Another Tomato Update:

On August 31, I blogged that the squirrels were, at last, leaving my tomato patch alone, and I hoped to get many more tomatoes. Things did not work out. During the hot spell when I was losing every single tomato to the blasted critters, I stopped watering my tomatoes. In retrospect, that was the wrong strategy; I should have been trying my hardest to grow tomatoes for the squirrels to eat. Most of my tomato plants withered or weakened, and their production in September has been poor.

I did get another thirty cherry tomatoes this month, before the next hot spell caused the squirrels to steal what remained. My totals for this year are: six Early Girls and 123 Cherry Tomatoes. That’s far from what I had hoped: 50 Early Girls and 900 Cherries.

There’s an irony here: This year, I was proud of keeping my costs down. The tomato plant sets are inexpensive. I needed no new fertilizer, and I had plenty of poles for the plants to grow on. My biggest expense was for the deterrent spray that did not keep the squirrels off my tomatoes.

Next year I hope to grow my plants in a chicken-wire enclosure.

Delicious Instant Coffee: Taster's Choice Gourmet:

It's generally a good idea to praise a product without knocking its competitors, but I can't resist knocking Starbucks Via. That coffee was rolled out gradually and confidently to great acclaim last year. I heard about it on one of Leo Laporte's podcasts, the Daily GizWiz. Leo was in ecstasy about Via. He claimed that it just tasted like good coffee, no "instant" taste at all. I was horribly disappointed when I tried it. For $1.00 a cup, I expected something that did not taste "instant", and Via does. I don't think you have to be a picky gourmet who spends $30.00 a pound for coffee (which I sometimes do) to taste the deficiency in Via, but let me add this disclaimer: it may taste different to you. I might just be the single unlucky person who doesn't like Via; maybe Leo Laporte was right.

But how about this product: Taster's Choice Gourmet Coffee (both mild and somewhat stronger): it is packaged about the same as Via, in little single-serve just-add-water tubes. It tastes decent for coffee, and there is NO, I repeat, NO instant coffee taste. It's a winner! And it costs about a fifth of what Via costs.

32 Loads:

I do most of the automatic laundries in our home. I like the “nothing added, no smell” washing machine soaps. Several brands advertise that their 32oz bottle holds enough soap for “32 loads.”

I think this is a clever advertizing trick. Each bottle comes with a lid that you pour the soap into, to transfer a measured amount into your washing machine. Just fill the lid up and you’ll get about sixteen loads. But there’s a faint line way down inside the lid. Be very disciplined and fill only to there, and you get 32, just as advertized. And we’re talking discipline here, as in: be very careful not to overfill the lid, every single time.

"Stealth" Gaming:

From time to time, I dream about buying a really expensive board game ($50 and up) that will give me many hours of pleasurable adventuring. I always decide not to buy, primarily for these reasons:

• The cost. That's real money!
• I intend, mostly, to play these games myself, and they are usually not intended as solo games.
• If I find a really, really good game, then I'm afraid I'll play it too much.

But now, I have stumbled upon a web-hosted treasure trove: "Printable" games that one can download free and enjoy. And there's a whole set of solo games. I may find one that will give me just as much pleasure as the $50 game I'm not buying. Fun!
There's something unusual about many of these games. Their developers have tried to create enjoyable board games that don't look like games. The goal is that you can play them stealthily at work without getting caught. They are called "stealth" or "Ninja" games. One game, for example, uses "post it" notes to replace dice.
I wonder how much these "stealth" games are catching on. Oh, the wasted productivity. Oh, the humanity!

Through the ear, Darkly:

Rosalyn Landor gives a stunning performance of the (abridged) audio book, Through a Glass Darkly by Karleen Koen.

In arts such as music and dance, there is usually a creator, a performer, and an audience. (To simplify, I shall refer to the audience as ‘you’.) There are also arts in which the conventional wisdom is that there is no performer, such as: reading a book.

I disagree with the common wisdom. In art, there is always a performer. Sometimes it is the person who created the art. Most often, it is you. You decide how to look at the Mona Lisa; where to look first, how to take in the details, how to bring the parts of the painting together. You decide how to view a statue. And when you read a book, you decide how the characters look, how they sound, how they move, and what the environments are like that they inhabit. The most detailed writer gives you, at best, clues in how to bring the work to life in your imagination. It’s a big responsibility, but it has its advantages. You can proceed at your own pace. You can make sure that the way you perform the work adjusts to your sensibilities. You can read into each book whatever you want.

