128 Megabytes of Storage on my keychain (oops):

I now have a little fob on my keychain that plugs into pretty much any youthful PC. After I transfer files to and from the fob, I can forget that it’s attached to the computer and walk off leaving ALL MY KEYS BEHIND.

Sadly Leaving a new place:

When I left Destin Florida, I realized that I will probably never visit this part of the world again. My specific reason for coming will not recur; I know that most of the year, the weather there is no where near as nice as it was for me; and we have many touristy priorities that will take us elsewhere. But the calm air, the lovely surf, the variegated skies, the song birds, the flowers - all were such pleasures. Leaving a fond place and knowing you will never return is one of the universal sad experiences.

I don’t know how to pronounce your name, could you say it for me five times?

We rarely have the nerve to ask people to help us pronounce their names right. Too embarrassing! But you can call them when they are (probably) away and listen to their phone message a few times. “This is Jero Feketekuti. Leave a …” “This is Jero Feketekuti. Leave a …” “This is …” Too bad many people do not say their name in their message, and some people are too embarrassed to pronounce their own name distinctly.

Reduce Wallet and Keys for a trip – up to a point:

When I go on a (several day) trip, I thin my wallet and keyring, leaving home things I’d never need on the trip, like my local library card. But here’s what’s important: if you can’t remember what some of the keys on your ring are for, even if you haven’t used them for a year, take them with you! Otherwise (as Murphy’s Law implies) you’re going to remember what they were for in the worst possible way.

In Which I invent an entirely new profession:

People combine caller ID with cell-phone melody rings to know who’s calling. They have fun picking a melody for each regular caller. I think we have it backwards.

I should pick my own unique melody, and everyone I call should hear the ring I choose. “But they’ll all pick Pachelbel’s Canon” you complain. Not at all. People who have trouble choosing their unique ring will consult a Ringtone Guru, who will study your personality for an hour and design a unique ring that is truly you. If you’re feeling flush, you can pay extra to buy additional phone melodies that express your current emotions. After all, mobile phones will soon have mood ring interfaces to warn the person you’re talking to how you’re feeling.

A few more days, please:

On May 20 I looked at the parking pass the hotel had given me. It was a form on which a clerk had written by hand that is was good until May 20. But I was staying to the 23rd! With a sinking heart I speculated why my pass was not good through the 23rd: Other guests had spoken of weekend parking permission problems. I went off to the desk expecting to be told to park my care elsewhere somehow.

When I showed my pass to the clerk, she said “I can fix that,” drew a dark 3 over the zero and handed it back to me. I looked dumbly at the handwriting, which now read “May 23”, and thought Gee, I could have done that myself.

I bumped head-first into a plane this week:

Bumping into a plane (on foot) is just as difficult as it sounds, you have to be pretty spacey. I found an area in the hangar where the phone signal was strong. I was talking on my cellphone while walking around. The plane’s wing, just a few arc-seconds above my of sight, whacked my forehead. Fortunately it was a small plane. The plane’s okay, and so am I. … And I almost did it again, a few hours later.

Big City Dwellers, eat your hearts out:

Here in Western Florida I drive over a 3.5 mile bridge (that’s not a typo) every day. Crossing this beautiful finger of the Gulf of Mexico – the rippling emerald and blue waters of Choctawatchee Bay - costs only $2. A $2 toll for 3.5 miles of bridge! What a great deal. Oncoming cars’ windshields sparkle in the sun like diamonds.

There’s a Walmart everywhere, but they’re not all the same:

In a Walmart in Western Florida, an expansive display of merchandise caught my eye. Before really looking at it I knew I had not seen the like in any New Jersey store. This aisle was full of packages each with a strangely shaped piece of metal: dozens of differently shaped custom fan blades.

Speed limits: continuous?

Driving in Florida, I remarked to my passenger that when I can see two speed limit signs ahead – say, 35 mph here, and 45 in the distance – I assume the speed limit is continuous: somewhere between the signs, the speed limit is 40.

My passenger disagreed. “The moment I see a speed sign in the distance, that’s the speed limit here and now. If I can see two signs, I ignore the first one. What’s the point?”

You’re the one!

So: I’m on a business trip. I’ve worked on, and learned about, part of a project to prepare an enormous demo. People have been swarming about to prepare the many systems, complex hardware, and much software. I was asked to join the team making the trip to do field integration and the demo.

A few days before the trip I said to the project leader, “Our team of people on the trip should get together and plan. We have to know who’ll do what and when!” He looked at me – sympathetically I must say – and said: “You’re the only one.”

