Ladies (and men) with Earrings and Earbuds:

From time to time, I uncover some problem in this universe, and I'm pleased when my proposed solution creates new jobs, new work for people, and even new professions. I've done this before, and I might be about to do it again:

My concern is directed to those who love to wear lovely, dangly earrings. People, I hate to be the one to point out the obvious, but your earrings clash hideously with the cheap plastic cords that hang from your earbuds! Have you ever thought about how this clash demeans your excellent jewelry?

The next time you buy earrings, insist on matching earbuds and cords. Color coordination is everything these days, and despite whatever you've been thinking, earbuds are jewelry. I'm serious about this! As a confirmed geek, I hate to see any aspect of electronics detract from anyone's appearance.

Should I join GRUG? Or how about a RUG?

Noblestar has just invited me to join GRUG. Or, they suggest, I might even want to join a local RUG. I think these acronyms are right up there on the embarassment scale, so I hasten to share them with you. I guess they are memorable, anyway. "GRUG" is the Global Rational User Group, and the acronym makes sense when you consider that 'Rational' is a valuable tool for developing complex software. In this case, I plan to remain one of the Global Rational User Non-Group Egalitarians. Just see if I don't.

Construction; and flipping the ticket:

There's a lot of construction at the local University. I saw a sign today on a road that's normally two-way. It said: Warning: One Way Traffic Ahead. Drivers approaching the sign were laughing about having to guess which 'one way' the University had in mind, because there was no arrow.

And speaking of finding our direction, here's Frank Rich on Oct. 4, about how convenient it might be for the Republicans to flip McCain and Pailin, to get more votes. If you don't believe what I wrote about Sarah Palin last Thursday, please believe it now.

Shopping While Jersey:

Dear New York Mayor What'sYourName: I know that this is a difficult time for New York City. You can no longer count on a great flow of dollars from your Wall Street minions. You must want us New Jerseyans to come into New York and spend whatever we can. I specifically remember mayor Giuliani asking us to help out after 9/11.

But I'm also staring, in infinite sadness, at the “no standing” ticket for $105 dollars that was just mailed to me, for picking up my wife next to one of your fine stores. Your zealousness in enforcing parking regulations for brief stops is most shortsighted. My wife and I have lost almost all interest in shopping New York. We will spend our money in New Jersey, where most stores have places to park. Too bad for you! We are disgusted.

Palin in 2012 or 2016:

The pundits are trying to assess how well Sarah Palin did in the debate tonight, but I say: that's not the point. She has just shattered a glass ceiling, and American politics will never be the same. Whatever you think of a woman's credentials for high office, Palin reminded us that television just loves a pretty face. If Palin had more experience and understanding, just put her on TV and she would blow away most men in a presidential race. I'm not the only person who's figuring this out. Palin can spend the next four or eight years in training. She'll still look good, too. She, and a few other pretty women – smarter and more experienced women, I hope – will be the new candidates for president in the coming elections. I just hope and pray that their “TV faces” won't be their best qualifications.

Millionaires of our part of the world, Unite!

This would be an awfully good time for all those executives of Immense USA Companies -- who've earned millions of dollars per year in return for destroying our economy -- to get together and pool some of their dough into funds for rescuing people who can't pay their mortgages. These wonderfully rich people have at least a few weeks to act on their own before people who are losing their mortgages start to feel really nasty.

The failure of the first bailout vote in the House was blamed -- at least in part -- on people's visceral anger against giving these money-suckers any more money. But why should those rich people appear so awful to the public eye? Why aren't they forming very visible organizations to use some of their wealth to rescue some of their, ahem, victims?

Filthy rich people, where are you? Can't you afford to be generous right now? How long do you propose to ponder the question? You may not have a handy $700 billion among you, but you can make a difference.

Greatest Error Messages:

Technologizer had an article on what are claimed to be the 13 greatest error messages of all time. Some of my favorites are missing from the list, of course. The web 404 error is claimed as the most important error, since its ubiquitousness accompanied the world-wide spread of the web itself. I would put this message as a close second:

?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

That's what the control terminal at Three Mile Island displayed when the software was overwhelmed by error messages of a melt-down. I imagine the terminal operator shouting, "Can you be more specific?"

