I moved to Seattle in May 2006 to work at Amazon, a company which was about one-sixth as valuable and occupied about one-third as much space in Seattle compared with today. A lot of marketers were using the phrase “world-class city” to pitch newly-built condominiums and townhouses. Refugees from recently converted or condemned apartment buildings provided heavy competition for rentals. Having moved from Pittsburgh, a city where the median house price was $85,000, I burst out laughing when a saleswoman asked whether I’d be interested in buying my temporary housing apartment in Chinatown for $280,000. (Someone paid more than that in 2006; the bank foreclosed last year and sold the property for $100,000 less.)

Over the next few years, the only thing “world-class” about Seattle was its economic collapse. By 2009, Seattle was no longer special. Washington Mutual became the largest bank ever to fail. Boeing and Microsoft, once considered rock-solid, laid employees off. Many proposed new condominium projects were never built, although the buildings they were meant to replace were vacated or destroyed anyway. One such building, the Marion Apartments, was torched by its 89-year-old caretaker who was to be evicted 12 hours later. The empty Marion building became a disgusting squatters’ haven for three and a half years before a crew knocked it down over the course of two days.

As the Marion’s replacement goes up and Amazon finishes its corporate campus — and starts work on another one — one thing is clear: Seattle is coming back. Many mothballed projects are finally being built. A block of Capitol Hill’s most venerable bars was known as the People’s Parking Lot after being razed and sitting unused for three years. It’s now Terravita, a mixed-use building opening in July. A one-story auto repair shop has given way to another massive mixed-use complex with a pretentious name: Citizen of the Pike Pine opens later this spring. A long-delayed project to replace a 491-stall parking lot just north of CenturyLink Field (formerly Qwest Field, speaking of economic problems) will now yield 444 apartments in two towers, plus retail and parking, for those who really want to live next to a train station and a football stadium.

Not everyone is happy about these new projects in Seattle. The city continues to badly neglect the poor with a high 9.5% sales tax, no income tax, cutbacks in mass transit and social services, and insultingly high rents for “affordable housing.” The low-income housing at Citizen, for example, costs 30% more than what I pay for my non-subsidized apartment less than a mile away. South Lake Union, once a quiet working-class neighborhood, also has its detractors: Crosscut architecture critic Lawrence Cheek called the Amazon headquarters “stiff architecture that stints on the fun” while an anonymous author coined the term “Am-hole” to oppose thousands of new white-collar workers (but not “those of you … who act friendly and normal”). The residential real estate market is frigid: willing buyers like myself are finding a very low inventory of homes for sale and a clear bias in favor of cash sales: 38% of homes sold last year in King County, which includes Seattle, were bought entirely with cash.

Seattle is a young city, especially for one which strives to be world-class, and as such there is a great deal of confusion of how to meld history with development. “More than 350 sites, buildings, vehicles, vessels, and street clocks” are designated as landmarks, from the obvious (the Space Needle, designated in 1999) to the banal (a bulletin board in Chinatown, which became a landmark in 1976). I’ve also observed that Seattleites resent anyone who moved to town after they did. In this city of transplants, those who move in tomorrow will ruin all my favorite places, which in turn ruined all the great places of the ’90s, which in turn ruined the famous hangouts of the ’80s, and so on. The one constant I’ve seen, particularly on Capitol Hill where I spend a lot of my free time, is that everyone fears becoming the next Belltown. Belltown is a region that I hesitate to call a “neighborhood” because young professional neighbors rarely commingle between the high-rise residential buildings and bridge-and-tunnel-crowd nightclubs. With an involved citizenry — and my neighbors young and old are very civic-minded — I have high hopes for my adopted city.

Seattle is rising: growing, changing, building. As the city celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Century 21 Exposition, a World’s Fair that gave the city several of its lasting claims to fame, it’s remarkable to note that from 1960 to 2000 Seattle’s city population dipped and rose to the same level; it wasn’t until the 2010 census that the city officially topped 600,000 residents. In just under six years I’ve seen phenomenal growth, a sudden collapse, and a heady recovery in this city — and there’s a lot more yet to come.

Disclaimer: Amazon.com is my employer. The views expressed in the above post are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Amazon.com.