When you listen to an audio book, it becomes very evident that a book must be performed in order to be perceived. I’m currently listening to a historical novel that, it seems to me, is not so great; but the performance is so good that the result is terrifically entertaining. Here's a negative review by Erica Jong. One of Jong's complaints, regarding the lack of depth in the characters, simply disappears in this engrossing performance. I rarely listen to abridged books. In fact, I picked this one up by accident. But after I finish it, I shall check out other book performances by Rosalyn Landor.

I like Google Priority Mail (Priority Gmail)!

I signed up for this new feature, and I really like it. If you want to try it, bear in mind that you can always view your inbox the usual way; there's a button onscreen to do that. "Priority" is just a way that Google can show your inbox to you. In Priority mode, the first emails you see are the ones that Google guesses are important; second, you will see your starred mail; what's left comes after that. You can train Google regarding what's important in several ways, so don't worry too much about how it guesses for you. Try it!

What should a cartoonist do after he loses the contest?

The last page of the New Yorker magazine runs a wonderful contest for cartoon captions. First, they print the cartoon without any caption. People write in with suggestions. Then people vote on the best three ideas, and then they show the cartoon with its winning caption. People are so resourceful, that the results can be quite apt.
If you want to draw a cartoon for this competition, all you have to do is to produce an image that is striking and really, really makes no sense. Then the New Yorker's clever readers will find a caption that, somehow, some way, fits.
Now here's the problem: suppose you're a cartoonist, and you submit a cartoon to the New Yorker for this page. You make it as bizarre and disjoint as you can. And the New Yorker declines to use your cartoon. You went to all that drawing effort, and now what? You can sell the cartoon to somebody else, but you'll have to come up with a caption on your own. Or maybe you can post it at your own cartoonist website and ask people for ideas...

Stand up for Computing:

My physical therapist convinced me that sitting down exacerbates my back problems. I sit down a lot. I read; I eat; and I work at my computer. I write on my computer; I process my Email; and I use the Web to follow the world, wherever I want it to take me.

Occasionally, on field trips for business, I have had to use my computer standing up. That was kind of fun. I recently noticed that a dresser in the same room where I use my computer had an excellent height for stand-up work. I made up my mind to move my laptop, my Internet connection, my wonderful Logitech Smart Mouse and my external keyboard to the other side of the room and try some standup.

The day I cleared off that dresser, the painters who are doing our windows moved a pile of stuff onto the dresser so that they could get at some window panels they had to remove. I looked at that dresser, piled high with papers and books, and said, “Screw it, I’m not going to stand up.” But after I sighed, I persevered. After a lot of stuff-shifting, yesterday was my first day of standup computing.

I was tired. My legs were worn out. My body ached. I just wanted to sit down. But I made some wonderful discoveries, and today I’m still standing.

Discovery #1: There’s another reason I use my computer that I did not list above, because I had not realized it. I use my computer to crash. I’m tired, so I sit down and peruse a few web sites. I can’t collapse-to-relax if I have to stand up. I was much more active yesterday, and I’m sure that was good for me. Also, I’m aware that it makes a difference in well-being to have a good posture at the computer. Well a good posture’s not likely if I’m just sitting there to rest my weary self, is it?

Discovery #2: It’s a lot easier to take a break from the computer if you’re already standing up. We all know we’re supposed to take breaks and not just sit there all day. But getting up out of the chair is a lot harder than just stepping away. Taking quick breaks was very easy for me yesterday.

Discovery #3: Maybe I was spending too much time at my computer. When I had to stand up, I went to the opposite extreme, spending a lot less. I’m actually thinking about getting a life.

Mainstream press throws Wikileaks under a bus:

The title of this entry copies Cory Doctorow's piece on this subject at BoingBoing. The issue is a new proposed federal journalist shield law, something a country with our first amendment shouldn't even need. The issue is that a few big, 'responsible' news entities are trying to work verbiage into this new law that prevents it from protecting Wikileaks. Cory links back to: Trying to exclude WikiLeaks from shield law stinks, by Douglas Lee.