And so it is. I figure, if I do anything right, great. If I make a mistake, well, um, (looks over his shoulder), um, …

Second Guessing, Third Guessing...

Do you sometimes feel that our country is too busy post-morteming what we should have done, and not spending enough effort to decide what to do next? Well here's an anecdote:

I used to work for a certain manager. If you told him about a new, serious problem, he immediately called a group meeting to determine whose fault the problem was. An hour or so later, when he had decided whether his own group or another was at fault, he was willing to start thinking about how to deal the matter.

Movies, get your movies:

In five to ten years it will possible to make a cube that fits in your hand and contains 1,000 full length movies. If you charge $10,000 for it no one will buy it. If you charge $100 for it no one will make it. (I’m ignoring inflation.) The in-between prices probably won’t work either.

By the way, I may be off-net a lot in the second half of May, Posting irregularly.

You might enjoy reading about “Déjà Vu”…

Here’s an explanation of Déjà Vu on the web. Please accept my apologies if I’m repeating myself. I don’t see it in my files, but I’m afraid I’ve posted this blog entry before.

By the way, I may be off-net a lot in the second half of May, Posting irregularly.

Armhole respectfully requests your attention:

Would you open a (spam) email from (I’m not making these up):
Pui Lrdwglue
Armhole F. Brahman
Pratfall U. Holidayed
ParsnipEmmettStinson
Peacefulness Q. Manor

Oops, down the drain...

You may never thank me for this little kitchen tip. My fear is that you will remember it someday:

Before you pour something through a strainer, stop and remember: are you planning to throw away the liquid or the solid?

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

A: To get a better wireless phone signal.

Blake Patterson's theory of fixing Everything:

When I knew Blake Patterson, he was a bassoonist and music theorist. He helped me fix two TV sets, and I have since resorted often to his method of repair:

Take it apart. Clean the insides. Vacuum the insides, wipe off dust. Put it back together.

Obviously this system does not deal with tired motors, loose wires, blown circuit boards and the like, but it is remarkably effectve. When you take somthing apart, note what you're doing so you can do it backwards later. If you lose parts, or have parts left over after reassembly, the thing may not improve.

Delete my file, Bro:

If computers could think more like humans, would we trust them? We might, if they acted like a sort of person we found trustworthy. I imagine the computer of the future trying out a British accent, then talking trash, acting the Limey, then trying perhaps a Russian accent (complete with newly-learned English spelling errors) and so on, until the machine sensed it had found the personality to win its owner's trust.

I can also imagine us users getting tired of the charade, and hitting the "Stop That" key.

Dear computer company, I am returning this computer for warrantee repairs. It insists on using the word 'like' in every error message.

Minaturization (not Moore's Law):

People mention Moore's Law when they talk about any trend in miniaturization. Hardly anyone knows that Moore's Law is simply an observation about the economics of shrinking computer circuitry over time.

Most of the miniaturization that we enjoy results from shrinking logic. People make new things by assembling components and writing algorithms to control them. When it becomes routine to solve a problem this way, it's then economical to make a chip containing the equivalent of all those components and logic. That chip is then used as a component in another product, starting the next shrinking cycle.

I like to Fool Myself:

Steve Martin used to do this bit in his comedy routine: “Oh my shoe’s untied!” and he would bend down to his shoe. The TV camera would zoom in on his perfectly tied shoe. Martin would then stand up and say “I like to play tricks on myself.”

A lot of us probably enjoy playing tricks on ourselves, but I never noticed until Martin pointed it out. One of my personal favorites is misreading a newspaper headline. When I take a second look, the reality is much less interesting than my initial reading. For example, this morning I saw a recipe headline: Glass Noodles with Carb. Seemed anachronistic, but a closer reading found: Glass Noodles with Crab.

Reach to the Back of the Bin:

If you’re taller than average or have long arms, you should be able to select better than average produce in a supermarket. (This idea does not apply if you’re already an expert at picking the best.) I figure the experts have already removed most of the best items from the front of the bin. I make my selections as far back as I can reach, where the random probabilities are more in my favor.

An arrow spinning round and round...

It's well known that if you need to remember a set of unrelated things, you can improve your recall by imagining a picture of them all. For example, if you need to buy a steak, popsicles, garbage bags and a staple gun: just imagine a popsicle with its stick stuck through a steak that's inside a garbage bag that you are stapling shut.

This weekend I thought of a good idea to blog about, and I made an image to remember it: a man with an arrow inside his head, the arrow curved round on itself, spinning ceaselessly round and round.

I'll get back to you on that one when I remember what it was about. Maybe.