When I joined Google+ last week, I was quickly disappointed that it followed the same model as every social networking site I’ve ever been on, going back to SixDegrees.com in 1997. Every one of these sites makes the same fatal flaw: the owners assume that this is the only web site you and your friends will ever use. This goes against the spirit of the Internet. When one router goes down, you can send your data through another. If your e-mail provider doesn’t meet your needs, you can switch to another or even start your own. When one news web site gets overloaded, you can visit another one.

To me, social networking is the next step after e-mail and mass syndication. E-mail’s major benefit is that anyone running a server that can send it is allowed to send it. Anyone running a server that can receive e-mail is allowed, but not obligated, to receive it. Design decisions made in the 1970s define no security, encryption, or even acknowledgement of delivery for e-mail; you can add those to a message, but there’s no requirement that anyone must use them. Syndicating content over the web started in the 1990s with standards such as RSS that are also simple by design: web sites like this one expose a feed so that you can read articles using various programs and services.

E-mail and syndication share a common benefit: I can use them in any way I want without getting permission from the content owner. I can transact any business by e-mail (using encryption, ideally) and I can read five newspapers or 5,000 by plugging the feeds into a reader. Even Twitter and Facebook originally exposed RSS feeds of friends’ updates, meaning that I could read through interleaved streams from all these services. Both services have since given up on interoperability in favor of forcing more users to use first-party apps or web sites. My phone has four social network applications installed, each of which works with one and only one service.

Depending on one service to express a person’s identity is also a very dangerous idea. A colleague of mine, involved in the Arab Spring movements that have been all-too-closely linked to these closed social networks, had his Facebook account revoked early this year. With one action and no explanation it was like he had never been a Facebook user in the first place. A political movement should be its own social network that can be linked to, but not controlled by, a mainstream network like Facebook. That idea runs counter to the larger networks’ business model of sticking as many eyeballs as possible on one web site. Any users, whether human or automated, can have their access revoked if their actions run counter to a system administrators’ expectations. If you want to start a revolution, don’t centralize it on one service outside your control.

This colleague became very keen on the Diaspora Project, a set of technologies that will let people and groups set up their own servers and maintain control of their own data. I’m a big fan of this as well. I see the future of socialization moving away from self-contained sites such as Facebook and Google+ and towards a more distributed model. It wasn’t long ago when on-line content moved away from centralized networks like AOL and CompuServe and toward a model where anyone could set up their own web site. Some web sites became more popular than others, of course, but the cost of starting one’s own site has never been lower than it is today.

I foresee a future where I can use any photo sharing site, text publishing service, video sharing service, and commerce software package, relying on a federated ID system that might include, but not wholly depend on, the big players in social networking today. Just as AOL is remembered today for bringing a legion of non-geek users onto the Internet a generation ago, so too will Facebook be remembered for introducing the concept of socialization to the open web.

The open model of socialization won’t make money on its own. That’s OK. It will instead let companies that sell goods and services allow customers, acting on their own, to selectively release personal data and make transactions flow more freely. I should be able to carry around a list of authorization keys that signify my relationships with other people and entities, encrypted in such a way that only I may use them for specific purposes. For example, my friend could grant me access to his Amazon wish list by generating an access token and sending it to me securely. Of course there will be a need to back these tokens up, as with all personal data, but ultimately control of my relationship tokens should rest with me. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr already use API keys to let third-party applications use my data, but this is more to protect the larger web sites than to protect me since those sites can also revoke an application’s API key at any time for any reason.

Historically, open technologies have won except where economies of scale make it cheaper for a large closed competitor to do business with consumers. The web was a win-win over closed networks like AOL, and may prevail over closed app stores for selling access to content, since content providers don’t pay any royalties to a third party to serve content and customers don’t have to establish a third-party billing account to access said content. Game consoles are a notable exception: closed-platform consoles sell for a loss and make up the difference on software sales, whereas open platforms like the PC require a lot more cash up front to play the same games. Despite instant messaging being a common feature of closed services, and despite the open Jabber protocol having been adopted by Google and Facebook for their IM services, mobile phones’ text messaging has eclipsed Internet-based IM as the worldwide way to exchange short messages — and customers often pay hundreds of dollars a year for the privilege!

The next few years are going to be very chaotic for social networking as the market — that is, you and me — decides whether to warehouse our information on closed systems or in our own pockets. I sincerely hope that an open protocol like IMAP, SMTP, and HTTP today emerges as the standard for granting other people and companies access to selected parts of our digital lives.