One offensive observation by these weasels is the assertion that Wikileaks is not practicing Journalism; it's just doing "data dissemination." Thank God that no responsible paper has ever stooped to disseminating data, like, oh, say, the Pentagon Papers, or transcriptions of the Nixon tapes, or Associated Press feeds.

Here's one of the fine points Lee makes, and I quote: First, does anyone — including the most mainstream of traditional journalists — really think it a good idea that Congress and judges define, analyze and evaluate what is appropriate “editorial oversight”? For decades, news organizations have struggled to resist those efforts in libel cases and, so far, those struggles have succeeded.

Before we add a few dozen more exceptions to the first amendment, why don’t we exercise our muscles a bit by adding a measly one or two exceptions to the second? I’m not sympathetic to most of what WikiLeaks does, but it’s pathetic for news media in the USA to think that it’s so dangerous, it needs its own exception from our constitution.


I’ve been down a lot lately, haven’t I? I’ll write with a lighter hand next time, I promise.

A Tomato Update:

I was expecting another great home-tomato harvest this year, maybe 900 cherry tomatoes and more than fifty early girls. But my totals-to-date suck. When it got hot, squirrels discovered my tomatoes and carried them off, even though we tried to make them taste disgusting to squirrels. But now...

It’s NUT season. The squirrels have better things to interest them. My tomatoes, instead of disappearing, are turning red again. I hope to get 150 cherry tomatoes and almost twenty early girls this year.

Pure France:

President Sarkozy has apparently launched a crusade to deport every Roma from france. (I suspect that my failure to capitalize ‘france’ in the previous sentence was intentional.) After the Roma are gone, what Ethnic Cleansing will this country turn to next?

Better Border Crossing:

I’m back, with a better idea for crossing the border between the USA and Canada. We just spent a few days with friends in Montreal. We drove up the Northway and waited for an hour on long lines of cars, so that a customs official could interview us for two minutes and send us on our way. There has to be a better way, a way that would improve the crossing experience and bring additional revenue to both countries. And there is. I’m here to tell you about it.

Border crossings should be modeled on the way that the Six Flags Park in NJ gives people access to rides. When I arrived at Customs and saw all those cars waiting to cross, I should have been able to switch over to the “jumper” line. Cars in the jumper line are taken first – a great savings in time – but not everyone would get on the jumper line, because you would have to pay, say $35 for the privilege.

I think a lot of people would be willing to pay this fee to save forty minutes, especially when, like us, they are tired and eager to get where they are going. That’s why there would be another line, a very short one, for “jumper” jumpers. You would have to pay another $35 to get on this really short line that goes absolutely first. At eight P.M. on a rainy Sunday night, it would be worth it.

CFL bulbs are a gamble, but...

Some CFl bulbs are great. Some are much dimmer than you have any right to expect. Some die much sooner than they ought to.

When a CFL bulb dies, check to see if there's a phone number on the bulb. If there is, call it. You will answer a few questions, and they may send you a new bulb. You do not have to remember how long you've used it, nor do you need a sales receipt. Just make that phone call to get a free replacement under warranty.

I may take a few days off from blogging. Hey, it's August, right?

A Nation of Fat People, reassured:

I'm not sure how we got here, but an awful lot of Americans (including myself) are distinctly overweight. There seem to be many causes of our overconsumption of food, and many subtle incentives that encourage us to stay that way. I think I have uncovered yet another societal "device" that makes us comfortable with overweight, and I'm not happy about it. I refer to Wide Screen TV sets.

It's great to have a TV that can display an extremely clear high resolution movie. The wide screen lets you see the whole picture (I hope your DVD really has the whole picture); at last, the true movie experience comes home.

But what happens when those fancy TVs display a good old-fashioned NTSC signal?

A standard TV image is a little wider than it is tall. Modern TVs should "letterbox" these images, with a black swath on each side. But generally, they're not shown that way. Instead, the TV (or maybe even the broadcasting station, I don't know) str-e--e-tch-es the image to fit the high-def screen. I see this a lot in TVs at motels and in public places. All the people on the screen look extra fat, fat-faced, chubby, portly, plump. Even the athletes look fat.