Here are two other messages that Technologizer somehow missed:

"Cannot execute as a child of Basic." (A mainframe error message to a programmer. Reported by Steve Weintraub.)

"There is an error somewhere between the beginning and the end of your program." (a Fortran Compiler message. Most developers know that this particular error is ALWAYS true, it need not be stated.)

Sue Zahmen:

In the 1940's and '50s, we used to send short messages across country for free. I'm talking about Ma Bell Telephone, not ham radio. When I learned about this communication medium, I was so traumatized that I've remembered it ever since. My aunts, stealing from the telephone company!

My two aunts had just flown across country for a visit. We picked them up at the airport and brought them home. Now, they wanted to advise family back on the west coast that they had arrived safely. Long distance calls cost real money in those days. But here's what they did: they placed a collect call. There was a certain etiquette to collect calls that the phone company required. You told the operator your name, the person you wanted to call, and the number to call. Then, while you remained online listening, the operator placed the call and asked, “Do you wish to accept a collect call from X?”

You were required to keep your mouth shut during this interchange. Shouting “It's Edna, I'm okay!” over the operator's question was right out. But my aunts used a well-worn tactic: They told the operator they wanted to call a fanciful person, a made-up name. That way, the people at the other end knew that everything was okay, and they refused to accept the collect call.

You might think that this made-up name was a signal agreed-upon in advance, but no. During the long flight, my aunts were expected to think up a name that would surprise and delight their relatives back west, while also, in some manner of word play, suggest that they had arrived okay, together. I blush to tell you the awful name they asked for on this occasion.

Toss the Pasta Sauce!

Bruce Schneier explains what's really wrong about having the TSA screen for jars of liquid, knitting needles, and the like. His post begins with a TSA agent finding a jar of pasta sauce in Schneier's luggage. He confiscates it and tosses it into a bin full of similar jars of liquids. Schneier does not even bother to state the obvious: if those jars were explosive, tossing another explosive jar into the mix ought to be catastrophic; but no one thinks for a moment that there's the slightest danger.

Schneier moves on to a surprising conclusion. Check him out.

Apple iPhone developers need a Union:

I could stud this blog entry with links, but I won't; you can easily check my facts if you wish. Apple opened the iPhone to third-party applications, making their phone terrifically different from all the other lame phones you can buy. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of developers are preparing apps for the iPhone. Some apps are amusing, some are useful. Some are free, some can make money for their developers, and -- of course -- for Apple.

But there's a catch. To keep the iPhione clean from viruses, malicious apps and disgusting content, Apple has to approve each app. I personally would not risk a few hundred development hours when Apple has the right to tell me "thanks but no thanks" at the very end of the process. But hundreds of software people have taken that risk, and reports are multiplying of what appear to be wholly unjustified rejections by Apple. And there's a common theme: if you want to know for sure why Apple rejected your app, so that you can fix it maybe, you're out of luck. Stare at those tea leaves, you might learn something.

Apple third party developers: you need to join together. Make a guild, or a union, to negotiate with Apple, to tell the whole world when Apple is unreasonable. You need clout. Or you need to forget the iPhone, and get a life.

The Prophet of Panamindorah:

Today I'm recommending an audio book to you that I am greatly enjoying. It's the first in a series. The series is: The Prophet of Panamindorah, and the first book is Fauns and Filinians. The author, Abigail Hilton, has imagined a wondrously complex world for the settings of her tales. It sprawls over time and place, even touching down in Florida. Her world is full of imaginary creatures that are fascinating for the listener to imagine. The action is fast and furious, and a sizable handful of characters comes alive in the constant political infighting and intrigues that pepper her tale. It's a really fun read. Click the picture above to hear the promo. Here's the Web Page for Book 1 at PodioBooks. And here's the author's Panamindorah website.

