times' website to check up on the world. That's when I discovered the Superbowl takes place at some point in the near future. It's key here that I only realized the Superbowl "takes place at some point in the near future." Because it took me — and I'm not embellishing here at all — five minutes to find the date of the upcoming football championship. It's really something that, first of all, I had no idea the Superbowl was happening soon, and, second, I'm so inept at hunting down sports statistics it took me five minutes to find the date a very, very important game takes place. (Strike three.)

It probably doesn't do much for my appeal to the Tea Party crowd that I composed this blog post listening to 17th century opera. (Lully's Thésée for the curious. And, even though I basically speak fluent French, I still can't understand a word of it.) And, given how awful my luck tends to be, this blog post will probably resurface 30 years from now while I'm waiting for some Senate subcommittee to approve me for some government position analyzing economic policy. Oh well. Perhaps it's time I actually learn what a "down" is.