Surrounded by all these fat and famous people, why shouldn't I keep the extra weight on? I look like all those desireable people.

How should a device warn you that its batteries are getting low?

In 1969 I worked at a company that developed both hardware and software, and for the first time, I met [i]hardware people[/i]. I remember one of their fancies: to imagine a machine that would warn you it was not plugged in, by lighting an emergency light.

How should a device warn you when its batteries are low? Our wireless doorbell uses as bizarre a strategy as I can imagine. A few months ago, the doorbell rang. Our device uses the "Big Ben" tones, which take a few seconds to play. There's no mistaking them. I rushed to the front door, but nobody was there. A day or two later, the same thing happened. When it happened five times in one day -- gee, all those false alarms -- I figured it was time to throw the darn thing away, but first, I might as well try changing the batteries. And that solved the problem.

Why am I writing about this now? There was nobody at the front door this morning...

Automobile Software:

Years ago, when I heard that carmakers were going to build cars that were mechanically simpler and controlled by software, I was genuinely frightened. Bugs, I thought. There are always bugs. I didn't even worry then, what mostly bothers me now: do these companies understand how to thoroughly test software?

Toyota's recent experiences with sudden acceleration suggest that the company's software developers are not experienced enough to know one of the most basic lessons about software. Or, much more likely, they do understand, and their request for what's necessary fell on the deaf ears of their bean-counters.

In a company that is going to bet the lives of its customers on its software, even the bean-counters have to understand this lesson. I will illustrate it from an experience in my long, checkered career.

In 1978 and 1979, I developed an unusual sort of disk subsystem for an office work station. We used an optical disk, where you can only write once to a given location, but you can read many times. Despite the unusual chaarcteristics of an optical disk, my software made it appear to be an ordinary disk drive, in which files could be rewritten and modified.

A dozen developers depended on my disk subsystem, and during my early releases, they often came to me, angry about a failure in my software. "I wrote a file and it's gone!" they said.

To their complaints, I always said the same thing: "Let's look at the log." My software logged every request the developers made of my disk system, and I logged how I responded to each request. I might say, "Look, you never opened the file." Or I might say, "You opened the file, but you never wrote any data to it." Or I might say, "Oops, I've got a bug."

The point is this: When you ask other people to use your system, you must protect yourself against incorrect claims of failure, and you must track how your system is working, to help find bugs.

In the case of cars, there should have been loggers recording data, even ten or twenty years ago, to record what the driver does, how the car responds, and what the observable conditions are, for MINUTES leading up to each crash. That data would make it easy for Toyota to say to us drivers: Sorry, you never pressed the brake pedal.

Why aren't these detailed loggers on every car that uses software? My guess is, it's too expensive to add the necessary memory and sensory equipment. But is it more expensive than what Toyota has gone through? Good loggers would enable them to say what percentage of sudden acceleration claims are driver-faults, and to better diagnose the cases that are their fault. Instead of letting the world wonder whether they are blowing smoke about sticking pedals, they could publish logs to independent reviewers to demonstrate the truth of their claims. I'd say they are foolish beyond belief, not to have the necessary log data.

By the way, I know there are loggers in modern cars. And I know that it was possible to use that data to show that, in many cases, an accelerating Toyata was the driver's error. It's just painfully evident that these loggers are inadequate, or we would sure as heck have heard about the data they recorded.

The Columbia Broadchasing System:

I spent three glorious teen summers at Buck's Rock Work Camp in Connecticut. In my second year, the camp had, for the first time, a radio/engineering club. The radio counselor was asked to do the announcing when we were actually on the radio. I had better explain.

Each of the three years I was there, the orchestra took a LONG bus trip to a Connecticut radio station. We set up our stuff and, following the country western show by the same local “star” who sang and played Hawaiian guitar, our absolutely terrible orchestra played on the air for half an hour. I have no idea how such arrangements were made in the 1950's, but obviously Buck's Rock got some nice on-the-air advertising out of it, and maybe even some dollars.

