Everything Wrong with Computers Epitomized in a Screenshot:

The title of this blog entry is copied from an item in John C. Dvorak's blog. The screenshot shows the sort of info that modern computers on the web can so easily collect. It's a list of "classical artists", a loose association of performing nouns associated with classical music. And it's not just names. There's a picture to the left of each title. Take a look at the pic of Antonin Dvorak. Oops. It's John C. Right here!

The Programmable Wall Switch:

Have you ever wished you could control a wall switch with an automatic timer? Timers that plug into A/C outlets are easy to buy, but what about those wall switches?

A company that specializes in inventions for religious Jews has announced the answer to this problem, and their answer is not just for Jews. Please note, I haven't tried it yet, but it looks exciting. You screw their intelligent timer over your wall toggle switch, and you program it for several Off and On times. (It also has a random timer.) It is battery operated, and at the designated times, a mechanical device flips the switch up or down.

The timer can be preordered (estimated ship date: end of September) for $29.95 plus $6.80 shipping, per switch. Check it out here.

Thanks, Amex. But, Gee, no thanks. I think...

I recently had to change my American Express number. And then I had to cogitate and knock my head around to try to remember all the companies that needed my number, to could charge periodically. I missed at least one, and I was embarrassed when they called me.

A week later, I got an email from American Express. In it, they listed all the companies I had bought anything from with any regularity. Might I need to contact some of these, they asked, to update my Amex number?

They cast a wide net. I made only three purchases in the last eight years from one of the companies they suggested. Their "reminder" email is certainly a good idea, and I'm sure it helps many people.

But.

There's a security issue here. Email is not particularly secure. I think it's possible that someone might be able to get access to the email that Amex sent me. But the purchases I made at the companies they listed were all very secure. Only those companies, Amex, and I, know where I made these repetitive purchases.

If someone gets a look at my buying history, I don't think it will cause a problem. I'm more than ready to admit, for example, that I buy the World's Softest Socks. But some people reasonably need to keep their purchase history secret, and Amex's helpful email, in my opinion, adds a tiny risk to lifting that secrecy. I don't think Amex should send emails like this, unless we ask for them. I would be happier if they had just sent me an email offering to send me this list of purchases. What do you think?

Shelby Lyman Column with a fascinating position:

I come to praise Shelby Lyman today. His Sunday column for September 9, 2012 features a position after black's 17th move in the game Victor Mikhalevski versus Robert Gardner, 2012.  (Click through here to find that position, or to play over the entire game. You may have to enable a plugin.)

The problem is easy to solve. What's interesting is the position. White's Queen, Rook and Knight are en prise, and so is black's Queen. What was black's last move that brought us to this position? And for that matter, what was White's 17th move? It's not easy to figure these out. (Hint: black's position was already desperate.)

Sadly, the problem has two (trivially different) solutions. This is a rare game in which no one resigned, and Gardner allowed Mikhalevski to checkmate him. The actual moves of the game are the other solution, not the one Lyman gives.

Another use for MLB.COM:

Major league baseball has a pretty cool website for following all of the major league baseball games. I use the iPad mlb.com app, and I have discovered a pleasing use for it.

While each game is in progress, MLB saves short video clips of game highlights. Most of these, for me, are boring, unless I am rooting for the team involved. Who wants to watch yet another slugger hit a home run?

However, many of these video highlights are spectacular catches and amazing defensive plays. After the day's games are over, I like to go through the entire day's schedule, watching great defensive video clips on my full screen.

My iPad, thanks to Vince Lombardi:

This is the sort of story one just shouldn't tell. It begs bad luck. But it's so interesting, I shall tell it to you anyway. Someday my iPad may slip out of my hands and crash to a smash on the floor. But that has never happened, and I owe my good fortune to the famous coach of the Green Bay Packer football team, Vince Lombardi. I shall explain.

In one of his team's great years, Green Bay had a rather young halfback who ran the ball well but tended to fumble it. I'll call him Fred. After yet another fumble in an early season game, it looked like Fred's goose was cooked. The reporters gathered round to get the juicy story after the Monday team meeting. Would Fred be benched? Fired?

Not at all. At the team meeting, Lombardi handed Fred a football. “Hold on to this,” he said. “All the time. When you're eating. When you're sleeping. When you walk around. Don't let go of this football, all week.”

The reporters enjoyed following Fred around. He clung to that football for dear life. And for the rest of the season, he rarely fumbled. Lombardi had found the cure.