Disclaimer: I work for Amazon.com. These statements represent only my own opinion and do not reflect the opinions of my employer.

I’ve been very excited about video streaming technologies in the past. I was part of the beta for Joost, a peer-to-peer video streaming venture by the creators of Skype, which I said “looks amazing” at the time. Despite the Joost client’s slick user interface and social features, the service never attracted enough compelling content. (I can only watch so many World’s Strongest Man and Stella reruns.) Joost eventually abandoned their peer-to-peer client in favor of a simple Flash web site and silently slipped into obscurity.

Since 2007 a variety of TV-on-your-PC options have come around: Hulu, Boxee, Netflix streaming, and YouTube have all been seen as successes in getting video watchers to cross over to the Internet. So far, though, there is no compelling cocktail to blend new-media with old. In short, there is no successful TV-on-your-PC-on-your-TV experience.

I still have the same media PC I bought four years ago, a hatbox-sized Sony VGX-TP1 now running Windows 7. I plugged it into my A/V receiver and dedicated it to media consumption. I mostly run Windows Media Center to record and play back TV shows, but since it has a full operating system, I can view videos from any source. So far I haven’t found many reasons to lug out the keyboard and navigate around the web on a screen 10 feet away. There’s virtually no development going on for applications for media PCs: everything is either designed to run in a web browser or on a portable device. Windows Media Center is supposedly extendable with a plugin system, but what plugins exist are hobbyists’ weekend projects, supported by a threadbare network of what Microsoft euphemistically calls “enthusiasts.”

My Xbox 360, also made by Microsoft, goes further in enabling the 10-foot interface: besides the games it plays, it can also stream content from Netflix, Last.fm, ESPN, and Hulu Plus. Its interface, alas, isn’t simple enough: I boot into an ad-filled dashboard that requires scrolling in both directions to reveal icons for these services. Even with my fancy Harmony One universal remote, there’s no way for me to automate turning my system on and switching to a particular video service. There’s also no way to consume content for other services since only Microsoft can release dashboard updates for my console. (A company called PlayOn makes a server that enables other forms of media streaming to the Xbox 360, but I found it to be a kludgey, expensive, inelegant hack.)

There are several other devices that stream Internet video as a secondary function, like the PlayStation 3 and the Wii, and as a primary function, like the Roku and Apple TV boxes. All of these are limited by arrangements that must exist between the device makers and content providers. Major League Baseball streams its video to the PlayStation 3 but not to the Xbox 360. Amazon’s Instant Video service works on the Roku devices but not on Apple TV. The only device I own that can stream everything on-line is my media PC, but navigating file trees and web sites requires me to squint at tiny text 10 feet away.

Boxee and Google TV have tried to offer more open, extensible platforms for streaming video. In exchange for their efforts, they’ve been served cease and desist notices from many of the more traditional content providers. ABC, NBC, CBS, and other networks blocked Google TV’s web browser from accessing their video sites even though that browser is functionally identical to one running on my media PC. Boxee, whose software runs on a PC or on a dedicated set-top box, has experienced disputes with Netflix that jeopardized Netflix’s streaming functionality for Boxee’s users.

Two kinds of standards need to coalesce before Internet video can be considered mainstream: one for finding content and one for playing it back with minimal effort.

Google TV’s efforts have been centered around search. Typing a title or actor can bring up content stored on your cable box or on the Internet. That’s a good start. A comprehensive solution would also include subscription services linked to the device, each of which would expose a simple catalog, unencrypted and designed to be indexed on one device or by any search engine. These standards already exist but few providers expose such indexes to their customers in such a programmatic way. My DVR’s guide shows all the channels in a single grid. Why should I have to memorize which services and which apps provide the shows I want to watch?

Playing back content needs to be as easy as powering a device on and seeing a list of options. For example, if I finished half of a movie last night, my device should immediately offer to resume where I left off. If I watched yesterday’s Yankees game, I should see an option on the home screen to watch today’s. Roku and Apple TV famously center their attention around video playback, but their applications don’t work with each other. I should be able to customize my video experience as flexibly as I can customize the desktop on my PC, the bookmarks in my web browser, and the speed dial on my telephone. Most single-purpose devices have common languages for referring to content and activities, but streaming video is still too abstract a concept to be a pushbutton operation.