The station was a CBS affiliate, and Jerry (the radio counselor) started joking weeks in advance that he would sign off like this: “This Buck's Rock Concert was brought to you by WCON [I don't remember the actual call letters], an affiliate of CBS, the Columbia Broad-Chasing System.” This was a good running joke at camp, but many of us wondered how Jerry was going to get out of this “groove” when he had to do the real signoff. Well, the show was recorded (the camp made more money by selling the records to parents), so I had many chances to hear what happened to Jerry. It went like this:
“This Buck's Rock Concert was brought to you by WCON, an affiliate of CBS, the Columbia Broad [dead air, slightly under one second] -Casting System.”

I'm annoyed at Nuance.com (Dragon Naturally Speaking 11):

Nuance's new version of Dragon Naturally Speaking ("NatSpeak") is out. I want to upgrade to it, if it will support the ability to edit by voice in Open Office Writer, version 3. How do I find out if it does?

Well perhaps I'll have to buy it to find out. The company is woefully unprepared to help me. I started by going to their support page, which referred me to one of those "knowledge base" pages. It's nearly impossible for a knowledge base, built up on people's current questions and problems, to tell me what a new version can do.

I looked for specifications for version 11. There is a spec page, and it is too vague.

I found a way to call their support line and talk to an actual human. She assured me that NatSpeak 11 has dropped support for both MS Word 97 and Open Office 3.

So that's it, I said, I won't buy it.

But David Pogue reviewed the product in the New York Times. He flatly says it supports Open Office 3. Now maybe he made a mistake, but he did whet my appetite. I went back to the Nuance website. I found a product matrix that tells me exactly which features are in each of the version of the product (home, professional, etc.). That matrix has NO VERSION NUMBER attached to it. I can't tell whether it refers to version 10 or 11.

I kept looking at the Nuance web site. I found a form where I can submit a question to sales support. Just the thing! I filled in 11 fields of personal information and typed my question. When I clicked "Submit," the form took me to this webpage: http://now.eloqua.com/f.asp, which (as of 7/30/10) was broken, down or unimplemented. (Actually, www.eloqua.com is okay, so the particular link I got is probably just incorrect. Nuance, if this is your fault and not Eloqua's, then I am really upset with you.)

I can't tell you what a downer it is to submit a question on a filled out form and go to a non-webpage. Nuance, can you hear me? I want to find out about NatSpeak 11. Your web pages are not helping me! Please try harder.

Ballmer probably doesn't iGet it:

A reporter named Barry Collins covered a Ballmer speech story about Microsoft catching up with the iPad. Reading just a bit between the lines, it sounds like Ballmer, and Microsoft, really don't get it. Let me make a few points:

Collins says that Ballmer compared the tablet market to that of the netbook, where Microsoft ceded early ground to Linux-based machines before dominating the market. Now I remember how they dominated the netbook market: they made the biggest manufacturers of netbooks offers they could not refuse, to sell Windows versions of their netbooks. So I guess Microsoft will do the same thing here: they will make a deal with Apple to sell iPads running Windows. Not. Stevie B., it ain't tht simple.

Ballmer, again according to Collins, talks of working with various partners to produce various tablet products. That focus will not compete with Apple. Apple's iPad is not a tablet product; it is a computer that has been very carefully aimed at a bunch of markets, and it happens to look and feel like a tablet. Apple (or at least, Steve Jobs), saw these markets very clearly, and made sure the iPad would click with them. A bunch of slate products from Microsoft aren't even likely to reach "me too" status, unless Ballmer and Microsoft's marketing people understand that.

The iPad is easy to understand and use. I hope Microsoft can grok that, instead of working out complex software tie-ins to their many other somewhat incompatible offerings that are aimed at a lot of the same markets. How simple will their tablet/xBox tie-in be?

Clearly, Microsoft is not going to come up with a good iPad competitor overnight. They have to aim at what the iPad will become in three years, not what it is now. Mr. Ballmer, what is that target? Do you have a prayer of figuring it out, and developing that target product now?

The Zune took years to become a respectable product, and it never came close to implementing what its own manager said he expected to offer for it. Microsoft's attempts to conquer the clever-phone market suggest that their view is: Windows first, phone second. How are they going to do better in the iPad market?

Jailbreaking made (not?) easy:

I don't have to give you a reference for this well-known story: the excellent woman in charge of making governmental exceptions to the draconian DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) has ruled that it's permissible for iPhone users to "jailbreak" their phone: that is, to install the OS of their choice if that enables them to run the programs they want. This remarkable decision makes sense if you focus on what the DMCA intends to protect. The DMCA appears to make it illegal to reverse engineer any software in order to break or hack said software. But the goal of the DMCA is to prevent such analysis in order to prevent the copying of copywritten material. Apple is taking advantage of the DMCA in order to patrol the apps that can appear on iPhones.

