Inflation!

On a nearby store with “Dollar” in its name, a sign said: All Items: $1.00 and up.
It wasn't even telling the truth. Most items in the store were $1.19 or $1.38, but you could buy candy for 69 cents.

Another Leak, the worst so far:

You're probably talking about this terrible security disaster already: the largest database leak ever. Arweena, a spokes-elf for Santa Claus, admitted a few hours ago that the database posted at WikiLeaks yesterday is indeed the comprehensive 2009 list of which kids have been naughty, and which were nice. The source of the leak is unclear. It may have come from a renegade reindeer, or it could be the work of a clever programmer in the Ukraine. Either way, it's a terrible black eye for Santa. Arweena promised that in the future, access to this database would be restricted on a “need to know” basis. And you know who that means!

The size of this database is astounding; it's not just for Christians. Abu Dhabi and India have registered official protests over the inclusion of their children in the comprehensive worldwide listings; And there have been howls of outrage everywhere about the inclusion of sixteen and seventeen year-olds. Santa's list is an inexcusable invasion of privacy for teenagers everywhere.

The myriad of inaccuracies (see Cory Doctorow's critique at Boing Boing) makes matters much worse. The majority of the children are accurately identified by their age, addresses, birthdates and (where possible) national identification numbers. All United States kids with Social Security numbers are now sharing their identities with the whole world. But in some cases, and for a few countries, the kids are identified by name alone. Aristotle Makektikutis, a thirteen year old Athenian, insists he is not the Aristotle Makektikutis in Santa's Greek records whose naughty deed is listed as “pollution.” His parents have issued a statement that their son does not even know how to pollute.

But it gets worse. In fact, this reporter thinks that any sober assessment of Santa's database can come to only one conclusion: it never should have been, and it should never be again. The mistakes! Jane Doe (actual name withheld), who is fully identified in the database and stands accused of “weak morals” is actually twenty-six, not eleven as shown in Santa's data record. Jane Doe has had to disappear into the FBI witness protection program to hide from the crowd of men seeking her company. Frequent age errors in the database mean that grown men and women who used their social security numbers as banking passwords are now losing their life savings. This outrage cannot go on.

Pity the poor Predators and their handlers:

Today's scandal concerns the revelation that our terrorist enemies have been intercepting the video that unmanned Predator airplanes transmit to our forces on the ground. It sounds like a terrible black eye for our military that this “hacking” has been going on. (By the way, this is not actually “hacking,” any more than watching TV in your home is “hacking”.) Our enemies need little more than a laptop and a very cheap program to record the video. And many, many hours of Predator surveillance have been discovered on enemy laptops.

I think there's a lot of nonsense in the way the media is reporting this story. I've had a lot of time to think about this encryption issue, because I have been working on another program that transmits video to the ground. (I do not have any government clearance; I have no special knowledge of the Predator program, and I am not about to give away any secrets. Let's just talk sense here.) There are costs to using encryption, even if encryption had been instituted on Predators from Day One. There are costs to having the Predator's video intercepted, and I suspect that these costs are being overhyped. I hope that our military analysts choose a sensible reaction to this monitoring problem, rather than a 'move-plot” reaction (by assuming the fantastically worst possible outcome).

First, let's consider the costs of operating an encrypted system. Today's powerful computers can probably encrypt and decrypt a video stream on the fly, so that there will be no delay in using the video on the ground. That may not have been the case when the current Predator design was approved. It's possible that encryption was not included from day one because adding this feature would have made the program much more difficult, delayed it, and made it less useful.

Today, as the media have discussed, the problem is that adding encryption to all the relevant government computers is a considerable cost, and a likely delay. During such an upgrade, some computers that need to run flawlessly may be temporarily incompatible with the encrypted feed; or they may assume that the feed is encrypted when in fact it is not. Such confusion hurts us, possibly more than the current open feed helps our enemies.

Let's assume that we do upgrade all Predators to use encryption. There will still be an ongoing cost, possibly a painful one. The Predator and its ground crew will have to share the password to be able to view the video. Obviously, all Predators cannot use the same wired-in password all the time, because when that password is leaked or guessed, everything would be in the open again. Sometimes the ground crews and the Predator will fail to share the same password. (This is a corollary of Murphy's law, trust me on this.) So using encryption means that some entire flights will be useless.

Finally, I would like to speculate about what our enemies are getting by viewing our Predator video. I am not impressed by the argument that it tells then where our troops are. There are other ways to know where a Predator is, and one good way would be to intercept its video stream even without being able to read the stream. I am sure that anyone with access to hundreds of hours of Predator video can figure out something useful about our military habits, by analyzing what we choose to make our Predators examine, and by analyzing what we choose to look at most closely. But it's possible that we could post all this Predator video on the web and be no worse off. (We would actually be better off, because hundreds of Americans would spend their own time examining the video, and reporting important phenomena that are hard to see, under stress in the field.)