When I got my iPad, the first thing that impressed me about it was how smooth and slip-slidey it felt. I had to learn to hold on to it! Remembering Lombardi and Fred, I resolved to carry my iPad a lot, and rarely let go of it, until it felt like an extension of my hands.

So far, so good.

I like to read Neil Genzlinger:

I like to read Neil Genzlinger's columns in the New York Times. Currently he's a TV critic, but he writes well on many subjects, and some of his columns take a wild, original idea and spin it out delightfully. To whet your appetite, please check out his current column on DogTV. Genzlinger wondered how other species would react to this channel that's intended for dogs. Would they react differently? Read on to discover his findings.

Samsung vs. Apple vs. the Rest of Us:

I can't bear it. I'm going batty listing to Leo Laport's TWIT show (This Week in Tech) #368. Leo, Adam Curry, Fr. Robert Ballecer and Nilay Patel discuss the Samsung vs.Apple lawsuit, which Samsung lost (so far). I think it was Patel who summed up more or less as follows: Samsung tried to copy Apple's product. Apple made a great product. Samsung's job is not to copy Apple. Samsung's job is to make a different great product.

So let's talk about pianos. Steinway makes a great product. The job of other piano companies must be to make pianos that are distinctly different, not to copy Steinway. 59 keys perhaps instead of 88; white keys only, perhaps. Oval keys, not rectangular. Keys that lift up instead of pressing down. Six pedals instead of three, with entirely different functions.

NO!

The piano is a great product, and great pianists are wonderful because they use competing products that share very similar user interfaces. The various piano companies have to innovate under the hood unless they license each other's patents, but the user experience is much the same. And that's great for pianists.

And let's discuss Microsoft Windows. Please imagine that when Microsoft released Windows 95, they licensed the right to their user interface to one manufacturer, Dell perhaps, and all the other companies had to develop some other great, very different-looking product in order to compete. What an awful nightmare! Microsoft did the opposite, standardizing their user interface and encouraging all hardware and software Windows companies to stay with their standards. The resulting consistency was wonderful for us all,

It's terrible that Apple's brilliant iPhone and iPad GUIs are not standards that other companies can be encouraged to follow, for the benefit of all of us. (I know that any company can pay a small fortune to license these GUI rights from Apple; that's not the same thing.)

Leo and his TWIT friends have it wrong. It's time for Apple to follow Bill Gate's insight that consistent GUIs are great for customers. And it's time to admit that the Samsung vs. Apple lawsuit is just an example of how hard cases make bad law.

I was a political DJ today:

When I create my classical music shows on WPRB, I try to be apolitical. I know my listeners want to hear music, not political opinions they may not share. But today, as the Republican Presidential Convention kicks off, I completely lost it. And I'm not very repentant. Here's what happened.

At 8 a.m., as required, I gave the rather blah weather report for the region near Princeton, NJ. And then I said, "But that's not the weather report you want to hear, is it? Here's the report for New Orleans."

I launched into today's and tomorrow's weather there, noting the rising predicted wind speeds (up into the sixties). I could not keep the glee out of my voice. The best I could do was not to say what I was thinking, which is this:

Hey, you Republicans: when God gives you a hurricane, relax and enjoy it.

When God Gives you a Hurricane...

Republicans have plans to abort the RNC early if a hurricane strikes. In my opinion, that is wrong. When God gives you a hurricane, you should not abort your plans. You should just bring them up as lovingly as you can.

FIOS is happy to serve us, or so they say...

We switched to FIOS at the end of 2011. We are happy with the result, although I spent three complex months figuring out how to make Verizon fix almost $100 per month of overbilling for services that Verizon eventually agreed were unwanted, promised to be free, or charged at inflated prices. Anyway that was then. I just got this announcement from Verizon:

Effective August 29, 2012, the FiOS Digital Voice calendar feature will be moved to a new system.  Existing calendar entries will not be transferred to the new system and will not be available after August 29, 2012.  Customers should review and make note of their calendar entries prior to August 29^th, and will be able enter them into the new FiOS Digital Voice calendar after August 31, 2012.

We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you in the future. 

Sincerely,

Your Verizon Team 

Thank goodness I am not relying on this calendar. Reviewing - heck, just finding - all calendar entries that one wants to keep can be slow, tedious work. I got this announcement on August 23 at 8 PM. People who relied on this calendar system and are currently on vacation: good luck to you. I'm sure you will agree that Verizon gave you plenty of warning.