Perhaps what Apple is doing is similar to what HP did when the DMCA became law: HP put a computer processer in their ink cartridges, and when their competitors reverse-engineered how the printers talk to the cartridges, HP sued that they were breaking the DMCA. HP lost this case, because (as I understand it) there was no copyright issue involved; HP had just contrived a way to design hardware to try to take advantage of the DMCA rules. Now if an iPhone user avoids using almost all of the Apple OS in order to jailbreak the phone, where is the copyright violation?

But this DMCA "exception" does not promise to make life easy for the jailbreakers. They are permitted to modify the iPhoine software, but I think Apple is still permitted to change it back at will, in order to put the jailbreakers at a disadvantage. Apple just has to have a reason for forcibly downloading new versions of their iPhone software, other than just punishing the jailbreakers.

Expect frequent OS upgrades from Apple.

Elephant Steak (Grandma Paula again):

My Grandmother Paula had a strange, inventive and biting German sense of humor. I remember far too few examples of what appealed to her comedic sense, but I have just remembered a joke that she loved to tell. It gives me great pleasure to publicize this joke on the internet, but please be forewarned: you're not going to like it.
Two guys decided to open a restaurant. The creative one decided that he had a great way to get them some publicity: their menu would offer, in addition to the usual sorts of food: elephant steak.

The practical one was aghast. "But we don't have elephant steak," he said.

Don't worry," the creative one said. "Just put it on the menu and leave it to me."

They opened for business on a balmy evening, and wouldn't you know it? The first customer who came in ordered elephant steak. The practical owner had conniptions. He asked his partner, "What are we going to do?"

The creative partner went to the customer and asked him, "Where's the rest of your party?"

"My party? Why, what do you mean? I've come alone."

"Alone? Well, you don't expect us to slaughter our elephant just for you, do you?"

www.sportrio.org

I received a request from Lucas Meyer at sportrio.org, requesting that we exchange links. As an ex-volleyball player (I still watch it on TV), I was particularly fascinated by the page on Footvolley in Rio. 'Footvolley' seems to be volleyball on the beach for soccer players, somehow using the feet and heads instead of hands. I can't wait to see how this game is played, I thought. But I didn't have to wait. See Youtube here, and here. (Yes, it's even played in the USA.)

Sports salaries and Winning Teams:

The Miami pro basketball team managed its salary cap in such a way that they could hire three stars who want to play together. News reports on this coup mentioned that the rest of the Miami team will have to play for peanuts, to fit under the team salary cap. It takes more than three people to play basketball, so there's a fasinating possibility that the three new Miami stars may not make a winning team.

I have always believed what sports stars have always said: they want to earn lots of $$$, but really, truly, they want to win championships. If this is true, how dumb are these players? I have two questions for them that seem to have no answers. I've wondered about these questions for a long time, but the Miami deals really put them in the spotlight.

Question #1: Why didn't LeBron James and the other two stars lower their money requirements? Why not try to earn 80% of what they got, in order to leave Miami with more money to fill out the team? What are they thinking? Earning every last dollar in order to make the rest of their team as weak as possible?

Question #2: Who will be willing to sign on with Miami for those minimal salaries? Hey, I know: Veterans worth ten times as much (or even more), who know that by filling out a strong team with these stars, they are likely to win a championship. Isn't this a no-brainer?

By the way, let's bear in mind that winning championships enables players to make more money for the rest of their lives. Better advertizing deals, more successful TV & movie careers, and even more profitable car dealerships. Why don't these guys act like they want to win?

Oh, wait. I know. They just want the money.

Three Turtles creep into a:

My Grandmother Paula had a strange, inventive and biting German sense of humor. I remember far too few examples of what appealed to her comedic sense, but I have just remembered a joke that she loved to tell. It gives me great pleasure to publicize this joke on the internet, but please be forewarned: you're not going to like it.