Now let's remember the bottom line: there are costs to encrypting, and costs to not encrypting. Someone has to balance these costs and decide how to spend our military time and money most wisely. Let's not let embarrassment stampede us into action.

Under a dollar for coffee...

When I buy really excellent coffee beans, I'm horrified by the cost. Shipping (which is highway robbery of course) pushes the rates up to about $28 per pound. To assuage my conscience, I follow an expensive order with a cheap one, more like $7/pound. In my opinion, the $7/pound coffee I buy still makes a better drink than you can buy in Starbucks, for dollars per cup.

I had never tried to figure out how many cups of coffee I can get for that money, but I'm tracking my consumption this time. At first I was hoping that the cost for my expensive beans would be less than $1.50 per cup, but it appears that the cost per cup will be much better, about $0.85. That's pretty fantastic, considering that I believe I'm making better coffee than I can buy in nearby coffee houses, and much cheaper too.

But here's the thing: As I noticed that the likely cost per cup was coming down, I did not get very excited. Because no matter how many cups I get per pound of beans, it's obvious that the $7/pound coffee costs one fourth of that. In relative terms: compared to Starbucks, my expensive coffee is a bargain; compared to supermarket prices, it's a grand luxury.

AT&T, can you stand the heat?

AT&T has determined that its iPhone users are using too much bandwidth. In fact, just a few percent of iPhone users account for nearly half of the bandwidth that its iPhone customers require. AT&T proposes to 'educate' these users, or else to charge them more, to make them cut back. This sort of misguided thinking by our Internet providers threatens to push United States Networking back into the dark ages of computing.

In fact, iPhone's 'leading edge' users are requiring the sort of bandwidth that fifty percent of iPhone users will require in about three years. AT&T's job is to plan for those needs, not to scuttle them. The bottom line? AT&T, if you can't stand the heat, get out of the iPhone.

A Devastating Putdown:

I met a fellow today whom I haven't thought about for years. We were reintroduced, and I really put him down. He was not devastated, but I clearly got to him. At the time, I was fascinated that I had invented a nasty remark, and sorry that I had used it. He's a nice guy, and he didn't begin to deserve it.

I had walked into the lab to find a manager bringing a developer up to speed, a person I did not recognize. I started to introduce myself, but he said, “Toby, I remember you. We worked together ten years ago on the motion video project.” And he told me his name.

I remembered him at once. In fact, we had been acquaintances at best. We worked with the same people, but not quite on the same project, and our paths had indeed crossed quite often in 1999 and 2000. My response to him was, “I remember! You never answered my last email to you, in 2003.”

That was the putdown. And as best as I can recall, it's true. In 2003, I was looking for consulting work, and I had systematically emailed developers I knew of including, this Mr. X.

I wish I had saved my remark for someone who really deserved it. I can think of a lot of situations in which my remark would be even more devastating if I, and the other person, both knew it was false.

Too many ads:

There are too many ads in pro football. The ads slow an unnecessarily slow game into a painfully slow game. I record games on Tivo so that I can “speedwatch”, and I still find it annoying to skip over so many ads.

One situation in particular annoys me. I don't understand why fans accept it. A lot of people watch pro football on TV, and they should all be complaining. It works like this: When a team scores, there's an ad break. That's fine. Excellent time for a few ads. Then comes the kickoff, and right after it, there's another ad break. That means we get to watch ONE PLAY sandwiched between pods of ads.

The people who televise the games know that what they are doing is wrong. Late in the game, if the score is close, they'll skip that ad after the kickoff and leave the excitement in. Ads after the kickoff: what a dumb idea.

Unsubscribe!

I've been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. This book is full of well-planned experiments that show we do not reason as we believe we do. The book is full of entertaining surprises, and you can just read it for fun. But I think it is helpful to try to understand situations where we cannot help acting irrationally in predictable ways, and situations where we might become more rational if we knew how to try.

I noticed one of the latter situations during my vacation. I was often away from my email for days at a time, and when I finally logged in, I usually found dozens of emails waiting for me. The majority of these were ad-mails from companies I had once made a purchase from. I had no idea how many of these I got per week, but at last I realized that I value the time it takes me to scan and delete each of these dumb messages.

I realized that I was behaving in accordance with one of the principles discussed in Ariely's book: we tend to overvalue the risk of losing something. I had not unsubscribed to any of these company's ad-mails, because, one of these days, I might need to know – or to be reminded of – what they were selling.

