More about Modcomp:

In my previous post about Modcomp, I mentioned that -- as far as I know -- they were the only mid-70's computer company that routinely revised its computers by replacing chips and rewiring wires. All of Modcomp's competitors made upgrades and hardware fixes by replacing entire boards. (We're talking foot-square boards, there was less miniaturiation in those days.) Modcomp's approach was much more flexible and dynamic, but -- let's be frank -- it was wrong.

First, as I mentioned, Modcomp issued corrections every week. At that torrid pace, you have to suspect that they were introducing problems as fast as they fixed them. There could not be time to run careful tests on each week's combination of fixes before publishing them. Even if the fixes were good, they still had to be performed correctly on your computer. You had to hope that every wire was rewired correctly, and it's easy to attach a wire to the wrong pin.

Second, Modcomp had to perform most of the wiring changes for its customers. They paid a lot to get the rare people who knew how to do this fieldwork and were willing to travel, and to try to be deadly accurate. Paying maintenance guys to swap boards was cheaper, simpler and safer, and required far less qualified people.

Now here's an interesting note. Our company agreed on a set of critical changes with Modcomp that required an entire forty hours of rewiring. They sent a young woman to us, to make these changes. They told us they had learned that men were too impatient to do a lot of rewiring accurately. All their top repair people were women.

A software company catches fire:

My mid-1970's computer company caught fire and burned, for possibly as much as twenty seconds. If you're wondering, I can assure you: you never want to experience any kind of malicious fire.

In those days we used electrostatic printers. They spilled a fixer on special paper and the printer burned dots into the papers. The print stayed visible for a year or two before fading into uselessness. The fixer was nonflammable. But apparently, if a tiny leak allowed it to form a cloud over the printer's power supply, eventually it would start a flash fire. The fire consumed all the oxygen in the building very quickly, and after those first twenty seconds it probably just simmered a bit.

It was our practice to run 500 page printouts overnight, so the fire happened about 2 a.m. with no one there. The guy who left at 1 a.m. said "Gee, I wish I had been there, maybe I could have done something." Had he been there, he probably would have died.

I arrived the next morning to find mini-computers smoking in the parking lot. Firetrucks were there, and the windows were black with smoke. A new employee started work that day. He stood there looking at the mess. I would have understood if he had quit on the spot, but he stayed and worked there for four years.

The company survived the fire because, one week before, they had shipped a brace of computers and software to a prime customer. If those computers had been caught in the fire, they could not have been shipped and there would have been no cashflow cushion, nothing to tide us over until insurance money came in.

Everything smelled of smoke. There were plastic knobs in the ceiling to adjust vents, and the knobs nearest the fire now looked like stalactites. The computers closest to the fire looked just awful. But their only problem was that their plastic exteriors had melted. New plastic was put in place, and we used those machines for years.

Several Modcomp machines were twenty feet from the fire, and they worked fine afterwards. But the Modcomp company was kind enough to warn us that these computers would all fail disastrously after about three months, because the acid smoke had caused uncorrectable damage to their printed circuit boards. Their machines all failed as predicted, but there was insurance money to replace them.

We did no programming for weeks. Removable disk packs -- lots of them -- had to be opened and cleaned. Card decks -- thousands of punch cards -- had to be cleaned. Everything had to be cleaned. After about six weeks the office stopped smelling of smoke, and we started to program again.

Modcomp: Chips and Wires ...

In the mid 1970's, my company used mini computers made by a company called Modcomp. This was no ordinary company. For one thing, I remember hearing that one or two of their executives was wanted for accounting fraud. For another, the names for the Modcomp computer instructions were designed by an alien from outer space, and were generally less mnemonic than for other computers. Typical instruction names in those days were: JUMPL (jump to another address if result is less than zero); LB (load byte); ADD (add). In Modcompese, I'll bet you wouldn't guess what the SUM instruction did; that's right, it SU-btracted, storing the result in M-emory.
But that's not important now. Modcomp, unlike all of its competitors, built their minicomputers with chips that could easily be removed and replaced. (Take just a moment and savor the fact that in this, Modcomp differed from ALL of its competitors. Perhaps they knew something that Modcomp didn't know.) Chip replacement made it easy for Modcomp to upgrade machines and fix computer bugs, and they issued correction sheets all the time. Typically a bug was fixed by replacing a few chips, removing and rewiring a few wires. (There were printed circuit boards in the 70s, but typically every mini had lots and of real wires as well.)

At that time my company was developing software for a large oil company to control waste in a refinery plant. We bought the Modcomp mini-computers, sold them to our customer, and held on to them for many months while we developed the software for them. One day our customer mentioned a contract clause we had totally ignored: "You're keeping the computers up to date, right? All the upgrades and bug fixes?"