Thank you, Mr. Garbage Man!

My home 'office' has a plastic antistatic mat. It's old, it has been crumbling, and it was time to replace it. I got it out of my room and contemplated how to get rid of it. It was enormous, 45" by 53", and pretty thick. If I just dropped it at the curb, garbage men would never notice it, and it would kill grass.

With difficulty, I rolled it up enough to stick it into an empty garbage can. The plastic mat stuck out way above the top of the can, but at least it was in there. Garbage men are finicky; they know what they are supposed to pick up, what to ignore. Would they take it?

They did, at the first opportunity. Thank you, Mr. garbage man.

Password Problems:

This morning, during my regular radio broadcast, I tried to log in to Google Mail, but my password was not accepted. I tried several times, watching what I typed carefully, in mounting frustration and worry. I knew I was typing the right password! I prepared to tell Gmail that I had forgotten my password; I even made sure I could log into my backup email to receive a message from Google about my password. But then common sense set in. I had no idea what was going on, so I decided to wait until I got home, even though I badly wanted access to my email.

At about the same time, I noticed something else bizarre. I always enter data into a “playlist”, about each piece of music I play. Some of the radio station keyboard keys were producing funny characters with accent marks, instead of the normal punctuation I expected.

Eventually I put two and two together. I was unable to enter my password because the keyboard was in some weird foreign language mode. If I had managed to tell Google a new password, it wouldn't have worked at home. I saved myself a day's frustration by refusing to overreact and “fix” my password right away. And now, I'm reminding myself that passwords can fail due to keyboard issues. To see if I'm experiencing such an error, I can try entering the password in my login ID field, because that field does not have a mask, so I see what I type.

And that brings me to a topic I've mentioned before. It's not so great that password fields mask your input. Unless someone is standing over your shoulder or watching nearby, you are better off seeing the password you type, for many reasons. We almost never have that option.

Baseball: neutral site

Today, I have a few outrageous suggestions for Major League Baseball. First, it's time to do like football, and play the World Series at a neutral site, in a stadium that has either mild fall weather or a dome. The current playoff schedule has pushed the game dates too late, to a point where bad weather can ruin a good competition, washing away the players' pitching and fielding skills. And by the way, team fans will travel to see the series, just as football fans travel to the Superbowl. Using a neutral site will also improve publicity and ratings. Imagine a world series between, say, Milwaukee and Washington, played -- fortunately -- in Los Angeles.

Playing the series at a neutral location eliminates travel dates. The series can be played in seven straight days, or maybe with one rest day after game four. The current format, with two rest days, over-emphasizes good front-line pitching. To get into the playoffs, a team needs a good complete staff, but winning the series requires maybe three fine starters, a closer and two setup pitchers. Fewer rest days will make the series a whole-team affair. I really want to see the hide-bound leaders of basball wake up and make this change.

Fire the Boss ...

John Dvorak's blog pointed to a column by Robert X. Cringely. It's a fascinating column that intelligently covers several topics, but eventually it focuses on how to improve an IT organization while cutting it. His solution is to fire the (likely incompetent) boss.

Cringely reminds me of a time in my career where I and my boss audited a large software organization. We eventually brought a lot of bad news to the vice president of software development at that company, including the fact that the programmers were a C+ group. (He had thought they were A- at least.) His organization was not producing, and hardly anyone realized how far behind schedule they were. He asked us how to improve his organization. We couldn't bear to tell him: he had to go. This was just one more case where you could only improve the group from the top down.

Imagine a really fine programmer coming to interview at this company. They desperately want to hire him, to improve their staff. But he sees that if he takes a job here, he'll be working for incompetent management. He sees that his coworkers won't be very competent, and their work will make his own work more difficult. He could hardly miss all the signs we saw. He won't take the job. When an organization is a mess, you can't fix it from the bottom up.