Three turtles decided to go out to a tea-house for tea. They were worried that it might rain, but they decided to go anyway. When they got to the tea-house, they ordered tea and cookies. While waiting for their order, they looked outside, and it looked like it was going to rain hard. So they decided that the third turtle should go home and fetch their umbrellas.

The third turtle did not want to leave. He said, "If I go home to get our umbrellas, you'll eat my cookie."

"No, no," the others said. "We won't eat your cookie."

It took some arguing, but at last, the third turtle got off his chair and crept away.

The waiter brought the tea and cookies to the table. After he had set the food down, the two turtles ate their own cookies and drank their tea. Then they stared at the third turtle's cookie. But of course, they had promised not to eat it.

A long time passed. A very long time.

The first turtle said to the second, "It looks like he's not coming back. Let's eat his cookie."

When the first turtle said that, a little turtle voice piped up from floor next to the tea-house door, saying, "If you eat my cookie, I won't get your umbrellas."

The BP Oil company hopes they have finally stopped their oil well from spilling. I have a little advice for BP, that comes from my father. In about 1953, at work, his boss, Leo, was telling a long, convoluted joke. After awhile, Leo said, “So, to make a long story short –” To which my father replied,
“Too late.”


{By the way, the Shelby Lyman chess column has another error today. I'll report on it soon. I hope I don't need a whole 'nother blog just to critique one puzzle column.}

Shelby Lyman's Chess Column: Errors (item #1):

My fine local paper, the Trenton Times, has a daily chess column. The column doesn't say so, but Times employees assure me that this is Shelby Lyman's daily chess puzzle. Have you found errors in any of these daily chess puzzles? If so, please comment. I wish this entertaining puzzle column was more accurate.

I count Shelby Lyman as a friend, way back from 1959, and I enjoyed his many chess forays on TV. This column is usually fun, but it is also frustrating for the errors that appear in it. The quality of the column appears to change every few years, suggesting the possibility that various people have been hired to "ghost-write" the puzzles. (I have not contacted Lyman about this blog piece. I would be writing him instead of writing to all of you, if I knew how to contact his column.)

Part of my frustration comes from never seeing a correction. The column, years ago, rarely posted the worst possible error: giving the solution to some other problem than the one shown (and moving non-existent pieces). Perhaps six times a year there are mistakes: solutions that do not work, or alternate and better solutions. I wish the column published corrections when there were errors! Many of the errors could be avoided by testing the problems with computer programs specifically designed to test problems; I do not know why they seem not to be used.

Today, I made a determined deffort to find the puzzle in today's Lyman puzzle on the internet. Instead, I found other people who are frustrated that they cannot contact Lyman to discuss errors. This web page illustrates a catch by one 'Jedzz': I remember the diagram he shows, and -- gee -- the column must have more mistakes than I thought, because I did not catch this one.

In order to share Lyman's mistakes with you, I needed a program that would put chess diagrams in my blog. I am using Chess Diagrams, by DrAmbar (A Chatterjee). (Thanks!) I hope, I hope, my positions will be correct. I do not wish to insert any more errors. Today's error, the proverbial straw for me, is a minor one:

The caption implies that this position arose in the game Tregubov-Vorobiov (2001). The hint is: White to Play. Win a rook. And the hint is correct. I expected the solution to show several lines, but it only shows this (I added the question marks):
1. Qf7ch! Qd7? 2. Rc1ch?? Kd8 3. Qf8ch gets a rook.

Now if black had played 1 ... K moves, then 2. Qf8ch would indeed win a rook. But after 1... Qd7, white wins everything: 2. Rxb7ch Rxb7 3. Rxb7ch Kxb7 4. Qxd7ch K moves 5. Qg7 and black's remaining rook is trapped.

I will share one more Lyman puzzle error with you, and then: let's look forward, not back. Here's another position, in which "White Forces Mate" (Warning: Don't try to solve it!)

The given solution is: 1. Bf7ch Kh7 2. Bg6ch Kh6 3. Rh8ch Kg5 4. Rxh5 mate. And it would be mate, too, if black couldn't just play 4 ... Kg4. (It's possible that the position is incorrect; add a white pawn at h3 and it all works.)

Open Message to Shelby Lyman: Please check your problems by computer, and please print corrections! Thanks.

