Lowell Deeds

Tis the season for leftovers, right…so here’s a few techie things I thought about blogging on but had too many other things on my plate.

Last week Microsoft released its new music player called Zune and industry experts are already predicting a battle of the giants…the other giant being the Apple iPod, of course. The Zune got off to a quick start grabbing 9% of the US market in its first week of sales. Some believe the Zune is an iPod slayer…as for me, I’ll believe it when I see it. Every kid and adult I know wants an iPod for Christmas (that includes me).

New York, New York…Later today in New York Microsoft will announce the release of its new (and long awaited) Vista Operating System…but don’t go heading to your favorite tech store at midnight tonight to get your copy…it is available for only business customers?… As for me, I believe the day of the stagnant,box style, operating system is quickly coming to an end…and Microsoft knows it.

Got a question???? Well, Google doesn’t have the answer anymore. The search behemoth decided to abandon its “answer service”. Here is how it worked…You asked your question through Google and a researcher looked up the answer for you…of course, Google charged a fee depending on the amount of time it took to find the answer…as for me, I checked it out once. It didn’t do much for me and…Google’s Internet search is so effective you can find the answer to about any question you want FREE, so why pay for it.

A new study done by the University of Southern California says that 21% of adults think their children are on the Internet too much…I remember growing up hearing experts say kids were watching too much TV… As for me, I would rather have a kid on the Internet than in front of the boob tube watching The Adventures of Davy Crockett.

OK…I’m done with them…I’m throwing the rest of the leftovers out…

Yesterday I journeyed to Concord, New Hampshire to visit the Merrimack County Registry of Deeds, the one office in our neighbor to the north that has been doing electronic recording. Kathi Guay, the Register of Deeds, was kind enough to show me around the registry, to arrange for an electronic recording to arrive while I was there, and to discuss some of the “big picture” issues that I’ve been struggling with. Perhaps the most prominent of those issues right now is what I call the “recording gap,” that is, the time between a remote customer does a final rundown on the registry website and presses the “send to register” button and the time at which the registry actually records the document. That time is certainly not excessive. It’s often only a few minutes. But how do we address those few documents that might get on record during those few minutes? In New Hampshire, they give incoming electronic recordings top priority. If you are a walk-in customer with a document and the clerk has already commenced recording your document, when an electronically submitted document arrives, everything stops until the electronic recording is processed. The objective is to promote greater use of electronic recording by making that “gap” as narrow as possible. While I don’t think I’ll adopt that system completely, I do think a modified version of it is how we should operate. I envision us having a separate terminal for processing electronic recordings. When one arrives, an employee immediately begins processing it at that terminal, regardless of how many customers are waiting in line. Other clerks will continue to take those customers at the regular recording terminals, it’s just that electronic recordings will potentially jump in front of them. That’s a reasonable concession because the walk-in customer continues to have the benefit of the existing “look back” feature and can abort a recording right up until the registry clerk presses the “record” button. And that’s exactly how it works with documents received by mail and courier right now. More on this topic to come . . .

The Middlesex South Satellite Office is on the move…and it should happen sometime next week. All week long we have been shuffling furniture and computers up and down the registry’s hallways. Yesterday, the new copy area was arranged, re-arranged, re-arranged again and finally connected. Today, our MIS director intends to set up and test south public access terminals and cashiering stations. We expect this to go smoothly…We hope to make the change over seamless with as little interuption to the public as possible…The plan is to keep recording, search and printing capabilities operational in both the old and new satellite locations…basically run a parallel system for at least one day…I am not sure how much of the reoragnization will be accomplish on Thursday and Friday (last and first day of the month) of this week. The move has a number of objectives… customer convenience and department efficiency. Streamlining these departments means eliminating seldom used equipment and re-allocating staff. One major change from our original plan involves the Secretary of State’s Corporation computer and the computer connected to other registries. Both of these have been moved to the hallway outside of Registered Land. Another major change…The 3M Printer/Reader used to make plans will be moved to what is now the Middlesex South Office…yes, you will still be able to purchase copies made from this machine.

As more and more information becomes available online, libraries are making radical changes in how they operate in an effort to stave off extinction. Saturday’s Globe featured a story on the transformation of UMass Amherst’s W.E.B. Du Bois library. Dominating the UMass skyline, this 28-story structure formerly held 3 million volumes and assorted other tangible documents, but shrinking usage compelled the library to alter the services it offers. A café, 200 public computer terminals and even “cell phone privacy booths” have replaced many of the dusty stacks of books and papers that have been moved to off site storage. The results are positive, as usage of the library is up 27% this year. To survive in the digital age, it seems, libraries must go from places to get books to places to get information (and human contact, apparently). This also illustrates our societal need to have what is commonly called “a third place.” In this construct, the first two places are work and home, but there is a need for another spot, a third place, where human contact and a good cup of coffee are readily available. With our recent movement of thousands of record books into storage as a strategy for making more space available to both our employees and our customers, we here at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds are quite interested in following the experience of other institutions as they navigate the path from the paper to the digital age.