With newly opened eyes, I have been vigilantly unsubscribing, and I'm enjoying my email more.

Organic Whatever:

I've just finished consuming a lovely gift: a Goji Berry bar. If you're not familiar with Goji berries, you need to know that they contain a certain amount of protein, which makes them very special.

Now I'm something of a party pooper with regard to protein content in foods. I consider a food to be a good source of protein if the food's cost is less than ten cents per protein gram. Goji berries do not come anywhere near this standard, but the Goji bar tasted delicious, and it did contain five grams of protein.

The bar also labeled itself "organic," and let me tell you what that means. The quite annoying contents are: Organic Peanuts, Organic Raisins, Organic Sunflower Seeds, Organic Almonds, Organic Agave Syrup, Organic Goji Berries, Organic Brown Rice Syrup, Organic Raspberries, and Organic Organics (I just threw that last one in to see if you're paying attention).

For me, the magic of this awful Organic nagging is spoiled by what it says on the packaging just after the ingredients list:
CONTAINS PEANUTS, ALMONDS, MAY CONTAIN SESAME, TREE NUTS AND SOY.

My goodness, you don't suppose they are warning us that the product may contain non-organic ingredients do you? (I don't; I assume that the laws governing these warnings do not permit them to scream ORGANIC. I hope I'm right. I consume a lot of non-organic products, but I'd never want to do that unintentionally.)

Exxon (Xonex), Boxing:

Exxon, in the 1960's (I think), developed a plan to remain a high profit company even after the world's oil supplies ran out. All they had to do was become a major player in the computer business, where profits seemed even higher than in oil. Exxon nurtured a series of computer startups between 1975 and 1985. In the early 1980's, they combined the most successful of these into Exxon Office Systems (EOS). Exxon pulled the plug on EOS early in 1985. They may have wagered as much as a billion dollars (over a decade) in computer companies. (In contrast, I've heard that AT&T lost a billion in one year of the computer business, in 1985.)

Today, computer profit margins are dwindling, although not everywhere, and the world's oil supply still has many years to run. I just want to share one brief observation with you, from my early years in Exxon's computer business.

In mid 1978, I joined Exxon's 19th computer startup. Its goal was to produce the paperless office. It was expected to rely heavily on the 20th startup, which tried and failed to develop the first practical office optical disk drive. Our startup was called “Xonex”. The name is an anagram of Exxon, and it is also a sort of spelling of 19 in roman numerals (X one X). For about a year and a half, Xonex worked in happy isolation, but then we got more and more involved with the other startups.

I believe that the majority of Exxon's startups were duds. (I could be wrong about this, but I never heard anything about most of them.) The non-duds were pretty exciting: the first cheap Fax; ink-jet technology; an intelligent typewriter; and the world's best (for a year or three) word processing system. After a while, Exxon forced them to try to work together, and then Exxon squeezed us all into one company.

In 1980, I often thanked my CEO for giving me more than to the opportunity to do cutting edge work. I told him that I also felt I was in the first row, watching a boxing match, as Exxon figured out how to deal with all its ventures. This “dealing” got more and more exciting to watch. It was a terrific education in business management for me.

But then, frankly, it got too exciting. That's when I realized: I wasn't in the front row watching a boxing match; I was in the ring!

Dink for Doink!

After seeing and hearing many of the wonderful applications that have been invented for the iPhone: I wish someone would invent a music box that can make phone calls.

Impressions of Jerusalem, Autumn, 2009:

We just spent a wonderful two weeks in Israel. Nonetheless, many impressions of this foreign culture are relatively bizarre. Here are some of my memories from the trip:

They told us the weather was unusual for the degree of rain: torrents fell in blocks of days. But there were sunny summer and fall days as well. Sometimes we let Jersusalem's presence enwrap our own presences, joyous in the clear air among the bountiful views. And sometimes we engaged in what seemed like a war to overcome this country, however briefly, to accomplish some tiny goal. Israel is too clever; Israelis are too smart for their own good.

An elevator lifted us from the depths of a parking garage right up to the street. A one-way door allowed us to leave it, but there was no way for a disabled person to take the elevator back to our car.

A liberal sprinkling of traffic lights moves Jerusalem's traffic a little. Often you see many traffic lights at once (they are not masked for direct view, as in the US). Different lights, often in different colors, advise you when you can go straight or turn. Such ornament-driving demands great concentration.

Always, you must watch for 'turn-only' lanes. Near the King David Hotel, there's a tiny road that ends on a main street. You stay on the little road to turn left, but you must cross part of a gas station to find the right turn lane.