There was an awesome mound of fix-sheets in our director's desk drawer that we had never applied. He sorted through these, suspecting that some of them must be obsolete already. Eventually we forced a meeting with our customer and the director of the Modcomp fixups division, to decide what fixes must be applied, both now and in the future.

The Modcomp guy was proud of the intense rate at which his company issued fixes. He saw this process as insurance that the computers were as good as possible, although I suspect you will come to a different conclusion. At the meeting, discussion focused on the amount of time needed to take a computer out of service to apply each weekly batch of fixes. Finally our director confronted the Modcomp guy: "You're telling me that we'll have to take our computers out of service more than forty hours a week to keep them current?"
After some hemming and hawing, the Modcomp guy agreed. It was an astounding moment. Our customer agreed that we could apply only the most important fixes, to be determined by Modcomp, so that we could finish writing our programs for them.

I wonder how many fixes were added after the computer went into production at the customer plant. They wanted to run 24/7.

Watch habits:

last Last Thursday's blog entry was about shifting my watch from my left wrist to my right. I can see already that this change in a life-long habit will be harder to manage than learning to thread my belt in the opposite direction. My new wrist position conflicts with three other life-long habits, two of which I'm happy to mention here.

What do you do when you're not sure that you remembered to put on your watch? When this thought hits me, I run my right hand up my left arm to feel for my watch. All that does now, is to give me a better view of my right wrist.

Do you take your watch off to wash dishes? I don't. But to be safe, I've developed a habit of keeping my right hand more in the water, and my left hand more out. My watch runs more risk of getting wet now.

But, some of you will ask, isn't your watch “water resistant”? It is, but what does that mean? I imagine myself writing a letter to Cadex saying, “My watch got wet and now it doesn't work.” And Cadex writes back to me, “Oh, our watches aren't that water resistant.”

2500 Square feet of Gravel:

We've lived near the university, and walked across its grounds, for many years. It's always a little depressing when more of the campus greenery is plowed under to make room for new buildings, but the university flourishes, so losing grass is inevitable.

Recently a strip of grass near a new building was ripped up. Gravel was laid there, and -- from the look of it -- pressed down with a steam roller. I used to walk through that grass strip, and for the last two weeks I've walked over the new gravel instead. I calculated its size, and that's why the title of this item mentions 2,500' sq. It was hard to figure out why they laid this gravel. I thought it might become a small parking lot, but there was no entrance to it. In the last two weeks I once saw a truck that had climbed the curb to park there.

Well today the gravel is gone, plowed under. That same strip of land is now a sea of big dirt clods. I wonder what they're going to do next, but right now, it looks like somebody turned a strip of land into gravel by mistake.

Micro-adjusting my watch band:

I'm still happy with the new Cadex watch I told you about on April 18th. But its watchband is not ideal for me. It's psuedo-leather with buckle-holes in it. I almost always wear my watch on my left wrist, and the correct hole to stick the buckle in would be third from the end. There's a horizontal band that you push up to lock the pin into its hole. (I'm not describing this well, but this arrangement is very common in watchbands.) The band does not hold well at the third hole, so I could lose the watch. And the fourth hole is too tight. And there's no in between.

But I happen to know that my right wrist is narrower than my left. So I've given up on a lifetime habit, and I'm learning to wear my watch on my right wrist, where the fourth hole is perfect.

Strangely, this is the second lifetime habit that I've given up in a year. I wear my PDA, mp3 player, flash memory and phone in little packs that I hang on my belt. The belt goes through loops on these little packs, so the there's no chance the packs can fall off, except for the pack at the open end of my belt (where the belt-holes are). When I open my belt (in a bathroom, say), I might be spacey enough to fail notice a pack sliding off my belt. That means the important, expensive stuff has to go at the other end of my belt, where the buckle makes it impossible to lose anything. But the buckle-part of my belt was always on my left, and I wanted the unloseable stuff to be on my right! So I reversed my belt. After a liftime of threading my belt one way around my waist, I've had to learn to thread it the other way. Getting used to that took weeks. But I haven't lost anything, so it must have been worth the effort.

A Triumph for the 36-watt CFL:

You've heard me carp about the new compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Well, they're not nearly all bad, and here's a case where a CFL made me happy.

There's a lamp in our front yard that used to have a conventional 40 watt bulb. It died recently, so I replaced it with a 36 watt CFL. That lamp will use a little less electricity now, while burning much brighter, but that's not the exciting part.

Each time this bulb burns out, I have to stand on tiptoe and reach up with my arm, yet down with my hand, to barely touch the old bulb to remove it. Screwing in the new bulb is just as awkward. But these CFLs: the more watts they use, the longer they are. It was easy to screw in the 36 watt CFL, and it will be just as easy to replace it with another, similar bulb, when the new one dies much, much sooner than the manufacturer claims.

Where would I look for ...