When I call for “standards,” I don’t want one company to control all of my media. I know that iTunes videos will play on Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and iTunes software on my PCs, but iTunes won’t work with other devices such as my Xbox 360. Replacing one media juggernaut (Comcast) with another serves no purpose.

So far I’ve been reading and enjoying Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, a “pro-human” polemic about recent movements in technology. Lanier discusses MIDI, originally developed for keyboards but shoehorned into styles of music that have more nuances than “key up” and “key down,” as an example of an overly simplistic standard that we’re now stuck with. Lack of standards drives innovation as there’s an arms race for dominance of a new category, but it can also stifle adoption as customers fear spending money on a product which might be useless in a short time. (Exhibit A: The HD DVD player gathering dust under my TV.)

I’m really optimistic about the digital future of media, and not just because one category of it pays my rent. There’s something magical about thinking of any song, TV show, movie, book, or video game and being able to consume it in minutes. The lack of standards for video represents a real limitation: given the choice of buying a DVD for $10 or a restricted digital copy for the same price, I’ll choose the DVD every time until I can know that the next device I buy can play that digital copy. Here’s hoping for a more accessible future.

Since last April, I’ve taken trips to Pittsburgh, Portland, New York (twice), Maui, Paris, and Milan (with a side trip to meet my relatives in Genoa). Those last few trips were with my friend and nursery-school sweetheart Andrea. Andrea took such a shine to Maui that she has since moved to Lahaina, the small tourist town where we spent four days over New Year’s. She made the decision two days into the trip and found work at a restaurant three days after moving there permanently.

I’m continuing to fund the Amalgamated Compassion Fund, a charitable gift fund that I set up through Fidelity a few years ago. The Amalgamated Compassion Fund has issued more than $8,000 in grants to organizations local and national and, thanks to the stock market rebound, is doing well enough to fuel more grants to come.

I still own the house in Pittsburgh that I bought nearly six years ago. After moving out nearly five years ago, I eventually found a tenant to basically pay for my mortgage while I waited for the Pittsburgh housing market to improve. My house’s 15-year loan will be paid off in 2019; there’s a chance I might still be renting the house out then.

I still get more satisfaction out of disposing of stuff I don’t need or want than out of acquiring new things. As I type this I can see at least a dozen large things that I’d like to sell or donate to someone else.

I’m so far behind on my stack of Xbox 360 games that I’m planning to skip PAX Prime this August. Still playing Dragon Age: Origins (about 9 hours in), Borderlands (35 hours), Fallout: New Vegas (about 35 hours), and Mass Effect 2 (about 40 hours). Portal 2 comes out tomorrow. Many more casual games on my console and my phone await my free time.

I’ve been reading a lot. Just finished The Hangman’s Daughter and I’m about to start on Veins by Drew, the artist behind Toothpaste for Dinner. After that is Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget which of course I’ll be reading on my gadgets.

Still rooting for the Steelers (who I watched lose Super Bowl XLV from my hotel bed in Paris at 4 AM, and who will come to Seattle if the NFL lockout is resolved this year) and for the Yankees (who I’m going to see at their ballpark next month). Haven’t been to a Sounders or a Storm game in Seattle yet.

Still counteracting the sedentary life of a software engineer by going to the gym at least three times a week and having plenty of vegetables every day. Still drinking way too much coffee (black) and soda (diet), but less alcohol.

I’m happy that this post is more than twice as long as the one concerning what I’ve been doing at work for the past year.

I was the sixth member of Kindle Content Store (KiCS, pronounced “kicks”) at that time. This nascent team had spun off from a larger group two months earlier. Since then, KiCS has split again — into eight teams — to handle all the products and services that six people owned a year ago. I’m now on a team that owns the shopping experiences on the web-based Kindle Store and on the store built into Kindle devices themselves.

In the last year, we’ve launched three new devices: the newest Kindle DX, the newest Kindle 3G + Wi-Fi, and the first Wi-Fi Kindle. We launched the UK Kindle Store, selling content and hardware to UK customers in pounds sterling. We launched Kindle content gifting, the first gift system by a major e-book seller. We launched Audible content sales for Kindle devices with Wi-Fi. We hired at a pace I’ve never seen anywhere at Amazon to grow in a market that, according to publishers, tripled in size in the past year.