In the last twenty years, we have seen Jerusalem choke on its traffic. Despite some wonderful projects to speed traffic around the periphery, the narrow downtown streets fill with halting trucks and cars. And these winding streets have been intentionally narrowed even further: by reserving lanes for buses and taxis; and by destroying other lanes to build a light rail transport whose ongoing construction endures forever. When Israel decided they needed tunnels for some of their roads, tunnels sprang up in a year or two. But light rail construction appears to be similar to continental drift: centimeters per century.

Parking on streets is now civilized. You used to have to buy pasteboards at the post office and stick pins in holes to mark your parking allowance. As tourists, we used to park illegally, fearing that we could never deal with the P.O. Now you find machines at every parking site that sell parking rights for shekels.

Despite what you read in the news, the great day-to-day danger in Israel is car accidents. Everybody knows someone who died in one. Many of those dead are pedestrians. I kept a few of them alive myself, when – as usual – they stepped off the curb without looking.

There's a lot of negotiating in Israel, and it's fun to assume that no price is fixed. I parked in the Neviim Street Parking Lot, where the clearly posted price was a very expensive 12 shekels per hour. "For an hour and a quarter," the attendant told me, "the price is already 20. And it goes up from there. But you can pay me twenty in advance for the whole day."
I paid twenty, and the attendant carefully wrote 'all day' (in English) on my parking ticket. Maybe I could have bargained down to eighteen, who knows? But I parked there almost three hours, so I thought I had struck a great bargain, until I returned to my car. There was no attendant at the lot to collect fees! I could have parked for nothing, unless the only reason the two attendants left was that all the remaining drivers, like me, had paid in advance.

We drove half of our 960 kilometers in the West Bank territories, where friends, and children of friends, and even an express road have chosen to live. The K'far Adumim settlement, on a few hilltops in the middle of nowhere, offers stunning views. I stood on a porch where I could see both Jerusalem and Amman. "They are that close together," my host said. "Think about it."

Elaine gifted me with a special tourist treat: a 100-minute Segway ride, rolling through the parks and grounds near the Knesset. It will probably be my only Segway ride ever, and it was wonderful.

In the past, we traveled all the way to the depths of Tel Aviv to buy bitter almonds for Elaine's most special cake. They are difficult to buy, perhaps because a single bitter almond, uncooked, can kill a young child. A friend insisted that by now it must be possible to buy them in Jerusalem's great shouk, Machane Yehuda. We were doubtful, having failed in the past, but this time we succeeded. (You have to find a vendor who sells them, rather than a vendor who falsely claims to sell them and offers you ordinary almonds; the real ones taste horribly bitter.) We also discovered that Machane Yehuda has entered the 21st century, with HD TVs and a fine Italian restaurant, Topolino. (For dessert we ate chocolate-filled home-made ravioli in chocolate sauce.) In fact, fine Italian dairy dining seems to be a specialty of Jerusalem.

In Hebrew, the TV show 'Ugly Betty' is named 'Betti'.

We ate our last restaurant meal at Cafe Inbal in Ein Kerem. I made sure of the exact address before driving there: 25.

I don't know why I thought that this talismanic number would help me. Ein Kerem is a town spread out in patches along a twisting valley road. Building numbers are puzzling and rare, and signs are haphazard. Eventually I pulled up at a restaurant and inquired where I might find Cafe Inbal. They pointed to a sign behind a parked car. I was there.

At Ben Gurion Airport, I watched two workers sift a few kilos of dirt near some half-hidden ticket counters. At first it seemed that their desire was to keep (for themselves) what failed to fall through the screen, but then they took the finer dirt and mixed up some concrete. I'm sure they had a good reason; there's a reason for everything in fascinating Israel.

My Zenclass Review (Updated twice):

The ZenClass Nirvana Seat-Back Organizer and Travel Tote is a remarkable carry-on bag for airplane flights. (It's also handy in cars, on strollers and on changing tables!) I believe it's not perfect, but it's so wonderful that I look forward to discovering how to take advantage of all it offers. Here's a wonderful video to show its versatility.

The ZenClass bag zips up to form a small, light carry-on bag, about 8 by 12 inches and thin. (You'll probably keep it in your fullsize carry-on. Or you can wear it on your belt or body, in several different ways.) When you get on the plane, you unzip it and hang it over the tray that comes with your seat. The ZenClass bag has an ingenious flap for this purpose. You lock the tray in its closed position, and now all the contents of the ZenClass bag are available to you. There are three goodsize zip pockets, several see-through mesh pockets, and various special purpose holders (e.g., for a passport, for a ticket, for a pen). Depending on how you load it, you now have everything you need -- even a paperback book -- within reach for your whole flight. (You can even pop your laptop into the open bag.)