Today’s Globe contains a story about a growing backlog of “foreclosure filings” at the Massachusetts Land Court. The court attributes the delay to several factors including a rise in overall foreclosures, a temporary shortage of employees at the court and a clunky computer system. I can’t address the second and third factors, but based on statistics at this registry, I can confirm that the incidence of foreclosures continues to rise. Comparing the number of foreclosure deeds filed here makes this quite clear. In all of November 2005, only one foreclosure deed was filed; in November 2004 there were 2; in November 2003 there were 3. So far for this November, there have been 22 foreclosure deeds filed. In fact, the total number of foreclosure deeds filed thus far in 2006 – 153 of them – is more than three times as many as were filed in all of 2005 (47). So there’s still no sign of an easing of the housing market’s slide. At the end of next week, we’ll post the official figures for the entire month of November.

Here is my top ten list of little-known “Pilgrim/orginial Thanksgiving” facts…

Number 10…Turkey wasn’t the only fowl the Pilgrims ate on the first Thanksgiving… They also ate Duck, Goose, Swan and Crane…(Swan?… Hey, it probably tastes like chicken).

Number 9…The first Thanksgiving lasted three days…(now that’s alot of thanking).

Number 8…The Pilgrims celebrated Thanksgiving with the Wampanoag Indians. The Wampanoag chief was Massasoit.

Number 7…The Pilgrims didn’t use forks… they ate with spoons, knives and their fingers (no paper plates either).

Number 6…The best foods at the feast were placed near the most important people (“hey, can I sit near Chief Massasoit”).

Number 5…There were no pies at the first Thanksgiving, but there were other desserts (”Miles, would you please pass the mousse?”…”no, the chocolate one, not the one with the antlers”).

Number 4…The original Thanksgiving occured sometime between September 21 and November 11 (and since it was a three day event I’ll bet it was a long weekend).

Number 3…William Bradford was the governor of Massachusetts at the time of the first Thanksgiving

Number 2…The Pilgrims originally left England headed for the Hudson River in NY, but ended up in Cape Cod (I guess they didn’t use Yahoo Maps?).

And…
the Number One little-known fact about the original Thanksgiving is…
The morning of the first Thanksgiving the Plymouth Pilgrims played a friendly game of touch football against Yarmouth and lost 7-0.

Happy Thanksgiving

In many fields, Microsoft’s PowerPoint has become the standard means of conveying information to an audience. While I find this application to be quite useful, it does have its critics. The biggest complaints are that it tends to “dumb down” the information presented. Each slide can hold only so much text, data or images and users tend to simply read what’s written on the slides as if its some kind of teleprompter that’s aimed at the audience. In doing this, many speakers tend to face the screen and place their backs to the crowd. As a means of poking fun at this phenomenon and of lodging a valid critique, someone has imaginged what the Gettysburg Address (delivered 143 years ago just this past Sunday) would be like in PowerPoint.

I found last week’s Mass GIS Day very enjoying (GIS states for Geograpic Information System). Over thirty agencies attended the event sponsored by MassGIS. Each vendor demonstrated their unique use for the state’s mapping system. The wide range of uses employed by these agencies truly amazed me. State and local agencies use GIS in Crime Prevention, Economic development, Election results, Climate analysis, Education, Property Assessing etc. I spoke with a number of people at the event, but two conversations stand out in my mind…One was with a representative from the town of Concord, MA. He explained that his department overlays plans from the registry of deeds onto the town’s assessor maps. When you click on the assessor parcel an image of the registry plan is displayed. I loved it. I also talked to someone from the Merrimack Valley Planning Commission. They use GIS to attract businesses to “the Valley”. They have plotted every commercial parcel in their area. Zoning information, land characteristics, building size and construction traits are available with the click of a mouse. If a business in Texas is looking to relocate to the Merrimcak Valley they can virtual shop online. I congratulate the people from Mass GIS for a well run informative event.

Yesterday’s GIS Day at the State House included a short speaking program. Here’s what I had to say:

Twelve years ago when I first took office, I inherited a brand new state of the art Wang imaging system complete with an optical disk jukebox for the storage of scanned images. We added so many images so quickly that we quickly needed a new jukebox. The cost of 40 GB of storage was $40,000, a fact that never fails to bring a smile to the face of anyone who realizes today that five times that amount of storage can be had for less than the cost of a reserved grandstand ticket at Fenway Park.

This story exemplifies how rapid changes in the cost of electronic storage and the ready availability of hi-speed Internet service has revolutionized the record storage business. Today, every document at the registry – all 10 million pages reaching back to 1631 – are now scanned and available online.

This technological transformation has completely changed how the registry of deeds operates and is organized. The center of gravity of the registry of deeds is now our website, www.lowelldeeds.com. Today, everything that can be done at the registry can be done on our website, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

Technology has completely transformed the way we perform our traditional mission. The great challenge we face is one of imagination because technological advances have also presented us with opportunities to do much, much more than ever before. Our business right now is like a jigsaw puzzle that’s just come out of the box. Each of our offices is like a piece of that puzzle. We operate on our own, but if we can figure out how to fit all the pieces together, we will complete the puzzle to the great benefit of society. Like the puzzle just out of the box, much of the cost has already been paid. All that’s needed is our vision, our imagination and, as those of you who do puzzles know full well, a great deal of persistence.