So, yeah, I’ve been busy.

The Kindle Content Store Shopping Experience Team (KiCSSET, pronounced “kick-set”) is hiring, as is just about everyone else in my building. Send your resumes my way. Get in quickly before we split again.

Seattle’s housing market continued to inflate in 2007 and 2008. When I renewed my lease I accepted a small increase in those years. When the bubble burst here, thousands of underwater house and condo owners put their units on the rental market just as several large employers cut back on staff (Boeing, Microsoft) or shut down entirely (Washington Mutual). The drop in demand and jump in supply sent both rents and house prices plunging. Units that had been snapped up in hours in 2006 now linger on Craigslist for 7 days until the site mercy-kills their listings.

All this has meant two things: a flood of new information about the rental market and an opportunity to lower my rent. In 2009 and in this year I used the steps below to negotiate my rent down. I’m paying less for rent now than I was in 2006 — and less even than I did when I lived in Pittsburgh.

Step 1: Set up a search. Go to your city’s Craigslist site. Click “apts/housing for rent.” Search for your building’s name, address, or intersection — anything that will yield results from your own building.

Step 2: Subscribe. If your search returned any results, you’ll see an orange “RSS” link in the lower-right corner of the results page. Click on this, and you’ll see options to subscribe to a real-time feed of search results. I use Safari on my MacBook, but RSS readers are built in to Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows as well. There are also web-based RSS readers like Google Reader that you can access from anywhere. Sites like Feed My Inbox can even take an RSS feed and send you e-mail alerts of new listings.

Step 3: Take notes. Craigslist postings expire 7 days after they’re posted but many are manually removed earlier than that. Whenever you get a hit on your feed, save or print the listing. This will help you out at negotiation time.

Step 4: Start the conversation with your landlord. Over a month before my lease expired, I called my landlord and asked if I could discuss renewing my lease. I brought a listing of my findings. I told my landlord that I had seen similar units to mine renting for less, so I wanted to have my own rent reduced to match the market rate.

Step 5: Profit! My landlord told me straight up that if I were renewing in February and not July, he could lower the rent another 10%. Real estate is cyclical: people usually prefer to move in the summer months when school is out and the weather is best. I didn’t try to tempt fate by asking for a 6- or an 18-month lease to re-up in winter time. My landlord offered me $100 off my rent and I signed on the line.

Start your research early and know your market. Landlords would much rather keep you as a tenant than have their apartment go empty for a few weeks or months.

In microfinance, a lender provides a small loan to a borrower who can’t get credit from traditional banks. Grameen Bank, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning microfinance organization, lent small sums to rural entrepreneurs, most of them women, in Bangladesh. The community spirit helped these businesses thrive and Grameen’s annual income is now in the tens of millions of dollars.

Kiva takes the spirit of microfinance and adds the ease of Internet shopping. After funding my account with PayPal and reading a few borrower profiles, I invested small amounts — as little as $25 — into shares of loans to be paid back up to 12 months later. Although the borrowers paid interest to the creditors who made the loans, I didn’t receive any of that as income. My first few loans were repaid quickly so I loaned the funds again to new entrepreneurs. Many times Kiva was so flooded with lenders that I had no outlets to lend any money.

In total I supported 68 borrowers in Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Cambodia, Cameroon, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, Paraguay, Peru, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Ukraine, and Vietnam. Of these loans only 6 ended in default, including two in Kenya during a time of major political crisis. I invested $1,000 cash and funded $3,375 of loan shares. My loss of $131 in capital represented only 3.9% of the total loan amount, more than double the Kiva average of 1.84% but well below the default rate I experienced on Prosper, a site which lends to US-only borrowers. I lost 13.1% of my cash to defaults but that’s still a better performance than if I had invested in the S&P 500, which lost 16.3% of its value in that same time frame.

Overall I was impressed with the principle of microfinance but I think it works best when a community is involved from end to end. With only a brief profile to connect me via Kiva and an intermediary finance organization to the borrower, I felt like I didn’t know enough about the loans I was funding. Some borrowers are in states like Iraq, Kenya, and Lebanon where political unrest is a major concern, making me wonder where my money would really go.