Beverage service does not require you to put your tray down; the ZenClass bag has a cupholder. When your meal comes, make sure that most of the ZenClass bag's contents are in its (closed) zip pockets. Then open the tray to eat, and the ZenClass bag will hide under the tray until you're done with your food.

I tried the ZenClass bag out on two eleven-hour flghts, and I never needed anything that was out of reach: pills, reading material, snacks, you name it.

The ZenClass bag doesn't interfere with the seat pocket below your tray, so you can fill that up too. It costs $39.99 plus shipping. I've found a few negative aspects of the ZenClass bag; perhaps some of these comments reflect my lack of experience with it:

-1: The ZenClass bag doesn't fully close when not in use. It zips three-quarters closed; the top side is "auto-closed" by magnets. I believe it's possible for small things to fall out of the top, so when the ZenClass bag is closed, I make sure that almost all its contents are zipped up in its inner pockets; a slight nuisance.

-2: It's hard to get the zipper moving when you want to close the ZenClass bag. And it gets harder, the more you fill it.

-3: Although the ZenClass bag has neat see-though pockets, your stuff will spend a lot of time zipped up out of sigtht. I think it's necessary to review what I've stuffed in all those pockets from time to time, to make sure I know what I've got.

-4: If you use a laptop on a flight, you're going to keep the tray down a lot. You'll have to get the laptop out of the way, each time you need the ZenClass bag.

Update:
Brent Hollowell (of ZenClass) wrote the following:
All of our new product has YKK zippers - the highest quality brand name zippers available. UPDATE: {I talked to Brent about the magnetic top, and found that no one has complained that they lost anything out of the top of the ZenClass bag. Thus the magnetic top appears to work just fine, although there are people like me who worry that something might fall out, when the bag is not in its normal vertical position. The magnetic top allows easy access to items in the top of the bag: passports, tickets, etc.}

In the "tray table down" position, in order to use your laptop and the organizer at the same time, try this: In the long zippered pocket that spans the entire bag, lay something fairly rigid/structured (like a couple of magazines, newspaper, book, notebook or even a laptop when not in use) across the entire inside of the pocket, horizontally, so that it spans the mid-point or folding part of the bag. This will give the bag a solid structure in the open position. You can then rest the entire unit on the metal tray table "arms"that hold the table in place (these are parallel to the floor on most current aircraft equipment).The back lip of the tray should meet the bottom edge of the organizer and hold it fairly well in position so that you can use the tray table.

It's not the most elegant solution, but unless it's insanely turbulent (or you're flying on an aircraft with the older tray tables) then you should be OK to use it in this manner as well. We did not design it for this mode, but we are working on a (hopefully) simple solution that will make it easily usable in both modes... trying to do it simply without adding quite a bit of cost, so we want to be deliberate about how we solve this one!

Fashion in “Law & Order”:

Near the beginning of almost every Law & Order TV show, the camera thoughtfully observes the first corpse. It must be someone's job to decide how to dress these corpses. I wonder if any manufacturers try to offer kickbacks to get their clothing lines on death-display.

Segway Tours!

We have just returned from a wonderful vacation in Israel, during which I took a Segway Tour in Jerusalem. If you search for Segway Tours, you'll see there are a lot of them, everywhere. There are at least two companies in Jerusalem: The Green Ride (which I took and recommend), and Segway Jerusalem (which I only know from their ad). Since riding a Segway is unintuitive, I imagine that most tours work like mine: first, they train you to use the Segway; then you start the tour on simple ground; then gradually you get a chance to zip along over hills and dips.

Touring on a Segway is great. You cover a lot of ground (I rode for 100 minutes). You see well because you are up higher. And you feel safer, because you can 'outrun' anyone if you have to. (My tour covered a lot of interesting trails where we saw absolutely no one. On the Segway I felt fine, but I might have felt uncomfortable walking in such places.)

If you're curious, here's what's unintuitive: You need to move smoothly as you step on or off it, so it doesn't try to get away from you. You control your speed by leaning forward or back at the ankles, not at the waist. You turn by sliding your handle bar right or left, not by turning the handlebar. And it's hard to keep the Segway still; you are more likely to jitter slightly back and forth when trying not to move it. After a while, some of this becomes second nature, and you just enjoy the ride.

GPS, At Last:

For a long time, my wife and I have wondered whether to buy a GPS. Usually, my wife did the wondering, and I did the nay-saying. I’m proud of my knowledge of streets in all the places we drive, and I’m a careful user of Google Maps. Why did I need a GPS?