By the way, please note that Verizon's new, replacement system will be available after the old one is shut down. There will not be even one day when people can systematically move appointments from the old system to the new one. Perhaps, on August 30, people will put their appointments on some other system altogether, if they're not happy with scraps of paper.

Here's a hint to Verizon: if you want people's business, give them more than a week's notice whenever you decide to pull a rug out from under them. It's just possible you have competitors who are more thoughtful. You never know.

Catch 22, General Mills!

The New York Times has an article about websites that are illegally collecting information about children without explicit parental permission. The article quotes a spokesman for General Mills who said that GM does not collect the original child’s e-mail address and sends only one e-mail to that child’s friend.

How do they know that they send only one email to a child's friend?

In order to make sure GM sends only one email from Bobby Bevling, who played one of their games, to his email friend Curt Cremable, GM must keep a database with the names of children who played at their website like Bobby, and the names of children they have already emailed, like  Curt.

I believe that is exactly the sort of data about children that it is illegal for them to collect.

Forcing Multitasking on myself. Why?

I sat down a few evenings ago to edit my current novel. But first, I turned my iPad on and set it next to me, so that if any of my opponents in Words With Friends or HeroAcademy played their turn – as they were likely to do – I would be alerted to stop editing and, instead, think hard about my next move.

WHY DID I DO THAT?

Why should I carefully set up an excellent distraction, ensuring that I would not be able to concentrate on one thing? Fortunately, I came to my senses, turned the iPad off, and put it away in another room.

McDonalds Espresso: Excellent !!?

On a long auto trip home, we stopped - for the restrooms - at a McDonalds in the middle of Ct. I asked, feeling doubtful, whether they made espresso, since I did not see a typical espresso machine anywhere.

Of course, I was told. The clerk pressed a button on a coffee machine labeled "espresso" and at once some coffee poured into the cup. It tasted freshly made, it tasted good, and it was not the slightest bit bitter. Remarkable, I'd say.

Somebody Moved my Cheese today:

I entered the Princeton Public Library, intending to find my next audio book. The shelving had been heavily rearranged, and I had a few moments' trouble figuring out where the majority of the audio books were.

I'm so used to entering those audio shelves, and recently I've been listening to books by one author, S. J. Rozan. Seeing my usual target completely obscured, I had a true "somebody moved my cheese" moment.

Fortunately, if I may mix metaphors, I made lemonade from the missing cheese. I recalled that, at my advanced age and with my glasses-enabled eyesight, I tend to select only those audio books that are one shelf below my neckline. The moment I saw the audio books in their new, far different layout, I rejoiced that I would see different books and have a rich choice of new authors.

And next time, I'll know where to find my cheese.

Pointless? (Bucket List):

I do not have a bucket list. Organizing my life to include many specific, planned experiences does not appeal to me. Life is far too short to try to fill it with everything that matters. If I occupied my time fulfilling a list of things to do, who knows what amazing, spontaneous events I might miss? 


 I’ll give you an example.

Someone I know had a medical appointment, and I was happy to chauffeur. And of course, that meant spending time in a waiting room.

I have never experienced anything like this waiting room, not even in department stores. While I sat, relaxed and unhurried, I let my eyes run over an extraordinary tasteful panoply of brassieres and female undergarments in every shape, size, color and pattern. They were a pleasure to view, a spur to the imagination.

I had never heard of such a place. I doubt that this waiting room is on anyone’s bucket list. It's just an out-of-the-way place that's waiting to give assistance, help and pleasure to those lucky enough to find it.

A Vested Interest in Weather Reports:

I try not to rely on weather reports. They are a vague approximation from the viewpoint of any one individual, even when they are fairly accurate for a town or a specific area. I try to be ready for what I see in the skies, and I don't mind when the predictions are wrong.

With one exception. I'm required to read weather reports on my radio program. I don't "predict" more than twenty-four hours in advance. This morning I told my listeners that there would be hardly any breeze tonight. But right now, a steady twenty miles-per-hour wind is rippling through my back yard.

I misinformed my listeners! I feel bad.

An Unpleasant Truth:

The Batman Massacre in Colorado reminds liberals like me how nice it would be if access to guns was better controlled in the United States. It would probably take fifty years to get some control over the enormous quantity of firearms in circulation, but hey, if we had started exercising control in 1950, by now we would have made some progress.

If you are hoping that massacres like this will change the way Americans view gun ownership, forget it. Even liberals have to measure the damage guns do against our country's gold standard: automobile deaths.