I just offered Ed Felton Five Dollars:

Ed Felton has a fascinating new argument about the value of privacy. He looks at situations where people are willing to give away their privacy for very small compensation. Traditionally, experts argue that such actions show that people don't value their privacy. Ed argues differently: If you know that your birth date is readily available, you will probably be willing to sell it to someone for very little. Ed says that if people sell their personal details readily and cheaply, they are showing that they believe their private details are already poorly protected, and thus worth little.

I wonder how Ed values his privacy, especially where security is involved. So I just offered Ed Felton five dollars for the right to publish information about a specific time period when his house will be unoccupied. (You'll see my offer among the comments to his argument.) I'm making a sincere offer, and I really don't know whether Ed will go for it.

I Gave Blood!

In my life, I've given over eight gallons of blood. But for the last five or so years, I was on a “permanently deferred” list, for alternately failing and passing one of their precautionary blood tests.

Many medical tests are quantitative. You run a test that produces some sort of score, and people decide that a certain score is a pass or fail. They set the scores to minimize either false positives or false negatives, whichever is most awful. In the case of keeping the blood supply clean, false positives are less serious. The blood bank doctor who stopped me from giving blood was frank about this. My test was borderline, but two borderline fails and I was out.

About five years went by, and I passed the test yet again. I started thinking – after all this time, maybe the test has become more precise. I applied to the blood bank again to be allowed to give blood. The doctor agreed that the test had become more accurate and was happy to retest me one more time, and I passed.

Today was the glorious day when I went to the familiar blood room, and observed all the procedures that had stayed the same, and all the procedures that had changed. It was a triumph for me, but also a day of great nostalgia. I have only a few more years to give blood before I'm too old, but I might get to the ten gallon mark.

Here's one of the things that has changed since I last gave blood: Afterwards, the technician placed the usual bandage over the spot where she had drawn blood. She said “Be careful to bend your elbow as little as possible. There's no inflammation there now, but if you bend it a lot, there will be.”
I whined, “How do you remember not to bend your elbow?”
“Oh,” she said, “I just told you that to make me feel better.”

The Intelligently Designed Game of Spore:

Will Wright's game of Spore will be released this Friday and Sunday. The game has had great publicity, and it will rank among the most popular computer games for years. Spore features a faux simulation of evolution, incorrect in many respects; yet it will give its players a sense of how evolution can work. In the game, a few simple rules govern how creatures can evolve. Hordes of people have been tinkering with the game's initial evolution machine, and they have produced a prodigious variety of creatures.

Now here's what interests me:

Kids who are anti-evolutionists will play this game. Children of proponents of Intelligent Design will play this game. Anti-evolutionist grown-ups will play this game. How will it affect their perception of evolution? If you do not believe in evolution, what will you say about this game?

You might just diss Spore, or even try to ban it. Or you might claim that what happens in this game is actually a form of Intelligent Design. But there's no getting around the fact that the game will familiarize people with evolution. And once you get the hang of it, there may be no going back. And don't forget, Spore will be taught in the schools -- informally, even though it's not part of the curriculum -- it's going to be the main topic of discussion for a lot of gamers, for months.

He stole my lane!

The pool where I lap-swim has five lanes. The most convenient lane, for those of us with bad backs and bad knees, is the one next to the steps leading down into the pool. Yesterday that lane was free, so I came down those steps and started splashing cold water on my head, preparing to take the plunge.

Just then a big old fellow descended the steps and swam away, in MY LANE! I was furious with him. It's easy for two people to share a lane, but he didn't ask, and anyway there were two empty lanes.

We're all club members here, so there's no point making fuss. I shifted to the next lane and started to swim.

When you're swimming many laps, you need something to think about, to make time fly. Boredom is the enemy of any repetitive exercise. Well I had something to think about this time! As I swam my first laps, I kept glancing at my interloper, and mentally grumbling. But an unexpected thing happened: he swam to the far end; he swam back to the stairs; he walked out of the pool and departed, after less than three minutes in the water.

I swiched lanes, even though I had to "break stride" to do it. I wanted my lane back!