I've been carrying around an ID badge, and some papers, for an activity that I'd like to tell you about someday. I had a very nice bag to keep these items in, but I needed that bag for another purpose. I took my ID stuff out and did something really dreadful: I put it "where I couldn't possibly fail to find it."

I found it four weeks later, by which time I had admitted it was lost in my house and had gotten a duplicate ID. And then I found it. Really, I had put that stuff in a place where it couldn't be missed. But that's not good enough, is it? Not for me, anyway.

The next time I need to put something away for awhile, I hope I will do two things. One: I'll make a note in my email telling me where I've put it. And then ... Two: now this is my new idea: I'll try to imagine myself looking for this thing, and I'll put it where I think I would look. I'll let you know if that ever works.

I've been getting a lot of Nigerian news lately:

I'm not talking about spam. I have a new Nokia N800 PDA, and of course I want to get news about it. I set up a Google News Alert for "N800". After a few disastrous days, I changed that to: N800 -nigeria. 'N' is a money abbreviation in Nigeria, so I get news stories about anything costing n800. The "-nigeria" is not nearly a good enough filter. After all, in the US, we don't say "USA" every time we mention dollars. Unfortunately, "N800" seems to be a common amount of money in Nigerian news (in thousands or millions).

I once performed a solo concerto with orchestra:

During the depression, there was federal money for all sorts of unlikely projects to keep people in work. Some musicians got a grant to build a Hurdy-Gurdy, the crank-driven instrument you've seen pictures of, that accompanies Italian Organ Grinders and monkeys. The grant covered writing out parts for one of Haydn's Hurdy-Gurdy concertos, and programming the Hurdy-Gurdy to play the two solo parts. (That's right, there were two solo parts, not one.)

The musicians on this project must have been a little puzzled about what they were doing, because they built the wrong instrument. The Hurdy-Gurdy of old is a violin with a round, spring-drive mechanism that continuously "bows" the strings, and a set of push-down pegs that play notes. It sounds pretty sickly, but it's a lot easier to manage than a real violin. Haydn wrote concertos for pairs of thiese old Hurdy-Gurdies. It was child's play to program the new windup H-G to play two notes at once, heck, it can play a lot more than that.

The conductor of the Columbia University undergrad orchestra, Howard Shanet, specialized in digging up unusual music, and this find was a humdinger. The orchestra parts were easy to play, and how hard is it to play a H-G? You just turn the crank handle at the right speed, and the notes come out. Shanet decided that the librarian of a music collection in Philadelphia, who had often loaned us orchestra parts, would get the reward of performing the concerto in concert. For rehearsal, Columbia orchestra's own librarian would play the H-G.

The first rehearsal was a disaster. It was almost impossible to crank the H-G at a "wrong" speed, but our librarian could not stay in synch with the orchesra. For some reason, the problem was immediately obvious only to me, and in between "takes" I tried to coach the librarian, but he just didn't "get" it. Finally, an impatient conductor snapped at me, "You know so much about it, you do it." I toook over the H-G part and all was well.

The problem was finding the downbeat. You had to crank the H-G once, all the way around, for each measure. It seemed to be "human nature" to crank DOWN for the first beat -- that would be six o'clock if you imagine the crank going around a clock circle -- but the first beat was actually on the way up, around ten o'clock. I played H-G for all the rest of the rehearsals.

The day before the concert was a tense time for me. I wanted to perform the concerto, and I thought I really ought to. What was the chance that the Philadelphia librarian would find the downbeat without a single rehearsal? If I may be frank, I would say that my tension came from this: I could not decide what ached me more: the risk that the Philly librarian would make a fool of himself; or my great desire to be the soloist.
Hours before the concert, Howard Shanet informed me that the Philly librarian would not be able to make it. I still wish I knew what he told the librarian during their phone call. Anyway, I had a ball.

Lively Fishing Worms:

My father liked to fish, often using worms as bait. He would go outside in summer, about an hour after sunset, to collect the nightcrawlers that came out looking for mates. I remember some fun evenings joining him to catch worms. Dad experimented with media to store the worms until he was ready to fish. He found that the best way to keep them alive was to put them in a can with topsoil and coffee grounds.

One recent morning I had to go out and do things without benefit of my morning coffee. I got to thinking about these worms and suddenly it hit me: Of course they were lively, from all that caffeine!

$5000 or more ...

I can't resist mentioning this: a radio ad suggesting that you should call them if your credit card debt is "greater than $5000 or more." If my debt was infinity (greater than Aleph null, that is), I guess I would be eligible to call.

I understand their expression thus: Greater than [$5000 or more].

Slip-sliding Soap:

In many hotel rooms, the bathtub/shower enclosure comes with built-in shelves for soap. These shelves lean downward just enough to drop every bar into the tub. They have always annoyed me, but last week I dscovered how to persuade my soap to stay put. Take a wet washcloth (most hotel rooms have too many of these, anyway) and plop it onto the little shelf. The cloth probably won't slide off. Then tuck your soap between the washcloth and the enclosure wall.