Thank you to MassGIS and to all the other participants for organizing this event. To continue my puzzle analogy, this is like looking at the picture on the front of the box. We’ve got a glimpse of what the end product should look like, now we have to do the tough work of fitting those pieces together. I look forward to joining with you on this project.

Today is GIS Day in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. MassGIS, the state’s geographic mapping agency, is sponsoring a terrific event here at the Great Hall of the State House. More than thirty exhibitors from local, regional and state level governmental entities have come together to display the latest in GIS in the Commonwealth. Besides illustrating the benefits of GIS to folks at the State House, this gathering has provided a unique opportunity for the participants to share ideas and collaborate on projects. In the four hours we’ve been here, we have discussed linking our registry data with maps and photos at MassGIS and with assessor data at various city and town halls within our district. Tomorrow’s post will elaborate on some of these plans, so please check back.

This morning the Boston Globe ran an article on Foreclosure filings in Massachusetts. Normally, I would jump on this as a perfect topic for today’s blog…but the mashup map used by the Globe in this article impressed me more than the statistics. This is the second well thought-out, informative mashup the Globe has used in the past week. Last week the results of the governor’s race were depicted on a map listing voting tallies in every community in Massachusetts. It was a wonderful tool for political junkies (like me) to analyze the race. Oh yeah, the foreclosure stats… according to ForeclosuresMass.com filings in Massachusetts increased by 54% in the first nine months of 2006…and urban areas such as Lawrence, Lowell and Lynn had more filings per 10,000 people than suburban areas… But…check out the map…it’s great.

Anyone who has used the ACS computer system (now in place in 13 registries) both at a registry and on Internet knows that they are two very different systems. The in-registry version, for example, displays document images alongside indexing data. On the website, those things happen sequentially. In either place, it’s usually a good idea to start with a broad rather than a narrow search. For example, if you’re looking for documents in the name “John H Jones Jr” you should probably search “Jones, John” which will yield all combinations that include those two names. At the registry, the results will all show up on the same screen with “Jones, John” followed by “Jones, John H” followed by “Jones, John H Jr.” You just scroll down to see all the results. On the website, however, you see each of these names followed by a number indicating the number of documents in that particular set. Most people find the in-registry version much more user friendly. But with more of our users searching our records on the Internet, we’d like to find out what features or functionality that exist on the in-registry version should be added onto the website version. I’ll be working on this over the next few weeks, so if you have anything you’d like to contribute, please use the “contact us” button on the www.lowelldeeds.com site to send along your thoughts.

All things must change… I have no problem with that, but did the Federal Government have to decide to change the Citizenship Test the week after I blogged about it? Why? you ask… If you took the test I posted on November 8 you’d know. It is made up of trivia questions that mainly test your ability to memorize facts. It seems the Feds finally realized that if a person knows the year the US Constitution was written it has nothing to do with what type of citizen he/she will make. For this reason the Office of Citizenship and Immigration has decided to change the test. According to office spokesperson Shawn Saucier “The new test is designed to encourage immigrants to really look at our history and government, and what we value as a society” (sounds like a good idea to me). The new examine won’t be administered nationwide until 2008. In the meantime a pilot program will be started to “test the test”. The city of Boston has agreed to take part in this pilot program. Boston officials expect to begin using the new examine early in 2007. But… I must admit, I love trivia questions…in fact, how about one for old times sake? Who was the seventeenth president of the United States? (Hint… Lincoln was the sixteenth).

Tomorrow is Veterans Day. As you go about your activities on what forecasters are predicting will be another wonderful day, weather-wise, please take a few moments to consider the meaning of the holiday. The overall population of Massachusetts is roughly 6.4 million people, placing it 13th in population rank. There are 490,000 veterans living in Massachusetts, placing it 18th in veteran population rank. In 2006, there are 24.5 million veterans living in the United States. Of them, 9.5 million are 65 or older and 1.7 million are women. World War I ended at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918. Congress made November 11 a national holiday (Armistice Day) in 1938. In 1954, Congress changed the name of the holiday to Veterans Day as a way to honor all American veterans.

“Draft N” is shorthand for a new WIFI format with the official name of 802.11N. The N standard is potentially ten times as fast as the current standard (802.11G) and has four times the ranges. While the N standard hassn’t been formally adopted yet, many companies are beginning to sell equipment that utilizes it. Equipment that uses the N standard will still be able to communicate with the G standards so a new piece of equipment won’t require replacement of the entire wireless network. As I understand WIFI, it’s just like a two-way radio. The signal goes through space from the router to the computer and from the computer back to the router. While the power of the N equipment will allow it to reach out to a maximum range of 1400 feet (G equipment’s max range is 300), few people sit more than four football fields away from their router. The real benefit of this powerful signal is that it will push through walls and ceilings to allow greater wireless connectivity within buildings and offices. Of course, this signal strength comes with a price. More people who aren’t supposed to be on your network will be able to receive its signal, giving greater opportunity to hackers to tap into your network.