We love automobiles in the USA. We drive them everywhere, at a cost of 30,000 deaths per year. (It used to be worse, over 50,000 in 1978.) Gun deaths are harder to record and count, but they seem to be in the same ballpark, with some estimates as low as 30,000 per year.

The bottom line is very simple. Let us Americans do what we want. Collateral damage on the order of 0.01% of our innocent men, women, children and babies is a decent price to pay. Multi-car accidents, where a few dozen cars smash into each other, don't make the national news headlines. Why should a demented shooter?

Cooking tip: stir-frying with Strawberries:

When you stir-fry, whatever the recipe, add a few quartered strawberries, late in the pan-frying. They will add subtlety and depth to the taste.

The "Daily Planet": World's most financially secure newspaper.

Once in a while, The Onion hits one out of the ballpark. Here's their headline: Economically Healthy 'Daily Planet' now most unrealistic part of Superman Universe. And here's a direct quote: "I can play along with Superman using a steel girder to swat someone into outer space, but I just can't get past the idea that The Daily Planet still occupies one of the largest skyscrapers in all of Metropolis and is totally impervious to newsroom layoffs or dwindling home subscriptions," said comics blogger Marc Daigle, ...


Clark Kent: Have you tried Blogging?

Toilet Paper: Feed from the top or the bottom?

People feel very strongly about whether to feed a toilet paper roll from the top or the bottom. Since there's a lot to be said for both ways, one must view the decision as subjective. But:

One of our friends made an objective decision about how to feed his TP. There's an Air Conditioning vent very near the paper roll. If he puts the roll in the "wrong" way, the paper unspools by itself and sails across the room.

Fleeting fame ...

Everybody talks about the weather; hardly anybody talks about the weatherman (or woman).

But check out this one.

Every single web page should be dated!

Every web page should have information on it about when it was created, and when it was last modified. Pages that are generated from databases should indicate how old the data is. To some extent, browsers could enforce this rule. Why don't they?

How often do you check out a review on a web page, or instructions on how to do something, without knowing whether it was posted a month or six years ago? There ought to be a law.

Do you think that food is Organic?

The New York Times has a good article on the "oversizing" of the Organic food business. Big Food companies have discovered that you can price organic food products much higher than their conventional competitors, and they have moved deeply into organic foods. The big companies need to produce "organic" food on a bigger scale, and so compromise is a big temptation.

Now there's a board that tries to control the notion of what Organic Food is, and it maintains a list of acceptable substances, as part of the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. The board is gradually being co-opted by the Big Food companies, but their control is not yet overwhelming. For example, the board voted recently on whether to allow an actual herbicide in growing some organic foods, but the herbicide was voted down.

I wanted to see the list of acceptable organic ingredients, and I found the list on this webpage. But don't rush to click the link yet; please, read on.

The remarkable thing about the list is that it is buried in verbiage on this page. It's preceded by many, many definitions and procedural matters. It's obvious that all that legalese wouldn't be needed if the organic food business was mostly the work of sincerely committed farmers and the like. But with companies trying to "push the envelope" it becomes necessary to define absolutely everything.

To see the actual list, go to that page and search for "Alginic" or "Bentonite". Both of these words are near the top of the list. The list allows: in organic food, or in the preparation or packaging thereof:
Carnauba wax
Chlorine materials (with exceptions)
Diethylaminoethanol (one specific use only)
Octadecylamine
Tetrasodium pyrophosphate (for use only in meat analog products)
Fructooligosaccharides
Orange shellac-unbleached (not as horrible as it sounds, perhaps)
And many of your other favorite flavors.

The Times article interviews, Michael J. Potter, the founder of Eden Foods, and suggests that Edenmight be the last pretty large organic food company that is not pushing the ingredients envelope.


In any case, remember to wash your sugar cubes before you eat them! Cheers.

Making you eat Broccoli?

Now that the new health bill has been blessed, more or less, by the Supreme Court, are you afraid that the federal government will make you eat some specific food? Well, I have news for you. The government has already been making you eat something: corn, and/or all the many other foods and food products manufactured from corn.

Corn production is favorably blessed by the federal government, which also keeps the price of imported sugar high. You can avoid corn, high fructose corn syrup, corn starch, corn etc., and corn etc., if you read labels very carefully and prepare some of your own food. Frankly, if the government tried to shove broccoli down our throats instead, it might be better for us.

Wave her off:

After my morning radio show on WPRB, the first third of my mile-walk home is uphill. There's a bus that runs up campus every few minutes, and I'm always happy to catch it.