Audio Books on Playaway:

Our local library is renting out audio books on Playaway. You get a device that's smaller than 2" x 3" x 1/2". It has an entire book on it, and a few small buttons for control. It remembers where you are. Its small display shows you how many chapters you've read. You can adjust volume, and there's an equalizer. You stick it in your pocket, plug in your headphones, and listen.

It's much more convenient and versatile than CDs or tapes, or even a normal audio player. I recently drove a long trip, during which I had to switch CDs on the road. With Playaway, there's nothing to fiddle with, pop out or pop in. It's great. Ask your library to get Playaways.

Exhaustion (2):

I'm not as tired as I was yesterday, but I remember some other times of brain-driven exhaustion. I described yesterday how my brain can make me work young, like, oh, a fifty-year old. Here's another example of how I've driven myself like a young'un, recovering more and more slowly as I age.

I do a few really exhausting things once or twice a year, and I've been doing them for many years: I lead some of the Orthodox Jewish prayer services for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. The goal of a good prayer service is entirely different from an opera production, but the demands are similar: you're on your feet and singing with dramatic intent for long periods of time.

Leading these services calls for lots of energy. The closing service of Yom Kippur, which starts after 24 hours of neither eating nor drinking, is particularly demanding. I started leading these services many years ago, so I know how to husband my strength. But I don't really have that strength anymore, it's just a feat of mind over body. I remember, about twenty years ago, an undergraduate leading a Yom Kippur service I had led the previous year. I could see him tire as the service went on. Afterward, he asked me, “Where do you get the energy?” I could tell him then; I can't tell him now, but that energy comes from somewhere when I need it.

The words are the same each year; the melodies are similar. As I harness myself to these familiar patterns, I feel the energy flow. It's incredible to know that I can call on all that strength; and fascinating to know that I'll spend days afterwards, paying my body back. All of you are going to have similar experiences. All it takes is a vigorous activity you don't want to leave behind you.

Exhaustion (1):

I'm 67, but last week I didn't feel a day over 50. We had a tough deadline to meet, and several times I worked late, slept a few hours and got up early. There was a mass of detail to attend to, and it felt great to see my younger self kick in, stay awake and alert, to help our team achieve an excellent finish. I knew I would pay later.

I've been catching up on my sleep, but – days later – I know I'm still exhausted. I swim regularly, and today I got really exhausted in 35 minutes. Last weekend, before the big push at work, I swam 45 fast, effortless minutes. So what's going on?

The fascinating thing is that, when you fall back into old habits, your body can summon up the strength that goes with those habits, even if you really don't have that strength anymore. You remember how to behave, how to do the task, and how to summon the energy. If in fact your body's too old for that, you pay it back later, with a much longer recovery time. Next time you see an oldster not acting their age, amazing you with their resources, maybe that's what's happening. Keep an eye on them later. For example:

Wow, I am tired.

Awesome User Error:

This is going to be a very confusing story about an awesome error I inflicted on myself.

I've been testing a program whose name I'm probably not permitted to tell you, but the name is similar to “Task Manager”. You're probably familiar with the Task Manager program, you can use it to turn your PC off, to list the processes that are running, to see how much CPU time you're using, and even to “kill” programs that won't quit when you want them to.

I've been fixing a bug that works like this: my own program tries to quit, but a little piece of it keeps running. I can see, in Task Manager, that my program has a running “process”. My program won't start again unless that process quits. The worst part of the bug was that sometimes Task Manager couldn't “kill” it. I would have to reboot the PC to get rid of it. So you can imagine that each time my program quit, I looked anxiously at the list of processes in Task Manager, to see if my program was gone.

This was a very rare issue until, sometime today, my brain fused the names of my program with “Taskmgr” -- that's how Task Manager appears in the “process” list -- and I started running Task Manager to see whether “Task Manger” was running.

Now of course it always was! So I thought that my bug had become repeatable. Worse, when I told Task Manager to kill Task Manager, the strangest thing happened: Task Manager disappeared right off the screen. And if I ran it again to see if it had managed to kill MY program (which wasn't even running anymore), why ... there was Task Manager again, right in its list of running processes!

The first time I told it to kill itself (thinking I was telling it to kill MY program), I was astounded when Task Manager disappeared. “WOW!” I said, “My program is so hard to kill that Task Manager dies, trying to kill it.” Hours later, the silver coin dropped, and I realized that every time Task Manager had disappeared, my program had not been running, and my bug was not happening.

It's a peculiar thing, though, that Task Manager is allowed to kill itself. I'll bet the person who wrote that program thought hard about whether to allow it to commit suicide.

Men will cook if there's danger involved --- etc.