Changing Horses in Midstream:

I started to call the Princeton Medical Center. Here's what their contact page says:

1.888.PHCS4YOU (1.888.742.7496)

Those letter-mnemonics are easier to remember, but harder to dial. I had dialed 1.888.PHCS4 when I noticed the numbers in parenthesis. Just in time, I resisted the urge to dial -496, because I realized that the two numbers are different!!! I'm sure they both work. But I've never before seen an all digit phone number paired with a "letter-heavy" phone number, where they weren't the same. I finished my dialing with -YOU. Weird.

By the way, I'm okay.

Hopper Site Endangered! So what?

A New York Times story today reports that new construction on Cape Cod (Truro, Mass) may endanger, even obliterate, a barren view that may have inspired some of Edward Hopper's paintings. Here's the story. A couple plans to build a mansion in the way, and some of the neighbors are complaining. But if you take the idea of protecting such views to their natural extreme, it's ridiculous.

Now I must admit that protecting scenery that has inspired artists might have its good side. Consider David Roberts, whose many, many paintings of Jerusalem and its surrounds are well-known. Preserving all the views that inspired him would imply allowing only about 1,000 people to live within ten miles of Jerusalem. I have no idea how that would affect Middle-Eastern politics, but surely the effect would be profound.

Thanks goodness Rembrandt never found time to come to Manhattan and paint its lovely rural landscapes; we might have had to preserve those scapes even today. Remember the Red Apple's motto: If you can make it here, then Rembrandt must have failed to paint what you're building over.

And what of El Greco's View of Toledo? How much of Toledo do we need to rip down to restore the view that inspired him? And then there's Vermeer's View of Delft. If any artist's inspired view was ever worth preserving, this one is it.

Would I like to buy another watch?

Amazon.com has software at its web site that tries to figure out what I might want to buy. It gives me lots of suggestions. I remember when I bought a really abstruse programming book on general search patterns. Amazon told me that people who bought this book also bought ... the first three Harry Potter books.

Right now, Amazon's recommendation logic has gotten quite annoying. I recently bought a watch. Now, I'm getting email suggestions for great watch bargains. The suggestions are well-targeted to me, except that – Hello?? Amazon?? I HAVE a watch. How many do I need?

Dear Amazon, please suggest more watches to me, in about six years. I might need one by then.

Year-2006 Technology:

A recent ad from Dell computer told me that they are giving away prizes in an online contest. They invited me to enter the contest every day to the end of September. I thought that would be a good idea. Entering the contest took five minutes, with a lot of lines to fill out. That does it, I thought. I'm not entering this contest again, too much work.

Two minutes later I got an Email informing me that I had won one of their fifth prizes, a PowerVault RD1000. Now if you're a lot like me, you would naturally have two thoughts:

1. Isn't it nice to get instant notification that you've won something?
2. What the heck is a PowerVault RD1000?

The latter question turned out to be very interesting, since Dell has chosen to use one identifying symbol for a vast line of products. I exchanged many emails with their prize people, and eventually discovered that I had won a backup disk system consisting of a chassis with a USB interface, and an 80/160MB cartridge. (Let's just call it an 80MB cartridge, because the higher number refers to the estimated drive size if you compress everything.)

Now it happens that I recently decided I need 160MB of disk drive backup for my audio files. There's a very sweet recent product that's portable and handy, the Western Digital Passport USB drive. (Several other companies, such as Iomega, make similar drives.) My first reaction was great joy; I did not have to buy that drive, I would use my prize instead.

Except ...

Well first of all, note that the prize drive is half the space I think I need. Disk Cartridge prices are very high for the RD1000, and prices for the Passport drive are remarkably low. The bottom line here is that disk drive prices drop very, very fast over time. The RD1000, a year-2006 product, cannot easily compete with newer disk drives. Now I'm obligated to pay taxes on my prize if I receive it, and its estimated value is $299. The tax on this drive compares closely with the price of newer disk drives, and the newer drives are likely to be more convenient to carry around and use on multiple systems.