Today’s fortuitous typo grants us a favor:

I received an ad from a website that is prepared to tell me what about The Next Boon On The Internet. What boon would you like the internet to give you? I’ll settle for this: All web pages shall display the date of their last update, so I’ll know when I’m looking at a dead web site.

I have a confession to make. After I wrote this item I kept replacing the boon with other boons I wanted even more. I want the Internet to give me at least fifty boons.

This movie has been modified:

I imagine putting a video tape in my VCR and seeing something like this. Any movie director could make it happen. Think about it:

ovie has been modified.
s been edited to fit your scre

What Color are your Status Lights?

Products sold worldwide should conform to a European standard for indicator colors. Intuitively obvious (red=trouble, yellow=warning, green=okay), the standard is often ignored, and I can remember bitter arguments lasting weeks – in a computer design group – about the right color for some indicator lights.

Suppose your floppy drive lights up whenever you read or write to it; would you agree with me that the light should be yellow? I figure you’re being warned that if you pull the floppy out while it's in use, a problem will occur. (Many disagree.)

The power cord on my laptop lights a green light when it has power. That’s fine with me. If the cord is disconnected, my laptop will switch to its battery and not die. But I would prefer the power cord to show me a bright red light when it is receiving no electricity at all. The “no power” warning light that doesn’t rely on batteries is a holy grail of hardware design.

Pile high the Software…

In 1987 I visited the offices of PC Magazine – still my favorite magazine about the home and business computer world – to persuade them to review a product. They took us to their lab, a rectangular room about 60 x 30 feet with work tables all around the walls. The middle of the room was a midden – an astounding heap of floppy disks and software products more than three feet high and eight feet across. There were ten to twenty copies of every popular program on that pile, and tons of less familiar stuff as well. (In those days, a product usually fit on one to three floppies.) It was clear many many salesmen sent freebies to PC Magazine, hoping to get mentioned or reviewed. The staff at the mag might need two or three copies of a new program; they just tossed the rest on the pile.

I looked at that giant pile of useful software and drooled. I don’t think of myself as a thievish person, but I sure wished I could have had ten minutes alone in that room with my briefcase.

No Need to Reply to this Blog Item:

Sometimes I receive a short email note, and I agonize over whether to reply. The writer seems to be completing something, but maybe it would be impolite not to write back “thanks”, or “I got your message.” I worry that if I send a short unnecessary reply, the other person will agonize in turn about whether I expect a reply, and so ad infinitum.
Luckily I have a solution to this problem. I’ll often send an email like this: ”Mr. Plony, I really liked your blog posting on March 17. You expressed something very well that I’ve often thought about. No need to reply to this message.”
I wish the world understood the acronym: NNTRTTM. It would save quite a bit of typing.

Some headlines are really peculiar:

These headlines are all real but I’m not providing links. I’d like you to marvel at their mystery:

• Dog finds skull that was likely stolen from crypt.
  
• Kangaroo mistaken for giant beaver.
  
• Lizard spit drug controls diabetes, weight.
  
• Armed robbers steal ox's gallbladder stones.
  
• Nervous dragon given acupuncture.
  

Who ya gonna mail? (Host Flusters):

So you’re browsing a web page and you want to send an email. You feel there HAS to be a contact email address somewhere on this page, but you can’t find it. You even searched the page for “contact.” Now try this: in your browser, click View, then click PageSource (or Source). You’ll get a text window full of abstruse HTML code. Search that text (the search or find command is probably in the edit menu for this text) for these six letters: mailto . This is the html tag that precedes a genuine email address. After you copy and paste, close the source window. Good luck!

There’s no such thing as a free office:

I moved to a new development group at a large company. They showed me my office, a room about twenty feet square with a lockable door. This is the largest office I’ve ever had, and the only lockable office I’ve ever had. I was amazed! How could they offer such a thing to a consultant? Other people in the group, even managers, had cubes or small offices. Mine was almost the only one with lock and key.

I set the office up with my desk, table and computer just the way I liked it.

Two mornings later, I came in to find my locked door open, and everything moved around to open up a yard-wide conduit under the floor filled with wiring. “How often do you have to open this up?” I asked the workmen. “Often,” they said, "you better leave everything where it is now.” They left an hour later after making quite a racket. Still, it WAS a large office. Better than the office I got at another department of the same company two years later: a hallway 40 feet long, three feet wide, with neither window nor electrical outlet. It was also better than my first office ever at that company, a cube 5 by 7.5 feet, that I had to share with three other people. (I’m not making this up! Since we didn’t know each other very well, only one of us entered the office at a time.)