I believe it is Rita Rudner who advises that "Men will cook when there's danger involved." Some men (me, for example) enjoy a few other things if there's danger involved.

I was working at the small airport earlier this week. There's a lot of expansion-type construction there. As a result, the walk between the plane in the hangar and my development PC takes a long, circuitous route, unless I go through the construction zone; so that's what I do.
First, I open a door that has a long slit cut in it for a window. (Pay attention to this detail, it will be important later.) Then I look both ways - you never know what might come swinging through the air at a construction site - and I cross one corner of the site. Then I walk through a wide doorway that has no door, and I'm near the plane.

Going back is a little more interesting. First I look through the doorless doorway -- you never know what might come swinging through the air at a construction site - and I cross my corner of the site. The door with the slit in it is locked, but only on this side. I reach through the slit, angle my arm way down, unlock the door, and I'm out.

I did want to ask the construction workers why the door was locked only on the inside, but I was afraid I knew what they would say: "It's to keep fools like you from hurting yourself."

Well ... Eventually, I did ask one of the construction workers:
"Do you happen to know why this door is locked only on the inside?"
He chuckled, said "Yep," and walked away. Wrong question, I guess. I always was a good setup man.

Disappointed in Sirius Radio:

About nine months ago, I rented a car that had a few Sirius radio channels. I listened to it for about ten hours, ignoring all my favorite podcasts, before it began to pall. There were three humor channels: raunchy, classic, and current. I really like standup, and I discovered a lot of good material. But you can't spend your life just listening to standup.

Last week I got another car with Sirius radio. One hundred Sirius channels, this time. A few of those carry music I really like, but once again, I checked out the humor. I guess that there's an awful lot more good music than good humor, because the focus of the Sirius humor channels has changed, and they are strip mining, I would say, pretty shallow veins this month. There's a raunchy channel that utilizes very little material from the great comedians of the '90's. The high point here was a very, very long and clever rendition of the 'Aristocrats' joke by Gilbert Gottfired. Then there was a blue collar humor channel, and, I'll call it, an esoteric humor channel. The guys working the esoteric channel spoke both very loud and very soft. There was no way I could set the volume to catch any humorist's every word, a great disappointment.

But the main thing I can say about the three humor channels is that they are constantly interrupted by ads and station breaks, and these are so much louder that I had to keep adjusting the volume. A pain! It's really outrageous for a radio station to turn up the volume for ads and breaks, especially a pay station. Sirius: I think you're losing it.

There might have been a woman in room 220, too!

Okay, I've worked up the nerve to tell you how I came to remember my mother's story, that I recounted yesterday. I've just returned from a business trip. On the first night I stayed in Maryland in a nice hotel, in room 223. On the remaining nights I was at a nice place in Virginia. When I arrived, the elevator was not working, so I begged for, and got, a first floor room: 120. Wednesday night, neither of my electronic keys worked. I pushed each one into the slot of room 220 several times, but thank goodness, nothing happened. Okay, I told myself, I'll just have to go back down the elevator, lugging my heavy laptop, and tell them I need new electronic keys. Wait a minute! I don't need the elevator to get to my room! I'm in room 120. And all those memories came flooding back ...

Ohhhhh mom, I'm glad I don't have to tell you: Mr. Boss wasn't the only one.

There's a Woman in my Room!

Straight out of school, my mother worked as an economist in Washington, D.C. Her boss – he must have been able to do many things right to be a boss – had, she said, the worst memory you could possibly imagine. He was also, I believe, just a teeny bit unobservant. She told only one story to illustrate how strange he was, but it was pretty convincing. I had forgotten this story for most of fifty years, but it has returned to me, and I'm delighted to share it with you now.

Mr. Boss often took business trips to Manhattan. He had a favorite hotel there, near Columbus Circle. For reasons that will gradually come clear, I shall call it: Hotel Bee. His secretary was well aware of his preference, and routinely reserved a room for him there.

On this particular occasion, Mr. Boss arrived in Manhattan, went to hotel in Columbus Circle, and – can you believe it? They had no record of his reservation. He raised a holy stink. The hotel was crowded, but eventually they found a room for him. Let's call it room #559. Mr. Boss parked his stuff and went out to dinner.

After dinner, he went to his beloved Hotel Bee, took the elevator to the fifth floor, opened room #559 with his key, and – you won't believe this – there was a woman in his room, and all his stuff was gone. Worse, it looked like she was actually staying there, there were women's things instead of his own.
After he demanded to know what she was doing in his room; after she demanded to know what he meant, barging into her locked room; they both went to the manager and raised a holy stink. There ensued a period of awesome confusion and shouting, which will make perfect sense to you when you know how they sorted things out.