This is the most valuable prize I've ever won in a contest, and I turned it down. I'm going to buy a 160MB drive instead.

Counting to a Billion:

In 1964, I wrote many programs for an IBM 7094 mainframe. This was a wonderful machine. It could hold 160,000 characters in its memory, although some of that memory was reserved for hold a small operating system. It could add two numbers together in just over one microsecond. We made that 7094 leap and dance in many different ways.

In those days, you submitted your programming "job" as a deck of punched cards. Some hours later, your card deck, and the computer output, appeared in an "output bin." There was one bin for every letter of the alphabet, because a lot of people submitted jobs to that one mainframe. Operators ran the decks through the computer as fast as they could. Some jobs, of course, took longer than others.

One day my wife and I were talking about counting up to large numbers. One way a growing child discovers mortality is through the realization that in one's entire life, there are numbers you cannot count up to. Counting "one, two, three, four, etc., ... one billion" is right out. That's when I noted that our 7094 could count to a billion in less than an hour. Wow!

Pretty soon we decided to do it. The only drawback was that computer time for the entire university was precious, so I did not want anyone to know what I was doing. If the computer sat in a tight loop adding one to a running total for a thousand seconds, I would probably be caught and banished from the engineering center. So I wrote a program that ran for less than two minutes. The program read in a punch card to tell it what number to start counting from, and it punched a card at the end of the run to use as input to the next run. I submitted my program once or twice a day, and proudly saved all the outputs for years.

After a few few days of these runs -- we might have been up to 403,682 or so -- Tony, the head operator, took me aside.
"You've got a funny program that sits there for two minutes and seems to do nothing. Are you sure it doesn't have a bug?"
"I'll take a look at it," I said, thankful I hadn't quite been busted. I knew I had to change the program so that it looked busy. The problem was that it sat in a tight "add one" loop, so the program counter LED display on the computer console did not change, and the other displays that showed computer activity did not change either.

I modified the program. I made it hundreds of instructions long -- most of them "add one" instructions. But among the adds, I sprinkled computer instructions to make all of the console lights turn on and off. My modified program escaped criticism, and it actually counted faster. The 7094 had "lookahead logic", and it was able to process about 1.5 of my addition instructions at once. (The simpler program, in its three instruction loop, prevented any "lookahead" from occurring.)

So: we counted to a billion. Pretty neat!

Cars are getting too quiet?

Scientific American has an article by Sarah Simpson, with a new worry about hybrid cars. You may not have begun to worry about this one yet. The question is, are hybrid cars too quiet to be safe for pedestrians? The article takes a "wait and see" posture. If you were reading my blog four years ago, you know that for me, car engines became dangerously quiet 56 years ago. With my passion for biking through intersections by relying on sound alone to tell me if they were empty, I was lucky to survive the quieter engines that Detroit turned out in 1952.

I'm over the hump on this issue. Bring on the quieter cars, and - maybe - quieter towns and cities as well.

Free Business Cards:

I ordered some simple business cards so that I could show people how to find my novel online. I was attracted to an ad for 250 "free" business cards. I knew they couldn't be free. I guessed the trick was that they would have a high shipping charge. Little did I know.

First, the website walked me through a design of my card. That was very nice. Then we started the ordering process. Would I like more cards, or better paper, or address labels to go with the cards, or magnets, or pens? All these items were customized to the design I had chosen. There were dozens of optional categories, pages of addiitonal options. Would I like a rubber stamp? Would I like to buy some magazines while I was at it? Would I like printing on the back of the card? Would I like faster shipping?

And last, but not least, get this: Would I like a fully functional, customizable website, designed to match the business card? What an incredible option! I resisted temptation over and over. (Frankly, I think it makes more sense to buy business cards to match my website, not the other way round.)

Shipping was $5.45. I definitely have to explain about shipping. For $5.45, they proposed to take TWENTY-ONE DAYS to ship the cards to me. Shipping times that you would call "reasonable" cost more. Twenty-one days, that's slow shipping. The temptation to pay more for fast shipping was very great, but I figured I could wait them out. I thought it was just a bluff. After all, how do you make a shipment take 21 days, send it around the world by rickshaw?