In the time since I started lending with Kiva and Prosper, I established a Charitable Gift Fund with Fidelity Investments. I donate to this gift fund and Fidelity invests it in stocks for me. I can then take this money which may have appreciated in value and grant it to charities both local and global. Overall I think that the core idea of microfinance is sound: invest in local communities and everyone will benefit. I plan to continue my investment efforts in vehicles where I don’t need to see my money coming back to me directly, but rather in an improvement in my surroundings.

I’d planned a trip to the 2010 Olympics ever since I moved to Seattle in 2006. How many times am I going to be a brief train ride away from an international event like this? My train tickets were booked last March, I got in on the first wave of event ticket preorders, and Andrea got her first passport ever — after much red tape and lost sleep.

Much has been said about these Olympics, but I learned a lot about the games by actually going there.

The U.S. is a minority

I thought that the Olympic events would be popular among U.S. residents. It’s pretty easy to get to Vancouver from anywhere in North America. Even Seattle expected a flurry of tourists flying in to Sea-Tac Airport and traveling to Vancouver by land.

I saw arenas filled almost entirely with Canadian fans even when Canada wasn’t competing. In a men’s hockey prelim pitting the U.S. against Switzerland, Canadian jerseys outnumbered American and Swiss supporters combined. The fans sitting to our right in the last row of the upper deck were Vancouverites who cheered for the Swiss and, polite to a fault, apologized to us for doing so.

I wore USA shirts and a USA jacket and I carried a 3-by-5-foot American flag, thinking I’d be surrounded by compatriots. Instead I felt surprisingly outnumbered but still very welcome.

Tourists are sheep

We stayed in Kitsilano at an apartment within walking distance of Granville Island and within quick bus range of downtown. Our first reaction when we went out for dinner Saturday night: “Where is everybody?”

Walking around Kitsilano’s commercial strips of Broadway and 4th Avenue, you’d never know that hundreds of thousands of tourists are in town. Most Kitsilano restaurants had no lines at all, and at Trattoria Italian Kitchen, the one packed house, the crowd was entirely local. Vanier Park, just across False Creek from the downtown core, was very sparsely visited on a beautiful Friday afternoon.

On many streets downtown, foot traffic was at or below normal tourist levels. There were crushes of humanity at Robson Square, home of the BC Pavilion; on main tourist drag Robson Street; and around the Olympic cauldron and its infamous chain-link fence. The LiveCity pavilions, home of many free events, had 60-minute wait times to clear security, but we got free cheese and chocolate at the Italian House with virtually no wait at all. It really was feast or famine downtown, and once you got even a block off the beaten path it was shockingly lonely.

Protesters? What protesters?

It’s not surprising that with the Olympics in the Pacific Northwest, there are protesters who want their voices heard by a major crowd. Much was reported of an event on Saturday the 13th when a few protesters, including one from the Seattle area, smashed windows at the Hudson Bay Company and at a bank branch nearby. That damage was quickly repaired. Aside from that, social action was much more passive.

We spent a fair amount of time downtown during the day and never saw any masked anarchists waving signs or chanting slogans. We saw a single person handing out flyers near a small display of tents to demonstrate against Canada’s public housing policy. We read op-eds in the local paper accusing the indigenous First Nations peoples of selling out their culture for games being played on their land. In true Pacific Northwest style, most protesters were passive-aggressive in their approach.

If you get the opportunity to go to the games in London, Sochi, or Rio, seize it. Going to the Olympics is a once-in-a-lifetime event that you’ll remember forever.

Earlier in the summer, I jumped at the chance to preorder Windows 7 for $50. My Windows computer at home does very little besides play media, but I figured that Windows Vista wouldn’t be supported for very long. Fifty bucks isn’t that much to pay for an upgrade anyway; by contrast, I paid $130 to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 and another $25 to upgrade to 10.6 just a few years later.

I dutifully waited until after the World Series (recorded on my Windows media box) to install the upgrade. I inserted the Windows 7 disc into my Windows Vista PC while booted into Vista, as the instructions stated. When Windows 7 Setup asked me where I wanted to install the OS, I saw my first show-stopping error message: “Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition.” Binging this message brings up about 212,000 results. The error recurred even after I deleted my existing Windows Vista partition and tried to create another one. It turns out I had to boot into BIOS setup, change the boot order to make my hard disk second only to the CD/DVD drive, and return to Windows 7 Setup. (Note how this error message says nothing about changing one’s boot order.)