But times change and at last I began to suspect that a GPS might be good for both of us. Still, we delayed our purchase. With little knowledge of GPS systems, it’s not easy to choose between the $100 kind and the $600 kind. What did we want? We opted for the lower middle, a $230 Garmin 1300T. I’ve done a little local driving with it, and I've used it for a long trip as well. I am totally fascinated at how useful I think it’s going to be. I never suspected!

My wife teased me that most of the benefits I’m excited about are mickey-mouse addons. But still, let me tell you what I’m excited about. Driving long distance, late at night, there's always a danger of getting tired and hypnotized. But the GPS helped me stay alert by showing me more of the geography of the dark regions I was driving through. Another important feature is that the GPS map shows me curves before I reach them. Driving late at night, on the Merritt parkway, say, it really helps to anticipate the curves, making my driving safer.

Okay, on to the bells and whissies.

The 1300T comes with many voices. I can learn a bit of vocabulary by using other languages on familiar routes. (A German voice drove me to work, and a French voice drove me home. I’ll try the French-Canadian voice another time. I’m even going to try Cantonese.)

The GPS can monitor my driving to show me whether I am doing the right things to save fuel.

The GPS can put my current speed or altitude (something that really fascinates me) right on the dashboard, where I can easily peek at it while I drive.

The GPS 3D map gives me context about converging roads, helping me to visualize better where I am. I need this feature even locally, where roads are definitely not straight.

I usually try to stay away from down, downtown Manhattan, where where roads are definitely not in a grid. But with my GPS, I’m not afraid of this locale anymore – I think.

An Unpardonable action (?) in a Zonealarm upgrade:

I'm not the Internet Police, so I don't get to set the rules. However, I think that Zonealarm did something that is totally unacceptable in the current version of its anti-virus software. It added a toolbar to both Internet Explorer and Firefox. It's okay for it to OFFER to add a toolbar, but it's another thing to drop it in there and wait for me to notice it. YOU HAVE TO ASK THE USER IF HE WANTS ANOTHER TOOLBAR. It's not okay to put this notice in the fine print, either.

Installing my current version of Zonealarm Antivirus (90_114) appears to have forced some bizarre behavior changes in the behavior of my home computer. I'm waiting for them to make yet another suggestion on how to recover from their upgrade, so I won't discuss my misery in detail.

One of the remarkable changes to my computer, after this upgrade, was that I can no longer run multiple “windows” of Firefox 3. I can have one window with multiple tabs. Trying to run a second window creates a situation where, when I completely exit from Firefox, I will find that it is still running, taking much of my computer's cpu to try to bring up that second window.

I “solved” that problem by noticing the Zonealarm toolbar add-on and disabling it.

In its present version, Zonealarm sought to “improve” my computer experience by interposing its own GUI into the process of downloading a file. It pops up another window, offers me choices that I have already made, shows me the progress of downloading (which firefox already shows me), and then, afterwards, asks me what I want to DO with my downloaded file. These are all waste steps that it adds to my normal procedures. As long as two years ago, there were grumbles that the Zonealarm product was morphing from a nimble, light anti-virus protection into something baroque. Perhaps the nay-sayers were right.

WSIG: Real Country Radio

If you're tooling up US route 81 near Woodstock, Virginia, then I suggest you tune to WSIG, 96.9, Real Country Radio. They entertained me for nearly an hour with one marvelous song after another. You can listen to them on the web also: click their web site and then click the big “listen live” button. (It may take 15 seconds or so for the audio to come.)

I've sampled many country Western stations on my trips south. I haven't listened to a lot of WSIG's programming yet, but what I heard was – for me at least – exceptional. To an outsider, the lyrics of Country Western songs tend to sound banal, even though, often, they are not. The essence of CW music is that the music fits the lyrics like a glove, making every syllable seem obvious the moment you hear it. CW is a remarkable contrast to Rock, which forces its words to fit the heavy rhythms, and Blues, which often disassociates the lyrics from the rhythm altogether.

In CW, the male singers tend to sound like suave cowboys, and the women tend to sound desperate. There's a lot more variety than you may notice at first. I enjoyed one song in which the chorus was a solo on a bass guitar, with a finishing lick on a 12-stringer.

Now! You can use your voice to make phone calls:

Words seriously fail me. I've just received an email that makes me smile, and I hope it will hit you the same way. Nuance, the company that makes Dragon Naturally Speaking (excellent voice-to-text products) is testing a new product for Blackberries called Nuance Voice Control (NVC). It will enable Blackberry users to – get this – send text messages by dictating them. The dictated message will be converted to text and SMS'ed (or emailed) to its recipient. Now put aside the likelihood that the phone company will probably charge more to send the text message than they would to send the equivalent vocal message. What's really special here is that Nuance has invented a way to for people to “speak” on a telephony network. “”WATSN CM HR, I NEED U.”