I purchased these 'free' cards on July 22. On July 31, VistaPrint notified me that the cards have shipped. The cards arrived August 9. I knew it! I called their bluff. That's a lot better than 21 shipping days, and they look good.

Over and Over ...

In Willam Goldman's novel Boys and Girls Together, there's a writer named Adam who has to decide which he should write first: the great American novel, or a potboiler that will make him rich. He decides to do the potboiler first, and there's a mighty painful scene where his publisher's agent tells him he absolutely won't publish the book.

Maybe Adam was lucky. I'm currently recording my novel as an audio book. I did not see this coming, but the main effect of this effort is that I have to read it, and hear it, over and over. I read each page three times before recoding it, and I may record some scenes many times to get them right. After listening to, and editing, every sentence, I listen to the final cut. When the final cut is okay, I submit it to PodioBooks. They modify my tracks a little, adding an intro and an outro. I have to listen to their modified version to make sure it hasn't been munged. Their copying process is excellent, but in fact they have had to apply it to my chapters three times, which means I get to hear each chapter three more times.

I can't imagine how awful I'd feel by now if I didn't actually enjoy listening to what I wrote. No potboilers for me!

2-way, 3-way, 4-way, 5-way, all-way!

For many years I enjoyed stopping at 4-way stop signs, and their less common 3- and 5-way siblings. (In case any of you have missed it, the idea of these signs is that everybody stops at the intersection; each car enters the intersection in the order that the cars arrived.)

Now, I'm seeing “all-way” stop signs. These are clearly an improvement over the other signs because they solve a manufacturing problem: you make all your signs the same, instead of guessing how many you will need for each of 3, 4 and 5-way intersections. Guessing how much of each option to stock is a bane of marketing and manufacturing.

So why didn't the signs always say “all-way”? Perhaps it took a genius to think of this simplification, but I think that what we see here is an incremental improvement, where the two steps were required. I'm guessing that, thirty years ago, signs saying “all-way” would not have made as much sense. When you know that these signs are replacing the 4-way (etc.) signs, it's obvious what they mean.

Who Died Today?

When I was young, I found it morbid and bizarre that my parents read the obituaries in the New York Times. Many of their friends did, too. Several of them assured me that I, too, would read the obits when I got older.

Son-of-a-gun, they were right. I'm spellbound by the big stories of excellent people who have died, and I'm happiest when they die at ages thirty years and more beyond mine. And of course I always keep an eye peeled for a familiar name. You never know, these days.

Demonstrating against the high cost of gasoline:

As the price of gas rose, there were protests against the new high prices, especially by truckers and those whose livelihood is directly affected. Unless you believe that there's some sort of conspiracy to raise gas prices, you're liable to feel, as I do, that such protests are useless. For example, imagine that a day comes whmn there are a thousand gas gallons left in the entire world; what would be the point of protesting their price?

Nonetheless, there is a situation where protests against high gas prices make sense, and I believe that such demonstrations have already occurred in Europe. We have to mix one more ingredient into the stew: a high tax on gas. Many people believe that high gas taxes force people to conserve, and are thus beneficial. But in a country with high gas taxes, why not protest to lower them, when the price of gas arcs up? I think it's ironic that a well-intended effort to force gas conservation can foster well-intended gas price protests.

Soap Dish Slides in Motels:

You probably all have had this experience, unless you prefer liquid soap: You're staying in hotel where the shower/bath enclosure is all one gigantic piece of plastic. That enclosure includes a little soap dish, maybe two, that was designed by a sadist. Put your bar of soap there, and it slides right down onto the bathtub floor.

I made many infuriating attempts to balance the soap perfectly before giving up. It fell to the floor every time. What crazy person designed those soap dishes?

But at last I found a solution that I'm happy to share with you. Wet a washcloth, fold it up, and you can balance that on the soap dish. Then put your soap on the washcloth.