Municipal Security:

I recently spent three hours at municipal court. (I had to plead guilty to a moving violation.) Apparently the way these courts work is that they summon thirty or so people to arrive at 5 pm, and then we all sit around while cases are called. Some people were probably there for five hours.

The evening started like this: a few of us arrived early and sat down in the court room. Then a policeman came in and asked us all to go back into the hall and go through a metal detector. (I could probably have left anything in the courtroom under a chair while I did that.)

I wear my phone and PDA in a pouch on my belt. I removed that pouch and my keys, etc., before going through the detector. There was only one decent place to set my stuff down: on a table just beyond the detector, so I reached around and put my pouch and stuff there.

I walked though the detector without even a chirp, picked up my gear from the table and went back to the court room. I could have secreted anything in my pouch, even something solid weighing two pounds. The policeman did not even glance at it.

George Steinbrenner: Let's hear it for the New York Times

After George Steinbrenner died, CBS Radio (880 in the New York Area) started memorializing him in their regular 30 minute news blocks. I hated these radio snippets about Steinbrenner. I was driviing to NYC, and news radio is generally good listening. But I wanted to turn the radio off, every time their mini-pieces about G.S. came on.

I wasn't sure why I hated these radio snippets until my New York Times came the next morning, laden with columns about Steinbrenner. You need print to do justice to a subject like this. I gobbled up every word. GS is only one of thousands of topics that deserve newspapers and magazines to hash them out.

Parking Illegally:

I'm trying to work up the nerve to park illegally in a parking garage. Now that I've imagined how to do it, I'm really curious what would happen. Let me explain.

We have a disability permit that we hang, when appropriate, in our car. In New Jersey, this permit takes into account all of the inconveniences that normal parking spaces visit upon the disabled, by allowing us to park illegally. I believe we can even ignore parking meters (but I have been careful never to do this).

Now, what does it mean to park illegally in a parking garage? I would never park there in a non-space. Travel lanes in a parking garage are dangerously narrow and full of blind turns. It would be foolish and dangerous to "make up" a parking space in a garage.

So here's my idea: I enter the garage, taking the automatic parking ticket as usual. When I leave the garage, I will drive up to the attendant with the disability permit clearly displayed. I will hand him the automatic ticket, and I will explain that I am not going to pay anything, because I was parked illegally.

I have a funny feeling that it's just not going to fly.

Is THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN a Paternalistic Twit?

In this week’s New in Review section, Thomas Friedman takes up the question of Octavia Nasr’s firing for expressing condolences over (I’m quoting him now:) Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, one of the most prominent Lebanese Shiite spiritual leaders who was involved in the founding of the Hezbollah militia.
Friedman is largely on Nasr’s side, for reasons that, as you can guess, resonate with me. The column is called Can We Talk? He raises freedom-of-speech issues for reporters. He argues in favor of getting news from people with first-hand contextual knowledge. He sounds quite thoughtful. Nonetheless, he feels that Nasr should have been suspended for a month, and one basis for his reasoning appears near the beginning of his column:

Reporters covering a beat should not be issuing condolences for any of the actors they cover. It undermines their credibility.

My mouth gaped so wide that my lower jaw banged my breakfast plate when I read that line. Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? Well, how many reporters does the New York Times need to fire - or suspend - for expressing their condolences for George Steinbrenner, all this week, and even in the same section with Friedman's column?

I'm not taking a position on Octavia Nasr. But as for Friedman: What an idiotic, vapid idea.

A GUI Tip for Website Developers:

Here’s another public service for you all, especially for those of you who develop websites.

As you know, it is common for a webpage to have links to multiple pages; groups of pictures perhaps, or the next group of hits, whatever. Typically, a web page allows you to navigate to these subpages with references like this:

|1|2|3|4| next |

Now it’s important to note that the word ‘next’ is entirely superfluous; it does not enable you to do anything you can’t do by clicking a page number. My goal here is to tell you how to lay out a web page so that the word ‘next’ (and maybe even ‘prev’) becomes utterly useful. There are two ways to do this; the best approach is to adopt both:

1: Put the numbers so close together that it’s really hard to select one and click it.

2: Display the “current” page number in a barely different way from the other numbers. That way, the user will despair of knowing which page he’s on, and he (or she) will be eager to click ‘next’.

I’m so glad I could help.