Customer Support Hell (and Heaven):

When we bought our new dishwasher, we qualified for a $50 rebate. I hate filling in rebate forms. I know they are out to get me if I make the slightest mistake. So I agonized over my form and (I thought) I got everything right.

Weeks later, I got a very polite letter. “Hey, we want to help you,” it said, “but you submitted the wrong invoice.” Darn. I submitted the bill for the dishwasher itself, forgetting that our rebate was for the installation, not the dishwasher. I plead guilty to this mistake, but it's easy to make. It seems weird to get a rebate for the installation and NOT have to submit the bill for buying the item.

So I carefully resubmitted, just ahead of their deadline.

Two weeks later we got a weird postcard advising us that one or more of our rebate requests could not be fulfilled, or was being fulfilled for partial credit. So of course I called the customer service number. They found my file at once, almost as if they had been waiting for me. I was told that it could take them three weeks for my resubmission to get into their files (this is after 2.5 weeks by the way, so for all we knew, they were still going to get my corrected letter). But they did not have my resubmission just now. Could I FAX everything to them in the next hour or be damned? (They put it more politely than that.)

My fault again, I could find only part of my paperwork. But I did find the invoice for the installation. This is the ONE thing they did not have on file, but they insisted I file the other paperwork that they already had but I couldn't find. I begged for, and got, a one day reprieve to find my paperwork.

That was Thursday. Friday was a busy day, and I simply gave up on getting the rebate.

Now it's Saturday night. I stumbled over the remaining paperwork, and I'm now in a position to FAX EVERYTHING to them. But I won't, and here's why:

In Saturday's mail, we received the full $50 rebate.

How to make time fly when you're On Hold:

I've assembled two agonizing time-consumers together, and I really like the result.

Currently, I am waiting on the phone to talk to a New Jersey state "hotline" that might conceivably help me with one of their impenetrably bizarre computer forms. It may take me a long time to get through. I've got my phone on "speaker", and now I want time to fly until I reach them.

I also have daily PT exercises to do. I hate to think of the time I'm 'wasting' while I exercise; it takes a chunk out of my every day. I can practically feel the clock spinning its dial while I try to stay calm and hold a pose for another, oh hell, thirty seconds, three times.

So that's it: I'm doing my PT while waiting for the hotline to answer my phone call. I hope they give me time to finish...

Programmers are not like other people:

I think I have blogged before about (how hard it is to do this.

One of the many ways to minimize keystrokes while abbreviating a text note is to open parentheses (and not close them.

It's usually obvious where the closing paren goes, so why not omit the keystroke? Except that in most kinds of programming, it is important to get your parentheses balanced just right. Even now as I type, I'm resisting a desire to go back and close those two parentheses.

Today when I'm not blogging, I'm writing up my plan for my radio show tomorrow (WPRB.COM and WPRB 103.3 FM in NJ and Philly; 6:00 a.m. EDT). I have divided the show into a series of 'UNIT' items. I found that in one place I spelled the word 'UINT'. That might look like a terrible misspelling to you, but to me, it's a meaningful word. It characterizes the following symbol as a representation of an unsigned integer. So there.

I'm playing dumb. It might be fun:

I purchased a set of Whirly balls. Fortunately they were very inexpensive. Something for my grandkids to play with, I thought. These are plastic balls similar to whiffle balls, basball size. They might be fun to catch and throw. But here's the interesting part: the packaging promised some sort of game to play with the three balls, as follows:

A Hole New Game.

{Also:} the balls are intended solely for impact with each other.

I expected to find the rules of the whirly ball game inside the packaging, but there was nothing inside except the balls. So I contacted the company that makes them -- Amloid -- and asked them to email me the rules of the game. But after seeing their other mindless beach products, I have a feeling that there will be no game at all; I was just misled by their overeager labeling. I wonder what they will say in their email...

How old were you when you last used trigonometry?

My father was a civil rights lawyer, but among his many interests, he enjoyed recreational math, and he was never afraid of trig tables. Our family visited his mother's farm every summer, nestled in the Catskill mountains of New York, near the Ashokan reservoir. A beautiful bridged road called the "Reservoir Road" cuts across the Ashokan on its way to the reservoir ponds and the spellbinding aeration fountains. From that bridge, there's a prodigious view of the Catskills. Looking west you see a high, long ridge, and what looks like a "duckbill," the tip of a mountain peeking over that ridge. Everybody said that the duckbill was the top of Slide, the tallest mountain in the Catskills. We always enjoyed stopping to look at that ridge, along with the whole panoply of mountains surrounding the reservoir.