When I drive to the station, I take a long walk through the parking garage and then a short walk to the station. That same bus picks people up at the garage, and sometimes I can see the driver waiting for stragglers.

Two weeks ago I saw the driver, a hundred feet away, waiting for me. I thought that was a shame. She would wait for me to come out of the parking garage and turn away toward the radio station, and then realize she had waited in vain. I needed to give some sort of hand signal that would convince her not to wait.

After a moment's thought, I cocked my arm, palm out, fingers spread, and swung my arm down. I had gotten it right. She drove away.

How I learned to Swim (the Boff):

I have always been a careless fellow, noticing little of what goes on around me. When I was nine I could not swim, so I always wore plastic waterwings in the water. They enabled me to paddle out beyond my depth, certain that I would not sink and drown.

One day at the Spillway pond I was splashing happily in the deepest place when I noticed that I had forgotten to put on my waterwings. I scrambled out of the pond, ran to my parents, and crowed, “I CAN SWIM!”

How I learned to Swim (Intro):

I want to tell you how I learned to swim, but first I shall invoke some memories of where I learned. The date was 1950 or 1951, and around this time – there were polio scares every summer – we did not go to public pools. We spent some time at the bay beach near Jones Beach Stadium (Long Island), where I generally played in the sand. But when we visited Grandma Paula, we swam almost every day.

Her farm was in the lower Catskills near the Ashokan reservoir. We usually went to the “Cold Spot” or to the “Spillway pond”. The Spillway pond was the preferred place, but its water consisted of runoff from the Ashokan, and in dry years there was no pond at all. In wet years, the pond was deep and its current too fierce.

The Cold Spot was always the same, wonderfully swampy with water spiders, wasps, and reeds in many different clusters and shapes. After we swam there, our parents carefully plucked the leeches from our bodies.

Rarely, we swam at “The Weir”, a great expanse of shallow water. I'm not sure why we generally avoided the Weir, but perhaps the reason was a retaining wall of the Ashokan that loomed fifty feet above, shutting out the sunlight on even the brightest afternoons.

I learned to swim at the Spillway, rather suddenly, and tomorrow I plan to tell you about it.

One, Two, Three, Many (on the radio):

I usually organize and broadcast a 2.5 hour radio show of classical music, every Tuesday morning. This week I subbed for the DJ with the 8:30 slot, so I had a five hour program. (I shall do the same on the 26th. You can hear me at wprb.com, 6:00 a.m., EDT, Tuesdays.)

For 6/19/12, I had an unusual idea for a show. I called it “One, Two, Three, Many.” And here's what I did: I played a solo piece, then a duo, a trio, a quartet and so on, right up to a nonet. And then I completed the show with Mozart's Gran Partita for 13 instruments. (You can hear part of that piece near the beginning of the movie Amadeus.)

The incredible thing is that I had to do very little time management. The program fit exactly into a five hour period. Wow!

All the music was terrific. The composers were Bach, Mozart, Bartok, Haydn, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Berwald, Schubert and Martinu. You can check out the actual playlist here.

Email was not invented in the 1970's:

VA Shiva Ayyadurai claims to have invented Email in the early 1970's. Nonsense! In 1968, I joined a Princeton, NJ company called Applied Logic Corporation (ALC), which offered nationwide timesharing to its customers. In addition to using compilers and various applications, all customers could exchange Email, using a mail program with "To", "From" and "CC" capabilities. The mail program was in place when I arrived, in January of 1968; it had been written even sooner.


The mail program may have been developed by ALC, but it may also have been offered by the developer of the hardware and system software: DEC, in their PDP 6 operating system. We developers at ALC used email heavily to control our specs, share modules and cooperate on testing. We thought it was absolutely wonderful to have Email.

Garry Moore (2):

Garry Moore was exceedingly popular for about one year during the run of his TV show. It was produced in Manhattan, and during that year he learned never to stop moving on the sidewalks. If he stopped to chat with an admirer (he was often recognized), a crowd would form, making progress impossible. When greeted, he learned to say something brief, perhaps add a handshake, and move on.

One night he left the studio late and met a fellow on one of the empty side streets. The fellow spoke some sort of greeting. Garry brifely clasped the man's arm, said “You betcha,” and moved on.

At the end of the block he realized what the man had said:
“This is a stickup.”

He looked back. The man was standing in mid-block, staring. After a frozen moment, the man turned around and ran away.