When Mr. Boss had arrived in New York, he had gone to hotel Aye, which is quite close to hotel Bee. Of course, they had had no reservation for him. Mr. Boss might have noticed that he was in the wrong hotel, they don't all look the same. But after dinner, Mr. Boss went to Hotel Bee, where he did have a reservation. He might have noticed that he was in a different hotel. But he did not. He might have gotten a clue that something was wrong when hotel Aye's key failed to work in room #559 of Hotel Bee. But that's the strangest part of this story: somehow, it did.

We can draw an inference from this anecdote, and I think it supports my mother's point: you have to be a pretty strange person to fall into stories like this.

This item is really about safe driving!

Today I'm going to mention computer role playing and urinal games, but please bear in mind that I have only one goal in mind: safe driving.

We begin by observing that putting games inside urinals seems to make bathrooms cleaner. A number of experiments along these lines are happening in Europe and Asia, but not, I believe, in our own relatively prudish United States. Here's an example: giving men something to aim at makes a difference.
If you've played computer games, you probably know that as you travel about, you must keep your eyes peeled for valuable items to pick up. They could be hidden anywhere, and you learn to react to the slightest visual cues along the way.
Also, I'm sure you'll agree that superhighways of the future will be heavily networked, and your future auto will have a fancy computer system that communicates with the highway's computers. All of these computers will interact with you by placing displays on your front windshield, since that's a great way to make you see warnings abot road problems.
Finally, I'm sure you'll agree that the safest drivers on fast highways will be those who are staying alert for the slightest sign of trouble: in front of them, to the rear, to the sides; and well in advance.

To put this all together, imagine that your toll for driving a super highway is discounted by the number of, let's call them "brabs", that you see along the way. The highway and your car's master computer cooperate with your windshield to make it seem to you that brabs are hiding along the road. And of course you watch alertly for these brabs and click some switch when you see them, to lower your tolls. Your general alertness thus contributes to overall road safety. I think this is a win-win idea, and I hope to see it in my lifetime.

As an added benefit: if you fail to find even the easiest brabs, a police car may stop you to see whether you're half asleep. And if you find hundreds of non-existent brabs, you might be checked for LSD.

Under ...

When you're driving through a long tunnel, and you have a modern GPS, then that GPS will be delighted to draw a picture for you -- with lots of bright blue -- to show you that you are under a great deal of water.

Skillful Coffee Cooling:

I recently posted about the Java Wand, a clever, compact device that makes good coffee and is easy to travel with. I complained that there was a slight issue: When the coffee's hot, you suck hot coffee right into your mouth. But it turns out that I merely needed to learn to use the wand properly. You suck up a strawful of coffee, hold that coffee in the glass straw a few moments to cool, then suck it into your mouth. This experience is, I feel, more pleasurable than taking those first few hot sips from a teaspoon. In fact, it's very effective to use the same company's Tea Wand to cool a hot cup of coffee.

In the past, when I was in a hurry, I used the salesman's trick to cool the coffee: I dropped ice into it. But the “Health tea Wand” is better. It's a glass straw whose bottom acts as a glass filter to keep out tea leaves. It also keeps out most coffee grounds, enabling me to suck on the hottest coffee, keeping each mouthful in the glass a moment to cool it. I'm delighted with the WisdomWands products.

My remarkable coffee grinder:

I have the simplest sort of coffee grinder. It looks roughly like this. The unit in the picture claims a $50 list price, but I bought mine in 1985 for $10. There are a lot of knocks on this kind of grinder. It can burn the grounds, and these cheap grinders don't last very long. Except for mine.

When I bought it, I could see that the grinder's weak point was its easily overheated motor. Metal fatigue usually ruins little hot-running devices. So I decided never to run it more than ten seconds at a time. These days I run it for 9 seconds, give it 9 minutes rest, then another 9 seconds, and maybe one more such cycle, to grind my coffee beans. The unit still works.

Actually it broke today, but for a fascinating reason: the a/c power cord wore out. Both the insulation and the wire broke. To me, this particular problem validates the way I've use the grinder. Its designers never expected it to last so long that it would need a higher quality power cord.
I fixed it for another $5. I doubt it will last another twenty years; but I doubt I'll be grinding coffee in twenty years, anyway.

Feeble GPS:

If you're driving through a long tunnel, and your car sports a modern GPS, why, then that GPS will be happy to draw a picture for you, to show you that you're under a great body of water. I've just completed my first serious immersion in GPS-life, driving 700 miles in a rental car over roads familiar and unknown. I have an awful lot of impressions to sort out, such as the fact that I hate to be told to "drive straight in 1.8 miles" while trying to hear an audio book.

But here's what you should bear in mind about today's driver-GPS systems: They are feeble inventions of great ingenuity. In the future, we'll look back at them, and we'll laugh.