One day when I was about eleven, my father asked, "Is that really the tip of Slide Mountain?" Out came the topological maps and the trig tables, and my father began to plot triangles to calculate our line of sight. From the middle of the reservoir, the view west is toward the Friday Mountain/Cornell/Wittenberg Ridge (running north/south), about 3800 feet above sea level. Slide Mountain is set well back from the ridge, at a height of 4400'. If you look at a topo map like this one, it's hard to imagine what else the duckbill could be, but still, you have to do the math to see if Slide is visible over that ridge. We did the math, and sure enough it was. I can't convey to you how satisfying it was to know that the math proved that that duckbill was Slide.

IBMish Writing:

I'm going off half-cocked today, because I don't have a URL to point to, but I read somewhere that in Great Britain, schools are thinking about using computers to grade essay tests. Obvious jokes arise, as one thinks about how to pad a computer-read exercise to get higher grades. And what's the point in writing to a computer? They can't think.

However, I believe this is a good idea, up to a point. A computer can certainly try to check for proper spelling, punctuation and syntax. And a skilled writer, even in fourth grade, can learn how to avoid fancy writing constructions that a computer will fail to understand. It's all about technique, and everyone could use some practice in developing technique. As long as we don't trust a computer to decide whether the writer has actually answered a question.

Cancel a Mandatory Meeting:

I was invited to a mandatory meeting yesterday.

There's something wrong with that sentence, isn't there? We're not invited to mandatory meetings; we're told to come. To move our heaven and earth priorities, and to get there if we possibly can.

So I went.

This particular mandatory meeting was canceled. The cancellation notice went out an hour before the meeting, so several people – like me – didn't see it. But that's not the point.

I have deduced, in the course of my life, several rules by which a person may live better, and I have now deduced one more:

Do not cancel a mandatory meeting.

Look at it this way. When you cancel a mandatory meeting, you're saying: I'm scheduling this meeting, and you have to come. But I don't.

Now that Jay Leno's in Prime Time:

I Tivoed the second show so I could watch it later.

Bacteria! Infections! Shower heads! Never mind?

BBC News brings us the apparently useless news that showerheads can harbor dangerous bacteria. News sources are pretty good at misquoting their sources, but if this quote is accurate, I think we can forget about the whole thing:
Lead researcher Professor Norman Pace, said: "If you are getting a face full of water when you first turn your shower on, that means you are probably getting a particularly high load of Mycobacterium avium, which may not be too healthy."

Now when's the last time you turned your shower on, directly at your face? Didn't you let it run for a few seconds, or do you like to be frozen by cold tap water? I'm going to ignore this invaluable alert.

Accidental Ping!

I'm sure I once blogged about a clever tactic I used in my years of work at Exxon Office Systems. I had a reputation as a reliable hard worker. That meant that on rare occasions, I could accept an action item for something I hated to do, and then just not do it. I always got away with this, by the way. No one ever noticed; and if they had, I would have played for time by saying, “I sent you an email. Didn't you get it?”

Now I have discovered a vaguely similar tactic, but I have no use for it now. I hope it's helpful to some of you.

Let's suppose there's someone you need to contact by email. You tried twice (no response), and you fear trying again, because you don't want to seem to be bugging them. So you address them on some irrelevant email that was obviously intended for another person. There should be some name-similarity so that it will be obvious you just hit the wrong name in your address list.

After they send this irrelevant email back to you, telling you that you mis-addressed it: voila! You're in touch.

Chivalry?

I drove to the Post Office to ship a light package overseas. I parked to the right of a gas guzzler. A middle-aged woman struggled on my left to remove a large package from her car.

I decided that the right thing to do was to sit and wait for her. If I opened my car door, it would just get in her way. ... Five seconds later, I asked myself, What is she going to do with that package? Obviously, she was going to go into the P.O. and get on line, the same line I needed to get on. And she would be ahead of me.

Oh, no you don't!

I opened my door a tad, squeezed out and slipped past her, mumbling “Excuse me, excuse me,” and I hurried to the door.

And then my heart sank. Between me and the infernal clerk-line lay three heavy double doors. Here came that woman, struggling with her large package. And I knew what I had to do.

I opened the first double door so that she could enter ahead of me.

I opened the second double door so that she could enter ahead of me.

I opened the last double door so that she could enter ahead of me. She stepped in and said, “Go ahead, you go first.”

Chivalry.

Rare Earths:

The New York Times has a great article on the next world elemental scarcity: Rare Earths. Apparently, China mines the giant share of Rare Earth minerals. It is squeezing the world supply and persuading companies that they can get enough Rare Earths by building their factories in China. There's a lot of good background in this story, and a great chart on its second page (click where it says 'Multimedia').