After continuing the installation, my product key wasn’t accepted. I re-entered it many times but in all cases, I wasn’t allowed to continue. In true Microsoft style, despite the lack of messaging indicating I could do so, I clicked “Next” to skip the product key step entirely.

The initial installation of Windows 7 looked and worked much like Vista with the added experience of completely broken video playback. After more Binging I found that I had to install a new video driver — from Intel’s site, not from Windows Update — to get video playback working again.

The problems with activation continued. Microsoft has a support site called Microsoft Answers, modeled after Yahoo! Answers, on which there are legions of questions concerning product keys not being accepted. The simple explanation is that Microsoft thinks I did a full install with an upgrade product, so my upgrade product key is not sufficient. Their official response to many of these questions: install your old OS and then upgrade again using a very specific set of steps. Well, my PC didn’t come with recovery CDs, only a recovery partition, and the only way to access that recovery partition is to burn CDs before wiping out the Windows installation that came with the PC! Sony will helpfully sell me a set of recovery discs for $48, almost what I paid for this Windows 7 upgrade.

There’s an interesting article called Clean Install Windows 7 with Upgrade Media by Windows übermensch Paul Thurrott. I didn’t try it because it seemed like a hack that Microsoft could eventually retaliate against, forcing people to activate again to receive Windows 7 Service Pack 1, for example. Imagine my surprise when a representative from Microsoft, using Easy Assist, used exactly this procedure to let me activate Windows 7 using my upgrade product key. I explicitly asked the rep whether he was doing this because I erased my old Windows partition during the install process, and he said yes with a defeated, “this is my 50th call about this today” tone to his voice.

Microsoft has finally allowed me to use the software that I paid for, and all it took was a wasted Saturday afternoon reading forums and 40 minutes on the phone. I can understand their reason for imposing activation on corporations with multiple licenses, but Microsoft’s lack of trust in their own end-user customers is really inappropriate. At this point I don’t care how great Windows 8 will be. If I have to go through that activation pain again, I’m sitting that next version out.

More recently, I’ve seen an even uglier side to this perverse flavor of democracy: because I put my phone number down right next to my candidate of choice, the local Democratic Party has decided to sell my information to all sorts of other organizations. I was okay when the party called me a dozen times on Election Day to get out the vote, but now I’m getting robocalls from “independent” organizations.

Here’s one robocall from “Qualified Leadership for Seattle,” a nebulous organization backed by four unions and local real estate überdeveloper Vulcan, Inc. Here’s another. Thanks to GrandCentral, which is now called “Google Voice,” for letting me record these telemarketing calls. I’ve received two other telemarketing calls on my Google Voice number, one of which is from “Qualified Leadership from Seattle,” in the last week. I’ve only given this number to take-out food places that expect a local phone number, to my landlord so that my intercom works, and to the Washington State Democratic Party.

Seattle, like King County and nearly all other counties in Washington, now votes entirely by mail, in private. Unsatisfied with letting neighbors fight each other for political superiority, the Washington State Democratic Party is now selling its voter information to shadowy organizations to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about leading Mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan, a T-Mobile executive. It’s unclear whether these organizations want voters to re-elect Mayor Greg Nickels, a man who believed Seattle ought not to clear snow from its streets in any effective way, or whether they want novelty environmentalist candidate Mike McGinn to win. All I get is negative rhetoric, and it’s my own fault for receiving the calls. There is no opt-out offered by the recordings I receive.

I’ve written to the Washington State Democratic Party requesting a halt to the phone calls. I’ve also sent recordings of the calls to Shaun Dakin, an anti-robocall activist who requested them of me via Twitter, who has circulated them more widely. Dakin runs the unofficial National Political Do Not Contact Registry (NPDNC), which aims to block political calls in the way the National Do Not Call Registry blocks non-political telemarketing calls. The NPDNC Registry has gathered little support so far, but I hope it becomes more useful as the backlash against robocalls accelerates.

Because they come from political organizations, these robocalls are still legal even though I’m on the National Do Not Call Registry. These slimy, shadowy callers are really making me think twice about caucusing again in Washington in 2012. Why exactly am I supposed to give up my phone number to vote?