A GPS ought to be tightly- coupled with its automobile. Many quirks of its user interface derive from the GPS computer having so little idea of, or knowledge of, what's going on. The next time your'e bored, imagine what a GPS would be like if it had these capabilites:

• It would know your location to within an accuracy of one foot; it would know if you were in the correct lane.
• It would monitor the turn signals; it would know if you intended to make a turn as instructed.
• It would be able to operate the turn signals for you, if you preferred not to signal manually.
• It could advise you when to brake, or that you're going too fast, given the curviness of the road.
• It would know whether you had enough gas to reach your destination, so it would know when to direct you to a price-competitive gas station.
• My GPS asked me whether I wanted the shortest route, the route with the most super highways, or the route with the least super highways. Over time, this list of alternatives will expand to include choices of familiar/unfamilar routes, fuel-efficient routes, and (I think some high end systems have these): routes to avoid bad weather, construction, or traffic jams.
• A GPS that knows the weather and the traffic can tell me when it's advisable to turn cruise control on and off.

I believe there are already GPS systems that handle audio input. This business of pressing buttons to slo- ... -wly program an address is ridiculous. My GPS warned me not to program it while driving. It then required me to press several buttons (while driving) to confirm I was resuming the last driving plan. GPS systems that take weather and construction schedules into account can do something else that's rather clever: they can suggest what time of day I should start driving, for best time and weather. And so on, and so on, and so on.

Today's GPS developers have been ingenious, doing so much with so little. But what we're enjoying is only a primitive new technology.

Does anybody remember Ex-Cell-O?

For many years (including the 1960's), Ex-Cell-O corporation held a patent on virtually every paper milk carton produced. Other liquids used the same carton and licensed the same patent. I often noticed Ex-Cell-O's patent on the cartons. Perhaps you didn't, even if you were old enough to drink from their cartons. I had my own painful reasons for noticing them. I believe the company still exists, and this may be part of them.

Here's a story about the milk carton that discusses Ex-Cell-O's role.

In the 1960's and '70's, we believed that Ex-Cell-O had many subsidiary companies. They were making all these $$ from their patent, and they wanted to use that capital to grow into a giant, before their patent lapsed. I suspect that they had the miserable experience of watching some of their ventures fail. The one that affected me was: Bryant.

Bryant manufactured drums and disk drives. One of their units held the astounding amount of 40 MB. (That was astounding for 1971, anyway.) The drive was about 5 feet long, 3 feet wide and 3 feet high. Inside that rectangular frame was an axle that spun very fast, twirling a few dozen platters that were each large enough to be used for coffee tables. The company I worked at (and owned stock in) relied on Bryant, and only Bryant, for their massive disk storage. But at some point a maintenance problem developed with these drives, and their downtime was a killer for us.

Our most memorable Bryant moment was when the drive train on one of these giant boxes froze. The entire, enormous box jumped off the ground, flew through the air, and landed three feet closer to one maintenance guy who watched it jump at him in horror. I suspect that Bryant was not a very successful way for Ex-Cell-O to spend their milk money.

Cheap Self Serve New Jersey Gas:

Here's another story that I'm going to end by saying, “I don't really want to know.”

On the way to work, I pass an intersection with three gas stations. That's – clearly – one too many. The station with the most expensive gas has gone out of business a few times in the last few years. The other two stations sell lesser-known brands at lower prices. Let's call the shaky one the “MoTeXarco” station. Currently it's easy to see that MoTeXarco is shut down, because those tall signs that advertise gas prices have no numbers on them. Yet a few days ago, when I pulled up to the red light, I glanced over to see a well-dressed gentleman at one of the pumps. He looked like he had just finished serving himself some gas, as he put away the pump-hose and his wallet. (Self-service is illegal in NJ, you're required to wait for the attendant to put your credit card, or his own card, into the pump.)

And I started to think ...

Maybe the guy really did just fill his tank. If he did, he used gas that was many weeks old. And the price must have been many weeks old as well. He could have saved fifty cents a gallon or more. Could it be? Can you close a station and forget to turn off the pumps? Of course, he might have driven into the station, tried to pump some gas, and failed, but who knows?

I'm tempted to find out. It would just take a minute to pull up to MoTeXarco's pumps and see if they're working. But even using my credit card, I would probably break a dozen laws or more. And if I got caught? It's not worth the risk. And anyway, I'd rather dream about this incident; I don't really want to know.

This is my 1,234th post in Precision Blogging. Scribble, scribble, eh? Today: the Pulse pen:

If you've started reading my blog recently, I recommend the archives. They're not too shabby.

Today, I'm going to critique, without having seen or used it, the Pulse smart pen. According to a David Pogue column, Jim Marggraff, the genius who brought us the Fly Fusion Pen, has taken a great step forward with the Pulse. Here's my bottom line: I think the Pulse is very exciting. I wish I had one, but I don't want to buy it. I wish it luck, but I think that small computers will compete against it too well. Now here are the details.

I love the Fly Fusion Pen. See my blog entry about it, here. It was hard for me to decide to buy it, because that product seemed to be aimed at pre-teen girls. But I was right, it's great for adults, too. The Fly Fusion Pen is a computer that you can use, very discreetly, to take notes for later computer processing. You can use it where you might embarrass people by typing on your PC, or where you do not want to lug your heavy, bulky PC. Both the Fly Fusion and the Pulse do a lot of other things as well, and I think that's part of the problem. (More on this below.)

As soon as I saw Pogue's column, a single question popped into my mind: did I make a terrible mistake, buying too soon? I decided that I prefer the Fly Fusion Pen to the Pulse. The reasons are simple: The Pulse would cost another $50 to $100 (the Devil is in the accessories); the Fly fusion Pen hit a great price point for me, under $100. And the Pulse offers much too much; I don't want to pay for its solutions to problems I don't have. (I don't mind that extra hour I spent reading the Fly Fusion Pen's documentation, before settling on the four simple commands I would need. But complexity brings ... well ... more complexity.)

The Pulse looks like a terrific item. It's classy. It has an OLED display. It records audio. Executives and college students will be proud to carry it. The fact that it can play audio back also means you can use menus with it (like the Fly pen)! You can tap through a series of choices you do not see, and the audio speaker will tell you what they are, to let you select one. The Pulse has two amazing features lacking on the Fly Pen:

• It has an Open Platform software interface. Developers are encouraged to extend it. Who knows what they'll do with it? In time, this product could morph into something wonderful and unexpected.
• You can associate recorded audio with written notes. If you are going to record a lot of audio, that can be a fantastic feature. This feature caught David Pogue's imagination, and that contributed to the Pulse getting “good ink” in the New York Times.

The second half of David Pogue's review covers the pains of complexity in the Pulse product. The Fly Fusion pen has many of the same learning issues, but let me assure you: if you know what you want to do with the pen, it will be easier to learn than Pogue suggests.

Now here's my jaundiced view: In the long run, most complex things that you can do with the Pulse pen will compete against small computers. The general purpose computer almost always wins. Very specialized computers (like fancy synthesizers) carve out unbeatable niches, but usually you are better off owning a computer that can do hundreds of kinds of tasks. Many people who want to combine written notes and audio can do that on their PCs. As an open-api platform, the Pulse will be looking for exciting niches where our ever-shrinking ultra small PCs cannot compete. I wish it luck in finding them.

Otherwise, I'd like to see Smart Pens focus on what they can do best: write computer readable text. I don't want to pay extra for all the software development that enables the pens to do too many other things; and there probably IS a cost there in the base retail price. The Fly Fusion pen can actually behave like a synthesizer. Someone wrote software to support this feature, and I'm paying for part of that feature, even though I do not want it.

By the way, be warned: you need special paper for these pens to write on. (The paper's cheap, you just have to be able to carry it.) The paper is special. When I write in their notebook, the dots on the page tell my Fly Fusion pen what PAGE I'm on.

A handsome pen that makes no noise and discreetly writes info for me to upload: If the price is right, that's the specialized computer that a generalized PC can't match.

The Infernal Progress Bar:

Just once in my programming career, I wrote a program to install some software. (In fact, it was one of the toughest types of installation: the video driver for the main CRT.) Every install program shows a progress bar so that you can see how the installation is going. I took this bar very seriously. The files that an install program installs are compressed, but I found that the rate of install progress was directly related to the size of the uncompressed files. I built into my install compilation, the knowledge of how many bytes had to be installed, and I used that figure to produce a pretty accurate and reassuring progress bar.

That is so rare.

I'm, sure you've see progress bars that creep from about zero to fifteen percent; they hover there for awhile and suddenly: bang, the install is done. And you've seen bars that expand from 0 to 100 percent several times during an install, without a clue how many times the bar is going to fill. Having paid my dues here, I'm contemptuous of all these lousy progress bars. If you're going to display one, make it real!

I recently watched a software install that hits a new low. I suspect that the programmer in this case was himself subjected to so many terrible progress bars that he had no idea what they were. During his install, a black smudge moves back and forth on the progress bar, back and forth, back and forth. It doesn't show progress at all; although it does provide some confidence that the installer program has not died. Now really ...

Honk Honk! (Oops)

I often drive through a dangerous intersection. There's a delayed green light, and while cars are allowed to drive toward me, pedestrians step off the curb and cross in front of my car. They look up and see I have a red light, so they assume they must have the green, and they are oblivious of the cars coming straight toward me, and them. These careless, unobservant people annoy me, even when they are not talking to their cellphones.

Recently I honked at a woman crossing in front of my car. As she turned to stare at me, I realized that I really had the red light; she was entitled to cross. How to diffuse an embarrassing situation?

I did what I imagine any of you would do: I waved to her. She gave me a puzzled glance, waved back, and completed her crossing.